Memoirs

Front matter

"Hisiili

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

Contents

PAas I.— Eaklt Life (1824-1837) 1

II.— Boyhood and Youth (1837-1845) 65

III. — Univebsity Life and Travel in Europe (1845-1848) . 107

I. Early Life

1824-1837.

My birthplace — Count Bruno and Dufief — Family items — General Lafayette — The Dutch witch-nurse — Early friends and associations — Philadelphia sixty years ago — Early reading — Genealogy — First schools — Summers in New England — English influences — The Revolutionary grandfather — Centenarians — The last survivor of the Boston Tea-party and the last signer of the Declaration — Indians — Memories of relations — A Quaker school — My ups and downs in classes — Arithmetic — My first ride in a railway car — My marvellous invention — Mr. Alcott's school — A Transcendental teacher — Rev. W. H. Furness — Miss Eliza Leslie — The boarding-school near Boston — Books — A terrible winter — My first poem — I return to Philadelphia.

I WAS born on the 15th of August, 1824, in a house which was in Philadelphia, and in Chestnut Street, the second door below Third Street, on the north side. It had been built in the old Colonial time, and in the room in which I first saw life there was an old chimney-piece, which was so remarkable that strangers visiting the city often came to see it. It was, I believe, of old carved oak, possibly mediaeval, which had been brought from some English manor as a relic. I am indebted for this information to a Mr. Landreth, who lived in the house at the time.*

* As I was very desirous of learning more about this celebrated fireplace, I inserted a request in the JE*ubUc Ledger for information regarding it, which elicited the following from some one to me unknown, to whom I now return thanks : —

" Mk. Citt-Editor of the Public Ledger, — In your edition of this date, I notice a communication headed ' To Local Antiquarians.' With-

It was then a boarding-house, kept by a Mrs. Eodgers. She had taken it from a lady who had also kept it for boarders. The daughter of this latter married President Madison. She was the well-known "Dolly Madison," famous for her grace, accomplishments, and ielle humeur, of whom there are stories still current in Washington.

My authority informed me that there were among the boarders in the house two remarkable men, one of whom often petted me as a babe, and took a fancy to me. He was a Swedish Count, who had passed, it was said, a very wild life as pirate for several years on the Spanish Main. He was identified as the Count Bruno of Frederica Bremer's novel, " The Neighbours." The other was the famous philologist, Dufief, author of "Nature Displayed," a work of such remarkable ability that I wonder that it should have passed into oblivion.

My mother had been from her earliest years devoted to literature to a degree which was unusual at that time in the TJnited States. She had been, as a girl, a special protegee of Hannah Adams, the author of many learned works, who was the first person buried in the Mount Auburn Cemetery of Boston. She directed my mother's reading, and had great

out any well-founded pretensions to the designation ' Antiquarian,' as I get older I stUl take a great interest in the early history of our beloved city. I remember distinefly the fact, but not the date, of reading a description of the ' mantelpiece.' It was of wood, handsomely carved on the pUlars, and under the shelf, and on the centre between the pillars, was the following quaint and witty hieroglyphic inscription : —

When the grate is M. T. put : When it is . putting :

which is a little puzzling at first sight, but readily translated by converting the punctuation points into written words. Senior. "Frcmhford, MayS4, 189S."

I can add to this, that the chimney-piece was originally made for wood-fires, and that long after a grate was set in and the inscription added.

BAKLY LIFE. 3

influence over her. My mother had also been very intimate with the daughters of Jonathan Eussell, the well-known diplomatist. My maternal grandfather was Colonel Godfrey, who had fought in the war of the Eevolution, and who was at one time an aide-de-camp of the Governor of Massachusetts. He was noted for the remarkable gentleness of his character. I have heard that when he went forth of a morning, all the animals on his farm would run to meet and accompany him. He had to a miraculous degree a certain sympathetic power, so that all beings, men included, loved him. I have heard my mother say that as a girl she had a tame crow who was named Tom, and that he could distinctly cry the word " What ? " When Tom was walking about in the garden, if called, he would reply " What ? " in a perfectly human manner.

When I was one month old. General Lafayette visited our city and passed in a grand procession before the house. It is one of the legends of my infancy that my nurse said, " Charley shall see the General too ! " and held me up to the window. General Lafayette, seeing this, laughed and bowed to me. He was the first gentleman who ever saluted me formally. When I reflect how in later life adventure, the study of languages, and a French Eevolution came into my experiences, it seems to me as if Count Bruno, Dufief, and Lafayette had all been premonitors of the future.

I was a great sufferer from many forms of ill-health in my infancy. Before my second birthday, I had a terrible illness with inflammation of the brain. Dr. Dewees (author of a well-known work on diseases of women and children), who attended me, said that I was insane for a week, and that it was a case without parallel. I mention this because I believe that I owe to it in a degree whatever nervousness and tendency to " idealism " or romance and poetry has subsequently been developed in me. Through all my childhood and youth its influence was terribly felt, nor have I to this day recovered from it.

I should mention that my first nurse in life was an old Dutch woman named Van der Poel. I had not been born many days before I and my cradle were missing. There was a prompt outcry and search, and both were soon found in the garret or loft of the house. There I lay sleeping, on my breast an open Bible, with, I believe, a key and knife, at my head lighted candles, money, and a plate of salt. Ifurse Van der Poel explained that it was done to secure my rising in life — by taking me up to the garret.» I have since learned from a witch that the same is still done in exactly the same manner in Italy, and in Asia. She who does it must be, however, a strega or sorceress (my nurse was reputed to be one), and the child thus initiated will become deep in darksome lore, an adept in occulta, and a scholar. If I have not turned out to be all of this in majoribus, it was not the fault of my nurse.

Next door to us lived a family in which were four daughters who grew up to be famous belles. It is said that when the poet N. P. Willis visited them, one of these young ladies, who was familiar with his works, was so overcome that she fainted. Forty years after Willis distinctly recalled the circumstance. Fainting was then fashionable.

Among the household friends of our family I can remember Mr. John Vaughan, who had legends of Priestley, Berkeley, and Thomas Moore, and who often dined with us on Sunday. I can also recall his personal reminiscences of General Washington, Jefferson, and all the great men of the previous generation. He was a gentle and beautiful old man, with very courtly manners and snow-white hair, which he wore in a queue. He gave away the whole of a large fortune to the poor. Also an old Mr. Crozier, who had been in France through all the French Eevolution, and had known Kobespierre, Marat, Fouquier Tinville, &c. I wish that I had betimes noted down all the anecdotes I ever heard from them. There were also two old ladies, own nieces of Benjamin Franklin, who for many years continually took tea with us. One of them, Mrs. Kinsman, presented me with the cotton quilt under which her uncle had died. Another lady, Miss Louisa Nancrede, who had been educated in Prance, had seen Napoleon, and often described him to me. She told me many old French fairy-tales, and often sang a ballad (which I found in after years in the works of Gazette), which made a great impression on me — something like that of " Childe Roland to the dark tower came." It was called Le Sieur Unguerrand, and the refrain was " Oh ma ionnefai tanipeur."

That these and many other influences of culture stirred me strangely even as a child, is evident from the fact that they have remained so vividly impressed on my memory. This reminds me that I can distinctly remember that when I was eight years of age, in 1832, my grandmother, Mrs. Oliver Leland, told my mother that the great German poet Goethe had recently died, and that they bade me remember it. On the same day I read in the Athenceum (an American reprint of leading articles, poems, &c., from English magazines, which grandmother took all her life long) a translation of Schiller's " Diver." I read it only once, and to this day I can repeat nearly the whole of it. I have now by me, as I write, a silver messenger-ring of King Robert, and I never see it without thinking of the corner of the room by the sidedoor where I stood when grandmother spoke of the death of Goethe. But I anticipate.

My father was a commission merchant, and had his place of business in Market Street below Third Street. His partner was Charles S. Boker, who had a son, George, who will often be mentioned in these Memoirs. George became in after life distinguished as a poet, and was Minister for many years at Constantinople and at St. Petersburg.

From Mrs. Eodgers' my parents went to Mrs. Shinn's, in Second Street. It also was a very old-fashioned house, with a garden full of flowers, and a front doorstep almost on a level with the ground. The parlour had a large old fireplace, set with blue tiles of the time of Queen Anne, and it was my delight to study and have explained to me from them the story of Joseph and his brethren and ^sop's fables. Everything connected with this house recurs to me as eminently pleasant, old-fashioned, and very respectable. I can remember something very English-like among the gentlemen-boarders who sat after dinner over their Madeira, and a beautiful lady, Mrs. Stanley, who gave me a sea-shell. Thinking of it all, I seem to have lived in a legend by Hawthorne.

There was another change to a Mrs. Eaton's boarding-house in Eifth Street, opposite to the side of the Franklin Library. I can remember that there was a very good marine picture by Birch in the drawing-room. This was after living in the Washington Square house, of which I shall speak anon. I am not clear as to these removals. There were some men of culture at Mrs. Eaton's — among them Sears C. Walker, a great astronomer, and a Dr. Brewer, who had travelled in Italy and brought back with him pieces of sculpture. We were almost directly opposite the State House, where liberty had been declared, while to the side, across the street, was the Library founded by Dr. Franklin, with his statue over the door. One of his nieces often told me that this was an absolutely perfect likeness. The old iron railing, now removed — more's the pity ! — surrounded the Square, which was full of grand trees.

It was believed that the spirit of Dr. Franklin haunted the Library, reading the books. Once a coloured woman, who, in darkey fashion, was scrubbing the floor after midnight, beheld the form. She was so frightened that she fainted. But stranger still, when the books were removed to the New Library in Locust Street, the ghost went with them, and there it still " spooks " about as of yore to this day, as every negro in the quarter knows.

In regard to Franklin and his apparition, there was a schoolboy joke to this effect : that whenever the statue of

Franklin over the Library door heard the clock strike twelve at night, it descended, went to the old Jefferson Wigwam, and drank a glass of beer. But the sell lay in this, that a statue cannot hear.

And there was a dim old legend of a colony of Finns, who, in the Swedish time, had a village all to themselves in Wiccacoe. They were men of darksome lore and magic skill, and their women were witches, who at tide and time sailed forth merrily on brooms to the far-away highlands of the Hudson, where they held high revel with their Yankee, Dutch, and Indian colleagues of the mystic spell. David MacEitchie, in a recent work, has made a note of this curious offshoot of the old Philadelphia Swedes.

And I can also remember that before a marble yard in Eace Street there were two large statues of very grim forbidding-looking dogs, of whom it was said that when there was any one about to die in the quarter, these uncanny hounds came down during a nightly storm and howled a death duet.

And when I was very young there still lingered in the minds of those invaluable living chronicles (whether bound in sheepskin or in calf), the oldest inhabitants, memories from before the Eevolution of the Indian market, when on every Saturday the natives came from their rural retreats, bringing pelts or skins, baskets, moccasins, mocos or birch boxes of maple-sugar, feathers, and game for sale. Then they ranged themselves all along the west side of Independence Square, in tents or at tables, and sold— or were sold themselves— in bargains. Even now the Sunday-child, or he who is gifted to behold the departed, may see the ghostly forms of Eed-men carrying on that weekly goblin market. Miss Eliza Leslie's memory was full of these old stories, which she had collected from old people.

As for the black witches, as there were still four negro sorcerers in Philadelphia in 1883 (I have their addresses), it may be imagined to what an extent Voodoo still prevailed among our Ebo-ny men and brothers. Of one of these my mother had a sad experience. We had a black cook named Ann Lloyd, of whom, to express it mildly, one must say that she was " no good." My mother dismissed her, but several who succeeded her left abruptly. Then it was found that Ann, who professed to be a witch, had put a spell of death on all who should take her place. My mother learned this, and when the last black cook gave warning she received a good admonition as to a Christian being a slave to the evil one. I believe that this ended the enchantment. There is or was in South Fifth Street an African church, over the door of which was the charming inscription, " Those who have walked in Darkness have seen a great light." But this light has not even yet penetrated to the darksome depths of Lombard or South Streets, if I may believe the strange tales which I have heard, even of late, of superstition there.

Philadelphia was a very beautiful old-fashioned city in those days, with a marked character. Every house had its garden, in which vines twined over arbours, and the magnolia, honeysuckle, and rose spread rich perfume of summer nights, and where the humming-bird rested, and scarlet tanager or oriole with the yellow and blue bird flitted in sunshine or in shade. Then swallows darted at noon over the broad streets, and the mighty sturgeon was so abundant in the Delaware that one could hardly remain a minute on the wharf in early morn or ruddy evening without seeing some six-foot monster dart high in air, falling on his side with a plash. In the winter-time the river was allowed to freeze over, and then every schoolboy walked across to Camden and back, as if it had been a pilgrimage or religious duty, while meantime there was always a kind of Eussian carnival on the ice, oxen being sometimes roasted whole, and all kinds of " fakirs," as they are now termed, selling doughnuts, spruce-beer, and gingerbread, or tempting the adventurous with thimblerig ; many pedestrians stopping at the old-fashioned inn on Smith's Island for hot punch. Juleps and cobblers, and the

" one thousand and one American fancy drinks," were not as yet invented, and men drank themselves unto the devil quite as easily on rum or brandy straight, peach and honey, madeira and punch, as they now do on more varied temptations. Lager beer was not as yet in the land. I remember drinking it in after years in New Street, where a German known as der diche Georg first dealt it in 1848 to our American public. Maize-whisky could then be bought for fifteen cents a gallon ; even good " old rye " was not much dearer ; and the best Havanna cigars until 1840 cost only three cents a-piece. As they rose in price they depreciated in quality, and it is now many years since I have met with a really aromatic old-fashioned Havanna.

It was a very well-shaded, peaceful city, not " a great village," as it was called by New Yorkers, but like a pleasant English town of earlier times, in which a certain picturesque rural beauty still lingered. The grand old double houses, with high flights of steps, built by the Colonial aristocracy — such as the Bird mansion in Chestnut Street by Ninth Street — had a marked and pleasing character, as had many of the quaint black and red-brick houses, whose fronts reminded one of the chequer-board map of our city. All of this quiet charm departed from them after they were surrounded by a newer and noisier life. I well remember one of these fine old Colonial houses. It had been the old Penington mansion, but belonged in my early boyhood to Mr. Jones, who was one of my father's partners in business. It stood at the corner of Fourth and Eace Streets, and was surrounded on all sides by a garden. There was a legend to the effect that a beautiful lady, who had long before inhabited the house, had been so fond of this garden, that after death her spirit was often seen of summer nights tending or watering the flowers. She was a gentle ghost, and the story made a great impression on me. I still possess a pictured tile from a chimney-piece of this old mansion.

The house is gone, but it is endeared to me by a very

IQ MEMOIRS.

strange memory. When I was six or seven years of age, I had read Shakespeare's " Tempest," and duly reflected on it. The works of Shakespeare were very rare indee^ in Quaker Philadelphia in those days, and much tabooed, but Mr. Jones, who had a good library in the great hall upstairs, possessed a set in large folio. This I was allowed to read, but not to remove from the place. How well I can remember passing my Saturday afternoons reading those mighty tomes, standing first on one leg, then on the other for very weariness, yet absorbed and fascinated !

About this time I was taken to the theatre to see Fannie Kemble in " Much Ado About Nothing "—or it may have been to a play before that time — when my father said to me that he supposed I had never heard of Shakespeare. To which I replied by repeating all the songs in the " Tempest." One of these, referring to the loves of certain sailors, is not very decent, but I had not the remotest conception of its impropriety, and so proceeded to repeat it. A saint of virtue must have laughed at such a declamation.

As it recurs to me, the spirit which was over Philadelphia in my boyhood, houses, gardens, people, and their life, was strangely quiet, sunny, and quaint, a dream of olden time drawn into modern days. The Quaker predominated, and his memories were mostly in the past ; ours, as I have often - said, was a city of great trees, which seemed to me to be ever repeating their old poetic legends to the wind of Swedes, witches, and Indians.

Among the street-cries and sounds, the first which I can remember was the postman's horn, when I was hardly three years old. Then there were the watchmen, " who cried the hour and weather all night long." Also a coloured man who shouted, in a strange, musical strain which could be heard a mile :

" Tra-la-la-la-la-la-loo.

Le-mon-ioe-oream !

An'-wanilla-too ! "

EARLY LIFE. H

Also the quaint old Hominy-man :

" De Hominy man is on tiis way, Prum de Navy- Yard 1 Wid his harmony 1 " (Spoken) " Law bess de putty eyes ob de young lady I Hominy's good fur de young ladies !

" De Harmony man is on his way," &c.

Also, " Hot-corn ! " " Pepper-pot ! " " Be-au-ti-ful Clams ! " ■with the " Sweep-oh " cry, and charcoal and muffin bells.

One of the family legends was, that being asked by some lady, for whom I had very little liking, to come and visit her, I replied with great politeness, but also with marked firmness, " I am very much obliged to you, ma'am, and thank you — but I woiiH."

In Washington Square, three doors from us, at the corner of Walnut Street, lived Dr. George McClellan. He had two sons, one, John, of my own age, the other, George, who was three years younger. Both went to school with me in later years. George became a soldier, and finally rose to the head of the army in the first year of the War of Eebellion, or Emancipation, as I prefer to term it.

Washington Square, opposite our house, had been in the olden time a Potter's Field, where all the victims of the yellow fever pestilence had been interred. Now it had become a beautiful little park, but there were legends of a myriad of white confused forms seen flitting over it in the night, for it was a mysterious haunted place to many still, and I can remember my mother gently reproving one of our pretty neighboui's for repeating such tales.

I have dreamy yet very oft-recurring memories of my life in childhood, as, for instance, that just before I was quite three years old I had given to me a copy of the old New England Primer, which I could not then read, yet learned from others the rhymes with the quaint little cuts.

"In Adam's fall We sin-ned all."

" My book and heart Shall never part," &c.

Also of a gingerbread toy, with much sugar, colour, and gilding, and of lying in a crib and having the measles. I can remember that I understood the meaning of the word dead before that of alive, because I told my nurse that I had heard that Dr. Dewees was dead. But she replying that he was not, but alive, I repeated " live " as one not knowing what it meant.

I recollect, also, that one day, when poring over the pictures in a toy-book, my Uncle Amos calling me a good little boy for so industriously reading, I felt guilty and ashamed because I could not read, and did not like to admit it. Whatever my faults or follies may be, I certainly had an innate rectitude, a strong sense of honesty, just as many children have the contrary ; and this, I believe, is due to inherited qualities, though these in turn are greatly modified by early association and influences. That I also had precocious talent and taste for the romantic, poetic, marvellous, quaint, supernatural, and humorous, was soon manifested. Even as an infant objects of Iric-h-lrac and of antiquity awoke in me an interest allied to passion or awe, for which there was no parallel among others of my age. This was, I believe, the old spirit which had come down through the ages into my blood — the spirit which inspired Leland the Flos Grammaticorum, and after him John Leland, the antiquary of King Henry VIII., and Chrs. (Charles) Leland, who was secretary of the Society of Antiquaries in the time of Charles I. Let me hereby inform those who think that " Chrs." means Christopher, that there has been a Charles in the family since time immemorial, alternated with an Oliver since the days of Cromwell.

John Leyland, an Englishman, now living, who is a deep and sagacious scholar, and the author of the " Antiquities of the Town of Halifax" (a very clever work), declares that for four hundred years there has not been a generation in which some Leland (or Leyland) of the old Bussli de Leland stock has not written a work on antiquity or allied to antiquarianism, though in one case it is a translation of Demosthenes, and in another a work on Deistical Writers. He traces the connection with his own family of the Henry Leland, my ancestor, a rather prominent political Puritan character in his time, who first went to America in 1636, and acquired land which my grandfather still owned. It was very extensive.

There is a De la Laund in the roll of Battle Ahbey,* but John says our progenitor was De Bussli, who came over with the Conqueror, ravaged all Yorkshire, killing 100,000 men, and who also burned up, perhaps alive, the 1,000 Jews in the Tower of York. For these eminent services to the state he was rewarded with the manor of Leyland, from which he took his name. The very first complete genealogical register of any American family ever published was that of the Leland family, by Judge Leland, of Koxbury, Mass. (but for which he was really chiefly indebted to another of the name), in which it is shown that Henry Leland had had in 1847 fifteen thousand descendants in America. In regard to which I am

* Also given as Delaund or Dellaund in one copy. De Quincey was proud of his descent from De la Laund. I may here say that John Leyland, who is a painstaking and conscientious antiquarian and accomplished genealogist, has been much impressed with the extraordinary similarity of disposition, tastes, and pursuits which has characterised the Lelands for centuries. Any stranger knowing us would think that he and I were nearly related. It is told of the manor of Leyland that during the early Middle Ages it was attempted to build a church there in a certain place, but every morning the stones were found to be removed. Finally, it was completed, but the next dawn beheld the whole edifice removed to the other spot, while a spirit-voice was heard to oaE (one account says that the words were found on a mystic scroll) ;

honoured with a membership in the Massachusetts Genealogical Society. The crest of Bussli and the rest of us is a raven or crow transfixed by an arrow, with a motto which I dearly love. It is Gui debeo, fidus. Very apropos of this crow or raven is the following: Heinrich Heine, in his "Germany" (vol. ii. p. 311, Heinemann's edition), compares the same to priests " whose pious croaking is so well known to our ears." This is in reference to such birds which fly about the mountain of Kyffiiauser, in which the Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa is sleeping, and where he will sleep till they disappear. And then, praising himself, Heine adds : " But old age has weakened them, and there are good marksmen who know right well how to bring them down. I know one of these archers, who now lives in Paris, and who knows how, even from that distance, to hit the crows which fly about the KyfEhauser. When the Emperor returns to earth, he will surely find on his way more than one raven slain by this archer's arrows. And the old hero will say, smiling, ' That man carried a good bow.' " In my note to this I remarked that " the raven or crow transfixed by an arrow is the crest of the coat-of-arms of the name of Leland, or of my own. I sincerely trust that Bussli, the first who bore it, did not acquire the right to do so by shooting a clergyman." As a single crow is an omen of ill-luck, so the same transfixed signifies misfortune overcome, or the forcible ending of evil influences by a strong will. It is a common belief or saying among all the Lelands, however widely related, that there has never been a convicted criminal of the name. Dii faxint !

At four years of age, while still living in Washington Square, I was sent to an infant school in Walnut Street, above Eighth Street, south side, near by. It was kept by the Misses Donaldson. We all sat in a row, on steps, as in an amphitheatre, but in straight lines. Miss Donaldson, senior, sat at a desk, prim and perpendicular, holding a rod which was fifteen or twenty feet in length, with which she could hit on the head or poke any noisy or drowsy child, without stirring from her post. It was an ingenious invention, and one which might he employed to advantage in small churches. I can remember that at this time I could not hear a tune played without stringing my thoughts to it ; not that I have any special ear for music, but because I am moved by melody. There was a rhyme that was often sung to me to the tune of " Over the Water "—