Recollections, personal and literary

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I. A New England Childhood i

II. New York in 1835 17

II

SOON after I was ten years old, a journey to New York was projected by my mother, or possibly by my step-father, who, having relatives there, was no doubt anxious to meet them once more. He was not opposed by this uneasy woman, who, collecting her two boys and what baggage pertained to them and to herself, shipped them and it on a little packet that sailed from Providence, Rhode Island, for New York, as often as the number of its passengers and the bulk of its freight seemed to justify that proceeding.

After a stormy passage of two days, we landed at or near the Battery one bright Sunday morning late in the autumn of 1835, and wandered up Broadway, which was swarming with hogs. I remember how quiet the town was, as we walked to Canal Street, and then west to Greenwich Street, where my step-father's brother-in-law kept 2 17 a restaurant. I was tried as an assistant at the oyster bar, but without much success. There was little to choose between the relatives of my mother and the relatives of my step-father, for they were poor on both sides ; so I was not benefited by this change of residence.

My early recollections of New York are not over and above pleasant, for they connect themselves with my step-father's family, who were just the people not to know, and who were the cause of my being sent into the street to sell matches. I have some interesting memories of this period, however, for the great fire of 1835 occurred, and I was taken to see the smoking ruins.

Reticent and moody, busy and businesslike, my mother seemed to have remembered my lack of education, and sought a means of satisfying it, and, alternately humble and proud, decided that she had found it.

" My son," she said, " shall never go to a public school ; " so she selected instead one which was kept by a couple of married pedagogues, a Mr. and Mrs. Steele, in the front and back basement of a house near by, — an academy, as it purported to be, for *' Young Gentlemen and Ladies." What the mistress of this establishment taught the pupils I had no means of knowing, from those whom I saw. They smiled and simpered and looked charming and smart in their pretty lace collars and gay ribbons.

What its master did not teach his pupils I speedily discovered. A tallish, showy person, good looking in a way ; he was a lazy, worthless fellow, who knew nothing, his sole qualifications for the position he occupied consisting of his boundless ignorance and impudence. He knew absolutely nothing, and could scarcely have pretended to any knowledsfe to himself when alone.

I remember once asking him how to do a sum which had perplexed me, — a simple, easy one in the " rule of three." He smirked and grinned ; but instead of showing me how to do it, he unlocked the drawer of his desk, handed me a Key to Daboll's Arithmetic, told me to copy on my slate the answer, without a word of explanation, and then returned his precious book once more to its guarded safety of lock and key.

The only book there — the only school-book in use, I mean — was written by Parson Weems, an eccentric bookmaker, who, by virtue of having been the rector of an Episcopal Church at Mount Vernon, which Washington attended, elected himself as the historiographer of the Father of his Country, and our earliest American novelist, inventing for the delectation of his credulous readers the famous filial and paternal anecdote of the cherry-tree and the little hatchet. Later he was the biographer of Sergeant Jasper and General Marion, describing in his double memoir the courage of the former in his perilous leap from the ramparts of Fort Moultrie into the dark waters below for the preservation of the colonial flag of South Carolina, which had been shot from its staff by a belligerent British man-o'-war in the offing, and the calculated courtesy of Marion in his invitation to the British officer who was on a visit to him, probably with a flag of truce, to dine with him in the forest which surrounded his encampment and to partake of his banquet of roasted sweet potatoes, — a politic proceeding that captured his gallant adversary and convinced him that no force in the world could conquer a people who could subsist on sweet potatoes.

Disappointed with the manifest scarcity of education acquired in the pay school that had been chosen for me, and determined that I should leave it, my mother sent me to the public school. The only examination for admission to which I was subjected was in my handwriting, which was sufficiently legible, it seemed, to place me in the highest class there, — the ninth class, I am proud to remember.

I was a fluent reader, but the only study in which I distinguished myself was geography, in which I became so proficient that I could repeat the names of some of our mountain ranges, the situation of our principal lakes, the direction of our longest rivers, and the boundaries of our oldest states and newest territories. My foreign geographical knowledge was of Italy and its most important products, which I remember were corn, wine, silk, and oil.

Disgusted and angered at my evident in- 21 capacity, my mother lost her patience with me and all her interest in my education. I was old enough, she observed, to earn my living, or something toward our common living, and I was compelled, when about fifteen, to contribute my mite. I became an errand boy, a shop boy, and occasionally an idle boy on the shady side of sequestered streets, where I sometimes loitered to shoot marbles with lads of my own age ; I may have been reprehensible, and vicious, if you insist upon it, but never enough so to figure as a " Park Shooter."

Shifting fi-om one employment to another, I obtained a situation in one of a series of law ofifices in a little Inn of Court in Beekman Street. My handwriting served me here, and I was engaged as a legal copyist, my duties as such resolving themselves into a second or third transcription of affidavits wherein Simple Simon, being duly sworn, did depose and say whatever he had persuaded himself was the grievance from which he was suffering at the time.

My salary was small, — less than a dollar a week, — but small as it was my mother allowed me fifty cents a month out of it, which large sum was thoughtfully invested in books. I haunted old book-stalls after of^ce hours, and picked up bargains in the shape of odd volumes, mostly of the English poets. Among other poets whose acquaintance I made at this time were Beattie and Falconer. I read the story of Edwin, who was no vulgar minstrel boy ; but I could not read the story of Palaemon. I could see that Beattie had some claim to be considered a poet, but I could not see, nor have I ever been able to see, what shadow of a claim Falconer had.

Business was dull and clients scarce during my residence in these inns of court. I remember, however, one client who visited our little ofBce, on a summary request from its principal to do so. I was sitting idly at my desk one day, when the door opened and an unknown figure crossed the threshold ; he was a gentleman of twenty-six or twenty-eight, bright-eyed, good-looking, and more than well dressed — dandyfied. There was between him and his tailor an outstanding bill for the non-payment of clothes, probably those he then had on. It was Mr. J. H. Ingraham, who was the first novehst I ever met face to face and hand to hand, the author of several fictions of an aquatic nature, such as " Lafitte ; or, the Pirate of the Gulf," " Captain Kidd," and " The Dancing Feather," — the forerunner, in the last mentioned work, of such masters of the craft as Lieutenant Judson — "Ned Buntline " — and Mr. Sylvanus Cobb.

I once had the honour of meeting " Ned Buntline " on Blackwell's Island, whither he had been sent for stimulating into a riot the dramatic difference of opinion which then existed between the admirers of Mr. Edwin Forrest, on the one hand, and Mr. William Charles Macready on the other. I never had the honour of meeting Mr. Cobb anywhere.

To return to Mr. Ingraham, however, who at a later period and in a more pacific turn of mind concluded to diversify his experience and widen his career by becoming the incumbent of an Episcopal Church in Mississippi, and continuing his former vocation therein, but in a higher, holier, more Biblical direction, in three gorgeous romances of early Hebrew royal personages and miraculous events, proving himself in these the forerunner of General Lew Wallace, who surpassed him in his imaginative simplicity with the heroic mythologies of the Orient and Mexico.

My intellectual life was broadened at this time, and brightened by the substitution of literature for law. This felicity was accomplished by a weekly paper, of which Mr. Park Benjamin and Mr. Epes Sargent were the editors, and which was called the New World. It was, I think, the first paper of the kind ever published in New York, and was admirable for what it was and was intended to be ; namely, the speediest and cheapest reprint of the most popular British authors. I seem to remember reading in its spacious columns the novels of Lever, Cockton, G. P. R. James, and certainly one by Dickens, for it was in the New World, in its weekly winding up of " Master Humphrey's Clock," that I wondered at and sobbed over the pitiable wanderings of Little Nell and her grandfather.

Another journal which was a liberal education to me was the Mirror, edited by Mr. N.

P. Willis and Mr. George P. Morris, who issued, at intervals, a Mirror Library, — if that is what it was called, — the specialty of which was its reprints of favourite writers. One number was devoted to the " English Songs " of Barry Cornwall, and another to " The Eve of St. Agnes " of Keats. I enjoyed my reading, without regard to my like or dislike of the poet upon whom it was bestowed; but it taught me nothing, for I was not clever enough to imitate, nor intelligent enough to originate : all the same, I continued to write.

About this time I became a sort of factotum in the ofHce of a new and short-lived journal which reported the sayings and doings of Dickens, who was then travelling in this country. This distant connection with authorship brought me in contact with another author, in the person of Mr. Lewis Gaylord Clark, the editor of The Knickerbocker Magazine, who was a contributor to the journal in question. It was soon moribund, and another situation had to be obtained. One was found, — or made. It was in a tailors shop, where the aspiring rhymster cooled his natural ardour by sponging cloth, and encouraged his propensity for commerce by selling slop-clothes to sailors.

I was next installed as book-keeper in a bankrupt brush and bellows factory. From this I was transplanted to an occupation for which I was most unfit in that it demanded what I never possessed — physical strength and endurance. What my mother was thinking of when she sent me to learn the trade of a blacksmith, I never knew ; but send me she did, and I tried to learn the trade, though unsuccessfully. I was put at once at the anvil, and before the day was over my right hand was so blistered that I had to open its fingers with my left hand, and detach them from the handle of the sledge-hammier that I wielded. Clearly I was not intended for a blacksmith. Even my mother saw this at the end of three or four days, and permitted me to find lighter employment.

It came to me, I never quite knew how, in the shape of iron moulding. When about eighteen years old, I went into an iron foundry to learn the trade. My wages were ^2.25 a week for the first year, ^^3.00 for the second year, and $3.75 for the third year. I was in the foundry for some three years, and it was hard work. I was a slender boy, and my task was to carry in each hand a ladle containing forty pounds of molten iron, and to keep up with the other men in filling the moulds in which we were casting fenders and frames for fireplaces. When the casting was made, we had to break the mould and take it out, and throw water on the sand, and then we would try to find a cool place in which to recover. There would be four or five men at a time pouring the molten metal into the moulds. This firm of iron founders is still in existence.

I was then living with my mother in Delancey Street. There was comparatively little of the city above Canal Street. Though the work was hard for a delicate boy, it had to be done. I had one consolation, however, which could not be taken from me ; the day would end, night would come, and then I could write poetry. It was sorry stuff, and no one knew it better than I; but it gave me pleasure, and offended no one. I never offered it for publication, I was not vain enough for that ; but when it had served its turn, and I was beyond it, I wisely committed it to the flames. Such was my early life.

Later I met an acquaintance who was working for Marsh, a carriage painter, who, I remember, had a boy who attained a great celebrity as a drummer. I worked for Marsh for some months. My chief occupation was to rub down old carriages from the Astor House with pumice stone, so that the old cracked paint was removed, and the ground prepared for fresh varnish. Years after, when Artemus Ward came to New York, he boarded with Marsh, who told him several queer tales about me.

Ill

TO retrace my steps a little, let me say, though a reader from boyhood, it was years before it occurred to me that a book was other than a book. Not that all books were alike, — far from it ; but that a book was a book, whatever was its subject, and whoever was its author. That there are books which are not books, except in their outward form, and that there are " books which are books," as Lamb puts it, was a late discovery of mine, and one which I might never have made if I had not tried to write books myself. I cannot remember the time when I did not read, nor (hardly) when I did not write. If I had been asked why I wrote, I could only have said it was because I wanted to.

As I have explained, I had no education, or only such rudiments of education as were taught in the common schools of the thirties,

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Manuscript of a Poem by Burns and the material conditions which surrounded me were not of a kind that was stimulating, they were so barren and so depressing. I was not emulous of my school-fellows, who were more clever than I, and I was not confident of myself, for I concealed my scribblings. I read everything that came in my way, and, strange to say, nothing seemed to come in my way but verse. The first poet whom I read was Burns, and, despite my ignorance of his dialect, he exercised a singular fascination over me, a fascination that made me try my hand at a Scotch song. How did it run ? —

Oh, say, hae ye seen my Mary? She 's a bonnie lass, wi' a saft blue ee. And she trips as lichtlie owre the lea As ony, ony fairy.

From Burns I passed to Thomson, to Cowper, to Beattie, to Falconer, and, last of all, to Shakespeare, or so much of Shakespeare as was included in an odd volume which contained two of his Roman plays and " Troilus and Cressida," and which I found hard reading. By-and-by I escaped from the eighteenth-century poets, and made the acquaintance of Mrs. Hemans, Miss Landon, and Miss Eliza Cook. At a later period I was in touch with contemporary verse, and, indeed, with contemporary literature generally, and this was through the New World, — which I have already mentioned.

I have forgotten what I tried to write about, nor does it matter, for, whatever it was, it was nothing of which I possessed any knowledge. I had no experience upon which I could draw, and if I had aspirations I was not aware of them. When I was seventeen or thereabouts, I heard of a drugclerk in the neighbourhood whom I was told I ought to know. He was of my own age, or nearly so, and was troubled with the same complaint of scribbling verse. He flew at higher game than I did, however, and with a bolder wing. For, while I fluttered about my poor mundane trifles, he soared aloft in the heaven of solemn song. One of his themes, I remember, was " A Dialogue between Christian and Experience," and another was "A Soliloquy on Golgotha."

He read these pieces to me as he wrote them, and if I did not greatly admire them, as I fear I did not, for I could never endure religious verse, he certainly did, for he read them over and over again. He believed in himself more than in me, for I soon noticed that he .never asked me to read my pieces ; and I was glad he did not, since they were not of a kind that he could care for. His mind was more active than mine, and in more directions, for, while he was never weary of wooing the Muse of Zion, he always found time

" To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair."

He was more voluminous than I could be, and more ambitious than I dared be, for the moment he scrawled through his effusions he copied them and sent them to the Sunday papers.

It delighted him to see his name in print there — I could not understand why, since he professed the greatest contempt for editors, who never knew good verse from bad ; but so it was, and I wondered at him. If I had known that he was dying of consumption, I might have understood his incessant 3 33 restlessness of mind and his diseased desire for distinction ; but I did not until it was too late. He died, and made no sign. I felt his loss for a time, not so much on his account, I fear, as on my own, for in losing him I lost my only friend. I had no one to visit then, no one to talk with ; I had nothing but my books, which I knew by heart, and pens, ink, and paper, which I abused. Why I wrote, night after night, in my lonesome bedroom, by the light of an oil lamp, I never knew. I copied my verses in little books, and though the verses increased in number the books did not, for before I filled the second I destroyed the first, and before I filled the third I destroyed the second. I might, perhaps, have stopped production, but I could not possibly have stopped destruction.

After many holocausts, I wrote a small piece, which, on reading it over carefully, I concluded to spare, since it seemed to me better than anything I had yet written. It might not be good, — though I hoped it was, — but, as I saw worse things in print every day, I resolved to have it printed — if I could.

It was an apostrophe to several ideal qualities, — Wealth, Power, Ambition, Truth, ^ — which, for their shortcomings, I sentenced to extinction, excepting the last, which I reprieved in the last stanza, telling Death that Truth would be the death of him. I finished this clumsy fantasy as well as I could, gave it a Latin title, " Non Omnis Moriar," made a clean copy of it, and sent it to a little periodical, — a weekly, I think, which I had somewhere stumbled across. It was called The Rover, and was edited by Seba Smith, whose name I remembered from having seen it in one of my school-books attached to a copy of verses, " The Mother Perishing in a Snow-Storm."

A week passed, two weeks passed, and, as the poem did not appear, I lost a half-day in order to learn its fate. I found the office of The Rover, which was in, or near, what is now called " Newspaper Row," in Nassau Street, or Fulton Street, and I found Mr. Smith in the editorial room, which was on the second floor, and was a part of the composing-room, as was the custom then. He was what I considered an elderly man, — somewhat over fifty, I imagine, — was tall, or seemed so as he sat at his desk writing, had a pleasant face, a kind, bright eye, and a sweet, gentle voice.

I mentioned my namx, and said I had sent a poem to him to see if he would print it. I had made a bet that he would n't, and if I had won the bet, as I expected, I was going to claim it.

He smiled, rather incredulously, I thought, as if he doubted the bet (which was a genuine one), and said that if I had wanted to win I should have wagered the other way. The poem not only would be printed, but was printed ; and, opening his desk, he handed me a copy of The Rover. I was surprised, and told him so.

Then I thanked him, and, hurrying from the room and down the stairs, stopped when I reached the sidewalk to see how I looked in print. Many years have passed since that day, — more than half a century, I fancy, — but I have never forgotten it, nor Mr. Seba Smith, who was the first editor, the first poet, the first man of letters, whom I was fortunate enough to meet.

The kindness with which Mr. Smith received me removed any apprehensions that I might have had respecting the treatment I was Hkely to receive from men of established reputation, and served to strengthen my confidence in my own talents. I still shrank from my elders, but I no longer dreaded them ; and to convince myself that I did not, I sought acquaintance with another writer who was well spoken of in two or three critical journals. His name was Ralph Hoyt : he was an Episcopal clergyman, the pastor of the Church of the Good Shepherd, and the author of a volume of supposititious poetry.

Why I sought his acquaintance instead of continuing and cultivating my acquaintance with Mr. Smith I know not, but probably because I felt the need of something which I did not obtain from books, and which I fancied could be obtained only from contact with more mature minds. My remembrance of my first visit to Mr. Hoyt is vague. He received me in what I took to be his lodgings, on the second floor of an old house on the east side of the town, listened with a meditative air to what I had to say, and replied in a measured, precise way, weighing his words as if he were in the pulpit. When the interview — which was not a long one — was over, he invited me to visit him whenever I had time, and to bring what I wrote with me.

If I had been asked how I felt when I parted from him, I could not have told. That he had been very courteous to me was certain. But mingled with this courtesy was, or I fancied there was, a kind of condescension, which puzzled me. I tried to analyse his manner on my way home, but, as analysis was not habitual with me, I soon abandoned it.

" He is a minister," I thought, " and all ministers talk as he did. It is the badge of his profession, the nap of his cloth, and I may have rubbed it the wrong way."

At the end of several months I paid a second visit to Mr. Hoyt, who had removed from lodgings and was living in a smaller house, of which he and his family appeared to be the only occupants. Like the neighbourhood in which it stood, it was poor, — a shabby little brick dwelling two stories high, with a rickety wooden stoop, and an ashbarrel on the edge of the curbstone. I lifted the rusty iron knocker, which fell with a dull thud, and was finally admitted into the dingy hall-way by a frouzy Irish girl, who showed me into what she called " the dochtor's stoody." It was scantily furnished with three or four black haircloth chairs, a faded and worn ingrain carpet, and a large mahogany table between the two front windows. At the table sat the poet, clothed in his clerical suit (he had been ofiRciating at a funeral, he informed me), but looking somewhat less grave than on my first visit. He asked me what I had been doing since he saw me last, and I told him that I had been working at my trade. The literalness of my answer seemed to surprise him.

" I did not mean that," he replied ; " I meant, what have you been reading and writing?" I told him that I had lately read Leigh Hunt and John Keats, and liked them very much.

He stared at me blankly, as if he had never heard their names before, whereat I wondered; though I should not have done so, for I soon discovered that his reading was less than mine. He was not a reader, and when I showed him my latest piece I discovered that he was not a critic. He perused it slowly, pausing at every second or third line in a search for flaws, after which, with knitted brows, he resumed his snail-like perusal. When he finished the manuscript he handed it back to me with a judicial air and a few perfunctory words that meant nothing.

If I had been a little older and a little bolder I would probably have questioned the justice of his judgment; but what would have been the use ? He did not like my verse, — that was evident ; and I misfht have known he would not like it, for if his verse was good mine was bad, and if mine was good his was bad indeed. He hurt me, and he humiliated me. That he hurt me was, no doubt, my fault, for I had no right to be sensitive ; but that he humiliated me was certainly his fault, for he had no right to be patronising. But perhaps I expected too much from him, — expected praise, which I did not deserve, and sympathy, which he could not bestow. He was a poor clergyman, with a parish to look after, and a family to provide for.

I can put myself in his place now as I could not then, and divining what his life was, how busy, how devoted, how anxious, and how narrow, I can see that I was not, and could not be, much to him. That he was friendly I knew ; that he liked me I believed ; and that he saw promise in my verse I was told by others, to whom he spoke well of it.

IV The New World And The Knicker- Bocker Magazine

IT was through Mr. Hoyt that I became acquainted with my third literary friend, who expressed to him a wish to meet me. This was Mr. Park Benjamin.

Mr. Benjamin was a very different man from Mr. Hoyt, — certain where he was hesitant, outspoken where he was reticent, good-natured but quick-tempered, hasty but generous, dogmatic, impulsive, aggressive, resolute. The son of an American merchant in Demerara, where he was born in the first decade of the century, his nature was tropical, his nurture tender and solicitous. Lame from infancy, he was brought to this country when he was three years old, and was educated at first in a little town in Connecticut, and afterward at New Haven, where the family of his father resided. At the age of sixteen he was sent to Harvard College, which he quitted before the close of

THE WORLD AND KNICKERBOCKER

his second year, in consequence of a severe illness, and entered Washington College, whence he was graduated with the highest honours.

He studied law for a while at Cambridge and New Haven, and was admitted to the bar in Connecticut and Massachusetts ; but if he had any practice he soon abandoned it for literature. He reaped no glory from two periodicals with which he was associated, — the New England Magazine and the American Monthly Magazine ; but, what with his expenditures thereon, and unfortunate investments in other directions, he managed to lose most of his patrimonial property. His next literary venture was in the New Yorker with Mr. Horace Greeley, and the New World with Mr. Epes Sargent.