The life and letters of Margaret Junkin Preston

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Childhood 1

II. The Days of her Youth .... 12

Chapter I Childhood

When a friend said to Margaret Junkin Preston, some years before her death, that he was keeping her letters for the life of her that would one daybe written, she treated the matter as a fantastic joke. So little claim did she consider her literary work to have given her on fame's bead-roll that her executors do not find a scrap of autobiography among her papers.

It was perhaps the acceptance of her own estimate of herself in this connection that kept her family from offering to the public any memorial of her life at the time of her passing into the great beyond. This, and the difficulty that our increasingly busy generation finds in labor that requires what our poet herself called —

" Hours winnowed of care, — Days hedged from interruption, and withdrawn Inviolate from household exigence."

But in the years since her death it has been found that the readers of her poetry are also her lovers, whose sincere affection gives them the right to ask for a more complete acquaintance than her shyness had allowed during her lifetime. And it is in answer to this loyal demand that the following pages have been prepared.

If the challenge is made that what the poet withheld during her life should not now be made public, because death has left the door ajar, it seems a sufficient answer to say that no reader devoured more eagerly every scrap of biography within reach than Mrs. Preston ; and none owned more frankly the debt she owed those other lives.

Her turn thus to please and instruct has now come ; but the promise is given at the outset that no revelations shall be made which would have offended her womanly modesty, if she had found them upon the pages of Mrs. Browning's biography, for example, or that of one less famous than England's uncrowned poetess-laureate.

A reader of biography naturally wants to know something of the beginnings of the life whose story is to be told ; but does not this curiosity too often bring down on our unwary heads an avalanche of genealogy that threatens to overwhelm us ?

Mrs. Preston's forbears were for the most part strenuously occupied with life's highest duties, and were not concerned with exploiting themselves. Neither shall we seek to do this ; a few lines may, however, be devoted to indicating the strains which were mingled to make up the being of this womanpoet.

Her father has left it on record that he knew very little of his family, and that heraldry had taken no notice of his ancestors : but this did not leave him without a glow of pride in the fact that " his lineage was of that stalwart, godly, and heroic race, the Covenanters of Scotland ; men and women who braved persecution for Christ's crown and covenant; and despite the curses of the Stuarts, and the claymores of Claverhouse, witnessed so long and so steadfastly for God and his truth." 1

Mrs. Preston's first American ancestor, on her father's side, was her great-grandfather, Joseph Junkin, who came to Pennsylvania some time in the reign of George the Second, from County Antrim, Ireland. But there was no Irish blood in Joseph Junkin's veins. His ancestors had left Inverness, Scotland, for County Antrim, to escape the cruel persecutions of the Stuarts, and the little Margaret Junkin of this memoir was brought up on tales of heroism for conscience' sake ; — tales which fired her heart and her imagination to the end of life. Great-grandmother Junkin, ne'e Elizabeth Wallace, was even more the centre of these family traditions than her husband, for she had been, as a child, in the famous siege of Londonderry.

These great-grandparents of Mrs. Preston were married after coming to this country, took up land in Pennsylvania, and built on it a substantial stone house. In this mansion a second Joseph Junkin was born, who lived to fight as valiantly for political freedom, in the War of Independence,

1 See Life of Dr. George Junkin.

as his ancestors had done for freedom of conscience. Loyalty and courage have not been lacking in the Junkin family from generation to generation.

Joseph the second married in his turn Eleanor Cochrane, another Scotch-Irish lass, of a family noted even among Covenanters for strictness of principle and practice. Mrs. Preston used to tell her children, with a mixture of pride and amusement, of the little Cochranes walking to church on Sundays, over a mountain ridge covered with whortleberries, without daring to pick one ripe berry for fear of the Fourth Commandment ! And this is not an idle tale, in view of our present task ; we are to find presently this morbid conscientiousness a warring element, even a controlling force, in a nature otherwise composed of the glow and flame and beauty-love and imagination that go to make up the soul of a true artist.

Having thus briefly introduced the grandparents and great-grandparents of Margaret Junkin, it is fitting to paint a little more carefully the portraits of the father and mother whom she loved with a passionate devotion passing the capacity of most hearts ; whose rare goodness was ever to her their true greatness, beside which their other somewhat remarkable qualities paled.

George Junkin, the father of Mrs. Preston, was the sixth of fourteen children born to Joseph and Eleanor Junkin, in the stone mansion in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. Religion and education were the foundations on which his childhood was built, and religion and education became the two absorbing passions of the man. One might almost say that from the days of his a-b-c training in the log school-house, to the end of his honored life as preacher and teacher, there was not a day on which one or the other, or both of these high themes did not occupy the first place in his thoughts. The judgment of his contemporaries is unanimous as to his strong and acute intellect ; his bold and candid character; his intense convictions ; his eagerness as a reformer of what he believed contrary to God's will. It goes without saying that such a man, living in such times, could not do the work he did without arousing animosity ; but the very enemies he made were ready to confess that there was not a thread of selfishness or self-seeking or dishonesty of purpose in the man, while those who knew him best could say, as did his old pupil, Dr. Charles Elliot, that he held the lamp of love, divine and human, so high that its radiance shone out on the darkest day.

Mrs. Preston's biographer is tempted to linger over the lofty and successful life of this father whom she loved so deeply ; but the world has had that story, enthusiastically told.

To this earnest, combative, toilsome worker, God gave as a life companion one of the sweetest, most radiant souls that ever came from His heart of love. Julia Rush Miller, to whom George Junkin was married in Philadelphia, on the first of June, 1819, was, like himself, of Scotch parentage, being a descendant of the " Fighting Laird of Newton ; " but, unlike her lover,* she was reared in wealth and luxury, and she brought to the making of his home not only beauty and grace of person, good family connection, and a considerable fortune, but that tact and fine social discernment which were hers by inheritance and training. The old legend of the halcyon bird building her nest on the stormy waters, and thereby bringing them days of calm, is the best picture one can give of the perfect marriage which made for these two a sweet and central calm on the waves of an otherwise stormy and restless life. The young bridegroom himself records that his love was such as human language was not intended to express ! And for thirty-five years this sweet woman, always beautiful, always young, was the strength and happiness of his life.

Mr. Junkin was, at the time of his marriage, a minister in the Associate Reformed (one form of the Presbyterian) Church, and he took his bride to live in the village of Milton, Penn., where the young preacher was serving more than one country church. In this village, on the nineteenth of May, 1820, in a plain little hired house, was born Margaret Junkin, bringing with her into the world the unusual gifts which were to make her name known to many of her fellow countrymen whose hearts respond to the poetic touch.

There is not a person now living to tell the story of Margaret's first ten years; nor a line left to keep the record of this earliest decade. We gather, however, from the memories of much younger people in her generation some impression of what this early life must have been.

Although Mrs. Junkin had brought a generous dowry to her husband, they lived with exceeding plainness and simplicity in the little village home. For money meant to George Junkin, then and always, not ease and comfort and luxury for himself, nor even for his family, but power to do good ; especially in bestowing upon worthy young men chances of education, which would fit them to become ministers of the gospel.

With his wife's full consent, Dr. Junkin began then to give with that openhandedness which resulted in his putting into the ministry of the Presbyterian Church enough men to form a whole synod ! This also resulted in reducing his possessions to such a degree that his family had to be brought up in rigid economy, feeling at every turn the limitations of a narrow income.

The little Margaret was never sent to school : was this for economy's sake, or because the parents wished to keep in their own hands the early training of their precocious child ? We do not know. But the child herself, looking back from her experience as a woman, regretted this loss of the companions and discipline of childish schooling. It, perhaps, fixed, even thus early, a shy and somewhat morbid habit of mind, which never left her.

But her education did not suffer. Rather, one may say, the child's childhood suffered from overstrenuous education. The seriousness, and conscientiousness, and intense realization of solemn truths, which little Margaret necessarily inherited with her covenanting blood, needed much sunlight and play and frolicsome idleness and laissez faire to sweeten life, and keep a wholesome balance in the young nature.

Instead of this curriculum, she was early set to con difficult tasks. Her mother was, of course, her first teacher ; and having received in Philadelphia the best education America afforded girls, Mrs. Junkin was well qualified for the undertaking. But Margaret's father was her chief teacher ; and from her sixth year, when he taught her the Greek alphabet, until her twenty-first year, when, as she used to say, the door of knowledge was slammed in her face, the father's relentless ambition was matched by the child's, to make her a scholar.

I do not think Margaret knew when her young ambition to be a scholar first began to stir. Look back as far as she would towards that dawn of life, she seemed always to see the little student, pressing forward to whatever goal was set before her ; never satisfied ; and, as it seemed to her sensitive spirit, never satisfying her eager teacher. Ah, commendation was homoeopathic in those days ! Sugar-plums and words of praise were alike feared as unwholesome for children.

When our busy little girl was ten years old, her father moved to Germantown, and took charge of the Manual Labor School there. This, of course, brought the city of Philadelphia, and the friends of her mother's girlhood, within reach of an afternoon's call ; and these two years, spent within the glamour of city ways, where life was eased somewhat of burden and drudgery, brightened with opportunities of sight-seeing, and sweetened by ties of kindred and family affection, were the red-letter days in the memory of the child, the maiden, and even of the old woman. She never afterwards lived in a city, until her declining years brought her to Baltimore, and then four walls bounded the world for her.

But the two years in Germantown were chiefly memorable in Margaret's life, not for the half imaginary impression she brought thence of the ease and charm of city life, but for the beginning of that rare blessedness, a life-long friendship.

One of Dr. Junkin's teachers in the Manual Labor School, who followed him to Easton, and gave valuable aid in the founding of Lafayette College, was Charles F. McCay, a young student of Princeton College. Mr. McCay afterwards filled the chair of mathematics in the University of Georgia, and was for a time president of the College of South Carolina. He was the dearest of Margaret Junkin's early friends, and I have seen in the light of her eyes, when she spoke of him fifty years afterwards, the reflection from that great distance of his bright, lovable nature.

Mr. McCay was to the little Margaret an unselfish elder brother. He was ten years her senior, but seems to have found nothing more to his taste than the companionship of the two little girls, Margaret and her sister Eleanor, whose studies he fostered and encouraged, whose sedate little games he enlivened with boyish spirits, and whose dear comrade he was in a* thousand helpful ways. We shall see, by and by, how this golden thread of true friendship was to reappear and brighten our poet's last days.

Before speaking of Dr. Junkin's removal from Germantown, it is time to count up the little tribe of brothers and sisters who followed Margaret into this love-crowned home. There were four sons and another daughter born during the ten years of Dr. Junkin's life as pastor in Milton. Next to Margaret was John, who became a physician, a scientist, and something of an inventor; Joseph, a brilliant young scholar, who died soon after graduation ; Eleanor, afterwards the wife of " Stonewall" Jackson ; George, a prominent and successful lawyer of Philadelphia, an elder in the Presbyterian Church ; and Ebenezer, who spent a useful life as a minister of the gospel. Another son, William, who was born after the removal to Germantown, was in many respects the most attractive member of the family, inheriting, as he did, his mother's beauty of person and grace of manner, as well as her fine mental gifts ; his life, devoted to the gospel ministry, has ended since this task was undertaken, and the sense of a great loss fills many hearts.

" There were thus six children younger than Margaret," her brother George says, " at the time of our removal to Easton. To all of us ' Maggie,' as we always called her, was a little mother. She ever had the most watchful care of us all, doing what she could to relieve her parents, as to our physical well being, and especially with regard to our education. My first recollection of Maggie is at the time of my youngest sister's birth, in Easton, when she had the care and entertainment of the little brood, mothering us with great success." The little sister, to whose birth Mr. Junkin refers, was Julia Miller, the youngest of the eight children who lived to maturity. She was afterwards the wife of the late Professor Junius M. Fishburn, of Washington College, Virginia.

And so, peering eagerly into the mists of seventy years ago, we catch a glimpse of this ten-year old Margaret; slight, fair, with abundant auburn curls and blue eyes; quick of mind and movement ; sensitive, shy, conscientious ; exercising a commanding influence over the younger children, in spite of her tiny stature ; tender-hearted ; always busy; obedient and loyal to her grave father; passionately devoted to her beautiful and charming mother; a little house-mother herself from her earliest years ; yet even then tingling with poetry and romance, and with the ambition to be a scholar — such is the dainty figure thrown upon the warmly colored background of a home rich in mental and spiritual culture.

Chapter II

The removal of Dr. Junkin from Germantown to Easton was in the interest of an educational enthusiasm which was then paramount with him. He had left his country churches in 1829, to take the presidency of Pennsylvania's Manual Labor School, at Germantown, " convinced," he says himself, " that I might be useful in bringing into the ministry men of the right stamp, and thus do more than I could in my pastoral position." For this Manual Labor School was not intended primarily to make artisans, mechanics, or artists of any sort, but " had been inaugurated by philanthropic gentlemen of the Presbyterian Church, in and around Philadelphia, with a view to facilitate the education of young men for the Christian ministry."

After carrying on this Germantown enterprise for two years, filling the school with students, and doing conspicuously good work in organizing new and improved methods, Dr. Junkin found that his board of trustees were minded to leave to him not only the management, but the financial responsibility of the school. As a matter of fact, many of the pecuniary claims of those two years were met out of his private fortune.

And so ready was this man to spend and be spent for his fellow men that it seems likely he would have gone on supplying this deficit as long as he had a dollar left, if another factor had not entered into the question ; one which was three times to uproot his plans and his home. This was his unfaltering and outspoken loyalty to conviction.

It is not necessary to enter here upon those dissensions in the Presbyterian Church which resulted in its division into the " Old " and the "New" schools; suffice it to say that this line, falling between Dr. Junkin and his trustees at Germantown, made him willing to entertain the proposal to remove to Easton, Penn., where an embryo college offered a fine opportunity for realizing the enthusiast's dreams of education which should be at once theoretical and practical.

To this new home the Junkins moved when Margaret was twelve years old ; and here, with an interval spent — as we shall see later — in Ohio, the child grew into womanhood, and lived sixteen eager, busy, ambitious years. Here, of course, her education went on under the most favorable circumstances ; favorable, that is to say, for the mental culture per se. One still doubts whether a judicious mixture of the frivolous, a little more of the companionship of nonsense, would not have been more wholesome for a highly romantic soul, much given to introspection. But that might have spoiled the poet. Who can say?

At Easton, as elsewhere, but perhaps especially at Easton, her father's intense and absorbing purpose, which resulted in the establishment of Lafayette College, was the chief factor in the girl's education. How full of splendid moral tonic must have been the atmosphere of that home, where personal interests were not first, an end to which work and salary were only means ; but where the work was first, and the family a noble fellowship, whose highest aims were to further the work — for God and man ! What were Greek and Latin and French and history, compared to this school of life, in which her father, and no less her unselfish, high-souled mother, were her lesson-books !

And yet the Greek and Latin and literature were much, and at Easton Margaret's home studies were widened by private lessons from the nascent college's professors and tutors. Her application was intense. And as she was not relieved from domestic duties during these years of hard study, but on the contrary assumed conscientiously (as the eldest daughter) a large part of them, the strain must have been very great. In after years her husband would playfully tell her — towering above her small stature — that it was the weight of these studies in early life that had stunted her growth, and made her, as Browning says, " the smallest lady alive."

There was, however, another tradition in the family as to the cause of Margaret's small size, for she had been tossed on the horns of a cow, as a little toddler, a year or two old ; and everybody knows the Scotch superstition which attributes to this mishap the power to dwarf a little child's growth !

Mrs. Preston often spoke of the difference between the avocations of her young life and the so much lighter tasks of girls at the end of the century : " We made everything we wore, when I was a young lady, my dear," she often said, "from our hand-embroidered collars and cuffs, and the worked edging on our underclothes, our corsets, and our hemstitched handkerchiefs, to our gaitertops, which we stitched, and then had soled at the shoemaker's, not to speak of stitching linen shirts by the dozen (with collars and cuffs attached) for our father and brothers. All this, remember, was done by hand."

" How did you ever find time to read or write ? " her listener would exclaim ; and thus put on her mettle, the older woman would count up the classic authors in history, fiction, and poetry which she and her sisters read under their mother's guidance in those early, busy days. " We would have been ashamed to confess ignorance of these writers," she would insist ; " all educated women in my youth were expected to have at least so much knowledge."

But the circle of girls whose May-time was in the sixties and seventies, instead of the thirties and forties of the century, shook their heads (heads often innocent of Gibbon and Hume, of Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth), and doubted whether the poetess was not judging her contemporaries by herself. Perhaps 'their suspicions were right.

Another reminiscence of Margaret Junkin's student days took the form of a keen regret in later years ; for it was connected with that loss of good eyesight which so early set a limit to the girl's otherwise unbounded ambition. " The only time," she said, " that I had to prepare my Greek lessons was after the family bedtime ; the only time my busy father could hear me recite was before our early breakfast ; so that study and recitation were both done by the inefficient light of our primitive candles. I am sure the close sight thus required by the Greek text put a strain upon my eyes which was the beginning of my trouble."

" Many a time," her children remember hearing her say, " when we would kiss our mother good-night, she would say to sister Ellie, ' Be sure you put out Maggie's candle when you go to bed ; ' but when Ellie would offer to discharge her mission, I would raise my finger in half-serious threat, and say, ' Touch it if you dare ! ' It was the only respect in which I disobeyed my mother's wishes, and as my father encouraged my undertaking more than I could possibly do in the daytime, I felt justified. But in this, as in everything else, my mother was far wiser than I."

Some years before Mrs. Preston's death, when an admirer spoke of her scholarship, she answered with an almost angry disclaimer, " How can you speak of one as a scholar whose studies were cut short at twenty-one, never to be resumed ! " And if one limits the word " study " to systematic lessons, this was true.

For at that age Margaret's eyes were in such a condition that loss of sight was feared, and for about seven years she was hardly allowed any reading, much less study ; for part of that time she lived in a darkened room, often suffering acute pain, and during the whole time her impatient spirit was chafed and fretted by thwarted ambition. She took entire charge of the housekeeping during those years, walked and visited, and helped on the education of the younger children as far as her " ball and chain " would permit.

Before this period of semi-blindness, and afterwards, the education of her brothers and sisters was the most strenuous purpose of her life, and they bear record to-day to her unwearied efforts to interest them in good reading and in memorizing poetry, besides helping them in daily and less enlivening tasks.

One of the pleasures which this failure of eyesight denied the young student was the use of pencil and brush. She had very decided artistic talent, and although want of thorough instruction and this early embargo upon the use of her eyes threw her out of the race for any prize in this respect, she always said it was the work she loved best, and that if she had been free to choose, she would willingly have thrown away her pen for crayon or palette.

It must have been soon after going to Easton that Margaret began to write. No record can be found — how interesting such would be ! — of her first attempt at verse-making. Her kindred now living cannot remember a time when she did not write verses and rhyming letters ; so that it is left to our imagination to picture the little girl, her small fair face flushed with eagerness, her hands trembling, her pulses galloping, as she feels the first breath of that divine afflatus which was later to „take possession of her spirit, making her a priestess of no mean order in this cult.

As we cannot find, in that dim past, the beginning of her intellectual life, neither is there any record of the beginning of the deeper life which we call religion. Did she grow into that sweet inheritance of faith, which is the happy privilege of children of the covenant, hardly knowing when she made the great decision, stepping over the boundary between natural and revealed religion so early that it was an invisible line ? We cannot remember to have heard her tell the story of her conversion ; but the impression her after Christian life made was that of one who had had deep conviction of sin, anxious fears, more or less struggle, as if the way had proved straight and narrow to her young soul.

There came dark days in her life afterwards when she questioned the reality of her conversion ; but she was the only one who could doubt the sincerity of a faith and devotion that for threescore years " constrained " her ; holding her to convictions of duty, prompting daily loving-kindnesses, calling forth constant acknowledgment of God's greatness and praise of His goodness, even when unable to feel assured of her own acceptance with him.

The tone of Calvinistic religion seventy years ago was sternly distant from our Lord's tender words, " Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not." One reminiscence of Mrs. Preston's childhood will serve to show how cruelly unwise and unlike their Master some of those very good Christians were in this respect. Mrs. Preston used to tell us, with a shiver at the recollection (and her little hearers shivered with her), of a certain Sabbath afternoon when the child, playing out in God's sunshine and sweet air, was caught by a solemn-faced theological student, a comparative stranger, and carried off to a darkened room, to be questioned about the safety of her soul ! The little one was hardly old enough to know that she had a soul, and certainly its interests could have been safely left with her Heavenly Father; but the pious young prig, not getting satisfactory answers, told her that he was very much afraid her soul was going to be lost ! Let us hope that conscience tormented the saintly idiot properly, in after days, for putting this cruel and wicked thought into the heart of a little child of the covenant, whose blessed privilege it ought to have been at that age to know only the love of God in Christ Jesus.

One must not, of course, set down to a creed the faults of its fanatics. Those lofty views of God's holiness, of his all-wise and powerful control, which men call Calvinism, were the foundation stones of Mrs. Preston's character ; but we are at liberty to rejoice, as she did afterwards, that

God's infinite loving-kindness has had its proper emphasis in the teaching of this generation.

There was another incident, associated in the minds of Mrs. Preston's children with this last, which also had a most unhappy effect upon her childhood ; its evil spell was never quite exorcised. This, too, had for its background a happy little child and a bright autumn day in which the young heart was rejoicing. This time she was taken, without knowing where she was going, into a house of mourning, where people sat in solemn rows (waiting no doubt for a funeral service), and wearing looks of woe. The child was terrified at the awful silence and gloom, and when she was lifted for a sight of the white face in its coffin, and her warm little hand was taken in an older hand and laid on the dead brow, the terrible unknown chill sent a shock to her sensitive nature from which it was never to recover. As long as she lived, Mrs. Preston could never again bring herself to look upon the face of the dead, not even her best beloved ; and no faith, no hope, no promise, was able to banish from her life the haunting, nameless dread of its inevitable end.