New England in letters

Foreword

THE present volume records a series of pilgrimages to the New England scenes and places associated with the men and women who have helped to make our literature, though brief its chronicle, one of our most preious heritages. The story of each author's life and work is told as far as possible in connection with its environment, and it is hoped that in this way the reader will be brought to a closer and more intimate knowledge of those who though dead yet live in the messages they have left for their fellows. The preparation of these pages has been for the author a source of delight : if they give pleasure to those into whose hands they fall he will feel that his labor has abundant reward.

R. R. W.

To

WHO IN

HALE AND HONORED AGE BINDS A FRUITFUL PRESENT

TO A HEROIC PAST

Contents

I Through Longfellow's Country

II Wanderings in Whittier Land

III The Salem of Hawthorne .

Chapter I Through Longfellow's Country

WHEN it was ended there was reason to rejoice that the pilgrimage here recorded had its beginning in Portland, for Longfellow, best beloved of our poets, was born in the beautiful old town by the sea, cherished it beyond any place on earth and sang its charms in some of his sweetest verse. Here, as a youth, amid scenes upon which the eye never tires of feasting, he drank in the undying beauty of nature, and with it the lessons of love, patience and resignation which were the master influences in his literary career. One has but to read "My Lost Youth," "The Sea Diver," "The Skeleton in Armor," "The Lighthouse," and his other poems of the sea to know how abiding recollection of his boyhood home helped to shape the cliildren of his fancy.

Portland honors Longfellow's memory in more than one graceful and appreciative way. There is a statue of the poet in the western end of the city, and the house at the corner of Hancock and Fore Streets where, in

1807, he was born is visited every year by a throng of pilgrims. It is still in a fair state of preservation, but the neighborhood has deteriorated since Longfellow's father lived in it, and it now wears an unkempt and slovenly air. Longfellow passed his youth in the house on Congress Street known as the Longfellow mansion and often mistaken for his birthplace. This house was bequeathed by his sister in 1901 to the Maine Historical Society upon condition that it should be kept in its present form, as a memorial to Longfellow and his family. Built in 1785 by General Peleg Wadsworth, grandfather of the poet, it was originally two stories high, a third being added in 1826; but it has undergone no alteration since the latter date, though it stands now in the heart of the business quarter of the town.

Portland Avas also the birthplace of Nathaniel Parker and Sara Payson Willis — " Fanny Fern " — and for the latter its beauty and charm were precious memories until her death. She tells us in her touching "Story About Myself" that while writing the book in widowed poverty her thoughts went back to her childhood home. She had often, in the olden time, wandered in the woods about Portland w ith her mother, who " always used to pluck a leaf of the fern to place in her bosom for its sweet odor." Living over again the vanished days, she said to herself: "My name shall be 'Fanny Fern,* little dreaming that anybody would ever know or care anything about it." "Many long days after this," she writes in another place, " I visited my birthplace, Portland. I wandered up and down the streets of that lovely, leafy city and tried to find the church where good Dr. Payson used to preach. Then, too, I wanted to see the house where I was bom, the house where he laid hands of blessing on my baby forehead when it was purple with what they thought was the 'death agony.' But where it was that the little flickering life began I could not find out."

Others have since discovered what she tried in vain to learn. On the site of a neat cottage at 72 Franklin Street once stood the house in which Nathaniel and Sara Willis were born. Their pious yet militant father was the founder of the Portland "Argus," and underwent imprisonment for his too caustic comments on the doings of his neighbors. James and Erastus Brooks were also Portland editors in their youth; and so was Seba Smith, one of the drollest of our early humorists, while there James G. Blaine tried his 'prentice hand at journalism. Another Portland editor of the old days, and one native to the soil, was John Neal, a prolific and gifted maker of books, who needed only the power of concentration to have left an enduring mark upon the literature of his time.

Portland also claims as her own Nathaniel Deering and Isaac McLellan, "poet of the rod and gun"; Ann S. Stephens and Elizabeth Payson Prentiss, whose once popular novels still find readers, and Elizabeth Akers Allen, whose "Rock me to Sleep, Mother," won for its author sure if slender fame; while Eliza Oakes, though born in another part of Maine, lived for a number of years in Portland, and there became the wife of Seba Smith. This gifted and beautiful woman was the first of her sex in this country to appear as a public lecturer, and among the first to speak from a pulpit. Sixty years ago her popularity was at its flood, and her writings in prose and verse carried her name to other lands. Men pass away, however, and their idols with them, and long before old age she had disappeared from public view. Her death in 1892 was notable chiefly because it reminded a busy and careless world that such a woman as Eliza Oakes Smith had ever lived.

While Longfellow was still a boy in Portland, Nathaniel Hawthorne came to dwell in another part <rf the same county. The latter was fourteen years old when, early in 1818, he was taken by his widowed mother to live in a house built for her by her brother in the town of Raymond, now as then a secluded, forestgirt hamlet, reached by a twenty -mile drive from Portland through the lovely valley of the Presumscott, or by an equal journey from the railway station at the southern end of Lake Sebago. The house occupied by the Hawthornes, a large two-storied wooden structure, was subsequently remodeled into a church. Though Mrs. Hawthorne and her daughters remained three or four years at Raymond, the son at the end of a twelvemonth was sent to school in Salem, and two years later he entered Bowdoin College. He returned, however, to spend his yearly vacations in the wilderness, and these visits compassed some of the most gratefully remembered experiences of his life.

Hawthorne, at a later time, spoke of Raymond as the place where" I first got my cursed habit of solitude "; yet he always rehshed solitude, and, he declares in another place, " I hved in Maine hke a bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed." During the long days of summer he roamed, gun in hand, through the great woods; and during the moonlight nights of winter he would skate for hours all alone upon Lake Sebago, with the deep shadows of the snow-clad hills on either hand. Now and then, when he got too far away from home to return, he would seek shelter in some logger's cabin, and there pass the night, warmed by a roaring wood-fire, watching the silent stars. " I ran quite wild," he wrote in 1853, "and would, I think, have willingly run wild till tliis time, fishing all day long, or shooting with an old fowling-piece, but reading a good deal, too, on the rainy days, especially in Shakespeare and 'The Pilgrim's Progress' and any poetry or liffht books within reach."

Though Bowdoin when Hawthorne entered it in 1821 was a struggling institution of slender resources, it numbered poets and statesmen among its undergraduates, for his fellow-students included Longfellow and Franklin Pierce. Both of these men became his lifelong friends, but the one of his classmates who stood closest to him was Horatio Bridge, his chum and inseparable companion. Bridge, who afterwards served with distinction in the navy, seems earlier even than the embryo writer himself to have divined his true calling. "If anybody," Hawthorne wrote him in later years, " is responsible for my being an author, it is yourself. I know not whence your faith came; but while we were lads together at a country college, gathering blackberries in study hours under those tall academic pines ; or watching the great logs as they tumbled along the current of the Androscoggin; or shooting pigeons or gray squirrels in the woods; or bat-fowling in the summer twilight; or catching trout in that shadowy little stream which, I suppose, is still wandering riverward through the forest — though you and I will never cast a line in it again — two idle lads, in short (as we need not fear to acknowledge now), doing a hundred things the faculty never heard of, or else it had been worse for us — still it was your prognostic of your friend's destiny that he was to be a writer of fiction."

Hawthorne's college room was 17 Maine Hall, one of the three dormitories of brick and stone which flank Bowdoin's wide-spreading campus. There remains no other visible memorial of his residence at Brunswick, though the site of the inn he describes in "Fanshawe" is marked by an elm. The presence of Longfellow, on the other hand, is felt in more than one corner of the old college town. The poet's room when a student was 27 Winthrop Hall; upon his return to Bowdoin in 18?9 to become professor of modern languages he made his home in the house now occupied by General Joshua L. Chamberlain at the corner of Maine and Potter Streets; and at 23 Federal Street, an elm-shaded thoroughfare running from the Androscoggin to the college campus, one finds the house to which he brought his bride.

Mary Potter had been a schoolmate of Longfellow in their native Portland, and tradition has it that on the young professor's returning to the town after three years' absence in Europe, whence he had gone to fit himself for his duties at Bowdoin, he saw her at church and was so struck with her beauty and grace as to follow her home without venturing to accost her. But on reaching his own house, one of his biographers tells us, " he begged his sister to call with him at once at the Potter residence, and all the rest followed as in a novel." The husband was twenty-four and the wife nineteen years of age when they began married life in the Federal Street house — a two-storied wooden structure of the type so often seen in New England, but still attractive under its goodly elms. The main portion of the house has a porch in front with the entrance hall behind it and a hall window above. Four windows on either side light corresponding rooms, and a large ell extends backward from the main house to the edge of a small bluff, marked by two old pine trees.

Longfellow has left us a pleasant picture of his study on the ground floor of the main house. " I can almost fancy myself in Spain," he writes on a June day in 1831, " the morning is so soft and beautiful. The tessellated shadow of the honeysuckle lies motionless upon my study floor, as if it were a figure in the carpet; and through the open window comes the fragrance of the wild briar and the mock orange. The birds are carolling in the trees, and their shadows flit across the window as they dart to and fro in the sunshine; while the murmur of the bee, the cooing of the doves from the eaves, and the whirring of a little humming-bird that has its nest in the honeysuckle, send up a sound of joy to meet the rising sun." Such was the nook in which Longfellow laid the corner-stone of his fame. Here he gave final form to his " Outre Mer" and his translation of the " Coplas of Jorge Manrique," and in a Brunswick shipyard found the material and impulse to write " The Building of the Ship." But his connection with Bowdoin came soon to an end. He left it in 1834, on the way to his long professorship at Harvard, and, save for an occasional visit in after years, the scene of his early labors knew him no more.

Sixteen years after Longfellow's departure from Bowdoin Calvin E. Stowe joined its faculty as professor of divinity, and with his wife, Harriet Beecher, took up his residence in a house at 63 Federal Street, soon to become historic as the birthplace of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Mrs. Stowe 's father was Lyman Beecher and Henry Ward Beecher was her brother. She had passed her early married life in southern Ohio, on the border line between the free and slave States, and her experiences had bred an interest in the anti-slavery agitation which was shared to the full by her husband. Thus, when they settled in Brunswick, both were distressed at the apathy with which their new neighbors regarded the abolition movement, and it was not long before the wife conceived the idea of writing some sketches that should give the world a picture of slavery as she had seen it. One day while looking over a bound volume of an anti-slavery magazine she read an account of the escape of a slave and her child from Kentucky over the ice of the Ohio River. This was the first incident of a story that swiftly assumed shape in her mind, and for the model of Uncle Tom she took the husband of a former slave employed in her own family.

The scene of Uncle Tom's death, in which the pathos and dramatic force of the story reach a climax, was the first put on paper. This came to her mind while attending communion service in a Brunswick church. She went home and at once wrote out the chapter with such effective truth as to capture completely the sympathies of her children. After that the story took form rapidly, and, when the opening chapters were submitted to the "National Era," an anti-slavery journal published in Washington, the editor at once accepted it for serial publication. It was enthusiastically received from the outset, and without delay John P. Jewett, a young Boston publisher, offered to issue the whole in book form. His offer was accepted, and in March, 1852, the first edition of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" came from the press.

Its success was immediate and without parallel in literary history. Ten thousand copies were sold in a fortnight; for months eight great presses were kept constantly at work; and in America alone 300,000 copies were sold witliin a year. Nor was its popularity limited to the author's own country; still less was it the success of a day. The book had an enormous sale in Europe, and after half a century is still read in scores of different languages. Its moral and political effect in bringing home to the people of the North the true meaning of slavery is now a commonplace of history. Mrs. Stowe was always of the opinion that the story had been written through her quite as much as by her, and an incident related by her biographer shows that this belief became more unquestioning with the years. Wliile at Sag Harbor shortly before her death, an old sea-captain came up to shake hands with her, saying:

"I am glad to meet the woman who wrote 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.'"

"But I did not write it," answered the white-haired old lady as she shook the captain's hand.

" You didn't ! " he ejaculated in amazement. " Why, who did then } "

"God wrote it," was the reply. "I merely did his dictation."

"Amen," said the captain reverently, as, hat in hand, he walked thoughtfully away.

The birthplace of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is a house very like that to which Longfellow brought his bride, save that it lacks the porch mentioned in the case of the other. It was owned in earher days by John Titcomb, a professor of odd jobs, and a well known figure in the Brunswick of his time, to whom Mrs. Stowe makes frequent and humorous reference in her letters. Her occupancy of the Titcomb house ended in 1852, when her husband left Bowdoin to become professor of sacred literature at Andover Theological Seminary. Maine, however, gave being to one of her later stories, that charming idyl, "The Pearl of Orr's Island," which borrowed its setting from an island near Brunswick, where the author spent many summer months.

It is a roundabout journey from New Brunswick to Waterford, but it leads through many a stretch of charming scenery, and it takes one to the birthplace and grave of Charles Farrar Browne, the droll and whimsical genius best known to folk of his own time as Artemus Ward. Waterford lies among the foot-hills of the ^Vhite Mountains, and under the very shadow of Mount Tir'm, so named, according to local tradition, from the Indians, who in climbing its steep sides were wont to say, "Tire um Injuns." Its site, a level plain known as Waterford Flat, affords room for only a small number of buildings, and in this hamlet of five score inhabitants, on an April day, in 1834, Charles Farrar Browne entered life. His birthplace was destroyed by fire many years ago, but the two-storied house, painted white with green window-blinds, in which he passed the greater part of his boyhood, still stands, under sheltering elms, on the north side of the village green. Browne's father died when he was only thirteen years old, and a little later the son left Waterford to make his own way in the world. He often returned, however, to this hamlet among the hills, and, as he grew in fame, his visits to Waterford became occasions of social interest in which all of the people of the place had part. Those who remember him will tell you that he extended his hand to every child and greeted all he met as neighbors and friends. Only one door was he known to pass. Some rich relatives of his mother who held aloof from him when he was a poor printer and most needed their friendship, were now fain to offer him the hospitalities of their home, but he never called to accept them. Browne had a wanderer's love for his birthplace. When dying in England, at the early age of thirty-three, he made request that his body be brought to Waterford for burial, and it now lies beside those of his parents, brothers and sister in the little village cemetery. A granite monument at the left of the family plot bears simply the word "Browne," but on the plain white headstone which marks the grave of the gentle humorist is inscribed the legend — " His memory will live as a sweet and unfading recollection."

The burial garth in which Browne takes his rest borrows its name of Elm Vale from a farm christened and long owned by Robert Haskins, the uncle of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and there in the days of his youth the sage of Concord passed many happy hours. Robert Haskins, of Boston, bom in 1774, at the age of twenty-three took to wife Rebecca, daughter of the Reverend William Emerson, of Concord. The same year the town of Waterford hired the Reverend Lincoln Ripley to minister to the spiritual needs of its people. His brother was the second husband of Mrs. Haskins' mother, and it was his settlement in the community that in 1802 brought Robert Haskins to Waterford, where he established the first store in the town, becoming also a farmer and manufacturer. He settled first in a locality known as Plummer Hill, but later established the Elm Yale homestead which long stood just across the road from the cemetery of the same name. Shaded by mighty elms, the house erected by Haskins was built of pine from primeval trees, and when it was burned there disappeared a splendid example of the housebuilding of three generations ago. Here when a young man and even in his mature years Ralph Waldo Emerson visited his aunts, Mrs. Haskins, and her maiden sister, Mary Moody Emerson. But he came to Elm Vale only once after it had passed into the hands of strangers, and then, its interior having been much changed, he would not enter the old house. He asked leave, instead, to visit the orchard, where he filled his pockets with apples, and then returned to his carriage. Elm Vale never saw him again.

The morrow of his visit to Waterford found the writer among the New Hampshire hills at the birthplace of Daniel Webster. The records tell us that Webster's father, a Puritan of stern and sterling character, served under Wolfe in the French war, and later was a captain in the Revolutionary army. A few years before the War of Independence, he received a grant of land in the then remote wilderness along the Merrimac River, and in what is now the town of Salisbury erected a log-cabin, with no other white man's habitation between it and the Canadian border. The elder Webster, who was twice married, commemorated his second union by building a one-story frame house hard by the log-cabin of the first days. Daniel was born in this house, which still exists as the wing of a later structure a few rods from its original location. Its former site is now marked by a huge boulder, and by the side of the latter is a tall staff, from which a flag floats on pleasant days.

Near the boulder is a well, shaded by an elm tree which was planted in 1768 by Webster's father. For sixty summers the son, at regular visits, sat beneath its spreading branches and looked upon the fields his father's labors had wrested from the wilderness. The Salisbury farm is situated about two miles from the subsequent homestead of the Websters in South Franklin. It has few fertile spots. Granite rocks are everywhere visible, and give an air of barrenness to the scene. Yet standing upon the spot the thought is strong within one that these "crystal hills gray and cloud-topped" among which Webster was cradled, and the rough pastures in which he grew to man's estate left their quickening impress upon the majestic physical and mental stature which gave him a foremost place among great Americans. One also loves to think that among these wild hills he wooed the gentle-natured woman who became his wife and the mother of his children. Winsome Grace Fletcher was a school-teacher in Salisbury, not far from Webster's birthplace, when the young lawyer with the great dark eyes took her heart and life into his keeping. Tradition has it that he one day assisted her in disentangling a skein of silk. Then taking up a piece of tape, he said :

" Grace, cannot you help me to tie a knot that will never untie ? "

"I don't know, Daniel," was the blushing answer, "but I am willing to try."

The knot was tied, and until her death twenty years later hers was the most gracious influence in her husband's life, her memory remaining with him as a benediction until the end.

It is a delightful drive on a summer's morning from Salisbury to the shaded town of Hanover, the seat of Dartmouth College, whose chief boast is that it was Webster's alma mater. Ambition for his children was the controlling motive in the later life of Captain Ebenezer Webster, and he strained his scanty means to the utmost to give his youngest son the best education within reach, first at Exeter Academy and later at Dartmouth. In 1797, Daniel, a slender lad of fifteen, entered the latter institution, then in its struggling infancy.

Desperately poor, despite his father's sacrifices, his four years in college were years not only of hard labor, but of struggle against obstacles that would have balked a weaker spirit. When a friend sent him a recipe for greasing boots, he hastened to thank him. "But," he wrote, "my boots need other doctoring, for they not only admit water, but even peas and gravel-stones." His college days, nevertheless, were happy ones, and his classmates were wont in after years to recall his singular charm of presence and his rapid progress in the studies he liked — Latin, literature and liistory. They also recalled that he was ambitious to lead even then, and that, all things considered, he was the most remarkable of the undergraduates of his time. " If anything difficult was to be done," writes one of them, "the task was laid upon Webster."

The visitor to Hanover comes upon more than one interesting reminder of the college days of this " mighty man in the moulding process." During his freshman and sophomore years Webster was an inmate of the house of Humphrey Farrar, which yet stands near the corner of Main and Lebanon Streets, and during his junior year he occupied the south chamber of what is now known as the McMurphy house at the corner of

Main Street and Webster Avenue. He lodged during his senior year in Dartmouth Hall, the oldest of the college buildings, and tradition has it that his was the room then and now numbered 1, northwest corner of the third story. Webster was graduated from Dartmouth in 1801; and that until the end it held a warm place in his affections is attested by his oft-repeated visits to Hanover in after years and by the noble service which he rendered the college in one of the greatest of his triumphs at the bar. Nor are those which have to do with Webster the only cherished associations Hanover and Dartmouth offer to the lover of books and bookmen: James Freeman Clarke was born in the town, and Rufus Choate and George P. Marsh were graduated from the college, where Oliver Wendell Holmes and Arthur Sherburne Hardy were professors in the morning of their careers.

The writer's way when he left Hanover led through Concord and the countryside hamlet of Amherst to Portsmouth by the sea. Concord guards the dust of Franklin Pierce and of that stout apostle of freedom, John P. Hale, but the pleasant town claims a place in this chronicle by reason of its memories of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and of that singular genius, who, born plain

Benjamin Thompson, lives in history as Count Rumford. It was in a fine old house yet standing in South Spring Street, Concord, not, however, on its original site, that Emerson wooed and wed Ellen Louisa Tucker, the beloved wife of his youth so soon to be taken from him by death, while the Rolfe and Rumford Asylum in Hale Street helps to keep fresh the romance of Thompson's early manhood.

The wealthiest man in the Concord of colonial days was Colonel Benjamin Rolfe, who in 1764 built for himself a nobie dwelling. Five years later, at the age of sixty, he took to wife the daughter of the minister of the town, a comely maiden of half his years. Then the colonel died, and when in 1772 Thompson, a handsome stripling in the flush of his youth, came to Concord to teach school the widow promptly lost her heart to him. He was nineteen and she was thirty-three, but the tiny god of love mocks at disparity in age as well as at locks and keys. So the young schoolmaster and the widow were married at the end of a brief courtship, and took up their abode in the mansion of the old colonel, where was born their only child, Sarah Thompson, afterwards Countess of Rumford. When the Revolution broke Thompson chose the side of the King, and in 1775 filed to England. The remainder of his long career, a career of brilliant and practically unbroken success, belongs to the history of science and political economy in Europe. He never lost interest, however, in his native land and when, in 1791, he was, for his scientific work, raised to the dignity of Count of the Holy Roman Empire, he chose for his title that of Rumford — the early name of the town where he had won his bride, and where his first advancement had come to him

The Count's wife who, as he often declared in after years, "had married him rather than he her," never followed him across seas, but shortly after her death, in 1792, their daughter joined her father in Europe, and when, in 1814, he, too, passed away, was allowed to take the title of Countess. After long residence in France and England, the Countess of Rumford, in 1844, returned to America. Eight years later she died in the house in which she was born, and which, with an adequate fund for its support provided in her will, — the death, in 1809, of her childless step-brother, Paul Rolfe, had made her a rich woman, — now serves as an asylum for poor girls. Though Count Rumford's fame has been somewhat dimmed by the years, and for his countrymen blemished by what many of them would term his political apostacy, the fact remains that it was founded upon scientific labors of the first importance, while the clear, forcible English of his essays, which are models of their kind, entitles their author to high rank among America's early men of letters. Those who have read them will not deny the fine old mansion in which Thompson's career may be said to have begun a place among our literary landmarks.