A writer of books in his genesis...

CHAPTER FOURTH-At St. Louis . . 294 I The Philosophical Society . . 315

II Emerson and Alcott in St. Louis 329

III The University Brocki^eyer . . 343

IV Brockmeyer's Spiritual Genesis . 363 V In The High School 399

VI The Parting of The Ways ... 420

VII Rounded Out 441

Appendix I The Historic Johnny Appleseed 447

Appendix II Clarence, A Drama . . . 456

Appendix IV The Soul's Journey . . . 544

Appendix V Literary Bibles .... 629

Appendix VI Pedagogical Address . . 655

Appendix VII List of Printed Works . 665

A WELTER OF BOOKS.

CHAPTEE FIRST.

EARLY YEARS.

In tlie old family Bible stood the following inscription: Denton Jaques Snider, born January 9th, 1841. On the opposite page in the same book it was stated that the parents of the six children whose births were there recorded bore the names of John R. Snider and Catherine (Prather) Snider, both beingborn and raised in the neighborhood of Clear Spring, Washington Connty, Maryland, which lies on the Potomac. The husband was of German origin, of good plebeian stock, belonging probabh^ to the old Pennsylvania migration from Teutonic fatherland; the mother was of English descent, and claimed an aristocratic connection, both through g 'A WRITER OF BOOKS.

kinship and wealth; indeed one member of her family has been heard to declare that a drop of Norman blood had trickled down the centnries through the ancestral veins of my grandmother ^s people, the Jaqneses. Now this first paragraph of this new book would not be complete unless it were mentioned that the aforeborn Denton Jaques Snider is the Writer of Books, concerning whom the present book is about to be written — by whom? By none other than by the said Writer of Books himself. Or, to speak out the matter more plainly, if not very modestly, it is I who am going to travel in writ a little arc or perchance a little cycle of my own existence to see how it looks to myself, and I shall be glad, my reader, to take you along as companion. The first personal pronoun as a kind of herald or master of ceremonies has now made its entrance and given its bow, and it will not fail to maintain its part to the end, with a fair degree of selfassurance, we have no doubt.

The relatives of both houses, the Snidera and the Prathers, were scattered along each side of the Potomac in considerable and everincreasing numbers, on the one hand reaching down into Virginia, and on the other up into Pennsylvania. They seem to have been in the main a sturdy, quiet, agricultural folk.

EARLY YEARS. rj

who never attracted much notice from any body, not even from themselves.

It is not known— at least I do not know— from what part of Germany my father's or from what part of England my mother's ancestors came to the New World. Neither side seems to have produced a genealogist interested in tracing the origins of the offshoots of his family. Only one little domestic document ever came under my eye, and that too by a sudden spark of chance. There was in the household, it seems, an old tattered, rather mysterious piece of paper in German script, which no member of the family could read. It had been carefully treasured by an aunt with a somewhat superstitious veneration, though she did not understand its contents. I had never heard of it. For some months I, when a boy, had been studying German and was flinging bits of it around the house, with an air of superiority, I suppose, when one of my sisters challenged me to read the ancient document which she knew of, but I did not. The aunt soon produced it from her carefully locked little box of family heirlooms, and even went so far as to say that I should possess it if I could read it. I soon deciphered it, not without aid. of grammar and dictionary, and found it to be the baptismal certificate of Johannes Schneider, familiarly known to us all by liis Anglicized name of John Snider, our grandfather, the date of his birth being 1776 at Hagerstown, Maryland. Thus the Declaration of Independence and my grandfather were born the same year in adjoining States. He died when I was some four or five years old; I recollect of being present at his funeral, and of trying to climb by myself the graveyard fence, from which I tumbled down on a sharp rock, getting for my earliest act of self-assertion a gash in my forehead, whose scar I carry to this day over my left eye.

The rather peculiar given name, Denton Jaques, which I bear— at least some people have qualified it as such— was that of an uncle of my mother. I never saw him, but he has transmitted to me in it a kind of stumbling block on the threshold of life. It was pronounced in all sorts of ways by neighbors, and among Shakesperians it has associated me with the melancholy Jaques, not a very agreeable companion in temperament. The whole name has rather a mixed sound, showing both a French and a German constituent, both modified, however, by an English accent. So let it stand here at the entrance with its little foreshadow: stat nominis umbra.

It may be added, with a feeling of some

EARLY YEARS. 9

relief that neither side of the family, as far as my knowledge reaches, has ever produced a person of distinction, a man or woman much exalted above the common level of humanity. Looking backward in time, no lofty peak is discernible in the ancestral pedigree, much less a line of mountainous heights springing heavenward and bounding the horizon of the past. No great excellence can be seen and no great lack of it ; no illustrious son of light and no mighty scoundrel. The paternal and maternal streams do not seem to have ever separated themselves markedly from the vast ocean of the People, but to have flowed with it onwardly toward its goal. Both have been borne by it, not leading it, in its earthgirdling sweep westward; both belong with the other millions, to that unique ethnic circummigration of the globe, which has been going on so many thousands of years, and which is usually called Aryan. So I was born an Aryan emigrant — that is my farthest stretch in genealogy.

From this rather remote flight into ancestry it is time that I should turn back to the present and tell where I was born. On a farm about a mile southwest of the town of Mount Gilead, Morrow County, Ohio, the record reports that I first saw the light on the day above given, The house has disappeared, but I recollect that it stood along a stream of water called the Whetstone, running through a grove of sycamores, whose leafy tops, mounted on flecked and shaly bodies, still flutter pleasantly in the memory.

I. MiGEATION

It is evident from the foregoing facts that a fresh migration of my ancestors has taken place. The scene has shifted from an old State to a new, from a Commonwealth born of Europe to a Commonwealth born of the American Union. In this difference of political origin will arise a difference of political character, which time is to develop. The Atlantic watershed with its face toward the East is left behind; the great dividing bulwark, the Allegheny range, is crossed, the emigrants debouch into a different world as they descend from the mountains into the valley of the Ohio, whose stream runs westward, opposite to that of the Potomac. Nature herself faces them about in their march toward the future.

This migration is recorded in writing as well as preserved in memory. But the previous migrations of the two families are historically lost; at least they are not known

MIGRATION. ^ll

to me, and were not known to my father, for I asked liim about them. He declared himself ignorant of the road by which his family had come into Western Maryland before the Eevolntion, from the Lord knows where. Originally, of course, his stock was German, as already indicated, but he had completely lost the ancestral speech. As a boy I tested him once with my " Dutch '^ spelling book, and he could not pronounce me a word.

There is no doubt, however, that the chief cause of the migration of the family from the South was slavery. One day in the early 30 ^s grandfather Snider having disposed of his property in Maryland, set out across the mountains with his children, their mother having already passed beyond. He had several brothers who also quitted their Southern home and settled in Ohio. All this was but a drop in the great migratory current which was then flowing out of the Slave States into the free North-West. The movement of the People had been at first toward the fruitful land and' genial clime of the South and the Southwest, but the Kepeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1820 showed that slavery had not only fastened permanently its clutch upon the Southern States but that its leaders were bent on extending it to new territory. Tben began that significant deflection of the vast flocks of hardy home-seekers, who turned away from the sunny South to the colder North, populating it and developing it with amazing energy and rapidity. Into that vast migratory swirl of humanity to the West which lasted several generations, first sweeping Southward and then bending around Northward, the Sniders plunged and were borne on with the moving myriads, unconsciously to the fulfilment of a great national purpose, which rose to the surface in the Civil War.

Both of my grandfathers were slaveholdoj's, and it is understood that both were favorable to emancipation. One of them, however, remained in the old State, unwilling to break rudely the strong ties of kindred, of business, and, doubtless, of class. The other went forth into the wilderness and there built a new home. These two different characteristics may have descended into their common grandchild. My father also seems to have felt the migratory spirit of the family, yea, perchance, of the old Aryan race, and so resolved to take another step Westward, not a very Large one, from Ohio to the neighboring State of Indiana. There he settled on a farm not far from Columbia, Whitley County, after a stay of some months in the town. I was then about five or six years old, and still

MIGRATION. 13

to-day strange fleeting cloudlets of memory of that journey rise unbidden and then vanish. The exploits of our dog Trusty in swimming streams and chasing rabbits have left the most vivid impression on the child ^s mind; nor has the rough jolting of the corduroy road ever been smoothed out of my brain.

In that Indiana town I went to my first school, very unwillingly, I imagine, as I recollect being switched to the school house and in it also. The printed page, however, must have exercised some early fascination over me, since I had already learned at home to spell and read a little on my own initiative. The country was still new, some Indians lingered in the locality; there I saw my first big painted Indian, his squaw and also a pappoose.

An unhealthy season set in, my mother fell sick and died, leaving fi\e small children, of whom I was the third. This sad event took place in the year 1847, and left the family ever afterwards more or less uncentered. I recollect that she was an anxious mother, she worried over the health of her children in the malarious climate of Indiana, and wished to return to Ohio and even to Maryland. We lived in a log cabin with a single room, as did most of the pioneers in that locality; when her illness continued the children were distributed among the neighbors who were kind. At last came a summons to her bedside, it was late at night, the dying mother made some sign to see her children; after a time she opened her eyes, and with a prolonged vivid glance, which I still remember, she gave us her last look of love, then turned her head and passed away. That look remains with me still, and is the most precious, indeed almost the only memorial, I have of her earthly presence.

The family was broken up, the central spirit being gone; my father soon found that he could not make himself its center, and my eldest sister was still too young for such a task. He soon resolved to return to the old homestead in Ohio. Well do I recollect the day we started; the wagon, covered with an awning and filled with household goods, waited in the yard with horses hitched. The five children, ranging from ten years of age to two, were hoisted one by one into the vehicle with its white arcade of muslin overhead, the team started and away we sailed, with happy, happy hearts, though without the mother. The sun shone as the horses trotted down the hillock away from the cabin home, which soon disappeared from our look forever. In an hour or so the clouds gathered and hid the sun, the rain descended, and by the time we readied Fort Wayne, we were thoroughly wet. But in the evening we were lifted out at an inn, and dried before a blazing fire on a large hearth. So ended the first day. After a week or so we drove up to the old farm house on the Whetstone in which all of us children had been born, and to which we had returned.

We had indeed come back to our natal home, but with a great domestic chasm, being now a motherless, uncentered family which soon began to fly asunder. In a brief time ;we had to leave the old farmhouse, as it was in possession of others. My father went to town and tried housekeeping a few months, when he gave it up. We children were scattered and knocked about in a variety of ways; lifers discipline had begun with some severity. In general we found shelter with good people, but they had their own families, and we necessarily remained outsiders.

II. Early Schooling

In my seventh year I started definitely to school, former attempts having been failures. Even now the effort was not a concentrated one, and could not be, in the nature of the situation. I had no home strictly, belonged nowhere precisely on the earth, and, of course anchored myself chiefly in the clonds. This is a period— from the seventh to the eleventh year— when the character is largely employed in shaping itself. I was trained by life not only to self-reliance but to self -introversion, and dwelt chiefly in an imaginary world of my own architecture, which sometimes partook of classic sunshine and sometimes of Gothic gloom. I often brooded, and I recollect of dallying with the thought of suicide. Once I sat fishing on the banks of the Whetstone, when my domineering fantas}^ tried hard to push me into the pellucid stream with its softly persuasive ripples, and actually did jump me into deep water, but I swam out, with one future result at any rate, namely this book, a sentence of which you, my reader, have been brought by some stroke of fate just now to read.

During the aforementioned years I was tossed pretty evenly between two quite different sorts of education, that of a private school and that of farm life, each of which had its own separate locality and environment.

Some ten miles south of Mount Gilead lived a Quaker by the name of Jesse Harkness, who, with his wife, Cynthia, kept a small boarding school, having also a goodly number of day

EARLY SCHOOLING.

pupils from the neighborhood. The pedagogic pair had started their first little school near the old homestead on the Whetstone, so that my father knew them and concluded to put some of his children under their tuition as well as their domestic care, especially as they had no children of their own. Their building was the largest in that neighborhood of farna houses, and made quite an imposing appearance, being set on a gentle eminence, which was baptized with the classic but ambitious title of Mount Hesper, from which height, seemingly, the grand illumination of the West (Hesperia) was to take place. The center of the establishment was undoubtedly the mistress of the household, a Quakeress bearing also a classic name, Cynthia, the well-known designation of the Greek deity Artemis, who could likewise be Eoman Diana, or even the Moon, as we catch in Shakespeare's little jet poetic, ^^the pale reflex of Cynthia 's brow. ' ' So we had, on the outside at least a kind of heathen temple presided over by an Hellenic goddess, but on the inside all was strict Quakerdom into which not even the rather colorless heresies of Elias Hicks dared intrude.

In fact the most horrible memory that haunts me still of this period is my forced attendance at Quaker meeting, in which we

Ig A WRITER OF BOOK^.

boys, four or five of us, had to sit together without a whisper, playless, laughless, nearly motionless, all in a state of incipient rebellion, but terrorized by the fierce hawk-eye of Jesse, who sat and watched us from his corner. There was no preaching, singing, praying—no external service to draw the attention of youth; all had to be internal, even in the undeveloped child, except when some old member rose, the spirit moving, and recited a verse of scripture after which he would sit down again, usually smoothing with his hand his roach, which was not allowed to curl up. Such a short break in that awful silence was always welcome to me as .a most exciting episode, which by no means took place at every meeting. When we came home, Jesse would giv^ us a little round of ear-twingeing and nose-tweaking for our sins, not very severe but perceptible; my offense generally was an unconscious smile which would not wear off by much lecturing and some drubbing. I think I may say that here began that distaste for going to church which has accompanied me through life. At Oberlin I had a similar experience, of which something will be said later.

The physical diet was spare, and the spiritual diet for boys yet sparer. No stories, no fairy tales, no fiction; the whole imaginative

EARLY SCHOOLING. J[9

gift of the child— the most active at our time of life— was openly suppressed but secretly ran riot. One of the boys smuggled the forbidden novel into our group; it was devoured furtively by most of us and was going the rounds when Jesse caught it up one day and flung it into the fire. He was still living when the Freeburgers came out, but I did not dare send him a copy. One young fellow brought a memorized stock of ballads, which he used to sing to us in great privacy, for music also ,was a forbidden thing; he could chant the whole of John Gilpin and make little rhymes of his own, to my boundless admiration as well as intense desire to be able to perform the same marvelous exploit. One of his petty squibs, made up on myself, I can still recall. In fact not long afterwards I began to rattle off little jingles on my own account and the habit is not yet wholly broken. (See Johnny Appleseed's Rhymes.) Moreover in the school course I picked up a good deal of poetry from Ebenezer Porter's Rhetorical Reader, as well as from Goold Brown's English Grammar. Thus a little rill of imagination and music trickled through the dry sands of Mount Hesper, almost in spite of itself.

Still the Quaker discipline was not without its decided advantages. Besides being sternly practiced in the virtues of obedience, veracity, economy, I was made to breathe an atmosphere of study, of aspiration to learn, of information. Jesse liad traveled, and had his store of experiences; men of education would often stay at the house on their way to and from the yearly meetings of their sect, which formed a line of Quaker settlements from Eichmond, Ind., through Ohio to Cleveland. This line had another distinction belonging to the time: through it ran the underground railroad on which fugitive slaves had a free passage to Canada. I recollect well the excitement produced by the case of Eichard Dillingham, a young Quaker of the neighborhood, who went down to Tennessee and was arrested for enticing negroes from their masters. At Mount Hesper I first commenced to acquire the study habit, which has clung to me as the dearest friend through joy and sorrow. There was a small library in the place, and the book now began to tell its wonders to the Writer of Books.

"When I was not at Mount Hesper, I went to a farm some nine miles distant, which was owned by a great-uncle of the name of Newson, familiarly known to the kinship as Uncle Joe. Here work was the watchword from sun-up to sun-down; the printed book vanished into the background, and Nature unrolled her pages of green and gold to the diligent hand of the toiler. On the farm the chief gain for me was something which no school can give— a first-hand knowledge of the primal cultnre, which was agricnltnre. I was too yonng to perform the heavier tasks, but I saw and took part in them all : plowing, sowing, reaping, the care of domestic animals, including several kinds of fowls ; also I got to know a number of the wild denizens of the neighboring forest. Physical phenomena, the wind, the rain, the snow, heat and cold, are a more intimate part of the farmer's existence than e^ en of the villager's. I felt this cliange as a return to Mother Nature, from whom the school necessarily estranged me. Still it was in itself a school whose lessons I have never forgotten, and which is the unconscious substrate underlying both language and thought. Particularly the American farmer has a unique life of his own. In general he possesses his special homestead, with a portion of the glebe fenced off around the same; he dwells not in a hamlet of peasants (as is mostly the case in Europe), but is himself the baron in his own castle with lands attached. The soil in no sense owns him, but he owns the soil ; he is truly individualized, a free citizen of a free State, and socially the most independent of men. On the other side, he is also very dependent, having to rely on the bounty of the seasons; God's gifts are his chief necessity, not man's, as he regards the situation; thus he is easily religious and conservative. It is true that this old American farm-life is being broken up by steam and electricity, with their cheap and rapid transit, which turns country into city and city into country. Also the unparalleled development of agricultural implements is making inroads upon the transmitted methods and usages of the farm. I hold the statement to be true that mightier advances have been made in the instrumentalities for cultivating this, our earth, during the last half century than took place during the thirty or forty centuries since our ancestors emerged from their nomadic condition. Sixty years ago I was a farmer's boy; since then I believe the improvement in husbandry to have been greater than that during the entire lapse of time from the earliest Aryan crop of grain. I saw pretty nearly the same agricultural implements, and pretty nearly the same manipulation of them as had come down from immemorial ages. I may add one reflection: this marvelous evolution of food-raising machinery springs from and is required by American institutions, and may well be regarded as a phase of that new stage of civilization which is arising in the Occident. The freer the man,

EARLY SCHOOLING.

the more obedient Nature becomes to Ms liberated hand.

Still the farm today remains a great educator, giving that which no school, no town, no city can impart. It carries man back to his first cultivation, the cultivation of the soil, which is connected with the settled home and with the domestication of plants and animals, and above all with human domestication. The domestic grains are still sown, the domestic animals are still reared, on the farm; and they are the results of uncounted ages of evolution. With this primeval occupation of man, language, mythus, folk-lore, poetry unfold, whose earliest hints may be felt in tillage. There is at present an educational tendency to send town children to the coimtry to observe the processes of husbandry; better still would it be if their hands were set to work in certain occupations of the farm.

Anyhow at Uncle Joe 's I acquired the rudiments of the basic processes of agriculture, which, I must repeat, has laid the foundation stones of all other culture. I went to the harvest-field, raked the sheaf, cocked the hay, drove the team, fed the cattle, did a hundred chores, and thus became a living part, though a small one, of that very lively unit, the American farm, which might be called the original cell of our social organismo Primarily onr country is a vast cluster of farms and farmers whose energy and character are the well-head of the nation's energy and character. It is generally stated that the city recuperates largely its human supply of brain from the same sources whence it derives its bread and meat. I may add that I always hailed with delight the transition from Jesse's to Uncle Joe's, chiefly because on the farm I obtained better food and more of it. Boys will complain, but the frugal Quaker really underfed us, though the faminepinched Hindoo would have reveled in our thin gravies and butterless bread as Heaven-sent luxuries. Nor should it in justice be forgotten that Jesse received a very small compensation for his services and supplies.

But the time has arrived when both these kinds of training, the boarding-school and the farm, are to drop out of my life forever. I had reached my eleventh year when a new shift of environment as well as of discipline took place.

III. The Second Home

My father now resolved to bring his scattered children together into a home once more. They were growing up parted from him and from one another, and were forming

THE SECOND HOME.

habits and attachments, which might soon be too strong to break. Young as I was, I recollect his talking to me about the change which had long been his cherished dream. With some such design he had married a second time, but this attempt turned out unsuccessful. I saw my stepmother but a few weeks; she was sympathetic and kind-hearted, but was already ill with what soon showed itself a fatal malady. Not long after she died; he and we children found ourselves where we were before— dispersed to the four winds.

At last about 1851 my father began to see his way to a reconstruction of his home and took a dwelling in the town of Mount Gilead. My eldest sister was then toward fifteen years old, and my second sister somewhat less than two years younger; with such help the new household seemed possible. Still he found us a centrifugal set after so many years of separation at the most impressionable ' time of life. I have never deemed my father a strong character, nor did he possess a robust constitution; he was kind-hearted and conscientious toward his children, but his discipline was lax ; I felt at once the loosened grip and began to fly off after my own sweet will. Now and then, however, he felt compelled to box the ears of the whole group of us impartially for some little domestic brawl— an act

2G ^ WRITER OF BOOKS.

of momentary despair on his part, of which he would at once repent. I have no doubt our second home would have gone to pieces in a year, if we had not been reinforced at the critical moment by just the needed personality. My father's sister, affectionately called by us Aunt Mary, a childless widow whose husband had recently died, came to live with us and at once centered about herself the recalcitrant units of our family. Not only this she did through her unusual will-power, but she became the domestic heart as well; she mothered her brother 's orphaned children anew, and made herself the fountain of their hopes in life as well as of their aspiration for improvement. She had but little education herself, but the value of education she seemed to appreciate better than anybody I knew of in my youth. It must be confessed that she was more ambitious for the children under her charge than my father was; but she controlled him, and through her I could reach him, and get his consent to take a fresh step in advance, with which she never failed to sympathize.

Mount Gilead was then a village containing less than a thousand people. It possessed a small but active life of its own, social and commercial; it was the shire-town of the county with court house and some educated

THE SECOND HOME.

professional men, lawyers, doctors and preachers, and especially one schoolmaster, who still looms up in my memory above them all. The main interest of the town, however, centered in politics. The presidential election of 1852 was at hand; a majority of the people belonged to the Democratic party as against the Whigs, but the balance of power was held by the Freesoilers, then a young and very active organization to which my father, though a born Southerner, had attached himself. From him the son naturally took his earliest political bias. I can still recall vividly the campaign of 1852. I at once became an ardent politician; the boys of the village divided according to the leanings of their parents and sometimes had little scrimmages over the respective candidates for the Presidency. A great day it was for our party and for the town and especially for me when John P. Hale, my Presidential candidate, appeared and made a speech in the grove along the Whetstone. Salmon P. Chase, then a Senator from Ohio, was also present and addressed the meeting. The other two political parties never brought any men of equal distinction to that little speck of a town. These forceful orators, along with their cause, made a strong impression upon my boyish mind; they aroused sympathy for the enslaved, and appealed to the law of the human heart ; they rather turned away from the written law as laid down in statute and constitution. After a vague, dreamy fashion, I already felt the battle between the two laws, and the same conflict was lurking more or less distinctly in every soul of the community. To be sure the people divided into parties which outwardly affirmed one side or the other; but internally every man had some trace of the time's scission which was destined to grow deeper and deeper till the final mighty clash. The town resounded with political discussions in the stores and on the street corners; sometimes though rarely the doughty antagonists came to blows. Once the whole community, including women and, of' course, the boys, seemed to range themselves on two battle lines, when a leading lawyer struck a leading preacher for calling him a liar in a heated argument. Thus Mount Gilead had a little war of its own already in 1852, dimly foreshadowing the later big war in a kind of germ. A disputation on the street would quickly gather a crowd of eager listeners, who would divide at once and show their respective sympathies by applause and derision. It was certainly a period of great fermentation; looking backward I have to think that it was the early preparation of the people for the approaching