An Epistle to Posterity

Front matter

AN EPISTLE TO POSTERITY

BEING RAMBLING RECOLLECTIONS OF MANY YEARS OF MY LIFE

BY

Frontmatter

Copyright, 1897, by Harper & Brothers.

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All rights reserved.

I Dedicate this Book

TO MY SONS

SAMUEL SHERWOOD

AND

ARTHUR MURRAY SHERWOOD

Ita, filii mei dilectissimi, vivitote ut majoribus vestris decori sitis, posteri vero memoria vestra glorientur et honestentur

PREFACE

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Rousseau once sent to Voltaire an ode addressed to Posterity.

"Voici une lettre qui n'arrivera jamais à son adresse," said Voltaire, in his cruel way.

Perhaps this should discourage me from attempting to collect my rambling recollections under a title which is stolen from Petrarch; but I am encouraged by thinking that Petrarch will not care for this transparent appropriation of his forgotten title, and I am sure that I shall not care if Posterity never receives my letter. I shall not be here to watch for an answer.

And yet I shall be glad if a record of the changeful times in which I have lived gives pleasure to any one who reads my book now, or to those who come after me. It has been a remarkable era. Progress has harnessed several new steeds to her car since I started to travel onward. Life is much more full of comfort now than it has ever been. Some one asks, Is not life stifled in appliances? Are we any happier than our ancestors were? Is a single day of Europe worth a cycle of Cathay? Have we not taken on some neuralgias and malarias and nervous prostrations? I leave that question for Posterity to answer, and I am rather glad that I shall not be responsible for the reply.

But I will answer Mallock's question, "Is life worth living?" in the affermative. I have found it eminently so. Life has been an enjoyable experiment, and amusing, in spite of its sorrows and disappointments. Life is a success if we can work and laugh. It has been a perpetual pleasure to me to see luxury march on with giant tread; to watch the great city of New York grow; to welcome art and beauty into our houses; to see the statues and the buildings improve in every decade. It has even been a pleasure (the sure accompaniment of advancing years) to say, "Oh, we had greater geniuses on the stage and in the forum, and greater beauties at the balls, in the old time!" That gentle murmur of complaint is, however, lost in the magnificent march of the coming centuries. Quite worth while it is to have seen the transition period.

M. E. W. S.

Chapter I

AN EPISTLE TO POSTERITY

CHAPTER I

Early Days in New Hampshire — My Father and Mother — Mr. Emerson's School at Boston — Daniel Webster at Marshfield — Visit to Washington — "Tyler Too" — Charles Dickens — Along the Ohio and Down the Mississippi — The Carved Oxen at Nauvoo — Joseph Smith and the Mormons

My recollections of childhood are very vivid, especially of my father, a tall and most picturesque man, with blue eyes and fine curling black hair, with a great laughing mouth full of white teeth and of eloquent voice, and a laugh which filled the whole county of Cheshire; a man who liked to dance and to march, who never heard music but to keep step to it; a man, in fact, who had the veriest charm for children — a tremendous vitality.

In those days my father, still a boy himself, and a very boyish boy, was the best hand of us all at snowballing in the winter, teaching us to slide and to skate, and reading aloud to us in the evening the immortal stories of Walter Scott, with a mingled joy and pathos which the author himself would have enjoyed; a kind and loving and generous man, full of genius and eccentricity, who dressed in furs and moccasins in January, when he would go up to the White Mountains to hunt the moose with Anans, an Indian of the St. François tribe, who had been educated at Hanover, at Dartmouth College — that venerable institution founded by an English Earl for the education of the Indians, which, according to Anans, "spoiled a great many good Indians and made very poor white men."

Years after, in Rome, I met the Earl's great-grand-daughter. Lady Louisa Legge, and as she asked me with great naïveté about this bequest I had to tell her it had been relegated to the humble prosaic education of white boys.

But perhaps it had made Anans a better companion for my father, who had a real friendship for this son of the forest. I remember the camp in the wilderness, Anans and his Indian wife and their pappoose swung in a birch-bark cradle under a spreading tree, and a little pair of moccasins which Mrs. Anans wrought with beads for my little feet when as a child I was taken to the White Mountains. Perhaps to that I owe my love of wandering, for I have never been able to keep them still since.

My father must have been a very good housekeeper, for I remember always a most hospitable table, and a larder full of succulent delicacies — venison and moose tongue, wild turkey and quail (shot with his own unerring gun), besides all the excellent provision of the domestic farm-yard, and the yearly pig-killing, which frightful, bloody scene I used to peep at surreptitiously from my nursery window. A fine series of cellars underlined our large house, dark, wandering, limitless, like the mysteries of Udolpho, and filled with binns, where vegetables kept all winter without freezing, together with the hams of the late slaughtered pig, and his bequest of wreaths of sausages. A great barrel of Ma from John and Charles March, New York, was rolled in every fall, and my father and my uncle Robert, another son of Anak (for they were both six feet four), used to attend to the bottling of this, then daily used, fine wine. I never drank any of it, but I have the ichor of it in my veins to-day, innocent as I am, in the shape of rheumatism. "My grandfather left me the gout, without any cellar of wine to keep it up on," said James Russell Lowell, and I might say the same. My father was lawyer, politician, and military man. I never heard him addressed by any lesser title than Captain, and he was a captain of thousands for fifty years; after that he was called General, as his father was called the "old Squire" all his life, a tribute to the customs of the Old World which I have always remembered with pleasure.

James "Wilson, my grandfather, I remember as a handsome and distinguished figure. He was exceedingly fond of dress, and never walked up the street but in a full-dress suit, with a ruffled shirt and white cravat. In the ruffle was placed a topaz pin surrounded by pearls. In his fine, well-kept hand was a gold-headed cane, and his feet were in polished shoes; he looked the rich and respected citizen.

"There goes the old Squire, as vain as a peacock," I overheard a working-man say one day. But I was very much afraid of this vision of old-time elegance, for he did not like to see me romping along the street, and once addressed me in this terrible manner: "Mary Elizabeth, I am very sorry to see a pupil of Miss Fiske's school, and my granddaughter, dancing on the public highway." I did stop dancing until after his dear back was turned, but hypocrisy is the tribute which vice pays to virtue. I kept on dancing for many years, street or no street, but I took good care not to let him see me.

This splendid old person had been a classmate of John Quincy Adams at Harvard, and Mr. Adams told me afterwards that he remembered my grandfather as "the best-dressed man in college." "He used to wear a scarlet coat and knee - breeches, and was the strongest and best wrestler in college," says my authority. I imagine this coat had cost his mother many a hard bout of spinning and weaving, for this brave woman went to Boston twice a year on horseback with the products of her loom, that she might educate her oldest son, and proudly she dressed him well.

She and her husband, Robert Wilson, had come over from Ireland together, as children, in that first great emigration of the Scotch-Irish to America — those undismayed Presbyterians, who brought such noble gifts with them, and who became such important settlers for the new colonies. Robert Wilson, a relative of General Stark, fought in the Revolutionary war, and settled down, an impoverished man, in Peterboro, N. H.; but his brave wife, full of good blood, kept up the traditions of her English and Scotch ancestry. The eldest son must be educated — indeed, she educated two sons at Harvard, a feat of extraordinary valor in those days.

Both lived to honor her, and she lived to see them both in Congress, a fact which delighted her much. Her son James, my grandfather, saw the Capitol burned by the British. My father was a veritable Irishman, more Irish than Scotch, and he always reminded me, after I grew older, of the sketches of Grattan. His eloquence, which was marvellous, could make even a New Hampshire jury laugh and cry, and he became the leading advocate of his State. He was impulsive and lavish, imprudent and always in hot water, although, like the clever Bishop Wilberforce, "he always came out cleaner than he went in." He was philanthropic, and wise (for other people). New Hampshire enjoys to-day, in her fine roads, the result of his wise forecast, for he helped to legislate for them, and her blind and lunatic asylums owe much to his great heart and brilliant brain. He was a lovely, dear, big playmate to his little children. We kept on admiring him until we were no longer little; but I can never forget that sense of protection and security with which I crept into those huge arms, or the love and warmth of that grand, magnificent embrace, when I was cold, unhappy, or misunderstood.

He was amusing too, with his guns and game, the prodigious glory of his military uniforms, blue with gold facings, and a long yellow plume in his chapeau bras, which I found delightfully picturesque. He was a Mason as well, and I often wickedly opened a secret drawer in his closet where I saw strange jewels and insignia which it was not expected that I should behold. On all occasions when a speech was permissible he made one, and his voice was superb; he could be heard "across the Atlantic," and later on, when he vowed to elect the first General Harrison, in 1840, "Tippecanoe and Tyler too," I often heard him address five thousand people, all hanging on his every word. Mr, Webster called him the "first of the stump speakers," and the Hon. Henry Wilson, born a Colbaith, told me that he changed his name to Wilson from admiration of my father's eloquence.

He was a strange, romantic outcrop of Irish blood and Puritan surroundings, singularly unlike his prudent, reserved father. As a man of genius is unlike his race and is often misunderstood, my father was misunderstood, and I fear he became unhappy and disappointed. His political idol was Mr. Webster, and when Mr. Webster made the 7th-of-March speech my father's political heart broke.

A good patriot and a fine, unselfish character, always ready to work for any good cause. General James Wilson lived to be eighty-four years old, and died in the house where he had made us all so happy. The State offered him a public funeral, for who had served it so well? The town of Keene, where he was loved and honored, suspended business, as the soldiers of his own "Keene Light Infantry" escorted him to his last home. It was a beautiful day in May, and Monadnock, his neighboring giant, looked down upon him in a full-dress uniform of blue and gold. The children of the public schools stood in line as he was carried along. In the church his much-loved pastor said: "To whom are these great honors paid? To the silver-tongued orator, to the soldier, to the learned lawyer, to the politician? No, to the man of heart;" and that he was.

As I looked my last on his peaceful face I noticed that his black curls were scarcely streaked with gray. They lay in still infantile luxuriance as he had always worn them around his massive brow. The strange contradiction, which had pervaded his nature — the child and the giant — it was all there — noble, lovable, and youthful to the last.

My mother, a beautiful and quiet person, was the antipodes of her husband. Hers was a soul made for renunciation, and the Puritan element was strong in her. She never allowed herself to lavish caresses upon her children, but she was their faithful friend in illness, and always stood ready — the very genius of hospitality — to feed the hungry and to clothe the poor. When I reflect on all that a housewife had to meet in cold New Hampshire winters, with the thermometer at 28° below zero and no furnace, I can but wonder at and admire her pluck and her ingenuity, for her parlor windows were full of hot-house plants all winter; and I think I never went to a party for thirty years in after-life that I did not seem to breathe the scent of the little bouquet which she always had ready for me in those early days — a white rose, a sprig of geranium, and a clove pink, with some sweet-scented verbena. I can see her almost statuesque dignity still, and the rich, red lips, which rarely parted in a smile; but when they did, what a perfect set of teeth! A slice of fresh cocoanut was not more deliciously white and fresh, and her complexion of lilies and roses remained with her to the last. How could such wonderful beauty have survived that cold climate? Years after, at Washington, these charms of hers excited national admiration. She received it with the calmness of the mother of the Gracchi; indeed, she was a study after the antique.

Perhaps the early death of her boys — victims to those cruel winters, victims of croup and scarlet-fever — had saddened her; but I do not remember my mother as enjoying her beauty or as ever seeming frivolous or vain. She was apt to be well dressed — that seemed to crop out of her inner consciousness — and she had "love, honor, obedience, troops of friends"; but she died at fifty, looking only twenty, and I often wish that I could go back and make her smile that too rare smile, too often interrupted by tears.

Her large, populous, and busy household was presided over below-stairs by Roxana, the last of a noble race — an American servant, the best cook that ever suggested the Physiologie du Goût. "When I forget, O Roxana! thy clear soups, light bread, and delicate desserts, thy coffee, better than any I have drunk in Paris; when I am ungrateful for thy broiled birds and thy superb treatment of venison — "The haunch was a picture for painters to study; The fat was so white and the lean was so ruddy" —

when I forget thy cookery, O Roxana! may I be condemned to eat sawdust all my days!

From the amount of sawdust and bad cookery which I have eaten I might consider myself punished for ingratitude; but no! there was never such a cook as Roxana!

The physical conditions of my bringing-up were eminently healthy. The good and plentiful table, the splendid, exhilarating air, the exercise on horseback, the line sleigh-rides in an immense gilded structure called "The Sleigh," which my father had had built for his own long limbs, and to accommodate a large family and all the neighbors — a sleigh which reminded one of St. Petersburg — the fascinating summers and autumns, with the picnics and the walks and excursions in that prettiest and most finished valley which surrounds Iveene (worthy of its English-named county, Cheshire); with Monadnock, a stone mountain, shaped like Vesuvius, which Nature dropped from her apron as she was going up to make the White Mountains; those pine woods, as ample as the Pineta of Ravenna; the soft hills wooded to the top; the wide, fertile, and picturesque meadows; the slow and sluggish current of the Ashuelot, winding among the drooping willows and stately elms — afforded days for the pleasures of budding girlhood which were unrivalled. Then Keene was an agreeable, sociable place, full of scholarly men and handsome matrons, who had homes to which any one would like to be invited. We had parties and balls, and occasionally a military ball, and I never imagined that there was such a thing as ennui. We read prodigiously, and that atmosphere of culture for which Boston has been so much, perhaps, laughed at penetrated to our very midst. We were intimate with the Sage of Weimar and with Thomas Carlyle. Emerson came up to lecture to us, and we welcomed the first little green books which emanated from Boz and the yellow-colored Thackerays. The first yellow cover I ever saw held Becky Sharp in its embrace. It was the purest and best society I have seen. No unclean thing came near it. But — alas that there is always a but! — my mother's clear blue eyes, sharp as a Damascus blade, cut through the dignified pretensions of Miss F——— 's school. She found out that I was individually learning nothing, and I was surprised one night reading Miss Edgeworth's Helen at the hour of two in the morning.

I have always illogically wished that Miss Edgeworth, now sunk into undeserved oblivion, could have lived to hear that anybody sat up all night to read her decorous Helen. What fin-de-siècle girl will do it now?

But I hurt nothing but my eyes in this nocturnal impropriety. The one candle was blown out, and I was rebuked. My mother told me that Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Selden had called on her the day before to say that they feared Mary Elizabeth was reading too many novels; that Mr. Tilden, the head of the circulating library, said that the same offending M. E. took out two novels every week, while Lucretia Brown took out Mrs. Chaporee's Letters and The Serious Call; and Mrs. Selden said she thought it very bad for a girl's future to be reading novels all the time. Alas! when I was put through a severe examination I stood A No. 1 in Scott, Bulwer, Edgeworth, and Miss Austen, but I did not know much geography nor the least arithmetic, so I was marched into my father's office, where he was at work upon a complicated law-case. My mother, as beautiful and quite as severe as Dante's avenging angel, stood pale and terrible, addressing the busy man (who found it quite inconvenient to receive us at that time) with these words, which are burned into my heart: "Colonel Wilson, here is our daughter, whom we have sent to Miss Fiske's school, and of whose abilities and studious habits we had hoped so much. She was reading a novel at two o'clock last night, and she cannot parse a word of Paradise Lost. She cannot bound Pennsylvania, she does not know where Jerusalem is, and she thinks six times six may be forty."

My father's sense of humor was so strong that he burst into a fit of laughter which shook the house, and I burst into tears. He took me to that ample breast of his, and said, "Never mind, we will send you to Boston to school. Don't cry. Don't read so many novels, and obey your mother. But how does it happen that you do not know the multiplication-table?"

"Father, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it! — so I write Matilda Slocum's compositions, and she does my sums."

"Well," said he, "you have been cheating yourself most bravely. Let Matilda's compositions alone, and do you tell me the 'nines and sixes' to-morrow night at dinner."

So a very delightful dinner of turkey was spoiled for me the next day at four o'clock, and I was put on a short commons of novels. Bulwer was entirely forbidden, and I read Napoleon at St. Helena. I was allowed Walter Scott (God bless him!) and Miss Austen. God bless her a thousand times! She lighted the weary way of a poor little girl for a very dreary winter.

I think the Reverend Mr. Livermore came in about this time to teach me a little German, to soften the asperities of Mrs. Selden and Mrs. Brown, and even to give me a lift up the ladder of literature, for he accepted my first story, sent anonymously to the Social Gazette, a periodical read in his dear clerical parlor, where I first experienced the exhilarating thrill of hearing my own writings read to an appreciative circle. Mr. Prentiss said, "That is a capital story." I, the unknown author, sat burning in the background. My mother (O rapture!) applauded it. Dear woman, it was the only time!

When I got home I told her I had written it. "Go to bed, my dear; it was a very poor story indeed," said she, sternly.

My mother thought flattery of any kind was wicked, and so had the early teaching of her Puritan, Calvinistic parents steeled her tender heart that she allowed my youth to pass without a caress and without praise. The word love was never mentioned. I wonder we did not all grow up Shakeresses. In fact, the fault of all New England education was a certain hardness. Our minds were cultivated more than our hearts.

There was a blue lookout for my dreamy shirkmg of the boundaries of Pennsylvania. Never, however, did so slight a fault lead to so useful a punishment. To go to Mr. Emerson's school, to be a "Boston girl" — even in name — was a vision of majesty. I determmed that I would learn how to study, and after a fashion I did. Female education was at a very low ebb in what were called "Ladies' Schools" in those days. "We learned to be ladies, I hope, for we certainly learned very little else. Had it not been for cultivated people about me — had it not been for my dear Reverend Mr. Livermore, I should have had most arid oases in my youthful mind. My parents were both too busy to criticise me; there were younger children, always having the croup and the scarlet-fever. I often sat up all night, not reading Miss Edgeworth, but holding in my arms a poor little struggling brother. Alas! I saw three of them die, and how deeply did I sympathize with my poor mother! Perhaps this ploughshare of agony which went through my girlish heart kept me from being cold, indifferent, merciless, thoughtless. I hope so, but I still believe praises and smiles and a little approbation would have made of me a more amiable character.

My father and mother had followed that wave of Unitarianism which was started by Channing and Martineau, and all my ideas of religion were hopeful, inspiring, and beautiful. I never knew that horror of "a jealous God," which doctrine had been assiduously preached in New England just before I came on the scene, and which had gone far to fill the insane asylums. Indeed, one of my own schoolmates had gone raving in a religious mania under my own eyes. But I can remember the soothing words of Mr. Livermore, who came in as I was holding one little dear, dying brother in my arms — how he took him from me and said, with such hopeful, peaceful assurance, that "death was swallowed up in victory." I never had a doubt. My God has always been a loving God.

I wish I could repay here my indebtness to that ad , loving man, Abbot Livermore. He belonged to that ministerial family whom Dr. Bellows called "the Abbots with one t."

Would that any convent had enjoyed such an abhot! Keene, under that Christ-like influence, and that of his follower, the Rev. William O. White, was a community to be envied. Spiritualism, Second-Adventism, and Mormonism devastated our neighboring towns, but no such delusions troubled the peace of those congregations comitted to their charge — these enlightened men; and they brought to us that wonderful body of thinkers, Waterston, Dr. Lowell, Dr. Parkman, James Freeman Clarke, Rev. C. A. Bartol, the saintly W. B. O. Peabody of Springfield, Dr. Gannett, Dr. Bellows (destined to be one of the best friends of my later life); later on, Edward Everett Hale, several Channings, and Dr. Lothrop, the polished Wilberforce of the Unitarian Church. These men were scholars and elegant men of the world. Dr. Huntington, now Bishop of Central New York, was one of them, and, like him, many of the Unitarians of that day became Episcopalians of this day. It was perhaps a halting-place for the soul, freed from the terrible chains of Calvinism, upward and on to a more "reasonable faith." It needed, perhaps, for its ultimate development, the liberal creed and the wonderful prayer-book of the Episcopal Church.

Some letters written about this time have turned up in an old desk and have helped my recollections. As they may amuse the reader, I print them, mistakes and all:

"Boston, Nov. 184—.

"Dear Mother, — I am finding my place in Mr. Emerson's school. I thought I never should, and I cried three nights pretty hard. He made me take up the Latin grammar and learn it all by heart from be to end. I recite sometimes to his daughter, Lucy Emerson, a very pretty girl, with the brightest eyes and little dancing black curls, but the sharpest thing you ever saw. She won't let me make a mistake, her eyes go right through me. I told Mr. Emerson I would rather recite to him or to Miss Monroe. He laughed and said he was glad Lucy was so correct. I think he and she mean to be kind — but oh! duty and pleasure have to be kept seperate. I miss home and Keene very much, but Mrs. P is very kind and gives me rather too good a breakfast. I have to walk up a steep hill, and then go up four flights of stairs, and I suffer a pain in my chest after all that. I trust your tic doloureaux is better.

"Ever your loving

"M. E."

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(From my mother to me.)

"Dear Mary Elizabeth, — Seperate is not correct. Separate would be nearer right. Are you not to study the English branches at Mr. Emerson's school? I am sure I knew how to spell Separate at your age. Now, my dear child, exercise all your talents and all your principles. This is your first absence from home. Try to lay the foundations of a useful character. Remember, life is not all play. I miss your sympathy, and sometimes think I have thrown my own sorrows and cares on you too early. "We are already counting the days until you come home at Christmas.

"Your mother,

"M. L. W."

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"Boston, Nov. 6.

"Dear Mother, — I have bought my winter suit. It is of blue merino, with a spot of brown in it, like an autumn leaf, and a lovely blue silk cloak lined with a brown satin; a bonnet of blue, with Marabout feathers, and rosebuds — O, just the sweetest thing you ever saw ! Willlam says it is very becoming. I wore it all to Dr. Lowell's church last Sunday, and I could not help thinking of myself, all the time. There is a great pleasure in new clothes, isn't there? Do you think we attend to clothes quite enough, at Keene ? Here the girls talk and think of them, a great deal. I fear I have spent too much money, nearly one hundred dollars, since I left you, but I think I have got all I need get, for the winter. I am getting on pretty well at Mr. Emerson's, although it is as hard as a galley slave's life. I wish I could sit down and tell you all about C——— and M——— and Susan — nice girls all of them. M. P. sings as delightfully as ever, and is the belle of all our little parties. We go out to tea often. Father's friends treat me with a great deal of attention, and the Lawrences and Mrs. Page have asked me to tea. I am to see Washington Allston's picture to-morrow.

"Ever your loving

"M. E."

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"Keene, Dec.

"My darling Daughter, — I hear you look very well in your new blue suit, and I think as you bought it all yourself, and not with my advice, you shall not be scolded for spending so much. We must try to make it do for two winters, but I am seriously sorry to hear you say you could not help thinking of yourself all church time! Try on that sacred day to dismiss all thoughts of yourself and your clothes. It is one reason I wish you to be well-dressed so you shall not think of yourself, for I know it is mortifying to a young person to be ill-dressed, but I trust you will rise above clothes. Thank Mrs. P. for her great kindness to you, and do not eat hot cakes for breakfast. Dr. Twitchell says that is the cause of the pain in your chest. Your little sisters both have severe sore throats. Take care and not get one, in Boston. Bathe yourself freely in cold water, even if you have to break the ice in the pitcher.