i K ■:'■<:■:■'■: fyvmll Hmretisiitg p THE GIFT OF ibwg f\Msf^ 31 viii^i^ 7583 The date show« when this volume was takenF ■"■> renew this book copy Mie call No. and^glve to * the tjorarian. ~ HOME USE RULES. All Books subject to Recall. All books must be returned at end of col- lege year for inspec- tion and repairs. Students must re- turn all books before leaying town. Officers should arrange for the return of books ^wanted during their absence from town. Books needed by more than one person are held on the reserve list. Volumes of periodi- cals and of pamphlets' are held in the library as much as possible. For special purposes' they are given out for a limited time. Borrowers should not use their- library privileges for the ben e- nt of other persons. Books of special value and gift books, when the giver wishes it, are not allowed to circulate. Readers are asked ' to report all cases of books marked or muti- lated. ■ - Do not deface books by marks and writingr. arW38333 """" ""'""'">' '""'"">' A ..young scholar's letters: oii„,an? ^924 031 762 838 U^iVM^f-i ■ .^j:a A:V^ 9«, «fi Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031762838 YOUNG SCHOLAR'S LETTERS BEING A MEMOIR OF BYRON CALDWELL SMITH D, O. KELLOGG G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS NEW YORK LONDON 17 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET 24 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND Ube IRnfcIiecbocliec f^eea 1897 5 Copyright, 1897 MARGARET CALDWELL SMITH Entered at Stationers' Hall, London Ube 1knicUx'boc\iCV press, •fiUw JSorft PREFACE. IN the legend of Hellas, when Herakles brought Theseus back from Hades, the Greeks called the return of the Attic prince a Psychagogia, or a leading of a soul back from the region of the dead. In a less literal but a more significant way, the publica- tion of these letters replaces Byron Caldwell Smith, who died in the splendid promise of his youth, amongst the living generation, and by them " he, being dead, yet speaketh." Many who knew him in his fair per- son will rejoice at this restoration of his bright, strong- pinioned spirit to a place and function among man- kind, and lament the less his early decease, which seemed at the time to end a career of extraordinary promise. These letters were written by a young man between the ages of nineteen and twenty-three, during four years of student-life in five university cities of Europe. It is notable that the author of them had planned for himself, and in advance, the scheme of study that he followed there, and that it was dominated by an ideal of culture rather than by standards of professional at- tainments. It is further remarkable that, although so young on leaving home, he had already forged his way to philosophic, religious, and social conceptions which he thereafter developed but never abandoned. Stud- ents, wherever they congregate, make a world of their iv Preface. own, and in Kurope their communities have a Bo- hemian irresponsibility and freedom on which dissolute habits make heavy inroads. For young Smith such temptations could not seduce him from the joy he had in conforming to the pure order of nature and he came out of the Circeau ordeal unsullied. ' ' I have with- stood every temptation," he writes to his mother as he set his face homeward, " and grappled with every diffi- culty that I thought might conceal treasures for my life, that I might be worthy one day to return to your bosom as pure in body and soul as when I nestled there as at the fountain of my life." Is not the remem- brance of a spirit so self-poised, of a pursuit of truth and beauty so strenuous, of conduct so blameless, and of a career ended with the bloom of youthful enthusi- asm fragrant upon it, worthy of perpetuation ? It has fallen to one who was a close associate of Byron Smith during all his professional life and who, for a part of the time, knew him as a member of his own family, to edit these letters. In performing this task care has been taken to present the character of their author with fulness and integrity, and to sacrifice uni- formity of style to the spontaneity and freedom of epistolary writing at different times and under different circumstances. To make them look as he would have made them look had he revised them for publication (a task he would never have undertaken, for he did not dream that his biography could be of public inter- est), would be to introduce into them an element of constraint and reserve incompatible with their naivete and self-revelation. There have been eliminated from these letters some personal comments and ephemeral business matters of no permanent interest, but enough of these has been preserved to keep alive the epistolary Preface. v form and color. It was a fixed principle with Profes- sor Smith to give no needless oflfence to a single person, though he scorned trimming, cowardice, and untruth- fulness. For this reason, where no verity or sup- pression of traits was involved, the editor has rarely modified or erased vehement expressions of dislike for things other men cherish, which never would have fallen from Smith's lips except under the sacred con- fidence of intimate friendship or family intercourse. Otherwise the portraiture in these pages stands as its subject drew it, unsuspicious that strange eyes would ever behold it. It is a picture veracious and without concealments. From the dawning of intelligence Byron Smith was a child of enthusiasm and ardor. His hunger for know- ledge and his aspiration for culture grew with his growth and were unappeasable. In the realm of books the ground he conquered will seem prodigious even to scholars. To some his expressions of opinion may at times seem over-confident and even egotistical. A part of that self-assertion (which he never showed in general company) belongs to the intimacy of home. But a part, too, belongs to his singular sense of clear- ness in thinking and the fervor kindled in him by the themes of which he discoursed. Among his rare intellectual characteristics there may be noted his philosophic and religious views. Even those who dissent most widely from them, will recog- nize that he presents them with masterful comprehen- sion, logical force, and great vigor of language. He claimed discipleship of Spinoza and Hegel, frankly avowing himself to be a pantheist. From Absolute Being he stripped away all predicates, especially dis- carding all anthropomorphism. Thus he was left to vi Preface. confront in his soul an inscrutable abstraction as the source of all being and history. For most men this position is paralyzing to the religious sense, and re- sults in an impotent or indifferent agnosticism. Not so with Byron Smith. To him this mystery was life, and wonderful beyond utterance. It was a divine and ultimate fact, and here he worshipped with a reverence that was impassioned. On this foundation he built a religiou. On it he also founded a system of ethics, and gloried in its noble generosity and arduous exactions upon human nature. It called for a self-effacement seldom reached by the devotee of mysticism. Yet he was not an ascetic. To him selfishness was simply separation from nature, in and through which ceaselessly throbbed the unspeakable Divinity. He recognized no personal immortality, and thought it made self of extravagant importance, setting it in opposition to the divine whole, and making love a passion rather than a principle. Death was to him a dreamless repose, a blessed Nirvana. Although first of all a metaphysician, he did not believe in the opposition of philosophy and science. Science he understood in its principles, methods, and tendencies, but he found in it a firm support for his speculations. He would not lose his hold upon the unity of all things, for at that centre was divinity. Not unrelated to these premises were his views of art and scholarship. Nature had a sacred beauty for him. It was a revelation of the Absolute. The artist was touched with a divine afflatus. In verdant fields under ' ' azure ' ' skies, on the sea and on land, and in the galleries or before the temples of Europe, his soul kindled with solemn joy. Of the poets he was a dis- cerning critic, and few pens have more incisively Preface. vii pointed out the soul of art or a singer's limitations. He seems to see into the heart of a Wordsworth, a Goetlie, a Tennyson, or a Swinburne. His arguments have the parry and unerring thrust of a skilled dialectician. His thought moves through metaphor and epigram with lucidity and charm, as the clear waters of a river, catching light on its white foam as it pours over obstacles, or purling in soft cadences along the reaches of its channel. To those who respect youth, lofty aspiration towards verity, faculties capable and brilliant, the ardor of a noble nature, loyalty to conviction, and purity of heart, — all combined in a narrative of devotion to culture, — these autobiographical pages are now committed. D. O. KSLLOGG. ViNELAND, N. J., February, 1897. LETTERS OF A YOUNG SCHOLAR. INTRODUCl'ORY. THIS book is for the most part an autobiography of Byron Caldwell Smith, since that part is com- piled from his letters. It needs no justification from the fact that it puts before mankind a remarkable union of youth and mental gifts in one person, nor from the desire of fond relatives and friends to perpetu- ate the memory of a character they can never forget or of an influence they can never erase. In a final judg- ment of values men do not ask the age of the singer whose impassioned notes thrill them, nor of the painter whose limning entrances them. Work and lives must be taken at their real worth. It is therefore with the conviction that they deserve it that these letters are wrought into this life-history, and that the reader will recognize the fine enthusiasms, the high gifts, the ele- vation of character, and the eloquence of expression thus disclosed as of fascinating interest. Yet youth has its beautiful glamour, and great ex- cellences are more striking when early attained. These letters were written when their author was passing from nineteen to twenty-three during four years of studious life at Heidelberg, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, and Athens. 2 A Young Scholar. They were for the home reading of parents loved with unusual candor and confidence, and their self-revela- tion is without constraint. Their writer unfolded himself in that large atmosphere of sympathy, as the flowers expand their petals and give forth their per- fume in a balmy morning of June. In them his remi- niscences of youth complete a rounded history of his mental life, and it is only necessary that a friendly band should add a few details of childhood and of the days that were fading away under the stroke of disease to make a whole biography and chain a life that other- wise would seem like the rapturous dream of an artist and a sage, to this earth. Antecedents. Authors searching for new scenes and strong natures to give color to their writings have as yet not discov- ered the valleys of the upper Ohio. Yet they were peopled by a dominant race as religious as the Puri- tans of New England, but far more touched with ardor. Their lives were as simple, their confronting of a new wilderness to be subdued as brave and unre- pining, their veraciousness as stern and thorough, their strength as indomitable, their ideals as high, their do- mestic affections as sweet and faithful, as those of any people that ever reared and gave vigor to states. It is the Scotch-Irish race that gave character to the settle- ments of this region, and they came thither with their school-masters and their Presbyterian pastors, not as fugitives from persecution, but under the more genial impulse that .seeks enlargement of life and room to grow'in their own fashion. They were not embittered ; they were not joyless ; they were godly. One sees Antecedents. 3 in their characters the same difference in moderation and geniality as between the Presbyterians and Inde- pendents in the days of the English Commonwealth. Sir Walter Scott describes it well in Woodstock and other of his novels. Into these valleys came now and then descendants of those German Anabaptist sects whom the influence of Penn drew to the fertile fields of the Susquehanna valley ; a meek, devout, simple people, clannish as Israelites for like reasons of faith, living in a perpetual sense of obedience to God, and, while narrowed by too formal adherence to the letter of the law, yet too godly to lose its spirit. They were a meek, affectionate people, plodding with dogged perseverance, as are the characteristics of their race. Among these people Alexander Campbell found a field ripe for his harvesting. He followed his father from Ulster province to Washington county, Pennsyl- vania, where both were stirred by an unappeasable desire to see the unity of Christians. They would wipe from Christendom all the blots and scars of contro- versy and creeds, and have believers one family, known only as obedient disciples of Christ. Campbell wished to reach the heart of divine truth that makes men free, and, holding with unquestioning conviction that through the New Testament the mind of Jesus spoke so that the lowliest heart could understand, he strove to silence all the jargon of the schools and the disso- nances of the sects, so that men should hear in Christ's words the revealing voice of God's will. His ideals were by no means novel. Others had tried the same dangerous experiment again and again through the ages, and the issue had been a religion more fantastic and even antinomian than that of the formalized 4 A Young Scholar. church from which they sought to escape. If Camp- bell's venture was free from this peril it was largely owing to the sound sense, the self-restraint, and the discerning consciences of the people who received his tenets. He sowed his seed on good ground. Men and women reopened their Bibles and tested Campbell's preaching by his fidelity to the primitive gospels. They gathered about and adopted his teachings. He secured their liberty by a Congregational system of church government; they accepted adult baptism by' immersion ; their young men prophesied in their meet- ings ; they founded their church-fellowship on simple obedience to Christ ; they repudiated dogmatism and formulas. Great was the influence of that evangelist of rude eloquence, glowing faith, and brave, high rec- titude. It lingers now, spread all along the Ohio val- ley to Missouri. In its nurture his widowed mother trained the youth of President Garfield, and its fra- grance was upon him at the White House as chief of the nation. The Disciples of Christ, as they wish to be called, or the Campbellites, as sectarian discrimina- tion terms them, may not have been able to break through the limitations that rest upon all religious societies, and so have only added another denomination to the motley divisions of Protestant Christendom, but they were of heroic blood, fearless of scorn, veracious and truth-loving as they could see the truth, simple in manners, and withal not lacking in picturesque qualities. Byron Smith was the child of these influences. In him mingled the blood of Penn's Palatinate Germans and of the Ulster Presbyterians. The inspiriting fel- lowship of The Disciples brought his parents to- gether, and its atmosphere enveloped his cradle. His Antecedents. 5 father was of the Pennsylvania German stock, and came across the Appalachian ranges to the Ohio valley with his father, and here both came under the influence of Alexander Campbell and for a time were now and then lay exhorters in that communion. His mother's family came from Belfast, in Ireland, and were the children of the covenant, as the Irish Presbyterians defined their relation to God, the covenant-keeping Sovereign of the Universe. This commingling of races has given rise again and again to some of the finest personalities of the world. The warmth of family loy- alty and love never cools in the blood of either. To the huge capacity of the German for enduring persist- ency and thoroughness of work, the Irish adds its acuteness, ardor, versatility, and. wit. The qualities of either race are counterparts in the making of a full- rounded, well-balanced, and strong man. The genius of work and the genius of intellect combine in the ideal genius. How far this result was attained in our young scholar his own words are soon to disclose. The father, George P. Smith, in middle life was a lithe, slight man, alert and elastic in motion, full-bearded, and with wavy hair touched with iron-grey. His brown eyes had in them a glint of light that indicated quick understanding and resolute energy ; evidently a man not to be trifled with, and self-reliant. His manner was placid, his speech soft, his manners gentle and without affectation. Fear he did not understand. There slept in him a Berserker rage, that shot forth at the last indignity of bodily assault, and woe to the man that laid hands upon him. Such a man is seldom mo- lested, and had not one or two rash men dared to awaken this temper by violence it never would have been known what a tempest that tranquil man's breast 6 A Young Scholar. could brew. But his scorn of wrong and his purpose to see the earth clean and righteous, never slept within him. In his youth he preached as the spirit moved him among assemblies of The Disciples, though he never sought ordination or pastoral care. He made journal- ism his business, and, in the days when men were angered by slavery, he was working on the editorial staff of the Wheeling Times and Gazette. He was the friend of the bondman. As the presidential election of 1856 drew on, Mr. Smith advocated in that Democratic city the choice of John C. Fremont, and in the City Hall addressed an assembly in an anti -slavery speech. Many were enraged and a mob gathered to waylay him on the street. He was beaten and his clothing torn from him, but possessing himself of a dirk he held the crowd at bay, having wounded two of his assail- lants when the sheriff rescued him. Strangers to him went on his bail-bond, from admiration of his pluck. In a pro-slavery court a Wheeling jury acquitted him of the charges of the indictment, but he was advised quietly to leave the city. ' ' Not until I have cast my vote for Fremont,' ' was his answer. On election morn- ing, amply and visibly armed with knife and pistol he walked openly to the polls and deposited his ballot for the Republican candidate and none molested him going or returning. He then turned his face westward and, after two years' stay in Mason, Illinois, moved on to Danville in the same State, where he published a news- paper. He was at Steubenville, Ohio, visiting his wife's parents and on his way to Port Townsend on Puget Sound to assume the duties of collector of the port, an office to which President lyincoln had appointed him, when the call was made by the government for three months' volunteers to resist thfe secession rebellion. Antecedents. 7 He abandoned the civil office and promptly enlisted, receiving the rank of captain and serving on General Morris's staff at Wheeling, Virginia. Again he en- listed, when troops for a year's service were called for, and going to Dwight, 111., he became major of the 69th regiment of that State. This little place was the home of his family during his service in the field. As a major his services were rendered in Chicago, but the fol- lowing year he obtained permission to recruit a regi- ment, and he raised the 129th Illinois volunteers, becoming its colonel under the commission of Governor Richard Yates. The regiment was immediately ordered to l/ouisville, Kentucky, and was attached to General Rosecranz's army. At I^ouisville the Colonel passed through a long and dangerous sickness in a military hospital, which he left in health too shattered for service in the field. Consequently he resigned in 1864, and removed to Jacksonville, 111., where his son Byron, then a lad of fifteen, had already passed two terms in Illinois College. Here he became editor and pro- prietor of the Daily Jacksonville Journal, and in the columns of that paper the youth found occasion at times to practise his pen. The family settled in Humboldt, Kansas in 1869, led thither in hopes that the change would restore the father's failing health, and here he mingled farming with journalism and with pubhc ser- vice in the House of Representatives of that State. In 1884 he fled from the agues of a new state to Pittsburg, Pa., where he was in the .service of the Pension Bureau. He died at Steubenville, Ohio, in the summer of 1889. This narrative necessarily fixes the residences and migrations of the son until he went abroad, when his own letters begin to indicate his locations, pursuits, and fortunes. 8 A Young Scholar. Byron Smith's mother, Margaret Caldwell, was the daughter of Belfast Presbyterians who settled on a farm near Steubenville, Ohio. To describe their home is most quickly done by saying that its pious and winning spirit Burns portrayed in "The Cotter's Saturday Night. ' ' It was the cotter' s household trans- ferred to the freer and larger life of an American frontier, for when the Caldwells came to the Ohio valley it was a frontier. There was frugality in it without penury, diligence and thrift, but without anxiety. The sire was patriarch and priest to his family. He read to them God's oracles and they knelt reverently and daily at the family altar. High thoughts gave dignity to the home ; love lent it warmth and cheer ; veracity made life earnest and real for it. One feels the strength and wholesomeness of these integrities, — the solidity and stability of truth-loving are in it. Mr. Caldwell lived to be a venerable man and in his later years was much an inmate of his daughter's family. As his hair whitened with the silvery touch of time, he grew oracular in his cozy ingle-side seat, speaking as one having the author- ity of a good life and a long experience. His converse still was of high themes, for his love of right-living grew with his years, his interest in the lives of kindred and neighbors mellowed and expanded, and his need to discern the divineness of reality in things and the Godward purport of events was imperative. The people I have described drifted widely as time went by from the doctrinal moorings of early days, and outgrew their Campbellite cradles. No influence was more potent in producing the change than the unfolding of the bright and captivating life that had sprung from them. But through it all, the love of love, the human soulfulness that was more than conventions and station. Antecedents. 9 the conviction that truth was the keeper of all security and goodness, the scorn of sham, and the courage of rectitude persisted. Indeed it was just these qualities, which their primal faiths nourished in them, that made their changes of mind necessary. Their birthright spirit wafted them on. These Smiths and Caldwells were not learned people, but they had a substitute for learning in their bright common-sense. They were never lured to grasp the unearned favors of fashion or position, but they loved to see work done honestly and well. For social arts they had bonhommie. Such were the influences that nurtured the youth of Byron Smith. It is his mother's testimony that parent- al authority never was used to warp or constrain his development. Indeed there was little occasion for inter- ference, for the child, quick of wit, and inquisitive for the reason of things, found as keen delight in the play of his mental faculties as a boy does with his first pair of skates. Yet he was far from being a pale, large foreheaded book-worm, devouring his books in quiet corners of the house. It could not be said of him, as John Stuart Mill said of his childhood, that he ' ' never was a boy." While still in petticoats he was ready to arbitrate his differences with his mates with a pair of chubby fists, and when in knickerbockers, he strove to be first in the race. He needed no spur either on the play-ground or in the school-room. His merriment was hearty, his enthusiasms many. Over his large lustrous brown eyes there passed expressions of intent- ness, questioning, eagerness, intelligence, mirth, jubil- ancy with vivacity, like troops that enter and pass over the mimic stage, until sleep drew down the long- fringed curtains of their lids. His dark brown hair lO A Young Scholar. clustered about a face of clear brunette complexion and rosy cheeks, such as seems to be granted to Irish beauties. But from the earliest manifestations of in- tellect there appeared in him a delight in ideas, and an insatiable appetite for knowledge that was his domin- ant characteristic. The great function of his parents was to tend the unfolding of the soul of their son and nurture it with sympathy, and this they proudly did. Early Years. Island Creek is a farming township on the Ohio River immediately north of Steubenville, and in it the Smiths and Cald wells dwelt on adjoining farms and had the same religious connections. Here, on the 28th of August, 1849, Byron Caldwell Smith was born, being the first child of his parents. Their migrations fixed the scenes of his childhood and his schooling. His teaching was such as was afforded by such towns as Mason, Dwight, and Danville in Illinois, with the ex- ception of four months in a Roman Catholic school at Wheeling when his father was on staff duty there in the early days of the Civil War. Mathematics were a delight to his heart, and he seemed to have entertained towards them in his childhood the spirit of a remark that he made years after, to the effect that no farther advance in that branch of study was to be expected except from highly imaginative minds. Imagination is not associated usually with pure mathematics, but men who can conceive concretely of figures of four or five dimensions have a rare gift. At all events, these studies to Smith were more than ingenious processes and solutions of problems. They conjured before him relations numerically expressed and marshalled vital Early Years. ii things in orderly procession. He excelled, therefore, in geometry. At ten years of age, while attending the White Seminary at Danville, he was present at the annual exhibition of the proficiency of its scholars before a public audience. The class in higher geometry came to the front, and soon had themselves, their teachers, and the lookers-on in a very uncomfortable state of flushing warmth and uneasiness. One after another failed to make his diagram fit his problem, or his demonstration fit the figure. Byron, through the humiliating scene grew restless, his face glistened with eagerness because the failures were so needless to his mind, and at last he went forward to explain, and with lucid demonstration to the admiration of the audience solved the problems and corrected the diagrams. He had just passed his fifteenth natal day when he entered Illinois College at Jacksonville. At this time he was pondering deep questions of government, such as the philosophical basis of personal rights and liberty ; theological problems cast spells over his thought and he was then in quest of that unity which would recon- cile faith and nature. A clear conception of such prob- lems was to be found in ideas and not in the formal drill of grammar and logic he had reached. During his college course, through the columns of the Jackson- ville Journal, he entered anonymously upon a contro- versy with the classical professor of the college over the right method of making Greek a means of culture rather than of mental discipline. The professor was a man of more force, ability, and thought than in those days was ordinarily to be found in the chairs of West- em sectarian colleges, and he was lured into the dis- cussion by the impression that he was answering the criticisms of some clergyman in the place. Great was 12 A Young Scholar. the surprise of the town when the fact came out that the Goliath of the faculty had been measuring weapons with a David of the class-rooms having the ruddiness of his teens fresh upon him. In these days the young stu- dent was found propounding his reflections and views to those who were interested in him. He would have seemed pedantic had it not been for the evident flame of enthusiasm that was in him. I,ife was opening to him as a very wonderful and beautiful thing. To see the order of nature, to contemplate a lucid thought, to perceive the primal rock of truth under facts, to catch the tone of beauty in literature, made him rapturous, and like all hale youth he could not restrain the expres- sion of his ardor. His speech was always fluent and yet with all his glowing teniperament there was in him a singular power of accuracy and fitness in the use of words. No doubt, to prosaic and unsympathetic nat- ures this exuberance of utterance was a bore and a token of too great self-complaisance. Had he vaulted with poles on the campus, shouted rollicking college songs in college corridors, exhibited the antics and abandon of high animal spirits, people would have said these performances fitted his youth, and have smiled with the amusement or pleasure that older people so readily receive from the pagan glee of young students. To comprehend Byron Smith's style of exuberance at this time we must conceive that ideas and mental operations were to him what athletic sports are to young men. He approached them in a similar spirit. In the summer when he attained the age of nineteen he graduated from Illinois College, and, having laid out a scheme of scholarly culture for the following six years, found in his parents' generosity and devotion the means of putting it in execution. It was to be carried Early Years. 13 out in Europe, and with it begin those letters which convert the rest of this book into an autobiography. They were penned with no dream that stranger eyes would ever see them ; they are wholly without con- straint or afifectation. They present their author in all the freedom of self-revelation that love and confi- dence and sympathy could secure for him. It is not the intention of their editor to add one needless word to their narrative, and they require small elucidation. If the art of letter-writing is a lost one, it surely revived with Byron Smith's pen. It is, perhaps, proper to apprise those who will read on, that the picture to be unveiled to them is not one of incident, but of a gifted soul. As the highest art lies in depicting the human form as the instrument of a noble intellect and heart, so it is the higher reach of literature to reveal the mind and soul of a noble man. The letters now take up their function and appear in chronological order. i,ette;rs. The splendor and mystery of the sea ; Bremen ; the Cathedral of Cologne; pantheism native to the German mind as seen in the early religious architecture as well as in the transcendental philosophy ; Heidelberg; early soulsickness. Heidei,berg, Sept. 23d, i858. I