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Cornell University Library 
 CT 119.G59 
 
 Commemorative addresses :George William 
 
 3 1924 008 695 847 
 
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 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
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COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES 
 
 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS; EDWIN BOOTH 
 
 LO UIS KOSSUTH; JOHN JAMES 4 UD VBON 
 
 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 
 
 BY 
 
 PARKE GODWIN 
 
 NEW YORK 
 HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 
 
 1895 
 
Copyright, 1894, by Harper & Brothers. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 Electrotyped by Wynkoop & Hallenbect. New York. 
 Printed by J.J. Little & Co., New York. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAOB 
 
 George William Curtis 3 
 
 Edwin Booth 65 
 
 Louis Kossuth 107 
 
 John James Audubon 149 
 
 William Cullen Bryant . . . . -195 
 
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS 
 
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS* 
 
 Gentlemen of the Century Association: 
 
 We are brought together to-night to do hon- 
 or to the memory of a fellow-member who had 
 long prized and adorned our association — whom 
 many of you knew, and knew only to admire 
 and love — George William Curtis. He died on 
 the 31st of August last — the closing day of a 
 brilliant summer — at his home near the shore 
 of the sea whose moans are now his requiem. 
 
 It is a sorrowful task for me to utter the 
 memorial words you require, because, although 
 somewhat younger than myself, he was one of 
 my earliest as well as latest friends, with whom 
 I was for some time associated in earnest polit- 
 ical and literary work, whom I never approached 
 or even thought of without a glow of affection. 
 
 * Originally delivered before the Century Association of New 
 York, and subsequently repeated before the Brooklyn Historical 
 Society and before the New York Civil Service Reform Associa- 
 tion. 
 
 3 
 
4 George William Curtis 
 
 and whose loss has filled my eyes, as it has 
 those of many others, with unavailing tears ; 
 and yet, so vivid a personality was he to me 
 that, knowing him gone, I cannot, in the phrase 
 of one of our older poets, " make him dead." 
 It is almost impossible for me to think that the 
 manly form so full of activity, and the attractive 
 face always aglow with light and sweetness, are 
 motionless forever; that the voice which music 
 itself attuned to the expression of every noble 
 and tender human sentiment is still, and so 
 still; that the busy brain which forged for us 
 the solid bolts of reason and built the beautiful 
 fabrics of fancy has ceased to work ; and that 
 the large, honest, and loving heart will beat no 
 more. 
 
 In complying with your request I shall offer 
 you no biography of Mr. Curtis, for which the 
 time allotted to my task would be inadequate, 
 and I can only refer to those leading events of 
 his life which will enable you to appreciate best 
 his character and services as a writer, a speak- 
 er, a citizen, and a man. 
 
 Mr. Curtis, although a resident of New York 
 since his fifteenth year, was a native of New 
 England. He was born on the 24th of Febru- 
 ary, 1824 — within that decade which saw the 
 first gleams of a permanent American literature 
 
George William Curtis 5 
 
 in the writings of Dana, Irving, Bryant, Cooper, 
 Halleck, and the yet unnoted Poe — at Provi- 
 dence, Rhode Island — a State where Roger Wil- 
 liams had early planted the seeds of a true 
 spiritual liberty, and Bishop Berkeley, the friend 
 of Addison, Pope, and Steele, and the founder 
 of an ideal philosophy, had left the traditions of 
 his presence. 
 
 His ancestors on both sides were of the Puri- 
 tan stock — not particularly distinguished as I 
 find, save that his mother's father, James Bur- 
 rill, Jr., was a Chief Justice of the State and a 
 Senator of the United States, whose last speech 
 and vote were given, a few days before his 
 death, against the territorial extension of slavery. 
 
 It was a good stock to spring from — for 
 those grim religionists, who burned witches and 
 Quakers, had in the old world smitten kings to 
 preserve liberty, and in the new, laid the foun- 
 dations of a democratic empire that now stretches 
 over a continent. That imaginative temperament 
 which peers into the unseen, and gives a mys- 
 tical predominance to things of the spirit over 
 things of the flesh, often blossoms into the love- 
 liest flowers. Certainly to it we trace nearly all 
 our foremost poets, from him who, as a boy still, 
 sung our first immortal song amid the snow- 
 drifts of the Hampshire hills, to him, our Quaker 
 
6 George William Curtis 
 
 Tyrtasus, who the other day put off his singing 
 robes to take on a wreath of unfading laurel. 
 
 Mr. Curtis's schooling outside of the home, 
 where he was a diligent reader of books, was 
 brief and scanty :* two years at a public acad- 
 emy, and one of private tuition ; but his educa- 
 tion was none the less wide-ranging, nutritious, 
 and fruitful. As with nearly all men of genius, 
 it was a self-education and peculiar. After a 
 year's trial of a mercantile pursuit, which proved 
 repulsive, instead of going to college, he hurried, 
 with a brother, to Brook Farm, a small agricul- 
 tural and educational association, recently gath- 
 ered near Roxbury, Mass.f It was an outcome 
 of a socialistic wave rolling over Europe and 
 America at the time, and, by its agitations. 
 
 * He attended an academy at Jamaica Plains, near Boston, 
 for two years. His mother died while he was yet a child, and 
 the father married again, and in 1839 removed to New York 
 with his family. His father was cashier of one bank and after- 
 wards president of another, and the lad could easily have gone 
 to college if he had wished. 
 
 t The immediate founders were the Rev. George Ripley and 
 his wife, Charles A. Dana, Wm. H. Channing, C. P. Cranch, 
 John S. Dwight, and others; but Theodore Parker, Margaret 
 Fuller, Eronson Alcott, Henry James the elder, Albert Bris- 
 bane, Parke Godwin, etc., took a deep interest in its success. 
 All over the country, later, many citizens attentively studied 
 socialism, among whom I may mention one who was afterwards 
 distinguished as a soldier and statesman and as the second 'of 
 our martyr-Presidents, James A. Garfield. 
 
George William Curtis 7 
 
 stirring up a good deal of foam, ooze, and am- 
 phibious drift-wood, with here and there a pearl 
 of the sea like this. But it was nothing new on 
 the face of the earth. In all ages generous 
 minds, dissatisfied with the actual conditions of 
 society, have endeavored to bring back a van- 
 ished golden age by a reconstruction of its 
 methods ; and the loftiest intellects have exerted 
 their best faculties to discover the Alladin's 
 Lamp which could transform hovels into palaces. 
 A man who has not, at some time of his youth, 
 been convinced that he could lift society at once 
 to a state of universal prosperity and happiness, 
 has more of the clod in him than of the angel. 
 
 These New England reformers were tinctured 
 by that mode of thinking which was called 
 Transcendentalism, but which was not so much 
 a creed as an emotional protest against the hard, 
 metallic cast given to Calvinism by the severe 
 Puritan intellect. But their practical arrange- 
 ments were largely influenced by the specula- 
 tions of Fourier, which had already formed a 
 school in France, and were widely accepted in 
 the United States.* 
 
 Hawthorne, in his " Blithedale Romance " — a 
 
 * Nearly fifty practical experiments under the impulse given 
 by them were made, and failed in the end. 
 
S George William Curtis 
 
 fanciful story suggested by his own experiences 
 at Brook Farm — calls its inmates " a knot of 
 dreamers," and dreamers they were indeed, but 
 of a beautiful dream. They hoped, by means of 
 wiser and juster industrial and social arrange- 
 ments, "to simplify economics, to combine leisure 
 for study with healthful and honest toil, to avert 
 unjust collisions of caste, equalize refinements, 
 awaken generous affections, diffuse courtesy, and 
 sweeten and sanctify life as a whole."* More 
 disinterested aims never animated a body of cul- 
 tivated men and women. The experiment proved 
 to most of them merely a romantic episode in 
 their lives, but one never to be forgotten. Mr. 
 Curtis for nearly two years shared in their labors 
 of the house and field, and in their instructions 
 and studies ; but was chiefly remembered by his 
 companions for his sprightly leadership of pic- 
 nics and masquerades, and his pleasant singing, 
 after nightfall, of romanzas from the operas. He 
 must have been benefited by the influences of 
 that select and gentle circle, which appealed to 
 the better tendencies of his naturally fine nature, 
 and strengthened his interest in social questions ; 
 but while, in accordance with Schiller's noble 
 advice, he always " reverenced the dreams of his 
 
 Wm. H. Channing, in " Memoirs of Margaret Fuller." 
 
George William Curtis 9 
 
 youth," he never became a socialist. His ex- 
 periences there convinced him, if we may judge 
 by his after-conduct, that the best way to reform 
 and elevate society is not by withdrawing from 
 it to a small coterie in a corner ; but by breast- 
 ing its tides as they come, and by laying one's 
 heart against the great heart of humanity — to 
 get from it the best inspirations it has to give, 
 and to return to it the noblest ideals we can 
 impart. Sects, parties, and conclaves which shut 
 themselves off from the broad currents of life 
 are apt to dwindle into narrowness an^hanity, 
 or, sooner or later, return to the broad bosom 
 they had abandoned. ^^ 
 
 A second period in Mr. Curtis's^Man of self- 
 culture begftn when he left the happy family 
 at Brook Farm — not yet dispersed by the frost- 
 winds of a financial winter — to settle on a farm 
 at Concord. His aim was partly to become a 
 practical agriculturist, and partly to obtain more 
 leisure and solitude for study. He might have 
 procured a more classical tuition in the neigh- 
 boring halls of Harvard ; but he preferred that 
 open university whose dome is the overarching 
 blue, whose floors are the enamelled meadows, 
 and whose chambers are the sylvan cloisters of the 
 groves — shut in at eve by crimson curtains, and 
 lit up all night by the silver lamps of heaven. 
 
lo George William Curtis 
 
 His text-books lay before him in the locality 
 itself, teeming with nutritious patriotic memo- 
 ries. Every house of the small cluster of houses 
 was inhabited by the descendants of those who 
 landed " on the stern and rock-bound coast, 
 when breaking waves dashed high " j the hills 
 around had echoed the thunders of Adams and 
 of Otis when they roused the colonists to arms; 
 yonder highway was the road on which the 
 hoofs of Paul Revere's horse clattered in his 
 famous midnight ride; Lexington Green was 
 but a few miles off, and daily before him stood 
 the bridge where the " embattled farmers fired 
 the shot heard round the world." It is to the 
 study of this class-book I ascribe his rare famil- 
 iarity with our Revolutionary annals, and his 
 intense but high-toned Americanism — an Ameri- 
 canism which, not insensible to the grandeurs 
 of Niagara, the Mississippi, the Rocky Moun- 
 tains, and the sea- like lakes, where great ships 
 sail out never to be heard of more, nor un- 
 mindful of that intelligence and brawny energy 
 which converts the forests and the rocks into 
 benignant human uses, yet finds its chief nutri- 
 ment in those free democratic institutions which, 
 emancipating the individual from the fetters of 
 convention, give a larger scope than is to be 
 found anywhere else to the development of the 
 
George William Curtis ii 
 
 noblest manhood and womanhood. He was 
 particularly fortunate to find in this open-air 
 college teachers not often to be met with in 
 class-rooms — such as Emerson, the first philos- 
 opher of his time, who inwove with the in- 
 sight and poetry of Plato an insight and poe- 
 try of his own, with a Rembrandt's power to 
 paint, and ears that heard aeolian harps in every 
 whispering wind ; as Hawthorne — our New Eng- 
 land Prospero — who evolved out of the chill 
 and desolate regions of Puritanism a whole new 
 world of romance and fascination; as Thoreau, 
 the woodland Diogenes — Plotinus- Orson, as 
 Curtis called him — whose " quick ears and sharp 
 eyes " had caught the deeper secrets of the 
 forest ; and as Margaret Fuller, among the most 
 learned of women, who communed with .iEschylus 
 and Dante and Boccaccio and Beethoven, and 
 aspired to ride in the flaming chariots of Goethe 
 drawn by the coursers of the sun. 
 
 By two of these teachers our young scholar, 
 just on the verge of manhood, must have been 
 deeply impressed. Emerson had already put 
 forth that thin little volume on " Nature," which 
 bulges with suggestive thought as the branches 
 in spring-time swell with the coming buds. A 
 few of his strange poems had appeared, whose 
 voices come down to us from the upper air, 
 
12 George William Curtis 
 
 like the rough music of Pan when he pipes to 
 the winds and the stars. He was even then 
 engaged with those "Essays"* which have im- 
 parted so bracing, stimulating, and strengthen- 
 ing a tonic to the intellect of the century, and 
 whose one great virtue, whatever their defects 
 and inconsistencies, is to set men thinking with 
 a desire to think aright. 
 
 Hawthorne was also at that time gathering 
 his " Mosses from an Old Manse " — mosses that 
 in his hands bloomed into the strangest orchidian 
 shapes, and an old manse that rose on pillars of 
 cloud — in many-gabled towers, through whose 
 casements shone a moonlight haunted by witches 
 and ghosts, grim, ghastly, and terrible, and yet 
 with faces as beautiful as any which look from 
 "^the pictures of Stuart and Copley. As Emerson 
 had a power to incite thought; so Hawthorne 
 had to incite imagination, but our impressible 
 scholar, while he admired the serene and lofty 
 tone of the one, and the weird and impassioned 
 fantasy of the other, was inspired, not enslaved, 
 by them; we find some traces of each in his 
 writings, but only traces ; and no one has written 
 with more discrimination of them than he has 
 since written. He wandered freely through their 
 
 * The first series was published in 1841, the second in 1844. 
 
George William Curtis 13 
 
 gardens of bloom ; he inhaled with pleasure the 
 perfume of their flowers, he sipped with ecstacy 
 of " their lucent sirups, tinct with cinnamon," 
 but he cherished his own ideals of truth and 
 beauty, and turned away to find them by 
 methods of his own. As he had not become 
 a socialist at Brook Farm, so at the fountain- 
 head of the sect he did not become a trans- 
 cendentalist."* — 
 
 Mr. Curtis's residence of four years in Europe 
 and the East may be regarded as the third 
 period of his self- culture. He sailed in l846,t 
 and was landed at Marseilles, whence he hastened 
 to Italy, and then visited the greater part of 
 western Europe, and of Egypt and Syria. Fruit- 
 ful years they were indeed. As he travelled on 
 foot when he could, or by diligence or market- 
 boat, he saw much of the common people in tlieir 
 haunts and homes ; he explored every quiet nook 
 
 * The reader will find in Hawthorne (" Old Manse "), Lowell 
 (article on " Thorean "), and Curtis (Emerson, in "Homes of 
 American Authors ") most amusing accounts of the eccentrics 
 that Emerson attracted to Concord — "Apostles of the New- 
 ness," and preachers of various kinds of bran-and-potato 
 gospels. 
 
 t He was accompanied by our late fellow-member — preacher, 
 poet, artist, and musician — Mr. C. P. Cranch and his family, 
 and in the East by his friend, and, later, brother-in-law, Quincy 
 Shaw. At Rome he fell in with Hicks and Kensett, also mem- 
 bers of this club. 
 
14 George William Curtis 
 
 or sheltered valley or mountain-pass where beauty 
 lingers, and every picturesque village or town or 
 city which lives in history. Of course he loitered 
 in the cathedrals where the twilight often breaks 
 into organ peals or Gregorian chants, and the 
 galleries where immortal genius had shattered 
 the sunbeams upon canvas ; he haunted the mu- 
 seums, the theatres, and the opera-houses ; he at- 
 tended courses of lectures at Leipsic and Berlin; 
 and as one of his years was the famous revolu- 
 tionary year of 1 848, he saw at Paris the masses 
 when they go down into the streets, and at Berlin 
 he heard the angry students sing by torchlight 
 
 " A mighty fortress is our God, 
 A trusty shield and weapon." 
 
 In 1850 he came back, laden like a foraging 
 bee with sweet burdens of language, art, litera- 
 ture, scenery, and society. 
 
 The flowers and fruits of this rich European 
 harvest have left their fragrance and savor in all 
 his subsequent work ; but his Eastern gatherings 
 he shared at once with the public, as a sort of 
 first-proofs of his apprentice and wander-years. 
 They were two remarkable volumes, purporting 
 to be books of travel,* and which, as such, came 
 
 ' "Nile Notes of a Howadji," 1851, and "The Howadji 
 ia Syria," 1852. 
 
George William Curtis 15 
 
 into comparison with several reigning favorites, 
 such as the "Eothen" of Kinglake, "The Cres- 
 cent and the Cross " of Eliot Warburton, and the 
 " Eastern Letters " of Harriet Martineau. But a 
 comparison was hardly possible, they were so 
 different. Those books were books of travel 
 strictly, full of useful information and the proper 
 sentiments ; but these books contained scarcely 
 a description from cover to cover. They fur- 
 nished very little erudition as to Thothmes, 
 Ramses, or the interminable dynasties ; they 
 deciphered no hieroglyphics, unrolled no mum- 
 mies, and penetrated into no tombs ; but, plun- 
 ging at once into the voluptuous sunshine of the 
 East, they shouted with ancient Pistol, 
 
 " A foutra for the world and worldlings base ! 
 I speak of Africa, and golden joys." 
 
 Their pages were all pictures and poetry — im- 
 pressionist pictures, a little hazy in form, perhaps, 
 but radiant with color — and poetry without 
 rhyme, yet rhythmical as the song of birds or the 
 dance of waves on the strand. Whatever was 
 peculiar in Eastern climate, landscape, or life, you 
 were made to feel with a vividness it never had 
 before ; and even generations mummied ere our 
 civilizations began masqueraded like a new life in 
 death. 
 
1 6 George William Curtis 
 
 Nor, ia the tumult and rapture of sensuous 
 impressions, were the sacred traditions of place 
 forgotten, and especially of Him who hovers over 
 human memory as the tranquil sweetness of a 
 summer sky hovers over the landscape. How 
 touching that passage which, after forty years, 
 recurs to me as I write, where, stretched by 
 night on the Syrian sands, the myriads of warlike 
 hordes that once trod them rise again — Assyrians, 
 Jews, Saracens, Persians, Arabs, Crusaders, and 
 Frenchmen — but, through " the flash of cimeters, 
 the cloud of hurtling arrows, and the glittering 
 Roman axes," the author sees only, subduing 
 emperors, kings and sultans, the figure of One 
 who rode upon an ass, with no sceptre but a 
 palm-branch, and no crown but a crown of thorns. 
 
 These first books gave Mr. Curtis position 
 and even fame as an author ; but they sadly 
 puzzled some of the critics, who complained of 
 their excesses of color and sentiment — not see- 
 ing under the pomp of the garb the keen ar- 
 tistic sensitiveness, the opulent imagination, and 
 the subtle, swift- glancing fertility of thought 
 which rendered that pomp both necessary and 
 appropriate. But other critics felt with Keats, 
 on his first reading Chapman, 
 
 "... like some lone watchers of the skies. 
 When a new planet swims into their ken." 
 
George William Curtis i-j 
 
 They were new in the extreme novelty of their 
 form and matter, and they were planetary in 
 their effulgence. That overfulness complained 
 of, like the buoyancy of youth, might be chas- 
 tened, but not exhausted, by maturity and prom- 
 ised a rich future. His next book, letters from 
 the watering-places to a newspaper, and called 
 " Lotus-Eating," glows with a similar, yet sub- 
 dued, exuberance, deluging our landscape with 
 "purpureal gleams," and seeing in the hotels 
 the same men and women that he had seen 
 when floating on the canals of Venice, stepping 
 out of the canvases of Titian and Giorgione. 
 
 It was at this time (1851-52) that I became 
 more intimately acquainted with Mr. Curtis, so 
 that henceforth I shall be able to speak of him 
 from personal reminiscences. It came about ia 
 this wise : An enterprising publisher of New 
 York, Mr. Putnam, had projected a magazine of 
 the highest class, which should take rank beside 
 the Blackwoods and Frasers of the old world. 
 We possessed some ponderous quarterlies like 
 the North American Review and others, mainly 
 organs of religious denominations, but the maga- 
 zine proper had scarcely risen beyond the second 
 story back of the milliner shops. It was a 
 hazardous undertaking, but the publisher was 
 brave and the scheme was carried into effect 
 
1 8 George William Curtis 
 
 Mr. Charles F. Briggs, better known as Harry- 
 Franco, from a forgotten novel of his, was asked 
 to take the helm as manager, and Mr. Curtis 
 and myself were given each a laboring oar. We 
 gathered a goodly company of assistants around 
 us, nearly all the known men of letters of the 
 time,* and put forth a worthy pioneer of the 
 more imposing ventures of to-day. 
 
 Mr. Curtis was at that time a great favorite 
 in society — not of the fashionable sort he after- 
 wards satirized, but of a higher grade, which had 
 historical pretensions, and retained some of the 
 old flowing colonial courtesy and culture. His 
 
 * It may interest those who are curious as to our literary 
 history to add, that among our promised contributors — the most 
 of whom complied with their promises — were Irving, Byrant, 
 Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Hawthorne, Thoreau, George 
 Ripley, Miss Sedgwick, Mrs. Kirkland, author of "A New 
 Home: Who'll Follow?" J. P. Kennedy, author of "Swallow 
 Barn " ; Fred S. Cozzens, of the " Sparrow-grass Papers " ; 
 Richard Grant White, "Shakespeare's Scholar"; Edmund 
 Quincy, author of "Twice Married"; William Swintou, since 
 the accomplished historian of •' The Array of the Potomac " ; 
 Richard Kimball, Herman Melville, of " Typee " and " Omoo " 
 fame, Richard Henry Stoddard, E. C. Stedman, Ellsworth, 
 Thomas Buchanan Read, Maria Lowell, Jarvis McEntee, and 
 others. We had a strong backing from the clergy — the Rev. 
 Drs. Hawks, Vinton, Hanson, Bethune, Baird, also the occa- 
 sional assistance of Arthur Hugh Clough, the friend of Tom 
 Hughes, Matthew Arnold, and other pupils of Dr. Arnold, who 
 was then in this country — William Henry Herbert, reputed 
 
George William Curtis 19 
 
 fine figure, his handsome face, his polished ad- 
 dress, his humorous talk, and growing fame as 
 an author, got him easy access anywhere, or as 
 Lowell has since rhymed it, 
 
 " all the chariest doors 
 Swung wide on flattered hinges to admit 
 Such high-bred manners, such good-natured wit." 
 
 A few feared lest the adulations heaped upon 
 him should seduce him from the student's smoky 
 lamp to Paphian bowers lit by gilded chande- 
 liers and eyes more bright than jewels ; but they 
 knew little of his native good sense, his strong 
 self-respect, and his broad sympathies, which 
 would have saved him at any time from scorch- 
 ing his wings in any false glare, however flattering 
 or seductive. He got out of society, as out of 
 everything else, whatever he thought to be good, 
 and the rest he let go to the ash- barrel. 
 
 grandson of the Earl of Pembroke, sportsman and naturalist, 
 known as Frank Forrester; William North, a frank and bril. 
 liant young Englishman ; Fitz-Jaraes O'Brien, who died in our 
 war for the Union, and Thomas Francis Meagher, a gallant 
 soldier in the same war, and afterwards Governor of Montana. 
 Miss Delia Bacon, whose unhappy history is told by Hawthorne 
 in " Our Old Home," began her eccentric Shakespeare- Bacon con- 
 troversy by a learned and brilliant article in the monthly. An 
 article by Dr. Hanson, going to prove that the heir to the French 
 throne, who was supposed to have been killed in the Tower, was 
 still living as a St. Regis Indian (the Rev. Eleazer Williams), 
 produced a great sensation both in the United States and France. 
 
20 George William Curtis 
 
 I mention this to introduce a little incident 
 that had a great deal to do in directing his 
 future course. Our first number of the monthly 
 had been a success; at least those arbiters, not 
 merely of all elegancies, but of destiny itself — 
 the daily press — ^had patted us on the back, and 
 we set sail on halcyon seas and under favorable 
 winds. It was while providing entertainment 
 for our readers in a second number that the 
 vivacious Harry Franco exclaimed, " I have it ! 
 Let us, each of us, write an article on the state 
 of parties. You, Howadji, who hang a little 
 candle in the naughty world of fashion, will show 
 it up in their light; you, Pathfinder, who con- 
 sort with scurvy politicians, will say of it what 
 they think; while I will discuss it in some way 
 of my own " — which he never did. 
 
 But Mr. Curtis and the other person were 
 moved by the hint, and the former at once wrote 
 a paper on the state of parties, which he called 
 " Our Best Society." It was a severe criticism 
 of the follies, foibles, and affectations of those 
 circles which got their guests, as they did their 
 edibles and carriages, from Brown, sexton and 
 caterer, and which thought unlimited supplies of 
 terrapin and champagne the test and summit of 
 hospitality. Trenchant as it was, it was yet re- 
 ceived with applause. Some thought the name 
 
George William Curtis 21 
 
 of the leading lady more suggestive than facts 
 warranted, and that in such phrases as "ram- 
 pant vulgarity in Brussels lace," " the orgies of 
 rotten Corinth," and " the frenzied festivals of 
 Rome in her decadence," the brush was over- 
 loaded. None the less, the satire delighted the 
 public, and was soon followed by other papers in 
 the same vein — since collected as " The Potiphar 
 Papers." The older folks acknowledged them to 
 be the best things of the kind since Irving and 
 his friends had taken the town with the whim- 
 whams and conceits of Evergreen, Wizard, and 
 the Cockloft family. They were to some extent 
 exaggerations, in which occasional incidents were 
 given as permanent features : but their high and 
 earnest purpose, their genuine humor, their amus- 
 ing details, their hits at characters, and their sar- 
 casms, " deodorized of offensive personality " by 
 constant drippings from the springs of fancy, won 
 them great favor. If we behind the screen 
 sometimes felt that we shook hands with the 
 originals of Kurtz Pasha and the Reverend 
 Cream- Cheese, they were, like sweet bully Bot- 
 tom, marvellously translated. 
 
 All the while Mr. Curtis was flinging his 
 squibs and crackers into Vanity Fair, he was 
 wandering in a wholly different realm — a realm 
 "of ampler ether and diviner air." He was writ- 
 
22 George William Curtis 
 
 ing for us, from time to time, papers of a much 
 higher tone than any he had yet written, and 
 which seemed to me, as I sometimes looked over 
 the proof-sheets, to open an entirely new and 
 rich vein in our hterature. They were those ex- 
 quisite reveries since published under the quaint 
 title of "Prue and I." The main conception, the 
 Leit-Motif, as Wagner would say, was as old as 
 poetry and the arts — the steeping of the palpable 
 and familiar in the glorious dyes of the ideal, 
 which children's fables, folk-lore. Middle- Age leg- 
 ends, and great poets have done for us time out 
 of mind ; but Mr. Curtis's treatment of his theme 
 was quite fresh and original and most captivat- 
 ing. His shabby old book-keeper, in a faded 
 cravat, whose brain teems with visions 
 
 "Of all that is most beauteous — imaged there 
 In happier beauty," 
 
 is one of the most delightful of dreamers. He 
 roams not in the fabled world of ancient poets, 
 peopled with oread or dryad fleet or naiad of 
 the stream, nor in the world of more modern 
 fancy, whose forest depths and fields and foun- 
 tains teem with fairy shapes of peerless grace 
 and cunning trickeries ; but his caprices revel in 
 a sphere of their own, whence all rude neces- 
 sities are banished, and gentle passions and sweet 
 
George William Curtis 23 
 
 longings for the serene and joyous and perfect 
 reign alone. These are the Ariels with which 
 he rides on the winds and plays on the curled 
 cloud. How quaint is that touch, worthy of 
 Elia, where, going back to his boyhood, he tells 
 how he visited the wharves where the foreign 
 ships come in, and returning home with a smell 
 on his clothes, was chided by the good mother. 
 He says : " I retired from the maternal pres- 
 ence proud and happy. I was aromatic. I had 
 about me the true foreign air. Whoever smelt 
 me smelt distant countries." With what a royal 
 hospitality he sallied forth from his cold beef and 
 cabbage to the avenues and squares where pros- 
 perous citizens were going to dinner, and furnished 
 their tables more amply than those of any em- 
 peror. How the ladies in the gilded chariots, 
 superb and sweet, each one his own Aurelia, 
 seemed " fairer than the evening air, clad in the 
 beauty of a thousand stars," while he lent to 
 them a tongue like Perdita's, and the music of 
 St. Cecilia herself. Could anybody resist an in- 
 vitation to his castles in Spain, which " stood 
 lofty and fair in a luminous golden atmosphere, 
 a little hazy and dreamy perhaps, like Indian sum- 
 mer, but where no gales blew and there were no 
 tempests. All the sublime mountains and beau- 
 tiful valleys and soft landscapes were to be found 
 
24 George William Curtis 
 
 in the grounds. From the windows looked the 
 sweet women whom poets have painted, and 
 bands of celestial music played all night to en- 
 chant the brilHant company into silence." Mr. 
 Franco and his colleague of the triumvirate used 
 to look forward to these delightful papers as one 
 does to a romance "to be continued "; and when 
 we received one of them, we chirruped over it, 
 as if by some strange merit of our own we had 
 entrapped a sunbeam. We followed the lines so 
 intently, with such various exclamations of pleas- 
 ure, that a stranger coming in might have sus- 
 pected both of us to belong to that wonderful 
 company of eccentrics which the old scrivener 
 summoned from the misty realms of tradition — 
 the Wandering Jew ; the priests of Prester John ; 
 the alchemists who sought to turn base metals 
 into gold; the hunters of El Dorado, of En- 
 chanted Islands, of the Fountain of Perpetual 
 Youth ; the makers of Utopias ever looming up 
 and ever vanishing; even our own Captain 
 Symmes, who sails through his hole into the 
 interior of the earth, where its jewels and pre- 
 cious metals are forged ; and that famous friend 
 of our childhood, the Baron Munchausen, whose 
 signal claim to a place in a fictitious world was 
 that he was the one most replenished liar out of 
 all the thousand millions of humans — and brought 
 
George William Curtis 25 
 
 them all together on the deck of the Flying 
 Dutchman, to sail forever through foggy seas, 
 onward, onward to unknown shores.* 
 
 It was an evidence of the fecundity and ver- 
 satility of Mr. Curtis's gifts, that while he was 
 thus carrying forward two distinct lines of inven- 
 tion — the one full of broad comic effects, and the 
 other of exquisite ideals, he was contributing to 
 the entertainment of our public in a half-dozen 
 other different modes — monthly criticisms of 
 music and the drama that broadened the scope 
 and raised the tone of that form of writing; 
 rippling Venetian songs that had the swing of 
 the gondola in them; crispy short stories of 
 humor or pathos ; reminiscences of the Alps 
 taken from his Swiss diaries ; elaborate reviews 
 of books, like Dickens's " Bleak House," the 
 Bronte novels. Dr. Veron's Memoires, Hiawatha, 
 and recent English poetry — including that of 
 Kingsley, Matthew Arnold, Thackeray, the 
 Brownings, and Tennyson — which, written forty 
 years ago have not been surpassed since by 
 more appreciative, discriminating, and sympa- 
 
 * There is something similar to this in Hawthorne's "A 
 Select Party," where Funnyman asks the Oldest Inhabitant, 
 Monsieur On Dit — the Clerk of the Weather, Davy Jones, the 
 Man of Straw, and others to a banquet in his palace — ^which is 
 more diverting perhaps, but less imaginatively pathetic. 
 
26 George William Curtis 
 
 thetic criticism, even in that masterly and more 
 elaborate book of our fellow-member, " The Vic- 
 torian Poets." In addition to these, he gave us, 
 from time to time, solid and thoughtful discus- 
 sions of " Men of Character," of " Manners," of 
 " Fashion," of the " Minuet and the Polka " as 
 social tide-marks, and of " Rachel," which may 
 still be read with instruction and pleasure for 
 their keen observation, their nice critical discern- 
 ment, their cheerful philosophy, and their en- 
 trancing charms of style. 
 
 Then, ever and anon, Mr. Curtis would be off 
 for a week or two, delivering lectures on " Sir 
 Philip Sidney," on "The Genius of Dickens," 
 on "The Position of Women," and, in one case, 
 a course of lectures in Boston and in New York 
 on " Contemporary Fiction," In a galaxy of lec- 
 turers which included Emerson, Phillips, Beecher, 
 Chapin, Henry Giles, and others, he was a bright 
 particular star, and everywhere a favorite. A' 
 harder- working literary man I never knew ; he 
 was incessantly busy; a constant, careful, and 
 wide reader ; yet never missing a great meeting 
 or a great address or a grand night at the 
 theatre. From our little conclaves at No. lo 
 Park Place, where I fear we remorselessly slaugh- 
 tered the hopes of many a bright spirit (chiefly 
 female), he was seldom absent, and when he 
 
George William Curtis 27 
 
 came he took his full share of the routine — un- 
 less Irving, Bryant, Lowell, Thackeray, or Long- 
 fellow sauntered in, and " that day we worked 
 no more." 
 
 We now approach a wholly different phase of 
 our friend's activity — less agreeable than the 
 others, but more important, and a phase which 
 shows how brave, manly, and noble he could be 
 in the face of the most alluring literary and 
 social seductions. Up to the time of his joining 
 us in Putnam he had taken no part in politics. 
 Like his friends Lowell and Longfellow, who had 
 written, the one " Biglow Papers," with a fervor 
 that almost raised a slang into a classic, and the 
 other " Hymns of Slavery," which brought tears 
 to the eyes — though tears have never yet rusted 
 away the chains of the captive — he was intensely 
 anti-slavery in feeling. But his opinions had not 
 yet crystallized into definite shape. So far as 
 he had any politics at all, they were a general 
 acquiescence with the Whig school as interpreted 
 by Seward, who was still a. watcher of times and 
 seasons. Like all scholars, he felt what Milton 
 has described as " an unwillingness to leave the 
 quiet and still air of delightful studies to embark 
 on a troubled sea of noises and harsh disputes." 
 Yet he was one of those who thought that a 
 man of letters had something else to do in this 
 
.28 George William Curtis 
 
 world than to sing love-ditties to Amaryllis in 
 the shade, or paint pretty pictures for the cul- 
 tured classes. 
 
 Be that as it may, it was impossible for a 
 man of genius and soul, at that day, to resist 
 the great ground-swell of popular passion fast 
 coming to the surface. Those years, from 1848 
 to i860, were years of revival and resuscita- 
 tion, when the American people began to 
 breathe again the invigorating air of their early 
 days. Let me recall — at least for those too 
 young to remember — how tangled and terrible 
 our political condition was, and how it had 
 been brought about. 
 
 Our fathers had deliberately founded this 
 nation on the great central, pervasive, and dis- 
 tinguishing idea of right as transcending inter- 
 est, and of equal popular rights as the origin, 
 the basis, and the aim of all good government. 
 Yet they had allowed the nation to carry in its 
 flanks a monstrous evil, in flat and disgrace- 
 ful contradiction of its fundamental principles. 
 Their excuse was the belief that free institutions 
 would inevitably work out its speedy extinc- 
 tion. But that hope was a delusion. Slavery, 
 instead of yielding to the influences of free- 
 dom, struck its roots deeper into the soil, and 
 began to stretch forth its dead- man's fingers to 
 
George William Curtis 29 
 
 the heart-strings of the people. Claiming a 
 constitutional guarantee, interwoven with vast 
 commercial interests, fortified by inveterate prej- 
 udices of race, it grew so rapidly in power that 
 it soon assumed to control conventions, dictate 
 policies, elect congressmen and presidents, and 
 prescribe opinions. The South was riding the 
 nation as the Old Man of the Sea rode on the 
 shoulders of Sindbad. 
 
 Then came those days, " never to be recalled 
 without a blush," when the politicians bowed 
 down to it as to an idol, and worshipped it ; 
 when the counting-houses fawned upon it, that 
 thrift might follow fawning ; when the Press dec- 
 orated its hideous brows with wreaths of praise, 
 and even the Pulpit wove around it the sanc- 
 tions of Holy Writ. The panting fugitive, guided 
 by the North Star, fled from bloodhounds and 
 deadly morasses, and came to our homes to 
 beg for refuge ; we were told to return him to 
 bondage — and we did it. Our virgin territories 
 — the homes of a vast future civilization — 
 whose soil was yet unwet by the blood of the 
 bondman, and its dews unstained by his tears, 
 were claimed as the rightful abodes of the curse 
 — and we acquiesced. 
 
 Of course these atrocities provoked reaction. 
 Side by side with the black stain in our his- 
 
30 George William Curtis 
 
 tory ran a line of white which brightened and 
 broadened each day. Individuals protested, even 
 when they were killed for -it ; small sects re- 
 membered that Christianity was a gospel of 
 brotherhood, not of hatred ; the Abolitionists 
 made their frantic appeals to the moral sense ; 
 Liberty-men resorted to the ballot-box; Con- 
 science-Whigs undermined the old Whig Party 
 as Free-soil Democrats were undermining the 
 old Democratic Party ; but as yet they were all 
 working apart and at loose £nds. Traditional 
 prejudices and mutual misunderstandings kept 
 them asunder. Many of them even hoped that 
 the dispute could be compromised and the con- 
 flict adjourned. 
 
 Our little world of the Monthly was pro- 
 foundly stirred by these agitations of the outer 
 world. For the first time in the history of our 
 higher periodicals, its managers had stepped 
 down from their snowy pedestals to take part 
 in the brabble and scuffle of the streets ; and it 
 raised an almost universal outburst of vitupera- 
 tion and censure. As Lamb said of his play, 
 " Great heavens, how they did hiss ! " For a 
 time it seemed as if the little bark was destined 
 to go down amid the roaring and foaming rocks.* 
 
 * It happened while Mr. Curtis had been ministering to the 
 delight of our readers in many ways and receiving showers of 
 
George William. Curtis 31 
 
 The offence and the service of the Monthly, 
 speaking the sentiments of large and increasing 
 classes of literary and professional people, was, 
 that while the old parties shilly-shallied, it had 
 steadfastly and stubbornly insisted that no con- 
 cihation between the free and the slave States 
 was possible or desirable. The conflict was an 
 irrepressible conflict. Our political system, in 
 bringing together under the same rule two in- 
 compatible forms of civilization, had yoked 
 Pegasus, the winged horse of the gods, to a 
 drudge ox, and they would not and could not 
 pull together. There was but one thing to do, 
 
 applause in return, that another one of the triumvirate, taken 
 by Mr. Franco's suggestion, had written his version of the state 
 of parties, and called it "Our New President." It was a 
 criticism of Mr. Pierce, who had recently been elected, not for 
 Democratic depravity in general, but for the reckless license he 
 had shown in distributing the sacred trusts of of&ce to a parcel 
 of heelers and hoodlums, whose only desert was that they had 
 voted the regular ticket, and stood ready to mangle and maul 
 any one who did not join with them in that ceremony. This 
 article raised a. fierce outcry of opposition ; but Commodore 
 Putnam, though he had values on board, was a brave soul, 
 and said, " Brace up, my lads ! Put her head one point 
 nearer to the wind and crowd on sail!" — which we did ac- 
 cordingly — but without appeasing the north-westers. A suc- 
 cession of papers on "Parties and Politics," perhaps more 
 verjuicy than juicy; on "Our American Despotism," meaning 
 slavery; on "Kansas — It Must be Free"; and "The Two 
 Forms of Society, Which?" only aggravated the original scream 
 of protest into a fierce howl of rage. 
 
32 George William Curtis 
 
 in the actual condition of things, and that was 
 for the friends of freedom, of every name and 
 description, to sink their party differences, to 
 unite in a new party — to nail the glorious de- 
 vice of " Free soil, free speech, free men " to 
 their banners, and march to victory. " But 
 oh ! " cried the timider souls, " that means civil 
 war ! " " And if it does," was the reply, " never 
 strike sail to a fear ! Come into port grandly, 
 or sail with God the seas." 
 
 Events soon brought about the consummation 
 so devoutly wished. Free-minded Whigs and 
 free-minded Democrats and others joined hands 
 in 1854-55, to form the new Republican Party, 
 and in 1856 designated the young Pathfinder of 
 the West, who had nailed the flag of freedom on 
 the highest peaks of the Rocky Mountains, to 
 carry it in triumph to the Capitol. That auspi- 
 cious union filled older, perhaps wiser, certainly 
 more conservative, minds with terror and dismay ; 
 they heard only " ancestral voices prophesying 
 woe," and saw Spectres of the Brocken, that 
 seemed to rise like demons from the pit. But to 
 younger, perhaps more visionary, minds it seemed, 
 to use De Quincey's phrases, " as if the morning 
 had come of a mighty day full of awakening sus- 
 pense and busy preparation, a day of crisis and 
 of final hope," when infinite cavalcades went fil- 
 
George William Curtis 33 
 
 ing off and they he?,rd the march of innumerable 
 armies, and in the distance a din of " battle, and 
 agony, and sudden death," followed by a grand 
 burst of coronation hymns signalizing victory. 
 
 Mr. Curtis's great opportunity had now come, 
 and it came almost without his knowing it. He 
 had fully approved the wild dashes of the Monthly 
 against the Gibraltar rocks of the old parties, but 
 he had written nothing as yet ; and while he was 
 in the habit of reading beautiful lectures from the 
 written page, he distrusted his ability to speak 
 from the platform. By the merest accident, at a 
 Republican meeting on Staten Island, he was 
 suddenly and vociferously called upon for an 
 address. He ascended the steps with trembling; 
 he stammered a few commonplaces for a while, 
 " his practised accents throttled by his fears," and 
 then his good genius came to his aid, and he 
 poured forth an invective against slavery which 
 filled his hearers with an unquenchable fire.* 
 
 * His first discourse after that was at the Wesleyan Uni- 
 versity (Middletown, Conn., Aug., 1856), where he had been 
 invited to speak on "The Duties of the American Scholar." 
 "Gladly would I speak to you," he said, " of the charms of 
 scholarship, of the dignity and worth of the scholar — of the 
 abstract relation of the scholar to the State. . . . But would 
 you have counted him a friend of Greece who quietly discussed 
 the abstract nature of patriotism on that summer day through 
 whose hopeless and immortal hours Leonidas and his three 
 
34 George William Curtis 
 
 From that hour his course was clear, and he 
 entered into the Fremont campaign with an 
 inexpressible fearlessness and ardor ; he spoke 
 from stump to stump ; he spoke by night and by- 
 day, and he spoke with a force of eloquence that 
 he has never since equalled. But oh, what a 
 battle it was ! You have had a presidential 
 campaign recently, which was milk and honey 
 compared to that of fire and hail, in which a vast 
 social system, the continuance of the government, 
 the integrity of the nation itself, were at stake. 
 
 Fortunately we failed in that attempt — fortu- 
 nately, because the nation was not quite ready yet, 
 and Fremont was not an adequate leader. But it 
 prepared the way for the Lincoln campaign in 
 i860, which was scarcely less strenuous and 
 violent. Mr. Curtis had shown his power on the 
 stump ; he now showed it in the convention, when 
 at Chicago he put pandemonium to defeat, and 
 bid the wild uproar be ruled. 
 
 All through the inevitable war he did what he 
 could to urge on its vigorous prosecution. Nor 
 was this service at a distance from the seat of war 
 
 hundred stood at Thermopylse for liberty ? . . . Freedom has 
 always its Thermopylae, and the American scholar should know- 
 that the American Thermopylae is ICansas." That clarion voice 
 echoed through all the colleges and among the hills, and had 
 a great effect in arousing young men to the greatness of the 
 existing contest. 
 
George William Curtis 35 
 
 a perfunctory service. It had its sorrows and 
 its sufferings. From his own family a cherished 
 brother, Josepli Curtis, in the prime of youth; 
 from the noble family into which he had married, 
 no less dear to him,* three of its inmates, in life's 
 dawn of hope and promise — Shaw, Lowell, and 
 Barlow — had gone to the front; and from his 
 immediate circle others, like that brilliant genius, 
 Theodore Winthrop, were gripping their sabres on 
 the outposts. Any day's bulletins might bring — 
 some days' bulletins did bring — irreparable heart- 
 aches. Four of the five young heroes fell in the 
 fierce joy of battle, to pass to an immortal youth. 
 But through all vicissitude and anguish his voice 
 stiil helped to ram the cannon home, to cheer the 
 poor brother in the trenches, to push forward the 
 shining tents of light into the frowning darkness. 
 It seems as if such excitements must have 
 distracted him from literary pursuits, but these 
 had now become only the more regular and ex- 
 acting. Since 1853, Mr. Curtis, without sever- 
 ing his connection with Putnam, had written in 
 a desultory way for Harper s Magazine, and he 
 finally accepted an editorial department of it, 
 called the Editor's Easy Chair. It was the name 
 given to a form of literary work which, begun 
 
 * In 1857 Mr. Curtis was married to Annie, a daughter of 
 Francis G. Shaw, of Stateu Island. 
 
36 George William Curtis 
 
 by a Frenchman, Montaigne, who is still, first in 
 merit as he was first in time, has long been a 
 favorite with English readers — the short essay- 
 on minor topics of social interest which takes 
 up offences too light for the censorship of the 
 pulpit and too harmless for the chastisements 
 of the law. It is a form which Addison, Steele, 
 Johnson, Goldsmith, Lamb, Irving, and Thack- 
 eray have made exceedingly attractive. The 
 eighty or hundred volumes of the British Es- 
 sayists which have stood the sand-blasts of 
 time lie side by side, in every respectable library, 
 with the eighty or hundred volumes of the 
 British poets. Carlyle has somewhere com- 
 pared the editor to the vagrant preacher who 
 sets up his booth in any field, and utters his 
 wisdom or unwisdom to all who choose to hear. 
 But the editor of the Easy Chair preached no 
 sermons, or nothing that had in it the stiffness 
 and super-sanctity of the sermon. It was rather 
 the flowing and genial talk of the well-informed 
 scholar, who was also the well-bred gentleman, 
 turned critic and commentator. It was talk in 
 many styles — critical, historical, humorous, grave, 
 fanciful ; in short, in every style except that 
 which Voltaire declares the only bad one — the 
 wearisome. Our friend was never dull, but 
 always elastic, cheerful, enlivening ; with fewer 
 
George William Curtis 37 
 
 ways of being tedious, and more of being en- 
 tertaining, than any of his predecessors. He 
 had, it seems to me, all the elegance of Addi- 
 son with less of his coldness and a heartier glow ; 
 all the sprightliness of Steele, with a richer hu- 
 mor and a keener sense of moral values ; but to 
 find his proper parallels we must come down to 
 Goldsmith, Lamb, Irving, and Thackeray. How 
 many thousands gladly recall what a privilege 
 and delight it has been for many years to have 
 this commentator visit them every month, to 
 tell them what to admire and what to impugn, 
 and to inspire them as they sat in their own 
 easy-chairs with kindlier feelings towards their 
 fellows, to dissipate the blues of business or 
 public affairs, and to send them to bed with 
 buoyant hopes for the morrow ! What pleasant 
 companionships he helped us to form with the 
 forgotten poets, from whom he would furnish 
 little-known but delicious verses ; with misprized 
 story-tellers like that fine fellow, Fielding, de- 
 spite his bedraggled clothes ; or with our child- 
 hood's friend, dear old John Bunyan ! How we 
 would visit with him at the Brownings in Flor- 
 ence, or get a chatty letter from them, or go out 
 to supper with that grim old ogre and cynic, 
 Titmarsh, and find him to be, after all, one of 
 the most simple and kindly of men ; or hear the 
 
38 George William Curtis 
 
 famous Boz read once more of Pickwick and 
 Sam and Buzfuz and the widder ! How he 
 made the stately Everett come before us and 
 speak over again one of his pieces, with all the 
 attitudes and gestures rightly put in ; or the 
 fiery Phillips wield his keen, incisive, glittering 
 rapier — but bloodless now ! As for the mimic 
 world of the stage, so entrancing to many of us, 
 he would ring his little bell, and the curtain would 
 rise, and the elder Booth or the elder Wallack 
 would reappear, for this time only ; or the 
 younger Booth, with his matchless elocution, re- 
 cite a bit of Hamlet; or Mrs. Kemble give to 
 Shakespeare a new delight by her recitation ; or 
 the dear old John Gilbert revive Sir Peter or 
 Sir Anthony till your sides ached ; or Jefferson 
 sidled on as poor Rip, to make the heart as well 
 as the sides ache. Now and then he would take 
 you aside and whisper slyly into your ear the 
 gossip of the sylphs of the season at Newport, 
 or turn the key into enchanted chambers where 
 the echoes still lingered of voices long silent — 
 of Pasta and Grisi and Sontag and Jenny Lind, 
 and where Thalberg and Sivori and Ole Bull 
 once played — in short, open a thousand sources 
 of keen and noble enjoyment. 
 
 You may say, perhaps, that any editor of a 
 periodical can play this showman's part. Oh, 
 
George William Curtis 39 
 
 yes ; but not with the inexhaustible variety of 
 matter, the inimitable grace of manner, of Curtis. 
 His superiority was shown when, called away 
 altogether, the whole literary world asked, " And 
 who can take his place?" and the whole liter- 
 ary world answered, " No one." Well might 
 that world feel kindly towards him, for in all 
 those forty years he had made and left no 
 rankling wound. If any one was to be re- 
 proved, he was reproved with a smile that took 
 away the sting. Even 
 
 " The stroke of death was like a lover's pinch. 
 Which hurts and is desired." 
 
 When a cancer was to be cut out, it was cut out 
 with the surgeon's delicate lancet, and never 
 with the soldier's sword, much less with the 
 butcher's cleaver. In fact, he taught us how to 
 censure, and censure severely, but without bit- 
 terness, as he taught us how to jest without a 
 grimace, and to instruct without pedantry or 
 assumption. 
 
 It was observed of the Easy Chair that no 
 allusion was ever made by it to passing politics, 
 even when 
 
 "The day was filled with slaughter. 
 
 And the night-sky red with flames," 
 
 excepting, perhaps, by a picturesque glance at 
 departing troops, or a shadow of disaster moving 
 
40 George William Curtis 
 
 over the page like an ominous cloud. The pleas- 
 ant, graceful talk went rippling on its way, as 
 fresh as a mountain brook through daisied mead- 
 ows; and you might have supposed the genial 
 talker cosily seated in some rustic retreat amid 
 cooling dews and odorous grasses, and listening 
 to the songs of birds and the musical whispers 
 of the winds. But all the while he was in the 
 centre of strife. 
 
 Towards the close of the war (1863) he had 
 accepted the exclusive political control of Har- 
 per's Weekly, and was thus brought in direct con- 
 tact with public affairs. It was a stirring time, 
 but a most trying time for statesmen and pub- 
 licists. The war itself had been a spectacle of 
 terrible grandeur; there were in the valor and 
 self-sacrifice of the troops, and the calm confi- 
 dence of the people in their cause, features of 
 moral sublimity; and the magnificent result of 
 the war — the emancipation of a continent justi- 
 fied its awful cost, and made us proud of a nation 
 capable of such sacrifices in defence of a noble 
 and heroic idea. But after the war, from the 
 martyrdom of Lincoln to that of Garfield, came 
 a period of almost universal dislocation — at the 
 South, of all the usual machinery of civic and 
 social life; and at the North, of all the usual 
 political opinions. Questions arose as to how we 
 
George William Curtis 41 
 
 should weld the broken pieces again — questions 
 of formidable magnitude and extreme difficulty. 
 There a horde of freedmen, ignorant, illiterate, 
 and who had never taken care of themselves, was 
 endowed with the franchise, to become the prey 
 of carpet-bag adventurers, to whom the ballot- 
 box was but another name for the dice-box; 
 here a whole new generation, who had never 
 seen a gold coin, was asked to decide as to the 
 disposition of an enormous debt and a deluge of 
 paper money. For the first time in our history, 
 a president was impeached and tried for swing- 
 ing round the circle, as he called a whirligig of 
 vagaries ; for the first time ia our history, a 
 great historical party became so lost to self- 
 respect, to consistency of principle, to sanity of 
 mind, that it made its standard-bearer of a life- 
 long and inveterate enemy, with whom it had no 
 sentiment in common ; and, for the first time in 
 our history, the presidency itself was made, 
 through fraud and violence, a foot-ball of factions 
 which brought the ship of state again into the 
 troughs of the sea, and summoned the clouds 
 with their lightnings to the horizon. 
 
 In this uncertain and perilous condition of 
 affairs it was almost a providential benefaction 
 that a journal having thousands of exchanges 
 and nearly half a million weekly readers should 
 
42 George William Curtis 
 
 have been put in the hands of a person so clear- 
 sighted, so well-balanced, so honest, and so cour- 
 ageous as Mr. Curtis. With many of his con- 
 clusions at the time I did not agree. He was 
 of the old Federalistic school, which put its 
 confidence more in the mere forms of law than 
 in the saving instincts and good sense of the 
 people, and his distrust of the Democratic party, 
 largely justified by recent events, amounted to 
 prejudice ; but I was glad, even while sometimes 
 fighting him in the press, to recognize his high- 
 mindedness, his impartiality, his conscientious ad- 
 herence to his convictions, and his knightly cour- 
 tesy and manly frankness. His influence was 
 great, because his readers felt that every word he 
 said was the truth as he understood it. His edi- 
 torial articles were models of political discussion, 
 always calm, serious, and earnest, with nothing 
 of the hurried superficiaUty, the disingenuous per- 
 versions that often mark the newspaper style. 
 They met every question face to face without dis- 
 guising its difficulties or giving a partisan turn to 
 any of its aspects. They taunted no one ; they 
 sneered at no one ; they argued openly, fairly, 
 generously with all. Their author seemed, in- 
 deed, to have but one ambition, which was to lift 
 our politics to the highest level of dignity and 
 honor. 
 
George William Curtis 43 
 
 As soon as Mr. Curtis was satisfied that the 
 proper fruits of the war would be gathered and 
 garnered, and 
 
 " The sacred pillars of the commonwealth 
 Stand readjusted on their ancient poise," 
 
 his attention was turned to certain administra- 
 tive reforms which seemed to require instant 
 action. A chief, almost exclusive, object of his 
 solicitude was the condition of the civil' service, 
 which was deplorable to the last degree. Meth- 
 ods of distributing public office had come into 
 vogue utterly at war with any true theory of 
 popular institutions, with any right constitution 
 of political parties, and with the uniform prac- 
 tice of the Fathers of the Republic. They were 
 the application to practical politics of the maxims 
 of ancient and barbaric warfare, which proclaimed 
 that to the victor belonged the spoils of the 
 enemy. Forty years ago, in writing of the sub- 
 ject, the present speaker asked : " Need any 
 one attempt to describe the disastrous effect of 
 such a practice on all the functions of public 
 life ? Does it not attack political virtue at its 
 source ; corrupt the integrity of the political 
 body ; inflame controversies which should be the 
 debate of great principles into intemperate and 
 violent personal hatreds ; convert popular suf- 
 frage into a farce, or, what is worse, into a false- 
 
44 George William Curtis 
 
 hood and a fraud ; introduce the most unworthy 
 agents into the most responsible trusts ; bring 
 a scandal upon government, and thereby weaken, 
 if it does not wholly destroy, the sanctity of 
 law ? " This argument was illustrated by a ref- 
 erence to the metropohs, where "a nest of 
 profligates and gamesters had baffled juries, 
 baffled courts, baffled legislatures, and contemned 
 public opinion in their shameless career of pecu- 
 lation." 
 
 Of course such results were deprecated by 
 many of our more eminent statesmen, and as 
 far back as 1835 Mr. Calhoun, in his famous 
 report on "Executive Patronage," denounced 
 the methods in which they originated with the 
 utmost lucidity and vehemence. " Were a pre- 
 mium offered," he said, " for the best means of 
 subverting liberty and establishing despotism^ no 
 scheme more perfect could be devised." In this 
 view he was joined by Webster, Clay, and other 
 eminent statesmen of all parties. In fact the 
 best traditions of all parties were against the 
 practice. 
 
 But the most pernicious tendency of the 
 system they did not foresee, and that was the 
 aggrandizement of the king-maker rather than 
 of the king ; or, in other words, the evolution of 
 that most anomalous of all political creatures. 
 
George William Curtis 45 
 
 the party boss. It brought into existence an 
 order of men who, without having performed 
 any public services — who were neither soldiers, 
 statesmen, great merchants, nor captains of in- 
 dustry — who, without possessing any signal ability 
 or virtue, except the ability to conspire and to 
 intrigue, and the virtue of a shameless impu- 
 dence, are able, by the promise of spoils, to com- 
 bine their corps of janissaries in such a way as 
 to empower them to dictate terms to assembly- 
 men, congressmen, judges — nay, to presidents, 
 the august embodiments of the majesty and the 
 might of the people. 
 
 Mr. Curtis was an earnest observer of this last 
 development, apd he had no need to go abroad 
 for proofs of its iniquity. Object-lessons — a sort 
 of kindergarten of deviltry — were hourly before 
 him. He lived through the career of one 
 Tweed, a coarse, vulgar, ignorant, and reckless 
 adventurer, who, scarcely able to make a living 
 by an honest mechanical trade, had yet, by the 
 use of a party organization and the doctrine of 
 spoils, made himself the political dictator of the 
 city and, to a considerable extent, of the State. 
 He designated aldermen, assemblymen, judges, 
 and all the lesser occupants of bureaus, i. e., he 
 determined who should make, interpret, and ex- 
 ecute the laws, turning all the great functions of 
 
46 George William Curtis 
 
 government into a means of enriching himself 
 and his fellow-conspirators. This Panama scan- 
 dal, which is to-day shaking France to the core, 
 had its prototype in our city court-house, whose 
 every stone was laid in a mortar of corruption, 
 and every nail driven by purchased and infamous 
 hands. So complete was the ascendency of one 
 man that, when the better members of his party 
 protested against his outrages, he replied with a 
 sardonic leer, " And what are you going to do 
 about it ? " 
 
 It is true that Tweed and his harpies were 
 ultimately dislodged, his legislators deposed and 
 dogged by the curses of after-time, his judges 
 impeached, his immediate friends imprisoned or 
 exiled ; but not until they were well gorged, and 
 after years of effort on the part of one of our 
 most astute and persistent statesmen. Even then, 
 while the particular brood was killed, the cock- 
 atrice's egg remained uncrushed. Tweed had, 
 and still has, his imitators in every State, city, 
 and town in the nation, and their iron grip is 
 fastened almost as firmly as ever upon parties — 
 but not quite, thank Heaven and the untiring 
 zeal of the Civil- Service reformers ! 
 
 It was in vain to ask Congress or other 
 legislative bodies to abolish the nuisance, be- 
 cause so many of their members were made by 
 
George William Curtis 47 
 
 the machine, and no one likes to kill his crea- 
 tor. Even when it was not so, the interest in 
 the reform was abstract, indirect, impersonal, 
 and a matter of general principle confined to 
 a few, while the interest in the evil itself was 
 immediate, personal, profitable, and shared by- 
 many. It took forty years of strenuous strug- 
 gle before Mr. Thomas Allen Jencks, of Rhode 
 Island, could secure the appointment of a Civil- 
 Service Commission to inquire into the nature 
 of the abuses under federal rule, and to suggest 
 remedies. Mr. Curtis was at once indicated as 
 a member of that commission, and, appointed 
 to it by President Grant, was chosen its chair- 
 man. We have seen the determination and 
 energy he applied to the uprooting of slavery ; 
 and here was another form of it — not so patent 
 or repulsive, far more subde, and scarcely less 
 destructive of the moral fibre of the nation — to 
 which he gave the same fearlessness and fervor 
 of antagonism. His first report, in 1871, as an 
 exposition of the evil, and of the proper mode 
 of correcting it, was a sort of magna charta of 
 reform. Its logic was never answered, and could 
 not be; indeed, its argument of the constitu- 
 tional points involved was in substance, and 
 almost in terms, adopted by the Court of Ap- 
 peals in this State, and afterwards by the 
 
4,8 George William Curtis 
 
 Supreme Court of the United States. But of 
 what avail ? General Grant was sincere in his 
 approval of the change, but he found that his 
 interference had stirred up a nest of hornets 
 more formidable than the bullets of his fifty 
 battles. His call for appropriations to carry on 
 the struggle was flung in his teeth by Con- 
 gress, his zeal abated, and Mr. Curtis was com- 
 pelled to resign. 
 
 His zeal, however, did not abate. Too much 
 had been done towards the introduction of the 
 reform into the federal bureaus to warrant an 
 abandonment of it; and for ten years, as presi- 
 dent of the national league and of the local 
 league, his efforts were incessant and effective. 
 His annual addresses, in the former capacity, 
 were models of appeal — crammed with pertinent 
 facts, with impregnable proofs, with withering 
 sarcasms, with irresistible eloquence. They so 
 held all executive officers up to the line of duty 
 that many of them, ashamed to do openly what 
 party exigences required, resorted to shifts and 
 subterfuges to hide their cowardice. 
 
 In assuming this position of censorship, Mr. 
 Curtis came in conflict with the party of his pre- 
 dilection, and saw no alternative but to break 
 away from it altogether; that, however, was no 
 easy step. He admitted the necessity of parties ; 
 
George William Curtis 49 
 
 but he held, too, that the basis of party itself 
 must be reason and conscience. Allegiance to 
 party, carried beyond that point, became infi- 
 delity to one's own soul, and treason to the best 
 interests of the nation. Willingly had he given 
 to his party the careful study, the patient toil, 
 the persuasive eloquence, the burning enthusiasm 
 of his best days ; but one thing he would not 
 sacrifice to any party — his sense of right and 
 wrong as a moralist, his independence as a citi- 
 zen, his self-respect as a man. Denounce him 
 you might, ridicule him, ostracise him, fill his 
 post-bag with the garbage of the gutter, and yet 
 would he trust in that interior monitor which is 
 the highest rule of duty we can know or even con- 
 ceive. But for men of this high tone, whom the 
 poor sticklers for use and wont are apt to decry, 
 "The dust of antique time would lie unswept, 
 
 And mountainous Error be too highly heaped 
 
 For truth to overpeer." 
 
 Mr. Curtis's disappointment with the action of 
 Republican leaders as to the civil service led his 
 mind to serious distrust of the policy of the 
 Republican party on other questions, which, as 
 they are still pending, we cannot discuss at this 
 time. Suffice it to say that he was compelled, 
 in 1884, to announce that he could not support 
 its candidate for the Presidency, and in 1888, 
 
5o George William Curtis 
 
 that he must support the candidate of the oppo- 
 sition. But in thus taking an attitude of com- 
 plete superiority to all parties, he thenceforth 
 stood before the public as the champion of Inde- 
 pendence, to which he kept 
 
 "constant as the northern star . . . 
 
 That unassailable holds in his rank 
 
 Unshaked of motion." 
 
 Indeed, his mind seemed to opea more and more 
 fully as he advanced to that most vital and salu- 
 tary of all social truths — that while organizations 
 are indispensable to the attainment of certain 
 great human ends, the individual person is always 
 higher than any organization, and for the simple 
 reason that the man is the End, and the organ- 
 ization only the Means. Therefore it is, that 
 when you put the means above the end, you 
 reverse the true order of life, you raise power 
 above right, and open and ease the way to in- 
 numerable and destructive tyrannies. The gran- 
 deur of his position, denounced by partisans, was, 
 after his death, recognized by the newspapers of 
 nearly every faction when they spoke of him — 
 as Lowell had previously spoken of him in verse 
 — as "the Great Citizen." He was the great 
 citizen because he had dared to be the honest 
 citizen, and a nobler epitaph "nor marble nor 
 brass nor parchment " ever bore. 
 
George William Curtis 51 
 
 Mr. Curtis owed his successes to the voice no 
 less than to the pen, and this address would be 
 exceedingly imperfect if it did not dwell for a 
 moment on his peculiar oratory. " Eloquence," 
 he somewhere says, " is the supreme charm of 
 speech," giving it precedence over song, "but 
 where the charm lies is the most delusive of 
 secrets. It is the spell of the magician, but it is 
 not in his wand nor in his words. It is the tone 
 of the picture, it is the rhythm of the poem. It 
 is neither a statement nor an argument, nor a 
 rhetorical, picturesque, or passionate appeal. It 
 is all these penetrated and glowing with the power 
 of living speech — a magnetism, a fascination, a 
 nameless delight." 
 
 But however it is to be explained, I can bear 
 witness to the fact in his case. It has been my 
 good fortune to hear many of the foremost speak- 
 ers of the age — from Kossuth, the prince of all, to 
 Gladstone, Bright, Thiers, Channing, Everett, 
 Webster, Choate, Sumner, Beecher, Phillips, Ser- 
 geant Prentiss, and last, though not least, Robert 
 Ingersoll ; and while I recognize in several of 
 them quahties which Mr. Curtis did not attain — 
 a majesty and massiveness of movement like that 
 of a great ship of war bearing gallantly down into 
 the battle, or the impetus energy which, like a 
 deep and swollen river, sweeps all before it, or. 
 
52 George William Curtis 
 
 again, an intensity of pathos which renders every 
 sentence tremulous with tears — it may be said of 
 Mr. Curtis, without extravagance of praise, that 
 for sustained elevation and dignity, for uniformity 
 of grace and unruffled fulness and richness of 
 charm, he had few peers. His greatest effort, as 
 I recall it now, was the eulogy he delivered on 
 your late venerable president, Mr. Bryant, at the 
 Academy of Music. A more brilliant or distin- 
 guished assemblage was never gathered in that 
 once famous temple of art— comprising the rival 
 claimants for the presidency, governors, judges, 
 and the picked representatives of the professional, 
 literary, and artistic classes, and circling zones of 
 whatever was beautiful in our female world. His 
 subject was not one of those that are usually 
 thought necessary to arouse the best energies of 
 a speaker — no invasion of Philip, no conspiracy 
 against the mistress of the world, no cruel tyrant 
 hanging like a cloud on the declivities of the hills, 
 no separation of mother country and daughter 
 colonies, no calling of a nation to arms — only the 
 character of a simple citizen whose victories were 
 those of the pen. Yet for an hour and a half that 
 vast and diversified audience was held in rapt 
 attention; not a silvery word or a golden image 
 was lost; and when he closed with an impressive 
 passage there was a solemn hush as if all were 
 
George William Curtis 53 
 
 expectant of more, a pause that called to mind 
 Milton's oft-quoted description of the efifect of 
 Raphael's discourse on our first parent, when he 
 left his voice so charming in Adam's ear that for 
 a while he 
 
 " Thought him still speaking, still stood fixed to hear." 
 
 It was a suspense of nature preceding a thunder- 
 break of applause. 
 
 Under the immediate influence of the spell, 
 one was ever too full of the pleasure to undertake 
 to analyze, or even to wish to analyze its sources, 
 and only in cooler moments, when the effect had 
 passed off, could he recall them. He would then, 
 perhaps, remember the liquid and equable flow of 
 the voice, pure and rich in tone, distinct in enun- 
 ciation, and melodious in inflection and cadence; 
 the limpid simplicity and purity of the language, 
 at the same time sinewy and strong ; the kindled 
 eye and the rapid changes of feature answering to 
 each emotion as it arose; the play and flash of 
 imagery, like lightning in the summer cloud — 
 never brought in as mere ornament, but arising 
 spontaneously as the only possible vehicle of the 
 thought ; the thought itself, always natural, 
 apposite, and impressive, but borne on some 
 wave of feeling which pulsated through each sen- 
 tence like rich blood in the cheeks of a sensitive 
 
54 George William Curtis 
 
 woman ; the felicity of the allusions or quotations, 
 each one of which was like turning on a new 
 shade of color; and then the perfect symmetry 
 and completeness of the whole — no part obtrusive, 
 no part deficient — and all presented with such an 
 absence of apparent effort, such consummate ease 
 and grace of delivery, that no room was left in 
 the mind of the hearer for any emotion but that 
 of admiration and delight. 
 
 Complimenting him, after the delivery of his 
 eulogy on Bryant, on the perfectness of the per- 
 formance, he modestly replied, " Dear friend, it 
 was the occasion of my life " — which was doubt- 
 less true as to circumstances ; but the phrase con- 
 veyed to me the open secret of his life. He was 
 so supremely, thoroughly, and unconsciously the 
 artist, that every occasion was an occasion, if not 
 the occasion, of his life. By the mere instinct of 
 artistic fitness he made his preparations so care- 
 fully and completely ;4iis respect for his audience, 
 however composed, was so profound, his fidelity 
 to his own ideals so exacting, that he was ever 
 at his best. ^ He could no more have offered an 
 uncombed or slovenly speech than he could have 
 come forward uncombed and slovenly in person; 
 or than a great painter could hang a daub on 
 the walls of an exhibition, or a true poet put 
 forth a poem with rheumatism in its feet. I have 
 
George William Curtis 55 
 
 no doubt that those who afterwards heard his 
 eulogies of Sumner, Phillips, and Lowell, or his 
 oration at the Washington Monument or on the 
 Saratoga battle-field, or his several addresses to 
 the Civil Service League, thought as I did at the 
 Bryant Commemoration — that they had got him 
 in his happiest mood. Even on lesser occasions 
 — a dinner of the Chamber of Commerce, of the 
 Academy of Design, or of a college fraternity — ^he 
 was sure to be u£^ to^ expectation, if he did not 
 surpass it ; and when he mingled some touches of 
 humor, some quips and quirks of merriment, in 
 his discourse, they were certain to be set in an 
 enchased framework of gold and silver. How 
 often at a simple symposium of a few good fel- 
 lows, when George, as we famiharly called him, 
 was talking, it seemed as if we sat under a gor- 
 geous summer sky, with murmurs of music in all 
 the air. 
 
 Mr. Curtis was most happily endowed for the 
 production of effects upon others, either as a 
 writer or a speaker. His mind was both acute 
 and vigorous, but it was planted in a soil richly 
 /sensitive, imaginative, and emotional. His turn 
 of thought was not philosophical, i. e., metaphys- 
 ical or speculative; he never dug down to what 
 Schopenhauer called " the fourfold roots of the 
 sufficient reason," and the very phrase would have 
 
56 George William Curtis 
 
 amused him ; but none the less he had a philoso- 
 phy of his own — that natural idealism or ideal 
 naturalism which is the philosophy of all artists 
 who see consciousness in nature and nature in 
 consciousness; and for whom the smile, which 
 is a pure delight of the mind, exists also in the 
 sparkle of the eye and the curve of the lips. 
 His intellectual life came to him from no mys- 
 terious pineal gland hidden away in the folds 
 of the brain, but from the tremulous fibres of 
 the senses, whose manifold, many-colored, many- 
 toned messages were taken up by that imperial 
 wizard and artificer, the fantasy — and, by some 
 secret alchemy, dissolved and wrought over again 
 into manifold, many-colored, many-toned words. 
 It is not to be inferred from this that Mr. 
 Curtis's reasoning powers were inferior ; he seized 
 readily upon general principles, but not the pro- 
 foundest nor the most abstract, only the middle 
 sort, the axiomata media, which connect the more 
 obvious aspects of things and lie open to com- 
 mon-sense. He could argue well, as many an 
 adversary found to his cost, but not at long 
 breath ; he preferred figures of rhetoric to figures 
 of logic, and he drew men by the lyre of Apollo 
 rather than drove them by the club of Hercules. 
 \ They were the more easily drawn because, 
 \ through all the glow and glamour of his sensuous 
 
George William Curtis 57 
 
 and imaginative showings there pierced such a 
 solid aspiration for what is permanently com- 
 manding in nature and permanently ennobling in 
 conduct, and such a fixed, instinctive, unaffected 
 love of truth, that he commanded at the same / 
 time that he won adherence and homage.* 
 
 The career I have roughly outlined — though 
 full, well-rounded, and beautiful — gives but an 
 imperfect image of the man as he was in himself, 
 in his humble home, and in his private intercourse 
 with friends. Nothing he ever wrote or spoke or 
 did was so dear to those who knew him inti- 
 mately as "the soft memory of his virtues," in 
 which so many varied elements kindly mingled. 
 Simple and guileless as a child, sweet, modest, 
 and lovable as a woman, loyal and devoted to his 
 friends, generous and without gall to his enemies, 
 and uniformly courteous to all, he carried with 
 him everywhere an atmosphere of cheerfulness 
 
 * If one were disposed to criticise his intellectual constitu- 
 tion, one might say that he was, particularly in early life, over- 
 charged with sentiment that came near to sentimentality. His 
 personal emotions were then so strong that he was not able 
 to master them completely or to be dramatic. His novel, called 
 " Trumps," was a proof of this ; although written with extreme 
 grace, and abounding in exquisite scenes and descriptions, it 
 was not a success with novel -readers, because the characters too 
 strictly reflected the moods of the author. But this trait helped 
 his oratory. 
 
58 George William Curtis 
 
 that was as invigorating as a mountain breeze. 
 Punctual in the discharge of the lowUest as of the 
 highest duties, working for thirteen years a poor 
 man to pay off debts which were not legal debts 
 nor debts of honor, but claims upon business asso- 
 ciates for whom he was not strictly responsible, 
 he was ever as ready to take part in local political 
 meetings as he was to attend a State convention, 
 and more ready to read a sermon of Channing or 
 Martineau to a small flock of fellow-worshippers 
 than he was to put on the robes of a Chancellor 
 of the University or to parade as a minister in 
 foreign courts. Enjoying every innocent pleasure 
 to the full — indeed, in our old Century Saturday 
 nights, remembering with Prince Hal, " the poor 
 creature, small beer," he was jovial with the most 
 jovial, knowing that pleasure builds up and for- 
 tifies the nerves for the severer strains of life ; but 
 he never went to excess, nor lost his self-respect 
 nor dignity in any unseemly hilarity. His ab- 
 solute sincerity inspired a confidence as abso- 
 lute ; and if circumstances compelled him to 
 break with an old friend, the rupture awakened 
 no resentments — only painful regrets that it must 
 be so. He was only stern and unbending in the 
 line of what he deemed his duty, and even then, 
 " his wit, with fancy arm in arm. 
 Masked half its muscles in its skill to charm." 
 
George William Curtis 59 
 
 In a word, Mr. Curtis touched life at nearly 
 every point at which it is possible for the indi- 
 vidual soul to put forth its tendrils into the 
 universe. As much as any landscape artist or 
 poet he loved external Nature in all her moods 
 and forms, her glancing lights and deepening 
 shadows ; he had the scholar's fondness for 
 books, and could have lived forever in that 
 magic world of truth and fiction which lies like 
 a storage-battery on the shelves of every library; 
 he delighted in pictures, of which he judged 
 with a rare mastery without losing enthusiasm ; 
 he was enraptured by music, whether of the 
 oratorio or the opera — of Jenny Lind or Pade- 
 rewski or some humble St. Cecilia singing alone 
 the touching melodies of the fireside ; and yet 
 he communed betimes with the " spiritual crea- 
 ures who walk the earth, or when we wake or 
 when we sleep," and often heard from steeps 
 of echoing hills and thickets " celestial voices 
 on the midnight air, sole or responsive to each 
 other's song." One silver chord, it seems to 
 me, bound his whole being in harmony. It 
 was that innate, instinctive, spontaneous ideality 
 which inspired, shaped, and toned his every 
 feeling and thought as well as his every act. 
 An aspiration for excellence, in its various 
 forms of justice, truth, goodness, and courtesy, 
 
6o George William Curtis 
 
 ever cast its light before his eyes and ever 
 whispered in his ears, as the sea murmurs in 
 the sea-shell of a vast Beyond which is its 
 proper home. 
 
 It was this ideality which lured him as a 
 boy to seek a golden age restored in the fra- 
 ternity at Brook Farm ; which led him to the 
 neighborhood of Emerson and Hawthorne, and 
 in after-life gathered around him so many noble 
 friendships ; which carried him to the sources 
 of civilization in the mystic East, and to its 
 splendid final achievements in Europe ; which, 
 with all his daintiness and reserve, made him 
 so tolerant of uncouth and shambling reformers, 
 in whose strident voices he heard the far-off 
 preludes of coming harmonies ; which opened a 
 door from the severe labors of his every-day 
 life into a dream-land of glorious hopes ; which 
 drew the sword of his eloquence against slavery 
 and the unmanly degradations of our civic and 
 political customs; which scattered so many 
 jewels over his pages, and gave to his style at 
 times the flavor of a luscious old wine, " with 
 beaded bubbles winking at the brim," and 
 
 " Tasting of Flora and the country green. 
 Dance, and Provengal song, and sun-burned mirth " ; 
 
 which accounts, too, for an occasional undertone 
 of pensive sadness which escapes him, like the 
 
George William Curtis 6 1 
 
 sigh of a strong man, and which made him 
 profoundly religious — but with a religion that, 
 defecated of the more acrid creeds, finds in the 
 imperative law of Reverence for Manhood the 
 highest, nay, the only conceivable, realization of 
 an Eternal Love and Wisdom. 
 
 As I look back on this rare, sweet, gentle, 
 great personality, there comes before me, as an 
 external emblem of it, the palm-tree he once 
 saw in Capri — gently throned upon a slope of 
 richest green, and crowned with brilhant and 
 fragrant flowers, as it rose in separate and 
 peculiar stateliness in the odorous garden air. 
 Towering far above its selected society of shin- 
 ing fig-trees and lustrous oleanders, it looked 
 through the dream-mists of Southern Italy down 
 upon the bright bay of Naples, where all the 
 civilizations of the ages have at some time 
 passed — across to the islands of the sirens who 
 sang to Ulysses ; to the orange groves of Sor- 
 rento, where Tasso was born ; and to the rocky 
 shelves of Posilippo, where Virgil lies buried. 
 As it looked, the birds came and lodged in its 
 branches — tropic birds with their songs of love ; 
 birds of the far Norland, who chanted their 
 mystic tunes; and vocalists without a name, 
 whose magifc accents carry the secrets of the 
 elves and fairies — while the people gathered in 
 
62 George William Curtis 
 
 its shade for shelter, and ate its luscious fruit 
 for strength, and listened to its melodies for 
 cheer. But the palm, we are told, had a song 
 of its own — a prophetic song, which told of 
 a broad and ever- flowing river, ever flowing 
 through greener grasses, under sunnier skies, to 
 an eternal summer ; typical of that grand stream 
 of humanity which, though it sometimes breaks 
 in cataracts, and bears the woes of earth on its 
 bosom — funeral processions as well as festal 
 processions — and reflects from its surface the 
 storms no less than the smiles of heaven, is 
 gliding ever on, ever on, to a future of larger 
 liberty, surer justice, broader culture, and a 
 universal love and peace. If that tree is now 
 fallen, and its trunk lies prostrate on the mould 
 that decays, and the birds sing no more in its 
 branches, yet the echoes of its own song float 
 on, and the thought of its beauty is to us who 
 knew it, and will be to those who shall come 
 to know it, " a joy forever " ; yes, a joy forever 
 — but 
 
 " Oh for the touch of a vanished hand. 
 And the sound of a voice that is still ! " 
 
EDWIN BOOTH 
 
EDWIN BOOTH* 
 
 Mr. President and Gentlemen of The Players: 
 
 It was but a few months since I was asked to 
 speak some commemorative words of a dear friend 
 deceased, who was a most distinguished and 
 charming ornament of our literature, Mr. George 
 William Curtis ; and it is to me a most affecting 
 incident that the last time I saw another dear 
 friend — no less distinguished and charming in 
 another sphere — he was reading those words 
 with sympathetic approval. But as I listened to 
 his over-generous appreciations I little thought 
 how soon I should be asked to perform the 
 same melancholy duty in respect to himself. I 
 refer, of course, to Edwin Booth. 
 
 The name, as I pronounce it, falters upon my 
 
 * " The Players," a club of which Mr. Edwin Booth was the 
 Founder and First President, gave a memorial celebration of 
 the sixtieth anniversary of his birth at the Madison Square Con- 
 cert Hall on the 13th of November, 1893. Mr. Joseph Jefferson 
 presided on the occasion and made a brief address ; an elegy 
 
 65 
 
66 Edwin Booth 
 
 lips, for it recalls many hours of joy, with few of 
 sorrow, while it reminds me that he is gone 
 from us forever. We shall no more see that 
 fine intellectual face which interpreted with so 
 much beauty and truth the grandest creations of 
 the foremost human intellect; we shall hear no 
 more that melodious voice which added a new 
 music to the music of poetry, whether it came 
 to us in the flute-like tones of the sweet south 
 breathing upon a bank of violets, or like the 
 deep organ-pipe of the ocean when it breaks in 
 heavy cadences on the coast; he will lead us no 
 more into that ideal realm, whose golden portals 
 are flung wide by the magic of genius, to reveal 
 to us the grand figures of history and grander 
 figures than history has ever known, men of 
 heroic mould and colossal passions and women 
 as fair and lovely as the women of a lover's 
 dreams, whom it is a rapture to see, as it would 
 be an education to know ; and we shall no more 
 feel the grasp of the hand whose pulsations were 
 ever fresh and warm from the heart. He is 
 gone — gone into the silent land — and how im- 
 
 •was read by Mr. George E. Woodbury ; music was furnished by 
 Walter Damrosch, director of the New York Symphony Orches- 
 tra, and brief addresses were also made by Tommaso Salvini 
 and Henry Irving. The eulogium which follows was spoken 
 on that occasion. 
 
Edwin Booth 67 
 
 penetrable and still it is. We peer into its dark- 
 ness and the clouds only gather and thicken ; 
 we call to its people, and they answer us not 
 again, and we are left to a faith that often 
 wavers and a hope that often sinks; but as we 
 walk in reverent ignorance backward let us in- 
 dulge the hope and cherish the faith as better 
 for us, perhaps, as a moral discipline than any 
 clearer knowledge. 
 
 You will not expect me, in this brief hour 
 of communion, to present you a detailed biog- 
 raphy of Mr. Booth, or any elaborate estimate of 
 his character and career : those are themes for 
 a more deliberate occasion, and we can only 
 glance at a few salient points which commend 
 him to public remembrance. It would seem as 
 if he had been dedicated to the theatre both by 
 outward circumstances and inward vocation. If 
 it cannot be said of him, as our venerable and 
 genial President has said of himself, that he was 
 almost born upon the stage, it may be said of 
 him that he was cradled within sound of its 
 plaudits, and nourished upon some of its noblest 
 traditions. His father, Junius Brutus Booth, was 
 one of that galaxy of actors who rose on the 
 sunset of Garrick, and included among its bright 
 particular stars the Kembles, Henderson, Cooke, 
 Young, Cooper, Kean and Mrs. Siddons and Miss 
 
68 Edwin Booth 
 
 O'Neill. He was, indeed, a formidable rival of 
 Kean, to whose jealousy he owed the signal 
 honor, as we do the signal advantage, of his 
 transfer from the metropolis to this western 
 wilderness. For many years he was the one 
 cometary splendor of our theatrical skies, and 
 showed the way to a host of luminaries who 
 have since dazzled our eyes, without paling his 
 effulgence. For if the younger sort in those 
 early days were disposed to lose themselves in 
 bursts of admiration over any of these, the older 
 heads would simply remark, " Ah, yes ! very well, 
 very well ; but have you ever seen Booth ? " as 
 if that were at once the climax and close of all 
 possible criticism. 
 
 Well, it is among my earliest recollections to 
 have seen that meteor, as he flashed across the 
 boards of the old Park Theatre, as Richard or 
 Sir Giles or Pescara, when I was too young to 
 be critical, but not too young to receive an in- 
 delible impression of his power and brilliancy. 
 Like Burbage, Garrick and Kean, he was small 
 but of a compact figure, with a commanding 
 presence, a most expressive face and great lumi- 
 nous eyes that seemed to be set on fire from 
 some inner volcanic source. His voice was less 
 liquid than that of his son, and his carriage less 
 dignified and graceful, but his outbreaks of pas- 
 
Edwin Booth 69 
 
 sion, whether of rage or pathos, were simply- 
 titanic. In hearing them one could readily be- 
 lieve the stories that were told of his fellow actors 
 stopping in their parts to gaze upon him in mute 
 amazement and awe. 
 
 Edwin Booth, the fourth son of this eccentric 
 genius, inherited many of his best qualities, and' 
 added to them others that tempered their inten- j 
 sity of blaze and mellowed the excesses of their 
 energy. He was born on a farm near BaltimorS^ 
 in Maryland, which the father had procured as 
 a retreat from the glare and the bustle of the 
 footlights ; and he might have said, with more 
 truth, perhaps, than Owen Glendower, that, 
 
 "At my birth 
 
 The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes- 
 
 for he came into the world in November of 1833, 
 during that meteoric shower of the 13th, which 
 passed as phenomenal into the annals of astron- 
 omy. I remember it distinctly, when we students 
 of Princeton rushed out into the night to see 
 the sky, from zenith to horizon, on every side, a 
 sea of streaming flame, which recalled the most 
 high and palmy state of Rome, " A little ere 
 the mightiest Julius fell," when 
 
 " Stars with trains of fire and dews of blood 
 Disastered the sun," 
 
70 Edwin Booth 
 
 but they were deemed " the precursors of fierce 
 events," while these in the milder superstition 
 of the negroes augured a brilliant destiny. 
 
 More important to the new-comer than these 
 exhalations was that grand drop of sunshine, 
 the farm, where his limbs were nourished by 
 the fresh juices of the earth, his lungs expanded 
 by the winds, and his imagination kindled by 
 the shapes and shadows of the darkling wood. 
 His education there was elementary and limited . 
 — a little while at a lady's school, another little 
 while under a foreign teacher, who taught hin t- 
 
 th^R violin, — while the — negroes -around taught 
 
 him the banio. and a less while if any at a, 
 higher academy. Doubtless the father's presence 
 was something of an education ; for he was a 
 scholar who read a great deal — an expert lin- 
 guist — at least, he could present French parts 
 to French audiences in their native tongue — 
 and a gentleman of taste, who lined his walls 
 with pictures and books. But any education 
 there would have been irregular, considering 
 the habit he had of carrying some of his chil- 
 dren on his theatrical tours. Edwin told me 
 that he remembered being taken, when he was 
 but five or six years old, behind the scenes, to 
 await the exit of his father, who would then 
 catch him in his arms, caress him and toss him 
 
Edwin Booth 7J 
 
 in the air, repeating some nursery tale or song, 
 as a mode of relieving the tension of his nerves. 
 Under these influences he naturally aspired 
 to the stage, and a playfellow of his boyhood, 
 who remembers him as a curly-haired, bright- 
 eyed, handsome lad, recalls his enthusiasm in 
 that direction ; but he always insisted that he 
 would only play the villains, who had much to 
 do and to say for themselves, while he despised 
 the parts of lovers, whom he regarded as milk- 
 sops. In that the incipient tragedian spoke. 
 But the father was opposed to his children 
 going upon the stage, not because he under- 
 estimated his profession, but because he doubted 
 their capacity for it. And once in reply to a 
 remonstrance, he petulantly exclaimed, " Well, 
 let them play the banjo between the acts." 
 
 Edwin's first appearance, in 1849, when he 
 was scarcely seventeen, was by accident — the 
 failure of a friend whose part as Tressel, in; 
 Colley Gibber's mutilation of Richard III., he[ 
 assumed, and the same companion, who was' 
 present, reports that while he carried himself 
 with self-possession and dignity he was inaudible 
 at the middle of the pit. The eminent Rufus 
 Choate, a warm admirer of the father, was 
 heard to remark on that occasion " that it was 
 a great pity that eminent men should have 
 
72 Edwin Booth 
 
 such mediocre children." Edwin, however, per- 
 severed, and got himself regularly enlisted in 
 the stock company at the remunerative salary 
 of six dollars a week, which he was glad to 
 get whenever he could. The parental objection 
 seems soon to have disappeared, for he was 
 pushed into a first part by the father himself, 
 who refused, in 1850, to appear in Richard, 
 when he was announced for it, and insisted that 
 Edwin should take his place. This was at the 
 old National Theatre in this city, which be- 
 came the Chatham Street Chapel, where in 
 later years I saw an Abolition riot that was a 
 good deal livelier than any play. One can 
 easily fancy what an ordeal it must have been 
 for a youth of eighteen to be substituted for 
 the most famous actor of the day. At first he 
 was received with some murmurs, but gradually 
 won approval, and at the end was called before 
 the curtain. He was a bit elated by his own 
 success, but in after years said that it was a 
 mere boyish imitation of his father, and exe- 
 crable at that. It, however, settled his career, 
 and he became a Thespian for the rest of his 
 days. 
 
 But his novitiate, or apprenticeship, passed on 
 the outskirts of civilization, was a rough one, be- 
 set with drudgery, doubt and disaster. California 
 
Edwin Booth 73 
 
 in thos e davs lay liVp a Inminrmg gnlrlpp |i^7P 
 
 . on our western horizon, and thither many men 
 turned jp pnrgnii- r.f fr.r hinp nr fame. Amonpr 
 t hem the father and son crossed the pestilential 
 isthmus in 1852 in hi gh hop es of siiccess^hiit 
 destined to encounter a gr^at rleal of haj^j^daj^. 
 
 and vicissitude. ^Thejf^t-Vipr gprin ahanHnnpH c;an 
 Francisc o fnr New Orlpans, and die d on his way 
 north, leavi ng the son behind him to battle, 
 agains t the world for himself. In the larger ' 
 cities on the coast Edwin did tolerably well, but 
 his adventures among the mining camps of the 
 foothills, as told by one of his companions, were 
 full of grotesque yet painful incidents. They 
 take us back to the very days of Shakespeare, 
 when the licensed companies, driven from the 
 metropolis by the plague, which often carried off 
 more than one-fifth of the inhabitants, rambled 
 through towns and villages, to exhibit their half- 
 contraband wares, in the granges of farmers, in 
 the back yards of inns or in booths on the 
 open plain ; but their experiences must have 
 been luxurious compared to those which gave 
 to Edwin Booth his earliest lessons. What with 
 imprisonment in mountain burgs isolated by 
 snow and threatened with starvation ; with long 
 tramps of thirty or fifty miles through slush and 
 mud ; with the cooking of their own food or 
 
74 Edwin Booth 
 
 the mending of their own clothes ; with per- 
 formances on boards laid across the billiard 
 tables of saloons or on the trunks of fallen trees ; 
 with a free discharge of pistols now and then in 
 the midst of some grand scene of heroism or 
 love ; and with a final return to the coast so 
 utterly penniless as to render a resort to negro 
 farces or a local travesty a necessary alternative 
 to hopeless want, his entrance upon his career 
 cannot be said to have been either encouraging 
 or cheerful. 
 
 Nor was the outcome much better of a voyag e 
 l.hd^ade with a transient company to the islands 
 
 of the South Se ag, ac; far off tVipn ag \\\f Antipn- 
 
 des now and almost quite as unknown. For 
 what reason they went, unless it was to confirm 
 a prophecy of Shakespeare that " eyes not yet 
 created should o'er read his gentle verse," it is 
 difficult to say; but they played in Australia, 
 Samoa and Hawaii, sometimes before royal 
 courts which probably did not understand a word 
 of what they uttered, but more often to a frieze 
 and background of dusky natives in full para- 
 disaic costume and intermittent purses. This was 
 ^in 1854. J\\ <-^" rat.ti-n fry r-ai.'f/^i-n;-^ whr'''* ^" 
 ■ accomplished lady. Mrs. Forrest, had opened a 
 successful thea tre, the light began to dawn upon 
 the youthlul stroller, and he was enabled to 
 
Edwin Booth 75 
 
 show the mettle that was in him, and by a few 
 astonishing hits to gather the means of getting 
 pack to the East. 
 
 These six novitiate years on the frontiers of 
 civilization, acting in companies picked from 
 the roadside, and to audiences not at all exact- 
 ing or refined in their demands, were years rather 
 of drudgery, and of crude and careless work than 
 of education or discipline. They were years of 
 apprenticeship and required severe labor and 
 endurance, but did not impart the nicer quali- 
 ties of culture. Yet they, were not wholly fruit - 
 les s. He acquired by them the mere mechanical 
 tricks of his trade! They fa miliarized him witH" 
 t he scene, developed his vnirp^ infiT^tj^d self-con- 
 fidence, and perhaps awakened a higher ambition. 
 On his return tO the iiast m 1856, arduous trials 
 awaited him there, which proved, however, both 
 educative and disciplinary. They opened his 
 eyes to the defects of his old imitative and tra- 
 ditional methods, and threw him back upon native 
 original methods, and his better judgment. De- 
 ficient in early cultivation, and misled by the 
 accepted models of the times, he had to unlearn 
 much that he had learned, and to learn much 
 that he did not know. He did not leap to the 
 top at once — nobody ever does — ^but had to climb 
 to it, through thickets and thorns, with an occa- 
 
76 Edwin Booth 
 
 sional tumble on the rocks. Even after he had 
 ventured an appeal to the cultivated taste of 
 Boston, and been approved, a foreign actress with 
 whom he played refused to go on because of his 
 ungainly and awkward ways. In contrast is the 
 fact that when he played with Miss Cushman in 
 Macbeth she differed so widely from his refined 
 and intellectual conception of the character as 
 to beg him to " remember that Macbeth was the 
 great ancestor of all the Bowery villains." But 
 Mr. Booth was not too conceited or too indif- 
 ferent to learn ; he read widely and carefully ; 
 he observed constantly and closely ; and he was 
 wise enough to put aside his faults when they 
 were discovered to him, even when they were 
 pointed out by unfriendly criticism. Perhaps the 
 acquaintanceship that he formed at this time here 
 in New York with a considerable number of 
 young artists and literary men (now past masters 
 in fame), who had been attracted to him by his 
 rare modesty and unquestionable genius, may have 
 helped to awaken his ambition for the highest 
 places. 
 
 He began, however, at the bottom, with the 
 study of details. He recalled that Garrick, who 
 to a mind that attracted Burke, Johnson, Gold- 
 smith, and Reynolds, added accomplishments that 
 fascinated the multitude, was a most sedulous 
 
Edwin Booth 77 
 
 student in courts, on the streets, in asylums, and 
 booths, of features, gestures, walk, and tone ; that 
 Kean, apparently the most impulsive actor that 
 had ever appeared, yet when preparing for Lear 
 had practised before a glass, night after night, 
 demanding repeated rehearsals, and even mark- 
 ing his positions, his recoils and his advances, on 
 the stage in chalk, and he followed their exam- 
 ples. Anybody who will read his notes to Fur- 
 ness's Variorum Edition of Othello will remark 
 the importance he attached to every movement, 
 every expression of face, every tone of the voice. 
 Even his own performances were constant objects 
 of observation, with a view to their improvement. 
 Once when I praised him highly on his Macbeth, 
 of which I had formed conceptions, derived from 
 the performance of Macready, with whom, next 
 to Werner, it was his best, he replied : " It is 
 only a study, but I think I can make something 
 of it yet." At another time, happening into his 
 room about noon, I found him prostrate on the 
 sofa, half out of breath, and covered with per- 
 spiration, and exclaimed : " Not ill, I hope ; " and 
 he replied : " No ; it is that abominable speech. 
 I have been practising it all the morning. I have 
 shouted it and screeched it. I have roared it 
 and mumbled it, and whispered it, but it will 
 not come right." None the less, I observed 
 
78 Edwin Booth 
 
 afterward that this very speech was so far right 
 as to bring down a triple bob major of applause. 
 This attention to detail seems, perhaps, me- 
 chanical, and it would be mechanical if regarded 
 as an end alone, and not a means ; but it is no 
 more mechanical than the painter's study of his 
 chalk drawing, from which he never deviates and 
 yet fills out with all the glory of color and form. 
 It is no more mechanical than the metres and 
 rhythms the poet observes in order to reach the 
 heights of poetic beauty and grandeur ; it is no 
 more mechanical than the inexorable laws of 
 counterpoint which the musician obeys if he 
 would delight the world with the loveliness of a 
 chorus in Lohengrin, or with the sublime, 
 cherubic, heavenly harmonies of a concerto in C 
 minor. Genius is, of course, the main thiny: its 
 . intuitions and sympathies are the prime movers, 
 the br eath of life, the source of all grand effects ; 
 but genius itself can only work by instrume nts, 
 and when it mounts its winged Pegasus, or drives 
 the courser of the sun, it must still guide its 
 steed by snaffle and bit. - Mr. Booth had the 
 genius, but he had no less the judgment, the 
 
 taste an d the will fr» put an pnd tn itg mprp riir- 
 
 vet ings and prancings, and to direct it toward its 
 triumphal goals. 
 
 Mr. i5ooth's range of impersonation during 
 
Edwin Booth 79 
 
 these later six years of journey work, when he 
 began to be recognized as " the hope of the hv- 
 ing drama " (to use Barrett's phrase) — but not 
 yet its full realization — was quite broad, com- 
 prising both comic and tragic characters, some 
 thirty in all. But he was more effective in 
 tragedy than comedy, though not deficient in the 
 latter. Those of you who saw his Benedick, his 
 Petruchio and the lighter scenes of Ruy Bias 
 and Don Caesar de Bazan, will remember the 
 extreme delicacy and grace of his comic delin- 
 eations, which never degenerated into farce or 
 buffoonery. If at times, in private life, among 
 intimate friends, he was, like Yorick, " a fellow of 
 infinite jest," the humor which opens fountains of 
 tears seemed to be more suited to his habitual 
 temperament and tone of thought than that which 
 ripples the face with smiles. As he grew older 
 and more experienced he gravitated by a sort of 
 native affinity towards the grander and more 
 severe creations of Shakespeare — Lear, Hamlet, 
 Macbeth, the two Richards, Othello, lago, Brutus, 
 Cassius, Antony, and Wolsey — but not, if I re- 
 member rightly, Coriolanus or the Egyptian An- 
 tony. Now and then he strayed into other fields 
 and gave us masterly representations of Richelieu, 
 Pescara, Sir Giles and Bertuccio, and yet he 
 seems to have avoided, purposely, Virginias, 
 
8o Edwin Booth 
 
 Damon, Pizarro, and the Gladiator, as perhaps a 
 little too sentimentally ad captandum for the true 
 artist. J't ' l Y i T- i t'" Fhn1""nr''nrr hr plainly agpirpH , 
 and through him won the place, which he held 
 
 ' lor tnirt y years, ol' lllt^ I uilijiuijI ■' ^'nfrirn'T--actor. 
 He had many worthy rivals, tew, it any, equals ; 
 certainly no superiors. Hi^mnst-fnrmiflal^lp rnm- 
 
 _petitr7 r. Mr tT'^""'" 'F/M-'--'gf, frsr -whom he was 
 partly named, a superb and impressive performer, 
 was, through age and infirmity, falling into "the 
 sere and yellow leaf" when Booth was in the 
 prime of vigor and bloom. It may be that Mr. 
 Forrest's growing fondness for certain native 
 tragedies, in which declamation took the place of 
 poetry, or a cut-and-dried type of character that 
 of real nature, may have separated him somewhat 
 from the currents in which aesthetic judgment was 
 beginning to run. 
 
 It is the highest eulogy one can pronounce 
 upon an English actor to say that his master- 
 pieces of performance were the masterpieces of 
 Shakespeare's creation, for they imply more than 
 the ordinary requirements of a good performer. 
 These are manifold and of a high order, physical, 
 intellectual, emotional and volitional, and these 
 Mr. Booth possessed in a large measure, and he 
 improved them by study and self-discipline. 
 
Edwin Booth 8l 
 
 pr oportioned in build, and he carried himsel f '"'^'^ 
 a rare dignity and grace, so that his poses were , 
 always statuesque and his motions like the wave/ 
 
 ot the be nding corn. His mobile features, lightec 
 by large lustrous eyes, made his face not mere!); 
 handsome, but exceedingly expressive ; while his 
 voice, clear as a bell, and loud as a trumpet, rai 
 through the whole gamut of vocal utterance, 
 marrying sweetness to sonorousness of sounc. 
 without a jar. But to these mere outer gifts h^ 
 joined rapidity and ease of emotional excitement! 
 and, more important than the rest, a depth anq 
 breadth of intelligence which together enabled 
 him to apprehend the most subtle as well as far- 
 reaching thought of his author, and to respond 
 to his sentiment as the musical chord does to 
 the pulsations of the air. 
 
 His eminence in the Shakespeare circle was 
 due to his possession of the latter qualities. The 
 great Master differs from all other dramatic 
 writers in many respects, but in two respects 
 particularly, which put to the final test the powers 
 of the actor. The first of these is his marvelous 
 insight into what Tennyson called " The abysmal 
 deeps of personality." Other writers are apt to 
 delineate their personages from the outside, as 
 embodying solely some imperious passion, or as 
 charged with some one transcendent mission. 
 
83 Edwin Booth 
 
 which is to be presented, as the cannon ball flies, 
 in an undeviating line. Among the ancients, for 
 example, no one can mistake as to what Aga- 
 memnon, Antigone, or Orestes has to do, or how 
 it is to be done ; amid the pomp of the language 
 the way is always clear. Even among the more 
 romantic moderns, no one disputes as to what 
 Karl Moor, Don Carlos, Egmont, Hernani, or 
 Triboulet means ; nearly all actors would present 
 them in the same way. But Shakespeare's per- 
 sons are not so easily grasped, not because they 
 are purposely or bunglingly obscure, but because 
 they are at once so very deep and so very broad. 
 In other words, while most writers write from 
 the surface Shakespeare writes from the inmost 
 center outward to the periphery, where he touches 
 life on every side. His characters, therefore, are 
 so involved in the infinite intricacies of inward 
 motive and caprice, and so bound up with the 
 incessant complexities and cross-play of outward 
 circumstances that they must be studied closely 
 and time and again to learn what they are. No- 
 body gets them at a glance. They are too pro- 
 found to be fathomed by the eye alone, and too 
 many-sided to be taken in by any single sym- 
 pathy. Besides, while they are such complete 
 and consistent individualities, growing from youth 
 to age, that one has told of the girlhood of 
 
Edwin Booth 83 
 
 Shakespeare's heroines, and another of the after- 
 wedded life of Benedick and Beatrice, of Imo- 
 gen and Posthumus, of Isabella and the Duke, 
 they are yet types of permanent and universal 
 humanity, and to be interpreted, as the living 
 man is, by a scale which widens and deepens as 
 our own hearts and minds grow in experience 
 and insight. Two hundred years of the astutest 
 comment have not yet indicated their full sig- 
 nificance. 
 
 The other trait of the great Master, an actor 
 should always bear in mind, is the exuberance 
 of his poetic nature, which exudes in words, 
 diction, rhythm, scene, personage and story. 
 Goethe was much reproached for having said 
 once that Shakespeare was much more of a 
 poet than he was of a dramatist, by which he 
 merely meant that the poet was primary and 
 predominant while the playwright was second- 
 ary. In other words, poetry is the very atmos- 
 phere in which he lives. He nowhere restricts 
 himself, as Henry James accuses the great 
 French authors of doing, to the multitudinous 
 glaring outside life of the senses. He was as 
 open as ever man was to every skyey and 
 every earthy influence, but through all these he 
 saw " the deeper, stronger, subtler inward life, 
 the wonderful adventures of the soul." What- 
 
84 Edwin Booth 
 
 ever theme he touches, though in itself com- 
 monplace and unpleasing, he steeps in the color 
 of his fancy, and he scatters the color over all 
 surrounding objects. Like a bird, he dips his 
 wings in fetid pools only to disperse the water- 
 drops in showers of pearls. Whatever story he 
 tells or passion he betrays, though in them- 
 selves repellant or even hideous, he purges 
 them of their grossness and lifts them into an 
 air of ideal freshness. Like Niagara — which in 
 its maddest plunge -and loudest roar still waves 
 the iridescent banner of its rainbow, and still 
 sends up to the skies its mist-columns of dia- 
 monds — he raises his scenes, which in their 
 literal nakedness might shock us with horror, 
 up to the purer and serener heights of the 
 ideal, where .^schylus not only heard the 
 groans of the incestuous king and saw the wild- 
 eyed furies in pursuit of Orestes, but heard, 
 too, the thunder-tones of destiny and saw the 
 dread forms of the immortals. 
 
 Mr. Booth grew to be keenly apprehensive 
 of the characteristics of the Master, and studied 
 them closely and brought them out as he best 
 could into more and more distinctness and 
 vividness. His representations, as he advanced, 
 while they showed a closer analysis of charac- 
 ter, which is a mark of thought, conveyed at 
 
Edwin Booth 8; 
 
 the same time that higher ideal value which is 
 the essence of poetry. He seems to penetrate 
 m ore and mory in1r> tTip intp n'nr gigpifiranrc n f 
 "Tiis personages bv disc pfri'pg mr.r(» fnl1y wKai- 
 was universal in them and so of permanent 
 interest to humanity. T hus his King Lear, 
 which in the beginning was the traditional 
 King Lear, an irascible old man liable to 
 sudden and fearful explosions of wrath, and 
 who did many foolish things, gradually became 
 the type of imperious arbitrary will under- 
 mining its own force, dispersing families and 
 disrupting kingdoms through sheer caprice, and 
 an exponent, not of a particular history, but of 
 a universal truth of human nature. Thu s H am- 
 let, whom he once wrote of as an " unbalanced 
 geniu s," was raised afterwards to the perfection 
 of manhood, who, charged with an imperative 
 duty it was imp ossible to execute, fell by the 
 corrosive and destructive action of his own 
 thoughts into distraction a nd madness, and 
 b rought down a wiiole beautilul w orld with his 
 own r uin amidst a sound of wrangling bells. 
 Thus Macbeth, on the surface a heartless and 
 sanguinary tyrant who butchers his best friends 
 and deluges his estates with blood, is shown to 
 us in the end as infinitely more than that : as 
 the victim of that irritable imaginativeness which, 
 
86 Edwin Booth 
 
 dealing with the darker powers, whelms reason, 
 nature, conscience and affection in a vortex of 
 hell-born dreams. 
 
 In the last two impersonations, it may be 
 perhaps well to observe, Mr. Booth was assisted 
 by a peculiarity of his own constitution, which 
 lent them singular truth and awesomeness. I 
 refer to his openness to those darker and more 
 mysterious aspects of life which have been called 
 the night side of nature. He was peculiarly 
 sensitive to the hidden, subtle, boding, unfamiliar 
 influences of that unknown and unfathomable 
 ocean which rolls on the outside of our habitual 
 and fixed experiences. He was at one time 
 deeply interested in certain abnormal phenomena 
 which are called spiritualism, and, indeed, in the 
 jargon of its adepts he was considered a medium. 
 Certainly he could tell some strange tales now 
 and then of his unconscious cerebral excitements. 
 But the only practical effect they had upon his 
 conduct, so far as I could observe, was to deepen 
 the awfulness of his representations of personages 
 who had walked on the border lands of the 
 unseen. His Hamlet, whatever the passion or 
 occupation of the moment, was always haunted 
 by the dread vision that came to him on the 
 ramparts of Elsinore, and Macbeth was ever 
 accompanied by the fatal sisters whose super- 
 
Edwin Booth 87 
 
 natural soliciting pushed him on while they con- 
 soled him in his immeasurable atrocities. 
 
 It was a consequence of Mr. Booth's careful 
 study of his Shakespearian parts that he gradu- 
 ally refined his modes of rendering them out of 
 the old boisterous, objurgatory and detonating 
 style into one more gentle, and therefore, as I 
 think, more artistic. He was at no period T idj^ 
 cient in force and intensity of expression. ^Tlis 
 curses in Lear fell like avalanches from Alpen 
 heights when a storm is on the hill ; his alter- 
 nations from joy to rage in Shylock throbbed 
 and glowed with the red-heat of molten iron ; 
 the lament of Othello was like the moan of an 
 archangel for a heaven betrayed and lost, ending 
 in that remorseful cry, which " shivered to the 
 tingling stars ; " and I have heard him utter the 
 simple phrase in the graveyard scene, " What ! 
 the poor Ophelia," with such heartbreaking pathos 
 that whole rows of women, and of men too, took 
 to their handkerchiefs. But he never found it 
 necessary, at least in his later days, in order to 
 get his feeling understood, to shriek like a maniac 
 or to howl like a wounded wolf He had taken 
 to heart what the great Master, who could not 
 be accused of tameness or frigidity, and who was 
 doubtless as good a critic as he was a dramatist, 
 had long since taught us in "the very torrent. 
 
88 Edwin Booth 
 
 tempest, and whirlwind of passion, to beget a 
 temperance that must give it smoothness." 
 
 He had learned in particular two phases of 
 emotional expression, which I do not suppose 
 were original with him, but which are very im- 
 portant and require the utmost skill and delicacy 
 of management. The first may be called the 
 ascending phase of emotion, in which every strong 
 passion fosters and aggravates itself, so that, be- 
 ginning on the low level of excitement, it rises 
 by its own self-governed vehemence to a violent 
 intensity. It was displayed by Mr. Booth in 
 several passages of Hamlet, where, in spite of the 
 strongest efforts of self-restraint, he is gradually 
 carried away by the movements of his brain, and 
 finally loses himself in a frenzy that passes for 
 madness. The other phase of expression to which 
 I have referred, and which may be called the 
 descending phase, exhibits a towering passion in 
 its subsidence. It is said to have been one of 
 the master-strokes of Kean, who, though fond of 
 abrupt transitions — that is, from transports of 
 frenzy to calmness or even sportiveness — was yet 
 artist enough to know that this was not always 
 natural, and so at times came down from his 
 extreme heights by gradations of fall, like the 
 waves of the sea which still heave and swell when 
 the tempest is wholly past away. This effect was 
 
Edwin Booth 89 
 
 grandly given by Mr. Booth in Lear, whose tre- 
 mendous discharges of anger are followed by 
 sudden returns to patience and self-control, when 
 his voice assumed to be calm, and his face ap- 
 peared to be smooth, but the twitching muscles 
 and the tremulous tones gave proof that the pas- 
 sion had not yet vanished. 
 
 It should always be borne in mind that it is 
 not the aim of dramatic art, whether in author- 
 ship or representation, to bring forth monsters, 
 either fiends, or freaks, or wild beasts. It pre- 
 sents us human beings, swayed even to madness 
 in the intensity of their passions, but still human 
 beings. Even in its most abnormal departures 
 from the human type, as in Caliban, they have 
 still many touches of human nature in them, 
 which they show, if in no other way, by speak- 
 ing its language, and at times uttering the most 
 exquisite poetry. The drama, as Schiller says, 
 "must unveil crime in its deformity, and place 
 it before the eyes of men in all its colossal mag- 
 nitude ; it must diligently explore its dark snares 
 and become familiar with sentiments at the wick- 
 edness of which the soul revolts ; " but in doing 
 so it does not cut itself loose from all semblance 
 of manhood. Otherwise its personages would 
 excite, not pity and terror, but horror. Richard, 
 lago, Shylock, Macbeth, do diabolical things, 
 
go Edwin Booth 
 
 but they are none the less men, perverted by 
 evil, hardened by crime, wholly bent away from 
 goodness and truth, and yet capable of both 
 goodness and truth, and at their worst exhibit- 
 ing, perhaps, masterly intellect, heroic courage, 
 sublime defiance, strong affection — are like Mil- 
 ton's fallen angels, " the excess of glory ob- 
 scured." 
 
 f^ An open secret of Mr. Booth's success was 
 the high conception he had formed and cherished 
 of the dignity and usefulness of the theatrical 
 
 J figc tion. Pained at times by the perversions of 
 it in bad hands, he was yet not ashamed of his 
 profession ; nor did he suppose, as Macready 
 appears to have done in later life, that he would 
 have been better and happier in some other 
 walk. On the contrary, he was proud of it, and 
 rejoiced in his ability to serve it, and through it, 
 the highest interests of the public. He was not 
 insensible of its degradations, actual and pos- 
 sible, but he knew that it is precisely those 
 things in our human nature which fall the low- 
 est that are capable of the highest. He knew 
 that dramatic literature is the highest form of 
 intellectual achievement, and that the stage is 
 the means by which it is most vividly interpreted 
 and most widely diffused. In a general sense the 
 principal aim of all art is to please, but we 
 
Edwin Booth 91 
 
 should remember that that pleasure ranges from 
 the merest trivial amusement of the moment to 
 that which Dryden calls noble pleasure, which 
 interests alike and at once the intellect, the con- 
 science, the imagination, the passions, and the 
 sensibilities in their finest and sweetest exercises, 
 and leaves traces of exaltation that go sounding 
 through the soul for ever. Even in its lightest 
 forms, the pleasure produced by the histrionic 
 art is not to be despised. The play — impulse, 
 as Schiller calls it, in which it originates, and 
 which gives rise to the delicious pranks of chil- 
 dren and the merry sports and pastimes of the 
 common people, is that instinct of human nature 
 which lifts it out of the hard grind of necessity 
 — whether physical or moral — and surrenders it 
 to the joy of a disinterested freedom. Not only 
 does it " ease the anguish of the torturing hour," 
 but it is the main support — the generator and 
 the regenerator — of whatever is most healthful 
 and wholesome in the exercise of our faculties. 
 In common parlance, we name it recreation, for- 
 getting often that recreation is simply re-creation 
 — or the making over of that which is worn, and 
 not something fresh and new. Talleyrand used 
 to say that the arrantest nonsense is very refresh- 
 ing, and Shakespeare, in one of his eulogies of 
 merriment, asserts that it both relieves the wear 
 
92 Edwin Booth 
 
 and the woe of life, and cures some of its afflic- 
 tions. In this he anticipated the doctrine of 
 modern science, which teaches that pleasurable 
 excitements build up the nervous system and 
 maintain it in health and growth, while depres- 
 sion, despondency, or sorrow — any form of pain, 
 in fact — wastes it away and ends in its total 
 destruction. Assuredly we all of us know that 
 a sound, hearty laugh clears the cobwebs from 
 the brain and elevates the whole being into a 
 more serene and invigorating air. But if that be 
 true of our lower enjoyments, what shall be said 
 of the recuperative power of the higher sort 
 which appeals at once and in harmonious union 
 to those lofty capacities which are the distin- 
 guishing marks of humanity — which, separating 
 man from every other form of existence, make 
 him what he is, the crown and consummation of 
 creation — the paragon of animals — the beauty of 
 the world — and infinitely grander than all " this 
 brave o'erhanging firmament," with its " majes- 
 tical roof fretted with golden fire." 
 
 Now, dramatic art, as I have said, appropri- 
 ates to itself the excellences of all other forms 
 of art, and supplements them with excellences 
 of its own. It abounds in that prose which is 
 " full of wise saws and modern instances " ; its 
 naive and racy songs furnish the best specimens 
 
Edwin Booth 93 
 
 of lyric enthusiasm ; it rivals the solemn epic in 
 the grandeur of its stories, and, not satisfied with 
 speech, it calls in as its assistants and handmaids 
 the imposing splendors of architecture to build 
 its temples, of sculptui-e and painting to adorn 
 them, of eloquence to add charm to its utter- 
 ances, and of the delicious exhilarations of music, 
 to bear the spirit on harmonious wings to elysian 
 homes. Like other literature, it rummages the 
 ages for its themes ; it turns over the dusty 
 leaves of chronicle and annalist for its persons, 
 filling in their gaps of forgetfulness ; but, more 
 than this, by its marvellous power of character- 
 ization, it clothes the skeletons of the dead past 
 in flesh and blood, and presents them to us in 
 their very habits as they lived. A thousand 
 buried majesties revisit the glimpses of the moon ; 
 the colossal demigods of old mythologies that 
 helped to shape the primal choas — the noble 
 masters of antiquity, whose words have given law 
 to the arts and policies of all future time — the 
 chivalric champions of the oppressed and of 
 womanhood in the middle ages — even the un- 
 known heroes and heroines of domestic life, to 
 say nothing of the fantastic little tricksters of 
 faery, who win our loves, revive, and we are 
 made acquainted with men grander than any in 
 actual history, and with women fairer than our 
 
94 Edwin Booth 
 
 visionary seraphs, and lovelier than our legend- 
 ary saints, in that they are real women breath- 
 ing thoughtful breath. 
 
 It is not merely the defence, it is the justifi- 
 cation, nay, it is the pre-eminent glory of the 
 theatre, that it is the great popular interpreter 
 of this creative inspiration — the channel through 
 which its rare and exquisite treasures are con- 
 veyed to the minds of the people. The lofty 
 achievements of the human brain and heart, in 
 nearly every other domain — its great poems, its 
 great histories, its great systems of thought, its 
 great pictures, and its great music, are a closed 
 book to the masses. They are richly laden 
 argosies that sail on the unseen ether of the 
 skies, and not on the ordinary atmosphere. Few 
 see them but those who have the opulence and 
 the leisure to climb the golden step to the stars. 
 They are an unknown realm — and how sad the 
 thought ! — to the vast majority of mankind even 
 in most cultivated nations. But the theatre 
 brings the gold and the jewels of its Ophir 
 mines of genius home to the bosom of nearly 
 every class — one might add, of nearly every in- 
 dividual. It is the one institution of society 
 which may be said to be, in the strict sense of the 
 word, popular. Other institutions touch the 
 sensibilities, or tastes, or interests and rouse the 
 
Edwin Booth 95 
 
 souls of selected circles, but this goes directly 
 to the sensibilities and rouses the souls of all. 
 Consider, too, how incessant and wide are its 
 influences. Victor Hugo has compared it to the 
 ancient Tribune whence the orators fulmined 
 over Greece, and to the modern Pulpit, which 
 drops its heavenly messages in " rills of oily 
 eloquence," but it has an immense advantage 
 over either of these in its almost unbroken ac- 
 tivity through space as well as in time. Every 
 night in the week, in nearly every town and 
 city of civilization, it is telling its tales and teach- 
 ing its lessons of good or ill, and the Press alone 
 surpasses it in the immediate reach and con- 
 stancy of its work. 
 
 And what is that work ? Nothing less than 
 the whole sphere of human relations, which is 
 precisely the sphere of our ethical being. It 
 deals directly, almost exclusively, with the con- 
 duct of man to man, and morality is the breath 
 of its life. It is essentially a moral force, a tre- 
 mendous agency for good or evil. Scientists tell 
 us that while there are evidences of a vast phys- 
 ical order in the external world there are no evi- 
 dences of a moral order there. The grand forces of 
 nature, regardless of man or his desires, drive the 
 wheels of their chariots over his universe axle-deep 
 in blood. Historians tell us that the final adjust- 
 
g6 Edwin Booth 
 
 ments of events, the rewards of good, and the ret- 
 ributions of evils are far apart in space, remote in 
 time, and seldom observed, or not observed in 
 the end by men who saw the beginning, or, as 
 Horace says, " the flying criminal is only limp- 
 ingly followed by the retributive blow." But it is 
 not so in the little world of the drama, where the 
 consequences of conduct are near, open, and 
 swift. Dramatic art controls the season of its own 
 harvests, hangs its nemeses on the neck of its 
 events, and freights the lightning- flashes of its 
 auguries with the ratthng thunder-peals of their 
 fulfillment. 
 
 Such an agency is not to be neglected, much 
 less derided, and especially by those who take the 
 moral and religious interests of society into their 
 special keeping; nor are the actual conductors 
 of it to be held up to derision, and excluded from 
 the mercies of the All- merciful, as they were but 
 an age ago. They are to be prized, as others are 
 prized, by the faithful discharge of their function. 
 If their shortcomings in the past have been lam- 
 entable, which of the professions shall throw the 
 first stone ? None the less let us hold them to 
 their responsibilities, and remind them constantly 
 of what an almost omnipotent means of human 
 elevation they wield; and, as in the early days 
 of the beautiful Grecian culture, the dramatists re- 
 
Edwin Booth 97 
 
 vived and perpetuated whatever was grand, awful, 
 and sublime in their almost forgotten traditions ; 
 as in the middle age the Church, the mightiest 
 of spiritual forces, still called to its aid the Mys- 
 teries which brought home to the common people 
 whatever was lovely and holy in Hebrew or 
 Christian legend ; so, in this enlightened Nine- 
 teenth Century, shall we not demand of the 
 drama that it shall take the lead in all the purify- 
 ing, strengthening, broadening, and elevating ten^ 
 dencies which make a progressive civilization ? 
 
 It was Mr. Booth's conviction of the real pos-> 
 sibilities of the stage that induced him to work for 
 its improvement, not only in the parts he played,/ 
 but in all its adjuncts and accessories. As far 
 back as i860, when he was the manager of the 
 Winter Garden Theatre, following the example 
 of Macready and the younger Kean in England, 
 he put many pieces upon the stage with a 
 degree of historical accuracy and impressiveness 
 that was an education to our playgoers, and led 
 the way in which our later Wallacks, Dalys and i 
 Palmers have creditably followed. 
 
 His opulent equipment of the Winter Garden 
 went up in flames, but, nothing daunted, he 
 soon after projected a theatre which should be 
 a model of its kind, both for the comfort and 
 safety of the audience, and the convenience of 
 
98 Edwin Booth 
 
 the players. It was made as complete as it 
 could be In every respect, with the knowledge 
 and resources at his command. Plays were 
 produced with an accuracy and amplitude of 
 artistic device that pleased both mind and eye. 
 Not only the plays in which he took part, but 
 those in which others appeared. 
 
 That enterprise, in spite of its artistic merits, 
 went down in bankruptcy, as the former had 
 gone up in flame ; but the projector of it was 
 not disheartened. Again he took to the road ; 
 again the streams of Pactolus flowed into his 
 pockets ; and again, having paid the last penny 
 of former indebtedness, he bethought him, not 
 of himself, but of his fellows. It was on a 
 pleasant yachting voyage in the Summer time 
 with chosen friends, loving and beloved, along 
 the picturesque coast of Maine, where high hills 
 peep over their forests of greenery, and the far 
 glance of dancing waves shoot back the bright 
 beams of the sky, that he communicated to 
 them his plans for an institution which, let us 
 pray, the greediness of fire will not consume 
 nor the maelstrom of finance absorb. He told 
 them of the society,, now called " The Players," 
 to whose gratitude and hospitality we owe the 
 splendid assemblage which honors this hall to- 
 day. He gave to it all his available funds ; he 
 
Edwin Booth 99 
 
 gave to it the companions of his long silent 
 life — his books ; and he gave to it the treasures 
 of his secret heart — his pictures and his relics. 
 His desire was to erect a home where the se- 
 lected members of his profession might meet 
 with one another, and with the representatives 
 of other professions, in friendly intercourse and 
 on terms of social equality and reciprocal es- 
 teem. 
 
 It is within the walls of its sumptuous edifice, 
 as you walk its halls and corridors, that the pic- 
 tures bring back to the eye the celebrities of 
 the stage whom we all revere — and some of 
 whom have found a place in England's proudest 
 memorial of her honored dead. It is there that 
 a letter, a sword, a lock of hair, or a tatter of 
 dress restores Garrick, Kemble, Kean, Mrs. 
 Siddons almost to the touch, and there the 
 elder Booth, Cooke, Cooper, EUiston, Munden, 
 Forrest, Wallack, Gilbert, Barnes, Placide, and 
 others look down upon you in genial serer.ity. 
 As one sits there, sometimes in a kind of rev- 
 ery, he hears the tinkling of a httle bell and 
 he sees the curtain rise, and then a whole en- 
 trancing world of grace and splendor exhales 
 like a glorious vision. It is there now that the 
 genius, the beauty, the distinction of the city 
 is gathered annually to lay its tributes of affec- 
 
loo Edwin Booth 
 
 tion and respect at the feet of the Founder, 
 whose good remembrance 
 
 " Lies richer in their thoughts than on his tomb." 
 
 It was there that he spent his last hours, in 
 communion with friends who deemed it an 
 honor to be admitted to his confidence, and 
 there his gentle spirit took its way to the wel- 
 comes of the good and great made perfect. 
 
 Like a light in the skies he has now passed 
 below the dews and damps of the horizon ; but 
 may we not say of him with our earliest of 
 poets : 
 
 " That the soft mem'ry of his virtues yet 
 Lingers like twilight hues, when the bright sun is set." 
 
 May we not say of him, as of the good Dun- 
 can, that " after life's fitful fever he sleeps 
 well," leaving behind him no rankling animosi- 
 ties, no unadjusted wrongs, no bitter remem- 
 brances, only sorrow and a grateful sense of 
 his genius and goodness. In life, no doubt, he 
 had his enemies — who has not ? — but no one 
 ever learned that fact from his own lips. There 
 were those, perhaps, even of his own profession, 
 who exaggerated his hereditary traits into per- 
 sonal faults, but it produced no bitter resent- 
 ment in his heart. For the thirty years that I 
 knew him with more or less intimacy I never 
 
Edwin Booth loi 
 
 heard him speak an unkind word of any human 
 being. Yet he was as unassuming as he was 
 generous, and I may add that during that long 
 interval I never heard him speak unduly of 
 himself, or of himself at all save in connection 
 with some project for the public good. 
 
 Affliction fell upon him, — the early death of 
 his father — whom he loved and honored — the 
 withering of that fair flower now " enskied and 
 sainted," around whose being the tenderest fibres 
 of his heart were strung — that great public 
 calamity, which for a moment blotted his heaven 
 of future hope and happiness ; but these misfor- 
 tunes, while they may have deepened the lines 
 of thought on his forehead, never galled his heart 
 with a drop of despair or pessimism. Recover- 
 ing with elastic spirit from every blow, he kept 
 the even tenor of his way in the discharge of 
 his duty, as he conceived it. The other day, in 
 taking up his copy of " Macready's Reminiscen- 
 ces," I found near the close, where the veteran 
 actor expresses dissatisfaction with his life, that 
 Mr. Booth had penciled on the margin : " What 
 would this man have ? Blessed with education, 
 with a loving family, with fame and fortune and 
 the friendship of the great, he ought to have 
 been supremely happy." Mr. Booth was not 
 supremely happy — few are ; but he enjoyed life. 
 
I03 Edwin Booth 
 
 He enjoyed it because he had discovered the 
 true secret of tranquillity and content — the use of 
 his faculties and his fortune, not as a means of 
 self-indulgence or ostentation, but for the further- 
 ance of general ends. Scarcely one of his more 
 intimate friends but could tell you of some dark 
 home brightened, of some decayed gentleman or 
 gentlewoman raised to comfort and cheerfulness 
 by his unseen but timely intervention. He had 
 learned the deep wisdom of that epigram of 
 Martial, which perhaps he had never read, which 
 says that " What we possess and try to keep 
 flies away, but what we give away remains a 
 joyful possession forever." It was for this his 
 friends not only admired him, but loved him ; 
 and it was for this the greater public mingled 
 with its admiration of the artist its attachment 
 to the man. For, strange as it may seem, this 
 man who had passed his life in the expression 
 of simulated sentiments was in his own life the 
 sincerest and truest of men. This man, who, 
 like a nomad, had spent his days in wandering 
 over the earth, prized above all things else the 
 retirement and seclusion of the home ; this con- 
 spicuous leader of a profession more than others 
 exposed to temptation, preserved himself as pure 
 as the wind- sifted snow of the mountains ; and 
 he, the popular idol, who had only to appear 
 
Edwin Booth 103 
 
 upon tlie boards to awaken round upon round of 
 rapturous applause, dreaded notoriety, shunned 
 the crowd, and loved to be alone with his own 
 thoughts. How gentle he was there I cannot 
 tell you — as gentle as the breeze that will not 
 detach the delicate blossom from the stem ; nor 
 how strong he was in his adherence to duty — 
 as strong as the oak that no blasts from the hills 
 can pull up by its roots. 
 
 Therefore it was that a strong personal feel- 
 ing pervaded his popularity. Recall those final 
 days, when he was laid upon the couch of pain, 
 and remember how eagerly we followed the bul- 
 letins, rejoicing when they were favorable and 
 sorrowing when they were not so. Tried skill 
 and devoted affection were gathered about that 
 couch — the affections of life-long friends, and of 
 one, the image of her who had long since gone 
 to prepare his way; but neither skill nor affec- 
 tion could delay the death-hour, and when, on 
 that sweet, soft day of June, as light and warmth 
 were broadening over the earth, and the trees 
 had put on a fuller and richer green, it was an- 
 nounced that his eyes were finally closed on all 
 this brightness and beauty — how instinctively we 
 exclaimed with Horatio, bending over the pros- 
 trate form of Hamlet, " Now cracks a noble 
 heart ! " and as the big tears flushed our eyes, 
 
104 Edwin Booth 
 
 how we added with him : " Good-night, sweet 
 Prince ! And flights of angels sing thee to thy 
 rest." Indeed, may we not repeat it here, " Good- 
 night, sweet Prince," and as we utter it may we 
 not hear with our finer ears a responsive echo, 
 floating with solemn softness, downward from the 
 heights, " Good- night, dear friends, God bless 
 you all ; good-night ! " 
 
LOUIS KOSSUTH 
 
LOUIS KOSSUTH* 
 
 Ladies and Gentlemen of the Hungarian and 
 OTHER Societies: 
 
 The life and death of Louis Kossuth were 
 events seemingly so far apart in time that it is 
 difficult to bring them together in thought. His 
 active career belonged to the first half and middle 
 of the Nineteenth Century, and his death took 
 place at the close of it, after an interval of more 
 than forty years. The scenes in which he figured 
 conspicuously had long since passed from the 
 stage when he died, so that many of those who 
 had seen him at the height of his glory had 
 preceded him to the tomb. His departure, in- 
 deed, was to a large number of us, who were 
 rather his successors than his contemporaries, 
 somewhat of a surprise, and it became known to 
 
 * This address was delivered in part at a great commemo- 
 rative meeting of Hungarian and other societies, held in the 
 Cooper Institute of New York on the 4th of April, 1894. It 
 was afterwards given in full at the Century Association on the 
 27th of April, and a week or two later repeated before the Phi 
 Beta Kappa Society of Yale College, New Haven. 
 
 107 
 
io8 Louis Kossuth 
 
 us, like the fall of a majestic and solitary oak 
 which has survived its fellows, by the echoes it 
 aroused in all the surrounding hills. 
 
 I am one of the few persons whose lives cover- 
 ing this gap are able to speak of him from im- 
 mediate knowledge. With thousands of others, 
 I saw him the day he landed upon our shores 
 below the old quarantine ground on Staten Island, 
 and we were struck at first sight by the pictur- 
 esqueness of his appearance in a semi-military 
 coat and a soft Hungarian hat whose plumes 
 were waving in the breeze. I heard the mar- 
 vellous address in which he poured forth his 
 gratitude as an exile for liberty's sake from the 
 despotisms of the Old World to the young Re- 
 public of the New World, which had been his 
 rescue and his refuge. I witnessed the magnifi- 
 cent reception given him the next day as the 
 guest of the nation by the City of New York 
 (never before vouchsafed any individual, save 
 Lafayette, who had been our revolutionary ally), 
 when all the houses were aflame with color, and 
 the shouts of the multitude in the streets " out- 
 voiced the loud-mouthed seas." More lately, as 
 one of the committee of the Press appointed to 
 invite him to a banquet, I was brought into 
 familiar contact with him, and in that way was 
 enabled to hear day after day the almost inau- 
 
Louis Kossuth 109 
 
 merable addresses he made to dififerent assem- 
 blies and delegations. I cannot say that I was 
 more impressionable than other men of the time, 
 but his presence affected me more deeply than 
 that of any other man that I had ever met, not 
 excepting the grand Daniel Webster, with his 
 craggy brows and cavernous eyes that more often 
 repelled than attracted by their solemnity. 
 
 Kossuth's fascination was due partly to the 
 glamour of his recent exploits, partly to his deep, 
 full, rich voice that had a strange music in it, 
 partly to his sad, patient, pleading look, after- 
 wards recalled to me by Mr. Lincoln when I saw 
 him alone in the great White House — whence a 
 little coffin had gone a few days before — partly 
 to the gentleness of his manner, which added 
 somewhat of female loveliness to its heroic dig- 
 nity,- but mostly to an indescribable magnetism, 
 which emanated from him as the aroma from the 
 rose — or seductiveness from a beautiful woman. 
 The portraits painted of him at the time (some 
 of which are still extant) representing him as an 
 alert, eager, impulsive soldier ready to leap upon 
 his war-steed and to wave his glittering falchion 
 over his head (as David has painted Napoleon 
 amid the narrow and rocky defiles of the Alps), 
 were quite fantastic in their misconceptions. He 
 was little of the soldier and very much of the 
 
I lo Louis Kossuth 
 
 Student with his thoughtful brows, or of the lawyer 
 lost in complicated cases, or of the statesman 
 whose shoulders bow beneath the weight of 
 mightied monarchies. He moved me profoundly 
 when I first saw him, and now that forty more 
 winters have sifted their snows upon my head, I 
 look back through the mist of years and still 
 see him as an imposing figure, visionary and 
 exaggerated perhaps, like the shadows which the 
 setting sun casts upon the semi-luminous clouds 
 of the mountain tops. 
 
 I shall not detain you with any elaborate 
 details of Kossuth's historical career and ser- 
 vices. Recent commemorations, sending their 
 echoes from the Ural to the Rocky Mountains, 
 have told his story to the overarching skies. 
 Nothing more need be said except in the way 
 of a personal contribution to that general esti- 
 mate of his rank and worth, which posterity 
 will ultimately form. That estimate, however, 
 was not helped by one of our newspapers which 
 said the other day that " Kossuth had gained 
 great notoriety for a time by the eccentricity 
 of his character and the romantic adventures 
 of his life.'' He was eccentric in one respect, 
 in that he devoted extraordinary abilities, which 
 might have won him fame and wealth, in any 
 of the liberal professions, to a single great public 
 
Louis Kossuth ui 
 
 end ; and his life was adventurous, in that it 
 was full of vicissitudes, changing from the palace 
 to the prison, from the legislative hall, where 
 his word was a command, to the narrow cham- 
 ber where he wrote for his bread, or from the 
 idolatry of populous cities to the loneliness of 
 the desert. Indeed, phases of his adventures 
 were as romantic as any that ever confronted a 
 chivalric knight who, in defence of an ideal aim, 
 courted the extremes of danger with a manly 
 emprise, prowess and endurance ; but adven- 
 ture and romance were mere incidents in a 
 career of far more substantial meaning. If you 
 will read the youthful papers in which he be- 
 gan the struggle against the Hapsburg dynasty ; 
 the early speeches in the Hungarian Diet by 
 which he gathered the national feelings of his 
 countrymen into a unity of conviction ; the 
 official documents which called an army and a 
 treasury into existence ; the hundred addresses 
 which aroused the sober and sedate inhabitants of 
 England into transports of enthusiasm, and the 
 two hundred others in this country, which 
 rolled like thunder from the Alleghanies to the 
 Rockies, you will everywhere discover the evi- 
 dences of a serious, sober reason, looking be- 
 fore and after, of an affection grasping the 
 broadest interests, and of a courage recoiling 
 
1 1 2 Louis Kossuth 
 
 before no difficulty. Kossuth was not a fanatic, 
 but a careful student of principles, an intel- 
 ligent publicist, a wise legislator, who stood 
 front to front with the most eminent statesmen 
 of his age, and brought to the encounter with 
 them a knowledge, a prudence, a wisdom at 
 least equal to their own. His schemes were 
 elevated and generous in their aims, and rational 
 and feasible in their means; or, if they were 
 impracticable in any respect, they were so only, 
 as all schemes are at first impracticable, which 
 purpose to bring the conditions of society up 
 to a higher standard of justice and truth, but 
 which in the end demonstrate their rationality 
 by becoming a part of the established order of 
 the world. His real intellectual and moral 
 affinities turned him to the Pericles, the Catos, 
 and the Ciceros of antiquity ; to the Vaninies 
 and Brunos of the renaissance ; to the L'Hopitals 
 and Condes of France, the Sydneys, Hampdens, 
 Vanes, and Chatams of England ; to William 
 of Orange, and, most of all, to the Adamses, 
 the Henrys, the Jeffersons, the Washingtons of 
 our own colonial history. 
 
 It must be remembered in estimating Kos- 
 suth that he was pre-eminently a child of the 
 age in which he lived. He was born in 1802, or, 
 as Victor Hugo, who came in the same year, says. 
 
Louis Kossuth 113 
 
 " when the Nineteenth Century was two years 
 old." The continent of Europe was still feeling 
 the shock of that great earthquake, the French 
 Revolution, and a gigantic spirit of the storm, Na- 
 poleon Bonaparte, was playing with the tempest 
 at the height of his power, but not at the end 
 of his career. The siege of Toulon had directed 
 attention to him ; the battle of the Sections in 
 Paris, showing the efficacy of real bullets, dis- 
 closed his terrible earnestness ; while the cam- 
 paign of Italy had astounded the martinets and 
 enthused the masses. This young soldier of 
 fortune had been already chosen first Consul 
 for life in France, and was soon to be pro- 
 claimed the Emperor ; but Ulm and Eylau and 
 Wagram and Jena and Boradino were yet to 
 come. Kossuth as a child might have heard 
 the tramp of those legions which carried vic- 
 tory or death to nearly every capital of Eu- 
 rope, and a few years later seen the all-con- 
 querors broken, famished and distressed, as 
 they retreated before the frost-demons of Russia, 
 while their great leader, the tide of his fortunes 
 rolled back and his dream of invincibleness dis- 
 solved, found his word of command, that once 
 awed the world, dying away in the bleak air 
 as an impotent sound. Kossuth was thirteen 
 years of age when Waterloo dispersed his power, 
 
114 Louis Kossuth 
 
 and nineteen when he finally sank into the pit. 
 A youth of quick sensibility and earnest pur- 
 poses, living in the whirl of such agitations, 
 he was deeply absorbed in those great ques- 
 tions of international law, of the pretentions of 
 dynasties, of the origin of governments, of the 
 rights of the people, which cannon, volleys may 
 disturb, but which human reason in the end 
 determines and decides. 
 
 Destined to the profession of the law, Kossuth 
 devoted his faculties to the study of it with the 
 ardor of one who sees in it the life or death of 
 his fellow men. He studied it, however, under 
 the influences of that Philosophy of the Eight- 
 eenth Century, slightly modified by that of the 
 Nineteenth, which had broken away from nearly 
 all the religious and political theories of the 
 past. Those superstitious creeds and emasculat- 
 ing fears which had made man the abject and 
 cowering slave of his environment, had given 
 way to the nobler view, that it is his destiny as it 
 will be his triumph to become the master of 
 nature by the force of his own genius. The 
 logic of his reason and the impulses of his heart 
 compelled him to the acceptance of the new 
 doctrine, to which he was already inclined by 
 the traditions of his family, seventeen members of 
 which had been executed within a generation or 
 
Louis Kossuth iij 
 
 two for their fidelity to liberal principles, while 
 his father, who was a nobleman and a lawyer, 
 was no less a democrat, and the university in 
 which he was educated was distinguished for 
 the broad spirit that directed its instructions. 
 The contests of that day, you will remember, 
 the outcome of centuries of controversy, were 
 fundamental, going to the very roots of human 
 belief, and of deadly earnestness in that they in- 
 volved the convictions and interests of all classes 
 of the people. 
 
 It was a dogma of nearly all the old reli- 
 gions, which originated in times of the crudest 
 barbarism and ignorance, that political power 
 was derived from some superior, generally some 
 unknown god or gods who had delegated it to 
 certain classes, priests or kings and the families 
 to which they belonged. Strange as it may 
 seem, this notion was to a large extent en- 
 grafted upon the accepted Christianity in spite 
 of its grand inspiration as to the universal 
 brotherhood of man and the common fatherhood 
 of God. And it was confirmed and perpetuated 
 by the whole tenor of feudalism. It would be ' 
 incredible to us now if traces of it did not 
 linger in many of the most enlightened courts 
 of Europe, that men should ever have delighted 
 in a self- degradation which confessed that cer- 
 
ii6 Louis Kossuth 
 
 tain families were hereditarily noble and divine, 
 while their own families were by birth base and 
 ignoble ; or that they should ever have consented 
 to kiss the feet of certain assumed superiors in 
 a spirit of servility, which was ill-disguised under 
 the name of loyalty. But such was the case. 
 
 As late as 1821, the Congress of Laybach, 
 the mouthpiece of the Holy Alliance, as it was 
 called, proclaimed without a blush that God had 
 endowed a few persons, meaning emperors, kings 
 and princes, with " a part of his sovereignty and 
 made them solely responsible for its use. All 
 changes of legislation and administration must 
 emanate from them ; everything that deviates 
 from their will necessarily leads to disorders and 
 commotions and evils far more insufferable than 
 those they pretend to remedy." In other words, 
 absolute submission to the decrees of their con- 
 secrated potentates was the rule of duty, and 
 the slightest departure from them an evidence 
 of wickedness and treason that deserved rebuke 
 and punishment. 
 
 A sturdy line of thinkers, whose pathway 
 was illuminated by the fires of the stake, had 
 steadily protested against this view of political 
 right and duty. From the dawn of the Re- 
 naissance down through the Italian Republics, 
 the Reformation, the Freethinkers of England, 
 
Louis Kossuth 117 
 
 the Encyclopedists of France, our patriots of 
 '^6, and the French Revolutionists of '89, that 
 hoary old dogma of dread and degradation had 
 lost one after another of its miserable features 
 until at this day it is almost completely aban- 
 doned. Men are now inclined to look no more 
 for the source and measure of political life to 
 unknown gods of the clouds and winds, who 
 have often more of demon than divinity in 
 them ; to obscure oracles from the smoke of 
 cruel sacrifices; to conclaves of cowled priests, 
 mumbling of mysteries, while they grasp for 
 gold ; to imperial anarks wreathed in curses 
 dark ; or to lines of s*;ern, black-bearded kings 
 with wolvish eyes ; but they turn to humanity 
 itself, endowed with more than godlike or king- 
 like dignity by the possession of reason, affec- 
 tion, conscience, and free-will, and thereby 
 rendered capable of an indefinite growth in 
 truth, goodness, and justice. As creatures of 
 an infinite life, we now hold that all men as men 
 are subject to equal responsibilities and entitled 
 to an equal participation in things that are 
 common to all. 
 
 Kossuth, in consecrating his youthful energy 
 to the furtherance of the modern movement, 
 began his work at home. As Hungary had 
 ever been an independent nation with her own 
 
Ii8 Louis Kossuth 
 
 traditions, language, genius, and government, 
 his first aim was to recover the autocrasy 
 which had been taken from her by the wiles 
 of diplomacy and the force of the sword. As 
 she was covered over with those fetters of re- 
 straint which a foolish self-interest inspires in the 
 vain hope that the vast movements of industry 
 and trade can be regulated by a petty legisla- 
 tion, his second aim was to substitute volun- 
 tary for servile labor, and to guarantee to every 
 one the right to use his muscular strength and 
 intellectual skill in the determination of his own 
 destiny, according to his own desires, and not 
 at the dictation of others, who were often 
 strangers and always enemies. Then again, as 
 she was still subjected to those religious exac- 
 tions, which defrauded Protestants of the gov- 
 ernment of their own churches and schools, and 
 oppressed Catholics with exorbitant and iniqui- 
 tous taxes, he desired to bring about the 
 emancipation and the equality of all religious 
 confessions. National independence, industrial 
 liberty, religious emancipation ! 
 
 But how was he to achieve such changes ? Sent 
 to the Diet as the proxy of a landed proprietor, 
 who had a voice but not a vote in the Lower 
 House, his voice soon became more potential than 
 a hundred votes. Yet the proceedings of the 
 
Louis Kossuth 119 
 
 Diet were secret and never reached the people, 
 nor was there anywhere a public press to sup- 
 ply the deficiency. In this strait he and a few 
 friends resorted to the strange contrivance of a 
 written newspaper, which was circulated by 
 hand from door to door ; but even this feeble 
 agency excited the suspicion of authority, and 
 was forbidden. None the less, it was continued 
 in secret, and Kossuth, the principal manager, 
 was seized in his bed by night, tried for trea- 
 son, and condemned to four years of solitary 
 imprisonment. Of course, an outrage so arbi- 
 trary aroused a tremendous popular resentment ; 
 his release was demanded; the Diet took up 
 his cause and made it its own. Austria re- 
 lucted, but at the end of two years, as the 
 Diet refused to pay its subsidies, it was com- 
 pelled to yield. Kossuth was released, but, alas, 
 for the purposes of the despots he who had 
 gone to the dungeon an almost unknown agi- 
 tator, came forth as the honored champion of 
 freedom of the press, freedom of trade, and 
 freedom of conscience, and a hero of the 
 people. 
 
 Indeed, the work of propagation then be- 
 came more active than ever; the written news- 
 paper was supplanted by the lithographic 
 newspaper; and the simple disquisition of 
 
I20 Louis Kossuth 
 
 individuals gave way to a report of the dis- 
 cussions of the Diet, where the tone of a 
 majority of the speakers had risen to an alti- 
 tude of almost open defiance. It was resolved 
 by the Diet that all the oppressive burdens of 
 feudality should be lifted ; that the peasants, no 
 longer mere adscripts of the glebe, should be 
 free proprietors of their lands ; that equality of 
 rights and duties should be the fundamental 
 law ; that political, civic, and religious liberty 
 should be the common property of citizens, no 
 matter what race they belonged to, or what 
 tongue they speak, or what religion they pro- 
 fessed ; and as guarantee they demanded a na- 
 tional ministry to see to the defence of their 
 rights and the execution of their local laws. 
 Austria with reluctance was at length compelled 
 to yield, a native ministry was appointed and 
 Kossuth became the Minister of Finance. It was 
 simply putting a weapon in his hands to beat 
 down all past and proposed encroachments of a 
 domination which had now become not only 
 oppressive but loathsome. 
 
 It was in the midst of these perturbations that 
 the year 1848, christened and consecrated in his- 
 tory as " the year of Revolution," arrived. The 
 first outbreak took place in France in the month 
 of February, but the fires of it had been long 
 
Louis Kossuth 121 
 
 smouldering under the surface and were every- 
 where seeking a vent. The great scientific dis- 
 coveries of the previous age, enlarged and 
 quickened by the spirit of inquiry they had in- 
 spired into philosophy and research, had given 
 to man a wider mastery of the forces of nature. 
 Increased facilities of intercourse, an easier and 
 broader interchange of the products of skill and 
 enterprise, had in a thousand ways promoted a 
 vast intellectual, social and material activity. Lit- 
 erature was not only stimulated into fresh exer- 
 tions, but broadened in its sympathies, and, aided 
 by mechanical inventions, more universally dis- 
 tributed. The social conditions of mankind were 
 changing and presented questions for discussion 
 as to the welfare of the masses which could not 
 be put aside. As wealth and capital increased, 
 and were followed by a growing prosperity, these 
 questions forced themselves upon attention. The 
 industrial classes began to demand larger oppor- 
 tunities and a fairer share of the results to which 
 their labor so effectively contributed. A few of 
 the wiser governments, like those of England and 
 Belgium, bought their peace by timely conces- 
 sions to popular needs in the form of juster 
 methods of taxation and a more expanded suf- 
 frage ; but the blear-eyed bigots of use and wont 
 persisted in their selfish and foolish old modes. 
 
122 Louis Kossuth 
 
 They were awakened to their real dangers only 
 by the actual uprising of the people and the dis- 
 charge of guns. Greece broke away from the 
 inhuman tyranny of the Turks ; Italy revolted 
 against the exactions of her hosts of petty dukes 
 and princes and the overbearing preponderance 
 of Austria ; the castles of the Rhine, erewhile the 
 haunts of the robber-barons, began to glare on 
 the midnight skies. Once more the students of 
 the universities thundered forth Luther's grand 
 old hymn, " Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott ; " 
 peasants turned their scythes to the reaping of 
 redder harvests than those of the field ; and tumul- 
 tuary upheavals soon shook the pavements of 
 capital cities with earthquake rumbles. The 
 rulers, offering reforms when it was too late, had 
 no recourse but to armies of suppression. In a 
 little while the whole surface of Europe exhib- 
 ited the wild aspect which Byron saw upon the 
 hills, where 
 
 " from peak to peak, the rattling crags among 
 
 Leaped the live thunder; not from one lone cloud, — 
 But every mountain then had found a tongue. 
 And Jura answered through her misty shroud 
 Back to the joyous Alps, who called to her aloud." 
 
 Hungary, quick to feel the generous impulse, 
 was the first to proclaim her independence, and 
 Kossuth was lifted on the top wave of the rising 
 
Louis Kossuth 123 
 
 flood by an almost unanimous vote of both 
 houses of the National Diet, sustained by the 
 adherence of every municipality and every village, 
 and charged with the conduct of the tempest. 
 Rejoicing in his intelligence and confident of his 
 honor and patriotism, the power conferred upon 
 him was almost dictatorial. But never was a 
 heavier burden imposed upon the shoulders of a 
 man. The people, in convention assembled, re- 
 peating the accents of Jefferson's immortal paper, 
 claimed to be a nation ; yet, composed as they 
 were of several different, even hostile races, they 
 were utterly unorganized and without means. 
 It fell upon Kossuth to do what our Hamilton 
 had done at the close of the Revolutionary war, 
 that is, to create a Treasury ; and it may be said 
 of him, as Webster said of Hamilton, that "he 
 struck the rock of the national resources, and 
 copious streams gushed forth; he touched the 
 dead corpse of public credit, and it sprang upon 
 its feet." It fell upon him besides to raise an 
 army, and he sent forth his appeal, which, like 
 Lincoln's first proclamation, was answered by a 
 similar song, " We are coming. Father Lajos, three 
 hundred thousand strong ; " and that improvised 
 army, which sprang almost spontaneously from 
 the soil, like the first volunteers of our Civil War, 
 had to be armed, provisioned, and disciplined. 
 
124 Louis Kossuth 
 
 Thus raw and inchoate, it was compelled to meet 
 the train-bands of Croats, Slavs, and Germans, 
 which Austria had treacherously suborned, as 
 well as the veteran troops of the Empire itself, 
 in a sort of double war, externally against the 
 Empire, and internally against tumultuous hordes 
 of semi -savages. Kossuth, although not educated 
 as a soldier, put himself at the head of his troops 
 and shared in all the vicissitudes of their des- 
 perate campaigns. In the starving bivouacs on 
 the mountain sides, when the rocks were their 
 beds and the drifting snow their coverlids ; in 
 the furious forays of a barbarous frontier ; in the 
 conflagration of villages, when their homes went 
 up in flames ; in the deadly conflicts of the 
 ranged battle, where thousands on both sides 
 went down to sudden death, — he took his part, 
 rallying the hopeless and cheering the brave to 
 more vigorous onsets. They fought, like brave 
 men, long and well. For weeks together, every 
 day saw its bloody conflict ; and every night the 
 skies were red with the reflected light of burning 
 towns and villages. Thus, for two years they pro- 
 tracted the struggle. The internal enemies were 
 three times dispersed, the external invaders were 
 driven beyond the frontiers, once to the gates of 
 Vienna (nay, to the very halls of the Hapsburgs), 
 where the victors might have dictated their own 
 
Louis Kossuth 125 
 
 terms but for the cruel intervention of Russia, 
 never to be forgotten nor forgiven. 
 
 Alas ! what could those poor peasants do, 
 though the legendary descendants of fathers who 
 had conquered Cyrus, and Alexander, and the 
 Persian Kings ; what, though the sons of that 
 Attila, who had once swept over Europe as the 
 Scourge of God, could they do against so for- 
 midable a foe ? They could only fight, and fight 
 they did ; they fought in the spirit of the lad of 
 eighteen who, when surrounded by a hostile 
 troop, was asked in pure pity to call for quar- 
 ter, and replied, " Hungarians will not cry for 
 quarter till the fatherland is free," and so let his 
 noble soul exale through the hundred bullet-holes 
 that pierced his body. At last, overwhelmed by 
 numbers and betrayed by some that he had 
 trusted, Kossuth was compelled to resign his mili- 
 tary command ; many of his companions were 
 executed on the spot, many were carried to 
 dungeons, and he himself only escaped with ex- 
 treme difficulty to the shores of the Danube. 
 Ah ! what a desolate hour must that have been ? 
 Looking across the stream he saw his country 
 "a solemn wilderness, where all the brave lay 
 dead ; " in the roar of the waters through the 
 Iron Gates he heard the sobs and sighs of his 
 comrades in prison, while the tumult of the cur- 
 
126 Louis Kossuth 
 
 rent scarcely equaled the tumult of grief in his 
 heart. He yielded his sword to the Turks, who, 
 more Christian than Christians, refused to sur- 
 render him to the allied sovereigns, though often 
 summoned to do so. Nominally, they confined 
 him to a fortress, yet allowed him to go free and 
 to wander along the bleak coasts of Asia, where 
 every hillock was the tomb of a buried civiliza- 
 tion, and the winds of the desert whistled among 
 the weeds that grew over the sites of once pop- 
 ulous cities. 
 
 In this dark hour it was that our Republic 
 stretched out its sheltering arms to the expatri- 
 ated hero, and invited him as a guest to our 
 shores. Austria, of course, protested against us, 
 but our defence was in the hands of Daniel 
 Webster, whose arguments were apt to be woven 
 of chain-mail and riveted on both sides with 
 flawless bolts. Perhaps the timely appearance in 
 the Mediterranean of a stately frigate, flying the 
 Stars and Stripes and exhibiting a double row 
 of grinning battle teeth, gave an added force to 
 the small shot of diplomacy. Be that as it 
 may, Kossuth was taken on board of our man- 
 of-war amid the cheers of gallant tars, who ached 
 only for a more serious conflict, and after land- 
 ing for a while in England, where he excited by 
 his speech the usually slow and phlegmatic blood 
 
Louis Kossuth 127 
 
 of John Bull into ecstacies of approval, he was 
 brought to our embraces. Never before in the 
 annals of nations had a single, unfriended man 
 been received by more earnest acclamations of 
 welcome than Kossuth was received by our peo- 
 ple. Even now, after an interval of so many 
 years, I still feel their shouts tingling in my 
 veins. He did not come to us with the halos 
 of success around him ; but, what was no less 
 appealing, he came with the prestige of one who 
 had deserved success and lost it through no de- 
 merits of his own. 
 
 His welcome, indeed, was all the more 
 heartfelt in that he was not a victor, but a 
 martyr, representing in his failure all the 
 downtrodden nationalities . of Europe which, 
 by the swift reactions that followed the spasms 
 of 1848, had succumbed to the despots. Hun- 
 gary lay panting and breathless at the feet of 
 the Czar ; France through distracted counsels was 
 tottering toward the verge of an abyss, where 
 the sword of an usurper gleamed in the distance; 
 even Prussia looked up to a lowering heaven, 
 not yet wholly without stars ; and Italy, like a 
 captive nightingale, could sing no more in her 
 rosy bower, but only shiver and be silent in the 
 rasping breezes of the north. Kossuth was re- 
 ceived by us as our Washington would have 
 
128 Louis Kossuth 
 
 been received by the lovers of liberty abroad, if 
 he had failed at Trenton or Monmouth and been 
 sent by the British authorities to eat the bitter 
 bread of exile in foreign lands. We simply saw 
 in him a son of the people, who, almost alone 
 and unfriended, had bearded the two most 
 powerful dynasties of the world, and though 
 stricken down in the attempt, still a terror to 
 their eyes. How could our souls fail to go 
 forth to him in love and admiration ? With a 
 few of us, perhaps, the excitement was only con- 
 tagious, a sort of fox fire which glows but 
 does not burn, or an auroral flush reflected 
 from a chff" of ice ; but with the most of us it 
 was sincere and outgushing and mighty as the 
 flow of the Mississippi. 
 
 Had our feelings been dead at the outset, that 
 magical voice of his, when it had once got to 
 telling his story, would, like the bugle call of a 
 Highland chief, have rallied every man to his 
 side. Great Heavens ! what oratory it was. I 
 have heard many of the masters of speech, 
 but I have heard none that had a completer 
 mastery than he. In intellectual force and pene- 
 tration he was the equal of any of them ; his 
 voice was as melliferous, his manner as charm- 
 ing and persuasive, but his imagination was 
 warmed and colored by an oriental blood that 
 
Louis Kossuth 129 
 
 was not theirs, and he surpassed them all in a 
 depth and intensity of feeling which I cannot 
 describe. It was a sort of perpetual white heat, 
 which did not blaze or flame out, and yet 
 was always hot to the core. For the most part 
 his manner was easy and coloquial as if he 
 were talking to a friend on a point that con- 
 cerned him ; but when he was suddenly excited, 
 as some great thought or image swam into his 
 ken, his tones rose in the air like the chords of 
 an seolian when the wind plays over its strings, 
 or like the roar of a torrent that falls from the 
 crest of a mountain and wakens the echoes of far- 
 off summits. His invective and his pathos were 
 alike fearfully intense. No one who heard it 
 could ever forget the awful bitterness with 
 which, referring to the young Emperor of Aus- 
 tria, he spoke of the " Beardless Nero, the 
 murderer of my country ; " and how sponta- 
 neously the tears gushed to the eyes when he 
 referred to his dead comrades of the battle- 
 field as " the nameless demi-gods, each with a 
 smile on his face as if he rejoiced to make so 
 poor a sacrifice as his life for so great a cause 
 as his country." Yet he was never boisterous, 
 vehement or gesticulative ; he was equable like 
 the flow of his own lordly Danube, or our own 
 more lordly Hudson. He never put himself in 
 
130 Louis Kossuth 
 
 any tempest or whirlwind of emotion ; but he 
 controlled his emotions, and by that self-control 
 he controlled his hearers. In listening to him 
 you soon lost all sense of the speaker, i. e., of 
 his form, his voice, his imagery, his action, and 
 become simply absorbed in his theme. 
 
 It was owing to this intensity of interest in 
 his theme that Kossuth's eloquence was often 
 as manifest in private as it was in public. In 
 the solitude of his chamber, while walking the 
 floor, or musing after dinner, he would pour 
 out his thoughts with the lyrical enthusiasm 
 or the epic grandeur of a poet, when " his 
 muse of fire ascends the highest heaven of in- 
 vention.'' I can recall one time when I was 
 almost alone with him (perhaps Count Pulszki 
 and others of his staff may have been present) 
 and he began as if communing with himself: 
 " Oh that the poor people of Europe were as 
 free as this good people of the United States ! 
 Oh that they could brush away that rubbish of 
 Kings and Princes who sit like incubi upon 
 their energies, and stifle the sources of their 
 happiness ! Oh that their standing armies, which 
 are a wasting pestilence, might become in- 
 dustrial armies ! Behold ! Europe's history is 
 reckoned by centuries, and yet the countless 
 miUions there stand almost where they stood 
 
Louis Kossuth 131 
 
 when America emerged from the unexplorable 
 darkness that had covered her as the twilight 
 of the sea hides its gems. A few pilgrims, 
 driven out for liberty sake, land on the wild 
 coast of Plymouth, and within a generation or 
 two the unknown wilderness blooms into an 
 empire — ' whole as the marble, founded as the 
 rock, as broad and general as the casing air.' 
 On the scarcely out-rotted roots of the primitive 
 forest proud cities arise, teeming with boundless 
 life, growing like the grass of the prairies in 
 spring, advancing like the steam-engine, baffling 
 time and distance like the telegraph, and spread- 
 ing the pulsations of their own hearts to the 
 remotest parts of the world ; free as the circling 
 air, independent as the soaring eagle, active 
 as the forces of nature, and more powerful than 
 the giants of fable." He then went on with a 
 prophetic description of what Europe would be 
 if once set free, which I can only compare 
 to the sublime visions of St. John at Patmos, 
 recorded in the apocalypse : " And I, John, saw 
 the kings of the earth with their armies, and 
 they were cast into a lake of burning fire ; I 
 saw the thrones and they that sat upon them, 
 and they were judged ; I saw the dragon, the 
 old serpent, which is Satan, and he was bound 
 for a thousand years ; and after that I saw a 
 
132 Louis Kossuth 
 
 new heaven and a new earth, and the holy 
 city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from 
 heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her 
 husband ; and I heard a great voice, which 
 said : ' Behold, the tabernacle of God is with 
 men. And God shall wipe away all tears from 
 their eyes, and there shall be no more death, 
 nor sorrow, nor pain : for the former things are 
 passed away.' " 
 
 If Kossuth had spoken only in his own lan- 
 guage, he would have ranked among the most 
 eminent of orators, but it adds greatly to his 
 eminence that he was able to speak in several 
 languages with equal force and facility. Once, 
 in the course of a single week in New York, 
 he was called upon to address audiences com- 
 posed respectively of Germans, Italians, French- 
 men, and Americans, and in each case the ap- 
 plause which followed nearly every sentence 
 proved that he spoke to their hearts. His 
 English, for which I can vouch, was most re- 
 markable. It was not so much our modern 
 every- day EngHsh as the English of the Eliza- 
 bethan age. He had learned it, you know, 
 while he was in prison, from Shakespeare and 
 the Bible, and it had in it at times the sinewy 
 strength, the rounded fulness, the majestic roll 
 of Hooker or Jeremy Taylor. Indeed, it was 
 
Louis Kossuth 133 
 
 curious to listen to idioms that were like the 
 idioms which the master poet of mankind has 
 put in the mouth of Brutus when he pleaded 
 for the liberties of Rome, or in the mouth of 
 the banished Lear when he discoursed with the 
 elements and made the oak-cleaving thunder- 
 bolts the vehicles and companions of his pas- 
 sion. 
 
 Kossuth's diversity of tongue was not more 
 notable than his versatility of topic. Having 
 but one theme, the liberation of his country, it 
 might be supposed that his handling of it would 
 soon become monotonous; but it was not so; 
 for, as a skillful musician varies the leading 
 motive of his inspiration into innumerable minor 
 harmonies, so he varied his great theme into a 
 thousand accessories. In speaking to the several 
 nationalities, as I have said, he spoke to each 
 one in its own tongue, but he also spoke to 
 each one of the peculiarities of its position, 
 quoting often passages from its popular poets, 
 and citing the thrilling moments of its history. 
 When he spoke to the Bar, the Press, the 
 Municipahty, the Militia, Tammany Hall, the 
 Clergy, or Women, he spoke with a special ap- 
 propriateness of subject and time which each 
 one liked to hear. His first address, at Staten 
 Island, I remember, was a declaration of the 
 
134 Louis Kossuth 
 
 legitimacy of the Hungarian movement, and the 
 next day he followed it up at Castle Garden 
 with an outline of his principles and aims as a 
 reformer. Before the Corporation, as a metro- 
 politan representative of the people of the 
 United States, he discussed our hereditary pol- 
 icy as a Free State. Before the editors he laid 
 bare the true idea of nationality; before the 
 lawyers, Russia's piratical invasion of interna- 
 tional law ; before the militia, the relations of a 
 citizen soldiery to the State ; before Tammany 
 Hall, which was then an honest political asso- 
 ciation, the essential characteristics of a true 
 democracy ; before the clergy, the superiority of 
 life to faith ; and before the women, the claims 
 of liberty to their undying devotion. 
 
 From New York Kossuth went to Philadel- 
 phia, and there, in Independence Hall, his voice 
 rang the original proclamation of the old bell, of 
 " liberty to all the land," while he compared a 
 spurious French republicanism to that nobler 
 form of it which had been cradled in the sacred 
 chamber in which he was heard. At Baltimore, 
 the city of monuments, he showed that the strug- 
 gles which they commemorated were the same in 
 aspiration and aim as the struggles in which he 
 had been engaged. Soon after, at Washington, 
 in the presence of the Supreme Court, the Senate, 
 
Louis Kossuth 135 
 
 and the House of Representatives, he dwelt upon 
 the rightful relations of America to the Old 
 World ; but his great triumph in Washington was 
 at a banquet, at which, discoursing of the recip- 
 rocal duties of nations, he carried with him many- 
 distinguished leaders, among them Stephen A. 
 Douglas, a candidate for the Presidency, and 
 won from his righthand neighbor, Daniel Webster, 
 himself the author of orations not surpassed in 
 the Greek pages of Demosthenes or in the Latin 
 pages of Cicero, an outburst of irrepressible ap- 
 plause. 
 
 From Washington Kossuth journeyed to 
 Columbus, to Cincinnati, to Jackson, to New Or- 
 leans, to Mobile, to Charleston, to Richmond, 
 back to Albany, to Salem, to Worcester, to Bos- 
 ton; touching, as he passed, on the weakness of 
 Despotism, on the Balance of Power, on a Sound 
 and Honest Commerce, and on Democracy as 
 the Spirit of the Age, in strains of commanding 
 eloquence. Arrived in New England, he seemed 
 to know the minutest events of her history as 
 well as he knew those of his own country, so that 
 at Lexington and Concord the embattled farmers 
 rose from their graves "to fire the shot heard 
 round the world," and in Faneuil Hall the spirits 
 of the Adamses, the Otises and the Hancocks 
 laid over again the foundations of that constitu- 
 
136 Louis Kossuth 
 
 tional government, which is now the strength 
 and glory of sixty millions of freemen. His last 
 speech was given here at New York on the Fu- 
 ture of Nations, when he traced the history of 
 the old civilizations, ascribing their ruin to the 
 weakness of their people, and proclaiming with 
 prophetic earnestness that our duration would 
 depend, not upon the exuberant gifts of soil and 
 climate, not upon material prosperity, however 
 rich and glowing, not upon the inscrutable de- 
 crees of Providence, but upon the manliness, the 
 integrity, the conscience, and the love of justice 
 of our individual men. 
 
 Kossuth's mission to the United States was 
 not, in all respects, a success such as he desired, 
 but neither was it a failure. The principal 
 points that he presented were : First, that Rus- 
 sia, by her interference in the domestic 
 struggle of Hungary, had committed a gross 
 breach of the laws of nations, which could not 
 be regarded with indifference by other nations, 
 and especially by the United States, whose exist- 
 ence was due to such a struggle ; second, that 
 the people of the United States ought to insist 
 upon the rights of an open commerce with all 
 the people of Europe, whether they were in a 
 state of revolt or not against their own govern- 
 ments ; and third, that the people of Hungary 
 
Louis Kossuth 137 
 
 were and ought to remain a free and indepen- 
 dent nation, exercising the right of self-govern- 
 ment without intervention on the part of Austria 
 and other monarchies. To these points, as sen- 
 timents, no one could object ; on the contrary, 
 they were accepted with tumultuary plaudits ; 
 many of our prominent statesmen gave a nomi- 
 nal adherence to them, at least ; and Kossuth 
 was encouraged to raise money on his own con- 
 ditional notes to help the propagation of them 
 abroad. As sentiments, forms of speech with no 
 gunpowder behind them, they were scarcely 
 more than a brntum fulmen, a flash of heat 
 lightning, which does not strike, or a mutter of 
 Salmonean thunder that carries no bolt. They 
 were wholly harmless, yet, put the gunpowder 
 behind them and you are launched at once into 
 a career of active armed intervention in the 
 quarrels of foreign nations. But is that advis- 
 able ? Unless a nation chooses to make itself a 
 Don Quixote, bound to rescue from wrong all 
 the Dulcineas of the globe, including the swarthy 
 queens of the South Seas, or an Anarcharsis 
 Cloots, a spokesman for the universe, its foreign 
 policy must not be a matter of mere sentiment 
 but of fixed principle. 
 
 It was objected to Kossuth's demands, and 
 particularly by Henry Clay, who was then on 
 
138 Louis Kossuth 
 
 his deathbed, that they contravened our tra- 
 ditional attitude of neutrality, as it had been 
 prescribed by Washington in his Farewell 
 Address, which ought to be regarded as the 
 final testament of the Father of his Coun- 
 try to his children. Mr. Clay and other ob- 
 jectors, however, had forgotten that our policy 
 of neutrality was by no means fixed and abso- 
 lute. We had ourselves announced, in a message 
 of President Monroe, that no foreign despotism 
 should ever put a foot on this continent, either 
 north or south. Mr. Clay himself, in one of the 
 most persuasive speeches he ever made, had 
 pleaded the cause of the South American re- 
 publics against the domination of Spain, and 
 proposed our taking part in the Congress of 
 Panama. Daniel Webster, animated by a re- 
 membrance of the grand old Greeks, who were 
 our teachers in politics as in all the finer arts, 
 and had left their bones on the ever-memorable 
 fields of Thermopylae and Marathon in defence of 
 national independence, never spoke with a more 
 Doric solidity or a more classic beauty than 
 when he defended modern Greece in its revolt 
 against the Turks. He demonstrated that the 
 claims of the allied powers of Europe were con- 
 trary to reason, destructive of progress, and 
 wholly incompatible with the independence of 
 
Louis Kossuth 139 
 
 nations. "There are but two forms of govern- 
 ment," he said, " the absolute and the regulated, 
 or constitutional ; and our sympathies, our assist- 
 ance, our power must ever be on the side of 
 that form of which we are the most illustrious 
 exponents. As Greece, in the olden times, had 
 been the triumphant conqueror of tyranny and 
 ignorance, it was but an act of gratitude, for 
 us in the new times, to help her to maintain 
 her glory." Even in his later correspondence 
 with Baron Hulseman, the Austrian Charge 
 d' Affairs, in vindication of our hospitality to 
 Kossuth himself, he went quite as far in his 
 expressions as anything that Kossuth had said. 
 But he went no further, nor could any one of 
 us go any further for a very good reason. We 
 happened to be living in an enormous glass- 
 house and could not approve of an indiscriminate 
 throwing of stones. In other words, we were 
 keeping three millions of human beings in a 
 remorseless bondage, against the pity and sense 
 of justice of the world, and could not allow of 
 foreign interposition. A few slight tentatives 
 at interference on the part of England had 
 aroused our sensibilities to frenzy. Kossuth was 
 aware of this weak spot, and did not touch it 
 directly, yet his constant reiteration of the doc- 
 trine of human freedom revived and kindled our 
 
140 Louis Kossuth 
 
 earlier feelings. As a monk of the Middle Ages, 
 taking up a palimpsest all blurred with mould, 
 would rub the scrawlings upon it (some dusty 
 chronicle of a convent, perhaps), until he re- 
 vealed a treatise by Cicero, or a poem of Virgil, 
 so he brought back to us our original inspira- 
 tions. How was it possible for him to refer so 
 warmly to his own poor Hungarians, and to 
 prove their right to a part in the making of 
 their laws, without recalling our own funda- 
 mental principle as proclaimed in the Declara- 
 tion ? Why should we sympathize with the 
 oppressed people of Europe, and be indifferent 
 to the oppressed Africans within our threshold ? 
 Though wearing the burnished livery of the sun, 
 were they not men and brothers like all the 
 rest ? Should we open our hearts and our 
 purses to the far-off sufferers, and close them 
 to the sufferers at home ? 
 
 One coincidence, which perhaps you have 
 never observed, is remarkable. In 1850 it was by 
 common consent of our two great political parties 
 agreed that slavery was forever settled ; it was 
 settled by a compromise that was never again to 
 be touched, and thenceforth a thing taboo. Miss 
 Martineau, when she was here, said that Ameri- 
 can politicians who disagreed on every other topic 
 agreed on this, that slavery was too sacred a 
 
Louis Kossuth 141 
 
 theme even to be discussed. They who dared to 
 discuss it were proper objects for the vengeance 
 of the mob. Well, Kossuth talked in 1851-1852, 
 and in less than four years from that time the 
 anti-slavery agitation had shattered the old par- 
 ties to pieces, called into being a new party, put 
 the young Pathfinder of the West at its head as a 
 candidate for the Presidency, and given him more 
 than a million and a quarter of votes. A senti- 
 ment born of heart-beats had run like the current 
 of an electric battery from soul to soul, till it had 
 fused them into one, as it has since fused sixty 
 millions of people into a republic where only 
 free men breathe. 
 
 Kossuth's plans, however, were nullified, not 
 so much by our timidity as by the Coup d'Etat of 
 Napoleon the Third in France. I was with him 
 at dinner, with a few others, when the report 
 came that the President of the French Republic 
 had betrayed his trust and proclaimed himself an 
 Emperor. At first he was greatly dejected by 
 the news, but rallying his spirits in a moment, he 
 exclaimed, " Oh that your Congress would vote 
 me one of your frigates, or that your rich mer- 
 chants would buy me one, that I might proceed to 
 Hungary, fill it with the brave sons of the Mag- 
 yar, and, landing in Italy or France, put a stopper 
 upon this outburst of hell ! " This was not boast- 
 
142 Louis Kossuth 
 
 ing, but a simple, honest expression of his confi- 
 dence in his power to rally the masses to his 
 flag. None the less, it was scarcely more than 
 dreaming; the Empire was sustained by the 
 plebiscite, and it took twenty years, with the 
 genius of Bismarck and the sword of Von Moltke 
 to the fore, to prick the tremendous wind-bag 
 which seemed like a real thunder cloud in the air. 
 Kossuth returned to Europe in 1852, going 
 into retirement at Turin, Italy, and few things in 
 history are more pathetic than those later days of 
 exile and obscurity. The world seemed to have 
 suddenly receded from him, leaving him alone 
 with his memories. He, the idol of his country 
 and the welcome guest of the foremost civilized 
 nations, sunk as by some hostile enchantment into 
 a cave of abandonment and forgetfulness. So 
 great was the contrast between his early and later 
 days that it still brings tears" to the eyes, and what 
 renders it the more touching is that it was nobly 
 self-imposed. He might have returned to Hun- 
 gary, as many of his companions did, and re- 
 sumed a high place in her councils, but that im- 
 plied that he should ask forgiveness for deeds that 
 he considered his special title to an immortal 
 glory. It implied that he should recognize as 
 King of his native land an Emperor to whom he 
 had sworn an eternal hostility, as he had sworn 
 
Louis Kossuth 143 
 
 it to the very principle of monarchy. No, better 
 for him it was to be an outcast than an apostate. 
 Willingly his grateful friends would have heaped 
 him with the favors of fortune, but his self-respect 
 would not allow him to accept of charity when 
 he was entitled to justice. At the worst, he 
 might, without loss of honor, like the blind old 
 Belisarius, have gone upon the highways and 
 begged for an obole from those whose cause he 
 had defended at the cost of all he held dear, but 
 he preferred to work for his living, to write, to 
 lecture, to teach the languages, and so honestly 
 earn the crust that nourished him and the rude 
 roof that sheltered his head. One grand feature 
 of his character was that, in his destitution and 
 advancing age he did not repine or fret under 
 his reverses, or, like the imperial captive of St. 
 Helena, break his beak on the bars of his cage 
 while he screamed with impotent resentment 
 against his fate. At most a plaintive word 
 escaped him now and then, as when he said, 
 " I am like a wandering bird ; nay, worse than a 
 wandering bird, for he may find a summer home 
 among his fellows, while I am an outcast on the 
 face of the earth, having no citizenship anywhere." 
 Yet he never despaired of himself or his cause. 
 " When I was formerly an exile as now," he 
 wrote, " and arrogant tyrants debated about my 
 
144 Louis Kossuth 
 
 blood ; when my infant children were in prison, 
 and my wife, the faithful companion of my sor- 
 rows, was hunted like a deer by the sleuth hounds 
 of power ; when the heart of my old mother was 
 breaking under the shattered fortunes of her 
 house, all of us cast to the winds like the yellow 
 leaves of a fallen tree ; when my fatherland, my 
 sweet fatherland, was one half murdered and the 
 other half in chains ; when the sky of freedom was 
 dark down to the horizon, and still darkening, 
 nowhere a ray of hope, nowhere a spark of con- 
 solation, I did not despair, nor shall I ever de- 
 spair, until man sinks back into his primitive 
 bruteism and the God of Heaven has for- 
 gotten His attributes of Justice and Truth." 
 What a sublime patience, and what a sublime 
 hope ! 
 
 Kossuth was not, however, wholly inactive in 
 these last years of seclusion and adversity. When 
 in 1865 Italy strove again to rid herself of the 
 Austrian domination, he joined with Mazzini and 
 Garibaldi, he consulted with Cavour and Napo- 
 leon in., whom he detested, to help in her 
 deliverance. He organized a Hungarian corps, 
 which did good service till the false-hearted 
 peace at Villa Franca darkened the general hope. 
 Again, when France and England combined 
 against Russia, that " rock on which the world's 
 
Louis Kossuth 145 
 
 sighs for freedom are always breaking," he sent 
 his Hungarian friends to join the allies, and again 
 he failed to reap the reward which his soul de- 
 sired. It was after these disappointments Kos- 
 suth repeated, in a book written a few years be- 
 fore he died, that he and his few adherents were 
 mere wanderers of the deserts, without a country 
 or a home. And such, indeed, was the outward 
 fact, but his death itself disclosed a silver lining 
 to the cloud. Death, which we are apt to picture 
 as a grim skeleton, with a sweeping scythe in his 
 hand, carries also in another hand the wand of a 
 magician, which transforms the ugliest realities 
 into realms of splendor and beauty. The same 
 touch that laid this self-styled homeless and 
 friendless man in the tomb, aroused a country 
 that had been silently regenerated by means 
 of him, and five thousand compatriots followed 
 his coffin with garlands wet with the dew of 
 tears. Five hundred thousand others, scat- 
 tered over the entire globe, uttered their 
 speeches and songs of admiration. The oblo- 
 quies that had pursued him in life were changed 
 into hosannas, and the mud once flung upon 
 him, like the mystic weeds and thorns in the lap 
 of St. Elizabeth, bloomed into wreaths of lilies 
 and roses. Nay, is there not reason to hope, as 
 his spirit passed into another world, that all " The 
 
146 Louis Kossuth 
 
 inheritors of unfilled renown " rose from their 
 thrones to honor him ? 
 
 Kossuth refused to return to Hungary, yet he 
 was there all the time, for his thoughts pervaded 
 her counsels and shaped her destinies. Hungary, 
 no longer a dependent, is an integral and equal 
 half of the empire ; the old barbaric laws are 
 repealed or modified, and his principles are in- 
 scribed on the banners of her statesmen and 
 embalmed in the hearts of her people. As in 
 that old legend of the Huns, his ancestors, which 
 Kaulbach has transferred to the canvas, and 
 which tells how in a battle with the Romans, 
 when every man was stricken dead to the earth, 
 he yet rose to renew the battle in the air, so in 
 the battle for the rights of humanity the fight 
 goes on even when the combatants have per- 
 ished. In the viewless aspirations of the human 
 heart, in the silent forges of human thought, it 
 still goes on, and it will go on till truth and 
 justice have triumphed, and man, every man, 
 shall stand in the full dignity of his manhood, 
 which is the highest realization of Godhead that 
 we can know or even conceive. 
 
JOHN JAMES AUDUBON 
 
JOHN JAMES AUDUBON * 
 
 Ladies and Gentlemen: 
 
 Mr. Carlyle, in his famous book on " Heroes 
 and Hero Worship," has told us of the hero in 
 the several aspects of Divinity, Prophet, Priest, 
 Poet, King, and Man of Letters, but he over- 
 looked one phase of the character, which human 
 history knows : the Hero as Man of Science. 
 A little before he was writing his volume there 
 roamed in the primeval forests of America a 
 simple naturalist, whose life had exhibited every 
 quality of prowess and endurance, every trait of 
 
 * As long ago as 1S42, I made the acquaintance of Mr. 
 Audubon, and wrote about him in the Democratic Review of 
 that year. Again, eleven years later, in 1853, I prepared a 
 sketch of him for a volume published by Messrs. G. P. 
 Putnam & Co., called "The Homes of American Authors." 
 These papers, a. short time after his death, were condensed 
 into an address, which was read to a small literary circle at 
 Roslyn, Long Island. The recent erection of a monument to 
 his memory, in Trinity Cemetery, by the New York Academy 
 of Sciences, has induced me to revise this address, in order to 
 present his extraordinary career to the minds of a later 
 generation. 
 
 149 
 
150 John James Audubon 
 
 manly and heroic endeavor, that is to be found 
 in the most illustrious of his Great Men. If 
 we may believe what his fast friend Emerson 
 has said of heroism, that it was "a contempt 
 for safety and ease," " a self-trust which slights 
 the restraints of prudence in the plentitude of 
 its energy and power," " a mind of such a 
 balance that no disturbance can shake its will, 
 which pleasantly, and as it were merrily, ad- 
 vances to its own music," the " extreme of in- 
 dividual nature," "obedience to the impulses of 
 individual character," " undaunted boldness and 
 a fortitude not to be wearied out," then was 
 John James Audubon one of the truest of the 
 world's heroes, worthy to be ranked and re- 
 corded on the same page with the most dis- 
 tinguished of human celebrities. 
 
 For more than half a century he followed 
 with almost religious devotion a beautiful and 
 elevated pursuit, enlarging its boundaries by his 
 discoveries, and illustrating its objects by his 
 art. In all climates and in all weathers, 
 scorched by tropic suns and frozen by arctic 
 colds ; now diving fearlessly into the densest 
 forests and now wandering alone over desolate 
 prairies, far beyond the haunts of civilization, 
 and frequented only by savage beasts or more 
 savage men ; in perils, in difficulties and in 
 
John James Audubon 151 
 
 doubt ; listening only to the music of the birds 
 and the lofty inspirations of his own thoughts, 
 he kept for a lifetime on an original path, which 
 to some seemed chimerical and to others utterly 
 useless, until in the later years and fading twi- 
 light of his days his efforts were crowned with 
 success. The records of man's endeavor con- 
 tain few nobler examples of strength of purpose 
 and indefatigable zeal. 
 
 John James Audubon was born on the 4th 
 of May, 1780, in Louisiana, a French province 
 still, on a plantation near the city of New 
 Orleans. Both the time and place of his birth 
 were significant. It was in the spring of the 
 year, when the flowers and birds had just 
 awakened from their winter's sleep, and among 
 the orange groves which were giving forth their 
 richest perfumes. Cradled in the open air, 
 under grand secular trees, he may be said to 
 have been lulled to his slumbers by that prince 
 of melodious polyglots, the mocking-bird. 
 
 By parentage Audubon was of mingled 
 French and Spanish blood. His father, a naval 
 officer under Napoleon, was one of those rest- 
 less spirits which the titanic genius of the great 
 commander had called forth in France, and to 
 whom the whole surface of the earth was an 
 inheritance and a scene for exploits. It must 
 
152 ' John James Audubon 
 
 have been a pretty vigorous stock, as the 
 grandfather, a poor fisherman of La Vendee, 
 had a family " of which twenty-one grew to 
 years of maturity." His father was the twen- 
 tieth born, and was sent into the world when 
 he was but twelve years old, " with a shirt, a 
 warm dress, a cane, and the old man's bless- 
 ing," to seek his fortune as he could. He set 
 out as a boy before the mast, and at seventeen 
 was rated an able-bodied seaman ; at twenty 
 commanded a vessel; in a few years accumu- 
 lated a small fortune in the trade with St. 
 Domingo; made purchases in Louisiana, Vir- 
 ginia, and Pennsylvania ; joined the French 
 forces under Lafayette, who helped us in our 
 Revolution; and afterward was a captain or 
 commodore in the imperial navy, living to the 
 age of ninety. 
 
 From him the naturalist inherited his fine 
 form, his enterprise, his vigor, his simplicity, 
 and his honesty. The mother, of Spanish deri- 
 vation, named Anne Moynette, whom the father 
 had married in Louisiana, was taken after the 
 birth of three sons and a daughter to the estate 
 of Aux Cayes, in St. Domingo, where she was 
 put to death during a terrible insurrection of 
 the blacks. The children, with some plate and 
 money, were saved by a few of the more faith- 
 
John James Audubon 153 
 
 ful servants, and subsequently carried to France, 
 where, on a beautiful estate on the Loire and 
 under the care of an indulgent stepmother, John 
 James began his more formal education. His 
 father destined him to the navy, and he was 
 taught mathematics, geography, navigation, 
 music, drawing, and dancing. He took to the 
 music, and soon became somewhat proficient in 
 the violin, the flute, the flageolet, and the gui- 
 tar. His drawing master was the afterwards 
 celebrated painter David, but, as he says, " the 
 eyes and noses of giants, and the heads of 
 horses represented in ancient sculpture, were 
 not the themes I would be at " ; so he stole 
 away from the schools to the woods, where he 
 tried to sketch more living objects. Alas, in 
 his ignorance, "his pencil gave birth to a family 
 of cripples. So maimed were most of them 
 that they resembled the mangled corpses on a 
 field of battle." Yet he persevered, and he 
 produced hundreds of these rude sketches in 
 the course of the year, to be regularly made a 
 bonfire of on the anniversary of his birthday. 
 
 In his sixteenth year John James was sent 
 back to America to occupy and superintend a 
 farm called Mill Grove, which the father pos- 
 sessed on the banks of Perkioming Creek, a 
 branch of the Schuylkill near Philadelphia. This 
 
154 John James Audubon 
 
 was just what he wished, as he could hunt, fish, 
 draw and raise all sorts of fowls to his heart's 
 content. " One of my fancies then," he writes, 
 " was to be ridiculously fond of dress, to hunt 
 in black satin breeches, wear pumps while shoot- 
 ing, and display the finest ruffled shirts." But 
 he had no vices, ate no butcher's meat, lived 
 chiefly on fruits and vegetables, and never drank 
 spirits or even wine. He was, however, exces- 
 sively fond of dancing, attended all the balls 
 given in the neighborhood, and by his fine looks 
 became an object of admiration to the fair sex. 
 A young cotemporary, Mr. William Bakewell, 
 afterwards his brother-in-law, describes his house, 
 however, as not by any means that of a dandy. 
 It was already an attractive museum. " The 
 walls were festooned with all sorts of birds' eggs, 
 blown out and strung on a thread. The chimney- 
 piece was covered with stuffed squirrels, raccoons 
 and opossums, the shelves were covered with 
 fishes, frogs, snakes and other reptiles, and his 
 rough paintings of birds were arrayed along the 
 walls. He was an admirable marksman, an ex- 
 pert swimmer and skater, a clever and graceful 
 rider, and noted for his great strength as well as 
 for the elegance of his figure and carriage — alto- 
 gether a country Crichton. 
 
 His next door neighbor, an Englishman by 
 
John James Audubon 155 
 
 birth (though of French descent, the English hav- 
 ing changed his name of Bayquille into Bakewell), 
 was duly despised by the son of the Gaul, until 
 he discovered, by a chance visit, that the house 
 contained a fair daughter, with whom the son of 
 the Gaul soon struck up a friendship. It was 
 agreed that he should teach the lass the art of 
 drawing, while the lass taught the lad a more 
 perfect pronunciation of English; and, as it might 
 have been expected in the case, this Lucy Bake- 
 well became to the young man, like Words- 
 worth's Lucy, " fair as a star, when only one is 
 shining in the sky." In due time they were 
 betrothed, but before marriage paternal prudence 
 suggested that as the collecting and drawing of 
 birds was not likely to prove a stable or affluent 
 source of income, the youth should go to the city 
 to be trained in some lucrative commercial pur- 
 suit. He tried the experiment in New York, but 
 did not turn out an apt pupil of tare and tret ; 
 and then, after a visit of a year or two to France, 
 where he was enlisted in the French navy as 
 midshipman, but never served, he returned to 
 marry his dear Lucy and be very happy (1808). 
 No man ever made a better choice of a wife. 
 This woman became the veriest companion of his 
 life, sharing throughout in his pursuits, his sacri- 
 fices, his adventures, and contributing to his sue- 
 
156 John James Audubon 
 
 cess not only by her sympathy, but by her active 
 exertions. She was willing at all times to en- 
 dure any hardships that her husband might fol- 
 low the bent of his genius, and show to the world 
 what her unerring instinct had at once discerned 
 — the genuine stuff of manhood and ability that 
 was in him. It was determined, soon after their 
 marriage, that they should begin under the most 
 favorable circumstances, and for that purpose he 
 sold the property at Mill Grove, and, with the 
 proceeds, departed for the great West, that al- 
 ready loomed before the eyes of aspiring mortals 
 as the proper place to achieve a prodigious for- 
 tune with very little effort. 
 
 Accordingly, passing over to Pittsburg, and 
 providing himself with a mattress, guns and am- 
 munition, a skiff, and two stout negroes to help 
 in the rowing — he got afloat with his young wife 
 on the bosom of the Ohio, " the queen of rivers," 
 and, like Ulysses, " sailed toward the sunset and 
 the baths of all the western stars." The modes 
 of travel at that day were strongly in contrast 
 with the more easy and expeditious modes of 
 the present time. It was in the month of Octo- 
 ber that the little convoy set off, and his descrip- 
 tion of the voyage, in the midst of the rich dis- 
 play of the season, is full of poetry. " Every tree," 
 he says, " was hung with long and flowing festoons 
 
John James Audubon 157 
 
 of vines, or loaded with clustered fruits of varied 
 brilliancy, their rich carmine mingling beauti- 
 fully with the yellow foliage which yet predomi- 
 nated over the green leaves, with reflections of 
 livelier tints from the clear stream than ever 
 painter portrayed or poet imagined ; for the sun 
 was giving forth those glowing hues which pro- 
 claim the Indian summer. They glided down the 
 stream, meeting no other ripple than that formed 
 by the propulsion of their own boat. Now and 
 then a large catfish rose to the surface in pur- 
 suit of a shoal of fry, which, starting simulta- 
 neously from the water, like so many silvery 
 arrows, scattered a shower of light, while the 
 pursuer, with open jaws, seized the stragglers, 
 and with a splash of his tail disappeared. At 
 night, a tinkling of bells along the shore told 
 them that cattle were gently roving from valley 
 to valley in search of food or returning to their 
 distant homes. The hooting of a great owl, or 
 the muffled noise of its wings, as it sailed 
 smoothly over the stream, arrested the ear, with 
 the sound of the boatman's horn as it came 
 winding more and more softly from afar. When 
 daylight returned many songsters burst forth with 
 echoing notes, which grew mellower with the dis- 
 tance. Here and there the lonely cabin of a squat- 
 ter struck the eye, giving note of a commencing 
 
158 John James Audubon 
 
 civilization. Sluggish flatboats were overtaken 
 and passed, some laden with products from the 
 headwaters of streams that flow into the Ohio, 
 and others crowded with emigrants in search of 
 a new home in the boundless soHtudes of the 
 far west." " When I think of that time," Audu- 
 bon writes at the close of his narrative, " and 
 call back to mind the beauty and the grandeur 
 of those almost uninhabited shores ; when I pic- 
 ture to myself the dense forests, with their lofty 
 summits, that everywhere spread along the hills 
 and overhung the margin of the stream, unmo- 
 lested by the axe of the settler; when I know 
 how dearly purchased the safe navigation of that 
 river has been by the blood of many worthy 
 Virginians ; when I see that no longer any abor- 
 igines are to be found there, and that the vast 
 herds of elks, deer, and buffaloes which once pas- 
 tured on those hills and in those valleys, making 
 to themselves great roads to the several salt 
 springs, no longer exist ; when I reflect that all 
 this portion of our Union, instead of being in 
 a state of nature, is now covered with villages, 
 farms, and towns, where the din of hammers and 
 machinery is constantly heard; that the woods 
 are fast disappearing under the axe by day 
 and fire by night; that hundreds of steamboats 
 are gliding to and fro over the whole length of 
 
John James Audubon 159 
 
 the majestic river, forcing commerce to take root 
 and prosper at every spot ; when I see the 
 surplus population of Europe coming to assist 
 in the destruction of the forests and transplanting 
 civilization into its darkest recesses ; when I re- 
 member that these extraordinary changes have 
 all taken place within the short period of twenty 
 years, I pause with wonder and can scarcely 
 believe the reality." 
 
 But these twenty years were scarcely less 
 eventful for him than they were for the nation. 
 After a journey of twelve days, he arrived at 
 Louisville, in Kentucky, where he settled, with 
 a promising prospect of business, but which 
 had an unprosperous outcome in the end. The 
 truth is that he was soon so absorbed in his 
 studies of nature, that he was apt to leave 
 the management of his affairs to others, who 
 failed to give to them the care which the pre- 
 carious nature of all frontier trading requires. 
 His enterprises at Louisville failed disastrously, 
 but enough means were left him to enable him 
 to remove to Henderson, Ky., where he put 
 up a mill and engaged in other ventures, but 
 with equal want of success (18 10). He became 
 in fact, wherever he went, so addicted to excur- 
 sions in the canebrakes and forests that little 
 time or thought was left him for more prosaic 
 
i6o John James Audubon 
 
 occupations. Provided with a rough leathern 
 dress, a knapsack that contained his pencils and 
 colors, and with a good trusty gun at his side, 
 he wandered for days, and even months, in 
 search of animals to describe and paint. At 
 one time we find him watching for hours in the 
 tangled canebrakes, where some shy songster 
 is busily rearing her brood ; at another, he is 
 seen scaling the almost inaccessible height 
 where the eagle hovers over its rocky nest ; 
 now he is floating in a frail skiff down the 
 rushing tide of the Mississippi, and is carried 
 on he knows not whither by the* flood ; then 
 the jealous Indian prowls about his lonely path, 
 or lurks beneath the tree on which he sleeps, 
 waiting for an opportunity to put an end to 
 his life and his uncomprehended labors together ; 
 here he begs shelter and food in some lonely 
 log cabin of the frontiers ; and there he wanders 
 hopelessly through interminable pine-barrens, 
 while hunger, heat and thirst, and insects and 
 wild beasts beleaguer his steps like so many 
 persecuting spirits. But wherever he is, what- 
 ever lot betides, the same high genial enthu- 
 siasm warms him, the same unfaltering purpose 
 sustains and fortifies his soul. 
 
 In the course of his excursions, Audubon 
 was among the first to explore those rich West- 
 
John James Audubon i6i 
 
 ern Territories, which have since become pop- 
 ulous States, and the homes of an enterprising 
 civilization. It was only a little while before 
 his visit that Lewis and Clarke, under the auspices 
 and at the expense of the Federal Government, 
 had succeeded in penetrating the forests and 
 wastes of the great Northwest (1805-7). With 
 some of the members of their party he made 
 acquaintance, and from them he doubtless 
 learned a great deal as to the various trails of 
 the wilds, the methods of reaching them and of 
 overcoming their difficulties. He was, indeed, 
 only a few steps behind the famous Daniel 
 Boone, the greatest of Indian fighters, at a time 
 when Kentucky was called " the dark and 
 bloody ground," and a pioneer of the advanc- 
 ing settlers, seemingly against his will, as he is 
 reported to have complained that a county was 
 always too thickly settled when there was a 
 neighbor within twenty miles. Audubon met 
 with Boone many times, when they had long 
 and serious talks of their respective adventures 
 in the woods (18 12). 
 
 Some of these Audubon tells us with great 
 vivacity in his books. At one time, when he 
 was returning home across the barrens of Ken- 
 tucky, he remarked a sudden and strange dark- 
 ness in the western horizon. He supposed 
 
1 62 John James Audubon 
 
 at first it might be a coming storm of thunder 
 and rain, as he heard the rumbhng of what 
 seemed a violent tornado. He spurred his 
 horse, with the view of galloping to some place 
 of shelter, when the animal, more sagacious 
 than his rider, refused to go on, or rather put 
 his feet slowly one before the other, as if he 
 were feeling his way upon a smooth bit of ice. 
 He dismounted, when his steed fell to groaning, 
 piteously ; all the shrubs and trees began to 
 move from their very roots, and the ground 
 rose and sank in successive furrows. It was an 
 earthquake ; one, as he afterwards ascertained, 
 that spread over the whole State of Kentucky, 
 and lasted, at intervals, for nearly two weeks. 
 " Who can describe," he says, " the sensation I 
 experienced, when rocking on my horse and 
 moved to and fro like a child in the cradle, and 
 expecting the ground eVery moment to open 
 into an abyss that would engulf me and all 
 around ? " Again, after fording a creek and 
 about entering upon some bottom lands, he dis- 
 covered a heavy thickness in the atmos- 
 phere and apprehended another earthquake ; 
 but his horse did not stop as before, or ex- 
 hibit any particular degree of trepidation. In 
 a moment a light breeze began to agitate the 
 taller trees, which gradually increased till 
 
John James Audubon 163 
 
 branches and twigs were whirled away, and the 
 entire forest was in fearful commotion. The no- 
 blest trunks, unable to stand before the blast, were 
 torn up by the roots and rent in pieces. " Never 
 can I forget the scene presented to me at that 
 moment, when everything seemed to be writh- 
 ing in the wind, and masses of branches, twigs, 
 trunks, foliage, and dust moved through the air 
 with extreme velocity and left nothing behind 
 but broken stumps and heaps of shapeless ruins." 
 It was one of those cyclones — the first to be 
 described, I think — which have so frequently 
 since produced havoc and death in our Western 
 States. It is strange to say that in the midst 
 of all the dangers he encountered, he was but 
 once exposed to direct assassination. It was on 
 a prairie, in a log cabin where he had stopped 
 for the night, occupied by a hideous-looking 
 old hag of a woman, who took a fancy to his 
 watch, and wanted two stalwart sons, who came 
 in later, to butcher him as he slept. They 
 were willing enough to do the deed, but catch- 
 ing sight of his whisky-flask, delayed it long 
 enough to get themselves pretty drunk, when 
 opportunely two belated travelers came in and 
 saved the victim. As only " regulator law " was 
 acknowledged on the prairies in those days, it 
 is remarked that miscreants arrested for crimes 
 
164 John James Audubon 
 
 were not always hung or killed on the spot, 
 but taken enth-ely naked to some nettle- swamp, 
 where they were tied and allowed to make 
 their escape as they could. 
 
 But neither hurricanes, earthquakes, nor In- 
 dian massacre ever gave him as much pain 
 as a couple of Norway rats, who had made 
 their home in his papers once. Before one of 
 his departures, he had carefully placed his draw- 
 ings in a wooden box, and handed it over 
 to a friend for safe-keeping. His absence lasted 
 for several months, and when he returned he 
 naturally inquired for the box, which contained 
 what " he was pleased to call his treasures." 
 The box was produced and opened, but, " Oh, 
 reader ! " he exclaims, " feel for me ; a pair 
 of hungry rats had taken possession of the 
 whole and reared a young family among the 
 gnawed bits of paper, which a few months be- 
 fore had represented more than a thousand 
 inhabitants of the air." "The burning heat," 
 says the noble-hearted sufferer, " which instantly 
 rushed through my brain was too great to be 
 endured, without affecting the whole of my nerv- 
 ous system. I slept not for several nights, and 
 the days passed like days of oblivion, until the 
 animal powers were recalled into action through 
 the strength of my constitution. I took up my 
 
John James Audubon 165 
 
 gun, my note-book and my pencils, and went 
 forth to the woods as gayly as if nothing had 
 happened." 
 
 Audubon's main object at the outset seems 
 to have been simply to gratify his taste in the 
 capture and drawing of birds ; but once, while in 
 Louisville (1810), he had the good fortune to en- 
 counter Alexander Wilson, the Paisley weaver, 
 as he was called, but who was no less an orni- 
 thologist and a poet, — and his predecessor in 
 what was destined to become the great work of 
 his life. Wilson came into his room by chance 
 to solicit a subscription for an illustrated book 
 on the birds of America, and the sight of those 
 illustrations seems to have awakened his ambi- 
 tion to realize his early dreams. It is not known 
 precisely when he conceived his design of a work 
 which should surpass Wilson's, but the compari- 
 son of his own drawings with those of the Scotch 
 genius set him seriously to thinking, and his 
 labors thereafter had a higher purpose than the 
 gratification of the dilettant. At any rate, from 
 this time his excursions into the woods were defi- 
 nitely aimed at the gathering of materials for 
 a great book, such as he afterwards achieved. 
 But he encountered one most formidable em- 
 barrassment : the want of means for the support 
 of his family. As, with characteristic generosity. 
 
1 66 John James Audubon 
 
 he had surrendered the estate in France be- 
 queathed to him by his father to his sisters; 
 while his other property was rendered entirely 
 unproductive by the Continental wars of Napo- 
 leon, and, after 1 8 1 2, by our war with England ; 
 he was left to begin his great life work without 
 a penny in his pockets. His only recourse was 
 to utilize his accomplishments, by teaching lan- 
 guages, music, drawing, and even dancing to the 
 young men and maidens of the river towns along 
 the banks of the Mississippi. In this strait his 
 wife was a great help to him, as the head of a 
 school which she established at Bayou Sara. As 
 most of the towns on the frontier were nests of 
 gamblers and horse thieves, neither of them found 
 their occupations very remunerative, and it was 
 not until he added to his repertoire the talent of 
 portrait painting, that he was able to put aside 
 something toward the expenses of his journeys in 
 the wilderness. During one of his visits to New 
 Orleans he encountered the artists Jarvis and 
 Vanderlyn, who gave him hints as to the use of 
 oils, but not much assistance otherwise. He was 
 indebted for greater services to a German painter 
 named Stein, who instructed him in the com- 
 position of colors and the handling of the brush. 
 His crude chalks and charcoals were then dis- 
 carded for paint, and it was not long before he 
 
John James Audubon 167 
 
 was in considerable demand as a portrayer of 
 physiognomy. Even with this assistance he was 
 often reduced to such a tenuity in purse that he 
 was compelled, when he wanted a new pair of 
 shoes, or a suit of Society clothing, or a belt and 
 ammunition, to acquire it by rendering the hand- 
 some features of the dealer, or of his wife and 
 daughters, on canvas. He was once offered a job 
 at scene painting at the theatre at New Orleans, 
 which he declined; but at another time he did 
 not decline to decorate the panels of a steamboat 
 with scenes from the shores of the Mississippi. 
 His hardest trial in these efforts was, perhaps, the 
 teaching of a dancing school near Natchez, when 
 he both played the violin and set the steps, but 
 not being familiar with " figures," got into some 
 deplorable entanglements of the sexes. For a 
 short time he was the superintendent of a museum 
 in Cincinnati, where he gained little or nothing, 
 although he incurred liabilities for debts for which 
 he was afterwards prosecuted and compelled to 
 borrow money to escape arrest. 
 
 It was about this time (1824) that he visited 
 Philadelphia, where Sully, the artist, approved his 
 work, and he met with the Prince of Musignano, 
 son of Lucien and nephew of Napoleon Buona- 
 parte, — himself a naturalist, engaged on a book of 
 American birds, — who highly commended what he 
 
1 68 John James Audubon 
 
 had done, and advised him to take it to Europe. 
 But Lawson, the engraver of Wilson's plates, said 
 that it was almost impossible to engrave his, 
 which doused him, not merely with cold water, 
 as he remarks, but with a whole pailful of the 
 iciest ice. Rembrandt Peale, an artist of some dis- 
 tinction, and the father of artist sons, to whom 
 he gave successively the names of Tician, Raphael, 
 and others of the Italian school, encouraged him 
 in his despondency, and he recovered confidence 
 to go back to the West to resume his wander- 
 ings in the wilds. 
 
 Audubon's first visit to England was, under 
 the circumstances, as audacious and hopeless 
 an enterprise as ever entered into the head of 
 any sanguine speculator. His friends, with the 
 exception of his wife and children, to their 
 credit be it spoken, regarded the whole scheme 
 as crack-brained and hopeless. What he pro- 
 posed to himself in thus going to a foreign 
 land, where he knew not a soul and was utterly 
 unknown, with scarcely a penny in his pocket 
 and no patrons to fall back upon, was the publica- 
 tion of a work which would require the services 
 of the most eminent engravers and colorists, 
 and of a courageous publisher when publishers 
 were few. It was estimated that the book 
 would cost at the least no less than one hun- 
 
John James Audubon 169 
 
 dred thousand dollars, to be raised by sub- 
 scription of a thousand dollars each. This work 
 was to be executed, both as to the figures 
 and the letter-press, on a scale of magnificence 
 scarcely before attempted by any individual, and 
 only by governments having unlimited means at 
 command. What his enthusiasm for his pro- 
 ject must have been, and his confidence in the 
 merits of his drawings and in his own energies, 
 it is hard for an indifferent spectator to con- 
 ceive. 
 
 He set sail from New Orleans on the 26th of 
 April, 1826, and after a voyage of three months 
 landed at Liverpool July 20th. But as the 
 vessel in which he sailed approached the shores 
 of Albion, his ardor seems to have deserted 
 him for a moment, and he fell into a despon- 
 dency which almost turned him homeward. All 
 that he had to rely upon in the way of assist- 
 ance was a letter from one Vincent Nolte to 
 a Mr. Rathbone, of Liverpool, and letters from 
 Sully to Gilbert Stuart and Washington All- 
 ston, American artists, then in London. Even 
 with these helps his prospects seemed to him 
 so precarious that he often wished himself back 
 in the woods or in the arms of his faithful 
 Lucy. He was, however, at once cordially re- 
 ceived by Mr. Rathbone, who was delighted 
 
170 John James Audubon 
 
 with his ways, and introduced him to Mr. 
 Roscoe — a merchant of literary tastes, whom 
 Irving has celebrated — and to Lord Stanley, 
 "a tall, raw-boned Scotchman, with frank and 
 agreeable manners," who took a great interest 
 in his schemes. By these gentlemen he was 
 also furnished with letters to Sir Walter Scott, 
 Sir Humphrey Davy, Sir Thomas Lawrence, 
 Hannah More, Miss Edgeworth, and many 
 other notable persons who were afterwards of 
 use to him. An exhibition of his birds at 
 Liverpool netted him some five hundred dol- 
 lars, with which he went to Manchester, where 
 he failed, and then to Edinburgh where he was 
 far more successful. At Edinburgh he was taken 
 in hand by Professors Jamieson, Selby arid Swain- 
 son, Dr. Knox, Dr. Waitt ; McCuUough, Professor 
 of Political Economy; Francis Jeifrey, Andrew 
 Combe, Sir Walter Scott, Sir William Jardine, and, 
 most effective of all, Christopher North of the 
 famous Nodes Ambrosiana. His pictures were not 
 only exhibited but he was made a member of 
 several of the learned associations, invited to 
 the dinners and receptions of the most promi- 
 nent circles, and by his appearance — for he still 
 adhered to his long hair and backwoodsman 
 dress — he attracted the stare of the streets. 
 Titled ladies solicited his presence at their 
 
John James Audubon 171 
 
 houses as an oddity, which he did not much 
 like. Their manners he thought haughty and 
 pretentious, and by no means as gracious as he 
 had expected. He was much more pleased with 
 those of Miss O'Neil, the actress, and of the 
 company she had brought together for his en- 
 tertainment, consisting mainly of actors and 
 musicians. He visited Mrs. Grant, of Laggun; 
 talked with Lady Mary Clark, aged eighty-two, 
 who had known Wolfe and Montgomery ; heard 
 Sydney Smith preach, whose " deep seriousness 
 and fervor " he praises, and saw Sir Edwin 
 Landseer's pictures of animals, which he criti- 
 cises with severity " as animals of the cabinet 
 and not of the woods." Captain Basil Hall, 
 who afterwards dissected " American manners " 
 with a pitchfork, became his especial friend ; 
 but no one adopted him more heartily than 
 Christopher North, who wrote about him in 
 the newpapers and in Blackwood, and com- 
 mended his exhibition in the highest terms. 
 " The hearts of all who are capable of con- 
 ceiving the dangers, difSculties and sacrifices he 
 must have encountered and overcome before 
 his genius could embody these innumerable 
 triumphs ' warm towards him.' " " The man 
 himself," Wilson added, " is full of intelligence 
 and fine enthusiasm, and most interesting in 
 
172 John James Audubon 
 
 his looks and manners — a perfect gentleman, 
 and esteemed by all who know him for the 
 simplicity and frankness of his nature. In his 
 own walk he is the greatest artist that ever 
 lived." 
 
 Hisexhibition in Edinburgh, consisting of some 
 four hundred drawings, painted in water colors, 
 and including no less than two thousand figures, 
 covered the walls of Institution Hall in the Royal 
 Society Building (1827), "and the effect," wrote 
 John Wilson, in a later number of Blackwood, 
 " was like magic. The spectator imagined him- 
 self in the forest. All were of the size of life, from 
 the wren and the humming-bird to the wild 
 turkey and the Bird of Washington. But what 
 signified the mere size ? The colors were all of 
 life, too — bright as when borne in beaming beauty 
 through the woods. There, too, were their atti- 
 tudes and postures, infinite as they are assumed 
 by the restless creatures, in motion or rest, in 
 their glees and their gambols, their loves and 
 their wars, singing or caressing, or brooding 
 or preying, or tearing one another to pieces. 
 The trees, too, in which they sat or sported, all 
 true to nature, in body, branch, spray and leaf; 
 the flowering shrubs and the ground-flowers, the 
 weeds and the very grass — all American — so, too, 
 the atmosphere and the skies — all transatlantic. 
 
John James Audubon 173 
 
 It was a wild and poetical vision of the heart of 
 the New World, inhabited as yet almost wholly 
 by the lovely or noble creatures that 'own 
 not man's dominion.' There many a fantastic 
 tumbler played his strange vagaries in the air; 
 there many a cloud-cleaver swept the skies ; there 
 living gleams glanced through the forest glades ; 
 there meteor-like plumage shone in the wood- 
 gloom ; there strange shapes stalked stately along 
 the shell-bright shore ; and there, halcyons all, 
 fair floaters hung in the sunshine on waveless 
 seas. That all this wonderful creation should 
 have been the unassisted work of one man in his 
 own country, wholly unbefriended, was a thought 
 that woke towards the American woodsman feel- 
 ings of more than admiration, of the deepest 
 personal interest."* 
 
 As a consequence of this favorable apprecia- 
 tion, Audubon succeeded in getting a publisher 
 for his " Birds of America," a Mr. Lizard. On 
 the 19th of November he wrote in his journal, 
 " Saw to-day the firstproof of the first engraving 
 of my 'American Birds,' and was much pleased 
 with my appearance ; " and, again, December 
 loth, he wrote, " My success in Edinburgh borders 
 on the miraculous. My book is to be published 
 
 * Blackwood^ s Edinburgh Magazine, 183 1. 
 
174 John James Audubon 
 
 in numbers, containing four birds in each, the 
 size of life, in a style surpassing any now existing, 
 at two guineas a number. The engravings are 
 truly beautiful." How many subscriptions he 
 obtained in Scotland is not noted, but he was 
 sufficiently encouraged by them to turn his 
 attention to the larger and more opulent field of 
 London (1827). 
 
 In London, fortified by the approvals of Sir 
 Walter Scott, Sir David Brewster and others, he 
 was cordially received by Albert Gallatin, the 
 American Minister ; by Sir Thomas Lawrence, the 
 idolized portrait painter of Great Britain ; by 
 Charles Bonaparte ; by J. P. Children, of the 
 British Museum, and many others. He thinks it 
 worth while to mention that his book was " pre- 
 sented to his Majesty, the King, who was pleased 
 to call it fine, and permitted its publication under 
 his particular patronage, approbation and protec- 
 tion." He adds, "The Duchess of Clarence put 
 down her name as a subscriber, and all my friends 
 speak as if a mountain of sovereigns had dropped 
 in an ample purse — and for me." By November, 
 1828, eleven numbers of the book had appeared, 
 containing more than one hundred plates. 
 
 The truth is that Audubon led two lives while 
 in England: a pubhc life, in which he shook hands 
 with princes, lords and ladies, and hobnobbed 
 
John James Audubon 175 
 
 with men of science and celebrity ; and a private 
 life, in which, after working from sunrise to sun- 
 set in painting what are called pot-boilers, he 
 spent the evening in threading the slums and 
 alleys to find buyers for them among the Jews 
 and other dealers. "What came in from sub- 
 scriptions and shows was religiously reserved for 
 the great work," and only what he picked up in 
 the shops was used for his support. He alludes 
 to these contrasted experiences in his journal 
 thus : " I am feted, feasted and elected to socie- 
 ties ; it is Mr. Audubon here and Mr. Audubon 
 there, and I only hope Mr. Audubon will not be 
 made a conceited fool at last." Then, again, 
 "Snowing and blowing as if the devil had cut 
 the strings of the bags of Eolus ; what crowds 
 of poverty-stricken idlers, whose sallow faces and 
 ragged garments tell of hunger and hardship — all 
 worse off than the slaves of Louisiana — and in 
 their homes I find artists, men of talent, who get 
 but a scanty meal a day and send their children 
 forth to beg. Oh ! " he exclaims, after describing 
 a painful case of this kind, " oh, that I were in my 
 dear backwoods again ! " 
 
 From London Audubon proceeded to Paris, 
 where other trials as well as other honors 
 awaited him. Paris, in 1828, was still the old 
 Paris of half-paved dirty streets, \yithput §ide^ 
 
176 John James Audubon 
 
 walks, but with filthy gutters in the centre, 
 where carriages, carts, goats, and pedestrians 
 splashed their way, while by night they were 
 lighted by sputtering oil-lamps hanging on ropes. 
 He complains bitterly of the trouble he had in 
 getting about in his visits to patrons. The 
 famous Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint- Hilaire, though 
 rivals in other respects, were harmonious in the 
 attentions they paid him. Cuvier said that his 
 paintings " were the most magnificent monu- 
 ment that art had ever raised to ornithology," 
 and read a paper on them to the Institute — of 
 which Audubon was made a member, — while St. 
 Hilaire helped him, in many ways, with his sub- 
 scriptions. Among others to whom Audubon 
 was sent, a year or two later, was the great 
 world-known banker, Rothschild, who was sup- 
 posed to be rich enough to pave his walks with 
 gold, and not miss it from his strong-box. The 
 poor artist presented his letter, and was met by 
 the question, " Sir, is this a letter of business, 
 or a letter of introduction ? " Audubon, as he 
 had not read it, could not say ; then the baron 
 opened it, read and remarked, " This is a letter 
 of introduction, and seems to call for my sub- 
 scription to some book or other. I never sign 
 my name to any subscription list, but you may 
 send in your work and I will pay for a copy 
 
John James Audubon ' 177 
 
 of it." Audubon retired, boiling with rage, but 
 he sent in the book, with an account, when the 
 baron exclaimed to the messenger, " What, a 
 hundred pounds for birds ! I will give you five 
 pounds and not a farthing more." And so the 
 book went back to the publisher's shop. France 
 was at that time poor, in consequence of the 
 exhaustions of war, but still had men of less 
 wealth, but finer taste and larger heart than the 
 money-god, who liberally furthered a work, to 
 which Audubon had given such unparalleled 
 diligence and ability. 
 
 Audubon returned to New York in 1830, 
 where he renewed his intimacy with his old 
 friends, Mitchell, McKay, Irving, and others, and 
 then set off" for the great pine swamps and 
 forests of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, spending 
 several weeks in them ; then skirted the coasts 
 of Virginia and the Carolinas, and finally 
 pitched his headquarters among the everglades 
 of Florida. There he made himself at home 
 among the alligators and turtles of the rivers, 
 while he lived with the " Live-Oakers," wood- 
 cutters, or the tortoise-catchers, or joined in the 
 sports of the deer-hunters ; made acquaintance 
 with the coral seekers, whom he found to be 
 a better sort of folks than they are reputed 
 to be ; and caught glimpses of the pirates of the 
 
178 John James Audubon 
 
 Gulf. Having satisfied his curiosity, and finished 
 his drawings, he next set his face towards a 
 different region entirely — the far North. For 
 nearly two years he was traversing the vast 
 pine woods of Maine and New Brunswick, a 
 part of Canada, and the bays and river-mouths 
 of ice-bound Labrador. He became as familiar 
 with the lumbermen, the eggers, and the bear- 
 hunters of these far, far regions, and with the 
 salmon, cod, and seal-fishers of the Bay of 
 Fundy and the Gut of Canso as he had been 
 with the squatters of the prairies or the turtlers 
 of the Tortugas, and he painted and described 
 them all with the same graphic pencil and pen. 
 The object of these new wanderings was to 
 gather matter for a new book, which he had 
 begun in 1828, and which he called the "Or- 
 nithological Biography; or, An Account of 
 the Birds of the United States of America, ac- 
 companied by a description of the objects 
 represented in a work entitled 'The B'rds of 
 America.' " The earlier book, in folio, had been 
 extended to five volumes, containing some 448 
 plates and more than a thousand figures, life- 
 size, in lithographic colors (Edinburgh, 183 1 - 
 1839),* but he was not yet satisfied with what he 
 
 * A cheaper edition in imperial quarto was issued more 
 lately in 1844. 
 
John James Audubon 179 
 
 had done. A faithful portrayal or transcript of 
 the form and plumage of his aerial friends was not 
 all that he desired to accomplish — as if they had 
 no lives of their own and no relation to the rest 
 of Nature, sitting forever alone and melancholy, 
 like the stock-dove of the poet, and brooding 
 over their own sweet notes. He wished to 
 describe them in their natural locahties and habi- 
 tudes, as he had seen them for years in their 
 sequestered homes. Knowing how they made 
 love, mated, and reared their young; how each 
 one had its individualities of character and cus- 
 tom; how its postures and motions and migra- 
 tions were as much a part of its history as its 
 structure and hue ; and how the food it fed upon, 
 as well as the trees on which it built, were 
 important elements in the knowledge of it — he 
 now strove to write of them in their peculiar 
 characteristics and ways. He helped out his pic- 
 tures by his letterpress, and his letterpress by 
 his pictures, and by the combination of the two 
 made us entirely familiar with the intimate being 
 of his favorites. The work was accomplished in 
 six volumes, three of plates and three of descrip- 
 tions, and formed a whole that has not been 
 surpassed as a source of mingled instruction and 
 interest. 
 
 Audubon made no less than six voyages to 
 
i8o John James Audubon 
 
 Europe in the prosecution of his many designs, 
 while he employed the intervals in gathering 
 new resources from the woods. He was enabled, 
 however, to find a sort of permanent home in 
 New York about the year 1838, and shortly 
 after his settlement there, — in 1842,1 think, — he 
 was in the habit of dropping into the office of 
 the Evening Post, to have a chat with Mr. Bry- 
 ant, the poet, whose congenial love of nature had 
 attracted the naturalist, so that they soon became 
 warm friends. Audubon's narratives of his excit- 
 ing adventures in the woods, and of the eminent 
 persons that he had seen, were exceedingly 
 pleasant. He was fond of talk, and the enthu- 
 siasm with which he regarded anything that 
 pertained to his life-long pursuit gave an unusual 
 animation to what he said. He spoke, of course, 
 a great deal of himself, but never in the way of 
 egotism or boasting. If he had occasion to tell 
 of any extraordinary, or seemingly miraculous, 
 exploit, it was in the most modest terms and as 
 if anybody might have accomplished it with ease. 
 During one of these interviews he kindly in- 
 vited me to his house, and I accepted the invi- 
 tation with eagerness. Accordingly, one beautiful 
 Sunday morning, I directed my steps through 
 the outskirts of the city to an unfrequented road 
 which led me past suburban houses, pleasantly 
 
John James Audubon i8i 
 
 rising amid their green groves, and along the 
 banks of the Hudson. A sacred silence was 
 brooding everywhere, as if nature, sympathizing 
 with the solemn offices of the day, had conse- 
 crated an hour to meditation and rest. Behind 
 me lay the town, with its masses of perpetual 
 unquiet life; before me, the sloops, with their 
 white wings floating lazily on the surface of the 
 stream ; while all around were the green fields 
 and the cheering sunshine. Those squads of 
 boisterous strollers who usually select Sunday 
 for the invasion of the sylvan solitudes, were not 
 yet abroad ; and only the insects, with their small 
 hum, or the birds, with their sweet morning 
 hymns, seemed to be alive in the midst of the 
 infinite repose. 
 
 After wandering for some hours, I turned 
 into a rustic road which led directly down to- 
 wards the river. A noble forest was planted 
 on one side of it, and on the other vast grain- 
 fields lay laughing in the sun, or listening to 
 the complacent murmur of a brook that stole 
 along in the midst of clumps of bushes and wild 
 briars. About the half-worn path groups of 
 cattle loitered, some cropping the young grass 
 and others looking contemplatively towards the 
 distant shine of the stream, which flashed through 
 the vista of trees in molten bands of silver. It 
 
1 82 John James Audubon 
 
 was such a scene as Cuyp or Paul Potter would 
 have loved to paint, if the native country of 
 those artists had ever furnished them with so 
 lovely and glorious a subject. 
 
 But my walk soon brought a secluded coun- 
 try - house into view, a house not entirely 
 adapted to the nature of the scenery, yet 
 simple and unpretending in its architecture, and 
 beautifully embowered amid elms and oaks. 
 Several graceful fawns, and a noble elk, were 
 stalking in the shade of the trees, apparently un- 
 conscious of the presence of a few dogs, and 
 not caring for the numerous turkeys, geese, 
 and other domestic animals that gobbled and 
 screamed around them. Nor did my own ap- 
 proach startle the wild, beautiful creatures that 
 seemed as docile as any of their tame com- 
 panions. 
 
 " Is the master at home ? " I asked of a 
 pretty maid-servant who answered my tap at 
 the door, and who after informing me that he 
 was, led me into a room on the left side of the 
 broad hall. It was not, however, a parlor, or 
 an ordinary reception-room that I entered, but 
 evidently a room for work. In one corner 
 stood a painter's easel, with a half-finished 
 sketch of a beaver on the paper ; in the other 
 lay the skin of an American panther. The 
 
John James Audubon 183 
 
 antlers of elks hung upon the walls ; stuffed 
 birds of every description of gay plumage or- 
 namented the mantelpiece ; and exquisite draw- 
 ings of field-mice, orioles, and woodpeckers were 
 scattered promiscuously in other parts of the 
 room, across one end of which a long rude 
 table was stretched to hold artist materials, 
 scraps of drawing-paper, and immense folio vol- 
 umes, filled with delicious paintings of birds 
 taken in their native haunts. 
 
 This, said I to myself, is the studio of the 
 naturalist, but hardly had the thought escaped 
 me when the master himself made his appear- 
 ance. He was a tall, thin man, with a high, 
 arched and serene forehead, and a bright pene- 
 trating gray ej^e ; his white locks fell in clusters 
 upon his shoulders, but were the only signs of 
 age, for his form was erect, and his step as 
 light as that of a deer. The expression of his 
 face was sharp, but noble and commanding, and 
 there was something in it, partly derived from 
 the aquiline nose and partly from the shutting 
 of the mouth, which made you think of the im- 
 perial eagle. 
 
 His greeting, as he entered, was at once frank 
 and cordial, and showed you the sincere, true 
 man. " How kind it is," he said, with a slight 
 French accent, and in a pensive tone, " to come 
 
1 84 John James Audubon 
 
 to see me ; and how wise, too, to leave that 
 crazy city ! " He then shook me warmly by the 
 hand. "Do you know," he continued, "how I 
 wonder that men can consent to swelter and fret 
 their lives away amid those hot bricks and pesti- 
 lent vapors, when the woods and fields are ail so 
 near ? It would kill me soon to be confined in 
 such a prison-house ; and when I am forced to 
 make an occasional visit there, it fills me with 
 loathing and sadness. Ah ! how often, when I 
 have been abroad on the mountains, has my heart 
 risen in grateful praise to God that it was not my 
 destiny to waste and pine among these noisome 
 congregations of the city." 
 
 It was curious to observe the influence which 
 his life had exerted upon the mind and character 
 of Audubon. Withdrawing him from the con- 
 ventionalities and cares of a more social condition, 
 he always retained the fresh, spontaneous, elastic 
 manner of a child, yet his constant and deep 
 converse with the thoughtful mysteries of nature 
 had imparted to him also the reflective wisdom 
 of the sage. Whatever came into his mind he 
 uttered with delightful unreserve and naivete; 
 but those utterances at the same time bore marks 
 of keen, original insight and of the deepest knowl- 
 edge. Thus, he knew nothing of the theology of 
 the schools, and cared as little for it, because the 
 
John James Audubon 185 
 
 untaught theology of the woods had filled his 
 mind with a nobler sense of God than the school- 
 men had ever dreamed ; he knew, too, nothing 
 of our politics, and cared nothing for them, be- 
 cause to his simple integrity they seemed only 
 frivolous and vain debates about rights that none 
 disputed and duties that all fulfilled; and his 
 reading, confined, I suspect, mainly to the neces- 
 sary literature of his profession, was neither ex- 
 tensive nor choice, because he found in his own 
 activity, earnestness and invention a fountain- 
 head of literature abundantly able to supply all 
 his intellectual and spiritual wants. The heroism 
 and poetry of his own life gave him no occasion 
 to learn the heroism and poetry of others ; yet 
 his apparent neglect of the " humanities " had 
 wrought no hardening or vulgarizing effect upon 
 his nature, for his sympathies were always the 
 most delicate, and his manners soft, gentle and 
 refined. 
 
 It was impossible, in turning over the leaves 
 of his large book, or in looking at the collection 
 which he exhibited at the Lyceum Hall, not to 
 imbibe some of his own enthusiasm for birds. 
 One was made to feel that they were in some 
 way nearer to our affections than any of the 
 other animal tribes. Other animals are either in- 
 different or inimical to us, or else mere " servile 
 
1 86 John James Audubon 
 
 ministers," while birds are, for the most part, 
 objects of admiration. Nobody but a born spe- 
 cialist ever likes insects or reptiles; fishes have 
 always an unutterably stupid or unsentimental 
 look, and deserve to be caught out of the dull 
 element in which they live, to die in ecstacies 
 in the oxygen of air ; wild beasts, though some- 
 times savagely grand and majestic, excite terror, 
 while tame beasts, which we subjugate, we are 
 apt to despise ; but birds win their way to our 
 hearts and imaginations by a thousand charms. 
 They are mostly lovely in form, brilliant in color, 
 and seductively pleasing in their motions. They 
 have such canny and knowing eyes, and they 
 lead such free, joyous, melodious lives of love. 
 Their swift and graceful evolutions, whether alone 
 or in flocks ; now darting like arrows to the very 
 gates of heaven, or outspeeding the wind as it 
 curls the white caps of the sea, or anon gather- 
 ing for their far-off flights to unknown lands — 
 awaken our aspirations as well as our thoughts, 
 and beget a profound interest in their mysterious 
 destinies ; while their varied songs, profuse, spark- 
 ling, sympathetic, and glorious, are the richest and 
 tenderest of nature's voices. Among the recol- 
 lections of our childhood, those of the birds we 
 have fed and cherished are often the dearest ; and 
 in maturer years the memory of the country 
 
John James Audubon 187 
 
 home in which we were reared, the woods in 
 which we wandered, the fields and forests where 
 we weekly worshiped, is the greener and 
 sweeter for the birds. Thus they are associated 
 with the most charming features of the external 
 world, and breathe a spell over the interior world 
 of thought. They are the poetry of nature, and 
 a pervading presence in poetry; and it is no 
 wonder that since the time Aristophanes made 
 them the vehicle for his immortal pen, the poets- 
 laureate — Shakespeare, Burns, Keats, Shelley, 
 Bryant, and Wordsworth — have found in them 
 the sources of their liveliest inspirations. 
 
 In spite of the happiness of his home and of 
 his surroundings in New York, Audubon was 
 hankering secretly to be off in the woods again. 
 His main hope was that he might be called to 
 join some governmental scientific expedition to 
 the extreme West, and so renew his intercourse 
 with the denizens of the wilds. In this view he 
 had been to Washington several times, where he 
 made the acquaintance of General Jackson, whom 
 he was said to resemble, Martin Van Buren, Lewis 
 Cass, Levi Woodbury, Benjamin F. Butler, and 
 of other officers connected with the Federal Ad- 
 ministration, and of Daniel Webster, J. C. Cal- 
 houn, Henry Clay, and others of the Senate and 
 House of Representatives. He was successful in 
 
1 88 John James Audubon 
 
 his aims so far that he was permitted to sail on 
 the cutter which was engaged in the exploration 
 of the Gulf of Mexico, and on which he visited the 
 islands and bays about Galveston, Baratraria, and, 
 in fact, the greater part of the Mexican and Texan 
 coast. Texas was at that time a separate Repub- 
 lic, under the Presidency of Sam Houston, having 
 just declared her independence of Mexico, but in 
 a rather rude and chaotic condition as yet. The 
 abode of Houston was a small log cabin, consist- 
 ing of two rooms, with a great wood fire in one 
 of them and a table heaped with papers, while 
 the floor was not only muddy but filthy, and 
 strewn about with trunks, camp-beds and mili- 
 tary accoutrements. Houston himself, a tall, 
 strong-proportioned man, with a rather scowling 
 face, and dressed in a large gray felt hat, a fancy 
 velvet coat, trousers trimmed with broad gold 
 lace, and a huge cravat. He was hospitable 
 enough to ask his visitors " to take a drink of 
 grog," and to promise whatever assistance he 
 could give. Around the headquarters was a 
 melee of Indians and blackguards of all kinds and 
 aspects. Audubon was delighted with his acqui- 
 sition of pelicans, cormorants, and several new 
 animals, and, after another trip to England to 
 prepare the fourth volume of his " Ornithologic 
 Biography," returned to New York, where he 
 
John James Audubon 189 
 
 settled his family for the rest of his life. But 
 he had long cherished the desire for himself 
 to visit the great plains of the extreme Northwest 
 and the Rocky Mountains, which he accompUshed 
 a few years later (1843). 
 
 When Audubon had completed his ornitho- 
 logical labors, he projected, in connection with 
 his friend. Dr. Bachman, the geologist, a work 
 of similar character, on " The Quadrupeds of 
 America." Indeed, he had already, in his pre- 
 vious wanderings, accumulated a large mass of 
 materials which would have helped him in his 
 design. But, after one or two visits to some of 
 his old haunts, the approach of age — he was then 
 near seventy — induced his friends to persuade 
 him to relinquish the more toilsome and hazard- 
 ous expeditions. A large part of the work was 
 consequently given over to Dr. Bachman and his 
 own two sons, who had inherited much of his 
 talent, both as observers and colorists. Before the 
 work was completed his over-wrought constitution 
 began to fail. His powers of execution and of 
 endurance showed signs of exhaustion ; the bril- 
 liant eye could no longer inspect the minute and 
 delicate organs of the smaller animals, and the 
 once firm hand trembled as it traced its lines. 
 He was at length confined to his house, and we 
 are told that a last bright gleam stole over his 
 
190 John James Audubon 
 
 features when, a few hours before his death, sitting 
 in his chair, he was shown one of his earliest 
 drawings. He died on the 27th of January, 185 1, 
 sinking gently to rest as a child who composes 
 himself to a beautiful sleep. 
 
 In writing of his decease, in 1853, I said 
 " that his countrymen had made too little of 
 his death. It is not, perhaps, to be expected 
 that the multitude, who knew little or nothing 
 of his services, should pay him their tributes of 
 gratitude and respect, but it was to be expected 
 that our scientific societies and artistic associa- 
 tions should at least propose a monument to 
 one who was so rare an ornament of both. 
 Yet if they have been neglectful, there are 
 those who will not be, and who will long cause 
 his name to be remembered. In the failure of 
 human memorials, the little wren will whisper 
 his name about our homesteads, the robin and 
 reedbird pipe it from the meadows, the ring- 
 dove coo it from the dewey depths of the 
 woods, and the imperial eagle, on the mountain - 
 top, scream it to the stars." It has since turned 
 out, however, that his fellow-men have not wholly 
 forgotten him. Thirty-six years after his death, 
 in August, 1887, at a meeting of the New York 
 Academy of Sciences, a movement was begun 
 for the proper honoring of his memory, which, 
 
John James Audubon 19 j 
 
 under the auspices and active efforts of Profes- 
 sors Martin, Eggleston, Britton, and others, cul- 
 minated in the placing of a runic cross over his 
 grave, bearing the name of Audubon, April 26, 
 A. D. 1893, with figures of his favorite birds and 
 animals sculptured on its sides. It was properly 
 assigned to Trinity Cemetery, which adjoined the 
 home of his later years, and at the foot of what 
 is now called Audubon Avenue. Nor was it 
 unfitting that the care of it was given to that 
 great religious corporation. Trinity Church, which 
 had already in its keeping the ashes of Alex- 
 ander Hamilton, of -Albert Gallatin, of Commo- 
 dore James Lawrence, of William Bradford, of 
 Robert Emmet and Dr. McNeven, of General 
 Montgomery, of George Frederick Cooke and of 
 the Martyrs of the Jersey Prison Ships; a mingled 
 assembly, all alike worthy, though not equally 
 distinguished for services rendered humanity. 
 This recognition of Audubon was late, but all the 
 more honorable in that it bears witness of the 
 fact that Time, which rapidly obliterates the 
 highest and the fairest fames, has yet a corner 
 on its tablets which it does not always touch 
 with its winnowing wings, or touches only to 
 waft away the gathered dust, and render the 
 record more bright and clear. 
 
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 
 
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT* 
 
 Mr. Chairman, and Ladies and Gentlemen: 
 
 It is only a few weeks since I visited the 
 mountainous part of Massachusetts which is in- 
 cluded in Hampshire county, and in a hollow 
 of whose hills lies the little town of Cumming- 
 ton. It is a region of varied grandeur and 
 beauty. From the high places, elevated some 
 two thousand feet above the turbulence of 
 the seas, and basking in the brightest of skies, 
 the sight wanders away far off to Mounts 
 Tom and Holyoke on one side, and to 
 Mounts Graylock and Monadnock on the 
 other, while the valleys teem with the brown 
 tilth of meadows and orchards, and the gay 
 bloom of flowers. A solitude almost as to 
 human habitations, it is yet rich everywhere 
 
 * Delivered before the Brooklyn Institute of Science and 
 Art, on the 3d of November, 1894, the centennial of Mr. 
 Bryant's birthday. 
 
 195 
 
ig6 William Cullen Bryant 
 
 in its appeals to human sensibility, fancy, im- 
 agination and thought. All the year round 
 Nature there puts on a most sumptuous ap- 
 parel — in the springtime, a flushing fullness 
 of greenery and blossom ; in the summer, sun- 
 rises and sunsets as luminous as those of Italy ; 
 in the autumn, that gorgeous array of color, 
 when the trees seem " groups of giant kings 
 in purple and gold, who guard enchanted 
 ground "; and in winter even, when the bleak 
 winds strip the forests, and oceans of snow 
 obliterate the incidents of the landscape, the 
 mossy trunks are cased in purest crystal, and 
 the delicate fingers of the frost weave the 
 trembling waterdrops into gems, till the groves 
 seem like " the caverns of some virgin mine," 
 where jewels grow, and " diamonds put forth 
 radiant rods and bud in amethyst and topaz"; 
 or, like the portals of some fairy palace, 
 
 " Where crystal columns send forth slender shafts 
 And crossing arches, and fantastic aisles 
 Wind from the sight in brightness." 
 
 In the bosom of this magnificent scenery, 
 WiUiam Cullen Bryant, the earliest of our poets, 
 whose name is indelibly connected with the rise 
 and progress of our literature from its begin- 
 nings, as well as with the redemption of our 
 
William Cullen Bryant 197 
 
 nation from a most degrading thraldom, was 
 born one hundred years ago. One hundred 
 years ago ! How the words go back, not 
 only to his birth, but to the very infancy of 
 the Republic ! It was the first year of the 
 second administration of George Washington as 
 President. The central government, representing 
 fifteen States, was organized and installed, but 
 not secure. Emerging from a severe seven 
 years' war, laden with debts, and distracted by 
 fierce colonial antagonisms, the people, if not 
 chaotic in their opinions, were fluctuating and 
 unsettled. The red savages of the frontier, which 
 was then in Ohio, were not more menacing to our 
 stability than the white savages of the interior, 
 unused to the restraints of salutary law. Party 
 feeling rose to a red heat of virulence. It did not 
 spare even the good and great chief, who wrote 
 to a friend that he would rather be dead than 
 the holder of a public office. The members of 
 his own cabinet were at swords' drawn as to 
 their convictions and tendencies. One vast fac- 
 tion, with Hamilton at its head, inclined to the 
 monarchical forms of Great Britain, our late op- 
 pressor and enemy ; another faction, under the 
 lead of Jefferson, admired republican France, our 
 late friend and ally. But alas I poor France 
 had rushed from liberty to licence. The " black 
 
198 William Cullen Bryant 
 
 terror " of Robespierre and his accomplices, who 
 had gone to the scaffold, had been succeeded 
 by the Directory, no less bloody. French pop- 
 ular armies menaced nearly all the States of 
 Europe ; Burke, Fox and Pitt thundered in the 
 British House of Commons ; and in the distance 
 gloomed, like a spectre, the Man of Destiny. 
 
 It was a time of general turbulence, uneasi- 
 ness and doubt. Indeed, we seem to return 
 to the " Dark Ages," when we think that no 
 steamer had yet rippled the surface of our rivers, 
 much less beat down the angry surges of the 
 sea ; that no locomotive had yet screamed its 
 triumphs to the echoes of the hills; that no 
 telegraphic or telephonic messages outran the 
 winds ; that no gas or electric lights galaxied 
 our cities; that no spectrum revealed the inter- 
 nal constitution of the sun and the stars ; and 
 no slender wire, running through the dark cham- 
 bers of the sea, where perpetual solitude and 
 silence brood over tangled weeds and the bones 
 of broken ships, " whose gold will never be 
 coined and vintages never drunk " — carried the 
 heartbeats of nations from shore to shore. 
 
 The child, whose birth took place in these 
 stormy times, and amid those beautiful scenes, 
 like all good New Englanders, had the Pilgrims 
 of the Mayflower for progenitors. He could 
 
IVilliam Ctillen Bryant 199 
 
 trace his blood, by a double current, back to 
 the fair Priscilla Mullins, who said to Mr. John 
 Alden, when he came with a love-errand from the 
 stout captain, Miles Standish, " Speak for your- 
 self, John," so that John did speak for himself, 
 and because he spoke for himself, there came of 
 their union, only three or four generations later, 
 our two foremost poets, Bryant and Longfellow, 
 the latter of whom has told of his ancestor's 
 wooing in such honeymoon verses. 
 
 It was a stalwart stock, indeed, strong- limbed 
 and strong-willed. Some of its members had 
 fought in the Indian massacres at Hadley and 
 Deerfield ; some had taken part in the old 
 French wars, at Port Royal and Louisburg ; one, 
 at least, used his spade and his musket at 
 Bunker Hill, and afterwards at Bennington, Sara- 
 toga and Yorktown ; while another was on board 
 the Chesapeake in her grapple with the Shannon ; 
 and all had their legends to tell to the younger 
 generations by the winter fireside. Fight was 
 in the blood, but poetry, too ; for several, both 
 males and females, read and wrote verses; and 
 a Reverend Alexander Keith, a disciple of John 
 Knox, brought in a Scotch strain which was 
 ever proverbial for its double " love of saintli- 
 ness and song." 
 
 Of the immediate parents the father, Peter 
 
200 William Cullen Bryant 
 
 Bryant, was a country physician, who shortened 
 his own life by travelling the rough mountain 
 roads through wind and sleet to prolong the 
 life of others, or to bring new life into being. 
 He was fond of science and rhymes, had taught 
 himself Greek and Latin, had travelled in the 
 footsteps of St. Pierre, whose Paul and Virginia 
 has filled little eyes all over the globe, and been 
 a legislator at Boston, whence he brought back 
 new books and that new aspect of Christianity 
 which Buckminster and Channing proclaimed 
 with fervid lips. The mother was a stately 
 matron, who to an advanced age could leap 
 upon her horse from the ground, and who, in 
 addition to the usual household duties, spun, 
 wove and fashioned all the clothing of the family, 
 while she taught the children their elements 
 and to read the Bible. In the absence of higher 
 amusements than barn-raisings, corn-husking, 
 and the maple sugar camp, that lonely house- 
 hold found its amusements in books. It had a 
 small but well-selected library, nearly every 
 volume of which was read over and over 
 again. By night, the boys of the family 
 might be seen stretched on the floor, with their 
 heads toward the birch-bark fire, absorbed in 
 Pope's Homer, or Spenser, or Milton, and even 
 Shakespeare, disliked of all Puritans. In the 
 
William Cullen Bryant 201 
 
 daytime, fantastically accoutered in meal-sacks, 
 and armed with cornstalks, they fought over the 
 battles of Greeks and Trojans, shouting the 
 speeches of Ulysses, or Hector, or Ajax; or at 
 other times roar to each other from the bushes 
 the strophes and anti-strophes of a terrible chorus 
 of Sophocles. 
 
 One of these boys, the second in age, named 
 William Cullen after an eminent Scotch physi- 
 cian, evinced an early liking for rhyme. When 
 a child of five or six years he added to the 
 usual prayers at his mother's knee a request 
 that God would enable him to write verses that 
 might endure. At seven years of age he 
 began to make verses ; at ten, wrote a poetical 
 school address which found its way into other 
 schools as a recitation ; he versified, also, pas- 
 sages from the Psalms and Job ; and at thirteen 
 his father got published some four or five hun- 
 dred lines, which were called "The Embargo." 
 It was a furious onslaught upon Jefferson, whose 
 religious opinions and commercial policy ranked 
 him, in the estimation of New England zealots, 
 alongside of Tom Paine and the devil. A little 
 later he wrote odes for Fourth of July celebra- 
 tions, and an ode to a strange god or goddess 
 called the Genius of Columbia, who was in the 
 habit of squaring her fists at Napoleon and other 
 
202 William Cullen Bryant 
 
 despots, and telling them to come on if they 
 wanted a thrashing. All these effusions were but 
 the pipings of a callow bird who had not yet 
 found the secret of his throat. 
 
 It was not until after he had been sent to 
 Williams College (where he remained but seven 
 months owing to the father's poverty), that he 
 learned a better strain. He then became en- 
 amoured of the Greek poets, their simplicity of 
 diction, their harmonious rhythms and vivid 
 imaginativeness, and their severe austerity of 
 judgment, and he made many translations from 
 them, from Anacreon, Mimnermus, Bion and the 
 choruses of Sophocles. Happily for him, Eng- 
 lish poetic literature was just then undergoing 
 an important change of form and spirit He 
 had been trained by his father in a love for 
 the writers that shone and sparkled in the reign 
 of Queen Anne. He admired them for their 
 light, easy, graceful touches ; for their pretty, 
 affected sentiments, their slashing wit, to say 
 nothing of their sweet, flute-like melodies ; but 
 he learned to see something much better in the 
 Greeks, — in Grey, Cowper, Thomson, Burns, and 
 more lately in Coleridge, Southey and Words- 
 worth. Those older men were artificial and 
 conventional in style ; they were men of the 
 town, of the coffee-house and the drawing- room — 
 
William Cullen Bryant 203 
 
 who walked in satin slippers and dressed in 
 silken gowns, and simpered with the court 
 beauties; while the newer men were children of 
 Nature, men of the woods and fields and open 
 skies, who studied her moods, her frowns as 
 well as her smiles, and sunk their plummets 
 deep in the common emotions of the universal 
 human heart. 
 
 One of the first fruits of this new awakening 
 was a poem that came to him as he roamed 
 in the dim shadows of the everlasting woods. 
 The blue of the summer sky had faded into 
 autumnal gray, and the brown earth was heaped 
 with decaying leaves. As he trod the ground 
 it gave forth a hollow sound as if from graves. 
 All through the vast solitudes, which stretched 
 interminably over the continent, one grand 
 process of death was ever going on. What 
 indeed, he asked, is the earth but a great sepul- 
 chre of once living things, and what its skies 
 and stars but the solemn decorations of a tomb ? 
 His thoughts took shape in a poem to which 
 he gave the Greek name of Thanatopsis, or a 
 View of Death. It was extremely sombre in 
 tone, but he had been reading the Greeks, 
 through whose lightest music moans an inef- 
 fable sadness, and Kirke White's "Ode to 
 the Rosemary," and Blair's " Contemplation of 
 
204 William Cullen Bryant 
 
 the Grave," and perhaps he remembered some 
 of Job's lamentations. But the poem was no 
 less original, and for its depth and breadth 
 of thought, its wealth of imagery, and its 
 organ- like roll of rhythm, a wonderful pro- 
 duction. 
 
 The distinction of " Thanatopsis " was not its 
 individual merit, great as it was, nor the proof it 
 gave of the breaking away of a youthful poet 
 from all his former idols, but in the historic fact 
 that it was the morning star of our poetic dawn. 
 Nothing like it had preceded it, nothing led 
 up to it. Our tastes before it had run to dog- 
 gerel, sermons, and psalmody of a nasal twang. 
 Fisher Ames declared in i8o[ that America 
 had produced no man of poetic genius, intimat- 
 ing that the muses, like nightingales, were too 
 delicate to cross salt-water, or if they did, 
 soon moulted and lost their feathers. Some 
 years later Mr. Bryant himself wrote a review 
 of " American Poetry," in which he found that 
 our Homers, Virgils, and Miltons were named 
 Joel Barlow, Timothy Dwight, and Jonathan 
 Trumbull, whom he dismissed with a pat and a 
 dismal smile. Well ! who now wipes the merciful 
 dust from the " Columbiad," the "Conquest of 
 Canaan," the " Battle of the Kegs," or " Hasty 
 Pudding " ? We hardly know the names. Yet 
 
William Cullen Bryant 205 
 
 " Thanatopsis," amid the effulgence of the 
 broader day it ushered in, still 
 
 " Flames on the forehead of our morning sky.'' 
 
 CuIIen Bryant was destined to the bar, and stu- 
 died law with all diligence, save that his teachers 
 now and then reminded him that in courts of jus- 
 tice Blackstone's " Commentaries " were a higher 
 authority than Wordsworth's " Lyrical Ballads." 
 But once equipped, it became necessary for him 
 to engage in the turmoil and struggle of the great 
 world. His departure from home had a pathos 
 in it which is worthy of note. He was going to 
 settle at Plainfield, a town on a neighboring hill, 
 and he set out for his new domicile on a bright 
 December afternoon, near sunset. As he climbed 
 the steep ascent, the big world grew bigger, and he 
 became exceedingly depressed. Without means, 
 without prospects, and almost without friends, he 
 hardly knew what was going to become of him. 
 At the moment a solitary waterfowl passed across 
 the crimson folds of cloud, and he followed it 
 with his eyes. As he gazed he said to it : 
 
 " All day thy wings have fanned 
 At that far height, the cold, thin atmosphere 
 Yet stoop not weary to the welcome land, 
 
 Though the dark night is near." 
 
2o6 William Cullen Bryant 
 
 Then his simple piety induced him to add : 
 
 " There is a Power whose care 
 Teaches thy way along that pathless coast, 
 The desert and illimitable air 
 
 Lone wandering, but not lost." 
 
 It was a natural inference, which cheered him 
 when, applying the thought to himself, he said : 
 
 " He that from zone to zone 
 Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, 
 In the long way that I must tread alone 
 
 Will lead my steps aright." 
 
 A sublime trust, which he carried through life 
 and was never deceived. 
 
 For ten years Mr, Bryant practiced law at 
 Great Harrington, holding a respectable if not 
 distinguished place at the bar. It was not a 
 calling, however, suited to his temperament or 
 the deeper yearnings of his mind. He worked 
 hard in the discharge of its duties, and even 
 went so far as to "swear off" from all his poetic 
 intoxications : 
 
 " I broke the spell that held me long, 
 The dear, dear witchery of song. 
 And said, the poet's idle lore 
 Shall waste my prime of years no more." 
 
 But in vain ; the influences that awaken the 
 sensibilities of the poet were around him still : 
 
William Cullen Bryant 207 
 
 " And whereso'er he looked the while 
 Was Nature's everlasting smile." 
 
 Pleasanter for him than the heat and jargon 
 of a small country court were the cool shades 
 about the river which the farmers had named 
 from its color of green, even though they tempted 
 him to loiter and dream. Pleasanter than the 
 drone of a judge was the pipe of the wood- 
 thrush, when insect wings were glittering in 
 the beams of the low sun. Clearer than all the 
 cloudy mysteries of jurisprudence were the white 
 clouds sailing over the blue deep, on whose 
 wings his fancy wandered to teeming cities ; 
 across great oceans breaking on the coasts ; to 
 lands of bloom far off; to the olive groves and 
 vines of Andalusia ; to the sunny vales of 
 Italy, and to the battlefields and tombs of 
 Greece, then lifting her sword against the Otto- 
 man. Brighter than all the luminaries of the 
 gown were the new moon, or the star of the Pole, 
 " beneath whose eye all deeds of darkness and 
 of light are done," or those other " orbs of 
 beauty and spheres of flame," which dance away, 
 away through the widening voids of space 
 while their silver voices in chorus sing. How 
 could he walk the streets, and look upon that 
 precipice, which is called Monument Mountain 
 — "shaggy and wild, with pinnacles of flint and 
 
2o8 William Cullen Bryant 
 
 many a hanging crag" — and not prefer to the 
 most learned decisions of the Bench the tale of 
 the lovelorn Indian maiden, who, climbing the 
 heights, decked herself with the sacrificial gar- 
 lands of her tribe, and, singing old songs of 
 love and death, leaped to her doom. 
 
 The outcome of this struggle between Themis 
 and the Muses was that the Muses got the best of 
 it ; his father having sent a dozen or more of his 
 poetic offspring to a little quarterly, called " The 
 North American Review," printed at Cam- 
 bridge, they procured him from the Phi Beta 
 Kappa of Harvard an invitation to deliver the 
 annual poem. That was the Olympic laurel of 
 the times, — and he read to them " The Ages." 
 It pleased the learned dons, and it pleased the 
 students, — of whom Ralph Waldo Emerson was 
 one — and he was invited to put it in print. 
 He did so along with seven other poems, and 
 they made a small, thin volume of forty pages. 
 But small as it was, it was yet the biggest book of 
 its kind that had been put forth on this side 
 of the Atlantic. 
 
 The poems it contained can not be said 
 to have been of a popular kind. They were 
 not of the impassioned sort which Byron had 
 made seductive, and which carried the feelings 
 away on turbid surges of emotion; they were 
 
William Cullen Bryant 209 
 
 not chivalric tales like those in which Scott 
 had poured a glamour of romance over his 
 Scottish heaths and highlands ; and they were 
 not outbursts of spiritual aspiration like those 
 in which Shelley lifts lis to " an ampler ether, a 
 diviner air." They were very grave poems — 
 very calm — profoundly meditative and thought- 
 ful ; and if affined to any school, to that of the 
 much condemned Lakers. But they were essen- 
 tially American — transcripts of the Hampshire 
 hills and the Berkshire valleys — and breathing the 
 fresh life of a new continent. The qualities they 
 chiefly displayed were these : An extremely 
 nice, sensitive, loving observation of nature — the 
 observation of delighted eyes and enraptured 
 ears; a penetrative yet comprehensive imagina- 
 tion which fuses and welds the sights and shows 
 of things into new and delicate combinations of 
 beauty; and a moralization of them all into human 
 meanings and human sympathies. Popular they 
 could scarcely be, but discerning minds said of 
 them, here are jewels to be added to the treasure- 
 store of English literature, and here is an author 
 who is going to add new lustre to English genius. 
 Those poems lifted Mr. Bryant at once to the 
 foremost rank in our poetical heavens ; and fol- 
 lowed as they were, from time to time, by 
 others of equal, if not greater, excellence, he 
 
2IO William Cullen Bryant 
 
 maintained that rank undisputed to the end, 
 not without rivals, but assuredly without equals, 
 and much more, without a superior. 
 
 They came, too, it is worthy of remark, in the 
 year 1821, which must ever be printed in red 
 in our literary calendars. It was in that year 
 that Washington Irving, Cooper, Halleck, Dana, 
 Sands, Hillhouse, Percival, Miss Sedgwick, Chan- 
 ning, Daniel Webster and Edward Livingston, 
 broke like stars out of the darkness. " Early 
 voices," as Bayard Taylor said, which many 
 others have followed — voices, perhaps, sweeter, 
 louder and more varied ; but we must never 
 forget the forerunners who, in advance of their 
 generation, create their own audiences and the 
 after audiences by which they were to be 
 judged. 
 
 It was in 1825 that Mr. Bryant finally aban- 
 doned the law and came to New York as "a 
 literary adventurer," as he says. He had been 
 enticed by offers of a share in the editorship of 
 a new periodical, the New York Review, that 
 had been projected. It was a great and trying 
 change for the child of the woods and fields. 
 New York City was not then the metropolis that 
 she is now. Boston was her literary and Phila- 
 delphia her commercial equal. She had but 
 one hundred and fifty thousand people in all — a 
 
William Cullen Bryant 211 
 
 twentieth of what she has now. Canal Street was 
 the northern boundary of the city proper, and all 
 beyond was forest and orchards, with a few scat- 
 tered farm-houses. I remember how we children 
 dreaded to go beyond the little stream that 
 gutted Canal Street, lest we should be taken by 
 the Indians or a far more formidable bugaboo, 
 the press gangs, which carried children off to sea. 
 Greenwich village, now Amos Street, was a place 
 of retreat for the richer families during the visi- 
 tations of the yellow fever, which were frequent 
 and desolating; and where Barclay Street ferry is 
 were shaded shore walks, in which Jonathan 
 Edwards, a preacher in Wall Street, still a place 
 of fashionable residences, is said to have walked 
 while he meditated those questions of " fate, 
 foreknowledge, foreknowledge absolute," which 
 Milton made a favorable diversion of his dusky 
 demons. Society was restricted both in its 
 numbers and culture; its leaders and lovely 
 women dwelt about the Battery. Everybody 
 knew everybody, and everybody walked in the 
 park for recreation in the afternoons; for busi- 
 ness closed early, and they had no concerts or 
 operas till later, and only one theatre. 
 
 It was easy to get acquainted then, and Mr. 
 Bryant, a whisper of whose rare qualities had 
 preceded him, was introduced gradually into the 
 
212 William Cullen Bryant 
 
 small coteries, first among the literary men and 
 artists — Cooper, Verplanck, Halleck, Sands, Pro- 
 fessor Anderson, Dunlop, Morse, Jarves, Van- 
 derlyn, Lorenzo de Ponte, the writer of the 
 libretto for Mozart's " Don Giovanni " — and 
 then among the higher dignitaries — President 
 Duer of Columbia, Chancellor Kent, Thomas 
 Addison Emmett. But he was very poor and 
 very much alone, with seeds of consumption in 
 his physical system, and prospects that rather 
 darkened than brightened as he went on. They 
 were for him almost the old Grub Street days 
 over again. In a little poem called " The Jour- 
 ney of Life " he said : 
 
 " The trampled earth returns a sound of fear — 
 A hollow sound as if I walked on tombs ; 
 And lights, that tell of cheerful homes, appear 
 Far off, and die like hope amid the glooms." 
 
 But that darkness was near the dawn. The 
 Evening Post, a prosperous evening journal, 
 which had been founded in the first year of 
 the century by Alexander Hamilton and his 
 friends, was in need of an assistant editor, and the 
 position was secured for him, and his destiny for 
 the rest of his life, or nearly sixty years, was 
 thus determined. 
 
 Journalism, as to its prodigious enterprise 
 
William Ciillen Bryant 213 
 
 and activity in gathering news, was not known 
 then. It was, none the less, to some extent, an 
 exponent and moulder of public opinion, and 
 particularly of political or party opinion. With 
 a high view of its character, Mr. Bryant began 
 from his novitiate days to prepare himself for 
 the discharge of its functions. His political 
 convictions, since those student years when 
 he wanted to enlist as a soldier in the army of 
 Massachusetts in order to defend the State 
 against the encroachments of the Federal Gov- 
 ernment, or else set up an independent em- 
 pire, had undergone a radical change. After the 
 peace of 181 5 the old parties had disintegrated, 
 and a period of quietude followed under the ad- 
 ministration of Monroe, who had been elected 
 almost unanimously, which was called the " era 
 of good feeHng." It was a brooding season 
 when opinions began to take a new shape, accord- 
 ing to the new circumstances. More active in- 
 dustries and interchanges had been stimulated by 
 the peace, and schemes for the promotion of them 
 were fostered. New England, which had become 
 manufacturing, wanted tariffs to shut out foreign 
 competition ; the agricultural West wanted high- 
 ways and canals to put it in easier communication 
 with the East ; and the South clamored for such 
 internal improvements as might expedite its one 
 
214 William Cullen Bryant 
 
 great staple of cotton to the sea-coasts. All of 
 them looked to the central government as the 
 Hercules who must pull their wagons out of the 
 ruts. 
 
 But other views were taking possession of in- 
 quiring minds. Even before his abandonment of 
 the law, Mr. Bryant's attention had been directed 
 to economical doctrines, which, wearing a gloss of 
 newness on this side of the Atlantic, were much in 
 favor with impartial and independent thinkers in 
 Europe. He had studied carefully the treatises 
 of Adam Smith, Say, Thornton, and Ricardo, and 
 especially the great debates in the British Parlia- 
 ment in the time of that champion of open com- 
 merce, Huskisson. What he had learned from 
 these sources was that the economic movements 
 of society, or the activities by which its wants 
 are supplied, like the physical movements of 
 nature, are cases of uniform and invariable law 
 which produce of themselves beneficent results, 
 if not artificially resisted. A deeper question, 
 however, was involved than that of freedom of 
 industry and exchange, and that was as to the 
 rightful function, the extent and the limits, of 
 governmental action in its relation to social phe- 
 nomena. How far shall it interfere, or how far 
 not interfere, in the regulation of individual 
 conduct? Mr. Bryant was not long in arriving 
 
William Cullen Bryant 215 
 
 at the answers commonly given by the disciples 
 of Laissez-Faire — yet with a difference. " Gov- 
 ernment," he said, "is the organ and representa- 
 tive of the whole community to which it pertains, 
 and not of any class or fraction of that 'commu- 
 nity. Its primary, predominant, almost exclusive, 
 duty is to maintain the conditions of universal 
 liberty and justice, or the equilibrium and har- 
 mony of all social forces, and to maintain them 
 in such a way that the energies of the individual 
 shall be left to act and expand according to his 
 own capacities and his own judgment. It must 
 not undertake enterprises of its own, either 
 religious, intellectual, or economical, but satisfy 
 itself with securing a perfectly safe and open field 
 for such enterprises as the voluntary work of in- 
 dividuals. In other words, government is not a 
 fraternal or eleemosynary institution erected to 
 perform deeds of charity, nor a commercial com- 
 pany erected to look after, to foster, nurse and 
 coddle, particular lines of business ; it is a strictly 
 juridical institution, whose supreme purpose is 
 to uphold liberty, justice, and order, and nothing 
 more." 
 
 On this theory of the State, Mr. Bryant 
 . contended, our polity as a nation was distinc- 
 tively founded, and we must either give up 
 our pretensions to democracy or carry them 
 
2i6 William Cullen Bryant 
 
 out to their logical and practicable results with 
 manly and consistent courage. He was the 
 more convinced of the soundness of this polit- 
 ical philosophy, because it was at one with his 
 moral instincts and his rehgious aspirations. 
 As the supreme and imperative law of morality 
 is the free recognition of the manhood of 
 man, or of that rationality, conscience and free- 
 dom which are distinguishing characteristics of 
 the human being, so he made the injunction 
 of the Apostle " to honor all men," asking for 
 yourself nothing as to rights which you cannot 
 willingly concede to all others, the sum and 
 substance of ethics. This was again in com- 
 plete unity of spirit with the religion of Christ, 
 which represents the Most High as assuming 
 the form of the human, in order to its glorifica- 
 tion in every partaker of it, down to the least 
 and lowest, on earth as in heaven. 
 
 It would be impossible, within the time al- 
 lotted me, to enter into any detail of Mr. 
 Bryant's editorial career during the more than 
 fifty years it covered. That would be nothing 
 less than a history of political parties from the 
 administration of Jackson to that of Hayes. 
 It is enough, however, in order to convey a fair 
 general conception of his political course, to say 
 that his dominant, unrelenting, invariable aim, 
 
William Cullen Bryant 217 
 
 in all the changes of circumstances, and all the 
 selfish shiftings of factions, was to rescue the 
 nation from its two fearful abuses of the funda- 
 mental principles of personal freedom. 
 
 The first of these, the first to which I shall 
 advert — not the first in the order of time — was 
 its gradual adoption of what were called " the 
 principles of protection," which, however, are not 
 principles but temporary expedients and devices. 
 Mr. Bryant was an out and out advocate of un- 
 limited commercial intercourse between the na- 
 tions of the earth. Not only his theoretical views 
 as to the proper functions of governments, but 
 his studies of actual experience, had convinced 
 him that every artificial interference with the 
 free choice of men in the direction of their 
 labor, and of the exchange of its proceeds, was 
 highly deleterious. It was like clapping a tour- 
 niquet on the circulation of the blood, which 
 could only produce paralysis and disease. It 
 debased legislation from its true aims into a 
 scramble for favors, and so perverted and de- 
 graded the struggles of parties ; it fostered 
 special interests and built up monopolies, and 
 so introduced a socialism which, in its assump- 
 tions, justified those larger socialisms which 
 would make the State the manager of railroads, 
 telegraphs, factories; in short, a complete social 
 
2i8 William Cullen Bryant 
 
 despotism, annihilating the individual and all 
 individual responsibility, discipline, and growth. 
 Indeed, Mr. Bryant was disposed to trace the 
 terrible corruptions which underlie and waste 
 our politics to this substitution of selfish in- 
 terests for general principles in the policy of 
 government, and he warred upon it without 
 stop, and with consuming zeal. 
 
 But a second abuse of freedom — more flagrant, 
 more repulsive and more portentous — was that 
 which converted the laborer himself into a subject 
 of ownership, and confiscated not merely the 
 proceeds of his labor, but his muscles and brains 
 to the owner. Our Fathers had endeavored to 
 bring together under the same form of govern- 
 ment two antagonistical and hostile forms of society 
 — slave States, which were semi-barbaric in their 
 very structure, and free States, which were an 
 outgrowth of an almost extreme free civilization. 
 Their excuse was that, at the outset, they held 
 this antagonism to be merely temporary and 
 transient. They supposed that freedom, in the 
 exuberance and elasticity of its energy, would 
 soon trample slavery into the dust. But in 
 that they were mistaken. By consenting to 
 the prolongation of the slave trade — a hellish 
 traffic — they confused and paralyzed the popular 
 moral sense ; by allowing representation to slave 
 
William Cullen Bryant 219 
 
 numbers, they imparted to the system a strong 
 political vitality ; and by enjoining the return 
 of fugitive slaves, they made everybody a parti- 
 ceps crimmis; while a timely mechanical inven- 
 tion rendered the slave form of industry one of 
 the most immediately profitable to be conceived. 
 It was slavery, then, rather than freedom that 
 first advanced. In the beginning, like the curl 
 of smoke that issued from the bottle of the 
 Afrite, it expanded into a black cloud which 
 veiled the heavens. It controlled politics, chose 
 Presidents, legislators and judges, and finally 
 dictated public opinions. Politicians bent to it, 
 trade worshiped it, newspapers defended it, 
 and even the pulpit found Scriptural sanction 
 for its most cruel atrocities. 
 
 Mr. Bryant did not join with those sappers 
 and miners, the brave Abolitionists, when they 
 began to blow their ram's horns around the 
 walls of the evil. In his view the question was 
 not one merely of individual right and wrong, 
 but of two conflicting civilizations — the roots 
 of both of which were deeply planted in the 
 soil, whose fibres had been historically woven 
 into our organic structure, and whose tendrils 
 stretched far and wide to a thousand social props. 
 The one practical and practicable thing to be 
 done, he thought, was to rescue the Democratic 
 
220 William Cullen Bryant 
 
 party, the predominating party of the nation, from 
 its complicity in the wrong. In all the agita- 
 tions that related to the right of petition, to the 
 Missouri compromise, to the Mexican War, to 
 the admission of Texas, to the Wilmot Proviso, 
 etc., he took a part, and devoted to them his 
 best and most earnest abihties. 
 
 Out of those agitations arose the Democratic 
 Free Soil Party, pledged to a regeneration of 
 public opinion. At the same time the old Silver 
 Gray Whigs, steeped in asphaltic pools of con- 
 servatism, were transformed into Anti-Slavery 
 Whigs, whose aims coinciding with those of 
 the Free Soilists, the two were ultimately fused 
 into one — the great Republican Party. The plat- 
 form for New York, proclaiming the creed which 
 won for it thirty years of triumph, was written 
 by one of Mr. Bryant's staff. Its first standard- 
 bearer, the young Pathfinder, was defeated; its 
 second, the immortal Lincoln, bore off the vic- 
 tory; and that victory was the signal of an 
 armed revolt against "the gentlest sway that 
 Time in all its course had seen." They who 
 rejected it had known its touches only, as 
 one of their own statesmen said, by the bene- 
 fits it conferred. No, the pinch was not there; 
 it was given by the irrepressible anti-slavery 
 sentiment. 
 
William Cullen Bryant 221 
 
 The collision, impending for half a century, had 
 come ; and then the patriotic instincts of the 
 northern masses awoke, and the world saw the 
 sublimest social spectacle it had ever seen, in what 
 a distinguished foreign writer, the Count Agenor 
 de Gasparin, called " The Uprising of a Great 
 People." It saw, to use the words of " Our 
 Country's Call," the men of the glade and forest, 
 sturdy as the oaks they cleaved, leave their 
 green woodlands for the red fields of strife ; it 
 saw the men who had breasted the mountain- 
 storms stand like their own gray cliffs and mock 
 the whirlwind of hostile onset ; it saw the men 
 who dwell by our rapid rivers, rush to the 
 rescue as terrible and mighty as their streams 
 when the rain has swollen them to torrents; it 
 saw the men who throng our ports, which open 
 to the great deep, in force and numbers like 
 the waves of the sea, pour their overwhelming 
 floods along the plains and drown out cities ; 
 and it saw even the clerk, the student, the 
 scholar, turn his pen into a sword, and wield 
 the flashing blade and drive the swift courser 
 to a swifter charge. For four long years 
 we looked into the face of slaughter with its 
 frowns of death. For four long years the air 
 was filled with the clamor of fife and drum, 
 with the tramp of gathering hosts, with the 
 
222 William Cullen Bryant 
 
 filing off of infinite cavalcades to unknown 
 encounters, with the awful roar and earthquake 
 shock of battle, with the shout of victory, with 
 the anguished shriek of defeat, with the wail of 
 mothers and sisters and wives refusing to be 
 comforted, because their dear ones were no 
 more. 
 
 All through this fearful conflict Mr. Bryant 
 was keenly alive to its duties, its terrors, and its 
 sorrows. He did not, like Pindar, in the perilous 
 hours of Salamis and Plateas, devote himself to 
 the improvement of his odes ; or, like Michael 
 Angelo, hew and mould the marble while Rome 
 was falling; or, like the modern Goethe, dress 
 his Venetian elegies to the entering tramp of the 
 French invader of his country. He gave his 
 most active aid in every way to the furtherance 
 of the national cause : he helped to raise and 
 equip troops ; he cheered the soldiers on as they 
 plunged into the black smoke from which there 
 might be no return ; he sustained the hopes of 
 the people when sudden reverses painted a pallor 
 upon their cheeks ; twice he visited Washington to 
 remonstrate against delays. But as he watched the 
 lightning flash of Sherman's sword from the heights 
 of Georgia, and heard the thunder roar of Grant's 
 cannon from the Wilderness, it was not without 
 many a heartache and a thought of the hideousness 
 
William Cullen Bryant 223 
 
 of war, in the midst of its glory. He wrote to a 
 friend : " When I think of this great conflict and 
 its great issues, my mind reverts to the grand 
 imagery of the Apocalypse — to that vision, when 
 the messengers of God came down to do his 
 bidding, to reap the earth, ripe for the harvest, 
 and to gather the spoils of the vineyards ; to tread 
 the winepress till it flows over with blood, to 
 pour out the phials of God's judgments upon the 
 earth, and turn its rivers into blood, until the 
 great dragon shall be bound and cast into the 
 bottomless pit." 
 
 Mr. Bryant's muse was not entirely silent or 
 sterile in those terrible times of trial, but its in- 
 spiration had taken a curious turn. The sun 
 shone as brightly as before, the stars still glittered 
 in the skies, seed-time and harvest came in their 
 seasons ; but he could no longer indulge in com- 
 munion with the sweet and gentle ministries of 
 nature, and he no longer stopped to hear the soft 
 voices of the grass, or the tiny music that swells 
 from " every moss-cup of the rock and every 
 nameless blossom's bell." Every wind that blew 
 from the southwest trembled with the concus- 
 sions of deadly battle ; the red flowers of the 
 field recalled another red that stained more dis- 
 tant fields ; and the dropping leaves of autumn 
 symboled the dropping of noble corpses into 
 
224 William Cullen Bryant 
 
 nameless graves. Yet the poet still lived in the 
 patriot, and his imagination, flying from the pain- 
 ful pressure of the actual, took refuge in the ideal 
 realms of faery. 
 
 It was then he wrote the charming fable of 
 the rustic maiden who followed the brooks about 
 her dwelling, down to the middle chambers of the 
 deep, where amid 
 
 " Strange growths, the pretty coralline. 
 The dulse with crimson leaves, and streaming far 
 Sea thong and sea lace " 
 
 she trod the pearly sands, spotted with silver 
 shells, and beheld the many-peopled world of 
 waters, bewildering in its vastness. It was then 
 he told us of " the Little People of the Snow," 
 who float on its tiny flakes, yet build the huge 
 white walls and pinnacles that rise like some ca- 
 thedral dome, such as he, the Florentine who bore 
 the name of heaven's most potent angel, reared 
 at Rome, or such as the unknown builder reared, 
 the wondrous fane, the glory of Burgos. It 
 was then he wrote of the dreamy youth who 
 visited the mystic land of clouds and its castles 
 of the air : 
 
 " Vast halls with golden floors, and bright alcoves. 
 And walls of pearl, and sapphire vaults 
 Besprent with golden stars " 
 
William Cullen Bryant 225 
 
 but whose magnificent galleries and gardens and 
 terraces are swept into nothingness by the first 
 rude blasts of the wind. 
 
 In these plays of fancy even, as in nearly all of 
 Mr. Bryant's poems, there is a strong tinge of 
 sadness; but it is a sadness mollified by an 
 ideal philosophy, which runs through his life as 
 well as his poetry. His view of the course and 
 outcome of that 
 
 " great movement of the universe, 
 
 Which bears so silently this visible scene 
 Into Night's shadow, and the streaming rays 
 Of starlight " 
 
 is decidedly optimistic. When he looks into 
 "the Ages," full of crime, guilt, folly, and 
 suffering, he finds in them also a "promise 
 of happier days, whose dawn is nigh," that 
 
 " He who tames the elements shall not live 
 The slave of his own passions : he whose eye 
 Unwinds the eternal mazes of the sky " 
 
 shall yet unwind the mysteries of his own des- 
 tiny. That awful "Flood of Years," which 
 carries all men, rustic, soldier, artist, lover, young 
 and old, for a moment on its foaming crest, 
 and then drops them into its black waters, — 
 
226 William Cullen Bryant 
 
 which sweeps away all the works of man's 
 hands — battlemented walls and stately palaces, 
 the thrones of kings, the shrines of gods ; yea, 
 memorial stones overgrown with undecipherable 
 legends, — shall yet flow in peace around green 
 islands where the flowers never wither, sorrows 
 are forgotten, and 
 
 " the eternal change 
 
 That waits on growth and action, shall proceed 
 With everlasting concord, hand in hand." 
 
 It is indeed a cheerful philosophy in the face 
 of that Nature which another poet, Tennyson, 
 tells 'us "red in tooth and claw with ravine 
 shrieks against our creeds,"— r-and never was it 
 more beautifully applied than in i860, when 
 the world was deploring the nearly simulta- 
 neous loss of a large number ol its prominent 
 benefactors and celebrities — Humboldt, Macau- 
 lay, De Quincy, Ritter, Arndt, Mrs. Browning, 
 and Mrs. Jameson abroad, and Irving, Prescott, 
 Leslie, Parker, and others at home. Our poet 
 sees them as " the constellations of the early 
 night, that made the darkness glorious;" but 
 soon he marks their rays grow dim upon the 
 horizon's verge and sink beyond the moun- 
 tains. 
 
William Cullen Bryant 227 
 
 "The great Orion, with his jeweled belt, 
 That large-limbed warrior of the skies, goes down 
 Into the gloom. He looks in vain to find 
 The group of sister stars, which mothers love 
 To show their wondering babes, the gentle Seven." 
 
 In vain he seeks " the resplendent cressets 
 which the Twins upHfted in their youthful 
 hands." 
 
 " The streaming tresses of the Egyptian Queen 
 Spangle the heavens no more; the Virgin trails 
 No more her glittering garments through the blue ! 
 Gone ! all are gone ; and the forsaken Night 
 With all her winds, in all her dreary wastes, 
 Sighs that they shine upon her face no more." 
 
 He repines at the disappearance and asks if 
 the Night must then grow starless in her later 
 hours ; if no new sources of light will succeed 
 to those that have disappeared ? Ah, no ! 
 Nature has not failed ; his eyes are dim. At 
 that very hour a fiery host is there above. 
 
 "Hercules, with flaming mace, 
 The Lyre with silver chords, the Swan uppoised 
 On gleaming wings, the Dolphin gliding on 
 With glistening scales, and that poetic Steed 
 With beaming mane, whose feet struck out from earth 
 The fount of Hippocrene, and many more 
 Fair-clustered splendors, with whose rays the night 
 Shall close her march in glory." 
 
228 William Cullen Bryant 
 
 This was perhaps his highest teaching, 
 familiar now, but novel then : as the good and 
 great go, so the good and great come again. 
 Evil in itself is superficial and evanescent. The 
 tempests sweep the surface of the seas, piling the 
 wrecks of navies on its shores, but only a little 
 way below lies the vast and moveless deep, 
 nourishing an inexhaustible life ; the cyclones 
 tear up the forests and prostrate cities, but the 
 calm, clear sunshine glows untouched above ; 
 and so " the heathen rage and the people 
 imagine a vain thing," but inside of their riots 
 sits the supernal Goodness and Wisdom, making 
 the earth silent before Him. 
 
 At the close of the war, when the problem of 
 reconstruction presented difficulties to our states- 
 men, even greater than those which had arisen 
 in its course, Mr. Bryant still gave his best 
 wisdom to a large-minded, unresentful solution. 
 He was particularly zealous in retrieving the 
 errors which had swamped our finances in a 
 Malgebolian bog of paper-money. His corre- 
 spondence with Mr. Chase, the Secretary of the 
 Treasury, and his editorial comments, contributed 
 greatly to our return to a sound, stable, and 
 enduring condition. 
 
 In all the great controversies that ensued the 
 dislocations of the war, the Evening Post was 
 
William Cullen Bryant 229 
 
 an immense power for good. Everybody that 
 knew it at all, knew that it stood inflexibly for 
 honesty, justice and progress. It did not keep 
 on hand a poor little bundle of ragged opinions, 
 to be given out at the nod of a party leader — 
 much less, if that party leader happened to be 
 a Boss dressed in diamonds and dirty clothes. 
 Its trumpets never blew an uncertain sound. 
 Yet in critical moments, when the Republic 
 seemed to be rushing towards the billows again, 
 it was moderate and conciliatory, while it was 
 firm, as at the time of the impeachment of John- 
 son, and of the decision against the election of 
 Tilden. No mere question of party ascendency 
 was worth the awful cost of a civil war. The 
 terrors of the late arbitrament by arms rang in 
 its ears too dolefully to allow it to entertain the 
 thought of a renewal of them. Besides, its con- 
 fidence in the methods of true democracy was 
 so strong that any proposal to resort to bullets 
 when ballots would ultimately suffice, seemed to 
 it no less than treason to the first principles of 
 our mode of government. 
 
 But he had learned, in the course of time, 
 another mode of influencing public opinion, 
 and that was by speech. He was never an 
 orator in the sense that Clay, Choate, Prentiss, 
 Phillips, and Curtis were orators. The power 
 
230 William Cullen Bryant 
 
 to wield the passions of a multitude, as a 
 minstrel wields the strings of his harp, or the 
 wind brings music from the trees, was not an 
 original gift. I recall an occasion when toasted 
 at a public dinner, wishing to acknowledge the 
 compliment, he rose with trepidation, and after 
 stammering a few incoherent words, sat down 
 in utter confusion. As the art of speaking 
 well, however, was a most useful one, he re- 
 solved to overcome his nervousness and timid- 
 ity, and in the end made himself an attractive 
 speaker, so much so that he got to be in de- 
 mand. " Few occasions," says Mr. George 
 Ripley, " were complete without his presence. 
 He was always the honored guest of the even- 
 ing, and the moment in which he was to be 
 called upon to speak was awaited with eager 
 expectation. He was singularly happy in seiz- 
 ing the tone of the company, and his remarks 
 were not only pertinent, but eminently felici- 
 tous. Making no pretensions to impassioned 
 eloquence, he was always impressive, often pa- 
 thetic, and sometimes quietly humorous, with a 
 zest and pungency that touched the feelings of 
 his hearers to the quick. On more important 
 occasions, when the principal speech was as- 
 signed to him, he discharged the trust with a 
 tranquil dignity of manner, a severe self-posses- 
 
William Cullen Bryant 231 
 
 sion, an amplitude of knowledge and illust 
 tion that invariably won the admiration of 
 his audience. His last address (that on Maz- 
 zini) was a masterpiece of descriptive oratory." 
 Apart from his more elaborate eulogies upon 
 departed friends — Irving, Cooper, Verplanck, 
 Halleck, and Thomas Cole, alike remarkable for 
 graceful narrative, and discriminating yet sym- 
 pathetic analyses, Mr. Bryant produced some 
 thirty or forty minor discourses, in which the 
 originality of thought is no less striking than the 
 variety of subject. He aided by his advocacy 
 the foundation of many of our most important 
 institutions — the Academy of Design, Central 
 Park, the Mercantile Library, and the Metro- 
 politan Art Museum ; he sketched the characters 
 and services of the most illustrious men of genius, 
 such as Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, Scott, 
 Burns, Franklin, Mazzini, and Kossuth ; he dis- 
 cussed important principles of public and private 
 policy, such as Italian Unity, Negotiation vs. 
 War, Municipal Reform, Freedom of Exchange, 
 Foreign Intervention, the Newspaper Press, Na- 
 tional Honesty, Music in Schools, and even the 
 Cultivation of Native Fruits and Flowers. In 
 each of these efforts the reader will find some 
 profound or suggestive thought, great afifluence 
 of imagery, pertness of anecdote, and an exquisite 
 
232 William Cullen Bryant 
 
 grace and elegance of diction. Mr. Bryant's prose 
 style, indeed, was always a model of simplicity, 
 purity, correctness, animation, and ease. Even 
 his daily editorials often exhibited the dignity of 
 the essay, were rich in literary allusion or cita- 
 tion and at times flashed with wit. 
 
 Mr. Bryant's real distinction, whatever his 
 political services may have been, still lay in the 
 sphere of poetry. His earlier contemporaries had 
 cissigned him the highest rank, and never after- 
 wards changed their verdict. Dana, a man of 
 profound thought and clear poetic insight, was 
 his lifelong friend, correspondent, and admirer. 
 Irving had caused his poems to be republished 
 in England, and rejoiced that they had won for 
 him the approval of Wilson, Rogers, Campbell, 
 Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Cooper said to me 
 once, "They may talk of us, and praise us as 
 they please, but Bryant is our great literary 
 glory." Halleck knew nearly all his poems by 
 heart. So, the younger generation of writers, 
 who had grown up in the wake of his ascend- 
 ant, some of whom had risen in certain lines 
 to a greater height, readily confirmed the older 
 judgments. At a reception tendered him by the 
 Century Club on his seventieth birthday, Emer- 
 son said that " he first and he only made known 
 to mankind our northern landscape — its summer 
 
William Cullen Bryant 233 
 
 splendor, its autumn russet, its winter lights and 
 glories." " He has continued to levy on all 
 American nature; has subsidized every grove 
 and monumental mountain, every gleaming water, 
 those gardens of the desert — the prairies, every 
 waterfowl and wood-bird, the evening wind, the 
 stormy March, the songs of the stars — he has 
 suborned every one of these to speak for him, 
 so that there is no feature of day or night which 
 does not recall the name of Bryant." His friend 
 Longfellow, adopting the words of Dante to Vir- 
 gil, wrote to him : 
 
 " Tu es lo mio maestro, e el, mio autore." 
 
 Lowell, who had once flung a jest at his apparent 
 coldness, still praised his verse for its " strength, 
 its grace, its sweetness, and its dignity," and pro- 
 claimed that his words, when the Ship of State 
 was threatened, "had rammed the cannon home 
 and edged our swords, and sent our boarders 
 shouting." Whittier remarked that more than as 
 master of our song, more than as the unflinching 
 patriot, was the spotless, dauntless man to be 
 honored. The dear, genial Dr. Holmes, for 
 whose loss our eyes are still moistened, said to me 
 once, " He has given immortality to a simple 
 word, without prefix or suffix — and that is Bry- 
 ant." Even the spleeny Poe, who had few good 
 
234 William Cullen Bryant 
 
 words for anybody, had some good words for 
 him ; and I have seen the younger poet gaze at 
 the elder with those dark, luminous eyes of his 
 full of speechless reverence. But a greater cause 
 of Mr. Bryant's continued preeminence than 
 even the kindly regards of his colleagues, was 
 the fact that his poems had been adopted as 
 class-books in our public schools, and so be- 
 come the daily food of youthful generations. 
 As a distinguished lady of New England said to 
 me lately : " Bryant we breathed in as uncon- 
 sciously as we breathed the air; he was assim- 
 ilated into our intellectual being ; and whatever 
 a later criticism may say of his limitations, 
 with us he will remain the best forever." Thus 
 it was that he who had been at first the Fore- 
 runner, then the Leader, became in his old age 
 the Patriarch of our native literature. 
 
 You will scarcely find in history the record of 
 an old age more honored, or more full of useful- 
 ness, like his own October, "journeying in long 
 serenity away." Possessed of ample means, the 
 reward of his own toils, the owner of a country 
 home and a city home, where the music of kind 
 voices was ever heard, visited by eminent men 
 from abroad and the friend of many eminent 
 men at home, .he alternated his days between 
 the planting of trees, his professional work and 
 
William Cullen Bryant 235 
 
 the discharge of kind offices. As the shadows 
 lengthened he grew perhaps more serious, but 
 he never desponded. A great domestic calam- 
 ity fell upon him in the later days : The loss 
 of her whose lifelong attachment had been " a 
 poem of the tenderest rhythm," but he tempered 
 the gloom of his grief by a recurrence to stren- 
 uous literary occupations. As he had lessened 
 the horrors of the Civil War by a flight into the 
 gentle realms of faery, so he softened this per- 
 sonal depression among the majestic shades of a 
 prehistoric age. He was over seventy-two years 
 old when he began a translation of that im- 
 mortal Greek epic which has survived all time. 
 It was a task from which any scholar, in the 
 prime of his vigor, might have shrunk; but this 
 veteran finished it in six years, and finished 
 it with a mastery of execution, a simplicity, an 
 elegance, a force and a fire that makes it, in my 
 opinion, the monumental version of the English 
 tongue. It has, at least, added to a brow, al- 
 ready wreathed with laurels, a crown that shines 
 like a silver moon new risen on a golden eve. 
 Mr. Bryant lived into his eighty-fourth year, 
 when the nation had grown from fifteen to 
 thirty-nine States, and his death, in 1878, by 
 accident and not infirmity, was deplored over 
 this vast expanse as a general affliction. The 
 
236 William Cullen Bryant 
 
 journals, public societies, many churches, and 
 thousands of individuals united in their expres- 
 sions of reverence for his character and of sor- 
 row for his loss. This universality of interest 
 was the more to be remarked in that Mr. 
 Bryant, apart from his professional function, 
 was in no sense of the word a public man. 
 He had never held a public office, entered little 
 into general society, and was personally known 
 only to a small circle of friends. His private 
 life had always been unusually recluse an re- 
 tired. He had fame, but not notoriety ; modest, 
 gentle, reserved, shrinking from all kinds of mis- 
 cellaneous recognition, and courting no honors or 
 plaudits, he was yet widely known, and respected 
 wherever he was known. He was a presence where 
 he was not seen — an influence that radiated far 
 beyond his immediate person. May we not 
 compare it to that of a stream which runs through 
 the thick grasses and dead foliage of a forest, 
 itself unseen, yet watering the roots of mighty 
 oaks, whose fibres shall furnish " the armaments 
 that thunder-strike the walls of rock-built cities." 
 Or, to the soft rain of the night, whose patter on 
 the roof is scarcely heard, but which revives the 
 drooping meads, fills the dried springs, whence 
 birds and cattle slake their thirst, replenishes the 
 pools, where the queen lilies and their courtly 
 
William Cullen Bryant 237 
 
 circles of green leaves ride, — and rising again to 
 the clouds, drop down spring violets and sum- 
 mer columbines and autumn's glorious glow, and 
 the rich, clustering harvests that reward the 
 waiting husbandman. 
 
 Was there ever a career at once more humble 
 and noble than that of whose interacting influ- 
 ences you have just heard an imperfect outline ? 
 From his childhood when he first whispered his 
 rude numbers to the brooks of the mountain 
 side, to the last conscious hour of a venerable 
 age, when he uttered a sublime apostrophe to 
 the genius of civil and religious liberty, which 
 he wished a possession of all the members of 
 the human race, Mr. Bryant's intellect had 
 been active in its communion with the spirit and 
 in its expression of the forms of beauty, seeing 
 in outward nature the living semblances of hu- 
 man life, and in human life the seed-corn of an 
 indefinitely higher development. All through 
 the long interval, which covered three-fourths of 
 this loud and impious Nineteenth Century, dash- 
 ing its mighty way through the rocky depths of 
 old abuse, he labored quietly in the furtherance 
 of its greatest ends, but in his own unostentatious 
 manner. The poet always, yet always the citi- 
 zen, the good American, he aspired to produce 
 in himself and in others, by the inner choice of 
 
238 William Cullen Bryant 
 
 the soul, and not by external constraint, what- 
 ever was brave, noble, disinterested, tender and 
 true in character; as the true source of what- 
 ever is just, rightful, humane, and permanent 
 in institutions. Those aspirations were never 
 remitted ; they had their effects while he lived, 
 and they are working now that he is dead. 
 It is sixteen years since they laid him under 
 the grass, in " flowery June," according to a 
 wish that he had poetically expressed some 
 fifty years before, and there, for we know not how 
 long, 
 
 " There through the long, long summer day, 
 
 The golden light shall lie, 
 And thick young herbs, and groups of flowers 
 
 Stand in their beauty by. 
 The oriole shall build and tell 
 Her love tale close beside his cell ; 
 
 The idle butterfly 
 Shall rest him there, and there be heard 
 The housewife bee and humming bird." 
 
 And though, as he beautifully expressed it, he 
 sees no more the seasons' glorious show; 
 though he hears no more the carols of the 
 birds, the shouts of the village children, or the 
 songs of maidens with fairy laughter blent; 
 though " his part in all the pomp that fills the 
 circuit of the summer hills, is that his grave 
 
William Cullen Bryant 239 
 
 is green ; " there is a grander part beyond ; for 
 his memory, too, is green, and will grow greener 
 with the rising suns and the falling dews. As we 
 have come together to-day, as others elsewhere 
 have come together, to pour out our tributes 
 of gratitude and admiration, so in future years 
 others will come together to cherish his genius 
 and his good deeds as a priceless national in- 
 heritance.