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POETIC LOCALITIES 
 
 OF 
 
 CAMBEIDGE. 
 
 Efitttli bg 
 
 W. J. STILLMAN. 
 
 ILLUSTRATED WITH HELIOTYPES FROM NATURE. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY, 
 
 Late Ticknob & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co. 
 
 1876 . ' 
 
TRANSFERRED FROM THK 
 
 OEPARTMENT of FHOT06RAPNS 
 
PREFACE 
 
 HE ravages of modern improvement bid fair to destroy within not 
 
 many years the few things amongst us which our poets have made 
 classical. In the hope that I may preserve them for another generation, 
 I have photographed some of those which belong to Cambridge. This I 
 have taken on myself to do, though no child of hers, but only a vagabond 
 guest made free of her fields and memories, and not unknown in some 
 of the houses which are her pride, that I may thereby pay my tribute 
 of reverent admiration where the muse has given her highest favors. 
 
 Of my subjects, one, the Chestnut-Tree, is preserved, a maimed beggar 
 for the grace of Cambridge city fathers, only on account of the poet’s 
 consecration. l\Iay the chrism be more potent, even, for the others, and 
 Time do his gentlest with sacred roof and tree ! 
 
 W. J. STILLMAN. 
 
 Cambridge, 1874. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 The Gajibrel-Roofed House . . . . 
 
 To A Child 
 
 The Village Blacksmith 
 
 An Indian Sdjijier Reverie. I. . . 
 
 An Indian Summer Reverie. II. . . 
 
 The Oak • 
 
 The River Charles 
 
 Beaver Brook 
 
 Under the Willows 
 
 Cambridge Churchyard 
 
 Al Fresco 
 
 Under the Washington Elm . . . . 
 
 Page 
 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes 11 
 
 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow . . . . 21 
 
 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow .... 23 
 
 James Russell Lowell 25 
 
 James Russell Lowell 27 
 
 James Russell Lowell 29 
 
 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow . . . . 31 
 
 James Russell Lowell 33 
 
 James Russell Lowell 35 
 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes 37 
 
 James Russell Lowell 39 
 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes 41 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 [Reproduced in Heliotype from Photographs by W. J. Stillman.] 
 
 The Old Holmes House Frontispiece. 
 
 Longfellow’s House .... Face page 21 
 
 The Old Chestnut-Tree, Brattle Street 23 
 
 The Marshes 25 
 
 Harvard College 27 
 
 The Oaks, Waverley 29 
 
 Charles Eiver . . 31 
 
 Beaver Brook 33 
 
 The Willows 35 
 
 The Old Churchyard 37 
 
 Elmwood 39 
 
 The Washington Elm -H 
 
FKOM “THE GAMBREL-EOOFED HOUSE AND ITS OUTLOOK.” 
 
 BY OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 M y birthplace, the home of my childhood and earlier and later boyhood, has 
 within a few months passed out of the ownership of my family into the 
 hands of that venerable Alma Mater who seems to have renewed her youth, and has 
 certainly repainted her dormitories. In truth, when I last revisited that familiar 
 scene and looked upon the Jlammantia moenia of the old halls, “ Massachusetts ” 
 with the dummy clock-dial, “ Harvard ” with the garrulous belfry, little “ Holden ” 
 with the sculptured unpunishable cherubs over its portal, and the rest of my early 
 brick-and-mortar acquaintances, I could not help saying to myself that I had lived 
 to see the peaceable establishment of the Red Republic of Letters. 
 
 Many of the things I shall put down I have no doubt told before in a fragmentary 
 w^ay, how many I cannot be quite sure, as I do not very often read my own prose 
 works. But when a man dies a great deal is said of him which has often been said 
 in other forms, and now this dear old house is dead to me in one sense, and I want 
 to gather up my recollections and wind a string of narrative round them, tying them 
 up like a nosegay for the last tribute : the same blossoms in it I have often laid on 
 its threshold while it was still living for me. 
 
 AVe Americans are all cuckoos, — we make our homes in the nests of other birds. 
 I have read somewhere that the lineal descendants of the man who carted off the 
 body of William Rufus, with Walter Tyrrel’s arrow sticking in it, have driven a 
 cart (not absolutely the same one, I suppose) in the New Forest, from that day to 
 this. I don’t quite understand Mr. Ruskin’s saying (if he said it) that he could n’t 
 get along in a country where there were no castles, but I do think we lose a great 
 deal in living where there are so few permanent homes. You will see how much I 
 parted with which was not reckoned in the price paid for the old homestead. 
 
 I shall say many things which an uncharitable reader might find fault with as 
 personal. I should not dare to call myself a poet if I did not ; for if there is any- 
 thing that gives one a title to that name, it is that his inner nature is naked and is 
 
 11 
 
POETIC LOCALITIES OF CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 not ashamed. But there are many such things I shall put in words, not because 
 they are personal, but because they are human, and are born of just such experiences 
 as those who hear or read what I say are like to have had in greater or less measure. 
 
 I find myself so much like other people that I often wonder at the coincidence. It 
 was only the other day that I sent out a copy of verses about my great-grand- 
 mother’s picture, and I was surprised to find how many other people had portraits 
 of their great-grandmothers or other progenitors, about which they felt as I did 
 about mine, and for whom I had spoken, thinking I was speaking for myself only. 
 And so I am not afraid to talk very freely with you, my precious reader or listener. 
 You too. Beloved, were born somewhere and remember your birthplace or your 
 early home ; for you some house is haunted by recollections ; to some roof you have 
 bid farewell. Your hand is upon mine, then, as I guide my pen. Your heart 
 frames the responses to the litany of my remembrance. For myself it is a tribute 
 of affection I am rendering, and I should put it on record for my own satisfaction, 
 were there none to read or to listen. 
 
 I hope you will not say that I have built a j^illared portico of introduction to a 
 humble structure of narrative. For when you look at the old gambrel-roofed house, 
 you will see an unpretending mansion, such as very possibly you were born in your- 
 self, or at any rate such a place of residence as your minister or some of your well- 
 to-do country cousins find good enough, but not at all too grand for them. AYe 
 have stately old Colonial palaces in our ancient village, now a city, and a thriving 
 one, — square-fronted edifices that stand back from the vulgar highway, with folded 
 arms, as it were ; social fortresses of the time when the twilight lustre of the throne 
 reached as far as our half-cleared settlement, with a glacis before them in the shape 
 of a long broad gravel-walk, so that in King George’s time they looked as formidably 
 to any but the silk-stocking gentry as Gibraltar or Ehrenbreitstein to a visitor with- 
 out the password. We forget all this in the kindly welcome they give us to-day ; 
 for some of them are still standing and doubly flunous, as we all know. But the 
 gambrel-roofed house, though stately enough for college dignitaries and scholarly 
 clergymen, was not one of those old Tory, Episcopal-church-goer’s strongholds. 
 One of its doors opens directly upon the green, always called the Common ; the 
 other, facing the south, a few steps from it, over a paved foot-walk, on the other 
 side of which is the miniature front yard, bordered with lilacs and syringas. The 
 honest mansion makes no pretensions. Acce.ssible, companionable, holding its hand 
 out to all, comfortable, respectable, and even in its way dignified, but not imposing, 
 not a house for his Alajesty’s Counsellor, or the Eight Eeverend successor of Him 
 who had not where to lay his head, for something like a hundred and fifty years it 
 has stood in its lot, and seen the generations of men come and go like the leaves of 
 the forest. I passed some pleasant hours, a few years since, in the Regi.stry of 
 Deeds and the Town Records, looking up the history of the old house. How tho.se 
 dear friends of mine, the antiquarians, for whose grave councils I compose my 
 
 12 
 
THE GAMBREL-ROOFED HOUSE AND ITS OUTLOOK. 
 
 features on the two rare Thursdays when I am at liberty to meet them, in whose 
 human herbarium the leaves and blossoms of past generations are so carefully spread 
 out and pressed and laid away, would listen to an expansion of the following brief 
 details into an Historical Memoir ! 
 
 The estate was the third lot of the eighth “ Squadron ” (whatever that might he), 
 and in the year 1707 was allotted in the distribution of undivided lands to “Mr. 
 ffox,” the Eeverend Jabez Fox, of Woburn, it maybe supposed, as it passed from 
 his heirs to the first Jonathan Hastings ; from him to his son, the long-remembered 
 College Steward; from him in the year 1792 to the Eeverend Eliphalet Pearson, 
 Professor of Hebrew and other Oriental languages in Harvard College, whose large 
 personality swam into my ken when I was looking forward to my teens ; from him 
 to the progenitors of my unborn self. 
 
 I wonder if there are any such beings nowadays as the great Eliphalet, with his 
 large features and conversational hasso profundo, seemed to me. His very name 
 had something elephantine about it, and it seemed to me that the house shook from 
 cellar to garret at his footfall. Some have pretended that he had Olympian aspira- 
 tions, and wanted to sit in the seat of Jove and bear the academic thunderbolt and 
 the aegis inscribed Christo et Ecclesioe. It is a common weakness enough to wish to 
 find one’s self in an empty saddle ; Cotton Mather was miserable all his days, I am 
 afraid, after that entry in his Diary : “ This Day Dr. Sewall was chosen President, 
 for his Piety." 
 
 There is no doubt that the men of the older generation look bigger and more 
 formidable to the boys whose eyes are turned up at their venerable countenances 
 than the race which succeeds them, to the same boys grown older. Everything is 
 twice as large, measured on a three-year-old’s three-foot scale as on a thirty-year- 
 old’s six-foot scale ; but age magnifies and aggravates persons out of due propor- 
 tion. Old people are a kind of monsters to little folks ; mild manifestations of 
 the terrible, it may be, but still, with their white locks and ridged and grooved 
 features, wliich those horrid little eyes exhaust of their details, like so many micro- 
 scopes, not exactly what human beings ought to be. The middle-aged and young 
 men have left comparatively faint impressions in my memory, but how grandly 
 the procession of the old clergymen who filled our pulpit from time to time, and 
 passed the day under our roof, marches before my closed eyes ! At their head the 
 most venerable David Osgood, the unajestic minister of Medford, with massive 
 front and shaggy overshadowing eyebrows ; following in the train, mild-eyed John 
 Foster of Brighton, with the lambent aurora of a smile about his pleasant mouth, 
 which not even the “ Sabbath ” could subdue to the true Levitical aspect ; and 
 bulky Charles Stearns of Lincoln, author of “ The Ladies’ Philosophy of Love. A 
 1 oem. 1/97. (how I stared at him ! he was the first living person ever pointed 
 out to me as a poet) ; and Thaddeus Mason Harris of Dorchester, (the same who, 
 a poor youth, trudging along, staff in hand, being then in a stress of sore need, 
 
 13 
 
POETIC LOCALITIES OF CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 found all at once that somewhat was adhering to the end of his stick, which some- 
 what proved to be a gold ring of price, bearing the words, “ God speed tliee, 
 hriend ! ”) already in decadence as I remember him, with liead slanting forward 
 and downward as if looking for a place to rest in after his learned labors ; and that 
 other Thaddeus, the old man of West Cambridge, who outwatched the rest so long 
 after they had gone to sleep in their own churchyards, that it almost seemed as if 
 he meant to sit up until the morning of the resurrection ; and bringing up the 
 rear, attenuateil but vivacious little Jonathan Homer of Hewton, who was, to look 
 upon, a kind of expurgated, reduced and Americanized copy of Voltaire, hut very 
 unlike him in wickedness or wit. The good-humored junior member of our family 
 always loved to make him happy by setting him chirruping about Miles Cover- 
 dale’s Version, and the Bishop’s Bible, and how he wrote to his friend Sir Isaac 
 (Coffin) about something or other, and how Sir Isaac wrote back that he rvas very 
 much pleased with the contents of his letter, and so on about Sir Isaac, ad libitum, 
 — for the admiral was his old friend, and he was proud of him. The kindly little 
 old gentleman was a collector of Bibles, and made himself believe he thought he 
 should publish a learned Commentary some day or other ; but his friends looked 
 for it only in the Greek Calends, — say on the 31st of April, when that should 
 come round, if you would modernize the phrase. I recall also one or two excep- 
 tional and infrequent visitors with perfect distinctness : cheerful Elijah Kellogg, a 
 lively missionary from the region of the Quoddy Indians, with much hopeful talk 
 about Sock Bason and his tribe ; also poor old Poorhouse-Parson Isaac Smith, his 
 head going like a China mandarin, as he discussed the possibilities of the escape 
 of that distinguished captive whom he spoke of under the name, if I can reproduce 
 phonetically its vibrating nasalities, of “General Mmbongaparty, — a name sug- 
 gestive to my young imagination of a dangerous, loose-jointed skeleton, threatening 
 
 us all like the armed figure of Death in my little New England Primer 
 
 To come back to the old house and its former tenant, the Professor of Hebrew 
 and other Oriental languages. Fifteen years he lived with his family under its 
 roof. I never found the slightest trace of him until a few years ago, when I 
 cleaned and brightened with pious hands the brass lock of “ the study, which 
 had for many years been covered with a thick coat of paint. On that I found 
 scratched, as with a nail or fork, the following inscription : 
 
 E PE 
 
 Only that and nothing more, but the story told itself. Master Edward Pearson, 
 then about as high as the lock, was disposed to immortalize himself in monumental 
 brass, and had got so far towards it, when a sudden interruption, probably a smart 
 box on the ear, cheated him of his fame, except so far as this poor record may 
 re.scue it. Dead long ago. I remember him well, a grown man, as a visitor at a 
 later period ] and, for some reason, I recall him in the attitude of the Colossus of 
 
 14 
 
THE GAMBREL-ROOFED HOUSE AND ITS OUTLOOK. 
 
 Ehodes, standing full before a generous wood-fire, not facing it, but quite the con- 
 trary, a perfect picture of the content afforded by a blazing hearth contemplated 
 from that point of view, and, as the heat stole through his person and kindled his 
 emphatic features, seeming to me a pattern of manly beauty. What a statue gal- 
 lery of posturing friends we all have in our memory ! The old Professor himself 
 sometimes visited the house after it had changed hands. Of course, my recollec- 
 tions are not to be wholly trusted, but I always think I see his likeness in a 
 profile face to be found among the illustrations of Eees’s Cyclopmdia. (See Plates, 
 Vol. IV., Plate 2, Painting, Diversities of the Human Face, Fig. 4.) 
 
 And now let us return to our chief picture. In the days of my earliest remem- 
 brance, a row of tall Lombardy poplars mounted guard on the western side of the 
 old mansion. Wliether, like the cypress, these trees suggest the idea of the 
 funeral torch or tlie monumental spire, whether their tremidous leaves make us 
 afraid by sympathy with their nervous thrills, whether the faint balsamic smell of 
 tlieir leaves and their closely swatlied limbs have in them vague hints of dead 
 Pharaohs stiffened in their cerements, I will not guess ; but they always seemed 
 to me to give an air of sepulchral sadness to the house before which they stood sen- 
 tries. Hot so with the row of elms which you may see leading up towards the 
 western entrance. I think the patriarch of them all went over in the great gale 
 of 1815 ; I know I used to shake the youngest of them with my hands, stout as it 
 is now, with a trunk that would defy the bully of Crotoiia, or the strong man 
 whose liaison with the Lady Delilah proved so disastrous. 
 
 The College plain would be nothing without its elms. As the long hair of a 
 woman is a glory to her, so are these green tresses that bank themselves against 
 the sky in thick clustered masses the ornament and the pride of the classic green. 
 You know the “'Washington elm,” or if you do not, you had better rekindle your 
 patriotism by reading tlie inscription, wliicli tells you that under its shadow the 
 great leader first drew his sword at the head of an American army. In a line 
 with that you may see two others : the coral fan, as I always called it from 
 its resemblance in form to that beautiful marine growth, and a third a little 
 farther along. I have heard it said that all three were planted at the same 
 time, and that the difference of their growth is due to the slope of the ground, — 
 the Washington elm being lower than either of the others. There is a row of 
 elms just in front of the old house on the south. When I was a child the 
 one at the southwest corner was struck by lightning, and one of its limbs and 
 a long ribbon of bark torn away. The tree never fully recovered its symmetry 
 and vigor, and forty years and more afterwards a second thunderbolt crashed 
 upon it and set its heart on fire, like those of the lost souls in the Hall of 
 Eblis. Heaven had twice blasted it, and the axe finished what the lightning 
 had begun 
 
 Beyond the garden was “ the field,” a vast domain of four acres or thereabout, 
 
 * 15 
 
POETIC LOCALITIES OF CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 by the measurement of after years, bordered to the north by a fathomless 
 chasm, — the ditch the base-ball players of the present era jump over; on the 
 east by unexplored territory ; on the south by a barren enclosure, where the 
 red sorrel proclaimed liberty and equality under its drapeau rouge, and suc- 
 ceeded in establishing a vegetable commune where all were alike, poor, mean, 
 sour, and uninteresting; and on the west by the Common, not then disgraced 
 by jealous enclosures, which make it look like a cattle-market. Beyond, as I 
 looked round, were the Colleges, the meeting-house, the little square market- 
 house, long vanished ; the burial-ground where the dead Presidents stretched 
 their weary bones under epitaphs stretched out at as full length as their sub- 
 jects ; the pretty church where the gouty Tories used to kneel on their has- 
 
 socks ; the district school-house, and hard by it Ma’am Hancock’s cottage, 
 never so called in those days, but rather “ tenfooter ” ; then houses scattered 
 near and far, open spaces, the shadowy elms, round hilltops in the distance, 
 and over all the great bowl of the sky. Mind you, this was the world, as I 
 first knew it ; terra veteribus cognita, as Mr. Arro'wsmith w’ould have called it, 
 if he had mapped the universe of my infancy. 
 
 But I am forgetting the old house again in the landscape. The Avorst of a 
 modern stylish mansion is, that it has no place for ghosts. I watched one 
 
 building not long since. It had no proper garret, to begin Avith, only a sealed 
 
 interval betAveen the roof and attics, where a spirit could not be accommodated, 
 unless it Avere flattened out like Eavel, Brother, after the millstone had fallen 
 on him. There Avas not a nook or a corner in the Avhole house fit to lodge 
 any respectable ghost, for every part was as open to observation as a literary 
 man’s character and condition, his figure and estate, his coat and his counte- 
 nance, are to his (or her) Bohemian Majesty on a tour of inspection through 
 his (or her) subjects’ keyholes. 
 
 Now the old house had Avainscots, behind Avhich the mice were ahvays 
 scampering and squeaking and rattling doAvn the plaster, and enacting family 
 scenes and parlor theatricals. It had a cellar Avhere the cold slug clung to the 
 walls, and the misanthropic spider withdrew from the garish day ; AAdiere the 
 green mould loved to groAv, and the long white potato-shoots Avent feeling along 
 the floor, if haply they might find the daylight ; it had great brick pillars, 
 always in a cold sweat with holding up the burden they had been aching 
 under day and night for a century and more ; it had sepulchral arches closed 
 by rough doors that hung on hinges rotten Avith rust, behind which doors, if 
 there AA^as not a heap of bones connected with a mysterious disappearance of 
 long ago, there Avell might have been, for it was just the place to look for 
 them. It had a garret, very nearly such a one as it seems to me one of us 
 has described in one of his books ; but let us look at this one as I can repro- 
 duce it from memory. It has a flooring of laths with ridges of mortar squeezed 
 
 16 
 
THE GAMBREL-ROOFED HOUSE AND ITS OUTLOOK. 
 
 up between them, which if you tread on you will go to — the Lord have mercy 
 on you ! where will you go to 1 — the same being crossed by narrow bridges 
 of boards, on which you may put your feet, but with fear and trembling. 
 Above you and around you are beams and joists, on some of which you may 
 see, when the light is let in, the marks of the conchoidal clippings of the 
 broadaxe, showing the rude way in which the timber was shaped as it came, 
 fidl of sap, from the neighboring forest. It is a realm of darkness and thick 
 dust, and shrouddike cobwebs and dead things they wrap in their gray folds. 
 For a garret is like a sea-shore, where wrecks are thrown up and slowly go to 
 pieces. There is the cradle which the old man you just remember was rocked 
 in ; there is the ruin of the bedstead he died on ; that ugly slanting contri- 
 vance used to be put under his pillow in the days when his breatli came 
 hard ; there is his old chair with both arms gone, symbol of the desolate time 
 when he had nothing earthly left to lean on; there is tlie large wooden reel 
 which the blear-eyed old deacon sent the minister’s lady, who thanked him 
 graciously, and twirled it smilingly, and in fitting season bowed it out decently 
 to the limbo of troublesome conveniences. And there are old leather port- 
 manteaus, like stranded porpoises, their mouths gaping in gaunt hunger for the 
 food with which they used to be gorged to bulging repletion ; and old brass 
 andirons, waiting until time shall revenge them on their paltry substitutes, and 
 they shall have their own again, and bring with them the fore-stick and the 
 back-log of ancient days ; and the empty churn, with its idle dasher, which 
 the Nancys and Phoebes, who have left their comfortable places to the Bridgets 
 and Norahs, used to handle to good purpose ; and the brown, shaky old spin- 
 ning-wheel, which was running, it may be, in the days when they were hanging 
 the Salem witches. 
 
 Under the dark and haunted garret were attic chambers which themselves had 
 histories. On a pane in the northeastern chamber may be read these names : 
 “ John Tracy,” “ Eobert Roberts,” “ Thomas Prince ” ; “ Stultus ” another hand had 
 added. When I found these names a few years ago (wrong side up, for the window 
 had been reversed), I looked at once in the Triennial to find them, for the epithet 
 showed that they were probably students. I found them all under the years 1771 
 and 1773. Does it please their thin ghosts thus to be dragged to the light of dayl 
 Has “ Stultus ” forgiven the indignity of being thus characterized 1 
 
 The southeast chamber was the Library Hospital. Every scholar should have a 
 book infirmary attached to his library. There should find a peaceable refuge the 
 many books, invalids from their birth, which are sent “ with the best regards of 
 the Author ” ; the respected, but unpresentable cripples which have lost a cover ; 
 the odd volumes of honored sets which go mourning all their days for their lost 
 brother ; the school-books which have been so often the subjects of assault and 
 battery, that they look as if the police court must know them by heart ; these and 
 
 17 
 
POETIC LOCALITIES OF CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 still more the pictured story-books, beginning with Mother Goose (which a dear old 
 friend of mine has just been amusing his philosophic leisure with turning most 
 ingeniously and happily into the tongues of Virgil and Homer), will be precious 
 mementos by and by, when children and grandchildren come along. What would 
 1 not give for that dear little paper-bound quarto, in large and most legible type, on 
 certain pages of which the tender hand that was the shield of my infancy had 
 crossed out with deep black marks something awful, probably about Bears, such 
 as once tare two-and-forty of us little folks for making faces, and the very name of 
 ■which made us hide our heads under the bedclothes 
 
 The rooms of the second story, the chambers of birth and death, are sacred to 
 silent memories. 
 
 Let us go down to the ground-floor. I should have begun with this, but that 
 the historical reminiscences of the old house have been recently told in a most 
 interesting memoir by a distinguished student of our local history. I retain my 
 doubts about those “ dents ” on the floor of the right-hand room, “ the study ” of 
 successive occupants, said to have been made by the butts of the Continental 
 militia’s firelocks, but this was the cause the story told me in childhood laid them 
 to. That military consultations were held in tliat room when the house was Gen- 
 eral Ward’s headquarters, that the Provincial generals and colonels and other men 
 of war there planned the movement which ended in the fortifying of Bunker’s Hill, 
 that AVarren slept in the house the night before the battle, that President Langdon 
 went forth from the western door and prayed for God’s blessing on the men just 
 setting forth on their bloody expedition, — all these things have been told, and 
 perhaps none of them need be doubted. 
 
 But now for fifty years and more that room has been a meeting-ground for the 
 platoons and companies which range themselves at the scholar’s word of command. 
 Pleasant it is to think that the retreating host of books is to give place to a still larger 
 army of volumes, which have seen service under the eye of a great commander. For 
 here the noble collection of him so freshly remembered as our silver-tongued orator, 
 our erudite scholar, our honored College President, our accomplished statesman, our 
 courtly ambassador, are to be reverently gathered by the heir of his name, himself 
 not unworthy to be surrounded by that august assembly of the wise of all ages and 
 of various lands and languages. 
 
 Could such a many-chambered edifice have stood a century and a half and not 
 have had its passages of romance to bequeath their lingering legends to the after- 
 time 1 There are other names on some of the small window-panes, which must 
 have had young flesh-and-blood owners, and there is one of early date which 
 elderly persons have whispered was home by a fair woman, whose graces made the 
 house beautiful in the eyes of the youth of that time. One especially — you will 
 find the name of Fortescue Vernon, of the class of 1780, in the Triennial Catalogue 
 — was a favored visitor to the old mansion ; but he went over seas, I think they told 
 
 18 
 
THE GAMBREL-ROOFED HOUSE AND ITS OUTLOOK. 
 
 me, and died still young, and tlie name of tlie maiden which is scratched on the 
 window-pane was never changed. I am telling the story honestly, as I remember 
 it, hut I may have colored it unconsciously, and the legendary pane may he broken 
 before this for aught I know. At least, I have named no names except the beau- 
 tiful one of the supposed hero of the romantic story. 
 
 It was a great happiness to have been born in an old house haunted by such rec- 
 ollections, with harmless ghosts walking its corridors, with fields of waving grass 
 and trees and singing birds, and that vast territory of four or five acres around it 
 to give a child the sense that he was born to a noble principality. It has been a 
 great pleasure to retain a certain hold upon it for so many years ; and since in the 
 natural course of things it must at length pass into other hands, it is a gratification 
 to see the old place making itself tidy for a new tenant, like some venerable dame 
 who is getting ready to entertain a neighbor of condition. Not long since a new 
 cap of shingles adorned this ancient mother among the village — now city — man- 
 sions. She has dressed herself in brighter colors than she has hitherto worn, so 
 they tell me, within the last few days. She has modernized her aspects in several 
 ways ; she has rubbed bright the glasses through which she looks at the Common 
 and the Colleges ; and as the sunsets shine upon her through the flickering leaves 
 or the wiry spray of the elms I remember from my childhood, they will glorify her 
 into the aspect she wore when President Holyoke, father of our long since dead 
 centenarian, looked upon her in her youthful comeliness. 
 
 The quiet corner formed by this and the neighboring residences has changed 
 less than any place I can remember. Our kindly, polite, shrewd, and humorous 
 old neighbor, who in former days has served the town as constable and auctioneer, 
 and who bids fair to become the oldest inhabitant of the city, was there when I 
 was born, and is living there to-day. By and by the stony foot of the great Uni- 
 versity will plant itself on this whole territory, and the private recollections which 
 clung so tenaciously and fondly to the place and its habitations will have died with 
 those who cherished them. 
 
 Shall they ever live again in the memory of those who loved them here below 1 
 What is this life without the poor accidents which made it our own, and by which 
 we identify ourselves 1 Ah me ! I might like to be a winged chorister, but still 
 it seems to me I should hardly be quite happy if I could not recall at will the 
 Old House with the Long Entry, and the White Chamber (where I wrote the first 
 verses that made me known, with a pencil, starts pede in uno, pretty nearly), and 
 the Little Parlor, and tlie Study, and the old books in uniforms as varied as those 
 of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company used to be, if my memory serves 
 me right, and the front yard with the stars of Bethlehem growing, flowerless, 
 among the grass, and the dear faces to be seen no more there or anywhere on this 
 earthly place of farewells. 
 
 19 
 
s 
 
 K 3 
 
FROM “TO A CHILD.” 
 
 BY HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 NCE, ah, once, within these walls. 
 
 One whom memory oft recalls. 
 The Father of his Country, dwelt. 
 
 And yonder meadows broad and damp 
 The fires of the besieging camp 
 Encircled with a burning belt. 
 
 Up and down these echoing stairs. 
 Heavy with the weight of cares. 
 Sounded his majestic tread ; 
 
 Yes, within this very room 
 Sat he in those hours of gloom. 
 
 Weary both in heart and head. 
 
 21 
 
THE VILLAGE BLACKSMITH. 
 
 BY HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 “I T~NDER a spreading chestnut-tree 
 The village smithy stands ; 
 
 The smith, a mighty man is he, 
 
 With large and sinewy hands ; 
 
 And the muscles of his brawny arms 
 Are strong as iron bands. 
 
 His hair is crisp, and black, and long. 
 His face is like the tan ; 
 
 His brow is wet with honest sweat, 
 
 He earns whate’er he can. 
 
 And looks the whole world in the face. 
 For he owes not any man. 
 
 Week in, week out, from morn till night. 
 You can hear his bellows blow ; 
 
 You can hear him swing his heavy sledge. 
 With measured beat and slow. 
 
 Like a sexton ringing the village bell. 
 When the evening sun is low. 
 
 And children coming home from school 
 Look in at the open door ; 
 
 They love to see the flaming forge. 
 
 And hear the bellows roar. 
 
 And catch the burning sparks that fly 
 Like chaff from a threshing-floor. 
 
 He goes on Sunday to the church. 
 
 And sits among his boys ; 
 
 He hears the parson pmy and preach. 
 
 He hears his daughter’s voice. 
 
 Singing in the village choir. 
 
 And it makes his heart rejoice. 
 
 23 
 
POETIC LOCALITIES OF CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 It sounds to him like her mother’s voice, 
 Singing in Paradise ! 
 
 He needs must think of her once more, 
 How in the grave she lies ; 
 
 And with his hard, rough hand he wipes 
 A tear out of his eyes. 
 
 Toiling, — rejoicing, — sorrowing. 
 
 Onward through life he goes ; 
 
 Each morning sees some task begin, 
 
 Each evening sees it close ; 
 
 Something attempted, something done. 
 
 Has earned a night’s repose. 
 
 Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend. 
 For the lesson thou hast taught ! 
 
 Thus at the flaming forge of life 
 Our fortunes must be wrought; 
 
 Thus on its sounding anvil shaped 
 Each burning deed and thought ! 
 
 24 
 
FEOM “AN INDIAN-SUMMEE EEVEEIE.” 
 
 Wlio cannot in their vaiious incomes share, 
 
 From every season drawn, of shade and light. 
 
 Who sees in them hut levels brown and bare ; 
 
 Each change of storm or sunshine scatters free 
 On them its largess of variety. 
 
 For Nature with cheap means still works her wonders rare. 
 
 In Spring they lie one broad expanse of green. 
 
 O’er which the light winds run with glimmering feet ; 
 
 Here, yellower stripes track out the creek unseen. 
 There, darker growths o’er hidden ditches meet ; 
 
 And purpler stains show where the blossoms crowd. 
 
 As if the silent shadow of a cloud 
 Hung there becalmed, with the next breath to fleet. 
 
 BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 I. 
 
 EAR marshes ! vain to him the gift of sight 
 
 25 
 

FROM “AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE.” 
 
 BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 II. 
 
 r I "^HERE gleams my native village, dear to me, 
 
 -L Though higher change’s waves each day are seen. 
 Whelming fields famed in boyhood’s history. 
 
 Sanding with houses the diminished green ; 
 
 There, in red brick, which softening time defies. 
 Stand square and stiff the Muses’ factories ; — 
 
 How with my life knit up is every well-known scene ! 
 
 27 
 
# 
 
THE OAK. 
 
 BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 ~TT7"nAT gnarled stretch, what dejrth of shade, is his ! 
 
 ' V There needs no crown to mark the forest’s king ; 
 How in his leaves outshines full summer’s bliss ! 
 
 Sun, storm, rain, dew, to him their tribute bring. 
 Which he with such benignant royalty 
 Accepts, as overpayeth what is lent ; 
 
 All nature seems his vassal proud to be. 
 
 And cunning only for his ornament. 
 
 IIow towers he, too, amid the billowed snows. 
 
 An um[uelled exile from the summer’s throne. 
 Whose plain, uncinctured front more kingly shows. 
 Now that the obscuring courtier leaves are flown. 
 Ills boughs make music of the winter air. 
 
 Jewelled with sleet, like some cathedral front 
 Where clinging snow-flakes with (juaint ait repair 
 The dints and furrows of time’s envious brunt. 
 
 How doth his patient strength the rude March wind 
 I’ersuade to seem glad lireaths of summer breeze. 
 And win the soil that fain woulil bo unkind. 
 
 To swell his revenues with proud increase ! 
 
 He is the gem ; and all the land.scajie wide 
 (So doth his grandeur isolate the sense) 
 
 Seems but the setting, worthless all beside. 
 
 An empty socket, were he fallen thence. 
 
 So, from oft converse with life’s wintry gales. 
 
 Should man learn how to clasp with tougher roots 
 'The inspiring earth ; — how otherwise avails 
 The leaf-creating sap that sunward shoots ? 
 
 29 
 
POETIC LOCALITIES OE CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 So every year that falhs with noiseless flake 
 Should fill old scars up on the stormward side, 
 
 And make hoar age revered for age’s sake, 
 
 Not for traditions of youth’s leafy pride. 
 
 So, from the pinched soil of a churlish fate. 
 
 True hearts compel the sap of sturdier growth. 
 
 So between earth and heaven stand simply great. 
 That these shall seem but their attendants both ; 
 
 For nature’s forces with obedient zeal 
 
 Wait on the rooted faith and oaken will ; 
 
 As quickly the pretender’s cheat they feel. 
 
 And tm-n mad Pucks to flout and mock him still. 
 
 Lord ! all thy works ai'e lessons, — each contains 
 Some emblem of man’s all-containing soul ; 
 
 Shall he make fruitless all thy glorious pains. 
 Delving within thy grace an eyeless mole ? 
 
 Make me the least of thy Dodona-grove, 
 
 Cause me some message of thy truth to bring. 
 
 Speak but a word through me, nor let thy love 
 Among my boughs disdain to perch and sing. 
 
 ;o 
 
. 
 
TO THE EIVEE CHAELES. 
 
 BY HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 
 
 R iver 1 that in silence windest 
 
 Through the meadows, bright and free, 
 Till at length thy rest thou findest 
 In the bosom of the sea ! 
 
 Four long years of mingled feeling. 
 
 Half in rest, and half in strife, 
 
 1 have seen thy waters stealing 
 Onward, like the stream of life. 
 
 Thou hast taught me. Silent River ! 
 
 Many a lesson, deep and long ; 
 
 Thou hast been a generous giver ; 
 
 I can give thee hut a song. 
 
 Oft in sadness and in illness, 
 
 I have watched thy current glide. 
 
 Till the beauty of its stillness 
 Overflowed me, like a tide. 
 
 And in better hours and brighter. 
 
 When I saw thy waters gleam, 
 
 I have felt my heart heat lighter. 
 
 And leap onward with thy stream. 
 
 Not for this alone I love thee. 
 
 Nor because thy waves of blue 
 From celestial seas above thee 
 Take their own celestial hue. 
 
 Where yon shadowy woodlands hide thee. 
 
 And thy waters disappear. 
 
 Friends I love have dwelt beside thee. 
 
 And have made thy margin dear. 
 
 31 
 
rOETIC LOCALITIES OF CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 More than this ; — thy name reminds me 
 Of three friends, all true and tried ; 
 And that name, like magic, binds me 
 Closer, closer to thy side. 
 
 Friends my soul with joy remembers ! 
 
 How like quivering flames they start, 
 When I fan the living embers 
 On the hearth-stone of my heart ! 
 
 ’T is for this, thou Silent River ! 
 
 That my spirit leans to thee : 
 
 Thou hast been a generous giver, 
 
 Take this idle song from me. 
 
 32 
 

BEAVER BROOK. 
 
 BY JAMES BUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 USHED with broad sunlight lies the hill. 
 
 And, minuting the long day’s loss. 
 The cedar’s shadow, slow and stUl, 
 
 Creeps o’er its dial of gray moss. 
 
 Warm noon brims full the valley’s cup, 
 
 The aspen’s leaves are scarce astir ; 
 
 Only the little mill sends up 
 Its busy, never-ceasing burr. 
 
 Climbing the loose-piled wall that hems 
 The road along the mill-pond’s brink. 
 
 From ’neath the arching barberry-stems. 
 
 My footstep scares the shy chewink. 
 
 Beneath a bony buttonwood 
 
 The mill’s red door lets forth the din ; 
 
 The whitened miller, dust-imbued. 
 
 Flits past the square of dark within. 
 
 No mountain torrent’s strength is here ; 
 
 Sweet Beaver, child of forest still, 
 
 Heaps its small pitcher to the ear. 
 
 And gently waits the miller’s will. 
 
 Swift slips Undine along the race 
 Unheard, and then, with flashing bound. 
 Floods the dull wheel with light and grace. 
 And, laughing, hunts the loath drudge round. 
 
 The miller dreams not at what cost 
 The quivering millstones hum and whirl. 
 
 Nor how for every turn are tost 
 Armfuls of diamond and of pearl. 
 
 3.3 
 
POETIC LOCALITIES OF CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 But Slimmer cleared my happier eyes 
 With drops of some celestial juice, 
 
 To see how Beauty underlies 
 Forevermore each fonn of Use. 
 
 And more : methought I saw that flood, 
 
 Which now so dull and darkling steals. 
 
 Thick, here and there, with human hlood. 
 
 To turn the world’s laborious wheels. 
 
 No more than doth the miller there. 
 
 Shut in our several cells, do we 
 Know with what waste of beauty rare 
 Moves every day’s machinery. 
 
 Surely the wiser time shall come 
 When this fine overplus of might. 
 
 No longer sullen, slow, and dumb. 
 
 Shall leap to music and to light. 
 
 In that new childhood of the Earth 
 Life of itself shall dance and play. 
 
 Fresh blood in Time’s shrunk veins make mirth. 
 And labor meet delight half-way. 
 
 34 
 
FROM “UNDER THE WILLOWS.” 
 
 BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 A mong tliem one, ail ancient willow, spreads 
 
 Eight balanced limbs, springing at once all round 
 His deep-ridged trunk with upward slant diverse. 
 
 In outline like enormous beaker, fit 
 
 For hand of Jotun, where ’mid snow and mist 
 
 He holds unwieldy revel. This tree, spared, 
 
 I know not by what grace, — for in the blood 
 Of our New World subduers lingers yet 
 Hereditary feud with trees, they being 
 (They and the red-man most) our fathers’ foes, — 
 
 Is one of six, a willow Pleiades, 
 
 The seventh fallen, that lean along the brink 
 Where the steep upland dijis into the marsh. 
 
 Their roots, like molten metal cooled in flowing. 
 
 Stiffened in coils and runnels down the bank. 
 
 The friend of all the winds, wide-armed he towers 
 And glints his steely aglets in the sun, 
 
 Or whitens fitfully with sudden bloom 
 Of leaves breeze-lifted, much as when a shoal 
 Of devious minnows wheel from where a pike 
 Lurks balanced ’neath the lily-pads, and whirl 
 A rood of silver bellies to the day. 
 
 35 
 

FEOM “CAMBPJDGE CHURCHY AED.” 
 
 BY OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 
 
 O UR ancient diurcb ! its lowly tower, 
 Beneath the loftier spire, 
 
 Is shadowed when the sunset hour 
 Clothes the tall shaft in fire ; 
 
 It sinks beyond the distant eye. 
 
 Long ere the glittering vane. 
 
 High wheeling in the western sky. 
 
 Has faded o’er the plain. 
 
 Like Sentinel and Nun, they keep 
 Their vigil on the green ; 
 
 One seems to guard, and one to weep. 
 
 The dead that lie between ; 
 
 And both roll out, so full and near. 
 
 Their music’s mingling waves. 
 
 They shake the grass, whose pennoned spear 
 Leans on the uaiTow graves. 
 
 37 
 
FEOM ‘'AL FEESCO.” 
 
 BY JAMES RTJSSELL LOWELL. 
 
 T he dandelions and buttercups 
 
 Gild aU the lawn ; the drowsy bee 
 Stumbles among the clover-tops. 
 
 And summer sweetens all but me ; 
 
 Away, unfruitful lore of books, 
 
 For whose vain idiom we reject 
 The soul’s more native dialect. 
 
 Aliens among the birds and brooks. 
 
 Dull to interpret or conceive 
 What gospels lost the woods retrieve ! 
 Away, ye critics, city-bred. 
 
 Who set man-traps of thus and so. 
 
 And in the first man’s footsteps tread. 
 
 Like those who toil through drifted snow ! 
 Away, my poets, whose sweet spell 
 Can make a garden of a cell ! 
 
 I need ye not, for I to-day 
 
 Will make one long sweet verse of play. 
 
 Snap, chord of manhood’s tenser strain ! 
 To-day I will be a boy again ; 
 
 The mind’s pursuing element, 
 
 Like a bow slackened and unbent, 
 
 In some dark corner shall be leant. 
 
 The robin sings, as of old, from the limb ! 
 The catbird croons in the lilac-bush ! 
 Through the dim arbor, himself more dim. 
 Silently hops the hermit-thrush. 
 
 The withered leaves keep dumb for him ; 
 The irreverent buccaneering bee 
 Hath stormed and rifled the nunnerj’’ 
 
 Of the lilv, and scattered the sacred floor 
 39 
 
POETIC LOCALITIES OF CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 With haste-dropt gold from shrine to door ; 
 There, as of yore, 
 
 The rich, milk-tingcing Imttercup 
 Its tiny jiolished urn holds up. 
 
 Filled with ripe summer to tlie edge. 
 
 The sun in his own wine to pledge ; 
 
 And our tall elm, this huudredth year 
 Doge of our leafy Venice here. 
 
 Who, with an annual ring, doth wed 
 The blue Adriatic overhead. 
 
 Shadows with his palatial mass 
 The deep canals of tlowing grass. 
 
 O unestranged hiids and bees ! 
 
 O face of nature always true ! 
 
 O never-imsympathizing trees ! 
 
 0 never-rejecting roof of blue. 
 
 Whose rash disherison never falls 
 On us unthinking prodigals. 
 
 Yet who convictest all our ill. 
 
 So grand and unajipeasable ! 
 klethinks my heart from each of these 
 Plucks part of childhood hack again. 
 
 Long there imprisoned, as the breeze 
 Doth every hidden odor seize 
 Of wood and water, hill and plain. 
 
 Once more am I admitted peer 
 In the upper house of Nature here. 
 
 And feel through all my j)ulses run 
 The royal blood of breeze and sun. 
 
 Upon these elm-arched solitudes 
 No hum of neighbor toil intrudes ; 
 
 The only hammer that I hear 
 Is wielded by the woodpecker. 
 
 The single noisy calling his 
 In all our leaf-hid Sybaris ; 
 
 The good old time, close-hidden here. 
 Persists, a loyal cavalier. 
 
 While Roundheads prim, with point of fox. 
 Probe wainscot-chink and empty box ; 
 
 Here no hoarse-voiced iconoclast 
 Insults thy statues, royal Past ; 
 
 Myself too prone the axe to wield, 
 
 1 touch the silver side of the shield 
 With lance reversed, and challenge peace, 
 
 A willing convert of the trees. 
 
 40 
 
UXDER THE WASHINGTOX ELM. 
 
 Our fathers gathered in arms, and swore 
 They would follow the sign their banners bore. 
 And fight till the land was free. 
 
 Half of their woik was done, 
 
 Half is left to do, — 
 
 Cambridge, and Concord, and Le.xington ! 
 
 When the battle is fought and won. 
 
 What shall be told of you ? 
 
 Hark ! — ’t is the south-wind moans, — 
 
 Who are the martjTS dowm ? 
 
 Ah, the manow was true in your children’s bones 
 That sprinkled with blood the cursed stones 
 Of the murder-haunted town ! 
 
 What if the storm-clouds blow ? 
 
 Wliat if the green leaves fall ? 
 
 Better the crashing tempest’s throe 
 Than the army of worms that gnawed below ; 
 Trample them one and all ! 
 
 Then, when the battle is won. 
 
 And the land from traitors free. 
 
 Our children shall tell of the strife begun 
 When Liberty’s second April sun 
 
 Was bright on our brave old tree ! 
 
 April 27, 1801. 
 
 BY OLIVER WENDELL IIOLME.S. 
 
 IGHTY years have passed, and more. 
 Since under the brave old tree 
 
 41