" 
 
William Morris 
 
 After the painting by Watts. 
 
VOLUME VI 
 
 NEW SERIES 
 
Copyright, 1899, by Elbert Hubbard. 
 
Of this edition but nine hundred and forty-seven 
 copies were printed and illumined by hand. This book 
 is Number -^ oZj, 
 
 SLLVnmEB^M 
 
INDEX 
 
 1 William Morris z 
 
 2 Robert Browning .... 2$ 
 
 3 Alfred Tennyson .... 51 
 
 4 Robert Burns .... 73 
 
 5 John Milton 97 
 
 6 Samuel Johnson .... zzg 
 

r 
 
 WILLIAM MORRIS 
 
THE IDLE SINGER. 
 
 From " The Earthly Paradise." 
 
 Of Heaven or Hell I have no power to sing, 
 I cannot ease the burden of your fears, 
 Or make quick-coming death a little thing. 
 Or bring again the pleasure of past years, 
 Nor for my words shall ye forget your tears, 
 Or hope again for aught that I can say, 
 The idle singer of an empty day. 
 
 But rather, when aweary of your mirth. 
 
 From full hearts still unsatisfied ye sigh. 
 
 And feeling kindly unto all the earth, 
 
 Grudge every minute as it passes by, 
 
 Made the more mindful that the sweet days die, — 
 
 Remember me a little then, I pray. 
 
 The idle singer of an empty day. 
 
 The heavy trouble, the bewildering care 
 
 That weighs us down who live and earn our bread, 
 
 These idle verses have no power to bear. 
 
 So let me sing of names remembered. 
 
 Because they, living not, can ne'er be dead. 
 
 Or long time take their memory quite away 
 
 From a poor singer of an empty day. 
 
 Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time. 
 Why should I strive to set the crooked straight ? 
 Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme 
 Beats with light wing against the ivory gate, 
 Telling a tale not too importunate 
 To those who in the sleepy region stay, 
 Lulled by the singer of an empty day. 
 
IHE parents of William Morris were WILLIAM 
 well-to-do people who lived in the MORRIS ¥ 
 village of ^Vathamstow, Essex. The 
 father was a London bill broker, cool- 
 headed, calculating & intensely prac- 
 tical 1^ In the home of his parents 
 William Morris surely received small 
 impulse in the direction of art ; he, 
 however, was taught how to make both 
 ends meet, and there ^vere drilled into 
 his chara(5ler many good lessons of 
 I plain common sense — a rather unusual 
 ;quipment for a poet, but still one that 
 [should not be waived nor considered 
 lightly. At the village school William 
 was neither precocious nor dull,neither 
 black nor white : his cosmos being 
 simply a sort of slatcy-gray, which 
 attra<5led no special attention from 
 schoolfellows or tutors. 
 From the village school he went to 
 Marlborough Academy, where by pa- 
 tient grubbing he fitted himself for 
 Exeter College, Oxford. 
 Morris the elder, proved his good 
 sense by taking no very special inter- 
 est in the boy's education : — violence 
 iof dire(5^ion in education falls fiat: 
 
WILLIAM man is a lonely creature, and has to work out his career 
 MORRIS 1» in his own way. To help the grub spin its cocoon is 
 quite unnecessary, and to play the part of Mrs. Gamp 
 with the butterfly in its chrysalis stage is to place a 
 quietus upon its career. The whole science of modern 
 education is calculated to turn out a good, fairish, 
 commonplace article ; but the formula for a genius re- 
 mains a secret with Deity. The great man becomes 
 great in spite of teachers and parents ; and his near 
 kinsmen, being color-blind, usually pooh-pooh the idea 
 that he is anything more than mediocre. 
 1^ At Oxford, W^illiam Morris fell in with a young 
 man of about his ow^n age by the name of Edward 
 Burne-Jones. Burne-Jones was studying theology. He 
 \vas slender in stature, dreamy, spiritual, poetic. Mor- 
 ris was a giant in strength, blunt m speech, bold in 
 manner, and had a shock of hair like a lion's mane. 
 This was in the year 1853 — these young men being 
 nineteen years of age. The slender, yellow, dreamy 
 student of theology and the ruddy athlete became fast 
 friends ^€<fi^ 
 
 " Send your sons to college and the boys will educate 
 them," said Emerson. These boys read poetry together; 
 and it seems the first author that specially attra(5led 
 them was Mrs. Browning ; & she attra<5ted them sim- 
 ply because she had recently eloped with the man she 
 loved. This fact proved to Morris that she was a worthy 
 woman and a discerning. She had the courage of his 
 convictions. To elope with a poor poet, leaving a rich 
 2 
 
father and a luxurious home — what nobler ambition ? WILLIAM 
 Burne-Jones, student of theology, considered her ac- MORRIS ¥ 
 tion proof of depravity. Morris, in order to show his 
 friend that Mrs. Browning was really a rare and gentle 
 soul, read aloud to Burne-Jones from her books. In 
 facft, Morris himself had never read much of Mrs. 
 Browning's work, but in championing her cause and in- 
 teresting his friend in her, he himself grew interested. 
 Like lawyers, we champion a cause first and look for 
 proof later. In teaching another, Morris taught himself. 
 By explaining a theme it becomes luminous to us. 
 In passing, it is well to note that this impulse in the 
 heart of William Morris to come to the defense. of an 
 accused person was ever very strong. His defense of 
 Mrs. Browning led straight to •* The Defense of Guin- 
 evere," begun while at Oxford and printed in book form 
 in his twenty-fourth year. Not that the offenses of 
 Guinevere and Elizabeth Barrett were parallel, but 
 Morris was by nature a defender of women. And it 
 should further be noted that Tennyson had not yet 
 written his " Idylls of the King," at the time Morris 
 wrote his poetic brief. 
 
 Another author that these young men took up at this 
 time was Ruskin. John Ruskin was fifteen years older 
 than Morris — an Oxford man, too, — also the son of a 
 merchant and rich by inheritance. Ruskin's natural in- 
 dependence, his ability for original thinking and his ac- 
 tion in embracing the cause of Turner, the ridiculed, 
 won the heart of Morris. In Ruskin he found a 
 
 3 
 
WILLIAM writer who expressed the thoughts that he believed. 
 
 MORRIS ¥ He read Ruskin, and insisted that Burne-Jones should. 
 Together they read •' The Nature of Gothic," and then 
 they went out upon the streets of Oxford & studied ex- 
 amples at first hand. They compared the old with the 
 new & came to the conclusion that the buildings erect- 
 ed two centuries before had various points to recom- 
 mend them which modern buildings had not. The mod- 
 ern buildings were built by contra(5tors, while the old 
 ones were constru(5led by men who had all the time 
 there was, and so they worked out their conceptions 
 of the eternal fitness of things. 
 
 Then these young men, with several others, drew up a 
 remonstrance against " the desecration by officious res- 
 toration, & the tearing down of time-mellowed stru<5t- 
 ures to make room for the unsightly brick piles of 
 boarding-house keepers." 
 
 The remonstrance was sent in to the authorities, and 
 by them duly pigeon-holed, with a passing remark that 
 young fellows sent to Oxford to be educated had better 
 attend to their books and mind their own business. 
 Having espoused the cause of the Middle Ages in archi- 
 tecture, these young men began to study the history 
 of the people who lived in the olden time. They read 
 Spenser and Chaucer, and chance threw in their way a 
 dog-eared copy of Malory's " Morte D' Arthur," &this 
 was still more dog-eared when they were through with 
 it. Probably no book ever made more of an impression 
 on Morris than this one ; and if he had written an ar- 
 4 
 
tide for the " Ladies' Home Journal " on '• Books that WILLIAM 
 Influenced Me Most," he would have placed Malory's MORRIS^ 
 " Morte D' Arthur " first. 
 
 The influence of Burne-Jones on Morris was marked, 
 and the influence of Morris on Burne-Jones was pro- 
 found. Morris discovered himself in explaining things 
 to Burne-Jones, and Burne-Jones, without knowing it, 
 adopted the opinions of Morris ; and it was owing to 
 Morris that he gave up theology. 
 
 Having abandoned the object that led him to college, 
 Burne-Jones lost faith in Oxford, and went down to 
 London to study art. 
 
 Morris hung on, secured his B. A. and articled himself 
 to a local architect with the firm intent of stopping the 
 insane drift for modern mediocrity, and bringing about 
 a just regard for the stately dignity of the Gothic. 
 A few months' experience, however, and he discovered 
 that an apprentice to an architecTt was not expecSted to 
 furnish plans nor even criticise those already made : 
 his business was to make detailed drawings from com- 
 pleted designs for the contracftors to work from. 
 A year at architecture, with odd hours filled in at poet- 
 ry and art, and news came from Burne-Jones that he 
 had painted a picture, and sold it for ten pounds. 
 Now Morris had all the money he needed. His father's 
 prosperity was at flood, & he had but to hint for funds 
 and they came, yet to make things with your own hands 
 and sell them was the true test of success. 
 He had writen " Gertha's Lovers," " The Tale of the 
 
 5 
 
WILLIAM Hollow Land," and various poems and essays for the 
 MORRIS ¥ college magazines ; & his book, ** The Defense of Guin- 
 evere," had been issued at his own expense, and the 
 edition was on his hands — a heavy weight. 
 Thoreau wrote to his friends, when the house burned 
 and destroyed all copies of his first book, ** The edition 
 is exhausted," but no such happiness came to Morris. 
 And so when glad tidings of an artistic success came 
 from Burne-Jones, he resolved to follow the lead and 
 abandon archite(5lure for " pure art." 
 Arriving in London he placed himself under the tutor- 
 ship of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a poet, dreamer & artist 
 six years his senior, whom he had known for some 
 time, and who had also instru<5\ed Burne-Jones. 
 While taking lessons in painting at the rather shabby 
 house of Rossetti in Portland Street, he was introduced 
 to Rossetti's favorite model — a young woman of rare 
 grace and beauty. Rossetti had painted her picTture as 
 " The Blessed Damozel," leaning over the bar of Heav- 
 en, while the stars in her hair were seven. Morris the 
 impressionable fell in love with the canvas and then 
 the 'woman. 
 
 When they were married, tradition has it, that Ros- 
 setti withheld his blessing & sought to drown his sor- 
 row in fomentations, with dark, dank hints in baritone 
 to the effect that the Thames only could appreciate 
 his grief. 
 
 But grief is transient ; and for many years Rossetti and 
 Burne-Jones pictured the tall, willowy figure of Mrs. 
 6 
 
Morris as the dream-woman, on tapestry and canvas ; WILLIAM 
 and as the " Blessed Virgin," her beautiful face and MORRIS l» 
 form are shown in many sacred places. 
 Truth need not be distorted in a frantic attempt to make 
 this an ideal marriage — only a woman with the intel- 
 lect of Minerva could have filled the restless heart of 
 William Morris. But the wife of Morris believed in her 
 lord, and never sought to hamper him, and if she failed 
 at times to comprehend his genius it was only because 
 she was human. Possibly she could not throw her net 
 over a sublime idea, but surely she was not a vampire, 
 ijji Whistler once remarked that without Mrs. Morris to 
 supply stained glass attitudes and the lissome beauty 
 of an angel, the Pre-Raphaelites would have long since 
 gone down to dust and forgetfulness. 
 
 HE year which William Morris 
 spent at archite<5ture, he con- 
 sidered as nearly a waste of 
 time, but it was not so in fact. 
 As a draughtsman he had devel- 
 oped a marvelous skill, and the 
 grace and sureness of his lines 
 were a delight to Burne-Jones, 
 Rossetti, Holman Hunt, Ford 
 Madox Brown and others of the 
 little artistic circle in which he found himself. 
 Youth lays great plans ; youth is always in revolt 
 against the present order; youth groups itself in bands 
 and swears eternal fealty ; and life, which is change, 
 
 7 
 
WILLIAM dissipates the plans, subdues the revolt into conformity, 
 MORRIS ¥ & the sworn friendships fade away into dull indifference. 
 Always ? Well, no, not exactly. In this instance the 
 plans and dreams found form ; the revolt was a revolu- 
 tion that succeeded ; and the brotherhood existed for 
 near fifty years and then was severed only by death. 
 W^ithout going into a history of the Pre-Raphaelite 
 Brotherhood, it will be noted that the band of enthu- 
 siasts in art, literature and architecture had been swung 
 by the arguments and personality of William Morris 
 into the strong current of his own belief, and this was 
 that Art and Life in the Middle Ages were much love- 
 lier things than they are now. 
 
 That being so, we should go back to medieval times 
 for our patterns. A study of the best household deco- 
 ration of the Fifteenth Century showed that all the 
 furniture used then was made to fit a certain apart- 
 ment, and with a definite purpose in view. Of course 
 it was made by hand, and the loving marks of the 
 tool were upon it i^ It was made as good and strong 
 and durable as it could be made. Floors and walls were 
 of mosaic or polished wood, and these were partially 
 covered by beautifully woven rugs, skins and tapestries. 
 The ceilings were sometimes ornamented with pi<5tures 
 painted in harmony with the use for which the room 
 was designed. Certainly there were no chromos, and 
 the pi<Jtures were few and these of the best, for the 
 age was essentially a critical one. 
 A modest circular was issued in which the fact was 
 8 
 
made known that, '♦ A company of historical artists WILLIAM 
 ^11 use their talents in home decoration," MORRIS ¥ 
 
 Dealers into whose hands this circular fell, smiled in 
 derision, & the announcement made no splash in Eng- 
 land's artistic waters. But the leaven was at work 
 which was bound to cause a revolution in the tastes of 
 fifty million people. 
 
 Most of our best moves are accidents, and every good 
 thing begins as something else. In the beginning there 
 was no expe(5\ation of building up a trade or making a 
 financial success of the business. The idea was simply 
 that the eight young men who composed the band were 
 to use their influence in helping each other to secure 
 commissions, and corroborate the views of doubting 
 patrons as to what was art & what not. In other words, 
 they were to stand by each other. Ford Madox Brown, 
 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Burne-Jones & Arthur Hughes 
 were painters ; Philip Webb an architedl ; Peter Paul 
 Marshall a landscape gardener and engineer : Charles 
 Joseph Faulkner, an Oxford don, was a designer, and 
 William Morris was an all 'round artist — ready to turn 
 his hand to anything. 
 
 These men undertook to furnish a home from garret to 
 cellar in an artistic way. 
 
 \Vork came and each set himself to help all the others. 
 From simply supplying designs for furniture, rugs, car- 
 pets and wall paper they began to manufacture these 
 things, simply because they could not buy or get others 
 to make the things they desired. 
 
 9 
 
WILLIAM Morris undertook the entire executive charge of affairs, 
 MORRIS ¥ and mastered the details of half a dozen trades in or- 
 der that he might intelligently conduct the business. 
 The one motto of the firm was " Not how cheap, but 
 how good." They insisted that housekeeping must be 
 simplified, and that we should have fewer things and 
 have them better. To this end single pieces of furniture 
 M^ere made and all sets of furniture discarded. I have 
 seen several houses furnished entire by William Morris, 
 and the first thing that impressed me was the sparsity 
 of things. Instead of a dozen pictures in a room there 
 were two or three — one on an easel and one or two 
 on the walls. Gilt frames were abandoned almost en- 
 tirely and dark stained \voods were used instead. 
 Wide fireplaces were introduced & mantels of solid oak. 
 For upholstery, leather covering was generally used 
 instead of cloth. Carpets were laid in strips, not tacked 
 down to stay, and rugs were laid so as to show a goodly 
 glimpse of hard-wood floor ; and in the dining room a 
 large round table was placed instead of a right angle 
 square one. This table was not covered with a table- 
 cloth ; mats or doilies being used here and there. To 
 cover a table entire with a cloth or spread, was pretty 
 good proof that the piece of furniture was cheap and 
 shabby ; so in no William Morris library or dining room 
 would you find a table entirely covered. The round din- 
 ing table is in very general use now, but few people 
 realize how its plainness was scouted when William 
 Morris first introduced it. 
 xo 
 
One piece of William Morris furniture has become dc- WILLIAM 
 cidedly popular in America, and that is the " Morris MORRIS # 
 Chair." The first chair of this pattern was made entirely 
 by the hands of the master. It was built by a man 
 who understood anatomy, unlike most chairs and all 
 church pew^s. It was also strong, durable, ornamental 
 and by a simple device the back could be adjusted so 
 as to fit a man's every mood. 
 
 ^ There has been a sad degeneracy among William 
 Morris chairs ; still, good ones can be obtained, nearly 
 as excellent as the one in which I rested at Kelmscott 
 House — broad, deep, massive, upholstered with curled 
 hair, & covered with leather that would delight a book- 
 binder. Such a chair can be used a generation and then 
 passed on to the heirs. 
 
 Furnishing of churches and chapels led naturally to 
 the making of stained glass windows, & hardly a large 
 city of Christendom but has an example of the Morris 
 work V^'v^ 
 
 Morris managed to hold that erratic genius, Dante 
 Gabriel Rossetti, in line and direct his efforts, which of 
 itself was a feat worthy of record. He made a fortune 
 for Rossetti, who was a child in this world's affairs, 
 and he also made a fortune for himself and every man 
 connected with the concern. 
 
 Burne-Jones stood by the ship manfully and proved his 
 good sense by never interfering with the master's plans, 
 or asking foolish, quibbling questions, — showing faith 
 on all occasions. 
 
 zi 
 
WILLIAM The Morris designs for wall paper, tapestry, cretonnes 
 MORRIS ¥ and carpets are now the property of the world, but to 
 say just which is a "William Morris design and which 
 a Burne-Jones is an impossibility, for these two strong 
 men worked together as one being with two heads and 
 four hands. At one time, I find the firm of Morris & Co. 
 had three thousand hands employed in its various man- 
 ufactories, the work in most instances being done by 
 hand and after the manner of the olden time. 
 William Morris was an avowed socialist long before so 
 many men began to grow fond of calling themselves 
 Christian Socialists. Morris was too practical not to 
 know that the time is not ripe for life on a communal 
 basis, but in his heart was a high and holy idea that 
 he has partially explained in his books, " A Dream 
 of John Ball," and " News from Nowhere," and more 
 fully in many lectures. His sympathy was ever with 
 the workingman and those who grind fordone at the 
 wheel of labor. To better the condition of the toiler 
 was his sincere desire. 
 
 There is one criticism that has been constantly brought 
 against Morris, and although he answered this criticism 
 a thousand times during his life, it still springs fresh — 
 put forth by little men who congratulate themselves 
 on having scored a point. 
 
 They ask in orotund, '* How could W^illiam Morris ex- 
 pecSl to benefit society at large, when all of the prod- 
 ucts he manufactured were so high in price that only 
 the rich could buy them ? " 
 
 12 
 
Socialism, according to William Morris, does not con- WILLIAM 
 sider it desirable to supply cheap stuffto anybody. The MORRIS ¥ 
 socialist aims to make every manufactured article of 
 the best quality possible. It is not how cheap can this 
 be made but how good. Make it as excellent as it can 
 be made to serve its end. Then sell it at a price that 
 affords something more than a bare existence to the 
 w^orkmen who put their lives into its formation. In 
 this way you raise the status of the worker — you pay 
 him for his labor and give him an interest and pride in 
 the product. Cheap products make cheap men. The first 
 thought of socialism is for the worker who makes the 
 thing, not the man who buys it. 
 
 And so I will answer the questions of the critics as to 
 how society has been benefited by, say, a William 
 Morris book : 
 
 I. — The workmen who made it found a pride and sat- 
 isfaction in their work. 
 
 2. — They received a goodly reward in cash for their 
 time and efforts. 
 
 3. — The buyers were pleased with their purchase, and 
 received a decided satisfaction in its possession. 
 4. — Readers of the book were gratified to see their 
 author clothed in such fitting and harmonious dress. 
 5. — Reading the text has instru<5\ed some ; and possibly 
 inspired a few to nobler thinking. 
 
 After "The Defense of Guinevere" was published, it 
 was thirteen years before Morris issued another vol- 
 ume. His days had been given to art and the work of 
 
 13 
 
WILLIAM management. But now the business had gotten on to 
 MORRIS 1» such a firm basis that he turned the immediate super- 
 vision over to others and took two days of the week, 
 Saturday and Sunday, for literature. 
 Taking up the active work of literature when thirty- 
 seven years of age, he followed it with the zest of youth 
 for twenty years— until death claimed him. 
 William Morris thought literature should be the prod- 
 uct of the ripened mind — the mind that knows the 
 world of men & which has grappled with earth's prob- 
 lems ; and in this he had the strong corroboration of 
 several philosophers. He also considered that letters 
 should not be a profession in itself — to make a business 
 of an art is to degrade it. Literature should be the spon- 
 taneous output of the mind that has known and felt. To 
 work the mine of spirit as a business and sift its prod- 
 uct for hire, is to overwork the vein and palm off slag 
 for useful metal. Shakespeare w^as a theatre manager, 
 Milton a secretary, Bobby Burns a farmer, Lamb a 
 book-keeper, Wordsworth a government employee, 
 Emerson a lecturer, Hawthorne a custom-house in- 
 spector & \^^hitman a clerk i^ William Morris -was a 
 workingman and manufacturer, — and would 
 have been Poet Laureate of England had 
 he been willing to call himself a student 
 of sociology instead of a socialist. 
 Socialism itself (whatever it 
 may be) is not offensive 
 — the word is. 
 14 
 
NCE upon a daythe great Amer- 
 ican Apostle of Negation ex- 
 pressed a regret that he had not 
 been consulted when the Uni- 
 verse was being planned, other- 
 wise he would have arranged to 
 make good things catching in- 
 stead of bad. 
 
 The remark tokened a slight le- 
 sion in the logic of the Apostle, 
 for good things are now^, & ever have been, infectious. 
 1^ Once upon a day, I met a young man who told me 
 that he was exposed at Kelmscott House for a brief 
 hour, and caught it, and ever after there were in his 
 mind, thoughts, feelings, emotions and ideals that were 
 not there before. Possibly the psychologist would ex- 
 plain that the spores of all these things were simply 
 sleeping, awaiting the warmth and sunshine of some 
 peculiar presence to start them into being, but of that 
 I cannot speak — this only I know, that the young man 
 said to me, " Whereas I was once blind, I now see." 
 i^ William Morris was a giant in physical strength and 
 a giant in intellect. His nature was intensely mascu- 
 line in that he could plan and a(5t without thought of 
 precedent. Never was a man more emancipated from 
 the trammels of convention and custom than William 
 Morris O^^s^ 
 
 Kelmscott House at Hammersmith is in an ebb-tide 
 district where once wealth and fashion held sway ; but 
 
 15 
 
 WILLIAM 
 MORRIS %» 
 
WILLIAM now the vicinity is given over to factories, tenement 
 MORRIS ¥ houses and all that train of evil and vice that follow in 
 the wake of faded gentility. 
 
 At Hammersmith you will see spacious old mansions 
 used as warehouses ; others as boarding houses ; still 
 others converted into dance halls with beer gardens in 
 the rear, where once bloomed and blossomed milady's 
 flower beds. 
 
 The broad stone steps and w^ide hallways and iron 
 fences, with glimpses now and then of ancient door- 
 plates or more ancient knockers, tell of generations 
 turned to dust. 
 
 Just why William Morris, the poet and lover of har- 
 mony, should have selected this locality for a home is 
 quite beyond the average ken. Certainly it mystified the 
 fashionable literary world of London with whom he 
 never kept goose-step, but that still kept track of him — 
 for fashion has a way of patronizing genius — and some 
 of his old friends wrote him asking where Hammer- 
 smith was,& others expressed doubts as to its existence. 
 I had no difficulty in taking the right train for Ham- 
 mersmith, but once there, no one seemed to have ever 
 heard of the Kelmscott Press. When I inquired, grave 
 misgivings seemed to arise as to whether the press re- 
 ferred to was a cider press, a wine press or a press 
 for " cracklings." 
 
 Finally I discovered a man — a workingman — whose 
 face beamed at the mention of W^illiam Morris. Later 
 I found that if a man knew William Morris, his heart 
 j6 
 
throbbed at the mention of his name, and he at once WILLIAM 
 grew voluble and confidential and friendly. It was the MORRIS ¥ 
 " Open Sesame." And if a person did not know Will- 
 iam Morris, he simply did n't, and that was all there 
 was about it. 
 
 But the man I met knew " Th' Ole Man," which was 
 the affedlionate title used by all the hundreds and 
 thousands who worked with William Morris. And to 
 prove that he knew him, when I asked that he should 
 direct me to the Upper Mall, he simply insisted on go- 
 ing with me. Moreover, he told a needless lie and de- 
 clared he was on his way there, although when we met 
 he was headed in the other direction i^ By a devious 
 walk of half a mile we reached the high iron fence of 
 Kelmscott House. We arrived amid a florid description 
 of the Icelandic Sagas as told by my new-found friend 
 and interpreted by the Th' Ole Man. My friend had not 
 read the Sagas, but still he recommended them ; and so 
 we passed through the wide open gates & up the stone 
 ^valk to the entrance of Kelmscott House. 
 On the threshold we met Mr. F. S. Ellis & Mr. Emery 
 Walker, who addressed my companion as "Tom." I 
 knew Mr. Ellis slightly and also had met Mr. Walker, 
 who works Rembrandt miracles with a camera. 
 Mr. Ellis was deep in seeing the famous " Chaucer " 
 through the press, & Mr. Walker had a print to show, 
 so we turned aside, past a great pile of paper in crates 
 that cluttered the hallway, and entered the library. 
 There, leaning over the long, oaken table, in shirt- 
 
 17 
 
WILLIAM sleeves, was the master. Who could mistake that great 
 MORRIS ¥ shaggy head, the tangled beard, and frank, open-eyed 
 look of boyish animation ? 
 
 The man was sixty and more, but there was no ap- 
 pearance of age in eye, complexion, form or gesture — 
 only the whitened hair ! He greeted me as if we always 
 had known each other, and Ellis and piles of Chaucer 
 proof led straight to Professor Child of Harvard, 
 whose work Ellis criticised and Morris upheld. They 
 fell into a hot argument, which was even continued as 
 we walked across the street to the Doves Bindery ^ 
 The Doves Bindery, as all good men know, is man- 
 aged by Mr. Cobden-Sanderson, who married one of 
 the two daughters of Richard Cobden of Corn-Law 
 fame >^^^ 
 
 Just why Mr. Sanderson, the lawyer, should have bor- 
 rowed his wife's maiden name and made it legally a 
 part of his own, I do not know. Anyway I quite like 
 the idea of linking one's name with that of the woman 
 he loves, especially when it has been so honored by 
 the possessor as the name of Cobden. 
 Cobden-Sanderson caught the rage for beauty from 
 William Morris, and began to bind books for his own 
 pleasure. Morris contended that any man who could 
 bind books as beautifully as Cobden-Sanderson should 
 not waste his time with law. Cobden-Sanderson talked 
 it over with his wife, and she being a most sensible 
 woman agreed with William Morris. So Cobden-San- 
 derson, acting on the suggestion of Th' Ole Man, rent- 
 x8 
 
cd the time-mellowed mansion next door to the old WILLIAM 
 house occupied by the Kelmscott Press and went to MORRIS ^ 
 work binding books. 
 
 When we were once inside of the Bindery, the Chau- 
 cerian argument between Mr. Ellis and Th' Ole Man 
 shifted off into a wrangle with Cobden-Sanderson. 
 I could not get the drift of it exactly — it seemed to be 
 the continuation of some former quarrel, about an oak 
 leaf or something. Anyway, Th' Ole Man silenced his 
 opponent by smothering his batteries — all of which 
 will be better understood when I explain that Th' Ole 
 Man was large in stature, bluff, bold & strong-voiced, 
 whereas Cobden-Sanderson is small, red-headed, meek, 
 and wears bicycle trousers. 
 
 The argument, however, was not quite so serious an 
 affair as I at first supposed, for it all ended in a laugh 
 and easily ran off into a quiet debate as to the value of 
 Imperial Japan vs. ^Vhatman. 
 
 We walked through the various old parlors that now 
 do duty as workrooms for bright-eyed girls, then over 
 through the Kelmscott Press, and from this to another 
 old mansion that had on its door a brass plate so pol- 
 ished and repolished, like a machine-made sonnet too 
 much gone over, that one can scarcely make out its 
 intent. Finally I managed to trace the legend, " The 
 Seasons." I was told it was here that Thomson, the 
 poet, wrote his book ^ Once back in the library of 
 Kelmscott House, Mr. Ellis and Th' Ole Man leaned 
 over the great oaken table and renewed, in a gentler 
 
 19 
 
\VILLIAM key, the question as to whether Professor Child was 
 MORRIS ¥ justified in his construction of the Third Canto of the 
 " Canterbury Tales." Under cover of the smoke I quiet- 
 ly disappeared with Mr. Cockerill, the Secretary, for 
 a better view of the Kelmscott Press. 
 This was my first interview with William Morris. By 
 chance I met him once again for a few^ moments, some 
 days after, at the shop of Emery Walker in Clifford 
 Court, Strand. I had been told on divers occasions by 
 various persons that W^illiam Morris had no sympathy 
 for American art and small respe(5t for our literature. 
 I am sure this was not wholly true, for on this occa- 
 sion he told me he had read " Huckleberry Finn," and 
 doted on '* Uncle Remus." He also spoke with af- 
 fe<5tion and feeling of Walt Whitman, and 
 told me that he had read every printed 
 word that Emerson had written. And 
 further he congratulated me on 
 the success of my book, 
 " Songs from Vaga- 
 bo ndia." 
 
 20 
 
HE housekeeping world seems TVILLIAM 
 to have been in thrall to six hair- MORRIS ¥ 
 cloth chairs, a slippery sofa to 
 match, & a very cold, marble- 
 top center table, from the be- 
 ginning of this century down to 
 comparatively recent times. 
 In all the best homes there was 
 also a marble mantel to match 
 the center table ; on one end of 
 this mantel was a blue glass vase containing a bouquet 
 of paper roses, and on the other a plaster-Paris cat. 
 Above the mantel hung a wreath of wax flowers in a 
 glass case t^ In such houses were usually to be seen 
 gaudy-colored carpets, imitation lace curtains, and a 
 what-not in the corner that seemed ready to go into 
 dissolution through the law of gravitation. 
 i^ Early in the seventies lithograph presses began to 
 make chromos that were warranted just as good as oil 
 paintings, and these were distributed in millions by en- 
 terprising newspapers as premiums for subscriptions. 
 Looking over an old file of the "Christian Union" 
 for the year 187 1, I chanced upon an editorial wherein 
 it was stated that the end of painting pidtures by 
 hand had come, and the writer piously thanked heaven 
 for it — & added, " Art is now within the reach of all." 
 Furniture, carpets, curtains, pictures and books were 
 being manufa<5tured by machinery, and to glue things 
 together and give them a look of gentility and get them 
 
 2Z 
 
WILLIAM into a house before they fell apart, was the seeming 
 
 MORRIS 1* desideratum of all manufa<5\urers. 
 
 The editor of the "Christian Union" surely had a 
 basis of truth for his statement ; art had received a 
 sudden chill : palettes and brushes could be bought for 
 half-price, and many artists were making five-year 
 contra<5ts with lithographers ; while those too old to 
 learn to draw on lithograph stones saw nothing left for 
 them but to work designs with worsted in perforated 
 cardboard. 
 
 To the influence of William Morris does the civilized 
 world owe its salvation from the mad rage & rush for 
 the tawdry and cheap in home decoration. It will not 
 do to say that if W^illiam Morris had not called a halt 
 some one else would, nor to cavil by declaring that 
 the inanities of the Plush-Covered-Age followed the 
 Era of the Hair-Cloth Sofa. These things are frankly 
 admitted, but the refreshing fact remains that fully 
 one-half the homes of England & America have been 
 influenced by the good taste and vivid personality of 
 one strong, earnest man. 
 
 William Morris was the strongest all 'round man the 
 century has produced. He was an Artist and a Poet in 
 the broadest and best sense of these much bandied 
 terms. William Morris could do more things, and do 
 them well, than any man of either ancient or modern 
 times whom we can name. 
 
 1^ In a magazine article, a short time ago, I saw Mr. 
 Hopkinson Smith referred to as "the Leonardo da 
 
 22 
 
Vinci of America," and the article in question, I do WILLIAM 
 not believe was written by Mr. Smith, either. MORRIS ♦ 
 
 Mr. Hopkinson Smith is a talented man, and I surely 
 would not decry his various gifts. He is a writer, an 
 artist, an orator and a civil engineer. He is eminently 
 sane, possesses common sense plus, and always has 
 one eye well fixed on the Main Chance. He is practi- 
 cal. Mr. Smith is not a college man, and when in 1894 
 he gave a course of le<5tures at Harvard, the throngs 
 that crowded Sanders Theater to its utmost limit, tes- 
 tified to the fa<5l that of Harvard's three hundred pro- 
 fessors & teachers, not one could match this lighthouse 
 builder in point of personality. 
 
 However, the Plutarch who writes the parallel lives 
 of Hopkinson Smith and William Morris will place the 
 American at a great disadvantage. William Morris 
 could do everything that Smith can, even to building 
 a Race Rock Light, and beside this, was master of 
 six trades. He was a weaver, a blacksmith, a wood- 
 carver, a painter, a dyer and a printer. And he was a 
 musical composer of no mean ability. 
 Better than all, he was an enthusiastic lover of his 
 race : his heart throbbed for humanity, and believing 
 that society could be reformed only from below, he 
 cast his lot with the toilers, dressed as one of them, & 
 in the companionship of workingmen found a response 
 to his holy zeal which the society of an entailed aris- 
 tocracy denied. 
 
 The man who could influence the entire housekeeping 
 
 23 
 
WILLIAM of half a world, and give the kingdom of fashion a list 
 MORRIS ¥ to starboard ; who could paint beautiful pi<5^ures ; com- 
 pose music ; speak four languages ; write sublime verse ; 
 address a public assemblage effectively ; produce 
 plays ; resurrecfl the lost art of making books 
 — books such as were made only in the 
 olden time as a loving, religious ser- 
 vice ; who lived a clean, whole- 
 some, manly life — beloved by 
 those who knew him best 
 — shall we not call 
 him Master? 
 
Robert Browning 
 -n:-n Photograph taken from life, in 1870, 
 bv Ernest Edwards. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
So, take and use Thy work, 
 
 Amend what flaws may lurk, 
 
 What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim ! 
 
 My times be in Thy hand ! 
 
 Perfect the cup as planned ! 
 
 Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same. 
 
 — Rabbi Ben Ezra. 
 
F THERE ever lived a poet to whom ROBERT 
 the best minds pour out libations, it BROWNING 
 is Robert Browning. "We think of him 
 as dwelling on high Olympus ; we 
 read his lines by the light of dim can- 
 dles ; we quote him in sonorous mon- 
 otone at twilight when soft-sounding 
 organ chants come to us mellow and 
 sweet. Browning's poems form a lov- 
 er's litany to that elect few who hold 
 that the true mating of a man and 
 woman is the marriage of the mind. 
 And thrice blest was Browning, in 
 that fate allowed him to live his phi- 
 losophy — to work his poetry up into 
 life, and then again transmute life & 
 love into art. Fate was kind: success 
 came his way so slowly that he was 
 never subjected to the fierce, daz- 
 zling searchlight of publicity : his rec- 
 ognition in youth was limited to a few 
 obscure friends and neighbors. And 
 when distance divided him from these, 
 they forgot him ; so there seems a 
 hiatus in his history, when for a score 
 of years literary England dimly re- 
 membered some one by the name of 
 Browning, but could not just place 
 himdSki^ 
 
 as 
 
ROBERT About the year 1868 the author of " Sordello " was in- 
 BROWNING duced to appear at an evening of " Uncut Leaves " at 
 the house of a nobleman at the West-End, London. 
 James Russell Lowell was present and was congratu- 
 lated by a lady, sitting next to him, on the fact that 
 Browning was an American. 
 
 1^ "But only by adoption!" answered the gracious 
 Lowell. 
 
 **Yes," said the lady, ** I believe his father v^^as an 
 Englishman, so you Americans cannot have all the 
 credit ; but surely he shows the Negro or Indian blood 
 of his mother — very clever, is n't he, so very clever! " 
 Browning's swarthy complexion, and the fine poise of 
 the man — the entire absence of "nerves," as often 
 shown in the savage — seemed to carry out the idea 
 that his was a peculiar pedigree. In his youth, when 
 his hair was as black as the raven's wing and coarse 
 as a horse-tail, and his complexion mahogany, the re- 
 port that he was a Creole found ready credence. And 
 so did this gossip of mixed parentage follow him, that 
 Mrs. Sutherland Orr, in her biography, takes an entire 
 chapter to prove that in Robert Browning's veins there 
 flowed neither Indian nor Negro blood. 
 1^ Dr. Furnivall, however, explains that Browning's 
 grandmother on his father's side came from the West 
 Indies, that nothing is known of her family history, & 
 that she was a Creole. 
 
 And beyond this, the fact is stated that Robert Brown- 
 ing was quite pleased when he used to be taken for a 
 26 
 
Jew, — a conclusion made plausible by his complexion, ROBERT 
 hair and features. BROWNING 
 
 In its dead-serious, hero-worshipping attitude, the life 
 of Robert Browning by Mrs. Orr deserves to rank with 
 Weems' "Life of ^A^ashington." It is the brief of an 
 attorney for the defense. Little Willie anecdotes appear 
 on every page. 
 
 And thus do we behold the tendency to make Browning 
 something more than a man — and therefore something 
 less r^^ 
 
 Possibly women are given to this sort of thing more 
 than men, I am not sure ; but every young woman re- 
 gards her lover as a distinct and peculiar personage, 
 different from all others — as if this were a virtue — the 
 only one of his kind. Later, if fate is kind, she learns 
 that her own experience is not unique. We all easily 
 fit into a type and each is but a representative of his 
 class VMI^ 
 
 Robert Browning sprang from a line of clerks & small 
 merchants ; but as mitigation for the lack of a family 
 'scutcheon, we are told that his uncle, Reuben Brown- 
 ing, was a truly poet. For once in an idle hour he threw 
 off a little thing for an inscription to be placed on a pre- 
 sentation ink bottle, and Disraeli seeing it, declared 
 " Nothing like this has ever before been written ! " i^ 
 Beyond doubt, Disraeli made the statement — it bears 
 his ear-mark. It will be remembered that the Earl of 
 Beaconsfield had a stock form for acknowledging re- 
 ceipt of the many books sent to him by aspiring au- 
 
ROBERT thors. It ran something like this— " The Earl of Bea- 
 
 BROWNING consfield begs to thank the gifted author of for 
 
 a copy of his book, and gives the hearty assurance that 
 he will waste no time in reading the volume." 
 I0fb And further, the fact has been explained that Robert 
 Browning was entrusted with a latch-key early in life, 
 and that he always gave his mother a good-night kiss. 
 He gave her the good-night kiss willy-nilly. If she had 
 retired when he came home, he used the trusty latch- 
 key and went to her room to imprint on her lips the 
 good-night kiss. He did this, the biographer would 
 have us believe, so to convince the good mother that 
 his breath was what it should be, and he awakened 
 her so she would know the hour was reasonable. 
 In most manufactories there is an electric apparatus 
 wherewith every employee registers when he arrives, 
 by turning a key or pushing a button. Robert Browning 
 always fearlessly registered as soon as he got home — 
 this according to Mrs. Orr. 
 
 Unfortunately, or otherwise, there is a little scattered 
 information which makes us believe that Robert 
 Browning's mother was not so fearful of her son's con- 
 duct, nor suspicious as to his breath, as to lie awake 
 nights and keep tab on his hours. The world has never 
 denied that Robert Browning was entrusted with a 
 latch-key, and it little cares if occasionally, early in 
 life, he fumbled for the key-hole. And my conception 
 of his character is that when in the few instances Au- 
 rora, rosy goddess of the morn, marked his home- 
 28 
 
coming with glowing chrome-red in the eastern sky, ROBERT 
 he did not search the sleeping rooms for his mother to BROWNING 
 apprise her of the hour. 
 
 In one place Mrs. Orr avers, in a voice hushed \vith 
 emotion, that Browning carefully read all of Johnson's 
 Dictionary " as fit preparation for a literary career." 
 i^ W^ithout any attempt to deny that the perusal of a 
 dictionary is "fit preparation for a literary career," I 
 yet fear me that the learned biographer, in a warm 
 anxiety to prove the man exceeding studious and very 
 virtuous, has tipped a bit to t' other side. 
 She has apotheosized her subject — and in an attempt 
 to portray him as a peculiar person, set apart, has well 
 nigh given us a being without hands, feet, eyes, ears, 
 organs, dimensions, passions. 
 
 But after a careful study of the data, various visits to 
 
 the places where he lived in England, trips to Casa 
 
 Guidi, views from Casa Guidi windows, a journey to 
 
 Rezzonico Palace at Venice where he died, and 
 
 many a pious pilgrimage to Poets* Corner, in 
 
 Westminster Abbey, where he sleeps, I 
 
 am constrained to believe that Robert 
 
 Browning was made from the same 
 
 kind of clay as the rest of us. 
 
 He ^vas human — he was 
 
 splendidly human. 
 
ROBERT 
 BROWNING 
 
 REAT men never come singly. 
 The year 1812 should be as easy 
 to remember as 1492, for in it 
 were born Abraham Lincoln, 
 Charles Darwin, Alfred Tenny- 
 son and Robert Browning. 
 Browning's father was a bank 
 clerk ; & Robert Browning, 3rd, 
 author of " Paracelsus," could 
 have secured his father's place 
 in the Bank of England, if he had had ambitions. And 
 the fact that he did not was a source of silent sorrow 
 to the father, even to the day of his death in 1866. 
 Robert Browning, the grandfather, entered the Bank as 
 an errand boy, and rose by slow stages to Principal of 
 the Stock Room. He served the Bank full half a cen- 
 tury, and saved from his salary a goodly competence. 
 This money, tightly and rightly invested, passed to his 
 son. The son never reached the complete favor of his 
 employers that the father had known, but he added to 
 his weekly stipend by what a writer terms, " legiti- 
 mate perquisites." This, being literally interpreted, 
 means that he purchased paper, pens and sealing wax 
 for the use of the Bank, and charged the goods in at 
 his own price, doubtless with the consent of his super- 
 ior, with whom he divided profits. He could have par- 
 odied the song- writer of old and said, " Let me supply 
 the perquisite-requisites and I care not who makes 
 the laws." ^ So he grew rich — moderately rich — and 
 30 
 
lived simply and comfortably up at Camberwell, with ROBERT 
 only one besetting dissipation : he was a book-collector. BROWNING 
 He searched book-stalls on the way to the City in the 
 morning, and lay in wait for First Editions on the way 
 home at night. When he had a holiday, he went in 
 search of a book. He sneaked books into the house, and 
 declared to his admonishing wife the next week that 
 he had always owned 'em, or that they were presented 
 to him. The funds his father had left him, his salary 
 and "the perquisites," made a goodly income, but he 
 always complained of poverty. He was secretly hoard- 
 ing sums so to secure certain books. 
 The shelves grew until they reached the ceiling, and 
 then book-cases invaded the dining room. The collect- 
 or didn't trust his wife with the household purchasing ; 
 no bank clerk ever does, for women are not financiers 
 — and all the pennies were needed for books. The good 
 wife, having nothing else to do, grew anaemic, had neu- 
 ralgia and lapsed into a Shut-In, wearing a pale blue 
 wrapper and reclining on a couch, around which were 
 piled — mountain high — books. 
 
 The pale invalid used to imagine that the gfreat cases 
 were swaying and dancing a minuet, and she fully ex- 
 pected the tomes would all come a-toppling down and 
 smother her — and she didn't care much if they would, 
 but they never did. She was the mother of two chil- 
 dren — the boy Robert, born the year after her marriage ; 
 and in a little over another year a daughter came, and 
 this closed the family record. 
 
 3» 
 
ROBERT The invalid mother was a woman of fine feeling and 
 BROWNING much poetic insight. She did n't talk as much about 
 books as her husband did, but I think she knew the 
 good ones better. The mother and son moused in books 
 together, and Mrs. Orr is surely right in her suggestion 
 that this love of mother and son took upon itself the 
 nature of a passion. 
 
 The love of Robert Browning for Elizabeth Barrett 
 was a revival and a renewal, in many ways, of the con- 
 dition of tenderness and sympathy that existed between 
 himself and his mother. There certainly was a strange 
 and marked resemblance in the characters of Elizabeth 
 Barrett & the mother of Robert Browning ; & to many 
 this fully accounts for the instant affection that Brown- 
 ing felt toward the occupant of ** the darkened room," 
 when first they met. 
 
 The book-collector took much pride in his boy, and used 
 to take him on book-hunting excursions, and sometimes 
 to the Bank, on which occasions he would tell the Beef- 
 Eaters how this ^vas Robert Browning, 3rd, and that 
 all three of the R. B.'s were loyal servants of the Bank. 
 And the Beef-Eaters would rest their staves on the stone 
 floor, and smile Fifteenth Century grimaces at the boy 
 from under their cocked hats. 
 
 Robert, 3rd, was a healthy, rollicking lad, with power 
 plus, and a deal of destructiveness in his nature. But 
 destructiveness in a youngster is only energy not yet 
 properly directed, just as dirt is useful matter in the 
 wrong place. 
 3a 
 
To keep the boy out of mischief, he was sent to a sort ROBERT 
 of kindergarten, kept by a spinster around the corner. BROWNING 
 The spinster devoted rather more attention to the 
 Browning boy than to her other pupils — she had to, to 
 keep him out of mischief — and soon the boy was quite 
 the head scholar. 
 
 And they tell us that he was so much more clever than 
 any of the other scholars that to appease the rising 
 jealousy of the parents of the other pupils, the diplo- 
 matic spinster requested that the boy be removed from 
 her school — all this according to the earnest biographer. 
 The facts are that the boy had so much energy & rest- 
 less ambition ; was so full of brimming curiosity, 
 mischief and imagination — introducing turtles, bats 
 and mice on various occasions — that he led the whole 
 school a merry chase and wore the nerves of the an- 
 cient maiden to a frazzle. 
 He had to go. 
 
 1^ After this he studied at home with his mother. His 
 father laid out a schedule, and it was lived up to, for 
 about a week. 
 
 Then a private tutor was tried, but soon this plan was 
 abandoned, and a system of reading, best described as 
 " natural selection," was followed. 
 The boy was fourteen, and his sister was twelve, past. 
 These are the ages when children often experience a 
 change of heart, as all "revivalists" know. Robert 
 Browning was swinging off toward atheism. He grew 
 melancholy, irritable and wrote stanzas of sentimental 
 
 33 
 
ROBERT verse. He showed this vefse, high-sounding, stilted, 
 BROWNING bold and bilious, to his mother and then to his father, 
 and finally to Lizzie Flower. 
 
 A word about Lizzie Flower : she was nine years old- 
 er than Robert Browning ; and she had a mind that was 
 gracious and full of high aspiration. She loved books, 
 art, music, and all harmony made its appeal to her ; and 
 not in vain. She wrote verses and kept them locked in 
 her work-box ; and then she painted in water colors and 
 worked in worsted. A thoroughly good woman, she 
 was, far above the average, with a half minor key in 
 her voice and a tinge of the heart-broken in her com- 
 position, caused no one just knew how. Probably a cer- 
 tain young curate at St. Margaret's could have revealed 
 light along this line, but he married, evolved a double 
 chin, moved away to a fat living, and never told. 
 No woman is either wise or good until destiny has 
 subdued her by grinding her fondest hopes into the dust. 
 Lizzie Flower was wise and good. 
 She gave singing lessons to the Browning children. 
 She taught Master Robert Browning to draw. 
 She read to him some of her verses that were in the 
 sewing table drawer. And her sister, Sarah Flower, two 
 years older, afterwards Sarah Flower Adams, read 
 aloud to them a hymn she had just written, called 
 ♦' Nearer my God to Thee." 
 
 Then soon Master Robert took the Flower girls some 
 of the verses he had written. 
 
 Robert liked Lizzie Flower first-rate, & told his mother 
 34 
 
so i^b A young woman never cares anything for an un- ROBERT 
 licked cub, nine years younger than herself, unless fate BROWNING 
 has played pitch and toss with her heart's true love. 
 And then, the tendrils of the affections being ruthlessly 
 lacerated & uprooted, they cling to the first object that 
 presents itself ^^^ 
 
 Lizzie Flower was a wall-flower. That is to say, she 
 had early in life rid herself of the admiration of the 
 many, by refusing to supply an unlimited amount of 
 small talk. In feature, she was as plain as George Eliot. 
 A boy is plastic, and even a modest wall-flower can 
 woo him ; but a man, for her, inspires awe — with him 
 she takes no liberties. And the wall-flower wooes the 
 youth unwittingly, thinking the while she is only using 
 her influence to better instruct him. 
 It is fortunate for a boy escaping adolescence to be ed- 
 ucated & loved (the words are synonymous) by a good 
 woman, and the youngster who has not violently loved 
 a woman old enough to be his mother, has dropped 
 something out of his life that he will have to go back 
 and pick up in another incarnation. 
 I said Robert liked Lizzie Flower first-rate ; and she 
 declared that he was the brightest and most receptive 
 pupil she ever had. 
 
 He was seventeen — she was twenty-six. They read 
 Shelley, Keats and Byron aloud, and together passed 
 through the " Byronic Period." They became violently 
 atheistic, & at the same time decidedly religious, things 
 that seem paradoxical but are not. A vegetable diet was 
 
 35 
 
ROBERT adopted and for two years they eschewed meat. They 
 
 BROWNING worshipped in the woods, feeling that the groves were 
 
 God's first temples, and sitting at the gnarled roots of 
 
 some great oak they would read aloud, by turn, from 
 
 "Queen Mab." 
 
 And it was on one such excursion out across Hamp- 
 stead Heath they lost their copy of " Shelley " in the 
 leaves, & a wit has told us that it sprouted, & as a re- 
 sult — the flower and fruit — we have Browning's poem 
 of " Pauline." And this must be so, for Robert & Miss 
 Flower, (he always called her " Miss Flower," but she 
 called him "Robert") made many an excursion, in 
 search of the book, yet they never found it. 
 Robert now being eighteen, a man grown, not large but 
 very strong and wiry, his father made arrangements for 
 him to take a minor clerkship in the Bank. But the boy 
 rebelled — he was going to be an artist, or a poet — or 
 something like that. 
 
 The father argued that a man could be a poet and still 
 work in a bank — the salary was handy ; and there was 
 no money in poetry. In fact, he himself was a poet, as 
 his father had been before him. To be a bank clerk and 
 at the same time a poet — what nobler ambition ! 
 The young man was still stubborn. He was feeling dis- 
 contented with his environment : he was cramped, cab- 
 ined, cribbed, confined. He wanted to get out of the 
 world of petty plodding and away from the silly round 
 of conventions, out into the world of art — or else of 
 barbarism — he did n't care which. 
 36 
 
The latter way opened first, and a bit of wordy war- ROBERT 
 fare with his father on the subject of idleness sent BROW^NING 
 him off to a gipsy camp at Epsom Downs. How long he 
 lived with the vagabonds we do not know, but his 
 swarthy skin, and his skill as a boxer and wrestler, rec- 
 ommended him to the ragged gentry and they received 
 him as a brother. 
 
 It is probable that a week of pure vagabondia cured 
 him of the idea that civilization is a disease, for he 
 came back home, made a bonfire of his attire, & after 
 bathing well, was clothed in his right mind. 
 Groggy studies in French under a private tutor followed, 
 and then came a term as a special student in Greek at 
 London University. 
 
 1^ To be nearer the school, he took lodgings in Gower 
 Street ; and within a week a slight rough-house incident 
 occurred that crippled most of the furniture in his room 
 and deprived the stair-rail of its spindles. R. Browning, 
 2nd, bank clerk, paid the damages, and R. Browning, 
 3rd, aged twenty, came back home, formally notifying 
 all parties concerned that he had chosen a career — it 
 was Poetry. He would woo the divine Goddess, no 
 matter who opposed. There now ! His mother was de- 
 lighted ; his father gave reluctant assent, declaring that 
 any course in life was better than vacillation ; & Miss 
 Flower, who probably had sown the dragon's teeth, as- 
 sumed a look of surprise and gave it as her opinion that 
 Robert Browning would yet be Poet-Laureate of 
 England. 
 
 32 
 
ROBERT nHBH^nBnOBERT BROWNING awoke 
 BROWNING ^lik ^_^_""^VaKl one morning with a start — it 
 
 was the morning of his thir- 
 tieth birthday. 
 
 One's thirtieth birthday and his 
 seventieth are days that press 
 their message home with iron 
 hand. With his seventieth mile- 
 stone past, a man feels that his 
 work is done, and dim voices 
 call to him from across the Unseen. His work is done, 
 and so illy compared with what he once wished and ex- 
 pected ! But the impressions made upon his heart by 
 the day are no deeper than those his thirtieth birthday 
 inspires c2$ 
 
 At thirty, youth, with all it palliates and excuses, is 
 gone forever. The time for athletic sports is past ; the 
 young avoid you, or else look up to you as a Nestor & 
 tempt you to grow reminiscent. You are a man and must 
 give an account of yourself. 
 
 Out of the stillness came a Voice to Robert Brown- 
 ing saying, •* What hast thou done with the talent I 
 gave thee? " 
 
 What had he done ? It seemed to him at the moment 
 as if he had done nothing. He arose and looked into 
 the mirror. A few gray hairs were mixed in his beard, 
 there were crow's feet on his forehead, and the first 
 joyous flush of youth had gone from his face forever. 
 He was a bachelor, inwardly at war with his environ- 
 38 
 
ment, but making a bold front with his tuppence worth ROBERT 
 of philosophy to conceal the unrest within. BROWNING 
 
 A bachelor of thirty, strong in limb, clear in brain and 
 yet a dependent ! No one but himself to support and 
 could n't even do that ! Gadzooks ! Fie upon all poetry 
 and a plague upon the dumb, dense, shopkeeping, 
 beer-drinking nation upon which the sun never sets ! 
 d|b The father of Robert Browning had done every- 
 thing a father could. He had supplied board and books, 
 and given his son an allowance of a pound a week for 
 ten years. He had sent him on a journey to Italy, and 
 published several volumes of the young man's verse 
 at his own expense, & these books were piled high in 
 the garret, save a few that had been bought by chari- 
 table friends or given away. 
 
 Robert Browning was not discouraged — oh no, not 
 that, only the world sort of stretched out in a dull, 
 monotonous gray, where once it was green, the color 
 of hope, and all decked with flowers. 
 The little literary world of London knew Browning & 
 respected him. He was earnest and sincere and his 
 personality carried weight. His face was not handsome, 
 but his manner was one of poise and purpose, and to 
 come within his aura and look into his calm eyes was 
 to respect the man and make obeisance to the intellect 
 that you felt lay behind. 
 
 A few editors had gone out of their way to ♦* discover" 
 him to the world, but their lavish reviews fell flat. 
 Buyers would not buy — no one seemed to want the 
 
 39 
 
ROBERT wares of Robert Browning. He was hard to read, diffi- 
 BROWNING cult, obscure — or else there was n't anything in it all, 
 they did n't know which. 
 
 Fox, editor of the " Repository," had met Browning 
 at the Flowers' and liked him. He tried to make his 
 verse go, but could n't. Yet he did what he could and 
 insisted that Browning should go with him to the 
 "Sunday evenings" at Barry Cornwall's. There he 
 met Leigh Hunt, Monckton Milnes and Dickens. 
 Then there were dinner parties at Sergeant Talfourd's, 
 where he got acquainted with ^A^ordsworth, ^Valter 
 Savage Landor and Macready. 
 
 Macready impressed him greatly and he impressed 
 Macready. He gave the actor a copy of *• Paracelsus," 
 one of the pile in the garret, and Macready suggested 
 he write a play. •' Strafford" was the result, and we 
 know it was stillborn, and caused a very frosty feeling 
 to exist for many a year between the author and actor. 
 When a play fails the author blames the actor and 
 the actor damns the author. These men were human. 
 ^ Of course Browning's kinsmen all considered him 
 a failure, and when the father paid over the weekly 
 allowance he often rubbed it in a bit. Lizzie Flower 
 had modified her prophecy as to the Laureateship, but 
 was still loyal. They had tiffed occasionally, & broken 
 off the friendship, and once I believe returned letters. 
 To marry was out of the question — he could n't sup- 
 port himself— & besides that they were old, demnition 
 old : he was past thirty & she was forty— Gramercy 1 
 40 
 
i|b They tiffed. ROBERT 
 
 Then they made up. BROWNING 
 
 In the meantime Browning had formed a friendship, 
 very firm and frank, but strictly Platonic, of course, for 
 Fanny Haworth. Miss Haworth had seen more of the 
 ^vo^ld than Miss Flower — she was an artist, a writer 
 and moved in the best society. Browning and Miss 
 Haworth w^rote letters to each other for a while most 
 every day, and he called on her every Wednesday and 
 Saturday evening. 
 
 Miss Haworth bought and gave away many copies of 
 " PauHne," " Sordello " and "Paracelsus"; and in- 
 formed her friends that " Pippa Passes " and *♦ Two in 
 a Gondola " were great stuff. 
 
 About this time we find Edward Moxon (the man who 
 married the adopted daughter of Charles and Mary 
 Lamb), the publisher, saying to Browning: "Your 
 verse is all right. Browning, but a book of it is too 
 much : people are appalled ; they cannot digest it. And 
 when it goes into a magazine it is lost in the mass. 
 Now just let me get out your work in little monthly 
 installments, in booklet form, and I think it will go." 
 1^ Browning jumped at the idea. 
 
 The booklets were gotten out in paper covers and of- 
 fered at a moderate price. 
 
 They sold, and sold well. The literary elite bought 
 them by the dozen to give away. 
 
 People began to talk about Browning — he was getting 
 a foothold. His royalties now amounted to as much as 
 
 41 
 
ROBERT the weekly allowance from his father, and pater wAtt 
 BROWNING talking of cutting off the stipend entirely ^ Fi- 
 nances being easy, Browning thought it a good 
 time to take another look at Italy — some 
 of the best things he had written had 
 been inspired by Venice & Asolo 
 — he would go again. And so 
 he engaged passage on a 
 sailing ship for Naples. 
 
IHORTLY after Browning's re- 
 turn to London in 1844, he dined 
 at Sergeant Talfourd's i§t After 
 the dinner a well dressed and 
 sprightly old gentleman intro- 
 duced himself and begged that 
 Browning would inscribe a copy 
 of ' 'Bells & Pomegranates,' ' that 
 he had gotten specially bound. 
 There is an ancient myth about 
 writers being harassed by autograph fiends and all that, 
 but the simple fact is, nothing so warms the cockles 
 of an author's heart as to be asked for his autograph. 
 Of course Browning graciously complied with the 
 gentleman's request, and in order that he might insert 
 the owner's name in the inscription asked, 
 " What name, please ? " 
 And the answer was, "John Kenyon." 
 Then Mr. Browning and Mr. Kenyon had a nice little 
 visit, talking about books and art. And Mr. Kenyon told 
 Mr. Browning that Miss Elizabeth Barrett, the poet- 
 ess, was a cousin of his — he was a bit boastful of the 
 fact .PO^**^ 
 
 And Mr. Browning nodded and said he had often heard 
 of her, and admired her work. 
 
 Then Mr. Kenyon suggested that Mr. Browning write 
 and tell her so — ** You sec she has just gotten out a new 
 book, and we are all a little nervous about how it is 
 going to take. Miss Barrett lives in a darkened room, 
 
 43 
 
 ROBERT 
 BROWNING 
 
ROBERT you know, — sees no one — and a letter from a man like 
 BROWNING you would encourage her greatly." 
 
 Mr. Kenyon wrote the address of Miss Barrett on a 
 card and pushed it across the table. 
 Mr. Browning took the card, put it in his pocket-book 
 and promised to write Miss Barrett, as Mr. Kenyon 
 requested. 
 And he did. 
 Miss Barrett replied. 
 
 Mr. Browning answered, and soon several letters a 
 week were going in each direction. 
 Not quite so many missives were being received by 
 Fanny Haworth, and as for Lizzie Flower, I fear she 
 was quite forgotten. She fell into a decline, drooped and 
 died in a year. 
 
 Mr. Browning asked for permission to call on Miss 
 Barrett WV 
 
 Miss Barrett explained that her father would not allow 
 it, neither would the doctor or nurse, & added, " There 
 is nothing to see in me. I am a weed fit for the ground 
 and darkness." 
 
 But this repulse only made Mr. Browning want to see 
 her the more. He appealed to Mr. Kenyon, who was 
 the only person allowed to call, besides Miss Mitford — 
 Mr. Kenyon was her cousin. 
 
 Mr. Kenyon arranged — he was an expert at arranging 
 anything of a delicate nature. He timed the hour Mr. 
 Barrett was down town, & the nurse and doctor safely 
 out of the way, and they called on the invalid prisoner 
 44 
 
in the darkened room ^ They did not stay long, but ROBERT 
 when they went away Robert Browning trod on air. BROWNING 
 The beautiful girl-like face, in its frame of dark curls 
 lying back among the pillows, haunted him like a shad- 
 ow. He was thirty-three, she was thirty-five. She looked 
 like a child, but the mind — the subtle, appreciative, re- 
 ceptive mind ! The mind that caught every allusion, 
 that knew his thought before he voiced it, that found 
 nothing obscure in his work and that put a high and 
 holy construction on his every sentence — it was divine ! 
 divinity incarnated in woman. 
 
 Robert Browning tramped the streets forgetful of meat, 
 drink or rest. 
 
 He would give this woman freedom. He would devote 
 himself to restoring her to the air and sunshine. What 
 nobler ambition ! He was an idler, he had never done 
 anything for anybody. He was only a killer of time, a 
 vagrant, but now was his opportunity — he would do for 
 this beautiful soul what no one else on earth could do. 
 She was slipping away as it was — the world would soon 
 lose her. "Was there none to save ? 
 Here was the finest intellect ever given to a woman — 
 so sure, so vital, so tender and yet so strong ! 
 He would love her back to life and light ! 
 And so Robert Browning told her all this shortly after, 
 but before he told, she had divined his thought. For sol- 
 itude and loneliness and heart hunger had given her the 
 power of an astral being : she was in communication 
 with all the finer forces that pervade our ether. 
 
 AS 
 
ROBERT He would love her back to life and light— he told herso. 
 BROWNING She grew better. 
 
 And soon we find her getting up & throwing wide the 
 shutters. It was no longer the darkened room, for the 
 sunlight came dancing through the apartment, driving 
 out all the dark shadows that lurked therein. 
 The doctor was indignant ; the nurse resigned. 
 Of course, Mr. Barrett was not taken into confidence 
 and no one asked his consent. Why should they ? — he 
 was the man who could never understand. 
 So one fine day when the coast was clear, the couple 
 went over to St. Pancras Church, and were married. 
 The bride went home alone — could walk all right now 
 — and it was a week before her husband saw her, be- 
 cause he would not be a hypocrite and go ring the door 
 bell and ask if Miss Barrett was home ; and of course 
 if he had asked for Mrs. Robert Browning, no one 
 would have known whom he wanted to see. 
 But at the end of a week, the bride stole down the 
 stairs, while the family was at dinner, leading her dog 
 Flush by a string, & all the time, with throbbing heart, 
 she prayed the dog not to bark. I have oft wondered in 
 the stilly night-season what the effect on English Let- 
 ters would have been, had the dog really barked ! But 
 the dog did not bark ; and Elizabeth met her husband 
 there on the corner where the mail box is. No one 
 missed the runaway until the next day, & then the bride 
 & groom were safely in France, writing letters back 
 from Dieppe, asking forgiveness and craving blessings. 
 46 
 
,^HE is the Genius and I am the 
 Clever Person," Browning used 
 to say. And this I believe will 
 be the world's final judgment. 
 Browning knew the world in its 
 every phase — good & bad, high 
 & low, society and commerce, 
 the shop and gipsy camp. He 
 absorbed things, learned them, 
 compared and wrote it out. 
 Elizabeth Barrett had never traveled, her opportunities 
 for meeting people had been few, her experiences lim- 
 ited and yet she evolved truth : she secreted beauty 
 from within. 
 
 For two years after their elopement they did not write 
 — how could they ? goodness me ! They were on their 
 wedding tour. They lived in Florence and Rome and 
 in various mountain villages in Italy. 
 Health came back, and joy and peace and perfect love 
 were theirs. But it was joy bought with a price — Eliz- 
 abeth Barrett Browning had forfeited the love of her 
 father. Her letters written him came back unopened, 
 books inscribed to him were returned — he declared she 
 ^vas dead >^S?> 
 
 Her brothers, too, discarded her, and when her two 
 sisters wrote, they did so by stealth and their letters, 
 meant to be kind, were steel for her heart. Then her 
 father was rich ; and she had always known every com- 
 fort that money could buy. Now, she had taken up with 
 
 47 
 
 ROBERT 
 BROWNING 
 
ROBERT a poor poet and every penny had to be counted — abso- 
 BROWNING lute economy was demanded. And Robert Browning, 
 with a certain sense of guilt upon him, for depriving 
 her of all the creature comforts she had known, sought 
 by tenderness and love to make her forget the insults 
 her father heaped upon her. 
 
 As for Browning the bank clerk, he was vexed that his 
 son should show so little sense as to load himself up 
 with an invalid wife, and he cut off the allowance, de- 
 claring that if a man was old enough to marry he was 
 also old enough to care for himself. He did, however, 
 make his son several "loans"; and finally came to 
 " bless the day that his son had sense enough to marry 
 the best and most talented woman on earth." 
 Browning's poems were selling slowly, & Mrs. Brown- 
 ing's books brought her a little royalty, thanks to the 
 loyal management of John Kenyon, and so absolute 
 want and biting poverty did not overtake the runaways. 
 1^ After the birth of her son in 1849, Mrs. Browning's 
 health seemed to have fully returned. She used to ride 
 horseback up and down the mountain passes, & wrote 
 home to Miss Mitford that love had turned the dial 
 backward &thejoyousness of girlhood had come again 
 to her. 
 
 W^hen John Kenyon died and left them ten thousand 
 pounds, all their own, it placed them forever beyond 
 the apprehension of want, and also enabled them to do 
 for others, for they pensioned old Walter Savage Lan- 
 dor, and established him in comfortable quarters around 
 48 
 
the corner from Casa Guidi il|li I intimated a moment ROBERT 
 ago that their honeymoon continued for two years. This BROWNING 
 was a mistake, as it continued for just fifteen years, 
 when the beautiful girl-like form, with her head of flow- 
 ing curls upon her husband's shoulder, ceased to 
 breathe. Painlessly and without apprehension or pre- 
 monition the spirit had taken its flight. 
 That letter of Miss Blagdon's, written some weeks af- 
 ter, telling of how the stricken man paced the echoing 
 hallways at night crying, ** I want her ! I want her ! " 
 touches us like a strange, personal sorrow that once 
 pierced our hearts. 
 
 But Robert Browning's nature was too strong to be 
 subdued by grief. He remembered that others, too, had 
 buried their dead, and that sorrow had been man's por- 
 tion since the world began. He would live for his boy — 
 for Her child. 
 
 But Florence was no longer his Florence, and he made 
 haste to settle up his affairs and go back to England. 
 He never returned to Florence, & never saw the beau- 
 tiful monument, designed by his lifelong friend, Fred- 
 erick Leighton. 
 
 When you visit the little English Cemetery at Florence, 
 the slim little girl that comes down the path, swinging 
 the big bunch of keys, opens the high iron gate & leads 
 you, without word or question, straight to the grave of 
 Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 
 
 Browning was forty-nine when Mrs. Browning died« 
 And by the time he had reached his fiftieth meridian, 
 
 49 
 
ROBERT England, hearkening to America's suggestion, was 
 BROWNING awakening to the fact that he was one of the world's 
 great poets. 
 
 Honors came slowly, but surely — Oxford with a degree; 
 St. Andrew's with a Lord-Rectorship ; publishers with 
 advance payments. And when Smith and Elder paid 
 one hundred pounds for the poem of "Herve Riel," it 
 seemed that at last Browning's worth was being rec- 
 ognized. Not of course that money is the infallible test, 
 but even poetry has its Rialto, where the extent of ap- 
 preciation is shown by prices current. 
 Browning's best work was done after his wife's death ; 
 and in that love he ever lived and breathed. In his sev- 
 enty-fifth year, it filled his days and dreams as though 
 it were a thing of yesterday, singing in his heart a con- 
 tinual eucharist. 
 
 The "Ring and the Book " must be regarded as Brown- 
 ing's crowning work. Off-hand critics have disposed of 
 it, but the great minds go back to it again and again. In 
 the character of Pompilia the author sought to pay 
 tribute to the woman whose memory w^as ever in his 
 mind ; yet he was too sensitive and shrinking to fully 
 picture her. He sought to mask his inspiration ; but ten- 
 der, loving recollections of *' Ba" are interlaced and 
 interwoven through it all i§t When Robert Browning 
 died in i88g, the world of literature & art uncovered in 
 token of honor to one who had lived long and well 
 and had done a deathless work. And the doors of 
 storied Westminster opened wide to receive his dust. 
 
 50 
 
Tennyson 
 
 Fi-oin tlie etching by Raj on 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
Not of the sunlight, 
 Not of th« moonlight, 
 Nor of the starlight ! 
 O young Mariner, 
 Down to the haven. 
 Call your companions, 
 Launch your vessel. 
 And crowd your canvas, 
 And ere it vanishes 
 Over the margin. 
 After it, follow it, 
 Follow the Gleam. 
 — Merlin. 
 
IHE grandfather of Tennyson had two ALFRED 
 
 Isons, the elder boy according to Mr. TENNYSON 
 Clement Scott, being «' both willful & 
 commonplace." Now of course the 
 property & honors & titles, according 
 to the Law of England, would all grav- 
 itate to the commonplace boy ; & the 
 second son, who was competent, duti- 
 ful & worthy, would be out in the cold 
 
 jworld — simply because he was acci- 
 dentally born second & not first. It was 
 not his fault that he was born second, 
 & it was in no wise to the credit of 
 
 jthe other that he was born first. 
 So the father, seeing that the elder 
 boy had small exjecutive capacity, & 
 no appreciation of a Good Thing, dis- ^ 
 
 inherited him, giving him, however, a 
 
 Igenerous allowance, but letting the 
 
 ■titles go to the second boy, who was 
 
 Ibright and brave and withal a right 
 
 Imanly fellow. 
 
 Personally I 'm glad the honors went 
 to the best man. But Hallam Tenny- 
 son, son of the Poet, sees only rank 
 
 jinjustice in the action of his ancestor 
 who deliberately set his own opinion 
 
 |of right and justice against precedent 
 
 5x 
 
ALFRED as embodied in English Law il^ As a matter of strictest 
 TBNNYSON justice, we might argue that neither boy was entitled 
 to anything which he had not earned, and in dividing 
 the property between them, instead of allowing it all 
 to drift into the hands of the one accidentally born first, 
 the father acted wisely and well. 
 
 But neither Alfred nor Hallam Tennyson thought so. 
 How much their opinions were biased by the fact that 
 they were descendants of the first-born son we cannot 
 say. Anyway, the descendants of the second son, Hon. 
 Charles Tennyson d'Eyncourt, have made no protest, 
 of which I can learn, about justice being defeated. 
 Considering this subject of the Law of Entail one step 
 further, we find that Hallam, the present Lord Tenny- 
 son, is a Peer of the Realm simply because his father 
 was a great poet, and honors were given him on that 
 account by the Queen. These honors go to Hallam, who 
 as all men agree, is in many ways singularly like his 
 grandfather. 
 
 Genius is not hereditary, but titles are. Hallam is em- 
 inently pleased with the English Law of Entail, save 
 that he questions whether any father has the divine 
 right to divert his titles and wealth from the eldest son. 
 Lord Hallam's arguments are earnest and well ex- 
 pressed, but they seem to show that he is lacking in 
 what Herbert Spencer calls the "value sense"— in 
 other words, the sense of humor. 
 Hallam's lack of perspective is further in evidence 
 through his patient efforts to explain who the various 
 52 
 
Tennysons were. In my boyhood days I thought there ALFRED 
 
 was but one Tennyson. On reading Hallam's book, TENNYSON 
 
 however, one would think there were dozens of them. 
 
 To keep these various men, bearing one name, from 
 
 being confused in the mind of the reader is quite a task, 
 
 and to better identify one particular Tennyson, Hallam 
 
 usually refers to him as " Father," or ** My Father." ^ 
 
 In the course of a recent interview with Mr. 'W. H. 
 
 Seward, of Auburn, N. Y., I was impressed by his 
 
 dignified, respectful and affectionate references 
 
 to " Seward." «« This belonged to Seward," 
 
 &" Seward told me," — as though there 
 
 were but one. In these pages I will 
 
 speak of Tennyson — there has 
 
 been but one — there will 
 
 never be another. 
 
 ill ^ 
 53 
 
ALFRED 
 TENNYSON 
 
 HINK Mr. Clement Scott is a 
 little severe in his estimate of 
 the character of Tennyson's i^ 
 father, although the main facts 
 are doubtless as he states them. 
 The Rev. George Clayton Ten- 
 nyson, Rector of Somersby and 
 \A^ood Enderby parishes, was a 
 typical English parson. As a 
 boy he was simply big, fat and 
 lazy. His health was so perfect that it overtopped all 
 ambition and having no nerves to speak of, his sensibili- 
 ties were very slight. 
 
 When he was disinherited, in favor of his younger 
 brother, a keen, nervous, forceful fellow, he accepted 
 it as a matter of course. His career was planned for 
 him : he " took orders," married the young woman his 
 folks selected, and slipped easily into his proper niche — 
 his adipose serving as a buffer for his feelings. In his 
 intellect there was no flash, and his insight into the 
 heart of things was small. 
 
 Being happily married to a discreet woman who man- 
 aged him without ever letting him be aware of it, and 
 having a sure and sufficient income, and never know- 
 ing that he had a stomach, he did his clerical work, 
 (with the help of a curate) and lived out the measure 
 of his days, no wiser at the last than he was at thirty. 
 1^ In passing, we might call attention to the fact that 
 the average man is a victim of Arrested Development, 
 54 
 
and that the passing years bring an increase of knowl- ALFRED 
 edge only in very exceptional cases. Health and pros- TENNYSON 
 perity are not pure blessings — a certain element of dis- 
 content is necessary to spur men on to a higher life i^ 
 Rev. George Clayton Tennyson had income enough to 
 meet his wants, but not enough to embarrass him with 
 the responsibilities of taking care of it. Each quarterly 
 stipend was spent before it arrived, & the family lived 
 on credit until another three months rolled around. 
 They had roast beef as often as they wanted it, in the 
 cellar were puncheons, kegs and barrels, and as there 
 was no rent to pay nor landlords to appease, care sat 
 lightly on the Rector. 
 
 Elizabeth, this man's wife, is worthy of more than a 
 passing note. She was the daughter of Rev. Stephen 
 Fytche, vicar of Louth. Her family was not so high in 
 rank as the Tennysons, because the Tennysons be- 
 longed to the gentry. But she was intelligent, amiable, 
 fairly good-looking, and being the daughter of a clergy- 
 man, had beyond doubt a knowledge of clerical needs, 
 so it was thought would make a good wife for the new- 
 ly appointed incumbent of Somersby. 
 The parents arranged it, the young folks were willing, 
 and so they were married — and the bridegroom was 
 happy ever afterward. 
 
 And why should n't he be happy ? Surely no man was 
 ever blest with a better wife ! He had made a reach in- 
 to the matrimonial grab-bag and drawn forth a jewel. 
 This jewel was many faceted. Without affectation or 
 
 55 
 
ALFRED silly pride the clergyman's wife did the work that God 
 TENNYSON sent her to do. The sense of duty was strong upon her. 
 Babies came, one each two years, and in one case two 
 in one year, and there was careful planning required to 
 make the income reach, & keep the household in order. 
 Then she visited the poor and sick of the parish, and 
 received the many visitors. And with it all she found 
 time to read. Her mind was open and alert for all good 
 things. I am not sure that she was so very happy, 
 but no complaints escaped her. In all she bore 
 twelve children, eight sons and four daugh- 
 ters 1^ Ten of these children lived 
 to be over seventy-five years of age. 
 The fourth child that came 
 to her they named Alfred. 
 
 m 
 
 56 
 
ENNYSON'S education in ear- 
 ly youth was very slight. His 
 father laid down rules and gave 
 out lessons, but the strictness 
 of discipline never lasted more 
 than two days at a time. The 
 children ran wild and roamed 
 the woods of Lincolnshire in 
 search of all the curious things 
 that the woods hold in store 
 for boys i^ The father occasionally made stern efforts 
 to ** correct " his sons. In use of the birch he was am- 
 bidextrous. But I have noticed that in households 
 where a strap hangs behind the kitchen door, for ready 
 use, it is not utilized so much for pure discipline as to 
 case the feelings of the parent. They say that expres- 
 sion is a need of the human heart ; & I am also con- 
 vinced that in many hearts there is a very strong desire 
 at times to ** thrash " someone. Who it is makes little 
 difference, but children being helpless and the law giv- 
 ing us the right, we find gratification by falling upon 
 them with straps, birch rods, slippers, ferrules, hair 
 brushes or apple tree sprouts. 
 
 No student of pedagogics now believes that the free 
 use of the rod ever made a child " good," but all agree 
 that it has often served as a safety valve for pent up 
 emotion in the parent and teacher. 
 The father of Alfred Tennyson applied the birch, and 
 the boy took to the woods, moody, resentful, solitary. 
 
 57 
 
 ALFRED 
 TENNYSON 
 
ALFRED There was good in this, for the lad learned to live with- 
 TENNYSON in himself, and to be self-sufficient : to love the solitude, 
 and feel a kinship with all the life that makes the groves 
 and fields melodious. 
 
 In 1828, when nineteen years of age, Alfred was sent 
 to Trinity College, Cambridge. He remained there three 
 years, but left w^ithout a degree, and what w^as worse 
 — with the ill-w^ill of his teachers, who seemed to regard 
 his a hopeless case. He would n't study the books they 
 wanted him to. 
 
 College life, however, has much to recommend it be- 
 side the curriculum. At Cambridge, Tennyson made the 
 acquaintanceship of a group of young men who in- 
 fluenced his life profoundly. Kemble, Milnes, Brook- 
 field & Spedding remained his life-long friends ; 
 and as all good is reciprocal, no man can 
 say how much these eminent men 
 owe to the moody & melancholy 
 Tennyson, or how much 
 he owes to them. 
 
 5« 
 
JENN YSON began to write verse 
 very young. He has told of go- 
 ing ^vhen thirteen years of age 
 to visit his grandfather, and of 
 presenting him a poem. The old 
 gentleman gave him half a ^ 
 guinea with the remark, " This 
 is the first money you ever made 
 by writing poetry, and take my 
 word for it, it will be the last ! " 
 When eighteen years of age, with his brother, Charles, 
 he produced a thin book of thin verses. 
 We have the opinion of Coleridge to the effect that the 
 only lines which have any merit in the book, are those 
 signed C. T. ^ Charles became a clergyman of marked 
 ability, married rich, and changed his name from Ten- 
 nyson to Turner for economic and domestic reasons. 
 Years afterward, when Alfred had become Poet Lau- 
 reate, rumor has it, he thought of changing the " Tur- 
 ner " back to •• Tennyson," but was unable to bring it 
 about *V^ 
 
 The only honor captured by Alfred at Cambridge was 
 a prize for his poem, •• Timbuctoo." The encourage- 
 ment that this brought him, backed up by Arthur Hal- 
 lam's declaiming the piece in public — as a sort of defi 
 to detractors — caused him to fix his attention more as- 
 siduously on verse. He could write — it was the only 
 thing he could do — and so he wrote. 
 The year he was twenty-one he published a small book 
 
 59 
 
 ALFRED 
 TENNYSON 
 
ALFRED called "Poems, Chiefly Lyrical." The books went a- 
 TENNYSON begging for many years ; but times change, for a copy 
 of this edition was sold by Quaritch in 1895 for one 
 hundred and eighty pounds. The only piece in the book 
 that seems to show genuine merit is '• Mariana." 
 Two years afterward a second edition, revised and en- 
 larged, was brought out. This book contains " The Lady 
 of Shallott," "The May Queen," "A Dream of Fair 
 Women " and " The Lotus Eaters." 
 Beyond a few fulsome reviews from personal friends 
 and a little surly mention from the tribe of Jeffrey, the 
 volume attracted no attention. This coldness on the 
 part of buyers shot an atrabiliar tint through the am- 
 bition of our poet and the fond hope of a success in lit- 
 erature faded from his mind. 
 
 And then began what Stopford Brooke has called "the 
 ten fallow years in the life of Tennyson." But fallow 
 years are not all fallow. The dark brooding night is as 
 necessary for our life as the garish day. Great crops of 
 wheat that feed the nations grow only where the win- 
 ter's snow covers all as with a garment. And ever behind 
 the mystery of sleep, and beneath the silence of the 
 snow, Nature slumbers not nor sleeps. 
 The withholding of quick recognition gave the mind of 
 Tennyson an opportunity to ripen. Fate held him in 
 leash that he might be saved for a masterly work, and 
 all the time that he lived in semi-solitude and read and 
 thought and tramped the fields, his soul was growing 
 strong and his spirit was taking on the silken self-suf- 
 60 
 
ficicnt strength that marked his later days i9fb This hi- ALFRED 
 atus of ten years in the life of our poet is very similar TENNYSON 
 to the thirteen fallow years in the career of Browning. 
 These men crossed and re-crossed each other's path- 
 way but did not meet for many years. What a help 
 they might have been to each other in those years of 
 doubt and seeming defeat ! But each was to make his 
 way alone »€^ 
 
 Browning seemed to grow through society and travel, 
 but solitude served the needs of Tennyson. 
 "There must be a man behind every sentence," said 
 Emerson. After ten years of silence, when Tennyson 
 issued his book, the literary world recognized the man 
 behind it. Tennyson had grown as a writer, but more 
 as a man. And after all, it is more to be a man than a 
 poet 1^ All who knew Tennyson, and have written of 
 him, especially during those early years, begin with a 
 description of his appearance. His looks did not belie 
 the man. In intellect and in stature he was a giant. The 
 tall, athletic form, the great shaggy head, the classic 
 features & the look of untried strength were all thrown 
 into fine relief by the modesty, the half-embarrassment 
 of his manner. 
 
 To meet the poet was to acknowledge his power. No 
 man can talk as wise as he can look, and Tennyson 
 never tried to. His words were few and simple. 
 Those who met him went away ready to back his light- 
 est word. They felt there was a man behind the sen- 
 tence -M^S? 
 
 6z 
 
ALFRED Carlyle, who was a hero-worshipcr, but who usually 
 TENNYSON limited his worship to those well dead and long gone 
 hence, wrote of Tennyson to Emerson: ♦• One of the 
 finest looking men in the world. A great shock of dusky 
 hair ; bright, laughing, hazel eyes ; massive aquiline 
 face, most massive yet most delicate ; of sallow brown 
 complexion, almost Indian-looking, clothes cynically 
 loose, free-and-easy, smokes infinite tobacco. His voice 
 is musical, metallic, fit for loud laughter and piercing 
 wail, and all that may lie between ; speech and specu- 
 lation free and plenteous ; I do not meet in these late 
 decades such company over a pipe ! V/o shall see what 
 he will grow to." 
 
 And then again, writing to his brother John : "Some 
 weeks ago, one night, the poet Tennyson and Matthew 
 Arnold were discovered here sitting smoking in the gar- 
 den. Tennyson had been here before, but was still new 
 to Jane, — who was alone for the first hour or two of it. 
 A fine, large featured, dim-eyed, bronze-colored, shag- 
 gy-headed man is Alfred ; dusty, smoky, free-and-easy ; 
 who swims outwardly and inwardly, with great com- 
 posure in an articulate element as of tranquil chaos 
 and tobacco-smoke ; great now and then when he does 
 emerge ; a most restful, brotherly, solid-hearted man." 
 The " English Idylls," put forth in 1842 contained all 
 of the poems, heretofore published, that Tennyson 
 cared to retain. It must be stated to the credit, or dis- 
 credit, of America, that the only complete editions of 
 Tennyson were issued by New York and Boston pub- 
 6s 
 
lishers i§t These men seized upon the immature early ALFRED 
 poems of Tennyson, and combining them with his later TENNYSON 
 books, issued the whole in a style that tried men's eyes 
 — very proud of the fact that " this is the only com- 
 plete edition," etc. Of course they paid the author no 
 royalty, neither did they heed his protests, and possi- 
 bly all this prepared the way for frosty receptions of 
 daughters of quick machine-made American million- 
 aires, who journeyed to the Isle of ^^ight in after days. 
 Soon after the publication of " English Idylls," Alfred 
 Tennyson moved gracefully, like the launching of 
 a ship, into the first place among living poets. He 
 was then thirty-three years of age, with just half a 
 century, lacking a few months, yet to live. In all that 
 half century, with its conflicting literary lights & glares, 
 his title to first place was never seriously questioned. 
 ^ Up to 1842, in his various letters, and through his 
 close friends, we learn that Tennyson was sore pressed 
 for funds. He had n't money to buy books, and when 
 he traveled it was through the munificence of some 
 kind kinsman. He even excuses himself from attending 
 certain social functions on account of his lack of suit- 
 able raiment — probably with a certain satisfaction. 
 But when he tells of his poverty to Emily Sellwood, 
 the woman of his choice, there is anguish in his cry. 
 In fact, her parents succeeded in breaking off her re- 
 lationship w^ith Tennyson for a time on account of his 
 very uncertain prospects. His brothers, even those 
 younger than he, had slipped into snug positions — " but 
 
ALFRED Alfred dreams on with nothing special in sight. "i^ Po- 
 TENNYSON etry, in way of a financial return, is not to be com- 
 mended. Honors were coming Tennyson's way as early 
 as 1842, but it was not until 1845, when a pension of 
 two hundred pounds a year was granted him by the 
 Government that he began to feel easy. Even then there 
 were various old scores in way of loans to liquidate. 
 The year 1850, when he was forty-one, has been called 
 his "golden year," for in it occurred the publication of 
 ** In Memoriam," his appointment to the post of Poet 
 Laureate, and his marriage. 
 
 Emily Sellwood had waited for him all these years. 
 She had been sought after, & had refused several good 
 offers from eligible widowers and others who pitied her 
 sad plight and looked upon her as a forlorn old maid. 
 But she had given her heart to another. 
 Possibly she had not been courted quite so assiduously 
 as Tennyson's mother had been. W^hen that dear old 
 lady was past eighty she became very deaf, and the 
 family often ventured to carry on conversations in her 
 presence which possibly would have been modified had 
 the old lady been in full possession of her faculties. 
 One day as she sat knitting in the chimney corner, one 
 of her daughters in a burst of confidence to a visitor, 
 said, " Why, before Mamma married Papa she had re- 
 ceived twenty-three offers of marriage ! " 
 ♦'Twenty-four, my dear, — twenty-four," corrected the 
 old lady as she shifted the needles. 
 No one has ever claimed that Tennyson was an ideal 
 64 
 
lover. Surely he never could have been tempted to do ALFRED 
 what Browning did — break up the peace of a house- TENNYSON 
 hold by an elopement. His love was a thing of the head, 
 ^veighed carefully in the scales of his judgment. His 
 caution and good sense saved him from all Byronic ex- 
 cesses, or foolish alliances such as took Shelley captive. 
 He believed in law and order, and early saw that his 
 interests lay in that direction. He belonged to the 
 Church of England, & doubtless thought as he pleased, 
 but ever expressed himself with caution. 
 It is easy to accuse Tennyson of being insular — to say 
 that he is "the poet of England." Had he been more 
 he would have been less. "World-poets have usually 
 been revolutionists, and dangerous men who exploded 
 at an unknown extent of concussion. None of them has 
 been a safe man — none respectable. Dante, Shakes- 
 peare, Milton, Hugo and Whitman were outcasts. 
 Tennyson is always serene, sane and safe — his lines 
 breathe purity and excellence. He is the poet of religion, 
 of the home and fireside, of established order, of truth, 
 justice and mercy as embodied in law. 
 Very early he became a close personal friend of Queen 
 Victoria and many of his lines ministered to her per- 
 sonal consolation. 
 
 1^ For fifty years Tennyson's life was one steady, 
 triumphal march. He acquired wealth, such as no other 
 English poet before him had ever done ; his name was 
 known in every corner of the earth where white men 
 journeyed, and at home he was beloved and honored. 
 
 65 
 
ALFRED He died October 6th, 1892, aged eighty-three, and for 
 TENNYSON him the Nation mourned, and with deep 
 
 sincerity the Queen spoke of his de- 
 mise as a poignant, per- 
 sonal sorrow. 
 
 66 
 
T was at Cambridge he met 
 Arthur Hallam — Arthur Hal- 
 lam, immortal and remembered 
 alone for being the comrade & 
 friend of Tennyson. 
 Alfred took his friend Arthur to 
 his home in Lincolnshire one 
 vacation, and we know how 
 Arthur became enamored of 
 Tennyson's sister Emily, and 
 they were betrothed. Together, Tennyson and Hallam 
 made a trip through France and the Pyrenees. 
 Carlyle and Milburn, the blind preacher, once sat smok- 
 ing in the little arbor back of the house in Cheyne Row. 
 They had been talking of Tennyson, and after a long 
 silence Carlyle knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and 
 >vith a grunt said, ** Ha ! Death is a great blessing — the 
 joyousest blessing of all ! Without death there would 
 ha' been no * In Memoriam,' no Hallam and like 
 enough, no Tennyson ! " i^ It is futile to figure what 
 would have occurred had this or that not happened, 
 since every act of life is a sequence. But that Carlyle & 
 many others believed that the death of Hallam was the 
 making of Tennyson, there is no doubt. Possibly his 
 soul needed just this particular amount of bruising in or- 
 der to make it burst into undying song — who knows ! 
 When Charles Kingsley was asked for the secret of his 
 exquisite sympathy and fine imagination, he paused a 
 space, and then answered — " I had a friend." 
 
 67 
 
 ALFRED 
 TENNYSON 
 
ALFRED The desire for friendship is strong in every human 
 TENNYSON heart. We crave the companionship of those who can 
 understand. The nostalgia of life presses, we sigh for 
 " home," and long for the presence of one who sympa- 
 thizes with our aspirations, comprehends our hopes 
 and is able to partake of our joys. A thought is not our 
 own until we impart it to another, and the confession- 
 al seems a crying need of every human soul. 
 One can bear grief but it takes two to be glad. 
 We reach the Divine through some one, and by divid- 
 ing our joy with this one we double it, and come in 
 touch with the Universal. The sky is never so blue, the 
 birds never sing so blithely, our acquaintances are nev- 
 er so gracious as when we are filled with love for some 
 one o^y^s^ 
 
 Being in harmony with one we are in harmony with all. 
 1^ The lover idealizes and clothes the beloved with vir- 
 tues that only exist in his imagination. The beloved is 
 consciously or unconsciously aware of this, and en- 
 deavors to fulfill the high ideal ; and in the contempla- 
 tion of the transcendent qualities that his mind has 
 created, the lover is raised to heights otherwise im- 
 possible t^^ 
 
 Should the beloved pass from earth while this con- 
 dition of exaltation exists, the conception is indelibly 
 impressed upon the soul, just as the last earthly view 
 is said to be photographed upon the retina of the dead. 
 The highest earthly relationship is in its very essence 
 fleeting, for men are fallible, and living in a world 
 68 
 
where material wants jostle, and change and time play ALFRED 
 their ceaseless parts, gradual obliteration comes and TENNYSON 
 disillusion enters. But the memory of a sweet affinity 
 once fully possessed, and snapped by fate at its su- 
 premest moment, can never die from out the heart. All 
 other troubles are swallowed up in this, and if the in- 
 dividual is of too stern a fiber to be completely crushed 
 into the dust, time will come bearing healing, and the 
 memory of that once ideal condition will chant in the 
 heart a perpetual eucharist. 
 
 And I hope the world has passed forever from the 
 nightmare of pity for the dead : they have ceased from 
 their labors and are at rest. 
 
 But for the living, when death has entered & removed 
 the best friend, fate has done her worst ; the plummet 
 has sounded the depths of grief, and thereafter nothing 
 can inspire terror. At one fell stroke all petty annoy- 
 ances and corroding cares are sunk into nothingness |9^ 
 The memory of a great love lives enshrined in undying 
 amber. It affords a ballast 'gainst all the storms that 
 blow, and although it lends an unutterable sadness, it 
 imparts an unspeakable peace. Where there is this 
 haunting memory of a great love lost, there is always 
 forgiveness, charity and a sympathy that makes the 
 man brother to all who suffer and endure. The indi- 
 vidual himself is nothing : he has nothing to hope for, 
 nothing to lose, nothing to win, and this constant mem- 
 cry of the high and exalted friendship that was once 
 his is a nourishing source of strength ; it constantly 
 
 69 
 
ALFRED purifies the mind and inspires the heart to nobler living 
 TENNYSON and diviner thinking. The man is in communication 
 with Elemental Conditions. 
 
 To have known an ideal friendship, & had it fade from 
 your grasp and flee as a shadow before it is touched 
 with the sordid breath of selfishness, or sullied by mis- 
 understanding, is the highest good. And the constant 
 dwelling in sweet, sad recollection on the exalted vir- 
 tues of the one that has gone tends to crystallize these 
 very virtues in the heart of him who meditates them. 
 ^ The beauty with which love adorns its object be- 
 comes at last the possession of the one who loves. 
 At the hour when the strong and helpful, yet tender & 
 sympathetic friendship of Alfred Tennyson and Arthur 
 Hallam was at its height, there came a brief and abrupt 
 word from Vienna to the effect that Arthur was dead. 
 The shock of surprise, followed by dumb, bitter grief, 
 made an impression on the youthful mind of Tenny- 
 son that the sixty years which followed did not obliter- 
 ate ^'\?V 
 
 At first a numbness and deadness came over his spirit, 
 but this condition ere long gave way to a sweet con- 
 templation of the beauties of character that his friend 
 possessed, and he tenderly reviewed the gracious hours 
 they had spent together. 
 
 ** In Memoriam " is not one poem, it is made up of 
 many *• short swallow-flights of song that dip their 
 wings in tears and skim away." There are one hundred 
 and thirty separate songs in all, held together by the 
 70 
 
silken thread of love for his lost friend ^ Seventeen ALFRED 
 years were required for their evolution. TENNYSON 
 
 Some people, misled by the title, possibly, think of 
 these poems as a wail of grief for the dead, a vain cry 
 of sorrow for the lost, or a proud parading of mourn- 
 ing millinery. Such views could not be more wholly 
 wrong f^^ 
 
 To every soul that has loved and lost, to those who 
 have stood by open graves, to all who have beheld the 
 sun go down on less worth in the world, these songs 
 are a victor's cry. They tell of love and life that rises 
 phoenix-like from the ashes of despair ; of doubt turned 
 to faith ; of fear which has become serenest peace. 
 All poems that endure must have this helpful uplifting 
 quality. Without violence of direction they must be 
 beacon lights that gently guide stricken men & women 
 into safe harbors. 
 
 The •* Invocation," written nearly a score of years 
 after Hallam's death, reveals Tennyson's personal con- 
 quest of pain. His thought has broadened from the 
 sense of loss into a stately march of conquest over 
 death for the whole human race i§t The sharpness 
 of grief has wakened the soul to the contemplation of 
 sublime ideas — truth, justice, nobility, honor, and the 
 sense of beauty as shown in all created things. The man 
 once loved a person, now his heart goes out to the uni- 
 verse. The dread of death is gone, and he calmly con- 
 templates his own end and waits the summons without 
 either impatience or fear. He realizes that death itself 
 
 71 
 
ALFRED is a manifestation of life— that it is as natural and just 
 TENNYSON as necessary. 
 
 Sunset and evening star 
 
 And one clear call for me, 
 And may there be no moaning of the bar 
 • When I put out to sea. 
 
 The desire for sympathy and the wish for friendship 
 are in his heart, but the fever of unrest and 
 the spirit of revolt are gone. His heart, 
 his hope, his faith, his life, are 
 freely laid on the al- 
 tar of Eternal 
 Love. 
 
 t 
 
 7? 
 
/ 
 
Robert Burns 
 
ROBERT BURNS 
 
TO JEANIE. 
 
 Come, let me take thee to my breast, 
 And pledge we ne'er shall sunder; 
 
 And I shall spurn, as vilest dust, 
 The warld's wealth and grandeur. 
 
 And do I hear my Jeanie own 
 That equal transports move her ? 
 
 I ask for dearest life, alone, 
 That I may live to love her. 
 
 Thus in my arms, wi' all thy charms, 
 I clasp my countless treasure ; 
 
 I '11 seek nae mair o' heaven to share 
 Than sic a moment's pleasure. 
 
 And by thy een, sae bonie blue, 
 I swear I 'm thine for ever : 
 
 And on thy lips I seal my vow, 
 And break it shall I never. 
 

 HE business of Robert Burns was ROBERT 
 love-making. BURNS 
 
 All love is good, but some kinds of 
 love are better than others. Through 
 Burns' penchant for falling in love we 
 have his songs. A Burns bibliography 
 is simply a record of his love affairs, 
 and the spasms of repentance that 
 followed his lapses are made mani- 
 fest in religious verse. 
 Poetry is the very earliest form of 
 literature, and is the natural expres- 
 sion of a person in love ; and I sup- 
 pose we might as well admit the fact 
 at once, that without love there 
 would be no poetry. 
 Poetry is the bill and coo of sex. All 
 poets are lovers, and all lovers, either 
 actual or potential, are poets. Potential 
 poets are the people who read poetry ; 
 and so without lovers the poet would 
 never have a market for his wares. 
 If you have ceased to be moved by 
 religious emotion ; if your spirit is no 
 longer surged by music ; and you do 
 not linger over certain lines of poetry, 
 it is because the love instinct in your 
 heart has withered to ashes of roses. 
 It is idle to imagine Bobby Burns as 
 
 73 
 
ROBERT a staid member of the Kirk; had he a' been, there 
 BURNS would now be no Bobby Burns. 
 
 The literary ebullition of Robert Burns, he himself has 
 told us, began shortly after he had reached the age of 
 indiscretion ; and the occasion was his being paired in 
 the hay-field, according to the Scottish custom, with a 
 bonnie lassie. This custom of pairing still endures, and 
 is what the students of sociology call an expeditious 
 move. The Scotch are great economists — the greatest 
 in the world. Adam Smith, the father of the science of 
 economics, was a Scotchman ; and Draper, author of 
 " A History of Civilization," flatly declares that Adam 
 Smith's " Wealth of Nations " has influenced the peo- 
 ple of Earth for good more than any book ever written 
 — save none. 
 
 The Scotch are great conservators of energy. 
 The practice of pairing men and women in the hay- 
 field gets the work done. One man and woman going 
 down the grass-grown path afield might linger and 
 dally by the way. They would never make hay, but a 
 company of a dozen or more men and women would 
 not only reach the field, but do a lot of work. In Scot- 
 land the hay-harvest is short — when the grass is in 
 bloom, just right to make the best hay, it must be cut. 
 And so the men and women, the girls and boys, sally 
 forth. It is a jolly picnic time, looked forward to with 
 fond anticipation, and gazed back upon with sweet, sad 
 memories, or otherwise, as the case may be. 
 But they all make hay while the sun shines, and count 
 
 74 
 
it joy. Liberties are allowed during haying-time that ROBERT 
 otherwise would be declared scandalous ; during hay- BURNS 
 ing-time the Kirk waives her censor's right, and priest 
 and people mingle joyously. Wives are not jealous 
 during hay-harvest, and husbands never fault-finding, 
 because they each get even by allowing a mutual li- 
 cense. In Scotland during haying-time every married 
 man works alongside of some other man's wife. To the 
 psychologist it is somewhat curious how the desire for 
 propriety is overridden by a stronger desire — the desire 
 for the shilling. The Scotch farmer says, " anything to 
 get the hay in " — and by loosening a bit the strict 
 bands of social custom the hay is harvested. 
 In the hay-harvest the law of natural selection holds ; 
 partners are often arranged for weeks in advance ; and 
 trysts continue year after year. Old lovers meet, touch 
 hands in friendly scuffle for a fork, drink from the same 
 jug, recline at noon and eat lunch in the shade of a 
 friendly stack, & talk to heart's content as they Maud 
 Muller on a summer's day. 
 
 Of course this joyousness of the haying-time is not 
 wholly monopolized by the Scotch. Have n't you seen 
 the jolly haying parties in Southern Germany, France, 
 Switzerland and the Tyrol ? How the bright costumes 
 of the men and the jaunty attire of the women gleam 
 in the glad sunshine ! 
 
 But the practice of pairing is carried to a degree of per- 
 fection in Scotland that I have not noticed elsewhere. 
 Surely it is a great economic scheme ! It is like that in- 
 
 75 
 
ROBERT vention of a Connecticut man, which utilizes the ebb 
 
 BURNS and flow of the ocean tides to turn a grist-mill. And it 
 
 seems queer that no one has ever attempted to utilize 
 
 the waste of dynamic force involved in the maintain- 
 
 ance of the Company Sofa. 
 
 In Ayrshire, I have started out with a haying party of 
 twenty — ten men and ten women — at six o'clock in the 
 morning and ^vorked until six at night. I never worked 
 so hard, nor did so much. All day long there was a fire 
 of jokes and jolly jibes, interspersed with song, while 
 beneath all ran a gentle hum of confidential inter- 
 change of thought. The man who owned the field was 
 there to direct our efforts, and urge us on in well doing 
 by merry raillery, threat, and joyous rivalry. 
 The point I make is this — we did the work. Take heed, 
 ye Captains of Industry & note this truth, that where 
 men and women work together, under right influences, 
 much good is accomplished, & the work is pleasurable. 
 i^ Of course there are vinegar-faced philosophers who 
 say that the Scotch custom of pairing young men and 
 maidens in the hay-field is not without its effect on 
 esoterics, also on vital statistics ; & I 'm willing 
 to admit there may be danger in the 
 scheme, but life is a dangerous 
 business anyway — few 
 indeed get out of 
 it alive. 
 
 76 
 
URNS succeeded in his love- 
 making & succeeded in poetry, 
 but at everything else he was 
 a failure. He failed as a farmer, 
 a father, a friend, in society, as 
 a husband, and in business. 
 From his twenty-third year his 
 days were passed in sinning 
 and repenting. 
 
 Poetry and love-making should 
 be carried on with caution : they form a terrific tax on 
 life's forces. Most poets die young, not because the 
 gods especially love them, but because life is a bank 
 account, and to wipe out your balance is to have your 
 checks protested. The excesses of youth are drafts 
 payable at maturity. Chatterton dead at eighteen, Keats 
 at twenty-six, Shelley at thirty-three, Byron at thirty- 
 six, Poe at forty, and Burns at thirty-seven are the 
 rule. When drafts made by the men mentioned became 
 due, there was no balance to their credit and Charon 
 beckoned ^^^ 
 
 Most life insurance companies now ask the applicant 
 this question, "Do you write poetry to excess?" 
 Shakespeare, to be sure, clung to life until he was fifty- 
 three, but this seems the limit. Dickens and Thackeray, 
 senile and tottering, died at the same age Shakespeare 
 died. Of course I know that Browning, Tennyson, 
 Morris and Bryant lived to a fair old age, but this was 
 on borrowed time, for in the early life of each there 
 
 77 
 
 ROBERT 
 BURNS 
 
ROBERT was a hiatus of from ten to eighteen years, when the 
 BURNS men never wrote a line, nor touched a drop of any- 
 thing, bravely eschewing all honey from Hymettus. 
 Then the four men last named were all happily mar- 
 ried, and married life is favorable to longevity, but not 
 to poetry. As a rule only single men, or those unhap- 
 pily mated, make love and write poetry. Men hap- 
 pily married make money, cultivate content, 
 and evolve an aldermanic front, but love 
 and poetry are symptoms of unrest. 
 Thus is Emerson's proposition 
 partially proved, that in life all 
 things are bought & must 
 be paid for with a price 
 — even success & 
 happiness. 
 
 78 
 
JURNS once explained to Thomas ROBERT 
 Moore that the first fine, care- BURNS 
 less rapture of his song was 
 awakened into being when he 
 was sixteen years old, by *' a 
 bonie sweet sonsie lass " whom 
 we now know as •* Handsome 
 Nell." Her other name to us is 
 vapor, and history is silent as to 
 her life-pilgrimage. Whether 
 she lived to realize that she had first given voico 
 to one of the great singers of earth — of this we are 
 also ignorant. She was one year younger than Burns, 
 and little more than a child when she and Bobby lag- 
 ged behind the troop of tired hay-makers, and walked 
 home, hand in hand, in the gloaming i^ Here is one of 
 the stanzas addressed to *' Handsome Nell: " 
 
 She dresses all so clean and neat, 
 Both decent and genteel, 
 And then there 's something in her gait 
 Makes any dress look weel. 
 
 And how could Nell then ever guess why her cheeks 
 burned scarlet, and why she was so sorry when haying- 
 time was over ? She was sweet, innocent, artless and 
 their love was very natural, tender, innocent. It's a pity 
 that all loves cannot remain in just that idyllic milk- 
 maid stage, where the girls and boys awaken in the 
 early morning with the birds, and hasten forth bare- 
 foot across the dewy fields to find the cows. But love 
 
 79 
 
ROBERT never tarries. Love is progressive ; it cannot stand still. 
 BURNS I have heard of the •* passiveness " of woman's love, 
 but the passive woman is only one who does not love 
 — she merely consents to have affection lavished upon 
 her. When I hear of a passive woman, I always think 
 of the befuddled sailor who once saw one of those 
 dummy dress frames, all duly clothed in a flaming 
 bombazine (I think it was bombazine) in front of a 
 clothing establishment. The sailor, mistaking the dum- 
 my for a near and dear lady friend, embraced the wire 
 apparatus and imprinted a resounding smack on the 
 chaste plaster-Paris cheek. Meeting the sure-enough 
 lady shortly after he upbraided her for her cold pas- 
 sivity on the occasion named. 
 
 A passive woman — one who consents to be loved — 
 should seek occupation among those worthy firms who 
 warrant a fit in ready made gowns, or money refunded. 
 1^ Love is progressive — it hastens onward like the 
 brook hurrying to the sea. They say that love is blind : 
 love may be short-sighted, or inclined to strabismus, or 
 see things all out of their true proportion, magnifying 
 pleasant little ways into seraphic virtues, but love is 
 not really blind — the bandage is never so tight but that 
 it can peep. The only kind of love that is really blind 
 and deaf is Platonic love. Platonic love has n't the 
 slightest idea where it is going, and so there are sur- 
 prises and shocks in store for it. The other kind, with 
 eyes wide open, is better. I know a man who has tried 
 both il|b Love is progressive. All things that live should 
 80 
 
progress. To stand still is to retreat, and to retreat is ROBERT 
 death i^ Love dies, of course. All things die, or be- BURNS 
 come something else. And often they become something 
 else by dying. Behold the eternal Paradox ! The love 
 that evolves into a higher form is the better kind. Na- 
 ture is intent on evolution, yet of the myriad of spores 
 that cover earth, most of them are doomed to death ; 
 and of the countless rays sent out by the sun, the 
 number that fall athwart this planet are infinitesimal. 
 Edward Carpenter calls attention to the fact that dis- 
 appointed love, that is, love that is •• lost," often affects 
 the individual for the highest good. Love in its essence 
 is a spiritual emotion, and its office seems to be an in- 
 terchange of thought and feeling ; but often thwarted 
 in its object it becomes general, transforms itself into 
 sympathy, and embracing a v/orld, goes out to and 
 blesses all mankind. 
 
 Very, very rare is the couple that have the sense and 
 poise to allow passion just enough mulberry leaves, so 
 it will spin a beautiful silken thread, out of which a 
 Jacob's ladder can be constructed, reaching to the In- 
 finite. Most lovers in the end wear love to a fringe, 
 and there remains no ladder with angels ascending and 
 descending — not even a dream of a ladder. Instead of 
 the silken ladder on which one can mount to Heaven, 
 there is usually a dark, dank road to nowhere over 
 which is thrown a package of letters & trinkets, all fas- 
 tened 'round with a white ribbon, tied in a lover's knot. 
 The many loves of Robert Burns all ended in a black 
 
 8x 
 
ROBERT jumping-ofF-place, and before he had reached high 
 BURNS noon, he tossed over the last bundle of white-ribboned 
 missives and tumbled in after them. The life of 
 Burns is a tragedy, through which are inter- 
 spersed sparkling scenes of gayety, as if to 
 retrieve the depth of bitterness that 
 would otherwise be unbearable. 
 Go ask Mary Morison, High- 
 land Mary, Agnes McLe- 
 hosc, Betty Alison, or 
 Jean Armour ! 
 
 8a 
 
[HE poems of Robert Burns fall 
 easily into four divisions. 
 First, those that were written 
 while he was warmly wooing 
 the object of his affection. 
 Second, those written after he 
 had won her. 
 
 Third, those written when he 
 failed to win her. 
 Fourth, those written when he 
 felt it his duty to write, and really had nothing to say. 
 i^ The first named were written because he could not 
 help it, and are, for the most part, rarely excellent. 
 They are joyous, rapturous, sprightly, dancing, and 
 filled with references to sky, clouds, trees, fruit, grain, 
 birds and flowers. Birds and flowers, by the way, are 
 peculiarly lovers' properties. The song and the plumage 
 of birds, and the color and perfume of flowers are all 
 distinctly sex manifestations. Robert Burns sang his 
 songs just as the bird wings and sings, and for the same 
 reason. Sex holds flrst place in the thought of Nature ; 
 and sex in the minds of men and women holds a much 
 larger place than most of us are willing to admit. All 
 religious emotion and all art are born of the sex instinct. 
 il|li The second variety of Burns' poems, written after 
 he had won her, are touched with religious emotion, 
 or filled with vain regret and deep remorse, as the case 
 may be, all owing to the quality and kind of success 
 achieved, and the influence of the Dog Star. 
 
 83 
 
 ROBERT 
 BURNS 
 
ROBERT Burns wrote several deeply religious poems. Now, 
 BURNS men are very seldom really religious and contrite, ex- 
 cepting after an excess. Following a debauch a man 
 signs the pledge, vows chastity, writes fervently of as- 
 ceticism and the need of living in the spirit and not in 
 the senses. Good pictures show best on a dark back- 
 ground ^yf>^ 
 
 "The Cotter's Saturday Night," perhaps the most 
 quoted of any of Burns* poems, is plainly the result of 
 a terrible tip to t'other side. The author had gone so 
 far in the direction of Venusburg that he resolved on 
 getting back, and living thereafter a staid & proper life. 
 l9> In order to reform you must have an ideal, & the ideal 
 of Burns, on the occasion of having exhausted all ca- 
 pacity for sin, is embodied in the •• Saturday Night." 
 It is a beautiful dream. The real Scottish cotter is quite 
 another kind of a person. The religion of the live cot- 
 ter is well seasoned with fear, malevolence and absurd 
 dogmatism. The amount of love, patience, excellence 
 and priggishness shown in " The Cotter's Saturday 
 Night " never existed excepting in a poet's dream. 
 In stanza Number Ten of that particular poem is a 
 bit of unconscious autobiography that might as well 
 ha' been omitted, but in leaving it in, Burns was loyal 
 to the thought that surged through his brain. 
 People who are not scientific in their speech often 
 speak of the birds being happy. My opinion is that birds 
 are not any more happy than men — probably not as 
 much so. Many birds, like the English sparrow and 
 
 84 
 
blue jay, quarrel all day long. Come to think of it, I be- ROBERT 
 lieve that man is happier than the birds. He has a sense BURNS 
 of remorse, and this suggests a reformation, and from 
 the idea of reformation comes the picturing of an ideal. 
 This exercise of the imagination is pleasure, for in- 
 deed there is a certain satisfaction in every form of ex- 
 ercise of the faculties. There is a certain pleasure in 
 pain : for pain is never all pain. And sin sometimes is 
 not wholly bad, if through it we pass into a higher life, 
 the life of the spirit. 
 
 Anything is better than the Dead Sea of neutral noth- 
 ingness, wherein a man merely avoids sin by doing 
 nothing and being nothing. The stirring of the imagi- 
 nation by sorrow for sin, sometimes causes the soul to 
 wing a far-reaching upward flight. 
 Asceticism is often only a form of sensuality : the man 
 finds satisfaction in overcoming the flesh. And wher- 
 ever you find asceticism you find potential passion — a 
 smouldering volcano held in check by a devotion to 
 duty ; and a gratification is oft found in fidelity. 
 The moral and religious poems of Burns were written 
 in a desire to work off a fit of depression, and make 
 amends for folly. They are sincere and often very ex- 
 cellent. Great preachers have often been great sinners, 
 and the sermons that have moved men most are often 
 a direct recoil from sin on part of the preacher. Re- 
 morse finds play in preaching repentance. When a man 
 talks much about a virtue, be sure that he is clutching 
 for it. Temperance fanatics are men with a taste for 
 
 85 
 
ROBERT strong drink, trying hard to keep sober i^ The moral & 
 BURNS religious poems of Robert Burns are not equal to his 
 love songs. The love songs are free, natural, untram- 
 meled & unrestrained ; while his religious poems have a 
 vein of rotten warp running through them in the way 
 of affectation and pretence. From this I infer that sin is 
 natural, and remorse partially so. In Burns' moral 
 poems the author tries to win back the favor of re- 
 spectable people, which he had forfeited. In them there 
 is a violence of direction ; and all violence of direction 
 — all endeavors to please and placate certain people are 
 fatal to an artist. You must work to please only your- 
 self r€^» 
 
 Work to please yourself and you develop and strength- 
 en the artistic conscience. Cling to that and it shall be 
 your mentor in times of doubt : you need no other. 
 There are writers who would scorn to write a muddy 
 line, and would hate themselves for a year and a day 
 should they dilute their thought with the platitude of 
 the fear-ridden peoples. Be yourself and speak your 
 mind to-day, though it contradict all you have said be- 
 fore. And above all, in art, work to please yourself — 
 that Other Self that stands over and behind you look- 
 ing over your shoulder, watching your every act, word 
 and deed — knowing your every thought. Michael An- 
 gelo would not paint a picture on order. " I have a crit- 
 ic who is more exacting than you," said Meissonier — 
 " it is my Other Self." 
 
 Rosa Bonheur painted pictures just to please her Other 
 86 
 
Self, and never gave a thought of anyone else, nor ROBERT 
 wanted to think of anyone else, and having painted to BURNS 
 please herself, she made her appeal to the great Com- 
 mon Heart of humanity — the tender, the noble, the re- 
 ceptive, the earnest.the sympathetic, the loveable.That 
 is why Rosa Bonheur stands first among women art- 
 ists of all time : she worked to please her Other Self. 
 1^ That is the reason Rembrandt, who lived at the 
 same time Shakespeare lived, is to-day without a rival 
 in portraiture. Ke had the courage to make an enemy. 
 When at work he never thought of anyone but his 
 Other Self, and so he infused soul into every canvas. 
 The limpid eyes look down into yours from the walls & 
 tell of love, pity, earnestness and deep sincerity. Man, 
 like Deity, creates in his own image, and when he por- 
 trays someone else, he pictures himself, too — this pro- 
 vided his work is Art. If it is but an imitation of some- 
 thing seen somewhere, or done by someone else, or 
 done to please a patron with money, no breath of life 
 has been breathed into its nostrils and it is nothing, 
 save possibly dead perfection — no more. 
 Is it easy to please your Other Self? Try it for a day. 
 Begin to-morrow morning and say, ♦* This day I will 
 live as becomes a man. I will be filled with good cheer 
 and courage. I will do what is right ; I will work for 
 the highest ; I will put soul into every hand-grasp, 
 every smile, every expression — into all my work. I will 
 live to satisfy my Other Self." 
 Do you think it is easy ? Try it for a day. 
 
 87 
 
ROBERT Robert Burns wrote some deathless lines — lines writ- 
 BURNS ten out of the freshness of his heart, simply to please 
 himself, with no furtive eye on Dumfries, Edinburgh, 
 the Kirk, or the Unco Gudes of Ayrshire ; & these are 
 the lines that have given him his place in the world of 
 letters ^€€^ 
 
 The other day I was made glad by finding that John 
 Burroughs, Poet & Prophet, says that the male thrush 
 sings to please himself, out of pure delight, and pleas- 
 ing himself, he pleases his mate. " The female," says 
 Burroughs, " is always pleased with a male that is 
 pleased with himself." 
 
 The various controversial poems (granting for argu- 
 ment's sake that controversy is poetic) were written 
 when Burns was smarting under the sense of defeat. 
 These show a sharp insight into the heart of things, 
 and a lively wit, but are not sufficient foundation on 
 which to build a reputation. Ali Baba can do as well. 
 Considering the fact that twice as many people make 
 pilgrimages to the grave of Burns as visit the grave of 
 Shakespeare, & that his poems are on the shelves 
 of every library, his name now needs no defense. 
 The ores are very seldom found pure, and 
 if even the work of Deity is composite, 
 why should we be surprised that 
 man. His creature, should ex- 
 press himself in a varying 
 scale of excellence ! 
 
 88 
 
[HERE was certainly no Jack 
 FalstafF about Francis Schlat- 
 ter, whose whitened bones 
 were found amid the alkali dust 
 of the desert, a few months ago 
 — dead in an endeavor to do 
 without meat and drink for 
 forty days. 
 
 Schlatter purported, and be- 
 lieved, that he was the re-incar- 
 nation of the Messiah. Letters were sent to him, ad- 
 dressed simply, " Jesus Christ, Denver, Colorado," and 
 he walked up to the General Delivery window & asked 
 for them with a confidence, we are told, that relieved 
 the postmaster of a grave responsibility. 
 Schlatter was no mere ordinary pretender, working on 
 the superstitions of shallow-pated people. He lived up 
 to his belief — took no money, avoided notoriety when 
 he could, and the proof of his sincerity lies in the fact 
 that he died a victim to it. 
 
 Herbert Spencer has said all about the Messianic In- 
 stinct that there is to say, save this — the Messianic 
 Instinct first had its germ in the heart. of a woman. 
 Every woman dreams of the coming of the Ideal Man 
 — the man who will give her protection, even to giving 
 up his life for her, and vouchsafe peace to her soul i^ 
 I am told by a noted Bishop of the Catholic Church 
 that most women who become nuns are prompted to 
 take their vows solely through the occasion of an un- 
 
 89 
 
 ROBERT 
 BURNS 
 
ROBERT requited love. They become the bride of the Church 
 BURNS and find their highest joy in following the will of Christ. 
 He is their only Lord and Master. 
 
 The terms of endearment one hears at prayer meetings, 
 •• Blessed Jesus," " Dear Jesus," •* Loving Jesus," 
 ♦' Elder Brother," '• Patient, gentle Jesus," etc., were 
 first used by women in an ecstacy of religious trans- 
 portation. And the thought of Jesus as a loving '* per- 
 sonal Savior," would die from the face of the earth did 
 not woman keep it alive. The religious nature and the 
 sex nature are closely akin ; no psychologist can tell 
 where one ends and the other begins. 
 There may be wooden women in the world, & of these 
 I will not speak, but every strong, pulsing, feeling, 
 thinking woman goes through life, seeking the Ideal 
 Man. Whether she is married or single, rich or poor, 
 old or young, every new man she meets is interesting 
 to her, because she feels in some mysterious way, that 
 possibly he is the One. 
 
 Of course, I know that every good man, too, seeks the 
 Ideal Woman — but that deserves another chapter. 
 The only woman in whose heart there is not the live, 
 warm, Messianic Instinct, is the wooden woman, 
 and the one who believes she has already found him. 
 But this latter is holding an illusion that soon vanishes 
 with possession. 
 
 That pale, low-voiced, gentle and insane man, Francis 
 Schlatter, was followed at times by troops of women. 
 These women believed in him and loved him — in dif- 
 90 
 
V 
 
 ferent ways, of course, and with passion, varying ac- ROBERT 
 cording to temperament and the domestic environment BURNS 
 already existing. To love deeply is a matter of propin- 
 quity and opportunity. 
 
 One woman, whom '• The Healer " had cured of a lin- 
 gering disease, loved this man with a wild, mad, ab- 
 sorbing passion. Chance gave her the opportunity. He 
 came to her house, cold, hungry, homeless, sick. She 
 fed him, warmed him, looked into his liquid eyes, sat 
 at his feet and listened to his voice — she loved him — 
 and partook of his every mental delusion. 
 This woman now waits and watches in her mountain 
 home for his return. She knows the coyotes and buz- 
 zards picked the scant flesh from his starved frame, but 
 she says, " He promised he would come back to me, 
 and he will. I am waiting for him here." 
 This woman writes me long letters from her solitude, 
 telling me of her hopes & plans. Just why all the cranks 
 in the United States should write me letters, I do not 
 know, but they do — perhaps there is a sort o' fellow 
 feeling. This woman may write letters to others, just 
 as she does to me. Of this I do not know, but surely I 
 would not thus make public the heart tragedy told me 
 in a private letter, were it not that the woman herself 
 has printed a pamphlet, setting forth her faith and veil- 
 ing only those things into which it is not our right to 
 pry >^^ 
 
 This Mary Magdalene believes her lover was the Chosen 
 Son of God, and that the Father will re-clothe the Son 
 
 91 
 
ROBERT in a new garment of flesh and send him back to his be- 
 BURNS loved. So she watches and waits, and dresses herself 
 to receive him, and at night places a lighted lantern in 
 the window to guide the way. 
 She watches and waits. 
 
 Other women wait for footsteps that will never come, 
 & listen for a voice that will never be heard. All 'round 
 the world there is a sisterhood of such. Some, being 
 wise, lose themselves in loving service to others — in 
 useful work. But this woman, cut in the wilds of New 
 Mexico, hugs her sorrow to her heart, and feeds her 
 passion by recounting it, and watches away the leaden 
 hours, crying aloud to all who will listen: " He is not 
 dead — he is not dead ! He will come back to me ! He 
 promised it — he will come back to me ! This long, 
 dreary waiting is only a test of my loyalty and love ! 
 I will be patient, for he will come back to me ! He will 
 come back to me." 
 
 This world would be a sorry place if most men con- 
 ducted their lives on the Robert Burns plan. Burns was 
 affectionate, tender, generous and kind ; but he was not 
 wise. He never saw the future, nor did he know that 
 life is a sequence, and if you do this, it is pretty sure 
 to lead to that. His loves were largely of the earth. 
 Excess was a part of his wayward, undisciplined na- 
 ture ; and that constant tendency to put an enemy in 
 his mouth to steal away his brains bound him at last, 
 hand and foot. His old age could never have been frosty, 
 but kindly— it would have been babbling, irritable, sen- 
 92 
 
ile, sickening. Death was kind and reaped him young. ROBERT 
 1^ Sex was the rock on which Robert Burns split. He BURNS 
 seemed to regard pleasure-seeking as the prime end of 
 life, and in this he was not so very far removed from 
 the prevalent "civilized" society notion of marriage. 
 But it is a fantasmal idea, and makes a mock of mar- 
 riage, serving the satirist his excuse. 
 To a great degree the race is yet barbaric and as a peo- 
 ple we fail utterly to touch the hem of the garment of 
 Divinity. We have been mired in the superstition that 
 sex is unclean, and therefore honesty and expression 
 in love matters have been tabooed. 
 But the day will yet dawn when we will see that it 
 takes two to generate thought ; that there is the male 
 man and the female man, and only where these two 
 walk together hand in hand is there a perfect sanity 
 and a perfect physical, moral and spiritual health. 
 We will yet realize that a sex relationship which does 
 not symbol a spiritual condition is sacrilege. 
 We reach infinity through the love of one, and loving 
 this one, we are in love with all. And this condition of 
 mutual sympathy, trust, reverence, forbearance and 
 gentleness that can exist between a man and woman 
 gives the only hint of Heaven that mortals ever know. 
 From the love of man for woman we guess the love of 
 God, just as the scientist from a single bone constructs 
 the skeleton — aye ! and then clothes it in a complete 
 garment. 
 In their love affairs women are seldom wise nor men 
 
 9^ 
 
ROBERT just. How should we expect them to be when but yes- 
 BURNS terday Woman was a chattel and man a slave-owner? 
 Woman won by diplomacy — that is to say by trick- 
 ery and untruth, and man had his way through force, 
 and neither is quite willing to disarm. An amalgamated 
 personality is the rare exception, because neither 
 church, state nor society yet fully recognizes the fact 
 that spiritual comradeship and the marriage of the 
 mind constitute the only Divine mating. Dr. Blalock 
 once said that Robert Burns had eyes like the Christ. 
 Women who looked into those wide-open, generous 
 orbs lost their hearts in the liquid depths. 
 In the natures of Robert Burns and Francis Schlatter 
 there was little in common ; but their experiences were 
 alike in this : they were beloved by women. Behind him 
 Burns left a train of weeping women — a trail of broken 
 hearts. And I can never think of him except as a mere 
 youth — "Bobby Burns" — one who never came into 
 man's estate. In all his love-making he seemed never 
 to really benefit any woman, nor did he avail himself 
 of the many mental and spiritual excellences of wom- 
 an's nature, absorbing them into his own. He only 
 played a devil's tattoo upon her emotions. 
 If Burns knew anything of the beauty and excellence 
 of a high and holy friendship between a thinking man 
 and a thinking woman, with mutual aims, ideals and 
 ambitions, he never disclosed it. The love of a man for 
 a maid, or a maid for a man, can never last, unless 
 these two mutually love a third something. Then, as 
 94 
 
they are travelling the same way, they may move for- ROBERT 
 ward hand in hand, mutually sustained. The marriage BURNS 
 of the mind is the only compact that endures. I 
 love you because you love the things that I love. 
 That man alone is great who utilizes the 
 blessings that God provides ; and of 
 these blessings no gift equals the 
 gentle, trusting companion- 
 ship of a good woman. 
 
ROBERT WS^fS^^HKM^^^^^ written thus far, I find 
 BURNS Kffl^^X!BSs^^%!!fl ^^^* already I have reached the 
 
 limit of my allotted space. 
 In closing, it may not be amiss 
 for me to state that Robert 
 Burns was an Irish poet whose 
 parents happened to be Scotch. 
 He was born in 1759. 
 He died in 1796, and is buried at 
 Dumfries. 
 His mother survived him thirty-eight years, passing 
 out in 1834. Burns left four sons, each of whom was 
 often pointed out as the son of his father — but none of 
 them was. 
 
 This is all I think of, at present, concerning Robert 
 Burns v^" 
 
 For further facts I must refer the Gentle Reader to the 
 Encyclopedia Brittanica, a compilation that I 
 cheerfully recommend, it having been vouched 
 for to me by a dear friend, a clergyman of 
 East Aurora, who, the past year, pe- 
 rused the entire work, from A to 
 Z, reading five hours a day, 
 & therefore is compe- 
 tent to speak. 
 
 96 
 
John Milton, 
 
JOHN MILTON 
 
Thus with the year 
 Seasons return ; but not to me returns 
 Day, or the sweet approach of even or mom, 
 Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose, 
 Or fiocks, or herds, or human face divine ; 
 But cloud instead, and ever-during dark 
 Surrounds me ; from the cheerful ways of men 
 Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair 
 Presented with a universal blank 
 Of Nature's works, to me expunged and rased. 
 And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out. 
 So much the rather thou. Celestial Light, 
 Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers 
 Irradiate ; there plant eyes, all mist from thence 
 Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell 
 Of things invisible to mortal sight. 
 
 — Paradise Lost : Book IIL 
 
HAKESPEARE and Milton lived at 
 the same time. John Milton was eight 
 years old when William Shakespeare 
 died. The Miltons lived in Bread 
 j Street, and out of the back garret 
 ^^ window of their house could catch 
 a glimpse of the Globe Theatre. 
 The father of John Milton might have 
 kno^vn Shakespeare — might have 
 dined with him at the ** Mermaid," 
 played skittles with him on Hamp- 
 stead Heath, fished v^ith him from the 
 same boat in the river at Richmond ; 
 and John Milton, the lawyer, might 
 have discreetly schemed for passes 
 to the "Globe" and gone with his 
 boy John, Junior, to see ♦* As You 
 Like It" played, with the Master 
 himself in the role of old Adam. 
 Bread Street was just off Cheapside, 
 where the Mermaid Tavern stood, 
 and where Beaumont, Fletcher, Ben 
 Jonson and other roysterers often 
 lingered and made the midnight echo 
 with their mirth. In all probability, 
 ohn Milton, Senior, father of John 
 Milton, Junior, knew Shakespeare 
 well. But the Miltons owned their 
 home, were rich, influential, emi- 
 
 JOHN 
 MILTON 
 
 97 
 
JOHN nently respectable, attended Saint Giles Church, and 
 MILTON really did n't care to cultivate the society of play- 
 actors who kept bad hours, slept in the theatre, and 
 had meal-tickets at half a dozen taverns. 
 There were six children born into the Milton family, 
 three of whom died in infancy. Of the survivors, the 
 eldest was Anne, the second John, the third Chris- 
 topher. 
 
 Anne was strong, robust & hearty ; John was slender, 
 pale, with dreamy dark gray eyes and a head too big 
 for his body ; Christopher was so-so. And, in pass- 
 ing, it is well to explain, once for all, that Christopher 
 made his way straight to the front in life, taking up his 
 father's business, being appointed a Court Officer, then 
 promoted to the Woolsack, became rich, cultivated a 
 double chin, was knighted & passed out full of honors. 
 The chief worriment and cause of shame in the life of 
 Sir Christopher Milton came from the unseemly con- 
 1 duct of his brother John, who was much given to pro- 
 ducing political and theological pamphlets. And once 
 in desperation Sir Christopher Milton requested John 
 Milton to change his family name, that the tribe of 
 Milton might be saved the disgrace of having in it ** a 
 traducer of the State, an enemy of the King, and a 
 falsifier of Truth." 
 
 Sir Christopher Milton was an excellent and ^vorthy 
 man, and I must apologize for not giving him more at- 
 tention at this time, but lack of space forbids. 
 Sickly boys who are wise beyond their years are ever 
 98 
 
the pets of big sisters, and the object of loving, jealous, JOHN 
 zealous care on the part of their mothers. John Milton MILTON 
 talked like an oracle while yet a child, and one biogra- 
 pher records that even as a babe he sometimes mildly 
 reproved his parents for levity. 
 
 He was a precocious child, and have we not been told 
 that precocity does not train on ? But this boy was an 
 exception. He was incarnated into a family that prized 
 music, poetry, philosophy, and yet held fast to the 
 Christian faith. His father set psalms to music, his 
 sister wrote madrigals, and his mother played sweet 
 strains on a harp to waken him at morningtide. The 
 entire household united in a devotion to poetry and art. 
 Possibly this atmosphere of high thinking was too 
 rarified for real comfort — the gravity of the situation 
 being sustained only by a stern effort. 
 But no matter — father, mother and sister joined hands 
 to make the pale, handsome boy a prodigy of learning 
 — one that would surprise the world and leave his im- 
 press on the time. 
 And they succeeded. 
 
 Of the three Milton children that passed away in 
 childhood, I cannot but think that they succumbed to 
 overtraining, being crammed quite after the German 
 custom of stuffing geese so as to produce that delicious 
 diseased tidbit known to gourmets as pate de foie gras. 
 John Milton stood the cramming process like a true 
 hero. His parents set him apart for the Church — there- 
 fore he must be learned in books, familiar with lan- 
 
 99 
 
JOHN guages, versed in theories. They desired he should 
 MILTON have knowledge, v^rhich they did not know was quite a 
 different thing from wisdom. 
 
 So the boy had a private tutor in Greek and Latin at 
 nine years of age, and even then began to write verse. 
 At ten years of age his father had the lad's portrait 
 painted by that rare and thrifty Dutchman, Cornelius 
 Jansen. We have this picture now and it reveals the 
 pale, grave, winsome face with the flowing curls that 
 we always recognize. 
 
 No expense or pains were spared in the boy's educa- 
 tion. The time w^as divided up for him as the hours are 
 for a soldier. One tutor after another took him in hand 
 during the day, but the change of study and a glad res- 
 pite of an hour in the morning and the same in the 
 afternoon, for music, bore him up. 
 He was the pride of his parents, the delight of his 
 tutors. 
 
 Three years were spent at St. Paul's School ; then he 
 was sent to Cambridge. From there he wrote to his 
 mother, •* I am penetrating into the inmost recesses 
 of the Muses ; climbing high Olympus, visiting the 
 green pastures of Parnassus and drinking deep from 
 Pierian Springs." 
 
 This is terrible language for a child of fourteen. A boy 
 v<rho would talk like that now would be a proper and 
 fit target for cabbages. And no fond parent must for a 
 moment imagine that by following the system laid out 
 for the education of John Milton, can a John Milton 
 
 100 
 
be produced. The Miltonian curriculum in use to-day JOHN 
 would be sufficient excuse for action on the part of the MILTON 
 Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. 
 But John Milton, the weak-eyed boy with the chronic 
 headache, had a deal of whip-cord fiber in his make- 
 up. He stood the test and grubbed at his books every 
 night until the clocks tolled twelve. He was born at a 
 peculiar time, being the child of the Reformation mar- 
 ried to the Renaissance. The toughness and grimness 
 of Calvin were united in him with the tenderness of 
 Erasmus. From out the Universal Energy, of which 
 v^e are particles, he had called into his being quali- 
 ties so diverse that they seem never to have been 
 before or since united in one person. 
 He remained at Cambridge seven years. The beauty of 
 his countenance had increased so that he was as one 
 set apart. His finely chiseled features, framed in their 
 flowing curls, held the attention of every person he 
 met. A writer of the time described him as ** a grave 
 and sober person, but one not wholly ignorant of his 
 own parts." 
 
 There is a sly touch in this sentence that sheds light 
 upon ♦* The Lady of Christ's." John Milton was a bit 
 of a poseur, as Schopenhauer declares all great men 
 are and ever have been. With the masterly mind goes 
 a touch of the fakir. Milton knew his power — he gloried 
 in this bright blade of the intellect. 
 He was handsome — and he knew it. 
 And yet we will not cavil at his velvet coats, or laces, 
 
 xox 
 
JOHN or the golden chain that adorned his slender, shapely 
 MILrTON person. These things were only the transient, spring- 
 time adornments that passion puts forth. 
 And yet I see that one writer mentions the chaste and 
 ascetic quality of Milton's early life as proof of a cold 
 and measured nature. Seemingly the writer does not 
 know that intense feeling often finds a gratification in 
 asceticism, and that vows of chastity are proof of pas- 
 sion. There are many ways of working off" one's sur- 
 plus energy — Milton was married to his work. He 
 traversed the vast fields of Classic Literature, read in 
 the original from Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, French, 
 Spanish, Latin and Italian. He delved in abstruse 
 mathematics, studied music as a science and labored 
 at theology. In fact, he came to know so much of all 
 religions that he had faith in none. He seemed to view 
 religion in the cold, calculating light of a syllogistic 
 problem — not as a warm, pulsing motive in life. His 
 real religion was music, a fact he once frankly 
 acknowledged. 
 
 On the pinions of music he was carried out and away 
 beyond the boundaries of time and space, and there 
 he found the rest for his soul, without which he would 
 have sunk to earth and been covered by the kindly, 
 drifting leaves of oblivion. 
 
 For some, the secrets of music, the wonder of love, 
 and the misty, undefined prayers of the soul constitute 
 true religion. When you place a creed in a crucible 
 and afterward study the particles on a slide encased 
 
 102 
 
in balsam, you are apt to get a residuum or something JOHN 
 — a something that does not satisfy the heart. MILTON 
 
 Milton got well acquainted with theology. It was in- 
 teresting, but not what he had supposed. He came to 
 regard the Church as a useful part of the Government 
 — divine, of course, as all good things are divine — but 
 to become a priest and play a part — he would not 
 do it. 
 
 He was honest — stubbornly honest. 
 Seven years he had been at Cambridge, and now that 
 he was just ready to step into a ** living," right in the 
 line of a promotion that his beauty and intellect nat- 
 urally suggested, he balked. 
 
 It was a great blow to his parents. His mother plead- 
 ed ; his father threatened : but they soon perceived that 
 this son they had brought forth had a will stronger 
 than theirs. Their fond dreams of his preferment — 
 the handsome face of their boy above an oaken pulpit, 
 with thousands feeding on his words, the public honors, 
 and all that — faded away into tears and misty nothing- 
 ness. But parenthood is doomed to disappointment — 
 it does not endure long enough to see the end. Youth 
 is so headstrong and willful : it will not learn from the 
 experience of others. 
 
 And all these years of preparation and expense 1 Bet- 
 ter he had died and been laid to rest with the three 
 now in the churchyard. 
 
 Before Milton had served his seven years apprentice- 
 ship at Cambridge, his parents had moved to the vil- 
 
 X03 
 
JOHN lage of Horton — twenty miles out of London, Wind- 
 MILTON sor-way. 
 
 The village of Horton has not changed much with the 
 years, and a tramp across the fields from Eton by way 
 of Burnham Beeches and Stoke Pogis, where Gray 
 wrote "The Elegy," is quite worth while. It is a land 
 of lazy woods, and winding streams and hedge-rows 
 melodious with birds. One treads on storied ground, 
 and if you wish you can recline beneath gnarled old 
 oaks where Milton mused and scribbled, and wrote the 
 first drafts of " L' Allegro" and ** II Penseroso." 
 Milton loitered here at Horton for six years, and in the 
 time produced just six poems. 
 
 He was thirty-two years of age, and had never earned 
 a sixpence. But what booted it ! His father's & mother's 
 home was his : they gladly supplied his every want ; 
 and his mother especially was ever his kindly critic 
 and most intimate friend. His days were spent in study, 
 dreams, lonely walks across green fields, and home- 
 comings where, with his mother's hand in his, he 
 would talk or recite to her in order to clarify the 
 thought that pressed upon him. Very calm, very peace- 
 ful and very beautiful were those days. " The pensive 
 attitude of mind brings the best result — not the active," 
 he used to say. It was then he wrote to his old friend, 
 Diodati, "You ask what I am about — what I am 
 thinking of? Why, with God's help, I am thinking of 
 immortality. Forgive the word, it is for your ear alone 
 — I am pluming my wings for flight." 
 X04 
 
The good mother had misty, prophetic visions of what JOHN 
 this flight might be, and had ceased to counsel her son MILTON 
 against the sin of idleness. But she did not live to see 
 her prophecies find form, for in this time of peace and 
 love, when the vibrant air was filled with hope, she 
 passed Beyond. 
 
 Long years after, John Milton exclaimed, " Oh ! Why 
 could she not have lived to know ! " And the poign- 
 ant grief of this son, then a man in years 
 (with thirtieth birthday well behind), 
 turned on the thought that he had dis- 
 appointed Her — the mother who 
 had loved him into being. 
 
 X05 
 
JOHN pfSHBJSRSJRI^^'^ON'S woes began with his 
 MILTON i^^<»7f^«ifllB^W marriage. In his " Defensio 
 
 Secunda," he tells, with a touch 
 of pride, of the absolute inno- 
 cency that continued until his 
 thirty-fifth year. When w^e con- 
 sider how his combined inno- 
 cence and ignorance plunged 
 him into a sudden marriage 
 with a bit of pink and white protoplasm, aged sev- 
 enteen, we cannot but regret that he had not devoted 
 a little of his valuable time to a study of feminin- 
 ity. And in some ■way vre think of Thackeray, when 
 he was being shown the marvelous works of a cer- 
 tain amateur artist. •' Look at that ! look at that ! " 
 cried the zealous guide, *' and he never had a lesson 
 in art in his life ! " Thackeray adjusted his glasses, 
 looked at the picture carefully, sighed and said, 
 ** "What a pity he did n't have just a little good in- 
 struction ! " 
 
 Milton the student, versed in abstraction and full of 
 learned lore, "went up the Thames seeking a little 
 needed rest. Five miles from Oxford lived an ebb-tide 
 aristocratic family by the name of Powell. Milton had 
 long known this family, and it seems decided to tarry 
 with them a day or so. Just "why he sought their com- 
 pany no one ever knew, and Milton was too proud to 
 tell. The brown thrush, rival of the lark and mocking- 
 bird, seldom seeks the society of the blue-jay. But it 
 zo6 
 
J^'jl'^j'^-' 
 
 '^ 'i^'tiasi ■ €i 
 
 'f 
 
 
 ^iRfe 
 
 mmM 
 
 y 
 
 
 %-iSi:b 
 
 
 
 
did this time. The Powells were roaring, riotous, roys- JOHN 
 tering, fox-hunting Wadsworthi, on the eve of bank- MILTON 
 ruptcy, with marriageable daughters. 
 The executive functions of love-making are best carried 
 on byshallo^v people, so mediocre women often show 
 rare skill in courtship and sometimes succeed in bag- 
 ging big game. But surely Mary Powell had no con- 
 ception of the greatness of Milton's intellect — she only 
 knew that he was handsome, and her parents said he 
 ^vas rich. 
 
 There ^vere feasting and mirth Tvhen Milton arrived 
 back in town accompanied by his bride & various of her 
 kinsmen. In all marriage festivals there is something 
 pathetically absurd, and I never see a sidewalk 
 awning spread without thinking of the one erected 
 for John Milton and Mary Powell, who were led 
 through it by an Erebus that was not only blind, but 
 stone deaf. 
 
 John Milton was an ascetic, and lived in a realm of 
 reverie and dreams ; his wife had a strong bias toward 
 the voluptuous, reveling in a world of sense, and de- 
 manding attention as her right. Milton began diving 
 into his theories and books, and forgot the poor child 
 ^vho had no abstract world into which to withdraw. 
 Suddenly deprived of the gay companionship that her 
 father's house supplied, she felt herself aggrieved, 
 alone ; & tears of homesickness began to stream down 
 her pretty cheeks. 
 
 When summoned into her husband's presence she had 
 
 X07 
 
JOHN nothing to say, and Milton, the theorist, discovered 
 MILTON that what he had mistaken for the natural reticence 
 and bashfulness of maidenhood was only density and 
 lack of ideas. But the loneliness of the poor country 
 girl, shut up in a student's den, is a deal more touch- 
 ing than the scholar's wail about *' the silent and in- 
 sensate " wife. The girl was being deprived of the rol- 
 licking freedom to which she had been used, but the 
 great man was w^aking the echoes with his wail for a 
 companionship he had never known. 
 Yet the girl was shrewd. All women are shrewd, I am 
 told, and some are v/ise and some are not ; and many 
 women there be who consider finesse an improvement 
 on frankness. At the end of a month, Milton's wife 
 contrived to have her parents send for her to return 
 home on a visit that was to last only until come 
 Michaelmas. But Michaelmas arrived and the young 
 bride refused to return, sending back saucy answers to 
 the great author of ** II Penseroso." 
 In the meantime Milton wrote pamphlets urging that 
 divorce should be granted on the grounds of incompati- 
 bility ; and pronouncing as inhuman the laws that gave 
 freedom from marital woes on no less ignoble grounds 
 than that a man should violate his honor. 
 There is pretty good evidence that a part of Milton's 
 argument on the subject of divorce was written out 
 while his wife was under his roof. This reveals a little 
 lack of delicacy on part of the author ; but it must be 
 granted that Milton goes to the very bottom of the sub- 
 zo8 
 
jcct, even to stating the fact that those happily married JOHN 
 have neither pity nor patience with those mismated. MILTON 
 '* If you want sympathy," he says, "you must go to 
 those who are regarded as not respectable." Any man 
 who writes on philosophy can find his every cue in 
 Plato, and he who discusses divorce from a radical 
 standpoint can find himself anticipated by Milton in 
 the Seventeenth Century. Every view is taken, even 
 down to the suggestion of a probationary marriage, 
 which Milton thought might come about when civil- 
 ization had ceased to crawl and began to walk. 
 One looks in vain for a trace of the unhappy wife of 
 Milton ever having read her husband's tracts. It is 
 probable she never did and would not have compre- 
 hended their import if she had ; and it is very sure that 
 she never came to realize that she was wedded to the 
 greatest living man of the age. A truce was patched 
 up, on the bankruptcy of her father, and she came back 
 penitent, and was taken into favor. Not only did she 
 come back, but she brought her family ; and the raven- 
 ous Royalists consumed the substance of the spiritual 
 and ascetic Puritan. 
 
 Had Milton then died, it is probable that the gladsome 
 widow would have been consolable and married again 
 very shortly, just as did the widows of Van Dyck and 
 Rubens, not knowing that to have been the wife of a 
 king was honor enough for one woman. 
 But after fifteen years of domestic "neglect," during 
 which she doubtless benefited her husband by stirring 
 
 log 
 
JOHN in him a noble discontent, she passed from earth ; and 
 MILTON it was left for John Milton to repeat twice more his 
 marital venture with a similar result. And in this, 
 Fate sends back a fact that leers like Mephis- 
 topheles, in way of answer to Milton's 
 pamphlets on divorce : Why should the 
 state grant a divorce, when great 
 men refuse to learn by experi- 
 ence and, given the op- 
 portunity, only repeat 
 the blunders they 
 have already 
 made ? 
 
 »?9 
 
►D in His goodness has in cer- JOHN 
 tain instances sent great men MILTON 
 angels of light for assistants — 
 mates -who could comprehend 
 & sympathize with their ideals. 
 But it is expecting too much to 
 suppose that Nature can look 
 out for such a trifle as that the 
 right man should marry the right 
 woman. Nature possibly never considered a time 
 contract, and she is a careless jade, anyway. She 
 moves blindly along with never a thought for the 
 individual. 
 
 Audubon, the naturalist, records that one-third of all 
 birds hatched tumble out of the nest before they can 
 fly, and once on the ground the parent birds are un- 
 able either to warm, feed or protect them. 
 Read the lives of the Great Men who have lived dur- 
 ing the past three thousand years, and listen closely 
 and you will hear the wild wail of neglected p.nd un- 
 appreciated wives. A woman can forgive a beating, 
 but to be forgotten — never. She hates, by instinct, an 
 austere and self-contained character. Dignity & pride 
 repel her; preoccupation keeps her aloof; concentra- 
 tion on an idea is unforgivable. 
 
 The wife of Tolstoy asking to have her husband ad- 
 judged insane is not a rare instance in the lives of 
 thinkers. To think thoughts that are different from the 
 thoughts one's neighbors think is surely good reason 
 
 III 
 
JOHN why the man should be looked after. Recently we 
 MILTON have had evidence that the wife of Victor Hugo re- 
 garded the author of •• Les Miserables " with suspi- 
 cion, and at one time actually made preparations to let 
 him enjoy his exile alone — she would back to Paris 
 and enjoy life as every one should. At Guernsey there 
 was no society ! 
 
 When Isaac Newton called upon his lady-love and in 
 a fit of abstraction, looking about for a utensil to push 
 the tobacco down in his pipe, chanced upon the lady's 
 little finger, the law of gravitation stood no show and 
 Newton and his pipe were sent like nebulae, whirling 
 into space. 
 
 When the Great Inventor, absorbed in a problem as to 
 Electricity (that thing which to us is only a name and 
 of which we know nothing), forgets home, wife, child, 
 supper; and midnight finds him in his laboratory, 
 ■where he has been since sunrise — ^just imagine, if you 
 please, the shrill greeting that is in cold storage for 
 him when he stumbles home, haggard and worn, at 
 dawn. How can he explain why he did this thing and 
 answer the questions as to who was there, & ^vhat 
 good it all did anyway ! 
 
 Thought is a torture, and requires such a concentra- 
 tion of energy that there is nothing left for the soft 
 courtesies. The day is fleeting, and the night cometh 
 when no man can work. The hot impulse to grasp and 
 materialize the dream ere it fades is strong upon the 
 man. 
 
 112 
 
Of course he is selfish — he sacrifices everything, as JOHN 
 Palissy did when fuel was short and the clay just at MILTON 
 the turning point. Yes, the artist is selfish : he sacri- 
 fices his wife and society, and himself, too, to get the 
 work done. Four-o'clocks, mealtime, bedtime, and all 
 the household system as to pink teas, calls and eti- 
 quette, stand for naught. And down the corridors of 
 Time comes to us the shrill wail of neglected wives, 
 and the crash of broken hearts echoes like the sound 
 of a painter falling through a skylight. All this is the 
 price of achievement. 
 
 fAKING a little look backward 
 into Milton's life we find that 
 until his thirty-third year he had 
 not tasted of practical life at 
 all. About that time his father 
 in a sort of desperation packed 
 him off for the Continent, in 
 charge of a trusty attendant, 
 who acted in the dual capacity 
 of servant and friend. The letters he carried to in- 
 fluential men in Paris, Florence, Venice and Rome 
 secured him the Speaker's eye, and his beauty and 
 learning did the rest. His march was that of a con- 
 quering hero. In Paris he surprised the savants by 
 addressing them in their own tongue, and reciting 
 from their chief writers. This was repeated in Italy ; 
 and at Florence, as a sort of half-challenge for per- 
 mission to occupy the highest seats, he was invited 
 
 113 
 
JOHN to read from his own compositions, and this he did 
 MILTON with such grace and power that thereafter all doors 
 flew open at his touch. 
 
 Returning to England after an absence of fifteen 
 months, he found his father's household broken up, 
 and through bad investments the family fortune sadly 
 depleted. But travel added cubits to his stature : the 
 mixing with men had put him into possession of his 
 own, and he now felt well able to cope with the world. 
 He secured modest lodgings in St. Bride's Church- 
 yard, and set to work to make a living and a name by 
 authorship. His head teemed with themes for poems, 
 but cash advances were not forthcoming from pub- 
 lishers, and, to bridge over, he tried tutoring. 
 It was at this time that •• Paradise Lost " was con- 
 ceived, and rough jottings were made as to divisions 
 and heads, and a few stanzas were written of the im- 
 mortal poem that was not to be completed for a score 
 of years. 
 
 The first volume of Milton's poems was issued in 1645, 
 when he was thirty-seven years of age. But before 
 this there were pamphlets put forth that made polit- 
 ical London reel. The author was at once seen to be a 
 man of remarkable learning and marvelous intellect, 
 and the work secured Milton a few friends and divers 
 enemies. 
 
 From a man of leisure Milton had suddenly become a 
 worker, whose every daylight hour was crammed with 
 duties. His skill as a teacher brought him all the pu- 
 X14 
 
pils he cared for, and he moved into better quarters in JOHN 
 Aldersgate. He was immersed in his work, was making MILTON 
 valuable acquaintances among literary people, was re- 
 vered by his pupils, and the happiness was his of 
 knowing that he was influential and independent. 
 A fine intoxication comes to every brain-worker 
 when the world acknowledges with tangible remit- 
 tances that the product of his mind has a value on 
 the Rialto. Such was Milton's joy in 1643. 
 "The L'Allegro," " II Penseroso," "Comus" and 
 " Lycidas " had established his place as a poet ; & the 
 power of his pen had been proven in sundry religious 
 and political controversies. 
 
 In his household were two sons of his sister and 
 
 several other pupils who had sought his tutorship. 
 
 He was contented in his work, pleased and 
 
 happy with the young friends who sat at 
 
 his board, and in the hour or two 
 
 snatched each day from toil, 
 
 for music and reverie. 
 
 115 
 
JOHN |#gPggBMpjjjH| EIZE upon the moments as they 
 MILTON llfJ^P^«!^^2?SG fly, O John Milton, & hug them 
 
 to thy heart ! Those were days 
 
 of gold when your mother was 
 
 your patient listener and friend. 
 
 Her love enveloped you as an 
 
 aura, and her voice, soft and 
 
 low, upheld you when courage 
 
 faltered. But these, too, are 
 
 glorious days — days full of work and health, and 
 
 hope, and high endeavor. But these days of peace 
 
 and freedom are the last you shall ever know. Even 
 
 now they flee as a shadow and fade into mist ! Gross 
 
 stupidity, silent and insensate, sits waiting for you 
 
 at the door; calumny is near; taunting hate comes 
 
 riding fast 1 
 
 The sympathy for which you yearn shall be yours 
 only in dreams, and you shall be cheated of all the 
 tenderness for which your heart craves. The love and 
 gentleness ^vhich you associate with your mother, you 
 ascribe in innocence and ignorance to all women ; but 
 Fate shall undeceive you, O John Milton, and make 
 mock of all your high ideals. You dote on liberty, but 
 liberty is not for you. You shall see the funeral of the 
 Republic ; the defamation of your honor ; the proscrip- 
 tion of all the sacred things you prize. Your compan- 
 ions shall not be of your own choosing, but shall be 
 those who neither know nor value the sweet, subtle 
 mintage of the mind. Around you mad riot shall surge, 
 tl6 
 
a distaste for liberty shall prevail — an enthusiasm for JOHN 
 slavery. The glorious leaders of your Puritan faith MILTON 
 shall be condemned and executed, hanged, cut down 
 from the gallows alive, and quartered amid the hoarse 
 insults of the people they sought to serve ; and you, 
 yourself, shall be hunted like a wild beast. You shall 
 see the prisons filled to overflowing with men and 
 women whose only crime was a love of truth. And a 
 libertine shall sit on the throne of the England that 
 you love. These things you shall see with those mild, 
 dark eyes, and then night, eternal night, shall settle 
 down upon you, and for those idle orbs no day shall 
 dawn, nor starry night appear, nor face of man nor 
 child shall be reflected there. Your sightlessness shall 
 give those who owe you gratitude and love oppor- 
 tunity to filch your gold, and finally Are shall rob you 
 of your books, and well-nigh all your treasures. 
 Your daughters shall neither esteem nor respect you, 
 and the lines you dictate shall be to them but the idle 
 vaporings of a mind diseased. Your acute ears shall 
 hear these daughters express the wish that you were 
 dead ; and then in your blindness you will give your- 
 self into the keeping of a woman as dull, dense and 
 unfeeling as the foolish child you first chose as wife. 
 But with it all your obstinacy shall constitute your 
 power ; and that beauty which was yours in youth shall 
 be with you to the last. You shall feel all the torments 
 of the damned and become familiar with the scorch- 
 ing flames of hell, but as recompense the splendors 
 
 "7 
 
JOHN of the Celestial Kingdom shall open upon your inward 
 MILTON vision, and your soul shall behold that which the eyes 
 of earth have lost. Something great and proud 
 shall go out from your presence to all the dis- 
 cerning ones who shall approach you, 
 and your end shall be like the set- 
 ting of the sun, bright, calm, 
 poised and resplendent. 
 
 xx8 
 
Samuel Johnson. 
 
SAMUEL JOHNSON 
 
LETTER TO CHESTERFIELD. 
 
 • • • Seven years, my Lord, have now passed, since I waited in 
 your outward rooms and was repulsed from your door ; during which 
 time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties of which it 
 is useless to complain, & have brought it at last to the verge of pub- 
 lication without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, 
 or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never 
 had a patron before. 
 
 The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found 
 him a native of the rocks. 
 
 Is not a patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man 
 struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached the ground 
 encumbers him with help ? The notice which you have been pleased 
 to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind ; but it has 
 been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it ; till I am a sol- 
 itary, and cannot impart it ; till I am known, and do not want it. I hope 
 it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations where no 
 benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the public should 
 consider me as owing that to a patron which Providence has enabled 
 me to do for myself. 
 
 Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation to any 
 favourer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I should con- 
 clude it, should less be possible, with less ; for I have been long wak- 
 ened from that dream of hope in which I once boasted myself with so 
 much exultation, my Lord, 
 
 Your Lordship's most humble, most obedient servant, 
 
 Sam Johnson. 
 
HE critics, I believe, have made a SAMUEL 
 distinction between large men and JOHNSON 
 [great men. 
 
 Samuel Johnson >vas both. 
 He was massive in intellect, colossal 
 in memory, weighed nigh three hun- 
 dred pounds, and had prejudices to 
 match. He was possessed of a giant's 
 strength, and occasionally used it like 
 a giant — for instance, when he felled 
 an officious bookseller with a folio. 
 Johnson was most unfortunate in his 
 biographer. In picturing the great 
 writer, Boswell writes more enter- 
 tainingly than Johnson ever did, and 
 I thereby overtops his subject. And 
 when in reply to the intimation that 
 Boswell was going to write his life, 
 I Johnson answered, "If I really 
 thought he was, I would take his," 
 he spoke a jest in earnest. 
 Walking along Market Street in the 
 city of St. Louis, with a friend, not 
 long ago, my comrade suddenly 
 stopped and excitedly pointed out a 
 man across the way — «* Look quick — 
 [there he goes ! " exclaimed my friend, 
 that man with the derby and duster 
 -see ? That 's the husband of Mrs. 
 
 119 
 
SAMUEL Lease of Kansas ! " And all I could say was, " God 
 JOHNSON help him!" 
 
 Not but that Mrs. Lease is a most excellent and ami- 
 able lady, but the idea of a man, made in the image 
 of his Maker, being reduced to the social state of a 
 drone bee is most depressing. 
 
 Among that worthy class of people referred to some- 
 what ironically as "the reading public," Boswell is 
 read, but Johnson never. And so sternly true is the 
 fact, that many critics, set on a hair-trigger, aver that 
 were it not for Boswell no one would now know that 
 a writer by the name of Johnson ever lived. But the 
 fact is, Boswell ruined the literary reputation of John- 
 son, by intimating that Johnson wrote Johnsonese, but 
 that is a mistake. 
 
 Johnson never wrote Johnsonese. The piling up of 
 reasons, the cumulation of argument — setting off epi- 
 gram against epigram, that mark Johnson's literary 
 style are its distinguishing features. He is profound, 
 but always lucid. And lucidity is just what modern 
 Johnsonese lacks. The \s^ord was coined by a man who 
 had neither the patience to read Johnson nor the abil- 
 ity to comprehend him. Only sophomores, and private 
 secretaries who write the speeches for Congressmen, 
 write Johnsonese. 
 
 Quibblers possibly may arise and present Johnson's 
 definition of network — ** anything reticulated or de- 
 cussated at equal distances -with interstices between 
 the intersections," but with the quibbler we have no 
 
 X20 
 
time to dally. Some people insist on having their lit- SAMUEL 
 erature illustrated, just as others refuse to attend lee- JOHNSON 
 tures that are not reinforced by a stereopticon. 
 Johnson had a style that is stately, dignified, splendid. 
 It moves from point to point with absolute precision, 
 and in it there is seldom anything ambiguous, muddy, 
 misty or uncertain. Get down a volume of *• Lives of 
 the Poets," and prove my point for yourself, by open- 
 ing at any page. It was Boswell who set his own light, 
 chatty & amusing gossip over against the wise, stately 
 diction of Johnson, and allowed Goldsmith to say, 
 "Your little fishes talk like whales — " and the mud 
 ball has stuck. The average man is much more w^illing 
 to take the wily Boswell's word for it, than to read 
 Johnson for himself. 
 
 The precision of Johnson's English cannot fail to de- 
 light the student of letters who cares to interest him- 
 self in the subject of sentence-building. Johnson 
 handles a thought with such ease ! He makes you think 
 of the circus ** strong man" who tosses the cannon 
 balls, marked «* weight 250 lbs." What if the balls are 
 sometimes only wood painted black ! Have we not 
 been entertained ? Read this random paragraph: 
 " Criticism is a study by which men grow important 
 and formidable at very small expense. The power of 
 invention has been conferred by nature upon few, and 
 the labor of learning those sciences which may by con- 
 tinuous effort be obtained is too great to be willingly 
 endured ; but every man can exert such judgment as he 
 
 I2X 
 
SAMUEL has upon the works of others; and he whom nature 
 JOHNSON has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet 
 support his vanity by the name of * critic '." 
 But the greatest literary light of his day has been 
 thrown into the shadow by a man whom no one sus- 
 pected of being able to write entertainingly. In the 
 world of letters, the great Cham exists only as a lesser 
 luminary; just as the once noted novelist, George 
 Henry Lewes, is now known as the husband of George 
 Eliot. 
 
 And yet no one is so rash as to say that the name of 
 Boswell would now be known were it not for Johnson. 
 And conversely (or otherwise) if it were the proper 
 place, I would show that were it not for George Henry 
 Lewes we would never have had "Adam Bede," or 
 V The Mill on the Floss." . 
 
 Boswell wrote the best •• Life " ever written. Nothing 
 like it was ever written before ; nothing to equal it has 
 been written since. It has had hundreds of imitators, 
 but no competitors. Matthew Arnold said that no man 
 ever had so good a subject, but Arnold for the moment 
 seemed to forget that Hawkins, a professional literary 
 man, published his "Life of Johnson" long before 
 Bos well's was sent to the printer — and who reads 
 Hawkins ? 
 
 Surely Boswell had a great subject, and he rises to the 
 level of events and makes the most of it. At times I 
 have wondered if Boswell were not really a genius so 
 great and profound that he was willing to play the fool, 
 
 122 
 
as Edgar in " Lear" plays the maniac, and allow him- SAMUEL 
 self to be snubbed (in print) in order to make his tell- JOHNSON 
 ing point ! Millionaires can well afford to wear ragged 
 coats. Second rate man Boswell may have been, as he 
 himself so oft admits, yet as a biographer he stands 
 first in the front rank. But suppose his extreme ignor- 
 ance was only the domino disguising a cleverness so 
 subtle that it was not discovered until after his death I 
 And what if he smiles now, as from out of Elysium he 
 looks and beholds how, as a writer, he eclipsed old 
 Ursa Major, and thus clipped the claws that were ready 
 for any chance Scot that might pass that way ! 
 Mr. John Hay has suggested that possibly the insight, 
 piquancy and calm wisdom of Omar Khayyam are two- 
 thirds essence of FitzGerald. If so the joke is on Omar, 
 not FitzGerald. 
 
 A dozen of Johnson's contemporaries wrote about 
 him, and all make him out a profound scholar, a deep 
 philosopher, a facile writer. Boswell by his innocent 
 quoting and recounting makes his conversation outstrip 
 all of his other accomplishments. He reveals the man 
 by the most skillful indirection, and by leaving his 
 guard down, often allows the reader to score a point. 
 And of all devices of writing folk, none is finer than 
 to please the reader by allowing him to pat himself on 
 the back. 
 
 If a writer is too clever he repels. Shakespeare avoids 
 the difficulty, and proves himself the master by keep- 
 ing out of sight; Renan wins by a great show of 
 
 123 
 
SAMUEL modesty & deferential fairness ; Boswell assumes an 
 JOHNSON innocence and ignorance that were really not parts of 
 his nature. Every man who reads Boswell considers 
 himself the superior of Boswell, and therefore is per- 
 fectly at home. It is not pleasant to be in the society 
 of those who are much your superiors. Any man who 
 sits in the company of Samuel Pepys for a half hour 
 feels a sort of a half patronizing pity for him and 
 therefore is happy, for to patronize is bliss. 
 If Boswell has reinforced fact with fiction, and given 
 us art for truth, then his character of Samuel Johnson 
 is the most vividly conceived and deeply etched in all 
 the realm of books. But if he gives merely the simple 
 facts, then Boswell is no less a genius, for he has 
 omitted the irrelevant & inconsequential, and 
 by playing o£F the excellent against the ab- 
 surd, he has placed his subject among 
 the few great wits who have ever 
 lived — a man who ^vrote re- 
 markably well, but talked 
 infinitely better. 
 
 X24 
 
pNTAIGNE advises young men 
 that if they will fall in love, 
 why, to fall in love with women 
 older than themselves. His ar- 
 gument is that a young and 
 pretty woman makes such a 
 demand on a man's time and at- 
 tention that she is sure, event- 
 ually, to wear love to the warp. 
 So the wise old Frenchman suggests that it is the 
 part of wisdom to give your affection to one who 
 is both plain and elderly — one who is not suffering 
 from a surfeit of love, and one whose head has not 
 been turned by flattery. " Young women," says 
 the philosopher, ** demand attention as their right and 
 often flout the giver, whereas old women are very 
 grateful." 
 
 Whether Samuel Johnson, of Lichfield, ever read Mon- 
 taigne or not is a question, but this we know, that when 
 he was twenty-six he married the Widow Porter, aged 
 forty-nine. 
 
 Assuming that Johnson had read Montaigne and was 
 mindful of his advice, there ^vere other excellent rea- 
 sons why he did not link his fortunes with those of a 
 young and pretty woman. 
 
 Johnson in his youth, as well as throughout life, was 
 a Grind of the pure type. The Grind is a fixture, a few 
 being found at every University, even unto this day. 
 The present writer, once in a book of fiction, founded 
 
 125 
 
 SAMUEL 
 JOHNSON 
 
SAMUEL on fact, took occasion to refer to the genus Grind, with 
 JOHNSON Samuel Johnson in mind, as follows: He is poor in 
 purse, but great in frontal development. 
 He goes to school because he wishes to, (no one ever 
 *<sent" a Grind to college). He has a sallow skin, a 
 watery eye, a shambling gait, but he has the facts. 
 His clothes are outgrown, his coat shiny, his linen a 
 dull ecru, his hands clammy. He reads a book as he 
 walks, and when he bumps into you he always excul- 
 pates himself in Attic Greek. 
 
 This absent-mindedness and habit of reading on the 
 street, affords the Sport (another college type) 
 great opportunity for the playing of pranks. It is very 
 funny to walk along in front of a Grind who is reading 
 as he walks, and then suddenly stop and stoop, and 
 let the Grind fall over you ; for the innocent Grind, 
 thinking he has been in fault, is ever profuse in apol- 
 ogies. 
 
 Many years ago there was a Grind. A party of Sports 
 saw him approaching, deeply immersed in his book. 
 "Look you," quoth the chief of the Sports — "look 
 you and observe him fall over me." 
 And they looked. 
 Onward blindly trudged the Grind, reading as he came. 
 
 The Sport stepped ahead of him, stooped, and 
 
 one big foot of the Grind shot out and kicked him into 
 the gutter. Then the Grind continued his walk and his 
 reading without saying a word. 
 This incident is here recorded for the betterment of 
 
 X2€ 
 
the Young, to show them that things are not always SAMUEL 
 what they seem. JOHNSON 
 
 Samuel Johnson, I have said, was a Grind of the pure 
 type. He was so near-sighted that he fell over chairs 
 in drawing rooms, and so awkward that his long arms 
 occasionally brushed the bric-a-brac from mantels. No 
 lady's train was safe if he were in the room. At gath- 
 erings of young people if Johnson appeared, his pres- 
 ence was at once the signal for mirth, of which he was, 
 of course, the unconscious object. 
 Johnson's face was scarred by the King's Evil, that 
 even the touch of Queen Anne had failed to cure. While 
 a youth he talked aloud to himself, a privilege that 
 should be granted only to those advanced in years. He 
 would grunt out prayers and expletives at uncertain 
 times, keep up a clucking sound with his tongue, sway 
 his big body from side to side, and drum a tattoo upon 
 his knee. Now and again would come a suppressed 
 whistle, and then a low humming sound, backed up by 
 a vacant non compos mentis smile. 
 This most strange young man was a boarder in the 
 home of Mrs. Porter, when her husband was alive, 
 and the husband and boarder had been fast friends — 
 drawn together by a bookish bias. 
 Very naturally when the husband passed away, the 
 boarder sought to console the bereaved landlady, and 
 the result was as usual. And when, long years after, 
 Johnson would solemnly explain that it was a pure 
 love-match on both sides, the statement never failed to 
 
 Z27 
 
SAMUEL excite much needless and ill-suppressed merriment on 
 JOHNSON the part of the listeners. 
 
 Unlike most literary men Johnson was domestic, and 
 his marriage was one of the most happy events of his 
 career. But to show that the philosophy of Montaigne 
 is not infallible, and that all signs fail in dry weather, 
 it might be stated that the bride proved by her conduct 
 on her wedding day that she had some relish of the 
 saltness of time in her cosmos, despite her fifty sum- 
 mers and as many hard winters. 
 
 Said Johnson to Boswell, referring to the horseback 
 ride home after the wedding ceremony : " Sir, she had 
 read the old romances, and had got into her head the 
 fantastical notion that a woman of spirit should use 
 her lover like a dog. So, sir, at first she told me that I 
 rode too fast, and she could not keep up with me ; and 
 when I rode a little slower, she passed me, and com- 
 plained that I lagged behind. I was not to be made the 
 slave of caprice ; & I resolved to begin as I meant 
 to end. I therefore pushed on briskly, till I was 
 fairly out of sight. The road lay between 
 two hedges, so I was sure she could 
 not miss it ; & I contrived that she 
 should soon come up with me. 
 When she did I observed 
 her to be in tears." 
 
 X28 
 
SHORTLY after his marriage, 
 Johnson opened a private school 
 for boys. To operate a private 
 school successfully implies a 
 certain amount of skill in the 
 management of parents ; but 
 Johnson's uncouth manners and 
 needlessly blunt speech were ap- 
 palling to those who had chil- 
 dren who might possibly be given to imitation. 
 Only three pupils were secured, and but one of these 
 received any benefit from the tutor ; and this benefit 
 came, according to the scholar, from the master's sup- 
 plying an excellent object for ridicule. 
 This pupil's name was David Garrick. 
 The meeting with David Garrick was a pivotal point 
 in the life of Johnson. Johnson's mental and spiritual 
 existence flowed on, separate and apart, from that of 
 his wife. There was no meeting of the waters. His af- 
 fection for her was most tender and constant, but in 
 quality it seemed to differ but slightly from the senti- 
 ment he entertained toward " Hodge," his cat. 
 Hodge was fed on oysters that his owner could ill af- 
 ford ; and after Johnson had spent the little fortune 
 that belonged to his wife, the lady was regaled on the 
 best and choicest that his income, or credit, could 
 secure^ But if one of those lightning flashes of wit 
 ever escaped him in her direction we do not know it. 
 Garrick evidently was the first flint that tried his steel. 
 
 129 
 
 SAMUEL 
 JOHNSON 
 
SAMUEL The distinctions of teacher and scholar were soon lost 
 JOHNSON between these two, and the lessons took the turn of a 
 fusillade of wit. They made comments on the authors 
 they read, and comments on the people they met, and 
 criticised each other with cantharides remarks that 
 tested friendship to its extremest limit. And this con- 
 tinual skirmish that would have made sworn foes of 
 common men in a day revealed to each that the other 
 had the element of unexpectedness in his nature and 
 was worth loving. 
 
 Humor and melancholy go hand in hand ; both are born 
 of an extreme sensitiveness, and the man who smiles 
 at the trivial misfits of life realizes also that all men 
 who tread the earth are living under a sentence of 
 death, and that Fate has merely allowed them an in- 
 definite, but limited reprieve. 
 
 At the outset of Johnson's career, one cannot but see 
 that the companionship and nimble wit of Garrick 
 saved his ponderous and melancholy mind from going 
 into bankruptcy. 
 
 And now we find them, one twenty-eight, big, near- 
 sighted, theoretical, blundering ; and the other twenty- 
 one, slight, active, graceful, practical. They were alike 
 in this : they both loved books and were possessed of 
 the eager, earnest, receptive mind. To possess the 
 hospitable mind ! For what greater blessing can one 
 pray ! 
 
 And then they were alike in other respects — they were 
 desperately poor ; neither had an income ; neither had 
 Z30 
 
a profession; both were ambitious. Johnson had writ- 
 ten a tragedy — "Irene" — and he had read it to Gar- 
 rick several times, and Garrick said it was good and 
 should make a hit. But Garrick did n't know much 
 about tragedies — law was his bent — he had read law 
 for two years, off and on. They would go to London 
 and seize fortune by the scalp-lock. In London good 
 lawyers were needed, and London was the only place 
 for a playwright. 
 
 They scraped together their pennies, borrowed a few 
 more, got a single letter of introduction between them 
 to some person of unknown influence and started away, 
 with the lachrymose blessings of the elderly bride, and 
 Davy's mother. 
 
 They must have been a queer sight when the stage let 
 them down at the Strand — dusty, dirty, tired and 
 scared by the babel of sounds & sights I And no doubt 
 Johnson's enormous size saved them from sundry in- 
 sults and divers taunts that otherwise might have 
 come their way. 
 
 Those first few weeks in London were given to staring 
 into shop windows and wandering, open-mouthed, up 
 and down. No one wanted the tragedy — the managers 
 all sniffed at it. Little then did Davy dream, as they 
 made their way from the office of one theatre manager 
 to that of another, that he himself would some day 
 own a theatre and give the discarded play its first set- 
 ting. And little did he think that he would yet be the 
 foremost actor of his time, and his awkward mate the 
 
 131 
 
 SAMUEL 
 JOHNSON 
 
SAMUEL literary dictator of London. Oh ! this game of life is a 
 JOHNSON great play ! The blissful uncertainty of it all ! The am- 
 bitions, plans, strivings, heartaches, mad desires and 
 vain reachings out of empty arms ! The tears, the bit- 
 ter disappointments, the sleepless nights, the echoes 
 of prayers unheard, and the hollow hopelessness of 
 love turned to hate ! 
 
 And then mayhap we do as Emerson did, go out into 
 the woods, and all the trees say, '< Why so hot, my 
 little man." 
 
 Garrick, disappointed and undone at the thought of de- 
 feat in his chosen profession, turned to commercial 
 life, & then to the theatre. At his first stage appearance 
 he trembled with diffidence and all but fled in fright. 
 He persevered, for he could do nothing else. He arose 
 step by step, and honors, wealth and fame were his. 
 Love came to him, he wedded the woman of his choice ; 
 and after his death she survived for forty-three years. 
 She lived one hundred years, lacking two. Garrick was 
 born in 1716 ; his wife died in 1822, which seems to 
 bring the times of Johnson pretty close home to us. 
 Throughout her long life, she lived in the memory of 
 the love that had been hers, cherishing and protecting, 
 idolizing, as did Mary Shelley, the one name and that 
 alone. 
 
 Johnson and Garrick thoroughly respected and admired 
 each other, yet they often quarrelled — they quarrelled 
 to the last. But when Davy had lain him down in his 
 last sleep, aged sixty-three, it was Johnson, aged 
 . 132 
 
seventy, who wrote his epitaph, introducing into it the SAMUEL 
 deathless sentence • * ♦ «by that stroke of JOHNSON 
 
 death which has eclipsed the gaiety of 
 nations, and impoverished the 
 public stock of harm- 
 less pleasure." 
 
 X33 
 
SAMUEL 
 JOHNSON 
 
 HREE months in London and 
 Johnson succeeded in getting 
 work on the editorial staff of 
 "The Gentlemen's Magazine." 
 Prosperity smiled, not exactly a 
 broad grin, but the expression 
 was something better than a 
 stony, forbidding stare. 
 He made haste to go back to 
 Lichfield after his '• Letty," which name, by the way, 
 is an improvement on Betty, Betsy or Tetsy — being 
 baby-talk for Elizabeth. 
 
 They took modest lodgings in a third floor, back, off 
 Fleet Street, and Johnson began that life of struggle 
 against debt, ridicule and unkind condition that was to 
 continue for forty-seven years ; never out of debt, never 
 free from attacks of enemies ; a life of wordy warfare 
 and inky broadsides against cant, affectation and un- 
 truth — with the weapons of his dialectics always kept 
 well burnished by constant use ; hated & loved ; jeered 
 and praised ; feared and idolized. 
 
 Coming out of his burrow one dark night, he encoun- 
 tered an old beggar-woman who importuned him for 
 alms. He was brushing past her, when one of her ex- 
 clamations caught his ear. " Sir," said the woman, •♦ I 
 am an old strugglerl " 
 
 ** Madam," replied Johnson, " so am I ! " And he gave 
 her his last sixpence. 
 
 But life in London was cheap in those days — it is now 
 134 
 
if you know how to do it, or else have to. Johnson SAMUEL 
 used to maintain that for thirty pounds a year one could JOHNSON 
 live like a gentleman, and as proof would quote an im- 
 aginary acquaintance who argued that ten pounds a 
 year for clothes would keep a man in good appearance ; 
 a garret could be hired for eighteen pence a week, and 
 if anyone asked your address you could reply, •* I am 
 to be found in such a place." Three pence laid out at a 
 coffee-house would enable one to pass some hours a 
 day in good company ; dinner might be had for six- 
 pence and supper you could do without. On clean-shirt 
 day you could go abroad and call on your lady friends. 
 Among Johnson's first literary tasks in London was 
 the work of reporting the debates in Parliament. In 
 order that the best possible results might be obtained 
 he resorted to the rather unique, but not entirely orig- 
 inal, method of not attending Parliament at all. Two or 
 three young men would be sent to listen to the debates ; 
 they v^ould make notes giving the general drift of the 
 argument, and Johnson would write out the speech. 
 His style was exactly suited to this kind of work, being 
 eminently oratorical. And as at the time no public rec- 
 ord of proceedings was kept and Parliament did not al- 
 low the press the liberty it now possesses — all being 
 sort of clouded in mysterious awe — these reports of 
 debates were eagerly sought after. To avoid the law, a 
 fictitious name was given the speaker, or his initials 
 used in a way that the individual could be easily rec- 
 ognized by the reading public. 
 
 <35 
 
SAMUEL Some of Johnson's best work was done at this time, 
 JOHNSON and in several instances the speaker, not slow to ap- 
 preciate a good thing, allowed the matter to be reissued 
 as his own. Long years after, a certain man was once 
 praising the speeches of Lord Chesterfield and was 
 led on to make explanations. He did so, naming two 
 speeches, one of which he zealously declared had the 
 style of Cicero, the other that of Demosthenes. John- 
 son becalmed the speaker by agreeing with him as to 
 the excellence of the speeches, and then adding, ** I 
 wrote them." 
 
 The gruffness of Ursa Major should never be likened 
 to that of the Sage of Chelsea. Carlyle vented his 
 spleen on the nearest object, as irate gentlemen some- 
 times kick at the cat ; but Johnson merely sparred for 
 points. When Miss Monckton undertook to refute his 
 statements as to the shallowness of Sterne by declar- 
 ing that " Tristram Shandy " affected her to tears, 
 Johnson rolled himself in contortions, smiled an exas- 
 perating grimace and replied, •* Why, dearest, that is 
 because you are a dunce 1" Afterward, when re- 
 proached for the remark, he replied, " Madam, if I had 
 thought so, I surely would not have said it." 
 Once, at the house of Garrick, to the terror of every- 
 one, Burke contradicted Johnson flatly, and Johnson's 
 good sense and good nature revealed themselves by no 
 show of resentment. An equally exciting, but harmless 
 occasion, was the only time that the author of " Ras- 
 selas" met the man who wrote the "Wealth of 
 Z36 
 
Nations." Johnson called Adam Smith a liar, & Smith SAMUEL 
 promptly handed back an epithet not in the Dictionary. JOHNSON 
 Nevertheless, old Ursa spoke in affectionate praise of 
 " Adam," as he called him, thereafter, thus recognizing 
 the right of the other man to be frank if he cared to. 
 Johnson wanted no privilege that he was not willing 
 to grant to others. 
 
 When Blair asked Johnson if he thought any,* modem 
 man could have written " Ossian," Johnson replied, 
 " Yes, sir, many men, many women, and many chil- 
 dren." And if Blair took umbrage at the remark, so 
 much the worse for Blair. 
 
 We have recently heard of the Boston lady who died 
 and went to Heaven, and on being questioned by an 
 arch-angel as to how she liked it, replied languidly, 
 " Very, very beautiful it all is ! " And then sighed and 
 added, " But it is not Boston ! " This story seems 
 to illustrate that all tales have their prototype, for Bos- 
 well tells of taking Dr. Johnson out to Greenwich Park, 
 and saying, ** Now, now, is n't this fine ! " But John- 
 son would not enthuse ; he only grunted, *' All very fine 
 —but it 's not Fleet Street." 
 
 On another occasion when a Scotchman was dilating 
 on the noble prospects to be enjoyed among the hills 
 of Scotland, Johnson called a halt by saying, " Sir, let 
 me tell you that the noblest prospect a Scotchman ever 
 sees is the highroad that leads him to England." 
 This seems to display a terrible hatred toward Scot- 
 land, and several Scots, with their usual plentiful lack 
 
 X37 
 
SAMUEL of wit have so solemnly written it down. But the more 
 JOHNSON sensible way is to conclude that the situation simply 
 afforded opportunity for a little harmless banter. 
 Another equally undisputable proof of prejudice is 
 shown when Boswell tells Johnson of the wonderful 
 preaching of a Quaker woman. Johnson listened in 
 grim, cold silence and then exclaimed, ** Sir, a wom- 
 an's preaching is like a dog's walking on its hind legs. 
 It is not done well ; but you are surprised to find it done 
 at all." 
 
 One of the leading encyclopedias, I see, says,'* Dr. John- 
 son was one of the greatest conversationalists of all 
 time." The writer evidently does not distinguish be- 
 tween talk, conversation and harangue. Johnson could 
 talk and he often harangued, but he was not a conver- 
 sationalist. Neither could he address a public assem- 
 blage, and I do not find that he ever attempted it. Good 
 talkers are seldom orators. One reads with smiles col- 
 ored by pity, of Carlyle's sleepless nights and cold, 
 terror-clothed anticipations of his Lord Rector's speech. 
 In deliberative gatherings a very small man could ap- 
 ply the snuffers to the great Dictator of Letters. 
 " Sir," said Dr. Johnson to a talkative politician, at a 
 dinner party, '* I perceive you are a vile Whig," & then 
 he proceeded to demolish him. Yet Johnson himself 
 was a Whig, although he never knew it ; just as he was 
 a liberal in religion, and yet was boastful of being a 
 staunch Churchman. 
 
 Johnson's irritability never vented itself against the 
 138 
 
helpless. His charity knew no limit — not even the hot- SAMUEL 
 torn of his purse — when he had no money to give, he JOHNSON 
 borrowed it. And when his pension was three hundred 
 pounds a year, the Thrales could not figure out that he 
 spent more than seventy or eighty on himself. The rest 
 went to his dependents. In his latter days his home 
 was a regular museum of waifs and strays. There was 
 Miss Williams, the ancient aristocratic spinster who 
 came to London to have an operation performed on 
 one of her eyes. She came to Johnson's home and re- 
 mained ten years, because she had been a friend of his 
 wife's. This claim was enough and she slid into the 
 head place in Johnson's household. Her peevishness 
 used to drive the old man, at times, into the street, but 
 that tongue of his, with its crushing retorts, was ever 
 silent and tender towards her. The poor creature be- 
 came blind, and used to shock the finicky Boswell by 
 testing the fullness of the teacups with her finger. 
 Then there was a Mrs. Desmoulins and her daughter, 
 who drifted down from Lichfield and came to Johnson 
 because forty years before he, too, had lived in Lich- 
 field. He gave them house-room, treated them as 
 guests, and each week left a half-guinea on the man- 
 tel of their room. 
 
 Then there was the broken down Levett, and Francis 
 Barber, who, coming as a servant, remained as one 
 of the family, because he was too old to work. A 
 Miss Carmichael, in green spectacles and bombazine, 
 carrying a cane, completed what the Doctor called his 
 
 <39 
 
SAMUEL " seraglio." Writing to Mrs. Thrale in playful mood tell- 
 JOHNSON ing of his household troubles, he says, *' Williams hates 
 everybody ; Levett hates Desmoulins, & does not love 
 Williams ; Desmoulins hates them both ; Poll loves 
 none of them." And he, the great, gruff and 
 mighty Ursa Major, listened to all their 
 woes, caring for them in sickness, wip- 
 ing the death-dew from their fore- 
 heads, wearing crape upon 
 his sleeve for them 
 when dead. 
 
 X40 
 
HIS man tasted all the fame that 
 is one man's due ; he had all the 
 money he needed, or knew how 
 to use ; the coveted LL. D. came 
 from his Alma Mater; and the 
 patronage from Lord Chester- 
 field, for which he craved, only 
 that he might fling it back. He 
 was the friend and confidant of 
 the great and proud, deferred to by the King & sought 
 out by those who prized the far reaching mind and sub- 
 tle imagination — the things that link us with the Infi- 
 nite. The fear of hell and dread of death that haunted 
 him in youth and middle age, finally gave way to faith 
 and trust. When partial paralysis came to him at mid- 
 night, his sanity did not fail him & knowing the worst, 
 he yet hesitated to disturb the other members of the 
 household, but went to sleep, philosophizing on the 
 phenomena of the case — alert for more knowledge, as 
 was his wont. Morning came and being speechless, he 
 wrote on his ever ready pad of paper and handing the 
 sheet to his servant, watched with amused glances the 
 perplexity and terror of the man. He next wrote to his 
 friend, Mrs. Thrale, that letter, a classic of wit and 
 resignation, wherein he explains his condition and ex- 
 cuses himself for not calling upon her and explaining 
 the matter by word of mouth. 
 
 Such willingness to accept the inevitable is curative. 
 He grew better and recovered his speech. But old age 
 
 141 
 
 SAMUEL 
 JOHNSON 
 
SAMUEL is a disease that has no cure save death. Johnson ac- 
 JOHNSON cepted the issue as a brave man should — thankful for 
 the taste of conscious life that had been his. When the 
 last hour was nigh he sent loving messages to his clos- 
 est friends, repeating their names over one by one. His 
 last recorded words were directed to a young woman 
 who called upon him, *' God bless you, my dear." 
 And so he passed painlessly and quietly into the sleep 
 that knows no waking, pleased at last to know that his 
 dust would rest in Westminster Abbey. 
 Thus ended, as the day dies out of the western sky, 
 this life, seemingly so full of tempest and contradiction. 
 The hours of his life were full of enjoyment, and no 
 day passed but that someone, weak, weary and worn, 
 arose and called him blessed. Most of his wild impre- 
 cations and blustering contradictions were reserved for 
 those who fattened on such things, and who came to 
 be tossed and gored. In his spirit Socrates and Falstaff 
 joined hands. In his life there was a deal of gladness — 
 far, far more than Of misery and unrest ; which fact I 
 believe is true of every life. 
 The Universe seems planned for good. 
 A world made up of such men as Samuel Johnson 
 would be a wild chaos of tasks undone. But since Na- 
 ture has never sent but one such man, and more than 
 a century has passed since his death and we know not 
 yet with whom to compare him, we need have no fears. 
 The world is held in place through the opposition of 
 forces : and the body of every healthy man is the 
 14a 
 
battle ground of animal organisms that match strength SAMUEL, 
 against strength. So, too, a healthy society always has JOHNSON 
 these strong and sturdy organisms, which set in play 
 other forces that hold in check their seeming excess. 
 That the Divine Energy should incarnate itself & find 
 expression in the form of man, and that this man 
 should inspire others to think and write, to do and dare, 
 is a subject, the contemplation of which should make 
 us stand uncovered. The companionship of Johnson 
 inspired Reynolds to better painting ; Garrick to strong- 
 er acting ; Burke to more accurate thinking — and hun- 
 dreds of others, too, quenched their thirst at the rock 
 which he smote whenever he discoursed or wrote. 
 Sympathy is the first essential to insight. So with sym- 
 pathy, I pray, behold this blundering giant, and you 
 will see that the basis of his character was a great 
 Sincerity. He was honest — doggedly honest — and saw 
 with flashing vision the thing that was, and thither he 
 followed, crowding, pushing, knocking down whatso- 
 ever opinion or prejudice was in the way. And so he 
 ever struggled forward. But hate him not, for he is thy 
 brother, yea ! he is brother to all who strive and reach 
 forward toward the Ideal. Shining through dust and 
 disorder, now victorious, now eclipsed in deepest 
 gloom, in him is the light of genius ; and this is never 
 base, but at the worst is admirable, lovable with pity. 
 There was pride in his heart, but no vanity ; and he 
 should be loved for this if for no other reason : he had 
 the courage to make an enemy. In his great heart were 
 
 Z43 
 
SAMUEL wild burstings of affection, and a hunger for love that 
 
 JOHNSON only the grave requited. There, too, were fierce 
 
 flashes of wrath, smothered in an hour by the 
 
 soft dew of pity. His faults & follies were 
 
 manifold, as he oft lamented with 
 
 tears, but the soul of the man was 
 
 sublime in its qualities ; world 
 
 wide in its influence. 
 
 144 
 
so HERE ENDETH VOLUME SIX OF LITTLE JOUR- 
 NEYS, THE SAME BEING TO THE HOMES OF ENGLISH 
 AUTHORS. & WRITTEN BY ELBERT HUBBARD : THE IN- 
 ITIALS AND TITLE PAGE BEING DESIGNED BY SAMUEL 
 WARNER: THE WHOLE DONE INTO A BOOK BY THE 
 ROYCROFTERS, AT THEIR SHOP, WHICH IS IN EAST 
 AURORA, NEW YORK, U. S. A., IN THE YEAR MCM <^ fi