"So live that when thy summons comes, to join
The innumerable caravan which moves
To that mysterious realm where each must take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon; but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams."
"Yes," he said, "I will come back to Cummington." So he went to Europe but came not back to occupy that home. He loved the old home. We were driving by his place one day when we saw him planting apple trees in July. We all know that apple trees won't grow when planted in July, so my father, knowing him well, called to him and said, "Mr. Bryant, what are you doing there? They won't grow." Mr. Bryant paused a moment and looked at us, and then said half playfully: "Conwell, drive on, you have no part nor lot in this matter. I do not expect these trees to grow; I am setting them out because I want to live over again the days when my father used to set trees when they would grow. I want to renew that memory." He was wise, for in his work on "The Transmigration of Races" he used that experience wonderfully.
In 1860, when we were teaching school, my elder brother and myself, in Blanchford, Massachusetts, were asked to go to Brooklyn with the body of a lady who died near our schools. We went to Brooklyn on Saturday and after the funeral, our friends asked us to stay over Sunday, saying that they would take us to hear Henry Ward Beecher! That was a great inducement, because my father read the "Tribune" every Sunday morning after his Bible (and sometimes before it) and what Henry Ward Beecher said, my father thought, "was law and Gospel." Sunday night, we went to Plymouth Church, and there was a crowd an hour before the service, and when the doors were opened we were crowded up the stairs. We boys were thrust back into a dirty corner where we could not see. Oh, yes, that is the way they treat the boys, put them any place—they're only boys! I remember the disappointment of that night, when we went there more to see than hear. But finally Mr. Beecher came out and gave out his text. I remember that I did not pay very much attention to it. In the middle of the sermon Mr. Beecher began in the strangest way to auction off a woman: "How much am I offered for the woman?" he yelled, and while in his biographies, they have said that this woman was sold in the Broadway Tabernacle, but I afterwards asked Mrs. Beecher and she said that Mr. Beecher had not sold this woman twice, so far as she knew, but that she recalled distinctly the sale in the Plymouth Church. I remember standing up on tip-toes to look for that woman that was being sold. After he had finished, after the singing of the hymn, he said "Brethren, be seated," and then said, "Sam, come here." A colored boy came up tremblingly and stood beside him. "This boy is offered for $770.00; he is owned in South Carolina and has run away. His master offers him to me for $770.00, and now if the officers of the church will pass the plates the boy shall be set free," and when the plates were returned over $1700.00 came in. As we went our way home I said to my elder brother: "Oh, what a grand thing it must be to preach to a congregation of fifteen hundred people." But my elder brother very wisely said: "You don't know anything about it; you do not know whether he is happy or not." "Well," I suggested, "wasn't it a strange thing to introduce a public auction in the middle of a sermon," and my elder brother again said that if they did more of that in a country church they would have a larger congregation. Afterwards I was quite fortunate to know Mr. Beecher and frequently reported his sermons. I often heard him say that the happiest years he ever knew were back in Lawrenceville, Ohio, in that little church where there were no lamps and he had to borrow them himself, light them himself, and prepare the church for the first service. He told how he swept the church, lighted the fire in the stove, and how it smoked; then how he sawed the wood to heat the church, and how he went into carpenter work to earn money to pay his own salary, yet he said that was the happiest time of his life. Mrs. Beecher told me afterwards that Mr. Beecher often talked about those days and said that bye and bye he would retire and they would again go back to the simple life they had enjoyed so much.
When he had built his new home near the Hudson, Robert Collier and I visited him. We found in the rear of an addition that clap-boards had been put up in all sorts of adjustment. Mr. Collier asked him: "Where did you find a carpenter to do such poor work as that?" and Mr. Beecher said humorously: "You could not hire that carpenter on your house." Then he said: "Mr. Collier, I put those boards on that house myself. I insisted that they leave that work for me to do. I have been happy putting on these boards and driving these nails. They took me back to the old days at Lawrenceville, where we lived over a store and our pantry was a dry goods box. But there we were so happy. I am hoping sometime to be as happy again, but it is not possible to do it while I am in the service of the public." He had promised himself and his wife some day to go back to that simple life. But his sudden death taught the same great lesson with all the examples I give of great men and women. Rev. Robt. Collier always enjoyed the circus—the circus was the great place of enjoyment outside, perhaps, of his pulpit work. It was Robert Collier who used to tell the story of the boy whose aunt always made him go to church, but after going to a circus he wrote to his aunt: "Auntie, if you had ever been to a circus, you wouldn't go to another prayer-meeting as long as you live." The love of Collier for the circus only shows the simplicity of the great man's mind. Mr. Collier is said to have paid a dollar for a fifty cent ticket to the circus, only making it conditional that he was to have the privilege of going 'round to the rear and crawling under the tent, showing what he must have done when a boy. The fact of Mr. Collier's love for the circus was one of the strange things in the eccentricities of a great man's life. Once Mr. Barnum came into Mr. Collier's church and Mr. Collier said to the usher: "Please show Mr. Barnum to a front seat for he always gives me one in his circus." These simplicities often show that somewhere back in each man's life there is a point where happiness and love are one, and when, that point is passed, we go on longing to the return.
The night after he went to hear Henry Ward Beecher's great sermon they persuaded us to stay until the following Monday night, because there was to be a lecture at the Cooper Institute and there was to be a parade of political clubs, and fire works, so as country boys, easily influenced, we decided that the school could wait for another day, and staid for the procession. We went to Cooper's Institute and there was a crowd as there was at Beecher's church. We finally got on the stairway and far in the rear of the great crowd, but my brother stood on the floor, and I sat on the ledge of the window sill, with my feet on his shoulders, so he held me while I told him down there what was going on over yonder. The first man that came on the platform, and presided at that meeting, was William Cullent Bryant, our dear old neighbor. When we boys in a strange city saw that familiar face, oh, the emotions that arose in our hearts! How proud we were at that hour, that he, our neighbor, was presiding on that occasion. He took his seat on the stage, the right of which was left vacant for some one yet to come. Next came a very heavy man, but immediately following him a tall, lean man. Mr. Bryant arose and went toward him, bowing and smiling. He was an awkward specimen of a man and all about me people were asking "Who is that?" but no man seemed to know. I asked a gentleman who that man was, but he said he didn't know. He was an awkward specimen indeed; one of the legs of his trousers was up about two inches above his shoe; his hair was dishevelled and stuck out like rooster's feathers; his coat was altogether too large for him in the back, his arms much longer than the sleeves, and with his legs twisted around the rungs of the chair, was the picture of embarrassment. When Mr. Bryant arose to introduce the speaker of that evening, he was known seemingly to few in that great hall. Mr. Bryant said: "Gentlemen of New York, you have your favorite son in Mr. Seward and if he were to be President of the United States, every one of us would be proud of him." Then came great applause. "Ohio has her favorite son in Judge Wade; and the nation would prosper under his administration, but Gentlemen of New York, it is a great honor that is conferred upon me to-night, for I can introduce to you the next President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln." Then through that audience flew the query as to whom Abraham Lincoln was. There was but weak applause. Mr. Lincoln had in his hand a manuscript. He had written it with great care and exactness and the speech which you read in his biography is the one that he wrote, not the one that he delivered as I recall it, and it is fortunate for the country that they did print the one that he wrote. I think the one he wrote had already been set up in type that afternoon from his manuscript, and consequently they did not go over it to see whether it had been changed or not. He had read three pages and had gone on to the fourth when he lost his place and then he began to tremble and stammer. He then turned it over two or three times, threw the manuscript upon the table, and, as they say in the west, "let himself go." Now the stammering man who had created only silent derision up to that point, suddenly flashed out into an angel of oratory and the awkward arms and dishevelled hair were lost sight of entirely in the wonderful beauty and lofty inspiration of that magnificent address. The great audience immediately began to follow his thought, and when he uttered that quotation from Douglass, "It is written on the sky of America that the slaves shall some day be free," he had settled the question that he was to be the next President of the United States. The applause was so-great that the building trembled and I felt the windows shake behind me. Afterward, as we walked home, I said to my elder brother again, "Wasn't it a great thing to be introduced to all those people as the next President of the United States?" and my elder brother very wisely said: "You do not know whether he was really happy or not." Afterwards, in 1864, when one of my soldiers was unjustly sentenced and his gray-haired mother plead with me to use what influence I would have with the President, I went to Washington and told the story to the President. He said he had heard something about it from Mr. Stanton, and he said he would investigate the matter, and he did afterward decide that the man should not be put to death. At the close of that interview I said to the President: "I beg your pardon, Mr. Lincoln, but is it not a most exhausting thing to sit here hearing all these appeals and have all of this business on your hands?" He laid his head on his hand, and in a somewhat wearied manner, said, with a deep sigh: "Yes, yes; no man ought to be ambitious to be President of the United States," and said he, "When this war is over, and that won't be very long, I tell my "Tad" that we will go back to the farm where I was happier as a boy when I dug potatoes at twenty-five cents a day than I am now; I tell him I will buy him a mule and a pony and he shall have a little cart and he shall make a little garden in a field all his own," and the President's face beamed as he arose from his chair in the delight of excitement as he said: "Yes, I will be far happier than I have ever been here." The next time I looked in the face of Abraham Lincoln was in the east room of the White House at Washington as he lay in his coffin. Not long ago at a Chautauqua lecture I was on the very farm which he bought at Salem, Illinois, and looked around the place where he had resolved to build a mansion, but which was never constructed.
Near my home in the Berkshires, Charles Dudley Warner was born. When he had accomplished great things in literature and had written "My Summer in a Garden," that popular work which attracted the attention of his newspaper friends, he went to Hartford, where the latter gave him a banquet. I was invited to attend and report it for the public press. They lauded him and said how beautiful it was to be so elevated above his fellow men, and how great he was in the estimation of the world But he in his answer to the toast said, "Gentlemen, I wish for no fame, I desire no glory and you have made a mistake if you think I enjoy any such notoriety. I envy the Hartford teacher whose smile threw sunshine along her pathway." Then he told us the story of a poor little boy, cold and barefooted, standing on the street on a terribly cold day. A lady came along, and looking kindly at him, said, "Little boy, are you cold?" The little fellow, looking up into her face, said, "Yes Ma'am, I was cold till you smiled." He would rather have a smile like that and the simple love of his fellow men than to have all the fame of the earth. He was honored in all parts of the world by the greatest of the great, yet he was a sad man when he wrote "My Summer in a Garden," and it all seems a mystery how he could in such grief have written that remarkable little tale. This sadness is often associated with humorists. Mr. Shaw was one of the saddest men I ever met. Why, he cried on the slightest occasion. I went one day to interview him in Boston, and Mr. Shepard, his publisher, said "Please don't trouble Josh Billings now." "What is the matter?" "Oh, he is crying again," said Mr. Shepard. I asked him how Mr. Shaw could write such funny things as he did. He then showed me the manuscript (which Mr. Shaw had just placed on his desk and which he had just written), in which he says, "I do not know any cure for laziness, but I have known a second wife to hurry it up some." Artemus Ward wrote the most laughable things while his heart was in the deepest wretchedness. Often these glimpses of the funny men whose profession would seem to show them to be the happiest of earth's people, prove that they are sometimes the most gloomy and miserable.
John B. Gough, the great temperance orator, the greatest the world has ever seen, said to me one evening at his home that he would lecture for forty years, and then would stop. But his wife said, "Now, John, you know you won't give it up." He assented, "Yes, I will." But his wife said, "No you won't. You men when you drink of public life find it like a drink of whiskey, and you are just like the rest of the men." "No," said he. Then Mr. Gough told again his familiar story of the minister who was preaching in his pulpit in Boston when he saw the Governor of the State coming up the aisle. Immediately he began to stammer, and finally said: "I see the Governor coming in, and as I know you will want to hear an exhortation from him, I think that I had better stop." Then one of the old officials leaped up from one of the front seats and said, "I insist upon your going on with your sermon, sir; you ought not be embarrassed by the Governor's coming in. We are all worms! All worms! nothing but worms!" Then the minister was angry and shouted: "Sir, I would have you understand that there is a difference in worms." Mr. Gough said he was different from other people yet the years came and went, and he stayed on the public platform. One night a committee from Frankford, Philadelphia, asked me to write him and ask him to lecture for them. I wrote and whether my influence had anything to do with it or not, I do not know, but he came from New York and when he was in about the middle of his lecture, he came to that sentence, "Young man, keep your record clear, for a single glass of intoxicating liquor may somewhere, in after years, change into a horrid monster that shall carry you down to woe." And when he had uttered that wonderful sentence of advice, he slopped to get breath, reached for a drink of water, swung forward and fell over. The doctor said he was too late for any earthly aid, and John B. Gough, with his armor on, went on into Glory. He never found that earthly rest he had promised himself. His garden never showed its flowers, and his fields were never strewn with grain.
When our regiment was encamped in Faneuil Hall at Boston before embarking for the war in 1863, Mr. Wendell Phillips sent an invitation to the officers of the regiment to visit his home. But when we reached his house we found that he had been called to Worcester suddenly to make a speech. But we found his wife there in her rolling chair, for she was a permanent invalid. Our evening was spent very pleasantly, but I said to her: "Are you not very lonesome when Mr. Phillips is away so much?" "Yes," she said, "I am very lonesome; he is father, mother, brother, sister, husband and child to me," and said she, "he cares for me with the tenderness of a mother; he waits upon me, he takes me out, and brings me in; he dresses me, and it now seems so strange that he is not by my side. If it were not for him, I should die, but he says that as soon as the slaves are free that he will come back and be the same husband he was before." The officers standing around me smiled as they heard of his promise to retire, but said she, "Oh, yes, he will do as he promised." When the war was over and the slaves were free, and he had scolded General Grant all he wished, he did do as he promised, and did retire. He sold his house in the city and bought one in Waverly, Massachusetts. He did prove the exception and went back to the private life that he had promised himself and his wife. Every Sunday morning as I drove by his home I could see him swinging on his gate. It was a double gate over the driveway, and he would pull that gate far in, get on it and then swing way out over the side-walk and then in again. Well, he used to swing on that gate every Sunday morning, and my family wondered why it was that he always did it on that particular morning. One Sunday morning when I drove by, I found Mr. Phillips swinging on his gate over the side-walk, and I said, "Mr. Phillips, my family wish me to ask you why you swing on this gate every Sunday morning." Mr. Phillips, who had a very deep sense of humour, stepped off the gate, stood back, and assuming a dignified, ministerial air, "I am requested to discourse to-day upon the text 'Why I swing upon this gate on Sunday morning,' and I will, therefore, divide my text into two heads." I quickly told him that I must get to church some time that day. "Then," said he, with a smile, "just one word more: Why do I swing on a gate? Because the first time I saw my wife she was swinging on the gate, and the second time I saw her, we kissed each other over the top of the gate, and when I swing it reminds me of other happy days long gone by. That, sir, is the reason I swing upon this gate." Then his humor all disappeared and he said: "I really swing upon this gate on Sunday morning because I think the next thing to the love of God is love of man for a true woman—as you cannot say you love God and hate your brother, neither can you say you love God unless you have first loved a human being, and I swing on this gate on Sunday morning because to me it is next to life's highest worship." And then, in a majestic manner, he said, "Conwell, all within this gate is PARADISE and all without it MARTYRDOM." In that wonderful sentence, which I feel sure I recall accurately, he uttered the most glorious expression that could ever come from uninspired lips.
I had a glimpse of James G. Elaine when I went to his home in Augusta, Maine, to write his biography for the committee. A day or two after it was finished a distinguished Senator from Washington came to see me in Philadelphia and asked if Mr. Blaine had seen the book, and I told him that he certainly had. "Did he see that second chapter?" "Of course he did," said I; "he corrected it." Then he wanted to know how much money it would take to get the book out of circulation. "Why, what is the matter with the book," said I, but he would not tell me, and said that he would pay me well if I would only keep the book from circulation. He did not tell me what was the matter. I told him that the publishers owned the copyright, having bought it from me. He said, "Is it not possible for you to take a trip to Europe to-morrow morning?" "But why take a trip to Europe?" "The committee will pay all of your expenses, all your family's expenses, and of any servants you wish lo take with you—only get out of the country." "Well," I said, "I am not going to leave the country for my country's good, unless I know what I am going for." I never could find out what the trouble with that second chapter was, and I afterwards asked Mrs. Blaine if she knew what was the matter. She then broke out in a paroxysm of grief and said that if he had stayed in Washington, Pennsylvania, where he was a teacher, "he would be living yet." She said "he had given thirty years of his life to the public service, and now they have so ungratefully disgraced his name, sent him to an early grave, and all in consequence of what he has done for the public. He is a stranger to his country—a stranger to his friends," and then she said, "O would to God he had stayed in Pennsylvania!" I left her then, but I have never known what was in that second chapter that caused the disturbance. But I do know the second chapter was concerning their early and happy life in Washington, Pennsylvania, where he taught in the college.
Near our home in Newton, Massachusetts, was that of F.F. Smith, who wrote "America." It was of him that Oliver Wendell Holmes said that "Nature tried to hide him by naming him Smith." Smith lived that quiet and restful life that reminds one of Tennyson's "Brook" when thinking of him. He knew the glory of modest living.