In the days of bereavement following the death of Dr. Smith, the companion of Brown's solitude was Joseph Dennie. Often in the intervals of work they wandered through the quiet park, and many a time they knelt together in the Brick Church, a square beyond the Park Theatre, with the memory of their dead companion strong upon them. The shadow of their friend's death was still over them when they parted, and Joseph Dennie went to Philadelphia to start his magazine, The Portfolio, which was to cause the name of "The Lay Preacher" to ring through the land. He was in Philadelphia when Brown, in 1803, started The Literary Magazine and American Register. But the next year he was in New York again, occasionally joining in a literary partnership in which there was a third member now, for Brown had married the daughter of Dr. Linn, the Presbyterian minister. The years rolled on, and Brown sought to fight off death by terrific work. But death only clutched him the tighter. The strolls with Elizabeth, his gentle-hearted wife, grew shorter and shorter and less frequent, until they ceased altogether six years after his marriage, and another landmark in the literary history of the city had gone down.
There was one stately and studious member of the Friendly Club who, it is recorded, could seldom be persuaded to go to the Park Theatre except on the "great nights." James Kent, then a Professor of Law at Columbia College, when not at work (those were rare moments indeed), loved best to wander over the College grounds. These are now lost beyond all tracing in the overcrowding between the City Hall and Hudson River. Then it was a delightful country spot. When Professor Kent did not walk on the College grounds by the riverside, he strolled up Broadway past the hospital with his friend, Dr. David Hosack, and the two discussed at length the Elgin Botanical Garden that the physician had just laid out three miles above the city. It was this James Kent who came to be Chancellor of New York and whose memory lives in his Commentaries on American Law.
Beyond the city, separated from it in summer by a mile of marshy and untilled land, in winter by a dreary waste with a single road leading across a snow-bound way, lay the village of Greenwich. A dreamy little country place that had been an Indian village before the settling of New Amsterdam; with lines of peaked-roof houses on zig-zagged lanes, and now and again, in the midst of a farm-like garden, a rambling house of stone, with great square windows and gables enough for half a dozen houses. The village might have been thousands of miles away from New York for all the likeness it bore to it.
On a dusty and rarely travelled lane, that led from the village towards the city, lived a man who had won the hearts of Americans by writing Common Sense, but who lived to reap their hatred by writing The Age of Reason, a deistic argument against Christianity. In the quiet village his house was pointed out as the abode of a friendless man, and when they spoke of him the villagers whispered the dread name—Tom Paine.
There he lived with Madame Bonneville and her two sons, the only companions he cared to have near him save his own thoughts. In that picturesque spot he was fully content to pass his final days in solitude and marked contrast to a life of energy and excitement.
It is close upon a century since that time, and the pilgrim feet that seek to follow Paine through Greenwich Village must walk Bleecker Street (the dusty lane in much changed form), must pass Grove Street, and the fourth house from the corner, on the north side, walking towards the east, is Paine's. It was humble enough in the days when he lived there. It is far humbler now in contrast to the buildings that have grown up about it. A two-story frame house, the ground floor is made into a store, as though it made an effort to keep up with the business character of the street. Two brick structures rise above it on each side and seem to have forced the roof to a frightful angle, so different is it from its new neighbors. Once Joel Barlow went to see Paine there, and the two spent almost an entire day beside a front window, talking of many things. Paine recalled the troublous days of the French Revolution, when he had written his Age of Reason in the prison of the Luxembourg, and had given it to Barlow to find a publisher. The author of the Columbiad often spoke of the visit later.
The dusty road where the house stood, even though it was little travelled, came to be too noisy a place for Paine, for in his illness even the chance passer-by irritated him. So he moved away to a house in a nearby field, so far from the road that he found absolute quiet. In after days Grove Street swept this home away, and another building, numbered 59, is pointed out as the place where Paine died shortly after his removal.
The hatred of many people followed Thomas Paine even after death, and there could be no rest for an advocate of infidel opinions in a town where dwelt descendants of stern Huguenots. His body was taken to New Rochelle, and there, refused burial in hallowed ground, was finally laid to rest outside the town, in a corner of the farm given to him by the State in recognition of his services in the cause of the colonies against the mother country. Ten years later, William Cobbett, the English Radical, an ardent admirer of Paine, visited New Rochelle, and, seeing the neglected grave by the wayside, had the bones dug up one night and spirited away to England. In another twenty years the followers of Thomas Paine had grown in number, and the Paine Historical Society erected a monument over the empty grave by the roadside. But on this spot, where no rest had been permitted him in life or in death, it seems rather to mock than to bless his grave.