In the year 1820, Halleck sat in the Park Row house by the bedside of his friend, who was dying of consumption, and here, at the age of twenty-five, Joseph Rodman Drake passed away. Halleck followed the coffin to that beautiful spot beyond the Harlem that they both loved so well, and there by the side of the Bronx streamlet the poet Drake was buried. In the depth of his grief Halleck wrote the lines:
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Green be the turf above thee, Friend of my better days; None knew thee but to love thee, None named thee but to praise. |
And now after more than three quarters of a century the words still murmur their message of friendship and sorrow above Drake's grave. The city has sped on far beyond the little graveyard, and harsh sounds throb where once was only the singing of birds; but the consecrated spot remains, cared for year by year as well as may be in despite of relic-hunting vandals.
Halleck outlived his friend by many long years. He gave up bookkeeping for Jacob Barker, and during eighteen years was the confidential manager of the affairs of John Jacob Astor. But he never failed to regret the comrade of his youth, losing with him much of his inspiration.
Half an hour's journey from Drake's grave, on the western side of the Harlem River, there stands, at One Hundred and Sixtieth Street and Edgecombe Avenue, a house on a bluff so high above the river that it can be seen from afar—white in the sunlight. This is the Morris house, where Mary Philipse lived after she became the wife of Roger Morris; where Washington had his headquarters; where Madame Jumel lived, and where she married Aaron Burr. To the one who strolls in the footsteps of littérateurs of a bygone day, it is, more than all, the house where Halleck visited, and where he wrote Marco Bozzaris. Although this was his most widely known poem, and though it was written five years after the death of Drake, the memory of his friend was like a fresh sorrow to him while he wrote. During forty odd years from that time he continued the gently courteous, witty talker, the dignified life of each gathering he attended. But, as he knew so well, his Muse was sorely wounded when Drake died, and the fuller poetic life that might have been his was buried on the green slope of the Bronx with his friend.