From this point, a walk due east straight across town to the Bowery is as direct a route as could be found to the house where Bryant boarded in Fourth Street near the Bowery. It was here he entertained the friendly Unitarian clergyman, Orville Dewey, and discussed poetry with him. Here too he began the acquaintance with his fellow-lodger, Parke Godwin, without a thought that Godwin would one day be his son-in-law, without a thought that they would walk side by side through a literary life for close upon half a century.
Still on up-town, this time to Union Square. Between that green spot and Irving Place in Fifteenth Street, you come upon the home of the Century Club in its early days, when it was the chief place in America for the entertainment of men of letters. This club, founded by Bryant, was presided over at various times by Bancroft, Verplanck, and men whose names are equally well remembered. Bryant was the president when he died. The club now has a sumptuous home in Forty-third Street near Fifth Avenue.
Last home of all of Bryant in New York is the brownstone house next to the College of St. Francis Xavier, in Sixteenth Street. Here he lived during the last years of his life when he was not passing the long spring and summer months at his well-beloved Cedarmere at Roslyn, Long Island, which had been his favorite abiding place since 1843. It was in this Sixteenth Street house that he wrote his last lines of verse—on the birthday of Washington; it was here that he died.
One more structure not a great distance away calls up strongly the memory of Bryant. In Fourth Avenue at Twentieth Street is picturesque All Souls' Church, which has been there since 1855. Built of brick trimmed with Caen stone, planned in the form of a Greek cross, it was the first example of the Byzantine style of architecture in America. It was to have a tall, square, tower-like steeple, but this was never built. To this church the body of Bryant was taken, and there in the presence of all literary New York, and while the whole city mourned, Dr. Bellows, who had been his long-time friend, preached his funeral sermon.
Chapter X
Half a Century Ago
LIKE many a landed estate, like many a quiet village, like many a battle-ground, like many a winding and historic road, like so many other places of interest of which the island of Manhattan has been the scene in days agone—Minniesland is not easy to locate. Relentlessly and remorselessly the great masses of brick and mortar have forged ahead in their furtherance of the city's growth, seeking a level as they spread, dominating the island, levelling the hills, and stretching over valleys until the surface of the land is altered beyond all knowing. Minniesland is one of the almost buried districts of the great city. Its last surviving relic, a square ornamental structure, is the one token that it ever existed. Now that the town has surrounded this building, and streets have cut through and mutilated the first plan of the district, this house may be found standing where One Hundred and Fifty-fifth Street slopes down to the Hudson River. Enter it; pass through its ancient halls, and, standing on its porch, blot from the mind the spot as it is and reconstruct it as it was half a century ago.
Fifty years ago the city was far away there to the south, and this house, miles and miles away up-country, was at the edge of a forest stretching down the hillside to the river. There were other farmhouses around it. To the north was the mansion where Colonel Morris had lived before the Revolution; where Madame Jumel in later days had married Aaron Burr. To the south was the square frame building, close by a clump of thirteen trees, where Alexander Hamilton had lived and where his widow stayed on after his death.
Forgetting for a moment these old-time surroundings of the house by the forest edge, turn to the building itself, and imagine at the window a man sitting. He has long hair and clear blue eyes. He is painting at a small easel and working in quite a wonderful manner, for he is ambidextrous. He stops in his work and looks over the trees towards the Hudson. If that ever-moving river recalls to him his past life, John James Audubon, ornithologist, is reviewing a strange and adventurous career in many countries, full of losses, of suffering, of changes, of perils. He thinks of himself as a boy wandering through the dense, hot wilds of San Domingo; as a youth hard at his art studies in Paris under the master David; as a man at his father's country place on the Schuylkill, failing utterly and absolutely when he goes into business, and letting his father's fortune slip away from his nerveless grasp. He remembers, too, his marriage, and how his wife followed his restless career with unchanging love and remained always a balance-wheel to his impetuosity. He recalls how, through all the changes of that early and unsettled life, the naturalist-love born in him when he roamed the tropical home of his youth was always strongest in his nature, and was constantly cropping out in his mania for collecting beautiful things that were quite worthless from a commercial point of view, just as it was shown in his personal appearance; for his manner of dressing, always with his hair falling over his shoulders, marked him as a man regardless of conventionality, a man so bound within the circle of his own thoughts that he had little time or inclination to peek out and see which way the world was moving.