Audubon had passed through the hardest struggles of his life, had travelled in England, in France, in Scotland, arranging for the publication of his bird pictures, that remarkable work which set his memory apart; he had succeeded in his life's object, and at the close of 1840 had come here to this forest hillside by the Hudson, built the house on the estate Minniesland, named in honor of his wife, made it a luxurious abode, and there gathered his friends about him.
With this home of Audubon there is associated a memory of the early days of the telegraph. When Samuel F.B. Morse built the first telegraph line to Philadelphia, he had it strung across the river from Fort Lee to the basement of Audubon's house, and there he received the first telegraphic message ever sent to the island of Manhattan. Here Audubon lived, wrote, and painted until even his rugged strength was worn out. He worked until those clever ambidextrous hands lost the cunning to work out the forms his active brain could still conceive. The day came, in 1851, when he died, fortunately before any great change had come over the beauties of Minniesland. The peacefulness of Trinity Cemetery, which takes in part of the Audubon farm, is still faintly reminiscent of the scene of the ornithologist's later life, and there, close by the old house, is the grave of Audubon, and upon his tomb are sculptured the birds he loved so well, now keeping watch over him.
While Audubon worked in his out-of-town retreat, another scholar and writer lived farther down the island towards the city. Clement C. Moore lived in a little district of his own called Chelsea Village, now merged into the city by so deft a laying out of streets that there is little irregularity at the point where town and village met. A bit of the old village remains exactly as it was in the General Theological Seminary, and the block on which it stands, Twentieth to Twenty-first streets, Ninth and Tenth avenues, is still called Chelsea Square. Clement C. Moore inherited from his father, Bishop Benjamin Moore, a large tract of land along the river near the present Chelsea Square, and gave the land on which the seminary was built to that institution. He himself lived in a house which his father had occupied before him and which stood on the line of the present Twenty-third Street on the block between Ninth and Tenth avenues. It was a very old building, renowned for the fact that General Washington had stopped there one afternoon when he had his headquarters in the city. Clement C. Moore was a professor in the General Theological Seminary, and while there compiled the first Greek and Hebrew lexicons ever published in this country. But it is not by reason of his learned books or his philanthropy that his name is best recalled, but by a poem which he wrote for his children and of which the world at large might never have known but that it was sent without his knowledge and published in an up-State paper. This poem, the Christmas classic of The Visit of St. Nicholas, begins with "'T was the night before Christmas," and its simple yet merry jingle and delightful word-pictures have endeared it to all children since his time and will endure to please many more to come.
All that there was of literary New York half a century ago centred about Anne C. Lynch. She established a circle, a gathering which increased or fell off in numbers as men and women of brains came and went. This was the first near approach to a salon in this country. In the early days of her coming to the city, Miss Lynch lived in a neat-appearing brick house in Waverly Place, just off Washington Square. She moved elsewhere from time to time, the literary coterie moving about as she moved. At the height of her success, in 1855, she married the Italian educator, Vincenzo Botta, then in his second year in New York and occupying a professorship of Italian literature in the University of New York. The receptions of Mrs. Botta flourished and were as popular as had been those of Miss Lynch. Her writings, too, went on, and her most widely known work, the material for which she gathered during her intimate personal association with many authors, the Handbook of Universal Literature, was written when she lived in Thirty-seventh Street, a few doors west of Fifth Avenue.
In the early years of Anne C. Lynch's receptions, one of her intimates was Caroline M. Kirkland, the friend of Bayard Taylor. Mrs. Kirkland, who had just returned after a residence in Michigan, sought her advice before she published Forest Life, which was the second of her descriptions of the sparsely settled region where she had spent three years of her life. The intimacy between these two continued for years, indeed until Mrs. Kirkland died, in 1864, stricken with paralysis while under the strain of managing a great sanitary fair during the Civil War.
Through Mrs. Kirkland, Lydia M. Child was introduced at the Lynch receptions, when she was associated with her husband in conducting the National Anti-Slavery Standard. She had been a writer since her youth, having published her first book, Hobomok, in 1821. Her works had been much read, but lost much of their popularity after she published the first anti-slavery book in America, in 1833, under the title An Appeal for that Class of Americans Called Africans. She ever remained prominent as an abolitionist, but because of her opinions lost caste as a writer of novels. But Miss Lynch cared little what opinions any one held so long as they really had opinions and would stand by them, and Mrs. Child was welcomed to her home until she left the city, in 1844, to spend the rest of her life in Wayland, Massachusetts.