And the Antipodes too have a Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich.”
And other readers will remember that, for nearly a generation, more than half the English novels which turned out well, ended thus, in a flourish of trumpets in which anybody who was good for anything went away from England. Even Carlyle’s Chartism had nothing better to propose than that England should send away the people she did not know how to take care of at home. Among them Clough came, but apparently he was too old. He went back to England, and, I think, accepted a government office—not, perhaps, inspector of slate-pencils, but something not more edifying. He died in 1862, in Florence.
He was a charming poet, and I cannot but think a charming companion. I always think of him as a bishop “in partibus,” a bishop without a mitre or a see. For Mr. Emerson told me an interesting story of Clough. He was one of a cluster of young men who had taken great delight in Emerson, on his visit in 1848 in England. When that visit was over, and Mr. Emerson sailed for America on his return, Clough accompanied him to Liverpool and bade him good-by on the deck of the steamer. As they walked up and down the deck together, Clough said sadly, “What shall we do without you? Think where we are. Carlyle has led us all out into the desert, and he has left us there”—a remark which was exactly true. Emerson said in reply that very many of the fine young men in England had said this to him as he went up and down in his journeyings there. “And I put my hand upon his head as we walked, and I said, ‘Clough, I consecrate you Bishop of all England. It shall be your part to go up and down through the desert to find out these wanderers and to lead them into the promised land.’”
I do not know, but I am afraid that Clough never thought himself in the promised land, nor scarcely upon any Pisgah looking down upon it. But I tell the story, as showing how highly Emerson thought of Clough as far back as 1849.
As I have said, Lowell succeeded Longfellow, who had come to Cambridge when Lowell was a sophomore; and Lowell, like every one else who worked under Longfellow, was always grateful to him. Longfellow began, all too early, the habit of speaking of himself as an old man. But the published volumes of his own life show how diligent and active he was, and that he considered his relief from the daily work of his professorship as simply an opportunity for wider work in literature.
By his boundless liberality to every child of sorrow he had made Cambridge the Mecca of a polyglot pilgrimage in which any European exiles who could read or write came of course to the Craigie House to ask for his patronage and assistance. With Mr. Lowell’s arrival there were, I think, no fewer of such visitors at the Craigie House; but by the law of the instrument they found their way by the pleasant shady walk which leads from Longfellow’s home to Elmwood and Mount Auburn.
I remember among these an accomplished gentleman, who worked in America in the anti-slavery cause, in ante-bellum days. He always was grateful to Longfellow for his assistance to him, which came at a time when it was most needed. Heinrich von Hutten was a lineal descendant, I think, of Ulrich von Hutten, the poet of the Reformation. He came to this country in the suite of Kossuth, who ought, perhaps, to have been spoken of elsewhere in this series. Von Hutten gave his life and strength, and perhaps his blood, to the Hungarian cause. After his arrival here he was employed by a publishing firm to translate Mrs. Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” into the German language. After he had begun, there was a terror lest a rival translation should be finished before his, and the good Von Hutten worked day and night—too much, alas! by night—in completing the work assigned to him. The story always reminds me of Milton’s sonnet,
“What sustains me, dost thou ask?
The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied
In Liberty’s defense, my noble task,”