One of Lowell’s fellow professors told me this curious story, which will illustrate the narrowness of New England observation at that time. There appeared at Cambridge in the year 1859 a young gentleman named Robert Todd Lincoln, who has been already quoted, and is quite well known in this country and in England. This young man wished to enter Harvard College, and his father, one Abraham Lincoln, who has since been known in the larger world, had fortified him with a letter of introduction to Dr. Walker, the president of the college. This letter of introduction was given by one Stephen A. Douglas, who was a person also then quite well known in political life, and he presented the young man to Dr. Walker as being the son of his friend Abraham Lincoln, “with whom I have lately been canvassing the State of Illinois.” When this letter, now so curious in history, was read, Lowell said to my friend who tells me the story, “I suppose I am the only man in this room who has ever heard of this Abraham Lincoln; but he is the person with whom Douglas has been traveling up and down in Illinois, canvassing the State in their new Western fashion, as representatives of the two parties, each of them being the candidate for the vacant seat in the Senate.” What is more, my friend says it is probably true that at the moment when this letter was presented by young Robert Lincoln, none of the faculty of Harvard College, excepting Lowell, had ever heard of Abraham Lincoln. The story is a good one, as showing how far it was in those days possible for a circle of intelligent men to know little or nothing of what was happening in the world beyond the sound of their college bell.[[9]]
It would be almost of course that, in a series of reminiscences which are not simply about Lowell but about his friends, I should include some careful history of the Saturday Club, which has held its regular meetings up to this time from the date of the dinner-party given by Mr. Phillips, as already described in the history of the “Atlantic.” But that story has been so well told by Mr. Morse in his memoir of Dr. Holmes, and by Mr. Cooke in the “New England Magazine,” that I need hardly do more than repeat what has been said before. In Morse’s “Life of Dr. Holmes” there are two pages of admirably well-selected pictures of some of the members best known. When the reader sees the names of gentlemen who have attended the club more or less regularly in forty years, he will readily understand why Emerson and Holmes and Lowell and others of their contemporaries have spoken of the talk there as being as good talk as they had ever heard anywhere. Holmes’s list, besides himself, was Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Motley, Whipple, Whittier, Professors Agassiz and Peirce; John Sullivan Dwight, Governor Andrew, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and Charles Sumner, Presidents Felton and Eliot, Professors Norton and Goodwin, William Hickling Prescott, Thomas Gold Appleton, John Murray Forbes, John Elliot Cabot, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, William Morris Hunt, Charles Francis Adams, Francis Parkman, James Freeman Clarke, Judge Lowell, Judge Hoar, George Frisbie Hoar, and Bishop Brooks.
CHARLES ELIOT NORTON
One of the last times when I saw Lowell and Emerson together was on the 18th of July, 1867, when Emerson delivered his second Phi Beta Kappa address. It had never happened before, I think, that the same orator should have spoken twice before Phi Beta Kappa with an interval of thirty years between the orations; nor is it probable that such a thing will ever happen again. In 1837 the word Transcendentalist was new, and it was considered “good form” to ridicule the Transcendentalists, and especially to ridicule Emerson. Yet he had his admirers then, especially his admirers in college, where the recollections of his poetry and philosophy, as shown when he was an undergraduate, had not died out. A few years ago I printed his two Bowdoin prize dissertations, written when he was seventeen and eighteen years of age, and they are enough to show that the boy, at that age, was father of the man. When he spoke in 1837, the oration was received in a certain patronizing way by his seniors. Mr. Cabot says, “He was regarded as a promising young beginner, from whom a fair poetical speech might be expected,” and the address was spoken of with a gay badinage such as could not be called criticism. I remember, at the frugal dinner-party of Phi Beta Kappa after the oration of 1837, Mr. Edward Everett, who was an enthusiastic Cambridge man and college man and Phi Beta man, said with perfect good nature of the Transcendentalists, that their utterances seemed to him to be compounded like the bolts of Jupiter,—
“Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosæ
Addiderant, rutili tres ignis, et alitis Austri,”
and made this extempore translation:—
“Three parts were raging fire, and three were whelming water,
But three were thirsty cloud, and three were empty wind!”