VI
NOTED VISITORS AT “GREEN PEACE”
Charles Simmer and His Brother George.—Edwin P. Whipple. James T. Fields.—Doctor Kane.—Rev. Thomas Starr King.—Prof. Cornelius C. Felton.—Arthur Hugh Clough.—Frederika Bremer.—Laura Bridgman.
AMONG those who came to “Green Peace” was Charles Sumner, my father’s most intimate friend. The great Massachusetts Senator towered above his fellow-men physically as well as intellectually. He was a man of noble proportions, and his great height and size seemed to correspond with entire fitness to his massive brain and solid mental acquirements. The great dignity of his character and manner made him seem even larger than he really was. I cannot give his exact height, but it was at least six feet two inches. Brother Harry once said to our younger sister:
“There are two kinds of giants, Laura. There are the ogres who eat people up, and there are the harmless giants. Now Mr. Sumner is a harmless giant!”
He was a handsome man, always well dressed and scrupulously exact about his personal appearance. When I first remember him he usually wore drab-cloth gaiters with white-pearl buttons, which gave him a look of immaculate neatness. Yet we know he was not a dandy, because Mr. Longfellow tells us so. A large man—who is necessarily the target for many eyes—should certainly be careful about his appearance. Six feet three with breadth in proportion would make a large area of untidiness sad to contemplate! We children, as I have said, considered him as a good-natured giant, but he was not familiar with little people and their ways. We did not have much intercourse with him, save from an admiring distance. But he well understood that children like presents. He brought two dolls for Julia and Flossy from the anti-slavery fair. I am ashamed to say that, although the younger, I insisted on having the beautiful wax doll dressed in white with “Effie” marked on her handkerchief! Julia received the companion doll, dressed in black as a nun. She did not compare with Effie in beauty.
On a certain evening, as he was going out of the front door of “Green Peace,” I valiantly called out to him, “Good night, Mr. Sumner.” And a great voice answered me out of the darkness, “Good night, child!” He was very careful and exact in his use of English, as became a man of scholarly attainments, and did not like to have other people take liberties with our mother-tongue. Thus he rebuked our governess for saying that the clock was out of kilter. There was no such word as kilter, he averred, in the English language. Miss Seegar was rather indignant at being forbidden the use of this quaint Yankee expression; after Mr. Sumner had gone she took down the dictionary and found that kilter was duly recorded there!
It is evidently one of the many so-called Americanisms which are, in reality, words formerly used in England.
He once went away from a party at our house without taking leave of any one. My mother was rather troubled at this, and my father, who had known Mr. Sumner long and intimately, said, “Why, that is Sumner’s idea of taking French leave.” Whereupon sister Julia observed, “I should as soon think of an elephant walking incognito down Broadway as of Mr. Sumner’s taking French leave without being observed.”
Of the attack upon him in the Senate I shall speak later. Suffice it to say here that the intense and prolonged physical suffering caused by this murderous assault was not the only form of political martyrdom which he was destined to endure.