A number of Frederika Bremer’s books have been translated into English; we read her stories with much pleasure in our school-girl days. The H—— Family, The Neighbors, The Home, are the titles of some of them. Her description of Swedish family life is delightful.
George Sumner, like the Senator, was a man of intellectual tastes and possessed a wide knowledge of books. In mid-Victorian days there was no complete catalogue of the library in the Vatican. Some one in Rome who was anxious to find a certain volume was referred to “a young American who knows more about the books there than any one else.” This was George Sumner. He was one of the habitués of our house. I remember a visit he paid us at Lawton’s Valley when a lame knee gave him anxiety. We heard him walk heavily and perseveringly up and down his room, in the vain hope of curing it by exercise. One day there was a crash! In the effort to save himself from falling he had pulled over the light iron washstand. When he again visited us my father had him placed, chair and all, in an open wagon that he might enjoy a drive. I last saw him at the Massachusetts General Hospital when he could move little save his head. Thus was a brilliant man in the prime of life turned gradually into a marble statue!
George L. Stearns was a striking figure, with his beautiful brown beard, long, soft, and silky as a woman’s hair. He was greatly interested in the anti-slavery cause, and when the Civil War came entered the army as a major. He wished to serve without pay, which my father thought a mistake, because an unpaid volunteer might feel unwilling to submit to the regular discipline of the army. It is true that my father had served in the army of Greece without pay, but the conditions there were very different from those prevailing in the United States during the Civil War.
Mrs. Stearns was also full of public spirit, although sometimes rather sentimental. She once brought to “Green Peace” a bunch of nasturtiums of various colors, which were then something of a rarity. Apropos of these, she said to my father, who knew nothing of music:
“Doctor Howe, do not the palest of these nasturtiums remind you of the high notes of the soprano in the opera of ‘Semiramide’?”
The persons of note who came to “Green Peace” could all speak some language—Greek, French, Polish, German, or Italian—if not English.
There was one silent figure, however, who spoke only with her swift-flying fingers. Yet her fame had spread over the civilized world. The name of Laura Bridgman was a household word in the nineteenth century. That a girl, deaf, dumb, and blind from infancy, should be able to communicate her thoughts to others, write, cipher, and study like other children, was thought a miracle. People found it so hard to believe that they came in crowds to see the marvel with their own eyes. So many visitors—eleven hundred, on one occasion—appeared at the weekly exhibitions of the school that it was thought necessary to seat Laura in a little enclosure, lest her young head be turned by too much attention.
Charles Dickens thus saw her. His account of his visit to the school, with a beautiful tribute to my father, is to be found in his American Notes. If Byron’s helmet was the symbol of the latter’s earlier labors, Laura Bridgman was the living witness of the success of his later work.
She was often summoned to “Green Peace” to see foreigners of distinction, as well as to make familiar visits to the household. When I can first remember her she was a young woman in the early twenties. Her education had then been completed, but she was allowed to remain at the school, the true home of her spirit. Here every one could talk her finger language.
In appearance Laura was exquisitely neat. Her brown hair was brushed perfectly smooth and braided in a coil at the nape of the neck, thus showing to advantage her shapely head. She had good features and was comely, save for the heavy white scars at her throat made by the disease—scarlet fever—which had deprived her of her senses. Green shades covered the sightless eyes.