V: An Eccentric Visitor
WE may be permitted to take a certain pride in the fact that most strangers who sojourn for a time among us express admiration and liking for the town. There has been, however, one historic and notable exception. A young man named Percival who visited us in 1815, the year of his graduation from Yale College, did not care for Hartford at all and, moreover, did not hesitate to proclaim his distaste in some of the verses he was then engaged in writing. However, poor Percival did not like any spot very well. It is with a sense of faint amusement or, when we know his history, of compassion, rather than with any shade of resentment, that we now read the stanzas in which he published his sentiments to an unappreciative world:
"Ismir! Fare thee well forever!
From thy walls with joy I go,
Every tie I freely sever,
Flying from thy den of woe.
* * * *
Ismir! Land of cursed deceivers,
Where the sons of darkness dwell
Hope, the cherub's base bereavers,—
Hateful city! Fare thee well."
When he wrote this James Gates Percival was twenty years old. Some of the emotion of these lines arose simply from uncurbed youthful reaction from disappointment. Most of it, however, was individual and characteristic temperament—the same uncomfortable mental constitution that seemed to make it impossible for him to withhold the vitriolic verses he wrote and printed on the character of a clergyman who had objected to Percival's suit for his daughter's hand.
The young poet had come to Hartford on the invitation of his classmate, Horace Hooker, who later entered the ministry and whose wife wrote for the young a number of very instructive and very pious stories which in their day attained a considerable popularity. It was hoped that in the literary atmosphere which at that time existed in Hartford this odd young man, with his undoubted poetic strain and his dreamy and contemplative nature, would find a congenial milieu.
The visit, however, was a failure. Young Percival was not popular. "He was too shy and modest," says his biographer, "to adapt himself to different circles. He wanted confidence, and at social gatherings [in Hartford] he talked at great length on single subjects, but in so low a tone that people could not hear him. He was not treated as he expected to be; it seemed to him that he was not appreciated, and he came away in disgust."
This charge against us of lack of appreciation finds some mitigation in the fact that the poet departed from many places in the same frame of mind and for the same reason. Percival was one of those pathetic spirits who find the world an unhappy abiding place. His constitutional wretchedness was in fact so extreme that he is said in early life to have attempted self-destruction and one of his best poems, as well as one of the gloomiest in the language, reflects his moods at this period under the title of "The Suicide."
Fortune aggravated the disadvantage of one unfitted at the best to cope with the world by allotting to him a life of penury. For many years he lived as a recluse in the State Hospital Building in New Haven where he was allowed the use of three rooms which he never permitted visitors to enter—on one occasion even refusing to admit Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It is related that at another time a somewhat pompous gentleman, accompanied by two ladies, was visiting the building and, learning that the poet lived there, rapped at his door and then stood waiting, a lady on each side of him. The door opened a crack and Percival's face appeared. "I am extremely happy and rejoiced," began the visitor, with a great deal of manner, "that I have the honor of addressing the poet Percival—" But he got no further, for Percival instantly ejaculated "Boo!" and slammed the door. This seems to have been his customary manner of excusing himself to callers.