Of my life at City College I wish that I could write more, because I wish I had been privileged to graduate with the Class of 1875. There were 286 of us, and I remember very vividly some of the incidents of my brief stay. The halo of military distinction that encircled the brow of the president, General Alexander S. Webb, is still bright for me, and bright that day when the great Christine Nilsson came to our classroom and sang for us. Of the faculty, Professor Doremus remains especially vivid in my memory; electricity for illuminating purposes was at that time confined to powerful arc-lights; he tried to explain to us the possibility of some inventor some day subdividing the power in one of those lamps so that it could be used to illuminate private houses. Though “stumped” in anatomy and chemistry through my unfamiliarity with the long words employed, I stood well on the general roll and was No. 11. My college career was rudely ended on March 20, 1871, when my father withdrew me and put me to work. His difficulty in mastering the English language and American commercial methods were handicaps too severe for him. He lost most of his original money, and his unreinforced efforts could not support us all.
Early in our occupancy of the Second Avenue house, the back parlour had to be rented as a doctor’s office, and shortly after my mother decided that it was her duty to take in boarders. I cannot speak of my mother as she was during these trials without the deepest emotion. There is nobody to whom I owe so much; there was no debt which so profoundly affected my entire career. In Mannheim her position had always been one of comfort. I had seen her there with good friends, good books, good dramas, and good music; she was the mistress of a commodious house, with a corps of competent servants, in a city with every custom and tradition of which she was intimately familiar; respected by the community, the mother of thirteen children, she was calm, philosophic, considerate of every domestic call upon her, not only supervising our education, physical and mental, but also finding time to add continuously to her own broad culture. Now a complete change had come. She was a stranger in a strange land; most of her friends were new; the city of her husband’s adoption was a puzzle, its manners foreign, its language long almost unknown; there was small time for amusement; there was, on the contrary, the ever-constant and ever-pressing strain of helping, by her own endeavours, to make both ends meet.
All of this deeply affected my young and impressionable mind. I feared lest my mother, who was my idol, and who was so superior in accomplishments and knowledge to the people that boarded with us, might, in the course of her duties, be compelled to render quasi-menial services. Luckily, two things prevented this. On the one hand, her wonderful poise and tact and her extraordinarily sweet nature won so prompt a recognition that the least gentle of our lodgers instinctively became worshippers at her shrine. On the other hand, my sisters, themselves bred to comfort, rivalled one another in a friendly struggle to shield her from every possible annoyance. High-spirited girls as they were, they did not hesitate to assume everything that might in any way hurt her sensibilities, and their devotion and self-sacrifice are among my tenderest memories.
Appreciating how things were at home, I became quickly reconciled to abandoning textbook education, and instead, to plunging into the rough school of life.
The influence of the beautiful spirit of my mother had early given me good ideals and a love of purity, and the ebb of the family fortunes developed an irrepressible ambition to accomplish four things: to restore my mother to the comforts to which she had been accustomed; to save myself from an old age of financial stress such as my father’s; to give my own children the chances in life that were all but denied to me, and to try to attain a standard of thought and conduct consonant with the fine concepts that characterized my mother’s mind and lips.
My experiences were not unique, nor were my high resolves exceptionally heroic; they are found in the life history of most men. Nevertheless, such histories are not often told at first hand, so that what may have been commonplace in the happening becomes interesting in the narration. Forsaking the chronological order of my story, let me look backward and forward in an attempt to present this phase of my mental development.
I was full of energy, and had tremendous hopes as to my future success, which gave me a certain assurance that was often misconstrued into conceit, but which was really a conviction of the necessity to collect religiously a mental, moral, physical, and financial reserve guaranteeing the realization of my best desires.
Accordingly, I pursued a rather carefully ordered course. At the age of fourteen I had taken very seriously my confirmation in the Thirty-ninth Street Temple, and now I formed the habit of visiting churches of many denominations and making abstracts of the sermons that I heard delivered by Henry Ward Beecher, Henry W. Bellows, Rabbi Einhorn, Richard S. Storrs, T. De Witt Talmage, and Dr. Alger, and many others of the famous pulpit-orators who enriched the intellectual life of New York. It was the era when Emerson led American thought, and I profited by passing my impressionable years in that period whose daily press was edited by such men as Horace Greeley, William Cullen Bryant, Charles A. Dana, Henry T. Raymond, and Lawrence Godkin.
There lived with us a hunchbacked Quaker doctor, Samuel S. Whitall, a beautiful character, softened instead of embittered by his affliction, the physician at the coloured hospital, who gave half his time to charitable work among the poor. I frequently opened the door for his patients and ran his errands, and we became friends. I remember his long, religious talks, and how deeply I was impressed by Penn’s “No Cross, No Crown,” a copy of which he gave me. Largely because of it I composed twenty-four rules of action, tabulating virtues that I wished to acquire and vices that I must avoid. I even made a chart of these maxims, and every night marked against myself whatever breaches of them I had been guilty of. Looking over this record for February and March of 1872, I find that I charged myself with dereliction in not heeding my self-imposed admonitions against indulgence in sweets, departures from strict veracity, too much talking, extravagance, idleness, and vanity—a heavy indictment!
The fact is that I had acquired an almost monastic habit of mind and loved the conquest of my impulses much as the athlete loves the subjection of his muscles to the demands of his will. In my commonplace book for 1871 I find transcribed two quotations that governed me. The one is from Dr. Hall’s “Happy Old Age” and runs: