A tree does not show more markedly than man the results of ancestral care, wealth, and leisurely culture. Numerous are the faces and histories scattered all through our national album, which are signalized by a curious mixture of original forest wildness and park growths newly begun, cultivated shoots grafted upon hardy native stocks, and giving off large unsymmetrically shaped fruits,—fruits less sour than the natural, but less genial, plump, mellow, and blooming than the full-nursed growth. Of these were, in oratory, Felix Grundy, whose exposed youth shot up on the wilderness frontier of Kentucky, where “death was in almost every bush, and an ambuscade in every thicket,” and who attained, in Tennessee, a large altitude and breadth; Sargeant S. Prentiss, transplanted from among the pines of Maine to the coarse richness of a Mississippi soil, and through whose waving tops swept sometimes the storm of invective, sometimes the æolian strains of tenderest, soul-trembling breathings; John J. Crittenden, a farmer’s boy, born in 1785, whose prickly logic sheathed, like a burr, the smooth-meated chestnut; and, among statesmen, Samuel Houston of Texas, shaggy-barked, yet with much tasselling wealth of flower at the top; Daniel D. Tompkins of New York, and a large number of others, strong saplings, pushing up in brave defiance of adversities, some wrought into bureaus, others inlaying cabinets,—American woods, some still sappy and cross-grained, but making as good state furniture as an untechnical taste has hitherto been content to demand or use.
Glancing through our book,—in which we treasure only the portraits of the departed,—we dwell with satisfaction upon a group of high-toned, conscientious, Christian statesmen, who honored public office in their persons, and shed upon the Senate a light so effulgent, that the many opaque substances, so often thrust into it, have not been able wholly to absorb: John Macpherson Berrien, born in 1781; Theodore Frelinghuysen and Samuel L. Southard, in 1787; and William C. Preston in 1794; with whom are worthily associated Hugh S. Legaré, whose fine face brought its welcome into every company, as his radiant mind sparkled and scintillated over every subject; and Benjamin F. Butler of New York, whose clear-cut physiognomy, like an antique on a fine stone, shows handsomely in every setting.
Winfield Scott came into life in 1786, and so crystallized about himself each of the three wars in which he was the principal magnet,—the maritime contest of 1812, the Mexican war in 1847, and the opening of the Rebellion in 1861,—that his calm front and majestic presence would readily single him out as the model figure for our American Mars. Like a great elm in the Berkshire valley he stands, massive in strength of trunk, spreading out in varied branches of learning, special study, and active experience, and dropping his pendulous, wide-circuiting limbs and generous foliage over a broad expanse of rich meadow. Under this vast, wide-reaching, many-dropping banyan-tree history seems to gather in a sleepy, contented calm.
Dearly do we all love to pause over the beautifully bordered page which holds the genial, sunny-faced visage of Washington Irving. He was four years old when Washington delivered his first Inaugural. Through all the nineteenth century he shines, like a blessed presence, until his eclipse, in 1859. How our landscapes, the lives of our best and worthiest, the graceful legends of our rivers, mountains, prairies, and historical sites,—barren, voiceless, and dumb before, warm into life, and stretch out their living hands in tender entreaty, instinct and round with charms of persuasive beauty, as, like the prophet over the child, he stretches himself over them!
Of some of his associates and compeers, still happily spared to us, we cannot speak; for the living are too numerous to be enumerated, and too near to be sketched; but of Joseph Rodman Drake, whose brief twenty-five years of life exhaled such beautiful and deathless creations as the Culprit Fay; of Fitz-Greene Halleck, his companion and fellow-laborer, whose rare humor stole into delicious song, as sprites are said to play hide-and-seek in buttercups and honeysuckles; and of James R. Paulding, linked in literary work as by family ties with Irving, and whose diversified genius gives him a large, if not a choice place in our Walhalla,—of all these kindly faces we delight to keep copies in our album.
Like Irving, fortunate in the enjoyment of a wide European reputation, but less fortunate than he in securing the undivided hearts of his countrymen,—whose early history, aboriginal legends, forest scenery, and naval characters he has so well tapestried in novels, essay, biography, and history,—James Fenimore Cooper, born in 1789, has, by his sea tales, caused many a mother’s heart to yearn after her runaway boy, and by his land stories, garnered up many of our best sheaves of fiction into a national stack. As we gaze on his large, square, massive forehead, we forget his sharply feathered arrows, aimed at our national faults, which generally, of course, missed the conscience and touched only the liver. Remembering “The Pioneers,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “The Spy,” “Pilot,” and “Red Rover,” we fall to blessing the creations which stalk over our rough fences, and brush away our raw villages, uproarious with faces of civilized red-men, and so endeavor to get by, as boys do a haunted place at nightfall, the recollection of those twenty-two libel suits, whose damages he found, like most plaintiffs in that species of legal fiction, to end in the payment of the costs out of his own pocket.
Others there are, too, whose physiognomies recall to us pleasantly the explorers in science, workers amid Nature’s secrets, earlier than those who now push their daring way into her very robing-room: Benjamin Silliman, the elder, who came in 1779, and through a long life lectured so many into the pleasant idea that they knew something of geology and chemistry, and through his “Journal of Science,” established in 1818, gathered up the mental products of his fellow-harvesters; Robert Hare, two years younger, who, at the age of twenty, invented the compound blow-pipe, and up to his death, in 1858, continued his discoveries, until he left, by his spiritual explorations, his scientific brethren behind him; and Benjamin Rush, born in 1780, who by his tasteful style, made boluses less distasteful, and even gave the muses such a draught that they became delirious over his medical pages.
William H. Prescott, reserved until nearly the close of the eighteenth century ere he was born, and becoming blind in outward vision at the age of eighteen, so clarified his inner sight and quickened it to the perception of new beauties, and so perfected himself by the grace, gentleness, and cheerful gayety of a happy nature, that Peru, Mexico, the times of Ferdinand, Isabella, and Philip II., filtrated through them, glow in splendor and are inwrought and outwrought in such delicacy of color and such noble boldness as to make him stand out in singularly beautiful proportions to thousands of loving eyes, that have never rested, and will now never rest, upon his fine classic head.
Stop we a moment to admire the intellectual features of Catherine M. Sedgwick, born in 1798, whose wise essays and wiser fictions lie upon so many tables; the calm head of Horatio Greenough, who produced his first work, the “Chanting Cherubs,” upon a commission from Fenimore Cooper, brought out the earliest American group in marble, and became a very Medusa, turning many Americans into stone; and finally the grand, quaint physiognomy of Nathaniel Hawthorne, given to us in 1804, and just withdrawn, whose genial tales and humorous descriptions will keep his memory as odorous as woodbines around the porches of houses seven-gabled, mossed, newly Gothic, or indifferently green-shuttered, and up to their eaves in white paint.
Unwillingly we close the list; for many are worthy to be added, who have laid their aching brains away, and more who are coining from their living thoughts a mintage more national than greenbacks and not half so soiled.