CHARLES SUMNER

As Mark Twain, in the preceding pages may be said to have led the reader back into the Boston and Cambridge circle, so there were constant excursions of interest from that circle out into the world in which such a man as Sumner stood as the friend of such another as Longfellow. For twenty-three years, from 1851 till his death in 1874, Sumner was a member of the United States Senate, and consequently was much more to be seen in Washington than in the State he represented. He appears from time to time in the pages of Mrs. Fields’s diary, and in the two ensuing passages figures first at her Boston dinner-table and then in Washington:

Saturday, November 18, 1865.—Last night Miss Kate Field and Charles Sumner dined with us. Before we went to dinner Charlotte Foster, the young colored girl whom Elizabeth Whittier was so fond of and who is now secretary of the Freedmen’s Bureau, came in to call. She is very pretty and good. It is difficult nevertheless for her to find a boarding-place. People do not readily admit a colored woman into their families. I shall help her to find a good home....

Mr. Sumner opened the conversation at dinner by asking Miss Field to tell him something of Mr. Landor. She, smiling, said that was difficult now because she had talked and written so much of him that she hardly knew what was left unsaid. Mr. Sumner described his own first introduction then at the house of his old friend, Mr. Kenyon, in London. He had dropped in there by accident, but was positively engaged elsewhere at dinner; before he left, however, he was able to parry skilfully a remark aimed at the Yankees, which tickled Mr. Landor and made him try to hold on and induce him to stay. He was obliged to go then, however, but he returned a few days after to breakfast, when Landor asked him why the body of Washington did not rest in the Capitol at Washington. “Because,” said Mr. Sumner, “his family wished his ashes to remain at Mt. Vernon.” “Ashes,” said L., “his body was not burned; why do you say ‘ashes,’ sir?” “I quoted, ‘E’en in our ashes live their wonted fires,’ and he said nothing more at the time, but,” added Mr. Sumner, “I have never used ‘ashes’ since.”

Kate Field said “his wife was a perfect fiend”; but Mr. Sumner was inclined to doubt the statement. “These marriages with men of genius are hard,” he said, “because genius wins the race in the end.”

Then Kate brought the authority of Mr. Browning and others to back her statement, but, referring to Mr. Landor’s temper, she said that while the Storys were at Siena passing the summer one year, the Brownings took a villa near by and Mr. Landor lived opposite, while she and Miss Isa Blagden went down to make the Brownings a visit. During their stay Mr. Landor fancied that the stock of tea lately purchased for his use was poisoned, and threw it all out of the window. The Contadine reaped the benefit of this; they came and gathered it up like a flock of doves.

Mr. Sumner spoke of the high, very high place he accorded to Mr. Landor as a writer of prose. He had been a source of great admiration to him for years, he said. As long ago as when G. W. Greene was living in Rome and first becoming a writer, he asked Mr. Sumner what masters of prose he should study. “Then,” said Mr. S., “you remember his own style was bad; the sentences apt to be jumbled up together. I told him to read Bacon, and Hooker, and all the prose of Dryden he could find in the prefaces and elsewhere, and Walter Savage Landor; and my reverence for Mr. Landor as a writer of prose has never diminished.”

Later during the dinner, talking of his life abroad, Mr. Sumner was reminded of a letter he had received from John P. Hale, our minister plenipotentiary to Spain. He said for a number of years, while Mr. Hale was in the Senate, whenever appeals came from our foreign ministers or consuls abroad asking for increase of salary, Mr. Hale would jump up and say, “Gentlemen of the Senate, allow me to say I would engage to live at any point in Europe upon the salary now granted by the Government. It is no economy, indeed it is a great lack of economy, to think of raising these salaries.”

“Hereupon comes a letter from Spain urging an increase of salary in terms which would convulse the Senate with laughter after the protestations they have heard so often. I should like nothing better than to read it to them.” For the lack of their presence, however, he read it to us, and it was amusing truly, as if the old days and speeches were a blank.

Mr. Sumner easily slipped from this subject into others connected with the Government.