He graced whatever he touched, and made the commonplace poetic. The ineffable tenderness and purity of his verse were the atmosphere in which the man lived and moved and breathed. The mystic afflatus of the born poet clothed him, as with a garment.
George P. Morris I met again and again. With the frank conceit, so permeated with the amiability and naïveté of the veteran songster, that it offended nobody, he told me how Braham had sung Woodman, Spare That Tree, before Queen Victoria, at her special request, and that Jenny Marsh of Cherry Valley was more of an accepted classic than Roy’s Wife of Aldivalloch. He narrated, too, the thrilling effect produced upon an audience in New York or Philadelphia by the singing for the first time in public of Near the Rock Where Drooped the Willow, and smiled benignantly on hearing that it was a favorite ballad in our home. He was then associated with N. P. Willis in the editorship of The New York Mirror, and agreed fully with me that it had not its peer among American literary periodicals.
My mother had taken it for years. We had a shelf full of the bound volumes at home. I have some of them in my own library, and twice or three times in the year, have a rainy afternoon-revel over the yellowed, brittle pages mottled with the mysterious, umber thumbmarks of Time.
Colonel Morris’s partner, Nathaniel Parker Willis, who had not yet taken to writing out the name at full length, was at his country-seat of “Idlewild.” He was ten years older when I saw him last, and under circumstances that took the sting from regret that I had not met him when life was fresh and faiths were easily confirmed.
While in Dorchester I had enjoyed improving my acquaintanceship with Maria Cummins. Encyclopædias register her briefly as “An American novelist. She wrote The Lamplighter.” In 1855, no other woman writer was so prominently before the reading public. The Lamplighter was in every home, and gossip of the personality of the author was seized upon greedily by press and readers. Meeting Augusta Evans, of Rutledge and St. Elmo and Beulah, four years thereafter, I was forcibly reminded of my Dorchester friend, albeit they belonged to totally different schools of literature. Both were quietly refined in manner and speech, and incredibly unspoiled by the flood of popular favor that had taken each by surprise. Alike, too, was the warmth of cordiality with which both greeted me, a stranger, whom they might never meet again.
An amusing incident connected with one of Maria Cummins’s visits broke down any lingering trace of strangerhood. She was to take tea at the house of my cousin, Francis Pierce. I was sitting by the window of the drawing-room, awaiting her arrival and gazing at the panorama of Boston Bay and the intervening hills, when an old lady, a relative-in-law of “Cousin Melissa,” stole in. She was over eighty, and so pathetically alone in the lower world that Melissa—the personation of Charity, which is Love—had granted her home and care for several years. She had donned her best cap and gown; as she crept up to me, she glanced nervously from side to side, and her withered hands chafed one another in agitation she could not conceal.
“I say, dearie,” she began, in a whisper, bending down to my face, “would you mind if I was to sit in the corner over there”—nodding toward the back parlor—“and listen to your talk after Miss Cummins comes? I won’t make the least mite of noise. I am an old woman. I never had a chance to hear two actresses talk before, and I may never have another.”
I consented, laughingly, and she took up her position just in time to escape being seen by the incoming guest. We chatted away cheerily at our far window, watching the sunset as it crimsoned the bay and faded languidly into warm gray.
“Summer sunsets are associated in my mind, in a dreamy way, with the tinkle of cow-bells,” observed my companion, and went on to tell how, as a child, living in Salem, she used to watch the long lines of cows coming in from the meadows at evening, and how musically the tinkle of many bells blended with other sunset sounds.