WHERE THE "BROTHERS AND SISTERS" MET
No single house in all Massachusetts has survived so many of the vicissitudes of fickle fortune and carried the traditions of a glorious past up into the realities of a prosperous and useful present more successfully than has Fay House, the present home of Radcliffe College, Cambridge. The central portion of the Fay House of to-day dates back nearly a hundred years, and was built by Nathaniel Ireland, a prosperous merchant of Boston. It was indeed a mansion to make farmer-folk stare when, with its tower-like bays, running from ground to roof, it was, in 1806, erected on the highroad to Watertown, the first brick house in the vicinity.
To Mr. Ireland did not come the good fortune of living in the fine dwelling his ambition had designed. A ship-blacksmith by trade, his prospects were ruined by the Jefferson Embargo, and he was obliged to leave the work of construction on his house unfinished and allow the place to pass, heavily mortgaged, into the hands of others. But the house itself and our story concerning it gained by Mr. Ireland's loss, for it now became the property of Doctor Joseph McKean (a famous Harvard instructor), and the rendezvous of that professor's college associates and of the numerous friends of his young family. Oliver Wendell Holmes was among those who spent many a social evening here with the McKeans.
The next name of importance to be connected with Fay House was that of Edward Everett, who lived here for a time. Later Sophia Willard Dana, granddaughter of Chief Justice Dana, our first minister to Russia, kept a boarding and day school for young ladies in the house. Among her pupils were the sisters of James Russell Lowell, Mary Channing, the first wife of Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and members of the Higginson, Parkman, and Tuckerman families. Lowell himself, and Edmund Dana, attended here for a term as a special privilege. Sophia Dana was married in the house, August 22, 1827, by the father of Oliver Wendell Holmes, to Mr. George Ripley, with whom she afterward took an active part in the Brook Farm Colony, of which we are to hear again a bit later in this series. After Miss Dana's marriage, her school was carried on largely by Miss Elizabeth McKean—the daughter of the Doctor Joseph McKean already referred to—a young woman who soon became the wife of Doctor Joseph Worcester, the compiler of the dictionary.
Delightful reminiscences of Fay House have been furnished us by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who, as a boy, was often in and out of the place, visiting his aunt, Mrs. Channing, who lived here with her son, William Henry Channing, the well-known anti-slavery orator. Here Higginson, as a youth, used to listen with keenest pleasure, to the singing of his cousin, Lucy Channing, especially when the song she chose was, "The Mistletoe Hung on the Castle Wall," the story of a bride shut up in a chest. "I used firmly to believe," the genial colonel confessed to the Radcliffe girls, in reviving for them his memories of the house, "that there was a bride shut up in the walls of this house—and there may be to-day, for all I know."
For fifty years after June, 1835, the house was in the possession of Judge P. P. Fay's family. The surroundings were still country-like. Cambridge Common was as yet only a treeless pasture, and the house had not been materially changed from its original shape and plan. Judge Fay was a jolly gentleman of the old school. A judge of probate for a dozen years, an overseer of Harvard College, and a pillar of Christ Church, he was withal fond of a well-turned story and a lover of good hunting, as well as much given to hospitality. Miss Maria Denny Fay, whose memory is now perpetuated in a Radcliffe scholarship, was the sixth of Judge Fay's seven children, and the one who finally became both mistress and owner of the estate. A girl of fourteen when her father bought the house, she was at the time receiving her young-lady education at the Convent of St. Ursula, where, in the vine-covered, red-brick convent on the summit of Charlestown, she learned, under the guidance of the nuns, to sing, play the piano, the harp, and the guitar, to speak French, and read Spanish and Italian. But her life on Mt. Benedict was suddenly terminated when the convent was burned. So she entered earlier than would otherwise have been the case upon the varied interests of her new and beautiful home. Here, in the course of a few years, we find her presiding, a gracious and lovely maiden, of whom the venerable Colonel Higginson has said: "I have never, in looking back, felt more grateful to any one than to this charming girl of twenty, who consented to be a neighbour to me, an awkward boy of seventeen, to attract me in a manner from myself and make me available to other people."
Very happy times were those which the young Wentworth Higginson, then a college boy, living with his mother at Vaughan House, was privileged to share with Maria Fay and her friends. Who of us does not envy him the memory of that Christmas party in 1841, when there were gathered in Fay House, among others, Maria White, Lowell's beautiful fiancée; Levi Thaxter, afterward the husband of Celia Thaxter; Leverett Saltonstall, Mary Story and William Story, the sculptors? And how pleasant it must have been to join in the famous charades of that circle of talented young people, to partake of refreshments in the quaint dining-room, and dance a Virginia reel and galop in the beautiful oval parlour which then, as to-day, expressed ideally the acme of charming hospitality! What tales this same parlour might relate! How enchantingly it might tell, if it could speak, of the graceful Maria White, who, seated in the deep window, must have made an exquisite picture in her white gown, with her beautiful face shining in the moonlight while she repeated, in her soft voice, one of her own ballads, written for the "Brothers and Sisters," as this group of young people was called.
OVAL PARLOUR, FAY HOUSE, CAMBRIDGE, MASS.