Here lie I
Killed by a sky
Rocket in my eye.
It was not by accident that Papa kept us in Boston over the Fourth. He must have longed, as elders do to-day, to be out of the hot city on Independence Day. He knew the risks of city streets to his “young barbarians”, and made it his business to minimize those risks, because he also knew the value of those early impressions upon a child’s imagination. Whatever his children might or might not turn out to be, he took good care that they should all grow up red-hot patriots.
Looking back upon the first six or seven years of my life, I find myself in a dim enchanted land, which I have come to think of as “The Twilight of the Gods”, for the figures that peopled it were, indeed, heroes and demigods. They drop easily apart into two groups, Mama’s friends and Papa’s friends. Mama’s friends—we called them “The Owls”—were poets, philosophers, and theologians, speculative men who sat long and discussed abstract things. Papa’s friends were statesmen, soldiers, militant philanthropists, men of action whose time was too precious for long visits, but who came and went with a certain tense purpose in strong contrast to those others. Such scraps of their talk as one overheard one understood more or less; one at least had some idea of “what they were driving at”, whereas the Owls talked rank nonsense, “about objectivity and subjectivity, Kant and ‘Dant’ and all the rest of them!”
Theodore Parker with his “hammer of Thor” was friend to both parents. I cannot remember him; he lives for me in a sort of dim limbo behind the Twilight of the Gods, peopled by men and women whom my parents had known before I was born and of whom I had heard them talk. Here lives Lafayette, who had signed himself in a letter to Papa (still preserved) “your forever friend”, and Thomas Carlyle, Margaret Fuller, Maria Edgeworth, Florence Nightingale, and a host of others. To this day I am linked to these great shadows by my parents’ friendship, as with some subtlest bond of sympathy and understanding. If I ever meet them, I shall surely know them.
John Brown is perhaps the most real of all these shadowy figures. My mother tells in her Reminiscences of her first meeting with him. My father had warned her of his coming to our house, with these words: “Do you remember that man of whom I spoke to you—the one who wished to be a saviour for the negro race? That man will call here this afternoon; you will receive him.”
The old house at Green Peace holds no more vivid memory than of that visitor who must be secretly admitted by its mistress lest some gossipy servant whisper. She stands, a slight gracious figure at the threshold, gazing earnestly at the stranger, “A Puritan of the Puritans, forceful, self-contained, with hair and beard of amber streaked with gray.”
In “The First Martyr”, one of the best of her patriotic poems, my mother tells the story of an incident of which I have no memory, but which has had its influence upon me for all that.
Returning from a visit to John Brown’s wife, a few weeks before his execution by the Commonwealth of Virginia, my mother came into my nursery and took me on her knee, hoping to distract her thoughts by playing with me. Some sense of what she was suffering was borne in upon me, for I questioned her closely: Why was she so sad? Where had she been that afternoon? Who had she seen? Bit by bit, I got the story from her. The poem, from which I quote the following verses, may be found in “Later Lyrics”:
My five-years’ darling on my knee,
Chattered and toyed and laughed with me;
“Now tell me, mother mine,” quoth she,
“Where you went i’ the afternoon?”
“Alas! my pretty little life,
I went to see a sorrowing wife,
Who will be widowed soon.”
“Now, Mother, what is that?” she said,
With wondering eyes and restless head.