Heaven put it in thy mind to take it hence,
That thou mightst win the more thy father’s love,
Pleading so wisely in excuse of it.’
Then she took the book and closed it. The application was evident to all, but she made us a touching little speech, full of affection, and afterward restored the recess.”[39]
Mrs. Dumont was the first Hoosier to become known beyond the State through imaginative writing. In the little school of story-tellers and poets that flourished in the Ohio Valley in its early history, she was one of the chief figures. It had not then become the fashion to transcribe with fidelity our American local life, and her prose sketches usually reflected nothing of the pioneer times. Her “Life Sketches from Common Paths: A Series of American Tales,” published at New York in 1856, is in the best manner of the day. Western is italicized in the preface of “Ashton Gray,” the novelette which closes the volume, and the author evidently believed that she was making a record of the life that lay about her; but after all, the scene is laid in Ohio and not in Indiana, and a Western atmosphere is not discernible. The hero is the traditional hero of old romance, “whose innate delicacy was refinement, and whose generous impulses, chivalry,” and whose “extreme beauty” was a subject of comment from fair lips. It is not surprising that Annabel, “the dreamy, the impressible, the desolate Annabel,” should have found Ashton “her beau-ideal of the distinctive characteristics of the fearless and self-sustained backwoodsman.... The untamed horse that tosses his mane in the green savannas could scarcely have moved with more freedom; and the perfect development of limb and muscle evidently arose from the conscious vigor and habitual action of one accustomed to tread, not the gay saloon and prescribed walks of fashion, but the rough paths of danger, and the limitless range of voiceless solitudes.” Ashton rescues three children from a burning cabin, using a ladder, in keeping with the best traditions, thus winning the heart of Annabel, who marries him clandestinely, just before he is arrested for murder. He is acquitted by the testimony of his supposed father, and an old Indian appears opportunely to confess that Ashton was really the son of Colonel Ainsworth, Annabel’s guardian.
There was a particular vocabulary that belonged to this school of romance, and Mrs. Dumont employed it in all its copiousness. When rightly used it minimized the importance of invention; and it was better adapted to the portrayal of delicate and shrinking heroines and noble and handsome heroes, than to the rougher work of depicting action. A nice instinct was essential to its proper use, and no one of her generation wielded it with more grace and ease than Mrs. Dumont. Scott and Irving were the inspiration of the school in which she took so high a place; and the verse which it produced so abundantly showed frequently the influence of Mrs. Hemans. Mrs. Dumont’s technical skill was superior to that of her Western contemporaries; but it is idle and ungracious to criticise the writings of one whose talents were so varied, and whose life was consecrated to good works.
Her name inevitably suggests that of another teacher, her kinswoman, Miss Catharine Merrill (1824-1900), who, with a wider field and larger opportunity, filled a similar place at Indianapolis for fifty years. She was born at Corydon, the old capital. Samuel Merrill, her father, was a cultivated man, a native of Vermont, and an early settler of Indianapolis. He subscribed to the English reviews and owned a large library, whose contents circulated freely among the pioneers. He had been educated at Dartmouth, and occasionally taught the higher branches, but he was a man of affairs, served the public in important offices, and was one of the ablest of the State’s early financiers. The daughter taught English literature in Butler College for eighteen years, and during this time, and subsequently as a teacher of private classes, inculcated in the minds of three generations a discriminating taste for literature. Miss Merrill wrote (1869) “The Soldier of Indiana,” a valuable record of the State’s participation in the war of the rebellion, which contains much biographical matter that is nowhere else collected. Mrs. Dumont and Miss Merrill afford delightful illustrations of the compelling force of personality. In a sense one succeeded the other, and, though they labored in different fields, throughout a century they impressed upon the youth of the commonwealth the nobility of character and the love of learning which they so happily combined in themselves.
Samuel K. Hoshour is another sterling figure in Indiana pedagogy. He was a native of Pennsylvania, and a minister, first in the Lutheran and afterward in the Disciples Church; but he was a school-teacher first, last, and always, and taught many hundreds of the youth of Indiana. He was, in his later years, a resident of Indianapolis, and died there in 1883. Oliver P. Morton, Lew Wallace, and others of the distinguished men of the State sat under his teaching. In the eyes of two generations he was the embodiment of learning and scholarship; and he retained to the last something of the austerity and exaggerated dignity of the old-fashioned school-teacher. He was, indeed, always the schoolmaster, and a pedant, though naïvely seeking to avoid the appearance of it. He was a linguist of wide reputation, and delighted in comparative philology. He had a fancy for unusual words, and took pleasure in illuminating their meanings from obscure origins. He wrote a book, prized by many of his old pupils, called “Altisonant Letters” (1840), which, as the title indicates, was written in high-sounding words. It is in the form of correspondence, and was devised as a kind of philological primer, to be “a stepping-stone from the current everyday English to the Latin and Greek.” The plan was not a bad one, and was in some respects a forerunner of the inductive methods of teaching languages that have since been popular.
CHAPTER IV
AN EXPERIMENT IN SOCIALISM
New Harmony, the scene of Robert Owen’s experiment in socialism, lies in Posey County, in the far southwestern corner of Indiana. The village is without direct communication with the outer world, but may be approached by boat on the Wabash River, or by a branch railroad which ends abruptly at New Harmony after a rough course through wheat fields, which are, in spring and summer, a charming feature of the landscape of this region. George Rapp gave expression to his peculiar religious ideas in the community which he established there, and he sold his large estate to Owen, who began building on the foundations left by Rapp a social structure after plans of his own. Owen’s ideas are not strikingly novel when taken in connection with the history of socialism; but the movement carried to Indiana many distinguished persons, and the life of subsequent generations in and about the village has, to this day, been colored by it.