Literary Shrines: The Haunts of Some Famous American Authors

by Theodore F. Wolfe

A Golden Age of Letters—Literary Associations—Isms—Clubs—Where Hester Prynne and Silas Lapham lived—The Corner Book-store—Home of Fields—Sargent—Hilliard—Aldrich—Deland—Parkman—Holmes—Howells—Moulton—Hale—Howe—Jane Austin, etc.

OF the cisatlantic cities our "modern Athens" is, to the literary pilgrim, the most interesting; for, whatever may be the claims of other cities to the present literary primacy, all must concede that Boston was long the intellectual capital of the continent and its centre of literary culture and achievement. If the pilgrim have attained to middle life and be loyal to the literary idols of his youth, his regard for the Boston of to-day must be largely reminiscential of a past that is rapidly becoming historic; for, of the constellation of brilliant authors and thinkers who first gained for the place its pre-eminence in letters, few or none remain alive. The requirements of labor and trade are transforming the old streets; the sedate and comfortable dwellings, once the abodes or the resorts of the littérateurs, are giving place to palatial shops or great factories; the neighborhood where Bancroft, Choate, Winthrop, Webster, and Edward Everett dwelt within a few rods of each other was long ago surrendered to merchandise and mammon; yet for us the busy scenes are haunted by memories and peopled by presences which the spirit of trade is powerless to exorcise.

To tread the streets which have daily echoed the foot-falls of the illustrious company who created here a golden age of learning and culture were alone a pleasure, but the city holds many closer and more personal mementos of her dead prophets, as well as the homes of a present generation who worthily strive to sustain her place and prestige.

Interwoven with the older Boston are literary associations hardly less memorable and enduring than its history: in the belfry of its historic holy of holies—Old South Church—was the study of the historian Dr. Belknap, and the dove that nested beneath the church-bell is preserved in the poetry of N. P. Willis; King's Chapel, the sanctuary where the beloved Dr. Holmes worshipped for so many years, and whence he was not long ago sadly borne to his burial, figures in the fiction of Fenimore Cooper; historic Copp's Hill is also a scene in a tale of the same novelist; the court-house occupies the site of the "beetle-browed" prison of Hester Prynne of "The Scarlet Letter;" the storied old State-house marked the place of her pillory; the theatre of the Boston Massacre is the scene of the thrilling episode of Hawthorne's "Gray Champion;" his "Legends of Province House" commemorate the ancient structure which stood nearly opposite the Old South Church; the Tremont House, where the "Jacobins' Club" used to assemble with Ripley, Channing, Theodore Parker, Bronson Alcott, Peabody, and the extreme reformers, was the resort of Hawthorne's "Miles Coverdale," as it was of the novelist himself, and on the street here he saw "ragamuffin Moodie" of "The Blithedale Romance." On the site of Bowdoin School, Charles Sumner was born; at one hundred and twenty Hancock Street he lived and composed the early orations which made his fame; at number one Exeter Place, Theodore Parker, the Vulcan of the New England pulpit, forged his bolts and wrote the "Discourses of Religion;" in Essex Street lived and wrote Wendell Phillips, at thirty-seven Common Street he died; at thirty-one Hollis Street the gifted Harriet Martineau was the guest of Francis Jackson; at the corner of Congress and Water Streets Lloyd Garrison wrote and published "The Liberator." In this older city, antedating the luxury of the Back Bay district of the new Boston, Mather wrote the "Magnalia," Paine sang his songs, Allston composed his tales, Buckminster wrote his homilies, Bowditch translated La Place's "Mécanique céleste." Here Emerson, Motley, Parkman, and Poe were born; here Bancroft lived, Combe wrote, Spurzheim died. Here Maffit, Channing, and Pierpont preached; Agassiz, Phillips, and Lyell lectured; Alcott, Elizabeth Peabody, and Fuller taught. Here Sargent wrote "Dealings with the Dead," Sprague his "Curiosity," Prescott his "Ferdinand and Isabella;" here Margaret Fuller held the "Conversations" which attracted and impressed the leading spirits of the time, and Bronson Alcott favored elect circles with his Orphic and oracular utterances; here lived Melvill, pictured in Holmes's "Last Leaf;" here Emerson preached Unitarianism "until he had carried it to the jumping-off-place," as one of his quondam parishioners avers, and here commenced his career as philosopher and lecturer. Here, besides those above mentioned, Dwight, Brisbane, Quincy, Ripley, Graham, Thompson, Hovey, Loring, Miller, Mrs. Folsom, and others of similar ability or zeal, discoursed and wrote in advocacy of the various reforms and "isms" in vogue half a century or more ago.

It has been said that, according to the local creed, whoso is born in Boston needs not to be born again, but some decades ago a literary prowler, like ourselves, discovered that "nobody is born in Boston," the people who have made its fame in letters and art being usually allured to it from other places. This is true in less degree of the present age, since Hale, Robert Grant, Ballou,—of "The Pearl of India,"—Bates, Guiney, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and others are "to the manor born;" but, if Boston has few birthplaces, she cherishes the homes and haunts of two generations of adult intellectual giants.

Prominent among the literary landmarks is the "Corner Book-store"—once the shop of the father of Dr. Clarke—at School and Washington Streets, which, like Murray's in London, has long been the rendezvous of the littérateurs. Here appeared the first American edition of "The Opium Eater" and of Tennyson's poems. Here was the early home of the "Atlantic," then edited by James T. Fields, who was the literary partner of the firm and the presiding genius of the old store. This lover of letters and sympathetic friend of literary men—always kind of heart and generous of hand—drew to him here the foremost of that galaxy who first achieved for America a place in the world of letters. To this literary Rialto, as familiar loungers, came in that golden age George Hilliard, Emerson, Ticknor, Saxe, Whipple, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Lowell, Agassiz, the "Autocrat," and the rest, to loiter among and discuss the new books, or, more often, to chat with their friend Fields at his desk, in the nook behind the green baize curtain. The store is altered some since Fields left it; the curtained back-corner, which was the domain of the Celtic urchin "Michael Angelo" and the trysting spot of the literary fraternity, has given place to shelves of shining books. The side entrance—used mostly by the authors because it brought them more directly to Fields's desk and den—is replaced by a window which looks out upon the spot where, as we remember with a thrill, Fields last shook Hawthorne's hand and stood looking after him as—faltering with weakness—he walked up this side street with Pierce to start upon the journey from which he never returned.

Literary tourists come to the store as to a shrine: thus in later years Matthew Arnold, Cable, Edmund Gosse, Professor Drummond, Dr. Doyle, and others like them, have visited the old corner. Nor is it deserted by the authors of the day; Holmes was often here up to the time of his death, and the visitor may still see, turning the glossy pages, some who are writers as well as readers of books: Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Scudder, Alger, Robert Grant,—whose "Reflections" and "Opinions" have been so widely read,—Miss Winthrop, Miss Jewett, Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton, and Mrs. Coffin are among those who still come to the familiar place. Near by, in Washington Street, Hawthorne's first romance, "Fanshawe," was published in 1828. From Fields's famous store the transition to the staid old mansion which was long his home, and in which his widow still lives, is easy and natural. We find it pleasantly placed below the western slope of Beacon Hill, overlooking an enchanting prospect of blue waters and sunset skies. It is one of those dignified, substantial, and altogether comfortable dwellings—with spacious rooms, wide halls, easy stairways, and generous fireplaces—which we inherit from a previous generation. Here Fields, hardly less famed as an author than as the friend of authors, and his gifted wife—who is still a charming writer—created in their beautiful home an atmosphere which attracted to it the best and highest of their kind, and made it what it has been for more than forty years, a centre and ganglion of literary life and interest. The old-fashioned rooms are aglow with most precious memories and teem with artistic and literary treasures, many of them being souvenirs of the illustrious authors whom the Fields have numbered among their friends and guests. The letters of Dickens, Hawthorne, Emerson, and others reveal the quality of the hospitality of this house and show how it was prized by its recipients. For years this was the Boston home of Hawthorne; to it came Emerson, Longfellow, and Whittier almost as freely as to their own abodes; here Holmes, Lowell, Charles Sumner, Greene, Bayard Taylor, Joseph Jefferson, were frequent guests; and here we see a quaintly furnished bedchamber which has at various times been occupied by Dickens, Trollope, Arthur Clough, Thackeray, Charles Kingsley, Matthew Arnold, Charlotte Cushman, and others of equal fame. Of the delights of familiar intercourse with the starry spirits who frequented this house, of their brilliant discussions of men and books, their scintillations of wit, their sage and sober words of wisdom, Mrs. Annie Fields affords but tantalizing hints in her reminiscences and the glimpses she occasionally allows us of her husband's diary and letters. Fields's library on the second floor—described as "My Friend's Library"—is a most alluring apartment, where we see, besides the "Shelf of Old Books" of which Mrs. Fields gives such a sympathetic account, other shelves containing numerous curious and uniquely precious volumes,—among them the few hundreds of worn and much annotated books which constituted the library of Leigh Hunt. In this room Emerson, while awaiting breakfast, wrote one of his poems, to which the hostess gave title.

In later years a younger generation of writers came to this mansion: Celia Thaxter was a frequent guest; the princess-like Sarah Orne Jewett, beloved by Whittier as a daughter, has made it her Boston home; Aldrich comes to see the widow of his friend; Miss Preston, Mrs. Ward, and other luminous spirits may be met among the company who assemble in these memory-haunted rooms. For several years Holmes lived in the same street, within a few doors of Fields's house.

At number fifty-four in quaint Pinckney Street, around the corner from Mrs. Fields's and near the former residence of Aldrich, we find the house in which the brilliant George Hilliard lived and died, scarcely changed since the time James Freeman Clarke here married Hawthorne to the lovely Sophia Peabody.

Upon the opposite side, at number eleven, dwells Mrs. E. P. Whipple, widow of the eminent author and critic,—herself a lady of refined critical tastes,—who keeps unchanged the home in which her husband died. In his lifetime a select circle of friends usually assembled here on Sunday evenings,—a circle in which Fields, Bronson Alcott, Lowell, Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, Sumner, Clarke, Dr. Bartol, Ole Bull, Lucretia Hale, Edwin Booth, and others of similar eminence in letters or art were included. Just around the corner, in Louisburg Square, Bronson Alcott died in the house of his daughter Mrs. Pratt,—the "Meg" of Louisa Alcott's books.