Elmwood, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 25th August 1870.
I forget just where I left off, whether I had brought my journal up to our leaving Memphremagog or not. The last day there was as pleasant as the rest. The young folks played croquet and American bowls all the morning, while I lay on the grass watching for humming-birds and talking occasional politics to any one who would join me. At about twelve a retired judge, Day by name, who lives four or five miles off, drove over with a member of the Government (I forget his name) who was to start from the pier below the house in the lake steamer. Mr. Allan owns this steamer, which stops at his pier whenever he runs up a flag; so you see the privileged classes are not extinct by any means in the British dominion in the new world. Now the Judge, having a seat in his light sort of phaeton, proposed to drive me over to the post-office, about four miles off, where he was going, and to bring me back to luncheon. So I embarked behind his two strong little trotting nags and had a most interesting drive. The roads were not worse than many Devonshire lanes, and where the pitches were steepest, the stout little nags made nothing of them.
The views of the lake were exquisite, and the Judge one of the pleasantest of men. He had been employed in 1865 on a mission to Washington, and gave me very graphic accounts of his interviews with Lincoln and the other leading men there, and confirmed many of my own views as to the comparative chances of the two great sections of our race in the new world in the future. He is less apprehensive of Canada joining the United States than most men of his standing, and I think has good reason for his confidence. Material interest will perhaps for a time (or rather, after a time, for at present it is very doubtful on which side they weigh) sway in the direction of annexation to the United States, but the ablest and most energetic of the younger men of the cultivated classes are so strongly bent on developing a distinct national life, that I expect to see them carry their country for independence rather than annexation, when the time comes, if it ever should, of a final cutting of the ropes which bind them to us. After luncheon we went off in the steam yacht to a bay in the lake, and then in row boats four or five miles up the bay into the heart of the hills, where we saw bald-headed eagles, and black and white king-fishers five times the size of ours, and after a very interesting and pleasant excursion got back to dinner, finishing the evening with dancing. At five next morning we heard the steamer’s whistle calling us. The young ladies were up to give us a cup of coffee and parting good words, and then we-steamed down for Newport, where we were to take the rail through the Connecticut valley to Boston. On the Newport wharf which joins the station we said good-bye to Allan and Stephen, and shall carry away most charming memories of our stay in Canada. General Lindsay and Eyre went with us, and their companionship made the journey very agreeable, though it was as hot as the Lower Danube, and the dust more uncomfortable and dirtying than any we have at home. Most part of the way the soil is as light and sandy as that about Dorking, and the trains seem to raise greater clouds of it.
The greater part of the journey was along the banks of the Merrimac, a fine river with as much water as the Thames at Richmond, I should say, but spread over a bed generally twice as broad. We saw the White Mountains at a distance on our left, and passed through a number of flourishing towns. The thing that struck me most was the apparent fusion into one class of the whole community. As you know, every one goes into the same long carriages, holding from sixty to eighty people. Of these there were four or often five on our train, and I often passed through them (as you may do, up the middle, without disturbing the passengers, who sit in pairs with their faces to the engine on each side of the passage), as there was a great deal of local traffic, seventy people often getting out at a station, I thus saw really a very considerable number of people on this first day in the States, and certainly should have been exceedingly puzzled to sort them in the broadest way, either into rich and poor, gentlemen or ladies (in the conventional sense) and common people, or any other radical division. I certainly saw at some stations children running about without shoes, and workmen in as dirty blouses as those of Europe; but in the trains they were all well dressed, quiet, self-respecting people, without any pretence to polish, or any approach to vulgarity. The bad taste in women’s dress, which I am told to expect elsewhere, does not certainly prevail in New England. All the women wore neat short dresses, with moderate trimmings according to taste; but I did not see an extravagant garment or, I am bound to add, a really pretty one along the whole line. On the whole I thought the women as good looking as any I have ever travelled amongst, but paler and sadder, or at any rate quieter, than a like number of Englishwomen. Once or twice men in stove-pipe hats (the ordinary tile of so-called civilisation), and wearing perhaps better cloth and whiter linen than the average, got in, but not one whom you would have picked out as a person bred and brought up in a different way, and occupying a station above or apart from the rest, as you see in every train in England. It may have been chance, but certainly it was startling. Then another surprise. They are certainly the least demonstrative people so far as strangers are concerned that I have ever been amongst. I had the prevailing idea that a Yankee was a note of interrogation walking about the world, and besides craving for all sorts of information about you, was always ready to impart to you the particulars of his own birth, parentage, and education, and his opinion on everything, “from Adam’s fall to Huldy’s bonnet.” Well, I left our party purposely several times on the journey to try the experiment of sitting on one of the small seats carrying two only with a Yankee. In not one single case did either of those I sat by say a single word to me, and when I commenced they just answered my question very civilly and relapsed into total silence. I may add that this first experience has been confirmed since, both in street and railway cars.
We got to Boston at about seven, and then had our first experience of the price of things here. It is only four miles out to Lowell’s, who lives on the other side of Cambridge, but we were obliged to pay five dollars for a carriage to get out there. We could get nothing but a great handsome family coach with two horses, and in that, accordingly, out we lumbered. Cambridge is a very pretty suburb of Boston, the centre point of it being Harvard College, consisting of four or five large blocks of red brick building and a stone chapel, standing in the midst of some fine trees. Elmwood Avenue in which Lowell lives is about half a mile beyond the College—a broad road shaded on both sides by tows of trees planted as in the Boulevards, as indeed is done along all the roads. The Professor’s house is a good, roomy, wooden one standing in the midst of some thirty acres of his own land, on which stand many good trees, and especially some pre-revolutionary English elms of which he is very proud. He was sitting on the piazza of the house with his wife and Holmes’ brother, taking a pipe and not the least expecting us. The Irish maid told us to “sit right down” while she went to fetch him. In a minute he and his wife came and put us at our ease, explaining that no letter had ever come since we had landed. Mabel was away at the sea for a few days.
Elmwood Avenue, Cambridge, 31s£ August 1870.
I managed with some difficulty and scramble to get off a letter to you by yesterday’s post, which ought to go by steamer from New York to-day, bringing my narrative up to our arrival here. We found Lowell on his verandah with his wife and friend, and sat there talking till ten. I am not the least disappointed with him, Henry Cowper notwithstanding. I have never met a more agreeable talker, and his kindness to me is quite unbounded. Then he has not a grain of vanity in his composition, but is as simple and truthful as the best kind of boy. The house is a wooden one, as four-fifths of the houses in New England are. It is roomy, airy, and furnished with quaint old heavy pieces, bureaus like ours, and solid heavy little mahogany tables, all dating from the last century. The plate in the same way is all of the Queen Anne shape, like your little tea-service and my grandmother’s milk jugs and tea-pots which George has. The plainness and simplicity of the living, too, is most attractive. We breakfast at 8.30, beginning with porridge, and following up with eggs, some hot dish, corn cakes, toast and fruit. Then there is no regular meal till six—a terribly late and fashionable dinner hour here, as the prevalent hour is two or three—and afterwards we have a cup of coffee and crackers (good plain biscuits) and a glass of toddy at ten. Miss Mabel and others have given us a desperate idea of the difficulties as to service, but they certainly do not exist in this establishment just now. The principal servant that we see is an Irish girl, Rose by name, who reminds me of one of Mrs. Cameron’s servants except that she is far more diligent. The ingenious way in which she hid away all my wardrobe in the ample cupboards and recesses of the bureau in my room was a perfect caution, and she whisks away my things and gets them beautifully washed, wholly refusing to allow me to pay for them. The parlour-maid is a little, slight, ladylike girl, who certainly is not a first-rate waiter, but then there is no need of one. The dinner is confined to one thing at a time—soup, sometimes fish, a joint, or chickens, and a sweet. The Professor opens his own wine at the table and passes it round, and very good it is, but one scarcely needs it in this climate. A cook whose acquaintance I have also made, and an Irishman who has been thirty years on the place in a roomy cottage, and attends to the cows, garden, and farm of thirty acres, complete the establishment. Mrs. Lowell, who is a very nice, quiet, and clever woman, is very fond of flowers, and manages to keep a few beds going about the house, and there are a number of very fine trees, so that though there is no pretence to the neatness and finish of English grounds and garden, the place has a thoroughly homely, cultivated atmosphere and look which is very attractive, and the whole town of Cambridge seems to be made up of just such houses. We have lost no time in lionising men and places. On Thursday we took the car into Boston and ascended the monument on Bunker’s Hill, 290 steps up a dark spiral staircase. Lowell had never been up it before, nor indeed has any native as far as I can find out. The view at the top repays you thoroughly for the grind with the thermometer at eighty in the shade. Boston Harbour, where the tea was thrown out of the English ships in 1775, and> the whole town and suburbs lie below you like a map, and are very striking. After descending we hunted up a number of people, including young Holmes, our Colonel, who was as charming as ever, absorbed in his law at which he is doing famously, and resolved in his first holiday to revisit England. He came out to dine, and fraternised immensely with R——, and with him a young Howells, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, whom Conway had brought to our house years ago, and I had entirely forgotten. However he is a very nice fellow, and I don’t think I betrayed my obliviousness. Next day, Friday, we had a long country drive in the morning through broad avenues lined with three fascinating wooden houses, each standing with plenty of elbow-room in its own grounds, up to a wooded hill from which we got a splendid view of the city. Then I went into Boston and called on the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, who is one of the best talkers I ever met, and quite worthy to be the Colonel’s father. He is one of Motley’s oldest friends, and deeply grieved, as all good men here, at his recall. His chief talk was of his memories of his English visits, and the folk he met, and so I find it with all the best men and women here. Notwithstanding the bitterness which our press created during the war, I am convinced that with a very little tact and judicious handling on our side the international relations may be easily made all we can wish as far as New England is concerned. Afterwards I sauntered about the town, looking at some good statues in their park (Boston Common), and letting the place sink into me. The Common is about the size, I should say, of Green Park, but of a regular shape. It lies on the side of a hill at the top of which are the State House and other public buildings and private houses. It is well wooded with fine American and English elms (pre-revolutionary, they say, but I don’t believe it. They are not used to our elms, and I doubt whether any of these are 100 years old) on the upper part and along the sides; the middle is a great playground for the boys, who are diligent there all day at base-ball, our rounders, which I should think must spoil the enjoyment of the place for ladies and children. However they can always take to the pretty gardens at the lower end, in which is a very fine equestrian statue of Washington, and one of Everett by Story, by no means fine in my opinion. How should it be, when he insisted on being taken with his arm right up in the air, his favourite attitude in speaking, and stands up in that attitude in ordinary buttoned frock coat and trousers? Everett has not been a trustworthy public man to my mind, and is simply nothing unless it is an orator, and I can’t say I think it wise to put him up there on the palpable stump. But we have made so many mistakes in our public statues that I suppose it must run in the blood. The best houses in the town, really charming residences, line the two sides and top of the Common, and fine stores the bottom. I have never seen a place I would so soon live in out of England as in one of these houses looking on to Boston Common. The old business town is being rebuilt just as London—red brick two or three story houses giving way everywhere to five or six stories of granite or stone. The town has as old and settled a look and feeling about it as any I know; but they have few old buildings, and I am afraid are going to pull down the most characteristic, the old State House, because it has ceased to be used for public purposes, and its removal will make a fine broad place and relieve the traffic of several narrow streets in the heart of the town. It will be a sad pity, and so unnecessary here, for they might carry it off bodily to any other site. You know how we have often heard, and wondered, scarce believing, of the raising bodily of the great hotels, etc., at Chicago. Well, suddenly, in Boston I came across a great market, three stories high (the upper part being occupied as houses) and 150 or 200 feet long, as big, say, as three houses in Grosvenor Square, which they were moving bodily back on rollers so as to widen the street. There were the wooden ways and the rollers, and the great block with all its marketing and living inhabitants lying on them, and already some twelve feet on its journey. It did not look any the worse for its journey unless it were in the foundations, where there were a few places which had been filled up, I saw, with new brickwork. The long pit twelve feet deep which has been left between the market and the street will now be turned into cellars, over which the new pavement will pass. On the Saturday we dined with the Saturday Club at 2.30 P.M., where were all the New England notables now in town. I sat on the right of Sumner, the State Senator, who was in the chair, with Boutwell, the Secretary of the Treasury, on my right, and Emerson on the other side of Sumner. So you may fancy how I enjoyed the sitting. Emerson is perfectly delightful: simple, wise, and full of humour and sunshine. The number of good Yankee stories I shall bring back unless they burst me will be a caution. Forbes, a great Boston merchant who owns an island seventy-two miles long off the coast close to Nantucket and Cape Cod, which you will find in the map, came up and claimed to have seen me for five minutes when I had the small-pox in 1863.
He knows J——— well, and insisted on carrying us off to his island that night, that we might attend a huge campmeeting on a neighbouring island on Sunday. So he drove up here with us and we packed—the dear Professor agreeing that we ought to do it—went down sixty miles by rail, slept on his yacht, and found ourselves in the morning at his wharf on the island. Your second letter came to hand from Cromer when we returned here, and has as usual lighted up my life.