Carlyle's laugh, and other surprises

by Thomas Wentworth Higginson

But while the immediate results of personal service to the college on the part of this group of remarkable men may have been inadequate,—since even Ticknor, ere parting, had with the institution a disagreement never yet fully elucidated,—yet their collective influence both on Harvard University and on American education was enormous. They helped to break up that intellectual sterility which had begun to show itself during the isolation of a merely colonial life; they prepared the way for the vast modern growth of colleges, schools, and libraries in this country, and indirectly helped that birth of a literature which gave us Irving, Cooper, Bryant, and the “North American Review”; and culminated later in the brilliant Boston circle of authors, almost all of whom were Harvard men, and all of whom had felt the Harvard influence.

XXIII
OLD NEWPORT DAYS

OLD NEWPORT DAYS

It was my good fortune, after discharge from the army during the Civil War, to dwell for a time under the hospitable roof of Mrs. Hannah Dame, in Newport, Rhode Island. Passing out of the front door one day, just as its bell rang, I saw before me one of the very handsomest men I had ever beheld, as I thought. He wore civilian dress, but with an unmistakable military air, and held out to me a card of introduction from a fellow officer. He had been discharged from the army on the expiration of his term of service with the regiment he had commanded in Frémont’s Mountain Department. Being out of employment for a time, and unsettled, as many of us were at that period, he came back to his early training as a market gardener, and, having made the professional discovery that most of the cabbages eaten in Boston were brought from New York, while nearly all the cauliflowers sold in New York were sent thither from Boston, he formed the plan of establishing a market garden midway between the two cities, and supplying each place with its favorite vegetable. This he did successfully for ten years, and then merged the enterprise in successive newer ones. In these he sometimes failed, but in the last one he succeeded where others had failed yet more completely, and astounded the nation by bringing the streets of New York into decent cleanliness and order for the first time on record. This man was Colonel George Edward Waring.

One of his minor achievements was that of organizing, at his house in Newport, the most efficient literary circle I ever knew, at a time when there were habitually more authors grouped in that city than anywhere else in America. But before giving a sketch of these persons, let me describe the house in which he received them. This house had been made internally the most attractive in Newport by the combined taste of himself and his wife, and was for a time the main centre of our simple and cordial group. In his study and elsewhere on the walls he had placed mottoes, taken partly from old English phrases and partly from the original Dutch, remembered almost from the cradle as coming from his Dutch maternal grandfather. Thus above his writing-desk the inscription read, Misérable à mon gré qui n’a chez soi où estre à soi (Alas for him who hath no home which is a home!). Under the mantelpiece and above the fireplace was the Dutch Eigen haasd iss goud waard (One’s own hearth is worth gold). In the dining-room there was inscribed above the fireplace, “Old wood to burn, Old wine to drink, Old friends to trust.” Opposite this was again the Dutch Praatjes vullen den buik neit (Prattle does not fill the box). On two sides of the room there were, “Now good digestion wait on appetite, and health on both,” and also “In every feast there are two guests to be entertained, the body and the soul.” In almost every case the lettering of these mottoes was made into a decoration with peacock’s feathers, and formed a series of charming welcomes quite in harmony with the unfailing cordiality of the host and the fine and hearty voice of the hostess.

It was at this house that there were to be found gathered, more frequently than anywhere else, the literary or artistic people who were then so abundant in Newport,—where no other house was to be compared with it except that of Mrs. Howe, who then lived in the country, and had receptions and a world of her own.

We had, for instance, Dr. J. G. Holland, now best known as the original founder of the “Century Magazine,” then having but a fugitive literary fame based on books written under the name of Timothy Titcomb and entitled “Bitter-Sweet” and “Kathrina, Her Life and Mine.” He was personally attractive because of his melodious voice, which made him of peculiar value for singing on all boating excursions. There was Edwin P. Whipple, a man reared in business, not literature; but with an inexhaustible memory of books and a fertile gift for producing them, especially those requiring personal anecdote and plenty of it. There was Dr. O. W. Holmes, who came to Newport as the guest of the Astor family, parents of the present English author of that name. At their house I spent one evening with Holmes, who was in his most brilliant mood, at the end of which he had talked himself into such an attack of asthma that he had to bid adieu to Newport forever, after an early breakfast the next morning.