I find the following sketches of different Newport visitors in a letter dated September 2, 1869:—
“We had an elder poet in Mr. [William Cullen] Bryant, on whom I called, and to my great surprise he returned it. I never saw him before. There is a little hardness about him, and he seems like one who has been habitually bored, but he is refined and gentle—thinner, older, and more sunken than his pictures—eyes not fine, head rather narrow and prominent; delicate in outline. He is quite agreeable, and ⸺ chatted to him quite easily. I saw him several times, but he does not warm one.
“At Governor Morgan’s I went to a reception for the [General] Grants. He is a much more noticeable man than I expected, and I should think his head would attract attention anywhere, and Richard Greenough [the sculptor] thought the same—and so imperturbable—without even a segar! Mrs. Grant I found intelligent and equable.... Sherman was there, too, the antipodes of Grant; nervous and mobile, looking like a country schoolmaster. He said to Bryant, in my hearing, ‘Yes, indeed! I know Mr. Bryant; he’s one of the veterans! When I was a boy at West Point he was a veteran. He used to edit a newspaper then!’
“This quite ignored Mr. Bryant’s poetic side, which Sherman possibly may not have quite enjoyed. Far more interesting than this, I thought, was a naval reception where Farragut was given profuse honors, yet held them all as a trivial pleasure compared to an interview with his early teacher, Mr. Charles Folsom, the superintendent of the University Printing-Office at Cambridge. To him the great admiral returned again and again, and we saw them sitting with hands clasped, and serving well enough, as some one suggested, for a group of ‘War and Peace,’ such as the sculptors were just then portraying.”
Most interesting, too, I found on one occasion, at Charles Perkins’s, the companionship of two young Englishmen, James Bryce and Albert Dicey, both since eminent, but then just beginning their knowledge of this country. I vividly remember how Dicey came in rubbing his hands with delight, saying that Bryce had just heard a boarder at the hotel where he was staying say Eurōpean twice, and had stopped to make a note of it in his diary. But I cannot allow further space to them, nor even to Mr. George Bancroft, about whom the reader will find a more ample sketch in this volume (page 95). I will, however, venture to repeat one little scene illustrating with what parental care he used to accompany young ladies on horseback in his old age, galloping over the Newport beaches. On one of these occasions, after he had dismounted to adjust his fair companion’s stirrup, he was heard to say to her caressingly, “Don’t call me Mr. Bancroft, call me George!”
In regard to my friend, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe and her Newport life, I have written so fully of her in the article on page 287 of this volume that I shall hardly venture it again. Nor have I space in which to dwell on the further value to our little Newport circle of such women as Katharine P. Wormeley, the well-known translator of Balzac and Molière and the author of “Hospital Transports” during the war; or of the three accomplished Woolsey sisters, of whom the eldest, under the name of “Susan Coolidge,” became a very influential writer for young people. She came first to Newport as the intimate friend of Mrs. Helen Maria Fiske Hunt, who was more generally known for many years as “H. H.” The latter came among us as the widow of one of the most distinguished officers whom the West Point service had reared. She was destined in all to spend five winters at Newport, and entered upon her literary life practically at that time. She lived there as happily, perhaps, as she could have dwelt in any town which she could christen “Sleepy Hollow,” as she did Newport; and where she could look from her window upon the fashionable avenue and see, she said, such “Headless Horsemen” as Irving described as having haunted the valley of that name.
After her second marriage she lived far away at the middle and then at the extreme western part of the continent, and we met but few times. She wrote to me freely, however, and I cannot do better than close by quoting from this brilliant woman’s very words her description of the manner in which she wrote the tale “Ramona,” now apparently destined to be her source of permanent fame. I do not know in literary history so vivid a picture of what may well be called spiritual inspiration in an impetuous woman’s soul.
The Berkeley, February 5, 1884.
I am glad you say you are rejoiced that I am writing a story. But about the not hurrying it—I want to tell you something— You know I have for three or four years longed to write a story that should “tell” on the Indian question. But I knew I could not do it, knew I had no background—no local color for it.