Carlyle's laugh, and other surprises

by Thomas Wentworth Higginson

My dear Kinsman,—Although I have given you no reason to be assured of it, you are still just the same to me in my honor and affection—you are never, and you never have been, otherwise in my thoughts than my kinsman (by your first recognition of our consanguinity) and my friend; yes, and early teacher, for I long ago told you that it was your essays that confirmed me, in my youth, in the course I chose for myself.

I am going on to Aldrich’s funeral, and with a rather lone and heavy heart, since I began life here in New York with him before the Civil War, and had every expectation that he would survive me: not wholly on the score of my seniority, but because I have had my “three calls” and more, and because he has ever been so strong and young and debonair. Health, happiness, ease, travel, all “things waregan,” seemed his natural right. If I, too, wished for a portion of his felicities, I never envied one to whom they came by the very fitness of things. And I grieve the more for his death, because it seems to violate that fitness.

Now, I can’t think of meeting you on Friday without first making this poor and inadequate attempt to set one thing right. Your latest letter—I was, at least, moved by it to address myself at once to a full reply, but was myself attacked that day so sorely by the grippe that I went to bed before completing it and was useless for weeks; the letter showed me that you thought, as well you might, that I had been hurt or vexed by something you had unwittingly done or written. I can say little to-night but to confess that no act, word, or writing, of yours from first to last has not seemed to contain all the friendship, kindness, recognition, that I could ever ask for.... Perhaps I have the ancestral infirmity of clinging to my fealties for good and all; but, as I say, you are my creditor in every way, and I constantly find myself in sympathy with your writings, beliefs, causes, judgments.—Now I recall it, the very choice you made of a little lyric of mine as the one at my “high-water” mark gave me a fine sense of your comprehension—it seemed to me a case of rem acu tetigit. I am thoroughly satisfied to have one man—and that man you—so quick to see just where I felt that I had been fortunate....

For some years, I venture to remind you, you have seen scarcely anything of mine in print. Since 1900 I have had three long and disabling illnesses, from two of which it was not thought I could recover. Between these, what desperate failure of efforts to “catch up.” Oh, I can’t tell you, the books, the letters, the debts, the broken contracts. Then the deaths of my wife and my son, and all the sorrows following; the break-up of my home, and the labor of winding up so much without aid. But from all the rack I have always kept, separated on my table, all your letters and remembrances—each one adding more, in my mind, to the explanation I had not written you....

Your attached kinsman and friend,

Edmund C. Stedman.

Stedman came from Mount Auburn to my house after the funeral of Aldrich, with a look of utter exhaustion on his face such as alarmed me. A little rest and refreshment brought him to a curious revival of strength and animation; he talked of books, men, and adventures, in what was almost a monologue, and went away in comparative cheerfulness with his faithful literary associate, Professor George E. Woodberry. Yet I always associate him with one of those touching letters which he wrote to me before the age of the typewriter, more profusely than men now write, and the very fact that we lived far apart made him franker in utterance. The following letter came from Keep Rock, New Castle, New Hampshire, September 30, 1887:—

“You are a ‘noble kinsman’ after all, of the sort from whom one is very glad to get good words, and I have taken your perception of a bit of verse as infallible, ever since you picked out three little ‘Stanzas for Music’ as my one best thing. Every one else had overlooked them, but I knew that—as Holmes said of his ‘Chambered Nautilus’—they were written ‘better than I could.’ By the way, if you will overhaul Duyckinck’s ‘Encyclopedia of Literature’ in re Dr. Samuel Mitchill, you will see who first wrote crudely the ‘Chambered Nautilus.’”

Two years after, he wrote, April 9, 1889:—

“The newspapers warn me that you are soon to go abroad.... I must copy for you now the song which you have kindly remembered so many years. In sooth, I have always thought well of your judgment as to poetry, since you intimated (in ‘The Commonwealth,’ was it not?) that these three stanzas of mine were the thing worth having of my seldom-written verse. I will write on the next page a passage which I lately found in Hartmann (a wonderful man for a pessimist), and which conveys precisely the idea of my song.”