EDWARD EVERETT HALE
The life of Edward Everett Hale has about it a peculiar interest as a subject of study. The youngest member of his Harvard class,—that of 1839,—he was also the most distinguished among them and finally outlived them all. Personal characteristics which marked him when a freshman in college kept him young to the end of his days. When the Reverend Edward Cummings came to Dr. Hale’s assistance in the South Congregational Church, he was surprised to find practically no young people in the parish, and still more surprised to know that their pastor was ignorant of the fact. These parishioners were all young when Dr. Hale took them in charge, and to him they had always remained so, for he had invested them with his own fresh and undying spirit.
Probably no man in America, except Beecher, aroused and stimulated quite so many minds as Hale, and his personal popularity was unbounded. He had strokes of genius, sometimes with unsatisfying results; yet failures never stood in his way, but seemed to drop from his memory in a few hours. An unsurpassable model in most respects, there were limitations which made him in some minor ways a less trustworthy example. Such and so curiously composed was Edward Everett Hale. He was the second son of a large family of sons and daughters, his parents being Nathan and Sarah Preston (Everett) Hale, and he was born in Boston, April 3, 1822. His father was the editor of the leading newspaper in Boston, the “Daily Advertiser,” and most of his children developed, in one way or another, distinct literary tastes. The subject of this sketch had before him, as a literary example and influence, the celebrated statesman and orator whose name he bore, and who was his mother’s brother.
My own recollections of him begin quite early. Nearly two years younger than he, I was, like him, the youngest of my Harvard class, which was two years later than his. My college remembrances of him are vivid and characteristic. Living outside of the college yard, I was sometimes very nearly late for morning prayers; and more than once on such occasions, as I passed beneath the walls of Massachusetts Hall, then a dormitory, there would spring from the doorway a tall, slim young student who had, according to current report among the freshmen, sprung out of bed almost at the last stroke of the bell, thrown his clothes over the stairway, and jumped into them on the way down. This was Edward Everett Hale; and this early vision was brought to my mind not infrequently in later life by his way of doing maturer things.
The same qualities which marked his personal appearance marked his career. He was always ready for action, never stopped for trifles, always lacked but little of being one of the heroes or men of genius of his time. Nor can any one yet predict which of these will be the form finally taken by his fame. His capacity for work was unlimited, and he perhaps belonged to more societies and committees than any man living. In this field his exhaustless energy had play, but his impetuous temperament often proved a drawback, and brought upon him the criticism of men of less talent but more accurate habits of mind. No denominational barriers existed for him. Ready to officiate in all pulpits and welcome in all, he left it unknown to the end of his life whether he did or did not believe in the Bible miracles, for instance. Nor did anybody who talked with him care much. His peculiar and attractive personality made him acceptable to all sorts of people and to men of all creeds; for his extraordinary versatility enabled him in his intercourse with other minds to adapt his sympathy and his language to the individual modes of thought and belief of each and all of them.
Some of his finest literary achievements were those which he himself had forgotten. Up to the last degree prolific, he left more than one absolutely triumphant stroke behind him in literature. The best bit of prose that I can possibly associate with him was a sketch in a newspaper bearing the somewhat meaningless title “The Last Shake,” suggested by watching the withdrawal of the last man with a hand-cart who was ever allowed to shake carpets on Boston Common. He was, no doubt, a dusty and forlorn figure enough. But to Hale’s ready imagination he stood for a whole epoch of history, for the long procession of carpet-shakers who were doing their duty there when Percy marched to Lexington, or when the cannonade from Breed’s Hill was in the air. Summer and winter had come and gone, sons had succeeded their fathers at their work, and the beating of the carpets had gone on, undrowned by the rising city’s roar. At last the more fastidious aldermen rebelled, the last shake was given, and Edward Everett Hale wrote its elegy. I suppose I kept the little newspaper cutting on my desk for five years, as a model of what wit and sympathy could extract from the humblest theme.
Another stroke was of quite a different character. Out of the myriad translations of Homer, there is in all English literature but one version known to me of even a single passage which gives in a high degree the Homeric flavor. That passage is the description of the Descent of Neptune (Iliad, Book XIII), and was preserved in Hale’s handwriting by his friend Samuel Longfellow, with whom I edited the book “Thalatta,”—a collection of sea poems. His classmate, Hale, had given it to him when first written, and then had forgotten all about it. Had it not been printed by us there, it might, sooner or later, have found its way into that still unpublished magazine which Hale and I planned together, when we lived near each other in Worcester, Massachusetts,—a periodical which was to have been called the “Unfortunates’ Magazine,” and was to contain all the prose and verse sent to us by neighbors or strangers with request to get it published. I remember that we made out a title-page between us, with a table of contents, all genuine, for the imaginary first number. Such a book was to some extent made real in “Thalatta,” and the following is Hale’s brilliant Homeric translation:—
THE DESCENT OF NEPTUNE