Beautiful as Newport is in these soft days of early summer, it is even lovelier in the autumn, and every year it is harder to leave Oak Glen, to give up the wide arc of the heavens, and to look up into God’s sky, between the two lines of brick houses of a city street. Each winter the place at Newport is kept open a little longer, and it is only the closing days of November that find Mrs. Howe established in her house in Boston. Beacon Street, with its smooth macadamized roadway, whereon there is much pleasure driving, and in the winter a perfect sleighing carnival, is as pleasant a street as it is possible to live on, but a country road is always a better situation than a city street, and a forest path perhaps is best of all. When she is once settled in her Boston home, the manifold interests of the complex city life claim every hour in the day. Her remarkable powers of endurance, her splendid enjoyment of life and health make her winters as full of pleasure as the more peaceful summer-tide. It is a very different life from that led at Oak Glen; it has an endless variety of interests, social, private, public, charitable, philanthropic, musical, artistic, and intellectual. A half-dozen clubs and associations of women in the city and its near vicinity, which owe their existence in large part to Mrs. Howe’s efforts, claim her presence in their midst at least once in every year.
Among the public occasions which have held the greatest interest for Mrs. Howe of late years was the dedication of the new Kindergarten for the Blind in 1887, at which she read one of her happiest “occasional poems.” The authors’ reading in aid of the Longfellow memorial fund, at the Boston Museum, where, before an audience the like of which had never before been seen in the theatre, she read a poem in memory of Longfellow, was an occasion which will not soon be forgotten by those who were present. Mrs. Howe was the only woman who took part in the proceedings, the other authors who read from their own works being Dr. Holmes, Mr. Lowell, Mark Twain, Colonel Higginson, Prof. Norton, Mr. E. E. Hale, Mr. Aldrich and Mr. Howells. Mrs. Howe has spoken several times at the Nineteenth Century Club, and she is always glad to revisit New York, for though she is often thought to be a Bostonian, she never forgets that the first twenty years of her life were passed in New York, the city of her birth.
Maud Howe.
MR. HOWELLS
MR. HOWELLS
IN BEACON STREET, BOSTON
If any one wants to live in a city street, I do not see how he can well find a pleasanter one than Beacon Street, Boston. Its older houses come down Beacon Hill, past the Common and the Public Garden, in single file, like quaint Continentals on parade, who, being few, have to make the most of themselves. Then it forms in double file again and goes on a long way, out toward the distant Brookline hills, which close in the view. Howells’s number is 302. In this Back Bay district of made ground, the favored West End of the newer city, you cannot help wondering how it is that all about you is in so much better taste than in New York—so much handsomer, neater, more homelike and engaging than our shabby Fifth Avenue. Beacon Street is stately; so is Marlborough Street, that runs next parallel to it; and even more so is Commonwealth Avenue—with its lines of trees down the centre, like a Paris boulevard,—next beyond it. The eye traverses long fretworks of good architectural design, and there is no feature to jar upon the quiet elegance and respectability. The houses seem like those of people in some such prosperous foreign towns as the newer Liverpool, Düsseldorf or Louvain. The comfortable horizontal line prevails. There are green front doors, and red brick, and brass knockers. A common pattern of approach is to have a step or two outside, and a few more within the vestibule. That abomination, the ladder-like “high stoop” of New York, seems unknown.
These are the scenes amid which Mr. Howells takes his walks abroad. From his front windows he may see the upper-class types about which he has written—the Boston girl, “with something of the nice young fellow about her,” the Chance Acquaintance, with his eye-glass, the thin, elderly, patrician Coreys, the blooming, philanthropic Miss Kingsbury. The fictitious Silas Lapham built in this same quarter the mansion with which he was to consolidate his social aspirations. Perhaps some may have thought it identical with that of Howells, so close are the sites, and so feelingly does the author speak—as if from personal experience—of dealings with an architect, and the like. But Howells’s abode does not savor of the architect, nor of the mansion. It is a builder’s house, though even the builder, in Boston, does not rid himself of the general tradition of comfort and solidity. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes lived in a house but little different, two doors above. That of Howells is plain and wide, of red brick, three stories and mansard roof, with a long iron balcony under the parlor windows. Its chief adornment is a vine of Japanese ivy, which climbs half the entire height of the façade. The singular thing about this vine is, that it is not planted in his own ground, but a section in that of his neighbor on each side. It charmingly drapes his wall, while growing but thinly on theirs, and forms a clear case of “natural selection” which might properly almost render its owners discontented enough to cut it down. The leaves, as I saw them, touched by the autumn, glowed with crimson like sumac. The house is approached by steps of easy grade. There is a little reception-room at the left of the hall, and the dining-room is on the same floor. You mount a flight of stairs, and come to the library and study, at the back, and the parlor in front.
Vlan! as the French have it—what a flood of light in this study! The shades of the three wide windows are drawn up to the very top; it is like being at the seaside; there are no owlish habits about a writer who can stand this. It is, in fact, the seaside, so why should it not seem like it? The bold waters of the Back Bay, a wide basin of the Charles River, dash up to the very verge of the small dooryard, in which the clothes hang out to dry. It looks as if they might some day take a notion to come in and call on the cook in the kitchen, or even lift up the whole establishment bodily, and land it on some new Ararat. This stretch of water is thought to resemble the canal of the Guidecca, at Venice; Henry James, with others, has certified to the view as Venetian. You take the Cambridge gas-works for Palladio’s domes, and Bunker Hill Monument, which is really more like a shot-tower, for a campanile; and then, at sunset, when the distant buildings are black upon the glowing, ruddy sky, the analogy is not so very remote. All the buildings on this new-made land are set upon piles, and the tides, in a measure, flow under them twice a day. It was a serious question at the beginning, whether there should not be canals here instead of streets; but, considering that the canals would be frozen up a large part of the year, the verdict was against them. I am rather sorry for this: it would have been interesting to see what kind of gondoliers the Boston hackmen and car-drivers would have made. Would they have worn uniforms? Would they have sung, to avoid collisions, in rounding the corners of Exeter and Fairfield streets? Ah me! for those plaintive ballads that might have been? It would have been interesting to see the congregation of Phillips Brooks’s church—the much-vaunted Trinity—going to service by water, and the visitors to the Art Museum, and the students to the Institute of Technology. All these are but a stone’s-throw from Howells. Howells may congratulate himself on a greater solidity for his share of the land than most, for fifty years ago, when there were tide-mills in this neighborhood, it was the site of a toll-house. Terra firma, all about him, has an antiquity of but from twelve to twenty years. His house is perhaps a dozen years old, and he has owned it but four.