Mr. Mitchell is eminently an “author at home.” There are many of our popular writers—both citizens and country dwellers—whose environment is a matter of comparative indifference to their readers. But the farmer of Edgewood has taken the public so pleasantly into his confidence, has welcomed them so cordially to his garden, his orchard and his very hearthstone, that—in a literary sense—we are all his guests and inmates. In the consulship of Plancus—as Thackeray would say—we Freshmen, after our pilgrimage to that shrine of liberty, the Judges’ Cave on West Rock, with its kakographic inscription,—“Oposition [sic] to tyrants is obedience to God,”—used to turn our steps southward to burn our youthful incense upon the shrine of literature, and see whether the burs had begun to open on the big chestnut trees that fringed Ik Marvel’s domain. In those days the easiest approach was through the little village of Westville, which nestles at the foot of the rock and seems, from a distance, to lay its church-spire, like a white finger, against the purple face of the cliff. The rustic gate at the northern corner of Edgewood, whence a carriage road led to the ridge behind the house, stood then invitingly open, and a printed notice informed the wayfarer that the grounds were free to the public on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons.

Now, as then, the reveries and dreams of Mr. Mitchell’s early books continue to charm the fireside musings of many a college dreamer; and successive generations of Freshmen still find their footsteps tending, in the golden autumn afternoons of first term, toward the Edgewood gates. But nowadays the pilgrim may take the Chapel Street horse-car at the college fence, and after a ten minutes’ ride, dismounting at the terminus of the line and walking a block to westward, he finds himself at the brink of what our geologists call “the New Haven terrace.” Thence the road descends into the water meadows, and, crossing on a new iron bridge the brackish sluice known as West River, leads straight on across a gravelly level, till it strikes, at a right angle, the foot of the Woodbridge hills and the Old Codrington Road (now Forest Street). On this road lies Edgewood, sloping to the east and south, lifted upon a shelf of land above the river plain, while behind it the hill rises steeply to the height of some hundred feet, and shuts off the west with the border of overhanging woods which gives the place its name.

From his library window Mr. Mitchell can look across a little foreground of well-kept dooryard, with blossoming shrubs and vines and bright parterres of flowers set in the close turf; across a hemlock hedge and a grass-bank sloping down to the road; across the road itself and the flat below it, checkered with his various crops, to the spires and roofs and elm-tops of New Haven and the green Fair Haven hills in the eastern horizon. Southward, following the line of the river, he sees the waters of the harbor, bounded by the white lighthouse on its point of rock. Northward is the trap “dyke” or precipice of West Rock, and northeastward, beyond the town, and dim with a violet haze, the sister eminence, East Rock. From the driveway which traverses the ridge behind the homestead the view is still wider and more distinct, taking in the salt marshes through which West River flows down to the bay, the village of West Haven to the south, and, beyond, the sparkling expanse of the Sound and the sandhills of Long Island. Back of the ridge, westward, stretches for miles a region which used to be known to college walkers as “The Wilderness,” from its supposed resemblance to the scene of Grant’s famous campaign: a region of scrubby woodland, intersected with sled roads and cut over every few years for fire-wood: a region—it may be said incidentally—dear to the hunters of the fugacious orchid.

The weather-stained old farmhouse described in “My Farm of Edgewood” made way some dozen years ago for a tasteful mansion of masonry and wood-work. The lower story of this is built of stone taken mostly from old walls upon the farm. The doors and windows have an edging of brick which sets off the prevailing gray with a dash of red. The upper story is of wood. There are a steep-pitched roof with dormer-windows, a rustic porch to the east, a generous veranda to the south, and vines covering the stone. The whole effect is both picturesque and substantial, graceful and homely at once. The front door gives entrance to a spacious hall, flanked upon the south by the double drawing-rooms and upon the north by the library, with its broad, low chimney opening, its book-shelves and easy-chairs, its tables and desk and wide mantel, covered and strewn in careless order with books, photographs, manuscripts, and all the familiar litter of a scholar’s study. At the rear of the hall is the long dining-room, running north and south, its windows giving upon the grassy hillside to the west. A conspicuous feature of this apartment is the full-length portrait, on the end wall, of Mr. Mitchell’s maternal grandfather, painted about the beginning of the century, and representing its subject in the knee-breeches and silk stockings of the period. Half-length portraits of Mr. Mitchell’s grandparents, painted about 1830, by Morse, the electrician, hang upon the side wall of the dining-room, and an earlier portrait of his mother surmounts the library mantel-piece. Mr. Mitchell’s culture, it will be seen, does not lack that ancestral background which Dr. Holmes thinks so important to the New England Brahmin. Three generations of the name adorn the pages of the Yale Triennial. His grandfather, Stephen Mix Mitchell, graduated in 1763, was a Representative and Senator in Congress and Chief Justice of Connecticut. His father, the Rev. Alfred Mitchell, graduated in 1809, was a Congregational minister at Norwich, in which city Mr. Mitchell was born, April 12, 1822. The statement has been made that “Doctor Johns” was a sketch from the Rev. Alfred Mitchell; but this is not true. Mr. Mitchell’s father died when his son was only eight years old, and though his theology was strictly Calvinistic, his personality made no such impression upon the boy as to enable him to reproduce it so many years after. Some features in the character of “Dr. Johns” were suggested by Dr. Hall, of Ellington, at whose once famous school Mr. Mitchell was for some time a pupil. The name of Donaldus G. Mitchell also appears on the Triennial Catalogue for the year 1792 as borne by a great-uncle of the present “Donaldus,” who took his bachelor’s degree in 1841. Mr. Mitchell’s mother was a Woodbridge, and some four years since he completed an elaborate and sumptuously-printed genealogy of that family, undertaken by his brother but left unfinished at his death.

The French windows of the drawing-room open upon the veranda to the south, and this upon a lawny perspective which is at once an example of Mr. Mitchell’s skillful landscape-gardening and a surprise to the stranger, who from the highway has caught only glimpses of sward and shrubbery through the hedge and the fringe of trees. The Edgewood lawn is a soft fold between the instep of the hill and the grassy bank that hangs over the road and carries the hedgerow. It is not very extensive, but the plantations of evergreens and other trees on either side are so artfully disposed, advancing here in capes and retiring there in bays and recesses, that the eye is lured along a seemingly interminable vista of gentle swales and undulations, bordered by richly-varied foliage, along the hillside farms beyond, and far into the heart of the south. Here and there on the steep slope to the right, and high above the lawn itself, are coppices of birch, hazel, alder, dogwood and other native shrubs, brought together years ago and protected by little enclosures, but now grown into considerable trees. North of the house is the neatly-kept garden, with its beds of vegetables and flowers, its rows of currant and gooseberry bushes, its box-edged alleys, and back of all a tall hedge of hemlock, clipped to a dense, smooth wall of dark green, starred with the lighter needles of this year’s growth. Mr. Mitchell tells, with a pardonable pride, how he brought from the woods, in two baskets, all the hemlocks which compose this beautiful screen. He has two workshops,—his library and his garden; and of the two he evidently loves the latter best, and works there every day before breakfast in the cool hours of the morning.

Edgewood has been identified with its present owner for a generation. He was not always a farmer; but farming was his early passion, and after several years of writing and wandering, he settled down here in 1855 and returned to his first love. On leaving college he went to work on his grandfather’s farm near Norwich. He gained at this time the prize of a silver cup from the New York Agricultural Society, for plans of farm buildings. He became a correspondent of The Albany Cultivator (now The Country Gentleman), contributing letters from Europe during his first visit abroad, in 1844-6. This was undertaken in search of health. He was threatened with consumption, and winter found him at Torquay in the south of England, suffering from a distressing and persistent cough. From this he was relieved after a violent fit of sea-sickness, while crossing the Channel to the island of Jersey, where he spent half a winter. Another half-winter was passed in tramping about England, and eighteen months on the continent. These experiences of foreign travel furnished the material for his first book, “Fresh Gleanings” (1847). After his return to this country he studied law in New York, but the confinement was injurious to his health, and in 1848 he went abroad a second time, traveling in England and Switzerland and residing for a while in Paris. France was on the eve of a revolution, and Mr. Mitchell’s impressions of the time were recorded in his second book, “The Battle Summer” (1850). Again returning to America, he took up his residence in New York, and issued in weekly numbers “The Lorgnette; or, Studies of the Town, by an Opera-Goer.” This was a series of satirical sketches, something after the plan of Irving’s “Salmagundi” papers. They were signed by an assumed name, and even the publisher was not in the secret of their authorship. The intermediary in the business was William Henry Huntington, who lately died in Paris, and who was known for many years to all Americans sojourning in the French capital as an accomplished gentleman and man of letters. The “Lorgnette” provoked much comment, and among Mr. Mitchell’s collection of letters are many from his publisher, detailing the guesses of eminent persons who called at his shop to ascertain the authorship.

The nucleus of the “Reveries of a Bachelor” was a paper contributed to The Southern Literary Messenger, and entitled “A Bachelor’s Reverie, in Three Parts: 1. Smoke, signifying Doubt; 2. Blaze, signifying Cheer; 3. Ashes, signifying Desolation.” Mr. Mitchell has a bibliographical rarity in his library in the shape of a copy of this first paper, in book form, bearing date Wormsloe, 1850, with the following colophon: “This edition of twelve copies of the Bachelor’s Reverie, by Ik: Marvel, hath been: by the Author’s Leave: printed privately for George Wymberley Jones.” This Mr. Jones was a wealthy and eccentric gentleman, who amused himself with a private printing-press at his estate of Wormsloe, near Savannah. The “Reveries,” by the way, has been by all odds its author’s most popular work, judged by the unfailing criterion of “sales.” In 1851 Mr. Mitchell was invited by Henry J. Raymond to edit the literary department of the Times, then newly established; but the labor promised to be too exacting for his state of health, and the offer was declined. In May, 1853, Mr. Mitchell was appointed Consul for the United States at Venice. In June of the same year he was married to Miss Mary F. Pringle, of Charleston, and sailed again for Europe to enter upon the duties of his consulate. He was attracted to Venice by the opportunities for historical study, and while there he began the collection of material looking toward a history of the Venetian Republic. This plan never found fulfilment, but traces of Mr. Mitchell’s Venetian studies crop out in many of his subsequent writings; especially, perhaps, in his lecture on “Titian and his Times,” read before the Art School of Yale College, and included in his latest volume, “Bound Together” (1884). In 1854 he resigned his consulate, and in July of the following year, he purchased Edgewood.

During the past thirty-three years Mr. Mitchell has led the enviable life of a country gentleman—a life of agriculture tempered by literature and diversified by occasional excursions into the field of journalism. He has seen his numerous children grow up about him; he has entertained at his charming home many of our most distinguished literati; and he has kept open his communication with the reading public by a series of books and contributions to the periodical press, on farming, landscape-gardening, and the practical and æsthetic aspects of rural life. He edited “The Atlantic Almanac” for 1868 and 1869, and in the latter year accepted the editorship of Hearth and Home—a position which made it necessary for him to spend a part of every week in New York. He was one of the judges of industrial art at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, and Commissioner from the United States at the Paris Exposition of 1878. His taste and experience in landscape-gardening have been called into play in the laying-out of the city park at East Rock, and at many private grounds in New Haven and elsewhere. Of late years the University has had the benefit of his services in one way and another. He has been one of the Council of the School of Fine Arts, since the establishment of that department, and has lectured before the School. In the fall and winter of 1884, he delivered a course of lectures on English literature to the students of the University; and the crowd of eager listeners that attended the series to the close showed that Mr. Mitchell had not lost that power of interesting and delighting young men which gave such wide currency to his “Reveries of a Bachelor” and “Dream Life” a generation ago. Among the other lectures and addresses delivered on various occasions—several of which are collected in “Bound Together,”—special mention may be made of the address on Washington Irving, which formed one of the pleasantest features of the centennial celebration at Tarrytown in 1883. Irving not only honored Mr. Mitchell with his personal friendship, but he was, in a sense, his literary master. For different as are the subjects upon which the two have written, Mr. Mitchell, more truly than any other American writer, has inherited the literary tradition of Irving’s time and school. There is the same genial and sympathetic attitude toward his readers; the same tenderness of feeling; and, in style, that gentle elaboration and that careful, high-bred English which contrasts so strikingly with the brusque, nervous manner now in fashion. Among the treasures of Mr. Mitchell’s correspondence, none, I will venture to say, are more highly valued by him than the letters from Washington Irving, although the collection contains epistles from Hawthorne, Holmes, Dickens, Greeley, and many other distinguished men. Other interesting memorabilia are the roughly drawn plans of Bayard Taylor’s house and grounds at “Kennett,” which the projector sketched for his host during his last visit at Edgewood.

In appearance Mr. Mitchell is rather under than over the average height, broad-shouldered and squarely shaped, the complexion fresh and ruddy, the nose slightly aquiline, the lips firmly shut, the glance of the eye kindly but keen. The engraving in The Eclectic Magazine for September, 1867, still gives an excellent idea of its subject, though the dark, luxuriant whiskers there pictured are now a decided gray. It may not be generally know that, besides German translations of several of Mr. Mitchell’s books, his “Reveries” and “Dream Life” have been reprinted in Germany in Dürr’s Collection of Standard American Authors.

Henry A. Beers.