Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, January 1885

by Various

After the Indian and the French and Indian wars were over, there was but a short interval of rest before the War of Independence began. The long rugged battle with the savage and the wilderness had done its work well in training men for the struggle which was to sunder all bonds, and convert the colony into a new nation, master of its own destiny. Northampton was not the scene of any battles; but bore its part in furnishing some brave and leading men, and money, or money’s worth, to the army. After the war was over, came a time of depression and disorganization in public affairs and in trade, which culminated hereabouts in what is known as Shays’ Rebellion, so named from its leader; but it was soon quelled, and peace and prosperity settled down upon Northampton and upon the whole land.

GLIMPSE THE SECOND.

If we lift a corner of the veil of time at the opening of the present century, we find our handful of settlers become a population of 4000,—there was no immigration in those days to swell the numbers by thousands and tens of thousands at a blow,—and possessed of resources for their social and intellectual welfare pretty much on a par with those of an English country town at that date of the same size: a little behind still in material comforts and luxuries, a little ahead in the amount of mental activity and the spirit of progress generated partly by more complete self-dependence, by the great and stirring times men had just passed through, and by hereditary influence from the parent stock, which was the pick of Old England in these qualities.

The spirit of fellowship thrives where all are fellow-workers. There comes, it would seem, a happy transition time between the struggles, privations, isolation of the pioneers, and the wealth, luxury, and poverty (grim skeleton in the cupboard of advancing prosperity), when there yet remains a good measure of that sense of neighborship necessarily developed, when no man is independent of the free help and good-will of others, no man is born with a silver spoon in his mouth,—a time, in short, when sociability is and “society” is not, and those to whom the lines have fallen in pleasant places can stretch out a friendly hand to the less fortunate without suspicion of condescension or patronage.

For sample, we will take a single group, the door of whose hospitable house has been set open for us by the privately printed memoirs of Mrs Anne Jean Lyman. The inmates are a judge, his wife, and a large family of children of all ages, for he has been twice married. The judge is a genuine product of the soil, his family having for at least three generations back been settled in Northampton. His wife, who is from the neighborhood of Boston, of Scotch ancestry on one side, and on the other descended from Anne Hutchinson (the eloquent woman-preacher, who, banished for heterodoxy from their settlement by the Pilgrim Fathers, was killed by the Indians in 1643), may be taken as a good but typical instance of the New England woman of that day—capable, practical, aspiring, intellectual, friendly above all.

There are no stirring adventures, no record of any achievements of genius in these memoirs, but the unpretending pages reflect a clear image of two fine characters, well adjusted to the social conditions amid which they lived. Both had beauty and dignity of person, warm sympathies, good brains, abundant energy, and a spirit of hospitality which made their home the focus where the worth and intellect of the village were wont to gather and to shine brightest and warmest. Northampton has now its row of thriving stores, to which the people from neighboring villages flock on market-days, making a cheerful bustle. The elms, planted by the pioneers on either side the street, from the boughs of one of which Jonathan Edwards had preached to the Indians, now spread a goodly shade. A four-horse stage from Boston, ninety miles distant, comes in every evening with bugle horn sounding gaily. The driver is the personal friend of the whole town, for his tenacious memory never lets slip a single message or commission—save on one memorable occasion, when he forgot to bring back his wife who had been visiting in Boston, and so furnished the village with a long-enduring joke. The social judge, when he hears the horn, takes his hat and with alert step and cheerful face, glowing in the evening light, hastens to Warner’s Tavern where the coach draws up, to welcome the arrivals and bring any friend who may be among them to his own home—and any stranger too, who seems in ill-health or sorrow, and not likely to be made comfortable at an inn. When the judge and his wife go yearly to Boston, a throng of neighbors flock into the library overnight, where the packing goes on, not only to take an affectionate leave, but to bring parcels of every size and commissions of every variety,—a pattern with request to bring back dresses for a family of five; and “could they go to the orphan asylum and see if a good child of ten could be bound out till she was eighteen? and if so, bring her back.” One requests them to call and see a sick mother at Sudbury, another a sick sister at Ware. Finally, a little boy, with bundle as large as himself, asks “if this would be too big to carry to grandmother?” “I’ll carry anything short of a cooking-stove,” says the kind lady; and wherever the stage stops to change horses, she runs round to hunt up the sick friend or deliver the parcel.

Here is a picture, in brief, of a day of home-life at a later period when the children are mostly grown up and the judge has retired from the Bench. It is the grey dawn of a summer’s day, and the mother is already up and doing, while the rest of her large family, all but the husband, are still asleep. Dressed in short skirt and white sacque, she goes with broom and duster to her parlor and dining-room, opens wide the windows to the sweet morning air and the song of the birds, and puts all in order. At six o’clock she calls up her two maids, puts on her morning-dress and white cap, takes the large work-basket that always stands handy in the corner—for she mends not only for the family but for the maids and the hired man—and works till breakfast, when often fifteen or twenty cheerful souls assemble round the table. After which, with help of children and grandchildren, the dishes are swiftly washed, the table cleared, and husband and wife are then wont to take their seat at the front door, that they may greet the passer-by or send messages to neighbors: she with the work-basket and the book that always lay handy under the work—some essay, poem, history, novel (for she is an omnivorous reader, and her letters intelligently discuss current literary topics)—or with the peas and beans to shell and string for dinner; he with the newspaper. Among the passers-by with whom they chat come, at certain seasons of the year, the judges of the Supreme Court and other notable men,—Baron Renné, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Emerson, too, while he was yet a young unknown Unitarian minister. Seldom does the large family sit down to dinner without guests, for any one who drops in is asked to stay, or some wearied-looking passer-by is pressed to step in. In the afternoon the mother’s chosen seat is at the window of the west parlor looking towards the hills, and then the young people flock around while she reads aloud through the long summer afternoons. All must share in her enjoyment, and often is the wayfarer, some “good neighbor” or “intellectual starveling,” beckoned in “just to hear this rich passage we are reading—it won’t take long.” If she finds any with a strong desire for knowledge, she never rests till the means to supply the want are found, and more than one youth of promise afterwards fulfilled owed his first good chance in life to this wise, generous-hearted woman.

GLIMPSE THE THIRD.

Northampton to-day carries her two hundred and thirty odd years lightly, and, save for the lofty and venerable elms, looks as young as the youngest of towns. How, indeed, can anything but the trees ever look old in America, since the atmosphere does not furnish old Time with moisture enough to write the record of his flight in grey tones and weather stains, and lichens, and worn and crumbling edges? Hawthorne’s “old manse” at Concord was the only ancient-looking house I saw. Either it had never been painted, or the paint was all worn off, and so the wooden walls had taken a silver-grey color, and, with its picturesque situation close to the Concord river and by the side of the field in which was fought the first battle in the War of Independence, it well deserves the honor and renown that have settled on it, both as associated with Emerson’s ancestors, his own early days, and with Hawthorne’s romance. But in general the yearly fresh coat of paint is a sort of new birth to the old houses, which makes them indistinguishable from modern ones, wood being still the material used in country-places for detached houses. But step inside some one or two of these pretty modest-looking cottages, under the shade of the Northampton elms, and you will find the low ceiling, the massive beams, small doors and windows, corner cupboards, and queer ups and downs along the passages, which tell that they were put up by hands long since mouldered in the grave, and make you feel as if you were at home again in some old Essex village.

Socially, the little town may be regarded as a kind of Cranford—but Cranford with a difference. There is the same preponderance of maiden ladies and widows—for what should the men do there? New England farming is a very slow and unprofitable affair compared with farming in the West, and there are no manufactures of any importance. There are the same tea-parties, with a solitary beau in the centre, “like the one white flower in the middle of a nosegay;” the same modest goodness, kindliness, refinement, making the best of limited means and of restricted interests. But even under these conditions the spirit of enterprise and of public spirit lurks in an American Cranford, and strikes out boldly in some direction or other. What would Miss Jenkyns have said to the notion of a college which should embody the most advanced ideas for giving young women precisely the same educational opportunities as young men? She would justly have felt that it was enough to make Dr. Johnson turn in his grave. Yet such a scheme has been realized by one of the maiden ladies of Northampton or its immediate neighborhood, in Smith College—a really noble institution; where, also, the experiment is being tried of housing the students, not in one large building, but in a cluster of pretty-looking, moderate-sized homes, standing amid lawn and garden, where they are allowed, under certain restrictions, to enter into and receive the society of the village, so that their lives may not be a too monotonous routine and “grind.”