But the nature of a lawyer's employment, even if he combine with it the kindred one of politics and legislation, is not apt to invest his home with that attraction to the stranger which the home of the literary man possesses. We are at once interested to know who the author is, who has charmed us by the quaintness of his conceits, or the freshness and purity of his style. We want to see the house and the room, where those intricate plots are matured, or those lifelike characters are first conceived. But Coke upon Littleton, seems pretty much the same, whether read upon the green slope of a country hill, or in the third story of an office down town. Besides, the author is at liberty to seek the most secluded spots, and dwell amongst the most romantic scenery, and surround himself with all that makes life beautiful to contemplate; and it is for his interest to do this, in order that his mind may be kept open to impressions, his spirits elevated and serene, and his whole life calm and happy. The lawyer on the other hand, must seek communion, not with nature, but with men; he must dwell among large communities, and rail even there where merchants most do congregate.
The home of the distinguished lawyer and statesman whose name is placed at the head of these lines, is an exception from the homes of others of his peers; if it be true that it is the fate of a lawyer's home to be an object of interest to its inmates alone. There was something in his frank, enthusiastic and generous nature, which made him always susceptible to the influences of home, and always fitted to awake and to wield those enchantments with which a home is invested. The secluded peninsula of Marblehead, with its long firm beach upon one side, and its rocky precipitous shore upon the other, begirt on three sides by the ever-changing Atlantic, is considered by his biographer to have had its effect in moulding the character of the boy; and in the quiet, tame inland beauty of Cambridge, with its academical proprieties, and its level streets, and its spacious marshes, through which the winding Charles "slips seaward silently;" many remain outside of the family circle, to testify to the magical attraction which once hung about the narrow brick house where he lived, and the cordial greeting which the visitor received at the hands of its former occupant.
Judge Story was born in the antiquated, primeval fishing town of Marblehead; a town presenting such a rocky and barren surface, that when Whitfield entered it for the first time, he was fain to inquire, "Pray, where do they bury their dead?" Story himself speaks of his birth-place as "a secluded fishing town, having no general connection with other towns, and, not being a thoroughfare, without that intercourse which brings strangers to visit it, or to form an acquaintance with its inhabitants." In fact it could not well be a thoroughfare, since it leads only from Salem to the sea, and the inhabitants of the latter town have a sufficiently ready access of their own. But though Marblehead with its scanty soil, and its isolated position, is neither an Eden nor a thoroughfare, it is at least a stout old place where men are grown; where an entire regiment was furnished for the cause of American Independence, completely officered and manned by brave men, to whom the dangers of war were but a continuation of previous lives of peril, and who supplied besides more privateers than history has recorded, to harass the enemy upon an element with which they were more familiar.
The town of Marblehead is supported by the fishery business. A large portion of its inhabitants are simple fishermen, whose manhood is passed in voyages to the Great Banks, and voyages back; a constant succession of those perils which are incident to the sea, with long winter evenings of sailors' yarns and ghost stories, in one monotonous round, till they finally depart
"On that drear voyage from whose night
The ominous shadows never lift."
It was among a population of this kind, and at a time when a long and disastrous war had crippled their resources, that the youthful Story began with his accustomed enthusiasm to acquire that education whose root is bitter when grown in the most favorable soil. Without advantages of good schooling, or a plentiful supply of books, he did what thousands of others, great and small, have done and are doing; that is, he acquired an education without the modern improvements on which our boys rely, and whose value their parents and teachers are so apt to over-estimate. In the shop of the Marblehead barber, the village great men assembled to hear the news, and to hold forth upon the condition and prospects of the young republic, as well as to have their ambrosial locks powdered and their beards removed. Here, in place of the modern lecture room, our young hero resorted, and listened reverently to oracular utterances from wise mouths in the intervals of the shaving brush and the razor. The village barber himself, endowed with an easy garrulity, more natural and professional than the stately reserve of his metropolitan brother, could, at his leisure, retail the wisdom of his many councillors, diluted to the point where it admitted of the mental digestion of a child.
This, together with the usual toils and discouragements of the classics, and the hopes and fears which a college examination inspires, made up a boy's life in Marblehead before this century began. The old Judge, late in life recalling these early Marblehead times, speaks of other influences, some of whose effect is, we imagine, derived from the fact that he is viewing them in his maturity, as they then appear, softened as seen down the long vista of nearly forty years. "My delight," he says, "was to roam over the narrow and rude territory of my native town; to traverse its secluded beaches and its shallow inlets; to gaze upon the sleepless ocean; to lay myself down on the sunny rocks, and listen to the deep tones of the rising and the falling tides; to look abroad when the foaming waves were driven with terrific force and uproar against the barren cliffs or the rocky promontories, which every where opposed their immovable fronts to resist them; to seek, in the midst of the tremendous majesty of an eastern storm, some elevated spot, where, in security, I could mark the mountain billow break upon the distant shore, or dash its broken waters over the lofty rocks which here and there stood along the coast, naked and weather-beaten. But still more was I pleased in a calm, summer day, to lay myself down alone on one of the beautiful heights which overlook the harbor of Salem, and to listen to the broken sounds of the hammers in the distant ship-yards, or to the soft dash of the oar of some swift-moving boat, or to the soft ripple of the murmuring wave; or to gaze on the swelling sail, or the flying bird, or the scarcely moving smoke, in a revery of delicious indolence."
When Story left Marblehead and entered Harvard College in 1795, he was brought in contact with somewhat different circumstances and different temptations from those which there await the youthful student in these days. Coming from a small and tolerably illiterate fishing town, into the midst of such literary shades, being in daily converse with young men at an age when the mind is lively, and full of the easy self-confidence which the mutual flattery of a College begets, his enthusiasm was quickened anew, and his generous nature attacked on its weakest side. "I seemed," he says, "to breathe a higher atmosphere, and to look abroad with a wider vision and more comprehensive powers. Instead of the narrow group of a village, I was suddenly brought into a large circle of young men engaged in literary pursuits, and warmed and cheered by the hopes of future eminence." There is, perhaps, no impropriety in saying, that at fifteen, we look abroad with a wider vision and more comprehensive powers than we do at twelve, and such young men as Channing, his friendly rival in College, and Tuckerman, his chum, might well be warmed and cheered by the hopes of future eminence. The students in those days enjoyed as much seclusion as now, with perhaps a little less general culture and a little more dissipation. But, as we have intimated, in some respects the changes were greater. The anti-republican system of "fagging" had not then become quite obsolete and forgotten, but existed at least in oral tradition, whereas now, its less rigorous substitute has recently fallen into disuse. In those days there was not even an unsuccessful attempt, to render the intercourse between the Professors and the students in any sense parental, but the formal and unconfiding manners of the old school were preached, as well as practised. The line of division between the College and the town was sharply drawn and unhesitatingly maintained on the part of the former, and the opportunities for social intercourse with Boston were comparatively limited, when omnibuses were unknown, and the bridge regarded as a somewhat hazardous speculation. Now the students are to be seen in Washington street on Saturdays, and there is scarce an evening's entertainment in Boston, without young representatives from Cambridge. And the old town itself has added so many new houses to its former number, that a great change is coming over the face of Cambridge society. The term "the season" is beginning to have its proper significance, the winter months being pretty well filled with the customary social observances. It is true that the College is still the controlling element. Festivities are mostly suspended during the first two months of the year, which is the time of the winter vacation, and revive again with the return of the spring and the students. But from faint symptoms which may be detected by the anxious observer, there is reason to fear that it may not be long before the great body of the students will have cause on their part, to complain of that exclusiveness which they have exercised as their prerogative for more than two centuries.
The four short years of Story's undergraduate existence were passed free, alike from this species of social pleasure and social anxiety. He was naturally fond of company, and had a healthy, youthful taste for conviviality; but he shrank instinctively from excesses, and was, fortunately, also ambitious to win a high rank for scholarship. His companions were of his own age, and those divinities who people the inner chambers of a young man's fancy at the age of nineteen, were not upon the spot to distract overmuch his attention from his studies. He left his home within the College walls before he had arrived at manhood, and returned again some thirty years after in the maturity of his powers, to repay to his foster mother the debt which he owed for his education, by imparting to her younger children the results of his experience. Cambridge is to be considered as his home; it was there that he won his greatest fame, it was there that he fondly turned to refresh himself after his labors on the full bench and the circuit; this was the home of his affections and his interests, and there his earnest and active life was brought to its calm and peaceful close.
In Brattle-street, a little distance on the road from the Colleges to Mount Auburn, there stands a narrow brick house, with its gable end to the street, facing the east, and a long piazza on its southern side. It is situated just at the head of Appian Way—not the Queen of Ways, leading from Rome to Brundusium, over which Horace journeyed in company with Virgil, and Paul's brethren came to meet him as far as Appii Forum and The Three Taverns, but a short lane, boasting not many more yards than its namesake miles; leading from Cambridge Common to Brattle-street, journeyed over by hurrying students with Horace and Virgil under their arms, without a single tavern in it, and hardly long enough to accommodate three. The external appearance of the house would hardly attract or reward the attention of the passer by. It stands by itself, looking as much too high for its width as an ordinary city residence in New-York, that has sprung up in advance of the rest of its block. The street in which it stands is flat and shady, but wonderfully dusty nevertheless, for Cambridge is a town