Noons glowed. The poet held each name
In hushless music to the ear—
Low for the thinking few to hear,
Loud for the noisy world’s acclaim;
And pondering, one that turns the page
Whereon their story hath been writ,
Gathers a purer lore from it,
Than all the wisdom of the sage;—
A simple lore of trust and faith
For Life’s fierce days of dust and heat,—
To keep the heart of boyhood sweet
Through every passion, unto death—
To love and reverence his time,
Not for its surface-growth of weeds,
But for its goodly buried seeds,—
To hope, and weave a hopeful rhyme!
The vision does not seem very clear even to me, now, and I suppose not many of those kind, hard-working country printers and busy city journalists recognized themselves in my forecast of the coming newspaper man. Yet I think there is something in the glowing fancy which is here reflected only in part, and I believe some graduate of our university courses of journalism may possibly do worse than keep my fond dream in mind. In this case, the yawning counting-room may not so soon engulf his high intentions, and, keeping clear of that shining sepulcher of noble ideals for a while, he may thank me for my over-generous faith in him.
No one that I can recall specifically thanked me at the time of that editorial convention, though no doubt the usual resolutions thanking the orator and poet were passed. I should be glad to believe that at the ball which crowned our festival some kind woman-soul may have tried to feign a pleasure in my verse which no man-soul attempted; but I have only the memory of my fearful joy in the dance which I seem to have led. I went back to Columbus with such heart as I could, but in the dense foreshortening of the time’s events I cannot find that of my own unhorsing from the shining procession of journalists figured in my poem. I can only be sure that I was unhorsed, and then suddenly, to my great joy and even greater surprise, was caught up and given a new mount, with even larger pay. That is, I was now invited to become professional reader for the young publisher who had issued the Poems of Two Friends, and who, apparently inspired by the signal failure of that book, imagined establishing a general publishing business in our capital. He followed it with several very creditable books, and he seems to have had the offer of many more manuscripts than he could handle. I have no doubt I dealt faithfully with these, and I know that he confided entirely in my judgment, for I was now twenty-three, without a doubt of my own as to my competence. There was one manuscript, offered by a lady who had lived some years in Chile, which I thought so interesting, though so formless, that I wrote it quite over, and my friend published it in a book which I should like to read again; but I have no hope of ever seeing it. He also published a very good Ohio version of Gautier’s Romance of a Mummy, but our bravest venture was a book which the publisher himself had fancied doing, and which he had fancied my writing. This was the life of Abraham Lincoln, printed with his speeches in the same volume with the life and speeches of Hannibal Hamlin, who was nominated with him on the Presidential ticket at the Republican Convention in 1860. It was the expectation of my friend, the very just and reasonable expectation, that I should go to Springfield, Illinois, and gather the material for the work from Lincoln himself, and from his friends and neighbors. But this part of the project was distasteful to me, was impossible; I felt that there was nothing of the interviewer in me, at a time when the interviewer was not yet known by name even to himself. Not the most prophetic soul of the time, not the wisest observer of events, could have divined my loss; and I was no seer. I would not go, and I missed the greatest chance of my life in its kind, though I am not sure I was wholly wrong, for I might not have been equal to that chance; I might not have seemed to the man whom I would not go to see, the person to report him to the world in a campaign life. What we did was to commission a young law student of those I knew, to go to Springfield and get the material for me. When he brought it back, a sheaf of very admirable notes, but by no means great in quantity, I felt the charm of the material; the wild poetry of its reality was not unknown to me; I was at home with it, for I had known the belated backwoods of a certain region in Ohio; I had almost lived the pioneer life; and I wrote the little book with none of the reluctance I felt from studying its sources. I will not pretend that I had any prescience of the greatness, the tragical immortality, that underlay the few simple, mostly humble, facts brought to my hand. Those who see that unique historic figure in the retrospect will easily blame my youthful blindness, but those who only knew his life before he overtopped all the history of his time will not be so ready to censure me for my want of forecast. As it was, I felt the inadequacy of my work, and I regretted it in the preface which owned its hasty performance.
There were several campaign lives of Lincoln which must have seemed better than mine to him; I cannot care now how it seemed to others; but what he thought of it I never knew. Within a few years I have heard that he annotated a copy of it, and that this copy is still somewhere extant in the West; but I am not certain that I should like to see it, much as my curiosity is concerning it. He might, he must, have said some things which could not console me for missing that great chance of my life when I was too young to know it. I saw him twice in Columbus, as I have told here already, and once in Washington, as I have told elsewhere. That was when I came from the office of his private secretaries at the White House, secure of my appointment as Consul at Venice, and lingered wistfully as he crossed my way through the corridor. Within no very long time past my old friend Piatt (he of the Poems of Two Friends) has told me that Lincoln then meant me to speak to him, as I might very fitly have done, in thanking him for my appointment, and that he had followed me out from the secretaries’ room to let me do so. He might have had some faint promptings of curiosity concerning the queer youth who had written that life of him from material which he would not come to him for in person. But without doubting my friend, I doubt the fact; neither Hay nor Nicolay ever mentioned the matter to me in our many talks of Lincoln; and I cannot flatter myself that I missed another greatest chance of my life. Rather, I imagine that he did not know who I was, or could in the least care, under the burdens which then weighed upon him. He might have suspected me an office-seeker without the courage to approach him instead of the office-seeker whose hopes he had, very likely without vividly realizing it, crowned with joy. I blame myself for not speaking to him, of course, as I blame myself for not having gone to him instead of sending to him for the facts of his past; in any event, with my literary sense, I must have valued those facts; but if Lincoln had not been elected in 1860 he would not have been nominated again; and in that case should I now be reproaching myself so bitterly?
VII
Another fame so akin to Lincoln’s in tragedy, and most worthy of mention in the story of his great time, is that of a state senator of ours in the legislative session of 1860. James A. Garfield, of whose coming to read Tennyson to us one morning in the Journal office I have told in My Literary Passions, was then a very handsome young man of thirty, with a full-bearded handsome face, and a rich voice suited to reading “The Poet” in a way to win even reluctant editors from their work to listen. It is strange that I should have no recollection of meeting Garfield again in Columbus, or anywhere, indeed, until nearly ten years later, when I stopped with my father over a night at his house in Hiram, Ohio, where we found him at home from Congress for the summer. I was then living in Cambridge, in the fullness of my content with my literary circumstance, and as we were sitting with the Garfield family on the veranda that overlooked their lawn I was beginning to speak of the famous poets I knew when Garfield stopped me with “Just a minute!” He ran down into the grassy space, first to one fence and then to the other at the sides, and waved a wild arm of invitation to the neighbors who were also sitting on their back porches. “Come over here!” he shouted. “He’s telling about Holmes, and Longfellow, and Lowell, and Whittier!” and at his bidding dim forms began to mount the fences and follow him up to his veranda. “Now go on!” he called to me, when we were all seated, and I went on, while the whippoorwills whirred and whistled round, and the hours drew toward midnight. The neighbors must have been professors in the Eclectic Institute of Hiram where Garfield himself had once taught the ancient languages and literature; and I do not see how a sweeter homage could have been paid to the great renowns I was chanting so eagerly, and I still think it a pity my poets could not have somehow eavesdropped that beautiful devotion. Under the spell of those inarticulate voices the talk sank away from letters and the men of them and began to be the expression of intimate and mystical experience; and I remember Garfield’s telling how in the cool of a summer evening, such as this night had deepened from, he came with his command into a valley of the Kanawha; for he had quickly turned from laws to arms, and this was in the beginning of the great war. He said that he noticed a number of men lying on the dewy meadow in different shapes of sleep, and for an instant, in the inveterate association of peace, he thought they were resting there after the fatigue of a long day’s march. Suddenly it broke upon him that they were dead, and that they had been killed in the skirmish which had left the Unionist force victors. Then, he said, at the sight of these dead men whom other men had killed, something went out of him, the habit of his lifetime, that never came back again: the sense of the sacredness of life, and the impossibility of destroying it. He let a silence follow on his solemn words, and in the leading of his confession he went on to say how the sense of the sacredness of other things of peace had gone out of some of the soldiers and never come back again. What was not their own could be made their own by the act of taking it; and he said we would all be surprised to know how often the property of others had been treated after the war as if it were the property of public enemies by the simple-hearted fellows who had carried the use of war in the enemy’s country back into their own. “You would be surprised,” he ended, “to know how many of those old soldiers, who fought bravely and lived according to the traditions of military necessity, are now in the penitentiary for horse-stealing.”
Once again I memorably met Garfield in my father’s house in Ashtabula County (the strong heart of his most Republican Congressional district) where he had come to see me about some passages in Lamon’s Life of Lincoln, which was then in the hands of my Boston publishers, withheld in their doubt of the wisdom or propriety of including them. I think Garfield was then somewhat tempted by the dramatic effect these passages would have with the public, but he was not strenuous about it, and he yielded whatever authority he might have had in the matter to the misgiving of the publishers; in fact, I do not believe that if it had been left to him altogether he would have advised their appearance. I met him for the last time in 1879 (when my wife and I were for a week the guests of President Hayes), as he was coming, with Mrs. Garfield on his arm, from calling upon us at the White House. He stopped me and said, “I was thinking how much like your father you carried yourself,” and I knew that he spoke from the affection which had been many years between them. I was yet too young to feel the resemblance, but how often in my later years I have felt and seen it! As we draw nearer to the door between this world and the next it is as if those who went before us returned to us out of it to claim us part of them.