MEMORIES OF A HOSTESS

By the Same Author

BIOGRAPHICAL

• American Bookmen (1898)
• Phillips Brooks (in “Beacon Biographies,” 1899)
• Life and Letters of George Bancroft (1908)
• Life and Labors of Bishop Hare (1911)
• Letters of Charles Eliot Norton (with Sara Norton, 1913)
• George von Lengerke Meyer: His Life and Public Services (1919)
• Memoirs of the Harvard Dead (1920, 1921, ——)

HISTORICAL

• Boston, the Place and the People (1903)
• Boston Common: Scenes from Four Centuries (1910)
• The Boston Symphony Orchestra (1914)
• The Humane Society of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1918)
• The Atlantic Monthly and Its Makers (1919)

VERSE

• Shadows (1897)
• Harmonies (1909)

EDITED

• The Beacon Biographies (31 volumes, 1899-1910)
• The Memory of Lincoln (1899)
• Home Letters of General Sherman (1909)
• Lines of Battle, by Henry Howard Brownell (1912)
• The Harvard Volunteers in Europe (1916)
• A Scholar’s Letters to a Young Lady (1920)

Mrs. Fields

Memories of a Hostess

A CHRONICLE OF
EMINENT FRIENDSHIPS

DRAWN CHIEFLY FROM THE DIARIES OF
Mrs. JAMES T. FIELDS

BY
M. A. DeWOLFE HOWE

“I stay a little longer, as one stays

To cover up the embers that still burn”

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS
BOSTON

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
M. A. DEWOLFE HOWE

First Impression, October, 1922
Second Impression, December, 1922

Printed in the
United States of America

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

(Most of the photographs reproduced are in the collections of the Boston Athenæum and the Harvard College Library, to which grateful acknowledgments are made.)

MEMORIES OF A HOSTESS

I
PRELIMINARY

In the years immediately before the death of Mrs. James T. Fields, on January 5, 1915, she spoke to me more than once of her intention to place in my possession a cabinet of old papers—journals of her own, letters from a host of correspondents, odds and ends of manuscript and print—which stood in a dark corner of a small reception-room near the front door of her house in Charles Street, Boston. On her death this intention was found to have been confirmed in writing. It was also made clear that Mrs. Fields had no desire that her own life should be made a subject of record—“unless,” she wrote, “for some reason not altogether connected with myself.” Such a reason is abundantly suggested in her records of the friends she was constantly seeing through the years covered by the journals. These friends were men and women whose books have made them the friends of the English-speaking world, and a better knowledge of them would justify any amplification of the records of their lives. In this process the figure of their friend and hostess in Charles Street must inevitably reveal itself—not as the subject of a biography, but as a central animating presence, a focus of sympathy and understanding, which seemed to make a single phenomenon out of a long series and wide variety of friendships and hospitalities.

The “blue books”—more than fifty in number—which Mrs. Fields used for the journals have already yielded many pages of valuable record to her own books, especially “James T. Fields: Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches” (1881), and “Authors and Friends” (1896); also even, here and there, to Mr. Fields’s “Yesterdays with Authors” (1871). Yet she left unprinted much that is both picturesque and illuminating: so many of the persons mentioned in the journal were still living or had but recently died when her books were written. There are, besides, many passages used in a fragmentary way, which may now with propriety be given complete.

Into these manuscript journals, then, I propose to dip afresh—not with the purpose of passing in a miscellaneous review all the friends who crossed the threshold of the Charles Street house in a fixed period of time, but rather in pursuit of what seems a more promising quest—namely, to consider separate friends and groups of friends in turn; to assemble from the journals passages that have to do with them; to supplement these by drawing now and then upon the old cabinet for a letter from this or that friend to Mr. or Mrs. Fields, and thus to step back across the years into a time and scene of refreshing remembrance. Many a friend, many a friendship, must be left untouched. In the processes of selection, figures of more than local significance will receive the chief consideration. In passages relating to one person, allusions to many others, sometimes treated separately in other passages, will often be found, for the friendships with one and another were constantly overlapping and interlocking. Bits of record of no obviously great importance will be included, not because they or the subjects of them are taken with undue seriousness, but merely that a vanished society, interesting in itself to those who care for the past and doubly interesting as material for a study in contrasts with the present, may have again its “day in court.” When Fields was publishing his reminiscences of Hawthorne, Lowell wrote to him: “Be sure and don’t leave anything out because it seems trifling, for it is out of these trifles only that it is possible to reconstruct character sometimes, if not always”; and he commended especially the hitting of “the true channel between the Charybdis of reticence, and the Scylla of gossip.” Under sailing orders of this nature, self-imposed, I hope to proceed.

“Another added to my cloud of witnesses,” wrote Mrs. Fields in her journal, on hearing, in 1867, that Forceythe Willson had died. Nearly fifty years of life then remained to the diarist, though she continued to keep her diary with regularity for hardly ten. Before her own death the cloud of witnesses was infinitely extended. Yet new friends constantly stood ready to fill, as best they might, the gaps that were left by the old. It is not the new who will appear in the following pages, but those with whom Mrs. Fields herself must now be numbered.

II
THE HOUSE AND THE HOSTESS

The fact that Henry James, in “The American Scene,” published in 1907, and again in an article which appeared in the “Atlantic Monthly” and the “Cornhill Magazine” in July, 1915, has set down in his own ultimate words his memories of Mrs. Fields and her Boston abode would be the despair of anyone attempting a similar task—were it not that quotation remains an unprohibited practice. In “The American Scene” he evokes from the past “the Charles Street ghosts,” and gives them their local habitation: “Here, behind the effaced anonymous door”—a more literal-minded realist might have noted that a vestibule-door contributed the only effacement and anonymity—“was the little ark of the modern deluge, here still the long drawing-room that looks over the water and towards the sunset, with a seat for every visiting shade, from far-away Thackeray down, and relics and tokens so thick on its walls as to make it positively, in all the town, the votive temple to memory.” In his “Atlantic” and “Cornhill” article he refers to the house, in a phrase at which Mrs. Fields would have smiled, as “the waterside museum of the Fieldses,” and to them as “addicted to every hospitality and every benevolence, addicted to the cultivation of talk and wit and to the ingenious multiplication of such ties as could link the upper half of the title-page with the lower”; he pays tribute to “their vivacity, their curiosity, their mobility, the felicity of their instinct for any manner of gathered relic, remnant, or tribute”; and in Mrs. Fields herself, surviving her husband for many years, he notes “the personal beauty of her younger years, long retained and not even at the end of such a stretch of life quite lost; the exquisite native tone and mode of appeal, which anciently we perhaps thought a little ‘precious,’ but from which the distinctive and the preservative were in time to be snatched, a greater extravagance supervening; the signal sweetness of temper and lightness of tact.”

There is one more of Henry James’s remarks about Mrs. Fields that must be quoted, “All her implications,” he says, “were gay, since no one so finely sentimental could be noted as so humorous; just as no feminine humor was perhaps ever so unmistakingly directed, and no state of amusement, amid quantities of reminiscence, perhaps ever so merciful.” Mirth and mercy do not always, like righteousness and peace, kiss each other. In Mrs. Fields the capacity for incapacitating laughter was such that I cannot help recalling one occasion, near the end of her life, when an attempt to tell a certain story—of which I remember nothing but that it had to do with a horse—involved her in such merriment that after repeated efforts to reach its “point,” she was forced to abandon the endeavor. What I cannot recall in a single instance, in the excellent telling of innumerable anecdotes, is unkindness, in word or suggestion, toward the persons involved in them. Mr. James did well to include this item in his enumeration of Mrs. Fields’s qualities.

Through all his lenses of memory and phrase he brought so vividly to one’s own vision the Mrs. Fields a younger generation had known that, on reading what he had written, I wrote to him in England, then nearly ending its first year in the war, and must have said that his pages would help me, at some future day, to deal with these of my own, now at last taking form. Thus, in part, he replied:—

July 20th, 1915

Your appreciation reached me, alas, but through the most muffling and deadening thickness of our unspeakable actuality here. It was to try and get out of that a little that I wrote my paper—in the most difficult and defeating conditions, which seemed to me to make it, with my heart so utterly elsewhere, a deplorably make-believe attempt. Therefore if it had any virtue, there must still be some in my poor old stump of a pen. Yes, the pipe of peace is a thing one has, amid our storm and stress, to listen very hard for when it twitters, from afar, outside; and when you shall pipe it over your exhibition of dear Mrs. Fields’s relics and documents I shall respond to your doing so with whatever attention may then be possible to me. We are not detached here, in your enviable way—but just exactly so must we therefore make some small effort to escape, even into whatever fatuity of illusion, to keep our heads above water at all. That in short is the history of my “Cornhill” scrap.

A Note of Acceptance

The time into which Henry James escaped by “piping” of Mrs. Fields has now grown far more remote than the added span of the last seven years, merely as years, could have made it. Remote enough it seemed to him when, at the end of his reminiscences of the Fieldses, he recalled a small “feast” in the Charles Street dining-room at which Mrs. Julia Ward Howe—it must have been about 1906—rose and declaimed, “a little quaveringly, but ever so gallantly, that ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ which she caused to be chanted half a century before and still could accompany with a real breadth of gesture, her great clap of hands and indication of the complementary step, on the triumphant line, ‘Be swift my hands to welcome him, be jubilant my feet!’”

Now it fell to my lot that night, as perhaps the youngest of the party, to convoy Mrs. Howe across two wintry bits of sidewalk into the carriage which bore her to and from the memorable dinner-party, and to accompany her on each of the little journeys. Quite as clear in my memory as her recitation of the “Battle Hymn” was the note of finality in her voice, quite free from unkindness, as she settled down for the return drive to her house in Beacon Street, far from a towering figure, and announced in the darkness: “Annie Fields has shrunk.” The hostess we were leaving and the guest some fifteen years her senior, and nearing ninety with what seemed an immortally youthful spirit, appear, when those words are recalled, as they must have been before either was touched by the diminishing hand of age; and the house whose door had just closed upon us—a house more recently obliterated to make room for a monstrous garage—came back as the scene of many a gathering of which the little feast described by Henry James was but a type.

Early in January of 1915 this door, which through a period of sixty years had opened upon extraordinary hospitality, was finally closed. Since 1866 it had borne the number 148. Ten years earlier, in 1856, when the house was first occupied by James T. Fields, afterwards identified with the publishing firms of Ticknor and Fields, and Fields, Osgood and Company, it was numbered 37, Charles Street. This Boston man of books and friendships, who before his death in 1881 was to become widely known as publisher, editor, lecturer, and writer, had married, in 1850, Eliza Josephine Willard, a daughter of Simon Willard, Jr., of the name still honorably associated with the even passage of time. She died within a few months, and in November of 1854 he married her cousin, Annie Adams, not yet twenty years old, the beautiful daughter of Dr. Zabdiel Boylston Adams. For those who knew Mrs. Fields toward the end of her four score and more years, it was far easier to see in her charming face and presence the exquisite, eager young woman of the mid-nineteenth century than to detect in the Charles Street of 1915, of which she was the last inhabitant of her own kind, any resemblance to the delightful street of family dwellings, many of them looking out over the then unfilled “Back Bay,” to which she had come about sixty years before. The Fieldses had lived here but a few years when, in 1859, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes—with the “Autocrat” a year behind him and the “Professor” a year ahead—became their neighbor at 21, subsequently 164, Charles Street. On the other side of them, nearer Beacon Street, John A. Andrew, the great war governor of Massachusetts, was a friend and neighbor. Across the way, for a time, lived Thomas Bailey Aldrich. In hillside streets near by dwelt many persons of congenial tastes, whose work and character contributed greatly to making Boston what it was through the second half of the last century.

The distinctive flavor of the neighborhood derived nothing more from any of its households than from that of Mr. and Mrs. Fields. Their dining—room and drawing-room[1]—that green assembling-place of books, pictures, music, persons, associations, all to be treasured—were the natural resort, not only of the whole notable local company of writers whose publisher was also their true and valued friend, but, besides, of many of the eminent visitors to Boston, of the type represented most conspicuously by Charles Dickens. After the death of Mr. Fields there was far more than a tradition carried on in the Charles Street house. Not merely for what it had meant, but for all that the gracious personality of Mrs. Fields caused it to go on meaning, it continued through her lifetime—extending beyond that of Miss Sarah Orne Jewett, for so many years of Mrs. Fields’s widowhood her delightful sister-hostess—the resort of older and younger friends, whose present thus drew a constant enrichment from the past.

It was not till 1863, nearly ten years after her marriage, that Mrs. Fields, who had kept a diary during a visit to Europe in 1859-60 with her husband, and for other brief periods, applied herself regularly to this practice, maintained through 1876, and thereafter renewed but intermittently. She wrote on the cover of the first slender volume: “No. 1. Journal of Literary Events and Glimpses of Interesting People.” A few of its earliest pages, revealing its general purpose and character, may well precede the passages relating, in accordance with the plan already indicated, to individual friends and groups of friends. In the first pages of all, on which Mrs. Fields built a few sentences for her “Biographical Notes,” I find:—

July 26, 1863.—What a strange history this literary life in America at the present day would make. An editor and publisher at once, and at this date, stands at a confluence of tides where all humanity seems to surge up in little waves; some larger than the rest (every seventh it may be) dashes up in music to which the others love to listen; or some springing to a great height retire to tell the story of their flight to those who stay below.

Mr. Longfellow is quietly at Nahant. His translation of Dante is finished, but will not be completely published until the Year 1865, that being the 600th anniversary since the death of the great Italian. Dr. Holmes was never in healthier mood than at present. His oration delivered before a large audience upon the Fourth of July this year places him high in the rank of native orators. It is a little doubtful how soon he will feel like writing again. He has contributed much during the last two years to the “Atlantic” magazine. He may well take a temporary rest.

Mr. Lowell is not well. He is now travelling. Mr. Hawthorne is in Concord. He has just completed a volume of English Sketches of which a few have been printed in the “Atlantic Monthly.” He will dedicate the volume to Franklin Pierce, the Democrat—a most unpopular thing just now, but friendship of the purest stimulates him, and the ruin in prospect for his book because of this resolve does not move him from his purpose. Such adherence is indeed noble. Hawthorne requires all that popularity can give him in a pecuniary way for the support of his family.

The “Atlantic Monthly” is at present an interesting feature of America. Purely literary, it has nevertheless a subscription list, daily increasing, of 32,000. Of course the editor’s labors are not slight. We have been waiting for Mr. Emerson to publish his new volume containing his address upon Henry Thoreau; but he is careful of words and finds many to be considered again and again, until it is almost impossible to extort a manuscript from his hands. He has written but little, of late.

July 28.—George William Curtis has done at least one great good work. He has by a gentle but continuously brave pressure transformed the “Harper’s Weekly,” which was semi-Secession, into an anti-slavery and Republican journal. The last issue is covered with pictures as well as words which tend to ameliorate the condition of the colored race. Mr. Curtis’s own house at Staten Island has been threatened by the mob; therefore his wife and children came last week to New England. I fear the death of Colonel Shaw, her brother, commanding the 54th Massachusetts (colored infantry), will induce them to return home. His death is one of our severest strokes.

July 31, 1863.—We have been in Concord this week, making a short visit at the Hawthornes’. He has just finished his volume of English Sketches, about to be dedicated to Franklin Pierce. It is a beautiful incident in Hawthorne’s life, the determination at all hazards to dedicate this book to his friend. Mr. P.’s politics at present shut him away from the faith of patriots, but Hawthorne has loved him since college days and he will not relent.[2] Mrs. Hawthorne is the stay of the house.

The wood-work, the tables and chairs and pedestals, are all ornamented by her artistic hand or what she has prompted her children to do. Una is full of exquisite maidenhood. Julian was away, but his beautiful illuminations lay upon the table. The one illustrating a portion of King Arthur’s address to Queen Guinevere (Tennyson) was remarkably fine.

The Offending Dedication

All this takes one back into a past sufficiently remote. The 1859-60 diary of travel achieves the more remarkable spectacle of Mrs. Fields in conversation with Leigh Hunt less than two months before he died, and reporting the very words of Shelley to this friend of his. They may be found in the “Biographical Notes” published by Mrs. Fields after her husband’s death. Shelley says, “Hunt, we write love-songs; why shouldn’t we write hate-songs?” And Hunt, recalling the remark, adds, “He said he meant to some day, poor fellow.” Perhaps one of his subjects would have been the second Mrs. Godwin, for, according to Hunt, he disliked her particularly, believing her untrue, and used to say that when he was obliged to dine with her “he would lean back in his chair and languish into hate.” Then, wrote Mrs. Fields, “he said no one could describe Shelley. He always was to him as if he came from the planet Mercury, bearing a winged wand tipped with flame.” It is now an even century since the death of Shelley, and here we find one of the older generation of our own time talking, as it were, with him at but a single remove. Almost the reader is persuaded to ask of Mrs. Fields herself, “Ah, did you once see Shelley plain?”

Thus from the records of bygone years many remembered figures might be summoned; but the evocations already made will suffice to indicate the point of vantage at which Mrs. Fields stood as a diarist, and to set the scene for the display of separate friendships.

III
DR. HOLMES, THE FRIEND AND NEIGHBOR[3]

If any familiar face should appear at the front of the procession that constantly crossed the threshold of 148, Charles Street, it should be that of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, for many years a near neighbor, and to the end of his life a devoted visitor and friend. Here, then, is an unpublished letter written from his summer retreat while Fields was still actively associated with the “Old Corner Bookstore” of Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, and in the year before his marriage with Annie Adams:—

Pittsfield, Sept. 6th, 1853

My dear Mr. Fields:—

Thank you for the four volumes, and the authors of three of them through you. You did not remember that I patronized you to the extent of Aleck before I came up; never mind, I can shove it round among the young farmeresses and perhaps help to work off the eleventh thousand of the most illustrious of all the Smiths.

I shall write to Hillard soon. I have been reading his book half the time today and with very great pleasure. I am delighted with the plan of it—practical information such as the traveller that is to be or that has been wishes for, with poetical description enough to keep the imagination alive, and sound American thought to give it manly substance. It is anything but a flash book, but I have not the slightest doubt that it will have a permanent and very high place in travelling literature. Many things have pleased me exceedingly,—when I have read a little more I shall try to tell him what pleases me most,—as I suppose like most authors he likes as many points for his critical self-triangulation as will come unasked for.

Hawthorne’s book has been not devoured, but bolted by my children. I have not yet had a chance at it, but I don’t doubt I shall read it with as much gusto as they, when my turn comes. When you write to him, thank him if you please for me, for I suppose he will hardly expect any formal acknowledgment.

I bloomed out into a large smile of calm delight on opening the delicate little “Epistle Dedicatory” wherein your name is embalmed. I cannot remember that our friend has tried that pace before; he wrote some pleasing lines I remember to Longfellow on the ship in which he was to sail when he went to Europe some years—a good many—ago.

Don’t be too proud! Wait until you get a prose dedication from a poet,—if you have not got one already,—and then consider yourself immortal.

Yours most truly,

O. W. Holmes

AN EARLY PHOTOGRAPH OF DR. HOLMES

This letter contains several provocations to curiosity. “Aleck, ... the most illustrious of all the Smiths,” was obviously Alexander Smith, the Scottish poet of enormous but strictly contemporaneous vogue, in whom the English reviewers of the time detected a kinship to Tennyson, Keats, Shelley, and Shakespeare. George S. Hillard’s new book was “Six Months in Italy,” and Hawthorne’s, “not devoured, but bolted” by the Holmes children, was “Tanglewood Tales.” The “delicate little ‘Epistle Dedicatory’” has been found elusive.

From this early letter of Dr. Holmes a seven-league step may be taken to a passage in a diary Mrs. Fields was writing in 1860,—the year following the removal of the Holmes household from Montgomery Place to Charles Street,—before her long unbroken series of journals began. The occasion described was one of those frequent breakfasts in the Fields dining-room, which bespoke, in the term of a later poet, the “wide unhaste” of the period. Of the guests, N. P. Willis was then at the top of his distinction as a New York editor; George T. Davis, a lawyer of Greenfield, Massachusetts, afterwards of Portland, Maine, a classmate of Dr. Holmes, was reputed one of the most charming table-companions and wits of his day: the tributes to his memory at a meeting of the Massachusetts Historical Society after his death in 1877 stir one’s envy of his contemporaries; George Washington Greene of Rhode Island was perhaps equally known as the friend of Longfellow and as the grandson and biographer of General Nathanael Greene; Whipple was, of course, Edwin P. Whipple, essayist and lecturer; the household of three was completed by Mrs. Fields’s sister, Miss Lizzie Adams.

Thursday, September 21, 1860.—Equinoctial clearing after a stormy night and morning. Willis came to breakfast, and Holmes and George T. Davis, G. W. Greene, Whipple, and our little household of three. Holmes talked better than all, as usual. Willis played the part of appreciative listener. G. T. Davis told wonderful stories, and Mr. Whipple talked more than usual. Holmes described the line of beauty which is made by any two persons who talk together congenially thus 〰, whereas, when an adverse element comes in, it proceeds thus Ʌ; and by and by one which has a frightful retrograde movement, thus ∕. Then blank despair settles down upon the original talker. He said people should dovetail together like properly built mahogany furniture. Much of all this congeniality had to do with the physical, he said. “Now there is big Dr. ——; he and I do very well together; I have just two intellectual heart-beats to his one.” Willis said he thought there should be an essay written upon the necessity that literary men should live on a more concentrated diet than is their custom. “Impossible,” said the Professor, “there is something behind the man which drives him on to his fate; he goes as the steam-engine goes and one might as well say to the engine going at the rate of sixty miles, ‘you had better stop now,’ and so make it stop, as to say it to a man driven on by a vital preordained energy for work.” Each man has a philosophical coat fitted to his shoulders, and he did not expect to find it fitting anybody else.

At another breakfast, in 1861, we find, besides the favorite humorist of the day, Dr. Holmes’s son and namesake, then a young officer in the Union army, now Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Sunday, December 8, 1861.—Yesterday morning “Artemus Ward,” Mr. Browne, breakfasted with us, also Dr. Holmes and the lieutenant, his son. We had a merry time because Jamie was in grand humor and represented people and incidents in the most incomparable manner. “Why,” said Dr. Holmes to him afterward, “you must excuse me that I did not talk, but the truth is there is nothing I enjoy so much as your anecdotes, and whenever I get a chance I can’t help listening to them.” The Professor complimented Artemus upon his great success and told him the pleasure he had received. Artemus twinkled all over, but said little after the Professor arrived. He was evidently immensely possessed by him. The young lieutenant has mostly recovered from his wound and speaks as if duty would recall him soon to camp. He will go when the time comes, but home evidently never looked half so pleasant before. Poor fellows! Heaven send us peace before long!

The finely bound copy of Dr. Holmes’s Fourth of July Oration at the Boston City Celebration of 1863, to which the following passage refers, is one of the rarities sought by American book-collectors. It was a practice of Dr. Holmes at this time to have his public speeches set up in large, legible type for his own reading at their delivery. One of these, an address to the alumni of Harvard on July 16, 1863, with the inscription, “Oliver Wendell Holmes to his friend James T. Fields. One of six copies printed,” is found among the Charles Street papers, and contributes, like the passage that follows, to the sense of pleasant intimacy between the neighboring houses.

August 3, 1863.—Dr. Holmes dropped in last night about his oration which the City Council have had printed and superbly bound. He has addressed it to the “Common Council” instead of the “City Council,” and he is much disturbed. J. T. F. told him it made but small consequence, and he went off comforted. One of the members of the Council told Mr. F. it was amusing to see “the Professor” while this address was passing through the press. He was so afraid something would be wrong that he would come in to see about it half a dozen times a day, until it seemed as if he considered this small oration of more consequence than the affairs of the state. Yet laugh as they may about these little peculiarities of “our Professor,” he is a most wonderful man.

Reduced facsimile of first page of Dr. Holmes’ 1863 Address to the Alumni of Harvard

In explanation of the ensuing bit, it need only be said that in October of 1863 Señorita Isabella Cubas was appearing at the Boston Theatre in “The Wizard Skiff, or the Massacre of Scio,” and other pantomimes. “The Wizard Skiff,” according to the “Advertiser,” was given on the fourteenth. On the sixteenth, a characteristic announcement read: “At ¼ past 8 Señorita Cubas will dance La Madrilena.” The tear of Dr. Holmes at the spectacle may be remembered with the “poetry and religion” anecdote of Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Fanny Ellsler.

October 16, 1863.—Mr. F. went in two evenings since to find Professor Holmes. His wife said he was out. “I don’t know where he is gone, I am sure, Mr. Fields,” she said in her eager way, “but he said he had finished his work and asked if he might go, and I told him he might, though he would not tell where he was going.”

Yesterday the “where” transpired. “By the way,” said the Professor, “have you seen that little poem by Mrs. Waterston upon the death of Colonel Shaw, ‘Together’? It made me cry. However, I don’t know how much that means, for I went to see the ‘beautiful Cubas’ in a pantomime the other night, and the first thing I knew down came a great round fat tear and went splosh on the ground. Wasn’t I provoked!”

FROM THE PLAY-BILL OF THE NIGHT OF DR. HOLMES’S “GREAT ROUND FAT TEAR”

The next fragment is neither a letter nor a passage from the diary, but a bit of excellent fooling, in Dr. Holmes’s handwriting, on a sheet of note paper. The meteorological records of 1864 would probably show that there were heavy rains in the course of the year. From Dr. Holmes’s interest in the tracing of Dr. Johnson’s footsteps an even century before his own, it is easy to imagine his fancy playing about the rainfall of the century ahead. I cannot find that this jeu d’esprit, with its entirely characteristic flavor of the “Breakfast Table,” was ever printed by its author.

Letter from the last man left by the Deluge of the year 1964 to the last woman left by the same

My dear Sole Survivoress:—

Love is natural to the human breast. The passion has seized me, and you, fortunately, cannot doubt as to its object.

Adored one, fairest, and indeed only individual of your sex, can you, could you doubt that if the world still possessed its full complement of inhabitants, 823,060,413 according to the most recent estimate, I should hesitate in selecting you from the 411,530,206½ females in existence previous to the late accident? Believe it not! Trust not the deceivers who—but I forget the late melancholy occurrence for the moment!

It is still damp in our—I beg your pardon—in my neighborhood. I hope you are careful of your precious health—so much depends upon it! The dodo is extinct—what if Man—but pardon me. Let me recommend long india-rubber boots—they will excite no remark, for reasons too obvious to mention.

May I hope for a favorable answer to my suit by the bearer of this message, the carrier-goose, who was with me during the rainy season in the top of the gigantic pine?

If any more favored suitor—What am I saying? If any recollection of the past is to come between me and happiness, break it gently to me, for my nerves have been a good deal tried by the loss of the human species (with the exception of ourselves) and there is something painful in the thought of shedding tears in a world so thoroughly saturated with liquid.

I am (by the force of circumstances)

Your Only lover and admirer

Ultimus Smith

O. W. H. Fixit.

Facsimile of the Conclusion of Ultimus Smith’s Declaration

A few brief items of May of 1864 bring back a time of sadness for all the friends of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

May 11, 1864.—J. T. F. went to see Dr. Holmes about Hawthorne’s health. The latter came to town looking very very ill. O. W. H. thinks the shark’s tooth is upon him, but would not have this known. Walked and talked with him; then carried him to “Metcalf’s and treated him to simple medicine as we treat each other to ice cream.”

O. W. H. picked up a New York pamphlet full of sneers against Boston “Mutual Admiration Society.” “These whipper-snappers of New York will do well to take care,” he says; “the noble race of men now so famous here is passing down the valley—then who will take their places! I am ashamed to know the names of these blackguards. There is ——, a stick of sugar-candy —— and, ——, who is not even a gum-drop, and plenty like them.”

Sunday. May 14.—Terrible days of war and change....

May 19.—Hawthorne is dead.

Less than a year later came the record of another death—unique in that every survivor of the war-time seems to have remembered the very moment and circumstances of learning the overwhelming fact.

April 15, 1865.—Last night when I shut this book I wondered a little what event or person would come next, powerful enough to compel me to write a few words; and before I was dressed this morning the news of the assassination of the President became our only thought. The President, Seward, and his son!

Mrs. Andrew came in before nine o’clock to ask if we thought it would be expected of her to receive “the Club” on Monday. We decided “No,” immediately, which chimed with her desire.

The city is weighed down by sadness. But Dr. Holmes expresses his philosophy for the consolation of all. “It will unite the North,” he says. “It is more than likely that Lincoln was not the best man for the work of re-construction,” etc. His faith keeps him from the shadows which surround many.

But it is a black day for us all. J. Wilkes Booth is in custody. Poor Edwin is in Boston.

April 22.—False report. Up to this date J. Wilkes Booth has not been taken. A reward of nearly $200,000 is set upon his head, but we believe him to have fled into Maryland or farther south, with some marauding party.

Henry Howard Brownell, the author of “War Lyrics,” appears in the following extract, with Dr. Holmes, whose high opinion of this singer of naval battle was set forth in print of no uncertain tone. Of Forceythe Willson, a poet, not yet thirty years old, of whom great things were expected, Mrs. Fields wrote later in the same volume of the journal: “He affects me like a wild Tennyson.... He is an indigenous growth of our middle states. He was a pupil of Horace Mann, and appreciated him.”

April 29, 1865.—Club dinner for J. T. F. Mr. Brownell was present, author of “The Bay Fight,” as Dr. Holmes’s guest. Dr. H. said privately to us, “Well, ’tain’t much for some folks to do what I’m doing for this man, but it’s a good deal for me. I don’t like that kind of thing, you know. I find myself unawares in something the position of a lion-hunter, which is unpleasant!!!” He has lately discovered that Forceythe Willson, the author of a noble poem called the “Color Sergeant” [“The Old Sergeant”], has been living two years in Cambridge. He wrote to him and told him how much he liked his poem and said he would like to make his acquaintance. “I will be at home,” the young poet replied to the elder, “at any time you may appoint to call upon me.” This was a little strange to O. W. H., who rather expected, as the elder who was extending the right hand, to be called upon, I suppose, although he did not say so. He found a fortress of a man, “shy as Hawthorne,” and “one who had not learned that the eagle’s wings should sometimes be kept down, as we people who live in the world must,” said the Professor to me afterward. “In State” by F. W. is a great poem.

More than a year later is found this characteristic glimpse of Dr. Holmes in the elation of finishing one of his books.

Wednesday, September 12, 1866.—After an hour J. went in to see Dr. Holmes. This was important. He had promised a week ago to hear him read his new romance, and he did not wish to show anything but the lively interest he really feels....

Jamie returned in two hours perfectly enchanted. The novel exceeded his hopes. No diminishing of power is to be seen; on the contrary it seems the perfect fruit of a life. It is to be called “The Guardian Angel.” Four parts are already completed and large books of notes stand ready for use and reference. Mrs. Holmes came in to tell Mr. Fields she wished Wendell would not publish anything more. He would only call down newspaper criticism, and where was the use. “Well, Amelia, I have written something now which the critics won’t complain of. You see it’s better than anything I have ever done.” “Oh, that’s what you always say, Wendell, but I wish you’d let it alone!” “But don’t you see, Amelia, I shall make money by it, and that won’t come amiss.” “No indeed, Mr. Fields, not in these times with our family, you know.” “But there’s one thing,” said the little Professor, suddenly looking up to Mr. Fields; “if anything should happen to me before I get the story done, you wouldn’t come down upon the widder for the money, would you now?” Then they had a grand laugh all round. He is very nervous indeed about his work and read it with great reluctance, yet desired to do so. He had read it to no one as yet until Mr. Fields should hear it.

Wendell, his son, had just returned from England, bringing a young English Captain of Artillery home with him for the night, the hotels being crowded. The captain’s luggage was in the entry. The Professor drew J. aside to show him how the straps of the luggage were arranged in order to slip in the address-card. “D’ye see that—good, ain’t it? I’ve made a drawing of that and am going to have some made like it.”

Near the end of 1866, Mrs. Fields, after a few words of realization that something lies beyond the age of thirty, pictures “the Autocrat” at her own breakfast-table, with General John Meredith Read, afterwards minister to Greece, and already, before that age of thirty which the diarist was just completing, an important figure in the military and political life of New York. A few sentences from the following passage are found in Mrs. Fields’s article on Dr. Holmes, which appeared first in the “Century Magazine,” and then in “Authors and Friends.”

It comes over me to put down here and now the fact that this year for the first time others perceived, as well as myself, that I have passed the freshness and lustre of youth—but I do not feel the change as I once thought I must—life is even sweeter than ever and richer though I can still remember the time when thirty years seemed the desirable limit of life—now it opens before me full of uncompleted labor, full of riches and plans—the wealth of love, the plans of eternity.

Friday morning.—Professor Holmes and Adjutant General Read of New York (a young man despite his title) breakfasted here at eight o’clock. They were both here punctually at quarter past eight, which was early for the season, especially as the General was late out, at a ball, last night. He was only too glad of the chance, however, to meet Dr. Holmes, and would have made a far greater effort to accomplish it. The talk at one time turned upon Dickens. Dr. Holmes said he thought him a greater genius than Thackeray and was never satisfied with admiring his wondrous powers of observation and fertility of reproduction; his queer knack at making scenes, too, was noticeable, but especially the power of beginning from the smallest externals and describing a man to the life though he might get no farther than the shirt-button, for he always failed in profound analysis. Hawthorne, beginning from within, was his contrast and counterpart. But the two qualities which Dickens possesses and which the world seems to take small account of, but which mark his peculiar greatness, are the minuteness of his observations and his endless variety. Thackeray had sharp corners in him, something which led you to see he could turn round short upon you some day, although sadness was an impressive element in his character—perhaps a sadness belonging to genius. Hawthorne’s sadness was a part of his genius—tenderness and sadness.

MRS. FIELDS

From a crayon portrait made by Rowse in 1863

On Monday, February 25, 1867, Mrs. Fields made note of the Saturday Club dinner of two days before, at which the guests were George William Curtis, “Petroleum V. Nasby,” and Dr. Hayes of Arctic fame, of whom Mrs. Fields had written a few days before: “He wears a corrugated face, and his slender spirited figure shows him the man for such resolves and expeditions. We were carried away like the hearers of an Arabian tale with his vivid pictures of Arctic life.” But apparently he was not the chief talker at the Saturday Club meeting, for Mrs. Fields wrote of it: “Dr. Holmes was in great mood for talk, but Lowell was critical and interrupted him frequently. ‘Now, James, let me talk and don’t interrupt me,’ he once said, a little ruffled by the continual strictures on his conversation.” But by the time that Longfellow’s sixtieth birthday came round on the following Wednesday, Dr. Holmes was ready for it with the verses, “In gentle bosoms tried and true,” recorded in Longfellow’s diary, and for another encounter with Lowell, who also celebrated the day with a poem, beginning “I need not praise the sweetness of his song.” Mrs. Fields’s diary records her husband’s account of the evening:—

February 28, 1867.—Thursday morning. Jamie had a most brilliant evening at Longfellow’s. A note came in from O. W. H. towards night, saying he was full of business and full of his story, but he must go to L.’s. Lowell’s poem in the morning had helped to stir him. J. reached his door punctually at eight. There stood the little wonder with hat and coat on and door ajar, his wife beside him. “I wouldn’t let him go with anybody else,” she said. “Mr. Fields, he ought not to go out tonight; hear him, how he wheezes with the asthma. Now, Wendell, when will you get home?” “Oh,” said he, “I don’t know. I put myself into Mr. Fields’s hands.” “Well, Mr. Fields, how early can you get him home?” “About twelve,” was the answer. “Now that’s pretty well,” said the Doctor. “Amelia, go in and shut the door. Mr. Fields will take care of me.” So between fun and anxiety they chatted away until they were fairly into the street and in the car. “I’ve been doing too much lately between my lectures and my story, and the fine dinners I have been to, and I ought not to go out tonight. Why, it’s one of the greatest compliments one man ever paid another, my going out to Longfellow’s tonight. By the way, Mr. Fields, do you appreciate the position you hold in our time? There never was anything like it. Why, I was nothing but a roaring kangaroo when you took me in hand, and I thought it was the right thing to stand up on my hind legs, but you combed me down and put me in proper shape. Now I want you to promise me one thing. We’re all growing old, I’m near sixty myself; by and by the brain will begin to soften. Now you must tell me when the egg begins to look addled. People don’t know of themselves.”

He had been to two large dinners lately, one at G. W. Wales’s, which he said was the finest dinner he had ever seen, the most perfect in all its appointments, decorated with the largest profusion of flowers, in as perfect taste as he had ever seen. “Why, even the chair you sat in was so delicately padded as to give pleasure to that weak spot in the back which we all inherit from the fall of Adam.” The other was at Mrs. Charles Dorr’s, where there were sixteen at table and the room “for heat was like the black hole at Calcutta,” but the company was very brilliant. Mr. and Mrs. Winthrop, Mrs. Parkman, Dr. Hayes, etc. He sat next Mrs. ——; says she is a thorough-bred woman of society, the daughter of a politician, the wife, first of a millionaire and now of a man of society. “I like such a woman now and then; she never makes a mistake.” Mrs. —— was thoroughly canvassed at the table, “picked clean as any duck for the spit and then roasted over a slow fire,” as O. W. H. afterward remarked to Mrs. Parkman, who is a very just woman and who weighed her well in the balances.

When they arrived at L.’s, my basket of flowers stood, surrounded by other gifts, and Longfellow himself sat crowned with all the natural loveliness of his rare nature. The day must have been a happy one for him.... O. W. H. had three perfect verses of a little poem in his hand which he read, and then Lowell talked, and they had great merriment and delight together.

FIELDS, THE MAN OF BOOKS AND FRIENDSHIPS

The two following passages from the diary for 1868 seem to indicate that Dr. Holmes made a double use of his poem, “Bill and Joe,” written in this year, included in his “Poems of the Class of ’29,” and according to the entry of July 17, read at the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa dinner of 1868:—

January 16, 1868.—We had just finished dinner when Professor Holmes came in with his poem, one of the annual he contributes to the class-supper of the “Boys of ’29.” He read it through to us with feeling, his voice growing tremulous and husky at times. It was pleasant to see how he enjoyed our pleasure in it. The talk turned naturally after a little upon the question of Chief Justice, when he took occasion to run over in his mind the character and qualifications of some of our chief barristers. “As for Bigelow[4] (who has just gone out of office and it is his successor over whom they are struggling), as for Bigelow, it is astonishing to see how every bit of that man’s talent has been brought into use; all he has is made the most of. Why, he’s like some cooks, give ’em a horse and they will use every part of him except the shoes.”

Friday, July 17, 1868.—Last evening Dr. Holmes came in fresh from the Phi Beta dinner at Cambridge.[5] He said, “I can’t stop and I only came to read you my verses I read at the dinner, they made such a queer impression. I didn’t mean to go, but James Lowell was to preside and sent me word that I really must be there, so I just wrote these off, and here they are—I don’t know that I should have brought them in to read to you, but Hoar declares they are the best I have ever done.” At length, in the exquisite orange of sunset, he read those delightful verses, full, full of feeling, “Bill and Joe.” We did not wonder the Phi Beta boys liked them. I shall be surprised if every boy, especially those who find the almond blossoms in the hair, as W. says, does not like them, and if they do not win for him a more universal reputation than he has yet won....

I was impressed last night with the nervous energy of O. W. H. His leg by a slight quiver kept time to the reading of his verses, and his talk fell before and after like swift rain. He does not go away from town but sways between Boston and Cambridge all these perfect summer days; receiving yesterday, the hottest day of this or many years, Motley at dinner, and going perpetually, and writing verses and letters not a few. His activity is wonderful; think of writing letters these warm delicious evenings by gaslight in a small front study on the street! It hurts him less than his wife, partly because the intellectual vivacity and excitement keeps him up, partly because he is physically fitted to bear almost everything but cold. How fortunate for the world that while he lives he should continue his work so faithfully. He will have no successor, at least for many a long year, after we have all gone to sleep under our green counterpanes and Nature has tucked us up well in yearly violets.

Earlier in the year Dr. Holmes and Mrs. Stowe met in Charles Street.

Wednesday morning, January 29, 1868.—Last night Professor Holmes, Mrs. Stowe, her daughter Georgie, and the Howellses, took tea here. The Professor came early and was in good talking trim—presently in came Mrs. Stowe, and they fell shortly into talk upon Homeopathy and Allopathy. He grew very warm, declared that cases cited of cures proved nothing, and we were all “incompetent” to judge! We could not but be amused at his heat, for we were more or less believers in Homeopathy against his one argument for Allopathy. In vain Mrs. Stowe and I tried to turn and stem the fiery tide: Georgie or Mrs. Howells would be sure to sweep us back into it again. However, there were many brilliant things said, and sweet and good and interesting things too. The Professor told us one curious fact, that chemists had in vain analyzed the poison of rattlesnakes and could not discover the elements of destruction it undoubtedly possesses. Also that, when Indians poison their arrows with it, they hang up the liver of a white wolf and make one snake after another bite it until the liver is entirely impregnated; they then leave it to dry until disintegrated, when they moisten and apply round the necks of the arrows—not on the point. He had a long quiet chat with Mrs. Stowe before the evening ended. They compared their early Calvinistic education and the effect produced upon their characters by such training.

Tuesday, April 13, 1869.—Dr. Holmes and his wife and Mr. Whittier dined here. The talk was free, totally free from all feeling of constraint, as it could not have been had another person been present. Whittier says he is afraid of strangers, and Dr. Holmes is never more delightful than under just such auspices. Dr. Holmes asked Whittier’s undisguised opinion of Longfellow’s “New England Tragedies”—“honest opinion now,” said he. “Well, I liked them,” said Whittier, half reluctantly—evidently he had found much that was beautiful and in keeping with the spirit of the times of which Longfellow wrote, and their passionless character did not trouble him as it had O. W. H. Presently, he added that he was surprised to find how he had preserved almost literally the old text of the old books he had lent Longfellow twelve years ago, and had measured it off into verse. “Ah,” said O. W. H., “you have said the severest thing after all—‘measured off’; that’s just what he has done. It is one of the easiest, the very commonest tricks of the rhymster to be able to do this. I am surprised to see the ease with which I can do it myself.” They spoke then of “Evangeline,” which both agreed in awarding unqualified praise. “Only,” said Whittier, “I always wondered there was no terrible outburst of indignation over the outrage done to that poor colony. The tide of the story runs as smoothly as if nothing had occurred. I long thought of working up that story myself, but I am glad I did not, only I can’t understand its being so calm.” They talked on religious questions of course, the Professor holding that sin being finite, and of such a nature that we could both outgrow it and root it up, Whittier still returning to the ground that sin was a “very real thing.”

It is impossible to represent the clearness and swiftness of Dr. Holmes’s talk. The purity of heart and strength of endeavor evident in the two poets makes their atmosphere a very elevating one and they evidently naturally rejoiced in each other’s society.

Mrs. Holmes had not been out to dine before this winter. Jamie sent us a pot of strawberries growing, which delighted everybody.

Before the following passage was written, in 1871, Dr. Holmes had moved from Charles Street to Beacon Street; Mr. Fields, in impaired health, had retired from active business as a publisher and was devoting himself chiefly to writing and lecturing; and Mrs. Fields, already interested in the establishment of Coffee Houses for the poor in the North End and elsewhere, had begun the notable work in public charities to which her energies were so largely given for the remaining forty-four years of her life. In the Coöperative Workrooms, still rendering their beneficent services, and in the larger organization of the Associated Charities, embodying a principle now widely adopted throughout the land, the labors of this generous spirit, never content to give all it had to the gracious life within its own four walls, have borne enduring fruits.

1871.—Thursday afternoon last (June 22) went to Cambridge for a few visits, and coming home stopped at Dr. Holmes’s, at his new house on Beacon St. Found them both at home, sitting lonely in the oriel window looking out upon a glorious sunset. They were thinking of the children who have flown out of their nest. Dr. Holmes was very friendly and sweet. He talked most affectionately with J., told him he no longer felt a spur to write since he had gone out of business; he needed just the little touch of praise and encouragement he used to administer to make him do it; now he did not think he should ever write any more worth mentioning. He had been in to see the Coffee House and entertained us much by saying he met President Eliot near the door one day just as he was going in, but he was ashamed of doing so until they had parted company. There was something so childlike in this confession that we all laughed heartily over it. However he got in at last, and “tears as big as onions stood in my eyes when I saw what had been accomplished.” “You must be a very happy woman,” he went on to say. I told him of the new one in Eliot Street about to be opened this coming week.

At the end of the summer of 1871, when Mr. and Mrs. Fields were beginning to learn the charms of the North Shore town of Manchester, where they established the “Gambrel Cottage” on “Thunderbolt Hill” which gave a summer synonym to the hospitality of Charles Street, they journeyed one day to Nahant for a midday dinner with Longfellow. Here Mrs. Fields’s sister, Louisa, Mrs. James H. Beal, was a neighbor of the poet. Another neighbor was the late George Abbot James, and in Longfellow’s diary for September 4, 1871, is the entry: “Call on Dr. Holmes at Mr. James’s. Sumner still there. We discuss the new poets.” Mrs. Fields reports a continuation of the talk with the same friends.

Wednesday, September 6, 1871.—Dined with Mr. Longfellow at Nahant. The day was warm with a soft south wind blowing, and as we crossed the beach white waves were curling up the sands.... The dear poet saw us coming from afar and walked to his little gate to meet us with such a sweet cordial welcome that it was worth going many a mile to have that alone. The three little ladies, his daughters, and Ernest’s wife, were within, but they came warmly forward to give us greeting; also Mr. Sam. Longfellow was of the party. A few moments’ chat in the little parlor, when Longfellow saw Holmes coming in the distance (he had an opera-glass, being short-sighted, and was sitting on the piazza with J.). “Hullo!” said he, “here comes Holmes, and all dressed up too, with flowers in his button-hole.” Sure enough, here was the Professor to have dinner with us also. He was full of talk as ever and looking remarkably well. Longfellow asked with much interest about Balaustion and Joaquin Miller, neither of which he had read. Holmes criticized as if unbearable and beyond the pale of decency Browning’s cutting of words, “Flower o’ the pine,” and such characteristic passages. Longfellow spoke of a volume of poems he had received of late from England in which “saw” was made to rhyme with “more.” Holmes said Keats often did that. “Not exactly, I think,” said L., “‘dawn’ and ‘forlorn,’ perhaps.” “Well,” said H., “when I was in college” (I think he said college, certainly while at Cambridge) “and my first volume was about to appear, Mrs. Folsom saw the sheets and fortunately at the very last moment for correction discovered I had made ‘forlorn’ rhyme with ‘gone,’ and out of her own head and without having time to consult with me she substituted ‘sad and wan.’”[6] The Professor went on to say that he must confess to a tender feeling of regret for his “so forlorn” to this very day, but he supposed every writer of poems must have his keen regrets for the numerous verses he could recall where he had wrestled with the English language and had lost something of his thought in his struggle with the necessities of art. We shortly after went to dinner, where the talk still continued to turn on art and artists, chiefly musical, the divorcement of music and thought; a thinker or man of intellect in listening to music comes to a comprehension of it, Holmes said, mediately, but a musician feels it directly through some gift of which the thinker knows nothing. Longfellow always recalls with intense delight hearing Gounod sing his own music in Rome—his voice was hardly to be mentioned among the fine voices of the world, indeed it was small, but his rendering was exquisite. Canvassing T. B. Read’s poems and speaking of “Sheridan’s Ride,” which has been so highly praised, “Yes,” said Holmes, “but there are very poor lines in it, but how often, to use Scripture phrase, there is a fly in the ointment.” The talk went bowling off to Père Hyacinthe. “He was very pleasant,” said Holmes, “it was most agreeable to meet him, but you could only go a short distance. His desire was to be a good Catholic, and ours is of course quite different. It was like speaking through a knot-hole after all.”

The dumb waiter bounced up. “We cannot call that a dumb waiter,” said L., “but I had an odd dream the other night. I thought Greene (G. W.) came bouncing up on the waiter in that manner and stepped off in a most dignified fashion with a crushed white hat on his head. He said he had just been to drive with a Spanish lady.”

Sumner (Charles) came up to the piazza. He had dined elsewhere and came over as soon as possible for a little talk. Holmes talked on, although we all said, “Mr. Sumner—here is Mr. Sumner,” without perceiving that the noble Senator was sitting just outside the cottage window waiting for us to rise, and began to converse about him. Longfellow grew nervous and rose to speak with Sumner—still Holmes did not perceive, and went on until Jamie relieved us from a tendency to convulsions by voting that we should join the Senator. Then Sumner related the substance of an amusing letter of Cicero’s he had just been reading in which Cicero gives an account to his friend of a visit he had just received from the Emperor Julius Cæsar. He had invited Julius to pass a few days with him, but he came quite unexpectedly with a thousand men! Cicero, seeing them from afar, debated with another friend what he should do with them, but at length managed to encamp them. To feed them was a less easy matter. The emperor took everything quite easily, however, and was very pleasant, “but,” adds Cicero, “he is not the man to whom I should say a second time, ‘if you are passing this way, give me a call.’”

Again, in 1873, Longfellow, Holmes, and Sumner are found together at the dinner-table with Mrs. Fields, this time in Charles Street. When she made use of her diary at this point, for her article on Dr. Holmes which appeared first in the “Century Magazine” (1895), it was with many omissions. The passage is now given almost entire. It should be said that the Misses Towne, mentioned at the beginning of it, were friends and summer neighbors at Manchester.

Saturday, October 11, 1873.—Helen and Alice Towne have come to pass Sunday with us. Charles Sumner, Longfellow, Greene, Dr. Holmes came to dine. Mr. Sumner seemed less strong than of late and I fancied he suffered somewhat while at table during the evening, but he told me he was working at his desk or reading during fourteen consecutive hours not infrequently at present, as he was in the habit of doing when uninterrupted by friendly visits. He said he was very fond of the passive exercise of reading; the active exercise of composition was of course agreeable in certain moods, but reading was a never-ending delight. He spoke of Lord Brougham, and Mrs. Norton and her two beautiful sisters. Both he and Mr. Longfellow recalled them in their youthful loveliness, but Mr. Sumner said when he was in England the last time he saw the Duchess of Somerset, who was a most poetic looking creature in her youth and (I believe) the youngest of the three sisters, so changed he should never have guessed who it might be. She was grown a huge red-faced woman. (Longfellow laughed, referring to her second marriage and said, “Yes, she had turned a Somerset!”) Dr. Holmes sparkled and coruscated as I have seldom heard him before. We are more than ever convinced that no one since Sydney Smith was ever so brilliant, so witty, spontaneous, naïf, and unfailing as Dr. Holmes. He talked much about his class in College: “There never was such vigor in any class before, it seems to me—almost every member turns out sooner or later distinguished for something. We have had every grade of moral status from a criminal to a Chief Justice, and we never let any one of them drop. We keep hold of their hands year after year and lift up the weak and failing ones till they are at last redeemed. Ah, there was one exception—years ago we voted to cast a man out who had been a defaulter or who had committed some offense of that nature. The poor fellow sank down, and before the next year, when we repented of this decision, he had gone too far down and presently died. But we have kept all the rest. Every fourth man in our class is a poet. Sam. Smith belongs to our class, who wrote ‘My Country, ’tis of Thee.’ Sam. Smith will live when Longfellow, Whittier, and all the rest of us have gone into oblivion—and yet what is there in those verses to make them live? Do you remember the line ‘Like that above’? I asked Sam. what ‘that’ referred to—he said ‘that rapture’!!—(The expression of the rapid talker’s face of contempt as he said this was one of the most amusing possible.)—Even the odds and ends of our class have turned out something.... Longfellow, I wish I could make you talk about yourself.”—“But I never do,” said L. quietly. “I know you never do, but you confessed to me once.”—“No, I don’t think I ever did,” said L. laughing

Greene was for the most part utterly speechless. He attended with great assiduity to his dinner, which was a good one, and Longfellow was watchful and kind enough to send him little choice things to eat which he thought he would enjoy.

Holmes was abstemious and never ceased talking—“Most men write too much. I would rather risk my future fame upon one lyric than upon ten volumes. But I have said Boston is the hub of the universe. I will rest upon that.”

All this report is singularly dry compared with the wit and humor which radiated about the table. We laughed till the tears ran down our cheeks. Longfellow was intensely amused. I have not seen him laugh so much for many a long day. We ladies sat at the table long after coffee and cigars in order to hear the talk....

Sumner said he had been much displeased by a remark Professor Henry Hunt made to him a few days ago. He said Mr. Agassiz was an impediment in the path of science. What did such men as Hunt and John Fiske mean by underrating a man who has given such books to the world as Agassiz has done, not to speak of his untiring efforts in the other avenues of influence! “It means just this,” said Holmes: “Agassiz will not listen to the Darwinian theory; his whole effort is on the other side. Now Agassiz is no longer young, and I was reading the other day in a book on the Sandwich Islands of an old Fejee man who had been carried away among strangers, but who prayed he might be carried home, that his brains might be beaten out in peace by his son according to the custom of those lands. It flashed over me then that our sons beat out our brains in the same way. They do not walk in our ruts of thoughts or begin exactly where we leave off, but they have a new standpoint of their own. At present the Darwinian theory can be nothing but an hypothesis; the important links of proof are missing and cannot be supplied; but in the myriad ages there may be new developments.”

I thought the young ladies looked a little tired sitting, so about nine o’clock we left the table—still the talk went on for about four hours when they broke up.

LOUIS AGASSIZ

With two letters from Dr. Holmes this rambling chronicle of his friendship with Mr. and Mrs. Fields must end. The first of the communications is a mere fragment of his everyday humor:

Beverly-Farms-by-the-Depot

July 18th, 1878

Dear Mr. Fields:—

The Corner sends me a book directed to me here, but on opening the outside wrapper I read “James T. Fields, Esq., Jamaica Plain, Boston, Mass.” The book, which is sealed up (or stuck up, like many authors), measures 7 × 5, nearly, and is presumably idiotic, like most books which are sent us without being ordered.

Perhaps you have received a similar package which on opening you found directed to O. W. Holmes, Esq., Peak of Teneriffe, Boston. If so, when the weather grows cool again and we can make up our minds to face the title page of the dreaded volume, we will make an exchange.

Always truly yours,

O. W. Holmes

The second letter, written ten years after Dr. Holmes, in moving from Charles to Beacon Street, had made the last of his “justifiable domicides,” strikes a more serious note, revealing that quality of true sympathy so closely joined in abundant natures with true humor. Mr. Fields had died in April of 1881, and Mrs. Fields had applied herself at once to the preparation of her volume, “James T. Fields: Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches,” drawing freely upon the diaries from which many of the foregoing pages, then passed over, are now taken. The performance of this loving labor must have done much towards the first filling of a life so grievously emptied. Already the intimate and beloved companionship of Miss Jewett had come into it.

294 Beacon St., November 16, 1881

My dear Mrs. Fields:—

I feel sure there will be but one voice with regard to your beautiful memorial volume. If I had any misgivings that you might find the delicate task too difficult—that you might be discouraged between the wish to draw a life-like picture and the fear of saying more than the public had a right to, these misgivings have all vanished, and I am sure your finished task leaves nothing to be regretted. As he was in life, he is in your loving but not overwrought story. I do not see how a life so full of wholesome activity and genuine human feeling could have been better pictured than it is in your pages. Long before I had finished reading your memoir in the proofs I had learned to trust you entirely as to the whole management of the work on which you had entered. All I feared was that your feelings might be overtasked, and that the dread of coming before the public when your whole heart was in the pages opened to its calm judgment might be more than you could bear.

And now, my dear Mrs. Fields, there must come a period of depression, almost of collapse, after the labor and the solace of this tender, tearful, yet blessed occupation. I think you need the kind thoughts and soothing words—if words have any virtue in them—of those who love you more than while each day had its busy hours in which the memory of so much that was delightful to recall kept the ever-returning pangs of grief a little while in abeyance. It must be so. But before long, quietly, almost imperceptibly, there will, I hope and trust, return to you the quieting sense of all that you have done and all that you have been for that life which for so many happy years you were privileged to share. How few women have so perfectly fulfilled, not only every duty, but every ideal that a husband could think of as going to make a happy home! This must be and will be an ever-growing source of consolation.

Forgive me for saying what many others must have said to you, but none more sincerely than myself.

I do not know how to express to you the feeling with which Mrs. Holmes looks upon you in your bereavement. I should do it injustice if I attempted to give it expression, for she lives so largely in her sympathies and her endeavors to help others that she could not but sorrow deeply with you in your affliction and wish there were any word of consolation she could add to the love she sends you.

Believe me, dear Mrs. Fields,

Affectionately yours,

O. W. Holmes

For thirteen years longer, till his death in 1894 at the age of eighty-five, Dr. Holmes was a prolific writer of notes, more often than letters, to Mrs. Fields. The sympathy of tried and ripened friendship runs through them all. In the Charles Street house the younger friends might see from time to time this oldest friend of their hostess. When he came no more, it was well for those of a later day that his memory was so securely held in the retrospect and the record of Mrs. Fields.

IV
CONCORD AND CAMBRIDGE VISITORS

The volumes in which Mrs. Fields brought to light many passages from her journals stand as red and black buoys marking the channel through which the navigator of these pages must steer his course if he is to avoid the rocks and shoals of the previously published. In her books it was but natural that she should deal most freely with those august figures in American letters who so towered above their contemporaries as to attach the longer and more portentous adjective “Augustan” to the circle formed by the joining of their hands. If it has become the fashion to look back upon the American Augustans and the English Victorians with similarly mingled feelings, in which tolerance stands in a growing proportion to the admiration and respect which formerly ruled supreme, it is the unaltered fact that the figures of the American group dominated both the local and the national scene of letters in their day, and that their historic significance is undiminished. But it is rather as human beings than as literary figures that they reveal themselves in the sympathetic records of Mrs. Fields—human beings who typified and embodied a state of thought and society so remote in its characteristic qualities from the prevailing conditions of this later day as to be approaching steadily that “equal date with Andes and with Ararat” of which one of them wrote in words quite unmistakably his own.

Perhaps no single member of the group is represented in Mrs. Fields’s journals so often as Dr. Holmes by illuminating pages which she herself left unprinted. For this reason, and because Concord and Cambridge visitors to Charles Street were in fact so much a “group,” it has seemed wise to assemble in this place passages that relate to one after another of the “Augustan” friends in turn. Sometimes they appear as separate subjects of record, sometimes in company with their fellows. That majestic figure, Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose death in 1864 made the earliest gap in the circle of figures most memorable, shall be first to step forth, like one of his own personages of the Province House, from the shadows in which indeed he lived.

HAWTHORNE IN 1857

The long chapter on Hawthorne in “Yesterdays with Authors,” and that small volume about him which Mrs. Fields contributed in 1899 to the “Beacon Biographies,” constitute the more finished portraits of the man as his host and hostess in Charles Street saw him. His letters to Fields are quoted at length in “Yesterdays with Authors,” and contribute an autobiographic element of much importance to any study of Hawthorne. But there are illuminating passages that were left unpublished. In one of them, for example, Hawthorne, in a letter of September 21, 1860, after lamenting the state of his daughter’s health, exclaimed: “I am continually reminded, nowadays, of a response which I once heard a drunken sailor make to a pious gentleman who asked him how he felt: ‘Pretty d——d miserable, thank God!’ It very well expresses my thorough discomfort and forced acquiescence.” In another, of July 14, 1861, after the calamity that befell Longfellow in the tragic death of his wife through burning, Hawthorne wrote to Fields:—

“How does Longfellow bear this terrible misfortune? How are his own injuries? Do write and tell me all about him. I cannot at all reconcile this calamity to my sense of fitness. One would think that there ought to have been no deep sorrow in the life of a man like him; and now comes this blackest of shadows, which no sunshine hereafter can ever penetrate! I shall be afraid ever to meet him again; he cannot again be the man that I have known.”

In the words, “I shall be afraid ever to meet him again,” the very accent of Hawthorne is clearly heard. Still another manuscript letter, preserved in the Charles Street cabinet, should now be printed to round out the story of Hawthorne’s reluctant omission from his “Atlantic” article—“Chiefly about War Matters”—that personal description of Abraham Lincoln which Fields was unwilling to publish in his magazine in 1862, but afterwards included in his “Yesterdays with Authors.”[7] In that place, however, he used but a few words from the following letter.

Concord, May 23, ’62

Dear Fields:—

I have looked over the article under the influence of a cigar and through the medium (but don’t whisper it) of a glass of arrack and water; and though I think you are wrong, I am going to comply with your request. I am the most good-natured man, and the most amenable to good advice (or bad advice either, for that matter) that you ever knew—so have it your own way. The whole description of the interview with Uncle Abe and his personal appearance must be omitted, since I do not find it possible to alter them, and in so doing, I really think you omit the only part of the article really worth publishing. Upon my honor, it seemed to me to have a historical value—but let it go. I have altered and transferred one of the notes so as to indicate to the unfortunate public that it here loses something very nice. You must mark the omission with dashes, so—x x x x x x x.

I have likewise modified the other passage you allude to; and I cannot now conceive of any objection to it.

What a terrible thing it is to try to get off a little bit of truth into this miserable humbug of a world! If I had sent you the article as I first conceived it, I should not so much have wondered.

I want you to send me a proof sheet of the article in its present state before making any alterations; for if ever I collect these sketches into a volume, I shall insert it in all its original beauty.

With the best regards to Mrs. Fields,

Truly yours,

Nath’l Hawthorne

P. S. I shall probably come to Boston next week, to the Saturday Club.

If these unpublished letters add something to the more formal portraits of Hawthorne drawn by Fields and his wife, still other lines may be added by means of the unconscious, fragmentary sketches on which the portraits were based. In Mrs. Fields’s diaries the following glimpses of Hawthorne in the final months of his life are found.

December 4, 1863.—Hawthorne and Mr. and Mrs. Alden passed the night with us; he came to town to attend the funeral of Mrs. Franklin Pierce. He seemed ill and more nervous than usual. He brought the first part of a story which he says he shall never finish.[8] J. T. F. says it is very fine, yet sad. Hawthorne says in it, “pleasure is only pain greatly exaggerated,” which is queer to say the least, if not untrue. I think it must be differently stated from this. He was as courteous and as grand as ever, and as true. He does not lose that all-saddening smile, either.

Sunday, December 6, 1863.—Mr. Hawthorne returned to us. He had found General Pierce overwhelmed with sadness at the death of his wife and greatly needing his companionship, therefore he accompanied him the whole distance to Concord, N. H. He said he could not generally look at such things, but he was obliged to look at the body of Mrs. Pierce. It was like a carven image laid in its richly embossed enclosure and there was a remote expression about it as if it had nothing to do with things present. Harriet Prescott was there. He had some talk with her and liked her. He was more deeply impressed than ever with the exquisite courtesy of his friend. Even at the grave, while overwhelmed with grief, Pierce drew up the collar of Hawthorne’s coat to keep him from the cold.[9]

We went to walk in the morning and left Mr. Hawthorne to read in the library. He found a book called “Dealings with the Dead,” which he liked—indeed he said he liked no house to stay in better than this. He thought the old edition of Boccaccio which belonged to Leigh Hunt a poor translation. He has already written the first chapter of a new romance, but he thought so little of the work himself as to make it impossible for him to continue until Mr. Fields had read it and expressed his sincere admiration for the work. This has given him better heart to go on with it. He talked of the magazine with Mr. F.; told him he thought it was the most ably edited magazine in the world, and was bound to be a success, with this exception: he said, “I fear its politics—beware! What will you do when in a year or two the politics of the country change?” “I will quietly wait for that time to come,” said J. T. F.; “then I can tell you.”

As the sunset deepened Mr. Hawthorne talked of his early life. His grandfather bought a township in Maine and at the early age of eleven years he accompanied his mother and sister down there to live upon the land. From that moment the happiest period of his life began and lasted until he was thirteen, when he was sent to school in Salem. While in Maine he lived like a bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom he enjoyed. During the moonlight nights of winter he would skate until midnight alone upon the icy face of Sebago Lake, with all its ineffable beauty stretched before him and the deep shadows of the hills on either hand. When he was weary he could take refuge sometimes in a log cabin (there were several in this region), where half a tree would be burning on the broad hearth and he could sit by that and see the stars up through the chimney. All the long summer days he roamed at will, gun in hand, through the woods, and there he learned a nearness to Nature and a love for free life which has never left him and made all other existence in a measure insupportable. His suffering began with that Salem school and his knowledge of his relatives who were all distasteful to him. He said, “How sad middle life looks to people of erratic temperaments. Everything is beautiful in youth—all things are allowed to it.” We gave him “Pet Marjorie” to read in the evening—a little story by John Brown. He thought it so beautiful that he read it carefully twice until every word was grasped by his powerful memory....

Talking of England, Hawthorne said she was not a powerful empire. The extent over which her dominions extended led her to fancy herself powerful. She is much like a squash vine which runs over a whole garden, but once cut at the root and it is gone at once.

We talked and laughed about Boswell, whom he thinks one of the most remarkable men who ever lived, and J. T. F. recalled that story of Johnson who, upon being told of a man who had committed some misdemeanor and was upon the verge of committing suicide in consequence, said, “Why does not the man go somewhere where he is not known, instead of to the devil where he is known?”

Hawthorne was in the same class at college with Longfellow, whom he says he could not appreciate at that time. He was always finely dressed and was a tremendous student. Hawthorne was careless in dress and no student, but always reading desultorily right and left. Now they are deeply appreciative of each other.[10]

Hawthorne says he wants the North to beat now; ’tis the only way to save the country from destruction. He has been strangely inert and remote upon the subject of the war; partly from his deep hatred of everything sad. He seemed to feel as if he could not live and face it.

He was intensely witty, but his wit is of so ethereal a texture that the fine essence has vanished and I can remember nothing now of his witty things!

It would be a pity to truncate the following passage by confining the record of Fields’s day in Concord to his glimpse of Hawthorne, already recorded, with emendations, in the “Biographical Notes.”

From a letter of Hawthorne’s after a visit to Charles Street

Saturday, January 9, 1864.—J. T. F. passed yesterday in Concord. He went first to see Hawthorne, who was sitting alone gazing into the fire, his grey dressing-gown, which became him like a Roman toga, wrapped around his figure. He said he had done nothing for three weeks. Yet we feel his romance must be maturing in his mind. General Barlow and Mrs. Howe had sent word they were coming to call, so Mrs. Hawthorne had gone out to walk (been thrown out on picket-duty, Mrs. Stowe said) and had left word at home that Mr. Hawthorne was ill and could see no one. After his visit there, full of affectionate kindness, J. T. F. proceeded to dinner with the Emersons. Here too the reception was most hearty, but he fancied there were no servants to speak of at either house. Mrs. E. looked deadly pale, but her wit coruscated marvellously; even Mr. Emerson grew silent to listen. She said a committee of three, of which she was one, had been formed to pronounce upon certain essays (unpublished) of Mr. Emerson, which they thought should be printed now. She thought some of them finer than any of his published essays. He laughed a great deal at the fun she poked at the earlier efforts.

From there J. T. F. proceeded to see the Thoreaus. The mother and sister live well, but lonely it should seem, there without Henry. They produced 32 volumes of journal and a few letters. The idea was to print the letters. We hope it may be done. Their house was like a conservatory, it was so filled with plants in beautiful condition. Henry liked to have the doors thrown open that he might look at these during his illness. He was an excellent son, and even when living in his retirement at Walden Pond, would come home every day. He supported himself too from a very early age.

Here follows a passage also used by Fields in “Yesterdays with Authors,” but in a rendering so moderated that the original entry in the journal is quite another thing.

Monday, March 28.—Mr. Hawthorne came down to take this as his first station on his journey for health. He shocked us by his invalid appearance. He has become quite deaf, too. His limbs are shrunken but his great eyes still burn with their lambent fire. He said, “Why does Nature treat us so like children! I think we could bear it if we knew our fate. At least I think it would not make much difference to me now what became of me.” He talked with something of his old wit at times; said, “Why has the good old custom of coming together to get drunk gone out? Think of the delight of drinking in pleasant company and then lying down to sleep a deep strong sleep.” Poor man! He sleeps very little. We heard him walking in his room during a long portion of the night, heavily moving, moving as if indeed waiting, watching for his fate. At breakfast he gave us a most singular account of an interview with Mr. Alcott. He said: “Alcott was one of the most excellent of men. He could never quarrel with anyone.” But the other day he came to make Mr. H. a call, to ask him if there was any difficulty or misunderstanding between the two families. Mr. Hawthorne said no, that would be impossible; “but I proceeded,” he continued, “to tell him it was not possible to live upon amicable terms with Mrs. Alcott.... The old man acknowledged the truth of all that I said (indeed who should know it better), but I comforted him by saying in time of illness or necessity I did not doubt we should be the best of helpers to each other. I clothed all this in velvet phrases, that it might not seem too hard for him to bear, but he took it all like a saint.”

April, 1864.—When Mr. Hawthorne returned after watching at the death-bed of Mr. Ticknor, his mind was in a healthier condition, we thought, than when he left, but the experience had been a terrible one. I can never forget the look of pallid exhaustion he wore the night he returned to us. He said he had scarcely eaten or slept since he left. “Mr. Childs watched me so closely after poor Ticknor died, as if I had lost my protector and friend, and so I had! But he stuck by as if he were afraid to leave me alone. He stayed past the dinner hour, and when I began to wonder if he never ate himself, he departed and sent another man to watch me till he should return!” Nevertheless he liked Mr. Childs and spoke repeatedly of his unwearying kindness. “I never saw anything like it,” he said; yet when he was abstractedly wondering where his slippers were, I overheard him say to himself, “Oh! I remember, that cursed Childs watched me so I forgot everything.”

He spoke of the coldness of somebody and said, “Well, I think he would have felt something if he had been there!” He said he did not think death would be so terrible if it were not for the undertakers. It was dreadful to think of being handled by those men.

He was often wholly overcome by the ludicrous view of something presented to him in the midst of his grief. There was a black servant sleeping in the room that last night, whose name was Peter. Once he snored loudly, when the dying man raised himself with an appreciation of fun still living in him and said, “Well done, Peter!”

In every account of the last week of Hawthorne’s life, the shock he received through the illness and death of his friend and traveling companion, Ticknor, in Philadelphia, is an item of sombre moment. The two men had left Boston together late in March—Hawthorne, sick and broken, writing but once, in a tremulous hand, to his wife during the ill-starred journey; Ticknor, giving himself unstintingly to the restoration of Hawthorne’s health, and stricken unto death before a fortnight was gone. The circumstances are suggested in the entry that has just been quoted from Mrs. Fields’s journal. They stand still more clearly revealed in the last letter written by Hawthorne to Fields, who refers to it in “Yesterdays with Authors,” and adds that the news of Ticknor’s death reached Boston on the very day after this letter was written, all too evidently with a feeble hold upon the pen.

Philadelphia, Continental Hotel

Saturday morning

Dear Fields:—

I am sorry to say that our friend Ticknor is suffering under a severe billious attack since yesterday morning. He had previously seemed uncomfortable, but not to an alarming degree. He sent for a physician during the night, and fell into the hands of an allopathist, who, of course, belabored with pills and powders of various kinds, and then proceeded to cup, and poultice, and blister, according to the ancient rule of that tribe of savages. The consequence is that poor Ticknor is already very much reduced, while the disorder flourishes as luxuriantly as if that were the doctor’s sole object. He calls it a billious colic (or bilious, I know not which) and says it is one of the severest cases he ever knew. I think him a man of skill and intelligence, in his way, and doubt not that he will do everything that his views of scientific medicine will permit.

Since I began writing the above, Mr. Bennett of Boston tells me the Doctor, after this morning’s visit, requested the proprietor of the Continental to telegraph to Boston the state of the case. I am glad of it, because it relieves me of the responsibility of either disclosing bad intelligence or withholding it. I will only add that Ticknor, under the influence of a blister and some powders, seems more comfortable than at any time since his attack, and that Mr. Bennett (who is an apothecary, and therefore conversant with these accursed matters) says that he is in a good state. But I can see that it will be not a very few days that will set him upon his legs again. As regards nursing, he shall have the best that can be obtained; and my own room is next to his, so that I can step in at any moment; but that will be of almost as much service as if a hippopotamus were to do him the same kindness. Nevertheless, I have blistered, and powdered, and pilled him and made my observation on medical science and the sad and comic aspects of human misery.

Excuse this illegible scrawl, for I am writing almost in the dark. Remember me to Mrs. Fields. As regards myself, I almost forgot to say that I am perfectly well. If you could find time to write Mrs. Hawthorne and tell her so, it would be doing me a great favor, for I doubt whether I can find an opportunity just now to do it myself. You would be surprised to see how stalwart I have become in this little time.

Your friend,

N. H.

Barely more than a month later, Hawthorne, traveling with another friend, Franklin Pierce, died in New Hampshire. Through the years that followed, the friendship of the Fieldses with his widow and children afforded many occasions for brief affectionate record in the chronicles of Charles Street.[11]

The two entries that follow touch, respectively, upon glimpses of Hawthorne’s immediate family at Concord, in the summer of 1865, and of his surviving sister in the summer of 1866.

Sunday, July 9, 1865.—Passed Friday in Concord. Called at the Emersons, but were disappointed to find them all in town, Jamie particularly, who wished to tell him that his new essay on Character is not suited to the magazine. Ordinary readers would not understand him and would consider it blasphemous. He thinks it would do more good if delivered simply to his own disciples first, in a volume of new essays uniform with the others.

Dined with Sophia Hawthorne and the children, the first real visit since that glorious presence has departed. What an altered household! She feels very lonely and is like a reed. I fear the children find small restraint from her. Poor child! How tired she is! Will God spare her further trial, I wonder, and take her to his rest?... Went to call on Sophia Thoreau.[12] ... We saw a letter from Froude, the historian, to H. T., as warmly appreciative as it was possible for a letter to be; also “long good histories,” as his sister said, from his admirer Cholmondely. His journal is in thirty-two volumes and when J. T. F. spoke of wishing for an editor to condense these, she said there was no hurry and she thought the man would come. We spoke of Sanborn. She said, “He knows a great deal, but I never associate him with my brother.”

She is a woman borne down with ill health. She seemed to possess, as we saw her, something of the self-sustaining power of her brother, the same repose and confidence in her fate, as being always good. Dear S. H. says she has this when she thinks of her brother, but often loses it when the surface of her life becomes irritated and she is disabled for work. Her aged mother, learning we were there, got up and dressed herself and came down, to her daughter’s great surprise. She has an immense care in that old lady evidently.

July 24, 1866.—We left just before eleven for Amesbury, to see Mr. Whittier, driving over to Beverly in an open wagon. It was one of the perfect days. As Keats said once, the sky sat “upon our senses like a sapphire crown.” We turned away after a time from the high road into a wood path, picking our way somewhat slowly to avoid the overhanging bushes and the rainy pools left in the ruts. We soon found ourselves near a place called Mt. Serat where we knew Miss Hawthorne lived, the only surviving sister of Nathaniel, and Mr. Fields determined at once to call upon her. To my surprise, in spite of the fine weather and her woodland life habitually, she was at home, and came down immediately as if she were sincerely glad to see us. She is a small woman, with small fine features, round full face, fresh-looking in spite of years, brilliant eyes, nervous brow, which twists as she speaks, and very nervous fingers. In one respect she differed from her brother—she was exquisitely neat (nor do I mean to convey the idea by this that he was unneat, but he always gave you a sense of disregarded trifles about his person and we frequently recall his reply to me when I offered to brush his coat one morning, “No, no, I never brush my coat, it wears it out!”), and gave you a sense of being particular in little things. I seemed to see in her another difference—a deterioration because of too great solitude—powers rusted—a decaying beauty—while with Hawthorne solitude fed his genius, solitude and the pressure of necessity. Utter solitude lames the native power of a woman even more than that of a man, for her natural growth is through her sympathies. She is a woman of no common mould, however. Lucy Larcom calls her a hamadryad, and says she belongs in the woods and should be seen there. I wish to see her again upon her own ground. She asked us almost immediately if we would not come with her to the woods, but our time was too short. From thence we held our way, and soon came by train to Newburyport and Amesbury. Whittier was at home, ready with an enthusiastic welcome.

To these memorials of Hawthorne must be added yet another, copied from a pencilled sheet preserved by Mrs. Fields in an envelope endorsed in her handwriting, “The original of a precious and extraordinary letter written by Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne while her husband lay dead.” Printed now, I believe for the first time, nearly sixty years after it was written, it rings with a devotion and exaltation which time is powerless to touch:

I wish to speak to you, Annie.

A person of a more uniform majesty never wore mortal form.

In the most retired privacy it was the same as in the presence of men.

The sacred veil of his eyelids he scarcely lifted to himself—such an unviolated sanctuary as was his nature, I, his inmost wife, never conceived nor knew.

So absolute a modesty was not before joined to so lofty a self-respect.

But what must have been that self-respect that he never in the smallest particular dishonored!

A conscience more void of offense never bore witness to GOD within.

It was the innocence of a baby and the grand comprehension of a sage.

To me—himself—even to me who was himself in unity—he was to the last the holy of holies behind the cherubim.

So unerring a judgment that a word from him would settle with me a chaos of doubts and questions that seemed perplexing to ordinary apprehension.

So equal a justice that I often wondered if he were human in this—for this seemed to partake of omniscience both of love and insight.

An impartiality of regard that solved all men and subjects in one alembick.

Truth and right alone he deigned to regard. Far below him was every other consideration.

A tenderness so infinite—so embracing—that GOD’S alone could surpass it. It folded the loathsome leper in as soft a caress as the child of his home affections—was not that divine!

Was it not Christianity in one action! What a bequest to his children—what a new revelation of Christ to the world was that! And for him—whom the sight and touch of unseemliness and uncleanness caused to shudder as an Eolian string shudders in the tempest.

Annie! to the last action in this house he was as lofty, as majestic, as imperial and as gentle—as in the strength of his prime, as on the day he rose upon my eye and soul a King among men by divine right!

When he awoke that early dawn and found himself unawares standing among the “Shining Ones” do you think they did not suppose he had been always with them—one of themselves? Oh, blessed be GOD for so soft a translation—as an infant wakes on its mother’s breast so he woke on the bosom of GOD and can never be weary any more, nor see nor touch an unclean thing. A demand for beauty and perfection that was inexorable. Yet though a flaw or a crack gave him so fine agony, no one, no one was ever so tolerant as he!

Hawthorne’s allusion to Alcott brings the figure of that Concord personage on the scene. The picture of him in Charles Street is so sharpened in outline by certain remarks upon him by the elder Henry James, a somewhat more frequent visitor, that the passages relating to the two men are here joined together. The first recorded glimpses of James occurred in the course of a visit to Newport.

September 23, 1863.—Received a visit at Newport from Henry James. His son was badly wounded in two places at Gettysburg. He spoke of the reviews of his work among other topics. “Who wrote the review in the Examiner?” asked Mr. F. “Oh! that was merely Freeman Clarke,” he replied; “he is a smuggler in theology and feels towards me much as a contraband towards an exciseman.” Speaking of fashion, he said, “there was good in it,” although it appears to be a drawback to the residents here while it lasts. He anticipates a change in European affairs; the age of ignorance is to pass away and strong democratic tendencies will soon pervade Europe. The march of civilization will work its revenge against aristocratic England, he believes.

Mr. James considers that people make a mistake to expect reason from Carlyle. “He is an artist, a wilful artist, and no reasoner. He has only genius.”

October 16, 1863.—Mr. Alcott breakfasted with us. He said all vivid new life was well described by his daughter Louisa. She was happier now that she had made a success. “She was formerly not content to wait, but so soon as she became content, then good fortune came, as she always does.” I told him we enjoyed deeply reading his MSS. of “The Rhapsodist” (Emerson) last night. He said he thought it was finally brought into presentable shape! “When in a more imperfect condition,” he continued, “I read it to Mr. Emerson. The modest man could only keep silent at such a time, but he conveyed to me the idea that he should prefer the paper should not be printed in the ‘Commonwealth.’ Later I again read it, when he said, ‘If I were dead.’ I have reason to believe that in its present shape he would not object to its presentation.”[13] He talked of his own valuable library and asked what he should do with it by and by. J. T. F. suggested it should go to the Union Club, which pleased him much. “That is the place,” said he. “If it were known this was my intention, might I not also be entitled to consideration at the Club?”

Among his books is a copy of Milton’s “World of Words,” owned by Sir Ferdinand Gorges, who early colonized the state of Maine.

He talked of Thoreau. “There will be seven or eight volumes of his works. Next should come the letters, with the commendatory poems prefixed. Come up to Concord and we will talk it over. If you go to see Miss Thoreau, arrange to talk with her in the absence of the mother, who would interrupt and speak again of the whole matter. Make Helen[14] feel that Henry will receive as much for his books as if he had made his own bargain, for he was good at a bargain and they are a little hard—that is, they do not understand all the bearings of many subjects.”

The good old man has come to Boston, being asked to perform funeral ceremonies over the bodies of two children. He asked for my Vaughan. “A beautiful poem which is not known is much at such a time,” he observed inquiringly. To which I heartily responded.

Mr. Emerson came in to see Mr. Fields today. “I shall reconsider my reluctance to have Mr. Alcott’s article published provided he will obtain consideration by it,” was his generous speech. He said he had begun to prepare a new volume of poems, “but I must go down the harbor before I can finish a little poem about the islands. I took steamboat yesterday and went down, but a mist came up and my visit was to no purpose.”

February 19, 1864.—This morning early called upon Mrs. Mott of Pennsylvania. Found Mr. James with her. He observed that circumstances had placed him above want, and inheritance had given him a position in the world which precluded his having any knowledge of the temptations which beset many men. His virtues were the result of his position rather than of character—an affair of temperament. He said society was to blame for much of the crime in it, and as for that poor young man who committed the murder at Malden, it was a mere fact of temperament or inheritance. He soon broke off his talk, saying it was “pretty well to be caught in the middle of such weighty topics in the presence of two ladies at 10 o’clock in the morning.” Then we talked of houses. He wishes a furnished house for a year in Boston until his departure.

July 28.—Still hot, with a russet sun. Mr. and Mrs. Henry James called in the evening. He talked of “Sterling.” “He was not stereotyped, but living, his eye burned; he was very vivacious, although he saw Death approaching. He was one of the choicest of friends.” Afterward he talked of Alcott’s visit to Carlyle. Carlyle told Mr. James he found him a terrible old bore. It was almost impossible to be rid of him, and impossible also to keep him, for he would not eat what was set before him. Carlyle had potatoes for breakfast and sent for strawberries for Mr. Alcott, who, when they arrived, took them with the potatoes upon the same plate, where the two juices ran together and fraternized. This shocked Carlyle, who would eat nothing himself, but stormed up and down the room instead. “Mrs. Carlyle is a naughty woman,” said Mr. J., “she wishes to make a sensation and does not mind sometimes following and imitating her husband’s way.” Mr. J. said Alcott once made him a visit in New York and when he found he could not go to Brooklyn to attend Mr. A.’s “conversation,” the latter said, “Very well; he would talk over the heads with him then before it was time to go.” They got into a great battle about the premises, during which Mr. Alcott talked of the Divine paternity as relating to himself, when Mr. James broke in with, “My dear sir, you have not found your maternity yet. You are an egg half hatched. The shells are yet sticking about your head.” To this Mr. A. replied, “Mr. James, you are damaged goods and will come up damaged goods in eternity.”

We laughed much before they left at a story about a man who called to ask money of John Jacob Astor. The gentleman was ushered into a twilight library, where he fancied himself alone until he heard a grunt from a deep chair, the high back of which was turned towards him; then the gentleman advanced, found Mr. Astor there and saluted him. He opened the business of the subscription to him, and was about to unfold the paper when Mr. Astor suddenly cried out, “Oo—oo—oo—ooooooo!” “What is the matter, my dear sir,” said he, “are you ill? [growing alarmed] Where is the bell? Let me ring the bell.” Then running to the door, he shouted, “Madame, madame.” Then to Mr. Astor, “Pray, sir, what is the matter?” “Oo—oo—oo.” “Have you a pain in your side!!” In a moment the household came running thither, and as the housekeeper bent over him, he cried, “Oo—oo—these horrid wretches sending to me for money!!” As may be believed, our friend of the subscription paper beat a hasty retreat and here ended also our evening.

A few days later there was an evening with Sumner and others, who talked of affairs in Washington. Mr. and Mrs. James were of the company. “These men,” wrote Mrs. Fields, “despond with regard to the civil government. They have more faith that our military affairs are doing well. Chiefly they look to Sherman as the great man. Mr. James was silent; he believes in Lincoln.” And there is the final note: “We must not forget Mr. James’s youth, who was ‘aninted with isle of Patmos.’”

July 10, 1866.—Forceythe Willson came and talked purely, lovingly, and like the pure character he aspires to be. He said Mr. Alcott talked with him of temperaments lately, with much wisdom. He said the blonde was nearest to perfection, that was the heavenly type. “You are not a blonde,” said the seer calmly, and, said Willson to me, “I was much amused and pleased too; for when I regarded the old man more closely I discovered he himself was a blonde.”

October 6, 1867.—Mr. Henry James and his daughter came to call. We chanced to ask him about Dr. G—— of New York, a physician of wide reputation in the diagnosis of disease. He is an old man now, but with so large a practice that he will see no new patients. Mr. James says, however, that he is a humbug, that is, as I understood. He is a man of discernment which he turns to the best account, but not a man of deep insight or unwonted development. Suddenly J. remembered that there was once a Dr. —— of New York who was also famous. The moment his name was mentioned Mr. James became quite a new man. His enthusiasm flamed. Dr. —— died at the early age of 38, and, according to the saying of the world, insane. “Yet he was no more insane than I am at this moment as far as the action of his mind was concerned, which was always perfectly clear. Several years before his death he was pursued by spirits which often kept him awake all night. His wife was a heavenly woman and a Swedenborgian. The spirits did not come to her, but she was persuaded that they did come to him. They so disturbed his life that he used to say he was ready to die, in order to pursue his tormentors and ferret out the occasion of his trouble. At one time they told him that in every age a man had been selected to do the bidding of the Lord God, to be the Lord Christ of the time, and he must fit himself to be that man. They prescribed for him therefore certain fasts and austerities which he religiously fulfilled, only asking in return an interview in which some sign should be given him. They promised faithfully, but when the time arrived it was postponed; and this occurred repeatedly, until he felt sure of the deceit of the parties concerned.”

Through the medium of these spirits Dr. —— became at length estranged from his wife. He went West to obtain a divorce, and while on this strange errand occurred a breach between himself and Mr. James. The latter wrote him a letter urging him away from the dead, which the doctor took as interference. The poor man returned to New York and at length shot himself. His wife never harbored the least animosity against him for his undeserved treatment. (Mr. J. looked like an invalid, but was full of spirit and kindness. He not infrequently speaks severely of men and things. Analysis is his second nature.)

March 5, 1869.—Jamie had an unusually turbulent and exciting day, and was thoroughly weary when night came. Henry James came first, and had gone so far as to abuse Emerson pretty well when the latter came in. “How do you do, Emer-son,” he said, with his peculiar intonation and voice, as if he had expected him on the heels of what had gone before. Mr. James calls his new book, “The Secret of Swedenborg.” Jamie thinks his article on Carlyle too abusive, especially as he stayed in his house, or was there long and familiarly. But his love of country was bitterly stung by Carlyle in “Shooting Niagara and After.”

Saturday, March 13, 1869.—Mr. Emerson read in the afternoon. The subject was Wordsworth in chief, but the time was far too short to do justice to the notes he had made. In the evening we went to Cambridge to hear Mr. James read his paper on “Woman.” We took tea first with the family and afterward listened to the lecture. He took the highest, the most natural, and the most religious point of view from which I have heard the subject discussed. He dealt metaphysically with it, after his own fashion, showing the subtle inherent counterparts of man to woman, showing to what extremes either would be led without the other. He spoke with unmingled disgust of the idea of woman, except for union in behalf of some charity for the time, forsaking the sanctity and privacy of her home to battle and unsex herself in the hot and dusty arena of the world.

(The members of the Woman’s Club asked him to write this lecture for them. He did not wish to spare the time, but promised to do so if they would invite him afterward to deliver it in public. They disliked the lecture so much that, although they did send him a public invitation, there were but twenty people present.)

Nothing could be holier or more inspiring than his ideal of womanhood. She is the embodied social idea, the genius of home, the light of life—“ever desiring novelty her life without man would be a long chase from one field to another, accompanied by soft gospel truth.”

He didn’t fail to whip the “pusillanimous” clergy, and as the room was overstocked with them, it was odd to watch the effect. Mr. James is perfectly brave, almost inapprehensive, of the storm of opinion he raises, and he is quite right. Nothing could be more clearly his own and inherent, than his views in this lecture, nothing which the times need more. He helps to lay that dreadful phantom of yourself which appears now and then conjured up by the right people, haranguing the crowd and endeavoring to be something for which you were clearly never intended by Heaven. I think I shall never forget a pretty little niece of Mrs. Dale Owen, who was with her at the first Club meeting in New York. Her face was full of softness and Madonna-like beauty, but she was learning to contract her brow over ideas and become “strong” in her manner of expressing them. It was a kind of nightmare.

Summer, 1871.—Mr. Alcott, Mr. Howison, Mr. Harris, the latter two lovers of philosophy, have been here this week. Channing is still writing poems in Concord, says Alcott. The latter smiles blandly at his own former absurdities, but he does not eat meat, and continues his ancient manner of living among books. The old gentleman gave me this wild rose as he went away. He quoted Vaughan, talked of a book of selections he would wish to see made, “a honey-pot into which one might dip at leisure,” also an almanac suitable for a lady, of the choicest things among the ancient writers. He was full of good sayings and most witty and attractive. He is somewhat deaf, but he bears this infirmity as he has borne all the ills of life with a mild sweet heroism most marked and worthy of love and to be copied.

Sunday, April 20, 1873.—Last night Mr. and Mrs. Henry James, Alice, and Mr. DeNormandie dined here. Mr. James looked very venerable, but was at heart very young and amused us much. He gave a description of Mr. George Bradford being run over by the horse-car, because of his own inadvertence in part, and of the good-natured crowd who insisted upon his having restitution for what he considered, in part, at least, his own fault. “Ain’t you dead?” said one. “267 Highland Ave. is the number, don’t forget,” said another; “you can prosecute.” “Where’s my hat?” he asked meekly. “Better ask if ye’re not dead, and not be looking for your hat,” said another.

He also told us of a visit of Elizabeth Peabody to the Alcotts. He said: “In Mr. A. the moral sense was wholly dead, and the æsthetic sense had never yet been born!”