← catalogue

The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I

by William James Stillman · English · Gutenberg #11546 · 584,952 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I

Author: William James Stillman


        
Release date: March 1, 2004 [eBook #11546]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11546

Credits: Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A JOURNALIST, VOLUME I ***

[Illustration: W.J. Stillman]




THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A JOURNALIST


WILLIAM JAMES STILLMAN


IN TWO VOLUMES


VOLUME I


1901




PREFACE


That a man should assume that his life is worth the venture of
a record in the form of an autobiography suggests a degree of
self-conceit of which I am not guilty. From my own initiative this
would never have been written, and the first suggestion that I should
write it, coming from a man of such experience in books and judgment
of men as the late Mr. Houghton, then head of the firm of Houghton,
Mifflin & Co., was as much a surprise to me as the publication will
be to any one. The impression it made on me was so vivid that I have
never forgotten the details of the occasion which called it out. I had
gone with Mr. Houghton and his daughters to the ruins of the Villa of
Hadrian, at Tivoli, and, wandering idly amongst them on a beautiful
autumn morning, not in the spirit of crude sightseeing, I was led to
talk of my experiences more than is my wont to do. "You should write
your life," he said to me with a manner of authority which at once
convinced me, and I decided that if there should come in my life a
pause in which the past could be considered rather than the needs of
the present and the cares of the future, I would set about it. Had
I at some earlier date entertained such a project, I should have
preserved many documents and data now lost, and have been able to
write more precisely of some things of greater interest than my
personal adventures. But in that part of my life which may be
considered relatively of a public character, or in which events of a
public interest occurred, I have ample record made at the time. In
what is peculiar to myself, and so of relatively trivial moment, dates
and the order of events are of little importance. It occurred to me in
the connection, that to give a human document of Puritan family life,
and the development of a mind from the archaic severity of New England
Puritanism to a complete freedom of thought, by a purely evolutionary
process, without revolt or revulsion, might be worth doing. For what
it is worth I have done it without much consideration of my own
dignity, and, candidly, not as to my blunders and peccadilloes, which
are of no importance to the story, but as to the earlier mental
conditions which were a part of the process. So much for the
personality.

Orthodox journalists may object to my assumption of their title. In my
multifarious occupation and random life I have, as I see when I look
back found my highest activity, and rendered my most serious services
to others, in my occupation as a journalist--all the rest was fringe
or failure. If I have been good for anything it was in connection
with, or through my position on, the press. And it would be ungrateful
and dishonest if I should omit to bear my testimony to the noble
character and large sincerity of the great journal to which the most
of my strength for more than twenty years has been given. If ever
I had a noble impulse, aroused by wrongs that came to my knowledge
during those years, a good cause to defend, or a public abuse to
attack, "The Times" has never refused to give me room to tell my
story, nor have I ever been expected to conform my views to those of
the office, or shape my correspondence to any ulterior purpose; nor
have I ever done so. And I consider it the greatest honor that has
ever come to me to have been so many years in its service, and to have
maintained the confidence of its direction.

To my critics much that I have told may seem trivial. I cannot judge
of what may interest others. I should hardly have believed that my
life as a whole could interest a public that does not know me, and I
am equally unable to judge of the value which its details may have to
others. In default of any criterion beyond my own judgment, I have
selected the items which had to me most importance, or had a marked
influence on my life or an interest beyond myself. I have told things
that will seem trite to Americans, and others that will be commonplace
to Englishmen, but I have two publics to think of, differing in slight
matters in their knowledge of things.

In affixing to the book the portraits of myself, I have yielded my own
opinion, which was opposed to it, to that of the publishers and my
friends, who urged it. To me it seemed a vanity for one almost unknown
to assume that a public would care what manner of man he might be, and
that such an assumption should follow an expressed general desire; but
the views of the publishers are imperative, and those of my friends
weightier than my own.

The drawing by Rowse was done about 1856, so that the interval between
its doing and that by my daughter in 1900 included all the active
period of my life, unless I except the Hungarian expedition. When the
Rowse drawing was executed, Lowell said of it, "You have nothing to do
for the rest of your life but to try to look like it." Since that time
every friend I then had, except Rowse and Norton, is gone where I must
soon follow.

DEEPDENE, FRIMLEY GREEN, Surrey, England.




CONTENTS


CHAP.

I. A NEW ENGLAND MOTHER AND HER FAMILY.

II. NATURE WORSHIP--EARLY RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES.

III. AN AMERICAN EDUCATION.

IV. COLLEGE LIFE.

V. ART STUDY IN AMERICA.

VI. ART STUDY IN ENGLAND.

VII. ON A MISSION FOR KOSSUTH.

VIII. AN ART STUDENT IN PARIS.

IX. SPIRITISM.

X. LIFE IN THE WILDERNESS.

XI. JOURNALISM.

XII. CAMBRIDGE.

XIII. THE ADIRONDACK CLUB--EMERSON AND AGASSIZ.

XIV. LOWELL.

XV. THE ADIRONDACKS AND FLORIDA.

XVI. ENGLAND AGAIN.

XVII. SWITZERLAND.

XVIII. PARIS AGAIN--THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA.

XIX. MY ROMAN CONSULATE.




THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A JOURNALIST




CHAPTER I

A NEW ENGLAND MOTHER AND HER FAMILY


A theory is advanced by some students of character that in what
concerns the formation of the individual nature, the shaping and
determination of it in the plastic stage, and especially in respect to
the moral elements on which the stability and purpose of a man's life
depend, a man is indebted to his mother, for good or for ill.
The question is too abstruse for argument, but, so far as my own
observation goes, it tends to a confirmation of the theory. I have
often noticed in children of friends that in childhood the likeness
to the mother was so vivid that one found no trace of the father, but
that in maturity this likeness disappeared to give place to that of
the father. In my own case, taking it for what it is worth, I can only
wish that the mother's part had been more enduring, not that I regret
the effect of my father's influence, but because I think my mother had
some qualities from which my best are derived, and which I should like
to see completely carried out in the life of a man, while I recognize
in a certain vagarious tendency in my father the probable hereditary
basis of the inconstancy of purpose and pursuit, which may not
have deprived my life of interest to others, but which has made
it comparatively barren of practical result. As a study of a
characteristic phase of New England life which has now entirely
disappeared, I believe that a picture of her and her family will be of
interest to some readers.

In my oldest brother, Thomas B. Stillman, known in the last generation
as the chief of the steam engineering of his day in the United States,
the mentor of that profession, I can see more of my mother than in any
other of the six brothers. He inherited, like all of us, his father's
mechanical tendency and inventiveness, and added to it a persistency
and constancy of purpose peculiarly hers, which none of the other
children inherited to the same extent; and he had in its fullness the
devotional sentiment, the absorption in religious duties, as the chief
motive in life, which was her ruling passion,--for passion it was in
her,--the hanging on the Cross of everything she most valued in life.

My mother, Eliza Ward Maxson, was born in Newport, Rhode Island,
on September 11, 1783, my father being seven years her senior.
The childhood of both was, therefore, surrounded by the facts and
associations of the war of American independence. He, in fact, as I
have heard him say, was born under the rule of the King of England,
and his father considered the Revolution so little justified that to
the day of his death he refused to recognize the government of the
United States; but, living a quiet life on his farm, he was never
disturbed by the pressure which exiled the noted and active Tories.

My mother's earliest recorded ancestor was a John Maxson, one of the
band of Roger Williams, driven by the Puritans out of Massachusetts
into the wilder parts of "Rhode Island and Providence Plantations,"
where--in the absence of all established law, as well as
government--they might worship God in the way their consciences
dictated, free from the restrictions on the liberty of conscience
imposed by the Pilgrim Fathers. There, at last, complete freedom of
dissent was found, and one of the consequences was that the colony
became a sort of field for Christian dialectics, where the most
extreme doctrines on all points of Christian belief were discussed
without other or more serious results of the _odium theologicum_ than
the building of many meeting-houses and the multiplication of sects.
Among these sects was one which played an important part in the local
theology of that day and for many years afterward, that known as the
"Seventh-Day Baptist," to which, it seems, John Maxson belonged. It
was not a new invention of the colonists, but had existed in England
since the days of early dissent, and it is possible that John Maxson
had brought the doctrine with him from England. Adhering to the
practice of baptism by immersion, the sect also maintained the
immutable obligation of the Seventh-Day Sabbath of the Ten
Commandments, the Jewish day of rest.

The grave disabilities imposed on them in Massachusetts by the
obligatory abstention from labor on two days, on one day by conscience
and the other by the rigorous laws of the Puritans, made Roger
Williams's little state the paradise of the Sabbatarians, and the sect
flourished greatly in it, while the social isolation consequent on
the practice of contracting marriages only in their church
membership--made imperative if family dissensions were to be avoided
on a question of primary importance to that community, which had
sacrificed all worldly advantages to what it believed to be obedience
to the Word of God--at once knit together their church in closer
relations, and drew to it others from the outside, attracted by the
magnetism of a more ascetic faith.

Amongst the emigrants from England on the Restoration were a family by
the name of Stillman, who, having had relations with the regicides,
went into what was then the most obscure and remote part of New
England and settled at Wethersfield, in Connecticut. One of the
brothers,--George,--hearing of this strange doctrine denying the
sanctity of the "Lord's Day," came to Newport to convert the erring
brothers; but, convinced by them, remained in the colony, where
he became a shining light. Thus it happened that both lines of my
ancestry became involved in the mystic bonds of a faith which was
shut off in a peculiar manner from all around them. The consequent
isolation, I fear, made much for self-righteousness. In their eyes it
was this observance which maintained continuity between the Christian
church and the institutions imposed in Paradise, and therefore made
them peculiarly the people of God. This amiable fanaticism, fervent
without being uncharitable, interfered in no wise with the widest
exercise of Christian sympathy with other sects, the observance of the
Seventh-Day Sabbath not being held as an essential to godliness or to
Christian fellowship, the non-observance being possibly only due to
ignorance, so that the relations of the historic First Seventh-Day
Baptist Church at Newport with the churches observing the "Lord's-Day
Sabbath" were always most kindly. The meeting-house occupied by
the Sabbatarians on the seventh day was occupied by one of the
Sunday-observing sects on the first, and the preachers of one often
officiated for the other. But the worldly advantage enjoyed by the
Sunday keeper was so considerable that all who did not hold to the
finest scruple of conscience in their conduct passed over to the
majority, and were excluded from the communion as a precaution against
the Sunday keepers becoming a majority in the church and taking it
away from the Sabbath keepers, as did actually occur with one of their
congregations in Vermont. In our community generally there was a most
scrupulous avoidance of any occupation on Sunday which might annoy
those who held it as Sabbath, and though in the State of New York the
laws were extremely liberal in this respect, my father in my boyhood
always made it a point not to allow in his workshop any work which
would be heard by the neighbors.

The absolute freedom of religious belief and practice, for the first
time found in this colony, had, as its first effect, the banishment
of all forms of sectarian persecution, so that the maxim of the
Broad Church--"Freedom in non-essentials"--was here put in practical
activity to an extent probably never before known in the Christian
world.

It can be readily understood that this continual selection of the most
scrupulous consciences, the closest thinkers, and the least worldly
characters in the church of my ancestors must have developed a
singularly fine and cutting-edge temper in its adherents, and the
succession of generations of men and women who had graduated in the
school of Scripture dialectics, and knew every text and its various
interpretations, made a community of Bible disputants such as even
Massachusetts could not show.

Amongst the refugees for religious liberty who found their billet
at Newport were many Jews, between whom and the Sabbatarians the
community of the Sabbath was a strong tie, and amongst the formulas of
prayer in use even down to my own boyhood I remember a common petition
for the restoration of Israel; and the Sabbatarian eye of prophecy
looked forward to the day when, in the peace of the millennium,
the Jews in Jerusalem should be the witnesses of the faith of the
Seventh-Day Baptist Church in the keeping alive the observance of the
Eden repose initiated by the Creator. Amongst my own earliest personal
recollections concerning Newport is that of a visit of some Jewish
friends of my mother's girlhood, who lived there, to my father's house
in Schenectady.

My mother's grandfather, on her mother's side, was a clergyman, Elder
Bliss, who, though a non-combatant, was a fiery patriot, two of whose
sons were in the Revolutionary army. His house was in a valley under
the fort held by the British force in occupation, between whose guns
and those of a battery held by the rebels there was occasional firing,
during which the balls sometimes went through the house, so that when
the first shot was heard he used to order all the family down into the
cellar, which afforded a valid protection. The girls of the household
were patriots, in whom zeal often overran discretion, and the pranks
they played on the British officers must sometimes have tasked the
gentlemen in the latter to a point on the limits of endurance. I
remember one incident recounted by my grandmother to my mother, and
by her to me, in which two of the girls stole past the sentry in the
British fort, or battery, for I could never learn exactly what was the
nature of these two outposts of authority and rebellion, and, running
the flag down, tore it into thirteen stripes and ran it up again and
escaped unseen. This insult brought the whole force about their ears,
and the commandant came, with his staff, to question the household if
any clue to it could be found. Fortunately, when the girls had come
back from their expedition and went giggling in their glee to their
mother, she suspected some dangerous venture and peremptorily ordered
them to hold their tongues and not come to her with any of their
mischief. She was thus able to reply to the officer charged with the
inquisition that she knew nothing of the matter, and such was the
rigid obligation of the truth in that Puritan community that even
the danger of a court-martial would not have induced her to tell
a falsehood, however the truth might compromise the family. The
officers, who well knew their sometime hosts, were so well assured
of this that the seniors were at once acquitted, and, regarding the
girls, they were too gentlemanly to push an inquiry which might have
punished a childish freak with the gravest military consequences, for,
as the officer on the quest said, "Even it's being a woman would not
protect the author of such a grave insult to the flag." Irrepressible
as they were, in spite of the danger they had so narrowly escaped,
they, not much later, stole the sword of one of the officers when they
were all temporarily quartered on the preacher, and, when the island
was evacuated by the British forces, brought it out and gave it to the
brother, an officer in the American army.

A feat of practical housewifery, which my mother used to tell
of, shows another side of the Rhode-Islander, which is not less
illustrative of the stock. One of the boys of the pastor's family
volunteered, or was drawn, in the militia for active service; but, as
he had no clothes fit for the camp, the sisters had a black and white
sheep brought from the pasture and clipped, and within twenty-four
hours had spun, woven, and made up a suit of mixed gray clothes for
the brother to go to the war in. No doubt such things have been done
in many another home, even in later times, but this is the home I have
to deal with, and in this my mother grew up. She was the eldest of a
family of five, left motherless when she was sixteen. Her father was
the director of the smallpox hospital in Newport, then an institution
of grave importance to the community, as the practice of obligatory
inoculation prevailed, and all the young people of the colony had to
go up in classes to the hospital and pass the ordeal. Her mother's
death left her the matron of the hospital and caretaker of her sister
and brothers, and the stories of her life at that time, which she
told me now and then, showed that, with the position, she assumed the
effective authority, and ruled her brothers with a severity which my
own experience of her maturer years enables me to understand. "Spare
the rod and spoil the child" was the maxim which flamed in the air
before every father and mother of that New England, and my mother's
physical vigor at sixty, when her conception of authority began to
relax,--I being then a lad six feet high and indisposed to physical
persuasion,--satisfied me that when her duty had required her to
assume the responsibility bequeathed her by her mother, she was fully
competent to meet it.

Accustomed to the hardest life, the most rigid economy in the
household, and without servants, for, except rare and lately
emancipated negro slaves, there was then no servile class in that
colony, the children had to perform all the duties pertaining to the
daily life, official or private, and my mother was able to pull an oar
or manage the sail-boat with her brothers, and catch the horses and
ride them bareback from pasture, when necessary for the daily work,
which was not insignificant, for Newport was really the seaport of
that section of the State, and as it was on an island of importance,
the intercourse with the mainland called for sea and land service. The
boys were all fishermen, for a large part of the subsistence of the
family came from the fishing-grounds outside the harbor, and, as the
oldest brother took early to the sailor's life, my mother had to
assume a larger share of all the harder services. The hospital was
also the quarantine station, and received all the cases of smallpox
which came to the port, and they must have been many and fatal, for I
have heard her say that she had to go the rounds of the hospital at
night, and that there would sometimes be five or six dead in the
dead-room at once.

The first acquaintance of my parents with each other was made in the
inoculating class, my father being resident in Westerly, a town of
Rhode Island on the borders of Connecticut. The marriage must have
taken place about two years later, on the second marriage of my
grandfather Maxson to the daughter of Samuel Ward, one of the leading
delegates from Rhode Island to the convention which drew up and
promulgated the Declaration of Independence[1]. Their early days of
married life must have been passed in an extreme frugality, for my
father was one of a large number of children, and, brought up on a
farm, learned the trade of ship-carpenter, which he alternated, as was
generally the habit of the young men of the New England coast, with
fishing on the banks of Newfoundland in the cod-fishing season.
Having, in addition, a share of the Yankee inventiveness, he became
interested in the perfecting of a fulling-machine, to introduce which
into what was then the West, he made a temporary residence in New York
State, at the old Dutch town of Schenectady, at that time the
entrepôt of commerce between the Eastern cities and New York, and the
Northwest. Utica was then a frontier settlement, Buffalo an outpost in
the wilderness, and, the country having barely recovered from the
war of 1812-15 between the United States and England, enterprise
and exploration had just begun to push through the thin lines of
settlements along the valleys of the Mohawk and upper Hudson, westward
by Buffalo and the great lakes to Ohio (then the Far West), and
northward to the valley of the St. Lawrence. Schenectady was the
distributing point of this wagon-borne commerce and movement until
the completion of the Erie Canal, which, down to my own period of
recollection, was the quickest channel of communication westward, with
its horse "packets," traveling at the creditable speed of four miles
an hour, the traffic barges making scarcely more than two.

[Footnote 1: Mr. Ward died just before the signing of the Declaration,
so that his name does not figure in the list of signers.]

Hardly established in what was intended for a temporary visit, the
residence of the family became fixed at Schenectady, owing to the
partner of my father, left to manage the business at Westerly,
becoming involved in personal embarrassments which brought on the
bankruptcy of the firm and the seizure of all my father's little
property, and, what was worse, the certainty of imprisonment for debt
in the case of his returning home. Owing to the judgments hanging
over him, which a succession of misfortunes prevented him from ever
satisfying, it was late in my own remembrance, I think about 1848 or
1850, before he was enabled to visit his early home. Hard times came
on the whole people of that section, and the practical destruction of
his business by the loss of all his capital drove him into seeking any
employment which would give a momentary relief.

Of this period of their existence my mother rarely spoke, and it must
have been one of severe privations. She has told me that she often
went to bed hungry, that the children might have enough to eat.
She had no assistance in her household duties, except that of her
daughter, a girl of tender years, and, having her husband's five
journeymen as members of the household, with five children, of whom my
sister was the second, she not only did the daily household duties,
including washing and baking, but spun and wove the cloth for the
clothes of her husband and children, cut and made them up. Her
cheerful faith in an overruling Providence must have been, in those
days, a supreme consolation, for, even in recalling them in the days
of my boyhood, the light of it still illumined her, and she never
questioned that He who had led them into the wilderness would maintain
them in it. She seemed to have but one care in her life while I knew
her--to know and do her duty. She found a special providence in
every instance of relief from their pressing wants, and I recall the
religious serenity with which she told me of the greatest strait of
the hardest winter of that period, when resources seemed to have been
exhausted to the last crumb, and they unexpectedly received from one
of her half brothers, who had gone farther west, and lived in what was
practically the wilderness, a barrel of salted pigeons' breasts.
There had been one of those almost fabulous flights of the now nearly
extinct passenger pigeons, which used to come north to breed in such
numbers that the forests where they colonized were so filled with
their nests that the settlers went into them and beat the young down
with poles, and the branches became so overloaded with the broods in
their nests that their weight often broke them down and threw the
young on the ground. They had that year chosen the forests in my
uncle's neighborhood for their nesting ground, and had been killed by
thousands and salted down for winter provision, only the breast being
used, owing to the superabundance of the birds. The gift came like the
answer to a prayer, for there was hunger in the house and the snow was
heavy on the ground, all the community being more or less in the same
straits.

Being the youngest of nine children, I can remember my mother only in
the days of comparative freedom from anxiety, when, the day's work
over and the house quiet, she used, as she sat by the fire with her
knitting, which occupied all the moments when her hands were not
required for other duties,--she knit all the stockings required for
the family,--to tell me incidents of her past life, mostly to show how
kind God had been to her and hers, and how faith in his providence
was justified in the event. Of herself she spoke only incidentally.
Dominating every act and thought of her existence was the profoundest
religious veneration I have ever met with, an openness of her mind
upward, as if she felt that the eternal eye was on her and reading her
thoughts. The sense of her responsibility was so serious that I think
that only the absorbing activity of her daily life, and the way in
which every moment was occupied with positive duties, prevented her
from falling into religious insanity. Her life was a constant prayer,
a wrestling with God for the salvation of her children. No image of
her remains in my mind so clear as that in which I see her sitting
by the fireside in the dim light of our single home-made candle, her
knitting-needles flying and her lips moving in prayer, while the tears
stole down her cheeks in the fervency of her devotion, until she felt
that she was being noticed, when the windows of her soul were suddenly
shut, and she turned to some subject of common interest, as if ashamed
to be discovered praying, for she permitted herself no ostentation of
devotion, but reserved it for her nights and solitary moments. Of her
own salvation she had only a faltering hope, harassed always by a fear
that she had at some time in her life committed the unpardonable sin,
as to the nature of which she knew nothing, and which was, therefore,
all the more feared, as the nature of it was to her the terrible
mystery of life and death.

What I inherit from her, and doubtless the indelible impression of her
fervent faith overshadowing my young life, produced a moulding of my
character which has never changed. I lived in an atmosphere of prayer
and trust in God which impressed me so that to this day the habit of
thought and conduct so formed is invincible, and in all the subsequent
modifications of the primitive and Hebraic conception of the spiritual
life which she inoculated me with, an unconscious aspiration in prayer
and an absolute and organic trust in the protection of the divine
Providence persist in my character, though reason has long assured me
that this is but a crude and personal conception of the divine law.
Truly from the environment of our early religious education we can
never escape. This the Jesuits know and profit by.

My mother was also haunted by the dread of God's wrath at her loving
her children more than she did Him, for, with all the fervency of her
gentle devotion, she never escaped the ghastly Hebrew conception of
God, always in wrath at every omission or transgression of the Law,
who, at the last great day, would demand of her an account of every
neglect of duty, every idle word and thought, and especially of the
manner in which she had taught her children to obey his commandments.
She seemed to scan her life continually to find some sin in the past,
for which she had not specifically repented, and, at times, as I knew
by the confidences of my later years, when she would appeal to me
for my opinion, the problem of the unpardonable sin became one of
absorbing study, which she finally laid aside in the supreme trust in
his goodness, who alone knew her intentions and desire to be obedient
to the Law.

Every one of her sons, as they were born, she dedicated to the service
of the Lord, in the ardent hope that one of them would become a
minister, and over me, the last, she let her hopes linger longest,
for, as I was considered a delicate child, unable to support the life
of hard work to which my older brothers had taken, she hoped that I
might be spared for study. Only the eldest son ever responded to her
desire by the wish to enter the service of the church, and he was far
too important to my father's little workshop to be spared for the
necessary schooling. He struggled through night schools, and in the
intervals of day leisure, to qualify himself to enter the college in
our city. Before doing so he fell under the notice of old Dr. Nott,
president of the college, who was, beside being a teacher of wonderful
ability, a clever inventor, and, perceiving my brother's mechanical
capacity, persuaded him to abandon the plan of entering the ministry,
and made him foreman of his establishment, the "Novelty Iron Works,"
at New York, for many years known as the leading establishment of its
kind in America. The next two brothers, having more or less the
same gifts, followed the eldest to New York; the next, an incurable
stammerer, was disqualified for the pulpit, and studied medicine,
being moreover of a fragile constitution; and the next, having the
least possible sympathy for the calling, also took to medicine.

With the migration of the three older brothers to New York, the
diminution of the family, and the aid the brothers in New York were
able to give the younger children at home, my mother's life took on
a new activity, in her resolute determination that the younger boys
should have such an education as the college (Union) afforded them.
This determination was opposed by my father, whose idea of the
education needed by boys did not go beyond the elements, and who
wanted them in the workshop. But it had become to my mother a
conception of her duty, that, as the relations between my eldest
brother and the president of the college led to an offer of what was
practically a free education, the younger boys should be permitted to
profit by the offer, and when duty entered her head there was no force
capable of driving it out. Charles, the first of us to graduate,
became the college bell-ringer, to pay his fees, but Jacob and myself
were in turn excused, even from this service. My father's practical
opposition, the refusal to pay the incidental expenses for what he
always persisted in regarding as a useless education, was met, in
Charles's case, by my mother's taking in the students' washing, to
provide them. In the cases of Jacob and myself, this drudgery was
exchanged for that of a students' boarding-house.

In all the housework involved in this complication of her duties, she
never had a servant until shortly before my birth, when she took into
the house a liberated African slave, the only other assistance in the
house, in my childhood, being a sister six years older than myself and
the daughter of one of our neighbors, who came as a "help" at the time
of my birth, and subsequently married my second brother. My mother was
also the family doctor, for, except in very grave cases, we never
had any other physician. She pulled our teeth and prescribed all our
medicines. I was well grown before I wore a suit which was not of her
cutting and making, though sometimes she was obliged to have in a
sewing-woman for the light work. She made all the bread we ate, cured
the hams, and made great batches of sausages and mincemeat for pies,
sufficient for the winter's consumption, as well as huge pig's-head
cheeses. How she accomplished all she did I never understood.

But with all her passionate desire to see one of her boys in what she
considered the service of God, there was never, on my mother's
part, the least pressure in that direction, no suggestion that the
sacrifices she was making demanded any measure of deviation from our
views as to the future. It was her hope that one of us would feel as
she did, but she cheerfully resigned the hope, as son after son turned
the other way. A boy who was born three years before me, and whose
death occurred before my birth, was, perhaps, in her mind, the
fulfillment of her dedication, for he was, according to the accounts
of friends of the family, a child of extraordinary intelligence, and
she felt that God had taken him from her. In one of those moments
of confidence, in the years when I had become a counselor to her, I
remember her telling me of this boy (known in the family as "_little_
William," to distinguish him from me), and the sufferings she endured
through her doubts, lest he should have lived long enough to sin, and
had not repented, for, though her dreary creed taught that the rigors
of eternal damnation rested on every one who had not repented of each
individual sin, and that adult baptism was the only assurance of
redemption, it did not teach, nor did she believe, that the innocence
of childhood required the certificate of the church. All the rest of
her children had professed religion and received baptism according
to the rites of the Baptist Church, but little William left in the
mother's heart the sting of uncertainty. Had he lived long enough
to transgress the Law and not repented? was to her an ever-present
question of terrible import. Years rolled by without weakening this
torture of apprehension that this little lamb of all her flock might
be expiating the sin of Adam in the flames of Eternity, a perpetual
babyhood of woe. The depth of the misery this haunting fear inflicted
on her can only be imagined by one who knew the passionate intensity
of her love for her children,--a love which she feared to be sinful,
but could not abate. Finally, one night, as she lay perplexing her
soul with this and other problems of sin and righteousness, she saw,
standing near her bed, her lost child, not as she supposed him to be,
a baby for eternity, but apparently a youth of sixteen, regarding her
silently, but with an expression of such radiant happiness in his face
that the shadow passed from her soul forever. She needed no longer to
be told that he was amongst the blessed. She told me this one day,
timidly, as something she had never dared tell the older children,
lest they should think her superstitious, or, perhaps, dissipate her
consolation by the assurance that she had dreamed. Dream she was
convinced it was not; but only to me, in her old age, had she ever
dared to confide this assurance, which had been so precious to her.

In charity, comfort for the afflicted, help,--not in money, for of
that there was little to spare,--but in food; in watching with the
sick and consoling the bereaved in her own loving, sympathetic
mother's way, she abounded. There was always something for the really
needy, and I remember that one of her most painful experiences came
from having refused food to a begging woman, to whose deathbed she was
called the next day, a deathbed of literal starvation. She recognized
the woman, who had come to our house with a story of a family of
starving children, but as my mother's experienced eye assured her she
had never been a mother, she refused her as a deceiver what the poor
always got. "Why did you tell me you had children," mother asked her,
"when you came to me yesterday?" "It was not true," said the dying
woman, "but I was starving, and I thought you would be more willing to
help me if you thought I had children." But from that day no beggar
was turned from our door without food. Silently and in secret she did
what good works came to her to be done, letting not her right hand
know what her left hand was doing, but all the poor knew her and her
works.

Silent too and undemonstrative in all her domestic relations she
always was, and I question if to any other of her family than myself
she ever confided her secret hopes or fears. And to me even she was so
undemonstrative that I never remember her kissing me from a passing
warmth; only when I went away on a journey or returned from one did
she offer to kiss me, and this was the manner of the family. And her
maintenance of family discipline was on the same rigorous level,
dispassionate as the law. If I transgressed the commands of herself or
of my father the punishment was inevitable, never in wrath, generally
on the day after the offense, but inexorable; she never meant to spoil
the child by sparing the rod, but flogged with tears in her eyes and
an aching heart, often giving the punishment herself, to prevent my
father from giving it, as he always flogged mercilessly and in anger,
though if I could keep out of his sight till the next day he forgot
all about it; she never forgot, and though the flogging might not come
for a week, it was never omitted when promised. And her worst severity
never raised a feeling of resentment in me, for I recognized it as
deserved, while my father's floggings, inflicted in the unreasoning
severity of anger, always made me rebellious. I remember only one
occasion on which I was punished unjustly by my mother.

A neighboring farmer had asked me to go to his field and shake down
the fruit from two apple-trees. It was in the hour before dinner, and
the regulations of the family were very severe about being at meals,
and unfortunately I had, in my glee at having a job of paying work to
do, infringed on the dinnertime. In payment for my services I received
from the farmer two huge pumpkins, charged with which I hastened home,
looking forward to my mother's praise and pleasure, but was met by
her in the hall, strap in hand, with which she administered a solid
flogging, explaining that my father was so angry at my being out at
dinner that she gave me the punishment to forestall his, which would
be, as I well knew, much severer. It is more than sixty years since
that punishment fell on my shoulders, but the astonishment with which
I received the flogging instead of the thanks I anticipated for the
wages I was bringing her, the haste with which my mother administered
it lest my father should anticipate her and beat me after his fashion,
are as vivid in my recollection as if it had taken place last year.
This was a sample of the family discipline. I was forbidden to walk
with other boys when I drove the cow to pasture; forbidden to bathe
in the mill-pond near by except at stated times, to play with certain
children, to amuse myself on the Sabbath, and other similar doings,
all to my childish apprehension harmless in themselves, and the
punishment never failed to follow the discovery of the transgression.
Naturally I learned to lie, a thing contrary to my inclination and
nature, and a torture to my conscience, but I had not the courage
to meet the flogging, or the firmness to resist temptation and the
persuasion of my young companions who rejoiced in a domestic freedom
of which I knew nothing. My father's severity finally brought
emancipation by its excess. He used to follow me to see if I obeyed
his orders, and one day when I had been persuaded by some boys of our
neighborhood to go and bathe in the forbidden hours, he found me in
the pond, led me home, and, cutting two tough peartree switches about
the thickness, at the butt, of his forefinger, he took me down into
the cellar, and making me strip off my jacket, broke them up to the
stumps over my back, protected only by a cotton shirt. This was the
deciding event which determined me to run away from home, which I did
the next week, and though my escapade did not last beyond ten days, on
my return the rod was buried.




CHAPTER II

NATURE WORSHIP--EARLY RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES


Looking back at my mother, after a lapse of nearly forty years since I
saw her last, I am surprised at the largeness of character developed
in the narrow and illiberal mould of the exclusive Puritanism of the
church of her inheritance, her freedom from bigotry, and the breadth
of her knowledge of human nature, as well as at the justice of her
instincts of religious essentials, which always kept her cheerful
and hopeful in spite of the gloomy doctrine imposed on her by her
education and surroundings. Believing firmly in the eternity of
hell-fire, with the logical and terrible day of judgment casting its
gloomy shadow over her life, she maintained an unbounded charity for
all humanity except herself, admitting the extenuation of ignorance
for all others, keeping for herself even to the tithes of mint and
cummin, but condoning, in her judgment of those who differed from her,
the offenses which for herself she would have thought mortal sins. In
her own household all latitude in religious observance was resisted
with all her strength.

In my paternal grandfather's house the Seventh Day was a day of
feasting, and after the church services all the connection went to the
ancestral home to eat the most sumptuous dinner of the week. Against
this infraction of the law which forbade on the Sabbath all work not
of mercy or necessity, my mother set her face, and when this was done
there was no long resistance possible and my father had to give way,
so that on that day we had a cold dinner, cooked on Friday. At sunset
on Friday, all work and all secular reading or amusements ceased,
and only a Sabbath day's journey was permitted so far as she could
control. But my father was a rover from his youth, and Saturday being
his only leisure day he used to take me with him on long walks in the
woods and fields, according to the season; and the weather and the
length of the day were his only limitations. In the house she ruled,
but out of it he made his own conscience, and so it happened that the
only pleasures that I owe him, except the bringing me a few books when
he came back from his business trips to New York to sell his machines,
were those long walks in the face of nature. He was, in his family,
apparently a cold, hard man, but out of it, kindly and benevolent,
melting always to distress which came in his way; with a passionate
love of animals and of nature. He was a poor business man, for he
could never press for the payment of debts due to him, but his honesty
was so rigid that it became a proverb in our town that a man should be
"as honest as old Joe Stillman," and that good name was all he gave or
left his children.

My father died in one of my occasional absences in Europe, and when I
saw my old mother in the black she never again laid off, she told me,
tranquilly and with a firm voice, but with the tears running down her
cheeks, how he died, and said, "He was so handsome that I wanted to
keep him another day." The warmth of expression struck me strangely,
for in all my home experience I had never heard before a word
which could be taken as a token of conjugal tenderness, but when I
reflected, I could see that it was and always had been the same with
the children. Of the nine children she bore, five died before she did,
including her second and, during my life, her only daughter, but in
all the bereavements she retained her calm, self-contained manner,
weeping silently, and tranquilly going about the house, comforting
those who shared the bereavement, uncomplaining, reconciled in
advance; she had consigned her beloved to the God who gave them to
her, and would have thought it rebellion to repine at any dispensation
which He sent her. In the most sudden and crushing grief I remember
her to have experienced, that which came with the news that my brother
Alfred had been killed by the explosion of a steamboat boiler at New
Orleans, there was one brief break-down of her fortitude, an hour's
yielding, and then all her thought was for the widow and the children.
No detail of the household duties was neglected, and nothing was
forgotten that concerned the comfort of others. She avoided all
external signs of grief, and, until my father died, she never wore
mourning. Her bereavements and her prayers were matters that concerned
only God and herself.

What I have said might give her the character of an ascetic, but
nothing could be further from her. She was always optimistic as to
earthly troubles, always cheerful and fond of mild festivities. At
times no one was more merry than she, and I have seen her laughing at
a good joke or story till the tears ran down her cheeks. Cheerfulness
was to her a duty which was never violated except when she was laying
her case before God.

Her ardent desire that her children should have a liberal education
came to a climax on me, the last, born at the end of the period of
child-bearing. She taught me my letters before I could articulate
them, when I was two I could read, and at three I was put on a high
stool to read the Bible for visitors, so that I cannot remember when I
could not read, and when not more than five or six I used to be at the
head of the spelling classes and spelling matches, in which all
the boys and girls were divided into equal companies, and the
school-teacher gave out the hardest words in the spelling-book to each
side in turn, all who failed to spell their word sitting down, until
the solitary survivor on one side or the other decided the victory,
and even before I was seven I was generally that survivor. I read
insatiably all the good story-books they would let me have, and I
cannot recall the time at which there was anything even in the Bible
new to me. With an incipient passion for nature and animal life, I
read with delight all the books of natural history I could get, and I
have heard in later years that in all the community of Sabbatarianism
I was known as a prodigy. Fortunately I was saved from a probable
idiocy in my later life by a severe attack of typhoid fever at seven,
out of which attack I came a model of stupidity, and so remained until
I was fourteen, my thinking powers being so completely suspended that
at the dame's school to which I was sent I was repeatedly flogged for
not comprehending the simplest things. I got through simple arithmetic
as far as "Long Division," and there had to turn back to the beginning
three times before I could be made to understand the principle of
division by more than one figure.

In the humiliation of this period of my life, in which I came to
consider myself as little better than a fool, my only consolation was
the large liberty I enjoyed in the woods and fields with my father
on Saturdays, or with my brothers Charles and Jacob on their long
botanizing excursions, or in the moments of leisure when I was not
wanted to turn the grindstone or blow the bellows in the workshop.
Those long walks, in which I was indefatigable, and the days or nights
when I went fishing with my brother Jacob, who was ten years older
than myself, and who inherited the wandering and adventurous longings
of my father, are the only things I can remember of this period which
gave me any pleasure. I can see vividly the banks of the Mohawk, where
we used to fish for perch, bream, and pike-perch; recall where, with
my brother Charles, we found the rarer flowers of the valley, the
cypripediums, the most rare wild-ginger, only to be found in one
locality, the walking fern, equally rare, and the long walks in the
pine forests, whose murmuring branches in the west wind fascinated me
more than any other thing in nature.

Perhaps I mingle in recollection the nature-worship of the two
septennates, for of the former was my first rapturous vision of the
open sea, which comes back to me with the memory of the pines. I had
gone with my father and mother to New York on a visit to my eldest
brother, who had just then finished the engines of the steamer
Diamond, which was the first that by her build was enabled to run
through from New York to Albany, past the "overslough" or bar formed
in the Hudson, which prevented the steamers of greater draught from
getting up to the wharf at Albany; and he had profited by her first
trip to visit home again and take us back with him. My brother pointed
out to me the Clermont, Fulton's trial steamer, then disused and
lying at Hoboken, but a cockboat to the Diamond, which was one of the
greatest successes of the day. Machinery fascinated me, being of the
mechanical breed, and I can recall the engines of the boat, which were
of a new type, working horizontally, and so permitting larger engines
in proportion to the draught of the steamer than had been before used.
We all went one day to Coney Island, on the southern shore of Long
Island, since a fashionable bathing place for New York, but then a
solitary stretch of seashore, with a temporary structure where bathers
might get refreshments, and a few bathing boxes. We drove out in my
brother's buggy, and as, at a turn in the road, I caught a glimpse of
the distant sea horizon, I rose in the buggy, shouting, "The sea!
the sea!" and, in an uncontrollable frenzy, caught the whip from my
brother's hand and slashed the horse in wild delirium, unconscious of
what I was doing. The emotion remains uneffaceable after more than
threescore years, one of the most vivid of my life. It was a rapture
and an interesting case of heredity, for I had not before been within
a hundred and fifty miles of the sea.

And how ecstatic was the sensation of the plunge into the breakers,
holding fast to my mother's hand, and then the race up the beach
before the next comber, trembling lest it should catch me, as if it
were a living thing ready to devour me. They never come back, these
first emotions of childhood; and though I have loved the sea all my
life, I have never again felt the sight of it as then.

Of this first period, I remember very well the grand occasion of the
opening of the Hudson and Mohawk Railroad, the first link in that line
which is now the New York Central, and see vividly the curious old
coaches,--three coach bodies together on one truck. This was in
1832, when I was four years old. The road was, I believe, the first
successful passenger railway in America, and was sixteen miles long,
with two inclined planes up which the trains were drawn, and down
which they were lowered by cables. There was an opposition line of
stagecoaches between Albany and Schenectady, running at the same price
and making the same time.

Of the second period, that of nature worship, was my first trout,
another delirium. My mother had taken me to visit one of her brothers,
a farmer in the western section of New York, soon after made famous
by the anti-rent war, in which my uncle was one of the "Indian
Chiefs[1]," and there I went fishing in the brook that ran through his
farm. I caught a small trout and did not know what fish it might be,
till I saw the crimson spots on his side and remembered that the trout
in books bore them, and then I threw him on the grass and danced
a wild dance around him, a powwow as furious as a red Indian's
scalp-dance, while he, poor little fingerling, jumped in the unkindly
herb. Then I caught him up and raced to the house nearly half a mile,
to show him, and put him in the trough under the pump, where he
arrived still gasping but alive, and where he remained for all my
recollection of his fate thereafter. But I remember that the beauty of
the little creature gave me more pleasure than the capture.

[Footnote 1: The bands which carried on what became an actual
insurrection against the civic authorities were led by men disguised
as red Indians and called chiefs.]

About this time I began to try to draw, and especially birds and
beautiful forms, though years before I had begun to color the
wood-cuts in my books. And my mother, who had an utterly uncultivated
but most tender love of art, gave up finally the oft-renewed ambition
to see one of her boys in the pulpit, and made every opportunity for
me to learn drawing,--I never quite understood why, for my abilities
in that line were little more than nine boys out of ten show.

It was a fortunate thing for my after-life that I lived so near the
forests that all my odd time was spent in them and in the surrounding
fields, and I knew every apple-tree of early fruiting for miles, and
every hickory-tree whose nuts were choice; and one of the joyous
experiences of the time was running down a young gray squirrel in the
woods, and catching him with my bare hands, and badly bitten they
were. I took him home and tamed him perfectly, and was very happy with
him, my first pet. He used to come and sleep in my pocket, and was
never kept in a cage. My father one morning left the window of our
room open, and "Bob" went out to explore, but, when he tried to find
his way back again, a dog of the neighborhood, as a neighbor told us,
chased him away, and to my intense grief he was shot by a hunter a
few days after in the adjoining forest. I cannot to this day see a
squirrel without emotion and affectionate remembrance of "Bob." The
love of animals, which I inherited from my father, was one of the
passions of my childhood, and I had an insatiate longing for pets.

Naturally my religious education during these early years was of the
severest orthodox character, and my mother's sincere, fervent, and
practical piety brought home to me, with the conviction of certainty,
the persuasion of its divine authority. Hell and its terrors were
always present to me, and she taught me that the wandering suggestions
of childish imagination, the recurrence of profane expressions heard
from others, and all forms of irreverent fantasies were the very
whisperings of the devil, to her, as to me, consequently, an
ever-present spirit, perpetually tempting me to repeat, and so make
myself responsible for the wickedness in them. I remember with great
vividness a caricature of Mrs. Trollope in a satirical illustrated
edition of her travels in America, representing her sitting in a
large armchair surrounded by negroes on their knees, one of whom was
represented as saying, "De Lord lub Missee Trollope," an expression
which my mother stigmatized as impious and not to be repeated, but
which perhaps for that very reason would recur to me in thought, and
which I set myself to pray against as the very whisper of the devil in
my ears. And naturally, the more I tried to put it out of my head, the
more it got fixed there, and it was long a source of great misery to
me that I could not keep the devil away from my ears. I was never
allowed a candle to go to bed with, and as I slept in the huge garret,
covering the whole house, I used to shut my eyes when I left the
kitchen, where we all sat in the evening, and groped my way to bed
without ever again opening my eyes until the next morning, for fear
of seeing the devil on my way. Awful spiritual presences haunted
me always in the dark, when I passed a churchyard or an empty and
solitary house. Such a house stood in the pasture where I used to
drive the cow, and when it happened that she had not come home at
nightfall, and I had to go to find her, the panic I endured from the
necessity of searching around this old house no one can imagine but a
boy naturally timid and accustomed to see ghosts and evil spirits
in the dusk. But I kept my fears to myself and always made a
conscientious search.

The peculiar ideas concerning conversion and regeneration, held in
common by all the branches of the adult-Baptist churches, were in my
mother's mind an obsession. Conviction of sin, repentance, the public
confession, profession of faith, and baptism were the necessary
degrees to regeneration, and, looking back on the tortures to which
my mother was subjected by those theological problems and the daily
anxiety she endured until each of us had passed through the gates of
salvation into the narrow way, I must wonder at that divine maternal
instinct which made her rejoice at my birth, as I know she did.

The whole community in which we lived, with the exception of a small
Episcopal church, had the same ideas of conversion and regeneration,
and a prominent feature in our social existence was the frequent
recurrence of the great revival meetings in which all the rude
eloquence of celebrated and powerful preachers, Baptist, Methodist,
and of other sects, was poured out on excited congregations. There
were "protracted meetings," or campaigns of prayer and exhortation,
lasting often a fortnight, at which all the resources of popular
theology were employed to awaken and maintain their audiences in a
state of frenzy and religious delirium, during which conviction of sin
was supposed to enter the heart more effectually. The tortures of hell
alternated with the delights of heaven, in imagery calculated to
drive the timid and conscientious young folks to insanity, at these
meetings, to which, once awakened, the subject of conviction went
three times a day, until the hysteria, the prolonged excitement so
produced, came as a sign of acceptance. As each new convert rose on
the "anxious seat[1]," where he or she went when the first feeling
of conviction came, and afterwards made the declaration of salvation
found, the shouts and cries of "Glory to God," the sobbing and groans
of the congregation were redoubled, and the exhortations of the
preacher renewed, to the still unconvicted to come forward to the
anxious seat where they would become subject to the concentrated
and personal prayers of the whole assembly. These meetings were the
substitutes for all other social diversions or emotions. There was a
revival preacher by the name of Knapp, whose lurid eloquence in this
vein made him famous, and whose imagery was equal in ghastliness to
anything that the Catholic Church could produce. I remember one of his
most dramatic bits, borrowed from a much earlier preacher, a passage
in his description of hell. In hell, he said, there was a clock,
which, instead of "tick," "tick," said, "Eternity," "Eternity," and
when the damned, weary of their tortures down in the depths, came up
to see what time it was, they heard the sentence of the clock, and
turned in despair to go down into the depths again as far as they
could.

[Footnote 1: The front line of seats next the pulpit, set apart for
those who had "found conviction."]

To these meetings my mother used to send me, giving me a holiday from
school for all the time the protracted meeting lasted. But conviction
never came. I was honest with myself, and though the frenzied and
ghastly exhortations harried my soul with dread, and I longed for the
coming of the ecstasy which was the recognizable sign of the grace
of God, I could not rise to the participation in it which the most
material and hysterical of the congregation enjoyed, and day after day
I went home saddened by the conviction that I was still one of the
unregenerate. The sign never came, but several years later I went
to make a visit to my brother Charles, who had then removed to
Plainfield, N.J., where he practiced medicine, and was one of the main
supports of the church in a community where the sect was large enough
to have a constant worship, which it never had in Schenectady. Here I
came under the influence of a beloved brother of my mother, one of the
most earnest and humble Christians I have ever known, and here were
gathered others of the denomination at a protracted meeting, at which
some of my friends of my own age became seriously inclined, and we
drifted together into the profession of Christian faith. But here
there was nothing of the ghastly terrors of the great revival
agitations. My uncle was a man of the world, had been all his early
life a sailor, and had taken late to what, in his experiences of men
and the vicissitudes of life, he considered the only reality, the duty
of making known to his fellows the importance of the spiritual life.
To fit himself for the ministry, he taught himself Hebrew and Greek
as well as Latin, and many years later was chosen as one of the New
Testament revisers for the American revision committee. But to him
the profession of religion was an act of the reason, not of revival
excitement, and in his ministrations he shunned carefully all the
frenzied exhortation of the revivalists. Associated with him in the
ministry and leading the meetings was another of the Sabbatarian
pastors, Elder Estee, a grave and earnest man like my uncle, who
inspired me with great confidence.

As I look back from the standpoint of one who reposes in the
evolutionary philosophy, in which the accidental and ecstatic
disappear, upon this phase of psychology, in which hysteria becomes
an element of moral reform, it seems to me worth while to record the
experience of one subjected to the forces which were counted as such
powerful aids to the spread of Christianity,--of one either under the
influences of the pomp of ceremony, the stimulus of music, the purely
sensuous stimulants to devotion,--or in the crude form of that
ecstatic exaltation in which the individual is carried into
a supersensuous state, in which perception, reason, and even
responsibility to a great extent are, if not suspended, so far made
abnormal that analysis becomes impossible. The term for this latter
condition amongst revivalists was "the power," and it was distinctly
a phenomenon sought for as the evidence of divine grace. The uncle of
whom I have spoken had once during his prior religious experience felt
the "power," and described it as an emotion which for the time
lifted him above the consideration of his surroundings, and left him
subsequently indifferent to that very curious shame which generally
accompanies the early yielding to the revivalist urgency of
acknowledging the necessity of change of heart,--a sense of having
made one's self ridiculous, which was, in my own and many other cases
in my knowledge, a powerful influence adverse to the "going forward"
at the meetings, or being understood to be "religious," as those were
considered who became serious in their attention at the meetings. This
was recognized by the preachers as the "fear of the world," and was
the object of attack of the most eloquent adjurations. Once carried
away by this hysteria, one had no longer any of this shame or fear of
the taunts of his irreligious companions, which was very heavy with a
nervous and sensitive boy like myself. But though I had all through my
attendance on the revival meetings earnestly desired to attain to that
exaltation, and considered it an indication of my graceless state,
that I was so insensible to the "spirit," which was another term for
the frenzy, I found it impossible to provoke it. It is a curious
subject, this usurpation of the reasoning faculties by the irrational,
which is permitted when religion becomes emotional, either in the
revolutionary condition of the revivalist or that of the conservative
and decorous ecclesiastical forms.

The movement at Plainfield, finding me in different surroundings from
those in my native place, and under the influence of deliberate and
sober-minded people, put the religious question under another light,
but, still under the persuasion, the natural result of my life's
training, that some special emotion or spiritual change, recognizable
as such, was an indispensable sign of the "change of heart" which was
desired, I was unhappy that no such sign appeared. I can distinctly
remember that the desire to satisfy my mother's passionate longing for
what she considered my regeneration was a large part of my desire to
meet the change, and, if I might, provoke it. I did not in spite of
my efforts really understand the view which my mother, in common with
most evangelical Christians, took of the work of regeneration. The
calm, rational conviction that all men are sinners, was clear enough
to me even in my youth, and the necessity of turning from what we
call "the world," to the cultivation of the higher and spiritual
development of character was equally clear, though not so in all
points was the distinction between the things condemned as worldly and
those approved as religious, the theatre, games of chance, dancing,
and frivolous amusements in general being all in the index of those
severe theologians.

As I remember my extreme youth I was, in spite of occasional
falsehoods,--mainly the consequence of the severity of the parental
discipline and the desire to escape the punishments I had to endure
when transgressing the sometimes whimsical injunctions laid on
me,--morbidly conscientious. I was absent-minded and often forgot
my duties, feeling, however, always the sting of remorse for any
omission, but, beyond taking apples or nuts for my own eating, I do
not think that I ever transgressed a commandment deliberately or
knowingly; I was, in fact, regarded by the boys of the neighborhood as
hopelessly "goody." I could not understand why the desire to go to a
dancing-school and dance should be a moral transgression, though
when I asked permission of my father to accept the offer of an
ex-dancing-master for whom I had been able to do some work in the
workshop, to give me preparatory lessons so that I might appear less
clumsy on entering the class, I was sternly brought to a sense of the
enormity of the matter by my father's replying, "William! I would
rather see you in your grave than in a dancing-school." I could only
understand that I had not been lifted by the divine grace from the
condition of total depravity in which I had been born, and I knew
that the preternatural indication of my redemption, which would be
recognized in the descent of the spirit in the form of the revival
frenzy, was wanting. I longed for it, prayed for it, and considered
myself forsaken of God because it would not come, but come it never
did, and it seemed to me that I was attempting to deceive both my
mother and the church when I finally yielded to the current which
carried along my young friends, and took the grace for granted, since,
as I thought, having asked the special prayers of the elders, men of
God, and powerful in influence with Him, I had a right to assume the
desired descent of the redeeming light on me, though I had never had
that peculiar manifestation of it which my companions seemed to have
experienced. I felt not a little twinge of conscience in assuming so
much, but I could not consent to prolong my mother's suspense and
grave concern at the exclusion of one of her children from the fold of
grace. I put down the doubts, accepted the conversion as logical
and real, and went forward with the others. I remember that at
the relation of our "experience" which followed as a rite on the
presentation of the convert for membership of the church, I was
the only one who told it calmly and audibly, all the others being
inaudible from their excitement and timidity, so that the presiding
elder was obliged to repeat to the audience what they said in his ear,
trembling, weeping with the emotion of the event. I felt as if I were
a hypocrite, and only the thought of my mother's satisfaction gave
me the courage to go through the ceremony. We were baptized, my
companions and I, in the little river in midwinter, after a partial
thaw, the blocks of ice floating by us in the water.

I must have been about ten or eleven when I went through this
experience, and I never got rid of the feeling of a certain unreality
in the whole transaction, but on the other hand I had the same feeling
of unreality in the system of theology which led to it. I tried to do
my best to carry out the line of spiritual duties imposed upon me. I
made no question that I was a bad boy, but the conception of total
depravity in the theological sense never gained a hold on me, and once
inside the church there seemed to be a certain safeguard thrown over
me. The sense of _ecstasy_ (which my Uncle William had experienced in
his religious relation, the "power" of the revivalists) I have since
known in conditions of extraordinary mental exaltation, and understand
it as a mental phenomenon, as the momentary extension of the
consciousness of the individual beyond the limitations of the bodily
sense--a being snatched away from the body and made to see and feel
things not describable in terms of ordinary experience, but in my
religious evolution it had no place, then or since.

The intellectual slowness of which I have spoken continued through
all these years. I had left the dame's school, where the rule of long
division proved my _pons asinorum_, and went to a man's school, where
I earned my schooling by making the fires and sweeping the schoolroom,
and here I learned some Latin and the higher rules in arithmetic by
rote, always with the reputation of a stupid boy, good in the snowball
fights of the intermission, when we had two snow forts to capture
and defend; in running foot-races, the speediest, and in backhand
wrestling, the strongest, but mentally hopeless. All this period of
my life seems dreary and void, except when I got to nature, and the
delight of my hours in the fields and woods is all that remains to
me of a childhood tormented by burdens of conscience laid on me
prematurely, and by a domestic discipline the severity of which,
with all the reverence and gratitude I bear my parents, I can hardly
consider otherwise than gravely mistaken and disastrous to me, though
my mother's discipline has never made me an enemy of the rod for
children. My own experience as child and parent convinces me that an
inexorable, though mild, physical punishment is the only remedy for
the obstinacy of certain fractious child natures, in the years before
reason operates, and for the assurance of necessary discipline in
families.

The incessant Bible lessons, filling my mind with indigestible
conceptions of life present and to come, mysteries for the
contemplation of a philosopher, not for a boy of ten; the recognition
of my total depravity, as manifested in the trivial transgressions of
a thoughtless child, to whom life had hardly yet offered a duty to
fulfill or transgress; the terrible gloom of this Puritan horizon, on
which no light showed me promise of better things, only to be hoped
for through a process of repentance and atonement for the sins of
Adam, the fitness and method of which process were far beyond my
capacity to comprehend, as beyond that of any child,--all these things
made my intellectual life so sombre that I can but regard the long
interval of intellectual apathy as a fortunate provision against some
form of mental malady consequent on the morbid development of my early
childhood.

Our winters were long and hard, and I remember the snow falling on
Thanksgiving Day (the last Thursday in November) and not thawing again
until the beginning of March, and that, in the house where I was born,
we had the fall of snow so heavy that we could tunnel the path to the
barn, the drift covering the door of the house. The coming of spring
was my constant preoccupation through the winter, and my joy was
intense at the first swelling of the buds, the coming color in the
willow twigs, which ushered in the changes of spring; then the
catkins, the willow leaves, and the long rains which carried off
the snow, all welcome as daylight after a weary night, because they
restored me to the forests and the wildflowers, the fields and the
streams; and for miles around I knew every sunny spot where came the
first anemones, hepaticas, and, above all, the trailing arbutus, joy
of my childhood, the little white violets, their yellow sisters, then
the "dog-tooth violet," and a long list of flowers whose names I have
forgotten long ago.

The perennial delight of this return of springtime was the great
feature of my life, and then began the excursions into the forests
around us, and the succession of sights and sounds, the order of the
unfolding of the leaves, from the willow to the oak, the singing of
the frogs in the marshes, and the birds in the copses and fields (for
in the great woods there are few singing birds). I knew them all, and
when and where to hear them. The bluebird, or blue robin, as it was
called in our neighborhood, was the first, and he assured us that
spring had really come with a plaintive song, the sweetest to memory
of all nature's voices; then the American robin (the migratory
thrush), a bold, cheery note, full of summer life; and after those the
chief was the bobolink, singing up into the sky like the skylark, and
with which we connected the ripening of the strawberry, the merriest
and most rollicking of all bird songs, as that of the bluebird was the
tenderest. Then came the hermit thrush, heard only in the depth of
the forest, shy and remote in his life and nesting, and the
whip-poor-will, in the evening. Each was a new leaf turned over in my
book of life, the reading of which was my only happiness. What else,
or more, could be expected of an existence hedged in by the terrors of
eternity, the hauntings of an inevitable condemnation, unless I could
obtain some mysterious renovation, only attainable through an act of
divine grace which no human merit could entitle me to, and which I
tried in vain to win the benediction of? And how dreary seemed the
heaven I was set to win--no birds, no flowers, no fields or forests,
only the eternal continuation of the hymn-singing and protracted
meetings, in which, in our system, consisted the glorification of
God, which was the end and aim of our existences! I wonder how many
religious parents remember the misery of child life under such
influences.

The struggles of conscience through which I went in those days can be
imagined by no one, and I can hardly realize them myself, except by
recalling little incidents which show what the pressure must have
been. I have mentioned an escapade of this period, connected with
the last flogging my father gave me, but of which that was only the
secondary cause, determining the moment but not the movement. It was
a matter of conscience at bottom. My mother had, when I was about six
years old, taken a little octoroon girl of three, the illegitimate
daughter of a quadroon in our neighborhood, with the intention
of bringing her up as a servant. The child was quick-witted and
irrepressible, and disputes began between us as soon as she felt at
home. I suppose she must have been inclined to impertinence, for she
had to be whipped, and as at her age no difference of condition was
evident to her, she became a severe trial to my equanimity. Every
outbreak of temper induced by her conduct toward me became occasion
of a period of penitence, for I was taught that such outbreaks were
sinful, and as neither had I the amount of self-control that I needed
to overlook the provocations she gave, nor had she the power of
understanding the position, the transgressions that my conscience had
to bear up under became an intolerable load.

At this juncture came the brutal and as I felt most unmerited flogging
of which I have told the story earlier: this precipitated a decision
which had been slowly forming from my conscientious worries. I
determined to go away from home, and seek a state of life in which I
could maintain my spiritual tranquillity. I discussed the subject with
a playmate of my age, the son of a gardener living near us, and, as
his father had even a stronger propensity to the rod than mine,
we sympathized on that ground and agreed to run away and work our
passages on some ship to a land where we could live in a modified
Robinson Crusoe manner,--not an uninhabited land, but one where we
could earn, by fishing and similar devices, enough to live. I had been
employed for a few months before in carrying to and fro the students'
clothes for a washerwoman, one of the neighbors, and had earned three
or four dollars which my mother had, as usual with any trifle I
earned, put into the fund for the daily expenses. I do not know how it
was with the older boys, but for me the rule was rigid--what I could
earn was a part of the household income. I inwardly rebelled against
this, but to no effect, so I never had any pocket-money. I submitted,
as any son of my mother would have done at my age or have given
a solid reason why not; but on this occasion, when money was
indispensable to that expedition on which so much depended, I quietly
reasserted my right to my earnings, and took the wages I had received,
from the drawer where they were kept. My companion had no money
at all, and thus my trifle had to pay for both as far as it would
go,--fortunately, perhaps, as it shortened the duration of the
expedition.

We went by train to Albany, where we took deck passage on a towing
steamer for New York. The run was longer than that of a passenger
steamer, so that the New York police who were warned to look out
for us by the post, had given us up when we arrived and search was
diverted in another direction. We arrived at New York with my funds
already nearly exhausted by the food expenses _en route_, and my
companion's courage had already given out--he was homesick and
discouraged, and announced his determination to return home. My own
courage, I can honestly say, had not failed me,--I was ready for
hardship, but to go alone into a strange world damped my ascetic ardor
and confounded all the plans I had made. I yielded, and with the last
few "York shillings"[1] in my pocket bargained for a deck passage
without board on a barge back to Albany. It was midsummer, and the
sleeping on some bags of wool which formed the better part of the
deck-load gave me no inconvenience, and the want of provisions of any
sort was remedied as well as might be by a pile of salt codfish which
was the other part of the deck-load, and which was the only food we
had until our arrival at Albany, which we reached at night after a
voyage of twenty-four hours. We slept under a boat overturned by the
shore that night until the rising tide drove us out, when we decided
to take the road back to Schenectady on foot, through a wide pine
forest which occupied the intervening country, a distance of about
sixteen miles. Passing on the way a stable in which there was nobody,
not even a beast, we turned in to sleep away the darkness, and I
remember very well what a yielding bed a manger filled with salt gave
me. With the dawn we resumed the journey, and by the way ate our fill
of whortleberries, with which the forest abounded.

[Footnote 1: 12½ cents each.]

The joy of my mother at our unhoped-for arrival--for she had received
no news of us since our departure--is easily imagined, but for me the
failure of all my plans for an ascetic and more spiritual life was
made more bitter by the fact that the little octoroon, who had heard
read the letter which I left for my mother, giving the motives for my
self-exile, had repeated it to all the neighborhood, so that I not
only had failed, but became the butt of the jokes of the boys of the
neighborhood, who already held a pique against me for my serious ways
and my habit of rebuking certain vices amongst them. I was jeered at
as the boy "who left his mother to seek religion," and this made life
for a time almost intolerable. But it was in part compensated for by
the change in the situation in the household. It was clear that I
had ceased to be the boy I used to be, and that I was to be taken
seriously, and reasoned with rather than flogged. I had escaped from
the pupa state of existence. But what I still look back to with
surprise was my unflinching confidence in the future to which I
committed myself in this escapade. I thought I was right, and that the
aspiration for spiritual freedom, which was the chief motive of my
leaving home, was certain to be supported by Providence, to whom I
looked with serene complacence. If my companion had not deserted me I
should not have turned back, but his defection destroyed all my plans.
In several of my maturer ventures, I can recognize the same mental
condition of serene indifference to danger while doing what I thought
my duty, owing, perhaps, in a great measure to ignorance or incapacity
to realize the danger, but also largely to ingrained confidence in an
overruling Providence which took account of my steps and would carry
me through.




CHAPTER III

AN AMERICAN EDUCATION


Whether on account of the escapade related in the preceding chapter
or from influences of which I knew, and still know, nothing, it was
decided not long after that I should go to New York to attend a public
school there and live with my eldest brother, who, being twenty-five
years older than myself, and childless, had always treated me with an
indulgence which was perhaps due in part to the rigor of my father's
rule, and in part to his fondness for me, of which I retain some early
recollections in his annual visits home. My brother's wife, a fellow
townswoman of ours, and a marriage-convert to the Seventh Day Baptist
Church, was one of the most disagreeable persons I have ever had to
deal with, and hysterical to a degree of occasional insanity. She had
adopted the severities of our Puritanic system with aggravations. The
Sabbath under her rule became a day of preatonement for the sins I was
foreordained to commit. Dinner, as was the general custom in those
days, was at noon, but on Saturday I had none till I had committed to
heart and recited a portion of Scripture, and as the mental apathy
of the period still weighed on me, the task of the Seventh Day was a
sarcastic comment on the divine rest, in commemoration of which it was
supposed to be instituted, and it made me grateful for the Sunday,
which I generally passed in mechanical occupations in the workshop of
my third brother, Paul, the foreman of the department in which the
minor articles of the works were made, steam-gauges, models of
inventions, etc., and as I had my share of the family manual
dexterity, I found interest enough in the workshop. As my brothers
always observed the Sabbath rigidly, they attracted around them a few
of the New England mechanics who were "Sabbath-keepers" and mostly
related to us, and so we had a small congregation and a church of our
way of thinking.

The school to which I was sent was one of those founded by the Public
School Society, a voluntary association of well-to-do citizens, who,
in the absence of any municipal initiative, had organized themselves
for the encouragement and support of primary education. As they
were originally excluded from the management of the schools, the
politicians, finding this a new field of operations and partisan
activity, presently established the rival system of the municipal
schools called "ward schools." At that time the political intrigues of
the Catholic Church for the control of the public school system had
just begun. The Public School Society had been organized for the free
and non-sectarian education of all children unable to meet the expense
of education in the private schools, and received subsidies from the
municipality. Not only were all children under sixteen admitted to
these schools without any fees, but the books, stationery, and all
other material necessary were furnished gratuitously, and those who
were shoeless were even provided with shoes, the only requisites
being cleanliness and regular attendance. The direction was rigidly
non-sectarian. The trustees were unpaid, and they comprised many of
the leading citizens interested in popular education. They had built
for their service sixteen schoolhouses in New York, and in each of
these there were on an average a thousand children. The schoolhouses,
of three stories, had a primary department for such children as were
too young to be taught their letters or were not yet able to read and
write, and to them the basement was given, the second story to the
older girls, and the upper to the boys. The teaching for the boys'
department was limited to the elements of arithmetic, elementary
algebra, astronomy, and geometry, but within these limits the
education was thorough, and all who went through it were qualified for
places in offices or counting-rooms. The day was always opened by
the reading of Scripture and prayer by the principal or one of the
assistants, and this practice was made the ground of attack by the
Catholic politicians, who objected to the Protestant Bible, all the
school-books being already expurgated of every passage to which the
bishops objected.

As our assistant principal was a Catholic, and often had to read the
chapter, there could have been little harm done even to a Catholic
pupil, but the political pressure was sufficient to induce the
corporation of the city to adopt the political or "ward school"
system, controlled by the politicians, and the new schools, one of
which was or was to be established in each ward of the city, began to
run an active opposition to the society schools, which they eventually
drove out of existence.

At the time I was in the school, the interference of politics had just
begun to make itself felt in the schools, but the corporation had not
the courage to introduce its system on a large scale by supplanting
_en bloc_ the society schools, which might have made a political
revolt; the Irish Catholic influence was still a feeble one, and the
population at large was hardly aware of its tendency, but as the
ward schools were gradually brought into active competition with the
society schools the children were drawn off from the latter by various
inducements and pressure on the parents. Each of our schools had four
paid teachers--the principal, an assistant, and a junior and a senior
monitor; and the elder pupils were employed in the instruction of the
younger and in the preservation of order in school and in the school
yard during the intermissions in which the gymnastics were enforced.
My mental apathy must have been still very profound, for I remember
that it often happened that when a question which had passed other
pupils came to me in the class, the senior monitor used to address me,
"Well, stupid, what do you say?" I evidently was the most stupid boy
in the class--nothing seemed to penetrate my mental dullness, but,
having grown tall and strong for my age, I was often made "yard
monitor," to keep order during the physical training.

There was a gang of young ruffians, street boys, who used to hang
around the school gates and maltreat the stragglers and even the boys
in the yard, if the gate was left open, and I remember one day three
or four of them invading the school-yard after I had dismissed the
boys to go upstairs at the end of the intermission, thinking that they
would have a fine game with the monitor. One made a pretext to quarrel
with me, and, gripping me round the body, called to his companions to
go and get some stones to pound me on the head with, this being the
approved manner of the young roughs of New York. Finding that I could
not extricate myself from his grip, I dragged him to the wall, and,
catching him by the ears, beat his head against the rough stones until
he dropped insensible, when, to the astonishment of his comrades,
instead of stamping on him and finishing him at once, I ran upstairs
as fast as my legs could carry me, so that when they came with their
stones they had only their champion to carry out.

On the holidays there were generally stone-fights between the boys of
our quarter and one of the adjoining quarters, and I shall carry to
my grave the scars on my head of cuts received in one of these field
combats, in which I refused to follow my party in flight, and took the
onslaught of the whole vanguard of the enemy, armed with stones,
and had my head pounded yellow, being only saved from worse by the
intervention of the men of the vicinity. This fight gave me the
unmerited reputation of courage and fighting power, and I was
thereafter unmolested by the young roughs, though, in fact, I was
timid to a degree and only stood my ground from nervous obstinacy; I
never provoked a quarrel, and only revolted against a bully when
the position became intolerable. I can remember the amazement of a
companion older than myself, who had been in the habit of bullying me
freely, until one day he went too far and I took him by the collar and
shook and swung him till he was dizzy and begged for mercy, for of
downright pugilistics I knew nothing, and a deliberate blow in the
face with my fist in cold blood was a measure too brutal to enter into
my mind.

The dreariness of this portion of my life was beyond description. The
oppression of my sister-in-law at home, the severities of the teachers
at school, and the exclusion from the influences of nature, in which
I had so long lived without restraint, resulted in an attack of
nostalgia which, when the coming of the first wildflowers brought it
to a crisis, induced my brother to send me home.

My brother was attached to me, but the jealousy of his wife towards
anybody who seemed to have any influence over him made it impossible
for him to show any feeling even to me, for it brought on furious
attacks of hysteria, to appease which he had sometimes to resort to
humiliating devices. One day she became so excited that she fell into
an extreme prostration and declared that she was dying. She had every
indication, indeed, of approaching dissolution, and made her last
dispositions, when my brother Charles, who was the family physician,
seeing that the danger was real, assured her husband that unless some
diversion of her humor was effected she would die. He advised
exciting her jealousy, and her husband, accordingly, as if taking
her dispositions for his conduct after her death, asked her what she
thought of his marrying, in that contingency, a certain lady, whose
name he mentioned, whereupon she rose in her bed in such a rage at the
suggestion (the woman being her especial detestation) that she threw
off all the symptoms of illness, and the next day went about the house
as usual. This cure proved a grave misfortune to the whole family.

In spite of my aversion I was sent back to New York the next autumn
for another winter's schooling. I landed from the steamer at the foot
of Cortlandt Street two or three days after a great fire in New York,
and I saw the ruins still smoking and the firemen playing on them.
My baggage--a biscuit box, with my scanty wardrobe and a bag of
hickory-nuts for my city cousins--I carried on my shoulders and walked
the length of the city, my brother living in what was then farther New
York, in Seventh Street, near the East River. At that time Fourteenth
Street was the extreme limit of the city's growth, except for a few
scattering residences. Beyond, and, on the East River side, even most
of what lay beyond Seventh Street, was unreclaimed land. I sailed my
toy boats on the salt marshes where Tompkins Square now is, and I used
to shoot, botanize, and hunt for crystals all over the island beyond
Thirty-Second Street, the land being sparsely inhabited. I discovered
a little wild cactus growing freely amongst the rocks, and carried
a handkerchief full of it home, getting myself well pricked by the
spines, but to my botanical enthusiasm this was nothing in view of the
discovery. Only here and there patches of arable land maintained small
farmhouses, but the greater part of the surface of Manhattan Island
was composed of a poor grazing land, interspersed with rolling ledges
of bare granite, on which were visible what were then known as
"diluvial scratches," which my brother Charles, who was an ardent
naturalist, explained to me as the grooves made by the irruption of
the deluge, which carried masses of stone across the broad ledges and
left these scratches, then held widely as testimony to the actuality
of the great deluge of Genesis. I think that we had to wait for
Agassiz to show us that the "diluvial scratches" were really glacial
abrasions, caused by the great glacier which came down the valley of
the Hudson and went to sea off Sandy Hook. At this time my brother was
making conchology his special study, and many holidays we spent on the
harbor, dredging for shells, and great was our joy when he discovered
a new species, which was named after him by the Lyceum of Natural
History of New York.

The following year my fifth brother, Jacob, on leaving college, took
charge of a school in the centre of New York State, built by the
Sabbatarian community at large, in De Ruyter, a village of which many
of the inhabitants were Sabbatarians, and it was decided that I should
go there to follow my studies in preparation for college. I was to
"board out" a debt which an uncle owed to my eldest brother, and
which was uncollectible in any other way, and there I made my first
acquaintance with semi-independent life, exchanging a home for a
dormitory and a boarding-house. My uncle was to supply also my
bedding, the academy being provided with bedsteads; but he was a
heedless man, and I remember that I had to sleep six weeks on the
bed-cords, with my wearing apparel as my only covering, before he
awoke to the fact that I had a prepaid claim on him for mattress and
bedding. But we were on the edge of a great forest, and in the almost
primeval woodland I found compensation for many discomforts, and what
time my tasks spared me was spent wandering there. The persistent
apathy which had oppressed me for so many years still refused to lift,
and my stupidity in learning was such that my brother threatened to
send me home as a disgrace to the family. I had taken up Latin again,
algebra, and geometry, and, though I was up by candlelight in the
morning, and rarely put my books away till after ten at night except
for meals, it was impossible for me to construe half of the lesson
in Virgil, and the geometry was learned by rote. I at length gave up
exercise to gain time for study, and my despairing struggles were
misery. I was then fourteen, and in the seventh year of this darkness,
and it seemed to me hopeless.

What happened I know not, but about the middle of the first term the
mental fog broke away suddenly, and before the term ended I could
construe the Latin in less time than it took to recite it, and the
demonstrations of Euclid were as plain and clear as a fairy story. My
memory came back so completely that I could recite long poems after
a single reading, and no member of the class passed a more brilliant
examination at the end of the term than I. At the end of the second
term I could recite the whole of Legendre's geometry, plane and
spherical, from beginning to end, without a question, and the class
examination was recorded as the most remarkable which the academy
had witnessed for many years. I have never been able to conceive an
explanation of this curious phenomenon, which I record only as of
possible interest to some one interested in psychology. Unfortunately,
the academy failed to meet the expenses, and at the end of my second
term the students dispersed to their homes, I going with great regret,
for I enjoyed intensely this life on the edge of a large natural
forest, through which ran a trout brook, and in which such wild
woodland creatures as still survived our civilization were tolerably
abundant. Amongst my fellow-students at De Ruyter was Charles Dudley
Warner, with whom I contracted a friendship which survives in
activity, though our paths in life have been since widely separated.
I recall him as a sensitive, poetical boy,--almost girlish in his
delicacy of temperament,--and showing the fine _esprit_ which has
made him one of the first of our humorists. His "Being a Boy" is a
delightful and faithful record of the existence of a genuine
New England boy, which will remain to future generations as a
paleontological record when the race of them is extinct, if indeed it
be not so already.

Returning to Schenectady, I found that the family had begun to
discuss the future of my career, which had arrived at the point of
divergences. My father, who had no opinion of the utility of advanced
education for boys in our station, was tenacious in his intention to
have me in his workshop, where he needed more apprentices, but my
mother was still more obstinate in hers that I should have the
education; and in the decision the voices of my brothers were too
potent not to hold the casting vote. In the stern, Puritanical manner
of the family, I had been more or less the _enfant gâté_ of all its
members, except my brother Paul, the third of my brothers, who, coming
into the knowledge of domestic affairs at the time when the family was
at its greatest straits, had expressed himself bitterly at my birth,
over the imprudence of our parents' increasing their obligations when
they were unable to provide for the education of the children they had
already, and had always retained for me a little of the bitterness of
those days. On the whole, the vote of the family council was for the
education. My own wishes were hardly consulted, for I differed from
both opinions, having an intense enthusiasm for art, to which I wished
to devote myself.

The collective decision, in which my father and myself were alike
overruled, was that I should go to Union College, in Schenectady,
as the collegiate education was supposed to be a facilitation for
whatever occupation I might afterwards decide on. This was, so far as
I was concerned, a fatal error, and one of a kind far too common in
New England communities, where education is estimated by the extent
of the ground it covers, without relation to the superstructure to
be raised on it. I had always been a greedy reader of books, and
especially of histories and the natural sciences,--everything in the
vegetable or animal world fascinated me,--and I had no ambition for
academic honors, nor did I ever acquire any, but I passionately
desired a technical education in the arts, and the decision of the
family deferred the first steps in that direction for years, and
precisely those years when facility of hand is most completely
acquired and enthusiasm against difficulties is strongest--the years
when, if ever, the artist is made.

That one of the gravest difficulties in our modern civilized life
is the excessive number of liberally educated young men whose
professional ambitions are, and can be, given no outlet, is now well
recognized, and of these, many no doubt, like myself, are diverted
from a natural bent to follow one which has no natural leading or
sequence. It was very possible for a clever man three hundred years
ago to learn all that science could show him without interference with
the acquisition of the special knowledge required to fit him for the
attainment of eminence in a technical study, or the technical mastery
in the working it out, but now the range of a liberal education is
so great that those who are required to take respectable rank in a
specialty must devote themselves exclusively to it, during the years
in which alone technical mastery is possible of acquirement. There
will always be many to whom the devotion to study for study's sake is
invincible, but the ranks of the brain-workers are so overcrowded that
it is a great pity to force into them a man or woman who would be
content to be a worker in another and humbler line, especially in
those of the manual occupations which bring their happiness in the
following of them. In my case the result of the imposed career was a
disaster; I was diverted from the only occupation to which I ever had
a recognizable calling, and ultimately I drifted into journalism,
as the consequence of a certain literary facility developed by the
exercises of the college course. The consequences were the graver that
I was naturally too much disposed to a vagrant life; and the want of
a dominant interest in my occupation led to indulgence, on every
occasion that offered in later life, of the tendency to wander. I came
out of the experience with a divided allegiance, enough devotion to
letters to make it a satisfaction to occupy myself with them, but
too much interest in art to be able to abandon it entirely. Before
entering college, art was a passion, but when, at the age of twenty,
the release gave me the liberty to throw myself into painting, the
finer roots of enthusiasm were dead, and I became only a dilettante,
for the years when one acquires the mastery of hand and will which
make the successful artist were past.

It was decided that I should continue my preparation for college in
the Lyceum of my native town, a quaint octagonal building in which the
students were seated in two tiers of stalls, the partitions between
which were on radii drawn from a centre on the master's desk, so that
nothing the pupil did escaped his supervision. The larger boys, some
of whom were over sixteen, were in a basement similarly arranged with
a single tier of desks, and I earned my instruction by supervising
this room. I had here full authority so far as the maintenance of
order was concerned and kept it, though some of the pupils were
older than myself. I remember that one of them, about my own age and
presumed strength, but himself convinced of his superiority, repeated
some act which I had reprimanded him for, and as I knew that to allow
it to pass unpunished was to put an end to my authority and position,
yet did not feel competent or authorized to give him a regular
flogging, I caught him by the collar and jerked him into the middle of
the room, setting him down on the floor with force enough to bewilder
him a little, and ordered him to sit there till I released him, and
his surprise was such that he actually did not move till I told him
to. I met no attempt to put my authority at defiance after that. A
schoolfellow here and classmate in college was Chester A. Arthur,
afterward President of the United States, a brilliant Hellenist, and
one of the best scholars and thinkers in the class.

There were two associate principals at the head of the school, one for
the classics, and the other for mathematics. Of the former I became
a favorite on account of the facility with which I got on in his
branches, and when the year was up I passed easily the examinations
for entrance into college, and by his advice entered in the freshman
year, though fairly well prepared to enter the sophomore with slight
conditions. He was anxious that I should do him credit in college. But
long before the term was out I found that the routine gave me hardly
an occupation. I had already done all the mathematics of the year at
De Ruyter, and the Latin and Greek came so easy that I found myself
idle most of my time. I decided to try a fresh examination in order to
gain a year by reëntering as a sophomore. The faculty declared such a
thing unprecedented and inadmissible, to which I replied that I would
then go to another college and enter, quite oblivious of the fact that
I had neither the means nor the consent of my family to leave its
protection and go to another city. The classical principal of the
Lyceum, who was also a tutor in the college, did what he could to
dissuade me, but I persisted and offered myself for examination, and
found him on the examining committee. He was really fond of me, and in
my own interest wanted me to go through college with honors, but this
was to me of trivial importance, compared with the abbreviation by a
year of the captivity of college life. He punished me by putting me to
read for examination a passage of Juvenal, which I had never opened,
as it did not come in the course even of the sophomores, but I passed
fairly well on it, and he, with a little irritation, gave me the
certificate, saying that it was not for what I did, but for what
he knew me to be capable of. So, conditioned by some trivial
supplementary examinations on subjects which I do not remember, I went
up a class.

The constitution of Union College, like most of the American schools
of the highest grade at that time, differed from that of the English
model in some respects very widely. The "University" of Union was
completed by collegated schools for medicine, divinity, law, and
technical education. The medical and law schools of Union were at
Albany, the capital of New York State. Our college buildings were
three--one, West College, in the town, for the freshman and sophomore
classes, and two on the hill above the town, North and South colleges,
for the juniors and seniors. As a large proportion of the students
were young men to whom the expenses of the education were a serious
matter, many prepared themselves at home to enter the junior class, so
that a class which only numbered a score as freshmen, often graduated
a hundred. Others, again, used to spend the winter term and vacations
in teaching in the rural or "district" schools to pay the expenses
of the other terms, and the majority of the graduates were of these
classes of men, often adults on entering, so that the class gathered
seriousness as it went on.

The freshmen and sophomores, delegated to the care of the junior
professors and tutors, indulged in many of the escapades of juvenility
for which university life in most countries is distinguished, and were
continually brought under the inflictions of college discipline, and
now and then some one was expelled. The favorite tricks of getting a
horse or cow into the recitation rooms, fastening the tutors in their
rooms just before the class hours, tying up, or stealing, the
bell which used to wake the students and call them to prayers or
recitations, with rare and perilous excursions into the civic domain,
or a fire alarm caused by setting fire to the outhouses, which always
brought down on us the wrath of the firemen, varied the monotony of
the student life, as everywhere else; but as I roomed at home for the
first year I never had part in these escapades, and in my sophomore
winter I took a district school in one of the valleys tributary to
that of the Mohawk, in which the town lies.

The community in which the school was situated was almost exclusively
composed of Scotch Cameronians, of whom several families were the
descendants of a then still vigorous patriarch of the sternest type of
that creed. It was necessary to pass a special examination to get the
State certificate necessary to teach a district school, and this I had
passed, but had still to undergo the questioning of the trustees of
the district, canny and cautious beyond the common. The wages for such
a school were twelve dollars a month and "board around," i.e. staying
at the houses of the parents a week for each pupil in turn, beginning
with those in best estate, so that, as the school had never less than
twenty or thirty pupils, the poorer families were never called on. One
of the boys intended to go to college, and his father was willing to
pay a special contribution to secure a teacher of Latin, and this
brought my wages up to sixteen dollars a month. But the cautious Scots
urged a conditional engagement,--a trial of one month,--a condition
which, as I might have anticipated, would end the engagement with
the month, considering the composition of the district and the usual
difference of views among the people. The two most advanced and oldest
of the pupils belonged to families bound together by the most cordial
jealousy which a petty community could inspire, and one of these was
my Latin pupil. His rival was a lazy student and a turbulent scholar,
with whom I had difficulties from insubordination from the beginning.
As, however, I had adopted the rule of depending entirely on moral
suasion in the government of the school and refused to flog, but
instead offered prizes for good behavior and studiousness at my own
expense for each week, my confidence in the better qualities of human
nature betrayed me from the beginning. The prizes went to stimulate
the jealousies between the two leaders, and the only punishment I
would inflict, that of sending the pupil home for disobedience, made
domestic difficulties.

The first week of the month I was boarded in the family of our
patriarch, whose grandsons furnished a number of the pupils, and the
life they led me was not one to make me regret the termination of the
engagement. I was awaked while it was still night to join in family
prayers, which were of a severity of which I had never dreamed. First
a long selection of Psalms was read, then another long one sung, and
then a prayer which, as I noticed by the clock, varied from ten to
twelve minutes, through which, being still drowsy, I slept, being
awakened by the family rising from their knees. This was the
invariable routine gone through twice a day. As in our own family,
with the exception of the Saturday morning family service, the
devotions were always those of the closet, this tedium of godliness
was a serious infliction. I was waked out of sound sleep, and bored
through, before breakfast, by vain repetitions lasting on an average
half an hour, after having endured the same for another half-hour
before being allowed to go to bed. No escape was permitted even to the
ill-willing, and it may easily be imagined that this addendum to
the annoyances of my school hours made the position of the
district schoolmaster one for which sixteen dollars a month was no
compensation.

The conflicts in the school, if they gave me less tedium, were all
the more acute. My Latin scholar was a lad who meant to profit by his
opportunities and devoted himself to his studies, and, naturally, had
a most cordial collaboration on my part, while the son of the rival
citizen was both lazy and refractory, so that, with my system of
inflicting no corporal punishments, he got none of the weekly prizes,
and got such milder punishments as could be inflicted. To tell the
truth, the pupils who were refractory to my system were few in
proportion, and the school was a pleasanter place than if the rod had
been always in hand, as in the days of my boyhood. But the month of
trial did not elapse without signs of a storm brewing in the valley.
My novel system of sparing the rod and spoiling the children could not
fail to provoke the disapproval of the orthodox, and the head of the
conspiracy was the father of my lazy schoolboy.

I left the valley for a visit home, on the last week of the month on
Friday night, and started back on foot, a walk of fifteen or twenty
miles, on Sunday afternoon, too late for convenience as I discovered
in the event. That portion of the valley of the Mohawk, a broad and
level plain, is bounded on the west by a range or ranges of hills
divided by deep valleys running north and south, perpendicular to the
course of the river, and in one of these valleys lay the township of
Princeton, in the middle of which was the schoolhouse, the farms of
the community being scattered over the hills around, and some of them
at distances of a mile or two. It was the head of the glen, and the
lay of the land was almost that of an amphitheatre, cannily chosen by
the father of the colony, the old Cameronian whose prayers and long
services grated so on my New England Puritanism. Before I turned out
of the Mohawk valley into that of Princeton, the sun had set, with all
the signs of a coming snowstorm, which broke on me suddenly in the
glen with a furious north wind tearing down the gorge and drifting the
snow as it fell, so that before I had gone a mile with the snow in my
face, it was almost impossible to force my way against snow and wind.
I wore a long Spanish cloak, such as was much in vogue then and there;
wrapping my face in it so that only my eyes were free, I fought on,
sometimes only able to walk backward from the cutting cold against my
face and eyes, making very slow progress; but it was Sunday night, and
the school must be opened at 9 A.M. on Monday. The snow gathered in
drifts often up to my middle, with bare, wind-swept spaces between,
and these drifts at times were crusted with wind-packed snow too hard
to be waded through, and I was obliged to break the snow crust by
throwing myself at full length on it. In this way I struggled on till
ten at night, when I came to a solitary house by the roadside, at
which I stopped to ask a night's lodging, for I could fight the
weather no longer. The house was dark and the family asleep, but I was
admitted. The bed given me was as cold as the snow outside, but it was
luxury compared to some of the quarters I had in my school district.
At one of the houses at which I had to take my turn, I remember that
there had been, as an afterthought of the house architect, a door
cut between the room I slept in and the farmyard, but, whether from
indifference or inability, the door had never been put in, and a
curtain which supplied its place and was intended to keep the snow
out, did it so incompletely that I found in the morning--after a snowy
night--that a heavy drift had formed between the opening and the bed.
In this room, too, I shared the bed of the hired man, who was paid the
same wages as mine, and in the eyes of the community was therefore in
every way my equal.

On reaching the schoolhouse the next morning, I found gathered there
not only a part of the scholars, but some of their parents,--including
the trustees of the school,--and was not long in learning that my
absence had been made use of by the disaffected of the district to
depose me. We had a brief debate, not on the question whether I should
go or not, but on the grounds of disaffection. The father of my lazy
boy was, of course, the spokesman, and it seemed as if he resented his
son's not being flogged, for want of discipline and partiality were
the burden of his complaint. This gave me ample opportunity for a
statement of my principles in instruction, and to say that his son was
the laziest and most stupid boy in the school, and that instruction
was wasted on him, and to contrast his progress and qualities
with those of my Latin boy. It was malicious, I admit, but it was
successful in infuriating the debate, and as I saw by the gathering
that the majority had decided to avail themselves of the month's
conditional engagement to dismiss me, I was quite indifferent to the
discord I left behind me.

"It's all very fine for you," said my antagonist, whose Scotch I will
not attempt to reproduce, "to sit up there on your desk and get your
sixteen dollars a month, as if you were a hard-working man,"--to which
I replied, "Perhaps you think you can come up here and earn it." As I
was quite indifferent to the dismissal, and only did not avail myself
of the privilege of going because I always had an obstinate way of
sticking to a thing I had begun till it was finished, I made no
attempt to conciliate, and it was with neither surprise nor serious
annoyance that I received my notice of dismissal. The only things I
had enjoyed, indeed, during the month, had been the walks through
the dense forest from the farmhouses to the schoolhouse in the quiet
sunshine of the winter mornings. The woods were more natural and older
than those around my home, and there was a freshness in the early
day which I never had realized so fully as in these morning walks to
school, and I shall always remember the snowy silence of that forest,
the first, on that scale, I had become familiar with.

But the poverty of the lives of these prosperous farmers was a
revelation even to me, accustomed as I was to a domestic simplicity
which would surprise modern Americans of any degree. New books were
a luxury none of them indulged in; beyond the Bible and two or three
volumes of general information, there was no reading except a weekly
newspaper, and the diet was such as I had never been used to, even at
De Ruyter. But for the vegetables of the farm, sailors at sea would
fare better than these landsmen. In later years I boarded with one of
the farmers in an adjoining valley, where I was engaged in painting a
cascade of great beauty, and for the six weeks I lived in the family I
saw only two articles of animal food--salt mackerel for breakfast and
salt pork for dinner. The narrowness of intellectual range and the
bigotry--political and religious--prevailing amongst them was such as
I had in no experience ever encountered, even in the "straitest sect
of the Pharisees," the Seventh Day Baptist Church of my youth. In the
community in which I had grown, there was always the early influence
of the sea to widen the range of thought and sympathy, but here, in
the narrow valley to which the farmer was confined, neither nature nor
religion seemed to have any liberating or liberalizing power. A
sturdy independence was the dominant trait of character, but this
independence was converted into a self-enslavement by the narrow range
of thought which everywhere prevailed. The old Cameronian patriarch,
in his sectarian exaltation, seemed almost a luminary in the
intellectual twilight of that secluded community, and it was possible
there to understand how even a narrow religious fanaticism could
become an ennobling element in the character of a community living in
such a restricted and materializing atmosphere. A few weeks in such
a state of society enables one to understand better the irresistible
attraction of cities and the life in the midst of multitudes to the
rustic, born and raised in the back-water stagnation of a rural life
like that of the farmers of my school district.

The remaining two months of the broken term of the college course and
the better part of the vacation were spent in my father's workshop,
where the work was rather pressing and the shop short-handed. My
father's business was mainly the manufacture of certain mechanical
implements for which he and his brother held the patents, and in the
spring and autumn he was accustomed to carry the consignments of them
to his customers in New York. His workshop was resorted to by several
ingenious fellow New Englanders who had inventions to work out, and in
the execution of these I was found useful. Among these was one Daniel
Ball, whose specialty was locks, of which he invented, patented,
and sold the patents of a new one every year, all worked out in my
father's shop. Ball was a man of remarkable mechanical ingenuity and
extraordinary profanity--of a savage temper, and very exclusive in his
human sympathies; but he had a profound reverence for my father, of
whom he used to say that "Old Joe Stillman was the only honest man God
ever made," and I am inclined to think, looking back on a long life
and wide experience in men of all classes and many nations, that Ball
was justified in the esteem he held my father in, though admissibly
wrong in his exclusiveness,--for I cannot recall, in all my memories
of the old man, a single instance of his hesitating over the most
trivial transaction in which a question of honesty was involved, and I
have known him to relinquish his clear rights rather than to provoke
a disagreement with a neighbor. He had a profound aversion to any
ostentation of religious fervor, as had my mother. If he had lived
to-day he would certainly have been an advanced evolutionist; even
then his liberality in matters of doctrine and his unbounded charity
towards all differences of opinion in religious questions used to
cause my mother great anxiety as to his orthodoxy. He thought
the fields and woods better places to pass the Sabbath in than a
meeting-house, and this was a subject of great pain to her, the more
that he developed the same feeling in me; but he never deferred in
these matters to anybody, and never held a shade of that reverence for
the clergy which was almost a passion in my mother's nature. While of
an extreme tenderness of heart to all suffering or hardship outside
the family, even towards animals, his domestic discipline was brutal
and narrow. In the latter respect he was a survival of the old New
England system; in the former, himself.

I had a parrot given me by one of my brothers returning from the
Southern States, and the bird took an extravagant fondness for my
father rather than for me. He was allowed to go free about the house
and garden, and would go and sit on the fence when my father should be
coming back from the workshop to dinner and supper, and run to meet
his footstep long before he was in sight, chuckling and chattering
with delight. Early one morning the parrot got shut, by chance, in the
cupboard, and, attempting to gnaw his way out, was mistaken for a rat,
and father took the shovel to kill him, while mother carefully opened
the door so that the rat might squeeze his way out to be killed, but
poor Poll got the blow instead, and had his neck broken. All that day
my father stayed at home weeping for Polly, and no business misfortune
in my recollection ever affected him as the death of the parrot did.
He could flog me without mercy, but he could not see the suffering of
a domestic or wild animal without tears, nor would he tolerate in us
children the slightest tendency to cruelty to the least living thing.

I have alluded to the differences between him and my mother on the
subject of education, the inutility of which, beyond a common-school
standard, he made an article of faith, and the return to the workshop
for the balance of the vacation, after my school-teaching failure, was
the occasion of the final battle. As the vacation drew to an end, and
the time which was still available for studying up the subjects of
the last term, for the examination on reëntering, approached its
imperative limit, I notified him that I must stop work. He said
nothing until I had actually given it up and gone back to my study,
about two weeks before the examination day. Coming home from the shop
that day to dinner, in a very bad humor, he asked me why I had
not been at work. I replied that I had barely the time absolutely
necessary to make up my arrears of study to enter college for the next
term. Then he broke out on me with a torrent of abuse as an idle,
shirking boy, who only cared to avoid work, ending with the accusation
that all I wanted was to "eat the bread of idleness," a phrase he was
very fond of. I suppose I inherited some of his inequality of temper,
and I replied by leaving the table, throwing my chair across the room
as I did so; and, assuring him that when I ate another morsel of bread
in his house he would know the reason why, I left the house in a
towering rage. Having forewarned him days before that I must go,
without his making the least objection, and having postponed the step
to the latest possible moment, out of consideration for the work in
hand, I considered this treatment as ungenerous, and was indignant.

I do not think that, weighing all the circumstances of the case, one
could say that my father was entitled to impose his authority in
a purely arbitrary interference with a matter in which the family
council had decided on my course, and which involved all my future, or
that my refusal to obey an irrational command implies any disrespect
to him. At all events, I decided at once that I would not yield in
this matter, and I made my preparations to seek another home, even
with a modification in my career. If I must abandon the liberal
education, I would not waste my life in a little workshop with three
workmen, and no opportunity to widen the sphere of activity, or
opening into a larger occupation. If I should be obliged to leave the
college, it should be for something in the direction of art, and in
this light I did not much regret the change. I had not, however,
calculated on my mother's tenacity, or the imperceptible domination
she exercised over my father.

When I returned to the house to get my clothes and make my
preparations for leaving home for good, I had a most painful scene
with my mother, and it was the only serious misunderstanding I ever
had with her. She went through, in a rapid résumé, the history of my
life, from the day when I was given her in consolation for the little
brother before me, who died, with a word for each of the crises
through which her care had carried me,--accidents, grave maladies, for
I was apparently not a strong child, and at several conjunctures my
life had been despaired of; all the story being told as she walked
up and down rapidly in the chamber, with the tears running down her
cheeks, and with a passionate vehemence I had never suspected her to
be capable of, since she had the most complete self-restraint I ever
knew in a woman. But it was an _impasse_--I neither could nor would
go back from the career decided upon, nor would the family have
consented, and to return to the workshop at my father's insistence was
to lose everything. It seemed brutal to refuse mother's entreaties
to ignore the collision of wills, and to go on as if nothing had
happened, but to do this and remain in the house with my father, in
the perpetual danger of another conflict, was impossible. The question
had to be settled, and all I could do was to insist on father's making
a distinct disavowal of any right or intention to demand my services
in the shop at any future time, and leaving me free to follow the
programme agreed on in the family council. It was in effect a frank
apology that I wanted, but I knew him too well to suppose he would
ever consent to make an apology in words, or to admit to me that he
had made a mistake; and I left the solution in my mother's hands, with
the understanding that the definite promise should be made to her,
and I knew too that this would hold him as completely as if made to a
public authority. Nothing could bring her to contradict him openly,
and in all my life I never saw her make a sign of disrespect for his
mastery in domestic things, but I knew that once this promise was made
to her I could count on his being held to it sternly.

That evening the matter was settled, but of what had passed, or what
was said, I never knew anything, for my mother never wasted words;
and, while no apology was made, or any retraction expressed, neither
my father nor myself ever alluded to the subject of my working in
the shop again, nor did I ever, as before, go into it during the
vacations, or offer to assist when affairs were hurried. The habit of
asserting the paternal authority and the sense of it, in my father,
were so strong that I never risked again reviving it.




CHAPTER IV

COLLEGE LIFE


I passed my examination and resumed my place in the class, but I never
tried district school-teaching again. Entering upon my junior year I
had a room in the north college. Each of the upper buildings--which
properly should have been called halls--was divided into five
sections, in effect separate residences, each being under the custody
of one of the professors or tutors, who was responsible for order
in the same, the two end sections of each of the colleges being an
official residence for one of the senior professors with families. The
rule required the students to be in their rooms after supper, but it
was almost as much honored in the breach as in the observance, and,
though the skylarking which resulted from the former often brought
the section officer up, those who had any tact avoided too close
an insistence on the regulations, so that the students in the same
sections commonly visited each other in the evenings, and not
infrequently those from the other sections came in.

Our quarters were of the simplest,--one room for two students, with
one wide bed,--and there we lived and studied. At half-past five the
bell rang to wake us, and half an hour later for prayers, the
sleepy ones returning to sleep after the waking bell, and thrusting
themselves into their clothes as they ran when the prayer-bell rang,
to get to prayers before the roll-call was over. From prayers again
we dispersed to the recitation rooms for the morning recitations, and
then to breakfast, mostly in town. There were two boarding-houses, one
at each end of the college walk, known as "North" and "South" halls
and forming part of the architectural scheme of the institution, and
here board was provided at somewhat lower terms than at the private
boarding-houses in town, and of very much inferior quality. The price
at the halls was, if I remember correctly, $1.25 a week for three
meals a day, that in the town ranging from $1.50 to $1.75. Furnished
rooms in the town cost 75 cents per week more, and a few favored or
wealthier students had permission to room in them, but as a rule the
undergraduates of Union were men of very limited means, on which
account the president and founder of the college, Dr. Nott, had
planned its regulations to facilitate the attendance of that class of
students, and the rules were such as closely to restrict the students
from any participation in the social life of the towns-people. The
visits of the section officers to the rooms of the students were
irregular, and the inquisition into the causes of absence so thorough,
that few, not of the most reckless, cared to risk a visit to the town,
half a mile from the upper buildings; and the old doctor's police was
too good for men to escape detection in any serious indulgence in
irregular hours.

Union was, at this epoch, and during the active life of the doctor,
the third university of the United States, coming, in the general
estimation and the number of its graduates, immediately after Yale,
Harvard being then, as always, the first; and it owed its character
and peculiar reputation to the strong and singular personality of its
first president. I have, in the course of my life, become more or less
acquainted with many able men, and Dr. Nott was the most remarkable of
all the teachers I have ever known, considering the limitation of his
position and profession,--that of a Presbyterian clergyman in a time
when sectarian differences ran high, and his sect had no lead in
public opinion. He had attained his position by the force of his
character assisted by his extraordinary tact and eloquence, but
unaided by patronage, and this at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, a time when institutions were forming and nothing was settled
in the character of society. The manual of public speakers which we
used to draw on for the speeches in class recitations included, as one
of the most brilliant examples, the doctor's oration on the death
of Alexander Hamilton, killed in a duel with Aaron Burr, one of the
earliest and the most prominent of the demagogues of America. I have
not read the oration for fifty years; but, as I remember it, it
was, in the fashion of the day, one of the most eloquent of all our
readings.

As I was a favorite of the doctor in the last year of my course and
for years after, and as no one has ever in my estimation done him
justice, it is to me a debt of gratitude, as well as a matter of
justice, to repair as best I may this neglect. No one but a pupil
could ever have fairly estimated his force of character, and no pupil
whose intercourse with him was not carried into the post-graduate
years could measure the ability with which he advised, especially in
political matters, with his old pupils. In the days of his activity,
no institution in the country furnished so large an element to the
practical statesmanship of the United States as did Union. Seward
was one of his favorite pupils, and it is well known that, up to the
period of the American Civil War, he never took a step in politics
without the advice of the doctor. Having had a struggle with poverty
in his own early life, Dr. Nott sympathized heartily with the poorer
students, and a practical education was more easily gained at Union
than was then possible at Yale or Harvard. Men were allowed to defer
payment of the fees till later life when their means had increased;
and, though there were no scholarships, there were many students whose
burdens were so far alleviated by the regulations that an earnest man
who was determined to take his degree and work his way if he must,
needed never leave college unsatisfied.

The doctor's reading of character and detective powers were barely
short of the miraculous, and his management of refractory students
became so well known that many who had been expelled from the other
universities were sent to Union and graduated with credit, so that the
college acquired the nickname of "Botany Bay." There came to him once
for admission a student expelled from Yale for persistent violation
of the regulations, and naturally without the letter which by general
usage was required from the president of one university to another,
certifying the good standing of the student. The president of Yale
wrote to the doctor to ask "if he meant to take that scoundrel into
his college." The doctor, who had made a rapid examination of the man,
replied, "Yes, and make a man of him." In one of my post-graduate
years, when I was staying with the doctor, he told me the story of
this man. He had estimated his character at a glance correctly, and
saw in him a mismanaged student. He was admitted unconditionally,
as if he had come with the best of characters, and for a time he
justified the confidence reposed in him. But the uneasy nature one
day broke out, and he committed a gross violation of the rules. The
discipline of the doctor began always with a friendly conversation,
and with some men ended with it, for he knew so well how to paint the
consequences of expulsion that it sufficed; but on the entry of this
student into his library, he saw on looking at him that he "had the
devil in his eye." He had, in fact, said to his roommate on getting
the summons to the interview, "If the doctor thinks he is going to
break me in he'll find himself mistaken." The doctor had a curious
kind of vision which made it impossible to say which of the persons in
the room he was looking at, and when, while seeming to be engaged on
his book, he had looked into the eyes of the student, and saw that the
light of battle was kindled in them, he waited for a little, and then,
as if preoccupied, said to him in his most kindly tone, "I am very
much occupied at this moment, my son; won't you come in to-morrow
evening?" The young man went back to his room already half conquered
by the affectionate manner, but the important point gained in the
doctor's tactics was that the psychological moment of combat in the
student had been reached and could not be kept up for a day, and when
on the next evening the interview took place, his combativeness had
given place to perplexity and complete demoralization. In this state
the doctor gave him a paternal lesson on the consequences to his
future life of the rebellion against necessary discipline and of
persistent disorderly conduct, but without any actual reproof or
mention of his offense, and all in his invariably kindly tone as if it
were a talk on generalities, and then dismissed him to think it over.
He had established cordial relations with the rebel, and from that day
had no trouble with him, and he graduated at the head of his class.

And the doctor understood men so well that he never wasted his trouble
on those who had nothing in them, but let them drift through the
course unnoted. Expulsions were very rare, and the secret police of
the university was so competent that the almost absolute certainty of
detection generally deterred the men from serious infractions of the
rules. The government seemed to be based on the policy of giving an
earnest man all the advantages to be got out of the institution, and
getting the indifferent through the course with the least discredit.
In a state of society in which the collegiate standing was of
importance to a man's career, this condition of things would have been
a grave objection to the college, but in our western world the degree
had very little importance, and the honors no effect on the future
position. Most of the prominent men of our past had not even been
through any university, and in politics it was often rather an
obstacle than a recommendation that a man was a "college man." What
the doctor tried to do, then, was to make a man when he found the
material for one, and to ignore the futile intellects. This was the
scheme of the education at Union when I was there, and it rarely
failed to find the best men in the class and bring them forward.

Our college life may have been to the men of sufficient means more
largely supplied with the elements of excitement, but for the poorer
students there was little romance in it. Now and then a demonstration
against an unpopular professor, a "bolt," i.e. abstention _en masse_
from a recitation; or a rarer invasion of the town and hostile
demonstration gave us a fillip, but the doctor had so well policed the
college and so completely brought under his moral influence the town,
that no serious row ever took place in my time. Later he told me how
he managed one of the worst early conflicts, in which the students on
one side of the college road, and the town boys on the other, were
arrayed in battle order, determined to fight out the question who were
the better men. The doctor had early notice of the imminent row, and,
fetching a circuit behind the "town," encouraged the boys on that side
with assurances of his impartiality and even his satisfaction with a
little punishment of the students, if they were aggressive. "But,"
said he, "don't begin the fight and put yourselves in the wrong. If my
boys come over, thrash them well, but let them strike the first blow."
Having put them in the strongest defensive attitude, believing that
they had the doctor with them, he went round to the students and
applied the same inducements to the defensive, leaving them under the
persuasion that he entirely approved their fighting, and then he went
home and left them to their conclusions. As time passed and neither
took the offensive, they all cooled off and went home.

The tact with which he dealt with the occasional outbreaks in the
college was very interesting. If it was a case of wanton defiance of
the habitual order, there was a very slight probability of its being
overlooked. A favorite prank of the stealing of the college bell was
invariably punished, first by having a hand-bell rung a little earlier
than regulation hours all through the sections; and, when his secret
police had discovered the offenders, they were punished according to
custom, never very severely, but sufficiently so to make them feel
humiliated. But the mystery of his police was never explained, and
we were always at a loss to conjecture how he discovered the most
elaborately concealed combinations, so that suddenly, even weeks
after, when the culprits thought they had finally escaped detection,
he would announce at prayers that they were to come to his study to
explain. If the outbreak, however, had been in any way justified by
an arbitrary or unwise act of discipline by any of the professors, he
used to ignore it altogether.

The professor of mensuration, a fussy and consequential little fellow,
a volunteer on the staff, and a man of singularly slight knowledge
of young men, very fond of showing his authority, especially at the
public examinations at the end of the term, had incurred the wrath
of the class and become the butt of all its practical jokes. Having
boasted one evening in society of the town that the students dared
not rebel against him, and the boast coming to their knowledge, not a
single student presented himself at the recitation next morning. The
next day he was greeted with such disorder that it was necessary to
suspend the exercises, and one of the most violent demonstrators
finished by throwing a huge wooden spoon at him, which, hitting him on
the head, ended the row. His public examinations were the most severe
we had to go through, and often quite needlessly so, in order to
impress the visitors with his own knowledge rather than with ours,
and as the end of a term drew near, I think in my last junior term,
a conspiracy was got up to put him _hors de combat_ for that
examination. It was decided to take him out of his room in the section
(he was section officer in my own section) and bring him into the
pine woods in the rear of the college, and there, unless he solemnly
promised to stay away from his class examination, to cut off his hair
and tar his head first, then crop his beard, and, if he was still
refractory, to strip him (it was midsummer) and tie him to a tree
and leave him all night, under the conviction that he would not show
himself at examination after that experience.

In the small hours, the conspirators, provided with a duplicate key to
the professor's door, made a stealthy attempt to open it, but found
his key on the inside and were unable to open the door, but woke the
victim, who, however, dared not raise an alarm. One of the smaller
students tried to climb in through the ventilator, but this was nailed
down, and then as a last resort the "smoking machine" was brought into
action. This was an "infernal machine," employed in hazing students
who had in any way offended the opinion of the class, especially by
indecorous subservience to the authorities or informing against their
fellow students. The latter was a rare offense and never pardoned.
The smoking machine consisted of a short length of stove-pipe with a
nozzle at each end, into one of which was introduced a bellows, and
the other was put through the keyhole of the door of the offender. In
the body of the pipe was a bed of lighted charcoal, and on this was
sprinkled tobacco and assafoetida, and the smoke was driven into the
room in such quantities that no human being could resist it more than
a few minutes. The smoking was continued for ten minutes, when, as the
professor did not surrender, it began to be feared that the joke had
gone too far, and two of the conspirators went out to see if there
were any external signs of vitality, and found that the victim had
opened his window and was lying with his head below the window-sill so
as to be out of the smoke which poured out over him. I suppose that
the delegates were drunk, for one of them threw a block of wood at
the professor's head which, missing him, drove in the window pane and
finished the experiment.

It was the gravest outrage of my time, and had there not been so large
a part of the senior class implicated in the conspiracy, directly or
indirectly, there is no doubt that the doctor would have taken the
most severe measures for the punishment of those concerned. No partial
punishment would have been possible, and the general irritation
against that particular professor was so great in the class, and
his course had been so little in conformity with the usages of the
college, that the doctor thought best to ignore the affair completely.
The professor was completely cowed, and we had no more browbeating
from him. But the practical jokes played on him were never attempted
with any other member of the faculty, all of them having been trained
in the doctor's own school. Except possibly the oldest of them,
all were graduates at Union under him; and his system of elastic,
unceasing pressure, constant and unobtrusive surveillance, and simple
appeals to the students' higher interests and manly feeling were so
generally potent in the government of the college that the petty
tyranny of the mensuration professor, nicknamed "Geodesy," found no
support in the faculty, though the same elastic system which threw the
responsibility of final results on the individual left him the same
freedom of action which it gave us, and he had to learn his lesson
while he taught us ours.

The students mostly joined one or other of a large number of secret
societies, mainly social and never scholastic, which had, almost
without exception, originated at Union, spreading to other
universities by migration or initiation of their members. The
distinction most sought for by ambitious students, the marshalship
of the "commencement" ceremonies,--i.e. the conferring of degrees,
speech-making, etc., of the graduating class,--was an elective office
and voted for by all the members of the class, so that, for this
position of a day, scholarship was only of secondary importance, the
personal popularity of the candidates determining the election. The
societies grouped themselves in two parties, the most popular man in
each party was its candidate, and the canvassing ran more or less
actively through the senior year, occupying largely the attention of
the students. These societies were in general boyish imitations of the
Freemasons, though the most eminent, the Phi Beta Kappa, was an old
and dignified institution, having been founded in 1776, at William and
Mary College, whence it soon spread to Harvard and Yale, eventually
establishing itself in most of the principal colleges of the country;
at Union, under the control of the faculty, it became the high
literary distinction of the class, only the third of the class with
the highest collective record being admitted at graduation. Each of
the societies had its secrets, its secret meetings, its grip and
passwords, and it always seemed to me, though I was early initiated
into one which had a distinguished record and literary reputation,
that it was a folly and a waste of the energies of the students.
Opposed to them all was an anti-secret society, and this, like the
others, was known by the initials of the secret name, which was
supposed to be Greek and to indicate, mysteriously, the character of
the society. Students at the earliest date, generally in the first
weeks of attendance, were thoroughly canvassed by the members of these
societies, and invited, in accordance with their characters, to enter
one or the other, those of a studious tendency finding most favor with
that to which I was invited, and which consisted mostly of poor and
studious men, others according to their social standing or wealth, or
even their tendency to a wild life.

Besides this we had a house of representatives for the juniors and
a senate for the seniors, over which two of the senior professors
presided, knowing the rules of the respective branches of Congress,
and requiring their observance in the debates, which echoed the grave
political questions of the day. There was no lecturing system, and
there was no such thing known as coaching; and the recitations
consisted, like those in the juvenile schools, in answering questions
taken from the lesson in standard textbooks, and called out no special
abilities in the students which could distinguish the men of mark from
the merest bookworms. There were men who never read the lesson and
depended on being prompted by a friend. One of these derelicts, the
son of a famous brewer, gave us a laugh which no member of the class
can have forgotten. He was known for drinking enormous quantities of
his father's beer and sleeping even in class; and when the question
put him was, "Who was the reputed inventor of poetry amongst the
Greeks?" he had no answer till the man behind him whispered,
"Orpheus." He caught it badly, and roared, "Morpheus." The laugh that
followed stopped recitation for ten minutes. A laugh in a large class
had a curious way of going on indefinitely.

Until we reached the senior year, and came under the direct care of
the old doctor, there was nothing in the course to awaken special
ambitions. The honors, determined chiefly by the marks given at the
end of the term, being mainly the reward of a diligence rather stupid
than otherwise, as a rule were regarded with great indifference, and,
for the most part, fell to the men who "poled" most assiduously, and
got the best marks for attention, diligence, and correct recitation of
the set tasks. As I look back on the life and work of that period, it
seems to me that it was most unintelligently spent, and when I reached
my senior year, and came under the direct stimulus of Dr. Nott, I
recognized that, so far as the true education was concerned, I had
wasted two years, and had I been master of my future I should have
been inclined to go back to the beginning and repeat the three years'
course of study under the new light, and with a recognition of the
purpose of higher study, for I saw that all that I had gained was
little more than parrot learning. The doctor indeed tried to make us
think, and he used to say that the textbook was a matter of entire
indifference, and that he would as soon have a book of riddles as
Kames's "Elements of Criticism," so long as he could make us think out
our conclusions. With him our recitations were a perpetual contest
of our wits against his; he showed us the shallowness of our
acquisitions, and dissected mercilessly both textbook and the
responses to the questions which he had drawn from it, admitting
nothing and pushing the pupil perpetually into the deeper water as
soon as he began to think his foot had touched firm land. The first
term under the doctor brought up every intellectual faculty I
possessed, and I suppose it was to this intense appreciation of his
leading that I owed his friendship and partiality in the following
years. So far as the influence of school can go, I owe to him the best
of my education, and especially the perception of the meaning of the
word itself. In the senior year I turned back in my life and sought
not to hasten, but to linger in the precincts of study, and the
imperious necessity of getting to the only occupation which would give
me the independence I desired, alone deterred me from a post-graduate
course of study to compensate for the inadequacy of the past years.

In entering the church, Dr. Nott had deprived the world of a statesman
of no ordinary calibre, but in the eyes of the Protestant, as of the
Catholic Church, in the country which had its precedents to make, as
in that which had precedents a thousand years old, the maxim, "once a
priest always a priest," kept him in the pulpit, to which he had no
irresistible call, and to which the accident of his career only had
led him. Had the church to which he belonged been organized with an
episcopal government, he had certainly been its primate; but in the
vague and incoherent condition of the Congregational churches, to one
of which he belonged, there was no career beyond that of the isolated
pastorate of a single congregation. In this insufficiency of interest
for an active and influential life there was only the educational
calling left to satisfy his enormous mental activity, and in this
he found his place. The future, which may look for his record in
libraries, or in the results of research, scientific or literary, will
not find him to occupy a position. He had, however, great mechanical
inventive powers, as well as a marvelous knowledge of human nature;
the former solved the problem, amongst others, of anthracite coal
combustion for American steamers. In the latter lay his qualifications
as the greatest teacher of young men of his generation.

Nobody could know him except the pupils to whom he disclosed himself,
and to whom his kindly and magnanimous nature was unreservedly open,
and they were few, and the list is fast being canceled; when we are
gone, no one will ever comprehend how he could have been what he
was. But the power he always exercised over his favorite boys was
extraordinary; any of us would have done anything permitted to human
nature to satisfy his wish. An instance of his influence, occurring
later in my life, will illustrate his power over his old pupils. When,
several years subsequent to my graduation, and on the election of
Lincoln as President, I had used what influence I could enlist with
the government (my brother being a prominent Republican) to get the
appointment as consul to Venice, which was generally given to an
artist, the principal petition in my favor went from Cambridge. It
was written by Judge Gray (now on the Supreme Court bench), headed by
Agassiz and signed by nearly every eminent literary or scientific man
in Cambridge, but it lay at the Department of State more than six
months, unnoticed. In the interim the war broke out and I had gone
home from Paris, where I was then living, to volunteer in the army;
but, being excluded by the medical requirements, and the ranks being
full,--800,000 volunteers being then enrolled,--I turned to my project
for Venice, and wrote a word to Dr. Nott, recalling his promise of
years before to use his influence in my favor, if ever it were needed.
He inclosed my letter, with one containing an indorsement of it, and
sent it to Seward, the Secretary of State, and the appointment--not
to Venice, which had just been given to Howells, but to Rome--came by
return of post.

Union was then the only university of importance not under some form
of denominational control, and for this reason had, perhaps, more than
the usual share of extreme liberalism, or atheism, as it was at that
time considered amongst the students; and one of my classmates, a man
a couple of years older than myself, and of far more than the average
intellectual power, made an active propaganda of the most advanced
opinions. He also introduced Philip James Bailey's "Festus" to our
attention, and for a time I was carried away by both. The great
revulsion from my previous straitened theological convictions was the
cause of infinite perplexity and distress. Up to that time nothing
had ever shaken me in my orthodox persuasions, and the necessity of
concealing from my mother and family my doubts and halting faith in
the old ideas made it all the more perplexing. I had to fight out
the question all alone. It was impossible to follow my classmate so
completely as to accept his conclusions and become the materialist
that he was, and so find a relative repose; and the conflict became
very grave. The entire scheme of Christianity disappeared from my
firmament; but, in the immediately previous years, I had been a reader
of Swedenborg, and I held immovably an intuition of immortality,--or,
if the term intuition be denied me, the conviction that immortality
was the foundation of human existence, grounded in my earliest
thoughts, and as clear as the sense of light,--and this never failed
me. In this respect Swedenborg helped my reason in its struggle,
though I could never see my way to the entire acceptance of his
doctrine.

My dogmatic theological education had been entirely incidental, for my
mother never discussed dogmas or doctrines, but the simple duties and
promises of religion, and my intelligence had never been, therefore,
so kept captive as to make release grateful. Christianity had never
been a doctrinal burden to me, or any form of belief inconsistent in
my mind with true Christianity. In my mother's thought there was only
one thing utterly profane, and that was self-righteousness. And there
happened to me in this conjuncture, what has in my later life been
often seen, that the modification of religious views imposed on us by
the superior force of another mind--a persuasion of what seems to be
truth as it is only seen by others' vision--could not hold its own
against the early convictions, and that a revulsion to the old faith
was sooner or later inevitable and generally healthy. The epidemic
passed, and, though it gave me great distress for the time, it made my
essential religious convictions stronger in the end. It is, I think,
Max Müller who says that no man can escape from the environment of his
early religious education. I have seen, in my experience of life and
men, many curious proofs of that law, men who have lived for many
years in the most absolute rejection of all religions, returning in
their old age to the simple faith of childhood, ending as they began.
The change of religious convictions which holds its own against all
influences is that which comes from the healthy evolution of our own
thought. At any rate, in my own case, the rationalistic revolution
completed its circle and brought me back to that simple faith to
remain in which is a reproach to no man, and the departure from which,
to be healthy, must be made on lines conformed to our better natures.
I felt the better for my excursion into new regions, and the freedom
of movement I acquired I never lost.

As I am telling the story of a phase of human life in which the study
of the religious character will be to some readers, perhaps, one of
the chief subjects of interest, and as to me the whole subject is now
purely objective, as a mental phenomenon in the life of another man
would be, I am tempted to tell a romantic incident of this period of
my evolution, because it illustrates clearly the state of mind and
sentiment developed by the peculiar education and surroundings of my
youth. In one of the winter vacations of my course, my brother Paul,
who was an ardent and sanguine proselyter in the Seventh-Day doctrine,
charged me with an expedition up the Mohawk valley as a colporteur,
to distribute Sabbath tracts, and, occasion arising, to discuss, with
those who offered, the doctrine involved. The snow was deep, and,
wading in it from house to house in all the towns as far as Utica, I
finished with a visit to the home at Whitestown, near by, of my old
friend the former preceptress of the De Ruyter Academy, with whom I
had always been a favorite, and who had taught me French (very little)
and drawing (very little more), but who was a charming and poetical
creature. I had not heard of her for years, and the latest news
was that she had become insane through a cruel disappointment in
love,--her lover having wantonly, and without offering a pretext,
broken off the engagement just before the wedding day,--and had been
sent to a lunatic asylum. I found her at home, a wretched shadow of
her old self, listless, and in a settled melancholy, which the doctors
said was incurable. She had in fact been discharged from the asylum
as a hopeless lunatic, though the violent phase of the insanity had
passed. It occurred to me that a diversion to old times would awaken
her again to a sense of the present, and I tried to draw her back to
the academy life by talking of it as if nothing had happened. That
something unwonted was passing in her mind soon became evident, and
finally she burst out with, "Why, Willie" (she had always so called me
in the old times), "didn't you know I had been crazy?" The manner, the
suddenness of the conflict between old associations and her present
state, the mingling of our old affection, for I had in my boyhood held
her very dear, as she had me, so overpowered me that I burst into
tears, and she threw her arms around me and kissed me again and again.
What the feeling which sprang up on her part was I could never quite
understand,--doubtless it was partly the delight of a sudden relief
from the old, monotonous pain, the unexpected unbending of a tense
and overborne mind and momentary obliteration of the dreary immediate
past, and partly the outburst of a passionate temperament which I had
never suspected; but on my part there arose an attachment as chivalric
as ever a knight of Arthur's time felt, yet perfectly platonic. That
she was nearly old enough to have been my mother did not in the least
matter--it was no question of love as young folks feel it; but in my
heart I offered myself a bearer of her sorrows. I had only recently
recovered from my wandering into the wilderness of doubt, and my
religious faith was as vivid as when I had been at my mother's
knee--Providence ruled, and God answered prayer. This phase of my
life, juvenile as I now perceive it to be, I respect as the most
honest in it. I honor the weakness as I cannot always what seems the
later strength. Those who read my life may put the estimate on it
which suits their creed; I only speak of it as a phenomenon of my
Puritan youth. I prayed earnestly that I might take on myself her
afflictions, if so she might be healed and come back to her right
mind. That was Friday night, for her family were "Seventh-Day
keepers," and I had gone to pass the Sabbath with them, so I stayed
two days, continuing my devotions earnestly. On Monday I went back
to my colportage, but that night I was taken with a sharp attack of
bronchitis, with high fever, and obliged to keep my room at the hotel.
The next day, finding the matter serious, I sallied out and returned
to the house of her parents, and remained there while the attack
lasted. A naturally strong constitution was my safety, and made light
of what was really a sharp attack of acute trouble, which kept me in
the house a considerable time, the care and happy charge of my friend.

What any physician of minds would have foreseen took place. She found
in the attention to her patient the diversion from all the train of
past preoccupations, and forgot in this absolutely novel situation
the old trouble. To the delight of the family she began to take an
interest in the affairs of the house, and, though for years she had
utterly neglected the most trivial attention to her dress and personal
appearance, and had shown such a determinedly suicidal disposition
that her mother had been obliged to sleep in the same bed with her to
be able to watch her effectively, she now became bright and cheerful
and seemed her old self again. From that time forward she rapidly
recovered, and when I went back to college we began a close
correspondence which was the beginning of my real literary education,
for her taste in literature was excellent, if a little sentimental,
and her criticisms were so sound that in some respects they have never
lost their effect on my way of thinking and expressing thought. She
was persuaded to come to Schenectady and pass the period of my next
vacation in our family. Her insanity absolutely disappeared, she
returned to healthy activity in her old vocation as teacher, and the
year after, to my great annoyance, married her former fiancé. I was
angry with her, not for marrying, but for marrying him after his
shameful treatment of her. She seemed to me, and to her family also,
to have thrown herself away on a man who had proved himself utterly
unworthy any woman's devotion. All my chivalry, too, seemed wasted,
and the only result of the experiment was the dissipation of an ideal,
the naïve expectation of the vicarious penalty to which I had in my
sincerity offered myself having passed away. Convinced, that I had
cured her, I was indignant at having cured her for him, but I suffered
no visitation of contempt for women, and my indignation was the
deepest feeling that remained from the experience, except the
literary impulse born of the persistent effort to interest her in my
correspondence and the consequent search for material for letters in
the details of college life and the nature around us; and the habit
of noticing and memorizing what might be of interest to others in the
most trivial incidents of life never quite left me. I became a profuse
letter-writer from inclination, and, though all the letters of
that part of my life and for years after were recalled and burnt
scrupulously, I am convinced that what literary ability I possess is
in a great degree owing to the impulse I received in that romantic
attachment.

What was, perhaps, more important, was that the vicarious offering of
myself, made in my morbid enthusiasm, and the commonplace result of
it, hastened the end of that phase of my religious experience. It was
only because my boyhood had been frozen up in those seven years of
apathy and began to thaw out in later years, when manhood should
have been taking the reins, that all that passage of childhood and
unsophisticated devotion intruded in the wrong place, to fill up the
void in the formation. My religious status, as well as my conception
of life, were only advanced to where they should have been at an
earlier period.

Atheism was at that time beginning to work strongly among the
students, and in opposition to it there began an antagonistic
evangelical movement, with prayer-meetings amongst those religiously
inclined. In my class, at this time, were several who became in after
life eminent in clerical activity, and amongst them were the brothers
Nevius, distinguished in the missionary service in the far East. I had
no liking for the prayer-meetings of the students, but I joined the
movement for holding religious services in the city almshouse, a
primitive institution which had no chaplain, and where were sent not
only the incurably poor and the incurably sick, but the idiots and
half-witted, as well as the temporarily incapacitated poor, who would
have been, in a better and more complete social organization, sent to
a hospital, which did not exist in Schenectady. With several other
students and two or three young ladies of the city we held services at
the "poorhouse" every Sunday. Short exhortations with prayers and the
singing of hymns composed the service, and I remember that one day, in
giving out a hymn in long metre, I started it to a short metre tune,
and had to go through it alone, the ladies whose business was the
musical part of the service not being able to accommodate their
measure to my leading. I made my solo as short as possible, and
finished with the ill-suppressed giggling of the girls, but my
audience of poor cripples and weak-minded were equally impressed.

No doubt the struggles with Festus and my atheistic friend, and the
partial influence of the ambient, the sincere piety of the old doctor,
which dominated the life of the college, helped to strengthen the
reaffirmation of my orthodox Christianity, and, for several years
after, I had no more question of the divine authority of the tenets of
our church, including the Seventh Day Sabbath, than I had of the laws
of nature; but the truly spiritual character of my mother's religion
saved me from becoming a bigot. If I had been trained in the dogmas of
Christianity, I have no doubt I should have then become an atheist.
Nor was I a prig. I must confess that I enjoyed the occasional larks
in which my classmates sometimes led and sometimes followed me, as
well as any of them. Our Greek professor, Doctor R., was a bit of a
snob, and the plebeians of the class, much the largest part, always
held him in ill will; and as his garden bordered on our section, and
his fowls roosted in the trees overhanging the green, we one day
decided to mulct him in a supper. That night a party of the students
of the section scaled the fence (I well remember tearing my trousers
in climbing it) and wrung the necks of four of his fowls, which we
sent into town next morning to be roasted, and which, accompanied
by sundry mince-pies and a huge bowl of eggnog, made us a luxurious
supper next midnight, the fragments being carefully--bones and bits of
pie-crusts included--deposited at the professor's front door before
daylight of next day, which happened to be Sunday. The package,
carefully made up and directed like an express parcel, was addressed
to him in all the fullness of formality, but it had rained in the
interval, and when in the morning the servant took it up, on opening
the door, the wet paper broke and the remnants of the feast bestrewed
the doorway. The boy afterwards told me that the profanity of the
professor was terrible to hear, and as he cut me two in my report of
the Greek that term, I always suspected that he comprised me in the
execration. As it happened the cut was undeserved, for there were few
men in the class who did their Greek better than I, and the cut cost
me the Phi Beta Kappa, which went to all the class whose aggregate
marks made an average per term of 98½, mine being 98¼. But as he
always held me in disrespect on account of my father's occupation, and
as assiduously paid court and gave good reports to the sons of wealthy
men, there was a mutual aversion. He gave _max_. that term to the son
of a famous quack doctor, who always came to me to be crammed for the
recitation, while I got 98. Naturally we had little respect for the
marking.

Of my college course, I retained only what held my sympathies. I never
went in for honors, or occupied myself beyond the required measure
with studies which did not _per se_ interest me. Greek and Latin, but
especially physics, the humanities, and literature enlisted all my
ambitions, and the little weekly paper which was read at the meetings
of our secret society occupied me more than was in due measure
perhaps. I took my degree of course, but not with distinction. The
majority of the family having, prior to my graduation, gathered at or
near New York city, my father and mother, having attained their
object in remaining in Schenectady, moved to New York, and I, finally
liberated for the study of art, gave myself seriously to that end.




CHAPTER V

ART STUDY IN AMERICA


During the time of my preparation for entry to college, a wandering
artist had happened to find his way to Schenectady, one of the
restless victims of his temperament, to whose unrest fate had given
other motives for change than his occupation. He was an Englishman by
the name of John Wilson, a pupil of the brothers Alfred and Edward
Chalons, fashionable London miniature painters of the early part of
the century. In years long gone by he had established himself at
St. Petersburg as a portrait painter, but, losing his wife and two
children by a flood of the Neva, which occurred during his momentary
absence in England, he abandoned Russia and went to one of the Western
States of America and gave himself up to agriculture. Here fate found
him again, and, after losing another wife and other children, he
became a wanderer, interested in everything new and strange. He had
been taken by Pitman's then new phonography, and his chief occupation
at that time was teaching it wherever at any school he could form a
class. He came to Union College, to this end, and had been recommended
to my mother for board and lodging, and she gladly availed herself of
the opportunity to get for me lessons in drawing in return for his
board. He was a constitutional reformer, a radical as radicalism was
then possible, had become an atheist with Robert Dale Owen, indignant
at the treatment accorded him by destiny, and was _au fond_ an honest
and philanthropic man. He taught me the simplest rudiments of portrait
and landscape in water-color, and of perspective, of which he was
master, and, as he failed to find a field for his phonographic
mission, I got up a small class in drawing for him, and after our
dozen lessons he went his way to new regions and I never heard from
him again. What he taught me I soon lost, except the perspective.

A little later, and while at work in my father's shop, there came in
for a piece of ironwork our local artist, a man of curious artistic
faculties, a shoemaker by trade, who had taught himself painting and
had made himself a certain position as the portrait painter of the
region. He desired to make for himself a lay-figure, and for the
articulations had conceived a new form of universal joint, which he
desired my father to put into shape. My father refused the job, as out
of the line of his work, and I volunteered to take it, stipulating for
some instruction in painting in return. The joint did not answer
when worked out, but the friendship between Sexton and myself lasted
through his life, and a truer example of the artistic nature never
came under my study. All that he knew of painting he got from books,
save for an annual visit to the exhibition of the American Academy at
New York, but his conception of the nature of art was very lofty and
correct, and had his education been in keeping with his natural gifts,
he would have taken a high position as a painter. His was one of the
most pathetic lives I can recall--a fine sensitive nature, full of the
enthusiasms of the outer world, with rare gifts in the embryonic state
and mental powers far above the average, limited in every direction,
in facilities, in education in art and in letters, and having his lot
cast in a community where, except the wife of President Nott, there
was not a single person who was capable of giving him sympathy or
artistic appreciation. Not least in the pathos of his situation was
the simplicity and humility with which he accepted himself, with
his whole nature yearning towards an ideal which he knew to be as
unattainable as the stars, without impatience or bitterness towards
men or fate. If he was not content with what was given him, no one
could see it, and he was so filled with the happiness that nature and
his limited art gave him that he had no room for discontent at the
limitations.

Happy days were those in which my leisure gave me the opportunity to
share this man's walks and make my crude sketches of his favorite
nooks and bends of our beautiful river Mohawk, and listen to his
experiences while he worked. I can see now that it was more nature
than art that evoked my enthusiasms, and that in art I felt mainly the
expression of the love of the beauty of nature. Sexton gave me some
idea of the use of oils, and from that time most of my leisure hours
and my vacant days were given to painting in an otherwise untaught
manner, copying such pictures as I could borrow, or translating
engravings into color--wretched things most certainly, but to me then,
with my crude enthusiasm, productive of greater pleasure than the
better productions of later years.

The three years of my college course had left me little room or
leisure for such studies, and at the end of them I realized that so
far as the object I had set before me was concerned, I had wasted the
years and blunted the edge of my enthusiasms. In preparation for
the career which I proposed to myself I had, however, been in
correspondence with Thomas Cole, then the leading painter of landscape
in America, and an artist to this day unrivaled in certain poetic and
imaginative gifts by any American painter. He was a curious result
of the influence of the old masters on a strongly individual English
mind, inclined to nature worship, born in England in the epoch of the
poetic English school to which Girtin, Turner, and their colleagues
belonged, and migrating to America in boyhood, early enough to become
impressed by the influence of primitive nature as a subject of art.
Self-taught in technique and isolated in his development, he became
inevitably devoted to the element of subject rather than to technical
attainment, and in the purely literary quality of art he has perhaps
been surpassed by no landscape painter of any time. His indifference
to technical qualities has left him in neglect at present, but in the
influence he had on American art, and for his part in the history of
it, he remains an important individuality now much underrated. It was
settled that I should become his pupil in the winter following my
graduation, but a few months before that he died.

At that moment there was not in the United States a single school of
art, and except Cole, who had one or two pupils when he died, there
was no competent landscape painter who accepted pupils, nor perhaps
one who was capable of teaching. Drawing masters there were here and
there, mostly in the conventional style adapted to the seminaries for
young ladies. Inman, the leading portrait painter of the day, had
taken pupils, but his powers did not extend to the treatment of
landscape, and my sympathies did not go beyond it. I applied to A.B.
Durand, then the president of our Academy, the only rival of Cole,
though in a purely naturalistic vein, and a painter of real power in
a manner quite his own, which borrowed, however, more from the Dutch
than from the Italian feeling, to which Cole inclined. Durand was
originally an engraver of the first order, and afterwards a portrait
painter, but his careful painting from nature and a sunny serenity in
his rendering of her marked him, even in the absence of imaginative
feeling, as a specialist in landscape, to which he later gave himself
entirely. His was a serene and beautiful nature, perfectly reflected
in his art, and he first showed American artists what could be done
by faithful and unaffected direct study of nature in large studies
carefully finished on the spot, though never carried to the
elaboration of later and younger painters. But he was so restrained by
an excess of humility as to his own work, and so justly diffident of
his knowledge of technique, that he could not bring himself to accept
a pupil, and I finally applied to F.E. Church, a young painter, pupil
of Cole, and for many years after the leading landscape painter of the
country. He was then in his first success, and I was his first pupil.

Church in many respects was the most remarkable painter of the
phenomena of nature I have ever known, and had he been trained in a
school of wider scope, he might have taken a place amongst the great
individualities of his art. But he had little imagination, and his
technical training had not emancipated him from an exaggerated
insistence on detail, which so completely controlled his treatment of
his subject that breadth and repose were entirely lost sight of. A
graceful composition, and most happy command of all the actual effects
of the landscape which he had seen, were his highest qualities;
his retention of the minutest details of the generic or specific
characteristics of tree, rock, or cloud was unsurpassed by the work
of any landscape painter whose work I know, and everything he knew he
rendered with a rapidity and precision which were simply inconceivable
by one who had not seen him at work. I think that his vision and
retention of even the most transitory facts of nature passing before
him must have been at the maximum of which the human mind is capable,
but he had no comprehension of the higher and broader qualities of
art. His mind seemed a camera obscura in which everything that passed
before it was recorded permanently, but he added in the rendering of
its record nothing which sprang from human emotion, or which involved
that remoulding of the perception that makes it conception, and
individual. The primrose on the river's brim he saw with a vision
as clear as that of a photographic lens, but it remained to him a
primrose and nothing more to the end. All that he did or could do was
the recording, form and color, of what had flitted past his eyes,
with unsurpassed fidelity of memory; but it left one as cold as the
painting of an iceberg. His recognition of art as distinguished from
nature was far too rudimentary to fit him for a teacher, for his love
of facts and detail blinded him to every other aspect of our relations
with nature, in the recognition of which consist the highest gifts of
the artist.

My study with Church lasted one winter, and showed me that nothing
was to be hoped for from him, and that the most intimate superficial
acquaintance with nature did not involve the perception of her more
intimate relation with art. I learned from him nothing that was worth
remembering, but I made acquaintance with a young portrait painter,
who had a studio in the same building, an Irishman named Boyle, a
pupil of Inman, whose ideas of art were of a far higher order, and to
my intercourse with him during that winter and the following summer,
which we spent together sketching in the valley of the Mohawk, I
owe the first clear ideas of what lay before me in artist life. At
Church's studio I met Edgar A. Poe, a slender, nervous, vivacious,
and extremely refined personage. But at that juncture I came across
"Modern Painters," and, like many others, wiser or otherwise, I
received from it a stimulus to nature worship, to which I was already
too much inclined, which made ineffaceable the confusion in my mind
between nature and art. Another acquaintance I made that winter was
of great importance in developing my technical abilities--that of a
well-known amateur of New York, afterwards a professional artist, Dr.
Edward Ruggles, a physician whose love of painting finally drove him
out of medicine. He had the most catholic and correct taste I had
then met, and he introduced me to William Page, the most remarkable
portrait painter in many respects America has ever produced, whose
talks on art used to make me sleepless with enthusiasm. Page was the
most brilliant talker I ever met, and a dear friend of Lowell.

Returning to Schenectady the following summer, I made my first direct
and thorough studies from nature, and amongst these was one, a view
from my window across gardens and a churchyard with the church spire
in the distance; a small study which incidentally had a most potent
effect on all my later life. It was bought in the autumn by the Art
Union of New York, and on the proceeds, thirty dollars, the first
considerable sum of money I had ever earned, I decided to go to Europe
and see what the English painters were doing. Of English art I
then knew only directly the pictures of Doughty, an early artistic
immigrant from England, and, as afterwards appeared to me, a fair
example of the school which had its lead from Constable, to whom he
had, however, no resemblance except in choice of motive. He had a
comprehension of technique possessed by none of our home painters--a
rapid and masterly execution with a scale of color limited to cool
grays, but, within this gamut, of exquisite refinement. Constant
repetitions of the same motive wore out his welcome on the part of the
American public, but his pictures had a charm which was long in losing
its power over me, and had an influence in determining me to go to
England at the first opportunity. But to see Turner's pictures was
always the chief motive, and was the one which decided me to go.

I was, in knowledge of worldly life, scarcely less a child then than
I had been when, at the age of ten, I determined to go out into the
world and make my own career, free from the obstacles I imagined to
be preventing me from following my ideals. The ever-present feeling
developed in me by the religious training of my mother, that an
overruling Providence had my life in keeping, made me quite oblivious
of or indifferent to the chances of disaster, for the assurance of
protection and leading to the best end left no place for anxieties. It
was a mental phenomenon which I now look back on with a wonder which
I think most sane people will share, that, at the age when most boys
have become men, for I graduated at twenty, I should have been capable
of going out into a strange world like one of the children of the
Children's Crusade, with an unfaltering faith that I should be led
and cared for by Providence as I had been by my parents. I had no
apprehension, from the moment that one of the ship-owners who was in
business relations with my elder brother offered me a free passage
on one of his sailing ships to Liverpool, that I should not find a
similar bridge back again; and with my thirty dollars changed into six
sovereigns, and a little valise with only a change of clothes, I went
on board the Garrick, a packet of the Black Ball line, sailing in the
last days of December, 1849. There had been a thaw and the Hudson
River was full of floating ice, which in the ebbing of the tide
endangered the shipping lying out in the stream, and the captain made
such haste to get out of the danger (the extent of which was shown by
the topmasts of an Austrian brig, showing above water where she had
been sunk by the floating ice) that the ship had her anchor apeak
before the boat which carried my brother and myself out could reach
it. We barely arrived in time for me to get aboard, the difficulty
of threading our way amongst the masses of ice making our boating
difficult. That my childish faith in Providence was a family trait
might be deduced from the fact that my brother, who had from boyhood
stood to me _in loco parentis_, had not asked me, until I was on the
point of going aboard, what my means of subsistence were, and, when
he found that I had only my six sovereigns, he told me to wait at
Liverpool for a letter of credit he would send me by the steamer which
followed.

That voyage is one of the most delightful memories of my life. I loved
the sea; and every phase of it, storm or calm, was a new joy. I had
one fellow-passenger, a German doctor of philosophy, Dr. Seemann, who
had been an ardent radical in Germany, and had been studying in
the United States the development of political intelligence under
democratic conditions, returning to his native land with the profound
conviction that democratic government was destined to be a failure.
We had hot debates on the subject, in which the doctor adduced his
conversations with the intelligent farmers of New England, whom he had
especially studied, to show that their political education was such
as to endanger the best interests of the community from its extreme
superficiality; I, with an unfaltering faith in the processes of
universal suffrage, disputed his conclusions, so hotly in fact that we
quarreled and he took one side of the quarter-deck for his promenades
and I the other. But the conditions of sea life, with a companionship
limited to two persons, are such that no quarrel that was not mortal,
or from rivalry in the affections of a woman, could endure many days,
and after a few such days we drew to the same side of the deck and
were better friends than before, but we dropped politics.

This was in January of 1850, and I am driven to curiosity as to the
subsequent career of the young German savant, who in that state of
American political evolution was capable of drawing the horoscope of a
nation, as it has been in recent times fulfilled; who saw in the crude
notions of political economy of that prosperous yesterday the germs of
the political blunders and errors of to-day. I drew his portrait, I
made a few studies of sea and sky, but for the most part the sensation
of simple existence under the conditions of illimitable freedom in
space, with no reminder of anything beyond, was sufficient for me. I
used to lie on my back on the roof of the wheel-house and look into
the sky, and try to make friends with the sea-gulls which sailed
around over me, curiously peering down with their dove-like eyes as if
to see what this thing might be. Then the nights, so luminous with the
"breeming" of the sea as we got into the Gulf Stream, and the flitting
and sudden population of the ocean, always bringing us surprises; the
more exciting and delightful storms which came on us in the region in
which they were always to be expected, and which, though we had some
that made lying in one's berth difficult, were never enough to satisfy
my desire for rough weather,--all these things filled my life so full
of the pure delight in nature that when, at the end of nearly three
weeks at sea, we came in sight of the Irish coast, I hated the land.
Life was enough under the sea conditions, and the prospect of the
return to the limitations of living amongst men was absolute pain.

We made Liverpool in twenty-one days from New York, and the steamer
which had left that port the next week did not arrive till three or
four days after, so that my waiting for the letter of credit involved
a hotel bill which nearly exhausted my money in hand. The kindly
captain, knowing my circumstances, made the hotel keeper throw off
fifty per cent. of his bill (for I went to the "captain's hotel"), and
thus I succeeded in getting to London with the money which was to have
paid my expenses for six weeks (according to the careful calculations
I had made, at the rate of a pound a week) reduced to provision for
three, after which Providence was expected to provide me with a
passage home. In these weeks I had planned to see Turner's pictures,
Copley Fielding's, with Creswick's, and all the others Ruskin had
mentioned. But the railways and hotels had never come into my
arithmetic, and that was always, and remains, my weak point. However,
the letter of credit was for fifty pounds, and so I felt justified in
my faith in Providence, my brother going to the general credit of that
account.




CHAPTER VI

ART STUDY IN ENGLAND


Arrived at Euston Station in the small hours of the morning, I bought
a penny loaf and walked the streets eating it and carrying my valise
until the day was sufficiently advanced for me to go to present a
letter of introduction given me by G.P. Putnam, the publisher, to his
agent in England, Mr. Delf, who at once took me to a lodging-house
in Bouverie Street, in which I got a room for six shillings a week,
service included, and an honest, kindly landlady to whom I still feel
indebted for the affectionate interest she took in me. I had letters
to Mr. S.C. Hall, editor of the "Art Journal," and the Rev. William
Black, pastor of the little Seventh Day Baptist Church at Millyard
in Goodmansfields, Leman Street, a very ancient and well-endowed
foundation, made by some Sabbatarian of centuries ago, with a
parsonage and provision for two sermons every Saturday; and under Mr.
Black's preaching I sat all the time I was in London. He was a man of
archaeological tastes whose researches had led him to the conviction
that the Seventh Day was the true Christian Sabbath, and to fellowship
with the congregation of Millyard. I was admitted to honorary
membership in the church, and the listening to the two dry-as-dust
sermons was compensated for by the cordial friendship of the pastor,
an invitation to dinner every Saturday, and the motherly interest of
his wife and daughters. My childhood's faith and my mother's creed
still hung so closely to me that the observances of our ancient church
were to me sacred, and the Sabbath day at Millyard still held me to
the simple ways of home. In that secluded nook, out of all the rush
and noise of London, we lived as we might have lived in an English
village; it was an _impasse_, and one who entered from the narrow and
squalid alleys which led to it was surprised to find the little square
of the old and disused graveyard, with its huge hawthorn trees and its
inclosure of the parsonage appendages, as peaceful and as far from the
world as if it had been in distant Devon.

My letter to Mr. Hall led to introductions to Leslie, Harding,
Creswick, and several minor painters, all of whom found me attentive
to the lessons they gave me on their own excellences and led me no
farther, but it also brought me into contact with a painter of a
higher and more serious order, J.B. Pyne, one of the few thinkers and
impartial critics I found amongst the English painters. Every Sunday I
went out to Pyne's house in Fulham, walking the six or seven miles
in the morning and spending the day there. Kitchen-gardens and green
fields then lay between Kensington and Fulham where are now the
museums, and there the larks sang and the hawthorn bloomed. After an
early dinner we passed the afternoon in talk on art and artists. Pyne
was one of the best talkers on art I ever knew, and a critic of very
great lucidity; his art had great qualities and as great defects, but
in comparison with some of the favorites of the public of that day he
was a giant, and in certain technical qualities he had no equal in
his generation except Turner. He had the dangerous tendency, for
an artist, of putting everything he did under the protection and
direction of a theory--a course which invariably checks the fertility
of technical resource, and which in his case had the unfortunate
effect of causing him to be regarded as a mere theorist, whose work
was done by line and rule. But I had good reason to know that Turner
thought more highly of him than the English public, and I am convinced
that as time goes on and his pictures acquire the mellowness of
tone for which he carefully calculated in his method and choice of
material, he will be more highly esteemed than in his own time, and
that the careful and systematic technique which characterized his
work, and which is so opposed to the random and hypothetically
inspired methods that are the admiration of a half-educated public,
will find its true appreciation in the future.

Of all the English artists of that day with whom I became acquainted,
Pyne impressed me as by a considerable measure the broadest thinker,
and, except Turner in his water-color, the ablest landscape painter;
old John Linnell in this respect standing nearest him in technical
power, with a more complete devotion to nature and her sentiment. In
Harding's work I took no interest; his conventions and tricks of
the brush repelled me, and generally his work left me cold and
discouraged, for this is the effect of wasted cleverness, that it
disheartens a man who, knowing that his abilities are less, finds the
achievement of cleverer men so poor in what satisfies the artist
of feeling. In it I saw an exaggeration of Pyne's defects and the
caricature of his good qualities. Creswick had a better feeling for
nature, but convention in his methods gave place to trick, and I
remember his showing me the way in which he produced detail in a
pebbly brookside, by making the surface of his canvas tacky and then
dragging over it a brush loaded with pigment which caught only on
the prominences, and did in a moment the work of an hour of faithful
painting.

A painter who taught me more than any other at that time was Edward
Wehnert, mainly known then as an illustrator, and hardly remembered
now even in that capacity. Attracted by one of his water-colors, I
went to him for lessons, which he declined to give, while really
giving me instructions informally and in the most kindly and generous
way, during the entire stay I made in London. Among all the artists I
have known, Wehnert's life was, with the exception of Sexton's, the
most pathetic. His native abilities were of a very high order, and
his education far above that which the British artist of that day
possessed. He was a pupil of Paul Delaroche, and the German blood
he had from his father gave him an imaginative element which the
Englishman in him liberated entirely from the German prescriptive
limitations, while there was just enough of the German poet in him to
give his design a sentiment which was entirely lacking in the English
figure painting of that day. He painted in both oil and water-color,
with a facility of design I have never known surpassed, making at a
single sitting, and without a model, a drawing with many figures. He
was at the moment I knew him engaged in illustrating Grimm's stories,
for a paltry compensation, but, as it seemed to me, in a spirit the
most completely concordant with the stories of all the illustrations I
have ever seen of that folk-lore.

Wehnert had several sisters, who had been accustomed to a certain ease
in life, and to maintain this all his efforts and those of a bachelor
brother were devoted, to the sacrifice of his legitimate ambitions;
he was overworked with the veriest hack-work of his profession, and
I never knew him but as a jaded man. He was a graduate of Göttingen,
widely read and well taught in all that related to his art as well as
in literature, and I used to sit much with him while he worked, and
most of my evenings were passed in the family. The sisters were women
who had been of the world, clever, accomplished, and with a restricted
and most interesting circle of friends; but over the whole family
there rested an air of tragic gravity, as if of some past which could
never be spoken of and into which I never felt inclined to inquire.
Among the memories of my first stay in London the Wehnerts awaken the
tenderest, for through many years they proved the dearest and kindest
of friends. And the hospitality of London, wherever I found access to
it, was unmeasured--the kindly feeling which showed itself to a young
and unknown student without recommendation or achievement made on me
an indelible impression. I now and then found people who asked me
where I had learned to speak English, or if all the people in the
section from which I came were as white as I was; but except in a
single case, that of a lady who proposed to make me responsible for
slavery in the United States, I never found anything but friendship
and courtesy, and generally the friendliness took the form of active
interest.

Most of my time was passed in hunting up pictures by Turner, and
of course I made the early acquaintance of Griffiths, a dealer in
pictures, who was Turner's special agent, and at whose gallery were to
be seen such of his pictures as he wished to sell,--for no inducement
could be offered which would make him dispose of some of them.
Griffiths told me that in his presence an American collector, James
Lenox, of New York, after offering Turner £5000, which was refused,
for the Old "Téméraire," offered him a blank check, which was also
rejected. Griffiths's place became one of my most common resorts,
for Griffiths was less a picture dealer than a passionate admirer of
Turner, and seemed to have drifted into his business through his love
for the artist's pictures; and to share in his admiration for Turner
was to gain his cordial friendship.

Here I first saw Ruskin and was introduced to him. I was looking at
some little early drawings of Turner, when a gentleman entered the
gallery, and, after a conversation between them, Griffiths came to
me and asked if I should not like to be presented to the author of
"Modern Painters," to which I naturally replied in the affirmative. I
could hardly believe my eyes, expecting to find in him something of
the fire, enthusiasm, and dogmatism of his book, and seeing only a
gentleman of the most gentle type, blonde, refined, and with as little
self-assertion or dogmatic tone as was possible consistently with the
holding of his own opinions; suggesting views rather than asserting
them, and as if he had not himself come to a conclusion on the subject
of conversation. A delightful and to me instructive conversation ended
in an invitation to visit his father's collection of drawings and
pictures at Denmark Hill, and later to spend the evening at his own
house in Grosvenor Street. After the lapse of forty-eight years, it
is difficult to distinguish between the incidents which took place in
this first visit to England in 1850 and those belonging to another a
little later, but my impression is very strong that it was during the
former that I spent the evening at the Grosvenor Street residence, at
which I met several artists of Ruskin's intimacy, and amongst them
G.F. Watts. I then saw Mrs. Ruskin, and I have a very vivid impression
of her personal beauty. I remember saying to a friend, to whom I spoke
of the visit just after, that she was the most beautiful wom

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/11546