Chapter XXIV: A Half-Century of American Literature 367 (3)

Neither of these descriptions exactly fitted Mr. Bancroft; his manners were really of the composite sort, and curiously suggestive of the different phases of his life. They were like that wonderful Japanese lacquer-work, made up of twenty or thirty different coats or films, usually laid on by several different workmen. There was at the foundation the somewhat formal and literal manner of the scholar, almost of the pedagogue: then one caught a glimpse of an executive, official style, that seemed to date from the period when he ordered California to be occupied; and over all there was a varnish of worldly courtesy, enhanced by an evident pleasure in being admired, and broken by an occasional outburst of rather blunt sincerity.

But he matured and mellowed well; his social life at Washington was more satisfactory to himself and others than that he led in New York; he had voluntarily transplanted himself to a community which, with all its faults and crudities, sets intellect above wealth, and readily conceded the highest place to a man like Bancroft. Foreign ministers came accredited to him as well as to the government; he was the friend of every successive administration, and had as many guests as he cared to see at his modest Sunday evening receptions. There he greeted every one cordially, aided by a wife amply gifted in the amenities. He was kind to everybody, and remembered the father or grandfather of anybody who had any such ancestors whom it was desirable to mention. In summer, at Newport, it was the same; his residence was like that described by his imagination in one of his own early poems—

“Where heaven lends her loveliest scene,
A softened air, a sky serene,
Along the shore where smiles the sea.”

Unlike most Newport “cottages,” his house was within sight of the ocean; between it and the sea lay the garden, and the “rose in Kenmure’s cap” in the Scottish ballad was not a characteristic more invariable than the same flower in Mr. Bancroft’s hand or buttonhole. His form was familiar, too, on Bellevue Avenue, taking as regularly as any old-fashioned Englishman his daily horseback exercise. At the same time he was one of the few men who were capable, even in Newport, of doing daily the day’s work; he rose fabulously early in the morning, and kept a secretary or two always employed. Since John Quincy Adams, there has not been among us such an example of laborious, self-exacting, seemingly inexhaustible old age; and, unlike Adams, Mr. Bancroft kept his social side always fresh and active, and did not have, like the venerable ex-President, to force himself out in the evening in order “to learn the art of conversation.” This combination, with his monumental literary work, will keep his memory secure. It will possibly outlive that of many men of greater inspiration, loftier aims, and sublimer qualities.

Mr. Bancroft, as an historian, combined some of the greatest merits and some of the profoundest defects ever united in a single author. His merits are obvious enough. He had great enthusiasm for his subject. He was profoundly imbued with that democratic spirit without which the history of the United States cannot be justly written. He has the graphic quality so wanting in Hildreth, and the piquancy whose absence makes Prescott too smooth. He has a style essentially picturesque, whatever may be its faults. The reader is compelled to admit that his resources in the way of preparation are inexhaustible, and that his command of them is astounding. One must follow him minutely, for instance, through the history of the War for Independence, to appreciate in full the consummate grasp of a mind which can deploy military events in a narrative as a general deploys brigades in a field. Add to this the capacity for occasional maxims to the highest degree profound and lucid, in the way of political philosophy, and you certainly combine in one man some of the greatest qualities of the historian.

Against this are to be set very grave faults. In his earlier editions there was an habitual pomposity and inflation of style which the sterner taste of his later years has so modified that we must now condone it. The same heroic revision has cut off many tame and commonplace remarks as trite as those virtuous truisms by which second-rate actors bring down the applause of the galleries at cheap theatres. Many needless philosophical digressions have shared the same fate. But many faults remain. There is, in the first place, that error so common with the graphic school of historians,—the exaggerated estimate of manuscript or fragmentary material at the expense of what is printed and permanent. In many departments of history this dependence is inevitable; but, unfortunately, Mr. Bancroft was not, except in the very earliest volumes of his history, dealing with such departments. The loose and mythical period of our history really ends with Captain John Smith. From the moment when the Pilgrims landed, the main facts of American history are to be found recorded in a series of carefully prepared documents, made by men to whom the pen was familiar, and who were exceedingly methodical in all their ways. The same is true of all the struggles which led to the Revolution, and of all those which followed. They were the work of honest-minded Anglo-Saxon men who, if they issued so much as a street hand-bill, said just what they meant, and meant precisely what they said. To fill the gaps in this solid documentary chain is, no doubt, desirable,—to fill them by every passing rumor, every suggestion of a French agent’s busy brain; but to substitute this inferior matter for the firmer basis is wrong. Much of the graphic quality of Mr. Bancroft’s writing is obtained by this means, and this portends, in certain directions, a future shrinkage and diminution in his fame.

A fault far more serious than this is one which Mr. Bancroft shared with his historical contemporaries, but in which he far exceeded any of them,—an utter ignoring of the very meaning and significance of a quotation-mark. Others of that day sinned. The long controversy between Jared Sparks and Lord Mahon grew out of this,—from the liberties taken by Sparks in editing Washington’s letters. Professor Edward T. Channing did the same thing in quoting the racy diaries of his grandfather, William Ellery, and substituting, for instance, in a passage cited as original, “We refreshed ourselves with meat and drink,” for the far racier “We refreshed our Stomachs with Beefsteaks and Grogg.” Hildreth, in quoting from the “Madison Papers,” did the same, for the sake not of propriety, but of convenience; even Frothingham made important omissions and variations, without indicating them, in quoting Hooke’s remarkable sermon, “New England’s Teares.” But Bancroft is the chief of sinners in this respect; when he quotes a contemporary document or letter, it is absolutely impossible to tell, without careful verifying, whether what he gives us between the quotation-marks is precisely what should be there, or whether it is a compilation, rearrangement, selection, or even a series of mere paraphrases of his own. It would be easy to illustrate this abundantly, especially from the Stamp Act volume; but a single instance will suffice.

When, in 1684, an English fleet sailed into Boston harbor, ostensibly on its way to attack the Dutch settlements on the Hudson, it left behind a royal commission, against whose mission of interference the colonial authorities at once protested, and they issued a paper, as one historian has said, “in words so clear and dignified as to give a foretaste of the Revolutionary state papers that were to follow a century later.” If ever there was a document in our pre-Revolutionary history that ought to be quoted precisely as it was written, or not at all, it was this remonstrance. It thus begins in Bancroft’s version, and the words have often been cited by others. He says of the colony of Massachusetts: “Preparing a remonstrance, not against deeds of tyranny, but the menace of tyranny, not against actual wrong, but against a principle of wrong, on the 25th of October, it thus addressed King Charles II.” The alleged address is then given, apparently in full, and then follows the remark, “The spirit of the people corresponded with this address.” It will hardly be believed that there never was any such address, and that no such document was ever in existence as that so formally cited here. Yet any one who will compare Bancroft’s draft with the original in the Records of Massachusetts (volume iv, part 2, pages 168-169) will be instantly convinced of this. Bancroft has simply taken phrases and sentences here and there from a long document and rearranged, combined, and, in some cases, actually paraphrased them in his own way. Logically and rhetorically the work is his own. The colonial authorities adopted their own way of composition, and he adopted his. In some sentences we have Bancroft, not Endicott; the nineteenth century, not the seventeenth. Whether the transformation is an improvement or not is not the question; the thing cited is not the original. An accurate historian would no more have issued such a restatement under the shelter of quotation-marks than an accurate theologian would have rewritten the Ten Commandments and read his improved edition from the pulpit. And it is a curious fact that while Mr. Bancroft has amended so much else in his later editions, he has left this passage untouched, and still implies an adherence to the tradition that this is the way to write history.

It is also to be noted that the evil is doubled when this practice is combined with the other habit, already mentioned, of relying largely upon manuscript authorities. If an historian garbles, paraphrases, and rearranges when he is dealing with matter accessible to all, how much greater the peril when he is dealing with what is in written documents held under his own lock and key. It is not necessary to allege intentional perversion, but we are, at the very least, absolutely at the mercy of an inaccurate habit of mind. The importance of this point is directly manifested on opening the leaves of Mr. Bancroft’s last and perhaps most valuable book, “The History of the Constitution.” The most important part of this book consists, by concession of all, in the vast mass of selections from the private correspondence of the period: for instance, of M. Otto, the French Ambassador. We do not hesitate to say that, if tried by the standard of Mr. Bancroft’s previous literary methods, this mass of correspondence, though valuable as suggestion, is worthless as authority. Until it has been carefully collated and compared with the originals, we do not know that a paragraph or a sentence of it is left as the author wrote it; the system of paraphrase previously exhibited throws the shadow of doubt over all. No person can safely cite one of these letters in testimony; no person knows whether any particular statement contained in it comes to us in the words of its supposed author or of Mr. Bancroft. It is no answer to say that this loose method was the method of certain Greek historians; if Thucydides composed speeches for his heroes, it was at least known that he prepared them, and there was not the standing falsehood of a quotation-mark.

A drawback quite as serious is to be found in this, that Mr. Bancroft’s extraordinary labors in old age were not usually devoted to revising the grounds of his own earlier judgments, but to perfecting his own style of expression, and to weaving in additional facts at those points which especially interested him. Professor Agassiz used to say that the greatest labor of the student of biology came from the enormous difficulty of keeping up with current publications and the proceedings of societies; a man could carry on his own observations, but he could not venture to publish them without knowing all the latest statements made by other observers. Mr. Bancroft had to encounter the same obstacle in his historical work, and it must be owned that he sometimes ignored it. Absorbed in his own great stores of material, he often let the work of others go unobserved. It would be easy to multiply instances. Thus, the controversies about Verrazzano’s explorations were conveniently settled by omitting his name altogether; there was no revision of the brief early statement that the Norse sagas were “mythological,” certainly one of the least appropriate adjectives that could have been selected; Mr. Bancroft never even read—up to within a few years of his death, at any rate—the important monographs of Varnhagen in respect to Amerigo Vespucci; he did not keep up with the publications of the historical societies. Laboriously revising his whole history in 1876, and almost rewriting it for the edition of 1884, he allowed the labors of younger investigators to go on around him unobserved. The consequence is that much light has been let in upon American history in directions where he has not so much as a window; and there are points where his knowledge, vast as it is, will be found to have been already superseded. In this view, that cannot be asserted of him which the late English historian, Mr. J. R. Green, proudly and justly claimed for himself: “I know what men will say of me—he died learning.” But Mr. Bancroft at least died laboring, and in the harness.

Mr. Bancroft was twice married, first to Miss Sarah H. Dwight, who died June 26, 1837, and in the following year to Mrs. Elizabeth (Davis) Bliss. By the first marriage he had several children, of whom John Chandler (Harvard, 1854) died in Europe, and George (Harvard, 1856) has spent most of his life in foreign countries.

X

CHARLES ELIOT NORTON

CHARLES ELIOT NORTON

It is a tradition in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, that Howells used to exult, on arriving from his Western birthplace, in having at length met for the first time, in Charles Eliot Norton, the only man he had ever seen who had been cultivated up to the highest point of which he was capable. To this the verdict of all Cambridge readily assented. What the neighbors could not at that time foresee was that the man thus praised would ever live to be an octogenarian, or that in doing so he would share those attractions of constantly increasing mildness and courtesy which are so often justly claimed for advancing years. There was in him, at an earlier period, a certain amount of visible self-will, and a certain impatience with those who dissented from him,—he would not have been his father’s son had it been otherwise. But these qualities diminished, and he grew serener and more patient with others as the years went on. Happy is he who has lived long enough to say with Goethe, “It is only necessary to grow old to become more indulgent. I see no fault committed which I have not committed myself.” This milder and more genial spirit increased constantly as Norton grew older, until it served at last only to make his high-bred nature more attractive.

He was born in Cambridge, November 16, 1827, and died in the very house where he was born, October 21, 1908. He was descended, like several other New England authors, from a line of Puritan clergymen. He was the son of Professor Andrews Norton, of Harvard University, who was descended from the Rev. John Norton, born in Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1651. The mother of the latter was the daughter of Emanuel Downing, and the niece of Governor John Winthrop. Mrs. Bradstreet, the well-known Puritan poetess, was also an ancestress of Charles Norton. His mother, Mrs. Caroline (Eliot) Norton, had also her ancestry among the most cultivated families in New England, the name of Eliot having been prominent for successive generations in connection with Harvard College. His parents had a large and beautiful estate in Cambridge, and were (if my memory serves me right) the one family in Cambridge that kept a carriage,—a fact the more impressed upon remembrance because it bore the initials “A. & C. N.” upon the panels, the only instance I have ever seen in which the two joint proprietorships were thus expressed. This, and the fact that I learned by heart in childhood Wordsworth’s poem, “The White Doe of Rylstone, or The Fate of the Nortons,” imparted to my youthful mind a slight feeling of romance about the Cambridge household of that name, which was not impaired by the fact that our parents on both sides were intimate friends, that we lived in the same street (now called Kirkland Street), and that I went to dancing-school at the Norton house. It is perhaps humiliating to add that I disgraced myself on the very first day by cutting off little Charlie’s front hair as a preliminary to the dancing lesson.

The elder Professor Norton was one of the most marked characters in Cambridge, and, although never a clergyman, was professor in the Theological School. It was said of him by George Ripley, with whom he had a bitter contest, that “He often expressed rash and hasty judgments in regard to the labors of recent or contemporary scholars, consulting his prejudices, as it would seem, rather than competent authority. But in his own immediate department of sacred learning he is entitled to the praise of sobriety of thought and profoundness of investigation” (Frothingham’s “Ripley,” 105). He was also a man of unusual literary tastes, and his “Select Journal of Foreign Periodical Literature,” although too early discontinued, took distinctly the lead of all American literary journals up to that time.

The very beginning of Charles Norton’s career would seem at first sight singularly in contrast with his later pursuits, and yet doubtless had formed, in some respects, an excellent preparation for them. Graduating at Harvard in 1846, and taking a fair rank at graduation, he was soon after sent into a Boston counting-house to gain a knowledge of the East India trade. In 1849 he went as supercargo on a merchant ship bound for India, in which country he traveled extensively, and returned home through Europe in 1851. There are few more interesting studies in the development of literary individuality than are to be found in the successive works bearing Norton’s name, as one looks through the list of them in the Harvard Library. The youth who entered upon literature anonymously, at the age of twenty-five, as a compiler of hymns under the title of “Five Christmas Hymns” in 1852, and followed this by “A Book of Hymns for Young Persons” in 1854, did not even flinch from printing the tragically Calvinistic verse which closes Addison’s famous hymn, beginning “The Lord my pasture shall prepare,” with a conclusion so formidable as death’s “gloomy horrors” and “dreadful shade.” In 1855 he edited, with Dr. Ezra Abbot, his father’s translations of the Gospels with notes (2 vols.), and his “Evidences of the Genuineness of the Gospels” (3 vols.). Charles Norton made further visits to Europe in 1855-57, and again resided there from 1868 until 1873; during which time his rapidly expanding literary acquaintanceships quite weaned his mind from the early atmosphere of theology.

Although one of the writers in the very first number of the “Atlantic Monthly,” he had no direct part in its planning. He wrote to me (January 9, 1899), “I am sorry that I can tell you nothing about the _primordia_ of the ‘Atlantic.’ I was in Europe in 1856-57, whence I brought home some MSS. for the new magazine.” It appears from his later statement in the Anniversary Number that he had put all these manuscripts by English authors in a trunk together, but that this trunk and all the manuscripts were lost, except one accidentally left unpacked, which was a prose paper by James Hannay on Douglas Jerrold, “who is hardly,” as Norton justly says, “to be reckoned among the immortals.” Hannay is yet more thoroughly forgotten. But this inadequate service in respect to foreign material was soon more than balanced, as one sees on tracing the list of papers catalogued under Norton’s name in the Atlantic Index.

To appreciate the great variety and thorough preliminary preparation of Norton’s mind, a student must take one of the early volumes of the “Atlantic Monthly” and see how largely he was relied upon for literary notices. If we examine, for instance, the fifth volume (1860), we find in the first number a paper on Clough’s “Plutarch’s Lives,” comprising ten pages of small print in double columns. There then follow in the same volume papers on Hodson’s “Twelve Years of a Soldier’s Life in India,” on “Friends in Council,” on Brooks’s “Sermons,” on Trollope’s “West Indies and the Spanish Main,” on “Captain John Brown,” on Vernon’s “Dante,” and one on “Model Lodging-Houses in Boston.” When we remember that his “Notes of Travel and Study in Italy” was also published in Boston that same year, being reviewed by some one in a notice of two pages in this same volume of the “Atlantic,” we may well ask who ever did more of genuine literary work in the same amount of time. This was, of course, before he became Professor in the college (1874), and his preoccupation in that way, together with his continuous labor on his translations of Dante, explains why there are comparatively few entries under his name in Atlantic Indexes for later years. Again, he and Lowell took charge of the “North American Review” in 1864, and retained it until 1868, during which period Norton unquestionably worked quite as hard as before, if we may judge by the collective index to that periodical.

It is to be noticed, however, that his papers in the “North American” are not merely graver and more prolonged, but less terse and highly finished, than those in the “Atlantic”; while in the development of his mind they show even greater freedom of statement. He fearlessly lays down, for instance, the following assertion, a very bold one for that period: “So far as the most intelligent portion of society at the present day is concerned, the Church in its actual constitution is an anachronism. Much of the deepest and most religious life is led outside its wall, and there is a constant and steady increase in those who not only find the claims of the Church inconsistent with spiritual liberty, but also find its services ill adapted to their wants.... It becomes more and more a simple assemblage of persons gathered to go through with certain formal ceremonies, the chief of which consists in listening to a man who is seldom competent to teach.” It must be remembered that the expression of such opinions to-day, when all his charges against the actual Church may be found similarly stated by bishops and doctors of divinity, must have produced a very different impression when made forty years ago by a man of forty or thereabouts, who occupied twenty pages in saying it, and rested in closing upon the calm basis, “The true worship of God consists in the service of his children and devotion to the common interests of men.” It may be that he who wrote these words never held a regular pew in any church or identified himself, on the other hand, with any public heretical organization, even one so moderate as the Free Religious Association. Yet the fact that he devoted his Sunday afternoons for many years to talking and Scripture reading in a Hospital for Incurables conducted by Roman Catholics perhaps showed that it was safer to leave such a man to go on his own course and reach the kingdom of heaven in his own way.

Norton never wrote about himself, if it could be avoided, unless his recollections of early years, as read before the Cambridge Historical Society, and reported in the second number of its proceedings, may be regarded as an exception. Something nearest to this in literary self-revelation is to be found, perhaps, in his work entitled “Letters of John Ruskin,” published in 1904, and going back to his first invitation from the elder Ruskin in 1855. This was on Norton’s first direct trip to Europe, followed by a correspondence in which Ruskin writes to him, February 25, 1861, “You have also done me no little good,” and other phrases which show how this American, nine years younger than himself, had already begun to influence that wayward mind. Their correspondence was suspended, to be sure, by their difference of attitude on the American Civil War; but it is pleasant to find that after ten months of silence Ruskin wrote to Norton again, if bitterly. Later still, we find successive letters addressed to Norton—now in England again—in this loving gradation, “Dear Norton,” “My dearest Norton,” “My dear Charles,” and “My dearest Charles,” and thenceforth the contest is won. Not all completed, however, for in the last years of life Ruskin addressed “Darling Charles,” and the last words of his own writing traced in pencil “From your loving J. R.”

I have related especially this one touching tale of friendship, because it was the climax of them all, and the best illustration of the essential Americanism of Norton’s career.

He indeed afforded a peculiar and almost unique instance in New England, not merely of a cultivated man who makes his home for life in the house where he was born, but of one who has recognized for life the peculiar associations of his boyhood and has found them still the best. While Ruskin was pitying him for being doomed to wear out his life in America, Norton with pleasure made his birthplace his permanent abode, and fully recognized the attractions of the spot where he was born. “What a fine microcosm,” he wrote to me (January 9, 1899), “Cambridge and Boston and Concord made in the 40’s.” Norton affords in this respect a great contrast to his early comrade, William Story, who shows himself in his letters wholly detached from his native land, and finds nothing whatever in his boyhood abode to attract him, although it was always found attractive, not merely by Norton, but by Agassiz and Longfellow, neither of whom was a native of Cambridge.

The only safeguard for a solitary literary workman lies in the sequestered house without a telephone. This security belonged for many years to Norton, until the needs of a growing family made him a seller of land, a builder of a high-railed fence, and at last, but reluctantly, a subscriber to the telephone. It needs but little study of the cards bearing his name in the catalogue of the Harvard Library to see on how enormous a scale his work has been done in this seclusion. It is then only that one remembers his eight volumes of delicately arranged scrap-books extending from 1861 to 1866, and his six volumes of “Heart of Oak” selections for childhood. There were comparatively few years of his maturer life during which he was not editor of something, and there was also needed much continuous labor in taking care of his personal library. When we consider that he had the further responsibility of being practically the literary executor or editor of several important men of letters, as of Carlyle, Ruskin, Lowell, Curtis, and Clough; and that in each case the work was done with absolute thoroughness; and that even in summer he became the leading citizen of a country home and personally engaged the public speakers who made his rural festals famous, it is impossible not to draw the conclusion that no public man in America surpassed the sequestered Norton in steadfastness of labor.

It being made my duty in June, 1904, to read a poem before the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa, I was tempted to include a few verses about individual graduates, each of which was left, according to its subject, for the audience to guess. The lines referring to Norton were as follows:—

“There’s one I’ve watched from childhood, free of guile,
His man’s firm courage and his woman’s smile.
His portals open to the needy still,
He spreads calm sunshine over Shady Hill.”

The reference to the combined manly and womanly qualities of Norton spoke for itself, and won applause even before the place of residence was uttered; and I received from Norton this recognition of the little tribute:—

ASHFIELD, 2 July, 1904.

MY DEAR HIGGINSON,—Your friendly words about me in your Phi
Beta poem give me so much pleasure that I cannot refrain from
thanking you for them. I care for them specially as a memorial
of our hereditary friendship. They bring to mind my Mother’s
affection for your Mother, and for Aunt Nancy, who was as
dear an Aunt to us children at Shady Hill as she was to you
and your brothers and sisters. What dear and admirable women!
What simple, happy lives they led! No one’s heart will be more
deeply touched by your poem than mine.

One most agreeable result of Norton’s Cambridge boyhood has not been generally recognized by those who have written about him. His inherited estate was so large that he led a life absolutely free in respect to the study of nature, and as Lowell, too, had the same advantage, they could easily compare notes. In answer to a criticism of mine with reference to Longfellow’s poem, “The Herons of Elmwood,” on my theory that these herons merely flew over Elmwood and only built their nests in what were then the dense swamps east of Fresh Pond, he writes to me (January 4, 1899): “I cannot swear that I ever saw a heron’s nest at Elmwood. But Lowell told me of their nesting there, and only a few weeks ago Mrs. Burnett told me of the years when they had built in the pines and of the time of their final desertion of the place.” To this he adds in a note dated five days later: “As to the night-herons lighting on pines, for many years they were in the habit of lighting and staying for hours upon mine and then flying off towards the [Chelsea] beach.” This taste accounts for the immense zest and satisfaction with which Norton edited a hitherto unknown manuscript of the poet Gray’s on natural history, with admirable illustrations taken from the original book, seeming almost incredibly accurate from any but a professional naturalist, the book being entitled, “The Poet Gray as a Naturalist with Selections from His Notes on the Systema Naturæ of Linnæus with Facsimiles of Some of his Drawings.”

In the Charles Eliot Norton number of the “Harvard Graduates’ Magazine” commemorating his eightieth birthday, Professor Palmer, with that singular felicity which characterizes him, says of Norton: “He has been an epitome of the world’s best thought brought to our own doors and opened for our daily use.” Edith Wharton with equal felicity writes from Norton’s well-known dwelling at Ashfield, whose very name, “High Pasture,” gives a signal for what follows:—

“Come up—come up; in the dim vale below
The autumn mist muffles the fading trees,
But on this keen hill-pasture, though the breeze
Has stretched the thwart boughs bare to meet the snow,
Night is not, autumn is not—but the flow
Of vast, ethereal and irradiate seas,
Poured from the far world’s flaming boundaries
In waxing tides of unimagined glow.

“And to that height illumined of the mind
He calls us still by the familiar way,
Leaving the sodden tracks of life behind,
Befogged in failure, chilled with love’s decay—
Showing us, as the night-mists upward wind,
How on the heights is day and still more day.”

But I must draw to a close, and shall do this by reprinting the very latest words addressed by this old friend to me; these being written very near his last days. Having been away from Cambridge all summer, I did not know that he had been at Cambridge or ill, and on my writing to him received this cheerful and serene answer, wholly illustrative of the man, although the very fact that it was dictated was sadly ominous:—

SHADY HILL, CAMBRIDGE, MASS., 6 October, 1908.

MY DEAR HIGGINSON,—Your letter the other day from Ipswich gave
me great pleasure....

It had never occurred to me that you were associated with
Ipswich through your Appleton relatives. My association with
the old town, whose charm has not wholly disappeared under the
hard hoof of the invader, begins still earlier than yours,
for the William Norton who landed there in 1636 was my direct
ancestor; and a considerable part of his pretty love story
seems to have been transacted there. I did not know the story
until I came upon it by accident, imbedded in some of the
volumes of the multifarious publications of our historical
society. It amused me to find that John Norton, whose
reputation is not for romance or for soft-heartedness, took an
active interest in pleading his brother’s cause with Governor
Winthrop, whose niece, Lucy Downing, had won the susceptible
heart of W. N.

My summer was a very peaceful and pleasant one here in my old
home till about six weeks ago, when I was struck down ... which
has left me in a condition of extreme muscular feebleness, but
has not diminished my interest in the world and its affairs.
Happily my eyes are still good for reading, and I have fallen
back, as always on similar occasions, on Shakespeare and Scott,
but I have read one or two new books also, the best of which,
and a book of highest quality, is the last volume of Morley’s
essays.

But I began meaning only to thank you for your pleasant note
and to send a cheer to you from my slower craft as your gallant
three-master goes by it with all sails set....

Always cordially yours,