Chapter C: E. Norton

XI

EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN

EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN

The sudden death of Edmund Clarence Stedman at New York on January 18, 1908, came with a strange pathos upon the readers of his many writings, especially as following so soon upon that of his life-long friend and compeer, Aldrich. Stedman had been for some years an invalid, and had received, in his own phrase, his “three calls,” that life would soon be ended. He was born at Hartford, Connecticut, on October 8, 1833, and was the second son of Colonel Edmund Burke Stedman and his wife Elizabeth Clement (Dodge) Stedman. His great-grandfather was the Reverend Aaron Cleveland, Jr., a Harvard graduate of 1735, and a man of great influence in his day, who died in middle life under the hospitable roof of Benjamin Franklin. Stedman’s mother was a woman of much literary talent, and had great ultimate influence in the training of her son, although she was early married again to the Honorable William B. Kinney, who was afterwards the United States Minister to Turin. Her son, being placed in charge of a great-uncle, spent his childhood in Norwich, Connecticut, and entered Yale at sixteen, but did not complete his course there, although in later life he was restored to his class membership and received the degree of Master of Arts. He went early into newspaper work in Norwich and then in New York, going to the front for a time as newspaper correspondent during the Civil War. He abandoned journalism after ten years or thereabouts, and became a member of the New York Stock Exchange without giving up his literary life, a combination apt to be of doubtful success. He married, at twenty, Laura Hyde Woodworth, who died before him, as did one of his sons, leaving only one son and a granddaughter as his heirs. His funeral services took place at the Church of the Messiah on January 21, 1908, conducted by the Reverend Dr. Robert Collyer and the Reverend Dr. Henry van Dyke.

Those who happen to turn back to the number of the “Atlantic Monthly” for January, 1898, will read with peculiar interest a remarkable paper entitled “Our Two Most Honored Poets.” It bears no author’s name, even in the Index, but is what we may venture to call, after ten years, a singularly penetrating analysis of both Aldrich and Stedman. Of the latter it is said: “His rhythmic sense is subtle, and he often attains an aerial waywardness of melody which is of the very essence of the lyric gift.” It also remarks most truly and sadly of Stedman that he “is of those who have suffered the stress of the day.” The critic adds: “Just now we felt grateful to Mr. Aldrich for putting all this [that is, life’s tragedies] away in order that the clarity and sweetness of his art might not suffer; now we feel something like reverence for the man [Mr. Stedman] who, in conditions which make for contentment and acquiescence, has not been able to escape these large afflictions.” But these two gifted men have since passed away, Aldrich from a career of singular contentment, Stedman after ten years of almost constant business failure and a series of calamities relating to those nearest and dearest.

One of the most prominent men in the New York literary organizations, and one who knew Stedman intimately, writes me thus in regard to the last years of his life: “As you probably know, Stedman died poor. Only a few days ago he told me that after paying all the debts hanging over him for years from the business losses caused by ⸺’s mismanagement, he had not enough to live on, and must keep on with his literary work. For this he had various plans, of which our conversations developed only a possible rearrangement of his past writings; an article now and then for the magazines (one, I am told, he left completed); and reminiscences of his old friends among men of letters—for which last he had, during eight months past, been overhauling letters and papers, but had written nothing. He was ailing, he said—had a serious heart affection which troubled him for years, and he found it a daily struggle to keep up with the daily claims on his time. You know what he was, in respect of letters,—and letters. He could always say ‘No’ with animation; but in the case of claims on his time by poets and other of the writing class, he never could do the negative. He both liked the claims and didn’t. The men who claimed were dear to him, partly because he knew them, partly because he was glad to know them. He wore himself quite out. His heart was exhausted by his brain. It was a genuine case of heart-failure to do what the head required.”

There lies before me a mass of private letters to me from Stedman, dating back to November 2, 1873, when he greeted me for the first time in a kinship we had just discovered. We had the same great-grandfather, though each connection was through the mother, we being alike great-grandchildren of the Reverend Aaron Cleveland, Jr., from whom President Grover Cleveland was also descended. At the time of this mutual discovery Stedman was established in New York, and although I sometimes met him in person, I can find no letters from him until after a period of more than ten years, when he was engaged in editing his Library of American Literature. He wrote to me afterwards, and often with quite cousinly candor,—revealing frankly his cares, hopes, and sorrows, but never with anything coarse or unmanly. All his enterprises were confided to me so far as literature was concerned, and I, being nearly ten years older, felt free to say what I thought of them. I wished, especially, however, to see him carry out a project of translations from the Greek pastoral poetry of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus. The few fragments given at the end of his volumes had always delighted me and many other students, while his efforts at the “Agamemnon” of Æschylus dealt with passages too formidable in their power for any one but Edward FitzGerald to undertake.

After a few years of occasional correspondence, there came a lull. Visiting New York rarely, I did not know of Stedman’s business perplexities till they came upon me in the following letter, which was apparently called out by one of mine written two months before.

71 West 54th Street, NEW YORK, July 12th, ’82.

MY DEAR COLONEL,—I had gone over with “the majority” [that is,
to Europe], when your friendly card of May 9th was written,
and it finally reached me at Venice. In that city of light,
air, and heavenly noiselessness, my son and myself at last had
settled ourselves in ideal rooms, overlooking the Grand Canal.
We had seclusion, the Molo, the Lagoon, and a good café, and
pure and cheap Capri wine. Our books and papers were unpacked
for the first time, and I was ready to make an end of the big
and burdensome book which I ought to have finished a year ago.
_Dis aliter visum!_ The next morning I was awakened to receive
news, by wire, of a business loss which brought me home,
through the new Gothard tunnel and by the first steamer. Here I
am, patching up other people’s blunders, with the thermometer
in the nineties. I have lived through worse troubles, but
am in no very good humor. Let me renew the amenities of
life, by way of improving my disposition: and I’ll begin by
thanking you for calling my attention to the error _in re_
Palfrey—which, of course, I shall correct. Another friend has
written me to say that Lowell’s father was a Unitarian—not a
Congregationalist. But Lowell himself told me, the other day,
that his father never would call himself a Unitarian, and that
he was old-fashioned in his home tenets and discipline. Mr. L.
[Lowell] was under pretty heavy pressure, as you know, when I
saw him, but holding his own with some composure—for a poet.
Again thanking you, I am,

Always truly yrs.,

E. C. STEDMAN.

This must have been answered by some further expression of solicitude, for this reply came, two months later,—

University Club, 370 Fifth Avenue, NEW YORK,
Sunday, Sept. 16, 1883.

MY DEAR HIGGINSON,—There _is_ a good deal, say what you will,
in “moral support.” I have proved it during the last few weeks:
’twould have been hard to get through with them, but for just
such words as yours. And I have had them in such abundance
that, despite rather poor displays of human nature in a sample
of my own manufacture, I am less than ever a pessimist.

As for that which Sophocles pronounced the father of
meanness—πενία—both my wife and myself have been used to it
nearly all our lives, and probably shall have, now, to renew
our old acquaintance with it. Though somewhat demoralized by a
few years of Philistine comfort—the _Persicos apparatus_, &c.—I
think we shall get along with sufficient dignity.

We have suffered more, however, than the money-loss, bad as
that is. And hence we are doubly grateful to those who, like
yourself, send a cheery voice to us at just this time.

Ever sincerely yrs.,

EDMUND C. STEDMAN.

During the next few years we had ample correspondence of a wholly literary and cheerful tone. He became engaged upon his Library of American Literature with a congenial fellow worker, Miss Ellen Hutchinson, and I was only one of many who lent a hand or made suggestions. He was working very hard, and once wrote that he was going for a week to his boyhood home to rest. During all this period there was, no doubt, the painful business entanglement in the background, but there was also in the foreground the literary work whose assuaging influence only one who has participated in it can understand. Then came another blow in the death of his mother, announced to me as follows:—

44 East 26th St., NEW YORK, Dec. 8th, 1889.

MY DEAR HIGGINSON,—Yes: I have been through a kind of Holy
Week, and have come out in so incorporeal a state that I strive
painfully, though most gratefully, to render thanks to some, at
least, of my beautiful mother’s friends and mine who have taken
note of her departure. I have always wished that she and you
could know more of each other—though nothing of yours escaped
her eager taste and judgment, for she was not only a natural
critic, but a very _clanswoman_, with a most loyal faith in
her blood and yours. Most of all, she was a typical woman, an
intensely human one, to the last, though made of no common
clay. She was of an age to die, and I am glad that her fine
intelligence was spared a season of dimness. Still, _I_ have
suffered a loss, and doubtless one that will last a lifetime.

Sincerely yours,

E. C. STEDMAN.

The laborious volumes of literary selections having been completed, there followed, still under the same pressure, another series of books yet more ambitious. His “Victorian Poets” (1875, thirteenth edition 1887) was followed by the “Poets of America” (1885), “A Victorian Anthology” (1895), and “An American Anthology” (1900). These books were what gave him his fame, the two former being original studies of literature, made in prose; and the two latter being collections of poetry from the two nations.

If we consider how vast a labor was represented in all those volumes, it is interesting to revert to that comparison between Stedman and his friend Aldrich with which this paper began. Their literary lives led them apart; that of Aldrich tending always to condensation, that of Stedman to expansion. As a consequence, Aldrich seemed to grow younger and younger with years and Stedman older; his work being always valuable, but often too weighty, “living in thoughts, not breaths,” to adopt the delicate distinction from Bailey’s “Festus.” There is a certain worth in all that Stedman wrote, be it longer or shorter, but it needs a good deal of literary power to retain the attention of readers so long as some of his chapters demand. Opening at random his “Poets of America,” one may find the author deep in a discussion of Lowell, for instance, and complaining of that poet’s prose or verse. “Not compactly moulded,” Stedman says, even of much of Lowell’s work. “He had a way, moreover, of ‘dropping’ like his own bobolink, of letting down his fine passages with odd conceits, mixed metaphors, and licenses which, as a critic, he would not overlook in another. To all this add a knack of coining uncouth words for special tints of meaning, when there are good enough counters in the language for any poet’s need.” These failings, Stedman says, “have perplexed the poet’s friends and teased his reviewers.” Yet Lowell’s critic is more chargeable with diffuseness than is Lowell himself in prose essays, which is saying a good deal. Stedman devotes forty-five pages to Lowell and thirty-nine even to Bayard Taylor, while he gives to Thoreau but a few scattered lines and no pretense at a chapter. There are, unquestionably, many fine passages scattered through the book, as where he keenly points out that the first European appreciation of American literature was “almost wholly due to grotesque and humorous exploits—a welcome such as a prince in his breathing-hour might give to a new-found jester or clown”; and when he says, in reply to English criticism, that there is “something worth an estimate in the division of an ocean gulf, that makes us like the people of a new planet.”

Turning back to Stedman’s earlier book, the “Victorian Poets,” one finds many a terse passage, as where he describes Landor as a “royal Bohemian in art,” or compares the same author’s death in Florence at ninety, a banished man, to “the death of some monarch of the forest, most untamed when powerless.” Such passages redeem a book from the danger of being forgotten, but they cannot in the long run save it from the doom which awaits too great diffuseness in words. During all this period of hard work, he found room also for magazine articles, always thoroughly done. Nowhere is there a finer analysis, on the whole, of the sources of difficulty in Homeric translation than will be found in Stedman’s review of Bryant’s translation of Homer, and nowhere a better vindication of a serious and carefully executed book (“Atlantic Monthly,” May, 1872). He wrote also an admirable volume of lectures on the “Nature and Elements of Poetry” for delivery at Johns Hopkins University.

As years went on, our correspondence inevitably grew less close. On March 10, 1893, he wrote, “I am so driven at this season, ‘let alone’ financial worries, that I have to write letters when and where I can.” Then follows a gap of seven years; in 1900 his granddaughter writes on October 25, conveying affectionate messages from him; two years after, April 2, 1903, he writes himself in the same key, then adds, “Owing to difficulties absolutely beyond my control, I have written scarcely a line for myself since the Yale bicentennial [1901]”; and concludes, “I am very warmly your friend and kinsman.” It was a full, easy, and natural communication, like his old letters; but it was four years later when I heard from him again as follows, in a letter which I will not withhold, in spite of what may be well regarded as its over-sensitiveness and somewhat exaggerated tone.

2643 Broadway, NEW YORK CITY,
Evening, March 20th, 1907.

MY DEAR KINSMAN,—Although I have given you no reason to be
assured of it, you are still just the same to me in my honor
and affection—you are never, and you never have been, otherwise
in my thoughts than my kinsman (by your first recognition of
our consanguinity) and my friend; yes, and early teacher, for I
long ago told you that it was your essays that confirmed me, in
my youth, in the course I chose for myself.

I am going on to Aldrich’s funeral, and with a rather lone
and heavy heart, since I began life here in New York with
him before the Civil War, and had every expectation that he
would survive me: not wholly on the score of my seniority,
but because I have had my “three calls” and more, and because
he has ever been so strong and young and debonair. Health,
happiness, ease, travel, all “things _waregan_,” seemed
his natural right. If I, too, wished for a portion of his
felicities, I never envied one to whom they came by the very
fitness of things. And I grieve the more for his death, because
it seems to violate that fitness.

Now, I can’t think of meeting you on Friday without first
making this poor and inadequate attempt to set one thing
right. Your latest letter—I _was_, at least, moved by it to
address myself at once to a full reply, but was myself attacked
that day so sorely by the grippe that I went to bed before
completing it and was useless for weeks; the letter showed
me that you thought, as well you might, that I had been hurt
or vexed by something you had unwittingly done or written. I
can say little to-night but to confess that no act, word, or
writing, of yours from first to last has not seemed to contain
all the friendship, kindness, recognition, that I could ever
ask for.... Perhaps I have the ancestral infirmity of clinging
to my fealties for good and all; but, as I say, you are my
creditor in every way, and I constantly find myself in sympathy
with your writings, beliefs, causes, judgments.—Now I recall
it, the very choice you made of a little lyric of mine as
the one at my “high-water” mark gave me a fine sense of your
comprehension—it seemed to me a case of _rem acu tetigit_. I
am thoroughly satisfied to have one man—and that man _you_—so
quick to see just where I felt that I had been fortunate....

For some years, I venture to remind you, you have seen scarcely
anything of mine in print. Since 1900 I have had three long and
disabling illnesses, from two of which it was not thought I
could recover. Between these, what desperate failure of efforts
to “catch up.” Oh, I can’t tell you, the books, the letters,
the debts, the broken contracts. Then the deaths of my wife and
my son, and all the sorrows following; the break-up of my home,
and the labor of winding up so much without aid. But from all
the rack I have always kept, separated on my table, all your
letters and remembrances—each one adding more, in my mind, to
the explanation I had _not_ written you....

Your attached kinsman and friend,

EDMUND C. STEDMAN.

Stedman came from Mount Auburn to my house after the funeral of Aldrich, with a look of utter exhaustion on his face such as alarmed me. A little rest and refreshment brought him to a curious revival of strength and animation; he talked of books, men, and adventures, in what was almost a monologue, and went away in comparative cheerfulness with his faithful literary associate, Professor George E. Woodberry. Yet I always associate him with one of those touching letters which he wrote to me before the age of the typewriter, more profusely than men now write, and the very fact that we lived far apart made him franker in utterance. The following letter came from Keep Rock, New Castle, New Hampshire, September 30, 1887:—

“You are a ‘noble kinsman’ after all, of the sort from whom
one is very glad to get good words, and I have taken your
perception of a bit of verse as infallible, ever since you
picked out three little ‘Stanzas for Music’ as my one best
thing. Every one else had overlooked them, but I knew that—as
Holmes said of his ‘Chambered Nautilus’—they were written
‘better than I could.’ By the way, if you will overhaul
Duyckinck’s ‘Encyclopedia of Literature’ _in re_ Dr. Samuel
Mitchill, you will see who first wrote crudely the ‘Chambered
Nautilus.’”

Two years after, he wrote, April 9, 1889:—

“The newspapers warn me that you are soon to go abroad....
I must copy for you now the song which you have kindly
remembered so many years. In sooth, I have always thought well
of your judgment as to poetry, since you intimated (in ‘The
Commonwealth,’ was it not?) that these three stanzas of mine
were the thing worth having of my seldom-written verse. I
will write on the next page a passage which I lately found in
Hartmann (a wonderful man for a pessimist), and which conveys
precisely the idea of my song.”

To this he adds as a quotation the passage itself:—

“The souls which are near without knowing it, and which can
approach no nearer by ever so close an embrace than they
eternally are, pine for a blending which can never be theirs so
long as they remain distinct individuals.”

The song itself, which he thought, as I did, his high-water mark, here follows. Its closing verse appears to me unsurpassed in American literature.

STANZAS FOR MUSIC

(From an Unfinished Drama)

Thou art mine, thou hast given thy word;
Close, close in my arms thou art clinging;
Alone for my ear thou art singing
A song which no stranger hath heard:
But afar from me yet, like a bird,
Thy soul, in some region unstirred,
On its mystical circuit is winging.

Thou art mine, I have made thee mine own;
Henceforth we are mingled forever:
But in vain, all in vain, I endeavor—
Though round thee my garlands are thrown,
And thou yieldest thy lips and thy zone—
To master the spell that alone
My hold on thy being can sever.

Thou art mine, thou hast come unto me!
But thy soul, when I strive to be near it—
The innermost fold of thy spirit—
Is as far from my grasp, is as free,
As the stars from the mountain-tops be,
As the pearl, in the depths of the sea,
From the portionless king that would wear it.

XII

EDWARD EVERETT HALE

EDWARD EVERETT HALE

The life of Edward Everett Hale has about it a peculiar interest as a subject of study. The youngest member of his Harvard class,—that of 1839,—he was also the most distinguished among them and finally outlived them all. Personal characteristics which marked him when a freshman in college kept him young to the end of his days. When the Reverend Edward Cummings came to Dr. Hale’s assistance in the South Congregational Church, he was surprised to find practically no young people in the parish, and still more surprised to know that their pastor was ignorant of the fact. These parishioners were all young when Dr. Hale took them in charge, and to him they had always remained so, for he had invested them with his own fresh and undying spirit.

Probably no man in America, except Beecher, aroused and stimulated quite so many minds as Hale, and his personal popularity was unbounded. He had strokes of genius, sometimes with unsatisfying results; yet failures never stood in his way, but seemed to drop from his memory in a few hours. An unsurpassable model in most respects, there were limitations which made him in some minor ways a less trustworthy example. Such and so curiously composed was Edward Everett Hale. He was the second son of a large family of sons and daughters, his parents being Nathan and Sarah Preston (Everett) Hale, and he was born in Boston, April 3, 1822. His father was the editor of the leading newspaper in Boston, the “Daily Advertiser,” and most of his children developed, in one way or another, distinct literary tastes. The subject of this sketch had before him, as a literary example and influence, the celebrated statesman and orator whose name he bore, and who was his mother’s brother.

My own recollections of him begin quite early. Nearly two years younger than he, I was, like him, the youngest of my Harvard class, which was two years later than his. My college remembrances of him are vivid and characteristic. Living outside of the college yard, I was sometimes very nearly late for morning prayers; and more than once on such occasions, as I passed beneath the walls of Massachusetts Hall, then a dormitory, there would spring from the doorway a tall, slim young student who had, according to current report among the freshmen, sprung out of bed almost at the last stroke of the bell, thrown his clothes over the stairway, and jumped into them on the way down. This was Edward Everett Hale; and this early vision was brought to my mind not infrequently in later life by his way of doing maturer things.

The same qualities which marked his personal appearance marked his career. He was always ready for action, never stopped for trifles, always lacked but little of being one of the heroes or men of genius of his time. Nor can any one yet predict which of these will be the form finally taken by his fame. His capacity for work was unlimited, and he perhaps belonged to more societies and committees than any man living. In this field his exhaustless energy had play, but his impetuous temperament often proved a drawback, and brought upon him the criticism of men of less talent but more accurate habits of mind. No denominational barriers existed for him. Ready to officiate in all pulpits and welcome in all, he left it unknown to the end of his life whether he did or did not believe in the Bible miracles, for instance. Nor did anybody who talked with him care much. His peculiar and attractive personality made him acceptable to all sorts of people and to men of all creeds; for his extraordinary versatility enabled him in his intercourse with other minds to adapt his sympathy and his language to the individual modes of thought and belief of each and all of them.

Some of his finest literary achievements were those which he himself had forgotten. Up to the last degree prolific, he left more than one absolutely triumphant stroke behind him in literature. The best bit of prose that I can possibly associate with him was a sketch in a newspaper bearing the somewhat meaningless title “The Last Shake,” suggested by watching the withdrawal of the last man with a hand-cart who was ever allowed to shake carpets on Boston Common. He was, no doubt, a dusty and forlorn figure enough. But to Hale’s ready imagination he stood for a whole epoch of history, for the long procession of carpet-shakers who were doing their duty there when Percy marched to Lexington, or when the cannonade from Breed’s Hill was in the air. Summer and winter had come and gone, sons had succeeded their fathers at their work, and the beating of the carpets had gone on, undrowned by the rising city’s roar. At last the more fastidious aldermen rebelled, the last shake was given, and Edward Everett Hale wrote its elegy. I suppose I kept the little newspaper cutting on my desk for five years, as a model of what wit and sympathy could extract from the humblest theme.

Another stroke was of quite a different character. Out of the myriad translations of Homer, there is in all English literature but one version known to me of even a single passage which gives in a high degree the Homeric flavor. That passage is the description of the Descent of Neptune (Iliad, Book XIII), and was preserved in Hale’s handwriting by his friend Samuel Longfellow, with whom I edited the book “Thalatta,”—a collection of sea poems. His classmate, Hale, had given it to him when first written, and then had forgotten all about it. Had it not been printed by us there, it might, sooner or later, have found its way into that still unpublished magazine which Hale and I planned together, when we lived near each other in Worcester, Massachusetts,—a periodical which was to have been called the “Unfortunates’ Magazine,” and was to contain all the prose and verse sent to us by neighbors or strangers with request to get it published. I remember that we made out a title-page between us, with a table of contents, all genuine, for the imaginary first number. Such a book was to some extent made real in “Thalatta,” and the following is Hale’s brilliant Homeric translation:—

THE DESCENT OF NEPTUNE

There sat he high retired from the seas;
There looked with pity on his Grecians beaten;
There burned with rage at the God-king who slew them.
Then rushed he forward from the rugged mountain;
He beat the forest also as he came downward,
And the high cliffs shook underneath his footsteps;
Three times he trod, his fourth step reached his sea-home.

There was his palace in the deep sea-water,
Shining with gold and builded firm forever;
And there he yoked him his swift-footed horses
(Their hoofs are brazen, and their manes are golden)
With golden thongs; his golden goad he seizes;
He mounts upon his chariot and doth fly;
Yea, drives he forth his steeds into the billows.

The sea-beasts from the depths rise under him—
They know their King: and the glad sea is parted,
That so his wheels may fly along unhinder’d.
Dry speeds between the waves his brazen axle:—
So bounding fast they bring him to his Grecians.

Earlier than this, in his racy papers called “My College Days,” we get another characteristic glimpse of Hale as a student. The Sunday afternoon before being examined for admission to college, he reports that he read the first six books of the Æneid (the last six having already been mastered) at one fell swoop,—seated meantime on the ridge-pole of his father’s house!

More firmly than on any of these productions Hale’s literary fame now rests on an anonymous study in the “Atlantic Monthly,” called “The Man without a Country,” a sketch of such absolutely lifelike vigor that I, reading it in camp during the Civil War, accepted it as an absolutely true narrative, until I suddenly came across, in the very midst of it, a phrase so wholly characteristic of its author that I sprang from my seat, exclaiming “_Aut Cæsar aut nullus_; Edward Hale or nobody.” This is the story on which the late eminent critic, Wendell P. Garrison, of the “Nation,” once wrote (April 17, 1902), “There are some who look upon it as the primer of Jingoism,” and he wrote to me ten years earlier, February 19, 1892, “What will last of Hale, I apprehend, will be the phrase ‘A man without a country,’ and perhaps the immoral doctrine taught in it which leads to Mexican and Chilean wars—‘My country, right or wrong.’”

Be this as it may, there is no doubt that on this field Hale’s permanent literary fame was won. It hangs to that as securely as does the memory of Dr. Holmes to his “Chambered Nautilus.” It is the exiled hero of this story who gives that striking bit of advice to boys: “And if you are ever tempted to say a word or do a thing that shall put a bar between you and your family, your home and your country, pray God in his mercy to take you that instant home to his own heaven!”

President James Walker, always the keenest of observers, once said of Hale that he took sides upon every question while it was being stated. This doubtless came, in part at least, from his having been reared in a newspaper office, or, as he said more tersely, having been “cradled in the sheets of the ‘Advertiser,’” and bred to strike promptly. His strongest and weakest points seem to have been developed in his father’s editorial office. Always ready to give unselfish sympathy, he could not always dispense deliberate justice. One of his favorite sayings was that his ideal of a committee was one which consisted of three persons, one of whom should be in bed with chronic illness, another should be in Europe, and he himself should be the third. It was one of his theories that clergymen were made to do small duties neglected by others, and he did them at a formidable sacrifice of time and in his own independent and quite ungovernable way. Taking active part for the Nation during the Civil War,—so active that his likeness appears on the Soldiers’ Monument on Boston Common,—he did not actually go to the war itself as chaplain of a regiment, as some of his friends desired; for they justly considered him one of the few men qualified to fill that position heartily, through his powerful voice, ready sympathy, and boundless willingness to make himself useful in every direction.

A very characteristic side of the man might always be seen in his letters. The following was written in his own hurried handwriting in recognition of his seventy-seventh birthday:—

April 8, ’99.

DEAR HIGGINSON,—Thanks for your card. It awaited me on my
return from North Carolina last night.

Three score & ten as you know, has many advantages,—and as yet,
I find no drawbacks.

Asa Gray said to me “It is great fun to be 70 years old. You do
not have to know everything!”

I see that you can write intelligibly.

I wish I could—But I cannot run a Typewriter more than a
Sewing-Machine.

Will the next generation learn to write—any more than learn the
alphabet?

With Love to all yours

Truly & always

E. E. HALE.

This next letter was called out by the death of Major-General Rufus Saxton, distinguished for his first arming of the freed slaves:—

WASHINGTON, D. C., Feb. 29, 1908.

DEAR HIGGINSON,—I have been reading with the greatest interest
your article on Gen. Saxton.

It has reminded me of an incident here—the time of which I
cannot place. But I think you can;—and if you can I wish you
would write & tell me when it happened—and perhaps what came of
it.

I was coming up in a street [car] when Charles Sumner came in &
took a seat opposite me—The car was not crowded.

Every one knew him, and he really addressed the whole
car—though he affected to speak to me. But he meant to have
every one hear—& they did. He said substantially this,—

“The most important order since the war began has been issued
at the War Department this morning.

“Directions have been given for the manufacture of a thousand
pair of Red Breeches. They are to be patterned on the Red
Trousers of the Zouaves—and are to be the uniform of the First
Negro Regiment.” He surprised the car—(as he meant to).

Now, 1. I cannot fix the date, can you?

2. Were the negro troops or any regiment of them ever clothed
in the Zouave Uniform?

I remember there was a “Zouave” Regiment from New York City—

[I had the pleasure of informing him that my regiment, which
he mentions, had been the only one disfigured by the scarlet
trousers, which were fortunately very soon worn out and gladly
banished. This was in August, 1862.]

It may be well enough to end these extracts from his correspondence with one of those bits of pure nonsense in which his impetuous nature delighted. This was on occasion of his joining the Boston Authors’ Club:—

ROXBURY, Mass., April 10, 1903.

DEAR HIGGINSON,—One sometimes does what there is no need of
doing. What we call here a Duke of Northumberland day is a day
when one does what he darn chooses to do, without reference to
the obligations of the social order. Such is to-day.

Did you ever hear the story of the graduate who never advanced
in his studies farther than that Pythagorean man did who never
could learn more than the first letters of the alphabet? I am
reminded of it by the elegant monogram of our Club.

This young fellow’s friends were very eager to get him through
the university, so they sent him out from Boston in a