Mr. Greeley lived through the most eventful era in our public history since the adoption of the Federal Constitution. For the eighteen years between the, formation of the Republican party, in 1854, and his sudden death in 1872, the stupendous civil convulsions through which we have passed have merely translated into acts, and recorded in our annals, the fruits of his thinking and the strenuous vehemence of his moral convictions. Whether he was right or wrong, is a question on which opinions will differ; but no person conversant with our history will dispute the influence which this remarkable and singularly endowed man has exerted in shaping the great events of our time. Whatever may be the ultimate judgment of other classes of his countrymen respecting the real value of his services, the colored race, when it becomes sufficiently educated to appreciate his career, must always recognize him as the chief author of their emancipation from slavery and their equal citizenship. Mr. Lincoln, to whom their ignorance as yet gives the chief credit, was a chip tossed on the surface of a resistless wave.
It was Mr. Greeley, more than any other man, who let loose the winds that lifted the waters and drove forward their foaming, tumbling billows. Mr. Greeley had lent hishand to stir public feeling to its profoundest depths before Mr. Lincoln's election became possible. He contributed more than any other man to defeat the compromise and settlement for which Mr. Lincoln and his chief adviser, Mr. Seward, were anxious in the exciting, expectant Winter of 1860-61, and to precipitate an avoidable bloody war. It was he, carrying a majority of the Republican party with him, who kept insisting, in the early stages of the conflict, that the emancipation of the slaves was an indispensable element of success. Mr. Lincoln stood out and resisted, ridiculing an emancipation proclamation as 'a bull against the comet.' Mr. Greeley roused the Republican party by that remarkable leader signed by his name and addressed to Mr. Lincoln, headed 'The Prayer of Twenty Millions,' the effect of which the President tried to parry by a public letter to the editor of theTribune, written with all the dexterous ingenuity and telling aptness of phrase of which Mr. Lincoln was so great a master. But Mr. Greeley victoriously carried the Republican party, which he had done more than all other men to form, with him; and within two months after Mr. Lincoln's reply to 'The Prayer of Twenty Millions,' his reluctance was overborne, and he was constrained to issue his celebrated Proclamation, which committed the Government to emancipation, and staked the success of the war on that issue. This culminating achievement, the greatest of Mr. Greeley's life, is the most signal demonstration of his talents. It was no sudden, random stroke. It was the effect of an accumulated, ever-rising, widening, deepening stream of influence, which had been gathering volume and momentum for years, and whose piling waters at last burst through and bore down every barrier. Mr. Greeley had long been doing all in his power to swell the tide of popular feeling against slavery, and itwas chiefly in consequence of the tremendous force he had given to the movement that that barbarous institution was at last swept away. It is the most extraordinary revolution ever accomplished by a single mind with no other instrument than a public journal.
It may be said, indeed, that Mr. Greeley had many zealous coadjutors. But so had Luther able coadjutors in the Protestant Reformation; so had Cromwell in the Commonwealth; so had Washington in our Revolution; so had Cobden in the repeal of the corn laws. They are nevertheless regarded as the leading minds in the respective innovations which they championed; and by as just a title Mr. Greeley will hold the first place with posterity on the roll of emancipation. This is the light in which he will be remembered so long as the history of our times shall be read.
It may be said, again, that Mr. Greeley's efforts in this direction were aided by the tendencies of his time. But so were Luther's, and Cromwell's, and Washington's, and everybody's who has left a great mark on his age, and accomplished things full of consequences to future generations. The first qualification for exerting this kind of fruitful influence is for the leader to be in complete sympathy with the developing tendencies of his own epoch. This is necessary to make him the embodiment of its spirit, the representative of its ideas, the quickener of its passions, the reviver of its courage in adverse turns of fortune, the central mind whom other advocates of the cause consult, whose action they watch in every new emergency, and whose guidance they follow because he has resolute, unflagging confidence to lead. In the controversies in which Mr. Greeley has been behind his age, or stood against the march of progress, even he has accomplished little. Since Henry Clay's death, he has been the most noted and active championof Protection; but that cause steadily declined until the war forced the government to strain every source of revenue, and since the close of the war free-trade ideas have made surprising advances in Mr. Greeley's own political party. On this subject he was the disciple of dead masters, and hung to the skirts of a receding cause; but in this school he acquired that dexterity in handling the weapons of controversy which proved so effective when he advanced from the position of a disciple to that of a master, and led a movement in the direction towards which the rising popular feeling was tending. Mr. Greeley's name will always be identified with the extirpation of negro slavery as its most distinguished, powerful, and effective advocate.
This is his valid title to distinction and lasting fame. Instrumental to this, and the chief means of its attainment, he founded a public journal which grew, under his direction, to be a great moving force in the politics and public thought of our time. This alone would have attested his energy and abilities; but this is secondary praise. It is the use he made of his journal when he had created it, the moral ends to which (besides making it a vehicle of news and the discussion of ephemeral topics) he devoted it, that will give him his peculiar place in history. If he had had no higher aim than to supply the market for current intelligence, as a great merchant supplies the market for dry-goods, he would have deserved to rank with the builders-up of other prosperous establishments by which passing contemporary wants were supplied, but would have had no claim on the remembrance of coming generations. But he regarded his journal not primarily as a property, but as the instrument of high moral and political ends; an instrument whose great potency forgood or ill he fully comprehended, and for whose salutary direction he felt a corresponding responsibility. His simple tastes, inexpensive habits, his contempt for the social show and parade which are the chief use made of wealth, and the absorption of his mind in other aims, made it impossible for him to think of theTribunemerely as a source of income, and he always managed it mainly with a view to make it an efficient organ for diffusing opinions which he thought conducive to the public welfare. It was this which distinguished Mr. Greeley from the founders of other important journals, who have, in recent years, been taken from us. With him the moral aim was always paramount, the pecuniary aim subordinate. Journalism, as he looked upon it, was not an end, but a means to higher ends. He may have had many mistaken and some erratic opinions on particular subjects; but the moral earnestness with which he pursued his vocation, and his constant subordination of private interest to public objects, nobly atone for his occasional errors.
Among the means by which Mr. Greeley gained, and so long held, the first place among American journalists, was his manner of writing. His negative merits as a writer were great; and it would be surprising to find these negative merits so rare as to be a title to distinction, if observation did not force the faults he avoided so perpetually upon our notice. He had no verbiage. We do not merely mean by this that he never used a superfluous word (which, in fact, he rarely did), but that he kept quite clear of the hazy, half-relevant ideas which encumber meaning and are the chief source of prolixity. He threw away every idea that did not decidedly help on his argument, and expressed the others in the fewest words that would make them clear. He began at once where the pith of his argument began; and had the secret, possessed by few writers, of stopping the moment he was done; leavinghis readers no chaff to sift out from the simple wheat. This perfect absence of cloudy irrelevance and encumbering superfluity was one source of his popularity as a writer. His readers had to devour no husks to get at the kernel of what he meant.
Besides these negative recommendations, Mr. Greeley's style had positive merits of a very high order. The source of these was in the native structure of his mind; no training could have conferred them; and it was his original mental qualities, and not any special culture, that pruned his writing of verbiage and redundancies. Whatever he saw, he saw with wonderful distinctness. Whether it happened to be a sound idea or a crotchet, it stood before his mind with the clearness of an object in sunlight. He never groped at and around it, like one feeling in the dark. He saw on which side he could lay hands on it at once with the firmest grasp. It was his vividness of conception which made Mr. Greeley so clear and succinct a writer. He knew precisely what he would be at, and he hastened to say it in the fewest words. His choice of language, though often homely, and sometimes quaint or coarse, was always adapted to his purpose. He had a great command of racy phrases in common use, and frequently gave them an unexpected turn which enlivened his style as by a sudden stroke of wit or grotesque humor. But these touches were rapid, never detained him; he kept grappling with his argument, and hurried on.
This peculiar style was aided by the ardor of his feelings and his vehement moral earnestness. Bent on convincing, he tried to flash his meaning on the minds of his readers in the readiest and manliest way; and he was so impatient to make them see the full force of his main points that he stripped them as naked as he could. This combined clearness of perception, strength of conviction, and hurrying ardorof feeling, were the sources of a style which enabled him to write more than any other journalist of his time, and yet always command attention. But he is a model which none can successfully imitate without his strongly marked individuality and peculiarities of mental structure. We have mentioned his occasional coarseness; but it was merely his preference of strong direct expression to dainty feebleness; he was never vulgar.
Mr. Greeley has contributed to the surprising growth and development of journalism in our time, chiefly by his successful efforts to make it a guide of public opinion, as well as a chronicle of important news. In his hands, it was not merely a mirror which indifferently reflects back the images of all objects on which it is turned, but a creative force; a means of calling into existence a public opinion powerful enough to introduce great reforms and sweep down abuses. He had no faith in purposeless journalism, in journalism which has so little insight into the tendencies of the time that it shifts its view from day to day in accommodation to transient popular caprices. No great object is accomplished without constancy of purpose, and a guide of public opinion can not be constant unless he has a deep and abiding conviction of the importance of what he advocates. Mr. Greeley's remarkable power, when traced back to its main source, will be found to have consisted chiefly in that vigorous earnestness of belief which held him to the strenuous advocacy of measures which he thought conducive to the public welfare, whether they were temporarily popular or not. Journalism may perhaps gain more success as a mercantile speculation by other methods; but it can be respected as a great moral and political force only in the hands of men who have the talents, foresight, and moral earnestness which fit them to guide public opinion. It is in this sense that Mr. Greeleywas our first journalist, and nobody can successfully dispute his rank, any more than Mr. Bennett's could be contested in the kind that seeks to float on the current instead of directing its course. The one did most to render our American journals great vehicles of news, the other to make them controlling organs of opinion. Their survivors in the profession have much to learn from both.--New York World.
Knight of the ready pen,Soldier without a sword,Such eyes hadst thou for other men,So true and grand a word!As Cæsar led his legionsTriumphant over Gaul,And through still wilder, darker regions,So thou didst lead us all!Until we saw the chainsWhich bound our brothers' lives,And heard the groans and felt the pains,Which come from wearing gyves.To brave heroic menThe false no more was true;And what the Nation needed thenCould any soldier do.
Illustration: WENDELL PHILLIPSWENDELL PHILLIPS
Long chapters of history are illumined as by as electric light in the following characteristic address from his pulpit by Henry Ward Beecher, at the time the name of the great philanthropist was added to the roll of American heroes.
The condition of the public mind throughout the North at the time I came to the consciousness of public affairs and was studying my profession may be described, in one word, as the condition of imprisoned moral sense. All men, almost, agreed with all men that slavery was wrong; but what can we do? The compromises of our fathers include us and bind us to fidelity to the agreements that had been made in the formation of our Constitution. Our confederation first, and our Constitution after. These were regarded everywhere as moral obligations by men that hated slavery. "The compromises of the Constitution must be respected," said the priest in the pulpit, said the politician in the field, said the statesmen in public halls; and men abroad, in England especially, could not understand what was the reason of the hesitancy of President Lincoln and of the people, when they had risen to arms, in declaring at once the end for which arms were taken and armies gathered to be the emancipation of theslaves. There never has been an instance in which, I think, the feelings and the moral sense of so large a number of people have been held in check for reasons of fidelity to obligations assumed in their behalf. There never has been in history another instance more notable, and I am bound to say, with all its faults and weaknesses, more noble. The commercial question--that being the underlying moral element--the commercial question of the North very soon became, on the subject of slavery, what the industrial and political question of the South had made it. It corrupted the manufacturer and the merchant. Throughout the whole North every man that could make any thing regarded the South as his legal, lawful market; for the South did not manufacture; it had the cheap and vulgar husbandry of slavery. They could make more money with cotton than with corn, or beef, or pork, or leather, or hats, or wooden-ware; and Northern ships went South to take their forest timbers, and brought them to Connecticut to be made into wooden-ware and ax-helves and rake-handles, and carried them right back to sell to the men whose axes had cut down the trees. The South manufactured nothing except slaves. It was a great manufacture, that; and the whole market of the North was bribed. The harness-makers, the wagon-makers, the clock-makers, makers of all manner of implements, of all manner of goods, every manufactory, every loom as it clanked in the North said, "Maintain," not slavery, but the "compromises of the Constitution." The Constitution--that was the veil under which all these cries were continually uttered.
The distinction between the Anti-slavery men and Abolitionists was simply this: The Abolitionists disclaimed the obligation to maintain this government and the compromises of the Constitution, and the Anti-slavery men recognized the binding obligation and sought the emancipation of slaves by themore circuitous and gradual influence; but Abolitionism covered both terms. It was regarded, however, throughout the North as a greater sin than slavery itself, and none of you that are under thirty years of age can form any adequate conception of the public sentiment and feeling during the days of my young manhood. A man that was known to be an Abolitionist had better be known to have the plague. Every door was shut to him. If he was born under circumstances that admitted him to the best society, he was the black sheep of the family. If he aspired by fidelity, industry, and genius, to good society, he was debarred. "An Abolitionist" was enough to put the mark of Cain upon any young man that arose in my early day, and until I was forty years of age. It was punishable to preach on the subject of liberty. It was enough to expel a man from Church communion, if he insisted on praying in the prayer-meeting for the liberation of the slaves. The Church was dumb in the North, not in the West. The great publishing societies that were sustained by the contributions of the Churches were absolutely dumb.
It was at the beginning of this Egyptian era in America that the young aristocrat of Boston appeared. His blood came through the best colonial families. He was an aristocrat by descent and by nature; a noble one, but a thorough aristocrat. All his life and power assumed that guise. He was noble; he was full of kindness to inferiors; he was willing to be, and do, and suffer for them; but he was never of them, nor equaled himself to them. He was always above them, and his gifts of love were always the gifts of a prince to his subjects. All his life long he resented every attack on his person and on his honor, as a noble aristocrat would. When they poured the filth of their imaginations upon him,he cared no more for it than the eagle cares what the fly is thinking about him away down under the cloud. All the miserable traffickers, and all the scribblers, and all the aristocratic boobies of Boston were no more to him than mosquitoes are to the behemoth or to the lion. He was aristocratic in his pride, and lived higher than most men lived. He was called of God as much as ever Moses and the prophets were; not exactly for the same great end, but in consonance with those great ends. You remember, my brother, when Lovejoy was infamously slaughtered by a mob in Alton?--blood that has been the seed of liberty all over this land! I remember it. At this time it was that Channing lifted up his voice and declared that the moral sentiment of Boston ought to be uttered in rebuke of that infamy and cruelty, and asking for Faneuil Hall in which to call a public meeting. This was indignantly refused by the Common Council of Boston. Being a man of wide influence, he gathered around about himself enough venerable and influential old citizens of Boston to make a denial of their united request a perilous thing; and Faneuil Hall was granted to call a public meeting to express itself on this subject of the murder of Lovejoy. The meeting was made up largely of rowdies. They meant to overawe and put down all other expressions of opinion except those that then rioted with the riotous. United States District-attorney Austin (when Wendell Phillips's name is written in letters of light on one side of the monument, down low on the other side, and spattered with dirt, let the name of Austin also be written) made a truculent speech, and justified the mob, and ran the whole career of the sewer of those days and justified non-interference with slavery. Wendell Phillips, just come to town as a young lawyer, without at present any practice, practically unknown, except to his own family, fired with the infamy, and, feeling called of Godin his soul, went upon the platform. His first utterances brought down the hisses of the mob. He was not a man very easily subdued by any mob. They listened as he kindled and poured on that man Austin the fire and lava of a volcano, and he finally turned the course of the feeling of the meeting. Practically unknown when the sun went down one day, when it rose next morning all Boston was saying, "Who is this fellow? Who is this Phillips?" A question that has never been asked since.
Thenceforth he has been a flaming advocate of liberty, with singular advantages over all other pleaders. Mr. Garrison was not noted as a speaker, yet his tongue was his pen. Mr. Phillips, not much given to the pen, his pen was his tongue; and no other like speaker has ever graced our history. I do not undertake to say that he surpassed all others. He had an intense individuality, and that intense individuality ranked him among the noblest orators that have ever been born to this continent, or I may say to our mother-land. He adopted in full the tenets of Garrison, which were excessively disagreeable to the whole public mind. The ground which he took was that which Garrison took. Seeing that the conscience of the North was smothered and mute by reason of the supposed obligations to the compromises of the Constitution, Garrison declared that the compromises of the Constitution were covenants with hell, and that no man was bound to observe them. This extreme ground Mr. Phillips also took,--immediate, unconditional, universal emancipation, at any cost whatsoever. That is Garrisonism; that is Wendell Phillipsism; and it would seem as though the Lord rather leaned that way, too.
I shall not discuss the merits of Mr. Garrison or Mr.Phillips in every direction. I shall say that while the duty of immediate emancipation without conditions was unquestionably the right ground, yet in the providence of God even that could not be brought to pass except through the mediation of very many events. It is a remarkable thing that Mr. Phillips and Mr. Garrison both renounced the Union and denounced the Union in the hope of destroying slavery; whereas the providence of God brought about the love of the Union when it was assailed by the South, and made the love of the Union the enthusiasm that carried the great war of emancipation through. It was the very antithesis of the ground which they took. Like John Brown, Mr. Garrison; like John Brown, Mr. Phillips; of a heroic spirit, seeking the great and noble, but by measures not well adapted to secure the end.
Little by little the controversy spread. I shall not trace it. I am giving you simply the atmosphere in which he sprang into being and into power. His career was a career of thirty or forty years of undiminished eagerness. He never quailed nor flinched, nor did he ever at any time go back one step or turn in the slightest degree to the right or left. He gloried in his cause, and in that particular aspect of it which had selected him; for he was one that was called rather than one that chose. He stood on this platform. It is a part of the sweet and pleasant memories of my comparative youth here, that when the mob refused to let him speak in the Broadway Tabernacle before it moved up-town--the old Tabernacle--William A. Hall, now dead, a fervent friend and Abolitionist, had secured the Graham Institute wherein to hold a meeting where Mr. Phillips should be heard. I had agreed to pray at the opening of the meeting. On the morning of the day on which it was to have taken place, I was visited by the committee of that Institute--excellentgentlemen, whose feelings will not be hurt now, because they are all now ashamed of it; they are in heaven. They visited me to say that in consequence of the great peril that attended a meeting at the Institute, they had withdrawn the liberty to use it, and paid back the money, and that they called simply to say that it was out of no disrespect to me, but from fidelity to their supposed trust. Well, it was a bitter thing.
If there is any thing on earth that I am sensitive to, it is the withdrawing of the liberty of speech and thought. Henry C. Bowen, who certainly has done some good things in his life-time, said to me: "You can have Plymouth Church if you want it." "How?" "It is the rule of the church trustees that the church may be let by a majority vote when we are convened; but if we are not convened, then every trustee must give his assent in writing. If you choose to make it a personal matter, and go to every trustee, you can have it." He meanwhile undertook, with Mr. Hall, to put new placards over the old ones, notifying men quietly that the meeting was to be held here, and distributed thousands and tens of thousands of hand-bills at the ferries. No task was ever more welcome. I went to the trustees man by man. The majority of the trustees very cheerfully accorded the permission. One or two of them were disposed to decline and withhold it. I made it a matter of personal friendship. "You and I will break, if you don't give me this permission." And they signed. So the meeting glided from the Graham Institute to this house. A great audience assembled. We had detectives in disguise, and every arrangement made to handle the subject in a practical form if the crowd should undertake to molest us. The Rev. Dr. R.S. Storrs consented to come and pray, for Mr. Wendell Phillips was by marriage a nearand intimate friend and relation of his. The reporters were here; when were they ever not?
Mr. Phillips began his lecture, and, you may depend upon it, by this time the lion was in him, and he went careering on. Hie views were extreme; he made them extravagant. I remember at one point--for he was a man without bluster, serene, self-poised, never disturbed in the least--he made an affirmation that was very bitter, and the cry arose over the whole congregation. He stood still, with a cold, bitter smile in his eye, and waited till they subsided, when he repeated it with more emphasis. Again the roar went through. He waited and repeated it, if possible, more intensely, and he beat them down with that one sentence until they were still, and let him go on.
The power to discern right amid all the wrappings of interest and all the seductions of ambition was singularly his. To choose the lowly for their sake, to abandon all favor, all power, all comfort, all ambition, all greatness--that was his genius and glory. He confronted the spirit of the nation and of the age. I had almost said he set himself against nature, as if he had been a decree of God over-riding all these other insuperable obstacles. That was his function. Mr. Phillips was not called to be a universal orator any more than he was a universal thinker. In literature and in history widely read, in person magnificent, in manners most accomplished, gentle as a babe, sweet as a new-blown rose, in voice clear and silvery, yet he was not a man of tempests, he was not an orchestra of a hundred instruments, he was not an organ, mighty and complex. The nation slept, and God wanted a trumpet, sharp, wide-sounding, narrow and intense; and that was Mr. Phillips. The long-roll is notparticularly agreeable in music, or in times of war, but it is better than flutes or harps when men are in a great battle, or are on the point of it. His eloquence was penetrating and alarming. He did not flow as a mighty Gulf Stream; he did not dash upon this continent as the ocean does; he was not a mighty rushing river. His eloquence was a flight of arrows, sentence after sentence polished, and most of them burning. He slung them one after the other, and where they struck they slew. Always elegant, always awful. I think his scorn is and was as fine as I ever knew it in any human being. He had that sublime sanctuary in his pride that made him almost insensitive to what would by other men be considered obloquy. It was as if he said every day in himself: "I am not what they are firing at. I am not there, and I am not that. It is not against me. I am infinitely superior to what they think me to be. They do not know me." It was quiet and unpretentious, but it was there. Conscience and pride were the two concurrent elements of his nature.
He lived to see the slave emancipated, but not by moral means. He lived to see the sword cut the fetter. After this had taken place, he was too young to retire, though too old to gather laurels of literature or to seek professional honors. The impulse of humanity was not at all abated. His soul still flowed on for the great under-masses of mankind, though, like the Nile, it split up into scores of mouths, and not all of them were navigable. After a long and stormy life his sun went down in glory. All the English-speaking people on the globe have written among the names that shall never die the name of that scoffed, detested, mob-beaten, persecuted wretch--Wendell Phillips. Boston, that persecuted and would have slain him, is now exceedingly busy in buildinghis tomb and rearing his statue. The men that would not defile their lips with his name are thanking God to-day that he lived.
He has taught some lessons--lessons that the young will do well to take heed to--that the most splendid gifts and opportunities and ambitions may be best used for the dumb and lowly. His whole life is a rebuke to the idea that we are to climb to greatness by climbing up on the backs of great men, that we are to gain strength by running with the currents of life, that we can from without add any thing to the great within that constitutes man. He poured out the precious ointment of his soul upon the feet of that diffusive Jesus who suffers here in his poor and despised ones. He has taught young ambitions, too, that the way to glory is the way often-times of adhesion simply to principle, and that popularity and unpopularity are not things to be known or considered. Do right and rejoice. If to do right will bring you under trouble, rejoice in it that you are counted worthy to suffer with God and the providences of God in this world.
He belongs to the race of giants, not simply because he was, in and of himself a great soul, but because he had bathed in the providence of God and came forth scarcely less than a god; because he gave himself to the work of God upon earth, and inherited thereby, or had reflected upon him, some of the majesty of his Master. When pigmies are all dead, the noble countenance of Wendell Phillips will still look forth, radiant as a rising sun, a sun that will never set. He has become to us a lesson, his death an example, his whole history an encouragement to manhood--and to heroic manhood.
"A creature not too bright or goodFor human nature's daily food."
The last thing that would have occurred to Mrs. Wordsworth would have been that her departure, or any thing about her, would be publicly noticed amidst the events of a stirring time. Those who knew her well regarded her with as true a homage as they ever rendered to any member of the household, or to any personage of the remarkable group which will be forever traditionally associated with the Lake District; but this reverence, genuine and hearty as it was, would not, in all eyes, be a sufficient reason for recording more than the fact of her death. It is her survivorship of such a group which constitutes an undisputed public interest in her decease. With her closes a remarkable scene in the history of the literature of our century. The well-known cottage, mount, and garden at Rydal will be regarded with other eyes when shut up or transferred to new occupants. With Mrs. Wordsworth, an old world has passed away before the eyes of the inhabitants of the district, and a new one succeeds, which may have its own delights, solemnities, honors, and graces, but which can never replace the familiar one that is gone. There was something mournful in the lingering of this aged lady--blind, deaf, and bereaved in her latter years; butshewas not mournful, any more than she was insensible. Age did not blunther feelings, nor deaden her interest in the events of the day. It seems not so very long ago that she said that the worst of living in such a place (as the Lake District), was its making one unwilling to go. It is too beautiful to let one be ready to leave it. Within a few years the beloved daughter was gone, and then the aged husband, and then the son-in-law, and then the devoted friend, Mr. Wordsworth's publisher, Mr. Moxon, who paid his duty occasionally by the side of her chair; then she became blind and deaf. Still her cheerfulness was indomitable. No doubt, she would in reality have been "willing to go," whenever called upon, throughout her long life; but she liked life to the end. By her disinterestedness of nature, by her fortitude of spirit, and her constitutional elasticity and activity, she was qualified for the honor of surviving her household--nursing and burying them, and bearing the bereavement which they were vicariously spared. She did it wisely, tenderly, bravely, and cheerfully; and then she will be remembered accordingly by all who witnessed the spectacle.
It was by the accident, so to speak, of her early friendship with Wordsworth's sister, that her life became involved with the poetic element which her mind would hardly have sought for itself in another position. She was the incarnation of good sense, as applied to the concerns of the every-day world. In as far as her marriage and course of life tended to infuse a new elevation into her views of things, it was a blessing; and, on the other hand, in as far as it infected her with the spirit of exclusiveness, which was the grand defect of the group in its own place, it was hurtful; but that very exclusiveness was less an evil than an amusement, after all. It was rather a serious matter to hear the poet's denunciation of the railway, and to read his well-known sonnets on the desecration of the Lake region by the unhallowedpresence of commonplace strangers; and it was truly painful to observe how the scornful and grudging mood spread among the young, who thought they were agreeing with Wordsworth in claiming the vales and lakes as a natural property for their enlightened selves. But it was so unlike Mrs. Wordsworth, with her kindly, cheery, generous turn, to say that a green field, with buttercups, would answer all the purposes of Lancashire operatives, and that they did not know what to do with themselves when they came among the mountains, that the innocent insolence could do no harm. It became a fixed sentiment when she alone survived to uphold it, and one demonstration of it amused the whole neighborhood in a good-natured way. "People from Birthwaite" were the bugbear--Birthwaite being the end of the railway. In the Summer of 1857, Mrs. Wordsworth's companion told her (she being then blind) that there were some strangers in the garden--two or three boys on the mount, looking at the view. "Boys from Birthwaite," said the old lady, in the well-known tone, which conveyed that nothing good could come from Birthwaite. When the strangers were gone, it appeared that they were the Prince of Wales and his companions. Making allowance for prejudices, neither few nor small, but easily dissolved when reason and kindliness had opportunity to work, she was a truly wise woman, equal to all occasions of action, and supplying other persons' needs and deficiencies.
In the "Memoirs of Wordsworth" it is stated that she was the original of
"She was a phantom of delight;"
and some things in the next few pages look like it; but for the greater part of the poet's life it was certainly believed by some, who ought to know, that that wonderful description related to another who flitted before his imagination inearlier days than those in which he discovered the aptitude of Mary Hutchinson to his own needs. The last stanza is very like her; and her husband's sonnet to the painter of her portrait, in old age, discloses to us how the first stanza might be also, in days beyond the ken of the existing generation.
Of her early sorrows, in the loss of two children and a beloved sister, who was domesticated with the family, there are probably no living witnesses. It will never be forgotten, by those who saw it, how the late dreary train of afflictions was met. For many years Wordsworth's sister Dorothy was a melancholy charge. Mrs. Wordsworth was wont to warn any rash enthusiasts for mountain-walking by the spectacle before them. The adoring sister would never fail her brother; and she destroyed her health, and then her reason, by exhausting walks and wrong remedies for the consequences. Forty miles in a day was not a singular feat of Dorothy's. During the long years of this devoted creature's helplessness she was tended with admirable cheerfulness and good sense. Thousands of lake tourists must remember the locked garden-gate when Miss Wordsworth was taking the air, and the garden-chair going round and round the terrace, with the emaciated little woman in it, who occasionally called out to strangers and amused them with her clever sayings. She outlived the beloved Dora, Wordsworth's only surviving daughter.
After the lingering illness of that daughter (Mrs. Quillinan), the mother encountered the dreariest portion, probably, of her life. Her aged husband used to spend the long Winter evenings in grief and tears--week after week, month after month. Neither of them had eyes for reading. He could not be comforted. She, who carried as tender a maternal heart as ever beat, had to bear her own grief and his too. She grew whiter and smaller, so as to be greatlychanged in a few months; but this was the only expression of what she endured, and he did not discover it. When he, too, left her, it was seen how disinterested had been her trouble. When his trouble had ceased, she, too, was relieved. She followed his coffin to the sacred corner of Grasmere churchyard, where lay now all those who had once made her home. She joined the household guests on their return from the funeral, and made tea as usual. And this was the disinterested spirit which carried her through the last few years, till she had just reached the ninetieth. Even then she had strength to combat disease for many days. Several times she rallied and relapsed; and she was full of alacrity of mind and body as long as exertion of any kind was possible. There were many eager to render all duty and love--her two sons, nieces, and friends, and a whole sympathizing neighborhood.
The question commonly asked by visitors to that corner of Grasmere churchyard was: Where wouldshebe laid when the time came? The space was so completely filled. The cluster of stones told of the little children who died a long life-time ago; of the sisters--Sarah Hutchinson and Dorothy Wordsworth; and of Mr. Quillinan, and his two wives, Dora lying between her husband and father, and seeming to occupy her mother's rightful place. And Hartley Coleridge lies next the family group; and others press closely round. There is room, however. The large gray stone, which bears the name of William Wordsworth, has ample space left for another inscription; and the grave beneath has ample space also for his faithful life-companion.
Not one is left now of the eminent persons who rendered that cluster of valleys so eminent as it has been. Dr. Arnold went first, in the vigor of his years. Southey died at Keswick, and Hartley Coleridge on the margin of RydalLake; and the Quillinans under the shadow of Loughrigg; and Professor Wilson disappeared from Elleray; and the aged Mrs. Fletcher from Lancrigg; and the three venerable Wordsworths from Rydal Mount.
The survivor of all the rest had a heart and a memory for the solemnlastof every thing. She was the one to inquire of about the last eagle in the district, the last pair of ravens in any crest of rocks, the last old dalesman in any improved spot, the last round of the last peddler among hills where the broad white road has succeeded the green bridal-path. She knew the district during the period between its first recognition, through Gray's "Letters," to its complete publicity in the age of railways. She saw, perhaps, the best of it. But she contributed to modernize and improve it, though the idea of doing so probably never occurred to her. There were great people before to give away Christmas bounties, and spoil their neighbors, as the established alms-giving of the rich does spoil the laboring class, which ought to be above that kind of aid. Mrs. Wordsworth did infinitely more good in her own way, and without being aware of it. An example of comfortable thrift was a greater boon to the people round than money, clothes, meat, or fuel. The oldest residents have long borne witness that the homes of the neighbors have assumed a new character of order and comfort, and wholesome economy, since the poet's family lived at Rydal Mount. It used to be a pleasant sight when Wordsworth was seen in the middle of a hedge, cutting switches for half a dozen children, who were pulling at his cloak, or gathering about his heels; and it will long be pleasant to family friends to hear how the young wives of half a century learned to make home comfortable by the example of the good housewife at the Mount, who never was above letting her thrift be known.
Finally, she who had noted so many last survivors was herself the last of a company more venerable than eagles, or ravens, or old-world yeomen, or antique customs. She would not, in any case, be the first forgotten. As it is, her honored name will live for generations in the traditions of the valleys round. If she was studied as the poet's wife, she came out so well from that investigation that she was contemplated for herself; and the image so received is her true monument. It will be better preserved in her old-fashioned neighborhood than many monuments which make a greater show.
"She was a phantom of delightWhen first she gleamed upon my sight;A lovely apparition, sentTo he a moment's ornament;Her eyes, as stars of twilight fair;Like twilight's, too, her dusky hair;But all things else about her drawnFrom May-time and the cheerful dawn;A dancing shape, an image gay,To haunt, to startle, and waylay.And now I see, with eye serene,The very pulse of the machine;A being breathing thoughtful breath,A traveler between life and death;The reason firm, the temperate will,Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;A perfect woman, nobly planned,To warn, to comfort, and command;And yet a spirit still and bright,With something of an angel light."HARRIET MARTINEAU IN 1859.
Marie Felicita Garcia, who died at the early age of twenty-eight, was one of the greatest singers the world has ever known. Born at Paris in 1808, according to some biographers at Turin, she was the daughter of Manuel Garcia, the famous Spanish tenor singer, by whom she was so thoroughly trained that she made her first public appearance in London March 25, 1826, and achieved a remarkable and instant success.
She sang with wonderful acceptance in different parts of England, and in the Autumn of the same year came to America as prima donna of an opera company under the management of her father. In New York her success was without precedent. In the memory of many aged people there she still holds her place as the Queen of Song.
In the following year she married Eugene Malibran, an elderly French merchant, under whose name she was ever afterwards known.
Returning to Europe, she made her first appearance in Paris January 14, 1828, where she added other jewels to the singer's crown.
We can not follow her throughout her brilliant career, but must hasten on to the closing scenes of her life.
In May, 1836, she fell from her horse and was seriously injured. Not considering the matter in its true aspect, she kept her engagements during the Summer, and in Septemberappeared in England, at the Manchester Musical Festival, though warned by her physician to desist. As the result of the imprudence a nervous fever set in, and she died September 23d, 1836.
In one of the many notices of this great singer, these words are found:
"Madame Malibran's voice was a mezzo-soprano of great volume and purity, and had been brought to absolute perfection by the severe training of her father. Her private character was irreproachable. Few women have been more beloved for their amiability, generosity, and professional enthusiasm. Her intellect was of a high order, and the charms of her conversation fascinated all who were admitted into the circle of her intimate friends. Her benefactions amounted to such considerable sums that her friends were frequently obliged to interfere for the purpose of regulating her finances."
Many stories are told, which show her kindness of heart. The following is one of pathetic interest:
In a humble room in one of the poorest streets of London, Pierre, a faithful French boy, sat humming by the bedside of his sick mother. There was no bread in the closet, and for the whole day he had not tasted food. Yet he sat humming to keep up his spirits. Still at times he thought of his loneliness and hunger, and he could scarcely keep the tears from his eyes; for he knew that nothing would be so grateful to his poor invalid mother as a good, sweet orange, and yet he had not a penny in the world.
The little song he was singing was his own--one he had composed, both air and words--for the child was a genius.
He went to the window, and, looking out, saw a man putting up a great bill with yellow letters, announcing that Madame Malibran would sing that night in public.
"O, if I could only go!" thought little Pierre; and then pausing a moment, he clasped his hands, his eyes lighted with a new hope.
Running to the little stand, he smoothed his yellow curls, and taking from a little box some old, stained paper, gave one eager glance at his mother, who slept, and ran speedily from the house.
"Who did you say was waiting for me?" said the madame to her servant; "I am already worn out with company."
"It's only a very pretty little boy, with yellow curls, who said if he can just see you he is sure you will not be sorry, and he will not keep you a moment."
"O, well, let him come in!" said the beautiful singer, with a smile; "I can never refuse children."
Little Pierre came in, his hat under his arm, and in his hand a little roll of paper. With manliness unusual for a child, he walked straight to the lady, and, bowing, said:
"I came to see you because my mother is very sick, and we are too poor to get food and medicine. I thought, perhaps, that if you would sing my little song at some of your grand concerts, may be some publisher would buy it for a small sum, and so I could get food and medicine for my mother."
The beautiful woman arose from her seat. Very tall and stately she was. She took the little roll from his hand and lightly hummed the air.
"Did you compose it?" she asked; "you, a child! And the words? Would you like to come to my concert?" she asked.
"O yes!" and the boy's eyes grew bright with happiness; "but I couldn't leave my mother."
"I will send somebody to take care of your mother for the evening, and here is a crown with which you may go andget food and medicine. Here is also one of my tickets. Come to-night; that will admit you to a seat near me."
Almost beside himself with joy, Pierre bought some oranges, and many a little luxury besides, and carried them home to the poor invalid, telling her, not without tears, of his good fortune.
When evening came, and Pierre was admitted to the concert hall, he felt that never in his life had he been in so great a place. The music, the myriad lights, the beauty, the flashing of diamonds and rustling of silks bewildered his eyes and brain.
At last she came, and the child sat with his glance riveted on her glorious face. Could he believe that the grand lady, all blazing with jewels, and whom every body seemed to worship, would really sing his little song?
Breathless he waited; the band--the whole band--struck up a plaintive little melody. He knew it, and clasped his hands for joy. And O, how she sang it! It was so simple, so mournful. Many a bright eye dimmed with tears, and naught could be heard but the touching words of that little song--O, so touching!
Pierre walked home as if he were moving on the air.
What cared he for money now? The greatest singer in all Europe had sung his little song, and thousands had wept at his grief.
The next day he was frightened at a visit from Madame Malibran. She laid her hand on his yellow curls, and, turning to the sick woman, said, "Your little boy, madame, has brought you a fortune. I was offered this morning, by the best publisher in London, $1,500 for his little song; and, after he has realized a certain amount from the sale, little Pierre here is to share the profits. Madame, thank God that your son has a gift from heaven."
The noble-hearted singer and the poor woman wept together. As to Pierre, always mindful of Him who watches over the tried and tempted, he knelt down by his mother's bedside and uttered a simple prayer, asking God's blessing on the kind lady who had deigned to notice their affliction.
The memory of that prayer made the singer more tender-hearted, and she, who was the idol of England's nobility, went about doing good. And in her early, happy death, he who stood beside her bed and smoothed her pillow, and lightened her last moments by his undying affection, was little Pierre of former days, now rich, accomplished, and the most talented composer of the day.
O singer of the heart,The heart that never dies!The Lord's interpreter thou art,His angel from the skies.Thy work on earth is greatAs his who saves a soul,Or his who guides the ship of state,When mountain-billows roll.The life of Heaven comes downIn gleams of grace and truth;Sad mortals see the shining crownOf sweet, perennial youth.The life of God, in songBecomes the life of man;Ashamed is he of sin and wrongWho hears a Malibran!