Ohio History Journal

edited by

ROBERT PRICE

 

The Road to Boston:

1860 Travel Correspondence

of William Dean Howells

 

 

 

 

Young William Dean Howells' travel letters, written for two Ohio newspapers during

the summer of 1860 and collected here for the first time, record the weeks imme-

diately preceding one of the most oft-retold incidents in the story of American

letters. The time was the first week of August, the place Boston's famed Parker

House. James Russell Lowell, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, was hosting a little

dinner party that included James T. Fields, his publisher, Dr. Oliver Wendell

Holmes, the Atlantic's famed "Autocrat," and a new contributor from Ohio who

was still signing himself, with youthful modesty, W. D. Howells. Suddenly, Dr.

Holmes, who of his generation probably knew best just when and how to say

such things, leaned across the table to Lowell and referring to their quiet-mannered

guest said, 'Well, James, this is something like the apostolic succession; this is the

laying on of hands.'1

Howells was only twenty-three--in six years he would make his triumphal entry

into the Atlantic's editorial family and in eleven years would become the editor-

in-chief. But Dr. Holmes' gracious whimsy was destined to be a favorite memory

both for Howells and for the multitude of readers who would eventually follow

his reminiscences--and, of course, for the symbol seekers in a later generation, who

would remember his successes as a leading novelist and his importance as the

critical leader in a new era of literary realism and would feel that Dr. Holmes'

kind words marked something of a turning point in the story of American

authorship.

Certainly for William Dean Howells favorable attention from the Autocrat was

the climax to a prescient summer, for which the happy, exuberant reportage he

had been turning out during the previous five weeks provided exactly the right

kind of dramatic build-up. His travels had taken him already from Columbus,

Ohio, into two lower provinces of Canada as far as Quebec City, thence down

into New England and to Boston; from there he shortly returned home via New

York. During these weeks he had sent back two concurrent series of travel reports,

which were originally printed during July and August in fourteen large installments

by the Ohio State Journal of Columbus and the Daily Gazette of Cincinnati.

 

1. Quoted in W. D. Howells, Literary Friends and Acquaintance: A Personal Retrospect of American

Authorship (New York, 1900), 35-40.

Mr. Price is professor emeritus of English at Otterbein College.



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86                                                               OHIO HISTORY

Upon arrival in Boston, Howells had immediately journeyed over to Cambridge

to seek out Lowell, who since the first of the year had published six of his poems

in the Atlantic. On the day of the dinner, in fact, James Fields was holding at the

journal's office the galley proof of still another poem, an ambitious, long narra-

tive in blank verse.² The story of the various momentous meetings in Boston and

Cambridge and of those to follow in a few days with Hawthorne, Emerson, and

Thoreau in Concord and with Whitman in New York, Howells put into a loving

account thirty years after in the opening chapters of My Literary Friends and

Acquaintance.3

Though he was usually voluminously autobiographical, Howells never quite

got around to a complete chronicling of his earlier, exciting weeks in 1860. He

referred to these adventures on various occasions and drew important fictional

substance from them but eventually left the record for another century's curious

to seek out from the columns of the Journal and the Gazette.

In 1860, after a spring of varied hackwork in Columbus, Howells had gone

home at the end of June for two weeks of relaxation with his family in Jefferson,

the county seat of Ashtabula County. His father, William Cooper Howells, was

editor there of the family-owned weekly, the Ashtabula Sentinel. Howells had

grown up since the age of fifteen in this community, and it was here in the printing-

writing-editing environment of his father's world that he had learned the craft

with which, by his late teens, he had been able to join the elder Howells, an active

and highly respected political journalist, as a professional correspondent in the

state capital.

The previous March, Howells had found himself somewhat summarily closed

out of a very pleasant associate editorship on the Ohio State Journal, a post he had

enjoyed since the fall of 1858. The parting had been a very friendly one, however.

Henry D. Cooke, the Journal's proprietor, was having to recoup financially and

had found a cut in staff the quickest means. Howells had immediately obtained

other work in Columbus, reading and editing manuscripts for his friend Frank

Foster of the local publishing house of Follett, Foster & Company. The December

before, this young firm had brought out Howells' first book, Poems of Two Friends,

done in collaboration with John James Piatt. Though this particular volume had

not been very profitable, the enterprising publishers were enjoying considerable

success with other regional authorships and currently were backing State Librarian

William T. Coggeshall's proposed anthology, The Poets and Poetry of the West.

They found Howells useful for compiling the needed biographical sketches.⁴

On May 18, Abraham Lincoln was nominated at Chicago as the Republican

presidential candidate. Follett and Foster, who had received the sole publishing

rights to the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which had proved a bonanza, now handed to

Howells the task of quickly preparing for publication a campaign "Life" of Lincoln.

The assignment was to prove a momentous one. Howells settled down to the col-

lected data early in June and had his draft ready in a little over a week. A paper-

bound first run of his Life of Abraham Lincoln was issued on June 25.5

2. "The Pilot's Story," Atlantic Monthly, VI (September 1860), 323-325: Howells, Literary Friends,

33-35.

3. Howells, Literary Friends, 1-90.

4. For the story of the Ohio State Journal (Columbus) editorship and the immediate background

of the summer travels, see W. D. Howells, Years of My Youth (New York, 1916), 143-239.

5. The complete Lives and Speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin (Columbus, 1860)

was published June 25, 1860; for text of Howells' Life, see pp. 17-94. See also Robert Price, "Young

Howells Drafts a 'Life' for Lincoln," Ohio History, LXXVI (Autumn 1967), 232-246.

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Howells' Correspondence                                               87

 

After completion of this project, Foster seems to have suggested to Howells

that he take his current earnings and go on a reportorial tour of the industries of

the eastern states. The publisher envisioned a volume suited to the firm's

subscription-agent trade, one dealing with the country's "more distinctive mechan-

ical inventions" employed in the great mills and factories of the East. Howells

could gather the substance, then "edit, or compile, or do something literary"

with it.6

Howells decided to go, though certainly not because of any personal interest

in Foster's assignment. No line of authorship could have appealed to him less at

the moment, for he was the "most unmechanical of human kind," and the material

appealed not at all to his poetic sensitivities that he felt most important to develop.

But he would give the project a try. He had mastered the knack of transmuting

almost any kind of factual substance swiftly and smoothly into printable copy.

Besides, the job would give him a chance to get out of native surroundings and

have a first look at the East toward which his literary yearnings were pushing him.

There might even be a professional opening. Certainly his prospects in Columbus

had begun to appear both narrowing and uncertain.

Even more appealing was the chance Howells saw in the expedition to try him-

self out in a very inviting, new writing role--that of the sentient reporter on tour.

The literary travel correspondent had become the most glamorous figure in Amer-

ican journalism. Scores of writers, known and unknown, skilled and unskilled, were

trying their pens on reports to home papers about journeys and observations

outside accustomed haunts. Editors welcomed printable travel copy, for they served

in an age of provincial readers who found a vast release in the many column

inches the typical neighborhood weekly or daily across the country gave regularly

to reports of the more fortunate who could move about in a larger world.

Much of this letter writing never managed to struggle beyond the Oh's and Ah's

of local excursionists, it is true, but for several decades a few professionals here

and there had managed to show a worthy individuality and win an enthusiastic

following. In the early Sixties, there were two acknowledged masters in the art:

the New York Tribune's world-trekking Bayard Taylor (whom Howells had met

at a lecture in Columbus in 1859) and the brilliant metropolitan observer for

Harper's Weekly, George William Curtis. Both of these shining successes in the

field were among those warming Howells' lively ambitions in the summer of 1860.

Howells was well prepared for the experiment. Certainly there were few young

newspapermen in the country in 1860 who possessed so practiced a hand. Though

he could record not more than eighteen months of formal schooling and was

chiefly self-taught in the larger world of academic disciplines, he had learned

through the family business and his own hard strivings how to meet every need

in a local printing and publishing establishment--everything from typesetting to the

writing and editing of copy--and how to turn out the work with effectiveness and

dispatch. At nineteen and twenty he had been doing legislative letters from the

state capital for Cincinnati and Cleveland dailies. As a staffman on the Columbus

Journal since 1858, in addition to regular routines, he had specialized in scanning

piles of exchange dailies, weeklies, monthlies in four languages for materials to

work over into columns variously titled "News and Humors of the Mail," "Literary

Notices," or "Literary Notes." And recently, in addition to the very special efforts

in poetry that currently engrossed him, he had been trying extended critical reviews,

6. Howells, Literary Friends, 19.

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personal sketches, and fiction. It was his verse that had won him a first important outside hearing. During 1859, the smartly current Saturday Press of New York had printed at least ten of his maturing lyrics (with no financial return, however). And a locally published forty-line tribute to "Old Brown," inspired by the Harper's Ferry tragedy the October before, had been picked up in the newspaper exchanges and was included in Echoes from Harper's Ferry, a memorial volume brought out by James Redpath in Boston, where it stood well beside pieces from such established authors as Whittier, Emerson, and Thoreau. Also, the Atlantic Monthly, the top literary journal in the United States, had given him a nod. The suggestion made by Foster for financing the trip was, as Howells recalled in Years of My Youth, that he use $175 of his own money in the summer's enter- prise, with the firm adding $50 in Ohio money, and a letter of credit addressed to certain publishers in Boston and New York, amounting to some $190 more. The excursion as he finally plotted it would demand a good deal of money, and he decided to throw in all his resources including his potential as a peripatetic reporter. At the last minute, accordingly, he had been able to make agreements with his Journal and Gazette friends for the two separate series. The space rates were low, but every dollar would count.7 On June 30, from Jefferson, he mailed back to the Ohio State Journal in Colum- bus two long sketches reporting the first short leg of his vacation travels. These appeared on July 4 under the heading "Letters from the Country." After that he produced from his wanderings six more extended contributions to the Journal, which were appearing under the serial caption "Letters En Passant" or "En Passant," and seven more to the Cincinnati Daily Gazette, which he called "Glimpses of 7. Howells, Years, 207; W. D. Howells, Mark Twain, Nathaniel S. Shale, and others, The Niagara Book (New York, 1893), 237-239.

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Howells' Correspondence                                                      89

 

Summer Travel." The "En Passant" letters carried no by-line. The "Glimpses" he

signed "Chispa" (spark), a favorite pen name that he had used frequently during

his earlier writing years. The two parallel series were managing remarkably well

not to jostle each other in their contents.

He was soon to discover that the labors were to be hard, confining, and merci-

lessly destitute of glamor. Nevertheless, he carried them through to the extent of

more than 29,000 words of published copy (perhaps there was some more that

did not reach print) before he arrived in Boston, when both series terminated five

weeks later. As for the trip, after two weeks in Jefferson, Howells took a lakeshore

train to Erie, Buffalo and Niagara, then steamers across Lake Ontario and down

the St. Lawrence to Montreal and Quebec. He returned to the States by rail, with

visits in Portland, Maine, and Haverhill, Massachusetts, before arriving in Boston

at 9:00 o'clock Wednesday morning, August the first.

At one time Howells seems to have considered the possibility of republishing

at least a portion of this travel correspondence. In August 1869, by then in his

third year as an assistant editor of the Atlantic, he wrote his old friend James M.

Comly in Columbus asking to borrow the Ohio State Journal files of 1859 to 1861.

He was thinking, he said, of making a book out of some recent prose pieces in the

Atlantic and thought that some of his early newspaper "rubbish" might help round

it out. Comly, owner and editor of the Journal, gladly cooperated.⁸ Howells' next

book appeared in time for the Christmas trade of 1870 under the title Suburban

Sketches, but it did not contain any of his earlier Ohio material. Apparently, he

thought at this time that his beginning efforts did not hold up quite well enough

to be worked over, as his later 1863-64 letters from Italy to the Boston Advertiser

had been into Venetian Life, or as similar articles from the Nation and the Atlantic

had been into Italian Journeys.

In the summer of 1870, Howells and his wife enjoyed a vacation trip to Niagara

Falls and Canada, a first return for him to the scenes of his happy travel adven-

tures in 1860. William Dean and Elinor Mead Howells had been married in Paris

in 1862 and by then had a daughter of seven and a son of six. Even so, they

thought of the trip as a delayed honeymoon. They traveled from Boston by New

York to Buffalo and at that point picked up almost exactly the rail and steamer

itinerary Howells had followed in 1860, even returning to Boston by way of Island

Pond and Portland. By the following March, Howells was enthusiastically reporting

himself busy on a "sort of narrative short story, half a travel sketch." He wrote his

father that he was fairly launched at last upon the "story of our last summer's

travels, which I am giving the form of fiction so far as the characters are con-

cerned." If he succeeded, he said, he could see clearly before him a "path in

literature which no one else has tried" and one he could make distinctly his own.

"I am going to take my people to Niagara and then down the St. Lawrence, and

so back to Boston."⁹

Their Wedding Journey, which began in the Atlantic of July 1871, developed

 

8. Howells to James M. Comly, August 5, 1869, in the VFM 1983, Ohio Historical Society. Cf.

letters to Comly, June 27, 1868, in Mildred Howells, ed., Life in Letters of William Dean Howells

(New York, 1928), I, 131; July 7 and August 9, 1868, VFM 1983. Comly was able to lend files for

July-December 1859, and January-December 1861. Howells then asked that the six summer travel

letters of 1860 be copied. He reported, however, "I'm obliged [for] that old rubbish of mine; but I

don't think any of the articles worth booking." September 5, 1869, VFM 1983.

9. Howells to Comly, March 31, 1871, VFM 1983; Howells to William Cooper Howells, undated,

Howells, Life in Letters, I, 162.

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into a six-months serial and from the first installment won a growing body of readers. It was issued as a book in December. A kind of sequel, A Chance Acquain- tance, followed immediately. Both novels drew heavily not only upon Howells' more recent observations but also upon the Journal and Gazette letters of 1860, from which Howells borrowed various specific details of place and incident, some- times whole passages verbatim. Basil and Isabel March, principal characters in both books, even carry along Basil's diary of ten years before--Howells' travel letters of 1860--to which Isabel playfully and sometimes embarrassingly refers.10 These novels that grew directly out of his first extended travel experiences and reporting seem to have set Howells in the course of his long quest for a satisfying realism in fiction. His Venetian tale that he had been struggling with since 1866 10. William M. Gibson has estimated that about a tenth of the material in Their Wedding Journey is based upon the 1860 correspondence, "Materials and Form in Howells' First Novels," American Literature, XIX (1947), 158-166); John K. Reeves reports that the one manuscript of this novel--appar- ently not the final draft--has portions of the printed articles mounted in the text, "Introduction" to Their Wedding Journey, John K. Reeves, ed. (Bloomington, 1968), xvi-xviii. See also A Chance Ac- quaintance (Boston, 1873).

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Howells' Correspondence                                                            91

 

and was intended to be his first was probably his third novel, A Foregone Con-

clusion, of 1875.

The summer travel letters of 1860 show young Howells' developing skills at a

sensitive transitional moment. Produced under pressure of time and travel sched-

ules, this writing reveals how remarkably mature his power had become. He was

able to turn out smooth printable, first-draft copy both rapidly and in quantity.

The accomplishment undoubtedly encouraged him in the months just ahead, and

for several years he continued extended correspondence for various papers.

Most revealingly, the 1860 letters record the young writer on one hand as the

searcher for poetic sensibility and on the other as a maturing observer of realistic

ironies. Both personae were glowingly exemplified in the popular verse and prose

of the German Romanticist Heinrich Heine, by whom Howells had been increas-

ingly possessed for several years.11

"I was at that particular moment resolved above all things to see things as

Heinrich Heine saw them," Howells confessed, laughing at his 1860-self thirty-

four years later, "or at least to report them as he did, no matter how I saw them;

and I went about framing phrases to this end, and trying to match the objects

of interest to them whenever there was the least chance of getting them together."¹²

Actually, Heine had two sides, the one working superbly with the other. There

was both the poet and the critic, both the idealist and the realist, both the im-

passioned verse recorder of delicate sensibilities and the caustic, eminently earthy

ironist--each doing a turn and serving the other as a brilliant foil. Heine's seraphs

and satyrs, each a pleasant diversion from the straight line of reality, strolled hand

in hand through the affairs of this world, alternately adoring and thumbing noses.

If a dangerous extreme of aestheticism threatened, Heine could usually counter

with a bit of healthy frankness--even of impudence--especially in his prose. He

could push human nature around a bit, then set it back on balance, sometimes

even with a hint of raciness on occasion, though wit never quite forgot the bounds

of good taste. He created the kind of great laughter that guards human sanity

by forcing it to honest observation. It was exactly the sort of thing the maturing

Howells had needed.13

The 1860 travel letters are delightfully varied, often reflecting in both mood

and manner the forces that had been moving in the writer. As Howells pointed

out long after, his descriptions are painfully Heinesque at times, as in the obvious

 

11. Heinrich Heine (1797-1856). Though remembered best for his internationally famous lyrics,

which were preeminent in the high tide of Romantic sensitivity, Heine has an ironic wit, notable in

his prose, which is said to have been powerful in curbing the Romantic movement in Germany. Young

Howells was especially familiar with the Buch der Lieder (lyrics) (1827) and the Reisebilder (travel

pictures) (1826).

Lowell had held up his report on Howells' first submissions to the Atlantic Monthly, fearing the

lyrics from an unknown Ohioan might be translations. Howells was chiefly self-taught in German. For

the role these studies played in his psychic as well as intellectual development from 1856 to 1860, see

Edwin H. Cady, The Road to Realism: The Early Years, 1837-1855, of William Dean Howells (Syracuse,

(1956), 52-53. For his acquaintance with German families and culture in Columbus, see Howells,

Years, 135-136; Howells, Life in Letters, I, 16, 18-20; letters exchanged with T. T. Frankenberg, No-

vember 2, 6, 1914, Martha Kinney Cooper Ohioana Library.

12. Howells, Literary Friends, 16.

13. "Ah! dear, wicked Heine!" Howells wrote to J. J. Piatt, March 4, 1859, Life in Letters, I, 23.

Heine's Reisebilder were setting the immediate pattern for Howells' travel letters. For the inception of

his interest in Heine, he credited an article in the Westminister and Foreign Quarterly Review, LXV

(January 1, 1856), 1-33. Cf. Howells, My Literary Passions (New York, 1891), 24. The Ashtabula Sen-

tinel of February 28 and March 23, 1856, quoted extensively from this article and excerpted the Reise-

bilder, probably in Howells' translation.

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92                                                                 OHIO HISTORY

 

straining to catch the supernal at Niagara. The sentimental evocation of Long-

fellow in Portland is downright ridiculous. Truly sensitive realization is probably

at its finest in the sketches from Montreal and Quebec, where he kept sheer feeling

within worthy restraint and succeeded in balancing it with some agreeable gro-

tesquerie that he picked up in his chats with local characters. There is an abun-

dance of playful wit throughout, inevitably making its appearance whenever the

young traveler casts his eye upon radiant femininity. Howells' accomplishment

is firmest and most convincing in such straight reporting as that which he gave

to the two parallel, but richly different, accounts of Blondin's spectacular tight-

rope performance over the Niagara gorge.

Back in Columbus by August 27, Howells found the Ohio State Journal reor-

ganizing, with an opening for him to return to the editorial staff in September.

This renewed "basis" with the Journal proved solid till the following spring when

the paper's ownership changed.¹⁴ Meanwhile, on November 6, Abraham Lincoln

had been elected, and by the following February Howells was writing to his friend,

former Governor Salmon P. Chase, now Ohio's Senator in Washington, applying

for a foreign diplomatic post as a consideration for the contribution his Life had

made to Lincoln's successful campaign.

In September 1861, Lincoln named Howells to a consulship in Venice. He

sailed in November.15

His prose during the year had been settling rapidly into a new professional

firmness while his poetry seemed to grow less certain. In addition to editorial

routines on the Journal, from April to July 1861, he wrote a series of letters to

the New York World on political and military developments in Ohio.¹⁶ When he

sailed for Europe, he had arranged with his home Journal for travel letters again,

three of which duly chronicled his progress through England and across the con-

tinent to Venice.17

After a year of adjustment to his new Italian environment, and to marriage,

he began in March 1863, a two-year run of "Letters from Venice" for the Boston

Advertiser, which proved so sound of insight and craft that they eventually shaped

themselves with little revision into the successful Venetian Life of 1866.18

James Russell Lowell, who had been influential in nudging the coming author

away from his infatuations with Heine and the German Romantics, accepted for

the North American Review in 1864 the first of two essays by Howells on con-

temporary Italian literature, the critical quality of which very clearly signaled the

talent not only of an observing traveler and commentator but also of a discern-

ing analyst who had found his bearings with full realistic awareness in inter-

national letters.19

Howells with his wife and daughter returned from Venice in 1865, not to Ohio,

but to the writing and publishing center of New York. He did some exploratory

free-lancing and had a turn on the staff of The Nation. Then in February 1866,

James T. Fields, convinced at last of Howells' full worth, opened to him an assis-

 

14. See Cady's careful summing up of personal adjustments through 1861, Road to Realism, 89-91.

15. Howells, Life in Letters, 37-41.

16. "From Ohio," New York World, April 16 through July 17, 1861, in William M. Gibson and

George A. Arms, A Bibliography of William Dean Howells (New York, 1948), 86.

17. "Letter from Europe," Ohio State Journal, January 9, 30, 31, 1862.

18. "Letter from Venice," Boston Advertiser, March 27, 1863, through May 3, 1865, Gibson and

Arms, Bibliography of Howells, 87-89.

19. North American Review, October 1864 and July 1865.

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tantship on the Atlantic Monthly. Just after his twenty-ninth birthday, William Dean Howells returned to Boston to become part of the professional world he had first scouted in the summer of 1860. PART ONE: BY TRAIN AND HACK The 4:00 A.M. northbound "Night Express" out of Columbus arrived in Cleveland at 9:50. Howells then transferred to the lakeshore line of the Cleveland & Erie Railroad for the village of Ashtabula in northeastern Ohio, arriving at 12:03. There he was met by a two-horse hack which picked up any passengers who wished to take the twelve-mile afternoon drive over the corduroy road to the county seat town of Jefferson, where the Howellses lived.20 Howells' first letter begins with a device as old as travel literature--the mock heroics of an early morning rising--but it closes with a genuinely exciting scoop. The "sun-browned youth" of the hack ride to Jefferson was his first contact with a celebrity on what was to be a brightly star-touched journey. Written for the Ohio State Journal, the two sketches in this first letter were 20. Howells' life in the capital is recorded in Years of My Youth. Cf. "In an Old-Time State Capi- tal," Harper's Monthly, CXIX (September-November 1914). See also Frederick Carver Marston, Jr., "The Early Life of William Dean Howells" (Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University, 1944), and Lucy Lay Zuber, "William Dean Howells in Columbus, 1858-1861" (M.A. thesis, The Ohio State Univer- sity, 1954). In a letter to Theodor T. Frankenberg, August 18, 1914, Martha Kinney Cooper Ohioana Library, Howells said that in the "Medical College" rooming house he lived in a large chamber two stories up to the right of the State Street door. See also Lathrop's Columbus Directory (1860-1862); Henry Howe, Historical Collections of Ohio (1896); Ruth Young White, We Too Built Columbus (Co- lumbus, 1936); Jacob H. Studer, Columbus, Ohio: Its History, Resources and Progress (Columbus, 1873).

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94                                                            OHIO HISTORY

 

obviously to delight all his knowing acquaintances in Columbus. They would be

quite familiar with the simple, natural and honest commonplaces of an early June

morning departure from the Ohio capital, without any of the special details of

local color that Howells would characteristically give the places he visits in later

sketches. Local friends could picture readily enough his shadowy "Medical Col-

lege" rooming house on East State Street, the omnibus lumbering along the dirt

and gravel streets, the dim early morning glimpses of the new classic-styled, white

limestone Ohio capitol with its unfinished dome, the view east out Broad Street

with its fashionable homes--Elinor Mead's cousins, the Platts, lived at the corner

of Broad and Cleveland. To the west, there were dark streets and alleys leading

down to the Scioto River with weather-beaten wooden bridges, locks, canalboats,

warehouses, soap-and-candle works, and such. Along each side of the waterway

were slum areas, and newspapermen had been calling considerable attention in

recent months to these sordid and brawling establishments which detracted from

the thriving city.

North on High Street, a plank road led out to the Union Railway Station just

beyond the corporation limits, where during the past ten years four lines had tied

a huge knot of connections, and an enormous cupolated raw-wooden barn then

provided a depot. With the railroads had come dismaying nuisances, as everyone

knew--tramps, thieves, thugs, and the women whom Howells' beloved Heine

dubbed "the ladies of the horizontal profession," who plied their trade, reporters

said, in the freight cars on the sidings. Townspeople found the dark edges of this

ten-acre patch convenient dumping places, and one reporter had recently observed

the carcasses of four pigs and two dogs, departure not recent, lying within a

thirteen-foot square.

The opening Walt Whitman lines in Howells' first "Letter" lent a timely ring

and just a hint of pleasant rakishness. Few Journal readers would have seen the

new, much talked about edition of the Leaves of Grass, but they had read enough

of the current tongue-in-cheek newspaper commentary to know the import. There

had been much of it in the Journal recently. Howells' columns show that he had

been engrossed with Whitman since January and particularly with the new edition

after review copies had gone out to papers in May.21 At least the male contingent

of his Columbus friends would know how to smile at his opening quotation. He

himself was already composing or at least planning a major review.

The Ashtabula station, where he transferred to go to Jefferson, held poignant

memories for all the Howells family. Eight years before, almost to the day, the

household of ten had arrived here on a move from Columbus that was to prove

their first effective step up from long frustrating poverty into the beginnings of

common comfort and professional success. They had landed late one evening on

the brand-new railroad, completed only this far the week before, and found them-

selves disembarking in an open field. While Mrs. Howells and five younger chil-

dren rode into town on the stage, the father and three older boys (Will was

fifteen) walked in along a country road, between rail fences, under a rising full

moon. Next morning the elder Howells with the aid of his older sons had set to

work on the Ashtabula Sentinel and turned out the weekly issue.²² Six months

 

21. For example, Ohio State Journal, February 9, May 21, 1860.

22. J. A. Howells, "Ashtabula Fifty Years Ago," Ashtabula Beacon-Record, June 28, 1902; and

undated clipping "Notes by J. A. Howells" in Rutherford B. Hayes Library. Cf. Howells, My Literary

Passions, 48-49. The Howells family moved on June 28, 1852.

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Howells' Correspondence                                                   95

 

later they bought a share in the paper and moved down to the county seat. Now

in 1860, the Howellses were the successful and outright owners, and William Cooper

Howells' editorial voice was a growing one in Republican politics.

In the concluding sketch of this first installment, the taciturn youth who slept

the trip to Jefferson against young Howells' shoulder was "Barclay Coppac, one

of John Brown's men." This letter says no more, but every Journal reader would

have recognized the name of one of the most hunted men in the country. Twenty-

one year old Coppac had been one of seven in John Brown's company who had

escaped from the catastrophe at Harper's Ferry in October.23 By June he was one

of only five still alive and free. Brown and all the others not killed in the fighting

had been taken prisoner (including Barclay's older brother Edwin) and were hanged

at Charlestown. The refugees from Harper's Ferry had been sheltered repeatedly

here in the Western Reserve corner of Ohio. Editor Howells, though unable to

condone many of Brown's actions, was an ardent abolitionist and gave active aid

to the Brown family and others associated with the tragedy.

Later chroniclers say that Coppac, after having found his way to his mother's

home in Iowa, was in the early summer of 1860 making a quiet expedition East

to see friends in Ohio, New York, and Massachusetts. The Howells' paper in

Jefferson refrained from reporting his visit there that week. In August, a year

later, Coppac would be killed in Missouri when a passenger train of the Hannibal

and St. Joseph line, on which he was riding as one of a body of Union Iowa

recruits, crashed into the Platte River. Confederate guerillas had burned away the

timbers of the bridge.

 

 

 

 

William Dean Howells, "Letters from the Country," in Ohio State

Journal, July 4, 1860

 

June 30, 1860

I

I believe I am not singular in the lothness I have sometimes felt to be called

up at three o'clock in the morning to go away upon the cars.

You are the same as I,

You are no different from me,

says Walt Whitman. So it is you I celebrate as much as myself.²⁴

And it is you have retired with the dreadful consciousness that you are to be

roused at three in the morning. Of course you have retired early--at ten o'clock;

and you find a difficulty in going to sleep. Sleep has become in some sort a duty;

and everybody knows how difficult it is to do one's duty. Then you go to bed with

a positive knowledge that you are to get up again. I do not say, that, theoretically,

one goes to bed with a view never to rise more; but practically, one goes to bed

for all time. As you shut off the gas, the fact of daylight seems so ridiculously

 

23. Osward Garrison Villard, John Brown (Boston, 1910), 682; Richard J. Hinton, John Brown and

His Men (New York, 1894), 539. A fifteen-quatrain poem, "The Wanderer," written for Barclay by

his mother in Spring Dale, Iowa, appeared in the Ashtabula Sentinel, August 8, 1860.

24. Cf Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Boston, 1860), 23.

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96                                                           OHIO HISTORY

 

improbable; and breakfast so absurdly remote, that you can scarcely believe in

them. You abandon yourself to slumber without a thought of the morrow, and

you sleep soundly, and straightforwardly until the indignant sun glares in at your

window, and reproaches your last night's incredulity.

But I say, when you go to bed with the four o'clock train on your mind, it is

sadly otherwise. It is in vain that you "loaf and invite your soul." There remains

that consciousness, which no well-meant devices can drug. You count five hun-

dred, and this consciousness chants "Four o'clock train!" immediately upon the

conclusion of the exercise. You try to think of all the dull editorials you have

read and written, and just as this is beginning to have its proper effect, the con-

sciousness laughs in your ear--"The omnibus will call at three, and drag you all

over the city before you get to the depot!" and the consciousness emits a trisyl-

labic theatrical derision. You rise, throw open your window, dip your palms into

water, and returning to your couch, are falling into a doze when you are ques-

tioned by your consciousness--whether that was the omnibus? Of course then you

have to look at your watch. It is only eleven--you groan, and directly afterward,

very much to your own astonishment, you drop asleep, waking at half hourly

intervals, until the time for the omnibus approaches, when your slumbers become

profound. The omnibus driver knocks at your door, and in the dream which the

noise suggests, you reproach a small boy for indecent conduct, as manifested in

pounding on the lid of a coffin. At last it becomes clear to you that some one is

knocking at your door, and it presently appears certain to be the omnibus man.

You wildly demand who is there? and then recollecting that you have a trunk to

be carried down, you tell him to come in; after which it occurs to you to get up

and unlatch the door. It is a protracted struggle to get a light, and the omnibus

man requests you to hurry it up and constantly looks out of the window in an

exciting way.

You are somewhat comforted to be finally seated in the omnibus, but this con-

solation is diminished by the presence of that elderly, hard-favored female, invari-

ably to be found in the omnibus for the four o'clock train. This being is a mystery

to me--an insoluble essence. Why does she always glower so darkly upon you,

as you take your seat? Why does she menace the idea of mankind with her parasol

in a white muslin covering? Why does she always travel with that objectionable

form of satchel? Why does she always look as if she had losses? Why is she never

gifted with youth and beauty? I feel that in a future life, it will be my privilege

to know something of this being. At present, however, she remains an enigma of

the most appalling character. I have not the least idea what her 1st, 2d, 5th and

8th would compose, or what would remain if you took away the two first letters of

her name. I only know that the trunk which she has checked at the depot is of a

gloomy device, and is quite bald in spots from a loss of the hair which originally

covered it. At the depot this female disappears; and you never find her any where

on the train.

You are not a selfish person, but after you taste the dark and bitter coffee-ous

compound, with which they have revived the noble art of tonicology in all the

depots of the known world--and turn to take your place in the car, it does fill you

with despite to find the seats occupied by those sleepy brutes who have come in

off the up-train. You feel that they are your enemies, bitterly opposed to you in

all that is to make life a pleasure; that they are not agreed with you in politics,

and are not of your religion--which is some comfort, for it is clear that they stand

• 12
 

Howells' Correspondence                                                   97

 

a poor chance of future bliss. You perceive that they embody all the vices that

make men hateful to man; and you regret that the train which brought them did

not experience a frightful disaster. When you are finally located, and become one

of the company, you transfer all this detestation to the next person who comes

in with a carpet-bag, looking about him with that air of idiotic distraction which

people wear before they have found a seat.

 

II

The people who left the railroad station and rode over to this village--(Any-

place, Nowhere, Ohio,)--were four in number, and were, in character, one lady,

stricken in years, belonging to three carpet-bags, and having a tendency to fly at

a band box, which threatened to roll out of the hack, and at last did so, to the

unspeakable dismay of the old lady. She made frantic attempts to seize it before

it escaped, and when it eluded her grasp, she appealed in a heart-rending voice

to the driver, and punched all the other passengers (to rouse their sympathies,)

with a hoe-handle, which I have no doubt she procured for that special purpose,

for she looked at it afterwards with reverent affection, as if she regarded it in the

nature of a Providence. It must be confessed that we derided her accident, and

in this derision two small children who occupied the back seat with the old lady,

did not spare to join. Even the old gentleman in spectacles, who made one on the

front seat, laughed merrily, and made a joke which has been the property of all

Christendom for so many years that I will not publish it here. Between me and

this old gentleman, a sun-bronzed youth was lodged, who nodded heavily, and

whom the band-box business did not seem to amuse so much.

I recollect,--in fact the band-box has called to mind--that I once traveled on

this same road with an irrepressible female, who had brought her baggage all

the way from Michigan in the extraordinary form of a barrel. Before the hack

started, the ingenuity of the whole station-village was called in play to devise means

for securing the barrel on the end of the vehicle. With the aid of an incalculable

quantity of rope, divers old leather straps, and some profane swearing, the barrel

was tolerably fastened, but swung round in a threatening manner, as if it would

like nothing better than to break away, and go rolling on to the end of the world.

I am the most obliging creature in life, and when the woman begged me-sitting

on the front seat--to keep an eye on the barrel, I did so. I kept my right eye on

it, which aches now at the recollection, and I rode ten miles with that horrible

barrel on my mind, blighting my existence, and rendering life a burthen. I was

forced to start forward at every heavy jolt, and with extended arms implore that

barrel of perdition not to break away; and this never failed to rouse the propri-

etress, who was bestowing maternal cares upon a wolverine-ling, and who always

flung back into her seat with a desolating cry, "O, my goodness gracious! it's a

going, and it's got all my things in."

But I was going to tell about the sunbrowned youth who dropped asleep in

revenge as soon as the laugh over the band box was finished. I think he found

my shoulder a comfort, for he slept up against it in the most contented manner.

He looked old and young, and there was a sadness in his face, of which, however,

the lines were sharply and decisively cut. A virgin [sic]²⁵ sweetness--that seemed,

somehow, to be a remembered trait--hovered about his mouth, and I saw that

25. Misprinted "virgin." See Howells' playful scolding of the "devoted proof-reader" in "Letters

En Passant" from Buffalo, June 17, 1860, below.

• 13
 

98                                                           OHIO HISTORY

 

he had fine, alert eyes.

After while, the old lady and the old gentleman and the two children quitted

the hack, and I was left alone with the sunbrowned youth. He was taciturn and

I was tired, so we did not talk. He only mentioned that he had been riding day

and night for some time, and could scarcely keep awake. He was also so good

as to smile at a joke which is not new to these columns nor to the friends of this

writer. When I reached my place of destination, I found that the unknown young

man was Barclay Coppac, one of John Brown's men.

 

 

 

 

 

PART TWO: NIAGARA FALLS

 

Howells' two weeks with his family in Jefferson saw stirring developments in

national affairs. In Baltimore, the main body of the ruptured Democratic national

convention had just nominated Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and Hershel V.

Johnson of Georgia to head their ticket, while a bloc of southern rebels had

named John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky and Joseph Lane of Oregon to stand

on a platform supporting an unrestricted slave economy.

The Howellses were abolition Republicans. William Cooper Howells had spent

January through March in Columbus serving another clerkship in the Republican

General Assembly and writing political newsletters. In May he had vacationed as

a roving correspondent as far as Washington, returning home just in time to re-

lease his oldest son Joe from the Sentinel so that he might attend the Chicago

convention and the nomination of Lincoln on May 16.26 Joseph A., who was now

carrying the central burdens of the family paper, was twenty-seven, married, with

a son named for William Dean.

Will's campaign life of Lincoln, announced in the Sentinal during the past

several weeks, arrived in Jefferson shortly after the author and was available at

W. R. Allen's general store. The paper edition sold for a quarter, the hardbound

for a dollar. The Sentinal gave it a fifty-five line review, incorporating high praise

from several other papers.²⁷ W. D. Howells' name and writing had appeared much

in the home paper since January with several poems, including "Old Brown,"

and generous reviews, especially of Poems of Two Friends published with J. J.

Piatt in December, and Will's several poems in the Atlantic.

At the moment, however, Will was fleeing politics. He turned his immediate

writing in Jefferson to finishing up his review of the newly published Leaves of

Grass. The result, unfortunately, turned out to be hasty and superficial, falling

much too undiscriminatingly into the current trend of raucous newspaper fun mak-

ing. Whitman, Howells said, was a bull in the china shop of poetry. He moved

through his book like "an ill-conditioned dream, perfectly nude, with his clothes

over his arm." He was "not a man you would like to know." The poems were

"metreless, rhymeless, shaggy, coarse, sublime, disgusting, beautful, tender, harsh,

vile, elevated, foolish, wise, pure, and nasty .... "

 

 

26. Ashtabula Sentinel, May 16, 20, 1860.

27. Ibid., July 11, 1860.

• 14
 

Howells' Correspondence                                                    99

 

The Sentinel printed the review the week of Howells' departure for Niagara.28

A copy went on immediately to the office of the Saturday Press in New York,

Whitman's most vigorous proponents, where it was reprinted on August 11, just

as Howells arrived for what proved to be a highly unsatisfying visit with the Press's

coterie--and for an introduction to Whitman himself! In all his extended reminis-

cence from these years, Howells never alluded to his ill-conceived review.

Off on his pilgrimage, the morning of Monday, July 16, he arrived in Buffalo

in time to do another rather thin letter for Columbus, and the next morning he

penned his opening correspondence for the Cincinnati Gazette, signed "Chispa."

This favorite nom de plume, which Howells had first used with the Gazette in his

legislative newsletters of 1858, had been borrowed from a beloved character in

his early reading, the sharp-witted servant in Longfellow's verse drama The Spanish

Student. "Thus I wag through the world, half the time on foot, and the other half

walking," proclaims Chispa, "and always as merry as a thunderstorm in the night.

And so we plough along, as the fly said to the ox .... "29 "Chispa" was a delight-

fully appropriate sign-off for the Heinesque reportage Howells proposed to write,

in which earthy ironies and caustic wit should alternate, supposedly, with the

most delicate of soul-searching sentiment. "I had schooled myself for great impres-

sions, and did not mean to lose one of them," Howells recalled in 1893; "they were

all going into that correspondence which I was so proud to be writing, and finally,

I hoped they were going into literature: poems, sketches, studies and I do not

know what all. But I had not counted upon the Rapids taking me by the throat,

as it were, and making my heart stop .... "30

The first day's gatherings lent better to caricature than to sensibility, but the

first big confrontation was just ahead. After his morning writing stint, Howells

remembered, he did a round of calls at Buffalo newspaper offices, then took a

train to Niagara Falls and was whisked by omnibus to the Cataract House where

he settled delightedly in a room overlooking the rapids.

He hurried out for a first survey and had reached the gorge and ventured down

the enclosed stairway to the wet and slippery rocks at the foot of the American

Falls when he realized that the worst was happening! Just when his sensibilities

should have been awaking to their brightest, he was having an onslaught of chron-

ically recurring vertigo. The attack sadly marred the morning, he recalled, but

one would never guess it from the joyous account he penned during the afternoon

at his little table in the hotel.

There was further conflict between actuality and idealized expectation the next

morning when Howells very happily fell under the guidance of the well-known

Ohio artists Godfrey N. and John P. Frankenstein.31 Sons of the prevailing Roman-

ticism, these Cincinnatians were making a professional career of painting and

reporting the Falls--notably Godfrey, who had shown his Panorama of Niagara

in Columbus early the year before.32 They now pointed out to the young visitor

all the exquisite iridescences they were recording. "I looked very hard," he remem-

bered, "and as I was not going to be outdone in the perception of beauty, I said

that I did see them, and I tried to believe that I saw them, but Heaven knows,

 

28. "New Publication, Leaves of Grass," Ashtabula Sentinel, July 18, 1860.

29. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Spanish Student (Cambridge, 1843), III, vi.

30. Howells, "Niagara, First and Last," Niagara Book, 240-267.

31. See Edna M. Clark, Ohio Art and Artists (Richmond, c. 1932), 106-110; Howe, Historical Col-

lections, I, 404; Frank H. Severance, Studies of the Niagara Frontier (Buffalo, 1911), 154-155.

32. Ohio State Journal, January 20. 1859.

• 15
 

100                                                               OHIO HISTORY

 

I never did. I hope this fraud will not be finally accounted against me."³³ His

readers in Columbus and Cincinnati were quite unaware of his lack of perception.

The two sketches of Blondin's (Jean Francois Gravelet) tightrope walking feats

over the Whirlpool Rapids are surely devoid of any affectation. On the afternoon

of July 18, Howells saw one of the daredevil equilibrist's most brilliant exhibitions,

and his accounts are among the best of contemporary reports. Long afterward he

concluded, however, that for a government to have permitted such life-risking

entertainment was essentially "an offense to morality, and it thinned the frail bar-

rier which the aspiration of centuries has slowly erected between humanity and

savagery."34

Howells spent so much time turning out his flow of copy that these four intense

days at Niagara Falls seemed like two weeks when he brought them back to

memory in 1893, and he so reported them in "Niagara First and Last" for the

Niagara Book. As for that blessed correspondence, he complained, it was not too

much appreciated! Toward the Gazette he kept a lifelong pique, or a pretended

one, for having disregarded much of the prose and several poems.35 Actually,

at least 7,000 words from Niagara were printed, and they appear to give a com-

prehensive coverage. If anything was tossed out, it was very likely the verses--

understandably so, if his Heinesque recordings are to be judged in quality by the

Niagara poem "Avery" that turns up in his first novel, Their Wedding Journey.

In this story Howells drew heavily upon the 1860 writing and perhaps salvaged

some of the slighted verse. Certainly he made especially effective use of the scenes

recorded in the letters from the foot of the American falls and on Terrapin Tower.

But this time, his heroine was the one to suffer from a frightening bout with

vertigo.36

 

 

 

 

William Dean Howells, "Letters En Passant," Ohio State Journal,

July 23, 1860

 

Buffalo, July 17, 1860

 

The letters from the country were comprised and accomplished in a single

epistle.

The truth is, I hate to repeat what I have said before, and I find that it was

impossible to write letters from the same place twice, without saying the same

thing over again--saying this summer what I said last summer.37

So I spared myself, and you. I found amusement in doing nothing, and you

found amusement in reading nothing from me. It is therefore all amicably arranged

between us.

 

33. Howells, Niagara Book, 243-244.

34. Ibid., 262-263.

35. Ibid.; cf. letter to "Editor Gazette" from Columbus, August 27, 1860, Martha Kinney Cooper

Ohioana Library.

36. Howells, Their Wedding Journey (New York, 1871), 179-180.

37. A reference to two letters of the summer before: "In the Country," Ohio State Journal, June

9-10, 1859. These were signed, "Chispa."

• 16
 

Howells' Correspondence                                                   101

 

(But not so with the devoted proof-reader, who permitted the compositer to

make me say that Barclay Coppic had a "virgin" sweetness of expression, when

I wrote "strange sweetness," in characters remarkable for their distinctness. I know

very well that there is a gross superstition in the typographical mind that I do

not write a good hand, but it is a superstition miserable and fatal, as I will main-

tain against a universe of compositors.)

Well, after undergoing some two weeks' recreation in the country, I am now

one day out on a voyage of summer sight seeing. If Providence should not happen

(as a pious friend, now deceased, was wont to observe,) I shall visit all the places

of interest in Canada and New England, and you will hear from me at all points,

unless indeed I should find it more profitable not to write.

I came down the lake shore through Erie to this city, yesterday afternoon,

without experiences differing in heat, dust and discomfort from those of ten thou-

sand other people who traveled yesterday afternoon on the cars. The route is

pretty enough--through woodland, meadows, wheat and corn, and those charming

little villages of northern Ohio and Pennsylvania, with occasional blue glimpses

of the Lake.

We stopped at Erie for dinner, and there I was surprised to find that the prin-

ciples of preparing human food, and cutting human hair, are intimately related.

I have ever found that a sandwich, and a sufficiency of honest Rheinwein is more

composing to the body, and grateful to the spirit, than any hotel dinner whatever.

And so I fondly went in search of these vanities at Erie, instead of cramming

myself at the eating hall. Of course, when I beheld the sign--Deutches Easthaus,

[sic]³⁸ I repaired to that scene of refreshment. I entered, and found it a barber

shop! And yet the place had the expression of a Easthaus: there was the green-

blind screen known only to the Easthaus, and there, in a picture on the wall, was

the festive fraulien bearing exhuberant glasses of beer to three yellow-haired stu-

dents. Then why that barber's chair? Why that gaunt and loutish boy, undergoing

tonsure in it? But this, I said to myself, may be a delusion--a cheat. Let me try

yon other place, that vaunts itself to be an eating-house. I try the other place,

and am met at the threshold by an abstracted youth, who dreamily snips the pro-

fessional shear at my hair, but says nothing.

"No,"--I reply--"I thought it was an eating house."

The youth looks pityingly upon me and will explain, but I fiercely refer him

to his sign, and discouraged from further attempts, withdraw to my car, where

I read my railroad guide, by way of satisfying my appetite.

But I remain bewildered. Why this unheard-of sea-change of the restaurant

into the saloon of the barber?

Is it, as the Spaniards cry, a thing of Erie, or is it a transformation to which

the eating house is any where subject?

The question is subtle and appalling.

It cannot be denied that Buffalo is a beautiful place, though it is rather languid

now, as to business. For the most part, I observe that draymen lead a life of

luxurious repose, and the well-paved streets, are not resonant to many wheels.

But perhaps, the city is all the pleasanter to visit on that account. And when you

do visit Buffalo, and wish to see its charmingest aspects, take the horse-cars on

Niagara street, and pass out between the well-shaded, tasteful mansions on either

 

38. Howells probably wrote "Gasthaus." The Journal also misspelled Deutsches and Fraulein;

"exhuberant" may have been Howells' own.

• 17
 

hand to the reservoir of the water-works. Ascend the embankment of this, and you have the city lying before you, and on your right, the fair blue lake [Lake Erie], alive with white sails and smoke-plumed steamers, and restless, struggling tugs, beating about, like mighty logicians wrestling with the problem of the soul. Let the morning be like this,--clear, sweet and cool, and let all the city trees be astir, and all the lake's expanses, nippled39 with dainty waves, silver and lucent in the sun. Then, indeed, if you have ever felt the impulses of the beautiful, you must take off your hat, and--keep perfectly quiet, and lay hold of some terrestrial object, or you must go up, you are so rarified and lightened. If, as you return in the car, there is a secret in silk and perfume seated opposite --if the secret's black veil falls down to lie upon the red lips, and be softly breathed away, and flutter back again--if the secret's hand is little and daintily gloved,-if her parasol is perverse, and will fall, and be gracefully picked up-- why, Buffalo and the lakes, and nature will not seem less beautiful, because of the beautiful work of art--the secret, that leaves the car at last, and walks off upon the flagging, with pretty pronunciations of gaiter heels. This afternoon I am off for Niagara and Blondin. Auf wiedersehn! [sic] William Dean Howells, "Glimpses of Summer Travel," Cincinnati Gazette, July 21, 1860 Buffalo, July 16, 1860 Three weeks ago I left Cincinnati with a number of fixed determinations to 39. Howells wrote "rippled," of course. See his correction when adapting this description in Their Wedding Journey, 147.

• 18
 

Howells' Correspondence                                               103

 

tell you all about some days that I was going to spend in the country.

I was to have nothing else to do but to present my rural experiences in that

picturesque and idyllic and pastoral manner, which should make everybody long

to mow a few swaths of grass, or milk a cow, or do something of that kind.

But you know, when I got into the country, and had nothing to do but to write

an occasional letter to the Gazette, I found the days altogether too long for such

a brief labor. It struck me absurd, to sit down immediately after breakfast to write,

when I could write just as well after dinner, or supper, or after the people were

asleep, and I could have the house quiet, and all to myself.

I am sensitive to ridicule, and when I perceived that it would be absurd to

write one short letter in the early part of a long day, I wrote none at all.

It seemed to me altogether better and wiser to read some nice old books that

I found in the library at home, to saunter about the village, the fields and woods,

or to lounge beneath the dark maples that shadow the home threshold.

So I did all this; and so you have not heard from me; and so perhaps would

not, if I had remained at home. But this morning I turned the key upon the last

piece of stuffing in my carpetbag; and turned my back upon Mapleshade.

Ah me! it is always a pang to one--this leaving home--no matter how often one

leaves.

Long they stand at the gate, waving the departing hack goodbyes, and der Kleine,40

after obstreperous demands--" 'Et me chee!" is held up, and permitted to see, which

he does, with great dancing blue eyes, as if this were not a mournful occasion.

Through the broad-sweeping meadows of old Ashtabula, where the clatter of

the mowing machine drowns the music of the bobolink--through clouds of stifling

dust, worse on the country roads than on the cars--past pretty trim farmhouses,

set, Yankee fashion, close to the street--past the men cutting wheat--past patches

of unhopeful corn, not yet more than a foot high--past the charming village of

Ashtabula, that lies with its green-shuttered white houses upon the crest of a high-

land, overlooking a streamy and orcharded valley--and so to the railroad station.

There is not much to see before you reach Erie; nor much, indeed, there--though

Erie is a pretty place, even as seen from the depot; and the well-informed patriotic

mind recalls that it was there the fleet was improvised which "whipped" in the

battle of Lake Erie.

For the landscape one has the wide meadows, the woodlands, the fields of corn

looking better than in Ashtabula, and the fields of uncut, golden wheat. Everywhere

the season has been gloriously abundant, and heavy harvests ripening to the garner

are the earnests of a good time coming.

On the way from Erie to Buffalo one constantly catches glimpses of the near

lying lake through the foliage of the trees. To-day the wind was fresh, and the blue

expanse was full of waves, that nodded and flashed their plumy crests in the slant-

ing sun, and smote the eye with a sense of delicious coolness, doubly grateful in

the dusty atmosphere of the cars.

On they came to the shore, in far sweeping ranks, like an advancing army, and

dashed themselves in foam and spray upon the sand. The people in the cars looked

at them--the children with wild and explosive delight, their elders with silence and

gravity. For in the presence of any sea the soul feels oppressively the mystery of

life. It, too, like the wave, is beating toward that shore, so far, so near, so dreaded,

 

 

40. "the little fellow."

• 19
 

104                                                            OHIO HISTORY

 

so unknown, where it will shatter its visible form, and the divine essence will pass

unseen.

Alas! Whither?

Something of this must have fleeted through the minds of passengers, I think;

but for my part, I forgot to make any serious reflections, and was without a simile

(except the above, which is not original,) to describe the onset of the waves, until

I reached Buffalo, where the fierce and uncontrollable tumult of the hackmen sup-

plied it.

I do not blush to confess that I am a nervous person, and not knowing the hotels

in Buffalo, it was with some anxiety that I looked for that gentleman, who usually

comes aboard the cars before you reach a city, and asks you in a tremendous poly-

syllable:

"Wishridenombusmetseetyerbaj?"

But he came not, and when we stepped out of the depot at Buffalo, we were

exposed to a furious tempest of hospitality from gents with whips in their hands,

who proposed to carry us anywhere or everywhere, and left one of us in extreme

doubt as to where he wanted to go. He narrowly escaped being shipped at once to

Niagara Falls, but by dint of eloquent explanation, procured himself to be taken

to a hotel instead. Why this sort of thing, O Buffalo?

Buffalo has horse railroads on two of the principal streets--Main and Niagara--

and two tracks on each street, so that you are not obliged to walk half a mile to

take another route for return, as you do in Cincinnati. These railroads are a recent

thing here, and the longest (on Main street) is not yet completed. But already it

carries you from the harbor, through the heart of the city, to the beautiful resi-

dences near the suburbs. If you are a wise man, and wish to see a new place, you

take the horse car at once, and make a guide book of the driver. He is always

civil, and does not find it incompatible with the dignity of his station to point out

objects of interest along the route. He commonly possesses a fund of general in-

formation, which he will readily impart, and if it is your weakness to joke, he will

not begrudge you the applausive smile. For my part, I found that the most inter-

esting people in Cincinnati (after the newspaper men) were the horse car drivers.

The city of Buffalo did not strike me as one of much business-life, at present,

though I fell in love with its cleanliness, its airy streets, near-lying lake, and pic-

turesque shipping. After supper, I sauntered into the little pocket-park, on Main

street, where there are trees and a fountain. The device of the latter is a very

young gentleman, classically naked, gripping a fish about the head. Popular taste

has ornamented the curly hair of the figure with black paint, and gifted it with a

premature mustache of the same color. The effect is vivid and unique, but not, I

think, altogether pleasing.

To-morrow I am off for Niagara Falls, whence I will write you again.

 

QUESTION DE BLONDIN!41

I have never believed that there was a Blondin. If, therefore, I should see not

only Blondin's rope at Niagara, but should see Blondin walk it with his feet in pil-

lows, I have no doubt I shall be inspired to write something worthy of the Gazette,

upon the occasion.

• 20
 

Howells' Correspondence                                                            105

 

William Dean Howells, "Glimpses of Summer Travel," continued, Cin-

cinnati Gazette, July 24, 1860

 

Niagara Falls, July 17, 1860.

 

I

I thought, when I came to see the Falls, I should find myself doubly at a loss

for a companion of voyage--for some one to burst forth to.

But it was not so. It is true that at the first glance, when I beheld the passionate

turmoil of the rapids, as the omnibus whirled me from the depot to the Cataract

House, I wanted to confide an emotion or two to the driver; but the thing was im-

possible; and when afterwards, I descended that interminable tunnel staircase, and

stood at the foot of the American Falls, in the real presence of the Cataract--my

feeling was that of such repression that it was a divine rapture to remain dumb.

It seemed such a feeble and foolish thing to try to speak; not merely on account

of the audible voice of the waters, for I could raise my own above that, and make

myself heard two feet away. But one could not speak above the tumult of his own

soul, to make his voice heard in that of another soul, and so silence seemed wisest,

and humblest and best.

There were two women down there, with parasols, and irrepressible skirts and

pretty feet, and two gentlemen descended with me. One of these assisted the ladies

over the sharp and slippery stones, so bare and shaggy beyond the spray, and so

green and grassy within the fall of mist. The other gentleman, who had a clerical

aspect, clambered off upon the rocks, as nimble as any goat. For my part, I could

only stand still and look at that sublime Revelation, and feel the truth of God.

Ah, no words can tell it, no pigment can counterfeit it--that magnificence of

whirling, knolled,42 bewildered, mad, white plunging water, bathed and halved

again in snowy mist, almost to the fatal brink from which it leaps. How it furiously

combats with itself in the descent, and breaks itself into detached masses, and

plunges thundering into the gulf below! How it cries aloud with the strong voice

of its agony to the Everlasting. How it crawls frightened, stunned, and bruised, to

foam dizzily away from the bottom of the precipice. How the human soul responds

to all in those mute wander-words of helpless lulling.

Break, break, break,

A t the foot of thy stones, O sea;

And I would that my tongue could utter

The thoughts that arise in me.43

 

 

41. Le Blondin was Jean Francois Gravelet (1824-1897). On June 30, 1859, for his debut, the dare-

devil performer ran out along the 1,200 foot rope stretched across the Niagara River gorge, just below

the Falls. He stopped 150 feet out and lay down on his back 200 feet above the torrent; then he stood

and continued to the middle of the rope. There he sat down and lowered a string to the Maid of the

Mist, waiting below, where a bottle of wine was attached to the string. He drew the bottle up to his

position and "regaled himself with a draught of its contents." Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper,

July 16, 1859. Since his first performance, Blondin's increasingly sensational feats had been much in

the news, and Howells may have been influenced by the skepticism expressed in a reprint of the New

York Times article on September 3. Ohio State Journal, July 16, August 9, 22, September 3, 1859. In

1860, Blondin stretched his cable farther down the gorge directly over the Whirlpool Rapids. For

Blondin, see Lloyd Graham, Niagara County (New York, 1949), 159, 162-170; Howells, et al., Niagara

Book, 190; Justice Jarvis Blume, Across Niagara on a Man's Back (undated pamphlet, c. 1900).

42. Probably a misprint for "knotted."

43. Tennyson, "Break, Break, Break." Howells quoted from memory.

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106                                                               OHIO HISTORY

 

"Splendid, isn't it?" asked the gentleman who had done the gallant to the ladies,

and now stood at my elbow. "And here it has been going for years and years, and

doesn't appear to have worn away the rocks at all."

O idle and inadequate wretch!

 

II

I ascended the house-tunnel acclivity in the car which drags you up a very in-

clined plane of several hundred feet, and makes you feel as if you were going to

be tumbled out every moment, for five cents; and then went over to Goat Island.

For all the thousands of people that pass over the island every summer, and

hold incessant picnic in its shades, it is still woody and forestlike. The undergrowth

remains uncut, and everybody seems willing to keep the path worn from the bridge

to the point of the island where you reach Terrapin Tower. In the shade at all

points of view are benches, for the most part occupied by parties resting from the

wholesome fatigue of their rambles and astonishment.

You will not, I trust, patient reader, take a carriage for Goat Island,--you can

do it so much more serenely, cheaply and satisfactorily on foot; and then you can

let every natural beauty explain itself. Your driver might tell of this and that inci-

dent, and point out the scene of the occurrence, but a human interest cannot add

to the wild attraction of the place. You give a passing shudder indeed, as you cross

the suspension bridge, to the memory of that lost wretch who clung so long to the

bit of wood there in the rapids, and was at last swept over the falls.44 But it is only

an instant's thought--the cataract dashes it away, as it dashed away the little atom

of life.

You must go to the guide book for a full and elegant description of Goat Island.

My purposes are too utterly idle, to impart information; but I have taken you

across the island; and now you traverse the brink of the cataract on that slender

wooden bridge to Terrapin Tower, built on a few great rocks that resist the fury

of the headlong waters. You ascend, and behold the Canada Falls in all their

grandeur. Here at the inmost curve of the Horse-shoe the great body of the water

goes over, in a torrent of glittering green, with knots of white on it, and robed in

mist. Further again toward the Canada shore, the water is shallower, and descends,

like an avalanche of snow; and there on your left is the American Fall, shuddering

down into a gulf of hoary vapor. Far away below crawls the creamy river, on whose

shore the men and women "show scarce so large as beetles."⁴⁵

But what do I say? This sort of thing has been attempted a thousand times, and

has not been done. You always behold the Falls with a fresh sense--for no writing

and no picture has ever presented them to you. You have indeed their outward

form in your mind--the shores, the rapids, the islands, the smoking curve of the

river, the cataract, with that stout rainbow resting one end of its arc on the brink

of the precipice, and the other on the chimneys of the "Maid of the Mist;"--but

you have nothing of the spirit of the Falls--nothing of that profound and subtle

magnificence that makes itself felt in the actual presence.

 

 

 

44. The story of Joseph Avery's tragic death in July 1853 was told in contemporary guidebooks.

Cf. [T. Nelson & Sons], The Falls of Niagara . . . (London, 1860). For Howells' poetic use of the story,

see Their Wedding Journey, 176-181. In his intense effort to follow the pattern of Heine, the Avery

poem may have been drafted at the time of the 1860 visit.

45. Shakespeare, King Lear, Act. IV, Sc. vi.

• 22
 

III I found on returning to my hotel, and looking at my guide book, that I was all wrong to visit Goat Island first--that I ought first to have viewed the cataract from Prospect Point, on the American side. Now, as I am a conscientious and conserva- tive person, and like to do everything in the legitimate way, this grieved me so I immediately hastened to Prospect Point, to repair my error, if possible. Everything is so stupendous in Nature, here, that one is keenly alive to the inadequacy of human life and human affairs--one cannot bear to see a battered tin cup or an old castaway boot, when the voice of Niagara thunders to him; and I was inexpressibly shocked to read on the plank walk leading to Prospect Point: "Go to Jones if you want cheap groceries." Jones, indeed! Groceries--fie! I would not buy of that wretched man, though he sold to me at cost, and gave me credit. It was almost dusk when I did Prospect Point, and I returned weary with splen- dor and magnificence--too weary to glow in the mention of Prospect Point. It is already night. From my window I behold the rapids, dark and headlong; on the heavy air rises hoarsely the thunder of the cataract. Peace! O feeble pen. July 18th.--I was very glad to meet Godfrey Frankenstein, the artist, this morn- ing. Under his guidance, I did Goat Island thoroughly, and subtly, and profoundly. The artist at Niagara, like the maker of hay, works most profitably while the sun shines; and this forenoon, when some light clouds had dimmed the sun, my painter- friend put up the beautiful sketch which he was making of the Canada Fall, and we started together upon the circuit of the island.

• 23
 

Ah! if this man could waste his time as guide, how gloriously the public could see Niagara. For I penetrated with him all manner of inscrutable thickets and secret nooks, commanding unknown views of the cataract--places that only an artist's eye could discover. He taught me, too, to see some of the beautiful tints of the water and mists--delicious purples, and greens and crimsons--that escape the greedy, common eye, which gulps and bolts the whole thing, as it were, untasted. Sixteen summers' sojourn about Niagara has made Frankenstein intimate with all its beau- ties, and he seems in some sort the genius of the place, and worthy, if any one is worthy, to paint it. He takes you down a narrow path, steeply dropping through the hillside cedars, where it seems that the only thing you can do is to fall off without expostulation, and lo! the Falls as they appear in one of his pictures. Here, in a space not two feet wide, hanging halfway down the precipice, he or his brother John stand to paint. Above the suspension bridge, on a narrow strip of land, that juts into the rapids, I saw his brother at work this morning, on a very successful sketch of the great tumult before him. And wherever Niagara is beautiful and grand (and that is everywhere) the Frankensteins have transferred as much of that beauty and grandeur as paint can fix upon the canvas. Goat Island is the constant scene of tender passages--a place of unlimited flir- tation. In the presence of the great cataract, soul clings unconsciously to soul. You find yourself bellowing vain commonplaces of admiration to every one you meet, and you make acquaintance surprisingly easy. You can understand then how it happens, when young Jones strays upon the island with Miss Smith, (who is dressed in one of those bewitching suits of gray, and wears her beautiful hair in a broad roll under a jaunty Spanish hat,) how it happens, I say, that the arm of young

• 24
 

Jones convulsively clasps the waist of Miss Smith at all thrilling points of view, and the little hands of Miss Smith grip the arm of young Jones. Happy people! straying under the trees, with the dancing shadows of the leaves upon you! Happy, indeed, if you could walk here forever, and not become Mr. and Mrs. Jones, and be old and fat. So we said enviously, seeing the bliss of young Jones and Miss Smith, as they sat down in the shade, near the Hermit's Cascade, and drew near together, and made believe to read books, and knew nothing but love! O Niagara! you are nothing; and O Hermit's Cascade! you are a mere turmoil of foam, and if the Hermit really bathed in you, (as that public character is said to have done,) then he had better have bathed safely, if not picturesquely, in a tub at home. QUESTION OF BLONDIN Henceforth let there be no doubt of Blondin. I have seen him; and, in my sight, he has crossed the Niagara river three times, on a line stretched a giddy number of feet above the rapids. After dinner, G. F. [Frankenstein] was to show me the Falls from the Canada side, and we crossed the river together at the ferry, immediately below the Ameri- can Fall. (You should cross here; it is much more convenient than the Suspension Bridge, and you enjoy a sensation, tossed about in the boat on the water leaping terrified away from the cataract.) After we reached the Canada side it began to rain, and we could not "do" the scenes and views satisfactorily. So we went into the interesting museum over there, and saw those lesser astonishments, which the

• 25
 

110                                                           OHIO HISTORY

 

curiosity falls back upon so gratefully, after taking in Niagara. After that we strolled

about, and being determined upon Blondin, took a carriage for the Suspension

Bridge.

It still continued to rain, and there was much doubt and discontent among the

assembled multitude lest the rope walker should not dare death for our "giddy

pleasure of the eyes." One mild, elderly gentleman pronounced it an outrage; and,

for my part, I should cheerfully have assisted to tear M. Blondin to pieces, such

was my just indignation at the possibility of disappointment.

But after awhile it ceased to rain; the crowd thronged the Suspension Bridge;

the inclosures, with seats, were opened; and M. Blondin appeared, running and

out of breath. He was a pale, mustached, gentle looking man, dressed in black.

When he appeared at the door of his little house, about to step upon the rope, he

was habited in the conventional tights and spangles of the ring. You all know how

his rope is guyed, and made fast and firm as it can be made. Some of the guys

had snapped in the rain, and the rope was by no means in a straight line. It was

evident, too, that Blondin felt fearful lest the damp should have added to his peril.

He bore his balancing pole and advanced near the brink of the precipice with

slow and cautious steps--his wonderfully sensitive limbs seeming endowed with in-

telligence in every muscle. His feet, so flexible and alert, clung eagerly to their nar-

row path, that swayed and quivered beneath him. The spectacle was one of intense

terror to me, at first, and I found the print of my own nails deep in my moist

palms; but presently, as the brave athlete passed out over the boiling flood, the

spectacle lost reality, and became a mere picture.

Figure to yourselves now, the green and vitreous waves careering furiously

onward with their white crests, far beneath the slender cord that crosses from per-

pendicular walls of black and shaggy rock. Figure the beautiful bridge with its

thousands of spectators, and the thousands on either shore. The wind blows strong

and cool; the roar of the mighty Falls fills the air.

The athlete accelerates his pace; he pauses when a third of the way over--stands

on one foot, stoops, and stands upon his head. He lies carelessly upon his back,

resting his pole athwart his body. He rises and passes on to the middle of the

rope. Here he pauses, makes fast his balance pole, swings down a smaller line, that

serves for a slack-rope, and whirls round and round, till it seems only a wheel there

near the flood. Suddenly he unclasps his hands and hangs by the ankles, head

downward, over that death-rapid river!

He mounts, and again resumes his balance pole, and advances briskly toward

the shore, pausing to stand upon his head once more. He reaches the little house,

and eager hands are stretched forth to take him in.

For all we can see, he does not rest a moment. They chain his hands and feet

together, and thus shackled, his feet are put into willow baskets, round and of the

capacity perhaps of half bushels.

He takes the rope again, with his balance pole in his hand, treading not with

timid steps, but bold, firm strides. In the middle he stops, rests one basketed foot

on the other, and then comes toward us without further delay, his chains clanking

as he moves.

As soon as he has arrived, he removes the chains and baskets, and sets out on

his return, walking backwards.

It is useless. You cannot describe Blondin, any more than you can describe

Niagara. Both are stupendous and baffling; I hardly know which is the more so.

• 26
 

I was glad when the spectacle, which lasted a full hour, was over, and have no wish to do Blondin again. Once is enough. Chispa. William Dean Howells, "En Passant," continued, Ohio State Journal, July 24, 1860 Niagara Falls, July 19, 1860. Shall I add myself to the number of absurd people who have attempted to de- scribe Niagara? It is hard to deny myself the luxury. One comes here with the best intentions of being sensible in the world, and then gives utterance to the most foolish inco- herencies. I remember to have remarked to several people already, that the Falls are stupendous; that the spray is beautiful; that those rapids are fine, and the prec- ipices frightful. But I certainly feel now that it was folly to do so--that I had better have said nothing, or said, with regard to the whole thing, that it was nice. That would have expressed the glory of the cataract--which lives in voices, lights, and immensities--as well as any other form of words. For the best that my art can do for Niagara is to suggest it. Whatever artist attempts more, is beat down helpless in the presence of its grandeur, and can only present the convulsions of his own ideas. My first feeling on seeing the cataract, was that of vague disappointment. I had not figured anything greater, but something different,--or perhaps it did not im-

• 27
 

112                                                        OHIO HISTORY

 

press me as I intended; for one always approaches the sublime with a pre-dispo-

sition to be glorified. It is the conventional habit of thought, which on a second

glance at Niagara falls from you, and leaves you free to be affected naturally.

I have done the whole Cataract thoroughly, in my stay of two days--and I may

speak by the card. When you first come (and let it be in the afternoon,) take the

car that descends from near Point Prospect to the river's edge, and then clamber

over the rocks as close as you can to the foot of the American Falls, which is the

point to experience your first sensations, and have your first rainbow, to realize

Niagara, to unburden your mind of all old lumber of expectation, which you have

stored away from pictures, and travels, and foolish poems-- for all poems about

Niagara are ridiculously inadequate.

From this point the Canada fall is almost hidden by heavy clouds of mist, that

as you glance quickly at them, are full of delicate, fleeting dusks and purples, not

seen with a steady look. Ascend now, and firmly, yet with that refined politeness

natural to you, decline the hospitable offers of the numerous gentlemanly coach-

men who desire the pleasure of taking you all around for an unnameable trifle,

and cross the Suspension Bridge to Goat Island on foot.

Pass through the delicious little solitude in the heart of the Island, which the

foot-path traverses, and emerge at Terrapin Tower, where half the civilized world

has inscribed its names, in different styles of character, on the walls. If you find

here the ubiquitous bore, who haunts even the presence of magnificence, frown

upon him, and affect not to hear what he says. If you see an oldish gentleman,

who clambers close to the brink of the precipice and looks over in the furious

abyss, point the bore to him. If the bore should mildly expostulate with the oldish

gentleman, and the oldish gentleman should reply that phrenologists have told

him he can go anywhere without danger,--draw the conclusions of wisdom from

the scene.

Then go up to the top of Terrapin Tower, and do your Horse Shoe Falls. When

you sweep with one glance over the career of the tumultuous rapids, and leap (in

your thoughts, gentle reader, in your thoughts,) down with that green translucent

sea of falling water into the white and thundering gulf below--look hastily about,

and if there is no one near, go crazy a little while to yourself. Then compose your

countenance, and return to your hotel, pausing on the suspension bridge to gulp

the American rapids, and half muse upon the sweetness with which the pretty

young girl, belonging to the German party, said, "O ich danke!" when her brother

(or lover, was it?) gave her the rare flowers.

Goat Island is marvelously rustic for a place visited by so many thousands every

year. The shrubbery and wild undergrowth remain unravaged, and the place wears

an air of seclusion which would be fatal to the emotional nature under some cir-

cumstances. Indeed in your brief ramble, you will hardly have failed to see some

melancholy instance of this--misguided young people clinging to each other, with

half embracing arms, in attitudes picturesque and tender, and seeming to look at

the cataract, but really looking into the future, more full of rainbows, and beauti-

ful colors, than the spray of the falls. You give a sigh to all this, I say, and go and

eat your supper.

As it grows dusk, you visit Point Prospect at the brink of the American fall, and

do your Horseshoe again, but from the tower is the best. Go to sleep amid the

thundering voices of the rapids, and in the morning take Prospect Point before

breakfast. After that meal repeat Goat Island, and toujours Goat Island, as often

• 28
 

as possible--walking, look you--not riding. Walk all around the Island, and see the cataract in all its moods--see the Hermit's Cascade, see the bosky little isles, see the rapids, and chutes and eddies, and at the southern point look far up the river to where the rapids begin, and the water beyond is a smooth and tranquil sea. If you wish to cross to the Canada side immediately below the falls, there is a skiff-ferry, which is one of the institutions, and which affords you the cataracts in unique aspects. But there is not much to see in Canada except Table Rock and a live museum, and perhaps the passage under the falls. I leave the delights of mere damp and noise and sensation to those who care for such vanities, but I will not imperil any reader of mine by taking him under the cataract, on either side. I prefer my Niagara dry. And I believe I am making it so, for I feel that my letter is tremendously like a guide-book, and I have no doubt that its most decorative expressions are bor- rowed from the book which I paid too much for on the cars. Let us start afresh with a fresh topic. I saw Blondin perform yesterday. I have, (in connection with a vague skepticism on the subject of Blondin,) always felt that if the man really existed and walked across Niagara on a rope, I might have the fortune to see him drop in. I had not a ferocious curiosity, like the En- glish gentleman who followed the showman for so many years in the expectation that some day the lion would bite off the showman's head, when he thrust it into the beast's jaws, and was finally rewarded by witnessing the spectacle. Nevertheless, it is as I have stated, and I determined to see Blondin, when I found him adver- tised to walk. It rained somewhat in the afternoon, and continued wet until four o'clock, when Blondin was to perform. An immense crowd had thronged the beautiful suspen- sion bridge, some three hundred feet below which the rope is stretched from one

• 29
 

114                                                           OHIO HISTORY

 

dark and lofty precipice to another, over a wild rapid, where the angry waves beat

up twenty feet, their green masses crested with foam. A few sharp and jagged

cedars grow at the water's edge on the Canada side, but the American is a naked

wall of sombre rock, rising abruptly from the river. If the athlete should fall on

the Canada side, he would be spitted on one of the cedars; if he fell into the

rapids, he would be whirled away and gulfed in the swiftest death; if he fell upon

the American side, he would be dashed in pieces on the rock.

It was impossible not to observe these details of fearful interest, as Blondin ad-

vanced from the little box on the Canadian side, near the place where I stood. He

was habited in the customary flesh-tights of the rope dancer, and every fibre of the

fine animal seemed alive with instinct of its own. He lifted his clinging sinuous

feet with delicate precision. He bore his balance pole in his hands, and moved it

slowly up and down. He glanced at the faces on the bridge, at the people on either

shore, and stepped alertly out upon the rope beyond the brink of the precipice.

The rain had now ceased, and the wind blew strong and fresh from the breast

of the cataract, whose solemn voices filled the air, while the rapids shouted wildly

below.

It would have been a relief to have broken away and rushed out of sight of that

death-daring spectacle. But it was impossible. The eye refused to quit it, and the

spectator's soul went along with the rope-dancer on his slender cord.

Blondin moved cautiously, and seemed apprehensive of the effect that the rain

might have had upon his rope. With soft and regular undulations of his pole--

with calm eyes fixed upon the opposite shore--with feet that clasped like hands,

planting themselves with infinite eagerness and unerring certainty--with muscles

acting like separate intelligences in concert--he advanced over the flood, paused,

stood on one foot, stood on his head, lay flat upon the rope on his back, rose and

passed to the middle of the river. Here a slack-rope was contrived, and securing his

balance pole, Blondin descended to this, and after whirling round and round, sud-

denly loosed his hands and swung head downward, supported by ropes about his

ankles. He ascended to the main rope again, and continued his journey to the

American shore, where, when he stood just over the water's edge, he repeated the

performance of standing on his head.

All this, however, was as nothing. The piece de resistance was yet to come.

The athlete placed his feet each one in a willow basket, with wooden bottom--

much such a basket in shape and size, as editors and merchants use to put waste

scraps of paper in. His wrists and ankles were chained together with heavy chains.

He took up his balance pole, and set forth upon his return, swinging his legs wide

and free from the rope, as he must, at every step. His progress was cautious, but

not slow. When in the center of the rope, he paused and stood on one foot, rest-

ing one basket on the top of the other. Then he came on without further delay,

the chains clanking audibly till he stepped upon the wooden platform prepared

for him.

This was the piece de resistance. The descent was yet to come. Without resting

a moment, Blondin divested himself of his chains and baskets, and returned to the

American shore, walking backwards the whole way, pausing only once.

The performance occupied an hour--that is, Blondin spent an hour on his rope.

He is a quiet looking man, wearing a very light and arching mustache. His form is

noble and perfectly developed, and you must heartily admire while you deplore

him. As I returned to my hotel, I made some very virtuous reflections on the evil

• 30
 

Howells' Correspondence                                                      115

 

effects of such a spectacle, but as they will naturally occur to the right minded

reader, I forbear to set them down here. Neither he nor I, however, would fail to

see Blondin, for all our moral reflections, I think.

The Suspension Bridge is one of the sights of Niagara. It must therefore be

seen, and not described; which is also the case with the whirlpool in Niagara river

a mile below the bridge.

Returning on the Canadian side, I had a fine view (which no one should miss,)

of the Cataract, from Victoria Point; and this morning I have been doing Goat

Island again, with some friends, when I pointed out the splendors with an eloquent

silence, which rather baffled the professional guides.

One of the interests of Goat Island, just now, is the presence of the artist broth-

ers, Godfrey and John Frankenstein, who are adding to their store of sketches at

the falls, and may be happened upon any sunny morning, in little out-of-the-way

nooks, commanding superb views.

There are so many things about Niagara that one thinks to say, that it fills with

despair to contemplate the amount which must remain unsaid by the rapidest

talkers. There are the smaller islands to mention, the far-seen picturesque shores,

the black and frowning cliffs; there is the pretty little village at the Falls, with its

bazaars of Indian work, and curiosity shops; there are the Indian women, who sit

and embroider moccasins in the shady corners, and shatter your ideal of the Indian

Maid; there are the studiable visitors in throngs from all parts of civilization; there is

the hotel life, and its chance acquaintances and flirtations and fast livers. There is--

An end for the present. To-morrow, I am off for Lake Ontario.

 

 

 

 

PART THREE: TORONTO AND THE ST. LAWRENCE

 

On his last half-day at Niagara Falls, Howells suffered a bit of shocking reality

that does not appear in his correspondence to either paper.

He had paid a special visit to the Whirlpool Rapids, then crossed over to the

Canadian side to view the battle site at Lundy's Lane,46 getting some especially

characteristic Heinesque material at each place. After this he ventured out onto

Table Rock (where a large piece had crumbled away only a short while earlier and

where the portion he stood on was to fall about three months hence), and from

there was attracted to a group of people nearby who were peering curiously at

something down over the edge of the precipice.

Thinking that there might be material to work up in the day's letter, he waited

his turn to lie down on his stomach and creep up to the declivity to crane his neck

over the edge so as to see, far down on the rocks, a human corpse! The next day's

Buffalo Morning Express verifies Howells' recollection: "Body Found at Falls . . .

the body of an unknown man was found yesterday, under the bank, on the Cana-

 

46. The most stubbornly contested battle of the War of 1812 was fought near Niagara Falls from

late afternoon till midnight, July 25, 1814. The American victory prevented a British invasion of the

United States via the Niagara front. American casualties were very heavy, forty-three to forty-five per-

cent. Both General Winfield Scott and General Jacob Brown, who bore the brunt of the command,

were badly wounded. Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People (New York,

1965), 391.

• 31
 

116                                                             OHIO HISTORY

 

dian side ... decomposition had commenced ... had been there some time."47

One brief glimpse sufficed. "He was a very green and yellow melancholy of a

man, as to his face," Howells remembered, "and in his workman's blue overalls

he had a trick of swimming upwards to the eye of the aesthetic spectator, so that

one had to push back with a hard clutch on the turf to keep from plunging over

to meet him." He made a mental note of this morbid impulse as possible future

literary material, then crawled back and went away to feel faint for a while in

secret.⁴8

His account of final observations in the Niagara neighborhood and of his de-

parture for eastern Canada he completed for Cincinnati that evening in Toronto,

and for Columbus two days later in Montreal.

Basil and Isabel March of Their Wedding Journey also visit the Whirlpool,

guided, of course, by Will's descriptions. Since Isabel does not care for battlefields,

they omit Lundy's Lane, but Basil sums up the story of his earlier visit in two pages

of almost word-for-word recall--even to the "sweet summer morning, when the sun

shone, and the birds sang, and the music of a piano and a girl's voice rose from a

bowery cottage near."⁴⁹

They take the steamer at Ogdensburg for the St. Lawrence, the rapids, and

Montreal, their musings en route directed in part by Howells' Journal letter of

July 22. Just as their boat is approaching Victoria Bridge Howells turned to his

Gazette report of July 23 and transferred bodily to his fictional steamer the pretty

little singer who had so intrigued him in 1860. Although Basil March is now pre-

sumably beyond the province of interest in red lips and fluttering skirts, he laughs

so hard at the sweet impudence of the actress that he gets a guilty feeling.⁵⁰

 

 

 

 

William Dean Howells, "Glimpses of Summer Travel," continued, Cin-

cinnati Gazette, July 27, 1860

 

Toronto, July 20, 1860.

 

I

To-day I brought to an end my three days of marvel-spiced idleness at Niagara.

It is a relief, I think, to be away out of the roar of the rapids, the thunder and

splendor of the falls, and to resume something of one's individuality, which dwindles

so painfully there.

This morning I spent the time in a drive to the whirlpool and Lundy's Lane.

The whirlpool is part of Niagara's magnificence, and defied my feeble astonish-

ment; what with its shores clothed in dark cedars, its wild swirl of water, where

in the circuit of a mile the northern lakes pour their floods and combat dizzily

together, and then sweep furiously away to Ontario, the black cliffs beetling far

above, and tempting all those mad impulses of suicide that lurk in every breast,

 

47. Buffalo Morning Express, July 21, 1860.

48. Howells, Niagara Book, 249.

49. Howells, Their Wedding Journey, 197-198.

50. Ibid., Chap. 7.

• 32
 

Howells' Correspondence                                                    117

 

and rise in the presence of deadly perils.

I was glad to get away from that to Lundy's Lane, where the human interest,

sanguinary as it is, was a soothing contrast to the excitements of precipices and

whirling waters. I ascended the tower built on the highest point of land; and with

the thick tongued aid of a slightly inebriated English veteran of the battle, studied

the famous field. The pretty little town of Drummondsville is built, with orchards

and gardens and flowery dooryards, on the bloody ground; and where the battle

raged the fiercest there is now the calm eternal peace of graves.

The sunlight shone so softly upon the scene, the sweet summer wind blew over

it so bland, the birds sang and the voices of children rose in the street, and the

story of the fearful struggle that befell there seemed only a dream of history, which

became a waking fact at the sight of skulls and cannonballs and jagged, rusty bayo-

nets, picked up from the field. Then, indeed, I felt the presence of the battle ghost

which must haunt the place, and I suppose that I should have experienced the

appropriate emotions, but the war-worn veteran looked a decided hint for remuner-

ation, and stopped so suggestively in his narrative, that the whole thing was driven

out of my mind.

I went back to the ferry below the Falls, and crossing, took my last good look

at the cataract, so brave there in the sunlight, with its rainbow and purple and

sunny mists. At the hotel I met the Frankensteins, said goodbye to them, com-

mended the cataract to their keeping, and bolting that tumultuous dinner which

one eats when going to start in five minutes, set out for the Suspension Bridge,

where the wisely intending traveler takes the Erie & Ontario cars to the American

Express steamers at Niagara. Completely en rapport with Mr. McKay, the general

agent at the Falls, (whose courtesy is most patient and distinguished,) you are put

in the way of seeing the Canadian lake cities, and descending the St. Lawrence

in superb style on the American Express steamers, which connect at Kingston with

the Royal Mail Line for Quebec.

On our way to Niagara, Brock's Monument was pointed out by the conductor.

It is a fine column, crowning the beautiful heights of Queenstown, where (see

guide books) "a sanguinary action was fought on the 13th of October, 1812." On

account of the Americans not taking a sufficiently lively interest in this battle, it

resulted in favor of our friends, the enemy.51

The steamer New York was in waiting at Niagara, and crossed rapidly to Toronto,

where I quitted her. My brief lake voyage had been most delicious--what with the

blue water rising in little waves, just feathered with white, the fresh sweet-blowing

wind, the dreamy fading away of the one shore, and the dreamy growth of the

other upon the vision, the broad-streaming splendor of an afternoon sun upon

the lake, over which the white, low-winging gull dipped almost unseen--the passing

ships and steamers, and the uncounted little pleasures of every sense, so alive to

the novel impression. Added to the regret at leaving all this picturesqueness was

a regret for the comfortable--a regret that I was leaving the New York with her

attentive officers and half set supper, for the wild uncertainty of an unknown hotel

in a strange land! Eheu!

 

 

 

 

51. To the memory of Sir Isaac Brock, British commander in Upper Canada who was killed at

the battle of Queenston Heights, October 13, 1812. The Americans under Captain John E. Wool were

enveloped, however, and forced to surrender. Morison, Oxford History, 385.

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118                                                          OHIO HISTORY

 

II

Approached from the Lake, Toronto is a stately and beautiful city, superb with

her public edifices, yet with her many parks and shaded avenues wearing an air

of full-breathed ease and summer coolness. A flat peninsula, on which a lighthouse

stands, with a few low houses and dwarfish trees, forms one side of the harbor

entrance, and on the other lies the city, the most populous and the thriftiest in

Western Canada. But, just now, Toronto feels the heavy hand of paralysis laid

upon our own lake cities, and but for the excitement created by the parade of a

Buffalo Fire Company, which was fraternizing with the Canadians, the streets

were not crowded nor noisy.

I strolled up from the wharf to the Rossin House, (the custom-house officer

having politely passed my trunks and small valise and portfolio without examina-

tion,) and at the hotel perceived for the first time that I was no longer in my

beloved native land. You know very well what a noble and august creature with

us the hotel clerk is, frowning loftily upon you when you approach to register

your name; meditating a dignified space, and then handing out the key of your

room, with splendid hauteur, and dismissing you disdainfully from his presence.

At Toronto all this was quite different. The clerk of the Rossin House absolutely

received us with civility, smiled like a being of our own degraded rank, gave us

fine rooms, and instructed the porter quietly to bring up our luggage. I had fallen

in with a young New-Yorker, and in the ramble which we took after supper through

the city, we recurred constantly with a sort of rapture to the virtues of this hotel

clerk.

In Toronto the shops are fine, and the whole place looks American; but you

distinguish at once between the Canadian and English looks of the people, and

the air of such Americans as you chance to meet. The great Republic asserts itself

in the countenance, dress, and stride of every citizen, who does not go about the

strange place with the bullying pride of the Englishman, but with a nonchalant

confidence that nothing can come up to the States, after all. We amuse ourselves

with picking out young Englishmen from the passers, and identifying them by

that "villainous hanging of the nether lip" which is the characteristic of young

England.52 The women, however, it was impossible to tell from our own. They all,

nearly, wear those bewitching Spanish hats, with the orthodox amplitude of skirts,

and move and look like the American fair. They are certainly pretty, a confession

which the sex demands at the expense of patriotism.

One hour ago we concluded our walk, reserving Toronto for a daylight inspec-

tion on to-morrow.

 

III

July 21.--When it rains, one may regret it, but one cannot help it. This morning

I lingered on the hotel steps, looking at the rain, (which descended as if with no

intention of ceasing before night,) longing to take the walk through the beautiful

city I had promised myself. Under these discouraging circumstances, not even the

inspiriting spectacle of wet pedestrians, dripping umbrellas, and liquid cabmen

could enliven one, and I even beheld without a smile a race between a young negro

and his blown-off-hat, which resulted in the triumph of the former after a brief

struggle.

 

 

52. Shakespeare, Henry the Fourth, Part One, Act I, Sc. i.

• 34
 

Presently, however, a hand's breadth of blue sky appeared in the northwest, and the clouds floated off and the sun shone with a glorious light upon the city, and the silver lake, veiled in purple mists. It is the glory of these northern cities to look down their shady avenues, out upon the cool and glittering expanses of lake, and one might be tempted to endure their fierce winter for the fair summer's sake. The guide book says that at Toronto, "the traveler will perhaps please himself with a peep at the Catholic Church of St. Michael, the St. James Cathedral (English,) the University of Toronto, the St. Lawrence Hall and Market, the Parliament House, Osgoode Hall, the Post Office, the Court House," and some buildings of lesser note. I did the churches, last evening, and had them off my conscience. The Canadian Parliament no longer meets at Toronto, and there remained chiefly Osgoode Hall and the University. In the former building the Court of Queen's Bench is held, and all the Government offices of Toronto are located. It is a beautiful structure, faced with a freestone which is easy to work. The pavements of the courts are tesselated, with little squares of blue, purple, red and yellow stones. The rotunda is finished in perfect taste, and the whole edifice in this respect presents a contrast with our public buildings not pleasant to the American. The room of the library of the Toronto Law Society is particularly fine. You approach the University through a noble avenue of pines, cedars, locusts and willows. The College stands in the midst of beautiful grounds, on which the forest trees still stand in picturesque groves, and shadowing the winding, undu- lating walks and drives. The building is of white sandstone, and in the Elizabethan style--gabled, and spired, and towered, quaint in detail, and stately in general effect. It is said to be the finest structure of the kind in the New World; and,

• 35
 

120                                                                  OHIO HISTORY

 

indeed, it is hard to conceive any which could surpass it in beauty. It is newly

finished, but its air of newness does not detract from its grandeur; though I con-

fess that as I walked through its sounding and arched aisles, and noted a "modern

improvement" in the shape of a coil of hose, I felt my finer feelings somewhat

shocked. There cannot be any doubt that the hose would prove extremely useful

in case of a fire.

The museum of the University is very complete, from the head of a mummy

down through all the branches of stuffed natural history, to the toe of a bat. There

is a fine library, and lecture rooms uncounted. The provincial lunatic asylum is

near the University; but as one meets insanity at large, everywhere, I did not care

to look at it here in confinement. I chose rather to pause in the University grounds,

and see two cannon captured at Sebastapol.53 They were presented to Toronto by

the fond mother land, and Toronto is mounting them on two sandstone blocks in

sight of her University. (The reader will notice here that I am virtuous enough to

refrain from allusion to teaching the young idea how to shoot--so natural in this

connection.) Both pieces were spiked. They are immense in size and in bore--being

as large as a flour barrel, and of the caliber of "The Mount Vernon Papers."⁵⁴ I

suppose they appeared grim enough, when belching flame and death into the allied

camp; but here they looked singularly peaceful, and yawned idly at the gate,

where a small boy was flatting his nose against the paling.

I thought the college avenue a mile in length as I went up; but coming back

hungry to dinner, I found it two miles long. The reader may average it as he pleases.

It is odd, this effect that hunger will have upon us. "One day," says Hunt, "there

was no soup for dinner, and then we disputed the existence of a god."55

Chispa.

 

 

William Dean Howells, "En Passant," continued, Ohio State Journal,

July 28, 1860

 

Montreal, L.C., July 22, '60.

 

What with leaving Niagara, being whirled to the lake port of the same name

in the cars, taking the American Express Steamer New York for Toronto, spend.

ing a busy day of sight seeing in that city, taking another American Express Steamer

for Ogdensburgh, and steaming across Lake Ontario in the night, connecting with

the Royal Mail Line for Montreal and Quebec, descending the magnificent St.

Lawrence, and shooting through the glorious rapids of that river--what with all

this, I say, and with having my sea-legs and my sea-head still on, I am somewhat

 

 

53. The fall of Sebastopol, September 8, 1855, after an eleven-month siege by Allied armies marked

the defeat of the Russians in the Crimean War. The charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, a troop

of six hundred English soldiers against a large Russian army, had been immortalized by Tennyson.

54. After running for a year in the New York Ledger, "The Mount Vernon Papers," fifty-three in

number, by Edward Everett, had just been issued in book form by D. Appleton & Co. The New York

Saturday Press of July 7, 1860, reviewed the letters as "a dead, dull, leaden weight of pretentious

commonplaces." Even though Everett was a leading scholar and statesman in his day, he is commonly

recalled now for his two-hour address that was eclipsed by Lincoln's memorable words (only three

paragraphs) at the dedication of the Gettysburg Soldiers' Cemetery, November 19, 1863.

55. Leigh Hunt (1784-1859).

• 36
 

confused as to time and distances, and am not sure whether it was last year or Niagara Falls, I last wrote you from.56 Let me begin at the beginning. I ended my series of glorified sensations at the great Cataract on Friday. On the morning of that day I did the whirlpool, to which I rode three miles below the falls. It is to me one of the most impressive spectacles of that grand place. In the round of a mile, the great lakes of the north all pour their floods, where they swoop and swirl in silent, dreadful vortices, and with resist- less under currents boiling beneath the calm, oily eddies. Abruptly from this scene of secret power--so different from the thunder and grandeur of other features of Niagara--rise lofty cliffs on all sides, to a height of two hundred feet, clothed from the water's edge almost to their crests with dark cedars. Silently the lakes steal out of the whirlpool, drunk and wild, and then with brawling rapids roar away to On- tario through the narrow channel of the Niagara: The Whirlpool is not visited so much as formerly, I think, for a small house at which refreshments were offered to the fatigued public is now closed-- Door shut and window barred. And on the Canada side, the steps descending to the water's edge from the top of the cliff are in such despair, that out of regard to the enlightened public, of whom these letters En Passant are the chief delight, I declined to commit suicide by going down. My guide descended a few steps, but returned with the remark that it made him feel chilly, at which frigidity I could not wonder. Every thing is grand and beautiful and picturesque and all that, about Niagara, and this whirlpool must especially not be missed. I returned to the Clifton House through the charming village of Drummondsville, which is built on the battle-ground of Lundy's Lane. The coachman, whose service and establishment I had hired, 56. It was Saturday morning.

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122                                                          OHIO HISTORY

 

assured me that the action there fought was a famous one, and on referring to the

guide book, I found this statement confirmed, so I resolved to stop at Lundy's Lane.

"No. 37," was my guide, a young person with whom I had much informing con-

versation. The morning was delicious, and as we bowled merrily over the free soil

of Canada, to and from the whirlpool, No. 37 confided to me more of his family

history than I think it right to set down here; but if the Niagara-doing public desire

a good and trusty drive at the falls, No. 37 is the man for their money. (N.B. This

is not a puff.)

But I was going to say, that I talked with No. 37, first, of course, on the subject

of the travel this summer, which has fallen off on both sides of the river at Niagara.

No. 37 was of opinion that the John Brown affair had kept away a good many

southerners. They used to come to the Clifton House in crowds, and bring their

slaves with them, and take them away again, in spite of all the coaxing the Canada

negroes could do.

No. 37 thought this was pretty good evidence that the niggers were well off in

slavery; but admitted that it was a horrible thing, if slavery degraded a man so

much that he didn't know he was better off free.

Negroes, however, were too saucy in Canada. Sometimes they intermarried with

the whites. It was suggested that they had a perfect right to do so, if the whites

were willing. 37 declared in response that he would shoot a relative of his if she

married a negro. Which it could not be denied, would effect a divorcement. It was

asked if all the Canadians felt as he did towards the negroes. O no--he was born

on the other side; and he aired our vulgar national prejudices as if they were some-

thing to be proud of.

Coming down the St. Lawrence, this morning, I fell in talk with a Canadian

from Toronto, who expressed great horror of the fugitive slave law, and the Dred

Scott decision, but said that Canada did not desire the presence of a black popu-

lation. Another told me that the negroes were in the west and south of the prov-

ince, where they live in such numbers, seldom settle land, but unless they already

have trades, devote themselves to the easy arts of wood sawing and white-washing.

It seems, indeed, that the same cruel and unjust prejudices oppress and exclude

the race here as in the States, though here they have equal rights with the white

people. Canada has not solved the sable problem.

But I must go back to Lundy's Lane, and ascend the tower of observation built

there, where I find an old British militia man who was in the battle. This noble

old soldier, who, responsive to the tributary coin--

Shouldered his crutch and showed how fields were won,

gave me a simple and highly unintelligible lecture on the Battle of Lundy's Lane--

first asking me if I had ever heard of General Scott. I replied that I had--that he

had made several pleasing speeches in the Presidential campaign of 1852, which

I had read with profit and entertainment.

"Well," said the veteran, "this is the place where General Scott got his laurels."

I looked the appropriate depth of astonishment, and Captain Smith rambled

heavily through his story. He evidently went just so long to every auditor, and

nothing could stop him short of it, so I fell into a reverie until he came to an end.

It was hard to remember, that sweet summer morning, when the sun shone, and

the birds sang, and the music of a piano and a girl's voice rose from a bowery

little cottage near, that all the pure air had once been tainted with battle smoke,

that the peaceful fields had been planted with cannon, instead of potatoes and

• 38
 

Howells' Correspondence                                              123

 

corn, and that where the cows came down the foeman's lane, with tinkling bells,

the shock of armed men had befallen. Far away gleamed the blue and tranquil

Ontario; far away rolled the beautiful land, with farm house, fields and woods, and

at the foot of the tower lay the pretty village. The battle of the past, seemed only

a vagary of my own, and how could I doubt the warrior at my elbow?--grieved

though I was to find that a habit of potation had the better of his utterance that

morning.

The guide explained afterwards, that persons visiting the field, were commonly

so much pleased with the Captain's eloquence, that they kept the noble old soldier

in brandy and water rapture throughout the season, thereby greatly refreshing his

memory, and making the battle bloodier and bloodier as the cannon advanced

and the number of visitors increased.

At Toronto, the cosas de Canada57 first became noticeable not so much in the

buildings and streets of the city, the vehicles, and so forth, (for these were Ameri-

can in appearance,) but in the looks of the people. The Canadian looks something

like an Irishman, an Englishman, and a Scotchman, and not altogether like either.

He seems not to have the impudence of the one, the rude hauteur of the second,

nor the metapheesical aispect of the third, but with a touch of New-World careless-

ness, he suggests all three. When he speaks he drops many of his h's, trills his r's,

and has a perceptible Doric burr. The walk of the Toronto man, is however, en-

tirely his own, and indescribable, though I do not deny that it might not be acquired

by practice on the transverse planks of the wooden pavements of his city. The women

had an English bloom of complexion, and were certainly charming, as women are

everywhere, but I have no doubt the keen feminine eye would have detected a

fatal absence of style, (by the way what does style mean?) and these northern

beauties absolutely stepped when they walked, and not that divine glide, so destruc-

tive in our fair countrywomen. The pretty Spanish hat is universally worn, with the

hair netted in a broad roll upon the neck; but the suits of gray have not reached

Canada.

Toronto is a beautiful city, with four parks, and streets sufficiently wide, looking

out upon the little bay, formed by a low peninsula that juts into the lake. The busi-

ness part is well built, and the part where residences and homes are set, is shaded

and serene, without great splendor of edifice. I believe the town has now some fifty

thousand inhabitants.

The pride of the city is in her public buildings, which are certainly superb. I

visited Osgoods Hall, where the Courts of Queen's Bench are held; the Model

School, where there is a fine gallery of paintings and copies of famous statuary in

plaster; and the University of Toronto, of which the building is the largest and

noblest in America. One gives so little idea of buildings, to describe them even in

the most graphic manner, that I leave the reader to erect these edifices out of the

picturesque materials of his own imagination, charging him not to spare expense,

and to be sure and have his University approached through a noble avenue of trees

a mile in length; and have all these institutions set in the midst of grounds taste-

fully laid out, and jealously kept beautiful.

At six o'clock Saturday morning, I stepped aboard the "Northerner" for Ogdens-

burg, regretting Toronto, no little. The evening was beautiful; soft clouds floated

lazily over the skies, a fresh wind blew across the lakes rippling its blue surface,

and touching with a faint white, the azure crests of the waves. The fair and stately

57. The Canadian look.

• 39
 

city, faded slowly down the horizon; the sun sunk with a crimson glory upon the land, and laid his red livid beams in a wide and radiant path upon the trembling waters. Then the wind rose, And like the wings of sea-birds, Flashed the white caps of the sea.58 The wind rose, (but not to sea-sickness,) and I sat long upon the deck, "und dachte meine s??sse gar nichts Gedanken,"59 while the steamer rushed stormily through the gale; while the people chatted about me, while the white gull dipped along the wave, while the land and the clouds blended their lines and all was beautiful. It was seven o'clock this morning when I awoke, and found the boat threading the first of the Thousand Islands that lie at the mouth of the St. Lawrence; and so my first glance took in the rarest part of that beauty upon which the vision has feasted all day. These little islands are all covered with dark evergreens, and such summer green trees as can draw life from the soil thinly hiding the rocks. The greater part of them are not more than an eighth of a mile in circumference; and they are usually oval in form. The boat winds in and out among them, threading their mazes with stately speed, and commanding beautiful views of them and the far-lying low shores of the river. For, to my surprise, the banks of the St. Lawrence were comparatively flat, rising gradually from the water, to not more than fifty feet at any place, I think. If the water had been of dusky gold color, instead of translucent green, and the shores and islands covered with cottonwood and willows, instead of dark cedars, it would have required no great effort to believe myself on the Mississippi between Cairo 58. Longfellow, "Twilight." 59. "and thought my sweet nothing-at-all thoughts" The quotation is used again in translated form in the July 29 letter from Portland to the Ohio State Journal. "Gedanken" misspelled "redanken."

• 40
 

Howells' Correspondence                                              125

 

and St. Louis, so much did these great rivers impress me as kindred, in the outline

features of their landscape.

It is a little below Ogdensburgh [New York], where we took the English steamer

Banshee, that the first rapids are passed, and from thence to Montreal, we pass five

more rapids, the largest being the Long Sault rapid nine miles in length, and forty

miles below Ogdensburgh; and the most dangerous being La Cluri Rapids, eight

miles above Montreal.

The sensation of going over the rapids in the careening boat, that flies swiftly

through the foaming water, is one of wild delight. You forget all danger, if there is

any, in the excitement and novelty of the scene. All day long the wind blew so

cold that shawls and overcoats were required for warmth, but all day long the

boat's cabin was deserted by the passengers, who thronged her forecastle, eager for

the rapids. Great foaming waves would strike her bows, and brawl away to her stern,

while she dipped and rolled, and shot onward, like a bird blown by the wind; and

fields, houses, woodlands and Islands whirled out of sight. The young fellows aboard

all clutched their hats, and roared "By Jove!" as with one voice; the children crowed

and laughed; and tender little women cooed together in wild raptures, and one

brave girl, with her unconscious, fearless smile, her picturesque attitude, and back-

streaming hair and feather, seemed the genius of the scene.

The long rapids, passed, we crossed two beautiful little lakes-- St. Francis and

St. Peter's--and had time to enjoy the quieter charms of the landscape--the farms

and woods on either side, the purple expanses before us, and far to the south, the

faint-seen mountains of Vermont. At last the mountain of Montreal appeared in

sight--the distance faded away, the spires and domes and roofs of the city grew

upon the vision, we passed under the famous tubular bridge, and slowly rounded

to the wharf. And here, with the novel feeling of actual presence in a foreign city,

adieu for the nonce.

 

 

 

 

PART FOUR: MONTREAL

 

Some outer bounds of young Howells' provinciality began to show up rather con-

spicuously as the Canadian letters accumulated. His reservations toward British

manners, customs, and politics had been stirred uncomfortably in Toronto and

continued to express themselves throughout the journey. He seemed to like Cana-

dians least when they appeared to talk, dress, or think like Englishmen!

In matters of religion, Howells had begun to view all authoritarian systems with

a wary and skeptical eye, his questioning resulting, it would seem, not so much at

this stage of his early maturity from a considered liberalism as from the aloof

dissent encouraged by his family's Quaker and Swedenborgian leanings. In his

dispatches, his comments upon Catholicism as an order reveal little realistic knowl-

edge of the faith or of its inner workings as a system. In a conversation with Dr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes a few days later in Boston, Howells would show equal obliv-

iousness to the affairs of Protestant churches in Columbus.60

On the other hand, the outward symbols of the Roman church in French Canada,

60. Howells, Literary Friends, 45-46.

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126                                                           OHIO HISTORY

 

like all else there that was new and strange--the French language (which for him

had here become a living thing for the first time), the Old World architecture, man-

ners, dress, and daily routines--were obviously helping to release him to roam hap-

pily and at will in a wide domain of romantic sensitivity.

His serious Montreal sketches are among the best of the trip, and it is not sur-

prising that he found them easily adaptable when he was ready for his first novel.

Basil and Isabel March of Their Wedding Journey, by the time they reach Mon-

treal, are being guided almost constantly by Basil's assumed diary of ten years

before. They take the same ride around Mount Royal and visit with the same

mysterious young priest, after which Isabel exclaims, "Why didn't something hap-

pen?" And Basil explains, "Ah my dear! What could have been half so good as the

nothing that did happen? Suppose we knew him to have taken orders because of a

disappointment in love, how common it would have made him; everybody has been

crossed in love once or twice."61

They call at the Convent of the Gray Nuns and note the same details and criti-

cisms of what seems an unnatural system of self-sacrifice. Basil ponders tenderly

whether or not the two very pretty young girls among the Sisters may actually be

"the twain he had seen there so many years ago, stricken forever young in their

joyless beauty."62

 

 

 

 

William Dean Howells, "Glimpses of Summer Travel," continued, Cin-

cinnati Gazette, July 31, 1860

 

Montreal, July 23.

 

I

I greet you, Cincinnatians, from this beautiful city of the North, where I button

my woolen coat, with a calm feeling of October comfort in the act--I greet you

that swelter and fry up Fourth street and down Vine, and offer you my sincerest

compassion.

Is it indeed summer? I hardly know. The flowers are in bloom, the woods are

green--but the wind blows not with the hot breath of July; and not a linen coat is

seen. All day yesterday, while we descended the St. Lawrence, it was so cold that

one had ado to keep warm; and Saturday night was a little autumn.

 

II

I left Toronto in the early evening on Saturday, and on yesterday morning

awoke in the presence of the Thousand Islands at the entrance of the St. Lawrence.

Ah! that St. Lawrence river! It rushes through my remembered yesterday, a

dream a hundred miles long, (like those never-ending processions of De Quincey's

opium visions,)63 with its picturesque sloping shores, its "summer isles of Eden

 

 

 

61. Howells, Their Wedding Journey, 268-270.

62. Ibid., 255.

63. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (Boston, 1856).

• 42
 

Howells' Correspondence                                                   127

 

lying in dark purple spheres of sea,"⁶⁴ its fairy lakes with floating lights, its pretty

towns, and, above all, its wild and glorious rapids. Life may stale anywhere; but

life amid the infinite variety of this river must remain vivider and newer than in

the dull streets of cities and the gloom of editorial dens. I had a mind to put it

to the captain of the steamer, so calmly smoking his pipe, whether he was not a

happy man; but with another look at that serene countenance, in every line of

which roast beef and plum pudding and grand rapids were legibly written, the

question seemed so preposterous that I gave up unasked. And, to tell the truth,

I had as little time to propound such psychal problems to the captain as he to

hear them. I could not so long forsake the glories of the landscape on which the

eye feasted with infinite greed--from the mountains of Vermont, lying purple and

vague against the southern sky, to the furthest stretch of rocky shore upon the

north. All delights of the vision are here harmonized and refined to their divinest

essence--rare colors of sky, exquisite tints of water, dark verdure of evergreens,

yellow gold of wheat fields, gray green of meadows, white of houses, gloom of

rocks, cool-breathing dusk of woodlands.

But of the glories of the St. Lawrence, of course the rapids are the first--seen

afar off, like flocking white-winged sea-birds beating against the shores, heard

hoarsely as the boat approaches, and descended at wild speed, with great leaps

and buffets and lurches, all the people enthused with the swift motion, and the

stormy grandeur of the scene. The shores hurry away as the boat bounds through

the white surf, between the brown rocks that lurk beneath the smoother stretches

of water, and the career of the vessel is felt in every fiber of the passenger. The

longest rapid--that of the Long Sault--is nine miles, and this has been passed in

twenty minutes, without steam.

 

III

It was after six o'clock when we came in sight of the city of Montreal, lying

at the foot of her dark green mountain, regal and stately indeed. The pretty singer,

who had not appeared before, now came forward to the forecastle, and with her

coquettish shawl about her, flirted with the young Englishmen and Canadians of

her acquaintance. One of the latter, whose expression of face was precisely that

of the beaver on the escutcheon of his Province, was the most eagerly attentive

to the singer, who received his heavy gallantries with gay impertinent nonchalance

--delightful, but improper; while the innocent American girl who sat beside her

father looked on with shocked admiration.

When we came to the La Chine Rapids, the last and the most dangerous, the

pretty singer rose to her feet, apostrophized the tumult with a charming attitude,

and warbled a delicious bit of song, and altogether disputed the attractions of

the river. Then appeared the Victoria Bridge, looking so low, because of its great

length that it seemed impossible to pass beneath it.

"I wonder now," said one of Konigin Pomare's attendants, "if we're going

right under it."

"No, sir," said Konigin Pomare, "we're going right over it," a witless sweet

impudence at which one must laugh.65

 

 

 

64. Tennyson, "Locksley Hall."

65. Queen Pomare. Perhaps an allusion to the Tahitian ruler deposed by the French; a familiar

name in South Sea romance.

• 43
 

But we really went under, and saw something of its structure; but as I hope to see something more--wait. IV Montreal, on Sunday evening, was not so dull as our Puritan cities.66 I strolled out after supper, and wandering about in the intricacies of the narrow streets, tasted and nibbled at the novelty of the place, so unlike all American towns. Streets leading nowhere, narrow and dark, stupid culs de sac, little odd old houses with dormer windows and roofed with tile and tin, stately public edifices, the magnificent Cathedral, a hundred other steeples piercing the dusk--this confusion is my first impression of Montreal. Cabs were rattling by, the wooden sidewalks were thronged, refreshment booths were open, and the whole place seemed to be recreating itself after the labors of devotion. That is, the French part, which forms one-half the population of Montreal, and is industrious and devout, but not Sabbatarian. The alert and bright-eyed youngster who took me through the Cathedral, this morning, and lectured me rapidly upon the pictures, the confessionals, the pulpits and the altars, and told me that there were thirty priests attached to the service of the Cathedral, and that the Cathedral was of such and such dimensions, and that the great bell in the left tower weighed twenty-nine thousand pounds, and that it was only rung once a month, when sixteen men were required to move its ponderous tongue--this youngster was French, and was quite sure that I was a 66. Howells' two and a half days in Montreal are only fragmentarily reported in the letters. Gaps may indicate unprinted correspondence.

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Howells' Correspondence                                                129

 

Yankee. Yankees always come to the Cathedral, he said; and I think indeed, that

as the church charges twenty-five cents admission to the towers, and our country-

men pay this charge in large numbers, the national curiosity does a great deal

toward the support of the "true faith."67

Only a few devotees were in the Cathedral this morning, and these were all

women, (who seem to have more need of repentance in Catholic countries than

men,) with the exception of an old Indian, that knelt and prayed over his beads

before the picture of the Virgin, with many contrite sighs and tears. He was a

savage man, my little guide told me, and indeed his devotion, in its fervor and

pathos, was very unlike that of the Christian gentleman.

In the tower, as I went up, I encountered another coming down. I addressed

him with the national salutation, "Hello!" and when he responded in an unmis-

takably American manner, I proposed that he should go up again with me. Our

brief acquaintance ripened into the warmest friendship, and we confided to each

other the leading facts of our personal history. I am continually amazed at the

ardor of these sudden friendships, en passant. My New-Yorker, whom I left behind

at Toronto, I parted from with a poignant grief that was only equaled by the

rapture with which my new friend and I greeted each other in the tower. I am

in a state of desolate bereavement just now, however, for after seeing the hospital

of the Gray Nuns, together, a cruel fate has already cast me and my friend

asunder. He was, perhaps, not the wisest young man; he had the glow of a col-

lege prize still upon him; but he was good, and he is gone. He bought many

things of the Gray Nuns, and gave a Canada shilling to God for the poor.68

We had passed through the wards of the Hospital and seen the infirm and

orphans, and entered the little chapel of the nuns. It is in the form of the cross,

furnished with coarse wooden benches, and the floors are bare. At noon the bell

struck and the nuns entered, habited in dresses of gray, with blue check aprons,

and wearing black crape caps. They entered with a quick tread, chaunting as they

came, and, as they passed the fount [sic] of holy water, touching their brows with

it. Then they knelt, and when a brief formula had been repeated, passed out,

touching their brows with holy water, as before. None were old, and some were

beautiful, with fair serene faces and quiet eyes, like as many Evangelines. But

others seemed the victims of a system, rather than a sorrow or a superstition, and

cast quick bright glances at the people in their chapel.

"It is wicked," said my tower-made friend; and indeed, perhaps, it is wrong to

entomb so much fresh and beautiful young life. These gray sisters--gray too soon

--do much good, and are lambs of God without doubt; and yet the world has as

its kids, no less tender and pure and faithful, that delight in kind deeds, and do

not wear gray coarse cloth and crape, but go about their sweet charities in silk

and Spanish hats.

The sacrifice that the nun makes has its beauty, but it is the beauty of death.

One could not look upon these gentle sisters without thinking them already

pale ghosts, wanly hovering between heaven and the world, ministering and con-

soling those below, but yearning for the glory above, and taught to suffer and do

good, not for the good's sake, but for the reward's sake. Poor soeurs grises! In

their narrow cells, over their work, at the bedside of sickness and age and sorrow,

 

67. "Le Gros Bourdon" in the southwest tower of L'eglise de Notre Dame, built in 1824, is said to

be the heaviest bell in America. For the little French guide, cf. Howells, Their Wedding Journey, 269-270.

68. Order of the Grey Nuns, Guy Street, founded 1737.

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130                                                             OHIO HISTORY

 

kneeling with clasped hands and yearning eyes before the bloody spectacle of the

Passion--they are only quaint, sweet phantoms, but at which one looks, and feels

more subtly the greatness of their Church's power, than in the presence of her

grandest piles, or in the sight of her august ceremonies, with praying priests,

swinging censers, tapers, and pictures, and images, under a gloomy heaven of

cathedral arches. Here, indeed, the faithful have given their treasure; but the nun

has given her life, her earthly hope, her woman's passionate nature, and all the

tenderness that clings about the name of beloved and mother. The Church should

not spare its benedictions to the world so sorely bereaved.

We passed out of the nunnery into the street. The little orphan girls were play-

ing at subdued sports in the convent yard; the rain fell soft and thin, and the

gray clouds that floated over the sky so swiftly, seemed far-seen gray sisters in

flight for heaven.

Chispa.

 

 

William Dean Howells, "Glimpses of Summer Travel," continued, Cin-

cinnati Gazette, August 1, 1860

 

Montreal, July 25.

 

 

I entered softly the pretty little church, and walked up the aisle with those

hushing steps that blend with perfect silence, rather than interrupt it. I had been

riding round the beautiful mountain, from which Montreal the city takes its name;

and, passing through the quaint French villages that cluster around its base, had

lived a life of which the American draws no breath in his own land. The quiet of

the hamlets; their picturesque cottages,

--with dormer windows and gables projecting,

Over the basements below;69

the neat and flourishing gardens; the clean, door-open views; the little school-

house, where I caught sight of the mistress in her quaint cap, with book in hand;

the immortal old women, crooked, and brown, and bowed with the labor of the

fields; the dark-eyed children that peered through the little windows at the falling

rain--all this seemed an illuminated page out of the sweet pastoral story of Acadie,

before the cruel proclamation was made in the church. Unconsciously, I looked

for Evangeline, and Basil the blacksmith, and Gabriel Lajeunesse. But the rain

fell softly and these gentle people of poetry remained within doors. Far away to

the right, and left and north swept the rich plains, dotted with Canadian villages,

and with the mighty Ottawa and St. Lawrence rolling through them. In the re-

motest distance rose one purple peak against the eastern sky; and right at the

south, the Royal Mountain lifted its growth of pines and summer trees between

me and the city. The scene was sublime and subtly impressive, and I had paused

with reverence at the door of the little church, before I raised the latch.

There was no one there but myself; the urn of blessed water seemed not to

have been touched that day, and no penitent knelt or bowed before the shrine.

 

 

69. Evangeline, I, 11. Central characters in Longfellow's romance are named in this paragraph.

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Howells' Correspondence                                                  131

 

A lamp hung burning in front of the altar; the white roof swelled into fair arches

above me; the pale light, like a visible silence, stole through the painted windows.

I heard myself breathe as I passed slowly from picture to picture.

Suddenly a small door opened in the side of the church, and a small priest

appeared, in black gown, and with bare shaven crown. He too, as he advanced

with "whispering feet," seemed a part of the silence, and when he approached

with his trembling black eyes fixed upon me, and bowed courteously, it seemed

impossible that he should speak.

But he spoke, the little priest, the cassocked piece of tradition, the well tonsured

dream of an age and a church that is passing:

"Parlez vous Francais, monsieur?"

"Non, monsieur."

"Non?" (As if it were impossible.)

"Je suis Americain." (In explanation.)

"Oh, ah!" (Relieved.)

Then the little priest passed round with me and explained the pictures, which

were far finer than those in the great Cathedral, and painted by eminent artists

at Paris. There was one of the crucifixion, which was extremely beautiful.

The small ecclesiastic's English went scarcely further than my French. He could

only say, "Fine pictures--fine church--fine altar," and I could only respond with

intense "Ouis." But we learned much, and smiled intelligently, and so the conver-

sation was of profit to both. At last the priest paused near the box of charities.

As the coin clinked within, he smiled serenely--then seemed to lapse into tradition

again, and vanished by the door through which he had entered.70

I would have thought it all a dream of the past, if I had not found the driver

of my carriage very impatient at the door, as no doubt the reader is.

 

II

But one meets naturally so much Catholicism in Montreal, for here Canadian

Catholicism has its headquarters. Here the august faith has its "turrets golden

and bright, its dungeons dark and terrible"--the ecclesiastical pomp of its Cathe-

drals, the austere learning of its colleges, the wan and secret renunciation and

solemnity of its convents, the goodness and charity of its hospitals. Nearly one-

half of the whole population of the city is French, and these are all Catholics;

and besides, there are some thousands of Irish Catholics, who have churches and

priests apart from the French, as in the United States they worship apart from

the Germans. The best feeling does not exist between the two nationalities, but

the Church flourishes nevertheless.

There is a Jesuit college in Montreal, and several nunneries in the city, and on

the lesser isles of the St. Lawrence. At one of the island convents which you see

about twenty miles above Montreal, as you approach the city, the peculiar man-

ners and customs of France of the seventeenth century are continued. The convent

is supported chiefly by the revenues derived from the lands it holds, and these

lands are cultivated with the agricultural implements of two centuries ago; and

the same spirit of old and of world-forgetfulness prevails in every part of life on

Nuns' Island.

A very large building has just been erected on the western slope of the moun-

tain, for the Grand Seminary of Saint Sulpice. This I entered, as I passed round,

70. Cf. Howells, Their Wedding Journey, Chap. 8.

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132                                                           OHIO HISTORY

 

and begged permission to go through it. I was met with a polite negative by a

French student; but before I could withdraw, an Irish brother, looking indescrib-

ably droll with his honest pickax-suggestive visage peering from under a broad-

brimmed black hat, and black gowned to his feet, informed the Frenchman that

the Superior had permitted him that day to take visitors through the building.

He spoke French, but he enriched the pronunciation of that tongue with such a

delicious brogue that it was impossible to mistake his nation. I put myself under

his charge, and applied with him to the Superior, a grave, hollow-cheeked young

Parisian, who sat reading in a narrow room, and only turned his head to respond,

shading his eyes with his thin scholarly hand.

So we passed through the building, which is of stone, and immense, and not

yet quite finished. The rooms of the students range along the corridors, and have

each a prayer placarded on the door, in French. As my kind Irish guide showed

me through the well cultivated garden of the Seminary, he told me that all the

studies were in Latin, while the language of the house was French. The students

were not allowed to speak with the servants; and the Irish student confessed that

it would be a relief to "ask about things, now and then." There is a large tank in

the garden, where the students can amuse themselves by rowing a boat, and they

may walk for recreation.

My guide said it was vacation, and all the students were gone home, except

himself and those I had seen in the college. He was from the United States, and

seemed glad to hear me speak of them, though he had a confused idea that Cin-

cinnati and St. Louis were contiguous. This was the first ecclesiastical institution

in Montreal that refused money; and he informed me that there was no charity

of the college to which I could contribute; and so I was fain to come away as

pecunious as I went.

 

III

The French population of Montreal is partly engaged in trade, but the greater

number are laborers, gardeners and artisans. As I walked through the great market

of Bonsecours, the other morning, I saw none of the market people but seemed to

be French. The black-eyed girls at the fruit stands were French; the miraculously old

women that sold fowl and vegetables were French; the old-clothes men were French;

those that vended beads, and toys were French; the butchers and farmers were all

French--and a patois of that tongue was kept up to the furious exclusion of every

English syllable. The gardeners live in the little villages around the mountain; where

also many small tanners dwell. These hang a sheep tail above their doors, in an-

nouncement of their business, and have their little vats in the cellar, or in one end

of the house.

I looked in vain for a quarter exclusively French in Montreal. The reader will

not find this; but he is safe to attribute French occupation to every little one-story

house--and there are thousands of them--that peers down upon a narrow street,

out of a dormer window. For the most part, they are a peaceable, harmless people,

given to religion, industry and ignorance.

 

IV

Yesterday morning I did the Victoria Bridge,71 taking the excursion train which

 

71. Designed by Robert Stephenson and A. M. Ross, the Victoria Tubular Bridge, built in 1854,

was replaced in 1898-99 by the Victoria Jubilee Bridge, which rests on the piers of its predecessor.

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Howells' Correspondence                                                  133

 

passes over twice every day, and in returning stops fifteen minutes in the center

of the bridge, so that the curious may inspect its construction.

I might tell you of the immense stones of which the abutments and piers are

built, weighing every stone a ton, and laid in the tunnel dug beneath the river bed;

I might tell you that the bridge is nearly two miles long, and is twenty feet wide

and sixteen feet deep; I might tell you that it is all made of iron plates a quarter

of an inch in thickness, welded and bolted together for all time--and then I could

only give you the dullest statistical facts of the bridge. You can only realize the

grandeur of the work by seeing it. That immense structure, so heavy, so solid, so

indestructible, one must have words of iron and stone to represent it on paper;

mere vowels and consonants are too flimsy.

It is a wonderful work, severely simple in its utilitarian style, but by its very

absence of the ornate impressing you with a sense of beauty. As the cars roar

through, the end at which you have entered grows small and smaller, till distance

and the smoke of the locomotive obscure the light altogether, and you rush along

in darkness. At the center, where you stop and look out upon the great river, beat-

ing so feebly against the mighty piers, built as Cheops would have built them, with

regard to weight and size--but with regard to harmony and purpose and solidarity

of idea, built only as Stephenson would have built them--you feel profoundly the

greatness of the genius which planned the perfect work.

Here are some statistics:

 

MASONRY

Three millions of cubic feet of masonry in the Victoria Bridge! That is to say,

if turned into lineal measure, it would reach 510 miles; or as a solid would form

a pyramid 215 feet high, having a base of 215 feet square. These figures will give

some idea of the solidity of the structure, and the warrant that exists for its endur-

ance for all time. The courses being 3 feet 10 inches and 3 feet to 2 feet 6 inches

to above water level, and thence verging into a course 18 inches under the plates,

being in length from 7 feet to 12 feet. One course of ashlar of 3 feet 10 inches,

was examined by the writer: the perimeter of the pier at this point measured 200

feet. It consists of 32 stones: the lightest of these weighed 7 tons, the heaviest 17;

the average weight of the whole was 10 1/2 tons.

Such work may indeed be termed Cyclopean. Each course to the top of the

cutwater is fastened by a dog-wedged bolt of 1 1/2 inch iron--that is to say, a bolt

with the base slit to receive a wedge, into which an iron prism is inserted. Thus

prepared, it is passed down until it reaches the bottom of the hole drilled to re-

ceive it, when the bolt itself is driven upon the wedge--thus widening out the end

of the bolt, so that is never can be again drawn out, passing through two whole

courses into the third below it. Thus every three courses are distinctly doweled to-

gether, and the whole mass of work being likewise laid in the best water-lime, and

carefully grouted, is formed into one solid mass; for horizontally the joints are like-

wise kept cramped together by plates 12 inch by 5 inch of 1/2 inch iron.

 

TUBES

Each tube covers two openings, that is to say, it is fixed in position in the center,

and is free to expand or contract on the adjoining two piers. They are 16 in. x 19

in. at the ends, but they gradually increase to the center, at which point they are

16 ft. x 21 ft. 8 in. The length will accordingly be:

• 49
 

134                                                         OHIO HISTORY

 

On  center pier  ......................  16 feet.

Two openings, each of 242 min .......... 484                                  "

Resting on E pier ....................                                               8    "

"    "  W pier  ....................                                               8    "

--------

516 feet.

The expansion rollers are seven in number, in each set of 6 inches in diameter,

in a cast iron frame rolling on planed bed plates, the rollers themselves being

turned and the beds plated, they run as smoothly as on glass. The weight of each

tube, with all its appurtenances of 516 feet, is about 644 tons, that is to say for

each opening 322 tons. The construction of this character of work is now so well

known that much allusion is not necessary. Moreover it is simple in the extreme,

being formed of boiler plate riveted together with angle irons and lateral and trans-

verse braces. The skill lies in reducing this boiler iron to such dimensions that there

is no unnecessary material, to add to the weight and to the expense, and yet ob-

taining a sufficiency of strength.

I concluded my sight-seeing this morning, with a glance at the Irish Cathedral,

which, as to paintings, is the finest in Montreal. There are several pictures in this

Cathedral, which the tourist should not fail to see. I have spent the rest of the day

in taking farewell glances at the motley life of the place--more interesting to me

than the splendors and professed sights of the place. I have silently bidden adieu

to the people that look out of the low windows of the houses set close upon the

pavement; I have refused with mournful satisfaction to ride in cabs and calaches

for the last time; I have listened in adieu to the patois of the Montreal French; I

have taken my final stare at the English and French girls going by, with equal hid-

eousness of hat and dress; I have torn myself away from the contemplation of the

shop windows, and now, within a brief time of taking boat for Quebec, I am seated

in the solitude of my apartment, writing this letter; and wondering between sen-

tences whether the fair American that plays the piano in the parlor is from the

North or the South. I have already exhausted the reading room and the office,

where one sees Canadians looking as English and as ill as possible, Americans en-

deavoring to support the glory of the eagle abroad but feeling strange and lost

here, and English going about with silent faces, broad expanses of indifference,

wooded on either cheek with a scraggy growth of the national whisker; and so,

even to you, adieu!

Chispa.

 

 

 

 

PART FIVE: QUEBEC

 

Because Howells had agreed with his editors to keep intimate reporting of identi-

fiable personalities to a minimum, two particularly noteworthy meetings along the

Canada route came to light only in later reminiscence. The first, a very pleasant

one, happened on Monday or Tuesday in Montreal; the second, much less gratify-

ing, came Thursday evening as he was preparing to depart from Quebec and is

described in the introduction to Part Six, below.

In Toronto, on Saturday, Howells had left behind, very regretfully, the com-

panionship of the young New Yorker with whom he had delightedly shared the

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Howells' Correspondence                                                135

 

ogling of Spanish hats and ample skirts. Monday morning while in the Cathedral

in Montreal, he made hopeful contact with a second young traveler from New York,

only to see him hurry off home very shortly in search of a good night's sleep and

better cigars!

Then, "something very pretty happened." After another hard day of viewing

and reporting, Howells came into the hotel lobby feeling decidedly alone. Too much

of the strange and new without a friendly sharing can be devastating to a young

man's morale. He stepped to the desk register for a routine scanning--a newspaper-

man always has a chance of discovering an interesting name. But finding none,

he was just turning away, when two smartly dressed young fellows moved in after

him for a look.

"Hello, here's Howells!" one of them exclaimed.

"Oh I was just looking for some one I knew," Will said. "I hope you are some

one who knows me."

"Only through your contributions to the Saturday Press," said the other.

His "contributions to the Saturday Press!" These golden words Howells was to

cherish fondly all his long years, for it was the first time in his professional ex-

perience that any person far away from home had ever identified him in public

merely by virtue of his having appeared on a printed page. Though young men of

smart literary tastes in the 1860's did commonly read poetry, and at the moment

it was a fashionable gesture to follow the New York Saturday Press (where the

name of W. D. Howells had been printed at least thirteen times the past year),

this chance recognition at a hotel desk in Canada was just a bit remarkable.

The newcomers were from New York. They proved friendly, and though one

of them faded promptly, the one who recognized Howells went on with him to

happy adventuring in Quebec. "We were comrades for four or five rich days,"

Howells remembered (it was really three or four), "and shared our pleasures and

expenses in viewing the monuments of those ancient Canadian capitals, which I

think we valued at all their picturesque worth. We made jokes to mask our emo-

tions; we giggled and made giggle, in the right way; we fell in and out of love

with all the pretty faces and dresses we saw; and talked evermore about literature

and literary people."⁷²

They talked especially of New York, for Will's companion proved to be an

intelligent man-about-town who was not only acquainted with the Saturday Press

but could talk about the Bohemian group that was allied with the journal and

Pfaff's lager beer cellar on Broadway where they gathered. This flood of colorful

details enchanted Will, who resolved instantly to include New York in his itinerary

even though his friend's talk of tobacco and beer gave him some qualms--both

were still likely to make him sick.

The companionship probably helps account for the increased buoyancy in the

letters from Quebec. There is less of the overly serious romanticizing than from

Montreal and certainly no close skirting of sentimental drivel such as would show

up in the next hastily penned outpourings under the shadow of Longfellow in

Portland, Maine.

When Howells got to New York some two weeks later, he did not look up his

unidentified chance acquaintance, and--with typical reticence--four years afterward,

 

72. Howells, Literary Friends, 5-7. Using the license he often exercised (or allowed) in his golden-

afternoon memoirs, Howells did not calendar this meeting precisely. It appears to have come on his

second or third day, certainly not on the first.

• 51
 

136                                                           OHIO HISTORY

 

when on return from Italy he noted that his Montreal and Quebec companion had

become a lawyer in Wall Street, he never carried out an intention to call upon him.

From the Quebec recordings, Howells would draw some of the finer moments

for his second novel A Chance Acquaintance. The little coffin the father carries

from the French cathedral provides a deeply moving page of parental sorrow.73

The veteran of Sebastapol guiding visitors at the Citadel provides the model for

the character of Private Joseph Drakes in Their Wedding Journey, who after twenty

years in England's wars now has a Mrs. Drakes and a "brood of Ducklings" to

support. He would migrate to the States if he could find some gentleman needing

help with horses and grounds.74

In a delightfully realistic touch, Howells has Isabel March in this story very

conscientiously reading her husband's old journal, of course, with the result that

they have to run out to Montmorency and see the Falls, expressly because of what

he had written! Consequently, Basil finds himself cringing a trifle as he has to hear

his own "sad farrago of sentiment about the village and the rural sights, and es-

pecially a girl tossing hay in the field." Still, he feels that he had recorded some

touches of nature and reality and cherishes them.75 So does the reader. And so

did the aging Howells who went back fondly to this happy day in the opening of

Literary Friends and Acquaintance.

 

 

 

 

William Dean Howells, "En Passant," continued, Ohio State Journal,

August 4, 1860

 

Quebec, July 26, 1860.

 

Saturday afternoon I experienced my final sensations of Montreal, and at seven

in the evening came aboard the boat for this city.⁷⁶

I had fallen in with one of those chance companions of travel, who (if you are

yourself well natured) always lighten the vexations, and enhance the pleasures of

a jaunt. Together, then, my friend and I watched the beautiful city fade from sight,

and all her new world bustle and enterprise, and all her old world grandeur and

quaintness. We saluted her in parting, with the sigh of regret, and the jest of the

light heart. Together we mourned that the fair being in blue did not come aboard

our boat instead of taking the omnibus for the hotel; together we offered the land-

scape those impertinent compliments, with which one, weary of sensation, shakes

off the tendency to explosive admiration, together we saw the houses and roofs

and spires of Montreal recede, and her mountain rise before her, dark and purple,

like a kingly mountain indeed.

Then we turned to the St. Lawrence, and did its scenery, so grandly pictures-

que, with wooded islands, pretty villages, and green shelving shores, until the night

 

 

 

73. Cf. Howells, A Chance Acquaintance, 114-117.

74. Howells, Their Wedding Journey, 292-295.

75. Ibid., 317-328.

76. It was Wednesday afternoon.

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fell, and the sparks from the chimneys of the boat drifted like a rain of stars upon the river, and the black column of smoke hung over the deck like a plume on the crest of a giant. There we sat and talked till it drew near to midnight; and idly imagined for the sake of the contrast with our own security the loss of a man in the tumult of the steamer's wake--his falling from the boat, his wild headlong plunge, his coming up again whirled and dizzy, with the steamer far away, and the stars looking down so "cruelly meek," on the wide, swift river, and on him, whose eyes should seek the shore and boat in vain, whose dispairing clamor should reach no human ear. And so we slept, and awoke this morning, just as the steamer floated silently up to her wharf at Quebec. With only one full day before us, we determined to see all we could of the city--looking so grim and strong from her mighty citadel down upon the old French town without the wall, and upon the broad St. Lawrence, and its shipping, and valley green with plenty and alive with villages. It was hard to believe that this was not some old city of the European past, into which we had been suddenly enchanted. Only the steamers in the harbor linked us to the present. The streets through which we passed, in going to our hotel, were narrow and crooked and steep; the houses in the Lower Town were lofty and old and quaintly gabled; and the absence of people, (for it was early morning) deepened the illusion. We passed through the gate of the city, up through devious lanes, turning sharp corners, and rounding curious angles, with bewildering irregularity, until at last we entered our hotel, and with the sight of the gentlemanly and accommodating clerk, and the savor of breakfast, returned to modern life at once. The first thing after breakfast, to be done was the French Cathedral, which, with much splendor of gilding, has no solemnity, and does not impress you with a feeling of awe. There are one or two fine paintings in it; in the Seminary Chapel near by, are the best pictures in any Canadian church I have yet seen. A noncha-

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lant priest was sprinkling a poor little coffin with holy water as we entered the

Cathedral; and then one of the mourners rose and took it in his arms and passed

out; and presently we encountered him again, seated in a calash, with the little

coffin in his lap, and several other calashes following.77

The truth is--and the confession is somewhat humiliating--churches pale upon

the sight-seer, after while, and when we had looked at the paintings, and the people

reading their devotions, we were glad to leave the Cathedral and go and see the

Citadel--the fortress that makes Quebec the strongest city in the New World.⁷⁸

We wound up the hill side through a stone viaduct, a solid mass of masonry, built

upon the everlasting rock, and built "for all time," like the celebrated cough candy.

At the gate of the Citadel, we delivered the permit to enter from the Commanding

officer, and a soldier accompanied us through the fortress, and showed us whatever

was marvellous, and explained whatever was curious. He wore upon his breast,

the Crimean medal and ribbon, as well as the Turkish medal, and he had been

at the taking of Sebastapol. He gave his opinion very quietly but decidedly that

Quebec would be extremely hard to take; and the innumerable guns and mortars

commanding every approach, the immense walls of the citadel, the solid towers,

were such strong confirmation of the Crimean veteran, that I was really obliged

to admit to my friend that I supposed even John Brown could not capture it with

the same force that took Harper's Ferry. Our military guide pointed out the place

where the Americans under Benedict Arnold attempted to storm the city, and where

the gallant Montgomery fell. A board bearing an inscription of the fact, indicates

the locality; and several cows were grazing with apparent unconcern upon the

ground hallowed by that heroic death.79

We passed out of the viaduct again, and ascended to the Heights of Abraham,

where Wolfe was killed, and where the column is erected to his memory.80 The

old battle-field is an open common now, over which we wended, plucking a few

butter-cups and clover-heads that grow in the scrubby grass. There was no battle-

ghost haunting the place--battle-ghosts, I think, haunt only our boyish fancy as

we pore over thrilling histories, and dream of some day visiting the scenes described.

I heard no voice saying, "I die content," while a glad clamor of victory arose;--

rather the words and tune of an absurd old song in solemnization of Wolfe's death,

drifted through my brain and put all the skulls of my heroic imaginatives upon

the broad grin.

So we said we had won the Plains of Abraham, and came away. From all these

heights (those from the citadel and the battery in particular,) you have views of

city and river, and valley, and far off mountains--unspeakably magnificent. But

there are other views, more full perhaps, to be had from the road leading to the

falls of Montmorency, by which you settle its shape and geography in your mind,

 

77. The Basilica, founded in 1647, and the Seminaire de Quebec, founded in 1663. The picture

gallery includes works by Van Dyck, Teniers, Tintoretto, Salvator Rosa, and Poussin.

78. The Citadel, a forty-acre fortress built by the British, 1823-32, crowns the highest point of Cape

Diamond, the Quebec headland, 333 feet above the St. Lawrence River. Long obsolete, it serves today

mainly as a tourist attraction.

79. On New Year's Eve 1775, combined United Colonies forces under Brigadier Benedict Arnold

and General Richard Montgomery assaulted the British fortifications at Quebec and were severely

repulsed. General Montgomery was killed.

80. On the night of September 12, 1759, a British force commanded by General James Wolfe crept

secretly up the bluff from the St. Lawrence and the next morning in an open-field battle on the Plains

of Abraham outside the Citadel defeated the French under the command of the Marquis de Montcalm.

The surrender of the city five days later preluded the end of French rule in Canada. Both Wolfe and

Montcalm were mortally wounded in the battle.

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without the sacrifice of its poetry and picturesqueness. The wall of the city shows most distinctly from this road; and you have grouped in more effect its many spires and quaint houses rising one above another, with dormer windows, steep roofs, gleaming with tin, and clinging to the hillsides, and clustered in the narrow space along the waters' edge below. It was nearly eleven o'clock when we directed the coachman to drive us to Montmorency Falls, some eight miles from Quebec. The rain, which had fallen at intervals during the morning, had now ceased, and the sun shone through the light clouds. The Canadian farmers were mowing in their meadows, and the sweet smell of grass was on the air. So idle and free and glad we whirled along, that it seemed this was not a part of the book-life I had always led; but only a pleasant passage remembered from some forgotten book. I could not enough feast my vision upon the landscape, so full of the rarest poetry. All the road to Montmorency Falls is but the long street of a French village. The little stone cottages had every one a flower-garden at the side, or its pot of flowers at the windows; behind lay the well-kept gardens, and beyond, the flourishing fields. Little children, sitting in the doors, or standing in the street, made us low bows as we passed, and smiled with dignified serenity; or ran after the carriage to offer nosegays of pinks and roses. Busy housewives glanced up from their labors, and old men and dames, "arrived at the age when people can be idle with impunity," gave their whole attention to our establishment. In one of the wayside hayfields, stood the fair idyllic figure of a young girl, resting her hand upon the top of the fork with which she had been tossing the grass. A dark straw hat shaded her face; she wore a loose jacket of yellow stuff and a gown of some purple color. She lifted her eyes, as one does when one will gaze intently, and looked at the passing carriage. Then we knew that this was

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Evangeline, When in the harvest heat she bore to the reapers at noontide Flagons of home-brewed ale...81 And that she was only playing idly at hay-making until her beer should be finished. How could we help bowing to the real Evangeline? We bowed low, and Evange- line returned the salutation, and emboldened the strangers to kiss their hands to her, and then rapturously kissed hers in return. Gabriel Lajeunesse was not there; and perhaps it was not proper in Evangeline, but it was pleasant. Indeed, the young girl seemed to me so much a part of the sweetness and freshness of the morning, so much a flower, that I cannot think of her now, (as I listen to the dropping of the rain from gable to gable of the hotel,) except as some delicate blossom that lies mingled with the hay, there in the field, all slender, and beaten, and forlorn--its life gone with the sunshine, the singing of the birds, the breath of the meadow--(As for the next Evangeline whom we saw, in sabots and weeding onions, the less said of her the more sentimental we shall have this letter.) The cathedral of this long village, which we entered, is in better taste than any I have yet seen. It is perfectly new, and the grand arches are of pure and snowy white giving the interior of the "fretted vault" an indescribably chaste and airy appearance. They were celebrating mass when we went in, and the cathedral was crowded with Canadians. At last we reached the Falls, which are formed by a slender stream that reaches through a rocky channel, and dashes itself down an almost perpendicular cliff of two hundred feet, in a delicious shower of foam and crystal. Niagara is so stupen- dous that it stuns and bewilders rather than satisfies you, but you take in the whole beauty of Montmorency--its picturesque shores and steep cliffs, its wild little rapids, 81. Evangeline, I, 50-51.

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and its fall,--all tenderly tinted with green and faintest crimson, and haloed with

silver and purple mist, that flies from the rock-fretted water, and rises in dreamy

folds from beneath. On either side above the fall grow pines and cedars, but below,

the brown cliffs are shaggy and naked. There is no means of reaching the foot of

the cataract as at Niagara, but the point from which you view it, affords the whole

spectacle.

All afternoon it has rained drearily and in the dreariest moment I departed from

my friend, and have been driven to the contemplation of steep roofs and chimneys

for recreation and companionship, without experiencing any emotions of a lively

and cheerful nature.

To-morrow I am off for Portland "afore the broke of day," as the colored per-

son who expresses in song, the inexorable determination to go to Richmond, states

the hour of his departure.82

 

 

William Dean Howells, "Glimpses of Summer Travel," continued,

Cincinnati Gazette, August 6, 1860

 

Portland, July 28.

 

I

At Montreal I met a young person from New York, who had been doing Boston,

Portland, the Grand Trunk Railway, the White Mountains, Quebec and the St.

Lawrence, in somewhat less time than it takes to tell you, and who complained

bitterly of an overdose of sight-seeing. He declared with a wicked satisfaction that

he had slept all the way through the Franconia mountains; he exulted that he had

come from Quebec to Montreal during the night; and he declined, with much dis-

gust, to go round the mountains, or visit the Convent of the Gray Nuns. All that

this wretched youth desired to do, was to go to sleep as much as possible, to ignore

Canada and get back to the republican metropolis, where at least the cigars were

not poisonous.

It is with nearly the same magnificent ennui that I look back upon my life of

the last two days, crowded with sensations of Quebec, with the glorification of

mountain landscapes, and the travel of more hundred miles than it is pleasant in

my present jostled state to think of.

 

II

Quebec is like no other city of America. Its architecture and the great majority

of its people are those of the French past; its wall and massive citadel (yawning

with black guns over the weariness of uninterrupted peace) are parts of an age and

a system alien to American experience; its hotel bills are uniquely extravagant

and impudent.

In this city I spent one day, and saw everything, of course. With that habit of

emotion which has made sentiment an easy thing to me, my feelings in threading

the devious streets of the Lower Town, where the steep gables of the old stone

houses almost meet over the narrow way, and in passing through the massive gate

 

82. The Grand Trunk Railroad connected with the Canadian National Railway at Richmond, P.Q.,

for Island Pond, the immigration and customs checkpoint, in the northeastern corner of Vermont.

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142                                                           OHIO HISTORY

 

of the city, into the Upper Town, were of precisely that illusive and picturesque

nature which the reader will readily imagine. They were also appropriate to the

different occasions of viewing the interior of the citadel and the cathedrals, of see-

ing the spots where Montcalm and Wolfe and Montgomery fell, of treading the

Plains of Abraham, of looking out from all these points upon that magnificent

landscape of far off mountain, nearer plain, and mighty river, with the quaint old

French city on its shore, of riding to the beautiful Falls of Montmorency, and of

paying the cruel tolls and charges incident to these pleasures. Perhaps, with this

frank confession, the reader will spare me minute allusion to individual raptures.

Quebec is still a French city in everything but its government, and the habits

of the few English who keep the shops of its Upper Town, hold its offices, and

construct those ingenious bills which make its shabby hotels such wonderful and

fearful things. As at Montreal, the artizans and laborers are nearly all French, and

the suburbs and neighboring country are settled by the same people. Their patois,

their politeness, their pretty villages greeted me all the way to Montmorency Falls.

They have their great cathedrals and their superb religion, and their dislike of the

English.

The Lower Town of Quebec is composed of those suburbs which cluster without

the wall about the docks of the St. Lawrence, and is much older than the Upper

Town in appearance. The view of it from the citadel and grand battery is full of

the rarest effects to the eye and suggestions to the fancy. You look far down into

its narrow lanes, where two carriages can hardly pass, and where the pathways are

not a yard wide, and see the quaint little figures moving about with nothing of the

hurry and tumult of our occidental life. The houses are slender and tall, and some-

times have two rows of dormer windows in the roof; and when suddenly at one of

these a wrinkled face looks out and peers upward, it seems, as your American

glance meets that of the old French dame, that it is the encounter of the feudal past

and the free present. The scene is appropriate: the great ships ride at anchor in

the river--

As silent as a painted ship upon a painted ocean;83

a light haze lies upon the southern shore; and the whole landscape seems the pic-

ture of a dream.

Ah! that citadel of Quebec! how it embodies in its brutal struggle of stone, and

guns, the British idea. You feel the grasp of the lion upon you, as you enter its

viaduct, and pass through its gates, guarded by sentries as impassive and destruc-

tive as the black guns that keep iron ward over the river and country. It is hard

to tell, indeed, whether the rocky foundations of the hill, or the citadel, with its

batteries, and massive walls and garrison of Crimean veterans--be the stronger. "It

'ud be a bad place to take," said the soldier, who was showing us through the

fortress. He wore the Crimean medal, and had been at the capture at Sebastapol.

He rubbed his brown hand softly over the gun near which we stood, as if it were

a live thing. "Yes, it 'ud be a hard place to take. Down there's where General

Montgomery fell," pointing to a steep ravine where a few scrubby bushes grew.

Where Montgomery fell, and that is all! O glory, a name, a spot shown to idle

curiosity, a commemorative piece of board! The soldier had been twenty years in

the service of Her Majesty; he wore Her Majesty's likeness over his heart on the

Crimean medal; he had seen war in many battles of many lands; he was still a

private, and he took the tributary quarter. And this was all, O glory!

83. Coleridge, "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Howells quoted from memory.

• 58
 

How unreal it seemed, standing there upon the Plains of Abraham, doing the place, with the ineffable impertinence of the half-sated tourist! There was Wolfe's monument: on that field now covered with a growth of harsh grass, grazed upon by cows, had bloomed "the blood-red blossom of war"; and I had to laugh when my companion threw himself into a heroic attitude, and cried-- "'Can storied urn or animated bust, Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath, sir? Can honor's voice provoke the silent dust, Can flattery soothe the dull cold ear of death, sir?' Certainly not."84 III The churches in Quebec are hardly worth the doing. There are some fine paint- ings in the Chapel of the Seminary, near the grand Cathedral; but as for the Cathedral itself, its altar is gilt, and its interior effect not the serene and solemn effect of such a house. The church that most pleased me at Quebec is that of the Parish of Branfort [Beauport], which you must be sure to enter as you go to the Falls of Montmorency. The roof and walls and pillars are of the purest white, and the impression made upon the beholder is that of tender veneration. As for the Falls of Montmorency, we could only give them an hour when we ought to have given them days. A little river comes leaping down through shores of low cedars and pines, over foamy rapids, to dash itself in mist and "creamy spray," from a 84. Howells' friend is waggishly quoting from Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," a favorite poem of Wolfe (as guides continue to remember). Wolfe is said to have recited the poem to a young midshipman the evening before the battle. Morison, Oxford History, 168.

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144                                                          OHIO HISTORY

 

cliff nearly two hundred feet in height. And that is all that one can say in words;

the cataract is inexpressibly beautiful, and far more enjoyable than Niagara, for

you seem to taste it more, and are not obliged to yield such hopeless astonishment,

as in the presence of the great Falls.

 

IV

From Island Pond, (the American station on the border of Canada,) where the

functions of the customhouse officer was agreeably confined to looking intently at

the outside of trunks, and marking them twice with chalk to signify that they had

been examined,) from Island Pond, on the Grand Trunk Railway almost to Port-

land, we had the finest mountain scenery. I had left Quebec at seven in the morn-

ing, and after losing sight of the lordly heights in the vicinity of the city, had seen

nothing mountainous up to this point. When, therefore, the Franconia Hills [New

Hampshire] rose softly in view--blue when first seen, and nearer, clothed with

young pines and poplars, from foot to crest, with dark cloud-shadows sleeping

upon their sides--one's vision seemed scarcely adequate to the scene upon which

I feasted. Here and there, the hills were bluff, with revelations of brown rock, and

now and then a gray and naked peak appeared; but for the most part they were

luxuriant with the softly blending tints of evergreen and summer-green trees. We

wound in and out among them for hours, and saw them rise and grow upon the

sight, and fade away like the procession of a dream.

And here, too, began to be apparent the secret of New England. At the foot of

these mountains--in their narrow ravines--along their rocky streams--wherever a

rood of ground could be snatched from nature, there the farm house was set--there

the cattle grazed--there the grain grew. Coming from the broad-acred, opulent

West, it affects me with compassion to see the mowers hoarding the scanty crops

of hay that waved over the stony little meadows. The grass was cut to the very

edge of the water along the banks; and where the plow could scarcely tickle the

hill slopes, they laughed feebly in their harvests. There were no orchards to be

seen, and I suppose that they raise no fruit.

But I saw that they must raise men, for in those rocky valleys little villages

clustered, with their green shuttered white houses and white church, with all the

peculiarities of Yankee architecture, the cornice and the invariable wings to which

I was accustomed in the Reserve in Ohio.

This was in New Hampshire. As we entered Maine and approached Portland

and the sea, the hills disappeared, the meadows and fields grew broad, and the

whole land seemed to draw long Western breaths of plenty. About Portland the

country is very fine. It is gently rolling, and cultivated in corn and potatoes--for

wheat, an old farmer told me, does not grow well here. More corn is raised than

I supposed. It goes to supply the horses of the vast lumbering regions at Maine.

But the greater part of the land is in meadow; and in every pasture lot a number

of graceful, slender elms is left standing, and the landscape is full of beauty.

Chispa.

 

 

 

PART SIX: NEW ENGLAND

 

Having just seen his Quebec friend of the happy days off on Thursday evening

• 60
 

for the return boat to Montreal, Howells was feeling rather deserted. He wandered back into his hotel and glancing into the reading room was surprised and delighted to see a familiar figure sitting there.85 It was Bayard Taylor, the enormously popu- lar newspaper correspondent, lecturer, and poet, whom Will had met in Columbus in February 1859, when Taylor gave his lecture, "Life in the North," on Friday the fourth at the Congregational church. (Dr. Samuel M. Smith, a mutual friend of Howells and Taylor, quite probably was the host for the famed speaker, who re- mained in Columbus until the following Tuesday.) Hoping to draw Taylor's notice, Howells first made several tentative sorties into the room. Failing in this tactic, he took firmer grip of his nerve, approached the celebrity and introduced himself. They had met at Dr. Smith's in Columbus, he explained.86 Ah, yes, and how was the Doctor? Taylor showed no sign of recognizing How- ells. Doubtless the oversight was honest. Will gave a favorable report. The other man offered no encouragement to fur- ther talk and the interview died. Howells admitted in retrospect that Taylor was probably as tired as he looked and wholly unprepared to humor another young man from the multitude who indulged themselves in the pleasure of telling so glamorous a public figure that they had met him before. The incident was not quite closed. Taylor, who had set out in July from his home in Chester County, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two guests from Ger- many, had been on a two-week rail and water jaunt via the White Mountains and St. Lawrence as far as the Saguenay and was returning now on the way to Niagara 85. Howells, Literary Friends, 3-8. 86. Ohio State Journal, February 4, 5, 6, 7, 1859. For evidence of the continued friendship of Taylor for his host in Columbus, see Howells to Comly (Smith's son-in-law), December 23, 1866, VFM 1983. Howells reported that Taylor had breakfasted with him "last Sunday, and sent all manner of cordial remembrances to the Smiths."

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Falls. Like Howells, he was writing summer correspondence, his usual travelogue for the New York Tribune. And it was in that paper that Howells, who rejoined the Ohio State Journals editorial staff probably read them a few weeks later.87 Taylor indulged himself in some very acid commentary upon the crude manners of Americans traveling in Canada, especially of the Westerners.88 Howells may have written, and certainly approved, a Journal editorial that objected sharply to the down-grading from Taylor and quoted the remark attributed to Baron von Humboldt that Bayard Taylor had traveled more and seen less than any other man. It closed with the observation that "there is no excuse for ill-manners, when such people as Mr. Taylor are abroad."89 Friday, July 27, Howells made the rail trip from Quebec to Richmond junction in the lower province, then to the home border, through the immigration check at Island Pond, Vermont, thence through the scenic White Mountain country of New Hampshire, and finally across Maine to Portland. Since July 22 he had produced at least 12,700 words of copy for his Ohio readers, not an inconsiderable accom- plishment. There is no wonder that his creative drive was slacking by the end of the trip--we have no letters describing Boston or New York City. Also, the traveler appears to have been weary and was certainly a bit desolate from temporary loss of good fellowship. In New England, he was back in a world of plain, sobering fact, both in the political shadows that were gathering and in his own immediate personal uncertainties, for at this point he had no sure prospects awaiting him 87. Reprinted as "Travels at Home," in Bayard Taylor, At Home and Abroad. Second Series (New York, 1862), 319-403. Cf. Albert E. Smith, Bayard Taylor (Boston, 1896), 143-144. 88. Taylor, "Travels at Home," 388-392. 89. Ohio State Journal, October 3, 1860. None of Howells' contributions to the Journal after his return to the editorial staff in September are signed. Various editorials dealing with books and authors are presumably by him.

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upon his return to Columbus. Though Howells managed to keep the flow of sensibility wide open in these closing letters, he admitted eventually that it was a forced effort. In the later hours of his long, hard train ride, the farm country of Maine really seemed quite ordinary. He did not find the "hoary antiquity" here that he had dreamed of, though he was glad that the typical wooden buildings looked far newer than the "coal-smoked brick" of the Ohio River Valley, and there were more woodlands than he had expected in a region he had supposed denuded. The ocean in first glimpse was dull and cold and uninspiring, far different from the tender blue of his own Lake Erie. When he surveyed the water through the telescope from the observation tower on the Promenade, he saw only "a vitreous glare." As for the Longfellow house that evoked a gush of sentiment, he discovered afterward it was not the poet's birthplace after all!90 Most disturbing of the realities to be faced immediately was his commitment to Follett, Foster & Company to gather materials for a subscription volume on eastern manufactures. In Portland, he set about the chore and appears to have spent much of his precious time these last fleeting days of vacation attempting to adapt himself in some practical way to gathering comprehensible data about industry--first here, then in Haverhill, Salem, and Lowell. A Unitarian pastor in Portland to whom Foster had provided a letter of introduction very graciously guided him to an iron foundry where he watched something being cast, he was not quite sure what. At an oil refinery (where Will heard the term "kerosene" for the first time), the man- agement refused point-blank to grant him inspection. Rebuffed, Howells suc- cumbed to half-heartedness and returned to Portland's historic past. In Haverhill, however, where he arrived on Monday, July 30, to spend two 90. Howells, Literary Friends, 13-16.

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nights, he began a study of the Massachusetts shoe industry. Though a hint of

his efforts gets into his closing letter, it is the moonlit Haverhill and not the day-

time factory town that wins. Certain apparition-like memories of Haverhill still

clung to the aging Howells in 1900. He remembered a machine that "chewed a

shoe sole full of pegs, and dropped it out of the iron jaws with an indifference

as great as my own, and probably as little sense of how it had done its work."

He also recalled seeing a member of a negro minstrel troupe coming down the

hotel steps wearing exaggerated peg-top trousers and a red shoestring tie, a fashion

contrast that made Howells feel out of style in his black inch-wide tie and "spring-

bottoms.^"91

So much for the industries of Haverhill! In Literary Friends and Acquaintance

Howells believed he had gone from Portland directly down to Salem to pursue his

factory observations.92 The letters show otherwise. There was a duty-run to Salem

and Lowell sometime, but it must have come a few days later, just after his mo-

mentous visits with Lowell, Fields, William D. Ticknor, and Holmes in Boston and

Cambridge. Whenever it was, the frustrations experienced in Salem closed out the

factory project forever; and after his climactic interviews with Hawthorne, Emer-

son, and Thoreau in Concord, he went to New York. He returned to Ohio with a

renewed sense of well-being and literary purpose that carried no further delusions

as to his aptitude for technological reporting.

 

 

 

 

William Dean Howells, "En Passant," continued, Ohio State Journal,

August 6, 1860

Portland, Maine, July 29, 1860.

 

My sentimental journey in Canada came to an end on Friday afternoon, when

we reached Island Pond, the first station on the Grand Trunk Railroad, within the

American border. I had been just one week beyond the shadow of the spread-

eagle's wings, but I crept back under the hovering of the extremest feathers, with

the feeling of the exile restored to his native land, after a heart-breaking, hair-

whitening absence.

Hail! dear land of politics! I cried, (for nearly the first thing that met my gaze

was a Lincoln and Hamlin flag,)93 hail, home of Washington, of John Brown, of

Edward Everett and the Mt. Vernon papers! hail--

And I have no doubt that I should have gone on much to the same purpose

for an indefinite period, but the truth is the bell began to ring for dinner, as I

came to the third hail, and the demands of appetite are superior to the demands

of rapture. So I went into the dining saloon, and ate that wild and turbulent repast,

which one devours in "Twenty minutes for dinner, gentlemen," and came forth

stunned and swindled, and resumed my seat in the car, and was whirled on to

Portland, through the valleys of beautiful mountains, past the White Hills, over

91. Ibid., 21-22.

92. Ibid., 16-20.

93. Senator Hannibal Hamlin, vice-presidential candidate on the Republican ticket with Lincoln,

was a native of Maine.

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broad serene meadows of Maine, and so into the city.

Yes, I have bidden adieu to Canada--its ravening hackmen and hotels; its curi-

ous French life; its grand cathedrals; its ill-dressed women; its white canvas-shoes

and egregious hats;--to everything of the peculiar and picturesque in her Majesty's

Province.

(In Canada, they give you eighty cents in change for an American dollar, and

you are in pain, lest you should bring some of the change home, where the shillings

will not pass for twenty-five cent pieces; but I wish to assure the future traveler,

out of the stores of my own experience, that he will not bring back change to the

extent of a Provincial copper from Canada, but will have paid it all out in the

purchase of wisdom before he crosses the border. I rather insist upon this piece

of information, for it is a part of the valuable pecuniary knowledge which I ac-

quired in my passage through the Provinces. As it is no longer of any use to my-

self, I am willing, like the old physician whose sands of life are almost run, to

impart it to a suffering generation; persons desiring particulars will address the

undersigned, enclosing one letter stamp to pay for this advertisement.)

As to Portland. It is a beautiful city--as beautiful and as quiet as Columbus.

The business blocks and residences and public buildings, are all good, but the

glory of the city is in its old elms. These keep the whole city in delicious summer-

shadow; sheltering the mansions and meeting in graceful arches over the streets.

Looked down upon from some height, the city is so much grove, that you can

hardly tell whether it be town or country. It stands on a peninsula that juts into

the sea, and forms one of the finest harbors in the world. On one side lies the blue

water of the bay, on the other the ocean--serene and calm to-day, with white sails

faintly shining against the horizon, and full of azure and purple lights. And far

beyond all ships, and shining against another horizon--the domes, and spires, and

heroes, and poets and histories of Europe. My thought went over and visited all

the wonder-cities of the mother-continent, while the keeper of the observatory was

adjusting the telescope, that I might see the pleasure-barge laden with people, and

coming in from one of the two hundred green wooded isles that dot the bay of

Portland. I consented to return, and to use the telescope, with its feeble glance of

forty miles. I had a mind to tell the man of the diamond-lense, with which one looks

readily into mill-stones, and across wide seas, but he was about to signal a brig,

and I thought it best not to interrupt him. He did not know that it was the first

time I had beheld the ocean, and I dare say the outbreak of rapture to which I

was tempted, would not have seemed a wise thing to him. As was the primrose to

Peter Bell, so must be the sea to this man--an expanse of brackish water, clear at

times and foggy at times, on which ships sailed and were to be signaled. So I turned

and looked again toward the sea that could understand, and had in one clasping

glance--city, and bay, and islands, and horizon, with its beyond of Europe, and

"thought my sweet nothing-at-all thoughts."

This morning I strolled into the old graveyard of the city, and spent an hour in

the perusal of its quaint memorials. It lies upon a gentle acclivity that over-looks

the ocean; its trees are bowed westward in shrinking from ocean storms, and half

its monuments are to the memory of such as have perished at sea. Captain Smith,

who died upon the African coast very many years ago, is remembered in weather-

beaten verse; and Captain Jones, who was lost off the Cape of Good Hope, is not

suffered to be forgotten, in this place, and here lies a young girl who was drowned

in Portland Bay, "Etat.16."

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And the stately ships go on

To their haven under the hill;

And O, for the touch of a vanished hand,

And the sound of a voice that is still.94

This breath of the divinest song, to thy memory, poor child--drowned in Portland

Bay--"Etat. 16." It is better I think, than

As I am now, so you shall be,

Prepare for death and follow me.

Side by side, in this old graveyard, lie the commander of the American brig

Enterprise, and the English brig Boxer, who were killed in the terrible battle fought

between their vessels, off Portland, in 1813.95 The Enterprise was victorious, the

Boxer was taken, and it was a glorious thing, and is mentioned glowingly in Ameri-

can history, and here is the dust of the victor and the vanquished, in eternal peace.

Alas! Death alone triumphs, and he knows not in his great victory, who has won

in the little struggle of life. It was a grim satire on "this bloody nest of ridiculous

murderers," to see these two foes, contemptuously reconciled by the grave, to be

one banquet to the same worms. The sea-wind whispers sadly to the leaves of the

elms, and from the silence of the city, broke suddenly the chime of bells, and all

the air palpitated with solemn and mournful harmony.

In Portland you are impressed not alone with the sea, and shade, and storied

urns (giving occasion to cheap moralizing,)96 but you feel almost as soon as you

enter, the intense respectability and virtue which pervade it. Neal Dow lives here,

and there is a rigorous public observance of the Maine Law, though a down-hearted

temperance man told me that while it was enforced in the country, it was not alto-

gether so in the city.97 Nevertheless you see no drunkenness; and I had doubted if

the innocent inhabitants understood the use of profane swearing, until I was re-

quested by a placard in the moral barber-shop where I was shaved--"Not to curse,"

and informed in the well known lines of Cowper, that the habit of profanity was

neither brave, polite nor wise. So I made a note, and said nothing about the dull

razor.

The city has not yet recovered from the troubles of 1857; and having sunk nearly

a hundred thousand in preparations for the coming of the Great Eastern--the streets

do not present a very busy aspect; people move about in an orderly and respect-

able way, and even the laborers have a dignity, which gives the hod and the dray,

a sort of distinction.98 As for the servants at the hotel, they all have intelligence

and morality, and total abstinence written upon their countenances; and the porter

has such a particularly virtuous expression, that when he brings my boots, I ask

him to sit down, as the feeble tribute, which I can pay to so much worth.

94. Tennyson, "Break, Break, Break." The Journal misprinted "vanished" as "varnished."

95. "This was the engagement [War of 1812] ... off the harbor of Portland, in which both cap-

tains were slain. They were buried side by side, in the cemetery on Mountjoy." Longfellow's note to

"My Lost Youth."

96. Gray's words became "stoned urns" in the Journal.

97. Neal Dow (1804-1897), temperance reformer, drafted the "Maine Law" of 1851, a pioneering

prohibition measure in the United States.

98. Though suffering from an economic recession, Portlanders had invested heavily in improving

their docks to welcome the maiden voyage of the mammoth new British liner, the Great Eastern. The

ship made for New York instead, where, on June 28, she reached the bar at Sandy Hook. With a gross

tonnage of 18,914 and a draft of 30 feet, she was forced to wait till high tide to get safely over into

moorings. Long delayed in construction, she was already outmoded by refinements in American craft.

She spent the summer running excursion trips along the eastern seaboard, where Howells missed see-

ing her both in Portland and New York.

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William Dean Howells, "Glimpses of Summer Travel," concluded, Cin-

cinnati Gazette, August 9, 1860

 

Portland, July 30, 1860.

 

I

The summer has been very dry in this part of New England. The Portlanders

had yesterday the first rain that has fallen in many weeks. But here, the drouth

does not produce intense heat; and you must look at the yellow fields before you

can believe that the air has not been cooled by recent rains. Nestled under her

three thousand elms, with the sea on one side and the beautiful bay upon the

other, Portland can know nothing of the dog-days, except what she has read in

books. Indeed, during my stay, the weather has been uncomfortably cold; and I

inferred the traveler who would enjoy his summer sojourn here, must come well

provided with flannels and overcoats.

There is more business life in Portland than I expected to find. The calamities

of 1857 fell heavily upon her; the non-arrival of the Great Eastern, was--to charac-

terize it in the mildest terms--a pecuniary disappointment, for two large docks had

been built for her at a cost of nearly $100,000; the unfavorable season has affected

the city's prosperity, and yet it seems to me that there is more bustle and activity

in her streets than I saw either at Buffalo or Toronto.

But I confess that I have not contemplated Portland much in a business point

of view. I have loved rather to lounge up and down the streets, and pay reverence

to the memories of the unknown men that planted her noble elms, and made "gothic

archways" of the pave. I have cared rather to saunter out beyond the busy heart

of the town, in those quiet and pensive ways, where, in shadow and serenity, the

New England home life of the city beats, where the houses are old and look full

of family legends and histories. It has pleased me rather to enter that graveyard

where the captains of the Boxer and the Enterprise (both killed in the famous battle

between their ships off Portland) sleep side by side, and where, in sight of the sea,

so much seafaring mortality is buried.

Yes, Portland is a beautiful city--and I could willingly stay here more than two

days, for the scenery of sea and land is grand, the air is pure and wholesome, and

the fried fresh cod is unspeakably good. There is not much to be seen in the way

of public buildings, though these are good, including the invariable U. S. Custom

House, which is the same in all cities that I have seen.

But after a week of Canada, I find the American tones and the American faces

very pleasant to me. I have a real affection for the politicians, who dispute in the

office, and ring the well known changes upon Douglas and Breckinridge, and Lin-

coln, and never so much as allude to the coming of 'Is 'Ighness the Prince of

Wales.99 I even have a tender regard for the enlightened Southern gentleman who

is spending the summer here, and who demands of the Republican, "What is it

about niggers, anyway? I have a hundred of 'em, and I want to git rid of 'em,

and they won't leave. They're better off as they are; they're freer than I am. Ai'n't

everybody a slave?--you jus' as much as niggers?"

 

99. His Highness Edward Prince of Wales had arrived at St. John's, Newfoundland, on July 23.

After a triumphal tour of Canada, he would visit the United States, including a stop at the Union

Station in Columbus. Ohio State Journal, October 2, 1860. He would eventually embark for home

from Portland.

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I say I have a regard even for this person--for I feel that nowhere but in my

own dear native land do you hear people talk such idiotic nonsense. I know that

the eagle is flapping her wings somewhere above me, and I am content.

 

II

The poet Longfellow was born in Portland, and the house where he was born

is still standing--a middle-aged three-story brick house, painted red, with a portico

in front. Two slender and pensive elms shadow its roof and lend "a tender grace"

to a place that was sacred to me. In its day the mansion was doubtless a great

house, but now an immense hotel has been erected beside it, and it looks dwarfed

and humbled. I gave a moment in the rain yesterday to outside glances at the

early home of the poet, with no wish to penetrate the rooms that I had peopled

with the creations of his poetry and the shadowy presence of the poet's own boy-

hood. The real inhabitants of the place, indeed, are still Longfellows, and the fra-

grance of the name and the warmth of kinship lingers about it.

But it was not so much the sight of this old house that touched me, as the sight

of Deering's woods which Longfellow mentions in his exquisite poem, "My Lost

Youth." The poet dignifies and endears whatever he will, and I entered this simple

grove of oaks near Portland, which a poet had enchanted to me, half ashamed and

half proud of the reverence with which I regarded it. The comrade of my walk

and I had been talking of the poet's mission, and how he should be the great

teacher and preacher; but when we stood within the shadow and whisper of those

trees, I forgot the fine scheme of poethood that my philosophy had spun, and

would have the poet be only as he had been, in all the world full of sorrowful

glances, sublime yearning, inscrutable power--yet the equal of every man in human

weakness and human passion, as much a teacher in his helplessness as in his great

strength. "Words, words, words!" Was it the lost youth of the poet lingering in

Deering's woods, and not the sea wind that haunted those shades, and stirred the

harsh leaves and subtly breathed that refrain of ineffable sadness:

A boy's will is the wind's will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.100

Chispa.

 

 

 

William Dean Howells, "En Passant," concluded, Ohio State Journal,

August 7, 1860

Boston, Mass., Aug. 1st, 1860.

 

I left you, much-enduring reader, at Portland, I think; and now I have to bring

you down to this city.

And it is no light matter, let me tell you beforehand, to unfold three days and

an hundred miles of New England travel. You should have been at my elbow, and

had me shout my impressions to you above the clangor of the cars; or had me

whisper them (and this reader is imagined to be very young and fair, with a good

habit of listening,) in the moonlight strolls through the tranced streets of the New

England village, where I spent two nights. But now I will not answer if the summer-

100. Longfellow, "My Lost Youth."

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Howells' Correspondence                                               153

 

drink which I purvey to you, have lost its sparkle, and be somewhat flat. It has

been three days on draught. Nevertheless, if you insist.

At Portland, the traveler, who enters New England by the route I came, takes

his first fresh cod-fish and mackerel; and if he be a thankful creature, rejoicing

in all the victualer manifestations of providence, his gratitude will be perhaps

silent but deep. Ah, favored region! of which the land grows scholars and poets,

and the sea fresh cod and mackerel. I do not wonder that the Yankees are the

uncrafty, contented, and home-keeping race that they are known to be. They have

many things to render them happy, and if a rural population, possessing, (as the

greater number of the country New English do,) large blocks of granite in every

cornfield and meadow, for the purpose of holding the soil down--if such cannot

be happy, will some authority on the subject have the kindness to inform me who

can? (The jest is prodigiously heavy. But consider the amount of stone used in its

construction! and then, it will last forever.)

I am so far away from the codfish and mackerel now, that it is hardly worth

while to go back; and besides, we have already left Portland, and are on our way

to Haverhill, in Massachusetts. We are engaged, indeed, in flatting our noses against

the car window, and trying to stare the landscape out of countenance. It is absurd

to attempt this, of course, but every failure has its uses, and we incidentally dis-

cover that the Maine landscape is wild, somewhat flat, and wears a western look. As

we enter New Hampshire, the country grows populous, and the villages more fre-

quent. The board fences (they have not one of our dear ugly old picturesque rail

fences in the whole land,) give way to stone walls. There are hills, and the principal

crop is a cropping out of granite. The farmers have been cutting the feeble attempt

at hay, which the stony fields have made, and have secured it from the malign

action of the weather, by working it into broken winnows, and stretching caps of

canvas over it.

It was in this State that the young woman came aboard the cars who thanked

you so kindly for your seat when you offered it. You remember that your satchel

seemed to be in the way, and that you plunged at the offending baggage and re-

moved it, and insisted upon sitting in the sun, and giving the young woman the

better part of the seat; she was not pretty, and she was meanly dressed, with some

poor little female endeavors to be fine; but she thanks you, and cared tenderly for

her old mother when they left the cars. Go with God! unknown Yankee maiden,

whether thou bindest shoes, or moilest in a mill, or drudgest in a kitchen. The bene-

diction is cheap--but it is given freely; like the rain and the sunshine, and the

money one bestows upon the waiter, who remembers you at dinner. In Massachu-

setts (pronounced Mah-achusetts by the natives,) the railroad villages are not more

than three miles apart, and often not more than two miles. They are all beautiful

to the hurried glimpse which snatches a consciousness of a hillside cluster of white

houses, under loving elms, with a willowed stream winding secretly below.

At last, we reach Haverhill, where we are going to stop all night. We stand

satchel in hand and await the onset of hackmen. Prodigious! There are three hack-

men, and there is no onset at all. One of them asks in a tone of disinterested in-

quiry whether you would like to ride up, and when, calmed and rebuked, you

reply that you would, he mildly opens the door of his vehicle, and you get in. It

is nothing to you, but you cannot help wondering now, whether the young person

from Maine, who met her friend at the depot, and rode up in the same hack with

you, has been homesick up to this date, already beyond the time predicted by her

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friend.

The road, which the hackman was obliged to take, to set these young ladies

down, was quite roundabout, and afforded you the most picturesque and delicious

impressions of Haverhill--impressions of pretty wooden houses half hid by trees--

of winding, sloping streets--of the purple Merrimac--of the old drawbridge which

crosses it, and of the masts of the schooners lying at the wharves.

It is moonlight, after supper, and the temptation to saunter forth, is greater even

than your sense of weariness. You wander out beyond that surprise of a business

street, (all built up with fine blocks of brick,) and seek the calmer avenues that

pleased you in your sweet ride from the station. There is a beautiful harmony of

light and shadow, trees and houses, and open space, in

The vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with blue.

A feeling of eld possesses you, passing through the streets of the town settled more

than two hundred years ago--so long before time had conceived the vigorous west-

ern life of Ohio. The influences of the past steal into your thoughts I say, and the

story of Thomas Dustin of Haverhill, whose wife was taken captive by the Indians,

and who only saved his children by the greatest bravery, is strongly blended with

the memory of that boy at school, who never got his history lessons, and was con-

stantly kept after school, on account of default.101

If you draw near the river, you behold the divine mystery of the tide, which the

water, whispering softly to the shores that it ebbs away from, cannot make known.

The bridge is dark and silent, and looks like not a bridge of wood, but of poetry,

like that bridge upon which Longfellow lingered, when he saw the moon in the

waters under him

Like a golden goblet falling

And sinking into the sea.102

This is the moonlight Haverhill. The daylight Haverhill is a place where there

is much bustle and activity, where lots are high and rents likewise, where there is

growth and prosperity. Nearly as many shoes are made in Haverhill as in Lynn,

and all these four-story brick buildings, are manufactories where the work is cut

out, and given to be made up by shoemakers in all parts of New England. Haver-

hill produces about ten million pairs of shoes annually, which find market in the

West, in Mexico, South America, the Sandwich Islands, and nearly everywhere on

this hemisphere, that the foot of woman demands chaussure, for it is only "woman's-

work" that is made at Haverhill. There are also large hat manufactories, where

wool hats of every fashion and fineness are made, and where you see the inchoate

wool shaped into the perfect hat.

This morning we left Haverhill, and passing through an almost continuous vil-

lage, entered Boston at nine o'clock. But for the absence of forest, and the dense

population, New England does not look older than Ohio,--does not look old like

Canada; for her farm houses and villages are all built of wood, and have a freshly-

painted appearance, and shed poetry, as they shed rain. I object to it.

 

101. In 1698, Hannah Dustin, wife of Thomas, a brickmaker in Haverhill, was kidnapped with

her new-born child and a nurse by the Indians and taken to the vicinity of present-day Concord,

N.H. Helped by the nurse and a captive English boy, she killed and scalped ten Indians and escaped.

102. Longfellow, "The Bridge."

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