Literary Boston

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It had not the appealing charm I found in the face of James Parton,
another historian I knew earlier in my Boston days. I cannot say how
much his books, once so worthily popular, are now known but I have an
abiding sense of their excellence. I have not read the 'Life of
Voltaire', which was the last, but all the rest, from the first, I have
read, and if there are better American biographies than those of Franklin
or of Jefferson, I could not say where to find them. The Greeley and the
Burr were younger books, and so was the Jackson, and they were not nearly
so good; but to all the author had imparted the valuable humanity in
which he abounded. He was never of the fine world of literature, the
world that sniffs and sneers, and abashes the simpler-hearted reader. But
he was a true artist, and English born as he was, he divined American
character as few Americans have done. He was a man of eminent courage,
and in the days when to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast, he
had the heart to say of the Mysteries, that he did not know. He outlived
the condemnation that this brought, and I think that no man ever came
near him without in some measure loving him. To me he was of a most
winning personality, which his strong, gentle face expressed, and a cast
in the eye which he could not bring to bear directly upon his vis-a-vis,
endeared. I never met him without wishing more of his company, for he
seldom failed to say something to whatever was most humane and most
modern in me. Our last meeting was at Newburyport, whither he had long
before removed from New York, and where in the serene atmosphere of the
ancient Puritan town he found leisure and inspiration for his work. He
was not then engaged upon any considerable task, and he had aged and
broken somewhat. But the old geniality, the old warmth glowed in him,
and made a summer amidst the storm of snow that blinded the wintry air
without. A new light had then lately come into my life, by which I saw
all things that did not somehow tell for human brotherhood dwarfish and
ugly, and he listened, as I imagined, to what I had to say with the
tolerant sympathy of a man who has been a long time thinking those
things, and views with a certain amusement the zeal of the fresh
discoverer.

There was yet another historian in Boston, whose acquaintance I made
later than either Parkman's or Parton's, and whose very recent death
leaves me with the grief of a friend. No ones indeed, could meet John
Codman Ropes without wishing to be his friend, or without finding a
friend in him. He had his likes and his dislikes, but he could have had
no enmities except for evil and meanness. I never knew a man of higher
soul, of sweeter nature, and his whole life was a monument of character.
It cannot wound him now to speak of the cruel deformity which came upon
him in his boyhood, and haunted all his after days with suffering. His
gentle face showed the pain which is always the part of the hunchback,
but nothing else in him confessed a sense of his affliction, and the
resolute activity of his mind denied it in every way. He was, as is well
known, a very able lawyer, in full practice, while he was making his
studies of military history, and winning recognition for almost unique
insight and thoroughness in that direction, though I believe that when he
came to embody the results in those extraordinary volumes recording the
battles of our civil war, he retired from the law in some measure. He
knew these battles more accurately than the generals who fought them, and
he was of a like proficiency in the European wars from the time of
Napoleon down to our own time. I have heard a story, which I cannot
vouch for, that when foreknowledge of his affliction, at the outbreak of
our civil war, forbade him to be a soldier, he became a student of
soldiership, and wreaked in that sort the passion of his most gallant
spirit. But whether this was true or not, it is certain that he pursued
the study with a devotion which never blinded him to the atrocity of war.
Some wars he could excuse and even justify, but for any war that seemed
wanton or aggressive, he had only abhorrence.

The last summer of a score that I had known him, we sat on the veranda of
his cottage at York Harbor, and looked out over the moonlit sea, and he
talked of the high and true things, with the inextinguishable zest for
the inquiry which I always found in him, though he was then feeling the
approaches of the malady which was so soon to end all groping in these
shadows for him. He must have faced the fact with the same courage and
the same trust with which he faced all facts. From the first I found him
a deeply religious man, not only in the ecclesiastical sense, but in the
more mystical meanings of the word, and he kept his faith as he kept his
youth to the last. Every one who knew him, knows how young he was in
heart, and how he liked to have those that were young in years about him.
He wished to have his house in Boston, as well as his cottage at York,
full of young men and young girls, whose joy of life he made his own, and
whose society he preferred to his contemporaries'. One could not blame
him for that, or for seeking the sun, wherever he could, but it would be
a false notion of him to suppose that his sympathies were solely or
chiefly with the happy. In every sort, as I knew him, he was fine and
good. The word is not worthy of him, after some of its uses and
associations, but if it were unsmutched by these, and whitened to its
primitive significance, I should say he was one of the most perfect
gentlemen I ever knew.




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Celia Thaxter
Charles F. Browne
Dawn upon him through a cloud of other half remembered faces
Edmund Quincy
Ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense
Few men last over from one reform to another
Francis Parkman
Generous lover of all that was excellent in literature
Got out of it all the fun there was in it
Greeting of great impersonal cordiality
Grieving that there could be such ire in heavenly minds
His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event
Julia Ward Howe
Looked as if Destiny had sat upon it
Man who may any moment be out of work is industrially a slave
Pathos of revolt from the colorless rigidities
Plain-speaking or Rude Speaking
Pointed the moral in all they did
Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the sermon
Tired themselves out in trying to catch up with him
True to an ideal of life rather than to life itself
Wasted face, and his gay eyes had the death-look
When to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast
Whitman's public use of his privately written praise