University of Virginia Library

13. LETTER XIII.

This is not a very prompt answer to your last, my
dear Doctor, for I intended to have taken my brains
to you bodily, and replied to all your “whether-or-noes”
over a broiled oyster at * * * * *. Perhaps I
may bring this in my pocket. A brace of ramblers,
brothers of my own, detained me for a while, but are
flitting to-day; and Bartlett has been here a week, to
whom, more particularly, I wish to do the honors of
the scenery. We have climbed every hill-top that has
the happiness of looking down on the Owaga and Susquehannah,
and he agrees with me that a more lovely
and habitable valley has never sat to him for its picture.
Fortunately, on the day of his arrival, the dust
of a six weeks' drought was washed from its face, and,
barring the will that precedes autumn, the hill-sides
were in holyday green and looked their fairest. He
has enriched his portfolio with four or five delicious
sketches, and if there were gratitude or sense of renown
in trees and hills, they would have nodded their
tops to the two of us. It is not every valley or pine-tree
that finds painter and historian, but these are as
insensible as beauty and greatness were ever to the
claims of their trumpeters.

How long since was it that I wrote to you of Bartlett's
visit to Constantinople? Not more than four or five
weeks, it seems to me, and yet, here he is, on his return
from a professional trip to Canada, with all its
best scenery snug in his portmanteau! He steamed to
Turkey and back, and steamed again to America, and
will be once more in England in some twenty days —
having visited and sketched the two extremities of the
civilized world. Why, I might farm it on the Susquehannah
and keep my town-house in Constantinople —
(with money). It seemed odd to me to turn over a
drawing-book, and find on one leaf a freshly-pencilled
sketch of a mosque, and on the next a view of Glenmary
— my turnip-field in the foreground. And then
the man himself — pulling a Turkish para and a Yankee
shinplaster from his pocket with the same pinch
— shuffling to breakfast in my abri on the Susquehannah,
in a pair of peaked slippers of Constantinople,
that smell as freshly of the bazar as if they were
bought yesterday — waking up with “pekke! pekke!
my good fellow!” when William brings him his boots
— and never seeing a blood-red maple (just turned
with the frost) without fancying it the sanguine flag
of the Bosphorus or the bright jacket of a Greek! All
this unsettles me strangely. The phantasmagoria of
my days of vagabondage flit before my eyes again.
This, “by-the-by, do you remember, in Smyrna?”
and “the view you recollect from the Seraglio!” and
such like slip-slop of travellers, heard within reach of
my corn and pumpkins, affects me like the mad poet's
proposition,

I have amused my artist friend since he has been
here, with an entertainment not quite as expensive as
the Holly Lodge fireworks, but quite as beautiful —
the burning of log-heaps. Instead of gossipping over
the tea-table these long and chilly evenings, the three
or four young men who have been staying with us
were very content to tramp into the woods with a bundle
of straw and a match-box, and they have been initiated
into the mysteries of “picking and piling,” to
the considerable improvement of the glebe of Glenmary.
Shelley says,

and I am inclined to think that there are varieties of
glory in its phenomena which would make it worth
even your metropolitan while to come to the west and
“burn fallow.” At this season of the year — after the
autumn droughts, that is to say — the whole country
here is covered with a thin smoke, stealing up from
the fires on every hill, in the depths of the woods, and
on the banks of the river; and what with the graceful
smoke-wreaths by day, and the blazing beacons all
around the horizon by night, it adds much to the variety,
and, I think, more to the beauty of our western
October. It edifies the traveller who has bought wood
by the pound in Paris, or stiffened for the want of it in
the disforested Orient, to stand off a rifle-shot from a
crackling wood, and toast himself by a thousand cords
burnt for the riddance. What experience I have had
of these holocausts on my own land has not diminished
the sense of waste and wealth with which I first
watched them. Paddy's dream of “rolling in a bin
of gold guineas,” could scarce have seemed more
luxurious.

Bartlett and I, and the rest of us, in our small way,
burnt enough, I dare say, to have made a comfortable
drawing-room of Hyde Park in January, and the effects
of the white light upon the trees above and
around were glorious. But our fires were piles of
logs and brush — small beer, of course, to the conflagration
of a forest. I have seen one that was like the
Thousand Columns of Constantinople ignited to a red
heat, and covered with carbuncles and tongues of
flame. It was a temple of fire — the floor, living coals
— the roof, a heavy drapery of crimson — the aisles
held up by blazing and innumerable pillars, sometimes
swept by the wind till they stood in still and naked
redness while the eye could see far into their depths,
and again covered and wreathed and laved in ever-changing
billows of flame. We want an American
Tempesta or “Savage Rosa,” to “wreak” such pictures
on canvass; and perhaps the first step to it would
be the painting of the foliage of an American autumn.
These glorious wonders are peculiarities of our country;
why should they not breed a peculiar school of
effect and color?

Among the London news which has seasoned our
breakfasts of late, I hear pretty authentically that Campbell
is coming to look up his muse on the Susquehannah.
He is at present writing the life of Petrarch, and
superintending the new edition of his works (to be illustrated
in the style of Rogers's), and, between whiles,
projecting a new poem; and, my letters say, is likely
to find the way, little known to poets, from the Temple
of Fame to the Temple of Mammon. One would
think it were scarce decent for Campbell to die without
seeing Wyoming. I trust he will not. What would
I not give to get upon a raft with him, and float down
the Susquehannah a hundred miles to the scene of
his Gertrude, watching his fine face while the real displaced
the ideal valley of his imagination. I think it
would trouble him. Probably in the warmth of composition
and the familiarity of years, the imaginary
scene has become enamelled and sunk into his mind,
and it would remain the home of his poem after Wyoming
itself had made a distinct impression on his
memory. They would be two places — not one. He
wrote it with some valley of his own land in his mind's
eye, and gray Scotland and sunny and verdant Pennsylvania
will scarce blend. But he will be welcome.
Oh, how welcome! America would rise up to Campbell.
He has been the bard of freedom, generous and
chivalric in all his strains; and, nation of merchants
as we are, I am mistaken if the string he has most
played is not the master-chord of our national character.
The enthusiasm of no people on earth is so
easily awoke, and Campbell is the poet of enthusiasm.
The schoolboys have him by heart, and what lives upon
their lips, will live and be beloved for ever.

It would be a fine thing, I have often thought, dear
Doctor, if every English author would be at the pains
to reap his laurels in this country. If they could
overcome their indignation at our disgraceful robbery
of their copyrights, and come among the people who
read them for the love they bear them — read them as
they are not read in England, without prejudice or favor,
personal or political — it would be more like taking
a peep at posterity than they think. In what is the
judgment of posterity better than that of contemporaries?
Simply in that the author is seen from a distance
— his personal qualities lost to the eye, and his
literary stature seen in proper relief and proportion.
We know nothing of the degrading rivalries and difficulties
of his first efforts, or, if we do, we do not realize
them, never having known him till success sent his
name over the water. His reputation is a Minerva to
us — sprung full-grown to our knowledge. We praise
him, if we like him, with the spirit in which we criticise
an author of another age — with no possible private
bias. Witness the critiques upon Bulwer in this
country, compared with those of his countrymen.
What review has ever given him a tithe of his deservings
in England! Their cold acknowledgment of his
merits reminds one of Enobarbus's civility to Menas:

I need not to you, dear Doctor enlarge upon the benefits,
political and social, to both countries, which
would follow the mutual good-will of our authors.
We shall never have theirs while we plunder them so
barefacedly as now, and I trust in heaven we shall,
some time or other, see men in Congress who will go
deeper for their opinions than the circular of a pirating
bookseller.

I wish you to send me a copy of Dawes's poems
when they appear. I have long thought he was one
of the unappreciated; but I see that his fine play of
Athanasia is making stir among the paragraphers. Rufus
Dawes is a poet if God ever created one, and he
lives his vocation as well as imagines it. I hope he
will shuffle off the heavenward end of his mortal coil
under the cool shades of my Omega. He is our Coleridge,
and his talk should have reverent listeners. I
have seldom been more pleased at a change in the literary
kaleidoscope, than at his awakening popularity;
and, I pray you blow what breath you have into his
new-spread sail. Cranch, the artist, who lived with
me in Italy (a beautiful scholar in the art, whose hand
is fast overtaking his head), has, I see by the papers,
made a capital sketch of him. Do you know whether
it is to be engraved for the book?

Ossian represents the ghosts of his heroes lamenting
that they had not had their fame, and it is a pity,
I think, that we had not some literary apostle to tell
us, from the temple of our Athens, who are the unknown
great. Certain it is, they often live among us,
and achieve their greatness unrecognised. How profoundly
dull was England to the merits of Charles

Lamb till he died! Yet he was a fine illustration of
my remark just now. America was posterity to
him. The writings of all our young authors were
tinctured with imitation of his style, when, in England
(as I personally know), it was difficult to light upon
a person who had read his Elia. Truly “the root
of a great name is in the dead body.” There is Walter
Savage Landor, whose Imaginary Conversations
contain more of the virgin ore of thought than any
six modern English writers together, and how many
persons in any literary circle know whether he is alive
or dead — an author of Queen Elizabeth's time or
Queen Victoria's? He is a man of fortune, and has
bought Boccacio's garden at Fiesolé, and there upon
the classic Africus, he is tranquilly achieving his renown,
and it will be unburied, and acknowledged when
he is dead. Travellers will make pilgrimages to the
spot where Boccacio and Landor have lived, and wonder
that they did not mark while it was done — this
piling of Ossa on Pelion.

By the way, Mr. Landor has tied me to the tail of
his immortality, for an offence most innocently committed;
and I trust his biographer will either let me
slip off at “Lethe's wharf,” by expurgating the book
of me, or do me justice in a note. When I was in
Florence, I was indebted to him for much kind attention
and hospitality; and I considered it one of the
highest of my good fortunes abroad to go to Fiesolé,
and dine in the scene of the Decameron with an author
who would, I thought, live as long as Boccacio.
Mr. Landor has a glorious collection of paintings, and
at parting he presented me with a beautiful picture by
Cuyp, which I had particularly admired, and gave me
some of my most valuable letters to England, where I
was then going. I mention it to show the terms on
which we separated. While with him on my last visit,
I had expressed a wish that the philosophical conversations
in his books were separated from the political,
and republished in a cheap form in America; and
the following morning, before daylight, his servant
knocked at the door of my lodgings, with a package
of eight or ten octavo volumes, and as much manuscript,
accompanied by a note from Mr. Landor, committing
the whole to my discretion. These volumes,
I should tell you, were interleaved and interlined very
elaborately, and having kept him company under his
olive-trees, were in rather a dilapidated condition.
How to add such a bulk of precious stuff to my baggage,
I did not know. I was at the moment of starting,
and it was very clear that even if the custom-house
officers took no exception to them (they are
outlawed through Italy for their political doctrines),
they would never survive a rough journey over the
Appenines and Alps. I did the best I could. I sent
them with a note to Theodore Fay, who was then in
Florence, requesting him to forward them to America
by ship from Leghorn; a commission which I knew
that kindest and most honorable of men and poets,
would execute with the fidelity of an angel. So he
did. He handed them to an American straw-bonnet
maker (who, he had no reason to suppose, was the malicious
donkey he afterward proved), and through him
they were shipped and received in New York. I expected,
at the time I left Florence, to make but a short
stay in England, and sail in the same summer for
America; instead of which I remained in England
two years at the close of which appeared a new book
of Mr. Landor's Pericles and Aspasia. I took it up
with delight, and read it through to the last chapter,
where, of a sudden, the author jumps from the academy
of Plato, clean over three thousand years, upon
the shoulders of a false American, who had robbed
him of invaluable manuscripts! So there I go to posterity
astride the Finis of Pericles and Aspasia! I
had corresponded occasionally with Mr. Landor, and
in one of my letters had stated the fact, that the man
uscripts had been committed to Mr. Miles to forward
to America. He called, in consequence, at the shop
of this person who denied any knowledge of the
books, leaving Mr. Landor to suppose that I had been
either most careless or most culpable in my management
of his trust. The books had, however, after a
brief stay in New York, followed me to London; and
Fay and Mr. Landor both happening there together,
the explanation was made and the books and manuscripts
restored unharmed to the author. I was not
long enough in London afterward to know whether I
was forgiven by Mr. Landor; but, as his book has not
reached a second edition, I am still writhing in my
purgatory of print.

I have told you this long story, dear Doctor, because
I am sometimes questioned on the subject by the literary
people with whom you live, and hereafter I shall
transfer them to your button for the whole matter.
But what a letter! Write me two for it, and revenge
yourself in the postage.