Read Ebook: The Friendly Club and Other Portraits by Parsons Francis

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 208 lines and 21916 words, and 5 pages

eems to have been happier in this work of enormous detail than at any other time of his life.

But it was as a geologist that his most valuable practical work was done. His "Report on the Geology of Connecticut," published in 1842, was the result of five years of arduous labor and is a sufficient monument for any man.

"While engaged in this survey," he wrote, "I can confidently say that I have been laborious and diligent. While traveling, it was my practice to rise early, in the longer days generally at dawn; in the shorter generally I got my breakfast and was on my way by daybreak, I continued, scarcely with any relaxation, as long as I had daylight and then was generally obliged to sit up till midnight, not unfrequently till one o'clock A. M. in order to complete my notes and arrange my specimens. This was continued, not only week after week, but month after month, almost without cessation."

Under the law Percival could not be paid till his report had been approved by the governor. It is characteristic of the whimsical geologist that he refused to submit to this approval by one whom he considered incompetent to pass upon his labors and it was only by the ruse of a friend who got possession of the report and presented it to the governor, who at once approved it, that Percival secured his pay.

This work brought Percival a high reputation as a geologist. He was engaged by the American Mining Company to investigate the lead deposits in Wisconsin and this in turn resulted in his employment by that state to make a geological survey similar to that of Connecticut. He had made his first report and was engaged upon his second when he became ill and in May, 1856, he died and was buried in Hazel Green, Wisconsin. "Eminent as a Poet," runs his epitaph, "rarely accomplished as a Linguist, learned and acute in Science, a Man without Guile."

During his employment in Wisconsin his friends had bought a lot and built a house for him in New Haven. It was a queer structure, built after the poet's own plans, with the entrance at the rear, blind windows at the front, and of only one story in height. He was looking forward to spending here his last years, close to his college, with his few intimate friends, surrounded by his books. During an interval in his Wisconsin employment he came to New Haven to inspect his future home and is said to have broken down completely as he was compelled to leave by the duty that called him westward.

He was a strange creature, impossible to get along with, handicapped by an over-sensitiveness that led him into resentments that often held the implication of ingratitude, and with a constant grudge against the world. He should have been endowed and relieved of all the detail of life. Even then it is doubtful if he would have produced great poetry, unless he had been rigorously trained by some dominant master to condense, revise and work over again and again his diffuse, sentimental and dreamy verses. A few of them retained for a time a certain vogue and then gradually passed into oblivion. Perhaps the two that were longest remembered were "To Seneca Lake" and "The Coral Grove." It is an odd thing, but some selections from a boyish effort entitled "Seasons of New England," hitherto generally cited as evidence of his youthful absurdities, would make excellent examples of the free verse that nowadays is taken so seriously. In this respect, at least, he was ahead of his time.

In his review of the "Life and Letters" Lowell seems rather dogmatic and intolerant, but with his inevitable insight and art of statement he crystalizes into one sentence the whole trouble with Percival. "He appears," writes Lowell, "as striking an example as could be found of the poetic temperament unballasted with those less obvious qualities which make the poetic faculty."

It should be recorded that children loved this old bachelor in spite of his eccentricities and that with them he seemed to feel unrestrained and free, forgetting the shyness that formed an insuperable barrier to ready friendship with adults. In our Connecticut history he should not be forgotten and if any of the spirits of the departed revisit the glimpses of the moon this strange apparition ought sometimes to be met, driving his phantom buggy through forgotten lanes of the state he loved, or with his hammer and bag of specimens, climbing on foot the hills and ledges he knew so well.

"Ah, pensive scholar, what is fame? A fitful tongue of leaping flame; A giddy whirlwind's fickle gust, That lifts a pinch of mortal dust; A few swift years, and who can show Which dust was Bill, and which was Joe?"

He does not deserve to be forgotten. Born at Ridgefield, Connecticut, in 1793, he died at New York City in 1860. For twenty-four hours his body lay in state in St. Bartholomew's Church where crowds passed his bier and at Southbury, Connecticut, where he was buried, groups of children preceded the coffin and strewed flowers in its path.

It was a fitting and touching ceremony, for all his life he had been the friend of children. It was almost entirely for them that he wrote his two hundred books, of which he estimated, five years before his death, that seven million copies had then been sold, including, we assume, those editions that had been translated into nearly every modern language, even Greek and Persian.

Rummage among the top shelves of any old library and you will be pretty sure to discover some of these almost forgotten volumes--Parley's "Tales of the Sea," "Tales About the Sun, Moon and Stars," tales about New York, about ancient Rome, about Great Britain, about animals, about almost everything in this interesting world and outside of it. Of his "Natural History" George Du Maurier says--"Last, but not least of our library, was Peter Parley's 'Natural History,' of which we knew every word by heart," and a writer in the "Congregationalist" a quarter of a century ago ventured the opinion, "We have no doubt, were it needed, that 1,000 aged people could rise and repeat the widely famous lines, 'The world is round and, like a ball, seems swinging in the air.'"

You will find as a frontispiece for some of these well worn books a picture of a kindly old gentleman in a cocked hat, with a crutch and a gouty foot, his pockets bulging with good things for children. This was the mythical "Peter Parley", and Goodrich tells an amusing story of how, during a visit in the South, his host's little grandson, after cautiously inspecting the visitor who had been introduced to him as Peter Parley, took his grandfather aside and warned him that the guest must be an impostor, for his foot wasn't bound up and he didn't walk with a crutch.

Perhaps in your search on the dusty shelves you will be fortunate enough to find a copy of Goodrich's verses entitled "The Outcast, and Other Poems," printed in 1841, or an odd number of "The Token," an "annual," which Goodrich published from 1828 till 1842 and in which were first given to the world some of the early productions of such young literary sparks as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

During the course of an eventful life Goodrich came into relations more or less intimate with many famous people. A few of them, beside those just mentioned, were Daniel Webster , James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Whittier, Jeffery, founder and editor of the Edinburgh Review, Sir Walter Scott and Lockhart his son-in-law and biographer. Goodrich was an eye-witness in Paris of the Revolution of '48 and he draws a vivid portrait of the third Napoleon on the eve of the Coup d'Etat. His daughter tells of an informal celebration in Florence, planned in his honor by Charles Lever, at which there were present the Brownings, the Tennysons, the Storys, Gibson and Powers the sculptors, Lowell, Lamartine, Longfellow, Trollope, Buchanan Read and others--surely a brilliant company of which to be the center.

In London he was present at the ceremonies attendant upon the return of Byron's body from Greece. He heard Clay, Calhoun, John Randolph and other celebrities of the day speak in the Senate. He was a guest at levees at the White House and gives a dramatic account of a meeting there between Jackson and John Quincy Adams on the night of the former's defeat for the presidency by the latter. He saw John Marshall presiding over the Supreme Court. He presents a minute description of President Monroe whom he encountered both at Washington and also at Hartford during a ceremony at the School for the Deaf, and whose personal appearance he thought far from prepossessing. In fact, there are few persons who attained distinction during the first half of the nineteenth century of whom the reader will not find an entertaining and graphic sketch in Goodrich's "Recollections of a Life Time."

It is a book well worth reading for not only is it written in an amusing and racy style and enlivened by anecdote and delightful comment, but it is a historic review of the politics, literature, international relations and social life of the time, put together by a writer eminently qualified for the task. We are chiefly concerned, however, with Goodrich's picture of life in the old town a century ago.

He came here as a youth of seventeen in 1811 and Hartford was his home, though he was frequently absent in Europe and elsewhere, till 1826 when he moved to Boston.

The city when he arrived was, he says, "a small commercial town, of four thousand inhabitants, dealing in lumber and smelling of molasses and Old Jamaica--for it had still some trade with the West Indies. . . . There was a high tone of general intelligence and social respectability about the place, but it had not a single institution, a single monument that marked it as even a provincial metropolis of taste, in literature, art, or refinement." In this latter respect things were changed before he left. Trinity College, the American School for the Deaf, the Retreat for the Insane and other philanthropic and educational institutions were established during his residence in the provincial capital.

On his arrival he worked as a clerk in a dry goods store and his intimate friend was George Sheldon, "favored clerk" in the "ancient and honored firm" of Hudson & Goodwin, publishers of the "Connecticut Courant," Webster's Spelling Book, and much besides. Mr. Goodwin, of this firm, he describes as "a large, hale, comely old gentleman, of lively mind and cheerful manners. There was always sunshine in his bosom and wit upon his lip. He turned his hand to various things, though chiefly to the newspaper, which was his pet. His heaven was the upper loft in the composition room; setting type had for him the sedative charms of knitting work to a country dame."

At the home of his uncle, Senator Chauncey Goodrich, he met all the prominent members of the famous "Hartford Convention," which finds in him a vigorous defender against the charge of unpatriotism.

He began his career as a publisher in partnership with Sheldon whose early death terminated that enterprise. Goodrich himself, however, here published by subscription the poems of John Trumbull, whom he knew well, eight volumes of the Waverly novels, then arousing intense interest, and several school books and "toy books," as he calls them, for children. He was a leading member of a literary club which included Bishop J. M. Wainwright, Isaac Toucey, William M. Stone, Jonathan Law and S. H. Huntington.

Another literary "cotery," of which Mrs. Sigourney was the presiding genius, met generally at Daniel Wadsworth's home. Some of the poems and papers read at the first of these clubs were published by Goodrich in a short-lived periodical called "The Round Table."

We find gossipy sketches of Jeremiah Wadsworth, Dr. Cogswell and his deaf and dumb daughter Alice, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, Theodore Dwight, the poets Brainard and Percival, Dr. Strong, pastor of the "Middle Brick" Church, Colonel John Trumbull, the artist and his beautiful wife, who was supposed to be the daughter of an English earl but about whose lineage there was an impenetrable mystery. Many others of the old Hartford characters live again in these pages which furnish us what is doubtless a very accurate, as well as a very charming impression of the social life of the old town one hundred years ago.

But the great world called the future "Peter Parley" and his ambitions and love of variety drew him away from the place of his earliest literary experience to foreign residence and travel and to the little brown house that he afterward built at Jamaica Plain. Later in life he returned again to Europe and for two years was American Consul at Paris.

He had his failures as well as his successes, his days of financial losses, as well as of affluence. He experienced, too, his periods of feeble health. But he possessed the courage that ancestry like his often seems to breed and one cannot fail to accord a hearty tribute to the resolution with which, in an impaired physical condition, he set himself, like Mr. Clemens, to overcome adversity with hard work, with his pen.

His Parley books were the outgrowth of two impulses or characteristics--his innate love of children and his personal rebellion on the one hand against the dull school books of his boyhood and on the other against what he considered such ridiculous and deleterious old fairy stories as "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Jack the Giant Killer." He did not think the climax of "Little Red Riding Hood" was healthy reading for children and he did not at all approve of Jack the Giant Killer's morals. In his opinion there was no particular sense in the Mother Goose jingles.

And so he tried to give children, in the guise of perfectly proper but at the same time interesting stories and verses, the information and a good deal of the education they required. He may have carried his theory to some extremes, but he was one of the first among us to realize that with children effective educational methods must take into consideration the securing at the outset of interest and attention.

What extraordinary success he achieved has already been intimated. Yet it is pathetic to note that he himself was the first to acknowledge the fact that his fame would be temporary. "I have written too much," he says at the height of his reputation, "and have done nothing really well. You need not whisper it to the public, at least until I am gone; but I know, better than anyone can tell me, that there is nothing in this long catalogue that will give me a permanent place in literature."

Yet it is safe to say that as long as the human mind loves to dip into the past and to re-create in familiar surroundings the scenes and people of long ago his "Recollections of a Life Time" will have its readers. And many of us would cheerfully relinquish any hope of immortal memory could we be assured of the love of the countless children to whom "Peter Parley" was a dear friend and companion.

IT is not often claimed that the small city or country town produces proportionately more of the human phenomena popularly denominated "characters" than does the larger municipality. Whether this is indeed a fact, or whether the truth is that in the small group variations from type are more conspicuous, is perhaps immaterial. At all events the memories and traditions of pronounced personalities seem to be frequently associated with the less populous communities, especially in New England.

In any review of the personages that lived in the capital of Connecticut in the last century the individuality of one of the life-long pastors of its oldest church stands forth as a shining example of the capricious and at the same time engaging forms in which humanity may be clothed. Above all else the Rev. Doctor Joel Hawes was a "character."

To begin with, his personal appearance was sufficiently extraordinary. Tall, gaunt, awkward, with large hands and feet, he would have attracted attention--and did attract attention--anywhere. His face was homely and in repose unprepossessing, but when he became interested in talk his expression gathered from the play of thought an animation which caused his listeners to forget the essential unattractiveness of his features.

In many respects there was something Lincoln-like about him, though he lacked the fine eyes, the wistful, haunting look, that distinguish the later portraits of his great contemporary. Like Lincoln, too, he came from the common stock and was trained in a rough school. The story of his tacking loose leaves from the Bible on the walls of the store, where in his youth he worked, and memorizing verses between visits of customers recalls somewhat similar methods of self-education employed by the boy who became president. With no money, with no friends except of his own making, with no "advantages" or "background," with not even a fair start, he early developed a tremendous courage and determination; when to this was added a sense that the hand of God was upon him nothing could stop him. That in his day he should become one of the foremost divines in the country was inevitable.

It was his earnestness and force that made him what he was and not, it must be confessed, any outstanding brilliancy of mind. His fellow-citizen, Doctor Bushnell, far excelled him in mental power, in breadth and originality of thought, in versatility and imagination. In Horace Bushnell was always something of the poet, much of the mystic. His books are bought today and his name remembered, while Dr. Hawes, except in his old church and city, is forgotten. Yet it is to be doubted whether, considering Joel Hawes's early difficulties and his moderate mental equipment, one could find a better example than his life furnished of what may be accomplished by a man who cherishes a conviction of personal destiny. He became assured that God intended him to preach the gospel and he proceeded to do just exactly that with confidence, single-mindedness and consequent success during a long life. His last sermon was delivered three days before his death.

Might not this principle be adopted to advantage by many a modern clergyman?

It was in a rough-shod manner, regardless of obstacles, that Doctor Hawes plowed his way through life. He did not know how to compromise. Tact, adaptability, adjustment, finesse,--these words were not included in his vocabulary. He paid little attention to the amenities of existence, but went directly to his object, as on the occasion when in prayer meeting, after lamenting the fact that ordinarily only a few persons took active part in these gatherings, he suddenly called upon one diffident attendant, whose voice had never been heard, with the peremptory request, "Brother Jones, will you lead us in prayer--and we won't take any excuse."

This absolute sincerity, this disdain of any pretense or artificiality, this almost childlike na?vet?, while they furnished many amusing and sometimes embarrassing incidents, had no small part in endearing the good man in the hearts of his people. Indeed the significant thing about the numerous anecdotes of him that are still occasionally quoted is that while so many of them turn on his peculiarities and eccentricities, none of them seems to detract from the affection and esteem in which the man and his memory are held in the traditions of his church. Doubtless the reason is that these stories essentially serve to delineate and illumine the portrait of an intensely earnest, able and vigorous servant of God and his fellow men.

His humor was not all unconscious. He had his own notions of the incongruous and diverting. On one of his journeys abroad he wrote of the tombs in Westminster Abby--"There lie in promiscuous assemblage kings, queens, statesmen, warriors, poets, scholars, prostitutes, and villains, each, by his epitaph, now in heaven, but all awaiting the decisions of the last day, which, in a great majority of cases, will, it cannot be doubted, reverse forever the judgment of man."

There was, too, another side to him. Hidden in the uncouth body was a kindly and sympathetic heart. Children, at first awed and possibly repelled by his appearance and manners, soon grew to love him. His biographer quotes him as saying that he could never go past a hand-organ in the street without stopping to listen with the children and see the monkey.

Sorrow and suffering found in him an instant response and the instinctive impulse to comfort and help. Generally these traits, while partly inherent, are emphasized and made of value to others, as well as to one's self, by experience. Doctor Hawes's life had its tragic sorrows and these were translated into a singular ability to comfort and help. Then, too, while he would never compromise for an instant with temptation, weakness and sin, he could understand. As in the case of most forceful, passionate natures, his early days, before he discovered the Bible, had their period of wildness, brief though it was. In the practical conduct of life he was no theorist, no amateur. He had struggled against poverty and loneliness, as he had fought and conquered the devil in his own life, and he recognized his old adversary and knew how to deal with him when he saw the fight going on in the experience of others.

Perhaps it was all this as much as anything that constituted the foundation for his interest in the youth of his church and city. In 1827 this interest resulted in a series of "Lectures to Young Men" delivered on successive Sunday evenings to crowded and enthusiastic assemblies in his own church, and later repeated at Yale College where subsequently he became a member of the corporation. The following year the lectures were published "at the united request" of his hearers and instantly became famous. "Few books," says Doctor Walker in his history of the First Church, "attained a like circulation." Nearly a hundred thousand copies, in various editions, were issued in this country and more in Great Britain. One Scotch publisher alone, asserts Doctor Walker, printed fifty thousand copies.

Reading these lectures today, nearly a century after their composition, one is impressed by the fact that here is a compendium, as valuable now as at the time of delivery, of practical rules for a good and useful life. The titles of the five original addresses indicate the subject matter--"Claims of Society on Young Men;" "Dangers of Young Men;" "Importance of Established Principles;" "Formation and Importance of Character;" "Religion the Chief Concern."

The lectures deal with plain, fundamental truths, in a straightforward business-like way. There is as little ornament as imagination about them; they have more vigor than originality, but they are bristling with common sense and set forth with tremendous earnestness the principles of a practical Christian philosopher. Epigrammatic touches, indeed, are not wanting. "A lover of good books," says the lecturer, "can never be in want of good society;" and again, "He who cares not for others will soon find that others will not care for him." "The Gospel may be neglected," he asserts, "but it cannot be understandingly disbelieved." "Character is power; character is influence," he says, "and he who has character, though he may have nothing else, has the means of being eminently useful, not only to his immediate friends, but to society, to the church of God, and to the world."

Today the mind of youth is questioning. It is seeking not only rules for the conduct of life but a rational interpretation of religious creed and aspiration that will prove a guide in explorations on ground that perhaps Doctor Hawes would have considered forbidden. He was not a meta-physician. To him the way was plain. The fundamental truths, the orthodox acceptances, were good enough for him. The questions that for long troubled Doctor Bushnell not only did not worry Doctor Hawes--he did not understand why one should ask them. Doctor Bushnell was ahead of his time. He began where Doctor Hawes left off, and soon about the younger man gathered a school of disciples who shared in sympathy, if not with equality of intellectual penetration, the tenets of the religious philosopher, the visions of the seer and poet.

It was inevitable that two such divergent personalities as Hawes and Bushnell, laborers in the same field, living in the same city, should come into conflict. The story of that famous difference, of the struggles to find common ground and of the final reconciliation, have today a note of pathos. For the lay reader it is not easy at first glance to see what it is all about, and yet what feeling and bitterness were aroused!

There is no space here to go into the details of that old dispute. The letters the two ministers exchanged, like all sincere letters, are typical of their respective characters and a memorialist of Doctor Hawes finds nothing for which to apologize in his side of the correspondence. His letters, indeed, evidence what a modern theologian might consider his speculative limitations, but they show, too, beneath his determination to adhere to his principles, a genuine grief at the separation and a hope that the two churches might be "rooted and grounded in the truth, and their pastors as happily united in fellowship and love."

The church of which Doctor Hawes was minister was, and still is, something more than an ecclesiastical organization. It is a civic institution. It founded the town. Its minister takes rank as a public personage. In this character Dr. Hawes was interested in many local activities. An example of this was his connection with the famous Hartford Female Seminary--and this may serve also as another illustration of his interest in young people. On the Seminary's organization he was chosen a trustee--an office he held till his death. For many years he was its president. At the reunion of its graduates in 1892, a speaker who had been one of his "boys," and who was the executor of his will, gave a little address on his old pastor which is one of the best portraits of him that remains.

". . . the Hartford Female Seminary," said this speaker, "was his especial delight. To its principals he was a devoted friend; its teachers were his proteg?s and assistants; the pupils his spiritual garden. It was to him the nursery of all that was best in womanhood. I do not know how his sober judgment would have ranked, in relative importance, Yale College, the A. B. C. F. M., and the Seminary; but I know that in his affection this school had the warmest place. How regularly on Monday morning he opened its sessions with fervent prayer; how benignantly his benediction fell on the school as he took his departure, you all know who were in attendance in his time. And although you may have smiled at his peculiarities, I do not believe a doubt ever crossed one of your minds that Joel Hawes was a loving, faithful friend, and truly a man of God."

IN the Spring of 1869 Gideon Welles, who had been appointed Secretary of the Navy by Lincoln and had served to the end of the Johnson administration, returned to Hartford where he lived till his death in 1878. His diary for May 2, 1869, contains the following entry:

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet