He was born in New Haven on the 22d of September, 1828, and was a grave, delicate, rather precocious child. He was at school only in New Haven, and entered Yale College just as he was sixteen. The pure, manly morality which was the substance of his character, and his brilliant exploits of scholarship, made him the idol of his college friends, who saw in him the promise of the splendid career which the fond faith of students allots to the favorite classmate. He studied for the Clark scholarship, and gained it; and his name, in the order of time, is first upon the roll of that foundation. For the Berkeleian scholarship he and another were judged equal, and, drawing lots, the other gained the scholarship; but they divided the honor.
In college his favorite studies were Greek and mental philosophy. He never lost the scholarly taste and habit. A wide reader, he retained knowledge with little effort, and often surprised his friends by the variety of his information. Yet it was not strange, for he was born a scholar. His mother was the great-granddaughter of old President Edwards; and among his relations upon the maternal side, Winthrop counted six Presidents of colleges. Perhaps also in this learned descent we may find the secret of his early seriousness. Thoughtful and self-criticising, he was peculiarly sensible to religious influences, under which his criticism easily became self-accusation, and his sensitive seriousness grew sometimes morbid. He would have studied for the ministry or a professorship, upon leaving college, except for his failing health.
In the later days, when I knew him, the feverish ardor of the first religious impulse was past. It had given place to a faith much too deep and sacred to talk about, yet holding him always with serene, steady poise in the purest region of life and feeling. There was no franker or more sympathetic companion for young men of his own age than he; but his conversation fell from his lips as unsullied as his soul.
He graduated in 1848, when he was twenty years old; and for the sake of his health, which was seriously shattered,—an ill-health that colored all his life,—he set out upon his travels. He went first to England, spending much time at Oxford, where he made pleasant acquaintances, and walking through Scotland. He then crossed over to France and Germany, exploring Switzerland very thoroughly upon foot,—once or twice escaping great dangers among the mountains,—and pushed on to Italy and Greece, still walking much of the way. In Italy he made the acquaintance of Mr. W. H. Aspinwall, of New York, and upon his return became tutor to Mr. Aspinwall’s son. He presently accompanied his pupil and a nephew of Mr. Aspinwall, who were going to a school in Switzerland; and after a second short tour of six months in Europe he returned to New York, and entered Mr. Aspinwall’s counting-house. In the employ of the Pacific Steamship Company he went to Panama and resided for about two years, travelling, and often ill of the fevers of the country. Before his return he travelled through California and Oregon,—went to Vancouver’s Island, Puget Sound, and the Hudson Bay Company’s station there. At the Dalles he was smitten with the smallpox, and lay ill for six weeks. He often spoke with the warmest gratitude of the kind care that was taken of him there. But when only partially recovered he plunged off again into the wilderness. At another time he fell very ill upon the plains, and lay down, as he supposed, to die; but after some time struggled up and on again.
He returned to the counting-room, but, unsated with adventure, joined the disastrous expedition of Lieutenant Strain. During the time he remained with it his health was still more weakened, and he came home again in 1854. In the following year he studied law and was admitted to the bar. In 1856 he entered heartily into the Fremont campaign, and from the strongest conviction. He went into some of the dark districts of Pennsylvania and spoke incessantly. The roving life and its picturesque episodes, with the earnest conviction which inspired him, made the summer and autumn exciting and pleasant. The following year he went to St. Louis to practise law. The climate was unkind to him, and he returned and began the practice in New York. But he could not be a lawyer. His health was too uncertain, and his tastes and ambition allured him elsewhere. His mind was brimming with the results of observation. His fancy was alert and inventive, and he wrote tales and novels. At the same time he delighted to haunt the studio of his friend Church, the painter, and watch day by day the progress of his picture, the Heart of the Andes. It so fired his imagination that he wrote a description of it, in which, as if rivalling the tropical and tangled richness of the picture, he threw together such heaps and masses of gorgeous words that the reader was dazzled and bewildered.
The wild campaigning life was always a secret passion with him. His stories of travel were so graphic and warm, that I remember one evening, after we had been tracing upon the map a route he had taken, and he had touched the whole region into life with his description, my younger brother, who had sat by and listened with wide eyes all the evening, exclaimed with a sigh of regretful satisfaction, as the door closed upon our story-teller, “It’s as good as Robinson Crusoe!” Yet, with all his fondness and fitness for that kind of life, or indeed any active administrative function, his literary ambition seemed to be the deepest and strongest.
He had always been writing. In college and upon his travels he kept diaries; and he has left behind him several novels, tales, sketches of travel, and journals. The first published writing of his which is well known is his description, in the June (1861) number of the Atlantic Monthly Magazine, of the March of the Seventh Regiment of New York to Washington. It was charming by its graceful, sparkling, crisp, offhand dash and ease. But it is only the practised hand that can “dash off” effectively. Let any other clever member of the clever regiment, who has never written, try to dash off the story of a day or a week in the life of the regiment, and he will see that the writer did that little thing well because he had done large things carefully. Yet, amid all the hurry and brilliant bustle of the articles, the author is, as he was in the most bustling moment of the life they described, a spectator, an artist. He looks on at himself and the scene of which he is part. He is willing to merge his individuality; but he does not merge it, for he could not.
So, wandering, hoping, trying, waiting, thirty-two years of his life went by, and they left him true, sympathetic, patient. The sharp private griefs that sting the heart so deeply, and leave a little poison behind, did not spare him. But he bore everything so bravely, so silently,—often silent for a whole evening in the midst of pleasant talkers, but not impertinently sad, nor ever sullen,—that we all loved him a little more at such times. The ill-health from which he always suffered, and a flowerlike delicacy of temperament, the yearning desire to be of some service in the world, coupled with the curious, critical introspection which marks every sensitive and refined nature and paralyzes action, overcast his life and manner to the common eye with pensiveness and even sternness. He wrote verses in which his heart seems to exhale in a sigh of sadness. But he was not in the least a sentimentalist. The womanly grace of temperament merely enhanced the unusual manliness of his character and impression. It was like a delicate carnation upon the cheek of a robust man. For his humor was exuberant. He seldom laughed loud, but his smile was sweet and appreciative. Then the range of his sympathies was so large, that he enjoyed every kind of life and person, and was everywhere at home. In walking and riding, in skating and running, in games out of doors and in, no one of us all in the neighborhood was so expert, so agile as he. For, above all things, he had what we Yankees call faculty,—the knack of doing everything. If he rode with a neighbor who was a good horseman, Theodore, who was a Centaur, when he mounted, would put any horse at any gate or fence; for it did not occur to him that he could not do whatever was to be done. Often, after writing for a few hours in the morning, he stepped out of doors, and, from pure love of the fun, leaped and turned summersaults on the grass, before going up to town. In walking about the island, he constantly stopped by the road-side fences, and, grasping the highest rail, swung himself swiftly and neatly over and back again, resuming the walk and the talk without delay.
I do not wish to make him too much a hero. “Death,” says Bacon, “openeth the gate to good fame.” When a neighbor dies, his form and quality appear clearly, as if he had been dead a thousand years. Then we see what we only felt before. Heroes in history seem to us poetic because they are there. But if we should tell the simple truth of some of our neighbors, it would sound like poetry. Winthrop was one of the men who represent the manly and poetic qualities that always exist around us,—not great genius, which is ever salient, but the fine fibre of manhood that