Do be gracious! …
Love to everybody and to you, if you send the cards, etc.; if not, not.
Conditionally your friend,
Unconditionally your admirer,
T. S. King.
5. A quotation from Mrs. Howe’s poem, “Our Orders.”
Prof. Cornelius C. Felton has already appeared in this eventful history as a member of the “Five of Clubs.” In addition to being professor of Greek, he was for a time president of Harvard College.
Among his friends he was genial and jolly, with a gift of hearty laughter. “Heartiest of Greek professors,” Charles Dickens called him. He was sturdy and thick-set, with close-curling black hair covering his round head. At Memorial Hall, Cambridge, there is a portrait of him in his robes of office. This picture is characterized by due dignity of mien and bearing, but I like best to think of him with those merry eyes gleaming behind his spectacles as his cheery laugh broke upon our ears.
Professor Felton related to us the story of his visit to the Maid of Athens, who was no longer young and beautiful as in Byron’s day. He was much impressed by the superior quality of her pickled olives, and told us that he longed to repeat the poet’s verses, with a slight change. Instead of saying,
Maid of Athens, ere we part
Give, oh, give me back my heart,
he wanted to exclaim,
Maid of Athens, ere we part,
Give, oh, give me a jar of pickled olives!
In her correspondence with my father Florence Nightingale appeals to him for advice and assistance for the martyrs of the cause of progress, political and religious. One of the latter was Arthur Hugh Clough, the English poet, whom she thus introduced:
Embley Romsay, Oct. 28 (1852).
My dear Dr. Howe—I have never thanked you for your most kind and valuable letter about my friend. But herewith comes my friend in person, to profit by that most kind sentence of yours, “Do not fail to give him a letter to me.”
His name is Arthur Hugh Clough, M.A. (late Fellow and Tutor of Oriel College, Oxford). He was a favorite pupil of Dr. Arnold of Rugby, and was elected Tutor of Oriel at twenty-two. He has given up very high prospects, because he was unwilling to pledge himself to inculcate the doctrines of the English Church. This has stopped his progress in his own country. He comes to seek a more impartial mother in yours.
He is about to marry a very charming cousin of mine—but his untimely integrity has lessened his means, and he is now going to try to make her a position in the New World.
He was Professor of English Literature at University College, London. He is a first-rate classical scholar; he would undertake to prepare young men for college who are anxious for advanced classical knowledge, and also to teach (or lecture upon) English Literature and Language.
He is known in England as an author and poet, and has been a contributor to our more liberal Reviews.
I have tried to enlist your and Mrs. Howe’s sympathies in his favour. But, indeed, my dear Dr. Howe, I know your kindness so well that it seems as if I thought it impossible to trespass upon it. …
Believe me, with best love to dear Mrs. Howe and my godchild, yours most truly and gratefully,
Florence Nightingale.
Mr. Clough made a visit at “Green Peace” which I shall never forget, since it produced one of the small tragedies of my childhood.
Our house was one of those rambling structures, built at different periods of time, wherein the space is not disposed of to the best advantage. Hence, as we were a large family and each of us had a separate room, some one had to be, turned out in order to accommodate Mr. Clough. He was accordingly established in the housekeeper’s room, and we children were duly warned not to go there, as was our custom. But I forgot this caution, and next morning turned with some difficulty the old-fashioned brass handle of the housekeeper’s door and peeped into the room.
Little Red Riding-Hood was not more surprised at the transformation of her grandmother into the wolf than I was at the sudden change which had come over our young and handsome housekeeper. As some one sat up in bed (after the fashion of the wolf in the story) to ask what I wanted, I said to myself, “Why, Mrs. S—— has grown bald and gray in one night!” Then the true state of the case flashed upon my infant consciousness and I went away suddenly and much abashed. It is to be feared that I left the door open.
When I came down to breakfast Mr. Clough looked up and said, as it seemed to me rather cruelly, “I think that I have seen this young lady before, this morning.”
Mr. Clough’s poem, “The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich,” was republished in this country, and was widely read both here and in England. He was present at one time where some thoughtless young men were amusing themselves with laughing at the new aspirant for poetical honors.
“Who is this old Clough?” says one.
“I should like to see him,” says another.
After listening to their remarks for some time, the grave, quiet man rose to leave the room, and as he passed the group who were making so merry at his expense he simply said, “The name is Clough” [Cluff].
Frederika Bremer, the Swedish authoress, visited us when I was a very little child. She traveled extensively in America and related her experiences in Homes of the New World. In this she described “the dark, energetic father and two charming little girls, all lilies and roses.” After it had been translated into English, people told us that we had been put into a printed book. Our young friends wished that they, too, could have the great happiness of being put into a book, like Julia and Flossy Howe.
Miss Bremer gave an account of Mr. George Sumner and his visit to the Czar of Russia, representing him as an awkward, ungainly youth and making fun of him. He did carry to the Czar of Russia, be it said in passing, an acorn from the grave of Washington. The Czar was much pleased and paid the young man a good deal of attention. When Charles Sumner learned what our young friends had said, he mischievously remarked to his brother, “Some people would prefer not to have been put in a book.”
A number of Frederika Bremer’s books have been translated into English; we read her stories with much pleasure in our school-girl days. The H—— Family, The Neighbors, The Home, are the titles of some of them. Her description of Swedish family life is delightful.
George Sumner, like the Senator, was a man of intellectual tastes and possessed a wide knowledge of books. In mid-Victorian days there was no complete catalogue of the library in the Vatican. Some one in Rome who was anxious to find a certain volume was referred to “a young American who knows more about the books there than any one else.” This was George Sumner. He was one of the habitués of our house. I remember a visit he paid us at Lawton’s Valley when a lame knee gave him anxiety. We heard him walk heavily and perseveringly up and down his room, in the vain hope of curing it by exercise. One day there was a crash! In the effort to save himself from falling he had pulled over the light iron washstand. When he again visited us my father had him placed, chair and all, in an open wagon that he might enjoy a drive. I last saw him at the Massachusetts General Hospital when he could move little save his head. Thus was a brilliant man in the prime of life turned gradually into a marble statue!
George L. Stearns was a striking figure, with his beautiful brown beard, long, soft, and silky as a woman’s hair. He was greatly interested in the anti-slavery cause, and when the Civil War came entered the army as a major. He wished to serve without pay, which my father thought a mistake, because an unpaid volunteer might feel unwilling to submit to the regular discipline of the army. It is true that my father had served in the army of Greece without pay, but the conditions there were very different from those prevailing in the United States during the Civil War.
Mrs.