Russell H. Conwell, Founder of the Institutional Church in America Part 26

"PERSONAL GLIMPSES OF CELEBRATED MEN AND WOMEN."[A]

[Footnote A: Stenographic report by A. Russell Smith, Sec'y.]

When I had been lecturing forty years, which is now four years ago, the Lecture Bureau suggested that before I retire from the public platform, that I should prepare one subject and deliver it through the country. For I had told the Bureau thirty years ago that when I had lectured forty years, I would retire. They therefore suggested a talk on this topic, "Personal Glimpses of Celebrated Men and Women." But a death in our family which destroyed the homeness of our house produced such an effect upon us that after the forty years came we found that we would rather wander than stay at home, and consequently we are traveling still, and will do so until the end. This explanation will show why many of these things are said. For I must necessarily bring myself often into this topic, sometimes unpleasantly to myself. Mark Twain says, that the trouble with an old man is that he "remembers so many things that ain't so," and with Mark Twain's caution in my ears, I will try to give you these "Personal Glimpses of Celebrated Men and Women."

I do not claim to be a very intimate friend of great men. But a fly may look at an elephant, and for this reason we may glance at the great men and women whom I have seen through the many years of public life. Sometimes those glimpses give us a better idea of the real man or woman than an entire biography written while he was living would do; and to-night as a grandfather would bring his grandchildren to his knee and tell them of his little experiences, so let me tell to you these incidents in a life now so largely lived out.

As I glance back to the Hamps.h.i.+re Highlands of the dear old Berks.h.i.+re Hills in Ma.s.sachusetts, where my father worked as a farmer among the rooks for twenty years to pay off a mortgage of twelve hundred dollars upon his little farm, my elder brother and myself slept in the attic which had one window in the gable end, composed of four lights and those very small. I remember that attic so distinctly now, with the ears of corn hung by the husks on the bare rafters, the rats running over the floor and sometimes over the faces of the boys; the patter of the rain upon the roof, and the whistle of the wind around that gable end, the sifting of the snows through the hole in the window over the pillow on our bed. While these things may appear very simple and homely before this great audience, yet I mention them because in this house I had a glimpse of the first great man I ever saw. It was far in the country, far from the railroad, far from the city, yet into that region there came occasionally a man or woman whose name is a household word in the world. In those mountains of my boyhood there was then an "underground railroad" running from Virginia to Canada.

It was called an "underground railroad," although it was a system by which the escaped slaves from Virginia came into Delaware, from Delaware into Philadelphia, then to New York, then to Springfield, and from Springfield my father took the slaves by night to Worthington, Ma.s.s., and they were sent on by St. Albans, over the Canada line into liberty. This "underground railroad" system was composed of a chain of men of whom my father was one link. One night my father drove up in the dark, and my elder brother and I looked out to see who it was he had! brought home with him. We supposed he had brought a slave whom he was helping to escape. Oh, those dreary, dark days, when we were in continual dread lest the United States Marshal should arrest my father, throw him into prison for thus a.s.sisting these fugitive slaves. The gloomy memory of those early years chills me now. But as we gazed out that dark night, we saw that it was a white man with father and who helped unhitch the horses and put them in the barn. In the morning this white man sat at the breakfast table and my father introduced him to us, saying: "Boys, this is Frederick Dougla.s.s, the great colored orator," While I looked at him, giggling as boys will do, Mr. Dougla.s.s turned to us and said, "Yes, boys, I am a colored man; my mother was a colored woman and my father a white man," and said he, "I have never seen my father, and I do not know much about my mother. I remember her once when she interfered between me and the overseer, who was whipping me, and she received the lash upon her cheek and shoulder, and her blood ran across my face. I remember was.h.i.+ng her blood from my face and clothes." That story made a deep impression on us boys, stamped indelibly on our memories. Frederick Dougla.s.s is thus mentioned to ill.u.s.trate the subject that I have come to teach to-night. He frequently came to our house after that and my mother often said to him, "Mr. Dougla.s.s, you will work yourself to death," but he replied that until the slaves were free, and that would be very soon, he must devote his life to them. But after that, said he, "I will retire to Rochester, New York, where I have some land and will build a house." He told us how many rooms it would have, what decorations would be there, but when the war had been over several years, he came to the house again and my father asked him about the house in Rochester. "Well," he said, "I have not built that one yet, but I have my plans for it. I have some work yet to do; I must take care of the freedmen in the South, and look after their financial prosperity, then I will build my cottage." You all remember that he never built his house, but suddenly went on into the unknown of the greatest work of his life.

I remember that in 1852, my father came with another man who was put for the night into the northwest bedroom--this is the room where those New Englanders always put their friends, because, perhaps, pneumonia comes there first--that awful, cold, dismal, northwest bedroom.

Thinking a favorite uncle had come, I went to the door early in the morning. The door was shut--one of those doors which, if you lift the latch, the door immediately swings open. I lifted the latch and prepared to leap in to awaken my uncle and astonish him by my early morning greeting. But when the door swung back, I glanced toward the bed. The astonishment chills me at this moment, for in that bed was not my uncle; but a giant, whose toes stood up at the foot-board, and whose long hair was spread out over the pillow and his long gray whiskers lay on the bed clothes, and oh, that snore--it sounded like some steam horn. That giant figure frightened me and I rushed out into the kitchen and said, "Mother, who is that strange man in the northwest bed room?" and she said, "Why, that is John Brown." I had never seen John Brown before, although my father had been with him in the wool business in Springfield. I had heard some strange things about John Brown, and the figure of the man made them seem doubly terrible. I hid beside my mother, where I said I would stay until the man was through his breakfast, but father came out and demanded that the boys should come in, and he set me right under the wing of that awful giant. But when John Brown saw us coming in so timidly, he turned to us with a smile so benign and beautiful and so greatly in contrast to what we had pictured him, that it was a transition. He became to us boys one of the loveliest men we ever knew. He would go to the barn with us and milk the cows, pitch the hay from the hay-mow; he drove the cattle to water for us, and told us many a story, until the dear, good old man became one of the treasurers of our life. It is true that my mother thought he was half crazy, and consequently she and father did not always agree about him, and did not discuss him before the children. But nevertheless, be he a crank, or a fanatic, or what he may, one thing is sure, the richest milk of human kindness flowed from that heart and devoted itself sincerely to the uplift of humanity. I remember him with love, love deep and sacred, up to this present time. However great an extremist John Brown was, there were many of them in New England. Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown never could agree. John Brown used to criticise Wendell Phillips severely. He said that Wendell Phillips could not see to read the clearest signs of revolution, and he was reminded by the husband who bought a grave-stone that had been carved for another woman, but the stone-cutter said "That has the name of another person." "Oh,"

said the widower, "that makes no difference; my wife couldn't read."

John Brown once said of Wm. Lloyd Garrison that he couldn't see the point and was like the woman who never could see a joke. One morning, seated at the breakfast table, her husband cracked a joke, but she did not smile, when he said, "Mary, you could not see a joke if it were fired at you from a Dalgreen gun," whereupon she remarked: "Now John, you know they do not fire jokes out of a gun." Well do I recall that December 2d of 1859. Only a few weeks before John Brown came to our house and my father subscribed to the purchase of rifles to aid in the attempt to raise the insurrection among the slaves. The last time I saw John Brown he was in the wagon with my father. Father gave him the reins and came back as though he had forgotten something. John Brown said, "Boys, stay at home; stay at home! Now, remember, you may never see me again," and then in a lower voice, "And I do not think you ever will see me again," but "Remember the advice of your Uncle Brown (as we called him), and stay at home with the old folks, and remember that you will be more blessed here than anywhere else on earth." The happiest place on earth for me is still at my old home in Litchfield, Connecticut. I did not understand him then, but on December 2d at eleven o'clock my father called us all into the house and all that hour from eleven to twelve o'clock we sat there in perfect silence. As the old clock in that kitchen struck eleven, I heard the bell, ring from the Methodist Church, its peal coming up the valley, from hill to hill, and echoing its sad tone as the hour wore on. The peal of that bell remains with me now; it has ever been a source of inspiration to me. Sixty times struck that old bell. Once a minute, and when the long sad hour was over, father put his Bible upon the mantel and went slowly out, and we all solemnly followed, going to our various duties.

That solemn hour had a voice in the coming great Civil War of 1861-65.

At that hour John Brown was hanged in Virginia. All through New England, they kept that hour with the same solemn services which characterized my father's family. When the call came for volunteers the young men of New England enlisted in the army, and sang again and again, that old song, "John Brown's body lies mouldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on." His soul is still marching on. And while I am one of those who would be the first to resist any attempt to mar the sweet fraternity that now characterises the feeling between the North and South, as I believe that the Southern soldier fought for what he believed to be right, and consequently is ent.i.tled to our fraternal respect, and while I believe that John Brown was sometimes a fanatic, yet this ill.u.s.tration teaches us this great lesson and that John Brown's advice was true. His happiest days were pa.s.sed far back in the quiet of his old home.

Near to our home, in the town of c.u.mmington, lived William Cullen Bryant, one of the great poets of New England. He came back there to spend his summers among the mountains he so clearly loved. He promised the people of c.u.mmington that he would again make his permanent home there. I remember asking him if he would come clown to the stream where he wrote "Thanatopsis" and recite it for us. The good, old neighbor, white haired and trembling, came down to the banks of that little stream and stood in the shade of the same old maple where he had written that beautiful poem, and read from the wonderful creation that made his name famous.

"So live that when thy summons comes, to join The innumerable caravan which moves To that mysterious realm where each must take His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry slave at night, Scourged to his dungeon; but, sustained and soothed By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams."

"Yes," he said, "I will come back to c.u.mmington." So he went to Europe but came not back to occupy that home. He loved the old home. We were driving by his place one day when we saw him planting apple trees in July. We all know that apple trees won't grow when planted in July, so my father, knowing him well, called to him and said, "Mr. Bryant, what are you doing there? They won't grow." Mr. Bryant paused a moment and looked at us, and then said half playfully: "Conwell, drive on, you have no part nor lot in this matter. I do not expect these trees to grow; I am setting them out because I want to live over again the days when my father used to set trees when they would grow. I want to renew that memory." He was wise, for in his work on "The Transmigration of Races" he used that experience wonderfully.

In 1860, when we were teaching school, my elder brother and myself, in Blanchford, Ma.s.sachusetts, were asked to go to Brooklyn with the body of a lady who died near our schools. We went to Brooklyn on Sat.u.r.day and after the funeral, our friends asked us to stay over Sunday, saying that they would take us to hear Henry Ward Beecher! That was a great inducement, because my father read the "Tribune" every Sunday morning after his Bible (and sometimes before it) and what Henry Ward Beecher said, my father thought, "was law and Gospel." Sunday night, we went to Plymouth Church, and there was a crowd an hour before the service, and when the doors were opened we were crowded up the stairs.

We boys were thrust back into a dirty corner where we could not see. Oh, yes, that is the way they treat the boys, put them any place--they're only boys! I remember the disappointment of that night, when we went there more to see than hear. But finally Mr. Beecher came out and gave out his text. I remember that I did not pay very much attention to it. In the middle of the sermon Mr. Beecher began in the strangest way to auction off a woman: "How much am I offered for the woman?" he yelled, and while in his biographies, they have said that this woman was sold in the Broadway Tabernacle, but I afterwards asked Mrs. Beecher and she said that Mr. Beecher had not sold this woman twice, so far as she knew, but that she recalled distinctly the sale in the Plymouth Church. I remember standing up on tip-toes to look for that woman that was being sold. After he had finished, after the singing of the hymn, he said "Brethren, be seated," and then said, "Sam, come here." A colored boy came up tremblingly and stood beside him. "This boy is offered for $770.00; he is owned in South Carolina and has run away. His master offers him to me for $770.00, and now if the officers of the church will pa.s.s the plates the boy shall be set free," and when the plates were returned over $1700.00 came in. As we went our way home I said to my elder brother: "Oh, what a grand thing it must be to preach to a congregation of fifteen hundred people." But my elder brother very wisely said: "You don't know anything about it; you do not know whether he is happy or not." "Well," I suggested, "wasn't it a strange thing to introduce a public auction in the middle of a sermon," and my elder brother again said that if they did more of that in a country church they would have a larger congregation.

Afterwards I was quite fortunate to know Mr. Beecher and frequently reported his sermons. I often heard him say that the happiest years he ever knew were back in Lawrenceville, Ohio, in that little church where there were no lamps and he had to borrow them himself, light them himself, and prepare the church for the first service. He told how he swept the church, lighted the fire in the stove, and how it smoked; then how he sawed the wood to heat the church, and how he went into carpenter work to earn money to pay his own salary, yet he said that was the happiest time of his life. Mrs. Beecher told me afterwards that Mr. Beecher often talked about those days and said that bye and bye he would retire and they would again go back to the simple life they had enjoyed so much.

When he had built his new home near the Hudson, Robert Collier and I visited him. We found in the rear of an addition that clap-boards had been put up in all sorts of adjustment. Mr. Collier asked him: "Where did you find a carpenter to do such poor work as that?" and Mr.

Beecher said humorously: "You could not hire that carpenter on your house." Then he said: "Mr. Collier, I put those boards on that house myself. I insisted that they leave that work for me to do. I have been happy putting on these boards and driving these nails. They took me back to the old days at Lawrenceville, where we lived over a store and our pantry was a dry goods box. But there we were so happy. I am hoping sometime to be as happy again, but it is not possible to do it while I am in the service of the public." He had promised himself and his wife some day to go back to that simple life. But his sudden death taught the same great lesson with all the examples I give of great men and women. Rev. Robt. Collier always enjoyed the circus--the circus was the great place of enjoyment outside, perhaps, of his pulpit work.

It was Robert Collier who used to tell the story of the boy whose aunt always made him go to church, but after going to a circus he wrote to his aunt: "Auntie, if you had ever been to a circus, you wouldn't go to another prayer-meeting as long as you live." The love of Collier for the circus only shows the simplicity of the great man's mind. Mr.

Collier is said to have paid a dollar for a fifty cent ticket to the circus, only making it conditional that he was to have the privilege of going 'round to the rear and crawling under the tent, showing what he must have done when a boy. The fact of Mr. Collier's love for the circus was one of the strange things in the eccentricities of a great man's life. Once Mr. Barnum came into Mr. Collier's church and Mr.

Collier said to the usher: "Please show Mr. Barnum to a front seat for he always gives me one in _his_ circus." These simplicities often show that somewhere back in each man's life there is a point where happiness and love are one, and when, that point is pa.s.sed, we go on longing to the return.

The night after he went to hear Henry Ward Beecher's great sermon they persuaded us to stay until the following Monday night, because there was to be a lecture at the Cooper Inst.i.tute and there was to be a parade of political clubs, and fire works, so as country boys, easily influenced, we decided that the school could wait for another day, and staid for the procession. We went to Cooper's Inst.i.tute and there was a crowd as there was at Beecher's church. We finally got on the stairway and far in the rear of the great crowd, but my brother stood on the floor, and I sat on the ledge of the window sill, with my feet on his shoulders, so he held me while I told him down there what was going on over yonder. The first man that came on the platform, and presided at that meeting, was William Cullent Bryant, our dear old neighbor. When we boys in a strange city saw that familiar face, oh, the emotions that arose in our hearts! How proud we were at that hour, that he, our neighbor, was presiding on that occasion. He took his seat on the stage, the right of which was left vacant for some one yet to come. Next came a very heavy man, but immediately following him a tall, lean man. Mr. Bryant arose and went toward him, bowing and smiling. He was an awkward specimen of a man and all about me people were asking "Who is that?" but no man seemed to know. I asked a gentleman who that man was, but he said he didn't know. He was an awkward specimen indeed; one of the legs of his trousers was up about two inches above his shoe; his hair was dishevelled and stuck out like rooster's feathers; his coat was altogether too large for him in the back, his arms much longer than the sleeves, and with his legs twisted around the rungs of the chair, was the picture of embarra.s.sment. When Mr. Bryant arose to introduce the speaker of that evening, he was known seemingly to few in that great hall. Mr. Bryant said: "Gentlemen of New York, you have your favorite son in Mr. Seward and if he were to be President of the United States, every one of us would be proud of him." Then came great applause. "Ohio has her favorite son in Judge Wade; and the nation would prosper under his administration, but Gentlemen of New York, it is a great honor that is conferred upon me to-night, for I can introduce to you the next President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln." Then through that audience flew the query as to whom Abraham Lincoln was. There was but weak applause. Mr. Lincoln had in his hand a ma.n.u.script. He had written it with great care and exactness and the speech which you read in his biography is the one that he wrote, not the one that he delivered as I recall it, and it is fortunate for the country that they did print the one that he wrote. I think the one he wrote had already been set up in type that afternoon from his ma.n.u.script, and consequently they did not go over it to see whether it had been changed or not. He had read three pages and had gone on to the fourth when he lost his place and then he began to tremble and stammer. He then turned it over two or three times, threw the ma.n.u.script upon the table, and, as they say in the west, "let himself go." Now the stammering man who had created only silent derision up to that point, suddenly flashed out into an angel of oratory and the awkward arms and dishevelled hair were lost sight of entirely in the wonderful beauty and lofty inspiration of that magnificent address. The great audience immediately began to follow his thought, and when he uttered that quotation from Dougla.s.s, "It is written on the sky of America that the slaves shall some day be free,"

he had settled the question that he was to be the next President of the United States. The applause was so-great that the building trembled and I felt the windows shake behind me. Afterward, as we walked home, I said to my elder brother again, "Wasn't it a great thing to be introduced to all those people as the next President of the United States?" and my elder brother very wisely said: "You do not know whether he was really happy or not." Afterwards, in 1864, when one of my soldiers was unjustly sentenced and his gray-haired mother plead with me to use what influence I would have with the President, I went to Was.h.i.+ngton and told the story to the President. He said he had heard something about it from Mr. Stanton, and he said he would investigate the matter, and he did afterward decide that the man should not be put to death. At the close of that interview I said to the President: "I beg your pardon, Mr. Lincoln, but is it not a most exhausting thing to sit here hearing all these appeals and have all of this business on your hands?" He laid his head on his hand, and in a somewhat wearied manner, said, with a deep sigh: "Yes, yes; no man ought to be ambitious to be President of the United States," and said he, "When this war is over, and that won't be very long, I tell my "Tad" that we will go back to the farm where I was happier as a boy when I dug potatoes at twenty-five cents a day than I am now; I tell him I will buy him a mule and a pony and he shall have a little cart and he shall make a little garden in a field all his own," and the President's face beamed as he arose from his chair in the delight of excitement as he said: "Yes, I will be far happier than I have ever been here." The next time I looked in the face of Abraham Lincoln was in the east room of the White House at Was.h.i.+ngton as he lay in his coffin. Not long ago at a Chautauqua lecture I was on the very farm which he bought at Salem, Illinois, and looked around the place where he had resolved to build a mansion, but which was never constructed.

Near my home in the Berks.h.i.+res, Charles Dudley Warner was born. When he had accomplished great things in literature and had written "My Summer in a Garden," that popular work which attracted the attention of his newspaper friends, he went to Hartford, where the latter gave him a banquet. I was invited to attend and report it for the public press. They lauded him and said how beautiful it was to be so elevated above his fellow men, and how great he was in the estimation of the world But he in his answer to the toast said, "Gentlemen, I wish for no fame, I desire no glory and you have made a mistake if you think I enjoy any such notoriety. I envy the Hartford teacher whose smile threw suns.h.i.+ne along her pathway." Then he told us the story of a poor little boy, cold and barefooted, standing on the street on a terribly cold day. A lady came along, and looking kindly at him, said, "Little boy, are you cold?" The little fellow, looking up into her face, said, "Yes Ma'am, I was cold till you smiled." He would rather have a smile like that and the simple love of his fellow men than to have all the fame of the earth. He was honored in all parts of the world by the greatest of the great, yet he was a sad man when he wrote "My Summer in a Garden," and it all seems a mystery how he could in such grief have written that remarkable little tale. This sadness is often a.s.sociated with humorists. Mr. Shaw was one of the saddest men I ever met. Why, he cried on the slightest occasion. I went one day to interview him in Boston, and Mr. Shepard, his publisher, said "Please don't trouble Josh Billings now." "What is the matter?" "Oh, he is crying again," said Mr. Shepard. I asked him how Mr. Shaw could write such funny things as he did. He then showed me the ma.n.u.script (which Mr. Shaw had just placed on his desk and which he had just written), in which he says, "I do not know any cure for laziness, but I have known a second wife to hurry it up some." Artemus Ward wrote the most laughable things while his heart was in the deepest wretchedness.

Often these glimpses of the funny men whose profession would seem to show them to be the happiest of earth's people, prove that they are sometimes the most gloomy and miserable.

John B. Gough, the great temperance orator, the greatest the world has ever seen, said to me one evening at his home that he would lecture for forty years, and then would stop. But his wife said, "Now, John, you know you won't give it up." He a.s.sented, "Yes, I will." But his wife said, "No you won't. You men when you drink of public life find it like a drink of whiskey, and you are just like the rest of the men." "No," said he. Then Mr. Gough told again his familiar story of the minister who was preaching in his pulpit in Boston when he saw the Governor of the State coming up the aisle. Immediately he began to stammer, and finally said: "I see the Governor coming in, and as I know you will want to hear an exhortation from him, I think that I had better stop." Then one of the old officials leaped up from one of the front seats and said, "I insist upon your going on with your sermon, sir; you ought not be embarra.s.sed by the Governor's coming in. We are all worms! All worms! nothing but worms!" Then the minister was angry and shouted: "Sir, I would have you understand that there is a difference in worms." Mr. Gough said he was different from other people yet the years came and went, and he stayed on the public platform. One night a committee from Frankford, Philadelphia, asked me to write him and ask him to lecture for them. I wrote and whether my influence had anything to do with it or not, I do not know, but he came from New York and when he was in about the middle of his lecture, he came to that sentence, "Young man, keep your record clear, for a single gla.s.s of intoxicating liquor may somewhere, in after years, change into a horrid monster that shall carry you down to woe." And when he had uttered that wonderful sentence of advice, he slopped to get breath, reached for a drink of water, swung forward and fell over.

The doctor said he was too late for any earthly aid, and John B.

Gough, with his armor on, went on into Glory. He never found that earthly rest he had promised himself. His garden never showed its flowers, and his fields were never strewn with grain.

When our regiment was encamped in Faneuil Hall at Boston before embarking for the war in 1863, Mr. Wendell Phillips sent an invitation to the officers of the regiment to visit his home. But when we reached his house we found that he had been called to Worcester suddenly to make a speech. But we found his wife there in her rolling chair, for she was a permanent invalid. Our evening was spent very pleasantly, but I said to her: "Are you not very lonesome when Mr. Phillips is away so much?" "Yes," she said, "I am very lonesome; he is father, mother, brother, sister, husband and child to me," and said she, "he cares for me with the tenderness of a mother; he waits upon me, he takes me out, and brings me in; he dresses me, and it now seems so strange that he is not by my side. If it were not for him, I should die, but he says that as soon as the slaves are free that he will come back and be the same husband he was before." The officers standing around me smiled as they heard of his promise to retire, but said she, "Oh, yes, he will do as he promised." When the war was over and the slaves were free, and he had scolded General Grant all he wished, he did do as he promised, and did retire. He sold his house in the city and bought one in Waverly, Ma.s.sachusetts. He did prove the exception and went back to the private life that he had promised himself and his wife. Every Sunday morning as I drove by his home I could see him swinging on his gate. It was a double gate over the driveway, and he would pull that gate far in, get on it and then swing way out over the side-walk and then in again. Well, he used to swing on that gate every Sunday morning, and my family wondered why it was that he always did it on that particular morning. One Sunday morning when I drove by, I found Mr. Phillips swinging on his gate over the side-walk, and I said, "Mr. Phillips, my family wish me to ask you why you swing on this gate every Sunday morning." Mr. Phillips, who had a very deep sense of humour, stepped off the gate, stood back, and a.s.suming a dignified, ministerial air, "I am requested to discourse to-day upon the text 'Why I swing upon this gate on Sunday morning,' and I will, therefore, divide my text into two heads." I quickly told him that I must get to church some time that day. "Then," said he, with a smile, "just one word more: Why do I swing on a gate? Because the first time I saw my wife she was swinging on the gate, and the second time I saw her, we kissed each other over the top of the gate, and when I swing it reminds me of other happy days long gone by. That, sir, is the reason I swing upon this gate." Then his humor all disappeared and he said: "I really swing upon this gate on Sunday morning because I think the next thing to the love of G.o.d is love of man for a true woman--as you cannot say you love G.o.d and hate your brother, neither can you say you love G.o.d unless you have first loved a human being, and I swing on this gate on Sunday morning because to me it is next to life's highest wors.h.i.+p." And then, in a majestic manner, he said, "Conwell, all within this gate is PARADISE and all without it MARTYRDOM." In that wonderful sentence, which I feel sure I recall accurately, he uttered the most glorious expression that could ever come from uninspired lips.

I had a glimpse of James G. Elaine when I went to his home in Augusta, Maine, to write his biography for the committee. A day or two after it was finished a distinguished Senator from Was.h.i.+ngton came to see me in Philadelphia and asked if Mr. Blaine had seen the book, and I told him that he certainly had. "Did he see that second chapter?" "Of course he did," said I; "he corrected it." Then he wanted to know how much money it would take to get the book out of circulation. "Why, what is the matter with the book," said I, but he would not tell me, and said that he would pay me well if I would only keep the book from circulation.

He did not tell me what was the matter. I told him that the publishers owned the copyright, having bought it from me. He said, "Is it not possible for you to take a trip to Europe to-morrow morning?" "But why take a trip to Europe?" "The committee will pay all of your expenses, all your family's expenses, and of any servants you wish lo take with you--only get out of the country." "Well," I said, "I am not going to leave the country for my country's good, unless I know what I am going for." I never could find out what the trouble with that second chapter was, and I afterwards asked Mrs. Blaine if she knew what was the matter. She then broke out in a paroxysm of grief and said that if he had stayed in Was.h.i.+ngton, Pennsylvania, where he was a teacher, "he would be living yet." She said "he had given thirty years of his life to the public service, and now they have so ungratefully disgraced his name, sent him to an early grave, and all in consequence of what he has done for the public. He is a stranger to his country--a stranger to his friends," and then she said, "O would to G.o.d he had stayed in Pennsylvania!" I left her then, but I have never known what was in that second chapter that caused the disturbance. But I do know the second chapter was concerning their early and happy life in Was.h.i.+ngton, Pennsylvania, where he taught in the college.

Near our home in Newton, Ma.s.sachusetts, was that of F.F. Smith, who wrote "America." It was of him that Oliver Wendell Holmes said that "Nature tried to hide him by naming him Smith." Smith lived that quiet and restful life that reminds one of Tennyson's "Brook" when thinking of him. He knew the glory of modest living.

The last time I saw the sweet Quaker poet, John Greenleaf Whittier, was in Amesbury, before he died. He sent a note to the lecture hall asking me to come to come to him. I asked him what was his favorite poem of his own writing. He said he had not thought very much about it, but said that there was one that he especially remembered:

"I know not where His islands lift Their fronded palms in air, I only know I cannot drift Beyond His love and care."

I then asked him, "Mr. Whittier, how could you write all those war songs which sent us young men to war, and you a peaceful Quaker? I cannot understand it." He smiled and said that his great-grandfather had been on a s.h.i.+p that was attacked by pirates, and as one of the pirates was climbing up the rope into their s.h.i.+p, his great-grandfather grasped a knife and cut the rope, saying: "If thee wants the rope, thee can have it." He said that he had inherited something of the same spirit.

At Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, Bayard Taylor took me to the grave of his wife, and said "Here is the spot where I determined to live anew.

From this grave the real experiences of my life began." There he was completing his home called "Cedar Croft." But he died while U.S.

Minister to Germany. The Young Men's Congress of Boston, when arranging for a great memorial service in Tremont Temple, asked me to call on Dr. Oliver Wendel Holmes to ask him to write a poem on Bayard Taylor's death. When I asked Mr. Holmes to write this poem, to be read in the Tremont Temple, he was sitting on the rocking chair. He rocked back and kicked up his feet, and began to laugh. "I write a poem on Bayard Taylor--ah, no--but I tell you, if you will get Mr. Longfellow to write a poem on Bayard Taylor's death, I will read it." These things only show the eccentricities of Mr. Holmes. So I went to Mr.

Longfellow and told him what Dr. Holmes had said, and here is the poem he wrote:

"Dead he lay among his books!

The peace of G.o.d was in his looks.

As the statues in the gloom Watch o'er Maximilian's tomb, So those volumes from their shelve.

Watched him, silent as themselves.

Ah, his hand will never more Turn their storied pages o'er.

Never more his lips repeat Songs of theirs, however sweet.

Let the lifeless body rest!

He is gone who was its guest.

Gone as travellers haste to leave An inn, nor tarry until eve.

"Traveller! in what realms afar, In what planet, in what star, In what gardens of delight Rest thy weary feet to-night?

Poet, thou whose latest verse Was a garland on thy hea.r.s.e, Thou hast sung with organ tone In Deukalion's life thine own.

On the ruins of the Past Blooms the perfect flower, at last Friend, but yesterday the bells Rang for thee their loud farewells; And to-day they toll for thee, Lying dead beyond the sea; Lying dead among thy books; The peace of G.o.d in all thy looks."

That great traveller, like Mr. Longfellow, used to tell me of his first wife. He always said that her sweet spirit occupied that room and stood by him. I often told him that he was wrong and argued with him, but he said, "I know she is here." I often thought of the great inspiration she had been to him in his marvelous poems and books.

Poor Bayard Taylor, "In what gardens of delight, rest thy weary feet to-night?" Mr. Longfellow once said that Mary "stood between him and his ma.n.u.script," and he could not get away from the impression that she was with him all the time. How sad was her early death and how he suffered the martyrdom of the faithful! Longfellow's home life was always beautiful But his later years were disturbed greatly by souvenir and curiosity seekers.

Horace Greeley died of a broken heart because he was not elected President of the United States, and never was happy in the last years of his life. His idea of true happiness was to go to some quiet retreat and publish some little paper. He once declared at a dinner in Brooklyn that he envied the owner of a weekly paper in Indiana whose paper was so weakly that the subscribers did not miss it if it failed to appear.

Mr. Tennyson told me that he would not exchange his home, walled in as it was like a fortress for Windsor Castle or the throne of the Queen.

Mr. Carnegie said to me only a few months ago that if a man owned his home and had his health he had all the money that man needed to be as happy as any person can be. Mr. Carnegie was right about that.

Empress Eugenie, in 1870, was said to be the happiest woman in France.

I saw her in the Tuilleres at a gorgeous banquet and a few years after, when her husband had been captured, her son killed and she was a widow, at the Chislehurst Cottage, I said to her, "The last time I saw you in that beautiful palace you were said to be the happiest woman in the world." "Sir," she said, "I am far happier now than I was then." It was a statement that for a long time I could not understand.

I caught a glimpse of Garibaldi weeping because he did not go back with his wife, Anita, to South America.

I visited Charles d.i.c.kens at his home and asked him to come to America again and read from his books, but Mr. d.i.c.kens said "No, I will never cross the ocean; I will not go even to London. When I die, I am to be buried out there on the lawn," and he pointed out the place to me. A few weeks later I hired a custodian to let me in early at the rear gate of Westminster Abbey, for Parliament had changed Mr. d.i.c.kens's will in one respect, and provided that he should not be buried on the lawn of his cottage, but instead in Westminster Abbey, but they made no other change in his will. There I looked on the fifteen men, all whom the will allowed to be present at his funeral, who were bearing all that was mortal of Charles d.i.c.kens to his rest, and I heard Dean Stanley say "While Mr. d.i.c.kens lived, his loss was our gain; but now his gain is our loss." When he uttered that great truth, very condensed, in that beautiful language, he showed that human life in the public service of one's fellow men may be nothing more or less than continual sacrifice.

My friends, if you are called to public service; if you have influence that you can use for the public good, do not hesitate to go if you are SURE that DUTY calls you. But if, instead, no voice of G.o.d, no call of mankind, doth require that you go out and give up the best of life for your fellows, remember how fortunate you are. If you can go to your home at evening and read your paper in peace, and rest undisturbed, do so, and remember that you have reached the very height of personal happiness. Then seek no farther, count thyself happy and go no farther than G.o.d shall call you. For the happiest man is not famous, nor rich, but he who hath his loved ones in an undisturbed peace around.

Remember what Wendell Phillips said, "All within this gate is Paradise; all without it is MARTYDROM."

I had a glimpse of Generals Grant and Sheridan wrestling like boys, over a box of cigars sent into General Grant's tent. They were boys again.