Literary Hearthstones of Dixie Part 7

In Colonel Hunter's library, selected with scholarly taste, he found the great old English masters who had the good fortune to be born into the language while it was yet "a well of English undefiled." In that well he became saturated with a pure, direct, simple diction which later contact with the tendencies of his era and the ephemeral production of the daily press was not able to change.

It was in the office of the _Countryman_ that Joel Chandler Harris made his first venture into the world of print, shyly, as became one who would afterward be known as the most modest literary man in America. When Colonel Hunter found out the authors.h.i.+p of the bright paragraphs that slipped into his paper now and then with increasing frequency, he captured the elusive young genius and set it to work as a regular contributor. In this periodical the young writer's first poem appeared: a mournful lay of love and death, as a first poem usually is, however cheerful a philosopher its author may ultimately become.

This idyllic life soon ceased. When the tide of war rolled over central Georgia, it swept many lives out of their accustomed paths and destroyed many a support around which budding aspirations had wound their tendrils. The "printer's boy" sat upon a fence on the old Turner plantation, watching Sloc.u.m's Corps march by, and amiably receiving the good-natured gibes and jests of the soldiers, who apparently found something irresistibly mirth-provoking in the quaint little figure by the wayside. Sherman was marching to the sea, and the Georgia boy was taking his first view of the progress of war.

Among the many enterprises trampled to earth by those ruthless feet was the _Countryman_, which survived the desolating raid but a short time. It was years before the young journalist knew another home. For some months he set type on the Macon _Daily Telegraph_, going from there to New Orleans as private secretary of the editor of the _Crescent Monthly_. When the _Crescent_ waned and disappeared from the journalistic sky, he returned to Georgia and became editor, compositor, pressman, mailing clerk, and entire force on the Forsyth _Advertiser_.

A pungent editorial upon the abuses of the State government, which appeared in the _Advertiser_, attracted the attention of Colonel W.T.

Thompson and led him to offer Mr. Harris a place on the staff of the Savannah _Daily News_. Happily, there lived in Savannah the charming young lady who was to be the loving centre of the pleasant home of "Uncle Remus." The marriage took place in 1873, and Mr. Harris remained with the _News_ until '76, when, to escape yellow fever, he removed to Atlanta. He was soon after placed on the editorial staff of the _Const.i.tution_, and in its columns Uncle Remus was first introduced to the world.

In his home in West End, "Snap-Bean Farm," he lived in calm content with his harmonious family and his intimate friends, Shakespeare and his a.s.sociates, and those yet older companions who have come down to us from ancient Biblical times. Some of his intimates were chosen from later writers. Among poets, he told me that Tom Moore was his most cherished companion, the one to whom he fled for consolation in moments of life's insufficiencies.

Mr. Harris had no objection to talking in sociable manner of other writers, but if his visitor did not wish to see him close up like a clam and vanish to the seclusion of an upper room it was better not to mention Uncle Remus. Neither had he any fancy for the kind of talk that prevails at "pink teas" and high functions of society in general.

Anything that would be appropriate to the topics introduced in such places would never occur to him, and the vapory nothingness was so filled with mysterious terrors for him that he fled before them in unspeakable alarm.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SNAP-BEAN FARM, ATLANTA, GEORGIA The residence of Joel Chandler Harris]

"Snap-Bean Farm" was all the world that he cared for, and here he lived and wove his enchantments, not in his well-appointed study, as a thoroughly balanced mind would have done, but all over the house, just where he happened to be, preferably beside the fire after the little ones had gone to bed, leaving memories of their youthful brightness to make yet more glowing the flames, and waves of their warmth of soul to linger in enchantment about the hearth.

It was a sunny, happy day when I visited "Snap-Bean Farm." A violet-bordered walk led me to the pretty frame cottage, built upon a terrace quite a distance from the street--a shady, woodsy, leafy, flowery, fragrant distance--a distance that suggested infinite beauty and melody, infinite fascination. When the home was established there, the rumbling and clang of the trolley never broke the stillness of the peaceful spot. A horse-car crept slowly and softly to a near-by terminus and stopped, as if, having reached Uncle Remus and his woodsy home, there could be nothing beyond worth the effort. There were wide reaches of pine-woods, holding illimitable possibilities of romance, of legend, of wildwood and wild-folk tradition. It was a country home in the beginning, and it remained a country home, regardless of the outstretching of the city's influences. Joel Chandler Harris had a country soul, and if he had been set down in the heart of a metropolis his home would have stretched out into mystic distances of greenery and surrounded itself with a limitless reach of cool, vibrant, amber atmosphere, and looked out upon a colorful and fragrant wilderness of flowers, and he would have dwelt in the solitudes that G.o.d made.

As I walked, a fragrance wrapped me around as with a veil of radiant mist. It came straight from the heart of his many-varied roses that claimed much of his time and care. The shadow of two great cedar trees reached protecting arms after me as I went up to the steps of the cottage hidden away in a green and purple and golden and pink tangle of bloom and sweet odors; ivy and wistaria and jasmine and honeysuckle. Beside the steps grew some of his special pet roses.

Their glowing and fragrant presence sometimes afforded him a congenial topic of discourse when a guest chanced to approach too closely the subject of the literary work of the host, if one may use the term in connection with a writer who so constantly disclaimed any approach to literature, and so persistently declined to take himself seriously.

In the front yard was a swing that appealed to me reminiscently with the force of the olden days when I had a swing of my very own. As I "let the old cat die," we talked of James Whitcomb Riley's poem, "Waitin' fer the Cat to Die," and Mr. Harris told me of the visit Riley had made to him not long before. Two men with such cheerful views of life could not but be congenial, and it was apparent that the visit had brought joy to them both.

I did not see the three dogs and seven cats--mystic numbers!--but felt confident that my genial host could not have been satisfied with any less.

The charmed circle in which Br'er Fox and Br'er Rabbit shone as social stars is yet with us, and we shall not let it go out from our lives.

The mystic childhood of a dim, mysterious race is brought to us through these beings that have come to us from the olden time "when animals talked like people."

"The Sign of the Wren's Nest" is peopled by these legendary forms with their never-dying souls. They lurk in every corner and peer out from every crevice. They hide behind the trees, and sometimes in the moonlight we see them looking out at us as we walk along the path.

They crouch among interlacing vines and look at us through the lacy screen with eyes in which slumber the traditions of the ages.

We look for the Magician who, with a wave of the hand, made all these to live and move before us. We know he must be there. We "cannot make him dead"; but he can make himself and us alive in the life of the past. A little door, with one shutter of Memory and one of Faith, opens before us, and he comes to dwell again in the world which he created in "The Sign of the Wren's Nest."

"THE POET OF THE FLAG"

FRANCIS SCOTT KEY

Away back in the years, Terra Rubra, the colonial home of John Ross Key, spread out broad acres under the sky of Maryland, in the northern part of Frederick County. Girt by n.o.ble trees, the old mansion, built of brick that came from England in the days when the New World yet remained in ignorance of the wealth of her natural and industrial resources, stood in the middle of the s.p.a.cious lawn which afforded a beautiful playground for little Francis Scott Key and his young sister, who lived here the ideal home life of love and happiness.

Among the flowers of the terraced garden they learned the first lessons of beauty and sweetness and the triumph of growth and blossoming. At a short distance was a dense line of forest, luring the young feet into tangled wildernesses of greenery and the colorful beauty of wild flowers in summer, and lifting great gray arms in solemn majesty against the dun skies of winter. Through it flowed the rippling silver of Pipe Creek on its sparkling way to the sea. At the foot of a gra.s.sy slope a spring offered draughts of the clear pure water which is said to be the only drink for one who would write epics or live an epic. Beyond a wide expanse of wind-blown gra.s.s the young eyes saw the variant gray and purple tints of the Catoctin Mountains, showing mystic changes in the floodtide of day or losing themselves in the crimson and gold sea of sunset.

In this stately, old, many-verandaed home, looking across nearly three thousand acres of fertile land as if with a proud sense of lords.h.i.+p, the wide-browed, poet-faced boy with the beautiful dreamy eyes and the line of genius between his delicately arched brows pa.s.sed the golden years of his childhood.

It is said that President Was.h.i.+ngton once went to Terra Rubra to visit his old friend. General John Ross Key, of Revolutionary fame. It may be that the venerated hand of the "Father of His Country"--the hand that had so resolutely put away all selfish ambitions and had reached out only for good things to bestow upon his people and his nation--was laid in blessing upon the bright young head of little Francis Scott Key, helping to plant in the youthful heart the seed that afterward blossomed into the thought which he expressed many years later:

I have said that patriotism is the preserving virtue of Republics.

Let this virtue wither and selfish ambition a.s.sume its place as the motive for action, and the Republic is lost.

Here, my countrymen, is the sole ground of danger.

Seven miles from Annapolis, where the Severn River flows into Round Bay, stands Belvoir, a s.p.a.cious manor-house with sixteen-inch walls, in which are great windows reaching down to the polished oak floor. In this home of Francis Key, his grandfather, the young Francis Scott Key spent a part of the time of his tutelage, preparing for entrance into St. John's College, the stately buildings of which were erected by a certain early Key, who had come to our sh.o.r.e to help unlock the gates of liberty for the world.

The old college, with its historic campus, fits well into the atmosphere of Annapolis, standing proudly in her eighteenth-century dignity, watching the rest of the world scramble in a helter-skelter rush for modern trivialities. Its old walls are in pleasing harmony with the colonial mansions poised on little hillocks, from which they look down on you with benevolent condescension and invite you to climb the long flights of steps that lead to their very hearts, grand but hospitable, which you do in a glow of high-pitched ambition, as if you were scaling an arduous but fascinating intellectual height. Having reached the summit, you stop an instant on the landing, partly for breathing purposes, but more especially to exult a moment on the height of triumph.

The four-storied college at the end of Prince George Street--regal Annapolis would not be content with a street of less than royal dignity--looks down with pleased approval on its wide expanse of green campus, for that stretch of ground has a history that makes it worthy of the n.o.ble building which it supports. It spread its greenery to the view of those window-eyes decades before the Revolution, and when that fiery torch flamed upon the country's record the college green furnished a camping place for the freedom-loving Frenchmen who came over the sea to help set our stars permanently into the blue of our national sky. In 1812 American troops pitched their tents on the famous campus, and under the waving green of its summer gra.s.ses and the white canopy of its winter snows men who died for their country's honor lie in their long sleep.

On the grounds east of the college buildings stands the Tulip Tree which sheltered the first settlers of Annapolis in 1649, and may have hidden away in the memory-cells of its stanch old heart reminiscences of a time when a bluff old Latin sailor, with more ambition in his soul than geography in his head, unwittingly blundered onto a New World. Whatever may be its recollections, it has st.u.r.dily weathered the storms of centuries, surviving the tempests hurled against it by Nature and the poetry launched upon it by Man. It has been known by the name of the "Treaty Tree," from a tradition that in the shade of its branches the treaty with the Susquehannoghs was signed in 1652. In 1825 General La Fayette was entertained under its spreading boughs, and it has since extended hospitable arms over many a patriotic celebration.

In "the antiente citie" Francis Scott Key found many things which appealed to his patriotic soul. On the State House hill was the old cannon brought to Maryland by Lord Baltimore's colony and rescued from a protracted bath in St. Mary's River to take its place among the many relics of history which make Annapolis the repository of old stories tinged by time and fancy with a mystic coloring of superst.i.tion. He lived in the old "Carvel House," erected by Dr. Upton Scott on s.h.i.+pwright Street. Not far away was the "Peggy Stewart" dwelling, overlooking the harbor where the owner of the unfortunate _Peggy Stewart_, named for the mistress of the mansion, was forced by the revolutionary citizens of Annapolis, perhaps incited by an over-zealous enthusiasm but with good intentions, to burn his s.h.i.+p in penalty for having paid the tax on its cargo of tea.

If Francis Key had a taste for the supernatural, there was ample opportunity for its gratification in this haven of tradition. He may have seen the headless man who was accustomed to walk down Green Street to Market s.p.a.ce, with what intention was never divulged. Every old house had its ghost, handed down through the generations, as necessary a piece of furniture as the tester-bed or the sideboard.

Perhaps not all of these mysterious visitants were as quiet as the shadowy lady of the Brice house, who would glide softly in at the hour of gloaming and, with her head on her hand, lean against the mantel, look sadly into the faces of the occupants of the room, and vanish without a sound--of course, it is undeniable that Annapolis would have only well-bred ghosts.

After graduation from St. John's, in that famous cla.s.s known as the "Tenth Legion" because of its brilliancy, Francis Scott Key studied law in the office of his uncle, Philip Barton Key, in Annapolis, where his special chum was Roger Brooke Taney, who persuaded him to begin the practice of his profession in Frederick City. In 1801 the youthful advocate opened his law office in the town from which the Revolutionary Key had marched away to Boston to join Colonel Was.h.i.+ngton's troops. Francis Key invited his friend to visit Terra Rubra with him, and Mr. Taney found the old plantation home so fascinating that many visits followed. Soon there was a wedding at beautiful Terra Rubra, when pretty, graceful Ann Key became the wife of the future Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

In 1802, at Annapolis, in the mahogany wainscoted drawing-room of the old Lloyd house, built in 1772, Key was married to Mary Tayloe Lloyd.

After a few years of practice in Frederick City, Francis Scott Key removed to Georgetown, now West Was.h.i.+ngton. Here at the foot of what is known as M Street, but was Bridge Street in the good old days before Georgetown had given up her picturesque street names for the insignificant numbers and letters of Was.h.i.+ngton, half a block from the old Aqueduct Bridge, stands a two-storied, gable-roofed, dormer-windowed house, bearing in black letters the inscription, "The Key Mansion." Below is the announcement that it is open to the public from 9 A.M. to 5 P.M. daily, excepting Sunday. On a placard between two front doors are printed the words, "Home of Francis Scott Key, author of The Star-Spangled Banner," the patriotic color-scheme being shown in the white placard and blue and red lettering.

For more than a century the house has stood there, and the circling years have sent it into remote antiquity of appearance, the storms of time having so swept it with their winds and beaten it with their rains and bombarded it with snow and sleet and hail as to make difficult the realization that it was once the home of bounding, scintillant life, and that its walls in the years gone by were radiant with the visions and hopes and ambitions of a happy group of youthful souls. It stands at the foot of what is now a street of shops, and the wearing away of the decades have taken from it all suggestion of home surroundings.

Through a door at the left I pa.s.sed into a wide hall, on the walls of which are some patriotic inscriptions. There is one, a quotation from President McKinley, that conveys an admonition the disregard of which leads to consequences we often have occasion to deplore: "The vigilance of the Citizen is the safety of the Republic."

At the right of the hall are two rooms, locked now, but serving as parlors when the sad old house was a bright, beautiful home. A steep Colonial stairway leads to a hall on the second floor, where again there are inscriptions on the walls to remind the visitor of his duties as a citizen of the nation over which the Star-Spangled Banner yet waves.

On the second floor the first sign of life appeared. A door stood slightly ajar, and in answer to a touch a tall woman with a face of underlying tragedy and a solitary aspect that fitted well with the loneliness of the old house appeared and courteously invited me to enter. She is the care-taker of the mansion, bears an aristocratic old Virginia name, and is wrapped around with that air of gloomily garnered memories characteristic of women who were in the heart of the crucial period of our history. I am not surprised when she tells me that she watched the battle of Fredericksburg from her window as she lay ill in her room, and that she witnessed the burning of Richmond after the surrender. I recognize the fact that life has been a harder battle, since all her own have pa.s.sed over the line and left her to the lonely conflict, than was ever a contest in those days of war.

She tells me that the Key relics have all been taken to the Betsy Ross house in Philadelphia. What they were she does not know, for they were all packed in boxes when she first came to the Key mansion. The only object left from the possessions of the man who made that old dwelling a shrine upon which Americans of to-day ought to place offerings of patriotism is an old frame in a small room at the end of the hall. On the bottom of the frame is printed in large black letters the name, Francis Scott Key. Some jagged fragments within the frame indicate that something, either picture or flag, has been hastily and carelessly removed.

Finding no relic of the man whose life once glorified the now dark and gloomy house, I hold with the greater tenacity the mental picture I have of the old flag I used to see in the National Museum. Faded, discolored, and tattered, it is yet the most glorious piece of bunting our country owns to-day--the flag that floated over Fort McHenry through the fiery storm of that night of anxious vigil in which our national anthem was born.

In this old house on Bridge Street Francis Scott Key lived when he was Attorney for the District of Columbia, and in a small brick office adjoining his home he did the work that placed him in the front rank of the American bar.

St. John's Episcopal Church, not far away, where he was vestryman, has a tablet to the memory of Reverend Johannes I. Sayrs, a former rector, on which is an inscription by Key. In Christ Church is a memorial window dedicated to Francis Scott Key.

"It is a pity that the old house is to be sold," said a resident of Georgetown.

"Is it to be sold?" I asked. For a long time this fate has been hovering over the old Key home, but I had hoped, even when there was no hope.