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vol. title: vol. period: 1882 pages in vol.: 229 |
A Boston Revival.
If Col. Olcott and Mme. Blavatsky had staid in the United States, instead of going to India in search of the true faith among the Brahmins, they might have found a religion more truly bric-à-brac than anything they will discover in Bombay. As it is, Boston has secured this inestimable boon, and is at this moment in possession of a faith as ancient, if we may believe the missionaries, as the American continent. This cultus has been imported from the far West by a band of Zuni Indians, who live in New-Mexico. The Zuni religion is a delightful form of paganism, much more pagan, in fact, than that of the ancient Greeks, or even than of the earliest Phœnicians. Precisely what the Zuni faith consists of no non-Zuni person can tell. The delightful mystery which envelops this antique religion constitutes its chief charm. No sensible person would care much for a creed, confession of faith, and ritual which could be understood by everybody. If it were not for its being a peculiarly rococo and early-twilight religion, Boston would not have cared a rap for the Zuni development. Every æsthetic person knows that the further back in the world’s history we go, the better do things become. Boston has something better than early English or even the Italian Renaissance. It has the Zuni religion.
How long the Zuni Indians have maintained their strange and mystic ritual may be estimated from a single statement: When the Zuni faith was first revealed to man, one of the conditions imposed upon the patriarchs of the tribe was that they should go to the sea-side every month and bring home a quantity of sea-water for incantation purposes. As the region now known as New-Mexico was then near the borders of what is now known as the Atlantic Ocean, this was an easy task. But, as all geographers and other scientific persons very well know, the American continent has been steadily rising from the sea, ever since its foundations were laid. It has been estimated by a well-known scientific person that the continent has risen three-quarters of an inch during the last five centuries—without making any allowance of the strata of tomato cans and hoop-skirts formed along that portion of the Atlantic sea-board frequented by Summer visitors. If the student of theology will calculate the time required, on this basis, to raise from under high-water mark that portion of the American continent which lies between the Atlantic Ocean at Boston and the country of the Zunis in New-Mexico, he will ascertain with tolerable accuracy the age of the Zuni faith. And this calculation is now being worked out by several Harvard Professors, who will, in time, give the result to the world, showing that the Zuni variety of paganism is so very aged that the Hindu faiths now being imbibed by Olcott, Blavatsky, and the other Theosophists may be considered as modern inventions.
As years passed by, and successive generations of Zunis came and went, and centuries and eons rolled over their heads, the Atlantic Ocean grew more and more remote to the Zuni ritualists. They had been in the habit of starting for their monthly supply of sea-water immediately after breakfast, and of getting back with the sacred fluid in time for a 12 o’clock dinner. The journey grew longer, and some of the Zunis grumbled a good deal over the necessity for these long pilgrimages. Nevertheless, no orthodox Zuni could possibly think of worshipping in the simple faith of his fathers without a fair supply of salt water. Mere salt and water would be no more efficacious than a three-foot gas-burner on a consecrated altar where real candles are prescribed by the ritual. It was in vain that the precious store was hoarded. In course of time it would waste, and it is reported that the Zuni youth, profanely thinking that any liquid so carefully guarded must be good to drink, became surreptitiously inebriated on one of the few remaining bottles left in camp. Then, after the lapse of about five centuries, during which the Eastern sea had been pushed half-way back to the coast of Europe from New-Mexico, the last few drops of consecrated brine were gone, or nearly gone.
At this emergency appeared on the scene Prof. Cushing, a zealous student of ethnology and theology. He saw his opportunity. Being desirous of learning the history of the Zuni tribe, its faith and its literature, he offered to get for them a supply of the much-desired sea-water, provided they would make a Zuni of him. The simple people agreed to this proposition, the only conditions being that the Professor should bring in a scalp, and marry a Zuni woman. Nobody knows where the Professor secured his scalp, although there are ugly rumors concerning the mysterious disappearance of the hair of a “subject” in the Boston Medical College. To marry a Zuni woman he flatly refused, and this part of the contract was waived, as they say in law. Last Tuesday Prof. Cushing and his band of Zuni ritualists were taken to Deer Island, in Boston Harbor, by the Mayor and Common Council, accompanied by the Rev. Phillips Brooks, Collector Beard, several Harvard Professors, and a steam-boat load of “citizens generally.” There were incantations, delightfully pagan ceremonies, and a general ducking all around. Prof. Cushing was initiated into the thirty-third degree of the Zuni faith, and may now learn the sacred epic, which is never written out, and which may be rattled off orally in twenty-six hours. The ceremonies over, the Zunis were bundled into wagons, with their demijohns and bottles, and the City Government of Boston and the Faculty of Harvard College went home with the delightful consciousness that they had assisted in preserving one of the oldest and most truly bric-à-brac forms of heathenism known to man.
Longfellow Dead.
A reporter of The World called at No. 35 Clinton place last night to see Mr. Samuel Ward, a life-long friend of Mr. Longfellow, to inquire whether he had any intelligence from Boston as to the causes of the poet’s death.
“None but what I have seen in the evening papers,” answered Mr. Ward. “It is so very sudden, but not unexpected by those friends who have seen the lamp of life gradually growing dimmer and dimmer, though his spirit and genial sympathy were as bright as ever.”
“When did you see him last?”
“On last Thanksgiving Day, when I was shown up to his bedroom, in which he laughingly said ‘he had constituted himself an invalid’ in consequence of a vertigo lasting some twenty-four hours which had passed away, but left him much enfeebled. He was getting stronger and was quite able to go out and walk, but averse to ‘facing the music’ of being accosted in the street and of enduring the constant strain of receiving visitors, to whom his door had never been closed since 1838. He was pallid, and that ‘pearmain’-apple hue of ruddy health, like a bunch of holly berries in a frame of snow, seemed forever to have left his cheek.”
“Was your visit a long one?”
“Not more than half an hour, the remembrance of which will ever be gilded in my memory by his reading me his last poem, ‘Hermes Trismegistus,’ which now proves to have been the song of the dying swan. He seemed pleased with my enthusiastic admiration for that lovely poem, which I urged him to lose no time in enriching the world with. I wrote him to the same effect on my return to New York and have his reply announcing that it would appear in the Century before an audience ‘of a hundred thousand readers,’ as he himself said. He expressed his admiration for a new style of American novel, as typified by the ‘Grandissimes’ of Mr. Cable, which he had read with interest in the hope that it might inaugurate a new era in American romance.”
“How long have you known Mr. Longfellow?”
“I met him for the first time in Heidelberg in March, 1836, since which time I have possessed the now mournful, though always pleasing, treasure of a friendship which has lasted without a shade or ripple for forty-six years. He was my guest in New York when his ‘Hyperion’ was going through the press, and many of his poems I saw in MS. before they appeared in print. I called his attention to some of the subjects which became poems in his hands, especially among the translations, for example, the ‘Two Locks of Hair’ and the ‘Children of the Lord’s Supper.’ Baron Nordin, then Swedish Minister at Washington, gave me Tegner’s poem, which I took to my dear poet, and found it a fortnight after done into English, and heard the verses ring with all their tender sensibility when read by him.”
“Do you remember any other poems in which you took an interest before their publication?”
“Yes; I remember one more, and in fact two—at a wide interval of separation. I used to go once a month to spend Sunday with him in the Craigie House. He was then a widower. In fact, he had begged me to come on, desiring my opinion of a recent production. After breakfast he made haste to read me the ‘Skeleton in Armor,’ with which his Boston admirers had found fault as not being up to the standard of the ‘Psalm of Life,’ ‘The Reaper and the Flowers,’ &c. I was greatly stirred by the dash of the verse and the symmetry of the series of pictures it so graphically presented. I took the poem and read it aloud with a certain fervor inspired by its heroic measure, and I think that his own opinion was confirmed by my enthusiastic rendering of the part. I carried it to New York, where, having shown it to the poet Halleck, and obtained a certificate from him of its surpassing lyric excellence, I sold it to Mr. Lewis Gaylord Clarke, of the Knickerbocker Magazine, for $50, a large price in those days for any poetical production. About ten years ago, when paying him my usual Christmas visit, he read me the ‘Hanging of the Crane,’ 200 lines, for which Mr. Robert Bonner, of the New York Ledger, paid me $4,000, having offered $1,000 when I mentioned the existence of the poem. Mr. Longfellow declined that price, when the owner of Dexter—whom the poet, in his letters to me, called ‘Diomed, the tamer of horses’—quadrupled his bid and obtained the prize. Tom Moore, living with Washington Irving in the Champs Elysées in Paris, used to walk up and down the garden for two hours, composing verses and pulling out the fingers of an old glove. He called ten lines a day, at a guinea a line, ‘his task.’ The Cornhill Magazine paid Mr. Tennyson three guineas a line for ‘Tythonous,’ and it was reserved for the New York Ledger to add a pound to the laureate’s price.”
“Would you say that Mr. Longfellow was equally fond of books and of conversation?”
“He was a ‘noiseless sewing-machine’ in his work. His mind was stored with the lore of Scandinavian, German, Italian, Spanish and French literature. His work was always exuberant, from the fulness of his resources, and his technique at as ready command as the fingers of the Abbé Liszt for the keys of his piano. Doubtless he pondered his productions before putting them into shape, for I remember his telling me that he had carried in his thoughts for a year a scheme for the ‘Skeleton in Armor,’ which was suggested by a skeleton with an old-fashioned hauberk exhumed, I believe, at Taunton, and exhibited at Fall River in a museum long since burned to the ground. It was, I think, in 1839 that he rode with my sister, Mrs. Howe, and a gay party from Newport to Fall River, to inspect this curious relic, about which he challenged my sister to make a poem; and his persistence in accomplishing his purpose may, perhaps, be a fair example of his pertinacious adhesion to a project. He was extremely methodical and could lay his finger at a minute’s notice upon the minutest memorandum, however long it might have lain in its hiding place. His translation of the ‘Inferno’ was the result of ten minutes’ daily work at a standing desk in his library, while his coffee was reaching the boiling point on his breakfast table.”
“But now, Mr. Ward, about his fondness for society?”
“He revelled in his friends and their sympathies. He was genial and humorous at table and ever bubbling over with cheerfulness and quiet mirth when in the society of those he liked. But then you have a man who was at the same time a bookworm and an inspired bard, whose door has been open to all pilgrims for nearly half a century, whose poems are a rich portion of the intellectual wealth of the world and the pride of his own country. Some of these thousands will have their say, and I make way for them.
“Nothing human that I ever knew exceeded the tenacity of his friendship. His heart might be likened to a precious library, in which the recollections of his friends were enshrined like rare volumes, to be taken down and cherished when the corresponding friend appeared before him, or awoke his attention by a letter. There was no jealousy in his composition, and no poet was ever a more sincere admirer of the productions of genuine aspirants to the guild. His charities were many and constant, and I know of an instance in which his purse for years provided support for the family of an old schoolfellow. He rarely was happier then when he could shed the rays of tender sympathy upon the hearts of his beneficiaries. His warmest attachment was for Charles Sumner; and Felton, whom Dickens calls ‘the heartiest of Greek professors,’ and George S. Hillard were ever about him in his early days in Cambridge. Prescott, the historian; George Ticknor, to whose chair he succeeded as Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard, and Dr. Howe, of the Perkins Asylum, were his constant and friendly associates. To him I may exactly apply, in conclusion, the stanzas of Halleck upon Drake, the author of the ‘Culprit Fay:’
“Green be the turf above thee, |
London, March 25.—The Standard this morning in an article on the death of the poet Longfellow, says: “Longfellow commands a wider audience among our people than any poet of this age, save, perhaps, Tennyson.”
The Daily Telegraph says: “The place Longfellow occupies in English literature is decidedly bright. He is almost as well known and widely read in England as in America. His influence has been wholly good. As long as the English language lasts his works will be quoted as models of simplicity of style and purity of thought. Death has taken America’s greatest literary son.”
The News says: “Longfellow’s death will be lamented in every English home. His verses are not likely to die out of English literature for many generations to come.”
The Times says: “The news of Longfellow’s death will be read with deep regret wherever the English language is spoken. The death of no literary Englishman could excite more genuine sorrow than that of the much-loved author of ‘Evangeline.’ He will be no more sincerely lamented in America than in this country.”
Editor's notes