The Life and Letters of Margaret Junkin Preston
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THE LIFE AND LETTEKS OF MARGARET JUNEIN PRESTON THE LIFE AND LETTEKS OF MARGARET JUNKIN PRESTON BY ELIZABETH PRESTON ALLAN BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY (Cfce fttoa#foe pre??, <£ambri&0e 1903 £?>?—& 6>?~£^- /J^L . y^^^^z^L^- COPYRIGHT 1903 BY ELIZABETH PRESTON ALLAN ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Ptiblished November, iqoj *1 DEDICATED TO THE POET'S GRANDCHILDREN GEORGE AND MARGARET PRESTON CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. Childhood 1 II. The Days of her Youth .... 12 III. Lexington 35 IV. Life in Lexington 58 V. Love and Marriage 91 VI. A Journal of War Times . .110 VII. The War Journal continued . 151 VIII. The War Journal concluded . 176 IX. Post Bellum Days 209 X. Letters 243 XL Last Letters 289 XII. Last Days 325 Appendix : Margaret J. Preston ; an Appreciation. By James A. Harrison. 341 THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF MARGARET JUNKIN PRESTON CHAPTER I CHILDHOOD When a friend said to Margaret Junkin Preston, some years before her death, that he was keeping her letters for the life of her that would one day- be written, she treated the matter as a fantastic joke. So little claim did she consider her literary work to have given her on fame's bead-roll that her executors do not find a scrap of autobiography among her papers. It was perhaps the acceptance of her own esti- mate of herself in this connection that kept her family from offering to the public any memorial of her life at the time of her passing into the great beyond. This, and the difficulty that our increas- ingly busy generation finds in labor that requires what our poet herself called — " Hours winnowed of care, — Days hedged from interruption, and withdrawn Inviolate from household exigence." But in the years since her death it has been found that the readers of her poetry are also her 2 MARGARET JUNKIN PRESTON lovers, whose sincere affection gives them the right to ask for a more complete acquaintance than her shyness had allowed during her lifetime. And it is in answer to this loyal demand that the following pages have been prepared. If the challenge is made that what the poet with- held during her life should not now be made pub- lic, because death has left the door ajar, it seems a sufficient answer to say that no reader devoured more eagerly every scrap of biography within reach than Mrs. Preston ; and none owned more frankly the debt she owed those other lives. Her turn thus to please and instruct has now come ; but the promise is given at the outset that no revelations shall be made which would have offended her womanly modesty, if she had found them upon the pages of Mrs. Browning's biography, for example, or that of one less famous than England's uncrowned poetess-laureate. A reader of biography naturally wants to know something of the beginnings of the life whose story is to be told ; but does not this curiosity too often bring down on our unwary heads an avalanche of genealogy that threatens to overwhelm us ? Mrs. Preston's forbears were for the most part strenuously occupied with life's highest duties, and were not concerned with exploiting themselves. Neither shall we seek to do this ; a few lines may, however, be devoted to indicating the strains which were mingled to make up the being of this woman- poet. Her father has left it on record that he knew CHILDHOOD 3 very little of his family, and that heraldry had taken no notice of his ancestors : but this did not leave him without a glow of pride in the fact that " his lineage was of that stalwart, godly, and heroic race, the Covenanters of Scotland ; men and women who braved persecution for Christ's crown and covenant; and despite the curses of the Stuarts, and the claymores of Claverhouse, witnessed so long and so steadfastly for God and his truth." 1 Mrs. Preston's first American ancestor, on her father's side, was her great-grandfather, Joseph Junkin, who came to Pennsylvania some time in the reign of George the Second, from County An- trim, Ireland. But there was no Irish blood in Joseph Junkin's veins. His ancestors had left Inverness, Scotland, for County Antrim, to escape the cruel persecutions of the Stuarts, and the little Margaret Junkin of this memoir was brought up on tales of heroism for conscience' sake ; — tales which fired her heart and her imagination to the end of life. Great-grandmother Junkin, ne'e Eliz- abeth Wallace, was even more the centre of these family traditions than her husband, for she had been, as a child, in the famous siege of London- derry. These great-grandparents of Mrs. Preston were married after coming to this country, took up land in Pennsylvania, and built on it a substantial stone house. In this mansion a second Joseph Junkin was born, who lived to fight as valiantly for political freedom, in the War of Independence, 1 See Life of Dr. George Junkin. ; 4 MARGARET JUNKIN PRESTON as his ancestors had done for freedom of conscience. Loyalty and courage have not been lacking in the Junkin family from generation to generation. Joseph the second married in his turn Eleanor Cochrane, another Scotch-Irish lass, of a family noted even among Covenanters for strictness of principle and practice. Mrs. Preston used to tell her children, with a mixture of pride and amuse- ment, of the little Cochranes walking to church on Sundays, over a mountain ridge covered with whortleberries, without daring to pick one ripe berry for fear of the Fourth Commandment ! And this is not an idle tale, in view of our present task we are to find presently this morbid conscientious- ness a warring element, even a controlling force, in a nature otherwise composed of the glow and flame and beauty-love and imagination that go to make up the soul of a true artist. Having thus briefly introduced the grandparents and great-grandparents of Margaret Junkin, it is fitting to paint a little more carefully the portraits of the father and mother whom she loved with a passionate devotion passing the capacity of most hearts ; whose rare goodness was ever to her their true greatness, beside which their other somewhat remarkable qualities paled. George Junkin, the father of Mrs. Preston, was the sixth of fourteen children born to Joseph and Eleanor Junkin, in the stone mansion in Cumber- land County, Pennsylvania. Religion and educa- tion were the foundations on which his childhood was built, and religion and education became the CHILDHOOD 5 two absorbing passions of the man. One might almost say that from the days of his a-b-c training in the log school-house, to the end of his honored life as preacher and teacher, there was not a day on which one or the other, or both of these high themes did not occupy the first place in his thoughts. The judgment of his contemporaries is unanimous as to his strong and acute intellect ; his bold and candid character; his intense convictions ; his eager- ness as a reformer of what he believed contrary to God's will. It goes without saying that such a man, living in such times, could not do the work he did without arousing animosity ; but the very ene- mies he made were ready to confess that there was not a thread of selfishness or self-seeking or dis- honesty of purpose in the man, while those who knew him best could say, as did his old pupil, Dr. Charles Elliot, that he held the lamp of love, divine and human, so high that its radiance shone out on the darkest day. Mrs. Preston's biographer is tempted to linger over the lofty and successful life of this father whom she loved so deeply ; but the world has had that story, enthusiastically told. To this earnest, combative, toilsome worker, God gave as a life companion one of the sweetest, most radiant souls that ever came from His heart of love. Julia Rush Miller, to whom George Junkin was married in Philadelphia, on the first of June, 1819, was, like himself, of Scotch parentage, being " " a descendant of the Fighting Laird of Newton ; but, unlike her lover,* she was reared in wealth and 6 MARGARET JUNKIN PRESTON luxury, and she brought to the making of his home not only beauty and grace of person, good family connection, and a considerable fortune, but that tact and fine social discernment which were hers by inheritance and training. The old legend of the halcyon bird building her nest on the stormy waters, and thereby bringing them days of calm, is the best picture one can give of the perfect marriage which made for these two a sweet and central calm on the waves of an otherwise stormy and restless life. The young bridegroom himself records that his love was such as human language was not in- tended to express ! And for thirty-five years this sweet woman, always beautiful, always young, was the strength and happiness of his life. Mr. Junkin was, at the time of his marriage, a minister in the Associate Reformed (one form of the Presbyterian) Church, and he took his bride to live in the village of Milton, Penn., where the young preacher was serving more than one coun- try church. In this village, on the nineteenth of May, 1820, in a plain little hired house, was born Margaret Junkin, bringing with her into the world the unusual gifts which were to make her name known to many of her fellow countrymen whose hearts respond to the poetic touch.