XXXIII Doctor of Laws 1873

XXXIII Doctor of Laws 1873 (LETTERS 2108 TO 2170) SooN AFTER THE NEw YEAR the Cummington Library was completed, and at about the same time Bryant contracted for a new road with an easy slope leading from the old village center on Cummington Hill to the Westfield River valley, joining the highway at the library. This would replace an earlier road so steep as to be sometimes impassable in the winter and spring. With these projects in hand, Bryant took his two daughters and Anna Fairchild, accompanied again by John Durand, on a Florida holiday. Leaving New York in February, they visited Jacksonville, Saint Augustine, Palatka, Green Cove Springs, and Silver Spring, stopping at Mandarin to see Harriet Beecher Stowe's winter home. In letters to the Evening Post Bryant remarked on noticeable changes since his visit thirty years earlier-particularly in the conditions of the former slaves. They were, he thought, less favorable on the whole, despite emancipation, for the blacks were now not so well fed or clad; probably more intelligent, but less hardy and more easily fatigued at work. On their return trip the travelers stopped at Savannah, Charleston, Norfolk, and Richmond, reaching home in mid-April. In May the Cumming ton Library received its books, and the next month, with the new "Bryant Road" from the hill completed, it was opened to the public. In June, by a coincidence, President James McCosh of the college at Princeton, New Jersey, who had tried in vain the year before to get Bryant as a commencement speaker, asked him to give the principal address at the dedication of the new Chancellor Green Library. Bryant stayed for two days at McCosh's home on the campus, giving his talk and receiving the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. Earlier this year he had lectured at the Roslyn Lyceum on his impres sions of Mexico. Neither talk, however, was printed in his only notable publication of 1873, a volume of selected Orations and Addresses, brought out by Putnam, which was very favorably received. James T. Fields is reported to have called these "the most beautiful speeches in the English language." In March Bryant was elected an honorary member of the Russian Academy, founded in 1773 by Catherine II. He was little concerned this year with political matters, although he was busier with his newspaper as a result of the death in April of its literary editor, John R. Thompson. But in one instance at least he made an imprint on American foreign policy. In November Secretary of State Hamilton Fish asked his advice on what action the government should take toward the Spanish colony of Cuba, after a gunboat had seized an American freighter Doctor of Laws 95 carrying arms to Cuban insurgents, and had executed eight American sailors. Fish asked Bryant to "favor me with your views on the subject." Bryant advised that "a war with Spain would be a real disaster" to be "sedulously avoided." We did not need nor want Cuba, he wrote, for "we have trouble enough already with the freed men of our own country" to wish to add to them an ignorant population, white and black, which had lived for centuries under the "most grinding despotism." Two weeks later the matter was settled amicably with Spain without the hostilities against which Bryant had warned. At the end of July, as had become his custom, Bryant went to Cumming ton. There he busied himself with his two volumes of landscape scenes, Picturesque America. In August a young editor who had taken "very great pleasure" in reading Bryant's Orations and Addresses, William Dean Howells of the Atlantic Monthly, solicited for that magazine "a series of articles-the more autobiographical the better" on his lifetime experiences. But Bryant pleaded preoccupation with other writing and the indolence of old age, and was still undecided when Howells pressed him again later in the year. Soon after his return to Roslyn in late September Bryant was kept by another engagement from dining with the British mystery writer Wilkie Collins, then giving readings in this country. In December he was invited by Robert Waterston to a centennial celebration by the Massachusetts Historical Society of the Boston Tea Party. In declining the invitation Bryant replied, in a letter read at the meeting, with a sweeping review of the century's changes which may have suggested the theme of his last major poem, "The Flood of Years," written three years later. 96 LETTERS oF WILLIAM CuLLEN BRYANT 2108. To Frederic Huidekoper1 The Evening Post, 41 Nassau Street, cor. Liberty, New York, Jany. 2d. 1873. Dear Sir. My memory not serving me in the case mentioned in your letter, I put the letter into the hands of Mr. Gay,2 now in this office and at one time editor of the Anti Slavery Standard, who has looked up what is written on the enclosed paper,3 which is as near as we can come to answering your inquiry. It may put you on the track of the particulars of the case. I am, sir, very truly yours W. C. BRYANT. MANUSCRIPT: NYPL-BG ADDREss: F. Huidekoper Esq. DOCKETED: W. C. Bryant, I Jan. 2, 1873. 1. Frederic Huidekoper (1817-1892) was Professor of New Testament and Church History, 1844-1877, at the Meadville (Pennsylvania) Unitarian Theological School, founded in 1844 by his father, Harm Jan Huidekoper (1776-1854), an immigrant from Holland. The letter Bryant mentions is unrecovered. 2. In 1872 Sydney Howard Gay (1814-1888), previously the editor of the American Anti-Slavery Standard, the New York Tribune, and the Chicago Tribune, had become managing editor of the EP. 3. Unrecovered. 2109. To Christiana Gibson New York, Jany. 6th. 1873. My dear friend. Your last letter to me was dated October 23d, and I was haunted by a dim fancy that I had answered it, until your letter to Julia arrived the day before yesterday. Sad as the tenor of the letter to Julia was, it yet brought the welcome news that your cough, which obliged you to fly your country, had left you, and that your young niece Flora had also found her health restored by the mild climate, and, now about to embark for India, had the hope of a happy future before her. You and yours may be assured of our deep and sincere sympathy in the sorrows which it has pleased Providence to send upon you. Here too the closing days of the year have been saddened by the deaths of those whom we much prized, suddenly removed in the midst of their usefulness-Kensett, the amiable and generous artist1-Putnam, the liberal-minded and kindly bookseller,2 and the promoter of every good work-and the much esteemed Treasurer of the Century Asso- Doctor of Laws 97 ciation, Priestly, a man of great worth and intelligence.3 It is not often that we lose, so near to each other, so many deeply and widely mourned. What a fleeting thing human life is!-like the shadow of a cloud passing swiftly over the field, leaving behind the flowers, which it visits but for an instant, and the prattling brooks and the pools that give back the image of the sky, and the song-sparrow warbling on its perch and the meadow lark brooding on its nest in the grass-leaving all, all-and hurrying to be lost on the dim, distant hills, where the sight can no longer follow it. I miss Putnam greatly. He published two of my books, and I employed him to get together my Cummington Library-about four thousand volumes. What he did for me beyond my special directions, was judiciously and disinterestedly done. I must tell you about the Library. The building containing the books is finished, and is perfectly fire-proof-with a floor of Portland Cement laid on brick arches, and a ceiling of brick laid on iron beams, so that there will be nothing to burn save the shelves. Then there is the dwelling house of the Librar ian, ample for a pretty large family, built of concrete, that is to say, a mixture of water, lime and sand. There is also a barn for the house hold and a shed to shelter the horses of those who visit the library and a croft of eleven acres for the family. The Westfield, a winding brawling stream, with a fringe of thicket, murmurs under the win dows. I have procured at some expense a new road to be made from my house to the library, avoiding a steep and high hill which the old road first climbed and then descended. Are we never to see you again on this side of the Atlantic? May it not be that the breath of the climate which filled your lungs for so many-may I not say rather happy years?-have as kindly an influence on your health as the air of Nice? Our people are beginning to go westward on our continent in search of health. Minnesota is full of persons who have gone thither on account of weak lungs, most of whom find a healing power in the air of that region. By and by we shall run down to Mexico, on railways already projected, and the winter of Mexico is one long, temperate, cloudless summer. Your sister, Miss Jessie, must have had a sad winter. Her kind and humane assiduities are always at hand wherever there is suffering and sorrow. I hope her health may not have suffered in consequence of her watchings at the bedside of her poor niece.

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