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LITERARY NEW YORK

Its Landmarks and Associations

by

CHARLES HEMSTREET

With 65 Illustrations







[Illustration]


G.P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1903

Copyright, 1903
by
Charles Hemstreet

Published, November, 1903

The Knickerbocker Press, New York




[Illustration: The "Half-Moon" on the Hudson--1609.

From the painting by L.W. SEAVEY.]




Contents


CHAPTER                                                  PAGE

      I. WRITERS OF NEW AMSTERDAM                           1

     II. BEFORE THE REVOLUTION                             25

    III. THE POET OF THE REVOLUTION                        45

     IV. IN THE DAYS OF THOMAS PAINE                       67

      V. THE CITY THAT IRVING KNEW                         87

     VI. WITH PAULDING, DRAKE, AND HALLECK                106

    VII. COOPER AND HIS FRIENDS                           125

   VIII. THOSE WHO GATHERED ABOUT POE                     145

     IX. AT THE CLOSE OF THE KNICKERBOCKER DAYS           167

      X. HALF A CENTURY AGO                               189

     XI. TWO FAMOUS MEETING-PLACES                        209

    XII. SOME OF THE WRITERS OF TO-DAY                    230




Full-Page Illustrations


                                                         PAGE

THE "HALF MOON" ON THE HUDSON, 1609            _Frontispiece_
    From the painting by L.W. Seavey.

THE STADT HUYS                                              8

BROAD STREET, 1642                                         30

KING'S COLLEGE, ABOUT 1773                                 42

THE DEBTORS' PRISON                                        48

WILLIAM SMITH    }
PETER STUYVESANT }
PHILIP FRENEAU   }                                         60
THOMAS PAINE     }
JOEL BARLOW      }

THE FIRST TAMMANY WIGWAM, CORNER NASSAU AND
  SPRUCE STREETS                                           70

MAP OF STREETS IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK IN 1827             76

JAMES KIRKE PAULDING }
PHILIP HONE          }
WASHINGTON IRVING    }                                    100
JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE  }
FITZ-GREENE HALLECK  }
J. FENIMORE COOPER   }

THE PARK THEATRE, PARK ROW, 1831                          136

RICHARD HENRY STODDARD }
JOHN JAMES AUDUBON     }
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT  }                                  150
BAYARD TAYLOR          }
EDGAR ALLAN POE        }
ROBERT FULTON          }

POE'S COTTAGE AT FORDHAM                                  158
    From a drawing by C.W. Mielatz, by permission.
    Copyright, 1899, by The Society of Iconophiles.

THE BATTERY IN 1830                                       164
    From a drawing by C. Burton.

THE APOLLO ROOMS IN 1830                                  170

VIEW OF OLD BUILDINGS IN WILLIAM STREET,
  LOOKING TOWARDS MAIDEN LANE, 1800                       182

W.D. HOWELLS        }
J.G. HOLLAND        }
RICHARD GRANT WHITE }                                     200
BRANDER MATTHEWS    }
WILLIAM WINTER      }
    From an engraving of the picture by J.H. Marble;
    courtesy of W.E. Benjamin.




Illustrations in the Text


                                                        PAGE

SEAL OF NEW AMSTERDAM                                      1

EARLY DUTCH HOUSES                                         2

THE WALL AND GATE                                          5

AN OLD FAMILY BIBLE                                        6

STUYVESANT'S "WHITEHALL"                                   8

ALONG THE STRAND                                           9

DE SILLE'S HOUSE                                          14

A WOMAN'S COSTUME, NEW AMSTERDAM                          16

STUYVESANT'S BOUWERIE HOUSE                               20

THE CHURCH IN THE FORT                                    21

CAPTAIN KIDD'S HOUSE                                      23

THE CHURCH CALLED TRINITY                                 34

"THE NEW-YORK GAZETTE"                                    39

THE COLLECT                                               48

THE BRITISH PRISON-SHIP                                   53

THE MIDDLE DUTCH CHURCH                                   55

FRAUNCES' TAVERN                                          62

BROAD STREET AND FEDERAL HALL                             63

RICHMOND HILL                                             64

THE CORNER STONE OF THE PARK THEATRE                      69

THE POST OFFICE, WILLIAM STREET                           78

GOLDEN HILL INN                                           88

ST. GEORGE'S CHAPEL, BEEKMAN ST.                          89

THE CITY HOTEL                                           101

THE HOUSE OF ASTOR, WHERE IRVING WROTE "ASTORIA"         102

WHERE IRVING LIVED, 17TH STREET AND IRVING PLACE         104

THE SHAKESPEARE TAVERN                                   120

THE JUMEL MANSION                                        123

WASHINGTON HALL                                          132

ON BLOOMINGDALE ROAD, NEAR 75TH STREET, IN POE'S TIME    147

THE HOUSE IN CARMINE STREET                              149

WHERE POE WROTE "THE RAVEN"                              157

MUSEUM AT THE NORTH END OF THE PARK, 1825                170

NIBLO'S GARDEN                                           171

AUDUBON'S HOME, 156TH STREET AND NORTH RIVER             193

CLEMENT C. MOORE'S HOUSE, CHELSEA                        196

THE UNIVERSITY BUILDING                                  219

THE STUDIO BUILDING IN WEST 10TH STREET                  221

53 EAST 20TH STREET                                      223

10 WEST STREET                                           232

WHERE "HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES" WAS WRITTEN             237

146 MACDOUGAL STREET                                     239

108 WAVERLY PLACE                                        240

RICHARD GRANT WHITE'S HOME                               241

WHERE RICHARD HENRY STODDARD DIED                        243

WHERE THE AUTHORS' CLUB WAS ORGANIZED                    244

HORACE GREELEY'S HOME                                    245

THE BEEKMAN MANSION                                      249

LAWRENCE HUTTON'S HOUSE                                  252

DE KAY'S HOUSE, LONDON TERRACE                           254




Literary New York




Chapter I

Writers of New Amsterdam


[Illustration: Seal of New Amsterdam]

There is a fashion nowadays of trimming the fronts of brick houses by
placing black bricks among the red in such a way as to form odd and
unique designs. It is an attractive way of doing, for it varies the
staid simplicity of the solid color. But for all it may seem original
and new, it is a style that had its beginning long, long ago, even in
the days when the stern Peter Stuyvesant governed with an iron hand
over the Dutch colony of fifteen hundred people, the town that was one
day to be New York, but which in his time was called New Amsterdam.

[Illustration: Early Dutch Houses]

It was a tiny town then; picturesque, too, for the houses were low,
irregular, with sloping roofs and gable ends to the street. They were
built of wood--that is, all except the church, the Stadt Huys, the
Governor's house, and some few dwellings of colonists who had brought
much wealth with them from Holland. These were for the most part of
stone. It was usual in them all--there were scarcely more than a
hundred,--whether of wood or stone, to have chimneys outside the
walls, thus making less the danger of fire, and if any part of the
house were of brick it was sure to be the chimney. All the brick had
then to be brought from Holland, so it was an expensive building
material and but sparingly used.

At this time when Stuyvesant held full sway there were two industrious
colonists who held the idea that their short-cut to immense wealth lay
in the way of making bricks at home and supplying them to their fellow
colonists. So it came about, after long and slow deliberation, that
the first brickyard was started. To be sure the venturesome
fortune-hunters soon found that they were not to succeed all at once,
for, owing to their lack of knowledge, they ruined so many of their
bricks that the profits of the business were like to be consumed in
the black-burned material that they threw aside as worthless.

But just at this time an odd thing happened. This was no less than
the appearance of a colonist who agreed to buy--at a low price to be
sure, but still to buy--all the black-burned and apparently useless
brick. The brickmakers wondered very much at this, and without doubt
thought the man a trifle unsound in his mind, but they agreed, and
very soon the buyer had built himself a house, which when it was
completed showed the burnt brick alternating with the red, prettily
decorating the front and making of it the most attractive dwelling in
the town. And at this they were filled with admiration and respect.
All the townspeople went to look at the house, and while looking
marvelled that Jacob Steendam could have thought out such a useful
plan, for he was not known as a practical man. Anything but that, for
was he not a poet? More than this, was he not the only poet in the
colony? And still more than this, he was the first poet of New
Amsterdam.

[Illustration: The Wall and Gate]

And in other ways, too, this first literary man of the colony was no
ordinary man. He had come to New Amsterdam in the employ of the owners
of the colony, the Dutch West India Company, and he worked in the
Company's warehouse. But he had a mind which fixed itself on things
above the beaver skins which it was his task to register before they
were sent across the sea. He was clerk by day, poet by night. It was
his custom while the townspeople slept, and they were early abed, to
wander about in the moonlight. He could walk the length and breadth of
the town with no great exertion, for it merely tipped the triangular
point of the island of Manhattan, enclosed on two sides by rivers and
on the land side by a wall of wood and soil which served to keep the
Indians out--a wall stretching straight across the island quite from
river to river, following the line that Wall Street was to take later
when Indians should be no more and when the town itself should have
burst its bounds. Here then the poet walked through the narrow
streets--winding ways that had their birth as Indian trails, passed
their infancy as cow-paths, and had so wound around marshy tracts and
deviated from their course that as streets they must of necessity be
irregular and vacillating.

[Illustration: An Old Family Bible]

While this was a time of advancement for the little colony, as you may
have guessed from the brickmaking venture, yet it was certainly not a
literary period. The colonists who had left their homes in Holland to
seek their fortunes in a new world had found that Fortune overseas
frowned upon them as often as she smiled, and while she had raised the
hopes of some, the many were struggling for bare existence. There was
no book-making; indeed there were few books of any sort, and reading
meant conning over Bibles, prayer-books, psalm-books, and Testaments
which had been brought across the ocean. These were stoutly bound
volumes, many of them heirlooms, their pages bearing the marks of
patient and persistent handling.

[Illustration: Stuyvesant's "Whitehall"]

The poet Steendam dreamed and thought out many a verse as he stood on
the bridge that spanned the canal leading from the bay to the Sheep
Pasture,--the canal that was one day to be buried deep beneath Broad
Street. He must have walked beneath the wall of the weak little fort
at the water's edge, passed Governor Stuyvesant's new home that was
called Whitehall, and that was to pass away, leaving its name to the
road leading to it, which the road was still to bear more than two
hundred and fifty years later. And perhaps he went on along the strand
to the Stadt Huys (for it was only a few steps farther along the
waterside), the stone house that "William the Testy" had built as a
tavern and that in the first poet's day had become the first City Hall
of New Amsterdam. And he sometimes stood beside the first graveyard,
near the plaine that was to become the Bowling Green, and so on to
the city wall, with its gates locked while the townsmen slept.

[Illustration: THE STADT HUYS.]

[Illustration: Along the Strand]

Though the streets are to-day much changed from those which the poet
walked alone save for the company of his Muse, you can walk them even
now, until you come to a thoroughfare noticeable because it is so
short and winding, tucked away at the edge of the city's business
section. And if you do walk into Stone Street, you must of necessity
come to a bend from which both ends of the street curve out of sight,
while you stand in a kind of huge well, closed in by iron-shuttered
warehouses. Here in this bend you are standing on what was the garden
of Jacob Steendam's checker-fronted house. In his day it was Hoogh
Street, though in a few years it was to take its present name when it
was the first street to be paved with stone.

In those nightly walks through the quiet streets of the sleeping town,
the poet Steendam found inspiration for his verses--the first verses
ever penned in the colony, and called variously _The Praise of New
Netherland_, _The Complaint of New Amsterdam_, _The Thistle Finch_,
and others. Although these suggested true affection for the land of
his adoption, it was the home of his youth and the never-fading
remembrance of his childhood's days that haunted him and called to
him. And at last, one day after thirteen years, the sight of a ship
preparing to sail for Holland so overcame him that almost within the
hour he had bidden farewell and had sailed with her, leaving to the
townspeople his memory and his verse.

But by the time of his going there had come forward another poet to
take his place, by name Nicasius De Sille. There was a vast difference
between the first poet and the second. Steendam was a poor man, and in
his verses sought always to touch those who had never grasped the
skirts of fleeting Fortune. The second was a man of wealth, a kind of
"society poet." For even in that small circle, in the first
half-century of its existence, there were marked differences in
wealth, birth, and reputation, which were to develop with the passing
years into the distinctions of to-day.

The aristocracy of those times centred about the family of the Dutch
Governor, Peter Stuyvesant. Mrs. Stuyvesant had been, before her
marriage, Judith Bayard, the daughter of a Paris divine. Mrs. Bayard,
the sister of Peter Stuyvesant, had married Mrs. Stuyvesant's brother,
and when left a widow with three infant sons she followed her brother
when he became Governor of New Netherland. These two women had lived
in ease and refinement, and in coming to the colony well knew that
there they would find a life of comparative hardship. Yet they came
willingly enough, following husband and brother, and brought with them
an atmosphere of intellectual and social culture that left its impress
for all time. By the time Steendam returned to his boyhood home, a few
ambitious folk had gathered themselves about the Stuyvesants. There
was Oloff Van Cortlandt, a thriving merchant and one of the richest
men in New Netherland; there were Hendrick Kip and his three sons;
there were Dr. La Montagne and his daughters, and Govert Loockermans,
and others.

It was to this well-to-do-set that Nicasius De Sille belonged, and
after the going of Steendam he became the only literary man in the
colony. He also had come over in the service of the Dutch West India
Company, but in a far different capacity from Steendam. For he came,
when Stuyvesant's rule had run eight years of its course, as a
Councillor in the provincial government, and his life was thenceforth
closely connected with that of the Governor. He came, heralded as a
statesman, as a lawyer, as a man of deep learning, as a man of wealth.
But with not one word of his being a poet--yet only by reason of his
poems has his name lived. He built for himself a house beside the
little canal where Steendam walked in the night, just where now
Exchange Street touches Broad, and here, with his two motherless
daughters and one son, he lived more luxuriously than had yet been
seen. For he had brought with him from Holland heavy plate of rich
design, more plate than was in all the town beside; solid, carved
furniture and rare hangings; and on winter nights his guests sat down
to a table laden with blue and white china ornamented with strange
Chinese pictures, and drank their tea, alternately biting lumps of
sugar, from the tiniest china cups, and altogether were entertained
with all the pomp and circumstance he had known in The Hague. At these
evening entertainments De Sille read his poems in such perfect style
as to win much applause, and doubtless it was the reading of these, as
well as his courtly manner and great wealth, that very soon won for
him the love of fair Tryntie Croegers.

[Illustration: De Sille's House]

And then one day there was a grand gathering in the stone church
inside the fort--on the wedding-day of Nicasius De Sille and Mistress
Tryntie Croegers. Into the church went the friends: women, some with
petticoats of red cloth, some with skirts of blue or purple silk set
off with rare lace, all with silken hoods over much befrizzled hair,
and their fingers covered with glittering rings, and with great
lockets of gold on their bosoms. Each had a Bible fastened to her
girdle by links of gold--not the plain, strongly bound Bibles used by
Jacob Steendam and his friends, but elaborately wrought in silver,
with golden clasps. The men were just as gaily dressed as the women,
for they wore long coats adorned with shining buttons and pockets
trimmed with lace, and colored waistcoats, knee-breeches of velvet,
silk stockings, and low shoes set off by silver buckles. Outside the
fort among the townspeople of lower degree it was, too, quite a
holiday. Men with coarse frocks and leather aprons, women in homespun
gowns, turbaned negresses, swarthy negro slaves, dusky Indians,--all
made merry in their several ways as though glad of an excuse. And the
motley throng outside the fort and the elegant gathering within all
made way for the wrinkled little bell-ringer, who carried the cushions
from the Stadt Huys for the burgomasters and the schepens, who
insisted on every bit of their dignity, come what would, on this day
or on any other. So, with those inside the church looking on in
silence and the people outside keeping up an incessant din and
clatter, the poet of the rich was married to Tryntie Croegers by the
good Dominie Megapolensis.

[Illustration: A Woman's Costume

New Amsterdam]

But for all such a fair starting off this married life had an untimely
ending. Though Nicasius De Sille might win a wife by his poetry, it
seemed that he could not hold one. There were no poetic readings in
the house by the canal after the marriage, and the literature of the
town which had started out so bravely fell into a decline with the
languishing of De Sille's connubial bliss. Before the third year had
gone by, a commission of their friends was trying to tell the pair how
happy their lives should have been. But all the reasoning had no
effect, and the friends were forced to give it up and submit to a
decision, in very quaint wording, the tenor of which was that it was
acknowledged that there was no love between the two, and that the only
recommendation that could be made was that the property should be
divided equally and they go their several ways,--which they did. But
the earlier readings of poetry had sown the seed of still another
marriage. For at those readings, Anna, the youngest daughter of the
poet, had sat by her father's side, and young Hendrick Kip had sat by
his father's side, and about the time the commission of friends was
announcing its failure to patch up matters, Anna De Sille and Hendrick
Kip, all undismayed by the bad example, had decided to sit side by
side through the remainder of their lives.

[Illustration: Stuyvesant's Bouwerie House]

All this time De Sille was growing more and more rich, when there
came a great change. Of a sudden one day the English ship sailed into
the bay, and the English soldiers took possession of the town, and the
rule of the Dutch in New Amsterdam had passed, and the English became
governors of their province of New York. Then Stuyvesant went to live
in a little settlement he had built up and called Bouwerie Village,
which was far out on the Bouwerie Road, and Nicasius De Sille settled
down as a merchant, and little more was heard of him as a poet.

It was a simple enough thing to rename the town and call it after the
brother of an English king, but that made but little change in the
customs of the people. For many a long year it was to remain the
quaint, slow-going town it had been. Certainly no English brain or
hand added to the literature of this time, and the only bit of writing
which survives is the work of a Dutch minister.

In the eighteenth year after the coming of the English, when it had
come to be 1682, Dominie Henricus Selyns came to New York from
Holland. He had lived four years in the town when it was New
Amsterdam, and we have his own words for it that he found the
settlement scarcely altered a whit from the time he left. And now he
took charge of the little church in the fort, the same church where
Nicasius De Sille was married with such pomp. His congregation was
made up of much the same kind of people as of old, and perhaps it was
just as well, since he still preached in the Dutch language. The poems
he wrote, all in the Dutch language, were read as piously as were the
Bibles, and were quite at one with them in religious feeling. No one
then imagined that a day would come when a critic might hint that the
good Dominie's contributions to the early literature of New York might
be just a shade gloomy and despairing in their views of the
fearfulness of the after-life.

[Illustration: The Church in the Fort]

For quite twenty years the good Dominie lived to aid in fostering the
infant literature of infant New York, living a life as quiet and as
regular as any Dutch colonist could have demanded. On a Sunday morning
he preached in the church in the fort the long, heavy sermons that his
people loved. In the afternoon he rode away on the highway that led
into the country, past the Collect Pond, over the Kissing Bridge at
the Fresh Water, on to the stretch that was to grow into the Bowery,
through the forest till he came to the few clustering houses of the
Bouwerie Village, where Stuyvesant had spent his old age. In the
village church he preached of an afternoon,--the church which
Stuyvesant had built and beside which he was buried,--the church which
was to stand another hundred years and which was then to give way to a
house of worship to be called St. Mark's, which, in turn, two
centuries and more after Stuyvesant's day, was still to be found
standing in the core of a great metropolis.

[Illustration: Capt. Kidd's House]

Dominie Selyns lived long enough to see many changes. He lived to see
a Dutch prince become England's king; he lived to see New York rent
asunder through the overzealousness of one Jacob Leisler, who feared
lest the town should not recognize a king of Dutch blood; he lived to
see Lord Bellomont made Governor and riding through the streets in a
coach the gorgeousness of which astounded all; he lived to see
Captain William Kidd sail out of the harbor in the ship _Adventure
Galley_, with never a thought that a few years more would see him
executed as a pirate. And when Dominie Selyns died, bequeathing his
poems to swell the scanty literature of his times, the era of the
Dutch had well-nigh ended.




Chapter II

Before the Revolution


When William Bradford came to New York, in 1693, the town had grown so
large that it must needs have a night-watch--four men who each carried
a lantern, and who, strolling through the quiet streets, proclaimed at
the start of each hour that the weather was fair, or that the weather
was foul, and told beside that all was as well as it should be in
those nightly hours. More than this, the town went a step farther
towards the making of a metropolis, and lit the streets by night
(whether for the benefit of the night-watch or for some other the
records say not), by placing on a pole projecting from each seventh
house a lantern with a candle in it.

Pilgrims who year after year seek out the shrines that are connected
in one way or another with the literature of the city have worn a path
plain to be seen along the stone pavement about Trinity Church, a path
leading straight to a bit of greensward where, beside a gravel walk,
is the tomb of William Bradford. Although Bradford made slight
pretence of being a man of letters, he is remembered as one who loved
to foster literature. And, there being little enough left to recall
the writings of the seventeenth century, this tombstone has its many
visitors. The pilgrims who find their way to it have but half
completed their journey. If they leave the churchyard and stray on,
not going by way of crowded Wall Street, which would be the direct
course, but taking one of the more winding and narrow streets to the
south, they will come after a time to a thoroughfare where the
structure of the Elevated Road forms a bridge to convey heavy trains
that hurry past, stirring the air with constant vibration. In this
street, dark even when the sun shines brightest, is another reminder
of William Bradford,--a tablet in form, but quite as much a tombstone
as the other; for its brazen letters tell in true epitaph how he lived
here two hundred years gone by, and how here on this spot he set up
the first printing-press in the colony, and that here he did the
public printing, as well as such books and psalms, tracts and
almanacs, and such like things as he had time for. These were all
queer, rough-lettered, black-lined pamphlets, and none was more quaint
than John Clapp's _Almanac_, the first which came from the press and
the first written in the city.

John Clapp had time without end to write this almanac, and yet no one
ever knew just when he did it. He was the keeper of the inn in the
Bouwerie Village, and, having more idle moments than busy ones, he
spent most of his time on the broad stoop of the inn, pipe in mouth,
looking first at the house where Peter Stuyvesant had lived, then at
the dusty road leading away up country towards the King's Bridge in
one direction, and down country towards the town. But write it he did,
and Bradford printed it, and John Clapp was shrewd enough to advertise
himself well by writing in his Table of Contents concerning his
tavern:

     It is two miles from the city, and is generally the baiting
     place where gentlemen take leave of their friends, and where
     a parting glass or two of generous wine

          If well applied makes dull horses feel
          One spur in the head is worth two in the heel.

Again, in a Chronological Table, under the June date, he made the
interesting announcement:

     The 24th of this month is celebrated the feast of St. John
     the Baptist, in commemoration of which (and to keep up a
     happy union and lasting friendship by the sweet harmony of
     good society) a feast is held by the _Johns_ of this city,
     at John Clapp's in the Bouwerie, where any gentleman whose
     name is John may find a hearty welcome to join in concert
     with his namesakes.

In response to this there came such a large gathering as would make it
seem that all the townsmen had been baptized by one name.

It was by an odd slip that the only important book planned and partly
written in these last years of the seventeenth century was not printed
by Bradford. More than once had the Episcopal minister, the Rev. John
Miller, talked with this first printer of his plan for a history of
the colony which he was then writing. This would have been carried
out, beyond all doubt, if the clergyman had not just then decided to
go to England to settle some troublesome Church matters, taking his
history with him. As ill-fortune would have it, the ship in which he
sailed was captured by the French,--France then being at war with
England,--and rather than have the slightest bit of information
conveyed to the enemy through his means, the clergyman tossed the
precious pages into the sea. In the course of time, released by the
French, he reached England, and there rewrote the history from memory,
and drew for it a quaint map of the town as he had known it. Having
done so much he died, leaving his work to lie for more than a century
and a quarter unpublished, until, in 1843, a London bookseller put it
into print. The original, being sold again passed through several
hands until it finally found a resting-place in the British Museum,
where it is now preserved.

[Illustration: BROAD STREET, 1642.]

The early days of the eighteenth century saw the fitting out of the
first library to which the townsmen had general access--a library that
in the next fifty years was to change from the private property of the
Rev. John Sharpe into the Corporation Library, and later be chartered
as the Society Library, under which title it was to live to grow
richer and richer in literary treasures until it came to be called the
oldest library in America in the days when the city had grown far
beyond any bounds then thought of. In the first days of its existence,
the library occupied tiny quarters, quite large enough for all the
books it contained, in a room in the City Hall. This was not in the
old Stadt Huys of the Dutch by the waterside, for that was gone now,
but in a pretentious building facing the "broad street" that had been
made by the filling up of the Heere Graft of old. Other buildings
were set up at this same time. There was the new French Huguenot
church which had been in Petticoat Lane and was now rebuilt in the
newly laid-out street below the Maiden's Lane, called Pine Street from
the pine-trees there. Then there was the church called Trinity. Though
it, too, was a new church, the ground on which it stood had a history
that harked back to the very earliest Dutch times. For it was upon the
lower edge of the Annetje Jans Farm, the strip of land above the city
to the west which had been given to the husband of Annetje Jans far
back in the year 1635; that had been linked with another farm by
Governor Lovelace to make the Duke's Farm; and had become the King's
Farm when the duke after whom it was named became a king. And then, it
having become the Queen's Farm (and Queen Anne graciously presenting
it in the year 1703 to Trinity Church for all time), it took the last
name that it was to have and became the Church Farm--a name that was
to cling to it after every vestige of country green had disappeared
from its surface, and when houses had been set upon it as thick as the
stalks of grain that once ripened upon its rolling bosom.

[Illustration: "The Church called Trinity"]

The library in the City Hall was yet quite a new thing, the church
called Trinity had stood on the historic ground but a few years, the
French church was barely completed, and the town was so sprightly and
full of activity that 't is small wonder Madame Sarah Knight, coming
at such a time, should find much to wonder at and to write about. Her
coming marks another advance in literary New York, for Madame Knight
was a bookish woman come from far-off Boston town, and was a teacher
well versed in the "art of composition." She found all quite different
as compared with her own Massachusetts, where her father had been
sentenced to stand for two hours in the stocks, his conduct having
been found "lewd and unseemly" when, on a Sabbath day, after an
absence of three years, he had kissed his wife when she met him at his
own door-step! No wonder Madame Knight thought New York society quite
gay and reckless, for at this time Lord Cornbury governed, and he had
an odd fancy for wearing women's clothing indoors for his own
delectation and to the amusement of the citizens as he walked the
walls of the fort. Though Madame Knight met many persons of quality
and witnessed many interesting scenes, had her visit in the city been
extended, say for half a dozen years, until the coming of Governor
Robert Hunter, she would have met a man truly in full accord with her
ideas and tastes.

Had Governor Hunter's hopes been fulfilled there might have been a far
different writing of literary history. He came from England in the
summer of 1710, from the midst of a busy and troublous life, seeing
before him in imagination quiet and peaceful years with the wife he
cherished, and a career which should be helped on by his
correspondence with his English friends, Dean Swift, Richard Steele,
Joseph Addison, and some others. It would be an ideal life; he had
planned it well. But the repose he sought he scarce for an hour
realized. Undreamed-of turmoil kept him in a whirl of unsettledness.
And though the wife of his heart stood by his side, and he gained
comfort from knowing that nothing could turn her away, differences
with the Government at home, which refused to reimburse him for money
spent; wrangling with the Assembly, which refused money for the
conduct of affairs in the colony; the uprising of negro slaves; the
turbulent actions of unfriendly Indians--these things and others left
him never an hour for the work he had planned. It was a note of
despair that he sounded when he wrote to Swift across the sea:

     This is the finest air to live upon in the universe, and if
     our trees and birds could speak and our Assemblymen be
     silent, the finest conversation also. The soil bears all
     things, but not for me.... In a word, and to be serious, I
     have spent my time here in such torment and vexation that
     nothing hereafter in life can ever make amends for it.

Still, for all this, he found time for some writing, especially for a
play, the one called _Androborus_--The Man-eater,--in which he wrote
in such a bantering, humorous, satirical manner of the colonial
officers as to set the town going with laughter. From this on he got
along better and the people came to appreciate their Governor.
Gradually there centred about the house in the fort a "Court Circle,"
where the Lady Hunter shone brightly, not alone because she was the
first lady of the province, nor because her husband was Governor and a
writer, but because others came to know her as a loving, lovely, and
lovable woman. But when it looked as though the Governor was to have
at last the ease and rest and quiet he had hoped for from the
beginning, Lady Hunter died! This was the worst that could happen to
Robert Hunter. There was nothing more for him to live and struggle
for, he said. He resigned his office and, before many years, his life.

At this time of the "Court Circle," a mild, quiet man, the son of a
Presbyterian minister, came from Philadelphia to visit the Governor.
And no one could foresee that this Cadwallader Colden would remain
during the rest of his life and be, for almost half a century, the
leader of literary New York.

Colden came to be a friend of William Bradford, as he had been of
Hunter, and watched his work with deep interest. He often advised
Bradford when that first printer of New York published the _New York
Gazette_, in 1725, the first newspaper in the city, and upheld him a
few years later when the second newspaper was issued by Bradford's old
apprentice boy, Peter Zenger, who had become his rival.

In the first ten years that Colden lived in New York he wrote
diligently, and published his _History of the Five Nations_, an
exhaustive work telling of the powerful Indian tribes, of their forms
of government, and their wars. This was one of the earliest books of
importance, and he was planning a second part of this same history
when, in the year 1732, Cosby came to be Governor. In after years
Colden told how his studies and his writings were interrupted by the
coming of the new and lively Governor.

[Illustration:

Numb. 425

THE

New-York Gazette,

From _December_ 10, to Monday, _December_ 17, 1733.]

And now it seemed as though there were to be dissensions in the city.
There was trouble with the Governor; trouble with Peter Zenger, who
wished to print what the king's representatives did not want printed;
trouble about who should be Chief Justice. But when these were
straightened out there began a season of festivity, and during one
entire winter there were entertainments at which the culture, the
refinement, and the wit of the province gathered. These were days of
splendor, when women wore gay brocades and arranged their hair in a
variety of bewildering, towering, and fantastic shapes; when wide
skirts were in the heyday of their fashion; when tight-lacing was in
vogue; when men wore enormous wigs, and attired themselves in many
colors, adorning themselves with buttons of silver--large, and
decorated with the initials of the wearer.

In the height of this brilliant season there came from England, to
visit the Governor's family, Lord Augustus Fitzroy, son of that Duke
of Grafton who was Chamberlain to King George II. He was received with
all the ceremony due to his rank. The Mayor, the Recorder, and some
other city officials met, and presented to him the freedom of the city
in a box of burnished gold. Soon Lord Augustus had made himself so
vastly agreeable to one of the daughters of Governor Cosby that there
was talk of a marriage. But everybody agreed that this could not be,
for the match was beneath him, according to the ideas of English
society. Still, the young man was determined, the young woman was
inclined, and the Governor's wife was a strategist. So one mild
summer's night the young nobleman, resplendent in gay clothes, with a
couple of his friends, assisted Dominie Campbell over the fort wall,
where they found the young woman waiting, and there in the silence and
the darkness the marriage occurred. There was some stern talk of what
ought to be done to Dominie Campbell, and wonderment as to what the
Duke of Grafton would say, but nothing serious came of it, although
the romantic wedding was the talk of the town for many a year.

Cadwallader Colden lived down by the waterside near the fort wall over
which Dominie Campbell was dragged. And in his house there, when
Cosby's rule quieted down, Colden got to his studies again. He lived
until the days of the Revolution were at hand; lived to exercise the
duties of Governor in a stormy period; lived to see the town rent by
turmoil and political rancor; lived to be hated by many people for
loyalty to a king they would no longer serve. Quite to the end of
his life he remained a leader, and, dying, left writings on history,
medicine, geology, botany, metaphysics, and other learned subjects.

[Illustration: KING'S COLLEGE, ABOUT 1773.]

It was in this midway time between the days of Cosby and the period of
the Revolution that William Smith lived and wrote. Not so marked a
figure in literature as Colden, nor so profound a student; not one to
leave so strong and lasting an imprint, but well to be remembered as a
writer whose birthplace was New York. Born in the year after Colden
published his _History of the Five Nations_, he attained a high place
as a lawyer, giving his attention to the political and legal records.
When still a young man he was one of those who spoke at the ceremony
of the laying of the corner-stone of King's College--which was to be
in existence a century and a half later as Columbia University. For
many years he lived close by Colden and intercourse would have led to
mutual good, but the two were not friendly after Smith wrote a history
of the city and Colden criticised it.

Although William Smith was one of the earliest writers to own New York
as his birthplace, he would not join in a revolt against the king whom
he had served all his life. So he accepted the post of Chief Justice
of Canada, leaving others to become the writers of the Revolution.




Chapter III

The Poet of the Revolution


In the far down-town business section of New York, there is a street
so short that you can walk its entire length in ten minutes or less
time. It leads from the park where the City Hall is, straight to the
river. Beginning at the tall buildings where the newspapers have their
homes, it continues along between the warehouses of leather merchants
and the solid stonework of the bridge that crosses from the Manhattan
to the Brooklyn shore; leads to the open space at the top of Cherry
Hill, then makes a steep descent as though about to plunge deep into
the river. For much of its length it is a constant scene of noise and
bustle and disorder--that is, in the daylight hours. At night, when
it is silent and deserted, it suggests the time, far back in the year
1678, when it was a country lane some distance from the city, a
by-path leading from the house of Jacob Leisler to the river. It was
Frankfort Lane then, Leisler calling it so as a reminder of the German
town of his birth. Now it has become Frankfort Street. Leisler's
garden was close upon the spot where the street touches the parkside,
and here Leisler was executed in 1691, a martyr to the cause of
constitutional liberty.

The lane was beginning to assume the proportions of a street in the
year 1752, when there lived in one of the dainty houses that fronted
it the family of Pierre Freneau, the last of a long line of Huguenots.
There were Freneaus who fought with the Huguenots at La Rochelle, and
there were Freneaus still living in that ancient city when the
revocation of the Edict of Nantes forced so many to strange lands. The
Freneau family, refugees from their native land, prospered in America,
and a son born in the Frankfort Street house in this year 1752 gave
historic interest to the name. The boy was christened Philip, and came
to be called the Poet of the Revolution.

Philip Freneau struggled through babyhood in Frankfort Street, and
just as he was able to walk was whisked away to a farm in New Jersey,
where his father had built a house, calling it Mount Pleasant after
the old homestead in La Rochelle.

Quite within the throw of a stone of Frankfort Street, and in the very
year of Philip Freneau's birth, was born Eliza Schuyler, who with the
passing of years was to marry and bear the name of Eliza Bleecker and
the title of the first poetess of New York.

[Illustration: The Collect]

In her childhood, the future poetess had a favorite walk over the bit
of rolling ground to the south of Frankfort Street, the spot called
Golden Hill, which a few years later was to be trampled by many
soldiers, where the tall grass was to be reddened by the blood of
patriots--the first blood shed in the Revolution. She strolled hand in
hand with her father over the green Common, which was to become the
City Hall Park. Sometimes, in the mid-summer, she was taken on
excursions to the shores of a pleasant lake, called the Collect,
quite a journey from the city. It was there that John Fitch's boat
sailed years before Fulton's successful boat was launched into the
Hudson. When the city outgrew its early bounds, the lake was drained
and solid ground made, and the Tombs Prison rose in gloomy majesty
where the deep waters had been.

[Illustration: THE DEBTORS' PRISON.]

Eliza Schuyler preserved a lively memory of playing about a little
square frame building on the Common, and though she never spoke of it
by name it was the first Poor House of the city. She wrote, too, of a
certain day when she went to the Common with her father--he was an
important man that day and served on a committee--to see laid the
first stone of another building. It was only a Debtors' Prison, but it
was looked upon as the most beautiful structure in the city for many a
day. For it was in the main patterned after the temple of Diana of
Ephesus. The townsmen of those early days admired the building, and
would have grieved if they could have foreseen that the day would come
when city officials would forget that the old prison had been copied
from so perfect a model; would forget that it had been a military
prison when the British held possession of the city; would forget that
many a brave officer of the Continental Army and many a true patriot
soldier had passed bitter days there, and dying had left memories of
sentiment and poetry and historic interest hovering about the old
place.

Still, though it could not be foretold, the day did come when it was
no longer a prison but had become the Hall of Records, when it was
called an ugly and unsightly structure which obstructed the view of
newer and taller ones--buildings that Tammany architects considered
the perfection of beauty perhaps on account of their costliness. So it
must be torn down.

At the age between girlhood and womanhood, Eliza Schuyler left New
York to live in the village of Tomhannock, and when news of her again
reached her friends in the city she was the wife of John J. Bleecker.
Only twice after that did she revisit the scenes of her early life,
and it was not until her death that the writings of this first poetess
of New York became well known and popular.

The short and peaceful life of Eliza Bleecker was nearing an end
before--his college days being over--Philip Freneau again trod the
streets of New York. Already his tireless pen was at work, the pen
that was to aid the cause of the Revolution. But when it looked to him
as though his country would not be able to throw off the kingly yoke,
he decided on a journey. He passed two years in the West Indies
writing of the _Beauties of Santa Cruz_ and the _House of Night_. Then
a longing for the home from which he received scant word came upon
him. He started homeward, only to be lured from his course by the
beauties of Bermuda, where he fell in love with the Governor's
daughter, remembered in his verse as the "Fair Amanda." He was still
writing, lolling his time away beneath tropical skies, when tardy news
came that the colonies had declared themselves free. Swiftly he threw
off the languor of repose, of love, of romance, and returned home.
The charm of the sea life was on him then, so taking out letters of
reprisal from the Continental Congress, Freneau the poet sailed over
the sea, actively aiding his country's cause by capturing British
merchantmen and sinking British ships for a year, until in 1780 he
had a ship of his own built. But on her first voyage disaster befell
her, and almost within sight of land the _Aurora_ was captured. When
Philip Freneau next saw New York it was as a prisoner on the hulk
_Scorpion_, as she lay anchored alongside another notorious
prison-ship, the _Jersey_, close by the Battery shore.

There never was such an energetic prisoner. Each moment was employed
for his country, if not with his sword at least with his pen, which
was quite as powerful a weapon.

[Illustration: The British Prison-Ship]

In those days of wretched misery and suffering, within view of the
city by day, in the noisome ship's hold by night, Freneau thought out
his best-remembered poem, _The British Prison-Ship_ and many another
line which in the later days of the Revolution was to rouse American
feeling; verse that was to be distributed to the American soldiers, to
be read by them on the march and by the light of the camp-fires; lines
that were to commemorate the victories and the heroism of the soldiers
of the Revolution; lines ridiculing each separate act of the British.

New York, in this time that the poet Freneau lay a prisoner, was not
as it had been in his college days. The battle of Long Island had been
fought, and Washington and his army had been driven from New York. And
on the night of the British entry a great fire had started in the
lower part of the city, swept away the house where Bradford's press
had been, leaped across Broadway and laid Trinity Church a mass of
ruins scattered over the churchyard where Freneau's father lay buried.

The British soldiers were quartered in the public buildings; the
British officers had taken possession of the houses deserted by
wealthy patriots; the Middle Dutch Church, which had been the
architectural pride of the city, had become a riding school for
troopers.

[Illustration: The Middle Dutch Church]

There was a red-painted wooden building in John Street, a few feet
from Broadway, the only theatre in the city. The actors had closed it,
and fled at the coming of the British. But the house was open again
now, and the British officers played at mimic war between the
intervals of real battles.

No one threw himself more heartily into these performances than Major
John André, who was so soon to give up his life for his country. He
even wrote some of the speeches used by the actors, and one of the
poems he wrote for Rivington's _Gazetteer_ was printed while he was
away on his last mission, conferring with Benedict Arnold on the banks
of the Hudson.

After the treason was discovered, Arnold sought a safe retreat within
the British lines at New York, and lived for a time in a solid,
picturesque little house by the Bowling Green. It stood on a grassy
slope that stretched down to the water's edge a few boat lengths from
where the _Scorpion_ lay with the poet prisoner on board.

There was a picket fence, painted white, on one side of the green
slope, and Sergeant John Champe once hid his men behind it to carry
off Arnold when he should take his nightly walk by the waterside, an
attempt that failed through Arnold's changing his quarters on the
selfsame day.

When the Revolution was over, Freneau was again in New York, which
slowly recovered from the ravages of war. Hanover Square was a
favorite haunt of his. He has left the record that he loved to linger
in that open space, where might be seen a mingling of business and
home life. Freneau liked it, for there books were printed and sold,
and, too, it was the "Newspaper Row" of the town. This open space had
been at first Van Brugh Street, taking its name from Johannes
Pietersen Van Brugh, a wealthy Hollander whose home faced the square
for close upon half a century. It bore his name until in 1714, when
with the accession of George I. of Hanover it took the name of Hanover
Square.

In a house facing this square, Bradford printed the first newspaper,
and though in Freneau's time it was still standing, a more stately
building was to take its place and bear a tablet telling of the old
one. It was here that the other early newspapers came into existence:
Parker's _Weekly Post-Boy_, in 1742; Weyman's _New York Gazette_, in
1759; Holt's _New York Journal_, in 1766. It was here, too, that was
prominently displayed the "Sign of the Bible and Crown," before the
house of Hugh Gaine. Freneau had flayed this man in his verse many a
time.

Gaine was an Irishman who published the _New York Mercury_, and
changed his politics to whichever side was uppermost--Whig to-day,
Tory to-morrow. He printed Freneau's satires against Great Britain as
a Whig, and then as a Tory fell under the power of Freneau's pen, for
Freneau hated inconstancy quite as much as he did Tory principles.

Then there was close at hand the home of Rivington's _New York
Gazetteer_. This Rivington, failing as a bookseller in London,
planted his sign in Hanover Square and proudly proclaimed himself as
the only London bookseller in America. He established his Tory
newspaper, the _New York Gazetteer_, and had it wrecked by patriots,
who threw the furniture out into Hanover Square and moulded the type
into bullets. It was he who printed the poems of André; who after the
war gave up a Tory paper and was strong for the cause of the new
nation and was in consequence denounced by Freneau.

Freneau smiled to see the signs of Gaine and Rivington changed to suit
the views of the new republic and rivalling one another in their show
of patriotism. Tempted into Gaine's bookstore by the display of
volumes, he chanced upon a friend who called him by name. And old Hugh
Gaine, turning slowly about at the sound of a name he knew so well,
stared at the enemy he had never seen:

"Is your name Freneau?" he asked. And the poet answered:

"Yes, Philip Freneau."

For just a moment the bookseller hesitated, then said:

"I want to shake your hand; you have given me and my friend Rivington
a lasting reputation."

It was in one of these very bookstores that Freneau met Lindley Murray
in the year after the peace was declared. From their first meeting the
two were friends. Murray had accumulated a fortune as a salt merchant
on Long Island during the British occupation. Strong patriot as
Freneau was, he was attracted to the son at first through the memory
of the parent, for it was Lindley Murray's mother, living on Murray
Hill, who had saved Putnam's troops from being trapped by the British.
The friendship of Freneau and Lindley Murray might have ripened,
but that in the year after their meeting Murray went to England, where
he was to devote himself, for his own amusement, to horticulture, in a
pretty little garden beside his home near York, and where he wrote his
famous grammar for a young ladies' school.

[Illustration:

1. WILLIAM SMITH.
2. PETER STUYVESANT.
3. PHILIP FRENEAU.
4. THOMAS PAINE.
5. JOEL BARLOW.]

Even in the lifetime of Freneau, changes came to Hanover Square. For
more than half a century it was the "Newspaper Row," then it gradually
became the dry-goods district, then settled down to a general centre
for wholesale houses. At one corner of the square lived for a time
Jean Victor Moreau, the French General, after he had been banished for
supposed participation in the plot of Cadoudal and Pichegru against
the life of the First Consul.

[Illustration: Fraunces' Tavern]

In the years that followed the Revolution, Freneau spent much of his
time in sea trips, but he was in the city again when George Washington
took the oath of office as the first President of the United States at
the Federal Hall in Wall Street; and was in the quaint St. Paul's
Chapel, then quite a new structure, when Washington went there on the
day of his inauguration. In the same year, Freneau lived for a time in
Wall Street, close by the house where Alexander Hamilton lived, who in
those days was a figure in literary New York by reason of his writing
of the _Federalist_ papers. That was thirteen years before Hamilton
occupied his country house, "The Grange," far up the island, which
was to be still standing a hundred years later, when the city had
crept up to and beyond it, and left it where One Hundred and
Forty-first Street crosses Convent Avenue. Close by, in narrow Nassau
Street, when Freneau lived in Wall, was the home of a man who had been
his classmate in college. This was Aaron Burr. He, too, in a few
years, was to leave the humble house in Nassau Street, to live in the
Richmond Hill house, where the British Commissary Mortier had lived,
and from which Burr walked forth on an eventful morning in 1804 to
fight a mortal combat with Hamilton on the Jersey shore.

[Illustration: Broad St. and Federal Hall]

In 1791 Philip Freneau was in Philadelphia editing the _National
Gazette_, the strongest political paper of his day, memorable for
partisan abuse and for such bitter attacks on the administration that
Washington alluded to its editor as "that rascal Freneau." The paper
continued under Freneau until 1793, when he returned to New York for a
time.

[Illustration: Richmond Hill]

In those days of 1793 there were three or four detached houses in
Cedar Street close by Nassau. In the one nearest the corner, on any
day of the week a man, slender and tall, with eyes that were keen and
gray, with dress always in perfect taste, with broad-brimmed hat and
queue, could be seen. He came from this house and walked over to
Broadway, and his neighbors watched regularly for his going and his
coming. He was Noah Webster, editor of _The Minerva_, a paper at that
time devoted to the support of President Washington's administration.
His name was to become a household word, for his paper became the
_Commercial Advertiser_ (that lived and throve even in the twentieth
century), and after he had left the city he wrote a world-famed
dictionary.

The poetic muse hovered closest about Philip Freneau in the days of
stirring scenes and momentous events. The Poet of the Revolution was
less active when quieter days came. Still he continued to pass a life
of restless energy, and lived far into another century and long after
many another writer had arisen to eclipse him in the literary life of
New York.




Chapter IV

In the Days of Thomas Paine


When the eighteenth century was within two years of its close, a group
of men, perhaps half a dozen in all, made up the writers of New York.

The city then lay between the park (a name that had just been bestowed
upon the Common of old) and the Battery; with Broadway, the main
thoroughfare of the town, sending out tendrils of narrow streets to
tangle and turn about themselves in such persistent fashion that they
were never to be straightened out. Quite abruptly, where the park
began, Broadway dwindled from a street to a lane, but with a strong
branch thoroughfare to the east which, with the advent of years, was
to become Park Row. It was not a new thoroughfare by any means, since,
as far back as the days of the Dutch Governors, it had been the one
road that led up through the forested island.

There faced the road, and so quite of necessity faced the park as
well, a square building, its front so taken up with windows and doors
as to cause wonder that there should be any pretence whatsoever of a
front wall. Not an attractive building, with these many windows always
staring, like eyes, across the road into the park, but one to be
remembered because, for one reason or another, it could well be called
the literary centre of the town. Here it stood, the first Park
Theatre, towering above its neighbors, glistening in its newness.

[Illustration: The Corner Stone of the Park Theatre

The corner stone of
this Theatre was laid
on the 5th day of May
AD 1795

Jacob Morton     }
Wm. Henderson    } Commissioners
Carlile Pollock  }

Lewis Hallem     }
John Hodgkinson  } managers]

It was rare in the days when the Park Theatre was new, just as it is
rare nowadays, for writers to be of a practical turn of mind. But in
this little group, oddly enough, there was one man of business. He was
the proprietor of the theatre, and although he wrote plays, and
painted pictures, and wrote books, William Dunlap was a man of
affairs. His home was around the corner in quiet Ann Street, which in
another hundred years came to be a very noisy street indeed, crowded
with venders of every sort of odds and ends that can be imagined. A
block away, around another corner in Beekman Street, on the south side
below Nassau, was Dunlap's home when he had given up the theatre,
settled down to literature, and got to writing his important books,
the _American Theatre_ and the _History, Rise, and Progress of the
Arts of Design in the United States_. While he was yet managing the
theatre, Dunlap's favorite strolling-place was up along the parkside,
past the Brick Church, and so on a few steps across Nassau Street to
where Spruce Street has its start. On any pleasant afternoon he could
be found standing on that corner, for a time at least, before the
door of Martling's Tavern, where the Tammany Society had its first
home. Looking at that first Wigwam after this lapse of time, it seems
picturesque enough, and it must in truth have been so, for the enemies
of the Tammany Society were in the habit of referring to it as the
"Pig-pen." A frame building, low, rough, and unpainted, with a
bar-room at one end, a kitchen at the other, and between the two a
"long room," some steps lower than the general floor,--that was
Martling's.

[Illustration: THE FIRST TAMMANY WIGWAM, CORNER NASSAU AND SPRUCE
STREETS.]

In the tap-room at Martling's, after an evening in which the untimely
death of George Frederick Cooke had been discussed, Dunlap announced
his intention of writing a life of his actor-friend, who then lay in a
new-made grave in St. Paul's Churchyard. The book was written, and
though few remember the volume now, it was widely read and served to
keep alive the actor's memory. Since that time the grave has been
cared for, and the marble tombstone, later erected by Edmund Kean,
still stands amid the bushes close by the entrance door of the Chapel.

It was in the year 1810 that Cooke played at the Park Theatre, the
first foreign "star" to come to the city and to attract the
townspeople in such wise that they almost mobbed the playhouse in
their efforts to see him. It was this same Cooke, who, hearing many
speak of a young actor who had played there the year before, said, "I
should have liked to have seen this Payne of yours." Cooke saw him the
next year, and they appeared together in this same Park Theatre, Payne
playing Edgar to Cooke's Lear.

The name of John Howard Payne did not then have the significance that
it came to have later. For he was known only as a youth who had acted
Norval in the tragedy of _Douglas_ with such fiery earnestness as to
be proclaimed the "Young American Roscius." Who could have foreseen
that adventurous "boy actor" grown to manhood, and writing a song that
was to live and be known the world over by reason of its appeal to all
hearts?

In Pearl Street, scarce a foot of which is left untrod by the
footsteps of the writers of the city, Payne was born. Around the
modest house that bore the number 33, near to Whitehall Street, he
first toddled with baby steps, and the nearby "broad" street, where
the canal had been, was his first journey when he could walk. His
parents moved to East Hampton, on Long Island, so early in his
childhood, and so many of his childish days were passed in the fields
there while his father taught school in the Clinton Academy, that
East Hampton is often spoken of as the place of his birth. But for all
that the "lowly thatched cottage" of his song was there, and for all
that much of his later life was passed in foreign countries, Payne
loved the city of his birth and took occasion many times to say so.

In London, when ill-luck bore hardest upon him, he wrote _Clari, the
Maid of Milan_, and gave _Home, Sweet Home_ to the heroine as her
principal song. He received the honors of New York when he returned
for a brief period, twenty-two years after his boyish triumph at the
Park Theatre, and was so affectionately remembered that when, a decade
later, he died in far-away Tunis, it was felt that he should not be
left in a foreign land. But, although this sentiment was strong, it
was not until 1883 that his body was brought to America. Then, for a
day, the coffin lay in state in the City Hall, in the Governor's Room,
close by a window from which a view could be had of where the old Park
Theatre had stood, just across the stretch of green sward. And the
people, in honor of the man whose one song had thrilled an entire
world, filed past the sealed coffin by the thousands, and shed many a
tear that day.

One of the tortuous streets springing from Broadway, starting close by
Trinity Church, winding away to the east, and mingling with other
streets until brought to an abrupt halt by the river, was called, and
is still called, Pine Street. In the first days of the nineteenth
century it bore no suggestion, save in name, of a forest that once
stretched above the city. In those good old days when the Dutch held
full sway, Cornelius van Tienhoven was the bookkeeper of the West
India Company, and when he married the step-daughter of Jan Jansen
Damen, the bride brought him as dower a slice of this forest. When,
later, a clearing was cut through the wood it was called Tienhoven's
Street. But such a name rang too strongly Dutch for those who served
an English king, and when the English came they quickly called it King
Street. And so it remained until after the Revolution, when, in
remembrance of the Dutch forest, the name was changed to Pine Street.

Now, whether it was pure accident or whether he searched and found the
prettiest street in all the town, it is nevertheless a fact that here
Dr. Elihu Hubbard Smith had fixed his home, scarce more than a block
from Trinity Church, and here he wrote much of his verse. Here, too,
in his house, on many a Tuesday evening, met the Friendly Club, and
at these meetings, following the custom of the club from the time that
Washington lived in the city, each member in turn read a passage from
some favorite author, thus giving impetus to the conversation. In Dr.
Smith's parlor, joining in these discussions, sat William Dunlap,
Charles Brockden Brown, James Kent, Joseph Dennie, and all the writers
of the circle. It was Dr. Smith who wrote the prologue for the Park
Theatre upon its opening, and not a member of the Friendly Club but
attended the first performance.

[Illustration: MAP OF STREETS IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK IN 1827.]

It is small wonder that Charles Brockden Brown was the foremost member
of the club. He had just claim. Thrusting aside criticism and advice,
ignoring the fact that he was an invalid facing the hardship that must
be overcome, he stood forth as the first writer in America to support
himself by his pen alone. The Bar, even though there was ever so fair
a prospect of his earning a living by it, could not attract him
against his natural desire. The writings of this determined genius
could not but be successful. Seeking no friends, but having many,
preferring the single companionship of Dr. Smith, with whom he lived,
Charles Brockden Brown wrote his novel, _Wieland_, and followed it in
the next three years with _Ormond_, _Edgar Huntley_, _Arthur Mervyn_,
_Jane Talbot_, and _Clara Howard_. Many a man of the pen, in
admiration of the iron will of this first American novelist, finds a
delight in thinking of him and in following his footsteps along Pine
Street and the lower end of Broadway to the Battery.

[Illustration: The Post Office

William St.]

In the days of bereavement following the death of Dr. Smith, the
companion of Brown's solitude was Joseph Dennie. Often in the
intervals of work they wandered through the quiet park, and many a
time they knelt together in the Brick Church, a square beyond the Park
Theatre, with the memory of their dead companion strong upon them. The
shadow of their friend's death was still over them when they parted,
and Joseph Dennie went to Philadelphia to start his magazine, _The
Portfolio_, which was to cause the name of "The Lay Preacher" to ring
through the land. He was in Philadelphia when Brown, in 1803, started
_The Literary Magazine and American Register_. But the next year he
was in New York again, occasionally joining in a literary partnership
in which there was a third member now, for Brown had married the
daughter of Dr. Linn, the Presbyterian minister. The years rolled on,
and Brown sought to fight off death by terrific work. But death only
clutched him the tighter. The strolls with Elizabeth, his
gentle-hearted wife, grew shorter and shorter and less frequent, until
they ceased altogether six years after his marriage, and another
landmark in the literary history of the city had gone down.

There was one stately and studious member of the Friendly Club who, it
is recorded, could seldom be persuaded to go to the Park Theatre
except on the "great nights." James Kent, then a Professor of Law at
Columbia College, when not at work (those were rare moments indeed),
loved best to wander over the College grounds. These are now lost
beyond all tracing in the overcrowding between the City Hall and
Hudson River. Then it was a delightful country spot. When Professor
Kent did not walk on the College grounds by the riverside, he strolled
up Broadway past the hospital with his friend, Dr. David Hosack, and
the two discussed at length the Elgin Botanical Garden that the
physician had just laid out three miles above the city. It was this
James Kent who came to be Chancellor of New York and whose memory
lives in his _Commentaries on American Law_.

Beyond the city, separated from it in summer by a mile of marshy and
untilled land, in winter by a dreary waste with a single road leading
across a snow-bound way, lay the village of Greenwich. A dreamy little
country place that had been an Indian village before the settling of
New Amsterdam; with lines of peaked-roof houses on zig-zagged lanes,
and now and again, in the midst of a farm-like garden, a rambling
house of stone, with great square windows and gables enough for half a
dozen houses. The village might have been thousands of miles away from
New York for all the likeness it bore to it.

On a dusty and rarely travelled lane, that led from the village
towards the city, lived a man who had won the hearts of Americans by
writing _Common Sense_, but who lived to reap their hatred by writing
_The Age of Reason_, a deistic argument against Christianity. In the
quiet village his house was pointed out as the abode of a friendless
man, and when they spoke of him the villagers whispered the dread
name--Tom Paine.

There he lived with Madame Bonneville and her two sons, the only
companions he cared to have near him save his own thoughts. In that
picturesque spot he was fully content to pass his final days in
solitude and marked contrast to a life of energy and excitement.

It is close upon a century since that time, and the pilgrim feet that
seek to follow Paine through Greenwich Village must walk Bleecker
Street (the dusty lane in much changed form), must pass Grove Street,
and the fourth house from the corner, on the north side, walking
towards the east, is Paine's. It was humble enough in the days when he
lived there. It is far humbler now in contrast to the buildings that
have grown up about it. A two-story frame house, the ground floor is
made into a store, as though it made an effort to keep up with the
business character of the street. Two brick structures rise above it
on each side and seem to have forced the roof to a frightful angle, so
different is it from its new neighbors. Once Joel Barlow went to see
Paine there, and the two spent almost an entire day beside a front
window, talking of many things. Paine recalled the troublous days of
the French Revolution, when he had written his _Age of Reason_ in the
prison of the Luxembourg, and had given it to Barlow to find a
publisher. The author of the _Columbiad_ often spoke of the visit
later.

The dusty road where the house stood, even though it was little
travelled, came to be too noisy a place for Paine, for in his illness
even the chance passer-by irritated him. So he moved away to a house
in a nearby field, so far from the road that he found absolute quiet.
In after days Grove Street swept this home away, and another building,
numbered 59, is pointed out as the place where Paine died shortly
after his removal.

The hatred of many people followed Thomas Paine even after death, and
there could be no rest for an advocate of infidel opinions in a town
where dwelt descendants of stern Huguenots. His body was taken to New
Rochelle, and there, refused burial in hallowed ground, was finally
laid to rest outside the town, in a corner of the farm given to him by
the State in recognition of his services in the cause of the colonies
against the mother country. Ten years later, William Cobbett, the
English Radical, an ardent admirer of Paine, visited New Rochelle,
and, seeing the neglected grave by the wayside, had the bones dug up
one night and spirited away to England. In another twenty years the
followers of Thomas Paine had grown in number, and the Paine
Historical Society erected a monument over the empty grave by the
roadside. But on this spot, where no rest had been permitted him in
life or in death, it seems rather to mock than to bless his grave.




Chapter V

The City that Irving Knew


Stretching from Broadway towards the east, starting from the
ivy-covered walls of the Chapel of St. Paul--here lay the scenes of
Washington Irving's childhood. Golden Hill was the name given to this
district, long before Irving was born; called so because of its golden
appearance in the autumn days. It was a wondrously beautiful place,
and set squarely upon the hill-top was an inn that, in the days of the
Revolution, came to be a meeting-place for patriots. Even now, when
the glories of Golden Hill seem quite forgotten, there are those who
love to walk its crowded ways, and who firmly believe that it came by
its name in prophecy of the golden flower of literature one day to be
born close by it.

[Illustration: Golden Hill Inn]

The lane that once had its course up the grain-covered hill is there
yet; now, a crowded, dismal thoroughfare bearing the name of William
Street. It is well to start with this old lane, partly because it is
the oldest street in the Golden Hill district, and partly because the
Golden Hill inn of old still stands upon it: a squatty building built
of narrow bricks that were brought from Holland, with a tall chimney
like none of its neighbors; a venerable house full of cracks and
crevices, carved mantels, open fireplaces, wide doorways; made over to
conform to modern business ideas, but not conforming to these very
well; painted and patched up to look new, but looking quite its age to
any one with half an eye for architecture.

Almost opposite this inn of Golden Hill, midway of the block between
Fulton and John streets, there stood in the year 1783 a quaint little
two-storied dwelling with high-backed roof. One morning the patrons of
the inn had a bit to gossip about. It was a year for gossip anyway,
for the War of the Revolution was near its close. The talk was of a
child that had been born to the Irving family over the way, and who
was to be called Washington in honor of the man so well named the
"Father of his Country." Before another year the Irving family moved
into a house next to the inn on the north and separated from it only
by a garden. In this house Washington Irving spent his youth. Close by
he was baptized, in the Chapel of St. George. The Chapel is gone now,
but where Beekman Street crosses Cliff, on the front of a building
appear in raised letters the words "St. George Building," that show
the spot where it once stood.

Not far off is the place where the John Street Theatre was, where
Irving went with his friend James K. Paulding, who was himself to make
a name in the literature of the city. Irving's parents were not given
to theatre-going, but Irving, when the family prayers had been said
and he had been sent to bed, ofttimes crept out of the gable window,
slid down the slanting roof, dropped to the ground, and stole away. He
went, just as now following in his footsteps you can go, past the old
inn, around the next corner where, on a house wall, is a tablet
reciting the departed glories of Golden Hill, then on a few steps
until you reach, close by Broadway, a dreary arcade. Walk through the
arcade and you will find it heavy with the sounds of workmen and
machines. The arcade was a covered way leading to the playhouse, and
is all that remains of the theatre.

[Illustration: St. George's Chapel

Beekman St.]

Two minutes' walk away in Ann Street was Mrs. Ann Kilmaster's school,
where Irving studied. Ann Street is only three blocks long and far
from an inviting spot at any point, but here, in the last block of its
length, it dwindles to half the width it had in starting.

A score of steps from the school, at the northwest corner of Ann
Street and William, Irving lived with his mother after his father's
death. The house is no longer there, but there is one just like it
five houses farther along William Street, that stood there in Irving's
time.

In the Ann Street house, when he was a law clerk, he did his first
writing, the sketches signed "Jonathan Oldstyle," and published in the
_Morning Chronicle_, which was conducted by his brother Peter. From
this house, while still a lad, he loved to wander down the streets
that stretched over the eastern slope of Golden Hill, and spent hours
on the piers watching the ships loading and unloading, dreaming of the
foreign ports where they had touched, hoping that he might one day see
the shores of those far-away lands. For even in his boyhood the
longing for travel was strong upon him.

He was still a law clerk, and still living in this Ann Street house,
when he sat in an upper room with his brother William and James K.
Paulding, and they planned a magazine of their own. They went to see
David Longworth, the printer, in his shop beside the Park
Theatre,--"Dusky Davie" they called him, after a song that was popular
at the time,--and after many conferences and much secret doing the
three stripling writers started the sparkling _Salmagundi_ on its way,
with the avowed purpose "to instruct the young, reform the old,
correct the town, and castigate the age." Paulding was the "Launcelot
Langstaff" of the publication, and William Irving was "Pindar
Cockloft" the poet.

To the west of Golden Hill, Cortlandt Street extends to the river. In
a house on that street close by Broadway, the three writers of
_Salmagundi_ spent much time at the home of the Fairlie sisters.
There lived Mary Fairlie, known to _Salmagundi_ readers as "Sophia
Sparkle," and who married Cooper the tragic actor.

In the Ann Street house most of the _Knickerbocker History of New
York_ was written. Washington Irving and his brother Peter were to
write it as an extravagant burlesque on Dr. Samuel Mitchill's _Picture
of New York_, then a very popular and learned work. But Peter Irving
was forced to Europe by ill health in 1808, and Washington settled
down to the history, changing its plan and scope. Ten minutes' walk to
the north of where Irving lived in Ann Street is a little park--a
green spot that has taken the place of the squalid Mulberry Bend slum.
In Mulberry Street opposite the park was the location of the imaginary
Independent Columbian Hotel where Dietrich Knickerbocker was supposed
to have lived, and left his manuscript in payment of his board bill.

But by far the most important house connected with this part of
Irving's life is gone now. This was in Broadway where Leonard Street
now crosses. A square house of many rooms, indeed it was a mansion in
the city of 1809. Here lived Josiah Ogden Hoffman, the protector of
the youthful author, in whose office Irving came by his law training.
In the Hoffman mansion, Irving courted Matilda Hoffman, the lawyer's
fair daughter; here he saw her sicken and grow more feeble day by day;
here she died, and so ended the romance of his life. He never
mentioned her name in after days and could not bear to hear it spoken.
But she lived in his memory, and he never married. In the depths of
his seclusion, during the first months of his sorrow, he finished the
_History_. But his heart was not in the laughter of the book, and he
made joy for others out of his own sorrow.

Two years after this, Irving was living beside the Bowling Green, at
16 Broadway, with his friend, Henry Brevoort, at the house of Mrs.
Ryckman. While here he edited the _Analectic Magazine_. From here he
often strolled up Broadway as far as Cortlandt Street, to dine at the
house of Jane Renwick, then passing her widowhood in the city. Her son
became the Professor James Renwick of Columbia College. It was she of
whom Burns sang as _The Blue-Eyed Lassie_.

Still another house knew the Irving of early days, the boarding-house
of Mrs. Brandish, at Greenwich and Rector streets, where he went from
Bowling Green. It was a pretty brick building on a quiet street then,
but it is a gloomy-enough place to look upon now, darkened by the
Elevated Railroad and overrun with hoards of noisy children and
tenement dwellers; a strange spot to look for memories of the
gentle-hearted Irving.

When Irving left New York in 1815, it was with no intention of
remaining away any length of time. In England he wrote _Rip Van
Winkle_, though he had never been in the Catskills, where the scene of
his classic lay. In Paris he met John Howard Payne, and the two worked
together, in the Rue Richelieu, adapting French plays to English
representation--but this partnership came to little. He went to Spain
and there, while writing the _Life and Voyages of Columbus_, he met a
young man then fitting himself by travel to enter on the duties of
Professor of Modern Languages in Bowdoin College. This was Henry W.
Longfellow, unknown then as a poet. While in Spain, Irving occupied
the Governor's quarters in the Alhambra, an otherwise deserted palace,
abiding there in a kind of Oriental dream, and living over in
imagination the _Conquest of Granada_. Back in London again as
Secretary of the Legation to the Court of St. James, he arranged his
material for the _Voyages of the Companions of Columbus_, and half a
dozen other works. Then, after seventeen years of wandering, he
returned to his native city.

Although he tells us that his heart throbbed at sight of New York, and
that in all his travels he had seen no place that caused such a thrill
of joy, it was no longer the city of his youth. He had left a town of
one hundred thousand people and found a city of two hundred thousand.
The companions of his youth had grown to be men, and many of them were
renowned in literature and business life. He found streets grown long
out of all remembrance, houses tall beyond all knowing, strangers who
knew him simply as a name. He found many silent graves where he had
left blooming youth. But for all this there were many ready and
anxious to do him honor.

A few steps beyond Trinity Churchyard on Broadway is a narrow
thoroughfare called Thames Street. It is easy to be found, and beside
it is a tall building on which is a tablet relating how the Burns's
Coffee-House once stood on the spot. This had been a mansion built by
Étienne De Lancey, a Huguenot noble, and Thames Street was the
carriage-way that led to the door. In this coffee-house the merchants
of the city signed the Non-Importation Agreement in the days before
the Revolution.

When Irving returned to the city the coffee-house was gone, and on
its site was the City Hotel, the main hostelry of the city. Here the
chief citizens gathered and a banquet was held and all honor paid to
the "illustrious guest, thrice welcome to his native city."

[Illustration: The City Hotel]

From the site of this old house, it is a pleasant walk down Broadway,
past the Bowling Green to Bridge Street, where, at No. 3, Irving,
after his return, went to live with his brother Ebenezer, who had been
the Captain Greatheart of "Cockloft Hall." Here, in this home, Irving
spent many happy days. It was called by him "the family hive," for it
was always filled to overflowing with relatives.

[Illustration:

1. JAMES KIRKE PAULDING.
2. PHILIP HONE.
3. WASHINGTON IRVING.
4. JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE.
5. FITZ GREENE HALLECK.
6. J. FENIMORE COOPER.]

But one place above all others in New York is filled with the memory
of Irving. This is a bit of ground on the east side of the city, a
point of land stretching out into the river. Here of all places the
spirit of Irving still lingers, for here of all places it is less
changed in appearance since his feet trod the ground. In Irving's day
it was a stretch of countryside with summer houses of the wealthy at
long distances facing the river. Now, though the city has encompassed
it, there is still left the one green spot by the riverside beyond
Eighty-eighth Street. The East River Park they call it, and there are
rough stone steps leading to the waterside, winding paths and
overhanging trees--the trees that Irving stood beneath. And there,
across the stretch of water, is Hell Gate, its tempestuous waters
tamed by the hand of man, but nevertheless the same Hell Gate that
Irving looked upon and that Irving wrote about. Part of this park were
the grounds of John Jacob Astor, the friend of Irving. His house stood
beyond the park, where Eighty-eighth Street now touches East End
Avenue,--a square two-story frame dwelling of colonial type, painted
white, with deep veranda, wide halls, and spacious rooms; set high
upon a hill, backed by a forest of towering trees, and fronted by a
vast lawn stretching by gentle slope to the cliff at the riverside.
Here Irving was a guest, and wrote _Astoria_, telling of Astor's
settlement on the Columbia River and of scenes beyond the Rockies;
here he met Captain Bonneville and his friends, and the journals of
the one and thrilling tales of the other gave material for the
_Adventures of Captain Bonneville_.

The house of Astor is gone now, but within the limits of this park
still stands the home of Gracie, the merchant, where Irving was a
constant visitor, and where, in the rooms given over to stranger
hands, still linger memories of Paulding and Halleck, Bancroft and
Drake, and a host of others.

[Illustration: The House of Astor where Irving wrote "Astoria"]

It was while working on _Astoria_ that Irving began the building of
Wolfert's Roost, the Van Tassel house of the _Legend of Sleepy
Hollow_, on that delightful spot on the Hudson which in the first
days of Irving's residence there was called Dearman. In after time the
name was changed to Irvington, in his honor, and Wolfert's Roost, in
honor of the glorious country, became Sunnyside. It is Sunnyside to
this day, altered by additions made in the intervening years, but
still the house of Irving; and the ivy clinging to its walls has
sprung from a root taken from the ruins of Scott's "fair Melrose" and
planted where it now grows by the friendly hand of Jane Renwick.

[Illustration: Where Irving lived--17th St. and Irving Place]

On the corner of Seventeenth Street and Irving Place (a thoroughfare
to which his memory gave a name), late in life, Irving lived betimes.
Here was once the home of John T. Irving, a nephew of the author. It
is a sturdy house still, and looks as youthful as its neighbors that
were built many a day after it. Then it stood quite alone in a stretch
of country. From the windows of the large room on the ground floor,
Irving could see the waters of the East River. In this room he wrote
portions of _Oliver Goldsmith_, parts, too, of the _Life of Mahomet_,
and arranged the notes of what was to be his last book--the _Life of
Washington_.

But his real home was Sunnyside, and there, in the year 1859, when he
was seventy-six years old, he died.




Chapter VI

With Paulding, Drake, and Halleck


In the summer of 1797, a tall, well-built lad with a face showing just
a suggestion of melancholy, landed from the weekly market sloop and
walked along the streets of New York for the first time. He was a
country boy, well versed in trees and brooks and used to pathless
hills and rough country roads, and his first impression of New York
was that the dwellers there were great lumpkins. He could not imagine
why they pointed at him and nodded at him and laughed as he walked in
the middle of the street, quite disregarding the paved walk. He
stopped, from time to time, to ask his way, until he came to a little
square brick house in Vesey Street, below Church, bearing the number
43, the home of William Irving. There he went in and was given a good
hug by Mrs. Irving. The boy was James Kirke Paulding, and she who
welcomed him was his sister, with whom he was to live until he should
get a start in the ways and work of the city.

William Irving lived in a house delightfully situated, though no one
would think so now when the spot is jammed with merchants' warehouses,
and sounds of trade fill the air. When Paulding came to town, it was
beyond the ken of the business section, and there were not so many
houses about but that he could enjoy an inviting view. From the front
door he looked straight before him over the grounds of Columbia
College, and to the left across green gardens to the river. From his
little window in the upper story he saw the city to the south, and to
the east St. Paul's Chapel, with the steeple that came to be so gray
with age looking then so new, for it had just been added to the
church. Beyond the graveyard and across Broadway, he had a good view
of the park with its three buildings--the Bridewell, the Almshouse,
and the Prison,--and across the park could see the Park Theatre and
the Brick Church. He could catch a glimpse of Broadway winding over a
hill toward the Stone Bridge at Canal Street, and other roads leading
into the country towards the north, where level stretches led past
rude farmhouses and quaint inns.

The first few years of Paulding in the city, when he was clerk in the
United States Loan Office, were years of hard work. But there were
relaxations, too, for his relationship to William Irving brought him
in contact with the other members of the family--young Washington
Irving and Dr. Peter Irving. When, in a few years, Dr. Irving
published his newspaper, the _Morning Chronicle_, Paulding wrote bits
of prose and verse for it. So his first writings appeared in the same
publication and at the same time as the first writings of Washington
Irving, and it was the interchange of thought in the Vesey Street
house and the opportunities afforded by the _Morning Chronicle_ that
led Paulding's thoughts towards writing as a profession.

Meantime there was much going on in the way of improvement. The new
City Hall was erected in the park; the first free schoolhouse was
opened; and Fulton's _Clermont_ sailed up the Hudson, the first
successful steamboat. A commission had been appointed, too, with the
object of directing the course of the streets, which up to that time
had grown out of the paths left by the cows in their wanderings to
pasture. The commissioners did their work so that, as time went on,
the highways were laid out to form a city of strict right angles. The
cows certainly did their part in a manner that left far more
picturesque twists and turns than were to be found in the upper part
laid out by the commissioners in such a scientifically uninteresting
way.

Paulding lived with William Irving in the Vesey Street house for nine
years, and then the Irvings moved a few blocks the other side of
Columbia College, to 287 Greenwich Street, and Paulding went with
them. Here began the meetings of a literary set, which in a few months
developed into the "Ancient Club of New York," with Washington, Peter,
and William Irving, Paulding, Henry Brevoort, and Gouverneur Kemble
leading members. Kemble owned some land in New Jersey, on which was
located _Salmagundi's_ Cockloft Hall, and on this account was called
"The Patroon." From one of the informal meetings of the Ancient Club,
Washington Irving, his brother William, and Paulding went secretly to
Irving's house in Ann Street to discuss details of _Salmagundi_.
Paulding wrote his share of _Salmagundi_ on the upper floor of the
Greenwich Street house, while the lower floor was the mill of Pindar
Cockloft, conducted by William Irving.

From this house on many an evening the friends went to dine at Dyde's,
the fascinating eating-house near the Park Theatre, then beginning a
long career with the founders of _Salmagundi_ as a foundation for the
memories that were to cluster around its doors, to be passed over,
years later, to Windust's still more famous resort on almost the same
spot.

Paulding was still living with the Irving family when, in 1807, they
went to live at No. 17 in aristocratic State Street, at the corner of
Pearl, facing the Battery Park. Here, overlooking the blue waters of
the bay dotted with sailboats and rowboats, and beyond to the
stretches of Jersey shore, Paulding wrote his contributions to the
_Analectic Magazine_, edited by Washington Irving from his home little
more than a stone's throw away across the Bowling Green; also, _The
Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan_. Here, too,
replying to an attack on his country, he wrote, _The United States and
England_, a pamphlet that attracted the notice of President Madison,
who summoned Paulding to Washington for eight years as Secretary of
the Board of Navy Commissioners. During those eight years he wrote
_The Backwoodsman_ his longest poem and the one which he liked best of
all, a liking not generally shared by his readers; the second series
of _Salmagundi_; and _Koningsmarke_.

Having married Gertrude, the sister of his friend and companion
Gouverneur Kemble, his days were moving smoothly along when the death
of his wife's father took him again to New York and he went to live in
what had long been the home of "The Patroon." This was a mansion of
solid type in Whitehall Street, corner of Stone, set in the midst of a
wide-spreading garden, a site blurred out in later days by the Produce
Exchange. Here he lived during the fourteen years he acted as Navy
Agent at New York, devoting his evenings to literary work, writing his
most successful book, _The Dutchman's Fireside_, also _John Bull in
America_, _Tales of the Good Woman_, and _Westward Ho!_ In the evening
he went often to the Park Theatre, and came to know James H. Hackett,
the greatest Falstaff America had seen, writing for him _The Lion of
the West_, which Hackett acted for many years. And then after fifteen
years in this house he left it, and with his family went to Washington
as Secretary of the Navy.

Once more, in 1841, he returned to New York, to live in Beach Street,
then the fashionable St. John's Park neighborhood. But, his wife dying
before he was really settled, he soon left New York and passed the
last days of his life in Dutchess County, the region of his birth.

At about the time Paulding moved into the State Street house two young
men met one afternoon at the home of a mutual friend. One was
studying medicine and beginning to see something more in life than a
struggle for mere existence. He was Joseph Rodman Drake. The other,
Fitz-Greene Halleck, was a bookkeeper and had but just come from his
birthplace in Guilford, Connecticut. He had read much poetry and had
written some stray verse. A few days after their meeting, the two came
together again in the rooms where Halleck boarded in Greenwich Street,
not half a dozen houses from the place where Washington Irving was
living with Mrs. Brandish. The second meeting was the real start of an
inseparable friendship which has caused them to be looked upon as the
Orestes and Pylades of American poets.

Halleck had begun his work for Jacob Barker. The warehouse where he
was employed stands yet and can easily be found by walking down John
Street to Burling Slip, and so on around the corner into South Street
by the waterside. Drake ofttimes took that walk and sat there by the
side of his friend's desk. Often, too, in the late afternoon, Halleck
walked from there to the green that since has been called the City
Hall Park, and sat until Drake came from his studies in the nearby
College of Physicians and Surgeons. The college was part of Columbia,
which lay to the west of the green. In time the city overgrew the
college grounds so completely that those interested in remembering
where they had been set up a tablet at West Broadway and Murray
Street, as a reminder that they should not be entirely forgotten. From
the park it was the wont of the youthful poets to walk along Broadway
below Trinity Church--then the fashionable promenade,--and so on to
the Battery, past where Irving had lived by the Bowling Green, past
where Paulding was then living.

The time came when Drake was graduated, and then there were the long
evenings together back of his office in the store numbered 121 Bowery,
just above Hester Street. From this house the friends made their long
excursions across the Harlem River, far beyond the town, into the
romantic Bronx of which Drake sang so often and so well.

One night, starting from the Bowery shop, Drake took Halleck down
Broadway into Thames Street, and there, back of the City Hotel, dined
him in a dingy little public house, the first of many pleasant
evenings there. It was the ale-house kept by William Reynolds, a
genial, red-faced man who had been a grave-digger in the nearby
Trinity Churchyard.

The tavern remained a place of entertainment for close upon a hundred
years, most of the time known as "Old Tom's," from Reynolds's
successor. It came to be a landmark for the curious, but as the
curious always stood outside and never by any chance went in to buy of
what was on sale there, it went the way of all old places. To-day, if
you turn into Thames Street, from busy Broadway, you come upon a mass
of buildings in perpetual shade, and with a decidedly provincial air
not at all in keeping with the up-to-date city. A walk of half a block
brings you to Temple Street--a thoroughfare leading nowhere in
particular, but which wise chroniclers have quarrelled over, some
urging that it came by its name because of being close by Trinity
Church, which is a temple of worship, and others quite as vigorously
contending that it took its name from Charlotte Temple, who lived
nearby. Here you find Reynolds's tavern metamorphosed into a modern
place of business, and though the street is still quaint-appearing,
every suggestion of romance has vanished from the tavern. Nevertheless
the curious, who in its days of need regarded it from afar, love to
sit in it, surrounded by modern conveniences, and tell what it was
like "in Drake's time."

Drake prospered, and after a time set up his pharmacy in the busiest
part of town, that later grew to be the core of Newspaper Row. When
Drake lived in Park Row, the second door from Beekman Street, he and
Halleck hit upon the idea of the "Croaker Papers," a series of satires
in verse, printed in the _Evening Post_, in which the poets sailed
into the public characters of the day. This was the house where
Halleck went to read his _Fanny_ to Drake, and made some corrections
at his friend's suggestion before he gave it to the world.

[Illustration: The Shakespeare Tavern]

Around the corner from the Park Row shop, the Shakespeare Tavern was
conducted by Thomas Hawkins Hodgkinson, the actor; a resort for the
actors, the artists, the writers, the talkers of the town; a popular
rendezvous quite in contrast to Reynolds's quiet inn. It stood at the
southwest corner of Fulton and Nassau streets, a double house of
brick, having for its sign a bust of the great poet over the door. In
after years a tablet was set to mark the spot. Halleck tells of a
meeting here with James Lawson, the journalist, who came to write the
_Tales and Sketches of a Cosmopolite_.

On a night when Drake and Paulding and some others gathered for a
friendly evening there arose a discussion, argued for and against by
all the company, as to whether or not the rivers of America were rich
enough in legend and romance to lend themselves to poetic treatment.
And after the talk had lengthened into the morning hours, Drake went
to the room over his Park Row shop to put his view of the subject into
writing. In a few days he read to Halleck the poem on which his fame
chiefly rests, _The Culprit Fay_--a poetic fantasy illumining the
Highlands of the Hudson.

In the year 1820, Halleck sat in the Park Row house by the bedside of
his friend, who was dying of consumption, and here, at the age of
twenty-five, Joseph Rodman Drake passed away. Halleck followed the
coffin to that beautiful spot beyond the Harlem that they both loved
so well, and there by the side of the Bronx streamlet the poet Drake
was buried. In the depth of his grief Halleck wrote the lines:

     Green be the turf above thee,
       Friend of my better days;
     None knew thee but to love thee,
       None named thee but to praise.

And now after more than three quarters of a century the words still
murmur their message of friendship and sorrow above Drake's grave. The
city has sped on far beyond the little graveyard, and harsh sounds
throb where once was only the singing of birds; but the consecrated
spot remains, cared for year by year as well as may be in despite of
relic-hunting vandals.

Halleck outlived his friend by many long years. He gave up bookkeeping
for Jacob Barker, and during eighteen years was the confidential
manager of the affairs of John Jacob Astor. But he never failed to
regret the comrade of his youth, losing with him much of his
inspiration.

[Illustration: The Jumel Mansion]

Half an hour's journey from Drake's grave, on the western side of the
Harlem River, there stands, at One Hundred and Sixtieth Street and
Edgecombe Avenue, a house on a bluff so high above the river that it
can be seen from afar--white in the sunlight. This is the Morris
house, where Mary Philipse lived after she became the wife of Roger
Morris; where Washington had his headquarters; where Madame Jumel
lived, and where she married Aaron Burr. To the one who strolls in the
footsteps of _littérateurs_ of a bygone day, it is, more than all, the
house where Halleck visited, and where he wrote _Marco Bozzaris_.
Although this was his most widely known poem, and though it was
written five years after the death of Drake, the memory of his friend
was like a fresh sorrow to him while he wrote. During forty odd years
from that time he continued the gently courteous, witty talker, the
dignified life of each gathering he attended. But, as he knew so well,
his Muse was sorely wounded when Drake died, and the fuller poetic
life that might have been his was buried on the green slope of the
Bronx with his friend.




Chapter VII

Cooper and His Friends


In that cheerless precinct of New York City to which still clings the
name St. John's Park, though there has been no park there this
half-century,--in Beach Street, a dozen or perhaps twenty steps from
Hudson Street, there stands a house that could not fail to attract the
attention of an observant passer-by. A brick building, its
architectural features suggest roomy attractiveness--a condition
little sought after in these days when the value of every inch of
ground calls for compactness regardless of beauty of appearance. One
looking at this building and given to sentiment might argue that it is
strongly reminiscent of a human being who had once been vigorous and
had made a considerable show in the world of fashion and pride, but
who had sunk to poverty and decrepitude. For the carved window-cases
are hacked and beaten away, the wrought-iron railings are twisted and
rusty, the marble steps are cracked and crumbling, the high ceilings
with their heavy and ornate mouldings are seamed and discolored, and
the massive oaken doors are cracked by many a rusty nail driven into
them, holding ragged and worn-out garments. Yet even in its age and
neglect are found traces of its primal sturdy and artistic
proportions.

In the year 1821, this house was the home of James Fenimore Cooper.
His first book, _Precaution_, had failed utterly. His second book,
_The Spy_, had been prodigiously successful, when in this year he went
to New York to live in what was then the fashionable district of St.
John's Park. He was thirty-one years old, had lived at Cooperstown,
studied at Yale, shipped as a sailor before the mast, made voyages to
England and Spain, been appointed midshipman, and seen service on Lake
Ontario and Lake Champlain, had resigned his commission, and had
married Augusta de Lancey at Heathcote Hill Manor, Mamaroneck. After
the birth of his daughter, Susan Fenimore Cooper, who became a writer
of rural sketches, he settled down in Westchester County to live the
life of a country gentleman. He might have remained there all his days
but that one day he got hold of a particularly stupid book of English
life, and was so bored by it that it forced from him the exclamation
that he could write a better himself! Which remark being interpreted
literally by his wife, there was nothing for the country gentleman but
to make good his boast. So he wrote a dull and stupid story which
even his friends had difficulty in reading to the end, and then,
doubtless finding writing more agreeable than farming, wrote another
that destined him evermore to a literary life.

This much of Cooper's life was behind him when he moved into the Beach
Street house. In this home he wrote _The Pioneers_, first of the
famous Leatherstocking Tales and, too, _The Pilot_.

In the New York of that day there was one place where he loved to go
for a quiet dinner and discussion with the literary friends whom he
quickly gathered around him. This was the chief hostelry of the day,
the City Hotel, which stood close by where Wall Street runs into
Broadway. It was at one of these dinners that he met James A.
Hillhouse, who, though he had already written _The Judgment_ and was
recognized as a poet, was then engaged in mercantile pursuits in the
city; but was very soon to make a home in New Haven and remain there
during the rest of his life. Hillhouse was not a regular diner with
Cooper, but he introduced there a friend who became much more regular
in his attendance. Samuel Woodworth was even then shouldering aside
adversity with intermittent success. It was his habit to walk briskly
up from his printing office at the foot of Wall Street, very much in
the manner of a man having an imperative appointment. Four years
before Cooper came to town, on a very hot summer day, Woodworth had
walked in this same eager manner to his house farther up-town in Duane
Street, and there, drinking from a pump before his door, had said:
"I'd like to have a drink to-day from the old bucket that hung in my
father's well." Whereupon his kindly wife hinted that the old bucket
of his remembrance would make a good subject for a poem--a hint that
within the hour took the form of _The Old Oaken Bucket_, a pastoral
poem well remembered and much sung, though many another of his, many
an operetta, and even the historical romance, _The Champion of
Freedom_, have faded from memory.

At these dinners, when Cooper sat with his friends, Woodworth and
Morris held the first discussions of the plans for _The Mirror_, which
was started in 1823, but from which the inconstant Woodworth soon
retired.

On more than one occasion one of the dinner party was Richard Henry
Dana, a founder of the _North American Review_ and the friend of
Bryant. The City Hotel was quite convenient for him, for he had made a
sort of headquarters in the place of Wiley, the publisher, around the
corner in Wall Street by New Street. At that time he issued from
Wiley's shop _The Idle Man_, that literary publication which scarcely
lived long enough to include his novels, _Tom Thornton_ and _Paul
Felton_, and some contributions from Washington Allston and Bryant.

Many a good idea came from the meetings at the City Hotel, but
possibly none more felicitous than that of the Bread-and-Cheese Club.
This remained so long in the germ that the realization seemed far off,
but finally, in 1824, began the holding of its fortnightly meetings in
Washington Hall--afterwards swept away to give place to the Stewart
Building at Broadway and Reade Street. The club derived its name from
Cooper's conceit of having candidates balloted for with bread and
cheese, a bit of bread favoring election and cheese deciding against
it.

[Illustration: Washington Hall]

As Cooper had in the main originated the club, he was the leading
spirit around whom gathered Halleck and Bryant, Percival, Professor
Renwick, Dr. J.W. Francis, and all the writers of the day. An
enthusiastic member was Philip Hone, who had just retired from
business and bought a house at 235 Broadway opposite the park, a site
considered a good way up-town for a residence. His diary, which in
after years led him to be called the Pepys of America, was commenced
in this house, but the greater part was written at his residence of
later date, at the southwest corner of Broadway and Great Jones
Street.

Gulian C. Verplanck was a member too. At the time he occupied a
professorship in the General Theological Seminary. From one of the
meetings he walked down Broadway and through Wall Street past the
house, near Broad Street, where he was born, discussing with Bryant
and Robert C. Sands an early suggestion of the _Talisman_ magazine,
which was not to ripen into an accomplished fact for a good three
years. On this same walk, too, he took part while Bryant and Sands
discussed plans for the _Atlantic Monthly_, which Sands established
the next year.

But writers were not the only members of the Bread-and-Cheese Club.
There were scholars and professional men, and often there were
statesmen and men of national distinction as guests. But as Cooper was
its leading spirit, when he left for his trip abroad the club went to
pieces. He started in 1825 on his foreign travels, and at the time of
his going was living at 345 Greenwich Street, where he had finished
work on _The Last of the Mohicans_.

In the year after his going there was a gala night at the Lafayette
Theatre, when _The Spy_ was enacted. The Lafayette was the largest
theatre then. Upon its site in West Broadway near Canal Street St.
Alphonsus's Church now stands. To that performance came from up-State
Enoch Crosby, who was said to be the original Spy, and when he
appeared in a box with some friends the audience gave him a thunderous
ovation.

Cooper returned from abroad in 1833, having added _The Prairie_, _The
Red Rover_, _The Water Witch_, and _The Bravo_ to his list of
published books, and went to live in Bleecker Street, two blocks from
Broadway, near Thompson Street. This was a select neighborhood then of
pretty, irregular brick dwellings. The house is there yet, but the
neighborhood is no longer elegant. Italian merchants, unkempt in
appearance, carry on meagre and uncertain kinds of business, and
Cooper's old house is so decorated with signs inside and out as to be
picturesque only for its dinginess and disorder. Cooper did not live
there long, for he soon moved to Broadway at Prince Street, into a
house that later gave way to Niblo's Garden, and there he completed
work on the volumes covering his stay in Europe, under the titles
_Sketches in Switzerland_ and _Gleanings in Europe_. But he made no
very long stay on Broadway, for he moved again, this time to St.
Mark's Place, a few doors from Third Avenue, into an unpretentious
brick house of three stories that is there still. There he wrote
_Homeward Bound_ and began in earnest that fierce combat with his
critics which was to last to the end of his days and leave many a
regret that he had not been a more even-tempered man. From this house
he went to Cooperstown, which became his final home.

At the time that Cooper lived in New York there walked along Broadway,
between Canal Street and the Chapel of St. Paul's, on almost every
pleasant afternoon, a man who in appearance was a veritable Hamlet.
His garb was a customary suit of solemn black, and his eyes sought the
ground as he moved with pensive step. This was McDonald Clarke, whose
eccentric appearance and acts and whose melancholy verses gave him the
name of The Mad Poet.

[Illustration: THE PARK THEATRE, PARK ROW, 1831.]

If Broadway was his walk of an afternoon, Park Row was his haunt by
night; and Windust's place, a door or two below the Park Theatre
(literally below it, for it was beneath the sidewalk), was his
centring point.

The resort of Edward Windust was not an old place, but a famous one.
It was opened in 1824 and lasted only until 1837, when the proprietor
thought himself cramped in space and opportunity and, moving away to
seek a larger field, found failure. It was the actors' museum of the
city. Its walls were lined with reminders of the stage: playbills, and
swords that had seen the service of savage mimic wars; pictures, and
frames of clippings, and bits of the wardrobes of kings and queens who
had strutted their brief hour and passed away. It was the nightly
gathering point of such actors as were in town, such writers, such
wits, such gallant gentlemen. Edmund Kean and the Wallacks, Harry
Placide and Cooper, Jack Scott, Mitchell, Brown, and Junius Brutus
Booth were frequenters, with Fitz-Greene Halleck, Willis, Morris, and
the rest, who nightly crowded the tier of stalls that ranged along one
side of the room, making them resound with gay and brilliant talk.

In Windust's, too, sat McDonald Clarke in gloomy majesty night after
night. There he formed among many others the acquaintance of Mordecai
M. Noah, journalist and playwright, who had been Consul at Tunis and
who in the years to come was to start several unsuccessful papers,
until in 1843 he was to publish the _Sunday Times and Messenger_,
which continued for more than half a century.

From Windust's McDonald Clarke often wandered out into the City Hall
Park over the way, and sat there through many a long summer night
dreaming over his _Elixir of Moonshine_, or, with the memory of his
afternoon walks upon him, composing lines for his _Afara, or the
Belles of Broadway_, and many another melancholy verse. Often he sat
there until daybreak, then went on into Broadway again. He had a
favorite early-morning stand on the Fulton Street side of St. Paul's
Churchyard, and there, an hour before the town was stirring,
soliloquized as he looked through the railings at the brown
tombstones.

On these same mornings, but a few hours later, another writer looked
down on the same faded tombstones, for Ray Palmer was the teacher of a
young ladies' school down Fulton Street beyond Broadway. He was young
then, in his twenty-second year, in ill-health, and suffering under
discouragements that would have been unendurable to a weaker-dispositioned
man. As he looked from the school window into the churchyard he wrote
a hymn which remained in his desk for several years, until it was
published in quite an accidental manner by Dr. Lowell Mason, when he
needed material for a book of church music which he had compiled. In a
few years this hymn, _My Faith Looks Up to Thee_, was to be sung
oftener than any other American hymn.

The sights and the sounds of the busy city that were an inspiration to
Ray Palmer always sent The Mad Poet in another direction,--on up
Broadway to Leonard Street, turning down there two short blocks to
Chapel Street, to the house where at that time he made his home. It
was a dreary enough street and a dismal enough upper room, but there
was a narrow window where the poet could look over the housetops in
the midnight hour and watch the stars that he seemed ever to hold
converse with. Or, if it was in the early evening, he had but to lean
forward from his window to see the people going into the Italian Opera
House on the next corner. The Italian Opera House had a great deal of
attraction for The Mad Poet. Not that he went there often to attend
the performances, but he liked to inspect it from his window height as
though he caught a glimpse of the sorrows and disappointments
connected with it. He had moved into the house in the year 1833--the
year that the opera house was opened after it had been built for a
company headed by Lorenzo Da Ponte.

This Da Ponte had come to America in 1805, having a record as an
Italian dramatist, who had furnished libretti for Mozart's operas,
_Don Giovanni_ and _Nozze di Figaro_. He was professor in Columbia
College when he matured an idea for establishing a home for Italian
opera in New York, a plan which led to the building of the opera house
near which The Mad Poet lived. It opened splendidly with the singers
of the Cavalier di Rivafinoli, but a short season ended Lorenzo Da
Ponte's hopes.

If The Mad Poet from his housetop could have seen what the next few
years had in store, he would have beheld the aged dramatist dying at
his home in Spring Street, close to Broadway, his body followed from
there by his mourning friends--Halleck and Verplanck and Woodworth and
some few others,--followed to the churchyard surrounding the nearby
St. Patrick's Church; he would have seen the mark above the grave
crumbling away, leaving nothing to point the spot where Da Ponte lay
buried with his dreams and his hopes. But no inspiration hinted any of
these things to McDonald Clarke, and once, in speaking of Da Ponte, he
said that there at least was a man who had lived long unrewarded but
had attained his ambition at last.

For nine years after The Mad Poet went to the Chapel Street house his
Broadway walks continued, his dress each year growing more shabby, his
eye more downcast, and his verse more melancholy. Then one day he was
seen close by his favorite stand near the Churchyard of St. Paul's,
acting so strangely that he was thought to be intoxicated. Next
morning he awoke to find himself a prisoner in a vagrant cell, and the
shock to his sensitive nature sent him, a madman indeed, to the
Blackwell's Island Asylum, where in a few days he died.

Years after, the author of _Glimpses of Home Life_, Emma C. Embury,
whose home was in Brooklyn, told of a knoll in Greenwood Cemetery by
the side of a little lake where the oak-trees shaded a modest tomb on
which there were some lines of verse. They were lines written by
McDonald Clarke. The tomb is there yet, still shaded by oaks that have
grown sturdier with the passing years, and the grave by the lake is
the grave of The Mad Poet.




Chapter VIII

Those Who Gathered about Poe


When New York was a much younger city than it is, when it was well
within bounds on the lower part of the island of Manhattan, long
before there was a thought that it would overspread the island, jump
over a stream and go wandering up the mainland, overleap a river and
go spreading over another island to the sea,--long before the time
when these things came to be, there lay scattered in several
directions on the island of Manhattan and dotting the rolling country
land beyond, several tiny villages. These were Harlem, and Yorkville,
and Odellville, and Bloomingdale, and Chelsea, and Greenwich. The last
was the hamlet closest to the city. Quaint and curious, it spread its
scattered way along the Hudson River where houses had been set up
according to the needs and vagaries of men on roads natural and
unplanned. When the city grew larger and finally swept around
Greenwich Village, the roads becoming city streets, the village
continued a labyrinthian way, where strangers wandered and were lost
before they knew it.

[Illustration: On Bloomingdale Road near 75th St. in Poe's time]

In the very core of this old-time Greenwich section and at the very
place where the streets are so tangled, so irregular, so crooked, so
often no thoroughfare, so winding that they seem to be seeking out the
old farmhouses which they led to in early days, there is a pretty
little playground for children. This Hudson Park is an open spot with
green lawns and marble walks and a tall iron fence surrounding it;
quite a model park with everything about fresh, and new, and modern.
It is so very new and so very neat and so very clean that one would
not look there for old-time flavor. But curiously enough one thing
about it seems out of tone. On the green lawn is a monument old and
faded which, in an effort to match it with its natty surroundings, has
been set upon a base of glistening white marble. The monument is a
sort of key for the antiquarian, for without it this playground in its
spick-and-span newness might not be readily identified as the old St.
John's Burying-Ground, where once stood the accumulated tombstones of
more than fourscore years, until they were swept away and buried as
deep as those whose memories they marked. A new generation tramples
in and romps over the new park, with no knowledge or thought of what
is below the surface.

The graveyard of St. John's was a quiet, restful place in a quiet,
restful locality in the year 1837, when Edgar Allan Poe had a habit of
wandering through it. In that year Poe lived within a few steps of the
burial-ground in a modest wooden house that was numbered 113 Carmine
Street. He was then in his twenty-eighth year, had published three
volumes of poems, and had written some short stories and criticisms.
He had but just given up the editorship of the _Southern Literary
Messenger_ at Richmond, a position he had secured through the
friendship of John P. Kennedy, who had been his friend in his early
struggles in Baltimore and who was to continue a friend to him through
all his life. In 1832 Poe had first met him, when Kennedy was writing
_Swallow Barn_. Afterwards Kennedy wrote _Horseshoe Robinson_ and
other books before abandoning literature for politics and, in time,
becoming Secretary of the Navy.

[Illustration: The House in Carmine Street]

So Poe came to New York, and with him Virginia, his child wife, who
was already marked a victim of consumption, and there in the Carmine
Street house they lived. Sometimes she walked with her sombre-faced
husband through the nearby burying-ground, but more often she sat at
an upper window from which she could watch him on his ramble. In the
same house lived William Gowans the bookseller of Nassau Street; and
there Poe did work for the _New York Quarterly Review_; there also he
finished _The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym_.

In another house, some little distance away but in a direct course up
Carmine Street, in Sixth Avenue close by Waverley Place, Poe lived for
a short time, but long enough to write _The Fall of the House of
Usher_ and some magazine work, when he went to Philadelphia to _The
Gentleman's Magazine_, edited by William E. Burton, the famous
comedian. Oddly enough, when Burton died years afterwards, he found a
resting place in the obscure St. John's Burying-Ground.

[Illustration:

1. RICHARD HENRY STODDARD.
2. JOHN JAMES AUDUBON.
3. WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.
4. BAYARD TAYLOR.
5. EDGAR ALLAN POE.
6. ROBERT FULTON.]

It was not until 1844 that Poe returned to New York, and during the
years of his absence several writers with whom he was to become
acquainted on his return had forged their literary way. There was Seba
Smith, more generally known as "Major Jack Downing," from the
humorous papers which he wrote under that name, and who about this
time was writing the romance in verse called _Powhatan_. There was
William Ross Wallace, the lawyer and magazine writer, who in after
years was to be known through his poem of _The Liberty Bell_. There
was the Congregational clergyman George B. Cheever making his way,
having resigned his first pastorate, at Salem, Massachusetts, where he
had been imprisoned for libel on account of his temperance sketch
_Deacon Giles's Distillery_. There was Robert H. Messinger, known
through his Horatian ode, _Give Me the Old_, his fame daily expanding
in fashionable and literary circles. There was Edward Robinson,
Professor in the Union Theological Seminary, just returned from a tour
of exploration in Palestine with Rev. Eli Smith, publishing _Biblical
Researches in Palestine_. And there was Isaac McLelland, whose verse
was as good as his sportsmanship. These were some few of the men who
were first to recognize the genius of the poet.

Poe returned to New York the wiser for his experience with _The
Gentleman's Magazine_ and with _Graham's Magazine_, but having failed
to establish _The Stylus_, a proposed publication of his own, which
during all his life was to be a vision of Tantalus, just beyond his
grasp. He returned rich in experience, strong in adversity, poor in
pocket. There was no glorious opening for him, and finally he accepted
a sub-editorship on the _Evening Mirror_, grinding out copy for
several hard-working hours each day.

The _Evening Mirror_ was a newly started publication, but its
interests were so entwined with others that its history stretched back
something more than twenty years from the day when Poe first occupied
a desk in the office. Going back these one and twenty years, the
better to understand the atmosphere in which Poe worked, to the spring
of 1823, the time is reached when George P. Morris and Samuel
Woodworth joined forces and opened an office for the publication of
the _New York Mirror_ at 163 William Street. Morris was a young man
then, but already gave strong evidence of the decided character he was
to develop as an eminently practical printer and successful writer of
songs--a man of such unusual personal magnetism that well-nigh every
man who walked towards him a stranger walked away from him a friend.
The eight years which followed the starting of the _New York Mirror_
saw many changes; saw Morris becoming more and more popular as a
writer of songs; saw him publishing the memorable _Woodman, Spare
that Tree_, that was to make his name known over the land; saw
Woodworth withdraw from the _Mirror_, and that publication
strengthened and starting anew when Morris drew to the enterprise
Theodore S. Fay and Nathaniel P. Willis; saw Fay going abroad in a few
years as Secretary of Legation at Berlin, in which city he was to live
out most of his life.

N.P. Willis was a young man, too, in those early days of his
association with Morris. He had given up the _American Monthly
Magazine_ at Boston to devote his energies to the _New York Mirror_.
In the year that he became associated with Morris, 1831, he went
abroad at a salary of ten dollars a week, hoping to add strength and
diversity to the paper by a series of letters. In London, poor and
struggling, he managed to introduce himself into the fashionable set
at that time presided over by Lady Blessington, and he came to be the
adoration of all the sentimental young ladies in that set. There was a
daintiness about his dress, a suggestion of foppishness in the
arrangement of his blond hair, trifles about him which suggested the
dandy and the idler; but withal there was a terrific capacity for work
under the smooth outside. His letters to the _Mirror_ and other papers
did much for the refinement of literature and art, and, indirectly,
for the manners of the times. He was in America again in 1836,
bringing with him an English lady as a bride,--the Mary for whom the
country place Glen Mary at Owego was named, where he wrote his
delightful _Letters from under a Bridge_. He was again in Europe in
1839, soon starting _The Corsair_, and back to America in 1844, to
join his friend Morris (the _Mirror_ by this time being defunct) in
the starting of a daily paper which took the name of the _Evening
Mirror_. From this on Willis lived an active social-literary life,
singing of Broadway with the same facileness as he sang of country
scenes. He came to be a grave and patient invalid, living happily with
his second wife as he had with his first, and ending his days at
Idlewild,--his home on the Hudson.

It was with the newly started _Evening Mirror_ that Poe became
connected on his return from Philadelphia, and it would seem that if
he ever had prospects bright to look forward to it was with the
fair-minded, business-like Morris and the gentle-hearted Willis. But
when Poe had continued with them a brief six months even that gentle
restraint proved too much. The _Evening Mirror_ did not last long
after his going, though this had little to do with its failure. Then
the indefatigable Morris, with Willis, started the _Home Journal_ at
107 Fulton Street, which continued into the twentieth century, and is
now known under its changed title of _Town and Country_.

[Illustration: Where Poe wrote "The Raven"]

While Poe was working on the _Mirror_ he lived with his frail wife
Virginia and her mother, Mrs. Clemm, in Bloomingdale Village. It was a
village indeed then, and about the scattered houses were broad roads
and shaded lanes and clustering trees. The house in which Poe lived
was on a high bluff beside a country road which is now Eighty-fourth
Street, the house standing (as the thoroughfares run now) between
Broadway and West End Avenue. It was a plain, square, frame dwelling
with brick chimneys reaching high above the pointed roof, kept by Mrs.
Mary Brennan, and Poe rented rooms of her. Two windows faced towards
the Hudson, and he could sit and looking through the trees catch a
silvery glimpse of the river. Here he wrote _The Raven_ and _The Imp
of the Perverse_. From here he sent _The Raven_ to the _American
Review_ at 118 Nassau Street, where it was published over the pen name
of "Quarles"; and he was still living here when the poem was reprinted
in the _Evening Mirror_, for the first time over his own name.

[Illustration: POE'S COTTAGE AT FORDHAM.

(From a drawing by C.W. Mielatz, by permission.)

Copyright, 1899, by The Society of Iconophiles.]

It had come to be the summer of 1845 when Poe left the _Evening
Mirror_ for the long black desk in lower Nassau Street where he helped
Charles F. Briggs conduct the _Broadway Journal_. Briggs was the
matter-of-fact "Harry Franco," a journalist of great ability who in
another ten years was to edit _Putnam's Magazine_ from 10 Park Place.
More than one of Poe's friends said that the combination of Harry
Franco and the poet must assuredly bring forth great literary results
and financial success. But the partnership did not work at all well.
In a very short time Poe bought out his partner's interest through an
arrangement with Horace Greeley and moved the office of the paper into
Clinton Hall. But the _Broadway Journal_ under the management of Poe
was less of a success than it had been under Briggs and Poe, and the
poet retired from it in the first month of 1846.

This Clinton Hall in which Poe had his office was a substantial
building at the southwest corner of Nassau and Beekman streets. Temple
Court now stands on the site. A second and a third building of the
name have arisen in Astor Place, the second having been remodelled in
1854 from the Astor Place Opera House, the scene of the
Forrest-Macready riots. The present building, tall and heavy-looking,
is the home of the Mercantile Library, as each Clinton Hall has been
in its turn, and still retains the name first given to it in 1830,
when Governor De Witt Clinton presented a _History of England_ as a
nucleus for the library.

About the time when Poe was with the _Broadway Journal_ he moved into
a house not a great many steps from Broadway, in Amity Street, since
renamed West Third Street. Here amid surroundings marked by a
simplicity due less to simple tastes than poverty Poe lived and wrote
by the side of the delicate wife who was wasting away before his eyes.
Here he penned the _Philosophy of Composition_, by which he would make
it appear that _The Raven_ was not a product of inspiration, but the
work of calm reason and artistic construction,--a theory which no one
seems to have accepted. Here, too, he wrote _The Literati of New
York_, a series of papers that appeared in _Godey's Lady's Book_, and
were the sensation of the hour in literary circles. Their criticisms
were severe and impassioned, and one of the criticised, believing
himself ill-treated and his writings unjustly abused, sought
vindication. His answer entirely overlooked the libel laws and he was
promptly sued for damages by Poe. This was Thomas Dunn English, a
young man then twenty-four years old, who a few years before, in 1843,
had been asked by N.P. Willis to write a poem for the _New Mirror_.
The poem was written and sent to Willis with the suggestion that he
either print it or tear it up as he thought best. Willis printed it,
and though the writer came to be known as a poet, author, physician,
lawyer, and statesman, the best known of his achievements were these
verses of _Ben Bolt_.

In the spring of 1846, when the poet's wife grew more feeble, her
brilliant eyes more brilliant, and her pallid look more unearthly, Poe
moved out into the country to a little village called Fordham in
Westchester County. This was then far out from the city, a secluded
spot with rocky heights from which a view could be had of country
lanes and broad sweeps of meadow where farmers worked in the fields.
Since then the open landscape has given way to the regularity of city
streets and buildings.

Not a great distance from the railroad station still stands the house
where Poe lived; such a plain, low wooden building that those that
have grown up around it seem to be shouldering it out of the way, and
the widening and improving of streets have pushed it somewhat aside
from its original position. But there the dingy little house still
stands with its veranda, where Poe walked in the night just outside
the sitting-room windows,--walked and dreamed out his _Eureka_. There
are the door and the dwarf hallway. Inside, to the right, is the room,
with its meagre furniture, much of which was purchased with the
proceeds of the suit against Thomas Dunn English, where Poe received
the friends who remembered him in his hours of illness, of poverty,
and distress. In a room towards the front lay the dying wife on her
straw bed, covered with the poet's coat and clasping the
tortoise-shell cat closely to her wasted form. Up the stairs is the
attic chamber, with its slanting roof, where Poe worked, with the cat
at his elbow; where after his wife's death he penned a dirge for her
in the exquisite _Annabel Lee_; where he wrote the first draught of
_The Bells_, which he was to revise and complete while on his lecture
trip to Lowell. Next to it is the room where slept Mrs. Clemm, his
more than mother.

So many memories cling to this home of Poe that those who search for
substantial literary reminders have made it a visiting shrine, much to
the dismay of landowners who hold to the strong belief that
historic old houses are well enough as curiosities, but are
inconvenient things when they stand in the way of money-making
improvements.

[Illustration: THE BATTERY IN 1830.

(From a drawing by C. Burton.)]

After passing through these rooms and with the memory of Poe strong
upon you, walk away along the street remembering that in Poe's time it
was a delightful country road. Stroll towards the Harlem River as he
wandered many a moonlight night, his brain busy with the deep problems
of _The Universe_. After a time you will pass on to the High Bridge,
that carried the pipes of the Croton Aqueduct over the river,--this at
least unchanged since his day. Walk over the path there, high above
the water, and visit the lonely spot where the suggestion came to Poe
for that requiem of despair, the mystic _Ulalume_.

In the little wooden house at Fordham Poe lived, weak and lonely and
poor, after the death of his wife, making daily visits to her nearby
grave,--the grave that is there no longer. He was cared for by
Virginia's mother for something more than two years. Then in the June
of 1849 he left Fordham. Before the end of the year he was dead.




Chapter IX

At the Close of the Knickerbocker Days


A bustling, energetic, but provincial city was New York between the
years 1830 and 1840, the last days of the Knickerbockers. After 1840
it changed greatly, speeding rapidly on in the making of a metropolis.
Looking back now it is plain that the progress of enlargement went
steadily on year by year, but then the changes came on imperceptibly
enough.

To any one who knows the great metropolis of this twentieth century,
it will seem remarkable that Hanover Square was the place where
merchants and jobbers most did congregate, and that the business part
of the city (and that really meant all the town in those times) lay
all below Canal Street. Beyond that was the country, crossed by sand
hills, watered by many rivulets, traversed by roads that led to the
country places of the wealthy or to popular wayside taverns. The main
thoroughfares looked wider than they do now, for they were far less
crowded, although there were busses, and coaches, and drays, and many
other vehicles of a variety that would look quite odd on the streets
of this day, and in fact anywhere except in old prints, for they
became extinct many a day ago. There were no surface roads, no
elevated roads, no clanging electric cars, no bicycles, no motor
carriages, no thousand and one conveniences of comfort and confusion
that inventive genius and modern methods have called forth. To be sure
the first street railroad in the world had just been projected and
the cars were about to run through the streets, but this was not as
yet established.

The architectural appearance of the city was more meagre, more
uniform, far more picturesquely simple. There were wooden houses,
squat and irregular, and there were brick houses, low and solid; there
were no great towering structures to make one crane the neck to see
the top. It was a city where provinciality stared out at every corner,
a city which has been swept so entirely away that what is left of it
lingers only in odd nooks and corners and back streets where even the
oldest New Yorker has lost sight of it, and where visitors spend many
hours seeking out old-time curiosities in the byways of the
metropolis.

[Illustration: Museum at the north end of the Park

1825]

The larger buildings of those days, the ones to catch the eye of a
stranger, are all memories now, and it is a difficult matter to say
even where they stood with any degree of certainty. There was Masonic
Hall in Broadway and Pearl Street, with its great chamber in imitation
of the Chapel of Henry VIII., that was quite the pride of the town,
and indeed looked upon as the most elegant reception-room in detail
and appointment to be found in America. Close by, on the other side of
the way, was Contoit's Garden, a delightful resort, where could be had
the finest of ices and cakes. Farther on the Apollo dancing-rooms were
a Mecca for the youth of the town. Opposite the lower end of City
Hall Park was Scudder's, the first museum in the city, the forerunner
of Barnum's, filled to overflowing with curiosities of earth and sea
and air. Across the way, on the opposite side of the park, was the
Park Theatre with its broad white front and its record as the chief
playhouse of the city, although there were hosts of admirers and
patrons of the Old Bowery, and of the National in Leonard Street, and
of the Olympic in Broadway, where Mitchell was established as a great
favorite. Out beyond the city was Niblo's Garden, newly established
and a real rural retreat; near to it, over on the Bowery Road, was the
old Vauxhall, fast losing caste as a place of outdoor amusement. In
Nassau Street the Middle Dutch Church still stood, its silvery bell
sounding over the city in which Sunday was a day set apart for
religious observance and had not come to be a day of merrymaking.

[Illustration: THE APOLLO ROOMS IN 1830.]

[Illustration: Niblo's Garden]

It had come to be very near the end of the Knickerbocker days in this
quiet city where brimstone matches and india-rubber overshoes had just
been introduced,--indeed, it was close upon the year 1840,--when the
Astor House was a new structure talked about all over the land as a
wonderful palace. On the ground floor of this hotel John R. Bartlett
kept a well stocked book-shop, and not a day but it was much visited
by the literary folk of the town, for he was the friend of all bookish
people. He himself was a quiet, scholarly man, and it was there in his
shop, when his many friends left him leisure for work, that he
arranged the greater part of his _Dictionary of Americanisms_, by
which his name is remembered far better than by his historical
records,--remembered when the fact that he was Secretary of State in
Rhode Island is quite forgotten if it was ever widely known.

One of the familiar figures in Bartlett's book-shop was a keen-eyed,
spectacled man who walked with quite a noticeable limp. This was
Charles Fenno Hoffman, a notable man of his time, whose song,
_Sparkling and Bright_, was on everybody's tongue. Thirty-four years
of his life were behind him, years that were full to overflowing. He
was a New Yorker in the full meaning of the term, and many of the
events of his active life had centred about the little book-shop. His
birthplace was only eight blocks away, there where the structure of
the Elevated Road throws its shadow over Greenwich Street at its
crossing with Rector. Those interested searchers who have visited the
house where Washington Irving boarded close by this same corner will
find the house where Hoffman was born nearby it. Thoughts of Irving
and Hoffman entwine themselves naturally and closely, for Hoffman's
half-sister was that Matilda who was affianced to Irving and whose
early death shadowed his whole life.

Just around the corner from Bartlett's shop Hoffman went to school at
Columbia College, where the present Park Place now wends its way from
the river to Printing House Square. After leaving college he studied
law, but soon gave up that profession to become the associate editor
of the _American_ as the commencement of a literary career. In 1833 he
founded the _Knickerbocker_ magazine, and while conducting it enjoyed
the intimate fellowship of Harry Franco, William Cullen Bryant, Lewis
Gaylord Clark, William L. Stone, the brothers Duyckinck, Frederick S.
Cozzens, Park Benjamin, John L. Stephens, and a great many others in
the same field of writing.

All this was behind him when he became a familiar figure in Bartlett's
shop; and more, too, for he had worked with N.P. Willis on the
_Mirror_, and had travelled far in the wild West despite an accident
in his youth which had crushed his leg between a boat and the wharf,
leaving him a life-long cripple. In this western journeying he
gathered material for _A Winter in the West_ and _Wild Scenes in
Forest and Prairie_. He had already written _Vanderlyn_, and now in
the book-shop was daily discussing his plans for _Grayslaer_. No hint
came to the minds of those who listened to his witty talk in idle
hours at the book-shop that in another ten years he would be taken
from his last city home in Greene Street to live out the remaining
thirty-four years of his life in the asylum at Harrisburg, Pa., a
mental wreck.

It was Hoffman who introduced Lewis Gaylord Clark to the book-shop.
Clark had been associated with him on the _Knickerbocker_ magazine,
and it was Clark who continued that publication for many years in the
office on Broadway, just south of Cortlandt Street. To the office very
often went his twin brother, Willis Gaylord Clark, editor of the
Philadelphia _Gazette_, who contributed his now long-forgotten verse
to his brother's magazine almost to the day of his death.

It was quite natural that John L. Stephens should make Bartlett's
book-shop a headquarters while he was in town, for Bartlett and he
were firm friends of years' standing, and their minds ran along in
very much the same historical groove. Many a story the famous
traveller recounted to his friend and to the others who were gathered
there, and his presence was eagerly looked for. He had been to Egypt
and had written from there letters that were published in the
_Knickerbocker_ when Hoffman was at its head. He had been to Arabia,
to Poland, and to half a dozen other countries, and had written of his
travels with a straightforward directness that was very much like his
clear ringing talk. His visits to the book-shop happened years before
he became interested in the Panama Railroad, for when this project
came to his hand he devoted so much of himself to the building of the
road across the Isthmus that he gave little time to writing.

Another man who lingered in the book-shop more than any of the others
was a sort of _protégé_ of Clark's, since Clark had in a great
measure discovered him. His name was Frederick S. Cozzens, a wine
merchant, and almost every afternoon he walked from his place around
the next corner in Vesey Street, the second block below Broadway. It
was Clark who recognized him as a humorist long before any one else
appreciated him. His merry conversation was a delightful incident in
the book-shop years and years before he moved to Yonkers and was then
a great deal talked about as the author of the _Sparrowgrass Papers_.

This book-shop was a veritable treasury of literary secrets, for if
there was to be anything new in the literary world it was sure to be
spoken of there before it was rumored about anywhere else. In this way
the book-shop was first to hear of the publication of that journal of
books and opinions, _Arcturus_, for Evert A. Duyckinck was one of the
_habitués_ there. This is the author who, seven years later, with his
brother George was to start the publication of _The Literary World_;
and these are the brothers Duyckinck who while editing this
publication collected material and wrote their _Encyclopædia of
American Literature_, which gave them fame long after both were dead.

The publication of literary periodicals was in the air that year of
1840, and the little book-shop, being a literary world unto itself,
heard of all of them in turn before public announcement was made.
James Aldrich, who four years before had given up a prosperous
business for a writer's career, projected his _Literary Gazette_, in
which most of his poems afterwards appeared; and Park Benjamin, rather
a newcomer in the town, it having been only three years since he
transferred his _New England Magazine_ to New York under the title of
the _American Monthly Magazine_, the same year established _Our New
World_. He was a pleasant, affable man, and his companions at
Bartlett's place thought much of the author of _The Old Sexton_.

William Cullen Bryant lived in New York through these last days of
Knickerbocker life and still lived there when these times were looked
back upon as a period of great good-fellowship. He arrived in the city
a young man, scarcely known, but he lived to be old, still a citizen,
so entwined with the literary, social, and business interests that
innumerable places can be pointed out to-day as bearing closely upon
the poet's life and suggesting many reminders of himself and his work.

In the far down-town, in Broadway at the Pine Street corner, these
memories start. At that corner, in a building long gone now, when
Bryant was quite a stranger in the city, he edited the _New York
Review and Athenæum_, in which his own poem, _Death of the Flowers_,
was published, and in which Halleck's _Marco Bozzaris_ first appeared.
In his office there Bryant often talked with Percival and with
Hillhouse, and there he discussed with Verplanck and Sands what manner
of verse he would contribute to the newly started _Talisman_ magazine.

Up Broadway a little farther, at the Fulton Street corner, is the
publication office of the _Evening Post_, a building which more than
any other in New York should call forth thoughts of Bryant, for he was
the editor of that newspaper for two-and-fifty years. When he joined
the staff in 1826, in two years succeeding Coleman as editor and
remaining so until his death, the _Evening Post_ had its office in
William Street, near Pine. But Bryant spent many years of his
editorial life in the Broadway building, and one of its attractions,
now pointed out to all visitors, is the poet's window on an upper
floor where he sat at his desk, that was always stacked high and
negligently with all manner of useless papers and rejected
manuscripts, and looked over the city to the south as he worked.

[Illustration: VIEW OF OLD BUILDINGS IN WILLIAM STREET, LOOKING
TOWARDS MAIDEN LANE, 1800.]

Standing beside this window there are memories of other men than
Bryant to be called up, for here remembrance of many of his associates
comes vividly to mind. There was William Leggett, the poet's friend
and business companion, the brilliant journalist who wrote _Tales of a
Country Schoolmaster_, and who worked beside Bryant from 1829 to 1836.
With thoughts of him come those of Parke Godwin, who joined the
_Evening Post_ staff the year after Leggett left it, who as long as
the poet lived was his close friend, and who, marrying Bryant's
daughter Fanny, wove closer year by year the relations that bound
them. There are memories, too, of John Bigelow, who occupied an
editorial chair on the _Post_ for a dozen years after 1849.

Going still farther up Broadway in search of Bryant reminders, you
walk past the Post-Office and over the stretch of pavement made
historic by the personal encounter between the poet and William L.
Stone. This happened in 1831, and Stone, then editor of the
_Commercial Advertiser_, was not at all friendly to Bryant. The two
met there on the parkside, just opposite where Philip Hone lived, and
Hone, looking from his window, saw the encounter. Sitting down he
immediately wrote of it in the diary which is such a perfect
reflection of the city's history during the first half of the
nineteenth century.

Those were the days when Stone was collecting his information
concerning the Indians which he afterwards utilized to such advantage
in _The Life of Joseph Brant_, _The Life of Red Jacket_, and kindred
books.

Keeping on up Broadway to Leonard Street, thence over across town
three blocks west to 92 Hudson Street, the stroller comes to a
warehouse that has been reared above the home where Bryant lived when
he became editor of the _Evening Post_ and from which he often walked
around the corner to 345 Greenwich Street to make an evening call on
his near neighbor and friend J. Fenimore Cooper.

On a little farther, up Varick Street this time, past the old Chapel
of St. John's, lingering in its stately age quiet and dignified amid
the unwholesome neighbors that have grown up around it. On the very
next block, close by Canal Street, there is a red brick house with
stone steps, and here Bryant lived after his removal from Hudson
Street.

This same Varick Street leads straight north for half a mile until it
touches Carmine Street, and in the second block of that thoroughfare
is the house of age-worn brick that was the poet's "home in Carmine
Street," of which he spoke so often and so affectionately.

From this point, a walk due east straight across town to the Bowery is
as direct a route as could be found to the house where Bryant boarded
in Fourth Street near the Bowery. It was here he entertained the
friendly Unitarian clergyman, Orville Dewey, and discussed poetry with
him. Here too he began the acquaintance with his fellow-lodger, Parke
Godwin, without a thought that Godwin would one day be his son-in-law,
without a thought that they would walk side by side through a literary
life for close upon half a century.

Still on up-town, this time to Union Square. Between that green spot
and Irving Place in Fifteenth Street, you come upon the home of the
Century Club in its early days, when it was the chief place in America
for the entertainment of men of letters. This club, founded by Bryant,
was presided over at various times by Bancroft, Verplanck, and men
whose names are equally well remembered. Bryant was the president when
he died. The club now has a sumptuous home in Forty-third Street near
Fifth Avenue.

Last home of all of Bryant in New York is the brownstone house next to
the College of St. Francis Xavier, in Sixteenth Street. Here he lived
during the last years of his life when he was not passing the long
spring and summer months at his well-beloved Cedarmere at Roslyn, Long
Island, which had been his favorite abiding place since 1843. It was
in this Sixteenth Street house that he wrote his last lines of
verse--on the birthday of Washington; it was here that he died.

One more structure not a great distance away calls up strongly the
memory of Bryant. In Fourth Avenue at Twentieth Street is picturesque
All Souls' Church, which has been there since 1855. Built of brick
trimmed with Caen stone, planned in the form of a Greek cross, it was
the first example of the Byzantine style of architecture in America.
It was to have a tall, square, tower-like steeple, but this was never
built. To this church the body of Bryant was taken, and there in the
presence of all literary New York, and while the whole city mourned,
Dr. Bellows, who had been his long-time friend, preached his funeral
sermon.




Chapter X

Half a Century Ago


Like many a landed estate, like many a quiet village, like many a
battle-ground, like many a winding and historic road, like so many
other places of interest of which the island of Manhattan has been the
scene in days agone--Minniesland is not easy to locate. Relentlessly
and remorselessly the great masses of brick and mortar have forged
ahead in their furtherance of the city's growth, seeking a level as
they spread, dominating the island, levelling the hills, and
stretching over valleys until the surface of the land is altered
beyond all knowing. Minniesland is one of the almost buried districts
of the great city. Its last surviving relic, a square ornamental
structure, is the one token that it ever existed. Now that the town
has surrounded this building, and streets have cut through and
mutilated the first plan of the district, this house may be found
standing where One Hundred and Fifty-fifth Street slopes down to the
Hudson River. Enter it; pass through its ancient halls, and, standing
on its porch, blot from the mind the spot as it is and reconstruct it
as it was half a century ago.

Fifty years ago the city was far away there to the south, and this
house, miles and miles away up-country, was at the edge of a forest
stretching down the hillside to the river. There were other farmhouses
around it. To the north was the mansion where Colonel Morris had lived
before the Revolution; where Madame Jumel in later days had married
Aaron Burr. To the south was the square frame building, close by a
clump of thirteen trees, where Alexander Hamilton had lived and where
his widow stayed on after his death.

Forgetting for a moment these old-time surroundings of the house by
the forest edge, turn to the building itself, and imagine at the
window a man sitting. He has long hair and clear blue eyes. He is
painting at a small easel and working in quite a wonderful manner, for
he is ambidextrous. He stops in his work and looks over the trees
towards the Hudson. If that ever-moving river recalls to him his past
life, John James Audubon, ornithologist, is reviewing a strange and
adventurous career in many countries, full of losses, of suffering, of
changes, of perils. He thinks of himself as a boy wandering through
the dense, hot wilds of San Domingo; as a youth hard at his art
studies in Paris under the master David; as a man at his father's
country place on the Schuylkill, failing utterly and absolutely when
he goes into business, and letting his father's fortune slip away from
his nerveless grasp. He remembers, too, his marriage, and how his wife
followed his restless career with unchanging love and remained always
a balance-wheel to his impetuosity. He recalls how, through all the
changes of that early and unsettled life, the naturalist-love born in
him when he roamed the tropical home of his youth was always strongest
in his nature, and was constantly cropping out in his mania for
collecting beautiful things that were quite worthless from a
commercial point of view, just as it was shown in his personal
appearance; for his manner of dressing, always with his hair falling
over his shoulders, marked him as a man regardless of conventionality,
a man so bound within the circle of his own thoughts that he had
little time or inclination to peek out and see which way the world was
moving.

[Illustration: Audubon's Home

156th St. and N. River]

Audubon had passed through the hardest struggles of his life, had
travelled in England, in France, in Scotland, arranging for the
publication of his bird pictures, that remarkable work which set his
memory apart; he had succeeded in his life's object, and at the close
of 1840 had come here to this forest hillside by the Hudson, built
the house on the estate Minniesland, named in honor of his wife, made
it a luxurious abode, and there gathered his friends about him.

With this home of Audubon there is associated a memory of the early
days of the telegraph. When Samuel F.B. Morse built the first
telegraph line to Philadelphia, he had it strung across the river from
Fort Lee to the basement of Audubon's house, and there he received the
first telegraphic message ever sent to the island of Manhattan. Here
Audubon lived, wrote, and painted until even his rugged strength was
worn out. He worked until those clever ambidextrous hands lost the
cunning to work out the forms his active brain could still conceive.
The day came, in 1851, when he died, fortunately before any great
change had come over the beauties of Minniesland. The peacefulness of
Trinity Cemetery, which takes in part of the Audubon farm, is still
faintly reminiscent of the scene of the ornithologist's later life,
and there, close by the old house, is the grave of Audubon, and upon
his tomb are sculptured the birds he loved so well, now keeping watch
over him.

[Illustration: Clement C. Moore's House

Chelsea]

While Audubon worked in his out-of-town retreat, another scholar and
writer lived farther down the island towards the city. Clement C.
Moore lived in a little district of his own called Chelsea Village,
now merged into the city by so deft a laying out of streets that there
is little irregularity at the point where town and village met. A bit
of the old village remains exactly as it was in the General
Theological Seminary, and the block on which it stands, Twentieth to
Twenty-first streets, Ninth and Tenth avenues, is still called Chelsea
Square. Clement C. Moore inherited from his father, Bishop Benjamin
Moore, a large tract of land along the river near the present Chelsea
Square, and gave the land on which the seminary was built to that
institution. He himself lived in a house which his father had occupied
before him and which stood on the line of the present Twenty-third
Street on the block between Ninth and Tenth avenues. It was a very old
building, renowned for the fact that General Washington had stopped
there one afternoon when he had his headquarters in the city. Clement
C. Moore was a professor in the General Theological Seminary, and
while there compiled the first Greek and Hebrew lexicons ever
published in this country. But it is not by reason of his learned
books or his philanthropy that his name is best recalled, but by a
poem which he wrote for his children and of which the world at large
might never have known but that it was sent without his knowledge and
published in an up-State paper. This poem, the Christmas classic of
_The Visit of St. Nicholas_, begins with "'T was the night before
Christmas," and its simple yet merry jingle and delightful
word-pictures have endeared it to all children since his time and will
endure to please many more to come.

All that there was of literary New York half a century ago centred
about Anne C. Lynch. She established a circle, a gathering which
increased or fell off in numbers as men and women of brains came and
went. This was the first near approach to a _salon_ in this country.
In the early days of her coming to the city, Miss Lynch lived in a
neat-appearing brick house in Waverly Place, just off Washington
Square. She moved elsewhere from time to time, the literary coterie
moving about as she moved. At the height of her success, in 1855, she
married the Italian educator, Vincenzo Botta, then in his second year
in New York and occupying a professorship of Italian literature in the
University of New York. The receptions of Mrs. Botta flourished and
were as popular as had been those of Miss Lynch. Her writings, too,
went on, and her most widely known work, the material for which she
gathered during her intimate personal association with many authors,
the _Handbook of Universal Literature_, was written when she lived in
Thirty-seventh Street, a few doors west of Fifth Avenue.

In the early years of Anne C. Lynch's receptions, one of her intimates
was Caroline M. Kirkland, the friend of Bayard Taylor. Mrs. Kirkland,
who had just returned after a residence in Michigan, sought her advice
before she published _Forest Life_, which was the second of her
descriptions of the sparsely settled region where she had spent three
years of her life. The intimacy between these two continued for years,
indeed until Mrs. Kirkland died, in 1864, stricken with paralysis
while under the strain of managing a great sanitary fair during the
Civil War.

Through Mrs. Kirkland, Lydia M. Child was introduced at the Lynch
receptions, when she was associated with her husband in conducting the
_National Anti-Slavery Standard_. She had been a writer since her
youth, having published her first book, _Hobomok_, in 1821. Her works
had been much read, but lost much of their popularity after she
published the first anti-slavery book in America, in 1833, under the
title _An Appeal for that Class of Americans Called Africans_. She
ever remained prominent as an abolitionist, but because of her
opinions lost caste as a writer of novels. But Miss Lynch cared little
what opinions any one held so long as they really had opinions and
would stand by them, and Mrs. Child was welcomed to her home until she
left the city, in 1844, to spend the rest of her life in Wayland,
Massachusetts.

Very often Edgar Allan Poe attended the Lynch receptions, taking with
him his delicate wife, who seemed to get better for the moment when
she saw her husband the centre of a notable gathering. For even here
Poe had quite a following of his own. It was on one of these evenings
that he gave it as his opinion that _The Sinless Child_ was one of the
strongest long poems ever produced in America. This poem was just
then making a great stir and on this special evening had been the
subject of much discussion. The author was present, as she usually was
where writers congregated, for the beautiful and witty Elizabeth Oakes
Smith carried enthusiasm and inspiration wherever she went. She found
time to form part of many a circle, even though her days were well
filled, for she assisted her husband, "Major Jack Downing," in his
editorial work. For many a year before she finally retired to
Hollywood, South Carolina, she held her place as the first and only
woman lecturer in America.

[Illustration:

1. W.D. HOWELLS.
2. J.G. HOLLAND.
3. RICHARD GRANT WHITE.
4. BRANDER MATTHEWS.
5. WILLIAM WINTER.

From an engraving of the picture by J.H. Marble; courtesy of Mr. W.E.
Benjamin.]

Another dear friend of Poe's might usually be found at these
receptions. "Estella" Lewis, the poet, lived in Brooklyn and held
there quite a court of clever people. The time came when she was,
indeed, a friend in need to Poe in his time of dire necessity at
Fordham. It was at her Brooklyn home that he read _The Raven_ before
it was published, and Estella Lewis was the last friend he visited
before he left New York on the journey south which ended in his death.

On the "Poe nights," too, Ann S. Stephens was usually to be found at
Miss Lynch's. She became a much-read novelist, writing _Fashion and
Famine_ and _Mary Derwent_. On these nights, too, might be seen
Margaret Fuller, the transcendentalist. She had left her Massachusetts
home to take her place with Horace Greeley as literary editor of the
_Tribune_, and between whiles devoted herself to charitable work in an
effort to better the social condition of the poor of the metropolis.
During most of her stay she lived in a locality much changed since her
time, near where Forty-ninth Street touches the East River. A
picturesque spot it was, overlooking the green stretches of
Blackwell's Island, in the midst of suburban life. Her stay in New
York was short. After a year or so she went to Europe and in Italy
married the Marquis Ossoli. She was on her way back to America, in
1850, a passenger in the merchantman _Elizabeth_, when the ship was
wrecked off Fire Island and she perished with it.

To this group of writers also belongs Frances Sargent Osgood. While,
somewhere about the year 1846, the country was ringing with her
praise, she was living the secluded life of an invalid, with her
husband, in what was then becoming a fashionable neighborhood, 18 East
Fourteenth Street. Once, in 1845, she had met Poe, had been instantly
attracted by him, and became thereafter his staunch admirer,
expressing her opinion persistently whenever opportunity offered. He,
on his part, appreciated her poetic genius, and more than once
referred to the scrupulous taste, faultless style, and magical grace
of her verse. And several of his poems are addressed directly to her.

There was a young man named Richard Henry Stoddard who frequented the
Lynch receptions. He had worked for six years in a foundry learning
the trade of iron moulder, and writing poetry as he worked. By the
year 1848 he was beginning to make a name for himself, and his first
volume of poems, _Footnotes_, had just been published. At Miss Lynch's
house he met Miss Elizabeth Barstow, herself a poet, and some time
later visited her at her home in Mattapoisett. This led to their
marriage. Early in the year of his meeting with Miss Barstow, Stoddard
made the acquaintance of Bayard Taylor. Taylor had already travelled
on foot over Europe, had crystallized the results of these travels in
_Views Afoot_, and was then working under Greeley on the _Tribune_, as
one of the several editors. Side by side with him worked that
pure-hearted and thoughtful man who had been the instigator and
supporter of the Brook Farm experiment, George Ripley, who wrote the
_Tribune's_ book criticisms.

_Views Afoot_ was the most popular book of the day when Stoddard
walked into the _Tribune_ office and introduced himself to the author,
finding him very hard at work in a little pen of a room. This was the
start of a friendship which lasted for thirty years, and was only
broken in upon by death.

A few days after, Stoddard called upon Taylor, who then lived in
Murray Street, a few steps from Broadway. Charles Fenno Hoffman, who
occupied rooms in the same building, was then beginning to show signs
of the mental breakdown which was to cloud the last thirty-four years
of his life. But Hoffman was prosperous and occupied luxurious
quarters on the ground floor, while Taylor, despite the popularity of
his book, led a life of hard work and struggle. He was ill paid for
his services on the _Tribune_, as Greeley did not believe in high
salaries, and he lived up four flights of stairs in a sort of
two-roomed attic. There Stoddard went almost every Saturday after his
labors at the iron foundry, and there the friendship strengthened week
by week; there Taylor taught Stoddard to smoke; there they discussed
books and writers, and there wrote poetry together. There Taylor wrote
_Kubleh_ and _Ariel in the Cloven Pine_, and, too, the song that won
for him a prize when Barnum invited the entire country to a
competition in writing a song for Jenny Lind. Taylor was visited by a
great many friends, and with them the youthful Stoddard became
acquainted. Sometimes to the house in Murray Street came Rufus W.
Griswold, author of _Poets and Poetry of America_, _Prose Writers of
America_, and kindred works. He had been one of Taylor's early
advisers. The diplomatist and playwright, George H. Boker, often made
one of the party at this time, when his tragedy, _Calaynos_, was being
acted with great success at Sadlers's Wells Theatre in England.
Another visitor was Richard Kimball, the lawyer-author, then
enthusiastically putting the finishing touches to _St. Leger_.

These days of changing fortunes were the most romantic of Taylor's
career. Many other places in the city are associated with him, one a
house near Washington Square, where he lived for some years and wrote
among other things the _Poems of the Orient_. His last city home was
at 142 East Eighteenth Street. There he wrote _Deukalion_, and from
there he started out, after being dined and fêted, on his mission as
United States Minister to Germany. In England he met Carlyle. In Paris
he had a "queer midnight supper" with Victor Hugo. In Germany, though
he was then quite an ill man, he threw himself into official business
with an energy that his constitution, worn by years of persistent hard
work, would not warrant. Before the end of the year, the friends in
America who had wished him farewell in April, congratulating him that
he had attained an honor that he prized, knew that he lay dead in
Berlin.




Chapter XI

Two Famous Meeting-Places


Looking backward to the days before the Civil War is to bring into
review a host of men who then walked through the city in which time
has wrought so many changes, and to bring to the mind's eye familiar
streets, but so altered that they seem like unknown highways.

There was the Battery, with its old-time appearance, when the green
grass of summer was not cast into deep and continual shade by an
overhanging device of modern travel, and when its broad walk was a
promenade, the like and popularity of which was not to be found
elsewhere. There stood squat Castle Garden, half in the water and half
on the land, of nondescript style of architecture, suggesting a means
of defence against an invading force and giving cause for wonder as to
how it ever came by the flowery half of its name.

Wandering swiftly through the lower end of the town, memory recalls
old houses whose begrimed fronts bore the markings of a good hundred
years. There, by the Bowling Green, was where Washington and Putnam
had their headquarters. Farther up-town a hotel arose where Franconi's
Hippodrome had been. Still farther along was Murray Hill, where there
was just enough elevation of land to account in a measure for its
name. Still farther on were country places beyond the town--beyond the
town then, but now come to be the very heart's core of the metropolis.

But of all the points of interest none comes fresher to the mind than
Broadway. And though they have all changed, some swept away, some
freshened up, others reconstructed into modern ways and made to keep
pace with the progress of the passing days, no change or series of
changes have brought about such complete renewal, if the reminiscent
eye of the mind is to be believed, as has come to Broadway. Blotting
out for the moment the city's chief canyon of travel as it is to-day,
with its brobdingnagian structures, and its sights and sounds of
business and pleasure and enterprise, let the highway of old take its
place. As far back as fifty years ago, residences were gradually
metamorphosed into business hives, but they managed to retain much of
their conservative appearance for a long time, as though a battle were
being waged as to whether Broadway should be a place of homes or a
business thoroughfare. Trees by the curb line waved their branches in
angry protest against commercial encroachments and in opposition to
great glaring signs that blurted out business announcements in a
bold-faced manner, that argued they had come to stay. While the
Broadway of to-day gives the impression of narrowness because of the
height of the sky-scrapers that border it, it then looked exceedingly
wide. It was never a quiet street, for a continual procession of
omnibuses and other vehicles on business and pleasure bent streamed
along it. Among the popular resorts at which they often stopped was
Charles Pfaff's, where beer was sold. There of an evening met the
literary Bohemians of the city, in the days when Bohemia really
existed and before the word had well-nigh lost significance and
respect. They were gifted men with great power of intellect, who
spoke without fear and without favor and whose every word expressed a
thought. They were real men and they made the world a real place, a
place without affectation, without pretence, without show, without
need of applause, and without undue cringing to mere conventional
forms. These were the characteristics of the Bohemians, and Bohemia
was wherever two or three of them were gathered together. Bohemia was
the atmosphere they carried with them, and whether upon the streets or
in Pfaff's cellar they were at home. Pfaff's happening to be a
convenient gathering-place, and beer happening to be the popular brew
with most of them, they gathered there.

It is a tradition that the place came into favor through the personal
efforts of the energetic Henry Clapp. He was attracted to it, so the
tradition runs, soon after he started the _Saturday Press_ in 1858,
that lively publication, so brilliant while it lasted, so soon to die,
and at its death having pasted on its outer door an announcement which
read: "This paper is discontinued for want of funds, which by a
coincidence is precisely the reason for which it was started." Whether
it is true or not that Clapp was the first to call attention to the
resort that came to be the meeting-place of the Bohemians, matters
little. It grew to be such a meeting-place, and it is quite true that
the members of the staff of the _Saturday Press_ did more than any one
else to give it a name that has lived through the years.

It is hard to locate Pfaff's place now. Go to look for it on the east
side of Broadway, above Bleecker Street three or four doors, and you
will be disappointed, for there is nothing to locate--just a
conventional business house. Take an idle hour and picture it in
memory; that will be better. Thinking of it now it is quite natural to
contrast it with modern eating- and drinking-houses, famous for their
mirror-lined walls, richly carved appointments, carpeted floors, and
flashing electric lights. Pfaff's was a hole beneath the surface of
the street, ill-lighted, ill-ventilated, ill-kept. But it is far
better to read George Arnold's poem embodying the spirit of the
cellar, and recording how the company was "very merry at Pfaff's."
This poet was one of the merry company in the days when he wrote
regularly for the columns of _Vanity Fair_. He has himself said that
some of the poems were written in the late hours after an evening
spent in the underground Broadway resort with Fitz-Hugh Ludlow, with
Mortimer Thomson, the famous "Q. K. Philander Doesticks," and a score
of like writers. It was Arnold, too, who caused an hour of sadness
when he took there the story of the death of Henry W. Herbert, who was
well known to all the habitués. They all knew his life's story; they
had heard him tell of his father, the Dean of Manchester and cousin to
the Earl of Carnarvon; they had heard him tell how he had come to New
York from London, how he had taught in the school in Beaver Street
near Whitehall, and how in that little school he had partly written
his historical romance _Cromwell_, and how he had mapped out some of
the others that followed it. They knew, too, how he had, under the
name of "Frank Forester," produced such books as _American Game in its
Season_, _The Horse and Horsemanship in North America_, and become
famous by novel-writing. He was the first to introduce sports of the
field into fiction in America. Some of his comrades knew the
unhappiness that had crept into his life, but even his dearest friends
were not prepared for the news which Arnold brought one day, that
"Frank Forester" had died by his own hand in a room on the second
floor of the Stevens House, there in Broadway by the Bowling Green,
not more than the throw of a stone from the place where, in his early
days in New York, he had taught school.

Another friend of George Arnold's, who sometimes spent hours with him
at Pfaff's, was George Farrar Browne, but few will remember him by
this name, while many will recall that which he made famous, Artemus
Ward. He had passed his apprenticeship as a printer and reporter, had
made the country ring with the name of the lively but illiterate
showman, and was in New York trying to carry _Vanity Fair_ to
success--a task which he could not accomplish.

Another of the Pfaff company was Thomas Bailey Aldrich. This was at a
time when he had editorial charge of the _Saturday Press_ after he had
come from Portsmouth and served three years at his desk in the
commission house of his rich uncle. Working over the books of the
firm, his mind was often busy with themes outside of the commission
house, all tending towards a literary career.

Another lounger at Pfaff's whose name has become famous in the world
of letters was William Winter, who was sometimes a visitor. Howells
went there on his first visit to New York and dined with Walt Whitman,
and there were others--Bayard Taylor and Stedman among them.

[Illustration: The University Building]

It was only a few minutes' walk from Pfaff's to Washington Square,
and there could be found the substantial-appearing University
building, where Theodore Winthrop had his office and where he wrote
_Cecil Dreeme_ and _John Brent_. From that gloomy building he was
called to the war, and to his home there friends brought the details
of his death--shot through the heart while rallying his men in an
attack which he had helped to plan at the action of Big Bethel in
June, 1861. At the time of his death he was scarcely known as a
writer, and it was not until the publication of _Cecil Dreeme_ that
the world realized that it had lost an entertaining story-teller as
well as a brave soldier when Winthrop fell.

Among others who served in the Seventh Regiment of New York, of which
Theodore Winthrop was a member, was Fitz-James O'Brien, the erratic
and brilliant journalist, whose tale of _The Diamond Lens_ was his
best contribution to the literature of the day. The only literary man
of the Seventh to return to New York was O'Brien's friend, Charles
Graham Halpine, who resigned, and lived to make his name famous by his
humorous sketches of army life supposed to have been penned by
"Private Miles O'Reilly."

The name of Winthrop naturally suggests the name of Dr. John W.
Draper, who was associated with the University of New York for more
than thirty years. His technical writings made his name known over the
world, and he spent many years of his life in the dingy old University
building working on a _History of Intellectual Development in Europe_.

[Illustration: The Studio Building in West 70th St.]

Fitz-James O'Brien has told of how he was once sent by a newspaper to
see Henry T. Tuckerman, in a big brown building in Tenth Street. This
studio building, just east of Sixth Avenue, is there yet, and the room
on the second floor where O'Brien had his talk with the scholarly
essayist and critic may be seen. At that time Tuckerman was writing
_The Criterion; or, The Test of Talk about Familiar Things_. In this
large room overlooking the street it was his custom on Sunday evenings
to entertain his literary friends.

Another home where there were Sunday-evening gatherings for many years
was that of Alice and Phoebe Cary. This house, one of the few
residences remaining in a neighborhood otherwise given up to business
structures to-day, is numbered 53 on East Twentieth Street. Here the
Carys lived when they made their home in this city, coming from their
Ohio birthplace to a wider field of activity. You can walk now into
the little parlor where the gatherings were held. You can go into the
room above, where Phoebe worked--when she found time; for in the
joint housekeeping of the sisters Phoebe often said that she had to
be the housekeeper before she could be the poet. In that room she
wrote, after coming from church one Sunday, the hymn which has made
her name famous and well-beloved, _Nearer My Home_.

[Illustration: 53 EAST 20th St.]

There on the same floor was the favorite work-corner of Alice, and
sitting close by the window, where she could look out into the street,
she wrote many of her poems of memory and of domestic affection. In
this room, too, she died.

To recite the names of those Sunday-evening callers would be to recall
all the writers in the city at that time, and to mention all those
prominent in the world of letters who came from out of town. James
Parton was often one of the company, in the days when he was arranging
the material for his _Life of Horace Greeley_, material gathered from
those who had known the great editor during his early days in New
Hampshire and Vermont. Greeley himself dropped in occasionally, and
also another member of the _Tribune_ staff, Richard Hildreth, the
writer from Massachusetts, who had been associate editor of the Boston
_Atlas_ and who in after years was United States Consul at Trieste.

Herman Melville was invited to the Twentieth Street house at the time
when he was at work on his _Battle Pieces_, and could look back on
years of adventure by land and by sea, and on the hardships that had
supplied him with the material from which to write so much that was
odd and interesting. At one of these Sunday-night receptions, at which
Alice Cary introduced him first, Melville told the company, and told
it far better than he had ever written anything (at least so one of
his hearers has recorded), the story of that life of trial and
adventure. He began at the beginning, telling of his boyhood in New
York, of his shipping as a common sailor, and of his youthful
wanderings in London and Liverpool. In true sailor fashion, and with
picturesque detail, he spun the tale of his eighteen months' cruise to
the sperm fisheries in the Pacific, and held his hearers' close
attention while he related the coarse brutality of his captain, who
had forced him to desert at the Marquesas Islands. Then he traced his
wanderings with his one companion through the trackless forest on the
island of Nukahiva and of his capture by the Typee cannibals. He
related how there was little hope in his heart that he could ever
escape, but that he still held tight to life and his courage did not
desert him; how with the thought of death before him by night and by
day he yet hourly studied the strange life about him and garnered
those facts and fancies which he afterwards used to such advantage in
his successful _Typee_. It was a thrilling tale to listen to, in
strange contrast to his humdrum later life when he was an employee of
the New York Custom House. When you go to see the home of the Cary
sisters, walk on a few blocks to East Twenty-sixth Street, and there
see the house numbered 104. On this site stood Melville's house, where
he lived for many years and where, when he had come to be an old man,
he died.

Mary L. Booth was another visitor to the home of the Cary sisters, and
with them she talked over a great many details of her _History of the
City of New York_, which she was at that time energetically engaged
upon. And there this future editor of _Harper's Bazar_ met Martha J.
Lamb when Mrs. Lamb came to the city from Chicago. A talk between the
two had much to do with directing Mrs. Lamb's thought into historical
lines, and led to her publishing, some seventeen years later, her
_History of New York_, and to her assuming, in 1883, the editorship of
the _Magazine of American History_. Mary L. Booth used to tell very
amusingly how she had once met Samuel G. Goodrich, then famous as
"Peter Parley," at the little house in Twentieth Street, and how
disappointed she had been in listening to his talk and not finding it
as impressive as it should have been as coming from the author and
editor of more than one hundred and fifty volumes. This incident
occurred within a year or two of "Peter Parley's" death.

That popular writer of juvenile tales, Alice Haven, was also a visitor
of the Cary sisters. Her early life had been spent in Philadelphia,
where she had been married to J.C. Neal, but after his death she had
removed to New York and made her home there. She was very much
interested in the work of St. Luke's Hospital, which was not a great
distance away, and often came to talk with Phoebe Cary about that
institution. Miss Cary herself was interested in it because of her
regard for its founder, Dr. William Augustus Muhlenberg, who had
written a hymn that was a great favorite of hers, _I Would Not Live
Alway_. Dr. Muhlenberg was the rector of the Church of the Holy
Communion, and in 1846 on St. Luke's Day after his sermon he suggested
to his congregation that of the collection that was about to be taken
half should be put aside as the commencement of a fund which should be
used to found an institution for the care of the sick poor. The fund
started that day with thirty dollars, and that was the beginning of
St. Luke's Hospital. It was not a great while before the actual
hospital work was begun in a building at 330 Sixth Avenue, near
Twentieth Street, and there had a home until the completion of that at
Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street, where it remained until those
quarters were outgrown, and in 1896 it removed to the new buildings on
Cathedral Heights.




Chapter XII

Some of the Writers of To-Day


There is little of old-time picturesqueness in the city of New York
to-day, where buildings are too towering, too massive, too thickly
clustered to offer artistic and unique effects. But a stroll about the
homes of the writers of the city invests their rather commonplace
surroundings with more than passing interest.

In the older part of the town, the section that was all of New York a
hundred years ago and is now the far down-town, there are many
reminders of those friends whose books are on the most easily reached
library shelf.

To No. 10 West Street, that stands on the river front, Robert Louis
Stevenson was taken by a fellow-voyager in 1879; here he stopped the
first night he spent in America, and of this house he wrote in the
_Amateur Emigrant_. From the waterside just at dusk, catching a dim
outline of the varying housetops is to glimpse some old castle of
feudal times. The lowest building in all this block is No. 10--a
meagre, dingy, two-story structure that has come to be very old. The
doors and windows seem to have been made for some other building, and
to be trying to get back to where they belong, bulging out in the
struggle and making rents in the house-front.

[Illustration: No. 10 West St.]

Crossing Battery Park to State Street, at No. 17 is the tall
Chesebrough building that has sprung up on the spot where William
Irving, brother of Washington, lived, and where the Salmagundi wits
gathered sometimes in the evening. Two or three doors farther along is
a survival of old New York which delights the eye, with its porticoes
and oval windows, odd appearing and many-sided; a mansion when wealth
and affluence clustered around the Battery. This is the scene of the
first few chapters of Bunner's _Story of a New York House_. Around the
corner and through the wide doors of the Produce Exchange, at the back
of that building and literally hidden in the middle of the block, is
an old street that seems to have lost its usefulness, a quaint and
curious way full half a century and more behind the times, now bearing
the name of Marketfield Street, but once called Petticoat Lane. It is
no longer a thoroughfare, for in its length of half a block it has
neither beginning nor end. Here is all that is left of the house in
which Julia Ward Howe was born.

Passing along Broad Street, where Edmund C. Stedman, the poet and
financier, has an office close to Wall Street, you come in a few
minutes to the Custom House. To enter that building is to get lost in
a moment. Pass through the door into a veritable trackless wilderness
of narrow black halls, with rooms that open in the most unexpected
corners, and come after a while to the Debenture Room of old, and to
the window near which Richard Henry Stoddard had his desk for close
upon twenty years.

Freed from the intricacies of the old building, continue the stroll
up-town, and in Park Row, at No. 29, on the third floor, is found the
old home of the _Commercial Advertiser_, where Jesse Lynch Williams
worked, and wrote _A City Editor's Conscience_, and other stories. A
little way farther on is the _Tribune_ building, where William Winter
has his den, and under the same roof the room where Irving Bacheller
conducted a newspaper syndicate before _Eben Holden_ was thought of.
Then on again a few steps to the _Sun_ building and into the room,
little changed from the time when Charles A. Dana sat there so many
years, and, close by, the reporters' room where Edward W. Townsend
worked, and wrote about _Chimmie Fadden_. There is a winding
staircase, that the uninitiated could never find, leading into the
rooms of the _Evening Sun_, where Richard Harding Davis "reported,"
and where he conceived some of the Van Bibber stories. Directly
across the street is the _World_ office, and looking from the
windows, so high up that the city looks like a Lilliputian village,
you have the view that Elizabeth Jordan looked upon during the ten
years she was getting inspiration for the _Tales of a City Room_. Down
narrow Frankfort Street is Franklin Square, the home of _Harper's
Magazine_, where George W. Curtis established his Easy Chair in which
he was enthroned so long, and which is now occupied by William Dean
Howells.

Cherry Street leads out of Franklin Square direct to Corlear's Hook
Park. Half a hundred feet before that green spot is reached, in a
squalid neighborhood of dirty house-fronts, ragged children, begrimed
men, and slovenly women, there is a house numbered 426, above the door
of which are the words: "I was sick and ye visited Me." Dwellers in
the neighborhood know that this is a hospital for those suffering
from incurable disease, but, beyond this, seem to know very little
about it. It is the home of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, the daughter of
Nathaniel Hawthorne, who has given up her entire life to brighten many
another. In the same block, but nearer to Scammel Street, which is
next towards the south, Brent's foundry used to be in the days when
Richard Henry Stoddard was an iron-worker and the friend of Bayard
Taylor, whom he visited in Murray Street.

From this far East Side to Washington Square is quite a distance, but
stop half-way at Police Headquarters and the nearby reporters'
offices. Any one there will be glad to point out the room where Jacob
A. Riis worked so many years and wrote most of _How the Other Half
Lives_, and from which he carried out his ideas for benefiting the
city poor--carried them out so well that President Roosevelt called
him New York's most useful citizen.

[Illustration: Where "How The Other Half Lives" was written]

In Washington Square the wanderer has much to think of in the literary
associations recalled by this green garden that has blossomed from a
pauper graveyard, and which has been written of by Howells, Brander
Matthews, Bayard Taylor, Bunner, Henry James, F. Hopkinson Smith, and
almost every writer who has brought New York into fiction.

[Illustration: 146 Macdougal St.]

From the square, stroll in any direction for definite reminders.
Towards the south and around into Macdougal Street, at No. 146, there
is a dingy brick house with a trellised portico, where Brander
Matthews and his friends used to dine, and which James L. Ford made
the Garibaldi of his _Bohemia Invaded_. Walk towards the east, past
the site of the University building, and stand at the Greene Street
corner, at No. 21 Washington Place, where Henry James was born.
Towards the west a few steps into Waverly Place, at No. 108, is a
squat red brick house where Richard Harding Davis wrote his newspaper
tales. Across, at the corner, lived George Parsons Lathrop when he
wrote _Behind Time_, and there his wife, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, wrote
_Along the Shore_. An historic site this house stands on, for it is
where Stoddard and Taylor once lived together. A block to the north is
old-time Clinton Place, which now, for modern convenience, recking
not of memory or of sentiment, has become Eighth Street. There, to the
left of Fifth Avenue, at No. 18, is where Paul du Chaillu wrote _Ivar
the Viking_, and to the right the house opposite, covered from
basement to eaves with green clustering vines, is the home of Richard
Watson Gilder.

[Illustration: 108 Waverly Place]

It is only a question now of crossing half a dozen city blocks towards
the east to wander into what was called the Bouwerie Village. Modern
streets and modern improvements have so overridden the village of old
that traces of it are few and difficult to find. Here in this
district many a writer of New York has lived. At Fourth Avenue and
Tenth Street still stands the house, known to all who lived there as
"The Deanery," in which Miss Annie Swift kept boarders, and where the
family of Richard Henry Stoddard lived during the last four years that
Mr. Stoddard held his post in the Custom House. Here Stedman, and
Bayard Taylor, and Howells were visitors, with scores of other
writers; here Mrs. Stoddard wrote _The Morgensons_, and here Stoddard
himself wrote _The King's Bell_, _Melodies and Madrigals_, and other
poems. Not more than a block away, in the house numbered 118, Richard
Grant White had his home when he wrote _The New Gospel of Peace,
According to St. Benjamin_.

[Illustration: Richard Grant White's Home]

Around the corner in Third Avenue, at Thirteenth Street, is a tablet
telling of the pear tree that Peter Stuyvesant brought from Holland,
that grew and flourished on the edge of the Stuyvesant orchard for
more than two hundred years. Within a stone's throw of the tree in the
sixties, and while it yet bloomed, Stoddard lived with his friend
Bayard Taylor, and here the _Life of Humboldt_ came from Stoddard's
pen. Around another corner into Fourteenth Street and down a block to
No. 224, Paul du Chaillu had apartments when he wrote _The Land of
the Midnight Sun_; but the tree-filled yard and the vine-covered
cottage next to it, on which the writer's window looked, are buried
beneath a dwelling in the full flush of newness.

In Fifteenth Street, just past Stuyvesant Park, is a really
picturesque row of tiny houses that must have been there when
Stuyvesant Park was very new indeed. They have balconies enclosed by
iron fretwork, and the first in the row is especially dainty and
attractive, and quite overshadowed by the lofty building that has
grown up beside it. In this out-of-the-way corner the Stoddards lived
for something more than a quarter of a century, and here they died,
the brilliant son first, then Mrs. Stoddard, and finally Richard Henry
Stoddard, in 1903.

Along the parkside and around the corner to Seventeenth Street, No.
330 was another interesting landmark until, quite lately, it was
swept away. Brander Matthews lived there, and could look across the
square to the gray towers of St. George's while he wrote the _French
Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century_. H.C. Bunner had quarters there
when he wrote _A Woman of Honor_ and other stories of that period, and
Richard Grant White was a long dweller there.

[Illustration: Where Richard Henry Stoddard Died]

Northward a few streets, on the south side of Gramercy Park, is the
house of John Bigelow, writer of half a dozen important books, who
fifty years and more ago assisted William Cullen Bryant in the
editorial conduct of the _Evening Post_. Only a few steps away, in
historic Irving Place, the ivy-covered house is where Mrs. Burton
Harrison wrote _Sweet Bells out of Tune_, and on another block farther
to the south the Lotus Club long had its home, the building now given
over to commercial uses.

[Illustration: Where the Author's Club was organized]

In the short stretch of Fifteenth Street that leads from Irving Place
to Union Square are two points closely associated with the literature
of the city. One is midway the distance, the prosaic office of a
brewer now, but once the home of the Century Club when Bancroft the
historian was its president. The other is nearer to the square, with a
tall iron fence, and a gateway not at all in keeping with the modern
appearance of the street. Behind the tall fence is a bit of
greensward, and beyond that a house quaintly unusual in appearance,
seeming to shrink from sight in the shadows cast about it. This is
where Richard Watson Gilder at one time lived, where Charles De Kay
organized the Authors' Club, and where the Society of American Artists
was formed.

[Illustration: Horace Greeley's Home]

Beyond Union Square there is in Eighteenth Street the house numbered
121 where Brander Matthews lived for fourteen or more years, where he
wrote many of his books, and where was held the first meeting to
organize the American Copyright League. It was Professor Matthews who
gave the dinner at which the unique society known as the Kinsmen came
into being, at the Florence on the same street at number 105,--an
apartment house in which Ellen Glasgow, Elizabeth Bisland, and Edgar
Saltus have made their homes, and in which the widow of Herman
Melville is now living.

In nearby Nineteenth Street is still standing No. 35, a house where
Horace Greeley lived, with William Allen Butler, the author of
_Nothing to Wear_, for a next-door neighbor. Three blocks farther on
is the big office building where Dr. Josiah Strong wrote most of _Our
Country_, and where Hamilton W. Mabie has a study in the editorial
rooms of _The Outlook_. A few steps farther in Twenty-second Street,
at No. 33, Stephen Crane wrote part of _The Red Badge of Courage_ and
worked on the daily newspapers. Close by in Fifth Avenue is the
publishing house where the critic and essayist, William Crary
Brownell, author of _French Traits_, and other works, spends his
business hours. Around the corner in Twenty-third Street, on the top
floor of another publishing house is the den of the energetic author,
editor, and critic, Jeannette L. Gilder. Across Madison Square, at the
Twenty-fifth Street corner, Edgar Saltus had apartments for some time,
and just off Broadway in Twenty-seventh Street, at No. 26, Edgar
Fawcett wrote _A Mild Barbarian_.

On up Madison Avenue past Twenty-eighth Street is a brownstone
dwelling with a luxuriantly blooming window garden, where James Lane
Allen lives when he is in town and revises his writings. A few steps
into the next thoroughfare the Little Church Around the Corner
nestles in a populous district, and in the next block, just beyond the
Woman's Hotel, Mrs. Burton Harrison has written many of her books. Two
blocks away, in the _Life_ building, John A. Mitchell, founder of the
paper, spends several working hours of each day.

Going farther up-town in Park Avenue just beyond Thirty-sixth Street
is a substantial building where Dr. Josiah Gilbert Holland wrote and
where he died. In nearby Thirty-seventh Street hover memories of Parke
Godwin, who married the daughter of William Cullen Bryant, and whose
business and literary interests were closely entwined with those of
his father-in-law. A few steps westward is the solemnly quiet Brick
Presbyterian Church, where Dr. Henry van Dyke preached before he was
called to Princeton. Turning into Forty-sixth Street, note a house
distinguished from its neighbors by a doorway of wrought-iron, where
John A. Mitchell did much of the writing of _Amos Judd_.

[Illustration: The Beekman Mansion near 52nd St. [Transcriber's
Note: should be 51st St.] East River]

Across town, where Fifty-first Street touches the East River, is a
street so short and so out-of-the-way that few New Yorkers have ever
heard of it. It is called Beekman Place, and in it survives the memory
of the old Beekman house which stood near by, and which in the days of
the Revolution was used as a British headquarters. It was in the
Beekman house that Nathan Hale rested his last night on earth. Here in
this quiet spot Henry Harland lived in the eighties, when he was
employed in the Register's Office and got up at two o'clock many and
many a morning to write (under the name of Sidney Luska) some of his
earlier books. The windows of his home looked out upon a beautiful and
unusual city scene. Any one going now to where Fifty-first Street ends
at an embankment high above the river may see it just as he saw it
then--see the waves splashing on a rocky shore, with neither docks nor
wharves nor factories to interfere; see a broad river; see a green
island with stone turreted towers, and in the distance, forming a
background, the irregular sky-line of the Brooklyn borough shore.

Farther up-town to Central Park, and there on the south side is the
mammoth apartment house close to Sixth Avenue, where William Dean
Howells did much of his work; and on beyond the avenue, at No. 150,
Kate Douglas Wiggin evolved _Penelope's Experiences_. Still on
up-town, following the easterly side of the park, in Sixty-fourth
Street, at No. 16, Carl Schurz lived, and in Seventy-seventh Street is
the square house of stone where Paul Leicester Ford met such a fearful
death.

Crossing Central Park to the far west side, the journeyer comes to
wide, tree-lined West End Avenue, and there at Ninety-third Street,
almost upon the shores of the Hudson River, in a locality of beautiful
homes, Brander Matthews, author of _Vignettes of Manhattan_ and _A
Confident To-morrow_, lives and works. Returning down-town on the
westerly side of the city, stop just beyond Amsterdam Avenue and
Eighty-sixth Street before a house, colonial as to its doors and
windows at least, the home of that distinguished naval officer and
writer, Captain A.T. Mahan. On the nearest corner is the church where
funeral services were held over Paul du Chaillu when his body was
brought back from Russia. Down a few streets, John Denison Champlin,
author and encyclopædist, has his home, in a yellow apartment house,
and half a block along Seventy-eighth Street stands the terra cotta
building occupied by Stedman before he moved to Bronxville. Down to
Sixty-fifth Street now, a dozen steps or more west of Central Park,
Edgar Fawcett conceived _A Romance of Old New York_, before going to
Europe for an indefinite stay.

[Illustration: Lawrence Hutton's House]

In Thirty-fourth Street, midway between Seventh and Eighth Avenues,
visit the solid little brick house, with green shutters and an air of
dignity that proclaims it of another time. This has stood for three
quarters of a century and at one time had no neighbors. There, until
1898, when he went to Princeton, Lawrence Hutton gathered his
collection of objects artistic from all parts of the world; there he
kept his assortment of death masks; there he wrote and entertained his
friends, authors, actors, men of different callings.

[Illustration: De Kay's House--London Terrace]

Let the last step be to that reminder of old Chelsea Village, in
Twenty-third Street beyond Ninth Avenue, called London Terrace. The
Terrace was built when Chelsea was really a village, and exists
to-day long after the village has ceased to have an identity. One
house in the row, No. 413, is particularly interesting, picturesquely
and historically, carrying as its literary association the name of
Charles De Kay, critic and author--a name of to-day and of the past as
well, for he is the grandson of the poet, Joseph Rodman Drake.




Index


A

_Adventures of Captain Bonneville, The_, 102

_Afara_, 139

_Age of Reason, The_, 32, 84

Aldrich, James, 179

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 218

Allen, James Lane, 247

All Souls' Church, 188

_Along the Shore_, 238

_Amateur Emigrant_, 231

_American_, 174

American Copyright League, 245

_American Game in its Season_, 216

_American Monthly Magazine_, 154, 180

_American Review_, 158

_American Theatre, The_, 70

_Amos Judd_, 249

_Analectic Magazine_, 96, 112

_An Appeal for that Class of Americans Called Africans_, 200

"Ancient Club of New York," 110

André, Major John, 55, 56

_Androborus_, 37

_Annabel Lee_, 164

Apollo dancing rooms, 170

_Arcturus_, 178

_Ariel in the Cloven Pine_, 206

Arnold, Benedict, House of, 56

Arnold, George, 215, 216

_Arthur Mervyn_, 78

Astor House, 172

Astor, John Jacob, 102, 123

Astor Place Opera House, 160

_Astoria_, 102

_Atlantic Monthly_, 133

Audubon, John James, 189-195

Authors' Club, 245


B

Bacheller, Irving, 234

_Backwoodsman, The_, 113

Bancroft, George, 103, 186

Barlow, Joel, 84

Barstow, Elizabeth, 204

Bartlett, John R., 172-180

Bartlett's Book Shop, 172-180

_Battle Pieces_, 224

_Beauties of Santa Cruz_, 52

Beekman House, The, 249

_Behind Time_, 238

_Bells, The_, 164

_Ben Bolt_, 162

Benjamin, Park, 175, 179, 180

_Biblical Researches in Palestine_, 151

Bigelow, John, 183, 243

Bisland, Elizabeth, 246

Bleecker, Eliza, 47-51

Bleecker Street, 83

Bloomingdale Village, 145, 157

_Bohemia Invaded_, 238

Boker, George H., 207

Bonneville, Captain, 102

Bonneville, Madame, 82, 83

Books of New Amsterdam, 7

Booth, Mary L., 227

Botta, Mrs., 197, 199, 200

Botta, Vincenzo, 198

Bouwerie Village, 19, 22

Bowling Green, 8

Bradford's printing press, 27

Bradford, William, 38, 57

Bradford, William, tomb of, 25-29

_Bravo, The_, 134

Bread-and-Cheese Club, 131-133

Brevoort, Henry, 110

Brickmaking in New Amsterdam, 3

Briggs, Charles F., 159, 160

_British Prison Ship, The_, 53

Broad Street, 7, 13, 31

Broadway, 67

_Broadway Journal_, 159

Brook Farm, 205

Brown, Charles Brockden, 77, 78-80

Browne, George Farrar, 217

Brownell, William Crary, 247

Bryant, William Cullen, 132, 133, 174, 180-188

Bunner, H.C., 243

Burns's Coffee House, 99

Burr, Aaron, 63, 190

Burton, William E., 150

Butler, William Allen, 246


C

_Calaynos_, 207

Cary, Alice, 222-228

Cary, Phoebe, 222-228

_Cecil Dreeme_, 219

Century Club, 186, 244

_Champion of Freedom, The_, 130

Champlin, John Denison, 252

Cheever, George B, 151

Chelsea Square, 195, 196

Chelsea Village, 145, 195, 196

Child, Lydia M., 199, 200

_Chimmie Fadden_, 234

Church Farm, 33

Church in the Fort, 15, 20

Church of the Holy Communion, 229

_City Editor's Conscience, A_, 234

City Hall, First, 8

City Hall in Wall Street, 31

City Hall Park, 48, 67, 108

City Hall (Present), 75, 109

City Hotel, 100, 128

City Plan Commission, 109, 110

Clapp, Henry, 213

Clapp's _Almanac_, John, 27-29

_Clara Howard_, 78

_Clari, the Maid of Milan_, 74

Clark, Lewis Gaylord, 175-178

Clark, Willis Gaylord, 176

Clarke, McDonald, 136-144

_Clermont, The_, 109

Clinton Hall, 159, 160

Cobbett, William, 85

Colden, Cadwallader, 38, 39, 42, 43

Collect Pond, 22, 48

Columbia College, 81, 116, 174

Columbia University, 43

_Columbiad_, 84

_Commentaries on American Law_, 81

_Commercial Advertiser_, 65, 183

_Common Sense_, 82

Common, The, 48, 49, 67

_Complaint of New Netherland, The_, 10

_Confident To-morrow, A_, 251

_Conquest of Grenada_, 97

Contoit's Garden, 170

Cooke, George Frederick, 71, 72

Cooper, James Fenimore, 125-136, 184

Cooper, Susan Fenimore, 127

Cornbury, Lord, 34, 35

Corporation Library, 31

_Corsair, The_, 155

Cosby, Governor, 39-43

Cozzens, Frederick S., 175, 178

Crane, Stephen, 246

_Criterion, The_, 222

"Croaker Papers," 119

Croegers, Tryntie, 15

_Cromwell_, 216

_Culprit Fay, The_, 121

Curtis, George William, 235


D

Dana, Charles A., 234

Dana, Richard Henry, 130, 131

Da Ponte, Lorenzo, 141, 142

Davis, Richard Harding, 234, 238

_Deacon Giles's Distillery_, 151

Dearman, 104

_Death of the Flowers_, 181

Debtors' Prison, 49-51

DeKay, Charles, 245, 254

De Lancey, Étienne, 99

Dennie, Joseph, 77, 79, 80

De Sille, Anna, 18

De Sille, Nicasius, 11-19

_Deukalion_, 208

Dewey, Orville, 185

_Diamond Lens, The_, 220

_Dictionary of Americanisms_, 172

_Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan_, 112

_Don Giovanni_, 141

Downing, Major Jack, 150, 201

Drake, Joseph Rodman, 103, 115-124

Draper, Dr. John W., 220, 221

Du Chaillu, Paul, 239, 241, 252

Duke's Farm, 32

Dunlap, William, 70, 71, 77

_Dutchman's Fireside, The_, 113

Duyckinck, Evert A., 175, 178, 179

Duyckinck, George, 179

Dyde's, 111


E

East River Park, 101

_Eben Holden_, 234

_Edgar Huntley_, 78

Elgin Botanical Garden, 81

_Elixir of Moonshine_, 139

Embury, Emma C., 144

_Encyclopædia of American Literature_, 179

English, Thomas Dunn, 162, 164

_Eureka_, 163

_Evening Mirror_, 152, 156-159

_Evening Post_, 181, 182

Exchange Street, 13


F

Fairlie, Mary, 94

_Fall of the House of Usher_, 150

_Fanny_, 118

_Fashion and Famine_, 202

Fawcett, Edgar, 247, 253

Fay, Theodore S., 154

Federal Hall, 62

_Federalist_, 62

Fire of 1776, 54

First almanac printed, 27-29

First City Hall, 8

First free school, 109

First library, 31

First museum, 171

First newspaper, 38, 57

First newspaper row, 57

First night watch, 25

First poet of New Amsterdam, 4-10

First Poorhouse, 49

First printing press, 27

First street lighting, 25

First Tammany Hall, 71

First telegraphic message, 194

Fitzroy, Lord Augustus, 41, 42

_Footnotes_, 204

Fordham, 162-166

Ford, James L., 238

Ford, Paul Leicester, 251

Forester, Frank, 216

_Forest Life_, 199

Forrest-Macready Riots, 160

Francis, Dr. J.W., 132

Frankfort Street, 45, 46

_French Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century_, 243

_French Traits_, 247

Freneau, Philip, 47, 51-66

Friendly Club, 77

Fuller, Margaret, 202, 203


G

Gaine, Hugh, 58-60

_Gazetteer_, Rivington's, 56

General Theological Seminary, 195, 196

_Gentleman's Magazine, The_, 150, 152

Gilder, Jeannette L., 247

Gilder, Richard Watson, 239, 245

_Give Me the Old_, 151

Glasgow, Ellen, 246

_Gleanings in Europe_, 135

_Glimpses of Home Life_, 143

_Godey's Lady's Book_, 161

Godwin, Parke, 182, 183, 186, 248

Golden Hill, 48, 87, 88

Golden Hill Inn, 88

Goodrich, Samuel G., 227

Gowans, William, 149

Gracie's house, 103

_Graham's Magazine_, 152

_Grayslaer_, 175

Greeley, Horace, 202, 205, 206, 224, 246

Greenwich Village, 81-83, 145, 146

Griswold, Rufus W., 207

Grove Street, 84


H

Hackett, James H., 114

Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 103, 115-124, 132, 138, 142

Hall of Records, 49-51

Halpine, Charles Graham, 220

Hamilton, Alexander, 62, 191

Hamilton Grange, 62

_Handbook of Universal Literature_, 198

Hanover Square, 57-59, 61

Harland, Henry, 250

Harlem, 145

Harrison, Mrs. Burton, 244, 248

"Harry Franco," 159, 174

Haven, Alice, 228

Hell Gate, 101

Herbert, Henry W., 216, 217

Hildreth, Richard, 224

Hillhouse, James A., 128, 181

_History of Intellectual Development in Europe_, 221

_History of New York_, 227

_History of the City of New York_, 227

_History of the Five Nations_, 39

_History, Rise, and Progress of the Arts of Design in
the United States_, 70

_Hobomok_, 199

Hodgkinson, Thomas Hawkins, 120

Hoffman, Charles Fenno, 173-176, 206

Hoffman, Josiah Ogden, 95

Hoffman, Matilda, 95, 174

Holland, Dr. Josiah Gilbert, 248

_Home Journal_, 157

_Home, Sweet Home_, 74

_Homeward Bound_, 136

Hone, Philip, 132, 183

Hoogh Street, 10

_Horse and Horsemanship in North America, The_, 216

_Horseshoe Robinson_, 149

Hosack, Dr. David, 81

_House of Night, The_, 52

Houses of New Amsterdam, 2, 3

Howe, Julia Ward, 233

Howells, William Dean, 218, 235, 251

_How the Other Half Lives_, 236

Hudson Park, 146-148

Huguenot Church, 32

Hunter, Governor Robert, 35-38

Hutton, Lawrence, 253


I

_Idle Man, The_, 131

Idlewild, 156

_Imp of the Perverse, The_, 158

Independent Columbian Hotel, 94

Irving, Ebenezer, 100

Irving, John T., 104

Irving, Peter, 92, 94, 109, 110

Irvington, 104

Irving, Washington, 87-105, 109-112, 115, 174

Irving, Washington, birthplace of, 89

Irving, William, 93, 107, 108, 110-112, 231

Italian Opera House, 141

_Ivar the Viking_, 239

_I Would Not Live Alway_, 228


J

James, Henry, 238

_Jane Talbot_, 78

Jans Farm, Annetje, 32, 33

_Jersey_, The prison ship, 53

_John Brent_, 219

_John Bull in America_, 114

John Street Theatre, 55, 56, 90, 91

Jordan, Elizabeth, 235

_Judgment, The_, 128

Jumel, Madame, 190

Jumel Mansion, 190


K

Kean, Edmund, 137

Kemble, Gouverneur, 110, 111, 113

Kennedy, John P., 148, 149

Kent, James, 77, 80, 81

Kidd, Captain William, 24

Kilmaster's School, 91

Kimball, Richard, 207

_King's Bell_, 240

King's College, 43

King's Farm, 32

Kinsmen, The, 246

Kip, Hendrick, 12, 18

Kirkland, Caroline M., 198, 199

Kissing Bridge, 22

Knickerbocker Days, Close of the, 167-172

_Knickerbocker History of New York_, 94

_Knickerbocker_ Magazine, 174, 176, 177

Knight, Madame Sarah, 33-35

_Koningsmarke_, 113

_Kubleh_, 206


L

Lafayette Theatre, 134

Lamb, Martha J., 227

La Montagne, Dr., 12

_Land of the Midnight Sun, The_, 242

_Last of the Mohicans, The_, 134

Lathrop, George Parsons, 238

Lathrop, Rose Hawthorne, 236, 238

Lawson, James, 120

"Lay Preacher, The," 79

_Legend of Sleepy Hollow_, 103

Leggett, William, 182

Leisler, Jacob, 46

_Letters from under a Bridge_, 155

Lewis, Estella, 201, 202

_Liberty Bell, The_, 151

_Life and Voyages of Columbus_, 97

_Life of Horace Greeley_, 224

_Life of Humboldt_, 241

_Life of Joseph Brant, The_, 184

_Life of Mahomet_, 105

_Life of Red Jacket, The_, 184

_Life of Washington_, 105

_Lion of the West, The_, 114

_Literary Gazette_, 179

_Literary Magazine and American Register, The_, 80

_Literary World, The_, 179

_Literati of New York, The_, 161

London Terrace, 253

Longfellow, Henry W., 97

Longworth, David, 93

Loockermans, Govert, 12

Ludlow, Fitz-Hugh, 215

Luska, Sidney, 250

Lynch, Anne C., 197-204


M

Mabie, Hamilton W., 246

Mad Poet, The, 136-144

_Magazine of American History_, 227

Mahan, Captain A.T., 252

"Major Jack Downing," 150, 201

_Marco Bozzaris_, 124, 181

Martling's Tavern, 71

_Mary Derwent_, 202

Masonic Hall, 170

Matthews, Brander, 238, 243, 245, 246, 251

McLelland, Isaac, 152

_Melodies and Madrigals_, 240

Melville, Herman, 224-226

Mercantile Library, 160

Messinger, Robert H., 151

Middle Dutch Church, 55, 171

_Mild Barbarian, A_, 247

Miller, John, 29, 30

_Minerva, The_, 65

Minniesland, 189, 194

_Mirror, The_, 130

Mitchell, John A., 248, 249

Mitchill, Dr. Samuel, 94

Moore, Bishop Benjamin, 196

Moore, Clement C., 195, 196

Moreau, Jean Victor, 61

_Morgensons, The_, 240

_Morning Chronicle_, 92, 109

Morris, George P., 130, 138, 153, 154, 156, 157

Morris House, 123, 190

Morse, Samuel F.B., 194

Muhlenberg, Dr. William Augustus, 228

Murray Hill, 60

Murray, Lindley, 60, 61

Murray, Mrs., 60

_My Faith Looks up to Thee_, 140


N

_Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym_, 150

_National Anti-Slavery Standard_, 199

_National Gazette_, 64

_Nearer My Home_, 223

New Amsterdam, 2-6

_New England Magazine_, 179

_New Gospel of Peace, The_, 241

_New Mirror_, 162

Newspaper, First, 38, 57

Newspaper Row, The first, 57

New York before the Civil War, 209-212

_New York Gazette_, 38, 58

_New York Gazetteer_, 58

New York in 1830, 167-172

_New York Journal_, 58

_New York Mercury_, 58

_New York Mirror_, 153-156

_New York Quarterly Review_, 149

_New York Review and Athenæum_, 181

Niblo's Garden, 171

Night watch, The first, 25

Noah, Mordecai M., 138

_Nothing to Wear_, 246

_Nozze di Figaro_, 141


O

O'Brien, Fitz-James, 220, 221

Odellville, 145

_Old Oaken Bucket, The_, 130

_Old Sexton, The_, 180

"Old Tom's," 118, 119

_Oliver Goldsmith_, 105

O'Reilly, Miles, 220

_Ormond_, 78

Osgood, Frances Sargent, 203, 204

_Our Country_, 246

_Our New World_, 180

_Outlook, The_, 246


P

Paine, Thomas, 82-86

Paine, Thomas, Grave of, 85, 86

Paine, Thomas, House of, 83, 84

Palmer, Ray, 139, 140

Park Row, 68

Park Theatre, 68, 72, 75, 77, 171

Parton, James, 224

Paulding, James Kirke, 90, 93, 103, 107-114

_Paul Felton_, 131

Payne, John Howard, 72-75, 97

_Penelope's Experiences_, 251

Percival, James G., 132, 181

"Peter Parley," 227

Petticoat Lane, 233

Pfaff's, 213-218

_Philosophy of Composition_, 161

_Picture of New York_, 94

_Pilot, The_, 128

Pine Street, 32, 75, 76

_Pioneers, The_, 128

Poe, Edgar Allan, 145-166, 200-204

Poe, Virginia, 149, 157, 162, 164

_Poems of the Orient_, 208

Poet, First, of New Netherland, 4-10

_Poets and Poetry of America_, 207

Poorhouse, First, 49

_Portfolio, The_, 79

_Powhatan_, 151

_Prairie, The_, 134

_Praise of New Netherland, The_, 10

_Precaution_, 126

_Prose Writers of America_, 207

_Putnam's Magazine_, 159


Q

Queen's Farm, 32


R

_Raven, The_, 158, 161, 202

_Red Badge of Courage, The_, 246

_Red Rover, The_, 134

Renwick, Jane, 96, 104

Renwick, Professor James, 96, 132

Revolution, New York during the, 54-56

Reynold's Ale House, 117-119

Richmond Hill, 63

Riis, Jacob A., 236

Ripley, George, 205

_Rip Van Winkle_, 97

Rivington, James, 58, 59

Robinson, Edward, 151

_Romance of Old New York, A_, 253


S

St. George's Chapel, 90

St. John's Burying-Ground, 147, 148, 150

St. John's Park, 125, 126

_St. Leger_, 207

St. Luke's Hospital, 228, 229

St. Mark's Church, 22, 23

St. Patrick's Church, 142

St. Paul's Chapel, 62, 108

_Salmagundi_, 41, 93

_Salmagundi's_ Cockloft Hall, 111

Saltus, Edgar, 246, 247

Sands, Robert C, 133, 181

_Saturday Press_, 214, 218

Schurz, Carl, 251

Scudder's Museum, 171

Second City Hall, 12

Selyns, Henricus, 20-24

Shakespeare Tavern, 120

"Sign of the Bible and Crown," 58

_Sinless Child, The_, 200

_Sketches in Switzerland_, 135

Smith, Rev. Eli, 151

Smith, Dr. Elihu Hubbard, 76-79

Smith, Elizabeth Oakes, 201

Smith, Seba, 150

Smith, William, 43, 44

Society Library, 31

Society of American Artists, 245

_Southern Literary Messenger_, 148

_Sparkling and Bright_, 173

_Sparrowgrass Papers_, 178

_Spy, The_, 126, 134

Stadt Huys, 8

Stedman, Edmund C., 218, 233, 253

Steendam, Jacob, 4-10

Stephens, Ann S., 202

Stephens, John L., 175-177

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 230, 231

Stoddard, Richard Henry, 204-207, 233, 236, 238, 240-242

Stoddard, Mrs. Richard Henry, 240, 242

Stone Street, 9

Stone, William L., 175, 183, 184

_Story of a New York House, The_, 232

Streets first lighted, 25

Strong, Dr. Josiah, 246

Stuyvesant, Judith, 11

Stuyvesant, Peter, 1, 11, 12, 19

_Stylus, The_, 152

_Sunday Times and Messenger_, 138

Sunnyside, 104

_Swallow Barn_, 149

_Sweet Bells Out of Tune_, 244


T

_Tales and Sketches of a Cosmopolite_, 120

_Tales of a City Room_, 235

_Tales of a Country Schoolmaster_, 182

_Tales of the Good Woman_, 114

_Talisman_ Magazine, 181

_Talisman, The_, 133

Tammany Hall, First, 71

Taylor, Bayard, 198, 204-208, 218, 238, 241

Temple, Charlotte, 118

Temple Street, 118

Thames Street, 99

_Thistle Finch, The_, 10

Thomson, Mortimer, 215

Tienhoven's Street, 76

_Tom Thornton_, 131

_Town and Country_, 157

Townsend, Edward W., 234

Trinity Church, 26, 32

Tuckerman, Henry T., 221, 222

_Typee_, 226


U

_Ulalume_, 165

_United States and England_, 112

_Universe, The_, 165


V

Van Brugh Street, 57

Van Cortlandt, Oloff, 12

_Vanderlyn_, 175

Van Dyke, Henry, 248

_Vanity Fair_, 215, 218

Van Tassel house, 103

Vauxhall, 171

Verplanck, Gulian C., 133, 142, 181, 186

_Views Afoot_, 205

_Vignettes of Manhattan_, 251

_Visit of St. Nicholas_, 197

_Voyages of the Companions of Columbus_, 98


W

Wallace, William Ross, 151

Wall Street, 6

Wall, The city, 5

Ward, Artemus, 217

Washington, George, 62, 64

Washington Hall, 131

_Water Witch, The_, 134

Webster, Noah, 65

_Weekly Post-Boy_, 58

_Westward Ho!_, 114

Whitehall, 8

White, Richard Grant, 241, 243

Whitman, Walt, 218

_Wieland_, 78

Wiggin, Kate Douglas, 251

_Wild Scenes in Forest and Prairie_, 175

Wiley, the publisher, 130

Williams, Jesse Lynch, 234

William Street, 88

Willis, Nathaniel P., 138, 154-157, 162

Windust's, 111, 137, 138

_Winter in the West, A_, 175

Winter, William, 218, 234

Winthrop, Theodore, 219, 220

_Wolfert's Roost_, 103, 104

_Woman of Honor, The_, 243

_Woodman, Spare that Tree_, 154

Woodworth, Samuel, 129, 130, 142, 153, 154


Y

Yorkville, 145

"Young American Roscius," 73


Z

Zenger, Peter, 38, 40




_BELLES-LETTRES_


Browning, Poet and Man

A Survey. By ELISABETH LUTHER CARY, author of "The Rossettis,"
"William Morris," etc.

_8o. With 25 illustrations in photogravure and some text
illustrations. Net, $3.50._

_LIBRARY EDITION. With photogravure frontispiece and 16 illustrations
in half-tone. $2.50._

"It is written with taste and judgment.... The book is exactly what it
ought to be, and will lead many to an appreciation of Browning who
have hitherto looked at the bulk of his writings with disgust.... It
is beautifully illustrated, and the paper and typography are superb.
It is an edition that every admirer of Browning should possess, being
worthy in every way of the poet."--_Chicago Evening Post._


Tennyson, His Homes, his Friends, and his Work.

By ELISABETH LUTHER CARY, author of "The Rossettis," "William Morris,"
etc.

_8o. With 18 illustrations in photogravure and some text
illustrations. Net, $3.50._

_LIBRARY EDITION. With photogravure frontispiece and 16 illustrations
in half-tone, $2.50._

"The multitude of admirers of Tennyson in the United States will mark
this beautiful volume as very satisfactory. The text is clear, terse,
and intelligent, and the matter admirably arranged, while the
mechanical work is faultless, with art work especially marked for
excellence."--_Chicago Inter-Ocean._

_G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS_

_New York_ _London_




_BELLES-LETTRES_


William Morris, Poet, Craftsman, Socialist

By ELISABETH LUTHER CARY, author of "The Rossettis," "Robert
Browning," "Tennyson," etc.

_8o. Fully illustrated, uniform with "The Rossettis," "Browning,"
etc. Net, $3.50. By mail, $3.75._

William Morris, of active, varied, and interesting life, has been the
subject of several biographies, written from different points of view.
Nevertheless, there is need for an account that gathers together the
chief facts of the life in a condensed form, and connects them with
comment and criticism of an informing character. Miss Cary has
emphasized the essential unity of purpose underlying the numerous and
diverse pursuits in which Morris was engaged, and has sought to
distinguish the peculiar and enduring qualities by which his genius
was marked.


The Rossettis, Dante Gabriel and Christina

By ELISABETH LUTHER CARY

_With 27 illustrations in photogravure and some text illustrations.
Net, $3.50._

_LIBRARY EDITION. With photogravure frontispiece and 16 illustrations
in half-tone, $2.50._

"The story of this life has been told by Mr. Hall Caine, Mr. William
Sharp, Mr. Watts-Dunton, and Mr. William Rossetti, his brother, but
never quite so well as by Miss Cary, who, thoroughly conversant with
all the material which their writings furnish, has turned it to better
advantage than they were capable of from their personal relation to
its perplexing subject."--_Mail and Express._

_G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS_

_New York_ _London_