July 10, 1859
Dearest Mother:
Emerson says, “To-day is a king in disguise”; and it is
sometimes odd to think that these men and women of the "Atlantic
Monthly," mere mortals to me, will one day be regarded as demi-gods,
perhaps, and that it would seem as strange to another generation for me to have
sat at the same table with Longfellow or Emerson, as it now seems that men
should have sat at table with Wordsworth or with Milton. So I may as well tell
you all about my inducting little Harriet Prescott into that high company.
She met me at twelve in Boston at Ticknor's and we spent a
few hours seeing pictures and the aquarial gardens; the most prominent of the
pictures being a sort of luncheon before our dinner; viz., Holmes and
Longfellow in half length and very admirable, by Buchanan Read (I don't think
any previous king in disguise ever had his portrait so well painted as this
one, at any rate); also, by the same, a delicious painting of three Longfellow
children — girls with their mother's eyes and Mary Greenleaf's coloring, at
least three different modifications of it. . . .
In the course of these divertisements we stopped at
Phillips's and Sampson's, where we encountered dear, dark, slender, simple,
sensitive Whittier, trying to decide whether to "drink delight of battle
with his peers" at the dinner-table, or slide shyly back to Amesbury in
the next train. To introduce him to Harriet was like bringing a girl and a
gazelle acquainted; each visibly wished to run away from the other; to Whittier
a woman is a woman, and he was as bashful before the small authoress as if she
were the greatest. Cheery John Wyman was persuading him to stay to dinner, and
on my introducing him to my companion turned the battery of his good-nature
upon her, pronouncing her story the most popular which had appeared in the
magazine — “Oh, sir,” she whispered to me afterwards, “he spoke to me about my
story — do you suppose anybody else will? I hope not.”
Duly at three we appeared at the Revere House. You are to
understand that this was a special festival — prior to Mrs. Stowe's trip to
Europe — and the admission of ladies was a new thing. Harriet was whirled away
into some unknown dressing-room, and I found in another parlor Holmes, Lowell,
Longfellow, Whipple, Edmund Quincy, Professor Stowe, Stillman the artist, Whittier
(after all), Woodman, John Wyman, and Underwood. When dinner was confidentially
announced, I saw a desire among the founders of the feast to do the thing
handsomely toward the fair guests, and found, to my great amusement, that Mrs.
Stowe and Harriet Prescott were the only ones! Nothing would have tempted my
little damsel into such a position, I knew; but now she was in for it; to be
handed in to dinner by the Autocrat himself, while Lowell took Mrs. Stowe I
Miss Terry was at Saratoga and Mrs. Julia Howe suddenly detained; so these were
alone. But how to get them downstairs — send up a servant or go ourselves? —
that is, were they in a bedroom or a parlor; an obsequious attendant suddenly
suggested the latter, so Lowell and I went up. In a small but superb room the
authoress of “Uncle Tom” stood smoothing her ample plumage, while the junior
lady hovered timidly behind. . . . Mrs. Stowe was quietly dressed in a
Quakerish silk, but with a peculiar sort of artificial grape-leaf garland round
her head which I could not examine more minutely; she looked very well, but I
thought Harriet looked better; she had smoothed down her brown .curls, the only
pretty thing about her, except a ladylike little figure, robed in the plainest
imaginable black silk. . . .
Down we went: Dr. Holmes met us in the entry; each bowed
lower than the other, and we all marched in together. Underwood had wished to
place Edmund Quincy by Harriet, at his request, she being on Dr. Holmes's right
— the Autocrat's right, think of the ordeal for a humble maiden at her first
dinner party! but I told him the only chance for her to breathe was to place me
there, which he did. On Dr. Holmes's left was Whittier, next, Professor Stowe,
opposite me, while Mrs. S. was on Lowell's right at the other end.
By this lady's special stipulation the dinner was teetotal,
which compulsory virtue caused some wry faces among the gentlemen, not used to
such abstinence at “Atlantic” dinners; it was amusing to see how they nipped
at the water and among the ban mots privately circulated thereupon,
the best was Longfellow's proposition that Miss Prescott should send down into
her Cellar for some wine, since Mrs. Stowe would not allow any abovestairs!
This joke was broached early and carefully prevented from reaching the ears of
either of its subjects, but I thought it capital, for you remember her racy
description of wine, of which she knows about as much as she does of French
novels, which I find most people suppose her to have lived upon — she having
once perused “Consuelo”!
Little Dr. Holmes came down upon her instantly with her
laurels. “I suppose you meet your story wherever you go,” said he, “like Madam
d'Arblay" (and indeed the whole thing reminded me of her first
introductions into literary society). . . . I seized the first opportunity to
ask whether she and Mrs. Stowe had any conversation upstairs. “Yes,” said she
meekly; “Mrs. Stowe asked me what time it was and I told her I didn't know.” There's intellectual
intercourse for a young beginner! . . .
When the wife of Andrew Jackson Davis, the seer, was once
asked if her husband, who was then staying at Fitzhenry Homer's, was not
embarrassed by being in society superior to that in which he was trained, she
replied indignantly that her husband, who was constantly in the society of the
highest angels, was not likely to be overcome by Mrs. Fitzhenry Homer. And when
I reflected on the entertainments which were described in “In a Cellar,” I felt
no fear of Harriet's committing any solecism in manners at an “Atlantic”
dinner, which she certainly did not, though a little frightened, occasionally,
I could see, at the obsequiousness of the waiters and the absurd multiplicity
of courses. . . .
I don't care so very much for " Atlantic " dinners
— Professor Felton says they are more brilliant than London ones, but I think
that Mary and I get up quite as good ones in Worcester — but Dr. Holmes is
always effervescent and funny, and John Wyman is the best story-teller the
world ever saw, and indeed everybody contributed something. The best thing
Holmes said was in discoursing on his favorite theory of races and families. “Some
families,” he said, “are constitutionally incapable of doing anything wrong;
they try it as boys, but they relapse into virtue; as individuals, they attempt
to do wrong, but the race is too strong for them and they end in pulpits. Look
at the Wares, for instance; I don't
believe that the Wares fell in Adam!”
SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters
and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 106-10
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