CHAPTER XV THE HEARTH We go back to the fall of 1862, that we may follow from its beginning the story of the home life so far as its path is visible by the few and scattered lights afforded by imperfect records. The wedding on September thirtieth, 1862, was followed by a bridal trip to Washington, where many Connecticut friends, with Charles Dudley Warner at their head, offered the usual homage of congratulation. The vacations of editors in those agitated days were short, and we find the couple speedily established as boarders in Olive Street, New Haven, only two blocks away from the Palladium office, in the family of a niece of Professor Olmstead, of Yale College. A letter of Mrs. Northrop to a friend dated December twenty-eighth of this year dilates on the felicities of married life. Boarding, apparently, was not included in the list of felicities, for in the spring of 1863 the house 607 Chapel Street, which was to remain the Northrop home for twenty years, was bought. The distant reader may suffer himself to be told that Chapel Street is a street of versatile proclivities, by no means entirely or even very obtrusively religious, a street in which residential quiet is divided from commercial alertness by a two minutes' walk, and which becomes gravely academic on one side without ceasing to be shrewdly practical on the other-a combination and contrast in which it bore a marked resemblance to Professor Northrop. Cyrus Northrop's house, hardly more than eight blocks from the Yale campus, was part of a peaceable, refined, and genial neighborhood, in which all the families, exempt from the two pests of wealth and poverty, linked themselves in a sort of great gens and phratry to which every one subscribed with warmth and pleasure. To-day, as it would seem to the Western visitor's eyes, much of that early life remains, and much is gone. The apartment-house lifts its Atlantean shoulders among the lawns and homesteads of an elder day; physicians abound and undertakers flourish; the black-coated gentlemen who practise the last-named art are seen sometimes sitting behind their windows and eying the passer in the street with a look that says unmistakably "Eventually-why not now?" Next to Cyrus Northrop's old house a tailor presses clothes, and a small grocer offers borax soap and boneless codfish in exchange for the dimes and quarters of an unpretentious clientele. In New Haven the low and the high are often neighbors without being neighborly. "High", however, either in its literal or figurative sense, is not the fitting word for Cyrus Northrop's house. Mrs. Lockwood describes it as "a comfortable two-story house with high ceilings, bay windows, and 'all modern conveniences' as then recognized. Like most houses in the vicinity, it was painted white with green blinds.' blinds." Even to-day the house, though fallen from its first estate, looks like a place in which in former times life would have been always comely and often cheerful; the biographer noted with pleasure the comfort of the interior while the splenetic mistress of the house, having rashly invited him in, tempestuously proclaimed her utter ignorance of the Northrops and her amazement at his insanity in craving a glimpse of their old home. The present number of the house is 1319 Chapel Street, a fact which may have its grain of interest for some traveler from Minnesota. Mrs. Lockwood also tells us that the professor's study was "a large pleasant room on the second floor". In the spring of 1863, just after the purchase of the house and lot, Mrs. Northrop spent some little time in New York under the care of a physician. Cyrus writes: "Our place looks well. It is a delightful part of the city. High up, healthy, good neighborhood, brooks, woods and the country close by. The grass is green and beautiful in the yard." In July he writes: "This P. M. went up to our house and watered the tomatoes, beans, beets, and four hills of corn". Apparently, the place had hardly been bought before he was seized with an eagerness to dispose of it. He writes in April: "I haven't sold my place. Came within an ace of it. Should have made $250. Just a half hour to [so in original] late. Bad, wasn't it? Can't help it." The correspondence is affectionate. "Two or three weeks begin to seem awful long." And, later: "Come up and see a feller when you feel like it". To which he adds, with reassuring disrespect: "Goodbye, old lady". Affection at this period becomes colloquial. People dress more for each other during courtship and less for each other after marriage than for any other persons. Their speech in its apparel often follows the same law. The first child of the marriage, Minnie Warren Northrop, was born on April second, 1864. On June second, 1870, Cyrus junior, the first and only son, was born. The third and last child, Elizabeth, was born on September twenty-third, 1871.1 The early years of these children include a period in Cyrus Northrop's life the spirit of which is summed up in the simple but earnest words which he addresses to his wife on the tenth anniversary of their marriage. My dear Wife: Ten years to-day since we were married! You have been to me all these years more than tongue can tell. God has blessed us with three darling children and death has not entered our family circle. We have great occasion for thanksgiving. I wish to commemorate this day, by asking you to accept the accompanying watch and chain as a slight token of the love of Your Husband, 1 The following verses written by Cyrus Northrop on his three children are not the verses of a craftsman; they are the verses of a father. Their subject is homely and intimate; yet possibly they are the kind of verses which a biography more intent on usefulness than conservative of dignity is justified in printing in a foot-note. INCENTIVES TO LITERARY LIFE Poeta nascitur, non fit. I unlock the door and go into my house; I take off my overcoat, still as a mouse, I go through the hall to the sittingroom door, I open it; then there is stillness no more. Minnie Warren Northrop is described as a child of gentle disposition and an almost angelic beauty. Her complexion was fair, and her golden hair, in the pictures which have come down to us, crisps and crinkles over the pure, broad table of the forehead. The eyes were blue, and the look they cast was like an impact, resembling her father's look in the steadiness and sureness For rushing upon me with shouts of delight Our Bessie's face glows with a calm look of peace At last when I'm weary (?), I sit down in a chair Dear baby she's ready for all but her nap, Then Papa a story must tell them to please, Dear children! dear children! the light of our home, of its gaze. Greek scholars recalled their Homer to find in Воблs лóτviα "Hon the "ox-eyed, queenly Juno" the fit phrase for her eyes, as they found in Ayúdoyyoɩ xηoʊxes, “the clear-voiced heralds", the right description for her father's voice. Mrs. Lockwood tells us that there was a look of other-world-ness in her face which made people turn to look after her as she passed them in the street. There was a ripeness, a depth of quiet understanding, between her father and herself which was superadded to the usual charm and warmth of such relations. Minnie Northrop was named after another little girl, Minnie Husted, daughter of Cyrus Northrop's sister Lucy, who had been her uncle's pet and plaything, and who, some two months after the birth of her little namesake, was struck with malignant diphtheria and died after an illness of two days. No thought of personal risk prevented the brother "from giving to his sister, in her hour of trial, all possible aid and comfort and sympathy". There are early photographs of the younger children in the family album. Cyrus, plump and flourishing, looks out from his little cushion on a world which has been mostly cushion to his baby self thus far. Elizabeth, firmly set in a large chair, has the air of a snug little person who, having efficiently provided for her own welfare, is ready to inspect and analyze her neighbors. It was this little trio perhaps who first showed Cyrus Northrop how exquisite reality can be. The inmost thing, the final thing, in him was fatherhood. More than professor or president or public man, more than son or husband or brother, he was a father. It was the extension and replication of this fatherhood that made him the great president he afterwards became. Parental love is common; intensity in parental love is common: but perfection in the intensity of parental love is, like other perfections, the unusual thing. It appears in natures ripe enough, schooled enough, to give diversity and richness to the passion, yet simple enough to have kept intact its groundwork |