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WHERE THE "BROTHERS AND SISTERS" MET
NO single house in
all Massachusetts has survived so many of the vicissitudes of fickle fortune and
carried the traditions of a glorious past up into the realities of a prosperous
and useful present more successfully than has Fay House, the present home of
Radcliffe College, Cambridge. The central portion of the Fay House of to-day
dates back nearly a hundred years, and was built by Nathaniel Ireland, a
prosperous merchant of Boston. It was indeed a mansion to make farmer-folk stare
when, with its tower-like bays, running from ground to roof, it was, in 1806,
erected on the highroad to watertown, the first brick house in the vicinity.
To Mr. Ireland did
not come the good fortune of living in the fine dwelling his ambition had
designed. A ship-blacksmith by trade, his prospects were ruined by the Jefferson
Embargo, and he was obliged to leave the work of construction on his house
unfinished and allow the place to pass, heavily mortgaged, into the hands of
others. But the house itself and our story concerning it gained by Mr. Ireland's
lass, for it now became the property of Doctor Joseph McKean (a famous Harvard
instructor), and the rendezvous of that professor's college associates and of
the numerous friends of his young family. Oliver Wendell Holmes was among those
who spent many a social evening here with the McKeans.
The next name of
importance to be connected with Fay House was that of Edward Everett, who lived
here for a time. Later
Sophia
Willard Dana, granddaughter of. Chief Justice
Dana, our
first minister to Russia, kept a boarding and day school for young ladies in the
house. Among her pupils were the sisters of James Russell Lowell, Mary Channing,
the first wife of Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and members of the
Higginson, Parkman, and Tuckerman families. Lowell himself, and Edmund Dana,
attended here for a term as a special privilege.
Sophia Dana
was married in the house, August 22, 1827, by the father of Oliver Wendell
Holmes, to Mr. George Ripley, with whom she afterward took an active part in the
Brook Farm Colony, of which we are to hear again a bit later in this series.
After Miss Dana's marriage, her school was carried on largely by Miss Elizabeth
McKean – the daughter of the Doctor Joseph McKean already referred to – a young
woman who soon became the wife of Doctor Joseph Worcester, the compiler
of the
dictionary.
Delightful
reminiscences of Fay House have been furnished us by Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
who, as a boy, was often in and out of the place, visiting his aunt, Mrs.
Channing, who lived here with her son, william Henry Channing, the wellknown
anti-slavery orator. Here Higginson, as a youth, used to listen with keenest
pleasure, to the singing of his cousin, Lucy Channing, especially when the song
she chase was, "The Mistletoe Hung on the Castle Wall," the story of a bride
shut up in. a chest. "I used firmly to believe," the genial colonel confessed to
the Radcliffe girls, in reviving for them his memories of the house, "that there
was a bride shut up in the walls of this house – and there may be to-day, for
all I know."
For fifty years
after June, 1835, the house was in the possession of Judge P. P. Fay's family.
The surroundings were still country-like. Cambridge Common was as yet only a
treeless pasture, and the house had not been materially changed from its
original shape and plan. Judge Fay was a jolly gentleman of the old school. A
judge of probate for a dozen years, an overseer of Harvard College, and a pillar
of Christ Church, he was withal fond of a well-turned story and a lover of good
hunting, as well as much given to hospitality. Miss Maria Denny Fay, whose
memory is now perpetuated in a Radcliffe scholarship, was the sixth of Judge
Fay's seven children, and the one who finally became, both mistress and owner of
the estate. A girl of fourteen when her father bought the house, she was at the
time receiving her young-lady education at the Convent of St.
Ursula,
where, in the vine-covered, red-brick convent on the summit of Charlestown, she
learned, under the guidance of the nuns, to sing, play the piano, the harp, and
the guitar, to speak French, and read Spanish and Italian. But her life on Mt.
Benedict was suddenly terminated when the convent was burned. So she entered
earlier than would otherwise have been the case upon the varied interests of her
new and beautiful home. Here, in the course of a few years, we find her
presiding, a gracious and lovely maiden, of whom the venerable Colonel Higginson
has said: "I have never, in looking back, felt more. grateful to anyone than to
this charming girl of twenty, who consented to be a neighbour to me, an awkward
boy of seventeen, to attract me in a manner from myself and make me available to
other people."
Very happy times
were those which the young Wentworth Higginson, then a college boy, living with
his mother at Vaughan House, was privileged to share with Maria Fay and her
friends. Who of us does not envy him the memory of that Christmas party in 1841,
when there were gathered in Fay House, among others, Maria White, Lowell's
beautiful fiancée; Levi Thaxter, afterward the husband of Celia Thaxter;
Leverett Saltonstall, Mary Story and William Story, the sculptors? And how
pleasant it must have been to join in the famous charades of that circle of
talented young people, to partake of refreshments in the quaint dining-room, and
dance a Virginia reel and
galop in the
beautiful oval parlour which then, as today, expressed ideally the acme of
charming hospitality! What tales this same parlour might relate! How
enchantingly it might tell, if it could speak, of the graceful Maria White, who,
seated in the deep window, must have made an exquisite picture in her white
gown, with her beautiful face shining in the moonlight while she repeated, in
her soft voice, one of her own ballads, written for the "Brothers and Sisters,"
as this group of young people was called.
Of a more distinctly
academic cast were some of the companies later assembled in this same room –
Judge Story, Doctor Beck, President Felton, Professors Pierce, Lane, Child, and
Lowell, with maybe Longfellow, listening to one of his own songs, or that
strange figure, Professor Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles, oddly ill at ease
in his suit of dingy black. In his younger days he had been both pirate and
priest, and he retained, as professor, some of his early habits – seldom being
seated while he talked, and leaning against the door, shaking and fumbling his
college keys as the monks shake their rosaries. Mr. Arthur Gilman has related in
a charming article on Fay House,
written for the Harvard Graduates
Magazine (from
which, as from Miss Norris's sketch of the old place, printed in a recent
number of the Radcliffe Magazine,
many of the incidents here given are drawn), that Professor Sophocles was
allowed by Miss Fay to keep some hens on the estate, pets which he had an odd
habit of naming after his friends. When, therefore, some, accomplishment
striking and praiseworthy in a hen was related in company as peculiar to one or
another of them, the professor innocently calling his animals by the name he had
borrowed, the effect was apt to be startling.
During the latter
part of Miss Fay's long tenancy of this house, she had with her her elder
sister, the handsome Mrs. Greenough, a woman who had been so famous a beauty in
her youth that, on the occasion of her wedding, Harvard students thronged the
aisles and climbed the pews of old Christ Church to see her. The wedding
receptions of Mrs. Greenough's daughter and granddaughter were held, too., in
Fay House. This latter girl was the fascinating and talented Lily Greenough, who
was later a favourite at the court of Napoleon and Eugénie, and who, after the
death of her first husband, Mr. Charles Moulton, was married in this house to
Monsieur De Hegermann Lindencrone, at that time Danish Minister to the United
States, and now minister at Paris. Her daughter,
Suzanne
Moulton, who has left her name scratched with a diamond on one of the Fay House
windows, is now the Countess
Suzanne
Raben-Levetzan of Nystel, Denmark.
In connection with
the Fays' life in this house occurred one thing which will particularly send the
building down into posterity, and will link for all time Radcliffe and Harvard
traditions. For it was in the upper corner room, nearest the Washington Elm,
that Doctor Samuel Gilman, Judge Fay's brother-in-law, wrote "Fair Harvard,"
while a guest in this hospitable home, during the second centennial celebration
of the college on the Charles. Radcliffe girls often seem a bit triumphant as
they point out to visitors this room and its facsimile copy of the famous song.
Yet they have plenty of pleasant things of their own to remember.
Just one of these,
taken at random from among the present writer's own memories of pretty
happenings at Fay House, will serve: During Duse's last tour in this country,
the famous actress came out one afternoon, as many a famous personage does, to
drink a cup of tea with Mrs. Agassiz in the stately old parlour, where Mrs.
Whitman's famous portrait of the pre-sident of Radcliffe College vies in
attractiveness with the living reality graciouslv presiding over the Wednesday
afternoon teacups. As it happened, there was a scant attendance at the tea on
this day of Duse's visit. She had not been expected, and so it fell out that
some two or three girls who could speak French or Italian were privileged to do
the honours of the occasion to the great actress whom they had long worshipped
from afar. Duse was in one of her most charming moods, and she listened with the
greatest attention to her young hostesses' laboured explanations concerning the
college and its ancient home.
The best of it all,
from the enthusiastic girl-students' point of view, was, however, in the
dark-eyed Italienne's mode of saying farewell. As she entered her carriage – to
which she had been escorted by this little group – she took from her belt a
beautiful bouquet of roses, camellias, and violets. And as the smart coachman
flicked the impatient horses with his whip, Duse threw the girls the precious
flowers. Those who caught a camellia felt, of course, especially delighted, for
it was as the Dame
aux Camellias
that Duse had been winning for weeks the plaudits of admiring Boston. My own
share of the largesse consisted of a few fresh, sweet violets, which I still
have tucked away somewhere, together with one of the great actress's photographs
that bears the date of the pleasant afternoon hour passed with her in the
parlour where the "Brothers and Sisters" met.
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