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Frank Bellew, “Recollections of Ralph Waldo Emerson” (1884)
- University of Iowa Press
- Chapter
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[] The son of an officer in the British Army, illustrator and caricaturist Frank Henry Temple Bellew (1828–1888) was born in Calcutta, India, spent his early years in France and England, and moved to New York City in 1850, where he counted newspapermen Ed Underhill, Frank Cahill, and Walt Whitman among his friends. His illustrations were well known to American newspaper readers, and in 1881 he became the “special” artist for Canadian Illustrated News in Quebec. Bellew’s “Recollections of Ralph Waldo Emerson,” which concentrates on their initial acquaintance in 1855, offers rare glimpses—narrated with characteristic British humor—into Emerson’s professional life, light side, hospitality, and home life at the time. Of special interest in the essay are Bellew’s descriptions of Emerson’s frustration at correcting the proofs of English Traits, his ease at taking advantage of Hawthorne’s shyness, his interactions with his children, and his surprise on learning from Bellew that, without his permission, Whitman had published Emerson’s congratulatory letter on the appearance of Leaves of Grass in the New-York Tribune. Frank Bellew It was in July,,that I first I walked up the nave of Concord, and, though I have visited many old-land cathedrals,. . . not one ever impressed me more than this sanctuary of thought and learning, with its broad aisle of arching elms, its teeming memories of New-World history, and its thousand associations with the evangelists of our new religion of humanity. The scene itself was beautiful.The vaulted roof of green,nearly half a mile in length,belittled any temple of mere masonry. The comfortable New-England homes on either side, with their gardens of flowers in front and their peeps of orchards behind, seemed to incarnate the spirit of the apostle of the place. Here I met Emerson, and, being from a land of which he had formed many good opinions, he treated me perhaps with a larger measure of graciousness than was his wont with strangers. At all events, shortly after my introduction , he invited me to accompany him in his afternoon rambles through the woods and fields, which I learned was a most distinguished honor, rarely, if ever, accorded to any one, and for which I might thank my “Recollections of Ralph Waldo Emerson” () emerson in his own time nationality. On the occasion of our first tramp,—I think it was the first, but the spoon of time has so stirred up the pudding of my brain that the ingredients are tolerably mixed; but the time is not of the remotest consequence— on one occasion he took me to Walden Pond, to which Thoreau gave renown . It appeared to be an extinct gravel-pit, filled with the most exquisitely pure water, and was often used by himself and a few others as a bath. I think he claimed that its purity and coldness gave it special tonic properties for this purpose. He asked me if I would not like to take a plunge. “But we have no towels,” I suggested. “Oh,” he replied, “that is of no consequence: we can dry ourselves in the sun. I rarely trouble myself about towels.” But I, not being familiar with the rare dryness of the American climate, and recalling some damp recollections of having once or twice, as a boy, tried a similar experiment in England, which resulted in my shivering on the bank for some time after my swim and then with much difficulty dragging my wet body into my clothes and going home in great discomfort, did not dare to venture, and so missed an opportunity of something akin to baptism at the hands of the prophet. Near this pond he showed me a few acres of shrubbery he had planted as an investment for the benefit of his son, and he considered it the most profitable one he could make. The saplings were then about the thickness of a man’s wrist, and he calculated that by the time his son reached the age of twenty-one the timber would be of considerable value. His son was then, I think, about nine years of age. It would at least, he thought, pay better than railway-shares, in which he had invested some money, but from which, up to that time, he had received no dividends. On our way home he plucked a pod of the milk-weed, and broke it open to show me the shining silver-fish inside, and told me...