Paul M. Hollister

“ A treaty with Great Britain, Lafayette to be got out of prison, two sacks of field peas and some winter vetch—and there is George Washington. Our national heroes march down the ages without time to change costumes. While they live we call them everything under the sun; they die, and we endow them with a certain type-quality which they must wear forever to the exclusion of other and equally interesting qualities which they possessed in equal quantity. Unless some circumstance rescue those qualities from oblivion, a large part of the inspiration of their lives has been unnecessarily sacrificed. ”

“ Fancy a shaggy Bolshevik, his mouth full of broken English, his head full of sophistry, and his heart full of greed for the possessions of others, being led up Mount Vernon, Monticello or Doughoregan Manor! Could any contrast make a picture more grotesque? Could there be conceived a background more serenely sane, more perfectly American, against which to display the distortion of this foreign madness? Every stone and brick and timber of such houses preaches a sermon on Americanism. ”

“ And when the spreading chestnut tree over Dexter Pratt’s smithy fell, the children of Cambridge gave their pennies to fashion him an armchair of its wood, and used to traipse fearlessly into the Longfellow house from time to time to call on the poet and see that the chair gave him good service. Without question it is one of the homeliest chairs in the world—and one of the finest.
One cannot leave the house without a glance at his other friends, his closer intimates, nor enter the house without remarking them. ”

“ That April-day crowd returned to Hospital and Royal Streets and sacked the house from hall to belvedere, ripped down silk curtains, slashed paintings, wrenched out chandeliers, dug up two skeletons from the courtyard, pitched Madame Lalaurie’s precious possessions out of windows and made bonfire of the wreckage in the street. Nor when inside the stout old walls a new and finer residence was built in cheerful defiance of the ghost, could the spirit of tragedy be banished. ”

“ You may be mildly thrilled by the Indian-proof shutters, mystified by the secret staircase which follows the course of the chimney, and delighted with the kitchen William Coddington built, with its eight-inch beams, Dutch oven, churn, spinning-wheel, and a musket over the mantel for inviting Indians to dinner.
There are ever so many things in the house today to call up a Quincy tradition, for if you scratch almost any chapter of New England history you will find a Quincy tradition underneath. ”

“ Across the span of the years we can still hear the echo of an outraged protest—the hymn of hate of the daughters of William Chew, sung with all the cordial detestation that could be uttered by a group of sisters who came out to Germantown under British escort and found their lovely home in ruins at the hands of the army that had already made their father a prisoner. None can blame them for the gayety with which they entered into the social life of that winter in the occupied city, with never a thought for Washington’s men shivering in the snow at Valley Forge. ”

“ Few realize how wide and bustling was the world surveyed from Mount Vernon, nor to what extent he exerted himself to make use of the talents he had been given. Remember that there were no neighboring shops, no groceries, no service stations—not one, in fact, of the multitude of helping hands which science reaches out today to perform every conceivable task; and remember too that in his custody were, and upon his wise management depended, not only the happiness of his wife and her two children, but that of a company of several hundred others on the estate. ”

“ Either course will bring you before a wide low house of yellow brick, with green blinds and white woodwork and English ivy. Directly ahead of you, across the circle of the driveway, the square main section of the house, capped by a tower, rises above a bright portico. To left and right the house throws out long extensions of even height, terminating in wings set endwise to you, like double-faces in the game of dominoes. Your first impression will be one of unusual size, your next of flatly rectangular simplicity. ”

“ He had never realized that Charles Town, in the Carolinas, was the richest city south of Philadelphia, nor that here he was to find a spirit of resentment against British injustice as acute as that of his own people. “This town,” he wrote, “makes a beautiful appearance as you come up to it and in many respects a magnificent one. I can only say in general that in grandeur, splendor of building, decorations, equipages, numbers,161 commerce, shipping, and indeed everything it far surpasses all I ever saw or ever expect to see in America.” ”

“ Edmund the Third was a man not only of fortune but of discrimination, which he showed by marrying Dorothy Flynt—the first “Dorothy Q.” In 1706 he invited the whole countryside to the estate by the brook, and around and above the old Coddington house the whole corps of neighbors, abetted by hard cider, raised the huge timbers of a new mansion, the one which stands there today restored to its full dignity. It was a suitable dwelling for a man of eminence in the colony, a man big enough to quarrel with Benning Wentworth over the boundary of New Hampshire. ”

“ It has the requisite dignity of its poet and its general, the well-dressed air of its Tory merchant, the scholarly simplicity of its lexicographer, the open-armed hospitality of its rich apothecary-general, and the grace of the lady who is its present occupant. The composite of these qualities is a picture which is almost as familiar and as dear to America as Mount Vernon.
Out of that picture troops a story more varied in human incident than that of Washington’s own home. ”

“ Jefferson,” said one of Rochambeau’s aides later, “is the first American who has consulted the fine arts to know how he should shelter himself from the weather.” With no continental travel for background, with only the meagre pictorial record of the period to draw upon, he somehow responded instantly to the simplicity and useful beauty of the classic, and translated it to his castle. By the Greeks, for example, it was thought improper that a roof should indicate anything but a glorification of the heavens; the idea that human feet might be walking on the upper side of a ceiling was sacrilege. ”

“ Set in a jog of the stone wall at the highway is a memorial tablet which has evidently gone unnoticed by the gentlemen who write histories for primary schools—who are supposed to watch the fires on our national shrines, and to toss a bright epithet, an apt name, or a bit of patriotic tinder on the coals. In missing this Dobbs Ferry house they are clearly guilty of neglect of duty. It has a story that goes clear down to the stuff every American believes he is made of. ”

“ As a poet he gave the lie to the precious though fashionable complaint that nothing real in art need be expected from America until she had had a century or two of sandpapering. His enthusiasm of race drew occasional outbursts of a greater quality—the thing that made him a great citizen as well as a great national artist—the immortal spirit which went into such majestic songs as The Building of the Ship. ”

“ The Quincy Homestead It is perhaps impolite to compare a Massachusetts family tree to a banyan instead of the conventional elm, but no prowler among her old houses can come away without a feeling that almost everything in New England is related to almost everything else. Chicago glances over Boston’s shoulder and finds her reading the Monday Transcript’s genealogy page; Chicago howls with laughter and turns to Vanity Fair to see what is going on in New York. ”

“ No prince will come to rouse the place. But better than that, after sixty years of care and a century and a half of life, it re-creates each year to thousands of pilgrims the crises and victories that wrote our creed as a nation. And fortunately no landholder on this great farm of ours will leave Mount Vernon without a deep sense of relief that it is first and last a perfect monument to a country gentleman. ”

“ Their passing will deepen the twilight of an antiquity which New Orleans has cherished with more sympathy than all the rest of our American cities. Rigid modern buildings with Louis XVI fronts and O’Shaughnessy backs will rear their ventilators, tanks and pent-houses where, once upon a time, warm walls and climbing cupolas, odd contours and vine-like wrought-iron railings melted into a strangely complex and beautiful composition. ”

“ A critic who has traveled over certain of New Hampshire’s roads may suggest that Governor John Wentworth was the last man who improved them, but that is neither here nor there, and such comment is only likely to call down upon the scoffer’s head one of the ghosts without which no American colonial mansion is properly furnished. Jack Coolidge, as a boy, used to lie up in the loft and moan like a regulation ghost when disagreeable tourists asked to be shown about the house, and any one of them will tell you that the place is haunted. ”

“ Forget that the ceiling is blistered, that two panes are gone from the side windows, and that night-blooming lodgers have kicked the haunches off the carved steeds of Phoebus Apollo on the door. A century ago a slave would have swung wide the portal with great ceremony, and you would have mounted the winding stair to an upper hall which was notable for its elegance; today you find it dingy, uninspiring and forlorn. Not a ghost in sight anywhere. ”

“ There is African ragtime in New Orleans, as there is in every city and town where squeals the talking-machine, but in Beauregard Square you will not hear today the thumping of the voodoo chant, nor see the bamboula danced, as you might have in the days when it was Congo Square. ”

“ Still, however, the active physique her sea-faring father and her tomboy mother had given little Betsy Bowen held on grimly to life and activity, and the social mania which had consumed her thoughts lighted up her memory with fantasies, as a sputtering lantern creates half-authentic figures among the shadows of a dusty, neglected stage. Outside the house she had no friends except those who wanted her money or stole her firewood and livestock, indoors life was a perpetual pageant. ”

“ The nation loses a man, to mourn a saint. So in a lesser degree with our lesser heroes: Hale becomes the lay-figure of Loyalty, Franklin, of Common Sense, Grant, of Military Patience. Here, on a hill in Fairfax County, Virginia, in and about a great white house, we may catch glimpses of the man George Washington liked to be—glimpses denied us in the popular Washington legend. ”

“ The passing of the old order has a hundred conspicuous manifestations in New Orleans, perhaps because there is a legend for every old house, a tragedy for every shadow, a romantic blood-stain on every pavement. The Absinthe House takes in lodgers. The Cabildo, the ancient Spanish city hall, is a museum. ”

“ Heredity gave him an active mind and bearing of real charm, and just as the Manor house back in Maryland took on through the years extensions and embellishments which multiply its effect of useful luxury, so each addition to Charles Carroll’s intellect only seemed to make him more companionable and genuinely attractive. Even during his student period his sensitive spirit was not altogether proof against affairs of the heart, and if it had not been for her meddlesome sister, Miss Louisa Baker would have gone back to Maryland as his bride, as mistress over 68,000 acres. ”

“ The touch of her expert hand was evident in the decoration of the house, and the choice and disposition of the furniture and paintings were a compliment to her taste. Her ten slaves were more than enough to care for its needs. She drove out along the Bayou road of an afternoon behind fine horses, her coachman was coveted as a correct and desirable servant. What the world calls fine people came to her house with as keen an appetite for the intellectual cocktails of the hostess as for the creature hospitality they anticipated at her table. ”

“ Josiah the Third grew up to be mayor of Boston and president of Harvard, and if no other distinction remained to him except this passage from his speech in Congress on the embargo in 1808, it would be a proud enough monument for any American:
“But I shall be told, ‘This may lead to war.’ I ask, ‘Are we now at peace?’ Certainly not, unless retiring from insult be peace—unless shrinking under the lash be peace. ”