Boston Athenaeum

“ The choicest of his works during this period are in Boston, some belonging to the Museum of fine arts, and some to the private collections of the older families of the city. His "Spanish Girl," "Spalatro's Vision of the Bloody Hand," "The Death of King John," "Jeremiah," "The Witch of Endor," "Miriam and Rosalie," are best known in America. His "Belshazzar's Feast," a most ambitious undertaking, was left unfinished at his death, and became the property of the Boston Athenæum. Allston's writings display much talent, and his works in both prose and poetry have been highly praised by critics. ”

“ Literary, learned, scientific, benevolent, and secret societies, represented by their own edifices, halls, libraries, and collections, are very numerous, and well sustained. Among these may be mentioned the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the Massachusetts Historical Society; the Boston Athenæum, with a very extensive library, paintings, and statuary; the New England Historic Genealogical Society; the Masonic Temple; the Odd Fellows' Hall; the Mechanics' Association; the Mercantile Library Association; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Boston College (Roman Catholic) ”

“ In 1860 he made his head of St Stephen (now in the Boston Athenaeum) and in 1861 his “Falling Gladiator” (since 1886 in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts) , which Truman H. Bartlett calls “the most remarkable work of sculpture that has yet [1882] been produced in this country...powerful, wonderful, but not alluring.” ”

“ The matters they had in hand wandered indeed as stray vague airs across to us—this I think I have noted; but Boston itself could easily rule, in default even of New York, when to "go," in particular, was an act of such easy virtue. To go from Ashburton Place was to go verily round the corner not less than further afield; to go to the Athenæum, to the Museum, to a certain door of importances, in fact of immensities, defiant of vulgar notation, in Charles Street, at the opposite end from Beacon. ”

“ On his return he was active in founding the Anthology club, and wrote much for its magazine, the "Monthly Anthology," during its publication in 1803-11. In 1807 he was a founder of the Boston athenaeum, which grew out of the club. ”

“ I resided at Boston, in the United States. In that city there is a large and long-established library, styled the Athenaeum, connected with which is a reading-room, well supplied with foreign and American periodicals and newspapers. ”

“ The names of Trumbull, Vanderlyn, Frothingham, etc., alone would act as magic on a discriminating public, provided fair specimens of their talents be judiciously arranged for public inspection. Boston has done wonders this year in her Athenæum.{24} Why, then, should we, equally blessed with native talent, despair, and sit down in sack-cloth and ashes, when a single effort can make us her equal and rival? Gentlemen, I am enthusiastic, and yet have maturely weighed each and every reason against your regeneration, and boldly assert more is for you than against you. ”

“ We’ll teach you, then, little sneak, to be exquisite! We allow none of that rot round here.” It was heart-breaking, this presentation of a Boston practically void of an Athenæum; though perhaps not without interest as showing how much one’s own sense of the small city of the earlier time had been dependent on that institution. I found it of no use, at any rate, to think, for a compensatory sign of the new order, of the present Public Library ”

“ Mr. Davis, with his family, visited Boston in 1858, and was received with marked attention by all. During this visit he was introduced, and frequently came to the Athenæum, where I made his acquaintance. Among other objects of interest in the institution, I showed him Washington's library and this oration of Dr. Buchanan. Nothing so fixed his attention as this; he read it and expressed himself amazed. He had heard that such sentiments were expressed at the South, but had never seen them. ”

“ In Boston the Athenaeum, in New York the Metropolitan Art Museum, and both in the latter city and Philadelphia the private collections—which the kindness of their owners makes almost as accessible as public ones—afford us examples of most contemporary painters and of some of the older masters; while our schools of design are provided with casts from the most celebrated antique statues, and many of the best modern ones come to our shores. ”

“ The conservatory has possibly done more for New England culture than any other influence save Harvard University.
The literary life of Boston needs neither chronicler nor comment. Such men as Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Francis Parkman, Prescott, the historian, Longfellow, Lowell and countless others who, living, have made the city their home, or, dead, sleep in its chambers of Peace, have cast a glamour of books and bookmen and book-life around her until her title of "The Athens of America" has passed from jest to earnest. ”

“ Scientific institutions, music halls, and the splendid stores possessed by the booksellers and philosophical instrument makers, proclaim the literary and refined tastes of the inhabitants, which have earned for their city the name of the "American Athens." There is an air of repose about Boston; here, if anywhere, one would suppose that large fortunes were realised and enjoyed. The sleek horses do not appear to be hurried over the pavements; there are few placards, and fewer puffs; the very carts are built rather to carry weight than for speed. ”

“ The American Athenians have their thinking and writing done for them by a coterie whose distinctive characteristics are Socinianism in theology, a præter-Puritan prudery in ethics, a German tendency in metaphysics, and throughout all a firm persuasion that Boston is the fountain-head of art, scholarship, and literature for the western world, and particularly that New York is a Nazareth in such things, out of which can come nothing good. ”

“ The richness of color, the glory of form, was less to them than something which could set the sharp edge of their intellect in motion. “Besides, what is Boston going to do,” he said, “when these fellows die who give it its honor now, Longfellow, Holmes, and the rest? They can’t live forever, and with them its glory will depart without it is sustained by a foundation for art in other directions. Harvard University will do something to keep it up, but not much, and unless a distinct effort be made now, Boston will lose its place and go behind.” ”

“ It is right to say, and let us remember it on this sacred anniversary, as an inspiration to duty, that Boston has been the center of the two great movements in our history, the movement which gave us independence and the movement which purged the land of slavery. If we could rear on Boston Common a monument upon which, around the central form of Samuel Adams, should be grouped the figures of James Otis and John Adams, John Hancock and Joseph Warren and their associates, how much that monument would represent of what was most dynamic in the days which led up to the American Revolution! ”

“ I recall a Sunday afternoon in particular when I hung about on the now vaster platform of the State House for a near view of the military monuments erected there, the statues of Generals Hooker and Devens, and for the charm at once and the pang of feeling the whole backward vista, with all its features, fall from that eminence into grey perspective. The top of Beacon Hill quite rakes, with a but slightly shifting range, the old more definite Boston; for there seemed no item, nor any number, of that remarkable sum that it would not anciently have helped one to distinguish or divine. ”

“ The perception of it grows on the foreigner. Its charm is so deliciously old in this land, so deliciously young compared with the lovely frowst of Oxford and Cambridge. You see it in temperament, the charm of simplicity and good-heartedness and culture; in the Harvard undergraduate, who is a boy, while his English contemporary is either a young man or a schoolboy, less pleasant stages; and in the old Bostonian who heard, and still hears, the lectures of Dickens and Thackeray. Class Day brings so many of that older generation together. They reveal what Harvard, what Boston, was. ”

“ To conceive the interest attached to the thousand things in this museum, one must imagine a modern city, Boston for example, completely buried by an unexpected and terrific convulsion of nature. Its inhabitants mostly escape, but from various causes leave their city entombed, and in a hundred years the grass grows over it, and its very locality is forgotten. ”

“ The one educational institution in this country which has the honor of ante-dating Harvard College by a few years, and of thus being the very oldest in the land, is the Boston Latin School. For two hundred and fifty years it has been a part, and an important part, of the town and city of Boston, influencing all its other institutions, social, literary, moral, political, and religious, and largely giving to the metropolis, directly or indirectly, its wide-spread fame as the "Athens of America." ”

“ They ought to take the votes away from these people, who don't know how to use them, and give them only to us, the Educated." My heart leapt the Atlantic, and was in a Cathedral or University town of South England.
Yet Boston is alive. It sits, in comfortable middle-age, on the ruins of its glory. But it is not buried beneath them. It used to lead America in Literature, Thought, Art, everything. The years have passed. It is remarkable how nearly now Boston is to New York what Munich is to Berlin. Boston and Munich were the leaders forty years ago. ”

“ Every hour brings us from distant quarters of the Union the expression of mortification at the late events in Massachusetts, and at the behavior of Boston. The tameness was indeed shocking. Boston, of whose fame for spirit and character we have all been so proud; Boston, whose citizens, intelligent people in England told me they could always distinguish by their culture among Americans; the Boston of the American Revolution, which figures so proudly in John Adams’s Diary, which the whole country has been reading ”

“ Architecturally, Boston combines in the happiest way all that is beautiful and dignified in the classic models and all that is fresh and original in modern canons of building. A magnificent group of buildings, in the vicinity of Boylston and Huntingdon streets and Copley Square, fairly takes the breath away with its beauty. Trinity Church and the Museum of Fine Arts, the "New Old South Church" and the new Boston Public Library, form such a quartet of splendid edifices as even the travelled eye seldom sees. ”

“ The New England Conservatory of Music has an enviable reputation, and the Lowell School of Design, the Massachusetts Normal Art School, and the school connected with the Museum of Fine Arts are representative of Boston as a centre of art education. ”

“ And Athens, that great and mighty city, exercising a most powerful influence over the civilized world, distinguished for her legislators, her philosophers, and her historians,—what was the condition of woman there? ”

“ As the substantial citizen of to-day passes up this street, where shops are rapidly displacing the mansions of the last century, he looks with honest pride upon Boston's crowning glory, the gilded dome which, like a great golden egg, is nested upright upon the roof which shelters the annually-assembled wisdom of the Old Commonwealth. ”

“ The West, I believe, has built universities on another plan and to another purpose. But Harvard, like her great neighbour Boston, has been obedient to the voice of tradition, and her college, the oldest, remains also the greatest in America.
Culture has always been at once the boast and the reproach of Boston. A serious ancestry and the neighbourhood of a university are enough to ensure a grave devotion to the things of the spirit, and Boston has never found the quest of gold sufficient for its needs. ”

“ Always one of the most important of colonial towns, it conducted itself in sturdy Puritan style, fearing God, honoring the King—with reservations—burning witches and Quakers, waxing prosperous on codfish, and placing education above every earthly thing in value, until the exciting events of the Revolution, which has left behind it relics which make Boston a veritable "old curiosity shop" for the antiquarian, or indeed the ordinary loyal American, who can spend a happy day, or week, or month, prowling around the picturesque narrow streets, crooked as the proverbial ram's horn, of Old Boston. ”

“ The finest specimens long stood in the neighbourhood of Faneuiel Hall; but, with one exception, we believe, their picturesque heaps of triangles have dropped beneath the merciless hand of speculation and improvement. Boston has not grown so thriftily, or rather so miraculously, as the capitols of other States, through which the flood of emigration rolls more directly; but it is certainly the handsomest town in the United States, and probably its prosperity is more permanent and solid. ”

“ You may not find here the ardent skies of your own sunny South, but you will find as ardent hearts, as warm and generous hands to welcome you to our Commonwealth. We welcome you to the city of Boston, and you have already experienced how open-hearted, how generous, how free from all possible taint of sectional thought are the hospitality and cordiality of the city of Boston. We welcome you to Faneuil Hall. Many an eloquent voice has in all times resounded from the walls of Faneuil Hall. It is said that no voice is uttered by man in this air we breathe but enters into that air. ”