03.02. New York and Vicinity
Chapter 2 Danger of Foreign Travel to the Preacher.
-- Sunday In New York -- Dr. Lyman Abbot -- Salvation Army -- Money Question -- Death of the Innocents -- Riverside Park -- Sleepy Hollow -- The Grave of Irving -- Site of Major Andre’s Capture -- Sunnyside.
It is unquestionably a risky thing for a preacher to travel abroad. I allude not to physical peril, for statistics inform us that more people and killed and hurt at home than in traveling.
I was thinking of another kind of danger altogether, the fact of impaired or destroyed usefulness. It has been noticed that in many cases foreign travel has led to the undoing of the preacher. The man beloved of the congregation who goes abroad never comes back. Some one else returns who bears a resemblance to him -- but he is not the same. Or if he returns he brings Europe and Asia with him, and from this time on we deal with a foreigner and are kept busy looking at panoramas of the old world. The man’s conversation is changed. Everything now reminds him of what happened in Rome or Venice. Every address or sermon is characterized by such expressions as, One evening while standing on the Bridge of Sighs -- or, One morning while resting in the shadow of the Pyramids, and so on endlessly. The preaching becomes changed; the temple of Solomon is in a measure obscured or eclipsed by the Colosseum of Rome; Mt. Calvary disappears and Mount Blanc heaves in sight with its glaciers and avalanches. The Gospel is snowed under or covered with the sands of oriental deserts. The social life is altered. The blandest of men after crossing the Atlantic become intolerant. Willing, before he crossed the ocean, to listen; after this performance he monopolizes every conversation. A large dinner-party is brought to dead silence, while a question flung along the whole length of the table about some trifling date or name of place, secures the wandering attention of the guests and permits the interrupter to take another -- perhaps the ten thousandth -- voyage back to the old world where many of his tired listeners devoutly wish he had remained. The reader begins to see something of the peril alluded to in the opening sentence. Am I not right when I ask his best wishes to go out for me that I may return as I left, an unassuming man and willing to accord to my fellow-creatures perfect liberty of speech, and that in my sermons no Caesar shall take the place of Scriptural characters, and that Calvary, "lovely, mournful Calvary," shall continue to tower above the Himalayas and hide the Alps, and be seen and felt in its beauty and power in the substance of every conversation, in the heart of every prayer, and in the soul of every sermon until the end of life? I have reached the city of New York. The Sabbath is better observed in many respects than in New Orleans. There are more outward decencies, although it is far from being what it should. On side streets I saw many store doors open, and from my lofty seat on the elevated railway, as I went to church, I looked in through third and fourth-story windows upon scores and hundreds of operatives hard at work in shirt-making and tailoring establishments. My heart bled for them as I watched their stooping forms and pale faces.
I went over to Brooklyn to hear Dr. Talmage, but learned that he was absent on his summer vacation. What a kind congregation he has! -- a trip to the Holy Land, and than a vacation granted upon the top of that. From the deserted preaching-place of Dr. Talmage I walked down to Plymouth Tabernacle, Dr. Beecher’s famous church. I discovered, to my surprise, that the auditorium was very little larger than my own at the Carondelet Street Church in New Orleans. There were cane seats attached to the end of each pew that let down, would have filled the aisles and increased by several hundred the seating capacity of the building; but they were not in use. The chair wings were all folded neatly against the sides of the pews awaiting the step and voice of another pulpit giant before spreading themselves once more upon the air. The pulpit is made of olive wood brought from Palestine. The organ nearly touches the ceiling. The choir was composed of forty voices.
Dr. Abbott and the assistant, at half-past ten, stepped upon the platform and confronted a four-fifths audience. The assistant pastor prayed the opening prayer in the never-to-be-forgotten theological seminary accent. He asked the Divine being to awaken the purity and holiness that lay dormant within us all!
Dr. Abbott is a man of about sixty years, slender, medium height, grizzled beard, narrow face and high forehead. His text was from the Revised Version, "In his temple doth every one say glory." He said that Nature was the temple referred to here. The discourse treated of Nature, and was a preparation of the congregation for the summer vacation. Dr. Abbott impresses you agreeably, but not overwhelmingly; he was scholarly, but not eloquent, while his pulpit movements are angular -- not to say stiff. He labors also under this disadvantage, that the very memory of his illustrious predecessor fills the building, and as constantly, by swift mental comparisons, dwarfs the present incumbent.
He made a number of capital points. Said there were two ways of approaching Nature; one with the critical, analytical eye, and the other in which the form and life of the Great Father was sought after. When, in summing up this thought, he said that when a man pressed his wife to his heart, that at such a time he never thought of the bivalvular action of the heart or circulation of the blood, I saw that he had his audience. In the evening I waited on the ministrations of a young Baptist minister. The sermon was mainly an apology for taking a summer vacation; said topic not being without its interest to a Jonah fleeing from pastoral duty, who sat unknown before him. When he defined to the audience the multifarious labors of a preacher, he opened certainly some of their eyes. He mentioned, humorously, a department of labor described by the term Special Requests, well known to every minister. A few days before he had been written to from the West to ship a gentleman a hound by express; and a few days before that came from a distant State a request to please hunt up a stray lunatic on the streets of New York. The writer listened with a wondrous fellow-feeling, and knew that he could tell things of a certain nature on that line that would in no wise lower the interest, but rather deepen the surprise of the hour. The young preacher’s power I soon discovered to be his deep love and sympathy for man, his burning earnestness, an d the fact that he held up before the people a living Christ.
Monday night I visited one of the two places of worship of the Salvation Army. It was a rough wooden structure, appearing, as they doubtless intended that it should, like a barracks. A detachment of ten occupied the platform, composed of two women, six men, a boy and a Negro. The orchestra, so to speak, was made up of a piano, bass-drum, two tambourines, and clapping of hands together with the singing of the detachment. The meeting was presided over and led by a sweet-faced, black-eyed young woman who wore a black dress and a dark straw Quaker bonnet, over the top of which and coming down the sides was a broad red ribbon. She was a woman of manifest piety, showed marks of a fair education, and in the conduct of the meeting evinced herself full of resources. The audience was made up of different classes some being there evidently from curiosity; but under the earnest words of the leader and the martial-like melody of the hymns all were measurably affected. I had little conception until that night of how pleasantly such dissimilar instruments, as s piano, bass-drum and tambourine, could be made to agree. The church money question I find to be universal. Let no heart-sick pastor at home, wrestling with the problem of church finance, feel that his difficulty is peculiar to himself and his people. In the walls of the wealthy Plymouth Tabernacle I heard Dr. Abbott request his deacons to post themselves at the doors, and, basket in hand, to receive the collection that had been overlooked in the regular order of service. Then I heard one of these same deacons say to another, "That is right; let no one escape." As they spoke thus, it seemed to me that I was listening, as in a dream, to the utterances of Methodist stewards. At the Salvation Army barracks the leader announced a collection, and urged all present to give. Again my foot seemed to press my native heath. Sabbath night the Baptist preacher pressed upon his large audience the necessity of putting certain moneys, in certain envelopes, and so doing through the entire summer; that a great strain and pressure of the financial kind was now being experienced by the church. As he said this I immediately felt at home! Nothing that he could have said, even to the calling of my name, could have made me feel so perfectly at ease, and invested my surroundings with such a delightfully familiar air.
Just now, in this heated spell, disease, like Herod of old, is hewing down the children of the poor classes from three years old and downward. Three hundred often in a week. One week saw five hundred white ribbons streaming from as many doors. As I sped along the elevated road one evening I saw a mother with her sick baby on the flat roof of a tenement-house in the crowded quarter. There she was, evidently, to give the poor little dying one a breath of fresh, pure air. My heart melted at the sight.
Riverside Park is situated in the north-western part of the city, upon a high bluff overlooking the Hudson river, and commanding a view, up and down, of that animated stream for many miles. The park is treeless, save where the brow of the hill overlooks the river, but it is beautifully swarded. From its center arises the tomb of Gen. Grant. There the dead warrior lies in state, guarded day and night by two policemen. The whole scene -- the tomb remote from habitation of the living and the dead, the solitary coffin visible through the iron grating, the distant ships on the river, and the still more distant line of mountains -- formed a picture of loneliness striking to the mind, and ineradicable. Certainly it seems that one of the prices of greatness, or even prominence, in this world is loneliness. The higher men rise the lonelier they become, and the solitariness follows even in death. The question arose in my mind, Was this a great man lying before me? Was this life an accomplishment or an accident? Central Park is a rare stretch of physical loveliness. Two miles and a half long, and a half mile wide, with serpentine roads unfolding like silver ribbons through the trees, and with charming paths leading anywhere, everywhere, and suddenly bringing you into unexpected places of beauty, of cavern, glade, or lake side, you are constantly interested and charmed at every step. They have in the center of the park the obelisk brought thither Rome years ago from Egypt; but to my eye it was as much out of place as the helmet of Richard Coeur de Lion would be on the head of a dry goods clerk. That which most impressed me was that part of the park which has been trained to look like the forests of nature. Fully two hundred acres is, like a sylvan glade or deep tangled wild-wood. The eye and heart fairly luxuriates on the scene. I thought, as I looked, that when men desire to give us things worth the seeing and worth the having, they have to go to God’s works for a model. They obtained Gothic architecture by studying the splintered summits of the mountains. If they wanted an enduring arch, they fashioned one after the human skull. If they wanted a lighthouse that would withstand all the storms, they took the trunk of a tree for a model. And if they desired to delight the eye with a perfection of physical beauty in our parks, they did it not with avenue and colonnade, but by giving us in confused and yet delightful assemblage of rock, crag, leaping waterfall, glen and dark woods, a perfect representation of the Almighty’s works in nature.
Sleepy Hollow, the site of the famous legend of Washington Irving, is located about a mile from Tarrytown, and Tarrytown itself is situated about twenty-five miles above New York, on the Hudson. Sleepy Hollow, opening on the Hudson and running up the hills, is shaped like a curved horn or trumpet. In the broadest part, which is a few hundred yards wide and not far from the river, is the old church and bridge, by which and over which Ichabod Crane dashed in his endeavor to escape from the headless horseman. The church, which is a venerable structure of brick and stone and measures about thirty by forty feet, bears the hoary date of 1699. Just above the church is the dark clump of trees from which suddenly emerged the midnight spectral horseman. As I looked at the places of which I had read frequently as a boy, it was hard to tell which were more real to me, the author of the legends or the creature of the author’s imagination, Irving or Ichabod Crane. Such is the wonderful power of Genius. It makes new worlds, fills them with new people who from that moment become as lifelike as characters of history, indeed, in a sense even more, for the historical personage dies, but the character of fiction cannot be buried -- he always seems alive.
There is an old graveyard in Sleepy Hollow that runs from the ancient church up the northern slope of the valley. In the center of this cemetery and commanding a view of the "Hollow" and the Hudson River beyond, is the burial place of Irving. It seems to me for several reasons to be the proper spot for his last resting-place. It is not far from his home, it is in the midst of scenes made classic by his pen, and it is a place of great natural beauty as well. The marble slab at the head of the grave is not over three feet in height, but a large oak and beech blend their protecting shadows over the mound and give grace and character to the spot. I plucked a couple of daisies from near the grave as a memento of the man whose writings contributed so much delight to me in the days of my boyhood. It occurred to me as I left the place that "Sleepy Hollow" was a good name for a cemetery.
Major Andre was captured on the high road that runs on the crest of the Hudson River hills towards New York city. The arrest took place a mile north of Tarrytown. Since that time the town has not tarried, but gone forward until it surrounds the place of capture. Five or six handsome residences today look down upon the little valley in which over a hundred years ago the unhappy young English officer was halted by the cowboys. Standing by the monument that is erected to their honor on the identical spot of arrest, I could easily recall the scene. The densely shaded road, the sloping descent of the same, the musing fire of the horseman, and the sudden rushing out of the woods upon him of his captors. They are now called and lauded as patriots, but at the time of the capture they doubtless had no higher object than the purse of the stranger. The scene that, followed of the examination of Andre’s person appears in bas-relief upon the monument.
I was set to thinking by the guide’s explanation of the word Tarrytown. He said that long ago the farmers used to visit the village, and drank so deep and drank so long, and so protracted their stay from home, that the good wives called the place Tarrytown.
O the Tarrytowns in the land!
Three or four miles south of the last named place is Sunnyside, the home of Washington Irving. The house is a two-story stone building abounding in old-style gables. You reach it by a road descending from the high road on the hills and leading through a wild and beautiful glen. The house is on a plateau fifty feet above the Hudson, with the wooded hills towering in the rear. The side of the house is turned to the river, but from the gallery, that is touched by the lawn and shaded by a number of old trees, there is a commanding view up and down the Hudson for many miles that could hardly be surpassed for loveliness. A large Newfoundland dog was walking about under the trees, with occasional meditative stops and glances into the far distance. From his dignified bearing you could tell that he felt he was well descended, or realized perfectly the honor and attention bestowed by the public upon the house over which he stood as a kind of guard and protector. A nurse and two handsomely-dressed children in a distant part of the grounds gave a coloring of life to a picture, which otherwise would have been mournful in its loneliness. As I glanced at the ivy-clad house, drank in the quiet beauty of the place, where smooth sward and lofty trees and hedges and stonewall all harmonized in a pleasing manner; and as I then turned and looked on the sail-besprinkled Rhine of America flowing past, and at the mountains in the far distance, I could understand why Irving wrote, and how he could write. With the mountains voicing thoughts of eternity, the flowing river speaking of time, the bending forest whispering the secrets of nature, and all the beauties and solemnities of distant landscapes arousing the soul to appreciation and reflection -- the mind must have been quickened, the heart must have been made to glow, and the pen was bound to move. It would have been wonderful if he had not written.
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