The Young Adult Award-Winners Megapack

by Emily Cheney Neville

  It might be an interesting experiment for some young psychologist on the hunt for Ph.D. material to test critics for sharpness of sense reaction. He might discover that a critic is a man who has very little use of his senses. Otherwise with his feeling for words, might he not be a writer or poet himself? And without any comprehension of what a poet gathers through his senses, might not details which make a poet of a man go over his head? For when Lowell is treated only as a commentator of political conditions, his gift to us is overlooked.

  That night in May, 1857, every man had his gift on the table. Agassiz, as swift now as in his boyhood to esteem gifts not his own, listened with the rich appreciation that so quickens, and offered in return his own magic. When Longfellow rose at his end of the table, the voices quieted and the heads turned toward him. Agassiz leaned forward and listened to the poem that began “It was fifty years ago,” and if at the end his eyes were rimmed with tears, we must remember that Agassiz was an emotional man.

  Perhaps Thoreau was not present at the dinner. He cared little for dinners, and he liked Concord better than Cambridge or Boston. But he approved so highly of a man with such devotion to fish, that he sent him four casks of Concord fish. Agassiz pounced upon a new specimen among them, and rushed up to Concord to tell Thoreau about it. The two set out, because it was a fine day, to hunt turtles, and perhaps over a fence a tall girl hung, curious about these middle-aged gentlemen crawling under the willows. But she was used to queer maneuvers for she was Bronson Alcott’s daughter, and she was too busy about her writing to spend much time speculating about why one turtle was not as good as another.

  But Thoreau knew as much about them as Agassiz, and beyond his knowledge of turtles, he was of consequence to Agassiz. In spite of himself, for he hated being dragged out to lecture, and he hated people who interfered with his Walden privacy, he helped the growing popularity toward naturalists; he pulled with Agassiz, not against him. And they recognized each other as kin.

  Concord, and Cambridge, and Boston in this year 1857! If you could not find your great man in one place you had only to travel a few miles to find him in another. Cambridge, not far from either, combining the quiet green of the country with the smooth highways and shops of town, filled with the exuberance of college youth and the dignity of good adult living, Cambridge was a place where a man could live and satisfy his needs. Louis Agassiz liked his home and fitted into it as the snail fits its shell.

  In this year the Atlantic Monthly was founded, and its editor, James Russell Lowell gathered contributions until its index sounded like a roll call of the Saturday Club. He and Agassiz would walk home together after the meetings, talking, still talking, the only sound in the silent streets on an early Sunday morning. Science, we must give them, he told Agassiz, good strong meat. Write me essays for my magazine. Louis wrote them for him, and Lowell published them, for then, as now, the Atlantic Monthly intended to educate its public. The new magazine, everybody called it, and read it all over the country, savoring each poem, and testing the digestion of the mind with the prose. No newsstand today loaded with its fifty-seven varieties of illustrated magazines could rouse the excitement of the arrival of “the new magazine”; no dipping here and there for a catchy beginning could touch the solemn delight of settling down for an afternoon with an Atlantic article. A magazine was made to be read in those days!

  The Saturday Club and all of the social connections which Agassiz had made in Cambridge gave him the companionship and stimulus which his various old Hôtels des Neuchâtelois had supplied him. But there was no back yard of ocean with a dory tied in it, and Agassiz had to have his marine laboratory. From fishes, he had widened his interests to all sea forms. His son, Alexander, shared his interest. Elizabeth, who was wise about the needs of her men and who had no intention of turning her home into another Hôtel, managed a solution which satisfied everybody. Her father presented the two families of his children with a small house, not quite large enough for them, let alone guests, and close to it a small but perfect laboratory which was as near the tide mark as the one in East Boston. Outside the ocean stretched unbroken to the horizon, almost under foot it broke in rollers over the rocks after a storm, or swished in and out of deep gulleys on quiet days. Each tide brought new wonders, each pool kept in it the old. The North Shore air was salt and sharp, the kind which makes a man want to work. The place was Nahant.

  Nahant in early May now must be a little like the Nahant of Agassiz. And the pools, undisturbed by summer life, still yield some of the same treasures: delicate bright jellyfish, sea anemones feathering into the tide, pink bryozoa, and shadowy cold caves lined with exquisite hydroids. In those days, with the shore untouched and all to himself, Agassiz must have been grateful to the Cary family.

  When August grew hot and sultry, Lowell decided that it would be a good idea to go camping in the Adirondacks. He would, he said, have a philosophers’ camp. Nothing could please Agassiz more; he had not camped since the old Swiss days, nor had he had his fill of mountains. The philosophers dressed themselves in flannel shirts, and built themselves a rough shelter in the Adirondacks. They fished for the excellent trout in the streams, and cooked them over open fires. They shot game, and Agassiz gathered specimens. Longfellow refused to go because Emerson carried a gun. Who knew what he might shoot, a man like that! Longfellow was running no risks. But Judge Hoar went, and Dr. Howe who was Julia Ward Howe’s husband, and Holmes and Lowell and enough others to make it a philosophers’ camp. Not the camp of the old days, however, with zest of youth, and the danger, and the excitement of discovery; a camp of middle age, but better than no camp at all. For though middle age might circumscribe his body, youth still caught Louis Agassiz up to the peaks and swept over them with him unfatigued. It brought him back, hardened and renewed, with deepened capacity for enjoyment and for the sound productive work of his middle years.

  18. SALVAGE OF TIME

  The years were speeding by him, and there were certain things that Louis Agassiz meant to do with them before he was finished with them. He was not the kind who “made old bones,” and he knew it. No one could imagine him coddled in an easy chair with a shawl over his knees while he quavered stories of what the world was like eighty years ago. The present was always Agassiz’s most valued possession, and when he could no longer extract its full value, he would have no further use for it. There was much to do, indeed. And if a man’s life was not of sufficient span to allow him to finish all that he knew he was perfectly capable of doing, then there was nothing left but to make beginnings which so captured the imagination that the future would attend to them. One project, however, Agassiz meant no one to launch but himself.

  It was no season for projects. The war, like a thick cloud from a dust bowl, was settling over the country until the North could no longer see the South. Men would fight in its darkness, and choke, and die of it. They needed all the money there was to kill each other. Agassiz had many friends in the South, but he was convinced that the North was right in its attempt to preserve the Union. He took out his naturalization papers that he might in this time of trouble become an American in truth. He thought deeply about the blacks and the whites as an anthropologist would. The pure blacks, he believed, were perfectly adjusted to the climate and environment of the deep South, and there they would congregate in the future on the flatlands where whites could not live. The mulattoes, unhappy in their mixed blood, would move about restlessly toward the North, but like most mixed breeds, they were infertile and would die out. He looked ahead to a future of rather complete segregation of the races from natural causes. But nature has not seemed to act exactly as he expected.

  It was his work, he decided, to defend America against the loss of what she had won in times of peace, her educational fortresses. He recalled that Germany had founded the University of Berlin in the darkest hours of war, and he took up his arms to fight for his museum so that the progress of science need not be hindered.

  Money, money, money! He dir
ected every gift he possessed toward collecting money. It was willed to him, subscribed for him, granted by a legislature made up of hard-headed Yankees who would not let go of a penny until Agassiz had proved its return in benefits to crops. He laid the corner stone of the first wing of the museum before war was declared, and secure for a few months at least, he drew a long breath and went home to Switzerland for a rest. He had earned it.

  As he sailed down the harbor that June afternoon, he must have felt the deep relaxing peace that success after hard work brings. There they stood together on the deck and watched Boston Light prick its white column up from the blue water and then fade back into it. His wife, Elizabeth, on one side, his dear daughter Pauline on the other; his mother waiting for him across the ocean; the security of return to the hard work which was his life; and now a few weeks to be free, and gay, and young again. As much as he could, he put away his thoughts that he had lived with night and day, and savored his holiday.

  There was excitement in it for all of them. Elizabeth was to see the boyhood home of her Louis, she was to meet his super-mother, she was to share his honors. Pauline, after eight years, was going home again. But instead of the little girl who had cried when she left her grandmother, she was a well-dressed young lady as transformed as ever a fairy princess. What would grandmother think of her now! And the boys and girls she remembered in Cudrefin. Louis, most of all, was filled with high excitement. For to Louis, it was all his dreams come true.

  He was not the kind of man who would take comfort in any swagger about “See what I have become now! Look what you have missed.…” He was, moreover, so completely satisfied with his lot that there was no compulsion to make others appreciate it, which is satisfaction indeed. With those who had had faith in him he was eager to share a success which would confirm their judgment. But perhaps he thought of it less as success than as hard, rich living. At any rate it had brought him what he wanted, and now he could tell his mother all about it.

  The Agassiz family landed in England where English scientists and English society gave them welcome. June in England was still soft and cool and green, but to Louis now it seemed a little pale and old. He had no desire to return, and wondered at his old ambition.

  The family moved on to Paris, a sharper test of his contentment with what he had. For Paris would not believe that his refusal was final, and Louis had much ado to convince the Secretary of Public Instruction that he had no intention of taking over the Jardin des Plantes. Paris offered its full extent of French hospitality and Louis enjoyed it for a week. Then he was through with it. His good friend Humboldt had gone but lately, Cuvier was now a legend, and Paris seemed a little empty to him.

  Out of Paris to Switzerland, and when Louis saw his Alps again, he wept. For thirteen years he had lived a busy life away from them and had not known, himself, that nothing, the sea, the shore, the university, nothing had filled the place of the mountains. Not until he saw them again and wept over them. He could not get his fill of looking at them, and breathing their sharp thin air. On through the mountains, impatient at the crawl of the Swiss train, yet holding it back to point out to Elizabeth this and that, and to laugh and cry with Pauline. Finally Montagny where his mother lived with the family of her daughter, Cecile. And then finally, and last, and best, his mother!

  The best for Rose Agassiz, too. Her son. The gifted impetuous boy whom only she had understood, and been patient with, and loved. Yet now she looked at Elizabeth, waiting quietly her turn, and knew somehow with her infinite understanding of Louis’ needs that here at last was the woman that she herself might have chosen for him. Perhaps the two women recognized at once their likeness to each other, and smiled wisely over the excited head held close to his mother’s shoulder. The summer bade fair to be a perfect one.

  It was perfect. Cecile had married well and could make her guests comfortable. A corner of the garden, closed in by trees and ivy, was her mother’s outdoor sitting room, and there Louis stayed with her, and talked and talked, trying to make speech cover in a few weeks all that had happened in the long years. Yet there was no strangeness between them; it was as if he had never been away from her. Rose Agassiz listened unwearied for the years had taken no toll of her intelligence or of her charm. Elizabeth could see clearly where Louis came by his quality.

  There was a visit to Olympe, married in Lausanne, and to the brother Auguste who was an invalid at Diablerets, and a good-bye to each of them which they knew was for always. There was a meeting of the naturalists for Agassiz at Geneva filled with honors for him. And finally there was the most difficult visit of all, when Louis would show his wife and Pauline to Alexander Braun and his brother Max. Difficult only in anticipation, for the Brauns found Elizabeth, as his mother had, a woman made for Louis. They found Louis still their good friend, and shared his enthusiasm for his museum and his American home. Cily must have been much in their thoughts, but Cily was at peace now.

  The Agassiz family sailed for home early in September, the excitement over, exchanged for rich fulfilment. When they landed in Boston, Louis went ashore as eagerly as he had thirteen years ago to continue what he had then begun. He was well satisfied with a future in America, and he could scarcely wait to see what had been done to his museum. And if, though he did not emphasize this point, it would like to take over and pay for the collections which he had picked up in Europe. It was fortunate that he had planned a good-sized museum!

  Before his bags were unpacked Louis rushed out to see how much had been accomplished in his absence. There it rose, nearly complete, the north wing of the museum as he had planned it. When he stood before it as in a trance, he saw not one wing but the whole great building which held the treasures of the universe. When he closed his eyes and shook the mirage away, he knew that none of that miracle could ever exist except through him. He jammed his hat down on his head, and planned for an early train into Boston next morning. He must begin on the General Court at once if he was to get an annual appropriation for his museum. And it would need it.

  Not everybody was as enamored of the new wing and its location. Jules Marcou says, “I saw at once the great disadvantage of creating an establishment on such a large scale, in such an out-of-the-way place as Cambridge; but Agassiz was so sanguine and so optimistic that it would have been cruel to raise objections and to try to open his eyes.” Open eyes that could see right through the present into the future? It would indeed have been futile for Marcou or any other scientist to attempt it. “Not only was the building small and crowded,” goes on Marcou who saw only an unfinished north wing, “but the space allowed for each specialty was inadequate, the halls were cold and most uncomfortable during the long winters, and it was not easy even to reach the building, on account of the lack of proper sidewalks and roads, through the surrounding marsh.” Louis probably got his feet wet, too, but if he had noticed it he would have been surprised because he was treading through no marsh but on the firm pavements of the future. The classrooms may have been cold, but he was warm in the glow of his inspired teaching, and his students had no chance to blow on chilled fingers.

  By December the wing held collections after a fashion. Boxes, barrels, books, piled up everywhere, and only Louis could move through them with serenity because only Louis knew where he meant to put them. And he was much too busy to put them anywhere now for he had to spend every afternoon in Boston with the legislature committee. To some of his assistants who had not had the training of the various Hôtels des Neuchâtelois, it seemed a madhouse. Especially when Louis moved the old wooden storehouse next door and filled it up with assistants and students as a boardinghouse of sorts.

  Yet the work moved on, as it must with Agassiz behind it, until one day they were ready for the dedication. A proud day, that bleak November 13th in 1860, when Louis Agassiz stood up with the Governor and his fine staff and his handsome Lancers, and made his speech about his museum. Even if it had seemed a little extravagant up to that time, all those who heard his honest simple plea m
ust have been convinced that they could not go far wrong if they trusted this man.

  Now the regular classes began and Louis at last had a chance to teach as he believed teaching should be done. It was a new way to most of the youngsters and they puzzled over it a good deal before they found its meaning. One day a student named Samuel Scudder went over to the Museum and told Professor Agassiz that he proposed to devote himself to the study of insects. Agassiz presented him with a high-smelling fish and told him to look at it. “By and by,” he said, “I will ask you what you have seen,” and left the lad with his fish. Now follows the young entomologist’s own account of what happened to him:

  “In ten minutes I had seen all that could be seen in that fish. Half an hour passed, an hour, another hour; the fish began to look loathsome. I turned it over and around; looked it in the face, ghastly! From behind, beneath, above, sideways, at a three-quarters view, just as ghastly. I was in despair. At an early hour I concluded that lunch was necessary; so, with infinite relief, the fish was carefully replaced in the jar, and for an hour I was free.

  “On my return, I learned that Professor Agassiz had been at the Museum, but had gone, and would not return for several hours. Slowly I drew forth that hideous fish, and, with a feeling of desperation, again looked at it. I might not use a magnifying glass; instruments of all kinds were interdicted. My two hands, my two eyes, and the fish; it seemed a most limited field.… At last a happy thought struck me—I would draw the fish; and now, with surprise, I began to discover new features in the creature. Just then the professor returned.