After a year of schooling in Pittsfield, Hay moved from his uncle Milton’s house to Springfield, this time accompanied by his older brother Leonard, to attend Lutheran-run Illinois State University, which was barely a university at all but, in Hay’s case, a stepping stone to one. He and Leonard lived with their grandfather, their bachelor uncle, Nathaniel, and several aunts.
To the eye of John Hay, Springfield was a grand, if muddy, entrepôt. With a population of five thousand, it was ten times the size of Warsaw. “There had been very little of what might be called pioneer life in Springfield,” he would write in the Lincoln biography. “Civilization came in with a reasonably full equipment at the beginning.” Hay liked his new surroundings immediately. “[A]ll the sentimental talk we hear from the poet and the novelist, about the simplicity and quiet ease of village life, is all humbug,” he lectured to one of his sisters. “The city is the only place to gain a knowledge of the world, which will fit a man for entering upon the duties of life.”
His coursework included Latin (the Odes of Horace), Greek (Homer’s Iliad), rhetoric, and algebra. He also joined a literary society that gathered to debate and share members’ essays. Potentially more absorbing were the activities of the Illinois legislature, which convened in the red-topped State House on the city square. At least once Hay attended a session to hear a debate on the extension of slavery to the territories west of the Mississippi.
But even Springfield and the education it had to offer were not enough for the family scholar. All agreed that he had the makings to go much further. His father and mother set their sights on Brown University, the alma mater of Helen Hay’s father. Alas, they could not afford the expense, which, including tuition, room, and sundries, came to about $100 a year. Milton Hay, whom Charles Hay had encouraged to pursue a career in law, stepped forward and offered to pay his nephew’s way.
JOHN HAY, NOT YET seventeen, boarded a train for Providence in September 1855. “I had a whirling, bustling time on the way here,” he wrote his family upon arrival, assuring them he was “safe & sound in every thing except my eyes, mouth & ears were full of cinders & dust.” He was the farthest from home he had ever been but adapted quickly. “I don’t know whether I will come back to Illinois next summer or not,” he announced. “That is too far ahead to look at present.” He passed his entrance exams and, despite his age, was admitted to the junior class.
Brown was founded by Baptists in 1764; by the time John Hay matriculated, the curriculum was both classical and practical. Hay’s first courses were in chemistry, trigonometry, and rhetoric, for which he received high marks. “He at once took rank among the brightest boys in the college, and maintained it with a degree of ease that was the envy of his classmates,” his friend Billy Norris remembered. “In those days, all text was memorized, and it was the general opinion that Hay put his books under his pillow and had the contents thereof absorbed and digested by morning, for he was never seen ‘digging,’ or doing any other act or thing that could be construed into hard study.”
Hay took to life at Brown so readily that in November he persuaded his parents and uncle to let him fall back to the sophomore class. Not that he doubted he could graduate in two years; but, he reasoned, “[I]f I go through so hurriedly I will have little or no time to avail myself of the literary treasures of the libraries. This is one of the greatest advantages of an eastern college over a western one.”
He waxed further on the charms of campus life: “The professors are all men of the greatest ability, & what is more, perfect gentlemen. . . . I heard Oliver W. Holmes deliver a poem here last week which was a splendid thing. . . . Thackeray will be here before long & I expect to hear him lecture.” Such expressions of enlightenment were surely music to the ears of Dr. Hay.
Brown was beginning a period of refreshing change just as Hay arrived. Incoming President Barnas Sears was loved and respected by the two hundred or so undergraduates for relaxing the restrictions on campus life. Student rooms were no longer subject to daily inspection; for the first time, fraternities and literary societies were allowed to meet in the evening. Hay joined Theta Delta Chi, enduring the customary hazing and the nickname “Thaddeus of Warsaw.” At an early banquet, his fraternity brothers prodded him to make an impromptu address—and be sure to make it lively. To which Hay retorted waggishly, “Hay that is green can never be dry.”
In a debate, he argued the affirmative to “Resolved—that a prohibition liquor law is an unjustifiable violation of individual rights.” For a college man, albeit seventeen and still baby-faced, the cause was just, but he lost nonetheless. Later as a member of the Philermenian literary society, he took on more sober topics: “Resolved—that the course of the President on the Kansas [territorial slavery] question has been unconstitutional” and “Resolved—that prose writers have done more for the English language than poets.” In the former, the boy who had heard the bloody ghost in the basement took the affirmative and won; in the latter, the budding bard took the negative and won again.
Hay’s cleverness won over his school chums and teachers as well. To a roommate, he was “a young Dr. Johnson without his boorishness, a young Dr. Goldsmith without his frivolity.” James B. Angell, professor of modern languages and eventually president of the University of Michigan, remembered Hay a half-century later as “the most felicitous translator I ever met in my classes.” He won top honors in rhetoric for a paper entitled “The Saxon Conquest and the Norman Contrasted in Respect of Their Influence on the Language and the Literature of the Conquered Race.” Other papers not only reveal his maturing talent as a writer but also hint of the gracious statesman he would become. On the possibility of war with England—hypothetical, one assumes—the future ambassador to the Court of St. James’s made the case for comity:
“They are our brothers, speaking the same noble tongue, of which we are all so proud, the tongue which heard in a foreign land makes the warm blood leap gladly to the flushing cheek; the tongue in which Alfred prayed and Chaucer sung, in which Milton embodied the grand tale of a lost Eden & the bard of Avon wrote his deep lore of the soul of man. . . . Our history is the same with theirs, & we claim an equal share in all the story that a thousand years have shed upon the Saxon name.”
And the youngster from the Mississippi, who would one day tour the grand hotels, galleries, salons, palaces, plazas, and ruins of the Old World, cast a wistful eye to the horizon in “Foreign Travel Beneficial to the Man of Letters”:
“The first who undertook an extensive journey for purposes purely literary was Herodotus the Ionic historian, who travelled over the greater part of inhabited Europe, Asia & Africa, gathering from actual observations, from the testimony of eye-witnesses, and from the traditions of the priests, materials for the construction of his immortal work. . . . A marked difference is presented by our times. By the mighty agency of steam, time & distance are almost annihilated; regions which in other days were considered by each other as the Ultima Thule of earth, are brought by iron chains to within a few days journey.”
Yet he did not confine himself to campus life by any means. For instance, in the spring of 1856, in a letter to his uncle Milton, thanking him for his financial support, Hay mentioned that “Political feeling is running very high in Providence at present. . . . I went to a Republican meeting a few nights ago.”
And for all his intellectual gravity, he was not above a little mischief. He and his fraternity brothers often repaired to an off-campus location known as the What Cheer. Professor Angell recalled the night that Hay and several others, having fallen under the influence of Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s 1857 memoir, The Hasheesh Eater, determined to partake of the potion themselves—to excess, apparently. Hay and a roommate were the only ones in the group able to make their way to Dr. Angell’s door at 1 am and lead him back to their room to care for their disabled friends.
Increasingly over his three years at Brown, Hay assumed the pose of the poet, precociously world-wise and prematurely world-weary. For his muses
he reached out to Sarah Helen Whitman and Nora Perry, the leading ladies of Providence’s small yet vibrant literary salon. Whitman was a widow the same age as Hay’s mother. A Transcendentalist-turned-Spiritualist, séance participant, and an occasional poet herself, she draped herself in scarves and veils, and wore a coffin-shaped charm around her neck. Her coterie of friends included Margaret Fuller and Emerson. Perhaps her most noteworthy bona fide was that she had once been engaged to Edgar Allan Poe.
Nora Perry was one of the brightest talents in Whitman’s circle. Seven years older than Hay, she had already gained enviable renown; her first poem appeared in Harper’s when she was eighteen. With deep blue eyes and golden hair, she quickly won Hay’s thorough admiration and unrequited adoration.
Like his grandfather sixty-six years earlier, Hay was chosen to deliver the poem for his graduating class. His contribution, “Erato,” named for the Greek muse of song, is a 436-line testimonial to the enduring power of verse, of poetry. Its rhymed exhortation is saccharine, but it satisfied the genre and the occasion ably. “To say it was a class poem is sufficiently to characterize it,” William Dean Howells later remarked, “and to add that it was easily better than most class poems is not to praise it overmuch.”
In every age the poet’s lyre has rung,
In every land the God-sent bard has sung.
Old memories wedded to the minstrel’s rhyme,
Stray ever down the rippled shores of time.
IT WAS ONE THING to sing the glory and resilience of poetry, quite another to find honest work as a poet. Upon graduation from Brown in the summer of 1858, Hay had no choice but to return to Warsaw, loath as he was to make the journey. “When I look around me and see my trunk packed . . . I begin to realize that I have completed my self-immolation,” he sighed to Hannah Angell, daughter of Professor Angell, whose company on picnics he would miss. “A life, not new, but strange from long absence, calls upon me now.” Once home, his spirits flagged further. “I am unhappy in my morbid delicacy of spiritual perception,” he wrote again to Hannah.
Such brooding was plainly the affectation of a swain bent on winning feminine sympathy. And in Hay’s case it was a pose that mimicked the masters. In one of his papers at Brown he had written of the poet whose name he shared: “The prevailing tendency of Milton’s mind was to a pensive melancholy. . . . [T]hrough all his writings reigns a saddened sublimity which imparts additional beauty to the creations of his genius. Even in the bright period of his youth, when the sky knew as yet no cloud . . . his writings were pervaded with the same thoughtful pensiveness that adorns the grand music of Paradise Lost.”
Hay reckoned that to be a poet one had to act like one, and in Warsaw he clutched the cloak of melancholy with an even more histrionic flourish. “[N]ow that my journey is finished,” he wrote to Nora Perry, “I am willing to turn away from the familiar faces I meet in the streets of Warsaw and go to my room to converse with shadows.” As fall became winter, he turned the lamp even dimmer. “I have been very near to the valley of the shadow,” he told Sarah Whitman. “A few months of exile has [sic] worn the lustre from my dreams.”
His depression may in fact have been clinical. “I alternate between weeks of sickness & months of my normal condition of chronic worthlessness. . . . I have carried with me this winter in my own heart a portable Hell,” he divulged to Hannah Angell. Over the course of his life, he would fall into similar sloughs of “darkness.” Yet his distemper also bore the stamp of another tendency that was similarly chronic: affected snobbery. “If you want to see beauty & stupidity united, just go to a party in Warsaw,” he confided to a schoolmate. And to Hannah he groused at length: “How like a fool I once dreamed of raising the mental standard of this place. The one cannot raise the many. . . . The average Westerner always spells badly & rides well. Believes in himself & in [Stephen] Douglas [who in 1858 defeated Abraham Lincoln in the race for U.S. Senate], has a profound contempt for goodness & grammar, puts on his gloves & religion only Sundays . . . & is bored when he dies because he thinks heaven will be quiet.”
He took a similar posture toward Nora Perry, claiming that “I prefer, for my friends, men who can read,” adding, “There is, as yet, no room in the West for a genius”—by which he meant, only half-facetiously, himself.
In Warsaw he continued composing poetry, forwarding his efforts to Providence for suggestion and encouragement. One poem, “In the Mist,” was an unapologetic ode to gloom: “Drearily sweeping above the dim plain,/Wanders the rain. . . . Through the murk air/Wails the faint voice of a sullen despair. . . . Dreary the sky!/Dreary the heath! . . . Weary the strife/Of our wintry life!”
Yet aestheticism was not a profession; nobody, not in Warsaw anyway, was hiring sensualists. His parents wanted the best for him, and his father especially hated to see his son’s education squandered, even by taking a job as a schoolteacher. Hay briefly tried public lecturing, delivering a talk on, of all topics, the “History of the Jesuits” to an enthusiastic crowd in Warsaw. But he saw no future in this line of work, either. “I believe in the maxim of old Horace, Poeta noscitur orator fit,” his father remarked. “[T]he Poet is born but the orator is made by cultivation.” Hay next weighed the ministry then rejected it as well. “I would not do for a Methodist preacher for I am a poor horseman,” he joked to his uncle Milton, who remained very much invested in the graduate’s future. “I would not suit the Baptists for I dislike cold water. I would fail as an Episcopalian for I am no ladies’ man.”
Finally, after months of deliberation, it was agreed that he would move to Springfield and read the law with Milton Hay, who recently had opened a practice there with Stephen Logan, Abraham Lincoln’s former partner. “In a short while I shall begin the study of the law,” Hay wrote a friend of Sarah Whitman’s, “not on account of any love that I bear for the science, but because I do not clearly see what other path of life is open to me. . . . I am aware that I could not depend upon my pen for my life-labor, yet if I have any talent for writing, I should be sorry to let it entirely die. . . . The only numbers which are respected in this country are those preceded by the magical sign ‘$.’ In a year or two, if I live so long, I shall probably fall (or rise, if you will) to the lure of the money-getting masses around me. When I have made my moderate ‘pile,’ I hope there will be enough soul left within me to draw me back to the beaches & the bays of the blessed Atlantic.”
To this letter Hay attached several verses, including:
Blindly to the grave we go
Life to-day is death tomorrow;
God has kindly willed it so—
Shorter life is shorter sorrow.
He arrived in Springfield in May 1859, boarding with his grandfather and maiden aunts once again. Located halfway between the pro-slavery southern tier of the state and the abolitionist-leaning north, Springfield was very much in the throes of the great debate, waged so recently by Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, on whether slavery ought to be allowed to expand into the territories west of the Mississippi. Lincoln had scored well in his face-to-face exchanges with Douglas, and though he lost his bid for a seat in the U.S. Senate, he was now a political figure of national clout.
As fate would have it, the office of Milton Hay and Stephen Logan adjoined that of Lincoln and his partner, William Herndon, on Fifth Street, across from the Illinois State House. Lincoln, despite his growing renown, still very much depended on the income from his law practice. He continued to work in the courts of the Eighth Judicial Circuit, settled estates, and untangled the affairs of merchants, railroads, and the local gaslight company. In August, he took on the defense and won the acquittal of one Peachy Quinn Harrison, accused of stabbing to death a Sangamon County attorney named Greek Crafton. The other attorneys of record in the case were Herndon, Logan, and Milton Hay. All the while, John Hay fidgeted in the office of Logan & Hay, reading Blackstone’s Commentaries and whatever other arid texts his uncle prescribed.
Social, rather than legal or political, dive
rsion seemed to be his primary focus, and at first the prospects did not look promising. “I am stranded at last, like a weather-beaten hulk, on the dreary wastes of Springfield,” Hay wrote a college roommate. Gradually, though, he was welcomed into a circle of young people, squiring the girls to church, lectures, and socials. He took French lessons, impressing his fellow students with his knack for language. His punning won him favor as well. “One of his original conundrums was this: ‘Why is a dog fight like a flirtation?’ ” recalled the daughter of the town’s leading banker, Mary Ridgley, who later married Hay’s younger brother Charles. “An[swer]—Because it is an ‘affaire du coeur.’ ”
Another of the Springfield girls noted merrily that he had “a tongue that could have talked the traditional bird off of the bush.” And there was something about those “bright, dark eyes that wrought havoc in the hearts of susceptible maidens.”
Hay was now twenty-one, still smooth-faced but with an urbane affect. He gave his height as five foot eight, which was the average for an American man in 1860. Though somewhat slight of build, he carried himself with a jaunty self-confidence. “He was, for those days, elegantly dressed—better than any of us,” a Springfield friend observed. Mary Ridgley was another who was taken with his “dark, lustrous” eyes. She remembered, too, his “red cheeks and clear dark complexion; small, well-shaped hands which he had a habit of locking together, interlacing the fingers, and carrying at arm’s length, which the girls thought particularly fetching. He wore a long, loose overcoat, flying open, his hands thrust into his pockets, which was also thought very graceful and attractive as he swung himself along the street, for he had a rocking walk in those days.”
All the Great Prizes Page 4
