TRAVEL! 1872-1874 ABROAD 1 the spring of 1872, my brother, who had stayed bad with my aunt and cousin, spending the winter tone on the Riviera, for the milder climate, re- the SMART together 1 Barbor, where - father, deeply impressed try the ty of the region during OUR Street visit there in and acquired, through successive purchases, the . of the original differe treet for the development future I I Date is taxes it came about twelt Government passesses Monits national Park, title and only park upon time stimutic searcast. In titse - my father and trutter returned to pe, where my brother, interested in - the Haud seen ad, plannes to study stunitecture at title finances Boole Boons Arts in Puris. we Ind great faculty with Ms is, dreating excellently, state keen interest the design. latter thought well of tats that felt uncertain or the set of the work - elizate upon I brotzer's health. be decided to 8 with sin street, spons use wister in ris and estea hos it all turned out. 1813 My first trip abroad was made in the summer of 1871, during the vacation period between my Freshman and Sophomore years at Harvard. My older brother, William Ward Dorr, at Harvard also in an earlier class, and I sailed together from Boston as soon as the college term was over to join our parents, who had crossed in the early spring and would be awaiting us on the Rhine. The only steamships to England then making regular, mail-carrying trips were those of the Cunard Line, found- ed by Samuel Cunard of Halifax, Novia Scotia, in 1839, who had testified his faith in the triumph of steam over sails by offering the British government a well-considered, favorable contract for the carrying of mails; and the company he formed was given the contract for it. Samuel Cunard, it is interesting to note, was the son of a Philadelphia Loyalist who fled to Nova Scotia, like many others of his time, during the Revolution. The Cunard vessels made only two trips a week at that time, one from New York on Wednesdays, the other, on which the older boats were used, from Boston on Saturdays. The ship we sailed on was the Scotia, built in 1862, the last of the side-wheelers. (1872-74) 2. My father and brother sailed from New York in September, 1872, on the White Star Liner Baltic, then the newest and speediest of ocean-going craft, travel- ling directly to London from Liverpool on their arrival, and thence to Paris, where they took a suite of rooms on the Rue de Rivoli, overlooking pleasantly the Garden of the Tuilleries, which my father and I were to occupy again for a time the following year. Continuing my course at Harvard, the one outstand- ing recollection of that fall which I myself have is of the great Boston Fire. I had come in from Cambridge on a Saturday evening, when those of us whose homes were in Boston customarily spent the night there and the follow- ing day, and went with two of my classmates to the theater. During the first entriacte word began to circulate through the theater that there was a big fire outside. The play went on, but when the second entriacte came the rumor had gathered such proportions that, leaving the theater, my friends and I went out to see what it was all about. It was the great Boston Fire of Novem- ber, 1872, which was, next to that in Chicago the year before when a COW kicked over a lantern and set the (1872-74) 6. ended, my father thought it best for my brother to give it up and took him off to the south where they drove together over the famous Corniche Road, with its broad views out over the Mediterranean beyond an ever-changing foreground of pale green olive orchards and terraced gar- dens, to Genoa and Spezia and thence on to Rome, whence, my brother's outlook widened by the studies he had made and the winter's travel, he and my father returned to America in the spring of 1873 where the care of my Grandmother Ward had become a serious tax upon my mother. It was a time, also, when they wisely thought my brother and myself were best away. Accordingly, when the spring term at Harvard had ended, my brother and I sailed for Liverpool and spent the summer together travelling in England. We went to New York to take the steamer, spending one night at the Brevoort House and attending an amusing play that evening, I remember, called "Larks on the Hudson." Arriving at Liverpool, we went directly to London, where we made our headquarters for the summer at an old English Inn, the Queen's Hotel, on a side street off Piccadilly. Staying there also was a friend my brother Dictaphone, December 30, 1938. Fording 3 The earliest gardens in England were who those of the Herbalists, the herb doctors/kept gardens of simples for the cure of desease bak by the virtues inherent, they and the world believed in plants. These gardens, walls around, were maintained, no dount at much expense where those who used them might draw upon them at need, generally in the close neighbourhood of London or other of the larger cities. The earliest book on them we have is that of Gerard, published in Holyoke in 15 , years before the publication of the John first book on pleasure gardening that of/Parkinson, in 1629, also in Holyoke, with many illustrations of which I have a facsimile reprint made by the Oxford University Press some thirty-odd years ago. The garden class of that period was already extensive and is pleasant reading for the pecture it draws, as the azalea garden plants, of the ###### pleasant side of life in those xrhan troublous times. The garden craft in both fields must have been long accumulating though we have no earlier record of it, handed down as it was by tradition from generation to generation. of Gerard's garden was, if I remember right, close outside the walls of London in a district known as Holborn and was of two or three acres in extent, no doubt carefully maintained and labelled. Where ships went, trade brought back the plants grown for their beauty's sake or healing properties at the court where the ships came for other trade. A certain type of Iris, bulbous by nature where most irises are Rhizomatous, and brilliant in flower were called in Parkinson's day Flowers of Bristow, or Bristolx as we would call it now, brought back by the ships of Bristol merchants from the coasts of southern Spain. Others came from Turkey, Italy or Greece. One may associate pleasantly the growing gardens of the period with the growth in shipping. America was already sending some flowers back to England in the time of Charles the First, in whose gardeners name it bears. This art of gardening, whether for healing or for pleasure's sake, was at its xxxx early height in the Elizanethen days. The herbälists, to give a learned aspect to their start, gave Greek or Latin form to their name of plants; then & when 3 came along he worked the herbalists name into new classification, giving us the sundry changes the name we use today. Tof follow these names back to their simple origin, where this is possible, is a fascinating study and carries not a little history with it. buildings No doubt, the monks in the great abperp of england, dismantled and shorn of their lands and revenues, must have done a great work in England in their time in the cultivation of gardens of simples and the preservation of gardencraft of every kind through- out the dark period of the Middle Ages and the herbalists of the Elizabethan days were their inheritance, the monks who labored in the gardens finding homes among the people when the abbey was dispossessed. As x they built beautifully, they no doubt cultivated well and took pleasure in the beauty of their homes or they would have not taken all the pains they did to make them architecturally beautiful and beautiful in their site and setting. That their establishment were a heavy tax upon the people ##### there can be nc question but I question much if that tax were any heavier, if 4 as heavy, as that upon their lands and lmbor made by the barons, lords and boblemen, whom their lands were given as a crown and who built their costly manor 'sour houses on them and spent their revenues on costly living, their lives in idleness for hunting. A great development in gardening in England care as wealth from ffft trades and shipping from industry and the use of steam in the early and the Middle nineteenth century. Good roads were built, connecting the country and the city and the beautiful gardens and noble estates commends so highly and visited so widely were the results. Labor compared to revenue was almost neg- ligble in cost, lands were sbundant and the kixix tide of competition in their gardens' beauty gave a matter of pride to tixe owners. Exploration of the earth surface into new regions W2S actively being carried on as new ##### plant species were ### being constant- ly in produce. No one doubted then but that trees and shrubs brought in from the remoter regions of the earth could be planted out elsewhere and thrive, whether in England or America or that herbaceous plants would flower as beautifully in the corresponding letitude one portion of the clobe as in another. It HIS the state of thing when Mr. serrect vrote his Book and for 4 ICA seried afternard. the of clasts 5 requirements and the evils of plants deseases in a perhod of rapidly increasing communication what where until recently far isolated lands were not suspected. Mr. Winthrop's son, Henry winthrop Sargent, with whom I used to stay at the home he inherited on the Hudson said to me one day that the place was like a graveyard to him, because of the many plants, in his boyhood, that he had watched his father plant with such high hopes and expectations and which then one by one were dying. But until long after his father wrote this book and we used it as our guide in our journeying that summer, the movement toward increase on both ****** sides of the A, lantic the development of gardening 1874-75-76 trip. brotters Itlness- Mrs Delafreed- September 16, 1938. During my brother's stay in Rome with my father in the winter of 172 -- 173 he had come into intimate friendship with Mrs. Lewis L. her Delafield of New York, abroad as he for/health and it was a friendship that went deep -- not the chance friendship of people thrown pleasantly together in the course of travel, to pass and be forgotten. Mrs. Delafield, one of the old-time family of Philadelphia by birth/and some years older than my brother, was a brilliant social leader in her time, spirited and full of life. She had married, among many who had wished to marry her, Lewis and member L. Delafield of New York, a young lawyer/of an old family in New York with all the advantage that social position could then give a man of exceptional ability, and she had borne him several sons and a daughter in quick succession, which took her abroad that winter for a rest and change in the mild Italian climate. It was she who suggested to my brother his coming into her husband's office to sutdy law and get practive in what was already one of the 2. leading legal offices in New York at that period with a rapidly expanding business. It offered a great opportunity to my brother who had unusual ability and // an intelligence which would have carried him far had he lived to take advantage of it. Mr. Delafield made him welvome and pushed various opportunities in his way for getting a broad foundation for future practice. The last work he did was on a report prepaired for the legal society of New York which won him after his death, which came immediately thereafter, the high práise of the society, conveyed in a letter I still have. Had he lived, I probably should have joined in him in practive later, had my eyes permitted, for our minds worked well together, I the more philosophical in my interests, he the more practical. He spent a very pleasant winter in New York, where we all had many friends, joining the old Knickerbocker Club, riding in the Park for exercise, and going out pleasantly to New York society whose invasion by the super had not yet begun. 3. My father had helped him find a pleasant apartment high up in a new building, one of the first of its type, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-eighth street, with/good restaurant -- the famous Delmonic not far away. There helived, reading hard and interested in his work with plenty of fresh air and sunshine and a sober cast of mind inherited from my father's family, less tempermental than my mother's, which was the more artistic. One spring day he suddenly fell ill of the terrible Typhus fever, then more or less endemic in New York, brought by the great flood of imigrants from Central Europe by competing through with steamship lines to practically no sanitary supervision or restrannt. How my brother could have caught it is a mystery but most probably in the the crowded horse-cars of the period there was then no elevated line or other service, in going xpl downtown to Mr. Delafield's office or returning, which on pleasant he generally did by walking. It is a most dangerous disease in contagion and neither of my uncle's, my mother's brothers, living there ventured -- they or any member of their families to go near him. But Mrs. Delafield, with splendid 4. which we heroism and devotion the never could forget, went and cared for him until the end, in spite of her children and home duties. This made us all her close friend and I saw much of her on our return to America. The house I am now living in she came and occupied with her children the summer after we had built our Oldfarm house upon the shore, the summer of 1882. How they did it a wonder but somehow they did and the thought of it has been a pleasant one to me ever after. And I went on and stayed with them in New York the winter after our return, when she and her husband came to Boston later that same spring, he could take the time. Then a few years later her husband died suddenly of spinal meningitis, and a few years later. But her oldest son, named for his father, has come in to see me within the last few years, making a trip with his family to Bar Harbor, and we talked of old times, keeping the past alive. Life at times proves strangely swiftly, one generation vanishing another coming on. B 5. That act of Mrs. Delfield's in caring for with my brother LX such splendid indifference to the danger she was incurring, has been one of the high marks spiritually I have encountered in all the years that I have lived and one that has made the me feel the most if solid spiritual basis that somehow underlies our life. (1872-74) 17. Our plan, which the Dean of the college had approved be- fore I left for abroad that summer, attendance at lectures not required, was that I might stay abroad reading with my father and take my final examinations on my return the following spring. As my main theme for my last year at Harvard, I had chosen history, in reading which I knew my father would be to the full as much interested as I. And the memory or the reading we did together and the talks it led to has never left me. One of the books we read to- gether that winter was Macaulay's great work on the History of England from the Accession of James the Second, which made splendid reading and with whose attitude and principle my rather and I were in absolute accord; whether or not his facts were biased has always seemed to me a matter of indifference. The picture he sets before one stays, a wonderful comment upon human character and the effects of power. We broke the long winter in Paris toward the end by a visit of some weeks at Nice, upon the Riviera, contin- uing our reading still but taking long walks together into the high, mountainous interior with its donkey-ways and footfaths, its broad vicens areas the sea, + whose (Provenced) vegetation filed the sun-heated air with a perpert from when are returned to boston inthe spring I well advored in my [s]elected studies at experienced no deflicted in isunn M Itlan and taking y dysee [END DICT. 1 GH Thursday evening DEC 5-1938 1873. It was a pleasant part of England that my father's people came from, lying warm to the sun, good ground to cultivate or graze cattle and sheep upon, and warmed in the cold of winter by the Gulf Stream which bathed its shores and it was historic beyond any other region in the kingdom, for it was on its shore that the invaders landed who ruled successively the kingdom, the Romans, the Saxons and the Normans. And against which the effects of yet two more invasions failed in the time of the Armada and the first Napoleon. The Downs as good grazing land devoid of I// enemy- concealing trees were the site of fortresses built of earthworks of unknown early date which are among the earliest and most interesting remains in England while Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, nearby, tells of the old Druid of whose religious faith so little has come down to us, being entrusted to the memory of men and perished with them. One of the strangest things in man is his love of ####/ rhythm which seems to have no useful purpose but to be inherent in man's nature, as it is in birds and probably, undevel ped, in all higher life. And so it was that the men of old, whether Celts or the early Greeks, the religious doctrine they held so precious and important, allied to magic spells controlling the natural forces which, in analagy to themselves, they believed alive with personality and consciousness. Dorset and Dorchester, the Saxon settlement and the Roman Camp, was a region of special interest to us as the home whence in family tradition our first Dorr ancestor in America had come, though he actually ###1 sailed out from Devonshire as one of a group banded together to seek new opportunity across the sea. Suxxex, the land of the south Saxons, as Middlessex and Essex, the latter the land of the East Saxons, a land made famous by Thomas Hardy a generation later, was a land of intere t to us. These were lands of chalk down and gentle streams where much fierce fighting had been done, no doubt, in early days but quiet and peaceful now. How was it that the new doctrines of the Puritan period took such hold in so conservative a land? It was not economic; it seemed to have been purely doctrinal. ism. It was a revoke from the pride and luxury of eccleseastical It was a time when the presence of God among men seemed very :// immanent. He was every present with them and, being men of acute reasoning and deep earnestness, they argued, wrote and preached, confident of their reasoning and curiously unquestioning of fundemental facts 0 upon which it was based. They came to America to be free but not to win freedom for others than themselves, who differed from them. So stumbling upon ancient rocks of controversy, old as the thought of man, they flipped into many groups of various doctrine when they had put c of a cultural landscape. Walton and Jason Wood, 1750-2010 : the English Lake District as tourist destination, 1750-2010 (Book, 2013) [WorldC OCLC WorldCat Search WorldCat Search Advanced Search Find a Library