TRAVEL 1875-1878 - ABROAD R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Dept. New England Historic Genealogical Society 101 Newbury Street Boston, MA 02116 COPY 1871 - GBD & WWD go to London- then join parents at Baden-Baden (Good copy - to be read for typographical errors) 1872-1874 - C.H.D. to Paris for winter, going to Riviera and &WWW to Rome; ChD. returned home in spring; GBD & WWD going again, the same spring to England, Scotland and Wales, with Mr. Dana as a companion on the trip; in the fall of 1873 WWD returned home, & CHD joined GBD for a winter in Paris and on Riviera, returning home in the spring of 1874. (Good copy, but change has to be made, as it is written incorrectly. 1874 - 1878 -- Abroad - Rome, etc. (unfinished) 1878 - trip to Brittany ; trip to Spain, winter of 1877 to be added to the story. 1882 - Trip to Central Italy & Sicily - Rough Copy 1891-1892 - Trip to Palestine & Up Nile - Good Canoeing Trip to Moosehead Lake with Sam Warren - 1895 1902 - Trip with Geologists - Good 1903 - GBD & Vanderbilts - Good 1904 - To Sierras - Good 1907 - Last Trip Abroad Rough A trip through Virginia Staying at Biltmore Estes Park - (Col. Fordyce* 12, 1 Sunday gyl -page This search after my father's English ancestors, all of them whether ministers or not, belonging to the Puritan fold, material for which my father had brought out from home, proved of the greatest interest to both of us , taking us into towns and places we should not have otherwsie have visited and giving us real insight into the England of our origin. Ny mother is greater interest lay in the London galleries and their famous pictures and the famous old country seats with their gardens and their pictures, left open to the p blic on certain days and hours, upon payment of a Iee to the housekeeper or guide appointed to show people In over and- who took interest enough to come this too, the gardens especially, I took myself the greatest interest; and the memory of them , seen then or in later JEXES, visit to the English countryside, led directly on upon our return to Mt. Desert America to the building of our old home at xxxxxxxxx and the establishement (bring to me to fit in if necessary) of the first true pleasure garden on Mt. Deart Island and, on SO far/ as I know, XMX the whole Acadian shore from the Penboscto east, -- and a beautiful garden, too, it was with its flowers of the olden type and bedding plants only to fill in the caps in the later summer when the earlier bl omin- porennia S had done their season's work of insect life attraction through color, form and fragrance, and were ripening their seeds. 2 Cyl, 2 page 2 We were astonished as we visited these old manor houses, to find how many of them there- were built on the site of courtiers and the ru ned abbeys suppressed and given to his followers by Henry the Eight. But for the interest we took that summer and afterwards in those beautiful ol English gardnes and the remnants of the old English I visited with my father, the work I later did at home would never have been done nor Acadia National Park become into existence. It. has been a matter of great interest to me all through the later years to see how , in little things as in great, one thing is leads on to another as directly S though willed by fate, free ir themselves as our wills are, to determine what we do. The monks of old chose well the sites where they built their homes, in the most favored regions of the English countryside, their wealth and prosperity depending upon the crops their tenants raised. They were a burden on the land but no more than were the nobles and courtiers who followed them and who were far worse in wasting what the labor of the peasantry brought in, end they were in their time undoubtedly a much-needed refuge from the constant warfare of the period, the turanny and wastefulness of the court. In profession as in deed they upheld the spiritual side of life, its cultural and intellectual 8S ct throug the whole last period of the middle ages Between the and king there was ct that time but little to choose, but among the monks and nuns, the abbots and abbesses devoted to 8 D 1ctaphone, Thursday evening, December 22, 1938. Those years of intimate companionship abroad with my father and my mother, moving quietly about from place to place of interest or beauty as the spirit prompted, reading much and thinking much, were among the richest of my life and laid the foundation deep for future growth and study. That is the reason why my memory now turns back to them with so much particularity. My father was what Chaucer would have calle d 'a verra parfait gentleman with constant thought for others, broad human interests, and no thought for self, though full of the capacity for great enjoyment in all things beautiful and good. He lived together constantly as we travelled on, in the humours of the moment, in our appreciation and the thoughtsour travel roused. My mother was of a very different nature, not given as I to argument and reason nor patient of them, but arriving straight at her conclusions by passages of intuition all alone. This was not due so much to the fact that she was a woman as to inheritance, in which the artistic strain was strong and the warm interest in human life. In this she was remarkable; people came to her always for sympathy and help in their times of trouble for she was strong to lean upon. 2. But we all three had great reserves, even from each other, and lived our own lives out, not readily opening ourselves out to others. The period I was born into was one of extra- ordinary development in scientific thought, as that of the generation which had gone before me was in its breaking away from old religious views and dogmas. This last had led my grandfather to Unitari am, my grandfather on my mother's side, to his father's great concern. But behind the Unitar of that time lay the attitude of an earlier period AXEX which accepted all on face and did not question. The lack of warmth and colour had led my mother at the time when I was born to join the Episcopal Church, but this with her was a matter of feeling, not logical conviction. All that was spiritual, leaving dogma apart, aroused her deepest interest; for the spiritual wa.8 to her breath of life, and had been always from girlhood on. My father needed, truly, none to tell him what was xxp right or wrong in spiritual matters; he did the right intuitively, needing no instruction. And I think he made no attempt to solve the insoluble in regard to God's presence in the world Gerson 1876 Tuesday evening Dec 13. Returning from a brief trip to America, my father took the train from Liverpool to London which ran through, expr sss, with but a single stop upon the way, at Chester. My father left Liverpool in an else empty coach. At Chester another gentleman got in and settled down to read his newspaper. Pres ntly, that done, he entered into conversation with my father and finding he had Just comc over from New York, asked him some questions bearing on the political situation there. My father always took great interest in such matters from a broad standpoint, and they had a long and interesting talk together on matters american and English which lasted till they came to London. My father's fellow traveler it then tunrned out, was Mr. Gladstone then at the height of his political career My father took much interest in this chance meetng and opportunity for talk. He never had met Gladstone before nor did he ever see him afterwar s, but he bore him in high regard for his high humanity and broad, liberal views, and looked back upon the meeting with great interest. For his opponent Disraeli, he had slight regard, and I no more. Now, as then, it is it is hard for mc to realize how a Jew of his type could have been accepted by the English noblcmen a conservative party, as their leader, or how Queen Victoria ecould have looked on him with favor and riven him her intimacy and support. 2. Wherever he went while we were abroad, then and later, the London Times followed us in it 8 daily edition, my father reading it always , even to its reports on law cases tried in court, and its book reviews, letters from corre pondenta and reports of travelers It even followed us to America after our last trip together, when we went up the Nile, and I have still some unopened copies left of the last issues that czme out to us following his death. Left-alone After my father died, I read the Boston Horald then ably editied by my friend, Robert Lincoln O'Brien, but when he resigned his post on it, I subscribed to the Now York Times, which followed me in turn wherever I was or went. These three newspapers have been to me a great political education, the best the world could give, following daily its events and their comments on them, but forming my own opinion from occasionally their editorials. Sucn newspapers IS these reflect the movement of the world. and are better than books, such- except histories if one must choose between them , but it is only a few newspapers that one can read in such fashion and get value from and they are not for the multitude. Bri UMIT 1tanny 1943 revision U In the spring of 1878 we -- my father, mother and I -- made a trip together into Britanny. It was at the season when the broom and the gorse were in their bright yellow bloom, making gay the tracts along the coast, wild and picturesque with long, rocky inlets and projecting reefs on which the surf broke unceasingly as western winds drove in the waves from the Atlantic. It was a lonely coast from which fishermen sailed their craft, not in fleets but singly, each for himself. It was a dangerous coast, too, and often the fishermen, caught by fog and storms, did not return. But it made a great appeal to the imagination, the region steeped in ancient myth and legend. There was no thought then of motor cars; their day was yet to come. So we drove leisurely through the land, stopping where we would, my mother making sketches and my father and I wandering along the shore where the water came surgin in from the outer sea. Years ago I came upon a book, then lately published, entitled "The Fairy Lore of Celtic Lands." The author was a young student who, graduating from the University of California, planned to take that subject up as his first objective and went out to France to study, going to the University of Rennes, where he wrote a thesis for his doctorate on his chosen field. Thence he went to Oxford and studied under Sir John Rhys, the world's greatest authority on the old Celtic myths and legends. 2 Britanny 1943 Rhys found him a student according to his heart and, who he had completed his work with him, suggested that he take the subject of his Rennes thesis and expand it into a book. This he did and in it he discussed the theories that have been offered in exclanation of the fairy lore which was so marked a feature among the Bretons, the Irish and the Scotch Highlanders, all of kindred stock. But, one after another, he dismissed these theories and stated his own conviction that there was something real behind it all, something of which we in the broad light of the passing day fail to be conscious but which none-the-less is there, a $ factor (to be reckponed with) in our surroundings. And the author of the book, defending his position, said that no one who h d not done what he had done -- lived with the people in the ir huts, For dered by moonlight over lonely moors or visited the shore by starlight listening to the breaking waves -- was in position to pass judgment on it all. "There are, " he said, "things we cannot see in the broad light of day but of which we may become aware under the right conditions of eeriness and solitude." IP I was a thought that interested man for I am for from feeling own ministra and sense reveal to us in o-dinary life the while k that which is page 3 Brittany 1943 But to return to Brittany. The people at the time when we were there, sixty years ago, still wore in many parts their native costumes, quaint and picturesque. They still on had their fairs and still went aia Sunday, attired in their best, to the little, stone-built churches to worship and hear mass chanted, in the simple, unquestioning faither inherited through generations. One feature of our trip which was very pleasant 24 as that it was made in great part by carriage, a welcome relief from the tyranny of railroads. The difference in the character of the people of Britanny and of Northern France was extraordinarily marked; they W ere two races, two distinct x civilizations. All through Britanny .s through Normandy, which we went on to from Britanny, the drink was not wine, as elsewhere througout France, but cider. to XXX JmL. Box 1, and folder 6 may 30 - Dictafler Philasophy We returned from Europe in the fall of 1878, after a stay of four years. That autumn we came down to Bar Harbor and chose the site for our Oldfarm Home upon land my father had already purchased and planned upon our return to build upon. A new life began for us all, centering round this home out of which sprang the National Park and much besides. Living for four years abroad in the midst of historic scenes and reading much with my father about the human interests connected with them, I osme back with a mind full of questions as to the whys and wherefores and bent toward the study of philosophy. But my aim was practical; not the study of dialectics and past systems of thought leading nowhere but to get light on human hature and the problems of existance. Reading along these lines, I became a member of the Harvard Alumni Visiting Committee on the department of touch philosophy which brought me into/with the work that was being done there and the men who were doing it. William James's father had been an old family friend and William and Henry had been familiar figures at our house while I was growing up; John Fisko I know through my aunt, my-father's sister, who had sent abroad when I was a boy to get a first hand knowledge of Herbert Spencer and the new philosophy; and Josiah Royco was giving lectures on Spinoza and I arranged to read with him privately and talk Spinoza system over which had raised many questions in my mind and led me far back into the Middle Ages for its origin. The Visiting Committee on philosophy at the time I went an it WR8 an interesting one, no less than the Faculty. Brooks Adams, younger brother of Charles Frances and Henry, was its chairman and its members all were really interesting both in the subject and the work. I stayed on the Visiting Committee for years and presently became its Chairman, taking part as such in the raising a fund for experimental xx psychology, a new subject then, and ultimately in the building of a hall for philosophy, which hitherto had been housed about the yard as space could be found for it and lecture hours fitted in with lectures upon other subjects. Education, a new subject then in Academic circles, ***/ was given place by President Elliot till independent standing could be gigen it, in the department of philosophy. And this brought me into contact with the work that was being done to raise Everson Hall 3. its standard and with its teacher, Prof. Hanus, who had many troubles. One evening in , Prof. Royce came in to see me at our home in Boston to tell me of difficulties he had got into over the building of a now house on land he had purchased alongside of William James on Irving place, part of the old Norton property at Shady Hill which had been recently opened for development. The building of the house then well under way was costing much more than he anticipated and he had no funds to meet the additional expense. What Xid was he to do about it. I took it under consideration and told my mother, who offered a very practical solution; sek she would organisv some lectures for him on the history of philosophy, its men and problems, to be given in different private houses in Boston, the sponsoring by whose owners of them would give them standing and command attention. It was an admirable scheme providing means if it succeeded for Prof. Royoo to meet its obligations without borrowing and the burden of an idebtedness hanging over him. For a brief moment he questioned; could he give such a course of lectures and make them popular without lowering the dignity of his subject.- Philosophy. The houses The houses were obtained, the tickets sold, Royce wrote his lectures and the whole went off with much Solat. Another course was organized for the following autumn, followed by yet another in New York. The lectures were put into book form and published, and the book was dedicated gratefully to my mother, she had solved his problem. After that he used to come down and stay with us at oldfarm with other friends each summer that he could get away, having long talks with my mother and widening his horison. Professor Royce, a born philosopher, was a remarkable man. Born in a mining town among the mountains of California, he worked his way along through the University of California, were Prof. LaConto befriended him and thence went out to Germany to study philosophy, getting a place as instructor at Harvard on his return, had a quaint and homely personality. He had a head like Soorates, a slow, drawling speech, and a gift of humor all his own. His memory was remarkable. I remember one night when we were returning home, after dining out in my little open buckboard and were passing a meadow lit by a misty, waning moon, he started in his slow drawling utterance quoting what I had 5. what I had never ohanced to have read or heard before, Edgar Allen Poe's poem Walman which just fitted the hour and the scene and which he quoted from beginning to end without the loss of a word f-- (find the poem) Mr. Dorr make quotation. J I rember his once telling me speaking of the limitation to the imagination to things one has seen or experienced, that born as he was in the little mining town among the mountains of California and knowing no other scene he had read of the ocean and longed to see it. He dreamed of it but never in his dreams could he picture it as other than a big miner's pond. Big he could make it but it had to be no other than what he knew. He loved musio of the symphonic type, understanding how it was built up, and he loved Browning who combined poetry with religion and philosophic speculation. One morning, when our house was full at Oldfarm, he came down to breakfast from the cottage on the hill where we kept rooms open always to overflow into, complained bitterly that Dr. Hodgdon, in a boisterous and mood, and had made themselves so disagroeable about - I forget precisely what now - some favorite poem of poet of his that he was going home. He would not stand it! But breakfast over he was feeling better and by noon had forgotten it -- which shows philosophers too are but human after all. Ke had a very interesting group of younger people - friends of my own - who came to stay with us every summer in those days, climbing the mountains and going off on all-day tramps, with older people mingled and over enchanging group, bringing new thought and interests. And we.kept open house without no dinner parties,but teas and suppers only and no dress suit, no telephone as yet, nor electric lights, my mother still the center of it all until the last, interested in the younger generation, interested in people. her face was turned always to the sunrise, hot to the setting. My father had passed on the winter following our return from Egypt, along with Bishop Brooks, the greatest preacher I have over heard who left all dootrine behind to go to the heart of things, And our friend and neighbor, Col. John Markoe of Philadelphia, 18ap a very gallent gentleman and soldier of the Civil Wtr. Those were the closing years of a period that went back with little outward change to the end of the Civil the water was flowing fast the while boneath the bridge and a now world was in the making. In 1897 or thereabouts E got a pamphlet from a younger friend of mine at Harvard, Theodore William Richards, a ohemist of the now school which mingled experimental higher / older/chemistry with/mathematics, outlining a new idea of his, a continuously Atomewhich I read, so far as I could followyff/ it with interest and went to talk it over with him. It had won him fame, I learned, and the offer of a chair one of the Bamous old Universities of Germany which he was at that time considering the acceptance of though Harvard hold him, but the offer of a full professorship the atom of the older schoolof ohemists had always been a mystery to me and I was interested. His atom I Bound was a certain portion of space defined by the possesssion of certain characteristic energy -- for this was still the time when men conceived the world as made op of distinot, indestructible elements. What makes your atom expand?, I said, 'The solf- repulsion of the space within it', he answered. 8. "And what makes it contract!", I asked. 'The kick-back of external space, he answered, resisting the expansion. Then somewhere in space, I said, there must be a point of resistance equal to the force of expansion 'Yes, I he said, 'but that you can place as far off as you will. "It means however, that a stream of energy, incaluably straight, is always going out into space and never returning. " 'It does, , he said, I but that dows not enter into my calculation. For them all I need is mathematical space, space that I can deal with after the method of geometry Frankly, I have no use for matter. I I cannot imagine it in itself but only by its action upon other similar source-points of energy. Give me a point to work from, lines for measurement and an equation and I have all I want. This, cradely stated, was the substance of his theody and it was a theory that worked so well that it brought him honor and advancement but it was not long afterward that the new roantgen rays were discovered and stop by stop the old atomic theory gave way before now theories of matter, equally incom- prehensible reducced all to motion but cannot toll what it is that moves, or why or how. This is now nearly forty years ago and the mystery only deepens. More 9. than over it is wise xx not to dog netage Our knowledge is founded on our senses and our senses tell us only about things that have been useful to man, his preservation and development to the point he has now obtained. We are in the presence of forces that we cannot estimate, and of others which doubtless we are yet unconsoious of / Nonetheless make part of ourselves and our environment. Faith, the ovidence of things unseen, tells us nothing surely about facts; about principals I feel it does tell pt us of eternal truth and that on it we can surely build.