Jump to content

Page:Evert Augustus Duyckinck (IA evertaugustusduy01osgo).pdf/15

From Wikisource
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

3

teenth century. The New York of 1849, when I first knew him, had some treasures which were not possessed by the magnificent city which he left in 1878. Among his associates then were Irving, Cooper, Halleck, Bryant, Charles King and William Kent, while new residents of high name and promise with George Bancroft at their head were enriching the growing metropolis with their culture and their society. It is not well to forget that Dr. William Adams had been in the Broome St. Presbyterian Church since 1834, that Dr. H. W. Bellows, then in his Broadway Church, had been over his parish since 1839; that Dr. E. H. Chapin had been in his Murray Street Church for a year, and Dr. Bethune, whose stout heart beat like a trip-hammer, could be felt from his pulpit in Brooklyn, to which he came from Philadelphia in 1849.


I. There is much interest in tracing out the roots of a life so characteristic as Mr. Duyckinck's, and so closely connected with the history of New York and the development of American literature. We ask, therefore, what were the facts of blood and breeding that made him what he was and enabled him to do what he did.

We must not forget what he never forgot, yet never obtruded, that he was of Dutch lineage, and that his family can be traced back to the founders of New Amsterdam. We are not told what relation was borne to his race by the Evert Duyckinck, one of the little Dutch garrison at Hartford, in 1640, who while sowing grain was struck "a hole in his head with a sticke, soe that the blood ran down very strongly," but we do know that his ancestor Evert Duyckinck married Hendricke Simons, Sept. 9, 1646, and that the fourth Evert married Harriet June, Oct. 15, 1814, and in 1816, November 23, Evert Augustus was born, and seven years afterwards George Long, his brother and helper, was born October 17, 1823. Without going far into Dutch antiquities, a thoughtful student of history cannot but look upon a cultivated, genial, liberal, earnest and devout man like Evert Augustus Duyckinck, in connection with his race, and especially in contrast with the traits of theological rigidity so characteristic of its dominant powers. Before the island of Manhattan was bought from the natives in 1626, and the first governor Minuit arrived, the rigid Calvinistic party had triumphed over the Arminians or Remonstrants, Olden Barneveldt had been executed and Hugo Grotius had found safety in exile. When we ask for specific representatives of the civic wisdom and the generous theology of those Dutch martyrs among the magnates of New Amsterdam, from 1626 to 1664, the reply is not easy or satisfactory; yet the Remonstrant spirit must have been there, and it has shown itself in the whole subsequent history of the Dutch American race, and it has come to light conspicuously, like the fountain Arethusa of old, that reappeared in a distant river. Mr. Duyckinck's visit to the monument of Grotius in the new Kirk at Delft,