The Knickerbocker Gallery/Reminiscences of Christopher Colles
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John W. Francis
Reminiscences of Christopher Colles.
By John W. Francis.
How precious a boon is memory; how prolific of disquisition in the writings of the psychologist; how rich in associations when treated by the poet; how full of pleasures and of pains in him who has cherished this function of the mind by a proper observance of the laws of organic health, without which soundness of intellect is impaired, and our mental impressions resolved in a state of cloudiness, or lost in oblivion. As this great quality of the mind furnishes our most accurate knowledge; as by it we retain our power of recalling the various and numerous incidents of by-gone days, it summons our associations, as the occasion may demand, and yields gratification or suffering, according as life has been appropriated in furtherance of the proper destiny of our race. As retrospective reflections possess within themselves a permanence of impression denied to prospective views, and as time seems gradually to absorb the intensity of painful associations, the poet Rogers inculcates the belief, that as we advance in existence, past associations become less and less blended with sorrows, and unmixed gratification crowns the issue. It were well, indeed, could we be entirely confident of the truth of this theory of the mind. We must, however, leave it to the school-men to descant on, and to old heads to enjoy the fruition.
He who has passed a period of some three-score years and upward, some faithful Knickerbocker, for instance, native born, and ever a resident among us, whose tenacious memory enables him to meditate upon the thirty thousand inhabitants at the time of his birth with the almost oppressive population of some seven hundred thousand which the city at present contains; who contrasts the cheap and humble dwellings of that earlier date with the costly and magnificent edifices which now beautify the metropolis; who studies the sluggish state of the mechanic arts at the dawn of the Republic, and the mighty demonstrations of skill which our Fulton, and our Stevens, our Douglass, our Hoe, our Morse, have produced; who remembers the few and humble water-craft conveyances of days past, and now beholds the majestic leviathans of the ocean which crowd our harbors; who contemplates the partial and trifling commercial transactions of the Confederacy with the countless millions of commercial business which engross the people of the present day in our Union; who estimates the offspring of the press, and the achievements of the telegraph; he who has been the spectator of all this may be justly said to have lived the period of many generations, and to have stored within his reminiscences the progress of an era the most remarkable in the history of his species.
If he awakens his attention to a consideration of the progress of intellectual and ethical pursuits, if he advert to the prolific demonstrations which surround him for the advancement of knowledge, literary and scientific, moral and religious, the indomitable spirit of the times strikes him with more than logical conviction. The beneficence and humanity of his countrymen may be pointed out by contemplating her noble free schools, her vast hospitals and asylums for the alleviation of physical distress and mental infirmities; with the reflection that all these are the triumphs of a self-governed people, accomplished within the limited memory of an ordinary life. Should reading enlarge the scope of his knowledge, let him study the times of the old Dutch governors, when the Ogdens erected the first church in the fort of New-Amsterdam, in 1642, and then survey the vast panoramic view around him of the two hundred and fifty and more edifices now consecrated to the solemnities of religious devotion. It imparts gratification to know that the old Bible which was used in that primary church of Van Twiller is still preserved by a descend- ant of the builder, a precious relic of the property of the older period, and of the devotional impulse of those early progenitors.[1] To crown the whole, time in its course has recognized the supremacy of political and religious toleration, and established constitutional freedom on the basis of equal rights and even and exact justice to all men. That New-York has given her full measure of toil, expenditure, and talent in furtherance of these vast results, by her patriots and statesmen, is proclaimed in grateful accents by the myriad voice of the nation at large.
But however gratifying to national feeling our cogitations on themes of this nature might prove, they fall not within the scope of our present intentions. A special and much more definite object on this occasion is a reference to individuality. While we ponder at our leisure on those great issues already hinted at, we feel that specific justice has not been awarded to individual merit; and that in our general glorification of acts and principles, we have proved laggard in our encomiums on the authors and the actors of the very deeds which invoke our panegyric. The most amiable tendency of the human heart is the intrinsic appreciation of the noble spirits of a land, whose services have conferred benefits of wide and lasting duration; wisdom no less than gratitude cherishes their memories, and the example of their life is the most powerful stimulus to future efforts on the part of their successors. A people who cherish this reverence must naturally possess that delicious frame of mind whose most effective powers are manifested in the results of a philanthropic spirit, and whose joys are most in harmony with the diviner essence of our nature.
Duly to estimate the career of duty, which has marked the lives of the men who thus by individual or confederated toll reared up the nation to a commanding and an exemplary attitude, it becomes obligatory on us to scrutinize in distinctive cases the circumstances which checked or advanced their praiseworthy impulses for the public weal. It is only by such investigations and inquiries that we become proper umpires of their merits, can truthfully award the just meed of praise, or hold in reverence their claims to regard. As at the juridical tribunal circumstantial evidence is demanded, in order to arrive at a proper conclusion and pronounce an honest verdict in the premises, so in the various occupations and transactions of men, we associate the immediate and contingent relationship of affairs in order to arrive at just conclusions.
A striking example to illustrate this opinion of life and its attendant struggles is to be found in the auto-biography of Franklin. His honest chronicle of all his thoughts and doings enables us to recognize his extraordinary intellect, and his mighty services for the age in which he flourished and for all posterity, with a truthfulness we could never otherwise have obtained; and his renown is only rendered more enduring when we contemplate the extremes of his existence the destitute journeyman printer, and the noble statesman and philosopher: the self-taught sage is vested with still brighter renown when we find him at one time at the compositor's case, and, after successive changes, in the parliamentary arena, convicting the haughty Wedderburn of ignorance and insolence, to the admiration of a whole senate, and the approval of a Burke and a Priestley. He betrayed the lofty aspiration of his nature, when, even a stripling in years, he was solicitous of being introduced to Sir Isaac Newton, the philosopher whose glories his own were destined afterward to outshine. The cognomen of the penniless youth became a national name—the appellation of the land of his birth—and American citizen, and a countryman of Franklin, were synonymous terms.
Like remarks, and of a like tendency might be made in the case of Fulton. The extraordinary trials of his early life, the provocations he endured for years in his investigations and experimental essays, ere he accomplished navigation by steam, endear the man to us in a ten-fold view. I had the honor of a personal acquaintance with him. His liberal nature, his frank utterance, his chivalric bearing, all pronounced him one of Nature's noblest gifts. Neither the jeers of the vulgar nor the scoffs of the sciolist ever disturbed his equanimity or lessened the confidence he cherished in the ultimate results of his bold project. After his successful toils on the Hudson, it was affirmed it would be impossible to navigate in the East River, or cross the ferry to Brooklyn, because of the force of the currents. The folly of the declaration was soon demonstrated, and his floating dock, the subject of laughter by the unwise, completed the work he had long cogitated. When, soon after it was ascertained that this last labor of his had been adopted at Liverpool, and elsewhere abroad, the skeptics disappeared. European approval had been secured, and his sagacity and talent proclaimed even in the plaudits of his own countrymen. But this was at a time when an American printed book sold best with the imprint of—London: John Jones, Piccadilly.
If we view the early life of Fulton, and hold in memory his achievements—at first the humble watch-maker, and finally the man who, by his individual prowess, changed the relationships of remotest people, and brought the old and the new worlds as neighbors together; who, with pecuniary resources as nothing, save in the liberality of Chancellor Livingston, has established the comity of nations, and effected an annual profit to his country of more than one hundred millions of dollars, our estimate of his brilliant career becomes higher and higher by a proper study of his biography. Colden has given his interesting story, and Tuckerman, in his American Portraits, has drawn him to the life.
Another instance may be cited of profitable influence, in the case of De Witt Clinton. We need not advert to the early portions of his career. He was always a student, and it is sufficiently known to all that he identified himself with the great interests of public education and humanity. He was a naturalist of no mean pretensions, and mineralogy, geology, and botany were the pursuits of his pastime. To judge of his merits in the organization of the canal policy of the State of New-York, it behooves the inquirer after truth to become acquainted with the financial career and condition of the State, the history of its political leaders and factions, the force of public opinion, the persecuting vindictiveness of party strife, and the poison of a hireling press. No measure of such magnitude as the Erie and Hudson Canal was ever accomplished under such disheartening embarrassments. In the great city most to be benefited by its completion the opposition to it was strongest; and many of those who cherished feelings favorable to the undertaking were luke-warm in the project: the river counties were to be ruined by it, and a general bankruptcy of the State was to follow. It was affirmed that it was premature to be involved in such a mighty if not preposterous work. Clinton had early written to Jefferson on the subject, and pointed out the practicability and advantages of the design. Mr. Jefferson writes in answer that he thinks the time for such a vast work too early by a century. Upon its completion, Clinton informs him that all doubts of the practicability of the measure must now cease. Jefferson, in reply, congratulates him, and adds, in substance, "My opinion only shows that I have lived one hundred years too soon." The indomitable mind of Clinton rose superior to all obstacles. Under the guidance of his counsels, and his inflexible perseverance, the mighty undertaking was brought to a successful issue. His eulogist, Charles King, thus eloquently speaks of him: "In the great work of internal improvement he persevered through good report and through evil report with a steadiness of purpose that no obstacle could divert; and when all the elements were in commotion against him, and even his chosen associates were appalled, he alone, like Columbus on the wide waste of waters, in his frail bark, with a disheartened and unbelieving crew, remained firm, self-possessed, and unshaken."
The distinctive merits of individuals, such, for example, as those we have now mentioned, whose renown must endure for ages, are only to be fittingly awarded by thoroughly understanding the circumstances inherent in their very position of life, their habitat, so to speak, in the language of botany, when discoursing on the properties of plants. This rule observed, how preeminently do they increase in our estimate of their virtues, emphatic as their works proclaim their noble powers! Were the writers of American biography more attentive to considerations of this kind; were we furnished with more of what is termed ana, in the sketches and accounts of our illustrious men; were the novelty of situation, the condition of a new people, and that pioneer effort, so arduous, yet so inseparable from our country, dwelt upon, we would love with a greater devotion the character of the men who wrought for us such blessings, while our patriotism for the land of our birth, and the heritage bequeathed us, would be cherished with a loftier estimate of their intellectual worth.
A glance at the advanced state of education at the present time, compared with that of a former period, when instruction in the new republic was sparsely provided, when competent teachers were rarely found, and school discipline depended upon the arbitrary decision of a vain-glorious and ignorant pedagogue, would lessen our surprise that so few well-armed scholars have been reared among us. But even this state of education has not wholly suppressed the reputation we may claim for distinguished examples of scholarship. In these days, of more critical acumen, the science of mind seems better comprehended, and studies apter for diversities of intellect, are selected with better judgment and urged with greater fidelity. I tax memory for a case in point under the older régime. I was a youngster at the same school in New-York with Washington Irving. Every thing, I believe, was professed to be taught by the Principal. I remember how rigid was his law in enforcing public speaking; every scholar was assuredly to be made a Cicero. The selections assigned to each speaker were according to the master's deeper knowledge of the temperament and physical qualities of the scholar. "Pity the sorrows of a poor old man!" was given me. To young Irving, who had the advantage of more years, capacity, and strength, was assigned the heroic speech, "My voice is still for war." That my own exhibition was a sorry affair may be readily admitted; but what are we to think of the sedate, the peaceful and benignant Irving, whose bellicose propensities have never yet been developed, and whose organ of combativeness no phrenologist has yet discovered, selected to appear before a large assemblage to display the heroic impulses of a son of Mars! Time, however, has proved the futility of the instruction and the folly of the instructor; and Mr. Irving, while he smiles in secret at the discipline of his school-boy days, may rest satisfied that he wears a chaplet of greater lustre and more lasting glory than ever adorned the warrior's brow.
Life, physical and mental, is the result of association; we are portions of all around us. The harmony of the physiological organization preserves the one; the intellectual stores received by perception sustain the other. By association, the cerebral faculties become more capacious and of wider grasp, and judgment enlarges her sphere and acts with greater wisdom and justice. I would that truths founded on such a basis were more generally recognized, and that opinions and decisions were made on such organic principles. Association, not segregation, is the ladder we ascend, the better to have a true view of what we take cognizance of. The rule applies equally to things, to acts, and to individuals. I know my man, I make a right estimate, when I comprehend not merely what he accomplished, but the circumstances in which he moved and acted, the obstacles overcome, the incidents which favored his designs. Every body knows that there never flourished, within our precincts, a more beautiful wood than that which ornamented Hoboken and Wechawken. It has been famous in prose and in song; but when we are told that within that forest, in its best estate, Kalm, the botanist of Abo, enriched the species plantarum of Linnæus; that here the enthusiastic Masson discovered new plants of interesting character and properties; that Volney here at times luxuriated while in philosophical contemplation; that here, amidst these beautiful and majestic trees, Michaux the younger composed some portions of his American Flora; that Pursh added to his great botanical treasures from these woods, as did also the unfortunate Douglass; that in these walks Irving and Paulding and Verplanck, in their earlier days, cherished those sympathies with nature which give vitality to their descriptive powers; that here the ornithologist, Wilson, and his successor, Audubon, passed many of the choicest hours of their pilgrimage of life; that hare Cooke, the tragedian, after undue excitement, found alleviation of sorrow, and Matthews, the comedian, a solace for grievous melancholy; that the soil of Hoboken yielded to Bruce the magnesian lime-stone, a product most precious in a mineralogical cabinet; that here the elder Stevens made experiments, the first in either hemisphere, in demonstration of the practicability of railroad communication; and more, when we find that our congenial Halleck has enlisted his poetic gifts in laudation of this captivating spot, our gratification swells, every tree seems clothed with richer verdure, and becomes sacred to our feelings. I walk through these shady groves with emotions enhanced an hundred-fold by such associations, and consider how many rich minds have surveyed them, and what treasures they have yielded to the philosophical and rational pursuits of the disciples of knowledge.
But, passing from these general reflections on the prolific subject of the acquisition of knowledge under extreme difficulties, and the accomplishment of great deeds under adverse circumstances, I hasten to notice, though briefly, an individual who long bore a conspicuous part in the affairs of our active population, and whose life and trials may be set forth as an instructive instance of personal warfare against conflicting elements. I allude to
There must still be among us some few old Knickerbockers, whose recollections of some thirty-five years ago may bring him before them. The young men of the present day may have heard their fathers talk of the little weather-beaten old man, small in stature, and attenuated in frame, of weight some one hundred and ten pounds avoirdupois, who existed by his telegraph on the Government-House at the Bowling-Green, and his telescope in the Park.
Colles was by birth an Irishman, and, losing his parents when quite young, accident placed him under the care of the renowned Richard Pococke, the oriental traveller, and afterward Bishop of Ossory. The pursuits of Pococke led the mind of his adopted student to physical investigation, and, it would appear, that to considerable attainments in languages he added a fair acquaintance with mathematics, mineralogy, climate, antiquities, and geographical science. Shortly after the death of his patron, in 1765, inspired with the travelling propensities of his instructor, he set out a wanderer from his native land, and we find him about the year 1772 engaged hero in delivering a series of lectures on the subject of lock navigation. He was the first person who suggested canals, and improvements on the Ontario route. In November, 1784, according to the records of the Assembly, he presented a memorial on the subject, and, in April following, a favorable report was had thereon. Colles visited the country, and took an actual survey of the principal obstructions upon the Mohawk river as far as Wood Creek. He published the results of his tour in a pamphlet from the press of S. Loudon, 1785. "The amazing extent of the five great lakes," says Colles, "to which the proposed navigation will communicate, will be found to have five times as much coast as all England; and the countries watered by the numerous rivers which fall into these lakes, full seven or eight times as great as that valuable island."
In an article on the "Water Chronology of the City of New-York," published in that valuable repository, the Corporation Manual of Mr. Valentine for 1854, the services of Mr. Colles are duly noticed by the writer, Theodore R. De Forest. Colles, in 1774, proposed the construction of a reservoir and other works, between Pearl and White streets, in this city, and to answer that end, the expense was to be defrayed by issuing redeemable paper money. The war of the revolution arrested the undertaking, yet in 1778 the people petitioned that Colles' plan might be carried out. In 1797, we find his name among the applicants for a contract to convey water through the city by means of pipes. This was about the time that Dr. Brown associated himself with the Manhattan Company, in order to procure for the city a proper supply of pure and wholesome water. Dr. Brown recommended to the Common Council the Bronx river for that purpose; and this, it is affirmed, is the first indication on record that a supply from without the city was to be looked for. I believe that Colles made the original suggestion to Brown.
Through the kindness of a Knickerbocker friend, G. B. Rapelye, I have before me an elaborate pamphlet written by Colles, and published in New-York in 1808, on the interests of the United States of America, extending to all conditions of men, by means of inland navigable communications. He calls his plan, the Timber Canal, readier and more feasible to make, and far cheaper. These several tracts show the devotion and abilities of Colles, at a time when, in our country, few indeed were qualified to enter as competitors in his design.
These several projects of public improvement gave to Colles occupation congenial to his habits of study, though they resulted in but trifling pecuniary returns. His modesty and unassuming character were little calculated to force him within the channels of profitable occupation; yet he filled up what leisure he had with mathematics, hydraulics, and kindred studies. He was among the first, if not the very first individual who commenced itinerant public instruction. He practised land-surveying, and taught it in lectures in different parts of this State and elsewhere. He lectured on electricity, though I do not know that, like Franklin, he made his own electrical machine, in this city.[2] Mineralogy and manures, mesmerism and mathematics were also topics of his public discourses. The expоsitions of the orrery of Rittenhouse doubtless often aided to enlarge his audiences in those days. My old friend, President King, might have said more of him in his Memoir on the Croton Aqueduct.
As there were periods when he could not study, and hours when he could not lecture, the propensities of his old master roused him to new efforts as a traveller. He wandered through divers parts of Pennsylvania and this State, until he, by personal examinations and calculations, prepared a Book of Roads for New-York, which he published in 1789. I never heard from his lips any lamentations on his travels, or his gastric sufferings, such as old Mrs. Knight has recorded in her Tour through the Wilderness from Hartford to New-York, made some time before. Colles was a genuine philosopher; he had studied the Salernian precepts, and could practically declare that a hit in the morning was better than nothing all day.
Upon his final settlement in New-York, he at first lived by making band-boxes; whether his mathematics gave them more symmetry and grace, there is no one left to tell us. His support from this source was precarious, and other appliances were at work, in the manufacture of Prussian blue and other pigments, George Bazon commenced the Mathematical Correspondent, the first publication of that sort in the Union, and similar in its intentions to the work of Dr. Hutton. Baron was an English radical; and Colles, with a spice of democracy in him, must have found politics and mathematics and the social habits of Baron an occasional relief from his weightier cares. The almanac-makers at fault, Colles supplied their deficiencies in astronomical calculations; and he added to these avocations the collecting and arranging of opossum and beaver-skins, Indian vases and tomahawks, and other objects of curiosity with which he became familiar during his extensive western tours through the Mohawk country, and his interviews with the chiefs of Oneida Castle. He found a congenial friend in Gardiner Baker, who was then engaged in fitting up a cabinet of native curiosities for the Tammany Society, recently organized for the promotion of natural science and American antiquities, the Grand Sachem of which was William Pitt Smith, M.D., the author of the Letters of Amyntor.
A windfall seems to occur once in the life of every individual, and so it happened to Colles. The Constitution of the United States being adopted, and the duties on spirits established by Congress, both the hydrostatics and chemistry of Colles were called into requisition, and he was appointed to test the specific gravity of imported liquors. From the scarcity of the article, he turned his artistic skill to the making of proof-glasses—another source of profit to him. But this period of advantageous business had its end; and, in his study of new things, he projected his telegraph, which enabled him to meet his most pressing wants, in his again straitened condition. The American Academy of Fine Arts was now instituted, with Edward Livingston as its president; and, enriched with the Napoleon presents and Chancellor Livingston's rich gifts, needed a superintendent to watch over the beautiful sculptures which it possessed. John Pintard, his ever-constant friend, secured the trust for Colles, and we now find our ubiquitous philosopher in good quarters and in wholesome employment. The fondest mother never regarded with greater care her first-born than Colles watched over the Venus of the Bath. He had leisure now to drive another business, and perhaps the luckiest of his scientific hits was the application he made of his telescope and microscope. The casual pittance of a six-penny piece for a look at Venus, or the circulation, through the web of a frog's foot, with his exegetical remarks, proved adequate to his now fullest desires. What a contrast of condition in life was Colles in New-York, with his old master, the affluent Dolland, of London, with whom he had worked at achromatic lenses! It was not always a clear atmosphere for Colles apparatus, but a brilliant night or a cloudless day added to his receipts; and the fuller contents of his basket, and the larger size of his head of cabbage, as he returned from market, were diagnostic of the results of the preceding twenty-four hours.
While Colles was thus striving for the means of his daily existence, he was aided by a residence in the Government-House, whither the Academy of Arts had been removed. Nor was he wholly over-looked by prominent characters. His acquisitions were known by many to be extensive if not profound; his industry through a long life knew no idle hour; his talents were admitted to be above the ordinary standard; his plans were sometimes pronounced visionary, but his conversation was instructive, and his genius in mechanics sufficiently original to command approbation. His nature was benevolent: his morals void of offence toward God and man. He was the advocate of an enlarged toleration in political as well as in religious opinion; and cordially as well as practically adopted the sentiment of Jeremy Taylor, "The way to judge of religion is by doing our duty; and theology is rather a divine life than a divine knowledge." It was his constant aim to be useful. If his occupation was not always elevated, he was too frequently the victim of controlling circumstances. He knew Poor Richard by heart, yet he overlooked his aphorism, "Three removes are as bad as a fire," and was wont to substitute, in justification of his numerous transitions in life, the maxim, "A nimble sixpence is better than a sluggish shilling." Many paid deference to him amid all his disappointments. De Witt Clinton included him among the prominent promoters of internal improvement, and with philosophical liberality, uttered this noble sentiment in reference to Colles as well as others: "For the good which has been done by individuals or communities in relation to the work, let each have a due share of credit." Dr. Mitchill often visited him and lauded his services in the advancement of public works. Jarvis, the painter, pronounced him a genius, and painted his portrait with great fidelity. "My pencil," said Jarvis, "will render you hereafter better known: you have done too much good to be forgotten." The picture is, or ought to be, in the Historical Society. Dr. Hosack commemorated him, in his Life of Clinton, as an early pioneer in behalf of the canal policy of New-York, and caused an engraving of his portrait to occupy a niche on the column of his canal worthies. Senator Seward has not overlooked him in his elaborate introduction to the Natural History of New-York, Trumbull, the historical painter, often cheered him onward, and bid him hope, for on that article he himself had long lived. Nor was that genuine Knickerbocker, G. C. Verplanck, indifferent to his condition, nor backward in suggestions. In the great celebration which took place in this city in November, 1825, when the waters of Erie united with the Atlantic, the effigy of Colles was borne with appropriate dignity among the emblems of that vast procession. But to John Pintard was Colles most indebted, many years, for numerous acts of beneficence and for his bounty in greatest need. As through his whole life of four-score years he had always more ideas in his brain than pennies in his pocket, he must have proved something more than an occasional customer.
As Colles was an instructive representative of much of that peculiarity in the condition and affairs of New-York at the time in which he may be said to have flourished, I shall trespass a moment, by a brief exhibit of the circumstances which marked the period in which he was upon the whole a prominent character. Every body seemed to know him; no one spoke disparagingly of him. His enthusiasm, his restlessness were familiar to the citizens at large. He, in short, was a part of our domestic history, and an extra word or two may be tolerated the better to give him his fair proportions. Had I encountered Colles in any land, I would have been willing to have naturalized him to our soil and institutions. He had virtues, the exercise of which must prove profitable to any people. The biographer of Chaucer has seen fit, inasmuch as his hero was born in London, to give us a history and description of that city at the time of Chaucer's birth, as a suitable introduction to his work. I shall attempt no such task, nor shall I endeavor to make Colles a hero, much as I desire to swell his dimensions. I shall circumscribe him to a chap-book; he might be distended to a quarto. Yet the ardent and untiring man was so connected with divers affairs, even after he had domesticated himself among us, that the every movement in which he took a part must have had a salutary influence on the masses of those days. He was a lover of nature, and our village city of that time gave him a fair opportunity of recreation among the lordly plane, and elm, and catalpa trees of Wall-street, Broadway, Pearl-street, and the Bowery. The beautiful groves about Richmond Hill and Lispenard Meadows, and old Vauxhall, mitigated the dullness incident to his continuous toil. A trip to the scattered residences of Brooklyn awakened rural associations; a sail to Communipaw gave him the opportunity of studying marls and the bivalves. That divine principle of celestial origin, religious toleration, seems to have had a strong hold on the people of that day; and the persecuted Priestley, shortly after he reached our shores, held forth in the old Presbyterian Church in Wall-street, doubtless favored in a measure by the friendship of old Dr. Rodgers, a convert to Whitefield, and a pupil of Witherspoon. This fact I received from John Pintard. Livingston and Rodgers, Moore and Provoost supplied the best Christian dietetics his panting desires needed; while in the persons of Bayley and Kissam, and Hosack and Post he felt secure from the misery of dislocations and fractures, and that alarming pest, the yellow fever. He saw the bar occupied with such advocates as Hamilton and Burr, Hoffmann and Colden, and he dreaded neither the assaults of the lawless, nor the chicanery of contractors. The old Tontine gave him more daily news than he had time to digest, and the Argus and Minerva, Freneau's Time-Piece and Sword's New-York Magazine inspired him with increased zeal for liberty and a fondness for belles-letters. The City Library had, even at that early day, the same tenacity of purpose which marks its career at the present hour. There were literary warehouses in abundance. Judah had decorated his with the portrait of Paine, and here Colles might study Common Sense and the Rights of Man, or he might stroll to the store of Duyckinck, the patron of books of piety, works on education, and Noah Webster; or join tête-a-tête with old Hugh Gaine or James Rivington and Philip Freneau; now all in harmony, notwithstanding the withering satire against those accommodating old tories by the great bard of the revolutionary crisis.
The infantile intellect of those days was enlarged with Humpty-Dumpty and Hi-diddle-diddle.[3] Shop-windows were stored with portraits of Paul Jones and Truxton, and the musical sentiment broke forth in ejaculations of Tally Ho! and old Towler in one part of the town, and, in softer accents, with Roussean's Dream in another. Here and there, too, might be found a coterie gratified with the crescendo and diminuendo of Signor Trazetta; nearly thirty years elapsed from this period ere the arrival of the Garcia troupe, through the efforts of our lamented Almaviva, Dominick Lynck, the nonpareil of society, when the Italian opera, with its unrivalled claims, burst forth from the enchanting voice of that marvellous company. The years 1795–1800 were unquestionably the period in which the treasures of the German mind were first developed in this city by our exotic and indigenous writers. That learned orientalist, Dr. Kunze, now commenced the translations into English of the German Hymns, and Strebeck and Milledolar gave us the Catechism of the Lutherans. The Rev. Mr. Will, Charles Smith, and William Dunlap now supplied novelties from the German dramatic school, and Kotzebue and Schiller were found on that stage where Shakespeare had made his first appearance in the new world in 1752. Colles had other mental resources, as the gayeties and gravities of life were dominant with him. The city was the home of many noble spirits of the Revolution: General Stevens, of the Boston Tea Party, was here, full of anecdote. Fish, of Yorktown celebrity, and Gates of Saratoga, always accessible.
There existed in New York, about these times, a war of opinion which seized even the medical faculty. The Bastile had been taken. French speculations looked captivating, and Genet's movements won admiration, even with grave men. In common with others, our schoolmasters partook of the prevailing mania: the tricolored cockade was worn by numerous school-boys, as well as by their seniors. The yellow fever was wasting the population; but the patriotic fervor, either for French or English politics, glowed with ardor. With other boys I united in the enthusiasm. The Carminole was heard every-where. I give a verse of a popular song echoed throughout the streets of our city, and heard at the Belvidere at that period:
Strains like this of the Columbian bards in those days of party virulence emancipated the feelings of many a throbbing breast, even as now the songs, of pregnant simplicity and affluent tenderness, by Morris, afford delight to a community pervaded by a calmer spirit, and controlled by a loftier refinement. Moreover, we are to remember that in that early age of the Republic an author, and above all a poet, was not an every-day article. True, old Dr. Smith, once a chemical professor in King's College, surcharged with learning and love, who found Delias and Daphnes everywhere, might be seen in the public ways, with his madrigals for the beautiful women of his select acquaintance; but the buds of promise of the younger Low (of a poetic family) were blighted by an ornithological error:
Weems had not yet appeared in the market, with his Court of Hymen; Clifton was pulmonary; Wardell's declaration
was annunciatory—and nothing more; and Searson, exotic by birth, yet domesticated with us, having made vast struggles in his perilous journey toward Mount Parnassus, had already descended, with what feelings is left to conjecture, by the poet's closing lines of his Valedictory to his muse:
The Mohawk reviewers, as John Davis called the then critics of our city, thought, with the old saying, that "where there is so much smoke, there must be some fire." But it is no longer questionable, that our Castalian font was often dry, and when otherwise, its stream was rather a muddy rivulet than a spring of living waters. It needs our faithful Lossing to clear up the difficulties of that doubtful period of patriotism and of poetry.
There were enough enlightened minds and generous hearts to recognize the merits of Colles. He stood before the community as a kind of miniature edition of Count Rumford. Projectors, with new inventions, sought his opinions. Garnett, of Now-Jersey, a clever man, and in literary communion with the poet Akenside, conversed with him on the most effective impulse secured by the sails of the windmill. Williamson queried him on the electric powers of the gymnotus; Blanchard, the æronaut, on the æriform currents of our atmosphere; and Mitchill unfolded to him his theory of septic acid and how the Python produced pestilence. When Perkins arrived among us, armed with his tractors, and fortified by the credentials of a score of bishops and other dignitaries of the Church of England, in behalf of their saving efficacy, Colles, who meddled a little with physic, had nearly been entrapped by that infamous impostor, who assumed the ability to cure yellow fever by his metallic points, during its prevalence in 1799. The death of Perkins himself, on the third day of his illness, by the epidemic, while in full use of his remedial agent, was too convincing evidence of the absurdity of his means, for Colles longer to prosecute inquiries into the nature of the tractors and their mesmeric influence. Yet after all this sort of Caleb Quotem occupation, it was demonstrable that Colles, in feelings or in thoughts, never dismounted from the hobby he first rode: water and water-courses, canals and aqueducts, were ever present to his mind: he could not visit Spuytenduyvel without thinking of his dear Bronx; the very flow from the spout of his tea-pot advised him of hydraulics and lock navigation.
I knew Colles well for a long period, and I, in my way, pro re nata, administered to him an occasional dose. On the old principle that misery loves company, I illustrated to him, from occurrences around him, that genius and poverty were often associates, as in the case of Oliver Evans, and told him what Bard had long ago told me, that the accomplished architect of the spire of our venerable church of St. Paul, died penniless, and in a hospital—but what has now-a-days become a creed in some brains, that like cures like, had no alterntive influence in the present instance. Like other lovers of mathematics, he was fond of music, and versed in hymnology: he revelled with Toplady, and shed tears with Newton. When oppressed with inward sorrows he read Euler and Maclaurin, and occasionally, when without a meal, he summoned his ideality in calculating the safest means to sustain a bank currency. Like some political economists of the present day, he favored the notion that that bank was safest which has no capital. Colles cherished the doctrine of signs, which he derived, I believe, from Culpepper. He was wont to say that a disastrous star presided at his birth, and that if he had been brought up a hatter, the people would have come into the world without heads.
From this inadequate sketch it is sufficiently apparent that Colles pursued knowledge under the most stubborn difficulties; that through life he struggled with adverse forces, and rarely experienced the enjoyments of existence. His death took place in the fall of 1821, at the advanced age of eighty-four years. John Pintard and myself had the honor to be his only followers to the grave. The Rev. Dr. Creighton (that worthy divine who recently declined a bishopric) officiated on the mournful occasion. He lies in the Episcopal burial-ground in Hudson street, but no mark designates the spot. Thus much of Colles, and thus much was assuredly due to the memory of the man whose investigations more than three quarters of a century ago promoted the great internal policy which signalizes New-York, and finally ended in the erection of that immense undertaking, the Croton Aqueduct, a demonstration worthy of the talents and renown of Major Douglass. There was something very engaging in the physiognomy of Colles. He was naturally cheerful and buoyant; at times pensive, yet free from any corrosive melancholy. His ample front, his sparse white locks, his cavernous gray eyes, with that weakness which often marks old age, betokened a resigned spirit. To see him on an early morning visit, seated at his small pine table, with his bowl of milk, his dry bread and potato, offering up grace for the bounties he was favored with, was a lesson to the ungrateful epicure, of edifying influence. The cheerfulness and mellowness of his life are well expressed in the words of Dyer, on another occasion:
If to his great and varied attainments Colles had added the practical functions of a school-master, or had he been more fortunate in his fiscal relations, he might have been honored with the highest academic distinction by some of our venerable collegiate institutions.
- ↑ The Bible, that is, the Holy Scriptures contained in the Old and New Testaments. Quarto. Imprinted at London, by Robert Barker, Printer to the King, 1615, followed by Sternhold & Hopkins' Psalms. This volume is now in the possession of Dr. Ogden, of New-York.
- ↑ Colden Correspondence, when I examined it in 1810.
- ↑ We have books without end concerning the origin of nations and races, while these mental instructors of a people have been favored with scarcely a pamphlet in vindication of their claims to our consideration. I lave Inserted below the two best Latin versions descriptive of their trials and mishaps. They have been too long the schoolmasters of early thought to be longer overlooked. Why do not our scholars ferret out their birth-place, whether High Dutch or Low Dutch, with more satisfaction, instead of referring us to the drama of the sixteenth century and the Bodlelan Library? Would the task prove unworthy of the learning of the distinguished teacher of German, Professor Schmidt, of Columbia College? He might find in the inquiry a pastime from the cares of his collegiate life. Notwithstanding Porson's labors, "What's Hecuba to me or I to Hecuba?" is the exclamation of many a youth whose formative development sprung from
Humtus in muero requievit Dumtius alto;Humitus o muro Dumtius heu cecidit!Sed non regis equi, reginæ exercitus omnis,Humti, te, Dumti, restituere loco!
Hei didulum! atque iterum didulum! felisque fidesque,Vacca super lumæ cornua prosiluit:Nescio qua catulus risit dulcedine ludi;Alstulit et turpi lanx cochleare fuga.A like obscurity hangs over Jackey Horner. After all that has been said, we know not more accurately of his nativity than we do of the site of that antient city, old Troy.