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THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF ROBERT COLLYER

VOLUME I

THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF ROBERT COLLYER

VOLUME I

BOOKS BY JOHN HAYNES HOLMES

THE REVOLUTIONARY FUNCTION OF THE MODERN CHURCH

MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE

IS DEATH THE END?

NEW WARS FOR OLD

RELIGION FOR TO-DAY

THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF ROBERT COLLYER (2 volumes)

Robert Collyer 1880

THE LIFE AND LETTERS

OF

ROBERT COLLYER

1823-1912

BY

JOHN HAYNES HOLMES

ILLUSTRATED IN TWO VOLUMES

VOLUME I

NEW YORK

DODD MEAD AND COMPANY

1917

COPYRIGHT, 1917, By DODD mead AND COMPANY. INC.

A

c •

TO

Robert Staples Collyer A Beloved Son

'Robin has been my staff and stay"

R. C, in letter (June 14, 1901)

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'^ *jJUiA%Lk^ ^ K<^y^

COPTRIGHT, 1917, By DODD mead AND COMPANY, INC.

^ ft.

II

TO

Robert Staples Collyer A Beloved Son

'Robin has been my staff and stay"

R. C, in letter (June 14, 1901)

I*

PREFACE

In 1914, I compiled and published a collection of Robert Collyer's lectures, addresses and poems, under the title of "Clear Grit." In the Introduction to this volume, I spoke of "certain lectures of a largely autobiographical character which have been reserved for publication in a later volume."

This statement was the "little acorn" from which grew the "great oak" of this two- volume biography. Dr. Collyer's children had cherished the hope, even before their father's death, that the story of his life might some day be adequately told. The romance of his long career, the great- ness of his fame in the days of active service, the benignancy of his presence in old age, the loveli- ness of his character and influence, all conspired to the creation of such a hope in the hearts of those who knew and loved him most nearly. I shared this hope in the months following his death. It was not until I had read his autobi- ographical lectures, however, and arranged them for possible publication, that I began to under- stand how desirable, indeed necessary, was the

vii

Tiii PREFACE

fiiltjlment of this hope. I saw that the proper use for these documents was that of sources for biography; and I laid them one side, with the recommendation that they be reserved for such a purpose. Very shortly after the appearance of "Clear Grit," I was invited by ^Ir. and ^Irs, Robert S. CoUyer to undertake the writing of a "Xife and Letters," and immediately there- after entered upon my task.

The materials which I have used in the prepa- ration of this work, may be classified as follows :

(1) Robert Collyer's published autobiogra- phy, *^Some Memories." This I have used not so much as a source, as a guide through the wil- derness of other sources. It has also been in- -valuable as providing a kind of atmosphere in which to study and write. With the exception erf my chapter headings. I have made few quota- tioDs from this book. The fact that Dr. Collyer used whole pages of certain of his lectures in the writing of his memories, gives in some places the appearance of quotation. In all such cases, howexer, I have used the unpublished manu- scripts and not the printed volume.

(2) Or. Collyer's books. A complete list of these is given in the Appendix, Volume II, page 38-5.

(S) Dr. Collyer's autobiographical lectures.

PREFACE ix

above referred to. These were prepared for de- liverv at Sunday evening services in his church, and on the Lyceum platform. The most im- portant for my purposes were "From the Anvil to the Pulpit,' "My Mother," "Our Dale," "Charlotte Bronte," "In Autobiography," "Among the Mountains," and "The Fathers of the Church of the Messiah."

(4) Dr. Colly er's letters. Of these by all odds the most valuable were those written through a period of over forty years to the Rev. Flesher Bland, the clergyman under whose im- mediate influence he was converted to Methodism and began his lay-preaching. Lovely was the friendship between these two men. After CoU- yer's change from ^Methodism to Lnitarianism, their doctrinal beliefs were far apart, but this mattered not at all. They had found something more precious than theology. From the begin- ning of the correspondence, as though moved by some intuition of the future, ^Ir. Bland kept his friend's letters, and they were passed over to me numbered, labelled and beautifully arranged by his own hand. — Another interesting and care- fully preserved correspondence is that with Jas- per Douthit. of Shelbyville, Illinois. One series of letters, which would have enriched this work bevond all calculation, are those which went

X PREFACE

through nearly a half-centun- to Dr. WiUiam Henry Furness, of Philadelphia. Diligent but fruitless search on the part of the Furness fam- ily demonstrated that this correspondence had been either destroyed or lost.

( 5 ) Three large scrap-books of newspaper and magazine chppings — one kept through all the years of his own life by Flesher Bland ; one kept by Dr. CoUyer, or his family, after his arrival in New York; one prepared by a clipping-bureau after his death, composed of the articles and edi- torials occasioned by this event.

(6) Pamphlets, programmes, leaflets, etc. Of these I would make particular mention of an ''Historical Sketch of Unity Church, Chicago," by Samuel S. Greeley; and "Pa]3ers Read in the Church of the Messiah," by Robert Collyer and Gihnan H. Tucker.

(7) Church records, more especially those of the Church of the Messiah, Xew York.

(8) Newspapers, magazines, etc., covering periods of Dr. Collyer's life career, and contain- ing articles from his pen.

In using these materials, I have sought to tell a full and well-rounded story. I have made no attempt, however, and spent no time in the en- deavour, to hunt down and scrupulously record every smallest detail of Dr. Collyer's life. I feel

PREFACE

XI

reasonably sure that nothing of real importance or interest is omitted from these pages. But my purpose from the beginning has been not to pro- duce a chronicle of events, but to reproduce the personality of a man. I have set in order the narrative as it has revealed itself in the docu- ments placed abundantly and easily at my dis- posal, but never for its own sake. This I have done rather for the sake of providing a proper framework or background for a personal por- trait. The character and not the plot has been the great thing. It is this which has dictated the very liberal use which I have made of Dr. CoUyer's autobiographical lectures in the first part of the work, and his letters in the last part. Such use is eminently wise in any biography, but pre-eminently so in a biography of a man like Dr. Collyer, whose eveiy word was pregnant with personality. He could not thank a person for a gift, or state the condition of the weather, with- out producing a document which was redolent of his spii'it, and therefore miiquely and beautifully his o^vn. If any thanks are due to me for the writing of this book, I know that it will be be- cause I have availed myself of everj- opportunity for letting Robert Collyer speak for himself and thus reveal the fibre of his soul.

For assistance in this work, my thanks are due

xii PREFACE

to many persons. First of all, of course, are those who have placed their precious Collyer let- ters in my hands, and patiently allowed them to remain there for a somewhat prolonged period of time; and others who have sent me clippings, docimients, reminiscences, statements of personal fact, etc. I should like nothing better than to name here these good friends who have thus co- operated with me in my task, but an entire page of this text would not suffice to name them all, nor the most conscientious care, I fear, to make the list complete. These must find such reward as they can in the book itself. Certain persons, however, must be named — Dr. Jenkin Lloyd Jones and Rev. Frederick V. Hawley, of Chi- cago, and Charles W. Wendte, of Boston, for assistance in finding indispensable documents; Salem Bland, for free use of the priceless ma- terial collected by his father; Samuel Collyer, for a highly useful collection of newspaper clippings, and an important personal statement ; Mrs. John E. Roberts, for long and arduous labour in classi- fying and annotating letters for my use; Miss Mary C. Baker, my secretary, for unceasing watchfulness in the care, disposal and arrange- ment of all material; and Mr. and Mrs. Robert S. Collyer, for inviting me to undertake this work, for reading and criticising every page as

PREFACE xui

it has been written, for giving me invaluable sug- gestion, advice and information, and for sustain- ing me throughout what has inevitably been a trying task with their affection and their trust. Lastly, I would mention one other to whom I am peculiarly indebted — a friend beloved and hon- oured, who for a period of weeks placed at my disposal the resources of her home, in the quiet seclusion of which a large portion of my work was done.

The writing of this book has been a labour of love. For five years and a half, it was my privi- lege to know Robert CoUyer as his associate in the ministry of the Church of the Messiah. In the intimate personal relationship of this office, he was my colleague, my friend, my brother, my father in the spirit. In my perplexities he coun- selled me, in my sorrows comforted me, in my weaknesses strengthened me, in moments of peril saved me, and beyond all my poor deserts blessed me with his confidence and love. I know full well how impossible it is for me to repay the debt I owe to him. But the preparation of this book has made it possible for me to make some return, and such as it is, I have given it with joy. It is my one regret that I have been able to bring so little to so noble a task. If devotion and high resolve were enough, they have not been lacking.

xiv PREFACE

But along with these should go other qualities, needless to mention, which I have no right to claim. Especially have I been poor in the im- portant matter of time. For three full years this book has been upon my desk, and to it I would gladlj^ have given every moment of these years. But the crowded conditions of my profession have allowed but stray and fragmentary hours. Nothing that I have had, however, of ability and time, as well as of love, has been kept back; and no worshipper ever laid offerings upon an altar with greater joy, than I have here bestowed these petty gifts of mine.

If I have brought little to this book, however, it has brought much to me. It has disciplined me to the doing of arduous work. It has lifted me to the dignity of noble purpose. It has restored to me the sweet companionship of a rare and ra- diant spirit. It has given me friends whom I would not otherwise have known. And amid the agony and terror of an age of war, it has offered a quiet shrine where I have held converse with things good and beautiful, and thus restored my soul. No one knows so well as I, how this book has enriched my life. But I feel poor as I write this final word and lay down my pen.

J. H. H. August 1, 1917.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

VOLUME I

HAPTE	&		PAGE
	Preface		vii
	Introduction ....		xxi
	List of Illustrations		xvii
I	Well Born (1823)		1
II	Well Raised (1823-1831)		14
III	Doing His Best (1831-1848) .		45
IV	Crisis and Change (1848-1850)		77
V	America (1850-1858)		104
VI	From the Anvil to the Pulpit	(1858-
	1859)		140
VII	Chicago (1859-1861)		187
ail	The Civil War— National (1861-1865)	243

INTRODUCTION

The life of Robert Collyer spanned the period of ninety years (1823-1912), from the third dec- ade of the nineteenth century to the second dec- ade of the twentieth. It witnessed the industrial transformation of our civilisation, the tidal flow of foreign immigration into the United States, the battle against southern slavery, the scientific and philosophical upheaval consequent upon the work of Darwin, Spencer and their evolutionary confreres, the literar\' awakening of the Victo- rian epoch in England and the Transcendental epoch in America, the building of transconti- nental railroads and the winning of the West, the appearance of socialism and the world- wide movement for social change, and the mar- shalling of political and military forces for the great war now raging in all quarters of the globe. Neither in thought nor in action did Collyer in- fluence in more than slight degree the determin- ing forces of his time: only in the Civil War was he a part of great events, and only on the occa- sion of the Chicago fire did he win universal fame. His career, however, caught with peculiar

xix

XX IXTRODUCTIOX

clearness and beauty the reflection of many of these stupendous phenomena, and thus was a supremely characteristic product, of his age. To know Robert CoUyer is to know much that is most inspiring and lovely in the English-speak- ing world of the last century.

Collyer's life was set in two countries, Eng- land and America. Four scenes constitute the background of his activities. First (1823-1850) Yorkshire in the English midlands, with its moors and dales, ugly manufacturing ^dllages, wholesome peasantry-, its poverty, struggle and romance. Xext (1850-1859) Pennsylvania, with its pleasant farm lands, fragrant orchards, early industrial ambitions, and Philadelphia on the near horizon. Then (1859-1879) Chicago, in the years of its marvellous growth from a sprawling fron- tier settlement to the second city and first railroad centre of the land. And lastly (1879-1912) Xew York, where a serene old age contrasted strangely with the strenuous and heartless vigour of a vast metropolis. From the beginning to the end of his days, Robert Collyer's magic charm of per- sonality was a potent factor in his career; the popular apprentice in Ilkley was true father to the loved and venerated preacher in ^lanhattan. But it was only in Chicago that he entered upon the work which brought him happiness and

INTRODUCTION xxi

power, and there that he attained the zenith of his fanie.

The more intimate settings of Collyer's life are as nmnerous as they are varied. The little stone cottage in Washburndale ; the Blubberhouses fac- tory, with its clanging bell and huddled horde of child laboui'ers; the smithy in Ilkley, by the Wharf e; Denton JNIoor, with its mists and sun- shine, and autumn waves of purple heather; the JNIethodist chapel in x^ddingham; the emigrant ship on the broad and stormy expanse of the At- lantic ; the forge at Shoemakertown, the churches on the district circuit, and the library at Hatboro ; Chicago, with its teeming industry and swelling tides of population; the camps and battle-fields and prison-pens of the Civil War; Unity Church, the glory of Christian liberalism in the ]Middle West; and as at first a pimiacle of achievement and then a haven of rest, the Church of the ]Mes- siah in New York — these are the places to which the romance of his career conducts us one by one. To those who know this romance, successive pictures arise in inward vision — the eager young- ster romping over the moors in search of birds' nests and flowers, or listening to the chimes of Haworth church, or reading the tattered pages of "Dick AMiittington"; the fettered boy, toiling before the spimiing frames till the back bent and

xxii INTRODUCTION

the heart was well-nigh broken; the lusty black- smith, smiting the hot iron on the ringing anvil; the lay preacher, pouring out to Yorkshire yeo- men or Pennsylvania artisans the gospel of his spirit's life ; the emigrant, coming alone and fear- ful to an unknown land; the tender nurse at Donelson and Pittsburg Landing; the famous preacher and lyceum lecturer, sought and loved of thousands throughout the land ; the hero of the great fire, proclaiming the word of hope from the smoking ruins of his church; the beautiful old man, with locks of snow and smile of sunshine, reaping the rich harvest of his sowing. What a panorama of vii'tue and achievement it is! A life of such colour, warmth, fragrance, struggle, joy, disaster, victory, rich accomplishment and rich reward, as few men in this or any time have ever lived!

The characters that play with Robert Collyer the drama of his days are of almost uniform at- tractiveness and worth. The silent, honest, tough-sinewed father; the mother, rare specimen of strong and tender womanhood; Will Hardy, stern teacher of rebellious youth and merry fid- dler withal for a night's dancing at the inn; John Dobson, wool-comber, lover of books and men, and feeder of one poor famished soul; Harriett Watson, the first love, a dim but infinitely lovely

INTRODUCTION xxiii

vision appearing for a moment on the scene, and then gone ; Ann Ai-mitage, staunch companion of forty years, faithful ahke in vicissitude and tri- umph; children five, and then in due season troops of grandchildren; Flesher Bland, circuit preacher, winner of souls, and friend to Collyer, as Jonathan to David, through more than a half- century of time; the associates of fame — Emer- son, Longfellow, Thoreau, Mrs. Gaskell, Peter Cooper ; the thronging parishioners of Unity and the Messiah ; and that group of homely Yorkshire folk, to whom Collyer returned again and again through the mounting years, and who gathered him each time to their bosoms with fresh affec- tion and ever waxing pride. A noble company — worthy of a romance even more heroic, if not more lovely, than this of one great son of York- shire. They rise as figures of a novel, become as friends to our own hearts, and pass as those who are mourned and not forgotten.

And in all, through all, over all — Robert Coll- yer! His stalwart and handsome person — his courage, simplicity, and tender grace — his words of cheer and faith — his enthusiasm and frank good humour — his love of flowers and birds and little children — ^his devotion to men and noble causes — his atmosphere of open spaces, running waters and sunny skies — his poetry and song —

xxiv INTRODUCTION

his fondness for books, and sympathy with all sorts and conditions of men — his crushing sor- rows and benign old age — the whole romance of his pilgrimage from boyhood's poverty to man- hood's fame — above all, his own natural and sim- ple human self! This is the man, whom all loved when he was present; and now that he is gone, would hear his tale, that they may take from it both profit and example. Many are the men who were more richly endowed in native faculty than Robert Collyer; numberless are those who were blessed with favours of worldly training and advantage which he never knew. But there are few who have lived as beautifully as he, taught truth and right as winsomely, and hved and served the race with as cheerful a courage and as sublime a faith. The story of this long life is a narrative of events, for Collyer's days were full of drama and romance ; but more and better than this, it is a revelation of personality. Robert Collyer was at various times a "doiFer," a black- smith, a preacher, a lecturer, an author, a public leader, but always was he a radiant spirit, full of grace and truth, touched with the potency of love. Therefore does his tale escape the narrow confines of time and place. It takes on a uni- versal quality and suggests eternal things. It becomes as a legend which lives in men's hearts

INTRODUCTION xxv

forever, not as a story but as a symbol. God was in him, and his life therefore of God.

"Draw, if thou canst, the mystic line, Severing rightly his from thine, Which is human, which divine."

THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF ROBERT COLLYER

THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF ROBERT COLLYER

CHAPTER I

WELL-BORN

1823

"We have no family tree to speak of, only this low bush." R. C. in "Some Memories/' page 2.

"There are three things we must count on as of the finest worth in our life — I, That we shall be well bom, II, That we shall be well raised, and III, That we shall do our best in the work we have to do in this world. And shall I not add this fourth to crown the three; that we shall seek help from God, but for which help our life and work may be after all a crop of sand."

Thus does Robert Collyer speak in an open- ing paragraph of his autobiographical lecture, "From the Anvil to the Pulpit." That he could "fairly claim" to be "well born," and thus to ful- fil "one great condition of success in life," was

1

2 THE LIFE AND LETTERS

his reiterated and proud assertion. This claim was based first of all on the fact that he was an Englishman. *'There has never been a moment in the twenty-one years that I have been absent from this land," was his declaration in London, in 1871, at the forty-sixth anniversary of the British and Foreign Unitarian Association, "when it has not been one of the fondest recol- lections and convictions that I came of this grand old English stock." More particularly, however, did this claim refer to the quality of the stock from which he sprang. He could not claim this pride of birth "in the way some fine old families claim it in the old world and the new," for he counted no ancestors of princely blood, and cher- ished no monuments of by-gone dignity and prowess. He could not even claim the kind of noble heritage which Rene Vallery-Radot had in mind when he declared, in his "The Life of Pas- teur," that "the origin of the humblest families can be traced back by persevering search through the ancient parochial registers." ^ This fact of lineage may be true in France, where peasant life has preserved a unique type of indigenous in- dividuality, but it is certainly not true in Eng- land in our own, or in an elder, day. "We can only go back," said Dr. Collyer, "to our grand-

* Volume I, page 1.

OF ROBERT COLLYER d

fathers on both sides of the house." And what was true of this family must have been true of many another, as for example that of Sydney Smith, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

If the history of the Collyer clan can be said to have any definite beginning, it is in the in- dustrial revolution which marks with a glory, only surpassed by its indescribable shame, the era immediately following the downfall of the first Napoleon. It was at this time, w^hen Eng- land's hands were free from foreign wars for activity in domestic undertakings, that the uses of power machinery were developed on a vast scale, and factories built on every available site throughout the length and breadth of the British Isles. This resulted in an imperative demand for men, women, and even children, to operate the wonderful new machines in the mills; and nowhere, in the Ridings of Yorkshire or else- where, did the local supply of labour begin to sat- isfy the needs of the situation. Therefore the owners of the factories, with the permission if not the actual encouragement of the govern- ment, went scouring through the country-sides, the slums of the cities, and especially the work- houses of the kingdom, for boys and girls; and these they were allowed to take and hold as ap-

4 THE LIFE AND LETTERS

prentices — the boys until they were twenty-one, and the girls until they were eighteen, years of age, on condition that they provided their wards with food and shelter, instructed them in the three R's, and taught the boys a trade by which they could support themselves after their release from servitude.

It was under the impulse of this industrial re- vival that IMessrs. Colbeck and Wilks built a factory at Blubberhouses, a small village, or se- ries of villages, on a stream called the Washburn, in the parish of Fewston, some ten miles across the moors from the Yorkshire town of Ilkley. Searching the workhouses of the great cities for children to yoke to the spinning frames, these manufacturers found Samuel Colly er in Lon- don, and Harriett Norman in "the ancient city of Norwich," and brought them north. Both were young, the boy ten, and the girl nine years of age. The former, however, had already made himself so useful in the workhouse, that the of- ficers were loath to let him depart; and so surely did he display his cleverness and adaptability in the cotton mill at Blubberhouses, that he soon became known as "the chap" to handle whatever chance job needed to be done. In accordance with the regulations of the time, he was set to learn the trade of blacksmith. John Birch, who

OF ROBERT COLLYER 5

had his forge inside the factory, and was tenderly remembered in after years as a kind-hearted fel- low who always had a scrap of food in his can at noon-tide for "Little Sam," was his master; and under his skilful direction, the lad's progress was rapid.

In such a place and under such influences, the boy, Samuel, and the girl, Harriett, grew up side by side. And "it came to pass," says the Doctor, "that in due time they fell in love with each other"; "in due time" also, in January, 1823, they were married.^ Two miles they trudged together to Fewston church, when the snow was so heavy upon the ground that in places they had to walk on the top of the stone walls; and two miles they tiTidged back after the par- ish priest had made them one. Under these cir- cumstances, and in view of the fact that young Samuel dearly loved a drop of beer and his pipe, it is not to be wondered at that the "lad and las- sie" stopped at the Hopper Lane Hotel on their return to Blubberhouses, and took a "drop o' summat warm." A few days later, in conse- quence of a dispute as to wages, the newly-wed- ded pair removed to Keighley, where Collyer had

' Harriett's second marriage. Her first husband, named Wells, had been a close friend of Samuel Collyer. The three had grown up from childhood together,

6 THE LIFE AND LETTERS

found work in Hattersley's machine shop at an advance in salary. And it was in this town, on December 8th, 1823, that Robert, the first child of Samuel and Harriett, was born.

It was as the offspring of these two orphaned factory-hands that Robert Collyer proclaimed himself ''well born." "What I mean by being well born is this," he said, "that my father was one of the most healthful men I have ever known, and my mother was one of the most healthful women." "This they had in common, they were as free from contagion and infections as the stars. The most woful fevers would break out in the cottages all about us, and our neighbours and their children would die of them, but my folks were always on hand to help them, going and coming as the sunshine goes and comes, and tak- ing no special precautions to guard themselves against the peril, yet they never caught a fever, nor did any of their children, or felt, so far as I remember, the slightest fear. So this is how I come at the guess that we were well born, my father and my mother were both so healthy." . . . "In taking good care of themselves before I was born," said the Doctor once, "they are taking good care of me still, and have been through all these years."

Samuel Collyer, the father, born on the 27th

OF ROBERT COLLYER 7

of March, 1797, the same day and the same year as the Emperor Wilham of Prussia, was the son of one Robert, a sailor in Lord Nelson's fleet. "iMy father would tell me," writes the grandson, "how he sat on his shoulder to see the procession when the dust of the great Admiral was brought up the Thames for burial in St. Paul's. But not long after this my grandsire, going to sea again, went overboard one wild night in a great storm." "My grandmother died soon after, leaving a family of, I think, five children, who were taken to an asylum in the City of London for shelter and nurture."

"My father's eyes were brown," continues the Doctor, in one of his autobiographical fragments, "and were full of a steadfast strength." He was an active, able, strangely silent man — a black- smith by trade, as we have seen, and "as good a blacksmith," says the son, "as I ever knew, a man who would forge no lie in iron or steel. But he had no other especial faculty I can remember now, except that of striking the tune in the old meeting house on the hill, and even then you were not quite sure what the tune would prove to be until he got to the end of the first line." He had very little education, but he could write, as is attested by his signature in the parish reg- ister in the Fewston church, and he could read

8 THE LIFE AND LETTERS

well enough to read the Bible not too haltingly to a Sunday-school class of which he was teacher. He was a strong, tough-sinewed man, and yet gentle withal in a day when roughness and even brutality were common enough. "The kindest heart that ever beat was my father's," said Dr. Collyer in after years. *'He never thrashed me but once, and that was for striking my sister, and then he cried, begged my pardon, gave me a six- pence and took me to a grand 'tuck out' at a club dinner, which was so good that I would have taken another thrashing for the like." Another memory was of his father's fondness for taking long walks with the children over the moorlands on Sunday afternoons. A hard-working man all his days, he died suddenly while he was toiling at his anvil on a blazing July day in 1844.

Robert Collyer' s mother, like his father, was also the child of a sailor. This grandsire's name was Thomas Norman, "so we may, perhaps, date from the Conquest too!" "His ship went down in a storm with all on board"; and his children, like those of the elder Collyer, found their way in due season to the workhouse.

The daughter, Harriett, according to all ac- counts, was a remarkable woman. ^ Certainly

^ Dr. Henry W. Bellows, for many years minister of All Souls Church in New York, met Dr. Collyer on the street just after his

"My Mother" — R. C.

From a Photograph of Harriett Colly er taken shortly before her death in 187If

OF ROBERT COLLYER 9

her eldest son sang her praises early and late in words which did no less honour to his filial piety than to her maternal glory. "My mother," he wrote, "was a woman of such a splendid make and quality, that I still wonder whether she had ever failed in anything she set out to do. I believe if she had been ordered to take charge of a 70-gun ship and carry it through a battle, she would have done it. While in her good heart were wells of humour blended of laughter and tears, so that when the spirit moved (her) the tears would stream down her face — and a deep abiding tenderness, like that of the saints."

While the father "was of a dark complexion," the mother "was a blonde." "My mother's eyes were blue, blended of grey, and could snap fire when they must do so and make things boom, while the family nose jutted out well and strong." In a charming lecture entitled "My Mother," Dr. Collyer draws a picture of his mother as he re- called her from his early childhood days in the Yorkshire home. "A woman with flaxen hair and blue eyes; tall to the child's sight and full- chested, with a damask rose bloom mantling her face ; a step like a deer for lightness and strength, so that in middle age she could walk her twenty

return from a visit to England. "Ah, Robert," he said, "now I know where you get your outfit. I saw your mother in Leeds."

10 THE LIFE AND LETTERS

miles in a day over the hills to the great town of Leeds ; a laugh which is still like music to me, with a contagion of laughter in it which would start the whole household — the glance of a poet into the heart of the house beautiful all about her, and within all a deep abiding tenderness ready to spring forth as her crown and glory. . . . And she had also such a genius for doing well what she must take in hand that I think still if it had fallen to her lot and her training to gov- ern a kingdom she would have made a noble queen and governed it well, while what she did govern well was the house full of eager and out- breaking children with a good deal of the Ber- seker blood in them as I have reason to suspect — keeping us all w^ell in hand and clearing the way for us into the world's great life when the time came to go forth; seeing to it that we were well housed, well fed and well clad for weekday and Sunday, while the school wage was paid for us, so long as we could be spared to go there, out of the 18 shillings a week my father earned in those days at the anvil."

A masterful woman in all things practical! "But she had in her, also, wells of poesy," and the deeper and truer sensibilities of religion. "I can remember," says Dr. Collyer, "a dispute I held once with a small maiden who lived next

OF ROBERT COLLYER 11

door, over the rank and station of our families, when she said, 'But we are religious,' and I took a back seat, for her father was a deacon, and we were not religious in that way. But no profane word was ever spoken in the house or learnt out of doors. Mother's training in this, as in much beside, was so perfect that I think it was not until I became a minister that I could freely use the most sacred name, while I still balk at such words as hell, the devil, the infernal. And two things especially Mother held sacred among many. The day comes back to me when her face grew stern and her voice deep with rebuke. It was when one of us had thrown a stray leaf from some old Bible into the fire ; and another day when in some petu- lant moment I threw a hard crust of bread into the fire. The Bible and bread were among her most sacred things, and I think salt was one also; we must never waste salt.

"And the day came in my mother's long wid- owhood," continues the Doctor, "when the dear old heart found rest in the Baptist fold in which she died. But when I went over the first time (on a visit from America) I w^as a minister in a denomination far from her own. I must also preach at our great church at Leeds where her home was. So she must needs go and hear what I had to say. And after the service, as she

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walked home leaning on my arai, she said softly, *My lad, I didn't quite understand thy sermon, and I think I could not believe thy way if I had understood it. But then,' giving my arm a warm, close pressure, she concluded, 'I want thee to feel sure, my lad, that I believe in thee.'

"Well, this was the secret of Mother's influ- ence toward these higher things. She believed in her children, and gave her life for them all radiant with her love, held the small house sacred for us, and filled it with such good cheer as she could compass, for the heart as for all the rest."

A final picture of this adored parent is given by the Doctor in an account of his first visit to England from America, referred to above. "I went over after an absence of fifteen years," he says, "to see my mother. She was sitting in the old rocking chair where she had nursed all her children, but could not rise at once, because the sudden shock of her joy held her there some mo- ments, and the years had wrought such a change in me that she looked up with a touch of wonder ; but when I said 'Mother,' she held out her arms and cried, 'My lad, I didn't know thy face, but I know thy voice.' " This was in 1865. They met once again on a later visit to the old country —in 1871. She died in July, 1874.

Such was Robert CoUyer's mother — a woman

OF ROBERT COLLYER 13

at once strong and tender, like the son whom she brought forth. She was unquestionably the domi- nant element in the union of husband and wife, and therefore the determining influence in the life of her offspring — "the better half," certainly, "in those finer powers on which the children have to draw for their chance in life." Lack of educa- tion— ^her "mark" in the parish register at Few- ston would seem to indicate that she could not write, at least in her early days — seems never to have hampered her ; character in her walk of life and field of action was an all-sufficient substitute for learning. "When my father wanted a wife," says the Doctor, summing up the relationship with rare humour and understanding, "he didn't want a wax doll. He wanted a woman who would take care of him and make him toe the mark, which he did like a good fellow to the end of his life, and never suspected he was not at the head of that concern; and so I feel very much obliged to him for giving me my mother, though I suspect he would have had no great choice if she had first made up her mind to marry him, and I am not sure that this was not the way the thing was done. "When these two were made one all those years ago, their life was clear from what we call now the curse of heredity. So here I was in the world, well born/'

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CHAPTER II

WELL-RAISED 1823-1831

"When I ask how it has come to pass that I have 'wagged my jaw in a poopit' in some sort these fifty-five years — my good home training, I say." — R. C. in "Some Memories/' page 8.

Samuel and Harriett Collyer did not long re- main in Keighley. Within a month after the birth of Robert, the dispute as to wages had been settled, the love of "the old place" had re- asserted itself, and the young father and mother, with their first-born warmly clad against the wintry blasts, were trudging back over the moors to Blubberhouses. Here in the Fewston parish church, on January 29, 1824, the new baby was christened by the vicar, Mr. Ramshaw, at a bap- tismal font which is still standing and doing ser- vice; and here in Westhouse, in "a cottage of two rooms and an attic, looking right into the eye of the sun, and away to the westward over the great purple moors," he lived and was "well raised" during the next fourteen years.

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The Yorkshire district in which Robert Coll- yer was born and reared, and "every mile" of which became in time "familiar" to him, was a land of unusual natural features, and "sown thick with interest" of an historical and literary character. On the piles of crags which dot the landscape here and there, may be seen "the curi- ous figures of the cup and ring you find in the rocks in Central America, in the heart of Africa, in India, and in old Scandinavia, the symbols of a religion . . . the most primitive of the human race." On these same rocks are signs which in- dicate that "they were the high places of the Druids whom Csesar found when he came to con- quer Britain." Records of this invasion are not lacking. "They dig up Roman grave stones and altars," writes the Doctor, "with inscriptions to the local deities and the half -deified emperors"; and he adds that "the foundations of (Roman) dwellings in my own town were visible within a century." "The Saxons followed the Romans"; and in 626 came a Christian missionary, Pau- linus, of whom the three curiously carved crosses, now standing in the Ilkley church-yard, are a permanent memorial.

From these early times, the currents of English history ebbed and flowed through this ancient dis- trict, leaving ineffaceable traces of their passage.

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Here are venerable homesteads, "the same sort of place, with the exception perhaps of a chim- ney, that they had in the days of King Alfred," and inhabited by people "who live on the lands where their fathers lived probably before the Conquest and who can be traced by the records through 700 years." Here are the tracks of the Percys and Cliffords, who came and went on forays or in the chase. Here is Townton field, where was fought on Palm Sunday, 1461, "the last great struggle between the white rose of York and the red rose of Lancaster," and "no noise of battle was heard in the little church of Saxton, three or four miles on one side of the fatal field." And here, in a later and no less tragic age, battled the Cavaliers and Puritans, with one old mansion at least still showing the secret chambers where were hidden away the priests who fled the Roundheads of Cromwell.

Two episodes of local history bind this district to America. "The Town (of Ilkley ) ," writes Dr. CoUyer, "lies very sweetly in the lap of the dale, close to the river, with a wild confusion of rocks to the south, and to the north the grand old woods. And who think you should nestle in there time out of mind but our own Longfellows. They are there in crabbed Latin when the oldest register was started in 1580, I think; and before

OF ROBERT COLLYER 17

this, John Longfellow, a labouring man, in 1523 gives two days' wages to the king to prosecute the war with France, and his two days' wages are four pence, or eight cents, which reckoned in the money of our time would not be quite a dollar. Some paid the subsidy and some did not — it was rather a matter of option. But not with John Longfellow, who no doubt had the old Saxon peasant's ever smouldering wrath in him against the French. . . . They linger long in the town, but there is none there now; the branch, or root rather, that was transplated to the new world, left early and stayed in a little town hard by perhaps 100 years, and then came over here to give us our great poet.

"Then our dale throws out another strand which winds about a life of the deepest interest to us, the life of Washington. This strand is spun by the Fairfax family, who for many hun- dred years lived only a mile away from the hum- ble nest of the Longfellows, in a grand old place across the river. ... I know no other house to set beside it anywhere ; all the ways are thronged with men on errands of life and death. . . . Black Tom Fairfax (was) the great rose dia- mond in the crown of their glory, the best fighter and most potent general after Cromwell in the strife between the people and the crown, , , ,

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He starved the Cavaliers out of their holdings, and cleared the north and held it with the yeo- men and clothiers at his back, until Cromwell began to lead and govern." Nor should Edward Fairfax, "who translated Tasso (the best ever made)," be forgotten.

"And so who shall say," exclaims the Doctor, "that our quiet dale, hidden among the moors for so many ages, does not catch a fine lustre at last, and take its place in the history of the grand old mother land!" And w^io shall say that the story of this loyal son of the dale, w^ho tells these tales of other days with such delight, does not add to their "fine lustre," and bind with still an- other strand the Yorkshire country to America!

More important, however, for our purposes, than historical associations, are the natural fea- tures of this district in which Robert Collyer spent his early years. These have been made more or less familiar to readers of English liter- ature by the life and writings of Charlotte Bronte. "The land which was so familiar to her," says the Doctor, "was familiar to me. The bells in our churches rang over the wild moors together, through the same summer sunshine and winter storm. We saw^ the same bracken brighten in the glens that were so glorious in her eyes, and the same starry flowers spangle the

OF ROBERT COLLYER 19

pastures. But her father never came to our church to preach in my time, nor was the family known among us, and the little town of Haworth lay so far away, near as it was, and was withal so desolate in those days and hard to live in, that I remember it only through seeing it there on the cold shoulder of the hill, and hearing the sweet jangle of the bells smiting through the still sun- shine, as I sat reading or musing among the heather. All you had to do was to climb the hill above my home and then the music so sweet when you hear it through the far distances would melt and blend where you stood, while you could easily see the square black tower of the church of which her father was vicar standing up against the moors and the sky.

"A dale is a low place between hills, Dr. John- son says; but you w^ould say, if you saw one, it is a sort of civilised and humanised canyon, civi- lised by nature, for the dales are not so savage as canyons, and humanised because those who have lived in them time out of mind, have managed to sow them thick with the lights and shadows of our human life.

"And they are to be found under this name only in the north of England, where a great deal of the land is taken up by wild moors that lift themselves from 1,000 to 3,000 feet above the sea.

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sweeping away into the blue distance like rough rolling prairies. These moors are covered with heather, a sort of low brush touched with green in the spring, and in the summer all purple with blossom, so that the moors seem to reflect the blueness of the sky; while here and there you come to masses of grey crag that look in the far distance like the ruins of old fortresses piled against the heavens in the days when there were giants on the earth. . . . The grouse live on (these moors), ... a small breed of sheep very good to eat when they are young, and bees which gather honey of an exquisite flavour from the heather.

"Running through the moors from the high lands in the west eastward, you find these dales, deep grooves cut by the action of the water through a time of which we can form no concep- tion. They are quite narrow where the rivers rise, and entirely true to Wordsworth's lines about them —

Yorkshire dales Among the rocks and winding scaurs Where deep and low the hamlets lie Each with their little patch of sky And little lot of stars.'

But they open out wide and fair to the sun as they sweep eastward, and then, as it seems to me,

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nothing can be more lovely. The snow-drops ap- pear in the warm nooks sooner than they do here in the sunny comers on the Hudson. On the slopes stand great woods, with oaks in them that may have seen the Crusaders, and these woods all summer long are as full of singing birds as they can hold. The black bird will whistle to you from the thorn, and the throstle from the crab tree, and the sky lark will rain down melody on you from the white clouds as if it was a bird singing in paradise, so wonderfully do his showers of music fall from the tiny speck between your eyes and the infinite deep blue, while the swallow will chirp from the thatch of the cottage, and the jackdaw squawk from the old castle wall, and about this time the cuckoo will hide in the coverts and sound his curious note.

"To me, you may be sure, it is a lovely land. And yet about as wild as you would wish to see, and as desolate. . . . Tourists go there only in the summer and see the landscape touched with the lively greys and decked in purple and gold; but there is another sight they never see and that is the long dreary fall and winter. About the end of September the skies grow heavy with fogs and mists that linger until January, and through the most of these weeks this fog and mist lies on the land like a vast sombre blanket which pre-

22 THE LIFE AND LETTERS

vents the smoke from rising above the forges and factories, until it lies so thick sometimes that my mother used to say you could cut it with a knife. You can always make sure of about three months of this weather, and then three months of winter, with but very little of the clear and deep splen- dour which makes the winters so welcome to the strong and warm-blooded over here. . . . And then after the winter comes the spring when through March and April the east wind sweeps in from Russia in a way which would make those who live in Boston think their east wind was hardly more than a summer zephyr. The poor folks who have to face this wind have a rhyme about it —

'When the wind is in the east, It's neither good for man nor beast.'

It is such a wind as the prophet must have had in his mind, one thinks, when he said, 'the Lord stayeth his strong wind in the day of his east wind,' as if he thought that even the divinest grace a man can attain to would be lost out of him if he had to stand such a wind when it blew up a hurricane. . . .

"Then there is the rain! For, catching the vapours alike from the German Ocean and the Irish Sea, these hills and moors distil the rains

OF ROBERT COLLYER 23

so as to make you feel it will never stop raining, and so far you are seldom at fault in your judg- ment. The long days of clear sunshine we have over here, when the atmosphere quivers with the sun's splendour, are very seldom seen in my dale. The most bitter trials of my boyhood were the wet days. The good mother would say. You can make such a visit if it is a fine day, but it seems to me now it never was a fine day by any accident. Talk about the laws of rain and sunshine ! There are no such laws in the dales, only of rain, rain driving over the hills, rain sweeping down the valleys, a bit of sunshine now and then, and then more rain. But then when you do get a day or a week of clear sunshine, you know how to value it. You feel as though you were looking right into heaven, the air dances and quivers on the moors like a vast translucent sea, the green moss- es at your feet are softer than all tapestry, the meadows and pastures are a wonder of the love- liest greenery, the hedge rows foam with wild blossoms, and in the barest reaches the gorse blooms into a golden glory. . . .

"And that is my dale! River and meadows, grand old woods and pastures, old stone bridges which in my day it would almost break the heart of a horse to cross with a load, so steep they were up to the centre, old halls and castles and church

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towers and cottages that reach back to the times of the Saxons, all threaded through and through with stretches of road the Romans made."

Not less interesting than the land were the people on the land. The peasant's cottage was "a place usually of four rooms, but often also of two, built of grey stone that defies all weathers, and covered with thatch instead of shingles. . . . The floors are not boarded, but covered with great flags, and these with fine sand for a car- pet. The walls are white-washed once a year by the women, never by the men. A rude picture or two is on the walls, a great rack for the pewter dishes and willow ware ... a settee of black oak and a chair to match of a fearful discomfort with rude carvings and a date which may be of the time of Elizabeth or James, an open fire al- ways, for stoves are not known, a great rack above you for oaten bread, and the meats for steady use are hung from the beams.

**Let us go in," continues Dr. Collyer, "and see an old friend of mine, who is now in his 90th year! His dress you will notice is the Saxon peasant's dress with but little alteration. Hear the old gentleman talk and they would probably understand him better in Denmark than you will. . . . When (he) dies, he will give commandment concerning his bones, and have everything done

OF ROBERT COLLYER 25

after the old fashion. . . . He will leave orders for plenty of spiced bread to be made, and cut in great wedges from the loaf, and plenty of spiced ale to be served round in the old silver tankards, and everybody will be expected to enjoy himself, and this they will do who are not very near of kin to him, for this is the last long lingering echo and refrain from the funeral feasts of the pagans a thousand years ago. If it is winter, there will be no flowers, only sprigs of evergreen, but if it is summer, they will deck his shroud as they did in Shakespeare's day with rosemary and pansies, violets and sweet thyme, and rue and columbines and daisies. And as they bear him away to the burial, the old neighbours and friends will sing old funeral chants as they go through the lanes that Job might have written and Jeremiah set to music, they are so doleful.

"This is the daleman of the old sturdy breed who still lingers in the more secluded nooks, and clings to the ancient ways. He mows his grain with the scythe, and reaps his grain with the sickle, and all modern inventions are an abomina- tion. . . . He never saw a steamboat, and he hates the French though he could not tell you why. . . . He is as honest as the day, but he has steadily killed the game when he got his chance, because that was what the Norman took

26 THE LIFE AND LETTERS

from him, and he will have it back. He brews his own beer and makes his own mead. He covers the little mirror when one of his family dies, and whispers the tidings to the bees in the garden. He saves a bit of the old yule log to kindle the new at Christmas, and will let no fire go out of his dwelling between old Christmas day and twelfth night, eats boiled wheat and honey on Christmas eve, and has the singers round on Christmas morning to sing the old carols. . . . He believes in witches and ghosts, thinks if he pays the parson his tithes promptly, then the parson will see that he comes to no harm here- after, goes when it suits him to what he calls 't' church,' and says his prayers, and that is his religion. Only this is to be understood, that he will not fight for any creed man ever made. No ghost of a martyr haunts our dale.

"So he has lived, and so he will die, and so his fathers lived before him." Changes have come — came even in Dr. Collyer's day. But "these things," he says, "are all on the surface. The main bulk (of the people) keep to the old ways, and raise generations of blue-eyed, sunny-haired and deep-chested men and women, sending the overplus to people new lands."

It was in such a country, and amid such peo- ple, that Robert Collyer passed his years of boy-

OF ROBERT COLLYER 27

hood and youth. The particular neighbourhood in which he hved until his fourteenth year, inele- gantly dubbed Blubberhouses, consisted of a series of factory towns, or hamlets, running along the banks of the Washburn, in the Washburn- dale, one of the deepest and fairest of the val- leys of the famous Yorkshire moors. The people in these towns, nearly all of them workers in the wool, cotton and linen mills established here in the early days of the industrial epoch because of the abundant water-power, numbered several thousand souls, all told. West End, a village on the road from Pateley to Bolton Bridge, alone had a population of two thousand. The towns, located close to one another along the flowing stream, were practically identical in appearance — a group of ugly factory buildings on the riv- er's edge, and back of them and around them, on a succession of terraces, long rows of cot- tages in which lived the workers. These cot- tages were invariably of the stone-wall, thatched- roof type described above. Here and there among them, however, usually at the end of a row of dwellings, appeared structures of a more commodious and impressive type. Dr. Collyer, in later years, described one of these, the home of a foreman, Thomas Scotson, as "a house of some dignity, thick clad with ivy, where the spar-

28 THE LIFE AND LETTERS

rows nested in great numbers and made a cheer- ful racket on summer mornings"; and another, the home of Michael Robinson, a manager of one of the factories, located "at the western end of the terrace," as a house which "had a low win- dow framed in roses," and which "seemed to our young eyes a very grand place indeed." Other more conspicuous structures were the workhouse, "a very commodious building considering the size of the hamlets," the chapel by the bridge at West End, a large gasmetre at no great dis- tance from Blubberhouses bridge, "which sup- plied the mill and a large number of cottages with light," and a hostel, called the Gate Inn, centre of village celebrations and festivals, in front of which on the big arm of a giant syca- more swung a sign bearing the symbol of a minia- ture five-barred gate, with the legend,

"This gate hangs well and hinders none, Refresh and pay, and travel on."

Back of all, on either side of the river, were the long slopes to the uplands, where on summer days the birds sang and the heather bloomed, and by night, when the noise of the factory wheels was stilled, came the wondrous silence of the stars. This was a busy dale, in Robert Collyer's boyhood days. Before he had left England for

OF ROBERT COLLYER 29

America, however, the blight of competition had ruined the thriving industries and scattered the people; and by the time he had reached the full tide of manhood, the hamlets had become as "the deserted village" of Goldsmith. The mills were silent and unoccupied, the chapel a mouldy and rotting wreck, and the sturdy stone cottages un- tenanted save by the birds which perched on roofs and chimney-tops and alone recalled the animation of former days. In the '70s the Leeds Corporation bought the property for the safe- guarding of the water supply of the great city — and the history of Blubberhouses was definitely closed !

It was in the hey-day of the material pros- perity of these hamlets in the Washburndale, that Robert Collyer was born and reared. The cottage which Samuel Collyer took for his home, after his return from the temporary flight to Keighley, was a two-room stone structure, as we have seen, with a low attic, or loft, overhead. "There was a bit of greensward" in front, with "a clump of roses set about with wall-flowers, pinks and sweet Williams. There was a plum- tree, also, branching about the windows.

"Within doors there was a bright open fire, and the walls of the living room were w^hite as driven snow. A floor of flags so clean that you

30 THE LIFE AND LETTERS

could eat your dinner on it most times and only- hurt the floor, and a bureau and chairs so bright that they shone like dim mirrors. A tall clock which was always too fast at bed time and in the mornings, and always too slow at meal time. A lot of the old willow pattern pottery ware on a rack against the wall for the holidays; and pictures which must have cost half a dollar each, pictures Rubens could not have painted to save him. These was Moses looking like old King George III, and drawn with a pair of legs no man could walk on without crutches, and Peter with a green beard."

The tasks of housekeeping in this little home were performed with a Puritan conscience and a cheery heart. "I still mind," says the Doctor, "how twice in the year (my mother) would make the walls in the living rooms white, as I still see them, with quick lime, the dire enemy of the fever which would invade other homes but never ours, while in all things else her feast of puri- fication belted the whole year, but never at the cost of comfort or cosiness in the small place, tight and trim as a ship's cabin. . . . There was fair white linen and calico, first to wear and then to sleep in. And until we could see to it ourselves, once a week there was the tub where we had a good sound scrubbing with yellow soap that got

OF ROBERT COLLYER 81

into your eyes, and a stout 'harden' towel to dry off withal, so that now when I think of our 'cot- ter's Saturday night,' the words of the wise man are apt to come back to me, '.Who hath red eyes, who hath contention, who hath strife?' Well, I answer, we had once a week, when we turned in- to that tub with my mother to work it, while there was but scant comfort in the words she would say as a sort of benediction, 'There now, children, cleanliness is next to godliness.' But in that tub, in the fair sweet linen, in the snow-white purity of fresh lime, and in the everlasting scrubbing of the things we had about us, lies one fair rea- son to my own mind, . . . why in all these years I have not been one day sick in my bed."

Life within this home was as plain and simple as it was clean. The income was small, a scant 18 shillings ($4.50) per week, and a family of six ^ "in the earlier years, to make good the old rhyme Mother would croon over us now and then —

'Four is good company, five is a charge, Six is a family, seven's too large.'

But I think she would have refitted the rhyme to the reason if there had been more. . . . We

*Four boys, William (a half-brother by Mrs. Collyer's first mar- riage), Robert, Thomas and John; and two girls, Martha and Maria. There was a seventh and last child still-born at about the time when Maria was four years old.

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came along with the most lovely regularity, about two years apart. . . . But my mother made that income stand good for plenty to eat and drink, two suits of clothes, one for week-days and one for Sundays, house rent and fire." And ''how did we fare, the six hearty children? There was oatmeal, and what we call mush who know no better, and skim-milk in plenty, with oatcake, as Mother would say, to fill in with; also wheaten bread for more careful use, and sometimes a trace of butter. Not much meat, for meat was dear, but soup with dumplings, and what the old York- shire folk used to call 'sike-like,' a word with a wide meaning. And the tradition still remains of an early time of innocency when Mother would say, 'Those who eat the most dumpling shall have the most meat.' So we would peg away un- til we did not want any meat, and then Mother would save it for the next day's dinner. There was fruit also when this was cheap, in the lovely guise of pie, and then more oatmeal and skim- milk for supper. And that was how we fared." But there was another item the week's wage must cover — that of schooling, for the education of the little ones was not free in those days as it is to-day. "You must pay so much a week or go ignorant." These hard-working parents, however, believed in "book-learning"; and until

OF ROBERT COLLYER 33

young Robert was eight years of age, the charge for schooling was carefully laid aside and paid each week. First, the boy went to school to *'Dame Horsman, at the Scaife House, in Blub- berhouses, an old lady in spectacles, who had a reel in a bottle, and I do not know yet how it got in." Later he went to a master's school half a mile away. This was soon closed, the master going to other parts; and then Robert was old enough to tramp two miles down the dale to Fewston, where he studied the three R's under (and very much under) Will Hardy, "who found me," says the Doctor, "a sad dunce at figures, which he believed in, but good at things in books which struck my fancy. They didn't strike his fancy, however, so he would give nie his knife to go and cut nice hazels along with another scapegrace named Robinson Gill, who taught me how to shave them at the line of their finest im- pact with one's shoulders, and things of that sort."

Will Hardy was evidently very much of a "character." He was equally noted for his hide- ously crippled legs, and his imcomparable fid- dling. "I well remember his grave, stern-look- ing face," says the Doctor, "as he sat perched aloft in the large rooms of the inns at Blubber- houses and Fewston, giving the music as the

84 THE LIFE AND LETTERS

dance went round." In the treatment of his pu- pils he was a discipHnarian of the old school. He had a strange gleam in his grey eyes, and was a "great marksman with the ferule. There was no use dodging. If you did, the ferule would find you out, and thump you all the harder." ^

It is the testimony of his most distinguished student, however, that Mr. Hardy was "a good teacher." Later on, when he opened a night school at Blubberhouses, young Robert, no longer free for day instruction, entered his classes. A final winter at night school, after he had left home, completed his education.

Other influences, however, brought to him their

* Years later, Robert Collyer and Robinson Gill, then both living in America, hunted out "old Willie Hardy," in one of their visits to "the old home." They found him, grown very feeble, sitting in a chimney corner.

"Is this Willie Hardy?" they said.

"Yes," he answered.

"And how are you getting on, sir?"

"Middling well for an auld man. But who are ye? I don't knaw your faces."

"It's Robinson Gill and Robert Collyer. We were your scholars lang syne"; and then, with a laugh, they said: "We have come to settle the old account of the lickings you gave us."

The tears sprang to the old eyes, with the gleam in them still, as he said, "Nae lads, ye will not do that. I's an old man now, and time has settled that bill a long while ago."

"But you will play us a tune on the old fiddle?"

"Ay, gladly," he answered. So they had many tunes, and Mr. Gill, who was a rich man, settled the bill in good gold.

^ CO CO

W Si,

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or ROBERT COLLYER 35

training and inspiration. There was the Sunday school, for example, which was "the only divinity school (he) ever had the opportunity to attend." Although his parents were married, and their children baptised, in the Anglican communion, the family went to the parish church only twice in the year, on Easter and Whitsuntide. The dis- tance undoubtedly had much to do with this fact, but it may be true also that old Parson Ram- shaw was not much to the liking of Samuel Coll- yer and his good wife. "He was one of the old rough *church-among-the-mountains' parsons," says the Doctor. "There were traditions of wild scrapes in his early days, such as a baby born within a few weeks of his marriage to his house- keeper, a very handsome woman, daughter of a neighbouring farmer; and of his shooting a don- key's ears off once when he was in his cups, mis- taking them for a pair of moor birds as they were cropping up over a level wall. But in my time, '30-'38, he was an old man, with a lot of wild sons, very handsome, and a daughter in the church- yard, to whose grave-stone a boy took me one day between school hours, and told me in a whisper, *she deed heart-broken for young Jen Hardisty' (a peasant lad who was then about there) . That was my earliest romance," continues the Doctor. "Ramshaw was no preacher. He gave out his

36 THE LIFE AND LETTERS

text and just yelled through a lot of words of which I could make neither head nor tail. He never came to our house, or did much of anything but shoot."

It was pleasanter on the whole to attend Sun- day services at "the little dissenting chapel on the hill," and here the Collyer family went regularly. "My mother," writes the Doctor, "always made a pretty curtsey before she went into our pew, and my father a bow towards the east window, but didn't know why, except that it was ^manners'; while I fear that I spent most of my time wonder- ing over a white dove with a very pink beak that was perched on the high-point of the sounding board over the pulpit, trying also to verify the unicorn in the king's arms, and waiting to hear the old clerk say. Amen." Sunday school twice every Sunday "with no rewards and no picnics" was the programme for the little ones. With mod- ern folk in our own country, for reasons never quite clear, such routine is usually fatal to reli- gious development. But with the Collyer clan in rural Yorkshire, it seems to have been different. "I really know of nothing outside my good home," is the testimony of the Robert of later years, "which can compare in pure worth to my steady training through about ten years in that good old orthodox Sunday school."

OF ROBERT COLLYER 37

More precious, however, than day school, or night school, or Sunday school, was the every- day school in the home itself. Here the hard- w^orking, taciturn father was a steadying in- fluence in the direction of obedience, patience and self-control, w^hile the mother served as the un- failing source of stimulus and inspiration. She it was who taught the children their simple pray- ers, and listened as they spoke them night and morning. She it was who placed "the old Bible on the bureau," and "let the youngsters browse in it to (their) hearts' content." She it was also who "loved to go over the sweet stories, with some w^ord out of her own heart." "My dear mother," says the Doctor, "was one of the best story tellers I have ever known, and I still sow daisies and violets on her grave and kiss the sod for this among the many gifts she had, that when we sat about her knees, by the winter fire, she would only tell us stories that were bright and wholesome and the mother-milk of laughter. And if a neighbour came in with some tale of a ghost or goblin, that would be likely to haunt our imag- inations, she would let them go right on ; but when they were through, she would tell another story that would make your hair stand on end until she came to the end of it, and that would fill the whole place with laughter, when it turned out to be a

38 THE LIFE AND LETTERS

donkey or something equally absurd. And when they had gone away, she would bid us say our prayers, and say there was nothing to fear if we were good bairns; but she would not send us to bed alone, she would go along with us and tell us some more bright stories to hush our fears, and then she would leave the candle until we fell asleep."

Was it this wise mother, or was it Master Har- dy, or was it the "old-fashioned Sunday school" which stirred in the growing lad, even in these early years, that love of reading which remained to his dying day one of the passions of his life? Probably something of one and something of an- other, together with a generous measure of na- tive instinct which determines likes and dislikes, we know not how nor why. At any rate, Robert Collyer was a lover of books, if there ever was one. The delightful story of the "big George the Third penny" is as familiar in biographical annals as the story of Theodore Parker and the turtle, but it must be told again if only that this narrative may be complete. One happy day, Robert held in his hand a big English penny, and "was looking through the window of our one small store at a jar full of candy (he) dearly loved." Right close to the jar, however, was a tiny book, with the fascinating inscription, "The

OF ROBERT COLLYER 39

History of Whittington and His Cat, William Walker, Printer, Price, One Penny." "I would fain have bought the candy," says the Doctor, "but I did buy the book, . . . and read (it) I guess until it was a mere rag. . . . This was the tiny seed of a library which, when the new cen- tury had dawned, had grown to more than three thousand volumes, while the time would fail me to tell how the hunger for books grew by what it fed on."

In the beginning, books were few. The home shelf carried only Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe," Goldsmith's "Eng- land," "the old family Bible with lots of pictures, and a few books beside I didn't care for. " This was no "five-foot shelf," unfortunately, but it served. "I would read my Bunyan and *Crusoe' and Goldsmith, and the stories in the old Bible," so writes the Doctor, and they "were as wells of pure water. It must have been by such reading that I got a lifelong love for simple Saxon words, and have been able to get along with but little Latin and less Greek." Occasionally also, a borrowed book came into the home through the father, who observed and rightly valued his son's love of read- ing, and memorable were the days when in this way the poems of Burns and the plays of Shakes- peare first came into his hands.

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Such was the raising of this Yorkshire "lad- die." Life varied little from day to day. Now and then, to be sure, there came unusual days. One such was the festival in observance of the dedication-day of the parish church, "when all the homes in the parish were burnished bright in honour of the day, and, so far as our means would allow, we feasted to our heart's content, very much as you do at Thanksgiving, while the kins- folk and friends, who had not moved too far away, would come to our feast, and when their festival came 'round we would go to theirs.

"Another joyous season was that of Christmas- tide. More than once the approach of this festal day was accompanied by anxious forebodings, for the household was poor, and the wherewithal for the celebration was scarcer than usual. But the pennies were somewhere, somehow found. Then would come a bit of malt from the malster, a piece of beef for the roast, and a cheese, al- ways a whole one, however small. The good mother would bake the yule-cakes and the loaf. Then on Christmas morn, before the light of day, would come the singers and players on di- vers instruments from Thurscross, with their carols, *While shepherds watched their flocks by night' and *God bless the master of this house.' For they were musical up there close to the moors,

OF ROBERT COLLYER 41

and had once 'performed' in an oratorio. This was the signal for the turning of the yule-log, the lighting of the candles, the tapping of the barrel, and the setting out of yule-loaf and cheese. Always 'largess' was given to the singers, often- times wet and cold from the drifting snow, with good wishes and proffered blessings all around. Then we went forth in our turn, . . . lads all, and no lassies, for no one of that sex must enter any door first on that or on any New Year's morning. And we would pipe up some little note, through our red noses for the frost was keen. And a little welcome would be given the children, theirs at our house, ours at theirs — some penny for the gold they gave in the old time, and a bit of cake no frankincense could match, or myrrh, the good man of the house wait- ing for us with his bounty and with a bit of clear fire to warm us. And no king of the East, or West, so happy as we were, surely, on the Christ- mas morn. . . . We were all neighbours' children, and must miss no house, for that would bring pain. — Then they would come in, the old neigh- bours, at eventide, to sit by the open fire and tell stories of Christmastides far away, when the great snows fell, or when the maid heard her lover call her from the moor, where he was lost, and how she raised the little hamlet, and they

42 THE LIFE AND LETTERS

went forth and found hini not dead ; ^ how the man was lost and could not be found, and when spring came and the snow melted, he was stand- ing stark in a drift close to the farm gate in the ghyll ; stories of great storms and of other things that shook little hearts, but nothing could harm you, or be seen even, while the holy tide lasted; and how the oxen always bowed their knees on the stroke of twelve Christmas eve, and who had verily seen them; and what peril there was taking fire from one house to another during the holy time, as was proven by many instances of disaster or death within the year. — Then the poor creatures came along we all knew — God's poor. I have heard brave music and singing in all these years, but I think I never heard anything so won- derful. It Vv^as a gift of God to his poor, and was saved for Christmas. It was seldom they would sing at other times ; but then it seemed as if they had heard the angels. They knew noth- ing of music; but the charm was on them and in them, and they sang. Verj^ old carols they only seemed to know ; and never, as I hear them so far away, rising above some lovely minor key; none of the rollicking and radiant things they brought from Thurscross, but just — ^melody. And so

'See Dr. Collyer's famous ballad, "Under the Snow," in "Clear Grit," page 317.

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once in the year, if never again, they did eat and were satisfied. I am not sure the folk did not like old Sally and old Willy the best of all, for I can still see tears stream down furrowed cheeks as they are singing, and then hear low strains of laughter that sound as if they had got tangled up with sobs."

These were notable events — but notable only because they marked variation from the monot- ony of constant and rather bare routine. Life in Blubberhouses was simple, in some ways hard and poor. Indeed it was probably harder and poorer than is at all indicated by Robert Collyer. The poet in the man inevitably came to the fore, as years passed by, and glorified the simplicity of these early days. But they had much of dignity and even beauty, and not a little joy, in the home of Samuel and Harriett Collyer at least. At any rate, the son Robert, in after years, in a country thousands of miles away, looked back upon it with gratitude and deep thanksgiving. In imagi- nation he would return to the old familiar scenes — "drink at a well he loved where the beryl brown water came from a spring hidden in the moors, wander over the pastures and through the lanes where he found the birds' nests the home canon would not allow him to molest, or make the mother bird afraid." And then he would con-

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jure up through the mists of the years the figure of his own boyhood, and softly say, "Dear little fellow, 3^ou had a hard time then, but it was a good time also, wasn't it? Have any flowers in the world beside ever seemed so sweet to you as the snow-drop, the primrose and the cowslip you knew so well where to find and bring home to Mother, or have any singing birds ever matched your memorj^ of the skylark and the throstle, or were there ever such Christmastides as those she made for us when her children and the world were all young together?"

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CHAPTER III

DOING HIS BEST 1881-1848

*'. . . Hard at work for all I was worth."— R. C. in "Some Memories," page S7.

For eight years the even flow of this austere but happy period of childhood was uninterrupted. Day after day, young Robert raced and romped over the wide-stretching moors; listened to the birds, to the ripple of the Washburn, or the far music of the Haworth church-bells; ate his sim- ple fare of skim-milk, oatcake, potatoes and salt, with a sip of cambric tea and perhaps a touch of marmalade on the Sunday ; read and re- read the few precious books within the home; went to day school and Sunday school; lent a hand in the work of the busy mother; had his sound sleep in the loft overhead through the si- lences of the long, long winter nights. Gladly would his parents have left the boy to the full enjoyment and profit of this healthy way of life. The memory of their own early years of bondage

46 THE LIFE AND LETTERS

to the spinning frames was too fresh and too vivid, we may well believe, to permit them to surrender lightly their little ones to the fell clutch of the factory. It was the desire to escape the possibility of this fate, undoubtedly, which had persuaded Samuel and Harriett, at the time of their marriage, to emigrate to the United States. But the panic of 1823-24 blasted their hopes for the time being. Then the babies began to arrive one after another in the home. And now, says the eldest, "I was eight years old . . . and must go to the factory and help to earn my own liv- ing."

The next six years mark the one wholly sad and painful period of Kobert Colly er's life. Dur- ing all of this time he worked in the linen mills at Blubberhouses, under those dreadful condi- tions of child-labour in industry which constitute one of the darkest pages in the history of modern England. He was one of those millions of help- less little "doiFers," as they were called, who changed the life of Robert Owen, stirred the re- forming zeal of Lord Shaftsbur^^ prompted the heroic cry of Mrs. Browning, and finally inscribed upon the statute-books of the kingdom the so- called Factory Acts. Dr. Collyer's description of what he endured in these years is pitiful in the extreme, especially when it is remembered

OF ROBERT COLLYER 47

that this is a picture of the fate not of a single child, but of the multitudes of children who swarmed in the factory towns and cities of the British Isles.

The working hours at Blubberhouses were thirteen a day, five days in the week, and eleven hours on Saturday; the wages were two shillings per week! At half-past five in the morning, the factory-bell sent its hideous call clanging through the valley, and at six o'clock the children were busily tending the whirring spindles. Here they stood till noon-time, with never a moment for rest or recreation. They were not even allowed to sit down at their work, and if they were caught by the overseer easing their weary limbs for a moment on some stray box or barrel, they were brought instantly to their feet by the stinging lash of a heavy leathern strap across their shoul- ders. Like prisoners in a pen, these poor toilers at the machines invented a code of signals, by which they warned one another of the approach of the foreman. But such devices, easily discov- ered or circumvented, availed them little, as did the scant hour at noon for luncheon. Each day brought its burden of exhaustion to even the strongest among the children, so that when the work stopped at eight o'clock in the evening, or on Saturday at six, they were tired "beyond all

46

THE LIFE AND LETTERS

to the spinning frames was too fresh and too vivid, we may well believe, to permit them to surrender lightly their little ones to the fell clutch of the factory. It was the desire to escape the possibility of this fate, undoubtedly, which had persuaded Samuel and Harriett, at the time of their marriage, to emigrate to the United States. But the panic of 1823-24 blasted their hopes for the time being. Then the babies began to arrive one after another in the home. And now, says the eldest, "I was eight years old . . . and must go to the factory and help to earn my own liv- ing."

The next six years mark the one wholly sad and painful period of Robert Collyer's life. Dur- ing all of this time he worked in the linen mills at Blubberhouses, under those dreadful condi- tions of child-labour in industry which constitute one of the darkest pages in the history of modern England. He was one of those millions of help- less little "doiFers," as they were called, who changed the life of Robert Owen, stirred the re- forming zeal of Lord Shaftsbuiy, prompted the heroic cry of Mrs. Browning, and finally inscribed upon the statute-books of the kingdom the so- called Factory Acts. Dr. Collyer's description of what he endured in these years is pitiful in the extreme, especially when it is remembered

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OF ROBERT COLLYER

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that this is a picture of the fate not of a single child, but of the multitudes of children who swarmed in the factory towns and cities of the British Isles.

The working hours at Blubberhouses were thirteen a day, five days in the week, and eleven hours on Saturday; the wages were two shillings per week ! At half-past five in the morning, the factory-bell sent its hideous call clanging through the valley, and at six o'clock the children were busily tending the whirring spindles. Here they stood till noon-time, with never a moment for rest or recreation. They were not even allowed to sit down at their work, and if they were caught by the overseer easing their weary limbs for a moment on some stray box or barrel, they were brought instantly to their feet by the stinging lash of a heavy leathern strap across their shoul- ders. Like prisoners in a pen, these poor toilers at the machines invented a code of signals, by which they warned one another of the approach of the foreman. But such devices, easily discov- ered or circumvented, availed them little, as did the scant hour at noon for luncheon. Each day brought its burden of exhaustion to even the strongest among the children, so that when the work stopped at eight o'clock in the evening, or on Saturday at six, they were tired "beyond all

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telling." The crippling of the children in their arms and backs, and especially in their legs, from much standing, was inevitable. The memory of the crooked limbs of his work-mates remained with Dr. Collyer to the end of his days, and cast a sinister light, as he used to put it, on the Scrip- ture phrase, *'The Lord regardeth not the legs of a man." Death also reaped a rich harvest. When examining the parish register, on the occa- sion of my visit to the Fewston church in the summer of 1913, I was struck by the large num- ber of "deaths" recorded at ages from nine or ten to eighteen or twenty years. It seemed as though, in these early days in the dale, a wholly disproportionate number of persons died in their youth. The vicar, who was showing me his church and neighbourhood, suggested tuberculo- sis ; I suggested child-labour ; and we finally com- promised on a combination of the two, with the latter ill an aggravating if not determining cause of the former.

As to how Dr. Collyer stood the trial of these days, he has left us in no doubt. His legs be- came bowed and twisted, like those of his com- rades; and it was his belief that only his later work as a blacksmith, which required a firm grip of a horse's hoof between his knees, ever straight- ened them out again. Sometimes, by the miracle

OF ROBERT COLLYER 49

of childhood, he would leave the factory not tired at all — and then there was a gay romp home to some treasured book if it was winter, or to some favourite nook on the moor or by the river if it was summer. JMore often, however, he was so tired as scarcely to be able to drag one aching limb after the other — and he was not a frail boy either, but big and strong for his years! On these days it would seem as though the hour of release would never come; and when at last the spindles ceased their turning and the doors flew open to the clear night air, nothing was wanted but "home and to bed." The darkness of this period of his life was never lifted from Dr. CoU- yer's heart, buoyant and cheery as it was. The harsh clangour of the factory bell, for instance, rang in his ears for years as the most dreadful sound in all the world, and was not wholly si- lenced until the iron-tongued monster had been torn from its place, transported to America, and relieved of its curse by re-baptism into the grateful service of Cornell University.^ When,

* The later story of this bell is one of the romances of Dr. Coll- yer's life, and is told in the following statement by President Adams, of Cornell, published on January 31, 1889.

"When the Rev. Robert Collyer was here last Spring he said to me incidentally, as we were walking about the university grounds, *I wish to make you a present.' I replied that we were always ready to receive presents worth having, and I was sure that he

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on a certain day in his old age, I chanced to ask him if he would like to live his life all over again,

would not offer us any other. He then proceeded to relate to me the following story:

" 'Some years ago the village in which I used to work as a blacksmith was swept away in order that the site might be used as a reservoir for the city of Leeds. In this general destruction the shop in which I worked as a boy perished. Against the old bell that used to wake me up very early in the morning I had a special grudge. At the same time I had so much interest in it that I asked a friend in the Town Council at Leeds to see that when the bell was broken up for old metal a piece of it should be sent to me as a paper weight. The result was that the Town Council voted to send me the whole bell. I have ever since been waiting for some appropriate place where it could be put, and if you can make any use of it I shall be glad to give it to you.'

"I replied that of course we should cheerfully accept it, and would find an appropriate place for it. I asked him about its size and tone, but he would only say that he knew nothing about that, except that when he was a boy it made altogether too much noise. I promised to see that the bell was put in some appropriate place. When I wrote to Dr. Collyer about coming to the Sage Chapel pulpit this spring, in reply he said: 'I have not forgotten that bell, though as yet it has not been quite convenient to send it.' Recently, however, I received from him the following very interesting and characteristic letter:

" 'New York, Jan. 21, 1889. "'Dear President Adams:

" 'That old bell will be sent up the road on Saturday, by my brother, in whose shop it lies.

" 'It was the factory bell which rang me out of bed between 1831 and 1838 and set me to work at 6 o'clock in the morning and then rang me out again at 8 p.m., allowing us an hour at noon to breathe and get our dinner and that was all. ... I hated that bell then a great deal worse than — well, you know the comparison.

" 'This was in Fewston, in the Forest of Knaresborough in York- shire. Fewston catches the eye in history as the home of Edward

OF ROBERT COLLYER 51

and he gave me his prompt and joyous answer that he would, his face suddenly grew stern and hard for a passing moment, and he burst out, "but not the years in the mill. I wouldn't live

Fairfax, who made the best translation of Tasso we have, and dedicated it in 1600 to Queen Bess. He also wrote a curious account of the cantrips of certain witches touching his daughter Helen and some others in Fewston, which was edited by Lord Houghton for the Philobiblion series, and has since been printed in a cheaper edition and better, by an old friend of mine, of which I must have sent a copy to the library at Cornell.

" 'Well, the old factory broke down long after I left, and served it right! Was purchased by the town of Leeds, 18 miles away, for the sake of the river, which is a fine soft stream tumbling down from the moors to supply the town withal. Then the factory was pulled down; vast reservoirs made to store the water of Washburn they drink in Leeds with great content, though the majority, I think, prefer beer. And when I heard of all this I wrote to a friend in the Town Council, saying, "When they break up that wicked old bell (you know there is a total depravity sometimes in inanimate things) secure me a piece and send it over," being moved as Quilp was when he would batter that old figurehead.

" 'Well, the first I knew after that about the thing was its ap- pearing at my door here as you see it, all charges paid, the gift I presume of the corporation and council. Then I began to relent, and said: "I will put you to some finer use, old fellow (it's a he), than to ring up children at unearthly hours to go to work in a fac- tory," and I finally struck the right idea. I do not know its tone now; I only know it used to be the most infernal clang in all the world to me, and I have no choice as to its special use. It will be pleasant to think of it as born again, converted and regenerate, now while the ages of Cornell endure, calling people to nobler occupations, and so much more welcome — a sweet bell, I hope, not jangled out of tune and harsh. Indeed yours,

"Robert Collyer.' "

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those over again, not for all the blessings that might be given me in compensation."

For a brief interval during this period, the child's burden was lightened a bit, not by the charity of the mill-owners, but, as is usually the case in such matters unfortunately, by grace and authority of the law of the land. In 1833 was passed one of that long series of Factory Acts which constitute one of the most important chap- ters in the history of modem English legislation, and which laid the foundation in law and custom of that great structure of social reform which is so conspicuous and beneficent a feature of our time. This particular Act, which had been pre- ceded by other acts in 1802,. 1819, 1825, and an amending act in 1831, provided that night work (between 8:30 p.m. and 5:30 a.m.) for per- sons under eighteen in cotton, wool, worsted, hemp, flax, tow and linen spinneries and weav- ing mills, should be prohibited ; that children from nine to thirteen should work not more than 48 hours a week ; and that young persons from thir- teen to eighteen should be restricted to 68 hours a week. Provision was also made for school at- tendance, and for the appointment of factory in- spectors to watch over the working of the law.

Judged by our modern standards of child-la- bour legislation, this Act seems moderate enough,

OF ROBERT COLLYER 58

indeed hardly decent. To the tiny toilers of that period, however, it was a veritable boon, as witness the ease of Robert Collyer. Ten years old at the time of its enactment, his hours in the factory were immediately reduced from 76 to 48 a week; and when three years later he passed his thirteenth year, were raised to not more than 68. This was a priceless gain of freedom. The little back was not now so bent, or the twisted limbs so tired, at the end of the day. There were welcome hours of sleep in the early morning, and equally welcome hours for play or reading out on the moors before the darkness fell. And how must it have cheered the mother's heart to see the yoke lifted ever so little from her dear one's shoulders! In the cottage at Westhouse, as in thousands of similar dwellings throughout the land, this Factory Act was as a very gift of heaven.

It was not until 1837, however, that any real change in the boy's life was effected. Then came the transfer of labour from the spinning- frame to the anvil, and of residence from the remote vil- lage of Blubberhouses to the thriving provincial town of Ilkley.

"There was (an) article in our home creed," writes the Doctor, "about which both my father and mother were always of one mind — the boys

54 THE LIFE AND LETTERS

must learn a trade. It would cost money, and if we stayed in the factory we could earn instead of spending, but this made no matter, we should lose our rank in life. ]My brave and steadfast father was a mechanic, it was a step above the factory, so we boys must be mechanics too, and then though we might never rise in the world, when they were through, we should not fall. Well, there was an old blacksmith six (sic) miles away over the moors, who had taught my father, and he was willing to teach me; I was rising fourteen then, and it was time to begin. . . . And (this) was how I came to the anvil, the utmost limit in those days of my ambition."

The master smith to whom he was apprenticed was indeed none other than John Birch, "ow'd Jacky Birch" as he was called, who had taught Robert Collyer's father his trade years before at the old factory forge. He was now the owner of a prosperous smithy in Ilkley, had always some two or three lads taking instruction at his anvil, and was glad enough, we may be sure, to receive into his keeping and guidance the son of his former pupil at Blubberhouses. Young Coll- yer was bound to him for a period of seven years, or until he was twenty-one, giving his labour, and receiving in return house room and food, week- day shirts and leathern aprons, and the teaching

OF ROBERT COLLYER 55

of an ancient master at his trade. It was a fair bargain, and to his parents, as to the boy himself, it must have seemed a settling of the problem of life-work as happy as it was final.

On a certain morning, therefore, of August, 1837, a sturdy lad of fourteen years of age might have been seen taking leave of the Collyer home in Washburndale, and starting on his walk across Denton Moor to Ilkley town. Down the village street, with many a smile and benediction from the housewives in the cottage row — over the river which had sung songs to his listening ears ever since he was a babe in arms — up the long slope of the hill to the great moors heaving to the sky — this would be the way he would go ; and when he reached the summit, we may well believe that he would pause for a moment to say good-bye to his little world. He tells us in his "Some Memories" that he was "homesick for a time" after leaving Westhouse, and it is pretty certain that the ail- ment would begin right here on the edge of the moors. It was not the factory that he regretted, as he looked down that brilliant summer day upon the black cloud of smoke hanging low over the scattered hamlet; he could only feel abound- ing joy that his days of slavery to the spinning- frames were over. No, it was the thought of the home-nest that choked the little lad. The

56 THE LIFE AND LETTERS

familiar white-washed walls, the friendly nook in the loft overhead, the rose-bush in the yard, the thrush that perched and sang in the old plum-tree by the door, the long hours of reading in the sum- mer fields, the stories by the winter fireside, the Christmas cheer, the quiet father whose compan- ionship he was just beginning to know, above all the full-breasted, big-hearted mother whose love was to him as the shelter of God's hand — these were the visions that held his gaze as he looked down through the clouds of smoke upon the stone cottage with its rough thatched roof. They were happy pictures, every one, and fading now forever from his sight.

But he must not linger. As brave in heart as he was stalwart in body, the lad w^ould turn away and set his face steadfastly toward his new home. In this same month of August, just seventy-six years later, it was my happy lot to travel on this same ancient road which had felt the trudging of young Robert's feet. I also climbed the slopes, took my last look at the lovely vale of Washburn- dale, and then turned westwards to the moors. Overhead a cloudless expanse of sky, blazing with the glory of midsummer! On every side, as far as the eye could see, the waves of purple heather rolling like ocean billows to the horizon I Not a house, not a tree, not a living thing, save

OF ROBERT COLLYER 57

here and there a rustling grouse fleeing the ap- proach of man I It was beautiful beyond all ex- pression— and yet lonely as the loneliness of the sea. We went on mile after mile, as though we were the only persons living on the planet. And then there came the crest of another long slope — this time downward into Wharfedale. Here at our feet were rich meadows, pleasant pastures, a cheerful sparkling river, luxuriant foliage in wooded dells, a range of hills with huge masses of craggy rocks, the long highway winding through the fields dotted with old stone cottages, and breaking into charming little lanes and by- paths, and, in the midst, the crowded buildings and streets of Ilkley, and the black streak of the railroad running off to Leeds. On such a day, through such a scene, and to such a goal, jour- neyed the Yorkshire apprentice lad. To him, as to me, the rolling moors must have seemed at once beautiful and lonely. In spite of the heather and the grouse, homesickness must still have lin- gered with him. But when he came at last to the slopes of Wharfedale, and looked down upon Ilkley parish, his heart must have leaped at the sheer loveliness of this new world. Here was his home — here was his life-work — here was the world that he was to make his own! Regrets would now yield to anticipations, the homesick-

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ness of the boy to the ambition of the man. With light step and shining eves, he would stride down the winding road, and welcome with eager breast the advent of his new day.

The change from the old to the new was great. Tlkley was a thriving provincial centre, mainly composed of busy tradesmen in the town proper, and busT farmers and daimnen in the surround- ing dale-country. As contrasted with Blubber- houses, it had no factories, with their tall chim- neys, whirring wheels and clouds of smoke, and no factory workers, with their poverty and dis- ease. In 1831, it had a population of 691 per- sons; in 1834, a population of 940; and in 1861, a population of 1407. Its chief distinctions, and largest soiu"ce of business activity, were a re- markable spring, ''arising from the side of a mountain near to the town," and a location in Wharfedale unrivaUed for scenic beauty. In early days, the spring was reputed to have cura- tive properties, especially in cases of scrofula and kindred diseases. Later and perhaps more hon- est chroniclers express doubts as to "whether there (were) any virtues in the water, more than its purity, and the tenuity of its component parts for internal use." However this may have been, Hkley was then, as it is now, a weU-known and much-frequented summer resort. "The worth of

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the waters/' writes the Doctor in his "Ilkley: Ancient and ^Modern/' "the lovely landscape, the free-blowing winds on the moors, the sunshine rippling like a vast translucent sea, as you stand knee-deep in the sweet blossoming heather, the breath of kine, the homely fare, and the quietness which lay on all things like Bunyans dream of Beulah, touched the heart and imagination of the forlorn, far and wide, and drew them to the pretty rural hollow, that had been waiting to help and bless them time out of mind."' In a small guide-book to Ilkley, pubHshed in 1829, there are named no less than six boarding-houses, twenty-nine lodging-houses, and three inns, the Rose and Crown, the Wheat Sheaf, and Lister's Arms. On the Hst of boarding-houses, it is inter- esting to note that of "John Birch, blacksmith, Eastgate." The shop-keepers included six gro- cers, five shoe-makers, three confectioners, two butchers, two drapers, two blacksmiths, two car- riers, two wheelwrights and carpenters, one tailor, one miller, and one "Richard Brown, top of Krrkgate, joiner, portrait, animal and landscape painter." It was not a city to which young Rob- ert had come : but it was a thriving village, with a variety of people and interests unknown in Blub- berhouses.

If the change ia Robert's physical environ-

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ment was great, so also were the changes in the more intimate associations of his personal life. Some of these were unfortunate, as, for example, the sudden withdrawal of home safe- guards and sanctities. "In my father's time," writes the Doctor, " (Birch) was a fine sober fel- low and a superb workman, but the years had made havoc of him, and boy as I was, I found very soon I had gone to live in the home of a drunkard. Still this was not so bad to me, as it would be to you. The proverb says a fox smells nothing amiss in his own den, and while our home was what I have told you of, we thought of beer very much as we thought of bread, while I was about as familiar with beer as I was with bread and beef, and thought no more of its hurting me, than you think of hot soda biscuits and solid chunks of mince pie, and pickles and doughnuts hurting you. Then I found again that the men were drinking a great deal more in my new place than we had ever thought of drinking in the old. Each had about a quart a day, and then the farmers who came to the forge were forever send- ing for beer, and so the thing went on from bad to worse, until one day . . . the old man went on a fearful drunk, and said 'ise verra badly, lad,' next day, and 'ise boon to dee,' and sure enough, that was the last of the drinking bouts."

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Here were depressing conditions — and dan- gerous, too, had it not been for the "good home training which had long since led him into clean and honourable ways," the power and purity of the boy's native manhood, as well as the pres- ence of certain other more favourable circum- stances. Thus the change from the spinning- frame to the anvil was all to the good. The hours, for one thing, were not so long, being limited to ten, except in very busy times. Then the work itself, for another thing, was conducive to health and vigour. Much of it was in the open air — all of it involved quick motion, vigorous exercise, and constant interest. No wonder that the twisted legs and the bent back became straight, the chest full, and the arms "like iron bands"! Further- more, Master Birch kept a good table, in spite of the beer. The food was simple and rough, but it was wholesome, plentiful and had some va- riety. "We got plenty of porridge and haver- cake," writes the Doctor in after days, "and he kept a good fat pig. Jack Toffin, one of the journeymen, used to say, however, that Mrs. Birch could make two giblet pies out of a *goois neck.' " It was at this time, undoubtedly, that Robert Collyer put on that abounding health, and developed that superb, almost giant-like stature, which remained so supremely the characteristics

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of his later physical manhood. In his autobiog- raphy, he relates how in these days a certain old man, coming into the forge to warm his hands, would turn to him and say, "How thou dost grow to be sewer: if thaa doesn't stop soin, we sail hev to put a stithy on thee heead." And along with growth, came the unbridled, exultant buoy- ancy of youth. "I was not a model boy," writes the Doctor. Indeed, it is remembered by a con- temporary in Ilkley that, standing with his aunt one day as young Collyer went striding by, he heard the good lady exclaim, "There goes that Collyer lad; he's a taastril." ^ Another tale has to tell of a certain night, when the "doings" con-

^ This may have been said of him at a somewhat earlier period. In a letter written in 1889 to a little girl who had seen this word "taastril" in an informal account of Dr, Collyer's life, and wanted to know what it meant, he explained as follows: "Dear Little Sister:

"Taastril, when you mean a boy, as old Lady Holmes did, is a little chap as full of mischief as he can hold, and the word which belongs to Yorkshire, as you say, takes on worse meanings when you grow up and grow worse. I was a little chap then when she said it, and didn't know she said it at all. But three years ago, when I was in England and had to speak in the Unitarian church in Halifax, an old gentleman came to see me, just about my own age. He was a little fellow, too, and was staying with the old lady, who was his aunt. He heard her say what I told, because I had run after her ducks and scared them dreadfully just before; and then, I should think it was fifty-five years after, this old gentleman turned up and told me what she said.

"So, if you were a boy, I should tell you not to get into mischief

"The Iron Gates," see page 7Jf From a Snapshot taken by the author in 1913

The Ilkley 'Smithv" From an old Photograph

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tinned until two o'clock in the morning. A mill- er's young wife, who had been waiting her truant husband something after the manner of Tarn o' Shanter's dame, greeted him as follows : "Why, David, man, thaa be out too late." "Noa, noa, woman," he replied, "Bob Collyer's yet behind me." "What! — Boab," she exclaimed, "then thaa be home full airly!"

If there are no sins or follies to record in these years, it is not because of any lack of vitality, but rather because of healthy activities which ab- sorbed this vitality and assimilated it to good uses. The ordinary routine of the young man's life in this period is not hard to trace. Six days in the week, he was up early in the morning, and hard at work until eventide "by the anvil, considering the unwrought iron." Horse-shoes, nails, bolts and bars, iron gates, the usual products of the smithy, made up the work of his hands. In the afternoon, not too late, the hammer was laid on the anvil, the forge fire banked for the night, and the young apprentice left to his own devices. If it were the winter-time, he was at his books in a

if you could help it, because you never know when you are safe. It may be fifty-five years, and then the old gentleman may come along and open the book, and there you are on the old yellow page, with the date in it of 1829 or '30, set down as a taastril.

"Indeed,

"Robert Collyer."

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trice, and all the long evening through was read- ing. If it were summer, and the lingering sun gave promise of bright hours on the moor, he was off to the uplands, to read in some fragrant nook or mayhap to gaze on the beauties of the dale, and dream. On the Sundays he was accus- tomed to spend the morning at the parish church ; ^ and in the afternoon, when the weather

' His recollections of the preachers were delightfully told in after years, in a letter to the Observer, under date of December 18, 1884:

"The first of these that I remember was a right racy divine, handsome as May, and a very useful man indeed in many ways, but the people who loved him had to apologise for him, and say 'it's parson's way,' and that is not a fortunate position for the parson. Still they would do anything for him except lend him 'brass,' and seemed just as well pleased as if he had gone through the whole service on a piping hot Sunday afternoon, when he said with great simplicity, after saying the prayers, 'I have no sermon to-day, and so will dismiss you with the benediction. Now to, etc.,' and the madcaps under age rather looked for some such rare fortune again but did not get it. He had also a curious trick of crying when he preached, for no reason that we could make out from the discourse, and no doubt a remark made by old Jacky Birch, as he wended home one Sunday, was often made, 'Aa wonder what t'parson wer roarin' at ta day.'

"The next that I remember was a mere drill-sergeant and was bound to make us all learn the step and march to church but — we didn't.

"The next had nothing to say and said it in the highest key he could reach, without the slightest modulation or emphasis. I think we should not have minded if he made the thing musical, but it was good news when we heard he was to leave us and when old Joe Smith, the parish clerk, gave notice that on the next Sunday Mr. B. would preach his funeral sermon. Poor old Joe was turned

OF ROBERT COLLYER 65

was fair, sometimes with companions, more often alone, always with a book, he climbed the long slopes to the moors. These great stretches of heather-strewn prairie were his unfailing delight, a veritable refuge of the spirit. Whenever op- portunity offered, wrote the Doctor in after days, "I would walk over the moors, with my book, or

eighty and would now and then give out the evening hymn in the morning.

"The next who stays in my memory was very 'high' and very dry, sincere as the day, and full of devotion to his work. But he was fresh from Oxford, full of the new wine which was fermenting there then, and did not know the people he had to deal with from a cord of wood. So instead of being all things to us as Paul directs by inference, he wanted us to be all things to him, and especially to attend no end of services on week days and to fast in Lent. Now Ilkley never did believe in fasting when she could get anything to eat, while very much of her living lay in providing in those times for 'company,' so while the good man wore himself to skin and bone in the weeks before Easter, we quietly voted the whole thing a nuisance, and he left.

"Then a man came of a very lovely spirit and with beautiful gifts as a preacher. Mr. Carrick won us all to hear and love him who went to the church, but his health gave out and he had to move away. Then the old vicar died presently, and a deputation went to Hull to see if the well-loved curate would not accept the living, for if he would we would petition the patron to give it to him as the one man we wanted, and even 'ware brass' some said, to make things smooth. He could not come; his health was too del- icate, and we were feeling bad enough about it when we heard the living had gone to a Mr. Snowdon. So when this rare man came, as the tide was rising, it was also making against him you see. We noticed at once also that Mr. Snowdon had not Mr. Carrick's rare gifts as a preacher — very few men have. But be was simple, sincere, and in real earnest."

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sit down on a great grey crag, and watch the sunshine ripple over the heather, while the music of the bells in the old tower at Haworth . . . came floating on the sunmier winds and mingled with that of our own old church, where the Long- fellows worshipped many hundred years."

Companions were not many at this time. Some, like two drunken apprentices, whom he mentions in the shop, w^ere distasteful to the finer instincts of self-respect and decent rectitude which had been so diligently cultivated in his home, and were naturally and easily avoided. Others, of a different character, were gladly welcomed to his heart. Thus there was Edward Dobson, a fellow apprentice at Birch's anvil, and a close friend so long as Collyer remained in Ilkley. Another well remembered associate was Edward Stephen- son, with whom he roomed for a time in the home of his brother, Thomas Stephenson. Christopher Hudson made friends with Robert through his kindred literary interests, as did Thomas Smith, a farmer's lad, and together the young men joined a library club which was being organised in the village. Down the dale, at Low Anstly, dwelt Robert Metcalfe, another farm boy, who would bring his master's horses to the smithy to be shod. And across the way from the open forge lived Mary Ann Smith, whose mother was

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an old friend of Harriett Collyer. More casual acquaintances were John Hardisty and his brother William.

Young Collyer's real companions at this time, however, as indeed throughout his life, were books. The fire kindled in his soul on the day when he bought "Whittington and His Cat," in- stead of the candy, with his penny, had never gone out. On the contrary, it had burned ever brighter and warmer with succeeding years. Even as an eight or ten year old mill-hand, with no library but the few volumes on the home- shelf, the boy dreamed dreams at his work in the factory about what he would like to do when he was a man, *'and this was not to be a sailor or to drive a stage-coach, but to go into a book-shop." By the time he came to Ilkley, the fire had grown into a conflagration and was the one consuming interest of his life. His work at the anvil, to which he was faithful and in which he soon ex- celled, was still, in the perspective of his inner- most soul, but an interruption or a postponement of what he regarded as his real vocation. "From the time when I used to read Bunyan and 'Cru- soe,' " writes the Doctor, "there had grown up in me a steady hunger to read all the books I could lay my hands on." He read at all times and under all conditions, "I could read and walk

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four miles an hour," he tells us, **I read when I was blowing the bellows in the forge, and in the evening when there was no candle I poked my head down toward the open fire, and never ate a meal if I could help it without a book close to mv hand. I did worse than this, for when I went a-eourting my wife, I read all the books in her father's house instead of — well what's the use telling what I ought to have done, only this I may say, that if she had not been the best lassie in all the world to me, as well as the bonniest, she would have given me the mitten, and served me right."

This passion for literature gathered about him young friends of a like turn of mind, as we have seen. Three of these, John Hobson, the school- master, Ben Whitley, and John Dobson, formed with Robert a private circle for reading and studv. Thev were wont to sit too^ether and read at nights as long as their taUow candle would hold out. They read good books, too; and generally the best English reviews. They read aloud, and in turns. Any holiday they had was passed in the fields reading, and the parson got only the dismal Sundays, the bright ones being passed in a larger temple, 'T can hear now one of us say- ing, *Xow, Bob, thee take a turn,' " was the Doc- tor's memory of these happy days.

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Of these three cronies, the nearest and dearest was John Dobson, whose name never came from Dr. C Oliver's lips in later years without being caressed with lingering affection. The influence and service of this man were the most beneficent that came into his life at this time, or perhaps at any other. Dobson was a wool-comber by trade, but a man who, like the young blacksmith whom he befriended, had a passionate interest in and love for books. He was incomparably the best read man among the native townsmen of Ilkley. His chief interest was in metaphysics, and he de- voured eagerly all volumes which "held argu- ments with you deep and vital'' about the prob- lems of God, the destiny of man, and the spiritual nature of the universe. The essays of John Fos- ter and of Isaac Taylor were favourites of his, as well as stories of the old Scotch Covenanters, and of all heroes who had fought and died valiantly to vindicate the inward witness of their souls. But he had a poetic side as well; for Dr. Collyer re- lates of him that, on a journey on foot to Scot- land, to see the battlefield of Drumclog. he took pains to pass through Westmoreland, to catch a glimpse of the great poet, Wordsworth, and was rewarded by seeing him sitting on a chair in the sun bv the door-wav of Dove Cottaore.

It is not surprising that this serious and sober

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man was drawn to Robert CoUyer, whose heart burned even as his own with the love of books. But it is at least unusual that he should have so dedicated himself to the service of this young man, who was no less than ten years his junior, and almost wholly uneducated. He must have seen in him not merely the kindred passion for the printed word, but some suggestion of those great qualities of mind and heart which were des- tined later to make the rough apprentice a leader of his generation. However this may be, John Dobson set himself devotedly to the task of sup- plying young Collyer with the books he wanted. He had a scant wage, but he was a bachelor and thus had no family cares; and what money was his was Collyer's also, for the reading. Volume after volume, he brought to him with shining eyes; together they read and discussed the pre- cious pages; together they lived and moved and had their being in this other and greater world of thought. What wonder that the book-hungry apprentice loved this man, and in later years, when fame and influence were his, acknowledged a debt to him which could never be discharged! The books which Robert Collyer read in these years are not known to us to any very great ex- tent. We have the record that on a certain Christmas day, when for some forgotten reason

OF ROBERT COLLYER 71

he could not go home, he found solace in a bor- rowed copy of Washington living's "Sketch Book." A reference to "The Vicar of Wakefield" reveals the fact that this was the first novel he had ever read. A chance reminiscence brings us the word that "on a day I can still recall, a still November day, when the mist lay on the halmes and the yellow sunshine touched the crags on the moor. Cooper came to me with 'The Last of the Mohicans,' and almost persuaded me to be an Indian." Still again he recalls the early day when he was led to read Scott's Waverly novels by a religious book which denounced them as immoral, "and gave quotations to prove it." Macaulay's "Essay on Bacon" was encountered at this time and deeply admired. Very cu- rious is his statement in a letter read at the fiftieth anniversary celebration of Dr. William Henry Furness, of Philadelphia, "Some years before I emigrated to America, my soul clove to him as I sat one day in a little thatched cottage in the heart of Yorkshire, and read 'The Journal of a Poor Vicar.' "

These memories are probably a not inaccurate indication of the kind of literary material that he most eagerly devoured. It is doubtful if he trav- elled very far with John Dobson on his journeys of intellectual exploration into the wilderness of

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Scotch metaphysics. Philosophical and theo- logical treatises were read, of course, just as everything that was a book was read. But his early passion for Burns and Shakespeare, his later love for Scott and Lamb, Dickens, Thacke- ray and ISIacaulay, and his unfailing delight in biography, history and folk-lore, show clearly in which direction he inclined. In these early years, as in later years, he read not in any deliberate or systematic way, but almost wholly for the mere joy of reading. And it is certain that it was not until many years later, when the process of evalu- ation was not wholly an unnatural one, that he came to appreciate the significance of what he was doing in this early time. "There was really no idea," he wrote, "of the good which might come out of it; the good lay in the books into which I must plunge my soul headlong, impas- sioned by the beauty and salt of truth. I had no more idea of being a minister, than that I should be here to tell this story. But now give a young man passion like this for anything, for books, business, painting, teaching, farming, mechanics, or music, I care not what, and you give him a lever to lift his world, and a patent of nobility, if the thing he does is noble. So shall I not call this my college course, — a very poor college and a very poor course, and in all these years there

OF ROBERT COLLYER 73

has been no time when I have not felt a little sad that there should have been no chance for me at a good education and training ; but such a chance as there was, lay in that everlasting hunger to read books." And a chance, may we not add, not merely for mental but for moral training as well. These years, as we have seen, had their perils, which the wholesome tradition of the old home might not have overcome, had it not been for other and co-operating influences. And of these, by all odds the most potent was the com- panionship of books. "They were of worth to me then," said the Doctor in a moment of confession, "to help me along a bit in the right direction; for they were good books which fell into my hands, and all the seed did not fall in thorny ground." And so the years passed — with hard work, long rambles on the moors, occasional visits home, congenial friends, beloved books! It was largely a wholesome life, with little to challenge in any serious way the young blacksmith's native worth. In 1844, on his twenty-first birthday, he was re- leased from his apprenticeship, but continued, without interruption, his labour at Birch's anvil. It is interesting to note that, in later years, Dr. Collyer was inclined to assert that he was never much of a workman — certainly no such master artisan as his father — for his heart, as he said,

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was far more in his books than in his hammer. But there is nevertheless good evidence that he must have been something more than an ordi- nary artisan. The chief item on this count must ever be the famous iron gates which he made for the parish church-yard at Ilkley. These were "as homely as a barn door,'' according to his testimony — so homely that the thought of them haunted the Doctor in after-time, and made him resolve that, if he could ever find the money, he would some day replace them by a new pair made by an artist. A full half-century- after the gates had left his forge, however, the Doctor, on a return visit to Ilkley, took occasion to examine them, and to his immense satisfaction discovered that not a rivet had sprung "in the clanging back and forth tlirough all the years." 3Iore than a dozen years later still, it was my privilege to see these gates, and my equal joy to discover that they were still in first class condition. Xor did I find them so '"homely" as the Doctor had al- ways pictured them!

Further evidence of Collyer's solid work as a smith is found in the fact that when John Birch died in 1846, he thought higlily enough of his twenty-three year old assistant to leave him the forge in his will. The Lord of the Manor, to whom the property belonged, however, would not

OF ROBERT COLLYER 75

have it so, as he felt that Collyer was too young to manage the business. So the shop was let to a master smith, Sampson Speight by name, of Mid- dleton; and Robert was hired at 18 shillings a week to take charge of the work. This was a fortunate chance, as it happened, for it left him free to venture elsewhere, when Ilkley was no longer home to him. Had the forge become his own at this critical moment, it is at least possible that the whole course of his after life might have been changed.

Although not technically a master, Robert was now to all intents and purposes his own man. Business prospered, and within a short time he was earning the highest wage for a smith of a pound a week. This looks small to us to-day, but it was enough in the England of the '40s to main- tain a home and keep a fire burning on the hearth, and thus to make inevitable a wife, as Ben Frank- lin pointed out long years ago. It was in June, 1846, that Collyer married Harriett Watson, an Ilkley girl, twenty-one years of age. Of the courtship we know little, save that it was con- ducted under some difficulties, as she was a work- ing girl as he was a working lad, and their time was scant. Xor was this available time always the most propitious. "I lost my heart in May," he writes, "and spent the summer trying to se-

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cure another to fill the vacancy. We were both busy week-days, and so we took Sunday evenings. I counted thirteen Sundays in succession on which it rained, and we had to court under an umbrella."

All this was forgotten when the banns were said, the union joined, and the lad and his wife safely ensconced in a house on the north side of Church street. Here they passed the first radiant days of married life ; here in due season, on July 5, 1847, was born a son, Samuel; and here for many a happy day still were cherished the con- fident and eager hopes of youth. Robert CoUyer had travelled a toilsome if not unwholesome road since the hour when, as a youngster of eight, he had begun his labours in the mill at Blubber- houses. Now seventeen years later, a sturdy artisan of twenty-five, he had found his work, established his home, and was rearing his family. It is probable that, had anybody asked him at this time, he would have said that his life was plotted out for him to the very end. And yet, as a matter of fact, it had not even begun!

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CHAPTER IV

CRISIS AND CHANGE

1848-1850

— "Then the memory comes of a change through a great sorrow which befell me^ when my life was dark in the shadow of death." — R. C. in "Some Mem- ories^" page 28.

In 1842 there befell the first of a series of like- events which shook the heart of our young man, at first as a slight tremor moves the ground, and then rent it as an earthquake, till all things were as "chaos and black night."

On May 29 of this year, his half-brother, Wil- liam Wells, the son of Mrs. Collyer by her first marriage, died at the age of twenty-three. The oldest of the family of children in the home, Wil- liam had been a close companion of Robert through all the years of childhood and early youth. The two had played together on the moors, worked together in the factory, and slept together in the loft of the old stone cottage. In his early manhood, William was stricken with

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tuberculosis, contracted as a boy in the cotton- mill, and had for some time been peculiarly de- pendent for strength and comfort upon his younger brother. His passing, while in many ways a relief, was yet the snapping of a link which had been close-bound from the very first, days of life.

Two years later, in July, 1844, there came the word that Robert's father had dropped dead at his anvil. In 1839, something over a year after the boy's departure for Ilkley, the family had re- moved from Blubberhouses to Leeds, where Samuel had obtained favourable employment at the machine works of Mr. Peter Fairbairn. It was here that he died. He had never been sick a day in his life, but for some time before this had now and again felt a peculiar dizziness, which had served as a slight warning to his family of what was coming. Young Robert, however, had heard nothing of this in Ilkley, and received the news of his father's death, therefore, as a light- ning stroke from a clear sky.

Another interval of two years brought the death of his master, "Jacky" Birch, to which reference has already been made. The circum- stances attending this event, rather than the event itself, seem to have made an altogether re- markable impression upon Robert CoUyer's mind.

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For three months after Birch's collapse from drink, writes the Doctor, "I attended to him; and then one morning as I was lifting him, great gouts of blood came jetting out of his chest, and in a few moments he was dead, while I made a pledge to the Islost High that, by his help I would not be buried also in such a grave ; and the result, as I think of it, had something to do w4th the way I must go from the anvil to the pulpit."

Then finally, as a last stroke beside which these other losses were as nothing, came the death of his wife. On February 1, 1849, only a little over two years and a half from the wedding-day, the beloved "lassie" perished in child-birth, and was buried in the village grave-yard with her babe, Jane, who had died three days later, on February 4, laid tenderly in her arms. The home on Church street was straightway closed, and the forlorn father, with his first child Samuel a year and a half old, took refuge in the home of Thomas Stephenson and his wife, which was located next door to the blacksmith shop.

Of this event. Dr. Collyer was strangely ret- icent throughout his life. It constituted a crisis of such moment in his career that he could never pass it by without some mention. But he would refer to it, in writing and in speech, only as "a vast and an awful sorrow," and say no more.

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This was a silence which seems to have begun, as by a kind of necessity, at the first moment of his loss. For he tells us that he consulted not "with flesh and blood," not even with his dearest friend and "good helper," John Dobson. It was as though there were feelings here too deep for words, as well as for tears. From the first black hour of his grief to the last sunny moment of his active years, he kept this experience as a place of holiness which only he might enter. A man, "the windows of (whose) heart" were always wide "open to the day," he yet had deep and at times unexpected reserves; and this memory, as pre- cious as it was pitiful, was the deepest of them aU.

The effect of the tragedy upon the young hus- band and father was immediate and overwhelm- ing. It marked, indeed, the supreme crisis of his career. For the first time in his experience, the beauty seemed to go out of the world and the joy of living to vanish from his heart. For the first time the hammer rang dull and lifeless on the an- vil. For the first time his beloved books failed to hold his mind and stir the deep places of his soul. Friends, even the dearest, were shut out completely from his life. "The secret lay be- tween God and my own soul" is the final word in his autobiography.

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Such a grief, however, though sacred beyond all expression, must have an end, and this ended in "the only refuge there is for us when life grows dark in the shadows of death." Robert Collyer found himself thinking, in his loneliness and sor- row, of the Sunday school on the hill where he had gone as a lad, of the hymns that his father had sung, of the prayers that his mother had heard, of the Bible on the book-shelf in the old stone cottage. In accordance with early habit, he had always attended the Ilkley parish church, but had never been as a young man what is com- monly called "religious." Now, however, his ten- der and deeply wounded heart was ready for a real experience, and it was the blaze of Wesley- anism which was still burning hotly over the northern moors, which "caught" him. Little by little, just how he never explained, he found him- self going to the meetings of the Methodists, his "neighbours and friends" all of them, in a little chapel on the outskirts of the town. Gradually he was moved to tell them "in not many words how it was with (him)," and "they gave (him) a warm welcome." Then, on a famous Sabbath night, he heard a local preacher, Flesher Bland, preach a sermon, "which took a wondrous hold" on him, and "at last the light came." "By heaven's grace," he underwent "a good old-fashioned con-

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version." The ^lethodists took him "on proba- tion," put him in "owd Jim Delves's" class for proper instruction; and in a few weeks received the ardent and regenerated young man into the full communion of the church.

Later events have tended somewhat to obscure, if not to hide, the central importance of this oc- casion in the life of Robert Collyer. In two re- spects at least, however, and both of them vital, this conversion to ]\Iethodism constituted without doubt a critical moment in his career.

On the one hand, it introduced him for the first time to the world of genuine spiritual experience. All through his early days, as we have seen, he lived in an atmosphere of religion, which acted as a determining influence upon his character. The chapel at Bluhberhouses, and the parish churches at Fewston and Ilkley, were familiar places, and the home on the moors as a veritable altar. But the great deeps of the inward spirit had not been uncovered, until the death of the young wife and mother had left him "desolate and afraid"; and even then the living waters there confined were left untouched until there came this great crisis of the soul. Impressive evidence of what Dr. Collyer himself thought of the signifi- cance of this moment in his life, is given in a pas-

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sage in his essay on William Ellery Channing.^ Speaking of a similar experience in the early ca- reer of the great Unitarian leader, he says, "It is the habit of our liberal faith to make light of what our orthodox brethren call a change of heart, conversion, and the new birth; but I say that, once truly apprehended, this change of heart, or conversion, is the most essential human experience of which I have any knowledge, and of all men in the world it is most essential to the man who is called to be an apostle separated unto the gospel of God. It is that point in the his- tory of human souls at which we pass from the first man of the earth earthy, to the second man which is the Lord from heaven. ... It lifted Wesley out of his posturing and pondering into the front rank among apostles, made a new man of Thomas Chalmers, and taught Thomas Guth- rie to teach ragged schools. And so, sweet as he was, and pure, and true, Channing had to go through the travail of the new birth before he could begin to live his life and do his work; he had to give himself utterly to God — to count moral attainment secondary, and supreme love to the Supreme Love, the end of all striving. . . . This is Methodism, you say! Well, it will be a long time before I deride this element in

^ See "Clear Grit," pages 17T-178.

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Methodism, fairly and truly understood. I believe in it with all my heart."

A second result of this conversion was the great and epoch-making discovery that he was dowered with the divine gift of speech. Long since, dur- ing earlier years, in his frequent wanderings over the moors, he had found himself orating to the landscape as though prompted by some eager spirit within his soul. "Something would set me thinking and talking back, as we say, with no audience but the moor sheep that were all about me, and would look up in wonder as to what it all meant, and then say. Baa." But in the Meth- odist chapel he had a more appreciative audience, and the spirit within him had a better chance. Going night after night to the prayer-meetings, he became accustomed to standing on his feet and bearing witness to his experience of religion. Lit- tle by little he discovered that his good neigh- bours heard him gladly, and were deeply moved by the fervent words that came pouring forth out of his heart. Nor was he the only one that made this discovery. For the people themselves were soon aware that they were listening to a prophet and were resolved to use him. One day old Mas- ter Delves was absent from his class, and Tom Smith, a member, speaking up from across the room, urged young Collyer to lead that night.

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He was frightened, and protested. But Smith was persistent. "Nah, lad," was his word, "tha mun lead t'class to-neet; tha can do't if tha tries." The decision to try was a momentous one, for it was in reality the casting of the die for a life-time. But taking hold, he led with complete success, as had been anticipated, and shortly thereafter he was himself made leader of a class.

"Then, some weeks later, the preacher in charge of the churches in our dale came to see me and tell me this story — ^how the brethren in the local conference had risen up one by one and said it had been borne in on them that I had a call to preach. They were rustical men who made their own living as artisans or small farmers, and preached on Sunday and 'find yourself for the love of God and of human souls. Now what do you think of it, the preacher said? And I an- swered, I thought they were right — I was ready when he was ready to give me a chance. Are you sure? he said. Yes, I answered, and went to work when I got home to think out a sermon."

From this time on, he was a lay-preacher. Every Sunday, when the fires were banked in the forge and the leathern apron laid aside, the stalwart young blacksmith went trudging across the moors or over the hills, to meet some little group of Methodists and speak to them of the

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deep things of the spirit. Sometimes he talked in little chapels; more often in kitchens or tap- rooms or workshops; once in a while, like the great John Wesley himself, out under the open skies, by some cross-roads or in some harvest field. Then on the Monday'- the fires were blazing again in the smithy, and the hammer ringing with a right good-will upon the anvil. Gradu- ally, under the influences of these new experi- ences, the young man found beauty creeping back into the world, and peace and joy taking their wonted places in his heart. His work began to hold him as before. His books were again the solace and inspiration of every moment that he could call his own. His friends were gathered again into his embrace, and beloved John Dobson was received once more into the sacred and secret places of his soul. Sorrow had endured for a night, but joy had come with the morning!

The experiences of the young preacher in his apostolic ventures were varied, and furnished vast amusement as well as tender thought in the recollections of after years. The first appoint- ment was three miles up the river, at "a gaunt place" called Addingham, "and, as I found, to a handful of hearers. The sermon was all ready. It was divided into three parts. The firstly and lastly were my own; the secondly I stole" from

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the sermon of a good Scotch divine, McCheyne by name, published in the "Christian Treasury." Now "this was what came of my first sermon. You must use no notes, this was the order, so I had none, but stumbled along somehow to the end. . . . After all was over, as I wended home, sud- denly as if a voice had cried Halt, I halted, for it came to me in a flash that I had forgotten that brave and wonderful secondly, far away the best word I had to say; while a dear friend and brother preacher met me not long after and told me how he had stood behind a screen to listen and thought fairly well of the sermon as a first effort, but there was one curious thing about it I must bear in mind. There seemed to be a wide gap between the firstly part and the lastly! And twenty-five years after, when we met in Canada, I told him what was the matter with that first effort, and how by good rights my text should have been, 'Thou shalt not steal.' While in all honesty I may say that from then until now I have stood true to Paul's exhortation, Let him that stole, steal no more.

"I make a clean breast of this," continues the Doctor, "for two reasons. First, my sin found me out. Now if there are degrees in sin, it might be thought that a man who steals one-third of a sermon, is only one-third as bad, shall we say, as

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the man who steals a whole sermon; still I was in for it all the same, because St. James says truly, or did to me, 'Whosoever shall offend in one point, he is guilty of all.' So I was cast back on myself, while there was cold comfort in the thought that I had meant to do a mean thing, and had failed to do it. This is the first reason why I have felt free to tell the story, and the second is that this offence opened the way to my ordina- tion as a Methodist local preacher.

"I had no special eagerness to try again," con- tinues the Doctor, "and thought they would not want me, but they did not know my secret and said I must try again. So the good old man in charge sent me to a farmhouse one Sunday on the lift of the moor, where they only had preaching now and then, and where I suppose he thought poor provender might pass where the feasts were few and far between.

"It was in June. I can see the place still, and am aware of the fragrance of the wild uplands stealing through the open lattice in bars of sun- shine to mingle with the pungent snap of the peat fire on the hearthstone, which gives forth the essence of the moorlands for a thousand years. And I mind still how heavy my heart was that afternoon. . . . Still I must try, and mind my good mother's words, who would say to us, No

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matter how poor you are, children, don't look poor and don't tell. They were simple-hearted folk up there of the old Methodist brand, eager and hungry for the bread of life, and very ready to come in with the grand Amen. The big farm kitchen was full of them, and they were just the hearers to help a poor fellow over the sand bar on the lift of their full hearts. So they sang with a will — and in all the world where will you hear such singing with a will as in old Yorkshire and Lancashire! Then I must pray with them. . . . Then the time for the sermon came after another hymn, when some stammering words came to my lips and then some more, while gleams of light began to play about my parable. And their eyes began to shine who listened, while now and then the Amens came in for a chorus from the chests of men who had talked to each other in the teeth of the winds up there from the times of the Sax- ons and the Danes. And now after all these years I still feel sure it was given me that afternoon what I should say and given them to answer, while I might say by grace I was saved through faith, but then you see this would still leave me tilting with a borrowed plume, because the faith would be mine, and I had none worth the name of my own.

"So the service ended and then the good man

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of the house came and laid his hands on me and said very tenderly, 'My lad, the Lord has called thee to preach His gospel. The Lord bless thee and make thee faithful in His work,' and all the people said Amen. . . . When I think of that afternoon on the moor side, I feel I would not like to exchange this simple ordination of mine from the heart and hands of the old farmer for that of any holiness or eminence on earth. And again this is a story with a purpose, or else I would not tell it. That invasion from on high helped greatly to put me in heart, and deepen the intuition, shall I call it, that I had a call to preach, and need not filch from Scot or lot for what I must say, as one to whom a full and clear spring has been revealed need not care for the cistern." Another wonderful memory of these early days of prophesying was that of the Sunday when he first preached in the home chapel at Ilkley. Ru- mours of the ordination sermon far away on the moors must have been carried back promptly to the town, for it was on the very next Sunday evening that he was invited to preach to his own folks. Dr. Collyer records that he was proud of this appointment, as well he might be; and the text was chosen and the sermon prepared for the occasion with especial care. It was plainly what is known as an "effort," but later years retained

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only the recollection of the thorn planted in the flesh by a certain shoemaker, "a thoughtful man," who failed lamentably in his task of being prop- erly impressed!

The question as to what kind of preaching was done by the ardent young blacksmith in these first days of apostolic pioneering is not difficult to answer in the light of the evidence available. Dr. Collyer himself never cherished any fond illusions. Recalling the fact that he was invited by the JNIethodist elder to preach "for nothing a Sunday and find myself," he comments sagely that this was "mighty poor pay, but then it was mighty poor preaching." The criticisms passed by certain of his friends and neighbours would seem to bear out the accuracy of this judgment. The shoemaker's thorn above referred to on the occasion of the Ilkley discourse, was none other than the following harsh verdict on the evening's work. "Ah want to speak to tha, lad," said the honest listener on the next morning, as Robert Collyer "proud of (his) effort," passed the door of the cobbling shop on his way to the forge. "Ah went to hear tha preach last night." "Did tha?" was the eager inquiry. "Does tha w^ants to knaw what ah thought of it," continued the im- perturbable shoemaker. "Well, if tha wants to knaw, ah w^ant to tell tha. Tha'U never mak a

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preacher while tha lives!" Then, seeing how his harsh criticism had pained and depressed the budding preacher, and being a kind-hearted fel- low, he quickly added, "Don't mistake what ah mean. Tha won't make a preacher for us in t' Methodist church. Tha may do somewhere else, but tha won't do for us. When tha preaches a sermon tha must say, 'Thus saith the Lord,' and not lose thi way reasoning about it. Ah fear tha'll want to reason ower much, an' if tha does tha'U have to git away."

Somewhat more comforting, and certainly much fuller of understanding, was the comment of another neighbour on the same sermon in the Ilkley chapel. "I met the miller," said Dr. CoUyer, telling the tale in after years, "and he said, *Ah heard tha preach last night.' I said, *Did you, sir?' He said, 'Ah'll tell tha what they're going to do wi' thee. They're going to make a spare rail of thee — they'll put thee into every gap there is. Now thee look out.' "

That the preaching of Robert CoUyer in these days of apostleship to the Yorkshire Methodists was crude, rough, unformed in the extreme, may be not unsafely conjectured. It is impossible to conceive, even in the light of later extraordinary achievements, that this young and untrained ar- tisan developed at this time anything other than

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the most elemental qualities of utterance. And yet, from the beginning, there must have been a full supply of that pithy wisdom and homely wit which never failed him to the end, much of that vigour, originality and native charm which were so supremely his characteristics in his best days as a preacher, and something even of that poetic beauty, sweet human tenderness and profound understanding of the common heart of man, which remained forever the real secret of his power. Certainly there was spontaneity if noth- ing more — that spontaneity of thought and speech which is as refreshing as the full tide of a sum- mer stream, and to the shrewd, sharp-witted, but all too often tongue-tied denizens of the country- side, as glad a miracle as "the over-plus of blos- som" in the spring. The canny elder of the home district knew what he was doing when he asked this whole-souled young blacksmith to preach at Addingham. The full-voiced dales- men in the farm kitchen were not deceived when they chanted their chorus of Amens in answer to the lad's appeals. The devout old farmer was moved by a real prompting of the Holy Ghost when he laid his hands upon the preacher's head and pledged him solemnly to God's service. Even the observations of the shoemaker and the miller show the impression of rude but genuine power

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which their townsman's word had made upon them. There were times, of course, when strength seemed to fail him; but more frequent I must be- lieve was such an experience as that *'on the lift of the moor" when "it was given (him) ," he knew not how nor why, "what (he) should say." The true spring of living water was in him, and it needed only the deep-cut channel to give it easy and abundant flow.

"There was many a Sunday," he says, "when it was like dropping buckets into empty wells. There was no preparation possible for me like that so priceless through the books and masters. I must come at my purpose in some other way. But now and then as I would be hard at work^ some thought would grow luminous for earth and heaven, and be as the seed that groweth secretly, and then there would be no trouble when the right time came for the reaping. Or one would elude me, do what I would. Yet there would be a day of redemption when the truth I could not capture would lift me on its wings and turn the croak I had felt I must make into a new song. One of these Sundays I well remember. I had walked twelve miles to preach, with my heart like a lump of lead, for there seemed to be no ac- cent of the Holy Ghost in the word I must say. But it was rare listening and good answer in a

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small chapel I found in an old farm kitchen, and I spoke two hours and wist not of the time, nor as it seemed did they."

There was something over a year of this preach- ing up and down the dale. Six days in the week, it was hard work at the anvil; and then, on the seventh day, it was the glad release to preach the gospel near or far. Into this new and glorious ac- tivity, Robert Collyer seemed to be thrusting firm and strong the new roots of a new life. But as time went on, it became more and more evident that the roots were not holding. The earthquake ofsudden sorrow had broken up the soil too widely and deeply for him really to catch hold again and flourish. The new planting must have new soil. Therefore did he ponder emigration — at first to Australia, w^hither he had offers of help for the journey, but finally and at last definitely to America.

The idea of this venture to strange lands across the seas was in the beginning an echo of the hopes which his parents had early cherished, as we have seen. "Before I was born," he says, "my father and mother wanted to emigrate to this new world, but they could not raise the money to bring them over, and all through my childhood I can still hear them speaking of their regret that they would never be able to cross the sea to these

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states. And so I grew up with the longing to come here, I think, in the very marrow of my bones."

As time went on, the economic motive began to play a prominent part in his speculations. Life in England in those days was a hard and often wearying struggle for bare subsistence. The big loaf had not yet come into the English labourer's home as it did after the repeal of the Corn Laws. "Fifty cents," writes the Doctor, "was all you got for shoeing a horse all round, and as your Yorkshire horse has big feet, this left me a very small margin." Better living than this was wanted, "because I always believed that good living, if you take care of yourself, has something to do with a good life." He had no extravagant financial ambitions. "My ideal fu- ture," he writes, "was not a great one. My whole ambition was to make m}^ way as a blacksmith. But I wanted a place where I could have a little home of my own, with books to read, and the chance to educate my children. I mind that I pictured to myself a quiet little cottage in a Pennsylvania village, where I should live with my wife and my children yet to come. In my picture I painted a pretty library, and plenty of ]»ooks, and a garden. I told my desires to my friends. They all tried to dissuade me from them.

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They offered me letters to get work anywhere save in America. But at last I started, and, as I expected, when I got here, I found every one ready to help me along. At our first Christmas dinner we had a turkey smoking on the table — a bird which in England I had no more thought we should ever eat of than I did of eating the American eagle."

Other motives also had their determining influ- ence on this adventure. Thus Dr. Collyer writes in one place that he wanted "not to be a cipher in a monarchy, but a citizen in a republic. I had no vote; I wanted one, and also to learn how to use it honestly and well. I had to bow and cringe before men who had rank and title. I hated to do it, as they say one I must not name hates holy water."

But no one of these motives, nor all of them to- gether, perhaps, might have availed, had it not been for the crisis and change recorded in this chapter. The death of his young wife, with the conversion to Methodism which followed, con- stituted the profoundest experience he had ever known. The old familiar world was suddenly lost, and a new world found. Life, which had hitherto been a simple round of working, playing, reading, living, now took on something of the stem aspects of duty and sacrifice. Religion,

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which had always been a sober reality, now be- came transfigured into an enthusiasm, a convic- tion, a consuming passion. In his sorrow, he had wandered blind and stumbling into waste places, and been lost. As a result of his conversion, he had recovered his sight and found his way into quiet paths of peace. Lender the influence of 3Iethodist teaching and habit, he had laid hold at last on those well-springs of spiritual insight, those living fountains of human sympathy, those great deeps of faith in the power and the love of God, upon which he drew so abundantly and un- failingly in his later years as pastor and preacher. In the most hteral sense of the word, he had undergone a "new birth," entered upon a new life, become a new man. What, therefore, more natural, nay inevitable, than that he should be- gin to dream of other lands, and at last, in due season, like another Abraham, go out, "not knowing whither he went" I He had started all over again in the things of the spirit — why should he not similarly start all over again in the things of the flesh? A new world without, as a reflection or rather expression of the new world within — this had become a necessity!

As early, therefore, as the closing months of 1849, Robert CoUyer had made his decision to emigrate to the L^nited States. It was not easy

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to make the change all at once, so that many weeks passed away before he laid down his ham- mer on "Jacky" Birch's old anvil and closed the smithy door for the last time. By the spring-tide, however, everything was ready, and, as a fitting sjTnbol of the close of the old life in England and the beginning of the new life in America, he pledged hand and heart, on April 9, 18.50, to Ann Armitao^e. daup^hter of a cloth-maker in the town, twenty-eight years of age, 'the woman who was to be by far my better half through more than foiiy years." He had not thought to marry again. The vials of his love would seem to have been empty. But his besetting loneliness, the sight of his motherless child, the need of a wife and home-maker in the new land, above all the tenderness and fidelity of one sweet Ilkley lass, did their perfect work, and in this relation as in others, he resolved to enter upon a new life. Long after this companion of his years had passed away, Dr. Collyer loved to recall the ''memories of a time, when," as he put it in his inimitable speech, 'T saw her sitting in the sunshine on a hill-side, and wondered whether this might not be the woman in all the world that God had placed here for me, who would make good my broken life, which had been stricken with great sorrow. And of a day, not very long after, when the word

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of the Lord came to me, as I most surely believe, saying, *G^t thee out from thy kindred and from thy father's house unto a land that I will show thee': and how it seemed so hard, when we had plighted our troth, to ask this maiden, whose life had lain in fairer lines than mine, to go with me into this unknown world, that I begged that I might come first and find work and start a home. . . . But I can still see the clear shining in her eyes and hear the very tones of her voice as she answered me from the holy book. 'Whither thou goest, I will go, and whither thou lodgest, I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. The Lord do so to me and more also, if aught but death part thee and me.' And then I knew something of the gift that had come to me in the great and loyal heart."

And so, on a Tuesday, April 9, 1850, these two were wed.- On Wednesday they started for Liverpool, leaving the baby, Samuel, in the safe care of Mother Collyer in Leeds, until the home across the seas could be established. On Satur- day, April 13, they "set sail in an old ship called

' "If we had taken stock in omens, there was one at the wedding, for the verv ancient minister who married us, began with the burial service in solonn accents, and the clerk who must sav the Amens, rushed on him, took the book from his hand, and set him right" — R. C. in "Lecture on Dr. Fumess."

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the Rosciu^j and in the t^erage, to seek (their) fortunes in this new - : : _: *

That this departure was easy is not for a mo- ment to be believed. Behind, to be sure, were struggle, weariness, sorrow, and a blind alley; before were opportunity, promise, and an open road. But behind also were all the precious treasures of Robert Collyer's heart. The mother in Leeds, who carried in her face the beauty of those early years in Washbumdale ; the friends in Ilkley town, who had grown to know and love this stalwart smith with the tongue of flame : the pleasant moors aglow with heather and ringing with the songs of birds: the long winter nights close by the fire with open book to enlighten and beguile : the quiet grave by the church where had ended his first love and his first life — ^these were some of the things that he was leaving. And be- fore him also was not merely promise, but tbat **liazard of new fortunes" which is quite as often disaster as it is victory. We may well believe, therefore, that the moment of leave-takins: wrenched the heart. There was comfort in the Bible and its accompanying commentary which first among his few books he had stowed away in his pack: there was joy in the brave young wom- an who had put her hand in his, and resolved to lodge where he lodged, and die where he died;

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there were challenge and inspiration in the ad- venturous path in which together these two had set their feet. But when he turned away for the last time, it must have been his farewell to his mother, his last moment in the quiet after-glow of evening by the unmarked grave, and the blank uncertainty of the future which were uppermost in his thoughts. What did it all mean? Where was he going? When should he return? What was to befall? "I remember," he says, "how I stood at a sharp turn of the road to take a last look at the old place, it might be forever, and how I said to myself — I wonder if I shall ever meet my old comrades again, and if I do, will they be glad to see me, or will they pity me and say, Poor fellow, he made a great mistake. It really was an adventure, which might have touched a stead- ier nerve than mine. I had never been forty miles from the spot in which I was born, never seen a ship or the sea, and didn't know a living soul on this continent I could go to for advice, or for a grasp of the hand."

It was a moment as sad as it was brave. But could he have looked forward as later he was able to look back, he would have been relieved of fu- ture fears if not of past regrets. In after days he saw with clearness that his very decision to go and begin anew was itself the warrant of his sue-

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cess. For this was no idle whim or despairing venture. It was a resolve made of that fibre of creative manhood, which the world can never wholly overcome. "I think I may say," the Doc- tor wrote years afterwards, of this turning-point in his career, "I had my father's and mother's gift in a certain power to hold my own, and to see a thing through when I had once made up my mind." He might, therefore, have been of good cheer, for the future, though hidden, was secure, even as the past.

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CHAPTER V

AMERICA! 1850-1858

"The light ... on these States."— R. C. in "Some Memories/' page 42.

The voyage to America was anything but agree- able. Steamers were crossing the Atlantic, but the Ilkley blacksmith and his bride had no money to spend for time or comfort, and therefore took passage in a sailing vessel. This craft was styled "the good ship Roscius'' in the posters; but our emigrant pair were not many days "out of" Liverpool, before they "concluded that she should have been named the Atrocious, so full she was of evil smells — and the bilge-water in our poor cabin, while the food for which we had paid good money of the realm was so bad that I can imagine no workhouse now in England, or prison, where it would not create a riot." It was an unhappy bridal trip, but it had its ending in just "one month to a day," when on May 11, 1850, the travellers reached New York.

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As they looked upon the city, they realised with a fresh poignancy, their utter loneliness in this new land which was to be their home. Not a soul was here who knew them, or could give them greeting. "I remember," writes the Doctor, *'how we said when we saw the land, How good it would be if there was one man or woman in all that strange new world who would meet us with a welcome, and say, 'Come and tarry with us for a day.' " What wonder that Dr. Colly er con- fesses that they were "lonesome," and that his "own heart was very heavy"!

Furthermore, there was not only lonesome- ness, but anxiety, to trouble them. For, strange as it may now seem, the question as to what kind of treatment they would receive at the hands of the people in America had been a matter for speculation, and even for some little fear, throughout the voyage. Dr. Collyer tells us that he "had read all the books that he could lay (his) hands on" about America, but wanting to know more than books could give, he "had gone before his leave-taking to see a sort of kinsman who had been three times to the States, to seek his for- tune, and said to him. Is there a good chance for a man over there in America? Are the people kind to a stranger? No, he said, there ain't a good chance, and you can do a great deal better here.

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*Whaa them Yankees,' he said in his broad Yorkshire, 'is saa keen and cunning, they'll tak the verra teeth ott o' yer heead, if ye dooant keep yer moath shut.' As he had lost some half-dozen," continues the Doctor, "I didn't like to ask him if 'them Yankees' had got those, but the pros- pect was a little blue."

All fears, however, proved groundless. Before he had set foot on American soil, while he was yet waiting on the ship's deck to land, Collyer heard from the pier a hearty voice in the broad Yorkshire dialect. It was like a breath of heather from the moors, or the song of an upland thrush. He found the speaker to be a tavern- keeper, who had come to the dock in search of guests. Without more ado, the young emigrant placed himself and his wife in the charge of this man. "I felt we should be safe," says the Doc- tor, "as I knew all the Yorkshire ways, and I could form some sort of judgment perhaps of these men who were bound to have my teeth."

His host proved all that could be desired — and so did the second inhabitant of this new land whom he chanced to encounter. On the night of their arrival JNIrs. Collyer was taken ill and needed medicine. "I went to a drug store on Broadway," says the Doctor, "to learn my first lesson and see how it was done. I found the man

OF ROBERT COLLYER 107

was civil and indeed friendly. He asked me if I had just landed, and what I meant to do. It would have been very pleasant to hear so kind a man in England, but here I was on my guard, and so I said to myself, I shall know what you mean when I see what you charge. How much, I said, when the package was pushed over. O, you are very welcome, the good fellow answered, keep your money. You will need it. And then he held out his hand and said, Come in again, I shall be glad to see you. And so I went back to the tavern with my first lesson, and something like a mist in my eyes, thinking of the way in which the very first American man I had met had pulled my teeth."

Here was a heartening start of his life in the new country. It goes far toward explaining his confession of later years, "I fell in love with America the day I landed and have never changed my mind." Further experience only tended to confirm the favourable first impression, as we shall see.

The thought uppermost in Robert Collyer's mind, of course, from the moment of his landing, was that of finding immediate emploj^ment. "About twenty dollars was all we had to start us in this new world," says the Doctor, so that time was short for the idle enjoyment of sight-seeing

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or native hospitality. Two days after their ar- rival in New York, therefore, Robert and his wife started for Philadelphia, which had been the original destination in their minds on leaving England. There was no particular reason for this choice, so far as we know. "When I had made up my mind to come to this new world," says the Doctor, "... and the question came, 'Where shall I alight in that land?' the answer could not be mistaken, 'In Philadelphia.' Why there of all places I could not have told you, but may say in passing that I was a staunch Metho- dist then and believed, as I do still, in answers to prayer when these touch some momentous turn- ing point in our human life. 'To Philadelphia,' the answer came." ^ — And therefore, when he touched these shores, it was to Philadelphia he went.

The joy of the journey, by way of South Amboy and the Delaware, "the cheapest route," lingered in the hearts of the two travellers for many a long year. It was a perfect May day, with orchards in full bloom, new sown farm- lands smiling in the sun, and all the air alive with prophecies of summer. The lovely land-

*In his old age, he wrote to Mrs. James T. Fields, "I decided that Philadelphia should be the place, for I knew no one any- where, and I loved the meaning of that word 'Philadelphia.'"

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scape seemed to hold out its arms in welcome, and to repeat the friendly greeting of the York- shire tavern-keeper and the Broadway druggist. It was therefore with hearts overflowing with life and cheer that they entered the City of Brotherly Love, and made their way to an inn, kept also by a Yorkshireman, which had been recommended to them by their New York host.

A search of the pages of the Philadelphia Ledger the next morning revealed the following advertisement: "Wanted, a blacksmith. Ap- ply to No. 5 Commerce Street." Here was manna in the wilderness! Without a moment's delay, Robert hastened to the address given, ap- plied for the job, and got it. The forge was located in Hammond's hammer factory, at a little place called Shoemakertown,^ seven miles north of Philadelphia, on the Tacony Creek. The work of making claw hammers was new, but the young Yorkshire blacksmith had years of practical experience behind him, and was un- afraid.

The journey to his new home and place of em- ployment brought fresh evidence of the friendli- ness of America. He was to report at the forge the next morning. Bright and early, therefore, he was plodding along the Old York highroad

'Now Ogontz, Pa.

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to Shoemakertown, in what was already a torrid sun. "I was tired," says the Doctor, "and a lit- tle sad, when a gentleman passed in a carriage, looked at me a moment, halted and said, Get in and have a ride. Now I had plodded along the roads in the mother-land when the humour took me, ever since I could remember, and a great many gentlemen had passed me in carriages, but in all my life not one of them had ever said, Get in and have a ride; and so this was some- thing of a wonder. I got into the carriage and we fell into a kindly talk, and my friend got to know almost as much about my life, as I knew myself, in an hour, held out his hand when our ways parted, after saying all sorts of cheerful things about America — and I went on my way thinking of what I had heard about Americans." This was Robert CoUyer's "second lesson," as he called it. "The third lesson was no great matter, but it still lies in my heart with the sweet- ness of a June rose. I had turned down a lane near the end of my journey that day, when all at once I came to a little garden foaming over with lilacs, the blossom I loved best. I could not re- sist gathering a whole lot of them into my arms and burying my face in them as I stood by the fence and just sobbing perhaps over another gar- den, thousands of miles away, when I heard a

OF ROBERT COLLYER 111

step, and saw a woman coming out of the cot- tage. There, I said to myself, I shall hear the rough side of that woman's tongue ; she will want to know what I am 'a-doin' at them air lilacs.' What she did was to say, in the cheeriest way im- aginable. Would you like some lilacs? And when I answered, If you will give me one, please, I shall be ever so glad, she made up a bunch as big as a broom, and handed it over the fence, with a pleasant word and a smile, while I said as I went down the lane. Nether mill- stones are nothing to the hardness of this Ameri- can heart, and how they do draw one's teeth, to be sure!"

One other experience Dr. Collyer always liked to link with these three, and this "the noblest and the best."

"When I got work, (my wife) said she would get work too, and then we should the sooner get a home together. So she took to sewing by the day for a lady near by, but was taken almost at once with a fever she had caught, no doubt, on the ship, — and it was a question of life and death. Well, now, the proper thing, you will say, was to take my wife to the hospital." The woman for whom she was working, however — a Mrs. Thomason, wife of a Presbyterian clergy- man, and a mother with four children — would

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not hear of such a thing. On the contrary, she took Mrs. Collyer into her home, and nursed her as if she had been her very own, until she was well. "Then we said," continued the Doctor, "we can never pay you for this loving kindness. But you have been at expense also ; please let us know how much, and we will make it good just as soon as we can earn the money. But they would not hear of it. They sent us forth with blessing and benediction."

"We were very poor," says Dr. Collyer, "when they poured on our young lives that lovely bene- diction."— Work was secured, however, and the young blacksmith "went at it with a will. I worked until my wife had to wring out my clothes at noon, for another stint at the ham- mers." Hammer-making was a new craft, as we have seen; but he was on "piece work," which put him on his mettle, and soon he was mak- ing twice as much money from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day as he had made in England from 6 A.M. to 7 P.M. Before he left the anvil for good and all, he was making twelve dozen claw- hammers a day, which was a record for the coun- try-side.

As soon as the wife had recovered from the fever, a modest home was found in Shoemaker- town. This was exchanged a year later for "one

OF ROBERT COLLYER 113

much better, in a lovely green lane, away from the forge." Here they remained until the great change nine years later, in 1859. Here "the children came, as I thought they would," says the Doctor; "as welcome as the flowers of May, for I felt that in all human probability I should always be able to feed them and clothe them and keep them warm, and give them the education befitting the children of a poor man." Emma^ was the first to arrive, on February 11, 1851. The second child, Agnes Sheldmerdine, born in

1853, died in infancy. Then came twins. Amy and Alice, who "were only a day old when they were taken." For the second time Mrs. Collyer was seriously ill, and sorrow was heavy upon the home. New courage and hope, however, came with the birth of Harriet Norman* on June 14, 1857. It was after the removal to Chicago in 1859, that the last two children were born — Annie Kennicutt ^ on May 12, 1860, and Robert Staples on January 10, 1862. Meanwhile in

1854, Samuel, the son by the first marriage, was brought over from his grandmother in England to his father in America, by a shopmate in the Shoemakertown factory, a Mr. Gallagher by

' Now Mrs. Hosmer, of Chicago.

* Later Mrs. Joseph Eastman, died September 23, 1903.

•Died February 10, 1886.

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name, who crossed the seas in this year to get his family. It is interesting to note that Samuel's voyage was on the S. S. City of Glasgow, which disappeared, without leaving a trace behind, on the return trip.

The country in which the new home was estab- lished, was one to win the heart. It is true that Philadelphia, the second city in the land, was only seven miles distant ; and Shoemakertown it- self a not too lovely industrial settlement. It is true also that the moors, the dales, the craggy hills of Yorkshire were all unknown. But the flat Pennsylvania countryside had wonders all its own, and soon appeared to the new settlers as "the most beautiful land (they) had ever laid eyes on." Walking out from the ugly factories and squatty homes of the village, they were lost in no time in the green lanes, bordered by lilac hedges and orchard blooms, which threaded the pleasant farm-lands in every direction. Stretches of meadow and pasture, watered by pleasant streams, and broken by occasional clumps of trees, interspersed the wide spaces of cultivated ground. In the spring, the air was heavy with the smell of wild flowers, or of the sodden, upturned soil, and later with the sweet- ness of the new-mown hay; while autumn brought the fragrance of gathered harvests and

OF ROBERT COLLYER 115

dropping fruit. Herds of cows fed quietly in the summer heat ; heavy teams of horses or yokes of oxen raised clouds of dust along the highways ; and workers toiled in the fields, or rested in the shade of spacious and prosperous-looking farm- buildings. Winter, with its frozen ground, shiv- ering stacks of withered corn-stalks, and drifting snows, was less cheerful. But the cutting east winds of the Yorkshire moors were unknown, and long periods of rain and mist a rarity. It is doubtful if Robert Collyer's eyes ever rested on anything in this new country which seemed as lovely to him as the purple heather, or his ear heard music to compare with the song of the Washburn throstle, or his feet trod earth as wel- come as the long slopes to the Wharfedale up- lands. His references through many years to these familiar features of the homeland, show with what fondness his heart clung to what it had first known and loved. But there was a warmth, an abundance, a serenity about this smiling coun- tryside which, in spite of ugly villages here and there like Shoemakertown, had a peculiarly in- gratiating charm, while a certain virgin fresh- ness, suggestive of unspoiled resources, brought constant reminder to the settler from over-seas that he had indeed passed from an old to a new world.

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Such a land brought compensation to the CoU- yers for what they had left behind; and glad re- lief as well from the rather sordid and ugly sur- roundings of Shoemakertown. What was miss- ing was not so much the beauty of the old coun- try, as the companionship of the old friends. It is this which explains, in all probability, the early homesickness of which Dr. Collyer made confes- sion in after years. But this lack was soon sup- plied, not so much perhaps through the essential friendliness of the people, though this was most certainly present, as through that innate quality of personal attraction with which Robert Coll- yer was endowed from the very beginning of his days. There was a wdnsomeness about him which was irresistible. One had but to look upon his open, good-natured countenance, hear the vibrant ring of his voice as it reverberated from his massive chest, feel the warm clasp of his tremendous hand, to love him. Honesty clothed him as a garment; goodwill radiated from his face as a glowing light. Wherever he walked the ways of men, they leaped to meet him, and meeting, took him to their hearts. "The only way to have a friend," says Emerson in his essay on Friendship, "is to be one." This it is which explains the seeming miracle of the drug clerk in New York, the driver on the Old

OF ROBERT COLLYER 117

York road, and the woman of the lilacs in Shoe- makertown. And this it is which explains also the warm hearts which promptly opened all about them in their new home. "We sought no friends," says the Doctor naively, in his "Some Memories;" "they came to us of their own free will." Of course they did — as naturally as the flower turns to the sun or the bee to the blossom. The warmth and sweetness of his soul, reflected in a face of noble beauty, drew all men unto him, even in these days when he was a mere immi- grant, unknown to acquaintanceship, much less to fame. Nor should we forget the wife who was a woman of infinite charm and large capacity of afl*ection. To her no less than to him must be rendered accounting for the doors and hearts which opened to them so promptly. They were a fascinating couple, to know whom was to love and serve.

On the very first day in the new home, the good woman next door came in with a dish of stewed tomatoes. On the same day, an old Quaker lady, "well up among the nineties," came hobbling across the road on her crutch, to give them greeting. Another neighbour, Old Michael, a representative of the German stock which was thickly planted in this particular district, early became a fast friend of the new blacksmith.

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Albert Engle, the store-keeper, and Charles Bos- ler, the niiller, trusted and loved him. And so, little by little, the niches left vacant by absent friends were filled, and the lonely hearts made happy. When the two young voyagers landed in Xew York, there was no friend to give them welcome; no familiar spot to which they could turn for refuge ; no opening, so far as they knew, for employment and the establishment of a home. Within a month, all these were supphed. Amer- ica had become to them as their own dear land across the seas.

It was in mid-May, 1850, that Robert Colly er went to work at the forge in Hanmiond's fac- tory. All went well until July, when '"we had to stop, to put in a new boiler. I could not af- ford to lay off," says the Doctor, "I must have a job of some sort." So for two weeks he tossed hay in a neighbour's meadow. Then, when the crop was ingathered, he sought out his employer, !Mr. Hammond, and asked for a job on the new boiler. There was no opening, save that of car- rying a hod for the brick-layers; but this was eagerly accepted. "So I carried a hod," boasted the Doctor, "for a dollar a day, to make ends meet; and in doing this I had to go through the nastiest hole in the wall with my load of bricks you ever saw, fuU of jagged ends, and the result

OF ROBERT COLLYER 119

was that on Saturday night I had more perfectly new and original bumps on that poor head of mine than j-our phrenologists ever dreamed of." There was balm, however, for the sensitive soul, as well as the bruised head, when at the end the "dear helpmeet" took the tired hod-carrier to her heart, and blessed him with her "Well done."

The lay-off, fortunately, was of short dura- tion, and Collyer was soon back at the anvil. Then followed a period of seven years, when work was steady and wages good. At one time, the young blacksmith was earning as much as fifty dollars a month, but such an income was possible only during the cool months.

Then, like a bolt out of the blue, came "the fearful panic of 1857, when ever^i;hing came to a deadlock." From October to the following March, the fii-es were out and the anvil silent. The situation in the little home, as in hundreds of thousands of similar homes throughout the land, was desperate. Here was the mother, not any too well ; three children clinging to her knee ; and savings sadly depleted by two lay-offs, one "with a broken arm, and again with a splint of steel in my eye," and by the recurring illness "for weeks together" of Mrs. Collyer. In such a plight any odd job, however humble, was wel- come. "I took to whatever I could get to do,"

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is the Doctor's word. "I did not care, you see, what the job was, so it was honest work, because a dollar a day meant independence, while to fold your hands meant beggary."

For awhile he worked at digging a well for a neighbour. Then he laboured "for a spell" on the turnpike. A gentleman long years after told him that he had seen him at this time breaking stones ; but it is the Doctor's testimony that this, if true, passed from his memory. Such ventures helped to keep the home together, and the chil- dren fed and clothed ; but they would have failed in the end, had not good friends who knew the worth of the sturdy Yorkshireman, as we have seen, come gallantly to the rescue. "Don't worry, Collyer," was the word of Albert Engle, "come to my store for anything that is needed in the family; it will be all right by-and-by." ® "Come to my mill for all the flour and meal you

• "Two weeks ago this very morning, Albert Engle died. His son wrote me at once that 'Father died this morning very sud- denly, and Mother wants to know if you won't come down and take the funeral service/

"I went to the old town, my home so many years ago, and then and there I told the large gathering present the story of my acquaintance and intimacy for forty-six years with the departed one, and spoke of him as the good husband, the good father, the good citizen, the good friend, and the good merchant, and said to them that I would pledge my confidence that Albert Engle did not possess one unclean dollar when he died." — R. C, in an interview, October 12, 1896.

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need," said Charles Rosier, "I can trust you." And George Heller, landlord, asked no rent during the distressful period. "I must record their names in my book of life," wrote Dr. CoU- yer in his autobiography; so I know that he would have me also record them here as those who made good the ancient promise, "Before you ask, I will answer."

Thus, by hard labour of his own, and by the helping hands of friends, Collyer "pulled through, none the worse for the panic." By early summer the fires were lighted again; for two more years, his hammer rang blithely on the anvil ; and the home prospered in its humble way as never before.

Life during these nine years at the forge in Shoemakertown was very similar, in all outward aspects at least, to what it had been in Ilkley. The hours of labour were shorter, the wages larger, and the general standard of living, there- fore, higher in normal times than had ever been dreamed of in the old country. But the drama of experience was much the same. At the cen- tre, of course, was the day's work. ^lorning and evening brought the companionship of wife and children, friendly intercourse with neighbours, occasional political or religious discussion in the stores or at the cross-roads. "My neighbours,"

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he says, "wanted me to take out papers of citi- zenship, but I told them I would wait awhile. They had been used to the country all their lives — I wanted to study it for a time." Often on Sundays and holidays, especially in summer, there were strolls down the green lanes, and over the meadows. Everything outside of the routine of the anvil, however, was tempered on this side of the Atlantic, as it had been on the other, by Robert Collyer's twin passions of read- ing and preaching.

The love of books was burning as hotly in his heart as ever — perhaps more hotly, to the extent at least that the increased income made it possi- ble for a time to add fuel to the flames. "From the first," writes the Doctor, "I bought books, and denied myself beer, because I could not af- ford both. I liked beer, but I liked books bet- ter." Before many months had passed, how- ever, the purchase of even an occasional volume became an extravagance which the good wife, with a cautious eye to the future, refused to tol- erate. The expense of the new home, the arrival of little children with mouths to feed and bodies to clothe, the support of the mother^ in Leeds which Robert shared now and for many years to

' "Father had no business to succeed to, and no property. Left Mother and five of us. . . . Dear old lady living yet. We all

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come with his brother, the need of saving against an evil day, all these conditions made necessary the use of every penny earned by the hard labour at the anvil. When illness of the mother, or ac- cident to the father, came along, the fiscal situa- tion became serious. And when there came un- employment, as in 1850 and 1857, there was positive disaster. The purchase of books, even second-hand ones, under such circumstances, be- came impossible. Now and again the young blacksmith, tempted by books as a toper by beer, yielded to the weaknesses of the flesh; and then desperate were the endeavours to conceal his of- fence from the watchful mother at home. He tells of one delightful occasion when he was guilty of expending almost a whole dollar for a thick volume of Littel, which had proved abso- lutely irresistible. He "durst not" bring it home; so he hid it carefully away under a currant bush in the yard, with the idea of rising early the next morning and smuggling the damning object into the house. His wiles were successful; and it was some days before the wife discovered the volume in his hand. "My dear," was the in- stant query, "where did you get that book?"

take care of her and hope she will live to be a hundred." — R. C. in letter (undated) written early in his Chicago days to Miss Alice Baker.

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"Oh," replied the husband softly, and with a fine nonchalance, "I have had this book some time I"

By such desperate ventures as this was a home library slowly but surely built up. In ad- dition to the Bible and commentary referred to above, Robert Collyer had brought some sixteen or eighteen other books with him across the sea. In the nine years at Shoemakertown, from 1850 to 1859, he reckons that he spent in all for books not more than ten dollars. Still, books were cheap — this was the age of pirated editions ; and what with judicious purchases of second-hand copies, and occasional gifts, the volumes on the shelves slowly but surely grew in number. By 1859, he can write in a personal letter, "I have gathered a good library in this land of cheap coarse books — essayists, poets, history, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica (new edition), with plenty others."

Not to such limited resources, however, could he be confined. Such a thirst for reading as beset this man, must find other springs of water ; and, fortunately for him, they were at hand. "I presently heard," he writes, "of a library in the small town of Hatboro, six or seven miles away, six one way and seven the other. A fine old farmer had found, a long while ago, that this was

OF ROBERT COLLYER 125

the noblest use he could make of a good deal of his money — to build up a library away among the rich green lands ; and so there it was waiting for me, with its treasure of good books. I see them again, as they stand on the shelves, and think I could walk right in and lay my hands on those that won me most potently, and cast their spell again over my heart — I may mention Haw- thorne among them all as the author I found there for the first time who won my heart for good and all, as we may say, and holds it still. Then I found a great treasure in no long time in Philadelphia, that I could no more exhaust than you can exhaust the spring we have been glancing at by drinking, which dips down toward the deepness of the world. I was still bound fast by the anvil, for this was our living, but there was my life, so far as good books could make it, rich for me and noble, in the great li- brary again seven miles away. So what matters about the hard day's work at the anvil, while there was some new volume to read when the day's work was done, or old one to read with an ever new delight? My new book or old one, with the sweet, green lane in the summer time where I could walk while the birds sang their native song, and the fragrance of the green things growing floated on the soft summer air.

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and the friends in winter, with the good wife busy about the room and the little ones sleeping in their cribs — I look back to those times still, and wonder whether they were not the best I ever knew. I was reading some lines the other day, in an old English ballad written three hun- dred years ago, and they told the stoiy of those times —

*0 for a booke and a shadie nook, ejther in doore or

out, With the green leaves whisp'ring overhede, or the

street cries all about, Where I maie reade, all to my ease, both of the New

and Olde, For a right good Booke, whereon to looke, was better

to me than Golde.' "

Was there ever a more msatiable reader? Xight and morning, by the fireside in winter and in the open fields in summer, at the anvil and in the preaching, it wa5 always a book which was the intimate companion and comforter. "In my life," says the Doctor in another place, "from fourteen to the day (a certain friend) met me in Germantown, there was no spare moment I did not read. I read while the iron was heatmg in the fire, while I ate my meals, from quitting work to bed-tune, and in the early morning. My

OF ROBERT COLLYER 127

poor wife often said, 'I cannot get you to talk as other husbands do. Look up and let me hear your voice.' I fear I was a dumb dog; but it is a comfort to remember I was never a mean dog. But this was the substance of my life from 30 to about 56.'' His oldest son, Samuel, in an autobiographical statement, says, "One of my duties in those days (in Shoemakertown) was to carry his luncheon to him at the shop, and I have a distinct recollection of seeing him many times reading a book while blowing the bellows." A Quaker woman of the neighbourhood, who saw much of him these days, in reminiscing in later years, testified that he was a tireless reader. "I can see him now," she said, "with his somewhat shabby coat, carrying a book in his pocket. He was always reading. He kept a book by him constantly while about his work; and when he went am^where after his work, he always carried a book. That was how he obtained his knowl- edge."

As to what this knowledge was, or what books he read at this time, we have information as scant, strangely enough, as that pertaining to the former days in Yorkshire. ]Mention of the ear- lier favourites of his youthful years — Bunyan, Goldsmith, Burns and Shakespeare — recurs more than once. He now adds Hawthorne to

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the list, as we have seen. Charlotte Bronte was first discovered at this time. Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was read with en- thusiasm as soon as it appeared. The amusing story about Littel indicates that literature of a more serious character had as strong an appeal as pure literature. The fact of