Thomas Gold Appleton

How sad it looks to see his name stretched out at full length and shrouded in all its syllables! For Westminster Abbey did not know Ben Jonson better by his shortened appellation than we of Boston knew our dear familiar friend as Tom Appleton.

He leaves a deep and lasting void in our lesser social world by his departure. There is no one at all like him, to fill his place. His outline does not seem to have been traced by one of the regular patterns of humanity ; it was as individual, as full of unexpected curves and angles, as the notched border of an indenture.

Men differ chiefly in the laws according to which their thoughts are associated with each other. His mind coupled remote ideas in a very singular way. Sometimes it was imagination, glancing from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven ; sometimes fancy, sparkling like a firefly, one moment here, the next there ; sometimes wit, flashing from the sudden collision of two thoughts that met like flint and steel ; less frequently humor, for humor is fire in damp tinder, and burns too slowly for the swift impatience of quick-kindling intelligences. But whatever the special character of his thought, it came sudden, instantaneous, as the glitter of a scymetar.

It was vigorous exercise to talk with him when his fancy was in its incandescent and scintillating mood. The fastest conversational roadster found him a running mate hard to keep up with. The most free-gaited of talkers was apt to flag when strained to hold his own with a companion of such electric vivacity.

He was a dangerous friend to meet at a time when one’s nervous energy was exhausted. His pungent talk was exhilarating when the listener was in good condition; too stimulating for moments of mental fatigue and collapse. One might as well handle a gymnotus after running a foot-race as brave the shower of sparks from his colloquial battery when the brain was tired and aching for repose. Whether his own brain ever rested or wanted rest those who never remember a dull moment in his company might well question.

Besides these remarkable and altogether exceptional gifts, we remember him for qualities which endeared him to many who knew him outside of the social circle where he shone with so much brilliancy. As a patron of art he was discriminating and generous. As an amateur artist he had taste and skill enough to make his pleasing sketches and painted pebbles an ornament to his own walls and tables, and welcome gifts to the friends for whom he was glad to employ his pencil and his palette.

His warm heart betrayed itself in kind words and generous acts. He thought of the well-being and the enjoyment of all the members of his household as if they had been of his own blood. He felt and enjoyed the privilege of inherited wealth, honestly, heartily, but with no vulgar pretension and no selfish exclusiveness. His affectionate nature found delight in the companionship of his many relatives, among whom he counted that most lovable of men, as unlike him as the moonbeam is unlike the lightning, — his brother-inlaw, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

A little more than sixty years ago, if one could have looked in at the garden or climbed up to the garret of No. 7 Walnut Street, he might have seen three boys, in mantles and doublets and other stage appurtenances, enacting the scenes of some truculent melodrama. One of these boys was our vivacious and inventive friend, who must, I think, have been stage manager and chief costumer. The second was a boy of striking beauty, with dark waving locks, who as a prince, or as a poet, or, with an inky cloak and suit of solemn black, as a youthful Hamlet, would have seemed the very ideal of his part. This was the future historian whose name is known and honored in all the academies of the world, whose books are read in all the most widely spoken tongues of Europe, — John Lothrop Motley. The third little boy, with the singular silvery thrill in his voice, — I remember It well in the mother from whom it descended to him, — this third little boy, the afterglow of whose more than auburn hair came from some ancestor whose sun had set before my day, was the embryo orator whose voice was so recently silenced, — Wendell Phillips.

These were the young companions and the lifelong friends of him over whom the grass is not yet green. Who was there among us worth knowing whom he did not know ? Who that knew Boston on its higher levels did not know him ?

We are not thinking now of the pleasant books in which his always active mind and happy nature show themselves in every page. We are not thinking of him in his relation to art and artists, though he gave so much of his time and thought and money to these. It is as a living presence in this Boston air which we breathe, — in the bright saloon, under the elms of the Common, amidst the flower-beds of the Public Garden, in the noisy street, the silent library, the memory - haunted picture - gallery, — everywhere, he comes before us. No man, no man of his generation certainly, pervaded the social atmosphere of this breezy centre of life so completely. He was the favorite guest of every banquet. A day withered its flowers, but age could not wither him. The sparkle left

but his wit bubbled up inexhaustible.

The city seems grayer and older since he has left it. The cold spring winds come in from the bay harsher and more unfriendly. We feel as Emerson felt when he wrote,—

“ Nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs is overspread with melancholy to-day.”

Our friend has left a few well-remembered witty sayings of which he has not always had the credit. Now that he is dead and gone, it may be hoped that they will find their way back to the “ onlie begetter ” of the best sayings Boston has heard since the days of Mather Byles, all whose pleasantries put together would count for nothing by the side of any one of our great wit’s prose epigrams. By these be will he remembered as Bias and Periander are immortal among the seven wise men of Greece by a single saying. But how much of all that he was must die with the memory of those now living ! I once heard him say that all we are and do is invisibly photographed, and that Heaven keeps the negatives. If all that he said worth recollecting was set down by the recording angel, the celestial scribe must have filled many of his great folios, and found occasion to smile much oftener than to drop a tear on the page before him.

Shenstone’s epitaph on his lovely young relative is cruel to the living. I will not say,

but I can say with truth that to recall this friend who has left our companionship must be to many of us one of the sweetest pleasures of memory.

Oliver Wendell Holmes.