Besides other means of recreation,
Carleton was happy in having been from childhood a
lover of music. In earlier life he sang in the
church choir, under the training of masters of increasing
grades of skill, in his native village, at Malden,
and in Boston. He early learned to play upon
keyed instruments, the melodion, the piano, and the
organ, the latter being his favorite. From this
great encyclopaedia of tones, he loved to bring out
grand harmonies. He used this instrument of many
potencies, for enjoyment, as a means of culture, for
the soothing of his spirits, and the resting of his
brain. When wearied with the monotony of work
with his pen, he would leave his study, as I remember,
when living in Boston, and, having a private key to
Shawmut Church, and dependent on no assistance except
that of the water-motor, he would, for a half hour
or more, and sometimes for hours, delight and refresh
himself with this organ, grandest of all
but one, in Boston, the city of good organs and organ-makers.
Many times throughout the war, in churches deserted
or occupied, alone or in the public service, in the
soldier’s camp-church or meeting in the open
air, wherever there was an instrument with keys, Carleton
was a valued participant and aid in worship.
Religious music was his favorite,
but he delighted in all sweet melodies. He loved
the Boston Symphony concerts and the grand opera.
Among his best pieces of writing were the accounts
of Wagner’s Parsifal at Bayreuth, and the great
Peace Jubilee after our civil war. At most of
the great musical events in Boston, he was present.
Shawmut Church had for many years one of the very best
quartette choirs in the city, supported at the instrument by such organists as
Dudley Buck, George Harris, Samuel Carr, H. E. Parkhurst, and Henry M. Dunham.
In Carleton, both voice and instrument found so appreciative a hearer, and one
who so often personally commended or appraised their renderings of a great
composer’s thought, or a heart-touching song, that “as well the singers as the
players on instruments” were always glad to know how he received their art and
work. In Europe, this lover of sweet sound enjoyed hearing the greatest
vocalists, and those mightiest of the masses of harmony known on earth, and
possible only in European capitals. Before going to some noble feast for ear and
soul, as, for example, Wagner’s rendition of his operas at Bayreuth, Carleton
would study carefully the literary history, the ideas sought to be expressed in
sound, and the score of the composer. In his grand description and
interpretation of Parsifal, he likened it among operas to the Jungfrau amid the
Bernese Alps. “In its sweep of vision, beauty, greatness, whiteness, glory, and
grandeur, it stands alone ... to show the greatness, the ideal of Wagner,
including the conflict of all time, the upbuilding of individual character, and
reaching on to eternity.”
Carleton, being a real Christian,
necessarily believed in, and heartily supported, foreign
missionary work. He saw in his Master, Christ,
the greatest of all missionaries, and in the twelve
missionaries, whom he chose to carry on his work, the
true order and line of the kingdom. “Apostolical”
succession is, literally, and in Christ’s intent,
missionary succession. He read in Paul’s
account of the organization of the Christian Church,
that, among its orders and dignities, its officers
and personnel, were “first missionaries.”
To him the only “orders” and “succession”
were those which propagated the Gospel. He had
seen the work of the modern apostles, sent forth by
American Christians, west of the Alleghanies first,
west of the Mississippi. He had later beheld
the true apostles at work, in India, China, and Japan.
It was on account of his seeing that he became a still
more enthusiastic upholder of missionary, or apostolic,
work. He gave many addresses and lectures in
New England, in loyalty to the mind of the Master.
As he had been a friend of the black man, slave or
free, so also was he ever a faithful defender of the
Asiatic stranger within our gates. Against the
bill which practically excluded the Chinamen from
the United States, in defiance of the spirit and letter
of the Burlingame treaty, Carleton spoke vigorously,
at the meeting held in Tremont Temple, in Boston,
to protest against the infamous Exclusion bill, which
committed the nation to perjury. Carleton could
never see the justice of stealing black men from Africa
to enslave them, of murdering red men in order to
steal their hunting-grounds, or of inviting yellow
men across the sea to do our work, and then kicking
them out when they were no longer needed.
Carleton was instrumental in giving impetus to the movement
to found that mission in Japan which has since borne fruit in the creation of
the largest and most influential body of Christian churches, and the great
Doshisha University, in Kioto. These churches are called Kumi-aï, or associated
independent churches, and out of them have come, in remarkable numbers,
preachers, pastors, editors, authors, political leaders, and influential men in
every department of the new modern life in Japan. It was at the meeting of the
American Board, held in Pittsburg, in the Third Presbyterian Church edifice,
October 7-8, 1869, that the mission to Japan was proposed. A paper by Secretary
Treat was read, and reported on favorably, and Rev. David Greene, who had
volunteered to be the apostle to the Sunrise Empire, made an address. The speech
of Carleton, who had just returned from Dai Nippon, capped the climax of
enthusiasm, and the meeting closed by singing the hymn, “Nearer, my God, to
Thee.”
At one of the later meetings of the
Board, at Rutland, Vermont, the Japanese student Neesima
pleaded effectually that a university be founded,
the history of which, under the name of the One Endeavor,
or Doshisha, is well known. In the same year
that Neesima was graduated from Amherst College, Carleton
received from this institution the honorary degree
of Master of Arts.
Carleton could turn his nimble pen
to rhyme, when his friends required verses, and best
when his own emotions struggled for utterance in poetry.
Several very creditable hymns were composed for anniversary
occasions and for the Easter Festivals of Shawmut Church.
Indeed, the first money ever paid
him by a publisher was for a poem, “The
Old Man’s Meditations,” which was copied
into “Littell’s Living Age.”
The pre-natal life, birth, and growth of this first-born
child of Carleton’s brain and heart, which inherited
a “double portion,” in both fame and pelf,
is worth noting. In 1852, an aged uncle of Mrs.
Coffin, who dwelt in thoughts that had not yet become
the commonplace property of our day, being at home
in the immensities of geology and the infinities of
astronomy, made a visit to the home in Boscawen, spending
some days. Carleton was richly fed in spirit,
and, conceiving the idea of the poem, on going out
to plough, put paper and pencil in his pocket.
As he thought out line upon line, or stanza by stanza,
he penned each in open air. At the end of the
furrow, or even in the middle of it, he would stop
his team, lay the paper on the back of the oxen, and
write down the thought or line. Finished at home
in the evenings, the poem was read to a friend, who
persuaded the author to test its editorial and mercantile
value.
“I shall never forget,” wrote Mrs. Coffin, October 13, 1896,
“with what joy he came to me and showed me the poetry in the magazine, and a
check for $5.00.”
The last three stanzas are:
“He sails once more
the sea of years
So wide and vast and deep!
He lives anew old hopes and fears
Sweet tales of love again he hears,
While flow afresh the scalding tears,
For one long since asleep.
“He sees the wrecks
upon the shore,
And everything is drear;
The rolling waves around him roar,
The angry clouds their torrents pour,
His friends are gone forevermore,
And he alone is here.
“Yet through the gloom
of gathering night,
A glory from afar
Streams ever on his fading sight,
With Orient beams that grow more bright,
The dawn of heaven’s supernal light
From Bethlehem’s radiant star.”
During the evenings of 1892, Carleton
guided a Reading Club of young ladies who met at his
house. I remember, one evening, with what effect
he read Lowell’s “Biglow Papers,”
his eyes twinkling with the fun which none enjoyed
more than he. On another evening, after reading
from Longfellow’s “The Poet’s Tale,”
“Lady Wentworth,” and other poems, Carleton,
before retiring, wrote a “Sequel to Lady Wentworth.”
It is full of drollery, suggesting also what might
possibly have ensued if “the judge” had
married “Maud Mueller.” Carleton’s
poem tells of the risks and dangers to marital happiness
which the old magistrate runs who weds a gay young
girl.
Carleton was ever a lover and student
of poetry, and among poets, Whittier was from the
first his favorite. As a boy he committed to
memory many of the Quaker poet’s trumpet-like
calls to duty. As a man he always turned for
inspiration to this sweet singer of freedom. What
attracted Carleton was not only the intense moral earnestness
of the Friend, his beautiful images and grand simplicity,
but the seer’s perfect familiarity with the
New Hampshire landscape, its mountains, its watercourses,
the ways and customs of the people, the local legends
and poetical associations, the sympathy with the Indian,
and the seraphic delight which he took in the play
of light upon the New Hampshire hills. Not more
did Daniel Webster study with eager eyes the glowing
and the paling of the light on the hilltops, no more
rapturously did Rembrandt unweave the mazes of darkness,
conjure the shadows, and win by study the mysteries
of light and shade, than did Whittier. To Carleton,
a true son of New Hampshire, who had himself so often
in boyhood watched and discriminated the mystery-play
of light in its variant forms at dawn, midday, and
sunset, by moon and star and zodiac, at the équinoxes
and solstices, the imagery of his favorite poet
was a perennial delight.
As he ripened in years, Carleton loved
poetry more and more. He delighted in Lowell,
and enjoyed the mysticism of Emerson. He had read
Tennyson earlier in life without much pleasure, but
in ripened years, and with refined tastes, his soul
of music responded to the English bard’s marvellous
numbers. He became unspeakably happy over the
tender melody of Tennyson’s smaller pieces,
and the grand harmony of “In Memoriam,”
which he thought the greatest poem ever written, and
the high-water mark of intellect in the nineteenth
century. Carleton was not only a lover of music,
but a composer. When some especially tender sentiment
in a hymn impressed him, or the re-reading of an old
sacred song kindled his imagination by its thought,
or moved his sensibilities by its smooth rhythm, then
Carleton was not likely to rest until he had made
a tune of his own with which to express his feelings.
Of the scores which he composed and sang at home, or
had sung in the churches, a number were printed, and
have had happy use.
To the end of his life, he seemed to present, in his carriage
and person, some of that New Hampshire ruggedness, and even rustic simplicity,
that attracted and lured, while it foiled and disgusted those hunters of human
prey who, in every large city, wait to take in the wayfaring man, whether he be
fool or wise. Because he wore comfortable shoes, and cared next to nothing about
conformity to the last new freak of fashion, the bunco man was very apt to make
a fool of himself, and find that he, and not the stranger, was the victim. In
Boston, which of late years has been so far captured by the Irishman that even
St. Patrick’s is celebrated under the guise of “Evacuation Day,” matters were
not very different from those in New York. Carleton, while often conducting
parties of young friends around Copp’s Hill, and the more interesting
historical, but now uncanny houses of the North End, was often remarked.
Occasionally he was recognized by the policeman, who would inform suspicious or
inquiring fellow foreigners or adopted sons of the Commonwealth, that “the old
fellow was only a countryman in town, and wouldn’t do any harm.”
Lest some might get a false idea,
I need only state that Mr. Coffin was a man of dignified
dress, and scrupulously neat. He was a gentleman
whose engaging presence might suggest the older and
more altruistic, rather than the newer and perhaps
brusquer style of manners. His was
a “mild and magnificent” blue eye in which
so many, who loved him so, liked to dwell, and he
had no need to wear glasses. The only sign of
ornament about him was his gold watch-chain and cross-bar
in his black vest buttonhole.