If we "drive on down Washington Street" with "Silas Lapham," we shall find in Chester Square the "Nankeen Square" where he dwelt in his less ambitious days, and the pretty oval green with the sturdy trees which the worthy colonel saw grow from saplings.
In a pleasant dwelling on the contiguous street lives and works the bright and busy Lucretia P. Hale, sister of the author-divine. She was the favorite scholar of Miss Elizabeth Peabody; and she has, through her writings and her classes, acquired an influence and discipleship little smaller than that which Margaret Fuller once possessed.
Farther south, in the Roxbury district, we seek the abode of the famed author of "The Man without a Country." Sauntering along the shady and delectable Highland Street, we interrogate a uniformed guardian of the law, who heartily rejoins, "Dr. Hale's is a temple on the right a block further on: and if any man's fit to live in a temple, it's him." As we walk the "block further on" we think that, however defective his grammar, the policeman's estimate of Hale is beyond criticism and agrees with that of the thousands of readers and friends of the indefatigable author, lecturer, preacher, editor, reformer, and promoter of all good. We find the house--very like a Greek temple--standing back from the street in the midst of an ample lawn, shaded by noble trees and decked with a wealth of shrubbery and bloom. The mansion is a large square edifice, with great dormer-windows in its roofs, surmounted by a cupola, and having in front a lofty portico upheld by heavy Ionic pillars, between which interlacing woodbine forms a leafy screen. Within is a wide hall, and opening out of it are generously proportioned rooms, some of them lined from floor to ceiling with thousands of books. The study is a commodious room, with a "pamphlet-annex" adjoining it on the garden side, and is crammed with book-shelves and drawers, while piles of books, magazines, portfolios, manuscripts, and memoranda are disposed on cases, tables, and stands about the apartment. Everything is obviously arranged for convenient and ready use, and well it may be so, for this is the work-room and "thinking-shop" of the hardest-working literary man in America. The books which made his first fame were written before he came to this house; of all the works produced in this study, the numerous poems, romances, histories, essays, editorials, reviews, discussions, translations,--to say nothing of the many hundreds of well-considered and carefully written sermons,--we may not here mention even the names, for no writer since Voltaire is more fruitful of finished and masterly work. It is notable that Hale regards "In His Name" as his best work from a literary point of view; of his other productions, he thinks some of the poems of the latest collection, "For Fifty Years," as good as anything,--"always excepting his sermons." Among the abundant treasures of his study, Hale has a most interesting and valuable collection of autograph letters, of which he is justly proud. His father was Nathan Hale of the Boston "Advertiser," his mother was sister to Edward Everett and herself an author and translator, his wife is niece to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, his son Robert has already acquired a reputation in the domain of letters. The doctor himself has been a writer from childhood, his earliest contributions being to his father's paper. His illustrious sister declares that in their nursery days she and her brother used to take their meals with the "Advertiser" pinned under their chins,--a practice to which their literary precocity has been attributed. We find Hale at the age of seventy-three blithe and hopeful, working as much and manifestly accomplishing more than ever before.