January 2011

“New Skies and New Stars” Fantastic Tragedy The Story of the Piano Of Barns and Bridges Current Books in Brief

There never was a time for valentines like the Nineteenth Century, those proper old days when love peeped out through clouds of lace and sentiment and not an analyst had appeared to tell us why we felt that way. On these pages is a little remembrance of that perfumed era when a valentine was prepared with pain and opened with blushes.

Near the end of 1851, New York was waiting rather breathlessly to see Lola Montez, and although the town was very eager it was not at all sure just what it was going to see.

Technically, Lola Montez was a dancer who had been cutting a very wide swath in Europe. It may be that she was not a very good dancer—opinions seemed to differ—but in one way or another she was clearly quite a person. She was the particular girl friend of Ludwig I of Bavaria; she had also, according to report, been the girl friend of many others, including Liszt, Dumas, Hugo, Lamartine and lesser mortals. Politically she was a freethinker, and she was supposed to have some sort of responsibility for the wave of revolution that had swept Europe in 1848. In what may have passed for her private life she was the Countess of Landsfeld, a champion of popular rights, coming to America in search of the profits that might come from a stage appearance.

Fortified towns are hard nuts to crack, and your teeth are not accustomed to it. Taking strong places is a particular trade, which you have taken up without serving an apprenticeship to it. Armies and veterans need skillful engineers to direct them in their attack. Have you any? But some seem to think that forts are as easy taken as snuff.

--Benjamin Franklin in a letter to his brother in Boston before the siege of Louisbourg.

"John Brown of Osawatomie, the guerrilla captain of Bleeding Kansas and leader of the abortive raid on Harpers Ferry to free the slaves, was hanged on the bright balmy morning of December 2, 1859. The scene of the execution of the old abolition raider was at Charlestown, then in Virginia, but soon to become Charlestown, West Virginia, through the agency of a war which Brown’s Harpers Ferry foray hastened.

A young man bearing a parcel called at the New York Herald office one day in 1854, and insisted that he must deliver it to the proprietor, James Gordon Bennett himself. Having passed muster in an anteroom (a procedure made advisable by a bomb Bennett had received in an innocent looking package not long before), the messenger was escorted into the presence of a lean, gnarled man, a bit over six feet tall, with a crown of curling white hair, florid complexion, large aquiline beak, and eyes so terribly crossed that while one of them surveyed his caller, the other appeared to glare out the window at the City Hall. There were no pleasantries.

“Who fr-r-rum?” (Bennett’s “r” was pure Aberdeen.)

“Mr. Isaac C. Pray.”