Page:Fitz-Greene Halleck, A Memorial.djvu/12

4 If Longfellow should die, the streets of Boston would be draped in mourning! But although we display no outward signs of grief, we feel not less keenly, that there is a vacant space among us; that a statue has fallen from its familiar pedestal; that a spark of immortal fire has been quenched forever; and that he who used to be, peculiarly, the intellectual soul and centre of this vast metropolis, now lies silent, in a narrow grave, at Guilford!

A brief biographical sketch, collected from various sources, may be not uninteresting.

Fitz-Greene Halleck was born in Guilford, Connecticut, July 8th, 1790. On his mother’s side, he was descended from the famous John Eliot, “the Apostle to the Indians,” and his father filled an inconsiderable position, during the Revolutionary war, under Sir Henry Clinton. “My father,” said Halleck to me, “was a British Commissary. But I am inclined to believe that this high-sounding title was a fiction. British and other commissaries, in the army, usually accumulate fortunes; but as my father made nothing out of the war, I think he must have been a sutler. And my opinion is,” continued he, “that as a sutler transacts his business upon his own capital, and a commissary draws his funds from the military chest, that the chances of being an honest man are in favor of the sutler!”

In 1814 we find Mr. Halleck a clerk of Jacob Barker. The late Daniel Embury, formerly President of the Atlantic Bank of Brooklyn, at that time was Mr. Barker’s cashier. He always spoke of Halleck with almost boyish affection. “When I found,”