Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

POETS, CASUALS, AND NOVELISTS

257

through the trade and fishery treaty of 1854 by a liberal
dispensation at Washington of what Horace Greeley once
called "both wine and champagne." He was nearly killed
by hostile natives while charg6 d'affaires in Japan in 1861,
figured for some years in Parliament, and resigned to come
to America to join Harris's Brotherhood of the New Life
in Chautauqua county, New York State. When I met
him through Mr. Dana this distinguished gentleman had
rasped the sensibilities of New York society by publishing
his "Tender Recollections of Irene Macgillicuddy," a
satire mordant and artistically conceived. His "Dollie
and the Two Smiths" had also made the best of such
humorous literary material as there may be in communitymatrimony of the loose-jointed sort. He was then, singularly enough, engaged in the promotion of emigration to
Palestine. Oliphant gave Mr. Dana a colored lithograph
of his pet colony at HaifA. The picture hung on the
wall of the editor's room as long as I occupied that apartment. The view became as familiar as that from The Sun
window alongside it, but when I visited the eastern shore
of the Mediterranean I was unable readily to identify
the exact location under Mount Carmel. Altogether,
Laurence Oliphant's was one of the strangest of the many
strange careers of vagrant intellectuals of great ability.
After his secession from the Brotherhood of the New Life,
Oliphant wrote to Dana:
I am more than ever convinced of the truth of the effort in
which I have been engaged for the last sixteen years, which
after all did not depend upon any one personality, and I shall
never regret my connection with Mr. IIHarris —though we did
not see things from the same point of view latterly. I do not

IKC a despairng view of the divine forces in nature being applied in a regenerative sense to humanity; indeed, my recent
experiences have been most encouraging, though it has not
been wonderful that the general public should think that we
have abandoned the movement because of our separation from
one man to whom they insisted we were irrevocably attached.