THE MURRAY HILL BIOGRAPHIES
ROBERT FROST
ROBERT FROST
A Study in Sensibility and Good Sense
By GORHAM B. MUNSON Author of “WALDO FRANK: A STUDY”
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY ON MURRAY HILL : NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1927, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
ROBERT FROST --A-- PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To HART CRANE
in memory of many enthusiastic conversations about poetry
CONTENTS
I “THE GENERATIONS OF MEN” 11
II “ONCE BY THE PACIFIC” 21
III “A BOY’S WILL” 27
IV “THE ROAD NOT TAKEN” 32
V “NEW HAMPSHIRE” 36
VI “PAN WITH US” 58
VII “INTO MY OWN” 69
VIII “A SENSIBILITIST” 87
IX “AGAINST THE WORLD IN GENERAL” 99
APPENDIX A [Selected British Opinion on Robert Frost] 117
APPENDIX B [Bibliographical] 125
APPENDIX C [Robert Frost on Education] 127
[Index] 131
I. “THE GENERATIONS OF MEN”
_“But don’t you think we sometimes make too much Of the old stock? What counts is the ideals And those will bear some keeping still about.”_
New England is our association with the name of Frost, and we are no doubt surprised when told that it is a Scandinavian name. Yet there are today many persons in Denmark who hearing this sound uttered behind their backs would turn with that sudden interest aroused by the unexpected pronouncing of one’s name. Certain of the remote ancestors of these Danish Frosts may have roved into England in the ninth century A.D., or it may have been Saxons bearing the name of Forst, which is the Saxon form of Frost, who invaded England in the fifth century A.D. and founded the line of English Frosts. In either case, the Frosts were settled there before the Norman Conquest and the name had begun to accrete sturdy Anglo-Saxon associations about its slightly harsh sound.
In 1135 Henry Frost, the probable ancestor of the American progenitor of one line of Frosts,[1] founded the Hospital of the Brothers of St. John the Evangelist at Cambridge, England, and this foundation became in 1509 St. John’s College, for which reason it is said that “Henry Frost ought never to be forgot, who gave birth to so noted a seat of religion, and afterwards to one of the most renouned seats of learning in Europe.”
The son of Henry Frost bore the name of the subject of this Study and wore a coat of arms which reads like a prophetic curio of the poetry of his namesake. “Argent. A chevron azure between two thistles slipped in chief, and a hind’s head erased in base proper. Crest: a grey squirrel sejant, semée of estoiles sable, collared and chained or, and holding between the paws a hazel branch fructed also proper.”
Until the early seventeenth century the Frost family spread deeper and deeper into the sub-soil of English life. Then came the migrations of the Puritans, crowded by unfavorable forces at home and drawn from afar by the promises of New England. In an old piece of writing one can read:
“Nicholas, Marride Bertha Cadwalla, Jan’y 1630 ffrom Tavistock, Devon Bertha Cadwalla, Borne ffeb’y ye 14th, 1610 Aprill Arrived in Sailed for America June, 1634, in ye year In ye Shipp Wulfrana, Alwin Wellborn, Master ffrom Plimouth, Devon.”
It was this Nicholas Frost who founded the line of which Robert Frost is a representative of the ninth generation. In the interval New England incorporated itself into the tissue, blood and bone of these “generations of men” ultimately to become song from the lips of Robert Frost.
The history of the early generations of this line is threaded into the history of certain old villages in Maine--Kittery, Eliot, Wells, York--located close to the present New Hampshire border, and today there is an inscription on Ambush Rock where Major Charles Frost was slain, Frost’s Hill is still known as such, and the Frost Garrison House, erected in 1733, is the only garrison house that remains in Old Kittery. Everett S. Stackpole, the patient chronicler of Old Kittery and Her Families, hints that a little mythological moss may have gathered about the early Frost settlers, and believes that Nicholas Frost was on the coast of Maine as early as 1632. He surmises that he returned to Tiverton, Devonshire, England, collected his wife and two sons, John and Charles, and came back to America in 1634.
Nicholas Frost appears to have landed at Little Harbor, now Rye, New Hampshire, and to have lived there for at least a year, since there is record of a daughter Anna being born there in April, 1635. Within the next two years he removed to the head of Sturgeon Creek, in what is now Eliot, Maine, where he made his home until his death in 1663.
His vicissitudes and achievements were of a typical pioneer character. He acquired a fairly large acreage of land, served as one of the first selectmen of Kittery, signed with his son a petition to Oliver Cromwell (signed with his mark, a combination of N and F, for this ancestor of a distinguished poet was illiterate), and lost his wife and fifteen year old daughter, Anna, to the Indians. It is said that they were captured on July 4, 1650 “and taken to a camp at the mouth of Sturgeon Creek. Nicholas and his son Charles were at York at the time, and on their return attempted to rescue them but were unsuccessful; Charles, however, killed a chief and a brave. The next day Charles, his father and some of the neighbors went back to the camp but were too late. The camp was deserted, only the bodies of Bertha and Anna were found there. They were buried near the old Garrison.”[2] Stackpole finds some of the details of this story scarcely credible, but it seems clearly a fact that Bertha Frost and her daughter were killed by the Indians.
Charles Frost, already mentioned several times in this narrative, became locally celebrated and until North of Boston was imported from England in 1915 was probably the most famous of the American Frosts.
He was noted as an Indian fighter, and bitterly hated by his foes who finally killed him from an ambush on July 4, 1697. The hatred of the Indians for him went to greater lengths: they opened his grave the night after the burial and carried the body to the top of Frost’s hill where it was suspended upon a stake. The reason for this vengeance lay in an incident that occurred in September, 1676, following the close of King Philip’s War, an incident that is sometimes described in the colonial and border war histories of our early settlers.
The Pennacooks, some of the neighboring Abenakis, and a number of “strange Indians” (alleged to be King Philip’s men) assembled, having been given an express pledge of safety, at Dover, New Hampshire, for a friendly conference with the whites. A sham fight was instituted and using this as a pretext the whites seized four hundred Indians. Of these three hundred were sent to Boston where a few were hanged and the rest sold into slavery. It is said that Major Waldron and Captain (later Major) Frost joined this stratagem with reluctance, but the Indians held them responsible for what they reasonably deemed an atrocious and treacherous deed, bided their time and killed Major Waldron thirteen years later and Major Frost twenty-one years after, causing one Joseph Storer in Wells to write: “It hath pleased God to take a way; Major Frost, the Indians waylad him Last Sabbath day as he was cominge whom from meeting at night; and killed him and John Heards wife and Denes Downing ... it is a Great Loss to the Whole Province; and Espesely to his fameley ... mistress Frost is very full of sory; and all her Children.”
His death is said to have been the last English blood shed in New England in King William’s War and inspired a memento in verse which runs:
The last of that grand triumvirate, Unflinching martyrs of a common fate, Waldron and Plaisted and Frost, these three, The flower of New England chivalry.
The descendants of this component of the flower of New England chivalry occupied themselves in divers ways but kept their home-roots within a radius of fifty miles of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. His son, the Hon. John Frost, married a sister of Sir William Pepperell who captured Louisburg in 1745 and himself served His Majesty for a time as Commander of the man-of-war Edward. Later he became a merchant of Newcastle, New Hampshire, and a member of the Governor’s Council. His son, William, was also a merchant of Newcastle, but apparently not as conspicuous as his grandfather or father. The line recovers its warlike tinge in his son, Lieutenant William Frost, an officer in the Continental Army during the American Revolution and a resident of Andover, Massachusetts. The sixth generation gives us Samuel Abbot Frost, who remained in New Hampshire most of his life and was the father of four children, among them William Prescott Frost, the grandfather of Robert, who moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts.