Where art took wing in Victorian America

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"A Summer of Hummingbirds" is a curious work of creative detection by a Mount Holyoke College professor who has spent many hours digging in the once-fertile soils of 19th-century New England.Much of America's cultural heritage -- literature, art, belles lettres, religious expression and journalism -- is buried there, where it flourished in mid-century.What Christopher Benfey manages, with some overreaching, is to re-imagine a rich period in the private lives of some of its most creative souls.There's poet Emily Dickinson of Amherst, Mass., whose genius was barely visible then; painter Martin Johnson Heade, an artist of exotic nature scenes; doughty novelist and professional scold Harriet Beecher Stowe; her brother, the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, the nation's best-known clergyman and adulterer of the day; Dickenson's sometime literary mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson; and writer and painter Mabel Loomis Todd, mistress of the poet's brother and savior of her poems.Others who briefly touch this circle are Mark Twain, Florida developer Henry Flagler, Dom Pedro II, last emperor of Brazil and, by his poems and reputation, Lord Byron. Benfey considers his work, "The Prisoner of Chillon," a key influence on Dickinson and others."Hummingbirds" (The Penguin Press; $25.95) covers the period from the Civil War through Dickinson's death in 1886 at age 56. The pathologically shy yet startlingly wise poet compared herself to a hummingbird, the tiny creature whose presence is often felt, rather than seen, like Dickinson, the focus of this book.Benfey's interpretation of Dickinson's often difficult and obscure verse lends a poignancy to her difficult life, where "hope was a thing with feathers" -- a hummingbird, perhaps?Heade, who painted the birds among verdant foliage after visiting Brazil in the 1860s, is also important to Benfey's story. A solitary man who did not marry until he was 64, he seemed to anticipate the coming tragedy of the Civil War in his 1850s landscapes and seascapes marked by clouds and storms.Benfey makes a host of connections between his varied crew of artists and public figures. His tender view of their relationships adds a human dimension to what might have been just names in history books.In Mabel Todd, a coquettish young woman who flirted with the infatuated Heade, Benfey finds his magnet, the person who tied together the various threads of his book.She became Austin Dickinson's lover after moving from Washington, D.C., to Amherst, when her husband, a rising astronomer, accepted a post at the college there.After Emily Dickinson died, Mabel Todd was prepared to recognize the greatness in her poems through her relationship with Heade, who used the same images in his paintings, Benfey believes. She and Higginson collaborated to publish many of them, thus preserving America's most important poetry that otherwise would have never surfaced. However, Benfey fails to mention that the pair badly edited and changed Dickinson's poems. These were not restored until 1955.There are many stories in "Hummingbirds," such as the development of Florida as a winter resort, the complicated lives of Stowe and her brother, and the claim that Massachusetts jurist Otis Lord wanted to marry Emily Dickinson but died before doing so.Old newspaper columnists, when short on ideas, would often write on the topic, "things I learned while looking something else up." There's some of that approach to Benfey's book, yet he weaves a seductive tale with fascinating characters and a real appreciation for Dickinson and her poems.He leads us to encounter the complexity and passions of a forgotten age and a group of fascinating people who seemed fated to obscurity.(E-mail book editor Bob Hoover at bhoover(at)post-gazette.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)