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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Cambridge Neighbors, by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Cambridge Neighbors
+       From "Literary Friends And Acquaintances"
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: October 22, 2004 [EBook #3392]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--Cambridge Neighbors
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS
+
+Being the wholly literary spirit I was when I went to make my home in
+Cambridge, I do not see how I could well have been more content if I had
+found myself in the Elysian Fields with an agreeable eternity before me.
+At twenty-nine, indeed, one is practically immortal, and at that age,
+time had for me the effect of an eternity in which I had nothing to do
+but to read books and dream of writing them, in the overflow of endless
+hours from my work with the manuscripts, critical notices, and proofs of
+the Atlantic Monthly. As for the social environment I should have been
+puzzled if given my choice among the elect of all the ages, to find poets
+and scholars more to my mind than those still in the flesh at Cambridge
+in the early afternoon of the nineteenth century. They are now nearly
+all dead, and I can speak of them in the freedom which is death's
+doubtful favor to the survivor; but if they were still alive I could say
+little to their offence, unless their modesty was hurt with my praise.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+One of the first and truest of our Cambridge friends was that exquisite
+intelligence, who, in a world where so many people are grotesquely
+miscalled, was most fitly named; for no man ever kept here more perfectly
+and purely the heart of such as the kingdom of heaven is of than Francis
+J. Child. He was then in his prime, and I like to recall the outward
+image which expressed the inner man as happily as his name. He was of
+low stature and of an inclination which never became stoutness; but what
+you most saw when you saw him was his face of consummate refinement: very
+regular, with eyes always glassed by gold-rimmed spectacles, a straight,
+short, most sensitive nose, and a beautiful mouth with the sweetest smile
+mouth ever wore, and that was as wise and shrewd as it was sweet. In a
+time when every other man was more or less bearded he was clean shaven,
+and of a delightful freshness of coloring which his thick sunny hair,
+clustering upon his head in close rings, admirably set off. I believe he
+never became gray, and the last time I saw him, though he was broken then
+with years and pain, his face had still the brightness of his
+inextinguishable youth.
+
+It is well known how great was Professor Child's scholarship in the
+branches of his Harvard work; and how especially, how uniquely, effective
+it was in the study of English and Scottish balladry to which he gave so
+many years of his life. He was a poet in his nature, and he wrought with
+passion as well as knowledge in the achievement of as monumental a task
+as any American has performed. But he might have been indefinitely less
+than he was in any intellectual wise, and yet been precious to those who
+knew him for the gentleness and the goodness which in him were protected
+from misconception by a final dignity as delicate and as inviolable as
+that of Longfellow himself.
+
+We were still much less than a year from our life in Venice, when he came
+to see us in Cambridge, and in the Italian interest which then commended
+us to so many fine spirits among our neighbors we found ourselves at the
+beginning of a life-long friendship with him. I was known to him only by
+my letters from Venice, which afterwards became Venetian Life, and by a
+bit of devotional verse which he had asked to include in a collection he
+was making, but he immediately gave us the freedom of his heart, which
+after wards was never withdrawn. In due time he imagined a home-school,
+to which our little one was asked, and she had her first lessons with his
+own daughter under his roof. These things drew us closer together, and
+he was willing to be still nearer to me in any time of trouble. At one
+such time when the shadow which must some time darken every door, hovered
+at ours, he had the strength to make me face it and try to realize, while
+it was still there, that it was not cruel and not evil. It passed, for
+that time, but the sense of his help remained; and in my own case I can
+testify of the potent tenderness which all who knew him must have known
+in him. But in bearing my witness I feel accused, almost as if he were
+present; by his fastidious reluctance from any recognition of his
+helpfulness. When this came in the form of gratitude taking credit to
+itself in a pose which reflected honor upon him as the architect of
+greatness, he was delightfully impatient of it, and he was most amusingly
+dramatic in reproducing the consciousness of certain ineffectual alumni
+who used to overwhelm him at Commencement solemnities with some such
+pompous acknowledgment as, "Professor Child, all that I have become, sir,
+I owe to your influence in my college career." He did, with delicious
+mockery, the old-fashioned intellectual poseurs among the students, who
+used to walk the groves of Harvard with bent head, and the left arm
+crossing the back, while the other lodged its hand in the breast of the
+high buttoned frock-coat; and I could fancy that his classes in college
+did not form the sunniest exposure for young folly and vanity. I know
+that he was intolerant of any manner of insincerity, and no flattery
+could take him off his guard. I have seen him meet this with a cutting
+phrase of rejection, and no man was more apt at snubbing the patronage
+that offers itself at times to all men. But mostly he wished to do
+people pleasure, and he seemed always to be studying how to do it; as for
+need, I am sure that worthy and unworthy want had alike the way to his
+heart.
+
+Children were always his friends, and they repaid with adoration the
+affection which he divided with them and with his flowers. I recall him
+in no moments so characteristic as those he spent in making the little
+ones laugh out of their hearts at his drolling, some festive evening in
+his house, and those he gave to sharing with you his joy in his
+gardening. This, I believe, began with violets, and it went on to roses,
+which he grew in a splendor and profusion impossible to any but a true
+lover with a genuine gift for them. Like Lowell, he spent his summers in
+Cambridge, and in the afternoon, you could find him digging or pruning
+among his roses with an ardor which few caprices of the weather could
+interrupt. He would lift himself from their ranks, which he scarcely
+overtopped, as you came up the footway to his door, and peer purblindly
+across at you. If he knew you at once, he traversed the nodding and
+swaying bushes, to give you the hand free of the trowel or knife; or if
+you got indoors unseen by him he would come in holding towards you some
+exquisite blossom that weighed down the tip of its long stem with a
+succession of hospitable obeisances.
+
+He graced with unaffected poetry a life of as hard study, of as hard
+work, and as varied achievement as any I have known or read of; and he
+played with gifts and acquirements such as in no great measure have made
+reputations. He had a rare and lovely humor which could amuse itself
+both in English and Italian with such an airy burletta as "Il Pesceballo"
+(he wrote it in Metastasian Italian, and Lowell put it in libretto
+English); he had a critical sense as sound as it was subtle in all
+literature; and whatever he wrote he imbued with the charm of a style
+finely personal to himself. His learning in the line of his Harvard
+teaching included an early English scholarship unrivalled in his time,
+and his researches in ballad literature left no corner of it untouched. I
+fancy this part of his study was peculiarly pleasant to him; for he loved
+simple and natural things, and the beauty which he found nearest life.
+At least he scorned the pedantic affectations of literary superiority;
+and he used to quote with joyous laughter the swelling exclamation of an
+Italian critic who proposed to leave the summits of polite learning for a
+moment, with the cry, "Scendiamo fra il popolo!" (Let us go down among
+the people.)
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+Of course it was only so hard worked a man who could take thought and
+trouble for another. He once took thought for me at a time when it was
+very important to me, and when he took the trouble to secure for me an
+engagement to deliver that course of Lowell lectures in Boston, which I
+have said Lowell had the courage to go in town to hear. I do not
+remember whether Professor Child was equal to so much, but he would have
+been if it were necessary; and I rather rejoice now in the belief that he
+did not seek quite that martyrdom.
+
+He had done more than enough for me, but he had done only what he was
+always willing to do for others. In the form of a favor to himself he
+brought into my fife the great happiness of intimately knowing Hjalmar
+Hjorth Boyesen, whom he had found one summer day among the shelves in the
+Harvard library, and found to be a poet and an intending novelist. I do
+not remember now just how this fact imparted itself to the professor, but
+literature is of easily cultivated confidence in youth, and possibly the
+revelation was spontaneous. At any rate, as a susceptible young editor,
+I was asked to meet my potential contributor at the professor's two
+o'clock dinner, and when we came to coffee in the study, Boyesen took
+from the pocket nearest his heart a chapter of 'Gunnar', and read it to
+us.
+
+Perhaps the good professor who brought us together had plotted to have
+both novel and novelist make their impression at once upon the youthful
+sub-editor; but at any rate they did not fail of an effect. I believe it
+was that chapter where Gunnar and Ragnhild dance and sing a 'stev'
+together, for I associate with that far happy time the rich mellow tones
+of the poet's voice in the poet's verse. These were most characteristic
+of him, and it is as if I might put my ear against the ethereal wall
+beyond which he is rapt and hear them yet.
+
+Our meeting was on a lovely afternoon of summer, and the odor of the
+professor's roses stole in at the open windows, and became part of the
+gentle event. Boyesen walked home with me, and for a fortnight after I
+think we parted only to dream of the literature which we poured out upon
+each other in every waking moment. I had just learned to know Bjornson's
+stories, and Boyesen told me of his poetry and of his drama, which in
+even measure embodied the great Norse literary movement, and filled me
+with the wonder and delight of that noble revolt against convention, that
+brave return to nature and the springs of poetry in the heart and the
+speech of the common people. Literature was Boyesen's religion more than
+the Swedenborgian philosophy in which we had both been spiritually
+nurtured, and at every step of our mounting friendship we found ourselves
+on common ground in our worship of it. I was a decade his senior, but at
+thirty-five I was not yet so stricken in years as not to be able fully to
+rejoice in the ardor which fused his whole being in an incandescent
+poetic mass. I have known no man who loved poetry more generously and
+passionately; and I think he was above all things a poet. His work took
+the shape of scholarship, fiction, criticism, but poetry gave it all a
+touch of grace and beauty. Some years after this first meeting of ours I
+remember a pathetic moment with him, when I asked him why he had not
+written any verse of late, and he answered, as if still in sad
+astonishment at the fact, that he had found life was not all poetry. In
+those earlier days I believe he really thought it was!
+
+Perhaps it really is, and certainly in the course of a life that
+stretched almost to half a century Boyesen learned more and more to see
+the poetry of the everyday world at least as the material of art. He did
+battle valiantly for that belief in many polemics, which I suppose gave
+people a sufficiently false notion of him; and he showed his faith by
+works in fiction which better illustrated his motive. Gunnar stands at
+the beginning of these works, and at the farthest remove from it in
+matter and method stands 'The Mammon of Unrighteousness'. The lovely
+idyl won him fame and friendship, and the great novel added neither to
+him, though he had put the experience and the observation of his ripened
+life into it. Whether it is too late or too early for it to win the
+place in literature which it merits I do not know; but it always seemed
+to me the very spite of fate that it should have failed of popular
+effect. Yet I must own that it has so failed, and I own this without
+bitterness towards Gunnar, which embalmed the spirit of his youth as 'The
+Mammon of Unrighteousness' embodied the thought of his manhood.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+It was my pleasure, my privilege, to bring Gunnar before the public as
+editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and to second the author in many a
+struggle with the strange idiom he had cast the story in. The proofs
+went back and forth between us till the author had profited by every hint
+and suggestion of the editor. He was quick to profit by any hint, and he
+never made the same mistake twice. He lived his English as fast as he
+learned it; the right word became part of him; and he put away the wrong
+word with instant and final rejection. He had not learned American
+English without learning newspaper English, but if one touched a phrase
+of it in his work, he felt in his nerves, which are the ultimate arbiters
+in such matters, its difference from true American and true English. It
+was wonderful how apt and how elect his diction was in those days; it
+seemed as if his thought clothed itself in the fittest phrase without his
+choosing. In his poetry he had extraordinary good fortune from the
+first; his mind had an apparent affinity with what was most native, most
+racy in our speech; and I have just been looking over Gunnar and
+marvelling anew at the felicity and the beauty of his phrasing.
+
+I do not know whether those who read his books stop much to consider how
+rare his achievement was in the mere means of expression. Our speech is
+rather more hospitable than most, and yet I can remember but five other
+writers born to different languages who have handled English with
+anything like his mastery. Two Italians, Ruffini, the novelist, and
+Gallenga, the journalist; two Germans, Carl Schurz and Carl Hillebrand,
+and the Dutch novelist Maarten Maartens, have some of them equalled but
+none of them surpassed him. Yet he was a man grown when he began to
+speak and to write English, though I believe he studied it somewhat in
+Norway before he came to America. What English he knew he learned the
+use of here, and in the measure of its idiomatic vigor we may be proud of
+it as Americans.
+
+He had least of his native grace, I think, in his criticism; and yet as a
+critic he had qualities of rare temperance, acuteness, and knowledge. He
+had very decided convictions in literary art; one kind of thing he
+believed was good and all other kinds less good down to what was bad; but
+he was not a bigot, and he made allowances for art-in-error. His hand
+fell heavy only upon those heretics who not merely denied the faith but
+pretended that artifice was better than nature, that decoration was more
+than structure, that make-believe was something you could live by as you
+live by truth. He was not strongest, however, in damnatory criticism.
+His spirit was too large, too generous to dwell in that, and it rose
+rather to its full height in his appreciations of the great authors whom
+he loved, and whom he commented from the plenitude of his scholarship as
+well as from his delighted sense of their grandeur. Here he was almost
+as fine as in his poetry, and only less fine than in his more fortunate
+essays in fiction.
+
+After Gunnar he was a long while in striking another note so true. He
+did not strike it again till he wrote 'The Mammon of Unrighteousness',
+and after that he was sometimes of a wandering and uncertain touch. There
+are certain stories of his which I cannot read without a painful sense of
+their inequality not only to his talent, but to his knowledge of human
+nature, and of American character. He understood our character quite as
+well as he understood our language, but at times he seemed not to do so.
+I think these were the times when he was overworked, and ought to have
+been resting instead of writing. In such fatigue one loses command of
+alien words, alien situations; and in estimating Boyesen's achievements
+we must never forget that he was born strange to our language and to our
+life. In 'Gunnar' he handled the one with grace and charm; in his great
+novel he handled both with masterly strength. I call 'The Mammon of
+Unrighteousness' a great novel, and I am quite willing to say that I know
+few novels by born Americans that surpass it in dealing with American
+types and conditions. It has the vast horizon of the masterpieces of
+fictions; its meanings are not for its characters alone, but for every
+reader of it; when you close the book the story is not at an end.
+
+I have a pang in praising it, for I remember that my praise cannot please
+him any more. But it was a book worthy the powers which could have given
+us yet greater things if they had not been spent on lesser things.
+Boyesen could "toil terribly," but for his fame he did not always toil
+wisely, though he gave himself as utterly in his unwise work as in his
+best; it was always the best he could do. Several years after our first
+meeting in Cambridge, he went to live in New York, a city where money
+counts for more and goes for less than in any other city of the world,
+and he could not resist the temptation to write more and more when he
+should have written less and less. He never wrote anything that was not
+worth reading, but he wrote too much for one who was giving himself with
+all his conscience to his academic work in the university honored by his
+gifts and his attainments, and was lecturing far and near in the
+vacations which should have been days and weeks and months of leisure.
+The wonder is that even such a stock of health as his could stand the
+strain so long, but he had no vices, and his only excesses were in the
+direction of the work which he loved so well. When a man adds to his
+achievements every year, we are apt to forget the things he has already
+done; and I think it well to remind the reader that Boyesen, who died at
+forty-eight, had written, besides articles, reviews, and lectures
+unnumbered, four volumes of scholarly criticism on German and
+Scandinavian literature, a volume of literary and social essays, a
+popular history of Norway, a volume of poems, twelve volumes of fiction,
+and four books for boys.
+
+Boyesen's energies were inexhaustible. He was not content to be merely a
+scholar, merely an author; he wished to be an active citizen, to take his
+part in honest politics, and to live for his day in things that most men
+of letters shun. His experience in them helped him to know American life
+better and to appreciate it more justly, both in its good and its evil;
+and as a matter of fact he knew us very well. His acquaintance with us
+had been wide and varied beyond that of most of our literary men, and
+touched many aspects of our civilization which remain unknown to most
+Americans. When he died he had been a journalist in Chicago, and a
+teacher in Ohio; he had been a professor in Cornell University and a
+literary free lance in New York; and everywhere his eyes and ears had
+kept themselves open. As a teacher he learned to know the more fortunate
+or the more ambitious of our youth, and as a lecturer his knowledge was
+continually extending itself among all ages and classes of Americans.
+
+He was through and through a Norseman, but he was none the less a very
+American. Between Norsk and Yankee there is an affinity of spirit more
+intimate than the ties of race. Both have the common-sense view of life;
+both are unsentimental. When Boyesen told me that among the Norwegians
+men never kissed each other, as the Germans, and the Frenchmen, and the
+Italians do, I perceived that we stood upon common ground. When he
+explained the democratic character of society in Norway, I could well
+understand how he should find us a little behind his own countrymen in
+the practice, if not the theory of equality, though they lived under a
+king and we under a president. But he was proud of his American
+citizenship; he knew all that it meant, at its best, for humanity. He
+divined that the true expression of America was not civic, not social,
+but domestic almost, and that the people in the simplest homes, or those
+who remained in the tradition of a simple home life, were the true
+Americans as yet, whatever the future Americans might be.
+
+When I first knew him he was chafing with the impatience of youth and
+ambition at what he thought his exile in the West. There was, to be
+sure, a difference between Urbana, Ohio, and Cambridge, Massachusetts,
+and he realized the difference in the extreme and perhaps beyond it. I
+tried to make him believe that if a man had one or two friends anywhere
+who loved letters and sympathized with him in his literary attempts, it
+was incentive enough; but of course he wished to be in the centres of
+literature, as we all do; and he never was content until he had set his
+face and his foot Eastward. It was a great step for him from the
+Swedenborgian school at Urbana to the young university at Ithaca; and I
+remember his exultation in making it. But he could not rest there, and
+in a few years he resigned his professorship, and came to New York, where
+he entered high-heartedly upon the struggle with fortune which ended in
+his appointment in Columbia.
+
+New York is a mart and not a capital, in literature as well as in other
+things, and doubtless he increasingly felt this. I know that there came
+a time when he no longer thought the West must be exile for a literary
+man; and his latest visits to its summer schools as a lecturer impressed
+him with the genuineness of the interest felt there in culture of all
+kinds. He spoke of this, with a due sense of what was pathetic as well
+as what was grotesque in some of its manifestations; and I think that in
+reconciling himself to our popular crudeness for the sake of our popular
+earnestness, he completed his naturalization, in the only sense in which
+our citizenship is worth having.
+
+I do not wish to imply that he forgot his native land, or ceased to love
+it proudly and tenderly. He kept for Norway the fondness which the man
+sitting at his own hearth feels for the home of his boyhood. He was of
+good family; his people were people of substance and condition, and he
+could have had an easier life there than here. He could have won even
+wider fame, and doubtless if he had remained in Norway, he would have
+been one of that group of great Norwegians who have given their little
+land renown surpassed by that of no other in the modern republic of
+letters. The name of Boyesen would have been set with the names of
+Bjornson, of Ibsen, of Kielland, and of Lie. But when once he had seen
+America (at the wish of his father, who had visited the United States
+before him), he thought only of becoming an American. When I first knew
+him he was full of the poetry of his mother-land; his talk was of fjords
+and glaciers, of firs and birches, of hulders and nixies, of housemen and
+gaardsmen; but he was glad to be here, and I think he never regretted
+that he had cast his lot with us. Always, of course, he had the deepest
+interest in his country and countrymen. He stood the friend of every
+Norwegian who came to him in want or trouble, and they, came to him
+freely and frequently. He sympathized strongly with Norway in her
+quarrel with Sweden, and her wish for equality as well as autonomy; and
+though he did not go all lengths with the national party, he was decided
+in his feeling that Sweden was unjust to her sister kingdom, and
+strenuous for the principles of the Norwegian leaders.
+
+But, as I have said, poetry, was what his ardent spirit mainly meditated
+in that hour when I first knew him in Cambridge, before we had either of
+us grown old and sad, if not wise. He overflowed with it, and he talked
+as little as he dreamed of anything else in the vast half-summer we spent
+together. He was constantly at my house, where in an absence of my
+family I was living bachelor, and where we sat indoors and talked, or
+sauntered outdoors and talked, with our heads in a cloud of fancies, not
+unmixed with the mosquitoes of Cambridge: if I could have back the
+fancies, I would be willing to have the mosquitoes with them. He looked
+the poetry he lived: his eyes were the blue of sunlit fjords; his brown
+silken hair was thick on the crown which it later abandoned to a
+scholarly baldness; his soft, red lips half hid a boyish pout in the
+youthful beard and mustache. He was short of stature, but of a stalwart
+breadth of frame, and his voice was of a peculiar and endearing quality,
+indescribably mellow and tender when he read his verse.
+
+I have hardly the right to dwell so long upon him here, for he was only a
+sojourner in Cambridge, but the memory of that early intimacy is too much
+for my sense of proportion. As I have hinted, our intimacy was renewed
+afterwards, when I too came to live in New York, where as long as he was
+in this 'dolce lome', he hardly let a week go by without passing a long
+evening with me. Our talk was still of literature and life, but more of
+life than of literature, and we seldom spoke of those old times. I still
+found him true to the ideals which had clarified themselves to both of us
+as the duty of unswerving fealty to the real thing in whatever we did.
+This we felt, as we had felt it long before, to be the sole source of
+beauty and of art, and we warmed ourselves at each other's hearts in our
+devotion to it, amidst a misunderstanding environment which we did not
+characterize by so mild an epithet. Boyesen, indeed, out-realisted me,
+in the polemics of our aesthetics, and sometimes when an unbeliever was
+by, I willingly left to my friend the affirmation of our faith, not
+without some quaking at his unsparing strenuousness in disciplining the
+heretic. But now that ardent and active soul is Elsewhere, and I have
+ceased even to expect the ring, which, making itself heard at the late
+hour of his coming, I knew always to be his and not another's. That
+mechanical expectation of those who will come no more is something
+terrible, but when even that ceases, we know the irreparability of our
+loss, and begin to realize how much of ourselves they have taken with
+them.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+It was some years before the Boyesen summer, which was the fourth or
+fifth of our life in Cambridge, that I made the acquaintance of a man,
+very much my senior, who remains one of the vividest personalities in my
+recollection. I speak of him in this order perhaps because of an obscure
+association with Boyesen through their religious faith, which was also
+mine. But Henry James was incommensurably more Swedenborgian than either
+of us: he lived and thought and felt Swedenborg with an entirety and
+intensity far beyond the mere assent of other men. He did not do this in
+any stupidly exclusive way, but in the most luminously inclusive way,
+with a constant reference of these vain mundane shadows to the spiritual
+realities from which they project. His piety, which sometimes expressed
+itself in terms of alarming originality and freedom, was too large for
+any ecclesiastical limits, and one may learn from the books which record
+it, how absolutely individual his interpretations of Swedenborg were.
+Clarifications they cannot be called, and in that other world whose
+substantial verity was the inspiration of his life here, the two sages
+may by this time have met and agreed to differ as to some points in the
+doctrine of the Seer. In such a case, I cannot imagine the apostle
+giving way; and I do not say he would be wrong to insist, but I think he
+might now be willing to allow that the exegetic pages which sentence by
+sentence were so brilliantly suggestive, had sometimes a collective
+opacity which the most resolute vision could not penetrate. He put into
+this dark wisdom the most brilliant intelligence ever brought to the
+service of his mystical faith; he lighted it up with flashes of the
+keenest wit and bathed it in the glow of a lambent humor, so that it is
+truly wonderful to me how it should remain so unintelligible. But I have
+only tried to read certain of his books, and perhaps if I had persisted
+in the effort I might have found them all as clear at last as the one
+which seems to me the clearest, and is certainly most encouragingly
+suggestive: I mean the one called 'Society the Redeemed Form of Man.'
+
+He had his whole being in his belief; it had not only liberated him from
+the bonds of the Calvinistic theology in which his youth was trammelled,
+but it had secured him against the conscious ethicism of the prevailing
+Unitarian doctrine which supremely worshipped Conduct; and it had colored
+his vocabulary to such strange effects that he spoke of moral men with
+abhorrence; as more hopelessly lost than sinners. Any one whose sphere
+tempted him to recognition of the foibles of others, he called the Devil;
+but in spite of his perception of such diabolism, he was rather fond of
+yielding to it, for he had a most trenchant tongue. I myself once fell
+under his condemnation as the Devil, by having too plainly shared his joy
+in his characterization of certain fellow-men; perhaps a group of
+Bostonians from whom he had just parted and whose reciprocal pleasure of
+themselves he presented in the image of "simmering in their own fat and
+putting a nice brown on each other."
+
+Swedenborg himself he did not spare as a man. He thought that very
+likely his life had those lapses in it which some of his followers deny;
+and he regarded him on the aesthetical side as essentially commonplace,
+and as probably chosen for his prophetic function just because of his
+imaginative nullity: his tremendous revelations could be the more
+distinctly and unmistakably inscribed upon an intelligence of that sort,
+which alone could render again a strictly literal report of them.
+
+As to some other sorts of believers who thought they had a special
+apprehension of the truth, he, had no mercy upon them if they betrayed,
+however innocently, any self-complacency in their possession. I went one
+evening to call upon him with a dear old Shaker elder, who had the
+misfortune to say that his people believed themselves to be living the
+angelic life. James fastened upon him with the suggestion that according
+to Swedenborg the most celestial angels were unconscious of their own
+perfection, and that if the Shakers felt they were of angelic condition
+they were probably the sport of the hells. I was very glad to get my
+poor old friend off alive, and to find that he was not even aware of
+being cut asunder: I did not invite him to shake himself.
+
+With spiritualists James had little or no sympathy; he was not so
+impatient of them as the Swedenborgians commonly are, and he probably
+acknowledged a measure of verity in the spiritistic phenomena; but he
+seemed rather incurious concerning them, and he must have regarded them
+as superfluities of naughtiness, mostly; as emanations from the hells.
+His powerful and penetrating intellect interested itself with all social
+and civil facts through his religion. He was essentially religious, but
+he was very consciously a citizen, with most decided opinions upon
+political questions. My own darkness as to anything like social reform
+was then so dense that I cannot now be clear as to his feeling in such
+matters, but I have the impression that it was far more radical than I
+could understand. He was of a very merciful mind regarding things often
+held in pitiless condemnation, but of charity, as it is commonly
+understood, he had misgivings. He would never have turned away from him
+that asketh; but he spoke with regret of some of his benefactions in the
+past, large gifts of money to individuals, which he now thought had done
+more harm than good.
+
+I never knew him to judge men by the society scale. He was most human in
+his relations with others, and was in correspondence with all sorts of
+people seeking light and help; he answered their letters and tried to
+instruct them, and no one was so low or weak but he or she could reach
+him on his or her own level, though he had his humorous perception of
+their foibles and disabilities; and he had that keen sense of the
+grotesque which often goes with the kindliest nature. He told of his
+dining, early in life, next a fellow-man from Cape Cod at the Astor
+House, where such a man could seldom have found himself. When they were
+served with meat this neighbor asked if he would mind his putting his fat
+on James's plate: he disliked fat. James said that he considered the
+request, and seeing no good reason against it, consented.
+
+He could be cruel with his tongue when he fancied insincerity or
+pretence, and then cruelly sorry for the hurt he gave. He was indeed
+tremulously sensitive, not only for himself but for others, and would
+offer atonement far beyond the measure of the offence he supposed himself
+to have given.
+
+At all times he thought originally in words of delightful originality,
+which painted a fact with the greatest vividness. Of a person who had a
+nervous twitching of the face, and who wished to call up a friend to
+them, he said, "He spasmed to the fellow across the room, and introduced
+him." His written style had traits of the same bold adventurousness, but
+it was his speech which was most captivating. As I write of him I see
+him before me: his white bearded face, with a kindly intensity which at
+first glance seemed fierce, the mouth humorously shaping the mustache,
+the eyes vague behind the glasses; his sensitive hand gripping the stick
+on which he rested his weight to ease it from the artificial limb he
+wore.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+The Goethean face and figure of Louis Agassiz were in those days to be
+seen in the shady walks of Cambridge to which for me they lent a
+Weimarish quality, in the degree that in Weimar itself a few years ago, I
+felt a quality of Cambridge. Agassiz, of course, was Swiss and Latin,
+and not Teutonic, but he was of the Continental European civilization,
+and was widely different from the other Cambridge men in everything but
+love of the place. "He is always an Europaen," said Lowell one day, in
+distinguishing concerning him; and for any one who had tasted the flavor
+of the life beyond the ocean and the channel, this had its charm. Yet he
+was extremely fond of his adoptive compatriots, and no alien born had a
+truer or tenderer sense of New England character. I have an idea that no
+one else of his day could have got so much money for science out of the
+General Court of Massachusetts; and I have heard him speak with the
+wisest and warmest appreciation of the hard material from which he was
+able to extract this treasure. The legislators who voted appropriations
+for his Museum and his other scientific objects were not usually lawyers
+or professional men, with the perspectives of a liberal education, but
+were hard-fisted farmers, who had a grip of the State's money as if it
+were their own, and yet gave it with intelligent munificence. They
+understood that he did not want it for himself, and had no interested aim
+in getting it; they knew that, as he once said, he had no time to make
+money, and wished to use it solely for the advancement of learning; and
+with this understanding they were ready, to help him generously. He
+compared their liberality with that of kings and princes, when these
+patronized science, with a recognition of the superior plebeian
+generosity. It was on the veranda of his summer house at Nahant, while
+he lay in the hammock, talking of this, that I heard him refer also to
+the offer which Napoleon III. had made him, inviting him upon certain
+splendid conditions to come to Paris after he had established himself in
+Cambridge. He said that he had not come to America without going over
+every such possibility in his own mind, and deciding beforehand against
+it. He was a republican, by nationality and by preference, and was
+entirely satisfied with his position and environment in New England.
+
+Outside of his scientific circle in Cambridge he was more friends with
+Longfellow than with any one else, I believe, and Longfellow told me how,
+after the doctors had condemned Agassiz to inaction, on account of his
+failing health he had broken down in his friend's study, and wept like an
+'Europaer', and lamented, "I shall never finish my work!" Some papers
+which he had begun to write for the Magazine, in contravention of the
+Darwinian theory, or part of it, which it is known Agassiz did not
+accept, remained part of the work which he never finished. After his
+death, I wished Professor Jeffries Wyman to write of him in the Atlantic,
+but he excused himself on account of his many labors, and then he
+voluntarily spoke of Agassiz's methods, which he agreed with rather than
+his theories, being himself thoroughly Darwinian. I think he said
+Agassiz was the first to imagine establishing a fact not from a single
+example, but from examples indefinitely repeated. If it was a question
+of something about robins for instance, he would have a hundred robins
+examined before he would receive an appearance as a fact.
+
+Of course no preconception or prepossession of his own was suffered to
+bar his way to the final truth he was seeking, and he joyously renounced
+even a conclusion if he found it mistaken. I do not know whether Mrs.
+Agassiz has put into her interesting life of him, a delightful story
+which she told me about him. He came to her beaming one day, and
+demanded, "You know I have always held such and such an opinion about a
+certain group of fossil fishes?" "Yes, yes!" "Well, I have just been
+reading------'s new book, and he has shown me that there isn't the least
+truth in my theory"; and he burst into a laugh of unalloyed pleasure in
+relinquishing his error.
+
+I could touch science at Cambridge only on its literary and social side,
+of course, and my meetings with Agassiz were not many. I recall a dinner
+at his house to Mr. Bret Harte, when the poet came on from California,
+and Agassiz approached him over the coffee through their mutual
+scientific interest in the last meeting of the geological "Society upon
+the Stanislow." He quoted to the author some passages from the poem
+recording the final proceedings of this body, which had particularly
+pleased him, and I think Mr. Harte was as much amused at finding himself
+thus in touch with the savant, as Agassiz could ever have been with that
+delicious poem.
+
+Agassiz lived at one end of Quincy Street, and James almost at the other
+end, with an interval between them which but poorly typified their
+difference of temperament. The one was all philosophical and the other
+all scientific, and yet towards the close of his life, Agassiz may be
+said to have led that movement towards the new position of science in
+matters of mystery which is now characteristic of it. He was ancestrally
+of the Swiss "Brahminical caste," as so many of his friends in Cambridge
+were of the Brahminical caste of New England; and perhaps it was the line
+of ancestral pasteurs which at last drew him back, or on, to the
+affirmation of an unformulated faith of his own. At any rate, before
+most other savants would say that they had souls of their own he became,
+by opening a summer school of science with prayer, nearly as consolatory
+to the unscientific who wished to believe they had souls, as Mr. John
+Fiske himself, though Mr. Fiske, as the arch-apostle of Darwinism, had
+arrived at nearly the same point by such a very different road.
+
+Mr. Fiske had been our neighbor in our first Cambridge home, and when we
+went to live in Berkeley Street, he followed with his family and placed
+himself across the way in a house which I already knew as the home of
+Richard Henry Dana, the author of 'Two Years Before the Mast.' Like
+nearly all the other Cambridge men of my acquaintance Dana was very much
+my senior, and like the rest he welcomed my literary promise as cordially
+as if it were performance, with no suggestion of the condescension which
+was said to be his attitude towards many of his fellow-men. I never saw
+anything of this, in fact, and I suppose he may have been a blend of
+those patrician qualities and democratic principles which made Lowell
+anomalous even to himself. He is part of the anti-slavery history of his
+time, and he gave to the oppressed his strenuous help both as a man and a
+politician; his gifts and learning in the law were freely at their
+service. He never lost his interest in those white slaves, whose brutal
+bondage he remembered as bound with them in his 'Two Years Before the
+Mast,' and any luckless seaman with a case or cause might count upon his
+friendship as surely as the black slaves of the South. He was able to
+temper his indignation for their oppression with a humorous perception of
+what was droll in its agents and circumstances; and I wish I could recall
+all that he said once about sea-etiquette on merchant vessels, where the
+chief mate might no more speak to the captain at table without being
+addressed by him than a subject might put a question to his sovereign. He
+was amusing in his stories of the Pacific trade in which he said it was
+very noble to deal in furs from the Northwest, and very ignoble to deal
+in hides along the Mexican and South American coasts. Every ship's
+master wished naturally to be in the fur-carrying trade, and in one of
+Dana's instances, two vessels encounter in mid-ocean, and exchange the
+usual parley as to their respective ports of departure and destination.
+The final demand comes through the trumpet, "What cargo?" and the captain
+so challenged yields to temptation and roars back "Furs!" A moment of
+hesitation elapses, and then the questioner pursues, "Here and there a
+horn?"
+
+There were other distinctions, of which seafaring men of other days were
+keenly sensible, and Dana dramatized the meeting of a great, swelling
+East Indiaman, with a little Atlantic trader, which has hailed her. She
+shouts back through her captain's trumpet that she is from Calcutta, and
+laden with silks, spices, and other orient treasures, and in her turn she
+requires like answer from the sail which has presumed to enter into
+parley with her. "What cargo?" The trader confesses to a mixed cargo for
+Boston, and to the final question, her master replies in meek apology,
+"Only from Liverpool, sir!" and scuttles down the horizon as swiftly as
+possible.
+
+Dana was not of the Cambridge men whose calling was in Cambridge. He was
+a lawyer in active practice, and he went every day to Boston. One was
+apt to meet him in those horse-cars which formerly tinkled back and forth
+between the two cities, and which were often so full of one's
+acquaintance that they had all the social elements of an afternoon tea.
+They were abusively overcrowded at times, of course, and one might easily
+see a prime literary celebrity swaying from, a strap, or hanging uneasily
+by the hand-rail to the lower steps of the back platform. I do not mean
+that I ever happened to see the author of Two Years Before the Mast in
+either fact, but in his celebrity he had every qualification for the
+illustration of my point. His book probably carried the American name
+farther and wider than any American books except those of Irving and
+Cooper at a day when our writers were very little known, and our
+literature was the only infant industry not fostered against foreign
+ravage, but expressly left to harden and strengthen itself as it best
+might in a heartless neglect even at home. The book was delightful, and
+I remember it from a reading of thirty years ago, as of the stuff that
+classics are made of. I venture no conjecture as to its present
+popularity, but of all books relating to the sea I think it, is the best.
+The author when I knew him was still Richard Henry Dana, Jr., his father,
+the aged poet, who first established the name in the public recognition,
+being alive, though past literary activity. It was distinctively a
+literary race, and in the actual generation it has given proofs of its
+continued literary vitality in the romance of 'Espiritu Santo' by the
+youngest daughter of the Dana I knew.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+There could be no stronger contrast to him in origin, education, and
+character than a man who lived at the same time in Cambridge, and who
+produced a book which in its final fidelity to life is not unworthy to be
+named with 'Two Years Before the Mast.' Ralph Keeler wrote the 'Vagabond
+Adventures' which he had lived. I have it on my heart to name him in the
+presence of our great literary men not only because I had an affection
+for him, tenderer than I then knew, but because I believe his book is
+worthier of more remembrance than it seems to enjoy. I was reading it
+only the other day, and I found it delightful, and much better than I
+imagined when I accepted for the Atlantic the several papers which it is
+made up of. I am not sure but it belongs to the great literature in that
+fidelity to life which I have spoken of, and which the author brought
+himself to practise with such difficulty, and under so much stress from
+his editor. He really wanted to fake it at times, but he was docile at
+last and did it so honestly that it tells the history of his strange
+career in much better terms than it can be given again. He had been, as
+he claimed, "a cruel uncle's ward" in his early orphan-hood, and while
+yet almost a child he had run away from home, to fulfil his heart's
+desire of becoming a clog-dancer in a troupe of negro minstrels. But it
+was first his fate to be cabin-boy and bootblack on a lake steamboat, and
+meet with many squalid adventures, scarcely to be matched outside of a
+Spanish picaresque novel. When he did become a dancer (and even a
+danseuse) of the sort he aspired to be, the fruition of his hopes was so
+little what he imagined that he was very willing to leave the Floating
+Palace on the Mississippi in which his troupe voyaged and exhibited, and
+enter the college of the Jesuit Fathers at Cape Girardeau in Missouri.
+They were very good to him, and in their charge he picked up a good deal
+more Latin, if not less Greek than another strolling player who also took
+to literature. From college Keeler went to Europe, and then to
+California, whence he wrote me that he was coming on to Boston with the
+manuscript of a novel which he wished me to read for the magazine. I
+reported against it to my chief, but nothing could shake Keeler's faith
+in it, until he had printed it at his own cost, and known it fail
+instantly and decisively. He had come to Cambridge to see it through the
+press, and he remained there four or five years, with certain brief
+absences. Then, during the Cuban insurrection of the early seventies, he
+accepted the invitation of a New York paper to go to Cuba as its
+correspondent.
+
+"Don't go, Keeler," I entreated him, when he came to tell me of his
+intention. "They'll garrote you down there."
+
+"Well," he said, with the air of being pleasantly interested by the
+coincidence, as he stood on my study hearth with his feet wide apart in a
+fashion he had, and gayly flirted his hand in the air, "that's what
+Aldrich says, and he's agreed to write my biography, on condition that I
+make a last dying speech when they bring me out on the plaza to do it,
+'If I had taken the advice of my friend T. B. Aldrich, author of
+'Marjorie Daw and Other People,' I should not now be in this place.'"
+
+He went, and he did not come back. He was not indeed garroted as his
+friends had promised, but he was probably assassinated on the steamer by
+which he sailed from Santiago, for he never arrived in Havana, and was
+never heard of again.
+
+I now realize that I loved him, though I did as little to show it as men
+commonly do. If I am to meet somewhere else the friends who are no
+longer here, I should like to meet Ralph Keeler, and I would take some
+chances of meeting in a happy place a soul which had by no means kept
+itself unspotted, but which in all its consciousness of error, cheerfully
+trusted that "the Almighty was not going to scoop any of us." The faith
+worded so grotesquely could not have been more simply or humbly affirmed,
+and no man I think could have been more helplessly sincere. He had
+nothing of that false self-respect which forbids a man to own himself
+wrong promptly and utterly when need is; and in fact he owned to some
+things in his checkered past which would hardly allow him any sort of
+self-respect. He had always an essential gaiety not to be damped by any
+discipline, and a docility which expressed itself in cheerful compliance.
+"Why do you use bias for opinion?" I demanded, in going over a proof with
+him. "Oh, because I'm such an ass--such a bi-ass."
+
+He had a philosophy which he liked to impress with a vivid touch on his
+listener's shoulder: "Put your finger on the present moment and enjoy it.
+It's the only one you've got, or ever will have." This light and joyous
+creature could not but be a Pariah among our Brahmins, and I need not say
+that I never met him in any of the great Cambridge houses. I am not sure
+that he was a persona grata to every one in my own, for Keeler was framed
+rather for men's liking, and Mr. Aldrich and I had our subtleties as to
+whether his mind about women was not so Chinese as somewhat to infect his
+manner. Keeler was too really modest to be of any rebellious mind
+towards the society which ignored him, and of too sweet a cheerfulness to
+be greatly vexed by it. He lived on in the house of a suave old actor,
+who oddly made his home in Cambridge, and he continued of a harmless
+Bohemianism in his daily walk, which included lunches at Boston
+restaurants as often as he could get you to let him give them you, if you
+were of his acquaintance. On a Sunday he would appear coming out of the
+post-office usually at the hour when all cultivated Cambridge was coming
+for its letters, and wave a glad hand in air, and shout a blithe
+salutation to the friend he had marked for his companion in a morning
+stroll. The stroll was commonly over the flats towards Brighton (I do
+not know why, except perhaps that it was out of the beat of the better
+element) and the talk was mainly of literature, in which he was doing
+less than he meant to do, and which he seemed never able quite to feel
+was not a branch of the Show Business, and might not be legitimately
+worked by like advertising, though he truly loved and honored it.
+
+I suppose it was not altogether a happy life, and Keeler had his moments
+of amusing depression, which showed their shadows in his smiling face. He
+was of a slight figure and low stature, with hands and feet of almost
+womanish littleness. He was very blonde, and his restless eyes were
+blue; he wore his yellow beard in whiskers only, which he pulled
+nervously but perhaps did not get to droop so much as he wished.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+Keeler was a native of Ohio, and there lived at Cambridge when I first
+came there an Indianian, more accepted by literary society, who was of
+real quality as a poet. Forceythe Willson, whose poem of "The Old
+Sergeant" Doctor Holmes used to read publicly in the closing year of the
+civil war, was of a Western altitude of figure, and of an extraordinary
+beauty of face in an oriental sort. He had large, dark eyes with clouded
+whites; his full, silken beard was of a flashing Persian blackness. He
+was excessively nervous, to such an extreme that when I first met him at
+Longfellow's, he could not hold himself still in his chair. I think this
+was an effect of shyness in him, as well as physical, for afterwards when
+I went to find him in his own house he was much more at ease.
+
+He preferred to receive me in the dim, large hall after opening his door
+to me himself, and we sat down there and talked, I remember, of
+supernatural things. He was much interested in spiritualism, and he had
+several stories to tell of his own experience in such matters. But none
+was so good as one which I had at second hand from Lowell, who thought it
+almost the best ghost story he had ever heard. The spirit of Willson's
+father appeared to him, and stood before him. Willson was accustomed to
+apparitions, and so he said simply, "Won't you sit down, father?" The
+phantom put out his hand to lay hold of a chair-back as some people do in
+taking a seat, and his shadowy arm passed through the frame-work. "Ah!"
+he said, "I forgot that I was not substance."
+
+I do not know whether "The Old Sergeant" is ever read now; it has
+probably passed with other great memories of the great war; and I am
+afraid none of Willson's other verse is remembered. But he was then a
+distinct literary figure, and not to be left out of the count of our
+poets. I did not see him again. Shortly afterwards I heard that he had
+left Cambridge with signs of consumption, which must have run a rapid
+course, for a very little later came the news of his death.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+The most devoted Cantabrigian, after Lowell, whom I knew, would perhaps
+have contended that if he had stayed with us Willson might have lived;
+for John Holmes affirmed a faith in the virtues of the place which
+ascribed almost an aseptic character to its air, and when he once
+listened to my own complaints of an obstinate cold, he cheered himself,
+if not me, with the declaration, "Well, one thing, Mr. Howells, Cambridge
+never let a man keep a cold yet!"
+
+If he had said it was better to live in Cambridge with a cold than
+elsewhere without one I should have believed him; as it was, Cambridge
+bore him out in his assertion, though she took her own time to do it.
+
+Lowell had talked to me of him before I met him, celebrating his peculiar
+humor with that affection which was not always so discriminating, and
+Holmes was one of the first Cambridge men I knew. I knew him first in
+the charming old Colonial house in which his famous brother and he were
+born. It was demolished long before I left Cambridge, but in memory it
+still stands on the ground since occupied by the Hemenway Gymnasium, and
+shows for me through that bulk a phantom frame of Continental buff in the
+shadow of elms that are shadows themselves. The 'genius loci' was
+limping about the pleasant mansion with the rheumatism which then
+expressed itself to his friends in a resolute smile, but which now
+insists upon being an essential trait of the full-length presence to my
+mind: a short stout figure, helped out with a cane, and a grizzled head
+with features formed to win the heart rather than the eye of the
+beholder.
+
+In one of his own eyes there was a cast of such winning humor and
+geniality that it took the liking more than any beauty could have done,
+and the sweetest, shy laugh in the world went with this cast.
+
+I long wished to get him to write something for the Magazine, and at last
+I prevailed with him to review a history of Cambridge which had come out.
+
+He did it charmingly of course, for he loved more to speak of Cambridge
+than anything else. He held his native town in an idolatry which was not
+blind, but which was none the less devoted because he was aware of her
+droll points and her weak points. He always celebrated these as so many
+virtues, and I think it was my own passion for her that first commended
+me to him. I was not her son, but he felt that this was my misfortune
+more than my fault, and he seemed more and more to forgive it. After we
+had got upon the terms of editor and contributor, we met oftener than
+before, though I do not now remember that I ever persuaded him to write
+again for me. Once he gave me something, and then took it back, with a
+self-distrust of it which I could not overcome.
+
+When the Holmes house was taken down, he went to live with an old
+domestic in a small house on the street amusingly called Appian Way. He
+had certain rooms of her, and his own table, but he would not allow that
+he was ever anything but a lodger in the place, where he continued till
+he died. In the process of time he came so far to trust his experience
+of me, that he formed the habit of giving me an annual supper. Some days
+before this event, he would appear in my study, and with divers delicate
+and tentative approaches, nearly always of the same tenor, he would say
+that he should like to ask my family to an oyster supper with him. "But
+you know," he would explain, "I haven't a house of my own to ask you to,
+and I should like to give you the supper here." When I had agreed to
+this suggestion with due gravity, he would inquire our engagements, and
+then say, as if a great load were off his mind, "Well, then, I will send
+up a few oysters to-morrow," or whatever day we had fixed on; and after a
+little more talk to take the strangeness out of the affair, would go his
+way. On the day appointed the fish-man would come with several gallons
+of oysters, which he reported Mr. Holmes had asked him to bring, and in
+the evening the giver of the feast would reappear, with a lank oil-cloth
+bag, sagged by some bottles of wine. There was always a bottle of red
+wine, and sometimes a bottle of champagne, and he had taken the
+precaution to send some crackers beforehand, so that the supper should be
+as entirely of his own giving as possible. He was forced to let us do
+the cooking and to supply the cold-slaw, and perhaps he indemnified
+himself for putting us to these charges and for the use of our linen and
+silver, by the vast superfluity of his oysters, with which we remained
+inundated for days. He did not care to eat many himself, but seemed
+content to fancy doing us a pleasure; and I have known few greater ones
+in life, than in the hospitality that so oddly played the host to us at
+our own table.
+
+It must have seemed incomprehensible to such a Cantabrigian that we
+should ever have been willing to leave Cambridge, and in fact I do not
+well understand it myself. But if he resented it, he never showed his
+resentment. As often as I happened to meet him after our defection he
+used me with unabated kindness, and sparkled into some gaiety too
+ethereal for remembrance. The last time I met him was at Lowell's
+funeral, when I drove home with him and Curtis and Child, and in the
+revulsion from the stress of that saddest event, had our laugh, as people
+do in the presence of death, at something droll we remembered of the
+friend we mourned.
+
+My nearest literary neighbor, when we lived in Sacramento Street, was the
+Rev. Dr. John G. Palfrey, the historian of New England, whose
+chimney-tops amid the pine-tops I could see from my study window when the
+leaves were off the little grove of oaks between us. He was one of the
+first of my acquaintances, not suffering the great disparity of our ages
+to count against me, but tactfully and sweetly adjusting himself to my
+youth in the friendly intercourse which he invited. He was a most gentle
+and kindly old man, with still an interest in liberal things which lasted
+till the infirmities of age secluded him from the world and all its
+interests. As is known, he had been in his prime one of the foremost of
+the New England anti-slavery men, and he had fought the good fight with a
+heavy heart for a brother long settled in Louisiana who sided with the
+South, and who after the civil war found himself disfranchised. In this
+temporary disability he came North to visit Doctor Palfrey upon the
+doctor's insistence, though at first he would have nothing to do with
+him, and refused even to answer his letters. "Of course," the doctor
+said, "I was not going to stand that from my mother's son, and I simply
+kept on writing." So he prevailed, but the fiery old gentleman from
+Louisiana was reconciled to nothing in the North but his brother, and
+when he came to return my visit, he quickly touched upon his cause of
+quarrel with us. "I can't vote," he declared, "but my coachman can, and
+I don't know how I'm to get the suffrage, unless my physician paints me
+all over with the iodine he's using for my rheumatic side."
+
+Doctor Palfrey was most distinctly of the Brahminical caste and was long
+an eminent Unitarian minister, but at the time I began to know him he had
+long quitted the pulpit. He was so far of civic or public character as
+to be postmaster at Boston, when we were first neighbors, but this
+officiality was probably so little in keeping with his nature that it was
+like a return to his truer self when he ceased to hold the place, and
+gave his time altogether to his history. It is a work which will hardly
+be superseded in the interest of those who value thorough research and
+temperate expression. It is very just, and without endeavor for picture
+or drama it is to me very attractive. Much that has to be recorded of
+New England lacks charm, but he gave form and dignity and presence to the
+memories of the past, and the finer moments of that great story, he gave
+with the simplicity that was their best setting. It seems to me such an
+apology (in the old sense) as New England might have written for herself,
+and in fact Doctor Palfrey was a personification of New England in one of
+the best and truest kinds. He was refined in the essential gentleness of
+his heart without being refined away; he kept the faith of her Puritan
+tradition though he no longer kept the Puritan faith, and his defence of
+the Puritan severity with the witches and Quakers was as impartial as it
+was efficient in positing the Puritans as of their time, and rather
+better and not worse than other people of the same time. He was himself
+a most tolerant man, and his tolerance was never weak or fond; it stopped
+well short of condoning error, which he condemned when he preferred to
+leave it to its own punishment. Personally he was without any flavor of
+harshness; his mind was as gentle as his manner, which was one of the
+gentlest I have ever known.
+
+Of as gentle make but of more pensive temper, with unexpected bursts of
+lyrical gaiety, was Christopher Pearse Cranch, the poet, whom I had known
+in New York long before he came to live in Cambridge. He could not only
+play and sing most amusing songs, but he wrote very good poems and
+painted pictures perhaps not so good. I always liked his Venetian
+pictures, for their poetic, unsentimentalized veracity, and I printed as
+well as liked many of his poems. During the time that I knew him more
+than his due share of troubles and sorrows accumulated themselves on his
+fine head, which the years had whitened, and gave a droop to the
+beautiful, white-bearded face. But he had the artist soul and the poet
+heart, and no doubt he could take refuge in these from the cares that
+shadowed his visage. My acquaintance with him in Cambridge renewed
+itself upon the very terms of its beginning in New York. We met at
+Longfellow's table, where he lifted up his voice in the Yankee folk-song,
+"On Springfield Mountain there did dwell," which he gave with a perfectly
+killing mock-gravity.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+At Cambridge the best society was better, it seems to me, than even that
+of the neighboring capital. It would be rather hard to prove this, and I
+must ask the reader to take my word for it, if he wishes to believe it.
+The great interests in that pleasant world, which I think does not
+present itself to my memory in a false iridiscence, were the intellectual
+interests, and all other interests were lost in these to such as did not
+seek them too insistently.
+
+People held themselves high; they held themselves personally aloof from
+people not duly assayed; their civilization was still Puritan though
+their belief had long ceased to be so. They had weights and measure,
+stamped in an earlier time, a time surer of itself than ours, by which
+they rated the merit of all comers, and rejected such as did not bear the
+test. These standards were their own, and they were satisfied with them;
+most Americans have no standards of their own, but these are not
+satisfied even with other people's, and so our society is in a state of
+tolerant and tremulous misgiving.
+
+Family counted in Cambridge, without doubt, as it counts in New England
+everywhere, but family alone did not mean position, and the want of
+family did not mean the want of it. Money still less than family
+commanded; one could be openly poor in Cambridge without open shame, or
+shame at all, for no one was very rich there, and no one was proud of his
+riches.
+
+I do not wonder that Turguenieff thought the conditions ideal, as Boyesen
+portrayed them to him; and I look back at my own life there with wonder
+at my good fortune. I was sensible, and I still am sensible this had its
+alloys. I was young and unknown and was making my way, and I had to
+suffer some of the penalties of these disadvantages; but I do not believe
+that anywhere else in this ill-contrived economy, where it is vainly
+imagined that the material struggle forms a high incentive and
+inspiration, would my penalties have been so light. On the other hand,
+the good that was done me I could never repay if I lived all over again
+for others the life that I have so long lived for myself. At times, when
+I had experienced from those elect spirits with whom I was associated,
+some act of friendship, as signal as it was delicate, I used to ask
+myself, how I could ever do anything unhandsome or ungenerous towards any
+one again; and I had a bad conscience the next time I did it.
+
+The air of the Cambridge that I knew was sufficiently cool to be bracing,
+but what was of good import in me flourished in it. The life of the
+place had its lateral limitations; sometimes its lights failed to detect
+excellent things that lay beyond it; but upward it opened illimitably. I
+speak of it frankly because that life as I witnessed it is now almost
+wholly of the past. Cambridge is still the home of much that is good and
+fine in our literature: one realizes this if one names Colonel Thomas
+Wentworth Higginson, Mr. John Fiske, Mr. William James, Mr. Horace E.
+Scudder, not to name any others, but the first had not yet come back to
+live in his birthplace at the time I have been writing of, and the rest
+had not yet their actual prominence. One, in deed among so many absent,
+is still present there, whom from time to time I have hitherto named
+without offering him the recognition which I should have known an
+infringement of his preferences. But the literary Cambridge of thirty
+years ago could not be clearly imagined or justly estimated without
+taking into account the creative sympathy of a man whose contributions to
+our literature only partially represent what he has constantly done for
+the humanities. I am sure that, after the easy heroes of the day are
+long forgot, and the noisy fames of the strenuous life shall dwindle to
+their essential insignificance before those of the gentle life, we shall
+all see in Charles Eliot Norton the eminent scholar who left the quiet of
+his books to become our chief citizen at the moment when he warned his
+countrymen of the ignominy and disaster of doing wrong.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+   Cold-slaw
+   Collective opacity
+   Expectation of those who will come no more
+   Felt that this was my misfortune more than my fault
+   Found life was not all poetry
+   He had no time to make money
+   Intellectual poseurs
+   No time to make money
+   NYC, a city where money counts for more and goes for less
+   One could be openly poor in Cambridge without open shame
+   Put your finger on the present moment and enjoy it
+   Standards were their own, and they were satisfied with them
+   Wonderful to me how it should remain so unintelligible
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Cambridge Neighbors, by William Dean Howells
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Cambridge Neighbors, by Howells
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+Title: Cambridge Neighbors
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: August, 2002  [Etext #3392]
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Cambridge Neighbors, by Howells
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+
+LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--Cambridge Neighbors
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+Being the wholly literary spirit I was when I went to make my home in
+Cambridge, I do not see how I could well have been more content if I had
+found myself in the Elysian Fields with an agreeable eternity before me.
+At twenty-nine, indeed, one is practically immortal, and at that age,
+time had for me the effect of an eternity in which I had nothing to do
+but to read books and dream of writing them, in the overflow of endless
+hours from my work with the manuscripts, critical notices, and proofs of
+the Atlantic Monthly.  As for the social environment I should have been
+puzzled if given my choice among the elect of all the ages, to find poets
+and scholars more to my mind than those still in the flesh at Cambridge
+in the early afternoon of the nineteenth century.  They are now nearly
+all dead, and I can speak of them in the freedom which is death's
+doubtful favor to the survivor; but if they were still alive I could say
+little to their offence, unless their modesty was hurt with my praise.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+One of the first and truest of our Cambridge friends was that exquisite
+intelligence, who, in a world where so many people are grotesquely
+miscalled, was most fitly named; for no man ever kept here more perfectly
+and purely the heart of such as the kingdom of heaven is of than Francis
+J. Child.  He was then in his prime, and I like to recall the outward
+image which expressed the inner man as happily as his name.  He was of
+low stature and of an inclination which never became stoutness; but what
+you most saw when you saw him was his face of consummate refinement: very
+regular, with eyes always glassed by gold-rimmed spectacles, a straight,
+short, most sensitive nose, and a beautiful mouth with the sweetest smile
+mouth ever wore, and that was as wise and shrewd as it was sweet.  In a
+time when every other man was more or less bearded he was clean shaven,
+and of a delightful freshness of coloring which his thick sunny hair,
+clustering upon his head in close rings, admirably set off.  I believe he
+never became gray, and the last time I saw him, though he was broken then
+with years and pain, his face had still the brightness of his
+inextinguishable youth.
+
+It is well known how great was Professor Child's scholarship in the
+branches of his Harvard work; and how especially, how uniquely, effective
+it was in the study of English and Scottish balladry to which he gave so
+many years of his life.  He was a poet in his nature, and he wrought with
+passion as well as knowledge in the achievement of as monumental a task
+as any American has performed.  But he might have been indefinitely less
+than he was in any intellectual wise, and yet been precious to those who
+knew him for the gentleness and the goodness which in him were protected
+from misconception by a final dignity as delicate and as inviolable as
+that of Longfellow himself.
+
+We were still much less than a year from our life in Venice, when he came
+to see us in Cambridge, and in the Italian interest which then commended
+us to so many fine spirits among our neighbors we found ourselves at the
+beginning of a life-long friendship with him.  I was known to him only by
+my letters from Venice, which afterwards became Venetian Life, and by a
+bit of devotional verse which he had asked to include in a collection he
+was making, but he immediately gave us the freedom of his heart, which
+after wards was never withdrawn.  In due time he imagined a home-school,
+to which our little one was asked, and she had her first lessons with his
+own daughter under his roof.  These things drew us closer together, and
+he was willing to be still nearer to me in any time of trouble.  At one
+such time when the shadow which must some time darken every door, hovered
+at ours, he had the strength to make me face it and try to realize, while
+it was still there, that it was not cruel and not evil.  It passed, for
+that time, but the sense of his help remained; and in my own case I can
+testify of the potent tenderness which all who knew him must have known
+in him.  But in bearing my witness I feel accused, almost as if he were
+present; by his fastidious reluctance from any recognition of his
+helpfulness. When this came in the form of gratitude taking credit to
+itself in a pose which reflected honor upon him as the architect of
+greatness, he was delightfully impatient of it, and he was most amusingly
+dramatic in reproducing the consciousness of certain ineffectual alumni
+who used to overwhelm him at Commencement solemnities with some such
+pompous acknowledgment as, "Professor Child, all that I have become, sir,
+I owe to your influence in my college career."  He did, with delicious
+mockery, the old-fashioned intellectual poseurs among the students, who
+used to walk the groves of Harvard with bent head, and the left arm
+crossing the back, while the other lodged its hand in the breast of the
+high buttoned frock-coat; and I could fancy that his classes in college
+did not form the sunniest exposure for young.  folly and vanity.  I know
+that he was intolerant of any manner of insincerity, and no flattery
+could take him off his guard.  I have seen him meet this with a cutting
+phrase of rejection, and no man was more apt at snubbing the patronage
+that offers itself at times to all men.  But mostly he wished to do
+people pleasure, and he seemed always to be studying how to do it; as for
+need, I am sure that worthy and unworthy want had alike the way to his
+heart.
+
+Children were always his friends, and they repaid with adoration the
+affection which he divided with them and with his flowers.  I recall him
+in no moments so characteristic as those he spent in making the little
+ones laugh out of their hearts at his drolling, some festive evening in
+his house, and those he gave to sharing with you his joy in his
+gardening.  This, I believe, began with violets, and it went on to roses,
+which he grew in a splendor and profusion impossible to any but a true
+lover with a genuine gift for them.  Like Lowell, he spent his summers in
+Cambridge, and in the afternoon, you could find him digging or pruning
+among his roses with an ardor which few caprices of the weather could
+interrupt.  He would lift himself from their ranks, which he scarcely
+overtopped, as you came up the footway to his door, and peer purblindly
+across at you.  If he knew you at once, he traversed the nodding and
+swaying bushes, to give you the hand free of the trowel or knife; or if
+you got indoors unseen by him he would come in holding towards you some
+exquisite blossom that weighed down the tip of its long stem with a
+succession of hospitable obeisances.
+
+He graced with unaffected poetry a life of as hard study, of as hard
+work, and as varied achievement as any I have known or read of; and he
+played with gifts and acquirements such as in no great measure have made
+reputations.  He had a rare and lovely humor which could amuse itself
+both in English and Italian with such an airy burletta as "Il Pesceballo"
+(he wrote it in Metastasian Italian, and Lowell put it in libretto
+English); he had a critical sense as sound as it was subtle in all
+literature; and whatever he wrote he imbued with the charm of a style
+finely personal to himself.  His learning in the line of his Harvard
+teaching included an early English scholarship unrivalled in his time,
+and his researches in ballad literature left no corner of it untouched.
+I fancy this part of his study was peculiarly pleasant to him; for he
+loved simple and natural things, and the beauty which he found nearest
+life.  At least he scorned the pedantic affectations of literary
+superiority; and he used to quote with joyous laughter the swelling
+exclamation of an Italian critic who proposed to leave the summits of
+polite learning for a moment, with the cry, "Scendiamo fra il popolo!"
+(Let us go down among the people.)
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+Of course it was only so hard worked a man who could take thought and
+trouble for another.  He once took thought for me at a time when it was
+very important to me, and when he took the trouble to secure for me an
+engagement to deliver that course of Lowell lectures in Boston, which I
+have said Lowell had the courage to go in town to hear.  I do not
+remember whether Professor Child was equal to so much, but he would have
+been if it were necessary; and I rather rejoice now in the belief that he
+did not seek quite that martyrdom.
+
+He had done more than enough for me, but he had done only what he was
+always willing to do for others.  In the form of a favor to himself he
+brought into my fife the great happiness of intimately knowing Hjalmar
+Hjorth Boyesen, whom he had found one summer day among the shelves in the
+Harvard library, and found to be a poet and an intending novelist.  I do
+not remember now just how this fact imparted itself to the professor, but
+literature is of easily cultivated confidence in youth, and possibly the
+revelation was spontaneous.  At any rate, as a susceptible young editor,
+I was asked to meet my potential contributor at the professor's two
+o'clock dinner, and when we came to coffee in the study, Boyesen took
+from the pocket nearest his heart a chapter of 'Gunnar', and read it to
+us.
+
+Perhaps the good professor who brought us together had plotted to have
+both novel and novelist make their impression at once upon the youthful
+sub-editor; but at any rate they did not fail of an effect.  I believe it
+was that chapter where Gunnar and Ragnhild dance and sing a 'stev'
+together, for I associate with that far happy time the rich mellow tones
+of the poet's voice in the poet's verse.  These were most characteristic
+of him, and it is as if I might put my ear against the ethereal wall
+beyond which he is rapt and hear them yet.
+
+Our meeting was on a lovely afternoon of summer, and the odor of the
+professor's roses stole in at the open windows, and became part of the
+gentle event.  Boyesen walked home with me, and for a fortnight after I
+think we parted only to dream of the literature which we poured out upon
+each other in every waking moment.  I had just learned to know Bjornson's
+stories, and Boyesen told me of his poetry and of his drama, which in
+even measure embodied the great Norse literary movement, and filled me
+with the wonder and delight of that noble revolt against convention, that
+brave return to nature and the springs of poetry in the heart and the
+speech of the common people.  Literature was Boyesen's religion more than
+the Swedenborgian philosophy in which we had both been spiritually
+nurtured, and at every step of our mounting friendship we found ourselves
+on common ground in our worship of it.  I was a decade his senior, but at
+thirty-five I was not yet so stricken in years as not to be able fully to
+rejoice in the ardor which fused his whole being in an incandescent
+poetic mass.  I have known no man who loved poetry more generously and
+passionately; and I think he was above all things a poet.  His work took
+the shape of scholarship, fiction, criticism, but poetry gave it all a
+touch of grace and beauty.  Some years after this first meeting of ours I
+remember a pathetic moment with him, when I asked him why he had not
+written any verse of late, and he answered, as if still in sad
+astonishment at the fact, that he had found life was not all poetry.  In
+those earlier days I believe he really thought it was!
+
+Perhaps it really is, and certainly in the course of a life that
+stretched almost to half a century Boyesen learned more and more to see
+the poetry of the everyday world at least as the material of art.  He did
+battle valiantly for that belief in many polemics, which I suppose gave
+people a sufficiently false notion of him; and he showed his faith by
+works in fiction which better illustrated his motive.  Gunnar stands at
+the beginning of these works, and at the farthest remove from it in
+matter and method stands 'The Mammon of Unrighteousness'.  The lovely
+idyl won him fame and friendship, and the great novel added neither to
+him, though he had put the experience and the observation of his ripened
+life into it.  Whether it is too late or too early for it to win the
+place in literature which it merits I do not know; but it always seemed
+to me the very spite of fate that it should have failed of popular
+effect.  Yet I must own that it has so failed, and I own this without
+bitterness towards Gunnar, which embalmed the spirit of his youth as
+'The Mammon of Unrighteousness' embodied the thought of his manhood.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+It was my pleasure, my privilege, to bring Gunnar before the public as
+editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and to second the author in many a
+struggle with the strange idiom he had cast the story in.  The proofs
+went back and forth between us till the author had profited by every hint
+and suggestion of the editor.  He was quick to profit by any hint, and he
+never made the same mistake twice.  He lived his English as fast as he
+learned it; the right word became part of him; and he put away the wrong
+word with instant and final rejection.  He had not learned American
+English without learning newspaper English, but if one touched a phrase
+of it in his work, he felt in his nerves, which are the ultimate arbiters
+in such matters, its difference from true American and true English.
+It was wonderful how apt and how elect his diction was in those days;
+it seemed as if his thought clothed itself in the fittest phrase without
+his choosing.  In his poetry he had extraordinary good fortune from the
+first;  his mind had an apparent affinity with what was most native, most
+racy in our speech; and I have just been looking over Gunnar and
+marvelling anew at the felicity and the beauty of his phrasing.
+
+I do not know whether those who read his books stop much to consider how
+rare his achievement was in the mere means of expression.  Our speech is
+rather more hospitable than most, and yet I can remember but five other
+writers born to different languages who have handled English with
+anything like his mastery.  Two Italians, Ruffini, the novelist, and
+Gallenga, the journalist; two Germans, Carl Schurz and Carl Hillebrand,
+and the Dutch novelist Maarten Maartens, have some of them equalled but
+none of them surpassed him.  Yet he was a man grown when he began to
+speak and to write English, though I believe he studied it somewhat in
+Norway before he came to America.  What English he knew he learned the
+use of here, and in the measure of its idiomatic vigor we may be proud of
+it as Americans.
+
+He had least of his native grace, I think, in his criticism; and yet as a
+critic he had qualities of rare temperance, acuteness, and knowledge.
+He had very decided convictions in literary art; one kind of thing he
+believed was good and all other kinds less good down to what was bad; but
+he was not a bigot, and he made allowances for art-in-error.  His hand
+fell heavy only upon those heretics who not merely denied the faith but
+pretended that artifice was better than nature, that decoration was more
+than structure, that make-believe was something you could live by as you
+live by truth.  He was not strongest, however, in damnatory criticism.
+His spirit was too large, too generous to dwell in that, and it rose
+rather to its full height in his appreciations of the great authors whom
+he loved, and whom he commented from the plenitude of his scholarship as
+well as from his delighted sense of their grandeur.  Here he was almost
+as fine as in his poetry, and only less fine than in his more fortunate
+essays in fiction.
+
+After Gunnar he was a long while in striking another note so true.  He
+did not strike it again till he wrote 'The Mammon of Unrighteousness',
+and after that he was sometimes of a wandering and uncertain touch.
+There are certain stories of his which I cannot read without a painful
+sense of their inequality not only to his talent, but to his knowledge of
+human nature, and of American character.  He understood our character
+quite as well as he understood our language, but at times he seemed not
+to do so.  I think these were the times when he was overworked, and ought
+to have been resting instead of writing.  In such fatigue one loses
+command of alien words, alien situations; and in estimating Boyesen's
+achievements we must never forget that he was born strange to our
+language and to our life.  In 'Gunnar' he handled the one with grace and
+charm; in his great novel he handled both with masterly strength.  I call
+'The Mammon of Unrighteousness' a great novel, and I am quite willing to
+say that I know few novels by born Americans that surpass it in dealing
+with American types and conditions.  It has the vast horizon of the
+masterpieces of fictions; its meanings are not for its characters alone,
+but for every reader of it; when you close the book the story is not at
+an end.
+
+I have a pang in praising it, for I remember that my praise cannot please
+him any more.  But it was a book worthy the powers which could have given
+us yet greater things if they had not been spent on lesser things.
+Boyesen could "toil terribly," but for his fame he did not always toil
+wisely, though he gave himself as utterly in his unwise work as in his
+best; it was always the best he could do.  Several years after our first
+meeting in Cambridge, he went to live in New York, a city where money
+counts for more and goes for less than in any other city of the world,
+and he could not resist the temptation to write more and more when he
+should have written less and less.  He never wrote anything that was not
+worth reading, but he wrote too much for one who was giving himself with
+all his conscience to his academic work in the university honored by his
+gifts and his attainments, and was lecturing far and near in the
+vacations which should have been days and weeks and months of leisure.
+The wonder is that even such a stock of health as his could stand the
+strain so long, but he had no vices, and his only excesses were in the
+direction of the work which he loved so well.  When a man adds to his
+achievements every year, we are apt to forget the things he has already
+done; and I think it well to remind the reader that Boyesen, who died at
+forty-eight, had written, besides articles, reviews, and lectures
+unnumbered, four volumes of scholarly criticism on German and
+Scandinavian literature, a volume of literary and social essays, a
+popular history of Norway, a volume of poems, twelve volumes of fiction,
+and four books for boys.
+
+Boyesen's energies were inexhaustible.  He was not content to be merely a
+scholar, merely an author; he wished to be an active citizen, to take his
+part in honest politics, and to live for his day in things that most men
+of letters shun.  His experience in them helped him to know American life
+better and to appreciate it more justly, both in its good and its evil;
+and as a matter of fact he knew us very well.  His acquaintance with us
+had been wide and varied beyond that of most of our literary men, and
+touched many aspects of our civilization which remain unknown to most
+Americans.  When be died he had been a journalist in Chicago, and a
+teacher in Ohio; he had been a professor in Cornell University and a
+literary free lance in New York; and everywhere his eyes and ears had
+kept themselves open.  As a teacher he learned to know the more fortunate
+or the more ambitious of our youth, and as a lecturer his knowledge was
+continually extending itself among all ages and classes of Americans.
+
+He was through and through a Norseman, but he was none the less a very
+American.  Between Norsk and Yankee there is an affinity of spirit more
+intimate than the ties of race.  Both have the common-sense view of life;
+both are unsentimental.  When Boyesen told me that among the Norwegians
+men never kissed each other, as the Germans, and the Frenchmen, and the
+Italians do, I perceived that we stood upon common ground.  When he
+explained the democratic character of society in Norway, I could well
+understand how he should find us a little behind his own countrymen in
+the practice, if not the theory of equality, though they lived under a
+king and we under a president.  But he was proud of his American
+citizenship; he knew all that it meant, at its best, for humanity.  He
+divined that the true expression of America was not civic, not social,
+but domestic almost, and that the people in the simplest homes, or those
+who remained in the tradition of a simple home life, were the true
+Americans as yet, whatever the future Americans might be.
+
+When I first knew him he was chafing with the impatience of youth and
+ambition at what he thought his exile in the West.  There was, to be
+sure, a difference between Urbana, Ohio, and Cambridge, Massachusetts,
+and he realized the difference in the extreme and perhaps beyond it.
+I tried to make him believe that if a man had one or two friends anywhere
+who loved letters and sympathized with him in his literary attempts,
+it was incentive enough; but of course he wished to be in the centres of
+literature, as we all do; and he never was content until he had set his
+face and his foot Eastward.  It was a great step for him from the
+Swedenborgian school at Urbana to the young university at Ithaca; and I
+remember his exultation in making it.  But he could not rest there, and
+in a few years he resigned his professorship, and came to New York, where
+he entered high-heartedly upon the struggle with fortune which ended in
+his appointment in Columbia.
+
+New York is a mart and not a capital, in literature as well as in other
+things, and doubtless he increasingly felt this.  I know that there came
+a time when he no longer thought the West must be exile for a literary
+man; and his latest visits to its summer schools as a lecturer impressed
+him with the genuineness of the interest felt there in culture of all
+kinds.  He spoke of this, with a due sense of what was pathetic as well
+as what was grotesque in some of its manifestations; and I think that in
+reconciling himself to our popular crudeness for the sake of our popular
+earnestness, he completed his naturalization, in the only sense in which
+our citizenship is worth having.
+
+I do not wish to imply that he forgot his native land, or ceased to love
+it proudly and tenderly.  He kept for Norway the fondness which the man
+sitting at his own hearth feels for the home of his boyhood.  He was of
+good family; his people were people of substance and condition, and he
+could have had an easier life there than here.  He could have won even
+wider fame, and doubtless if he had remained in Norway, he would have
+been one of that group of great Norwegians who have given their little
+land renown surpassed by that of no other in the modern republic of
+letters.  The name of Boyesen would have been set with the names of
+Bjornson, of Ibsen, of Kielland, and of Lie.  But when once he had seen
+America (at the wish of his father, who had visited the United States
+before him), he thought only of becoming an American.  When I first knew
+him he was full of the poetry of his mother-land; his talk was of fjords
+and glaciers, of firs and birches, of hulders and nixies, of housemen and
+gaardsmen; but he was glad to be here, and I think he never regretted
+that he had cast his lot with us.  Always, of course, he had the deepest
+interest in his country and countrymen.  He stood the friend of every
+Norwegian who came to him in want or trouble, and they, came to him
+freely and frequently.  He sympathized strongly with Norway in her
+quarrel with Sweden, and her wish for equality as well as autonomy; and
+though he did not go all lengths with the national party, he was decided
+in his feeling that Sweden was unjust to her sister kingdom, and
+strenuous for the principles of the Norwegian leaders.
+
+But, as I have said, poetry, was what his ardent spirit mainly meditated
+in that hour when I first knew him in Cambridge, before we had either of
+us grown old and sad, if not wise.  He overflowed with it, and he talked
+as little as he dreamed of anything else in the vast half-summer we spent
+together.  He was constantly at my house, where in an absence of my
+family I was living bachelor, and where we sat indoors and talked, or
+sauntered outdoors and talked, with our heads in a cloud of fancies, not
+unmixed with the mosquitoes of Cambridge: if I could have back the
+fancies, I would be willing to have the mosquitoes with them.  He looked
+the poetry he lived: his eyes were the blue of sunlit fjords; his brown
+silken hair was thick on the crown which it later abandoned to a
+scholarly baldness; his soft, red lips half hid a boyish pout in the
+youthful beard and mustache.  He was short of stature, but of a stalwart
+breadth of frame, and his voice was of a peculiar and endearing quality,
+indescribably mellow and tender when he read his verse.
+
+I have hardly the right to dwell so long upon him here, for he was only a
+sojourner in Cambridge, but the memory of that early intimacy is too much
+for my sense of proportion.  As I have hinted, our intimacy was renewed
+afterwards, when I too came to live in New York, where as long as he was
+in this 'dolce lome', he hardly let a week go by without passing a long
+evening with me.  Our talk was still of literature and life, but more of
+life than of literature, and we seldom spoke of those old times.  I still
+found him true to the ideals which had clarified themselves to both of us
+as the duty of unswerving fealty to the real thing in whatever we did.
+This we felt, as we had felt it long before, to be the sole source of
+beauty and of art, and we warmed ourselves at each other's hearts in our
+devotion to it, amidst a misunderstanding environment which we did not
+characterize by so mild an epithet.  Boyesen, indeed, out-realisted me,
+in the polemics of our aesthetics, and sometimes when an unbeliever was
+by, I willingly left to my friend the affirmation of our faith, not
+without some quaking at his unsparing strenuousness in disciplining the
+heretic.  But now that ardent and active soul is Elsewhere, and I have
+ceased even to expect the ring, which, making itself heard at the late
+hour of his coming, I knew always to be his and not another's.  That
+mechanical expectation of those who will come no more is something
+terrible, but when even that ceases, we know the irreparability of our
+loss, and begin to realize how much of ourselves they have taken with
+them.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+It was some years before the Boyesen summer, which was the fourth or
+fifth of our life in Cambridge, that I made the acquaintance of a man,
+very much my senior, who remains one of the vividest personalities in my
+recollection.  I speak of him in this order perhaps because of an obscure
+association with Boyesen through their religious faith, which was also
+mine.  But Henry James was incommensurably more Swedenborgian than either
+of us: he lived and thought and felt Swedenborg with an entirety and
+intensity far beyond the mere assent of other men.  He did not do this in
+any stupidly exclusive way, but in the most luminously inclusive way,
+with a constant reference of these vain mundane shadows to the spiritual
+realities from which they project.  His piety, which sometimes expressed
+itself in terms of alarming originality and freedom, was too large for
+any ecclesiastical limits, and one may learn from the books which record
+it, how absolutely individual his interpretations of Swedenborg were.
+Clarifications they cannot be called, and in that other world whose
+substantial verity was the inspiration of his life here, the two sages
+may by this time have met and agreed to differ as to some points in the
+doctrine of the Seer.  In such a case, I cannot imagine the apostle
+giving way; and I do not say he would be wrong to insist, but I think he
+might now be willing to allow that the exegetic pages which sentence by
+sentence were so brilliantly suggestive, had sometimes a collective
+opacity which the most resolute vision could not penetrate.  He put into
+this dark wisdom the most brilliant intelligence ever brought to the
+service of his mystical faith; he lighted it up with flashes of the
+keenest wit and bathed it in the glow of a lambent humor, so that it is
+truly wonderful to me how it should remain so unintelligible.  But I have
+only tried to read certain of his books, and perhaps if I had persisted
+in the effort I might have found them all as clear at last as the one
+which seems to me the clearest, and is certainly most encouragingly
+suggestive: I mean the one called 'Society the Redeemed Form of Man.'
+
+He had his whole being in his belief; it had not only liberated him from
+the bonds of the Calvinistic theology in which his youth was trammelled,
+but it had secured him against the conscious ethicism of the prevailing
+Unitarian doctrine which supremely worshipped Conduct; and it had colored
+his vocabulary to such strange effects that he spoke of moral men with
+abhorrence; as more hopelessly lost than sinners.  Any one whose sphere
+tempted him to recognition of the foibles of others, he called the Devil;
+but in spite of his perception of such diabolism, he was rather fond of
+yielding to it, for he had a most trenchant tongue.  I myself once fell
+under his condemnation as the Devil, by having too plainly shared his joy
+in his characterization of certain fellow-men; perhaps a group of
+Bostonians from whom he had just parted and whose reciprocal pleasure of
+themselves he presented in the image of "simmering in their own fat and
+putting a nice brown on each other."
+
+Swedenborg himself he did not spare as a man.  He thought that very
+likely his life had those lapses in it which some of his followers deny;
+and he regarded him on the aesthetical side as essentially commonplace,
+and as probably chosen for his prophetic function just because of his
+imaginative nullity: his tremendous revelations could be the more
+distinctly and unmistakably inscribed upon an intelligence of that sort,
+which alone could render again a strictly literal report of them.
+
+As to some other sorts of believers who thought they had a special
+apprehension of the truth, he, had no mercy upon them if they betrayed,
+however innocently, any self-complacency in their possession.  I went one
+evening to call upon him with a dear old Shaker elder, who had the
+misfortune to say that his people believed themselves to be living the
+angelic life.  James fastened upon him with the suggestion that according
+to Swedenborg the most celestial angels were unconscious of their own
+perfection, and that if the Shakers felt they were of angelic condition
+they were probably the sport of the hells.  I was very glad to get my
+poor old friend off alive, and to find that he was not even aware of
+being cut asunder: I did not invite him to shake himself.
+
+With spiritualists James had little or no sympathy; he was not so
+impatient of them as the Swedenborgians commonly are, and he probably
+acknowledged a measure of verity in the spiritistic phenomena; but he
+seemed rather incurious concerning them, and he must have regarded them
+as superfluities of naughtiness, mostly; as emanations from the hells.
+His powerful and penetrating intellect interested itself with all social
+and civil facts through his religion.  He was essentially religious, but
+he was very consciously a citizen, with most decided opinions upon
+political questions.  My own darkness as to anything like social reform
+was then so dense that I cannot now be clear as to his feeling in such
+matters, but I have the impression that it was far more radical than I
+could understand.  He was of a very merciful mind regarding things often
+held in pitiless condemnation, but of charity, as it is commonly
+understood, he had misgivings.  He would never have turned away from him
+that asketh; but he spoke with regret of some of his benefactions in the
+past, large gifts of money to individuals, which he now thought had done
+more harm than good.
+
+I never knew him to judge men by the society scale.  He was most human in
+his relations with others, and was in correspondence with all sorts of
+people seeking light and help; he answered their letters and tried to
+instruct them, and no one was so low or weak but he or she could reach
+him on his or her own level, though he had his humorous perception of
+their foibles and disabilities; and he had that keen sense of the
+grotesque which often goes with the kindliest nature.  He told of his
+dining, early in life, next a fellow-man from Cape Cod at the Astor
+House, where such a man could seldom have found himself.  When they were
+served with meat this neighbor asked if he would mind his putting his fat
+on James's plate: he disliked fat.  James said that he considered the
+request, and seeing no good reason against it, consented.
+
+He could be cruel with his tongue when he fancied insincerity or
+pretence, and then cruelly sorry for the hurt he gave.  He was indeed
+tremulously sensitive, not only for himself but for others, and would
+offer atonement far beyond the measure of the offence he supposed himself
+to have given.
+
+At all times he thought originally in words of delightful originality,
+which painted a fact with the greatest vividness.  Of a person who had a
+nervous twitching of the face, and who wished to call up a friend to
+them, he said, "He spasmed to the fellow across the room, and introduced
+him."  His written style had traits of the same bold adventurousness,
+but it was his speech which was most captivating.  As I write of him I
+see him before me: his white bearded face, with a kindly intensity which
+at first glance seemed fierce, the mouth humorously shaping the mustache,
+the eyes vague behind the glasses; his sensitive hand gripping the stick
+on which he rested his weight to ease it from the artificial limb he
+wore.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+The Goethean face and figure of Louis Agassiz were in those days to be
+seen in the shady walks of Cambridge to which for me they lent a
+Weimarish quality, in the degree that in Weimar itself a few years ago,
+I felt a quality of Cambridge.  Agassiz, of course, was Swiss and Latin,
+and not Teutonic, but he was of the Continental European civilization,
+and was widely different from the other Cambridge men in everything but
+love of the place.  "He is always an Europaen," said Lowell one day, in
+distinguishing concerning him; and for any one who had tasted the flavor
+of the life beyond the ocean and the channel, this had its charm.  Yet he
+was extremely fond of his adoptive compatriots, and no alien born had a
+truer or tenderer sense of New England character.  I have an idea that no
+one else of his day could have got so much money for science out of the
+General Court of Massachusetts; and I have heard him speak with the
+wisest and warmest appreciation of the hard material from which he was
+able to extract this treasure.  The legislators who voted appropriations
+for his Museum and his other scientific objects were not usually lawyers
+or professional men, with the perspectives of a liberal education, but
+were hard-fisted farmers, who had a grip of the State's money as if it
+were their own, and yet gave it with intelligent munificence. They
+understood that he did not want it for himself, and had no interested aim
+in getting it; they knew that, as he once said, he had no time to make
+money, and wished to use it solely for the advancement of learning; and
+with this understanding they were ready, to help him generously.
+He compared their liberality with that of kings and princes, when these
+patronized science, with a recognition of the superior plebeian
+generosity.  It was on the veranda of his summer house at Nahant, while
+he lay in the hammock, talking of this, that I heard him refer also to
+the offer which Napoleon III. had made him, inviting him upon certain
+splendid conditions to come to Paris after he had established himself in
+Cambridge.  He said that he had not come to America without going over
+every such possibility in his own mind, and deciding beforehand against
+it.  He was a republican, by nationality and by preference, and was
+entirely satisfied with his position and environment in New England.
+
+Outside of his scientific circle in Cambridge he was more friends with
+Longfellow than with any one else, I believe, and Longfellow told me how,
+after the doctors had condemned Agassiz to inaction, on account of his
+failing health he had broken down in his friend's study, and wept like an
+'Europaer', and lamented, "I shall never finish my work!"  Some papers
+which he had begun to write for the Magazine, in contravention of the
+Darwinian theory, or part of it, which it is known Agassiz did not
+accept, remained part of the work which he never finished.  After his
+death, I wished Professor Jeffries Wyman to write of him in the Atlantic,
+but he excused himself on account of his many labors, and then he
+voluntarily spoke of Agassiz's methods, which he agreed with rather than
+his theories, being himself thoroughly Darwinian.  I think he said
+Agassiz was the first to imagine establishing a fact not from a single
+example, but from examples indefinitely repeated.  If it was a question
+of something about robins for instance, he would have a hundred robins
+examined before he would receive an appearance as a fact.
+
+Of course no preconception or prepossession of his own was suffered to
+bar his way to the final truth he was seeking, and he joyously renounced
+even a conclusion if he found it mistaken.  I do not know whether Mrs.
+Agassiz has put into her interesting life of him, a delightful story
+which she told me about him.  He came to her beaming one day, and
+demanded, "You know I have always held such and such an opinion about a
+certain group of fossil fishes?"  "Yes, yes!"  "Well, I have just been
+reading ------'s new book, and he has shown me that there isn't the least
+truth in my theory"; and he burst into a laugh of unalloyed pleasure in
+relinquishing his error.
+
+I could touch science at Cambridge only on its literary and social side,
+of course, and my meetings with Agassiz were not many.  I recall a dinner
+at his house to Mr. Bret Harte, when the poet came on from California,
+and Agassiz approached him over the coffee through their mutual
+scientific interest in the last meeting of the geological "Society upon
+the Stanislow."  He quoted to the author some passages from the poem
+recording the final proceedings of this body, which had particularly
+pleased him, and I think Mr. Harte was as much amused at finding himself
+thus in touch with the savant, as Agassiz could ever have been with that
+delicious poem.
+
+Agassiz lived at one end of Quincy Street, and James almost at the other
+end, with an interval between them which but poorly typified their
+difference of temperament.  The one was all philosophical and the other
+all scientific, and yet towards the close of his life, Agassiz may be
+said to have led that movement towards the new position of science in
+matters of mystery which is now characteristic of it.  He was ancestrally
+of the Swiss "Brahminical caste," as so many of his friends in Cambridge
+were of the Brahminical caste of New England; and perhaps it was the line
+of ancestral pasteurs which at last drew him back, or on, to the
+affirmation of an unformulated faith of his own.  At any rate, before
+most other savants would say that they had souls of their own he became,
+by opening a summer school of science with prayer, nearly as consolatory
+to the unscientific who wished to believe they had souls, as Mr. John
+Fiske himself, though Mr. Fiske, as the arch-apostle of Darwinism, had
+arrived at nearly the same point by such a very different road.
+
+Mr. Fiske had been our neighbor in our first Cambridge home, and when we
+went to live in Berkeley Street, he followed with his family and placed
+himself across the way in a house which I already knew as the home of
+Richard Henry Dana, the author of 'Two Years Before the Mast.'  Like
+nearly all the other Cambridge men of my acquaintance Dana was very much
+my senior, and like the rest he welcomed my literary promise as cordially
+as if it were performance, with no suggestion of the condescension which
+was said to be his attitude towards many of his fellow-men.  I never saw
+anything of this, in fact, and I suppose he may have been a blend of
+those patrician qualities and democratic principles which made Lowell
+anomalous even to himself.  He is part of the anti-slavery history of his
+time, and he gave to the oppressed his strenuous help both as a man and a
+politician; his gifts and learning in the law were freely at their
+service.  He never lost his interest in those white slaves, whose brutal
+bondage he remembered as bound with them in his 'Two Years Before the
+Mast,' and any luckless seaman with a case or cause might count upon his
+friendship as surely as the black slaves of the South.  He was able to
+temper his indignation for their oppression with a humorous perception of
+what was droll in its agents and circumstances; and I wish I could recall
+all that he said once about sea-etiquette on merchant vessels, where the
+chief mate might no more speak to the captain at table without being
+addressed by him than a subject might put a question to his sovereign.
+He was amusing in his stories of the Pacific trade in which he said it
+was very noble to deal in furs from the Northwest, and very ignoble to
+deal in hides along the Mexican and South American coasts.  Every ship's
+master wished naturally to be in the fur-carrying trade, and in one of
+Dana's instances, two vessels encounter in mid-ocean, and exchange the
+usual parley as to their respective ports of departure and destination.
+The final demand comes through the trumpet, "What cargo?" and the captain
+so challenged yields to temptation and roars back "Furs!"  A moment of
+hesitation elapses, and then the questioner pursues, "Here and there a
+horn?"
+
+There were other distinctions, of which seafaring men of other days were
+keenly sensible, and Dana dramatized the meeting of a great, swelling
+East Indiaman, with a little Atlantic trader, which has hailed her.  She
+shouts back through her captain's trumpet that she is from Calcutta, and
+laden with silks, spices, and other orient treasures, and in her turn she
+requires like answer from the sail which has presumed to enter into
+parley with her.  "What cargo?" The trader confesses to a mixed cargo for
+Boston, and to the final question, her master replies in meek apology,
+"Only from Liverpool, sir!" and scuttles down the horizon as swiftly as
+possible.
+
+Dana was not of the Cambridge men whose calling was in Cambridge.  He was
+a lawyer in active practice, and he went every day to Boston.  One was
+apt to meet him in those horse-cars which formerly tinkled back and forth
+between the two cities, and which were often so full of one's
+acquaintance that they had all the social elements of an afternoon tea.
+They were abusively overcrowded at times, of course, and one might easily
+see a prime literary celebrity swaying from, a strap, or hanging uneasily
+by the hand-rail to the lower steps of the back platform.  I do not mean
+that I ever happened to see the author of Two Years Before the Mast in
+either fact, but in his celebrity he had every qualification for the
+illustration of my point.  His book probably carried the American name
+farther and wider than any American books except those of Irving and
+Cooper at a day when our writers were very little known, and our
+literature was the only infant industry not fostered against foreign
+ravage, but expressly left to harden and strengthen itself as it best
+might in a heartless neglect even at home.  The book was delightful, and
+I remember it from a reading of thirty years ago, as of the stuff that
+classics are made of.  I venture no conjecture as to its present
+popularity, but of all books relating to the sea I think it, is the best.
+The author when I knew him was still Richard Henry Dana, Jr., his father,
+the aged poet, who first established the name in the public recognition,
+being alive, though past literary activity.  It was distinctively a
+literary race, and in the actual generation it has given proofs of its
+continued literary vitality in the romance of 'Espiritu Santo' by the
+youngest daughter of the Dana I knew.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+There could be no stronger contrast to him in origin, education, and
+character than a man who lived at the same time in Cambridge, and who
+produced a book which in its final fidelity to life is not unworthy to be
+named with 'Two Years Before the Mast.'  Ralph Keeler wrote the 'Vagabond
+Adventures' which he had lived.  I have it on my heart to name him in the
+presence of our great literary men not only because I had an affection
+for him, tenderer than I then knew, but because I believe his book is
+worthier of more remembrance than it seems to enjoy.  I was reading it
+only the other day, and I found it delightful, and much better than I
+imagined when I accepted for the Atlantic the several papers which it is
+made up of.  I am not sure but it belongs to the great literature in that
+fidelity to life which I have spoken of, and which the author brought
+himself to practise with such difficulty, and under so much stress from
+his editor.  He really wanted to fake it at times, but he was docile at
+last and did it so honestly that it tells the history of his strange
+career in much better terms than it can be given again.  He had been, as
+he claimed, "a cruel uncle's ward" in his early orphan-hood, and while
+yet almost a child he had run away from home, to fulfil his heart's
+desire of becoming a clog-dancer in a troupe of negro minstrels.  But it
+was first his fate to be cabin-boy and bootblack on a lake steamboat,
+and meet with many squalid adventures, scarcely to be matched outside of
+a Spanish picaresque novel.  When he did become a dancer (and even a
+danseuse) of the sort he aspired to be, the fruition of his hopes was so
+little what he imagined that he was very willing to leave the Floating
+Palace on the Mississippi in which his troupe voyaged and exhibited, and
+enter the college of the Jesuit Fathers at Cape Girardeau in Missouri.
+They were very good to him, and in their charge he picked up a good deal
+more Latin, if not less Greek than another strolling player who also took
+to literature.  From college Keeler went to Europe, and then to
+California, whence he wrote me that he was coming on to Boston with the
+manuscript of a novel which he wished me to read for the magazine.  I
+reported against it to my chief, but nothing could shake Keeler's faith
+in it, until he had printed it at his own cost, and known it fail
+instantly and decisively.  He had come to Cambridge to see it through the
+press, and he remained there four or five years, with certain brief
+absences.  Then, during the Cuban insurrection of the early seventies, he
+accepted the invitation of a New York paper to go to Cuba as its
+correspondent.
+
+"Don't go, Keeler," I entreated him, when he came to tell me of his
+intention.  "They'll garrote you down there."
+
+"Well," he said, with the air of being pleasantly interested by the
+coincidence, as he stood on my study hearth with his feet wide apart in
+a fashion he had, and gayly flirted his hand in the air, "that's what
+Aldrich says, and he's agreed to write my biography, on condition that
+I make a last dying speech when they bring me out on the plaza to do it,
+'If I had taken the advice of my friend T. B. Aldrich, author of
+'Marjorie Daw and Other People,' I should not now be in this place.'"
+
+He went, and he did not come back.  He was not indeed garroted as his
+friends had promised, but he was probably assassinated on the steamer by
+which he sailed from Santiago, for he never arrived in Havana, and was
+never heard of again.
+
+I now realize that I loved him, though I did as little to show it as men
+commonly do.  If I am to meet somewhere else the friends who are no
+longer here, I should like to meet Ralph Keeler, and I would take some
+chances of meeting in a happy place a soul which had by no means kept
+itself unspotted, but which in all its consciousness of error, cheerfully
+trusted that "the Almighty was not going to scoop any of us."  The faith
+worded so grotesquely could not have been more simply or humbly affirmed,
+and no man I think could have been more helplessly sincere.  He had
+nothing of that false self-respect which forbids a man to own himself
+wrong promptly and utterly when need is; and in fact he owned to some
+things in his checkered past which would hardly allow him any sort of
+self-respect.  He had always an essential gaiety not to be damped by any
+discipline, and a docility which expressed itself in cheerful compliance.
+"Why do you use bias for opinion?" I demanded, in going over a proof with
+him.  "Oh, because I'm such an ass--such a bi-ass."
+
+He had a philosophy which he liked to impress with a vivid touch on his
+listener's shoulder: "Put your finger on the present moment and enjoy it.
+It's the only one you've got, or ever will have."  This light and joyous
+creature could not but be a Pariah among our Brahmins, and I need not say
+that I never met him in any of the great Cambridge houses.  I am not sure
+that he was a persona grata to every one in my own, for Keeler was framed
+rather for men's liking, and Mr. Aldrich and I had our subtleties as to
+whether his mind about women was not so Chinese as somewhat to infect his
+manner.  Keeler was too really modest to be of any rebellious mind
+towards the society which ignored him, and of too sweet a cheerfulness to
+be greatly vexed by it.  He lived on in the house of a suave old actor,
+who oddly made his home in Cambridge, and he continued of a harmless
+Bohemianism in his daily walk, which included lunches at Boston
+restaurants as often as he could get you to let him give them you, if you
+were of his acquaintance.  On a Sunday he would appear coming out of the
+post-office usually at the hour when all cultivated Cambridge was coming
+for its letters, and wave a glad hand in air, and shout a blithe
+salutation to the friend he had marked for his companion in a morning
+stroll.  The stroll was commonly over the flats towards Brighton (I do
+not know why, except perhaps that it was out of the beat of the better
+element) and the talk was mainly of literature, in which he was doing
+less than he meant to do, and which he seemed never able quite to feel
+was not a branch of the Show Business, and might not be legitimately
+worked by like advertising, though he truly loved and honored it.
+
+I suppose it was not altogether a happy life, and Keeler had his moments
+of amusing depression, which showed their shadows in his smiling face.
+He was of a slight figure and low stature, with hands and feet of almost
+womanish littleness.  He was very blonde, and his restless eyes were
+blue; he wore his yellow beard in whiskers only, which he pulled
+nervously but perhaps did not get to droop so much as he wished.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+Keeler was a native of Ohio, and there lived at Cambridge when I first
+came there an Indianian, more accepted by literary society, who was of
+real quality as a poet.  Forceythe Willson, whose poem of "The Old
+Sergeant" Doctor Holmes used to read publicly in the closing year of the
+civil war, was of a Western altitude of figure, and of an extraordinary
+beauty of face in an oriental sort.  He had large, dark eyes with clouded
+whites; his full, silken beard was of a flashing Persian blackness.
+He was excessively nervous, to such an extreme that when I first met him
+at Longfellow's, he could not hold himself still in his chair.  I think
+this was an effect of shyness in him, as well as physical, for afterwards
+when I went to find him in his own house he was much more at ease.
+
+He preferred to receive me in the dim, large hall after opening his door
+to me himself, and we sat down there and talked, I remember, of
+supernatural things.  He was much interested in spiritualism, and he had
+several stories to tell of his own experience in such matters.  But none
+was so good as one which I had at second hand from Lowell, who thought it
+almost the best ghost story he had ever heard.  The spirit of Willson's
+father appeared to him, and stood before him.  Willson was accustomed to
+apparitions, and so he said simply, "Won't you sit down, father?"  The
+phantom put out his hand to lay hold of a chair-back as some people do in
+taking a seat, and his shadowy arm passed through the frame-work.
+"Ah!" he said, "I forgot that I was not substance."
+
+I do not know whether "The Old Sergeant" is ever read now; it has
+probably passed with other great memories of the great war; and I am
+afraid none of Willson's other verse is remembered.  But he was then a
+distinct literary figure, and not to be left out of the count of our
+poets.  I did not see him again.  Shortly afterwards I heard that he had
+left Cambridge with signs of consumption, which must have run a rapid
+course, for a very little later came the news of his death.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+The most devoted Cantabrigian, after Lowell, whom I knew, would perhaps
+have contended that if he had stayed with us Willson might have lived;
+for John Holmes affirmed a faith in the virtues of the place which
+ascribed almost an aseptic character to its air, and when he once
+listened to my own complaints of an obstinate cold, he cheered himself,
+if not me, with the declaration, "Well, one thing, Mr. Howells, Cambridge
+never let a man keep a cold yet!"
+
+If he had said it was better to live in Cambridge with a cold than
+elsewhere without one I should have believed him; as it was, Cambridge
+bore him out in his assertion, though she took her own time to do it.
+
+Lowell had talked to me of him before I met him, celebrating his peculiar
+humor with that affection which was not always so discriminating, and
+Holmes was one of the first Cambridge men I knew.  I knew him first in
+the charming old Colonial house in which his famous brother and he were
+born.  It was demolished long before I left Cambridge, but in memory it
+still stands on the ground since occupied by the Hemenway Gymnasium, and
+shows for me through that bulk a phantom frame of Continental buff in the
+shadow of elms that are shadows themselves.  The 'genius loci' was
+limping about the pleasant mansion with the rheumatism which then
+expressed itself to his friends in a resolute smile, but which now
+insists upon being an essential trait of the full-length presence to my
+mind: a short stout figure, helped out with a cane, and a grizzled head
+with features formed to win the heart rather than the eye of the
+beholder.
+
+In one of his own eyes there was a cast of such winning humor and
+geniality that it took the liking more than any beauty could have done,
+and the sweetest, shy laugh in the world went with this cast.
+
+I long wished to get him to write something for the Magazine, and at last
+I prevailed with him to review a history of Cambridge which had come out.
+
+He did it charmingly of course, for he loved more to speak of Cambridge
+than anything else.  He held his native town in an idolatry which was not
+blind, but which was none the less devoted because he was aware of her
+droll points and her weak points.  He always celebrated these as so many
+virtues, and I think it was my own passion for her that first commended
+me to him.  I was not her son, but he felt that this was my misfortune
+more than my fault, and he seemed more and more to forgive it.  After we
+had got upon the terms of editor and contributor, we met oftener than
+before, though I do not now remember that I ever persuaded him to write
+again for me.  Once he gave me something, and then took it back, with a
+self-distrust of it which I could not overcome.
+
+When the Holmes house was taken down, he went to live with an old
+domestic in a small house on the street amusingly called Appian Way.  He
+had certain rooms of her, and his own table, but he would not allow that
+he was ever anything but a lodger in the place, where he continued till
+he died.  In the process of time he came so far to trust his experience
+of me, that he formed the habit of giving me an annual supper.  Some days
+before this event, he would appear in my study, and with divers delicate
+and tentative approaches, nearly always of the same tenor, he would say
+that he should like to ask my family to an oyster supper with him.  "But
+you know," he would explain, "I haven't a house of my own to ask you to,
+and I should like to give you the supper here."  When I had agreed to
+this suggestion with due gravity, he would inquire our engagements, and
+then say, as if a great load were off his mind, "Well, then, I will send
+up a few oysters to-morrow," or whatever day we had fixed on; and after a
+little more talk to take the strangeness out of the affair, would go his
+way.  On the day appointed the fish-man would come with several gallons
+of oysters, which he reported Mr. Holmes had asked him to bring, and in
+the evening the giver of the feast would reappear, with a lank oil-cloth
+bag, sagged by some bottles of wine.  There was always a bottle of red
+wine, and sometimes a bottle of champagne, and he had taken the
+precaution to send some crackers beforehand, so that the supper should be
+as entirely of his own giving as possible.  He was forced to let us do
+the cooking and to supply the cold-slaw, and perhaps he indemnified
+himself for putting us to these charges and for the use of our linen and
+silver, by the vast superfluity of his oysters, with which we remained
+inundated for days.  He did not care to eat many himself, but seemed
+content to fancy doing us a pleasure; and I have known few greater ones
+in life, than in the hospitality that so oddly played the host to us at
+our own table.
+
+It must have seemed incomprehensible to such a Cantabrigian that we
+should ever have been willing to leave Cambridge, and in fact I do not
+well understand it myself.  But if he resented it, he never showed his
+resentment.  As often as I happened to meet him after our defection he
+used me with unabated kindness, and sparkled into some gaiety too
+ethereal for remembrance.  The last time I met him was at Lowell's
+funeral, when I drove home with him and Curtis and Child, and in the
+revulsion from the stress of that saddest event, had our laugh, as people
+do in the presence of death, at something droll we remembered of the
+friend we mourned.
+
+My nearest literary neighbor, when we lived in Sacramento Street, was the
+Rev. Dr. John G. Palfrey, the historian of New England, whose chimney-
+tops amid the pine-tops I could see from my study window when the leaves
+were off the little grove of oaks between us.  He was one of the first of
+my acquaintances, not suffering the great disparity of our ages to count
+against me, but tactfully and sweetly adjusting himself to my youth in
+the friendly intercourse which he invited.  He was a most gentle and
+kindly old man, with still an interest in liberal things which lasted
+till the infirmities of age secluded him from the world and all its
+interests.  As is known, he had been in his prime one of the foremost of
+the New England anti-slavery men, and he had fought the good fight with a
+heavy heart for a brother long settled in Louisiana who sided with the
+South, and who after the civil war found himself disfranchised.  In this
+temporary disability he came North to visit Doctor Palfrey upon the
+doctor's insistence, though at first he would have nothing to do with
+him, and refused even to answer his letters.  "Of course," the doctor
+said, "I was not going to stand that from my mother's son, and I simply
+kept on writing."  So he prevailed, but the fiery old gentleman from
+Louisiana was reconciled to nothing in the North but his brother, and
+when he came to return my visit, he quickly touched upon his cause of
+quarrel with us.  "I can't vote," he declared, "but my coachman can, and
+I don't know how I'm to get the suffrage, unless my physician paints me
+all over with the iodine he's using for my rheumatic side."
+
+Doctor Palfrey was most distinctly of the Brahminical caste and was long
+an eminent Unitarian minister, but at the time I began to know him he had
+long quitted the pulpit.  He was so far of civic or public character as
+to be postmaster at Boston, when we were first neighbors, but this
+officiality was probably so little in keeping with his nature that it was
+like a return to his truer self when he ceased to hold the place, and
+gave his time altogether to his history.  It is a work which will hardly
+be superseded in the interest of those who value thorough research and
+temperate expression.  It is very just, and without endeavor for picture
+or drama it is to me very attractive.  Much that has to be recorded of
+New England lacks charm, but he gave form and dignity and presence to the
+memories of the past, and the finer moments of that great story, he gave
+with the simplicity that was their best setting.  It seems to me such an
+apology (in the old sense) as New England might have written for herself,
+and in fact Doctor Palfrey was a personification of New England in one of
+the best and truest kinds.  He was refined in the essential gentleness of
+his heart without being refined away; he kept the faith of her Puritan
+tradition though he no longer kept the Puritan faith, and his defence of
+the Puritan severity with the witches and Quakers was as impartial as it
+was efficient in positing the Puritans as of their time, and rather
+better and not worse than other people of the same time.  He was himself
+a most tolerant man, and his tolerance was never weak or fond; it stopped
+well short of condoning error, which he condemned when he preferred to
+leave it to its own punishment.  Personally he was without any flavor of
+harshness; his mind was as gentle as his manner, which was one of the
+gentlest I have ever known.
+
+Of as gentle make but of more pensive temper, with unexpected bursts of
+lyrical gaiety, was Christopher Pearse Cranch, the poet, whom I had known
+in New York long before he came to live in Cambridge.  He could not only
+play and sing most amusing songs, but he wrote very good poems and
+painted pictures perhaps not so good.  I always liked his Venetian
+pictures, for their poetic, unsentimentalized veracity, and I printed as
+well as liked many of his poems.  During the time that I knew him more
+than his due share of troubles and sorrows accumulated themselves on his
+fine head, which the years had whitened, and gave a droop to the
+beautiful, white-bearded face.  But he had the artist soul and the poet
+heart, and no doubt he could take refuge in these from the cares that
+shadowed his visage.  My acquaintance with him in Cambridge renewed
+itself upon the very terms of its beginning in New York.  We met at
+Longfellow's table, where he lifted up his voice in the Yankee folk-song,
+"On Springfield Mountain there did dwell," which he gave with a perfectly
+killing mock-gravity.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+At Cambridge the best society was better, it seems to me, than even that
+of the neighboring capital.  It would be rather hard to prove this, and I
+must ask the reader to take my word for it, if he wishes to believe it.
+The great interests in that pleasant world, which I think does not
+present itself to my memory in a false iridiscence, were the intellectual
+interests, and all other interests were lost in these to such as did not
+seek them too insistently.
+
+People held themselves high; they held themselves personally aloof from
+people not duly assayed; their civilization was still Puritan though
+their belief had long ceased to be so.  They had weights and measure,
+stamped in an earlier time, a time surer of itself than ours, by which
+they rated the merit of all comers, and rejected such as did not bear the
+test.  These standards were their own, and they were satisfied with them;
+most Americans have no standards of their own, but these are not
+satisfied even with other people's, and so our society is in a state of
+tolerant and tremulous misgiving.
+
+Family counted in Cambridge, without doubt, as it counts in New England
+everywhere, but family alone did not mean position, and the want of
+family did not mean the want of it.  Money still less than family
+commanded; one could be openly poor in Cambridge without open shame, or
+shame at all, for no one was very rich there, and no one was proud of his
+riches.
+
+I do not wonder that Turguenieff thought the conditions ideal, as Boyesen
+portrayed them to him; and I look back at my own life there with wonder
+at my good fortune.  I was sensible, and I still am sensible this had its
+alloys.  I was young and unknown and was making my way, and I had to
+suffer some of the penalties of these disadvantages; but I do not believe
+that anywhere else in this ill-contrived economy, where it is vainly
+imagined that the material struggle forms a high incentive and
+inspiration, would my penalties have been so light.  On the other hand,
+the good that was done me I could never repay if I lived all over again
+for others the life that I have so long lived for myself.  At times, when
+I had experienced from those elect spirits with whom I was associated,
+some act of friendship, as signal as it was delicate, I used to ask
+myself, how I could ever do anything unhandsome or ungenerous towards any
+one again; and I had a bad conscience the next time I did it.
+
+The air of the Cambridge that I knew was sufficiently cool to be bracing,
+but what was of good import in me flourished in it.  The life of the
+place had its lateral limitations; sometimes its lights failed to detect
+excellent things that lay beyond it; but upward it opened illimitably.
+I speak of it frankly because that life as I witnessed it is now almost
+wholly of the past.  Cambridge is still the home of much that is good and
+fine in our literature: one realizes this if one names Colonel Thomas
+Wentworth Higginson, Mr. John Fiske, Mr. William James, Mr. Horace E.
+Scudder, not to name any others, but the first had not yet come back to
+live in his birthplace at the time I have been writing of, and the rest
+had not yet their actual prominence.  One, in deed among so many absent,
+is still present there, whom from time to time I have hitherto named
+without offering him the recognition which I should have known an
+infringement of his preferences.  But the literary Cambridge of thirty
+years ago could not be clearly imagined or justly estimated without
+taking into account the creative sympathy of a man whose contributions to
+our literature only partially represent what he has constantly done for
+the humanities.  I am sure that, after the easy heroes of the day are
+long forgot, and the noisy fames of the strenuous life shall dwindle to
+their essential insignificance before those of the gentle life, we shall
+all see in Charles Eliot Norton the eminent scholar who left the quiet of
+his books to become our chief citizen at the moment when he warned his
+countrymen of the ignominy and disaster of doing wrong.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Cold-slaw. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Collective opacity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Expectation of those who will come no more . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Felt that this was my misfortune more than my fault. . . . . . . . . . .
+Found life was not all poetry. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+He had no time to make money . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Intellectual poseurs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+No time to make money. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+NYC, a city where money counts for more and goes for less. . . . . . . .
+One could be openly poor in Cambridge without open shame . . . . . . . .
+Put your finger on the present moment and enjoy it.. . . . . . . . . . .
+Standards were their own, and they were satisfied with them. . . . . . .
+Wonderful to me how it should remain so unintelligible . . . . . . . . .
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Cambridge Neighbors, by Howells
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Cambridge Neighbors, by W. D. Howells
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+Title: Cambridge Neighbors
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+Author: William Dean Howells
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+
+LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--Cambridge Neighbors
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS
+
+Being the wholly literary spirit I was when I went to make my home in
+Cambridge, I do not see how I could well have been more content if I had
+found myself in the Elysian Fields with an agreeable eternity before me.
+At twenty-nine, indeed, one is practically immortal, and at that age,
+time had for me the effect of an eternity in which I had nothing to do
+but to read books and dream of writing them, in the overflow of endless
+hours from my work with the manuscripts, critical notices, and proofs of
+the Atlantic Monthly.  As for the social environment I should have been
+puzzled if given my choice among the elect of all the ages, to find poets
+and scholars more to my mind than those still in the flesh at Cambridge
+in the early afternoon of the nineteenth century.  They are now nearly
+all dead, and I can speak of them in the freedom which is death's
+doubtful favor to the survivor; but if they were still alive I could say
+little to their offence, unless their modesty was hurt with my praise.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+One of the first and truest of our Cambridge friends was that exquisite
+intelligence, who, in a world where so many people are grotesquely
+miscalled, was most fitly named; for no man ever kept here more perfectly
+and purely the heart of such as the kingdom of heaven is of than Francis
+J. Child.  He was then in his prime, and I like to recall the outward
+image which expressed the inner man as happily as his name.  He was of
+low stature and of an inclination which never became stoutness; but what
+you most saw when you saw him was his face of consummate refinement: very
+regular, with eyes always glassed by gold-rimmed spectacles, a straight,
+short, most sensitive nose, and a beautiful mouth with the sweetest smile
+mouth ever wore, and that was as wise and shrewd as it was sweet.  In a
+time when every other man was more or less bearded he was clean shaven,
+and of a delightful freshness of coloring which his thick sunny hair,
+clustering upon his head in close rings, admirably set off.  I believe he
+never became gray, and the last time I saw him, though he was broken then
+with years and pain, his face had still the brightness of his
+inextinguishable youth.
+
+It is well known how great was Professor Child's scholarship in the
+branches of his Harvard work; and how especially, how uniquely, effective
+it was in the study of English and Scottish balladry to which he gave so
+many years of his life.  He was a poet in his nature, and he wrought with
+passion as well as knowledge in the achievement of as monumental a task
+as any American has performed.  But he might have been indefinitely less
+than he was in any intellectual wise, and yet been precious to those who
+knew him for the gentleness and the goodness which in him were protected
+from misconception by a final dignity as delicate and as inviolable as
+that of Longfellow himself.
+
+We were still much less than a year from our life in Venice, when he came
+to see us in Cambridge, and in the Italian interest which then commended
+us to so many fine spirits among our neighbors we found ourselves at the
+beginning of a life-long friendship with him.  I was known to him only by
+my letters from Venice, which afterwards became Venetian Life, and by a
+bit of devotional verse which he had asked to include in a collection he
+was making, but he immediately gave us the freedom of his heart, which
+after wards was never withdrawn.  In due time he imagined a home-school,
+to which our little one was asked, and she had her first lessons with his
+own daughter under his roof.  These things drew us closer together, and
+he was willing to be still nearer to me in any time of trouble.  At one
+such time when the shadow which must some time darken every door, hovered
+at ours, he had the strength to make me face it and try to realize, while
+it was still there, that it was not cruel and not evil.  It passed, for
+that time, but the sense of his help remained; and in my own case I can
+testify of the potent tenderness which all who knew him must have known
+in him.  But in bearing my witness I feel accused, almost as if he were
+present; by his fastidious reluctance from any recognition of his
+helpfulness. When this came in the form of gratitude taking credit to
+itself in a pose which reflected honor upon him as the architect of
+greatness, he was delightfully impatient of it, and he was most amusingly
+dramatic in reproducing the consciousness of certain ineffectual alumni
+who used to overwhelm him at Commencement solemnities with some such
+pompous acknowledgment as, "Professor Child, all that I have become, sir,
+I owe to your influence in my college career."  He did, with delicious
+mockery, the old-fashioned intellectual poseurs among the students, who
+used to walk the groves of Harvard with bent head, and the left arm
+crossing the back, while the other lodged its hand in the breast of the
+high buttoned frock-coat; and I could fancy that his classes in college
+did not form the sunniest exposure for young.  folly and vanity.  I know
+that he was intolerant of any manner of insincerity, and no flattery
+could take him off his guard.  I have seen him meet this with a cutting
+phrase of rejection, and no man was more apt at snubbing the patronage
+that offers itself at times to all men.  But mostly he wished to do
+people pleasure, and he seemed always to be studying how to do it; as for
+need, I am sure that worthy and unworthy want had alike the way to his
+heart.
+
+Children were always his friends, and they repaid with adoration the
+affection which he divided with them and with his flowers.  I recall him
+in no moments so characteristic as those he spent in making the little
+ones laugh out of their hearts at his drolling, some festive evening in
+his house, and those he gave to sharing with you his joy in his
+gardening.  This, I believe, began with violets, and it went on to roses,
+which he grew in a splendor and profusion impossible to any but a true
+lover with a genuine gift for them.  Like Lowell, he spent his summers in
+Cambridge, and in the afternoon, you could find him digging or pruning
+among his roses with an ardor which few caprices of the weather could
+interrupt.  He would lift himself from their ranks, which he scarcely
+overtopped, as you came up the footway to his door, and peer purblindly
+across at you.  If he knew you at once, he traversed the nodding and
+swaying bushes, to give you the hand free of the trowel or knife; or if
+you got indoors unseen by him he would come in holding towards you some
+exquisite blossom that weighed down the tip of its long stem with a
+succession of hospitable obeisances.
+
+He graced with unaffected poetry a life of as hard study, of as hard
+work, and as varied achievement as any I have known or read of; and he
+played with gifts and acquirements such as in no great measure have made
+reputations.  He had a rare and lovely humor which could amuse itself
+both in English and Italian with such an airy burletta as "Il Pesceballo"
+(he wrote it in Metastasian Italian, and Lowell put it in libretto
+English); he had a critical sense as sound as it was subtle in all
+literature; and whatever he wrote he imbued with the charm of a style
+finely personal to himself.  His learning in the line of his Harvard
+teaching included an early English scholarship unrivalled in his time,
+and his researches in ballad literature left no corner of it untouched.
+I fancy this part of his study was peculiarly pleasant to him; for he
+loved simple and natural things, and the beauty which he found nearest
+life.  At least he scorned the pedantic affectations of literary
+superiority; and he used to quote with joyous laughter the swelling
+exclamation of an Italian critic who proposed to leave the summits of
+polite learning for a moment, with the cry, "Scendiamo fra il popolo!"
+(Let us go down among the people.)
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+Of course it was only so hard worked a man who could take thought and
+trouble for another.  He once took thought for me at a time when it was
+very important to me, and when he took the trouble to secure for me an
+engagement to deliver that course of Lowell lectures in Boston, which I
+have said Lowell had the courage to go in town to hear.  I do not
+remember whether Professor Child was equal to so much, but he would have
+been if it were necessary; and I rather rejoice now in the belief that he
+did not seek quite that martyrdom.
+
+He had done more than enough for me, but he had done only what he was
+always willing to do for others.  In the form of a favor to himself he
+brought into my fife the great happiness of intimately knowing Hjalmar
+Hjorth Boyesen, whom he had found one summer day among the shelves in the
+Harvard library, and found to be a poet and an intending novelist.  I do
+not remember now just how this fact imparted itself to the professor, but
+literature is of easily cultivated confidence in youth, and possibly the
+revelation was spontaneous.  At any rate, as a susceptible young editor,
+I was asked to meet my potential contributor at the professor's two
+o'clock dinner, and when we came to coffee in the study, Boyesen took
+from the pocket nearest his heart a chapter of 'Gunnar', and read it to
+us.
+
+Perhaps the good professor who brought us together had plotted to have
+both novel and novelist make their impression at once upon the youthful
+sub-editor; but at any rate they did not fail of an effect.  I believe it
+was that chapter where Gunnar and Ragnhild dance and sing a 'stev'
+together, for I associate with that far happy time the rich mellow tones
+of the poet's voice in the poet's verse.  These were most characteristic
+of him, and it is as if I might put my ear against the ethereal wall
+beyond which he is rapt and hear them yet.
+
+Our meeting was on a lovely afternoon of summer, and the odor of the
+professor's roses stole in at the open windows, and became part of the
+gentle event.  Boyesen walked home with me, and for a fortnight after I
+think we parted only to dream of the literature which we poured out upon
+each other in every waking moment.  I had just learned to know Bjornson's
+stories, and Boyesen told me of his poetry and of his drama, which in
+even measure embodied the great Norse literary movement, and filled me
+with the wonder and delight of that noble revolt against convention, that
+brave return to nature and the springs of poetry in the heart and the
+speech of the common people.  Literature was Boyesen's religion more than
+the Swedenborgian philosophy in which we had both been spiritually
+nurtured, and at every step of our mounting friendship we found ourselves
+on common ground in our worship of it.  I was a decade his senior, but at
+thirty-five I was not yet so stricken in years as not to be able fully to
+rejoice in the ardor which fused his whole being in an incandescent
+poetic mass.  I have known no man who loved poetry more generously and
+passionately; and I think he was above all things a poet.  His work took
+the shape of scholarship, fiction, criticism, but poetry gave it all a
+touch of grace and beauty.  Some years after this first meeting of ours I
+remember a pathetic moment with him, when I asked him why he had not
+written any verse of late, and he answered, as if still in sad
+astonishment at the fact, that he had found life was not all poetry.  In
+those earlier days I believe he really thought it was!
+
+Perhaps it really is, and certainly in the course of a life that
+stretched almost to half a century Boyesen learned more and more to see
+the poetry of the everyday world at least as the material of art.  He did
+battle valiantly for that belief in many polemics, which I suppose gave
+people a sufficiently false notion of him; and he showed his faith by
+works in fiction which better illustrated his motive.  Gunnar stands at
+the beginning of these works, and at the farthest remove from it in
+matter and method stands 'The Mammon of Unrighteousness'.  The lovely
+idyl won him fame and friendship, and the great novel added neither to
+him, though he had put the experience and the observation of his ripened
+life into it.  Whether it is too late or too early for it to win the
+place in literature which it merits I do not know; but it always seemed
+to me the very spite of fate that it should have failed of popular
+effect.  Yet I must own that it has so failed, and I own this without
+bitterness towards Gunnar, which embalmed the spirit of his youth as
+'The Mammon of Unrighteousness' embodied the thought of his manhood.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+It was my pleasure, my privilege, to bring Gunnar before the public as
+editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and to second the author in many a
+struggle with the strange idiom he had cast the story in.  The proofs
+went back and forth between us till the author had profited by every hint
+and suggestion of the editor.  He was quick to profit by any hint, and he
+never made the same mistake twice.  He lived his English as fast as he
+learned it; the right word became part of him; and he put away the wrong
+word with instant and final rejection.  He had not learned American
+English without learning newspaper English, but if one touched a phrase
+of it in his work, he felt in his nerves, which are the ultimate arbiters
+in such matters, its difference from true American and true English.
+It was wonderful how apt and how elect his diction was in those days;
+it seemed as if his thought clothed itself in the fittest phrase without
+his choosing.  In his poetry he had extraordinary good fortune from the
+first;  his mind had an apparent affinity with what was most native, most
+racy in our speech; and I have just been looking over Gunnar and
+marvelling anew at the felicity and the beauty of his phrasing.
+
+I do not know whether those who read his books stop much to consider how
+rare his achievement was in the mere means of expression.  Our speech is
+rather more hospitable than most, and yet I can remember but five other
+writers born to different languages who have handled English with
+anything like his mastery.  Two Italians, Ruffini, the novelist, and
+Gallenga, the journalist; two Germans, Carl Schurz and Carl Hillebrand,
+and the Dutch novelist Maarten Maartens, have some of them equalled but
+none of them surpassed him.  Yet he was a man grown when he began to
+speak and to write English, though I believe he studied it somewhat in
+Norway before he came to America.  What English he knew he learned the
+use of here, and in the measure of its idiomatic vigor we may be proud of
+it as Americans.
+
+He had least of his native grace, I think, in his criticism; and yet as a
+critic he had qualities of rare temperance, acuteness, and knowledge.
+He had very decided convictions in literary art; one kind of thing he
+believed was good and all other kinds less good down to what was bad; but
+he was not a bigot, and he made allowances for art-in-error.  His hand
+fell heavy only upon those heretics who not merely denied the faith but
+pretended that artifice was better than nature, that decoration was more
+than structure, that make-believe was something you could live by as you
+live by truth.  He was not strongest, however, in damnatory criticism.
+His spirit was too large, too generous to dwell in that, and it rose
+rather to its full height in his appreciations of the great authors whom
+he loved, and whom he commented from the plenitude of his scholarship as
+well as from his delighted sense of their grandeur.  Here he was almost
+as fine as in his poetry, and only less fine than in his more fortunate
+essays in fiction.
+
+After Gunnar he was a long while in striking another note so true.  He
+did not strike it again till he wrote 'The Mammon of Unrighteousness',
+and after that he was sometimes of a wandering and uncertain touch.
+There are certain stories of his which I cannot read without a painful
+sense of their inequality not only to his talent, but to his knowledge of
+human nature, and of American character.  He understood our character
+quite as well as he understood our language, but at times he seemed not
+to do so.  I think these were the times when he was overworked, and ought
+to have been resting instead of writing.  In such fatigue one loses
+command of alien words, alien situations; and in estimating Boyesen's
+achievements we must never forget that he was born strange to our
+language and to our life.  In 'Gunnar' he handled the one with grace and
+charm; in his great novel he handled both with masterly strength.  I call
+'The Mammon of Unrighteousness' a great novel, and I am quite willing to
+say that I know few novels by born Americans that surpass it in dealing
+with American types and conditions.  It has the vast horizon of the
+masterpieces of fictions; its meanings are not for its characters alone,
+but for every reader of it; when you close the book the story is not at
+an end.
+
+I have a pang in praising it, for I remember that my praise cannot please
+him any more.  But it was a book worthy the powers which could have given
+us yet greater things if they had not been spent on lesser things.
+Boyesen could "toil terribly," but for his fame he did not always toil
+wisely, though he gave himself as utterly in his unwise work as in his
+best; it was always the best he could do.  Several years after our first
+meeting in Cambridge, he went to live in New York, a city where money
+counts for more and goes for less than in any other city of the world,
+and he could not resist the temptation to write more and more when he
+should have written less and less.  He never wrote anything that was not
+worth reading, but he wrote too much for one who was giving himself with
+all his conscience to his academic work in the university honored by his
+gifts and his attainments, and was lecturing far and near in the
+vacations which should have been days and weeks and months of leisure.
+The wonder is that even such a stock of health as his could stand the
+strain so long, but he had no vices, and his only excesses were in the
+direction of the work which he loved so well.  When a man adds to his
+achievements every year, we are apt to forget the things he has already
+done; and I think it well to remind the reader that Boyesen, who died at
+forty-eight, had written, besides articles, reviews, and lectures
+unnumbered, four volumes of scholarly criticism on German and
+Scandinavian literature, a volume of literary and social essays, a
+popular history of Norway, a volume of poems, twelve volumes of fiction,
+and four books for boys.
+
+Boyesen's energies were inexhaustible.  He was not content to be merely a
+scholar, merely an author; he wished to be an active citizen, to take his
+part in honest politics, and to live for his day in things that most men
+of letters shun.  His experience in them helped him to know American life
+better and to appreciate it more justly, both in its good and its evil;
+and as a matter of fact he knew us very well.  His acquaintance with us
+had been wide and varied beyond that of most of our literary men, and
+touched many aspects of our civilization which remain unknown to most
+Americans.  When be died he had been a journalist in Chicago, and a
+teacher in Ohio; he had been a professor in Cornell University and a
+literary free lance in New York; and everywhere his eyes and ears had
+kept themselves open.  As a teacher he learned to know the more fortunate
+or the more ambitious of our youth, and as a lecturer his knowledge was
+continually extending itself among all ages and classes of Americans.
+
+He was through and through a Norseman, but he was none the less a very
+American.  Between Norsk and Yankee there is an affinity of spirit more
+intimate than the ties of race.  Both have the common-sense view of life;
+both are unsentimental.  When Boyesen told me that among the Norwegians
+men never kissed each other, as the Germans, and the Frenchmen, and the
+Italians do, I perceived that we stood upon common ground.  When he
+explained the democratic character of society in Norway, I could well
+understand how he should find us a little behind his own countrymen in
+the practice, if not the theory of equality, though they lived under a
+king and we under a president.  But he was proud of his American
+citizenship; he knew all that it meant, at its best, for humanity.  He
+divined that the true expression of America was not civic, not social,
+but domestic almost, and that the people in the simplest homes, or those
+who remained in the tradition of a simple home life, were the true
+Americans as yet, whatever the future Americans might be.
+
+When I first knew him he was chafing with the impatience of youth and
+ambition at what he thought his exile in the West.  There was, to be
+sure, a difference between Urbana, Ohio, and Cambridge, Massachusetts,
+and he realized the difference in the extreme and perhaps beyond it.
+I tried to make him believe that if a man had one or two friends anywhere
+who loved letters and sympathized with him in his literary attempts,
+it was incentive enough; but of course he wished to be in the centres of
+literature, as we all do; and he never was content until he had set his
+face and his foot Eastward.  It was a great step for him from the
+Swedenborgian school at Urbana to the young university at Ithaca; and I
+remember his exultation in making it.  But he could not rest there, and
+in a few years he resigned his professorship, and came to New York, where
+he entered high-heartedly upon the struggle with fortune which ended in
+his appointment in Columbia.
+
+New York is a mart and not a capital, in literature as well as in other
+things, and doubtless he increasingly felt this.  I know that there came
+a time when he no longer thought the West must be exile for a literary
+man; and his latest visits to its summer schools as a lecturer impressed
+him with the genuineness of the interest felt there in culture of all
+kinds.  He spoke of this, with a due sense of what was pathetic as well
+as what was grotesque in some of its manifestations; and I think that in
+reconciling himself to our popular crudeness for the sake of our popular
+earnestness, he completed his naturalization, in the only sense in which
+our citizenship is worth having.
+
+I do not wish to imply that he forgot his native land, or ceased to love
+it proudly and tenderly.  He kept for Norway the fondness which the man
+sitting at his own hearth feels for the home of his boyhood.  He was of
+good family; his people were people of substance and condition, and he
+could have had an easier life there than here.  He could have won even
+wider fame, and doubtless if he had remained in Norway, he would have
+been one of that group of great Norwegians who have given their little
+land renown surpassed by that of no other in the modern republic of
+letters.  The name of Boyesen would have been set with the names of
+Bjornson, of Ibsen, of Kielland, and of Lie.  But when once he had seen
+America (at the wish of his father, who had visited the United States
+before him), he thought only of becoming an American.  When I first knew
+him he was full of the poetry of his mother-land; his talk was of fjords
+and glaciers, of firs and birches, of hulders and nixies, of housemen and
+gaardsmen; but he was glad to be here, and I think he never regretted
+that he had cast his lot with us.  Always, of course, he had the deepest
+interest in his country and countrymen.  He stood the friend of every
+Norwegian who came to him in want or trouble, and they, came to him
+freely and frequently.  He sympathized strongly with Norway in her
+quarrel with Sweden, and her wish for equality as well as autonomy; and
+though he did not go all lengths with the national party, he was decided
+in his feeling that Sweden was unjust to her sister kingdom, and
+strenuous for the principles of the Norwegian leaders.
+
+But, as I have said, poetry, was what his ardent spirit mainly meditated
+in that hour when I first knew him in Cambridge, before we had either of
+us grown old and sad, if not wise.  He overflowed with it, and he talked
+as little as he dreamed of anything else in the vast half-summer we spent
+together.  He was constantly at my house, where in an absence of my
+family I was living bachelor, and where we sat indoors and talked, or
+sauntered outdoors and talked, with our heads in a cloud of fancies, not
+unmixed with the mosquitoes of Cambridge: if I could have back the
+fancies, I would be willing to have the mosquitoes with them.  He looked
+the poetry he lived: his eyes were the blue of sunlit fjords; his brown
+silken hair was thick on the crown which it later abandoned to a
+scholarly baldness; his soft, red lips half hid a boyish pout in the
+youthful beard and mustache.  He was short of stature, but of a stalwart
+breadth of frame, and his voice was of a peculiar and endearing quality,
+indescribably mellow and tender when he read his verse.
+
+I have hardly the right to dwell so long upon him here, for he was only a
+sojourner in Cambridge, but the memory of that early intimacy is too much
+for my sense of proportion.  As I have hinted, our intimacy was renewed
+afterwards, when I too came to live in New York, where as long as he was
+in this 'dolce lome', he hardly let a week go by without passing a long
+evening with me.  Our talk was still of literature and life, but more of
+life than of literature, and we seldom spoke of those old times.  I still
+found him true to the ideals which had clarified themselves to both of us
+as the duty of unswerving fealty to the real thing in whatever we did.
+This we felt, as we had felt it long before, to be the sole source of
+beauty and of art, and we warmed ourselves at each other's hearts in our
+devotion to it, amidst a misunderstanding environment which we did not
+characterize by so mild an epithet.  Boyesen, indeed, out-realisted me,
+in the polemics of our aesthetics, and sometimes when an unbeliever was
+by, I willingly left to my friend the affirmation of our faith, not
+without some quaking at his unsparing strenuousness in disciplining the
+heretic.  But now that ardent and active soul is Elsewhere, and I have
+ceased even to expect the ring, which, making itself heard at the late
+hour of his coming, I knew always to be his and not another's.  That
+mechanical expectation of those who will come no more is something
+terrible, but when even that ceases, we know the irreparability of our
+loss, and begin to realize how much of ourselves they have taken with
+them.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+It was some years before the Boyesen summer, which was the fourth or
+fifth of our life in Cambridge, that I made the acquaintance of a man,
+very much my senior, who remains one of the vividest personalities in my
+recollection.  I speak of him in this order perhaps because of an obscure
+association with Boyesen through their religious faith, which was also
+mine.  But Henry James was incommensurably more Swedenborgian than either
+of us: he lived and thought and felt Swedenborg with an entirety and
+intensity far beyond the mere assent of other men.  He did not do this in
+any stupidly exclusive way, but in the most luminously inclusive way,
+with a constant reference of these vain mundane shadows to the spiritual
+realities from which they project.  His piety, which sometimes expressed
+itself in terms of alarming originality and freedom, was too large for
+any ecclesiastical limits, and one may learn from the books which record
+it, how absolutely individual his interpretations of Swedenborg were.
+Clarifications they cannot be called, and in that other world whose
+substantial verity was the inspiration of his life here, the two sages
+may by this time have met and agreed to differ as to some points in the
+doctrine of the Seer.  In such a case, I cannot imagine the apostle
+giving way; and I do not say he would be wrong to insist, but I think he
+might now be willing to allow that the exegetic pages which sentence by
+sentence were so brilliantly suggestive, had sometimes a collective
+opacity which the most resolute vision could not penetrate.  He put into
+this dark wisdom the most brilliant intelligence ever brought to the
+service of his mystical faith; he lighted it up with flashes of the
+keenest wit and bathed it in the glow of a lambent humor, so that it is
+truly wonderful to me how it should remain so unintelligible.  But I have
+only tried to read certain of his books, and perhaps if I had persisted
+in the effort I might have found them all as clear at last as the one
+which seems to me the clearest, and is certainly most encouragingly
+suggestive: I mean the one called 'Society the Redeemed Form of Man.'
+
+He had his whole being in his belief; it had not only liberated him from
+the bonds of the Calvinistic theology in which his youth was trammelled,
+but it had secured him against the conscious ethicism of the prevailing
+Unitarian doctrine which supremely worshipped Conduct; and it had colored
+his vocabulary to such strange effects that he spoke of moral men with
+abhorrence; as more hopelessly lost than sinners.  Any one whose sphere
+tempted him to recognition of the foibles of others, he called the Devil;
+but in spite of his perception of such diabolism, he was rather fond of
+yielding to it, for he had a most trenchant tongue.  I myself once fell
+under his condemnation as the Devil, by having too plainly shared his joy
+in his characterization of certain fellow-men; perhaps a group of
+Bostonians from whom he had just parted and whose reciprocal pleasure of
+themselves he presented in the image of "simmering in their own fat and
+putting a nice brown on each other."
+
+Swedenborg himself he did not spare as a man.  He thought that very
+likely his life had those lapses in it which some of his followers deny;
+and he regarded him on the aesthetical side as essentially commonplace,
+and as probably chosen for his prophetic function just because of his
+imaginative nullity: his tremendous revelations could be the more
+distinctly and unmistakably inscribed upon an intelligence of that sort,
+which alone could render again a strictly literal report of them.
+
+As to some other sorts of believers who thought they had a special
+apprehension of the truth, he, had no mercy upon them if they betrayed,
+however innocently, any self-complacency in their possession.  I went one
+evening to call upon him with a dear old Shaker elder, who had the
+misfortune to say that his people believed themselves to be living the
+angelic life.  James fastened upon him with the suggestion that according
+to Swedenborg the most celestial angels were unconscious of their own
+perfection, and that if the Shakers felt they were of angelic condition
+they were probably the sport of the hells.  I was very glad to get my
+poor old friend off alive, and to find that he was not even aware of
+being cut asunder: I did not invite him to shake himself.
+
+With spiritualists James had little or no sympathy; he was not so
+impatient of them as the Swedenborgians commonly are, and he probably
+acknowledged a measure of verity in the spiritistic phenomena; but he
+seemed rather incurious concerning them, and he must have regarded them
+as superfluities of naughtiness, mostly; as emanations from the hells.
+His powerful and penetrating intellect interested itself with all social
+and civil facts through his religion.  He was essentially religious, but
+he was very consciously a citizen, with most decided opinions upon
+political questions.  My own darkness as to anything like social reform
+was then so dense that I cannot now be clear as to his feeling in such
+matters, but I have the impression that it was far more radical than I
+could understand.  He was of a very merciful mind regarding things often
+held in pitiless condemnation, but of charity, as it is commonly
+understood, he had misgivings.  He would never have turned away from him
+that asketh; but he spoke with regret of some of his benefactions in the
+past, large gifts of money to individuals, which he now thought had done
+more harm than good.
+
+I never knew him to judge men by the society scale.  He was most human in
+his relations with others, and was in correspondence with all sorts of
+people seeking light and help; he answered their letters and tried to
+instruct them, and no one was so low or weak but he or she could reach
+him on his or her own level, though he had his humorous perception of
+their foibles and disabilities; and he had that keen sense of the
+grotesque which often goes with the kindliest nature.  He told of his
+dining, early in life, next a fellow-man from Cape Cod at the Astor
+House, where such a man could seldom have found himself.  When they were
+served with meat this neighbor asked if he would mind his putting his fat
+on James's plate: he disliked fat.  James said that he considered the
+request, and seeing no good reason against it, consented.
+
+He could be cruel with his tongue when he fancied insincerity or
+pretence, and then cruelly sorry for the hurt he gave.  He was indeed
+tremulously sensitive, not only for himself but for others, and would
+offer atonement far beyond the measure of the offence he supposed himself
+to have given.
+
+At all times he thought originally in words of delightful originality,
+which painted a fact with the greatest vividness.  Of a person who had a
+nervous twitching of the face, and who wished to call up a friend to
+them, he said, "He spasmed to the fellow across the room, and introduced
+him."  His written style had traits of the same bold adventurousness,
+but it was his speech which was most captivating.  As I write of him I
+see him before me: his white bearded face, with a kindly intensity which
+at first glance seemed fierce, the mouth humorously shaping the mustache,
+the eyes vague behind the glasses; his sensitive hand gripping the stick
+on which he rested his weight to ease it from the artificial limb he
+wore.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+The Goethean face and figure of Louis Agassiz were in those days to be
+seen in the shady walks of Cambridge to which for me they lent a
+Weimarish quality, in the degree that in Weimar itself a few years ago,
+I felt a quality of Cambridge.  Agassiz, of course, was Swiss and Latin,
+and not Teutonic, but he was of the Continental European civilization,
+and was widely different from the other Cambridge men in everything but
+love of the place.  "He is always an Europaen," said Lowell one day, in
+distinguishing concerning him; and for any one who had tasted the flavor
+of the life beyond the ocean and the channel, this had its charm.  Yet he
+was extremely fond of his adoptive compatriots, and no alien born had a
+truer or tenderer sense of New England character.  I have an idea that no
+one else of his day could have got so much money for science out of the
+General Court of Massachusetts; and I have heard him speak with the
+wisest and warmest appreciation of the hard material from which he was
+able to extract this treasure.  The legislators who voted appropriations
+for his Museum and his other scientific objects were not usually lawyers
+or professional men, with the perspectives of a liberal education, but
+were hard-fisted farmers, who had a grip of the State's money as if it
+were their own, and yet gave it with intelligent munificence. They
+understood that he did not want it for himself, and had no interested aim
+in getting it; they knew that, as he once said, he had no time to make
+money, and wished to use it solely for the advancement of learning; and
+with this understanding they were ready, to help him generously.
+He compared their liberality with that of kings and princes, when these
+patronized science, with a recognition of the superior plebeian
+generosity.  It was on the veranda of his summer house at Nahant, while
+he lay in the hammock, talking of this, that I heard him refer also to
+the offer which Napoleon III. had made him, inviting him upon certain
+splendid conditions to come to Paris after he had established himself in
+Cambridge.  He said that he had not come to America without going over
+every such possibility in his own mind, and deciding beforehand against
+it.  He was a republican, by nationality and by preference, and was
+entirely satisfied with his position and environment in New England.
+
+Outside of his scientific circle in Cambridge he was more friends with
+Longfellow than with any one else, I believe, and Longfellow told me how,
+after the doctors had condemned Agassiz to inaction, on account of his
+failing health he had broken down in his friend's study, and wept like an
+'Europaer', and lamented, "I shall never finish my work!"  Some papers
+which he had begun to write for the Magazine, in contravention of the
+Darwinian theory, or part of it, which it is known Agassiz did not
+accept, remained part of the work which he never finished.  After his
+death, I wished Professor Jeffries Wyman to write of him in the Atlantic,
+but he excused himself on account of his many labors, and then he
+voluntarily spoke of Agassiz's methods, which he agreed with rather than
+his theories, being himself thoroughly Darwinian.  I think he said
+Agassiz was the first to imagine establishing a fact not from a single
+example, but from examples indefinitely repeated.  If it was a question
+of something about robins for instance, he would have a hundred robins
+examined before he would receive an appearance as a fact.
+
+Of course no preconception or prepossession of his own was suffered to
+bar his way to the final truth he was seeking, and he joyously renounced
+even a conclusion if he found it mistaken.  I do not know whether Mrs.
+Agassiz has put into her interesting life of him, a delightful story
+which she told me about him.  He came to her beaming one day, and
+demanded, "You know I have always held such and such an opinion about a
+certain group of fossil fishes?"  "Yes, yes!"  "Well, I have just been
+reading ------'s new book, and he has shown me that there isn't the least
+truth in my theory"; and he burst into a laugh of unalloyed pleasure in
+relinquishing his error.
+
+I could touch science at Cambridge only on its literary and social side,
+of course, and my meetings with Agassiz were not many.  I recall a dinner
+at his house to Mr. Bret Harte, when the poet came on from California,
+and Agassiz approached him over the coffee through their mutual
+scientific interest in the last meeting of the geological "Society upon
+the Stanislow."  He quoted to the author some passages from the poem
+recording the final proceedings of this body, which had particularly
+pleased him, and I think Mr. Harte was as much amused at finding himself
+thus in touch with the savant, as Agassiz could ever have been with that
+delicious poem.
+
+Agassiz lived at one end of Quincy Street, and James almost at the other
+end, with an interval between them which but poorly typified their
+difference of temperament.  The one was all philosophical and the other
+all scientific, and yet towards the close of his life, Agassiz may be
+said to have led that movement towards the new position of science in
+matters of mystery which is now characteristic of it.  He was ancestrally
+of the Swiss "Brahminical caste," as so many of his friends in Cambridge
+were of the Brahminical caste of New England; and perhaps it was the line
+of ancestral pasteurs which at last drew him back, or on, to the
+affirmation of an unformulated faith of his own.  At any rate, before
+most other savants would say that they had souls of their own he became,
+by opening a summer school of science with prayer, nearly as consolatory
+to the unscientific who wished to believe they had souls, as Mr. John
+Fiske himself, though Mr. Fiske, as the arch-apostle of Darwinism, had
+arrived at nearly the same point by such a very different road.
+
+Mr. Fiske had been our neighbor in our first Cambridge home, and when we
+went to live in Berkeley Street, he followed with his family and placed
+himself across the way in a house which I already knew as the home of
+Richard Henry Dana, the author of 'Two Years Before the Mast.'  Like
+nearly all the other Cambridge men of my acquaintance Dana was very much
+my senior, and like the rest he welcomed my literary promise as cordially
+as if it were performance, with no suggestion of the condescension which
+was said to be his attitude towards many of his fellow-men.  I never saw
+anything of this, in fact, and I suppose he may have been a blend of
+those patrician qualities and democratic principles which made Lowell
+anomalous even to himself.  He is part of the anti-slavery history of his
+time, and he gave to the oppressed his strenuous help both as a man and a
+politician; his gifts and learning in the law were freely at their
+service.  He never lost his interest in those white slaves, whose brutal
+bondage he remembered as bound with them in his 'Two Years Before the
+Mast,' and any luckless seaman with a case or cause might count upon his
+friendship as surely as the black slaves of the South.  He was able to
+temper his indignation for their oppression with a humorous perception of
+what was droll in its agents and circumstances; and I wish I could recall
+all that he said once about sea-etiquette on merchant vessels, where the
+chief mate might no more speak to the captain at table without being
+addressed by him than a subject might put a question to his sovereign.
+He was amusing in his stories of the Pacific trade in which he said it
+was very noble to deal in furs from the Northwest, and very ignoble to
+deal in hides along the Mexican and South American coasts.  Every ship's
+master wished naturally to be in the fur-carrying trade, and in one of
+Dana's instances, two vessels encounter in mid-ocean, and exchange the
+usual parley as to their respective ports of departure and destination.
+The final demand comes through the trumpet, "What cargo?" and the captain
+so challenged yields to temptation and roars back "Furs!"  A moment of
+hesitation elapses, and then the questioner pursues, "Here and there a
+horn?"
+
+There were other distinctions, of which seafaring men of other days were
+keenly sensible, and Dana dramatized the meeting of a great, swelling
+East Indiaman, with a little Atlantic trader, which has hailed her.  She
+shouts back through her captain's trumpet that she is from Calcutta, and
+laden with silks, spices, and other orient treasures, and in her turn she
+requires like answer from the sail which has presumed to enter into
+parley with her.  "What cargo?" The trader confesses to a mixed cargo for
+Boston, and to the final question, her master replies in meek apology,
+"Only from Liverpool, sir!" and scuttles down the horizon as swiftly as
+possible.
+
+Dana was not of the Cambridge men whose calling was in Cambridge.  He was
+a lawyer in active practice, and he went every day to Boston.  One was
+apt to meet him in those horse-cars which formerly tinkled back and forth
+between the two cities, and which were often so full of one's
+acquaintance that they had all the social elements of an afternoon tea.
+They were abusively overcrowded at times, of course, and one might easily
+see a prime literary celebrity swaying from, a strap, or hanging uneasily
+by the hand-rail to the lower steps of the back platform.  I do not mean
+that I ever happened to see the author of Two Years Before the Mast in
+either fact, but in his celebrity he had every qualification for the
+illustration of my point.  His book probably carried the American name
+farther and wider than any American books except those of Irving and
+Cooper at a day when our writers were very little known, and our
+literature was the only infant industry not fostered against foreign
+ravage, but expressly left to harden and strengthen itself as it best
+might in a heartless neglect even at home.  The book was delightful, and
+I remember it from a reading of thirty years ago, as of the stuff that
+classics are made of.  I venture no conjecture as to its present
+popularity, but of all books relating to the sea I think it, is the best.
+The author when I knew him was still Richard Henry Dana, Jr., his father,
+the aged poet, who first established the name in the public recognition,
+being alive, though past literary activity.  It was distinctively a
+literary race, and in the actual generation it has given proofs of its
+continued literary vitality in the romance of 'Espiritu Santo' by the
+youngest daughter of the Dana I knew.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+There could be no stronger contrast to him in origin, education, and
+character than a man who lived at the same time in Cambridge, and who
+produced a book which in its final fidelity to life is not unworthy to be
+named with 'Two Years Before the Mast.'  Ralph Keeler wrote the 'Vagabond
+Adventures' which he had lived.  I have it on my heart to name him in the
+presence of our great literary men not only because I had an affection
+for him, tenderer than I then knew, but because I believe his book is
+worthier of more remembrance than it seems to enjoy.  I was reading it
+only the other day, and I found it delightful, and much better than I
+imagined when I accepted for the Atlantic the several papers which it is
+made up of.  I am not sure but it belongs to the great literature in that
+fidelity to life which I have spoken of, and which the author brought
+himself to practise with such difficulty, and under so much stress from
+his editor.  He really wanted to fake it at times, but he was docile at
+last and did it so honestly that it tells the history of his strange
+career in much better terms than it can be given again.  He had been, as
+he claimed, "a cruel uncle's ward" in his early orphan-hood, and while
+yet almost a child he had run away from home, to fulfil his heart's
+desire of becoming a clog-dancer in a troupe of negro minstrels.  But it
+was first his fate to be cabin-boy and bootblack on a lake steamboat,
+and meet with many squalid adventures, scarcely to be matched outside of
+a Spanish picaresque novel.  When he did become a dancer (and even a
+danseuse) of the sort he aspired to be, the fruition of his hopes was so
+little what he imagined that he was very willing to leave the Floating
+Palace on the Mississippi in which his troupe voyaged and exhibited, and
+enter the college of the Jesuit Fathers at Cape Girardeau in Missouri.
+They were very good to him, and in their charge he picked up a good deal
+more Latin, if not less Greek than another strolling player who also took
+to literature.  From college Keeler went to Europe, and then to
+California, whence he wrote me that he was coming on to Boston with the
+manuscript of a novel which he wished me to read for the magazine.  I
+reported against it to my chief, but nothing could shake Keeler's faith
+in it, until he had printed it at his own cost, and known it fail
+instantly and decisively.  He had come to Cambridge to see it through the
+press, and he remained there four or five years, with certain brief
+absences.  Then, during the Cuban insurrection of the early seventies, he
+accepted the invitation of a New York paper to go to Cuba as its
+correspondent.
+
+"Don't go, Keeler," I entreated him, when he came to tell me of his
+intention.  "They'll garrote you down there."
+
+"Well," he said, with the air of being pleasantly interested by the
+coincidence, as he stood on my study hearth with his feet wide apart in
+a fashion he had, and gayly flirted his hand in the air, "that's what
+Aldrich says, and he's agreed to write my biography, on condition that
+I make a last dying speech when they bring me out on the plaza to do it,
+'If I had taken the advice of my friend T. B. Aldrich, author of
+'Marjorie Daw and Other People,' I should not now be in this place.'"
+
+He went, and he did not come back.  He was not indeed garroted as his
+friends had promised, but he was probably assassinated on the steamer by
+which he sailed from Santiago, for he never arrived in Havana, and was
+never heard of again.
+
+I now realize that I loved him, though I did as little to show it as men
+commonly do.  If I am to meet somewhere else the friends who are no
+longer here, I should like to meet Ralph Keeler, and I would take some
+chances of meeting in a happy place a soul which had by no means kept
+itself unspotted, but which in all its consciousness of error, cheerfully
+trusted that "the Almighty was not going to scoop any of us."  The faith
+worded so grotesquely could not have been more simply or humbly affirmed,
+and no man I think could have been more helplessly sincere.  He had
+nothing of that false self-respect which forbids a man to own himself
+wrong promptly and utterly when need is; and in fact he owned to some
+things in his checkered past which would hardly allow him any sort of
+self-respect.  He had always an essential gaiety not to be damped by any
+discipline, and a docility which expressed itself in cheerful compliance.
+"Why do you use bias for opinion?" I demanded, in going over a proof with
+him.  "Oh, because I'm such an ass--such a bi-ass."
+
+He had a philosophy which he liked to impress with a vivid touch on his
+listener's shoulder: "Put your finger on the present moment and enjoy it.
+It's the only one you've got, or ever will have."  This light and joyous
+creature could not but be a Pariah among our Brahmins, and I need not say
+that I never met him in any of the great Cambridge houses.  I am not sure
+that he was a persona grata to every one in my own, for Keeler was framed
+rather for men's liking, and Mr. Aldrich and I had our subtleties as to
+whether his mind about women was not so Chinese as somewhat to infect his
+manner.  Keeler was too really modest to be of any rebellious mind
+towards the society which ignored him, and of too sweet a cheerfulness to
+be greatly vexed by it.  He lived on in the house of a suave old actor,
+who oddly made his home in Cambridge, and he continued of a harmless
+Bohemianism in his daily walk, which included lunches at Boston
+restaurants as often as he could get you to let him give them you, if you
+were of his acquaintance.  On a Sunday he would appear coming out of the
+post-office usually at the hour when all cultivated Cambridge was coming
+for its letters, and wave a glad hand in air, and shout a blithe
+salutation to the friend he had marked for his companion in a morning
+stroll.  The stroll was commonly over the flats towards Brighton (I do
+not know why, except perhaps that it was out of the beat of the better
+element) and the talk was mainly of literature, in which he was doing
+less than he meant to do, and which he seemed never able quite to feel
+was not a branch of the Show Business, and might not be legitimately
+worked by like advertising, though he truly loved and honored it.
+
+I suppose it was not altogether a happy life, and Keeler had his moments
+of amusing depression, which showed their shadows in his smiling face.
+He was of a slight figure and low stature, with hands and feet of almost
+womanish littleness.  He was very blonde, and his restless eyes were
+blue; he wore his yellow beard in whiskers only, which he pulled
+nervously but perhaps did not get to droop so much as he wished.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+Keeler was a native of Ohio, and there lived at Cambridge when I first
+came there an Indianian, more accepted by literary society, who was of
+real quality as a poet.  Forceythe Willson, whose poem of "The Old
+Sergeant" Doctor Holmes used to read publicly in the closing year of the
+civil war, was of a Western altitude of figure, and of an extraordinary
+beauty of face in an oriental sort.  He had large, dark eyes with clouded
+whites; his full, silken beard was of a flashing Persian blackness.
+He was excessively nervous, to such an extreme that when I first met him
+at Longfellow's, he could not hold himself still in his chair.  I think
+this was an effect of shyness in him, as well as physical, for afterwards
+when I went to find him in his own house he was much more at ease.
+
+He preferred to receive me in the dim, large hall after opening his door
+to me himself, and we sat down there and talked, I remember, of
+supernatural things.  He was much interested in spiritualism, and he had
+several stories to tell of his own experience in such matters.  But none
+was so good as one which I had at second hand from Lowell, who thought it
+almost the best ghost story he had ever heard.  The spirit of Willson's
+father appeared to him, and stood before him.  Willson was accustomed to
+apparitions, and so he said simply, "Won't you sit down, father?"  The
+phantom put out his hand to lay hold of a chair-back as some people do in
+taking a seat, and his shadowy arm passed through the frame-work.
+"Ah!" he said, "I forgot that I was not substance."
+
+I do not know whether "The Old Sergeant" is ever read now; it has
+probably passed with other great memories of the great war; and I am
+afraid none of Willson's other verse is remembered.  But he was then a
+distinct literary figure, and not to be left out of the count of our
+poets.  I did not see him again.  Shortly afterwards I heard that he had
+left Cambridge with signs of consumption, which must have run a rapid
+course, for a very little later came the news of his death.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+The most devoted Cantabrigian, after Lowell, whom I knew, would perhaps
+have contended that if he had stayed with us Willson might have lived;
+for John Holmes affirmed a faith in the virtues of the place which
+ascribed almost an aseptic character to its air, and when he once
+listened to my own complaints of an obstinate cold, he cheered himself,
+if not me, with the declaration, "Well, one thing, Mr. Howells, Cambridge
+never let a man keep a cold yet!"
+
+If he had said it was better to live in Cambridge with a cold than
+elsewhere without one I should have believed him; as it was, Cambridge
+bore him out in his assertion, though she took her own time to do it.
+
+Lowell had talked to me of him before I met him, celebrating his peculiar
+humor with that affection which was not always so discriminating, and
+Holmes was one of the first Cambridge men I knew.  I knew him first in
+the charming old Colonial house in which his famous brother and he were
+born.  It was demolished long before I left Cambridge, but in memory it
+still stands on the ground since occupied by the Hemenway Gymnasium, and
+shows for me through that bulk a phantom frame of Continental buff in the
+shadow of elms that are shadows themselves.  The 'genius loci' was
+limping about the pleasant mansion with the rheumatism which then
+expressed itself to his friends in a resolute smile, but which now
+insists upon being an essential trait of the full-length presence to my
+mind: a short stout figure, helped out with a cane, and a grizzled head
+with features formed to win the heart rather than the eye of the
+beholder.
+
+In one of his own eyes there was a cast of such winning humor and
+geniality that it took the liking more than any beauty could have done,
+and the sweetest, shy laugh in the world went with this cast.
+
+I long wished to get him to write something for the Magazine, and at last
+I prevailed with him to review a history of Cambridge which had come out.
+
+He did it charmingly of course, for he loved more to speak of Cambridge
+than anything else.  He held his native town in an idolatry which was not
+blind, but which was none the less devoted because he was aware of her
+droll points and her weak points.  He always celebrated these as so many
+virtues, and I think it was my own passion for her that first commended
+me to him.  I was not her son, but he felt that this was my misfortune
+more than my fault, and he seemed more and more to forgive it.  After we
+had got upon the terms of editor and contributor, we met oftener than
+before, though I do not now remember that I ever persuaded him to write
+again for me.  Once he gave me something, and then took it back, with a
+self-distrust of it which I could not overcome.
+
+When the Holmes house was taken down, he went to live with an old
+domestic in a small house on the street amusingly called Appian Way.  He
+had certain rooms of her, and his own table, but he would not allow that
+he was ever anything but a lodger in the place, where he continued till
+he died.  In the process of time he came so far to trust his experience
+of me, that he formed the habit of giving me an annual supper.  Some days
+before this event, he would appear in my study, and with divers delicate
+and tentative approaches, nearly always of the same tenor, he would say
+that he should like to ask my family to an oyster supper with him.  "But
+you know," he would explain, "I haven't a house of my own to ask you to,
+and I should like to give you the supper here."  When I had agreed to
+this suggestion with due gravity, he would inquire our engagements, and
+then say, as if a great load were off his mind, "Well, then, I will send
+up a few oysters to-morrow," or whatever day we had fixed on; and after a
+little more talk to take the strangeness out of the affair, would go his
+way.  On the day appointed the fish-man would come with several gallons
+of oysters, which he reported Mr. Holmes had asked him to bring, and in
+the evening the giver of the feast would reappear, with a lank oil-cloth
+bag, sagged by some bottles of wine.  There was always a bottle of red
+wine, and sometimes a bottle of champagne, and he had taken the
+precaution to send some crackers beforehand, so that the supper should be
+as entirely of his own giving as possible.  He was forced to let us do
+the cooking and to supply the cold-slaw, and perhaps he indemnified
+himself for putting us to these charges and for the use of our linen and
+silver, by the vast superfluity of his oysters, with which we remained
+inundated for days.  He did not care to eat many himself, but seemed
+content to fancy doing us a pleasure; and I have known few greater ones
+in life, than in the hospitality that so oddly played the host to us at
+our own table.
+
+It must have seemed incomprehensible to such a Cantabrigian that we
+should ever have been willing to leave Cambridge, and in fact I do not
+well understand it myself.  But if he resented it, he never showed his
+resentment.  As often as I happened to meet him after our defection he
+used me with unabated kindness, and sparkled into some gaiety too
+ethereal for remembrance.  The last time I met him was at Lowell's
+funeral, when I drove home with him and Curtis and Child, and in the
+revulsion from the stress of that saddest event, had our laugh, as people
+do in the presence of death, at something droll we remembered of the
+friend we mourned.
+
+My nearest literary neighbor, when we lived in Sacramento Street, was the
+Rev. Dr. John G. Palfrey, the historian of New England, whose chimney-
+tops amid the pine-tops I could see from my study window when the leaves
+were off the little grove of oaks between us.  He was one of the first of
+my acquaintances, not suffering the great disparity of our ages to count
+against me, but tactfully and sweetly adjusting himself to my youth in
+the friendly intercourse which he invited.  He was a most gentle and
+kindly old man, with still an interest in liberal things which lasted
+till the infirmities of age secluded him from the world and all its
+interests.  As is known, he had been in his prime one of the foremost of
+the New England anti-slavery men, and he had fought the good fight with a
+heavy heart for a brother long settled in Louisiana who sided with the
+South, and who after the civil war found himself disfranchised.  In this
+temporary disability he came North to visit Doctor Palfrey upon the
+doctor's insistence, though at first he would have nothing to do with
+him, and refused even to answer his letters.  "Of course," the doctor
+said, "I was not going to stand that from my mother's son, and I simply
+kept on writing."  So he prevailed, but the fiery old gentleman from
+Louisiana was reconciled to nothing in the North but his brother, and
+when he came to return my visit, he quickly touched upon his cause of
+quarrel with us.  "I can't vote," he declared, "but my coachman can, and
+I don't know how I'm to get the suffrage, unless my physician paints me
+all over with the iodine he's using for my rheumatic side."
+
+Doctor Palfrey was most distinctly of the Brahminical caste and was long
+an eminent Unitarian minister, but at the time I began to know him he had
+long quitted the pulpit.  He was so far of civic or public character as
+to be postmaster at Boston, when we were first neighbors, but this
+officiality was probably so little in keeping with his nature that it was
+like a return to his truer self when he ceased to hold the place, and
+gave his time altogether to his history.  It is a work which will hardly
+be superseded in the interest of those who value thorough research and
+temperate expression.  It is very just, and without endeavor for picture
+or drama it is to me very attractive.  Much that has to be recorded of
+New England lacks charm, but he gave form and dignity and presence to the
+memories of the past, and the finer moments of that great story, he gave
+with the simplicity that was their best setting.  It seems to me such an
+apology (in the old sense) as New England might have written for herself,
+and in fact Doctor Palfrey was a personification of New England in one of
+the best and truest kinds.  He was refined in the essential gentleness of
+his heart without being refined away; he kept the faith of her Puritan
+tradition though he no longer kept the Puritan faith, and his defence of
+the Puritan severity with the witches and Quakers was as impartial as it
+was efficient in positing the Puritans as of their time, and rather
+better and not worse than other people of the same time.  He was himself
+a most tolerant man, and his tolerance was never weak or fond; it stopped
+well short of condoning error, which he condemned when he preferred to
+leave it to its own punishment.  Personally he was without any flavor of
+harshness; his mind was as gentle as his manner, which was one of the
+gentlest I have ever known.
+
+Of as gentle make but of more pensive temper, with unexpected bursts of
+lyrical gaiety, was Christopher Pearse Cranch, the poet, whom I had known
+in New York long before he came to live in Cambridge.  He could not only
+play and sing most amusing songs, but he wrote very good poems and
+painted pictures perhaps not so good.  I always liked his Venetian
+pictures, for their poetic, unsentimentalized veracity, and I printed as
+well as liked many of his poems.  During the time that I knew him more
+than his due share of troubles and sorrows accumulated themselves on his
+fine head, which the years had whitened, and gave a droop to the
+beautiful, white-bearded face.  But he had the artist soul and the poet
+heart, and no doubt he could take refuge in these from the cares that
+shadowed his visage.  My acquaintance with him in Cambridge renewed
+itself upon the very terms of its beginning in New York.  We met at
+Longfellow's table, where he lifted up his voice in the Yankee folk-song,
+"On Springfield Mountain there did dwell," which he gave with a perfectly
+killing mock-gravity.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+At Cambridge the best society was better, it seems to me, than even that
+of the neighboring capital.  It would be rather hard to prove this, and I
+must ask the reader to take my word for it, if he wishes to believe it.
+The great interests in that pleasant world, which I think does not
+present itself to my memory in a false iridiscence, were the intellectual
+interests, and all other interests were lost in these to such as did not
+seek them too insistently.
+
+People held themselves high; they held themselves personally aloof from
+people not duly assayed; their civilization was still Puritan though
+their belief had long ceased to be so.  They had weights and measure,
+stamped in an earlier time, a time surer of itself than ours, by which
+they rated the merit of all comers, and rejected such as did not bear the
+test.  These standards were their own, and they were satisfied with them;
+most Americans have no standards of their own, but these are not
+satisfied even with other people's, and so our society is in a state of
+tolerant and tremulous misgiving.
+
+Family counted in Cambridge, without doubt, as it counts in New England
+everywhere, but family alone did not mean position, and the want of
+family did not mean the want of it.  Money still less than family
+commanded; one could be openly poor in Cambridge without open shame, or
+shame at all, for no one was very rich there, and no one was proud of his
+riches.
+
+I do not wonder that Turguenieff thought the conditions ideal, as Boyesen
+portrayed them to him; and I look back at my own life there with wonder
+at my good fortune.  I was sensible, and I still am sensible this had its
+alloys.  I was young and unknown and was making my way, and I had to
+suffer some of the penalties of these disadvantages; but I do not believe
+that anywhere else in this ill-contrived economy, where it is vainly
+imagined that the material struggle forms a high incentive and
+inspiration, would my penalties have been so light.  On the other hand,
+the good that was done me I could never repay if I lived all over again
+for others the life that I have so long lived for myself.  At times, when
+I had experienced from those elect spirits with whom I was associated,
+some act of friendship, as signal as it was delicate, I used to ask
+myself, how I could ever do anything unhandsome or ungenerous towards any
+one again; and I had a bad conscience the next time I did it.
+
+The air of the Cambridge that I knew was sufficiently cool to be bracing,
+but what was of good import in me flourished in it.  The life of the
+place had its lateral limitations; sometimes its lights failed to detect
+excellent things that lay beyond it; but upward it opened illimitably.
+I speak of it frankly because that life as I witnessed it is now almost
+wholly of the past.  Cambridge is still the home of much that is good and
+fine in our literature: one realizes this if one names Colonel Thomas
+Wentworth Higginson, Mr. John Fiske, Mr. William James, Mr. Horace E.
+Scudder, not to name any others, but the first had not yet come back to
+live in his birthplace at the time I have been writing of, and the rest
+had not yet their actual prominence.  One, in deed among so many absent,
+is still present there, whom from time to time I have hitherto named
+without offering him the recognition which I should have known an
+infringement of his preferences.  But the literary Cambridge of thirty
+years ago could not be clearly imagined or justly estimated without
+taking into account the creative sympathy of a man whose contributions to
+our literature only partially represent what he has constantly done for
+the humanities.  I am sure that, after the easy heroes of the day are
+long forgot, and the noisy fames of the strenuous life shall dwindle to
+their essential insignificance before those of the gentle life, we shall
+all see in Charles Eliot Norton the eminent scholar who left the quiet of
+his books to become our chief citizen at the moment when he warned his
+countrymen of the ignominy and disaster of doing wrong.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Cold-slaw
+Collective opacity
+Expectation of those who will come no more
+Felt that this was my misfortune more than my fault
+Found life was not all poetry
+He had no time to make money
+Intellectual poseurs
+No time to make money
+NYC, a city where money counts for more and goes for less
+One could be openly poor in Cambridge without open shame
+Put your finger on the present moment and enjoy it
+Standards were their own, and they were satisfied with them
+Wonderful to me how it should remain so unintelligible
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Cambridge Neighbors
+by William Dean Howells
+
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