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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Literary Friends And Acquaintances, 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: Literary Friends And Acquaintances
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: October 28, 2006 [EBook #4201]
+Last Updated: August 21, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+   Biographical
+   My First Visit to New England
+   First Impressions of Literary New York
+   Roundabout to Boston
+   Literary Boston As I Knew It
+   Oliver Wendell Holmes
+   The White Mr. Longfellow
+   Studies of Lowell
+   Cambridge Neighbors
+   A Belated Guest
+   My Mark Twain
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
+
+Long before I began the papers which make up this volume, I had meant to
+write of literary history in New England as I had known it in the lives
+of its great exemplars during the twenty-five years I lived near them. In
+fact, I had meant to do this from the time I came among them; but I let
+the days in which I almost constantly saw them go by without record save
+such as I carried in a memory retentive, indeed, beyond the common, but
+not so full as I could have wished when I began to invoke it for my work.
+Still, upon insistent appeal, it responded in sufficient abundance; and,
+though I now wish I could have remembered more instances, I think my
+impressions were accurate enough. I am sure of having tried honestly to
+impart them in the ten years or more when I was desultorily endeavoring
+to share them with the reader.
+
+The papers were written pretty much in the order they have here,
+beginning with My First Visit to New England, which dates from the
+earliest eighteen-nineties, if I may trust my recollection of reading it
+from the manuscript to the editor of Harper’s Magazine, where we lay
+under the willows of Magnolia one pleasant summer morning in the first
+years of that decade. It was printed no great while after in that
+periodical; but I was so long in finishing the study of Lowell that it
+had been anticipated in Harper’s by other reminiscences of him, and it
+was therefore first printed in Scribner’s Magazine. It was the paper
+with which I took the most pains, and when it was completed I still felt
+it so incomplete that I referred it to his closest and my best friend,
+the late Charles Eliot Norton, for his criticism. He thought it wanting
+in unity; it was a group of studies instead of one study, he said; I must
+do something to draw the different sketches together in a single effect
+of portraiture; and this I did my best to do.
+
+It was the latest written of the three articles which give the volume
+substance, and it represents mare finally and fully than the others my
+sense of the literary importance of the men whose like we shall not look
+upon again. Longfellow was easily the greatest poet of the three, Holmes
+often the most brilliant and felicitous, but Lowell, in spite of his
+forays in politics, was the finest scholar and the most profoundly
+literary, as he was above the others most deeply and thoroughly New
+England in quality.
+
+While I was doing these sketches, sometimes slighter and sometimes less
+slight, of all those poets and essayists and novelists I had known in
+Cambridge and Boston and Concord and New York, I was doing many other
+things: half a dozen novels, as many more novelettes and shorter stories,
+with essays and criticisms and verses; so that in January, 1900, I had
+not yet done the paper on Lowell, which, with another, was to complete my
+reminiscences of American literary life as I had witnessed it. When they
+were all done at last they were republished in a volume which found
+instant favor beyond my deserts if not its own.
+
+There was a good deal of trouble with the name, but Literary Friends and
+Acquaintance was an endeavor for modest accuracy with which I remained
+satisfied until I thought, long too late, of Literary Friends and
+Neighbors. Then I perceived that this would have been still more
+accurate and quite as modest, and I gladly give any reader leave to call
+the book by that name who likes.
+
+Since the collection was first made, I have written little else quite of
+the kind, except the paper on Bret Harte, which was first printed shortly
+after his death; and the study of Mark Twain, which I had been preparing
+to make for forty years and more, and wrote in two weeks of the spring of
+1910. Others of my time and place have now passed whither there is
+neither time nor place, and there are moments when I feel that I must try
+to call them back and pay them such honor as my sense of their worth may
+give; but the impulse has as yet failed to effect itself, and I do not
+know how long I shall spare myself the supreme pleasure-pain, the “hochst
+angenehmer Schmerz,” of seeking to live here with those who live here no
+more.
+
+W. D. H.
+
+
+
+
+MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+If there was any one in the world who had his being more wholly in
+literature than I had in 1860, I am sure I should not have known where to
+find him, and I doubt if he could have been found nearer the centres of
+literary activity than I then was, or among those more purely devoted to
+literature than myself. I had been for three years a writer of news
+paragraphs, book notices, and political leaders on a daily paper in an
+inland city, and I do not know that my life differed outwardly from that
+of any other young journalist, who had begun as I had in a country
+printing-office, and might be supposed to be looking forward to
+advancement in his profession or in public affairs. But inwardly it was
+altogether different with me. Inwardly I was a poet, with no wish to be
+anything else, unless in a moment of careless affluence I might so far
+forget myself as to be a novelist. I was, with my friend J. J. Piatt,
+the half-author of a little volume of very unknown verse, and Mr. Lowell
+had lately accepted and had begun to print in the Atlantic Monthly five
+or six poems of mine. Besides this I had written poems, and sketches,
+and criticisms for the Saturday Press of New York, a long-forgotten but
+once very lively expression of literary intention in an extinct bohemia
+of that city; and I was always writing poems, and sketches, and
+criticisms in our own paper. These, as well as my feats in the renowned
+periodicals of the East, met with kindness, if not honor, in my own city
+which ought to have given me grave doubts whether I was any real prophet.
+But it only intensified my literary ambition, already so strong that my
+veins might well have run ink rather than blood, and gave me a higher
+opinion of my fellow-citizens, if such a thing could be. They were
+indeed very charming people, and such of them as I mostly saw were
+readers and lovers of books. Society in Columbus at that day had a
+pleasant refinement which I think I do not exaggerate in the fond
+retrospect. It had the finality which it seems to have had nowhere since
+the war; it had certain fixed ideals, which were none the less graceful
+and becoming because they were the simple old American ideals, now
+vanished, or fast vanishing, before the knowledge of good and evil as
+they have it in Europe, and as it has imparted itself to American travel
+and sojourn. There was a mixture of many strains in the capital of Ohio,
+as there was throughout the State. Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, New
+York, and New England all joined to characterize the manners and customs.
+I suppose it was the South which gave the social tone; the intellectual
+taste among the elders was the Southern taste for the classic and the
+standard in literature; but we who were younger preferred the modern
+authors: we read Thackeray, and George Eliot, and Hawthorne, and Charles
+Reade, and De Quincey, and Tennyson, and Browning, and Emerson, and
+Longfellow, and I--I read Heine, and evermore Heine, when there was not
+some new thing from the others. Now and then an immediate French book
+penetrated to us: we read Michelet and About, I remember. We looked to
+England and the East largely for our literary opinions; we accepted the
+Saturday Review as law if we could not quite receive it as gospel. One
+of us took the Cornhill Magazine, because Thackeray was the editor; the
+Atlantic Monthly counted many readers among us; and a visiting young lady
+from New England, who screamed at sight of the periodical in one of our
+houses, “Why, have you got the Atlantic Monthly out here?” could be
+answered, with cold superiority, “There are several contributors to the
+Atlantic in Columbus.” There were in fact two: my room-mate, who wrote
+Browning for it, while I wrote Heine and Longfellow. But I suppose two
+are as rightfully several as twenty are.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+That was the heyday of lecturing, and now and then a literary light from
+the East swam into our skies. I heard and saw Emerson, and I once met
+Bayard Taylor socially, at the hospitable house where he was a guest
+after his lecture. Heaven knows how I got through the evening. I do not
+think I opened my mouth to address him a word; it was as much as I could
+do to sit and look at him, while he tranquilly smoked, and chatted with
+our host, and quaffed the beer which we had very good in the Nest. All
+the while I did him homage as the first author by calling whom I had met.
+I longed to tell him how much I liked his poems, which we used to get by
+heart in those days, and I longed (how much more I longed!) to have him
+know that:
+
+     “Auch ich war in Arkadien geboren,”
+
+that I had printed poems in the Atlantic Monthly and the Saturday Press,
+and was the potential author of things destined to eclipse all literature
+hitherto attempted. But I could not tell him; and there was no one else
+who thought to tell him. Perhaps it was as well so; I might have
+perished of his recognition, for my modesty was equal to my merit.
+
+In fact I think we were all rather modest young fellows, we who formed
+the group wont to spend some part of every evening at that house, where
+there was always music, or whist, or gay talk, or all three. We had our
+opinions of literary matters, but (perhaps because we had mostly accepted
+them from England or New England, as I have said) we were not vain of
+them; and we would by no means have urged them before a living literary
+man like that. I believe none of us ventured to speak, except the poet,
+my roommate, who said, He believed so and so was the original of so and
+so; and was promptly told, He had no right to say such a thing.
+Naturally, we came away rather critical of our host’s guest, whom I
+afterwards knew as the kindliest heart in the world. But we had not
+shone in his presence, and that galled us; and we chose to think that he
+had not shone in ours.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+At that time he was filling a large space in the thoughts of the young
+people who had any thoughts about literature. He had come to his full
+repute as an agreeable and intelligent traveller, and he still wore the
+halo of his early adventures afoot in foreign lands when they were yet
+really foreign. He had not written his novels of American life, once so
+welcomed, and now so forgotten; it was very long before he had achieved
+that incomparable translation of Faust which must always remain the
+finest and best, and which would keep his name alive with Goethe’s, if he
+had done nothing else worthy of remembrance. But what then most
+commended him to the regard of us star-eyed youth (now blinking sadly
+toward our seventies) was the poetry which he printed in the magazines
+from time to time: in the first Putnam’s (where there was a dashing
+picture of him in an Arab burnoose and, a turban), and in Harper’s, and
+in the Atlantic. It was often very lovely poetry, I thought, and I still
+think so; and it was rightfully his, though it paid the inevitable
+allegiance to the manner of the great masters of the day. It was graced
+for us by the pathetic romance of his early love, which some of its
+sweetest and saddest numbers confessed, for the young girl he married
+almost in her death hour; and we who were hoping to have our hearts
+broken, or already had them so, would have been glad of something more of
+the obvious poet in the popular lecturer we had seen refreshing himself
+after his hour on the platform.
+
+He remained for nearly a year the only author I had seen, and I met him
+once again before I saw any other. Our second meeting was far from
+Columbus, as far as remote Quebec, when I was on my way to New England by
+way of Niagara and the Canadian rivers and cities. I stopped in Toronto,
+and realized myself abroad without any signal adventures; but at Montreal
+something very pretty happened to me. I came into the hotel office, the
+evening of a first day’s lonely sight-seeing, and vainly explored the
+register for the name of some acquaintance; as I turned from it two
+smartly dressed young fellows embraced it, and I heard one of them say,
+to my great amaze and happiness, “Hello, here’s Howells!”
+
+“Oh,” I broke out upon him, “I was just looking for some one I knew. I
+hope you are some one who knows me!”
+
+“Only through your contributions to the Saturday Press,” said the young
+fellow, and with these golden words, the precious first personal
+recognition of my authorship I had ever received from a stranger, and the
+rich reward of all my literary endeavor, he introduced himself and his
+friend. I do not know what became of this friend, or where or how he
+eliminated himself; but we two others were inseparable from that moment.
+He was a young lawyer from New York, and when I came back from Italy,
+four or five years later, I used to see his sign in Wall Street, with a
+never-fulfilled intention of going in to see him. In whatever world he
+happens now to be, I should like to send him my greetings, and confess to
+him that my art has never since brought me so sweet a recompense, and
+nothing a thousandth part so much like Fame, as that outcry of his over
+the hotel register in Montreal. We were comrades for four or five rich
+days, and shared our pleasures and expenses in viewing the monuments of
+those ancient Canadian capitals, which I think we valued at all their
+picturesque worth. We made jokes to mask our emotions; we giggled and
+made giggle, in the right way; we fell in and out of love with all the
+pretty faces and dresses we saw; and we talked evermore about literature
+and literary people. He had more acquaintance with the one, and more
+passion for the other, but he could tell me of Pfaff’s lager-beer cellar
+on Broadway, where the Saturday Press fellows and the other Bohemians
+met; and this, for the time, was enough: I resolved to visit it as soon
+as I reached New York, in spite of the tobacco and beer (which I was
+given to understand were de rigueur), though they both, so far as I had
+known them, were apt to make me sick.
+
+I was very desolate after I parted from this good fellow, who returned to
+Montreal on his way to New York, while I remained in Quebec to continue
+later on mine to New England. When I came in from seeing him off in a
+calash for the boat, I discovered Bayard Taylor in the reading-room, where
+he sat sunken in what seemed a somewhat weary muse. He did not know me,
+or even notice me, though I made several errands in and out of the
+reading-room in the vain hope that he might do so: doubly vain, for I am
+aware now that I was still flown with the pride of that pretty experience
+in Montreal, and trusted in a repetition of something like it. At last,
+as no chance volunteered to help me, I mustered courage to go up to him
+and name myself, and say I had once had the pleasure of meeting him at
+Doctor-------‘s in Columbus. The poet gave no sign of consciousness at
+the sound of a name which I had fondly begun to think might not be so all
+unknown. He looked up with an unkindling eye, and asked, Ah, how was the
+Doctor? and when I had reported favorably of the Doctor, our
+conversation ended.
+
+He was probably as tired as he looked, and he must have classed me with
+that multitude all over the country who had shared the pleasure I
+professed in meeting him before; it was surely my fault that I did not
+speak my name loud enough to be recognized, if I spoke it at all; but the
+courage I had mustered did not quite suffice for that. In after years he
+assured me, first by letter and then by word, of his grief for an
+incident which I can only recall now as the untoward beginning of a
+cordial friendship. It was often my privilege, in those days, as
+reviewer and editor, to testify my sense of the beautiful things he did
+in so many kinds of literature, but I never liked any of them better than
+I liked him. He had a fervent devotion to his art, and he was always
+going to do the greatest things in it, with an expectation of effect that
+never failed him. The things he actually did were none of them mean, or
+wanting in quality, and some of them are of a lasting charm that any one
+may feel who will turn to his poems; but no doubt many of them fell short
+of his hopes of them with the reader. It was fine to meet him when he
+was full of a new scheme; he talked of it with a single-hearted joy, and
+tried to make you see it of the same colors and proportions it wore to
+his eyes. He spared no toil to make it the perfect thing he dreamed it,
+and he was not discouraged by any disappointment he suffered with the
+critic or the public.
+
+He was a tireless worker, and at last his health failed under his labors
+at the newspaper desk, beneath the midnight gas, when he should long have
+rested from such labors. I believe he was obliged to do them through one
+of those business fortuities which deform and embitter all our lives; but
+he was not the man to spare himself in any case. He was always
+attempting new things, and he never ceased endeavoring to make his
+scholarship reparation for the want of earlier opportunity and training.
+I remember that I met him once in a Cambridge street with a book in his
+hand which he let me take in mine. It was a Greek author, and he said he
+was just beginning to read the language at fifty: a patriarchal age to me
+of the early thirties!
+
+I suppose I intimated the surprise I felt at his taking it up so late in
+the day, for he said, with charming seriousness, “Oh, but you know, I
+expect to use it in the other world.” Yea, that made it worth while, I
+consented; but was he sure of the other world? “As sure as I am of
+this,” he said; and I have always kept the impression of the young faith
+which spoke in his voice and was more than his words.
+
+I saw him last in the hour of those tremendous adieux which were paid him
+in New York before he sailed to be minister in Germany. It was one of
+the most graceful things done by President Hayes, who, most of all our
+Presidents after Lincoln, honored himself in honoring literature by his
+appointments, to give that place to Bayard Taylor. There was no one more
+fit for it, and it was peculiarly fit that he should be so distinguished
+to a people who knew and valued his scholarship and the service he had
+done German letters. He was as happy in it, apparently, as a man could
+be in anything here below, and he enjoyed to the last drop the many cups
+of kindness pressed to his lips in parting; though I believe these
+farewells, at a time when he was already fagged with work and excitement,
+were notably harmful to him, and helped to hasten his end. Some of us
+who were near of friendship went down to see him off when he sailed, as
+the dismal and futile wont of friends is; and I recall the kind, great
+fellow standing in the cabin, amid those sad flowers that heaped the
+tables, saying good-by to one after another, and smiling fondly, smiling
+wearily, upon all. There was champagne, of course, and an odious
+hilarity, without meaning and without remission, till the warning bell
+chased us ashore, and our brave poet escaped with what was left of his
+life.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+I have followed him far from the moment of our first meeting; but even on
+my way to venerate those New England luminaries, which chiefly drew my
+eyes, I could not pay a less devoir to an author who, if Curtis was not,
+was chief of the New York group of authors in that day. I distinguished
+between the New-Englanders and the New-Yorkers, and I suppose there is no
+question but our literary centre was then in Boston, wherever it is, or
+is not, at present. But I thought Taylor then, and I think him now, one
+of the first in our whole American province of the republic of letters,
+in a day when it was in a recognizably flourishing state, whether we
+regard quantity or quality in the names that gave it lustre. Lowell was
+then in perfect command of those varied forces which will long, if not
+lastingly, keep him in memory as first among our literary men, and master
+in more kinds than any other American. Longfellow was in the fulness of
+his world-wide fame, and in the ripeness of the beautiful genius which
+was not to know decay while life endured. Emerson had emerged from the
+popular darkness which had so long held him a hopeless mystic, and was
+shining a lambent star of poesy and prophecy at the zenith. Hawthorne,
+the exquisite artist, the unrivalled dreamer, whom we still always liken
+this one and that one to, whenever this one or that one promises greatly
+to please us, and still leave without a rival, without a companion, had
+lately returned from his long sojourn abroad, and had given us the last
+of the incomparable romances which the world was to have perfect from his
+hand. Doctor Holmes had surpassed all expectations in those who most
+admired his brilliant humor and charming poetry by the invention of a new
+attitude if not a new sort in literature. The turn that civic affairs
+had taken was favorable to the widest recognition of Whittier’s splendid
+lyrical gift; and that heart of fire, doubly snow-bound by Quaker
+tradition and Puritan environment; was penetrating every generous breast
+with its flamy impulses, and fusing all wills in its noble purpose. Mrs.
+Stowe, who far outfamed the rest as the author of the most renowned novel
+ever written, was proving it no accident or miracle by the fiction she
+was still writing.
+
+This great New England group might be enlarged perhaps without loss of
+quality by the inclusion of Thoreau, who came somewhat before his time,
+and whose drastic criticism of our expediential and mainly futile
+civilization would find more intelligent acceptance now than it did then,
+when all resentment of its defects was specialized in enmity to Southern
+slavery. Doctor Edward Everett Hale belonged in this group too, by
+virtue of that humor, the most inventive and the most fantastic, the
+sanest, the sweetest, the truest, which had begun to find expression in
+the Atlantic Monthly; and there a wonderful young girl had written a
+series of vivid sketches and taken the heart of youth everywhere with
+amaze and joy, so that I thought it would be no less an event to meet
+Harriet Prescott than to meet any of those I have named.
+
+I expected somehow to meet them all, and I imagined them all easily
+accessible in the office of the Atlantic Monthly, which had lately
+adventured in the fine air of high literature where so many other
+periodicals had gasped and died before it. The best of these, hitherto,
+and better even than the Atlantic for some reasons, the lamented Putnam’s
+Magazine, had perished of inanition at New York, and the claim of the
+commercial capital to the literary primacy had passed with that brilliant
+venture. New York had nothing distinctive to show for American
+literature but the decrepit and doting Knickerbocker Magazine. Harper’s
+New Monthly, though Curtis had already come to it from the wreck of
+Putnam’s, and it had long ceased to be eclectic in material, and had
+begun to stand for native work in the allied arts which it has since so
+magnificently advanced, was not distinctively literary, and the Weekly
+had just begun to make itself known. The Century, Scribner’s, the
+Cosmopolitan, McClure’s, and I know not what others, were still
+unimagined by five, and ten, and twenty years, and the Galaxy was to
+flash and fade before any of them should kindle its more effectual fires.
+The Nation, which was destined to chastise rather than nurture our young
+literature, had still six years of dreamless potentiality before it; and
+the Nation was always more Bostonian than New-Yorkish by nature, whatever
+it was by nativity.
+
+Philadelphia had long counted for nothing in the literary field. Graham’s
+Magazine at one time showed a certain critical force, but it seemed to
+perish of this expression of vitality; and there remained Godey’s Lady’s
+Book and Peterson’s Magazine, publications really incredible in their
+insipidity. In the South there was nothing but a mistaken social ideal,
+with the moral principles all standing on their heads in defence of
+slavery; and in the West there was a feeble and foolish notion that
+Western talent was repressed by Eastern jealousy. At Boston chiefly, if
+not at Boston alone, was there a vigorous intellectual life among such
+authors as I have named. Every young writer was ambitious to join his
+name with theirs in the Atlantic Monthly, and in the lists of Ticknor &
+Fields, who were literary publishers in a sense such as the business
+world has known nowhere else before or since. Their imprint was a
+warrant of quality to the reader and of immortality to the author, so
+that if I could have had a book issued by them at that day I should now
+be in the full enjoyment of an undying fame.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+Such was the literary situation as the passionate pilgrim from the West
+approached his holy land at Boston, by way of the Grand Trunk Railway
+from Quebec to Portland. I have no recollection of a sleeping-car, and I
+suppose I waked and watched during the whole of that long, rough journey;
+but I should hardly have slept if there had been a car for the purpose. I
+was too eager to see what New England was like, and too anxious not to
+lose the least glimpse of it, to close my eyes after I crossed the border
+at Island Pond. I found that in the elm-dotted levels of Maine it was
+very like the Western Reserve in northern Ohio, which is, indeed, a
+portion of New England transferred with all its characteristic features,
+and flattened out along the lake shore. It was not till I began to run
+southward into the older regions of the country that it lost this look,
+and became gratefully strange to me. It never had the effect of hoary
+antiquity which I had expected of a country settled more than two
+centuries; with its wood-built farms and villages it looked newer than
+the coal-smoked brick of southern Ohio. I had prefigured the New England
+landscape bare of forests, relieved here and there with the tees of
+orchards or plantations; but I found apparently as much woodland as at
+home.
+
+At Portland I first saw the ocean, and this was a sort of disappointment.
+Tides and salt water I had already had at Quebec, so that I was no longer
+on the alert for them; but the color and the vastness of the sea I was
+still to try upon my vision. When I stood on the Promenade at Portland
+with the kind young Unitarian minister whom I had brought a letter to,
+and who led me there for a most impressive first view of the ocean, I
+could not make more of it than there was of Lake Erie; and I have never
+thought the color of the sea comparable to the tender blue of the lake. I
+did not hint my disappointment to my friend; I had too much regard for
+the feelings of an Eastern man to decry his ocean to his face, and I felt
+besides that it would be vulgar and provincial to make comparisons. I am
+glad now that I held my tongue, for that kind soul is no longer in this
+world, and I should not like to think he knew how far short of my
+expectations the sea he was so proud of had fallen. I went up with him
+into a tower or belvedere there was at hand; and when he pointed to the
+eastern horizon and said, Now there was nothing but sea between us and
+Africa, I pretended to expand with the thought, and began to sound myself
+for the emotions which I ought to have felt at such a sight. But in my
+heart I was empty, and Heaven knows whether I saw the steamer which the
+ancient mariner in charge of that tower invited me to look at through his
+telescope. I never could see anything but a vitreous glare through a
+telescope, which has a vicious habit of dodging about through space, and
+failing to bring down anything of less than planetary magnitude.
+
+But there was something at Portland vastly more to me than seas or
+continents, and that was the house where Longfellow was born. I believe,
+now, I did not get the right house, but only the house he went to live in
+later; but it served, and I rejoiced in it with a rapture that could not
+have been more genuine if it had been the real birthplace of the poet. I
+got my friend to show me
+
+       “----the breezy dome of groves,
+        The shadows of Deering’s woods,”
+
+because they were in one of Longfellow’s loveliest and tenderest poems;
+and I made an errand to the docks, for the sake of the
+
+       “---black wharves and the slips,
+        And the sea-tides tossing free,
+        And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
+        And the beauty and mystery of the ships,
+        And the magic of the sea,”
+
+mainly for the reason that these were colors and shapes of the fond
+vision of the poet’s past. I am in doubt whether it was at this time or
+a later time that I went to revere
+
+       “--the dead captains as they lay
+        In their graves o’erlooking the tranquil bay,
+        where they in battle died,”
+
+but I am quite sure it was now that I wandered under
+
+       “--the trees which shadow each well-known street,
+        As they balance up and down,”
+
+for when I was next in Portland the great fire had swept the city avenues
+bare of most of those beautiful elms, whose Gothic arches and traceries I
+well remember.
+
+The fact is that in those days I was bursting with the most romantic
+expectations of life in every way, and I looked at the whole world as
+material that might be turned into literature, or that might be
+associated with it somehow. I do not know how I managed to keep these
+preposterous hopes within me, but perhaps the trick of satirizing them,
+which I had early learnt, helped me to do it. I was at that particular
+moment resolved above all things to see things as Heinrich Heine saw
+them, or at least to report them as he did, no matter how I saw them; and
+I went about framing phrases to this end, and trying to match the objects
+of interest to them whenever there was the least chance of getting them
+together.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+I do not know how I first arrived in Boston, or whether it was before or
+after I had passed a day or two in Salem. As Salem is on the way from
+Portland, I will suppose that I stopped there first, and explored the
+quaint old town (quainter then than now, but still quaint enough) for the
+memorials of Hawthorne and of the witches which united to form the Salem
+I cared for. I went and looked up the House of Seven Gables, and
+suffered an unreasonable disappointment that it had not a great many more
+of them; but there was no loss in the death-warrant of Bridget Bishop,
+with the sheriff’s return of execution upon it, which I found at the
+Court-house; if anything, the pathos of that witness of one of the
+cruelest delusions in the world was rather in excess of my needs; I could
+have got on with less. I saw the pins which the witches were sworn to
+have thrust into the afflicted children, and I saw Gallows Hill, where
+the hapless victims of the perjury were hanged. But that death-warrant
+remained the most vivid color of my experience of the tragedy; I had no
+need to invite myself to a sense of it, and it is still like a stain of
+red in my memory.
+
+The kind old ship’s captain whose guest I was, and who was transfigured
+to poetry in my sense by the fact that he used to voyage to the African
+coast for palm-oil in former days, led me all about the town, and showed
+me the Custom-house, which I desired to see because it was in the preface
+to the Scarlet Letter. But I perceived that he did not share my
+enthusiasm for the author, and I became more and more sensible that in
+Salem air there was a cool undercurrent of feeling about him. No doubt
+the place was not altogether grateful for the celebrity his romance had
+given it, and would have valued more the uninterrupted quiet of its own
+flattering thoughts of itself; but when it came to hearing a young lady
+say she knew a girl who said she would like to poison Hawthorne, it
+seemed to the devout young pilgrim from the West that something more of
+love for the great romancer would not have been too much for him.
+Hawthorne had already had his say, however, and he had not used his
+native town with any great tenderness. Indeed, the advantages to any
+place of having a great genius born and reared in its midst are so
+doubtful that it might be well for localities designing to become the
+birthplaces of distinguished authors to think twice about it. Perhaps
+only the largest capitals, like London and Paris, and New York and
+Chicago, ought to risk it. But the authors have an unaccountable
+perversity, and will seldom come into the world in the large cities,
+which are alone without the sense of neighborhood, and the personal
+susceptibilities so unfavorable to the practice of the literary art. I
+dare say that it was owing to the local indifference to her greatest
+name, or her reluctance from it, that I got a clearer impression of Salem
+in some other respects than I should have had if I had been invited there
+to devote myself solely to the associations of Hawthorne. For the first
+time I saw an old New England town, I do not know, but the most
+characteristic, and took into my young Western consciousness the fact of
+a more complex civilization than I had yet known. My whole life had been
+passed in a region where men were just beginning ancestors, and the
+conception of family was very imperfect. Literature, of course, was full
+of it, and it was not for a devotee of Thackeray to be theoretically
+ignorant of its manifestations; but I had hitherto carelessly supposed
+that family was nowhere regarded seriously in America except in Virginia,
+where it furnished a joke for the rest of the nation. But now I found
+myself confronted with it in its ancient houses, and heard its names
+pronounced with a certain consideration, which I dare say was as much
+their due in Salem as it could be anywhere. The names were all strange,
+and all indifferent to me, but those fine square wooden mansions, of a
+tasteful architecture, and a pale buff-color, withdrawing themselves in
+quiet reserve from the quiet street, gave me an impression of family as
+an actuality and a force which I had never had before, but which no
+Westerner can yet understand the East without taking into account. I do
+not suppose that I conceived of family as a fact of vital import then; I
+think I rather regarded it as a color to be used in any aesthetic study
+of the local conditions. I am not sure that I valued it more even for
+literary purposes, than the steeple which the captain pointed out as the
+first and last thing he saw when he came and went on his long voyages, or
+than the great palm-oil casks, which he showed me, and which I related to
+the tree that stood
+
+        “Auf brennender Felsenwand.”
+
+Whether that was the kind of palm that gives the oil, or was a sort only
+suitable to be the dream of a lonely fir-tree in the North on a cold
+height, I am in doubt to this day.
+
+I heard, not without concern, that the neighboring industry of Lynn was
+penetrating Salem, and that the ancient haunt of the witches and the
+birthplace of our subtlest and somberest wizard was becoming a great
+shoe-town; but my concern was less for its memories and sensibilities
+than for an odious duty which I owed that industry, together with all the
+others in New England. Before I left home I had promised my earliest
+publisher that I would undertake to edit, or compile, or do something
+literary to, a work on the operation of the more distinctive mechanical
+inventions of our country, which he had conceived the notion of
+publishing by subscription. He had furnished me, the most immechanical
+of humankind, with a letter addressed generally to the great mills and
+factories of the East, entreating their managers to unfold their
+mysteries to me for the purposes of this volume. His letter had the
+effect of shutting up some of them like clams, and others it put upon
+their guard against my researches, lest I should seize the secret of
+their special inventions and publish it to the world. I could not tell
+the managers that I was both morally and mentally incapable of this; that
+they might have explained and demonstrated the properties and functions
+of their most recondite machinery, and upon examination afterwards found
+me guiltless of having anything but a few verses of Heine or Tennyson or
+Longfellow in my head. So I had to suffer in several places from their
+unjust anxieties, and from my own weariness of their ingenious engines,
+or else endure the pangs of a bad conscience from ignoring them. As long
+as I was in Canada I was happy, for there was no industry in Canada that
+I saw, except that of the peasant girls, in their Evangeline hats and
+kirtles, tossing the hay in the way-side fields; but when I reached
+Portland my troubles began. I went with that young minister of whom I
+have spoken to a large foundry, where they were casting some sort of
+ironmongery, and inspected the process from a distance beyond any chance
+spurt of the molten metal, and came away sadly uncertain of putting the
+rather fine spectacle to any practical use. A manufactory where they did
+something with coal-oil (which I now heard for the first time called
+kerosene) refused itself to me, and I said to myself that probably all
+the other industries of Portland were as reserved, and I would not seek
+to explore them; but when I got to Salem, my conscience stirred again.
+If I knew that there were shoe-shops in Salem, ought not I to go and
+inspect their processes? This was a question which would not answer
+itself to my satisfaction, and I had no peace till I learned that I could
+see shoemaking much better at Lynn, and that Lynn was such a little way
+from Boston that I could readily run up there, if I did not wish to
+examine the shoe machinery at once. I promised myself that I would run up
+from Boston, but in order to do this I must first go to Boston.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+I am supposing still that I saw Salem before I saw Boston, but however
+the fact may be, I am sure that I decided it would be better to see
+shoemaking in Lynn, where I really did see it, thirty years later. For
+the purposes of the present visit, I contented myself with looking at a
+machine in Haverhill, which chewed a shoe sole full of pegs, and dropped
+it out of its iron jaws with an indifference as great as my own, and
+probably as little sense of how it had done its work. I may be unjust to
+that machine; Heaven knows I would not wrong it; and I must confess that
+my head had no room in it for the conception of any machinery but the
+mythological, which also I despised, in my revulsion from the
+eighteenth-century poets to those of my own day.
+
+I cannot quite make out after the lapse of so many years just how or when
+I got to Haverhill, or whether it was before or after I had been in
+Salem. There is an apparitional quality in my presences, at this point
+or that, in the dim past; but I hope that, for the credit of their order,
+ghosts are not commonly taken with such trivial things as I was. For
+instance, in Haverhill I was much interested by the sight of a young man,
+coming gayly down the steps of the hotel where I lodged, in peg-top
+trousers so much more peg top than my own that I seemed to be wearing
+mere spring-bottoms in comparison; and in a day when every one who
+respected himself had a necktie as narrow as he could get, this youth had
+one no wider than a shoestring, and red at that, while mine measured
+almost an inch, and was black. To be sure, he was one of a band of negro
+minstrels, who were to give a concert that night, and he had a light to
+excel in fashion.
+
+I will suppose, for convenience’ sake, that I visited Haverhill, too,
+before I reached Boston: somehow that shoe-pegging machine must come in,
+and it may as well come in here. When I actually found myself in Boston,
+there were perhaps industries which it would have been well for me to
+celebrate, but I either made believe there were none, or else I honestly
+forgot all about them. In either case I released myself altogether to
+the literary and historical associations of the place. I need not say
+that I gave myself first to the first, and it rather surprised me to find
+that the literary associations of Boston referred so largely to
+Cambridge. I did not know much about Cambridge, except that it was the
+seat of the university where Lowell was, and Longfellow had been,
+professor; and somehow I had not realized it as the home of these poets.
+That was rather stupid of me, but it is best to own the truth, and
+afterward I came to know the place so well that I may safely confess my
+earlier ignorance.
+
+I had stopped in Boston at the Tremont House, which was still one of the
+first hostelries of the country, and I must have inquired my way to
+Cambridge there; but I was sceptical of the direction the Cambridge
+horse-car took when I found it, and I hinted to the driver my anxieties
+as to why he should be starting east when I had been told that Cambridge
+was west of Boston. He reassured me in the laconic and sarcastic manner
+of his kind, and we really reached Cambridge by the route he had taken.
+
+The beautiful elms that shaded great part of the way massed themselves in
+the “groves of academe” at the Square, and showed pleasant glimpses of
+“Old Harvard’s scholar factories red,” then far fewer than now. It must
+have been in vacation, for I met no one as I wandered through the college
+yard, trying to make up my mind as to how I should learn where Lowell
+lived; for it was he whom I had come to find. He had not only taken the
+poems I sent him, but he had printed two of them in a single number of
+the Atlantic, and had even written me a little note about them, which I
+wore next my heart in my breast pocket till I almost wore it out; and so
+I thought I might fitly report myself to him. But I have always been
+helpless in finding my way, and I was still depressed by my failure to
+convince the horse-car driver that he had taken the wrong road. I let
+several people go by without questioning them, and those I did ask
+abashed me farther by not knowing what I wanted to know. When I had
+remitted my search for the moment, an ancient man, with an open mouth and
+an inquiring eye, whom I never afterwards made out in Cambridge,
+addressed me with a hospitable offer to show me the Washington Elm. I
+thought this would give me time to embolden myself for the meeting with
+the editor of the Atlantic if I should ever find him, and I went with
+that kind old man, who when he had shown me the tree, and the spot where
+Washington stood when he took command of the Continental forces, said
+that he had a branch of it, and that if I would come to his house with
+him he would give me a piece. In the end, I meant merely to flatter him
+into telling me where I could find Lowell, but I dissembled my purpose
+and pretended a passion for a piece of the historic elm, and the old man
+led me not only to his house but his wood-house, where he sawed me off a
+block so generous that I could not get it into my pocket. I feigned the
+gratitude which I could see that he expected, and then I took courage to
+put my question to him. Perhaps that patriarch lived only in the past,
+and cared for history and not literature. He confessed that he could not
+tell me where to find Lowell; but he did not forsake me; he set forth
+with me upon the street again, and let no man pass without asking him. In
+the end we met one who was able to say where Mr. Lowell was, and I found
+him at last in a little study at the rear of a pleasant, old-fashioned
+house near the Delta.
+
+Lowell was not then at the height of his fame; he had just reached this
+thirty years after, when he died; but I doubt if he was ever after a
+greater power in his own country, or more completely embodied the
+literary aspiration which would not and could not part itself from the
+love of freedom and the hope of justice. For the sake of these he had
+been willing to suffer the reproach which followed their friends in the
+earlier days of the anti-slavery struggle: He had outlived the reproach
+long before; but the fear of his strength remained with those who had
+felt it, and he had not made himself more generally loved by the ‘Fable
+for Critics’ than by the ‘Biglow Papers’, probably. But in the ‘Vision
+of Sir Launfal’ and the ‘Legend of Brittany’ he had won a liking if not a
+listening far wider than his humor and his wit had got him; and in his
+lectures on the English poets, given not many years before he came to the
+charge of the Atlantic, he had proved himself easily the wisest and
+finest critic in our language. He was already, more than any American
+poet,
+
+        “Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
+                  The love of love,”
+
+and he held a place in the public sense which no other author among us
+has held. I had myself never been a great reader of his poetry, when I
+met him, though when I was a boy of ten years I had heard my father
+repeat passages from the Biglow Papers against war and slavery and the
+war for slavery upon Mexico, and later I had read those criticisms of
+English poetry, and I knew Sir Launfal must be Lowell in some sort; but
+my love for him as a poet was chiefly centred in my love for his tender
+rhyme, ‘Auf Wiedersehen’, which I can not yet read without something of
+the young pathos it first stirred in me. I knew and felt his greatness
+some how apart from the literary proofs of it; he ruled my fancy and held
+my allegiance as a character, as a man; and I am neither sorry nor
+ashamed that I was abashed when I first came into his presence; and that
+in spite of his words of welcome I sat inwardly quaking before him. He
+was then forty-one years old, and nineteen my senior, and if there had
+been nothing else to awe me, I might well have been quelled by the
+disparity of our ages. But I have always been willing and even eager to
+do homage to men who have done something, and notably to men who have
+done something in the sort I wished to do something in, myself. I
+could never recognize any other sort of superiority; but that I am proud
+to recognize; and I had before Lowell some such feeling as an obscure
+subaltern might have before his general. He was by nature a bit of a
+disciplinarian, and the effect was from him as well as in me; I dare say
+he let me feel whatever difference there was as helplessly as I felt it.
+At the first encounter with people he always was apt to have a certain
+frosty shyness, a smiling cold, as from the long, high-sunned winters of
+his Puritan race; he was not quite himself till he had made you aware of
+his quality: then no one could be sweeter, tenderer, warmer than he; then
+he made you free of his whole heart; but you must be his captive before
+he could do that. His whole personality had now an instant charm for me;
+I could not keep my eyes from those beautiful eyes of his, which had a
+certain starry serenity, and looked out so purely from under his white
+forehead, shadowed with auburn hair untouched by age; or from the smile
+that shaped the auburn beard, and gave the face in its form and color the
+Christ-look which Page’s portrait has flattered in it.
+
+His voice had as great a fascination for me as his face. The vibrant
+tenderness and the crisp clearness of the tones, the perfect modulation,
+the clear enunciation, the exquisite accent, the elect diction--I did not
+know enough then to know that these were the gifts, these were the
+graces, of one from whose tongue our rough English came music such as I
+should never hear from any other. In this speech there was nothing of
+our slipshod American slovenliness, but a truly Italian conscience and an
+artistic sense of beauty in the instrument.
+
+I saw, before he sat down across his writing-table from me, that he was
+not far from the medium height; but his erect carriage made the most of
+his five feet and odd inches. He had been smoking the pipe he loved, and
+he put it back in his mouth, presently, as if he found himself at greater
+ease with it, when he began to chat, or rather to let me show what manner
+of young man I was by giving me the first word. I told him of the
+trouble I had in finding him, and I could not help dragging in something
+about Heine’s search for Borne, when he went to see him in Frankfort; but
+I felt at once this was a false start, for Lowell was such an impassioned
+lover of Cambridge, which was truly his patria, in the Italian sense,
+that it must have hurt him to be unknown to any one in it; he said, a
+little dryly, that he should not have thought I would have so much
+difficulty; but he added, forgivingly, that this was not his own house,
+which he was out of for the time. Then he spoke to me of Heine, and when
+I showed my ardor for him, he sought to temper it with some judicious
+criticisms, and told me that he had kept the first poem I sent him, for
+the long time it had been unacknowledged, to make sure that it was not a
+translation. He asked me about myself, and my name, and its Welsh
+origin, and seemed to find the vanity I had in this harmless enough. When
+I said I had tried hard to believe that I was at least the literary
+descendant of Sir James Howels, he corrected me gently with “James
+Howel,” and took down a volume of the ‘Familiar Letters’ from the shelves
+behind him to prove me wrong. This was always his habit, as I found
+afterwards when he quoted anything from a book he liked to get it and
+read the passage over, as if he tasted a kind of hoarded sweetness in the
+words. It visibly vexed him if they showed him in the least mistaken;
+but
+
+        “The love he bore to learning was at fault”
+
+for this foible, and that other of setting people right if he thought
+them wrong. I could not assert myself against his version of Howels’s
+name, for my edition of his letters was far away in Ohio, and I was
+obliged to own that the name was spelt in several different ways in it.
+He perceived, no doubt, why I had chosen the form liked my own, with the
+title which the pleasant old turncoat ought to have had from the many
+masters he served according to their many minds, but never had except
+from that erring edition. He did not afflict me for it, though; probably
+it amused him too much; he asked me about the West, and when he found
+that I was as proud of the West as I was of Wales, he seemed even better
+pleased, and said he had always fancied that human nature was laid out on
+rather a larger scale there than in the East, but he had seen very little
+of the West. In my heart I did not think this then, and I do not think
+it now; human nature has had more ground to spread over in the West; that
+is all; but “it was not for me to bandy words with my sovereign.” He
+said he liked to hear of the differences between the different sections,
+for what we had most to fear in our country was a wearisome sameness of
+type.
+
+He did not say now, or at any other time during the many years I knew
+him, any of those slighting things of the West which I had so often to
+suffer from Eastern people, but suffered me to praise it all I would. He
+asked me what way I had taken in coming to New England, and when I told
+him, and began to rave of the beauty and quaintness of French Canada, and
+to pour out my joy in Quebec, he said, with a smile that had now lost all
+its frost, Yes, Quebec was a bit of the seventeenth century; it was in
+many ways more French than France, and its people spoke the language of
+Voltaire, with the accent of Voltaire’s time.
+
+I do not remember what else he talked of, though once I remembered it
+with what I believed an ineffaceable distinctness. I set nothing of it
+down at the time; I was too busy with the letters I was writing for a
+Cincinnati paper; and I was severely bent upon keeping all personalities
+out of them. This was very well, but I could wish now that I had
+transgressed at least so far as to report some of the things that Lowell
+said; for the paper did not print my letters, and it would have been
+perfectly safe, and very useful for the present purpose. But perhaps he
+did not say anything very memorable; to do that you must have something
+positive in your listener; and I was the mere response, the hollow echo,
+that youth must be in like circumstances. I was all the time afraid of
+wearing my welcome out, and I hurried to go when I would so gladly have
+staid. I do not remember where I meant to go, or why he should have
+undertaken to show me the way across-lots, but this was what he did; and
+when we came to a fence, which I clambered gracelessly over, he put his
+hands on the top, and tried to take it at a bound. He tried twice, and
+then laughed at his failure, but not with any great pleasure, and he was
+not content till a third trial carried him across. Then he said, “I
+commonly do that the first time,” as if it were a frequent habit with
+him, while I remained discreetly silent, and for that moment at least
+felt myself the elder of the man who had so much of the boy in him. He
+had, indeed, much of the boy in him to the last, and he parted with each
+hour of his youth reluctantly, pathetically.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+We walked across what must have been Jarvis Field to what must have been
+North Avenue, and there he left me. But before he let me go he held my
+hand while he could say that he wished me to dine with him; only, he was
+not in his own house, and he would ask me to dine with him at the Parker
+House in Boston, and would send me word of the time later.
+
+I suppose I may have spent part of the intervening time in viewing the
+wonders of Boston, and visiting the historic scenes and places in it and
+about it. I certainly went over to Charleston, and ascended Bunker Hill
+monument, and explored the navy-yard, where the immemorial man-of-war
+begun in Jackson’s time was then silently stretching itself under its
+long shed in a poetic arrest, as if the failure of the appropriation for
+its completion had been some kind of enchantment. In Boston, I early
+presented my letter of credit to the publisher it was drawn upon, not
+that I needed money at the moment, but from a young eagerness to see if
+it would be honored; and a literary attache of the house kindly went
+about with me, and showed me the life of the city. A great city it
+seemed to me then, and a seething vortex of business as well as a whirl
+of gaiety, as I saw it in Washington Street, and in a promenade concert
+at Copeland’s restaurant in Tremont Row. Probably I brought some
+idealizing force to bear upon it, for I was not all so strange to the
+world as I must seem; perhaps I accounted for quality as well as quantity
+in my impressions of the New England metropolis, and aggrandized it in
+the ratio of its literary importance. It seemed to me old, even after
+Quebec, and very likely I credited the actual town with all the dead and
+gone Bostonians in my sentimental census. If I did not, it was no fault
+of my cicerone, who thought even more of the city he showed me than I
+did. I do not know now who he was, and I never saw him after I came to
+live there, with any certainty that it was he, though I was often
+tormented with the vision of a spectacled face like his, but not like
+enough to warrant me in addressing him.
+
+He became part of that ghostly Boston of my first visit, which would
+sometimes return and possess again the city I came to know so familiarly
+in later years, and to be so passionately interested in. Some color of
+my prime impressions has tinged the fictitious experiences of people in
+my books, but I find very little of it in my memory. This is like a web
+of frayed old lace, which I have to take carefully into my hold for fear
+of its fragility, and make out as best I can the figure once so distinct
+in it. There are the narrow streets, stretching saltworks to the docks,
+which I haunted for their quaintness, and there is Faunal Hall, which I
+cared to see so much more because Wendell Phillips had spoken in it than
+because Otis and Adams had. There is the old Colonial House, and there
+is the State House, which I dare say I explored, with the Common sloping
+before it. There is Beacon Street, with the Hancock House where it is
+incredibly no more, and there are the beginnings of Commonwealth Avenue,
+and the other streets of the Back Bay, laid out with their basements left
+hollowed in the made land, which the gravel trains were yet making out of
+the westward hills. There is the Public Garden, newly planned and
+planted, but without the massive bridge destined to make so ungratefully
+little of the lake that occasioned it. But it is all very vague, and I
+could easily believe now that it was some one else who saw it then in my
+place.
+
+I think that I did not try to see Cambridge the same day that I saw
+Lowell, but wisely came back to my hotel in Boston, and tried to realize
+the fact. I went out another day, with an acquaintance from Ohio; whom I
+ran upon in the street. We went to Mount Auburn together, and I viewed
+its monuments with a reverence which I dare say their artistic quality
+did not merit. But I am, not sorry for this, for perhaps they are not
+quite so bad as some people pretend. The Gothic chapel of the cemetery,
+unsorted as it was, gave me, with its half-dozen statues standing or
+sitting about, an emotion such as I am afraid I could not receive now
+from the Acropolis, Westminster Abbey, and Santa Crocea in one. I tried
+hard for some aesthetic sense of it, and I made believe that I thought
+this thing and that thing in the place moved me with its fitness or
+beauty; but the truth is that I had no taste in anything but literature,
+and did not feel the effect I would so willingly have experienced.
+
+I did genuinely love the elmy quiet of the dear old Cambridge streets,
+though, and I had a real and instant pleasure in the yellow colonial
+houses, with their white corners and casements and their green blinds,
+that lurked behind the shrubbery of the avenue I passed through to Mount
+Auburn. The most beautiful among them was the most interesting for me,
+for it was the house of Longfellow; my companion, who had seen it before,
+pointed it out to me with an air of custom, and I would not let him see
+that I valued the first sight of it as I did. I had hoped that somehow I
+might be so favored as to see Longfellow himself, but when I asked about
+him of those who knew, they said, “Oh, he is at Nahant,” and I thought
+that Nahant must be a great way off, and at any rate I did not feel
+authorized to go to him there. Neither did I go to see the author of
+‘The Amber Gods’ who lived at Newburyport, I was told, as if I should
+know where Newburyport was; I did not know, and I hated to ask. Besides,
+it did not seem so simple as it had seemed in Ohio, to go and see a young
+lady simply because I was infatuated with her literature; even as the
+envoy of all the infatuated young people of Columbus, I could not quite
+do this; and when I got home, I had to account for my failure as best I
+could. Another failure of mine was the sight of Whittier, which I then
+very much longed to have. They said, “Oh, Whittier lives at Amesbury,”
+ but that put him at an indefinite distance, and without the introduction
+I never would ask for, I found it impossible to set out in quest of him.
+In the end, I saw no one in New England whom I was not presented to in
+the regular way, except Lowell, whom I thought I had a right to call upon
+in my quality of contributor, and from the acquaintance I had with him by
+letter. I neither praise nor blame myself for this; it was my shyness
+that with held me rather than my merit. There is really no harm in
+seeking the presence of a famous man, and I doubt if the famous man
+resents the wish of people to look upon him without some measure, great
+or little, of affectation. There are bores everywhere, but he is
+likelier to find them in the wonted figures of society than in those
+young people, or old people, who come to him in the love of what he has
+done. I am well aware how furiously Tennyson sometimes met his
+worshippers, and how insolently Carlyle, but I think these facts are
+little specks in their sincerity. Our own gentler and honester
+celebrities did not forbid approach, and I have known some of them caress
+adorers who seemed hardly worthy of their kindness; but that was better
+than to have hurt any sensitive spirit who had ventured too far, by the
+rules that govern us with common men.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+My business relations were with the house that so promptly honored my
+letter of credit. This house had published in the East the campaign life
+of Lincoln which I had lately written, and I dare say would have
+published the volume of poems I had written earlier with my friend Piatt,
+if there had been any public for it; at least, I saw large numbers of the
+book on the counters. But all my literary affiliations were with Ticknor
+& Fields, and it was the Old Corner Book-Store on Washington Street that
+drew my heart as soon as I had replenished my pocket in Cornhill. After
+verifying the editor of the Atlantic Monthly I wised to verify its
+publishers, and it very fitly happened that when I was shown into Mr.
+Fields’s little room at the back of the store, with its window looking
+upon School Street, and its scholarly keeping in books and prints, he had
+just got the magazine sheets of a poem of mine from the Cambridge
+printers. He was then lately from abroad, and he had the zest for
+American things which a foreign sojourn is apt to renew in us, though I
+did not know this then, and could not account for it in the kindness he
+expressed for my poem. He introduced me to Mr. Ticknor, who I fancied
+had not read my poem; but he seemed to know what it was from the junior
+partner, and he asked me whether I had been paid for it. I confessed
+that I had not, and then he got out a chamois-leather bag, and took from
+it five half-eagles in gold and laid them on the green cloth top of the
+desk, in much the shape and of much the size of the Great Bear. I have
+never since felt myself paid so lavishly for any literary work, though I
+have had more for a single piece than the twenty-five dollars that
+dazzled me in this constellation. The publisher seemed aware of the
+poetic character of the transaction; he let the pieces lie a moment,
+before he gathered them up and put them into my hand, and said, “I always
+think it is pleasant to have it in gold.”
+
+But a terrible experience with the poem awaited me, and quenched for the
+moment all my pleasure and pride. It was ‘The Pilot’s Story,’ which I
+suppose has had as much acceptance as anything of mine in verse (I do not
+boast of a vast acceptance for it), and I had attempted to treat in it a
+phase of the national tragedy of slavery, as I had imagined it on a
+Mississippi steamboat. A young planter has gambled away the slave-girl
+who is the mother of his child, and when he tells her, she breaks out
+upon him with the demand:
+
+   “What will you say to our boy when he cries for me, there in Saint
+   Louis?”
+
+I had thought this very well, and natural and simple, but a fatal
+proof-reader had not thought it well enough, or simple and natural
+enough, and he had made the line read:
+
+   “What will you say to our boy when he cries for ‘Ma,’ there in Saint
+   Louis?”
+
+He had even had the inspiration to quote the word he preferred to the one
+I had written, so that there was no merciful possibility of mistaking it
+for a misprint, and my blood froze in my veins at sight of it. Mr.
+Fields had given me the sheets to read while he looked over some letters,
+and he either felt the chill of my horror, or I made some sign or sound
+of dismay that caught his notice, for he looked round at me. I could
+only show him the passage with a gasp. I dare say he might have liked to
+laugh, for it was cruelly funny, but he did not; he was concerned for the
+magazine as well as for me. He declared that when he first read the line
+he had thought I could not have written it so, and he agreed with me that
+it would kill the poem if it came out in that shape. He instantly set
+about repairing the mischief, so far as could be. He found that the
+whole edition of that sheet had been printed, and the air blackened round
+me again, lighted up here and there with baleful flashes of the newspaper
+wit at my cost, which I previsioned in my misery; I knew what I should
+have said of such a thing myself, if it had been another’s. But the
+publisher at once decided that the sheet must be reprinted, and I went
+away weak as if in the escape from some deadly peril. Afterwards it
+appeared that the line had passed the first proof-reader as I wrote it,
+but that the final reader had entered so sympathetically into the
+realistic intention of my poem as to contribute the modification which
+had nearly been my end.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+As it fell out, I lived without farther difficulty to the day and hour of
+the dinner Lowell made for me; and I really think, looking at myself
+impersonally, and remembering the sort of young fellow I was, that it
+would have been a great pity if I had not. The dinner was at the
+old-fashioned Boston hour of two, and the table was laid for four people
+in some little upper room at Parker’s, which I was never afterwards able
+to make sure of. Lowell was already, there when I came, and he presented
+me, to my inexpressible delight and surprise, to Dr. Holmes, who was
+there with him.
+
+Holmes was in the most brilliant hour of that wonderful second youth
+which his fame flowered into long after the world thought he had
+completed the cycle of his literary life. He had already received full
+recognition as a poet of delicate wit, nimble humor, airy imagination,
+and exquisite grace, when the Autocrat papers advanced his name
+indefinitely beyond the bounds which most immortals would have found
+range enough. The marvel of his invention was still fresh in the minds
+of men, and time had not dulled in any measure the sense of its novelty.
+His readers all fondly identified him with his work; and I fully expected
+to find myself in the Autocrat’s presence when I met Dr. Holmes. But
+the fascination was none the less for that reason; and the winning smile,
+the wise and humorous glance, the whole genial manner was as important to
+me as if I had foreboded something altogether different. I found him
+physically of the Napoleonic height which spiritually overtops the Alps,
+and I could look into his face without that unpleasant effort which
+giants of inferior mind so often cost the man of five feet four.
+
+A little while after, Fields came in, and then our number and my pleasure
+were complete.
+
+Nothing else so richly satisfactory, indeed, as the whole affair could
+have happened to a like youth at such a point in his career; and when I
+sat down with Doctor Holmes and Mr. Fields, on Lowell’s right, I felt
+through and through the dramatic perfection of the event. The kindly
+Autocrat recognized some such quality of it in terms which were not the
+less precious and gracious for their humorous excess. I have no reason
+to think that he had yet read any of my poor verses, or had me otherwise
+than wholly on trust from Lowell; but he leaned over towards his host,
+and said, with a laughing look at me, “Well, James, this is something
+like the apostolic succession; this is the laying on of hands.” I took
+his sweet and caressing irony as he meant it; but the charm of it went to
+my head long before any drop of wine, together with the charm of hearing
+him and Lowell calling each other James and Wendell, and of finding them
+still cordially boys together.
+
+I would gladly have glimmered before those great lights in the talk that
+followed, if I could have thought of anything brilliant to say, but I
+could not, and so I let them shine without a ray of reflected splendor
+from me. It was such talk as I had, of course, never heard before, and
+it is not saying enough to say that I have never heard such talk since
+except from these two men. It was as light and kind as it was deep and
+true, and it ranged over a hundred things, with a perpetual sparkle of
+Doctor Holmes’s wit, and the constant glow of Lowell’s incandescent
+sense. From time to time Fields came in with one of his delightful
+stories (sketches of character they were, which he sometimes did not mind
+caricaturing), or with some criticism of the literary situation from his
+stand-point of both lover and publisher of books. I heard fames that I
+had accepted as proofs of power treated as factitious, and witnessed a
+frankness concerning authorship, far and near, that I had not dreamed of
+authors using. When Doctor Holmes understood that I wrote for the
+‘Saturday Press’, which was running amuck among some Bostonian
+immortalities of the day, he seemed willing that I should know they were
+not thought so very undying in Boston, and that I should not take the
+notion of a Mutual Admiration Society too seriously, or accept the New
+York Bohemian view of Boston as true. For the most part the talk did not
+address itself to me, but became an exchange of thoughts and fancies
+between himself and Lowell. They touched, I remember, on certain matters
+of technique, and the doctor confessed that he had a prejudice against
+some words that he could not overcome; for instance, he said, nothing
+could induce him to use ‘neath for beneath, no exigency of versification
+or stress of rhyme. Lowell contended that he would use any word that
+carried his meaning; and I think he did this to the hurt of some of his
+earlier things. He was then probably in the revolt against too much
+literature in literature, which every one is destined sooner or later to
+share; there was a certain roughness, very like crudeness, which he
+indulged before his thought and phrase mellowed to one music in his later
+work. I tacitly agreed rather with the doctor, though I did not swerve
+from my allegiance to Lowell, and if I had spoken I should have sided
+with him: I would have given that or any other proof of my devotion.
+Fields casually mentioned that he thought “The Dandelion” was the most
+popularly liked of Lowell’s briefer poems, and I made haste to say that I
+thought so too, though I did not really think anything about it; and then
+I was sorry, for I could see that the poet did not like it, quite; and I
+felt that I was duly punished for my dishonesty.
+
+Hawthorne was named among other authors, probably by Fields, whose house
+had just published his “Marble Faun,” and who had recently come home on
+the same steamer with him. Doctor Holmes asked if I had met Hawthorne
+yet, and when I confessed that I had hardly yet even hoped for such a
+thing, he smiled his winning smile, and said: “Ah, well! I don’t know
+that you will ever feel you have really met him. He is like a dim room
+with a little taper of personality burning on the corner of the mantel.”
+
+They all spoke of Hawthorne, and with the same affection, but the same
+sense of something mystical and remote in him; and every word was
+priceless to me. But these masters of the craft I was ‘prentice to
+probably could not have said anything that I should not have found wise
+and well, and I am sure now I should have been the loser if the talk had
+shunned any of the phases of human nature which it touched. It is best
+to find that all men are of the same make, and that there are certain
+universal things which interest them as much as the supernal things, and
+amuse them even more. There was a saying of Lowell’s which he was fond
+of repeating at the menace of any form of the transcendental, and he
+liked to warn himself and others with his homely, “Remember the
+dinner-bell.” What I recall of the whole effect of a time so happy for
+me is that in all that was said, however high, however fine, we were
+never out of hearing of the dinner-bell; and perhaps this is the best
+effect I can leave with the reader. It was the first dinner served in
+courses that I had sat down to, and I felt that this service gave it a
+romantic importance which the older fashion of the West still wanted.
+Even at Governor Chase’s table in Columbus the Governor carved; I knew of
+the dinner ‘a la Russe’, as it was then called, only from books; and it
+was a sort of literary flavor that I tasted in the successive dishes.
+When it came to the black coffee, and then to the ‘petits verres’ of
+cognac, with lumps of sugar set fire to atop, it was something that so
+far transcended my home-kept experience that it began to seem altogether
+visionary.
+
+Neither Fields nor Doctor Holmes smoked, and I had to confess that I did
+not; but Lowell smoked enough for all three, and the spark of his cigar
+began to show in the waning light before we rose from the table. The
+time that never had, nor can ever have, its fellow for me, had to come to
+an end, as all times must, and when I shook hands with Lowell in parting,
+he overwhelmed me by saying that if I thought of going to Concord he
+would send me a letter to Hawthorne. I was not to see Lowell again
+during my stay in Boston; but Doctor Holmes asked me to tea for the next
+evening, and Fields said I must come to breakfast with him in the
+morning.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+I recall with the affection due to his friendly nature, and to the
+kindness afterwards to pass between us for many years, the whole aspect
+of the publisher when I first saw him. His abundant hair, and his full
+“beard as broad as ony spade,” that flowed from his throat in Homeric
+curls, were touched with the first frost. He had a fine color, and his
+eyes, as keen as they were kind, twinkled restlessly above the wholesome
+russet-red of his cheeks. His portly frame was clad in those Scotch
+tweeds which had not yet displaced the traditional broadcloth with us in
+the West, though I had sent to New York for a rough suit, and so felt
+myself not quite unworthy to meet a man fresh from the hands of the
+London tailor.
+
+Otherwise I stood as much in awe of him as his jovial soul would let me;
+and if I might I should like to suggest to the literary youth of this day
+some notion of the importance of his name to the literary youth of my
+day. He gave aesthetic character to the house of Ticknor & Fields, but
+he was by no means a silent partner on the economic side. No one can
+forecast the fortune of a new book, but he knew as well as any publisher
+can know not only whether a book was good, but whether the reader would
+think so; and I suppose that his house made as few bad guesses, along
+with their good ones, as any house that ever tried the uncertain temper
+of the public with its ventures. In the minds of all who loved the plain
+brown cloth and tasteful print of its issues he was more or less
+intimately associated with their literature; and those who were not
+mistaken in thinking De Quincey one of the delightfulest authors in the
+world, were especially grateful to the man who first edited his writings
+in book form, and proud that this edition was the effect of American
+sympathy with them. At that day, I believed authorship the noblest
+calling in the world, and I should still be at a loss to name any nobler.
+The great authors I had met were to me the sum of greatness, and if I
+could not rank their publisher with them by virtue of equal achievement,
+I handsomely brevetted him worthy of their friendship, and honored him in
+the visible measure of it.
+
+In his house beside the Charles, and in the close neighborhood of Doctor
+Holmes, I found an odor and an air of books such as I fancied might
+belong to the famous literary houses of London. It is still there, that
+friendly home of lettered refinement, and the gracious spirit which knew
+how to welcome me, and make the least of my shyness and strangeness, and
+the most of the little else there was in me, illumines it still, though
+my host of that rapturous moment has many years been of those who are
+only with us unseen and unheard. I remember his burlesque pretence that
+morning of an inextinguishable grief when I owned that I had never eaten
+blueberry cake before, and how he kept returning to the pathos of the
+fact that there should be a region of the earth where blueberry cake was
+unknown. We breakfasted in the pretty room whose windows look out
+through leaves and flowers upon the river’s coming and going tides, and
+whose walls were covered with the faces and the autographs of all the
+contemporary poets and novelists. The Fieldses had spent some days with
+Tennyson in their recent English sojourn, and Mrs. Fields had much to
+tell of him, how he looked, how he smoked, how he read aloud, and how he
+said, when he asked her to go with him to the tower of his house, “Come
+up and see the sad English sunset!” which had an instant value to me such
+as some rich verse of his might have had. I was very new to it all, how
+new I could not very well say, but I flattered myself that I breathed in
+that atmosphere as if in the return from life-long exile. Still I
+patriotically bragged of the West a little, and I told them proudly that
+in Columbus no book since Uncle Tom’s Cabin had sold so well as ‘The
+Marble Faun’. This made the effect that I wished, but whether it was
+true or not, Heaven knows; I only know that I heard it from our leading
+bookseller, and I made no question of it myself.
+
+After breakfast, Fields went away to the office, and I lingered, while
+Mrs. Fields showed me from shelf to shelf in the library, and dazzled me
+with the sight of authors’ copies, and volumes invaluable with the
+autographs and the pencilled notes of the men whose names were dear to me
+from my love of their work. Everywhere was some souvenir of the living
+celebrities my hosts had met; and whom had they not met in that English
+sojourn in days before England embittered herself to us during our civil
+war? Not Tennyson only, but Thackeray, but Dickens, but Charles Reade,
+but Carlyle, but many a minor fame was in my ears from converse so recent
+with them that it was as if I heard their voices in their echoed words.
+
+I do not remember how long I stayed; I remember I was afraid of staying
+too long, and so I am sure I did not stay as long as I should have liked.
+But I have not the least notion how I got away, and I am not certain
+where I spent the rest of a day that began in the clouds, but had to be
+ended on the common earth. I suppose I gave it mostly to wandering about
+the city, and partly to recording my impressions of it for that newspaper
+which never published them. The summer weather in Boston, with its sunny
+heat struck through and through with the coolness of the sea, and its
+clear air untainted with a breath of smoke, I have always loved, but it
+had then a zest unknown before; and I should have thought it enough
+simply to be alive in it. But everywhere I came upon something that fed
+my famine for the old, the quaint, the picturesque, and however the day
+passed it was a banquet, a festival. I can only recall my breathless
+first sight of the Public Library and of the Athenaeum Gallery: great
+sights then, which the Vatican and the Pitti hardly afterwards eclipsed
+for mere emotion. In fact I did not see these elder treasuries of
+literature and art between breakfasting with the Autocrat’s publisher in
+the morning, and taking tea with the Autocrat himself in the evening, and
+that made a whole world’s difference.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+The tea of that simpler time is wholly inconceivable to this generation,
+which knows the thing only as a mild form of afternoon reception; but I
+suppose that in 1860 very few dined late in our whole pastoral republic.
+Tea was the meal people asked people to when they wished to sit at long
+leisure and large ease; it came at the end of the day, at six o’clock, or
+seven; and one went to it in morning dress. It had an unceremonied
+domesticity in the abundance of its light dishes, and I fancy these did
+not vary much from East to West, except that we had a Southern touch in
+our fried chicken and corn bread; but at the Autocrat’s tea table the
+cheering cup had a flavor unknown to me before that day. He asked me if
+I knew it, and I said it was English breakfast tea; for I had drunk it at
+the publisher’s in the morning, and was willing not to seem strange to
+it. “Ah, yes,” he said; “but this is the flower of the souchong; it is
+the blossom, the poetry of tea,” and then he told me how it had been
+given him by a friend, a merchant in the China trade, which used to
+flourish in Boston, and was the poetry of commerce, as this delicate
+beverage was of tea. That commerce is long past, and I fancy that the
+plant ceased to bloom when the traffic fell into decay.
+
+The Autocrat’s windows had the same outlook upon the Charles as the
+publisher’s, and after tea we went up into a back parlor of the same
+orientation, and saw the sunset die over the water, and the westering
+flats and hills. Nowhere else in the world has the day a lovelier close,
+and our talk took something of the mystic coloring that the heavens gave
+those mantling expanses. It was chiefly his talk, but I have always
+found the best talkers are willing that you should talk if you like, and
+a quick sympathy and a subtle sense met all that I had to say from him
+and from the unbroken circle of kindred intelligences about him. I saw
+him then in the midst of his family, and perhaps never afterwards to
+better advantage, or in a finer mood. We spoke of the things that people
+perhaps once liked to deal with more than they do now; of the intimations
+of immortality, of the experiences of morbid youth, and of all those
+messages from the tremulous nerves which we take for prophecies. I was
+not ashamed, before his tolerant wisdom, to acknowledge the effects that
+had lingered so long with me in fancy and even in conduct, from a time of
+broken health and troubled spirit; and I remember the exquisite tact in
+him which recognized them as things common to all, however peculiar in
+each, which left them mine for whatever obscure vanity I might have in
+them, and yet gave me the companionship of the whole race in their
+experience. We spoke of forebodings and presentiments; we approached the
+mystic confines of the world from which no traveller has yet returned
+with a passport ‘en regle’ and properly ‘vise’; and he held his light
+course through these filmy impalpabilities with a charming sincerity,
+with the scientific conscience that refuses either to deny the substance
+of things unseen, or to affirm it. In the gathering dusk, so weird did
+my fortune of being there and listening to him seem, that I might well
+have been a blessed ghost, for all the reality I felt in myself.
+
+I tried to tell him how much I had read him from my boyhood, and with
+what joy and gain; and he was patient of these futilities, and I have no
+doubt imagined the love that inspired them, and accepted that instead of
+the poor praise. When the sunset passed, and the lamps were lighted, and
+we all came back to our dear little firm-set earth, he began to question
+me about my native region of it. From many forgotten inquiries I recall
+his asking me what was the fashionable religion in Columbus, or the
+Church that socially corresponded to the Unitarian Church in Boston. He
+had first to clarify my intelligence as to-what Unitarianism was; we had
+Universalists but not Unitarians; but when I understood, I answered from
+such vantage as my own wholly outside Swedenborgianism gave me, that I
+thought most of the most respectable people with us were of the
+Presbyterian Church; some were certainly Episcopalians, but upon the
+whole the largest number were Presbyterians. He found that very strange
+indeed; and said that he did not believe there was a Presbyterian Church
+in Boston; that the New England Calvinists were all of the Orthodox
+Church. He had to explain Oxthodoxy to me, and then I could confess to
+one Congregational Church in Columbus.
+
+Probably I failed to give the Autocrat any very clear image of our social
+frame in the West, but the fault was altogether mine, if I did. Such
+lecturing tours as he had made had not taken him among us, as those of
+Emerson and other New-Englanders had, and my report was positive rather
+than comparative. I was full of pride in journalism at that day, and I
+dare say that I vaunted the brilliancy and power of our newspapers more
+than they merited; I should not have been likely to wrong them otherwise.
+It is strange that in all the talk I had with him and Lowell, or rather
+heard from them, I can recall nothing said of political affairs, though
+Lincoln had then been nominated by the Republicans, and the Civil War had
+practically begun. But we did not imagine such a thing in the North; we
+rested secure in the belief that if Lincoln were elected the South would
+eat all its fiery words, perhaps from the mere love and inveterate habit
+of fire-eating.
+
+I rent myself away from the Autocrat’s presence as early as I could, and
+as my evening had been too full of happiness to sleep upon at once, I
+spent the rest of the night till two in the morning wandering about the
+streets and in the Common with a Harvard Senior whom I had met. He was a
+youth of like literary passions with myself, but of such different
+traditions in every possible way that his deeply schooled and definitely
+regulated life seemed as anomalous to me as my own desultory and
+self-found way must have seemed to him. We passed the time in the
+delight of trying to make ourselves known to each other, and in a promise
+to continue by letter the effort, which duly lapsed into silent patience
+with the necessarily insoluble problem.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+I must have lingered in Boston for the introduction to Hawthorne which
+Lowell had offered me, for when it came, with a little note of kindness
+and counsel for myself such as only Lowell had the gift of writing, it
+was already so near Sunday that I stayed over till Monday before I
+started. I do not recall what I did with the time, except keep myself
+from making it a burden to the people I knew, and wandering about the
+city alone. Nothing of it remains to me except the fortune that favored
+me that Sunday night with a view of the old Granary Burying-ground on
+Tremont Street. I found the gates open, and I explored every path in the
+place, wreaking myself in such meagre emotion as I could get from the
+tomb of the Franklin family, and rejoicing with the whole soul of my
+Western modernity in the evidence of a remote antiquity which so many of
+the dim inscriptions afforded. I do not think that I have ever known
+anything practically older than these monuments, though I have since
+supped so full of classic and mediaeval ruin. I am sure that I was more
+deeply touched by the epitaph of a poor little Puritan maiden who died at
+sixteen in the early sixteen-thirties than afterwards by the tomb of
+Caecilia Metella, and that the heartache which I tried to put into verse
+when I got back to my room in the hotel was none the less genuine because
+it would not lend itself to my literary purpose, and remains nothing but
+pathos to this day.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+I am not able to say how I reached the town of Lowell, where I went
+before going to Concord, that I might ease the unhappy conscience I had
+about those factories which I hated so much to see, and have it clean for
+the pleasure of meeting the fabricator of visions whom I was authorized
+to molest in any air-castle where I might find him. I only know that I
+went to Lowell, and visited one of the great mills, which with their
+whirring spools, the ceaseless flight of their shuttles, and the
+bewildering sight and sound of all their mechanism have since seemed to
+me the death of the joy that ought to come from work, if not the
+captivity of those who tended them. But then I thought it right and well
+for me to be standing by,
+
+        “With sick and scornful looks averse,”
+
+while these others toiled; I did not see the tragedy in it, and I got my
+pitiful literary antipathy away as soon as I could, no wiser for the
+sight of the ingenious contrivances I inspected, and I am sorry to say no
+sadder. In the cool of the evening I sat at the door of my hotel, and
+watched the long files of the work-worn factory-girls stream by, with no
+concern for them but to see which was pretty and which was plain, and
+with no dream of a truer order than that which gave them ten hours’ work
+a day in those hideous mills and lodged them in the barracks where they
+rested from their toil.
+
+I wonder if there is a stage that still runs between Lowell and Concord,
+past meadow walls, and under the caressing boughs of way-side elms, and
+through the bird-haunted gloom of woodland roads, in the freshness of the
+summer morning? By a blessed chance I found that there was such a stage
+in 1860, and I took it from my hotel, instead of going back to Boston and
+up to Concord as I must have had to do by train. The journey gave me the
+intimacy of the New England country as I could have had it in no other
+fashion, and for the first time I saw it in all the summer sweetness
+which I have often steeped my soul in since. The meadows were newly
+mown, and the air was fragrant with the grass, stretching in long winrows
+among the brown bowlders, or capped with canvas in the little haycocks it
+had been gathered into the day before. I was fresh from the affluent
+farms of the Western Reserve, and this care of the grass touched me with
+a rude pity, which I also bestowed on the meagre fields of corn and
+wheat; but still the land was lovelier than any I had ever seen, with its
+old farmhouses, and brambled gray stone walls, its stony hillsides, its
+staggering orchards, its wooded tops, and its thick-brackened valleys.
+From West to East the difference was as great as I afterwards found it
+from America to Europe, and my impression of something quaint and strange
+was no keener when I saw Old England the next year than when I saw New
+England now. I had imagined the landscape bare of trees, and I was
+astonished to find it almost as full of them as at home, though they all
+looked very little, as they well might to eyes used to the primeval
+forests of Ohio. The road ran through them from time to time, and took
+their coolness on its smooth hard reaches, and then issued again in the
+glisten of the open fields.
+
+I made phrases to myself about the scenery as we drove along; and yes, I
+suppose I made phrases about the young girl who was one of the inside
+passengers, and who, when the common strangeness had somewhat worn off,
+began to sing, and sang most of the way to Concord. Perhaps she was not
+very sage, and I am sure she was not of the caste of Vere de Vere, but
+she was pretty enough, and she had a voice of a bird-like tunableness, so
+that I would not have her out of the memory of that pleasant journey if I
+could. She was long ago an elderly woman, if she lives, and I suppose
+she would not now point out her fellow-passenger if he strolled in the
+evening by the house where she had dismounted, upon her arrival in
+Concord, and laugh and pull another girl away from the window, in the
+high excitement of the prodigious adventure.
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+Her fellow-passenger was in far other excitement; he was to see
+Hawthorne, and in a manner to meet Priscilla and Zenobia, and Hester
+Prynne and little Pearl, and Miriam and Hilda, and Hollingsworth and
+Coverdale, and Chillingworth and Dimmesdale, and Donatello and Kenyon;
+and he had no heart for any such poor little reality as that, who could
+not have been got into any story that one could respect, and must have
+been difficult even in a Heinesque poem.
+
+I wasted that whole evening and the next morning in fond delaying, and it
+was not until after the indifferent dinner I got at the tavern where I
+stopped, that I found courage to go and present Lowell’s letter to
+Hawthorne. I would almost have foregone meeting the weird genius only to
+have kept that letter, for it said certain infinitely precious things of
+me with such a sweetness, such a grace, as Lowell alone could give his
+praise. Years afterwards, when Hawthorne was dead, I met Mrs. Hawthorne,
+and told her of the pang I had in parting with it, and she sent it me,
+doubly enriched by Hawthorne’s keeping. But now if I were to see him at
+all I must give up my letter, and I carried it in my hand to the door of
+the cottage he called The Wayside. It was never otherwise than a very
+modest place, but the modesty was greater then than to-day, and there was
+already some preliminary carpentry at one end of the cottage, which I saw
+was to result in an addition to it. I recall pleasant fields across the
+road before it; behind rose a hill wooded with low pines, such as is made
+in Septimius Felton the scene of the involuntary duel between Septimius
+and the young British officer. I have a sense of the woods coming quite
+down to the house, but if this was so I do not know what to do with a
+grassy slope which seems to have stretched part way up the hill. As I
+approached, I looked for the tower which the author was fabled to climb
+into at sight of the coming guest, and pull the ladder up after him; and
+I wondered whether he would fly before me in that sort, or imagine some
+easier means of escaping me.
+
+The door was opened to my ring by a tall handsome boy whom I suppose to
+have been Mr. Julian Hawthorne; and the next moment I found myself in the
+presence of the romancer, who entered from some room beyond. He advanced
+carrying his head with a heavy forward droop, and with a pace for which I
+decided that the word would be pondering. It was the pace of a bulky man
+of fifty, and his head was that beautiful head we all know from the many
+pictures of it. But Hawthorne’s look was different from that of any
+picture of him that I have seen. It was sombre and brooding, as the look
+of such a poet should have been; it was the look of a man who had dealt
+faithfully and therefore sorrowfully with that problem of evil which
+forever attracted, forever evaded Hawthorne. It was by no means
+troubled; it was full of a dark repose. Others who knew him better and
+saw him oftener were familiar with other aspects, and I remember that one
+night at Longfellow’s table, when one of the guests happened to speak of
+the photograph of Hawthorne which hung in a corner of the room, Lowell
+said, after a glance at it, “Yes, it’s good; but it hasn’t his fine
+‘accipitral’ [pertaining to the look of a bird of prey; hawklike. D.W.]
+look.”
+
+In the face that confronted me, however, there was nothing of keen
+alertness; but only a sort of quiet, patient intelligence, for which I
+seek the right word in vain. It was a very regular face, with beautiful
+eyes; the mustache, still entirely dark, was dense over the fine mouth.
+Hawthorne was dressed in black, and he had a certain effect which I
+remember, of seeming to have on a black cravat with no visible collar. He
+was such a man that if I had ignorantly met him anywhere I should have
+instantly felt him to be a personage.
+
+I must have given him the letter myself, for I have no recollection of
+parting with it before, but I only remember his offering me his hand, and
+making me shyly and tentatively welcome. After a few moments of the
+demoralization which followed his hospitable attempts in me, he asked if
+I would not like to go up on his hill with him and sit there, where he
+smoked in the afternoon. He offered me a cigar, and when I said that I
+did not smoke, he lighted it for himself, and we climbed the hill
+together. At the top, where there was an outlook in the pines over the
+Concord meadows, we found a log, and he invited me to a place on it
+beside him, and at intervals of a minute or so he talked while he smoked.
+Heaven preserved me from the folly of trying to tell him how much his
+books had been to me, and though we got on rapidly at no time, I think we
+got on better for this interposition. He asked me about Lowell, I dare
+say, for I told him of my joy in meeting him and Doctor Holmes, and this
+seemed greatly to interest him. Perhaps because he was so lately from
+Europe, where our great men are always seen through the wrong end of the
+telescope, he appeared surprised at my devotion, and asked me whether I
+cared as much for meeting them as I should care for meeting the famous
+English authors. I professed that I cared much more, though whether this
+was true, I now have my doubts, and I think Hawthorne doubted it at the
+time. But he said nothing in comment, and went on to speak generally of
+Europe and America. He was curious about the West, which he seemed to
+fancy much more purely American, and said he would like to see some part
+of the country on which the shadow (or, if I must be precise, the damned
+shadow) of Europe had not fallen. I told him I thought the West must
+finally be characterized by the Germans, whom we had in great numbers,
+and, purely from my zeal for German poetry, I tried to allege some proofs
+of their present influence, though I could think of none outside of
+politics, which I thought they affected wholesomely. I knew Hawthorne
+was a Democrat, and I felt it well to touch politics lightly, but he had
+no more to say about the fateful election then pending than Holmes or
+Lowell had.
+
+With the abrupt transition of his talk throughout, he began somehow to
+speak of women, and said he had never seen a woman whom he thought quite
+beautiful. In the same way he spoke of the New England temperament, and
+suggested that the apparent coldness in it was also real, and that the
+suppression of emotion for generations would extinguish it at last. Then
+he questioned me as to my knowledge of Concord, and whether I had seen
+any of the notable people. I answered that I had met no one but himself,
+as yet, but I very much wished to see Emerson and Thoreau. I did not
+think it needful to say that I wished to see Thoreau quite as much
+because he had suffered in the cause of John Brown as because he had
+written the books which had taken me; and when he said that Thoreau
+prided himself on coming nearer the heart of a pine-tree than any other
+human being, I could say honestly enough that I would rather come near
+the heart of a man. This visibly pleased him, and I saw that it did not
+displease him, when he asked whether I was not going to see his next
+neighbor, Mr. Alcott, and I confessed that I had never heard of him. That
+surprised as well as pleased him; he remarked, with whatever intention,
+that there was nothing like recognition to make a man modest; and he
+entered into some account of the philosopher, whom I suppose I need not
+be much ashamed of not knowing then, since his influence was of the
+immediate sort that makes a man important to his townsmen while he is
+still strange to his countrymen.
+
+Hawthorne descanted a little upon the landscape, and said certain of the
+pleasant fields below us be longed to him; but he preferred his hill-top,
+and if he could have his way those arable fields should be grown up to
+pines too. He smoked fitfully, and slowly, and in the hour that we spent
+together, his whiffs were of the desultory and unfinal character of his
+words. When we went down, he asked me into his house again, and would
+have me stay to tea, for which we found the table laid. But there was a
+great deal of silence in it all, and at times, in spite of his shadowy
+kindness, I felt my spirits sink. After tea, he showed me a book case,
+where there were a few books toppling about on the half-filled shelves,
+and said, coldly, “This is my library.” I knew that men were his books,
+and though I myself cared for books so much, I found it fit and fine that
+he should care so little, or seem to care so little. Some of his own
+romances were among the volumes on these shelves, and when I put my
+finger on the ‘Blithedale Romance’ and said that I preferred that to the
+others, his face lighted up, and he said that he believed the Germans
+liked that best too.
+
+Upon the whole we parted such good friends that when I offered to take
+leave he asked me how long I was to be in Concord, and not only bade me
+come to see him again, but said he would give me a card to Emerson, if I
+liked. I answered, of course, that I should like it beyond all things;
+and he wrote on the back of his card something which I found, when I got
+away, to be, “I find this young man worthy.” The quaintness, the little
+stiffness of it, if one pleases to call it so, was amusing to one who was
+not without his sense of humor, but the kindness filled me to the throat
+with joy. In fact, I entirely liked Hawthorne. He had been as cordial
+as so shy a man could show himself; and I perceived, with the repose that
+nothing else can give, the entire sincerity of his soul.
+
+Nothing could have been further from the behavior of this very great man
+than any sort of posing, apparently, or a wish to affect me with a sense
+of his greatness. I saw that he was as much abashed by our encounter as
+I was; he was visibly shy to the point of discomfort, but in no ignoble
+sense was he conscious, and as nearly as he could with one so much his
+younger he made an absolute equality between us. My memory of him is
+without alloy one of the finest pleasures of my life: In my heart I paid
+him the same glad homage that I paid Lowell and Holmes, and he did
+nothing to make me think that I had overpaid him. This seems perhaps
+very little to say in his praise, but to my mind it is saying everything,
+for I have known but few great men, especially of those I met in early
+life, when I wished to lavish my admiration upon them, whom I have not
+the impression of having left in my debt. Then, a defect of the Puritan
+quality, which I have found in many New-Englanders, is that, wittingly or
+unwittingly, they propose themselves to you as an example, or if not
+quite this, that they surround themselves with a subtle ether of
+potential disapprobation, in which, at the first sign of unworthiness in
+you, they helplessly suffer you to gasp and perish; they have good
+hearts, and they would probably come to your succor out of humanity, if
+they knew how, but they do not know how. Hawthorne had nothing of this
+about him; he was no more tacitly than he was explicitly didactic. I
+thought him as thoroughly in keeping with his romances as Doctor Holmes
+had seemed with his essays and poems, and I met him as I had met the
+Autocrat in the supreme hour of his fame. He had just given the world
+the last of those incomparable works which it was to have finished from
+his hand; the ‘Marble Faun’ had worthily followed, at a somewhat longer
+interval than usual, the ‘Blithedale Romance’, and the ‘House of Seven
+Gables’, and the ‘Scarlet Letter’, and had, perhaps carried his name
+higher than all the rest, and certainly farther. Everybody was reading
+it, and more or less bewailing its indefinite close, but yielding him
+that full honor and praise which a writer can hope for but once in his
+life. Nobody dreamed that thereafter only precious fragments, sketches
+more or less faltering, though all with the divine touch in them, were
+further to enrich a legacy which in its kind is the finest the race has
+received from any mind. As I have said, we are always finding new
+Hawthornes, but the illusion soon wears away, and then we perceive that
+they were not Hawthornes at all; that he had some peculiar difference
+from them, which, by and-by, we shall no doubt consent must be his
+difference from all men evermore.
+
+I am painfully aware that I have not summoned before the reader the image
+of the man as it has always stood in my memory, and I feel a sort of
+shame for my failure. He was so altogether simple that it seems as if it
+would be easy to do so; but perhaps a spirit from the other world would
+be simple too, and yet would no more stand at parle, or consent to be
+sketched, than Hawthorne. In fact, he was always more or less merging
+into the shadow, which was in a few years wholly to close over him; there
+was nothing uncanny in his presence, there was nothing even unwilling,
+but he had that apparitional quality of some great minds which kept
+Shakespeare largely unknown to those who thought themselves his
+intimates, and has at last left him a sort of doubt. There was nothing
+teasing or wilfully elusive in Hawthorne’s impalpability, such as I
+afterwards felt in Thoreau; if he was not there to your touch, it was no
+fault of his; it was because your touch was dull, and wanted the use of
+contact with such natures. The hand passes through the veridical phantom
+without a sense of its presence, but the phantom is none the less
+veridical for all that.
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+I kept the evening of the day I met Hawthorne wholly for the thoughts of
+him, or rather for that reverberation which continues in the young
+sensibilities after some important encounter. It must have been the next
+morning that I went to find Thoreau, and I am dimly aware of making one
+or two failures to find him, if I ever really found him at all.
+
+He is an author who has fallen into that abeyance, awaiting all authors,
+great or small, at some time or another; but I think that with him, at
+least in regard to his most important book, it can be only transitory. I
+have not read the story of his hermitage beside Walden Pond since the
+year 1858, but I have a fancy that if I should take it up now, I should
+think it a wiser and truer conception of the world than I thought it
+then. It is no solution of the problem; men are not going to answer the
+riddle of the painful earth by building themselves shanties and living
+upon beans and watching ant-fights; but I do not believe Tolstoy himself
+has more clearly shown the hollowness, the hopelessness, the unworthiness
+of the life of the world than Thoreau did in that book. If it were newly
+written it could not fail of a far vaster acceptance than it had then,
+when to those who thought and felt seriously it seemed that if slavery
+could only be controlled, all things else would come right of themselves
+with us. Slavery has not only been controlled, but it has been
+destroyed, and yet things have not begun to come right with us; but it
+was in the order of Providence that chattel slavery should cease before
+industrial slavery, and the infinitely crueler and stupider vanity and
+luxury bred of it, should be attacked. If there was then any prevision
+of the struggle now at hand, the seers averted their eyes, and strove
+only to cope with the less evil. Thoreau himself, who had so clear a
+vision of the falsity and folly of society as we still have it, threw
+himself into the tide that was already, in Kansas and Virginia, reddened
+with war; he aided and abetted the John Brown raid, I do not recall how
+much or in what sort; and he had suffered in prison for his opinions and
+actions. It was this inevitable heroism of his that, more than his
+literature even, made me wish to see him and revere him; and I do not
+believe that I should have found the veneration difficult, when at last I
+met him in his insufficient person, if he had otherwise been present to
+my glowing expectation. He came into the room a quaint, stump figure of
+a man, whose effect of long trunk and short limbs was heightened by his
+fashionless trousers being let down too low. He had a noble face, with
+tossed hair, a distraught eye, and a fine aquilinity of profile, which
+made me think at once of Don Quixote and of Cervantes; but his nose
+failed to add that foot to his stature which Lamb says a nose of that
+shape will always give a man. He tried to place me geographically after
+he had given me a chair not quite so far off as Ohio, though still across
+the whole room, for he sat against one wall, and I against the other; but
+apparently he failed to pull himself out of his revery by the effort, for
+he remained in a dreamy muse, which all my attempts to say something fit
+about John Brown and Walden Pond seemed only to deepen upon him. I have
+not the least doubt that I was needless and valueless about both, and
+that what I said could not well have prompted an important response; but
+I did my poor best, and I was terribly disappointed in the result. The
+truth is that in those days I was a helplessly concrete young person, and
+all forms of the abstract, the air-drawn, afflicted me like physical
+discomforts. I do not remember that Thoreau spoke of his books or of
+himself at all, and when he began to speak of John Brown, it was not the
+warm, palpable, loving, fearful old man of my conception, but a sort of
+John Brown type, a John Brown ideal, a John Brown principle, which we
+were somehow (with long pauses between the vague, orphic phrases) to
+cherish, and to nourish ourselves upon.
+
+It was not merely a defeat of my hopes, it was a rout, and I felt myself
+so scattered over the field of thought that I could hardly bring my
+forces together for retreat. I must have made some effort, vain and
+foolish enough, to rematerialize my old demigod, but when I came away it
+was with the feeling that there was very little more left of John Brown
+than there was of me. His body was not mouldering in the grave, neither
+was his soul marching on; his ideal, his type, his principle alone
+existed, and I did not know what to do with it. I am not blaming
+Thoreau; his words were addressed to a far other understanding than mine,
+and it was my misfortune if I could not profit by them. I think, or I
+venture to hope, that I could profit better by them now; but in this
+record I am trying honestly to report their effect with the sort of youth
+I was then.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+Such as I was, I rather wonder that I had the courage, after this
+experiment of Thoreau, to present the card Hawthorne had given me to
+Emerson. I must have gone to him at once, however, for I cannot make out
+any interval of time between my visit to the disciple and my visit to the
+master. I think it was Emerson himself who opened his door to me, for I
+have a vision of the fine old man standing tall on his threshold, with
+the card in his hand, and looking from it to me with a vague serenity,
+while I waited a moment on the door-step below him. He must then have
+been about sixty, but I remember nothing of age in his aspect, though I
+have called him an old man. His hair, I am sure, was still entirely
+dark, and his face had a kind of marble youthfulness, chiselled to a
+delicate intelligence by the highest and noblest thinking that any man
+has done. There was a strange charm in Emerson’s eyes, which I felt then
+and always, something like that I saw in Lincoln’s, but shyer, but
+sweeter and less sad. His smile was the very sweetest I have ever
+beheld, and the contour of the mask and the line of the profile were in
+keeping with this incomparable sweetness of the mouth, at once grave and
+quaint, though quaint is not quite the word for it either, but subtly,
+not unkindly arch, which again is not the word.
+
+It was his great fortune to have been mostly misunderstood, and to have
+reached the dense intelligence of his fellow-men after a whole lifetime
+of perfectly simple and lucid appeal, and his countenance expressed the
+patience and forbearance of a wise man content to bide his time. It
+would be hard to persuade people now that Emerson once represented to the
+popular mind all that was most hopelessly impossible, and that in a
+certain sort he was a national joke, the type of the incomprehensible,
+the byword of the poor paragrapher. He had perhaps disabused the
+community somewhat by presenting himself here and there as a lecturer,
+and talking face to face with men in terms which they could not refuse to
+find as clear as they were wise; he was more and more read, by certain
+persons, here and there; but we are still so far behind him in the reach
+of his far-thinking that it need not be matter of wonder that twenty
+years before his death he was the most misunderstood man in America. Yet
+in that twilight where he dwelt he loomed large upon the imagination; the
+minds that could not conceive him were still aware of his greatness. I
+myself had not read much of him, but I knew the essays he was printing in
+the Atlantic, and I knew certain of his poems, though by no means many;
+yet I had this sense of him, that he was somehow, beyond and above my
+ken, a presence of force and beauty and wisdom, uncompanioned in our
+literature. He had lately stooped from his ethereal heights to take part
+in the battle of humanity, and I suppose that if the truth were told he
+was more to my young fervor because he had said that John Brown had made
+the gallows glorious like the cross, than because he had uttered all
+those truer and wiser things which will still a hundred years hence be
+leading the thought of the world.
+
+I do not know in just what sort he made me welcome, but I am aware of
+sitting with him in his study or library, and of his presently speaking
+of Hawthorne, whom I probably celebrated as I best could, and whom he
+praised for his personal excellence, and for his fine qualities as a
+neighbor. “But his last book,” he added, reflectively, “is a mere mush,”
+ and I perceived that this great man was no better equipped to judge an
+artistic fiction than the groundlings who were then crying out upon the
+indefinite close of the Marble Faun. Apparently he had read it, as they
+had, for the story, but it seems to me now, if it did not seem to me
+then, that as far as the problem of evil was involved, the book must
+leave it where it found it. That is forever insoluble, and it was rather
+with that than with his more or less shadowy people that the romancer was
+concerned. Emerson had, in fact, a defective sense as to specific pieces
+of literature; he praised extravagantly, and in the wrong place,
+especially among the new things, and he failed to see the worth of much
+that was fine and precious beside the line of his fancy.
+
+He began to ask me about the West, and about some unknown man in
+Michigan; who had been sending him poems, and whom he seemed to think
+very promising, though he has not apparently kept his word to do great
+things. I did not find what Emerson had to say of my section very
+accurate or important, though it was kindly enough, and just enough as to
+what the West ought to do in literature. He thought it a pity that a
+literary periodical which had lately been started in Cincinnati should be
+appealing to the East for contributions, instead of relying upon the
+writers nearer home; and he listened with what patience he could to my
+modest opinion that we had not the writers nearer home. I never was of
+those Westerners who believed that the West was kept out of literature by
+the jealousy of the East, and I tried to explain why we had not the men
+to write that magazine full in Ohio. He alleged the man in Michigan as
+one who alone could do much to fill it worthily, and again I had to say
+that I had never heard of him.
+
+I felt rather guilty in my ignorance, and I had a notion that it did not
+commend me, but happily at this moment Mr. Emerson was called to dinner,
+and he asked me to come with him. After dinner we walked about in his
+“pleached garden” a little, and then we came again into his library,
+where I meant to linger only till I could fitly get away. He questioned
+me about what I had seen of Concord, and whom besides Hawthorne I had
+met, and when I told him only Thoreau, he asked me if I knew the poems of
+Mr. William Ellery Channing. I have known them since, and felt their
+quality, which I have gladly owned a genuine and original poetry; but I
+answered then truly that I knew them only from Poe’s criticisms: cruel
+and spiteful things which I should be ashamed of enjoying as I once did.
+
+“Whose criticisms?” asked Emerson.
+
+“Poe’s,” I said again.
+
+“Oh,” he cried out, after a moment, as if he had returned from a far
+search for my meaning, “you mean the jingle-man!”
+
+I do not know why this should have put me to such confusion, but if I had
+written the criticisms myself I do not think I could have been more
+abashed. Perhaps I felt an edge of reproof, of admonition, in a
+characterization of Poe which the world will hardly agree with; though I
+do not agree with the world about him, myself, in its admiration. At any
+rate, it made an end of me for the time, and I remained as if already
+absent, while Emerson questioned me as to what I had written in the
+Atlantic Monthly. He had evidently read none of my contributions, for he
+looked at them, in the bound volume of the magazine which he got down,
+with the effect of being wholly strange to them, and then gravely affixed
+my initials to each. He followed me to the door, still speaking of
+poetry, and as he took a kindly enough leave of me, he said one might
+very well give a pleasant hour to it now and then.
+
+A pleasant hour to poetry! I was meaning to give all time and all
+eternity to poetry, and I should by no means have wished to find pleasure
+in it; I should have thought that a proof of inferior quality in the
+work; I should have preferred anxiety, anguish even, to pleasure. But if
+Emerson thought from the glance he gave my verses that I had better not
+lavish myself upon that kind of thing, unless there was a great deal more
+of me than I could have made apparent in our meeting, no doubt he was
+right. I was only too painfully aware of my shortcoming, but I felt that
+it was shorter-coming than it need have been. I had somehow not
+prospered in my visit to Emerson as I had with Hawthorne, and I came away
+wondering in what sort I had gone wrong. I was not a forth-putting
+youth, and I could not blame myself for anything in my approaches that
+merited withholding; indeed, I made no approaches; but as I must needs
+blame myself for something, I fell upon the fact that in my confused
+retreat from Emerson’s presence I had failed in a certain slight point of
+ceremony, and I magnified this into an offence of capital importance. I
+went home to my hotel, and passed the afternoon in pure misery. I had
+moments of wild question when I debated whether it would be better to go
+back and own my error, or whether it would be better to write him a note,
+and try to set myself right in that way. But in the end I did neither,
+and I have since survived my mortal shame some forty years or more. But
+at the time it did not seem possible that I should live through the day
+with it, and I thought that I ought at least to go and confess it to
+Hawthorne, and let him disown the wretch who had so poorly repaid the
+kindness of his introduction by such misbehavior. I did indeed walk down
+by the Wayside, in the cool of the evening, and there I saw Hawthorne for
+the last time. He was sitting on one of the timbers beside his cottage,
+and smoking with an air of friendly calm. I had got on very well with
+him, and I longed to go in, and tell him how ill I had got on with
+Emerson; I believed that though he cast me off, he would understand me,
+and would perhaps see some hope for me in another world, though there
+could be none in this.
+
+But I had not the courage to speak of the affair to any one but Fields,
+to whom I unpacked my heart when I got back to Boston, and he asked me
+about my adventures in Concord. By this time I could see it in a
+humorous light, and I did not much mind his lying back in his chair and
+laughing and laughing, till I thought he would roll out of it. He
+perfectly conceived the situation, and got an amusement from it that I
+could get only through sympathy with him. But I thought it a favorable
+moment to propose myself as the assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly,
+which I had the belief I could very well become, with advantage to myself
+if not to the magazine. He seemed to think so too; he said that if the
+place had not just been filled, I should certainly have had it; and it
+was to his recollection of this prompt ambition of mine that I suppose I
+may have owed my succession to a like vacancy some four years later. He
+was charmingly kind; he entered with the sweetest interest into the story
+of my economic life, which had been full of changes and chances already.
+But when I said very seriously that now I was tired of these fortuities,
+and would like to be settled in something, he asked, with dancing eyes,
+
+“Why, how old are you?”
+
+“I am twenty-three,” I answered, and then the laughing fit took him
+again.
+
+“Well,” he said, “you begin young, out there!”
+
+In my heart I did not think that twenty-three was so very young, but
+perhaps it was; and if any one were to say that I had been portraying
+here a youth whose aims were certainly beyond his achievements, who was
+morbidly sensitive, and if not conceited was intolerably conscious, who
+had met with incredible kindness, and had suffered no more than was good
+for him, though he might not have merited his pain any more than his joy,
+I do not know that I should gainsay him, for I am not at all sure that I
+was not just that kind of youth when I paid my first visit to New
+England.
+
+
+
+
+
+FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK
+
+It was by boat that I arrived from Boston, on an August morning of 1860,
+which was probably of the same quality as an August morning of 1900. I
+used not to mind the weather much in those days; it was hot or it was
+cold, it was wet or it was dry, but it was not my affair; and I suppose
+that I sweltered about the strange city, with no sense of anything very
+personal in the temperature, until nightfall. What I remember is being
+high up in a hotel long since laid low, listening in the summer dark,
+after the long day was done, to the Niagara roar of the omnibuses whose
+tide then swept Broadway from curb to curb, for all the miles of its
+length. At that hour the other city noises were stilled, or lost in this
+vaster volume of sound, which seemed to fill the whole night. It had a
+solemnity which the modern comer to New York will hardly imagine, for
+that tide of omnibuses has long since ebbed away, and has left the air to
+the strident discords of the elevated trains and the irregular alarum of
+the grip-car gongs, which blend to no such harmonious thunder as rose
+from the procession of those ponderous and innumerable vans. There was a
+sort of inner quiet in the sound, and when I chose I slept off to it, and
+woke to it in the morning refreshed and strengthened to explore the
+literary situation in the metropolis.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+Not that I think I left this to the second day. Very probably I lost no
+time in going to the office of the Saturday Press, as soon as I had my
+breakfast after arriving, and I have a dim impression of anticipating the
+earliest of the Bohemians, whose gay theory of life obliged them to a
+good many hardships in lying down early in the morning, and rising up
+late in the day. If it was the office-boy who bore me company during the
+first hour of my visit, by-and-by the editors and contributors actually
+began to come in. I would not be very specific about them if I could,
+for since that Bohemia has faded from the map of the republic of letters,
+it has grown more and more difficult to trace its citizenship to any
+certain writer. There are some living who knew the Bohemians and even
+loved them, but there are increasingly few who were of them, even in the
+fond retrospect of youthful follies and errors. It was in fact but a
+sickly colony, transplanted from the mother asphalt of Paris, and never
+really striking root in the pavements of New York; it was a colony of
+ideas, of theories, which had perhaps never had any deep root anywhere.
+What these ideas, these theories, were in art and in life, it would not
+be very easy to say; but in the Saturday Press they came to violent
+expression, not to say explosion, against all existing forms of
+respectability. If respectability was your ‘bete noire’, then you were a
+Bohemian; and if you were in the habit of rendering yourself in prose,
+then you necessarily shredded your prose into very fine paragraphs of a
+sentence each, or of a very few words, or even of one word. I believe
+this fashion prevailed till very lately with some of the dramatic
+critics, who thought that it gave a quality of epigram to the style; and
+I suppose it was borrowed from the more spasmodic moments of Victor Hugo
+by the editor of the Press. He brought it back with him when he came
+home from one of those sojourns in Paris which possess one of the French
+accent rather than the French language; I long desired to write in that
+fashion myself, but I had not the courage.
+
+This editor was a man of such open and avowed cynicism that he may have
+been, for all I know, a kindly optimist at heart; some say, however, that
+he had really talked himself into being what he seemed. I only know that
+his talk, the first day I saw him, was of such a sort that if he was half
+as bad, he would have been too bad to be. He walked up and down his room
+saying what lurid things he would directly do if any one accused him of
+respectability, so that he might disabuse the minds of all witnesses.
+There were four or five of his assistants and contributors listening to
+the dreadful threats, which did not deceive even so great innocence as
+mine, but I do not know whether they found it the sorry farce that I did.
+They probably felt the fascination for him which I could not disown, in
+spite of my inner disgust; and were watchful at the same time for the
+effect of his words with one who was confessedly fresh from Boston, and
+was full of delight in the people he had seen there. It appeared, with
+him, to be proof of the inferiority of Boston that if you passed down
+Washington Street, half a dozen men in the crowd would know you were
+Holmes, or Lowell, or Longfellow, or Wendell Phillips; but in Broadway no
+one would know who you were, or care to the measure of his smallest
+blasphemy. I have since heard this more than once urged as a signal
+advantage of New York for the aesthetic inhabitant, but I am not sure,
+yet, that it is so. The unrecognized celebrity probably has his mind
+quite as much upon himself as if some one pointed him out, and otherwise
+I cannot think that the sense of neighborhood is such a bad thing for the
+artist in any sort. It involves the sense of responsibility, which
+cannot be too constant or too keen. If it narrows, it deepens; and this
+may be the secret of Boston.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+It would not be easy to say just why the Bohemian group represented New
+York literature to my imagination; for I certainly associated other names
+with its best work, but perhaps it was because I had written for the
+Saturday Press myself, and had my pride in it, and perhaps it was because
+that paper really embodied the new literary life of the city. It was
+clever, and full of the wit that tries its teeth upon everything. It
+attacked all literary shams but its own, and it made itself felt and
+feared. The young writers throughout the country were ambitious to be
+seen in it, and they gave their best to it; they gave literally, for the
+Saturday Press never paid in anything but hopes of paying, vaguer even
+than promises. It is not too much to say that it was very nearly as well
+for one to be accepted by the Press as to be accepted by the Atlantic,
+and for the time there was no other literary comparison. To be in it was
+to be in the company of Fitz James O’Brien, Fitzhugh Ludlow, Mr. Aldrich,
+Mr. Stedman, and whoever else was liveliest in prose or loveliest in
+verse at that day in New York. It was a power, and although it is true
+that, as Henry Giles said of it, “Man cannot live by snapping-turtle
+alone,” the Press was very good snapping-turtle. Or, it seemed so then;
+I should be almost afraid to test it now, for I do not like
+snapping-turtle so much as I once did, and I have grown nicer in my
+taste, and want my snapping-turtle of the very best. What is certain is
+that I went to the office of the Saturday Press in New York with much the
+same sort of feeling I had in going to the office of the Atlantic Monthly
+in Boston, but I came away with a very different feeling. I had found
+there a bitterness against Boston as great as the bitterness against
+respectability, and as Boston was then rapidly becoming my second
+country, I could not join in the scorn thought of her and said of her by
+the Bohemians. I fancied a conspiracy among them to shock the literary
+pilgrim, and to minify the precious emotions he had experienced in
+visiting other shrines; but I found no harm in that, for I knew just how
+much to be shocked, and I thought I knew better how to value certain
+things of the soul than they. Yet when their chief asked me how I got on
+with Hawthorne, and I began to say that he was very shy and I was rather
+shy, and the king of Bohemia took his pipe out to break in upon me with
+“Oh, a couple of shysters!” and the rest laughed, I was abashed all they
+could have wished, and was not restored to myself till one of them said
+that the thought of Boston made him as ugly as sin; then I began to hope
+again that men who took themselves so seriously as that need not be taken
+very seriously by me.
+
+In fact I had heard things almost as desperately cynical in other
+newspaper offices before that, and I could not see what was so
+distinctively Bohemian in these ‘anime prave’, these souls so baleful by
+their own showing. But apparently Bohemia was not a state that you could
+well imagine from one encounter, and since my stay in New York was to be
+very short, I lost no time in acquainting myself further with it. That
+very night I went to the beer-cellar, once very far up Broadway, where I
+was given to know that the Bohemian nights were smoked and quaffed away.
+It was said, so far West as Ohio, that the queen of Bohemia sometimes
+came to Pfaff’s: a young girl of a sprightly gift in letters, whose name
+or pseudonym had made itself pretty well known at that day, and whose
+fate, pathetic at all times, out-tragedies almost any other in the
+history of letters. She was seized with hydrophobia from the bite of her
+dog, on a railroad train; and made a long journey home in the paroxysms
+of that agonizing disease, which ended in her death after she reached New
+York. But this was after her reign had ended, and no such black shadow
+was cast forward upon Pfaff’s, whose name often figured in the verse and
+the epigrammatically paragraphed prose of the ‘Saturday Press’. I felt
+that as a contributor and at least a brevet Bohemian I ought not to go
+home without visiting the famous place, and witnessing if I could not
+share the revels of my comrades. As I neither drank beer nor smoked, my
+part in the carousal was limited to a German pancake, which I found they
+had very good at Pfaff’s, and to listening to the whirling words of my
+commensals, at the long board spread for the Bohemians in a cavernous
+space under the pavement. There were writers for the ‘Saturday Press’ and
+for Vanity Fair (a hopefully comic paper of that day), and some of the
+artists who drew for the illustrated periodicals. Nothing of their talk
+remains with me, but the impression remains that it was not so good talk
+as I had heard in Boston. At one moment of the orgy, which went but
+slowly for an orgy, we were joined by some belated Bohemians whom the
+others made a great clamor over; I was given to understand they were just
+recovered from a fearful debauch; their locks were still damp from the
+wet towels used to restore them, and their eyes were very frenzied. I was
+presented to these types, who neither said nor did anything worthy of
+their awful appearance, but dropped into seats at the table, and ate of
+the supper with an appetite that seemed poor. I stayed hoping vainly for
+worse things till eleven o’clock, and then I rose and took my leave of a
+literary condition that had distinctly disappointed me. I do not say
+that it may not have been wickeder and wittier than I found it; I only
+report what I saw and heard in Bohemia on my first visit to New York, and
+I know that my acquaintance with it was not exhaustive. When I came the
+next year the Saturday Press was no more, and the editor and his
+contributors had no longer a common centre. The best of the young
+fellows whom I met there confessed, in a pleasant exchange of letters
+which we had afterwards, that he thought the pose a vain and unprofitable
+one; and when the Press was revived, after the war, it was without any of
+the old Bohemian characteristics except that of not paying for material.
+It could not last long upon these terms, and again it passed away, and
+still waits its second palingenesis.
+
+The editor passed away too, not long after, and the thing that he had
+inspired altogether ceased to be. He was a man of a certain sardonic
+power, and used it rather fiercely and freely, with a joy probably more
+apparent than real in the pain it gave. In my last knowledge of him he
+was much milder than when I first knew him, and I have the feeling that
+he too came to own before he died that man cannot live by snapping-turtle
+alone. He was kind to some neglected talents, and befriended them with a
+vigor and a zeal which he would have been the last to let you call
+generous. The chief of these was Walt Whitman, who, when the Saturday
+Press took it up, had as hopeless a cause with the critics on either side
+of the ocean as any man could have. It was not till long afterwards that
+his English admirers began to discover him, and to make his countrymen
+some noisy reproaches for ignoring him; they were wholly in the dark
+concerning him when the Saturday Press, which first stood his friend, and
+the young men whom the Press gathered about it, made him their cult. No
+doubt he was more valued because he was so offensive in some ways than he
+would have been if he had been in no way offensive, but it remains a fact
+that they celebrated him quite as much as was good for them. He was
+often at Pfaff’s with them, and the night of my visit he was the chief
+fact of my experience. I did not know he was there till I was on my way
+out, for he did not sit at the table under the pavement, but at the head
+of one farther into the room. There, as I passed, some friendly fellow
+stopped me and named me to him, and I remember how he leaned back in his
+chair, and reached out his great hand to me, as if he were going to give
+it me for good and all. He had a fine head, with a cloud of Jovian hair
+upon it, and a branching beard and mustache, and gentle eyes that looked
+most kindly into mine, and seemed to wish the liking which I instantly
+gave him, though we hardly passed a word, and our acquaintance was summed
+up in that glance and the grasp of his mighty fist upon my hand. I doubt
+if he had any notion who or what I was beyond the fact that I was a young
+poet of some sort, but he may possibly have remembered seeing my name
+printed after some very Heinesque verses in the Press. I did not meet
+him again for twenty years, and then I had only a moment with him when he
+was reading the proofs of his poems in Boston. Some years later I saw
+him for the last time, one day after his lecture on Lincoln, in that
+city, when he came down from the platform to speak with some handshaking
+friends who gathered about him. Then and always he gave me the sense of
+a sweet and true soul, and I felt in him a spiritual dignity which I will
+not try to reconcile with his printing in the forefront of his book a
+passage from a private letter of Emerson’s, though I believe he would not
+have seen such a thing as most other men would, or thought ill of it in
+another. The spiritual purity which I felt in him no less than the
+dignity is something that I will no more try to reconcile with what
+denies it in his page; but such things we may well leave to the
+adjustment of finer balances than we have at hand. I will make sure only
+of the greatest benignity in the presence of the man. The apostle of the
+rough, the uncouth, was the gentlest person; his barbaric yawp,
+translated into the terms of social encounter, was an address of singular
+quiet, delivered in a voice of winning and endearing friendliness.
+
+As to his work itself, I suppose that I do not think it so valuable in
+effect as in intention. He was a liberating force, a very “imperial
+anarch” in literature; but liberty is never anything but a means, and
+what Whitman achieved was a means and not an end, in what must be called
+his verse. I like his prose, if there is a difference, much better;
+there he is of a genial and comforting quality, very rich and cordial,
+such as I felt him to be when I met him in person. His verse seems to me
+not poetry, but the materials of poetry, like one’s emotions; yet I would
+not misprize it, and I am glad to own that I have had moments of great
+pleasure in it. Some French critic quoted in the Saturday Press (I
+cannot think of his name) said the best thing of him when he said that he
+made you a partner of the enterprise, for that is precisely what he does,
+and that is what alienates and what endears in him, as you like or
+dislike the partnership. It is still something neighborly, brotherly,
+fatherly, and so I felt him to be when the benign old man looked on me
+and spoke to me.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+That night at Pfaff’s must have been the last of the Bohemians for me,
+and it was the last of New York authorship too, for the time. I do not
+know why I should not have imagined trying to see Curtis, whom I knew so
+much by heart, and whom I adored, but I may not have had the courage, or
+I may have heard that he was out of town; Bryant, I believe, was then out
+of the country; but at any rate I did not attempt him either. The
+Bohemians were the beginning and the end of the story for me, and to tell
+the truth I did not like the story. I remember that as I sat at that
+table under the pavement, in Pfaff’s beer-cellar, and listened to the
+wit that did not seem very funny, I thought of the dinner with Lowell,
+the breakfast with Fields, the supper at the Autocrat’s, and felt that I
+had fallen very far. In fact it can do no harm at this distance of time
+to confess that it seemed to me then, and for a good while afterwards,
+that a person who had seen the men and had the things said before him
+that I had in Boston, could not keep himself too carefully in cotton; and
+this was what I did all the following winter, though of course it was a
+secret between me and me. I dare say it was not the worst thing I could
+have done, in some respects.
+
+My sojourn in New York could not have been very long, and the rest of it
+was mainly given to viewing the monuments of the city from the windows of
+omnibuses and the platforms of horse-cars. The world was so simple then
+that there were perhaps only a half-dozen cities that had horse-cars in
+them, and I travelled in those conveyances at New York with an unfaded
+zest, even after my journeys back and forth between Boston and Cambridge.
+I have not the least notion where I went or what I saw, but I suppose
+that it was up and down the ugly east and west avenues, then lying open
+to the eye in all the hideousness now partly concealed by the elevated
+roads, and that I found them very stately and handsome. Indeed, New York
+was really handsomer then than it is now, when it has so many more pieces
+of beautiful architecture, for at that day the skyscrapers were not yet,
+and there was a fine regularity in the streets that these brute bulks
+have robbed of all shapeliness. Dirt and squalor there were a plenty,
+but there was infinitely more comfort. The long succession of cross
+streets was yet mostly secure from business, after you passed Clinton
+Place; commerce was just beginning to show itself in Union Square, and
+Madison Square was still the home of the McFlimsies, whose kin and kind
+dwelt unmolested in the brownstone stretches of Fifth Avenue. I tried
+hard to imagine them from the acquaintance Mr. Butler’s poem had given
+me, and from the knowledge the gentle satire of The ‘Potiphar Papers’ had
+spread broadcast through a community shocked by the excesses of our best
+society; it was not half so bad then as the best now, probably. But I do
+not think I made very much of it, perhaps because most of the people who
+ought to have been in those fine mansions were away at the seaside and
+the mountains.
+
+The mountains I had seen on my way down from Canada, but the sea-side
+not, and it would never do to go home without visiting some famous summer
+resort. I must have fixed upon Long Branch because I must have heard of
+it as then the most fashionable; and one afternoon I took the boat for
+that place. By this means I not only saw sea-bathing for the first time,
+but I saw a storm at sea: a squall struck us so suddenly that it blew
+away all the camp-stools of the forward promenade; it was very exciting,
+and I long meant to use in literature the black wall of cloud that
+settled on the water before us like a sort of portable midnight; I now
+throw it away upon the reader, as it were; it never would come in
+anywhere. I stayed all night at Long Branch, and I had a bath the next
+morning before breakfast: an extremely cold one, with a life-line to keep
+me against the undertow. In this rite I had the company of a young
+New-Yorker, whom I had met on the boat coming down, and who was of the
+light, hopeful, adventurous business type which seems peculiar to the
+city, and which has always attracted me. He told me much about his life,
+and how he lived, and what it cost him to live. He had a large room at a
+fashionable boardinghouse, and he paid fourteen dollars a week. In
+Columbus I had such a room at such a house, and paid three and a half,
+and I thought it a good deal. But those were the days before the war,
+when America was the cheapest country in the world, and the West was
+incredibly inexpensive.
+
+After a day of lonely splendor at this scene of fashion and gaiety, I
+went back to New York, and took the boat for Albany on my way home. I
+noted that I had no longer the vivid interest in nature and human nature
+which I had felt in setting out upon my travels, and I said to myself
+that this was from having a mind so crowded with experiences and
+impressions that it could receive no more; and I really suppose that if
+the happiest phrase had offered itself to me at some moments, I should
+scarcely have looked about me for a landscape or a figure to fit it to. I
+was very glad to get back to my dear little city in the West (I found it
+seething in an August sun that was hot enough to have calcined the
+limestone State House), and to all the friends I was so fond of.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+I did what I could to prove myself unworthy of them by refusing their
+invitations, and giving myself wholly to literature, during the early
+part of the winter that followed; and I did not realize my error till the
+invitations ceased to come, and I found myself in an unbroken
+intellectual solitude. The worst of it was that an ungrateful Muse did
+little in return for the sacrifices I made her, and the things I now
+wrote were not liked by the editors I sent them to. The editorial taste
+is not always the test of merit, but it is the only one we have, and I am
+not saying the editors were wrong in my case. There were then such a
+very few places where you could market your work: the Atlantic in Boston
+and Harper’s in New York were the magazines that paid, though the
+Independent newspaper bought literary material; the Saturday Press
+printed it without buying, and so did the old Knickerbocker Magazine,
+though there was pecuniary good-will in both these cases. I toiled much
+that winter over a story I had long been writing, and at last sent it to
+the Atlantic, which had published five poems for me the year before.
+After some weeks, or it may have been months, I got it back with a note
+saying that the editors had the less regret in returning it because they
+saw that in the May number of the Knickerbocker the first chapter of the
+story had appeared. Then I remembered that, years before, I had sent
+this chapter to that magazine, as a sketch to be printed by itself, and
+afterwards had continued the story from it. I had never heard of its
+acceptance, and supposed of course that it was rejected; but on my second
+visit to New York I called at the Knickerbocker office, and a new editor,
+of those that the magazine was always having in the days of its failing
+fortunes, told me that he had found my sketch in rummaging about in a
+barrel of his predecessors manuscripts, and had liked it, and printed
+it. He said that there were fifteen dollars coming to me for that
+sketch, and might he send the money to me? I said that he might, though
+I do not see, to this day, why he did not give it me on the spot; and he
+made a very small minute in a very large sheet of paper (really like Dick
+Swiveller), and promised I should have it that night; but I sailed the
+next day for Liverpool without it. I sailed without the money for some
+verses that Vanity Fair bought of me, but I hardly expected that, for the
+editor, who was then Artemus Ward, had frankly told me in taking my
+address that ducats were few at that moment with Vanity Fair. I was then
+on my way to be consul at Venice, where I spent the next four years in a
+vigilance for Confederate privateers which none of them ever surprised.
+I had asked for the consulate at Munich, where I hoped to steep myself
+yet longer in German poetry, but when my appointment came, I found it was
+for Rome. I was very glad to get Rome even; but the income of the office
+was in fees, and I thought I had better go on to Washington and find out
+how much the fees amounted to. People in Columbus who had been abroad
+said that on five hundred dollars you could live in Rome like a prince,
+but I doubted this; and when I learned at the State Department that the
+fees of the Roman consulate came to only three hundred, I perceived that
+I could not live better than a baron, probably, and I despaired. The
+kindly chief of the consular bureau said that the President’s
+secretaries, Mr. John Nicolay and Mr. John Hay, were interested in my
+appointment, and he advised my going over to the White House and seeing
+them. I lost no time in doing that, and I learned that as young Western
+men they were interested in me because I was a young Western man who had
+done something in literature, and they were willing to help me for that
+reason, and for no other that I ever knew. They proposed my going to
+Venice; the salary was then seven hundred and fifty, but they thought
+they could get it put up to a thousand. In the end they got it put up to
+fifteen hundred, and so I went to Venice, where if I did not live like a
+prince on that income, I lived a good deal more like a prince than I
+could have done at Rome on a fifth of it.
+
+If the appointment was not present fortune, it was the beginning of the
+best luck I have had in the world, and I am glad to owe it all to those
+friends of my verse, who could have been no otherwise friends of me. They
+were then beginning very early careers of distinction which have not been
+wholly divided. Mr. Nicolay could have been about twenty-five, and Mr.
+Hay nineteen or twenty. No one dreamed as yet of the opportunity opening
+to them in being so constantly near the man whose life they have written,
+and with whose fame they have imperishably interwrought their names. I
+remember the sobered dignity of the one, and the humorous gaiety of the
+other, and how we had some young men’s joking and laughing together, in
+the anteroom where they received me, with the great soul entering upon
+its travail beyond the closed door. They asked me if I had ever seen the
+President, and I said that I had seen him at Columbus, the year before;
+but I could not say how much I should like to see him again, and thank
+him for the favor which I had no claim to at his hands, except such as
+the slight campaign biography I had written could be thought to have
+given me. That day or another, as I left my friends, I met him in the
+corridor without, and he looked at the space I was part of with his
+ineffably melancholy eyes, without knowing that I was the
+indistinguishable person in whose “integrity and abilities he had reposed
+such special confidence” as to have appointed him consul for Venice and
+the ports of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom, though he might have
+recognized the terms of my commission if I had reminded him of them. I
+faltered a moment in my longing to address him, and then I decided that
+every one who forebore to speak needlessly to him, or to shake his hand,
+did him a kindness; and I wish I could be as sure of the wisdom of all my
+past behavior as I am of that piece of it. He walked up to the
+water-cooler that stood in the corner, and drew himself a full goblet from
+it, which he poured down his throat with a backward tilt of his head, and
+then went wearily within doors. The whole affair, so simple, has always
+remained one of a certain pathos in my memory, and I would rather have
+seen Lincoln in that unconscious moment than on some statelier occasion.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+I went home to Ohio; and sent on the bond I was to file in the Treasury
+Department; but it was mislaid there, and to prevent another chance of
+that kind I carried on the duplicate myself. It was on my second visit
+that I met the generous young Irishman William D. O’Connor, at the house
+of my friend Piatt, and heard his ardent talk. He was one of the
+promising men of that day, and he had written an anti-slavery novel in
+the heroic mood of Victor Hugo, which greatly took my fancy; and I
+believe he wrote poems too. He had not yet risen to be the chief of Walt
+Whitman’s champions outside of the Saturday Press, but he had already
+espoused the theory of Bacon’s authorship of Shakespeare, then newly
+exploited by the poor lady of Bacon’s name, who died constant to it in an
+insane asylum. He used to speak of the reputed dramatist as “the fat
+peasant of Stratford,” and he was otherwise picturesque of speech in a
+measure that consoled, if it did not convince. The great war was then
+full upon us, and when in the silences of our literary talk its awful
+breath was heard, and its shadow fell upon the hearth where we gathered
+round the first fires of autumn, O’Connor would lift his beautiful head
+with a fine effect of prophecy, and say, “Friends, I feel a sense of
+victory in the air.” He was not wrong; only the victory was for the
+other aide.
+
+Who beside O’Connor shared in these saddened symposiums I cannot tell
+now; but probably other young journalists and office-holders, intending
+litterateurs, since more or less extinct. I make certain only of the
+young Boston publisher who issued a very handsome edition of ‘Leaves of
+Grass’, and then failed promptly if not consequently. But I had already
+met, in my first sojourn at the capital, a young journalist who had given
+hostages to poetry, and whom I was very glad to see and proud to know.
+Mr. Stedman and I were talking over that meeting the other day, and I can
+be surer than I might have been without his memory, that I found him at a
+friend’s house, where he was nursing himself for some slight sickness,
+and that I sat by his bed while our souls launched together into the
+joyful realms of hope and praise. In him I found the quality of Boston,
+the honor and passion of literature, and not a mere pose of the literary
+life; and the world knows without my telling how true he has been to his
+ideal of it. His earthly mission then was to write letters from
+Washington for the New York World, which started in life as a good young
+evening paper, with a decided religious tone, so that the Saturday Press
+could call it the Night-blooming Serious. I think Mr. Stedman wrote for
+its editorial page at times, and his relation to it as a Washington
+correspondent had an authority which is wanting to the function in these
+days of perfected telegraphing. He had not yet achieved that seat in the
+Stock Exchange whose possession has justified his recourse to business,
+and has helped him to mean something more single in literature than many
+more singly devoted to it. I used sometimes to speak about that with
+another eager young author in certain middle years when we were chafing
+in editorial harness, and we always decided that Stedman had the best of
+it in being able to earn his living in a sort so alien to literature that
+he could come to it unjaded, and with a gust unspoiled by kindred savors.
+But no man shapes his own life, and I dare say that Stedman may have been
+all the time envying us our tripods from his high place in the Stock
+Exchange. What is certain is that he has come to stand for literature
+and to embody New York in it as no one else does. In a community which
+seems never to have had a conscious relation to letters, he has kept the
+faith with dignity and fought the fight with constant courage. Scholar
+and poet at once, he has spoken to his generation with authority which we
+can forget only in the charm which makes us forget everything else.
+
+But his fame was still before him when we met, and I could bring to him
+an admiration for work which had not yet made itself known to so many;
+but any admirer was welcome. We talked of what we had done, and each
+said how much he liked certain thing of the other’s; I even seized my
+advantage of his helplessness to read him a poem of mine which I had in
+my pocket; he advised me where to place it; and if the reader will not
+think it an unfair digression, I will tell here what became of that poem,
+for I think its varied fortunes were amusing, and I hope my own
+sufferings and final triumph with it will not be without encouragement to
+the young literary endeavorer. It was a poem called, with no prophetic
+sense of fitness, “Forlorn,” and I tried it first with the ‘Atlantic
+Monthly’, which would not have it. Then I offered it in person to a
+former editor of ‘Harper’s Monthly’, but he could not see his advantage
+in it, and I carried it overseas to Venice with me. From that point I
+sent it to all the English magazines as steadily as the post could carry
+it away and bring it back. On my way home, four years later, I took it
+to London with me, where a friend who knew Lewes, then just beginning
+with the ‘Fortnightly Review’, sent it to him for me. It was promptly
+returned, with a letter wholly reserved as to its quality, but full of a
+poetic gratitude for my wish to contribute to the Fortnightly. Then I
+heard that a certain Mr. Lucas was about to start a magazine, and I
+offered the poem to him. The kindest letter of acceptance followed me to
+America, and I counted upon fame and fortune as usual, when the news of
+Mr. Lucas’s death came. I will not poorly joke an effect from my poem in
+the fact; but the fact remains. By this time I was a writer in the
+office of the ‘Nation’ newspaper, and after I left this place to be Mr.
+Fields’s assistant on the Atlantic, I sent my poem to the Nation, where
+it was printed at last. In such scant measure as my verses have pleased
+it has found rather unusual favor, and I need not say that its
+misfortunes endeared it to its author.
+
+But all this is rather far away from my first meeting with Stedman in
+Washington. Of course I liked him, and I thought him very handsome and
+fine, with a full beard cut in the fashion he has always worn it, and
+with poet’s eyes lighting an aquiline profile. Afterwards, when I saw
+him afoot, I found him of a worldly splendor in dress, and envied him, as
+much as I could envy him anything, the New York tailor whose art had
+clothed him: I had a New York tailor too, but with a difference. He had
+a worldly dash along with his supermundane gifts, which took me almost as
+much, and all the more because I could see that he valued himself nothing
+upon it. He was all for literature, and for literary men as the
+superiors of every one. I must have opened my heart to him a good deal,
+for when I told him how the newspaper I had written for from Canada and
+New England had ceased to print my letters, he said, “Think of a man like
+sitting in judgment on a man like you!” I thought of it, and was avenged
+if not comforted; and at any rate I liked Stedman’s standing up so
+stiffly for the honor of a craft that is rather too limp in some of its
+votaries.
+
+I suppose it was he who introduced me to the Stoddards, whom I met in New
+York just before I sailed, and who were then in the glow of their early
+fame as poets. They knew about my poor beginnings, and they were very,
+very good to me. Stoddard went with me to Franklin Square, and gave the
+sanction of his presence to the ineffectual offer of my poem there. But
+what I relished most was the long talks I had with them both about
+authorship in all its phases, and the exchange of delight in this poem
+and that, this novel and that, with gay, wilful runs away to make some
+wholly irrelevant joke, or fire puns into the air at no mark whatever.
+Stoddard had then a fame, with the sweetness of personal affection in it,
+from the lyrics and the odes that will perhaps best keep him known, and
+Mrs. Stoddard was beginning to make her distinct and special quality felt
+in the magazines, in verse and fiction. In both it seems to me that she
+has failed of the recognition which her work merits. Her tales and
+novels have in them a foretaste of realism, which was too strange for the
+palate of their day, and is now too familiar, perhaps. It is a peculiar
+fate, and would form the scheme of a pretty study in the history of
+literature. But in whatever she did she left the stamp of a talent like
+no other, and of a personality disdainful of literary environment. In a
+time when most of us had to write like Tennyson, or Longfellow, or
+Browning, she never would write like any one but herself.
+
+I remember very well the lodging over a corner of Fourth Avenue and some
+downtown street where I visited these winning and gifted people, and
+tasted the pleasure of their racy talk, and the hospitality of their
+good-will toward all literature, which certainly did not leave me out. We
+sat before their grate in the chill of the last October days, and they
+set each other on to one wild flight of wit after another, and again I
+bathed my delighted spirit in the atmosphere of a realm where for the
+time at least no
+
+       “----rumor of oppression or defeat,
+        Of unsuccessful or successful war,”
+
+could penetrate. I liked the Stoddards because they were frankly not of
+that Bohemia which I disliked so much, and thought it of no promise or
+validity; and because I was fond of their poetry and found them in it. I
+liked the absolutely literary keeping of their lives. He had then, and
+for long after, a place in the Custom house, but he was no more of that
+than Lamb was of India House. He belonged to that better world where
+there is no interest but letters, and which was as much like heaven for
+me as anything I could think of.
+
+The meetings with the Stoddards repeated themselves when I came back to
+sail from New York, early in November. Mixed up with the cordial
+pleasure of them in my memory is a sense of the cold and wet outdoors,
+and the misery of being in those infamous New York streets, then as for
+long afterwards the squalidest in the world. The last night I saw my
+friends they told me of the tragedy which had just happened at the camp
+in the City Hall Park. Fitz James O’Brien, the brilliant young Irishman
+who had dazzled us with his story of “The Diamond Lens,” and frozen our
+blood with his ingenious tale of a ghost--“What was It”--a ghost that
+could be felt and heard, but not seen--had enlisted for the war, and
+risen to be an officer with the swift process of the first days of it. In
+that camp he had just then shot and killed a man for some infraction of
+discipline, and it was uncertain what the end would be. He was
+acquitted, however, and it is known how he afterwards died of lockjaw
+from a wound received in battle.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+Before this last visit in New York there was a second visit to Boston,
+which I need not dwell upon, because it was chiefly a revival of the
+impressions of the first. Again I saw the Fieldses in their home; again
+the Autocrat in his, and Lowell now beneath his own roof, beside the
+study fire where I was so often to sit with him in coming years. At
+dinner (which we had at two o’clock) the talk turned upon my appointment,
+and he said of me to his wife: “Think of his having got Stillman’s place!
+We ought to put poison in his wine,” and he told me of the wish the
+painter had to go to Venice and follow up Ruskin’s work there in a book
+of his own. But he would not let me feel very guilty, and I will not
+pretend that I had any personal regret for my good fortune.
+
+The place was given me perhaps because I had not nearly so many other
+gifts as he who lost it, and who was at once artist, critic, journalist,
+traveller, and eminently each. I met him afterwards in Rome, which the
+powers bestowed upon him instead of Venice, and he forgave me, though I
+do not know whether he forgave the powers. We walked far and long over
+the Campagna, and I felt the charm of a most uncommon mind in talk which
+came out richest and fullest in the presence of the wild nature which he
+loved and knew so much better than most other men. I think that the book
+he would have written about Venice is forever to be regretted, and I do
+not at all console myself for its loss with the book I have written
+myself.
+
+At Lowell’s table that day they spoke of what sort of winter I should
+find in Venice, and he inclined to the belief that I should want a fire
+there. On his study hearth a very brisk one burned when we went back to
+it, and kept out the chill of a cold easterly storm. We looked through
+one of the windows at the rain, and he said he could remember standing
+and looking out of that window at such a storm when he was a child; for
+he was born in that house, and his life had kept coming back to it. He
+died in it, at last.
+
+In a lifting of the rain he walked with me down to the village, as he
+always called the denser part of the town about Harvard Square, and saw
+me aboard a horse-car for Boston. Before we parted he gave me two
+charges: to open my mouth when I began to speak Italian, and to think
+well of women. He said that our race spoke its own tongue with its teeth
+shut, and so failed to master the languages that wanted freer utterance.
+As to women, he said there were unworthy ones, but a good woman was the
+best thing in the world, and a man was always the better for honoring
+women.
+
+
+
+
+ROUNDABOUT TO BOSTON
+
+During the four years of my life in Venice the literary intention was
+present with me at all times and in all places. I wrote many things in
+verse, which I sent to the magazines in every part of the
+English-speaking world, but they came unerringly back to me, except in
+three instances only, when they were kept by the editors who finally
+printed them. One of these pieces was published in the Atlantic Monthly;
+another in Harpers Magazine; the third was got into the New York Ledger
+through the kindness of Doctor Edward Everett Hale, who used I know not
+what mighty magic to that end. I had not yet met him; but he interested
+himself in my ballad as if it had been his own. His brother, Charles
+Hale, later Consul-General for Egypt, whom I saw almost every moment of
+the two visits he paid Venice in my time, had sent it to him, after
+copying it in his own large, fair hand, so that it could be read. He was
+not quite of that literary Boston which I so fondly remembered my
+glimpses of; he was rather of a journalistic and literary Boston which I
+had never known; but he was of Boston, after all. He had been in
+Lowell’s classes at Harvard; he had often met Longfellow in Cambridge; he
+knew Doctor Holmes, of course; and he let me talk of my idols to my
+heart’s content. I think he must have been amused by my raptures; most
+people would have been; but he was kind and patient, and he listened to
+me with a sweet intelligence which I shall always gratefully remember. He
+died too young, with his life’s possibilities mainly unfulfilled; but
+none who knew him could fail to imagine them, or to love him for what he
+was.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+Besides those few pitiful successes, I had nothing but defeats in the
+sort of literature which I supposed was to be my calling, and the defeats
+threw me upon prose; for some sort of literary thing, if not one, then
+another, I must do if I lived; and I began to write those studies of
+Venetian life which afterwards became a book, and which I contributed as
+letters to the ‘Boston Advertiser’, after vainly offering them to more
+aesthetic periodicals. However, I do not imagine that it was a very
+smiling time for any literary endeavorer at home in the life-and-death
+civil war then waging. Some few young men arose who made themselves
+heard amid the din of arms even as far as Venice, but most of these were
+hushed long ago. I fancy Theodore Winthrop, who began to speak, as it
+were, from his soldier’s grave, so soon did his death follow the earliest
+recognition by the public, and so many were his posthumous works, was
+chief of these; but there were others whom the present readers must make
+greater effort to remember. Forceythe Willson, who wrote The Old
+Sergeant, became known for the rare quality of his poetry; and now and
+then there came a poem from Aldrich, or Stedman, or Stoddard. The great
+new series of the ‘Biglow Papers’ gathered volume with the force they had
+from the beginning. The Autocrat was often in the pages of the Atlantic,
+where one often found Whittier and Emerson, with many a fresh name now
+faded. In Washington the Piatts were writing some of the most beautiful
+verse of the war, and Brownell was sounding his battle lyrics like so
+many trumpet blasts. The fiction which followed the war was yet all to
+come. Whatever was done in any kind had some hint of the war in it,
+inevitably; though in the very heart of it Longfellow was setting about
+his great version of Dante peacefully, prayerfully, as he has told in the
+noble sonnets which register the mood of his undertaking.
+
+At Venice, if I was beyond the range of literary recognition I was in
+direct relations with one of our greatest literary men, who was again of
+that literary Boston which mainly represented American literature to me.
+The official chief of the consul at Venice was the United States Minister
+at Vienna, and in my time this minister was John Lothrop Motley, the
+historian. He was removed, later, by that Johnson administration which
+followed Lincoln’s so forgottenly that I name it with a sense of
+something almost prehistoric. Among its worst errors was the attempted
+discredit of a man who had given lustre to our name by his work, and who
+was an ardent patriot as well as accomplished scholar. He visited Venice
+during my first year, which was the darkest period of the civil war, and
+I remember with what instant security, not to say severity, he rebuked my
+scarcely whispered misgivings of the end, when I ventured to ask him what
+he thought it would be. Austria had never recognized the Secessionists
+as belligerents, and in the complications with France and England there
+was little for our minister but to share the home indignation at the
+sympathy of those powers with the South. In Motley this was heightened
+by that feeling of astonishment, of wounded faith, which all Americans
+with English friendships experienced in those days, and which he, whose
+English friendships were many, experienced in peculiar degree.
+
+I drifted about with him in his gondola, and refreshed myself, long
+a-hungered for such talk, with his talk of literary life in London.
+Through some acquaintance I had made in Venice I was able to be of use to
+him in getting documents copied for him in the Venetian Archives,
+especially the Relations of the Venetian Ambassadors at different courts
+during the period and events he was studying. All such papers passed
+through my hands in transmission to the historian, though now I do not
+quite know why they need have done so; but perhaps he was willing to give
+me the pleasure of being a partner, however humble, in the enterprise. My
+recollection of him is of courtesy to a far younger man unqualified by
+patronage, and of a presence of singular dignity and grace. He was one
+of the handsomest men I ever saw, with beautiful eyes, a fine blond beard
+of modish cut, and a sensitive nose, straight and fine. He was
+altogether a figure of worldly splendor; and I had reason to know that he
+did not let the credit of our nation suffer at the most aristocratic
+court in Europe for want of a fit diplomatic costume, when some of our
+ministers were trying to make their office do its full effect upon all
+occasions in “the dress of an American gentleman.” The morning after his
+arrival Mr. Motley came to me with a handful of newspapers which,
+according to the Austrian custom at that day, had been opened in the
+Venetian post-office. He wished me to protest against this on his behalf
+as an infringement of his diplomatic extra-territoriality, and I proposed
+to go at once to the director of the post: I had myself suffered in the
+same way, and though I knew that a mere consul was helpless, I was
+willing to see the double-headed eagle trodden under foot by a Minister
+Plenipotentiary. Mr. Motley said that he would go with me, and we put
+off in his gondola to the post-office. The director received us with the
+utmost deference. He admitted the irregularity which the minister
+complained of, and declared that he had no choice but to open every
+foreign newspaper, to whomsoever addressed. He suggested, however, that
+if the minister made his appeal to the Lieutenant-Governor of Venice,
+Count Toggenburg would no doubt instantly order the exemption of his
+newspapers from the general rule.
+
+Mr. Motley said he would give himself the pleasure of calling upon the
+Lieutenant-Governor, and “How fortunate,” he added, when we were got back
+into the gondola, “that I should have happened to bring my court dress
+with me!” I did not see the encounter of the high contending powers, but
+I know that it ended in a complete victory for our minister.
+
+I had no further active relations of an official kind with Mr. Motley,
+except in the case of a naturalized American citizen, whose property was
+slowly but surely wasting away in the keeping of the Venetian courts. An
+order had at last been given for the surrender of the remnant to the
+owner; but the Lombardo-Venetian authorities insisted that this should be
+done through the United States Minister at Vienna, and Mr. Motley held as
+firmly that it must be done through the United States Consul at Venice. I
+could only report to him from time to time the unyielding attitude of the
+Civil Tribunal, and at last he consented, as he wrote, “to act
+officiously, not officially, in the matter,” and the hapless claimant got
+what was left of his estate.
+
+I had a glimpse of the historian afterwards in Boston, but it was only
+for a moment, just before his appointment to England, where he was made
+to suffer for Sumner in his quarrel with Grant. That injustice crowned
+the injuries his country had done a most faithful patriot and
+high-spirited gentleman, whose fame as an historian once filled the ear
+of the English-speaking world. His books seemed to have been written in
+a spirit already no longer modern; and I did not find the greatest of
+them so moving as I expected when I came to it with all the ardor of my
+admiration for the historian. William the Silent seemed to me, by his
+worshipper’s own showing, scarcely level with the popular movement which
+he did not so much direct as follow; but it is a good deal for a prince
+to be able even to follow his people; and it cannot be said that Motley
+does not fully recognize the greatness of the Dutch people, though he may
+see the Prince of Orange too large. The study of their character made at
+least a theoretical democrat of a scholar whose instincts were not
+perhaps democratic, and his sympathy with that brave little republic
+between the dikes strengthened him in his fealty to the great
+commonwealth between the oceans. I believe that so far as he was of any
+political tradition, he was of the old Boston Whig tradition; but when I
+met him at Venice he was in the glow of a generous pride in our war as a
+war against slavery. He spoke of the negroes and their simple-hearted,
+single-minded devotion to the Union cause in terms that an original
+abolitionist might have used, at a time when original abolitionists were
+not so many as they have since become.
+
+For the rest, I fancy it was very well for us to be represented at Vienna
+in those days by an ideal democrat who was also a real swell, and who was
+not likely to discredit us socially when we so much needed to be well
+thought of in every way.
+
+At a court where the family of Count Schmerling, the Prime Minister,
+could not be received for want of the requisite descents, it was well to
+have a minister who would not commit the mistake of inviting the First
+Society to meet the Second Society, as a former Envoy Extraordinary had
+done, with the effect of finding himself left entirely to the Second
+Society during the rest of his stay in Vienna.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+One of my consular colleagues under Motley was another historian, of no
+such popularity, indeed, nor even of such success, but perhaps not of
+inferior powers. This was Richard Hildreth, at Trieste, the author of
+one of the sincerest if not the truest histories of the United States,
+according to the testimony both of his liking and his misliking critics.
+I have never read his history, and I speak of it only at second hand; but
+I had read, before I met him, his novel of ‘Archy Moore, or The White
+Slave’, which left an indelible impression of his imaginative verity upon
+me. The impression is still so deep that after the lapse of nearly forty
+years since I saw the book, I have no misgiving in speaking of it as a
+powerful piece of realism. It treated passionately, intensely, though
+with a superficial coldness, of wrongs now so remote from us in the
+abolition of slavery that it is useless to hope it will ever beg
+generally read hereafter, but it can safely be praised to any one who
+wishes to study that bygone condition, and the literature which grew out
+of it. I fancy it did not lack recognition in its time, altogether, for
+I used to see it in Italian and French translations on the bookstalls. I
+believe neither his history nor his novel brought the author more gain
+than fame. He had worn himself out on a newspaper when he got his
+appointment at Trieste, and I saw him in the shadow of the cloud that was
+wholly to darken him before he died. He was a tall thin man, absent,
+silent: already a phantom of himself, but with a scholarly serenity and
+dignity amidst the ruin, when the worst came.
+
+I first saw him at the pretty villa where he lived in the suburbs of
+Trieste, and where I passed several days, and I remember him always
+reading, reading, reading. He could with difficulty be roused from his
+book by some strenuous appeal from his family to his conscience as a
+host. The last night he sat with Paradise Lost in his hand, and nothing
+could win him from it till he had finished it. Then he rose to go to
+bed. Would not he bid his parting guest good-bye? The idea of farewell
+perhaps dimly penetrated to him. He responded without looking round,
+
+       “They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
+        Through Eden took their solitary way,”
+
+and so left the room.
+
+I had earlier had some dealings with him as a fellow-consul concerning a
+deserter from an American ship whom I inherited from my predecessor at
+Venice. The man had already been four or five months in prison, and he
+was in a fair way to end his life there; for it is our law that a
+deserting sailor must be kept in the consul’s custody till some vessel of
+our flag arrives, when the consul can oblige the master to take the
+deserter and let him work his passage home. Such a vessel rarely came to
+Venice even in times of peace, and in times of war there was no hope of
+any. So I got leave of the consul at Trieste to transfer my captive to
+that port, where now and then an American ship did touch. The flag
+determines the nationality of the sailor, and this unhappy wretch was
+theoretically our fellow-citizen; but when he got to Trieste he made a
+clean breast of it to the consul. He confessed that when he shipped
+under our flag he was a deserter from a British regiment at Malta; and he
+begged piteously not to be sent home to America, where he had never been
+in his life, nor ever wished to be. He wished to be sent back to his
+regiment at Malta, and to whatever fate awaited him there. The case
+certainly had its embarrassments; but the American consul contrived to
+let our presumptive compatriot slip into the keeping of the British
+consul, who promptly shipped him to Malta. In view of the strained
+relations between England and America at that time this was a piece of
+masterly diplomacy.
+
+Besides my old Ohio-time friend Moncure D. Conway, who paid us a visit,
+and in his immediate relations with literary Boston seemed to bring the
+mountain to Mahomet, I saw no one else more literary than Henry Ward
+Beecher. He was passing through Venice on his way to those efforts in
+England in behalf of the Union which had a certain great effect at the
+time; and in the tiny parlor of our apartment on the Grand Canal, I can
+still see him sitting athletic, almost pugilistic, of presence, with his
+strong face, but kind, framed in long hair that swept above his massive
+forehead, and fell to the level of his humorously smiling mouth. His
+eyes quaintly gleamed at the things we told him of our life in the
+strange place; but he only partly relaxed from his strenuous pose, and
+the hands that lay upon his knees were clinched. Afterwards, as he
+passed our balcony in a gondola, he lifted the brave red fez he was
+wearing (many people wore the fez for one caprice or another) and saluted
+our eagle and us: we were often on the balcony behind the shield to
+attest the authenticity of the American eagle.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+Before I left Venice, however, there came a turn in my literary luck, and
+from the hand I could most have wished to reverse the adverse wheel of
+fortune. I had labored out with great pains a paper on recent Italian
+comedy, which I sent to Lowell, then with his friend Professor Norton
+jointly editor of the North American Review; and he took it and wrote me
+one of his loveliest letters about it, consoling me in an instant for all
+the defeat I had undergone, and making it sweet and worthy to have lived
+through that misery. It is one of the hard conditions of this state that
+while we can mostly make out to let people taste the last drop of
+bitterness and ill-will that is in us, our love and gratitude are only
+semi-articulate at the best, and usually altogether tongue-tied. As
+often as I tried afterwards to tell Lowell of the benediction, the
+salvation, his letter was to me, I failed. But perhaps he would not have
+understood, if I had spoken out all that was in me with the fulness I
+could have given a resentment. His message came after years of thwarted
+endeavor, and reinstated me in the belief that I could still do something
+in literature. To be sure, the letters in the Advertiser had begun to
+make their impression; among the first great pleasures they brought me
+was a recognition from my diplomatic chief at Vienna; but I valued my
+admission to the North American peculiarly because it was Lowell let me
+in, and because I felt that in his charge it must be the place of highest
+honor. He spoke of the pay for my article, in his letter, and asked me
+where he should send it, and I answered, to my father-in-law, who put it
+in his savings-bank, where he lived, in Brattleboro, Vermont. There it
+remained, and I forgot all about it, so that when his affairs were
+settled some years later and I was notified that there was a sum to my
+credit in the bank, I said, with the confidence I have nearly always felt
+when wrong, that I had no money there. The proof of my error was sent me
+in a check, and then I bethought me of the pay for “Recent Italian
+Comedy.”
+
+It was not a day when I could really afford to forget money due me, but
+then it was not a great deal of money. The Review was as poor as it was
+proud, and I had two dollars a printed page for my paper. But this was
+more than I got from the Advertiser, which gave me five dollars a column
+for my letters, printed in a type so fine that the money, when translated
+from greenbacks into gold at a discount of $2.80, must have been about a
+dollar a thousand words. However, I was richly content with that, and
+would gladly have let them have the letters for nothing.
+
+Before I left Venice I had made my sketches into a book, which I sent on
+to Messrs. Trubner & Co., in London. They had consented to look at it to
+oblige my friend Conway, who during his sojourn with us in Venice, before
+his settlement in London, had been forced to listen to some of it. They
+answered me in due time that they would publish an edition of a thousand,
+at half profits, if I could get some American house to take five hundred
+copies. When I stopped in London I had so little hope of being able to
+do this that I asked the Trubners if I might, without losing their offer,
+try to get some other London house to publish my book. They said Yes,
+almost joyously; and I began to take my manuscript about. At most places
+they would not look at me or it, and they nowhere consented to read it.
+The house promptest in refusing to consider it afterwards pirated one of
+my novels, and with some expressions of good intention in that direction,
+never paid me anything for it; though I believe the English still think
+that this sort of behavior was peculiar to the American publisher in the
+old buccaneering times. I was glad to go back to the Trubners with my
+book, and on my way across the Atlantic I met a publisher who finally
+agreed to take those five hundred copies. This was Mr. M. M. Hurd, of
+Hurd & Houghton, a house then newly established in New York and
+Cambridge. We played ring-toss and shuffleboard together, and became of
+a friendship which lasts to this day. But it was not till some months
+later, when I saw him in New York, that he consented to publish my book.
+I remember how he said, with an air of vague misgiving, and an effect of
+trying to justify himself in an imprudence, that it was not a great
+matter anyway. I perceived that he had no faith in it, and to tell the
+truth I had not much myself. But the book had an instant success, and it
+has gone on from edition to edition ever since. There was just then the
+interest of a not wholly generous surprise at American things among the
+English. Our success in putting down the great Confederate rebellion had
+caught the fancy of our cousins, and I think it was to this mood of
+theirs that I owed largely the kindness they showed my book. There were
+long and cordial reviews in all the great London journals, which I used
+to carry about with me like love-letters; when I tried to show them to
+other people, I could not understand their coldness concerning them.
+
+At Boston, where we landed on our return home, there was a moment when it
+seemed as if my small destiny might be linked at once with that of the
+city which later became my home. I ran into the office of the Advertiser
+to ask what had become of some sketches of Italian travel I had sent the
+paper, and the managing editor made me promise not to take a place
+anywhere before I had heard from him. I gladly promised, but I did not
+hear from him, and when I returned to Boston a fortnight later, I found
+that a fatal partner had refused to agree with him in engaging me upon
+the paper. They even gave me back half a dozen unprinted letters of
+mine, and I published them in the Nation, of New York, and afterwards in
+the book called Italian Journeys.
+
+But after I had encountered fortune in this frowning disguise, I had a
+most joyful little visit with Lowell, which made me forget there was
+anything in the world but the delight and glory of sitting with him in
+his study at Elmwood and hearing him talk. It must have been my
+freshness from Italy which made him talk chiefly of his own happy days in
+the land which so sympathetically brevets all its lovers fellow-citizens.
+At any rate he would talk of hardly anything else, and he talked late
+into the night, and early into the morning. About two o’clock, when all
+the house was still, he lighted a candle, and went down into the cellar,
+and came back with certain bottles under his arms. I had not a very
+learned palate in those days (or in these, for that matter), but I knew
+enough of wine to understand that these bottles had been chosen upon that
+principle which Longfellow put in verse, and used to repeat with a
+humorous lifting of the eyebrows and hollowing of the voice:
+
+       “If you have a friend to dine,
+        Give him your best wine;
+        If you have two,
+        The second-best will do.”
+
+As we sat in their mellow afterglow, Lowell spoke to me of my own life
+and prospects, wisely and truly, as he always spoke. He said that it was
+enough for a man who had stuff in him to be known to two or three people,
+for they would not suffer him to be forgotten, and it would rest with
+himself to get on. I told him that though I had not given up my place at
+Venice, I was not going back, if I could find anything to do at home, and
+I was now on my way to Ohio, where I should try my best to find
+something; at the worst, I could turn to my trade of printer. He did not
+think it need ever come to that; and he said that he believed I should
+have an advantage with readers, if not with editors, in hailing from the
+West; I should be more of a novelty. I knew very well that even in my
+own West I should not have this advantage unless I appeared there with an
+Eastern imprint, but I could not wish to urge my misgiving against his
+faith. Was I not already richly successful? What better thing
+personally could befall me, if I lived forever after on milk and honey,
+than to be sitting there with my hero, my master, and having him talk to
+me as if we were equal in deed and in fame?
+
+The cat-bird called in the syringa thicket at his door, before we said
+the good-night which was good morning, using the sweet Italian words, and
+bidding each other the ‘Dorma bene’ which has the quality of a
+benediction. He held my hand, and looked into my eyes with the sunny
+kindness which never failed me, worthy or unworthy; and I went away to
+bed. But not to sleep; only to dream such dreams as fill the heart of
+youth when the recognition of its endeavor has come from the achievement
+it holds highest and best.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+I found nothing to do in Ohio; some places that I heard of proved
+impossible one way or another, in Columbus and Cleveland, and Cincinnati;
+there was always the fatal partner; and after three weeks I was again in
+the East. I came to New York, resolved to fight my way in, somewhere,
+and I did not rest a moment before I began the fight.
+
+My notion was that which afterwards became Bartley Hubbard’s. “Get a
+basis,” said the softening cynic of the Saturday Press, when I advised
+with him, among other acquaintances. “Get a salaried place, something
+regular on some paper, and then you can easily make up the rest.” But it
+was a month before I achieved this vantage, and then I got it in a
+quarter where I had not looked for it. I wrote editorials on European
+and literary topics for different papers, but mostly for the Times, and
+they paid me well and more than well; but I was nowhere offered a basis,
+though once I got so far towards it as to secure a personal interview
+with the editor-in-chief, who made me feel that I had seldom met so busy
+a man. He praised some work of mine that he had read in his paper, but I
+was never recalled to his presence; and now I think he judged rightly
+that I should not be a lastingly good journalist. My point of view was
+artistic; I wanted time to prepare my effects.
+
+There was another and clearer prospect opened to me on a literary paper,
+then newly come to the light, but long since gone out in the dark. Here
+again my work was taken, and liked so much that I was offered the basis
+(at twenty dollars a week) that I desired; I was even assigned to a desk
+where I should write in the office; and the next morning I came joyfully
+down to Spruce Street to occupy it. But I was met at the door by one of
+the editors, who said lightly, as if it were a trifling affair, “Well,
+we’ve concluded to waive the idea of an engagement,” and once more my
+bright hopes of a basis dispersed themselves. I said, with what calm I
+could, that they must do what they thought best, and I went on
+skirmishing baselessly about for this and the other papers which had been
+buying my material.
+
+I had begun printing in the ‘Nation’ those letters about my Italian
+journeys left over from the Boston Advertiser; they had been liked in the
+office, and one day the editor astonished and delighted me by asking how
+I would fancy giving up outside work to come there and write only for the
+‘Nation’. We averaged my gains from all sources at forty dollars a week,
+and I had my basis as unexpectedly as if I had dropped upon it from the
+skies.
+
+This must have been some time in November, and the next three or four
+months were as happy a time for me as I have ever known. I kept on
+printing my Italian material in the Nation; I wrote criticisms for it
+(not very good criticisms, I think now), and I amused myself very much
+with the treatment of social phases and events in a department which grew
+up under my hand. My associations personally were of the most agreeable
+kind. I worked with joy, with ardor, and I liked so much to be there, in
+that place and in that company, that I hated to have each day come to an
+end.
+
+I believed that my lines were cast in New York for good and all; and I
+renewed my relations with the literary friends I had made before going
+abroad. I often stopped, on my way up town, at an apartment the
+Stoddards had in Lafayette Place, or near it; I saw Stedman, and reasoned
+high, to my heart’s content, of literary things with them and him.
+
+With the winter Bayard Taylor came on from his home in Kennett and took
+an apartment in East Twelfth Street, and once a week Mrs. Taylor and he
+received all their friends there, with a simple and charming hospitality.
+There was another house which we much resorted to--the house of James
+Lorrimer Graham, afterwards Consul-General at Florence, where he died. I
+had made his acquaintance at Venice three years before, and I came in for
+my share of that love for literary men which all their perversities could
+not extinguish in him. It was a veritable passion, which I used to think
+he could not have felt so deeply if he had been a literary man himself.
+There were delightful dinners at his house, where the wit of the
+Stoddards shone, and Taylor beamed with joyous good-fellowship and
+overflowed with invention; and Huntington, long Paris correspondent of
+the Tribune, humorously tried to talk himself into the resolution of
+spending the rest of his life in his own country. There was one evening
+when C. P. Cranch, always of a most pensive presence and aspect, sang the
+most killingly comic songs; and there was another evening when, after we
+all went into the library, something tragical happened. Edwin Booth was
+of our number, a gentle, rather silent person in company, or with at
+least little social initiative, who, as his fate would, went up to the
+cast of a huge hand that lay upon one of the shelves. “Whose hand is
+this, Lorry?” he asked our host, as he took it up and turned it over in
+both his own hands. Graham feigned not to hear, and Booth asked again,
+“whose hand is this?” Then there was nothing for Graham but to say,
+“It’s Lincoln’s hand,” and the man for whom it meant such unspeakable
+things put it softly down without a word.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+It was one of the disappointments of a time which was nearly all joy that
+I did not then meet a man who meant hardly less than Lowell himself for
+me. George William Curtis was during my first winter in New York away on
+one of the long lecturing rounds to which he gave so many of his winters,
+and I did not see him till seven years afterwards, at Mr. Norton’s in
+Cambridge. He then characteristically spent most of the evening in
+discussing an obscure point in Browning’s poem of ‘My Last Duchess’. I
+have long forgotten what the point was, but not the charm of Curtis’s
+personality, his fine presence, his benign politeness, his almost
+deferential tolerance of difference in opinion. Afterwards I saw him
+again and again in Boston and New York, but always with a sense of
+something elusive in his graciousness, for which something in me must
+have been to blame. Cold, he was not, even to the youth that in those
+days was apt to shiver in any but the higher temperatures, and yet I felt
+that I made no advance in his kindness towards anything like the
+friendship I knew in the Cambridge men. Perhaps I was so thoroughly
+attuned to their mood that I could not be put in unison with another; and
+perhaps in Curtis there was really not the material of much intimacy.
+
+He had the potentiality of publicity in the sort of welcome he gave
+equally to all men; and if I asked more I was not reasonable. Yet he was
+never far from any man of good-will, and he was the intimate of
+multitudes whose several existence he never dreamt of. In this sort he
+had become my friend when he made his first great speech on the Kansas
+question in 1855, which will seen as remote to the young men of this day
+as the Thermopylae question to which he likened it. I was his admirer,
+his lover, his worshipper before that for the things he had done in
+literature, for the ‘Howadji’ books, and for the lovely fantasies of
+‘Prue and I’, and for the sound-hearted satire of the ‘Potiphar Papers’,
+and now suddenly I learnt that this brilliant and graceful talent, this
+travelled and accomplished gentleman, this star of society who had
+dazzled me with his splendor far off in my Western village obscurity, was
+a man with the heart to feel the wrongs of men so little friended then as
+to be denied all the rights of men. I do not remember any passage of the
+speech, or any word of it, but I remember the joy, the pride with which
+the soul of youth recognizes in the greatness it has honored the goodness
+it may love. Mere politicians might be pro-slavery or anti-slavery
+without touching me very much, but here was the citizen of a world far
+greater than theirs, a light of the universal republic of letters, who
+was willing and eager to stand or fall with the just cause, and that was
+all in all to me. His country was my country, and his kindred my
+kindred, and nothing could have kept me from following after him.
+
+His whole life taught the lesson that the world is well lost whenever the
+world is wrong; but never, I think, did any life teach this so sweetly,
+so winningly. The wrong world itself might have been entreated by him to
+be right, for he was one of the few reformers who have not in some
+measure mixed their love of man with hate of men; his quarrel was with
+error, and not with the persons who were in it. He was so gently
+steadfast in his opinions that no one ever thought of him as a fanatic,
+though many who held his opinions were assailed as fanatics, and suffered
+the shame if they did not win the palm of martyrdom. In early life he
+was a communist, and then when he came out of Brook Farm into the world
+which he was so well fitted to adorn, and which would so gladly have kept
+him all its own, he became an abolitionist in the very teeth of the world
+which abhorred abolitionists. He was a believer in the cause of women’s
+rights, which has no picturesqueness, and which chiefly appeals to the
+sense of humor in the men who never dreamt of laughing at him. The man
+who was in the last degree amiable was to the last degree unyielding
+where conscience was concerned; the soul which was so tender had no
+weakness in it; his lenity was the divination of a finer justice. His
+honesty made all men trust him when they doubted his opinions; his good
+sense made them doubt their own opinions, when they had as little
+question of their own honesty.
+
+I should not find it easy to speak of him as a man of letters only, for
+humanity was above the humanities with him, and we all know how he turned
+from the fairest career in literature to tread the thorny path of
+politics because he believed that duty led the way, and that good
+citizens were needed more than good romancers. No doubt they are, and
+yet it must always be a keen regret with the men of my generation who
+witnessed with such rapture the early proofs of his talent, that he could
+not have devoted it wholly to the beautiful, and let others look after
+the true. Now that I have said this I am half ashamed of it, for I know
+well enough that what he did was best; but if my regret is mean, I will
+let it remain, for it is faithful to the mood which many have been in
+concerning him.
+
+There can be no dispute, I am sure, as to the value of some of the
+results he achieved in that other path. He did indeed create anew for us
+the type of good-citizenship, well-nigh effaced in a sordid and selfish
+time, and of an honest politician and a pure-minded journalist. He never
+really forsook literature, and the world of actual interests and
+experiences afforded him outlooks and perspectives, without which
+aesthetic endeavor is self-limited and purblind. He was a great man of
+letters, he was a great orator, he was a great political journalist, he
+was a great citizen, he was a great philanthropist. But that last word
+with its conventional application scarcely describes the brave and gentle
+friend of men that he was. He was one that helped others by all that he
+did, and said, and was, and the circle of his use was as wide as his
+fame. There are other great men, plenty of them, common great men, whom
+we know as names and powers, and whom we willingly let the ages have when
+they die, for, living or dead, they are alike remote from us. They have
+never been with us where we live; but this great man was the neighbor,
+the contemporary, and the friend of all who read him or heard him; and
+even in the swift forgetting of this electrical age the stamp of his
+personality will not be effaced from their minds or hearts.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+Of those evenings at the Taylors’ in New York, I can recall best the one
+which was most significant for me, and even fatefully significant. Mr.
+and Mrs. Fields were there, from Boston, and I renewed all the pleasure
+of my earlier meetings with them. At the end Fields said, mockingly,
+“Don’t despise Boston!” and I answered, as we shook hands, “Few are
+worthy to live in Boston.” It was New-Year’s eve, and that night it came
+on to snow so heavily that my horse-car could hardly plough its way up to
+Forty-seventh Street through the drifts. The next day, and the next, I
+wrote at home, because it was so hard to get down-town. The third day I
+reached the office and found a letter on my desk from Fields, asking how
+I should like to come to Boston and be his assistant on the ‘Atlantic
+Monthly’. I submitted the matter at once to my chief on the ‘Nation’,
+and with his frank goodwill I talked it over with Mr. Osgood, of Ticknor
+& Fields, who was to see me further about it if I wished, when he came to
+New York; and then I went to Boston to see Mr. Fields concerning details.
+I was to sift all the manuscripts and correspond with contributors; I was
+to do the literary proof-reading of the magazine; and I was to write the
+four or five pages of book-notices, which were then printed at the end of
+the periodical in finer type; and I was to have forty dollars a week. I
+said that I was getting that already for less work, and then Mr. Fields
+offered me ten dollars more. Upon these terms we closed, and on the 1st
+of March, which was my twenty-ninth birthday, I went to Boston and began
+my work. I had not decided to accept the place without advising with
+Lowell; he counselled the step, and gave me some shrewd and useful
+suggestions. The whole affair was conducted by Fields with his unfailing
+tact and kindness, but it could not be kept from me that the
+qualification I had as practical printer for the work was most valued, if
+not the most valued, and that as proof-reader I was expected to make it
+avail on the side of economy. Somewhere in life’s feast the course of
+humble-pie must always come in; and if I did not wholly relish this, bit
+of it, I dare say it was good for me, and I digested it perfectly.
+
+
+
+
+LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT
+
+Among my fellow-passengers on the train from New York to Boston, when I
+went to begin my work there in 1866, as the assistant editor of the
+Atlantic Monthly, was the late Samuel Bowles, of the Springfield
+Republican, who created in a subordinate city a journal of metropolitan
+importance. I had met him in Venice several years earlier, when he was
+suffering from the cruel insomnia which had followed his overwork on that
+newspaper, and when he told me that he was sleeping scarcely more than
+one hour out of the twenty-four. His worn face attested the misery which
+this must have been, and which lasted in some measure while he lived,
+though I believe that rest and travel relieved him in his later years. He
+was always a man of cordial friendliness, and he now expressed a most
+gratifying interest when I told him what I was going to do in Boston. He
+gave himself the pleasure of descanting upon the dramatic quality of the
+fact that a young newspaper man from Ohio was about to share in the
+destinies of the great literary periodical of New England.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+I do not think that such a fact would now move the fancy of the liveliest
+newspaper man, so much has the West since returned upon the East in a
+refluent wave of authorship. But then the West was almost an unknown
+quality in our literary problem; and in fact there was scarcely any
+literature outside of New England. Even this was of New England origin,
+for it was almost wholly the work of New England men and women in the
+“splendid exile” of New York. The Atlantic Monthly, which was
+distinctively literary, was distinctively a New England magazine, though
+from the first it had been characterized by what was more national, what
+was more universal, in the New England temperament. Its chief
+contributors for nearly twenty years were Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes,
+Whittier, Emerson, Doctor Hale, Colonel Higginson, Mrs. Stowe, Whipple,
+Rose Terry Cooke, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Prescott Spofford, Mrs.
+Phelps Ward, and other New England writers who still lived in New
+England, and largely in the region of Boston. Occasionally there came a
+poem from Bryant, at New York, from Mr. Stedman, from Mr. Stoddard and
+Mrs. Stoddard, from Mr. Aldrich, and from Bayard Taylor. But all these,
+except the last, were not only of New England race, but of New England
+birth. I think there was no contributor from the South but Mr. M. D.
+Conway, and as yet the West scarcely counted, though four young poets
+from Ohio, who were not immediately or remotely of Puritan origin, had
+appeared in early numbers; Alice Cary, living with her sister in New
+York, had written now and then from the beginning. Mr. John Hay solely
+represented Illinois by a single paper, and he was of Rhode Island stock.
+It was after my settlement at Boston that Mark Twain, of Missouri, became
+a figure of world-wide fame at Hartford; and longer after, that Mr. Bret
+Harte made that progress Eastward from California which was telegraphed
+almost from hour to hour, as if it were the progress of a prince. Miss
+Constance F. Woolson had not yet begun to write. Mr. James Whitcomb
+Riley, Mr. Maurice Thompson, Miss Edith Thomas, Octave Thanet, Mr.
+Charles Warren Stoddard, Mr. H. B. Fuller, Mrs. Catherwood, Mr. Hamlin
+Garland, all whom I name at random among other Western writers, were then
+as unknown as Mr. Cable, Miss Murfree, Mrs. Rives Chanler, Miss Grace
+King, Mr. Joel Chandler Harris, Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, in the South,
+which they by no means fully represent.
+
+The editors of the Atlantic had been eager from the beginning to discover
+any outlying literature; but, as I have said, there was in those days
+very little good writing done beyond the borders of New England. If the
+case is now different, and the best known among living American writers
+are no longer New-Englanders, still I do not think the South and West
+have yet trimmed the balance; and though perhaps the news writers now
+more commonly appear in those quarters, I should not be so very sure that
+they are not still characterized by New England ideals and examples. On
+the other hand, I am very sure that in my early day we were characterized
+by them, and wished to be so; we even felt that we failed in so far as we
+expressed something native quite in our own way. The literary theories we
+accepted were New England theories, the criticism we valued was New
+England criticism, or, more strictly speaking, Boston theories, Boston
+criticism.
+
+Of those more constant contributors to the Atlantic whom I have
+mentioned, it is of course known that Longfellow and Lowell lived in
+Cambridge, Emerson at Concord, and Whittier at Amesbury. Colonel
+Higginson was still and for many years afterwards at Newport; Mrs. Stowe
+was then at Andover; Miss Prescott of Newburyport had become Mrs.
+Spofford, and was presently in Boston, where her husband was a member of
+the General Court; Mrs. Phelps Ward, as Miss Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,
+dwelt in her father’s house at Andover. The chief of the Bostonians were
+Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Doctor Holmes, and Doctor Hale. Yet Boston stood
+for the whole Massachusetts group, and Massachusetts, in the literary
+impulse, meant New England. I suppose we must all allow, whether we like
+to do so or not, that the impulse seems now to have pretty well spent
+itself. Certainly the city of Boston has distinctly waned in literature,
+though it has waxed in wealth and population. I do not think there are
+in Boston to-day even so many talents with a literary coloring in law,
+science, theology, and journalism as there were formerly; though I have
+no belief that the Boston talents are fewer or feebler than before. I
+arrived in Boston, however, when all talents had more or less a literary
+coloring, and when the greatest talents were literary. These expressed
+with ripened fulness a civilization conceived in faith and brought forth
+in good works; but that moment of maturity was the beginning of a
+decadence which could only show itself much later. New England has
+ceased to be a nation in itself, and it will perhaps never again have
+anything like a national literature; but that was something like a
+national literature; and it will probably be centuries yet before the
+life of the whole country, the American life as distinguished from the
+New England life, shall have anything so like a national literature. It
+will be long before our larger life interprets itself in such imagination
+as Hawthorne’s, such wisdom as Emerson’s, such poetry as Longfellow’s,
+such prophecy as Whittier’s, such wit and grace as Holmes’s, such humor
+and humanity as Lowell’s.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+The literature of those great men was, if I may suffer myself the figure,
+the Socinian graft of a Calvinist stock. Their faith, in its varied
+shades, was Unitarian, but their art was Puritan. So far as it was
+imperfect--and great and beautiful as it was, I think it had its
+imperfections--it was marred by the intense ethicism that pervaded the
+New England mind for two hundred years, and that still characterizes it.
+They or their fathers had broken away from orthodoxy in the great schism
+at the beginning of the century, but, as if their heterodoxy were
+conscience-stricken, they still helplessly pointed the moral in all they
+did; some pointed it more directly, some less directly; but they all
+pointed it. I should be far from blaming them for their ethical
+intention, though I think they felt their vocation as prophets too much
+for their good as poets. Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the
+sermon, though not always, nor nearly always. It was in poetry and in
+romance that they excelled; in the novel, so far as they attempted it,
+they failed. I say this with the names of all the Bostonian group, and
+those they influenced, in mind, and with a full sense of their greatness.
+It may be ungracious to say that they have left no heirs to their
+peculiar greatness; but it would be foolish to say that they left an
+estate where they had none to bequeath. One cannot take account of such
+a fantasy as Judd’s Margaret. The only New-Englander who has attempted
+the novel on a scale proportioned to the work of the New-Englanders in
+philosophy, in poetry, in romance, is Mr. De Forest, who is of New Haven,
+and not of Boston. I do not forget the fictions of Doctor Holmes, or the
+vivid inventions of Doctor Hale, but I do not call them novels; and I do
+not forget the exquisitely realistic art of Miss Jewett or Miss Wilkins,
+which is free from the ethicism of the great New England group, but which
+has hardly the novelists’s scope. New England, in Hawthorne’s work,
+achieved supremacy in romance; but the romance is always an allegory, and
+the novel is a picture in which the truth to life is suffered to do its
+unsermonized office for conduct; and New England yet lacks her novelist,
+because it was her instinct and her conscience in fiction to be true to
+an ideal of life rather than to life itself.
+
+Even when we come to the exception that proves the rule, even to such a
+signal exception as ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, I think that what I say holds
+true. That is almost the greatest work of imagination that we have
+produced in prose, and it is the work of a New England woman, writing
+from all the inspirations and traditions of New England. It is like
+begging the question to say that I do not call it a novel, however; but
+really, is it a novel, in the sense that ‘War and Peace’ is a novel, or
+‘Madame Flaubert’, or ‘L’Assommoir’, or ‘Phineas Finn’, or ‘Dona
+Perfecta’, or ‘Esther Waters’, or ‘Marta y Maria’, or ‘The Return of the
+Native’, or ‘Virgin Soil’, or ‘David Grieve’? In a certain way it is
+greater than any of these except the first; but its chief virtue, or its
+prime virtue, is in its address to the conscience, and not its address to
+the taste; to the ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense.
+
+This does not quite say the thing, but it suggests it, and I should be
+sorry if it conveyed to any reader a sense of slight; for I believe no
+one has felt more deeply than myself the value of New England in
+literature. The comparison of the literary situation at Boston to the
+literary situation at Edinburgh in the times of the reviewers has never
+seemed to me accurate or adequate, and it holds chiefly in the fact that
+both seem to be of the past. Certainly New York is yet no London in
+literature, and I think Boston was once vastly more than Edinburgh ever
+was, at least in quality. The Scotch literature of the palmy days was
+not wholly Scotch, and even when it was rooted in Scotch soil it flowered
+in the air of an alien speech. But the New England literature of the
+great day was the blossom of a New England root; and the language which
+the Bostonians wrote was the native English of scholars fitly the heirs
+of those who had brought the learning of the universities to
+Massachusetts Bay two hundred years before, and was of as pure a lineage
+as the English of the mother-country.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+The literary situation which confronted me when I came to Boston was,
+then, as native as could well be; and whatever value I may be able to
+give a personal study of it will be from the effect it made upon me as
+one strange in everything but sympathy. I will not pretend that I saw it
+in its entirety, and I have no hope of presenting anything like a
+kinetoscopic impression of it. What I can do is to give here and there a
+glimpse of it; and I shall wish the reader to keep in mind the fact that
+it was in a “state of transition,” as everything is always and
+everywhere. It was no sooner recognizably native than it ceased to be
+fully so; and I became a witness of it after the change had begun. The
+publishing house which so long embodied New England literature was
+already attempting enterprises out of the line of its traditions, and one
+of these had brought Mr. T. B. Aldrich from New York, a few weeks before
+I arrived upon the scene in that dramatic quality which I think never
+impressed any one but Mr. Bowles. Mr. Aldrich was the editor of ‘Every
+Saturday’ when I came to be assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly. We
+were of nearly the same age, but he had a distinct and distinguished
+priority of reputation, insomuch that in my Western remoteness I had
+always ranged him with such elders and betters of mine as Holmes and
+Lowell, and never imagined him the blond, slight youth I found him, with
+every imaginable charm of contemporaneity. It is no part of the office
+which I have intended for these slight and sufficiently wandering
+glimpses of the past to show any writer in his final place; and above all
+I do not presume to assign any living man his rank or station. But I
+should be false to my own grateful sense of beauty in the work of this
+poet if I did not at all times recognize his constancy to an ideal which
+his name stands for. He is known in several kinds, but to my thinking he
+is best in a certain nobler kind of poetry; a serious sort in which the
+thought holds him above the scrupulosities of the art he loves and honors
+so much. Sometimes the file slips in his hold, as the file must and
+will; it is but an instrument at the best; but there is no mistouch in
+the hand that lays itself upon the reader’s heart with the pulse of the
+poet’s heart quick and true in it. There are sonnets of his, grave, and
+simple, and lofty, which I think of with the glow and thrill possible
+only from very beautiful poetry, and which impart such an emotion as we
+can feel only
+
+       “When a great thought strikes along the brain
+        And flushes all the cheek.”
+
+When I had the fortune to meet him first, I suppose that in the employ of
+the kindly house we were both so eager to serve, our dignities were about
+the same; for if the ‘Atlantic Monthly’ was a somewhat prouder affair
+than an eclectic weekly like ‘Every Saturday’, he was supreme in his
+place, and I was subordinate in mine. The house was careful, in the
+attitude of its senior partner, not to distinguish between us, and we
+were not slow to perceive the tact used in managing us; we had our own
+joke of it; we compared notes to find whether we were equally used in
+this thing or that; and we promptly shared the fun of our discovery with
+Fields himself.
+
+We had another impartial friend (no less a friend of joy in the life
+which seems to have been pretty nearly all joy, as I look back upon it)
+in the partner who became afterwards the head of the house, and who
+forecast in his bold enterprises the change from a New England to an
+American literary situation. In the end James R. Osgood failed, though
+all his enterprises succeeded. The anomaly is sad, but it is not
+infrequent. They were greater than his powers and his means, and before
+they could reach their full fruition, they had to be enlarged to men of
+longer purse and longer patience. He was singularly fitted both by
+instinct and by education to become a great publisher; and he early
+perceived that if a leading American house were to continue at Boston, it
+must be hospitable to the talents of the whole country. He founded his
+future upon those generous lines; but he wanted the qualities as well as
+the resources for rearing the superstructure. Changes began to follow
+each other rapidly after he came into control of the house. Misfortune
+reduced the size and number of its periodicals. ‘The Young Folks’ was
+sold outright, and the ‘North American Review’ (long before Mr. Rice
+bought it and carried it to New York) was cut down one-half, so that
+Aldrich said, it looked as if Destiny had sat upon it. His own
+periodical, ‘Every Saturday’, was first enlarged to a stately quarto and
+illustrated; and then, under stress of the calamities following the great
+Boston fire, It collapsed to its former size. Then both the ‘Atlantic
+Monthly’ and ‘Every Saturday’ were sold away from their old ownership,
+and ‘Every Saturday’ was suppressed altogether, and we two ceased to be
+of the same employ. There was some sort of evening rite (more funereal
+than festive) the day after they were sold, and we followed Osgood away
+from it, under the lamps. We all knew that it was his necessity that had
+caused him to part with the periodicals; but he professed that it was his
+pleasure, and he said he had not felt so light-hearted since he was a
+boy. We asked him, How could he feel gay when he was no longer paying us
+our salaries, and how could he justify it to his conscience? He liked
+our mocking, and limped away from us with a rheumatic easing of his
+weight from one foot to another: a figure pathetic now that it has gone
+the way to dusty death, and dear to memory through benefactions unalloyed
+by one unkindness.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+But when I came to Boston early in 1866, the ‘Atlantic Monthly’ and
+‘Harper’s’ then divided our magazine world between them; the ‘North
+American Review’, in the control of Lowell and Professor Norton, had
+entered upon a new life; ‘Every Saturday’ was an instant success in the
+charge of Mr. Aldrich, who was by taste and training one of the best
+editors; and ‘Our Young Folks’ had the field of juvenile periodical
+literature to itself.
+
+It was under the direction of Miss Lucy Larcom and of Mr. J. T.
+Trowbridge, who had come from western New York, where he was born, and
+must be noted as one of the first returners from the setting to the
+rising sun. He naturalized himself in Boston in his later boyhood, and
+he still breathes Boston air, where he dwells in the street called
+Pleasant, on the shore of Spy Pond, at Arlington, and still weaves the
+magic web of his satisfying stories for boys. He merges in their
+popularity the fame of a poet which I do not think will always suffer
+that eclipse, for his poems show him to have looked deeply into the heart
+of common humanity, with a true and tender sense of it.
+
+Miss Larcom scarcely seemed to change from date to date in the generation
+that elapsed between the time I first saw her and the time I saw her
+last, a year or two before her death. A goodness looked out of her
+comely face, which made me think of the Madonna’s in Titian’s
+“Assumption,” and her whole aspect expressed a mild and friendly spirit
+which I find it hard to put in words. She was never of the fine world of
+literature; she dwelt where she was born, in that unfashionable Beverly
+which is not Beverly Farms, and was of a simple, sea-faring, God-fearing
+race, as she has told in one of the loveliest autobiographies I know, “A
+New England Girlhood.” She was the author of many poems, whose number
+she constantly enlarged, but she was chiefly, and will be most lastingly,
+famed for the one poem, ‘Hannah Binding Shoes’, which years before my
+days in Boston had made her so widely known. She never again struck so
+deep or so true a note; but if one has lodged such a note in the ear of
+time, it is enough; and if we are to speak of eternity, one might very
+well hold up one’s head in the fields of asphodel, if one could say to
+the great others there, “I wrote Hannah Binding Shoes.” Her poem is
+very, very sad, as all who have read it will remember; but Miss Larcom
+herself was above everything cheerful, and she had a laugh of mellow
+richness which willingly made itself heard. She was not only of true New
+England stock, and a Boston author by right of race, but she came up to
+that city every winter from her native town.
+
+By the same right and on the same terms, another New England poetess,
+whom I met those first days in Boston, was a Boston author. When I saw
+Celia Thaxter she was just beginning to make her effect with those poems
+and sketches which the sea sings and flashes through as it sings and
+flashes around the Isles of Shoals, her summer home, where her girlhood
+had been passed in a freedom as wild as the curlew’s. She was a most
+beautiful creature, still very young, with a slender figure, and an
+exquisite perfection of feature; she was in presence what her work was:
+fine, frank, finished. I do not know whether other witnesses of our
+literary history feel that the public has failed to keep her as fully in
+mind as her work merited; but I do not think there can be any doubt but
+our literature would be sensibly the poorer without her work. It is
+interesting to remember how closely she kept to her native field, and it
+is wonderful to consider how richly she made those sea-beaten rocks to
+blossom. Something strangely full and bright came to her verse from the
+mystical environment of the ocean, like the luxury of leaf and tint that
+it gave the narrower flower-plots of her native isles. Her gift, indeed,
+could not satisfy itself with the terms of one art alone, however varied,
+and she learned to express in color the thoughts and feelings impatient
+of the pallor of words.
+
+She remains in my memories of that far Boston a distinct and vivid
+personality; as the authoress of ‘Amber Gods’, and ‘In a Cellar’, and
+‘Circumstance’, and those other wild romantic tales, remains the gentle
+and somewhat evanescent presence I found her. Miss Prescott was now Mrs.
+Spofford, and her husband was a rising young politician of the day. It
+was his duties as member of the General Court that had brought them up
+from Newburyport to Boston for that first winter; and I remember that the
+evening when we met he was talking of their some time going to Italy that
+she might study for imaginative literature certain Italian cities he
+named. I have long since ceased to own those cities, but at the moment I
+felt a pang of expropriation which I concealed as well as I could; and
+now I heartily wish she could have fulfilled that purpose if it was a
+purpose, or realized that dream if it was only a dream. Perhaps,
+however, that sumptuous and glowing fancy of hers, which had taken the
+fancy of the young readers of that day, needed the cold New England
+background to bring out all its intensities of tint, all its splendors of
+light. Its effects were such as could not last, or could not be farther
+evolved; they were the expression of youth musing away from its
+environment and smitten with the glories of a world afar and beyond, the
+great world, the fine world, the impurpled world of romantic motives and
+passions. But for what they were, I can never think them other than what
+they appeared: the emanations of a rarely gifted and singularly poetic
+mind. I feel better than I can say how necessarily they were the
+emanations of a New England mind, and how to the subtler sense they must
+impart the pathos of revolt from the colorless rigidities which are the
+long result of puritanism in the physiognomy of New England life.
+
+Their author afterwards gave herself to the stricter study of this life
+in many tales and sketches which showed an increasing mastery; but they
+could not have the flush, the surprise, the delight of a young talent
+trying itself in a kind native and, so far as I know, peculiar to it.
+From time to time I still come upon a poem of hers which recalls that
+earlier strain of music, of color, and I am content to trust it for my
+abiding faith in the charm of things I have not read for thirty years.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+I speak of this one and that, as it happens, and with no thought of
+giving a complete prospect of literary Boston thirty years ago. I am
+aware that it will seem sparsely peopled in the effect I impart, and I
+would have the reader always keep in mind the great fames at Cambridge
+and at Concord, which formed so large a part of the celebrity of Boston.
+I would also like him to think of it as still a great town, merely, where
+every one knew every one else, and whose metropolitan liberation from
+neighborhood was just begun.
+
+Most distinctly of that yet uncitified Boston was the critic Edwin P.
+Whipple, whose sympathies were indefinitely wider than his traditions. He
+was a most generous lover of all that was excellent in literature; and
+though I suppose we should call him an old-fashioned critic now, I
+suspect it would be with no distinct sense of what is newer fashioned. He
+was certainly as friendly to what promised well in the younger men as he
+was to what was done well in their elders; and there was no one writing
+in his day whose virtues failed of his recognition, though it might
+happen that his foibles would escape Whipple’s censure. He wrote
+strenuously and of course conscientiously; his point of view was solely
+and always that which enabled him best to discern qualities. I doubt if
+he had any theory of criticism except to find out what was good in an
+author and praise it; and he rather blamed what was ethically bad than
+what was aesthetically bad. In this he was strictly of New England, and
+he was of New England in a certain general intelligence, which constantly
+grew with an interrogative habit of mind.
+
+He liked to talk to you of what he had found characteristic in your work,
+to analyze you to yourself; and the very modesty of the man, which made
+such a study impersonal as far as he was concerned, sometimes rendered
+him insensible to the sufferings of his subject. He had a keen
+perception of humor in others, but he had very little humor; he had a
+love of the beautiful in literature which was perhaps sometimes greater
+than his sense of it.
+
+I write from a cursory acquaintance with his work, not recently renewed.
+Of the presence of the man I have a vivider remembrance: a slight, short,
+ecclesiasticized figure in black; with a white neckcloth and a silk hat
+of strict decorum, and between the two a square face with square
+features, intensified in their regard by a pair of very large glasses,
+and the prominent, myopic eyes staring through them. He was a type of
+out-dated New England scholarship in these aspects, but in the hospitable
+qualities of his mind and heart, the sort of man to be kept fondly in the
+memory of all who ever knew him.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+Out of the vague of that far-off time another face and figure, as
+essentially New En&land as this, and yet so different, relieve
+themselves. Charles F. Browne, whose drollery wafted his pseudonym as
+far as the English speech could carry laughter, was a Westernized Yankee.
+He added an Ohio way of talking to the Maine way of thinking, and he so
+became a literary product of a rarer and stranger sort than our
+literature had otherwise known. He had gone from Cleveland to London,
+with intervals of New York and the lecture platform, four or five years
+before I saw him in Boston, shortly after I went there. We had met in
+Ohio, and he had personally explained to me the ducatless well-meaning of
+Vanity Fair in New York; but many men had since shaken the weary hand of
+Artemus Ward when I grasped it one day in front of the Tremont Temple. He
+did not recognize me, but he gave me at once a greeting of great
+impersonal cordiality, with “How do you do? When did you come?” and
+other questions that had no concern in them, till I began to dawn upon
+him through a cloud of other half remembered faces. Then he seized my
+hand and wrung it all over again, and repeated his friendly demands with
+an intonation that was now “Why, how are you; how are you?” for me alone.
+It was a bit of comedy, which had the fit pathetic relief of his
+impending doom: this was already stamped upon his wasted face, and his
+gay eyes had the death-look. His large, loose mouth was drawn, for all
+its laughter at the fact which he owned; his profile, which burlesqued.
+an eagle’s, was the profile of a drooping eagle; his lank length of limb
+trembled away with him when we parted. I did not see him again; I
+scarcely heard of him till I heard of his death, and this sad image
+remains with me of the humorist who first gave the world a taste of the
+humor which characterizes the whole American people.
+
+I was meeting all kinds of distinguished persons, in my relation to the
+magazine, and early that winter I met one who remains in my mind above
+all others a person of distinction. He was scarcely a celebrity, but he
+embodied certain social traits which were so characteristic of literary
+Boston that it could not be approached without their recognition. The
+Muses have often been acknowledged to be very nice young persons, but in
+Boston they were really ladies; in Boston literature was of good family
+and good society in a measure it has never been elsewhere. It might be
+said even that reform was of good family in Boston; and literature and
+reform equally shared the regard of Edmund Quincy, whose race was one of
+the most aristocratic in New England. I had known him by his novel of
+‘Wensley’ (it came so near being a first-rate novel), and by his Life of
+Josiah Quincy, then a new book, but still better by his Boston letters to
+the New York Tribune. These dealt frankly, in the old anti-slavery days
+between 1850 and 1860, with other persons of distinction in Boston, who
+did not see the right so clearly as Quincy did, or who at least let their
+interests darken them to the ugliness of slavery. Their fault was all
+the more comical because it was the error of men otherwise so correct, of
+characters so stainless, of natures so upright; and the Quincy letters
+got out of it all the fun there was in it. Quincy himself affected me as
+the finest patrician type I had ever met. He was charmingly handsome,
+with a nose of most fit aquilinity, smooth-shaven lips, “educated
+whiskers,” and perfect glasses; his manner was beautiful, his voice
+delightful, when at our first meeting he made me his reproaches in terms
+of lovely kindness for having used in my ‘Venetian Life’ the Briticism
+‘directly’ for ‘as soon as.’
+
+Lowell once told me that Quincy had never had any calling or profession,
+because when he found himself in the enjoyment of a moderate income on
+leaving college, he decided to be simply a gentleman. He was too much of
+a man to be merely that, and he was an abolitionist, a journalist, and
+for conscience’ sake a satirist. Of that political mood of society which
+he satirized was an eminent man whom it was also my good fortune to meet
+in my early days in Boston; and if his great sweetness and kindness had
+not instantly won my liking, I should still have been glad of the glimpse
+of the older and statelier Boston which my slight acquaintance with
+George Ticknor gave me. The historian of Spanish literature, the friend
+and biographer of Prescott, and a leading figure of the intellectual
+society of an epoch already closed, dwelt in the fine old square brick
+mansion which yet stands at the corner of Park Street and Beacon, though
+sunk now to a variety of business uses, and lamentably changed in aspect.
+The interior was noble, and there was an air of scholarly quiet and of
+lettered elegance in the library, where the host received his guests,
+which seemed to pervade the whole house, and which made its appeal to the
+imagination of one of them most potently. It seemed to me that to be
+master of such circumstance and keeping would be enough of life in a
+certain way; and it all lingers in my memory yet, as if it were one with
+the gentle courtesy which welcomed me.
+
+Among my fellow-guests one night was George S. Hillard, now a faded
+reputation, and even then a life defeated of the high expectation of its
+youth. I do not know whether his ‘Six Months in Italy’ still keeps
+itself in print; but it was a book once very well known; and he was
+perhaps the more gracious to me, as our host was, because of our common
+Italian background. He was of the old Silver-gray Whig society too, and
+I suppose that order of things imparted its tone to what I felt and saw
+in that place. The civil war had come and gone, and that order accepted
+the result if not with faith, then with patience. There were two young
+English noblemen there that night, who had been travelling in the South,
+and whose stories of the wretched conditions they had seen moved our host
+to some open misgiving. But the Englishmen had no question; in spite of
+all, they defended the accomplished fact, and when I ventured to say that
+now at least there could be a hope of better things, while the old order
+was only the perpetuation of despair, he mildly assented, with a gesture
+of the hand that waived the point, and a deeply sighed, “Perhaps;
+perhaps.”
+
+He was a presence of great dignity, which seemed to recall the past with
+a steadfast allegiance, and yet to relax itself towards the present in
+the wisdom of the accumulated years. His whole life had been passed in
+devotion to polite literature and in the society of the polite world; and
+he was a type of scholar such as only the circumstances of Boston could
+form. Those circumstances could alone form such another type as Quincy;
+and I wish I could have felt then as I do now the advantage of meeting
+them so contemporaneously.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+The historian of Spanish literature was an old man nearer eighty than
+seventy when I saw him, and I recall of him personally his dark tint, and
+the scholarly refinement of his clean-shaven face, which seemed to me
+rather English than American in character. He was quite exterior to the
+Atlantic group of writers, and had no interest in me as one of it.
+Literary Boston of that day was not a solidarity, as I soon perceived;
+and I understood that it was only in my quality of stranger that I saw
+the different phases of it. I should not be just to a vivid phase if I
+failed to speak of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe and the impulse of reform which
+she personified. I did not sympathize with this then so much as I do
+now, but I could appreciate it on the intellectual side. Once, many
+years later, I heard Mrs. Howe speak in public, and it seemed to me that
+she made one of the best speeches I had ever heard. It gave me for the
+first time a notion of what women might do in that sort if they entered
+public life; but when we met in those earlier days I was interested in
+her as perhaps our chief poetess. I believe she did not care much to
+speak of literature; she was alert for other meanings in life, and I
+remember how she once brought to book a youthful matron who had perhaps
+unduly lamented the hardships of housekeeping, with the sharp demand,
+“Child, where is your religion?” After the many years of an acquaintance
+which had not nearly so many meetings as years, it was pleasant to find
+her, at the latest, as strenuous as ever for the faith of works, and as
+eager to aid Stepniak as John Brown. In her beautiful old age she
+survives a certain literary impulse of Boston, but a still higher impulse
+of Boston she will not survive, for that will last while the city
+endures.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+The Cambridge men were curiously apart from others that formed the great
+New England group, and with whom in my earlier ignorance I had always
+fancied them mingling. Now and then I met Doctor Holmes at Longfellow’s
+table, but not oftener than now and then, and I never saw Emerson in
+Cambridge at all except at Longfellow’s funeral. In my first years on
+the Atlantic I sometimes saw him, when he would address me some grave,
+rather retrorsive civilities, after I had been newly introduced to him,
+as I had always to be on these occasions. I formed the belief that he
+did not care for me, either in my being or doing, and I am far from
+blaming him for that: on such points there might easily be two opinions,
+and I was myself often of the mind I imagined in him.
+
+If Emerson forgot me, it was perhaps because I was not of those qualities
+of things which even then, it was said, he could remember so much better
+than things themselves. In his later years I sometimes saw him in the
+Boston streets with his beautiful face dreamily set, as he moved like one
+to whose vision
+
+       “Heaven opens inward, chasms yawn,
+        Vast images in glimmering dawn,
+        Half shown, are broken and withdrawn.”
+
+It is known how before the end the eclipse became total and from moment
+to moment the record inscribed upon his mind was erased. Some years
+before he died I sat between him and Mrs. Rose Terry Cooke, at an
+‘Atlantic Breakfast’ where it was part of my editorial function to
+preside. When he was not asking me who she was, I could hear him asking
+her who I was. His great soul worked so independently of memory as we
+conceive it, and so powerfully and essentially, that one could not help
+wondering if; after all, our personal continuity, our identity hereafter,
+was necessarily trammeled up with our enduring knowledge of what happens
+here. His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event, and yet his
+character, his personality, his identity fully persisted.
+
+I do not know, whether the things that we printed for Emerson after his
+memory began to fail so utterly were the work of earlier years or not,
+but I know that they were of his best. There were certain poems which
+could not have been more electly, more exquisitely his, or fashioned with
+a keener and juster self-criticism. His vision transcended his time so
+far that some who have tired themselves out in trying to catch up with
+him have now begun to say that he was no seer at all; but I doubt if
+these form the last court of appeal in his case. In manner, he was very
+gentle, like all those great New England men, but he was cold, like many
+of them, to the new-comer, or to the old-comer who came newly. As I have
+elsewhere recorded, I once heard him speak critically of Hawthorne, and
+once he expressed his surprise at the late flowering brilliancy of
+Holmes’s gift in the Autocrat papers after all his friends supposed it
+had borne its best fruit. But I recall no mention of Longfellow, or
+Lowell, or Whittier from him. At a dinner where the talk glanced upon
+Walt Whitman he turned to me as perhaps representing the interest
+posterity might take in the matter, and referred to Whitman’s public use
+of his privately written praise as something altogether unexpected. He
+did not disown it or withdraw it, but seemed to feel (not indignantly)
+that there had been an abuse of it.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+The first time I saw Whittier was in Fields’s room at the publishing
+office, where I had come upon some editorial errand to my chief. He
+introduced me to the poet: a tall, spare figure in black of Quaker cut,
+with a keen, clean-shaven face, black hair, and vivid black eyes. It was
+just after his poem, ‘Snow Bound’, had made its great success, in the
+modest fashion of those days, and had sold not two hundred thousand but
+twenty thousand, and I tried to make him my compliment. I contrived to
+say that I could not tell him how much I liked it; and he received the
+inadequate expression of my feeling with doubtless as much effusion as he
+would have met something more explicit and abundant. If he had judged
+fit to take my contract off my hands in any way, I think he would have
+been less able to do so than any of his New England contemporaries. In
+him, as I have suggested, the Quaker calm was bound by the frosty
+Puritanic air, and he was doubly cold to the touch of the stranger,
+though he would thaw out to old friends, and sparkle in laugh and joke. I
+myself never got so far with him as to experience this geniality, though
+afterwards we became such friends as an old man and a young man could be
+who rarely met. Our better acquaintance began with some talk, at a second
+meeting, about Bayard Taylor’s ‘Story of Kennett’, which had then lately
+appeared, and which he praised for its fidelity to Quaker character in
+its less amiable aspects. No doubt I had made much of my own Quaker
+descent (which I felt was one of the few things I had to be proud of),
+and he therefore spoke the more frankly of those traits of brutality into
+which the primitive sincerity of the sect sometimes degenerated. He
+thought the habit of plain-speaking had to be jealously guarded to keep
+it from becoming rude-speaking, and he matched with stories of his own
+some things I had heard my father tell of Friends in the backwoods who
+were Foes to good manners.
+
+Whittier was one of the most generous of men towards the work of others,
+especially the work of a new man, and if I did anything that he liked, I
+could count upon him for cordial recognition. In the quiet of his
+country home at Danvers he apparently read all the magazines, and kept
+himself fully abreast of the literary movement, but I doubt if he so
+fully appreciated the importance of the social movement. Like some
+others of the great anti-slavery men, he seemed to imagine that mankind
+had won itself a clear field by destroying chattel slavery, and he had.
+no sympathy with those who think that the man who may any moment be out
+of work is industrially a slave. This is not strange; so few men last
+over from one reform to another that the wonder is that any should, not
+that one should not. Whittier was prophet for one great need of the
+divine to man, and he spoke his message with a fervor that at times was
+like the trembling of a flame, or the quivering of midsummer sunshine. It
+was hard to associate with the man as one saw him, still, shy, stiff, the
+passion of his verse. This imbued not only his antislavery utterances,
+but equally his ballads of the old witch and Quaker persecution, and
+flashed a far light into the dimness where his interrogations of Mystery
+pierced. Whatever doubt there can be of the fate of other New England
+poets in the great and final account, it seems to me that certain of
+these pieces make his place secure.
+
+There is great inequality in his work, and I felt this so strongly that
+when I came to have full charge of the Magazine, I ventured once to
+distinguish. He sent me a poem, and I had the temerity to return it, and
+beg him for something else. He magnanimously refrained from all show of
+offence, and after a while, when he had printed the poem elsewhere, he
+gave me another. By this time, I perceived that I had been wrong, not as
+to the poem returned, but as to my function regarding him and such as he.
+I had made my reflections, and never again did I venture to pass upon
+what contributors of his quality sent me. I took it and printed it, and
+praised the gods; and even now I think that with such men it was not my
+duty to play the censor in the periodical which they had made what it
+was. They had set it in authority over American literature, and it was
+not for me to put myself in authority over them. Their fame was in their
+own keeping, and it was not my part to guard it against them.
+
+After that experience I not only practised an eager acquiescence in their
+wish to reach the public through the Atlantic, but I used all the
+delicacy I was master of in bowing the way to them. Sometimes my utmost
+did not avail, or more strictly speaking it did not avail in one instance
+with Emerson. He had given me upon much entreaty a poem which was one of
+his greatest and best, but the proof-reader found a nominative at odds
+with its verb. We had some trouble in reconciling them, and some other
+delays, and meanwhile Doctor Holmes offered me a poem for the same
+number. I now doubted whether I should get Emerson’s poem back in time
+for it, but unluckily the proof did come back in time, and then I had to
+choose between my poets, or acquaint them with the state of the case, and
+let them choose what I should do. I really felt that Doctor Holmes had
+the right to precedence, since Emerson had withheld his proof so long
+that I could not count upon it; but I wrote to Emerson, and asked (as
+nearly as I can remember) whether he would consent to let me put his poem
+over to the next number, or would prefer to have it appear in the same
+number with Doctor Holmes’s; the subjects were cognate, and I had my
+misgivings. He wrote me back to “return the proofs and break up the
+forms.” I could not go to this iconoclastic extreme with the
+electrotypes of the magazine, but I could return the proofs. I did so,
+feeling that I had done my possible, and silently grieving that there
+could be such ire in heavenly minds.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+Emerson, as I say, I had once met in Cambridge, but Whittier never; and I
+have a feeling that poet as Cambridge felt him to be, she had her
+reservations concerning him. I cannot put these into words which would
+not oversay them, but they were akin to those she might have refined upon
+in regard to Mrs. Stowe. Neither of these great writers would have
+appeared to Cambridge of the last literary quality; their fame was with a
+world too vast to be the test that her own
+
+        “One entire and perfect crysolite”
+
+would have formed. Whittier in fact had not arrived at the clear
+splendor of his later work without some earlier turbidity; he was still
+from time to time capable of a false rhyme, like morn and dawn. As for
+the author of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ her syntax was such a snare to her that
+it sometimes needed the combined skill of all the proof-readers and the
+assistant editor to extricate her. Of course, nothing was ever written
+into her work, but in changes of diction, in correction of solecisms, in
+transposition of phrases, the text was largely rewritten on the margin of
+her proofs. The soul of her art was present, but the form was so often
+absent, that when it was clothed on anew, it would have been hard to say
+whose cut the garment was of in many places. In fact, the proof-reading
+of the ‘Atlantic Monthly’ was something almost fearfully scrupulous and
+perfect. The proofs were first read by the under proof-reader in the
+printing-office; then the head reader passed them to me perfectly clean
+as to typography, with his own abundant and most intelligent comments on
+the literature; and then I read them, making what changes I chose, and
+verifying every quotation, every date, every geographical and
+biographical name, every foreign word to the last accent, every technical
+and scientific term. Where it was possible or at all desirable the proof
+was next submitted to the author. When it came back to me, I revised it,
+accepting or rejecting the author’s judgment according as he was entitled
+by his ability and knowledge or not to have them. The proof now went to
+the printers for correction; they sent it again to the head reader, who
+carefully revised it and returned it again to me. I read it a second
+time, and it was again corrected. After this it was revised in the
+office and sent to the stereotyper, from whom it came to the head reader
+for a last revision in the plates.
+
+It would not do to say how many of the first American writers owed their
+correctness in print to the zeal of our proof-reading, but I may say that
+there were very few who did not owe something. The wisest and ablest
+were the most patient and grateful, like Mrs. Stowe, under correction; it
+was only the beginners and the more ignorant who were angry; and almost
+always the proof-reading editor had his way on disputed points. I look
+back now, with respectful amazement at my proficiency in detecting the
+errors of the great as well as the little. I was able to discover
+mistakes even in the classical quotations of the deeply lettered Sumner,
+and I remember, in the earliest years of my service on the Atlantic,
+waiting in this statesman’s study amidst the prints and engravings that
+attested his personal resemblance to Edmund Burke, with his proofs in my
+hand and my heart in my mouth, to submit my doubts of his Latinity. I
+forget how he received them; but he was not a very gracious person.
+
+Mrs. Stowe was a gracious person, and carried into age the inalienable
+charm of a woman who must have been very, charming earlier. I met her
+only at the Fieldses’ in Boston, where one night I witnessed a
+controversy between her and Doctor Holmes concerning homoeopathy and
+allopathy which lasted well through dinner. After this lapse of time, I
+cannot tell how the affair ended, but I feel sure of the liking with
+which Mrs. Stowe inspired me. There was something very simple, very
+motherly in her, and something divinely sincere. She was quite the
+person to take ‘au grand serieux’ the monstrous imaginations of Lady
+Byron’s jealousy and to feel it on her conscience to make public report
+of them when she conceived that the time had come to do so.
+
+In Francis Parkman I knew much later than in some others a
+differentiation of the New England type which was not less
+characteristic. He, like so many other Boston men of letters, was of
+patrician family, and of those easy fortunes which Clio prefers her sons
+to be of; but he paid for these advantages by the suffering in which he
+wrought at what is, I suppose, our greatest history. He wrought at it
+piecemeal, and sometimes only by moments, when the terrible head aches
+which tormented him, and the disorder of the heart which threatened his
+life, allowed him a brief respite for the task which was dear to him. He
+must have been more than a quarter of a century in completing it, and in
+this time, as he once told me, it had given him a day-laborer’s wages;
+but of course money was the least return he wished from it. I read the
+regularly successive volumes of ‘The Jesuits in North America, The Old
+Regime in Canada’, the ‘Wolfe and Montcalm’, and the others that went to
+make up the whole history with a sufficiently noisy enthusiasm, and our
+acquaintance began by his expressing his gratification with the praises
+of them that I had put in print. We entered into relations as
+contributor and editor, and I know that he was pleased with my eagerness
+to get as many detachable chapters from the book in hand as he could give
+me for the magazine, but he was of too fine a politeness to make this the
+occasion of his first coming to see me. He had walked out to Cambridge,
+where I then lived, in pursuance of a regimen which, I believe, finally
+built up his health; that it was unsparing, I can testify from my own
+share in one of his constitutionals in Boston, many years later.
+
+His experience in laying the groundwork for his history, and his
+researches in making it thorough, were such as to have liberated him to
+the knowledge of other manners and ideals, but he remained strictly a
+Bostonian, and as immutably of the Boston social and literary faith as
+any I knew in that capital of accomplished facts. He had lived like an
+Indian among the wild Western tribes; he consorted with the Canadian
+archaeologists in their mousings among the colonial archives of their
+fallen state; every year he went to Quebec or Paris to study the history
+of New France in the original documents; European society was open to him
+everywhere; but he had those limitations which I nearly always found in
+the Boston men, I remember his talking to me of ‘The Rise of Silas
+Lapham’, in a somewhat troubled and uncertain strain, and interpreting
+his rise as the achievement of social recognition, without much or at all
+liking it or me for it. I did not think it my part to point out that I
+had supposed the rise to be a moral one; and later I fell under his
+condemnation for certain high crimes and misdemeanors I had been guilty
+of against a well-known ideal in fiction. These in fact constituted
+lese-majesty of romanticism, which seemed to be disproportionately dear
+to a man who was in his own way trying to tell the truth of human nature
+as I was in mine. His displeasures passed, however, and my last meeting
+with our greatest historian, as I think him, was of unalloyed
+friendliness. He came to me during my final year in Boston for nothing
+apparently but to tell me of his liking for a book of mine describing
+boy-life in Southern Ohio a half-century ago. He wished to talk about
+many points of this, which he found the same as his own boylife in the
+neighborhood of Boston; and we could agree that the life of the
+Anglo-Saxon boy was pretty much the same everywhere. He had helped
+himself into my apartment with a crutch, but I do not remember how he had
+fallen lame. It was the end of his long walks, I believe, and not long
+afterwards I had the grief to read of his death. I noticed that perhaps
+through his enforced quiet, he had put on weight; his fine face was full;
+whereas when I first knew him he was almost delicately thin of figure and
+feature. He was always of a distinguished presence, and his face had a
+great distinction.
+
+It had not the appealing charm I found in the face of James Parton,
+another historian I knew earlier in my Boston days. I cannot say how
+much his books, once so worthily popular, are now known but I have an
+abiding sense of their excellence. I have not read the ‘Life of
+Voltaire’, which was the last, but all the rest, from the first, I have
+read, and if there are better American biographies than those of Franklin
+or of Jefferson, I could not say where to find them. The Greeley and the
+Burr were younger books, and so was the Jackson, and they were not nearly
+so good; but to all the author had imparted the valuable humanity in
+which he abounded. He was never of the fine world of literature, the
+world that sniffs and sneers, and abashes the simpler-hearted reader. But
+he was a true artist, and English born as he was, he divined American
+character as few Americans have done. He was a man of eminent courage,
+and in the days when to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast, he
+had the heart to say of the Mysteries, that he did not know. He outlived
+the condemnation that this brought, and I think that no man ever came
+near him without in some measure loving him. To me he was of a most
+winning personality, which his strong, gentle face expressed, and a cast
+in the eye which he could not bring to bear directly upon his vis-a-vis,
+endeared. I never met him without wishing more of his company, for he
+seldom failed to say something to whatever was most humane and most
+modern in me. Our last meeting was at Newburyport, whither he had long
+before removed from New York, and where in the serene atmosphere of the
+ancient Puritan town he found leisure and inspiration for his work. He
+was not then engaged upon any considerable task, and he had aged and
+broken somewhat. But the old geniality, the old warmth glowed in him,
+and made a summer amidst the storm of snow that blinded the wintry air
+without. A new light had then lately come into my life, by which I saw
+all things that did not somehow tell for human brotherhood dwarfish and
+ugly, and he listened, as I imagined, to what I had to say with the
+tolerant sympathy of a man who has been a long time thinking those
+things, and views with a certain amusement the zeal of the fresh
+discoverer.
+
+There was yet another historian in Boston, whose acquaintance I made
+later than either Parkman’s or Parton’s, and whose very recent death
+leaves me with the grief of a friend. No ones indeed, could meet John
+Codman Ropes without wishing to be his friend, or without finding a
+friend in him. He had his likes and his dislikes, but he could have had
+no enmities except for evil and meanness. I never knew a man of higher
+soul, of sweeter nature, and his whole life was a monument of character.
+It cannot wound him now to speak of the cruel deformity which came upon
+him in his boyhood, and haunted all his after days with suffering. His
+gentle face showed the pain which is always the part of the hunchback,
+but nothing else in him confessed a sense of his affliction, and the
+resolute activity of his mind denied it in every way. He was, as is well
+known, a very able lawyer, in full practice, while he was making his
+studies of military history, and winning recognition for almost unique
+insight and thoroughness in that direction, though I believe that when he
+came to embody the results in those extraordinary volumes recording the
+battles of our civil war, he retired from the law in some measure. He
+knew these battles more accurately than the generals who fought them, and
+he was of a like proficiency in the European wars from the time of
+Napoleon down to our own time. I have heard a story, which I cannot
+vouch for, that when foreknowledge of his affliction, at the outbreak of
+our civil war, forbade him to be a soldier, he became a student of
+soldiership, and wreaked in that sort the passion of his most gallant
+spirit. But whether this was true or not, it is certain that he pursued
+the study with a devotion which never blinded him to the atrocity of war.
+Some wars he could excuse and even justify, but for any war that seemed
+wanton or aggressive, he had only abhorrence.
+
+The last summer of a score that I had known him, we sat on the veranda of
+his cottage at York Harbor, and looked out over the moonlit sea, and he
+talked of the high and true things, with the inextinguishable zest for
+the inquiry which I always found in him, though he was then feeling the
+approaches of the malady which was so soon to end all groping in these
+shadows for him. He must have faced the fact with the same courage and
+the same trust with which he faced all facts. From the first I found him
+a deeply religious man, not only in the ecclesiastical sense, but in the
+more mystical meanings of the word, and he kept his faith as he kept his
+youth to the last. Every one who knew him, knows how young he was in
+heart, and how he liked to have those that were young in years about him.
+He wished to have his house in Boston, as well as his cottage at York,
+full of young men and young girls, whose joy of life he made his own, and
+whose society he preferred to his contemporaries’. One could not blame
+him for that, or for seeking the sun, wherever he could, but it would be
+a false notion of him to suppose that his sympathies were solely or
+chiefly with the happy. In every sort, as I knew him, he was fine and
+good. The word is not worthy of him, after some of its uses and
+associations, but if it were unsmutched by these, and whitened to its
+primitive significance, I should say he was one of the most perfect
+gentlemen I ever knew.
+
+
+
+
+OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+Elsewhere we literary folk are apt to be such a common lot, with
+tendencies here and there to be a shabby lot; we arrive from all sorts of
+unexpected holes and corners of the earth, remote, obscure; and at the
+best we do so often come up out of the ground; but at Boston we were of
+ascertained and noted origin, and good part of us dropped from the skies.
+Instead of holding horses before the doors of theatres; or capping verses
+at the plough-tail; or tramping over Europe with nothing but a flute in
+the pocket; or walking up to the metropolis with no luggage but the MS.
+of a tragedy; or sleeping in doorways or under the arches of bridges; or
+serving as apothecaries’ ‘prentices--we were good society from the
+beginning. I think this was none the worse for us, and it was vastly the
+better for good society.
+
+Literature in Boston, indeed, was so respectable, and often of so high a
+lineage, that to be a poet was not only to be good society, but almost to
+be good family. If one names over the men who gave Boston her supremacy
+in literature during that Unitarian harvest-time of the old Puritanic
+seed-time which was her Augustan age, one names the people who were and
+who had been socially first in the city ever since the self-exile of the
+Tories at the time of the Revolution. To say Prescott, Motley, Parkman,
+Lowell, Norton, Higginson, Dana, Emerson, Channing, was to say patrician,
+in the truest and often the best sense, if not the largest. Boston was
+small, but these were of her first citizens, and their primacy, in its
+way, was of the same quality as that, say, of the chief families of
+Venice. But these names can never have the effect for the stranger that
+they had for one to the manner born. I say had, for I doubt whether in
+Boston they still mean all that they once meant, and that their
+equivalents meant in science, in law, in politics. The most famous, if
+not the greatest of all the literary men of Boston, I have not mentioned
+with them, for Longfellow was not of the place, though by his sympathies
+and relations he became of it; and I have not mentioned Oliver Wendell
+Holmes, because I think his name would come first into the reader’s
+thought with the suggestion of social quality in the humanities.
+
+Holmes was of the Brahminical caste which his humorous recognition
+invited from its subjectivity in the New England consciousness into the
+light where all could know it and own it, and like Longfellow he was
+allied to the patriciate of Boston by the most intimate ties of life. For
+a long time, for the whole first period of his work, he stood for that
+alone, its tastes, its prejudices, its foibles even, and when he came to
+stand in his ‘second period, for vastly, for infinitely more, and to make
+friends with the whole race, as few men have ever done, it was always, I
+think, with a secret shiver of doubt, a backward look of longing, and an
+eye askance. He was himself perfectly aware of this at times, and would
+mark his several misgivings with a humorous sense of the situation. He
+was essentially too kind to be of a narrow world, too human to be finally
+of less than humanity, too gentle to be of the finest gentility. But
+such limitations as he had were in the direction I have hinted, or
+perhaps more than hinted; and I am by no means ready to make a mock of
+them, as it would be so easy to do for some reasons that he has himself
+suggested. To value aright the affection which the old Bostonian had for
+Boston one must conceive of something like the patriotism of men in the
+times when a man’s city was a man’s country, something Athenian,
+something Florentine. The war that nationalized us liberated this love
+to the whole country, but its first tenderness remained still for Boston,
+and I suppose a Bostonian still thinks of himself first as a Bostonian
+and then as an American, in a way that no New-Yorker could deal with
+himself. The rich historical background dignifies and ennobles the
+intense public spirit of the place, and gives it a kind of personality.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+In literature Doctor Holmes survived all the Bostonians who had given the
+city her primacy in letters, but when I first knew him there was no
+apparent ground for questioning it. I do not mean now the time when I
+visited New England, but when I came to live near Boston, and to begin
+the many happy years which I spent in her fine, intellectual air. I found
+time to run in upon him, while I was there arranging to take my place on
+the Atlantic Monthly, and I remember that in this brief moment with him
+he brought me to book about some vaunting paragraph in the ‘Nation’
+claiming the literary primacy for New York. He asked me if I knew who
+wrote it, and I was obliged to own that I had written it myself, when
+with the kindness he always showed me he protested against my position.
+To tell the truth, I do not think now I had any very good reasons for it,
+and I certainly could urge none that would stand against his. I could
+only fall back upon the saving clause that this primacy was claimed
+mainly if not wholly for New York in the future. He was willing to leave
+me the connotations of prophecy, but I think he did even this out of
+politeness rather than conviction, and I believe he had always a
+sensitiveness where Boston was concerned, which could not seem ungenerous
+to any generous mind. Whatever lingering doubt of me he may have had,
+with reference to Boston, seemed to satisfy itself when several years
+afterwards he happened to speak of a certain character in an early novel
+of mine, who was not quite the kind of Bostonian one could wish to be.
+The thing came up in talk with another person, who had referred to my
+Bostonian, and the doctor had apparently made his acquaintance in the
+book, and not liked him. “I understood, of course,” he said, “that he
+was a Bostonian, not the Bostonian,” and I could truthfully answer that
+this was by all means my own understanding too.
+
+His fondness for his city, which no one could appreciate better than
+myself, I hope, often found expression in a burlesque excess in his
+writings, and in his talk perhaps oftener still. Hard upon my return
+from Venice I had a half-hour with him in his old study on Charles
+Street, where he still lived in 1865, and while I was there a young man
+came in for the doctor’s help as a physician, though he looked so very
+well, and was so lively and cheerful, that I have since had my doubts
+whether he had not made a pretext for a glimpse of him as the Autocrat.
+The doctor took him upon his word, however, and said he had been so long
+out of practice that he could not do anything for him, but he gave him
+the address of another physician, somewhere near Washington Street. “And
+if you don’t know where Washington Street is,” he said, with a gay burst
+at a certain vagueness which had come into the young man’s face, “you
+don’t know anything.”
+
+We had been talking of Venice, and what life was like there, and he made
+me tell him in some detail. He was especially interested in what I had
+to say of the minute subdivision and distribution of the necessaries, the
+small coins, and the small values adapted to their purchase, the
+intensely retail character, in fact, of household provisioning; and I
+could see how he pleased himself in formulating the theory that the
+higher a civilization the finer the apportionment of the demands and
+supplies. The ideal, he said, was a civilization in which you could buy
+two cents’ worth of beef, and a divergence from this standard was towards
+barbarism.
+
+The secret of the man who is universally interesting is that he is
+universally interested, and this was, above all, the secret of the charm
+that Doctor Holmes had for every one. No doubt he knew it, for what that
+most alert intelligence did not know of itself was scarcely worth
+knowing. This knowledge was one of his chief pleasures, I fancy; he
+rejoiced in the consciousness which is one of the highest attributes of
+the highly organized man, and he did not care for the consequences in
+your mind, if you were so stupid as not to take him aright. I remember
+the delight Henry James, the father of the novelist, had in reporting to
+me the frankness of the doctor, when he had said to him, “Holmes, you are
+intellectually the most alive man I ever knew.” “I am, I am,” said the
+doctor. “From the crown of my head to the sole of my foot, I’m alive,
+I’m alive!” Any one who ever saw him will imagine the vivid relish he
+had in recognizing the fact. He could not be with you a moment without
+shedding upon you the light of his flashing wit, his radiant humor, and
+he shone equally upon the rich and poor in mind. His gaiety of heart
+could not withhold itself from any chance of response, but he did wish
+always to be fully understood, and to be liked by those he liked. He
+gave his liking cautiously, though, for the affluence of his sympathies
+left him without the reserves of colder natures, and he had to make up
+for these with careful circumspection. He wished to know the character
+of the person who made overtures to his acquaintance, for he was aware
+that his friendship lay close to it; he wanted to be sure that he was a
+nice person, and though I think he preferred social quality in his
+fellow-man, he did not refuse himself to those who had merely a sweet and
+wholesome humanity. He did not like anything that tasted or smelt of
+Bohemianism in the personnel of literature, but he did not mind the scent
+of the new-ploughed earth, or even of the barn-yard. I recall his
+telling me once that after two younger brothers-in-letters had called
+upon him in the odor of an habitual beeriness and smokiness, he opened
+the window; and the very last time I saw him he remembered at eighty-five
+the offence he had found on his first visit to New York, when a
+metropolitan poet had asked him to lunch in a basement restaurant.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+He seemed not to mind, however, climbing to the little apartment we had
+in Boston when we came there in 1866, and he made this call upon us in
+due form, bringing Mrs. Holmes with him as if to accent the recognition
+socially. We were then incredibly young, much younger than I find people
+ever are nowadays, and in the consciousness of our youth we felt, to the
+last exquisite value of the fact, what it was to have the Autocrat come
+to see us; and I believe he was not displeased to perceive this; he liked
+to know that you felt his quality in every way. That first winter,
+however, I did not see him often, and in the spring we went to live in
+Cambridge, and thereafter I met him chiefly at Longfellow’s, or when I
+came in to dine at the Fieldses’, in Boston. It was at certain meetings
+of the Dante Club, when Longfellow read aloud his translation for
+criticism, and there was supper later, that one saw the doctor; and his
+voice was heard at the supper rather than at the criticism, for he was no
+Italianate. He always seemed to like a certain turn of the talk toward
+the mystical, but with space for the feet on a firm ground of fact this
+side of the shadows; when it came to going over among them, and laying
+hold of them with the band of faith, as if they were substance, he was
+not of the excursion. It is well known how fervent, I cannot say devout,
+a spiritualist Longfellow’s brother-in-law, Appleton, was; and when he
+was at the table too, it took all the poet’s delicate skill to keep him
+and the Autocrat from involving themselves in a cataclysmal controversy
+upon the matter of manifestations. With Doctor Holmes the inquiry was
+inquiry, to the last, I believe, and the burden of proof was left to the
+ghosts and their friends. His attitude was strictly scientific; he
+denied nothing, but he expected the supernatural to be at least as
+convincing as the natural.
+
+There was a time in his history when the popular ignorance classed him
+with those who were once rudely called infidels; but the world has since
+gone so fast and so far that the mind he was of concerning religious
+belief would now be thought religious by a good half of the religious
+world. It is true that he had and always kept a grudge against the
+ancestral Calvinism which afflicted his youth; and he was through all
+rises and lapses of opinion essentially Unitarian; but of the honest
+belief of any one, I am sure he never felt or spoke otherwise than most
+tolerantly, most tenderly. As often as he spoke of religion, and his
+talk tended to it very often, I never heard an irreligious word from him,
+far less a scoff or sneer at religion; and I am certain that this was not
+merely because he would have thought it bad taste, though undoubtedly he
+would have thought it bad taste; I think it annoyed, it hurt him, to be
+counted among the iconoclasts, and he would have been profoundly grieved
+if he could have known how widely this false notion of him once
+prevailed. It can do no harm at this late day to impart from the secrets
+of the publishing house the fact that a supposed infidelity in the tone
+of his story The Guardian Angel cost the Atlantic Monthly many
+subscribers. Now the tone of that story would not be thought even mildly
+agnostic, I fancy; and long before his death the author had outlived the
+error concerning him.
+
+It was not the best of his stories, by any means, and it would not be too
+harsh to say that it was the poorest. His novels all belonged to an
+order of romance which was as distinctly his own as the form of
+dramatized essay which he invented in the Autocrat. If he did not think
+poorly of them, he certainly did not think too proudly, and I heard him
+quote with relish the phrase of a lady who had spoken of them to him as
+his “medicated novels.” That, indeed, was perhaps what they were; a
+faint, faint odor of the pharmacopoeia clung to their pages; their magic
+was scientific. He knew this better than any one else, of course, and if
+any one had said it in his turn he would hardly have minded it. But what
+he did mind was the persistent misinterpretation of his intention in
+certain quarters where he thought he had the right to respectful
+criticism in stead of the succession of sneers that greeted the
+successive numbers of his story; and it was no secret that he felt the
+persecution keenly. Perhaps he thought that he had already reached that
+time in his literary life when he was a fact rather than a question, and
+when reasons and not feelings must have to do with his acceptance or
+rejection. But he had to live many years yet before he reached this
+state. When he did reach it, happily a good while before his death, I do
+not believe any man ever enjoyed the like condition more. He loved to
+feel himself out of the fight, with much work before him still, but with
+nothing that could provoke ill-will in his activities. He loved at all
+times to take himself objectively, if I may so express my sense of a
+mental attitude that misled many. As I have said before, he was
+universally interested, and he studied the universe from himself. I do
+not know how one is to study it otherwise; the impersonal has really no
+existence; but with all his subtlety and depth he was of a make so
+simple, of a spirit so naive, that he could not practise the feints some
+use to conceal that interest in self which, after all, every one knows is
+only concealed. He frankly and joyously made himself the starting-point
+in all his inquest of the hearts and minds of other men, but so far from
+singling himself out in this, and standing apart in it, there never was
+any one who was more eagerly and gladly your fellow-being in the things
+of the soul.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+In the things of the world, he had fences, and looked at some people
+through palings and even over the broken bottles on the tops of walls;
+and I think he was the loser by this, as well as they. But then I think
+all fences are bad, and that God has made enough differences between men;
+we need not trouble ourselves to multiply them. Even behind his fences,
+however, Holmes had a heart kind for the outsiders, and I do not believe
+any one came into personal relations with him who did not experience this
+kindness. In that long and delightful talk I had with him on my return
+from Venice (I can praise the talk because it was mainly his), we spoke
+of the status of domestics in the Old World, and how fraternal the
+relation of high and low was in Italy, while in England, between master
+and man, it seemed without acknowledgment of their common humanity.
+“Yes,” he said, “I always felt as if English servants expected to be
+trampled on; but I can’t do that. If they want to be trampled on, they
+must get some one else.” He thought that our American way was infinitely
+better; and I believe that in spite of the fences there was always an
+instinctive impulse with him to get upon common ground with his
+fellow-man. I used to notice in the neighborhood cabman who served our
+block on Beacon Street a sort of affectionate reverence for the Autocrat,
+which could have come from nothing but the kindly terms between them; if
+you went to him when he was engaged to Doctor Holmes, he told you so with
+a sort of implication in his manner that the thought of anything else for
+the time was profanation. The good fellow who took him his drives about
+the Beverly and Manchester shores seemed to be quite in the joke of the
+doctor’s humor, and within the bounds of his personal modesty and his
+functional dignity permitted himself a smile at the doctor’s sallies,
+when you stood talking with him, or listening to him at the
+carriage-side.
+
+The civic and social circumstance that a man values himself on is
+commonly no part of his value, and certainly no part of his greatness.
+Rather, it is the very thing that limits him, and I think that Doctor
+Holmes appeared in the full measure of his generous personality to those
+who did not and could not appreciate his circumstance, and not to those
+who formed it, and who from life-long association were so dear and
+comfortable to him. Those who best knew how great a man he was were
+those who came from far to pay him their duty, or to thank him for some
+help they had got from his books, or to ask his counsel or seek his
+sympathy. With all such he was most winningly tender, most intelligently
+patient. I suppose no great author was ever more visited by letter and
+in person than he, or kept a faithfuler conscience for his guests. With
+those who appeared to him in the flesh he used a miraculous tact, and I
+fancy in his treatment of all the physician native in him bore a
+characteristic part. No one seemed to be denied access to him, but it
+was after a moment of preparation that one was admitted, and any one who
+was at all sensitive must have felt from the first moment in his presence
+that there could be no trespassing in point of time. If now and then
+some insensitive began to trespass, there was a sliding-scale of
+dismissal that never failed of its work, and that really saved the author
+from the effect of intrusion. He was not bored because he would not be.
+
+I transfer at random the impressions of many years to my page, and I
+shall not try to observe a chronological order in these memories. Vivid
+among them is that of a visit which I paid him with Osgood the publisher,
+then newly the owner of the Atlantic Monthly, when I had newly become the
+sole editor. We wished to signalize our accession to the control of the
+magazine by a stroke that should tell most in the public eye, and we
+thought of asking Doctor Holmes to do something again in the manner of
+the Autocrat and the Professor at the Breakfast Table. Some letters had
+passed between him and the management concerning our wish, and then
+Osgood thought that it would be right and fit for us to go to him in
+person. He proposed the visit, and Doctor Holmes received us with a mind
+in which he had evidently formulated all his thoughts upon the matter.
+His main question was whether at his age of sixty years a man was
+justified in seeking to recall a public of the past, or to create a new
+public in the present. He seemed to have looked the ground over not only
+with a personal interest in the question, but with a keen scientific zest
+for it as something which it was delightful to consider in its generic
+relations; and I fancy that the pleasure of this inquiry more than
+consoled him for such pangs of misgiving as he must have had in the
+personal question. As commonly happens in the solution of such problems,
+it was not solved; he was very willing to take our minds upon it, and to
+incur the risk, if we thought it well and were willing to share it.
+
+We came away rejoicing, and the new series began with the new year
+following. It was by no means the popular success that we had hoped; not
+because the author had not a thousand new things to say, or failed to say
+them with the gust and freshness of his immortal youth, but because it
+was not well to disturb a form associated in the public mind with an
+achievement which had become classic. It is of the Autocrat of the
+Breakfast Table that people think, when they think of the peculiar
+species of dramatic essay which the author invented, and they think also
+of the Professor at the Breakfast Table, because he followed so soon; but
+the Poet at the Breakfast Table came so long after that his advent
+alienated rather than conciliated liking. Very likely, if the Poet had
+come first he would have had no second place in the affections of his
+readers, for his talk was full of delightful matter; and at least one of
+the poems which graced each instalment was one of the finest and greatest
+that Doctor Holmes ever wrote. I mean “Homesick in Heaven,” which seems
+to me not only what I have said, but one of the most important, the most
+profoundly pathetic in the language. Indeed, I do not know any other
+that in the same direction goes so far with suggestion so penetrating.
+The other poems were mainly of a cast which did not win; the metaphysics
+in them were too much for the human interest, and again there rose a
+foolish clamor of the creeds against him on account of them. The great
+talent, the beautiful and graceful fancy, the eager imagination of the
+Autocrat could not avail in this third attempt, and I suppose the Poet at
+the Breakfast Table must be confessed as near a failure as Doctor Holmes
+could come. It certainly was so in the magazine which the brilliant
+success of the first had availed to establish in the high place the
+periodical must always hold in the history of American literature. Lowell
+was never tired of saying, when he recurred to the first days of his
+editorship, that the magazine could never have gone at all without the
+Autocrat papers. He was proud of having insisted upon Holmes’s doing
+something for the new venture, and he was fond of recalling the author’s
+misgivings concerning his contributions, which later repeated themselves
+with too much reason, though not with the reason that was in his own
+mind.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+He lived twenty-five years after that self-question at sixty, and after
+eighty he continued to prove that threescore was not the limit of a man’s
+intellectual activity or literary charm. During all that time the work
+he did in mere quantity was the work that a man in the prime of life
+might well have been vain of doing, and it was of a quality not less
+surprising. If I asked him with any sort of fair notice I could rely
+upon him always for something for the January number, and throughout the
+year I could count upon him for those occasional pieces in which he so
+easily excelled all former writers of occasional verse, and which he
+liked to keep from the newspapers for the magazine. He had a pride in
+his promptness with copy, and you could always trust his promise. The
+printer’s toe never galled the author’s kibe in his case; he wished to
+have an early proof, which he corrected fastidiously, but not overmuch,
+and he did not keep it long. He had really done all his work in the
+manuscript, which came print-perfect and beautifully clear from his pen,
+in that flowing, graceful hand which to the last kept a suggestion of the
+pleasure he must have had in it. Like all wise contributors, he was not
+only patient, but very glad of all the queries and challenges that
+proof-reader and editor could accumulate on the margin of his proofs, and
+when they were both altogether wrong he was still grateful. In one of
+his poems there was some Latin-Quarter French, which our collective
+purism questioned, and I remember how tender of us he was in maintaining
+that in his Parisian time, at least, some ladies beyond the Seine said
+“Eh, b’en,” instead of “Eh, bien.” He knew that we must be always on the
+lookout for such little matters, and he would not wound our ignorance. I
+do not think any one enjoyed praise more than he. Of course he would not
+provoke it, but if it came of itself, he would not deny himself the
+pleasure, as long as a relish of it remained. He used humorously to
+recognize his delight in it, and to say of the lecture audiences which in
+earlier times hesitated applause, “Why don’t they give me three times
+three? I can stand it!” He himself gave in the generous fulness he
+desired. He did not praise foolishly or dishonestly, though he would
+spare an open dislike; but when a thing pleased him he knew how to say so
+cordially and skilfully, so that it might help as well as delight. I
+suppose no great author has tried more sincerely and faithfully to
+befriend the beginner than he; and from time to time he would commend
+something to me that he thought worth looking at, but never insistently.
+In certain cases, where he had simply to ease a burden, from his own to
+the editorial shoulders, he would ask that the aspirant might be
+delicately treated. There might be personal reasons for this, but
+usually his kindness of heart moved him. His tastes had their
+geographical limit, but his sympathies were boundless, and the hopeless
+creature for whom he interceded was oftener remote from Boston and New
+England than otherwise.
+
+It seems to me that he had a nature singularly affectionate, and that it
+was this which was at fault if he gave somewhat too much of himself to
+the celebration of the Class of ‘29, and all the multitude of Boston
+occasions, large and little, embalmed in the clear amber of his verse,
+somewhat to the disadvantage of the amber. If he were asked he could not
+deny the many friendships and fellowships which united in the asking; the
+immediate reclame from these things was sweet to him; but he loved to
+comply as much as he loved to be praised. In the pleasure he got he
+could feel himself a prophet in his own country, but the country which
+owned him prophet began perhaps to feel rather too much as if it owned
+him, and did not prize his vaticinations at all their worth. Some polite
+Bostonians knew him chiefly on this side, and judged him to their own
+detriment from it.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+After we went to live in Cambridge, my life and the delight in it were so
+wholly there that in ten years I had hardly been in as many Boston
+houses. As I have said, I met Doctor Holmes at the Fieldses’, and at
+Longfellow’s, when he came out to a Dante supper, which was not often,
+and somewhat later at the Saturday Club dinners. One parlous time at the
+publisher’s I have already recalled, when Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe and
+the Autocrat clashed upon homeopathy, and it required all the tact of the
+host to lure them away from the dangerous theme. As it was, a battle
+waged in the courteous forms of Fontenoy, went on pretty well through the
+dinner, and it was only over the coffee that a truce was called. I need
+not say which was heterodox, or that each had a deep and strenuous
+conscience in the matter. I have always felt it a proof of his extreme
+leniency to me, unworthy, that the doctor was able to tolerate my own
+defection from the elder faith in medicine; and I could not feel his
+kindness less caressing because I knew it a concession to an infirmity.
+He said something like, After all a good physician was the great matter;
+and I eagerly turned his clemency to praise of our family doctor.
+
+He was very constant at the Saturday Club, as long as his strength
+permitted, and few of its members missed fewer of its meetings. He
+continued to sit at its table until the ghosts of Hawthorne, of Agassiz,
+of Emerson, of Longfellow, of Lowell, out of others less famous, bore him
+company there among the younger men in the flesh. It must have been very
+melancholy, but nothing could deeply cloud his most cheerful spirit. His
+strenuous interest in life kept him alive to all the things of it, after
+so many of his friends were dead. The questions which he was wont to
+deal with so fondly, so wisely, the great problems of the soul, were all
+the more vital, perhaps, because the personal concern in them was
+increased by the translation to some other being of the men who had so
+often tried with him to fathom them here. The last time I was at that
+table he sat alone there among those great memories; but he was as gay as
+ever I saw him; his wit sparkled, his humor gleamed; the poetic touch was
+deft and firm as of old; the serious curiosity, the instant sympathy
+remained. To the witness he was pathetic, but to himself he could only
+have been interesting, as the figure of a man surviving, in an alien but
+not unfriendly present, the past which held so vast a part of all that
+had constituted him. If he had thought of himself in this way, it would
+have been without one emotion of self-pity, such as more maudlin souls
+indulge, but with a love of knowledge and wisdom as keenly alert as in
+his prime.
+
+For three privileged years I lived all but next-door neighbor of Doctor
+Holmes in that part of Beacon Street whither he removed after he left his
+old home in Charles Street, and during these years I saw him rather
+often. We were both on the water side, which means so much more than the
+words say, and our library windows commanded the same general view of the
+Charles rippling out into the Cambridge marshes and the sunsets, and
+curving eastward under Long Bridge, through shipping that increased
+onward to the sea. He said that you could count fourteen towns and
+villages in the compass of that view, with the three conspicuous
+monuments accenting the different attractions of it: the tower of
+Memorial Hall at Harvard; the obelisk on Bunker Hill; and in the centre
+of the picture that bulk of Tufts College which he said he expected to
+greet his eyes the first thing when he opened them in the other world.
+But the prospect, though generally the same, had certain precious
+differences for each of us, which I have no doubt he valued himself as
+much upon as I did. I have a notion that he fancied these were to be
+enjoyed best in his library through two oval panes let into the bay there
+apart from the windows, for he was apt to make you come and look out of
+them if you got to talking of the view before you left. In this pleasant
+study he lived among the books, which seemed to multiply from case to
+case and shelf to shelf, and climb from floor to ceiling. Everything was
+in exquisite order, and the desk where he wrote was as scrupulously neat
+as if the sloven disarray of most authors’ desks were impossible to him.
+He had a number of ingenious little contrivances for helping his work,
+which he liked to show you; for a time a revolving book-case at the
+corner of his desk seemed to be his pet; and after that came his
+fountain-pen, which he used with due observance of its fountain
+principle, though he was tolerant of me when I said I always dipped mine
+in the inkstand; it was a merit in his eyes to use a fountain pen in
+anywise. After you had gone over these objects with him, and perhaps
+taken a peep at something he was examining through his microscope, he sat
+down at one corner of his hearth, and invited you to an easy chair at the
+other. His talk was always considerate of your wish to be heard, but the
+person who wished to talk when he could listen to Doctor Holmes was his
+own victim, and always the loser. If you were well advised you kept
+yourself to the question and response which manifested your interest in
+what he was saying, and let him talk on, with his sweet smile, and that
+husky laugh he broke softly into at times. Perhaps he was not very well
+when you came in upon him; then he would name his trouble, with a
+scientific zest and accuracy, and pass quickly to other matters. As I
+have noted, he was interested in himself only on the universal side; and
+he liked to find his peculiarity in you better than to keep it his own;
+he suffered a visible disappointment if he could not make you think or
+say you were so and so too. The querulous note was not in his most
+cheerful register; he would not dwell upon a specialized grief; though
+sometimes I have known him touch very lightly and currently upon a slight
+annoyance, or disrelish for this or that. As he grew older, he must have
+had, of course, an old man’s disposition to speak of his infirmities; but
+it was fine to see him catch himself up in this, when he became conscious
+of it, and stop short with an abrupt turn to something else. With a real
+interest, which he gave humorous excess, he would celebrate some little
+ingenious thing that had fallen in his way, and I have heard him
+expatiate with childlike delight upon the merits of a new razor he had
+got: a sort of mower, which he could sweep recklessly over cheek and chin
+without the least danger of cutting himself. The last time I saw him he
+asked me if he had ever shown me that miraculous razor; and I doubt if he
+quite liked my saying I had seen one of the same kind.
+
+It seemed to me that he enjoyed sitting at his chimney-corner rather as
+the type of a person having a good time than as such a person; he would
+rather be up and about something, taking down a book, making a note,
+going again to his little windows, and asking you if you had seen the
+crows yet that sometimes alighted on the shoals left bare by the ebb-tide
+behind the house. The reader will recall his lovely poem, “My Aviary,”
+ which deals with the winged life of that pleasant prospect. I shared
+with him in the flock of wild-ducks which used to come into our neighbor
+waters in spring, when the ice broke up, and stayed as long as the
+smallest space of brine remained unfrozen in the fall. He was graciously
+willing I should share in them, and in the cloud of gulls which drifted
+about in the currents of the sea and sky there, almost the whole year
+round. I did not pretend an original right to them, coming so late as I
+did to the place, and I think my deference pleased him.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+As I have said, he liked his fences, or at least liked you to respect
+them, or to be sensible of them. As often as I went to see him I was
+made to wait in the little reception-room below, and never shown at once
+to his study. My name would be carried up, and I would hear him
+verifying my presence from the maid through the opened door; then there
+came a cheery cry of wellcome: “Is that you? Come up, come up!” and I
+found him sometimes half-way down the stairs to meet me. He would make
+an excuse for having kept me below a moment, and say something about the
+rule he had to observe in all cases, as if he would not have me feel his
+fence a personal thing. I was aware how thoroughly his gentle spirit
+pervaded the whole house; the Irish maid who opened the door had the
+effect of being a neighbor too, and of being in the joke of the little
+formality; she apologized in her turn for the reception-room; there was
+certainly nothing trampled upon in her manner, but affection and
+reverence for him whose gate she guarded, with something like the
+sentiment she would have cherished for a dignitary of the Church, but
+nicely differenced and adjusted to the Autocrat’s peculiar merits.
+
+The last time I was in that place, a visitant who had lately knocked at
+my own door was about to enter. I met the master of the house on the
+landing of the stairs outside his study, and he led me in for the few
+moments we could spend together. He spoke of the shadow so near, and
+said he supposed there could be no hope, but he did not refuse the cheer
+I offered him from my ignorance against his knowledge, and at something
+that was thought or said he smiled, with even a breath of laughter, so
+potent is the wont of a lifetime, though his eyes were full of tears, and
+his voice broke with his words. Those who have sorrowed deepest will
+understand this best.
+
+It was during the few years of our Beacon Street neighborhood that he
+spent those hundred days abroad in his last visit to England and France.
+He was full of their delight when he came back, and my propinquity gave
+me the advantage of hearing him speak of them at first hand. He
+whimsically pleased himself most with his Derby-day experiences, and
+enjoyed contrasting the crowd and occasion with that of forty or fifty
+years earlier, when he had seen some famous race of the Derby won;
+nothing else in England seemed to have moved him so much, though all that
+royalties, dignities, and celebrities could well do for him had been
+done. Of certain things that happened to him, characteristic of the
+English, and interesting to him in their relation to himself through his
+character of universally interested man, he spoke freely; but he has said
+what he chose to the public about them, and I have no right to say more.
+The thing that most vexed him during his sojourn apparently was to have
+been described in one of the London papers as quite deaf; and I could
+truly say to him that I had never imagined him at all deaf, or heard him
+accused of it before. “Oh, yes,” he said, “I am a little hard of hearing
+on one side. But it isn’t deafness.”
+
+He had, indeed, few or none of the infirmities of age that make
+themselves painfully or inconveniently evident. He carried his slight
+figure erect, and until his latest years his step was quick and sure.
+Once he spoke of the lessened height of old people, apropos of something
+that was said, and “They will shrink, you know,” he added, as if he were
+not at all concerned in the fact himself. If you met him in the street,
+you encountered a spare, carefully dressed old gentleman, with a
+clean-shaven face and a friendly smile, qualified by the involuntary
+frown of his thick, senile brows; well coated, lustrously shod, well
+gloved, in a silk hat, latterly wound with a mourning-weed. Sometimes he
+did not know you when he knew you quite well, and at such times I think
+it was kind to spare his years the fatigue of recalling your identity; at
+any rate, I am glad of the times when I did so. In society he had the
+same vagueness, the same dimness; but after the moment he needed to make
+sure of you, he was as vivid as ever in his life. He made me think of a
+bed of embers on which the ashes have thinly gathered, and which, when
+these are breathed away, sparkles and tinkles keenly up with all the
+freshness of a newly kindled fire. He did not mind talking about his
+age, and I fancied rather enjoyed doing so. Its approaches interested
+him; if he was going, he liked to know just how and when he was going.
+Once he spoke of his lasting strength in terms of imaginative humor: he
+was still so intensely interested in nature, the universe, that it seemed
+to him he was not like an old man so much as a lusty infant which
+struggles against having the breast snatched from it. He laughed at the
+notion of this, with that impersonal relish which seemed to me singularly
+characteristic of the self-consciousness so marked in him. I never heard
+one lugubrious word from him in regard to his years. He liked your
+sympathy on all grounds where he could have it self-respectfully, but he
+was a most manly spirit, and he would not have had it even as a type of
+the universal decay. Possibly he would have been interested to have you
+share in that analysis of himself which he was always making, if such a
+thing could have been.
+
+He had not much patience with the unmanly craving for sympathy in others,
+and chiefly in our literary craft, which is somewhat ignobly given to it,
+though he was patient, after all. He used to say, and I believe he has
+said it in print,--[Holmes said it in print many times, in his three
+novels and scattered through the “Breakfast Table” series. D.W.]--that
+unless a man could show a good reason for writing verse, it was rather
+against him, and a proof of weakness. I suppose this severe conclusion
+was something he had reached after dealing with innumerable small poets
+who sought the light in him with verses that no editor would admit to
+print. Yet of morbidness he was often very tender; he knew it to be
+disease, something that must be scientifically rather than ethically
+treated. He was in the same degree kind to any sensitiveness, for he was
+himself as sensitive as he was manly, and he was most delicately
+sensitive to any rightful social claim upon him. I was once at a dinner
+with him, where he was in some sort my host, in a company of people whom
+he had not seen me with before, and he made a point of acquainting me
+with each of them. It did not matter that I knew most of them already;
+the proof of his thoughtfulness was precious, and I was sorry when I had
+to disappoint it by confessing a previous knowledge.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+I had three memorable meetings with him not very long before he died: one
+a year before, and the other two within a few months of the end. The
+first of these was at luncheon in the summer-house of a friend whose
+hospitality made it summer the year round, and we all went out to meet
+him, when he drove up in his open carriage, with the little sunshade in
+his hand, which he took with him for protection against the heat, and
+also, a little, I think, for the whim of it. He sat a moment after he
+arrived, as if to orient himself in respect to each of us. Beside the
+gifted hostess, there was the most charming of all the American
+essayists, and the Autocrat seemed at once to find himself singularly at
+home with the people who greeted him. There was no interval needed for
+fanning away the ashes; he tinkled up before he entered the house, and at
+the table he was as vivid and scintillant as I ever saw him, if indeed I
+ever saw him as much so. The talk began at once, and we had made him
+believe that there was nothing egotistic in his taking the word, or
+turning it in illustration from himself upon universal matters. I spoke
+among other things of some humble ruins on the road to Gloucester, which
+gave the way-side a very aged look; the tumbled foundation-stones of poor
+bits of houses, and “Ah,” he said, “the cellar and the well?” He added,
+to the company generally, “Do you know what I think are the two lines of
+mine that go as deep as any others, in a certain direction?” and he began
+to repeat stragglingly certain verses from one of his earlier poems,
+until he came to the closing couplet. But I will give them in full,
+because in going to look them up I have found them so lovely, and because
+I can hear his voice again in every fondly accented syllable:
+
+     “Who sees unmoved, a ruin at his feet,
+     The lowliest home where human hearts have beat?
+     Its hearth-stone, shaded with the bistre stain,
+     A century’s showery torrents wash in vain;
+     Its starving orchard where the thistle blows,
+     And mossy trunks still mark the broken rows;
+     Its chimney-loving poplar, oftenest seen
+     Next an old roof, or where a roof has been;
+     Its knot-grass, plantain,--all the social weeds,
+     Man’s mute companions following where he leads;
+     Its dwarfed pale flowers, that show their straggling heads,
+     Sown by the wind from grass-choked garden-beds;
+     Its woodbine creeping where it used to climb;
+     Its roses breathing of the olden time;
+     All the poor shows the curious idler sees,
+     As life’s thin shadows waste by slow degrees,
+     Till naught remains, the saddening tale to tell,
+     Save home’s last wrecks--the CELLAR AND THE WELL!”
+
+The poet’s chanting voice rose with a triumphant swell in the climax, and
+“There,” he said, “isn’t it so? The cellar and the well--they can’t be
+thrown down or burnt up; they are the human monuments that last longest
+and defy decay.” He rejoiced openly in the sympathy that recognized with
+him the divination of a most pathetic, most signal fact, and he repeated
+the last couplet again at our entreaty, glad to be entreated for it. I do
+not know whether all will agree with him concerning the relative
+importance of the lines, but I think all must feel the exquisite beauty
+of the picture to which they give the final touch.
+
+He said a thousand witty and brilliant things that day, but his pleasure
+in this gave me the most pleasure, and I recall the passage distinctly
+out of the dimness that covers the rest. He chose to figure us younger
+men, in touching upon the literary circumstance of the past and present,
+as representative of modern feeling and thinking, and himself as no
+longer contemporary. We knew he did this to be contradicted, and we
+protested, affectionately, fervently, with all our hearts and minds; and
+indeed there were none of his generation who had lived more widely into
+ours. He was not a prophet like Emerson, nor ever a voice crying in the
+wilderness like Whittier or Lowell. His note was heard rather amid the
+sweet security of streets, but it was always for a finer and gentler
+civility. He imagined no new rule of life, and no philosophy or theory
+of life will be known by his name. He was not constructive; he was
+essentially observant, and in this he showed the scientific nature. He
+made his reader known to himself, first in the little, and then in the
+larger things. From first to last he was a censor, but a most winning
+and delightful censor, who could make us feel that our faults were other
+people’s, and who was not wont
+
+     “To bait his homilies with his brother worms.”
+
+At one period he sat in the seat of the scorner, as far as Reform was
+concerned, or perhaps reformers, who are so often tedious and ridiculous;
+but he seemed to get a new heart with the new mind which came to him when
+he began to write the Autocrat papers, and the light mocker of former
+days became the serious and compassionate thinker, to whom most truly
+nothing that was human was alien. His readers trusted and loved him; few
+men have ever written so intimately with so much dignity, and perhaps
+none has so endeared himself by saying just the thing for his reader that
+his reader could not say for himself. He sought the universal through
+himself in others, and he found to his delight and theirs that the most
+universal thing was often, if not always, the most personal thing.
+
+In my later meetings with him I was struck more and more by his
+gentleness. I believe that men are apt to grow gentler as they grow
+older, unless they are of the curmudgeon type, which rusts and crusts
+with age, but with Doctor Holmes the gentleness was peculiarly marked. He
+seemed to shrink from all things that could provoke controversy, or even
+difference; he waived what might be a matter of dispute, and rather
+sought the things that he could agree with you upon. In the last talk I
+had with him he appeared to have no grudge left, except for the puritanic
+orthodoxy in which he had been bred as a child. This he was not able to
+forgive, though its tradition was interwoven with what was tenderest and
+dearest in his recollections of childhood. We spoke of puritanism, and I
+said I sometimes wondered what could be the mind of a man towards life
+who had not been reared in its awful shadow, say an English Churchman, or
+a Continental Catholic; and he said he could not imagine, and that he did
+not believe such a man could at all enter into our feelings; puritanism,
+he seemed to think, made an essential and ineradicable difference. I do
+not believe he had any of that false sentiment which attributes virtue of
+character to severity of creed, while it owns the creed to be wrong.
+
+He differed from Longfellow in often speaking of his contemporaries. He
+spoke of them frankly, but with an appreciative rather than a censorious
+criticism. Of Longfellow himself he said that day, when I told him I had
+been writing about him, and he seemed to me a man without error, that he
+could think of but one error in him, and that was an error of taste, of
+almost merely literary taste. It was at an earlier time that he talked
+of Lowell, after his death, and told me that Lowell once in the fever of
+his anti-slavery apostolate had written him, urging him strongly, as a
+matter of duty, to come out for the cause he had himself so much at
+heart. Afterwards Lowell wrote again, owning himself wrong in his
+appeal, which he had come to recognize as invasive. “He was ten years
+younger than I,” said the doctor.
+
+I found him that day I speak of in his house at Beverly Farms, where he
+had a pleasant study in a corner by the porch, and he met me with all the
+cheeriness of old. But he confessed that he had been greatly broken up
+by the labor of preparing something that might be read at some
+commemorative meeting, and had suffered from finding first that he could
+not write something specially for it. Even the copying and adapting an
+old poem had overtaxed him, and in this he showed the failing powers of
+age. But otherwise he was still young, intellectually; that is, there
+was no failure of interest in intellectual things, especially literary
+things. Some new book lay on the table at his elbow, and he asked me if
+I had seen it, and made some joke about his having had the good luck to
+read it, and have it lying by him a few days before when the author
+called. I do not know whether he schooled himself against an old man’s
+tendency to revert to the past or not, but I know that he seldom did so.
+That morning, however, he made several excursions into it, and told me
+that his youthful satire of the ‘Spectre Pig’ had been provoked by a poem
+of the elder Dana’s, where a phantom horse had been seriously employed,
+with an effect of anticlimax which he had found irresistible. Another
+foray was to recall the oppression and depression of his early religious
+associations, and to speak with moving tenderness of his father, whose
+hard doctrine as a minister was without effect upon his own kindly
+nature.
+
+In a letter written to me a few weeks after this time, upon an occasion
+when he divined that some word from him would be more than commonly dear,
+he recurred to the feeling he then expressed: “Fifty-six years ago--more
+than half a century--I lost my own father, his age being seventy-three
+years. As I have reached that period of life, passed it, and now left it
+far behind, my recollections seem to brighten and bring back my boyhood
+and early manhood in a clearer and fairer light than it came to me in my
+middle decades. I have often wished of late years that I could tell him
+how I cherished his memory; perhaps I may have the happiness of saying
+all I long to tell him on the other side of that thin partition which I
+love to think is all that divides us.”
+
+Men are never long together without speaking of women, and I said how
+inevitably men’s lives ended where they began, in the keeping of women,
+and their strength failed at last and surrendered itself to their care. I
+had not finished before I was made to feel that I was poaching, and
+“Yes,” said the owner of the preserve, “I have spoken of that,” and he
+went on to tell me just where. He was not going to have me suppose I had
+invented those notions, and I could not do less than own that I must have
+found them in his book, and forgotten it.
+
+He spoke of his pleasant summer life in the air, at once soft and fresh,
+of that lovely coast, and of his drives up and down the country roads.
+Sometimes this lady and sometimes that came for him, and one or two
+habitually, but he always had his own carriage ordered, if they failed,
+that he might not fail of his drive in any fair weather. His cottage was
+not immediately on the sea, but in full sight of it, and there was a
+sense of the sea about it, as there is in all that incomparable region,
+and I do not think he could have been at home anywhere beyond the reach
+of its salt breath.
+
+I was anxious not to outstay his strength, and I kept my eye on the clock
+in frequent glances. I saw that he followed me in one of these, and I
+said that I knew what his hours were, and I was watching so that I might
+go away in time, and then he sweetly protested. Did I like that chair I
+was sitting in? It was a gift to him, and he said who gave it, with a
+pleasure in the fact that was very charming, as if he liked the
+association of the thing with his friend. He was disposed to excuse the
+formal look of his bookcases, which were filled with sets, and presented
+some phalanxes of fiction in rather severe array.
+
+When I rose to go, he was concerned about my being able to find my way
+readily to the station, and he told me how to go, and what turns to take,
+as if he liked realizing the way to himself. I believe he did not walk
+much of late years, and I fancy he found much the same pleasure in
+letting his imagination make this excursion to the station with me that
+he would have found in actually going.
+
+I saw him once more, but only once, when a day or two later he drove up
+by our hotel in Magnolia toward the cottage where his secretary was
+lodging. He saw us from his carriage, and called us gayly to him, to
+make us rejoice with him at having finally got that commemorative poem
+off his mind. He made a jest of the trouble it had cost him, even some
+sleeplessness, and said he felt now like a convalescent. He was all
+brightness, and friendliness, and eagerness to make us feel his mood,
+through what was common to us all; and I am glad that this last
+impression of him is so one with the first I ever had, and with that
+which every reader receives from his work.
+
+That is bright, and friendly and eager too, for it is throughout the very
+expression of himself. I think it is a pity if an author disappoints
+even the unreasonable expectation of the reader, whom his art has invited
+to love him; but I do not believe that Doctor Holmes could inflict this
+disappointment. Certainly he could disappoint no reasonable expectation,
+no intelligent expectation. What he wrote, that he was, and every one
+felt this who met him. He has therefore not died, as some men die, the
+remote impersonal sort, but he is yet thrillingly alive in every page of
+his books. The quantity of his literature is not great, but the quality
+is very surprising, and surprising first of all as equality. From the
+beginning to the end he wrote one man, of course in his successive
+consciousnesses. Perhaps every one does this, but his work gives the
+impression of an uncommon continuity, in spite of its being the effect of
+a later and an earlier impulse so very marked as to have made the later
+an astonishing revelation to those who thought they knew him.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+It is not for me in such a paper as this to attempt any judgment of his
+work. I have loved it, as I loved him, with a sense of its limitations
+which is by no means a censure of its excellences. He was not a man who
+cared to transcend; he liked bounds, he liked horizons, the constancy of
+shores. If he put to sea, he kept in sight of land, like the ancient
+navigators. He did not discover new continents; and I will own that I,
+for my part, should not have liked to sail with Columbus. I think one
+can safely affirm that as great and as useful men stayed behind, and
+found an America of the mind without stirring from their thresholds.
+
+
+
+
+THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW
+
+We had expected to stay in Boston only until we could find a house in Old
+Cambridge. This was not so simple a matter as it might seem; for the
+ancient town had not yet quickened its scholarly pace to the modern step.
+Indeed, in the spring of 1866 the impulse of expansion was not yet
+visibly felt anywhere; the enormous material growth that followed the
+civil war had not yet begun. In Cambridge the houses to be let were few,
+and such as there were fell either below our pride or rose above our
+purse. I wish I might tell how at last we bought a house; we had no
+money, but we were rich in friends, who are still alive to shrink from
+the story of their constant faith in a financial future which we
+sometimes doubted, and who backed their credulity with their credit. It
+is sufficient for the present record, which professes to be strictly
+literary, to notify the fact that on the first day of May, 1866, we went
+out to Cambridge and began to live in a house which we owned in fee if
+not in deed, and which was none the less valuable for being covered with
+mortgages. Physically, it was a carpenter’s box, of a sort which is
+readily imagined by the Anglo-American genius for ugliness, but which it
+is not so easy to impart a just conception of. A trim hedge of
+arbor-vita; tried to hide it from the world in front, and a tall board
+fence behind; the little lot was well planted (perhaps too well planted)
+with pears, grapes, and currants, and there was a small open space which
+I lost no time in digging up for a kitchen-garden. On one side of us
+were the open fields; on the other a brief line of neighbor-houses;
+across the street before us was a grove of stately oaks, which I never
+could persuade Aldrich had painted leaves on them in the fall. We were
+really in a poor suburb of a suburb; but such is the fascination of
+ownership, even the ownership of a fully mortgaged property, that we
+calculated the latitude and longitude of the whole earth from the spot we
+called ours. In our walks about Cambridge we saw other places where we
+might have been willing to live; only, we said, they were too far off: We
+even prized the architecture of our little box, though we had but so
+lately lived in a Gothic palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, and were
+not uncritical of beauty in the possessions of others. Positive beauty
+we could not have honestly said we thought our cottage had as a whole,
+though we might have held out for something of the kind in the brackets
+of turned wood under its eaves. But we were richly content with it; and
+with life in Cambridge, as it began to open itself to us, we were
+infinitely more than content. This life, so refined, so intelligent, so
+gracefully simple, I do not suppose has anywhere else had its parallel.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+It was the moment before the old American customs had been changed by
+European influences among people of easier circumstances; and in
+Cambridge society kept what was best of its village traditions, and chose
+to keep them in the full knowledge of different things. Nearly every one
+had been abroad; and nearly every one had acquired the taste for olives
+without losing a relish for native sauces; through the intellectual life
+there was an entire democracy, and I do not believe that since the
+capitalistic era began there was ever a community in which money counted
+for less. There was little show of what money could buy; I remember but
+one private carriage (naturally, a publisher’s); and there was not one
+livery, except a livery in the larger sense kept by the stableman Pike,
+who made us pay now a quarter and now a half dollar for a seat in his
+carriages, according as he lost or gathered courage for the charge. We
+thought him extortionate, and we mostly walked through snow and mud of
+amazing depth and thickness.
+
+The reader will imagine how acceptable this circumstance was to a young
+literary man beginning life with a fully mortgaged house and a salary of
+untried elasticity. If there were distinctions made in Cambridge they
+were not against literature, and we found ourselves in the midst of a
+charming society, indifferent, apparently, to all questions but those of
+the higher education which comes so largely by nature. That is to say,
+in the Cambridge of that day (and, I dare say, of this) a mind cultivated
+in some sort was essential, and after that came civil manners, and the
+willingness and ability to be agreeable and interesting; but the question
+of riches or poverty did not enter. Even the question of family, which
+is of so great concern in New England, was in abeyance. Perhaps it was
+taken for granted that every one in Old Cambridge society must be of good
+family, or he could not be there; perhaps his mere residence tacitly
+ennobled him; certainly his acceptance was an informal patent of
+gentility. To my mind, the structure of society was almost ideal, and
+until we have a perfectly socialized condition of things I do not believe
+we shall ever have a more perfect society. The instincts which governed
+it were not such as can arise from the sordid competition of interests;
+they flowed from a devotion to letters, and from a self-sacrifice in
+material things which I can give no better notion of than by saying that
+the outlay of the richest college magnate seemed to be graduated to the
+income of the poorest.
+
+In those days, the men whose names have given splendor to Cambridge were
+still living there. I shall forget some of them in the alphabetical
+enumeration of Louis Agassiz, Francis J. Child, Richard Henry Dana, Jun.,
+John Fiske, Dr. Asa Gray, the family of the Jameses, father and sons,
+Lowell, Longfellow, Charles Eliot Norton, Dr. John G. Palfrey, James
+Pierce, Dr. Peabody, Professor Parsons, Professor Sophocles. The variety
+of talents and of achievements was indeed so great that Mr. Bret Harte,
+when fresh from his Pacific slope, justly said, after listening to a
+partial rehearsal of them, “Why, you couldn’t fire a revolver from your
+front porch anywhere without bringing down a two-volumer!” Everybody had
+written a book, or an article, or a poem; or was in the process or
+expectation of doing it, and doubtless those whose names escape me will
+have greater difficulty in eluding fame. These kindly, these gifted folk
+each came to see us and to make us at home among them; and my home is
+still among them, on this side and on that side of the line between the
+living and the dead which invisibly passes through all the streets of the
+cities of men.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+We had the whole summer for the exploration of Cambridge before society
+returned from the mountains and the sea-shore, and it was not till
+October that I saw Longfellow. I heard again, as I heard when I first
+came to Boston, that he was at Nahant, and though Nahant was no longer so
+far away, now, as it was then, I did not think of seeking him out even
+when we went for a day to explore that coast during the summer. It seems
+strange that I cannot recall just when and where I saw him, but early
+after his return to Cambridge I had a message from him asking me to come
+to a meeting of the Dante Club at Craigie House.
+
+Longfellow was that winter (1866-7) revising his translation of the
+‘Paradiso’, and the Dante Club was the circle of Italianate friends and
+scholars whom he invited to follow him and criticise his work from the
+original, while he read his version aloud. Those who were most
+constantly present were Lowell and Professor Norton, but from time to
+time others came in, and we seldom sat down at the nine-o’clock supper
+that followed the reading of the canto in less number than ten or twelve.
+
+The criticism, especially from the accomplished Danteists I have named,
+was frank and frequent. I believe they neither of them quite agreed with
+Longfellow as to the form of version he had chosen, but, waiving that,
+the question was how perfectly he had done his work upon the given lines:
+I myself, with whatever right, great or little, I may have to an opinion,
+believe thoroughly in Longfellow’s plan. When I read his version my
+sense aches for the rhyme which he rejected, but my admiration for his
+fidelity to Dante otherwise is immeasurable. I remember with equal
+admiration the subtle and sympathetic scholarship of his critics, who
+scrutinized every shade of meaning in a word or phrase that gave them
+pause, and did not let it pass till all the reasons and facts had been
+considered. Sometimes, and even often, Longfellow yielded to their
+censure, but for the most part, when he was of another mind, he held to
+his mind, and the passage had to go as he said. I make a little haste to
+say that in all the meetings of the Club, during a whole winter of
+Wednesday evenings, I myself, though I faithfully followed in an Italian
+Dante with the rest, ventured upon one suggestion only. This was kindly,
+even seriously, considered by the poet, and gently rejected. He could
+not do anything otherwise than gently, and I was not suffered to feel
+that I had done a presumptuous thing. I can see him now, as he looked up
+from the proof-sheets on the round table before him, and over at me,
+growing consciously smaller and smaller, like something through a
+reversed opera-glass. He had a shaded drop-light in front of him, and in
+its glow his beautiful and benignly noble head had a dignity peculiar to
+him.
+
+All the portraits of Longfellow are likenesses more or less bad and good,
+for there was something as simple in the physiognomy as in the nature of
+the man. His head, after he allowed his beard to grow and wore his hair
+long in the manner of elderly men, was leonine, but mildly leonine, as
+the old painters conceived the lion of St. Mark. Once Sophocles, the
+ex-monk of Mount Athos, so long a Greek professor at Harvard, came in for
+supper, after the reading was over, and he was leonine too, but of a
+fierceness that contrasted finely with Longfellow’s mildness. I remember
+the poet’s asking him something about the punishment of impaling, in
+Turkey, and his answering, with an ironical gleam of his fiery eyes,
+“Unhappily, it is obsolete.” I dare say he was not so leonine, either,
+as he looked.
+
+When Longfellow read verse, it was with a hollow, with a mellow resonant
+murmur, like the note of some deep-throated horn. His voice was very
+lulling in quality, and at the Dante Club it used to have early effect
+with an old scholar who sat in a cavernous armchair at the corner of the
+fire, and who drowsed audibly in the soft tone and the gentle heat. The
+poet had a fat terrier who wished always to be present at the meetings of
+the Club, and he commonly fell asleep at the same moment with that dear
+old scholar, so that when they began to make themselves heard in concert,
+one could not tell which it was that most took our thoughts from the text
+of the Paradiso. When the duet opened, Longfellow would look up with an
+arch recognition of the fact, and then go gravely on to the end of the
+canto. At the close he would speak to his friend and lead him out to
+supper as if he had not seen or heard anything amiss.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+In that elect company I was silent, partly because I was conscious of my
+youthful inadequacy, and partly because I preferred to listen. But
+Longfellow always behaved as if I were saying a succession of edifying
+and delightful things, and from time to time he addressed himself to me,
+so that I should not feel left out. He did not talk much himself, and I
+recall nothing that he said. But he always spoke both wisely and simply,
+without the least touch of pose, and with no intention of effect, but
+with something that I must call quality for want of a better word; so
+that at a table where Holmes sparkled, and Lowell glowed, and Agassiz
+beamed, he cast the light of a gentle gaiety, which seemed to dim all
+these vivider luminaries. While he spoke you did not miss Fields’s story
+or Tom Appleton’s wit, or even the gracious amity of Mr. Norton, with his
+unequalled intuitions.
+
+The supper was very plain: a cold turkey, which the host carved, or a
+haunch of venison, or some braces of grouse, or a platter of quails, with
+a deep bowl of salad, and the sympathetic companionship of those elect
+vintages which Longfellow loved, and which he chose with the inspiration
+of affection. We usually began with oysters, and when some one who was
+expected did not come promptly, Longfellow invited us to raid his plate,
+as a just punishment of his delay. One evening Lowell remarked, with the
+cayenne poised above his bluepoints, “It’s astonishing how fond these
+fellows are of pepper.”
+
+The old friend of the cavernous arm-chair was perhaps not wide enough
+awake to repress an “Ah?” of deep interest in this fact of natural
+history, and Lowell was provoked to go on. “Yes, I’ve dropped a red
+pepper pod into a barrel of them, before now, and then taken them out in
+a solid mass, clinging to it like a swarm of bees to their queen.”
+
+“Is it possible?” cried the old friend; and then Longfellow intervened to
+save him from worse, and turned the talk.
+
+I reproach myself that I made no record of the talk, for I find that only
+a few fragments of it have caught in my memory, and that the sieve which
+should have kept the gold has let it wash away with the gravel. I
+remember once Doctor Holmes’s talking of the physician as the true seer,
+whose awful gift it was to behold with the fatal second sight of science
+the shroud gathering to the throat of many a doomed man apparently in
+perfect health, and happy in the promise of unnumbered days. The thought
+may have been suggested by some of the toys of superstition which
+intellectual people like to play with.
+
+I never could be quite sure at first that Longfellow’s brother-in-law,
+Appleton, was seriously a spiritualist, even when he disputed the most
+strenuously with the unbelieving Autocrat. But he really was in earnest
+about it, though he relished a joke at the expense of his doctrine, like
+some clerics when they are in the safe company of other clerics. He told
+me once of having recounted to Agassiz the facts of a very remarkable
+seance, where the souls of the departed outdid themselves in the
+athletics and acrobatics they seem so fond of over there, throwing large
+stones across the room, moving pianos, and lifting dinner-tables and
+setting them a-twirl under the chandelier. “And now,” he demanded, “what
+do you say to that?” “Well, Mr. Appleton,” Agassiz answered, to
+Appleton’s infinite delight, “I say that it did not happen.”
+
+One night they began to speak at the Dante supper of the unhappy man
+whose crime is a red stain in the Cambridge annals, and one and another
+recalled their impressions of Professor Webster. It was possibly with a
+retroactive sense that they had all felt something uncanny in him, but,
+apropos of the deep salad-bowl in the centre of the table, Longfellow
+remembered a supper Webster was at, where he lighted some chemical in
+such a dish and held his head over it, with a handkerchief noosed about
+his throat and lifted above it with one hand, while his face, in the pale
+light, took on the livid ghastliness of that of a man hanged by the neck.
+
+Another night the talk wandered to the visit which an English author (now
+with God) paid America at the height of a popularity long since toppled
+to the ground, with many another. He was in very good humor with our
+whole continent, and at Longfellow’s table he found the champagne even
+surprisingly fine. “But,” he said to his host, who now told the story,
+“it cawn’t be genuine, you know!”
+
+Many years afterwards this author revisited our shores, and I dined with
+him at Longfellow’s, where he was anxious to constitute himself a guest
+during his sojourn in our neighborhood. Longfellow was equally anxious
+that he should not do so, and he took a harmless pleasure in
+out-manoeuvring him. He seized a chance to speak with me alone, and
+plotted to deliver him over to me without apparent unkindness, when the
+latest horse-car should be going in to Boston, and begged me to walk him
+to Harvard Square and put him aboard. “Put him aboard, and don’t leave
+him till the car starts, and then watch that he doesn’t get off.”
+
+These instructions he accompanied with a lifting of the eyebrows, and a
+pursing of the mouth, in an anxiety not altogether burlesque. He knew
+himself the prey of any one who chose to batten on him, and his
+hospitality was subject to frightful abuse. Perhaps Mr. Norton has
+somewhere told how, when he asked if a certain person who had been
+outstaying his time was not a dreadful bore, Longfellow answered, with
+angelic patience, “Yes; but then you know I have been bored so often!”
+
+There was one fatal Englishman whom I shared with him during the great
+part of a season: a poor soul, not without gifts, but always ready for
+more, especially if they took the form of meat and drink. He had brought
+letters from one of the best English men alive, who withdrew them too
+late to save his American friends from the sad consequences of welcoming
+him. So he established himself impregnably in a Boston club, and came
+out every day to dine with Longfellow in Cambridge, beginning with his
+return from Nahant in October and continuing far into December. That was
+the year of the great horse-distemper, when the plague disabled the
+transportation in Boston, and cut off all intercourse between the suburb
+and the city on the street railways. “I did think,” Longfellow
+pathetically lamented, “that when the horse-cars stopped running, I
+should have a little respite from L., but he walks out.”
+
+In the midst of his own suffering he was willing to advise with me
+concerning some poems L. had offered to the Atlantic Monthly, and after
+we had desperately read them together he said, with inspiration, “I think
+these things are more adapted to music than the magazine,” and this
+seemed so good a notion that when L. came to know their fate from me, I
+answered, confidently, “I think they are rather more adapted to music.”
+ He calmly asked, “Why?” and as this was an exigency which Longfellow had
+not forecast for me, I was caught in it without hope of escape. I really
+do not know what I said, but I know that I did not take the poems, such
+was my literary conscience in those days; I am afraid I should be weaker
+now.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+The suppers of the Dante Club were a relaxation from the severity of
+their toils on criticism, and I will not pretend that their table-talk
+was of that seriousness which duller wits might have given themselves up
+to. The passing stranger, especially if a light or jovial person, was
+always welcome, and I never knew of the enforcement of the rule I heard
+of, that if you came in without question on the Club nights, you were a
+guest; but if you rang or knocked, you could not get in.
+
+Any sort of diversion was hailed, and once Appleton proposed that
+Longfellow should show us his wine-cellar. He took up the candle burning
+on the table for the cigars, and led the way into the basement of the
+beautiful old Colonial mansion, doubly memorable as Washington’s
+headquarters while he was in Cambridge, and as the home of Longfellow for
+so many years. The taper cast just the right gleams on the darkness,
+bringing into relief the massive piers of brick, and the solid walls of
+stone, which gave the cellar the effect of a casemate in some fortress,
+and leaving the corners and distances to a romantic gloom. This basement
+was a work of the days when men built more heavily if not more
+substantially than now, but I forget, if I ever knew, what date the
+wine-cellar was of. It was well stored with precious vintages, aptly
+cobwebbed and dusty; but I could not find that it had any more charm than
+the shelves of a library: it is the inside of bottles and of books that
+makes its appeal. The whole place witnessed a bygone state and luxury,
+which otherwise lingered in a dim legend or two. Longfellow once spoke
+of certain old love-letters which dropped down on the basement stairs
+from some place overhead; and there was the fable or the fact of a
+subterranean passage under the street from Craigie House to the old
+Batchelder House, which I relate to these letters with no authority I can
+allege. But in Craigie House dwelt the proud fair lady who was buried in
+the Cambridge church-yard with a slave at her head and a slave at her
+feet.
+
+        “Dust is in her beautiful eyes,”
+
+and whether it was they that smiled or wept in their time over those
+love-letters, I will leave the reader to say. The fortunes of her Tory
+family fell with those of their party, and the last Vassal ended his days
+a prisoner from his creditors in his own house, with a weekly enlargement
+on Sundays, when the law could not reach him. It is known how the place
+took Longfellow’s fancy when he first came to be professor in Harvard,
+and how he was a lodger of the last Mistress Craigie there, long before
+he became its owner. The house is square, with Longfellow’s study where
+he read and wrote on the right of the door, and a statelier library
+behind it; on the left is the drawing-room, with the dining-room in its
+rear; from its square hall climbs a beautiful stairway with twisted
+banisters, and a tall clock in their angle.
+
+The study where the Dante Club met, and where I mostly saw Longfellow,
+was a plain, pleasant room, with broad panelling in white painted pine;
+in the centre before the fireplace stood his round table, laden with
+books, papers, and proofs; in the farthest corner by the window was a
+high desk which he sometimes stood at to write. In this room Washington
+held his councils and transacted his business with all comers; in the
+chamber overhead he slept. I do not think Longfellow associated the
+place much with him, and I never heard him speak of Washington in
+relation to it except once, when he told me with peculiar relish what he
+called the true version of a pious story concerning the aide-de-camp who
+blundered in upon him while he knelt in prayer. The father of his
+country rose and rebuked the young man severely, and then resumed his
+devotions. “He rebuked him,” said Longfellow, lifting his brows and
+making rings round the pupils of his eyes, “by throwing his scabbard at
+his head.”
+
+All the front windows of Craigie House look, out over the open fields
+across the Charles, which is now the Longfellow Memorial Garden. The
+poet used to be amused with the popular superstition that he was holding
+this vacant ground with a view to a rise in the price of lots, while all
+he wanted was to keep a feature of his beloved landscape unchanged. Lofty
+elms drooped at the corners of the house; on the lawn billowed clumps of
+the lilac, which formed a thick hedge along the fence. There was a
+terrace part way down this lawn, and when a white-painted balustrade was
+set some fifteen years ago upon its brink, it seemed always to have been
+there. Long verandas stretched on either side of the mansion; and behind
+was an old-fashioned garden with beds primly edged with box after a
+design of the poet’s own. Longfellow had a ghost story of this quaint
+plaisance, which he used to tell with an artful reserve of the
+catastrophe. He was coming home one winter night, and as he crossed the
+garden he was startled by a white figure swaying before him. But he knew
+that the only way was to advance upon it. He pushed boldly forward, and
+was suddenly caught under the throat-by the clothes-line with a long
+night-gown on it.
+
+Perhaps it was at the end of a long night of the Dante Club that I heard
+him tell this story. The evenings were sometimes mornings before the
+reluctant break-up came, but they were never half long enough for me. I
+have given no idea of the high reasoning of vital things which I must
+often have heard at that table, and that I have forgotten it is no proof
+that I did not hear it. The memory will not be ruled as to what it shall
+bind and what it shall loose, and I should entreat mine in vain for
+record of those meetings other than what I have given. Perhaps it would
+be well, in the interest of some popular conceptions of what the social
+intercourse of great wits must be, for me to invent some ennobling and
+elevating passages of conversation at Longfellow’s; perhaps I ought to do
+it for the sake of my own repute as a serious and adequate witness. But
+I am rather helpless in the matter; I must set down what I remember, and
+surely if I can remember no phrase from Holmes that a reader could live
+or die by, it is something to recall how, when a certain potent cheese
+was passing, he leaned over to gaze at it, and asked: “Does it kick? Does
+it kick?” No strain of high poetic thinking remains to me from Lowell,
+but he made me laugh unforgettably with his passive adventure one night
+going home late, when a man suddenly leaped from the top of a high fence
+upon the sidewalk at his feet, and after giving him the worst fright of
+his life, disappeared peaceably into the darkness. To be sure, there was
+one most memorable supper, when he read the “Bigelow Paper” he had
+finished that day, and enriched the meaning of his verse with the beauty
+of his voice. There lingers yet in my sense his very tone in giving the
+last line of the passage lamenting the waste of the heroic lives which in
+those dark hours of Johnson’s time seemed to have been
+
+     “Butchered to make a blind man’s holiday.”
+
+The hush that followed upon his ceasing was of that finest quality which
+spoken praise always lacks; and I suppose that I could not give a just
+notion of these Dante Club evenings without imparting the effect of such
+silences. This I could not hopefully undertake to do; but I am tempted
+to some effort of the kind by my remembrance of Longfellow’s old friend
+George Washington Greene, who often came up from his home in Rhode
+Island, to be at those sessions, and who was a most interesting and
+amiable fact of those delicate silences. A full half of his earlier life
+had been passed in Italy, where he and Longfellow met and loved each
+other in their youth with an affection which the poet was constant to in
+his age, after many vicissitudes, with the beautiful fidelity of his
+nature. Greene was like an old Italian house-priest in manner, gentle,
+suave, very suave, smooth as creamy curds, cultivated in the elegancies
+of literary taste, and with a certain meek abeyance. I think I never
+heard him speak, in all those evenings, except when Longfellow addressed
+him, though he must have had the Dante scholarship for an occasional
+criticism. It was at more recent dinners, where I met him with the
+Longfellow family alone, that he broke now and then into a quotation from
+some of the modern Italian poets he knew by heart (preferably Giusti),
+and syllabled their verse with an exquisite Roman accent and a bewitching
+Florentine rhythm. Now and then at these times he brought out a faded
+Italian anecdote, faintly smelling of civet, and threadbare in its
+ancient texture. He liked to speak of Goldoni and of Nota, of Niccolini
+and Manzoni, of Monti and Leopardi; and if you came to America, of the
+Revolution and his grandfather, the Quaker General Nathaniel Greene,
+whose life he wrote (and I read) in three volumes: He worshipped
+Longfellow, and their friendship continued while they lived, but towards
+the last of his visits at Craigie House it had a pathos for the witness
+which I should grieve to wrong. Greene was then a quivering paralytic,
+and he clung tremulously to Longfellow’s arm in going out to dinner,
+where even the modern Italian poets were silent upon his lips. When we
+rose from table, Longfellow lifted him out of his chair, and took him
+upon his arm again for their return to the study.
+
+He was of lighter metal than most other members of the Dante Club, and he
+was not of their immediate intimacy, living away from Cambridge, as he
+did, and I shared his silence in their presence with full sympathy. I was
+by far the youngest of their number, and I cannot yet quite make out why
+I was of it at all. But at every moment I was as sensible of my good
+fortune as of my ill desert. They were the men whom of all men living I
+most honored, and it seemed to be impossible that I at my age should be
+so perfectly fulfilling the dream of my life in their company. Often, the
+nights were very cold, and as I returned home from Craigie House to the
+carpenter’s box on Sacramento Street, a mile or two away, I was as if
+soul-borne through the air by my pride and joy, while the frozen blocks
+of snow clinked and tinkled before my feet stumbling along the middle of
+the road. I still think that was the richest moment of my life, and I
+look back at it as the moment, in a life not unblessed by chance, which I
+would most like to live over again--if I must live any. The next winter
+the sessions of the Dante Club were transferred to the house of Mr.
+Norton, who was then completing his version of the ‘Vita Nuova’. This
+has always seemed to me a work of not less graceful art than Longfellow’s
+translation of the ‘Commedia’. In fact, it joins the effect of a
+sympathy almost mounting to divination with a patient scholarship and a
+delicate skill unknown to me elsewhere in such work. I do not know
+whether Mr. Norton has satisfied himself better in his prose version of
+the ‘Commedia’ than in this of the ‘Vita Nuova’, but I do not believe he
+could have satisfied Dante better, unless he had rhymed his sonnets and
+canzonets. I am sure he might have done this if he had chosen. He has
+always pretended that it was impossible, but miracles are never
+impossible in the right hands.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+After three or four years we sold the carpenter’s box on Sacramento
+Street, and removed to a larger house near Harvard Square, and in the
+immediate neighborhood of Longfellow. He gave me an easement across that
+old garden behind his house, through an opening in the high board fence
+which enclosed it, and I saw him oftener than ever, though the meetings
+of the Dante Club had come to an end. At the last of them, Lowell had
+asked him, with fond regret in his jest, “Longfellow, why don’t you do
+that Indian poem in forty thousand verses?” The demand but feebly
+expressed the reluctance in us all, though I suspect the Indian poem
+existed only by the challenger’s invention. Before I leave my faint and
+unworthy record of these great times I am tempted to mention an incident
+poignant with tragical associations. The first night after Christmas the
+holly and the pine wreathed about the chandelier above the supper-table
+took fire from the gas, just as we came out from the reading, and
+Longfellow ran forward and caught the burning garlands down and bore them
+out. No one could speak for thinking what he must be thinking of when
+the ineffable calamity of his home befell it. Curtis once told me that a
+little while before Mrs. Longfellow’s death he was driving by Craigie
+House with Holmes, who said be trembled to look at it, for those who
+lived there had their happiness so perfect that no change, of all the
+changes which must come to them, could fail to be for the worse. I did
+not know Longfellow before that fatal time, and I shall not say that his
+presence bore record of it except in my fancy. He may always have had
+that look of one who had experienced the utmost harm that fate can do,
+and henceforth could possess himself of what was left of life in peace.
+He could never have been a man of the flowing ease that makes all comers
+at home; some people complained of a certain ‘gene’ in him; and he had a
+reserve with strangers, which never quite lost itself in the abandon of
+friendship, as Lowell’s did. He was the most perfectly modest man I ever
+saw, ever imagined, but he had a gentle dignity which I do not believe
+any one, the coarsest, the obtusest, could trespass upon. In the years
+when I began to know him, his long hair and the beautiful beard which
+mixed with it were of one iron-gray, which I saw blanch to a perfect
+silver, while that pearly tone of his complexion, which Appleton so
+admired, lost itself in the wanness of age and pain. When he walked, he
+had a kind of spring in his gait, as if now and again a buoyant thought
+lifted him from the ground. It was fine to meet him coming down a
+Cambridge street; you felt that the encounter made you a part of literary
+history, and set you apart with him for the moment from the poor and
+mean. When he appeared in Harvard Square, he beatified if not beautified
+the ugliest and vulgarest looking spot on the planet outside of New York.
+You could meet him sometimes at the market, if you were of the same
+provision-man as he; and Longfellow remained as constant to his
+tradespeople as to any other friends. He rather liked to bring his
+proofs back to the printer’s himself, and we often found ourselves
+together at the University Press, where the Atlantic Monthly used to be
+printed. But outside of his own house Longfellow seemed to want a fit
+atmosphere, and I love best to think of him in his study, where he
+wrought at his lovely art with a serenity expressed in his smooth,
+regular, and scrupulously perfect handwriting. It was quite vertical,
+and rounded, with a slope neither to the right nor left, and at the time
+I knew him first, he was fond of using a soft pencil on printing paper,
+though commonly he wrote with a quill. Each letter was distinct in
+shape, and between the verses was always the exact space of half an inch.
+I have a good many of his poems written in this fashion, but whether they
+were the first drafts or not I cannot say; very likely not. Towards the
+last he no longer sent his poems to the magazines in his own hand; but
+they were always signed in autograph.
+
+I once asked him if he were not a great deal interrupted, and he said,
+with a faint sigh, Not more than was good for him, he fancied; if it were
+not for the interruptions, he might overwork. He was not a friend to
+stated exercise, I believe, nor fond of walking, as Lowell was; he had
+not, indeed, the childish associations of the younger poet with the
+Cambridge neighborhoods; and I never saw him walking for pleasure except
+on the east veranda of his house, though I was told he loved walking in
+his youth. In this and in some other things Longfellow was more European
+than American, more Latin than Saxon. He once said quaintly that one got
+a great deal of exercise in putting on and off one’s overcoat and
+overshoes.
+
+I suppose no one who asked decently at his door was denied access to him,
+and there must have been times when he was overrun with volunteer
+visitors; but I never heard him complain of them. He was very charitable
+in the immediate sort which Christ seems to have meant; but he had his
+preferences; humorously owned, among beggars. He liked the German
+beggars least, and the Italian beggars most, as having most savair-faire;
+in fact, we all loved the Italians in Cambridge. He was pleased with the
+accounts I could give him of the love and honor I had known for him in
+Italy, and one day there came a letter from an Italian admirer, addressed
+to “Mr. Greatest Poet Longfellow,” which he said was the very most
+amusing superscription he had ever seen.
+
+It is known that the King of Italy offered Longfellow the cross of San
+Lazzaro, which is the Italian literary decoration. It came through the
+good offices of my old acquaintance Professor Messadaglia, then a deputy
+in the Italian Parliament, whom, for some reason I cannot remember, I had
+put in correspondence with Longfellow. The honor was wholly unexpected,
+and it brought Longfellow a distress which was chiefly for the gentleman
+who had procured him the impossible distinction. He showed me the pretty
+collar and cross, not, I think, without a natural pleasure in it. No man
+was ever less a bigot in things civil or religious than he, but he said,
+firmly, “Of course, as a republican and a Protestant, I can’t accept a
+decoration from a Catholic prince.” His decision was from his
+conscience, and I think that all Americans who think duly about it will
+approve his decision.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+Such honors as he could fitly permit himself he did not refuse, and I
+recall what zest he had in his election to the Arcadian Academy, which
+had made him a shepherd of its Roman Fold, with the title, as he said, of
+“Olimipico something.” But I fancy his sweetest pleasure in his vast
+renown came from his popular recognition everywhere. Few were the lands,
+few the languages he was unknown to: he showed me a version of the “Psalm
+of Life” in Chinese. Apparently even the poor lost autograph-seeker was
+not denied by his universal kindness; I know that he kept a store of
+autographs ready written on small squares of paper for all who applied by
+letter or in person; he said it was no trouble; but perhaps he was to be
+excused for refusing the request of a lady for fifty autographs, which
+she wished to offer as a novel attraction to her guests at a lunch party.
+
+Foreigners of all kinds thronged upon him at their pleasure, apparently,
+and with perfect impunity. Sometimes he got a little fun, very, very
+kindly, out of their excuses and reasons; and the Englishman who came to
+see him because there were no ruins to visit in America was no fable, as
+I can testify from the poet himself. But he had no prejudice against
+Englishmen, and even at a certain time when the coarse-handed British
+criticism began to blame his delicate art for the universal acceptance of
+his verse, and to try to sneer him into the rank of inferior poets, he
+was without rancor for the clumsy misliking that he felt. He could not
+understand rudeness; he was too finely framed for that; he could know it
+only as Swedenborg’s most celestial angels perceived evil, as something
+distressful, angular. The ill-will that seemed nearly always to go with
+adverse criticism made him distrust criticism, and the discomfort which
+mistaken or blundering praise gives probably made him shy of all
+criticism. He said that in his early life as an author he used to seek
+out and save all the notices of his poems, but in his latter days he read
+only those that happened to fall in his way; these he cut out and amused
+his leisure by putting together in scrapbooks. He was reluctant to make
+any criticism of other poets; I do not remember ever to have heard him
+make one; and his writings show no trace of the literary dislikes or
+contempts which we so often mistake in ourselves for righteous judgments.
+No doubt he had his resentments, but he hushed them in his heart, which
+he did not suffer them to embitter. While Poe was writing of “Longfellow
+and other Plagiarists,” Longfellow was helping to keep Poe alive by the
+loans which always made themselves gifts in Poe’s case. He very, very
+rarely spoke of himself at all, and almost never of the grievances which
+he did not fail to share with all who live.
+
+He was patient, as I said, of all things, and gentle beyond all mere
+gentlemanliness. But it would have been a great mistake to mistake his
+mildness for softness. It was most manly and firm; and of course it was
+braced with the New England conscience he was born to. If he did not
+find it well to assert himself, he was prompt in behalf of his friends,
+and one of the fine things told of him was his resenting some censures of
+Sumner at a dinner in Boston during the old pro-slavery times: he said to
+the gentlemen present that Sumner was his friend, and he must leave their
+company if they continued to assail him.
+
+But he spoke almost as rarely of his friends as of himself. He liked the
+large, impersonal topics which could be dealt with on their human side,
+and involved characters rather than individuals. This was rather strange
+in Cambridge, where we were apt to take our instances from the
+environment. It was not the only thing he was strange in there; he was
+not to that manner born; he lacked the final intimacies which can come
+only of birth and lifelong association, and which make the men of the
+Boston breed seem exclusive when they least feel so; he was Longfellow to
+the friends who were James, and Charles, and Wendell to one another. He
+and Hawthorne were classmates at college, but I never heard him mention
+Hawthorne; I never heard him mention Whittier or Emerson. I think his
+reticence about his contemporaries was largely due to his reluctance from
+criticism: he was the finest artist of them all, and if he praised he
+must have praised with the reservations of an honest man. Of younger
+writers he was willing enough to speak. No new contributor made his mark
+in the magazine unnoted by him, and sometimes I showed him verse in
+manuscript which gave me peculiar pleasure. I remember his liking for
+the first piece that Mr. Maurice Thompson sent me, and how he tasted the
+fresh flavor of it, and inhaled its wild new fragrance. He admired the
+skill of some of the young story-tellers; he praised the subtlety of one
+in working out an intricate character, and said modestly that he could
+never have done that sort of thing himself. It was entirely safe to
+invite his judgment when in doubt, for he never suffered it to become
+aggressive, or used it to urge upon me the manuscripts that must often
+have been urged upon him.
+
+Longfellow had a house at Nahant where he went every summer for more than
+a quarter of a century. He found the slight transition change enough
+from Cambridge, and liked it perhaps because it did not take him beyond
+the range of the friends and strangers whose company he liked. Agassiz
+was there, and Appleton; Sumner came to sojourn with him; and the
+tourists of all nations found him there in half an hour after they
+reached Boston. His cottage was very plain and simple, but was rich in
+the sight of the illimitable, sea, and it had a luxury of rocks at the
+foot of its garden, draped with sea-weed, and washed with the
+indefatigable tides. As he grew older and feebler he ceased to go to
+Nahant; he remained the whole year round at Cambridge; he professed to
+like the summer which he said warmed him through there, better than the
+cold spectacle of summer which had no such effect at Nahant.
+
+The hospitality which was constant at either house was not merely of the
+worldly sort. Longfellow loved good cheer; he tasted history and poetry
+in a precious wine; and he liked people who were acquainted with manners
+and men, and brought the air of capitals with them. But often the man
+who dined with Longfellow was the man who needed a dinner; and from what
+I have seen of the sweet courtesy that governed at that board, I am sure
+that such a man could never have felt himself the least honored guest.
+The poet’s heart was open to all the homelessness of the world; and I
+remember how once when we sat at his table and I spoke of his poem of
+“The Challenge,” then a new poem, and said how I had been touched by the
+fancy of
+
+       “The poverty-stricken millions
+        Who challenge our wine and bread,
+        And impeach us all as traitors,
+        Both the living and the dead,”
+
+his voice sank in grave humility as he answered, “Yes, I often think of
+those things.” He had thought of them in the days of the slave, when he
+had taken his place with the friends of the hopeless and hapless, and as
+long as he lived he continued of the party which had freed the slave. He
+did not often speak of politics, but when the movement of some of the
+best Republicans away from their party began, he said that he could not
+see the wisdom of their course. But this was said without censure or
+criticism of them, and so far as I know he never permitted himself
+anything like denunciation of those who in any wise differed from him. On
+a matter of yet deeper interest, I do not feel authorized to speak for
+him, but I think that as he grew older, his hold upon anything like a
+creed weakened, though he remained of the Unitarian philosophy concerning
+Christ. He did not latterly go to church, I believe; but then, very few
+of his circle were church-goers. Once he said something very vague and
+uncertain concerning the doctrine of another life when I affirmed my hope
+of it, to the effect that he wished he could be sure, with the sigh that
+so often clothed the expression of a misgiving with him.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+When my acquaintance with Longfellow began he had written the things that
+made his fame, and that it will probably rest upon: “Evangeline,”
+ “Hiawatha,” and the “Courtship of Miles Standish” were by that time old
+stories. But during the eighteen years that I knew him he produced the
+best of his minor poems, the greatest of his sonnets, the sweetest of his
+lyrics. His art ripened to the last, it grew richer and finer, and it
+never knew decay. He rarely read anything of his own aloud, but in three
+or four cases he read to me poems he had just finished, as if to give
+himself the pleasure of hearing them with the sympathetic sense of
+another. The hexameter piece, “Elizabeth,” in the third part of “Tales
+of a Wayside Inn,” was one of these, and he liked my liking its
+rhythmical form, which I believed one of the measures best adapted to the
+English speech, and which he had used himself with so much pleasure and
+success.
+
+About this time he was greatly interested in the slight experiments I was
+beginning to make in dramatic form, and he said that if he were himself a
+young man he should write altogether for the stage; he thought the drama
+had a greater future with us. He was pleased when a popular singer
+wished to produce his “Masque of Pandora,” with music, and he was patient
+when it failed of the effect hoped for it as an opera. When the late
+Lawrence Barrett, in the enthusiasm which was one of the fine traits of
+his generous character, had taken my play of “A Counterfeit Presentment,”
+ and came to the Boston Museum with it, Longfellow could not apparently
+have been more zealous for its popular acceptance if it had been his own
+work. He invited himself to one of the rehearsals with me, and he sat
+with me on the stage through the four acts with a fortitude which I still
+wonder at, and with the keenest zest for all the details of the
+performance. No finer testimony to the love and honor which all kinds of
+people had for him could have been given than that shown by the actors
+and employees of the theatre, high and low. They thronged the scenery,
+those who were not upon the stage, and at the edge of every wing were
+faces peering round at the poet, who sat unconscious of their adoration,
+intent upon the play. He was intercepted at every step in going out, and
+made to put his name to the photographs of himself which his worshippers
+produced from their persons.
+
+He came to the first night of the piece, and when it seemed to be finding
+favor with the public, he leaned forward out of his line to nod and smile
+at the author; when they, had the author up, it was the sweetest flattery
+of the applause which abused his fondness that Longfellow clapped first
+and loudest.
+
+Where once he had given his kindness he could not again withhold it, and
+he was anxious no fact should be interpreted as withdrawal. When the
+Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil, who was so great a lover of Longfellow, came
+to Boston, he asked himself out to dine with the poet, who had expected
+to offer him some such hospitality. Soon after, Longfellow met me, and
+as if eager to forestall a possible feeling in me, said, “I wanted to ask
+you to dinner with the Emperor, but he not only sent word he was coming,
+he named his fellow-guests!” I answered that though I should probably
+never come so near dining with an emperor again, I prized his wish to ask
+me much more than the chance I had missed; and with this my great and
+good friend seemed a little consoled. I believe that I do not speak too
+confidently of our relation. He was truly the friend of all men, but I
+had certainly the advantage of my propinquity. We were near neighbors, as
+the pleonasm has it, both when I lived on Berkeley Street and after I had
+built my own house on Concord Avenue; and I suppose he found my youthful
+informality convenient. He always asked me to dinner when his old friend
+Greene came to visit him, and then we had an Italian time together, with
+more or less repetition in our talk, of what we had said before of
+Italian poetry and Italian character. One day there came a note from him
+saying, in effect, “Salvini is coming out to dine with me tomorrow night,
+and I want you to come too. There will be no one else but Greene and
+myself, and we will have an Italian dinner.”
+
+Unhappily I had accepted a dinner in Boston for that night, and this
+invitation put me in great misery. I must keep my engagement, but how
+could I bear to miss meeting Salvini at Longfellow’s table on terms like
+these? We consulted at home together and questioned whether I might not
+rush into Boston, seek out my host there, possess him of the facts, and
+frankly throw myself on his mercy. Then a sudden thought struck us: Go
+to Longfellow, and submit the case to him! I went, and he entered with
+delicate sympathy into the affair. But he decided that, taking the large
+view of it, I must keep my engagement, lest I should run even a remote
+risk of wounding my friend’s susceptibilities. I obeyed, and I had a
+very good time, but I still feel that I missed the best time of my life,
+and that I ought to be rewarded for my sacrifice, somewhere.
+
+Longfellow so rarely spoke of himself in any way that one heard from him
+few of those experiences of the distinguished man in contact with the
+undistinguished, which he must have had so abundantly. But he told,
+while it was fresh in his mind, an incident that happened to him one day
+in Boston at a tobacconist’s, where a certain brand of cigars was
+recommended to him as the kind Longfellow smoked. “Ah, then I must have
+some of them; and I will ask you to send me a box,” said Longfellow, and
+he wrote down his name and address. The cigar-dealer read it with the
+smile of a worsted champion, and said, “Well, I guess you had me, that
+time.” At a funeral a mourner wished to open conversation, and by way of
+suggesting a theme of common interest, began, “You’ve buried, I believe?”
+
+Sometimes people were shown by the poet through Craigie House who had no
+knowledge of it except that it had been Washington’s headquarters. Of
+course Longfellow was known by sight to every one in Cambridge. He was
+daily in the streets, while his health endured, and as he kept no
+carriage, he was often to be met in the horse-cars, which were such
+common ground in Cambridge that they were often like small invited
+parties of friends when they left Harvard Square, so that you expected
+the gentlemen to jump up and ask the ladies whether they would have
+chicken salad. In civic and political matters he mingled so far as to
+vote regularly, and he voted with his party, trusting it for a general
+regard to the public welfare.
+
+I fancy he was somewhat shy of his fellow-men, as the scholar seems
+always to be, from the sequestered habit of his life; but I think
+Longfellow was incapable of marking any difference between himself and
+them. I never heard from him anything that was ‘de haut en bas’, when he
+spoke of people, and in Cambridge, where there was a good deal of
+contempt for the less lettered, and we liked to smile though we did not
+like to sneer, and to analyze if we did not censure, Longfellow and
+Longfellow’s house were free of all that. Whatever his feeling may have
+been towards other sorts and conditions of men, his effect was of an
+entire democracy. He was always the most unassuming person in any
+company, and at some large public dinners where I saw him I found him
+patient of the greater attention that more public men paid themselves and
+one another. He was not a speaker, and I never saw him on his feet at
+dinner, except once, when he read a poem for Whittier, who was absent. He
+disliked after-dinner speaking, and made conditions for his own exemption
+from it.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+Once your friend, Longfellow was always your friend; he would not think
+evil of you, and if he knew evil of you, he would be the last of all that
+knew it to judge you for it. This may have been from the impersonal
+habit of his mind, but I believe it was also the effect of principle, for
+he would do what he could to arrest the delivery of judgment from others,
+and would soften the sentences passed in his presence. Naturally this
+brought him under some condemnation with those of a severer cast; and I
+have heard him criticised for his benevolence towards all, and his
+constancy to some who were not quite so true to themselves, perhaps. But
+this leniency of Longfellow’s was what constituted him great as well as
+good, for it is not our wisdom that censures others. As for his
+goodness, I never saw a fault in him. I do not mean to say that he had
+no faults, or that there were no better men, but only to give the witness
+of my knowledge concerning him. I claim in no wise to have been his
+intimate; such a thing was not possible in my case for quite apparent
+reasons; and I doubt if Longfellow was capable of intimacy in the sense
+we mostly attach to the word. Something more of egotism than I ever
+found in him must go to the making of any intimacy which did not come
+from the tenderest affections of his heart. But as a man shows himself
+to those often with him, and in his noted relations with other men, he
+showed himself without blame. All men that I have known, besides, have
+had some foible (it often endeared them the more), or some meanness, or
+pettiness, or bitterness; but Longfellow had none, nor the suggestion of
+any. No breath of evil ever touched his name; he went in and out among
+his fellow-men without the reproach that follows wrong; the worst thing I
+ever heard said of him was that he had ‘gene’, and this was said by one
+of those difficult Cambridge men who would have found ‘gene’ in a
+celestial angel. Something that Bjornstjerne Bjornson wrote to me when
+he was leaving America after a winter in Cambridge, comes nearer
+suggesting Longfellow than all my talk. The Norsemen, in the days of
+their stormy and reluctant conversion, used always to speak of Christ as
+the White Christ, and Bjornson said in his letter, “Give my love to the
+White Mr. Longfellow.”
+
+A good many, years before Longfellow’s death he began to be sleepless,
+and he suffered greatly. He said to me once that he felt as if he were
+going about with his heart in a kind of mist. The whole night through he
+would not be aware of having slept. “But,” he would add, with his
+heavenly patience, “I always get a good deal of rest from lying down so
+long.” I cannot say whether these conditions persisted, or how much his
+insomnia had to do with his breaking health; three or four years before
+the end came, we left Cambridge for a house farther in the country, and I
+saw him less frequently than before. He did not allow our meetings to
+cease; he asked me to dinner from time to time, as if to keep them up,
+but it could not be with the old frequency. Once he made a point of
+coming to see us in our cottage on the hill west of Cambridge, but it was
+with an effort not visible in the days when he could end one of his brief
+walks at our house on Concord Avenue; he never came but he left our house
+more luminous for his having been there. Once he came to supper there to
+meet Garfield (an old family friend of mine in Ohio), and though he was
+suffering from a heavy cold, he would not scant us in his stay. I had
+some very bad sherry which he drank with the serenity of a martyr, and I
+shudder to this day to think what his kindness must have cost him. He
+told his story of the clothes-line ghost, and Garfield matched it with
+the story of an umbrella ghost who sheltered a friend of his through a
+midnight storm, but was not cheerful company to his beneficiary, who
+passed his hand through him at one point in the effort to take his arm.
+
+After the end of four years I came to Cambridge to be treated for a long
+sickness, which had nearly been my last, and when I could get about I
+returned the visit Longfellow had not failed to pay me. But I did not
+find him, and I never saw him again in life. I went into Boston to
+finish the winter of 1881-2, and from time to time I heard that the poet
+was failing in health. As soon as I felt able to bear the horse-car
+journey I went out to Cambridge to see him. I had knocked once at his
+door, the friendly door that had so often opened to his welcome, and
+stood with the knocker in my hand when the door was suddenly set ajar,
+and a maid showed her face wet with tears. “How is Mr. Longfellow?” I
+palpitated, and with a burst of grief she answered, “Oh, the poor
+gentleman has just departed!” I turned away as if from a helpless
+intrusion at a death-bed.
+
+At the services held in the house before the obsequies at the cemetery, I
+saw the poet for the last time, where
+
+        “Dead he lay among his books,”
+
+in the library behind his study. Death seldom fails to bring serenity to
+all, and I will not pretend that there was a peculiar peacefulness in
+Longfellow’s noble mask, as I saw it then. It was calm and benign as it
+had been in life; he could not have worn a gentler aspect in going out of
+the world than he had always worn in it; he had not to wait for death to
+dignify it with “the peace of God.” All who were left of his old
+Cambridge were present, and among those who had come farther was Emerson.
+He went up to the bier, and with his arms crossed on his breast, and his
+elbows held in either hand, stood with his head pathetically fallen
+forward, looking down at the dead face. Those who knew how his memory
+was a mere blank, with faint gleams of recognition capriciously coming
+and going in it, must have felt that he was struggling to remember who it
+was lay there before him; and for me the electly simple words confessing
+his failure will always be pathetic with his remembered aspect: “The
+gentleman we have just been burying,” he said, to the friend who had come
+with him, “was a sweet and beautiful soul; but I forget his name.”
+
+I had the privilege and honor of looking over the unprinted poems
+Longfellow left behind him, and of helping to decide which of them should
+be published.
+
+There were not many of them, and some of these few were quite
+fragmentary. I gave my voice for the publication of all that had any
+sort of completeness, for in every one there was a touch of his exquisite
+art, the grace of his most lovely spirit. We have so far had two men
+only who felt the claim of their gift to the very best that the most
+patient skill could give its utterance: one was Hawthorne and the other
+was Longfellow. I shall not undertake to say which was the greater
+artist of these two; but I am sure that every one who has studied it must
+feel with me that the art of Longfellow held out to the end with no touch
+of decay in it, and that it equalled the art of any other poet of his
+time. It knew when to give itself, and more and more it knew when to
+withhold itself.
+
+What Longfellow’s place in literature will be, I shall not offer to say;
+that is Time’s affair, not mine; but I am sure that with Tennyson and
+Browning he fully shared in the expression of an age which more
+completely than any former age got itself said by its poets.
+
+
+
+
+STUDIES OF LOWELL
+
+I have already spoken of my earliest meetings with Lowell at Cambridge
+when I came to New England on a literary pilgrimage from the West in
+1860. I saw him more and more after I went to live in Cambridge in 1866;
+and I now wish to record what I knew of him during the years that passed
+between this date and that of his death. If the portrait I shall try to
+paint does not seem a faithful likeness to others who knew him, I shall
+only claim that so he looked to me, at this moment and at that. If I do
+not keep myself quite out of the picture, what painter ever did?
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+It was in the summer of 1865 that I came home from my consular post at
+Venice; and two weeks after I landed in Boston, I went out to see Lowell
+at Elmwood, and give him an inkstand that I had brought him from Italy.
+The bronze lobster whose back opened and disclosed an inkpot and a
+sand-box was quite ugly; but I thought it beautiful then, and if Lowell
+thought otherwise he never did anything to let me know it. He put the
+thing in the middle of his writing-table (he nearly always wrote on a
+pasteboard pad resting upon his knees), and there it remained as long as
+I knew the place--a matter of twenty-five years; but in all that time I
+suppose the inkpot continued as dry as the sand-box.
+
+My visit was in the heat of August, which is as fervid in Cambridge as it
+can well be anywhere, and I still have a sense of his study windows
+lifted to the summer night, and the crickets and grasshoppers crying in
+at them from the lawns and the gardens outside. Other people went away
+from Cambridge in the summer to the sea and to the mountains, but Lowell
+always stayed at Elmwood, in an impassioned love for his home and for his
+town. I must have found him there in the afternoon, and he must have
+made me sup with him (dinner was at two o’clock) and then go with him for
+a long night of talk in his study. He liked to have some one help him
+idle the time away, and keep him as long as possible from his work; and
+no doubt I was impersonally serving his turn in this way, aside from any
+pleasure he might have had in my company as some one he had always been
+kind to, and as a fresh arrival from the Italy dear to us both.
+
+He lighted his pipe, and from the depths of his easychair, invited my shy
+youth to all the ease it was capable of in his presence. It was not
+much; I loved him, and he gave me reason to think that he was fond of me,
+but in Lowell I was always conscious of an older and closer and stricter
+civilization than my own, an unbroken tradition, a more authoritative
+status. His democracy was more of the head and mine more of the heart,
+and his denied the equality which mine affirmed. But his nature was so
+noble and his reason so tolerant that whenever in our long acquaintance I
+found it well to come to open rebellion, as I more than once did, he
+admitted my right of insurrection, and never resented the outbreak. I
+disliked to differ with him, and perhaps he subtly felt this so much that
+he would not dislike me for doing it. He even suffered being taxed with
+inconsistency, and where he saw that he had not been quite just, he would
+take punishment for his error, with a contrition that was sometimes
+humorous and always touching.
+
+Just then it was the dark hour before the dawn with Italy, and he was
+interested but not much encouraged by what I could tell him of the
+feeling in Venice against the Austrians. He seemed to reserve a like
+scepticism concerning the fine things I was hoping for the Italians in
+literature, and he confessed an interest in the facts treated which in
+the retrospect, I am aware, was more tolerant than participant of my
+enthusiasm. That was always Lowell’s attitude towards the opinions of
+people he liked, when he could not go their lengths with them, and
+nothing was more characteristic of his affectionate nature and his just
+intelligence. He was a man of the most strenuous convictions, but he
+loved many sorts of people whose convictions he disagreed with, and he
+suffered even prejudices counter to his own if they were not ignoble. In
+the whimsicalities of others he delighted as much as in his own.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+Our associations with Italy held over until the next day, when after
+breakfast he went with me towards Boston as far as “the village”: for so
+he liked to speak of Cambridge in the custom of his younger days when
+wide tracts of meadow separated Harvard Square from his life-long home at
+Elmwood. We stood on the platform of the horsecar together, and when I
+objected to his paying my fare in the American fashion, he allowed that
+the Italian usage of each paying for himself was the politer way. He
+would not commit himself about my returning to Venice (for I had not
+given up my place, yet, and was away on leave), but he intimated his
+distrust of the flattering conditions of life abroad. He said it was
+charming to be treated ‘da signore’, but he seemed to doubt whether it
+was well; and in this as in all other things he showed his final fealty
+to the American ideal.
+
+It was that serious and great moment after the successful close of the
+civil war when the republican consciousness was more robust in us than
+ever before or since; but I cannot recall any reference to the historical
+interest of the time in Lowell’s talk. It had been all about literature
+and about travel; and now with the suggestion of the word village it
+began to be a little about his youth. I have said before how reluctant
+he was to let his youth go from him; and perhaps the touch with my
+juniority had made him realize how near he was to fifty, and set him
+thinking of the past which had sorrows in it to age him beyond his years.
+He would never speak of these, though he often spoke of the past. He
+told once of having been on a brief journey when he was six years old,
+with his father, and of driving up to the gate of Elmwood in the evening,
+and his father saying, “Ah, this is a pleasant place! I wonder who lives
+here--what little boy?” At another time he pointed out a certain window
+in his study, and said he could see himself standing by it when he could
+only get his chin on the window-sill. His memories of the house, and of
+everything belonging to it, were very tender; but he could laugh over an
+escapade of his youth when he helped his fellow-students pull down his
+father’s fences, in the pure zeal of good-comradeship.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+My fortunes took me to New York, and I spent most of the winter of 1865-6
+writing in the office of ‘The Nation’. I contributed several sketches of
+Italian travel to that paper; and one of these brought me a precious
+letter from Lowell. He praised my sketch, which he said he had read
+without the least notion who had written it, and he wanted me to feel the
+full value of such an impersonal pleasure in it. At the same time he did
+not fail to tell me that he disliked some pseudo-cynical verses of mine
+which he had read in another place; and I believe it was then that he
+bade me “sweat the Heine out of” me, “as men sweat the mercury out of
+their bones.”
+
+When I was asked to be assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and came
+on to Boston to talk the matter over with the publishers, I went out to
+Cambridge and consulted Lowell. He strongly urged me to take the
+position (I thought myself hopefully placed in New York on The Nation);
+and at the same time he seemed to have it on his heart to say that he had
+recommended some one else for it, never, he owned, having thought of me.
+
+He was most cordial, but after I came to live in Cambridge (where the
+magazine was printed, and I could more conveniently look over the
+proofs), he did not call on me for more than a month, and seemed quite to
+have forgotten me. We met one night at Mr. Norton’s, for one of the
+Dante readings, and he took no special notice of me till I happened to
+say something that offered him a chance to give me a little humorous
+snub. I was speaking of a paper in the Magazine on the “Claudian
+Emissary,” and I demanded (no doubt a little too airily) something like
+“Who in the world ever heard of the Claudian Emissary?” “You are in
+Cambridge, Mr. Howells,” Lowell answered, and laughed at my confusion.
+Having put me down, he seemed to soften towards me, and at parting he
+said, with a light of half-mocking tenderness in his beautiful eyes,
+“Goodnight, fellow-townsman.” “I hardly knew we were fellow-townsmen,” I
+returned. He liked that, apparently, and said he had been meaning to
+call upon me; and that he was coming very soon.
+
+He was as good as his word, and after that hardly a week of any kind of
+weather passed but he mounted the steps to the door of the ugly little
+house in which I lived, two miles away from him, and asked me to walk.
+These walks continued, I suppose, until Lowell went abroad for a winter
+in the early seventies. They took us all over Cambridge, which he knew
+and loved every inch of, and led us afield through the straggling,
+unhandsome outskirts, bedrabbled with squalid Irish neighborhoods, and
+fraying off into marshes and salt meadows. He liked to indulge an excess
+of admiration for the local landscape, and though I never heard him
+profess a preference for the Charles River flats to the finest Alpine
+scenery, I could well believe he would do so under provocation of a fit
+listener’s surprise. He had always so much of the boy in him that he
+liked to tease the over-serious or over-sincere. He liked to tease and
+he liked to mock, especially his juniors, if any touch of affectation, or
+any little exuberance of manner gave him the chance; when he once came to
+fetch me, and the young mistress of the house entered with a certain
+excessive elasticity, he sprang from his seat, and minced towards her,
+with a burlesque of her buoyant carriage which made her laugh. When he
+had given us his heart in trust of ours, he used us like a younger
+brother and sister; or like his own children. He included our children
+in his affection, and he enjoyed our fondness for them as if it were
+something that had come back to him from his own youth. I think he had
+also a sort of artistic, a sort of ethical pleasure in it, as being of
+the good tradition, of the old honest, simple material, from which
+pleasing effects in literature and civilization were wrought. He liked
+giving the children books, and writing tricksy fancies in these, where he
+masked as a fairy prince; and as long as he lived he remembered his early
+kindness for them.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+In those walks of ours I believe he did most of the talking, and from his
+talk then and at other times there remains to me an impression of his
+growing conservatism. I had in fact come into his life when it had spent
+its impulse towards positive reform, and I was to be witness of its
+increasing tendency towards the negative sort. He was quite past the
+storm and stress of his anti-slavery age; with the close of the war which
+had broken for him all his ideals of inviolable peace, he had reached the
+age of misgiving. I do not mean that I ever heard him express doubt of
+what he had helped to do, or regret for what he had done; but I know that
+he viewed with critical anxiety what other men were doing with the
+accomplished facts. His anxiety gave a cast of what one may call
+reluctance from the political situation, and turned him back towards
+those civic and social defences which he had once seemed willing to
+abandon. I do not mean that he lost faith in democracy; this faith he
+constantly then and signally afterwards affirmed; but he certainly had no
+longer any faith in insubordination as a means of grace. He preached a
+quite Socratic reverence for law, as law, and I remember that once when I
+had got back from Canada in the usual disgust for the American
+custom-house, and spoke lightly of smuggling as not an evil in itself,
+and perhaps even a right under our vexatious tariff, he would not have
+it, but held that the illegality of the act made it a moral of fence.
+This was not the logic that would have justified the attitude of the
+anti-slavery men towards the fugitive slave act; but it was in accord
+with Lowell’s feeling about John Brown, whom he honored while always
+condemning his violation of law; and it was in the line of all his later
+thinking. In this, he wished you to agree with him, or at least he
+wished to make you; but he did not wish you to be more of his mind than
+he was himself. In one of those squalid Irish neighborhoods I confessed
+a grudge (a mean and cruel grudge, I now think it) for the increasing
+presence of that race among us, but this did not please him; and I am
+sure that whatever misgiving he had as to the future of America, he would
+not have had it less than it had been the refuge and opportunity of the
+poor of any race or color. Yet he would not have had it this alone.
+There was a line in his poem on Agassiz which he left out of the printed
+version, at the fervent entreaty of his friends, as saying too bitterly
+his disappointment with his country. Writing at the distance of Europe,
+and with America in the perspective which the alien environment clouded,
+he spoke of her as “The Land of Broken Promise.” It was a splendid
+reproach, but perhaps too dramatic to bear the full test of analysis, and
+yet it had the truth in it, and might, I think, have usefully stood, to
+the end of making people think. Undoubtedly it expressed his sense of
+the case, and in the same measure it would now express that of many who
+love their country most among us. It is well to hold one’s country to
+her promises, and if there are any who think she is forgetting them it is
+their duty to say so, even to the point of bitter accusation. I do not
+suppose it was the “common man” of Lincoln’s dream that Lowell thought
+America was unfaithful to, though as I have suggested he could be tender
+of the common man’s hopes in her; but he was impeaching in that blotted
+line her sincerity with the uncommon man: the man who had expected of her
+a constancy to the ideals of her youth end to the high martyr-moods of
+the war which had given an unguarded and bewildering freedom to a race of
+slaves. He was thinking of the shame of our municipal corruptions, the
+debased quality of our national statesmanship, the decadence of our whole
+civic tone, rather than of the increasing disabilities of the
+hard-working poor, though his heart when he thought of them was with
+them, too, as it was in “the time when the slave would not let him
+sleep.”
+
+He spoke very rarely of those times, perhaps because their political and
+social associations were so knit up with the saddest and tenderest
+personal memories, which it was still anguish to touch. Not only was he
+
+                  “--not of the race
+        That hawk, their sorrows in the market place,”
+
+but so far as my witness went he shrank from mention of them. I do not
+remember hearing him speak of the young wife who influenced him so
+potently at the most vital moment, and turned him from his whole
+scholarly and aristocratic tradition to an impassioned championship of
+the oppressed; and he never spoke of the children he had lost. I recall
+but one allusion to the days when he was fighting the anti-slavery battle
+along the whole line, and this was with a humorous relish of his Irish
+servant’s disgust in having to wait upon a negro whom he had asked to his
+table.
+
+He was rather severe in his notions of the subordination his domestics
+owed him. They were “to do as they were bid,” and yet he had a
+tenderness for such as had been any time with him, which was wounded when
+once a hired man long in his employ greedily overreached him in a certain
+transaction. He complained of that with a simple grief for the man’s
+indelicacy after so many favors from him, rather than with any
+resentment. His hauteur towards his dependents was theoretic; his actual
+behavior was of the gentle consideration common among Americans of good
+breeding, and that recreant hired man had no doubt never been suffered to
+exceed him in shows of mutual politeness. Often when the maid was about
+weightier matters, he came and opened his door to me himself, welcoming
+me with the smile that was like no other. Sometimes he said, “Siete il
+benvenuto,” or used some other Italian phrase, which put me at ease with
+him in the region where we were most at home together.
+
+Looking back I must confess that I do not see what it was he found to
+make him wish for my company, which he presently insisted upon having
+once a week at dinner. After the meal we turned into his study where we
+sat before a wood fire in winter, and he smoked and talked. He smoked a
+pipe which was always needing tobacco, or going out, so that I have the
+figure of him before my eyes constantly getting out of his deep chair to
+rekindle it from the fire with a paper lighter. He was often out of his
+chair to get a book from the shelves that lined the walls, either for a
+passage which he wished to read, or for some disputed point which he
+wished to settle. If I had caused the dispute, he enjoyed putting me in
+the wrong; if he could not, he sometimes whimsically persisted in his
+error, in defiance of all authority; but mostly he had such reverence for
+the truth that he would not question it even in jest.
+
+If I dropped in upon him in the afternoon I was apt to find him reading
+the old French poets, or the plays of Calderon, or the ‘Divina Commedia’,
+which he magnanimously supposed me much better acquainted with than I was
+because I knew some passages of it by heart. One day I came in quoting
+
+        “Io son, cantava, io son dolce Sirena,
+        Che i marinai in mezzo al mar dismago.”
+
+He stared at me in a rapture with the matchless music, and then uttered
+all his adoration and despair in one word. “Damn!” he said, and no more.
+I believe he instantly proposed a walk that day, as if his study walls
+with all their vistas into the great literatures cramped his soul
+liberated to a sense of ineffable beauty of the verse of the ‘somma
+poeta’. But commonly be preferred to have me sit down with him there
+among the mute witnesses of the larger part of his life. As I have
+suggested in my own case, it did not matter much whether you brought
+anything to the feast or not. If he liked you he liked being with you,
+not for what he got, but for what he gave. He was fond of one man whom I
+recall as the most silent man I ever met. I never heard him say
+anything, not even a dull thing, but Lowell delighted in him, and would
+have you believe that he was full of quaint humor.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+While Lowell lived there was a superstition, which has perhaps survived
+him, that he was an indolent man, wasting himself in barren studies and
+minor efforts instead of devoting his great powers to some monumental
+work worthy of them. If the robust body of literature, both poetry and
+prose, which lives after him does not yet correct this vain delusion, the
+time will come when it must; and in the meantime the delusion cannot vex
+him now. I think it did vex him, then, and that he even shared it, and
+tried at times to meet such shadowy claim as it had. One of the things
+that people urged upon him was to write some sort of story, and it is
+known how he attempted this in verse. It is less known that he attempted
+it in prose, and that he went so far as to write the first chapter of a
+novel. He read this to me, and though I praised it then, I have a
+feeling now that if he had finished the novel it would have been a
+failure. “But I shall never finish it,” he sighed, as if he felt
+irremediable defects in it, and laid the manuscript away, to turn and
+light his pipe. It was a rather old-fashioned study of a whimsical
+character, and it did not arrive anywhere, so far as it went; but I
+believe that it might have been different with a Yankee story in verse
+such as we have fragmentarily in ‘The Nooning’ and ‘FitzAdam’s Story’.
+Still, his gift was essentially lyrical and meditative, with the
+universal New England tendency to allegory. He was wholly undramatic in
+the actuation of the characters which he imagined so dramatically. He
+liked to deal with his subject at first hand, to indulge through himself
+all the whim and fancy which the more dramatic talent indulges through
+its personages.
+
+He enjoyed writing such a poem as “The Cathedral,” which is not of his
+best, but which is more immediately himself, in all his moods, than some
+better poems. He read it to me soon after it was written, and in the
+long walk which we went hard upon the reading (our way led us through the
+Port far towards East Cambridge, where he wished to show me a tupelo-tree
+of his acquaintance, because I said I had never seen one), his talk was
+still of the poem which he was greatly in conceit of. Later his
+satisfaction with it received a check from the reserves of other friends
+concerning some whimsical lines which seemed to them too great a drop
+from the higher moods of the piece. Their reluctance nettled him;
+perhaps he agreed with them; but he would not change the lines, and they
+stand as he first wrote them. In fact, most of his lines stand as he
+first wrote them; he would often change them in revision, and then, in a
+second revision go back to the first version.
+
+He was very sensitive to criticism, especially from those he valued
+through his head or heart. He would try to hide his hurt, and he would
+not let you speak of it, as though your sympathy unmanned him, but you
+could see that he suffered. This notably happened in my remembrance from
+a review in a journal which he greatly esteemed; and once when in a
+notice of my own I had put one little thorny point among the flowers, he
+confessed a puncture from it. He praised the criticism hardily, but I
+knew that he winced under my recognition of the didactic quality which he
+had not quite guarded himself against in the poetry otherwise praised. He
+liked your liking, and he openly rejoiced in it; and I suppose he made
+himself believe that in trying his verse with his friends he was testing
+it; but I do not believe that he was, and I do not think he ever
+corrected his judgment by theirs, however he suffered from it.
+
+In any matter that concerned literary morals he was more than eager to
+profit by another eye. One summer he sent me for the Magazine a poem
+which, when I read it, I trembled to find in motive almost exactly like
+one we had lately printed by another contributor. There was nothing for
+it but to call his attention to the resemblance, and I went over to
+Elmwood with the two poems. He was not at home, and I was obliged to
+leave the poems, I suppose with some sort of note, for the next morning’s
+post brought me a delicious letter from him, all one cry of confession,
+the most complete, the most ample. He did not trouble himself to say
+that his poem was an unconscious reproduction of the other; that was for
+every reason unnecessary, but he had at once rewritten it upon wholly
+different lines; and I do not think any reader was reminded of Mrs.
+Akers’s “Among the Laurels” by Lowell’s “Foot-path.” He was not only
+much more sensitive of others’ rights than his own, but in spite of a
+certain severity in him, he was most tenderly regardful of their
+sensibilities when he had imagined them: he did not always imagine them.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+At this period, between the years 1866 and 1874, when he unwillingly went
+abroad for a twelvemonth, Lowell was seen in very few Cambridge houses,
+and in still fewer Boston houses. He was not an unsocial man, but he was
+most distinctly not a society man. He loved chiefly the companionship of
+books, and of men who loved books; but of women generally he had an
+amusing diffidence; he revered them and honored them, but he would rather
+not have had them about. This is over-saying it, of course, but the
+truth is in what I say. There was never a more devoted husband, and he
+was content to let his devotion to the sex end with that. He especially
+could not abide difference of opinion in women; he valued their taste,
+their wit, their humor, but he would have none of their reason. I was by
+one day when he was arguing a point with one of his nieces, and after it
+had gone on for some time, and the impartial witness must have owned that
+she was getting the better of him he closed the controversy by giving her
+a great kiss, with the words, “You are a very good girl, my dear,” and
+practically putting her out of the room. As to women of the flirtatious
+type, he did not dislike them; no man, perhaps, does; but he feared them,
+and he said that with them there was but one way, and that was to run.
+
+I have a notion that at this period Lowell was more freely and fully
+himself than at any other. The passions and impulses of his younger
+manhood had mellowed, the sorrows of that time had softened; he could
+blamelessly live to himself in his affections and his sobered ideals. His
+was always a duteous life; but he had pretty well given up making man
+over in his own image, as we all wish some time to do, and then no longer
+wish it. He fulfilled his obligations to his fellow-men as these sought
+him out, but he had ceased to seek them. He loved his friends and their
+love, but he had apparently no desire to enlarge their circle. It was
+that hour of civic suspense, in which public men seemed still actuated by
+unselfish aims, and one not essentially a politician might contentedly
+wait to see what would come of their doing their best. At any rate,
+without occasionally withholding open criticism or acclaim Lowell waited
+among his books for the wounds of the war to heal themselves, and the
+nation to begin her healthfuller and nobler life. With slavery gone,
+what might not one expect of American democracy!
+
+His life at Elmwood was of an entire simplicity. In the old colonial
+mansion in which he was born, he dwelt in the embowering leafage, amid
+the quiet of lawns and garden-plots broken by few noises ruder than those
+from the elms and the syringas where
+
+     “The oriole clattered and the cat-bird sang.”
+
+From the tracks on Brattle Street, came the drowsy tinkle of horse-car
+bells; and sometimes a funeral trailed its black length past the corner
+of his grounds, and lost itself from sight under the shadows of the
+willows that hid Mount Auburn from his study windows. In the winter the
+deep New England snows kept their purity in the stretch of meadow behind
+the house, which a double row of pines guarded in a domestic privacy. All
+was of a modest dignity within and without the house, which Lowell loved
+but did not imagine of a manorial presence; and he could not conceal his
+annoyance with an over-enthusiastic account of his home in which the
+simple chiselling of some panels was vaunted as rich wood-carving. There
+was a graceful staircase, and a good wide hall, from which the
+dining-room and drawing-room opened by opposite doors; behind the last,
+in the southwest corner of the house, was his study.
+
+There, literally, he lived during the six or seven years in which I knew
+him after my coming to Cambridge. Summer and winter he sat there among
+his books, seldom stirring abroad by day except for a walk, and by night
+yet more rarely. He went to the monthly mid-day dinner of the Saturday
+Club in Boston; he was very constant at the fortnightly meetings of his
+whist-club, because he loved the old friends who formed it; he came
+always to the Dante suppers at Longfellow’s, and he was familiarly in and
+out at Mr. Norton’s, of course. But, otherwise, he kept to his study,
+except for some rare and almost unwilling absences upon university
+lecturing at Johns Hopkins or at Cornell.
+
+For four years I did not take any summer outing from Cambridge myself,
+and my associations with Elmwood and with Lowell are more of summer than
+of winter weather meetings. But often we went our walks through the
+snows, trudging along between the horsecar tracks which enclosed the only
+well-broken-out paths in that simple old Cambridge. I date one memorable
+expression of his from such a walk, when, as we were passing Longfellow’s
+house, in mid-street, he came as near the declaration of his religious
+faith as he ever did in my presence. He was speaking of the New
+Testament, and he said, The truth was in it; but they had covered it up
+with their hagiology. Though he had been bred a Unitarian, and had more
+and more liberated himself from all creeds, he humorously affected an
+abiding belief in hell, and similarly contended for the eternal
+punishment of the wicked. He was of a religious nature, and he was very
+reverent of other people’s religious feelings. He expressed a special
+tolerance for my own inherited faith, no doubt because Mrs. Lowell was
+also a Swedenborgian; but I do not think he was interested in it, and I
+suspect that all religious formulations bored him. In his earlier poems
+are many intimations and affirmations of belief in an overruling
+providence, and especially in the God who declares vengeance His and will
+repay men for their evil deeds, and will right the weak against the
+strong. I think he never quite lost this, though when, in the last years
+of his life, I asked him if he believed there was a moral government of
+the universe, he answered gravely and with a sort of pain, The scale was
+so vast, and we saw such a little part of it.
+
+As to tine notion of a life after death, I never had any direct or
+indirect expression from him; but I incline to the opinion that his hold
+upon this weakened with his years, as it is sadly apt to do with men who
+have read much and thought much: they have apparently exhausted their
+potentialities of psychological life. Mystical Lowell was, as every poet
+must be, but I do not think he liked mystery. One morning he told me
+that when he came home the night before he had seen the Doppelganger of
+one of his household: though, as he joked, he was not in a state to see
+double.
+
+He then said he used often to see people’s Doppelganger; at another time,
+as to ghosts, he said, He was like Coleridge: he had seen too many of
+‘em. Lest any weaker brethren should be caused to offend by the
+restricted oath which I have reported him using in a moment of transport
+it may be best to note here that I never heard him use any other
+imprecation, and this one seldom.
+
+Any grossness of speech was inconceivable of him; now and then, but only
+very rarely, the human nature of some story “unmeet for ladies” was too
+much for his sense of humor, and overcame him with amusement which he was
+willing to impart, and did impart, but so that mainly the human nature of
+it reached you. In this he was like the other great Cambridge men,
+though he was opener than the others to contact with the commoner life.
+He keenly delighted in every native and novel turn of phrase, and he
+would not undervalue a vital word or a notion picked up out of the road
+even if it had some dirt sticking to it.
+
+He kept as close to the common life as a man of his patrician instincts
+and cloistered habits could. I could go to him with any new find about
+it and be sure of delighting him; after I began making my involuntary and
+all but unconscious studies of Yankee character, especially in the
+country, he was always glad to talk them over with me. Still, when I had
+discovered a new accent or turn of speech in the fields he had
+cultivated, I was aware of a subtle grudge mingling with his pleasure;
+but this was after all less envy than a fine regret.
+
+At the time I speak of there was certainly nothing in Lowell’s dress or
+bearing that would have kept the common life aloof from him, if that life
+were not always too proud to make advances to any one. In this
+retrospect, I see him in the sack coat and rough suit which he wore upon
+all out-door occasions, with heavy shoes, and a round hat. I never saw
+him with a high hat on till he came home after his diplomatic stay in
+London; then he had become rather rigorously correct in his costume, and
+as conventional as he had formerly been indifferent. In both epochs he
+was apt to be gloved, and the strong, broad hands, which left the
+sensation of their vigor for some time after they had clasped yours, were
+notably white. At the earlier period, he still wore his auburn hair
+somewhat long; it was darker than his beard, which was branching and
+full, and more straw-colored than auburn, as were his thick eyebrows;
+neither hair nor beard was then touched with gray, as I now remember.
+When he uncovered, his straight, wide, white forehead showed itself one
+of the most beautiful that could be; his eyes were gay with humor, and
+alert with all intelligence. He had an enchanting smile, a laugh that
+was full of friendly joyousness, and a voice that was exquisite music.
+Everything about him expressed his strenuous physical condition: he would
+not wear an overcoat in the coldest Cambridge weather; at all times he
+moved vigorously, and walked with a quick step, lifting his feet well
+from the ground.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+It gives me a pleasure which I am afraid I cannot impart, to linger in
+this effort to materialize his presence from the fading memories of the
+past. I am afraid I can as little impart a due sense of what he
+spiritually was to my knowledge. It avails nothing for me to say that I
+think no man of my years and desert had ever so true and constant a
+friend. He was both younger and older than I by insomuch as he was a
+poet through and through, and had been out of college before I was born.
+But he had already come to the age of self-distrust when a man likes to
+take counsel with his juniors as with his elders, and fancies he can
+correct his perspective by the test of their fresher vision. Besides,
+Lowell was most simply and pathetically reluctant to part with youth, and
+was willing to cling to it wherever he found it. He could not in any
+wise bear to be left-out. When Mr. Bret Harte came to Cambridge, and the
+talk was all of the brilliant character-poems with which he had then
+first dazzled the world, Lowell casually said, with a most touching,
+however ungrounded sense of obsolescence, He could remember when the
+‘Biglow Papers’ were all the talk. I need not declare that there was
+nothing ungenerous in that. He was only too ready to hand down his
+laurels to a younger man; but he wished to do it himself. Through the
+modesty that is always a quality of such a nature, he was magnanimously
+sensitive to the appearance of fading interest; he could not take it
+otherwise than as a proof of his fading power. I had a curious hint of
+this when one year in making up the prospectus of the Magazine for the
+next, I omitted his name because I had nothing special to promise from
+him, and because I was half ashamed to be always flourishing it in the
+eyes of the public. “I see that you have dropped me this year,” he
+wrote, and I could see that it had hurt, and I knew that he was glad to
+believe the truth when I told him.
+
+He did not care so much for popularity as for the praise of his friends.
+If he liked you he wished you not only to like what he wrote, but to say
+so. He was himself most cordial in his recognition of the things that
+pleased him. What happened to me from him, happened to others, and I am
+only describing his common habit when I say that nothing I did to his
+liking failed to bring me a spoken or oftener a written acknowledgment.
+This continued to the latest years of his life when the effort even to
+give such pleasure must have cost him a physical pang.
+
+He was of a very catholic taste; and he was apt to be carried away by a
+little touch of life or humor, and to overvalue the piece in which he
+found it; but, mainly his judgments of letters and men were just. One of
+the dangers of scholarship was a peculiar danger in the Cambridge
+keeping, but Lowell was almost as averse as Longfellow from contempt. He
+could snub, and pitilessly, where he thought there was presumption and
+apparently sometimes merely because he was in the mood; but I cannot
+remember ever to have heard him sneer. He was often wonderfully patient
+of tiresome people, and sometimes celestially insensible to vulgarity. In
+spite of his reserve, he really wished people to like him; he was keenly
+alive to neighborly good-will or ill-will; and when there was a question
+of widening Elmwood avenue by taking part of his grounds, he was keenly
+hurt by hearing that some one who lived near him had said he hoped the
+city would cut down Lowell’s elms: his English elms, which his father had
+planted, and with which he was himself almost one blood!
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+In the period of which I am speaking, Lowell was constantly writing and
+pretty constantly printing, though still the superstition held that he
+was an idle man. To this time belongs the publication of some of his
+finest poems, if not their inception: there were cases in which their
+inception dated far back, even to ten or twenty years. He wrote his
+poems at a heat, and the manuscript which came to me for the magazine was
+usually the first draft, very little corrected. But if the cold fit took
+him quickly it might hold him so fast that he would leave the poem in
+abeyance till he could slowly live back to a liking for it.
+
+The most of his best prose belongs to the time between 1866 and 1874, and
+to this time we owe the several volumes of essays and criticisms called
+‘Among My Books’ and ‘My Study Windows’. He wished to name these more
+soberly, but at the urgence of his publishers he gave them titles which
+they thought would be attractive to the public, though he felt that they
+took from the dignity of his work. He was not a good business man in a
+literary way, he submitted to others’ judgment in all such matters. I
+doubt if he ever put a price upon anything he sold, and I dare say he was
+usually surprised at the largeness of the price paid him; but sometimes
+if his need was for a larger sum, he thought it too little, without
+reference to former payments. This happened with a long poem in the
+Atlantic, which I had urged the counting-room authorities to deal
+handsomely with him for. I did not know how many hundred they gave him,
+and when I met him I ventured to express the hope that the publishers had
+done their part. He held up four fingers, “Quattro,” he said in Italian,
+and then added with a disappointment which he tried to smile away, “I
+thought they might have made it cinque.”
+
+Between me and me I thought quattro very well, but probably Lowell had in
+mind some end which cinque would have fitted better. It was pretty sure
+to be an unselfish end, a pleasure to some one dear to him, a gift that
+he had wished to make. Long afterwards when I had been the means of
+getting him cinque for a poem one-tenth the length, he spoke of the
+payment to me. “It came very handily; I had been wanting to give a
+watch.”
+
+I do not believe at any time Lowell was able to deal with money
+
+     “Like wealthy men, not knowing what they give.”
+
+more probably he felt a sacredness in the money got by literature, which
+the literary man never quite rids him self of, even when he is not a
+poet, and which made him wish to dedicate it to something finer than the
+every day uses. He lived very quietly, but he had by no means more than
+he needed to live upon, and at that time he had pecuniary losses. He was
+writing hard, and was doing full work in his Harvard professorship, and
+he was so far dependent upon his salary, that he felt its absence for the
+year he went abroad. I do not know quite how to express my sense of
+something unworldly, of something almost womanlike in his relation to
+money.
+
+He was not only generous of money, but he was generous of himself, when
+he thought he could be of use, or merely of encouragement. He came all
+the way into Boston to hear certain lectures of mine on the Italian
+poets, which he could not have found either edifying or amusing, that he
+might testify his interest in me, and show other people that they were
+worth coming to. He would go carefully over a poem with me, word by
+word, and criticise every turn of phrase, and after all be magnanimously
+tolerant of my sticking to phrasings that he disliked. In a certain line
+
+     “The silvern chords of the piano trembled,”
+
+he objected to silvern. Why not silver? I alleged leathern, golden, and
+like adjectives in defence of my word; but still he found an affectation
+in it, and suffered it to stand with extreme reluctance. Another line of
+another piece:
+
+     “And what she would, would rather that she would not”
+
+he would by no means suffer. He said that the stress falling on the last
+word made it “public-school English,” and he mocked it with the answer a
+maid had lately given him when he asked if the master of the house was at
+home. She said, “No, sir, he is not,” when she ought to have said “No,
+sir, he isn’t.” He was appeased when I came back the next day with the
+stanza amended so that the verse could read:
+
+     “And what she would, would rather she would not so”
+
+but I fancy he never quite forgave my word silvern. Yet, he professed
+not to have prejudices in such matters, but to use any word that would
+serve his turn, without wincing; and he certainly did use and defend
+words, as undisprivacied and disnatured, that made others wince.
+
+He was otherwise such a stickler for the best diction that he would not
+have had me use slovenly vernacular even in the dialogue in my stories:
+my characters must not say they wanted to do so and so, but wished, and
+the like. In a copy of one of my books which I found him reading, I saw
+he had corrected my erring Western woulds and shoulds; as he grew old he
+was less and less able to restrain himself from setting people right to
+their faces. Once, in the vast area of my ignorance, he specified my
+small acquaintance with a certain period of English poetry, saying,
+“You’re rather shady, there, old fellow.” But he would not have had me
+too learned, holding that he had himself been hurt for literature by his
+scholarship.
+
+His patience in analyzing my work with me might have been the easy effort
+of his habit of teaching; and his willingness to give himself and his own
+was no doubt more signally attested in his asking a brother man of
+letters who wished to work up a subject in the college library, to stay a
+fortnight in his house, and to share his study, his beloved study, with
+him. This must truly have cost him dear, as any author of fixed habits
+will understand. Happily the man of letters was a good fellow, and knew
+how to prize the favor-done him, but if he had been otherwise, it would
+have been the same to Lowell. He not only endured, but did many things
+for the weaker brethren, which were amusing enough to one in the secret
+of his inward revolt. Yet in these things he was considerate also of the
+editor whom he might have made the sharer of his self-sacrifice, and he
+seldom offered me manuscripts for others. The only real burden of the
+kind that he put upon me was the diary of a Virginian who had travelled
+in New England during the early thirties, and had set down his
+impressions of men and manners there. It began charmingly, and went on
+very well under Lowell’s discreet pruning, but after a while he seemed to
+fall in love with the character of the diarist so much that he could not
+bear to cut anything.
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+He had a great tenderness for the broken and ruined South, whose sins he
+felt that he had had his share in visiting upon her, and he was willing
+to do what he could to ease her sorrows in the case of any particular
+Southerner. He could not help looking askance upon the dramatic shows of
+retribution which some of the Northern politicians were working, but with
+all his misgivings he continued to act with the Republican party until
+after the election of Hayes; he was away from the country during the
+Garfield campaign. He was in fact one of the Massachusetts electors
+chosen by the Republican majority in 1816, and in that most painful hour
+when there was question of the policy and justice of counting Hayes in
+for the presidency, it was suggested by some of Lowell’s friends that he
+should use the original right of the electors under the constitution, and
+vote for Tilden, whom one vote would have chosen president over Hayes.
+After he had cast his vote for Hayes, he quietly referred to the matter
+one day, in the moment of lighting his pipe, with perhaps the faintest
+trace of indignation in his tone. He said that whatever the first intent
+of the constitution was, usage had made the presidential electors
+strictly the instruments of the party which chose them, and that for him
+to have voted for Tilden when he had been chosen to vote for Hayes would
+have-been an act of bad faith.
+
+He would have resumed for me all the old kindness of our relations before
+the recent year of his absence, but this had inevitably worked a little
+estrangement. He had at least lost the habit of me, and that says much
+in such matters. He was not so perfectly at rest in the Cambridge
+environment; in certain indefinable ways it did not so entirely suffice
+him, though he would have been then and always the last to allow this. I
+imagine his friends realized more than he, that certain delicate but
+vital filaments of attachment had frayed and parted in alien air, and
+left him heart-loose as he had not been before.
+
+I do not know whether it crossed his mind after the election of Hayes
+that he might be offered some place abroad, but it certainly crossed the
+minds of some of his friends, and I could not feel that I was acting for
+myself alone when I used a family connection with the President, very
+early in his term, to let him know that I believed Lowell would accept a
+diplomatic mission. I could assure him that I was writing wholly without
+Lowell’s privity or authority, and I got back such a letter as I could
+wish in its delicate sense of the situation. The President said that he
+had already thought of offering Lowell something, and he gave me the
+pleasure, a pleasure beyond any other I could imagine, of asking Lowell
+whether he would accept the mission to Austria. I lost no time carrying
+his letter to Elmwood, where I found Lowell over his coffee at dinner. He
+saw me at the threshold, and called to me through the open door to come
+in, and I handed him the letter, and sat down at table while he ran it
+through. When he had read it, he gave a quick “Ah!” and threw it over
+the length of the table to Mrs. Lowell. She read it in a smiling and
+loyal reticence, as if she would not say one word of all she might wish
+to say in urging his acceptance, though I could see that she was
+intensely eager for it. The whole situation was of a perfect New England
+character in its tacit significance; after Lowell had taken his coffee we
+turned into his study without further allusion to the matter.
+
+A day or two later he came to my house to say that he could not accept
+the Austrian mission, and to ask me to tell the President so for him, and
+make his acknowledgments, which he would also write himself. He remained
+talking a little while of other things, and when he rose to go, he said
+with a sigh of vague reluctance, “I should like to see a play of
+Calderon,” as if it had nothing to do with any wish of his that could
+still be fulfilled. “Upon this hint I acted,” and in due time it was
+found in Washington, that the gentleman who had been offered the Spanish
+mission would as lief go to Austria, and Lowell was sent to Madrid.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+When we met in London, some years later, he came almost every afternoon
+to my lodging, and the story of our old-time Cambridge walks began again
+in London phrases. There were not the vacant lots and outlying fields of
+his native place, but we made shift with the vast, simple parks, and we
+walked on the grass as we could not have done in an American park, and
+were glad to feel the earth under our feet. I said how much it was like
+those earlier tramps; and that pleased him, for he wished, whenever a
+thing delighted him, to find a Cambridge quality in it.
+
+But he was in love with everything English, and was determined I should
+be so too, beginning with the English weather, which in summer cannot be
+overpraised. He carried, of course, an umbrella, but he would not put it
+up in the light showers that caught us at times, saying that the English
+rain never wetted you. The thick short turf delighted him; he would
+scarcely allow that the trees were the worse for foliage blighted by a
+vile easterly storm in the spring of that year. The tender air, the
+delicate veils that the moisture in it cast about all objects at the
+least remove, the soft colors of the flowers, the dull blue of the low
+sky showing through the rifts of the dirty white clouds, the hovering
+pall of London smoke, were all dear to him, and he was anxious that I
+should not lose anything of their charm.
+
+He was anxious that I should not miss the value of anything in England,
+and while he volunteered that the aristocracy had the corruptions of
+aristocracies everywhere, he insisted upon my respectful interest in it
+because it was so historical. Perhaps there was a touch of irony in this
+demand, but it is certain that he was very happy in England. He had come
+of the age when a man likes smooth, warm keeping, in which he need make
+no struggle for his comfort; disciplined and obsequious service; society,
+perfectly ascertained within the larger society which we call
+civilization; and in an alien environment, for which he was in no wise
+responsible, he could have these without a pang of the self-reproach
+which at home makes a man unhappy amidst his luxuries, when he considers
+their cost to others. He had a position which forbade thought of
+unfairness in the conditions; he must not wake because of the slave, it
+was his duty to sleep. Besides, at that time Lowell needed all the rest
+he could get, for he had lately passed through trials such as break the
+strength of men, and how them with premature age. He was living alone in
+his little house in Lowndes Square, and Mrs. Lowell was in the country,
+slowly recovering from the effects of the terrible typhus which she had
+barely survived in Madrid. He was yet so near the anguish of that
+experience that he told me he had still in his nerves the expectation of
+a certain agonized cry from her which used to rend them. But he said he
+had adjusted himself to this, and he went on to speak with a patience
+which was more affecting in him than in men of more phlegmatic
+temperament, of how we were able to adjust ourselves to all our trials
+and to the constant presence of pain. He said he was never free of a
+certain distress, which was often a sharp pang, in one of his shoulders,
+but his physique had established such relations with it that, though he
+was never unconscious of it, he was able to endure it without a
+recognition of it as suffering.
+
+He seemed to me, however, very well, and at his age of sixty-three, I
+could not see that he was less alert and vigorous than he was when I
+first knew him in Cambridge. He had the same brisk, light step, and
+though his beard was well whitened and his auburn hair had grown ashen
+through the red, his face had the freshness and his eyes the clearness of
+a young man’s. I suppose the novelty of his life kept him from thinking
+about his years; or perhaps in contact with those great, insenescent
+Englishmen, he could not feel himself old. At any rate he did not once
+speak of age, as he used to do ten years earlier, and I, then half
+through my forties, was still “You young dog” to him. It was a bright
+and cheerful renewal of the early kindliness between us, on which indeed
+there had never been a shadow, except such as distance throws. He wished
+apparently to do everything he could to assure us of his personal
+interest; and we were amused to find him nervously apprehensive of any
+purpose, such as was far from us, to profit by him officially. He
+betrayed a distinct relief when he found we were not going to come upon
+him even for admissions to the houses of parliament, which we were to see
+by means of an English acquaintance. He had not perhaps found some other
+fellow-citizens so considerate; he dreaded the half-duties of his place,
+like presentations to the queen, and complained of the cheap ambitions he
+had to gratify in that way.
+
+He was so eager to have me like England in every way, and seemed so fond
+of the English, that I thought it best to ask him whether he minded my
+quoting, in a paper about Lexington, which I was just then going to print
+in a London magazine, some humorous lines of his expressing the mounting
+satisfaction of an imaginary Yankee story-teller who has the old fight
+terminate in Lord Percy’s coming
+
+     “To hammer stone for life in Concord jail.”
+
+It had occurred to me that it might possibly embarrass him to have this
+patriotic picture presented to a public which could not take our Fourth
+of July pleasure in it, and I offered to suppress it, as I did afterwards
+quite for literary reasons. He said, No, let it stand, and let them make
+the worst of it; and I fancy that much of his success with a people who
+are not gingerly with other people’s sensibilities came from the
+frankness with which he trampled on their prejudice when he chose. He
+said he always told them, when there was question of such things, that
+the best society he had ever known was in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He
+contended that the best English was spoken there; and so it was, when he
+spoke it.
+
+We were in London out of the season, and he was sorry that he could not
+have me meet some titles who he declared had found pleasure in my books;
+when we returned from Italy in the following June, he was prompt to do me
+this honor. I dare say he wished me to feel it to its last implication,
+and I did my best, but there was nothing in the evening I enjoyed so much
+as his coming up to Mrs. Lowell, at the close, when there was only a
+title or two left, and saying to her as he would have said to her at
+Elmwood, where she would have personally planned it, “Fanny, that was a
+fine dinner you gave us.” Of course, this was in a tender burlesque; but
+it remains the supreme impression of what seemed to me a cloudlessly
+happy period for Lowell. His wife was quite recovered of her long
+suffering, and was again at the head of his house, sharing in his
+pleasures, and enjoying his successes for his sake; successes so great
+that people spoke of him seriously, as “an addition to society” in
+London, where one man more or less seemed like a drop in the sea. She was
+a woman perfectly of the New England type and tradition: almost
+repellantly shy at first, and almost glacially cold with new
+acquaintance, but afterwards very sweet and cordial. She was of a dark
+beauty with a regular face of the Spanish outline; Lowell was of an ideal
+manner towards her, and of an admiration which delicately travestied
+itself and which she knew how to receive with smiling irony. After her
+death, which occurred while he was still in England, he never spoke of
+her to me, though before that he used to be always bringing her name in,
+with a young lover-like fondness.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+In the hurry of the London season I did not see so much of Lowell on our
+second sojourn as on our first, but once when we were alone in his study
+there was a return to the terms of the old meetings in Cambridge. He
+smoked his pipe, and sat by his fire and philosophized; and but for the
+great London sea swirling outside and bursting through our shelter, and
+dashing him with notes that must be instantly answered, it was a very
+fair image of the past. He wanted to tell me about his coachman whom he
+had got at on his human side with great liking and amusement, and there
+was a patient gentleness in his manner with the footman who had to keep
+coming in upon him with those notes which was like the echo of his young
+faith in the equality of men. But he always distinguished between the
+simple unconscious equality of the ordinary American and its assumption
+by a foreigner. He said he did not mind such an American’s coming into
+his house with his hat on; but if a German or Englishman did it, he
+wanted to knock it off. He was apt to be rather punctilious in his shows
+of deference towards others, and at one time he practised removing his
+own hat when he went into shops in Cambridge. It must have mystified the
+Cambridge salesmen, and I doubt if he kept it up.
+
+With reference to the doctrine of his young poetry, the fierce and the
+tender humanity of his storm and stress period, I fancy a kind of baffle
+in Lowell, which I should not perhaps find it easy to prove. I never
+knew him by word or hint to renounce this doctrine, but he could not come
+to seventy years without having seen many high hopes fade, and known many
+inspired prophecies fail. When we have done our best to make the world
+over, we are apt to be dismayed by finding it in much the old shape. As
+he said of the moral government of the universe, the scale is so vast,
+and a little difference, a little change for the better, is scarcely
+perceptible to the eager consciousness of the wholesale reformer. But
+with whatever sense of disappointment, of doubt as to his own deeds for
+truer freedom and for better conditions I believe his sympathy was still
+with those who had some heart for hoping and striving. I am sure that
+though he did not agree with me in some of my own later notions for the
+redemption of the race, he did not like me the less but rather the more
+because (to my own great surprise I confess) I had now and then the
+courage of my convictions, both literary and social.
+
+He was probably most at odds with me in regard to my theories of fiction,
+though he persisted in declaring his pleasure in my own fiction. He was
+in fact, by nature and tradition, thoroughly romantic, and he could not
+or would not suffer realism in any but a friend. He steadfastly refused
+even to read the Russian masters, to his immense loss, as I tried to
+persuade him, and even among the modern Spaniards, for whom he might have
+had a sort of personal kindness from his love of Cervantes, he chose one
+for his praise the least worthy, of it, and bore me down with his heavier
+metal in argument when I opposed to Alarcon’s factitiousness the
+delightful genuineness of Valdes. Ibsen, with all the Norwegians, he put
+far from him; he would no more know them than the Russians; the French
+naturalists he abhorred. I thought him all wrong, but you do not try
+improving your elders when they have come to three score and ten years,
+and I would rather have had his affection unbroken by our difference of
+opinion than a perfect agreement. Where he even imagined that this
+difference could work me harm, he was anxious to have me know that he
+meant me none; and he was at the trouble to write me a letter when a
+Boston paper had perverted its report of what he said in a public lecture
+to my disadvantage, and to assure me that he had not me in mind. When
+once he had given his liking, he could not bear that any shadow of change
+should seem to have come upon him. He had a most beautiful and endearing
+ideal of friendship; he desired to affirm it and to reaffirm it as often
+as occasion offered, and if occasion did not offer, he made occasion. It
+did not matter what you said or did that contraried him; if he thought he
+had essentially divined you, you were still the same: and on his part he
+was by no means exacting of equal demonstration, but seemed not even to
+wish it.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+After he was replaced at London by a minister more immediately
+representative of the Democratic administration, he came home. He made a
+brave show of not caring to have remained away, but in truth he had
+become very fond of England, where he had made so many friends, and where
+the distinction he had, in that comfortably padded environment, was so
+agreeable to him.
+
+It would have been like him to have secretly hoped that the new President
+might keep him in London, but he never betrayed any ignoble
+disappointment, and he would not join in any blame of him. At our first
+meeting after he came home he spoke of the movement which had made Mr.
+Cleveland president, and said he supposed that if he had been here, he
+should have been in it. All his friends were, he added, a little
+helplessly; but he seemed not to dislike my saying I knew one of his
+friends who was not: in fact, as I have told, he never disliked a plump
+difference--unless he disliked the differer.
+
+For several years he went back to England every summer, and it was not
+until he took up his abode at Elmwood again that he spent a whole year at
+home. One winter he passed at his sister’s home in Boston, but mostly he
+lived with his daughter at Southborough. I have heard a story of his
+going to Elmwood soon after his return in 1885, and sitting down in his
+old study, where he declared with tears that the place was full of
+ghosts. But four or five years later it was well for family reasons that
+he should live there; and about the same time it happened that I had
+taken a house for the summer in his neighborhood. He came to see me, and
+to assure me, in all tacit forms of his sympathy in a sorrow for which
+there could be no help; but it was not possible that the old intimate
+relations should be resumed. The affection was there, as much on his
+side as on mine, I believe; but he was now an old man and I was an
+elderly man, and we could not, without insincerity, approach each other
+in the things that had drawn us together in earlier and happier years.
+His course was run; my own, in which he had taken such a generous
+pleasure, could scarcely move his jaded interest. His life, so far as it
+remained to him, had renewed itself in other air; the later friendships
+beyond seas sufficed him, and were without the pang, without the effort
+that must attend the knitting up of frayed ties here.
+
+He could never have been anything but American, if he had tried, and he
+certainly never tried; but he certainly did not return to the outward
+simplicities of his life as I first knew it. There was no more
+round-hat-and-sack-coat business for him; he wore a frock and a high hat,
+and whatever else was rather like London than Cambridge; I do not know
+but drab gaiters sometimes added to the effect of a gentleman of the old
+school which he now produced upon the witness. Some fastidiousnesses
+showed themselves in him, which were not so surprising. He complained of
+the American lower class manner; the conductor and cabman would be kind
+to you but they would not be respectful, and he could not see the fun of
+this in the old way. Early in our acquaintance he rather stupified me by
+saying, “I like you because you don’t put your hands on me,” and I heard
+of his consenting to some sort of reception in those last years, “Yes, if
+they won’t shake hands.”
+
+Ever since his visit to Rome in 1875 he had let his heavy mustache grow
+long till it dropped below the corners of his beard, which was now almost
+white; his face had lost the ruddy hue so characteristic of him. I fancy
+he was then ailing with premonitions of the disorder which a few years
+later proved mortal, but he still bore himself with sufficient vigor, and
+he walked the distance between his house and mine, though once when I
+missed his visit the family reported that after he came in he sat a long
+time with scarcely a word, as if too weary to talk. That winter, I went
+into Boston to live, and I saw him only at infrequent intervals, when I
+could go out to Elmwood. At such times I found him sitting in the room
+which was formerly the drawing-room, but which had been joined with his
+study by taking away the partitions beside the heavy mass of the old
+colonial chimney. He told me that when he was a newborn babe, the nurse
+had carried him round this chimney, for luck, and now in front of the
+same hearth, the white old man stretched himself in an easy-chair, with
+his writing-pad on his knees and his books on the table at his elbow, and
+was willing to be entreated not to rise. I remember the sun used to come
+in at the eastern windows full pour, and bathe the air in its warmth.
+
+He always hailed me gayly, and if I found him with letters newly come
+from England, as I sometimes did, he glowed and sparkled with fresh life.
+He wanted to read passages from those letters, he wanted to talk about
+their writers, and to make me feel their worth and charm as he did. He
+still dreamed of going back to England the next summer, but that was not
+to be. One day he received me not less gayly than usual, but with a
+certain excitement, and began to tell me about an odd experience he had
+had, not at all painful, but which had very much mystified him. He had
+since seen the doctor, and the doctor had assured him that there was
+nothing alarming in what had happened, and in recalling this assurance,
+he began to look at the humorous aspects of the case, and to make some
+jokes about it. He wished to talk of it, as men do of their maladies,
+and very fully, and I gave him such proof of my interest as even inviting
+him to talk of it would convey. In spite of the doctor’s assurance, and
+his joyful acceptance of it, I doubt if at the bottom of his heart there
+was not the stir of an uneasy misgiving; but he had not for a long time
+shown himself so cheerful.
+
+It was the beginning of the end. He recovered and relapsed, and
+recovered again; but never for long. Late in the spring I came out, and
+he had me stay to dinner, which was somehow as it used to be at two
+o’clock; and after dinner we went out on his lawn. He got a long-handled
+spud, and tried to grub up some dandelions which he found in his turf,
+but after a moment or two he threw it down, and put his hand upon his
+back with a groan. I did not see him again till I came out to take leave
+of him before going away for the summer, and then I found him sitting on
+the little porch in a western corner of his house, with a volume of Scott
+closed upon his finger. There were some other people, and our meeting
+was with the constraint of their presence. It was natural in nothing so
+much as his saying very significantly to me, as if he knew of my heresies
+concerning Scott, and would have me know he did not approve of them, that
+there was nothing he now found so much pleasure in as Scott’s novels.
+Another friend, equally heretical, was by, but neither of us attempted to
+gainsay him. Lowell talked very little, but he told of having been a
+walk to Beaver Brook, and of having wished to jump from one stone to
+another in the stream, and of having had to give it up. He said, without
+completing the sentence, If it had come to that with him! Then he fell
+silent again; and with some vain talk of seeing him when I came back in
+the fall, I went away sick at heart. I was not to see him again, and I
+shall not look upon his like.
+
+I am aware that I have here shown him from this point and from that in a
+series of sketches which perhaps collectively impart, but do not assemble
+his personality in one impression. He did not, indeed, make one
+impression upon me, but a thousand impressions, which I should seek in
+vain to embody in a single presentment. What I have cloudily before me
+is the vision of a very lofty and simple soul, perplexed, and as it were
+surprised and even dismayed at the complexity of the effects from motives
+so single in it, but escaping always to a clear expression of what was
+noblest and loveliest in itself at the supreme moments, in the divine
+exigencies. I believe neither in heroes nor in saints; but I believe in
+great and good men, for I have known them, and among such men Lowell was
+of the richest nature I have known. His nature was not always serene or
+pellucid; it was sometimes roiled by the currents that counter and cross
+in all of us; but it was without the least alloy of insincerity, and it
+was never darkened by the shadow of a selfish fear. His genius was an
+instrument that responded in affluent harmony to the power that made him
+a humorist and that made him a poet, and appointed him rarely to be quite
+either alone.
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+A BELATED GUEST
+
+It is doubtful whether the survivor of any order of things finds
+compensation in the privilege, however undisputed by his contemporaries,
+of recording his memories of it. This is, in the first two or three
+instances, a pleasure. It is sweet to sit down, in the shade or by the
+fire, and recall names, looks, and tones from the past; and if the
+Absences thus entreated to become Presences are those of famous people,
+they lend to the fond historian a little of their lustre, in which he
+basks for the time with an agreeable sense of celebrity. But another
+time comes, and comes very soon, when the pensive pleasure changes to the
+pain of duty, and the precious privilege converts itself into a grievous
+obligation. You are unable to choose your company among those immortal
+shades; if one, why not another, where all seem to have a right to such
+gleams of this ‘dolce lome’ as your reminiscences can shed upon them?
+Then they gather so rapidly, as the years pass, in these pale realms,
+that one, if one continues to survive, is in danger of wearing out such
+welcome, great or small, as met ones recollections in the first two or
+three instances, if one does one’s duty by each. People begin to say,
+and not without reason, in a world so hurried and wearied as this: “Ah,
+here he is again with his recollections!” Well, but if the recollections
+by some magical good-fortune chance to concern such a contemporary of his
+as, say, Bret Harte, shall not he be partially justified, or at least
+excused?
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+My recollections of Bret Harte begin with the arrest, on the Atlantic
+shore, of that progress of his from the Pacific Slope, which, in the
+simple days of 1871, was like the progress of a prince, in the universal
+attention and interest which met and followed it. He was indeed a
+prince, a fairy prince in whom every lover of his novel and enchanting
+art felt a patriotic property, for his promise and performance in those
+earliest tales of ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp’, and ‘Tennessee’s Partner’,
+and ‘Maggles’, and ‘The Outcasts of Poker Flat’, were the earnests of an
+American literature to come. If it is still to come, in great measure,
+that is not Harte’s fault, for he kept on writing those stories, in one
+form or another, as long as he lived. He wrote them first and last in
+the spirit of Dickens, which no man of his time could quite help doing,
+but he wrote them from the life of Bret Harte, on the soil and in the air
+of the newest kind of new world, and their freshness took the soul of his
+fellow-countrymen not only with joy, but with pride such as the
+Europeans, who adored him much longer, could never know in him.
+
+When the adventurous young editor who had proposed being his host for
+Cambridge and the Boston neighborhood, while Harte was still in San
+Francisco, and had not yet begun his princely progress eastward, read of
+the honors that attended his coming from point to point, his courage
+fell, as if he had perhaps, committed himself in too great an enterprise.
+Who was he, indeed, that he should think of making this
+
+        “Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,”
+
+his guest, especially when he heard that in Chicago Harte failed of
+attending a banquet of honor because the givers of it had not sent a
+carriage to fetch him to it, as the alleged use was in San Francisco?
+Whether true or not, and it was probably not true in just that form, it
+must have been this rumor which determined his host to drive into Boston
+for him with the handsomest hack which the livery of Cambridge afforded,
+and not trust to the horse-car and the local expressman to get him and
+his baggage out, as he would have done with a less portentous guest.
+However it was, he instantly lost all fear when they met at the station,
+and Harte pressed forward with his cordial hand-clasp, as if he were not
+even a fairy prince, and with that voice and laugh which were surely the
+most winning in the world. He was then, as always, a child of extreme
+fashion as to his clothes and the cut of his beard, which he wore in a
+mustache and the drooping side-whiskers of the day, and his jovial
+physiognomy was as winning as his voice, with its straight nose and
+fascinating thrust of the under lip, its fine eyes, and good forehead,
+then thickly crowned with the black hair which grew early white, while
+his mustache remained dark the most enviable and consoling effect
+possible in the universal mortal necessity of either aging or dying. He
+was, as one could not help seeing, thickly pitted, but after the first
+glance one forgot this, so that a lady who met him for the first time
+could say to him, “Mr. Harte, aren’t you afraid to go about in the cars
+so recklessly when there is this scare about smallpox?” “No, madam,” he
+could answer in that rich note of his, with an irony touched by
+pseudo-pathos, “I bear a charmed life.”
+
+The drive out from Boston was not too long for getting on terms of
+personal friendship with the family which just filled the hack, the two
+boys intensely interested in the novelties of a New England city and
+suburb, and the father and mother continually exchanging admiration of
+such aspects of nature as presented themselves in the leafless sidewalk
+trees, and patches of park and lawn. They found everything so fine, so
+refined, after the gigantic coarseness of California, where the natural
+forms were so vast that one could not get on companionable terms with
+them. Their host heard them without misgiving for the world of romance
+which Harte had built up among those huge forms, and with a subtle
+perception that this was no excursion of theirs to the East, but a
+lifelong exodus from the exile which he presently understood they must
+always have felt California to be. It is different now, when people are
+every day being born in California, and must begin to feel it home from
+the first breath, but it is notable that none of the Californians of that
+great early day have gone back to live amid the scenes which inspired and
+prospered them.
+
+Before they came in sight of the editor’s humble roof he had mocked
+himself to his guest for his trepidations, and Harte with burlesque
+magnanimity had consented to be for that occasion only something less
+formidable than he had loomed afar. He accepted with joy the theory of
+passing a week in the home of virtuous poverty, and the week began as
+delightfully as it went on. From first to last Cambridge amused him as
+much as it charmed him by that air of academic distinction which was
+stranger to him even than the refined trees and grass. It has already
+been told how, after a list of the local celebrities had been recited to
+him, he said, “why, you couldn’t stand on your front porch and fire off
+your revolver without bringing down a two volumer,” and no doubt the
+pleasure he had in it was the effect of its contrast with the wild
+California he had known, and perhaps, when he had not altogether known
+it, had invented.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+Cambridge began very promptly to show him those hospitalities which he
+could value, and continued the fable of his fairy princeliness in the
+curiosity of those humbler admirers who could not hope to be his hosts or
+his fellow-guests at dinner or luncheon. Pretty presences in the
+tie-backs of the period were seen to flit before the home of virtuous
+poverty, hungering for any chance sight of him which his outgoings or
+incomings might give. The chances were better with the outgoings than
+with the incomings, for these were apt to be so hurried, in the final
+result of his constitutional delays, as to have the rapidity of the
+homing pigeon’s flight, and to afford hardly a glimpse to the quickest
+eye. It cannot harm him, or any one now, to own that Harte was nearly
+always late for those luncheons and dinners which he was always going out
+to, and it needed the anxieties and energies of both families to get him
+into his clothes, and then into the carriage where a good deal of final
+buttoning must have been done, in order that he might not arrive so very
+late. He was the only one concerned who was quite unconcerned; his
+patience with his delays was inexhaustible; he arrived at the expected
+houses smiling, serenely jovial, radiating a bland gaiety from his whole
+person, and ready to ignore any discomfort he might have occasioned.
+
+Of course, people were glad to have him on his own terms, and it may be
+truly said that it was worth while to have him on any terms. There never
+was a more charming companion, an easier or more delightful guest.
+
+It was not from what he said, for he was not much of a talker, and almost
+nothing of a story-teller; but he could now and then drop the fittest
+word, and with a glance or smile of friendly intelligence express the
+appreciation of another’s fit word which goes far to establish for a man
+the character of boon humorist. It must be said of him that if he took
+the honors easily that were paid him he took them modestly, and never by
+word or look invited them, or implied that he expected them. It was fine
+to see him humorously accepting the humorous attribution of scientific
+sympathies from Agassiz, in compliment of his famous epic describing the
+incidents that “broke up the society upon the Stanislow.” It was a
+little fearsome to hear him frankly owning to Lowell his dislike for
+something over-literary in the phrasing of certain verses of ‘The
+Cathedral.’ But Lowell could stand that sort of thing from a man who
+could say the sort of things that Harte said to him of that delicious
+line picturing the bobolink as he
+
+     “Runs down a brook of laughter in the air.”
+
+This, Harte told him, was the line he liked best of all his lines, and
+Lowell smoked well content with the praise. Yet they were not men to get
+on easily together, Lowell having limitations in directions where Harte
+had none. Afterward in London they did not meet often or willingly.
+Lowell owned the brilliancy and uncommonness of Harte’s gift, while he
+sumptuously surfeited his passion of finding everybody more or less a Jew
+by finding that Harte was at least half a Jew on his father’s side; he
+had long contended for the Hebraicism of his name.
+
+With all his appreciation of the literary eminences whom Fields used to
+class together as “the old saints,” Harte had a spice of irreverence that
+enabled him to take them more ironically than they might have liked, and
+to see the fun of a minor literary man’s relation to them. Emerson’s
+smoking amused him, as a Jovian self-indulgence divinely out of character
+with so supreme a god, and he shamelessly burlesqued it, telling how
+Emerson at Concord had proposed having a “wet night” with him over a
+glass of sherry, and had urged the scant wine upon his young friend with
+a hospitable gesture of his cigar. But this was long after the Cambridge
+episode, in which Longfellow alone escaped the corrosive touch of his
+subtle irreverence, or, more strictly speaking, had only the effect of
+his reverence. That gentle and exquisitely modest dignity, of
+Longfellow’s he honored with as much veneration as it was in him to
+bestow, and he had that sense of Longfellow’s beautiful and perfected art
+which is almost a test of a critic’s own fineness.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+As for Harte’s talk, it was mostly ironical, not to the extreme of
+satire, but tempered to an agreeable coolness even for the things he
+admired. He did not apparently care to hear himself praised, but he
+could very accurately and perfectly mark his discernment of excellence in
+others. He was at times a keen observer of nature and again not,
+apparently. Something was said before him and Lowell of the beauty of
+his description of a rabbit, startled with fear among the ferns, and
+lifting its head with the pulsation of its frightened heart visibly
+shaking it; then the talk turned on the graphic homeliness of Dante’s
+noticing how the dog’s skin moves upon it, and Harte spoke of the
+exquisite shudder with which a horse tries to rid itself of a fly.
+
+But once again, when an azalea was shown to him as the sort of bush that
+Sandy drunkenly slept under in ‘The Idyl of Iced Gulch’, he asked, “Why,
+is that an azalea?” To be sure, this might have been less from his
+ignorance or indifference concerning the quality of the bush he had sent
+Sandy to sleep under than from his willingness to make a mock of an
+azalea in a very small pot, so disproportionate to uses which an azalea
+of Californian size could easily lend itself to.
+
+You never could be sure of Harte; he could only by chance be caught in
+earnest about anything or anybody. Except for those slight recognitions
+of literary, traits in his talk with Lowell, nothing remained from his
+conversation but the general criticism he passed upon his brilliant
+fellow-Hebrew Heine, as “rather scorbutic.” He preferred to talk about
+the little matters of common incident and experience. He amused himself
+with such things as the mystification of the postman of whom he asked his
+way to Phillips Avenue, where he adventurously supposed his host to be
+living. “Why,” the postman said, “there is no Phillips Avenue in
+Cambridge. There’s Phillips Place.” “Well,” Harte assented, “Phillips
+Place will do; but there is a Phillips Avenue.” He entered eagerly into
+the canvass of the distinctions and celebrities asked to meet him at the
+reception made for him, but he had even a greater pleasure in
+compassionating his host for the vast disparity between the caterer’s
+china and plated ware and the simplicities and humilities of the home of
+virtuous poverty; and he spluttered with delight at the sight of the
+lofty ‘epergnes’ set up and down the supper-table when he was brought in
+to note the preparations made in his honor. Those monumental structures
+were an inexhaustible joy to him; he walked round and round the room, and
+viewed them in different perspectives, so as to get the full effect of
+the towering forms that dwarfed it so.
+
+He was a tease, as many a sweet and fine wit is apt to be, but his
+teasing was of the quality of a caress, so much kindness went with it. He
+lamented as an irreparable loss his having missed seeing that night an
+absent-minded brother in literature, who came in rubber shoes, and
+forgetfully wore them throughout the evening. That hospitable soul of
+Ralph Keeler, who had known him in California, but had trembled for their
+acquaintance when he read of all the honors that might well have spoiled
+Harte for the friends of his simpler days, rejoiced in the unchanged
+cordiality of his nature when they met, and presently gave him one of
+those restaurant lunches in Boston, which he was always sumptuously
+providing out of his destitution. Harte was the life of a time which was
+perhaps less a feast of reason than a flow of soul. The truth is, there
+was nothing but careless stories carelessly told, and jokes and laughing,
+and a great deal of mere laughing without the jokes, the whole as unlike
+the ideal of a literary symposium as well might be; but there was present
+one who met with that pleasant Boston company for the first time, and to
+whom Harte attributed a superstition of Boston seriousness not realized
+then and there. “Look at him,” he said, from time to time. “This is the
+dream of his life,” and then shouted and choked with fun at the
+difference between the occasion and the expectation he would have
+imagined in his commensal’s mind. At a dinner long after in London,
+where several of the commensals of that time met again, with other
+literary friends of a like age and stature, Harte laid his arms well
+along their shoulders as they formed in a half-circle before him, and
+screamed out in mocking mirth at the bulbous favor to which the slim
+shapes of the earlier date had come. The sight was not less a rapture to
+him that he was himself the prey of the same practical joke from the
+passing years. The hair which the years had wholly swept from some of
+those thoughtful brows, or left spindling autumnal spears, “or few or
+none,” to “shake against the cold,” had whitened to a wintry snow on his,
+while his mustache had kept its youthful black. “He looks,” one of his
+friends said to another as they walked home together, “like a French
+marquis of the ancien regime.” “Yes,” the other assented, thoughtfully,
+“or like an American actor made up for the part.”
+
+The saying closely fitted the outward fact, but was of a subtle injustice
+in its implication of anything histrionic in Harte’s nature. Never was
+any man less a ‘poseur’; he made simply and helplessly known what he was
+at any and every moment, and he would join the witness very cheerfully in
+enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself. In the
+course of events, which were in his case so very human, it came about on
+a subsequent visit of his to Boston that an impatient creditor decided to
+right himself out of the proceeds of the lecture which was to be given,
+and had the law corporeally present at the house of the friend where
+Harte dined, and in the anteroom at the lecture-hall, and on the
+platform, where the lecture was delivered with beautiful aplomb and
+untroubled charm. He was indeed the only one privy to the law’s presence
+who was not the least affected by it, so that when his host of an earlier
+time ventured to suggest, “Well, Harte, this is the old literary
+tradition; this is the Fleet business over again,” he joyously smote his
+thigh and crowed out, “Yes, the Fleet!” No doubt he tasted all the
+delicate humor of the situation, and his pleasure in it was quite
+unaffected.
+
+If his temperament was not adapted to the harsh conditions of the elder
+American world, it might very well be that his temperament was not
+altogether in the wrong. If it disabled him for certain experiences of
+life, it was the source of what was most delightful in his personality,
+and perhaps most beautiful in his talent. It enabled him to do such
+things as he did without being at all anguished for the things he did not
+do, and indeed could not. His talent was not a facile gift; he owned
+that he often went day after day to his desk, and sat down before that
+yellow post-office paper on which he liked to write his literature, in
+that exquisitely refined script of his, without being able to inscribe a
+line. It may be owned for him that though he came to the East at
+thirty-four, which ought to have been the very prime of his powers, he
+seemed to have arrived after the age of observation was past for him. He
+saw nothing aright, either in Newport, where he went to live, or in New
+York, where he sojourned, or on those lecturing tours which took him
+about the whole country; or if he saw it aright, he could not report it
+aright, or would not. After repeated and almost invariable failures to
+deal with the novel characters and circumstances which he encountered he
+left off trying, and frankly went back to the semi-mythical California he
+had half discovered, half created, and wrote Bret Harte over and over as
+long as he lived. This, whether he did it from instinct or from reason,
+was the best thing he could do, and it went as nearly as might be to
+satisfy the insatiable English fancy for the wild America no longer to be
+found on our map.
+
+It is imaginable of Harte that this temperament defended him from any
+bitterness in the disappointment he may have shared with that simple
+American public which in the early eighteen-seventies expected any and
+everything of him in fiction and drama. The long breath was not his; he
+could not write a novel, though he produced the like of one or two, and
+his plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it. At any
+rate, they could not keep it, even when they got it, and they denoted the
+fatigue or the indifference of their author in being dramatizations of
+his longer or shorter fictions, and not originally dramatic efforts. The
+direction in which his originality lasted longest, and most strikingly
+affirmed his power, was in the direction of his verse.
+
+Whatever minds there may be about Harte’s fiction finally, there can
+hardly be more than one mind about his poetry. He was indeed a poet;
+whether he wrote what drolly called itself “dialect,” or wrote language,
+he was a poet of a fine and fresh touch. It must be allowed him that in
+prose as well he had the inventive gift, but he had it in verse far more
+importantly. There are lines, phrases, turns in his poems,
+characterizations, and pictures which will remain as enduringly as
+anything American, if that is not saying altogether too little for them.
+In poetry he rose to all the occasions he made for himself, though he
+could not rise to the occasions made for him, and so far failed in the
+demands he acceded to for a Phi Beta Kappa poem, as to come to that
+august Harvard occasion with a jingle so trivial, so out of keeping, so
+inadequate that his enemies, if he ever truly had any, must have suffered
+from it almost as much as his friends. He himself did not suffer from
+his failure, from having read before the most elect assembly of the
+country a poem which would hardly have served the careless needs of an
+informal dinner after the speaking had begun; he took the whole
+disastrous business lightly, gayly, leniently, kindly, as that golden
+temperament of his enabled him to take all the good or bad of life.
+
+The first year of his Eastern sojourn was salaried in a sum which took
+the souls of all his young contemporaries with wonder, if no baser
+passion, in the days when dollars were of so much farther flight than
+now, but its net result in a literary return to his publishers was one
+story and two or three poems. They had not profited much by his book,
+which, it will doubtless amaze a time of fifty thousand editions selling
+before their publication, to learn had sold only thirty-five hundred in
+the sixth month of its career, as Harte himself,
+
+     “With sick and scornful looks averse,”
+
+confided to his Cambridge host after his first interview with the Boston
+counting-room. It was the volume which contained “The Luck of Roaring
+Camp,” and the other early tales which made him a continental, and then
+an all but a world-wide fame. Stories that had been talked over, and
+laughed over, and cried over all up and down the land, that had been
+received with acclaim by criticism almost as boisterous as their
+popularity, and recognized as the promise of greater things than any done
+before in their kind, came to no more than this pitiful figure over the
+booksellers’ counters. It argued much for the publishers that in spite
+of this stupefying result they were willing, they were eager, to pay him
+ten thousand dollars for whatever, however much or little, he chose to
+write in a year: Their offer was made in Boston, after some offers
+mortifyingly mean, and others insultingly vague, had been made in New
+York.
+
+It was not his fault that their venture proved of such slight return in
+literary material. Harte was in the midst of new and alien
+conditions,--[See a corollary in M. Froude who visited the U.S. for a few
+months and then published a comprehensive analysis of the nation and its
+people. Twain’s rebuttal (Mr. Froude’s Progress) would have been ‘a
+propos’ for Harte in Cambridge. D.W.]--and he had always his temperament
+against him, as well as the reluctant if not the niggard nature of his
+muse. He would no doubt have been only too glad to do more than he did
+for the money, but actually if not literally he could not do more. When
+it came to literature, all the gay improvidence of life forsook him, and
+he became a stern, rigorous, exacting self-master, who spared himself
+nothing to achieve the perfection at which he aimed. He was of the order
+of literary men like Goldsmith and De Quincey, and Sterne and Steele, in
+his relations with the outer world, but in his relations with the inner
+world he was one of the most duteous and exemplary citizens. There was
+nothing of his easy-going hilarity in that world; there he was of a
+Puritanic severity, and of a conscience that forgave him no pang. Other
+California writers have testified to the fidelity with which he did his
+work as editor. He made himself not merely the arbiter but the
+inspiration of his contributors, and in a region where literature had
+hardly yet replaced the wild sage-brush of frontier journalism, he made
+the sand-lots of San Francisco to blossom as the rose, and created a
+literary periodical of the first class on the borders of civilization.
+
+It is useless to wonder now what would have been his future if the
+publisher of the Overland Monthly had been of imagination or capital
+enough to meet the demand which Harte dimly intimated to his Cambridge
+host as the condition of his remaining in California. Publishers, men
+with sufficient capital, are of a greatly varying gift in the regions of
+prophecy, and he of the Overland Monthly was not to be blamed if he could
+not foresee his account in paying Harte ten thousand a year to continue
+editing the magazine. He did according to his lights, and Harte came to
+the East, and then went to England, where his last twenty-five years were
+passed in cultivating the wild plant of his Pacific Slope discovery. It
+was always the same plant, leaf and flower and fruit, but it perennially
+pleased the constant English world, and thence the European world, though
+it presently failed of much delighting these fastidious States. Probably
+he would have done something else if he could; he did not keep on doing
+the wild mining-camp thing because it was the easiest, but because it was
+for him the only possible thing. Very likely he might have preferred not
+doing anything.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+The joyous visit of a week, which has been here so poorly recovered from
+the past, came to an end, and the host went with his guest to the station
+in as much vehicular magnificence as had marked his going to meet him
+there. Harte was no longer the alarming portent of the earlier time, but
+an experience of unalloyed delight. You must love a person whose worst
+trouble-giving was made somehow a favor by his own unconsciousness of the
+trouble, and it was a most flattering triumph to have got him in time, or
+only a little late, to so many luncheons and dinners. If only now he
+could be got to the train in time the victory would be complete, the
+happiness of the visit without a flaw. Success seemed to crown the
+fondest hope in this respect. The train had not yet left the station;
+there stood the parlor-car which Harte had seats in; and he was followed
+aboard for those last words in which people try to linger out pleasures
+they have known together. In this case the sweetest of the pleasures had
+been sitting up late after those dinners, and talking them over, and then
+degenerating from that talk into the mere giggle and making giggle which
+Charles Lamb found the best thing in life. It had come to this as the
+host and guest sat together for those parting moments, when Harte
+suddenly started up in the discovery of having forgotten to get some
+cigars. They rushed out of the train together, and after a wild descent
+upon the cigar-counter of the restaurant, Harte rushed back to his car.
+But by this time the train was already moving with that deceitful
+slowness of the departing train, and Harte had to clamber up the steps of
+the rearmost platform. His host clambered after, to make sure that he
+was aboard, which done, he dropped to the ground, while Harte drew out of
+the station, blandly smiling, and waving his hand with a cigar in it, in
+picturesque farewell from the platform.
+
+Then his host realized that he had dropped to the ground barely in time
+to escape being crushed against the side of the archway that sharply
+descended beside the steps of the train, and he went and sat down in that
+handsomest hack, and was for a moment deathly sick at the danger that had
+not realized itself to him in season. To be sure, he was able, long
+after, to adapt the incident to the exigencies of fiction, and to have a
+character, not otherwise to be conveniently disposed of, actually crushed
+to death between a moving train and such an archway.
+
+Besides, he had then and always afterward, the immense super-compensation
+of the memories of that visit from one of the most charming personalities
+in the world,
+
+     “In life’s morning march when his bosom was young,”
+
+and when infinitely less would have sated him. Now death has come to
+join its vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life, and that
+blithe spirit is elsewhere. But nothing can take from him who remains
+the witchery of that most winning presence. Still it looks smiling from
+the platform of the car, and casts a farewell of mock heartbreak from it.
+Still a gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years that are now
+numbered, and out of somewhere the hearer’s sense is rapt with the mellow
+cordial of a voice that was like no other.
+
+[This last paragraph reminds one again that, as with Holmes: a great poet
+writes the best prose. D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+MY MARK TWAIN
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+It was in the little office of James T. Fields, over the bookstore of
+Ticknor & Fields, at 124 Tremont Street, Boston, that I first met my
+friend of now forty-four years, Samuel L. Clemens. Mr. Fields was then
+the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and I was his proud and glad
+assistant, with a pretty free hand as to manuscripts, and an unmanacled
+command of the book-notices at the end of the magazine. I wrote nearly
+all of them myself, and in 1869 I had written rather a long notice of a
+book just winning its way to universal favor. In this review I had
+intimated my reservations concerning the ‘Innocents Abroad’, but I had
+the luck, if not the sense, to recognize that it was such fun as we had
+not had before. I forget just what I said in praise of it, and it does
+not matter; it is enough that I praised it enough to satisfy the author.
+He now signified as much, and he stamped his gratitude into my memory
+with a story wonderfully allegorizing the situation, which the mock
+modesty of print forbids my repeating here. Throughout my long
+acquaintance with him his graphic touch was always allowing itself a
+freedom which I cannot bring my fainter pencil to illustrate. He had the
+Southwestern, the Lincolnian, the Elizabethan breadth of parlance, which
+I suppose one ought not to call coarse without calling one’s self
+prudish; and I was often hiding away in discreet holes and corners the
+letters in which he had loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank
+suggestion; I could not bear to burn them, and I could not, after the
+first reading, quite bear to look at them. I shall best give my feeling
+on this point by saying that in it he was Shakespearian, or if his ghost
+will not suffer me the word, then he was Baconian.
+
+At the time of our first meeting, which must have been well toward the
+winter, Clemens (as I must call him instead of Mark Twain, which seemed
+always somehow to mask him from my personal sense) was wearing a sealskin
+coat, with the fur out, in the satisfaction of a caprice, or the love of
+strong effect which he was apt to indulge through life. I do not know
+what droll comment was in Fields’s mind with respect to this garment, but
+probably he felt that here was an original who was not to be brought to
+any Bostonian book in the judgment of his vivid qualities. With his
+crest of dense red hair, and the wide sweep of his flaming mustache,
+Clemens was not discordantly clothed in that sealskin coat, which
+afterward, in spite of his own warmth in it, sent the cold chills through
+me when I once accompanied it down Broadway, and shared the immense
+publicity it won him. He had always a relish for personal effect, which
+expressed itself in the white suit of complete serge which he wore in his
+last years, and in the Oxford gown which he put on for every possible
+occasion, and said he would like to wear all the time. That was not
+vanity in him, but a keen feeling for costume which the severity of our
+modern tailoring forbids men, though it flatters women to every excess in
+it; yet he also enjoyed the shock, the offence, the pang which it gave
+the sensibilities of others. Then there were times he played these
+pranks for pure fun, and for the pleasure of the witness. Once I
+remember seeing him come into his drawing-room at Hartford in a pair of
+white cowskin slippers, with the hair out, and do a crippled colored
+uncle to the joy of all beholders. Or, I must not say all, for I
+remember also the dismay of Mrs. Clemens, and her low, despairing cry of,
+“Oh, Youth!” That was her name for him among their friends, and it
+fitted him as no other would, though I fancied with her it was a
+shrinking from his baptismal Samuel, or the vernacular Sam of his earlier
+companionships. He was a youth to the end of his days, the heart of a
+boy with the head of a sage; the heart of a good boy, or a bad boy, but
+always a wilful boy, and wilfulest to show himself out at every time for
+just the boy he was.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+There is a gap in my recollections of Clemens, which I think is of a year
+or two, for the next thing I remember of him is meeting him at a lunch in
+Boston, given us by that genius of hospitality, the tragically destined
+Ralph Keeler, author of one of the most unjustly forgotten books,
+‘Vagabond Adventures’, a true bit of picaresque autobiography. Keeler
+never had any money, to the general knowledge, and he never borrowed, and
+he could not have had credit at the restaurant where he invited us to
+feast at his expense. There was T. B. Aldrich, there was J. T. Fields,
+much the oldest of our company, who had just freed himself from the
+trammels of the publishing business, and was feeling his freedom in every
+word; there was Bret Harte, who had lately come East in his princely
+progress from California; and there was Clemens. Nothing remains to me
+of the happy time but a sense of idle and aimless and joyful talk-play,
+beginning and ending nowhere, of eager laughter, of countless good
+stories from Fields, of a heat-lightning shimmer of wit from Aldrich, of
+an occasional concentration of our joint mockeries upon our host, who
+took it gladly; and amid the discourse, so little improving, but so full
+of good fellowship, Bret Harte’s fleeting dramatization of Clemens’s
+mental attitude toward a symposium of Boston illuminates. “Why,
+fellows,” he spluttered, “this is the dream of Mark’s life,” and I
+remember the glance from under Clemens’s feathery eyebrows which betrayed
+his enjoyment of the fun. We had beefsteak with mushrooms, which in
+recognition of their shape Aldrich hailed as shoe-pegs, and to crown the
+feast we had an omelette souse, which the waiter brought in as flat as a
+pancake, amid our shouts of congratulations to poor Keeler, who took them
+with appreciative submission. It was in every way what a Boston literary
+lunch ought not to have been in the popular ideal which Harte attributed
+to Clemens.
+
+Our next meeting was at Hartford, or, rather, at Springfield, where
+Clemens greeted us on the way to Hartford. Aldrich was going on to be
+his guest, and I was going to be Charles Dudley Warner’s, but Clemens had
+come part way to welcome us both. In the good fellowship of that cordial
+neighborhood we had two such days as the aging sun no longer shines on in
+his round. There was constant running in and out of friendly houses
+where the lively hosts and guests called one another by their Christian
+names or nicknames, and no such vain ceremony as knocking or ringing at
+doors. Clemens was then building the stately mansion in which he
+satisfied his love of magnificence as if it had been another sealskin
+coat, and he was at the crest of the prosperity which enabled him to
+humor every whim or extravagance. The house was the design of that most
+original artist, Edward Potter, who once, when hard pressed by
+incompetent curiosity for the name of his style in a certain church,
+proposed that it should be called the English violet order of
+architecture; and this house was so absolutely suited to the owner’s
+humor that I suppose there never was another house like it; but its
+character must be for recognition farther along in these reminiscences.
+The vividest impression which Clemens gave us two ravenous young Boston
+authors was of the satisfying, the surfeiting nature of subscription
+publication. An army of agents was overrunning the country with the
+prospectuses of his books, and delivering them by the scores of thousands
+in completed sale. Of the ‘Innocents Abroad’ he said, “It sells right
+along just like the Bible,” and ‘Roughing It’ was swiftly following,
+without perhaps ever quite overtaking it in popularity. But he lectured
+Aldrich and me on the folly of that mode of publication in the trade
+which we had thought it the highest success to achieve a chance in.
+“Anything but subscription publication is printing for private
+circulation,” he maintained, and he so won upon our greed and hope that
+on the way back to Boston we planned the joint authorship of a volume
+adapted to subscription publication. We got a very good name for it, as
+we believed, in Memorable Murders, and we never got farther with it, but
+by the time we reached Boston we were rolling in wealth so deep that we
+could hardly walk home in the frugal fashion by which we still thought it
+best to spare car fare; carriage fare we did not dream of even in that
+opulence.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+The visits to Hartford which had begun with this affluence continued
+without actual increase of riches for me, but now I went alone, and in
+Warner’s European and Egyptian absences I formed the habit of going to
+Clemens. By this time he was in his new house, where he used to give me
+a royal chamber on the ground floor, and come in at night after I had
+gone to bed to take off the burglar alarm so that the family should not
+be roused if anybody tried to get in at my window. This would be after
+we had sat up late, he smoking the last of his innumerable cigars, and
+soothing his tense nerves with a mild hot Scotch, while we both talked
+and talked and talked, of everything in the heavens and on the earth, and
+the waters under the earth. After two days of this talk I would come
+away hollow, realizing myself best in the image of one of those
+locust-shells which you find sticking to the bark of trees at the end of
+summer. Once, after some such bout of brains, we went down to New York
+together, and sat facing each other in the Pullman smoker without passing
+a syllable till we had occasion to say, “Well, we’re there.” Then, with
+our installation in a now vanished hotel (the old Brunswick, to be
+specific), the talk began again with the inspiration of the novel
+environment, and went on and on. We wished to be asleep, but we could
+not stop, and he lounged through the rooms in the long nightgown which he
+always wore in preference to the pajamas which he despised, and told the
+story of his life, the inexhaustible, the fairy, the Arabian Nights
+story, which I could never tire of even when it began to be told over
+again. Or at times he would reason high--
+
+       “Of Providence, foreknowledge, will and fate,
+        Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,”
+
+walking up and down, and halting now and then, with a fine toss and slant
+of his shaggy head, as some bold thought or splendid joke struck him.
+
+He was in those days a constant attendant at the church of his great
+friend, the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, and at least tacitly far from the
+entire negation he came to at last. I should say he had hardly yet
+examined the grounds of his passive acceptance of his wife’s belief, for
+it was hers and not his, and he held it unscanned in the beautiful and
+tender loyalty to her which was the most moving quality of his most
+faithful soul. I make bold to speak of the love between them, because
+without it I could not make him known to others as he was known to me. It
+was a greater part of him than the love of most men for their wives, and
+she merited all the worship he could give her, all the devotion, all the
+implicit obedience, by her surpassing force and beauty of character. She
+was in a way the loveliest person I have ever seen, the gentlest, the
+kindest, without a touch of weakness; she united wonderful tact with
+wonderful truth; and Clemens not only accepted her rule implicitly, but
+he rejoiced, he gloried in it. I am not sure that he noticed all her
+goodness in the actions that made it a heavenly vision to others, he so
+had the habit of her goodness; but if there was any forlorn and helpless
+creature in the room Mrs. Clemens was somehow promptly at his side or
+hers; she was always seeking occasion of kindness to those in her
+household or out of it; she loved to let her heart go beyond the reach of
+her hand, and imagined the whole hard and suffering world with compassion
+for its structural as well as incidental wrongs. I suppose she had her
+ladyhood limitations, her female fears of etiquette and convention, but
+she did not let them hamper the wild and splendid generosity with which
+Clemens rebelled against the social stupidities and cruelties. She had
+been a lifelong invalid when he met her, and he liked to tell the
+beautiful story of their courtship to each new friend whom he found
+capable of feeling its beauty or worthy of hearing it. Naturally, her
+father had hesitated to give her into the keeping of the young strange
+Westerner, who had risen up out of the unknown with his giant reputation
+of burlesque humorist, and demanded guaranties, demanded proofs. “He
+asked me,” Clemens would say, “if I couldn’t give him the names of people
+who knew me in California, and when it was time to hear from them I heard
+from him. ‘Well, Mr. Clemens,’ he said, ‘nobody seems to have a very
+good word for you.’ I hadn’t referred him to people that I thought were
+going to whitewash me. I thought it was all up with me, but I was
+disappointed. ‘So I guess I shall have to back you myself.’”
+
+Whether this made him faithfuler to the trust put in him I cannot say,
+but probably not; it was always in him to be faithful to any trust, and
+in proportion as a trust of his own was betrayed he was ruthlessly and
+implacably resentful. But I wish now to speak of the happiness of that
+household in Hartford which responded so perfectly to the ideals of the
+mother when the three daughters, so lovely and so gifted, were yet little
+children. There had been a boy, and “Yes, I killed him,” Clemens once
+said, with the unsparing self-blame in which he would wreak an unavailing
+regret. He meant that he had taken the child out imprudently, and the
+child had taken the cold which he died of, but it was by no means certain
+this was through its father’s imprudence. I never heard him speak of his
+son except that once, but no doubt in his deep heart his loss was
+irreparably present. He was a very tender father and delighted in the
+minds of his children, but he was wise enough to leave their training
+altogether to the wisdom of their mother. He left them to that in
+everything, keeping for himself the pleasure of teaching them little
+scenes of drama, learning languages with them, and leading them in
+singing. They came to the table with their parents, and could have set
+him an example in behavior when, in moments of intense excitement, he
+used to leave his place and walk up and down the room, flying his napkin
+and talking and talking.
+
+It was after his first English sojourn that I used to visit him, and he
+was then full of praise of everything English: the English personal
+independence and public spirit, and hospitality, and truth. He liked to
+tell stories in proof of their virtues, but he was not blind to the
+defects of their virtues: their submissive acceptance of caste, their
+callousness with strangers; their bluntness with one another. Mrs.
+Clemens had been in a way to suffer socially more than he, and she
+praised the English less. She had sat after dinner with ladies who
+snubbed and ignored one another, and left her to find her own amusement
+in the absence of the attention with which Americans perhaps cloy their
+guests, but which she could not help preferring. In their successive
+sojourns among them I believe he came to like the English less and she
+more; the fine delight of his first acceptance among them did not renew
+itself till his Oxford degree was given him; then it made his cup run
+over, and he was glad the whole world should see it.
+
+His wife would not chill the ardor of his early Anglomania, and in this,
+as in everything, she wished to humor him to the utmost. No one could
+have realized more than she his essential fineness, his innate nobleness.
+Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know them to be, but
+from the outside I should say that this marriage was one of the most
+perfect. It lasted in his absolute devotion to the day of her death,
+that delayed long in cruel suffering, and that left one side of him in
+lasting night. From Florence there came to me heartbreaking letters from
+him about the torture she was undergoing, and at last a letter saying she
+was dead, with the simple-hearted cry, “I wish I was with Livy.” I do
+not know why I have left saying till now that she was a very beautiful
+woman, classically regular in features, with black hair smooth over her
+forehead, and with tenderly peering, myopia eyes, always behind glasses,
+and a smile of angelic kindness. But this kindness went with a sense of
+humor which qualified her to appreciate the self-lawed genius of a man
+who will be remembered with the great humorists of all time, with
+Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy his company; none of
+them was his equal in humanity.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+Clemens had appointed himself, with the architect’s connivance, a
+luxurious study over the library in his new house, but as his children
+grew older this study, with its carved and cushioned arm-chairs, was
+given over to them for a school-room, and he took the room above his
+stable, which had been intended for his coachman. There we used to talk
+together, when we were not walking and talking together, until he
+discovered that he could make a more commodious use of the billiard-room
+at the top of his house, for the purposes of literature and friendship.
+It was pretty cold up there in the early spring and late fall weather
+with which I chiefly associate the place, but by lighting up all the
+gas-burners and kindling a reluctant fire on the hearth we could keep it
+well above freezing. Clemens could also push the balls about, and,
+without rivalry from me, who could no more play billiards than smoke,
+could win endless games of pool, while he carried points of argument
+against imaginable differers in opinion. Here he wrote many of his tales
+and sketches, and for anything I know some of his books. I particularly
+remember his reading me here his first rough sketch of Captain
+Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, with the real name of the captain, whom I
+knew already from his many stories about him.
+
+We had a peculiar pleasure in looking off from the high windows on the
+pretty Hartford landscape, and down from them into the tops of the trees
+clothing the hillside by which his house stood. We agreed that there was
+a novel charm in trees seen from such a vantage, far surpassing that of
+the farther scenery. He had not been a country boy for nothing; rather
+he had been a country boy, or, still better, a village boy, for
+everything that Nature can offer the young of our species, and no aspect
+of her was lost on him. We were natives of the same vast Mississippi
+Valley; and Missouri was not so far from Ohio but that we were akin in
+our first knowledges of woods and fields as we were in our early
+parlance. I had outgrown the use of mine through my greater bookishness,
+but I gladly recognized the phrases which he employed for their lasting
+juiciness and the long-remembered savor they had on his mental palate.
+
+I have elsewhere sufficiently spoken of his unsophisticated use of words,
+of the diction which forms the backbone of his manly style. If I mention
+my own greater bookishness, by which I mean his less quantitative
+reading, it is to give myself better occasion to note that he was always
+reading some vital book. It might be some out-of-the-way book, but it
+had the root of the human matter in it: a volume of great trials; one of
+the supreme autobiographies; a signal passage of history, a narrative of
+travel, a story of captivity, which gave him life at first-hand. As I
+remember, he did not care much for fiction, and in that sort he had
+certain distinct loathings; there were certain authors whose names he
+seemed not so much to pronounce as to spew out of his mouth. Goldsmith
+was one of these, but his prime abhorrence was my dear and honored prime
+favorite, Jane Austen. He once said to me, I suppose after he had been
+reading some of my unsparing praises of her--I am always praising her,
+“You seem to think that woman could write,” and he forbore withering me
+with his scorn, apparently because we had been friends so long, and he
+more pitied than hated me for my bad taste. He seemed not to have any
+preferences among novelists; or at least I never heard him express any.
+He used to read the modern novels I praised, in or out of print; but I do
+not think he much liked reading fiction. As for plays, he detested the
+theatre, and said he would as lief do a sum as follow a plot on the
+stage. He could not, or did not, give any reasons for his literary
+abhorrences, and perhaps he really had none. But he could have said very
+distinctly, if he had needed, why he liked the books he did. I was away
+at the time of his great Browning passion, and I know of it chiefly from
+hearsay; but at the time Tolstoy was doing what could be done to make me
+over Clemens wrote, “That man seems to have been to you what Browning was
+to me.” I do not know that he had other favorites among the poets, but
+he had favorite poems which he liked to read to you, and he read, of
+course, splendidly. I have forgotten what piece of John Hay’s it was
+that he liked so much, but I remembered how he fiercely revelled in the
+vengefulness of William Morris’s ‘Sir Guy of the Dolorous Blast,’ and how
+he especially exalted in the lines which tell of the supposed speaker’s
+joy in slaying the murderer of his brother:
+
+       “I am threescore years and ten,
+        And my hair is ‘nigh turned gray,
+        But I am glad to think of the moment when
+        I took his life away.”
+
+Generally, I fancy his pleasure in poetry was not great, and I do not
+believe he cared much for the conventionally accepted masterpieces of
+literature. He liked to find out good things and great things for
+himself; sometimes he would discover these in a masterpiece new to him
+alone, and then, if you brought his ignorance home to him, he enjoyed it,
+and enjoyed it the more the more you rubbed it in.
+
+Of all the literary men I have known he was the most unliterary in his
+make and manner. I do not know whether he had any acquaintance with
+Latin, but I believe not the least; German he knew pretty well, and
+Italian enough late in life to have fun with it; but he used English in
+all its alien derivations as if it were native to his own air, as if it
+had come up out of American, out of Missourian ground. His style was
+what we know, for good and for bad, but his manner, if I may difference
+the two, was as entirely his own as if no one had ever written before. I
+have noted before this how he was not enslaved to the consecutiveness in
+writing which the rest of us try to keep chained to. That is, he wrote
+as he thought, and as all men think, without sequence, without an eye to
+what went before or should come after. If something beyond or beside
+what he was saying occurred to him, he invited it into his page, and made
+it as much at home there as the nature of it would suffer him. Then, when
+he was through with the welcoming of this casual and unexpected guest, he
+would go back to the company he was entertaining, and keep on with what
+he had been talking about. He observed this manner in the construction
+of his sentences, and the arrangement of his chapters, and the ordering
+or disordering of his compilations.--[Nowhere is this characteristic
+better found than in Twain’s ‘Autobiography,’ it was not a “style” it was
+unselfconscious thought D.W.]--I helped him with a Library of Humor,
+which he once edited, and when I had done my work according to tradition,
+with authors, times, and topics carefully studied in due sequence, he
+tore it all apart, and “chucked” the pieces in wherever the fancy, for
+them took him at the moment. He was right: we were not making a
+text-book, but a book for the pleasure rather than the instruction of the
+reader, and he did not see why the principle on which he built his
+travels and reminiscences and tales and novels should not apply to it;
+and I do not now see, either, though at the time it confounded me. On
+minor points he was, beyond any author I have known, without favorite
+phrases or pet words. He utterly despised the avoidance of repetitions
+out of fear of tautology. If a word served his turn better than a
+substitute, he would use it as many times in a page as he chose.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+At that time I had become editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and I had
+allegiances belonging to the conduct of what was and still remains the
+most scrupulously cultivated of our periodicals. When Clemens began to
+write for it he came willingly under its rules, for with all his
+wilfulness there never was a more biddable man in things you could show
+him a reason for. He never made the least of that trouble which so
+abounds for the hapless editor from narrower-minded contributors. If you
+wanted a thing changed, very good, he changed it; if you suggested that a
+word or a sentence or a paragraph had better be struck out, very good, he
+struck it out. His proof-sheets came back each a veritable “mush of
+concession,” as Emerson says. Now and then he would try a little
+stronger language than ‘The Atlantic’ had stomach for, and once when I
+sent him a proof I made him observe that I had left out the profanity. He
+wrote back: “Mrs. Clemens opened that proof, and lit into the room with
+danger in her eye. What profanity? You see, when I read the manuscript
+to her I skipped that.” It was part of his joke to pretend a violence in
+that gentlest creature which the more amusingly realized the situation to
+their friends.
+
+I was always very glad of him and proud of him as a contributor, but I
+must not claim the whole merit, or the first merit of having him write
+for us. It was the publisher, the late H. O. Houghton, who felt the
+incongruity of his absence from the leading periodical of the country,
+and was always urging me to get him to write. I will take the credit of
+being eager for him, but it is to the publisher’s credit that he tried,
+so far as the modest traditions of ‘The Atlantic’ would permit, to meet
+the expectations in pay which the colossal profits of Clemens’s books
+might naturally have bred in him. Whether he was really able to do this
+he never knew from Clemens himself, but probably twenty dollars a page
+did not surfeit the author of books that “sold right along just like the
+Bible.”
+
+We had several short contributions from Clemens first, all of capital
+quality, and then we had the series of papers which went mainly to the
+making of his great book, ‘Life on the Mississippi’. Upon the whole I
+have the notion that Clemens thought this his greatest book, and he was
+supported in his opinion by that of the ‘portier’ in his hotel at Vienna,
+and that of the German Emperor, who, as he told me with equal respect for
+the preference of each, united in thinking it his best; with such
+far-sundered social poles approaching in its favor, he apparently found
+himself without standing for opposition. At any rate, the papers won
+instant appreciation from his editor and publisher, and from the readers
+of their periodical, which they expected to prosper beyond precedent in
+its circulation. But those were days of simpler acceptance of the
+popular rights of newspapers than these are, when magazines strictly
+guard their vested interests against them. ‘The New York Times’ and the
+‘St. Louis Democrat’ profited by the advance copies of the magazine sent
+them to reprint the papers month by month. Together they covered nearly
+the whole reading territory of the Union, and the terms of their daily
+publication enabled them to anticipate the magazine in its own restricted
+field. Its subscription list was not enlarged in the slightest measure,
+and The Atlantic Monthly languished on the news-stands as undesired as
+ever.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+It was among my later visits to Hartford that we began to talk up the
+notion of collaborating a play, but we did not arrive at any clear
+intention, and it was a telegram out of the clear sky that one day
+summoned me from Boston to help with a continuation of Colonel Sellers. I
+had been a witness of the high joy of Clemens in the prodigious triumph
+of the first Colonel Sellers, which had been dramatized from the novel of
+‘The Gilded Age.’ This was the joint work of Clemens and Charles Dudley
+Warner, and the story had been put upon the stage by some one in Utah,
+whom Clemens first brought to book in the courts for violation of his
+copyright, and then indemnified for such rights as his adaptation of the
+book had given him. The structure of the play as John T. Raymond gave it
+was substantially the work of this unknown dramatist. Clemens never
+pretended, to me at any rate, that he had the least hand in it; he
+frankly owned that he was incapable of dramatization; yet the vital part
+was his, for the characters in the play were his as the book embodied
+them, and the success which it won with the public was justly his. This
+he shared equally with the actor, following the company with an agent,
+who counted out the author’s share of the gate money, and sent him a note
+of the amount every day by postal card. The postals used to come about
+dinner-time, and Clemens would read them aloud to us in wild triumph.
+
+One hundred and fifty dollars--two hundred dollars--three hundred dollars
+were the gay figures which they bore, and which he flaunted in the air
+before he sat down at table, or rose from it to brandish, and then,
+flinging his napkin into his chair, walked up and down to exult in.
+
+By-and-by the popularity, of the play waned, and the time came when he
+sickened of the whole affair, and withdrew his agent, and took whatever
+gain from it the actor apportioned him. He was apt to have these sudden
+surceases, following upon the intensities of his earlier interest; though
+he seemed always to have the notion of making something more of Colonel
+Sellers. But when I arrived in Hartford in answer to his summons, I
+found him with no definite idea of what he wanted to do with him. I
+represented that we must have some sort of plan, and he agreed that we
+should both jot down a scenario overnight and compare our respective
+schemes the next morning. As the author of a large number of little
+plays which have been privately presented throughout the United States
+and in parts of the United Kingdom, without ever getting upon the public
+stage except for the noble ends of charity, and then promptly getting off
+it, I felt authorized to make him observe that his scheme was as nearly
+nothing as chaos could be. He agreed hilariously with me, and was
+willing to let it stand in proof of his entire dramatic inability. At the
+same time he liked my plot very much, which ultimated Sellers, according
+to Clemens’s intention, as a man crazed by his own inventions and by his
+superstition that he was the rightful heir to an English earldom. The
+exuberant nature of Sellers and the vast range of his imagination served
+our purpose in other ways. Clemens made him a spiritualist, whose
+specialty in the occult was materialization; he became on impulse an
+ardent temperance reformer, and he headed a procession of temperance
+ladies after disinterestedly testing the deleterious effects of liquor
+upon himself until he could not walk straight; always he wore a
+marvellous fire-extinguisher strapped on his back, to give proof in any
+emergency of the effectiveness of his invention in that way.
+
+We had a jubilant fortnight in working the particulars of these things
+out. It was not possible for Clemens to write like anybody else, but I
+could very easily write like Clemens, and we took the play scene and
+scene about, quite secure of coming out in temperamental agreement. The
+characters remained for the most part his, and I varied them only to make
+them more like his than, if possible, he could. Several years after,
+when I looked over a copy of the play, I could not always tell my work
+from his; I only knew that I had done certain scenes. We would work all
+day long at our several tasks, and then at night, before dinner, read
+them over to each other. No dramatists ever got greater joy out of their
+creations, and when I reflect that the public never had the chance of
+sharing our joy I pity the public from a full heart. I still believe
+that the play was immensely funny; I still believe that if it could once
+have got behind the footlights it would have continued to pack the house
+before them for an indefinite succession of nights. But this may be my
+fondness.
+
+At any rate, it was not to be. Raymond had identified himself with
+Sellers in the play-going imagination, and whether consciously or
+unconsciously we constantly worked with Raymond in our minds. But before
+this time bitter displeasures had risen between Clemens and Raymond, and
+Clemens was determined that Raymond should never have the play. He first
+offered it to several other actors, who eagerly caught it, only to give
+it back with the despairing renunciation, “That is a Raymond play.” We
+tried managers with it, but their only question was whether they could
+get Raymond to do it. In the mean time Raymond had provided himself with
+a play for the winter--a very good play, by Demarest Lloyd; and he was in
+no hurry for ours. Perhaps he did not really care for it perhaps he knew
+when he heard of it that it must come to him in the end. In the end it
+did, from my hand, for Clemens would not meet him. I found him in a mood
+of sweet reasonableness, perhaps the more softened by one of those
+lunches which our publisher, the hospitable James R. Osgood, was always
+bringing people together over in Boston. He said that he could not do
+the play that winter, but he was sure that he should like it, and he had
+no doubt he would do it the next winter. So I gave him the manuscript,
+in spite of Clemens’s charges, for his suspicions and rancors were such
+that he would not have had me leave it for a moment in the actor’s hands.
+But it seemed a conclusion that involved success and fortune for us. In
+due time, but I do not remember how long after, Raymond declared himself
+delighted with the piece; he entered into a satisfactory agreement for
+it, and at the beginning of the next season he started with it to
+Buffalo, where he was to give a first production. At Rochester he paused
+long enough to return it, with the explanation that a friend had noted to
+him the fact that Colonel Sellers in the play was a lunatic, and insanity
+was so serious a thing that it could not be represented on the stage
+without outraging the sensibilities of the audience; or words to that
+effect. We were too far off to allege Hamlet to the contrary, or King
+Lear, or to instance the delight which generations of readers throughout
+the world had taken in the mad freaks of Don Quixote. Whatever were the
+real reasons of Raymond for rejecting the play, we had to be content with
+those he gave, and to set about getting it into other hands. In this
+effort we failed even more signally than before, if that were possible.
+At last a clever and charming elocutionist, who had long wished to get
+himself on the stage, heard of it and asked to see it. We would have
+shown it to any one by this time, and we very willingly showed it to him.
+He came to Hartford and did some scenes from it for us. I must say he
+did them very well, quite as well as Raymond could have done them, in
+whose manner he did them. But now, late toward spring, the question was
+where he could get an engagement with the play, and we ended by hiring a
+theatre in New York for a week of trial performances.
+
+Clemens came on with me to Boston, where we were going to make some
+changes in the piece, and where we made them to our satisfaction, but not
+to the effect of that high rapture which we had in the first draft. He
+went back to Hartford, and then the cold fit came upon me, and “in
+visions of the night, in slumberings upon the bed,” ghastly forms of
+failure appalled me, and when I rose in the morning I wrote him: “Here is
+a play which every manager has put out-of-doors and which every actor
+known to us has refused, and now we go and give it to an elocutioner. We
+are fools.” Whether Clemens agreed with me or not in my conclusion, he
+agreed with me in my premises, and we promptly bought our play off the
+stage at a cost of seven hundred dollars, which we shared between us. But
+Clemens was never a man to give up. I relinquished gratis all right and
+title I had in the play, and he paid its entire expenses for a week of
+one-night stands in the country. It never came to New York; and yet I
+think now that if it had come, it would have succeeded. So hard does the
+faith of the unsuccessful dramatist in his work die.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+There is an incident of this time so characteristic of both men that I
+will yield to the temptation of giving it here. After I had gone to
+Hartford in response to Clemens’s telegram, Matthew Arnold arrived in
+Boston, and one of my family called on his, to explain why I was not at
+home to receive his introduction: I had gone to see Mark Twain. “Oh, but
+he doesn’t like that sort of thing, does he?” “He likes Mr. Clemens very
+much,” my representative answered, “and he thinks him one of the greatest
+men he ever knew.” I was still Clemens’s guest at Hartford when Arnold
+came there to lecture, and one night we went to meet him at a reception.
+While his hand laxly held mine in greeting, I saw his eyes fixed
+intensely on the other side of the room. “Who-who in the world is that?”
+ I looked and said, “Oh, that is Mark Twain.” I do not remember just how
+their instant encounter was contrived by Arnold’s wish, but I have the
+impression that they were not parted for long during the evening, and the
+next night Arnold, as if still under the glamour of that potent presence,
+was at Clemens’s house. I cannot say how they got on, or what they made
+of each other; if Clemens ever spoke of Arnold, I do not recall what he
+said, but Arnold had shown a sense of him from which the incredulous
+sniff of the polite world, now so universally exploded, had already
+perished. It might well have done so with his first dramatic vision of
+that prodigious head. Clemens was then hard upon fifty, and he had kept,
+as he did to the end, the slender figure of his youth, but the ashes of
+the burnt-out years were beginning to gray the fires of that splendid
+shock of red hair which he held to the height of a stature apparently
+greater than it was, and tilted from side to side in his undulating walk.
+He glimmered at you from the narrow slits of fine blue-greenish eyes,
+under branching brows, which with age grew more and more like a sort of
+plumage, and he was apt to smile into your face with a subtle but amiable
+perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence; you were all there for
+him, but he was not all there for you.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+I shall, not try to give chronological order to my recollections of him,
+but since I am just now with him in Hartford I will speak of him in
+association with the place. Once when I came on from Cambridge he
+followed me to my room to see that the water was not frozen in my bath,
+or something of the kind, for it was very cold weather, and then
+hospitably lingered. Not to lose time in banalities I began at once from
+the thread of thought in my mind. “I wonder why we hate the past so,”
+ and he responded from the depths of his own consciousness, “It’s so
+damned humiliating,” which is what any man would say of his past if he
+were honest; but honest men are few when it comes to themselves. Clemens
+was one of the few, and the first of them among all the people I have
+known. I have known, I suppose, men as truthful, but not so promptly, so
+absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful. He could
+lie, of course, and did to save others from grief or harm; he was, not
+stupidly truthful; but his first impulse was to say out the thing and
+everything that was in him. To those who can understand it will not be
+contradictory of his sense of humiliation from the past, that he was not
+ashamed for anything he ever did to the point of wishing to hide it. He
+could be, and he was, bitterly sorry for his errors, which he had enough
+of in his life, but he was not ashamed in that mean way. What he had
+done he owned to, good, bad, or indifferent, and if it was bad he was
+rather amused than troubled as to the effect in your mind. He would not
+obtrude the fact upon you, but if it were in the way of personal history
+he would not dream of withholding it, far less of hiding it.
+
+He was the readiest of men to allow an error if he were found in it. In
+one of our walks about Hartford, when he was in the first fine flush of
+his agnosticism, he declared that Christianity had done nothing to
+improve morals and conditions, and that the world under the highest pagan
+civilization was as well off as it was under the highest Christian
+influences. I happened to be fresh from the reading of Charles Loring
+Brace’s ‘Gesta Christi’; or, ‘History of Humane Progress’, and I could
+offer him abundant proofs that he was wrong. He did not like that
+evidently, but he instantly gave way, saying he had not known those
+things. Later he was more tolerant in his denials of Christianity, but
+just then he was feeling his freedom from it, and rejoicing in having
+broken what he felt to have been the shackles of belief worn so long. He
+greatly admired Robert Ingersoll, whom he called an angelic orator, and
+regarded as an evangel of a new gospel--the gospel of free thought. He
+took the warmest interest in the newspaper controversy raging at the time
+as to the existence of a hell; when the noes carried the day, I suppose
+that no enemy of perdition was more pleased. He still loved his old
+friend and pastor, Mr. Twichell, but he no longer went to hear him preach
+his sage and beautiful sermons, and was, I think, thereby the greater
+loser. Long before that I had asked him if he went regularly to church,
+and he groaned out: “Oh yes, I go. It ‘most kills me, but I go,” and I
+did not need his telling me to understand that he went because his wife
+wished it. He did tell me, after they both ceased to go, that it had
+finally come to her saying, “Well, if you are to be lost, I want to be
+lost with you.” He could accept that willingness for supreme sacrifice
+and exult in it because of the supreme truth as he saw it. After they had
+both ceased to be formal Christians, she was still grieved by his denial
+of immortality, so grieved that he resolved upon one of those heroic
+lies, which for love’s sake he held above even the truth, and he went to
+her, saying that he had been thinking the whole matter over, and now he
+was convinced that the soul did live after death. It was too late. Her
+keen vision pierced through his ruse, as it did when he brought the
+doctor who had diagnosticated her case as organic disease of the heart,
+and, after making him go over the facts of it again with her, made him
+declare it merely functional.
+
+To make an end of these records as to Clemens’s beliefs, so far as I knew
+them, I should say that he never went back to anything like faith in the
+Christian theology, or in the notion of life after death, or in a
+conscious divinity. It is best to be honest in this matter; he would
+have hated anything else, and I do not believe that the truth in it can
+hurt any one. At one period he argued that there must have been a cause,
+a conscious source of things; that the universe could not have come by
+chance. I have heard also that in his last hours or moments he said, or
+his dearest ones hoped he had said, something about meeting again. But
+the expression, of which they could not be certain, was of the vaguest,
+and it was perhaps addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness.
+All his expressions to me were of a courageous, renunciation of any hope
+of living again, or elsewhere seeing those he had lost. He suffered
+terribly in their loss, and he was not fool enough to try ignoring his
+grief. He knew that for this there were but two medicines; that it would
+wear itself out with the years, and that meanwhile there was nothing for
+it but those respites in which the mourner forgets himself in slumber. I
+remember that in a black hour of my own when I was called down to see
+him, as he thought from sleep, he said with an infinite, an exquisite
+compassion, “Oh, did I wake you, did I wake, you?” Nothing more, but the
+look, the voice, were everything; and while I live they cannot pass from
+my sense.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+He was the most caressing of men in his pity, but he had the fine
+instinct, which would have pleased Lowell, of never putting his hands on
+you--fine, delicate hands, with taper fingers, and pink nails, like a
+girl’s, and sensitively quivering in moments of emotion; he did not paw
+you with them to show his affection, as so many of us Americans are apt
+to do. Among the half-dozen, or half-hundred, personalities that each of
+us becomes, I should say that Clemens’s central and final personality was
+something exquisite. His casual acquaintance might know him, perhaps,
+from his fierce intensity, his wild pleasure in shocking people with his
+ribaldries and profanities, or from the mere need of loosing his
+rebellious spirit in that way, as anything but exquisite, and yet that
+was what in the last analysis he was. They might come away loathing or
+hating him, but one could not know him well without realizing him the
+most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men. He was
+Southwestern, and born amid the oppression of a race that had no rights
+as against ours, but I never saw a man more regardful of negroes. He had
+a yellow butler when I first began to know him, because he said he could
+not bear to order a white man about, but the terms of his ordering George
+were those of the softest entreaty which command ever wore. He loved to
+rely upon George, who was such a broken reed in some things, though so
+stanch in others, and the fervent Republican in politics that Clemens
+then liked him to be. He could interpret Clemens’s meaning to the public
+without conveying his mood, and could render his roughest answer smooth
+to the person denied his presence. His general instructions were that
+this presence was to be denied all but personal friends, but the soft
+heart of George was sometimes touched by importunity, and once he came up
+into the billiard-room saying that Mr. Smith wished to see Clemens. Upon
+inquiry, Mr. Smith developed no ties of friendship, and Clemens said,
+“You go and tell Mr. Smith that I wouldn’t come down to see the Twelve
+Apostles.” George turned from the threshold where he had kept himself,
+and framed a paraphrase of this message which apparently sent Mr. Smith
+away content with himself and all the rest of the world.
+
+The part of him that was Western in his Southwestern origin Clemens kept
+to the end, but he was the most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew. No
+man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery, and no one
+has ever poured such scorn upon the second-hand, Walter-Scotticized,
+pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal. He held himself responsible for
+the wrong which the white race had done the black race in slavery, and he
+explained, in paying the way of a negro student through Yale, that he was
+doing it as his part of the reparation due from every white to every
+black man. He said he had never seen this student, nor ever wished to
+see him or know his name; it was quite enough that he was a negro. About
+that time a colored cadet was expelled from West Point for some point of
+conduct “unbecoming an officer and gentleman,” and there was the usual
+shabby philosophy in a portion of the press to the effect that a negro
+could never feel the claim of honor. The man was fifteen parts white,
+but, “Oh yes,” Clemens said, with bitter irony, “it was that one part
+black that undid him.” It made him a “nigger” and incapable of being a
+gentleman. It was to blame for the whole thing. The fifteen parts white
+were guiltless.
+
+Clemens was entirely satisfied with the result of the Civil War, and he
+was eager to have its facts and meanings brought out at once in history.
+He ridiculed the notion, held by many, that “it was not yet time” to
+philosophize the events of the great struggle; that we must “wait till
+its passions had cooled,” and “the clouds of strife had cleared away.” He
+maintained that the time would never come when we should see its motives
+and men and deeds more clearly, and that now, now, was the hour to
+ascertain them in lasting verity. Picturesquely and dramatically he
+portrayed the imbecility of deferring the inquiry at any point to the
+distance of future years when inevitably the facts would begin to put on
+fable.
+
+He had powers of sarcasm and a relentless rancor in his contempt which
+those who knew him best appreciated most. The late Noah Brooks, who had
+been in California at the beginning of Clemens’s career, and had
+witnessed the effect of his ridicule before he had learned to temper it,
+once said to me that he would rather have any one else in the world down
+on him than Mark Twain. But as Clemens grew older he grew more merciful,
+not to the wrong, but to the men who were in it. The wrong was often the
+source of his wildest drolling. He considered it in such hopelessness of
+ever doing it justice that his despair broke in laughter.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+I go back to that house in Hartford, where I was so often a happy guest,
+with tenderness for each of its endearing aspects. Over the chimney in
+the library which had been cured of smoking by so much art and science,
+Clemens had written in perennial brass the words of Emerson, “The
+ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it,” and he gave his
+guests a welcome of the simplest and sweetest cordiality: but I must not
+go aside to them from my recollections of him, which will be of
+sufficient garrulity, if I give them as fully as I wish. The windows of
+the library looked northward from the hillside above which the house
+stood, and over the little valley with the stream in it, and they showed
+the leaves of the trees that almost brushed them as in a Claude Lorraine
+glass. To the eastward the dining-room opened amply, and to the south
+there was a wide hall, where the voices of friends made themselves heard
+as they entered without ceremony and answered his joyous hail. At the
+west was a little semicircular conservatory of a pattern invented by Mrs.
+Harriet Beecher Stowe, and adopted in most of the houses of her kindly
+neighborhood. The plants were set in the ground, and the flowering vines
+climbed up the sides and overhung the roof above the silent spray of a
+fountain companied by callas and other water-loving lilies. There, while
+we breakfasted, Patrick came in from the barn and sprinkled the pretty
+bower, which poured out its responsive perfume in the delicate accents of
+its varied blossoms. Breakfast was Clemens’s best meal, and he sat
+longer at his steak and coffee than at the courses of his dinner;
+luncheon was nothing to him, unless, as might happen, he made it his
+dinner, and reserved the later repast as the occasion of walking up and
+down the room, and discoursing at large on anything that came into his
+head. Like most good talkers, he liked other people to have their say;
+he did not talk them down; he stopped instantly at another’s remark and
+gladly or politely heard him through; he even made believe to find
+suggestion or inspiration in what was said. His children came to the
+table, as I have told, and after dinner he was apt to join his fine tenor
+to their trebles in singing.
+
+Fully half our meetings were at my house in Cambridge, where he made
+himself as much at home as in Hartford. He would come ostensibly to stay
+at the Parker House, in Boston, and take a room, where he would light the
+gas and leave it burning, after dressing, while he drove out to Cambridge
+and stayed two or three days with us. Once, I suppose it was after a
+lecture, he came in evening dress and passed twenty-four hours with us in
+that guise, wearing an overcoat to hide it when we went for a walk.
+Sometimes he wore the slippers which he preferred to shoes at home, and
+if it was muddy, as it was wont to be in Cambridge, he would put a pair
+of rubbers over them for our rambles. He liked the lawlessness and our
+delight in allowing it, and he rejoiced in the confession of his hostess,
+after we had once almost worn ourselves out in our pleasure with the
+intense talk, with the stories and the laughing, that his coming almost
+killed her, but it was worth it.
+
+In those days he was troubled with sleeplessness, or, rather, with
+reluctant sleepiness, and he had various specifics for promoting it. At
+first it had been champagne just before going to bed, and we provided
+that, but later he appeared from Boston with four bottles of lager-beer
+under his arms; lager-beer, he said now, was the only thing to make you
+go to sleep, and we provided that. Still later, on a visit I paid him at
+Hartford, I learned that hot Scotch was the only soporific worth
+considering, and Scotch-whiskey duly found its place on our sideboard.
+One day, very long afterward, I asked him if he were still taking hot
+Scotch to make him sleep. He said he was not taking anything. For a
+while he had found going to bed on the bath-room floor a soporific; then
+one night he went to rest in his own bed at ten o’clock, and had gone
+promptly to sleep without anything. He had done the like with the like
+effect ever since. Of course, it amused him; there were few experiences
+of life, grave or gay, which did not amuse him, even when they wronged
+him.
+
+He came on to Cambridge in April, 1875, to go with me to the centennial
+ceremonies at Concord in celebration of the battle of the Minute Men with
+the British troops a hundred years before. We both had special
+invitations, including passage from Boston; but I said, Why bother to go
+into Boston when we could just as well take the train for Concord at the
+Cambridge station? He equally decided that it would be absurd; so we
+breakfasted deliberately, and then walked to the station, reasoning of
+many things as usual. When the train stopped, we found it packed inside
+and out. People stood dense on the platforms of the cars; to our
+startled eyes they seemed to project from the windows, and unless memory
+betrays me they lay strewn upon the roofs like brakemen slain at the post
+of duty.
+
+Whether this was really so or not, it is certain that the train presented
+an impenetrable front even to our imagination, and we left it to go its
+way without the slightest effort to board. We remounted the fame-worn
+steps of Porter’s Station, and began exploring North Cambridge for some
+means of transportation overland to Concord, for we were that far on the
+road by which the British went and came on the day of the battle. The
+liverymen whom we appealed to received us, some with compassion, some
+with derision, but in either mood convinced us that we could not have
+hired a cat to attempt our conveyance, much less a horse, or vehicle of
+any description. It was a raw, windy day, very unlike the exceptionally
+hot April day when the routed redcoats, pursued by the Colonials, fled
+panting back to Boston, with “their tongues hanging out like dogs,” but
+we could not take due comfort in the vision of their discomfiture; we
+could almost envy them, for they had at least got to Concord. A swift
+procession of coaches, carriages, and buggies, all going to Concord,
+passed us, inert and helpless, on the sidewalk in the peculiarly cold mud
+of North Cambridge. We began to wonder if we might not stop one of them
+and bribe it to take us, but we had not the courage to try, and Clemens
+seized the opportunity to begin suffering with an acute indigestion,
+which gave his humor a very dismal cast. I felt keenly the shame of
+defeat, and the guilt of responsibility for our failure, and when a gay
+party of students came toward us on the top of a tally ho, luxuriously
+empty inside, we felt that our chance had come, and our last chance. He
+said that if I would stop them and tell them who I was they would gladly,
+perhaps proudly, give us passage; I contended that if with his far vaster
+renown he would approach them, our success would be assured. While we
+stood, lost in this “contest of civilities,” the coach passed us, with
+gay notes blown from the horns of the students, and then Clemens started
+in pursuit, encouraged with shouts from the merry party who could not
+imagine who was trying to run them down, to a rivalry in speed. The
+unequal match could end only in one way, and I am glad I cannot recall
+what he said when he came back to me. Since then I have often wondered
+at the grief which would have wrung those blithe young hearts if they
+could have known that they might have had the company of Mark Twain to
+Concord that day and did not.
+
+We hung about, unavailingly, in the bitter wind a while longer, and then
+slowly, very slowly, made our way home. We wished to pass as much time
+as possible, in order to give probability to the deceit we intended to
+practise, for we could not bear to own ourselves baffled in our boasted
+wisdom of taking the train at Porter’s Station, and had agreed to say
+that we had been to Concord and got back. Even after coming home to my
+house, we felt that our statement would be wanting in verisimilitude
+without further delay, and we crept quietly into my library, and made up
+a roaring fire on the hearth, and thawed ourselves out in the heat of it
+before we regained our courage for the undertaking. With all these
+precautions we failed, for when our statement was imparted to the
+proposed victim she instantly pronounced it unreliable, and we were left
+with it on our hands intact. I think the humor of this situation was
+finally a greater pleasure to Clemens than an actual visit to Concord
+would have been; only a few weeks before his death he laughed our defeat
+over with one of my family in Bermuda, and exulted in our prompt
+detection.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+From our joint experience in failing I argue that Clemens’s affection for
+me must have been great to enable him to condone in me the final
+defection which was apt to be the end of our enterprises. I have fancied
+that I presented to him a surface of such entire trustworthiness that he
+could not imagine the depths of unreliability beneath it; and that never
+realizing it, he always broke through with fresh surprise but unimpaired
+faith. He liked, beyond all things, to push an affair to the bitter end,
+and the end was never too bitter unless it brought grief or harm to
+another. Once in a telegraph office at a railway station he was treated
+with such insolent neglect by the young lady in charge, who was
+preoccupied in a flirtation with a “gentleman friend,” that emulous of
+the public spirit which he admired in the English, he told her he should
+report her to her superiors, and (probably to her astonishment) he did
+so. He went back to Hartford, and in due time the poor girl came to me
+in, terror and in tears; for I had abetted Clemens in his action, and had
+joined my name to his in his appeal to the authorities. She was
+threatened with dismissal unless she made full apology to him and brought
+back assurance of its acceptance. I felt able to give this, and, of
+course, he eagerly approved; I think he telegraphed his approval. Another
+time, some years afterward, we sat down together in places near the end
+of a car, and a brakeman came in looking for his official note-book.
+Clemens found that he had sat down upon it, and handed it to him; the man
+scolded him very abusively, and came back again and again, still scolding
+him for having no more sense than to sit down on a note-book. The
+patience of Clemens in bearing it was so angelic that I saw fit to
+comment, “I suppose you will report this fellow.” “Yes,” he answered,
+slowly and sadly. “That’s what I should have done once. But now I
+remember that he gets twenty dollars a month.”
+
+Nothing could have been wiser, nothing tenderer, and his humanity was not
+for humanity alone. He abhorred the dull and savage joy of the sportsman
+in a lucky shot, an unerring aim, and once when I met him in the country
+he had just been sickened by the success of a gunner in bringing down a
+blackbird, and he described the poor, stricken, glossy thing, how it lay
+throbbing its life out on the grass, with such pity as he might have
+given a wounded child. I find this a fit place to say that his mind and
+soul were with those who do the hard work of the world, in fear of those
+who give them a chance for their livelihoods and underpay them all they
+can. He never went so far in socialism as I have gone, if he went that
+way at all, but he was fascinated with Looking Backward and had Bellamy
+to visit him; and from the first he had a luminous vision of organized
+labor as the only present help for working-men. He would show that side
+with such clearness and such force that you could not say anything in
+hopeful contradiction; he saw with that relentless insight of his that
+with Unions was the working-man’s only present hope of standing up like a
+man against money and the power of it. There was a time when I was
+afraid that his eyes were a little holden from the truth; but in the very
+last talk I heard from him I found that I was wrong, and that this great
+humorist was as great a humanist as ever. I wish that all the work-folk
+could know this, and could know him their friend in life as he was in
+literature; as he was in such a glorious gospel of equality as the
+‘Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.’
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+Whether I will or no I must let things come into my story thoughtwise, as
+he would have let them, for I cannot remember them in their order. One
+night, while we were giving a party, he suddenly stormed in with a friend
+of his and mine, Mr. Twichell, and immediately began to eat and drink of
+our supper, for they had come straight to our house from walking to
+Boston, or so great a part of the way as to be a-hungered and a-thirst. I
+can see him now as he stood up in the midst of our friends, with his head
+thrown back, and in his hand a dish of those escalloped oysters without
+which no party in Cambridge was really a party, exulting in the tale of
+his adventure, which had abounded in the most original characters and
+amusing incidents at every mile of their progress. They had broken their
+journey with a night’s rest, and they had helped themselves lavishly out
+by rail in the last half; but still it had been a mighty walk to do in
+two days. Clemens was a great walker, in those years, and was always
+telling of his tramps with Mr. Twichell to Talcott’s Tower, ten miles out
+of Hartford. As he walked of course he talked, and of course he smoked.
+Whenever he had been a few days with us, the whole house had to be aired,
+for he smoked all over it from breakfast to bedtime. He always went to
+bed with a cigar in his mouth, and sometimes, mindful of my fire
+insurance, I went up and took it away, still burning, after he had fallen
+asleep. I do not know how much a man may smoke and live, but apparently
+he smoked as much as a man could, for he smoked incessantly.
+
+He did not care much to meet people, as I fancied, and we were greedy of
+him for ourselves; he was precious to us; and I would not have exposed
+him to the critical edge of that Cambridge acquaintance which might not
+have appreciated him at, say, his transatlantic value. In America his
+popularity was as instant as it was vast. But it must be acknowledged
+that for a much longer time here than in England polite learning
+hesitated his praise. In England rank, fashion, and culture rejoiced in
+him. Lord mayors, lord chief justices, and magnates of many kinds were
+his hosts; he was desired in country houses, and his bold genius
+captivated the favor of periodicals which spurned the rest of our nation.
+But in his own country it was different. In proportion as people thought
+themselves refined they questioned that quality which all recognize in
+him now, but which was then the inspired knowledge of the simple-hearted
+multitude. I went with him to see Longfellow, but I do not think
+Longfellow made much of him, and Lowell made less. He stopped as if with
+the long Semitic curve of Clemens’s nose, which in the indulgence of his
+passion for finding every one more or less a Jew he pronounced
+unmistakably racial. It was two of my most fastidious Cambridge friends
+who accepted him with the English, the European entirety--namely, Charles
+Eliot Norton and Professor Francis J. Child. Norton was then newly back
+from a long sojourn abroad, and his judgments were delocalized. He met
+Clemens as if they had both been in England, and rejoiced in his bold
+freedom from environment, and in the rich variety and boundless reach of
+his talk. Child was of a personal liberty as great in its fastidious way
+as that of Clemens himself, and though he knew him only at second hand,
+he exulted in the most audacious instance of his grotesquery, as I shall
+have to tell by-and-by, almost solely. I cannot say just why Clemens
+seemed not to hit the favor of our community of scribes and scholars, as
+Bret Harte had done, when he came on from California, and swept them
+before him, disrupting their dinners and delaying their lunches with
+impunity; but it is certain he did not, and I had better say so.
+
+I am surprised to find from the bibliographical authorities that it was
+so late as 1875 when he came with the manuscript of Tom Sawyer, and asked
+me to read it, as a friend and critic, and not as an editor. I have an
+impression that this was at Mrs. Clemens’s instance in his own
+uncertainty about printing it. She trusted me, I can say with a
+satisfaction few things now give me, to be her husband’s true and cordial
+adviser, and I was so. I believe I never failed him in this part, though
+in so many of our enterprises and projects I was false as water through
+my temperamental love of backing out of any undertaking. I believe this
+never ceased to astonish him, and it has always astonished me; it appears
+to me quite out of character; though it is certain that an undertaking,
+when I have entered upon it, holds me rather than I it. But however this
+immaterial matter may be, I am glad to remember that I thoroughly liked
+Tom Sawyer, and said so with every possible amplification. Very likely,
+I also made my suggestions for its improvement; I could not have been a
+real critic without that; and I have no doubt they were gratefully
+accepted and, I hope, never acted upon. I went with him to the horse-car
+station in Harvard Square, as my frequent wont was, and put him aboard a
+car with his MS. in his hand, stayed and reassured, so far as I counted,
+concerning it. I do not know what his misgivings were; perhaps they were
+his wife’s misgivings, for she wished him to be known not only for the
+wild and boundless humor that was in him, but for the beauty and
+tenderness and “natural piety”; and she would not have had him judged by
+a too close fidelity to the rude conditions of Tom Sawyer’s life. This
+is the meaning that I read into the fact of his coming to me with those
+doubts.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+Clemens had then and for many years the habit of writing to me about what
+he was doing, and still more of what he was experiencing. Nothing struck
+his imagination, in or out of the daily routine, but he wished to write
+me of it, and he wrote with the greatest fulness and a lavish
+dramatization, sometimes to the length of twenty or forty pages, so that
+I have now perhaps fifteen hundred pages of his letters. They will no
+doubt some day be published, but I am not even referring to them in these
+records, which I think had best come to the reader with an old man’s
+falterings and uncertainties. With his frequent absences and my own
+abroad, and the intrusion of calamitous cares, the rich tide of his
+letters was more and more interrupted. At times it almost ceased, and
+then it would come again, a torrent. In the very last weeks of his life
+he burst forth, and, though too weak himself to write, he dictated his
+rage with me for recommending to him a certain author whose truthfulness
+he could not deny, but whom he hated for his truthfulness to sordid and
+ugly conditions. At heart Clemens was romantic, and he would have had
+the world of fiction stately and handsome and whatever the real world was
+not; but he was not romanticistic, and he was too helplessly an artist
+not to wish his own work to show life as he had seen it. I was preparing
+to rap him back for these letters when I read that he had got home to
+die; he would have liked the rapping back.
+
+He liked coming to Boston, especially for those luncheons and dinners in
+which the fertile hospitality of our publisher, Osgood, abounded. He
+dwelt equidistant from Boston and New York, and he had special friends in
+New York, but he said he much preferred coming to Boston; of late years
+he never went there, and he had lost the habit of it long before he came
+home from Europe to live in New York. At these feasts, which were often
+of after-dinner-speaking measure, he could always be trusted for
+something of amazing delightfulness. Once, when Osgood could think of no
+other occasion for a dinner, he gave himself a birthday dinner, and asked
+his friends and authors. The beautiful and splendid trooper-like blaring
+was there, and I recall how in the long, rambling speech in which Clemens
+went round the table hitting every head at it, and especially visiting
+Osgood with thanks for his ingenious pretext for our entertainment, he
+congratulated blaring upon his engineering genius and his hypnotic
+control of municipal governments. He said that if there was a plan for
+draining a city at a cost of a million, by seeking the level of the water
+in the down-hill course of the sewers, blaring would come with a plan to
+drain that town up-hill at twice the cost and carry it through the Common
+Council without opposition. It is hard to say whether the time was
+gladder at these dinners, or at the small lunches at which Osgood and
+Aldrich and I foregathered with him and talked the afternoon away till
+well toward the winter twilight.
+
+He was a great figure, and the principal figure, at one of the first of
+the now worn-out Authors’ Readings, which was held in the Boston Museum
+to aid a Longfellow memorial. It was the late George Parsons Lathrop
+(everybody seems to be late in these sad days) who imagined the reading,
+but when it came to a price for seats I can always claim the glory of
+fixing it at five dollars. The price if not the occasion proved
+irresistible, and the museum was packed from the floor to the topmost
+gallery. Norton presided, and when it came Clemens’s turn to read he
+introduced him with such exquisite praises as he best knew how to give,
+but before he closed he fell a prey to one of those lapses of tact which
+are the peculiar peril of people of the greatest tact. He was reminded
+of Darwin’s delight in Mark Twain, and how when he came from his long
+day’s exhausting study, and sank into bed at midnight, he took up a
+volume of Mark Twain, whose books he always kept on a table beside him,
+and whatever had been his tormenting problem, or excess of toil, he felt
+secure of a good night’s rest from it. A sort of blank ensued which
+Clemens filled in the only possible way. He said he should always be
+glad that he had contributed to the repose of that great man, whom
+science owed so much, and then without waiting for the joy in every
+breast to burst forth, he began to read. It was curious to watch his
+triumph with the house. His carefully studied effects would reach the
+first rows in the orchestra first, and ripple in laughter back to the
+standees against the wall, and then with a fine resurgence come again to
+the rear orchestra seats, and so rise from gallery to gallery till it
+fell back, a cataract of applause from the topmost rows of seats. He was
+such a practised speaker that he knew all the stops of that simple
+instrument man, and there is no doubt that these results were accurately
+intended from his unerring knowledge. He was the most consummate public
+performer I ever saw, and it was an incomparable pleasure to hear him
+lecture; on the platform he was the great and finished actor which he
+probably would not have been on the stage. He was fond of private
+theatricals, and liked to play in them with his children and their
+friends, in dramatizations of such stories of his as ‘The Prince and the
+Pauper;’ but I never saw him in any of these scenes. When he read his
+manuscript to you, it was with a thorough, however involuntary,
+recognition of its dramatic qualities; he held that an actor added fully
+half to the character the author created. With my own hurried and
+half-hearted reading of passages which I wished to try on him from
+unprinted chapters (say, out of ‘The Undiscovered Country’ or ‘A Modern
+Instance’) he said frankly that my reading could spoil anything. He was
+realistic, but he was essentially histrionic, and he was rightly so.
+What we have strongly conceived we ought to make others strongly imagine,
+and we ought to use every genuine art to that end.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+There came a time when the lecturing which had been the joy of his prime
+became his loathing, loathing unutterable, and when he renounced it with
+indescribable violence. Yet he was always hankering for those fleshpots
+whose savor lingered on his palate and filled his nostrils after his
+withdrawal from the platform. The Authors’ Readings when they had won
+their brief popularity abounded in suggestion for him. Reading from
+one’s book was not so bad as giving a lecture written for a lecture’s
+purpose, and he was willing at last to compromise. He had a magnificent
+scheme for touring the country with Aldrich and Mr. G. W. Cable and
+myself, in a private car, with a cook of our own, and every facility for
+living on the fat of the land. We should read only four times a week, in
+an entertainment that should not last more than an hour and a half. He
+would be the impresario, and would guarantee us others at least
+seventy-five dollars a day, and pay every expense of the enterprise,
+which he provisionally called the Circus, himself. But Aldrich and I
+were now no longer in those earlier thirties when we so cheerfully
+imagined ‘Memorable Murders’ for subscription publication; we both
+abhorred public appearances, and, at any rate, I was going to Europe for
+a year. So the plan fell through except as regarded Mr. Cable, who, in
+his way, was as fine a performer as Clemens, and could both read and sing
+the matter of his books. On a far less stupendous scale they two made
+the rounds of the great lecturing circuit together. But I believe a
+famous lecture-manager had charge of them and travelled with them.
+
+He was a most sanguine man, a most amiable person, and such a believer in
+fortune that Clemens used to say of him, as he said of one of his early
+publishers, that you could rely upon fifty per cent. of everything he
+promised. I myself many years later became a follower of this hopeful
+prophet, and I can testify that in my case at least he was able to keep
+ninety-nine, and even a hundred, per cent. of his word. It was I who was
+much nearer failing of mine, for I promptly began to lose sleep from the
+nervous stress of my lecturing and from the gratifying but killing
+receptions afterward, and I was truly in that state from insomnia which
+Clemens recognized in the brief letter I got from him in the Western
+city, after half a dozen wakeful nights. He sardonically congratulated
+me on having gone into “the lecture field,” and then he said: “I know
+where you are now. You are in hell.”
+
+It was this perdition which he re-entered when he undertook that
+round-the-world lecturing tour for the payment of the debts left to him
+by the bankruptcy of his firm in the publishing business. It was not
+purely perdition for him, or, rather, it was perdition for only one-half
+of him, the author-half; for the actor-half it was paradise. The author
+who takes up lecturing without the ability to give histrionic support to
+the literary reputation which he brings to the crude test of his reader’s
+eyes and ears, invokes a peril and a misery unknown to the lecturer who
+has made his first public from the platform. Clemens was victorious on
+the platform from the beginning, and it would be folly to pretend that he
+did not exult in his triumphs there. But I suppose, with the wearing
+nerves of middle life, he hated more and more the personal swarming of
+interest upon him, and all the inevitable clatter of the thing. Yet he
+faced it, and he labored round our tiresome globe that he might pay the
+uttermost farthing of debts which he had not knowingly contracted, the
+debts of his partners who had meant well and done ill, not because they
+were evil, but because they were unwise, and as unfit for their work as
+he was. “Pay what thou owest.” That is right, even when thou owest it
+by the error of others, and even when thou owest it to a bank, which had
+not lent it from love of thee, but in the hard line of business and thy
+need.
+
+Clemens’s behavior in this matter redounded to his glory among the
+nations of the whole earth, and especially in this nation, so wrapped in
+commerce and so little used to honor among its many thieves. He had
+behaved like Walter Scott, as millions rejoiced to know, who had not
+known how Walter Scott had behaved till they knew it was like Clemens. No
+doubt it will be put to his credit in the books of the Recording Angel,
+but what the Judge of all the Earth will say of it at the Last Day there
+is no telling. I should not be surprised if He accounted it of less
+merit than some other things that Clemens did and was: less than his
+abhorrence of the Spanish War, and the destruction of the South-African
+republics, and our deceit of the Filipinos, and his hate of slavery, and
+his payment of his portion of our race’s debt to the race of the colored
+student whom he saw through college, and his support of a poor artist for
+three years in Paris, and his loan of opportunity to the youth who became
+the most brilliant of our actor-dramatists, and his eager pardon of the
+thoughtless girl who was near paying the penalty of her impertinence with
+the loss of her place, and his remembering that the insolent brakeman got
+so few dollars a month, and his sympathy for working-men standing up to
+money in their Unions, and even his pity for the wounded bird throbbing
+out its little life on the grass for the pleasure of the cruel fool who
+shot it. These and the thousand other charities and beneficences in
+which he abounded, openly or secretly, may avail him more than the
+discharge of his firm’s liabilities with the Judge of all the Earth, who
+surely will do right, but whose measures and criterions no man knows, and
+I least of all men.
+
+He made no great show of sympathy with people in their anxieties, but it
+never failed, and at a time when I lay sick for many weeks his letters
+were of comfort to those who feared I might not rise again. His hand was
+out in help for those who needed help, and in kindness for those who
+needed kindness. There remains in my mind the dreary sense of a long,
+long drive to the uttermost bounds of the South End at Boston, where he
+went to call upon some obscure person whose claim stretched in a
+lengthening chain from his early days in Missouri--a most inadequate
+person, in whose vacuity the gloom of the dull day deepened till it was
+almost too deep for tears. He bore the ordeal with grim heroism, and
+silently smoked away the sense of it, as we drove back to Cambridge, in
+his slippered feet, sombrely musing, sombrely swearing. But he knew he
+had done the right, the kind thing, and he was content. He came the
+whole way from Hartford to go with me to a friendless play of mine, which
+Alessandro Salvini was giving in a series of matinees to houses never
+enlarging themselves beyond the count of the brave two hundred who sat it
+through, and he stayed my fainting spirit with a cheer beyond flagons,
+joining me in my joke at the misery of it, and carrying the fun farther.
+
+Before that he had come to witness the aesthetic suicide of Anna
+Dickinson, who had been a flaming light of the political platform in the
+war days, and had been left by them consuming in a hapless ambition for
+the theatre. The poor girl had had a play written especially for her,
+and as Anne Boleyn she ranted and exhorted through the five acts, drawing
+ever nearer the utter defeat of the anticlimax. We could hardly look at
+each other for pity, Clemens sitting there in the box he had taken, with
+his shaggy head out over the corner and his slippered feet curled under
+him: he either went to a place in his slippers or he carried them with
+him, and put them on as soon as he could put off his boots. When it was
+so that we could not longer follow her failure and live, he began to talk
+of the absolute close of her career which the thing was, and how probably
+she had no conception that it was the end. He philosophized the
+mercifulness of the fact, and of the ignorance of most of us, when
+mortally sick or fatally wounded. We think it is not the end, because we
+have never ended before, and we do not see how we can end. Some can push
+by the awful hour and live again, but for Anna Dickinson there could be,
+and was, no such palingenesis. Of course we got that solemn joy out of
+reading her fate aright which is the compensation of the wise spectator
+in witnessing the inexorable doom of others.
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+When Messrs. Houghton & Mifflin became owners of The Atlantic Monthly,
+Mr. Houghton fancied having some breakfasts and dinners, which should
+bring the publisher and the editor face to face with the contributors,
+who were bidden from far and near. Of course, the subtle fiend of
+advertising, who has now grown so unblushing bold, lurked under the
+covers at these banquets, and the junior partner and the young editor had
+their joint and separate fine anguishes of misgiving as to the taste and
+the principle of them; but they were really very simple-hearted and
+honestly meant hospitalities, and they prospered as they ought, and gave
+great pleasure and no pain. I forget some of the “emergent occasions,”
+ but I am sure of a birthday dinner most unexpectedly accepted by
+Whittier, and a birthday luncheon to Mrs. Stowe, and I think a birthday
+dinner to Longfellow; but the passing years have left me in the dark as
+to the pretext of that supper at which Clemens made his awful speech, and
+came so near being the death of us all. At the breakfasts and luncheons
+we had the pleasure of our lady contributors’ company, but that night
+there were only men, and because of our great strength we survived.
+
+I suppose the year was about 1879, but here the almanac is unimportant,
+and I can only say that it was after Clemens had become a very valued
+contributor of the magazine, where he found himself to his own great
+explicit satisfaction. He had jubilantly accepted our invitation, and
+had promised a speech, which it appeared afterward he had prepared with
+unusual care and confidence. It was his custom always to think out his
+speeches, mentally wording them, and then memorizing them by a peculiar
+system of mnemonics which he had invented. On the dinner-table a certain
+succession of knife, spoon, salt-cellar, and butter-plate symbolized a
+train of ideas, and on the billiard-table a ball, a cue, and a piece of
+chalk served the same purpose. With a diagram of these printed on the
+brain he had full command of the phrases which his excogitation had
+attached to them, and which embodied the ideas in perfect form. He
+believed he had been particularly fortunate in his notion for the speech
+of that evening, and he had worked it out in joyous self-reliance. It was
+the notion of three tramps, three deadbeats, visiting a California
+mining-camp, and imposing themselves upon the innocent miners as
+respectively Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver
+Wendell, Holmes. The humor of the conception must prosper or must fail
+according to the mood of the hearer, but Clemens felt sure of compelling
+this to sympathy, and he looked forward to an unparalleled triumph.
+
+But there were two things that he had not taken into account. One was
+the species of religious veneration in which these men were held by those
+nearest them, a thing that I should not be able to realize to people
+remote from them in time and place. They were men of extraordinary
+dignity, of the thing called presence, for want of some clearer word, so
+that no one could well approach them in a personally light or trifling
+spirit. I do not suppose that anybody more truly valued them or more
+piously loved them than Clemens himself, but the intoxication of his
+fancy carried him beyond the bounds of that regard, and emboldened him to
+the other thing which he had not taken into account-namely, the immense
+hazard of working his fancy out before their faces, and expecting them to
+enter into the delight of it. If neither Emerson, nor Longfellow, nor
+Holmes had been there, the scheme might possibly have carried, but even
+this is doubtful, for those who so devoutly honored them would have
+overcome their horror with difficulty, and perhaps would not have
+overcome it at all.
+
+The publisher, with a modesty very ungrateful to me, had abdicated his
+office of host, and I was the hapless president, fulfilling the abhorred.
+function of calling people to their feet and making them speak. When I
+came to Clemens I introduced him with the cordial admiring I had for him
+as one of my greatest contributors and dearest friends. Here, I said, in
+sum, was a humorist who never left you hanging your head for having
+enjoyed his joke; and then the amazing mistake, the bewildering blunder,
+the cruel catastrophe was upon us. I believe that after the scope of the
+burlesque made itself clear, there was no one there, including the
+burlesquer himself, who was not smitten with a desolating dismay. There
+fell a silence, weighing many tons to the square inch, which deepened
+from moment to moment, and was broken only by the hysterical and
+blood-curdling laughter of a single guest, whose name shall not be handed
+down to infamy. Nobody knew whether to look at the speaker or down at
+his plate. I chose my plate as the least affliction, and so I do not
+know how Clemens looked, except when I stole a glance at him, and saw him
+standing solitary amid his appalled and appalling listeners, with his
+joke dead on his hands. From a first glance at the great three whom his
+jest had made its theme, I was aware of Longfellow sitting upright, and
+regarding the humorist with an air of pensive puzzle, of Holmes busily
+writing on his menu, with a well-feigned effect of preoccupation, and of
+Emerson, holding his elbows, and listening with a sort of Jovian oblivion
+of this nether world in that lapse of memory which saved him in those
+later years from so much bother. Clemens must have dragged his joke to
+the climax and left it there, but I cannot say this from any sense of the
+fact. Of what happened afterward at the table where the immense, the
+wholly innocent, the truly unimagined affront was offered, I have no
+longer the least remembrance. I next remember being in a room of the
+hotel, where Clemens was not to sleep, but to toss in despair, and
+Charles Dudley Warner’s saying, in the gloom, “Well, Mark, you’re a funny
+fellow.” It was as well as anything else he could have said, but Clemens
+seemed unable to accept the tribute.
+
+I stayed the night with him, and the next morning, after a haggard
+breakfast, we drove about and he made some purchases of bric-a-brac for
+his house in Hartford, with a soul as far away from bric-a-brac as ever
+the soul of man was. He went home by an early train, and he lost no time
+in writing back to the three divine personalities which he had so
+involuntarily seemed to flout. They all wrote back to him, making it as
+light for him as they could. I have heard that Emerson was a good deal
+mystified, and in his sublime forgetfulness asked, Who was this gentleman
+who appeared to think he had offered him some sort of annoyance! But I
+am not sure that this is accurate. What I am sure of is that Longfellow,
+a few days after, in my study, stopped before a photograph of Clemens and
+said, “Ah, he is a wag!” and nothing more. Holmes told me, with deep
+emotion, such as a brother humorist might well feel, that he had not lost
+an instant in replying to Clemens’s letter, and assuring him that there
+had not been the least offence, and entreating him never to think of the
+matter again. “He said that he was a fool, but he was God’s fool,”
+ Holmes quoted from the letter, with a true sense of the pathos and the
+humor of the self-abasement.
+
+To me Clemens wrote a week later, “It doesn’t get any better; it burns
+like fire.” But now I understand that it was not shame that burnt, but
+rage for a blunder which he had so incredibly committed. That to have
+conceived of those men, the most dignified in our literature, our
+civilization, as impersonable by three hoboes, and then to have imagined
+that he could ask them personally to enjoy the monstrous travesty, was a
+break, he saw too late, for which there was no repair. Yet the time
+came, and not so very long afterward, when some mention was made of the
+incident as a mistake, and he said, with all his fierceness, “But I don’t
+admit that it was a mistake,” and it was not so in the minds of all
+witnesses at second hand. The morning after the dreadful dinner there
+came a glowing note from Professor Child, who had read the newspaper
+report of it, praising Clemens’s burlesque as the richest piece of humor
+in the world, and betraying no sense of incongruity in its perpetration
+in the presence of its victims. I think it must always have ground in
+Clemens’s soul, that he was the prey of circumstances, and that if he had
+some more favoring occasion he could retrieve his loss in it by giving
+the thing the right setting. Not more than two or three years ago, he
+came to try me as to trying it again at a meeting of newspaper men in
+Washington. I had to own my fears, while I alleged Child’s note on the
+other hand, but in the end he did not try it with the newspaper men. I
+do not know whether he has ever printed it or not, but since the thing
+happened I have often wondered how much offence there really was in it. I
+am not sure but the horror of the spectators read more indignation into
+the subjects of the hapless drolling than they felt. But it must have
+been difficult for them to bear it with equanimity. To be sure, they
+were not themselves mocked; the joke was, of course, beside them;
+nevertheless, their personality was trifled with, and I could only end by
+reflecting that if I had been in their place I should not have liked it
+myself. Clemens would have liked it himself, for he had the heart for
+that sort of wild play, and he so loved a joke that even if it took the
+form of a liberty, and was yet a good joke, he would have loved it. But
+perhaps this burlesque was not a good joke.
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+Clemens was oftenest at my house in Cambridge, but he was also sometimes
+at my house in Belmont; when, after a year in Europe, we went to live in
+Boston, he was more rarely with us. We could never be long together
+without something out of the common happening, and one day something far
+out of the common happened, which fortunately refused the nature of
+absolute tragedy, while remaining rather the saddest sort of comedy. We
+were looking out of my library window on that view of the Charles which I
+was so proud of sharing with my all-but-next-door neighbor, Doctor
+Holmes, when another friend who was with us called out with curiously
+impersonal interest, “Oh, see that woman getting into the water!” This
+would have excited curiosity and alarmed anxiety far less lively than
+ours, and Clemens and I rushed downstairs and out through my basement and
+back gate. At the same time a coachman came out of a stable next door,
+and grappled by the shoulders a woman who was somewhat deliberately
+getting down the steps to the water over the face of the embankment.
+Before we could reach them he had pulled her up to the driveway, and
+stood holding her there while she crazily grieved at her rescue. As soon
+as he saw us he went back into his stable, and left us with the poor wild
+creature on our hands. She was not very young and not very pretty, and
+we could not have flattered ourselves with the notion of anything
+romantic in her suicidal mania, but we could take her on the broad human
+level, and on this we proposed to escort her up Beacon Street till we
+could give her into the keeping of one of those kindly policemen whom our
+neighborhood knew. Naturally there was no policeman known to us or
+unknown the whole way to the Public Garden. We had to circumvent our
+charge in her present design of drowning herself, and walk her past the
+streets crossing Beacon to the river. At these points it needed
+considerable reasoning to overcome her wish and some active manoeuvring
+in both of us to enforce our arguments. Nobody else appeared to be
+interested, and though we did not court publicity in the performance of
+the duty so strangely laid upon us, still it was rather disappointing to
+be so entirely ignored.
+
+There are some four or five crossings to the river between 302 Beacon
+Street and the Public Garden, and the suggestions at our command were
+pretty well exhausted by the time we reached it. Still the expected
+policeman was nowhere in sight; but a brilliant thought occurred to
+Clemens. He asked me where the nearest police station was, and when I
+told him, he started off at his highest speed, leaving me in sole charge
+of our hapless ward. All my powers of suasion were now taxed to the
+utmost, and I began attracting attention as a short, stout gentleman in
+early middle life endeavoring to distrain a respectable female of her
+personal liberty, when his accomplice had abandoned him to his wicked
+design. After a much longer time than I thought I should have taken to
+get a policeman from the station, Clemens reappeared in easy conversation
+with an officer who had probably realized that he was in the company of
+Mark Twain, and was in no hurry to end the interview. He took possession
+of our captive, and we saw her no more. I now wonder that with our joint
+instinct for failure we ever got rid of her; but I am sure we did, and
+few things in life have given me greater relief. When we got back to my
+house we found the friend we had left there quite unruffled and not much
+concerned to know the facts of our adventure. My impression is that he
+had been taking a nap on my lounge; he appeared refreshed and even gay;
+but if I am inexact in these details he is alive to refute me.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+A little after this Clemens went abroad with his family, and lived
+several years in Germany. His letters still came, but at longer
+intervals, and the thread of our intimate relations was inevitably
+broken. He would write me when something I had written pleased him, or
+when something signal occurred to him, or some political or social
+outrage stirred him to wrath, and he wished to free his mind in pious
+profanity. During this sojourn he came near dying of pneumonia in
+Berlin, and he had slight relapses from it after coming home. In Berlin
+also he had the honor of dining with the German Emperor at the table of a
+cousin married to a high officer of the court. Clemens was a man to
+enjoy such a distinction; he knew how to take it as a delegated
+recognition from the German people; but as coming from a rather cockahoop
+sovereign who had as yet only his sovereignty to value himself upon, he
+was not very proud of it. He expressed a quiet disdain of the event as
+between the imperiality and himself, on whom it was supposed to confer
+such glory, crowning his life with the topmost leaf of laurel. He was in
+the same mood in his account of an English dinner many years before,
+where there was a “little Scotch lord” present, to whom the English
+tacitly referred Clemens’s talk, and laughed when the lord laughed, and
+were grave when he failed to smile. Of all the men I have known he was
+the farthest from a snob, though he valued recognition, and liked the
+flattery of the fashionable fair when it came in his way. He would not
+go out of his way for it, but like most able and brilliant men he loved
+the minds of women, their wit, their agile cleverness, their sensitive
+perception, their humorous appreciation, the saucy things they would say,
+and their pretty, temerarious defiances. He had, of course, the keenest
+sense of what was truly dignified and truly undignified in people; but he
+was not really interested in what we call society affairs; they scarcely
+existed for him, though his books witness how he abhorred the dreadful
+fools who through some chance of birth or wealth hold themselves
+different from other men.
+
+Commonly he did not keep things to himself, especially dislikes and
+condemnations. Upon most current events he had strong opinions, and he
+uttered them strongly. After a while he was silent in them, but if you
+tried him you found him in them still. He was tremendously worked up by
+a certain famous trial, as most of us were who lived in the time of it.
+He believed the accused guilty, but when we met some months after it was
+over, and I tempted him to speak his mind upon it, he would only say. The
+man had suffered enough; as if the man had expiated his wrong, and he was
+not going to do anything to renew his penalty. I found that very
+curious, very delicate. His continued blame could not come to the
+sufferer’s knowledge, but he felt it his duty to forbear it.
+
+He was apt to wear himself out in the vehemence of his resentments; or,
+he had so spent himself in uttering them that he had literally nothing
+more to say. You could offer Clemens offences that would anger other men
+and he did not mind; he would account for them from human nature; but if
+he thought you had in any way played him false you were anathema and
+maranatha forever. Yet not forever, perhaps, for by and-by, after years,
+he would be silent. There were two men, half a generation apart in their
+succession, whom he thought equally atrocious in their treason to him,
+and of whom he used to talk terrifyingly, even after they were out of the
+world. He went farther than Heine, who said that he forgave his enemies,
+but not till they were dead. Clemens did not forgive his dead enemies;
+their death seemed to deepen their crimes, like a base evasion, or a
+cowardly attempt to escape; he pursued them to the grave; he would like
+to dig them up and take vengeance upon their clay. So he said, but no
+doubt he would not have hurt them if he had had them living before him.
+He was generous without stint; he trusted without measure, but where his
+generosity was abused, or his trust betrayed, he was a fire of vengeance,
+a consuming flame of suspicion that no sprinkling of cool patience from
+others could quench; it had to burn itself out. He was eagerly and
+lavishly hospitable, but if a man seemed willing to batten on him, or in
+any way to lie down upon him, Clemens despised him unutterably. In his
+frenzies of resentment or suspicion he would not, and doubtless could
+not, listen to reason. But if between the paroxysms he were confronted
+with the facts he would own them, no matter how much they told against
+him. At one period he fancied that a certain newspaper was hounding him
+with biting censure and poisonous paragraphs, and he was filling himself
+up with wrath to be duly discharged on the editor’s head. Later, he
+wrote me with a humorous joy in his mistake that Warner had advised him
+to have the paper watched for these injuries. He had done so, and how
+many mentions of him did I reckon he had found in three months? Just
+two, and they were rather indifferent than unfriendly. So the paper was
+acquitted, and the editor’s life was spared. The wretch never knew how
+near he was to losing it, with incredible preliminaries of obloquy, and a
+subsequent devotion to lasting infamy.
+
+His memory for favors was as good as for injuries, and he liked to return
+your friendliness with as loud a band of music as could be bought or
+bribed for the occasion. All that you had to do was to signify that you
+wanted his help. When my father was consul at Toronto during Arthur’s
+administration, he fancied that his place was in danger, and he appealed
+to me. In turn I appealed to Clemens, bethinking myself of his
+friendship with Grant and Grant’s friendship with Arthur. I asked him to
+write to Grant in my father’s behalf, but No, he answered me, I must come
+to Hartford, and we would go on to New York together and see Grant
+personally. This was before, and long before, Clemens became Grant’s
+publisher and splendid benefactor, but the men liked each other as such
+men could not help doing. Clemens made the appointment, and we went to
+find Grant in his business office, that place where his business
+innocence was afterward so betrayed. He was very simple and very
+cordial, and I was instantly the more at home with him, because his voice
+was the soft, rounded, Ohio River accent to which my years were earliest
+used from my steamboating uncles, my earliest heroes. When I stated my
+business he merely said, Oh no; that must not be; he would write to Mr.
+Arthur; and he did so that day; and my father lived to lay down his
+office, when he tired of it, with no urgence from above.
+
+It is not irrelevant to Clemens to say that Grant seemed to like finding
+himself in company with two literary men, one of whom at least he could
+make sure of, and unlike that silent man he was reputed, he talked
+constantly, and so far as he might he talked literature. At least he
+talked of John Phoenix, that delightfulest of the early Pacific Slope
+humorists, whom he had known under his real name of George H. Derby, when
+they were fellow-cadets at West Point. It was mighty pretty, as Pepys
+would say, to see the delicate deference Clemens paid our plain hero, and
+the manly respect with which he listened. While Grant talked, his
+luncheon was brought in from some unassuming restaurant near by, and he
+asked us to join him in the baked beans and coffee which were served us
+in a little room out of the office with about the same circumstance as at
+a railroad refreshment-counter. The baked beans and coffee were of about
+the railroad-refreshment quality; but eating them with Grant was like
+sitting down to baked beans and coffee with Julius Caesar, or Alexander,
+or some other great Plutarchan captain. One of the highest satisfactions
+of Clemens’s often supremely satisfactory life was his relation to Grant.
+It was his proud joy to tell how he found Grant about to sign a contract
+for his book on certainly very good terms, and said to him that he would
+himself publish the book and give him a percentage three times as large.
+He said Grant seemed to doubt whether he could honorably withdraw from
+the negotiation at that point, but Clemens overbore his scruples, and it
+was his unparalleled privilege, his princely pleasure, to pay the author
+a far larger check for his work than had ever been paid to an author
+before. He valued even more than this splendid opportunity the sacred
+moments in which their business brought him into the presence of the
+slowly dying, heroically living man whom he was so befriending; and he
+told me in words which surely lost none of their simple pathos through
+his report how Grant described his suffering.
+
+The prosperity, of this venture was the beginning of Clemens’s adversity,
+for it led to excesses of enterprise which were forms of dissipation. The
+young sculptor who had come back to him from Paris modelled a small bust
+of Grant, which Clemens multiplied in great numbers to his great loss,
+and the success of Grant’s book tempted him to launch on publishing seas
+where his bark presently foundered. The first and greatest of his
+disasters was the Life of Pope Leo XIII, which he came to tell me of,
+when he had imagined it, in a sort of delirious exultation. He had no
+words in which to paint the magnificence of the project, or to forecast
+its colossal success. It would have a currency bounded only by the
+number of Catholics in Christendom. It would be translated into every
+language which was anywhere written or printed; it would be circulated
+literally in every country of the globe, and Clemens’s book agents would
+carry the prospectuses and then the bound copies of the work to the ends
+of the whole earth. Not only would every Catholic buy it, but every
+Catholic must, as he was a good Catholic, as he hoped to be saved. It
+was a magnificent scheme, and it captivated me, as it had captivated
+Clemens; it dazzled us both, and neither of us saw the fatal defect in
+it. We did not consider how often Catholics could not read, how often
+when they could, they might not wish to read. The event proved that
+whether they could read or not the immeasurable majority did not wish to
+read the life of the Pope, though it was written by a dignitary of the
+Church and issued to the world with every sanction from the Vatican. The
+failure was incredible to Clemens; his sanguine soul was utterly
+confounded, and soon a silence fell upon it where it had been so
+exuberantly jubilant.
+
+
+
+
+XIX.
+
+The occasions which brought us to New York together were not nearly so
+frequent as those which united us in Boston, but there was a dinner given
+him by a friend which remains memorable from the fatuity of two men
+present, so different in everything but their fatuity. One was the sweet
+old comedian Billy Florence, who was urging the unsuccessful dramatist
+across the table to write him a play about Oliver Cromwell, and giving
+the reasons why he thought himself peculiarly fitted to portray the
+character of Cromwell. The other was a modestly millioned rich man who
+was then only beginning to amass the moneys afterward heaped so high, and
+was still in the condition to be flattered by the condescension of a yet
+greater millionaire. His contribution to our gaiety was the verbatim
+report of a call he had made upon William H. Vanderbilt, whom he had
+found just about starting out of town, with his trunks actually in the
+front hall, but who had stayed to receive the narrator. He had, in fact,
+sat down on one of the trunks, and talked with the easiest friendliness,
+and quite, we were given to infer, like an ordinary human being. Clemens
+often kept on with some thread of the talk when we came away from a
+dinner, but now he was silent, as if “high sorrowful and cloyed”; and it
+was not till well afterward that I found he had noted the facts from the
+bitterness with which he mocked the rich man, and the pity he expressed
+for the actor.
+
+He had begun before that to amass those evidences against mankind which
+eventuated with him in his theory of what he called “the damned human
+race.” This was not an expression of piety, but of the kind contempt to
+which he was driven by our follies and iniquities as he had observed them
+in himself as well as in others. It was as mild a misanthropy, probably,
+as ever caressed the objects of its malediction. But I believe it was
+about the year 1900 that his sense of our perdition became insupportable
+and broke out in a mixed abhorrence and amusement which spared no
+occasion, so that I could quite understand why Mrs. Clemens should have
+found some compensation, when kept to her room by sickness, in the
+reflection that now she should not hear so much about “the damned human
+race.” He told of that with the same wild joy that he told of
+overhearing her repetition of one of his most inclusive profanities, and
+her explanation that she meant him to hear it so that he might know how
+it sounded. The contrast of the lurid blasphemy with her heavenly
+whiteness should have been enough to cure any one less grounded than he
+in what must be owned was as fixed a habit as smoking with him. When I
+first knew him he rarely vented his fury in that sort, and I fancy he was
+under a promise to her which he kept sacred till the wear and tear of his
+nerves with advancing years disabled him. Then it would be like him to
+struggle with himself till he could struggle no longer and to ask his
+promise back, and it would be like her to give it back. His profanity
+was the heritage of his boyhood and young manhood in social conditions
+and under the duress of exigencies in which everybody swore about as
+impersonally as he smoked. It is best to recognize the fact of it, and I
+do so the more readily because I cannot suppose the Recording Angel
+really minded it much more than that Guardian. Angel of his. It
+probably grieved them about equally, but they could equally forgive it.
+Nothing came of his pose regarding “the damned human race” except his
+invention of the Human Race Luncheon Club. This was confined to four
+persons who were never all got together, and it soon perished of their
+indifference.
+
+In the earlier days that I have more specially in mind one of the
+questions that we used to debate a good deal was whether every human
+motive was not selfish. We inquired as to every impulse, the noblest,
+the holiest in effect, and he found them in the last analysis of selfish
+origin. Pretty nearly the whole time of a certain railroad run from New
+York to Hartford was taken up with the scrutiny of the self-sacrifice of
+a mother for her child, of the abandon of the lover who dies in saving
+his mistress from fire or flood, of the hero’s courage in the field and
+the martyr’s at the stake. Each he found springing from the unconscious
+love of self and the dread of the greater pain which the self-sacrificer
+would suffer in-forbearing the sacrifice. If we had any time left from
+this inquiry that day, he must have devoted it to a high regret that
+Napoleon did not carry out his purpose of invading England, for then he
+would have destroyed the feudal aristocracy, or “reformed the lords,” as
+it might be called now. He thought that would have been an incalculable
+blessing to the English people and the world. Clemens was always
+beautifully and unfalteringly a republican. None of his occasional
+misgivings for America implicated a return to monarchy. Yet he felt
+passionately the splendor of the English monarchy, and there was a time
+when he gloried in that figurative poetry by which the king was phrased
+as “the Majesty of England.” He rolled the words deep-throatedly out,
+and exulted in their beauty as if it were beyond any other glory of the
+world. He read, or read at, English history a great deal, and one of the
+by-products of his restless invention was a game of English Kings (like
+the game of Authors) for children. I do not know whether he ever
+perfected this, but I am quite sure it was not put upon the market. Very
+likely he brought it to a practicable stage, and then tired of it, as he
+was apt to do in the ultimation of his vehement undertakings.
+
+
+
+
+XX.
+
+He satisfied the impassioned demand of his nature for incessant
+activities of every kind by taking a personal as well as a pecuniary
+interest in the inventions of others. At one moment “the damned human
+race” was almost to be redeemed by a process of founding brass without
+air bubbles in it; if this could once be accomplished, as I understood,
+or misunderstood, brass could be used in art-printing to a degree
+hitherto impossible. I dare say I have got it wrong, but I am not
+mistaken as to Clemens’s enthusiasm for the process, and his heavy losses
+in paying its way to ultimate failure. He was simultaneously absorbed in
+the perfection of a type-setting machine, which he was paying the
+inventor a salary to bring to a perfection so expensive that it was
+practically impracticable. We were both printers by trade, and I could
+take the same interest in this wonderful piece of mechanism that he
+could; and it was so truly wonderful that it did everything but walk and
+talk. Its ingenious creator was so bent upon realizing the highest ideal
+in it that he produced a machine of quite unimpeachable efficiency. But
+it was so costly, when finished, that it could not be made for less than
+twenty thousand dollars, if the parts were made by hand. This sum was
+prohibitive of its introduction, unless the requisite capital could be
+found for making the parts by machinery, and Clemens spent many months in
+vainly trying to get this money together. In the mean time simpler
+machines had been invented and the market filled, and his investment of
+three hundred thousand dollars in the beautiful miracle remained
+permanent but not profitable. I once went with him to witness its
+performance, and it did seem to me the last word in its way, but it had
+been spoken too exquisitely, too fastidiously. I never heard him devote
+the inventor to the infernal gods, as he was apt to do with the geniuses
+he lost money by, and so I think he did not regard him as a traitor.
+
+In these things, and in his other schemes for the ‘subiti guadagni’ of
+the speculator and the “sudden making of splendid names” for the
+benefactors of our species, Clemens satisfied the Colonel Sellers nature
+in himself (from which he drew the picture of that wild and lovable
+figure), and perhaps made as good use of his money as he could. He did
+not care much for money in itself, but he luxuriated in the lavish use of
+it, and he was as generous with it as ever a man was. He liked giving it,
+but he commonly wearied of giving it himself, and wherever he lived he
+established an almoner, whom he fully trusted to keep his left hand
+ignorant of what his right hand was doing. I believe he felt no finality
+in charity, but did it because in its provisional way it was the only
+thing a man could do. I never heard him go really into any sociological
+inquiry, and I have a feeling that that sort of thing baffled and
+dispirited him. No one can read The Connecticut Yankee and not be aware
+of the length and breadth of his sympathies with poverty, but apparently
+he had not thought out any scheme for righting the economic wrongs we
+abound in. I cannot remember our ever getting quite down to a discussion
+of the matter; we came very near it once in the day of the vast wave of
+emotion sent over the world by ‘Looking Backward,’ and again when we were
+all so troubled by the great coal strike in Pennsylvania; in considering
+that he seemed to be for the time doubtful of the justice of the
+workingman’s cause. At all other times he seemed to know that whatever
+wrongs the workingman committed work was always in the right.
+
+When Clemens returned to America with his family, after lecturing round
+the world, I again saw him in New York, where I so often saw him while he
+was shaping himself for that heroic enterprise. He would come to me, and
+talk sorrowfully over his financial ruin, and picture it to himself as
+the stuff of some unhappy dream, which, after long prosperity, had
+culminated the wrong way. It was very melancholy, very touching, but the
+sorrow to which he had come home from his long journey had not that
+forlorn bewilderment in it. He was looking wonderfully well, and when I
+wanted the name of his elixir, he said it was plasmon. He was apt, for a
+man who had put faith so decidedly away from him, to take it back and pin
+it to some superstition, usually of a hygienic sort. Once, when he was
+well on in years, he came to New York without glasses, and announced that
+he and all his family, so astigmatic and myopic and old-sighted, had, so
+to speak, burned their spectacles behind them upon the instruction of
+some sage who had found out that they were a delusion. The next time he
+came he wore spectacles freely, almost ostentatiously, and I heard from
+others that the whole Clemens family had been near losing their eyesight
+by the miracle worked in their behalf. Now, I was not surprised to learn
+that “the damned human race” was to be saved by plasmon, if anything, and
+that my first duty was to visit the plasmon agency with him, and procure
+enough plasmon to secure my family against the ills it was heir to for
+evermore. I did not immediately understand that plasmon was one of the
+investments which he had made from “the substance of things hoped for,”
+ and in the destiny of a disastrous disappointment. But after paying off
+the creditors of his late publishing firm, he had to do something with
+his money, and it was not his fault if he did not make a fortune out of
+plasmon.
+
+
+
+
+XXI.
+
+For a time it was a question whether he should not go back with his
+family to their old home in Hartford. Perhaps the father’s and mother’s
+hearts drew them there all the more strongly because of the grief written
+ineffaceably over it, but for the younger ones it was no longer the
+measure of the world. It was easier for all to stay on indefinitely in
+New York, which is a sojourn without circumstance, and equally the home
+of exile and of indecision. The Clemenses took a pleasant, spacious
+house at Riverdale, on the Hudson, and there I began to see them again on
+something like the sweet old terms. They lived far more unpretentiously
+than they used, and I think with a notion of economy, which they had
+never very successfully practised. I recall that at the end of a certain
+year in Hartford, when they had been saving and paying cash for
+everything, Clemens wrote, reminding me of their avowed experiment, and
+asking me to guess how many bills they had at New Year’s; he hastened to
+say that a horse-car would not have held them. At Riverdale they kept no
+carriage, and there was a snowy night when I drove up to their handsome
+old mansion in the station carryall, which was crusted with mud as from
+the going down of the Deluge after transporting Noah and his family from
+the Ark to whatever point they decided to settle at provisionally. But
+the good talk, the rich talk, the talk that could never suffer poverty of
+mind or soul, was there, and we jubilantly found ourselves again in our
+middle youth. It was the mighty moment when Clemens was building his
+engines of war for the destruction of Christian Science, which
+superstition nobody, and he least of all, expected to destroy. It would
+not be easy to say whether in his talk of it his disgust for the
+illiterate twaddle of Mrs. Eddy’s book, or his admiration of her genius
+for organization was the greater. He believed that as a religious
+machine the Christian Science Church was as perfect as the Roman Church
+and destined to be, more formidable in its control of the minds of men.
+He looked for its spread over the whole of Christendom, and throughout
+the winter he spent at Riverdale he was ready to meet all listeners more
+than half-way with his convictions of its powerful grasp of the average
+human desire to get something for nothing. The vacuous vulgarity of its
+texts was a perpetual joy to him, while he bowed with serious respect to
+the sagacity which built so securely upon the everlasting rock of human
+credulity and folly.
+
+An interesting phase of his psychology in this business was not only his
+admiration for the masterly, policy of the Christian Science hierarchy,
+but his willingness to allow the miracles of its healers to be tried on
+his friends and family, if they wished it. He had a tender heart for the
+whole generation of empirics, as well as the newer sorts of scientitians,
+but he seemed to base his faith in them largely upon the failure of the
+regulars rather than upon their own successes, which also he believed in.
+He was recurrently, but not insistently, desirous that you should try
+their strange magics when you were going to try the familiar medicines.
+
+
+
+
+XXII.
+
+The order of my acquaintance, or call it intimacy, with Clemens was this:
+our first meeting in Boston, my visits to him in Hartford, his visits to
+me in Cambridge, in Belmont, and in Boston, our briefer and less frequent
+meetings in Paris and New York, all with repeated interruptions through
+my absences in Europe, and his sojourns in London, Berlin, Vienna, and
+Florence, and his flights to the many ends, and odds and ends, of the
+earth. I will not try to follow the events, if they were not rather the
+subjective experiences, of those different periods and points of time
+which I must not fail to make include his summer at York Harbor, and his
+divers residences in New York, on Tenth Street and on Fifth Avenue, at
+Riverdale, and at Stormfield, which his daughter has told me he loved
+best of all his houses and hoped to make his home for long years.
+
+Not much remains to me of the week or so that we had together in Paris
+early in the summer of 1904. The first thing I got at my bankers was a
+cable message announcing that my father was stricken with paralysis, but
+urging my stay for further intelligence, and I went about, till the final
+summons came, with my head in a mist of care and dread. Clemens was very
+kind and brotherly through it all. He was living greatly to his mind in
+one of those arcaded little hotels in the Rue de Rivoli, and he was free
+from all household duties to range with me. We drove together to make
+calls of digestion at many houses where he had got indigestion through
+his reluctance from their hospitality, for he hated dining out. But, as
+he explained, his wife wanted him to make these visits, and he did it, as
+he did everything she wanted. ‘At one place, some suburban villa, he
+could get no answer to his ring, and he “hove” his cards over the gate
+just as it opened, and he had the shame of explaining in his
+unexplanatory French to the man picking them up. He was excruciatingly
+helpless with his cabmen, but by very cordially smiling and casting
+himself on the drivers’ mercy he always managed to get where he wanted.
+The family was on the verge of their many moves, and he was doing some
+small errands; he said that the others did the main things, and left him
+to do what the cat might.
+
+It was with that return upon the buoyant billow of plasmon, renewed in
+look and limb, that Clemens’s universally pervasive popularity began in
+his own country. He had hitherto been more intelligently accepted or
+more largely imagined in Europe, and I suppose it was my sense of this
+that inspired the stupidity of my saying to him when we came to consider
+“the state of polite learning” among us, “You mustn’t expect people to
+keep it up here as they do in England.” But it appeared that his
+countrymen were only wanting the chance, and they kept it up in honor of
+him past all precedent. One does not go into a catalogue of dinners,
+receptions, meetings, speeches, and the like, when there are more vital
+things to speak of. He loved these obvious joys, and he eagerly strove
+with the occasions they gave him for the brilliancy which seemed so
+exhaustless and was so exhausting. His friends saw that he was wearing
+himself out, and it was not because of Mrs. Clemens’s health alone that
+they were glad to have him take refuge at Riverdale. The family lived
+there two happy, hopeless years, and then it was ordered that they should
+change for his wife’s sake to some less exacting climate. Clemens was
+not eager to go to Florence, but his imagination was taken as it would
+have been in the old-young days by the notion of packing his furniture
+into flexible steel cages from his house in Hartford and unpacking it
+from them untouched at his villa in Fiesole. He got what pleasure any
+man could out of that triumph of mind over matter, but the shadow was
+creeping up his life. One sunny afternoon we sat on the grass before the
+mansion, after his wife had begun to get well enough for removal, and we
+looked up toward a balcony where by-and-by that lovely presence made
+itself visible, as if it had stooped there from a cloud. A hand frailly
+waved a handkerchief; Clemens ran over the lawn toward it, calling
+tenderly: “What? What?” as if it might be an asking for him instead of
+the greeting it really was for me. It was the last time I saw her, if
+indeed I can be said to have seen her then, and long afterward when I
+said how beautiful we all thought her, how good, how wise, how
+wonderfully perfect in every relation of life, he cried out in a breaking
+voice: “Oh, why didn’t you ever tell her? She thought you didn’t like
+her.” What a pang it was then not to have told her, but how could we
+have told her? His unreason endeared him to me more than all his wisdom.
+
+To that Riverdale sojourn belong my impressions of his most violent
+anti-Christian Science rages, which began with the postponement of his
+book, and softened into acceptance of the delay till he had well-nigh
+forgotten his wrath when it come out. There was also one of those joint
+episodes of ours, which, strangely enough, did not eventuate in entire
+failure, as most of our joint episodes did. He wrote furiously to me of
+a wrong which had been done to one of the most helpless and one of the
+most helped of our literary brethren, asking me to join with him in
+recovering the money paid over by that brother’s publisher to a false
+friend who had withheld it and would not give any account of it. Our
+hapless brother had appealed to Clemens, as he had to me, with the facts,
+but not asking our help, probably because he knew he need not ask; and
+Clemens enclosed to me a very taking-by-the-throat message which he
+proposed sending to the false friend. For once I had some sense, and
+answered that this would never do, for we had really no power in the
+matter, and I contrived a letter to the recreant so softly diplomatic
+that I shall always think of it with pride when my honesties no longer
+give me satisfaction, saying that this incident had come to our
+knowledge, and suggesting that we felt sure he would not finally wish to
+withhold the money. Nothing more, practically, than that, but that was
+enough; there came promptly back a letter of justification, covering a
+very substantial check, which we hilariously forwarded to our
+beneficiary. But the helpless man who was so used to being helped did
+not answer with the gladness I, at least, expected of him. He
+acknowledged the check as he would any ordinary payment, and then he made
+us observe that there was still a large sum due him out of the moneys
+withheld. At this point I proposed to Clemens that we should let the
+nonchalant victim collect the remnant himself. Clouds of sorrow had
+gathered about the bowed head of the delinquent since we began on him,
+and my fickle sympathies were turning his way from the victim who was
+really to blame for leaving his affairs so unguardedly to him in the
+first place. Clemens made some sort of grit assent, and we dropped the
+matter. He was more used to ingratitude from those he helped than I was,
+who found being lain down upon not so amusing as he found my revolt. He
+reckoned I was right, he said, and after that I think we never recurred
+to the incident. It was not ingratitude that he ever minded; it was
+treachery, that really maddened him past forgiveness.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII.
+
+During the summer he spent at York Harbor I was only forty minutes away
+at Kittery Point, and we saw each other often; but this was before the
+last time at Riverdale. He had a wide, low cottage in a pine grove
+overlooking York River, and we used to sit at a corner of the veranda
+farthest away from Mrs. Clemens’s window, where we could read our
+manuscripts to each other, and tell our stories, and laugh our hearts out
+without disturbing her. At first she had been about the house, and there
+was one gentle afternoon when she made tea for us in the parlor, but that
+was the last time I spoke with her. After that it was really a question
+of how soonest and easiest she could be got back to Riverdale; but, of
+course, there were specious delays in which she seemed no worse and
+seemed a little better, and Clemens could work at a novel he had begun.
+He had taken a room in the house of a friend and neighbor, a fisherman
+and boatman; there was a table where he could write, and a bed where he
+could lie down and read; and there, unless my memory has played me one of
+those constructive tricks that people’s memories indulge in, he read me
+the first chapters of an admirable story. The scene was laid in a
+Missouri town, and the characters such as he had known in boyhood; but as
+often as I tried to make him own it, he denied having written any such
+story; it is possible that I dreamed it, but I hope the MS. will yet be
+found. Upon reflection I cannot believe that I dreamed it, and I cannot
+believe that it was an effect of that sort of pseudomnemonics which I
+have mentioned. The characters in the novel are too clearly outlined in
+my recollection, together with some critical reservations of my own
+concerning them. Not only does he seem to have read me those first
+chapters, but to have talked them over with me and outlined the whole
+story.
+
+I cannot say whether or not he believed that his wife would recover; he
+fought the fear of her death to the end; for her life was far more
+largely his than the lives of most men’s wives are theirs. For his own
+life I believe he would never have much cared, if I may trust a saying of
+one who was so absolutely without pose as he was. He said that he never
+saw a dead man whom he did not envy for having had it over and being done
+with it. Life had always amused him, and in the resurgence of its
+interests after his sorrow had ebbed away he was again deeply interested
+in the world and in the human race, which, though damned, abounded in
+subjects of curious inquiry. When the time came for his wife’s removal
+from York Harbor I went with him to Boston, where he wished to look up
+the best means of her conveyance to New York. The inquiry absorbed him:
+the sort of invalid car he could get; how she could be carried to the
+village station; how the car could be detached from the eastern train at
+Boston and carried round to the southern train on the other side of the
+city, and then how it could be attached to the Hudson River train at New
+York and left at Riverdale. There was no particular of the business
+which he did not scrutinize and master, not only with his poignant
+concern for her welfare, but with his strong curiosity as to how these
+unusual things were done with the usual means. With the inertness that
+grows upon an aging man he had been used to delegating more and more
+things, but of that thing I perceived that he would not delegate the
+least detail.
+
+He had meant never to go abroad again, but when it came time to go he did
+not look forward to returning; he expected to live in Florence always
+after that; they were used to the life and they had been happy there some
+years earlier before he went with his wife for the cure of Nauheim. But
+when he came home again it was for good and all. It was natural that he
+should wish to live in New York, where they had already had a pleasant
+year in Tenth Street. I used to see him there in an upper room, looking
+south over a quiet open space of back yards where we fought our battles
+in behalf of the Filipinos and the Boers, and he carried on his campaign
+against the missionaries in China. He had not yet formed his habit of
+lying for whole days in bed and reading and writing there, yet he was a
+good deal in bed, from weakness, I suppose, and for the mere comfort of
+it.
+
+My perspectives are not very clear, and in the foreshortening of events
+which always takes place in our review of the past I may not always time
+things aright. But I believe it was not until he had taken his house at
+21 Fifth Avenue that he began to talk to me of writing his autobiography.
+He meant that it should be a perfectly veracious record of his life and
+period; for the first time in literature there should be a true history
+of a man and a true presentation of the men the man had known. As we
+talked it over the scheme enlarged itself in our riotous fancy. We said
+it should be not only a book, it should be a library, not only a library,
+but a literature. It should make good the world’s loss through Omar’s
+barbarity at Alexandria; there was no image so grotesque, so extravagant
+that we did not play with it; and the work so far as he carried it was
+really done on a colossal scale. But one day he said that as to veracity
+it was a failure; he had begun to lie, and that if no man ever yet told
+the truth about himself it was because no man ever could. How far he had
+carried his autobiography I cannot say; he dictated the matter several
+hours each day; and the public has already seen long passages from it,
+and can judge, probably, of the make and matter of the whole from these.
+It is immensely inclusive, and it observes no order or sequence. Whether
+now, after his death, it will be published soon or late I have no means
+of knowing. Once or twice he said in a vague way that it was not to be
+published for twenty years, so that the discomfort of publicity might be
+minimized for all the survivors. Suddenly he told me he was not working
+at it; but I did not understand whether he had finished it or merely
+dropped it; I never asked.
+
+We lived in the same city, but for old men rather far apart, he at Tenth
+Street and I at Seventieth, and with our colds and other disabilities we
+did not see each other often. He expected me to come to him, and I would
+not without some return of my visits, but we never ceased to be friends,
+and good friends, so far as I know. I joked him once as to how I was
+going to come out in his autobiography, and he gave me some sort of
+joking reassurance. There was one incident, however, that brought us
+very frequently and actively together. He came one Sunday afternoon to
+have me call with him on Maxim Gorky, who was staying at a hotel a few
+streets above mine. We were both interested in Gorky, Clemens rather
+more as a revolutionist and I as a realist, though I too wished the
+Russian Tsar ill, and the novelist well in his mission to the Russian
+sympathizers in this republic. But I had lived through the episode of
+Kossuth’s visit to us and his vain endeavor to raise funds for the
+Hungarian cause in 1851, when we were a younger and nobler nation than
+now, with hearts if not hands, opener to the “oppressed of Europe”; the
+oppressed of America, the four or five millions of slaves, we did not
+count. I did not believe that Gorky could get the money for the cause of
+freedom in Russia which he had come to get; as I told a valued friend of
+his and mine, I did not believe he could get twenty-five hundred dollars,
+and I think now I set the figure too high. I had already refused to sign
+the sort of general appeal his friends were making to our principles and
+pockets because I felt it so wholly idle, and when the paper was produced
+in Gorky’s presence and Clemens put his name to it I still refused. The
+next day Gorky was expelled from his hotel with the woman who was not his
+wife, but who, I am bound to say, did not look as if she were not, at
+least to me, who am, however, not versed in those aspects of human
+nature.
+
+I might have escaped unnoted, but Clemens’s familiar head gave us away to
+the reporters waiting at the elevator’s mouth for all who went to see
+Gorky. As it was, a hunt of interviewers ensued for us severally and
+jointly. I could remain aloof in my hotel apartment, returning answer to
+such guardians of the public right to know everything that I had nothing
+to say of Gorky’s domestic affairs; for the public interest had now
+strayed far from the revolution, and centred entirely upon these. But
+with Clemens it was different; he lived in a house with a street door
+kept by a single butler, and he was constantly rung for. I forget how
+long the siege lasted, but long enough for us to have fun with it. That
+was the moment of the great Vesuvian eruption, and we figured ourselves
+in easy reach of a volcano which was every now and then “blowing a cone
+off,” as the telegraphic phrase was. The roof of the great market in
+Naples had just broken in under its load of ashes and cinders, and
+crashed hundreds of people; and we asked each other if we were not sorry
+we had not been there, where the pressure would have been far less
+terrific than it was with us in Fifth Avenue. The forbidden butler came
+up with a message that there were some gentlemen below who wanted to see
+Clemens.
+
+“How many?” he demanded.
+
+“Five,” the butler faltered.
+
+“Reporters?”
+
+The butler feigned uncertainty.
+
+“What would you do?” he asked me.
+
+“I wouldn’t see them,” I said, and then Clemens went directly down to
+them. How or by what means he appeased their voracity I cannot say, but
+I fancy it was by the confession of the exact truth, which was harmless
+enough. They went away joyfully, and he came back in radiant
+satisfaction with having seen them. Of course he was right and I wrong,
+and he was right as to the point at issue between Gorky and those who had
+helplessly treated him with such cruel ignominy. In America it is not
+the convention for men to live openly in hotels with women who are not
+their wives. Gorky had violated this convention and he had to pay the
+penalty; and concerning the destruction of his efficiency as an emissary
+of the revolution, his blunder was worse than a crime.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV.
+
+To the period of Clemens’s residence in Fifth Avenue belongs his
+efflorescence in white serge. He was always rather aggressively
+indifferent about dress, and at a very early date in our acquaintance
+Aldrich and I attempted his reform by clubbing to buy him a cravat. But
+he would not put away his stiff little black bow, and until he imagined
+the suit of white serge, he wore always a suit of black serge, truly
+deplorable in the cut of the sagging frock. After his measure had once
+been taken he refused to make his clothes the occasion of personal
+interviews with his tailor; he sent the stuff by the kind elderly woman
+who had been in the service of the family from the earliest days of his
+marriage, and accepted the result without criticism. But the white serge
+was an inspiration which few men would have had the courage to act upon.
+The first time I saw him wear it was at the authors’ hearing before the
+Congressional Committee on Copyright in Washington. Nothing could have
+been more dramatic than the gesture with which he flung off his long
+loose overcoat, and stood forth in white from his feet to the crown of
+his silvery head. It was a magnificent coup, and he dearly loved a coup;
+but the magnificent speech which he made, tearing to shreds the venerable
+farrago of nonsense about nonproperty in ideas which had formed the basis
+of all copyright legislation, made you forget even his spectacularity.
+
+It is well known how proud he was of his Oxford gown, not merely because
+it symbolized the honor in which he was held by the highest literary body
+in the world, but because it was so rich and so beautiful. The red and
+the lavender of the cloth flattered his eyes as the silken black of the
+same degree of Doctor of Letters, given him years before at Yale, could
+not do. His frank, defiant happiness in it, mixed with a due sense of
+burlesque, was something that those lacking his poet-soul could never
+imagine; they accounted it vain, weak; but that would not have mattered
+to him if he had known it. In his London sojourn he had formed the
+top-hat habit, and for a while he lounged splendidly up and down Fifth
+Avenue in that society emblem; but he seemed to tire of it, and to return
+kindly to the soft hat of his Southwestern tradition.
+
+He disliked clubs; I don’t know whether he belonged to any in New York,
+but I never met him in one. As I have told, he himself had formed the
+Human Race Club, but as he never could get it together it hardly counted.
+There was to have been a meeting of it the time of my only visit to
+Stormfield in April of last year; but of three who were to have come I
+alone came. We got on very well without the absentees, after finding
+them in the wrong, as usual, and the visit was like those I used to have
+with him so many years before in Hartford, but there was not the old
+ferment of subjects. Many things had been discussed and put away for
+good, but we had our old fondness for nature and for each other, who were
+so differently parts of it. He showed his absolute content with his
+house, and that was the greater pleasure for me because it was my son who
+designed it. The architect had been so fortunate as to be able to plan
+it where a natural avenue of savins, the closeknit, slender, cypress-like
+cedars of New England, led away from the rear of the villa to the little
+level of a pergola, meant some day to be wreathed and roofed with vines.
+But in the early spring days all the landscape was in the beautiful
+nakedness of the northern winter. It opened in the surpassing loveliness
+of wooded and meadowed uplands, under skies that were the first days
+blue, and the last gray over a rainy and then a snowy floor. We walked
+up and down, up and down, between the villa terrace and the pergola, and
+talked with the melancholy amusement, the sad tolerance of age for the
+sort of men and things that used to excite us or enrage us; now we were
+far past turbulence or anger. Once we took a walk together across the
+yellow pastures to a chasmal creek on his grounds, where the ice still
+knit the clayey banks together like crystal mosses; and the stream far
+down clashed through and over the stones and the shards of ice. Clemens
+pointed out the scenery he had bought to give himself elbow-room, and
+showed me the lot he was going to have me build on. The next day we came
+again with the geologist he had asked up to Stormfield to analyze its
+rocks. Truly he loved the place, though he had been so weary of change
+and so indifferent to it that he never saw it till he came to live in it.
+He left it all to the architect whom he had known from a child in the
+intimacy which bound our families together, though we bodily lived far
+enough apart. I loved his little ones and he was sweet to mine and was
+their delighted-in and wondered-at friend. Once and once again, and yet
+again and again, the black shadow that shall never be lifted where it
+falls, fell in his house and in mine, during the forty years and more
+that we were friends, and endeared us the more to each other.
+
+
+
+
+XXV.
+
+My visit at Stormfield came to an end with tender relucting on his part
+and on mine. Every morning before I dressed I heard him sounding my name
+through the house for the fun of it and I know for the fondness; and if I
+looked out of my door, there he was in his long nightgown swaying up and
+down the corridor, and wagging his great white head like a boy that
+leaves his bed and comes out in the hope of frolic with some one. The
+last morning a soft sugarsnow had fallen and was falling, and I drove
+through it down to the station in the carriage which had been given him
+by his wife’s father when they were first married, and been kept all
+those intervening years in honorable retirement for this final use. Its
+springs had not grown yielding with time; it had rather the stiffness and
+severity of age; but for him it must have swung low like the sweet
+chariot of the negro “spiritual” which I heard him sing with such fervor,
+when those wonderful hymns of the slaves began to make their way
+northward. ‘Go Down, Daniel’, was one in which I can hear his quavering
+tenor now. He was a lover of the things he liked, and full of a passion
+for them which satisfied itself in reading them matchlessly aloud. No
+one could read ‘Uncle Remus’ like him; his voice echoed the voices of the
+negro nurses who told his childhood the wonderful tales. I remember
+especially his rapture with Mr. Cable’s ‘Old Creole Days,’ and the
+thrilling force with which he gave the forbidding of the leper’s brother
+when the city’s survey ran the course of an avenue through the cottage
+where the leper lived in hiding: “Strit must not pass!”
+
+Out of a nature rich and fertile beyond any I have known, the material
+given him by the Mystery that makes a man and then leaves him to make
+himself over, he wrought a character of high nobility upon a foundation
+of clear and solid truth. At the last day he will not have to confess
+anything, for all his life was the free knowledge of any one who would
+ask him of it. The Searcher of hearts will not bring him to shame at
+that day, for he did not try to hide any of the things for which he was
+often so bitterly sorry. He knew where the Responsibility lay, and he
+took a man’s share of it bravely; but not the less fearlessly he left the
+rest of the answer to the God who had imagined men.
+
+It is in vain that I try to give a notion of the intensity with which he
+pierced to the heart of life, and the breadth of vision with which he
+compassed the whole world, and tried for the reason of things, and then
+left trying. We had other meetings, insignificantly sad and brief; but
+the last time I saw him alive was made memorable to me by the kind, clear
+judicial sense with which he explained and justified the labor-unions as
+the sole present help of the weak against the strong.
+
+Next I saw him dead, lying in his coffin amid those flowers with which we
+garland our despair in that pitiless hour. After the voice of his old
+friend Twichell had been lifted in the prayer which it wailed through in
+broken-hearted supplication, I looked a moment at the face I knew so
+well; and it was patient with the patience I had so often seen in it:
+something of puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be
+from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the
+laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him. Emerson,
+Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes--I knew them all and all the rest of our
+sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and
+like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln
+of our literature.
+
+ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
+
+
+   Absolute devotion to the day of her death,
+   Absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful
+   Addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness
+   Amiable perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence
+   Amuse him, even when they wronged him
+   Amusingly realized the situation to their friends
+   But now I remember that he gets twenty dollars a month
+   Christianity had done nothing to improve morals and conditions
+   Church: “Oh yes, I go. It ‘most kills me, but I go,”
+    Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature
+   Despair broke in laughter
+   Despised the avoidance of repetitions out of fear of tautology
+   Everlasting rock of human credulity and folly
+   Flowers with which we garland our despair in that pitiless hour
+   He did not care much for fiction
+   He did not paw you with his hands to show his affection
+   He was a youth to the end of his days
+   Heroic lies
+   His coming almost killed her, but it was worth it
+   Honest men are few when it comes to themselves
+   It was mighty pretty, as Pepys would say
+   Jane Austen
+   Left him to do what the cat might
+   Lie, of course, and did to save others from grief or harm
+   Liked to find out good things and great things for himself
+   Livy Clemens: nthe loveliest person I have ever seen
+   Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know
+   Mind and soul were with those who do the hard work of the world
+   Mock modesty of print forbids my repeating here
+   Most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew
+   Most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men
+   Nearly nothing as chaos could be
+   Never saw a dead man whom he did not envy
+   Never saw a man more regardful of negroes
+   No man ever yet told the truth about himself
+   No man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery
+   Not possible for Clemens to write like anybody else
+   Ought not to call coarse without calling one’s self prudish
+   Polite learning hesitated his praise
+   Praised it enough to satisfy the author
+   Reparation due from every white to every black man
+   Shackles of belief worn so long
+   Some superstition, usually of a hygienic sort
+   Stupidly truthful
+   The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it
+   Truthful
+   Used to ingratitude from those he helped
+   Vacuous vulgarity of its texts
+   Walter-Scotticized, pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal
+   We have never ended before, and we do not see how we can end
+   Well, if you are to be lost, I want to be lost with you
+   What he had done he owned to, good, bad, or indifferent
+   Whether every human motive was not selfish
+   Wonder why we hate the past so--“It’s so damned humiliating!”
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS
+
+   Absolute devotion to the day of her death,
+   Absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful
+   Abstract, the air-drawn, afflicted me like physical discomforts
+   Act officiously, not officially
+   Addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness
+   Always sumptuously providing out of his destitution
+   Amiable perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence
+   Amuse him, even when they wronged him
+   Amusingly realized the situation to their friends
+   Anglo-American genius for ugliness
+   Appeal, which he had come to recognize as invasive
+   Appeared to have no grudge left
+   Backed their credulity with their credit
+   Bayard Taylor: incomparable translation of Faust
+   Became gratefully strange
+   Best talkers are willing that you should talk if you like
+   But now I remember that he gets twenty dollars a month”
+    Candle burning on the table for the cigars
+   Celia Thaxter
+   Charles Reade
+   Charles F. Browne
+   Christianity had done nothing to improve morals and conditions
+   Church: “Oh yes, I go It ‘most kills me, but I go,”
+    Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature
+   Cold-slaw
+   Collective opacity
+   Confidence I have nearly always felt when wrong
+   Could make us feel that our faults were other people’s
+   Could easily believe now that it was some one else who saw it
+   Could only by chance be caught in earnest about anything
+   Couldn’t fire your revolver without bringing down a two volumer
+   Dawn upon him through a cloud of other half remembered faces
+   Death of the joy that ought to come from work
+   Death’s vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life
+   Despair broke in laughter
+   Despised the avoidance of repetitions out of fear of tautology
+   Did not feel the effect I would so willingly have experienced
+   Dinner was at the old-fashioned Boston hour of two
+   Discomfort which mistaken or blundering praise
+   Dollars were of so much farther flight than now
+   Edmund Quincy
+   Edward Everett Hale
+   Either to deny the substance of things unseen, or to affirm it
+   Emerson
+   Enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself
+   Espoused the theory of Bacon’s authorship of Shakespeare
+   Ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense
+   Everlasting rock of human credulity and folly
+   Expectation of those who will come no more
+   Express the appreciation of another’s fit word
+   Feigned the gratitude which I could see that he expected
+   Fell either below our pride or rose above our purse
+   Felt that this was my misfortune more than my fault
+   Few men last over from one reform to another
+   First dinner served in courses that I had sat down to
+   Flowers with which we garland our despair in that pitiless hour
+   Forbearance of a wise man content to bide his time
+   Forebore to speak needlessly to him, or to shake his hand
+   Found life was not all poetry
+   Francis Parkman
+   Gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years
+   Generous lover of all that was excellent in literature
+   George William Curtis
+   Giggle which Charles Lamb found the best thing in life
+   Give him your best wine
+   Got out of it all the fun there was in it
+   Greeting of great impersonal cordiality
+   Grieving that there could be such ire in heavenly minds
+   Hard of hearing on one side. But it isn’t deafness
+   Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Autocrat clashed upon homeopathy
+   Hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love
+   He was not bored because he would not be
+   He did not care much for fiction
+   He was not constructive; he was essentially observant
+   He had no time to make money
+   He was a youth to the end of his days
+   He did not paw you with his hands to show his affection
+   Heine
+   Heroic lies
+   His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event
+   His readers trusted and loved him
+   His enemies suffered from it almost as much as his friends
+   His coming almost killed her, but it was worth it
+   His plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it
+   Hollowness, the hopelessness, the unworthiness of life
+   Honest men are few when it comes to themselves
+   I find this young man worthy
+   I believe neither in heroes nor in saints
+   I did not know, and I hated to ask
+   If he was half as bad, he would have been too bad to be
+   If he was not there to your touch, it was no fault of his
+   In the South there was nothing but a mistaken social ideal
+   Incredible in their insipidity
+   Industrial slavery
+   Insatiable English fancy for the wild America no longer there
+   Intellectual poseurs
+   It is well to hold one’s country to her promises
+   It was mighty pretty, as Pepys would say
+   Jane Austen
+   Julia Ward Howe
+   Left him to do what the cat might
+   Lie, of course, and did to save others from grief or harm
+   Liked being with you, not for what he got, but for what he gave
+   Liked to find out good things and great things for himself
+   Lincoln
+   Literary dislikes or contempts
+   Livy Clemens: nthe loveliest person I have ever seen
+   Long breath was not his; he could not write a novel
+   Longfellow
+   Looked as if Destiny had sat upon it
+   Love of freedom and the hope of justice
+   Love and gratitude are only semi-articulate at the best
+   Lowell
+   Made all men trust him when they doubted his opinions
+   Man who may any moment be out of work is industrially a slave
+   Man who had so much of the boy in him
+   Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know
+   Mellow cordial of a voice that was like no other
+   Memory will not be ruled
+   Men who took themselves so seriously as that need
+   Men’s lives ended where they began, in the keeping of women
+   Met with kindness, if not honor
+   Might so far forget myself as to be a novelist
+   Mind and soul were with those who do the hard work of the world
+   Mock modesty of print forbids my repeating here
+   Most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew
+   Most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men
+   Motley
+   Napoleonic height which spiritually overtops the Alps
+   Nearly nothing as chaos could be
+   Never saw a man more regardful of negroes
+   Never saw a dead man whom he did not envy
+   Never paid in anything but hopes of paying
+   No man ever yet told the truth about himself
+   No time to make money
+   No man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery
+   Not quite himself till he had made you aware of his quality
+   Not a man who cared to transcend; he liked bounds
+   Not much patience with the unmanly craving for sympathy
+   Not much of a talker, and almost nothing of a story-teller
+   Not possible for Clemens to write like anybody else
+   Now death has come to join its vague conjectures
+   NYC, a city where money counts for more and goes for less
+   Odious hilarity, without meaning and without remission
+   Offers mortifyingly mean, and others insultingly vague
+   Old man’s tendency to revert to the past
+   Old man’s disposition to speak of his infirmities
+   One could be openly poor in Cambridge without open shame
+   Only one concerned who was quite unconcerned
+   Ought not to call coarse without calling one’s self prudish
+   Pathos of revolt from the colorless rigidities
+   Person who wished to talk when he could listen
+   Plain-speaking or Rude Speaking
+   Pointed the moral in all they did
+   Polite learning hesitated his praise
+   Praised it enough to satisfy the author
+   Praised extravagantly, and in the wrong place
+   Put your finger on the present moment and enjoy it
+   Quarrel was with error, and not with the persons who were in it
+   Quebec was a bit of the seventeenth century
+   Reformers, who are so often tedious and ridiculous
+   Remember the dinner-bell
+   Reparation due from every white to every black man
+   Secret of the man who is universally interesting
+   Seen through the wrong end of the telescope
+   Shackles of belief worn so long
+   Shy of his fellow-men, as the scholar seems always to be
+   So refined, after the gigantic coarseness of California
+   Some superstition, usually of a hygienic sort
+   Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the sermon
+   Sought the things that he could agree with you upon
+   Spare his years the fatigue of recalling your identity
+   Standards were their own, and they were satisfied with them
+   Stoddard
+   Study in a corner by the porch
+   Stupidly truthful
+   The world is well lost whenever the world is wrong
+   The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it
+   Things common to all, however peculiar in each
+   Thoreau
+   Those who have sorrowed deepest will understand this best
+   Times when a man’s city was a man’s country
+   Tired themselves out in trying to catch up with him
+   True to an ideal of life rather than to life itself
+   Truthful
+   Turn of the talk toward the mystical
+   Used to ingratitude from those he helped
+   Vacuous vulgarity of its texts
+   Visited one of the great mills
+   Walter-Scotticized, pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal
+   Wasted face, and his gay eyes had the death-look
+   We have never ended before, and we do not see how we can end
+   Welcome me, and make the least of my shyness and strangeness
+   Well, if you are to be lost, I want to be lost with you
+   What he had done he owned to, good, bad, or indifferent
+   When to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast
+   Whether every human motive was not selfish
+   Whitman’s public use of his privately written praise
+   Wit that tries its teeth upon everything
+   Women’s rights
+   Wonder why we hate the past so--“It’s so damned humiliating!”
+    Wonderful to me how it should remain so unintelligible
+   Work gives the impression of an uncommon continuity
+   Wrote them first and last in the spirit of Dickens
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Literary Friends And Acquaintances, by
+William Dean Howells
+
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diff --git a/4201-0.zip b/4201-0.zip
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+
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+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      Literary Friends and Acquaintances, by William Dean Howells
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd7; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    pre     { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Literary Friends And Acquaintances, 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: Literary Friends And Acquaintances
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: October 28, 2006 [EBook #4201]
+Last Updated: August 21, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      by William Dean Howells
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <big><b>CONTENTS</b></big>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> <big><b>LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES</b></big>
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> BIBLIOGRAPHICAL </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> <big><b>MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND</b></big>
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> I. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> II. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> III </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> IV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> V. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> VI. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> VII. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> VIII. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0012"> IX. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0013"> X. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0014"> XI. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0015"> XII. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0016"> XIII. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0017"> XIV. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0018"> XV. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0019"> XVI. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0020"> XVII. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0021"> <big><b>FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK</b></big>
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0022"> I. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0023"> II. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0024"> III. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0025"> IV. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0026"> V. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0027"> VI. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0028"> <big><b>ROUNDABOUT TO BOSTON</b></big> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0029"> I. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0030"> II. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0031"> III. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0032"> IV. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0033"> V. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0034"> VI. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0035"> <big><b>LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT</b></big>
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0036"> I. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0037"> II. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0038"> III. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0039"> IV. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0040"> V. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0041"> VI. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0042"> VII. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0043"> VIII. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0044"> IX. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0045"> X. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0046"> <big><b>OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES</b></big> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0047"> I. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0048"> II. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0049"> III. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0050"> IV. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0051"> V. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0052"> VI. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0053"> VII. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0054"> VIII. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0055"> IX. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0056"> <big><b>THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW</b></big>
+        </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0057"> I. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0058"> II. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0059"> III. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0060"> IV. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0061"> V. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0062"> VI. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0063"> VII. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0064"> VIII. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0065"> <big><b>STUDIES OF LOWELL</b></big> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0066"> I. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0067"> II. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0068"> III. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0069"> IV. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0070"> V. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0071"> VI. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0072"> VII. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0073"> VIII. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#linknine"> IX. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0074"> X. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0075"> XI. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0076"> XII. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0077"> <big><b>CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS</b></big> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0078"> I. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0079"> II. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0080"> III. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0081"> IV. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0082"> V. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0083"> VI. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0084"> VII. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0085"> VIII. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0086"> IX. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0087"> X. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0088"> XI. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0089"> <big><b>A BELATED GUEST</b></big> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0090"> I. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0091"> II. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0092"> III. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0093"> IV. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0094"> <big><b>MY MARK TWAIN</b></big> </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0095"> I. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0096"> II. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0097"> III. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0098"> IV. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0099"> V. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0100"> VI. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0101"> VII. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0102"> VIII. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0103"> IX. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0104"> X. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0105"> XI. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0106"> XII. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0107"> XIII. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0108"> XIV. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0109"> XV. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0110"> XVI. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0111"> XVII. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0112"> XIX. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0113"> XX. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0114"> XXI. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0115"> XXII. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0116"> XXIII. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0117"> XXIV. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0118"> XXV. </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0119"> <big><b>ETEXT EDITOR&rsquo;S BOOKMARKS</b></big>
+        </a>
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Long before I began the papers which make up this volume, I had meant to
+      write of literary history in New England as I had known it in the lives of
+      its great exemplars during the twenty-five years I lived near them. In
+      fact, I had meant to do this from the time I came among them; but I let
+      the days in which I almost constantly saw them go by without record save
+      such as I carried in a memory retentive, indeed, beyond the common, but
+      not so full as I could have wished when I began to invoke it for my work.
+      Still, upon insistent appeal, it responded in sufficient abundance; and,
+      though I now wish I could have remembered more instances, I think my
+      impressions were accurate enough. I am sure of having tried honestly to
+      impart them in the ten years or more when I was desultorily endeavoring to
+      share them with the reader.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The papers were written pretty much in the order they have here, beginning
+      with My First Visit to New England, which dates from the earliest
+      eighteen-nineties, if I may trust my recollection of reading it from the
+      manuscript to the editor of Harper&rsquo;s Magazine, where we lay under the
+      willows of Magnolia one pleasant summer morning in the first years of that
+      decade. It was printed no great while after in that periodical; but I was
+      so long in finishing the study of Lowell that it had been anticipated in
+      Harper&rsquo;s by other reminiscences of him, and it was therefore first printed
+      in Scribner&rsquo;s Magazine. It was the paper with which I took the most pains,
+      and when it was completed I still felt it so incomplete that I referred it
+      to his closest and my best friend, the late Charles Eliot Norton, for his
+      criticism. He thought it wanting in unity; it was a group of studies
+      instead of one study, he said; I must do something to draw the different
+      sketches together in a single effect of portraiture; and this I did my
+      best to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the latest written of the three articles which give the volume
+      substance, and it represents mare finally and fully than the others my
+      sense of the literary importance of the men whose like we shall not look
+      upon again. Longfellow was easily the greatest poet of the three, Holmes
+      often the most brilliant and felicitous, but Lowell, in spite of his
+      forays in politics, was the finest scholar and the most profoundly
+      literary, as he was above the others most deeply and thoroughly New
+      England in quality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While I was doing these sketches, sometimes slighter and sometimes less
+      slight, of all those poets and essayists and novelists I had known in
+      Cambridge and Boston and Concord and New York, I was doing many other
+      things: half a dozen novels, as many more novelettes and shorter stories,
+      with essays and criticisms and verses; so that in January, 1900, I had not
+      yet done the paper on Lowell, which, with another, was to complete my
+      reminiscences of American literary life as I had witnessed it. When they
+      were all done at last they were republished in a volume which found
+      instant favor beyond my deserts if not its own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a good deal of trouble with the name, but Literary Friends and
+      Acquaintance was an endeavor for modest accuracy with which I remained
+      satisfied until I thought, long too late, of Literary Friends and
+      Neighbors. Then I perceived that this would have been still more accurate
+      and quite as modest, and I gladly give any reader leave to call the book
+      by that name who likes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since the collection was first made, I have written little else quite of
+      the kind, except the paper on Bret Harte, which was first printed shortly
+      after his death; and the study of Mark Twain, which I had been preparing
+      to make for forty years and more, and wrote in two weeks of the spring of
+      1910. Others of my time and place have now passed whither there is neither
+      time nor place, and there are moments when I feel that I must try to call
+      them back and pay them such honor as my sense of their worth may give; but
+      the impulse has as yet failed to effect itself, and I do not know how long
+      I shall spare myself the supreme pleasure-pain, the &ldquo;hochst angenehmer
+      Schmerz,&rdquo; of seeking to live here with those who live here no more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      W. D. H. <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      If there was any one in the world who had his being more wholly in
+      literature than I had in 1860, I am sure I should not have known where to
+      find him, and I doubt if he could have been found nearer the centres of
+      literary activity than I then was, or among those more purely devoted to
+      literature than myself. I had been for three years a writer of news
+      paragraphs, book notices, and political leaders on a daily paper in an
+      inland city, and I do not know that my life differed outwardly from that
+      of any other young journalist, who had begun as I had in a country
+      printing-office, and might be supposed to be looking forward to
+      advancement in his profession or in public affairs. But inwardly it was
+      altogether different with me. Inwardly I was a poet, with no wish to be
+      anything else, unless in a moment of careless affluence I might so far
+      forget myself as to be a novelist. I was, with my friend J. J. Piatt, the
+      half-author of a little volume of very unknown verse, and Mr. Lowell had
+      lately accepted and had begun to print in the Atlantic Monthly five or six
+      poems of mine. Besides this I had written poems, and sketches, and
+      criticisms for the Saturday Press of New York, a long-forgotten but once
+      very lively expression of literary intention in an extinct bohemia of that
+      city; and I was always writing poems, and sketches, and criticisms in our
+      own paper. These, as well as my feats in the renowned periodicals of the
+      East, met with kindness, if not honor, in my own city which ought to have
+      given me grave doubts whether I was any real prophet. But it only
+      intensified my literary ambition, already so strong that my veins might
+      well have run ink rather than blood, and gave me a higher opinion of my
+      fellow-citizens, if such a thing could be. They were indeed very charming
+      people, and such of them as I mostly saw were readers and lovers of books.
+      Society in Columbus at that day had a pleasant refinement which I think I
+      do not exaggerate in the fond retrospect. It had the finality which it
+      seems to have had nowhere since the war; it had certain fixed ideals,
+      which were none the less graceful and becoming because they were the
+      simple old American ideals, now vanished, or fast vanishing, before the
+      knowledge of good and evil as they have it in Europe, and as it has
+      imparted itself to American travel and sojourn. There was a mixture of
+      many strains in the capital of Ohio, as there was throughout the State.
+      Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, New York, and New England all joined to
+      characterize the manners and customs. I suppose it was the South which
+      gave the social tone; the intellectual taste among the elders was the
+      Southern taste for the classic and the standard in literature; but we who
+      were younger preferred the modern authors: we read Thackeray, and George
+      Eliot, and Hawthorne, and Charles Reade, and De Quincey, and Tennyson, and
+      Browning, and Emerson, and Longfellow, and I&mdash;I read Heine, and
+      evermore Heine, when there was not some new thing from the others. Now and
+      then an immediate French book penetrated to us: we read Michelet and
+      About, I remember. We looked to England and the East largely for our
+      literary opinions; we accepted the Saturday Review as law if we could not
+      quite receive it as gospel. One of us took the Cornhill Magazine, because
+      Thackeray was the editor; the Atlantic Monthly counted many readers among
+      us; and a visiting young lady from New England, who screamed at sight of
+      the periodical in one of our houses, &ldquo;Why, have you got the Atlantic
+      Monthly out here?&rdquo; could be answered, with cold superiority, &ldquo;There are
+      several contributors to the Atlantic in Columbus.&rdquo; There were in fact two:
+      my room-mate, who wrote Browning for it, while I wrote Heine and
+      Longfellow. But I suppose two are as rightfully several as twenty are.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      That was the heyday of lecturing, and now and then a literary light from
+      the East swam into our skies. I heard and saw Emerson, and I once met
+      Bayard Taylor socially, at the hospitable house where he was a guest after
+      his lecture. Heaven knows how I got through the evening. I do not think I
+      opened my mouth to address him a word; it was as much as I could do to sit
+      and look at him, while he tranquilly smoked, and chatted with our host,
+      and quaffed the beer which we had very good in the Nest. All the while I
+      did him homage as the first author by calling whom I had met. I longed to
+      tell him how much I liked his poems, which we used to get by heart in
+      those days, and I longed (how much more I longed!) to have him know that:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;Auch ich war in Arkadien geboren,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      that I had printed poems in the Atlantic Monthly and the Saturday Press,
+      and was the potential author of things destined to eclipse all literature
+      hitherto attempted. But I could not tell him; and there was no one else
+      who thought to tell him. Perhaps it was as well so; I might have perished
+      of his recognition, for my modesty was equal to my merit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In fact I think we were all rather modest young fellows, we who formed the
+      group wont to spend some part of every evening at that house, where there
+      was always music, or whist, or gay talk, or all three. We had our opinions
+      of literary matters, but (perhaps because we had mostly accepted them from
+      England or New England, as I have said) we were not vain of them; and we
+      would by no means have urged them before a living literary man like that.
+      I believe none of us ventured to speak, except the poet, my roommate, who
+      said, He believed so and so was the original of so and so; and was
+      promptly told, He had no right to say such a thing. Naturally, we came
+      away rather critical of our host&rsquo;s guest, whom I afterwards knew as the
+      kindliest heart in the world. But we had not shone in his presence, and
+      that galled us; and we chose to think that he had not shone in ours.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      At that time he was filling a large space in the thoughts of the young
+      people who had any thoughts about literature. He had come to his full
+      repute as an agreeable and intelligent traveller, and he still wore the
+      halo of his early adventures afoot in foreign lands when they were yet
+      really foreign. He had not written his novels of American life, once so
+      welcomed, and now so forgotten; it was very long before he had achieved
+      that incomparable translation of Faust which must always remain the finest
+      and best, and which would keep his name alive with Goethe&rsquo;s, if he had
+      done nothing else worthy of remembrance. But what then most commended him
+      to the regard of us star-eyed youth (now blinking sadly toward our
+      seventies) was the poetry which he printed in the magazines from time to
+      time: in the first Putnam&rsquo;s (where there was a dashing picture of him in
+      an Arab burnoose and, a turban), and in Harper&rsquo;s, and in the Atlantic. It
+      was often very lovely poetry, I thought, and I still think so; and it was
+      rightfully his, though it paid the inevitable allegiance to the manner of
+      the great masters of the day. It was graced for us by the pathetic romance
+      of his early love, which some of its sweetest and saddest numbers
+      confessed, for the young girl he married almost in her death hour; and we
+      who were hoping to have our hearts broken, or already had them so, would
+      have been glad of something more of the obvious poet in the popular
+      lecturer we had seen refreshing himself after his hour on the platform.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He remained for nearly a year the only author I had seen, and I met him
+      once again before I saw any other. Our second meeting was far from
+      Columbus, as far as remote Quebec, when I was on my way to New England by
+      way of Niagara and the Canadian rivers and cities. I stopped in Toronto,
+      and realized myself abroad without any signal adventures; but at Montreal
+      something very pretty happened to me. I came into the hotel office, the
+      evening of a first day&rsquo;s lonely sight-seeing, and vainly explored the
+      register for the name of some acquaintance; as I turned from it two
+      smartly dressed young fellows embraced it, and I heard one of them say, to
+      my great amaze and happiness, &ldquo;Hello, here&rsquo;s Howells!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; I broke out upon him, &ldquo;I was just looking for some one I knew. I
+      hope you are some one who knows me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only through your contributions to the Saturday Press,&rdquo; said the young
+      fellow, and with these golden words, the precious first personal
+      recognition of my authorship I had ever received from a stranger, and the
+      rich reward of all my literary endeavor, he introduced himself and his
+      friend. I do not know what became of this friend, or where or how he
+      eliminated himself; but we two others were inseparable from that moment.
+      He was a young lawyer from New York, and when I came back from Italy, four
+      or five years later, I used to see his sign in Wall Street, with a
+      never-fulfilled intention of going in to see him. In whatever world he
+      happens now to be, I should like to send him my greetings, and confess to
+      him that my art has never since brought me so sweet a recompense, and
+      nothing a thousandth part so much like Fame, as that outcry of his over
+      the hotel register in Montreal. We were comrades for four or five rich
+      days, and shared our pleasures and expenses in viewing the monuments of
+      those ancient Canadian capitals, which I think we valued at all their
+      picturesque worth. We made jokes to mask our emotions; we giggled and made
+      giggle, in the right way; we fell in and out of love with all the pretty
+      faces and dresses we saw; and we talked evermore about literature and
+      literary people. He had more acquaintance with the one, and more passion
+      for the other, but he could tell me of Pfaff&rsquo;s lager-beer cellar on
+      Broadway, where the Saturday Press fellows and the other Bohemians met;
+      and this, for the time, was enough: I resolved to visit it as soon as I
+      reached New York, in spite of the tobacco and beer (which I was given to
+      understand were de rigueur), though they both, so far as I had known them,
+      were apt to make me sick.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was very desolate after I parted from this good fellow, who returned to
+      Montreal on his way to New York, while I remained in Quebec to continue
+      later on mine to New England. When I came in from seeing him off in a
+      calash for the boat, I discovered Bayard Taylor in the reading-room, where
+      he sat sunken in what seemed a somewhat weary muse. He did not know me, or
+      even notice me, though I made several errands in and out of the
+      reading-room in the vain hope that he might do so: doubly vain, for I am
+      aware now that I was still flown with the pride of that pretty experience
+      in Montreal, and trusted in a repetition of something like it. At last, as
+      no chance volunteered to help me, I mustered courage to go up to him and
+      name myself, and say I had once had the pleasure of meeting him at Doctor&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;-&rsquo;s
+      in Columbus. The poet gave no sign of consciousness at the sound of a name
+      which I had fondly begun to think might not be so all unknown. He looked
+      up with an unkindling eye, and asked, Ah, how was the Doctor? and when I
+      had reported favorably of the Doctor, our conversation ended.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was probably as tired as he looked, and he must have classed me with
+      that multitude all over the country who had shared the pleasure I
+      professed in meeting him before; it was surely my fault that I did not
+      speak my name loud enough to be recognized, if I spoke it at all; but the
+      courage I had mustered did not quite suffice for that. In after years he
+      assured me, first by letter and then by word, of his grief for an incident
+      which I can only recall now as the untoward beginning of a cordial
+      friendship. It was often my privilege, in those days, as reviewer and
+      editor, to testify my sense of the beautiful things he did in so many
+      kinds of literature, but I never liked any of them better than I liked
+      him. He had a fervent devotion to his art, and he was always going to do
+      the greatest things in it, with an expectation of effect that never failed
+      him. The things he actually did were none of them mean, or wanting in
+      quality, and some of them are of a lasting charm that any one may feel who
+      will turn to his poems; but no doubt many of them fell short of his hopes
+      of them with the reader. It was fine to meet him when he was full of a new
+      scheme; he talked of it with a single-hearted joy, and tried to make you
+      see it of the same colors and proportions it wore to his eyes. He spared
+      no toil to make it the perfect thing he dreamed it, and he was not
+      discouraged by any disappointment he suffered with the critic or the
+      public.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a tireless worker, and at last his health failed under his labors
+      at the newspaper desk, beneath the midnight gas, when he should long have
+      rested from such labors. I believe he was obliged to do them through one
+      of those business fortuities which deform and embitter all our lives; but
+      he was not the man to spare himself in any case. He was always attempting
+      new things, and he never ceased endeavoring to make his scholarship
+      reparation for the want of earlier opportunity and training. I remember
+      that I met him once in a Cambridge street with a book in his hand which he
+      let me take in mine. It was a Greek author, and he said he was just
+      beginning to read the language at fifty: a patriarchal age to me of the
+      early thirties!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I suppose I intimated the surprise I felt at his taking it up so late in
+      the day, for he said, with charming seriousness, &ldquo;Oh, but you know, I
+      expect to use it in the other world.&rdquo; Yea, that made it worth while, I
+      consented; but was he sure of the other world? &ldquo;As sure as I am of this,&rdquo;
+       he said; and I have always kept the impression of the young faith which
+      spoke in his voice and was more than his words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw him last in the hour of those tremendous adieux which were paid him
+      in New York before he sailed to be minister in Germany. It was one of the
+      most graceful things done by President Hayes, who, most of all our
+      Presidents after Lincoln, honored himself in honoring literature by his
+      appointments, to give that place to Bayard Taylor. There was no one more
+      fit for it, and it was peculiarly fit that he should be so distinguished
+      to a people who knew and valued his scholarship and the service he had
+      done German letters. He was as happy in it, apparently, as a man could be
+      in anything here below, and he enjoyed to the last drop the many cups of
+      kindness pressed to his lips in parting; though I believe these farewells,
+      at a time when he was already fagged with work and excitement, were
+      notably harmful to him, and helped to hasten his end. Some of us who were
+      near of friendship went down to see him off when he sailed, as the dismal
+      and futile wont of friends is; and I recall the kind, great fellow
+      standing in the cabin, amid those sad flowers that heaped the tables,
+      saying good-by to one after another, and smiling fondly, smiling wearily,
+      upon all. There was champagne, of course, and an odious hilarity, without
+      meaning and without remission, till the warning bell chased us ashore, and
+      our brave poet escaped with what was left of his life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I have followed him far from the moment of our first meeting; but even on
+      my way to venerate those New England luminaries, which chiefly drew my
+      eyes, I could not pay a less devoir to an author who, if Curtis was not,
+      was chief of the New York group of authors in that day. I distinguished
+      between the New-Englanders and the New-Yorkers, and I suppose there is no
+      question but our literary centre was then in Boston, wherever it is, or is
+      not, at present. But I thought Taylor then, and I think him now, one of
+      the first in our whole American province of the republic of letters, in a
+      day when it was in a recognizably flourishing state, whether we regard
+      quantity or quality in the names that gave it lustre. Lowell was then in
+      perfect command of those varied forces which will long, if not lastingly,
+      keep him in memory as first among our literary men, and master in more
+      kinds than any other American. Longfellow was in the fulness of his
+      world-wide fame, and in the ripeness of the beautiful genius which was not
+      to know decay while life endured. Emerson had emerged from the popular
+      darkness which had so long held him a hopeless mystic, and was shining a
+      lambent star of poesy and prophecy at the zenith. Hawthorne, the exquisite
+      artist, the unrivalled dreamer, whom we still always liken this one and
+      that one to, whenever this one or that one promises greatly to please us,
+      and still leave without a rival, without a companion, had lately returned
+      from his long sojourn abroad, and had given us the last of the
+      incomparable romances which the world was to have perfect from his hand.
+      Doctor Holmes had surpassed all expectations in those who most admired his
+      brilliant humor and charming poetry by the invention of a new attitude if
+      not a new sort in literature. The turn that civic affairs had taken was
+      favorable to the widest recognition of Whittier&rsquo;s splendid lyrical gift;
+      and that heart of fire, doubly snow-bound by Quaker tradition and Puritan
+      environment; was penetrating every generous breast with its flamy
+      impulses, and fusing all wills in its noble purpose. Mrs. Stowe, who far
+      outfamed the rest as the author of the most renowned novel ever written,
+      was proving it no accident or miracle by the fiction she was still
+      writing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This great New England group might be enlarged perhaps without loss of
+      quality by the inclusion of Thoreau, who came somewhat before his time,
+      and whose drastic criticism of our expediential and mainly futile
+      civilization would find more intelligent acceptance now than it did then,
+      when all resentment of its defects was specialized in enmity to Southern
+      slavery. Doctor Edward Everett Hale belonged in this group too, by virtue
+      of that humor, the most inventive and the most fantastic, the sanest, the
+      sweetest, the truest, which had begun to find expression in the Atlantic
+      Monthly; and there a wonderful young girl had written a series of vivid
+      sketches and taken the heart of youth everywhere with amaze and joy, so
+      that I thought it would be no less an event to meet Harriet Prescott than
+      to meet any of those I have named.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I expected somehow to meet them all, and I imagined them all easily
+      accessible in the office of the Atlantic Monthly, which had lately
+      adventured in the fine air of high literature where so many other
+      periodicals had gasped and died before it. The best of these, hitherto,
+      and better even than the Atlantic for some reasons, the lamented Putnam&rsquo;s
+      Magazine, had perished of inanition at New York, and the claim of the
+      commercial capital to the literary primacy had passed with that brilliant
+      venture. New York had nothing distinctive to show for American literature
+      but the decrepit and doting Knickerbocker Magazine. Harper&rsquo;s New Monthly,
+      though Curtis had already come to it from the wreck of Putnam&rsquo;s, and it
+      had long ceased to be eclectic in material, and had begun to stand for
+      native work in the allied arts which it has since so magnificently
+      advanced, was not distinctively literary, and the Weekly had just begun to
+      make itself known. The Century, Scribner&rsquo;s, the Cosmopolitan, McClure&rsquo;s,
+      and I know not what others, were still unimagined by five, and ten, and
+      twenty years, and the Galaxy was to flash and fade before any of them
+      should kindle its more effectual fires. The Nation, which was destined to
+      chastise rather than nurture our young literature, had still six years of
+      dreamless potentiality before it; and the Nation was always more Bostonian
+      than New-Yorkish by nature, whatever it was by nativity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Philadelphia had long counted for nothing in the literary field. Graham&rsquo;s
+      Magazine at one time showed a certain critical force, but it seemed to
+      perish of this expression of vitality; and there remained Godey&rsquo;s Lady&rsquo;s
+      Book and Peterson&rsquo;s Magazine, publications really incredible in their
+      insipidity. In the South there was nothing but a mistaken social ideal,
+      with the moral principles all standing on their heads in defence of
+      slavery; and in the West there was a feeble and foolish notion that
+      Western talent was repressed by Eastern jealousy. At Boston chiefly, if
+      not at Boston alone, was there a vigorous intellectual life among such
+      authors as I have named. Every young writer was ambitious to join his name
+      with theirs in the Atlantic Monthly, and in the lists of Ticknor &amp;
+      Fields, who were literary publishers in a sense such as the business world
+      has known nowhere else before or since. Their imprint was a warrant of
+      quality to the reader and of immortality to the author, so that if I could
+      have had a book issued by them at that day I should now be in the full
+      enjoyment of an undying fame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Such was the literary situation as the passionate pilgrim from the West
+      approached his holy land at Boston, by way of the Grand Trunk Railway from
+      Quebec to Portland. I have no recollection of a sleeping-car, and I
+      suppose I waked and watched during the whole of that long, rough journey;
+      but I should hardly have slept if there had been a car for the purpose. I
+      was too eager to see what New England was like, and too anxious not to
+      lose the least glimpse of it, to close my eyes after I crossed the border
+      at Island Pond. I found that in the elm-dotted levels of Maine it was very
+      like the Western Reserve in northern Ohio, which is, indeed, a portion of
+      New England transferred with all its characteristic features, and
+      flattened out along the lake shore. It was not till I began to run
+      southward into the older regions of the country that it lost this look,
+      and became gratefully strange to me. It never had the effect of hoary
+      antiquity which I had expected of a country settled more than two
+      centuries; with its wood-built farms and villages it looked newer than the
+      coal-smoked brick of southern Ohio. I had prefigured the New England
+      landscape bare of forests, relieved here and there with the tees of
+      orchards or plantations; but I found apparently as much woodland as at
+      home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At Portland I first saw the ocean, and this was a sort of disappointment.
+      Tides and salt water I had already had at Quebec, so that I was no longer
+      on the alert for them; but the color and the vastness of the sea I was
+      still to try upon my vision. When I stood on the Promenade at Portland
+      with the kind young Unitarian minister whom I had brought a letter to, and
+      who led me there for a most impressive first view of the ocean, I could
+      not make more of it than there was of Lake Erie; and I have never thought
+      the color of the sea comparable to the tender blue of the lake. I did not
+      hint my disappointment to my friend; I had too much regard for the
+      feelings of an Eastern man to decry his ocean to his face, and I felt
+      besides that it would be vulgar and provincial to make comparisons. I am
+      glad now that I held my tongue, for that kind soul is no longer in this
+      world, and I should not like to think he knew how far short of my
+      expectations the sea he was so proud of had fallen. I went up with him
+      into a tower or belvedere there was at hand; and when he pointed to the
+      eastern horizon and said, Now there was nothing but sea between us and
+      Africa, I pretended to expand with the thought, and began to sound myself
+      for the emotions which I ought to have felt at such a sight. But in my
+      heart I was empty, and Heaven knows whether I saw the steamer which the
+      ancient mariner in charge of that tower invited me to look at through his
+      telescope. I never could see anything but a vitreous glare through a
+      telescope, which has a vicious habit of dodging about through space, and
+      failing to bring down anything of less than planetary magnitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But there was something at Portland vastly more to me than seas or
+      continents, and that was the house where Longfellow was born. I believe,
+      now, I did not get the right house, but only the house he went to live in
+      later; but it served, and I rejoiced in it with a rapture that could not
+      have been more genuine if it had been the real birthplace of the poet. I
+      got my friend to show me
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       &ldquo;&mdash;&mdash;the breezy dome of groves,
+        The shadows of Deering&rsquo;s woods,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      because they were in one of Longfellow&rsquo;s loveliest and tenderest poems;
+      and I made an errand to the docks, for the sake of the
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       &ldquo;&mdash;-black wharves and the slips,
+        And the sea-tides tossing free,
+        And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
+        And the beauty and mystery of the ships,
+        And the magic of the sea,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      mainly for the reason that these were colors and shapes of the fond vision
+      of the poet&rsquo;s past. I am in doubt whether it was at this time or a later
+      time that I went to revere
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       &ldquo;&mdash;the dead captains as they lay
+        In their graves o&rsquo;erlooking the tranquil bay,
+        where they in battle died,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      but I am quite sure it was now that I wandered under
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       &ldquo;&mdash;the trees which shadow each well-known street,
+        As they balance up and down,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      for when I was next in Portland the great fire had swept the city avenues
+      bare of most of those beautiful elms, whose Gothic arches and traceries I
+      well remember.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fact is that in those days I was bursting with the most romantic
+      expectations of life in every way, and I looked at the whole world as
+      material that might be turned into literature, or that might be associated
+      with it somehow. I do not know how I managed to keep these preposterous
+      hopes within me, but perhaps the trick of satirizing them, which I had
+      early learnt, helped me to do it. I was at that particular moment resolved
+      above all things to see things as Heinrich Heine saw them, or at least to
+      report them as he did, no matter how I saw them; and I went about framing
+      phrases to this end, and trying to match the objects of interest to them
+      whenever there was the least chance of getting them together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I do not know how I first arrived in Boston, or whether it was before or
+      after I had passed a day or two in Salem. As Salem is on the way from
+      Portland, I will suppose that I stopped there first, and explored the
+      quaint old town (quainter then than now, but still quaint enough) for the
+      memorials of Hawthorne and of the witches which united to form the Salem I
+      cared for. I went and looked up the House of Seven Gables, and suffered an
+      unreasonable disappointment that it had not a great many more of them; but
+      there was no loss in the death-warrant of Bridget Bishop, with the
+      sheriff&rsquo;s return of execution upon it, which I found at the Court-house;
+      if anything, the pathos of that witness of one of the cruelest delusions
+      in the world was rather in excess of my needs; I could have got on with
+      less. I saw the pins which the witches were sworn to have thrust into the
+      afflicted children, and I saw Gallows Hill, where the hapless victims of
+      the perjury were hanged. But that death-warrant remained the most vivid
+      color of my experience of the tragedy; I had no need to invite myself to a
+      sense of it, and it is still like a stain of red in my memory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The kind old ship&rsquo;s captain whose guest I was, and who was transfigured to
+      poetry in my sense by the fact that he used to voyage to the African coast
+      for palm-oil in former days, led me all about the town, and showed me the
+      Custom-house, which I desired to see because it was in the preface to the
+      Scarlet Letter. But I perceived that he did not share my enthusiasm for
+      the author, and I became more and more sensible that in Salem air there
+      was a cool undercurrent of feeling about him. No doubt the place was not
+      altogether grateful for the celebrity his romance had given it, and would
+      have valued more the uninterrupted quiet of its own flattering thoughts of
+      itself; but when it came to hearing a young lady say she knew a girl who
+      said she would like to poison Hawthorne, it seemed to the devout young
+      pilgrim from the West that something more of love for the great romancer
+      would not have been too much for him. Hawthorne had already had his say,
+      however, and he had not used his native town with any great tenderness.
+      Indeed, the advantages to any place of having a great genius born and
+      reared in its midst are so doubtful that it might be well for localities
+      designing to become the birthplaces of distinguished authors to think
+      twice about it. Perhaps only the largest capitals, like London and Paris,
+      and New York and Chicago, ought to risk it. But the authors have an
+      unaccountable perversity, and will seldom come into the world in the large
+      cities, which are alone without the sense of neighborhood, and the
+      personal susceptibilities so unfavorable to the practice of the literary
+      art. I dare say that it was owing to the local indifference to her
+      greatest name, or her reluctance from it, that I got a clearer impression
+      of Salem in some other respects than I should have had if I had been
+      invited there to devote myself solely to the associations of Hawthorne.
+      For the first time I saw an old New England town, I do not know, but the
+      most characteristic, and took into my young Western consciousness the fact
+      of a more complex civilization than I had yet known. My whole life had
+      been passed in a region where men were just beginning ancestors, and the
+      conception of family was very imperfect. Literature, of course, was full
+      of it, and it was not for a devotee of Thackeray to be theoretically
+      ignorant of its manifestations; but I had hitherto carelessly supposed
+      that family was nowhere regarded seriously in America except in Virginia,
+      where it furnished a joke for the rest of the nation. But now I found
+      myself confronted with it in its ancient houses, and heard its names
+      pronounced with a certain consideration, which I dare say was as much
+      their due in Salem as it could be anywhere. The names were all strange,
+      and all indifferent to me, but those fine square wooden mansions, of a
+      tasteful architecture, and a pale buff-color, withdrawing themselves in
+      quiet reserve from the quiet street, gave me an impression of family as an
+      actuality and a force which I had never had before, but which no Westerner
+      can yet understand the East without taking into account. I do not suppose
+      that I conceived of family as a fact of vital import then; I think I
+      rather regarded it as a color to be used in any aesthetic study of the
+      local conditions. I am not sure that I valued it more even for literary
+      purposes, than the steeple which the captain pointed out as the first and
+      last thing he saw when he came and went on his long voyages, or than the
+      great palm-oil casks, which he showed me, and which I related to the tree
+      that stood
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+        &ldquo;Auf brennender Felsenwand.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Whether that was the kind of palm that gives the oil, or was a sort only
+      suitable to be the dream of a lonely fir-tree in the North on a cold
+      height, I am in doubt to this day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I heard, not without concern, that the neighboring industry of Lynn was
+      penetrating Salem, and that the ancient haunt of the witches and the
+      birthplace of our subtlest and somberest wizard was becoming a great
+      shoe-town; but my concern was less for its memories and sensibilities than
+      for an odious duty which I owed that industry, together with all the
+      others in New England. Before I left home I had promised my earliest
+      publisher that I would undertake to edit, or compile, or do something
+      literary to, a work on the operation of the more distinctive mechanical
+      inventions of our country, which he had conceived the notion of publishing
+      by subscription. He had furnished me, the most immechanical of humankind,
+      with a letter addressed generally to the great mills and factories of the
+      East, entreating their managers to unfold their mysteries to me for the
+      purposes of this volume. His letter had the effect of shutting up some of
+      them like clams, and others it put upon their guard against my researches,
+      lest I should seize the secret of their special inventions and publish it
+      to the world. I could not tell the managers that I was both morally and
+      mentally incapable of this; that they might have explained and
+      demonstrated the properties and functions of their most recondite
+      machinery, and upon examination afterwards found me guiltless of having
+      anything but a few verses of Heine or Tennyson or Longfellow in my head.
+      So I had to suffer in several places from their unjust anxieties, and from
+      my own weariness of their ingenious engines, or else endure the pangs of a
+      bad conscience from ignoring them. As long as I was in Canada I was happy,
+      for there was no industry in Canada that I saw, except that of the peasant
+      girls, in their Evangeline hats and kirtles, tossing the hay in the
+      way-side fields; but when I reached Portland my troubles began. I went
+      with that young minister of whom I have spoken to a large foundry, where
+      they were casting some sort of ironmongery, and inspected the process from
+      a distance beyond any chance spurt of the molten metal, and came away
+      sadly uncertain of putting the rather fine spectacle to any practical use.
+      A manufactory where they did something with coal-oil (which I now heard
+      for the first time called kerosene) refused itself to me, and I said to
+      myself that probably all the other industries of Portland were as
+      reserved, and I would not seek to explore them; but when I got to Salem,
+      my conscience stirred again. If I knew that there were shoe-shops in
+      Salem, ought not I to go and inspect their processes? This was a question
+      which would not answer itself to my satisfaction, and I had no peace till
+      I learned that I could see shoemaking much better at Lynn, and that Lynn
+      was such a little way from Boston that I could readily run up there, if I
+      did not wish to examine the shoe machinery at once. I promised myself that
+      I would run up from Boston, but in order to do this I must first go to
+      Boston.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I am supposing still that I saw Salem before I saw Boston, but however the
+      fact may be, I am sure that I decided it would be better to see shoemaking
+      in Lynn, where I really did see it, thirty years later. For the purposes
+      of the present visit, I contented myself with looking at a machine in
+      Haverhill, which chewed a shoe sole full of pegs, and dropped it out of
+      its iron jaws with an indifference as great as my own, and probably as
+      little sense of how it had done its work. I may be unjust to that machine;
+      Heaven knows I would not wrong it; and I must confess that my head had no
+      room in it for the conception of any machinery but the mythological, which
+      also I despised, in my revulsion from the eighteenth-century poets to
+      those of my own day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I cannot quite make out after the lapse of so many years just how or when
+      I got to Haverhill, or whether it was before or after I had been in Salem.
+      There is an apparitional quality in my presences, at this point or that,
+      in the dim past; but I hope that, for the credit of their order, ghosts
+      are not commonly taken with such trivial things as I was. For instance, in
+      Haverhill I was much interested by the sight of a young man, coming gayly
+      down the steps of the hotel where I lodged, in peg-top trousers so much
+      more peg top than my own that I seemed to be wearing mere spring-bottoms
+      in comparison; and in a day when every one who respected himself had a
+      necktie as narrow as he could get, this youth had one no wider than a
+      shoestring, and red at that, while mine measured almost an inch, and was
+      black. To be sure, he was one of a band of negro minstrels, who were to
+      give a concert that night, and he had a light to excel in fashion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I will suppose, for convenience&rsquo; sake, that I visited Haverhill, too,
+      before I reached Boston: somehow that shoe-pegging machine must come in,
+      and it may as well come in here. When I actually found myself in Boston,
+      there were perhaps industries which it would have been well for me to
+      celebrate, but I either made believe there were none, or else I honestly
+      forgot all about them. In either case I released myself altogether to the
+      literary and historical associations of the place. I need not say that I
+      gave myself first to the first, and it rather surprised me to find that
+      the literary associations of Boston referred so largely to Cambridge. I
+      did not know much about Cambridge, except that it was the seat of the
+      university where Lowell was, and Longfellow had been, professor; and
+      somehow I had not realized it as the home of these poets. That was rather
+      stupid of me, but it is best to own the truth, and afterward I came to
+      know the place so well that I may safely confess my earlier ignorance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had stopped in Boston at the Tremont House, which was still one of the
+      first hostelries of the country, and I must have inquired my way to
+      Cambridge there; but I was sceptical of the direction the Cambridge
+      horse-car took when I found it, and I hinted to the driver my anxieties as
+      to why he should be starting east when I had been told that Cambridge was
+      west of Boston. He reassured me in the laconic and sarcastic manner of his
+      kind, and we really reached Cambridge by the route he had taken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The beautiful elms that shaded great part of the way massed themselves in
+      the &ldquo;groves of academe&rdquo; at the Square, and showed pleasant glimpses of
+      &ldquo;Old Harvard&rsquo;s scholar factories red,&rdquo; then far fewer than now. It must
+      have been in vacation, for I met no one as I wandered through the college
+      yard, trying to make up my mind as to how I should learn where Lowell
+      lived; for it was he whom I had come to find. He had not only taken the
+      poems I sent him, but he had printed two of them in a single number of the
+      Atlantic, and had even written me a little note about them, which I wore
+      next my heart in my breast pocket till I almost wore it out; and so I
+      thought I might fitly report myself to him. But I have always been
+      helpless in finding my way, and I was still depressed by my failure to
+      convince the horse-car driver that he had taken the wrong road. I let
+      several people go by without questioning them, and those I did ask abashed
+      me farther by not knowing what I wanted to know. When I had remitted my
+      search for the moment, an ancient man, with an open mouth and an inquiring
+      eye, whom I never afterwards made out in Cambridge, addressed me with a
+      hospitable offer to show me the Washington Elm. I thought this would give
+      me time to embolden myself for the meeting with the editor of the Atlantic
+      if I should ever find him, and I went with that kind old man, who when he
+      had shown me the tree, and the spot where Washington stood when he took
+      command of the Continental forces, said that he had a branch of it, and
+      that if I would come to his house with him he would give me a piece. In
+      the end, I meant merely to flatter him into telling me where I could find
+      Lowell, but I dissembled my purpose and pretended a passion for a piece of
+      the historic elm, and the old man led me not only to his house but his
+      wood-house, where he sawed me off a block so generous that I could not get
+      it into my pocket. I feigned the gratitude which I could see that he
+      expected, and then I took courage to put my question to him. Perhaps that
+      patriarch lived only in the past, and cared for history and not
+      literature. He confessed that he could not tell me where to find Lowell;
+      but he did not forsake me; he set forth with me upon the street again, and
+      let no man pass without asking him. In the end we met one who was able to
+      say where Mr. Lowell was, and I found him at last in a little study at the
+      rear of a pleasant, old-fashioned house near the Delta.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lowell was not then at the height of his fame; he had just reached this
+      thirty years after, when he died; but I doubt if he was ever after a
+      greater power in his own country, or more completely embodied the literary
+      aspiration which would not and could not part itself from the love of
+      freedom and the hope of justice. For the sake of these he had been willing
+      to suffer the reproach which followed their friends in the earlier days of
+      the anti-slavery struggle: He had outlived the reproach long before; but
+      the fear of his strength remained with those who had felt it, and he had
+      not made himself more generally loved by the &lsquo;Fable for Critics&rsquo; than by
+      the &lsquo;Biglow Papers&rsquo;, probably. But in the &lsquo;Vision of Sir Launfal&rsquo; and the
+      &lsquo;Legend of Brittany&rsquo; he had won a liking if not a listening far wider than
+      his humor and his wit had got him; and in his lectures on the English
+      poets, given not many years before he came to the charge of the Atlantic,
+      he had proved himself easily the wisest and finest critic in our language.
+      He was already, more than any American poet,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+        &ldquo;Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
+                  The love of love,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      and he held a place in the public sense which no other author among us has
+      held. I had myself never been a great reader of his poetry, when I met
+      him, though when I was a boy of ten years I had heard my father repeat
+      passages from the Biglow Papers against war and slavery and the war for
+      slavery upon Mexico, and later I had read those criticisms of English
+      poetry, and I knew Sir Launfal must be Lowell in some sort; but my love
+      for him as a poet was chiefly centred in my love for his tender rhyme,
+      &lsquo;Auf Wiedersehen&rsquo;, which I can not yet read without something of the young
+      pathos it first stirred in me. I knew and felt his greatness some how
+      apart from the literary proofs of it; he ruled my fancy and held my
+      allegiance as a character, as a man; and I am neither sorry nor ashamed
+      that I was abashed when I first came into his presence; and that in spite
+      of his words of welcome I sat inwardly quaking before him. He was then
+      forty-one years old, and nineteen my senior, and if there had been nothing
+      else to awe me, I might well have been quelled by the disparity of our
+      ages. But I have always been willing and even eager to do homage to men
+      who have done something, and notably to men who have done something in the
+      sort I wished to do something in, myself. I could never recognize any
+      other sort of superiority; but that I am proud to recognize; and I had
+      before Lowell some such feeling as an obscure subaltern might have before
+      his general. He was by nature a bit of a disciplinarian, and the effect
+      was from him as well as in me; I dare say he let me feel whatever
+      difference there was as helplessly as I felt it. At the first encounter
+      with people he always was apt to have a certain frosty shyness, a smiling
+      cold, as from the long, high-sunned winters of his Puritan race; he was
+      not quite himself till he had made you aware of his quality: then no one
+      could be sweeter, tenderer, warmer than he; then he made you free of his
+      whole heart; but you must be his captive before he could do that. His
+      whole personality had now an instant charm for me; I could not keep my
+      eyes from those beautiful eyes of his, which had a certain starry
+      serenity, and looked out so purely from under his white forehead, shadowed
+      with auburn hair untouched by age; or from the smile that shaped the
+      auburn beard, and gave the face in its form and color the Christ-look
+      which Page&rsquo;s portrait has flattered in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His voice had as great a fascination for me as his face. The vibrant
+      tenderness and the crisp clearness of the tones, the perfect modulation,
+      the clear enunciation, the exquisite accent, the elect diction&mdash;I did
+      not know enough then to know that these were the gifts, these were the
+      graces, of one from whose tongue our rough English came music such as I
+      should never hear from any other. In this speech there was nothing of our
+      slipshod American slovenliness, but a truly Italian conscience and an
+      artistic sense of beauty in the instrument.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw, before he sat down across his writing-table from me, that he was
+      not far from the medium height; but his erect carriage made the most of
+      his five feet and odd inches. He had been smoking the pipe he loved, and
+      he put it back in his mouth, presently, as if he found himself at greater
+      ease with it, when he began to chat, or rather to let me show what manner
+      of young man I was by giving me the first word. I told him of the trouble
+      I had in finding him, and I could not help dragging in something about
+      Heine&rsquo;s search for Borne, when he went to see him in Frankfort; but I felt
+      at once this was a false start, for Lowell was such an impassioned lover
+      of Cambridge, which was truly his patria, in the Italian sense, that it
+      must have hurt him to be unknown to any one in it; he said, a little
+      dryly, that he should not have thought I would have so much difficulty;
+      but he added, forgivingly, that this was not his own house, which he was
+      out of for the time. Then he spoke to me of Heine, and when I showed my
+      ardor for him, he sought to temper it with some judicious criticisms, and
+      told me that he had kept the first poem I sent him, for the long time it
+      had been unacknowledged, to make sure that it was not a translation. He
+      asked me about myself, and my name, and its Welsh origin, and seemed to
+      find the vanity I had in this harmless enough. When I said I had tried
+      hard to believe that I was at least the literary descendant of Sir James
+      Howels, he corrected me gently with &ldquo;James Howel,&rdquo; and took down a volume
+      of the &lsquo;Familiar Letters&rsquo; from the shelves behind him to prove me wrong.
+      This was always his habit, as I found afterwards when he quoted anything
+      from a book he liked to get it and read the passage over, as if he tasted
+      a kind of hoarded sweetness in the words. It visibly vexed him if they
+      showed him in the least mistaken; but
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+        &ldquo;The love he bore to learning was at fault&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      for this foible, and that other of setting people right if he thought them
+      wrong. I could not assert myself against his version of Howels&rsquo;s name, for
+      my edition of his letters was far away in Ohio, and I was obliged to own
+      that the name was spelt in several different ways in it. He perceived, no
+      doubt, why I had chosen the form liked my own, with the title which the
+      pleasant old turncoat ought to have had from the many masters he served
+      according to their many minds, but never had except from that erring
+      edition. He did not afflict me for it, though; probably it amused him too
+      much; he asked me about the West, and when he found that I was as proud of
+      the West as I was of Wales, he seemed even better pleased, and said he had
+      always fancied that human nature was laid out on rather a larger scale
+      there than in the East, but he had seen very little of the West. In my
+      heart I did not think this then, and I do not think it now; human nature
+      has had more ground to spread over in the West; that is all; but &ldquo;it was
+      not for me to bandy words with my sovereign.&rdquo; He said he liked to hear of
+      the differences between the different sections, for what we had most to
+      fear in our country was a wearisome sameness of type.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not say now, or at any other time during the many years I knew him,
+      any of those slighting things of the West which I had so often to suffer
+      from Eastern people, but suffered me to praise it all I would. He asked me
+      what way I had taken in coming to New England, and when I told him, and
+      began to rave of the beauty and quaintness of French Canada, and to pour
+      out my joy in Quebec, he said, with a smile that had now lost all its
+      frost, Yes, Quebec was a bit of the seventeenth century; it was in many
+      ways more French than France, and its people spoke the language of
+      Voltaire, with the accent of Voltaire&rsquo;s time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not remember what else he talked of, though once I remembered it with
+      what I believed an ineffaceable distinctness. I set nothing of it down at
+      the time; I was too busy with the letters I was writing for a Cincinnati
+      paper; and I was severely bent upon keeping all personalities out of them.
+      This was very well, but I could wish now that I had transgressed at least
+      so far as to report some of the things that Lowell said; for the paper did
+      not print my letters, and it would have been perfectly safe, and very
+      useful for the present purpose. But perhaps he did not say anything very
+      memorable; to do that you must have something positive in your listener;
+      and I was the mere response, the hollow echo, that youth must be in like
+      circumstances. I was all the time afraid of wearing my welcome out, and I
+      hurried to go when I would so gladly have staid. I do not remember where I
+      meant to go, or why he should have undertaken to show me the way
+      across-lots, but this was what he did; and when we came to a fence, which
+      I clambered gracelessly over, he put his hands on the top, and tried to
+      take it at a bound. He tried twice, and then laughed at his failure, but
+      not with any great pleasure, and he was not content till a third trial
+      carried him across. Then he said, &ldquo;I commonly do that the first time,&rdquo; as
+      if it were a frequent habit with him, while I remained discreetly silent,
+      and for that moment at least felt myself the elder of the man who had so
+      much of the boy in him. He had, indeed, much of the boy in him to the
+      last, and he parted with each hour of his youth reluctantly, pathetically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      We walked across what must have been Jarvis Field to what must have been
+      North Avenue, and there he left me. But before he let me go he held my
+      hand while he could say that he wished me to dine with him; only, he was
+      not in his own house, and he would ask me to dine with him at the Parker
+      House in Boston, and would send me word of the time later.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I suppose I may have spent part of the intervening time in viewing the
+      wonders of Boston, and visiting the historic scenes and places in it and
+      about it. I certainly went over to Charleston, and ascended Bunker Hill
+      monument, and explored the navy-yard, where the immemorial man-of-war
+      begun in Jackson&rsquo;s time was then silently stretching itself under its long
+      shed in a poetic arrest, as if the failure of the appropriation for its
+      completion had been some kind of enchantment. In Boston, I early presented
+      my letter of credit to the publisher it was drawn upon, not that I needed
+      money at the moment, but from a young eagerness to see if it would be
+      honored; and a literary attache of the house kindly went about with me,
+      and showed me the life of the city. A great city it seemed to me then, and
+      a seething vortex of business as well as a whirl of gaiety, as I saw it in
+      Washington Street, and in a promenade concert at Copeland&rsquo;s restaurant in
+      Tremont Row. Probably I brought some idealizing force to bear upon it, for
+      I was not all so strange to the world as I must seem; perhaps I accounted
+      for quality as well as quantity in my impressions of the New England
+      metropolis, and aggrandized it in the ratio of its literary importance. It
+      seemed to me old, even after Quebec, and very likely I credited the actual
+      town with all the dead and gone Bostonians in my sentimental census. If I
+      did not, it was no fault of my cicerone, who thought even more of the city
+      he showed me than I did. I do not know now who he was, and I never saw him
+      after I came to live there, with any certainty that it was he, though I
+      was often tormented with the vision of a spectacled face like his, but not
+      like enough to warrant me in addressing him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He became part of that ghostly Boston of my first visit, which would
+      sometimes return and possess again the city I came to know so familiarly
+      in later years, and to be so passionately interested in. Some color of my
+      prime impressions has tinged the fictitious experiences of people in my
+      books, but I find very little of it in my memory. This is like a web of
+      frayed old lace, which I have to take carefully into my hold for fear of
+      its fragility, and make out as best I can the figure once so distinct in
+      it. There are the narrow streets, stretching saltworks to the docks, which
+      I haunted for their quaintness, and there is Faunal Hall, which I cared to
+      see so much more because Wendell Phillips had spoken in it than because
+      Otis and Adams had. There is the old Colonial House, and there is the
+      State House, which I dare say I explored, with the Common sloping before
+      it. There is Beacon Street, with the Hancock House where it is incredibly
+      no more, and there are the beginnings of Commonwealth Avenue, and the
+      other streets of the Back Bay, laid out with their basements left hollowed
+      in the made land, which the gravel trains were yet making out of the
+      westward hills. There is the Public Garden, newly planned and planted, but
+      without the massive bridge destined to make so ungratefully little of the
+      lake that occasioned it. But it is all very vague, and I could easily
+      believe now that it was some one else who saw it then in my place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I think that I did not try to see Cambridge the same day that I saw
+      Lowell, but wisely came back to my hotel in Boston, and tried to realize
+      the fact. I went out another day, with an acquaintance from Ohio; whom I
+      ran upon in the street. We went to Mount Auburn together, and I viewed its
+      monuments with a reverence which I dare say their artistic quality did not
+      merit. But I am, not sorry for this, for perhaps they are not quite so bad
+      as some people pretend. The Gothic chapel of the cemetery, unsorted as it
+      was, gave me, with its half-dozen statues standing or sitting about, an
+      emotion such as I am afraid I could not receive now from the Acropolis,
+      Westminster Abbey, and Santa Crocea in one. I tried hard for some
+      aesthetic sense of it, and I made believe that I thought this thing and
+      that thing in the place moved me with its fitness or beauty; but the truth
+      is that I had no taste in anything but literature, and did not feel the
+      effect I would so willingly have experienced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I did genuinely love the elmy quiet of the dear old Cambridge streets,
+      though, and I had a real and instant pleasure in the yellow colonial
+      houses, with their white corners and casements and their green blinds,
+      that lurked behind the shrubbery of the avenue I passed through to Mount
+      Auburn. The most beautiful among them was the most interesting for me, for
+      it was the house of Longfellow; my companion, who had seen it before,
+      pointed it out to me with an air of custom, and I would not let him see
+      that I valued the first sight of it as I did. I had hoped that somehow I
+      might be so favored as to see Longfellow himself, but when I asked about
+      him of those who knew, they said, &ldquo;Oh, he is at Nahant,&rdquo; and I thought
+      that Nahant must be a great way off, and at any rate I did not feel
+      authorized to go to him there. Neither did I go to see the author of &lsquo;The
+      Amber Gods&rsquo; who lived at Newburyport, I was told, as if I should know
+      where Newburyport was; I did not know, and I hated to ask. Besides, it did
+      not seem so simple as it had seemed in Ohio, to go and see a young lady
+      simply because I was infatuated with her literature; even as the envoy of
+      all the infatuated young people of Columbus, I could not quite do this;
+      and when I got home, I had to account for my failure as best I could.
+      Another failure of mine was the sight of Whittier, which I then very much
+      longed to have. They said, &ldquo;Oh, Whittier lives at Amesbury,&rdquo; but that put
+      him at an indefinite distance, and without the introduction I never would
+      ask for, I found it impossible to set out in quest of him. In the end, I
+      saw no one in New England whom I was not presented to in the regular way,
+      except Lowell, whom I thought I had a right to call upon in my quality of
+      contributor, and from the acquaintance I had with him by letter. I neither
+      praise nor blame myself for this; it was my shyness that with held me
+      rather than my merit. There is really no harm in seeking the presence of a
+      famous man, and I doubt if the famous man resents the wish of people to
+      look upon him without some measure, great or little, of affectation. There
+      are bores everywhere, but he is likelier to find them in the wonted
+      figures of society than in those young people, or old people, who come to
+      him in the love of what he has done. I am well aware how furiously
+      Tennyson sometimes met his worshippers, and how insolently Carlyle, but I
+      think these facts are little specks in their sincerity. Our own gentler
+      and honester celebrities did not forbid approach, and I have known some of
+      them caress adorers who seemed hardly worthy of their kindness; but that
+      was better than to have hurt any sensitive spirit who had ventured too
+      far, by the rules that govern us with common men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0012" id="link2H_4_0012">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IX.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      My business relations were with the house that so promptly honored my
+      letter of credit. This house had published in the East the campaign life
+      of Lincoln which I had lately written, and I dare say would have published
+      the volume of poems I had written earlier with my friend Piatt, if there
+      had been any public for it; at least, I saw large numbers of the book on
+      the counters. But all my literary affiliations were with Ticknor &amp;
+      Fields, and it was the Old Corner Book-Store on Washington Street that
+      drew my heart as soon as I had replenished my pocket in Cornhill. After
+      verifying the editor of the Atlantic Monthly I wised to verify its
+      publishers, and it very fitly happened that when I was shown into Mr.
+      Fields&rsquo;s little room at the back of the store, with its window looking
+      upon School Street, and its scholarly keeping in books and prints, he had
+      just got the magazine sheets of a poem of mine from the Cambridge
+      printers. He was then lately from abroad, and he had the zest for American
+      things which a foreign sojourn is apt to renew in us, though I did not
+      know this then, and could not account for it in the kindness he expressed
+      for my poem. He introduced me to Mr. Ticknor, who I fancied had not read
+      my poem; but he seemed to know what it was from the junior partner, and he
+      asked me whether I had been paid for it. I confessed that I had not, and
+      then he got out a chamois-leather bag, and took from it five half-eagles
+      in gold and laid them on the green cloth top of the desk, in much the
+      shape and of much the size of the Great Bear. I have never since felt
+      myself paid so lavishly for any literary work, though I have had more for
+      a single piece than the twenty-five dollars that dazzled me in this
+      constellation. The publisher seemed aware of the poetic character of the
+      transaction; he let the pieces lie a moment, before he gathered them up
+      and put them into my hand, and said, &ldquo;I always think it is pleasant to
+      have it in gold.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But a terrible experience with the poem awaited me, and quenched for the
+      moment all my pleasure and pride. It was &lsquo;The Pilot&rsquo;s Story,&rsquo; which I
+      suppose has had as much acceptance as anything of mine in verse (I do not
+      boast of a vast acceptance for it), and I had attempted to treat in it a
+      phase of the national tragedy of slavery, as I had imagined it on a
+      Mississippi steamboat. A young planter has gambled away the slave-girl who
+      is the mother of his child, and when he tells her, she breaks out upon him
+      with the demand:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+   &ldquo;What will you say to our boy when he cries for me, there in Saint
+   Louis?&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      I had thought this very well, and natural and simple, but a fatal
+      proof-reader had not thought it well enough, or simple and natural enough,
+      and he had made the line read:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+   &ldquo;What will you say to our boy when he cries for &lsquo;Ma,&rsquo; there in Saint
+   Louis?&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      He had even had the inspiration to quote the word he preferred to the one
+      I had written, so that there was no merciful possibility of mistaking it
+      for a misprint, and my blood froze in my veins at sight of it. Mr. Fields
+      had given me the sheets to read while he looked over some letters, and he
+      either felt the chill of my horror, or I made some sign or sound of dismay
+      that caught his notice, for he looked round at me. I could only show him
+      the passage with a gasp. I dare say he might have liked to laugh, for it
+      was cruelly funny, but he did not; he was concerned for the magazine as
+      well as for me. He declared that when he first read the line he had
+      thought I could not have written it so, and he agreed with me that it
+      would kill the poem if it came out in that shape. He instantly set about
+      repairing the mischief, so far as could be. He found that the whole
+      edition of that sheet had been printed, and the air blackened round me
+      again, lighted up here and there with baleful flashes of the newspaper wit
+      at my cost, which I previsioned in my misery; I knew what I should have
+      said of such a thing myself, if it had been another&rsquo;s. But the publisher
+      at once decided that the sheet must be reprinted, and I went away weak as
+      if in the escape from some deadly peril. Afterwards it appeared that the
+      line had passed the first proof-reader as I wrote it, but that the final
+      reader had entered so sympathetically into the realistic intention of my
+      poem as to contribute the modification which had nearly been my end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0013" id="link2H_4_0013">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      X.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      As it fell out, I lived without farther difficulty to the day and hour of
+      the dinner Lowell made for me; and I really think, looking at myself
+      impersonally, and remembering the sort of young fellow I was, that it
+      would have been a great pity if I had not. The dinner was at the
+      old-fashioned Boston hour of two, and the table was laid for four people
+      in some little upper room at Parker&rsquo;s, which I was never afterwards able
+      to make sure of. Lowell was already, there when I came, and he presented
+      me, to my inexpressible delight and surprise, to Dr. Holmes, who was there
+      with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Holmes was in the most brilliant hour of that wonderful second youth which
+      his fame flowered into long after the world thought he had completed the
+      cycle of his literary life. He had already received full recognition as a
+      poet of delicate wit, nimble humor, airy imagination, and exquisite grace,
+      when the Autocrat papers advanced his name indefinitely beyond the bounds
+      which most immortals would have found range enough. The marvel of his
+      invention was still fresh in the minds of men, and time had not dulled in
+      any measure the sense of its novelty. His readers all fondly identified
+      him with his work; and I fully expected to find myself in the Autocrat&rsquo;s
+      presence when I met Dr. Holmes. But the fascination was none the less for
+      that reason; and the winning smile, the wise and humorous glance, the
+      whole genial manner was as important to me as if I had foreboded something
+      altogether different. I found him physically of the Napoleonic height
+      which spiritually overtops the Alps, and I could look into his face
+      without that unpleasant effort which giants of inferior mind so often cost
+      the man of five feet four.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A little while after, Fields came in, and then our number and my pleasure
+      were complete.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nothing else so richly satisfactory, indeed, as the whole affair could
+      have happened to a like youth at such a point in his career; and when I
+      sat down with Doctor Holmes and Mr. Fields, on Lowell&rsquo;s right, I felt
+      through and through the dramatic perfection of the event. The kindly
+      Autocrat recognized some such quality of it in terms which were not the
+      less precious and gracious for their humorous excess. I have no reason to
+      think that he had yet read any of my poor verses, or had me otherwise than
+      wholly on trust from Lowell; but he leaned over towards his host, and
+      said, with a laughing look at me, &ldquo;Well, James, this is something like the
+      apostolic succession; this is the laying on of hands.&rdquo; I took his sweet
+      and caressing irony as he meant it; but the charm of it went to my head
+      long before any drop of wine, together with the charm of hearing him and
+      Lowell calling each other James and Wendell, and of finding them still
+      cordially boys together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I would gladly have glimmered before those great lights in the talk that
+      followed, if I could have thought of anything brilliant to say, but I
+      could not, and so I let them shine without a ray of reflected splendor
+      from me. It was such talk as I had, of course, never heard before, and it
+      is not saying enough to say that I have never heard such talk since except
+      from these two men. It was as light and kind as it was deep and true, and
+      it ranged over a hundred things, with a perpetual sparkle of Doctor
+      Holmes&rsquo;s wit, and the constant glow of Lowell&rsquo;s incandescent sense. From
+      time to time Fields came in with one of his delightful stories (sketches
+      of character they were, which he sometimes did not mind caricaturing), or
+      with some criticism of the literary situation from his stand-point of both
+      lover and publisher of books. I heard fames that I had accepted as proofs
+      of power treated as factitious, and witnessed a frankness concerning
+      authorship, far and near, that I had not dreamed of authors using. When
+      Doctor Holmes understood that I wrote for the &lsquo;Saturday Press&rsquo;, which was
+      running amuck among some Bostonian immortalities of the day, he seemed
+      willing that I should know they were not thought so very undying in
+      Boston, and that I should not take the notion of a Mutual Admiration
+      Society too seriously, or accept the New York Bohemian view of Boston as
+      true. For the most part the talk did not address itself to me, but became
+      an exchange of thoughts and fancies between himself and Lowell. They
+      touched, I remember, on certain matters of technique, and the doctor
+      confessed that he had a prejudice against some words that he could not
+      overcome; for instance, he said, nothing could induce him to use &lsquo;neath
+      for beneath, no exigency of versification or stress of rhyme. Lowell
+      contended that he would use any word that carried his meaning; and I think
+      he did this to the hurt of some of his earlier things. He was then
+      probably in the revolt against too much literature in literature, which
+      every one is destined sooner or later to share; there was a certain
+      roughness, very like crudeness, which he indulged before his thought and
+      phrase mellowed to one music in his later work. I tacitly agreed rather
+      with the doctor, though I did not swerve from my allegiance to Lowell, and
+      if I had spoken I should have sided with him: I would have given that or
+      any other proof of my devotion. Fields casually mentioned that he thought
+      &ldquo;The Dandelion&rdquo; was the most popularly liked of Lowell&rsquo;s briefer poems,
+      and I made haste to say that I thought so too, though I did not really
+      think anything about it; and then I was sorry, for I could see that the
+      poet did not like it, quite; and I felt that I was duly punished for my
+      dishonesty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hawthorne was named among other authors, probably by Fields, whose house
+      had just published his &ldquo;Marble Faun,&rdquo; and who had recently come home on
+      the same steamer with him. Doctor Holmes asked if I had met Hawthorne yet,
+      and when I confessed that I had hardly yet even hoped for such a thing, he
+      smiled his winning smile, and said: &ldquo;Ah, well! I don&rsquo;t know that you will
+      ever feel you have really met him. He is like a dim room with a little
+      taper of personality burning on the corner of the mantel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They all spoke of Hawthorne, and with the same affection, but the same
+      sense of something mystical and remote in him; and every word was
+      priceless to me. But these masters of the craft I was &lsquo;prentice to
+      probably could not have said anything that I should not have found wise
+      and well, and I am sure now I should have been the loser if the talk had
+      shunned any of the phases of human nature which it touched. It is best to
+      find that all men are of the same make, and that there are certain
+      universal things which interest them as much as the supernal things, and
+      amuse them even more. There was a saying of Lowell&rsquo;s which he was fond of
+      repeating at the menace of any form of the transcendental, and he liked to
+      warn himself and others with his homely, &ldquo;Remember the dinner-bell.&rdquo; What
+      I recall of the whole effect of a time so happy for me is that in all that
+      was said, however high, however fine, we were never out of hearing of the
+      dinner-bell; and perhaps this is the best effect I can leave with the
+      reader. It was the first dinner served in courses that I had sat down to,
+      and I felt that this service gave it a romantic importance which the older
+      fashion of the West still wanted. Even at Governor Chase&rsquo;s table in
+      Columbus the Governor carved; I knew of the dinner &lsquo;a la Russe&rsquo;, as it was
+      then called, only from books; and it was a sort of literary flavor that I
+      tasted in the successive dishes. When it came to the black coffee, and
+      then to the &lsquo;petits verres&rsquo; of cognac, with lumps of sugar set fire to
+      atop, it was something that so far transcended my home-kept experience
+      that it began to seem altogether visionary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Neither Fields nor Doctor Holmes smoked, and I had to confess that I did
+      not; but Lowell smoked enough for all three, and the spark of his cigar
+      began to show in the waning light before we rose from the table. The time
+      that never had, nor can ever have, its fellow for me, had to come to an
+      end, as all times must, and when I shook hands with Lowell in parting, he
+      overwhelmed me by saying that if I thought of going to Concord he would
+      send me a letter to Hawthorne. I was not to see Lowell again during my
+      stay in Boston; but Doctor Holmes asked me to tea for the next evening,
+      and Fields said I must come to breakfast with him in the morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0014" id="link2H_4_0014">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I recall with the affection due to his friendly nature, and to the
+      kindness afterwards to pass between us for many years, the whole aspect of
+      the publisher when I first saw him. His abundant hair, and his full &ldquo;beard
+      as broad as ony spade,&rdquo; that flowed from his throat in Homeric curls, were
+      touched with the first frost. He had a fine color, and his eyes, as keen
+      as they were kind, twinkled restlessly above the wholesome russet-red of
+      his cheeks. His portly frame was clad in those Scotch tweeds which had not
+      yet displaced the traditional broadcloth with us in the West, though I had
+      sent to New York for a rough suit, and so felt myself not quite unworthy
+      to meet a man fresh from the hands of the London tailor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Otherwise I stood as much in awe of him as his jovial soul would let me;
+      and if I might I should like to suggest to the literary youth of this day
+      some notion of the importance of his name to the literary youth of my day.
+      He gave aesthetic character to the house of Ticknor &amp; Fields, but he
+      was by no means a silent partner on the economic side. No one can forecast
+      the fortune of a new book, but he knew as well as any publisher can know
+      not only whether a book was good, but whether the reader would think so;
+      and I suppose that his house made as few bad guesses, along with their
+      good ones, as any house that ever tried the uncertain temper of the public
+      with its ventures. In the minds of all who loved the plain brown cloth and
+      tasteful print of its issues he was more or less intimately associated
+      with their literature; and those who were not mistaken in thinking De
+      Quincey one of the delightfulest authors in the world, were especially
+      grateful to the man who first edited his writings in book form, and proud
+      that this edition was the effect of American sympathy with them. At that
+      day, I believed authorship the noblest calling in the world, and I should
+      still be at a loss to name any nobler. The great authors I had met were to
+      me the sum of greatness, and if I could not rank their publisher with them
+      by virtue of equal achievement, I handsomely brevetted him worthy of their
+      friendship, and honored him in the visible measure of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his house beside the Charles, and in the close neighborhood of Doctor
+      Holmes, I found an odor and an air of books such as I fancied might belong
+      to the famous literary houses of London. It is still there, that friendly
+      home of lettered refinement, and the gracious spirit which knew how to
+      welcome me, and make the least of my shyness and strangeness, and the most
+      of the little else there was in me, illumines it still, though my host of
+      that rapturous moment has many years been of those who are only with us
+      unseen and unheard. I remember his burlesque pretence that morning of an
+      inextinguishable grief when I owned that I had never eaten blueberry cake
+      before, and how he kept returning to the pathos of the fact that there
+      should be a region of the earth where blueberry cake was unknown. We
+      breakfasted in the pretty room whose windows look out through leaves and
+      flowers upon the river&rsquo;s coming and going tides, and whose walls were
+      covered with the faces and the autographs of all the contemporary poets
+      and novelists. The Fieldses had spent some days with Tennyson in their
+      recent English sojourn, and Mrs. Fields had much to tell of him, how he
+      looked, how he smoked, how he read aloud, and how he said, when he asked
+      her to go with him to the tower of his house, &ldquo;Come up and see the sad
+      English sunset!&rdquo; which had an instant value to me such as some rich verse
+      of his might have had. I was very new to it all, how new I could not very
+      well say, but I flattered myself that I breathed in that atmosphere as if
+      in the return from life-long exile. Still I patriotically bragged of the
+      West a little, and I told them proudly that in Columbus no book since
+      Uncle Tom&rsquo;s Cabin had sold so well as &lsquo;The Marble Faun&rsquo;. This made the
+      effect that I wished, but whether it was true or not, Heaven knows; I only
+      know that I heard it from our leading bookseller, and I made no question
+      of it myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After breakfast, Fields went away to the office, and I lingered, while
+      Mrs. Fields showed me from shelf to shelf in the library, and dazzled me
+      with the sight of authors&rsquo; copies, and volumes invaluable with the
+      autographs and the pencilled notes of the men whose names were dear to me
+      from my love of their work. Everywhere was some souvenir of the living
+      celebrities my hosts had met; and whom had they not met in that English
+      sojourn in days before England embittered herself to us during our civil
+      war? Not Tennyson only, but Thackeray, but Dickens, but Charles Reade, but
+      Carlyle, but many a minor fame was in my ears from converse so recent with
+      them that it was as if I heard their voices in their echoed words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not remember how long I stayed; I remember I was afraid of staying
+      too long, and so I am sure I did not stay as long as I should have liked.
+      But I have not the least notion how I got away, and I am not certain where
+      I spent the rest of a day that began in the clouds, but had to be ended on
+      the common earth. I suppose I gave it mostly to wandering about the city,
+      and partly to recording my impressions of it for that newspaper which
+      never published them. The summer weather in Boston, with its sunny heat
+      struck through and through with the coolness of the sea, and its clear air
+      untainted with a breath of smoke, I have always loved, but it had then a
+      zest unknown before; and I should have thought it enough simply to be
+      alive in it. But everywhere I came upon something that fed my famine for
+      the old, the quaint, the picturesque, and however the day passed it was a
+      banquet, a festival. I can only recall my breathless first sight of the
+      Public Library and of the Athenaeum Gallery: great sights then, which the
+      Vatican and the Pitti hardly afterwards eclipsed for mere emotion. In fact
+      I did not see these elder treasuries of literature and art between
+      breakfasting with the Autocrat&rsquo;s publisher in the morning, and taking tea
+      with the Autocrat himself in the evening, and that made a whole world&rsquo;s
+      difference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0015" id="link2H_4_0015">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The tea of that simpler time is wholly inconceivable to this generation,
+      which knows the thing only as a mild form of afternoon reception; but I
+      suppose that in 1860 very few dined late in our whole pastoral republic.
+      Tea was the meal people asked people to when they wished to sit at long
+      leisure and large ease; it came at the end of the day, at six o&rsquo;clock, or
+      seven; and one went to it in morning dress. It had an unceremonied
+      domesticity in the abundance of its light dishes, and I fancy these did
+      not vary much from East to West, except that we had a Southern touch in
+      our fried chicken and corn bread; but at the Autocrat&rsquo;s tea table the
+      cheering cup had a flavor unknown to me before that day. He asked me if I
+      knew it, and I said it was English breakfast tea; for I had drunk it at
+      the publisher&rsquo;s in the morning, and was willing not to seem strange to it.
+      &ldquo;Ah, yes,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;but this is the flower of the souchong; it is the
+      blossom, the poetry of tea,&rdquo; and then he told me how it had been given him
+      by a friend, a merchant in the China trade, which used to flourish in
+      Boston, and was the poetry of commerce, as this delicate beverage was of
+      tea. That commerce is long past, and I fancy that the plant ceased to
+      bloom when the traffic fell into decay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Autocrat&rsquo;s windows had the same outlook upon the Charles as the
+      publisher&rsquo;s, and after tea we went up into a back parlor of the same
+      orientation, and saw the sunset die over the water, and the westering
+      flats and hills. Nowhere else in the world has the day a lovelier close,
+      and our talk took something of the mystic coloring that the heavens gave
+      those mantling expanses. It was chiefly his talk, but I have always found
+      the best talkers are willing that you should talk if you like, and a quick
+      sympathy and a subtle sense met all that I had to say from him and from
+      the unbroken circle of kindred intelligences about him. I saw him then in
+      the midst of his family, and perhaps never afterwards to better advantage,
+      or in a finer mood. We spoke of the things that people perhaps once liked
+      to deal with more than they do now; of the intimations of immortality, of
+      the experiences of morbid youth, and of all those messages from the
+      tremulous nerves which we take for prophecies. I was not ashamed, before
+      his tolerant wisdom, to acknowledge the effects that had lingered so long
+      with me in fancy and even in conduct, from a time of broken health and
+      troubled spirit; and I remember the exquisite tact in him which recognized
+      them as things common to all, however peculiar in each, which left them
+      mine for whatever obscure vanity I might have in them, and yet gave me the
+      companionship of the whole race in their experience. We spoke of
+      forebodings and presentiments; we approached the mystic confines of the
+      world from which no traveller has yet returned with a passport &lsquo;en regle&rsquo; 
+      and properly &lsquo;vise&rsquo;; and he held his light course through these filmy
+      impalpabilities with a charming sincerity, with the scientific conscience
+      that refuses either to deny the substance of things unseen, or to affirm
+      it. In the gathering dusk, so weird did my fortune of being there and
+      listening to him seem, that I might well have been a blessed ghost, for
+      all the reality I felt in myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I tried to tell him how much I had read him from my boyhood, and with what
+      joy and gain; and he was patient of these futilities, and I have no doubt
+      imagined the love that inspired them, and accepted that instead of the
+      poor praise. When the sunset passed, and the lamps were lighted, and we
+      all came back to our dear little firm-set earth, he began to question me
+      about my native region of it. From many forgotten inquiries I recall his
+      asking me what was the fashionable religion in Columbus, or the Church
+      that socially corresponded to the Unitarian Church in Boston. He had first
+      to clarify my intelligence as to-what Unitarianism was; we had
+      Universalists but not Unitarians; but when I understood, I answered from
+      such vantage as my own wholly outside Swedenborgianism gave me, that I
+      thought most of the most respectable people with us were of the
+      Presbyterian Church; some were certainly Episcopalians, but upon the whole
+      the largest number were Presbyterians. He found that very strange indeed;
+      and said that he did not believe there was a Presbyterian Church in
+      Boston; that the New England Calvinists were all of the Orthodox Church.
+      He had to explain Oxthodoxy to me, and then I could confess to one
+      Congregational Church in Columbus.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Probably I failed to give the Autocrat any very clear image of our social
+      frame in the West, but the fault was altogether mine, if I did. Such
+      lecturing tours as he had made had not taken him among us, as those of
+      Emerson and other New-Englanders had, and my report was positive rather
+      than comparative. I was full of pride in journalism at that day, and I
+      dare say that I vaunted the brilliancy and power of our newspapers more
+      than they merited; I should not have been likely to wrong them otherwise.
+      It is strange that in all the talk I had with him and Lowell, or rather
+      heard from them, I can recall nothing said of political affairs, though
+      Lincoln had then been nominated by the Republicans, and the Civil War had
+      practically begun. But we did not imagine such a thing in the North; we
+      rested secure in the belief that if Lincoln were elected the South would
+      eat all its fiery words, perhaps from the mere love and inveterate habit
+      of fire-eating.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I rent myself away from the Autocrat&rsquo;s presence as early as I could, and
+      as my evening had been too full of happiness to sleep upon at once, I
+      spent the rest of the night till two in the morning wandering about the
+      streets and in the Common with a Harvard Senior whom I had met. He was a
+      youth of like literary passions with myself, but of such different
+      traditions in every possible way that his deeply schooled and definitely
+      regulated life seemed as anomalous to me as my own desultory and
+      self-found way must have seemed to him. We passed the time in the delight
+      of trying to make ourselves known to each other, and in a promise to
+      continue by letter the effort, which duly lapsed into silent patience with
+      the necessarily insoluble problem.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0016" id="link2H_4_0016">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I must have lingered in Boston for the introduction to Hawthorne which
+      Lowell had offered me, for when it came, with a little note of kindness
+      and counsel for myself such as only Lowell had the gift of writing, it was
+      already so near Sunday that I stayed over till Monday before I started. I
+      do not recall what I did with the time, except keep myself from making it
+      a burden to the people I knew, and wandering about the city alone. Nothing
+      of it remains to me except the fortune that favored me that Sunday night
+      with a view of the old Granary Burying-ground on Tremont Street. I found
+      the gates open, and I explored every path in the place, wreaking myself in
+      such meagre emotion as I could get from the tomb of the Franklin family,
+      and rejoicing with the whole soul of my Western modernity in the evidence
+      of a remote antiquity which so many of the dim inscriptions afforded. I do
+      not think that I have ever known anything practically older than these
+      monuments, though I have since supped so full of classic and mediaeval
+      ruin. I am sure that I was more deeply touched by the epitaph of a poor
+      little Puritan maiden who died at sixteen in the early sixteen-thirties
+      than afterwards by the tomb of Caecilia Metella, and that the heartache
+      which I tried to put into verse when I got back to my room in the hotel
+      was none the less genuine because it would not lend itself to my literary
+      purpose, and remains nothing but pathos to this day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0017" id="link2H_4_0017">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I am not able to say how I reached the town of Lowell, where I went before
+      going to Concord, that I might ease the unhappy conscience I had about
+      those factories which I hated so much to see, and have it clean for the
+      pleasure of meeting the fabricator of visions whom I was authorized to
+      molest in any air-castle where I might find him. I only know that I went
+      to Lowell, and visited one of the great mills, which with their whirring
+      spools, the ceaseless flight of their shuttles, and the bewildering sight
+      and sound of all their mechanism have since seemed to me the death of the
+      joy that ought to come from work, if not the captivity of those who tended
+      them. But then I thought it right and well for me to be standing by,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+        &ldquo;With sick and scornful looks averse,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      while these others toiled; I did not see the tragedy in it, and I got my
+      pitiful literary antipathy away as soon as I could, no wiser for the sight
+      of the ingenious contrivances I inspected, and I am sorry to say no
+      sadder. In the cool of the evening I sat at the door of my hotel, and
+      watched the long files of the work-worn factory-girls stream by, with no
+      concern for them but to see which was pretty and which was plain, and with
+      no dream of a truer order than that which gave them ten hours&rsquo; work a day
+      in those hideous mills and lodged them in the barracks where they rested
+      from their toil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wonder if there is a stage that still runs between Lowell and Concord,
+      past meadow walls, and under the caressing boughs of way-side elms, and
+      through the bird-haunted gloom of woodland roads, in the freshness of the
+      summer morning? By a blessed chance I found that there was such a stage in
+      1860, and I took it from my hotel, instead of going back to Boston and up
+      to Concord as I must have had to do by train. The journey gave me the
+      intimacy of the New England country as I could have had it in no other
+      fashion, and for the first time I saw it in all the summer sweetness which
+      I have often steeped my soul in since. The meadows were newly mown, and
+      the air was fragrant with the grass, stretching in long winrows among the
+      brown bowlders, or capped with canvas in the little haycocks it had been
+      gathered into the day before. I was fresh from the affluent farms of the
+      Western Reserve, and this care of the grass touched me with a rude pity,
+      which I also bestowed on the meagre fields of corn and wheat; but still
+      the land was lovelier than any I had ever seen, with its old farmhouses,
+      and brambled gray stone walls, its stony hillsides, its staggering
+      orchards, its wooded tops, and its thick-brackened valleys. From West to
+      East the difference was as great as I afterwards found it from America to
+      Europe, and my impression of something quaint and strange was no keener
+      when I saw Old England the next year than when I saw New England now. I
+      had imagined the landscape bare of trees, and I was astonished to find it
+      almost as full of them as at home, though they all looked very little, as
+      they well might to eyes used to the primeval forests of Ohio. The road ran
+      through them from time to time, and took their coolness on its smooth hard
+      reaches, and then issued again in the glisten of the open fields.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I made phrases to myself about the scenery as we drove along; and yes, I
+      suppose I made phrases about the young girl who was one of the inside
+      passengers, and who, when the common strangeness had somewhat worn off,
+      began to sing, and sang most of the way to Concord. Perhaps she was not
+      very sage, and I am sure she was not of the caste of Vere de Vere, but she
+      was pretty enough, and she had a voice of a bird-like tunableness, so that
+      I would not have her out of the memory of that pleasant journey if I
+      could. She was long ago an elderly woman, if she lives, and I suppose she
+      would not now point out her fellow-passenger if he strolled in the evening
+      by the house where she had dismounted, upon her arrival in Concord, and
+      laugh and pull another girl away from the window, in the high excitement
+      of the prodigious adventure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0018" id="link2H_4_0018">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Her fellow-passenger was in far other excitement; he was to see Hawthorne,
+      and in a manner to meet Priscilla and Zenobia, and Hester Prynne and
+      little Pearl, and Miriam and Hilda, and Hollingsworth and Coverdale, and
+      Chillingworth and Dimmesdale, and Donatello and Kenyon; and he had no
+      heart for any such poor little reality as that, who could not have been
+      got into any story that one could respect, and must have been difficult
+      even in a Heinesque poem.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wasted that whole evening and the next morning in fond delaying, and it
+      was not until after the indifferent dinner I got at the tavern where I
+      stopped, that I found courage to go and present Lowell&rsquo;s letter to
+      Hawthorne. I would almost have foregone meeting the weird genius only to
+      have kept that letter, for it said certain infinitely precious things of
+      me with such a sweetness, such a grace, as Lowell alone could give his
+      praise. Years afterwards, when Hawthorne was dead, I met Mrs. Hawthorne,
+      and told her of the pang I had in parting with it, and she sent it me,
+      doubly enriched by Hawthorne&rsquo;s keeping. But now if I were to see him at
+      all I must give up my letter, and I carried it in my hand to the door of
+      the cottage he called The Wayside. It was never otherwise than a very
+      modest place, but the modesty was greater then than to-day, and there was
+      already some preliminary carpentry at one end of the cottage, which I saw
+      was to result in an addition to it. I recall pleasant fields across the
+      road before it; behind rose a hill wooded with low pines, such as is made
+      in Septimius Felton the scene of the involuntary duel between Septimius
+      and the young British officer. I have a sense of the woods coming quite
+      down to the house, but if this was so I do not know what to do with a
+      grassy slope which seems to have stretched part way up the hill. As I
+      approached, I looked for the tower which the author was fabled to climb
+      into at sight of the coming guest, and pull the ladder up after him; and I
+      wondered whether he would fly before me in that sort, or imagine some
+      easier means of escaping me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The door was opened to my ring by a tall handsome boy whom I suppose to
+      have been Mr. Julian Hawthorne; and the next moment I found myself in the
+      presence of the romancer, who entered from some room beyond. He advanced
+      carrying his head with a heavy forward droop, and with a pace for which I
+      decided that the word would be pondering. It was the pace of a bulky man
+      of fifty, and his head was that beautiful head we all know from the many
+      pictures of it. But Hawthorne&rsquo;s look was different from that of any
+      picture of him that I have seen. It was sombre and brooding, as the look
+      of such a poet should have been; it was the look of a man who had dealt
+      faithfully and therefore sorrowfully with that problem of evil which
+      forever attracted, forever evaded Hawthorne. It was by no means troubled;
+      it was full of a dark repose. Others who knew him better and saw him
+      oftener were familiar with other aspects, and I remember that one night at
+      Longfellow&rsquo;s table, when one of the guests happened to speak of the
+      photograph of Hawthorne which hung in a corner of the room, Lowell said,
+      after a glance at it, &ldquo;Yes, it&rsquo;s good; but it hasn&rsquo;t his fine &lsquo;accipitral&rsquo; 
+      [pertaining to the look of a bird of prey; hawklike. D.W.] look.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the face that confronted me, however, there was nothing of keen
+      alertness; but only a sort of quiet, patient intelligence, for which I
+      seek the right word in vain. It was a very regular face, with beautiful
+      eyes; the mustache, still entirely dark, was dense over the fine mouth.
+      Hawthorne was dressed in black, and he had a certain effect which I
+      remember, of seeming to have on a black cravat with no visible collar. He
+      was such a man that if I had ignorantly met him anywhere I should have
+      instantly felt him to be a personage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I must have given him the letter myself, for I have no recollection of
+      parting with it before, but I only remember his offering me his hand, and
+      making me shyly and tentatively welcome. After a few moments of the
+      demoralization which followed his hospitable attempts in me, he asked if I
+      would not like to go up on his hill with him and sit there, where he
+      smoked in the afternoon. He offered me a cigar, and when I said that I did
+      not smoke, he lighted it for himself, and we climbed the hill together. At
+      the top, where there was an outlook in the pines over the Concord meadows,
+      we found a log, and he invited me to a place on it beside him, and at
+      intervals of a minute or so he talked while he smoked. Heaven preserved me
+      from the folly of trying to tell him how much his books had been to me,
+      and though we got on rapidly at no time, I think we got on better for this
+      interposition. He asked me about Lowell, I dare say, for I told him of my
+      joy in meeting him and Doctor Holmes, and this seemed greatly to interest
+      him. Perhaps because he was so lately from Europe, where our great men are
+      always seen through the wrong end of the telescope, he appeared surprised
+      at my devotion, and asked me whether I cared as much for meeting them as I
+      should care for meeting the famous English authors. I professed that I
+      cared much more, though whether this was true, I now have my doubts, and I
+      think Hawthorne doubted it at the time. But he said nothing in comment,
+      and went on to speak generally of Europe and America. He was curious about
+      the West, which he seemed to fancy much more purely American, and said he
+      would like to see some part of the country on which the shadow (or, if I
+      must be precise, the damned shadow) of Europe had not fallen. I told him I
+      thought the West must finally be characterized by the Germans, whom we had
+      in great numbers, and, purely from my zeal for German poetry, I tried to
+      allege some proofs of their present influence, though I could think of
+      none outside of politics, which I thought they affected wholesomely. I
+      knew Hawthorne was a Democrat, and I felt it well to touch politics
+      lightly, but he had no more to say about the fateful election then pending
+      than Holmes or Lowell had.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the abrupt transition of his talk throughout, he began somehow to
+      speak of women, and said he had never seen a woman whom he thought quite
+      beautiful. In the same way he spoke of the New England temperament, and
+      suggested that the apparent coldness in it was also real, and that the
+      suppression of emotion for generations would extinguish it at last. Then
+      he questioned me as to my knowledge of Concord, and whether I had seen any
+      of the notable people. I answered that I had met no one but himself, as
+      yet, but I very much wished to see Emerson and Thoreau. I did not think it
+      needful to say that I wished to see Thoreau quite as much because he had
+      suffered in the cause of John Brown as because he had written the books
+      which had taken me; and when he said that Thoreau prided himself on coming
+      nearer the heart of a pine-tree than any other human being, I could say
+      honestly enough that I would rather come near the heart of a man. This
+      visibly pleased him, and I saw that it did not displease him, when he
+      asked whether I was not going to see his next neighbor, Mr. Alcott, and I
+      confessed that I had never heard of him. That surprised as well as pleased
+      him; he remarked, with whatever intention, that there was nothing like
+      recognition to make a man modest; and he entered into some account of the
+      philosopher, whom I suppose I need not be much ashamed of not knowing
+      then, since his influence was of the immediate sort that makes a man
+      important to his townsmen while he is still strange to his countrymen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hawthorne descanted a little upon the landscape, and said certain of the
+      pleasant fields below us be longed to him; but he preferred his hill-top,
+      and if he could have his way those arable fields should be grown up to
+      pines too. He smoked fitfully, and slowly, and in the hour that we spent
+      together, his whiffs were of the desultory and unfinal character of his
+      words. When we went down, he asked me into his house again, and would have
+      me stay to tea, for which we found the table laid. But there was a great
+      deal of silence in it all, and at times, in spite of his shadowy kindness,
+      I felt my spirits sink. After tea, he showed me a book case, where there
+      were a few books toppling about on the half-filled shelves, and said,
+      coldly, &ldquo;This is my library.&rdquo; I knew that men were his books, and though I
+      myself cared for books so much, I found it fit and fine that he should
+      care so little, or seem to care so little. Some of his own romances were
+      among the volumes on these shelves, and when I put my finger on the
+      &lsquo;Blithedale Romance&rsquo; and said that I preferred that to the others, his
+      face lighted up, and he said that he believed the Germans liked that best
+      too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon the whole we parted such good friends that when I offered to take
+      leave he asked me how long I was to be in Concord, and not only bade me
+      come to see him again, but said he would give me a card to Emerson, if I
+      liked. I answered, of course, that I should like it beyond all things; and
+      he wrote on the back of his card something which I found, when I got away,
+      to be, &ldquo;I find this young man worthy.&rdquo; The quaintness, the little
+      stiffness of it, if one pleases to call it so, was amusing to one who was
+      not without his sense of humor, but the kindness filled me to the throat
+      with joy. In fact, I entirely liked Hawthorne. He had been as cordial as
+      so shy a man could show himself; and I perceived, with the repose that
+      nothing else can give, the entire sincerity of his soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nothing could have been further from the behavior of this very great man
+      than any sort of posing, apparently, or a wish to affect me with a sense
+      of his greatness. I saw that he was as much abashed by our encounter as I
+      was; he was visibly shy to the point of discomfort, but in no ignoble
+      sense was he conscious, and as nearly as he could with one so much his
+      younger he made an absolute equality between us. My memory of him is
+      without alloy one of the finest pleasures of my life: In my heart I paid
+      him the same glad homage that I paid Lowell and Holmes, and he did nothing
+      to make me think that I had overpaid him. This seems perhaps very little
+      to say in his praise, but to my mind it is saying everything, for I have
+      known but few great men, especially of those I met in early life, when I
+      wished to lavish my admiration upon them, whom I have not the impression
+      of having left in my debt. Then, a defect of the Puritan quality, which I
+      have found in many New-Englanders, is that, wittingly or unwittingly, they
+      propose themselves to you as an example, or if not quite this, that they
+      surround themselves with a subtle ether of potential disapprobation, in
+      which, at the first sign of unworthiness in you, they helplessly suffer
+      you to gasp and perish; they have good hearts, and they would probably
+      come to your succor out of humanity, if they knew how, but they do not
+      know how. Hawthorne had nothing of this about him; he was no more tacitly
+      than he was explicitly didactic. I thought him as thoroughly in keeping
+      with his romances as Doctor Holmes had seemed with his essays and poems,
+      and I met him as I had met the Autocrat in the supreme hour of his fame.
+      He had just given the world the last of those incomparable works which it
+      was to have finished from his hand; the &lsquo;Marble Faun&rsquo; had worthily
+      followed, at a somewhat longer interval than usual, the &lsquo;Blithedale
+      Romance&rsquo;, and the &lsquo;House of Seven Gables&rsquo;, and the &lsquo;Scarlet Letter&rsquo;, and
+      had, perhaps carried his name higher than all the rest, and certainly
+      farther. Everybody was reading it, and more or less bewailing its
+      indefinite close, but yielding him that full honor and praise which a
+      writer can hope for but once in his life. Nobody dreamed that thereafter
+      only precious fragments, sketches more or less faltering, though all with
+      the divine touch in them, were further to enrich a legacy which in its
+      kind is the finest the race has received from any mind. As I have said, we
+      are always finding new Hawthornes, but the illusion soon wears away, and
+      then we perceive that they were not Hawthornes at all; that he had some
+      peculiar difference from them, which, by and-by, we shall no doubt consent
+      must be his difference from all men evermore.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am painfully aware that I have not summoned before the reader the image
+      of the man as it has always stood in my memory, and I feel a sort of shame
+      for my failure. He was so altogether simple that it seems as if it would
+      be easy to do so; but perhaps a spirit from the other world would be
+      simple too, and yet would no more stand at parle, or consent to be
+      sketched, than Hawthorne. In fact, he was always more or less merging into
+      the shadow, which was in a few years wholly to close over him; there was
+      nothing uncanny in his presence, there was nothing even unwilling, but he
+      had that apparitional quality of some great minds which kept Shakespeare
+      largely unknown to those who thought themselves his intimates, and has at
+      last left him a sort of doubt. There was nothing teasing or wilfully
+      elusive in Hawthorne&rsquo;s impalpability, such as I afterwards felt in
+      Thoreau; if he was not there to your touch, it was no fault of his; it was
+      because your touch was dull, and wanted the use of contact with such
+      natures. The hand passes through the veridical phantom without a sense of
+      its presence, but the phantom is none the less veridical for all that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0019" id="link2H_4_0019">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XVI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I kept the evening of the day I met Hawthorne wholly for the thoughts of
+      him, or rather for that reverberation which continues in the young
+      sensibilities after some important encounter. It must have been the next
+      morning that I went to find Thoreau, and I am dimly aware of making one or
+      two failures to find him, if I ever really found him at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He is an author who has fallen into that abeyance, awaiting all authors,
+      great or small, at some time or another; but I think that with him, at
+      least in regard to his most important book, it can be only transitory. I
+      have not read the story of his hermitage beside Walden Pond since the year
+      1858, but I have a fancy that if I should take it up now, I should think
+      it a wiser and truer conception of the world than I thought it then. It is
+      no solution of the problem; men are not going to answer the riddle of the
+      painful earth by building themselves shanties and living upon beans and
+      watching ant-fights; but I do not believe Tolstoy himself has more clearly
+      shown the hollowness, the hopelessness, the unworthiness of the life of
+      the world than Thoreau did in that book. If it were newly written it could
+      not fail of a far vaster acceptance than it had then, when to those who
+      thought and felt seriously it seemed that if slavery could only be
+      controlled, all things else would come right of themselves with us.
+      Slavery has not only been controlled, but it has been destroyed, and yet
+      things have not begun to come right with us; but it was in the order of
+      Providence that chattel slavery should cease before industrial slavery,
+      and the infinitely crueler and stupider vanity and luxury bred of it,
+      should be attacked. If there was then any prevision of the struggle now at
+      hand, the seers averted their eyes, and strove only to cope with the less
+      evil. Thoreau himself, who had so clear a vision of the falsity and folly
+      of society as we still have it, threw himself into the tide that was
+      already, in Kansas and Virginia, reddened with war; he aided and abetted
+      the John Brown raid, I do not recall how much or in what sort; and he had
+      suffered in prison for his opinions and actions. It was this inevitable
+      heroism of his that, more than his literature even, made me wish to see
+      him and revere him; and I do not believe that I should have found the
+      veneration difficult, when at last I met him in his insufficient person,
+      if he had otherwise been present to my glowing expectation. He came into
+      the room a quaint, stump figure of a man, whose effect of long trunk and
+      short limbs was heightened by his fashionless trousers being let down too
+      low. He had a noble face, with tossed hair, a distraught eye, and a fine
+      aquilinity of profile, which made me think at once of Don Quixote and of
+      Cervantes; but his nose failed to add that foot to his stature which Lamb
+      says a nose of that shape will always give a man. He tried to place me
+      geographically after he had given me a chair not quite so far off as Ohio,
+      though still across the whole room, for he sat against one wall, and I
+      against the other; but apparently he failed to pull himself out of his
+      revery by the effort, for he remained in a dreamy muse, which all my
+      attempts to say something fit about John Brown and Walden Pond seemed only
+      to deepen upon him. I have not the least doubt that I was needless and
+      valueless about both, and that what I said could not well have prompted an
+      important response; but I did my poor best, and I was terribly
+      disappointed in the result. The truth is that in those days I was a
+      helplessly concrete young person, and all forms of the abstract, the
+      air-drawn, afflicted me like physical discomforts. I do not remember that
+      Thoreau spoke of his books or of himself at all, and when he began to
+      speak of John Brown, it was not the warm, palpable, loving, fearful old
+      man of my conception, but a sort of John Brown type, a John Brown ideal, a
+      John Brown principle, which we were somehow (with long pauses between the
+      vague, orphic phrases) to cherish, and to nourish ourselves upon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not merely a defeat of my hopes, it was a rout, and I felt myself
+      so scattered over the field of thought that I could hardly bring my forces
+      together for retreat. I must have made some effort, vain and foolish
+      enough, to rematerialize my old demigod, but when I came away it was with
+      the feeling that there was very little more left of John Brown than there
+      was of me. His body was not mouldering in the grave, neither was his soul
+      marching on; his ideal, his type, his principle alone existed, and I did
+      not know what to do with it. I am not blaming Thoreau; his words were
+      addressed to a far other understanding than mine, and it was my misfortune
+      if I could not profit by them. I think, or I venture to hope, that I could
+      profit better by them now; but in this record I am trying honestly to
+      report their effect with the sort of youth I was then.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0020" id="link2H_4_0020">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XVII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Such as I was, I rather wonder that I had the courage, after this
+      experiment of Thoreau, to present the card Hawthorne had given me to
+      Emerson. I must have gone to him at once, however, for I cannot make out
+      any interval of time between my visit to the disciple and my visit to the
+      master. I think it was Emerson himself who opened his door to me, for I
+      have a vision of the fine old man standing tall on his threshold, with the
+      card in his hand, and looking from it to me with a vague serenity, while I
+      waited a moment on the door-step below him. He must then have been about
+      sixty, but I remember nothing of age in his aspect, though I have called
+      him an old man. His hair, I am sure, was still entirely dark, and his face
+      had a kind of marble youthfulness, chiselled to a delicate intelligence by
+      the highest and noblest thinking that any man has done. There was a
+      strange charm in Emerson&rsquo;s eyes, which I felt then and always, something
+      like that I saw in Lincoln&rsquo;s, but shyer, but sweeter and less sad. His
+      smile was the very sweetest I have ever beheld, and the contour of the
+      mask and the line of the profile were in keeping with this incomparable
+      sweetness of the mouth, at once grave and quaint, though quaint is not
+      quite the word for it either, but subtly, not unkindly arch, which again
+      is not the word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was his great fortune to have been mostly misunderstood, and to have
+      reached the dense intelligence of his fellow-men after a whole lifetime of
+      perfectly simple and lucid appeal, and his countenance expressed the
+      patience and forbearance of a wise man content to bide his time. It would
+      be hard to persuade people now that Emerson once represented to the
+      popular mind all that was most hopelessly impossible, and that in a
+      certain sort he was a national joke, the type of the incomprehensible, the
+      byword of the poor paragrapher. He had perhaps disabused the community
+      somewhat by presenting himself here and there as a lecturer, and talking
+      face to face with men in terms which they could not refuse to find as
+      clear as they were wise; he was more and more read, by certain persons,
+      here and there; but we are still so far behind him in the reach of his
+      far-thinking that it need not be matter of wonder that twenty years before
+      his death he was the most misunderstood man in America. Yet in that
+      twilight where he dwelt he loomed large upon the imagination; the minds
+      that could not conceive him were still aware of his greatness. I myself
+      had not read much of him, but I knew the essays he was printing in the
+      Atlantic, and I knew certain of his poems, though by no means many; yet I
+      had this sense of him, that he was somehow, beyond and above my ken, a
+      presence of force and beauty and wisdom, uncompanioned in our literature.
+      He had lately stooped from his ethereal heights to take part in the battle
+      of humanity, and I suppose that if the truth were told he was more to my
+      young fervor because he had said that John Brown had made the gallows
+      glorious like the cross, than because he had uttered all those truer and
+      wiser things which will still a hundred years hence be leading the thought
+      of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not know in just what sort he made me welcome, but I am aware of
+      sitting with him in his study or library, and of his presently speaking of
+      Hawthorne, whom I probably celebrated as I best could, and whom he praised
+      for his personal excellence, and for his fine qualities as a neighbor.
+      &ldquo;But his last book,&rdquo; he added, reflectively, &ldquo;is a mere mush,&rdquo; and I
+      perceived that this great man was no better equipped to judge an artistic
+      fiction than the groundlings who were then crying out upon the indefinite
+      close of the Marble Faun. Apparently he had read it, as they had, for the
+      story, but it seems to me now, if it did not seem to me then, that as far
+      as the problem of evil was involved, the book must leave it where it found
+      it. That is forever insoluble, and it was rather with that than with his
+      more or less shadowy people that the romancer was concerned. Emerson had,
+      in fact, a defective sense as to specific pieces of literature; he praised
+      extravagantly, and in the wrong place, especially among the new things,
+      and he failed to see the worth of much that was fine and precious beside
+      the line of his fancy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He began to ask me about the West, and about some unknown man in Michigan;
+      who had been sending him poems, and whom he seemed to think very
+      promising, though he has not apparently kept his word to do great things.
+      I did not find what Emerson had to say of my section very accurate or
+      important, though it was kindly enough, and just enough as to what the
+      West ought to do in literature. He thought it a pity that a literary
+      periodical which had lately been started in Cincinnati should be appealing
+      to the East for contributions, instead of relying upon the writers nearer
+      home; and he listened with what patience he could to my modest opinion
+      that we had not the writers nearer home. I never was of those Westerners
+      who believed that the West was kept out of literature by the jealousy of
+      the East, and I tried to explain why we had not the men to write that
+      magazine full in Ohio. He alleged the man in Michigan as one who alone
+      could do much to fill it worthily, and again I had to say that I had never
+      heard of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I felt rather guilty in my ignorance, and I had a notion that it did not
+      commend me, but happily at this moment Mr. Emerson was called to dinner,
+      and he asked me to come with him. After dinner we walked about in his
+      &ldquo;pleached garden&rdquo; a little, and then we came again into his library, where
+      I meant to linger only till I could fitly get away. He questioned me about
+      what I had seen of Concord, and whom besides Hawthorne I had met, and when
+      I told him only Thoreau, he asked me if I knew the poems of Mr. William
+      Ellery Channing. I have known them since, and felt their quality, which I
+      have gladly owned a genuine and original poetry; but I answered then truly
+      that I knew them only from Poe&rsquo;s criticisms: cruel and spiteful things
+      which I should be ashamed of enjoying as I once did.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whose criticisms?&rdquo; asked Emerson.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poe&rsquo;s,&rdquo; I said again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; he cried out, after a moment, as if he had returned from a far
+      search for my meaning, &ldquo;you mean the jingle-man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not know why this should have put me to such confusion, but if I had
+      written the criticisms myself I do not think I could have been more
+      abashed. Perhaps I felt an edge of reproof, of admonition, in a
+      characterization of Poe which the world will hardly agree with; though I
+      do not agree with the world about him, myself, in its admiration. At any
+      rate, it made an end of me for the time, and I remained as if already
+      absent, while Emerson questioned me as to what I had written in the
+      Atlantic Monthly. He had evidently read none of my contributions, for he
+      looked at them, in the bound volume of the magazine which he got down,
+      with the effect of being wholly strange to them, and then gravely affixed
+      my initials to each. He followed me to the door, still speaking of poetry,
+      and as he took a kindly enough leave of me, he said one might very well
+      give a pleasant hour to it now and then.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A pleasant hour to poetry! I was meaning to give all time and all eternity
+      to poetry, and I should by no means have wished to find pleasure in it; I
+      should have thought that a proof of inferior quality in the work; I should
+      have preferred anxiety, anguish even, to pleasure. But if Emerson thought
+      from the glance he gave my verses that I had better not lavish myself upon
+      that kind of thing, unless there was a great deal more of me than I could
+      have made apparent in our meeting, no doubt he was right. I was only too
+      painfully aware of my shortcoming, but I felt that it was shorter-coming
+      than it need have been. I had somehow not prospered in my visit to Emerson
+      as I had with Hawthorne, and I came away wondering in what sort I had gone
+      wrong. I was not a forth-putting youth, and I could not blame myself for
+      anything in my approaches that merited withholding; indeed, I made no
+      approaches; but as I must needs blame myself for something, I fell upon
+      the fact that in my confused retreat from Emerson&rsquo;s presence I had failed
+      in a certain slight point of ceremony, and I magnified this into an
+      offence of capital importance. I went home to my hotel, and passed the
+      afternoon in pure misery. I had moments of wild question when I debated
+      whether it would be better to go back and own my error, or whether it
+      would be better to write him a note, and try to set myself right in that
+      way. But in the end I did neither, and I have since survived my mortal
+      shame some forty years or more. But at the time it did not seem possible
+      that I should live through the day with it, and I thought that I ought at
+      least to go and confess it to Hawthorne, and let him disown the wretch who
+      had so poorly repaid the kindness of his introduction by such misbehavior.
+      I did indeed walk down by the Wayside, in the cool of the evening, and
+      there I saw Hawthorne for the last time. He was sitting on one of the
+      timbers beside his cottage, and smoking with an air of friendly calm. I
+      had got on very well with him, and I longed to go in, and tell him how ill
+      I had got on with Emerson; I believed that though he cast me off, he would
+      understand me, and would perhaps see some hope for me in another world,
+      though there could be none in this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I had not the courage to speak of the affair to any one but Fields, to
+      whom I unpacked my heart when I got back to Boston, and he asked me about
+      my adventures in Concord. By this time I could see it in a humorous light,
+      and I did not much mind his lying back in his chair and laughing and
+      laughing, till I thought he would roll out of it. He perfectly conceived
+      the situation, and got an amusement from it that I could get only through
+      sympathy with him. But I thought it a favorable moment to propose myself
+      as the assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, which I had the belief I
+      could very well become, with advantage to myself if not to the magazine.
+      He seemed to think so too; he said that if the place had not just been
+      filled, I should certainly have had it; and it was to his recollection of
+      this prompt ambition of mine that I suppose I may have owed my succession
+      to a like vacancy some four years later. He was charmingly kind; he
+      entered with the sweetest interest into the story of my economic life,
+      which had been full of changes and chances already. But when I said very
+      seriously that now I was tired of these fortuities, and would like to be
+      settled in something, he asked, with dancing eyes,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, how old are you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am twenty-three,&rdquo; I answered, and then the laughing fit took him again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you begin young, out there!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In my heart I did not think that twenty-three was so very young, but
+      perhaps it was; and if any one were to say that I had been portraying here
+      a youth whose aims were certainly beyond his achievements, who was
+      morbidly sensitive, and if not conceited was intolerably conscious, who
+      had met with incredible kindness, and had suffered no more than was good
+      for him, though he might not have merited his pain any more than his joy,
+      I do not know that I should gainsay him, for I am not at all sure that I
+      was not just that kind of youth when I paid my first visit to New England.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0021" id="link2H_4_0021">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was by boat that I arrived from Boston, on an August morning of 1860,
+      which was probably of the same quality as an August morning of 1900. I
+      used not to mind the weather much in those days; it was hot or it was
+      cold, it was wet or it was dry, but it was not my affair; and I suppose
+      that I sweltered about the strange city, with no sense of anything very
+      personal in the temperature, until nightfall. What I remember is being
+      high up in a hotel long since laid low, listening in the summer dark,
+      after the long day was done, to the Niagara roar of the omnibuses whose
+      tide then swept Broadway from curb to curb, for all the miles of its
+      length. At that hour the other city noises were stilled, or lost in this
+      vaster volume of sound, which seemed to fill the whole night. It had a
+      solemnity which the modern comer to New York will hardly imagine, for that
+      tide of omnibuses has long since ebbed away, and has left the air to the
+      strident discords of the elevated trains and the irregular alarum of the
+      grip-car gongs, which blend to no such harmonious thunder as rose from the
+      procession of those ponderous and innumerable vans. There was a sort of
+      inner quiet in the sound, and when I chose I slept off to it, and woke to
+      it in the morning refreshed and strengthened to explore the literary
+      situation in the metropolis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0022" id="link2H_4_0022">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Not that I think I left this to the second day. Very probably I lost no
+      time in going to the office of the Saturday Press, as soon as I had my
+      breakfast after arriving, and I have a dim impression of anticipating the
+      earliest of the Bohemians, whose gay theory of life obliged them to a good
+      many hardships in lying down early in the morning, and rising up late in
+      the day. If it was the office-boy who bore me company during the first
+      hour of my visit, by-and-by the editors and contributors actually began to
+      come in. I would not be very specific about them if I could, for since
+      that Bohemia has faded from the map of the republic of letters, it has
+      grown more and more difficult to trace its citizenship to any certain
+      writer. There are some living who knew the Bohemians and even loved them,
+      but there are increasingly few who were of them, even in the fond
+      retrospect of youthful follies and errors. It was in fact but a sickly
+      colony, transplanted from the mother asphalt of Paris, and never really
+      striking root in the pavements of New York; it was a colony of ideas, of
+      theories, which had perhaps never had any deep root anywhere. What these
+      ideas, these theories, were in art and in life, it would not be very easy
+      to say; but in the Saturday Press they came to violent expression, not to
+      say explosion, against all existing forms of respectability. If
+      respectability was your &lsquo;bete noire&rsquo;, then you were a Bohemian; and if you
+      were in the habit of rendering yourself in prose, then you necessarily
+      shredded your prose into very fine paragraphs of a sentence each, or of a
+      very few words, or even of one word. I believe this fashion prevailed till
+      very lately with some of the dramatic critics, who thought that it gave a
+      quality of epigram to the style; and I suppose it was borrowed from the
+      more spasmodic moments of Victor Hugo by the editor of the Press. He
+      brought it back with him when he came home from one of those sojourns in
+      Paris which possess one of the French accent rather than the French
+      language; I long desired to write in that fashion myself, but I had not
+      the courage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This editor was a man of such open and avowed cynicism that he may have
+      been, for all I know, a kindly optimist at heart; some say, however, that
+      he had really talked himself into being what he seemed. I only know that
+      his talk, the first day I saw him, was of such a sort that if he was half
+      as bad, he would have been too bad to be. He walked up and down his room
+      saying what lurid things he would directly do if any one accused him of
+      respectability, so that he might disabuse the minds of all witnesses.
+      There were four or five of his assistants and contributors listening to
+      the dreadful threats, which did not deceive even so great innocence as
+      mine, but I do not know whether they found it the sorry farce that I did.
+      They probably felt the fascination for him which I could not disown, in
+      spite of my inner disgust; and were watchful at the same time for the
+      effect of his words with one who was confessedly fresh from Boston, and
+      was full of delight in the people he had seen there. It appeared, with
+      him, to be proof of the inferiority of Boston that if you passed down
+      Washington Street, half a dozen men in the crowd would know you were
+      Holmes, or Lowell, or Longfellow, or Wendell Phillips; but in Broadway no
+      one would know who you were, or care to the measure of his smallest
+      blasphemy. I have since heard this more than once urged as a signal
+      advantage of New York for the aesthetic inhabitant, but I am not sure,
+      yet, that it is so. The unrecognized celebrity probably has his mind quite
+      as much upon himself as if some one pointed him out, and otherwise I
+      cannot think that the sense of neighborhood is such a bad thing for the
+      artist in any sort. It involves the sense of responsibility, which cannot
+      be too constant or too keen. If it narrows, it deepens; and this may be
+      the secret of Boston.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0023" id="link2H_4_0023">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It would not be easy to say just why the Bohemian group represented New
+      York literature to my imagination; for I certainly associated other names
+      with its best work, but perhaps it was because I had written for the
+      Saturday Press myself, and had my pride in it, and perhaps it was because
+      that paper really embodied the new literary life of the city. It was
+      clever, and full of the wit that tries its teeth upon everything. It
+      attacked all literary shams but its own, and it made itself felt and
+      feared. The young writers throughout the country were ambitious to be seen
+      in it, and they gave their best to it; they gave literally, for the
+      Saturday Press never paid in anything but hopes of paying, vaguer even
+      than promises. It is not too much to say that it was very nearly as well
+      for one to be accepted by the Press as to be accepted by the Atlantic, and
+      for the time there was no other literary comparison. To be in it was to be
+      in the company of Fitz James O&rsquo;Brien, Fitzhugh Ludlow, Mr. Aldrich, Mr.
+      Stedman, and whoever else was liveliest in prose or loveliest in verse at
+      that day in New York. It was a power, and although it is true that, as
+      Henry Giles said of it, &ldquo;Man cannot live by snapping-turtle alone,&rdquo; the
+      Press was very good snapping-turtle. Or, it seemed so then; I should be
+      almost afraid to test it now, for I do not like snapping-turtle so much as
+      I once did, and I have grown nicer in my taste, and want my
+      snapping-turtle of the very best. What is certain is that I went to the
+      office of the Saturday Press in New York with much the same sort of
+      feeling I had in going to the office of the Atlantic Monthly in Boston,
+      but I came away with a very different feeling. I had found there a
+      bitterness against Boston as great as the bitterness against
+      respectability, and as Boston was then rapidly becoming my second country,
+      I could not join in the scorn thought of her and said of her by the
+      Bohemians. I fancied a conspiracy among them to shock the literary
+      pilgrim, and to minify the precious emotions he had experienced in
+      visiting other shrines; but I found no harm in that, for I knew just how
+      much to be shocked, and I thought I knew better how to value certain
+      things of the soul than they. Yet when their chief asked me how I got on
+      with Hawthorne, and I began to say that he was very shy and I was rather
+      shy, and the king of Bohemia took his pipe out to break in upon me with
+      &ldquo;Oh, a couple of shysters!&rdquo; and the rest laughed, I was abashed all they
+      could have wished, and was not restored to myself till one of them said
+      that the thought of Boston made him as ugly as sin; then I began to hope
+      again that men who took themselves so seriously as that need not be taken
+      very seriously by me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In fact I had heard things almost as desperately cynical in other
+      newspaper offices before that, and I could not see what was so
+      distinctively Bohemian in these &lsquo;anime prave&rsquo;, these souls so baleful by
+      their own showing. But apparently Bohemia was not a state that you could
+      well imagine from one encounter, and since my stay in New York was to be
+      very short, I lost no time in acquainting myself further with it. That
+      very night I went to the beer-cellar, once very far up Broadway, where I
+      was given to know that the Bohemian nights were smoked and quaffed away.
+      It was said, so far West as Ohio, that the queen of Bohemia sometimes came
+      to Pfaff&rsquo;s: a young girl of a sprightly gift in letters, whose name or
+      pseudonym had made itself pretty well known at that day, and whose fate,
+      pathetic at all times, out-tragedies almost any other in the history of
+      letters. She was seized with hydrophobia from the bite of her dog, on a
+      railroad train; and made a long journey home in the paroxysms of that
+      agonizing disease, which ended in her death after she reached New York.
+      But this was after her reign had ended, and no such black shadow was cast
+      forward upon Pfaff&rsquo;s, whose name often figured in the verse and the
+      epigrammatically paragraphed prose of the &lsquo;Saturday Press&rsquo;. I felt that as
+      a contributor and at least a brevet Bohemian I ought not to go home
+      without visiting the famous place, and witnessing if I could not share the
+      revels of my comrades. As I neither drank beer nor smoked, my part in the
+      carousal was limited to a German pancake, which I found they had very good
+      at Pfaff&rsquo;s, and to listening to the whirling words of my commensals, at
+      the long board spread for the Bohemians in a cavernous space under the
+      pavement. There were writers for the &lsquo;Saturday Press&rsquo; and for Vanity Fair
+      (a hopefully comic paper of that day), and some of the artists who drew
+      for the illustrated periodicals. Nothing of their talk remains with me,
+      but the impression remains that it was not so good talk as I had heard in
+      Boston. At one moment of the orgy, which went but slowly for an orgy, we
+      were joined by some belated Bohemians whom the others made a great clamor
+      over; I was given to understand they were just recovered from a fearful
+      debauch; their locks were still damp from the wet towels used to restore
+      them, and their eyes were very frenzied. I was presented to these types,
+      who neither said nor did anything worthy of their awful appearance, but
+      dropped into seats at the table, and ate of the supper with an appetite
+      that seemed poor. I stayed hoping vainly for worse things till eleven
+      o&rsquo;clock, and then I rose and took my leave of a literary condition that
+      had distinctly disappointed me. I do not say that it may not have been
+      wickeder and wittier than I found it; I only report what I saw and heard
+      in Bohemia on my first visit to New York, and I know that my acquaintance
+      with it was not exhaustive. When I came the next year the Saturday Press
+      was no more, and the editor and his contributors had no longer a common
+      centre. The best of the young fellows whom I met there confessed, in a
+      pleasant exchange of letters which we had afterwards, that he thought the
+      pose a vain and unprofitable one; and when the Press was revived, after
+      the war, it was without any of the old Bohemian characteristics except
+      that of not paying for material. It could not last long upon these terms,
+      and again it passed away, and still waits its second palingenesis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The editor passed away too, not long after, and the thing that he had
+      inspired altogether ceased to be. He was a man of a certain sardonic
+      power, and used it rather fiercely and freely, with a joy probably more
+      apparent than real in the pain it gave. In my last knowledge of him he was
+      much milder than when I first knew him, and I have the feeling that he too
+      came to own before he died that man cannot live by snapping-turtle alone.
+      He was kind to some neglected talents, and befriended them with a vigor
+      and a zeal which he would have been the last to let you call generous. The
+      chief of these was Walt Whitman, who, when the Saturday Press took it up,
+      had as hopeless a cause with the critics on either side of the ocean as
+      any man could have. It was not till long afterwards that his English
+      admirers began to discover him, and to make his countrymen some noisy
+      reproaches for ignoring him; they were wholly in the dark concerning him
+      when the Saturday Press, which first stood his friend, and the young men
+      whom the Press gathered about it, made him their cult. No doubt he was
+      more valued because he was so offensive in some ways than he would have
+      been if he had been in no way offensive, but it remains a fact that they
+      celebrated him quite as much as was good for them. He was often at Pfaff&rsquo;s
+      with them, and the night of my visit he was the chief fact of my
+      experience. I did not know he was there till I was on my way out, for he
+      did not sit at the table under the pavement, but at the head of one
+      farther into the room. There, as I passed, some friendly fellow stopped me
+      and named me to him, and I remember how he leaned back in his chair, and
+      reached out his great hand to me, as if he were going to give it me for
+      good and all. He had a fine head, with a cloud of Jovian hair upon it, and
+      a branching beard and mustache, and gentle eyes that looked most kindly
+      into mine, and seemed to wish the liking which I instantly gave him,
+      though we hardly passed a word, and our acquaintance was summed up in that
+      glance and the grasp of his mighty fist upon my hand. I doubt if he had
+      any notion who or what I was beyond the fact that I was a young poet of
+      some sort, but he may possibly have remembered seeing my name printed
+      after some very Heinesque verses in the Press. I did not meet him again
+      for twenty years, and then I had only a moment with him when he was
+      reading the proofs of his poems in Boston. Some years later I saw him for
+      the last time, one day after his lecture on Lincoln, in that city, when he
+      came down from the platform to speak with some handshaking friends who
+      gathered about him. Then and always he gave me the sense of a sweet and
+      true soul, and I felt in him a spiritual dignity which I will not try to
+      reconcile with his printing in the forefront of his book a passage from a
+      private letter of Emerson&rsquo;s, though I believe he would not have seen such
+      a thing as most other men would, or thought ill of it in another. The
+      spiritual purity which I felt in him no less than the dignity is something
+      that I will no more try to reconcile with what denies it in his page; but
+      such things we may well leave to the adjustment of finer balances than we
+      have at hand. I will make sure only of the greatest benignity in the
+      presence of the man. The apostle of the rough, the uncouth, was the
+      gentlest person; his barbaric yawp, translated into the terms of social
+      encounter, was an address of singular quiet, delivered in a voice of
+      winning and endearing friendliness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As to his work itself, I suppose that I do not think it so valuable in
+      effect as in intention. He was a liberating force, a very &ldquo;imperial
+      anarch&rdquo; in literature; but liberty is never anything but a means, and what
+      Whitman achieved was a means and not an end, in what must be called his
+      verse. I like his prose, if there is a difference, much better; there he
+      is of a genial and comforting quality, very rich and cordial, such as I
+      felt him to be when I met him in person. His verse seems to me not poetry,
+      but the materials of poetry, like one&rsquo;s emotions; yet I would not misprize
+      it, and I am glad to own that I have had moments of great pleasure in it.
+      Some French critic quoted in the Saturday Press (I cannot think of his
+      name) said the best thing of him when he said that he made you a partner
+      of the enterprise, for that is precisely what he does, and that is what
+      alienates and what endears in him, as you like or dislike the partnership.
+      It is still something neighborly, brotherly, fatherly, and so I felt him
+      to be when the benign old man looked on me and spoke to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0024" id="link2H_4_0024">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      That night at Pfaff&rsquo;s must have been the last of the Bohemians for me, and
+      it was the last of New York authorship too, for the time. I do not know
+      why I should not have imagined trying to see Curtis, whom I knew so much
+      by heart, and whom I adored, but I may not have had the courage, or I may
+      have heard that he was out of town; Bryant, I believe, was then out of the
+      country; but at any rate I did not attempt him either. The Bohemians were
+      the beginning and the end of the story for me, and to tell the truth I did
+      not like the story. I remember that as I sat at that table under the
+      pavement, in Pfaff&rsquo;s beer-cellar, and listened to the wit that did not
+      seem very funny, I thought of the dinner with Lowell, the breakfast with
+      Fields, the supper at the Autocrat&rsquo;s, and felt that I had fallen very far.
+      In fact it can do no harm at this distance of time to confess that it
+      seemed to me then, and for a good while afterwards, that a person who had
+      seen the men and had the things said before him that I had in Boston,
+      could not keep himself too carefully in cotton; and this was what I did
+      all the following winter, though of course it was a secret between me and
+      me. I dare say it was not the worst thing I could have done, in some
+      respects.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My sojourn in New York could not have been very long, and the rest of it
+      was mainly given to viewing the monuments of the city from the windows of
+      omnibuses and the platforms of horse-cars. The world was so simple then
+      that there were perhaps only a half-dozen cities that had horse-cars in
+      them, and I travelled in those conveyances at New York with an unfaded
+      zest, even after my journeys back and forth between Boston and Cambridge.
+      I have not the least notion where I went or what I saw, but I suppose that
+      it was up and down the ugly east and west avenues, then lying open to the
+      eye in all the hideousness now partly concealed by the elevated roads, and
+      that I found them very stately and handsome. Indeed, New York was really
+      handsomer then than it is now, when it has so many more pieces of
+      beautiful architecture, for at that day the skyscrapers were not yet, and
+      there was a fine regularity in the streets that these brute bulks have
+      robbed of all shapeliness. Dirt and squalor there were a plenty, but there
+      was infinitely more comfort. The long succession of cross streets was yet
+      mostly secure from business, after you passed Clinton Place; commerce was
+      just beginning to show itself in Union Square, and Madison Square was
+      still the home of the McFlimsies, whose kin and kind dwelt unmolested in
+      the brownstone stretches of Fifth Avenue. I tried hard to imagine them
+      from the acquaintance Mr. Butler&rsquo;s poem had given me, and from the
+      knowledge the gentle satire of The &lsquo;Potiphar Papers&rsquo; had spread broadcast
+      through a community shocked by the excesses of our best society; it was
+      not half so bad then as the best now, probably. But I do not think I made
+      very much of it, perhaps because most of the people who ought to have been
+      in those fine mansions were away at the seaside and the mountains.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The mountains I had seen on my way down from Canada, but the sea-side not,
+      and it would never do to go home without visiting some famous summer
+      resort. I must have fixed upon Long Branch because I must have heard of it
+      as then the most fashionable; and one afternoon I took the boat for that
+      place. By this means I not only saw sea-bathing for the first time, but I
+      saw a storm at sea: a squall struck us so suddenly that it blew away all
+      the camp-stools of the forward promenade; it was very exciting, and I long
+      meant to use in literature the black wall of cloud that settled on the
+      water before us like a sort of portable midnight; I now throw it away upon
+      the reader, as it were; it never would come in anywhere. I stayed all
+      night at Long Branch, and I had a bath the next morning before breakfast:
+      an extremely cold one, with a life-line to keep me against the undertow.
+      In this rite I had the company of a young New-Yorker, whom I had met on
+      the boat coming down, and who was of the light, hopeful, adventurous
+      business type which seems peculiar to the city, and which has always
+      attracted me. He told me much about his life, and how he lived, and what
+      it cost him to live. He had a large room at a fashionable boardinghouse,
+      and he paid fourteen dollars a week. In Columbus I had such a room at such
+      a house, and paid three and a half, and I thought it a good deal. But
+      those were the days before the war, when America was the cheapest country
+      in the world, and the West was incredibly inexpensive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a day of lonely splendor at this scene of fashion and gaiety, I went
+      back to New York, and took the boat for Albany on my way home. I noted
+      that I had no longer the vivid interest in nature and human nature which I
+      had felt in setting out upon my travels, and I said to myself that this
+      was from having a mind so crowded with experiences and impressions that it
+      could receive no more; and I really suppose that if the happiest phrase
+      had offered itself to me at some moments, I should scarcely have looked
+      about me for a landscape or a figure to fit it to. I was very glad to get
+      back to my dear little city in the West (I found it seething in an August
+      sun that was hot enough to have calcined the limestone State House), and
+      to all the friends I was so fond of.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0025" id="link2H_4_0025">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I did what I could to prove myself unworthy of them by refusing their
+      invitations, and giving myself wholly to literature, during the early part
+      of the winter that followed; and I did not realize my error till the
+      invitations ceased to come, and I found myself in an unbroken intellectual
+      solitude. The worst of it was that an ungrateful Muse did little in return
+      for the sacrifices I made her, and the things I now wrote were not liked
+      by the editors I sent them to. The editorial taste is not always the test
+      of merit, but it is the only one we have, and I am not saying the editors
+      were wrong in my case. There were then such a very few places where you
+      could market your work: the Atlantic in Boston and Harper&rsquo;s in New York
+      were the magazines that paid, though the Independent newspaper bought
+      literary material; the Saturday Press printed it without buying, and so
+      did the old Knickerbocker Magazine, though there was pecuniary good-will
+      in both these cases. I toiled much that winter over a story I had long
+      been writing, and at last sent it to the Atlantic, which had published
+      five poems for me the year before. After some weeks, or it may have been
+      months, I got it back with a note saying that the editors had the less
+      regret in returning it because they saw that in the May number of the
+      Knickerbocker the first chapter of the story had appeared. Then I
+      remembered that, years before, I had sent this chapter to that magazine,
+      as a sketch to be printed by itself, and afterwards had continued the
+      story from it. I had never heard of its acceptance, and supposed of course
+      that it was rejected; but on my second visit to New York I called at the
+      Knickerbocker office, and a new editor, of those that the magazine was
+      always having in the days of its failing fortunes, told me that he had
+      found my sketch in rummaging about in a barrel of his predecessors
+      manuscripts, and had liked it, and printed it. He said that there were
+      fifteen dollars coming to me for that sketch, and might he send the money
+      to me? I said that he might, though I do not see, to this day, why he did
+      not give it me on the spot; and he made a very small minute in a very
+      large sheet of paper (really like Dick Swiveller), and promised I should
+      have it that night; but I sailed the next day for Liverpool without it. I
+      sailed without the money for some verses that Vanity Fair bought of me,
+      but I hardly expected that, for the editor, who was then Artemus Ward, had
+      frankly told me in taking my address that ducats were few at that moment
+      with Vanity Fair. I was then on my way to be consul at Venice, where I
+      spent the next four years in a vigilance for Confederate privateers which
+      none of them ever surprised. I had asked for the consulate at Munich,
+      where I hoped to steep myself yet longer in German poetry, but when my
+      appointment came, I found it was for Rome. I was very glad to get Rome
+      even; but the income of the office was in fees, and I thought I had better
+      go on to Washington and find out how much the fees amounted to. People in
+      Columbus who had been abroad said that on five hundred dollars you could
+      live in Rome like a prince, but I doubted this; and when I learned at the
+      State Department that the fees of the Roman consulate came to only three
+      hundred, I perceived that I could not live better than a baron, probably,
+      and I despaired. The kindly chief of the consular bureau said that the
+      President&rsquo;s secretaries, Mr. John Nicolay and Mr. John Hay, were
+      interested in my appointment, and he advised my going over to the White
+      House and seeing them. I lost no time in doing that, and I learned that as
+      young Western men they were interested in me because I was a young Western
+      man who had done something in literature, and they were willing to help me
+      for that reason, and for no other that I ever knew. They proposed my going
+      to Venice; the salary was then seven hundred and fifty, but they thought
+      they could get it put up to a thousand. In the end they got it put up to
+      fifteen hundred, and so I went to Venice, where if I did not live like a
+      prince on that income, I lived a good deal more like a prince than I could
+      have done at Rome on a fifth of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If the appointment was not present fortune, it was the beginning of the
+      best luck I have had in the world, and I am glad to owe it all to those
+      friends of my verse, who could have been no otherwise friends of me. They
+      were then beginning very early careers of distinction which have not been
+      wholly divided. Mr. Nicolay could have been about twenty-five, and Mr. Hay
+      nineteen or twenty. No one dreamed as yet of the opportunity opening to
+      them in being so constantly near the man whose life they have written, and
+      with whose fame they have imperishably interwrought their names. I
+      remember the sobered dignity of the one, and the humorous gaiety of the
+      other, and how we had some young men&rsquo;s joking and laughing together, in
+      the anteroom where they received me, with the great soul entering upon its
+      travail beyond the closed door. They asked me if I had ever seen the
+      President, and I said that I had seen him at Columbus, the year before;
+      but I could not say how much I should like to see him again, and thank him
+      for the favor which I had no claim to at his hands, except such as the
+      slight campaign biography I had written could be thought to have given me.
+      That day or another, as I left my friends, I met him in the corridor
+      without, and he looked at the space I was part of with his ineffably
+      melancholy eyes, without knowing that I was the indistinguishable person
+      in whose &ldquo;integrity and abilities he had reposed such special confidence&rdquo;
+       as to have appointed him consul for Venice and the ports of the
+      Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom, though he might have recognized the terms of my
+      commission if I had reminded him of them. I faltered a moment in my
+      longing to address him, and then I decided that every one who forebore to
+      speak needlessly to him, or to shake his hand, did him a kindness; and I
+      wish I could be as sure of the wisdom of all my past behavior as I am of
+      that piece of it. He walked up to the water-cooler that stood in the
+      corner, and drew himself a full goblet from it, which he poured down his
+      throat with a backward tilt of his head, and then went wearily within
+      doors. The whole affair, so simple, has always remained one of a certain
+      pathos in my memory, and I would rather have seen Lincoln in that
+      unconscious moment than on some statelier occasion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0026" id="link2H_4_0026">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I went home to Ohio; and sent on the bond I was to file in the Treasury
+      Department; but it was mislaid there, and to prevent another chance of
+      that kind I carried on the duplicate myself. It was on my second visit
+      that I met the generous young Irishman William D. O&rsquo;Connor, at the house
+      of my friend Piatt, and heard his ardent talk. He was one of the promising
+      men of that day, and he had written an anti-slavery novel in the heroic
+      mood of Victor Hugo, which greatly took my fancy; and I believe he wrote
+      poems too. He had not yet risen to be the chief of Walt Whitman&rsquo;s
+      champions outside of the Saturday Press, but he had already espoused the
+      theory of Bacon&rsquo;s authorship of Shakespeare, then newly exploited by the
+      poor lady of Bacon&rsquo;s name, who died constant to it in an insane asylum. He
+      used to speak of the reputed dramatist as &ldquo;the fat peasant of Stratford,&rdquo;
+       and he was otherwise picturesque of speech in a measure that consoled, if
+      it did not convince. The great war was then full upon us, and when in the
+      silences of our literary talk its awful breath was heard, and its shadow
+      fell upon the hearth where we gathered round the first fires of autumn,
+      O&rsquo;Connor would lift his beautiful head with a fine effect of prophecy, and
+      say, &ldquo;Friends, I feel a sense of victory in the air.&rdquo; He was not wrong;
+      only the victory was for the other aide.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Who beside O&rsquo;Connor shared in these saddened symposiums I cannot tell now;
+      but probably other young journalists and office-holders, intending
+      litterateurs, since more or less extinct. I make certain only of the young
+      Boston publisher who issued a very handsome edition of &lsquo;Leaves of Grass&rsquo;,
+      and then failed promptly if not consequently. But I had already met, in my
+      first sojourn at the capital, a young journalist who had given hostages to
+      poetry, and whom I was very glad to see and proud to know. Mr. Stedman and
+      I were talking over that meeting the other day, and I can be surer than I
+      might have been without his memory, that I found him at a friend&rsquo;s house,
+      where he was nursing himself for some slight sickness, and that I sat by
+      his bed while our souls launched together into the joyful realms of hope
+      and praise. In him I found the quality of Boston, the honor and passion of
+      literature, and not a mere pose of the literary life; and the world knows
+      without my telling how true he has been to his ideal of it. His earthly
+      mission then was to write letters from Washington for the New York World,
+      which started in life as a good young evening paper, with a decided
+      religious tone, so that the Saturday Press could call it the
+      Night-blooming Serious. I think Mr. Stedman wrote for its editorial page
+      at times, and his relation to it as a Washington correspondent had an
+      authority which is wanting to the function in these days of perfected
+      telegraphing. He had not yet achieved that seat in the Stock Exchange
+      whose possession has justified his recourse to business, and has helped
+      him to mean something more single in literature than many more singly
+      devoted to it. I used sometimes to speak about that with another eager
+      young author in certain middle years when we were chafing in editorial
+      harness, and we always decided that Stedman had the best of it in being
+      able to earn his living in a sort so alien to literature that he could
+      come to it unjaded, and with a gust unspoiled by kindred savors. But no
+      man shapes his own life, and I dare say that Stedman may have been all the
+      time envying us our tripods from his high place in the Stock Exchange.
+      What is certain is that he has come to stand for literature and to embody
+      New York in it as no one else does. In a community which seems never to
+      have had a conscious relation to letters, he has kept the faith with
+      dignity and fought the fight with constant courage. Scholar and poet at
+      once, he has spoken to his generation with authority which we can forget
+      only in the charm which makes us forget everything else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But his fame was still before him when we met, and I could bring to him an
+      admiration for work which had not yet made itself known to so many; but
+      any admirer was welcome. We talked of what we had done, and each said how
+      much he liked certain thing of the other&rsquo;s; I even seized my advantage of
+      his helplessness to read him a poem of mine which I had in my pocket; he
+      advised me where to place it; and if the reader will not think it an
+      unfair digression, I will tell here what became of that poem, for I think
+      its varied fortunes were amusing, and I hope my own sufferings and final
+      triumph with it will not be without encouragement to the young literary
+      endeavorer. It was a poem called, with no prophetic sense of fitness,
+      &ldquo;Forlorn,&rdquo; and I tried it first with the &lsquo;Atlantic Monthly&rsquo;, which would
+      not have it. Then I offered it in person to a former editor of &lsquo;Harper&rsquo;s
+      Monthly&rsquo;, but he could not see his advantage in it, and I carried it
+      overseas to Venice with me. From that point I sent it to all the English
+      magazines as steadily as the post could carry it away and bring it back.
+      On my way home, four years later, I took it to London with me, where a
+      friend who knew Lewes, then just beginning with the &lsquo;Fortnightly Review&rsquo;,
+      sent it to him for me. It was promptly returned, with a letter wholly
+      reserved as to its quality, but full of a poetic gratitude for my wish to
+      contribute to the Fortnightly. Then I heard that a certain Mr. Lucas was
+      about to start a magazine, and I offered the poem to him. The kindest
+      letter of acceptance followed me to America, and I counted upon fame and
+      fortune as usual, when the news of Mr. Lucas&rsquo;s death came. I will not
+      poorly joke an effect from my poem in the fact; but the fact remains. By
+      this time I was a writer in the office of the &lsquo;Nation&rsquo; newspaper, and
+      after I left this place to be Mr. Fields&rsquo;s assistant on the Atlantic, I
+      sent my poem to the Nation, where it was printed at last. In such scant
+      measure as my verses have pleased it has found rather unusual favor, and I
+      need not say that its misfortunes endeared it to its author.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But all this is rather far away from my first meeting with Stedman in
+      Washington. Of course I liked him, and I thought him very handsome and
+      fine, with a full beard cut in the fashion he has always worn it, and with
+      poet&rsquo;s eyes lighting an aquiline profile. Afterwards, when I saw him
+      afoot, I found him of a worldly splendor in dress, and envied him, as much
+      as I could envy him anything, the New York tailor whose art had clothed
+      him: I had a New York tailor too, but with a difference. He had a worldly
+      dash along with his supermundane gifts, which took me almost as much, and
+      all the more because I could see that he valued himself nothing upon it.
+      He was all for literature, and for literary men as the superiors of every
+      one. I must have opened my heart to him a good deal, for when I told him
+      how the newspaper I had written for from Canada and New England had ceased
+      to print my letters, he said, &ldquo;Think of a man like sitting in judgment on
+      a man like you!&rdquo; I thought of it, and was avenged if not comforted; and at
+      any rate I liked Stedman&rsquo;s standing up so stiffly for the honor of a craft
+      that is rather too limp in some of its votaries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I suppose it was he who introduced me to the Stoddards, whom I met in New
+      York just before I sailed, and who were then in the glow of their early
+      fame as poets. They knew about my poor beginnings, and they were very,
+      very good to me. Stoddard went with me to Franklin Square, and gave the
+      sanction of his presence to the ineffectual offer of my poem there. But
+      what I relished most was the long talks I had with them both about
+      authorship in all its phases, and the exchange of delight in this poem and
+      that, this novel and that, with gay, wilful runs away to make some wholly
+      irrelevant joke, or fire puns into the air at no mark whatever. Stoddard
+      had then a fame, with the sweetness of personal affection in it, from the
+      lyrics and the odes that will perhaps best keep him known, and Mrs.
+      Stoddard was beginning to make her distinct and special quality felt in
+      the magazines, in verse and fiction. In both it seems to me that she has
+      failed of the recognition which her work merits. Her tales and novels have
+      in them a foretaste of realism, which was too strange for the palate of
+      their day, and is now too familiar, perhaps. It is a peculiar fate, and
+      would form the scheme of a pretty study in the history of literature. But
+      in whatever she did she left the stamp of a talent like no other, and of a
+      personality disdainful of literary environment. In a time when most of us
+      had to write like Tennyson, or Longfellow, or Browning, she never would
+      write like any one but herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember very well the lodging over a corner of Fourth Avenue and some
+      downtown street where I visited these winning and gifted people, and
+      tasted the pleasure of their racy talk, and the hospitality of their
+      good-will toward all literature, which certainly did not leave me out. We
+      sat before their grate in the chill of the last October days, and they set
+      each other on to one wild flight of wit after another, and again I bathed
+      my delighted spirit in the atmosphere of a realm where for the time at
+      least no
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       &ldquo;&mdash;&mdash;rumor of oppression or defeat,
+        Of unsuccessful or successful war,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      could penetrate. I liked the Stoddards because they were frankly not of
+      that Bohemia which I disliked so much, and thought it of no promise or
+      validity; and because I was fond of their poetry and found them in it. I
+      liked the absolutely literary keeping of their lives. He had then, and for
+      long after, a place in the Custom house, but he was no more of that than
+      Lamb was of India House. He belonged to that better world where there is
+      no interest but letters, and which was as much like heaven for me as
+      anything I could think of.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The meetings with the Stoddards repeated themselves when I came back to
+      sail from New York, early in November. Mixed up with the cordial pleasure
+      of them in my memory is a sense of the cold and wet outdoors, and the
+      misery of being in those infamous New York streets, then as for long
+      afterwards the squalidest in the world. The last night I saw my friends
+      they told me of the tragedy which had just happened at the camp in the
+      City Hall Park. Fitz James O&rsquo;Brien, the brilliant young Irishman who had
+      dazzled us with his story of &ldquo;The Diamond Lens,&rdquo; and frozen our blood with
+      his ingenious tale of a ghost&mdash;&ldquo;What was It&rdquo;&mdash;a ghost that could
+      be felt and heard, but not seen&mdash;had enlisted for the war, and risen
+      to be an officer with the swift process of the first days of it. In that
+      camp he had just then shot and killed a man for some infraction of
+      discipline, and it was uncertain what the end would be. He was acquitted,
+      however, and it is known how he afterwards died of lockjaw from a wound
+      received in battle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0027" id="link2H_4_0027">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Before this last visit in New York there was a second visit to Boston,
+      which I need not dwell upon, because it was chiefly a revival of the
+      impressions of the first. Again I saw the Fieldses in their home; again
+      the Autocrat in his, and Lowell now beneath his own roof, beside the study
+      fire where I was so often to sit with him in coming years. At dinner
+      (which we had at two o&rsquo;clock) the talk turned upon my appointment, and he
+      said of me to his wife: &ldquo;Think of his having got Stillman&rsquo;s place! We
+      ought to put poison in his wine,&rdquo; and he told me of the wish the painter
+      had to go to Venice and follow up Ruskin&rsquo;s work there in a book of his
+      own. But he would not let me feel very guilty, and I will not pretend that
+      I had any personal regret for my good fortune.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The place was given me perhaps because I had not nearly so many other
+      gifts as he who lost it, and who was at once artist, critic, journalist,
+      traveller, and eminently each. I met him afterwards in Rome, which the
+      powers bestowed upon him instead of Venice, and he forgave me, though I do
+      not know whether he forgave the powers. We walked far and long over the
+      Campagna, and I felt the charm of a most uncommon mind in talk which came
+      out richest and fullest in the presence of the wild nature which he loved
+      and knew so much better than most other men. I think that the book he
+      would have written about Venice is forever to be regretted, and I do not
+      at all console myself for its loss with the book I have written myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At Lowell&rsquo;s table that day they spoke of what sort of winter I should find
+      in Venice, and he inclined to the belief that I should want a fire there.
+      On his study hearth a very brisk one burned when we went back to it, and
+      kept out the chill of a cold easterly storm. We looked through one of the
+      windows at the rain, and he said he could remember standing and looking
+      out of that window at such a storm when he was a child; for he was born in
+      that house, and his life had kept coming back to it. He died in it, at
+      last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a lifting of the rain he walked with me down to the village, as he
+      always called the denser part of the town about Harvard Square, and saw me
+      aboard a horse-car for Boston. Before we parted he gave me two charges: to
+      open my mouth when I began to speak Italian, and to think well of women.
+      He said that our race spoke its own tongue with its teeth shut, and so
+      failed to master the languages that wanted freer utterance. As to women,
+      he said there were unworthy ones, but a good woman was the best thing in
+      the world, and a man was always the better for honoring women.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0028" id="link2H_4_0028">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ROUNDABOUT TO BOSTON
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      During the four years of my life in Venice the literary intention was
+      present with me at all times and in all places. I wrote many things in
+      verse, which I sent to the magazines in every part of the English-speaking
+      world, but they came unerringly back to me, except in three instances
+      only, when they were kept by the editors who finally printed them. One of
+      these pieces was published in the Atlantic Monthly; another in Harpers
+      Magazine; the third was got into the New York Ledger through the kindness
+      of Doctor Edward Everett Hale, who used I know not what mighty magic to
+      that end. I had not yet met him; but he interested himself in my ballad as
+      if it had been his own. His brother, Charles Hale, later Consul-General
+      for Egypt, whom I saw almost every moment of the two visits he paid Venice
+      in my time, had sent it to him, after copying it in his own large, fair
+      hand, so that it could be read. He was not quite of that literary Boston
+      which I so fondly remembered my glimpses of; he was rather of a
+      journalistic and literary Boston which I had never known; but he was of
+      Boston, after all. He had been in Lowell&rsquo;s classes at Harvard; he had
+      often met Longfellow in Cambridge; he knew Doctor Holmes, of course; and
+      he let me talk of my idols to my heart&rsquo;s content. I think he must have
+      been amused by my raptures; most people would have been; but he was kind
+      and patient, and he listened to me with a sweet intelligence which I shall
+      always gratefully remember. He died too young, with his life&rsquo;s
+      possibilities mainly unfulfilled; but none who knew him could fail to
+      imagine them, or to love him for what he was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0029" id="link2H_4_0029">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Besides those few pitiful successes, I had nothing but defeats in the sort
+      of literature which I supposed was to be my calling, and the defeats threw
+      me upon prose; for some sort of literary thing, if not one, then another,
+      I must do if I lived; and I began to write those studies of Venetian life
+      which afterwards became a book, and which I contributed as letters to the
+      &lsquo;Boston Advertiser&rsquo;, after vainly offering them to more aesthetic
+      periodicals. However, I do not imagine that it was a very smiling time for
+      any literary endeavorer at home in the life-and-death civil war then
+      waging. Some few young men arose who made themselves heard amid the din of
+      arms even as far as Venice, but most of these were hushed long ago. I
+      fancy Theodore Winthrop, who began to speak, as it were, from his
+      soldier&rsquo;s grave, so soon did his death follow the earliest recognition by
+      the public, and so many were his posthumous works, was chief of these; but
+      there were others whom the present readers must make greater effort to
+      remember. Forceythe Willson, who wrote The Old Sergeant, became known for
+      the rare quality of his poetry; and now and then there came a poem from
+      Aldrich, or Stedman, or Stoddard. The great new series of the &lsquo;Biglow
+      Papers&rsquo; gathered volume with the force they had from the beginning. The
+      Autocrat was often in the pages of the Atlantic, where one often found
+      Whittier and Emerson, with many a fresh name now faded. In Washington the
+      Piatts were writing some of the most beautiful verse of the war, and
+      Brownell was sounding his battle lyrics like so many trumpet blasts. The
+      fiction which followed the war was yet all to come. Whatever was done in
+      any kind had some hint of the war in it, inevitably; though in the very
+      heart of it Longfellow was setting about his great version of Dante
+      peacefully, prayerfully, as he has told in the noble sonnets which
+      register the mood of his undertaking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At Venice, if I was beyond the range of literary recognition I was in
+      direct relations with one of our greatest literary men, who was again of
+      that literary Boston which mainly represented American literature to me.
+      The official chief of the consul at Venice was the United States Minister
+      at Vienna, and in my time this minister was John Lothrop Motley, the
+      historian. He was removed, later, by that Johnson administration which
+      followed Lincoln&rsquo;s so forgottenly that I name it with a sense of something
+      almost prehistoric. Among its worst errors was the attempted discredit of
+      a man who had given lustre to our name by his work, and who was an ardent
+      patriot as well as accomplished scholar. He visited Venice during my first
+      year, which was the darkest period of the civil war, and I remember with
+      what instant security, not to say severity, he rebuked my scarcely
+      whispered misgivings of the end, when I ventured to ask him what he
+      thought it would be. Austria had never recognized the Secessionists as
+      belligerents, and in the complications with France and England there was
+      little for our minister but to share the home indignation at the sympathy
+      of those powers with the South. In Motley this was heightened by that
+      feeling of astonishment, of wounded faith, which all Americans with
+      English friendships experienced in those days, and which he, whose English
+      friendships were many, experienced in peculiar degree.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I drifted about with him in his gondola, and refreshed myself, long
+      a-hungered for such talk, with his talk of literary life in London.
+      Through some acquaintance I had made in Venice I was able to be of use to
+      him in getting documents copied for him in the Venetian Archives,
+      especially the Relations of the Venetian Ambassadors at different courts
+      during the period and events he was studying. All such papers passed
+      through my hands in transmission to the historian, though now I do not
+      quite know why they need have done so; but perhaps he was willing to give
+      me the pleasure of being a partner, however humble, in the enterprise. My
+      recollection of him is of courtesy to a far younger man unqualified by
+      patronage, and of a presence of singular dignity and grace. He was one of
+      the handsomest men I ever saw, with beautiful eyes, a fine blond beard of
+      modish cut, and a sensitive nose, straight and fine. He was altogether a
+      figure of worldly splendor; and I had reason to know that he did not let
+      the credit of our nation suffer at the most aristocratic court in Europe
+      for want of a fit diplomatic costume, when some of our ministers were
+      trying to make their office do its full effect upon all occasions in &ldquo;the
+      dress of an American gentleman.&rdquo; The morning after his arrival Mr. Motley
+      came to me with a handful of newspapers which, according to the Austrian
+      custom at that day, had been opened in the Venetian post-office. He wished
+      me to protest against this on his behalf as an infringement of his
+      diplomatic extra-territoriality, and I proposed to go at once to the
+      director of the post: I had myself suffered in the same way, and though I
+      knew that a mere consul was helpless, I was willing to see the
+      double-headed eagle trodden under foot by a Minister Plenipotentiary. Mr.
+      Motley said that he would go with me, and we put off in his gondola to the
+      post-office. The director received us with the utmost deference. He
+      admitted the irregularity which the minister complained of, and declared
+      that he had no choice but to open every foreign newspaper, to whomsoever
+      addressed. He suggested, however, that if the minister made his appeal to
+      the Lieutenant-Governor of Venice, Count Toggenburg would no doubt
+      instantly order the exemption of his newspapers from the general rule.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Motley said he would give himself the pleasure of calling upon the
+      Lieutenant-Governor, and &ldquo;How fortunate,&rdquo; he added, when we were got back
+      into the gondola, &ldquo;that I should have happened to bring my court dress
+      with me!&rdquo; I did not see the encounter of the high contending powers, but I
+      know that it ended in a complete victory for our minister.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had no further active relations of an official kind with Mr. Motley,
+      except in the case of a naturalized American citizen, whose property was
+      slowly but surely wasting away in the keeping of the Venetian courts. An
+      order had at last been given for the surrender of the remnant to the
+      owner; but the Lombardo-Venetian authorities insisted that this should be
+      done through the United States Minister at Vienna, and Mr. Motley held as
+      firmly that it must be done through the United States Consul at Venice. I
+      could only report to him from time to time the unyielding attitude of the
+      Civil Tribunal, and at last he consented, as he wrote, &ldquo;to act
+      officiously, not officially, in the matter,&rdquo; and the hapless claimant got
+      what was left of his estate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had a glimpse of the historian afterwards in Boston, but it was only for
+      a moment, just before his appointment to England, where he was made to
+      suffer for Sumner in his quarrel with Grant. That injustice crowned the
+      injuries his country had done a most faithful patriot and high-spirited
+      gentleman, whose fame as an historian once filled the ear of the
+      English-speaking world. His books seemed to have been written in a spirit
+      already no longer modern; and I did not find the greatest of them so
+      moving as I expected when I came to it with all the ardor of my admiration
+      for the historian. William the Silent seemed to me, by his worshipper&rsquo;s
+      own showing, scarcely level with the popular movement which he did not so
+      much direct as follow; but it is a good deal for a prince to be able even
+      to follow his people; and it cannot be said that Motley does not fully
+      recognize the greatness of the Dutch people, though he may see the Prince
+      of Orange too large. The study of their character made at least a
+      theoretical democrat of a scholar whose instincts were not perhaps
+      democratic, and his sympathy with that brave little republic between the
+      dikes strengthened him in his fealty to the great commonwealth between the
+      oceans. I believe that so far as he was of any political tradition, he was
+      of the old Boston Whig tradition; but when I met him at Venice he was in
+      the glow of a generous pride in our war as a war against slavery. He spoke
+      of the negroes and their simple-hearted, single-minded devotion to the
+      Union cause in terms that an original abolitionist might have used, at a
+      time when original abolitionists were not so many as they have since
+      become.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the rest, I fancy it was very well for us to be represented at Vienna
+      in those days by an ideal democrat who was also a real swell, and who was
+      not likely to discredit us socially when we so much needed to be well
+      thought of in every way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At a court where the family of Count Schmerling, the Prime Minister, could
+      not be received for want of the requisite descents, it was well to have a
+      minister who would not commit the mistake of inviting the First Society to
+      meet the Second Society, as a former Envoy Extraordinary had done, with
+      the effect of finding himself left entirely to the Second Society during
+      the rest of his stay in Vienna.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0030" id="link2H_4_0030">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      One of my consular colleagues under Motley was another historian, of no
+      such popularity, indeed, nor even of such success, but perhaps not of
+      inferior powers. This was Richard Hildreth, at Trieste, the author of one
+      of the sincerest if not the truest histories of the United States,
+      according to the testimony both of his liking and his misliking critics. I
+      have never read his history, and I speak of it only at second hand; but I
+      had read, before I met him, his novel of &lsquo;Archy Moore, or The White
+      Slave&rsquo;, which left an indelible impression of his imaginative verity upon
+      me. The impression is still so deep that after the lapse of nearly forty
+      years since I saw the book, I have no misgiving in speaking of it as a
+      powerful piece of realism. It treated passionately, intensely, though with
+      a superficial coldness, of wrongs now so remote from us in the abolition
+      of slavery that it is useless to hope it will ever beg generally read
+      hereafter, but it can safely be praised to any one who wishes to study
+      that bygone condition, and the literature which grew out of it. I fancy it
+      did not lack recognition in its time, altogether, for I used to see it in
+      Italian and French translations on the bookstalls. I believe neither his
+      history nor his novel brought the author more gain than fame. He had worn
+      himself out on a newspaper when he got his appointment at Trieste, and I
+      saw him in the shadow of the cloud that was wholly to darken him before he
+      died. He was a tall thin man, absent, silent: already a phantom of
+      himself, but with a scholarly serenity and dignity amidst the ruin, when
+      the worst came.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I first saw him at the pretty villa where he lived in the suburbs of
+      Trieste, and where I passed several days, and I remember him always
+      reading, reading, reading. He could with difficulty be roused from his
+      book by some strenuous appeal from his family to his conscience as a host.
+      The last night he sat with Paradise Lost in his hand, and nothing could
+      win him from it till he had finished it. Then he rose to go to bed. Would
+      not he bid his parting guest good-bye? The idea of farewell perhaps dimly
+      penetrated to him. He responded without looking round,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       &ldquo;They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
+        Through Eden took their solitary way,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      and so left the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had earlier had some dealings with him as a fellow-consul concerning a
+      deserter from an American ship whom I inherited from my predecessor at
+      Venice. The man had already been four or five months in prison, and he was
+      in a fair way to end his life there; for it is our law that a deserting
+      sailor must be kept in the consul&rsquo;s custody till some vessel of our flag
+      arrives, when the consul can oblige the master to take the deserter and
+      let him work his passage home. Such a vessel rarely came to Venice even in
+      times of peace, and in times of war there was no hope of any. So I got
+      leave of the consul at Trieste to transfer my captive to that port, where
+      now and then an American ship did touch. The flag determines the
+      nationality of the sailor, and this unhappy wretch was theoretically our
+      fellow-citizen; but when he got to Trieste he made a clean breast of it to
+      the consul. He confessed that when he shipped under our flag he was a
+      deserter from a British regiment at Malta; and he begged piteously not to
+      be sent home to America, where he had never been in his life, nor ever
+      wished to be. He wished to be sent back to his regiment at Malta, and to
+      whatever fate awaited him there. The case certainly had its
+      embarrassments; but the American consul contrived to let our presumptive
+      compatriot slip into the keeping of the British consul, who promptly
+      shipped him to Malta. In view of the strained relations between England
+      and America at that time this was a piece of masterly diplomacy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides my old Ohio-time friend Moncure D. Conway, who paid us a visit,
+      and in his immediate relations with literary Boston seemed to bring the
+      mountain to Mahomet, I saw no one else more literary than Henry Ward
+      Beecher. He was passing through Venice on his way to those efforts in
+      England in behalf of the Union which had a certain great effect at the
+      time; and in the tiny parlor of our apartment on the Grand Canal, I can
+      still see him sitting athletic, almost pugilistic, of presence, with his
+      strong face, but kind, framed in long hair that swept above his massive
+      forehead, and fell to the level of his humorously smiling mouth. His eyes
+      quaintly gleamed at the things we told him of our life in the strange
+      place; but he only partly relaxed from his strenuous pose, and the hands
+      that lay upon his knees were clinched. Afterwards, as he passed our
+      balcony in a gondola, he lifted the brave red fez he was wearing (many
+      people wore the fez for one caprice or another) and saluted our eagle and
+      us: we were often on the balcony behind the shield to attest the
+      authenticity of the American eagle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0031" id="link2H_4_0031">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Before I left Venice, however, there came a turn in my literary luck, and
+      from the hand I could most have wished to reverse the adverse wheel of
+      fortune. I had labored out with great pains a paper on recent Italian
+      comedy, which I sent to Lowell, then with his friend Professor Norton
+      jointly editor of the North American Review; and he took it and wrote me
+      one of his loveliest letters about it, consoling me in an instant for all
+      the defeat I had undergone, and making it sweet and worthy to have lived
+      through that misery. It is one of the hard conditions of this state that
+      while we can mostly make out to let people taste the last drop of
+      bitterness and ill-will that is in us, our love and gratitude are only
+      semi-articulate at the best, and usually altogether tongue-tied. As often
+      as I tried afterwards to tell Lowell of the benediction, the salvation,
+      his letter was to me, I failed. But perhaps he would not have understood,
+      if I had spoken out all that was in me with the fulness I could have given
+      a resentment. His message came after years of thwarted endeavor, and
+      reinstated me in the belief that I could still do something in literature.
+      To be sure, the letters in the Advertiser had begun to make their
+      impression; among the first great pleasures they brought me was a
+      recognition from my diplomatic chief at Vienna; but I valued my admission
+      to the North American peculiarly because it was Lowell let me in, and
+      because I felt that in his charge it must be the place of highest honor.
+      He spoke of the pay for my article, in his letter, and asked me where he
+      should send it, and I answered, to my father-in-law, who put it in his
+      savings-bank, where he lived, in Brattleboro, Vermont. There it remained,
+      and I forgot all about it, so that when his affairs were settled some
+      years later and I was notified that there was a sum to my credit in the
+      bank, I said, with the confidence I have nearly always felt when wrong,
+      that I had no money there. The proof of my error was sent me in a check,
+      and then I bethought me of the pay for &ldquo;Recent Italian Comedy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not a day when I could really afford to forget money due me, but
+      then it was not a great deal of money. The Review was as poor as it was
+      proud, and I had two dollars a printed page for my paper. But this was
+      more than I got from the Advertiser, which gave me five dollars a column
+      for my letters, printed in a type so fine that the money, when translated
+      from greenbacks into gold at a discount of $2.80, must have been about a
+      dollar a thousand words. However, I was richly content with that, and
+      would gladly have let them have the letters for nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before I left Venice I had made my sketches into a book, which I sent on
+      to Messrs. Trubner &amp; Co., in London. They had consented to look at it
+      to oblige my friend Conway, who during his sojourn with us in Venice,
+      before his settlement in London, had been forced to listen to some of it.
+      They answered me in due time that they would publish an edition of a
+      thousand, at half profits, if I could get some American house to take five
+      hundred copies. When I stopped in London I had so little hope of being
+      able to do this that I asked the Trubners if I might, without losing their
+      offer, try to get some other London house to publish my book. They said
+      Yes, almost joyously; and I began to take my manuscript about. At most
+      places they would not look at me or it, and they nowhere consented to read
+      it. The house promptest in refusing to consider it afterwards pirated one
+      of my novels, and with some expressions of good intention in that
+      direction, never paid me anything for it; though I believe the English
+      still think that this sort of behavior was peculiar to the American
+      publisher in the old buccaneering times. I was glad to go back to the
+      Trubners with my book, and on my way across the Atlantic I met a publisher
+      who finally agreed to take those five hundred copies. This was Mr. M. M.
+      Hurd, of Hurd &amp; Houghton, a house then newly established in New York
+      and Cambridge. We played ring-toss and shuffleboard together, and became
+      of a friendship which lasts to this day. But it was not till some months
+      later, when I saw him in New York, that he consented to publish my book. I
+      remember how he said, with an air of vague misgiving, and an effect of
+      trying to justify himself in an imprudence, that it was not a great matter
+      anyway. I perceived that he had no faith in it, and to tell the truth I
+      had not much myself. But the book had an instant success, and it has gone
+      on from edition to edition ever since. There was just then the interest of
+      a not wholly generous surprise at American things among the English. Our
+      success in putting down the great Confederate rebellion had caught the
+      fancy of our cousins, and I think it was to this mood of theirs that I
+      owed largely the kindness they showed my book. There were long and cordial
+      reviews in all the great London journals, which I used to carry about with
+      me like love-letters; when I tried to show them to other people, I could
+      not understand their coldness concerning them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At Boston, where we landed on our return home, there was a moment when it
+      seemed as if my small destiny might be linked at once with that of the
+      city which later became my home. I ran into the office of the Advertiser
+      to ask what had become of some sketches of Italian travel I had sent the
+      paper, and the managing editor made me promise not to take a place
+      anywhere before I had heard from him. I gladly promised, but I did not
+      hear from him, and when I returned to Boston a fortnight later, I found
+      that a fatal partner had refused to agree with him in engaging me upon the
+      paper. They even gave me back half a dozen unprinted letters of mine, and
+      I published them in the Nation, of New York, and afterwards in the book
+      called Italian Journeys.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But after I had encountered fortune in this frowning disguise, I had a
+      most joyful little visit with Lowell, which made me forget there was
+      anything in the world but the delight and glory of sitting with him in his
+      study at Elmwood and hearing him talk. It must have been my freshness from
+      Italy which made him talk chiefly of his own happy days in the land which
+      so sympathetically brevets all its lovers fellow-citizens. At any rate he
+      would talk of hardly anything else, and he talked late into the night, and
+      early into the morning. About two o&rsquo;clock, when all the house was still,
+      he lighted a candle, and went down into the cellar, and came back with
+      certain bottles under his arms. I had not a very learned palate in those
+      days (or in these, for that matter), but I knew enough of wine to
+      understand that these bottles had been chosen upon that principle which
+      Longfellow put in verse, and used to repeat with a humorous lifting of the
+      eyebrows and hollowing of the voice:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       &ldquo;If you have a friend to dine,
+        Give him your best wine;
+        If you have two,
+        The second-best will do.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      As we sat in their mellow afterglow, Lowell spoke to me of my own life and
+      prospects, wisely and truly, as he always spoke. He said that it was
+      enough for a man who had stuff in him to be known to two or three people,
+      for they would not suffer him to be forgotten, and it would rest with
+      himself to get on. I told him that though I had not given up my place at
+      Venice, I was not going back, if I could find anything to do at home, and
+      I was now on my way to Ohio, where I should try my best to find something;
+      at the worst, I could turn to my trade of printer. He did not think it
+      need ever come to that; and he said that he believed I should have an
+      advantage with readers, if not with editors, in hailing from the West; I
+      should be more of a novelty. I knew very well that even in my own West I
+      should not have this advantage unless I appeared there with an Eastern
+      imprint, but I could not wish to urge my misgiving against his faith. Was
+      I not already richly successful? What better thing personally could befall
+      me, if I lived forever after on milk and honey, than to be sitting there
+      with my hero, my master, and having him talk to me as if we were equal in
+      deed and in fame?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cat-bird called in the syringa thicket at his door, before we said the
+      good-night which was good morning, using the sweet Italian words, and
+      bidding each other the &lsquo;Dorma bene&rsquo; which has the quality of a
+      benediction. He held my hand, and looked into my eyes with the sunny
+      kindness which never failed me, worthy or unworthy; and I went away to
+      bed. But not to sleep; only to dream such dreams as fill the heart of
+      youth when the recognition of its endeavor has come from the achievement
+      it holds highest and best.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0032" id="link2H_4_0032">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I found nothing to do in Ohio; some places that I heard of proved
+      impossible one way or another, in Columbus and Cleveland, and Cincinnati;
+      there was always the fatal partner; and after three weeks I was again in
+      the East. I came to New York, resolved to fight my way in, somewhere, and
+      I did not rest a moment before I began the fight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My notion was that which afterwards became Bartley Hubbard&rsquo;s. &ldquo;Get a
+      basis,&rdquo; said the softening cynic of the Saturday Press, when I advised
+      with him, among other acquaintances. &ldquo;Get a salaried place, something
+      regular on some paper, and then you can easily make up the rest.&rdquo; But it
+      was a month before I achieved this vantage, and then I got it in a quarter
+      where I had not looked for it. I wrote editorials on European and literary
+      topics for different papers, but mostly for the Times, and they paid me
+      well and more than well; but I was nowhere offered a basis, though once I
+      got so far towards it as to secure a personal interview with the
+      editor-in-chief, who made me feel that I had seldom met so busy a man. He
+      praised some work of mine that he had read in his paper, but I was never
+      recalled to his presence; and now I think he judged rightly that I should
+      not be a lastingly good journalist. My point of view was artistic; I
+      wanted time to prepare my effects.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was another and clearer prospect opened to me on a literary paper,
+      then newly come to the light, but long since gone out in the dark. Here
+      again my work was taken, and liked so much that I was offered the basis
+      (at twenty dollars a week) that I desired; I was even assigned to a desk
+      where I should write in the office; and the next morning I came joyfully
+      down to Spruce Street to occupy it. But I was met at the door by one of
+      the editors, who said lightly, as if it were a trifling affair, &ldquo;Well,
+      we&rsquo;ve concluded to waive the idea of an engagement,&rdquo; and once more my
+      bright hopes of a basis dispersed themselves. I said, with what calm I
+      could, that they must do what they thought best, and I went on skirmishing
+      baselessly about for this and the other papers which had been buying my
+      material.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had begun printing in the &lsquo;Nation&rsquo; those letters about my Italian
+      journeys left over from the Boston Advertiser; they had been liked in the
+      office, and one day the editor astonished and delighted me by asking how I
+      would fancy giving up outside work to come there and write only for the
+      &lsquo;Nation&rsquo;. We averaged my gains from all sources at forty dollars a week,
+      and I had my basis as unexpectedly as if I had dropped upon it from the
+      skies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This must have been some time in November, and the next three or four
+      months were as happy a time for me as I have ever known. I kept on
+      printing my Italian material in the Nation; I wrote criticisms for it (not
+      very good criticisms, I think now), and I amused myself very much with the
+      treatment of social phases and events in a department which grew up under
+      my hand. My associations personally were of the most agreeable kind. I
+      worked with joy, with ardor, and I liked so much to be there, in that
+      place and in that company, that I hated to have each day come to an end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I believed that my lines were cast in New York for good and all; and I
+      renewed my relations with the literary friends I had made before going
+      abroad. I often stopped, on my way up town, at an apartment the Stoddards
+      had in Lafayette Place, or near it; I saw Stedman, and reasoned high, to
+      my heart&rsquo;s content, of literary things with them and him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the winter Bayard Taylor came on from his home in Kennett and took an
+      apartment in East Twelfth Street, and once a week Mrs. Taylor and he
+      received all their friends there, with a simple and charming hospitality.
+      There was another house which we much resorted to&mdash;the house of James
+      Lorrimer Graham, afterwards Consul-General at Florence, where he died. I
+      had made his acquaintance at Venice three years before, and I came in for
+      my share of that love for literary men which all their perversities could
+      not extinguish in him. It was a veritable passion, which I used to think
+      he could not have felt so deeply if he had been a literary man himself.
+      There were delightful dinners at his house, where the wit of the Stoddards
+      shone, and Taylor beamed with joyous good-fellowship and overflowed with
+      invention; and Huntington, long Paris correspondent of the Tribune,
+      humorously tried to talk himself into the resolution of spending the rest
+      of his life in his own country. There was one evening when C. P. Cranch,
+      always of a most pensive presence and aspect, sang the most killingly
+      comic songs; and there was another evening when, after we all went into
+      the library, something tragical happened. Edwin Booth was of our number, a
+      gentle, rather silent person in company, or with at least little social
+      initiative, who, as his fate would, went up to the cast of a huge hand
+      that lay upon one of the shelves. &ldquo;Whose hand is this, Lorry?&rdquo; he asked
+      our host, as he took it up and turned it over in both his own hands.
+      Graham feigned not to hear, and Booth asked again, &ldquo;whose hand is this?&rdquo;
+       Then there was nothing for Graham but to say, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s Lincoln&rsquo;s hand,&rdquo; and
+      the man for whom it meant such unspeakable things put it softly down
+      without a word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0033" id="link2H_4_0033">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was one of the disappointments of a time which was nearly all joy that
+      I did not then meet a man who meant hardly less than Lowell himself for
+      me. George William Curtis was during my first winter in New York away on
+      one of the long lecturing rounds to which he gave so many of his winters,
+      and I did not see him till seven years afterwards, at Mr. Norton&rsquo;s in
+      Cambridge. He then characteristically spent most of the evening in
+      discussing an obscure point in Browning&rsquo;s poem of &lsquo;My Last Duchess&rsquo;. I
+      have long forgotten what the point was, but not the charm of Curtis&rsquo;s
+      personality, his fine presence, his benign politeness, his almost
+      deferential tolerance of difference in opinion. Afterwards I saw him again
+      and again in Boston and New York, but always with a sense of something
+      elusive in his graciousness, for which something in me must have been to
+      blame. Cold, he was not, even to the youth that in those days was apt to
+      shiver in any but the higher temperatures, and yet I felt that I made no
+      advance in his kindness towards anything like the friendship I knew in the
+      Cambridge men. Perhaps I was so thoroughly attuned to their mood that I
+      could not be put in unison with another; and perhaps in Curtis there was
+      really not the material of much intimacy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had the potentiality of publicity in the sort of welcome he gave
+      equally to all men; and if I asked more I was not reasonable. Yet he was
+      never far from any man of good-will, and he was the intimate of multitudes
+      whose several existence he never dreamt of. In this sort he had become my
+      friend when he made his first great speech on the Kansas question in 1855,
+      which will seen as remote to the young men of this day as the Thermopylae
+      question to which he likened it. I was his admirer, his lover, his
+      worshipper before that for the things he had done in literature, for the
+      &lsquo;Howadji&rsquo; books, and for the lovely fantasies of &lsquo;Prue and I&rsquo;, and for the
+      sound-hearted satire of the &lsquo;Potiphar Papers&rsquo;, and now suddenly I learnt
+      that this brilliant and graceful talent, this travelled and accomplished
+      gentleman, this star of society who had dazzled me with his splendor far
+      off in my Western village obscurity, was a man with the heart to feel the
+      wrongs of men so little friended then as to be denied all the rights of
+      men. I do not remember any passage of the speech, or any word of it, but I
+      remember the joy, the pride with which the soul of youth recognizes in the
+      greatness it has honored the goodness it may love. Mere politicians might
+      be pro-slavery or anti-slavery without touching me very much, but here was
+      the citizen of a world far greater than theirs, a light of the universal
+      republic of letters, who was willing and eager to stand or fall with the
+      just cause, and that was all in all to me. His country was my country, and
+      his kindred my kindred, and nothing could have kept me from following
+      after him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His whole life taught the lesson that the world is well lost whenever the
+      world is wrong; but never, I think, did any life teach this so sweetly, so
+      winningly. The wrong world itself might have been entreated by him to be
+      right, for he was one of the few reformers who have not in some measure
+      mixed their love of man with hate of men; his quarrel was with error, and
+      not with the persons who were in it. He was so gently steadfast in his
+      opinions that no one ever thought of him as a fanatic, though many who
+      held his opinions were assailed as fanatics, and suffered the shame if
+      they did not win the palm of martyrdom. In early life he was a communist,
+      and then when he came out of Brook Farm into the world which he was so
+      well fitted to adorn, and which would so gladly have kept him all its own,
+      he became an abolitionist in the very teeth of the world which abhorred
+      abolitionists. He was a believer in the cause of women&rsquo;s rights, which has
+      no picturesqueness, and which chiefly appeals to the sense of humor in the
+      men who never dreamt of laughing at him. The man who was in the last
+      degree amiable was to the last degree unyielding where conscience was
+      concerned; the soul which was so tender had no weakness in it; his lenity
+      was the divination of a finer justice. His honesty made all men trust him
+      when they doubted his opinions; his good sense made them doubt their own
+      opinions, when they had as little question of their own honesty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I should not find it easy to speak of him as a man of letters only, for
+      humanity was above the humanities with him, and we all know how he turned
+      from the fairest career in literature to tread the thorny path of politics
+      because he believed that duty led the way, and that good citizens were
+      needed more than good romancers. No doubt they are, and yet it must always
+      be a keen regret with the men of my generation who witnessed with such
+      rapture the early proofs of his talent, that he could not have devoted it
+      wholly to the beautiful, and let others look after the true. Now that I
+      have said this I am half ashamed of it, for I know well enough that what
+      he did was best; but if my regret is mean, I will let it remain, for it is
+      faithful to the mood which many have been in concerning him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There can be no dispute, I am sure, as to the value of some of the results
+      he achieved in that other path. He did indeed create anew for us the type
+      of good-citizenship, well-nigh effaced in a sordid and selfish time, and
+      of an honest politician and a pure-minded journalist. He never really
+      forsook literature, and the world of actual interests and experiences
+      afforded him outlooks and perspectives, without which aesthetic endeavor
+      is self-limited and purblind. He was a great man of letters, he was a
+      great orator, he was a great political journalist, he was a great citizen,
+      he was a great philanthropist. But that last word with its conventional
+      application scarcely describes the brave and gentle friend of men that he
+      was. He was one that helped others by all that he did, and said, and was,
+      and the circle of his use was as wide as his fame. There are other great
+      men, plenty of them, common great men, whom we know as names and powers,
+      and whom we willingly let the ages have when they die, for, living or
+      dead, they are alike remote from us. They have never been with us where we
+      live; but this great man was the neighbor, the contemporary, and the
+      friend of all who read him or heard him; and even in the swift forgetting
+      of this electrical age the stamp of his personality will not be effaced
+      from their minds or hearts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0034" id="link2H_4_0034">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Of those evenings at the Taylors&rsquo; in New York, I can recall best the one
+      which was most significant for me, and even fatefully significant. Mr. and
+      Mrs. Fields were there, from Boston, and I renewed all the pleasure of my
+      earlier meetings with them. At the end Fields said, mockingly, &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t
+      despise Boston!&rdquo; and I answered, as we shook hands, &ldquo;Few are worthy to
+      live in Boston.&rdquo; It was New-Year&rsquo;s eve, and that night it came on to snow
+      so heavily that my horse-car could hardly plough its way up to
+      Forty-seventh Street through the drifts. The next day, and the next, I
+      wrote at home, because it was so hard to get down-town. The third day I
+      reached the office and found a letter on my desk from Fields, asking how I
+      should like to come to Boston and be his assistant on the &lsquo;Atlantic
+      Monthly&rsquo;. I submitted the matter at once to my chief on the &lsquo;Nation&rsquo;, and
+      with his frank goodwill I talked it over with Mr. Osgood, of Ticknor &amp;
+      Fields, who was to see me further about it if I wished, when he came to
+      New York; and then I went to Boston to see Mr. Fields concerning details.
+      I was to sift all the manuscripts and correspond with contributors; I was
+      to do the literary proof-reading of the magazine; and I was to write the
+      four or five pages of book-notices, which were then printed at the end of
+      the periodical in finer type; and I was to have forty dollars a week. I
+      said that I was getting that already for less work, and then Mr. Fields
+      offered me ten dollars more. Upon these terms we closed, and on the 1st of
+      March, which was my twenty-ninth birthday, I went to Boston and began my
+      work. I had not decided to accept the place without advising with Lowell;
+      he counselled the step, and gave me some shrewd and useful suggestions.
+      The whole affair was conducted by Fields with his unfailing tact and
+      kindness, but it could not be kept from me that the qualification I had as
+      practical printer for the work was most valued, if not the most valued,
+      and that as proof-reader I was expected to make it avail on the side of
+      economy. Somewhere in life&rsquo;s feast the course of humble-pie must always
+      come in; and if I did not wholly relish this, bit of it, I dare say it was
+      good for me, and I digested it perfectly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0035" id="link2H_4_0035">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Among my fellow-passengers on the train from New York to Boston, when I
+      went to begin my work there in 1866, as the assistant editor of the
+      Atlantic Monthly, was the late Samuel Bowles, of the Springfield
+      Republican, who created in a subordinate city a journal of metropolitan
+      importance. I had met him in Venice several years earlier, when he was
+      suffering from the cruel insomnia which had followed his overwork on that
+      newspaper, and when he told me that he was sleeping scarcely more than one
+      hour out of the twenty-four. His worn face attested the misery which this
+      must have been, and which lasted in some measure while he lived, though I
+      believe that rest and travel relieved him in his later years. He was
+      always a man of cordial friendliness, and he now expressed a most
+      gratifying interest when I told him what I was going to do in Boston. He
+      gave himself the pleasure of descanting upon the dramatic quality of the
+      fact that a young newspaper man from Ohio was about to share in the
+      destinies of the great literary periodical of New England.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0036" id="link2H_4_0036">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I do not think that such a fact would now move the fancy of the liveliest
+      newspaper man, so much has the West since returned upon the East in a
+      refluent wave of authorship. But then the West was almost an unknown
+      quality in our literary problem; and in fact there was scarcely any
+      literature outside of New England. Even this was of New England origin,
+      for it was almost wholly the work of New England men and women in the
+      &ldquo;splendid exile&rdquo; of New York. The Atlantic Monthly, which was
+      distinctively literary, was distinctively a New England magazine, though
+      from the first it had been characterized by what was more national, what
+      was more universal, in the New England temperament. Its chief contributors
+      for nearly twenty years were Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier,
+      Emerson, Doctor Hale, Colonel Higginson, Mrs. Stowe, Whipple, Rose Terry
+      Cooke, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Prescott Spofford, Mrs. Phelps Ward, and
+      other New England writers who still lived in New England, and largely in
+      the region of Boston. Occasionally there came a poem from Bryant, at New
+      York, from Mr. Stedman, from Mr. Stoddard and Mrs. Stoddard, from Mr.
+      Aldrich, and from Bayard Taylor. But all these, except the last, were not
+      only of New England race, but of New England birth. I think there was no
+      contributor from the South but Mr. M. D. Conway, and as yet the West
+      scarcely counted, though four young poets from Ohio, who were not
+      immediately or remotely of Puritan origin, had appeared in early numbers;
+      Alice Cary, living with her sister in New York, had written now and then
+      from the beginning. Mr. John Hay solely represented Illinois by a single
+      paper, and he was of Rhode Island stock. It was after my settlement at
+      Boston that Mark Twain, of Missouri, became a figure of world-wide fame at
+      Hartford; and longer after, that Mr. Bret Harte made that progress
+      Eastward from California which was telegraphed almost from hour to hour,
+      as if it were the progress of a prince. Miss Constance F. Woolson had not
+      yet begun to write. Mr. James Whitcomb Riley, Mr. Maurice Thompson, Miss
+      Edith Thomas, Octave Thanet, Mr. Charles Warren Stoddard, Mr. H. B.
+      Fuller, Mrs. Catherwood, Mr. Hamlin Garland, all whom I name at random
+      among other Western writers, were then as unknown as Mr. Cable, Miss
+      Murfree, Mrs. Rives Chanler, Miss Grace King, Mr. Joel Chandler Harris,
+      Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, in the South, which they by no means fully
+      represent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The editors of the Atlantic had been eager from the beginning to discover
+      any outlying literature; but, as I have said, there was in those days very
+      little good writing done beyond the borders of New England. If the case is
+      now different, and the best known among living American writers are no
+      longer New-Englanders, still I do not think the South and West have yet
+      trimmed the balance; and though perhaps the news writers now more commonly
+      appear in those quarters, I should not be so very sure that they are not
+      still characterized by New England ideals and examples. On the other hand,
+      I am very sure that in my early day we were characterized by them, and
+      wished to be so; we even felt that we failed in so far as we expressed
+      something native quite in our own way. The literary theories we accepted
+      were New England theories, the criticism we valued was New England
+      criticism, or, more strictly speaking, Boston theories, Boston criticism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of those more constant contributors to the Atlantic whom I have mentioned,
+      it is of course known that Longfellow and Lowell lived in Cambridge,
+      Emerson at Concord, and Whittier at Amesbury. Colonel Higginson was still
+      and for many years afterwards at Newport; Mrs. Stowe was then at Andover;
+      Miss Prescott of Newburyport had become Mrs. Spofford, and was presently
+      in Boston, where her husband was a member of the General Court; Mrs.
+      Phelps Ward, as Miss Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, dwelt in her father&rsquo;s house
+      at Andover. The chief of the Bostonians were Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Doctor
+      Holmes, and Doctor Hale. Yet Boston stood for the whole Massachusetts
+      group, and Massachusetts, in the literary impulse, meant New England. I
+      suppose we must all allow, whether we like to do so or not, that the
+      impulse seems now to have pretty well spent itself. Certainly the city of
+      Boston has distinctly waned in literature, though it has waxed in wealth
+      and population. I do not think there are in Boston to-day even so many
+      talents with a literary coloring in law, science, theology, and journalism
+      as there were formerly; though I have no belief that the Boston talents
+      are fewer or feebler than before. I arrived in Boston, however, when all
+      talents had more or less a literary coloring, and when the greatest
+      talents were literary. These expressed with ripened fulness a civilization
+      conceived in faith and brought forth in good works; but that moment of
+      maturity was the beginning of a decadence which could only show itself
+      much later. New England has ceased to be a nation in itself, and it will
+      perhaps never again have anything like a national literature; but that was
+      something like a national literature; and it will probably be centuries
+      yet before the life of the whole country, the American life as
+      distinguished from the New England life, shall have anything so like a
+      national literature. It will be long before our larger life interprets
+      itself in such imagination as Hawthorne&rsquo;s, such wisdom as Emerson&rsquo;s, such
+      poetry as Longfellow&rsquo;s, such prophecy as Whittier&rsquo;s, such wit and grace as
+      Holmes&rsquo;s, such humor and humanity as Lowell&rsquo;s.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0037" id="link2H_4_0037">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The literature of those great men was, if I may suffer myself the figure,
+      the Socinian graft of a Calvinist stock. Their faith, in its varied
+      shades, was Unitarian, but their art was Puritan. So far as it was
+      imperfect&mdash;and great and beautiful as it was, I think it had its
+      imperfections&mdash;it was marred by the intense ethicism that pervaded
+      the New England mind for two hundred years, and that still characterizes
+      it. They or their fathers had broken away from orthodoxy in the great
+      schism at the beginning of the century, but, as if their heterodoxy were
+      conscience-stricken, they still helplessly pointed the moral in all they
+      did; some pointed it more directly, some less directly; but they all
+      pointed it. I should be far from blaming them for their ethical intention,
+      though I think they felt their vocation as prophets too much for their
+      good as poets. Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the sermon, though
+      not always, nor nearly always. It was in poetry and in romance that they
+      excelled; in the novel, so far as they attempted it, they failed. I say
+      this with the names of all the Bostonian group, and those they influenced,
+      in mind, and with a full sense of their greatness. It may be ungracious to
+      say that they have left no heirs to their peculiar greatness; but it would
+      be foolish to say that they left an estate where they had none to
+      bequeath. One cannot take account of such a fantasy as Judd&rsquo;s Margaret.
+      The only New-Englander who has attempted the novel on a scale proportioned
+      to the work of the New-Englanders in philosophy, in poetry, in romance, is
+      Mr. De Forest, who is of New Haven, and not of Boston. I do not forget the
+      fictions of Doctor Holmes, or the vivid inventions of Doctor Hale, but I
+      do not call them novels; and I do not forget the exquisitely realistic art
+      of Miss Jewett or Miss Wilkins, which is free from the ethicism of the
+      great New England group, but which has hardly the novelists&rsquo;s scope. New
+      England, in Hawthorne&rsquo;s work, achieved supremacy in romance; but the
+      romance is always an allegory, and the novel is a picture in which the
+      truth to life is suffered to do its unsermonized office for conduct; and
+      New England yet lacks her novelist, because it was her instinct and her
+      conscience in fiction to be true to an ideal of life rather than to life
+      itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even when we come to the exception that proves the rule, even to such a
+      signal exception as &lsquo;Uncle Tom&rsquo;s Cabin&rsquo;, I think that what I say holds
+      true. That is almost the greatest work of imagination that we have
+      produced in prose, and it is the work of a New England woman, writing from
+      all the inspirations and traditions of New England. It is like begging the
+      question to say that I do not call it a novel, however; but really, is it
+      a novel, in the sense that &lsquo;War and Peace&rsquo; is a novel, or &lsquo;Madame
+      Flaubert&rsquo;, or &lsquo;L&rsquo;Assommoir&rsquo;, or &lsquo;Phineas Finn&rsquo;, or &lsquo;Dona Perfecta&rsquo;, or
+      &lsquo;Esther Waters&rsquo;, or &lsquo;Marta y Maria&rsquo;, or &lsquo;The Return of the Native&rsquo;, or
+      &lsquo;Virgin Soil&rsquo;, or &lsquo;David Grieve&rsquo;? In a certain way it is greater than any
+      of these except the first; but its chief virtue, or its prime virtue, is
+      in its address to the conscience, and not its address to the taste; to the
+      ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This does not quite say the thing, but it suggests it, and I should be
+      sorry if it conveyed to any reader a sense of slight; for I believe no one
+      has felt more deeply than myself the value of New England in literature.
+      The comparison of the literary situation at Boston to the literary
+      situation at Edinburgh in the times of the reviewers has never seemed to
+      me accurate or adequate, and it holds chiefly in the fact that both seem
+      to be of the past. Certainly New York is yet no London in literature, and
+      I think Boston was once vastly more than Edinburgh ever was, at least in
+      quality. The Scotch literature of the palmy days was not wholly Scotch,
+      and even when it was rooted in Scotch soil it flowered in the air of an
+      alien speech. But the New England literature of the great day was the
+      blossom of a New England root; and the language which the Bostonians wrote
+      was the native English of scholars fitly the heirs of those who had
+      brought the learning of the universities to Massachusetts Bay two hundred
+      years before, and was of as pure a lineage as the English of the
+      mother-country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0038" id="link2H_4_0038">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The literary situation which confronted me when I came to Boston was,
+      then, as native as could well be; and whatever value I may be able to give
+      a personal study of it will be from the effect it made upon me as one
+      strange in everything but sympathy. I will not pretend that I saw it in
+      its entirety, and I have no hope of presenting anything like a
+      kinetoscopic impression of it. What I can do is to give here and there a
+      glimpse of it; and I shall wish the reader to keep in mind the fact that
+      it was in a &ldquo;state of transition,&rdquo; as everything is always and everywhere.
+      It was no sooner recognizably native than it ceased to be fully so; and I
+      became a witness of it after the change had begun. The publishing house
+      which so long embodied New England literature was already attempting
+      enterprises out of the line of its traditions, and one of these had
+      brought Mr. T. B. Aldrich from New York, a few weeks before I arrived upon
+      the scene in that dramatic quality which I think never impressed any one
+      but Mr. Bowles. Mr. Aldrich was the editor of &lsquo;Every Saturday&rsquo; when I came
+      to be assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly. We were of nearly the same
+      age, but he had a distinct and distinguished priority of reputation,
+      insomuch that in my Western remoteness I had always ranged him with such
+      elders and betters of mine as Holmes and Lowell, and never imagined him
+      the blond, slight youth I found him, with every imaginable charm of
+      contemporaneity. It is no part of the office which I have intended for
+      these slight and sufficiently wandering glimpses of the past to show any
+      writer in his final place; and above all I do not presume to assign any
+      living man his rank or station. But I should be false to my own grateful
+      sense of beauty in the work of this poet if I did not at all times
+      recognize his constancy to an ideal which his name stands for. He is known
+      in several kinds, but to my thinking he is best in a certain nobler kind
+      of poetry; a serious sort in which the thought holds him above the
+      scrupulosities of the art he loves and honors so much. Sometimes the file
+      slips in his hold, as the file must and will; it is but an instrument at
+      the best; but there is no mistouch in the hand that lays itself upon the
+      reader&rsquo;s heart with the pulse of the poet&rsquo;s heart quick and true in it.
+      There are sonnets of his, grave, and simple, and lofty, which I think of
+      with the glow and thrill possible only from very beautiful poetry, and
+      which impart such an emotion as we can feel only
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       &ldquo;When a great thought strikes along the brain
+        And flushes all the cheek.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      When I had the fortune to meet him first, I suppose that in the employ of
+      the kindly house we were both so eager to serve, our dignities were about
+      the same; for if the &lsquo;Atlantic Monthly&rsquo; was a somewhat prouder affair than
+      an eclectic weekly like &lsquo;Every Saturday&rsquo;, he was supreme in his place, and
+      I was subordinate in mine. The house was careful, in the attitude of its
+      senior partner, not to distinguish between us, and we were not slow to
+      perceive the tact used in managing us; we had our own joke of it; we
+      compared notes to find whether we were equally used in this thing or that;
+      and we promptly shared the fun of our discovery with Fields himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had another impartial friend (no less a friend of joy in the life which
+      seems to have been pretty nearly all joy, as I look back upon it) in the
+      partner who became afterwards the head of the house, and who forecast in
+      his bold enterprises the change from a New England to an American literary
+      situation. In the end James R. Osgood failed, though all his enterprises
+      succeeded. The anomaly is sad, but it is not infrequent. They were greater
+      than his powers and his means, and before they could reach their full
+      fruition, they had to be enlarged to men of longer purse and longer
+      patience. He was singularly fitted both by instinct and by education to
+      become a great publisher; and he early perceived that if a leading
+      American house were to continue at Boston, it must be hospitable to the
+      talents of the whole country. He founded his future upon those generous
+      lines; but he wanted the qualities as well as the resources for rearing
+      the superstructure. Changes began to follow each other rapidly after he
+      came into control of the house. Misfortune reduced the size and number of
+      its periodicals. &lsquo;The Young Folks&rsquo; was sold outright, and the &lsquo;North
+      American Review&rsquo; (long before Mr. Rice bought it and carried it to New
+      York) was cut down one-half, so that Aldrich said, it looked as if Destiny
+      had sat upon it. His own periodical, &lsquo;Every Saturday&rsquo;, was first enlarged
+      to a stately quarto and illustrated; and then, under stress of the
+      calamities following the great Boston fire, It collapsed to its former
+      size. Then both the &lsquo;Atlantic Monthly&rsquo; and &lsquo;Every Saturday&rsquo; were sold away
+      from their old ownership, and &lsquo;Every Saturday&rsquo; was suppressed altogether,
+      and we two ceased to be of the same employ. There was some sort of evening
+      rite (more funereal than festive) the day after they were sold, and we
+      followed Osgood away from it, under the lamps. We all knew that it was his
+      necessity that had caused him to part with the periodicals; but he
+      professed that it was his pleasure, and he said he had not felt so
+      light-hearted since he was a boy. We asked him, How could he feel gay when
+      he was no longer paying us our salaries, and how could he justify it to
+      his conscience? He liked our mocking, and limped away from us with a
+      rheumatic easing of his weight from one foot to another: a figure pathetic
+      now that it has gone the way to dusty death, and dear to memory through
+      benefactions unalloyed by one unkindness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0039" id="link2H_4_0039">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      But when I came to Boston early in 1866, the &lsquo;Atlantic Monthly&rsquo; and
+      &lsquo;Harper&rsquo;s&rsquo; then divided our magazine world between them; the &lsquo;North
+      American Review&rsquo;, in the control of Lowell and Professor Norton, had
+      entered upon a new life; &lsquo;Every Saturday&rsquo; was an instant success in the
+      charge of Mr. Aldrich, who was by taste and training one of the best
+      editors; and &lsquo;Our Young Folks&rsquo; had the field of juvenile periodical
+      literature to itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was under the direction of Miss Lucy Larcom and of Mr. J. T.
+      Trowbridge, who had come from western New York, where he was born, and
+      must be noted as one of the first returners from the setting to the rising
+      sun. He naturalized himself in Boston in his later boyhood, and he still
+      breathes Boston air, where he dwells in the street called Pleasant, on the
+      shore of Spy Pond, at Arlington, and still weaves the magic web of his
+      satisfying stories for boys. He merges in their popularity the fame of a
+      poet which I do not think will always suffer that eclipse, for his poems
+      show him to have looked deeply into the heart of common humanity, with a
+      true and tender sense of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Larcom scarcely seemed to change from date to date in the generation
+      that elapsed between the time I first saw her and the time I saw her last,
+      a year or two before her death. A goodness looked out of her comely face,
+      which made me think of the Madonna&rsquo;s in Titian&rsquo;s &ldquo;Assumption,&rdquo; and her
+      whole aspect expressed a mild and friendly spirit which I find it hard to
+      put in words. She was never of the fine world of literature; she dwelt
+      where she was born, in that unfashionable Beverly which is not Beverly
+      Farms, and was of a simple, sea-faring, God-fearing race, as she has told
+      in one of the loveliest autobiographies I know, &ldquo;A New England Girlhood.&rdquo;
+       She was the author of many poems, whose number she constantly enlarged,
+      but she was chiefly, and will be most lastingly, famed for the one poem,
+      &lsquo;Hannah Binding Shoes&rsquo;, which years before my days in Boston had made her
+      so widely known. She never again struck so deep or so true a note; but if
+      one has lodged such a note in the ear of time, it is enough; and if we are
+      to speak of eternity, one might very well hold up one&rsquo;s head in the fields
+      of asphodel, if one could say to the great others there, &ldquo;I wrote Hannah
+      Binding Shoes.&rdquo; Her poem is very, very sad, as all who have read it will
+      remember; but Miss Larcom herself was above everything cheerful, and she
+      had a laugh of mellow richness which willingly made itself heard. She was
+      not only of true New England stock, and a Boston author by right of race,
+      but she came up to that city every winter from her native town.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By the same right and on the same terms, another New England poetess, whom
+      I met those first days in Boston, was a Boston author. When I saw Celia
+      Thaxter she was just beginning to make her effect with those poems and
+      sketches which the sea sings and flashes through as it sings and flashes
+      around the Isles of Shoals, her summer home, where her girlhood had been
+      passed in a freedom as wild as the curlew&rsquo;s. She was a most beautiful
+      creature, still very young, with a slender figure, and an exquisite
+      perfection of feature; she was in presence what her work was: fine, frank,
+      finished. I do not know whether other witnesses of our literary history
+      feel that the public has failed to keep her as fully in mind as her work
+      merited; but I do not think there can be any doubt but our literature
+      would be sensibly the poorer without her work. It is interesting to
+      remember how closely she kept to her native field, and it is wonderful to
+      consider how richly she made those sea-beaten rocks to blossom. Something
+      strangely full and bright came to her verse from the mystical environment
+      of the ocean, like the luxury of leaf and tint that it gave the narrower
+      flower-plots of her native isles. Her gift, indeed, could not satisfy
+      itself with the terms of one art alone, however varied, and she learned to
+      express in color the thoughts and feelings impatient of the pallor of
+      words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She remains in my memories of that far Boston a distinct and vivid
+      personality; as the authoress of &lsquo;Amber Gods&rsquo;, and &lsquo;In a Cellar&rsquo;, and
+      &lsquo;Circumstance&rsquo;, and those other wild romantic tales, remains the gentle
+      and somewhat evanescent presence I found her. Miss Prescott was now Mrs.
+      Spofford, and her husband was a rising young politician of the day. It was
+      his duties as member of the General Court that had brought them up from
+      Newburyport to Boston for that first winter; and I remember that the
+      evening when we met he was talking of their some time going to Italy that
+      she might study for imaginative literature certain Italian cities he
+      named. I have long since ceased to own those cities, but at the moment I
+      felt a pang of expropriation which I concealed as well as I could; and now
+      I heartily wish she could have fulfilled that purpose if it was a purpose,
+      or realized that dream if it was only a dream. Perhaps, however, that
+      sumptuous and glowing fancy of hers, which had taken the fancy of the
+      young readers of that day, needed the cold New England background to bring
+      out all its intensities of tint, all its splendors of light. Its effects
+      were such as could not last, or could not be farther evolved; they were
+      the expression of youth musing away from its environment and smitten with
+      the glories of a world afar and beyond, the great world, the fine world,
+      the impurpled world of romantic motives and passions. But for what they
+      were, I can never think them other than what they appeared: the emanations
+      of a rarely gifted and singularly poetic mind. I feel better than I can
+      say how necessarily they were the emanations of a New England mind, and
+      how to the subtler sense they must impart the pathos of revolt from the
+      colorless rigidities which are the long result of puritanism in the
+      physiognomy of New England life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Their author afterwards gave herself to the stricter study of this life in
+      many tales and sketches which showed an increasing mastery; but they could
+      not have the flush, the surprise, the delight of a young talent trying
+      itself in a kind native and, so far as I know, peculiar to it. From time
+      to time I still come upon a poem of hers which recalls that earlier strain
+      of music, of color, and I am content to trust it for my abiding faith in
+      the charm of things I have not read for thirty years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0040" id="link2H_4_0040">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I speak of this one and that, as it happens, and with no thought of giving
+      a complete prospect of literary Boston thirty years ago. I am aware that
+      it will seem sparsely peopled in the effect I impart, and I would have the
+      reader always keep in mind the great fames at Cambridge and at Concord,
+      which formed so large a part of the celebrity of Boston. I would also like
+      him to think of it as still a great town, merely, where every one knew
+      every one else, and whose metropolitan liberation from neighborhood was
+      just begun.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Most distinctly of that yet uncitified Boston was the critic Edwin P.
+      Whipple, whose sympathies were indefinitely wider than his traditions. He
+      was a most generous lover of all that was excellent in literature; and
+      though I suppose we should call him an old-fashioned critic now, I suspect
+      it would be with no distinct sense of what is newer fashioned. He was
+      certainly as friendly to what promised well in the younger men as he was
+      to what was done well in their elders; and there was no one writing in his
+      day whose virtues failed of his recognition, though it might happen that
+      his foibles would escape Whipple&rsquo;s censure. He wrote strenuously and of
+      course conscientiously; his point of view was solely and always that which
+      enabled him best to discern qualities. I doubt if he had any theory of
+      criticism except to find out what was good in an author and praise it; and
+      he rather blamed what was ethically bad than what was aesthetically bad.
+      In this he was strictly of New England, and he was of New England in a
+      certain general intelligence, which constantly grew with an interrogative
+      habit of mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He liked to talk to you of what he had found characteristic in your work,
+      to analyze you to yourself; and the very modesty of the man, which made
+      such a study impersonal as far as he was concerned, sometimes rendered him
+      insensible to the sufferings of his subject. He had a keen perception of
+      humor in others, but he had very little humor; he had a love of the
+      beautiful in literature which was perhaps sometimes greater than his sense
+      of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I write from a cursory acquaintance with his work, not recently renewed.
+      Of the presence of the man I have a vivider remembrance: a slight, short,
+      ecclesiasticized figure in black; with a white neckcloth and a silk hat of
+      strict decorum, and between the two a square face with square features,
+      intensified in their regard by a pair of very large glasses, and the
+      prominent, myopic eyes staring through them. He was a type of out-dated
+      New England scholarship in these aspects, but in the hospitable qualities
+      of his mind and heart, the sort of man to be kept fondly in the memory of
+      all who ever knew him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0041" id="link2H_4_0041">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Out of the vague of that far-off time another face and figure, as
+      essentially New En&amp;land as this, and yet so different, relieve
+      themselves. Charles F. Browne, whose drollery wafted his pseudonym as far
+      as the English speech could carry laughter, was a Westernized Yankee. He
+      added an Ohio way of talking to the Maine way of thinking, and he so
+      became a literary product of a rarer and stranger sort than our literature
+      had otherwise known. He had gone from Cleveland to London, with intervals
+      of New York and the lecture platform, four or five years before I saw him
+      in Boston, shortly after I went there. We had met in Ohio, and he had
+      personally explained to me the ducatless well-meaning of Vanity Fair in
+      New York; but many men had since shaken the weary hand of Artemus Ward
+      when I grasped it one day in front of the Tremont Temple. He did not
+      recognize me, but he gave me at once a greeting of great impersonal
+      cordiality, with &ldquo;How do you do? When did you come?&rdquo; and other questions
+      that had no concern in them, till I began to dawn upon him through a cloud
+      of other half remembered faces. Then he seized my hand and wrung it all
+      over again, and repeated his friendly demands with an intonation that was
+      now &ldquo;Why, how are you; how are you?&rdquo; for me alone. It was a bit of comedy,
+      which had the fit pathetic relief of his impending doom: this was already
+      stamped upon his wasted face, and his gay eyes had the death-look. His
+      large, loose mouth was drawn, for all its laughter at the fact which he
+      owned; his profile, which burlesqued. an eagle&rsquo;s, was the profile of a
+      drooping eagle; his lank length of limb trembled away with him when we
+      parted. I did not see him again; I scarcely heard of him till I heard of
+      his death, and this sad image remains with me of the humorist who first
+      gave the world a taste of the humor which characterizes the whole American
+      people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was meeting all kinds of distinguished persons, in my relation to the
+      magazine, and early that winter I met one who remains in my mind above all
+      others a person of distinction. He was scarcely a celebrity, but he
+      embodied certain social traits which were so characteristic of literary
+      Boston that it could not be approached without their recognition. The
+      Muses have often been acknowledged to be very nice young persons, but in
+      Boston they were really ladies; in Boston literature was of good family
+      and good society in a measure it has never been elsewhere. It might be
+      said even that reform was of good family in Boston; and literature and
+      reform equally shared the regard of Edmund Quincy, whose race was one of
+      the most aristocratic in New England. I had known him by his novel of
+      &lsquo;Wensley&rsquo; (it came so near being a first-rate novel), and by his Life of
+      Josiah Quincy, then a new book, but still better by his Boston letters to
+      the New York Tribune. These dealt frankly, in the old anti-slavery days
+      between 1850 and 1860, with other persons of distinction in Boston, who
+      did not see the right so clearly as Quincy did, or who at least let their
+      interests darken them to the ugliness of slavery. Their fault was all the
+      more comical because it was the error of men otherwise so correct, of
+      characters so stainless, of natures so upright; and the Quincy letters got
+      out of it all the fun there was in it. Quincy himself affected me as the
+      finest patrician type I had ever met. He was charmingly handsome, with a
+      nose of most fit aquilinity, smooth-shaven lips, &ldquo;educated whiskers,&rdquo; and
+      perfect glasses; his manner was beautiful, his voice delightful, when at
+      our first meeting he made me his reproaches in terms of lovely kindness
+      for having used in my &lsquo;Venetian Life&rsquo; the Briticism &lsquo;directly&rsquo; for &lsquo;as
+      soon as.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lowell once told me that Quincy had never had any calling or profession,
+      because when he found himself in the enjoyment of a moderate income on
+      leaving college, he decided to be simply a gentleman. He was too much of a
+      man to be merely that, and he was an abolitionist, a journalist, and for
+      conscience&rsquo; sake a satirist. Of that political mood of society which he
+      satirized was an eminent man whom it was also my good fortune to meet in
+      my early days in Boston; and if his great sweetness and kindness had not
+      instantly won my liking, I should still have been glad of the glimpse of
+      the older and statelier Boston which my slight acquaintance with George
+      Ticknor gave me. The historian of Spanish literature, the friend and
+      biographer of Prescott, and a leading figure of the intellectual society
+      of an epoch already closed, dwelt in the fine old square brick mansion
+      which yet stands at the corner of Park Street and Beacon, though sunk now
+      to a variety of business uses, and lamentably changed in aspect. The
+      interior was noble, and there was an air of scholarly quiet and of
+      lettered elegance in the library, where the host received his guests,
+      which seemed to pervade the whole house, and which made its appeal to the
+      imagination of one of them most potently. It seemed to me that to be
+      master of such circumstance and keeping would be enough of life in a
+      certain way; and it all lingers in my memory yet, as if it were one with
+      the gentle courtesy which welcomed me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among my fellow-guests one night was George S. Hillard, now a faded
+      reputation, and even then a life defeated of the high expectation of its
+      youth. I do not know whether his &lsquo;Six Months in Italy&rsquo; still keeps itself
+      in print; but it was a book once very well known; and he was perhaps the
+      more gracious to me, as our host was, because of our common Italian
+      background. He was of the old Silver-gray Whig society too, and I suppose
+      that order of things imparted its tone to what I felt and saw in that
+      place. The civil war had come and gone, and that order accepted the result
+      if not with faith, then with patience. There were two young English
+      noblemen there that night, who had been travelling in the South, and whose
+      stories of the wretched conditions they had seen moved our host to some
+      open misgiving. But the Englishmen had no question; in spite of all, they
+      defended the accomplished fact, and when I ventured to say that now at
+      least there could be a hope of better things, while the old order was only
+      the perpetuation of despair, he mildly assented, with a gesture of the
+      hand that waived the point, and a deeply sighed, &ldquo;Perhaps; perhaps.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a presence of great dignity, which seemed to recall the past with a
+      steadfast allegiance, and yet to relax itself towards the present in the
+      wisdom of the accumulated years. His whole life had been passed in
+      devotion to polite literature and in the society of the polite world; and
+      he was a type of scholar such as only the circumstances of Boston could
+      form. Those circumstances could alone form such another type as Quincy;
+      and I wish I could have felt then as I do now the advantage of meeting
+      them so contemporaneously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0042" id="link2H_4_0042">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The historian of Spanish literature was an old man nearer eighty than
+      seventy when I saw him, and I recall of him personally his dark tint, and
+      the scholarly refinement of his clean-shaven face, which seemed to me
+      rather English than American in character. He was quite exterior to the
+      Atlantic group of writers, and had no interest in me as one of it.
+      Literary Boston of that day was not a solidarity, as I soon perceived; and
+      I understood that it was only in my quality of stranger that I saw the
+      different phases of it. I should not be just to a vivid phase if I failed
+      to speak of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe and the impulse of reform which she
+      personified. I did not sympathize with this then so much as I do now, but
+      I could appreciate it on the intellectual side. Once, many years later, I
+      heard Mrs. Howe speak in public, and it seemed to me that she made one of
+      the best speeches I had ever heard. It gave me for the first time a notion
+      of what women might do in that sort if they entered public life; but when
+      we met in those earlier days I was interested in her as perhaps our chief
+      poetess. I believe she did not care much to speak of literature; she was
+      alert for other meanings in life, and I remember how she once brought to
+      book a youthful matron who had perhaps unduly lamented the hardships of
+      housekeeping, with the sharp demand, &ldquo;Child, where is your religion?&rdquo;
+       After the many years of an acquaintance which had not nearly so many
+      meetings as years, it was pleasant to find her, at the latest, as
+      strenuous as ever for the faith of works, and as eager to aid Stepniak as
+      John Brown. In her beautiful old age she survives a certain literary
+      impulse of Boston, but a still higher impulse of Boston she will not
+      survive, for that will last while the city endures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0043" id="link2H_4_0043">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The Cambridge men were curiously apart from others that formed the great
+      New England group, and with whom in my earlier ignorance I had always
+      fancied them mingling. Now and then I met Doctor Holmes at Longfellow&rsquo;s
+      table, but not oftener than now and then, and I never saw Emerson in
+      Cambridge at all except at Longfellow&rsquo;s funeral. In my first years on the
+      Atlantic I sometimes saw him, when he would address me some grave, rather
+      retrorsive civilities, after I had been newly introduced to him, as I had
+      always to be on these occasions. I formed the belief that he did not care
+      for me, either in my being or doing, and I am far from blaming him for
+      that: on such points there might easily be two opinions, and I was myself
+      often of the mind I imagined in him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If Emerson forgot me, it was perhaps because I was not of those qualities
+      of things which even then, it was said, he could remember so much better
+      than things themselves. In his later years I sometimes saw him in the
+      Boston streets with his beautiful face dreamily set, as he moved like one
+      to whose vision
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       &ldquo;Heaven opens inward, chasms yawn,
+        Vast images in glimmering dawn,
+        Half shown, are broken and withdrawn.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      It is known how before the end the eclipse became total and from moment to
+      moment the record inscribed upon his mind was erased. Some years before he
+      died I sat between him and Mrs. Rose Terry Cooke, at an &lsquo;Atlantic
+      Breakfast&rsquo; where it was part of my editorial function to preside. When he
+      was not asking me who she was, I could hear him asking her who I was. His
+      great soul worked so independently of memory as we conceive it, and so
+      powerfully and essentially, that one could not help wondering if; after
+      all, our personal continuity, our identity hereafter, was necessarily
+      trammeled up with our enduring knowledge of what happens here. His
+      remembrance absolutely ceased with an event, and yet his character, his
+      personality, his identity fully persisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not know, whether the things that we printed for Emerson after his
+      memory began to fail so utterly were the work of earlier years or not, but
+      I know that they were of his best. There were certain poems which could
+      not have been more electly, more exquisitely his, or fashioned with a
+      keener and juster self-criticism. His vision transcended his time so far
+      that some who have tired themselves out in trying to catch up with him
+      have now begun to say that he was no seer at all; but I doubt if these
+      form the last court of appeal in his case. In manner, he was very gentle,
+      like all those great New England men, but he was cold, like many of them,
+      to the new-comer, or to the old-comer who came newly. As I have elsewhere
+      recorded, I once heard him speak critically of Hawthorne, and once he
+      expressed his surprise at the late flowering brilliancy of Holmes&rsquo;s gift
+      in the Autocrat papers after all his friends supposed it had borne its
+      best fruit. But I recall no mention of Longfellow, or Lowell, or Whittier
+      from him. At a dinner where the talk glanced upon Walt Whitman he turned
+      to me as perhaps representing the interest posterity might take in the
+      matter, and referred to Whitman&rsquo;s public use of his privately written
+      praise as something altogether unexpected. He did not disown it or
+      withdraw it, but seemed to feel (not indignantly) that there had been an
+      abuse of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0044" id="link2H_4_0044">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IX.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The first time I saw Whittier was in Fields&rsquo;s room at the publishing
+      office, where I had come upon some editorial errand to my chief. He
+      introduced me to the poet: a tall, spare figure in black of Quaker cut,
+      with a keen, clean-shaven face, black hair, and vivid black eyes. It was
+      just after his poem, &lsquo;Snow Bound&rsquo;, had made its great success, in the
+      modest fashion of those days, and had sold not two hundred thousand but
+      twenty thousand, and I tried to make him my compliment. I contrived to say
+      that I could not tell him how much I liked it; and he received the
+      inadequate expression of my feeling with doubtless as much effusion as he
+      would have met something more explicit and abundant. If he had judged fit
+      to take my contract off my hands in any way, I think he would have been
+      less able to do so than any of his New England contemporaries. In him, as
+      I have suggested, the Quaker calm was bound by the frosty Puritanic air,
+      and he was doubly cold to the touch of the stranger, though he would thaw
+      out to old friends, and sparkle in laugh and joke. I myself never got so
+      far with him as to experience this geniality, though afterwards we became
+      such friends as an old man and a young man could be who rarely met. Our
+      better acquaintance began with some talk, at a second meeting, about
+      Bayard Taylor&rsquo;s &lsquo;Story of Kennett&rsquo;, which had then lately appeared, and
+      which he praised for its fidelity to Quaker character in its less amiable
+      aspects. No doubt I had made much of my own Quaker descent (which I felt
+      was one of the few things I had to be proud of), and he therefore spoke
+      the more frankly of those traits of brutality into which the primitive
+      sincerity of the sect sometimes degenerated. He thought the habit of
+      plain-speaking had to be jealously guarded to keep it from becoming
+      rude-speaking, and he matched with stories of his own some things I had
+      heard my father tell of Friends in the backwoods who were Foes to good
+      manners.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whittier was one of the most generous of men towards the work of others,
+      especially the work of a new man, and if I did anything that he liked, I
+      could count upon him for cordial recognition. In the quiet of his country
+      home at Danvers he apparently read all the magazines, and kept himself
+      fully abreast of the literary movement, but I doubt if he so fully
+      appreciated the importance of the social movement. Like some others of the
+      great anti-slavery men, he seemed to imagine that mankind had won itself a
+      clear field by destroying chattel slavery, and he had. no sympathy with
+      those who think that the man who may any moment be out of work is
+      industrially a slave. This is not strange; so few men last over from one
+      reform to another that the wonder is that any should, not that one should
+      not. Whittier was prophet for one great need of the divine to man, and he
+      spoke his message with a fervor that at times was like the trembling of a
+      flame, or the quivering of midsummer sunshine. It was hard to associate
+      with the man as one saw him, still, shy, stiff, the passion of his verse.
+      This imbued not only his antislavery utterances, but equally his ballads
+      of the old witch and Quaker persecution, and flashed a far light into the
+      dimness where his interrogations of Mystery pierced. Whatever doubt there
+      can be of the fate of other New England poets in the great and final
+      account, it seems to me that certain of these pieces make his place
+      secure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is great inequality in his work, and I felt this so strongly that
+      when I came to have full charge of the Magazine, I ventured once to
+      distinguish. He sent me a poem, and I had the temerity to return it, and
+      beg him for something else. He magnanimously refrained from all show of
+      offence, and after a while, when he had printed the poem elsewhere, he
+      gave me another. By this time, I perceived that I had been wrong, not as
+      to the poem returned, but as to my function regarding him and such as he.
+      I had made my reflections, and never again did I venture to pass upon what
+      contributors of his quality sent me. I took it and printed it, and praised
+      the gods; and even now I think that with such men it was not my duty to
+      play the censor in the periodical which they had made what it was. They
+      had set it in authority over American literature, and it was not for me to
+      put myself in authority over them. Their fame was in their own keeping,
+      and it was not my part to guard it against them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After that experience I not only practised an eager acquiescence in their
+      wish to reach the public through the Atlantic, but I used all the delicacy
+      I was master of in bowing the way to them. Sometimes my utmost did not
+      avail, or more strictly speaking it did not avail in one instance with
+      Emerson. He had given me upon much entreaty a poem which was one of his
+      greatest and best, but the proof-reader found a nominative at odds with
+      its verb. We had some trouble in reconciling them, and some other delays,
+      and meanwhile Doctor Holmes offered me a poem for the same number. I now
+      doubted whether I should get Emerson&rsquo;s poem back in time for it, but
+      unluckily the proof did come back in time, and then I had to choose
+      between my poets, or acquaint them with the state of the case, and let
+      them choose what I should do. I really felt that Doctor Holmes had the
+      right to precedence, since Emerson had withheld his proof so long that I
+      could not count upon it; but I wrote to Emerson, and asked (as nearly as I
+      can remember) whether he would consent to let me put his poem over to the
+      next number, or would prefer to have it appear in the same number with
+      Doctor Holmes&rsquo;s; the subjects were cognate, and I had my misgivings. He
+      wrote me back to &ldquo;return the proofs and break up the forms.&rdquo; I could not
+      go to this iconoclastic extreme with the electrotypes of the magazine, but
+      I could return the proofs. I did so, feeling that I had done my possible,
+      and silently grieving that there could be such ire in heavenly minds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0045" id="link2H_4_0045">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      X.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Emerson, as I say, I had once met in Cambridge, but Whittier never; and I
+      have a feeling that poet as Cambridge felt him to be, she had her
+      reservations concerning him. I cannot put these into words which would not
+      oversay them, but they were akin to those she might have refined upon in
+      regard to Mrs. Stowe. Neither of these great writers would have appeared
+      to Cambridge of the last literary quality; their fame was with a world too
+      vast to be the test that her own
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+        &ldquo;One entire and perfect crysolite&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      would have formed. Whittier in fact had not arrived at the clear splendor
+      of his later work without some earlier turbidity; he was still from time
+      to time capable of a false rhyme, like morn and dawn. As for the author of
+      &lsquo;Uncle Tom&rsquo;s Cabin&rsquo; her syntax was such a snare to her that it sometimes
+      needed the combined skill of all the proof-readers and the assistant
+      editor to extricate her. Of course, nothing was ever written into her
+      work, but in changes of diction, in correction of solecisms, in
+      transposition of phrases, the text was largely rewritten on the margin of
+      her proofs. The soul of her art was present, but the form was so often
+      absent, that when it was clothed on anew, it would have been hard to say
+      whose cut the garment was of in many places. In fact, the proof-reading of
+      the &lsquo;Atlantic Monthly&rsquo; was something almost fearfully scrupulous and
+      perfect. The proofs were first read by the under proof-reader in the
+      printing-office; then the head reader passed them to me perfectly clean as
+      to typography, with his own abundant and most intelligent comments on the
+      literature; and then I read them, making what changes I chose, and
+      verifying every quotation, every date, every geographical and biographical
+      name, every foreign word to the last accent, every technical and
+      scientific term. Where it was possible or at all desirable the proof was
+      next submitted to the author. When it came back to me, I revised it,
+      accepting or rejecting the author&rsquo;s judgment according as he was entitled
+      by his ability and knowledge or not to have them. The proof now went to
+      the printers for correction; they sent it again to the head reader, who
+      carefully revised it and returned it again to me. I read it a second time,
+      and it was again corrected. After this it was revised in the office and
+      sent to the stereotyper, from whom it came to the head reader for a last
+      revision in the plates.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would not do to say how many of the first American writers owed their
+      correctness in print to the zeal of our proof-reading, but I may say that
+      there were very few who did not owe something. The wisest and ablest were
+      the most patient and grateful, like Mrs. Stowe, under correction; it was
+      only the beginners and the more ignorant who were angry; and almost always
+      the proof-reading editor had his way on disputed points. I look back now,
+      with respectful amazement at my proficiency in detecting the errors of the
+      great as well as the little. I was able to discover mistakes even in the
+      classical quotations of the deeply lettered Sumner, and I remember, in the
+      earliest years of my service on the Atlantic, waiting in this statesman&rsquo;s
+      study amidst the prints and engravings that attested his personal
+      resemblance to Edmund Burke, with his proofs in my hand and my heart in my
+      mouth, to submit my doubts of his Latinity. I forget how he received them;
+      but he was not a very gracious person.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Stowe was a gracious person, and carried into age the inalienable
+      charm of a woman who must have been very, charming earlier. I met her only
+      at the Fieldses&rsquo; in Boston, where one night I witnessed a controversy
+      between her and Doctor Holmes concerning homoeopathy and allopathy which
+      lasted well through dinner. After this lapse of time, I cannot tell how
+      the affair ended, but I feel sure of the liking with which Mrs. Stowe
+      inspired me. There was something very simple, very motherly in her, and
+      something divinely sincere. She was quite the person to take &lsquo;au grand
+      serieux&rsquo; the monstrous imaginations of Lady Byron&rsquo;s jealousy and to feel
+      it on her conscience to make public report of them when she conceived that
+      the time had come to do so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Francis Parkman I knew much later than in some others a differentiation
+      of the New England type which was not less characteristic. He, like so
+      many other Boston men of letters, was of patrician family, and of those
+      easy fortunes which Clio prefers her sons to be of; but he paid for these
+      advantages by the suffering in which he wrought at what is, I suppose, our
+      greatest history. He wrought at it piecemeal, and sometimes only by
+      moments, when the terrible head aches which tormented him, and the
+      disorder of the heart which threatened his life, allowed him a brief
+      respite for the task which was dear to him. He must have been more than a
+      quarter of a century in completing it, and in this time, as he once told
+      me, it had given him a day-laborer&rsquo;s wages; but of course money was the
+      least return he wished from it. I read the regularly successive volumes of
+      &lsquo;The Jesuits in North America, The Old Regime in Canada&rsquo;, the &lsquo;Wolfe and
+      Montcalm&rsquo;, and the others that went to make up the whole history with a
+      sufficiently noisy enthusiasm, and our acquaintance began by his
+      expressing his gratification with the praises of them that I had put in
+      print. We entered into relations as contributor and editor, and I know
+      that he was pleased with my eagerness to get as many detachable chapters
+      from the book in hand as he could give me for the magazine, but he was of
+      too fine a politeness to make this the occasion of his first coming to see
+      me. He had walked out to Cambridge, where I then lived, in pursuance of a
+      regimen which, I believe, finally built up his health; that it was
+      unsparing, I can testify from my own share in one of his constitutionals
+      in Boston, many years later.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His experience in laying the groundwork for his history, and his
+      researches in making it thorough, were such as to have liberated him to
+      the knowledge of other manners and ideals, but he remained strictly a
+      Bostonian, and as immutably of the Boston social and literary faith as any
+      I knew in that capital of accomplished facts. He had lived like an Indian
+      among the wild Western tribes; he consorted with the Canadian
+      archaeologists in their mousings among the colonial archives of their
+      fallen state; every year he went to Quebec or Paris to study the history
+      of New France in the original documents; European society was open to him
+      everywhere; but he had those limitations which I nearly always found in
+      the Boston men, I remember his talking to me of &lsquo;The Rise of Silas
+      Lapham&rsquo;, in a somewhat troubled and uncertain strain, and interpreting his
+      rise as the achievement of social recognition, without much or at all
+      liking it or me for it. I did not think it my part to point out that I had
+      supposed the rise to be a moral one; and later I fell under his
+      condemnation for certain high crimes and misdemeanors I had been guilty of
+      against a well-known ideal in fiction. These in fact constituted
+      lese-majesty of romanticism, which seemed to be disproportionately dear to
+      a man who was in his own way trying to tell the truth of human nature as I
+      was in mine. His displeasures passed, however, and my last meeting with
+      our greatest historian, as I think him, was of unalloyed friendliness. He
+      came to me during my final year in Boston for nothing apparently but to
+      tell me of his liking for a book of mine describing boy-life in Southern
+      Ohio a half-century ago. He wished to talk about many points of this,
+      which he found the same as his own boylife in the neighborhood of Boston;
+      and we could agree that the life of the Anglo-Saxon boy was pretty much
+      the same everywhere. He had helped himself into my apartment with a
+      crutch, but I do not remember how he had fallen lame. It was the end of
+      his long walks, I believe, and not long afterwards I had the grief to read
+      of his death. I noticed that perhaps through his enforced quiet, he had
+      put on weight; his fine face was full; whereas when I first knew him he
+      was almost delicately thin of figure and feature. He was always of a
+      distinguished presence, and his face had a great distinction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It had not the appealing charm I found in the face of James Parton,
+      another historian I knew earlier in my Boston days. I cannot say how much
+      his books, once so worthily popular, are now known but I have an abiding
+      sense of their excellence. I have not read the &lsquo;Life of Voltaire&rsquo;, which
+      was the last, but all the rest, from the first, I have read, and if there
+      are better American biographies than those of Franklin or of Jefferson, I
+      could not say where to find them. The Greeley and the Burr were younger
+      books, and so was the Jackson, and they were not nearly so good; but to
+      all the author had imparted the valuable humanity in which he abounded. He
+      was never of the fine world of literature, the world that sniffs and
+      sneers, and abashes the simpler-hearted reader. But he was a true artist,
+      and English born as he was, he divined American character as few Americans
+      have done. He was a man of eminent courage, and in the days when to be an
+      agnostic was to be almost an outcast, he had the heart to say of the
+      Mysteries, that he did not know. He outlived the condemnation that this
+      brought, and I think that no man ever came near him without in some
+      measure loving him. To me he was of a most winning personality, which his
+      strong, gentle face expressed, and a cast in the eye which he could not
+      bring to bear directly upon his vis-a-vis, endeared. I never met him
+      without wishing more of his company, for he seldom failed to say something
+      to whatever was most humane and most modern in me. Our last meeting was at
+      Newburyport, whither he had long before removed from New York, and where
+      in the serene atmosphere of the ancient Puritan town he found leisure and
+      inspiration for his work. He was not then engaged upon any considerable
+      task, and he had aged and broken somewhat. But the old geniality, the old
+      warmth glowed in him, and made a summer amidst the storm of snow that
+      blinded the wintry air without. A new light had then lately come into my
+      life, by which I saw all things that did not somehow tell for human
+      brotherhood dwarfish and ugly, and he listened, as I imagined, to what I
+      had to say with the tolerant sympathy of a man who has been a long time
+      thinking those things, and views with a certain amusement the zeal of the
+      fresh discoverer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was yet another historian in Boston, whose acquaintance I made later
+      than either Parkman&rsquo;s or Parton&rsquo;s, and whose very recent death leaves me
+      with the grief of a friend. No ones indeed, could meet John Codman Ropes
+      without wishing to be his friend, or without finding a friend in him. He
+      had his likes and his dislikes, but he could have had no enmities except
+      for evil and meanness. I never knew a man of higher soul, of sweeter
+      nature, and his whole life was a monument of character. It cannot wound
+      him now to speak of the cruel deformity which came upon him in his
+      boyhood, and haunted all his after days with suffering. His gentle face
+      showed the pain which is always the part of the hunchback, but nothing
+      else in him confessed a sense of his affliction, and the resolute activity
+      of his mind denied it in every way. He was, as is well known, a very able
+      lawyer, in full practice, while he was making his studies of military
+      history, and winning recognition for almost unique insight and
+      thoroughness in that direction, though I believe that when he came to
+      embody the results in those extraordinary volumes recording the battles of
+      our civil war, he retired from the law in some measure. He knew these
+      battles more accurately than the generals who fought them, and he was of a
+      like proficiency in the European wars from the time of Napoleon down to
+      our own time. I have heard a story, which I cannot vouch for, that when
+      foreknowledge of his affliction, at the outbreak of our civil war, forbade
+      him to be a soldier, he became a student of soldiership, and wreaked in
+      that sort the passion of his most gallant spirit. But whether this was
+      true or not, it is certain that he pursued the study with a devotion which
+      never blinded him to the atrocity of war. Some wars he could excuse and
+      even justify, but for any war that seemed wanton or aggressive, he had
+      only abhorrence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The last summer of a score that I had known him, we sat on the veranda of
+      his cottage at York Harbor, and looked out over the moonlit sea, and he
+      talked of the high and true things, with the inextinguishable zest for the
+      inquiry which I always found in him, though he was then feeling the
+      approaches of the malady which was so soon to end all groping in these
+      shadows for him. He must have faced the fact with the same courage and the
+      same trust with which he faced all facts. From the first I found him a
+      deeply religious man, not only in the ecclesiastical sense, but in the
+      more mystical meanings of the word, and he kept his faith as he kept his
+      youth to the last. Every one who knew him, knows how young he was in
+      heart, and how he liked to have those that were young in years about him.
+      He wished to have his house in Boston, as well as his cottage at York,
+      full of young men and young girls, whose joy of life he made his own, and
+      whose society he preferred to his contemporaries&rsquo;. One could not blame him
+      for that, or for seeking the sun, wherever he could, but it would be a
+      false notion of him to suppose that his sympathies were solely or chiefly
+      with the happy. In every sort, as I knew him, he was fine and good. The
+      word is not worthy of him, after some of its uses and associations, but if
+      it were unsmutched by these, and whitened to its primitive significance, I
+      should say he was one of the most perfect gentlemen I ever knew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0046" id="link2H_4_0046">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0047" id="link2H_4_0047">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Elsewhere we literary folk are apt to be such a common lot, with
+      tendencies here and there to be a shabby lot; we arrive from all sorts of
+      unexpected holes and corners of the earth, remote, obscure; and at the
+      best we do so often come up out of the ground; but at Boston we were of
+      ascertained and noted origin, and good part of us dropped from the skies.
+      Instead of holding horses before the doors of theatres; or capping verses
+      at the plough-tail; or tramping over Europe with nothing but a flute in
+      the pocket; or walking up to the metropolis with no luggage but the MS. of
+      a tragedy; or sleeping in doorways or under the arches of bridges; or
+      serving as apothecaries&rsquo; &lsquo;prentices&mdash;we were good society from the
+      beginning. I think this was none the worse for us, and it was vastly the
+      better for good society.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Literature in Boston, indeed, was so respectable, and often of so high a
+      lineage, that to be a poet was not only to be good society, but almost to
+      be good family. If one names over the men who gave Boston her supremacy in
+      literature during that Unitarian harvest-time of the old Puritanic
+      seed-time which was her Augustan age, one names the people who were and
+      who had been socially first in the city ever since the self-exile of the
+      Tories at the time of the Revolution. To say Prescott, Motley, Parkman,
+      Lowell, Norton, Higginson, Dana, Emerson, Channing, was to say patrician,
+      in the truest and often the best sense, if not the largest. Boston was
+      small, but these were of her first citizens, and their primacy, in its
+      way, was of the same quality as that, say, of the chief families of
+      Venice. But these names can never have the effect for the stranger that
+      they had for one to the manner born. I say had, for I doubt whether in
+      Boston they still mean all that they once meant, and that their
+      equivalents meant in science, in law, in politics. The most famous, if not
+      the greatest of all the literary men of Boston, I have not mentioned with
+      them, for Longfellow was not of the place, though by his sympathies and
+      relations he became of it; and I have not mentioned Oliver Wendell Holmes,
+      because I think his name would come first into the reader&rsquo;s thought with
+      the suggestion of social quality in the humanities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Holmes was of the Brahminical caste which his humorous recognition invited
+      from its subjectivity in the New England consciousness into the light
+      where all could know it and own it, and like Longfellow he was allied to
+      the patriciate of Boston by the most intimate ties of life. For a long
+      time, for the whole first period of his work, he stood for that alone, its
+      tastes, its prejudices, its foibles even, and when he came to stand in his
+      &lsquo;second period, for vastly, for infinitely more, and to make friends with
+      the whole race, as few men have ever done, it was always, I think, with a
+      secret shiver of doubt, a backward look of longing, and an eye askance. He
+      was himself perfectly aware of this at times, and would mark his several
+      misgivings with a humorous sense of the situation. He was essentially too
+      kind to be of a narrow world, too human to be finally of less than
+      humanity, too gentle to be of the finest gentility. But such limitations
+      as he had were in the direction I have hinted, or perhaps more than
+      hinted; and I am by no means ready to make a mock of them, as it would be
+      so easy to do for some reasons that he has himself suggested. To value
+      aright the affection which the old Bostonian had for Boston one must
+      conceive of something like the patriotism of men in the times when a man&rsquo;s
+      city was a man&rsquo;s country, something Athenian, something Florentine. The
+      war that nationalized us liberated this love to the whole country, but its
+      first tenderness remained still for Boston, and I suppose a Bostonian
+      still thinks of himself first as a Bostonian and then as an American, in a
+      way that no New-Yorker could deal with himself. The rich historical
+      background dignifies and ennobles the intense public spirit of the place,
+      and gives it a kind of personality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0048" id="link2H_4_0048">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In literature Doctor Holmes survived all the Bostonians who had given the
+      city her primacy in letters, but when I first knew him there was no
+      apparent ground for questioning it. I do not mean now the time when I
+      visited New England, but when I came to live near Boston, and to begin the
+      many happy years which I spent in her fine, intellectual air. I found time
+      to run in upon him, while I was there arranging to take my place on the
+      Atlantic Monthly, and I remember that in this brief moment with him he
+      brought me to book about some vaunting paragraph in the &lsquo;Nation&rsquo; claiming
+      the literary primacy for New York. He asked me if I knew who wrote it, and
+      I was obliged to own that I had written it myself, when with the kindness
+      he always showed me he protested against my position. To tell the truth, I
+      do not think now I had any very good reasons for it, and I certainly could
+      urge none that would stand against his. I could only fall back upon the
+      saving clause that this primacy was claimed mainly if not wholly for New
+      York in the future. He was willing to leave me the connotations of
+      prophecy, but I think he did even this out of politeness rather than
+      conviction, and I believe he had always a sensitiveness where Boston was
+      concerned, which could not seem ungenerous to any generous mind. Whatever
+      lingering doubt of me he may have had, with reference to Boston, seemed to
+      satisfy itself when several years afterwards he happened to speak of a
+      certain character in an early novel of mine, who was not quite the kind of
+      Bostonian one could wish to be. The thing came up in talk with another
+      person, who had referred to my Bostonian, and the doctor had apparently
+      made his acquaintance in the book, and not liked him. &ldquo;I understood, of
+      course,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that he was a Bostonian, not the Bostonian,&rdquo; and I
+      could truthfully answer that this was by all means my own understanding
+      too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His fondness for his city, which no one could appreciate better than
+      myself, I hope, often found expression in a burlesque excess in his
+      writings, and in his talk perhaps oftener still. Hard upon my return from
+      Venice I had a half-hour with him in his old study on Charles Street,
+      where he still lived in 1865, and while I was there a young man came in
+      for the doctor&rsquo;s help as a physician, though he looked so very well, and
+      was so lively and cheerful, that I have since had my doubts whether he had
+      not made a pretext for a glimpse of him as the Autocrat. The doctor took
+      him upon his word, however, and said he had been so long out of practice
+      that he could not do anything for him, but he gave him the address of
+      another physician, somewhere near Washington Street. &ldquo;And if you don&rsquo;t
+      know where Washington Street is,&rdquo; he said, with a gay burst at a certain
+      vagueness which had come into the young man&rsquo;s face, &ldquo;you don&rsquo;t know
+      anything.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We had been talking of Venice, and what life was like there, and he made
+      me tell him in some detail. He was especially interested in what I had to
+      say of the minute subdivision and distribution of the necessaries, the
+      small coins, and the small values adapted to their purchase, the intensely
+      retail character, in fact, of household provisioning; and I could see how
+      he pleased himself in formulating the theory that the higher a
+      civilization the finer the apportionment of the demands and supplies. The
+      ideal, he said, was a civilization in which you could buy two cents&rsquo; worth
+      of beef, and a divergence from this standard was towards barbarism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The secret of the man who is universally interesting is that he is
+      universally interested, and this was, above all, the secret of the charm
+      that Doctor Holmes had for every one. No doubt he knew it, for what that
+      most alert intelligence did not know of itself was scarcely worth knowing.
+      This knowledge was one of his chief pleasures, I fancy; he rejoiced in the
+      consciousness which is one of the highest attributes of the highly
+      organized man, and he did not care for the consequences in your mind, if
+      you were so stupid as not to take him aright. I remember the delight Henry
+      James, the father of the novelist, had in reporting to me the frankness of
+      the doctor, when he had said to him, &ldquo;Holmes, you are intellectually the
+      most alive man I ever knew.&rdquo; &ldquo;I am, I am,&rdquo; said the doctor. &ldquo;From the
+      crown of my head to the sole of my foot, I&rsquo;m alive, I&rsquo;m alive!&rdquo; Any one
+      who ever saw him will imagine the vivid relish he had in recognizing the
+      fact. He could not be with you a moment without shedding upon you the
+      light of his flashing wit, his radiant humor, and he shone equally upon
+      the rich and poor in mind. His gaiety of heart could not withhold itself
+      from any chance of response, but he did wish always to be fully
+      understood, and to be liked by those he liked. He gave his liking
+      cautiously, though, for the affluence of his sympathies left him without
+      the reserves of colder natures, and he had to make up for these with
+      careful circumspection. He wished to know the character of the person who
+      made overtures to his acquaintance, for he was aware that his friendship
+      lay close to it; he wanted to be sure that he was a nice person, and
+      though I think he preferred social quality in his fellow-man, he did not
+      refuse himself to those who had merely a sweet and wholesome humanity. He
+      did not like anything that tasted or smelt of Bohemianism in the personnel
+      of literature, but he did not mind the scent of the new-ploughed earth, or
+      even of the barn-yard. I recall his telling me once that after two younger
+      brothers-in-letters had called upon him in the odor of an habitual
+      beeriness and smokiness, he opened the window; and the very last time I
+      saw him he remembered at eighty-five the offence he had found on his first
+      visit to New York, when a metropolitan poet had asked him to lunch in a
+      basement restaurant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0049" id="link2H_4_0049">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      He seemed not to mind, however, climbing to the little apartment we had in
+      Boston when we came there in 1866, and he made this call upon us in due
+      form, bringing Mrs. Holmes with him as if to accent the recognition
+      socially. We were then incredibly young, much younger than I find people
+      ever are nowadays, and in the consciousness of our youth we felt, to the
+      last exquisite value of the fact, what it was to have the Autocrat come to
+      see us; and I believe he was not displeased to perceive this; he liked to
+      know that you felt his quality in every way. That first winter, however, I
+      did not see him often, and in the spring we went to live in Cambridge, and
+      thereafter I met him chiefly at Longfellow&rsquo;s, or when I came in to dine at
+      the Fieldses&rsquo;, in Boston. It was at certain meetings of the Dante Club,
+      when Longfellow read aloud his translation for criticism, and there was
+      supper later, that one saw the doctor; and his voice was heard at the
+      supper rather than at the criticism, for he was no Italianate. He always
+      seemed to like a certain turn of the talk toward the mystical, but with
+      space for the feet on a firm ground of fact this side of the shadows; when
+      it came to going over among them, and laying hold of them with the band of
+      faith, as if they were substance, he was not of the excursion. It is well
+      known how fervent, I cannot say devout, a spiritualist Longfellow&rsquo;s
+      brother-in-law, Appleton, was; and when he was at the table too, it took
+      all the poet&rsquo;s delicate skill to keep him and the Autocrat from involving
+      themselves in a cataclysmal controversy upon the matter of manifestations.
+      With Doctor Holmes the inquiry was inquiry, to the last, I believe, and
+      the burden of proof was left to the ghosts and their friends. His attitude
+      was strictly scientific; he denied nothing, but he expected the
+      supernatural to be at least as convincing as the natural.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a time in his history when the popular ignorance classed him
+      with those who were once rudely called infidels; but the world has since
+      gone so fast and so far that the mind he was of concerning religious
+      belief would now be thought religious by a good half of the religious
+      world. It is true that he had and always kept a grudge against the
+      ancestral Calvinism which afflicted his youth; and he was through all
+      rises and lapses of opinion essentially Unitarian; but of the honest
+      belief of any one, I am sure he never felt or spoke otherwise than most
+      tolerantly, most tenderly. As often as he spoke of religion, and his talk
+      tended to it very often, I never heard an irreligious word from him, far
+      less a scoff or sneer at religion; and I am certain that this was not
+      merely because he would have thought it bad taste, though undoubtedly he
+      would have thought it bad taste; I think it annoyed, it hurt him, to be
+      counted among the iconoclasts, and he would have been profoundly grieved
+      if he could have known how widely this false notion of him once prevailed.
+      It can do no harm at this late day to impart from the secrets of the
+      publishing house the fact that a supposed infidelity in the tone of his
+      story The Guardian Angel cost the Atlantic Monthly many subscribers. Now
+      the tone of that story would not be thought even mildly agnostic, I fancy;
+      and long before his death the author had outlived the error concerning
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not the best of his stories, by any means, and it would not be too
+      harsh to say that it was the poorest. His novels all belonged to an order
+      of romance which was as distinctly his own as the form of dramatized essay
+      which he invented in the Autocrat. If he did not think poorly of them, he
+      certainly did not think too proudly, and I heard him quote with relish the
+      phrase of a lady who had spoken of them to him as his &ldquo;medicated novels.&rdquo;
+       That, indeed, was perhaps what they were; a faint, faint odor of the
+      pharmacopoeia clung to their pages; their magic was scientific. He knew
+      this better than any one else, of course, and if any one had said it in
+      his turn he would hardly have minded it. But what he did mind was the
+      persistent misinterpretation of his intention in certain quarters where he
+      thought he had the right to respectful criticism in stead of the
+      succession of sneers that greeted the successive numbers of his story; and
+      it was no secret that he felt the persecution keenly. Perhaps he thought
+      that he had already reached that time in his literary life when he was a
+      fact rather than a question, and when reasons and not feelings must have
+      to do with his acceptance or rejection. But he had to live many years yet
+      before he reached this state. When he did reach it, happily a good while
+      before his death, I do not believe any man ever enjoyed the like condition
+      more. He loved to feel himself out of the fight, with much work before him
+      still, but with nothing that could provoke ill-will in his activities. He
+      loved at all times to take himself objectively, if I may so express my
+      sense of a mental attitude that misled many. As I have said before, he was
+      universally interested, and he studied the universe from himself. I do not
+      know how one is to study it otherwise; the impersonal has really no
+      existence; but with all his subtlety and depth he was of a make so simple,
+      of a spirit so naive, that he could not practise the feints some use to
+      conceal that interest in self which, after all, every one knows is only
+      concealed. He frankly and joyously made himself the starting-point in all
+      his inquest of the hearts and minds of other men, but so far from singling
+      himself out in this, and standing apart in it, there never was any one who
+      was more eagerly and gladly your fellow-being in the things of the soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0050" id="link2H_4_0050">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In the things of the world, he had fences, and looked at some people
+      through palings and even over the broken bottles on the tops of walls; and
+      I think he was the loser by this, as well as they. But then I think all
+      fences are bad, and that God has made enough differences between men; we
+      need not trouble ourselves to multiply them. Even behind his fences,
+      however, Holmes had a heart kind for the outsiders, and I do not believe
+      any one came into personal relations with him who did not experience this
+      kindness. In that long and delightful talk I had with him on my return
+      from Venice (I can praise the talk because it was mainly his), we spoke of
+      the status of domestics in the Old World, and how fraternal the relation
+      of high and low was in Italy, while in England, between master and man, it
+      seemed without acknowledgment of their common humanity. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I
+      always felt as if English servants expected to be trampled on; but I can&rsquo;t
+      do that. If they want to be trampled on, they must get some one else.&rdquo; He
+      thought that our American way was infinitely better; and I believe that in
+      spite of the fences there was always an instinctive impulse with him to
+      get upon common ground with his fellow-man. I used to notice in the
+      neighborhood cabman who served our block on Beacon Street a sort of
+      affectionate reverence for the Autocrat, which could have come from
+      nothing but the kindly terms between them; if you went to him when he was
+      engaged to Doctor Holmes, he told you so with a sort of implication in his
+      manner that the thought of anything else for the time was profanation. The
+      good fellow who took him his drives about the Beverly and Manchester
+      shores seemed to be quite in the joke of the doctor&rsquo;s humor, and within
+      the bounds of his personal modesty and his functional dignity permitted
+      himself a smile at the doctor&rsquo;s sallies, when you stood talking with him,
+      or listening to him at the carriage-side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The civic and social circumstance that a man values himself on is commonly
+      no part of his value, and certainly no part of his greatness. Rather, it
+      is the very thing that limits him, and I think that Doctor Holmes appeared
+      in the full measure of his generous personality to those who did not and
+      could not appreciate his circumstance, and not to those who formed it, and
+      who from life-long association were so dear and comfortable to him. Those
+      who best knew how great a man he was were those who came from far to pay
+      him their duty, or to thank him for some help they had got from his books,
+      or to ask his counsel or seek his sympathy. With all such he was most
+      winningly tender, most intelligently patient. I suppose no great author
+      was ever more visited by letter and in person than he, or kept a
+      faithfuler conscience for his guests. With those who appeared to him in
+      the flesh he used a miraculous tact, and I fancy in his treatment of all
+      the physician native in him bore a characteristic part. No one seemed to
+      be denied access to him, but it was after a moment of preparation that one
+      was admitted, and any one who was at all sensitive must have felt from the
+      first moment in his presence that there could be no trespassing in point
+      of time. If now and then some insensitive began to trespass, there was a
+      sliding-scale of dismissal that never failed of its work, and that really
+      saved the author from the effect of intrusion. He was not bored because he
+      would not be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I transfer at random the impressions of many years to my page, and I shall
+      not try to observe a chronological order in these memories. Vivid among
+      them is that of a visit which I paid him with Osgood the publisher, then
+      newly the owner of the Atlantic Monthly, when I had newly become the sole
+      editor. We wished to signalize our accession to the control of the
+      magazine by a stroke that should tell most in the public eye, and we
+      thought of asking Doctor Holmes to do something again in the manner of the
+      Autocrat and the Professor at the Breakfast Table. Some letters had passed
+      between him and the management concerning our wish, and then Osgood
+      thought that it would be right and fit for us to go to him in person. He
+      proposed the visit, and Doctor Holmes received us with a mind in which he
+      had evidently formulated all his thoughts upon the matter. His main
+      question was whether at his age of sixty years a man was justified in
+      seeking to recall a public of the past, or to create a new public in the
+      present. He seemed to have looked the ground over not only with a personal
+      interest in the question, but with a keen scientific zest for it as
+      something which it was delightful to consider in its generic relations;
+      and I fancy that the pleasure of this inquiry more than consoled him for
+      such pangs of misgiving as he must have had in the personal question. As
+      commonly happens in the solution of such problems, it was not solved; he
+      was very willing to take our minds upon it, and to incur the risk, if we
+      thought it well and were willing to share it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We came away rejoicing, and the new series began with the new year
+      following. It was by no means the popular success that we had hoped; not
+      because the author had not a thousand new things to say, or failed to say
+      them with the gust and freshness of his immortal youth, but because it was
+      not well to disturb a form associated in the public mind with an
+      achievement which had become classic. It is of the Autocrat of the
+      Breakfast Table that people think, when they think of the peculiar species
+      of dramatic essay which the author invented, and they think also of the
+      Professor at the Breakfast Table, because he followed so soon; but the
+      Poet at the Breakfast Table came so long after that his advent alienated
+      rather than conciliated liking. Very likely, if the Poet had come first he
+      would have had no second place in the affections of his readers, for his
+      talk was full of delightful matter; and at least one of the poems which
+      graced each instalment was one of the finest and greatest that Doctor
+      Holmes ever wrote. I mean &ldquo;Homesick in Heaven,&rdquo; which seems to me not only
+      what I have said, but one of the most important, the most profoundly
+      pathetic in the language. Indeed, I do not know any other that in the same
+      direction goes so far with suggestion so penetrating. The other poems were
+      mainly of a cast which did not win; the metaphysics in them were too much
+      for the human interest, and again there rose a foolish clamor of the
+      creeds against him on account of them. The great talent, the beautiful and
+      graceful fancy, the eager imagination of the Autocrat could not avail in
+      this third attempt, and I suppose the Poet at the Breakfast Table must be
+      confessed as near a failure as Doctor Holmes could come. It certainly was
+      so in the magazine which the brilliant success of the first had availed to
+      establish in the high place the periodical must always hold in the history
+      of American literature. Lowell was never tired of saying, when he recurred
+      to the first days of his editorship, that the magazine could never have
+      gone at all without the Autocrat papers. He was proud of having insisted
+      upon Holmes&rsquo;s doing something for the new venture, and he was fond of
+      recalling the author&rsquo;s misgivings concerning his contributions, which
+      later repeated themselves with too much reason, though not with the reason
+      that was in his own mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0051" id="link2H_4_0051">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      He lived twenty-five years after that self-question at sixty, and after
+      eighty he continued to prove that threescore was not the limit of a man&rsquo;s
+      intellectual activity or literary charm. During all that time the work he
+      did in mere quantity was the work that a man in the prime of life might
+      well have been vain of doing, and it was of a quality not less surprising.
+      If I asked him with any sort of fair notice I could rely upon him always
+      for something for the January number, and throughout the year I could
+      count upon him for those occasional pieces in which he so easily excelled
+      all former writers of occasional verse, and which he liked to keep from
+      the newspapers for the magazine. He had a pride in his promptness with
+      copy, and you could always trust his promise. The printer&rsquo;s toe never
+      galled the author&rsquo;s kibe in his case; he wished to have an early proof,
+      which he corrected fastidiously, but not overmuch, and he did not keep it
+      long. He had really done all his work in the manuscript, which came
+      print-perfect and beautifully clear from his pen, in that flowing,
+      graceful hand which to the last kept a suggestion of the pleasure he must
+      have had in it. Like all wise contributors, he was not only patient, but
+      very glad of all the queries and challenges that proof-reader and editor
+      could accumulate on the margin of his proofs, and when they were both
+      altogether wrong he was still grateful. In one of his poems there was some
+      Latin-Quarter French, which our collective purism questioned, and I
+      remember how tender of us he was in maintaining that in his Parisian time,
+      at least, some ladies beyond the Seine said &ldquo;Eh, b&rsquo;en,&rdquo; instead of &ldquo;Eh,
+      bien.&rdquo; He knew that we must be always on the lookout for such little
+      matters, and he would not wound our ignorance. I do not think any one
+      enjoyed praise more than he. Of course he would not provoke it, but if it
+      came of itself, he would not deny himself the pleasure, as long as a
+      relish of it remained. He used humorously to recognize his delight in it,
+      and to say of the lecture audiences which in earlier times hesitated
+      applause, &ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t they give me three times three? I can stand it!&rdquo; He
+      himself gave in the generous fulness he desired. He did not praise
+      foolishly or dishonestly, though he would spare an open dislike; but when
+      a thing pleased him he knew how to say so cordially and skilfully, so that
+      it might help as well as delight. I suppose no great author has tried more
+      sincerely and faithfully to befriend the beginner than he; and from time
+      to time he would commend something to me that he thought worth looking at,
+      but never insistently. In certain cases, where he had simply to ease a
+      burden, from his own to the editorial shoulders, he would ask that the
+      aspirant might be delicately treated. There might be personal reasons for
+      this, but usually his kindness of heart moved him. His tastes had their
+      geographical limit, but his sympathies were boundless, and the hopeless
+      creature for whom he interceded was oftener remote from Boston and New
+      England than otherwise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seems to me that he had a nature singularly affectionate, and that it
+      was this which was at fault if he gave somewhat too much of himself to the
+      celebration of the Class of &lsquo;29, and all the multitude of Boston
+      occasions, large and little, embalmed in the clear amber of his verse,
+      somewhat to the disadvantage of the amber. If he were asked he could not
+      deny the many friendships and fellowships which united in the asking; the
+      immediate reclame from these things was sweet to him; but he loved to
+      comply as much as he loved to be praised. In the pleasure he got he could
+      feel himself a prophet in his own country, but the country which owned him
+      prophet began perhaps to feel rather too much as if it owned him, and did
+      not prize his vaticinations at all their worth. Some polite Bostonians
+      knew him chiefly on this side, and judged him to their own detriment from
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0052" id="link2H_4_0052">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      After we went to live in Cambridge, my life and the delight in it were so
+      wholly there that in ten years I had hardly been in as many Boston houses.
+      As I have said, I met Doctor Holmes at the Fieldses&rsquo;, and at Longfellow&rsquo;s,
+      when he came out to a Dante supper, which was not often, and somewhat
+      later at the Saturday Club dinners. One parlous time at the publisher&rsquo;s I
+      have already recalled, when Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Autocrat
+      clashed upon homeopathy, and it required all the tact of the host to lure
+      them away from the dangerous theme. As it was, a battle waged in the
+      courteous forms of Fontenoy, went on pretty well through the dinner, and
+      it was only over the coffee that a truce was called. I need not say which
+      was heterodox, or that each had a deep and strenuous conscience in the
+      matter. I have always felt it a proof of his extreme leniency to me,
+      unworthy, that the doctor was able to tolerate my own defection from the
+      elder faith in medicine; and I could not feel his kindness less caressing
+      because I knew it a concession to an infirmity. He said something like,
+      After all a good physician was the great matter; and I eagerly turned his
+      clemency to praise of our family doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was very constant at the Saturday Club, as long as his strength
+      permitted, and few of its members missed fewer of its meetings. He
+      continued to sit at its table until the ghosts of Hawthorne, of Agassiz,
+      of Emerson, of Longfellow, of Lowell, out of others less famous, bore him
+      company there among the younger men in the flesh. It must have been very
+      melancholy, but nothing could deeply cloud his most cheerful spirit. His
+      strenuous interest in life kept him alive to all the things of it, after
+      so many of his friends were dead. The questions which he was wont to deal
+      with so fondly, so wisely, the great problems of the soul, were all the
+      more vital, perhaps, because the personal concern in them was increased by
+      the translation to some other being of the men who had so often tried with
+      him to fathom them here. The last time I was at that table he sat alone
+      there among those great memories; but he was as gay as ever I saw him; his
+      wit sparkled, his humor gleamed; the poetic touch was deft and firm as of
+      old; the serious curiosity, the instant sympathy remained. To the witness
+      he was pathetic, but to himself he could only have been interesting, as
+      the figure of a man surviving, in an alien but not unfriendly present, the
+      past which held so vast a part of all that had constituted him. If he had
+      thought of himself in this way, it would have been without one emotion of
+      self-pity, such as more maudlin souls indulge, but with a love of
+      knowledge and wisdom as keenly alert as in his prime.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For three privileged years I lived all but next-door neighbor of Doctor
+      Holmes in that part of Beacon Street whither he removed after he left his
+      old home in Charles Street, and during these years I saw him rather often.
+      We were both on the water side, which means so much more than the words
+      say, and our library windows commanded the same general view of the
+      Charles rippling out into the Cambridge marshes and the sunsets, and
+      curving eastward under Long Bridge, through shipping that increased onward
+      to the sea. He said that you could count fourteen towns and villages in
+      the compass of that view, with the three conspicuous monuments accenting
+      the different attractions of it: the tower of Memorial Hall at Harvard;
+      the obelisk on Bunker Hill; and in the centre of the picture that bulk of
+      Tufts College which he said he expected to greet his eyes the first thing
+      when he opened them in the other world. But the prospect, though generally
+      the same, had certain precious differences for each of us, which I have no
+      doubt he valued himself as much upon as I did. I have a notion that he
+      fancied these were to be enjoyed best in his library through two oval
+      panes let into the bay there apart from the windows, for he was apt to
+      make you come and look out of them if you got to talking of the view
+      before you left. In this pleasant study he lived among the books, which
+      seemed to multiply from case to case and shelf to shelf, and climb from
+      floor to ceiling. Everything was in exquisite order, and the desk where he
+      wrote was as scrupulously neat as if the sloven disarray of most authors&rsquo; 
+      desks were impossible to him. He had a number of ingenious little
+      contrivances for helping his work, which he liked to show you; for a time
+      a revolving book-case at the corner of his desk seemed to be his pet; and
+      after that came his fountain-pen, which he used with due observance of its
+      fountain principle, though he was tolerant of me when I said I always
+      dipped mine in the inkstand; it was a merit in his eyes to use a fountain
+      pen in anywise. After you had gone over these objects with him, and
+      perhaps taken a peep at something he was examining through his microscope,
+      he sat down at one corner of his hearth, and invited you to an easy chair
+      at the other. His talk was always considerate of your wish to be heard,
+      but the person who wished to talk when he could listen to Doctor Holmes
+      was his own victim, and always the loser. If you were well advised you
+      kept yourself to the question and response which manifested your interest
+      in what he was saying, and let him talk on, with his sweet smile, and that
+      husky laugh he broke softly into at times. Perhaps he was not very well
+      when you came in upon him; then he would name his trouble, with a
+      scientific zest and accuracy, and pass quickly to other matters. As I have
+      noted, he was interested in himself only on the universal side; and he
+      liked to find his peculiarity in you better than to keep it his own; he
+      suffered a visible disappointment if he could not make you think or say
+      you were so and so too. The querulous note was not in his most cheerful
+      register; he would not dwell upon a specialized grief; though sometimes I
+      have known him touch very lightly and currently upon a slight annoyance,
+      or disrelish for this or that. As he grew older, he must have had, of
+      course, an old man&rsquo;s disposition to speak of his infirmities; but it was
+      fine to see him catch himself up in this, when he became conscious of it,
+      and stop short with an abrupt turn to something else. With a real
+      interest, which he gave humorous excess, he would celebrate some little
+      ingenious thing that had fallen in his way, and I have heard him expatiate
+      with childlike delight upon the merits of a new razor he had got: a sort
+      of mower, which he could sweep recklessly over cheek and chin without the
+      least danger of cutting himself. The last time I saw him he asked me if he
+      had ever shown me that miraculous razor; and I doubt if he quite liked my
+      saying I had seen one of the same kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed to me that he enjoyed sitting at his chimney-corner rather as
+      the type of a person having a good time than as such a person; he would
+      rather be up and about something, taking down a book, making a note, going
+      again to his little windows, and asking you if you had seen the crows yet
+      that sometimes alighted on the shoals left bare by the ebb-tide behind the
+      house. The reader will recall his lovely poem, &ldquo;My Aviary,&rdquo; which deals
+      with the winged life of that pleasant prospect. I shared with him in the
+      flock of wild-ducks which used to come into our neighbor waters in spring,
+      when the ice broke up, and stayed as long as the smallest space of brine
+      remained unfrozen in the fall. He was graciously willing I should share in
+      them, and in the cloud of gulls which drifted about in the currents of the
+      sea and sky there, almost the whole year round. I did not pretend an
+      original right to them, coming so late as I did to the place, and I think
+      my deference pleased him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0053" id="link2H_4_0053">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      As I have said, he liked his fences, or at least liked you to respect
+      them, or to be sensible of them. As often as I went to see him I was made
+      to wait in the little reception-room below, and never shown at once to his
+      study. My name would be carried up, and I would hear him verifying my
+      presence from the maid through the opened door; then there came a cheery
+      cry of wellcome: &ldquo;Is that you? Come up, come up!&rdquo; and I found him
+      sometimes half-way down the stairs to meet me. He would make an excuse for
+      having kept me below a moment, and say something about the rule he had to
+      observe in all cases, as if he would not have me feel his fence a personal
+      thing. I was aware how thoroughly his gentle spirit pervaded the whole
+      house; the Irish maid who opened the door had the effect of being a
+      neighbor too, and of being in the joke of the little formality; she
+      apologized in her turn for the reception-room; there was certainly nothing
+      trampled upon in her manner, but affection and reverence for him whose
+      gate she guarded, with something like the sentiment she would have
+      cherished for a dignitary of the Church, but nicely differenced and
+      adjusted to the Autocrat&rsquo;s peculiar merits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The last time I was in that place, a visitant who had lately knocked at my
+      own door was about to enter. I met the master of the house on the landing
+      of the stairs outside his study, and he led me in for the few moments we
+      could spend together. He spoke of the shadow so near, and said he supposed
+      there could be no hope, but he did not refuse the cheer I offered him from
+      my ignorance against his knowledge, and at something that was thought or
+      said he smiled, with even a breath of laughter, so potent is the wont of a
+      lifetime, though his eyes were full of tears, and his voice broke with his
+      words. Those who have sorrowed deepest will understand this best.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was during the few years of our Beacon Street neighborhood that he
+      spent those hundred days abroad in his last visit to England and France.
+      He was full of their delight when he came back, and my propinquity gave me
+      the advantage of hearing him speak of them at first hand. He whimsically
+      pleased himself most with his Derby-day experiences, and enjoyed
+      contrasting the crowd and occasion with that of forty or fifty years
+      earlier, when he had seen some famous race of the Derby won; nothing else
+      in England seemed to have moved him so much, though all that royalties,
+      dignities, and celebrities could well do for him had been done. Of certain
+      things that happened to him, characteristic of the English, and
+      interesting to him in their relation to himself through his character of
+      universally interested man, he spoke freely; but he has said what he chose
+      to the public about them, and I have no right to say more. The thing that
+      most vexed him during his sojourn apparently was to have been described in
+      one of the London papers as quite deaf; and I could truly say to him that
+      I had never imagined him at all deaf, or heard him accused of it before.
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I am a little hard of hearing on one side. But it
+      isn&rsquo;t deafness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had, indeed, few or none of the infirmities of age that make themselves
+      painfully or inconveniently evident. He carried his slight figure erect,
+      and until his latest years his step was quick and sure. Once he spoke of
+      the lessened height of old people, apropos of something that was said, and
+      &ldquo;They will shrink, you know,&rdquo; he added, as if he were not at all concerned
+      in the fact himself. If you met him in the street, you encountered a
+      spare, carefully dressed old gentleman, with a clean-shaven face and a
+      friendly smile, qualified by the involuntary frown of his thick, senile
+      brows; well coated, lustrously shod, well gloved, in a silk hat, latterly
+      wound with a mourning-weed. Sometimes he did not know you when he knew you
+      quite well, and at such times I think it was kind to spare his years the
+      fatigue of recalling your identity; at any rate, I am glad of the times
+      when I did so. In society he had the same vagueness, the same dimness; but
+      after the moment he needed to make sure of you, he was as vivid as ever in
+      his life. He made me think of a bed of embers on which the ashes have
+      thinly gathered, and which, when these are breathed away, sparkles and
+      tinkles keenly up with all the freshness of a newly kindled fire. He did
+      not mind talking about his age, and I fancied rather enjoyed doing so. Its
+      approaches interested him; if he was going, he liked to know just how and
+      when he was going. Once he spoke of his lasting strength in terms of
+      imaginative humor: he was still so intensely interested in nature, the
+      universe, that it seemed to him he was not like an old man so much as a
+      lusty infant which struggles against having the breast snatched from it.
+      He laughed at the notion of this, with that impersonal relish which seemed
+      to me singularly characteristic of the self-consciousness so marked in
+      him. I never heard one lugubrious word from him in regard to his years. He
+      liked your sympathy on all grounds where he could have it
+      self-respectfully, but he was a most manly spirit, and he would not have
+      had it even as a type of the universal decay. Possibly he would have been
+      interested to have you share in that analysis of himself which he was
+      always making, if such a thing could have been.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had not much patience with the unmanly craving for sympathy in others,
+      and chiefly in our literary craft, which is somewhat ignobly given to it,
+      though he was patient, after all. He used to say, and I believe he has
+      said it in print,&mdash;[Holmes said it in print many times, in his three
+      novels and scattered through the &ldquo;Breakfast Table&rdquo; series. D.W.]&mdash;that
+      unless a man could show a good reason for writing verse, it was rather
+      against him, and a proof of weakness. I suppose this severe conclusion was
+      something he had reached after dealing with innumerable small poets who
+      sought the light in him with verses that no editor would admit to print.
+      Yet of morbidness he was often very tender; he knew it to be disease,
+      something that must be scientifically rather than ethically treated. He
+      was in the same degree kind to any sensitiveness, for he was himself as
+      sensitive as he was manly, and he was most delicately sensitive to any
+      rightful social claim upon him. I was once at a dinner with him, where he
+      was in some sort my host, in a company of people whom he had not seen me
+      with before, and he made a point of acquainting me with each of them. It
+      did not matter that I knew most of them already; the proof of his
+      thoughtfulness was precious, and I was sorry when I had to disappoint it
+      by confessing a previous knowledge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0054" id="link2H_4_0054">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I had three memorable meetings with him not very long before he died: one
+      a year before, and the other two within a few months of the end. The first
+      of these was at luncheon in the summer-house of a friend whose hospitality
+      made it summer the year round, and we all went out to meet him, when he
+      drove up in his open carriage, with the little sunshade in his hand, which
+      he took with him for protection against the heat, and also, a little, I
+      think, for the whim of it. He sat a moment after he arrived, as if to
+      orient himself in respect to each of us. Beside the gifted hostess, there
+      was the most charming of all the American essayists, and the Autocrat
+      seemed at once to find himself singularly at home with the people who
+      greeted him. There was no interval needed for fanning away the ashes; he
+      tinkled up before he entered the house, and at the table he was as vivid
+      and scintillant as I ever saw him, if indeed I ever saw him as much so.
+      The talk began at once, and we had made him believe that there was nothing
+      egotistic in his taking the word, or turning it in illustration from
+      himself upon universal matters. I spoke among other things of some humble
+      ruins on the road to Gloucester, which gave the way-side a very aged look;
+      the tumbled foundation-stones of poor bits of houses, and &ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; he said,
+      &ldquo;the cellar and the well?&rdquo; He added, to the company generally, &ldquo;Do you
+      know what I think are the two lines of mine that go as deep as any others,
+      in a certain direction?&rdquo; and he began to repeat stragglingly certain
+      verses from one of his earlier poems, until he came to the closing
+      couplet. But I will give them in full, because in going to look them up I
+      have found them so lovely, and because I can hear his voice again in every
+      fondly accented syllable:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;Who sees unmoved, a ruin at his feet,
+     The lowliest home where human hearts have beat?
+     Its hearth-stone, shaded with the bistre stain,
+     A century&rsquo;s showery torrents wash in vain;
+     Its starving orchard where the thistle blows,
+     And mossy trunks still mark the broken rows;
+     Its chimney-loving poplar, oftenest seen
+     Next an old roof, or where a roof has been;
+     Its knot-grass, plantain,&mdash;all the social weeds,
+     Man&rsquo;s mute companions following where he leads;
+     Its dwarfed pale flowers, that show their straggling heads,
+     Sown by the wind from grass-choked garden-beds;
+     Its woodbine creeping where it used to climb;
+     Its roses breathing of the olden time;
+     All the poor shows the curious idler sees,
+     As life&rsquo;s thin shadows waste by slow degrees,
+     Till naught remains, the saddening tale to tell,
+     Save home&rsquo;s last wrecks&mdash;the CELLAR AND THE WELL!&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      The poet&rsquo;s chanting voice rose with a triumphant swell in the climax, and
+      &ldquo;There,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;isn&rsquo;t it so? The cellar and the well&mdash;they can&rsquo;t
+      be thrown down or burnt up; they are the human monuments that last longest
+      and defy decay.&rdquo; He rejoiced openly in the sympathy that recognized with
+      him the divination of a most pathetic, most signal fact, and he repeated
+      the last couplet again at our entreaty, glad to be entreated for it. I do
+      not know whether all will agree with him concerning the relative
+      importance of the lines, but I think all must feel the exquisite beauty of
+      the picture to which they give the final touch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He said a thousand witty and brilliant things that day, but his pleasure
+      in this gave me the most pleasure, and I recall the passage distinctly out
+      of the dimness that covers the rest. He chose to figure us younger men, in
+      touching upon the literary circumstance of the past and present, as
+      representative of modern feeling and thinking, and himself as no longer
+      contemporary. We knew he did this to be contradicted, and we protested,
+      affectionately, fervently, with all our hearts and minds; and indeed there
+      were none of his generation who had lived more widely into ours. He was
+      not a prophet like Emerson, nor ever a voice crying in the wilderness like
+      Whittier or Lowell. His note was heard rather amid the sweet security of
+      streets, but it was always for a finer and gentler civility. He imagined
+      no new rule of life, and no philosophy or theory of life will be known by
+      his name. He was not constructive; he was essentially observant, and in
+      this he showed the scientific nature. He made his reader known to himself,
+      first in the little, and then in the larger things. From first to last he
+      was a censor, but a most winning and delightful censor, who could make us
+      feel that our faults were other people&rsquo;s, and who was not wont
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;To bait his homilies with his brother worms.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      At one period he sat in the seat of the scorner, as far as Reform was
+      concerned, or perhaps reformers, who are so often tedious and ridiculous;
+      but he seemed to get a new heart with the new mind which came to him when
+      he began to write the Autocrat papers, and the light mocker of former days
+      became the serious and compassionate thinker, to whom most truly nothing
+      that was human was alien. His readers trusted and loved him; few men have
+      ever written so intimately with so much dignity, and perhaps none has so
+      endeared himself by saying just the thing for his reader that his reader
+      could not say for himself. He sought the universal through himself in
+      others, and he found to his delight and theirs that the most universal
+      thing was often, if not always, the most personal thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In my later meetings with him I was struck more and more by his
+      gentleness. I believe that men are apt to grow gentler as they grow older,
+      unless they are of the curmudgeon type, which rusts and crusts with age,
+      but with Doctor Holmes the gentleness was peculiarly marked. He seemed to
+      shrink from all things that could provoke controversy, or even difference;
+      he waived what might be a matter of dispute, and rather sought the things
+      that he could agree with you upon. In the last talk I had with him he
+      appeared to have no grudge left, except for the puritanic orthodoxy in
+      which he had been bred as a child. This he was not able to forgive, though
+      its tradition was interwoven with what was tenderest and dearest in his
+      recollections of childhood. We spoke of puritanism, and I said I sometimes
+      wondered what could be the mind of a man towards life who had not been
+      reared in its awful shadow, say an English Churchman, or a Continental
+      Catholic; and he said he could not imagine, and that he did not believe
+      such a man could at all enter into our feelings; puritanism, he seemed to
+      think, made an essential and ineradicable difference. I do not believe he
+      had any of that false sentiment which attributes virtue of character to
+      severity of creed, while it owns the creed to be wrong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He differed from Longfellow in often speaking of his contemporaries. He
+      spoke of them frankly, but with an appreciative rather than a censorious
+      criticism. Of Longfellow himself he said that day, when I told him I had
+      been writing about him, and he seemed to me a man without error, that he
+      could think of but one error in him, and that was an error of taste, of
+      almost merely literary taste. It was at an earlier time that he talked of
+      Lowell, after his death, and told me that Lowell once in the fever of his
+      anti-slavery apostolate had written him, urging him strongly, as a matter
+      of duty, to come out for the cause he had himself so much at heart.
+      Afterwards Lowell wrote again, owning himself wrong in his appeal, which
+      he had come to recognize as invasive. &ldquo;He was ten years younger than I,&rdquo;
+       said the doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I found him that day I speak of in his house at Beverly Farms, where he
+      had a pleasant study in a corner by the porch, and he met me with all the
+      cheeriness of old. But he confessed that he had been greatly broken up by
+      the labor of preparing something that might be read at some commemorative
+      meeting, and had suffered from finding first that he could not write
+      something specially for it. Even the copying and adapting an old poem had
+      overtaxed him, and in this he showed the failing powers of age. But
+      otherwise he was still young, intellectually; that is, there was no
+      failure of interest in intellectual things, especially literary things.
+      Some new book lay on the table at his elbow, and he asked me if I had seen
+      it, and made some joke about his having had the good luck to read it, and
+      have it lying by him a few days before when the author called. I do not
+      know whether he schooled himself against an old man&rsquo;s tendency to revert
+      to the past or not, but I know that he seldom did so. That morning,
+      however, he made several excursions into it, and told me that his youthful
+      satire of the &lsquo;Spectre Pig&rsquo; had been provoked by a poem of the elder
+      Dana&rsquo;s, where a phantom horse had been seriously employed, with an effect
+      of anticlimax which he had found irresistible. Another foray was to recall
+      the oppression and depression of his early religious associations, and to
+      speak with moving tenderness of his father, whose hard doctrine as a
+      minister was without effect upon his own kindly nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a letter written to me a few weeks after this time, upon an occasion
+      when he divined that some word from him would be more than commonly dear,
+      he recurred to the feeling he then expressed: &ldquo;Fifty-six years ago&mdash;more
+      than half a century&mdash;I lost my own father, his age being
+      seventy-three years. As I have reached that period of life, passed it, and
+      now left it far behind, my recollections seem to brighten and bring back
+      my boyhood and early manhood in a clearer and fairer light than it came to
+      me in my middle decades. I have often wished of late years that I could
+      tell him how I cherished his memory; perhaps I may have the happiness of
+      saying all I long to tell him on the other side of that thin partition
+      which I love to think is all that divides us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Men are never long together without speaking of women, and I said how
+      inevitably men&rsquo;s lives ended where they began, in the keeping of women,
+      and their strength failed at last and surrendered itself to their care. I
+      had not finished before I was made to feel that I was poaching, and &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo;
+       said the owner of the preserve, &ldquo;I have spoken of that,&rdquo; and he went on to
+      tell me just where. He was not going to have me suppose I had invented
+      those notions, and I could not do less than own that I must have found
+      them in his book, and forgotten it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke of his pleasant summer life in the air, at once soft and fresh,
+      of that lovely coast, and of his drives up and down the country roads.
+      Sometimes this lady and sometimes that came for him, and one or two
+      habitually, but he always had his own carriage ordered, if they failed,
+      that he might not fail of his drive in any fair weather. His cottage was
+      not immediately on the sea, but in full sight of it, and there was a sense
+      of the sea about it, as there is in all that incomparable region, and I do
+      not think he could have been at home anywhere beyond the reach of its salt
+      breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was anxious not to outstay his strength, and I kept my eye on the clock
+      in frequent glances. I saw that he followed me in one of these, and I said
+      that I knew what his hours were, and I was watching so that I might go
+      away in time, and then he sweetly protested. Did I like that chair I was
+      sitting in? It was a gift to him, and he said who gave it, with a pleasure
+      in the fact that was very charming, as if he liked the association of the
+      thing with his friend. He was disposed to excuse the formal look of his
+      bookcases, which were filled with sets, and presented some phalanxes of
+      fiction in rather severe array.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When I rose to go, he was concerned about my being able to find my way
+      readily to the station, and he told me how to go, and what turns to take,
+      as if he liked realizing the way to himself. I believe he did not walk
+      much of late years, and I fancy he found much the same pleasure in letting
+      his imagination make this excursion to the station with me that he would
+      have found in actually going.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw him once more, but only once, when a day or two later he drove up by
+      our hotel in Magnolia toward the cottage where his secretary was lodging.
+      He saw us from his carriage, and called us gayly to him, to make us
+      rejoice with him at having finally got that commemorative poem off his
+      mind. He made a jest of the trouble it had cost him, even some
+      sleeplessness, and said he felt now like a convalescent. He was all
+      brightness, and friendliness, and eagerness to make us feel his mood,
+      through what was common to us all; and I am glad that this last impression
+      of him is so one with the first I ever had, and with that which every
+      reader receives from his work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That is bright, and friendly and eager too, for it is throughout the very
+      expression of himself. I think it is a pity if an author disappoints even
+      the unreasonable expectation of the reader, whom his art has invited to
+      love him; but I do not believe that Doctor Holmes could inflict this
+      disappointment. Certainly he could disappoint no reasonable expectation,
+      no intelligent expectation. What he wrote, that he was, and every one felt
+      this who met him. He has therefore not died, as some men die, the remote
+      impersonal sort, but he is yet thrillingly alive in every page of his
+      books. The quantity of his literature is not great, but the quality is
+      very surprising, and surprising first of all as equality. From the
+      beginning to the end he wrote one man, of course in his successive
+      consciousnesses. Perhaps every one does this, but his work gives the
+      impression of an uncommon continuity, in spite of its being the effect of
+      a later and an earlier impulse so very marked as to have made the later an
+      astonishing revelation to those who thought they knew him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0055" id="link2H_4_0055">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IX.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It is not for me in such a paper as this to attempt any judgment of his
+      work. I have loved it, as I loved him, with a sense of its limitations
+      which is by no means a censure of its excellences. He was not a man who
+      cared to transcend; he liked bounds, he liked horizons, the constancy of
+      shores. If he put to sea, he kept in sight of land, like the ancient
+      navigators. He did not discover new continents; and I will own that I, for
+      my part, should not have liked to sail with Columbus. I think one can
+      safely affirm that as great and as useful men stayed behind, and found an
+      America of the mind without stirring from their thresholds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0056" id="link2H_4_0056">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      We had expected to stay in Boston only until we could find a house in Old
+      Cambridge. This was not so simple a matter as it might seem; for the
+      ancient town had not yet quickened its scholarly pace to the modern step.
+      Indeed, in the spring of 1866 the impulse of expansion was not yet visibly
+      felt anywhere; the enormous material growth that followed the civil war
+      had not yet begun. In Cambridge the houses to be let were few, and such as
+      there were fell either below our pride or rose above our purse. I wish I
+      might tell how at last we bought a house; we had no money, but we were
+      rich in friends, who are still alive to shrink from the story of their
+      constant faith in a financial future which we sometimes doubted, and who
+      backed their credulity with their credit. It is sufficient for the present
+      record, which professes to be strictly literary, to notify the fact that
+      on the first day of May, 1866, we went out to Cambridge and began to live
+      in a house which we owned in fee if not in deed, and which was none the
+      less valuable for being covered with mortgages. Physically, it was a
+      carpenter&rsquo;s box, of a sort which is readily imagined by the Anglo-American
+      genius for ugliness, but which it is not so easy to impart a just
+      conception of. A trim hedge of arbor-vita; tried to hide it from the world
+      in front, and a tall board fence behind; the little lot was well planted
+      (perhaps too well planted) with pears, grapes, and currants, and there was
+      a small open space which I lost no time in digging up for a
+      kitchen-garden. On one side of us were the open fields; on the other a
+      brief line of neighbor-houses; across the street before us was a grove of
+      stately oaks, which I never could persuade Aldrich had painted leaves on
+      them in the fall. We were really in a poor suburb of a suburb; but such is
+      the fascination of ownership, even the ownership of a fully mortgaged
+      property, that we calculated the latitude and longitude of the whole earth
+      from the spot we called ours. In our walks about Cambridge we saw other
+      places where we might have been willing to live; only, we said, they were
+      too far off: We even prized the architecture of our little box, though we
+      had but so lately lived in a Gothic palace on the Grand Canal in Venice,
+      and were not uncritical of beauty in the possessions of others. Positive
+      beauty we could not have honestly said we thought our cottage had as a
+      whole, though we might have held out for something of the kind in the
+      brackets of turned wood under its eaves. But we were richly content with
+      it; and with life in Cambridge, as it began to open itself to us, we were
+      infinitely more than content. This life, so refined, so intelligent, so
+      gracefully simple, I do not suppose has anywhere else had its parallel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0057" id="link2H_4_0057">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was the moment before the old American customs had been changed by
+      European influences among people of easier circumstances; and in Cambridge
+      society kept what was best of its village traditions, and chose to keep
+      them in the full knowledge of different things. Nearly every one had been
+      abroad; and nearly every one had acquired the taste for olives without
+      losing a relish for native sauces; through the intellectual life there was
+      an entire democracy, and I do not believe that since the capitalistic era
+      began there was ever a community in which money counted for less. There
+      was little show of what money could buy; I remember but one private carriage
+      (naturally, a publisher&rsquo;s); and there was not one livery, except a livery
+      in the larger sense kept by the stableman Pike, who made us pay now a
+      quarter and now a half dollar for a seat in his carriages, according as he
+      lost or gathered courage for the charge. We thought him extortionate, and
+      we mostly walked through snow and mud of amazing depth and thickness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The reader will imagine how acceptable this circumstance was to a young
+      literary man beginning life with a fully mortgaged house and a salary of
+      untried elasticity. If there were distinctions made in Cambridge they were
+      not against literature, and we found ourselves in the midst of a charming
+      society, indifferent, apparently, to all questions but those of the higher
+      education which comes so largely by nature. That is to say, in the
+      Cambridge of that day (and, I dare say, of this) a mind cultivated in some
+      sort was essential, and after that came civil manners, and the willingness
+      and ability to be agreeable and interesting; but the question of riches or
+      poverty did not enter. Even the question of family, which is of so great
+      concern in New England, was in abeyance. Perhaps it was taken for granted
+      that every one in Old Cambridge society must be of good family, or he
+      could not be there; perhaps his mere residence tacitly ennobled him;
+      certainly his acceptance was an informal patent of gentility. To my mind,
+      the structure of society was almost ideal, and until we have a perfectly
+      socialized condition of things I do not believe we shall ever have a more
+      perfect society. The instincts which governed it were not such as can
+      arise from the sordid competition of interests; they flowed from a
+      devotion to letters, and from a self-sacrifice in material things which I
+      can give no better notion of than by saying that the outlay of the richest
+      college magnate seemed to be graduated to the income of the poorest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In those days, the men whose names have given splendor to Cambridge were
+      still living there. I shall forget some of them in the alphabetical
+      enumeration of Louis Agassiz, Francis J. Child, Richard Henry Dana, Jun.,
+      John Fiske, Dr. Asa Gray, the family of the Jameses, father and sons,
+      Lowell, Longfellow, Charles Eliot Norton, Dr. John G. Palfrey, James
+      Pierce, Dr. Peabody, Professor Parsons, Professor Sophocles. The variety
+      of talents and of achievements was indeed so great that Mr. Bret Harte,
+      when fresh from his Pacific slope, justly said, after listening to a
+      partial rehearsal of them, &ldquo;Why, you couldn&rsquo;t fire a revolver from your
+      front porch anywhere without bringing down a two-volumer!&rdquo; Everybody had
+      written a book, or an article, or a poem; or was in the process or
+      expectation of doing it, and doubtless those whose names escape me will
+      have greater difficulty in eluding fame. These kindly, these gifted folk
+      each came to see us and to make us at home among them; and my home is
+      still among them, on this side and on that side of the line between the
+      living and the dead which invisibly passes through all the streets of the
+      cities of men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0058" id="link2H_4_0058">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      We had the whole summer for the exploration of Cambridge before society
+      returned from the mountains and the sea-shore, and it was not till October
+      that I saw Longfellow. I heard again, as I heard when I first came to
+      Boston, that he was at Nahant, and though Nahant was no longer so far
+      away, now, as it was then, I did not think of seeking him out even when we
+      went for a day to explore that coast during the summer. It seems strange
+      that I cannot recall just when and where I saw him, but early after his
+      return to Cambridge I had a message from him asking me to come to a
+      meeting of the Dante Club at Craigie House.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Longfellow was that winter (1866-7) revising his translation of the
+      &lsquo;Paradiso&rsquo;, and the Dante Club was the circle of Italianate friends and
+      scholars whom he invited to follow him and criticise his work from the
+      original, while he read his version aloud. Those who were most constantly
+      present were Lowell and Professor Norton, but from time to time others
+      came in, and we seldom sat down at the nine-o&rsquo;clock supper that followed
+      the reading of the canto in less number than ten or twelve.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The criticism, especially from the accomplished Danteists I have named,
+      was frank and frequent. I believe they neither of them quite agreed with
+      Longfellow as to the form of version he had chosen, but, waiving that, the
+      question was how perfectly he had done his work upon the given lines: I
+      myself, with whatever right, great or little, I may have to an opinion,
+      believe thoroughly in Longfellow&rsquo;s plan. When I read his version my sense
+      aches for the rhyme which he rejected, but my admiration for his fidelity
+      to Dante otherwise is immeasurable. I remember with equal admiration the
+      subtle and sympathetic scholarship of his critics, who scrutinized every
+      shade of meaning in a word or phrase that gave them pause, and did not let
+      it pass till all the reasons and facts had been considered. Sometimes, and
+      even often, Longfellow yielded to their censure, but for the most part,
+      when he was of another mind, he held to his mind, and the passage had to
+      go as he said. I make a little haste to say that in all the meetings of
+      the Club, during a whole winter of Wednesday evenings, I myself, though I
+      faithfully followed in an Italian Dante with the rest, ventured upon one
+      suggestion only. This was kindly, even seriously, considered by the poet,
+      and gently rejected. He could not do anything otherwise than gently, and I
+      was not suffered to feel that I had done a presumptuous thing. I can see
+      him now, as he looked up from the proof-sheets on the round table before
+      him, and over at me, growing consciously smaller and smaller, like
+      something through a reversed opera-glass. He had a shaded drop-light in
+      front of him, and in its glow his beautiful and benignly noble head had a
+      dignity peculiar to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All the portraits of Longfellow are likenesses more or less bad and good,
+      for there was something as simple in the physiognomy as in the nature of
+      the man. His head, after he allowed his beard to grow and wore his hair
+      long in the manner of elderly men, was leonine, but mildly leonine, as the
+      old painters conceived the lion of St. Mark. Once Sophocles, the ex-monk
+      of Mount Athos, so long a Greek professor at Harvard, came in for supper,
+      after the reading was over, and he was leonine too, but of a fierceness
+      that contrasted finely with Longfellow&rsquo;s mildness. I remember the poet&rsquo;s
+      asking him something about the punishment of impaling, in Turkey, and his
+      answering, with an ironical gleam of his fiery eyes, &ldquo;Unhappily, it is
+      obsolete.&rdquo; I dare say he was not so leonine, either, as he looked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Longfellow read verse, it was with a hollow, with a mellow resonant
+      murmur, like the note of some deep-throated horn. His voice was very
+      lulling in quality, and at the Dante Club it used to have early effect
+      with an old scholar who sat in a cavernous armchair at the corner of the
+      fire, and who drowsed audibly in the soft tone and the gentle heat. The
+      poet had a fat terrier who wished always to be present at the meetings of
+      the Club, and he commonly fell asleep at the same moment with that dear
+      old scholar, so that when they began to make themselves heard in concert,
+      one could not tell which it was that most took our thoughts from the text
+      of the Paradiso. When the duet opened, Longfellow would look up with an
+      arch recognition of the fact, and then go gravely on to the end of the
+      canto. At the close he would speak to his friend and lead him out to
+      supper as if he had not seen or heard anything amiss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0059" id="link2H_4_0059">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In that elect company I was silent, partly because I was conscious of my
+      youthful inadequacy, and partly because I preferred to listen. But
+      Longfellow always behaved as if I were saying a succession of edifying and
+      delightful things, and from time to time he addressed himself to me, so
+      that I should not feel left out. He did not talk much himself, and I
+      recall nothing that he said. But he always spoke both wisely and simply,
+      without the least touch of pose, and with no intention of effect, but with
+      something that I must call quality for want of a better word; so that at a
+      table where Holmes sparkled, and Lowell glowed, and Agassiz beamed, he
+      cast the light of a gentle gaiety, which seemed to dim all these vivider
+      luminaries. While he spoke you did not miss Fields&rsquo;s story or Tom
+      Appleton&rsquo;s wit, or even the gracious amity of Mr. Norton, with his
+      unequalled intuitions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The supper was very plain: a cold turkey, which the host carved, or a
+      haunch of venison, or some braces of grouse, or a platter of quails, with
+      a deep bowl of salad, and the sympathetic companionship of those elect
+      vintages which Longfellow loved, and which he chose with the inspiration
+      of affection. We usually began with oysters, and when some one who was
+      expected did not come promptly, Longfellow invited us to raid his plate,
+      as a just punishment of his delay. One evening Lowell remarked, with the
+      cayenne poised above his bluepoints, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s astonishing how fond these
+      fellows are of pepper.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old friend of the cavernous arm-chair was perhaps not wide enough
+      awake to repress an &ldquo;Ah?&rdquo; of deep interest in this fact of natural
+      history, and Lowell was provoked to go on. &ldquo;Yes, I&rsquo;ve dropped a red pepper
+      pod into a barrel of them, before now, and then taken them out in a solid
+      mass, clinging to it like a swarm of bees to their queen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it possible?&rdquo; cried the old friend; and then Longfellow intervened to
+      save him from worse, and turned the talk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I reproach myself that I made no record of the talk, for I find that only
+      a few fragments of it have caught in my memory, and that the sieve which
+      should have kept the gold has let it wash away with the gravel. I remember
+      once Doctor Holmes&rsquo;s talking of the physician as the true seer, whose
+      awful gift it was to behold with the fatal second sight of science the
+      shroud gathering to the throat of many a doomed man apparently in perfect
+      health, and happy in the promise of unnumbered days. The thought may have
+      been suggested by some of the toys of superstition which intellectual
+      people like to play with.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I never could be quite sure at first that Longfellow&rsquo;s brother-in-law,
+      Appleton, was seriously a spiritualist, even when he disputed the most
+      strenuously with the unbelieving Autocrat. But he really was in earnest
+      about it, though he relished a joke at the expense of his doctrine, like
+      some clerics when they are in the safe company of other clerics. He told
+      me once of having recounted to Agassiz the facts of a very remarkable
+      seance, where the souls of the departed outdid themselves in the athletics
+      and acrobatics they seem so fond of over there, throwing large stones
+      across the room, moving pianos, and lifting dinner-tables and setting them
+      a-twirl under the chandelier. &ldquo;And now,&rdquo; he demanded, &ldquo;what do you say to
+      that?&rdquo; &ldquo;Well, Mr. Appleton,&rdquo; Agassiz answered, to Appleton&rsquo;s infinite
+      delight, &ldquo;I say that it did not happen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      One night they began to speak at the Dante supper of the unhappy man whose
+      crime is a red stain in the Cambridge annals, and one and another recalled
+      their impressions of Professor Webster. It was possibly with a retroactive
+      sense that they had all felt something uncanny in him, but, apropos of the
+      deep salad-bowl in the centre of the table, Longfellow remembered a supper
+      Webster was at, where he lighted some chemical in such a dish and held his
+      head over it, with a handkerchief noosed about his throat and lifted above
+      it with one hand, while his face, in the pale light, took on the livid
+      ghastliness of that of a man hanged by the neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another night the talk wandered to the visit which an English author (now
+      with God) paid America at the height of a popularity long since toppled to
+      the ground, with many another. He was in very good humor with our whole
+      continent, and at Longfellow&rsquo;s table he found the champagne even
+      surprisingly fine. &ldquo;But,&rdquo; he said to his host, who now told the story, &ldquo;it
+      cawn&rsquo;t be genuine, you know!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Many years afterwards this author revisited our shores, and I dined with
+      him at Longfellow&rsquo;s, where he was anxious to constitute himself a guest
+      during his sojourn in our neighborhood. Longfellow was equally anxious
+      that he should not do so, and he took a harmless pleasure in
+      out-manoeuvring him. He seized a chance to speak with me alone, and
+      plotted to deliver him over to me without apparent unkindness, when the
+      latest horse-car should be going in to Boston, and begged me to walk him
+      to Harvard Square and put him aboard. &ldquo;Put him aboard, and don&rsquo;t leave him
+      till the car starts, and then watch that he doesn&rsquo;t get off.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      These instructions he accompanied with a lifting of the eyebrows, and a
+      pursing of the mouth, in an anxiety not altogether burlesque. He knew
+      himself the prey of any one who chose to batten on him, and his
+      hospitality was subject to frightful abuse. Perhaps Mr. Norton has
+      somewhere told how, when he asked if a certain person who had been
+      outstaying his time was not a dreadful bore, Longfellow answered, with
+      angelic patience, &ldquo;Yes; but then you know I have been bored so often!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was one fatal Englishman whom I shared with him during the great
+      part of a season: a poor soul, not without gifts, but always ready for
+      more, especially if they took the form of meat and drink. He had brought
+      letters from one of the best English men alive, who withdrew them too late
+      to save his American friends from the sad consequences of welcoming him.
+      So he established himself impregnably in a Boston club, and came out every
+      day to dine with Longfellow in Cambridge, beginning with his return from
+      Nahant in October and continuing far into December. That was the year of
+      the great horse-distemper, when the plague disabled the transportation in
+      Boston, and cut off all intercourse between the suburb and the city on the
+      street railways. &ldquo;I did think,&rdquo; Longfellow pathetically lamented, &ldquo;that
+      when the horse-cars stopped running, I should have a little respite from
+      L., but he walks out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the midst of his own suffering he was willing to advise with me
+      concerning some poems L. had offered to the Atlantic Monthly, and after we
+      had desperately read them together he said, with inspiration, &ldquo;I think
+      these things are more adapted to music than the magazine,&rdquo; and this seemed
+      so good a notion that when L. came to know their fate from me, I answered,
+      confidently, &ldquo;I think they are rather more adapted to music.&rdquo; He calmly
+      asked, &ldquo;Why?&rdquo; and as this was an exigency which Longfellow had not
+      forecast for me, I was caught in it without hope of escape. I really do
+      not know what I said, but I know that I did not take the poems, such was
+      my literary conscience in those days; I am afraid I should be weaker now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0060" id="link2H_4_0060">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The suppers of the Dante Club were a relaxation from the severity of their
+      toils on criticism, and I will not pretend that their table-talk was of
+      that seriousness which duller wits might have given themselves up to. The
+      passing stranger, especially if a light or jovial person, was always
+      welcome, and I never knew of the enforcement of the rule I heard of, that
+      if you came in without question on the Club nights, you were a guest; but
+      if you rang or knocked, you could not get in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Any sort of diversion was hailed, and once Appleton proposed that
+      Longfellow should show us his wine-cellar. He took up the candle burning
+      on the table for the cigars, and led the way into the basement of the
+      beautiful old Colonial mansion, doubly memorable as Washington&rsquo;s
+      headquarters while he was in Cambridge, and as the home of Longfellow for
+      so many years. The taper cast just the right gleams on the darkness,
+      bringing into relief the massive piers of brick, and the solid walls of
+      stone, which gave the cellar the effect of a casemate in some fortress,
+      and leaving the corners and distances to a romantic gloom. This basement
+      was a work of the days when men built more heavily if not more
+      substantially than now, but I forget, if I ever knew, what date the
+      wine-cellar was of. It was well stored with precious vintages, aptly
+      cobwebbed and dusty; but I could not find that it had any more charm than
+      the shelves of a library: it is the inside of bottles and of books that
+      makes its appeal. The whole place witnessed a bygone state and luxury,
+      which otherwise lingered in a dim legend or two. Longfellow once spoke of
+      certain old love-letters which dropped down on the basement stairs from
+      some place overhead; and there was the fable or the fact of a subterranean
+      passage under the street from Craigie House to the old Batchelder House,
+      which I relate to these letters with no authority I can allege. But in
+      Craigie House dwelt the proud fair lady who was buried in the Cambridge
+      church-yard with a slave at her head and a slave at her feet.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+        &ldquo;Dust is in her beautiful eyes,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      and whether it was they that smiled or wept in their time over those
+      love-letters, I will leave the reader to say. The fortunes of her Tory
+      family fell with those of their party, and the last Vassal ended his days
+      a prisoner from his creditors in his own house, with a weekly enlargement
+      on Sundays, when the law could not reach him. It is known how the place
+      took Longfellow&rsquo;s fancy when he first came to be professor in Harvard, and
+      how he was a lodger of the last Mistress Craigie there, long before he
+      became its owner. The house is square, with Longfellow&rsquo;s study where he
+      read and wrote on the right of the door, and a statelier library behind
+      it; on the left is the drawing-room, with the dining-room in its rear;
+      from its square hall climbs a beautiful stairway with twisted banisters,
+      and a tall clock in their angle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The study where the Dante Club met, and where I mostly saw Longfellow, was
+      a plain, pleasant room, with broad panelling in white painted pine; in the
+      centre before the fireplace stood his round table, laden with books,
+      papers, and proofs; in the farthest corner by the window was a high desk
+      which he sometimes stood at to write. In this room Washington held his
+      councils and transacted his business with all comers; in the chamber
+      overhead he slept. I do not think Longfellow associated the place much
+      with him, and I never heard him speak of Washington in relation to it
+      except once, when he told me with peculiar relish what he called the true
+      version of a pious story concerning the aide-de-camp who blundered in upon
+      him while he knelt in prayer. The father of his country rose and rebuked
+      the young man severely, and then resumed his devotions. &ldquo;He rebuked him,&rdquo;
+       said Longfellow, lifting his brows and making rings round the pupils of
+      his eyes, &ldquo;by throwing his scabbard at his head.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      All the front windows of Craigie House look, out over the open fields
+      across the Charles, which is now the Longfellow Memorial Garden. The poet
+      used to be amused with the popular superstition that he was holding this
+      vacant ground with a view to a rise in the price of lots, while all he
+      wanted was to keep a feature of his beloved landscape unchanged. Lofty
+      elms drooped at the corners of the house; on the lawn billowed clumps of
+      the lilac, which formed a thick hedge along the fence. There was a terrace
+      part way down this lawn, and when a white-painted balustrade was set some
+      fifteen years ago upon its brink, it seemed always to have been there.
+      Long verandas stretched on either side of the mansion; and behind was an
+      old-fashioned garden with beds primly edged with box after a design of the
+      poet&rsquo;s own. Longfellow had a ghost story of this quaint plaisance, which
+      he used to tell with an artful reserve of the catastrophe. He was coming
+      home one winter night, and as he crossed the garden he was startled by a
+      white figure swaying before him. But he knew that the only way was to
+      advance upon it. He pushed boldly forward, and was suddenly caught under
+      the throat-by the clothes-line with a long night-gown on it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps it was at the end of a long night of the Dante Club that I heard
+      him tell this story. The evenings were sometimes mornings before the
+      reluctant break-up came, but they were never half long enough for me. I
+      have given no idea of the high reasoning of vital things which I must
+      often have heard at that table, and that I have forgotten it is no proof
+      that I did not hear it. The memory will not be ruled as to what it shall
+      bind and what it shall loose, and I should entreat mine in vain for record
+      of those meetings other than what I have given. Perhaps it would be well,
+      in the interest of some popular conceptions of what the social intercourse
+      of great wits must be, for me to invent some ennobling and elevating
+      passages of conversation at Longfellow&rsquo;s; perhaps I ought to do it for the
+      sake of my own repute as a serious and adequate witness. But I am rather
+      helpless in the matter; I must set down what I remember, and surely if I
+      can remember no phrase from Holmes that a reader could live or die by, it
+      is something to recall how, when a certain potent cheese was passing, he
+      leaned over to gaze at it, and asked: &ldquo;Does it kick? Does it kick?&rdquo; No
+      strain of high poetic thinking remains to me from Lowell, but he made me
+      laugh unforgettably with his passive adventure one night going home late,
+      when a man suddenly leaped from the top of a high fence upon the sidewalk
+      at his feet, and after giving him the worst fright of his life,
+      disappeared peaceably into the darkness. To be sure, there was one most
+      memorable supper, when he read the &ldquo;Bigelow Paper&rdquo; he had finished that
+      day, and enriched the meaning of his verse with the beauty of his voice.
+      There lingers yet in my sense his very tone in giving the last line of the
+      passage lamenting the waste of the heroic lives which in those dark hours
+      of Johnson&rsquo;s time seemed to have been
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;Butchered to make a blind man&rsquo;s holiday.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      The hush that followed upon his ceasing was of that finest quality which
+      spoken praise always lacks; and I suppose that I could not give a just
+      notion of these Dante Club evenings without imparting the effect of such
+      silences. This I could not hopefully undertake to do; but I am tempted to
+      some effort of the kind by my remembrance of Longfellow&rsquo;s old friend
+      George Washington Greene, who often came up from his home in Rhode Island,
+      to be at those sessions, and who was a most interesting and amiable fact
+      of those delicate silences. A full half of his earlier life had been
+      passed in Italy, where he and Longfellow met and loved each other in their
+      youth with an affection which the poet was constant to in his age, after
+      many vicissitudes, with the beautiful fidelity of his nature. Greene was
+      like an old Italian house-priest in manner, gentle, suave, very suave,
+      smooth as creamy curds, cultivated in the elegancies of literary taste,
+      and with a certain meek abeyance. I think I never heard him speak, in all
+      those evenings, except when Longfellow addressed him, though he must have
+      had the Dante scholarship for an occasional criticism. It was at more
+      recent dinners, where I met him with the Longfellow family alone, that he
+      broke now and then into a quotation from some of the modern Italian poets
+      he knew by heart (preferably Giusti), and syllabled their verse with an
+      exquisite Roman accent and a bewitching Florentine rhythm. Now and then at
+      these times he brought out a faded Italian anecdote, faintly smelling of
+      civet, and threadbare in its ancient texture. He liked to speak of Goldoni
+      and of Nota, of Niccolini and Manzoni, of Monti and Leopardi; and if you
+      came to America, of the Revolution and his grandfather, the Quaker General
+      Nathaniel Greene, whose life he wrote (and I read) in three volumes: He
+      worshipped Longfellow, and their friendship continued while they lived,
+      but towards the last of his visits at Craigie House it had a pathos for
+      the witness which I should grieve to wrong. Greene was then a quivering
+      paralytic, and he clung tremulously to Longfellow&rsquo;s arm in going out to
+      dinner, where even the modern Italian poets were silent upon his lips.
+      When we rose from table, Longfellow lifted him out of his chair, and took
+      him upon his arm again for their return to the study.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was of lighter metal than most other members of the Dante Club, and he
+      was not of their immediate intimacy, living away from Cambridge, as he
+      did, and I shared his silence in their presence with full sympathy. I was
+      by far the youngest of their number, and I cannot yet quite make out why I
+      was of it at all. But at every moment I was as sensible of my good fortune
+      as of my ill desert. They were the men whom of all men living I most
+      honored, and it seemed to be impossible that I at my age should be so
+      perfectly fulfilling the dream of my life in their company. Often, the
+      nights were very cold, and as I returned home from Craigie House to the
+      carpenter&rsquo;s box on Sacramento Street, a mile or two away, I was as if
+      soul-borne through the air by my pride and joy, while the frozen blocks of
+      snow clinked and tinkled before my feet stumbling along the middle of the
+      road. I still think that was the richest moment of my life, and I look
+      back at it as the moment, in a life not unblessed by chance, which I would
+      most like to live over again&mdash;if I must live any. The next winter the
+      sessions of the Dante Club were transferred to the house of Mr. Norton,
+      who was then completing his version of the &lsquo;Vita Nuova&rsquo;. This has always
+      seemed to me a work of not less graceful art than Longfellow&rsquo;s translation
+      of the &lsquo;Commedia&rsquo;. In fact, it joins the effect of a sympathy almost
+      mounting to divination with a patient scholarship and a delicate skill
+      unknown to me elsewhere in such work. I do not know whether Mr. Norton has
+      satisfied himself better in his prose version of the &lsquo;Commedia&rsquo; than in
+      this of the &lsquo;Vita Nuova&rsquo;, but I do not believe he could have satisfied
+      Dante better, unless he had rhymed his sonnets and canzonets. I am sure he
+      might have done this if he had chosen. He has always pretended that it was
+      impossible, but miracles are never impossible in the right hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0061" id="link2H_4_0061">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      After three or four years we sold the carpenter&rsquo;s box on Sacramento
+      Street, and removed to a larger house near Harvard Square, and in the
+      immediate neighborhood of Longfellow. He gave me an easement across that
+      old garden behind his house, through an opening in the high board fence
+      which enclosed it, and I saw him oftener than ever, though the meetings of
+      the Dante Club had come to an end. At the last of them, Lowell had asked
+      him, with fond regret in his jest, &ldquo;Longfellow, why don&rsquo;t you do that
+      Indian poem in forty thousand verses?&rdquo; The demand but feebly expressed the
+      reluctance in us all, though I suspect the Indian poem existed only by the
+      challenger&rsquo;s invention. Before I leave my faint and unworthy record of
+      these great times I am tempted to mention an incident poignant with
+      tragical associations. The first night after Christmas the holly and the
+      pine wreathed about the chandelier above the supper-table took fire from
+      the gas, just as we came out from the reading, and Longfellow ran forward
+      and caught the burning garlands down and bore them out. No one could speak
+      for thinking what he must be thinking of when the ineffable calamity of
+      his home befell it. Curtis once told me that a little while before Mrs.
+      Longfellow&rsquo;s death he was driving by Craigie House with Holmes, who said
+      be trembled to look at it, for those who lived there had their happiness
+      so perfect that no change, of all the changes which must come to them,
+      could fail to be for the worse. I did not know Longfellow before that
+      fatal time, and I shall not say that his presence bore record of it except
+      in my fancy. He may always have had that look of one who had experienced
+      the utmost harm that fate can do, and henceforth could possess himself of
+      what was left of life in peace. He could never have been a man of the
+      flowing ease that makes all comers at home; some people complained of a
+      certain &lsquo;gene&rsquo; in him; and he had a reserve with strangers, which never
+      quite lost itself in the abandon of friendship, as Lowell&rsquo;s did. He was
+      the most perfectly modest man I ever saw, ever imagined, but he had a
+      gentle dignity which I do not believe any one, the coarsest, the obtusest,
+      could trespass upon. In the years when I began to know him, his long hair
+      and the beautiful beard which mixed with it were of one iron-gray, which I
+      saw blanch to a perfect silver, while that pearly tone of his complexion,
+      which Appleton so admired, lost itself in the wanness of age and pain.
+      When he walked, he had a kind of spring in his gait, as if now and again a
+      buoyant thought lifted him from the ground. It was fine to meet him coming
+      down a Cambridge street; you felt that the encounter made you a part of
+      literary history, and set you apart with him for the moment from the poor
+      and mean. When he appeared in Harvard Square, he beatified if not
+      beautified the ugliest and vulgarest looking spot on the planet outside of
+      New York. You could meet him sometimes at the market, if you were of the
+      same provision-man as he; and Longfellow remained as constant to his
+      tradespeople as to any other friends. He rather liked to bring his proofs
+      back to the printer&rsquo;s himself, and we often found ourselves together at
+      the University Press, where the Atlantic Monthly used to be printed. But
+      outside of his own house Longfellow seemed to want a fit atmosphere, and I
+      love best to think of him in his study, where he wrought at his lovely art
+      with a serenity expressed in his smooth, regular, and scrupulously perfect
+      handwriting. It was quite vertical, and rounded, with a slope neither to
+      the right nor left, and at the time I knew him first, he was fond of using
+      a soft pencil on printing paper, though commonly he wrote with a quill.
+      Each letter was distinct in shape, and between the verses was always the
+      exact space of half an inch. I have a good many of his poems written in
+      this fashion, but whether they were the first drafts or not I cannot say;
+      very likely not. Towards the last he no longer sent his poems to the
+      magazines in his own hand; but they were always signed in autograph.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I once asked him if he were not a great deal interrupted, and he said,
+      with a faint sigh, Not more than was good for him, he fancied; if it were
+      not for the interruptions, he might overwork. He was not a friend to
+      stated exercise, I believe, nor fond of walking, as Lowell was; he had
+      not, indeed, the childish associations of the younger poet with the
+      Cambridge neighborhoods; and I never saw him walking for pleasure except
+      on the east veranda of his house, though I was told he loved walking in
+      his youth. In this and in some other things Longfellow was more European
+      than American, more Latin than Saxon. He once said quaintly that one got a
+      great deal of exercise in putting on and off one&rsquo;s overcoat and overshoes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I suppose no one who asked decently at his door was denied access to him,
+      and there must have been times when he was overrun with volunteer
+      visitors; but I never heard him complain of them. He was very charitable
+      in the immediate sort which Christ seems to have meant; but he had his
+      preferences; humorously owned, among beggars. He liked the German beggars
+      least, and the Italian beggars most, as having most savair-faire; in fact,
+      we all loved the Italians in Cambridge. He was pleased with the accounts I
+      could give him of the love and honor I had known for him in Italy, and one
+      day there came a letter from an Italian admirer, addressed to &ldquo;Mr.
+      Greatest Poet Longfellow,&rdquo; which he said was the very most amusing
+      superscription he had ever seen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is known that the King of Italy offered Longfellow the cross of San
+      Lazzaro, which is the Italian literary decoration. It came through the
+      good offices of my old acquaintance Professor Messadaglia, then a deputy
+      in the Italian Parliament, whom, for some reason I cannot remember, I had
+      put in correspondence with Longfellow. The honor was wholly unexpected,
+      and it brought Longfellow a distress which was chiefly for the gentleman
+      who had procured him the impossible distinction. He showed me the pretty
+      collar and cross, not, I think, without a natural pleasure in it. No man
+      was ever less a bigot in things civil or religious than he, but he said,
+      firmly, &ldquo;Of course, as a republican and a Protestant, I can&rsquo;t accept a
+      decoration from a Catholic prince.&rdquo; His decision was from his conscience,
+      and I think that all Americans who think duly about it will approve his
+      decision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0062" id="link2H_4_0062">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Such honors as he could fitly permit himself he did not refuse, and I
+      recall what zest he had in his election to the Arcadian Academy, which had
+      made him a shepherd of its Roman Fold, with the title, as he said, of
+      &ldquo;Olimipico something.&rdquo; But I fancy his sweetest pleasure in his vast
+      renown came from his popular recognition everywhere. Few were the lands,
+      few the languages he was unknown to: he showed me a version of the &ldquo;Psalm
+      of Life&rdquo; in Chinese. Apparently even the poor lost autograph-seeker was
+      not denied by his universal kindness; I know that he kept a store of
+      autographs ready written on small squares of paper for all who applied by
+      letter or in person; he said it was no trouble; but perhaps he was to be
+      excused for refusing the request of a lady for fifty autographs, which she
+      wished to offer as a novel attraction to her guests at a lunch party.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Foreigners of all kinds thronged upon him at their pleasure, apparently,
+      and with perfect impunity. Sometimes he got a little fun, very, very
+      kindly, out of their excuses and reasons; and the Englishman who came to
+      see him because there were no ruins to visit in America was no fable, as I
+      can testify from the poet himself. But he had no prejudice against
+      Englishmen, and even at a certain time when the coarse-handed British
+      criticism began to blame his delicate art for the universal acceptance of
+      his verse, and to try to sneer him into the rank of inferior poets, he was
+      without rancor for the clumsy misliking that he felt. He could not
+      understand rudeness; he was too finely framed for that; he could know it
+      only as Swedenborg&rsquo;s most celestial angels perceived evil, as something
+      distressful, angular. The ill-will that seemed nearly always to go with
+      adverse criticism made him distrust criticism, and the discomfort which
+      mistaken or blundering praise gives probably made him shy of all
+      criticism. He said that in his early life as an author he used to seek out
+      and save all the notices of his poems, but in his latter days he read only
+      those that happened to fall in his way; these he cut out and amused his
+      leisure by putting together in scrapbooks. He was reluctant to make any
+      criticism of other poets; I do not remember ever to have heard him make
+      one; and his writings show no trace of the literary dislikes or contempts
+      which we so often mistake in ourselves for righteous judgments. No doubt
+      he had his resentments, but he hushed them in his heart, which he did not
+      suffer them to embitter. While Poe was writing of &ldquo;Longfellow and other
+      Plagiarists,&rdquo; Longfellow was helping to keep Poe alive by the loans which
+      always made themselves gifts in Poe&rsquo;s case. He very, very rarely spoke of
+      himself at all, and almost never of the grievances which he did not fail
+      to share with all who live.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was patient, as I said, of all things, and gentle beyond all mere
+      gentlemanliness. But it would have been a great mistake to mistake his
+      mildness for softness. It was most manly and firm; and of course it was
+      braced with the New England conscience he was born to. If he did not find
+      it well to assert himself, he was prompt in behalf of his friends, and one
+      of the fine things told of him was his resenting some censures of Sumner
+      at a dinner in Boston during the old pro-slavery times: he said to the
+      gentlemen present that Sumner was his friend, and he must leave their
+      company if they continued to assail him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he spoke almost as rarely of his friends as of himself. He liked the
+      large, impersonal topics which could be dealt with on their human side,
+      and involved characters rather than individuals. This was rather strange
+      in Cambridge, where we were apt to take our instances from the
+      environment. It was not the only thing he was strange in there; he was not
+      to that manner born; he lacked the final intimacies which can come only of
+      birth and lifelong association, and which make the men of the Boston breed
+      seem exclusive when they least feel so; he was Longfellow to the friends
+      who were James, and Charles, and Wendell to one another. He and Hawthorne
+      were classmates at college, but I never heard him mention Hawthorne; I
+      never heard him mention Whittier or Emerson. I think his reticence about
+      his contemporaries was largely due to his reluctance from criticism: he
+      was the finest artist of them all, and if he praised he must have praised
+      with the reservations of an honest man. Of younger writers he was willing
+      enough to speak. No new contributor made his mark in the magazine unnoted
+      by him, and sometimes I showed him verse in manuscript which gave me
+      peculiar pleasure. I remember his liking for the first piece that Mr.
+      Maurice Thompson sent me, and how he tasted the fresh flavor of it, and
+      inhaled its wild new fragrance. He admired the skill of some of the young
+      story-tellers; he praised the subtlety of one in working out an intricate
+      character, and said modestly that he could never have done that sort of
+      thing himself. It was entirely safe to invite his judgment when in doubt,
+      for he never suffered it to become aggressive, or used it to urge upon me
+      the manuscripts that must often have been urged upon him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Longfellow had a house at Nahant where he went every summer for more than
+      a quarter of a century. He found the slight transition change enough from
+      Cambridge, and liked it perhaps because it did not take him beyond the
+      range of the friends and strangers whose company he liked. Agassiz was
+      there, and Appleton; Sumner came to sojourn with him; and the tourists of
+      all nations found him there in half an hour after they reached Boston. His
+      cottage was very plain and simple, but was rich in the sight of the
+      illimitable, sea, and it had a luxury of rocks at the foot of its garden,
+      draped with sea-weed, and washed with the indefatigable tides. As he grew
+      older and feebler he ceased to go to Nahant; he remained the whole year
+      round at Cambridge; he professed to like the summer which he said warmed
+      him through there, better than the cold spectacle of summer which had no
+      such effect at Nahant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The hospitality which was constant at either house was not merely of the
+      worldly sort. Longfellow loved good cheer; he tasted history and poetry in
+      a precious wine; and he liked people who were acquainted with manners and
+      men, and brought the air of capitals with them. But often the man who
+      dined with Longfellow was the man who needed a dinner; and from what I
+      have seen of the sweet courtesy that governed at that board, I am sure
+      that such a man could never have felt himself the least honored guest. The
+      poet&rsquo;s heart was open to all the homelessness of the world; and I remember
+      how once when we sat at his table and I spoke of his poem of &ldquo;The
+      Challenge,&rdquo; then a new poem, and said how I had been touched by the fancy
+      of
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       &ldquo;The poverty-stricken millions
+        Who challenge our wine and bread,
+        And impeach us all as traitors,
+        Both the living and the dead,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      his voice sank in grave humility as he answered, &ldquo;Yes, I often think of
+      those things.&rdquo; He had thought of them in the days of the slave, when he
+      had taken his place with the friends of the hopeless and hapless, and as
+      long as he lived he continued of the party which had freed the slave. He
+      did not often speak of politics, but when the movement of some of the best
+      Republicans away from their party began, he said that he could not see the
+      wisdom of their course. But this was said without censure or criticism of
+      them, and so far as I know he never permitted himself anything like
+      denunciation of those who in any wise differed from him. On a matter of
+      yet deeper interest, I do not feel authorized to speak for him, but I
+      think that as he grew older, his hold upon anything like a creed weakened,
+      though he remained of the Unitarian philosophy concerning Christ. He did
+      not latterly go to church, I believe; but then, very few of his circle
+      were church-goers. Once he said something very vague and uncertain
+      concerning the doctrine of another life when I affirmed my hope of it, to
+      the effect that he wished he could be sure, with the sigh that so often
+      clothed the expression of a misgiving with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0063" id="link2H_4_0063">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When my acquaintance with Longfellow began he had written the things that
+      made his fame, and that it will probably rest upon: &ldquo;Evangeline,&rdquo;
+       &ldquo;Hiawatha,&rdquo; and the &ldquo;Courtship of Miles Standish&rdquo; were by that time old
+      stories. But during the eighteen years that I knew him he produced the
+      best of his minor poems, the greatest of his sonnets, the sweetest of his
+      lyrics. His art ripened to the last, it grew richer and finer, and it
+      never knew decay. He rarely read anything of his own aloud, but in three
+      or four cases he read to me poems he had just finished, as if to give
+      himself the pleasure of hearing them with the sympathetic sense of
+      another. The hexameter piece, &ldquo;Elizabeth,&rdquo; in the third part of &ldquo;Tales of
+      a Wayside Inn,&rdquo; was one of these, and he liked my liking its rhythmical
+      form, which I believed one of the measures best adapted to the English
+      speech, and which he had used himself with so much pleasure and success.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About this time he was greatly interested in the slight experiments I was
+      beginning to make in dramatic form, and he said that if he were himself a
+      young man he should write altogether for the stage; he thought the drama
+      had a greater future with us. He was pleased when a popular singer wished
+      to produce his &ldquo;Masque of Pandora,&rdquo; with music, and he was patient when it
+      failed of the effect hoped for it as an opera. When the late Lawrence
+      Barrett, in the enthusiasm which was one of the fine traits of his
+      generous character, had taken my play of &ldquo;A Counterfeit Presentment,&rdquo; and
+      came to the Boston Museum with it, Longfellow could not apparently have
+      been more zealous for its popular acceptance if it had been his own work.
+      He invited himself to one of the rehearsals with me, and he sat with me on
+      the stage through the four acts with a fortitude which I still wonder at,
+      and with the keenest zest for all the details of the performance. No finer
+      testimony to the love and honor which all kinds of people had for him
+      could have been given than that shown by the actors and employees of the
+      theatre, high and low. They thronged the scenery, those who were not upon
+      the stage, and at the edge of every wing were faces peering round at the
+      poet, who sat unconscious of their adoration, intent upon the play. He was
+      intercepted at every step in going out, and made to put his name to the
+      photographs of himself which his worshippers produced from their persons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came to the first night of the piece, and when it seemed to be finding
+      favor with the public, he leaned forward out of his line to nod and smile
+      at the author; when they, had the author up, it was the sweetest flattery
+      of the applause which abused his fondness that Longfellow clapped first
+      and loudest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Where once he had given his kindness he could not again withhold it, and
+      he was anxious no fact should be interpreted as withdrawal. When the
+      Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil, who was so great a lover of Longfellow, came
+      to Boston, he asked himself out to dine with the poet, who had expected to
+      offer him some such hospitality. Soon after, Longfellow met me, and as if
+      eager to forestall a possible feeling in me, said, &ldquo;I wanted to ask you to
+      dinner with the Emperor, but he not only sent word he was coming, he named
+      his fellow-guests!&rdquo; I answered that though I should probably never come so
+      near dining with an emperor again, I prized his wish to ask me much more
+      than the chance I had missed; and with this my great and good friend
+      seemed a little consoled. I believe that I do not speak too confidently of
+      our relation. He was truly the friend of all men, but I had certainly the
+      advantage of my propinquity. We were near neighbors, as the pleonasm has
+      it, both when I lived on Berkeley Street and after I had built my own
+      house on Concord Avenue; and I suppose he found my youthful informality
+      convenient. He always asked me to dinner when his old friend Greene came
+      to visit him, and then we had an Italian time together, with more or less
+      repetition in our talk, of what we had said before of Italian poetry and
+      Italian character. One day there came a note from him saying, in effect,
+      &ldquo;Salvini is coming out to dine with me tomorrow night, and I want you to
+      come too. There will be no one else but Greene and myself, and we will
+      have an Italian dinner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Unhappily I had accepted a dinner in Boston for that night, and this
+      invitation put me in great misery. I must keep my engagement, but how
+      could I bear to miss meeting Salvini at Longfellow&rsquo;s table on terms like
+      these? We consulted at home together and questioned whether I might not
+      rush into Boston, seek out my host there, possess him of the facts, and
+      frankly throw myself on his mercy. Then a sudden thought struck us: Go to
+      Longfellow, and submit the case to him! I went, and he entered with
+      delicate sympathy into the affair. But he decided that, taking the large
+      view of it, I must keep my engagement, lest I should run even a remote
+      risk of wounding my friend&rsquo;s susceptibilities. I obeyed, and I had a very
+      good time, but I still feel that I missed the best time of my life, and
+      that I ought to be rewarded for my sacrifice, somewhere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Longfellow so rarely spoke of himself in any way that one heard from him
+      few of those experiences of the distinguished man in contact with the
+      undistinguished, which he must have had so abundantly. But he told, while
+      it was fresh in his mind, an incident that happened to him one day in
+      Boston at a tobacconist&rsquo;s, where a certain brand of cigars was recommended
+      to him as the kind Longfellow smoked. &ldquo;Ah, then I must have some of them;
+      and I will ask you to send me a box,&rdquo; said Longfellow, and he wrote down
+      his name and address. The cigar-dealer read it with the smile of a worsted
+      champion, and said, &ldquo;Well, I guess you had me, that time.&rdquo; At a funeral a
+      mourner wished to open conversation, and by way of suggesting a theme of
+      common interest, began, &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve buried, I believe?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes people were shown by the poet through Craigie House who had no
+      knowledge of it except that it had been Washington&rsquo;s headquarters. Of
+      course Longfellow was known by sight to every one in Cambridge. He was
+      daily in the streets, while his health endured, and as he kept no
+      carriage, he was often to be met in the horse-cars, which were such common
+      ground in Cambridge that they were often like small invited parties of
+      friends when they left Harvard Square, so that you expected the gentlemen
+      to jump up and ask the ladies whether they would have chicken salad. In
+      civic and political matters he mingled so far as to vote regularly, and he
+      voted with his party, trusting it for a general regard to the public
+      welfare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I fancy he was somewhat shy of his fellow-men, as the scholar seems always
+      to be, from the sequestered habit of his life; but I think Longfellow was
+      incapable of marking any difference between himself and them. I never
+      heard from him anything that was &lsquo;de haut en bas&rsquo;, when he spoke of
+      people, and in Cambridge, where there was a good deal of contempt for the
+      less lettered, and we liked to smile though we did not like to sneer, and
+      to analyze if we did not censure, Longfellow and Longfellow&rsquo;s house were
+      free of all that. Whatever his feeling may have been towards other sorts
+      and conditions of men, his effect was of an entire democracy. He was
+      always the most unassuming person in any company, and at some large public
+      dinners where I saw him I found him patient of the greater attention that
+      more public men paid themselves and one another. He was not a speaker, and
+      I never saw him on his feet at dinner, except once, when he read a poem
+      for Whittier, who was absent. He disliked after-dinner speaking, and made
+      conditions for his own exemption from it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0064" id="link2H_4_0064">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Once your friend, Longfellow was always your friend; he would not think
+      evil of you, and if he knew evil of you, he would be the last of all that
+      knew it to judge you for it. This may have been from the impersonal habit
+      of his mind, but I believe it was also the effect of principle, for he
+      would do what he could to arrest the delivery of judgment from others, and
+      would soften the sentences passed in his presence. Naturally this brought
+      him under some condemnation with those of a severer cast; and I have heard
+      him criticised for his benevolence towards all, and his constancy to some
+      who were not quite so true to themselves, perhaps. But this leniency of
+      Longfellow&rsquo;s was what constituted him great as well as good, for it is not
+      our wisdom that censures others. As for his goodness, I never saw a fault
+      in him. I do not mean to say that he had no faults, or that there were no
+      better men, but only to give the witness of my knowledge concerning him. I
+      claim in no wise to have been his intimate; such a thing was not possible
+      in my case for quite apparent reasons; and I doubt if Longfellow was
+      capable of intimacy in the sense we mostly attach to the word. Something
+      more of egotism than I ever found in him must go to the making of any
+      intimacy which did not come from the tenderest affections of his heart.
+      But as a man shows himself to those often with him, and in his noted
+      relations with other men, he showed himself without blame. All men that I
+      have known, besides, have had some foible (it often endeared them the
+      more), or some meanness, or pettiness, or bitterness; but Longfellow had
+      none, nor the suggestion of any. No breath of evil ever touched his name;
+      he went in and out among his fellow-men without the reproach that follows
+      wrong; the worst thing I ever heard said of him was that he had &lsquo;gene&rsquo;,
+      and this was said by one of those difficult Cambridge men who would have
+      found &lsquo;gene&rsquo; in a celestial angel. Something that Bjornstjerne Bjornson
+      wrote to me when he was leaving America after a winter in Cambridge, comes
+      nearer suggesting Longfellow than all my talk. The Norsemen, in the days
+      of their stormy and reluctant conversion, used always to speak of Christ
+      as the White Christ, and Bjornson said in his letter, &ldquo;Give my love to the
+      White Mr. Longfellow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A good many, years before Longfellow&rsquo;s death he began to be sleepless, and
+      he suffered greatly. He said to me once that he felt as if he were going
+      about with his heart in a kind of mist. The whole night through he would
+      not be aware of having slept. &ldquo;But,&rdquo; he would add, with his heavenly
+      patience, &ldquo;I always get a good deal of rest from lying down so long.&rdquo; I
+      cannot say whether these conditions persisted, or how much his insomnia
+      had to do with his breaking health; three or four years before the end
+      came, we left Cambridge for a house farther in the country, and I saw him
+      less frequently than before. He did not allow our meetings to cease; he
+      asked me to dinner from time to time, as if to keep them up, but it could
+      not be with the old frequency. Once he made a point of coming to see us in
+      our cottage on the hill west of Cambridge, but it was with an effort not
+      visible in the days when he could end one of his brief walks at our house
+      on Concord Avenue; he never came but he left our house more luminous for
+      his having been there. Once he came to supper there to meet Garfield (an
+      old family friend of mine in Ohio), and though he was suffering from a
+      heavy cold, he would not scant us in his stay. I had some very bad sherry
+      which he drank with the serenity of a martyr, and I shudder to this day to
+      think what his kindness must have cost him. He told his story of the
+      clothes-line ghost, and Garfield matched it with the story of an umbrella
+      ghost who sheltered a friend of his through a midnight storm, but was not
+      cheerful company to his beneficiary, who passed his hand through him at
+      one point in the effort to take his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the end of four years I came to Cambridge to be treated for a long
+      sickness, which had nearly been my last, and when I could get about I
+      returned the visit Longfellow had not failed to pay me. But I did not find
+      him, and I never saw him again in life. I went into Boston to finish the
+      winter of 1881-2, and from time to time I heard that the poet was failing
+      in health. As soon as I felt able to bear the horse-car journey I went out
+      to Cambridge to see him. I had knocked once at his door, the friendly door
+      that had so often opened to his welcome, and stood with the knocker in my
+      hand when the door was suddenly set ajar, and a maid showed her face wet
+      with tears. &ldquo;How is Mr. Longfellow?&rdquo; I palpitated, and with a burst of
+      grief she answered, &ldquo;Oh, the poor gentleman has just departed!&rdquo; I turned
+      away as if from a helpless intrusion at a death-bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the services held in the house before the obsequies at the cemetery, I
+      saw the poet for the last time, where
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+        &ldquo;Dead he lay among his books,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      in the library behind his study. Death seldom fails to bring serenity to
+      all, and I will not pretend that there was a peculiar peacefulness in
+      Longfellow&rsquo;s noble mask, as I saw it then. It was calm and benign as it
+      had been in life; he could not have worn a gentler aspect in going out of
+      the world than he had always worn in it; he had not to wait for death to
+      dignify it with &ldquo;the peace of God.&rdquo; All who were left of his old Cambridge
+      were present, and among those who had come farther was Emerson. He went up
+      to the bier, and with his arms crossed on his breast, and his elbows held
+      in either hand, stood with his head pathetically fallen forward, looking
+      down at the dead face. Those who knew how his memory was a mere blank,
+      with faint gleams of recognition capriciously coming and going in it, must
+      have felt that he was struggling to remember who it was lay there before
+      him; and for me the electly simple words confessing his failure will
+      always be pathetic with his remembered aspect: &ldquo;The gentleman we have just
+      been burying,&rdquo; he said, to the friend who had come with him, &ldquo;was a sweet
+      and beautiful soul; but I forget his name.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I had the privilege and honor of looking over the unprinted poems
+      Longfellow left behind him, and of helping to decide which of them should
+      be published.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were not many of them, and some of these few were quite fragmentary.
+      I gave my voice for the publication of all that had any sort of
+      completeness, for in every one there was a touch of his exquisite art, the
+      grace of his most lovely spirit. We have so far had two men only who felt
+      the claim of their gift to the very best that the most patient skill could
+      give its utterance: one was Hawthorne and the other was Longfellow. I
+      shall not undertake to say which was the greater artist of these two; but
+      I am sure that every one who has studied it must feel with me that the art
+      of Longfellow held out to the end with no touch of decay in it, and that
+      it equalled the art of any other poet of his time. It knew when to give
+      itself, and more and more it knew when to withhold itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What Longfellow&rsquo;s place in literature will be, I shall not offer to say;
+      that is Time&rsquo;s affair, not mine; but I am sure that with Tennyson and
+      Browning he fully shared in the expression of an age which more completely
+      than any former age got itself said by its poets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0065" id="link2H_4_0065">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      STUDIES OF LOWELL
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I have already spoken of my earliest meetings with Lowell at Cambridge
+      when I came to New England on a literary pilgrimage from the West in 1860.
+      I saw him more and more after I went to live in Cambridge in 1866; and I
+      now wish to record what I knew of him during the years that passed between
+      this date and that of his death. If the portrait I shall try to paint does
+      not seem a faithful likeness to others who knew him, I shall only claim
+      that so he looked to me, at this moment and at that. If I do not keep
+      myself quite out of the picture, what painter ever did?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0066" id="link2H_4_0066">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was in the summer of 1865 that I came home from my consular post at
+      Venice; and two weeks after I landed in Boston, I went out to see Lowell
+      at Elmwood, and give him an inkstand that I had brought him from Italy.
+      The bronze lobster whose back opened and disclosed an inkpot and a
+      sand-box was quite ugly; but I thought it beautiful then, and if Lowell
+      thought otherwise he never did anything to let me know it. He put the
+      thing in the middle of his writing-table (he nearly always wrote on a
+      pasteboard pad resting upon his knees), and there it remained as long as I
+      knew the place&mdash;a matter of twenty-five years; but in all that time I
+      suppose the inkpot continued as dry as the sand-box.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My visit was in the heat of August, which is as fervid in Cambridge as it
+      can well be anywhere, and I still have a sense of his study windows lifted
+      to the summer night, and the crickets and grasshoppers crying in at them
+      from the lawns and the gardens outside. Other people went away from
+      Cambridge in the summer to the sea and to the mountains, but Lowell always
+      stayed at Elmwood, in an impassioned love for his home and for his town. I
+      must have found him there in the afternoon, and he must have made me sup
+      with him (dinner was at two o&rsquo;clock) and then go with him for a long night
+      of talk in his study. He liked to have some one help him idle the time
+      away, and keep him as long as possible from his work; and no doubt I was
+      impersonally serving his turn in this way, aside from any pleasure he
+      might have had in my company as some one he had always been kind to, and
+      as a fresh arrival from the Italy dear to us both.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He lighted his pipe, and from the depths of his easychair, invited my shy
+      youth to all the ease it was capable of in his presence. It was not much;
+      I loved him, and he gave me reason to think that he was fond of me, but in
+      Lowell I was always conscious of an older and closer and stricter
+      civilization than my own, an unbroken tradition, a more authoritative
+      status. His democracy was more of the head and mine more of the heart, and
+      his denied the equality which mine affirmed. But his nature was so noble
+      and his reason so tolerant that whenever in our long acquaintance I found
+      it well to come to open rebellion, as I more than once did, he admitted my
+      right of insurrection, and never resented the outbreak. I disliked to
+      differ with him, and perhaps he subtly felt this so much that he would not
+      dislike me for doing it. He even suffered being taxed with inconsistency,
+      and where he saw that he had not been quite just, he would take punishment
+      for his error, with a contrition that was sometimes humorous and always
+      touching.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just then it was the dark hour before the dawn with Italy, and he was
+      interested but not much encouraged by what I could tell him of the feeling
+      in Venice against the Austrians. He seemed to reserve a like scepticism
+      concerning the fine things I was hoping for the Italians in literature,
+      and he confessed an interest in the facts treated which in the retrospect,
+      I am aware, was more tolerant than participant of my enthusiasm. That was
+      always Lowell&rsquo;s attitude towards the opinions of people he liked, when he
+      could not go their lengths with them, and nothing was more characteristic
+      of his affectionate nature and his just intelligence. He was a man of the
+      most strenuous convictions, but he loved many sorts of people whose
+      convictions he disagreed with, and he suffered even prejudices counter to
+      his own if they were not ignoble. In the whimsicalities of others he
+      delighted as much as in his own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0067" id="link2H_4_0067">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Our associations with Italy held over until the next day, when after
+      breakfast he went with me towards Boston as far as &ldquo;the village&rdquo;: for so
+      he liked to speak of Cambridge in the custom of his younger days when wide
+      tracts of meadow separated Harvard Square from his life-long home at
+      Elmwood. We stood on the platform of the horsecar together, and when I
+      objected to his paying my fare in the American fashion, he allowed that
+      the Italian usage of each paying for himself was the politer way. He would
+      not commit himself about my returning to Venice (for I had not given up my
+      place, yet, and was away on leave), but he intimated his distrust of the
+      flattering conditions of life abroad. He said it was charming to be
+      treated &lsquo;da signore&rsquo;, but he seemed to doubt whether it was well; and in
+      this as in all other things he showed his final fealty to the American
+      ideal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was that serious and great moment after the successful close of the
+      civil war when the republican consciousness was more robust in us than
+      ever before or since; but I cannot recall any reference to the historical
+      interest of the time in Lowell&rsquo;s talk. It had been all about literature
+      and about travel; and now with the suggestion of the word village it began
+      to be a little about his youth. I have said before how reluctant he was to
+      let his youth go from him; and perhaps the touch with my juniority had
+      made him realize how near he was to fifty, and set him thinking of the
+      past which had sorrows in it to age him beyond his years. He would never
+      speak of these, though he often spoke of the past. He told once of having
+      been on a brief journey when he was six years old, with his father, and of
+      driving up to the gate of Elmwood in the evening, and his father saying,
+      &ldquo;Ah, this is a pleasant place! I wonder who lives here&mdash;what little
+      boy?&rdquo; At another time he pointed out a certain window in his study, and
+      said he could see himself standing by it when he could only get his chin
+      on the window-sill. His memories of the house, and of everything belonging
+      to it, were very tender; but he could laugh over an escapade of his youth
+      when he helped his fellow-students pull down his father&rsquo;s fences, in the
+      pure zeal of good-comradeship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0068" id="link2H_4_0068">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      My fortunes took me to New York, and I spent most of the winter of 1865-6
+      writing in the office of &lsquo;The Nation&rsquo;. I contributed several sketches of
+      Italian travel to that paper; and one of these brought me a precious
+      letter from Lowell. He praised my sketch, which he said he had read
+      without the least notion who had written it, and he wanted me to feel the
+      full value of such an impersonal pleasure in it. At the same time he did
+      not fail to tell me that he disliked some pseudo-cynical verses of mine
+      which he had read in another place; and I believe it was then that he bade
+      me &ldquo;sweat the Heine out of&rdquo; me, &ldquo;as men sweat the mercury out of their
+      bones.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When I was asked to be assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and came
+      on to Boston to talk the matter over with the publishers, I went out to
+      Cambridge and consulted Lowell. He strongly urged me to take the position
+      (I thought myself hopefully placed in New York on The Nation); and at the
+      same time he seemed to have it on his heart to say that he had recommended
+      some one else for it, never, he owned, having thought of me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was most cordial, but after I came to live in Cambridge (where the
+      magazine was printed, and I could more conveniently look over the proofs),
+      he did not call on me for more than a month, and seemed quite to have
+      forgotten me. We met one night at Mr. Norton&rsquo;s, for one of the Dante
+      readings, and he took no special notice of me till I happened to say
+      something that offered him a chance to give me a little humorous snub. I
+      was speaking of a paper in the Magazine on the &ldquo;Claudian Emissary,&rdquo; and I
+      demanded (no doubt a little too airily) something like &ldquo;Who in the world
+      ever heard of the Claudian Emissary?&rdquo; &ldquo;You are in Cambridge, Mr. Howells,&rdquo;
+       Lowell answered, and laughed at my confusion. Having put me down, he
+      seemed to soften towards me, and at parting he said, with a light of
+      half-mocking tenderness in his beautiful eyes, &ldquo;Goodnight,
+      fellow-townsman.&rdquo; &ldquo;I hardly knew we were fellow-townsmen,&rdquo; I returned. He
+      liked that, apparently, and said he had been meaning to call upon me; and
+      that he was coming very soon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was as good as his word, and after that hardly a week of any kind of
+      weather passed but he mounted the steps to the door of the ugly little
+      house in which I lived, two miles away from him, and asked me to walk.
+      These walks continued, I suppose, until Lowell went abroad for a winter in
+      the early seventies. They took us all over Cambridge, which he knew and
+      loved every inch of, and led us afield through the straggling, unhandsome
+      outskirts, bedrabbled with squalid Irish neighborhoods, and fraying off
+      into marshes and salt meadows. He liked to indulge an excess of admiration
+      for the local landscape, and though I never heard him profess a preference
+      for the Charles River flats to the finest Alpine scenery, I could well
+      believe he would do so under provocation of a fit listener&rsquo;s surprise. He
+      had always so much of the boy in him that he liked to tease the
+      over-serious or over-sincere. He liked to tease and he liked to mock,
+      especially his juniors, if any touch of affectation, or any little
+      exuberance of manner gave him the chance; when he once came to fetch me,
+      and the young mistress of the house entered with a certain excessive
+      elasticity, he sprang from his seat, and minced towards her, with a
+      burlesque of her buoyant carriage which made her laugh. When he had given
+      us his heart in trust of ours, he used us like a younger brother and
+      sister; or like his own children. He included our children in his
+      affection, and he enjoyed our fondness for them as if it were something
+      that had come back to him from his own youth. I think he had also a sort
+      of artistic, a sort of ethical pleasure in it, as being of the good
+      tradition, of the old honest, simple material, from which pleasing effects
+      in literature and civilization were wrought. He liked giving the children
+      books, and writing tricksy fancies in these, where he masked as a fairy
+      prince; and as long as he lived he remembered his early kindness for them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0069" id="link2H_4_0069">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In those walks of ours I believe he did most of the talking, and from his
+      talk then and at other times there remains to me an impression of his
+      growing conservatism. I had in fact come into his life when it had spent
+      its impulse towards positive reform, and I was to be witness of its
+      increasing tendency towards the negative sort. He was quite past the storm
+      and stress of his anti-slavery age; with the close of the war which had
+      broken for him all his ideals of inviolable peace, he had reached the age
+      of misgiving. I do not mean that I ever heard him express doubt of what he
+      had helped to do, or regret for what he had done; but I know that he
+      viewed with critical anxiety what other men were doing with the
+      accomplished facts. His anxiety gave a cast of what one may call
+      reluctance from the political situation, and turned him back towards those
+      civic and social defences which he had once seemed willing to abandon. I
+      do not mean that he lost faith in democracy; this faith he constantly then
+      and signally afterwards affirmed; but he certainly had no longer any faith
+      in insubordination as a means of grace. He preached a quite Socratic
+      reverence for law, as law, and I remember that once when I had got back
+      from Canada in the usual disgust for the American custom-house, and spoke
+      lightly of smuggling as not an evil in itself, and perhaps even a right
+      under our vexatious tariff, he would not have it, but held that the
+      illegality of the act made it a moral of fence. This was not the logic
+      that would have justified the attitude of the anti-slavery men towards the
+      fugitive slave act; but it was in accord with Lowell&rsquo;s feeling about John
+      Brown, whom he honored while always condemning his violation of law; and
+      it was in the line of all his later thinking. In this, he wished you to
+      agree with him, or at least he wished to make you; but he did not wish you
+      to be more of his mind than he was himself. In one of those squalid Irish
+      neighborhoods I confessed a grudge (a mean and cruel grudge, I now think
+      it) for the increasing presence of that race among us, but this did not
+      please him; and I am sure that whatever misgiving he had as to the future
+      of America, he would not have had it less than it had been the refuge and
+      opportunity of the poor of any race or color. Yet he would not have had it
+      this alone. There was a line in his poem on Agassiz which he left out of
+      the printed version, at the fervent entreaty of his friends, as saying too
+      bitterly his disappointment with his country. Writing at the distance of
+      Europe, and with America in the perspective which the alien environment
+      clouded, he spoke of her as &ldquo;The Land of Broken Promise.&rdquo; It was a
+      splendid reproach, but perhaps too dramatic to bear the full test of
+      analysis, and yet it had the truth in it, and might, I think, have
+      usefully stood, to the end of making people think. Undoubtedly it
+      expressed his sense of the case, and in the same measure it would now
+      express that of many who love their country most among us. It is well to
+      hold one&rsquo;s country to her promises, and if there are any who think she is
+      forgetting them it is their duty to say so, even to the point of bitter
+      accusation. I do not suppose it was the &ldquo;common man&rdquo; of Lincoln&rsquo;s dream
+      that Lowell thought America was unfaithful to, though as I have suggested
+      he could be tender of the common man&rsquo;s hopes in her; but he was impeaching
+      in that blotted line her sincerity with the uncommon man: the man who had
+      expected of her a constancy to the ideals of her youth end to the high
+      martyr-moods of the war which had given an unguarded and bewildering
+      freedom to a race of slaves. He was thinking of the shame of our municipal
+      corruptions, the debased quality of our national statesmanship, the
+      decadence of our whole civic tone, rather than of the increasing
+      disabilities of the hard-working poor, though his heart when he thought of
+      them was with them, too, as it was in &ldquo;the time when the slave would not
+      let him sleep.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke very rarely of those times, perhaps because their political and
+      social associations were so knit up with the saddest and tenderest
+      personal memories, which it was still anguish to touch. Not only was he
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                  &ldquo;&mdash;not of the race
+        That hawk, their sorrows in the market place,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      but so far as my witness went he shrank from mention of them. I do not
+      remember hearing him speak of the young wife who influenced him so
+      potently at the most vital moment, and turned him from his whole scholarly
+      and aristocratic tradition to an impassioned championship of the
+      oppressed; and he never spoke of the children he had lost. I recall but
+      one allusion to the days when he was fighting the anti-slavery battle
+      along the whole line, and this was with a humorous relish of his Irish
+      servant&rsquo;s disgust in having to wait upon a negro whom he had asked to his
+      table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was rather severe in his notions of the subordination his domestics
+      owed him. They were &ldquo;to do as they were bid,&rdquo; and yet he had a tenderness
+      for such as had been any time with him, which was wounded when once a
+      hired man long in his employ greedily overreached him in a certain
+      transaction. He complained of that with a simple grief for the man&rsquo;s
+      indelicacy after so many favors from him, rather than with any resentment.
+      His hauteur towards his dependents was theoretic; his actual behavior was
+      of the gentle consideration common among Americans of good breeding, and
+      that recreant hired man had no doubt never been suffered to exceed him in
+      shows of mutual politeness. Often when the maid was about weightier
+      matters, he came and opened his door to me himself, welcoming me with the
+      smile that was like no other. Sometimes he said, &ldquo;Siete il benvenuto,&rdquo; or
+      used some other Italian phrase, which put me at ease with him in the
+      region where we were most at home together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Looking back I must confess that I do not see what it was he found to make
+      him wish for my company, which he presently insisted upon having once a
+      week at dinner. After the meal we turned into his study where we sat
+      before a wood fire in winter, and he smoked and talked. He smoked a pipe
+      which was always needing tobacco, or going out, so that I have the figure
+      of him before my eyes constantly getting out of his deep chair to rekindle
+      it from the fire with a paper lighter. He was often out of his chair to
+      get a book from the shelves that lined the walls, either for a passage
+      which he wished to read, or for some disputed point which he wished to
+      settle. If I had caused the dispute, he enjoyed putting me in the wrong;
+      if he could not, he sometimes whimsically persisted in his error, in
+      defiance of all authority; but mostly he had such reverence for the truth
+      that he would not question it even in jest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If I dropped in upon him in the afternoon I was apt to find him reading
+      the old French poets, or the plays of Calderon, or the &lsquo;Divina Commedia&rsquo;,
+      which he magnanimously supposed me much better acquainted with than I was
+      because I knew some passages of it by heart. One day I came in quoting
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+        &ldquo;Io son, cantava, io son dolce Sirena,
+        Che i marinai in mezzo al mar dismago.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      He stared at me in a rapture with the matchless music, and then uttered
+      all his adoration and despair in one word. &ldquo;Damn!&rdquo; he said, and no more. I
+      believe he instantly proposed a walk that day, as if his study walls with
+      all their vistas into the great literatures cramped his soul liberated to
+      a sense of ineffable beauty of the verse of the &lsquo;somma poeta&rsquo;. But
+      commonly be preferred to have me sit down with him there among the mute
+      witnesses of the larger part of his life. As I have suggested in my own
+      case, it did not matter much whether you brought anything to the feast or
+      not. If he liked you he liked being with you, not for what he got, but for
+      what he gave. He was fond of one man whom I recall as the most silent man
+      I ever met. I never heard him say anything, not even a dull thing, but
+      Lowell delighted in him, and would have you believe that he was full of
+      quaint humor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0070" id="link2H_4_0070">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      While Lowell lived there was a superstition, which has perhaps survived
+      him, that he was an indolent man, wasting himself in barren studies and
+      minor efforts instead of devoting his great powers to some monumental work
+      worthy of them. If the robust body of literature, both poetry and prose,
+      which lives after him does not yet correct this vain delusion, the time
+      will come when it must; and in the meantime the delusion cannot vex him
+      now. I think it did vex him, then, and that he even shared it, and tried
+      at times to meet such shadowy claim as it had. One of the things that
+      people urged upon him was to write some sort of story, and it is known how
+      he attempted this in verse. It is less known that he attempted it in
+      prose, and that he went so far as to write the first chapter of a novel.
+      He read this to me, and though I praised it then, I have a feeling now
+      that if he had finished the novel it would have been a failure. &ldquo;But I
+      shall never finish it,&rdquo; he sighed, as if he felt irremediable defects in
+      it, and laid the manuscript away, to turn and light his pipe. It was a
+      rather old-fashioned study of a whimsical character, and it did not arrive
+      anywhere, so far as it went; but I believe that it might have been
+      different with a Yankee story in verse such as we have fragmentarily in
+      &lsquo;The Nooning&rsquo; and &lsquo;FitzAdam&rsquo;s Story&rsquo;. Still, his gift was essentially
+      lyrical and meditative, with the universal New England tendency to
+      allegory. He was wholly undramatic in the actuation of the characters
+      which he imagined so dramatically. He liked to deal with his subject at
+      first hand, to indulge through himself all the whim and fancy which the
+      more dramatic talent indulges through its personages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He enjoyed writing such a poem as &ldquo;The Cathedral,&rdquo; which is not of his
+      best, but which is more immediately himself, in all his moods, than some
+      better poems. He read it to me soon after it was written, and in the long
+      walk which we went hard upon the reading (our way led us through the Port
+      far towards East Cambridge, where he wished to show me a tupelo-tree of
+      his acquaintance, because I said I had never seen one), his talk was still
+      of the poem which he was greatly in conceit of. Later his satisfaction
+      with it received a check from the reserves of other friends concerning
+      some whimsical lines which seemed to them too great a drop from the higher
+      moods of the piece. Their reluctance nettled him; perhaps he agreed with
+      them; but he would not change the lines, and they stand as he first wrote
+      them. In fact, most of his lines stand as he first wrote them; he would
+      often change them in revision, and then, in a second revision go back to
+      the first version.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was very sensitive to criticism, especially from those he valued
+      through his head or heart. He would try to hide his hurt, and he would not
+      let you speak of it, as though your sympathy unmanned him, but you could
+      see that he suffered. This notably happened in my remembrance from a
+      review in a journal which he greatly esteemed; and once when in a notice
+      of my own I had put one little thorny point among the flowers, he
+      confessed a puncture from it. He praised the criticism hardily, but I knew
+      that he winced under my recognition of the didactic quality which he had
+      not quite guarded himself against in the poetry otherwise praised. He
+      liked your liking, and he openly rejoiced in it; and I suppose he made
+      himself believe that in trying his verse with his friends he was testing
+      it; but I do not believe that he was, and I do not think he ever corrected
+      his judgment by theirs, however he suffered from it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In any matter that concerned literary morals he was more than eager to
+      profit by another eye. One summer he sent me for the Magazine a poem
+      which, when I read it, I trembled to find in motive almost exactly like
+      one we had lately printed by another contributor. There was nothing for it
+      but to call his attention to the resemblance, and I went over to Elmwood
+      with the two poems. He was not at home, and I was obliged to leave the
+      poems, I suppose with some sort of note, for the next morning&rsquo;s post
+      brought me a delicious letter from him, all one cry of confession, the
+      most complete, the most ample. He did not trouble himself to say that his
+      poem was an unconscious reproduction of the other; that was for every
+      reason unnecessary, but he had at once rewritten it upon wholly different
+      lines; and I do not think any reader was reminded of Mrs. Akers&rsquo;s &ldquo;Among
+      the Laurels&rdquo; by Lowell&rsquo;s &ldquo;Foot-path.&rdquo; He was not only much more sensitive
+      of others&rsquo; rights than his own, but in spite of a certain severity in him,
+      he was most tenderly regardful of their sensibilities when he had imagined
+      them: he did not always imagine them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0071" id="link2H_4_0071">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      At this period, between the years 1866 and 1874, when he unwillingly went
+      abroad for a twelvemonth, Lowell was seen in very few Cambridge houses,
+      and in still fewer Boston houses. He was not an unsocial man, but he was
+      most distinctly not a society man. He loved chiefly the companionship of
+      books, and of men who loved books; but of women generally he had an
+      amusing diffidence; he revered them and honored them, but he would rather
+      not have had them about. This is over-saying it, of course, but the truth
+      is in what I say. There was never a more devoted husband, and he was
+      content to let his devotion to the sex end with that. He especially could
+      not abide difference of opinion in women; he valued their taste, their
+      wit, their humor, but he would have none of their reason. I was by one day
+      when he was arguing a point with one of his nieces, and after it had gone
+      on for some time, and the impartial witness must have owned that she was
+      getting the better of him he closed the controversy by giving her a great
+      kiss, with the words, &ldquo;You are a very good girl, my dear,&rdquo; and practically
+      putting her out of the room. As to women of the flirtatious type, he did
+      not dislike them; no man, perhaps, does; but he feared them, and he said
+      that with them there was but one way, and that was to run.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have a notion that at this period Lowell was more freely and fully
+      himself than at any other. The passions and impulses of his younger
+      manhood had mellowed, the sorrows of that time had softened; he could
+      blamelessly live to himself in his affections and his sobered ideals. His
+      was always a duteous life; but he had pretty well given up making man over
+      in his own image, as we all wish some time to do, and then no longer wish
+      it. He fulfilled his obligations to his fellow-men as these sought him
+      out, but he had ceased to seek them. He loved his friends and their love,
+      but he had apparently no desire to enlarge their circle. It was that hour
+      of civic suspense, in which public men seemed still actuated by unselfish
+      aims, and one not essentially a politician might contentedly wait to see
+      what would come of their doing their best. At any rate, without
+      occasionally withholding open criticism or acclaim Lowell waited among his
+      books for the wounds of the war to heal themselves, and the nation to
+      begin her healthfuller and nobler life. With slavery gone, what might not
+      one expect of American democracy!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His life at Elmwood was of an entire simplicity. In the old colonial
+      mansion in which he was born, he dwelt in the embowering leafage, amid the
+      quiet of lawns and garden-plots broken by few noises ruder than those from
+      the elms and the syringas where
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;The oriole clattered and the cat-bird sang.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      From the tracks on Brattle Street, came the drowsy tinkle of horse-car
+      bells; and sometimes a funeral trailed its black length past the corner of
+      his grounds, and lost itself from sight under the shadows of the willows
+      that hid Mount Auburn from his study windows. In the winter the deep New
+      England snows kept their purity in the stretch of meadow behind the house,
+      which a double row of pines guarded in a domestic privacy. All was of a
+      modest dignity within and without the house, which Lowell loved but did
+      not imagine of a manorial presence; and he could not conceal his annoyance
+      with an over-enthusiastic account of his home in which the simple
+      chiselling of some panels was vaunted as rich wood-carving. There was a
+      graceful staircase, and a good wide hall, from which the dining-room and
+      drawing-room opened by opposite doors; behind the last, in the southwest
+      corner of the house, was his study.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There, literally, he lived during the six or seven years in which I knew
+      him after my coming to Cambridge. Summer and winter he sat there among his
+      books, seldom stirring abroad by day except for a walk, and by night yet
+      more rarely. He went to the monthly mid-day dinner of the Saturday Club in
+      Boston; he was very constant at the fortnightly meetings of his
+      whist-club, because he loved the old friends who formed it; he came always
+      to the Dante suppers at Longfellow&rsquo;s, and he was familiarly in and out at
+      Mr. Norton&rsquo;s, of course. But, otherwise, he kept to his study, except for
+      some rare and almost unwilling absences upon university lecturing at Johns
+      Hopkins or at Cornell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For four years I did not take any summer outing from Cambridge myself, and
+      my associations with Elmwood and with Lowell are more of summer than of
+      winter weather meetings. But often we went our walks through the snows,
+      trudging along between the horsecar tracks which enclosed the only
+      well-broken-out paths in that simple old Cambridge. I date one memorable
+      expression of his from such a walk, when, as we were passing Longfellow&rsquo;s
+      house, in mid-street, he came as near the declaration of his religious
+      faith as he ever did in my presence. He was speaking of the New Testament,
+      and he said, The truth was in it; but they had covered it up with their
+      hagiology. Though he had been bred a Unitarian, and had more and more
+      liberated himself from all creeds, he humorously affected an abiding
+      belief in hell, and similarly contended for the eternal punishment of the
+      wicked. He was of a religious nature, and he was very reverent of other
+      people&rsquo;s religious feelings. He expressed a special tolerance for my own
+      inherited faith, no doubt because Mrs. Lowell was also a Swedenborgian;
+      but I do not think he was interested in it, and I suspect that all
+      religious formulations bored him. In his earlier poems are many
+      intimations and affirmations of belief in an overruling providence, and
+      especially in the God who declares vengeance His and will repay men for
+      their evil deeds, and will right the weak against the strong. I think he
+      never quite lost this, though when, in the last years of his life, I asked
+      him if he believed there was a moral government of the universe, he
+      answered gravely and with a sort of pain, The scale was so vast, and we
+      saw such a little part of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As to tine notion of a life after death, I never had any direct or
+      indirect expression from him; but I incline to the opinion that his hold
+      upon this weakened with his years, as it is sadly apt to do with men who
+      have read much and thought much: they have apparently exhausted their
+      potentialities of psychological life. Mystical Lowell was, as every poet
+      must be, but I do not think he liked mystery. One morning he told me that
+      when he came home the night before he had seen the Doppelganger of one of
+      his household: though, as he joked, he was not in a state to see double.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He then said he used often to see people&rsquo;s Doppelganger; at another time,
+      as to ghosts, he said, He was like Coleridge: he had seen too many of &lsquo;em.
+      Lest any weaker brethren should be caused to offend by the restricted oath
+      which I have reported him using in a moment of transport it may be best to
+      note here that I never heard him use any other imprecation, and this one
+      seldom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Any grossness of speech was inconceivable of him; now and then, but only
+      very rarely, the human nature of some story &ldquo;unmeet for ladies&rdquo; was too
+      much for his sense of humor, and overcame him with amusement which he was
+      willing to impart, and did impart, but so that mainly the human nature of
+      it reached you. In this he was like the other great Cambridge men, though
+      he was opener than the others to contact with the commoner life. He keenly
+      delighted in every native and novel turn of phrase, and he would not
+      undervalue a vital word or a notion picked up out of the road even if it
+      had some dirt sticking to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He kept as close to the common life as a man of his patrician instincts
+      and cloistered habits could. I could go to him with any new find about it
+      and be sure of delighting him; after I began making my involuntary and all
+      but unconscious studies of Yankee character, especially in the country, he
+      was always glad to talk them over with me. Still, when I had discovered a
+      new accent or turn of speech in the fields he had cultivated, I was aware
+      of a subtle grudge mingling with his pleasure; but this was after all less
+      envy than a fine regret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the time I speak of there was certainly nothing in Lowell&rsquo;s dress or
+      bearing that would have kept the common life aloof from him, if that life
+      were not always too proud to make advances to any one. In this retrospect,
+      I see him in the sack coat and rough suit which he wore upon all out-door
+      occasions, with heavy shoes, and a round hat. I never saw him with a high
+      hat on till he came home after his diplomatic stay in London; then he had
+      become rather rigorously correct in his costume, and as conventional as he
+      had formerly been indifferent. In both epochs he was apt to be gloved, and
+      the strong, broad hands, which left the sensation of their vigor for some
+      time after they had clasped yours, were notably white. At the earlier
+      period, he still wore his auburn hair somewhat long; it was darker than
+      his beard, which was branching and full, and more straw-colored than
+      auburn, as were his thick eyebrows; neither hair nor beard was then
+      touched with gray, as I now remember. When he uncovered, his straight,
+      wide, white forehead showed itself one of the most beautiful that could
+      be; his eyes were gay with humor, and alert with all intelligence. He had
+      an enchanting smile, a laugh that was full of friendly joyousness, and a
+      voice that was exquisite music. Everything about him expressed his
+      strenuous physical condition: he would not wear an overcoat in the coldest
+      Cambridge weather; at all times he moved vigorously, and walked with a
+      quick step, lifting his feet well from the ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0072" id="link2H_4_0072">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It gives me a pleasure which I am afraid I cannot impart, to linger in
+      this effort to materialize his presence from the fading memories of the
+      past. I am afraid I can as little impart a due sense of what he
+      spiritually was to my knowledge. It avails nothing for me to say that I
+      think no man of my years and desert had ever so true and constant a
+      friend. He was both younger and older than I by insomuch as he was a poet
+      through and through, and had been out of college before I was born. But he
+      had already come to the age of self-distrust when a man likes to take
+      counsel with his juniors as with his elders, and fancies he can correct
+      his perspective by the test of their fresher vision. Besides, Lowell was
+      most simply and pathetically reluctant to part with youth, and was willing
+      to cling to it wherever he found it. He could not in any wise bear to be
+      left-out. When Mr. Bret Harte came to Cambridge, and the talk was all of
+      the brilliant character-poems with which he had then first dazzled the
+      world, Lowell casually said, with a most touching, however ungrounded
+      sense of obsolescence, He could remember when the &lsquo;Biglow Papers&rsquo; were all
+      the talk. I need not declare that there was nothing ungenerous in that. He
+      was only too ready to hand down his laurels to a younger man; but he
+      wished to do it himself. Through the modesty that is always a quality of
+      such a nature, he was magnanimously sensitive to the appearance of fading
+      interest; he could not take it otherwise than as a proof of his fading
+      power. I had a curious hint of this when one year in making up the
+      prospectus of the Magazine for the next, I omitted his name because I had
+      nothing special to promise from him, and because I was half ashamed to be
+      always flourishing it in the eyes of the public. &ldquo;I see that you have
+      dropped me this year,&rdquo; he wrote, and I could see that it had hurt, and I
+      knew that he was glad to believe the truth when I told him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not care so much for popularity as for the praise of his friends.
+      If he liked you he wished you not only to like what he wrote, but to say
+      so. He was himself most cordial in his recognition of the things that
+      pleased him. What happened to me from him, happened to others, and I am
+      only describing his common habit when I say that nothing I did to his
+      liking failed to bring me a spoken or oftener a written acknowledgment.
+      This continued to the latest years of his life when the effort even to
+      give such pleasure must have cost him a physical pang.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was of a very catholic taste; and he was apt to be carried away by a
+      little touch of life or humor, and to overvalue the piece in which he
+      found it; but, mainly his judgments of letters and men were just. One of
+      the dangers of scholarship was a peculiar danger in the Cambridge keeping,
+      but Lowell was almost as averse as Longfellow from contempt. He could
+      snub, and pitilessly, where he thought there was presumption and
+      apparently sometimes merely because he was in the mood; but I cannot
+      remember ever to have heard him sneer. He was often wonderfully patient of
+      tiresome people, and sometimes celestially insensible to vulgarity. In
+      spite of his reserve, he really wished people to like him; he was keenly
+      alive to neighborly good-will or ill-will; and when there was a question
+      of widening Elmwood avenue by taking part of his grounds, he was keenly
+      hurt by hearing that some one who lived near him had said he hoped the
+      city would cut down Lowell&rsquo;s elms: his English elms, which his father had
+      planted, and with which he was himself almost one blood!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0073" id="link2H_4_0073">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In the period of which I am speaking, Lowell was constantly writing and
+      pretty constantly printing, though still the superstition held that he was
+      an idle man. To this time belongs the publication of some of his finest
+      poems, if not their inception: there were cases in which their inception
+      dated far back, even to ten or twenty years. He wrote his poems at a heat,
+      and the manuscript which came to me for the magazine was usually the first
+      draft, very little corrected. But if the cold fit took him quickly it
+      might hold him so fast that he would leave the poem in abeyance till he
+      could slowly live back to a liking for it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The most of his best prose belongs to the time between 1866 and 1874, and
+      to this time we owe the several volumes of essays and criticisms called
+      &lsquo;Among My Books&rsquo; and &lsquo;My Study Windows&rsquo;. He wished to name these more
+      soberly, but at the urgence of his publishers he gave them titles which
+      they thought would be attractive to the public, though he felt that they
+      took from the dignity of his work. He was not a good business man in a
+      literary way, he submitted to others&rsquo; judgment in all such matters. I
+      doubt if he ever put a price upon anything he sold, and I dare say he was
+      usually surprised at the largeness of the price paid him; but sometimes if
+      his need was for a larger sum, he thought it too little, without reference
+      to former payments. This happened with a long poem in the Atlantic, which
+      I had urged the counting-room authorities to deal handsomely with him for.
+      I did not know how many hundred they gave him, and when I met him I
+      ventured to express the hope that the publishers had done their part. He
+      held up four fingers, &ldquo;Quattro,&rdquo; he said in Italian, and then added with a
+      disappointment which he tried to smile away, &ldquo;I thought they might have
+      made it cinque.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Between me and me I thought quattro very well, but probably Lowell had in
+      mind some end which cinque would have fitted better. It was pretty sure to
+      be an unselfish end, a pleasure to some one dear to him, a gift that he
+      had wished to make. Long afterwards when I had been the means of getting
+      him cinque for a poem one-tenth the length, he spoke of the payment to me.
+      &ldquo;It came very handily; I had been wanting to give a watch.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not believe at any time Lowell was able to deal with money
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;Like wealthy men, not knowing what they give.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      more probably he felt a sacredness in the money got by literature, which
+      the literary man never quite rids him self of, even when he is not a poet,
+      and which made him wish to dedicate it to something finer than the every
+      day uses. He lived very quietly, but he had by no means more than he
+      needed to live upon, and at that time he had pecuniary losses. He was
+      writing hard, and was doing full work in his Harvard professorship, and he
+      was so far dependent upon his salary, that he felt its absence for the
+      year he went abroad. I do not know quite how to express my sense of
+      something unworldly, of something almost womanlike in his relation to
+      money.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was not only generous of money, but he was generous of himself, when he
+      thought he could be of use, or merely of encouragement. He came all the
+      way into Boston to hear certain lectures of mine on the Italian poets,
+      which he could not have found either edifying or amusing, that he might
+      testify his interest in me, and show other people that they were worth
+      coming to. He would go carefully over a poem with me, word by word, and
+      criticise every turn of phrase, and after all be magnanimously tolerant of
+      my sticking to phrasings that he disliked. In a certain line
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;The silvern chords of the piano trembled,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      he objected to silvern. Why not silver? I alleged leathern, golden, and
+      like adjectives in defence of my word; but still he found an affectation
+      in it, and suffered it to stand with extreme reluctance. Another line of
+      another piece:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;And what she would, would rather that she would not&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      he would by no means suffer. He said that the stress falling on the last
+      word made it &ldquo;public-school English,&rdquo; and he mocked it with the answer a
+      maid had lately given him when he asked if the master of the house was at
+      home. She said, &ldquo;No, sir, he is not,&rdquo; when she ought to have said &ldquo;No,
+      sir, he isn&rsquo;t.&rdquo; He was appeased when I came back the next day with the
+      stanza amended so that the verse could read:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;And what she would, would rather she would not so&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      but I fancy he never quite forgave my word silvern. Yet, he professed not
+      to have prejudices in such matters, but to use any word that would serve
+      his turn, without wincing; and he certainly did use and defend words, as
+      undisprivacied and disnatured, that made others wince.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was otherwise such a stickler for the best diction that he would not
+      have had me use slovenly vernacular even in the dialogue in my stories: my
+      characters must not say they wanted to do so and so, but wished, and the
+      like. In a copy of one of my books which I found him reading, I saw he had
+      corrected my erring Western woulds and shoulds; as he grew old he was less
+      and less able to restrain himself from setting people right to their
+      faces. Once, in the vast area of my ignorance, he specified my small
+      acquaintance with a certain period of English poetry, saying, &ldquo;You&rsquo;re
+      rather shady, there, old fellow.&rdquo; But he would not have had me too
+      learned, holding that he had himself been hurt for literature by his
+      scholarship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His patience in analyzing my work with me might have been the easy effort
+      of his habit of teaching; and his willingness to give himself and his own
+      was no doubt more signally attested in his asking a brother man of letters
+      who wished to work up a subject in the college library, to stay a
+      fortnight in his house, and to share his study, his beloved study, with
+      him. This must truly have cost him dear, as any author of fixed habits
+      will understand. Happily the man of letters was a good fellow, and knew
+      how to prize the favor-done him, but if he had been otherwise, it would
+      have been the same to Lowell. He not only endured, but did many things for
+      the weaker brethren, which were amusing enough to one in the secret of his
+      inward revolt. Yet in these things he was considerate also of the editor
+      whom he might have made the sharer of his self-sacrifice, and he seldom
+      offered me manuscripts for others. The only real burden of the kind that
+      he put upon me was the diary of a Virginian who had travelled in New
+      England during the early thirties, and had set down his impressions of men
+      and manners there. It began charmingly, and went on very well under
+      Lowell&rsquo;s discreet pruning, but after a while he seemed to fall in love
+      with the character of the diarist so much that he could not bear to cut
+      anything.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="linknine" id="linknine"></a> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      IX.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      He had a great tenderness for the broken and ruined South, whose sins he
+      felt that he had had his share in visiting upon her, and he was willing to
+      do what he could to ease her sorrows in the case of any particular
+      Southerner. He could not help looking askance upon the dramatic shows of
+      retribution which some of the Northern politicians were working, but with
+      all his misgivings he continued to act with the Republican party until
+      after the election of Hayes; he was away from the country during the
+      Garfield campaign. He was in fact one of the Massachusetts electors chosen
+      by the Republican majority in 1816, and in that most painful hour when
+      there was question of the policy and justice of counting Hayes in for the
+      presidency, it was suggested by some of Lowell&rsquo;s friends that he should
+      use the original right of the electors under the constitution, and vote
+      for Tilden, whom one vote would have chosen president over Hayes. After he
+      had cast his vote for Hayes, he quietly referred to the matter one day, in
+      the moment of lighting his pipe, with perhaps the faintest trace of
+      indignation in his tone. He said that whatever the first intent of the
+      constitution was, usage had made the presidential electors strictly the
+      instruments of the party which chose them, and that for him to have voted
+      for Tilden when he had been chosen to vote for Hayes would have-been an
+      act of bad faith.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He would have resumed for me all the old kindness of our relations before
+      the recent year of his absence, but this had inevitably worked a little
+      estrangement. He had at least lost the habit of me, and that says much in
+      such matters. He was not so perfectly at rest in the Cambridge
+      environment; in certain indefinable ways it did not so entirely suffice
+      him, though he would have been then and always the last to allow this. I
+      imagine his friends realized more than he, that certain delicate but vital
+      filaments of attachment had frayed and parted in alien air, and left him
+      heart-loose as he had not been before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not know whether it crossed his mind after the election of Hayes that
+      he might be offered some place abroad, but it certainly crossed the minds
+      of some of his friends, and I could not feel that I was acting for myself
+      alone when I used a family connection with the President, very early in
+      his term, to let him know that I believed Lowell would accept a diplomatic
+      mission. I could assure him that I was writing wholly without Lowell&rsquo;s
+      privity or authority, and I got back such a letter as I could wish in its
+      delicate sense of the situation. The President said that he had already
+      thought of offering Lowell something, and he gave me the pleasure, a
+      pleasure beyond any other I could imagine, of asking Lowell whether he
+      would accept the mission to Austria. I lost no time carrying his letter to
+      Elmwood, where I found Lowell over his coffee at dinner. He saw me at the
+      threshold, and called to me through the open door to come in, and I handed
+      him the letter, and sat down at table while he ran it through. When he had
+      read it, he gave a quick &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; and threw it over the length of the table
+      to Mrs. Lowell. She read it in a smiling and loyal reticence, as if she
+      would not say one word of all she might wish to say in urging his
+      acceptance, though I could see that she was intensely eager for it. The
+      whole situation was of a perfect New England character in its tacit
+      significance; after Lowell had taken his coffee we turned into his study
+      without further allusion to the matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A day or two later he came to my house to say that he could not accept the
+      Austrian mission, and to ask me to tell the President so for him, and make
+      his acknowledgments, which he would also write himself. He remained
+      talking a little while of other things, and when he rose to go, he said
+      with a sigh of vague reluctance, &ldquo;I should like to see a play of
+      Calderon,&rdquo; as if it had nothing to do with any wish of his that could
+      still be fulfilled. &ldquo;Upon this hint I acted,&rdquo; and in due time it was found
+      in Washington, that the gentleman who had been offered the Spanish mission
+      would as lief go to Austria, and Lowell was sent to Madrid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0074" id="link2H_4_0074">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      X.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When we met in London, some years later, he came almost every afternoon to
+      my lodging, and the story of our old-time Cambridge walks began again in
+      London phrases. There were not the vacant lots and outlying fields of his
+      native place, but we made shift with the vast, simple parks, and we walked
+      on the grass as we could not have done in an American park, and were glad
+      to feel the earth under our feet. I said how much it was like those
+      earlier tramps; and that pleased him, for he wished, whenever a thing
+      delighted him, to find a Cambridge quality in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he was in love with everything English, and was determined I should be
+      so too, beginning with the English weather, which in summer cannot be
+      overpraised. He carried, of course, an umbrella, but he would not put it
+      up in the light showers that caught us at times, saying that the English
+      rain never wetted you. The thick short turf delighted him; he would
+      scarcely allow that the trees were the worse for foliage blighted by a
+      vile easterly storm in the spring of that year. The tender air, the
+      delicate veils that the moisture in it cast about all objects at the least
+      remove, the soft colors of the flowers, the dull blue of the low sky
+      showing through the rifts of the dirty white clouds, the hovering pall of
+      London smoke, were all dear to him, and he was anxious that I should not
+      lose anything of their charm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was anxious that I should not miss the value of anything in England,
+      and while he volunteered that the aristocracy had the corruptions of
+      aristocracies everywhere, he insisted upon my respectful interest in it
+      because it was so historical. Perhaps there was a touch of irony in this
+      demand, but it is certain that he was very happy in England. He had come
+      of the age when a man likes smooth, warm keeping, in which he need make no
+      struggle for his comfort; disciplined and obsequious service; society,
+      perfectly ascertained within the larger society which we call
+      civilization; and in an alien environment, for which he was in no wise
+      responsible, he could have these without a pang of the self-reproach which
+      at home makes a man unhappy amidst his luxuries, when he considers their
+      cost to others. He had a position which forbade thought of unfairness in
+      the conditions; he must not wake because of the slave, it was his duty to
+      sleep. Besides, at that time Lowell needed all the rest he could get, for
+      he had lately passed through trials such as break the strength of men, and
+      how them with premature age. He was living alone in his little house in
+      Lowndes Square, and Mrs. Lowell was in the country, slowly recovering from
+      the effects of the terrible typhus which she had barely survived in
+      Madrid. He was yet so near the anguish of that experience that he told me
+      he had still in his nerves the expectation of a certain agonized cry from
+      her which used to rend them. But he said he had adjusted himself to this,
+      and he went on to speak with a patience which was more affecting in him
+      than in men of more phlegmatic temperament, of how we were able to adjust
+      ourselves to all our trials and to the constant presence of pain. He said
+      he was never free of a certain distress, which was often a sharp pang, in
+      one of his shoulders, but his physique had established such relations with
+      it that, though he was never unconscious of it, he was able to endure it
+      without a recognition of it as suffering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He seemed to me, however, very well, and at his age of sixty-three, I
+      could not see that he was less alert and vigorous than he was when I first
+      knew him in Cambridge. He had the same brisk, light step, and though his
+      beard was well whitened and his auburn hair had grown ashen through the
+      red, his face had the freshness and his eyes the clearness of a young
+      man&rsquo;s. I suppose the novelty of his life kept him from thinking about his
+      years; or perhaps in contact with those great, insenescent Englishmen, he
+      could not feel himself old. At any rate he did not once speak of age, as
+      he used to do ten years earlier, and I, then half through my forties, was
+      still &ldquo;You young dog&rdquo; to him. It was a bright and cheerful renewal of the
+      early kindliness between us, on which indeed there had never been a
+      shadow, except such as distance throws. He wished apparently to do
+      everything he could to assure us of his personal interest; and we were
+      amused to find him nervously apprehensive of any purpose, such as was far
+      from us, to profit by him officially. He betrayed a distinct relief when
+      he found we were not going to come upon him even for admissions to the
+      houses of parliament, which we were to see by means of an English
+      acquaintance. He had not perhaps found some other fellow-citizens so
+      considerate; he dreaded the half-duties of his place, like presentations
+      to the queen, and complained of the cheap ambitions he had to gratify in
+      that way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was so eager to have me like England in every way, and seemed so fond
+      of the English, that I thought it best to ask him whether he minded my
+      quoting, in a paper about Lexington, which I was just then going to print
+      in a London magazine, some humorous lines of his expressing the mounting
+      satisfaction of an imaginary Yankee story-teller who has the old fight
+      terminate in Lord Percy&rsquo;s coming
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;To hammer stone for life in Concord jail.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      It had occurred to me that it might possibly embarrass him to have this
+      patriotic picture presented to a public which could not take our Fourth of
+      July pleasure in it, and I offered to suppress it, as I did afterwards
+      quite for literary reasons. He said, No, let it stand, and let them make
+      the worst of it; and I fancy that much of his success with a people who
+      are not gingerly with other people&rsquo;s sensibilities came from the frankness
+      with which he trampled on their prejudice when he chose. He said he always
+      told them, when there was question of such things, that the best society
+      he had ever known was in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He contended that the
+      best English was spoken there; and so it was, when he spoke it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We were in London out of the season, and he was sorry that he could not
+      have me meet some titles who he declared had found pleasure in my books;
+      when we returned from Italy in the following June, he was prompt to do me
+      this honor. I dare say he wished me to feel it to its last implication,
+      and I did my best, but there was nothing in the evening I enjoyed so much
+      as his coming up to Mrs. Lowell, at the close, when there was only a title
+      or two left, and saying to her as he would have said to her at Elmwood,
+      where she would have personally planned it, &ldquo;Fanny, that was a fine dinner
+      you gave us.&rdquo; Of course, this was in a tender burlesque; but it remains
+      the supreme impression of what seemed to me a cloudlessly happy period for
+      Lowell. His wife was quite recovered of her long suffering, and was again
+      at the head of his house, sharing in his pleasures, and enjoying his
+      successes for his sake; successes so great that people spoke of him
+      seriously, as &ldquo;an addition to society&rdquo; in London, where one man more or
+      less seemed like a drop in the sea. She was a woman perfectly of the New
+      England type and tradition: almost repellantly shy at first, and almost
+      glacially cold with new acquaintance, but afterwards very sweet and
+      cordial. She was of a dark beauty with a regular face of the Spanish
+      outline; Lowell was of an ideal manner towards her, and of an admiration
+      which delicately travestied itself and which she knew how to receive with
+      smiling irony. After her death, which occurred while he was still in
+      England, he never spoke of her to me, though before that he used to be
+      always bringing her name in, with a young lover-like fondness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0075" id="link2H_4_0075">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      In the hurry of the London season I did not see so much of Lowell on our
+      second sojourn as on our first, but once when we were alone in his study
+      there was a return to the terms of the old meetings in Cambridge. He
+      smoked his pipe, and sat by his fire and philosophized; and but for the
+      great London sea swirling outside and bursting through our shelter, and
+      dashing him with notes that must be instantly answered, it was a very fair
+      image of the past. He wanted to tell me about his coachman whom he had got
+      at on his human side with great liking and amusement, and there was a
+      patient gentleness in his manner with the footman who had to keep coming
+      in upon him with those notes which was like the echo of his young faith in
+      the equality of men. But he always distinguished between the simple
+      unconscious equality of the ordinary American and its assumption by a
+      foreigner. He said he did not mind such an American&rsquo;s coming into his
+      house with his hat on; but if a German or Englishman did it, he wanted to
+      knock it off. He was apt to be rather punctilious in his shows of
+      deference towards others, and at one time he practised removing his own
+      hat when he went into shops in Cambridge. It must have mystified the
+      Cambridge salesmen, and I doubt if he kept it up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With reference to the doctrine of his young poetry, the fierce and the
+      tender humanity of his storm and stress period, I fancy a kind of baffle
+      in Lowell, which I should not perhaps find it easy to prove. I never knew
+      him by word or hint to renounce this doctrine, but he could not come to
+      seventy years without having seen many high hopes fade, and known many
+      inspired prophecies fail. When we have done our best to make the world
+      over, we are apt to be dismayed by finding it in much the old shape. As he
+      said of the moral government of the universe, the scale is so vast, and a
+      little difference, a little change for the better, is scarcely perceptible
+      to the eager consciousness of the wholesale reformer. But with whatever
+      sense of disappointment, of doubt as to his own deeds for truer freedom
+      and for better conditions I believe his sympathy was still with those who
+      had some heart for hoping and striving. I am sure that though he did not
+      agree with me in some of my own later notions for the redemption of the
+      race, he did not like me the less but rather the more because (to my own
+      great surprise I confess) I had now and then the courage of my
+      convictions, both literary and social.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was probably most at odds with me in regard to my theories of fiction,
+      though he persisted in declaring his pleasure in my own fiction. He was in
+      fact, by nature and tradition, thoroughly romantic, and he could not or
+      would not suffer realism in any but a friend. He steadfastly refused even
+      to read the Russian masters, to his immense loss, as I tried to persuade
+      him, and even among the modern Spaniards, for whom he might have had a
+      sort of personal kindness from his love of Cervantes, he chose one for his
+      praise the least worthy, of it, and bore me down with his heavier metal in
+      argument when I opposed to Alarcon&rsquo;s factitiousness the delightful
+      genuineness of Valdes. Ibsen, with all the Norwegians, he put far from
+      him; he would no more know them than the Russians; the French naturalists
+      he abhorred. I thought him all wrong, but you do not try improving your
+      elders when they have come to three score and ten years, and I would
+      rather have had his affection unbroken by our difference of opinion than a
+      perfect agreement. Where he even imagined that this difference could work
+      me harm, he was anxious to have me know that he meant me none; and he was
+      at the trouble to write me a letter when a Boston paper had perverted its
+      report of what he said in a public lecture to my disadvantage, and to
+      assure me that he had not me in mind. When once he had given his liking,
+      he could not bear that any shadow of change should seem to have come upon
+      him. He had a most beautiful and endearing ideal of friendship; he desired
+      to affirm it and to reaffirm it as often as occasion offered, and if
+      occasion did not offer, he made occasion. It did not matter what you said
+      or did that contraried him; if he thought he had essentially divined you,
+      you were still the same: and on his part he was by no means exacting of
+      equal demonstration, but seemed not even to wish it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0076" id="link2H_4_0076">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      After he was replaced at London by a minister more immediately
+      representative of the Democratic administration, he came home. He made a
+      brave show of not caring to have remained away, but in truth he had become
+      very fond of England, where he had made so many friends, and where the
+      distinction he had, in that comfortably padded environment, was so
+      agreeable to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would have been like him to have secretly hoped that the new President
+      might keep him in London, but he never betrayed any ignoble
+      disappointment, and he would not join in any blame of him. At our first
+      meeting after he came home he spoke of the movement which had made Mr.
+      Cleveland president, and said he supposed that if he had been here, he
+      should have been in it. All his friends were, he added, a little
+      helplessly; but he seemed not to dislike my saying I knew one of his
+      friends who was not: in fact, as I have told, he never disliked a plump
+      difference&mdash;unless he disliked the differer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For several years he went back to England every summer, and it was not
+      until he took up his abode at Elmwood again that he spent a whole year at
+      home. One winter he passed at his sister&rsquo;s home in Boston, but mostly he
+      lived with his daughter at Southborough. I have heard a story of his going
+      to Elmwood soon after his return in 1885, and sitting down in his old
+      study, where he declared with tears that the place was full of ghosts. But
+      four or five years later it was well for family reasons that he should
+      live there; and about the same time it happened that I had taken a house
+      for the summer in his neighborhood. He came to see me, and to assure me,
+      in all tacit forms of his sympathy in a sorrow for which there could be no
+      help; but it was not possible that the old intimate relations should be
+      resumed. The affection was there, as much on his side as on mine, I
+      believe; but he was now an old man and I was an elderly man, and we could
+      not, without insincerity, approach each other in the things that had drawn
+      us together in earlier and happier years. His course was run; my own, in
+      which he had taken such a generous pleasure, could scarcely move his jaded
+      interest. His life, so far as it remained to him, had renewed itself in
+      other air; the later friendships beyond seas sufficed him, and were
+      without the pang, without the effort that must attend the knitting up of
+      frayed ties here.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He could never have been anything but American, if he had tried, and he
+      certainly never tried; but he certainly did not return to the outward
+      simplicities of his life as I first knew it. There was no more
+      round-hat-and-sack-coat business for him; he wore a frock and a high hat,
+      and whatever else was rather like London than Cambridge; I do not know but
+      drab gaiters sometimes added to the effect of a gentleman of the old
+      school which he now produced upon the witness. Some fastidiousnesses
+      showed themselves in him, which were not so surprising. He complained of
+      the American lower class manner; the conductor and cabman would be kind to
+      you but they would not be respectful, and he could not see the fun of this
+      in the old way. Early in our acquaintance he rather stupified me by
+      saying, &ldquo;I like you because you don&rsquo;t put your hands on me,&rdquo; and I heard
+      of his consenting to some sort of reception in those last years, &ldquo;Yes, if
+      they won&rsquo;t shake hands.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ever since his visit to Rome in 1875 he had let his heavy mustache grow
+      long till it dropped below the corners of his beard, which was now almost
+      white; his face had lost the ruddy hue so characteristic of him. I fancy
+      he was then ailing with premonitions of the disorder which a few years
+      later proved mortal, but he still bore himself with sufficient vigor, and
+      he walked the distance between his house and mine, though once when I
+      missed his visit the family reported that after he came in he sat a long
+      time with scarcely a word, as if too weary to talk. That winter, I went
+      into Boston to live, and I saw him only at infrequent intervals, when I
+      could go out to Elmwood. At such times I found him sitting in the room
+      which was formerly the drawing-room, but which had been joined with his
+      study by taking away the partitions beside the heavy mass of the old
+      colonial chimney. He told me that when he was a newborn babe, the nurse
+      had carried him round this chimney, for luck, and now in front of the same
+      hearth, the white old man stretched himself in an easy-chair, with his
+      writing-pad on his knees and his books on the table at his elbow, and was
+      willing to be entreated not to rise. I remember the sun used to come in at
+      the eastern windows full pour, and bathe the air in its warmth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He always hailed me gayly, and if I found him with letters newly come from
+      England, as I sometimes did, he glowed and sparkled with fresh life. He
+      wanted to read passages from those letters, he wanted to talk about their
+      writers, and to make me feel their worth and charm as he did. He still
+      dreamed of going back to England the next summer, but that was not to be.
+      One day he received me not less gayly than usual, but with a certain
+      excitement, and began to tell me about an odd experience he had had, not
+      at all painful, but which had very much mystified him. He had since seen
+      the doctor, and the doctor had assured him that there was nothing alarming
+      in what had happened, and in recalling this assurance, he began to look at
+      the humorous aspects of the case, and to make some jokes about it. He
+      wished to talk of it, as men do of their maladies, and very fully, and I
+      gave him such proof of my interest as even inviting him to talk of it
+      would convey. In spite of the doctor&rsquo;s assurance, and his joyful
+      acceptance of it, I doubt if at the bottom of his heart there was not the
+      stir of an uneasy misgiving; but he had not for a long time shown himself
+      so cheerful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the beginning of the end. He recovered and relapsed, and recovered
+      again; but never for long. Late in the spring I came out, and he had me
+      stay to dinner, which was somehow as it used to be at two o&rsquo;clock; and
+      after dinner we went out on his lawn. He got a long-handled spud, and
+      tried to grub up some dandelions which he found in his turf, but after a
+      moment or two he threw it down, and put his hand upon his back with a
+      groan. I did not see him again till I came out to take leave of him before
+      going away for the summer, and then I found him sitting on the little
+      porch in a western corner of his house, with a volume of Scott closed upon
+      his finger. There were some other people, and our meeting was with the
+      constraint of their presence. It was natural in nothing so much as his
+      saying very significantly to me, as if he knew of my heresies concerning
+      Scott, and would have me know he did not approve of them, that there was
+      nothing he now found so much pleasure in as Scott&rsquo;s novels. Another
+      friend, equally heretical, was by, but neither of us attempted to gainsay
+      him. Lowell talked very little, but he told of having been a walk to
+      Beaver Brook, and of having wished to jump from one stone to another in
+      the stream, and of having had to give it up. He said, without completing
+      the sentence, If it had come to that with him! Then he fell silent again;
+      and with some vain talk of seeing him when I came back in the fall, I went
+      away sick at heart. I was not to see him again, and I shall not look upon
+      his like.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am aware that I have here shown him from this point and from that in a
+      series of sketches which perhaps collectively impart, but do not assemble
+      his personality in one impression. He did not, indeed, make one impression
+      upon me, but a thousand impressions, which I should seek in vain to embody
+      in a single presentment. What I have cloudily before me is the vision of a
+      very lofty and simple soul, perplexed, and as it were surprised and even
+      dismayed at the complexity of the effects from motives so single in it,
+      but escaping always to a clear expression of what was noblest and
+      loveliest in itself at the supreme moments, in the divine exigencies. I
+      believe neither in heroes nor in saints; but I believe in great and good
+      men, for I have known them, and among such men Lowell was of the richest
+      nature I have known. His nature was not always serene or pellucid; it was
+      sometimes roiled by the currents that counter and cross in all of us; but
+      it was without the least alloy of insincerity, and it was never darkened
+      by the shadow of a selfish fear. His genius was an instrument that
+      responded in affluent harmony to the power that made him a humorist and
+      that made him a poet, and appointed him rarely to be quite either alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0077" id="link2H_4_0077">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0078" id="link2H_4_0078">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is well known how great was Professor Child&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;Professor Child, all that I have become, sir, I owe to
+      your influence in my college career.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;Il Pesceballo&rdquo; (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, &ldquo;Scendiamo fra il popolo!&rdquo; (Let us go down among the people.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0079" id="link2H_4_0079">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s two o&rsquo;clock
+      dinner, and when we came to coffee in the study, Boyesen took from the
+      pocket nearest his heart a chapter of &lsquo;Gunnar&rsquo;, and read it to us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &lsquo;stev&rsquo; 
+      together, for I associate with that far happy time the rich mellow tones
+      of the poet&rsquo;s voice in the poet&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our meeting was on a lovely afternoon of summer, and the odor of the
+      professor&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &lsquo;The Mammon of Unrighteousness&rsquo;. 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 &lsquo;The Mammon of Unrighteousness&rsquo; 
+      embodied the thought of his manhood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0080" id="link2H_4_0080">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After Gunnar he was a long while in striking another note so true. He did
+      not strike it again till he wrote &lsquo;The Mammon of Unrighteousness&rsquo;, 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&rsquo;s achievements we must
+      never forget that he was born strange to our language and to our life. In
+      &lsquo;Gunnar&rsquo; he handled the one with grace and charm; in his great novel he
+      handled both with masterly strength. I call &lsquo;The Mammon of
+      Unrighteousness&rsquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;toil terribly,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Boyesen&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &lsquo;dolce lome&rsquo;, 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0081" id="link2H_4_0081">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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 &lsquo;Society the Redeemed Form of Man.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;simmering in their own fat and
+      putting a nice brown on each other.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s plate: he
+      disliked fat. James said that he considered the request, and seeing no
+      good reason against it, consented.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;He spasmed to the fellow across the room, and introduced him.&rdquo;
+       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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0082" id="link2H_4_0082">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;He is always an Europaen,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s study, and wept like an
+      &lsquo;Europaer&rsquo;, and lamented, &ldquo;I shall never finish my work!&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;You know
+      I have always held such and such an opinion about a certain group of
+      fossil fishes?&rdquo; &ldquo;Yes, yes!&rdquo; &ldquo;Well, I have just been reading&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&lsquo;s
+      new book, and he has shown me that there isn&rsquo;t the least truth in my
+      theory&rdquo;; and he burst into a laugh of unalloyed pleasure in relinquishing
+      his error.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;Society upon the
+      Stanislow.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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
+      &ldquo;Brahminical caste,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0083" id="link2H_4_0083">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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 &lsquo;Two Years Before the Mast.&rsquo; 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 &lsquo;Two Years Before the
+      Mast,&rsquo; 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&rsquo;s master
+      wished naturally to be in the fur-carrying trade, and in one of Dana&rsquo;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, &ldquo;What cargo?&rdquo; and the captain so
+      challenged yields to temptation and roars back &ldquo;Furs!&rdquo; A moment of
+      hesitation elapses, and then the questioner pursues, &ldquo;Here and there a
+      horn?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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. &ldquo;What cargo?&rdquo; The trader confesses to a mixed cargo for Boston,
+      and to the final question, her master replies in meek apology, &ldquo;Only from
+      Liverpool, sir!&rdquo; and scuttles down the horizon as swiftly as possible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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 &lsquo;Espiritu
+      Santo&rsquo; by the youngest daughter of the Dana I knew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0084" id="link2H_4_0084">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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 &lsquo;Two Years Before the Mast.&rsquo; Ralph Keeler wrote the &lsquo;Vagabond
+      Adventures&rsquo; 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, &ldquo;a cruel
+      uncle&rsquo;s ward&rdquo; in his early orphan-hood, and while yet almost a child he
+      had run away from home, to fulfil his heart&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t go, Keeler,&rdquo; I entreated him, when he came to tell me of his
+      intention. &ldquo;They&rsquo;ll garrote you down there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;that&rsquo;s what
+      Aldrich says, and he&rsquo;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, &lsquo;If
+      I had taken the advice of my friend T. B. Aldrich, author of &lsquo;Marjorie Daw
+      and Other People,&rsquo; I should not now be in this place.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;the Almighty was not going to scoop any of us.&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;Why do you use bias for
+      opinion?&rdquo; I demanded, in going over a proof with him. &ldquo;Oh, because I&rsquo;m
+      such an ass&mdash;such a bi-ass.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had a philosophy which he liked to impress with a vivid touch on his
+      listener&rsquo;s shoulder: &ldquo;Put your finger on the present moment and enjoy it.
+      It&rsquo;s the only one you&rsquo;ve got, or ever will have.&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0085" id="link2H_4_0085">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;The Old
+      Sergeant&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s
+      father appeared to him, and stood before him. Willson was accustomed to
+      apparitions, and so he said simply, &ldquo;Won&rsquo;t you sit down, father?&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; he
+      said, &ldquo;I forgot that I was not substance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not know whether &ldquo;The Old Sergeant&rdquo; is ever read now; it has probably
+      passed with other great memories of the great war; and I am afraid none of
+      Willson&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0086" id="link2H_4_0086">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IX.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;Well, one thing, Mr. Howells, Cambridge never let a man
+      keep a cold yet!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &lsquo;genius loci&rsquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;But you know,&rdquo; he
+      would explain, &ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t a house of my own to ask you to, and I should
+      like to give you the supper here.&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;Well, then, I will send up a few oysters
+      to-morrow,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0087" id="link2H_4_0087">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      X.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s
+      insistence, though at first he would have nothing to do with him, and
+      refused even to answer his letters. &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; the doctor said, &ldquo;I was
+      not going to stand that from my mother&rsquo;s son, and I simply kept on
+      writing.&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;I
+      can&rsquo;t vote,&rdquo; he declared, &ldquo;but my coachman can, and I don&rsquo;t know how I&rsquo;m
+      to get the suffrage, unless my physician paints me all over with the
+      iodine he&rsquo;s using for my rheumatic side.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s table, where he lifted up his voice in
+      the Yankee folk-song, &ldquo;On Springfield Mountain there did dwell,&rdquo; which he
+      gave with a perfectly killing mock-gravity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0088" id="link2H_4_0088">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&rsquo;s, and so our society is in a state of tolerant and
+      tremulous misgiving.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0089" id="link2H_4_0089">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      A BELATED GUEST
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It is doubtful whether the survivor of any order of things finds
+      compensation in the privilege, however undisputed by his contemporaries,
+      of recording his memories of it. This is, in the first two or three
+      instances, a pleasure. It is sweet to sit down, in the shade or by the
+      fire, and recall names, looks, and tones from the past; and if the
+      Absences thus entreated to become Presences are those of famous people,
+      they lend to the fond historian a little of their lustre, in which he
+      basks for the time with an agreeable sense of celebrity. But another time
+      comes, and comes very soon, when the pensive pleasure changes to the pain
+      of duty, and the precious privilege converts itself into a grievous
+      obligation. You are unable to choose your company among those immortal
+      shades; if one, why not another, where all seem to have a right to such
+      gleams of this &lsquo;dolce lome&rsquo; as your reminiscences can shed upon them? Then
+      they gather so rapidly, as the years pass, in these pale realms, that one,
+      if one continues to survive, is in danger of wearing out such welcome,
+      great or small, as met ones recollections in the first two or three
+      instances, if one does one&rsquo;s duty by each. People begin to say, and not
+      without reason, in a world so hurried and wearied as this: &ldquo;Ah, here he is
+      again with his recollections!&rdquo; Well, but if the recollections by some
+      magical good-fortune chance to concern such a contemporary of his as, say,
+      Bret Harte, shall not he be partially justified, or at least excused?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0090" id="link2H_4_0090">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      My recollections of Bret Harte begin with the arrest, on the Atlantic
+      shore, of that progress of his from the Pacific Slope, which, in the
+      simple days of 1871, was like the progress of a prince, in the universal
+      attention and interest which met and followed it. He was indeed a prince,
+      a fairy prince in whom every lover of his novel and enchanting art felt a
+      patriotic property, for his promise and performance in those earliest
+      tales of &lsquo;The Luck of Roaring Camp&rsquo;, and &lsquo;Tennessee&rsquo;s Partner&rsquo;, and
+      &lsquo;Maggles&rsquo;, and &lsquo;The Outcasts of Poker Flat&rsquo;, were the earnests of an
+      American literature to come. If it is still to come, in great measure,
+      that is not Harte&rsquo;s fault, for he kept on writing those stories, in one
+      form or another, as long as he lived. He wrote them first and last in the
+      spirit of Dickens, which no man of his time could quite help doing, but he
+      wrote them from the life of Bret Harte, on the soil and in the air of the
+      newest kind of new world, and their freshness took the soul of his
+      fellow-countrymen not only with joy, but with pride such as the Europeans,
+      who adored him much longer, could never know in him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the adventurous young editor who had proposed being his host for
+      Cambridge and the Boston neighborhood, while Harte was still in San
+      Francisco, and had not yet begun his princely progress eastward, read of
+      the honors that attended his coming from point to point, his courage fell,
+      as if he had perhaps, committed himself in too great an enterprise. Who
+      was he, indeed, that he should think of making this
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+        &ldquo;Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      his guest, especially when he heard that in Chicago Harte failed of
+      attending a banquet of honor because the givers of it had not sent a
+      carriage to fetch him to it, as the alleged use was in San Francisco?
+      Whether true or not, and it was probably not true in just that form, it
+      must have been this rumor which determined his host to drive into Boston
+      for him with the handsomest hack which the livery of Cambridge afforded,
+      and not trust to the horse-car and the local expressman to get him and his
+      baggage out, as he would have done with a less portentous guest. However
+      it was, he instantly lost all fear when they met at the station, and Harte
+      pressed forward with his cordial hand-clasp, as if he were not even a
+      fairy prince, and with that voice and laugh which were surely the most
+      winning in the world. He was then, as always, a child of extreme fashion
+      as to his clothes and the cut of his beard, which he wore in a mustache
+      and the drooping side-whiskers of the day, and his jovial physiognomy was
+      as winning as his voice, with its straight nose and fascinating thrust of
+      the under lip, its fine eyes, and good forehead, then thickly crowned with
+      the black hair which grew early white, while his mustache remained dark
+      the most enviable and consoling effect possible in the universal mortal
+      necessity of either aging or dying. He was, as one could not help seeing,
+      thickly pitted, but after the first glance one forgot this, so that a lady
+      who met him for the first time could say to him, &ldquo;Mr. Harte, aren&rsquo;t you
+      afraid to go about in the cars so recklessly when there is this scare
+      about smallpox?&rdquo; &ldquo;No, madam,&rdquo; he could answer in that rich note of his,
+      with an irony touched by pseudo-pathos, &ldquo;I bear a charmed life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The drive out from Boston was not too long for getting on terms of
+      personal friendship with the family which just filled the hack, the two
+      boys intensely interested in the novelties of a New England city and
+      suburb, and the father and mother continually exchanging admiration of
+      such aspects of nature as presented themselves in the leafless sidewalk
+      trees, and patches of park and lawn. They found everything so fine, so
+      refined, after the gigantic coarseness of California, where the natural
+      forms were so vast that one could not get on companionable terms with
+      them. Their host heard them without misgiving for the world of romance
+      which Harte had built up among those huge forms, and with a subtle
+      perception that this was no excursion of theirs to the East, but a
+      lifelong exodus from the exile which he presently understood they must
+      always have felt California to be. It is different now, when people are
+      every day being born in California, and must begin to feel it home from
+      the first breath, but it is notable that none of the Californians of that
+      great early day have gone back to live amid the scenes which inspired and
+      prospered them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before they came in sight of the editor&rsquo;s humble roof he had mocked
+      himself to his guest for his trepidations, and Harte with burlesque
+      magnanimity had consented to be for that occasion only something less
+      formidable than he had loomed afar. He accepted with joy the theory of
+      passing a week in the home of virtuous poverty, and the week began as
+      delightfully as it went on. From first to last Cambridge amused him as
+      much as it charmed him by that air of academic distinction which was
+      stranger to him even than the refined trees and grass. It has already been
+      told how, after a list of the local celebrities had been recited to him,
+      he said, &ldquo;why, you couldn&rsquo;t stand on your front porch and fire off your
+      revolver without bringing down a two volumer,&rdquo; and no doubt the pleasure
+      he had in it was the effect of its contrast with the wild California he
+      had known, and perhaps, when he had not altogether known it, had invented.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0091" id="link2H_4_0091">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Cambridge began very promptly to show him those hospitalities which he
+      could value, and continued the fable of his fairy princeliness in the
+      curiosity of those humbler admirers who could not hope to be his hosts or
+      his fellow-guests at dinner or luncheon. Pretty presences in the tie-backs
+      of the period were seen to flit before the home of virtuous poverty,
+      hungering for any chance sight of him which his outgoings or incomings
+      might give. The chances were better with the outgoings than with the
+      incomings, for these were apt to be so hurried, in the final result of his
+      constitutional delays, as to have the rapidity of the homing pigeon&rsquo;s
+      flight, and to afford hardly a glimpse to the quickest eye. It cannot harm
+      him, or any one now, to own that Harte was nearly always late for those
+      luncheons and dinners which he was always going out to, and it needed the
+      anxieties and energies of both families to get him into his clothes, and
+      then into the carriage where a good deal of final buttoning must have been
+      done, in order that he might not arrive so very late. He was the only one
+      concerned who was quite unconcerned; his patience with his delays was
+      inexhaustible; he arrived at the expected houses smiling, serenely jovial,
+      radiating a bland gaiety from his whole person, and ready to ignore any
+      discomfort he might have occasioned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, people were glad to have him on his own terms, and it may be
+      truly said that it was worth while to have him on any terms. There never
+      was a more charming companion, an easier or more delightful guest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not from what he said, for he was not much of a talker, and almost
+      nothing of a story-teller; but he could now and then drop the fittest
+      word, and with a glance or smile of friendly intelligence express the
+      appreciation of another&rsquo;s fit word which goes far to establish for a man
+      the character of boon humorist. It must be said of him that if he took the
+      honors easily that were paid him he took them modestly, and never by word
+      or look invited them, or implied that he expected them. It was fine to see
+      him humorously accepting the humorous attribution of scientific sympathies
+      from Agassiz, in compliment of his famous epic describing the incidents
+      that &ldquo;broke up the society upon the Stanislow.&rdquo; It was a little fearsome
+      to hear him frankly owning to Lowell his dislike for something
+      over-literary in the phrasing of certain verses of &lsquo;The Cathedral.&rsquo; But
+      Lowell could stand that sort of thing from a man who could say the sort of
+      things that Harte said to him of that delicious line picturing the
+      bobolink as he
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;Runs down a brook of laughter in the air.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      This, Harte told him, was the line he liked best of all his lines, and
+      Lowell smoked well content with the praise. Yet they were not men to get
+      on easily together, Lowell having limitations in directions where Harte
+      had none. Afterward in London they did not meet often or willingly. Lowell
+      owned the brilliancy and uncommonness of Harte&rsquo;s gift, while he
+      sumptuously surfeited his passion of finding everybody more or less a Jew
+      by finding that Harte was at least half a Jew on his father&rsquo;s side; he had
+      long contended for the Hebraicism of his name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With all his appreciation of the literary eminences whom Fields used to
+      class together as &ldquo;the old saints,&rdquo; Harte had a spice of irreverence that
+      enabled him to take them more ironically than they might have liked, and
+      to see the fun of a minor literary man&rsquo;s relation to them. Emerson&rsquo;s
+      smoking amused him, as a Jovian self-indulgence divinely out of character
+      with so supreme a god, and he shamelessly burlesqued it, telling how
+      Emerson at Concord had proposed having a &ldquo;wet night&rdquo; with him over a glass
+      of sherry, and had urged the scant wine upon his young friend with a
+      hospitable gesture of his cigar. But this was long after the Cambridge
+      episode, in which Longfellow alone escaped the corrosive touch of his
+      subtle irreverence, or, more strictly speaking, had only the effect of his
+      reverence. That gentle and exquisitely modest dignity, of Longfellow&rsquo;s he
+      honored with as much veneration as it was in him to bestow, and he had
+      that sense of Longfellow&rsquo;s beautiful and perfected art which is almost a
+      test of a critic&rsquo;s own fineness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0092" id="link2H_4_0092">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      As for Harte&rsquo;s talk, it was mostly ironical, not to the extreme of satire,
+      but tempered to an agreeable coolness even for the things he admired. He
+      did not apparently care to hear himself praised, but he could very
+      accurately and perfectly mark his discernment of excellence in others. He
+      was at times a keen observer of nature and again not, apparently.
+      Something was said before him and Lowell of the beauty of his description
+      of a rabbit, startled with fear among the ferns, and lifting its head with
+      the pulsation of its frightened heart visibly shaking it; then the talk
+      turned on the graphic homeliness of Dante&rsquo;s noticing how the dog&rsquo;s skin
+      moves upon it, and Harte spoke of the exquisite shudder with which a horse
+      tries to rid itself of a fly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But once again, when an azalea was shown to him as the sort of bush that
+      Sandy drunkenly slept under in &lsquo;The Idyl of Iced Gulch&rsquo;, he asked, &ldquo;Why,
+      is that an azalea?&rdquo; To be sure, this might have been less from his
+      ignorance or indifference concerning the quality of the bush he had sent
+      Sandy to sleep under than from his willingness to make a mock of an azalea
+      in a very small pot, so disproportionate to uses which an azalea of
+      Californian size could easily lend itself to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You never could be sure of Harte; he could only by chance be caught in
+      earnest about anything or anybody. Except for those slight recognitions of
+      literary, traits in his talk with Lowell, nothing remained from his
+      conversation but the general criticism he passed upon his brilliant
+      fellow-Hebrew Heine, as &ldquo;rather scorbutic.&rdquo; He preferred to talk about the
+      little matters of common incident and experience. He amused himself with
+      such things as the mystification of the postman of whom he asked his way
+      to Phillips Avenue, where he adventurously supposed his host to be living.
+      &ldquo;Why,&rdquo; the postman said, &ldquo;there is no Phillips Avenue in Cambridge.
+      There&rsquo;s Phillips Place.&rdquo; &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; Harte assented, &ldquo;Phillips Place will do;
+      but there is a Phillips Avenue.&rdquo; He entered eagerly into the canvass of
+      the distinctions and celebrities asked to meet him at the reception made
+      for him, but he had even a greater pleasure in compassionating his host
+      for the vast disparity between the caterer&rsquo;s china and plated ware and the
+      simplicities and humilities of the home of virtuous poverty; and he
+      spluttered with delight at the sight of the lofty &lsquo;epergnes&rsquo; set up and
+      down the supper-table when he was brought in to note the preparations made
+      in his honor. Those monumental structures were an inexhaustible joy to
+      him; he walked round and round the room, and viewed them in different
+      perspectives, so as to get the full effect of the towering forms that
+      dwarfed it so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a tease, as many a sweet and fine wit is apt to be, but his teasing
+      was of the quality of a caress, so much kindness went with it. He lamented
+      as an irreparable loss his having missed seeing that night an
+      absent-minded brother in literature, who came in rubber shoes, and
+      forgetfully wore them throughout the evening. That hospitable soul of
+      Ralph Keeler, who had known him in California, but had trembled for their
+      acquaintance when he read of all the honors that might well have spoiled
+      Harte for the friends of his simpler days, rejoiced in the unchanged
+      cordiality of his nature when they met, and presently gave him one of
+      those restaurant lunches in Boston, which he was always sumptuously
+      providing out of his destitution. Harte was the life of a time which was
+      perhaps less a feast of reason than a flow of soul. The truth is, there
+      was nothing but careless stories carelessly told, and jokes and laughing,
+      and a great deal of mere laughing without the jokes, the whole as unlike
+      the ideal of a literary symposium as well might be; but there was present
+      one who met with that pleasant Boston company for the first time, and to
+      whom Harte attributed a superstition of Boston seriousness not realized
+      then and there. &ldquo;Look at him,&rdquo; he said, from time to time. &ldquo;This is the
+      dream of his life,&rdquo; and then shouted and choked with fun at the difference
+      between the occasion and the expectation he would have imagined in his
+      commensal&rsquo;s mind. At a dinner long after in London, where several of the
+      commensals of that time met again, with other literary friends of a like
+      age and stature, Harte laid his arms well along their shoulders as they
+      formed in a half-circle before him, and screamed out in mocking mirth at
+      the bulbous favor to which the slim shapes of the earlier date had come.
+      The sight was not less a rapture to him that he was himself the prey of
+      the same practical joke from the passing years. The hair which the years
+      had wholly swept from some of those thoughtful brows, or left spindling
+      autumnal spears, &ldquo;or few or none,&rdquo; to &ldquo;shake against the cold,&rdquo; had
+      whitened to a wintry snow on his, while his mustache had kept its youthful
+      black. &ldquo;He looks,&rdquo; one of his friends said to another as they walked home
+      together, &ldquo;like a French marquis of the ancien regime.&rdquo; &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; the other
+      assented, thoughtfully, &ldquo;or like an American actor made up for the part.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The saying closely fitted the outward fact, but was of a subtle injustice
+      in its implication of anything histrionic in Harte&rsquo;s nature. Never was any
+      man less a &lsquo;poseur&rsquo;; he made simply and helplessly known what he was at
+      any and every moment, and he would join the witness very cheerfully in
+      enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself. In the
+      course of events, which were in his case so very human, it came about on a
+      subsequent visit of his to Boston that an impatient creditor decided to
+      right himself out of the proceeds of the lecture which was to be given,
+      and had the law corporeally present at the house of the friend where Harte
+      dined, and in the anteroom at the lecture-hall, and on the platform, where
+      the lecture was delivered with beautiful aplomb and untroubled charm. He
+      was indeed the only one privy to the law&rsquo;s presence who was not the least
+      affected by it, so that when his host of an earlier time ventured to
+      suggest, &ldquo;Well, Harte, this is the old literary tradition; this is the
+      Fleet business over again,&rdquo; he joyously smote his thigh and crowed out,
+      &ldquo;Yes, the Fleet!&rdquo; No doubt he tasted all the delicate humor of the
+      situation, and his pleasure in it was quite unaffected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If his temperament was not adapted to the harsh conditions of the elder
+      American world, it might very well be that his temperament was not
+      altogether in the wrong. If it disabled him for certain experiences of
+      life, it was the source of what was most delightful in his personality,
+      and perhaps most beautiful in his talent. It enabled him to do such things
+      as he did without being at all anguished for the things he did not do, and
+      indeed could not. His talent was not a facile gift; he owned that he often
+      went day after day to his desk, and sat down before that yellow
+      post-office paper on which he liked to write his literature, in that
+      exquisitely refined script of his, without being able to inscribe a line.
+      It may be owned for him that though he came to the East at thirty-four,
+      which ought to have been the very prime of his powers, he seemed to have
+      arrived after the age of observation was past for him. He saw nothing
+      aright, either in Newport, where he went to live, or in New York, where he
+      sojourned, or on those lecturing tours which took him about the whole
+      country; or if he saw it aright, he could not report it aright, or would
+      not. After repeated and almost invariable failures to deal with the novel
+      characters and circumstances which he encountered he left off trying, and
+      frankly went back to the semi-mythical California he had half discovered,
+      half created, and wrote Bret Harte over and over as long as he lived.
+      This, whether he did it from instinct or from reason, was the best thing
+      he could do, and it went as nearly as might be to satisfy the insatiable
+      English fancy for the wild America no longer to be found on our map.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is imaginable of Harte that this temperament defended him from any
+      bitterness in the disappointment he may have shared with that simple
+      American public which in the early eighteen-seventies expected any and
+      everything of him in fiction and drama. The long breath was not his; he
+      could not write a novel, though he produced the like of one or two, and
+      his plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it. At any
+      rate, they could not keep it, even when they got it, and they denoted the
+      fatigue or the indifference of their author in being dramatizations of his
+      longer or shorter fictions, and not originally dramatic efforts. The
+      direction in which his originality lasted longest, and most strikingly
+      affirmed his power, was in the direction of his verse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whatever minds there may be about Harte&rsquo;s fiction finally, there can
+      hardly be more than one mind about his poetry. He was indeed a poet;
+      whether he wrote what drolly called itself &ldquo;dialect,&rdquo; or wrote language,
+      he was a poet of a fine and fresh touch. It must be allowed him that in
+      prose as well he had the inventive gift, but he had it in verse far more
+      importantly. There are lines, phrases, turns in his poems,
+      characterizations, and pictures which will remain as enduringly as
+      anything American, if that is not saying altogether too little for them.
+      In poetry he rose to all the occasions he made for himself, though he
+      could not rise to the occasions made for him, and so far failed in the
+      demands he acceded to for a Phi Beta Kappa poem, as to come to that august
+      Harvard occasion with a jingle so trivial, so out of keeping, so
+      inadequate that his enemies, if he ever truly had any, must have suffered
+      from it almost as much as his friends. He himself did not suffer from his
+      failure, from having read before the most elect assembly of the country a
+      poem which would hardly have served the careless needs of an informal
+      dinner after the speaking had begun; he took the whole disastrous business
+      lightly, gayly, leniently, kindly, as that golden temperament of his
+      enabled him to take all the good or bad of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first year of his Eastern sojourn was salaried in a sum which took the
+      souls of all his young contemporaries with wonder, if no baser passion, in
+      the days when dollars were of so much farther flight than now, but its net
+      result in a literary return to his publishers was one story and two or
+      three poems. They had not profited much by his book, which, it will
+      doubtless amaze a time of fifty thousand editions selling before their
+      publication, to learn had sold only thirty-five hundred in the sixth month
+      of its career, as Harte himself,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;With sick and scornful looks averse,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      confided to his Cambridge host after his first interview with the Boston
+      counting-room. It was the volume which contained &ldquo;The Luck of Roaring
+      Camp,&rdquo; and the other early tales which made him a continental, and then an
+      all but a world-wide fame. Stories that had been talked over, and laughed
+      over, and cried over all up and down the land, that had been received with
+      acclaim by criticism almost as boisterous as their popularity, and
+      recognized as the promise of greater things than any done before in their
+      kind, came to no more than this pitiful figure over the booksellers&rsquo; 
+      counters. It argued much for the publishers that in spite of this
+      stupefying result they were willing, they were eager, to pay him ten
+      thousand dollars for whatever, however much or little, he chose to write
+      in a year: Their offer was made in Boston, after some offers mortifyingly
+      mean, and others insultingly vague, had been made in New York.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not his fault that their venture proved of such slight return in
+      literary material. Harte was in the midst of new and alien conditions,&mdash;[See
+      a corollary in M. Froude who visited the U.S. for a few months and then
+      published a comprehensive analysis of the nation and its people. Twain&rsquo;s
+      rebuttal (Mr. Froude&rsquo;s Progress) would have been &lsquo;a propos&rsquo; for Harte in
+      Cambridge. D.W.]&mdash;and he had always his temperament against him, as
+      well as the reluctant if not the niggard nature of his muse. He would no
+      doubt have been only too glad to do more than he did for the money, but
+      actually if not literally he could not do more. When it came to
+      literature, all the gay improvidence of life forsook him, and he became a
+      stern, rigorous, exacting self-master, who spared himself nothing to
+      achieve the perfection at which he aimed. He was of the order of literary
+      men like Goldsmith and De Quincey, and Sterne and Steele, in his relations
+      with the outer world, but in his relations with the inner world he was one
+      of the most duteous and exemplary citizens. There was nothing of his
+      easy-going hilarity in that world; there he was of a Puritanic severity,
+      and of a conscience that forgave him no pang. Other California writers
+      have testified to the fidelity with which he did his work as editor. He
+      made himself not merely the arbiter but the inspiration of his
+      contributors, and in a region where literature had hardly yet replaced the
+      wild sage-brush of frontier journalism, he made the sand-lots of San
+      Francisco to blossom as the rose, and created a literary periodical of the
+      first class on the borders of civilization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is useless to wonder now what would have been his future if the
+      publisher of the Overland Monthly had been of imagination or capital
+      enough to meet the demand which Harte dimly intimated to his Cambridge
+      host as the condition of his remaining in California. Publishers, men with
+      sufficient capital, are of a greatly varying gift in the regions of
+      prophecy, and he of the Overland Monthly was not to be blamed if he could
+      not foresee his account in paying Harte ten thousand a year to continue
+      editing the magazine. He did according to his lights, and Harte came to
+      the East, and then went to England, where his last twenty-five years were
+      passed in cultivating the wild plant of his Pacific Slope discovery. It
+      was always the same plant, leaf and flower and fruit, but it perennially
+      pleased the constant English world, and thence the European world, though
+      it presently failed of much delighting these fastidious States. Probably
+      he would have done something else if he could; he did not keep on doing
+      the wild mining-camp thing because it was the easiest, but because it was
+      for him the only possible thing. Very likely he might have preferred not
+      doing anything.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0093" id="link2H_4_0093">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The joyous visit of a week, which has been here so poorly recovered from
+      the past, came to an end, and the host went with his guest to the station
+      in as much vehicular magnificence as had marked his going to meet him
+      there. Harte was no longer the alarming portent of the earlier time, but
+      an experience of unalloyed delight. You must love a person whose worst
+      trouble-giving was made somehow a favor by his own unconsciousness of the
+      trouble, and it was a most flattering triumph to have got him in time, or
+      only a little late, to so many luncheons and dinners. If only now he could
+      be got to the train in time the victory would be complete, the happiness
+      of the visit without a flaw. Success seemed to crown the fondest hope in
+      this respect. The train had not yet left the station; there stood the
+      parlor-car which Harte had seats in; and he was followed aboard for those
+      last words in which people try to linger out pleasures they have known
+      together. In this case the sweetest of the pleasures had been sitting up
+      late after those dinners, and talking them over, and then degenerating
+      from that talk into the mere giggle and making giggle which Charles Lamb
+      found the best thing in life. It had come to this as the host and guest
+      sat together for those parting moments, when Harte suddenly started up in
+      the discovery of having forgotten to get some cigars. They rushed out of
+      the train together, and after a wild descent upon the cigar-counter of the
+      restaurant, Harte rushed back to his car. But by this time the train was
+      already moving with that deceitful slowness of the departing train, and
+      Harte had to clamber up the steps of the rearmost platform. His host
+      clambered after, to make sure that he was aboard, which done, he dropped
+      to the ground, while Harte drew out of the station, blandly smiling, and
+      waving his hand with a cigar in it, in picturesque farewell from the
+      platform.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then his host realized that he had dropped to the ground barely in time to
+      escape being crushed against the side of the archway that sharply
+      descended beside the steps of the train, and he went and sat down in that
+      handsomest hack, and was for a moment deathly sick at the danger that had
+      not realized itself to him in season. To be sure, he was able, long after,
+      to adapt the incident to the exigencies of fiction, and to have a
+      character, not otherwise to be conveniently disposed of, actually crushed
+      to death between a moving train and such an archway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides, he had then and always afterward, the immense super-compensation
+      of the memories of that visit from one of the most charming personalities
+      in the world,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;In life&rsquo;s morning march when his bosom was young,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      and when infinitely less would have sated him. Now death has come to join
+      its vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life, and that blithe
+      spirit is elsewhere. But nothing can take from him who remains the
+      witchery of that most winning presence. Still it looks smiling from the
+      platform of the car, and casts a farewell of mock heartbreak from it.
+      Still a gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years that are now
+      numbered, and out of somewhere the hearer&rsquo;s sense is rapt with the mellow
+      cordial of a voice that was like no other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      [This last paragraph reminds one again that, as with Holmes: a great poet
+      writes the best prose. D.W.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0094" id="link2H_4_0094">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      MY MARK TWAIN
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0095" id="link2H_4_0095">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was in the little office of James T. Fields, over the bookstore of
+      Ticknor &amp; Fields, at 124 Tremont Street, Boston, that I first met my
+      friend of now forty-four years, Samuel L. Clemens. Mr. Fields was then the
+      editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and I was his proud and glad assistant,
+      with a pretty free hand as to manuscripts, and an unmanacled command of
+      the book-notices at the end of the magazine. I wrote nearly all of them
+      myself, and in 1869 I had written rather a long notice of a book just
+      winning its way to universal favor. In this review I had intimated my
+      reservations concerning the &lsquo;Innocents Abroad&rsquo;, but I had the luck, if not
+      the sense, to recognize that it was such fun as we had not had before. I
+      forget just what I said in praise of it, and it does not matter; it is
+      enough that I praised it enough to satisfy the author. He now signified as
+      much, and he stamped his gratitude into my memory with a story wonderfully
+      allegorizing the situation, which the mock modesty of print forbids my
+      repeating here. Throughout my long acquaintance with him his graphic touch
+      was always allowing itself a freedom which I cannot bring my fainter
+      pencil to illustrate. He had the Southwestern, the Lincolnian, the
+      Elizabethan breadth of parlance, which I suppose one ought not to call
+      coarse without calling one&rsquo;s self prudish; and I was often hiding away in
+      discreet holes and corners the letters in which he had loosed his bold
+      fancy to stoop on rank suggestion; I could not bear to burn them, and I
+      could not, after the first reading, quite bear to look at them. I shall
+      best give my feeling on this point by saying that in it he was
+      Shakespearian, or if his ghost will not suffer me the word, then he was
+      Baconian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the time of our first meeting, which must have been well toward the
+      winter, Clemens (as I must call him instead of Mark Twain, which seemed
+      always somehow to mask him from my personal sense) was wearing a sealskin
+      coat, with the fur out, in the satisfaction of a caprice, or the love of
+      strong effect which he was apt to indulge through life. I do not know what
+      droll comment was in Fields&rsquo;s mind with respect to this garment, but
+      probably he felt that here was an original who was not to be brought to
+      any Bostonian book in the judgment of his vivid qualities. With his crest
+      of dense red hair, and the wide sweep of his flaming mustache, Clemens was
+      not discordantly clothed in that sealskin coat, which afterward, in spite
+      of his own warmth in it, sent the cold chills through me when I once
+      accompanied it down Broadway, and shared the immense publicity it won him.
+      He had always a relish for personal effect, which expressed itself in the
+      white suit of complete serge which he wore in his last years, and in the
+      Oxford gown which he put on for every possible occasion, and said he would
+      like to wear all the time. That was not vanity in him, but a keen feeling
+      for costume which the severity of our modern tailoring forbids men, though
+      it flatters women to every excess in it; yet he also enjoyed the shock,
+      the offence, the pang which it gave the sensibilities of others. Then
+      there were times he played these pranks for pure fun, and for the pleasure
+      of the witness. Once I remember seeing him come into his drawing-room at
+      Hartford in a pair of white cowskin slippers, with the hair out, and do a
+      crippled colored uncle to the joy of all beholders. Or, I must not say
+      all, for I remember also the dismay of Mrs. Clemens, and her low,
+      despairing cry of, &ldquo;Oh, Youth!&rdquo; That was her name for him among their
+      friends, and it fitted him as no other would, though I fancied with her it
+      was a shrinking from his baptismal Samuel, or the vernacular Sam of his
+      earlier companionships. He was a youth to the end of his days, the heart
+      of a boy with the head of a sage; the heart of a good boy, or a bad boy,
+      but always a wilful boy, and wilfulest to show himself out at every time
+      for just the boy he was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0096" id="link2H_4_0096">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      There is a gap in my recollections of Clemens, which I think is of a year
+      or two, for the next thing I remember of him is meeting him at a lunch in
+      Boston, given us by that genius of hospitality, the tragically destined
+      Ralph Keeler, author of one of the most unjustly forgotten books,
+      &lsquo;Vagabond Adventures&rsquo;, a true bit of picaresque autobiography. Keeler
+      never had any money, to the general knowledge, and he never borrowed, and
+      he could not have had credit at the restaurant where he invited us to
+      feast at his expense. There was T. B. Aldrich, there was J. T. Fields,
+      much the oldest of our company, who had just freed himself from the
+      trammels of the publishing business, and was feeling his freedom in every
+      word; there was Bret Harte, who had lately come East in his princely
+      progress from California; and there was Clemens. Nothing remains to me of
+      the happy time but a sense of idle and aimless and joyful talk-play,
+      beginning and ending nowhere, of eager laughter, of countless good stories
+      from Fields, of a heat-lightning shimmer of wit from Aldrich, of an
+      occasional concentration of our joint mockeries upon our host, who took it
+      gladly; and amid the discourse, so little improving, but so full of good
+      fellowship, Bret Harte&rsquo;s fleeting dramatization of Clemens&rsquo;s mental
+      attitude toward a symposium of Boston illuminates. &ldquo;Why, fellows,&rdquo; he
+      spluttered, &ldquo;this is the dream of Mark&rsquo;s life,&rdquo; and I remember the glance
+      from under Clemens&rsquo;s feathery eyebrows which betrayed his enjoyment of the
+      fun. We had beefsteak with mushrooms, which in recognition of their shape
+      Aldrich hailed as shoe-pegs, and to crown the feast we had an omelette
+      souse, which the waiter brought in as flat as a pancake, amid our shouts
+      of congratulations to poor Keeler, who took them with appreciative
+      submission. It was in every way what a Boston literary lunch ought not to
+      have been in the popular ideal which Harte attributed to Clemens.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our next meeting was at Hartford, or, rather, at Springfield, where
+      Clemens greeted us on the way to Hartford. Aldrich was going on to be his
+      guest, and I was going to be Charles Dudley Warner&rsquo;s, but Clemens had come
+      part way to welcome us both. In the good fellowship of that cordial
+      neighborhood we had two such days as the aging sun no longer shines on in
+      his round. There was constant running in and out of friendly houses where
+      the lively hosts and guests called one another by their Christian names or
+      nicknames, and no such vain ceremony as knocking or ringing at doors.
+      Clemens was then building the stately mansion in which he satisfied his
+      love of magnificence as if it had been another sealskin coat, and he was
+      at the crest of the prosperity which enabled him to humor every whim or
+      extravagance. The house was the design of that most original artist,
+      Edward Potter, who once, when hard pressed by incompetent curiosity for
+      the name of his style in a certain church, proposed that it should be
+      called the English violet order of architecture; and this house was so
+      absolutely suited to the owner&rsquo;s humor that I suppose there never was
+      another house like it; but its character must be for recognition farther
+      along in these reminiscences. The vividest impression which Clemens gave
+      us two ravenous young Boston authors was of the satisfying, the surfeiting
+      nature of subscription publication. An army of agents was overrunning the
+      country with the prospectuses of his books, and delivering them by the
+      scores of thousands in completed sale. Of the &lsquo;Innocents Abroad&rsquo; he said,
+      &ldquo;It sells right along just like the Bible,&rdquo; and &lsquo;Roughing It&rsquo; was swiftly
+      following, without perhaps ever quite overtaking it in popularity. But he
+      lectured Aldrich and me on the folly of that mode of publication in the
+      trade which we had thought it the highest success to achieve a chance in.
+      &ldquo;Anything but subscription publication is printing for private
+      circulation,&rdquo; he maintained, and he so won upon our greed and hope that on
+      the way back to Boston we planned the joint authorship of a volume adapted
+      to subscription publication. We got a very good name for it, as we
+      believed, in Memorable Murders, and we never got farther with it, but by
+      the time we reached Boston we were rolling in wealth so deep that we could
+      hardly walk home in the frugal fashion by which we still thought it best
+      to spare car fare; carriage fare we did not dream of even in that
+      opulence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0097" id="link2H_4_0097">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The visits to Hartford which had begun with this affluence continued
+      without actual increase of riches for me, but now I went alone, and in
+      Warner&rsquo;s European and Egyptian absences I formed the habit of going to
+      Clemens. By this time he was in his new house, where he used to give me a
+      royal chamber on the ground floor, and come in at night after I had gone
+      to bed to take off the burglar alarm so that the family should not be
+      roused if anybody tried to get in at my window. This would be after we had
+      sat up late, he smoking the last of his innumerable cigars, and soothing
+      his tense nerves with a mild hot Scotch, while we both talked and talked
+      and talked, of everything in the heavens and on the earth, and the waters
+      under the earth. After two days of this talk I would come away hollow,
+      realizing myself best in the image of one of those locust-shells which you
+      find sticking to the bark of trees at the end of summer. Once, after some
+      such bout of brains, we went down to New York together, and sat facing
+      each other in the Pullman smoker without passing a syllable till we had
+      occasion to say, &ldquo;Well, we&rsquo;re there.&rdquo; Then, with our installation in a now
+      vanished hotel (the old Brunswick, to be specific), the talk began again
+      with the inspiration of the novel environment, and went on and on. We
+      wished to be asleep, but we could not stop, and he lounged through the
+      rooms in the long nightgown which he always wore in preference to the
+      pajamas which he despised, and told the story of his life, the
+      inexhaustible, the fairy, the Arabian Nights story, which I could never
+      tire of even when it began to be told over again. Or at times he would
+      reason high&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       &ldquo;Of Providence, foreknowledge, will and fate,
+        Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      walking up and down, and halting now and then, with a fine toss and slant
+      of his shaggy head, as some bold thought or splendid joke struck him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was in those days a constant attendant at the church of his great
+      friend, the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, and at least tacitly far from the
+      entire negation he came to at last. I should say he had hardly yet
+      examined the grounds of his passive acceptance of his wife&rsquo;s belief, for
+      it was hers and not his, and he held it unscanned in the beautiful and
+      tender loyalty to her which was the most moving quality of his most
+      faithful soul. I make bold to speak of the love between them, because
+      without it I could not make him known to others as he was known to me. It
+      was a greater part of him than the love of most men for their wives, and
+      she merited all the worship he could give her, all the devotion, all the
+      implicit obedience, by her surpassing force and beauty of character. She
+      was in a way the loveliest person I have ever seen, the gentlest, the
+      kindest, without a touch of weakness; she united wonderful tact with
+      wonderful truth; and Clemens not only accepted her rule implicitly, but he
+      rejoiced, he gloried in it. I am not sure that he noticed all her goodness
+      in the actions that made it a heavenly vision to others, he so had the
+      habit of her goodness; but if there was any forlorn and helpless creature
+      in the room Mrs. Clemens was somehow promptly at his side or hers; she was
+      always seeking occasion of kindness to those in her household or out of
+      it; she loved to let her heart go beyond the reach of her hand, and
+      imagined the whole hard and suffering world with compassion for its
+      structural as well as incidental wrongs. I suppose she had her ladyhood
+      limitations, her female fears of etiquette and convention, but she did not
+      let them hamper the wild and splendid generosity with which Clemens
+      rebelled against the social stupidities and cruelties. She had been a
+      lifelong invalid when he met her, and he liked to tell the beautiful story
+      of their courtship to each new friend whom he found capable of feeling its
+      beauty or worthy of hearing it. Naturally, her father had hesitated to
+      give her into the keeping of the young strange Westerner, who had risen up
+      out of the unknown with his giant reputation of burlesque humorist, and
+      demanded guaranties, demanded proofs. &ldquo;He asked me,&rdquo; Clemens would say,
+      &ldquo;if I couldn&rsquo;t give him the names of people who knew me in California, and
+      when it was time to hear from them I heard from him. &lsquo;Well, Mr. Clemens,&rsquo; 
+      he said, &lsquo;nobody seems to have a very good word for you.&rsquo; I hadn&rsquo;t
+      referred him to people that I thought were going to whitewash me. I
+      thought it was all up with me, but I was disappointed. &lsquo;So I guess I shall
+      have to back you myself.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Whether this made him faithfuler to the trust put in him I cannot say, but
+      probably not; it was always in him to be faithful to any trust, and in
+      proportion as a trust of his own was betrayed he was ruthlessly and
+      implacably resentful. But I wish now to speak of the happiness of that
+      household in Hartford which responded so perfectly to the ideals of the
+      mother when the three daughters, so lovely and so gifted, were yet little
+      children. There had been a boy, and &ldquo;Yes, I killed him,&rdquo; Clemens once
+      said, with the unsparing self-blame in which he would wreak an unavailing
+      regret. He meant that he had taken the child out imprudently, and the
+      child had taken the cold which he died of, but it was by no means certain
+      this was through its father&rsquo;s imprudence. I never heard him speak of his
+      son except that once, but no doubt in his deep heart his loss was
+      irreparably present. He was a very tender father and delighted in the
+      minds of his children, but he was wise enough to leave their training
+      altogether to the wisdom of their mother. He left them to that in
+      everything, keeping for himself the pleasure of teaching them little
+      scenes of drama, learning languages with them, and leading them in
+      singing. They came to the table with their parents, and could have set him
+      an example in behavior when, in moments of intense excitement, he used to
+      leave his place and walk up and down the room, flying his napkin and
+      talking and talking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was after his first English sojourn that I used to visit him, and he
+      was then full of praise of everything English: the English personal
+      independence and public spirit, and hospitality, and truth. He liked to
+      tell stories in proof of their virtues, but he was not blind to the
+      defects of their virtues: their submissive acceptance of caste, their
+      callousness with strangers; their bluntness with one another. Mrs. Clemens
+      had been in a way to suffer socially more than he, and she praised the
+      English less. She had sat after dinner with ladies who snubbed and ignored
+      one another, and left her to find her own amusement in the absence of the
+      attention with which Americans perhaps cloy their guests, but which she
+      could not help preferring. In their successive sojourns among them I
+      believe he came to like the English less and she more; the fine delight of
+      his first acceptance among them did not renew itself till his Oxford
+      degree was given him; then it made his cup run over, and he was glad the
+      whole world should see it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His wife would not chill the ardor of his early Anglomania, and in this,
+      as in everything, she wished to humor him to the utmost. No one could have
+      realized more than she his essential fineness, his innate nobleness.
+      Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know them to be, but
+      from the outside I should say that this marriage was one of the most
+      perfect. It lasted in his absolute devotion to the day of her death, that
+      delayed long in cruel suffering, and that left one side of him in lasting
+      night. From Florence there came to me heartbreaking letters from him about
+      the torture she was undergoing, and at last a letter saying she was dead,
+      with the simple-hearted cry, &ldquo;I wish I was with Livy.&rdquo; I do not know why I
+      have left saying till now that she was a very beautiful woman, classically
+      regular in features, with black hair smooth over her forehead, and with
+      tenderly peering, myopia eyes, always behind glasses, and a smile of
+      angelic kindness. But this kindness went with a sense of humor which
+      qualified her to appreciate the self-lawed genius of a man who will be
+      remembered with the great humorists of all time, with Cervantes, with
+      Swift, or with any others worthy his company; none of them was his equal
+      in humanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0098" id="link2H_4_0098">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Clemens had appointed himself, with the architect&rsquo;s connivance, a
+      luxurious study over the library in his new house, but as his children
+      grew older this study, with its carved and cushioned arm-chairs, was given
+      over to them for a school-room, and he took the room above his stable,
+      which had been intended for his coachman. There we used to talk together,
+      when we were not walking and talking together, until he discovered that he
+      could make a more commodious use of the billiard-room at the top of his
+      house, for the purposes of literature and friendship. It was pretty cold
+      up there in the early spring and late fall weather with which I chiefly
+      associate the place, but by lighting up all the gas-burners and kindling a
+      reluctant fire on the hearth we could keep it well above freezing. Clemens
+      could also push the balls about, and, without rivalry from me, who could
+      no more play billiards than smoke, could win endless games of pool, while
+      he carried points of argument against imaginable differers in opinion.
+      Here he wrote many of his tales and sketches, and for anything I know some
+      of his books. I particularly remember his reading me here his first rough
+      sketch of Captain Stormfield&rsquo;s Visit to Heaven, with the real name of the
+      captain, whom I knew already from his many stories about him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had a peculiar pleasure in looking off from the high windows on the
+      pretty Hartford landscape, and down from them into the tops of the trees
+      clothing the hillside by which his house stood. We agreed that there was a
+      novel charm in trees seen from such a vantage, far surpassing that of the
+      farther scenery. He had not been a country boy for nothing; rather he had
+      been a country boy, or, still better, a village boy, for everything that
+      Nature can offer the young of our species, and no aspect of her was lost
+      on him. We were natives of the same vast Mississippi Valley; and Missouri
+      was not so far from Ohio but that we were akin in our first knowledges of
+      woods and fields as we were in our early parlance. I had outgrown the use
+      of mine through my greater bookishness, but I gladly recognized the
+      phrases which he employed for their lasting juiciness and the
+      long-remembered savor they had on his mental palate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have elsewhere sufficiently spoken of his unsophisticated use of words,
+      of the diction which forms the backbone of his manly style. If I mention
+      my own greater bookishness, by which I mean his less quantitative reading,
+      it is to give myself better occasion to note that he was always reading
+      some vital book. It might be some out-of-the-way book, but it had the root
+      of the human matter in it: a volume of great trials; one of the supreme
+      autobiographies; a signal passage of history, a narrative of travel, a
+      story of captivity, which gave him life at first-hand. As I remember, he
+      did not care much for fiction, and in that sort he had certain distinct
+      loathings; there were certain authors whose names he seemed not so much to
+      pronounce as to spew out of his mouth. Goldsmith was one of these, but his
+      prime abhorrence was my dear and honored prime favorite, Jane Austen. He
+      once said to me, I suppose after he had been reading some of my unsparing
+      praises of her&mdash;I am always praising her, &ldquo;You seem to think that
+      woman could write,&rdquo; and he forbore withering me with his scorn, apparently
+      because we had been friends so long, and he more pitied than hated me for
+      my bad taste. He seemed not to have any preferences among novelists; or at
+      least I never heard him express any. He used to read the modern novels I
+      praised, in or out of print; but I do not think he much liked reading
+      fiction. As for plays, he detested the theatre, and said he would as lief
+      do a sum as follow a plot on the stage. He could not, or did not, give any
+      reasons for his literary abhorrences, and perhaps he really had none. But
+      he could have said very distinctly, if he had needed, why he liked the
+      books he did. I was away at the time of his great Browning passion, and I
+      know of it chiefly from hearsay; but at the time Tolstoy was doing what
+      could be done to make me over Clemens wrote, &ldquo;That man seems to have been
+      to you what Browning was to me.&rdquo; I do not know that he had other favorites
+      among the poets, but he had favorite poems which he liked to read to you,
+      and he read, of course, splendidly. I have forgotten what piece of John
+      Hay&rsquo;s it was that he liked so much, but I remembered how he fiercely
+      revelled in the vengefulness of William Morris&rsquo;s &lsquo;Sir Guy of the Dolorous
+      Blast,&rsquo; and how he especially exalted in the lines which tell of the
+      supposed speaker&rsquo;s joy in slaying the murderer of his brother:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       &ldquo;I am threescore years and ten,
+        And my hair is &lsquo;nigh turned gray,
+        But I am glad to think of the moment when
+        I took his life away.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Generally, I fancy his pleasure in poetry was not great, and I do not
+      believe he cared much for the conventionally accepted masterpieces of
+      literature. He liked to find out good things and great things for himself;
+      sometimes he would discover these in a masterpiece new to him alone, and
+      then, if you brought his ignorance home to him, he enjoyed it, and enjoyed
+      it the more the more you rubbed it in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of all the literary men I have known he was the most unliterary in his
+      make and manner. I do not know whether he had any acquaintance with Latin,
+      but I believe not the least; German he knew pretty well, and Italian
+      enough late in life to have fun with it; but he used English in all its
+      alien derivations as if it were native to his own air, as if it had come
+      up out of American, out of Missourian ground. His style was what we know,
+      for good and for bad, but his manner, if I may difference the two, was as
+      entirely his own as if no one had ever written before. I have noted before
+      this how he was not enslaved to the consecutiveness in writing which the
+      rest of us try to keep chained to. That is, he wrote as he thought, and as
+      all men think, without sequence, without an eye to what went before or
+      should come after. If something beyond or beside what he was saying
+      occurred to him, he invited it into his page, and made it as much at home
+      there as the nature of it would suffer him. Then, when he was through with
+      the welcoming of this casual and unexpected guest, he would go back to the
+      company he was entertaining, and keep on with what he had been talking
+      about. He observed this manner in the construction of his sentences, and
+      the arrangement of his chapters, and the ordering or disordering of his
+      compilations.&mdash;[Nowhere is this characteristic better found than in
+      Twain&rsquo;s &lsquo;Autobiography,&rsquo; it was not a &ldquo;style&rdquo; it was unselfconscious
+      thought D.W.]&mdash;I helped him with a Library of Humor, which he once
+      edited, and when I had done my work according to tradition, with authors,
+      times, and topics carefully studied in due sequence, he tore it all apart,
+      and &ldquo;chucked&rdquo; the pieces in wherever the fancy, for them took him at the
+      moment. He was right: we were not making a text-book, but a book for the
+      pleasure rather than the instruction of the reader, and he did not see why
+      the principle on which he built his travels and reminiscences and tales
+      and novels should not apply to it; and I do not now see, either, though at
+      the time it confounded me. On minor points he was, beyond any author I
+      have known, without favorite phrases or pet words. He utterly despised the
+      avoidance of repetitions out of fear of tautology. If a word served his
+      turn better than a substitute, he would use it as many times in a page as
+      he chose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0099" id="link2H_4_0099">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      At that time I had become editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and I had
+      allegiances belonging to the conduct of what was and still remains the
+      most scrupulously cultivated of our periodicals. When Clemens began to
+      write for it he came willingly under its rules, for with all his
+      wilfulness there never was a more biddable man in things you could show
+      him a reason for. He never made the least of that trouble which so abounds
+      for the hapless editor from narrower-minded contributors. If you wanted a
+      thing changed, very good, he changed it; if you suggested that a word or a
+      sentence or a paragraph had better be struck out, very good, he struck it
+      out. His proof-sheets came back each a veritable &ldquo;mush of concession,&rdquo; as
+      Emerson says. Now and then he would try a little stronger language than
+      &lsquo;The Atlantic&rsquo; had stomach for, and once when I sent him a proof I made
+      him observe that I had left out the profanity. He wrote back: &ldquo;Mrs.
+      Clemens opened that proof, and lit into the room with danger in her eye.
+      What profanity? You see, when I read the manuscript to her I skipped
+      that.&rdquo; It was part of his joke to pretend a violence in that gentlest
+      creature which the more amusingly realized the situation to their friends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was always very glad of him and proud of him as a contributor, but I
+      must not claim the whole merit, or the first merit of having him write for
+      us. It was the publisher, the late H. O. Houghton, who felt the
+      incongruity of his absence from the leading periodical of the country, and
+      was always urging me to get him to write. I will take the credit of being
+      eager for him, but it is to the publisher&rsquo;s credit that he tried, so far
+      as the modest traditions of &lsquo;The Atlantic&rsquo; would permit, to meet the
+      expectations in pay which the colossal profits of Clemens&rsquo;s books might
+      naturally have bred in him. Whether he was really able to do this he never
+      knew from Clemens himself, but probably twenty dollars a page did not
+      surfeit the author of books that &ldquo;sold right along just like the Bible.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We had several short contributions from Clemens first, all of capital
+      quality, and then we had the series of papers which went mainly to the
+      making of his great book, &lsquo;Life on the Mississippi&rsquo;. Upon the whole I have
+      the notion that Clemens thought this his greatest book, and he was
+      supported in his opinion by that of the &lsquo;portier&rsquo; in his hotel at Vienna,
+      and that of the German Emperor, who, as he told me with equal respect for
+      the preference of each, united in thinking it his best; with such
+      far-sundered social poles approaching in its favor, he apparently found
+      himself without standing for opposition. At any rate, the papers won
+      instant appreciation from his editor and publisher, and from the readers
+      of their periodical, which they expected to prosper beyond precedent in
+      its circulation. But those were days of simpler acceptance of the popular
+      rights of newspapers than these are, when magazines strictly guard their
+      vested interests against them. &lsquo;The New York Times&rsquo; and the &lsquo;St. Louis
+      Democrat&rsquo; profited by the advance copies of the magazine sent them to
+      reprint the papers month by month. Together they covered nearly the whole
+      reading territory of the Union, and the terms of their daily publication
+      enabled them to anticipate the magazine in its own restricted field. Its
+      subscription list was not enlarged in the slightest measure, and The
+      Atlantic Monthly languished on the news-stands as undesired as ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0100" id="link2H_4_0100">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was among my later visits to Hartford that we began to talk up the
+      notion of collaborating a play, but we did not arrive at any clear
+      intention, and it was a telegram out of the clear sky that one day
+      summoned me from Boston to help with a continuation of Colonel Sellers. I
+      had been a witness of the high joy of Clemens in the prodigious triumph of
+      the first Colonel Sellers, which had been dramatized from the novel of
+      &lsquo;The Gilded Age.&rsquo; This was the joint work of Clemens and Charles Dudley
+      Warner, and the story had been put upon the stage by some one in Utah,
+      whom Clemens first brought to book in the courts for violation of his
+      copyright, and then indemnified for such rights as his adaptation of the
+      book had given him. The structure of the play as John T. Raymond gave it
+      was substantially the work of this unknown dramatist. Clemens never
+      pretended, to me at any rate, that he had the least hand in it; he frankly
+      owned that he was incapable of dramatization; yet the vital part was his,
+      for the characters in the play were his as the book embodied them, and the
+      success which it won with the public was justly his. This he shared
+      equally with the actor, following the company with an agent, who counted
+      out the author&rsquo;s share of the gate money, and sent him a note of the
+      amount every day by postal card. The postals used to come about
+      dinner-time, and Clemens would read them aloud to us in wild triumph.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One hundred and fifty dollars&mdash;two hundred dollars&mdash;three
+      hundred dollars were the gay figures which they bore, and which he
+      flaunted in the air before he sat down at table, or rose from it to
+      brandish, and then, flinging his napkin into his chair, walked up and down
+      to exult in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By-and-by the popularity, of the play waned, and the time came when he
+      sickened of the whole affair, and withdrew his agent, and took whatever
+      gain from it the actor apportioned him. He was apt to have these sudden
+      surceases, following upon the intensities of his earlier interest; though
+      he seemed always to have the notion of making something more of Colonel
+      Sellers. But when I arrived in Hartford in answer to his summons, I found
+      him with no definite idea of what he wanted to do with him. I represented
+      that we must have some sort of plan, and he agreed that we should both jot
+      down a scenario overnight and compare our respective schemes the next
+      morning. As the author of a large number of little plays which have been
+      privately presented throughout the United States and in parts of the
+      United Kingdom, without ever getting upon the public stage except for the
+      noble ends of charity, and then promptly getting off it, I felt authorized
+      to make him observe that his scheme was as nearly nothing as chaos could
+      be. He agreed hilariously with me, and was willing to let it stand in
+      proof of his entire dramatic inability. At the same time he liked my plot
+      very much, which ultimated Sellers, according to Clemens&rsquo;s intention, as a
+      man crazed by his own inventions and by his superstition that he was the
+      rightful heir to an English earldom. The exuberant nature of Sellers and
+      the vast range of his imagination served our purpose in other ways.
+      Clemens made him a spiritualist, whose specialty in the occult was
+      materialization; he became on impulse an ardent temperance reformer, and
+      he headed a procession of temperance ladies after disinterestedly testing
+      the deleterious effects of liquor upon himself until he could not walk
+      straight; always he wore a marvellous fire-extinguisher strapped on his
+      back, to give proof in any emergency of the effectiveness of his invention
+      in that way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had a jubilant fortnight in working the particulars of these things
+      out. It was not possible for Clemens to write like anybody else, but I
+      could very easily write like Clemens, and we took the play scene and scene
+      about, quite secure of coming out in temperamental agreement. The
+      characters remained for the most part his, and I varied them only to make
+      them more like his than, if possible, he could. Several years after, when
+      I looked over a copy of the play, I could not always tell my work from
+      his; I only knew that I had done certain scenes. We would work all day
+      long at our several tasks, and then at night, before dinner, read them
+      over to each other. No dramatists ever got greater joy out of their
+      creations, and when I reflect that the public never had the chance of
+      sharing our joy I pity the public from a full heart. I still believe that
+      the play was immensely funny; I still believe that if it could once have
+      got behind the footlights it would have continued to pack the house before
+      them for an indefinite succession of nights. But this may be my fondness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At any rate, it was not to be. Raymond had identified himself with Sellers
+      in the play-going imagination, and whether consciously or unconsciously we
+      constantly worked with Raymond in our minds. But before this time bitter
+      displeasures had risen between Clemens and Raymond, and Clemens was
+      determined that Raymond should never have the play. He first offered it to
+      several other actors, who eagerly caught it, only to give it back with the
+      despairing renunciation, &ldquo;That is a Raymond play.&rdquo; We tried managers with
+      it, but their only question was whether they could get Raymond to do it.
+      In the mean time Raymond had provided himself with a play for the winter&mdash;a
+      very good play, by Demarest Lloyd; and he was in no hurry for ours.
+      Perhaps he did not really care for it perhaps he knew when he heard of it
+      that it must come to him in the end. In the end it did, from my hand, for
+      Clemens would not meet him. I found him in a mood of sweet reasonableness,
+      perhaps the more softened by one of those lunches which our publisher, the
+      hospitable James R. Osgood, was always bringing people together over in
+      Boston. He said that he could not do the play that winter, but he was sure
+      that he should like it, and he had no doubt he would do it the next
+      winter. So I gave him the manuscript, in spite of Clemens&rsquo;s charges, for
+      his suspicions and rancors were such that he would not have had me leave
+      it for a moment in the actor&rsquo;s hands. But it seemed a conclusion that
+      involved success and fortune for us. In due time, but I do not remember
+      how long after, Raymond declared himself delighted with the piece; he
+      entered into a satisfactory agreement for it, and at the beginning of the
+      next season he started with it to Buffalo, where he was to give a first
+      production. At Rochester he paused long enough to return it, with the
+      explanation that a friend had noted to him the fact that Colonel Sellers
+      in the play was a lunatic, and insanity was so serious a thing that it
+      could not be represented on the stage without outraging the sensibilities
+      of the audience; or words to that effect. We were too far off to allege
+      Hamlet to the contrary, or King Lear, or to instance the delight which
+      generations of readers throughout the world had taken in the mad freaks of
+      Don Quixote. Whatever were the real reasons of Raymond for rejecting the
+      play, we had to be content with those he gave, and to set about getting it
+      into other hands. In this effort we failed even more signally than before,
+      if that were possible. At last a clever and charming elocutionist, who had
+      long wished to get himself on the stage, heard of it and asked to see it.
+      We would have shown it to any one by this time, and we very willingly
+      showed it to him. He came to Hartford and did some scenes from it for us.
+      I must say he did them very well, quite as well as Raymond could have done
+      them, in whose manner he did them. But now, late toward spring, the
+      question was where he could get an engagement with the play, and we ended
+      by hiring a theatre in New York for a week of trial performances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens came on with me to Boston, where we were going to make some
+      changes in the piece, and where we made them to our satisfaction, but not
+      to the effect of that high rapture which we had in the first draft. He
+      went back to Hartford, and then the cold fit came upon me, and &ldquo;in visions
+      of the night, in slumberings upon the bed,&rdquo; ghastly forms of failure
+      appalled me, and when I rose in the morning I wrote him: &ldquo;Here is a play
+      which every manager has put out-of-doors and which every actor known to us
+      has refused, and now we go and give it to an elocutioner. We are fools.&rdquo;
+       Whether Clemens agreed with me or not in my conclusion, he agreed with me
+      in my premises, and we promptly bought our play off the stage at a cost of
+      seven hundred dollars, which we shared between us. But Clemens was never a
+      man to give up. I relinquished gratis all right and title I had in the
+      play, and he paid its entire expenses for a week of one-night stands in
+      the country. It never came to New York; and yet I think now that if it had
+      come, it would have succeeded. So hard does the faith of the unsuccessful
+      dramatist in his work die.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0101" id="link2H_4_0101">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      There is an incident of this time so characteristic of both men that I
+      will yield to the temptation of giving it here. After I had gone to
+      Hartford in response to Clemens&rsquo;s telegram, Matthew Arnold arrived in
+      Boston, and one of my family called on his, to explain why I was not at
+      home to receive his introduction: I had gone to see Mark Twain. &ldquo;Oh, but
+      he doesn&rsquo;t like that sort of thing, does he?&rdquo; &ldquo;He likes Mr. Clemens very
+      much,&rdquo; my representative answered, &ldquo;and he thinks him one of the greatest
+      men he ever knew.&rdquo; I was still Clemens&rsquo;s guest at Hartford when Arnold
+      came there to lecture, and one night we went to meet him at a reception.
+      While his hand laxly held mine in greeting, I saw his eyes fixed intensely
+      on the other side of the room. &ldquo;Who-who in the world is that?&rdquo; I looked
+      and said, &ldquo;Oh, that is Mark Twain.&rdquo; I do not remember just how their
+      instant encounter was contrived by Arnold&rsquo;s wish, but I have the
+      impression that they were not parted for long during the evening, and the
+      next night Arnold, as if still under the glamour of that potent presence,
+      was at Clemens&rsquo;s house. I cannot say how they got on, or what they made of
+      each other; if Clemens ever spoke of Arnold, I do not recall what he said,
+      but Arnold had shown a sense of him from which the incredulous sniff of
+      the polite world, now so universally exploded, had already perished. It
+      might well have done so with his first dramatic vision of that prodigious
+      head. Clemens was then hard upon fifty, and he had kept, as he did to the
+      end, the slender figure of his youth, but the ashes of the burnt-out years
+      were beginning to gray the fires of that splendid shock of red hair which
+      he held to the height of a stature apparently greater than it was, and
+      tilted from side to side in his undulating walk. He glimmered at you from
+      the narrow slits of fine blue-greenish eyes, under branching brows, which
+      with age grew more and more like a sort of plumage, and he was apt to
+      smile into your face with a subtle but amiable perception, and yet with a
+      sort of remote absence; you were all there for him, but he was not all
+      there for you.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0102" id="link2H_4_0102">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I shall, not try to give chronological order to my recollections of him,
+      but since I am just now with him in Hartford I will speak of him in
+      association with the place. Once when I came on from Cambridge he followed
+      me to my room to see that the water was not frozen in my bath, or
+      something of the kind, for it was very cold weather, and then hospitably
+      lingered. Not to lose time in banalities I began at once from the thread
+      of thought in my mind. &ldquo;I wonder why we hate the past so,&rdquo; and he
+      responded from the depths of his own consciousness, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s so damned
+      humiliating,&rdquo; which is what any man would say of his past if he were
+      honest; but honest men are few when it comes to themselves. Clemens was
+      one of the few, and the first of them among all the people I have known. I
+      have known, I suppose, men as truthful, but not so promptly, so
+      absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful. He could lie,
+      of course, and did to save others from grief or harm; he was, not stupidly
+      truthful; but his first impulse was to say out the thing and everything
+      that was in him. To those who can understand it will not be contradictory
+      of his sense of humiliation from the past, that he was not ashamed for
+      anything he ever did to the point of wishing to hide it. He could be, and
+      he was, bitterly sorry for his errors, which he had enough of in his life,
+      but he was not ashamed in that mean way. What he had done he owned to,
+      good, bad, or indifferent, and if it was bad he was rather amused than
+      troubled as to the effect in your mind. He would not obtrude the fact upon
+      you, but if it were in the way of personal history he would not dream of
+      withholding it, far less of hiding it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was the readiest of men to allow an error if he were found in it. In
+      one of our walks about Hartford, when he was in the first fine flush of
+      his agnosticism, he declared that Christianity had done nothing to improve
+      morals and conditions, and that the world under the highest pagan
+      civilization was as well off as it was under the highest Christian
+      influences. I happened to be fresh from the reading of Charles Loring
+      Brace&rsquo;s &lsquo;Gesta Christi&rsquo;; or, &lsquo;History of Humane Progress&rsquo;, and I could
+      offer him abundant proofs that he was wrong. He did not like that
+      evidently, but he instantly gave way, saying he had not known those
+      things. Later he was more tolerant in his denials of Christianity, but
+      just then he was feeling his freedom from it, and rejoicing in having
+      broken what he felt to have been the shackles of belief worn so long. He
+      greatly admired Robert Ingersoll, whom he called an angelic orator, and
+      regarded as an evangel of a new gospel&mdash;the gospel of free thought.
+      He took the warmest interest in the newspaper controversy raging at the
+      time as to the existence of a hell; when the noes carried the day, I
+      suppose that no enemy of perdition was more pleased. He still loved his
+      old friend and pastor, Mr. Twichell, but he no longer went to hear him
+      preach his sage and beautiful sermons, and was, I think, thereby the
+      greater loser. Long before that I had asked him if he went regularly to
+      church, and he groaned out: &ldquo;Oh yes, I go. It &lsquo;most kills me, but I go,&rdquo;
+       and I did not need his telling me to understand that he went because his
+      wife wished it. He did tell me, after they both ceased to go, that it had
+      finally come to her saying, &ldquo;Well, if you are to be lost, I want to be
+      lost with you.&rdquo; He could accept that willingness for supreme sacrifice and
+      exult in it because of the supreme truth as he saw it. After they had both
+      ceased to be formal Christians, she was still grieved by his denial of
+      immortality, so grieved that he resolved upon one of those heroic lies,
+      which for love&rsquo;s sake he held above even the truth, and he went to her,
+      saying that he had been thinking the whole matter over, and now he was
+      convinced that the soul did live after death. It was too late. Her keen
+      vision pierced through his ruse, as it did when he brought the doctor who
+      had diagnosticated her case as organic disease of the heart, and, after
+      making him go over the facts of it again with her, made him declare it
+      merely functional.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To make an end of these records as to Clemens&rsquo;s beliefs, so far as I knew
+      them, I should say that he never went back to anything like faith in the
+      Christian theology, or in the notion of life after death, or in a
+      conscious divinity. It is best to be honest in this matter; he would have
+      hated anything else, and I do not believe that the truth in it can hurt
+      any one. At one period he argued that there must have been a cause, a
+      conscious source of things; that the universe could not have come by
+      chance. I have heard also that in his last hours or moments he said, or
+      his dearest ones hoped he had said, something about meeting again. But the
+      expression, of which they could not be certain, was of the vaguest, and it
+      was perhaps addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness. All his
+      expressions to me were of a courageous, renunciation of any hope of living
+      again, or elsewhere seeing those he had lost. He suffered terribly in
+      their loss, and he was not fool enough to try ignoring his grief. He knew
+      that for this there were but two medicines; that it would wear itself out
+      with the years, and that meanwhile there was nothing for it but those
+      respites in which the mourner forgets himself in slumber. I remember that
+      in a black hour of my own when I was called down to see him, as he thought
+      from sleep, he said with an infinite, an exquisite compassion, &ldquo;Oh, did I
+      wake you, did I wake, you?&rdquo; Nothing more, but the look, the voice, were
+      everything; and while I live they cannot pass from my sense.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0103" id="link2H_4_0103">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IX.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      He was the most caressing of men in his pity, but he had the fine
+      instinct, which would have pleased Lowell, of never putting his hands on
+      you&mdash;fine, delicate hands, with taper fingers, and pink nails, like a
+      girl&rsquo;s, and sensitively quivering in moments of emotion; he did not paw
+      you with them to show his affection, as so many of us Americans are apt to
+      do. Among the half-dozen, or half-hundred, personalities that each of us
+      becomes, I should say that Clemens&rsquo;s central and final personality was
+      something exquisite. His casual acquaintance might know him, perhaps, from
+      his fierce intensity, his wild pleasure in shocking people with his
+      ribaldries and profanities, or from the mere need of loosing his
+      rebellious spirit in that way, as anything but exquisite, and yet that was
+      what in the last analysis he was. They might come away loathing or hating
+      him, but one could not know him well without realizing him the most
+      serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men. He was
+      Southwestern, and born amid the oppression of a race that had no rights as
+      against ours, but I never saw a man more regardful of negroes. He had a
+      yellow butler when I first began to know him, because he said he could not
+      bear to order a white man about, but the terms of his ordering George were
+      those of the softest entreaty which command ever wore. He loved to rely
+      upon George, who was such a broken reed in some things, though so stanch
+      in others, and the fervent Republican in politics that Clemens then liked
+      him to be. He could interpret Clemens&rsquo;s meaning to the public without
+      conveying his mood, and could render his roughest answer smooth to the
+      person denied his presence. His general instructions were that this
+      presence was to be denied all but personal friends, but the soft heart of
+      George was sometimes touched by importunity, and once he came up into the
+      billiard-room saying that Mr. Smith wished to see Clemens. Upon inquiry,
+      Mr. Smith developed no ties of friendship, and Clemens said, &ldquo;You go and
+      tell Mr. Smith that I wouldn&rsquo;t come down to see the Twelve Apostles.&rdquo;
+       George turned from the threshold where he had kept himself, and framed a
+      paraphrase of this message which apparently sent Mr. Smith away content
+      with himself and all the rest of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The part of him that was Western in his Southwestern origin Clemens kept
+      to the end, but he was the most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew. No
+      man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery, and no one
+      has ever poured such scorn upon the second-hand, Walter-Scotticized,
+      pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal. He held himself responsible for the
+      wrong which the white race had done the black race in slavery, and he
+      explained, in paying the way of a negro student through Yale, that he was
+      doing it as his part of the reparation due from every white to every black
+      man. He said he had never seen this student, nor ever wished to see him or
+      know his name; it was quite enough that he was a negro. About that time a
+      colored cadet was expelled from West Point for some point of conduct
+      &ldquo;unbecoming an officer and gentleman,&rdquo; and there was the usual shabby
+      philosophy in a portion of the press to the effect that a negro could
+      never feel the claim of honor. The man was fifteen parts white, but, &ldquo;Oh
+      yes,&rdquo; Clemens said, with bitter irony, &ldquo;it was that one part black that
+      undid him.&rdquo; It made him a &ldquo;nigger&rdquo; and incapable of being a gentleman. It
+      was to blame for the whole thing. The fifteen parts white were guiltless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens was entirely satisfied with the result of the Civil War, and he
+      was eager to have its facts and meanings brought out at once in history.
+      He ridiculed the notion, held by many, that &ldquo;it was not yet time&rdquo; to
+      philosophize the events of the great struggle; that we must &ldquo;wait till its
+      passions had cooled,&rdquo; and &ldquo;the clouds of strife had cleared away.&rdquo; He
+      maintained that the time would never come when we should see its motives
+      and men and deeds more clearly, and that now, now, was the hour to
+      ascertain them in lasting verity. Picturesquely and dramatically he
+      portrayed the imbecility of deferring the inquiry at any point to the
+      distance of future years when inevitably the facts would begin to put on
+      fable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had powers of sarcasm and a relentless rancor in his contempt which
+      those who knew him best appreciated most. The late Noah Brooks, who had
+      been in California at the beginning of Clemens&rsquo;s career, and had witnessed
+      the effect of his ridicule before he had learned to temper it, once said
+      to me that he would rather have any one else in the world down on him than
+      Mark Twain. But as Clemens grew older he grew more merciful, not to the
+      wrong, but to the men who were in it. The wrong was often the source of
+      his wildest drolling. He considered it in such hopelessness of ever doing
+      it justice that his despair broke in laughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0104" id="link2H_4_0104">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      X.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I go back to that house in Hartford, where I was so often a happy guest,
+      with tenderness for each of its endearing aspects. Over the chimney in the
+      library which had been cured of smoking by so much art and science,
+      Clemens had written in perennial brass the words of Emerson, &ldquo;The ornament
+      of a house is the friends who frequent it,&rdquo; and he gave his guests a
+      welcome of the simplest and sweetest cordiality: but I must not go aside
+      to them from my recollections of him, which will be of sufficient
+      garrulity, if I give them as fully as I wish. The windows of the library
+      looked northward from the hillside above which the house stood, and over
+      the little valley with the stream in it, and they showed the leaves of the
+      trees that almost brushed them as in a Claude Lorraine glass. To the
+      eastward the dining-room opened amply, and to the south there was a wide
+      hall, where the voices of friends made themselves heard as they entered
+      without ceremony and answered his joyous hail. At the west was a little
+      semicircular conservatory of a pattern invented by Mrs. Harriet Beecher
+      Stowe, and adopted in most of the houses of her kindly neighborhood. The
+      plants were set in the ground, and the flowering vines climbed up the
+      sides and overhung the roof above the silent spray of a fountain companied
+      by callas and other water-loving lilies. There, while we breakfasted,
+      Patrick came in from the barn and sprinkled the pretty bower, which poured
+      out its responsive perfume in the delicate accents of its varied blossoms.
+      Breakfast was Clemens&rsquo;s best meal, and he sat longer at his steak and
+      coffee than at the courses of his dinner; luncheon was nothing to him,
+      unless, as might happen, he made it his dinner, and reserved the later
+      repast as the occasion of walking up and down the room, and discoursing at
+      large on anything that came into his head. Like most good talkers, he
+      liked other people to have their say; he did not talk them down; he
+      stopped instantly at another&rsquo;s remark and gladly or politely heard him
+      through; he even made believe to find suggestion or inspiration in what
+      was said. His children came to the table, as I have told, and after dinner
+      he was apt to join his fine tenor to their trebles in singing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fully half our meetings were at my house in Cambridge, where he made
+      himself as much at home as in Hartford. He would come ostensibly to stay
+      at the Parker House, in Boston, and take a room, where he would light the
+      gas and leave it burning, after dressing, while he drove out to Cambridge
+      and stayed two or three days with us. Once, I suppose it was after a
+      lecture, he came in evening dress and passed twenty-four hours with us in
+      that guise, wearing an overcoat to hide it when we went for a walk.
+      Sometimes he wore the slippers which he preferred to shoes at home, and if
+      it was muddy, as it was wont to be in Cambridge, he would put a pair of
+      rubbers over them for our rambles. He liked the lawlessness and our
+      delight in allowing it, and he rejoiced in the confession of his hostess,
+      after we had once almost worn ourselves out in our pleasure with the
+      intense talk, with the stories and the laughing, that his coming almost
+      killed her, but it was worth it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In those days he was troubled with sleeplessness, or, rather, with
+      reluctant sleepiness, and he had various specifics for promoting it. At
+      first it had been champagne just before going to bed, and we provided
+      that, but later he appeared from Boston with four bottles of lager-beer
+      under his arms; lager-beer, he said now, was the only thing to make you go
+      to sleep, and we provided that. Still later, on a visit I paid him at
+      Hartford, I learned that hot Scotch was the only soporific worth
+      considering, and Scotch-whiskey duly found its place on our sideboard. One
+      day, very long afterward, I asked him if he were still taking hot Scotch
+      to make him sleep. He said he was not taking anything. For a while he had
+      found going to bed on the bath-room floor a soporific; then one night he
+      went to rest in his own bed at ten o&rsquo;clock, and had gone promptly to sleep
+      without anything. He had done the like with the like effect ever since. Of
+      course, it amused him; there were few experiences of life, grave or gay,
+      which did not amuse him, even when they wronged him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came on to Cambridge in April, 1875, to go with me to the centennial
+      ceremonies at Concord in celebration of the battle of the Minute Men with
+      the British troops a hundred years before. We both had special
+      invitations, including passage from Boston; but I said, Why bother to go
+      into Boston when we could just as well take the train for Concord at the
+      Cambridge station? He equally decided that it would be absurd; so we
+      breakfasted deliberately, and then walked to the station, reasoning of
+      many things as usual. When the train stopped, we found it packed inside
+      and out. People stood dense on the platforms of the cars; to our startled
+      eyes they seemed to project from the windows, and unless memory betrays me
+      they lay strewn upon the roofs like brakemen slain at the post of duty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whether this was really so or not, it is certain that the train presented
+      an impenetrable front even to our imagination, and we left it to go its
+      way without the slightest effort to board. We remounted the fame-worn
+      steps of Porter&rsquo;s Station, and began exploring North Cambridge for some
+      means of transportation overland to Concord, for we were that far on the
+      road by which the British went and came on the day of the battle. The
+      liverymen whom we appealed to received us, some with compassion, some with
+      derision, but in either mood convinced us that we could not have hired a
+      cat to attempt our conveyance, much less a horse, or vehicle of any
+      description. It was a raw, windy day, very unlike the exceptionally hot
+      April day when the routed redcoats, pursued by the Colonials, fled panting
+      back to Boston, with &ldquo;their tongues hanging out like dogs,&rdquo; but we could
+      not take due comfort in the vision of their discomfiture; we could almost
+      envy them, for they had at least got to Concord. A swift procession of
+      coaches, carriages, and buggies, all going to Concord, passed us, inert
+      and helpless, on the sidewalk in the peculiarly cold mud of North
+      Cambridge. We began to wonder if we might not stop one of them and bribe
+      it to take us, but we had not the courage to try, and Clemens seized the
+      opportunity to begin suffering with an acute indigestion, which gave his
+      humor a very dismal cast. I felt keenly the shame of defeat, and the guilt
+      of responsibility for our failure, and when a gay party of students came
+      toward us on the top of a tally ho, luxuriously empty inside, we felt that
+      our chance had come, and our last chance. He said that if I would stop
+      them and tell them who I was they would gladly, perhaps proudly, give us
+      passage; I contended that if with his far vaster renown he would approach
+      them, our success would be assured. While we stood, lost in this &ldquo;contest
+      of civilities,&rdquo; the coach passed us, with gay notes blown from the horns
+      of the students, and then Clemens started in pursuit, encouraged with
+      shouts from the merry party who could not imagine who was trying to run
+      them down, to a rivalry in speed. The unequal match could end only in one
+      way, and I am glad I cannot recall what he said when he came back to me.
+      Since then I have often wondered at the grief which would have wrung those
+      blithe young hearts if they could have known that they might have had the
+      company of Mark Twain to Concord that day and did not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We hung about, unavailingly, in the bitter wind a while longer, and then
+      slowly, very slowly, made our way home. We wished to pass as much time as
+      possible, in order to give probability to the deceit we intended to
+      practise, for we could not bear to own ourselves baffled in our boasted
+      wisdom of taking the train at Porter&rsquo;s Station, and had agreed to say that
+      we had been to Concord and got back. Even after coming home to my house,
+      we felt that our statement would be wanting in verisimilitude without
+      further delay, and we crept quietly into my library, and made up a roaring
+      fire on the hearth, and thawed ourselves out in the heat of it before we
+      regained our courage for the undertaking. With all these precautions we
+      failed, for when our statement was imparted to the proposed victim she
+      instantly pronounced it unreliable, and we were left with it on our hands
+      intact. I think the humor of this situation was finally a greater pleasure
+      to Clemens than an actual visit to Concord would have been; only a few
+      weeks before his death he laughed our defeat over with one of my family in
+      Bermuda, and exulted in our prompt detection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0105" id="link2H_4_0105">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      From our joint experience in failing I argue that Clemens&rsquo;s affection for
+      me must have been great to enable him to condone in me the final defection
+      which was apt to be the end of our enterprises. I have fancied that I
+      presented to him a surface of such entire trustworthiness that he could
+      not imagine the depths of unreliability beneath it; and that never
+      realizing it, he always broke through with fresh surprise but unimpaired
+      faith. He liked, beyond all things, to push an affair to the bitter end,
+      and the end was never too bitter unless it brought grief or harm to
+      another. Once in a telegraph office at a railway station he was treated
+      with such insolent neglect by the young lady in charge, who was
+      preoccupied in a flirtation with a &ldquo;gentleman friend,&rdquo; that emulous of the
+      public spirit which he admired in the English, he told her he should
+      report her to her superiors, and (probably to her astonishment) he did so.
+      He went back to Hartford, and in due time the poor girl came to me in,
+      terror and in tears; for I had abetted Clemens in his action, and had
+      joined my name to his in his appeal to the authorities. She was threatened
+      with dismissal unless she made full apology to him and brought back
+      assurance of its acceptance. I felt able to give this, and, of course, he
+      eagerly approved; I think he telegraphed his approval. Another time, some
+      years afterward, we sat down together in places near the end of a car, and
+      a brakeman came in looking for his official note-book. Clemens found that
+      he had sat down upon it, and handed it to him; the man scolded him very
+      abusively, and came back again and again, still scolding him for having no
+      more sense than to sit down on a note-book. The patience of Clemens in
+      bearing it was so angelic that I saw fit to comment, &ldquo;I suppose you will
+      report this fellow.&rdquo; &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he answered, slowly and sadly. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s what I
+      should have done once. But now I remember that he gets twenty dollars a
+      month.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nothing could have been wiser, nothing tenderer, and his humanity was not
+      for humanity alone. He abhorred the dull and savage joy of the sportsman
+      in a lucky shot, an unerring aim, and once when I met him in the country
+      he had just been sickened by the success of a gunner in bringing down a
+      blackbird, and he described the poor, stricken, glossy thing, how it lay
+      throbbing its life out on the grass, with such pity as he might have given
+      a wounded child. I find this a fit place to say that his mind and soul
+      were with those who do the hard work of the world, in fear of those who
+      give them a chance for their livelihoods and underpay them all they can.
+      He never went so far in socialism as I have gone, if he went that way at
+      all, but he was fascinated with Looking Backward and had Bellamy to visit
+      him; and from the first he had a luminous vision of organized labor as the
+      only present help for working-men. He would show that side with such
+      clearness and such force that you could not say anything in hopeful
+      contradiction; he saw with that relentless insight of his that with Unions
+      was the working-man&rsquo;s only present hope of standing up like a man against
+      money and the power of it. There was a time when I was afraid that his
+      eyes were a little holden from the truth; but in the very last talk I
+      heard from him I found that I was wrong, and that this great humorist was
+      as great a humanist as ever. I wish that all the work-folk could know
+      this, and could know him their friend in life as he was in literature; as
+      he was in such a glorious gospel of equality as the &lsquo;Connecticut Yankee in
+      King Arthur&rsquo;s Court.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0106" id="link2H_4_0106">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Whether I will or no I must let things come into my story thoughtwise, as
+      he would have let them, for I cannot remember them in their order. One
+      night, while we were giving a party, he suddenly stormed in with a friend
+      of his and mine, Mr. Twichell, and immediately began to eat and drink of
+      our supper, for they had come straight to our house from walking to
+      Boston, or so great a part of the way as to be a-hungered and a-thirst. I
+      can see him now as he stood up in the midst of our friends, with his head
+      thrown back, and in his hand a dish of those escalloped oysters without
+      which no party in Cambridge was really a party, exulting in the tale of
+      his adventure, which had abounded in the most original characters and
+      amusing incidents at every mile of their progress. They had broken their
+      journey with a night&rsquo;s rest, and they had helped themselves lavishly out
+      by rail in the last half; but still it had been a mighty walk to do in two
+      days. Clemens was a great walker, in those years, and was always telling
+      of his tramps with Mr. Twichell to Talcott&rsquo;s Tower, ten miles out of
+      Hartford. As he walked of course he talked, and of course he smoked.
+      Whenever he had been a few days with us, the whole house had to be aired,
+      for he smoked all over it from breakfast to bedtime. He always went to bed
+      with a cigar in his mouth, and sometimes, mindful of my fire insurance, I
+      went up and took it away, still burning, after he had fallen asleep. I do
+      not know how much a man may smoke and live, but apparently he smoked as
+      much as a man could, for he smoked incessantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not care much to meet people, as I fancied, and we were greedy of
+      him for ourselves; he was precious to us; and I would not have exposed him
+      to the critical edge of that Cambridge acquaintance which might not have
+      appreciated him at, say, his transatlantic value. In America his
+      popularity was as instant as it was vast. But it must be acknowledged that
+      for a much longer time here than in England polite learning hesitated his
+      praise. In England rank, fashion, and culture rejoiced in him. Lord
+      mayors, lord chief justices, and magnates of many kinds were his hosts; he
+      was desired in country houses, and his bold genius captivated the favor of
+      periodicals which spurned the rest of our nation. But in his own country
+      it was different. In proportion as people thought themselves refined they
+      questioned that quality which all recognize in him now, but which was then
+      the inspired knowledge of the simple-hearted multitude. I went with him to
+      see Longfellow, but I do not think Longfellow made much of him, and Lowell
+      made less. He stopped as if with the long Semitic curve of Clemens&rsquo;s nose,
+      which in the indulgence of his passion for finding every one more or less
+      a Jew he pronounced unmistakably racial. It was two of my most fastidious
+      Cambridge friends who accepted him with the English, the European entirety&mdash;namely,
+      Charles Eliot Norton and Professor Francis J. Child. Norton was then newly
+      back from a long sojourn abroad, and his judgments were delocalized. He
+      met Clemens as if they had both been in England, and rejoiced in his bold
+      freedom from environment, and in the rich variety and boundless reach of
+      his talk. Child was of a personal liberty as great in its fastidious way
+      as that of Clemens himself, and though he knew him only at second hand, he
+      exulted in the most audacious instance of his grotesquery, as I shall have
+      to tell by-and-by, almost solely. I cannot say just why Clemens seemed not
+      to hit the favor of our community of scribes and scholars, as Bret Harte
+      had done, when he came on from California, and swept them before him,
+      disrupting their dinners and delaying their lunches with impunity; but it
+      is certain he did not, and I had better say so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am surprised to find from the bibliographical authorities that it was so
+      late as 1875 when he came with the manuscript of Tom Sawyer, and asked me
+      to read it, as a friend and critic, and not as an editor. I have an
+      impression that this was at Mrs. Clemens&rsquo;s instance in his own uncertainty
+      about printing it. She trusted me, I can say with a satisfaction few
+      things now give me, to be her husband&rsquo;s true and cordial adviser, and I
+      was so. I believe I never failed him in this part, though in so many of
+      our enterprises and projects I was false as water through my temperamental
+      love of backing out of any undertaking. I believe this never ceased to
+      astonish him, and it has always astonished me; it appears to me quite out
+      of character; though it is certain that an undertaking, when I have
+      entered upon it, holds me rather than I it. But however this immaterial
+      matter may be, I am glad to remember that I thoroughly liked Tom Sawyer,
+      and said so with every possible amplification. Very likely, I also made my
+      suggestions for its improvement; I could not have been a real critic
+      without that; and I have no doubt they were gratefully accepted and, I
+      hope, never acted upon. I went with him to the horse-car station in
+      Harvard Square, as my frequent wont was, and put him aboard a car with his
+      MS. in his hand, stayed and reassured, so far as I counted, concerning it.
+      I do not know what his misgivings were; perhaps they were his wife&rsquo;s
+      misgivings, for she wished him to be known not only for the wild and
+      boundless humor that was in him, but for the beauty and tenderness and
+      &ldquo;natural piety&rdquo;; and she would not have had him judged by a too close
+      fidelity to the rude conditions of Tom Sawyer&rsquo;s life. This is the meaning
+      that I read into the fact of his coming to me with those doubts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0107" id="link2H_4_0107">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Clemens had then and for many years the habit of writing to me about what
+      he was doing, and still more of what he was experiencing. Nothing struck
+      his imagination, in or out of the daily routine, but he wished to write me
+      of it, and he wrote with the greatest fulness and a lavish dramatization,
+      sometimes to the length of twenty or forty pages, so that I have now
+      perhaps fifteen hundred pages of his letters. They will no doubt some day
+      be published, but I am not even referring to them in these records, which
+      I think had best come to the reader with an old man&rsquo;s falterings and
+      uncertainties. With his frequent absences and my own abroad, and the
+      intrusion of calamitous cares, the rich tide of his letters was more and
+      more interrupted. At times it almost ceased, and then it would come again,
+      a torrent. In the very last weeks of his life he burst forth, and, though
+      too weak himself to write, he dictated his rage with me for recommending
+      to him a certain author whose truthfulness he could not deny, but whom he
+      hated for his truthfulness to sordid and ugly conditions. At heart Clemens
+      was romantic, and he would have had the world of fiction stately and
+      handsome and whatever the real world was not; but he was not
+      romanticistic, and he was too helplessly an artist not to wish his own
+      work to show life as he had seen it. I was preparing to rap him back for
+      these letters when I read that he had got home to die; he would have liked
+      the rapping back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He liked coming to Boston, especially for those luncheons and dinners in
+      which the fertile hospitality of our publisher, Osgood, abounded. He dwelt
+      equidistant from Boston and New York, and he had special friends in New
+      York, but he said he much preferred coming to Boston; of late years he
+      never went there, and he had lost the habit of it long before he came home
+      from Europe to live in New York. At these feasts, which were often of
+      after-dinner-speaking measure, he could always be trusted for something of
+      amazing delightfulness. Once, when Osgood could think of no other occasion
+      for a dinner, he gave himself a birthday dinner, and asked his friends and
+      authors. The beautiful and splendid trooper-like blaring was there, and I
+      recall how in the long, rambling speech in which Clemens went round the
+      table hitting every head at it, and especially visiting Osgood with thanks
+      for his ingenious pretext for our entertainment, he congratulated blaring
+      upon his engineering genius and his hypnotic control of municipal
+      governments. He said that if there was a plan for draining a city at a
+      cost of a million, by seeking the level of the water in the down-hill
+      course of the sewers, blaring would come with a plan to drain that town
+      up-hill at twice the cost and carry it through the Common Council without
+      opposition. It is hard to say whether the time was gladder at these
+      dinners, or at the small lunches at which Osgood and Aldrich and I
+      foregathered with him and talked the afternoon away till well toward the
+      winter twilight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a great figure, and the principal figure, at one of the first of
+      the now worn-out Authors&rsquo; Readings, which was held in the Boston Museum to
+      aid a Longfellow memorial. It was the late George Parsons Lathrop
+      (everybody seems to be late in these sad days) who imagined the reading,
+      but when it came to a price for seats I can always claim the glory of
+      fixing it at five dollars. The price if not the occasion proved
+      irresistible, and the museum was packed from the floor to the topmost
+      gallery. Norton presided, and when it came Clemens&rsquo;s turn to read he
+      introduced him with such exquisite praises as he best knew how to give,
+      but before he closed he fell a prey to one of those lapses of tact which
+      are the peculiar peril of people of the greatest tact. He was reminded of
+      Darwin&rsquo;s delight in Mark Twain, and how when he came from his long day&rsquo;s
+      exhausting study, and sank into bed at midnight, he took up a volume of
+      Mark Twain, whose books he always kept on a table beside him, and whatever
+      had been his tormenting problem, or excess of toil, he felt secure of a
+      good night&rsquo;s rest from it. A sort of blank ensued which Clemens filled in
+      the only possible way. He said he should always be glad that he had
+      contributed to the repose of that great man, whom science owed so much,
+      and then without waiting for the joy in every breast to burst forth, he
+      began to read. It was curious to watch his triumph with the house. His
+      carefully studied effects would reach the first rows in the orchestra
+      first, and ripple in laughter back to the standees against the wall, and
+      then with a fine resurgence come again to the rear orchestra seats, and so
+      rise from gallery to gallery till it fell back, a cataract of applause
+      from the topmost rows of seats. He was such a practised speaker that he
+      knew all the stops of that simple instrument man, and there is no doubt
+      that these results were accurately intended from his unerring knowledge.
+      He was the most consummate public performer I ever saw, and it was an
+      incomparable pleasure to hear him lecture; on the platform he was the
+      great and finished actor which he probably would not have been on the
+      stage. He was fond of private theatricals, and liked to play in them with
+      his children and their friends, in dramatizations of such stories of his
+      as &lsquo;The Prince and the Pauper;&rsquo; but I never saw him in any of these
+      scenes. When he read his manuscript to you, it was with a thorough,
+      however involuntary, recognition of its dramatic qualities; he held that
+      an actor added fully half to the character the author created. With my own
+      hurried and half-hearted reading of passages which I wished to try on him
+      from unprinted chapters (say, out of &lsquo;The Undiscovered Country&rsquo; or &lsquo;A
+      Modern Instance&rsquo;) he said frankly that my reading could spoil anything. He
+      was realistic, but he was essentially histrionic, and he was rightly so.
+      What we have strongly conceived we ought to make others strongly imagine,
+      and we ought to use every genuine art to that end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0108" id="link2H_4_0108">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      There came a time when the lecturing which had been the joy of his prime
+      became his loathing, loathing unutterable, and when he renounced it with
+      indescribable violence. Yet he was always hankering for those fleshpots
+      whose savor lingered on his palate and filled his nostrils after his
+      withdrawal from the platform. The Authors&rsquo; Readings when they had won
+      their brief popularity abounded in suggestion for him. Reading from one&rsquo;s
+      book was not so bad as giving a lecture written for a lecture&rsquo;s purpose,
+      and he was willing at last to compromise. He had a magnificent scheme for
+      touring the country with Aldrich and Mr. G. W. Cable and myself, in a
+      private car, with a cook of our own, and every facility for living on the
+      fat of the land. We should read only four times a week, in an
+      entertainment that should not last more than an hour and a half. He would
+      be the impresario, and would guarantee us others at least seventy-five
+      dollars a day, and pay every expense of the enterprise, which he
+      provisionally called the Circus, himself. But Aldrich and I were now no
+      longer in those earlier thirties when we so cheerfully imagined &lsquo;Memorable
+      Murders&rsquo; for subscription publication; we both abhorred public
+      appearances, and, at any rate, I was going to Europe for a year. So the
+      plan fell through except as regarded Mr. Cable, who, in his way, was as
+      fine a performer as Clemens, and could both read and sing the matter of
+      his books. On a far less stupendous scale they two made the rounds of the
+      great lecturing circuit together. But I believe a famous lecture-manager
+      had charge of them and travelled with them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a most sanguine man, a most amiable person, and such a believer in
+      fortune that Clemens used to say of him, as he said of one of his early
+      publishers, that you could rely upon fifty per cent. of everything he
+      promised. I myself many years later became a follower of this hopeful
+      prophet, and I can testify that in my case at least he was able to keep
+      ninety-nine, and even a hundred, per cent. of his word. It was I who was
+      much nearer failing of mine, for I promptly began to lose sleep from the
+      nervous stress of my lecturing and from the gratifying but killing
+      receptions afterward, and I was truly in that state from insomnia which
+      Clemens recognized in the brief letter I got from him in the Western city,
+      after half a dozen wakeful nights. He sardonically congratulated me on
+      having gone into &ldquo;the lecture field,&rdquo; and then he said: &ldquo;I know where you
+      are now. You are in hell.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was this perdition which he re-entered when he undertook that
+      round-the-world lecturing tour for the payment of the debts left to him by
+      the bankruptcy of his firm in the publishing business. It was not purely
+      perdition for him, or, rather, it was perdition for only one-half of him,
+      the author-half; for the actor-half it was paradise. The author who takes
+      up lecturing without the ability to give histrionic support to the
+      literary reputation which he brings to the crude test of his reader&rsquo;s eyes
+      and ears, invokes a peril and a misery unknown to the lecturer who has
+      made his first public from the platform. Clemens was victorious on the
+      platform from the beginning, and it would be folly to pretend that he did
+      not exult in his triumphs there. But I suppose, with the wearing nerves of
+      middle life, he hated more and more the personal swarming of interest upon
+      him, and all the inevitable clatter of the thing. Yet he faced it, and he
+      labored round our tiresome globe that he might pay the uttermost farthing
+      of debts which he had not knowingly contracted, the debts of his partners
+      who had meant well and done ill, not because they were evil, but because
+      they were unwise, and as unfit for their work as he was. &ldquo;Pay what thou
+      owest.&rdquo; That is right, even when thou owest it by the error of others, and
+      even when thou owest it to a bank, which had not lent it from love of
+      thee, but in the hard line of business and thy need.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clemens&rsquo;s behavior in this matter redounded to his glory among the nations
+      of the whole earth, and especially in this nation, so wrapped in commerce
+      and so little used to honor among its many thieves. He had behaved like
+      Walter Scott, as millions rejoiced to know, who had not known how Walter
+      Scott had behaved till they knew it was like Clemens. No doubt it will be
+      put to his credit in the books of the Recording Angel, but what the Judge
+      of all the Earth will say of it at the Last Day there is no telling. I
+      should not be surprised if He accounted it of less merit than some other
+      things that Clemens did and was: less than his abhorrence of the Spanish
+      War, and the destruction of the South-African republics, and our deceit of
+      the Filipinos, and his hate of slavery, and his payment of his portion of
+      our race&rsquo;s debt to the race of the colored student whom he saw through
+      college, and his support of a poor artist for three years in Paris, and
+      his loan of opportunity to the youth who became the most brilliant of our
+      actor-dramatists, and his eager pardon of the thoughtless girl who was
+      near paying the penalty of her impertinence with the loss of her place,
+      and his remembering that the insolent brakeman got so few dollars a month,
+      and his sympathy for working-men standing up to money in their Unions, and
+      even his pity for the wounded bird throbbing out its little life on the
+      grass for the pleasure of the cruel fool who shot it. These and the
+      thousand other charities and beneficences in which he abounded, openly or
+      secretly, may avail him more than the discharge of his firm&rsquo;s liabilities
+      with the Judge of all the Earth, who surely will do right, but whose
+      measures and criterions no man knows, and I least of all men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He made no great show of sympathy with people in their anxieties, but it
+      never failed, and at a time when I lay sick for many weeks his letters
+      were of comfort to those who feared I might not rise again. His hand was
+      out in help for those who needed help, and in kindness for those who
+      needed kindness. There remains in my mind the dreary sense of a long, long
+      drive to the uttermost bounds of the South End at Boston, where he went to
+      call upon some obscure person whose claim stretched in a lengthening chain
+      from his early days in Missouri&mdash;a most inadequate person, in whose
+      vacuity the gloom of the dull day deepened till it was almost too deep for
+      tears. He bore the ordeal with grim heroism, and silently smoked away the
+      sense of it, as we drove back to Cambridge, in his slippered feet,
+      sombrely musing, sombrely swearing. But he knew he had done the right, the
+      kind thing, and he was content. He came the whole way from Hartford to go
+      with me to a friendless play of mine, which Alessandro Salvini was giving
+      in a series of matinees to houses never enlarging themselves beyond the
+      count of the brave two hundred who sat it through, and he stayed my
+      fainting spirit with a cheer beyond flagons, joining me in my joke at the
+      misery of it, and carrying the fun farther.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before that he had come to witness the aesthetic suicide of Anna
+      Dickinson, who had been a flaming light of the political platform in the
+      war days, and had been left by them consuming in a hapless ambition for
+      the theatre. The poor girl had had a play written especially for her, and
+      as Anne Boleyn she ranted and exhorted through the five acts, drawing ever
+      nearer the utter defeat of the anticlimax. We could hardly look at each
+      other for pity, Clemens sitting there in the box he had taken, with his
+      shaggy head out over the corner and his slippered feet curled under him:
+      he either went to a place in his slippers or he carried them with him, and
+      put them on as soon as he could put off his boots. When it was so that we
+      could not longer follow her failure and live, he began to talk of the
+      absolute close of her career which the thing was, and how probably she had
+      no conception that it was the end. He philosophized the mercifulness of
+      the fact, and of the ignorance of most of us, when mortally sick or
+      fatally wounded. We think it is not the end, because we have never ended
+      before, and we do not see how we can end. Some can push by the awful hour
+      and live again, but for Anna Dickinson there could be, and was, no such
+      palingenesis. Of course we got that solemn joy out of reading her fate
+      aright which is the compensation of the wise spectator in witnessing the
+      inexorable doom of others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0109" id="link2H_4_0109">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When Messrs. Houghton &amp; Mifflin became owners of The Atlantic Monthly,
+      Mr. Houghton fancied having some breakfasts and dinners, which should
+      bring the publisher and the editor face to face with the contributors, who
+      were bidden from far and near. Of course, the subtle fiend of advertising,
+      who has now grown so unblushing bold, lurked under the covers at these
+      banquets, and the junior partner and the young editor had their joint and
+      separate fine anguishes of misgiving as to the taste and the principle of
+      them; but they were really very simple-hearted and honestly meant
+      hospitalities, and they prospered as they ought, and gave great pleasure
+      and no pain. I forget some of the &ldquo;emergent occasions,&rdquo; but I am sure of a
+      birthday dinner most unexpectedly accepted by Whittier, and a birthday
+      luncheon to Mrs. Stowe, and I think a birthday dinner to Longfellow; but
+      the passing years have left me in the dark as to the pretext of that
+      supper at which Clemens made his awful speech, and came so near being the
+      death of us all. At the breakfasts and luncheons we had the pleasure of
+      our lady contributors&rsquo; company, but that night there were only men, and
+      because of our great strength we survived.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I suppose the year was about 1879, but here the almanac is unimportant,
+      and I can only say that it was after Clemens had become a very valued
+      contributor of the magazine, where he found himself to his own great
+      explicit satisfaction. He had jubilantly accepted our invitation, and had
+      promised a speech, which it appeared afterward he had prepared with
+      unusual care and confidence. It was his custom always to think out his
+      speeches, mentally wording them, and then memorizing them by a peculiar
+      system of mnemonics which he had invented. On the dinner-table a certain
+      succession of knife, spoon, salt-cellar, and butter-plate symbolized a
+      train of ideas, and on the billiard-table a ball, a cue, and a piece of
+      chalk served the same purpose. With a diagram of these printed on the
+      brain he had full command of the phrases which his excogitation had
+      attached to them, and which embodied the ideas in perfect form. He
+      believed he had been particularly fortunate in his notion for the speech
+      of that evening, and he had worked it out in joyous self-reliance. It was
+      the notion of three tramps, three deadbeats, visiting a California
+      mining-camp, and imposing themselves upon the innocent miners as
+      respectively Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver
+      Wendell, Holmes. The humor of the conception must prosper or must fail
+      according to the mood of the hearer, but Clemens felt sure of compelling
+      this to sympathy, and he looked forward to an unparalleled triumph.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But there were two things that he had not taken into account. One was the
+      species of religious veneration in which these men were held by those
+      nearest them, a thing that I should not be able to realize to people
+      remote from them in time and place. They were men of extraordinary
+      dignity, of the thing called presence, for want of some clearer word, so
+      that no one could well approach them in a personally light or trifling
+      spirit. I do not suppose that anybody more truly valued them or more
+      piously loved them than Clemens himself, but the intoxication of his fancy
+      carried him beyond the bounds of that regard, and emboldened him to the
+      other thing which he had not taken into account-namely, the immense hazard
+      of working his fancy out before their faces, and expecting them to enter
+      into the delight of it. If neither Emerson, nor Longfellow, nor Holmes had
+      been there, the scheme might possibly have carried, but even this is
+      doubtful, for those who so devoutly honored them would have overcome their
+      horror with difficulty, and perhaps would not have overcome it at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The publisher, with a modesty very ungrateful to me, had abdicated his
+      office of host, and I was the hapless president, fulfilling the abhorred.
+      function of calling people to their feet and making them speak. When I
+      came to Clemens I introduced him with the cordial admiring I had for him
+      as one of my greatest contributors and dearest friends. Here, I said, in
+      sum, was a humorist who never left you hanging your head for having
+      enjoyed his joke; and then the amazing mistake, the bewildering blunder,
+      the cruel catastrophe was upon us. I believe that after the scope of the
+      burlesque made itself clear, there was no one there, including the
+      burlesquer himself, who was not smitten with a desolating dismay. There
+      fell a silence, weighing many tons to the square inch, which deepened from
+      moment to moment, and was broken only by the hysterical and blood-curdling
+      laughter of a single guest, whose name shall not be handed down to infamy.
+      Nobody knew whether to look at the speaker or down at his plate. I chose
+      my plate as the least affliction, and so I do not know how Clemens looked,
+      except when I stole a glance at him, and saw him standing solitary amid
+      his appalled and appalling listeners, with his joke dead on his hands.
+      From a first glance at the great three whom his jest had made its theme, I
+      was aware of Longfellow sitting upright, and regarding the humorist with
+      an air of pensive puzzle, of Holmes busily writing on his menu, with a
+      well-feigned effect of preoccupation, and of Emerson, holding his elbows,
+      and listening with a sort of Jovian oblivion of this nether world in that
+      lapse of memory which saved him in those later years from so much bother.
+      Clemens must have dragged his joke to the climax and left it there, but I
+      cannot say this from any sense of the fact. Of what happened afterward at
+      the table where the immense, the wholly innocent, the truly unimagined
+      affront was offered, I have no longer the least remembrance. I next
+      remember being in a room of the hotel, where Clemens was not to sleep, but
+      to toss in despair, and Charles Dudley Warner&rsquo;s saying, in the gloom,
+      &ldquo;Well, Mark, you&rsquo;re a funny fellow.&rdquo; It was as well as anything else he
+      could have said, but Clemens seemed unable to accept the tribute.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I stayed the night with him, and the next morning, after a haggard
+      breakfast, we drove about and he made some purchases of bric-a-brac for
+      his house in Hartford, with a soul as far away from bric-a-brac as ever
+      the soul of man was. He went home by an early train, and he lost no time
+      in writing back to the three divine personalities which he had so
+      involuntarily seemed to flout. They all wrote back to him, making it as
+      light for him as they could. I have heard that Emerson was a good deal
+      mystified, and in his sublime forgetfulness asked, Who was this gentleman
+      who appeared to think he had offered him some sort of annoyance! But I am
+      not sure that this is accurate. What I am sure of is that Longfellow, a
+      few days after, in my study, stopped before a photograph of Clemens and
+      said, &ldquo;Ah, he is a wag!&rdquo; and nothing more. Holmes told me, with deep
+      emotion, such as a brother humorist might well feel, that he had not lost
+      an instant in replying to Clemens&rsquo;s letter, and assuring him that there
+      had not been the least offence, and entreating him never to think of the
+      matter again. &ldquo;He said that he was a fool, but he was God&rsquo;s fool,&rdquo; Holmes
+      quoted from the letter, with a true sense of the pathos and the humor of
+      the self-abasement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To me Clemens wrote a week later, &ldquo;It doesn&rsquo;t get any better; it burns
+      like fire.&rdquo; But now I understand that it was not shame that burnt, but
+      rage for a blunder which he had so incredibly committed. That to have
+      conceived of those men, the most dignified in our literature, our
+      civilization, as impersonable by three hoboes, and then to have imagined
+      that he could ask them personally to enjoy the monstrous travesty, was a
+      break, he saw too late, for which there was no repair. Yet the time came,
+      and not so very long afterward, when some mention was made of the incident
+      as a mistake, and he said, with all his fierceness, &ldquo;But I don&rsquo;t admit
+      that it was a mistake,&rdquo; and it was not so in the minds of all witnesses at
+      second hand. The morning after the dreadful dinner there came a glowing
+      note from Professor Child, who had read the newspaper report of it,
+      praising Clemens&rsquo;s burlesque as the richest piece of humor in the world,
+      and betraying no sense of incongruity in its perpetration in the presence
+      of its victims. I think it must always have ground in Clemens&rsquo;s soul, that
+      he was the prey of circumstances, and that if he had some more favoring
+      occasion he could retrieve his loss in it by giving the thing the right
+      setting. Not more than two or three years ago, he came to try me as to
+      trying it again at a meeting of newspaper men in Washington. I had to own
+      my fears, while I alleged Child&rsquo;s note on the other hand, but in the end
+      he did not try it with the newspaper men. I do not know whether he has
+      ever printed it or not, but since the thing happened I have often wondered
+      how much offence there really was in it. I am not sure but the horror of
+      the spectators read more indignation into the subjects of the hapless
+      drolling than they felt. But it must have been difficult for them to bear
+      it with equanimity. To be sure, they were not themselves mocked; the joke
+      was, of course, beside them; nevertheless, their personality was trifled
+      with, and I could only end by reflecting that if I had been in their place
+      I should not have liked it myself. Clemens would have liked it himself,
+      for he had the heart for that sort of wild play, and he so loved a joke
+      that even if it took the form of a liberty, and was yet a good joke, he
+      would have loved it. But perhaps this burlesque was not a good joke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0110" id="link2H_4_0110">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XVI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Clemens was oftenest at my house in Cambridge, but he was also sometimes
+      at my house in Belmont; when, after a year in Europe, we went to live in
+      Boston, he was more rarely with us. We could never be long together
+      without something out of the common happening, and one day something far
+      out of the common happened, which fortunately refused the nature of
+      absolute tragedy, while remaining rather the saddest sort of comedy. We
+      were looking out of my library window on that view of the Charles which I
+      was so proud of sharing with my all-but-next-door neighbor, Doctor Holmes,
+      when another friend who was with us called out with curiously impersonal
+      interest, &ldquo;Oh, see that woman getting into the water!&rdquo; This would have
+      excited curiosity and alarmed anxiety far less lively than ours, and
+      Clemens and I rushed downstairs and out through my basement and back gate.
+      At the same time a coachman came out of a stable next door, and grappled
+      by the shoulders a woman who was somewhat deliberately getting down the
+      steps to the water over the face of the embankment. Before we could reach
+      them he had pulled her up to the driveway, and stood holding her there
+      while she crazily grieved at her rescue. As soon as he saw us he went back
+      into his stable, and left us with the poor wild creature on our hands. She
+      was not very young and not very pretty, and we could not have flattered
+      ourselves with the notion of anything romantic in her suicidal mania, but
+      we could take her on the broad human level, and on this we proposed to
+      escort her up Beacon Street till we could give her into the keeping of one
+      of those kindly policemen whom our neighborhood knew. Naturally there was
+      no policeman known to us or unknown the whole way to the Public Garden. We
+      had to circumvent our charge in her present design of drowning herself,
+      and walk her past the streets crossing Beacon to the river. At these
+      points it needed considerable reasoning to overcome her wish and some
+      active manoeuvring in both of us to enforce our arguments. Nobody else
+      appeared to be interested, and though we did not court publicity in the
+      performance of the duty so strangely laid upon us, still it was rather
+      disappointing to be so entirely ignored.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are some four or five crossings to the river between 302 Beacon
+      Street and the Public Garden, and the suggestions at our command were
+      pretty well exhausted by the time we reached it. Still the expected
+      policeman was nowhere in sight; but a brilliant thought occurred to
+      Clemens. He asked me where the nearest police station was, and when I told
+      him, he started off at his highest speed, leaving me in sole charge of our
+      hapless ward. All my powers of suasion were now taxed to the utmost, and I
+      began attracting attention as a short, stout gentleman in early middle
+      life endeavoring to distrain a respectable female of her personal liberty,
+      when his accomplice had abandoned him to his wicked design. After a much
+      longer time than I thought I should have taken to get a policeman from the
+      station, Clemens reappeared in easy conversation with an officer who had
+      probably realized that he was in the company of Mark Twain, and was in no
+      hurry to end the interview. He took possession of our captive, and we saw
+      her no more. I now wonder that with our joint instinct for failure we ever
+      got rid of her; but I am sure we did, and few things in life have given me
+      greater relief. When we got back to my house we found the friend we had
+      left there quite unruffled and not much concerned to know the facts of our
+      adventure. My impression is that he had been taking a nap on my lounge; he
+      appeared refreshed and even gay; but if I am inexact in these details he
+      is alive to refute me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0111" id="link2H_4_0111">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XVII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A little after this Clemens went abroad with his family, and lived several
+      years in Germany. His letters still came, but at longer intervals, and the
+      thread of our intimate relations was inevitably broken. He would write me
+      when something I had written pleased him, or when something signal
+      occurred to him, or some political or social outrage stirred him to wrath,
+      and he wished to free his mind in pious profanity. During this sojourn he
+      came near dying of pneumonia in Berlin, and he had slight relapses from it
+      after coming home. In Berlin also he had the honor of dining with the
+      German Emperor at the table of a cousin married to a high officer of the
+      court. Clemens was a man to enjoy such a distinction; he knew how to take
+      it as a delegated recognition from the German people; but as coming from a
+      rather cockahoop sovereign who had as yet only his sovereignty to value
+      himself upon, he was not very proud of it. He expressed a quiet disdain of
+      the event as between the imperiality and himself, on whom it was supposed
+      to confer such glory, crowning his life with the topmost leaf of laurel.
+      He was in the same mood in his account of an English dinner many years
+      before, where there was a &ldquo;little Scotch lord&rdquo; present, to whom the
+      English tacitly referred Clemens&rsquo;s talk, and laughed when the lord
+      laughed, and were grave when he failed to smile. Of all the men I have
+      known he was the farthest from a snob, though he valued recognition, and
+      liked the flattery of the fashionable fair when it came in his way. He
+      would not go out of his way for it, but like most able and brilliant men
+      he loved the minds of women, their wit, their agile cleverness, their
+      sensitive perception, their humorous appreciation, the saucy things they
+      would say, and their pretty, temerarious defiances. He had, of course, the
+      keenest sense of what was truly dignified and truly undignified in people;
+      but he was not really interested in what we call society affairs; they
+      scarcely existed for him, though his books witness how he abhorred the
+      dreadful fools who through some chance of birth or wealth hold themselves
+      different from other men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Commonly he did not keep things to himself, especially dislikes and
+      condemnations. Upon most current events he had strong opinions, and he
+      uttered them strongly. After a while he was silent in them, but if you
+      tried him you found him in them still. He was tremendously worked up by a
+      certain famous trial, as most of us were who lived in the time of it. He
+      believed the accused guilty, but when we met some months after it was
+      over, and I tempted him to speak his mind upon it, he would only say. The
+      man had suffered enough; as if the man had expiated his wrong, and he was
+      not going to do anything to renew his penalty. I found that very curious,
+      very delicate. His continued blame could not come to the sufferer&rsquo;s
+      knowledge, but he felt it his duty to forbear it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was apt to wear himself out in the vehemence of his resentments; or, he
+      had so spent himself in uttering them that he had literally nothing more
+      to say. You could offer Clemens offences that would anger other men and he
+      did not mind; he would account for them from human nature; but if he
+      thought you had in any way played him false you were anathema and
+      maranatha forever. Yet not forever, perhaps, for by and-by, after years,
+      he would be silent. There were two men, half a generation apart in their
+      succession, whom he thought equally atrocious in their treason to him, and
+      of whom he used to talk terrifyingly, even after they were out of the
+      world. He went farther than Heine, who said that he forgave his enemies,
+      but not till they were dead. Clemens did not forgive his dead enemies;
+      their death seemed to deepen their crimes, like a base evasion, or a
+      cowardly attempt to escape; he pursued them to the grave; he would like to
+      dig them up and take vengeance upon their clay. So he said, but no doubt
+      he would not have hurt them if he had had them living before him. He was
+      generous without stint; he trusted without measure, but where his
+      generosity was abused, or his trust betrayed, he was a fire of vengeance,
+      a consuming flame of suspicion that no sprinkling of cool patience from
+      others could quench; it had to burn itself out. He was eagerly and
+      lavishly hospitable, but if a man seemed willing to batten on him, or in
+      any way to lie down upon him, Clemens despised him unutterably. In his
+      frenzies of resentment or suspicion he would not, and doubtless could not,
+      listen to reason. But if between the paroxysms he were confronted with the
+      facts he would own them, no matter how much they told against him. At one
+      period he fancied that a certain newspaper was hounding him with biting
+      censure and poisonous paragraphs, and he was filling himself up with wrath
+      to be duly discharged on the editor&rsquo;s head. Later, he wrote me with a
+      humorous joy in his mistake that Warner had advised him to have the paper
+      watched for these injuries. He had done so, and how many mentions of him
+      did I reckon he had found in three months? Just two, and they were rather
+      indifferent than unfriendly. So the paper was acquitted, and the editor&rsquo;s
+      life was spared. The wretch never knew how near he was to losing it, with
+      incredible preliminaries of obloquy, and a subsequent devotion to lasting
+      infamy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His memory for favors was as good as for injuries, and he liked to return
+      your friendliness with as loud a band of music as could be bought or
+      bribed for the occasion. All that you had to do was to signify that you
+      wanted his help. When my father was consul at Toronto during Arthur&rsquo;s
+      administration, he fancied that his place was in danger, and he appealed
+      to me. In turn I appealed to Clemens, bethinking myself of his friendship
+      with Grant and Grant&rsquo;s friendship with Arthur. I asked him to write to
+      Grant in my father&rsquo;s behalf, but No, he answered me, I must come to
+      Hartford, and we would go on to New York together and see Grant
+      personally. This was before, and long before, Clemens became Grant&rsquo;s
+      publisher and splendid benefactor, but the men liked each other as such
+      men could not help doing. Clemens made the appointment, and we went to
+      find Grant in his business office, that place where his business innocence
+      was afterward so betrayed. He was very simple and very cordial, and I was
+      instantly the more at home with him, because his voice was the soft,
+      rounded, Ohio River accent to which my years were earliest used from my
+      steamboating uncles, my earliest heroes. When I stated my business he
+      merely said, Oh no; that must not be; he would write to Mr. Arthur; and he
+      did so that day; and my father lived to lay down his office, when he tired
+      of it, with no urgence from above.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not irrelevant to Clemens to say that Grant seemed to like finding
+      himself in company with two literary men, one of whom at least he could
+      make sure of, and unlike that silent man he was reputed, he talked
+      constantly, and so far as he might he talked literature. At least he
+      talked of John Phoenix, that delightfulest of the early Pacific Slope
+      humorists, whom he had known under his real name of George H. Derby, when
+      they were fellow-cadets at West Point. It was mighty pretty, as Pepys
+      would say, to see the delicate deference Clemens paid our plain hero, and
+      the manly respect with which he listened. While Grant talked, his luncheon
+      was brought in from some unassuming restaurant near by, and he asked us to
+      join him in the baked beans and coffee which were served us in a little
+      room out of the office with about the same circumstance as at a railroad
+      refreshment-counter. The baked beans and coffee were of about the
+      railroad-refreshment quality; but eating them with Grant was like sitting
+      down to baked beans and coffee with Julius Caesar, or Alexander, or some
+      other great Plutarchan captain. One of the highest satisfactions of
+      Clemens&rsquo;s often supremely satisfactory life was his relation to Grant. It
+      was his proud joy to tell how he found Grant about to sign a contract for
+      his book on certainly very good terms, and said to him that he would
+      himself publish the book and give him a percentage three times as large.
+      He said Grant seemed to doubt whether he could honorably withdraw from the
+      negotiation at that point, but Clemens overbore his scruples, and it was
+      his unparalleled privilege, his princely pleasure, to pay the author a far
+      larger check for his work than had ever been paid to an author before. He
+      valued even more than this splendid opportunity the sacred moments in
+      which their business brought him into the presence of the slowly dying,
+      heroically living man whom he was so befriending; and he told me in words
+      which surely lost none of their simple pathos through his report how Grant
+      described his suffering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The prosperity, of this venture was the beginning of Clemens&rsquo;s adversity,
+      for it led to excesses of enterprise which were forms of dissipation. The
+      young sculptor who had come back to him from Paris modelled a small bust
+      of Grant, which Clemens multiplied in great numbers to his great loss, and
+      the success of Grant&rsquo;s book tempted him to launch on publishing seas where
+      his bark presently foundered. The first and greatest of his disasters was
+      the Life of Pope Leo XIII, which he came to tell me of, when he had
+      imagined it, in a sort of delirious exultation. He had no words in which
+      to paint the magnificence of the project, or to forecast its colossal
+      success. It would have a currency bounded only by the number of Catholics
+      in Christendom. It would be translated into every language which was
+      anywhere written or printed; it would be circulated literally in every
+      country of the globe, and Clemens&rsquo;s book agents would carry the
+      prospectuses and then the bound copies of the work to the ends of the
+      whole earth. Not only would every Catholic buy it, but every Catholic
+      must, as he was a good Catholic, as he hoped to be saved. It was a
+      magnificent scheme, and it captivated me, as it had captivated Clemens; it
+      dazzled us both, and neither of us saw the fatal defect in it. We did not
+      consider how often Catholics could not read, how often when they could,
+      they might not wish to read. The event proved that whether they could read
+      or not the immeasurable majority did not wish to read the life of the
+      Pope, though it was written by a dignitary of the Church and issued to the
+      world with every sanction from the Vatican. The failure was incredible to
+      Clemens; his sanguine soul was utterly confounded, and soon a silence fell
+      upon it where it had been so exuberantly jubilant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0112" id="link2H_4_0112">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIX.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The occasions which brought us to New York together were not nearly so
+      frequent as those which united us in Boston, but there was a dinner given
+      him by a friend which remains memorable from the fatuity of two men
+      present, so different in everything but their fatuity. One was the sweet
+      old comedian Billy Florence, who was urging the unsuccessful dramatist
+      across the table to write him a play about Oliver Cromwell, and giving the
+      reasons why he thought himself peculiarly fitted to portray the character
+      of Cromwell. The other was a modestly millioned rich man who was then only
+      beginning to amass the moneys afterward heaped so high, and was still in
+      the condition to be flattered by the condescension of a yet greater
+      millionaire. His contribution to our gaiety was the verbatim report of a
+      call he had made upon William H. Vanderbilt, whom he had found just about
+      starting out of town, with his trunks actually in the front hall, but who
+      had stayed to receive the narrator. He had, in fact, sat down on one of
+      the trunks, and talked with the easiest friendliness, and quite, we were
+      given to infer, like an ordinary human being. Clemens often kept on with
+      some thread of the talk when we came away from a dinner, but now he was
+      silent, as if &ldquo;high sorrowful and cloyed&rdquo;; and it was not till well
+      afterward that I found he had noted the facts from the bitterness with
+      which he mocked the rich man, and the pity he expressed for the actor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had begun before that to amass those evidences against mankind which
+      eventuated with him in his theory of what he called &ldquo;the damned human
+      race.&rdquo; This was not an expression of piety, but of the kind contempt to
+      which he was driven by our follies and iniquities as he had observed them
+      in himself as well as in others. It was as mild a misanthropy, probably,
+      as ever caressed the objects of its malediction. But I believe it was
+      about the year 1900 that his sense of our perdition became insupportable
+      and broke out in a mixed abhorrence and amusement which spared no
+      occasion, so that I could quite understand why Mrs. Clemens should have
+      found some compensation, when kept to her room by sickness, in the
+      reflection that now she should not hear so much about &ldquo;the damned human
+      race.&rdquo; He told of that with the same wild joy that he told of overhearing
+      her repetition of one of his most inclusive profanities, and her
+      explanation that she meant him to hear it so that he might know how it
+      sounded. The contrast of the lurid blasphemy with her heavenly whiteness
+      should have been enough to cure any one less grounded than he in what must
+      be owned was as fixed a habit as smoking with him. When I first knew him
+      he rarely vented his fury in that sort, and I fancy he was under a promise
+      to her which he kept sacred till the wear and tear of his nerves with
+      advancing years disabled him. Then it would be like him to struggle with
+      himself till he could struggle no longer and to ask his promise back, and
+      it would be like her to give it back. His profanity was the heritage of
+      his boyhood and young manhood in social conditions and under the duress of
+      exigencies in which everybody swore about as impersonally as he smoked. It
+      is best to recognize the fact of it, and I do so the more readily because
+      I cannot suppose the Recording Angel really minded it much more than that
+      Guardian. Angel of his. It probably grieved them about equally, but they
+      could equally forgive it. Nothing came of his pose regarding &ldquo;the damned
+      human race&rdquo; except his invention of the Human Race Luncheon Club. This was
+      confined to four persons who were never all got together, and it soon
+      perished of their indifference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the earlier days that I have more specially in mind one of the
+      questions that we used to debate a good deal was whether every human
+      motive was not selfish. We inquired as to every impulse, the noblest, the
+      holiest in effect, and he found them in the last analysis of selfish
+      origin. Pretty nearly the whole time of a certain railroad run from New
+      York to Hartford was taken up with the scrutiny of the self-sacrifice of a
+      mother for her child, of the abandon of the lover who dies in saving his
+      mistress from fire or flood, of the hero&rsquo;s courage in the field and the
+      martyr&rsquo;s at the stake. Each he found springing from the unconscious love
+      of self and the dread of the greater pain which the self-sacrificer would
+      suffer in-forbearing the sacrifice. If we had any time left from this
+      inquiry that day, he must have devoted it to a high regret that Napoleon
+      did not carry out his purpose of invading England, for then he would have
+      destroyed the feudal aristocracy, or &ldquo;reformed the lords,&rdquo; as it might be
+      called now. He thought that would have been an incalculable blessing to
+      the English people and the world. Clemens was always beautifully and
+      unfalteringly a republican. None of his occasional misgivings for America
+      implicated a return to monarchy. Yet he felt passionately the splendor of
+      the English monarchy, and there was a time when he gloried in that
+      figurative poetry by which the king was phrased as &ldquo;the Majesty of
+      England.&rdquo; He rolled the words deep-throatedly out, and exulted in their
+      beauty as if it were beyond any other glory of the world. He read, or read
+      at, English history a great deal, and one of the by-products of his
+      restless invention was a game of English Kings (like the game of Authors)
+      for children. I do not know whether he ever perfected this, but I am quite
+      sure it was not put upon the market. Very likely he brought it to a
+      practicable stage, and then tired of it, as he was apt to do in the
+      ultimation of his vehement undertakings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0113" id="link2H_4_0113">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XX.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      He satisfied the impassioned demand of his nature for incessant activities
+      of every kind by taking a personal as well as a pecuniary interest in the
+      inventions of others. At one moment &ldquo;the damned human race&rdquo; was almost to
+      be redeemed by a process of founding brass without air bubbles in it; if
+      this could once be accomplished, as I understood, or misunderstood, brass
+      could be used in art-printing to a degree hitherto impossible. I dare say
+      I have got it wrong, but I am not mistaken as to Clemens&rsquo;s enthusiasm for
+      the process, and his heavy losses in paying its way to ultimate failure.
+      He was simultaneously absorbed in the perfection of a type-setting
+      machine, which he was paying the inventor a salary to bring to a
+      perfection so expensive that it was practically impracticable. We were
+      both printers by trade, and I could take the same interest in this
+      wonderful piece of mechanism that he could; and it was so truly wonderful
+      that it did everything but walk and talk. Its ingenious creator was so
+      bent upon realizing the highest ideal in it that he produced a machine of
+      quite unimpeachable efficiency. But it was so costly, when finished, that
+      it could not be made for less than twenty thousand dollars, if the parts
+      were made by hand. This sum was prohibitive of its introduction, unless
+      the requisite capital could be found for making the parts by machinery,
+      and Clemens spent many months in vainly trying to get this money together.
+      In the mean time simpler machines had been invented and the market filled,
+      and his investment of three hundred thousand dollars in the beautiful
+      miracle remained permanent but not profitable. I once went with him to
+      witness its performance, and it did seem to me the last word in its way,
+      but it had been spoken too exquisitely, too fastidiously. I never heard
+      him devote the inventor to the infernal gods, as he was apt to do with the
+      geniuses he lost money by, and so I think he did not regard him as a
+      traitor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In these things, and in his other schemes for the &lsquo;subiti guadagni&rsquo; of the
+      speculator and the &ldquo;sudden making of splendid names&rdquo; for the benefactors
+      of our species, Clemens satisfied the Colonel Sellers nature in himself
+      (from which he drew the picture of that wild and lovable figure), and
+      perhaps made as good use of his money as he could. He did not care much
+      for money in itself, but he luxuriated in the lavish use of it, and he was
+      as generous with it as ever a man was. He liked giving it, but he commonly
+      wearied of giving it himself, and wherever he lived he established an
+      almoner, whom he fully trusted to keep his left hand ignorant of what his
+      right hand was doing. I believe he felt no finality in charity, but did it
+      because in its provisional way it was the only thing a man could do. I
+      never heard him go really into any sociological inquiry, and I have a
+      feeling that that sort of thing baffled and dispirited him. No one can
+      read The Connecticut Yankee and not be aware of the length and breadth of
+      his sympathies with poverty, but apparently he had not thought out any
+      scheme for righting the economic wrongs we abound in. I cannot remember
+      our ever getting quite down to a discussion of the matter; we came very
+      near it once in the day of the vast wave of emotion sent over the world by
+      &lsquo;Looking Backward,&rsquo; and again when we were all so troubled by the great
+      coal strike in Pennsylvania; in considering that he seemed to be for the
+      time doubtful of the justice of the workingman&rsquo;s cause. At all other times
+      he seemed to know that whatever wrongs the workingman committed work was
+      always in the right.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Clemens returned to America with his family, after lecturing round
+      the world, I again saw him in New York, where I so often saw him while he
+      was shaping himself for that heroic enterprise. He would come to me, and
+      talk sorrowfully over his financial ruin, and picture it to himself as the
+      stuff of some unhappy dream, which, after long prosperity, had culminated
+      the wrong way. It was very melancholy, very touching, but the sorrow to
+      which he had come home from his long journey had not that forlorn
+      bewilderment in it. He was looking wonderfully well, and when I wanted the
+      name of his elixir, he said it was plasmon. He was apt, for a man who had
+      put faith so decidedly away from him, to take it back and pin it to some
+      superstition, usually of a hygienic sort. Once, when he was well on in
+      years, he came to New York without glasses, and announced that he and all
+      his family, so astigmatic and myopic and old-sighted, had, so to speak,
+      burned their spectacles behind them upon the instruction of some sage who
+      had found out that they were a delusion. The next time he came he wore
+      spectacles freely, almost ostentatiously, and I heard from others that the
+      whole Clemens family had been near losing their eyesight by the miracle
+      worked in their behalf. Now, I was not surprised to learn that &ldquo;the damned
+      human race&rdquo; was to be saved by plasmon, if anything, and that my first
+      duty was to visit the plasmon agency with him, and procure enough plasmon
+      to secure my family against the ills it was heir to for evermore. I did
+      not immediately understand that plasmon was one of the investments which
+      he had made from &ldquo;the substance of things hoped for,&rdquo; and in the destiny
+      of a disastrous disappointment. But after paying off the creditors of his
+      late publishing firm, he had to do something with his money, and it was
+      not his fault if he did not make a fortune out of plasmon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0114" id="link2H_4_0114">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      For a time it was a question whether he should not go back with his family
+      to their old home in Hartford. Perhaps the father&rsquo;s and mother&rsquo;s hearts
+      drew them there all the more strongly because of the grief written
+      ineffaceably over it, but for the younger ones it was no longer the
+      measure of the world. It was easier for all to stay on indefinitely in New
+      York, which is a sojourn without circumstance, and equally the home of
+      exile and of indecision. The Clemenses took a pleasant, spacious house at
+      Riverdale, on the Hudson, and there I began to see them again on something
+      like the sweet old terms. They lived far more unpretentiously than they
+      used, and I think with a notion of economy, which they had never very
+      successfully practised. I recall that at the end of a certain year in
+      Hartford, when they had been saving and paying cash for everything,
+      Clemens wrote, reminding me of their avowed experiment, and asking me to
+      guess how many bills they had at New Year&rsquo;s; he hastened to say that a
+      horse-car would not have held them. At Riverdale they kept no carriage,
+      and there was a snowy night when I drove up to their handsome old mansion
+      in the station carryall, which was crusted with mud as from the going down
+      of the Deluge after transporting Noah and his family from the Ark to
+      whatever point they decided to settle at provisionally. But the good talk,
+      the rich talk, the talk that could never suffer poverty of mind or soul,
+      was there, and we jubilantly found ourselves again in our middle youth. It
+      was the mighty moment when Clemens was building his engines of war for the
+      destruction of Christian Science, which superstition nobody, and he least
+      of all, expected to destroy. It would not be easy to say whether in his
+      talk of it his disgust for the illiterate twaddle of Mrs. Eddy&rsquo;s book, or
+      his admiration of her genius for organization was the greater. He believed
+      that as a religious machine the Christian Science Church was as perfect as
+      the Roman Church and destined to be, more formidable in its control of the
+      minds of men. He looked for its spread over the whole of Christendom, and
+      throughout the winter he spent at Riverdale he was ready to meet all
+      listeners more than half-way with his convictions of its powerful grasp of
+      the average human desire to get something for nothing. The vacuous
+      vulgarity of its texts was a perpetual joy to him, while he bowed with
+      serious respect to the sagacity which built so securely upon the
+      everlasting rock of human credulity and folly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An interesting phase of his psychology in this business was not only his
+      admiration for the masterly, policy of the Christian Science hierarchy,
+      but his willingness to allow the miracles of its healers to be tried on
+      his friends and family, if they wished it. He had a tender heart for the
+      whole generation of empirics, as well as the newer sorts of scientitians,
+      but he seemed to base his faith in them largely upon the failure of the
+      regulars rather than upon their own successes, which also he believed in.
+      He was recurrently, but not insistently, desirous that you should try
+      their strange magics when you were going to try the familiar medicines.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0115" id="link2H_4_0115">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The order of my acquaintance, or call it intimacy, with Clemens was this:
+      our first meeting in Boston, my visits to him in Hartford, his visits to
+      me in Cambridge, in Belmont, and in Boston, our briefer and less frequent
+      meetings in Paris and New York, all with repeated interruptions through my
+      absences in Europe, and his sojourns in London, Berlin, Vienna, and
+      Florence, and his flights to the many ends, and odds and ends, of the
+      earth. I will not try to follow the events, if they were not rather the
+      subjective experiences, of those different periods and points of time
+      which I must not fail to make include his summer at York Harbor, and his
+      divers residences in New York, on Tenth Street and on Fifth Avenue, at
+      Riverdale, and at Stormfield, which his daughter has told me he loved best
+      of all his houses and hoped to make his home for long years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not much remains to me of the week or so that we had together in Paris
+      early in the summer of 1904. The first thing I got at my bankers was a
+      cable message announcing that my father was stricken with paralysis, but
+      urging my stay for further intelligence, and I went about, till the final
+      summons came, with my head in a mist of care and dread. Clemens was very
+      kind and brotherly through it all. He was living greatly to his mind in
+      one of those arcaded little hotels in the Rue de Rivoli, and he was free
+      from all household duties to range with me. We drove together to make
+      calls of digestion at many houses where he had got indigestion through his
+      reluctance from their hospitality, for he hated dining out. But, as he
+      explained, his wife wanted him to make these visits, and he did it, as he
+      did everything she wanted. &lsquo;At one place, some suburban villa, he could
+      get no answer to his ring, and he &ldquo;hove&rdquo; his cards over the gate just as
+      it opened, and he had the shame of explaining in his unexplanatory French
+      to the man picking them up. He was excruciatingly helpless with his
+      cabmen, but by very cordially smiling and casting himself on the drivers&rsquo; 
+      mercy he always managed to get where he wanted. The family was on the
+      verge of their many moves, and he was doing some small errands; he said
+      that the others did the main things, and left him to do what the cat
+      might.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was with that return upon the buoyant billow of plasmon, renewed in
+      look and limb, that Clemens&rsquo;s universally pervasive popularity began in
+      his own country. He had hitherto been more intelligently accepted or more
+      largely imagined in Europe, and I suppose it was my sense of this that
+      inspired the stupidity of my saying to him when we came to consider &ldquo;the
+      state of polite learning&rdquo; among us, &ldquo;You mustn&rsquo;t expect people to keep it
+      up here as they do in England.&rdquo; But it appeared that his countrymen were
+      only wanting the chance, and they kept it up in honor of him past all
+      precedent. One does not go into a catalogue of dinners, receptions,
+      meetings, speeches, and the like, when there are more vital things to
+      speak of. He loved these obvious joys, and he eagerly strove with the
+      occasions they gave him for the brilliancy which seemed so exhaustless and
+      was so exhausting. His friends saw that he was wearing himself out, and it
+      was not because of Mrs. Clemens&rsquo;s health alone that they were glad to have
+      him take refuge at Riverdale. The family lived there two happy, hopeless
+      years, and then it was ordered that they should change for his wife&rsquo;s sake
+      to some less exacting climate. Clemens was not eager to go to Florence,
+      but his imagination was taken as it would have been in the old-young days
+      by the notion of packing his furniture into flexible steel cages from his
+      house in Hartford and unpacking it from them untouched at his villa in
+      Fiesole. He got what pleasure any man could out of that triumph of mind
+      over matter, but the shadow was creeping up his life. One sunny afternoon
+      we sat on the grass before the mansion, after his wife had begun to get
+      well enough for removal, and we looked up toward a balcony where by-and-by
+      that lovely presence made itself visible, as if it had stooped there from
+      a cloud. A hand frailly waved a handkerchief; Clemens ran over the lawn
+      toward it, calling tenderly: &ldquo;What? What?&rdquo; as if it might be an asking for
+      him instead of the greeting it really was for me. It was the last time I
+      saw her, if indeed I can be said to have seen her then, and long afterward
+      when I said how beautiful we all thought her, how good, how wise, how
+      wonderfully perfect in every relation of life, he cried out in a breaking
+      voice: &ldquo;Oh, why didn&rsquo;t you ever tell her? She thought you didn&rsquo;t like
+      her.&rdquo; What a pang it was then not to have told her, but how could we have
+      told her? His unreason endeared him to me more than all his wisdom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To that Riverdale sojourn belong my impressions of his most violent
+      anti-Christian Science rages, which began with the postponement of his
+      book, and softened into acceptance of the delay till he had well-nigh
+      forgotten his wrath when it come out. There was also one of those joint
+      episodes of ours, which, strangely enough, did not eventuate in entire
+      failure, as most of our joint episodes did. He wrote furiously to me of a
+      wrong which had been done to one of the most helpless and one of the most
+      helped of our literary brethren, asking me to join with him in recovering
+      the money paid over by that brother&rsquo;s publisher to a false friend who had
+      withheld it and would not give any account of it. Our hapless brother had
+      appealed to Clemens, as he had to me, with the facts, but not asking our
+      help, probably because he knew he need not ask; and Clemens enclosed to me
+      a very taking-by-the-throat message which he proposed sending to the false
+      friend. For once I had some sense, and answered that this would never do,
+      for we had really no power in the matter, and I contrived a letter to the
+      recreant so softly diplomatic that I shall always think of it with pride
+      when my honesties no longer give me satisfaction, saying that this
+      incident had come to our knowledge, and suggesting that we felt sure he
+      would not finally wish to withhold the money. Nothing more, practically,
+      than that, but that was enough; there came promptly back a letter of
+      justification, covering a very substantial check, which we hilariously
+      forwarded to our beneficiary. But the helpless man who was so used to
+      being helped did not answer with the gladness I, at least, expected of
+      him. He acknowledged the check as he would any ordinary payment, and then
+      he made us observe that there was still a large sum due him out of the
+      moneys withheld. At this point I proposed to Clemens that we should let
+      the nonchalant victim collect the remnant himself. Clouds of sorrow had
+      gathered about the bowed head of the delinquent since we began on him, and
+      my fickle sympathies were turning his way from the victim who was really
+      to blame for leaving his affairs so unguardedly to him in the first place.
+      Clemens made some sort of grit assent, and we dropped the matter. He was
+      more used to ingratitude from those he helped than I was, who found being
+      lain down upon not so amusing as he found my revolt. He reckoned I was
+      right, he said, and after that I think we never recurred to the incident.
+      It was not ingratitude that he ever minded; it was treachery, that really
+      maddened him past forgiveness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0116" id="link2H_4_0116">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      During the summer he spent at York Harbor I was only forty minutes away at
+      Kittery Point, and we saw each other often; but this was before the last
+      time at Riverdale. He had a wide, low cottage in a pine grove overlooking
+      York River, and we used to sit at a corner of the veranda farthest away
+      from Mrs. Clemens&rsquo;s window, where we could read our manuscripts to each
+      other, and tell our stories, and laugh our hearts out without disturbing
+      her. At first she had been about the house, and there was one gentle
+      afternoon when she made tea for us in the parlor, but that was the last
+      time I spoke with her. After that it was really a question of how soonest
+      and easiest she could be got back to Riverdale; but, of course, there were
+      specious delays in which she seemed no worse and seemed a little better,
+      and Clemens could work at a novel he had begun. He had taken a room in the
+      house of a friend and neighbor, a fisherman and boatman; there was a table
+      where he could write, and a bed where he could lie down and read; and
+      there, unless my memory has played me one of those constructive tricks
+      that people&rsquo;s memories indulge in, he read me the first chapters of an
+      admirable story. The scene was laid in a Missouri town, and the characters
+      such as he had known in boyhood; but as often as I tried to make him own
+      it, he denied having written any such story; it is possible that I dreamed
+      it, but I hope the MS. will yet be found. Upon reflection I cannot believe
+      that I dreamed it, and I cannot believe that it was an effect of that sort
+      of pseudomnemonics which I have mentioned. The characters in the novel are
+      too clearly outlined in my recollection, together with some critical
+      reservations of my own concerning them. Not only does he seem to have read
+      me those first chapters, but to have talked them over with me and outlined
+      the whole story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I cannot say whether or not he believed that his wife would recover; he
+      fought the fear of her death to the end; for her life was far more largely
+      his than the lives of most men&rsquo;s wives are theirs. For his own life I
+      believe he would never have much cared, if I may trust a saying of one who
+      was so absolutely without pose as he was. He said that he never saw a dead
+      man whom he did not envy for having had it over and being done with it.
+      Life had always amused him, and in the resurgence of its interests after
+      his sorrow had ebbed away he was again deeply interested in the world and
+      in the human race, which, though damned, abounded in subjects of curious
+      inquiry. When the time came for his wife&rsquo;s removal from York Harbor I went
+      with him to Boston, where he wished to look up the best means of her
+      conveyance to New York. The inquiry absorbed him: the sort of invalid car
+      he could get; how she could be carried to the village station; how the car
+      could be detached from the eastern train at Boston and carried round to
+      the southern train on the other side of the city, and then how it could be
+      attached to the Hudson River train at New York and left at Riverdale.
+      There was no particular of the business which he did not scrutinize and
+      master, not only with his poignant concern for her welfare, but with his
+      strong curiosity as to how these unusual things were done with the usual
+      means. With the inertness that grows upon an aging man he had been used to
+      delegating more and more things, but of that thing I perceived that he
+      would not delegate the least detail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had meant never to go abroad again, but when it came time to go he did
+      not look forward to returning; he expected to live in Florence always
+      after that; they were used to the life and they had been happy there some
+      years earlier before he went with his wife for the cure of Nauheim. But
+      when he came home again it was for good and all. It was natural that he
+      should wish to live in New York, where they had already had a pleasant
+      year in Tenth Street. I used to see him there in an upper room, looking
+      south over a quiet open space of back yards where we fought our battles in
+      behalf of the Filipinos and the Boers, and he carried on his campaign
+      against the missionaries in China. He had not yet formed his habit of
+      lying for whole days in bed and reading and writing there, yet he was a
+      good deal in bed, from weakness, I suppose, and for the mere comfort of
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My perspectives are not very clear, and in the foreshortening of events
+      which always takes place in our review of the past I may not always time
+      things aright. But I believe it was not until he had taken his house at 21
+      Fifth Avenue that he began to talk to me of writing his autobiography. He
+      meant that it should be a perfectly veracious record of his life and
+      period; for the first time in literature there should be a true history of
+      a man and a true presentation of the men the man had known. As we talked
+      it over the scheme enlarged itself in our riotous fancy. We said it should
+      be not only a book, it should be a library, not only a library, but a
+      literature. It should make good the world&rsquo;s loss through Omar&rsquo;s barbarity
+      at Alexandria; there was no image so grotesque, so extravagant that we did
+      not play with it; and the work so far as he carried it was really done on
+      a colossal scale. But one day he said that as to veracity it was a
+      failure; he had begun to lie, and that if no man ever yet told the truth
+      about himself it was because no man ever could. How far he had carried his
+      autobiography I cannot say; he dictated the matter several hours each day;
+      and the public has already seen long passages from it, and can judge,
+      probably, of the make and matter of the whole from these. It is immensely
+      inclusive, and it observes no order or sequence. Whether now, after his
+      death, it will be published soon or late I have no means of knowing. Once
+      or twice he said in a vague way that it was not to be published for twenty
+      years, so that the discomfort of publicity might be minimized for all the
+      survivors. Suddenly he told me he was not working at it; but I did not
+      understand whether he had finished it or merely dropped it; I never asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We lived in the same city, but for old men rather far apart, he at Tenth
+      Street and I at Seventieth, and with our colds and other disabilities we
+      did not see each other often. He expected me to come to him, and I would
+      not without some return of my visits, but we never ceased to be friends,
+      and good friends, so far as I know. I joked him once as to how I was going
+      to come out in his autobiography, and he gave me some sort of joking
+      reassurance. There was one incident, however, that brought us very
+      frequently and actively together. He came one Sunday afternoon to have me
+      call with him on Maxim Gorky, who was staying at a hotel a few streets
+      above mine. We were both interested in Gorky, Clemens rather more as a
+      revolutionist and I as a realist, though I too wished the Russian Tsar
+      ill, and the novelist well in his mission to the Russian sympathizers in
+      this republic. But I had lived through the episode of Kossuth&rsquo;s visit to
+      us and his vain endeavor to raise funds for the Hungarian cause in 1851,
+      when we were a younger and nobler nation than now, with hearts if not
+      hands, opener to the &ldquo;oppressed of Europe&rdquo;; the oppressed of America, the
+      four or five millions of slaves, we did not count. I did not believe that
+      Gorky could get the money for the cause of freedom in Russia which he had
+      come to get; as I told a valued friend of his and mine, I did not believe
+      he could get twenty-five hundred dollars, and I think now I set the figure
+      too high. I had already refused to sign the sort of general appeal his
+      friends were making to our principles and pockets because I felt it so
+      wholly idle, and when the paper was produced in Gorky&rsquo;s presence and
+      Clemens put his name to it I still refused. The next day Gorky was
+      expelled from his hotel with the woman who was not his wife, but who, I am
+      bound to say, did not look as if she were not, at least to me, who am,
+      however, not versed in those aspects of human nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I might have escaped unnoted, but Clemens&rsquo;s familiar head gave us away to
+      the reporters waiting at the elevator&rsquo;s mouth for all who went to see
+      Gorky. As it was, a hunt of interviewers ensued for us severally and
+      jointly. I could remain aloof in my hotel apartment, returning answer to
+      such guardians of the public right to know everything that I had nothing
+      to say of Gorky&rsquo;s domestic affairs; for the public interest had now
+      strayed far from the revolution, and centred entirely upon these. But with
+      Clemens it was different; he lived in a house with a street door kept by a
+      single butler, and he was constantly rung for. I forget how long the siege
+      lasted, but long enough for us to have fun with it. That was the moment of
+      the great Vesuvian eruption, and we figured ourselves in easy reach of a
+      volcano which was every now and then &ldquo;blowing a cone off,&rdquo; as the
+      telegraphic phrase was. The roof of the great market in Naples had just
+      broken in under its load of ashes and cinders, and crashed hundreds of
+      people; and we asked each other if we were not sorry we had not been
+      there, where the pressure would have been far less terrific than it was
+      with us in Fifth Avenue. The forbidden butler came up with a message that
+      there were some gentlemen below who wanted to see Clemens.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How many?&rdquo; he demanded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Five,&rdquo; the butler faltered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Reporters?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The butler feigned uncertainty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What would you do?&rdquo; he asked me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wouldn&rsquo;t see them,&rdquo; I said, and then Clemens went directly down to
+      them. How or by what means he appeased their voracity I cannot say, but I
+      fancy it was by the confession of the exact truth, which was harmless
+      enough. They went away joyfully, and he came back in radiant satisfaction
+      with having seen them. Of course he was right and I wrong, and he was
+      right as to the point at issue between Gorky and those who had helplessly
+      treated him with such cruel ignominy. In America it is not the convention
+      for men to live openly in hotels with women who are not their wives. Gorky
+      had violated this convention and he had to pay the penalty; and concerning
+      the destruction of his efficiency as an emissary of the revolution, his
+      blunder was worse than a crime.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0117" id="link2H_4_0117">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXIV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      To the period of Clemens&rsquo;s residence in Fifth Avenue belongs his
+      efflorescence in white serge. He was always rather aggressively
+      indifferent about dress, and at a very early date in our acquaintance
+      Aldrich and I attempted his reform by clubbing to buy him a cravat. But he
+      would not put away his stiff little black bow, and until he imagined the
+      suit of white serge, he wore always a suit of black serge, truly
+      deplorable in the cut of the sagging frock. After his measure had once
+      been taken he refused to make his clothes the occasion of personal
+      interviews with his tailor; he sent the stuff by the kind elderly woman
+      who had been in the service of the family from the earliest days of his
+      marriage, and accepted the result without criticism. But the white serge
+      was an inspiration which few men would have had the courage to act upon.
+      The first time I saw him wear it was at the authors&rsquo; hearing before the
+      Congressional Committee on Copyright in Washington. Nothing could have
+      been more dramatic than the gesture with which he flung off his long loose
+      overcoat, and stood forth in white from his feet to the crown of his
+      silvery head. It was a magnificent coup, and he dearly loved a coup; but
+      the magnificent speech which he made, tearing to shreds the venerable
+      farrago of nonsense about nonproperty in ideas which had formed the basis
+      of all copyright legislation, made you forget even his spectacularity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is well known how proud he was of his Oxford gown, not merely because
+      it symbolized the honor in which he was held by the highest literary body
+      in the world, but because it was so rich and so beautiful. The red and the
+      lavender of the cloth flattered his eyes as the silken black of the same
+      degree of Doctor of Letters, given him years before at Yale, could not do.
+      His frank, defiant happiness in it, mixed with a due sense of burlesque,
+      was something that those lacking his poet-soul could never imagine; they
+      accounted it vain, weak; but that would not have mattered to him if he had
+      known it. In his London sojourn he had formed the top-hat habit, and for a
+      while he lounged splendidly up and down Fifth Avenue in that society
+      emblem; but he seemed to tire of it, and to return kindly to the soft hat
+      of his Southwestern tradition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He disliked clubs; I don&rsquo;t know whether he belonged to any in New York,
+      but I never met him in one. As I have told, he himself had formed the
+      Human Race Club, but as he never could get it together it hardly counted.
+      There was to have been a meeting of it the time of my only visit to
+      Stormfield in April of last year; but of three who were to have come I
+      alone came. We got on very well without the absentees, after finding them
+      in the wrong, as usual, and the visit was like those I used to have with
+      him so many years before in Hartford, but there was not the old ferment of
+      subjects. Many things had been discussed and put away for good, but we had
+      our old fondness for nature and for each other, who were so differently
+      parts of it. He showed his absolute content with his house, and that was
+      the greater pleasure for me because it was my son who designed it. The
+      architect had been so fortunate as to be able to plan it where a natural
+      avenue of savins, the closeknit, slender, cypress-like cedars of New
+      England, led away from the rear of the villa to the little level of a
+      pergola, meant some day to be wreathed and roofed with vines. But in the
+      early spring days all the landscape was in the beautiful nakedness of the
+      northern winter. It opened in the surpassing loveliness of wooded and
+      meadowed uplands, under skies that were the first days blue, and the last
+      gray over a rainy and then a snowy floor. We walked up and down, up and
+      down, between the villa terrace and the pergola, and talked with the
+      melancholy amusement, the sad tolerance of age for the sort of men and
+      things that used to excite us or enrage us; now we were far past
+      turbulence or anger. Once we took a walk together across the yellow
+      pastures to a chasmal creek on his grounds, where the ice still knit the
+      clayey banks together like crystal mosses; and the stream far down clashed
+      through and over the stones and the shards of ice. Clemens pointed out the
+      scenery he had bought to give himself elbow-room, and showed me the lot he
+      was going to have me build on. The next day we came again with the
+      geologist he had asked up to Stormfield to analyze its rocks. Truly he
+      loved the place, though he had been so weary of change and so indifferent
+      to it that he never saw it till he came to live in it. He left it all to
+      the architect whom he had known from a child in the intimacy which bound
+      our families together, though we bodily lived far enough apart. I loved
+      his little ones and he was sweet to mine and was their delighted-in and
+      wondered-at friend. Once and once again, and yet again and again, the
+      black shadow that shall never be lifted where it falls, fell in his house
+      and in mine, during the forty years and more that we were friends, and
+      endeared us the more to each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0118" id="link2H_4_0118">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XXV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      My visit at Stormfield came to an end with tender relucting on his part
+      and on mine. Every morning before I dressed I heard him sounding my name
+      through the house for the fun of it and I know for the fondness; and if I
+      looked out of my door, there he was in his long nightgown swaying up and
+      down the corridor, and wagging his great white head like a boy that leaves
+      his bed and comes out in the hope of frolic with some one. The last
+      morning a soft sugarsnow had fallen and was falling, and I drove through
+      it down to the station in the carriage which had been given him by his
+      wife&rsquo;s father when they were first married, and been kept all those
+      intervening years in honorable retirement for this final use. Its springs
+      had not grown yielding with time; it had rather the stiffness and severity
+      of age; but for him it must have swung low like the sweet chariot of the
+      negro &ldquo;spiritual&rdquo; which I heard him sing with such fervor, when those
+      wonderful hymns of the slaves began to make their way northward. &lsquo;Go Down,
+      Daniel&rsquo;, was one in which I can hear his quavering tenor now. He was a
+      lover of the things he liked, and full of a passion for them which
+      satisfied itself in reading them matchlessly aloud. No one could read
+      &lsquo;Uncle Remus&rsquo; like him; his voice echoed the voices of the negro nurses
+      who told his childhood the wonderful tales. I remember especially his
+      rapture with Mr. Cable&rsquo;s &lsquo;Old Creole Days,&rsquo; and the thrilling force with
+      which he gave the forbidding of the leper&rsquo;s brother when the city&rsquo;s survey
+      ran the course of an avenue through the cottage where the leper lived in
+      hiding: &ldquo;Strit must not pass!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Out of a nature rich and fertile beyond any I have known, the material
+      given him by the Mystery that makes a man and then leaves him to make
+      himself over, he wrought a character of high nobility upon a foundation of
+      clear and solid truth. At the last day he will not have to confess
+      anything, for all his life was the free knowledge of any one who would ask
+      him of it. The Searcher of hearts will not bring him to shame at that day,
+      for he did not try to hide any of the things for which he was often so
+      bitterly sorry. He knew where the Responsibility lay, and he took a man&rsquo;s
+      share of it bravely; but not the less fearlessly he left the rest of the
+      answer to the God who had imagined men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is in vain that I try to give a notion of the intensity with which he
+      pierced to the heart of life, and the breadth of vision with which he
+      compassed the whole world, and tried for the reason of things, and then
+      left trying. We had other meetings, insignificantly sad and brief; but the
+      last time I saw him alive was made memorable to me by the kind, clear
+      judicial sense with which he explained and justified the labor-unions as
+      the sole present help of the weak against the strong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Next I saw him dead, lying in his coffin amid those flowers with which we
+      garland our despair in that pitiless hour. After the voice of his old
+      friend Twichell had been lifted in the prayer which it wailed through in
+      broken-hearted supplication, I looked a moment at the face I knew so well;
+      and it was patient with the patience I had so often seen in it: something
+      of puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be from the
+      depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which
+      the unwise took for the whole of him. Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes&mdash;I
+      knew them all and all the rest of our sages, poets, seers, critics,
+      humorists; they were like one another and like other literary men; but
+      Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0119" id="link2H_4_0119">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ETEXT EDITOR&rsquo;S BOOKMARKS
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+   Absolute devotion to the day of her death,
+   Absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful
+   Abstract, the air-drawn, afflicted me like physical discomforts
+   Act officiously, not officially
+   Addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness
+   Always sumptuously providing out of his destitution
+   Amiable perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence
+   Amuse him, even when they wronged him
+   Amusingly realized the situation to their friends
+   Anglo-American genius for ugliness
+   Appeal, which he had come to recognize as invasive
+   Appeared to have no grudge left
+   Backed their credulity with their credit
+   Bayard Taylor: incomparable translation of Faust
+   Became gratefully strange
+   Best talkers are willing that you should talk if you like
+   But now I remember that he gets twenty dollars a month&rdquo;
+    Candle burning on the table for the cigars
+   Celia Thaxter
+   Charles Reade
+   Charles F. Browne
+   Christianity had done nothing to improve morals and conditions
+   Church: &ldquo;Oh yes, I go It &lsquo;most kills me, but I go,&rdquo;
+    Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature
+   Cold-slaw
+   Collective opacity
+   Confidence I have nearly always felt when wrong
+   Could make us feel that our faults were other people&rsquo;s
+   Could easily believe now that it was some one else who saw it
+   Could only by chance be caught in earnest about anything
+   Couldn&rsquo;t fire your revolver without bringing down a two volumer
+   Dawn upon him through a cloud of other half remembered faces
+   Death of the joy that ought to come from work
+   Death&rsquo;s vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life
+   Despair broke in laughter
+   Despised the avoidance of repetitions out of fear of tautology
+   Did not feel the effect I would so willingly have experienced
+   Dinner was at the old-fashioned Boston hour of two
+   Discomfort which mistaken or blundering praise
+   Dollars were of so much farther flight than now
+   Edmund Quincy
+   Edward Everett Hale
+   Either to deny the substance of things unseen, or to affirm it
+   Emerson
+   Enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself
+   Espoused the theory of Bacon&rsquo;s authorship of Shakespeare
+   Ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense
+   Everlasting rock of human credulity and folly
+   Expectation of those who will come no more
+   Express the appreciation of another&rsquo;s fit word
+   Feigned the gratitude which I could see that he expected
+   Fell either below our pride or rose above our purse
+   Felt that this was my misfortune more than my fault
+   Few men last over from one reform to another
+   First dinner served in courses that I had sat down to
+   Flowers with which we garland our despair in that pitiless hour
+   Forbearance of a wise man content to bide his time
+   Forebore to speak needlessly to him, or to shake his hand
+   Found life was not all poetry
+   Francis Parkman
+   Gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years
+   Generous lover of all that was excellent in literature
+   George William Curtis
+   Giggle which Charles Lamb found the best thing in life
+   Give him your best wine
+   Got out of it all the fun there was in it
+   Greeting of great impersonal cordiality
+   Grieving that there could be such ire in heavenly minds
+   Hard of hearing on one side. But it isn&rsquo;t deafness
+   Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Autocrat clashed upon homeopathy
+   Hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love
+   He was not bored because he would not be
+   He did not care much for fiction
+   He was not constructive; he was essentially observant
+   He had no time to make money
+   He was a youth to the end of his days
+   He did not paw you with his hands to show his affection
+   Heine
+   Heroic lies
+   His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event
+   His readers trusted and loved him
+   His enemies suffered from it almost as much as his friends
+   His coming almost killed her, but it was worth it
+   His plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it
+   Hollowness, the hopelessness, the unworthiness of life
+   Honest men are few when it comes to themselves
+   I find this young man worthy
+   I believe neither in heroes nor in saints
+   I did not know, and I hated to ask
+   If he was half as bad, he would have been too bad to be
+   If he was not there to your touch, it was no fault of his
+   In the South there was nothing but a mistaken social ideal
+   Incredible in their insipidity
+   Industrial slavery
+   Insatiable English fancy for the wild America no longer there
+   Intellectual poseurs
+   It is well to hold one&rsquo;s country to her promises
+   It was mighty pretty, as Pepys would say
+   Jane Austen
+   Julia Ward Howe
+   Left him to do what the cat might
+   Lie, of course, and did to save others from grief or harm
+   Liked being with you, not for what he got, but for what he gave
+   Liked to find out good things and great things for himself
+   Lincoln
+   Literary dislikes or contempts
+   Livy Clemens: nthe loveliest person I have ever seen
+   Long breath was not his; he could not write a novel
+   Longfellow
+   Looked as if Destiny had sat upon it
+   Love of freedom and the hope of justice
+   Love and gratitude are only semi-articulate at the best
+   Lowell
+   Made all men trust him when they doubted his opinions
+   Man who may any moment be out of work is industrially a slave
+   Man who had so much of the boy in him
+   Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know
+   Mellow cordial of a voice that was like no other
+   Memory will not be ruled
+   Men who took themselves so seriously as that need
+   Men&rsquo;s lives ended where they began, in the keeping of women
+   Met with kindness, if not honor
+   Might so far forget myself as to be a novelist
+   Mind and soul were with those who do the hard work of the world
+   Mock modesty of print forbids my repeating here
+   Most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew
+   Most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men
+   Motley
+   Napoleonic height which spiritually overtops the Alps
+   Nearly nothing as chaos could be
+   Never saw a man more regardful of negroes
+   Never saw a dead man whom he did not envy
+   Never paid in anything but hopes of paying
+   No man ever yet told the truth about himself
+   No time to make money
+   No man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery
+   Not quite himself till he had made you aware of his quality
+   Not a man who cared to transcend; he liked bounds
+   Not much patience with the unmanly craving for sympathy
+   Not much of a talker, and almost nothing of a story-teller
+   Not possible for Clemens to write like anybody else
+   Now death has come to join its vague conjectures
+   NYC, a city where money counts for more and goes for less
+   Odious hilarity, without meaning and without remission
+   Offers mortifyingly mean, and others insultingly vague
+   Old man&rsquo;s tendency to revert to the past
+   Old man&rsquo;s disposition to speak of his infirmities
+   One could be openly poor in Cambridge without open shame
+   Only one concerned who was quite unconcerned
+   Ought not to call coarse without calling one&rsquo;s self prudish
+   Pathos of revolt from the colorless rigidities
+   Person who wished to talk when he could listen
+   Plain-speaking or Rude Speaking
+   Pointed the moral in all they did
+   Polite learning hesitated his praise
+   Praised it enough to satisfy the author
+   Praised extravagantly, and in the wrong place
+   Put your finger on the present moment and enjoy it
+   Quarrel was with error, and not with the persons who were in it
+   Quebec was a bit of the seventeenth century
+   Reformers, who are so often tedious and ridiculous
+   Remember the dinner-bell
+   Reparation due from every white to every black man
+   Secret of the man who is universally interesting
+   Seen through the wrong end of the telescope
+   Shackles of belief worn so long
+   Shy of his fellow-men, as the scholar seems always to be
+   So refined, after the gigantic coarseness of California
+   Some superstition, usually of a hygienic sort
+   Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the sermon
+   Sought the things that he could agree with you upon
+   Spare his years the fatigue of recalling your identity
+   Standards were their own, and they were satisfied with them
+   Stoddard
+   Study in a corner by the porch
+   Stupidly truthful
+   The world is well lost whenever the world is wrong
+   The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it
+   Things common to all, however peculiar in each
+   Thoreau
+   Those who have sorrowed deepest will understand this best
+   Times when a man&rsquo;s city was a man&rsquo;s country
+   Tired themselves out in trying to catch up with him
+   True to an ideal of life rather than to life itself
+   Truthful
+   Turn of the talk toward the mystical
+   Used to ingratitude from those he helped
+   Vacuous vulgarity of its texts
+   Visited one of the great mills
+   Walter-Scotticized, pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal
+   Wasted face, and his gay eyes had the death-look
+   We have never ended before, and we do not see how we can end
+   Welcome me, and make the least of my shyness and strangeness
+   Well, if you are to be lost, I want to be lost with you
+   What he had done he owned to, good, bad, or indifferent
+   When to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast
+   Whether every human motive was not selfish
+   Whitman&rsquo;s public use of his privately written praise
+   Wit that tries its teeth upon everything
+   Women&rsquo;s rights
+   Wonder why we hate the past so&mdash;&ldquo;It&rsquo;s so damned humiliating!&rdquo;
+    Wonderful to me how it should remain so unintelligible
+   Work gives the impression of an uncommon continuity
+   Wrote them first and last in the spirit of Dickens
+</pre>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
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+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
diff --git a/4201.txt b/4201.txt
new file mode 100644
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--- /dev/null
+++ b/4201.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11728 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Literary Friends And Acquaintances, 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: Literary Friends And Acquaintances
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: October 28, 2006 [EBook #4201]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+   Biographical
+   My First Visit to New England
+   First Impressions of Literary New York
+   Roundabout to Boston
+   Literary Boston As I Knew It
+   Oliver Wendell Holmes
+   The White Mr. Longfellow
+   Studies of Lowell
+   Cambridge Neighbors
+   A Belated Guest
+   My Mark Twain
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
+
+Long before I began the papers which make up this volume, I had meant to
+write of literary history in New England as I had known it in the lives
+of its great exemplars during the twenty-five years I lived near them. In
+fact, I had meant to do this from the time I came among them; but I let
+the days in which I almost constantly saw them go by without record save
+such as I carried in a memory retentive, indeed, beyond the common, but
+not so full as I could have wished when I began to invoke it for my work.
+Still, upon insistent appeal, it responded in sufficient abundance; and,
+though I now wish I could have remembered more instances, I think my
+impressions were accurate enough. I am sure of having tried honestly to
+impart them in the ten years or more when I was desultorily endeavoring
+to share them with the reader.
+
+The papers were written pretty much in the order they have here,
+beginning with My First Visit to New England, which dates from the
+earliest eighteen-nineties, if I may trust my recollection of reading it
+from the manuscript to the editor of Harper's Magazine, where we lay
+under the willows of Magnolia one pleasant summer morning in the first
+years of that decade. It was printed no great while after in that
+periodical; but I was so long in finishing the study of Lowell that it
+had been anticipated in Harper's by other reminiscences of him, and it
+was therefore first printed in Scribner's Magazine. It was the paper
+with which I took the most pains, and when it was completed I still felt
+it so incomplete that I referred it to his closest and my best friend,
+the late Charles Eliot Norton, for his criticism. He thought it wanting
+in unity; it was a group of studies instead of one study, he said; I must
+do something to draw the different sketches together in a single effect
+of portraiture; and this I did my best to do.
+
+It was the latest written of the three articles which give the volume
+substance, and it represents mare finally and fully than the others my
+sense of the literary importance of the men whose like we shall not look
+upon again. Longfellow was easily the greatest poet of the three, Holmes
+often the most brilliant and felicitous, but Lowell, in spite of his
+forays in politics, was the finest scholar and the most profoundly
+literary, as he was above the others most deeply and thoroughly New
+England in quality.
+
+While I was doing these sketches, sometimes slighter and sometimes less
+slight, of all those poets and essayists and novelists I had known in
+Cambridge and Boston and Concord and New York, I was doing many other
+things: half a dozen novels, as many more novelettes and shorter stories,
+with essays and criticisms and verses; so that in January, 1900, I had
+not yet done the paper on Lowell, which, with another, was to complete my
+reminiscences of American literary life as I had witnessed it. When they
+were all done at last they were republished in a volume which found
+instant favor beyond my deserts if not its own.
+
+There was a good deal of trouble with the name, but Literary Friends and
+Acquaintance was an endeavor for modest accuracy with which I remained
+satisfied until I thought, long too late, of Literary Friends and
+Neighbors. Then I perceived that this would have been still more
+accurate and quite as modest, and I gladly give any reader leave to call
+the book by that name who likes.
+
+Since the collection was first made, I have written little else quite of
+the kind, except the paper on Bret Harte, which was first printed shortly
+after his death; and the study of Mark Twain, which I had been preparing
+to make for forty years and more, and wrote in two weeks of the spring of
+1910. Others of my time and place have now passed whither there is
+neither time nor place, and there are moments when I feel that I must try
+to call them back and pay them such honor as my sense of their worth may
+give; but the impulse has as yet failed to effect itself, and I do not
+know how long I shall spare myself the supreme pleasure-pain, the "hochst
+angenehmer Schmerz," of seeking to live here with those who live here no
+more.
+
+W. D. H.
+
+
+
+
+MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+If there was any one in the world who had his being more wholly in
+literature than I had in 1860, I am sure I should not have known where to
+find him, and I doubt if he could have been found nearer the centres of
+literary activity than I then was, or among those more purely devoted to
+literature than myself. I had been for three years a writer of news
+paragraphs, book notices, and political leaders on a daily paper in an
+inland city, and I do not know that my life differed outwardly from that
+of any other young journalist, who had begun as I had in a country
+printing-office, and might be supposed to be looking forward to
+advancement in his profession or in public affairs. But inwardly it was
+altogether different with me. Inwardly I was a poet, with no wish to be
+anything else, unless in a moment of careless affluence I might so far
+forget myself as to be a novelist. I was, with my friend J. J. Piatt,
+the half-author of a little volume of very unknown verse, and Mr. Lowell
+had lately accepted and had begun to print in the Atlantic Monthly five
+or six poems of mine. Besides this I had written poems, and sketches,
+and criticisms for the Saturday Press of New York, a long-forgotten but
+once very lively expression of literary intention in an extinct bohemia
+of that city; and I was always writing poems, and sketches, and
+criticisms in our own paper. These, as well as my feats in the renowned
+periodicals of the East, met with kindness, if not honor, in my own city
+which ought to have given me grave doubts whether I was any real prophet.
+But it only intensified my literary ambition, already so strong that my
+veins might well have run ink rather than blood, and gave me a higher
+opinion of my fellow-citizens, if such a thing could be. They were
+indeed very charming people, and such of them as I mostly saw were
+readers and lovers of books. Society in Columbus at that day had a
+pleasant refinement which I think I do not exaggerate in the fond
+retrospect. It had the finality which it seems to have had nowhere since
+the war; it had certain fixed ideals, which were none the less graceful
+and becoming because they were the simple old American ideals, now
+vanished, or fast vanishing, before the knowledge of good and evil as
+they have it in Europe, and as it has imparted itself to American travel
+and sojourn. There was a mixture of many strains in the capital of Ohio,
+as there was throughout the State. Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, New
+York, and New England all joined to characterize the manners and customs.
+I suppose it was the South which gave the social tone; the intellectual
+taste among the elders was the Southern taste for the classic and the
+standard in literature; but we who were younger preferred the modern
+authors: we read Thackeray, and George Eliot, and Hawthorne, and Charles
+Reade, and De Quincey, and Tennyson, and Browning, and Emerson, and
+Longfellow, and I--I read Heine, and evermore Heine, when there was not
+some new thing from the others. Now and then an immediate French book
+penetrated to us: we read Michelet and About, I remember. We looked to
+England and the East largely for our literary opinions; we accepted the
+Saturday Review as law if we could not quite receive it as gospel. One
+of us took the Cornhill Magazine, because Thackeray was the editor; the
+Atlantic Monthly counted many readers among us; and a visiting young lady
+from New England, who screamed at sight of the periodical in one of our
+houses, "Why, have you got the Atlantic Monthly out here?" could be
+answered, with cold superiority, "There are several contributors to the
+Atlantic in Columbus." There were in fact two: my room-mate, who wrote
+Browning for it, while I wrote Heine and Longfellow. But I suppose two
+are as rightfully several as twenty are.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+That was the heyday of lecturing, and now and then a literary light from
+the East swam into our skies. I heard and saw Emerson, and I once met
+Bayard Taylor socially, at the hospitable house where he was a guest
+after his lecture. Heaven knows how I got through the evening. I do not
+think I opened my mouth to address him a word; it was as much as I could
+do to sit and look at him, while he tranquilly smoked, and chatted with
+our host, and quaffed the beer which we had very good in the Nest. All
+the while I did him homage as the first author by calling whom I had met.
+I longed to tell him how much I liked his poems, which we used to get by
+heart in those days, and I longed (how much more I longed!) to have him
+know that:
+
+     "Auch ich war in Arkadien geboren,"
+
+that I had printed poems in the Atlantic Monthly and the Saturday Press,
+and was the potential author of things destined to eclipse all literature
+hitherto attempted. But I could not tell him; and there was no one else
+who thought to tell him. Perhaps it was as well so; I might have
+perished of his recognition, for my modesty was equal to my merit.
+
+In fact I think we were all rather modest young fellows, we who formed
+the group wont to spend some part of every evening at that house, where
+there was always music, or whist, or gay talk, or all three. We had our
+opinions of literary matters, but (perhaps because we had mostly accepted
+them from England or New England, as I have said) we were not vain of
+them; and we would by no means have urged them before a living literary
+man like that. I believe none of us ventured to speak, except the poet,
+my roommate, who said, He believed so and so was the original of so and
+so; and was promptly told, He had no right to say such a thing.
+Naturally, we came away rather critical of our host's guest, whom I
+afterwards knew as the kindliest heart in the world. But we had not
+shone in his presence, and that galled us; and we chose to think that he
+had not shone in ours.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+At that time he was filling a large space in the thoughts of the young
+people who had any thoughts about literature. He had come to his full
+repute as an agreeable and intelligent traveller, and he still wore the
+halo of his early adventures afoot in foreign lands when they were yet
+really foreign. He had not written his novels of American life, once so
+welcomed, and now so forgotten; it was very long before he had achieved
+that incomparable translation of Faust which must always remain the
+finest and best, and which would keep his name alive with Goethe's, if he
+had done nothing else worthy of remembrance. But what then most
+commended him to the regard of us star-eyed youth (now blinking sadly
+toward our seventies) was the poetry which he printed in the magazines
+from time to time: in the first Putnam's (where there was a dashing
+picture of him in an Arab burnoose and, a turban), and in Harper's, and
+in the Atlantic. It was often very lovely poetry, I thought, and I still
+think so; and it was rightfully his, though it paid the inevitable
+allegiance to the manner of the great masters of the day. It was graced
+for us by the pathetic romance of his early love, which some of its
+sweetest and saddest numbers confessed, for the young girl he married
+almost in her death hour; and we who were hoping to have our hearts
+broken, or already had them so, would have been glad of something more of
+the obvious poet in the popular lecturer we had seen refreshing himself
+after his hour on the platform.
+
+He remained for nearly a year the only author I had seen, and I met him
+once again before I saw any other. Our second meeting was far from
+Columbus, as far as remote Quebec, when I was on my way to New England by
+way of Niagara and the Canadian rivers and cities. I stopped in Toronto,
+and realized myself abroad without any signal adventures; but at Montreal
+something very pretty happened to me. I came into the hotel office, the
+evening of a first day's lonely sight-seeing, and vainly explored the
+register for the name of some acquaintance; as I turned from it two
+smartly dressed young fellows embraced it, and I heard one of them say,
+to my great amaze and happiness, "Hello, here's Howells!"
+
+"Oh," I broke out upon him, "I was just looking for some one I knew. I
+hope you are some one who knows me!"
+
+"Only through your contributions to the Saturday Press," said the young
+fellow, and with these golden words, the precious first personal
+recognition of my authorship I had ever received from a stranger, and the
+rich reward of all my literary endeavor, he introduced himself and his
+friend. I do not know what became of this friend, or where or how he
+eliminated himself; but we two others were inseparable from that moment.
+He was a young lawyer from New York, and when I came back from Italy,
+four or five years later, I used to see his sign in Wall Street, with a
+never-fulfilled intention of going in to see him. In whatever world he
+happens now to be, I should like to send him my greetings, and confess to
+him that my art has never since brought me so sweet a recompense, and
+nothing a thousandth part so much like Fame, as that outcry of his over
+the hotel register in Montreal. We were comrades for four or five rich
+days, and shared our pleasures and expenses in viewing the monuments of
+those ancient Canadian capitals, which I think we valued at all their
+picturesque worth. We made jokes to mask our emotions; we giggled and
+made giggle, in the right way; we fell in and out of love with all the
+pretty faces and dresses we saw; and we talked evermore about literature
+and literary people. He had more acquaintance with the one, and more
+passion for the other, but he could tell me of Pfaff's lager-beer cellar
+on Broadway, where the Saturday Press fellows and the other Bohemians
+met; and this, for the time, was enough: I resolved to visit it as soon
+as I reached New York, in spite of the tobacco and beer (which I was
+given to understand were de rigueur), though they both, so far as I had
+known them, were apt to make me sick.
+
+I was very desolate after I parted from this good fellow, who returned to
+Montreal on his way to New York, while I remained in Quebec to continue
+later on mine to New England. When I came in from seeing him off in a
+calash for the boat, I discovered Bayard Taylor in the reading-room, where
+he sat sunken in what seemed a somewhat weary muse. He did not know me,
+or even notice me, though I made several errands in and out of the
+reading-room in the vain hope that he might do so: doubly vain, for I am
+aware now that I was still flown with the pride of that pretty experience
+in Montreal, and trusted in a repetition of something like it. At last,
+as no chance volunteered to help me, I mustered courage to go up to him
+and name myself, and say I had once had the pleasure of meeting him at
+Doctor-------'s in Columbus. The poet gave no sign of consciousness at
+the sound of a name which I had fondly begun to think might not be so all
+unknown. He looked up with an unkindling eye, and asked, Ah, how was the
+Doctor? and when I had reported favorably of the Doctor, our
+conversation ended.
+
+He was probably as tired as he looked, and he must have classed me with
+that multitude all over the country who had shared the pleasure I
+professed in meeting him before; it was surely my fault that I did not
+speak my name loud enough to be recognized, if I spoke it at all; but the
+courage I had mustered did not quite suffice for that. In after years he
+assured me, first by letter and then by word, of his grief for an
+incident which I can only recall now as the untoward beginning of a
+cordial friendship. It was often my privilege, in those days, as
+reviewer and editor, to testify my sense of the beautiful things he did
+in so many kinds of literature, but I never liked any of them better than
+I liked him. He had a fervent devotion to his art, and he was always
+going to do the greatest things in it, with an expectation of effect that
+never failed him. The things he actually did were none of them mean, or
+wanting in quality, and some of them are of a lasting charm that any one
+may feel who will turn to his poems; but no doubt many of them fell short
+of his hopes of them with the reader. It was fine to meet him when he
+was full of a new scheme; he talked of it with a single-hearted joy, and
+tried to make you see it of the same colors and proportions it wore to
+his eyes. He spared no toil to make it the perfect thing he dreamed it,
+and he was not discouraged by any disappointment he suffered with the
+critic or the public.
+
+He was a tireless worker, and at last his health failed under his labors
+at the newspaper desk, beneath the midnight gas, when he should long have
+rested from such labors. I believe he was obliged to do them through one
+of those business fortuities which deform and embitter all our lives; but
+he was not the man to spare himself in any case. He was always
+attempting new things, and he never ceased endeavoring to make his
+scholarship reparation for the want of earlier opportunity and training.
+I remember that I met him once in a Cambridge street with a book in his
+hand which he let me take in mine. It was a Greek author, and he said he
+was just beginning to read the language at fifty: a patriarchal age to me
+of the early thirties!
+
+I suppose I intimated the surprise I felt at his taking it up so late in
+the day, for he said, with charming seriousness, "Oh, but you know, I
+expect to use it in the other world." Yea, that made it worth while, I
+consented; but was he sure of the other world? "As sure as I am of
+this," he said; and I have always kept the impression of the young faith
+which spoke in his voice and was more than his words.
+
+I saw him last in the hour of those tremendous adieux which were paid him
+in New York before he sailed to be minister in Germany. It was one of
+the most graceful things done by President Hayes, who, most of all our
+Presidents after Lincoln, honored himself in honoring literature by his
+appointments, to give that place to Bayard Taylor. There was no one more
+fit for it, and it was peculiarly fit that he should be so distinguished
+to a people who knew and valued his scholarship and the service he had
+done German letters. He was as happy in it, apparently, as a man could
+be in anything here below, and he enjoyed to the last drop the many cups
+of kindness pressed to his lips in parting; though I believe these
+farewells, at a time when he was already fagged with work and excitement,
+were notably harmful to him, and helped to hasten his end. Some of us
+who were near of friendship went down to see him off when he sailed, as
+the dismal and futile wont of friends is; and I recall the kind, great
+fellow standing in the cabin, amid those sad flowers that heaped the
+tables, saying good-by to one after another, and smiling fondly, smiling
+wearily, upon all. There was champagne, of course, and an odious
+hilarity, without meaning and without remission, till the warning bell
+chased us ashore, and our brave poet escaped with what was left of his
+life.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+I have followed him far from the moment of our first meeting; but even on
+my way to venerate those New England luminaries, which chiefly drew my
+eyes, I could not pay a less devoir to an author who, if Curtis was not,
+was chief of the New York group of authors in that day. I distinguished
+between the New-Englanders and the New-Yorkers, and I suppose there is no
+question but our literary centre was then in Boston, wherever it is, or
+is not, at present. But I thought Taylor then, and I think him now, one
+of the first in our whole American province of the republic of letters,
+in a day when it was in a recognizably flourishing state, whether we
+regard quantity or quality in the names that gave it lustre. Lowell was
+then in perfect command of those varied forces which will long, if not
+lastingly, keep him in memory as first among our literary men, and master
+in more kinds than any other American. Longfellow was in the fulness of
+his world-wide fame, and in the ripeness of the beautiful genius which
+was not to know decay while life endured. Emerson had emerged from the
+popular darkness which had so long held him a hopeless mystic, and was
+shining a lambent star of poesy and prophecy at the zenith. Hawthorne,
+the exquisite artist, the unrivalled dreamer, whom we still always liken
+this one and that one to, whenever this one or that one promises greatly
+to please us, and still leave without a rival, without a companion, had
+lately returned from his long sojourn abroad, and had given us the last
+of the incomparable romances which the world was to have perfect from his
+hand. Doctor Holmes had surpassed all expectations in those who most
+admired his brilliant humor and charming poetry by the invention of a new
+attitude if not a new sort in literature. The turn that civic affairs
+had taken was favorable to the widest recognition of Whittier's splendid
+lyrical gift; and that heart of fire, doubly snow-bound by Quaker
+tradition and Puritan environment; was penetrating every generous breast
+with its flamy impulses, and fusing all wills in its noble purpose. Mrs.
+Stowe, who far outfamed the rest as the author of the most renowned novel
+ever written, was proving it no accident or miracle by the fiction she
+was still writing.
+
+This great New England group might be enlarged perhaps without loss of
+quality by the inclusion of Thoreau, who came somewhat before his time,
+and whose drastic criticism of our expediential and mainly futile
+civilization would find more intelligent acceptance now than it did then,
+when all resentment of its defects was specialized in enmity to Southern
+slavery. Doctor Edward Everett Hale belonged in this group too, by
+virtue of that humor, the most inventive and the most fantastic, the
+sanest, the sweetest, the truest, which had begun to find expression in
+the Atlantic Monthly; and there a wonderful young girl had written a
+series of vivid sketches and taken the heart of youth everywhere with
+amaze and joy, so that I thought it would be no less an event to meet
+Harriet Prescott than to meet any of those I have named.
+
+I expected somehow to meet them all, and I imagined them all easily
+accessible in the office of the Atlantic Monthly, which had lately
+adventured in the fine air of high literature where so many other
+periodicals had gasped and died before it. The best of these, hitherto,
+and better even than the Atlantic for some reasons, the lamented Putnam's
+Magazine, had perished of inanition at New York, and the claim of the
+commercial capital to the literary primacy had passed with that brilliant
+venture. New York had nothing distinctive to show for American
+literature but the decrepit and doting Knickerbocker Magazine. Harper's
+New Monthly, though Curtis had already come to it from the wreck of
+Putnam's, and it had long ceased to be eclectic in material, and had
+begun to stand for native work in the allied arts which it has since so
+magnificently advanced, was not distinctively literary, and the Weekly
+had just begun to make itself known. The Century, Scribner's, the
+Cosmopolitan, McClure's, and I know not what others, were still
+unimagined by five, and ten, and twenty years, and the Galaxy was to
+flash and fade before any of them should kindle its more effectual fires.
+The Nation, which was destined to chastise rather than nurture our young
+literature, had still six years of dreamless potentiality before it; and
+the Nation was always more Bostonian than New-Yorkish by nature, whatever
+it was by nativity.
+
+Philadelphia had long counted for nothing in the literary field. Graham's
+Magazine at one time showed a certain critical force, but it seemed to
+perish of this expression of vitality; and there remained Godey's Lady's
+Book and Peterson's Magazine, publications really incredible in their
+insipidity. In the South there was nothing but a mistaken social ideal,
+with the moral principles all standing on their heads in defence of
+slavery; and in the West there was a feeble and foolish notion that
+Western talent was repressed by Eastern jealousy. At Boston chiefly, if
+not at Boston alone, was there a vigorous intellectual life among such
+authors as I have named. Every young writer was ambitious to join his
+name with theirs in the Atlantic Monthly, and in the lists of Ticknor &
+Fields, who were literary publishers in a sense such as the business
+world has known nowhere else before or since. Their imprint was a
+warrant of quality to the reader and of immortality to the author, so
+that if I could have had a book issued by them at that day I should now
+be in the full enjoyment of an undying fame.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+Such was the literary situation as the passionate pilgrim from the West
+approached his holy land at Boston, by way of the Grand Trunk Railway
+from Quebec to Portland. I have no recollection of a sleeping-car, and I
+suppose I waked and watched during the whole of that long, rough journey;
+but I should hardly have slept if there had been a car for the purpose. I
+was too eager to see what New England was like, and too anxious not to
+lose the least glimpse of it, to close my eyes after I crossed the border
+at Island Pond. I found that in the elm-dotted levels of Maine it was
+very like the Western Reserve in northern Ohio, which is, indeed, a
+portion of New England transferred with all its characteristic features,
+and flattened out along the lake shore. It was not till I began to run
+southward into the older regions of the country that it lost this look,
+and became gratefully strange to me. It never had the effect of hoary
+antiquity which I had expected of a country settled more than two
+centuries; with its wood-built farms and villages it looked newer than
+the coal-smoked brick of southern Ohio. I had prefigured the New England
+landscape bare of forests, relieved here and there with the tees of
+orchards or plantations; but I found apparently as much woodland as at
+home.
+
+At Portland I first saw the ocean, and this was a sort of disappointment.
+Tides and salt water I had already had at Quebec, so that I was no longer
+on the alert for them; but the color and the vastness of the sea I was
+still to try upon my vision. When I stood on the Promenade at Portland
+with the kind young Unitarian minister whom I had brought a letter to,
+and who led me there for a most impressive first view of the ocean, I
+could not make more of it than there was of Lake Erie; and I have never
+thought the color of the sea comparable to the tender blue of the lake. I
+did not hint my disappointment to my friend; I had too much regard for
+the feelings of an Eastern man to decry his ocean to his face, and I felt
+besides that it would be vulgar and provincial to make comparisons. I am
+glad now that I held my tongue, for that kind soul is no longer in this
+world, and I should not like to think he knew how far short of my
+expectations the sea he was so proud of had fallen. I went up with him
+into a tower or belvedere there was at hand; and when he pointed to the
+eastern horizon and said, Now there was nothing but sea between us and
+Africa, I pretended to expand with the thought, and began to sound myself
+for the emotions which I ought to have felt at such a sight. But in my
+heart I was empty, and Heaven knows whether I saw the steamer which the
+ancient mariner in charge of that tower invited me to look at through his
+telescope. I never could see anything but a vitreous glare through a
+telescope, which has a vicious habit of dodging about through space, and
+failing to bring down anything of less than planetary magnitude.
+
+But there was something at Portland vastly more to me than seas or
+continents, and that was the house where Longfellow was born. I believe,
+now, I did not get the right house, but only the house he went to live in
+later; but it served, and I rejoiced in it with a rapture that could not
+have been more genuine if it had been the real birthplace of the poet. I
+got my friend to show me
+
+       "----the breezy dome of groves,
+        The shadows of Deering's woods,"
+
+because they were in one of Longfellow's loveliest and tenderest poems;
+and I made an errand to the docks, for the sake of the
+
+       "---black wharves and the slips,
+        And the sea-tides tossing free,
+        And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
+        And the beauty and mystery of the ships,
+        And the magic of the sea,"
+
+mainly for the reason that these were colors and shapes of the fond
+vision of the poet's past. I am in doubt whether it was at this time or
+a later time that I went to revere
+
+       "--the dead captains as they lay
+        In their graves o'erlooking the tranquil bay,
+        where they in battle died,"
+
+but I am quite sure it was now that I wandered under
+
+       "--the trees which shadow each well-known street,
+        As they balance up and down,"
+
+for when I was next in Portland the great fire had swept the city avenues
+bare of most of those beautiful elms, whose Gothic arches and traceries I
+well remember.
+
+The fact is that in those days I was bursting with the most romantic
+expectations of life in every way, and I looked at the whole world as
+material that might be turned into literature, or that might be
+associated with it somehow. I do not know how I managed to keep these
+preposterous hopes within me, but perhaps the trick of satirizing them,
+which I had early learnt, helped me to do it. I was at that particular
+moment resolved above all things to see things as Heinrich Heine saw
+them, or at least to report them as he did, no matter how I saw them; and
+I went about framing phrases to this end, and trying to match the objects
+of interest to them whenever there was the least chance of getting them
+together.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+I do not know how I first arrived in Boston, or whether it was before or
+after I had passed a day or two in Salem. As Salem is on the way from
+Portland, I will suppose that I stopped there first, and explored the
+quaint old town (quainter then than now, but still quaint enough) for the
+memorials of Hawthorne and of the witches which united to form the Salem
+I cared for. I went and looked up the House of Seven Gables, and
+suffered an unreasonable disappointment that it had not a great many more
+of them; but there was no loss in the death-warrant of Bridget Bishop,
+with the sheriff's return of execution upon it, which I found at the
+Court-house; if anything, the pathos of that witness of one of the
+cruelest delusions in the world was rather in excess of my needs; I could
+have got on with less. I saw the pins which the witches were sworn to
+have thrust into the afflicted children, and I saw Gallows Hill, where
+the hapless victims of the perjury were hanged. But that death-warrant
+remained the most vivid color of my experience of the tragedy; I had no
+need to invite myself to a sense of it, and it is still like a stain of
+red in my memory.
+
+The kind old ship's captain whose guest I was, and who was transfigured
+to poetry in my sense by the fact that he used to voyage to the African
+coast for palm-oil in former days, led me all about the town, and showed
+me the Custom-house, which I desired to see because it was in the preface
+to the Scarlet Letter. But I perceived that he did not share my
+enthusiasm for the author, and I became more and more sensible that in
+Salem air there was a cool undercurrent of feeling about him. No doubt
+the place was not altogether grateful for the celebrity his romance had
+given it, and would have valued more the uninterrupted quiet of its own
+flattering thoughts of itself; but when it came to hearing a young lady
+say she knew a girl who said she would like to poison Hawthorne, it
+seemed to the devout young pilgrim from the West that something more of
+love for the great romancer would not have been too much for him.
+Hawthorne had already had his say, however, and he had not used his
+native town with any great tenderness. Indeed, the advantages to any
+place of having a great genius born and reared in its midst are so
+doubtful that it might be well for localities designing to become the
+birthplaces of distinguished authors to think twice about it. Perhaps
+only the largest capitals, like London and Paris, and New York and
+Chicago, ought to risk it. But the authors have an unaccountable
+perversity, and will seldom come into the world in the large cities,
+which are alone without the sense of neighborhood, and the personal
+susceptibilities so unfavorable to the practice of the literary art. I
+dare say that it was owing to the local indifference to her greatest
+name, or her reluctance from it, that I got a clearer impression of Salem
+in some other respects than I should have had if I had been invited there
+to devote myself solely to the associations of Hawthorne. For the first
+time I saw an old New England town, I do not know, but the most
+characteristic, and took into my young Western consciousness the fact of
+a more complex civilization than I had yet known. My whole life had been
+passed in a region where men were just beginning ancestors, and the
+conception of family was very imperfect. Literature, of course, was full
+of it, and it was not for a devotee of Thackeray to be theoretically
+ignorant of its manifestations; but I had hitherto carelessly supposed
+that family was nowhere regarded seriously in America except in Virginia,
+where it furnished a joke for the rest of the nation. But now I found
+myself confronted with it in its ancient houses, and heard its names
+pronounced with a certain consideration, which I dare say was as much
+their due in Salem as it could be anywhere. The names were all strange,
+and all indifferent to me, but those fine square wooden mansions, of a
+tasteful architecture, and a pale buff-color, withdrawing themselves in
+quiet reserve from the quiet street, gave me an impression of family as
+an actuality and a force which I had never had before, but which no
+Westerner can yet understand the East without taking into account. I do
+not suppose that I conceived of family as a fact of vital import then; I
+think I rather regarded it as a color to be used in any aesthetic study
+of the local conditions. I am not sure that I valued it more even for
+literary purposes, than the steeple which the captain pointed out as the
+first and last thing he saw when he came and went on his long voyages, or
+than the great palm-oil casks, which he showed me, and which I related to
+the tree that stood
+
+        "Auf brennender Felsenwand."
+
+Whether that was the kind of palm that gives the oil, or was a sort only
+suitable to be the dream of a lonely fir-tree in the North on a cold
+height, I am in doubt to this day.
+
+I heard, not without concern, that the neighboring industry of Lynn was
+penetrating Salem, and that the ancient haunt of the witches and the
+birthplace of our subtlest and somberest wizard was becoming a great
+shoe-town; but my concern was less for its memories and sensibilities
+than for an odious duty which I owed that industry, together with all the
+others in New England. Before I left home I had promised my earliest
+publisher that I would undertake to edit, or compile, or do something
+literary to, a work on the operation of the more distinctive mechanical
+inventions of our country, which he had conceived the notion of
+publishing by subscription. He had furnished me, the most immechanical
+of humankind, with a letter addressed generally to the great mills and
+factories of the East, entreating their managers to unfold their
+mysteries to me for the purposes of this volume. His letter had the
+effect of shutting up some of them like clams, and others it put upon
+their guard against my researches, lest I should seize the secret of
+their special inventions and publish it to the world. I could not tell
+the managers that I was both morally and mentally incapable of this; that
+they might have explained and demonstrated the properties and functions
+of their most recondite machinery, and upon examination afterwards found
+me guiltless of having anything but a few verses of Heine or Tennyson or
+Longfellow in my head. So I had to suffer in several places from their
+unjust anxieties, and from my own weariness of their ingenious engines,
+or else endure the pangs of a bad conscience from ignoring them. As long
+as I was in Canada I was happy, for there was no industry in Canada that
+I saw, except that of the peasant girls, in their Evangeline hats and
+kirtles, tossing the hay in the way-side fields; but when I reached
+Portland my troubles began. I went with that young minister of whom I
+have spoken to a large foundry, where they were casting some sort of
+ironmongery, and inspected the process from a distance beyond any chance
+spurt of the molten metal, and came away sadly uncertain of putting the
+rather fine spectacle to any practical use. A manufactory where they did
+something with coal-oil (which I now heard for the first time called
+kerosene) refused itself to me, and I said to myself that probably all
+the other industries of Portland were as reserved, and I would not seek
+to explore them; but when I got to Salem, my conscience stirred again.
+If I knew that there were shoe-shops in Salem, ought not I to go and
+inspect their processes? This was a question which would not answer
+itself to my satisfaction, and I had no peace till I learned that I could
+see shoemaking much better at Lynn, and that Lynn was such a little way
+from Boston that I could readily run up there, if I did not wish to
+examine the shoe machinery at once. I promised myself that I would run up
+from Boston, but in order to do this I must first go to Boston.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+I am supposing still that I saw Salem before I saw Boston, but however
+the fact may be, I am sure that I decided it would be better to see
+shoemaking in Lynn, where I really did see it, thirty years later. For
+the purposes of the present visit, I contented myself with looking at a
+machine in Haverhill, which chewed a shoe sole full of pegs, and dropped
+it out of its iron jaws with an indifference as great as my own, and
+probably as little sense of how it had done its work. I may be unjust to
+that machine; Heaven knows I would not wrong it; and I must confess that
+my head had no room in it for the conception of any machinery but the
+mythological, which also I despised, in my revulsion from the
+eighteenth-century poets to those of my own day.
+
+I cannot quite make out after the lapse of so many years just how or when
+I got to Haverhill, or whether it was before or after I had been in
+Salem. There is an apparitional quality in my presences, at this point
+or that, in the dim past; but I hope that, for the credit of their order,
+ghosts are not commonly taken with such trivial things as I was. For
+instance, in Haverhill I was much interested by the sight of a young man,
+coming gayly down the steps of the hotel where I lodged, in peg-top
+trousers so much more peg top than my own that I seemed to be wearing
+mere spring-bottoms in comparison; and in a day when every one who
+respected himself had a necktie as narrow as he could get, this youth had
+one no wider than a shoestring, and red at that, while mine measured
+almost an inch, and was black. To be sure, he was one of a band of negro
+minstrels, who were to give a concert that night, and he had a light to
+excel in fashion.
+
+I will suppose, for convenience' sake, that I visited Haverhill, too,
+before I reached Boston: somehow that shoe-pegging machine must come in,
+and it may as well come in here. When I actually found myself in Boston,
+there were perhaps industries which it would have been well for me to
+celebrate, but I either made believe there were none, or else I honestly
+forgot all about them. In either case I released myself altogether to
+the literary and historical associations of the place. I need not say
+that I gave myself first to the first, and it rather surprised me to find
+that the literary associations of Boston referred so largely to
+Cambridge. I did not know much about Cambridge, except that it was the
+seat of the university where Lowell was, and Longfellow had been,
+professor; and somehow I had not realized it as the home of these poets.
+That was rather stupid of me, but it is best to own the truth, and
+afterward I came to know the place so well that I may safely confess my
+earlier ignorance.
+
+I had stopped in Boston at the Tremont House, which was still one of the
+first hostelries of the country, and I must have inquired my way to
+Cambridge there; but I was sceptical of the direction the Cambridge
+horse-car took when I found it, and I hinted to the driver my anxieties
+as to why he should be starting east when I had been told that Cambridge
+was west of Boston. He reassured me in the laconic and sarcastic manner
+of his kind, and we really reached Cambridge by the route he had taken.
+
+The beautiful elms that shaded great part of the way massed themselves in
+the "groves of academe" at the Square, and showed pleasant glimpses of
+"Old Harvard's scholar factories red," then far fewer than now. It must
+have been in vacation, for I met no one as I wandered through the college
+yard, trying to make up my mind as to how I should learn where Lowell
+lived; for it was he whom I had come to find. He had not only taken the
+poems I sent him, but he had printed two of them in a single number of
+the Atlantic, and had even written me a little note about them, which I
+wore next my heart in my breast pocket till I almost wore it out; and so
+I thought I might fitly report myself to him. But I have always been
+helpless in finding my way, and I was still depressed by my failure to
+convince the horse-car driver that he had taken the wrong road. I let
+several people go by without questioning them, and those I did ask
+abashed me farther by not knowing what I wanted to know. When I had
+remitted my search for the moment, an ancient man, with an open mouth and
+an inquiring eye, whom I never afterwards made out in Cambridge,
+addressed me with a hospitable offer to show me the Washington Elm. I
+thought this would give me time to embolden myself for the meeting with
+the editor of the Atlantic if I should ever find him, and I went with
+that kind old man, who when he had shown me the tree, and the spot where
+Washington stood when he took command of the Continental forces, said
+that he had a branch of it, and that if I would come to his house with
+him he would give me a piece. In the end, I meant merely to flatter him
+into telling me where I could find Lowell, but I dissembled my purpose
+and pretended a passion for a piece of the historic elm, and the old man
+led me not only to his house but his wood-house, where he sawed me off a
+block so generous that I could not get it into my pocket. I feigned the
+gratitude which I could see that he expected, and then I took courage to
+put my question to him. Perhaps that patriarch lived only in the past,
+and cared for history and not literature. He confessed that he could not
+tell me where to find Lowell; but he did not forsake me; he set forth
+with me upon the street again, and let no man pass without asking him. In
+the end we met one who was able to say where Mr. Lowell was, and I found
+him at last in a little study at the rear of a pleasant, old-fashioned
+house near the Delta.
+
+Lowell was not then at the height of his fame; he had just reached this
+thirty years after, when he died; but I doubt if he was ever after a
+greater power in his own country, or more completely embodied the
+literary aspiration which would not and could not part itself from the
+love of freedom and the hope of justice. For the sake of these he had
+been willing to suffer the reproach which followed their friends in the
+earlier days of the anti-slavery struggle: He had outlived the reproach
+long before; but the fear of his strength remained with those who had
+felt it, and he had not made himself more generally loved by the 'Fable
+for Critics' than by the 'Biglow Papers', probably. But in the 'Vision
+of Sir Launfal' and the 'Legend of Brittany' he had won a liking if not a
+listening far wider than his humor and his wit had got him; and in his
+lectures on the English poets, given not many years before he came to the
+charge of the Atlantic, he had proved himself easily the wisest and
+finest critic in our language. He was already, more than any American
+poet,
+
+        "Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
+                  The love of love,"
+
+and he held a place in the public sense which no other author among us
+has held. I had myself never been a great reader of his poetry, when I
+met him, though when I was a boy of ten years I had heard my father
+repeat passages from the Biglow Papers against war and slavery and the
+war for slavery upon Mexico, and later I had read those criticisms of
+English poetry, and I knew Sir Launfal must be Lowell in some sort; but
+my love for him as a poet was chiefly centred in my love for his tender
+rhyme, 'Auf Wiedersehen', which I can not yet read without something of
+the young pathos it first stirred in me. I knew and felt his greatness
+some how apart from the literary proofs of it; he ruled my fancy and held
+my allegiance as a character, as a man; and I am neither sorry nor
+ashamed that I was abashed when I first came into his presence; and that
+in spite of his words of welcome I sat inwardly quaking before him. He
+was then forty-one years old, and nineteen my senior, and if there had
+been nothing else to awe me, I might well have been quelled by the
+disparity of our ages. But I have always been willing and even eager to
+do homage to men who have done something, and notably to men who have
+done something in the sort I wished to do something in, myself. I
+could never recognize any other sort of superiority; but that I am proud
+to recognize; and I had before Lowell some such feeling as an obscure
+subaltern might have before his general. He was by nature a bit of a
+disciplinarian, and the effect was from him as well as in me; I dare say
+he let me feel whatever difference there was as helplessly as I felt it.
+At the first encounter with people he always was apt to have a certain
+frosty shyness, a smiling cold, as from the long, high-sunned winters of
+his Puritan race; he was not quite himself till he had made you aware of
+his quality: then no one could be sweeter, tenderer, warmer than he; then
+he made you free of his whole heart; but you must be his captive before
+he could do that. His whole personality had now an instant charm for me;
+I could not keep my eyes from those beautiful eyes of his, which had a
+certain starry serenity, and looked out so purely from under his white
+forehead, shadowed with auburn hair untouched by age; or from the smile
+that shaped the auburn beard, and gave the face in its form and color the
+Christ-look which Page's portrait has flattered in it.
+
+His voice had as great a fascination for me as his face. The vibrant
+tenderness and the crisp clearness of the tones, the perfect modulation,
+the clear enunciation, the exquisite accent, the elect diction--I did not
+know enough then to know that these were the gifts, these were the
+graces, of one from whose tongue our rough English came music such as I
+should never hear from any other. In this speech there was nothing of
+our slipshod American slovenliness, but a truly Italian conscience and an
+artistic sense of beauty in the instrument.
+
+I saw, before he sat down across his writing-table from me, that he was
+not far from the medium height; but his erect carriage made the most of
+his five feet and odd inches. He had been smoking the pipe he loved, and
+he put it back in his mouth, presently, as if he found himself at greater
+ease with it, when he began to chat, or rather to let me show what manner
+of young man I was by giving me the first word. I told him of the
+trouble I had in finding him, and I could not help dragging in something
+about Heine's search for Borne, when he went to see him in Frankfort; but
+I felt at once this was a false start, for Lowell was such an impassioned
+lover of Cambridge, which was truly his patria, in the Italian sense,
+that it must have hurt him to be unknown to any one in it; he said, a
+little dryly, that he should not have thought I would have so much
+difficulty; but he added, forgivingly, that this was not his own house,
+which he was out of for the time. Then he spoke to me of Heine, and when
+I showed my ardor for him, he sought to temper it with some judicious
+criticisms, and told me that he had kept the first poem I sent him, for
+the long time it had been unacknowledged, to make sure that it was not a
+translation. He asked me about myself, and my name, and its Welsh
+origin, and seemed to find the vanity I had in this harmless enough. When
+I said I had tried hard to believe that I was at least the literary
+descendant of Sir James Howels, he corrected me gently with "James
+Howel," and took down a volume of the 'Familiar Letters' from the shelves
+behind him to prove me wrong. This was always his habit, as I found
+afterwards when he quoted anything from a book he liked to get it and
+read the passage over, as if he tasted a kind of hoarded sweetness in the
+words. It visibly vexed him if they showed him in the least mistaken;
+but
+
+        "The love he bore to learning was at fault"
+
+for this foible, and that other of setting people right if he thought
+them wrong. I could not assert myself against his version of Howels's
+name, for my edition of his letters was far away in Ohio, and I was
+obliged to own that the name was spelt in several different ways in it.
+He perceived, no doubt, why I had chosen the form liked my own, with the
+title which the pleasant old turncoat ought to have had from the many
+masters he served according to their many minds, but never had except
+from that erring edition. He did not afflict me for it, though; probably
+it amused him too much; he asked me about the West, and when he found
+that I was as proud of the West as I was of Wales, he seemed even better
+pleased, and said he had always fancied that human nature was laid out on
+rather a larger scale there than in the East, but he had seen very little
+of the West. In my heart I did not think this then, and I do not think
+it now; human nature has had more ground to spread over in the West; that
+is all; but "it was not for me to bandy words with my sovereign." He
+said he liked to hear of the differences between the different sections,
+for what we had most to fear in our country was a wearisome sameness of
+type.
+
+He did not say now, or at any other time during the many years I knew
+him, any of those slighting things of the West which I had so often to
+suffer from Eastern people, but suffered me to praise it all I would. He
+asked me what way I had taken in coming to New England, and when I told
+him, and began to rave of the beauty and quaintness of French Canada, and
+to pour out my joy in Quebec, he said, with a smile that had now lost all
+its frost, Yes, Quebec was a bit of the seventeenth century; it was in
+many ways more French than France, and its people spoke the language of
+Voltaire, with the accent of Voltaire's time.
+
+I do not remember what else he talked of, though once I remembered it
+with what I believed an ineffaceable distinctness. I set nothing of it
+down at the time; I was too busy with the letters I was writing for a
+Cincinnati paper; and I was severely bent upon keeping all personalities
+out of them. This was very well, but I could wish now that I had
+transgressed at least so far as to report some of the things that Lowell
+said; for the paper did not print my letters, and it would have been
+perfectly safe, and very useful for the present purpose. But perhaps he
+did not say anything very memorable; to do that you must have something
+positive in your listener; and I was the mere response, the hollow echo,
+that youth must be in like circumstances. I was all the time afraid of
+wearing my welcome out, and I hurried to go when I would so gladly have
+staid. I do not remember where I meant to go, or why he should have
+undertaken to show me the way across-lots, but this was what he did; and
+when we came to a fence, which I clambered gracelessly over, he put his
+hands on the top, and tried to take it at a bound. He tried twice, and
+then laughed at his failure, but not with any great pleasure, and he was
+not content till a third trial carried him across. Then he said, "I
+commonly do that the first time," as if it were a frequent habit with
+him, while I remained discreetly silent, and for that moment at least
+felt myself the elder of the man who had so much of the boy in him. He
+had, indeed, much of the boy in him to the last, and he parted with each
+hour of his youth reluctantly, pathetically.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+We walked across what must have been Jarvis Field to what must have been
+North Avenue, and there he left me. But before he let me go he held my
+hand while he could say that he wished me to dine with him; only, he was
+not in his own house, and he would ask me to dine with him at the Parker
+House in Boston, and would send me word of the time later.
+
+I suppose I may have spent part of the intervening time in viewing the
+wonders of Boston, and visiting the historic scenes and places in it and
+about it. I certainly went over to Charleston, and ascended Bunker Hill
+monument, and explored the navy-yard, where the immemorial man-of-war
+begun in Jackson's time was then silently stretching itself under its
+long shed in a poetic arrest, as if the failure of the appropriation for
+its completion had been some kind of enchantment. In Boston, I early
+presented my letter of credit to the publisher it was drawn upon, not
+that I needed money at the moment, but from a young eagerness to see if
+it would be honored; and a literary attache of the house kindly went
+about with me, and showed me the life of the city. A great city it
+seemed to me then, and a seething vortex of business as well as a whirl
+of gaiety, as I saw it in Washington Street, and in a promenade concert
+at Copeland's restaurant in Tremont Row. Probably I brought some
+idealizing force to bear upon it, for I was not all so strange to the
+world as I must seem; perhaps I accounted for quality as well as quantity
+in my impressions of the New England metropolis, and aggrandized it in
+the ratio of its literary importance. It seemed to me old, even after
+Quebec, and very likely I credited the actual town with all the dead and
+gone Bostonians in my sentimental census. If I did not, it was no fault
+of my cicerone, who thought even more of the city he showed me than I
+did. I do not know now who he was, and I never saw him after I came to
+live there, with any certainty that it was he, though I was often
+tormented with the vision of a spectacled face like his, but not like
+enough to warrant me in addressing him.
+
+He became part of that ghostly Boston of my first visit, which would
+sometimes return and possess again the city I came to know so familiarly
+in later years, and to be so passionately interested in. Some color of
+my prime impressions has tinged the fictitious experiences of people in
+my books, but I find very little of it in my memory. This is like a web
+of frayed old lace, which I have to take carefully into my hold for fear
+of its fragility, and make out as best I can the figure once so distinct
+in it. There are the narrow streets, stretching saltworks to the docks,
+which I haunted for their quaintness, and there is Faunal Hall, which I
+cared to see so much more because Wendell Phillips had spoken in it than
+because Otis and Adams had. There is the old Colonial House, and there
+is the State House, which I dare say I explored, with the Common sloping
+before it. There is Beacon Street, with the Hancock House where it is
+incredibly no more, and there are the beginnings of Commonwealth Avenue,
+and the other streets of the Back Bay, laid out with their basements left
+hollowed in the made land, which the gravel trains were yet making out of
+the westward hills. There is the Public Garden, newly planned and
+planted, but without the massive bridge destined to make so ungratefully
+little of the lake that occasioned it. But it is all very vague, and I
+could easily believe now that it was some one else who saw it then in my
+place.
+
+I think that I did not try to see Cambridge the same day that I saw
+Lowell, but wisely came back to my hotel in Boston, and tried to realize
+the fact. I went out another day, with an acquaintance from Ohio; whom I
+ran upon in the street. We went to Mount Auburn together, and I viewed
+its monuments with a reverence which I dare say their artistic quality
+did not merit. But I am, not sorry for this, for perhaps they are not
+quite so bad as some people pretend. The Gothic chapel of the cemetery,
+unsorted as it was, gave me, with its half-dozen statues standing or
+sitting about, an emotion such as I am afraid I could not receive now
+from the Acropolis, Westminster Abbey, and Santa Crocea in one. I tried
+hard for some aesthetic sense of it, and I made believe that I thought
+this thing and that thing in the place moved me with its fitness or
+beauty; but the truth is that I had no taste in anything but literature,
+and did not feel the effect I would so willingly have experienced.
+
+I did genuinely love the elmy quiet of the dear old Cambridge streets,
+though, and I had a real and instant pleasure in the yellow colonial
+houses, with their white corners and casements and their green blinds,
+that lurked behind the shrubbery of the avenue I passed through to Mount
+Auburn. The most beautiful among them was the most interesting for me,
+for it was the house of Longfellow; my companion, who had seen it before,
+pointed it out to me with an air of custom, and I would not let him see
+that I valued the first sight of it as I did. I had hoped that somehow I
+might be so favored as to see Longfellow himself, but when I asked about
+him of those who knew, they said, "Oh, he is at Nahant," and I thought
+that Nahant must be a great way off, and at any rate I did not feel
+authorized to go to him there. Neither did I go to see the author of
+'The Amber Gods' who lived at Newburyport, I was told, as if I should
+know where Newburyport was; I did not know, and I hated to ask. Besides,
+it did not seem so simple as it had seemed in Ohio, to go and see a young
+lady simply because I was infatuated with her literature; even as the
+envoy of all the infatuated young people of Columbus, I could not quite
+do this; and when I got home, I had to account for my failure as best I
+could. Another failure of mine was the sight of Whittier, which I then
+very much longed to have. They said, "Oh, Whittier lives at Amesbury,"
+but that put him at an indefinite distance, and without the introduction
+I never would ask for, I found it impossible to set out in quest of him.
+In the end, I saw no one in New England whom I was not presented to in
+the regular way, except Lowell, whom I thought I had a right to call upon
+in my quality of contributor, and from the acquaintance I had with him by
+letter. I neither praise nor blame myself for this; it was my shyness
+that with held me rather than my merit. There is really no harm in
+seeking the presence of a famous man, and I doubt if the famous man
+resents the wish of people to look upon him without some measure, great
+or little, of affectation. There are bores everywhere, but he is
+likelier to find them in the wonted figures of society than in those
+young people, or old people, who come to him in the love of what he has
+done. I am well aware how furiously Tennyson sometimes met his
+worshippers, and how insolently Carlyle, but I think these facts are
+little specks in their sincerity. Our own gentler and honester
+celebrities did not forbid approach, and I have known some of them caress
+adorers who seemed hardly worthy of their kindness; but that was better
+than to have hurt any sensitive spirit who had ventured too far, by the
+rules that govern us with common men.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+My business relations were with the house that so promptly honored my
+letter of credit. This house had published in the East the campaign life
+of Lincoln which I had lately written, and I dare say would have
+published the volume of poems I had written earlier with my friend Piatt,
+if there had been any public for it; at least, I saw large numbers of the
+book on the counters. But all my literary affiliations were with Ticknor
+& Fields, and it was the Old Corner Book-Store on Washington Street that
+drew my heart as soon as I had replenished my pocket in Cornhill. After
+verifying the editor of the Atlantic Monthly I wised to verify its
+publishers, and it very fitly happened that when I was shown into Mr.
+Fields's little room at the back of the store, with its window looking
+upon School Street, and its scholarly keeping in books and prints, he had
+just got the magazine sheets of a poem of mine from the Cambridge
+printers. He was then lately from abroad, and he had the zest for
+American things which a foreign sojourn is apt to renew in us, though I
+did not know this then, and could not account for it in the kindness he
+expressed for my poem. He introduced me to Mr. Ticknor, who I fancied
+had not read my poem; but he seemed to know what it was from the junior
+partner, and he asked me whether I had been paid for it. I confessed
+that I had not, and then he got out a chamois-leather bag, and took from
+it five half-eagles in gold and laid them on the green cloth top of the
+desk, in much the shape and of much the size of the Great Bear. I have
+never since felt myself paid so lavishly for any literary work, though I
+have had more for a single piece than the twenty-five dollars that
+dazzled me in this constellation. The publisher seemed aware of the
+poetic character of the transaction; he let the pieces lie a moment,
+before he gathered them up and put them into my hand, and said, "I always
+think it is pleasant to have it in gold."
+
+But a terrible experience with the poem awaited me, and quenched for the
+moment all my pleasure and pride. It was 'The Pilot's Story,' which I
+suppose has had as much acceptance as anything of mine in verse (I do not
+boast of a vast acceptance for it), and I had attempted to treat in it a
+phase of the national tragedy of slavery, as I had imagined it on a
+Mississippi steamboat. A young planter has gambled away the slave-girl
+who is the mother of his child, and when he tells her, she breaks out
+upon him with the demand:
+
+   "What will you say to our boy when he cries for me, there in Saint
+   Louis?"
+
+I had thought this very well, and natural and simple, but a fatal
+proof-reader had not thought it well enough, or simple and natural
+enough, and he had made the line read:
+
+   "What will you say to our boy when he cries for 'Ma,' there in Saint
+   Louis?"
+
+He had even had the inspiration to quote the word he preferred to the one
+I had written, so that there was no merciful possibility of mistaking it
+for a misprint, and my blood froze in my veins at sight of it. Mr.
+Fields had given me the sheets to read while he looked over some letters,
+and he either felt the chill of my horror, or I made some sign or sound
+of dismay that caught his notice, for he looked round at me. I could
+only show him the passage with a gasp. I dare say he might have liked to
+laugh, for it was cruelly funny, but he did not; he was concerned for the
+magazine as well as for me. He declared that when he first read the line
+he had thought I could not have written it so, and he agreed with me that
+it would kill the poem if it came out in that shape. He instantly set
+about repairing the mischief, so far as could be. He found that the
+whole edition of that sheet had been printed, and the air blackened round
+me again, lighted up here and there with baleful flashes of the newspaper
+wit at my cost, which I previsioned in my misery; I knew what I should
+have said of such a thing myself, if it had been another's. But the
+publisher at once decided that the sheet must be reprinted, and I went
+away weak as if in the escape from some deadly peril. Afterwards it
+appeared that the line had passed the first proof-reader as I wrote it,
+but that the final reader had entered so sympathetically into the
+realistic intention of my poem as to contribute the modification which
+had nearly been my end.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+As it fell out, I lived without farther difficulty to the day and hour of
+the dinner Lowell made for me; and I really think, looking at myself
+impersonally, and remembering the sort of young fellow I was, that it
+would have been a great pity if I had not. The dinner was at the
+old-fashioned Boston hour of two, and the table was laid for four people
+in some little upper room at Parker's, which I was never afterwards able
+to make sure of. Lowell was already, there when I came, and he presented
+me, to my inexpressible delight and surprise, to Dr. Holmes, who was
+there with him.
+
+Holmes was in the most brilliant hour of that wonderful second youth
+which his fame flowered into long after the world thought he had
+completed the cycle of his literary life. He had already received full
+recognition as a poet of delicate wit, nimble humor, airy imagination,
+and exquisite grace, when the Autocrat papers advanced his name
+indefinitely beyond the bounds which most immortals would have found
+range enough. The marvel of his invention was still fresh in the minds
+of men, and time had not dulled in any measure the sense of its novelty.
+His readers all fondly identified him with his work; and I fully expected
+to find myself in the Autocrat's presence when I met Dr. Holmes. But
+the fascination was none the less for that reason; and the winning smile,
+the wise and humorous glance, the whole genial manner was as important to
+me as if I had foreboded something altogether different. I found him
+physically of the Napoleonic height which spiritually overtops the Alps,
+and I could look into his face without that unpleasant effort which
+giants of inferior mind so often cost the man of five feet four.
+
+A little while after, Fields came in, and then our number and my pleasure
+were complete.
+
+Nothing else so richly satisfactory, indeed, as the whole affair could
+have happened to a like youth at such a point in his career; and when I
+sat down with Doctor Holmes and Mr. Fields, on Lowell's right, I felt
+through and through the dramatic perfection of the event. The kindly
+Autocrat recognized some such quality of it in terms which were not the
+less precious and gracious for their humorous excess. I have no reason
+to think that he had yet read any of my poor verses, or had me otherwise
+than wholly on trust from Lowell; but he leaned over towards his host,
+and said, with a laughing look at me, "Well, James, this is something
+like the apostolic succession; this is the laying on of hands." I took
+his sweet and caressing irony as he meant it; but the charm of it went to
+my head long before any drop of wine, together with the charm of hearing
+him and Lowell calling each other James and Wendell, and of finding them
+still cordially boys together.
+
+I would gladly have glimmered before those great lights in the talk that
+followed, if I could have thought of anything brilliant to say, but I
+could not, and so I let them shine without a ray of reflected splendor
+from me. It was such talk as I had, of course, never heard before, and
+it is not saying enough to say that I have never heard such talk since
+except from these two men. It was as light and kind as it was deep and
+true, and it ranged over a hundred things, with a perpetual sparkle of
+Doctor Holmes's wit, and the constant glow of Lowell's incandescent
+sense. From time to time Fields came in with one of his delightful
+stories (sketches of character they were, which he sometimes did not mind
+caricaturing), or with some criticism of the literary situation from his
+stand-point of both lover and publisher of books. I heard fames that I
+had accepted as proofs of power treated as factitious, and witnessed a
+frankness concerning authorship, far and near, that I had not dreamed of
+authors using. When Doctor Holmes understood that I wrote for the
+'Saturday Press', which was running amuck among some Bostonian
+immortalities of the day, he seemed willing that I should know they were
+not thought so very undying in Boston, and that I should not take the
+notion of a Mutual Admiration Society too seriously, or accept the New
+York Bohemian view of Boston as true. For the most part the talk did not
+address itself to me, but became an exchange of thoughts and fancies
+between himself and Lowell. They touched, I remember, on certain matters
+of technique, and the doctor confessed that he had a prejudice against
+some words that he could not overcome; for instance, he said, nothing
+could induce him to use 'neath for beneath, no exigency of versification
+or stress of rhyme. Lowell contended that he would use any word that
+carried his meaning; and I think he did this to the hurt of some of his
+earlier things. He was then probably in the revolt against too much
+literature in literature, which every one is destined sooner or later to
+share; there was a certain roughness, very like crudeness, which he
+indulged before his thought and phrase mellowed to one music in his later
+work. I tacitly agreed rather with the doctor, though I did not swerve
+from my allegiance to Lowell, and if I had spoken I should have sided
+with him: I would have given that or any other proof of my devotion.
+Fields casually mentioned that he thought "The Dandelion" was the most
+popularly liked of Lowell's briefer poems, and I made haste to say that I
+thought so too, though I did not really think anything about it; and then
+I was sorry, for I could see that the poet did not like it, quite; and I
+felt that I was duly punished for my dishonesty.
+
+Hawthorne was named among other authors, probably by Fields, whose house
+had just published his "Marble Faun," and who had recently come home on
+the same steamer with him. Doctor Holmes asked if I had met Hawthorne
+yet, and when I confessed that I had hardly yet even hoped for such a
+thing, he smiled his winning smile, and said: "Ah, well! I don't know
+that you will ever feel you have really met him. He is like a dim room
+with a little taper of personality burning on the corner of the mantel."
+
+They all spoke of Hawthorne, and with the same affection, but the same
+sense of something mystical and remote in him; and every word was
+priceless to me. But these masters of the craft I was 'prentice to
+probably could not have said anything that I should not have found wise
+and well, and I am sure now I should have been the loser if the talk had
+shunned any of the phases of human nature which it touched. It is best
+to find that all men are of the same make, and that there are certain
+universal things which interest them as much as the supernal things, and
+amuse them even more. There was a saying of Lowell's which he was fond
+of repeating at the menace of any form of the transcendental, and he
+liked to warn himself and others with his homely, "Remember the
+dinner-bell." What I recall of the whole effect of a time so happy for
+me is that in all that was said, however high, however fine, we were
+never out of hearing of the dinner-bell; and perhaps this is the best
+effect I can leave with the reader. It was the first dinner served in
+courses that I had sat down to, and I felt that this service gave it a
+romantic importance which the older fashion of the West still wanted.
+Even at Governor Chase's table in Columbus the Governor carved; I knew of
+the dinner 'a la Russe', as it was then called, only from books; and it
+was a sort of literary flavor that I tasted in the successive dishes.
+When it came to the black coffee, and then to the 'petits verres' of
+cognac, with lumps of sugar set fire to atop, it was something that so
+far transcended my home-kept experience that it began to seem altogether
+visionary.
+
+Neither Fields nor Doctor Holmes smoked, and I had to confess that I did
+not; but Lowell smoked enough for all three, and the spark of his cigar
+began to show in the waning light before we rose from the table. The
+time that never had, nor can ever have, its fellow for me, had to come to
+an end, as all times must, and when I shook hands with Lowell in parting,
+he overwhelmed me by saying that if I thought of going to Concord he
+would send me a letter to Hawthorne. I was not to see Lowell again
+during my stay in Boston; but Doctor Holmes asked me to tea for the next
+evening, and Fields said I must come to breakfast with him in the
+morning.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+I recall with the affection due to his friendly nature, and to the
+kindness afterwards to pass between us for many years, the whole aspect
+of the publisher when I first saw him. His abundant hair, and his full
+"beard as broad as ony spade," that flowed from his throat in Homeric
+curls, were touched with the first frost. He had a fine color, and his
+eyes, as keen as they were kind, twinkled restlessly above the wholesome
+russet-red of his cheeks. His portly frame was clad in those Scotch
+tweeds which had not yet displaced the traditional broadcloth with us in
+the West, though I had sent to New York for a rough suit, and so felt
+myself not quite unworthy to meet a man fresh from the hands of the
+London tailor.
+
+Otherwise I stood as much in awe of him as his jovial soul would let me;
+and if I might I should like to suggest to the literary youth of this day
+some notion of the importance of his name to the literary youth of my
+day. He gave aesthetic character to the house of Ticknor & Fields, but
+he was by no means a silent partner on the economic side. No one can
+forecast the fortune of a new book, but he knew as well as any publisher
+can know not only whether a book was good, but whether the reader would
+think so; and I suppose that his house made as few bad guesses, along
+with their good ones, as any house that ever tried the uncertain temper
+of the public with its ventures. In the minds of all who loved the plain
+brown cloth and tasteful print of its issues he was more or less
+intimately associated with their literature; and those who were not
+mistaken in thinking De Quincey one of the delightfulest authors in the
+world, were especially grateful to the man who first edited his writings
+in book form, and proud that this edition was the effect of American
+sympathy with them. At that day, I believed authorship the noblest
+calling in the world, and I should still be at a loss to name any nobler.
+The great authors I had met were to me the sum of greatness, and if I
+could not rank their publisher with them by virtue of equal achievement,
+I handsomely brevetted him worthy of their friendship, and honored him in
+the visible measure of it.
+
+In his house beside the Charles, and in the close neighborhood of Doctor
+Holmes, I found an odor and an air of books such as I fancied might
+belong to the famous literary houses of London. It is still there, that
+friendly home of lettered refinement, and the gracious spirit which knew
+how to welcome me, and make the least of my shyness and strangeness, and
+the most of the little else there was in me, illumines it still, though
+my host of that rapturous moment has many years been of those who are
+only with us unseen and unheard. I remember his burlesque pretence that
+morning of an inextinguishable grief when I owned that I had never eaten
+blueberry cake before, and how he kept returning to the pathos of the
+fact that there should be a region of the earth where blueberry cake was
+unknown. We breakfasted in the pretty room whose windows look out
+through leaves and flowers upon the river's coming and going tides, and
+whose walls were covered with the faces and the autographs of all the
+contemporary poets and novelists. The Fieldses had spent some days with
+Tennyson in their recent English sojourn, and Mrs. Fields had much to
+tell of him, how he looked, how he smoked, how he read aloud, and how he
+said, when he asked her to go with him to the tower of his house, "Come
+up and see the sad English sunset!" which had an instant value to me such
+as some rich verse of his might have had. I was very new to it all, how
+new I could not very well say, but I flattered myself that I breathed in
+that atmosphere as if in the return from life-long exile. Still I
+patriotically bragged of the West a little, and I told them proudly that
+in Columbus no book since Uncle Tom's Cabin had sold so well as 'The
+Marble Faun'. This made the effect that I wished, but whether it was
+true or not, Heaven knows; I only know that I heard it from our leading
+bookseller, and I made no question of it myself.
+
+After breakfast, Fields went away to the office, and I lingered, while
+Mrs. Fields showed me from shelf to shelf in the library, and dazzled me
+with the sight of authors' copies, and volumes invaluable with the
+autographs and the pencilled notes of the men whose names were dear to me
+from my love of their work. Everywhere was some souvenir of the living
+celebrities my hosts had met; and whom had they not met in that English
+sojourn in days before England embittered herself to us during our civil
+war? Not Tennyson only, but Thackeray, but Dickens, but Charles Reade,
+but Carlyle, but many a minor fame was in my ears from converse so recent
+with them that it was as if I heard their voices in their echoed words.
+
+I do not remember how long I stayed; I remember I was afraid of staying
+too long, and so I am sure I did not stay as long as I should have liked.
+But I have not the least notion how I got away, and I am not certain
+where I spent the rest of a day that began in the clouds, but had to be
+ended on the common earth. I suppose I gave it mostly to wandering about
+the city, and partly to recording my impressions of it for that newspaper
+which never published them. The summer weather in Boston, with its sunny
+heat struck through and through with the coolness of the sea, and its
+clear air untainted with a breath of smoke, I have always loved, but it
+had then a zest unknown before; and I should have thought it enough
+simply to be alive in it. But everywhere I came upon something that fed
+my famine for the old, the quaint, the picturesque, and however the day
+passed it was a banquet, a festival. I can only recall my breathless
+first sight of the Public Library and of the Athenaeum Gallery: great
+sights then, which the Vatican and the Pitti hardly afterwards eclipsed
+for mere emotion. In fact I did not see these elder treasuries of
+literature and art between breakfasting with the Autocrat's publisher in
+the morning, and taking tea with the Autocrat himself in the evening, and
+that made a whole world's difference.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+The tea of that simpler time is wholly inconceivable to this generation,
+which knows the thing only as a mild form of afternoon reception; but I
+suppose that in 1860 very few dined late in our whole pastoral republic.
+Tea was the meal people asked people to when they wished to sit at long
+leisure and large ease; it came at the end of the day, at six o'clock, or
+seven; and one went to it in morning dress. It had an unceremonied
+domesticity in the abundance of its light dishes, and I fancy these did
+not vary much from East to West, except that we had a Southern touch in
+our fried chicken and corn bread; but at the Autocrat's tea table the
+cheering cup had a flavor unknown to me before that day. He asked me if
+I knew it, and I said it was English breakfast tea; for I had drunk it at
+the publisher's in the morning, and was willing not to seem strange to
+it. "Ah, yes," he said; "but this is the flower of the souchong; it is
+the blossom, the poetry of tea," and then he told me how it had been
+given him by a friend, a merchant in the China trade, which used to
+flourish in Boston, and was the poetry of commerce, as this delicate
+beverage was of tea. That commerce is long past, and I fancy that the
+plant ceased to bloom when the traffic fell into decay.
+
+The Autocrat's windows had the same outlook upon the Charles as the
+publisher's, and after tea we went up into a back parlor of the same
+orientation, and saw the sunset die over the water, and the westering
+flats and hills. Nowhere else in the world has the day a lovelier close,
+and our talk took something of the mystic coloring that the heavens gave
+those mantling expanses. It was chiefly his talk, but I have always
+found the best talkers are willing that you should talk if you like, and
+a quick sympathy and a subtle sense met all that I had to say from him
+and from the unbroken circle of kindred intelligences about him. I saw
+him then in the midst of his family, and perhaps never afterwards to
+better advantage, or in a finer mood. We spoke of the things that people
+perhaps once liked to deal with more than they do now; of the intimations
+of immortality, of the experiences of morbid youth, and of all those
+messages from the tremulous nerves which we take for prophecies. I was
+not ashamed, before his tolerant wisdom, to acknowledge the effects that
+had lingered so long with me in fancy and even in conduct, from a time of
+broken health and troubled spirit; and I remember the exquisite tact in
+him which recognized them as things common to all, however peculiar in
+each, which left them mine for whatever obscure vanity I might have in
+them, and yet gave me the companionship of the whole race in their
+experience. We spoke of forebodings and presentiments; we approached the
+mystic confines of the world from which no traveller has yet returned
+with a passport 'en regle' and properly 'vise'; and he held his light
+course through these filmy impalpabilities with a charming sincerity,
+with the scientific conscience that refuses either to deny the substance
+of things unseen, or to affirm it. In the gathering dusk, so weird did
+my fortune of being there and listening to him seem, that I might well
+have been a blessed ghost, for all the reality I felt in myself.
+
+I tried to tell him how much I had read him from my boyhood, and with
+what joy and gain; and he was patient of these futilities, and I have no
+doubt imagined the love that inspired them, and accepted that instead of
+the poor praise. When the sunset passed, and the lamps were lighted, and
+we all came back to our dear little firm-set earth, he began to question
+me about my native region of it. From many forgotten inquiries I recall
+his asking me what was the fashionable religion in Columbus, or the
+Church that socially corresponded to the Unitarian Church in Boston. He
+had first to clarify my intelligence as to-what Unitarianism was; we had
+Universalists but not Unitarians; but when I understood, I answered from
+such vantage as my own wholly outside Swedenborgianism gave me, that I
+thought most of the most respectable people with us were of the
+Presbyterian Church; some were certainly Episcopalians, but upon the
+whole the largest number were Presbyterians. He found that very strange
+indeed; and said that he did not believe there was a Presbyterian Church
+in Boston; that the New England Calvinists were all of the Orthodox
+Church. He had to explain Oxthodoxy to me, and then I could confess to
+one Congregational Church in Columbus.
+
+Probably I failed to give the Autocrat any very clear image of our social
+frame in the West, but the fault was altogether mine, if I did. Such
+lecturing tours as he had made had not taken him among us, as those of
+Emerson and other New-Englanders had, and my report was positive rather
+than comparative. I was full of pride in journalism at that day, and I
+dare say that I vaunted the brilliancy and power of our newspapers more
+than they merited; I should not have been likely to wrong them otherwise.
+It is strange that in all the talk I had with him and Lowell, or rather
+heard from them, I can recall nothing said of political affairs, though
+Lincoln had then been nominated by the Republicans, and the Civil War had
+practically begun. But we did not imagine such a thing in the North; we
+rested secure in the belief that if Lincoln were elected the South would
+eat all its fiery words, perhaps from the mere love and inveterate habit
+of fire-eating.
+
+I rent myself away from the Autocrat's presence as early as I could, and
+as my evening had been too full of happiness to sleep upon at once, I
+spent the rest of the night till two in the morning wandering about the
+streets and in the Common with a Harvard Senior whom I had met. He was a
+youth of like literary passions with myself, but of such different
+traditions in every possible way that his deeply schooled and definitely
+regulated life seemed as anomalous to me as my own desultory and
+self-found way must have seemed to him. We passed the time in the
+delight of trying to make ourselves known to each other, and in a promise
+to continue by letter the effort, which duly lapsed into silent patience
+with the necessarily insoluble problem.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+I must have lingered in Boston for the introduction to Hawthorne which
+Lowell had offered me, for when it came, with a little note of kindness
+and counsel for myself such as only Lowell had the gift of writing, it
+was already so near Sunday that I stayed over till Monday before I
+started. I do not recall what I did with the time, except keep myself
+from making it a burden to the people I knew, and wandering about the
+city alone. Nothing of it remains to me except the fortune that favored
+me that Sunday night with a view of the old Granary Burying-ground on
+Tremont Street. I found the gates open, and I explored every path in the
+place, wreaking myself in such meagre emotion as I could get from the
+tomb of the Franklin family, and rejoicing with the whole soul of my
+Western modernity in the evidence of a remote antiquity which so many of
+the dim inscriptions afforded. I do not think that I have ever known
+anything practically older than these monuments, though I have since
+supped so full of classic and mediaeval ruin. I am sure that I was more
+deeply touched by the epitaph of a poor little Puritan maiden who died at
+sixteen in the early sixteen-thirties than afterwards by the tomb of
+Caecilia Metella, and that the heartache which I tried to put into verse
+when I got back to my room in the hotel was none the less genuine because
+it would not lend itself to my literary purpose, and remains nothing but
+pathos to this day.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+I am not able to say how I reached the town of Lowell, where I went
+before going to Concord, that I might ease the unhappy conscience I had
+about those factories which I hated so much to see, and have it clean for
+the pleasure of meeting the fabricator of visions whom I was authorized
+to molest in any air-castle where I might find him. I only know that I
+went to Lowell, and visited one of the great mills, which with their
+whirring spools, the ceaseless flight of their shuttles, and the
+bewildering sight and sound of all their mechanism have since seemed to
+me the death of the joy that ought to come from work, if not the
+captivity of those who tended them. But then I thought it right and well
+for me to be standing by,
+
+        "With sick and scornful looks averse,"
+
+while these others toiled; I did not see the tragedy in it, and I got my
+pitiful literary antipathy away as soon as I could, no wiser for the
+sight of the ingenious contrivances I inspected, and I am sorry to say no
+sadder. In the cool of the evening I sat at the door of my hotel, and
+watched the long files of the work-worn factory-girls stream by, with no
+concern for them but to see which was pretty and which was plain, and
+with no dream of a truer order than that which gave them ten hours' work
+a day in those hideous mills and lodged them in the barracks where they
+rested from their toil.
+
+I wonder if there is a stage that still runs between Lowell and Concord,
+past meadow walls, and under the caressing boughs of way-side elms, and
+through the bird-haunted gloom of woodland roads, in the freshness of the
+summer morning? By a blessed chance I found that there was such a stage
+in 1860, and I took it from my hotel, instead of going back to Boston and
+up to Concord as I must have had to do by train. The journey gave me the
+intimacy of the New England country as I could have had it in no other
+fashion, and for the first time I saw it in all the summer sweetness
+which I have often steeped my soul in since. The meadows were newly
+mown, and the air was fragrant with the grass, stretching in long winrows
+among the brown bowlders, or capped with canvas in the little haycocks it
+had been gathered into the day before. I was fresh from the affluent
+farms of the Western Reserve, and this care of the grass touched me with
+a rude pity, which I also bestowed on the meagre fields of corn and
+wheat; but still the land was lovelier than any I had ever seen, with its
+old farmhouses, and brambled gray stone walls, its stony hillsides, its
+staggering orchards, its wooded tops, and its thick-brackened valleys.
+From West to East the difference was as great as I afterwards found it
+from America to Europe, and my impression of something quaint and strange
+was no keener when I saw Old England the next year than when I saw New
+England now. I had imagined the landscape bare of trees, and I was
+astonished to find it almost as full of them as at home, though they all
+looked very little, as they well might to eyes used to the primeval
+forests of Ohio. The road ran through them from time to time, and took
+their coolness on its smooth hard reaches, and then issued again in the
+glisten of the open fields.
+
+I made phrases to myself about the scenery as we drove along; and yes, I
+suppose I made phrases about the young girl who was one of the inside
+passengers, and who, when the common strangeness had somewhat worn off,
+began to sing, and sang most of the way to Concord. Perhaps she was not
+very sage, and I am sure she was not of the caste of Vere de Vere, but
+she was pretty enough, and she had a voice of a bird-like tunableness, so
+that I would not have her out of the memory of that pleasant journey if I
+could. She was long ago an elderly woman, if she lives, and I suppose
+she would not now point out her fellow-passenger if he strolled in the
+evening by the house where she had dismounted, upon her arrival in
+Concord, and laugh and pull another girl away from the window, in the
+high excitement of the prodigious adventure.
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+Her fellow-passenger was in far other excitement; he was to see
+Hawthorne, and in a manner to meet Priscilla and Zenobia, and Hester
+Prynne and little Pearl, and Miriam and Hilda, and Hollingsworth and
+Coverdale, and Chillingworth and Dimmesdale, and Donatello and Kenyon;
+and he had no heart for any such poor little reality as that, who could
+not have been got into any story that one could respect, and must have
+been difficult even in a Heinesque poem.
+
+I wasted that whole evening and the next morning in fond delaying, and it
+was not until after the indifferent dinner I got at the tavern where I
+stopped, that I found courage to go and present Lowell's letter to
+Hawthorne. I would almost have foregone meeting the weird genius only to
+have kept that letter, for it said certain infinitely precious things of
+me with such a sweetness, such a grace, as Lowell alone could give his
+praise. Years afterwards, when Hawthorne was dead, I met Mrs. Hawthorne,
+and told her of the pang I had in parting with it, and she sent it me,
+doubly enriched by Hawthorne's keeping. But now if I were to see him at
+all I must give up my letter, and I carried it in my hand to the door of
+the cottage he called The Wayside. It was never otherwise than a very
+modest place, but the modesty was greater then than to-day, and there was
+already some preliminary carpentry at one end of the cottage, which I saw
+was to result in an addition to it. I recall pleasant fields across the
+road before it; behind rose a hill wooded with low pines, such as is made
+in Septimius Felton the scene of the involuntary duel between Septimius
+and the young British officer. I have a sense of the woods coming quite
+down to the house, but if this was so I do not know what to do with a
+grassy slope which seems to have stretched part way up the hill. As I
+approached, I looked for the tower which the author was fabled to climb
+into at sight of the coming guest, and pull the ladder up after him; and
+I wondered whether he would fly before me in that sort, or imagine some
+easier means of escaping me.
+
+The door was opened to my ring by a tall handsome boy whom I suppose to
+have been Mr. Julian Hawthorne; and the next moment I found myself in the
+presence of the romancer, who entered from some room beyond. He advanced
+carrying his head with a heavy forward droop, and with a pace for which I
+decided that the word would be pondering. It was the pace of a bulky man
+of fifty, and his head was that beautiful head we all know from the many
+pictures of it. But Hawthorne's look was different from that of any
+picture of him that I have seen. It was sombre and brooding, as the look
+of such a poet should have been; it was the look of a man who had dealt
+faithfully and therefore sorrowfully with that problem of evil which
+forever attracted, forever evaded Hawthorne. It was by no means
+troubled; it was full of a dark repose. Others who knew him better and
+saw him oftener were familiar with other aspects, and I remember that one
+night at Longfellow's table, when one of the guests happened to speak of
+the photograph of Hawthorne which hung in a corner of the room, Lowell
+said, after a glance at it, "Yes, it's good; but it hasn't his fine
+'accipitral' [pertaining to the look of a bird of prey; hawklike. D.W.]
+look."
+
+In the face that confronted me, however, there was nothing of keen
+alertness; but only a sort of quiet, patient intelligence, for which I
+seek the right word in vain. It was a very regular face, with beautiful
+eyes; the mustache, still entirely dark, was dense over the fine mouth.
+Hawthorne was dressed in black, and he had a certain effect which I
+remember, of seeming to have on a black cravat with no visible collar. He
+was such a man that if I had ignorantly met him anywhere I should have
+instantly felt him to be a personage.
+
+I must have given him the letter myself, for I have no recollection of
+parting with it before, but I only remember his offering me his hand, and
+making me shyly and tentatively welcome. After a few moments of the
+demoralization which followed his hospitable attempts in me, he asked if
+I would not like to go up on his hill with him and sit there, where he
+smoked in the afternoon. He offered me a cigar, and when I said that I
+did not smoke, he lighted it for himself, and we climbed the hill
+together. At the top, where there was an outlook in the pines over the
+Concord meadows, we found a log, and he invited me to a place on it
+beside him, and at intervals of a minute or so he talked while he smoked.
+Heaven preserved me from the folly of trying to tell him how much his
+books had been to me, and though we got on rapidly at no time, I think we
+got on better for this interposition. He asked me about Lowell, I dare
+say, for I told him of my joy in meeting him and Doctor Holmes, and this
+seemed greatly to interest him. Perhaps because he was so lately from
+Europe, where our great men are always seen through the wrong end of the
+telescope, he appeared surprised at my devotion, and asked me whether I
+cared as much for meeting them as I should care for meeting the famous
+English authors. I professed that I cared much more, though whether this
+was true, I now have my doubts, and I think Hawthorne doubted it at the
+time. But he said nothing in comment, and went on to speak generally of
+Europe and America. He was curious about the West, which he seemed to
+fancy much more purely American, and said he would like to see some part
+of the country on which the shadow (or, if I must be precise, the damned
+shadow) of Europe had not fallen. I told him I thought the West must
+finally be characterized by the Germans, whom we had in great numbers,
+and, purely from my zeal for German poetry, I tried to allege some proofs
+of their present influence, though I could think of none outside of
+politics, which I thought they affected wholesomely. I knew Hawthorne
+was a Democrat, and I felt it well to touch politics lightly, but he had
+no more to say about the fateful election then pending than Holmes or
+Lowell had.
+
+With the abrupt transition of his talk throughout, he began somehow to
+speak of women, and said he had never seen a woman whom he thought quite
+beautiful. In the same way he spoke of the New England temperament, and
+suggested that the apparent coldness in it was also real, and that the
+suppression of emotion for generations would extinguish it at last. Then
+he questioned me as to my knowledge of Concord, and whether I had seen
+any of the notable people. I answered that I had met no one but himself,
+as yet, but I very much wished to see Emerson and Thoreau. I did not
+think it needful to say that I wished to see Thoreau quite as much
+because he had suffered in the cause of John Brown as because he had
+written the books which had taken me; and when he said that Thoreau
+prided himself on coming nearer the heart of a pine-tree than any other
+human being, I could say honestly enough that I would rather come near
+the heart of a man. This visibly pleased him, and I saw that it did not
+displease him, when he asked whether I was not going to see his next
+neighbor, Mr. Alcott, and I confessed that I had never heard of him. That
+surprised as well as pleased him; he remarked, with whatever intention,
+that there was nothing like recognition to make a man modest; and he
+entered into some account of the philosopher, whom I suppose I need not
+be much ashamed of not knowing then, since his influence was of the
+immediate sort that makes a man important to his townsmen while he is
+still strange to his countrymen.
+
+Hawthorne descanted a little upon the landscape, and said certain of the
+pleasant fields below us be longed to him; but he preferred his hill-top,
+and if he could have his way those arable fields should be grown up to
+pines too. He smoked fitfully, and slowly, and in the hour that we spent
+together, his whiffs were of the desultory and unfinal character of his
+words. When we went down, he asked me into his house again, and would
+have me stay to tea, for which we found the table laid. But there was a
+great deal of silence in it all, and at times, in spite of his shadowy
+kindness, I felt my spirits sink. After tea, he showed me a book case,
+where there were a few books toppling about on the half-filled shelves,
+and said, coldly, "This is my library." I knew that men were his books,
+and though I myself cared for books so much, I found it fit and fine that
+he should care so little, or seem to care so little. Some of his own
+romances were among the volumes on these shelves, and when I put my
+finger on the 'Blithedale Romance' and said that I preferred that to the
+others, his face lighted up, and he said that he believed the Germans
+liked that best too.
+
+Upon the whole we parted such good friends that when I offered to take
+leave he asked me how long I was to be in Concord, and not only bade me
+come to see him again, but said he would give me a card to Emerson, if I
+liked. I answered, of course, that I should like it beyond all things;
+and he wrote on the back of his card something which I found, when I got
+away, to be, "I find this young man worthy." The quaintness, the little
+stiffness of it, if one pleases to call it so, was amusing to one who was
+not without his sense of humor, but the kindness filled me to the throat
+with joy. In fact, I entirely liked Hawthorne. He had been as cordial
+as so shy a man could show himself; and I perceived, with the repose that
+nothing else can give, the entire sincerity of his soul.
+
+Nothing could have been further from the behavior of this very great man
+than any sort of posing, apparently, or a wish to affect me with a sense
+of his greatness. I saw that he was as much abashed by our encounter as
+I was; he was visibly shy to the point of discomfort, but in no ignoble
+sense was he conscious, and as nearly as he could with one so much his
+younger he made an absolute equality between us. My memory of him is
+without alloy one of the finest pleasures of my life: In my heart I paid
+him the same glad homage that I paid Lowell and Holmes, and he did
+nothing to make me think that I had overpaid him. This seems perhaps
+very little to say in his praise, but to my mind it is saying everything,
+for I have known but few great men, especially of those I met in early
+life, when I wished to lavish my admiration upon them, whom I have not
+the impression of having left in my debt. Then, a defect of the Puritan
+quality, which I have found in many New-Englanders, is that, wittingly or
+unwittingly, they propose themselves to you as an example, or if not
+quite this, that they surround themselves with a subtle ether of
+potential disapprobation, in which, at the first sign of unworthiness in
+you, they helplessly suffer you to gasp and perish; they have good
+hearts, and they would probably come to your succor out of humanity, if
+they knew how, but they do not know how. Hawthorne had nothing of this
+about him; he was no more tacitly than he was explicitly didactic. I
+thought him as thoroughly in keeping with his romances as Doctor Holmes
+had seemed with his essays and poems, and I met him as I had met the
+Autocrat in the supreme hour of his fame. He had just given the world
+the last of those incomparable works which it was to have finished from
+his hand; the 'Marble Faun' had worthily followed, at a somewhat longer
+interval than usual, the 'Blithedale Romance', and the 'House of Seven
+Gables', and the 'Scarlet Letter', and had, perhaps carried his name
+higher than all the rest, and certainly farther. Everybody was reading
+it, and more or less bewailing its indefinite close, but yielding him
+that full honor and praise which a writer can hope for but once in his
+life. Nobody dreamed that thereafter only precious fragments, sketches
+more or less faltering, though all with the divine touch in them, were
+further to enrich a legacy which in its kind is the finest the race has
+received from any mind. As I have said, we are always finding new
+Hawthornes, but the illusion soon wears away, and then we perceive that
+they were not Hawthornes at all; that he had some peculiar difference
+from them, which, by and-by, we shall no doubt consent must be his
+difference from all men evermore.
+
+I am painfully aware that I have not summoned before the reader the image
+of the man as it has always stood in my memory, and I feel a sort of
+shame for my failure. He was so altogether simple that it seems as if it
+would be easy to do so; but perhaps a spirit from the other world would
+be simple too, and yet would no more stand at parle, or consent to be
+sketched, than Hawthorne. In fact, he was always more or less merging
+into the shadow, which was in a few years wholly to close over him; there
+was nothing uncanny in his presence, there was nothing even unwilling,
+but he had that apparitional quality of some great minds which kept
+Shakespeare largely unknown to those who thought themselves his
+intimates, and has at last left him a sort of doubt. There was nothing
+teasing or wilfully elusive in Hawthorne's impalpability, such as I
+afterwards felt in Thoreau; if he was not there to your touch, it was no
+fault of his; it was because your touch was dull, and wanted the use of
+contact with such natures. The hand passes through the veridical phantom
+without a sense of its presence, but the phantom is none the less
+veridical for all that.
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+I kept the evening of the day I met Hawthorne wholly for the thoughts of
+him, or rather for that reverberation which continues in the young
+sensibilities after some important encounter. It must have been the next
+morning that I went to find Thoreau, and I am dimly aware of making one
+or two failures to find him, if I ever really found him at all.
+
+He is an author who has fallen into that abeyance, awaiting all authors,
+great or small, at some time or another; but I think that with him, at
+least in regard to his most important book, it can be only transitory. I
+have not read the story of his hermitage beside Walden Pond since the
+year 1858, but I have a fancy that if I should take it up now, I should
+think it a wiser and truer conception of the world than I thought it
+then. It is no solution of the problem; men are not going to answer the
+riddle of the painful earth by building themselves shanties and living
+upon beans and watching ant-fights; but I do not believe Tolstoy himself
+has more clearly shown the hollowness, the hopelessness, the unworthiness
+of the life of the world than Thoreau did in that book. If it were newly
+written it could not fail of a far vaster acceptance than it had then,
+when to those who thought and felt seriously it seemed that if slavery
+could only be controlled, all things else would come right of themselves
+with us. Slavery has not only been controlled, but it has been
+destroyed, and yet things have not begun to come right with us; but it
+was in the order of Providence that chattel slavery should cease before
+industrial slavery, and the infinitely crueler and stupider vanity and
+luxury bred of it, should be attacked. If there was then any prevision
+of the struggle now at hand, the seers averted their eyes, and strove
+only to cope with the less evil. Thoreau himself, who had so clear a
+vision of the falsity and folly of society as we still have it, threw
+himself into the tide that was already, in Kansas and Virginia, reddened
+with war; he aided and abetted the John Brown raid, I do not recall how
+much or in what sort; and he had suffered in prison for his opinions and
+actions. It was this inevitable heroism of his that, more than his
+literature even, made me wish to see him and revere him; and I do not
+believe that I should have found the veneration difficult, when at last I
+met him in his insufficient person, if he had otherwise been present to
+my glowing expectation. He came into the room a quaint, stump figure of
+a man, whose effect of long trunk and short limbs was heightened by his
+fashionless trousers being let down too low. He had a noble face, with
+tossed hair, a distraught eye, and a fine aquilinity of profile, which
+made me think at once of Don Quixote and of Cervantes; but his nose
+failed to add that foot to his stature which Lamb says a nose of that
+shape will always give a man. He tried to place me geographically after
+he had given me a chair not quite so far off as Ohio, though still across
+the whole room, for he sat against one wall, and I against the other; but
+apparently he failed to pull himself out of his revery by the effort, for
+he remained in a dreamy muse, which all my attempts to say something fit
+about John Brown and Walden Pond seemed only to deepen upon him. I have
+not the least doubt that I was needless and valueless about both, and
+that what I said could not well have prompted an important response; but
+I did my poor best, and I was terribly disappointed in the result. The
+truth is that in those days I was a helplessly concrete young person, and
+all forms of the abstract, the air-drawn, afflicted me like physical
+discomforts. I do not remember that Thoreau spoke of his books or of
+himself at all, and when he began to speak of John Brown, it was not the
+warm, palpable, loving, fearful old man of my conception, but a sort of
+John Brown type, a John Brown ideal, a John Brown principle, which we
+were somehow (with long pauses between the vague, orphic phrases) to
+cherish, and to nourish ourselves upon.
+
+It was not merely a defeat of my hopes, it was a rout, and I felt myself
+so scattered over the field of thought that I could hardly bring my
+forces together for retreat. I must have made some effort, vain and
+foolish enough, to rematerialize my old demigod, but when I came away it
+was with the feeling that there was very little more left of John Brown
+than there was of me. His body was not mouldering in the grave, neither
+was his soul marching on; his ideal, his type, his principle alone
+existed, and I did not know what to do with it. I am not blaming
+Thoreau; his words were addressed to a far other understanding than mine,
+and it was my misfortune if I could not profit by them. I think, or I
+venture to hope, that I could profit better by them now; but in this
+record I am trying honestly to report their effect with the sort of youth
+I was then.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+Such as I was, I rather wonder that I had the courage, after this
+experiment of Thoreau, to present the card Hawthorne had given me to
+Emerson. I must have gone to him at once, however, for I cannot make out
+any interval of time between my visit to the disciple and my visit to the
+master. I think it was Emerson himself who opened his door to me, for I
+have a vision of the fine old man standing tall on his threshold, with
+the card in his hand, and looking from it to me with a vague serenity,
+while I waited a moment on the door-step below him. He must then have
+been about sixty, but I remember nothing of age in his aspect, though I
+have called him an old man. His hair, I am sure, was still entirely
+dark, and his face had a kind of marble youthfulness, chiselled to a
+delicate intelligence by the highest and noblest thinking that any man
+has done. There was a strange charm in Emerson's eyes, which I felt then
+and always, something like that I saw in Lincoln's, but shyer, but
+sweeter and less sad. His smile was the very sweetest I have ever
+beheld, and the contour of the mask and the line of the profile were in
+keeping with this incomparable sweetness of the mouth, at once grave and
+quaint, though quaint is not quite the word for it either, but subtly,
+not unkindly arch, which again is not the word.
+
+It was his great fortune to have been mostly misunderstood, and to have
+reached the dense intelligence of his fellow-men after a whole lifetime
+of perfectly simple and lucid appeal, and his countenance expressed the
+patience and forbearance of a wise man content to bide his time. It
+would be hard to persuade people now that Emerson once represented to the
+popular mind all that was most hopelessly impossible, and that in a
+certain sort he was a national joke, the type of the incomprehensible,
+the byword of the poor paragrapher. He had perhaps disabused the
+community somewhat by presenting himself here and there as a lecturer,
+and talking face to face with men in terms which they could not refuse to
+find as clear as they were wise; he was more and more read, by certain
+persons, here and there; but we are still so far behind him in the reach
+of his far-thinking that it need not be matter of wonder that twenty
+years before his death he was the most misunderstood man in America. Yet
+in that twilight where he dwelt he loomed large upon the imagination; the
+minds that could not conceive him were still aware of his greatness. I
+myself had not read much of him, but I knew the essays he was printing in
+the Atlantic, and I knew certain of his poems, though by no means many;
+yet I had this sense of him, that he was somehow, beyond and above my
+ken, a presence of force and beauty and wisdom, uncompanioned in our
+literature. He had lately stooped from his ethereal heights to take part
+in the battle of humanity, and I suppose that if the truth were told he
+was more to my young fervor because he had said that John Brown had made
+the gallows glorious like the cross, than because he had uttered all
+those truer and wiser things which will still a hundred years hence be
+leading the thought of the world.
+
+I do not know in just what sort he made me welcome, but I am aware of
+sitting with him in his study or library, and of his presently speaking
+of Hawthorne, whom I probably celebrated as I best could, and whom he
+praised for his personal excellence, and for his fine qualities as a
+neighbor. "But his last book," he added, reflectively, "is a mere mush,"
+and I perceived that this great man was no better equipped to judge an
+artistic fiction than the groundlings who were then crying out upon the
+indefinite close of the Marble Faun. Apparently he had read it, as they
+had, for the story, but it seems to me now, if it did not seem to me
+then, that as far as the problem of evil was involved, the book must
+leave it where it found it. That is forever insoluble, and it was rather
+with that than with his more or less shadowy people that the romancer was
+concerned. Emerson had, in fact, a defective sense as to specific pieces
+of literature; he praised extravagantly, and in the wrong place,
+especially among the new things, and he failed to see the worth of much
+that was fine and precious beside the line of his fancy.
+
+He began to ask me about the West, and about some unknown man in
+Michigan; who had been sending him poems, and whom he seemed to think
+very promising, though he has not apparently kept his word to do great
+things. I did not find what Emerson had to say of my section very
+accurate or important, though it was kindly enough, and just enough as to
+what the West ought to do in literature. He thought it a pity that a
+literary periodical which had lately been started in Cincinnati should be
+appealing to the East for contributions, instead of relying upon the
+writers nearer home; and he listened with what patience he could to my
+modest opinion that we had not the writers nearer home. I never was of
+those Westerners who believed that the West was kept out of literature by
+the jealousy of the East, and I tried to explain why we had not the men
+to write that magazine full in Ohio. He alleged the man in Michigan as
+one who alone could do much to fill it worthily, and again I had to say
+that I had never heard of him.
+
+I felt rather guilty in my ignorance, and I had a notion that it did not
+commend me, but happily at this moment Mr. Emerson was called to dinner,
+and he asked me to come with him. After dinner we walked about in his
+"pleached garden" a little, and then we came again into his library,
+where I meant to linger only till I could fitly get away. He questioned
+me about what I had seen of Concord, and whom besides Hawthorne I had
+met, and when I told him only Thoreau, he asked me if I knew the poems of
+Mr. William Ellery Channing. I have known them since, and felt their
+quality, which I have gladly owned a genuine and original poetry; but I
+answered then truly that I knew them only from Poe's criticisms: cruel
+and spiteful things which I should be ashamed of enjoying as I once did.
+
+"Whose criticisms?" asked Emerson.
+
+"Poe's," I said again.
+
+"Oh," he cried out, after a moment, as if he had returned from a far
+search for my meaning, "you mean the jingle-man!"
+
+I do not know why this should have put me to such confusion, but if I had
+written the criticisms myself I do not think I could have been more
+abashed. Perhaps I felt an edge of reproof, of admonition, in a
+characterization of Poe which the world will hardly agree with; though I
+do not agree with the world about him, myself, in its admiration. At any
+rate, it made an end of me for the time, and I remained as if already
+absent, while Emerson questioned me as to what I had written in the
+Atlantic Monthly. He had evidently read none of my contributions, for he
+looked at them, in the bound volume of the magazine which he got down,
+with the effect of being wholly strange to them, and then gravely affixed
+my initials to each. He followed me to the door, still speaking of
+poetry, and as he took a kindly enough leave of me, he said one might
+very well give a pleasant hour to it now and then.
+
+A pleasant hour to poetry! I was meaning to give all time and all
+eternity to poetry, and I should by no means have wished to find pleasure
+in it; I should have thought that a proof of inferior quality in the
+work; I should have preferred anxiety, anguish even, to pleasure. But if
+Emerson thought from the glance he gave my verses that I had better not
+lavish myself upon that kind of thing, unless there was a great deal more
+of me than I could have made apparent in our meeting, no doubt he was
+right. I was only too painfully aware of my shortcoming, but I felt that
+it was shorter-coming than it need have been. I had somehow not
+prospered in my visit to Emerson as I had with Hawthorne, and I came away
+wondering in what sort I had gone wrong. I was not a forth-putting
+youth, and I could not blame myself for anything in my approaches that
+merited withholding; indeed, I made no approaches; but as I must needs
+blame myself for something, I fell upon the fact that in my confused
+retreat from Emerson's presence I had failed in a certain slight point of
+ceremony, and I magnified this into an offence of capital importance. I
+went home to my hotel, and passed the afternoon in pure misery. I had
+moments of wild question when I debated whether it would be better to go
+back and own my error, or whether it would be better to write him a note,
+and try to set myself right in that way. But in the end I did neither,
+and I have since survived my mortal shame some forty years or more. But
+at the time it did not seem possible that I should live through the day
+with it, and I thought that I ought at least to go and confess it to
+Hawthorne, and let him disown the wretch who had so poorly repaid the
+kindness of his introduction by such misbehavior. I did indeed walk down
+by the Wayside, in the cool of the evening, and there I saw Hawthorne for
+the last time. He was sitting on one of the timbers beside his cottage,
+and smoking with an air of friendly calm. I had got on very well with
+him, and I longed to go in, and tell him how ill I had got on with
+Emerson; I believed that though he cast me off, he would understand me,
+and would perhaps see some hope for me in another world, though there
+could be none in this.
+
+But I had not the courage to speak of the affair to any one but Fields,
+to whom I unpacked my heart when I got back to Boston, and he asked me
+about my adventures in Concord. By this time I could see it in a
+humorous light, and I did not much mind his lying back in his chair and
+laughing and laughing, till I thought he would roll out of it. He
+perfectly conceived the situation, and got an amusement from it that I
+could get only through sympathy with him. But I thought it a favorable
+moment to propose myself as the assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly,
+which I had the belief I could very well become, with advantage to myself
+if not to the magazine. He seemed to think so too; he said that if the
+place had not just been filled, I should certainly have had it; and it
+was to his recollection of this prompt ambition of mine that I suppose I
+may have owed my succession to a like vacancy some four years later. He
+was charmingly kind; he entered with the sweetest interest into the story
+of my economic life, which had been full of changes and chances already.
+But when I said very seriously that now I was tired of these fortuities,
+and would like to be settled in something, he asked, with dancing eyes,
+
+"Why, how old are you?"
+
+"I am twenty-three," I answered, and then the laughing fit took him
+again.
+
+"Well," he said, "you begin young, out there!"
+
+In my heart I did not think that twenty-three was so very young, but
+perhaps it was; and if any one were to say that I had been portraying
+here a youth whose aims were certainly beyond his achievements, who was
+morbidly sensitive, and if not conceited was intolerably conscious, who
+had met with incredible kindness, and had suffered no more than was good
+for him, though he might not have merited his pain any more than his joy,
+I do not know that I should gainsay him, for I am not at all sure that I
+was not just that kind of youth when I paid my first visit to New
+England.
+
+
+
+
+
+FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK
+
+It was by boat that I arrived from Boston, on an August morning of 1860,
+which was probably of the same quality as an August morning of 1900. I
+used not to mind the weather much in those days; it was hot or it was
+cold, it was wet or it was dry, but it was not my affair; and I suppose
+that I sweltered about the strange city, with no sense of anything very
+personal in the temperature, until nightfall. What I remember is being
+high up in a hotel long since laid low, listening in the summer dark,
+after the long day was done, to the Niagara roar of the omnibuses whose
+tide then swept Broadway from curb to curb, for all the miles of its
+length. At that hour the other city noises were stilled, or lost in this
+vaster volume of sound, which seemed to fill the whole night. It had a
+solemnity which the modern comer to New York will hardly imagine, for
+that tide of omnibuses has long since ebbed away, and has left the air to
+the strident discords of the elevated trains and the irregular alarum of
+the grip-car gongs, which blend to no such harmonious thunder as rose
+from the procession of those ponderous and innumerable vans. There was a
+sort of inner quiet in the sound, and when I chose I slept off to it, and
+woke to it in the morning refreshed and strengthened to explore the
+literary situation in the metropolis.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+Not that I think I left this to the second day. Very probably I lost no
+time in going to the office of the Saturday Press, as soon as I had my
+breakfast after arriving, and I have a dim impression of anticipating the
+earliest of the Bohemians, whose gay theory of life obliged them to a
+good many hardships in lying down early in the morning, and rising up
+late in the day. If it was the office-boy who bore me company during the
+first hour of my visit, by-and-by the editors and contributors actually
+began to come in. I would not be very specific about them if I could,
+for since that Bohemia has faded from the map of the republic of letters,
+it has grown more and more difficult to trace its citizenship to any
+certain writer. There are some living who knew the Bohemians and even
+loved them, but there are increasingly few who were of them, even in the
+fond retrospect of youthful follies and errors. It was in fact but a
+sickly colony, transplanted from the mother asphalt of Paris, and never
+really striking root in the pavements of New York; it was a colony of
+ideas, of theories, which had perhaps never had any deep root anywhere.
+What these ideas, these theories, were in art and in life, it would not
+be very easy to say; but in the Saturday Press they came to violent
+expression, not to say explosion, against all existing forms of
+respectability. If respectability was your 'bete noire', then you were a
+Bohemian; and if you were in the habit of rendering yourself in prose,
+then you necessarily shredded your prose into very fine paragraphs of a
+sentence each, or of a very few words, or even of one word. I believe
+this fashion prevailed till very lately with some of the dramatic
+critics, who thought that it gave a quality of epigram to the style; and
+I suppose it was borrowed from the more spasmodic moments of Victor Hugo
+by the editor of the Press. He brought it back with him when he came
+home from one of those sojourns in Paris which possess one of the French
+accent rather than the French language; I long desired to write in that
+fashion myself, but I had not the courage.
+
+This editor was a man of such open and avowed cynicism that he may have
+been, for all I know, a kindly optimist at heart; some say, however, that
+he had really talked himself into being what he seemed. I only know that
+his talk, the first day I saw him, was of such a sort that if he was half
+as bad, he would have been too bad to be. He walked up and down his room
+saying what lurid things he would directly do if any one accused him of
+respectability, so that he might disabuse the minds of all witnesses.
+There were four or five of his assistants and contributors listening to
+the dreadful threats, which did not deceive even so great innocence as
+mine, but I do not know whether they found it the sorry farce that I did.
+They probably felt the fascination for him which I could not disown, in
+spite of my inner disgust; and were watchful at the same time for the
+effect of his words with one who was confessedly fresh from Boston, and
+was full of delight in the people he had seen there. It appeared, with
+him, to be proof of the inferiority of Boston that if you passed down
+Washington Street, half a dozen men in the crowd would know you were
+Holmes, or Lowell, or Longfellow, or Wendell Phillips; but in Broadway no
+one would know who you were, or care to the measure of his smallest
+blasphemy. I have since heard this more than once urged as a signal
+advantage of New York for the aesthetic inhabitant, but I am not sure,
+yet, that it is so. The unrecognized celebrity probably has his mind
+quite as much upon himself as if some one pointed him out, and otherwise
+I cannot think that the sense of neighborhood is such a bad thing for the
+artist in any sort. It involves the sense of responsibility, which
+cannot be too constant or too keen. If it narrows, it deepens; and this
+may be the secret of Boston.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+It would not be easy to say just why the Bohemian group represented New
+York literature to my imagination; for I certainly associated other names
+with its best work, but perhaps it was because I had written for the
+Saturday Press myself, and had my pride in it, and perhaps it was because
+that paper really embodied the new literary life of the city. It was
+clever, and full of the wit that tries its teeth upon everything. It
+attacked all literary shams but its own, and it made itself felt and
+feared. The young writers throughout the country were ambitious to be
+seen in it, and they gave their best to it; they gave literally, for the
+Saturday Press never paid in anything but hopes of paying, vaguer even
+than promises. It is not too much to say that it was very nearly as well
+for one to be accepted by the Press as to be accepted by the Atlantic,
+and for the time there was no other literary comparison. To be in it was
+to be in the company of Fitz James O'Brien, Fitzhugh Ludlow, Mr. Aldrich,
+Mr. Stedman, and whoever else was liveliest in prose or loveliest in
+verse at that day in New York. It was a power, and although it is true
+that, as Henry Giles said of it, "Man cannot live by snapping-turtle
+alone," the Press was very good snapping-turtle. Or, it seemed so then;
+I should be almost afraid to test it now, for I do not like
+snapping-turtle so much as I once did, and I have grown nicer in my
+taste, and want my snapping-turtle of the very best. What is certain is
+that I went to the office of the Saturday Press in New York with much the
+same sort of feeling I had in going to the office of the Atlantic Monthly
+in Boston, but I came away with a very different feeling. I had found
+there a bitterness against Boston as great as the bitterness against
+respectability, and as Boston was then rapidly becoming my second
+country, I could not join in the scorn thought of her and said of her by
+the Bohemians. I fancied a conspiracy among them to shock the literary
+pilgrim, and to minify the precious emotions he had experienced in
+visiting other shrines; but I found no harm in that, for I knew just how
+much to be shocked, and I thought I knew better how to value certain
+things of the soul than they. Yet when their chief asked me how I got on
+with Hawthorne, and I began to say that he was very shy and I was rather
+shy, and the king of Bohemia took his pipe out to break in upon me with
+"Oh, a couple of shysters!" and the rest laughed, I was abashed all they
+could have wished, and was not restored to myself till one of them said
+that the thought of Boston made him as ugly as sin; then I began to hope
+again that men who took themselves so seriously as that need not be taken
+very seriously by me.
+
+In fact I had heard things almost as desperately cynical in other
+newspaper offices before that, and I could not see what was so
+distinctively Bohemian in these 'anime prave', these souls so baleful by
+their own showing. But apparently Bohemia was not a state that you could
+well imagine from one encounter, and since my stay in New York was to be
+very short, I lost no time in acquainting myself further with it. That
+very night I went to the beer-cellar, once very far up Broadway, where I
+was given to know that the Bohemian nights were smoked and quaffed away.
+It was said, so far West as Ohio, that the queen of Bohemia sometimes
+came to Pfaff's: a young girl of a sprightly gift in letters, whose name
+or pseudonym had made itself pretty well known at that day, and whose
+fate, pathetic at all times, out-tragedies almost any other in the
+history of letters. She was seized with hydrophobia from the bite of her
+dog, on a railroad train; and made a long journey home in the paroxysms
+of that agonizing disease, which ended in her death after she reached New
+York. But this was after her reign had ended, and no such black shadow
+was cast forward upon Pfaff's, whose name often figured in the verse and
+the epigrammatically paragraphed prose of the 'Saturday Press'. I felt
+that as a contributor and at least a brevet Bohemian I ought not to go
+home without visiting the famous place, and witnessing if I could not
+share the revels of my comrades. As I neither drank beer nor smoked, my
+part in the carousal was limited to a German pancake, which I found they
+had very good at Pfaff's, and to listening to the whirling words of my
+commensals, at the long board spread for the Bohemians in a cavernous
+space under the pavement. There were writers for the 'Saturday Press' and
+for Vanity Fair (a hopefully comic paper of that day), and some of the
+artists who drew for the illustrated periodicals. Nothing of their talk
+remains with me, but the impression remains that it was not so good talk
+as I had heard in Boston. At one moment of the orgy, which went but
+slowly for an orgy, we were joined by some belated Bohemians whom the
+others made a great clamor over; I was given to understand they were just
+recovered from a fearful debauch; their locks were still damp from the
+wet towels used to restore them, and their eyes were very frenzied. I was
+presented to these types, who neither said nor did anything worthy of
+their awful appearance, but dropped into seats at the table, and ate of
+the supper with an appetite that seemed poor. I stayed hoping vainly for
+worse things till eleven o'clock, and then I rose and took my leave of a
+literary condition that had distinctly disappointed me. I do not say
+that it may not have been wickeder and wittier than I found it; I only
+report what I saw and heard in Bohemia on my first visit to New York, and
+I know that my acquaintance with it was not exhaustive. When I came the
+next year the Saturday Press was no more, and the editor and his
+contributors had no longer a common centre. The best of the young
+fellows whom I met there confessed, in a pleasant exchange of letters
+which we had afterwards, that he thought the pose a vain and unprofitable
+one; and when the Press was revived, after the war, it was without any of
+the old Bohemian characteristics except that of not paying for material.
+It could not last long upon these terms, and again it passed away, and
+still waits its second palingenesis.
+
+The editor passed away too, not long after, and the thing that he had
+inspired altogether ceased to be. He was a man of a certain sardonic
+power, and used it rather fiercely and freely, with a joy probably more
+apparent than real in the pain it gave. In my last knowledge of him he
+was much milder than when I first knew him, and I have the feeling that
+he too came to own before he died that man cannot live by snapping-turtle
+alone. He was kind to some neglected talents, and befriended them with a
+vigor and a zeal which he would have been the last to let you call
+generous. The chief of these was Walt Whitman, who, when the Saturday
+Press took it up, had as hopeless a cause with the critics on either side
+of the ocean as any man could have. It was not till long afterwards that
+his English admirers began to discover him, and to make his countrymen
+some noisy reproaches for ignoring him; they were wholly in the dark
+concerning him when the Saturday Press, which first stood his friend, and
+the young men whom the Press gathered about it, made him their cult. No
+doubt he was more valued because he was so offensive in some ways than he
+would have been if he had been in no way offensive, but it remains a fact
+that they celebrated him quite as much as was good for them. He was
+often at Pfaff's with them, and the night of my visit he was the chief
+fact of my experience. I did not know he was there till I was on my way
+out, for he did not sit at the table under the pavement, but at the head
+of one farther into the room. There, as I passed, some friendly fellow
+stopped me and named me to him, and I remember how he leaned back in his
+chair, and reached out his great hand to me, as if he were going to give
+it me for good and all. He had a fine head, with a cloud of Jovian hair
+upon it, and a branching beard and mustache, and gentle eyes that looked
+most kindly into mine, and seemed to wish the liking which I instantly
+gave him, though we hardly passed a word, and our acquaintance was summed
+up in that glance and the grasp of his mighty fist upon my hand. I doubt
+if he had any notion who or what I was beyond the fact that I was a young
+poet of some sort, but he may possibly have remembered seeing my name
+printed after some very Heinesque verses in the Press. I did not meet
+him again for twenty years, and then I had only a moment with him when he
+was reading the proofs of his poems in Boston. Some years later I saw
+him for the last time, one day after his lecture on Lincoln, in that
+city, when he came down from the platform to speak with some handshaking
+friends who gathered about him. Then and always he gave me the sense of
+a sweet and true soul, and I felt in him a spiritual dignity which I will
+not try to reconcile with his printing in the forefront of his book a
+passage from a private letter of Emerson's, though I believe he would not
+have seen such a thing as most other men would, or thought ill of it in
+another. The spiritual purity which I felt in him no less than the
+dignity is something that I will no more try to reconcile with what
+denies it in his page; but such things we may well leave to the
+adjustment of finer balances than we have at hand. I will make sure only
+of the greatest benignity in the presence of the man. The apostle of the
+rough, the uncouth, was the gentlest person; his barbaric yawp,
+translated into the terms of social encounter, was an address of singular
+quiet, delivered in a voice of winning and endearing friendliness.
+
+As to his work itself, I suppose that I do not think it so valuable in
+effect as in intention. He was a liberating force, a very "imperial
+anarch" in literature; but liberty is never anything but a means, and
+what Whitman achieved was a means and not an end, in what must be called
+his verse. I like his prose, if there is a difference, much better;
+there he is of a genial and comforting quality, very rich and cordial,
+such as I felt him to be when I met him in person. His verse seems to me
+not poetry, but the materials of poetry, like one's emotions; yet I would
+not misprize it, and I am glad to own that I have had moments of great
+pleasure in it. Some French critic quoted in the Saturday Press (I
+cannot think of his name) said the best thing of him when he said that he
+made you a partner of the enterprise, for that is precisely what he does,
+and that is what alienates and what endears in him, as you like or
+dislike the partnership. It is still something neighborly, brotherly,
+fatherly, and so I felt him to be when the benign old man looked on me
+and spoke to me.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+That night at Pfaff's must have been the last of the Bohemians for me,
+and it was the last of New York authorship too, for the time. I do not
+know why I should not have imagined trying to see Curtis, whom I knew so
+much by heart, and whom I adored, but I may not have had the courage, or
+I may have heard that he was out of town; Bryant, I believe, was then out
+of the country; but at any rate I did not attempt him either. The
+Bohemians were the beginning and the end of the story for me, and to tell
+the truth I did not like the story. I remember that as I sat at that
+table under the pavement, in Pfaff's beer-cellar, and listened to the
+wit that did not seem very funny, I thought of the dinner with Lowell,
+the breakfast with Fields, the supper at the Autocrat's, and felt that I
+had fallen very far. In fact it can do no harm at this distance of time
+to confess that it seemed to me then, and for a good while afterwards,
+that a person who had seen the men and had the things said before him
+that I had in Boston, could not keep himself too carefully in cotton; and
+this was what I did all the following winter, though of course it was a
+secret between me and me. I dare say it was not the worst thing I could
+have done, in some respects.
+
+My sojourn in New York could not have been very long, and the rest of it
+was mainly given to viewing the monuments of the city from the windows of
+omnibuses and the platforms of horse-cars. The world was so simple then
+that there were perhaps only a half-dozen cities that had horse-cars in
+them, and I travelled in those conveyances at New York with an unfaded
+zest, even after my journeys back and forth between Boston and Cambridge.
+I have not the least notion where I went or what I saw, but I suppose
+that it was up and down the ugly east and west avenues, then lying open
+to the eye in all the hideousness now partly concealed by the elevated
+roads, and that I found them very stately and handsome. Indeed, New York
+was really handsomer then than it is now, when it has so many more pieces
+of beautiful architecture, for at that day the skyscrapers were not yet,
+and there was a fine regularity in the streets that these brute bulks
+have robbed of all shapeliness. Dirt and squalor there were a plenty,
+but there was infinitely more comfort. The long succession of cross
+streets was yet mostly secure from business, after you passed Clinton
+Place; commerce was just beginning to show itself in Union Square, and
+Madison Square was still the home of the McFlimsies, whose kin and kind
+dwelt unmolested in the brownstone stretches of Fifth Avenue. I tried
+hard to imagine them from the acquaintance Mr. Butler's poem had given
+me, and from the knowledge the gentle satire of The 'Potiphar Papers' had
+spread broadcast through a community shocked by the excesses of our best
+society; it was not half so bad then as the best now, probably. But I do
+not think I made very much of it, perhaps because most of the people who
+ought to have been in those fine mansions were away at the seaside and
+the mountains.
+
+The mountains I had seen on my way down from Canada, but the sea-side
+not, and it would never do to go home without visiting some famous summer
+resort. I must have fixed upon Long Branch because I must have heard of
+it as then the most fashionable; and one afternoon I took the boat for
+that place. By this means I not only saw sea-bathing for the first time,
+but I saw a storm at sea: a squall struck us so suddenly that it blew
+away all the camp-stools of the forward promenade; it was very exciting,
+and I long meant to use in literature the black wall of cloud that
+settled on the water before us like a sort of portable midnight; I now
+throw it away upon the reader, as it were; it never would come in
+anywhere. I stayed all night at Long Branch, and I had a bath the next
+morning before breakfast: an extremely cold one, with a life-line to keep
+me against the undertow. In this rite I had the company of a young
+New-Yorker, whom I had met on the boat coming down, and who was of the
+light, hopeful, adventurous business type which seems peculiar to the
+city, and which has always attracted me. He told me much about his life,
+and how he lived, and what it cost him to live. He had a large room at a
+fashionable boardinghouse, and he paid fourteen dollars a week. In
+Columbus I had such a room at such a house, and paid three and a half,
+and I thought it a good deal. But those were the days before the war,
+when America was the cheapest country in the world, and the West was
+incredibly inexpensive.
+
+After a day of lonely splendor at this scene of fashion and gaiety, I
+went back to New York, and took the boat for Albany on my way home. I
+noted that I had no longer the vivid interest in nature and human nature
+which I had felt in setting out upon my travels, and I said to myself
+that this was from having a mind so crowded with experiences and
+impressions that it could receive no more; and I really suppose that if
+the happiest phrase had offered itself to me at some moments, I should
+scarcely have looked about me for a landscape or a figure to fit it to. I
+was very glad to get back to my dear little city in the West (I found it
+seething in an August sun that was hot enough to have calcined the
+limestone State House), and to all the friends I was so fond of.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+I did what I could to prove myself unworthy of them by refusing their
+invitations, and giving myself wholly to literature, during the early
+part of the winter that followed; and I did not realize my error till the
+invitations ceased to come, and I found myself in an unbroken
+intellectual solitude. The worst of it was that an ungrateful Muse did
+little in return for the sacrifices I made her, and the things I now
+wrote were not liked by the editors I sent them to. The editorial taste
+is not always the test of merit, but it is the only one we have, and I am
+not saying the editors were wrong in my case. There were then such a
+very few places where you could market your work: the Atlantic in Boston
+and Harper's in New York were the magazines that paid, though the
+Independent newspaper bought literary material; the Saturday Press
+printed it without buying, and so did the old Knickerbocker Magazine,
+though there was pecuniary good-will in both these cases. I toiled much
+that winter over a story I had long been writing, and at last sent it to
+the Atlantic, which had published five poems for me the year before.
+After some weeks, or it may have been months, I got it back with a note
+saying that the editors had the less regret in returning it because they
+saw that in the May number of the Knickerbocker the first chapter of the
+story had appeared. Then I remembered that, years before, I had sent
+this chapter to that magazine, as a sketch to be printed by itself, and
+afterwards had continued the story from it. I had never heard of its
+acceptance, and supposed of course that it was rejected; but on my second
+visit to New York I called at the Knickerbocker office, and a new editor,
+of those that the magazine was always having in the days of its failing
+fortunes, told me that he had found my sketch in rummaging about in a
+barrel of his predecessors manuscripts, and had liked it, and printed
+it. He said that there were fifteen dollars coming to me for that
+sketch, and might he send the money to me? I said that he might, though
+I do not see, to this day, why he did not give it me on the spot; and he
+made a very small minute in a very large sheet of paper (really like Dick
+Swiveller), and promised I should have it that night; but I sailed the
+next day for Liverpool without it. I sailed without the money for some
+verses that Vanity Fair bought of me, but I hardly expected that, for the
+editor, who was then Artemus Ward, had frankly told me in taking my
+address that ducats were few at that moment with Vanity Fair. I was then
+on my way to be consul at Venice, where I spent the next four years in a
+vigilance for Confederate privateers which none of them ever surprised.
+I had asked for the consulate at Munich, where I hoped to steep myself
+yet longer in German poetry, but when my appointment came, I found it was
+for Rome. I was very glad to get Rome even; but the income of the office
+was in fees, and I thought I had better go on to Washington and find out
+how much the fees amounted to. People in Columbus who had been abroad
+said that on five hundred dollars you could live in Rome like a prince,
+but I doubted this; and when I learned at the State Department that the
+fees of the Roman consulate came to only three hundred, I perceived that
+I could not live better than a baron, probably, and I despaired. The
+kindly chief of the consular bureau said that the President's
+secretaries, Mr. John Nicolay and Mr. John Hay, were interested in my
+appointment, and he advised my going over to the White House and seeing
+them. I lost no time in doing that, and I learned that as young Western
+men they were interested in me because I was a young Western man who had
+done something in literature, and they were willing to help me for that
+reason, and for no other that I ever knew. They proposed my going to
+Venice; the salary was then seven hundred and fifty, but they thought
+they could get it put up to a thousand. In the end they got it put up to
+fifteen hundred, and so I went to Venice, where if I did not live like a
+prince on that income, I lived a good deal more like a prince than I
+could have done at Rome on a fifth of it.
+
+If the appointment was not present fortune, it was the beginning of the
+best luck I have had in the world, and I am glad to owe it all to those
+friends of my verse, who could have been no otherwise friends of me. They
+were then beginning very early careers of distinction which have not been
+wholly divided. Mr. Nicolay could have been about twenty-five, and Mr.
+Hay nineteen or twenty. No one dreamed as yet of the opportunity opening
+to them in being so constantly near the man whose life they have written,
+and with whose fame they have imperishably interwrought their names. I
+remember the sobered dignity of the one, and the humorous gaiety of the
+other, and how we had some young men's joking and laughing together, in
+the anteroom where they received me, with the great soul entering upon
+its travail beyond the closed door. They asked me if I had ever seen the
+President, and I said that I had seen him at Columbus, the year before;
+but I could not say how much I should like to see him again, and thank
+him for the favor which I had no claim to at his hands, except such as
+the slight campaign biography I had written could be thought to have
+given me. That day or another, as I left my friends, I met him in the
+corridor without, and he looked at the space I was part of with his
+ineffably melancholy eyes, without knowing that I was the
+indistinguishable person in whose "integrity and abilities he had reposed
+such special confidence" as to have appointed him consul for Venice and
+the ports of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom, though he might have
+recognized the terms of my commission if I had reminded him of them. I
+faltered a moment in my longing to address him, and then I decided that
+every one who forebore to speak needlessly to him, or to shake his hand,
+did him a kindness; and I wish I could be as sure of the wisdom of all my
+past behavior as I am of that piece of it. He walked up to the
+water-cooler that stood in the corner, and drew himself a full goblet from
+it, which he poured down his throat with a backward tilt of his head, and
+then went wearily within doors. The whole affair, so simple, has always
+remained one of a certain pathos in my memory, and I would rather have
+seen Lincoln in that unconscious moment than on some statelier occasion.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+I went home to Ohio; and sent on the bond I was to file in the Treasury
+Department; but it was mislaid there, and to prevent another chance of
+that kind I carried on the duplicate myself. It was on my second visit
+that I met the generous young Irishman William D. O'Connor, at the house
+of my friend Piatt, and heard his ardent talk. He was one of the
+promising men of that day, and he had written an anti-slavery novel in
+the heroic mood of Victor Hugo, which greatly took my fancy; and I
+believe he wrote poems too. He had not yet risen to be the chief of Walt
+Whitman's champions outside of the Saturday Press, but he had already
+espoused the theory of Bacon's authorship of Shakespeare, then newly
+exploited by the poor lady of Bacon's name, who died constant to it in an
+insane asylum. He used to speak of the reputed dramatist as "the fat
+peasant of Stratford," and he was otherwise picturesque of speech in a
+measure that consoled, if it did not convince. The great war was then
+full upon us, and when in the silences of our literary talk its awful
+breath was heard, and its shadow fell upon the hearth where we gathered
+round the first fires of autumn, O'Connor would lift his beautiful head
+with a fine effect of prophecy, and say, "Friends, I feel a sense of
+victory in the air." He was not wrong; only the victory was for the
+other aide.
+
+Who beside O'Connor shared in these saddened symposiums I cannot tell
+now; but probably other young journalists and office-holders, intending
+litterateurs, since more or less extinct. I make certain only of the
+young Boston publisher who issued a very handsome edition of 'Leaves of
+Grass', and then failed promptly if not consequently. But I had already
+met, in my first sojourn at the capital, a young journalist who had given
+hostages to poetry, and whom I was very glad to see and proud to know.
+Mr. Stedman and I were talking over that meeting the other day, and I can
+be surer than I might have been without his memory, that I found him at a
+friend's house, where he was nursing himself for some slight sickness,
+and that I sat by his bed while our souls launched together into the
+joyful realms of hope and praise. In him I found the quality of Boston,
+the honor and passion of literature, and not a mere pose of the literary
+life; and the world knows without my telling how true he has been to his
+ideal of it. His earthly mission then was to write letters from
+Washington for the New York World, which started in life as a good young
+evening paper, with a decided religious tone, so that the Saturday Press
+could call it the Night-blooming Serious. I think Mr. Stedman wrote for
+its editorial page at times, and his relation to it as a Washington
+correspondent had an authority which is wanting to the function in these
+days of perfected telegraphing. He had not yet achieved that seat in the
+Stock Exchange whose possession has justified his recourse to business,
+and has helped him to mean something more single in literature than many
+more singly devoted to it. I used sometimes to speak about that with
+another eager young author in certain middle years when we were chafing
+in editorial harness, and we always decided that Stedman had the best of
+it in being able to earn his living in a sort so alien to literature that
+he could come to it unjaded, and with a gust unspoiled by kindred savors.
+But no man shapes his own life, and I dare say that Stedman may have been
+all the time envying us our tripods from his high place in the Stock
+Exchange. What is certain is that he has come to stand for literature
+and to embody New York in it as no one else does. In a community which
+seems never to have had a conscious relation to letters, he has kept the
+faith with dignity and fought the fight with constant courage. Scholar
+and poet at once, he has spoken to his generation with authority which we
+can forget only in the charm which makes us forget everything else.
+
+But his fame was still before him when we met, and I could bring to him
+an admiration for work which had not yet made itself known to so many;
+but any admirer was welcome. We talked of what we had done, and each
+said how much he liked certain thing of the other's; I even seized my
+advantage of his helplessness to read him a poem of mine which I had in
+my pocket; he advised me where to place it; and if the reader will not
+think it an unfair digression, I will tell here what became of that poem,
+for I think its varied fortunes were amusing, and I hope my own
+sufferings and final triumph with it will not be without encouragement to
+the young literary endeavorer. It was a poem called, with no prophetic
+sense of fitness, "Forlorn," and I tried it first with the 'Atlantic
+Monthly', which would not have it. Then I offered it in person to a
+former editor of 'Harper's Monthly', but he could not see his advantage
+in it, and I carried it overseas to Venice with me. From that point I
+sent it to all the English magazines as steadily as the post could carry
+it away and bring it back. On my way home, four years later, I took it
+to London with me, where a friend who knew Lewes, then just beginning
+with the 'Fortnightly Review', sent it to him for me. It was promptly
+returned, with a letter wholly reserved as to its quality, but full of a
+poetic gratitude for my wish to contribute to the Fortnightly. Then I
+heard that a certain Mr. Lucas was about to start a magazine, and I
+offered the poem to him. The kindest letter of acceptance followed me to
+America, and I counted upon fame and fortune as usual, when the news of
+Mr. Lucas's death came. I will not poorly joke an effect from my poem in
+the fact; but the fact remains. By this time I was a writer in the
+office of the 'Nation' newspaper, and after I left this place to be Mr.
+Fields's assistant on the Atlantic, I sent my poem to the Nation, where
+it was printed at last. In such scant measure as my verses have pleased
+it has found rather unusual favor, and I need not say that its
+misfortunes endeared it to its author.
+
+But all this is rather far away from my first meeting with Stedman in
+Washington. Of course I liked him, and I thought him very handsome and
+fine, with a full beard cut in the fashion he has always worn it, and
+with poet's eyes lighting an aquiline profile. Afterwards, when I saw
+him afoot, I found him of a worldly splendor in dress, and envied him, as
+much as I could envy him anything, the New York tailor whose art had
+clothed him: I had a New York tailor too, but with a difference. He had
+a worldly dash along with his supermundane gifts, which took me almost as
+much, and all the more because I could see that he valued himself nothing
+upon it. He was all for literature, and for literary men as the
+superiors of every one. I must have opened my heart to him a good deal,
+for when I told him how the newspaper I had written for from Canada and
+New England had ceased to print my letters, he said, "Think of a man like
+sitting in judgment on a man like you!" I thought of it, and was avenged
+if not comforted; and at any rate I liked Stedman's standing up so
+stiffly for the honor of a craft that is rather too limp in some of its
+votaries.
+
+I suppose it was he who introduced me to the Stoddards, whom I met in New
+York just before I sailed, and who were then in the glow of their early
+fame as poets. They knew about my poor beginnings, and they were very,
+very good to me. Stoddard went with me to Franklin Square, and gave the
+sanction of his presence to the ineffectual offer of my poem there. But
+what I relished most was the long talks I had with them both about
+authorship in all its phases, and the exchange of delight in this poem
+and that, this novel and that, with gay, wilful runs away to make some
+wholly irrelevant joke, or fire puns into the air at no mark whatever.
+Stoddard had then a fame, with the sweetness of personal affection in it,
+from the lyrics and the odes that will perhaps best keep him known, and
+Mrs. Stoddard was beginning to make her distinct and special quality felt
+in the magazines, in verse and fiction. In both it seems to me that she
+has failed of the recognition which her work merits. Her tales and
+novels have in them a foretaste of realism, which was too strange for the
+palate of their day, and is now too familiar, perhaps. It is a peculiar
+fate, and would form the scheme of a pretty study in the history of
+literature. But in whatever she did she left the stamp of a talent like
+no other, and of a personality disdainful of literary environment. In a
+time when most of us had to write like Tennyson, or Longfellow, or
+Browning, she never would write like any one but herself.
+
+I remember very well the lodging over a corner of Fourth Avenue and some
+downtown street where I visited these winning and gifted people, and
+tasted the pleasure of their racy talk, and the hospitality of their
+good-will toward all literature, which certainly did not leave me out. We
+sat before their grate in the chill of the last October days, and they
+set each other on to one wild flight of wit after another, and again I
+bathed my delighted spirit in the atmosphere of a realm where for the
+time at least no
+
+       "----rumor of oppression or defeat,
+        Of unsuccessful or successful war,"
+
+could penetrate. I liked the Stoddards because they were frankly not of
+that Bohemia which I disliked so much, and thought it of no promise or
+validity; and because I was fond of their poetry and found them in it. I
+liked the absolutely literary keeping of their lives. He had then, and
+for long after, a place in the Custom house, but he was no more of that
+than Lamb was of India House. He belonged to that better world where
+there is no interest but letters, and which was as much like heaven for
+me as anything I could think of.
+
+The meetings with the Stoddards repeated themselves when I came back to
+sail from New York, early in November. Mixed up with the cordial
+pleasure of them in my memory is a sense of the cold and wet outdoors,
+and the misery of being in those infamous New York streets, then as for
+long afterwards the squalidest in the world. The last night I saw my
+friends they told me of the tragedy which had just happened at the camp
+in the City Hall Park. Fitz James O'Brien, the brilliant young Irishman
+who had dazzled us with his story of "The Diamond Lens," and frozen our
+blood with his ingenious tale of a ghost--"What was It"--a ghost that
+could be felt and heard, but not seen--had enlisted for the war, and
+risen to be an officer with the swift process of the first days of it. In
+that camp he had just then shot and killed a man for some infraction of
+discipline, and it was uncertain what the end would be. He was
+acquitted, however, and it is known how he afterwards died of lockjaw
+from a wound received in battle.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+Before this last visit in New York there was a second visit to Boston,
+which I need not dwell upon, because it was chiefly a revival of the
+impressions of the first. Again I saw the Fieldses in their home; again
+the Autocrat in his, and Lowell now beneath his own roof, beside the
+study fire where I was so often to sit with him in coming years. At
+dinner (which we had at two o'clock) the talk turned upon my appointment,
+and he said of me to his wife: "Think of his having got Stillman's place!
+We ought to put poison in his wine," and he told me of the wish the
+painter had to go to Venice and follow up Ruskin's work there in a book
+of his own. But he would not let me feel very guilty, and I will not
+pretend that I had any personal regret for my good fortune.
+
+The place was given me perhaps because I had not nearly so many other
+gifts as he who lost it, and who was at once artist, critic, journalist,
+traveller, and eminently each. I met him afterwards in Rome, which the
+powers bestowed upon him instead of Venice, and he forgave me, though I
+do not know whether he forgave the powers. We walked far and long over
+the Campagna, and I felt the charm of a most uncommon mind in talk which
+came out richest and fullest in the presence of the wild nature which he
+loved and knew so much better than most other men. I think that the book
+he would have written about Venice is forever to be regretted, and I do
+not at all console myself for its loss with the book I have written
+myself.
+
+At Lowell's table that day they spoke of what sort of winter I should
+find in Venice, and he inclined to the belief that I should want a fire
+there. On his study hearth a very brisk one burned when we went back to
+it, and kept out the chill of a cold easterly storm. We looked through
+one of the windows at the rain, and he said he could remember standing
+and looking out of that window at such a storm when he was a child; for
+he was born in that house, and his life had kept coming back to it. He
+died in it, at last.
+
+In a lifting of the rain he walked with me down to the village, as he
+always called the denser part of the town about Harvard Square, and saw
+me aboard a horse-car for Boston. Before we parted he gave me two
+charges: to open my mouth when I began to speak Italian, and to think
+well of women. He said that our race spoke its own tongue with its teeth
+shut, and so failed to master the languages that wanted freer utterance.
+As to women, he said there were unworthy ones, but a good woman was the
+best thing in the world, and a man was always the better for honoring
+women.
+
+
+
+
+ROUNDABOUT TO BOSTON
+
+During the four years of my life in Venice the literary intention was
+present with me at all times and in all places. I wrote many things in
+verse, which I sent to the magazines in every part of the
+English-speaking world, but they came unerringly back to me, except in
+three instances only, when they were kept by the editors who finally
+printed them. One of these pieces was published in the Atlantic Monthly;
+another in Harpers Magazine; the third was got into the New York Ledger
+through the kindness of Doctor Edward Everett Hale, who used I know not
+what mighty magic to that end. I had not yet met him; but he interested
+himself in my ballad as if it had been his own. His brother, Charles
+Hale, later Consul-General for Egypt, whom I saw almost every moment of
+the two visits he paid Venice in my time, had sent it to him, after
+copying it in his own large, fair hand, so that it could be read. He was
+not quite of that literary Boston which I so fondly remembered my
+glimpses of; he was rather of a journalistic and literary Boston which I
+had never known; but he was of Boston, after all. He had been in
+Lowell's classes at Harvard; he had often met Longfellow in Cambridge; he
+knew Doctor Holmes, of course; and he let me talk of my idols to my
+heart's content. I think he must have been amused by my raptures; most
+people would have been; but he was kind and patient, and he listened to
+me with a sweet intelligence which I shall always gratefully remember. He
+died too young, with his life's possibilities mainly unfulfilled; but
+none who knew him could fail to imagine them, or to love him for what he
+was.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+Besides those few pitiful successes, I had nothing but defeats in the
+sort of literature which I supposed was to be my calling, and the defeats
+threw me upon prose; for some sort of literary thing, if not one, then
+another, I must do if I lived; and I began to write those studies of
+Venetian life which afterwards became a book, and which I contributed as
+letters to the 'Boston Advertiser', after vainly offering them to more
+aesthetic periodicals. However, I do not imagine that it was a very
+smiling time for any literary endeavorer at home in the life-and-death
+civil war then waging. Some few young men arose who made themselves
+heard amid the din of arms even as far as Venice, but most of these were
+hushed long ago. I fancy Theodore Winthrop, who began to speak, as it
+were, from his soldier's grave, so soon did his death follow the earliest
+recognition by the public, and so many were his posthumous works, was
+chief of these; but there were others whom the present readers must make
+greater effort to remember. Forceythe Willson, who wrote The Old
+Sergeant, became known for the rare quality of his poetry; and now and
+then there came a poem from Aldrich, or Stedman, or Stoddard. The great
+new series of the 'Biglow Papers' gathered volume with the force they had
+from the beginning. The Autocrat was often in the pages of the Atlantic,
+where one often found Whittier and Emerson, with many a fresh name now
+faded. In Washington the Piatts were writing some of the most beautiful
+verse of the war, and Brownell was sounding his battle lyrics like so
+many trumpet blasts. The fiction which followed the war was yet all to
+come. Whatever was done in any kind had some hint of the war in it,
+inevitably; though in the very heart of it Longfellow was setting about
+his great version of Dante peacefully, prayerfully, as he has told in the
+noble sonnets which register the mood of his undertaking.
+
+At Venice, if I was beyond the range of literary recognition I was in
+direct relations with one of our greatest literary men, who was again of
+that literary Boston which mainly represented American literature to me.
+The official chief of the consul at Venice was the United States Minister
+at Vienna, and in my time this minister was John Lothrop Motley, the
+historian. He was removed, later, by that Johnson administration which
+followed Lincoln's so forgottenly that I name it with a sense of
+something almost prehistoric. Among its worst errors was the attempted
+discredit of a man who had given lustre to our name by his work, and who
+was an ardent patriot as well as accomplished scholar. He visited Venice
+during my first year, which was the darkest period of the civil war, and
+I remember with what instant security, not to say severity, he rebuked my
+scarcely whispered misgivings of the end, when I ventured to ask him what
+he thought it would be. Austria had never recognized the Secessionists
+as belligerents, and in the complications with France and England there
+was little for our minister but to share the home indignation at the
+sympathy of those powers with the South. In Motley this was heightened
+by that feeling of astonishment, of wounded faith, which all Americans
+with English friendships experienced in those days, and which he, whose
+English friendships were many, experienced in peculiar degree.
+
+I drifted about with him in his gondola, and refreshed myself, long
+a-hungered for such talk, with his talk of literary life in London.
+Through some acquaintance I had made in Venice I was able to be of use to
+him in getting documents copied for him in the Venetian Archives,
+especially the Relations of the Venetian Ambassadors at different courts
+during the period and events he was studying. All such papers passed
+through my hands in transmission to the historian, though now I do not
+quite know why they need have done so; but perhaps he was willing to give
+me the pleasure of being a partner, however humble, in the enterprise. My
+recollection of him is of courtesy to a far younger man unqualified by
+patronage, and of a presence of singular dignity and grace. He was one
+of the handsomest men I ever saw, with beautiful eyes, a fine blond beard
+of modish cut, and a sensitive nose, straight and fine. He was
+altogether a figure of worldly splendor; and I had reason to know that he
+did not let the credit of our nation suffer at the most aristocratic
+court in Europe for want of a fit diplomatic costume, when some of our
+ministers were trying to make their office do its full effect upon all
+occasions in "the dress of an American gentleman." The morning after his
+arrival Mr. Motley came to me with a handful of newspapers which,
+according to the Austrian custom at that day, had been opened in the
+Venetian post-office. He wished me to protest against this on his behalf
+as an infringement of his diplomatic extra-territoriality, and I proposed
+to go at once to the director of the post: I had myself suffered in the
+same way, and though I knew that a mere consul was helpless, I was
+willing to see the double-headed eagle trodden under foot by a Minister
+Plenipotentiary. Mr. Motley said that he would go with me, and we put
+off in his gondola to the post-office. The director received us with the
+utmost deference. He admitted the irregularity which the minister
+complained of, and declared that he had no choice but to open every
+foreign newspaper, to whomsoever addressed. He suggested, however, that
+if the minister made his appeal to the Lieutenant-Governor of Venice,
+Count Toggenburg would no doubt instantly order the exemption of his
+newspapers from the general rule.
+
+Mr. Motley said he would give himself the pleasure of calling upon the
+Lieutenant-Governor, and "How fortunate," he added, when we were got back
+into the gondola, "that I should have happened to bring my court dress
+with me!" I did not see the encounter of the high contending powers, but
+I know that it ended in a complete victory for our minister.
+
+I had no further active relations of an official kind with Mr. Motley,
+except in the case of a naturalized American citizen, whose property was
+slowly but surely wasting away in the keeping of the Venetian courts. An
+order had at last been given for the surrender of the remnant to the
+owner; but the Lombardo-Venetian authorities insisted that this should be
+done through the United States Minister at Vienna, and Mr. Motley held as
+firmly that it must be done through the United States Consul at Venice. I
+could only report to him from time to time the unyielding attitude of the
+Civil Tribunal, and at last he consented, as he wrote, "to act
+officiously, not officially, in the matter," and the hapless claimant got
+what was left of his estate.
+
+I had a glimpse of the historian afterwards in Boston, but it was only
+for a moment, just before his appointment to England, where he was made
+to suffer for Sumner in his quarrel with Grant. That injustice crowned
+the injuries his country had done a most faithful patriot and
+high-spirited gentleman, whose fame as an historian once filled the ear
+of the English-speaking world. His books seemed to have been written in
+a spirit already no longer modern; and I did not find the greatest of
+them so moving as I expected when I came to it with all the ardor of my
+admiration for the historian. William the Silent seemed to me, by his
+worshipper's own showing, scarcely level with the popular movement which
+he did not so much direct as follow; but it is a good deal for a prince
+to be able even to follow his people; and it cannot be said that Motley
+does not fully recognize the greatness of the Dutch people, though he may
+see the Prince of Orange too large. The study of their character made at
+least a theoretical democrat of a scholar whose instincts were not
+perhaps democratic, and his sympathy with that brave little republic
+between the dikes strengthened him in his fealty to the great
+commonwealth between the oceans. I believe that so far as he was of any
+political tradition, he was of the old Boston Whig tradition; but when I
+met him at Venice he was in the glow of a generous pride in our war as a
+war against slavery. He spoke of the negroes and their simple-hearted,
+single-minded devotion to the Union cause in terms that an original
+abolitionist might have used, at a time when original abolitionists were
+not so many as they have since become.
+
+For the rest, I fancy it was very well for us to be represented at Vienna
+in those days by an ideal democrat who was also a real swell, and who was
+not likely to discredit us socially when we so much needed to be well
+thought of in every way.
+
+At a court where the family of Count Schmerling, the Prime Minister,
+could not be received for want of the requisite descents, it was well to
+have a minister who would not commit the mistake of inviting the First
+Society to meet the Second Society, as a former Envoy Extraordinary had
+done, with the effect of finding himself left entirely to the Second
+Society during the rest of his stay in Vienna.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+One of my consular colleagues under Motley was another historian, of no
+such popularity, indeed, nor even of such success, but perhaps not of
+inferior powers. This was Richard Hildreth, at Trieste, the author of
+one of the sincerest if not the truest histories of the United States,
+according to the testimony both of his liking and his misliking critics.
+I have never read his history, and I speak of it only at second hand; but
+I had read, before I met him, his novel of 'Archy Moore, or The White
+Slave', which left an indelible impression of his imaginative verity upon
+me. The impression is still so deep that after the lapse of nearly forty
+years since I saw the book, I have no misgiving in speaking of it as a
+powerful piece of realism. It treated passionately, intensely, though
+with a superficial coldness, of wrongs now so remote from us in the
+abolition of slavery that it is useless to hope it will ever beg
+generally read hereafter, but it can safely be praised to any one who
+wishes to study that bygone condition, and the literature which grew out
+of it. I fancy it did not lack recognition in its time, altogether, for
+I used to see it in Italian and French translations on the bookstalls. I
+believe neither his history nor his novel brought the author more gain
+than fame. He had worn himself out on a newspaper when he got his
+appointment at Trieste, and I saw him in the shadow of the cloud that was
+wholly to darken him before he died. He was a tall thin man, absent,
+silent: already a phantom of himself, but with a scholarly serenity and
+dignity amidst the ruin, when the worst came.
+
+I first saw him at the pretty villa where he lived in the suburbs of
+Trieste, and where I passed several days, and I remember him always
+reading, reading, reading. He could with difficulty be roused from his
+book by some strenuous appeal from his family to his conscience as a
+host. The last night he sat with Paradise Lost in his hand, and nothing
+could win him from it till he had finished it. Then he rose to go to
+bed. Would not he bid his parting guest good-bye? The idea of farewell
+perhaps dimly penetrated to him. He responded without looking round,
+
+       "They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
+        Through Eden took their solitary way,"
+
+and so left the room.
+
+I had earlier had some dealings with him as a fellow-consul concerning a
+deserter from an American ship whom I inherited from my predecessor at
+Venice. The man had already been four or five months in prison, and he
+was in a fair way to end his life there; for it is our law that a
+deserting sailor must be kept in the consul's custody till some vessel of
+our flag arrives, when the consul can oblige the master to take the
+deserter and let him work his passage home. Such a vessel rarely came to
+Venice even in times of peace, and in times of war there was no hope of
+any. So I got leave of the consul at Trieste to transfer my captive to
+that port, where now and then an American ship did touch. The flag
+determines the nationality of the sailor, and this unhappy wretch was
+theoretically our fellow-citizen; but when he got to Trieste he made a
+clean breast of it to the consul. He confessed that when he shipped
+under our flag he was a deserter from a British regiment at Malta; and he
+begged piteously not to be sent home to America, where he had never been
+in his life, nor ever wished to be. He wished to be sent back to his
+regiment at Malta, and to whatever fate awaited him there. The case
+certainly had its embarrassments; but the American consul contrived to
+let our presumptive compatriot slip into the keeping of the British
+consul, who promptly shipped him to Malta. In view of the strained
+relations between England and America at that time this was a piece of
+masterly diplomacy.
+
+Besides my old Ohio-time friend Moncure D. Conway, who paid us a visit,
+and in his immediate relations with literary Boston seemed to bring the
+mountain to Mahomet, I saw no one else more literary than Henry Ward
+Beecher. He was passing through Venice on his way to those efforts in
+England in behalf of the Union which had a certain great effect at the
+time; and in the tiny parlor of our apartment on the Grand Canal, I can
+still see him sitting athletic, almost pugilistic, of presence, with his
+strong face, but kind, framed in long hair that swept above his massive
+forehead, and fell to the level of his humorously smiling mouth. His
+eyes quaintly gleamed at the things we told him of our life in the
+strange place; but he only partly relaxed from his strenuous pose, and
+the hands that lay upon his knees were clinched. Afterwards, as he
+passed our balcony in a gondola, he lifted the brave red fez he was
+wearing (many people wore the fez for one caprice or another) and saluted
+our eagle and us: we were often on the balcony behind the shield to
+attest the authenticity of the American eagle.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+Before I left Venice, however, there came a turn in my literary luck, and
+from the hand I could most have wished to reverse the adverse wheel of
+fortune. I had labored out with great pains a paper on recent Italian
+comedy, which I sent to Lowell, then with his friend Professor Norton
+jointly editor of the North American Review; and he took it and wrote me
+one of his loveliest letters about it, consoling me in an instant for all
+the defeat I had undergone, and making it sweet and worthy to have lived
+through that misery. It is one of the hard conditions of this state that
+while we can mostly make out to let people taste the last drop of
+bitterness and ill-will that is in us, our love and gratitude are only
+semi-articulate at the best, and usually altogether tongue-tied. As
+often as I tried afterwards to tell Lowell of the benediction, the
+salvation, his letter was to me, I failed. But perhaps he would not have
+understood, if I had spoken out all that was in me with the fulness I
+could have given a resentment. His message came after years of thwarted
+endeavor, and reinstated me in the belief that I could still do something
+in literature. To be sure, the letters in the Advertiser had begun to
+make their impression; among the first great pleasures they brought me
+was a recognition from my diplomatic chief at Vienna; but I valued my
+admission to the North American peculiarly because it was Lowell let me
+in, and because I felt that in his charge it must be the place of highest
+honor. He spoke of the pay for my article, in his letter, and asked me
+where he should send it, and I answered, to my father-in-law, who put it
+in his savings-bank, where he lived, in Brattleboro, Vermont. There it
+remained, and I forgot all about it, so that when his affairs were
+settled some years later and I was notified that there was a sum to my
+credit in the bank, I said, with the confidence I have nearly always felt
+when wrong, that I had no money there. The proof of my error was sent me
+in a check, and then I bethought me of the pay for "Recent Italian
+Comedy."
+
+It was not a day when I could really afford to forget money due me, but
+then it was not a great deal of money. The Review was as poor as it was
+proud, and I had two dollars a printed page for my paper. But this was
+more than I got from the Advertiser, which gave me five dollars a column
+for my letters, printed in a type so fine that the money, when translated
+from greenbacks into gold at a discount of $2.80, must have been about a
+dollar a thousand words. However, I was richly content with that, and
+would gladly have let them have the letters for nothing.
+
+Before I left Venice I had made my sketches into a book, which I sent on
+to Messrs. Trubner & Co., in London. They had consented to look at it to
+oblige my friend Conway, who during his sojourn with us in Venice, before
+his settlement in London, had been forced to listen to some of it. They
+answered me in due time that they would publish an edition of a thousand,
+at half profits, if I could get some American house to take five hundred
+copies. When I stopped in London I had so little hope of being able to
+do this that I asked the Trubners if I might, without losing their offer,
+try to get some other London house to publish my book. They said Yes,
+almost joyously; and I began to take my manuscript about. At most places
+they would not look at me or it, and they nowhere consented to read it.
+The house promptest in refusing to consider it afterwards pirated one of
+my novels, and with some expressions of good intention in that direction,
+never paid me anything for it; though I believe the English still think
+that this sort of behavior was peculiar to the American publisher in the
+old buccaneering times. I was glad to go back to the Trubners with my
+book, and on my way across the Atlantic I met a publisher who finally
+agreed to take those five hundred copies. This was Mr. M. M. Hurd, of
+Hurd & Houghton, a house then newly established in New York and
+Cambridge. We played ring-toss and shuffleboard together, and became of
+a friendship which lasts to this day. But it was not till some months
+later, when I saw him in New York, that he consented to publish my book.
+I remember how he said, with an air of vague misgiving, and an effect of
+trying to justify himself in an imprudence, that it was not a great
+matter anyway. I perceived that he had no faith in it, and to tell the
+truth I had not much myself. But the book had an instant success, and it
+has gone on from edition to edition ever since. There was just then the
+interest of a not wholly generous surprise at American things among the
+English. Our success in putting down the great Confederate rebellion had
+caught the fancy of our cousins, and I think it was to this mood of
+theirs that I owed largely the kindness they showed my book. There were
+long and cordial reviews in all the great London journals, which I used
+to carry about with me like love-letters; when I tried to show them to
+other people, I could not understand their coldness concerning them.
+
+At Boston, where we landed on our return home, there was a moment when it
+seemed as if my small destiny might be linked at once with that of the
+city which later became my home. I ran into the office of the Advertiser
+to ask what had become of some sketches of Italian travel I had sent the
+paper, and the managing editor made me promise not to take a place
+anywhere before I had heard from him. I gladly promised, but I did not
+hear from him, and when I returned to Boston a fortnight later, I found
+that a fatal partner had refused to agree with him in engaging me upon
+the paper. They even gave me back half a dozen unprinted letters of
+mine, and I published them in the Nation, of New York, and afterwards in
+the book called Italian Journeys.
+
+But after I had encountered fortune in this frowning disguise, I had a
+most joyful little visit with Lowell, which made me forget there was
+anything in the world but the delight and glory of sitting with him in
+his study at Elmwood and hearing him talk. It must have been my
+freshness from Italy which made him talk chiefly of his own happy days in
+the land which so sympathetically brevets all its lovers fellow-citizens.
+At any rate he would talk of hardly anything else, and he talked late
+into the night, and early into the morning. About two o'clock, when all
+the house was still, he lighted a candle, and went down into the cellar,
+and came back with certain bottles under his arms. I had not a very
+learned palate in those days (or in these, for that matter), but I knew
+enough of wine to understand that these bottles had been chosen upon that
+principle which Longfellow put in verse, and used to repeat with a
+humorous lifting of the eyebrows and hollowing of the voice:
+
+       "If you have a friend to dine,
+        Give him your best wine;
+        If you have two,
+        The second-best will do."
+
+As we sat in their mellow afterglow, Lowell spoke to me of my own life
+and prospects, wisely and truly, as he always spoke. He said that it was
+enough for a man who had stuff in him to be known to two or three people,
+for they would not suffer him to be forgotten, and it would rest with
+himself to get on. I told him that though I had not given up my place at
+Venice, I was not going back, if I could find anything to do at home, and
+I was now on my way to Ohio, where I should try my best to find
+something; at the worst, I could turn to my trade of printer. He did not
+think it need ever come to that; and he said that he believed I should
+have an advantage with readers, if not with editors, in hailing from the
+West; I should be more of a novelty. I knew very well that even in my
+own West I should not have this advantage unless I appeared there with an
+Eastern imprint, but I could not wish to urge my misgiving against his
+faith. Was I not already richly successful? What better thing
+personally could befall me, if I lived forever after on milk and honey,
+than to be sitting there with my hero, my master, and having him talk to
+me as if we were equal in deed and in fame?
+
+The cat-bird called in the syringa thicket at his door, before we said
+the good-night which was good morning, using the sweet Italian words, and
+bidding each other the 'Dorma bene' which has the quality of a
+benediction. He held my hand, and looked into my eyes with the sunny
+kindness which never failed me, worthy or unworthy; and I went away to
+bed. But not to sleep; only to dream such dreams as fill the heart of
+youth when the recognition of its endeavor has come from the achievement
+it holds highest and best.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+I found nothing to do in Ohio; some places that I heard of proved
+impossible one way or another, in Columbus and Cleveland, and Cincinnati;
+there was always the fatal partner; and after three weeks I was again in
+the East. I came to New York, resolved to fight my way in, somewhere,
+and I did not rest a moment before I began the fight.
+
+My notion was that which afterwards became Bartley Hubbard's. "Get a
+basis," said the softening cynic of the Saturday Press, when I advised
+with him, among other acquaintances. "Get a salaried place, something
+regular on some paper, and then you can easily make up the rest." But it
+was a month before I achieved this vantage, and then I got it in a
+quarter where I had not looked for it. I wrote editorials on European
+and literary topics for different papers, but mostly for the Times, and
+they paid me well and more than well; but I was nowhere offered a basis,
+though once I got so far towards it as to secure a personal interview
+with the editor-in-chief, who made me feel that I had seldom met so busy
+a man. He praised some work of mine that he had read in his paper, but I
+was never recalled to his presence; and now I think he judged rightly
+that I should not be a lastingly good journalist. My point of view was
+artistic; I wanted time to prepare my effects.
+
+There was another and clearer prospect opened to me on a literary paper,
+then newly come to the light, but long since gone out in the dark. Here
+again my work was taken, and liked so much that I was offered the basis
+(at twenty dollars a week) that I desired; I was even assigned to a desk
+where I should write in the office; and the next morning I came joyfully
+down to Spruce Street to occupy it. But I was met at the door by one of
+the editors, who said lightly, as if it were a trifling affair, "Well,
+we've concluded to waive the idea of an engagement," and once more my
+bright hopes of a basis dispersed themselves. I said, with what calm I
+could, that they must do what they thought best, and I went on
+skirmishing baselessly about for this and the other papers which had been
+buying my material.
+
+I had begun printing in the 'Nation' those letters about my Italian
+journeys left over from the Boston Advertiser; they had been liked in the
+office, and one day the editor astonished and delighted me by asking how
+I would fancy giving up outside work to come there and write only for the
+'Nation'. We averaged my gains from all sources at forty dollars a week,
+and I had my basis as unexpectedly as if I had dropped upon it from the
+skies.
+
+This must have been some time in November, and the next three or four
+months were as happy a time for me as I have ever known. I kept on
+printing my Italian material in the Nation; I wrote criticisms for it
+(not very good criticisms, I think now), and I amused myself very much
+with the treatment of social phases and events in a department which grew
+up under my hand. My associations personally were of the most agreeable
+kind. I worked with joy, with ardor, and I liked so much to be there, in
+that place and in that company, that I hated to have each day come to an
+end.
+
+I believed that my lines were cast in New York for good and all; and I
+renewed my relations with the literary friends I had made before going
+abroad. I often stopped, on my way up town, at an apartment the
+Stoddards had in Lafayette Place, or near it; I saw Stedman, and reasoned
+high, to my heart's content, of literary things with them and him.
+
+With the winter Bayard Taylor came on from his home in Kennett and took
+an apartment in East Twelfth Street, and once a week Mrs. Taylor and he
+received all their friends there, with a simple and charming hospitality.
+There was another house which we much resorted to--the house of James
+Lorrimer Graham, afterwards Consul-General at Florence, where he died. I
+had made his acquaintance at Venice three years before, and I came in for
+my share of that love for literary men which all their perversities could
+not extinguish in him. It was a veritable passion, which I used to think
+he could not have felt so deeply if he had been a literary man himself.
+There were delightful dinners at his house, where the wit of the
+Stoddards shone, and Taylor beamed with joyous good-fellowship and
+overflowed with invention; and Huntington, long Paris correspondent of
+the Tribune, humorously tried to talk himself into the resolution of
+spending the rest of his life in his own country. There was one evening
+when C. P. Cranch, always of a most pensive presence and aspect, sang the
+most killingly comic songs; and there was another evening when, after we
+all went into the library, something tragical happened. Edwin Booth was
+of our number, a gentle, rather silent person in company, or with at
+least little social initiative, who, as his fate would, went up to the
+cast of a huge hand that lay upon one of the shelves. "Whose hand is
+this, Lorry?" he asked our host, as he took it up and turned it over in
+both his own hands. Graham feigned not to hear, and Booth asked again,
+"whose hand is this?" Then there was nothing for Graham but to say,
+"It's Lincoln's hand," and the man for whom it meant such unspeakable
+things put it softly down without a word.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+It was one of the disappointments of a time which was nearly all joy that
+I did not then meet a man who meant hardly less than Lowell himself for
+me. George William Curtis was during my first winter in New York away on
+one of the long lecturing rounds to which he gave so many of his winters,
+and I did not see him till seven years afterwards, at Mr. Norton's in
+Cambridge. He then characteristically spent most of the evening in
+discussing an obscure point in Browning's poem of 'My Last Duchess'. I
+have long forgotten what the point was, but not the charm of Curtis's
+personality, his fine presence, his benign politeness, his almost
+deferential tolerance of difference in opinion. Afterwards I saw him
+again and again in Boston and New York, but always with a sense of
+something elusive in his graciousness, for which something in me must
+have been to blame. Cold, he was not, even to the youth that in those
+days was apt to shiver in any but the higher temperatures, and yet I felt
+that I made no advance in his kindness towards anything like the
+friendship I knew in the Cambridge men. Perhaps I was so thoroughly
+attuned to their mood that I could not be put in unison with another; and
+perhaps in Curtis there was really not the material of much intimacy.
+
+He had the potentiality of publicity in the sort of welcome he gave
+equally to all men; and if I asked more I was not reasonable. Yet he was
+never far from any man of good-will, and he was the intimate of
+multitudes whose several existence he never dreamt of. In this sort he
+had become my friend when he made his first great speech on the Kansas
+question in 1855, which will seen as remote to the young men of this day
+as the Thermopylae question to which he likened it. I was his admirer,
+his lover, his worshipper before that for the things he had done in
+literature, for the 'Howadji' books, and for the lovely fantasies of
+'Prue and I', and for the sound-hearted satire of the 'Potiphar Papers',
+and now suddenly I learnt that this brilliant and graceful talent, this
+travelled and accomplished gentleman, this star of society who had
+dazzled me with his splendor far off in my Western village obscurity, was
+a man with the heart to feel the wrongs of men so little friended then as
+to be denied all the rights of men. I do not remember any passage of the
+speech, or any word of it, but I remember the joy, the pride with which
+the soul of youth recognizes in the greatness it has honored the goodness
+it may love. Mere politicians might be pro-slavery or anti-slavery
+without touching me very much, but here was the citizen of a world far
+greater than theirs, a light of the universal republic of letters, who
+was willing and eager to stand or fall with the just cause, and that was
+all in all to me. His country was my country, and his kindred my
+kindred, and nothing could have kept me from following after him.
+
+His whole life taught the lesson that the world is well lost whenever the
+world is wrong; but never, I think, did any life teach this so sweetly,
+so winningly. The wrong world itself might have been entreated by him to
+be right, for he was one of the few reformers who have not in some
+measure mixed their love of man with hate of men; his quarrel was with
+error, and not with the persons who were in it. He was so gently
+steadfast in his opinions that no one ever thought of him as a fanatic,
+though many who held his opinions were assailed as fanatics, and suffered
+the shame if they did not win the palm of martyrdom. In early life he
+was a communist, and then when he came out of Brook Farm into the world
+which he was so well fitted to adorn, and which would so gladly have kept
+him all its own, he became an abolitionist in the very teeth of the world
+which abhorred abolitionists. He was a believer in the cause of women's
+rights, which has no picturesqueness, and which chiefly appeals to the
+sense of humor in the men who never dreamt of laughing at him. The man
+who was in the last degree amiable was to the last degree unyielding
+where conscience was concerned; the soul which was so tender had no
+weakness in it; his lenity was the divination of a finer justice. His
+honesty made all men trust him when they doubted his opinions; his good
+sense made them doubt their own opinions, when they had as little
+question of their own honesty.
+
+I should not find it easy to speak of him as a man of letters only, for
+humanity was above the humanities with him, and we all know how he turned
+from the fairest career in literature to tread the thorny path of
+politics because he believed that duty led the way, and that good
+citizens were needed more than good romancers. No doubt they are, and
+yet it must always be a keen regret with the men of my generation who
+witnessed with such rapture the early proofs of his talent, that he could
+not have devoted it wholly to the beautiful, and let others look after
+the true. Now that I have said this I am half ashamed of it, for I know
+well enough that what he did was best; but if my regret is mean, I will
+let it remain, for it is faithful to the mood which many have been in
+concerning him.
+
+There can be no dispute, I am sure, as to the value of some of the
+results he achieved in that other path. He did indeed create anew for us
+the type of good-citizenship, well-nigh effaced in a sordid and selfish
+time, and of an honest politician and a pure-minded journalist. He never
+really forsook literature, and the world of actual interests and
+experiences afforded him outlooks and perspectives, without which
+aesthetic endeavor is self-limited and purblind. He was a great man of
+letters, he was a great orator, he was a great political journalist, he
+was a great citizen, he was a great philanthropist. But that last word
+with its conventional application scarcely describes the brave and gentle
+friend of men that he was. He was one that helped others by all that he
+did, and said, and was, and the circle of his use was as wide as his
+fame. There are other great men, plenty of them, common great men, whom
+we know as names and powers, and whom we willingly let the ages have when
+they die, for, living or dead, they are alike remote from us. They have
+never been with us where we live; but this great man was the neighbor,
+the contemporary, and the friend of all who read him or heard him; and
+even in the swift forgetting of this electrical age the stamp of his
+personality will not be effaced from their minds or hearts.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+Of those evenings at the Taylors' in New York, I can recall best the one
+which was most significant for me, and even fatefully significant. Mr.
+and Mrs. Fields were there, from Boston, and I renewed all the pleasure
+of my earlier meetings with them. At the end Fields said, mockingly,
+"Don't despise Boston!" and I answered, as we shook hands, "Few are
+worthy to live in Boston." It was New-Year's eve, and that night it came
+on to snow so heavily that my horse-car could hardly plough its way up to
+Forty-seventh Street through the drifts. The next day, and the next, I
+wrote at home, because it was so hard to get down-town. The third day I
+reached the office and found a letter on my desk from Fields, asking how
+I should like to come to Boston and be his assistant on the 'Atlantic
+Monthly'. I submitted the matter at once to my chief on the 'Nation',
+and with his frank goodwill I talked it over with Mr. Osgood, of Ticknor
+& Fields, who was to see me further about it if I wished, when he came to
+New York; and then I went to Boston to see Mr. Fields concerning details.
+I was to sift all the manuscripts and correspond with contributors; I was
+to do the literary proof-reading of the magazine; and I was to write the
+four or five pages of book-notices, which were then printed at the end of
+the periodical in finer type; and I was to have forty dollars a week. I
+said that I was getting that already for less work, and then Mr. Fields
+offered me ten dollars more. Upon these terms we closed, and on the 1st
+of March, which was my twenty-ninth birthday, I went to Boston and began
+my work. I had not decided to accept the place without advising with
+Lowell; he counselled the step, and gave me some shrewd and useful
+suggestions. The whole affair was conducted by Fields with his unfailing
+tact and kindness, but it could not be kept from me that the
+qualification I had as practical printer for the work was most valued, if
+not the most valued, and that as proof-reader I was expected to make it
+avail on the side of economy. Somewhere in life's feast the course of
+humble-pie must always come in; and if I did not wholly relish this, bit
+of it, I dare say it was good for me, and I digested it perfectly.
+
+
+
+
+LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT
+
+Among my fellow-passengers on the train from New York to Boston, when I
+went to begin my work there in 1866, as the assistant editor of the
+Atlantic Monthly, was the late Samuel Bowles, of the Springfield
+Republican, who created in a subordinate city a journal of metropolitan
+importance. I had met him in Venice several years earlier, when he was
+suffering from the cruel insomnia which had followed his overwork on that
+newspaper, and when he told me that he was sleeping scarcely more than
+one hour out of the twenty-four. His worn face attested the misery which
+this must have been, and which lasted in some measure while he lived,
+though I believe that rest and travel relieved him in his later years. He
+was always a man of cordial friendliness, and he now expressed a most
+gratifying interest when I told him what I was going to do in Boston. He
+gave himself the pleasure of descanting upon the dramatic quality of the
+fact that a young newspaper man from Ohio was about to share in the
+destinies of the great literary periodical of New England.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+I do not think that such a fact would now move the fancy of the liveliest
+newspaper man, so much has the West since returned upon the East in a
+refluent wave of authorship. But then the West was almost an unknown
+quality in our literary problem; and in fact there was scarcely any
+literature outside of New England. Even this was of New England origin,
+for it was almost wholly the work of New England men and women in the
+"splendid exile" of New York. The Atlantic Monthly, which was
+distinctively literary, was distinctively a New England magazine, though
+from the first it had been characterized by what was more national, what
+was more universal, in the New England temperament. Its chief
+contributors for nearly twenty years were Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes,
+Whittier, Emerson, Doctor Hale, Colonel Higginson, Mrs. Stowe, Whipple,
+Rose Terry Cooke, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Prescott Spofford, Mrs.
+Phelps Ward, and other New England writers who still lived in New
+England, and largely in the region of Boston. Occasionally there came a
+poem from Bryant, at New York, from Mr. Stedman, from Mr. Stoddard and
+Mrs. Stoddard, from Mr. Aldrich, and from Bayard Taylor. But all these,
+except the last, were not only of New England race, but of New England
+birth. I think there was no contributor from the South but Mr. M. D.
+Conway, and as yet the West scarcely counted, though four young poets
+from Ohio, who were not immediately or remotely of Puritan origin, had
+appeared in early numbers; Alice Cary, living with her sister in New
+York, had written now and then from the beginning. Mr. John Hay solely
+represented Illinois by a single paper, and he was of Rhode Island stock.
+It was after my settlement at Boston that Mark Twain, of Missouri, became
+a figure of world-wide fame at Hartford; and longer after, that Mr. Bret
+Harte made that progress Eastward from California which was telegraphed
+almost from hour to hour, as if it were the progress of a prince. Miss
+Constance F. Woolson had not yet begun to write. Mr. James Whitcomb
+Riley, Mr. Maurice Thompson, Miss Edith Thomas, Octave Thanet, Mr.
+Charles Warren Stoddard, Mr. H. B. Fuller, Mrs. Catherwood, Mr. Hamlin
+Garland, all whom I name at random among other Western writers, were then
+as unknown as Mr. Cable, Miss Murfree, Mrs. Rives Chanler, Miss Grace
+King, Mr. Joel Chandler Harris, Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, in the South,
+which they by no means fully represent.
+
+The editors of the Atlantic had been eager from the beginning to discover
+any outlying literature; but, as I have said, there was in those days
+very little good writing done beyond the borders of New England. If the
+case is now different, and the best known among living American writers
+are no longer New-Englanders, still I do not think the South and West
+have yet trimmed the balance; and though perhaps the news writers now
+more commonly appear in those quarters, I should not be so very sure that
+they are not still characterized by New England ideals and examples. On
+the other hand, I am very sure that in my early day we were characterized
+by them, and wished to be so; we even felt that we failed in so far as we
+expressed something native quite in our own way. The literary theories we
+accepted were New England theories, the criticism we valued was New
+England criticism, or, more strictly speaking, Boston theories, Boston
+criticism.
+
+Of those more constant contributors to the Atlantic whom I have
+mentioned, it is of course known that Longfellow and Lowell lived in
+Cambridge, Emerson at Concord, and Whittier at Amesbury. Colonel
+Higginson was still and for many years afterwards at Newport; Mrs. Stowe
+was then at Andover; Miss Prescott of Newburyport had become Mrs.
+Spofford, and was presently in Boston, where her husband was a member of
+the General Court; Mrs. Phelps Ward, as Miss Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,
+dwelt in her father's house at Andover. The chief of the Bostonians were
+Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Doctor Holmes, and Doctor Hale. Yet Boston stood
+for the whole Massachusetts group, and Massachusetts, in the literary
+impulse, meant New England. I suppose we must all allow, whether we like
+to do so or not, that the impulse seems now to have pretty well spent
+itself. Certainly the city of Boston has distinctly waned in literature,
+though it has waxed in wealth and population. I do not think there are
+in Boston to-day even so many talents with a literary coloring in law,
+science, theology, and journalism as there were formerly; though I have
+no belief that the Boston talents are fewer or feebler than before. I
+arrived in Boston, however, when all talents had more or less a literary
+coloring, and when the greatest talents were literary. These expressed
+with ripened fulness a civilization conceived in faith and brought forth
+in good works; but that moment of maturity was the beginning of a
+decadence which could only show itself much later. New England has
+ceased to be a nation in itself, and it will perhaps never again have
+anything like a national literature; but that was something like a
+national literature; and it will probably be centuries yet before the
+life of the whole country, the American life as distinguished from the
+New England life, shall have anything so like a national literature. It
+will be long before our larger life interprets itself in such imagination
+as Hawthorne's, such wisdom as Emerson's, such poetry as Longfellow's,
+such prophecy as Whittier's, such wit and grace as Holmes's, such humor
+and humanity as Lowell's.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+The literature of those great men was, if I may suffer myself the figure,
+the Socinian graft of a Calvinist stock. Their faith, in its varied
+shades, was Unitarian, but their art was Puritan. So far as it was
+imperfect--and great and beautiful as it was, I think it had its
+imperfections--it was marred by the intense ethicism that pervaded the
+New England mind for two hundred years, and that still characterizes it.
+They or their fathers had broken away from orthodoxy in the great schism
+at the beginning of the century, but, as if their heterodoxy were
+conscience-stricken, they still helplessly pointed the moral in all they
+did; some pointed it more directly, some less directly; but they all
+pointed it. I should be far from blaming them for their ethical
+intention, though I think they felt their vocation as prophets too much
+for their good as poets. Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the
+sermon, though not always, nor nearly always. It was in poetry and in
+romance that they excelled; in the novel, so far as they attempted it,
+they failed. I say this with the names of all the Bostonian group, and
+those they influenced, in mind, and with a full sense of their greatness.
+It may be ungracious to say that they have left no heirs to their
+peculiar greatness; but it would be foolish to say that they left an
+estate where they had none to bequeath. One cannot take account of such
+a fantasy as Judd's Margaret. The only New-Englander who has attempted
+the novel on a scale proportioned to the work of the New-Englanders in
+philosophy, in poetry, in romance, is Mr. De Forest, who is of New Haven,
+and not of Boston. I do not forget the fictions of Doctor Holmes, or the
+vivid inventions of Doctor Hale, but I do not call them novels; and I do
+not forget the exquisitely realistic art of Miss Jewett or Miss Wilkins,
+which is free from the ethicism of the great New England group, but which
+has hardly the novelists's scope. New England, in Hawthorne's work,
+achieved supremacy in romance; but the romance is always an allegory, and
+the novel is a picture in which the truth to life is suffered to do its
+unsermonized office for conduct; and New England yet lacks her novelist,
+because it was her instinct and her conscience in fiction to be true to
+an ideal of life rather than to life itself.
+
+Even when we come to the exception that proves the rule, even to such a
+signal exception as 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', I think that what I say holds
+true. That is almost the greatest work of imagination that we have
+produced in prose, and it is the work of a New England woman, writing
+from all the inspirations and traditions of New England. It is like
+begging the question to say that I do not call it a novel, however; but
+really, is it a novel, in the sense that 'War and Peace' is a novel, or
+'Madame Flaubert', or 'L'Assommoir', or 'Phineas Finn', or 'Dona
+Perfecta', or 'Esther Waters', or 'Marta y Maria', or 'The Return of the
+Native', or 'Virgin Soil', or 'David Grieve'? In a certain way it is
+greater than any of these except the first; but its chief virtue, or its
+prime virtue, is in its address to the conscience, and not its address to
+the taste; to the ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense.
+
+This does not quite say the thing, but it suggests it, and I should be
+sorry if it conveyed to any reader a sense of slight; for I believe no
+one has felt more deeply than myself the value of New England in
+literature. The comparison of the literary situation at Boston to the
+literary situation at Edinburgh in the times of the reviewers has never
+seemed to me accurate or adequate, and it holds chiefly in the fact that
+both seem to be of the past. Certainly New York is yet no London in
+literature, and I think Boston was once vastly more than Edinburgh ever
+was, at least in quality. The Scotch literature of the palmy days was
+not wholly Scotch, and even when it was rooted in Scotch soil it flowered
+in the air of an alien speech. But the New England literature of the
+great day was the blossom of a New England root; and the language which
+the Bostonians wrote was the native English of scholars fitly the heirs
+of those who had brought the learning of the universities to
+Massachusetts Bay two hundred years before, and was of as pure a lineage
+as the English of the mother-country.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+The literary situation which confronted me when I came to Boston was,
+then, as native as could well be; and whatever value I may be able to
+give a personal study of it will be from the effect it made upon me as
+one strange in everything but sympathy. I will not pretend that I saw it
+in its entirety, and I have no hope of presenting anything like a
+kinetoscopic impression of it. What I can do is to give here and there a
+glimpse of it; and I shall wish the reader to keep in mind the fact that
+it was in a "state of transition," as everything is always and
+everywhere. It was no sooner recognizably native than it ceased to be
+fully so; and I became a witness of it after the change had begun. The
+publishing house which so long embodied New England literature was
+already attempting enterprises out of the line of its traditions, and one
+of these had brought Mr. T. B. Aldrich from New York, a few weeks before
+I arrived upon the scene in that dramatic quality which I think never
+impressed any one but Mr. Bowles. Mr. Aldrich was the editor of 'Every
+Saturday' when I came to be assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly. We
+were of nearly the same age, but he had a distinct and distinguished
+priority of reputation, insomuch that in my Western remoteness I had
+always ranged him with such elders and betters of mine as Holmes and
+Lowell, and never imagined him the blond, slight youth I found him, with
+every imaginable charm of contemporaneity. It is no part of the office
+which I have intended for these slight and sufficiently wandering
+glimpses of the past to show any writer in his final place; and above all
+I do not presume to assign any living man his rank or station. But I
+should be false to my own grateful sense of beauty in the work of this
+poet if I did not at all times recognize his constancy to an ideal which
+his name stands for. He is known in several kinds, but to my thinking he
+is best in a certain nobler kind of poetry; a serious sort in which the
+thought holds him above the scrupulosities of the art he loves and honors
+so much. Sometimes the file slips in his hold, as the file must and
+will; it is but an instrument at the best; but there is no mistouch in
+the hand that lays itself upon the reader's heart with the pulse of the
+poet's heart quick and true in it. There are sonnets of his, grave, and
+simple, and lofty, which I think of with the glow and thrill possible
+only from very beautiful poetry, and which impart such an emotion as we
+can feel only
+
+       "When a great thought strikes along the brain
+        And flushes all the cheek."
+
+When I had the fortune to meet him first, I suppose that in the employ of
+the kindly house we were both so eager to serve, our dignities were about
+the same; for if the 'Atlantic Monthly' was a somewhat prouder affair
+than an eclectic weekly like 'Every Saturday', he was supreme in his
+place, and I was subordinate in mine. The house was careful, in the
+attitude of its senior partner, not to distinguish between us, and we
+were not slow to perceive the tact used in managing us; we had our own
+joke of it; we compared notes to find whether we were equally used in
+this thing or that; and we promptly shared the fun of our discovery with
+Fields himself.
+
+We had another impartial friend (no less a friend of joy in the life
+which seems to have been pretty nearly all joy, as I look back upon it)
+in the partner who became afterwards the head of the house, and who
+forecast in his bold enterprises the change from a New England to an
+American literary situation. In the end James R. Osgood failed, though
+all his enterprises succeeded. The anomaly is sad, but it is not
+infrequent. They were greater than his powers and his means, and before
+they could reach their full fruition, they had to be enlarged to men of
+longer purse and longer patience. He was singularly fitted both by
+instinct and by education to become a great publisher; and he early
+perceived that if a leading American house were to continue at Boston, it
+must be hospitable to the talents of the whole country. He founded his
+future upon those generous lines; but he wanted the qualities as well as
+the resources for rearing the superstructure. Changes began to follow
+each other rapidly after he came into control of the house. Misfortune
+reduced the size and number of its periodicals. 'The Young Folks' was
+sold outright, and the 'North American Review' (long before Mr. Rice
+bought it and carried it to New York) was cut down one-half, so that
+Aldrich said, it looked as if Destiny had sat upon it. His own
+periodical, 'Every Saturday', was first enlarged to a stately quarto and
+illustrated; and then, under stress of the calamities following the great
+Boston fire, It collapsed to its former size. Then both the 'Atlantic
+Monthly' and 'Every Saturday' were sold away from their old ownership,
+and 'Every Saturday' was suppressed altogether, and we two ceased to be
+of the same employ. There was some sort of evening rite (more funereal
+than festive) the day after they were sold, and we followed Osgood away
+from it, under the lamps. We all knew that it was his necessity that had
+caused him to part with the periodicals; but he professed that it was his
+pleasure, and he said he had not felt so light-hearted since he was a
+boy. We asked him, How could he feel gay when he was no longer paying us
+our salaries, and how could he justify it to his conscience? He liked
+our mocking, and limped away from us with a rheumatic easing of his
+weight from one foot to another: a figure pathetic now that it has gone
+the way to dusty death, and dear to memory through benefactions unalloyed
+by one unkindness.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+But when I came to Boston early in 1866, the 'Atlantic Monthly' and
+'Harper's' then divided our magazine world between them; the 'North
+American Review', in the control of Lowell and Professor Norton, had
+entered upon a new life; 'Every Saturday' was an instant success in the
+charge of Mr. Aldrich, who was by taste and training one of the best
+editors; and 'Our Young Folks' had the field of juvenile periodical
+literature to itself.
+
+It was under the direction of Miss Lucy Larcom and of Mr. J. T.
+Trowbridge, who had come from western New York, where he was born, and
+must be noted as one of the first returners from the setting to the
+rising sun. He naturalized himself in Boston in his later boyhood, and
+he still breathes Boston air, where he dwells in the street called
+Pleasant, on the shore of Spy Pond, at Arlington, and still weaves the
+magic web of his satisfying stories for boys. He merges in their
+popularity the fame of a poet which I do not think will always suffer
+that eclipse, for his poems show him to have looked deeply into the heart
+of common humanity, with a true and tender sense of it.
+
+Miss Larcom scarcely seemed to change from date to date in the generation
+that elapsed between the time I first saw her and the time I saw her
+last, a year or two before her death. A goodness looked out of her
+comely face, which made me think of the Madonna's in Titian's
+"Assumption," and her whole aspect expressed a mild and friendly spirit
+which I find it hard to put in words. She was never of the fine world of
+literature; she dwelt where she was born, in that unfashionable Beverly
+which is not Beverly Farms, and was of a simple, sea-faring, God-fearing
+race, as she has told in one of the loveliest autobiographies I know, "A
+New England Girlhood." She was the author of many poems, whose number
+she constantly enlarged, but she was chiefly, and will be most lastingly,
+famed for the one poem, 'Hannah Binding Shoes', which years before my
+days in Boston had made her so widely known. She never again struck so
+deep or so true a note; but if one has lodged such a note in the ear of
+time, it is enough; and if we are to speak of eternity, one might very
+well hold up one's head in the fields of asphodel, if one could say to
+the great others there, "I wrote Hannah Binding Shoes." Her poem is
+very, very sad, as all who have read it will remember; but Miss Larcom
+herself was above everything cheerful, and she had a laugh of mellow
+richness which willingly made itself heard. She was not only of true New
+England stock, and a Boston author by right of race, but she came up to
+that city every winter from her native town.
+
+By the same right and on the same terms, another New England poetess,
+whom I met those first days in Boston, was a Boston author. When I saw
+Celia Thaxter she was just beginning to make her effect with those poems
+and sketches which the sea sings and flashes through as it sings and
+flashes around the Isles of Shoals, her summer home, where her girlhood
+had been passed in a freedom as wild as the curlew's. She was a most
+beautiful creature, still very young, with a slender figure, and an
+exquisite perfection of feature; she was in presence what her work was:
+fine, frank, finished. I do not know whether other witnesses of our
+literary history feel that the public has failed to keep her as fully in
+mind as her work merited; but I do not think there can be any doubt but
+our literature would be sensibly the poorer without her work. It is
+interesting to remember how closely she kept to her native field, and it
+is wonderful to consider how richly she made those sea-beaten rocks to
+blossom. Something strangely full and bright came to her verse from the
+mystical environment of the ocean, like the luxury of leaf and tint that
+it gave the narrower flower-plots of her native isles. Her gift, indeed,
+could not satisfy itself with the terms of one art alone, however varied,
+and she learned to express in color the thoughts and feelings impatient
+of the pallor of words.
+
+She remains in my memories of that far Boston a distinct and vivid
+personality; as the authoress of 'Amber Gods', and 'In a Cellar', and
+'Circumstance', and those other wild romantic tales, remains the gentle
+and somewhat evanescent presence I found her. Miss Prescott was now Mrs.
+Spofford, and her husband was a rising young politician of the day. It
+was his duties as member of the General Court that had brought them up
+from Newburyport to Boston for that first winter; and I remember that the
+evening when we met he was talking of their some time going to Italy that
+she might study for imaginative literature certain Italian cities he
+named. I have long since ceased to own those cities, but at the moment I
+felt a pang of expropriation which I concealed as well as I could; and
+now I heartily wish she could have fulfilled that purpose if it was a
+purpose, or realized that dream if it was only a dream. Perhaps,
+however, that sumptuous and glowing fancy of hers, which had taken the
+fancy of the young readers of that day, needed the cold New England
+background to bring out all its intensities of tint, all its splendors of
+light. Its effects were such as could not last, or could not be farther
+evolved; they were the expression of youth musing away from its
+environment and smitten with the glories of a world afar and beyond, the
+great world, the fine world, the impurpled world of romantic motives and
+passions. But for what they were, I can never think them other than what
+they appeared: the emanations of a rarely gifted and singularly poetic
+mind. I feel better than I can say how necessarily they were the
+emanations of a New England mind, and how to the subtler sense they must
+impart the pathos of revolt from the colorless rigidities which are the
+long result of puritanism in the physiognomy of New England life.
+
+Their author afterwards gave herself to the stricter study of this life
+in many tales and sketches which showed an increasing mastery; but they
+could not have the flush, the surprise, the delight of a young talent
+trying itself in a kind native and, so far as I know, peculiar to it.
+From time to time I still come upon a poem of hers which recalls that
+earlier strain of music, of color, and I am content to trust it for my
+abiding faith in the charm of things I have not read for thirty years.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+I speak of this one and that, as it happens, and with no thought of
+giving a complete prospect of literary Boston thirty years ago. I am
+aware that it will seem sparsely peopled in the effect I impart, and I
+would have the reader always keep in mind the great fames at Cambridge
+and at Concord, which formed so large a part of the celebrity of Boston.
+I would also like him to think of it as still a great town, merely, where
+every one knew every one else, and whose metropolitan liberation from
+neighborhood was just begun.
+
+Most distinctly of that yet uncitified Boston was the critic Edwin P.
+Whipple, whose sympathies were indefinitely wider than his traditions. He
+was a most generous lover of all that was excellent in literature; and
+though I suppose we should call him an old-fashioned critic now, I
+suspect it would be with no distinct sense of what is newer fashioned. He
+was certainly as friendly to what promised well in the younger men as he
+was to what was done well in their elders; and there was no one writing
+in his day whose virtues failed of his recognition, though it might
+happen that his foibles would escape Whipple's censure. He wrote
+strenuously and of course conscientiously; his point of view was solely
+and always that which enabled him best to discern qualities. I doubt if
+he had any theory of criticism except to find out what was good in an
+author and praise it; and he rather blamed what was ethically bad than
+what was aesthetically bad. In this he was strictly of New England, and
+he was of New England in a certain general intelligence, which constantly
+grew with an interrogative habit of mind.
+
+He liked to talk to you of what he had found characteristic in your work,
+to analyze you to yourself; and the very modesty of the man, which made
+such a study impersonal as far as he was concerned, sometimes rendered
+him insensible to the sufferings of his subject. He had a keen
+perception of humor in others, but he had very little humor; he had a
+love of the beautiful in literature which was perhaps sometimes greater
+than his sense of it.
+
+I write from a cursory acquaintance with his work, not recently renewed.
+Of the presence of the man I have a vivider remembrance: a slight, short,
+ecclesiasticized figure in black; with a white neckcloth and a silk hat
+of strict decorum, and between the two a square face with square
+features, intensified in their regard by a pair of very large glasses,
+and the prominent, myopic eyes staring through them. He was a type of
+out-dated New England scholarship in these aspects, but in the hospitable
+qualities of his mind and heart, the sort of man to be kept fondly in the
+memory of all who ever knew him.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+Out of the vague of that far-off time another face and figure, as
+essentially New En&land as this, and yet so different, relieve
+themselves. Charles F. Browne, whose drollery wafted his pseudonym as
+far as the English speech could carry laughter, was a Westernized Yankee.
+He added an Ohio way of talking to the Maine way of thinking, and he so
+became a literary product of a rarer and stranger sort than our
+literature had otherwise known. He had gone from Cleveland to London,
+with intervals of New York and the lecture platform, four or five years
+before I saw him in Boston, shortly after I went there. We had met in
+Ohio, and he had personally explained to me the ducatless well-meaning of
+Vanity Fair in New York; but many men had since shaken the weary hand of
+Artemus Ward when I grasped it one day in front of the Tremont Temple. He
+did not recognize me, but he gave me at once a greeting of great
+impersonal cordiality, with "How do you do? When did you come?" and
+other questions that had no concern in them, till I began to dawn upon
+him through a cloud of other half remembered faces. Then he seized my
+hand and wrung it all over again, and repeated his friendly demands with
+an intonation that was now "Why, how are you; how are you?" for me alone.
+It was a bit of comedy, which had the fit pathetic relief of his
+impending doom: this was already stamped upon his wasted face, and his
+gay eyes had the death-look. His large, loose mouth was drawn, for all
+its laughter at the fact which he owned; his profile, which burlesqued.
+an eagle's, was the profile of a drooping eagle; his lank length of limb
+trembled away with him when we parted. I did not see him again; I
+scarcely heard of him till I heard of his death, and this sad image
+remains with me of the humorist who first gave the world a taste of the
+humor which characterizes the whole American people.
+
+I was meeting all kinds of distinguished persons, in my relation to the
+magazine, and early that winter I met one who remains in my mind above
+all others a person of distinction. He was scarcely a celebrity, but he
+embodied certain social traits which were so characteristic of literary
+Boston that it could not be approached without their recognition. The
+Muses have often been acknowledged to be very nice young persons, but in
+Boston they were really ladies; in Boston literature was of good family
+and good society in a measure it has never been elsewhere. It might be
+said even that reform was of good family in Boston; and literature and
+reform equally shared the regard of Edmund Quincy, whose race was one of
+the most aristocratic in New England. I had known him by his novel of
+'Wensley' (it came so near being a first-rate novel), and by his Life of
+Josiah Quincy, then a new book, but still better by his Boston letters to
+the New York Tribune. These dealt frankly, in the old anti-slavery days
+between 1850 and 1860, with other persons of distinction in Boston, who
+did not see the right so clearly as Quincy did, or who at least let their
+interests darken them to the ugliness of slavery. Their fault was all
+the more comical because it was the error of men otherwise so correct, of
+characters so stainless, of natures so upright; and the Quincy letters
+got out of it all the fun there was in it. Quincy himself affected me as
+the finest patrician type I had ever met. He was charmingly handsome,
+with a nose of most fit aquilinity, smooth-shaven lips, "educated
+whiskers," and perfect glasses; his manner was beautiful, his voice
+delightful, when at our first meeting he made me his reproaches in terms
+of lovely kindness for having used in my 'Venetian Life' the Briticism
+'directly' for 'as soon as.'
+
+Lowell once told me that Quincy had never had any calling or profession,
+because when he found himself in the enjoyment of a moderate income on
+leaving college, he decided to be simply a gentleman. He was too much of
+a man to be merely that, and he was an abolitionist, a journalist, and
+for conscience' sake a satirist. Of that political mood of society which
+he satirized was an eminent man whom it was also my good fortune to meet
+in my early days in Boston; and if his great sweetness and kindness had
+not instantly won my liking, I should still have been glad of the glimpse
+of the older and statelier Boston which my slight acquaintance with
+George Ticknor gave me. The historian of Spanish literature, the friend
+and biographer of Prescott, and a leading figure of the intellectual
+society of an epoch already closed, dwelt in the fine old square brick
+mansion which yet stands at the corner of Park Street and Beacon, though
+sunk now to a variety of business uses, and lamentably changed in aspect.
+The interior was noble, and there was an air of scholarly quiet and of
+lettered elegance in the library, where the host received his guests,
+which seemed to pervade the whole house, and which made its appeal to the
+imagination of one of them most potently. It seemed to me that to be
+master of such circumstance and keeping would be enough of life in a
+certain way; and it all lingers in my memory yet, as if it were one with
+the gentle courtesy which welcomed me.
+
+Among my fellow-guests one night was George S. Hillard, now a faded
+reputation, and even then a life defeated of the high expectation of its
+youth. I do not know whether his 'Six Months in Italy' still keeps
+itself in print; but it was a book once very well known; and he was
+perhaps the more gracious to me, as our host was, because of our common
+Italian background. He was of the old Silver-gray Whig society too, and
+I suppose that order of things imparted its tone to what I felt and saw
+in that place. The civil war had come and gone, and that order accepted
+the result if not with faith, then with patience. There were two young
+English noblemen there that night, who had been travelling in the South,
+and whose stories of the wretched conditions they had seen moved our host
+to some open misgiving. But the Englishmen had no question; in spite of
+all, they defended the accomplished fact, and when I ventured to say that
+now at least there could be a hope of better things, while the old order
+was only the perpetuation of despair, he mildly assented, with a gesture
+of the hand that waived the point, and a deeply sighed, "Perhaps;
+perhaps."
+
+He was a presence of great dignity, which seemed to recall the past with
+a steadfast allegiance, and yet to relax itself towards the present in
+the wisdom of the accumulated years. His whole life had been passed in
+devotion to polite literature and in the society of the polite world; and
+he was a type of scholar such as only the circumstances of Boston could
+form. Those circumstances could alone form such another type as Quincy;
+and I wish I could have felt then as I do now the advantage of meeting
+them so contemporaneously.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+The historian of Spanish literature was an old man nearer eighty than
+seventy when I saw him, and I recall of him personally his dark tint, and
+the scholarly refinement of his clean-shaven face, which seemed to me
+rather English than American in character. He was quite exterior to the
+Atlantic group of writers, and had no interest in me as one of it.
+Literary Boston of that day was not a solidarity, as I soon perceived;
+and I understood that it was only in my quality of stranger that I saw
+the different phases of it. I should not be just to a vivid phase if I
+failed to speak of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe and the impulse of reform which
+she personified. I did not sympathize with this then so much as I do
+now, but I could appreciate it on the intellectual side. Once, many
+years later, I heard Mrs. Howe speak in public, and it seemed to me that
+she made one of the best speeches I had ever heard. It gave me for the
+first time a notion of what women might do in that sort if they entered
+public life; but when we met in those earlier days I was interested in
+her as perhaps our chief poetess. I believe she did not care much to
+speak of literature; she was alert for other meanings in life, and I
+remember how she once brought to book a youthful matron who had perhaps
+unduly lamented the hardships of housekeeping, with the sharp demand,
+"Child, where is your religion?" After the many years of an acquaintance
+which had not nearly so many meetings as years, it was pleasant to find
+her, at the latest, as strenuous as ever for the faith of works, and as
+eager to aid Stepniak as John Brown. In her beautiful old age she
+survives a certain literary impulse of Boston, but a still higher impulse
+of Boston she will not survive, for that will last while the city
+endures.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+The Cambridge men were curiously apart from others that formed the great
+New England group, and with whom in my earlier ignorance I had always
+fancied them mingling. Now and then I met Doctor Holmes at Longfellow's
+table, but not oftener than now and then, and I never saw Emerson in
+Cambridge at all except at Longfellow's funeral. In my first years on
+the Atlantic I sometimes saw him, when he would address me some grave,
+rather retrorsive civilities, after I had been newly introduced to him,
+as I had always to be on these occasions. I formed the belief that he
+did not care for me, either in my being or doing, and I am far from
+blaming him for that: on such points there might easily be two opinions,
+and I was myself often of the mind I imagined in him.
+
+If Emerson forgot me, it was perhaps because I was not of those qualities
+of things which even then, it was said, he could remember so much better
+than things themselves. In his later years I sometimes saw him in the
+Boston streets with his beautiful face dreamily set, as he moved like one
+to whose vision
+
+       "Heaven opens inward, chasms yawn,
+        Vast images in glimmering dawn,
+        Half shown, are broken and withdrawn."
+
+It is known how before the end the eclipse became total and from moment
+to moment the record inscribed upon his mind was erased. Some years
+before he died I sat between him and Mrs. Rose Terry Cooke, at an
+'Atlantic Breakfast' where it was part of my editorial function to
+preside. When he was not asking me who she was, I could hear him asking
+her who I was. His great soul worked so independently of memory as we
+conceive it, and so powerfully and essentially, that one could not help
+wondering if; after all, our personal continuity, our identity hereafter,
+was necessarily trammeled up with our enduring knowledge of what happens
+here. His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event, and yet his
+character, his personality, his identity fully persisted.
+
+I do not know, whether the things that we printed for Emerson after his
+memory began to fail so utterly were the work of earlier years or not,
+but I know that they were of his best. There were certain poems which
+could not have been more electly, more exquisitely his, or fashioned with
+a keener and juster self-criticism. His vision transcended his time so
+far that some who have tired themselves out in trying to catch up with
+him have now begun to say that he was no seer at all; but I doubt if
+these form the last court of appeal in his case. In manner, he was very
+gentle, like all those great New England men, but he was cold, like many
+of them, to the new-comer, or to the old-comer who came newly. As I have
+elsewhere recorded, I once heard him speak critically of Hawthorne, and
+once he expressed his surprise at the late flowering brilliancy of
+Holmes's gift in the Autocrat papers after all his friends supposed it
+had borne its best fruit. But I recall no mention of Longfellow, or
+Lowell, or Whittier from him. At a dinner where the talk glanced upon
+Walt Whitman he turned to me as perhaps representing the interest
+posterity might take in the matter, and referred to Whitman's public use
+of his privately written praise as something altogether unexpected. He
+did not disown it or withdraw it, but seemed to feel (not indignantly)
+that there had been an abuse of it.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+The first time I saw Whittier was in Fields's room at the publishing
+office, where I had come upon some editorial errand to my chief. He
+introduced me to the poet: a tall, spare figure in black of Quaker cut,
+with a keen, clean-shaven face, black hair, and vivid black eyes. It was
+just after his poem, 'Snow Bound', had made its great success, in the
+modest fashion of those days, and had sold not two hundred thousand but
+twenty thousand, and I tried to make him my compliment. I contrived to
+say that I could not tell him how much I liked it; and he received the
+inadequate expression of my feeling with doubtless as much effusion as he
+would have met something more explicit and abundant. If he had judged
+fit to take my contract off my hands in any way, I think he would have
+been less able to do so than any of his New England contemporaries. In
+him, as I have suggested, the Quaker calm was bound by the frosty
+Puritanic air, and he was doubly cold to the touch of the stranger,
+though he would thaw out to old friends, and sparkle in laugh and joke. I
+myself never got so far with him as to experience this geniality, though
+afterwards we became such friends as an old man and a young man could be
+who rarely met. Our better acquaintance began with some talk, at a second
+meeting, about Bayard Taylor's 'Story of Kennett', which had then lately
+appeared, and which he praised for its fidelity to Quaker character in
+its less amiable aspects. No doubt I had made much of my own Quaker
+descent (which I felt was one of the few things I had to be proud of),
+and he therefore spoke the more frankly of those traits of brutality into
+which the primitive sincerity of the sect sometimes degenerated. He
+thought the habit of plain-speaking had to be jealously guarded to keep
+it from becoming rude-speaking, and he matched with stories of his own
+some things I had heard my father tell of Friends in the backwoods who
+were Foes to good manners.
+
+Whittier was one of the most generous of men towards the work of others,
+especially the work of a new man, and if I did anything that he liked, I
+could count upon him for cordial recognition. In the quiet of his
+country home at Danvers he apparently read all the magazines, and kept
+himself fully abreast of the literary movement, but I doubt if he so
+fully appreciated the importance of the social movement. Like some
+others of the great anti-slavery men, he seemed to imagine that mankind
+had won itself a clear field by destroying chattel slavery, and he had.
+no sympathy with those who think that the man who may any moment be out
+of work is industrially a slave. This is not strange; so few men last
+over from one reform to another that the wonder is that any should, not
+that one should not. Whittier was prophet for one great need of the
+divine to man, and he spoke his message with a fervor that at times was
+like the trembling of a flame, or the quivering of midsummer sunshine. It
+was hard to associate with the man as one saw him, still, shy, stiff, the
+passion of his verse. This imbued not only his antislavery utterances,
+but equally his ballads of the old witch and Quaker persecution, and
+flashed a far light into the dimness where his interrogations of Mystery
+pierced. Whatever doubt there can be of the fate of other New England
+poets in the great and final account, it seems to me that certain of
+these pieces make his place secure.
+
+There is great inequality in his work, and I felt this so strongly that
+when I came to have full charge of the Magazine, I ventured once to
+distinguish. He sent me a poem, and I had the temerity to return it, and
+beg him for something else. He magnanimously refrained from all show of
+offence, and after a while, when he had printed the poem elsewhere, he
+gave me another. By this time, I perceived that I had been wrong, not as
+to the poem returned, but as to my function regarding him and such as he.
+I had made my reflections, and never again did I venture to pass upon
+what contributors of his quality sent me. I took it and printed it, and
+praised the gods; and even now I think that with such men it was not my
+duty to play the censor in the periodical which they had made what it
+was. They had set it in authority over American literature, and it was
+not for me to put myself in authority over them. Their fame was in their
+own keeping, and it was not my part to guard it against them.
+
+After that experience I not only practised an eager acquiescence in their
+wish to reach the public through the Atlantic, but I used all the
+delicacy I was master of in bowing the way to them. Sometimes my utmost
+did not avail, or more strictly speaking it did not avail in one instance
+with Emerson. He had given me upon much entreaty a poem which was one of
+his greatest and best, but the proof-reader found a nominative at odds
+with its verb. We had some trouble in reconciling them, and some other
+delays, and meanwhile Doctor Holmes offered me a poem for the same
+number. I now doubted whether I should get Emerson's poem back in time
+for it, but unluckily the proof did come back in time, and then I had to
+choose between my poets, or acquaint them with the state of the case, and
+let them choose what I should do. I really felt that Doctor Holmes had
+the right to precedence, since Emerson had withheld his proof so long
+that I could not count upon it; but I wrote to Emerson, and asked (as
+nearly as I can remember) whether he would consent to let me put his poem
+over to the next number, or would prefer to have it appear in the same
+number with Doctor Holmes's; the subjects were cognate, and I had my
+misgivings. He wrote me back to "return the proofs and break up the
+forms." I could not go to this iconoclastic extreme with the
+electrotypes of the magazine, but I could return the proofs. I did so,
+feeling that I had done my possible, and silently grieving that there
+could be such ire in heavenly minds.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+Emerson, as I say, I had once met in Cambridge, but Whittier never; and I
+have a feeling that poet as Cambridge felt him to be, she had her
+reservations concerning him. I cannot put these into words which would
+not oversay them, but they were akin to those she might have refined upon
+in regard to Mrs. Stowe. Neither of these great writers would have
+appeared to Cambridge of the last literary quality; their fame was with a
+world too vast to be the test that her own
+
+        "One entire and perfect crysolite"
+
+would have formed. Whittier in fact had not arrived at the clear
+splendor of his later work without some earlier turbidity; he was still
+from time to time capable of a false rhyme, like morn and dawn. As for
+the author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' her syntax was such a snare to her that
+it sometimes needed the combined skill of all the proof-readers and the
+assistant editor to extricate her. Of course, nothing was ever written
+into her work, but in changes of diction, in correction of solecisms, in
+transposition of phrases, the text was largely rewritten on the margin of
+her proofs. The soul of her art was present, but the form was so often
+absent, that when it was clothed on anew, it would have been hard to say
+whose cut the garment was of in many places. In fact, the proof-reading
+of the 'Atlantic Monthly' was something almost fearfully scrupulous and
+perfect. The proofs were first read by the under proof-reader in the
+printing-office; then the head reader passed them to me perfectly clean
+as to typography, with his own abundant and most intelligent comments on
+the literature; and then I read them, making what changes I chose, and
+verifying every quotation, every date, every geographical and
+biographical name, every foreign word to the last accent, every technical
+and scientific term. Where it was possible or at all desirable the proof
+was next submitted to the author. When it came back to me, I revised it,
+accepting or rejecting the author's judgment according as he was entitled
+by his ability and knowledge or not to have them. The proof now went to
+the printers for correction; they sent it again to the head reader, who
+carefully revised it and returned it again to me. I read it a second
+time, and it was again corrected. After this it was revised in the
+office and sent to the stereotyper, from whom it came to the head reader
+for a last revision in the plates.
+
+It would not do to say how many of the first American writers owed their
+correctness in print to the zeal of our proof-reading, but I may say that
+there were very few who did not owe something. The wisest and ablest
+were the most patient and grateful, like Mrs. Stowe, under correction; it
+was only the beginners and the more ignorant who were angry; and almost
+always the proof-reading editor had his way on disputed points. I look
+back now, with respectful amazement at my proficiency in detecting the
+errors of the great as well as the little. I was able to discover
+mistakes even in the classical quotations of the deeply lettered Sumner,
+and I remember, in the earliest years of my service on the Atlantic,
+waiting in this statesman's study amidst the prints and engravings that
+attested his personal resemblance to Edmund Burke, with his proofs in my
+hand and my heart in my mouth, to submit my doubts of his Latinity. I
+forget how he received them; but he was not a very gracious person.
+
+Mrs. Stowe was a gracious person, and carried into age the inalienable
+charm of a woman who must have been very, charming earlier. I met her
+only at the Fieldses' in Boston, where one night I witnessed a
+controversy between her and Doctor Holmes concerning homoeopathy and
+allopathy which lasted well through dinner. After this lapse of time, I
+cannot tell how the affair ended, but I feel sure of the liking with
+which Mrs. Stowe inspired me. There was something very simple, very
+motherly in her, and something divinely sincere. She was quite the
+person to take 'au grand serieux' the monstrous imaginations of Lady
+Byron's jealousy and to feel it on her conscience to make public report
+of them when she conceived that the time had come to do so.
+
+In Francis Parkman I knew much later than in some others a
+differentiation of the New England type which was not less
+characteristic. He, like so many other Boston men of letters, was of
+patrician family, and of those easy fortunes which Clio prefers her sons
+to be of; but he paid for these advantages by the suffering in which he
+wrought at what is, I suppose, our greatest history. He wrought at it
+piecemeal, and sometimes only by moments, when the terrible head aches
+which tormented him, and the disorder of the heart which threatened his
+life, allowed him a brief respite for the task which was dear to him. He
+must have been more than a quarter of a century in completing it, and in
+this time, as he once told me, it had given him a day-laborer's wages;
+but of course money was the least return he wished from it. I read the
+regularly successive volumes of 'The Jesuits in North America, The Old
+Regime in Canada', the 'Wolfe and Montcalm', and the others that went to
+make up the whole history with a sufficiently noisy enthusiasm, and our
+acquaintance began by his expressing his gratification with the praises
+of them that I had put in print. We entered into relations as
+contributor and editor, and I know that he was pleased with my eagerness
+to get as many detachable chapters from the book in hand as he could give
+me for the magazine, but he was of too fine a politeness to make this the
+occasion of his first coming to see me. He had walked out to Cambridge,
+where I then lived, in pursuance of a regimen which, I believe, finally
+built up his health; that it was unsparing, I can testify from my own
+share in one of his constitutionals in Boston, many years later.
+
+His experience in laying the groundwork for his history, and his
+researches in making it thorough, were such as to have liberated him to
+the knowledge of other manners and ideals, but he remained strictly a
+Bostonian, and as immutably of the Boston social and literary faith as
+any I knew in that capital of accomplished facts. He had lived like an
+Indian among the wild Western tribes; he consorted with the Canadian
+archaeologists in their mousings among the colonial archives of their
+fallen state; every year he went to Quebec or Paris to study the history
+of New France in the original documents; European society was open to him
+everywhere; but he had those limitations which I nearly always found in
+the Boston men, I remember his talking to me of 'The Rise of Silas
+Lapham', in a somewhat troubled and uncertain strain, and interpreting
+his rise as the achievement of social recognition, without much or at all
+liking it or me for it. I did not think it my part to point out that I
+had supposed the rise to be a moral one; and later I fell under his
+condemnation for certain high crimes and misdemeanors I had been guilty
+of against a well-known ideal in fiction. These in fact constituted
+lese-majesty of romanticism, which seemed to be disproportionately dear
+to a man who was in his own way trying to tell the truth of human nature
+as I was in mine. His displeasures passed, however, and my last meeting
+with our greatest historian, as I think him, was of unalloyed
+friendliness. He came to me during my final year in Boston for nothing
+apparently but to tell me of his liking for a book of mine describing
+boy-life in Southern Ohio a half-century ago. He wished to talk about
+many points of this, which he found the same as his own boylife in the
+neighborhood of Boston; and we could agree that the life of the
+Anglo-Saxon boy was pretty much the same everywhere. He had helped
+himself into my apartment with a crutch, but I do not remember how he had
+fallen lame. It was the end of his long walks, I believe, and not long
+afterwards I had the grief to read of his death. I noticed that perhaps
+through his enforced quiet, he had put on weight; his fine face was full;
+whereas when I first knew him he was almost delicately thin of figure and
+feature. He was always of a distinguished presence, and his face had a
+great distinction.
+
+It had not the appealing charm I found in the face of James Parton,
+another historian I knew earlier in my Boston days. I cannot say how
+much his books, once so worthily popular, are now known but I have an
+abiding sense of their excellence. I have not read the 'Life of
+Voltaire', which was the last, but all the rest, from the first, I have
+read, and if there are better American biographies than those of Franklin
+or of Jefferson, I could not say where to find them. The Greeley and the
+Burr were younger books, and so was the Jackson, and they were not nearly
+so good; but to all the author had imparted the valuable humanity in
+which he abounded. He was never of the fine world of literature, the
+world that sniffs and sneers, and abashes the simpler-hearted reader. But
+he was a true artist, and English born as he was, he divined American
+character as few Americans have done. He was a man of eminent courage,
+and in the days when to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast, he
+had the heart to say of the Mysteries, that he did not know. He outlived
+the condemnation that this brought, and I think that no man ever came
+near him without in some measure loving him. To me he was of a most
+winning personality, which his strong, gentle face expressed, and a cast
+in the eye which he could not bring to bear directly upon his vis-a-vis,
+endeared. I never met him without wishing more of his company, for he
+seldom failed to say something to whatever was most humane and most
+modern in me. Our last meeting was at Newburyport, whither he had long
+before removed from New York, and where in the serene atmosphere of the
+ancient Puritan town he found leisure and inspiration for his work. He
+was not then engaged upon any considerable task, and he had aged and
+broken somewhat. But the old geniality, the old warmth glowed in him,
+and made a summer amidst the storm of snow that blinded the wintry air
+without. A new light had then lately come into my life, by which I saw
+all things that did not somehow tell for human brotherhood dwarfish and
+ugly, and he listened, as I imagined, to what I had to say with the
+tolerant sympathy of a man who has been a long time thinking those
+things, and views with a certain amusement the zeal of the fresh
+discoverer.
+
+There was yet another historian in Boston, whose acquaintance I made
+later than either Parkman's or Parton's, and whose very recent death
+leaves me with the grief of a friend. No ones indeed, could meet John
+Codman Ropes without wishing to be his friend, or without finding a
+friend in him. He had his likes and his dislikes, but he could have had
+no enmities except for evil and meanness. I never knew a man of higher
+soul, of sweeter nature, and his whole life was a monument of character.
+It cannot wound him now to speak of the cruel deformity which came upon
+him in his boyhood, and haunted all his after days with suffering. His
+gentle face showed the pain which is always the part of the hunchback,
+but nothing else in him confessed a sense of his affliction, and the
+resolute activity of his mind denied it in every way. He was, as is well
+known, a very able lawyer, in full practice, while he was making his
+studies of military history, and winning recognition for almost unique
+insight and thoroughness in that direction, though I believe that when he
+came to embody the results in those extraordinary volumes recording the
+battles of our civil war, he retired from the law in some measure. He
+knew these battles more accurately than the generals who fought them, and
+he was of a like proficiency in the European wars from the time of
+Napoleon down to our own time. I have heard a story, which I cannot
+vouch for, that when foreknowledge of his affliction, at the outbreak of
+our civil war, forbade him to be a soldier, he became a student of
+soldiership, and wreaked in that sort the passion of his most gallant
+spirit. But whether this was true or not, it is certain that he pursued
+the study with a devotion which never blinded him to the atrocity of war.
+Some wars he could excuse and even justify, but for any war that seemed
+wanton or aggressive, he had only abhorrence.
+
+The last summer of a score that I had known him, we sat on the veranda of
+his cottage at York Harbor, and looked out over the moonlit sea, and he
+talked of the high and true things, with the inextinguishable zest for
+the inquiry which I always found in him, though he was then feeling the
+approaches of the malady which was so soon to end all groping in these
+shadows for him. He must have faced the fact with the same courage and
+the same trust with which he faced all facts. From the first I found him
+a deeply religious man, not only in the ecclesiastical sense, but in the
+more mystical meanings of the word, and he kept his faith as he kept his
+youth to the last. Every one who knew him, knows how young he was in
+heart, and how he liked to have those that were young in years about him.
+He wished to have his house in Boston, as well as his cottage at York,
+full of young men and young girls, whose joy of life he made his own, and
+whose society he preferred to his contemporaries'. One could not blame
+him for that, or for seeking the sun, wherever he could, but it would be
+a false notion of him to suppose that his sympathies were solely or
+chiefly with the happy. In every sort, as I knew him, he was fine and
+good. The word is not worthy of him, after some of its uses and
+associations, but if it were unsmutched by these, and whitened to its
+primitive significance, I should say he was one of the most perfect
+gentlemen I ever knew.
+
+
+
+
+OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+Elsewhere we literary folk are apt to be such a common lot, with
+tendencies here and there to be a shabby lot; we arrive from all sorts of
+unexpected holes and corners of the earth, remote, obscure; and at the
+best we do so often come up out of the ground; but at Boston we were of
+ascertained and noted origin, and good part of us dropped from the skies.
+Instead of holding horses before the doors of theatres; or capping verses
+at the plough-tail; or tramping over Europe with nothing but a flute in
+the pocket; or walking up to the metropolis with no luggage but the MS.
+of a tragedy; or sleeping in doorways or under the arches of bridges; or
+serving as apothecaries' 'prentices--we were good society from the
+beginning. I think this was none the worse for us, and it was vastly the
+better for good society.
+
+Literature in Boston, indeed, was so respectable, and often of so high a
+lineage, that to be a poet was not only to be good society, but almost to
+be good family. If one names over the men who gave Boston her supremacy
+in literature during that Unitarian harvest-time of the old Puritanic
+seed-time which was her Augustan age, one names the people who were and
+who had been socially first in the city ever since the self-exile of the
+Tories at the time of the Revolution. To say Prescott, Motley, Parkman,
+Lowell, Norton, Higginson, Dana, Emerson, Channing, was to say patrician,
+in the truest and often the best sense, if not the largest. Boston was
+small, but these were of her first citizens, and their primacy, in its
+way, was of the same quality as that, say, of the chief families of
+Venice. But these names can never have the effect for the stranger that
+they had for one to the manner born. I say had, for I doubt whether in
+Boston they still mean all that they once meant, and that their
+equivalents meant in science, in law, in politics. The most famous, if
+not the greatest of all the literary men of Boston, I have not mentioned
+with them, for Longfellow was not of the place, though by his sympathies
+and relations he became of it; and I have not mentioned Oliver Wendell
+Holmes, because I think his name would come first into the reader's
+thought with the suggestion of social quality in the humanities.
+
+Holmes was of the Brahminical caste which his humorous recognition
+invited from its subjectivity in the New England consciousness into the
+light where all could know it and own it, and like Longfellow he was
+allied to the patriciate of Boston by the most intimate ties of life. For
+a long time, for the whole first period of his work, he stood for that
+alone, its tastes, its prejudices, its foibles even, and when he came to
+stand in his 'second period, for vastly, for infinitely more, and to make
+friends with the whole race, as few men have ever done, it was always, I
+think, with a secret shiver of doubt, a backward look of longing, and an
+eye askance. He was himself perfectly aware of this at times, and would
+mark his several misgivings with a humorous sense of the situation. He
+was essentially too kind to be of a narrow world, too human to be finally
+of less than humanity, too gentle to be of the finest gentility. But
+such limitations as he had were in the direction I have hinted, or
+perhaps more than hinted; and I am by no means ready to make a mock of
+them, as it would be so easy to do for some reasons that he has himself
+suggested. To value aright the affection which the old Bostonian had for
+Boston one must conceive of something like the patriotism of men in the
+times when a man's city was a man's country, something Athenian,
+something Florentine. The war that nationalized us liberated this love
+to the whole country, but its first tenderness remained still for Boston,
+and I suppose a Bostonian still thinks of himself first as a Bostonian
+and then as an American, in a way that no New-Yorker could deal with
+himself. The rich historical background dignifies and ennobles the
+intense public spirit of the place, and gives it a kind of personality.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+In literature Doctor Holmes survived all the Bostonians who had given the
+city her primacy in letters, but when I first knew him there was no
+apparent ground for questioning it. I do not mean now the time when I
+visited New England, but when I came to live near Boston, and to begin
+the many happy years which I spent in her fine, intellectual air. I found
+time to run in upon him, while I was there arranging to take my place on
+the Atlantic Monthly, and I remember that in this brief moment with him
+he brought me to book about some vaunting paragraph in the 'Nation'
+claiming the literary primacy for New York. He asked me if I knew who
+wrote it, and I was obliged to own that I had written it myself, when
+with the kindness he always showed me he protested against my position.
+To tell the truth, I do not think now I had any very good reasons for it,
+and I certainly could urge none that would stand against his. I could
+only fall back upon the saving clause that this primacy was claimed
+mainly if not wholly for New York in the future. He was willing to leave
+me the connotations of prophecy, but I think he did even this out of
+politeness rather than conviction, and I believe he had always a
+sensitiveness where Boston was concerned, which could not seem ungenerous
+to any generous mind. Whatever lingering doubt of me he may have had,
+with reference to Boston, seemed to satisfy itself when several years
+afterwards he happened to speak of a certain character in an early novel
+of mine, who was not quite the kind of Bostonian one could wish to be.
+The thing came up in talk with another person, who had referred to my
+Bostonian, and the doctor had apparently made his acquaintance in the
+book, and not liked him. "I understood, of course," he said, "that he
+was a Bostonian, not the Bostonian," and I could truthfully answer that
+this was by all means my own understanding too.
+
+His fondness for his city, which no one could appreciate better than
+myself, I hope, often found expression in a burlesque excess in his
+writings, and in his talk perhaps oftener still. Hard upon my return
+from Venice I had a half-hour with him in his old study on Charles
+Street, where he still lived in 1865, and while I was there a young man
+came in for the doctor's help as a physician, though he looked so very
+well, and was so lively and cheerful, that I have since had my doubts
+whether he had not made a pretext for a glimpse of him as the Autocrat.
+The doctor took him upon his word, however, and said he had been so long
+out of practice that he could not do anything for him, but he gave him
+the address of another physician, somewhere near Washington Street. "And
+if you don't know where Washington Street is," he said, with a gay burst
+at a certain vagueness which had come into the young man's face, "you
+don't know anything."
+
+We had been talking of Venice, and what life was like there, and he made
+me tell him in some detail. He was especially interested in what I had
+to say of the minute subdivision and distribution of the necessaries, the
+small coins, and the small values adapted to their purchase, the
+intensely retail character, in fact, of household provisioning; and I
+could see how he pleased himself in formulating the theory that the
+higher a civilization the finer the apportionment of the demands and
+supplies. The ideal, he said, was a civilization in which you could buy
+two cents' worth of beef, and a divergence from this standard was towards
+barbarism.
+
+The secret of the man who is universally interesting is that he is
+universally interested, and this was, above all, the secret of the charm
+that Doctor Holmes had for every one. No doubt he knew it, for what that
+most alert intelligence did not know of itself was scarcely worth
+knowing. This knowledge was one of his chief pleasures, I fancy; he
+rejoiced in the consciousness which is one of the highest attributes of
+the highly organized man, and he did not care for the consequences in
+your mind, if you were so stupid as not to take him aright. I remember
+the delight Henry James, the father of the novelist, had in reporting to
+me the frankness of the doctor, when he had said to him, "Holmes, you are
+intellectually the most alive man I ever knew." "I am, I am," said the
+doctor. "From the crown of my head to the sole of my foot, I'm alive,
+I'm alive!" Any one who ever saw him will imagine the vivid relish he
+had in recognizing the fact. He could not be with you a moment without
+shedding upon you the light of his flashing wit, his radiant humor, and
+he shone equally upon the rich and poor in mind. His gaiety of heart
+could not withhold itself from any chance of response, but he did wish
+always to be fully understood, and to be liked by those he liked. He
+gave his liking cautiously, though, for the affluence of his sympathies
+left him without the reserves of colder natures, and he had to make up
+for these with careful circumspection. He wished to know the character
+of the person who made overtures to his acquaintance, for he was aware
+that his friendship lay close to it; he wanted to be sure that he was a
+nice person, and though I think he preferred social quality in his
+fellow-man, he did not refuse himself to those who had merely a sweet and
+wholesome humanity. He did not like anything that tasted or smelt of
+Bohemianism in the personnel of literature, but he did not mind the scent
+of the new-ploughed earth, or even of the barn-yard. I recall his
+telling me once that after two younger brothers-in-letters had called
+upon him in the odor of an habitual beeriness and smokiness, he opened
+the window; and the very last time I saw him he remembered at eighty-five
+the offence he had found on his first visit to New York, when a
+metropolitan poet had asked him to lunch in a basement restaurant.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+He seemed not to mind, however, climbing to the little apartment we had
+in Boston when we came there in 1866, and he made this call upon us in
+due form, bringing Mrs. Holmes with him as if to accent the recognition
+socially. We were then incredibly young, much younger than I find people
+ever are nowadays, and in the consciousness of our youth we felt, to the
+last exquisite value of the fact, what it was to have the Autocrat come
+to see us; and I believe he was not displeased to perceive this; he liked
+to know that you felt his quality in every way. That first winter,
+however, I did not see him often, and in the spring we went to live in
+Cambridge, and thereafter I met him chiefly at Longfellow's, or when I
+came in to dine at the Fieldses', in Boston. It was at certain meetings
+of the Dante Club, when Longfellow read aloud his translation for
+criticism, and there was supper later, that one saw the doctor; and his
+voice was heard at the supper rather than at the criticism, for he was no
+Italianate. He always seemed to like a certain turn of the talk toward
+the mystical, but with space for the feet on a firm ground of fact this
+side of the shadows; when it came to going over among them, and laying
+hold of them with the band of faith, as if they were substance, he was
+not of the excursion. It is well known how fervent, I cannot say devout,
+a spiritualist Longfellow's brother-in-law, Appleton, was; and when he
+was at the table too, it took all the poet's delicate skill to keep him
+and the Autocrat from involving themselves in a cataclysmal controversy
+upon the matter of manifestations. With Doctor Holmes the inquiry was
+inquiry, to the last, I believe, and the burden of proof was left to the
+ghosts and their friends. His attitude was strictly scientific; he
+denied nothing, but he expected the supernatural to be at least as
+convincing as the natural.
+
+There was a time in his history when the popular ignorance classed him
+with those who were once rudely called infidels; but the world has since
+gone so fast and so far that the mind he was of concerning religious
+belief would now be thought religious by a good half of the religious
+world. It is true that he had and always kept a grudge against the
+ancestral Calvinism which afflicted his youth; and he was through all
+rises and lapses of opinion essentially Unitarian; but of the honest
+belief of any one, I am sure he never felt or spoke otherwise than most
+tolerantly, most tenderly. As often as he spoke of religion, and his
+talk tended to it very often, I never heard an irreligious word from him,
+far less a scoff or sneer at religion; and I am certain that this was not
+merely because he would have thought it bad taste, though undoubtedly he
+would have thought it bad taste; I think it annoyed, it hurt him, to be
+counted among the iconoclasts, and he would have been profoundly grieved
+if he could have known how widely this false notion of him once
+prevailed. It can do no harm at this late day to impart from the secrets
+of the publishing house the fact that a supposed infidelity in the tone
+of his story The Guardian Angel cost the Atlantic Monthly many
+subscribers. Now the tone of that story would not be thought even mildly
+agnostic, I fancy; and long before his death the author had outlived the
+error concerning him.
+
+It was not the best of his stories, by any means, and it would not be too
+harsh to say that it was the poorest. His novels all belonged to an
+order of romance which was as distinctly his own as the form of
+dramatized essay which he invented in the Autocrat. If he did not think
+poorly of them, he certainly did not think too proudly, and I heard him
+quote with relish the phrase of a lady who had spoken of them to him as
+his "medicated novels." That, indeed, was perhaps what they were; a
+faint, faint odor of the pharmacopoeia clung to their pages; their magic
+was scientific. He knew this better than any one else, of course, and if
+any one had said it in his turn he would hardly have minded it. But what
+he did mind was the persistent misinterpretation of his intention in
+certain quarters where he thought he had the right to respectful
+criticism in stead of the succession of sneers that greeted the
+successive numbers of his story; and it was no secret that he felt the
+persecution keenly. Perhaps he thought that he had already reached that
+time in his literary life when he was a fact rather than a question, and
+when reasons and not feelings must have to do with his acceptance or
+rejection. But he had to live many years yet before he reached this
+state. When he did reach it, happily a good while before his death, I do
+not believe any man ever enjoyed the like condition more. He loved to
+feel himself out of the fight, with much work before him still, but with
+nothing that could provoke ill-will in his activities. He loved at all
+times to take himself objectively, if I may so express my sense of a
+mental attitude that misled many. As I have said before, he was
+universally interested, and he studied the universe from himself. I do
+not know how one is to study it otherwise; the impersonal has really no
+existence; but with all his subtlety and depth he was of a make so
+simple, of a spirit so naive, that he could not practise the feints some
+use to conceal that interest in self which, after all, every one knows is
+only concealed. He frankly and joyously made himself the starting-point
+in all his inquest of the hearts and minds of other men, but so far from
+singling himself out in this, and standing apart in it, there never was
+any one who was more eagerly and gladly your fellow-being in the things
+of the soul.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+In the things of the world, he had fences, and looked at some people
+through palings and even over the broken bottles on the tops of walls;
+and I think he was the loser by this, as well as they. But then I think
+all fences are bad, and that God has made enough differences between men;
+we need not trouble ourselves to multiply them. Even behind his fences,
+however, Holmes had a heart kind for the outsiders, and I do not believe
+any one came into personal relations with him who did not experience this
+kindness. In that long and delightful talk I had with him on my return
+from Venice (I can praise the talk because it was mainly his), we spoke
+of the status of domestics in the Old World, and how fraternal the
+relation of high and low was in Italy, while in England, between master
+and man, it seemed without acknowledgment of their common humanity.
+"Yes," he said, "I always felt as if English servants expected to be
+trampled on; but I can't do that. If they want to be trampled on, they
+must get some one else." He thought that our American way was infinitely
+better; and I believe that in spite of the fences there was always an
+instinctive impulse with him to get upon common ground with his
+fellow-man. I used to notice in the neighborhood cabman who served our
+block on Beacon Street a sort of affectionate reverence for the Autocrat,
+which could have come from nothing but the kindly terms between them; if
+you went to him when he was engaged to Doctor Holmes, he told you so with
+a sort of implication in his manner that the thought of anything else for
+the time was profanation. The good fellow who took him his drives about
+the Beverly and Manchester shores seemed to be quite in the joke of the
+doctor's humor, and within the bounds of his personal modesty and his
+functional dignity permitted himself a smile at the doctor's sallies,
+when you stood talking with him, or listening to him at the
+carriage-side.
+
+The civic and social circumstance that a man values himself on is
+commonly no part of his value, and certainly no part of his greatness.
+Rather, it is the very thing that limits him, and I think that Doctor
+Holmes appeared in the full measure of his generous personality to those
+who did not and could not appreciate his circumstance, and not to those
+who formed it, and who from life-long association were so dear and
+comfortable to him. Those who best knew how great a man he was were
+those who came from far to pay him their duty, or to thank him for some
+help they had got from his books, or to ask his counsel or seek his
+sympathy. With all such he was most winningly tender, most intelligently
+patient. I suppose no great author was ever more visited by letter and
+in person than he, or kept a faithfuler conscience for his guests. With
+those who appeared to him in the flesh he used a miraculous tact, and I
+fancy in his treatment of all the physician native in him bore a
+characteristic part. No one seemed to be denied access to him, but it
+was after a moment of preparation that one was admitted, and any one who
+was at all sensitive must have felt from the first moment in his presence
+that there could be no trespassing in point of time. If now and then
+some insensitive began to trespass, there was a sliding-scale of
+dismissal that never failed of its work, and that really saved the author
+from the effect of intrusion. He was not bored because he would not be.
+
+I transfer at random the impressions of many years to my page, and I
+shall not try to observe a chronological order in these memories. Vivid
+among them is that of a visit which I paid him with Osgood the publisher,
+then newly the owner of the Atlantic Monthly, when I had newly become the
+sole editor. We wished to signalize our accession to the control of the
+magazine by a stroke that should tell most in the public eye, and we
+thought of asking Doctor Holmes to do something again in the manner of
+the Autocrat and the Professor at the Breakfast Table. Some letters had
+passed between him and the management concerning our wish, and then
+Osgood thought that it would be right and fit for us to go to him in
+person. He proposed the visit, and Doctor Holmes received us with a mind
+in which he had evidently formulated all his thoughts upon the matter.
+His main question was whether at his age of sixty years a man was
+justified in seeking to recall a public of the past, or to create a new
+public in the present. He seemed to have looked the ground over not only
+with a personal interest in the question, but with a keen scientific zest
+for it as something which it was delightful to consider in its generic
+relations; and I fancy that the pleasure of this inquiry more than
+consoled him for such pangs of misgiving as he must have had in the
+personal question. As commonly happens in the solution of such problems,
+it was not solved; he was very willing to take our minds upon it, and to
+incur the risk, if we thought it well and were willing to share it.
+
+We came away rejoicing, and the new series began with the new year
+following. It was by no means the popular success that we had hoped; not
+because the author had not a thousand new things to say, or failed to say
+them with the gust and freshness of his immortal youth, but because it
+was not well to disturb a form associated in the public mind with an
+achievement which had become classic. It is of the Autocrat of the
+Breakfast Table that people think, when they think of the peculiar
+species of dramatic essay which the author invented, and they think also
+of the Professor at the Breakfast Table, because he followed so soon; but
+the Poet at the Breakfast Table came so long after that his advent
+alienated rather than conciliated liking. Very likely, if the Poet had
+come first he would have had no second place in the affections of his
+readers, for his talk was full of delightful matter; and at least one of
+the poems which graced each instalment was one of the finest and greatest
+that Doctor Holmes ever wrote. I mean "Homesick in Heaven," which seems
+to me not only what I have said, but one of the most important, the most
+profoundly pathetic in the language. Indeed, I do not know any other
+that in the same direction goes so far with suggestion so penetrating.
+The other poems were mainly of a cast which did not win; the metaphysics
+in them were too much for the human interest, and again there rose a
+foolish clamor of the creeds against him on account of them. The great
+talent, the beautiful and graceful fancy, the eager imagination of the
+Autocrat could not avail in this third attempt, and I suppose the Poet at
+the Breakfast Table must be confessed as near a failure as Doctor Holmes
+could come. It certainly was so in the magazine which the brilliant
+success of the first had availed to establish in the high place the
+periodical must always hold in the history of American literature. Lowell
+was never tired of saying, when he recurred to the first days of his
+editorship, that the magazine could never have gone at all without the
+Autocrat papers. He was proud of having insisted upon Holmes's doing
+something for the new venture, and he was fond of recalling the author's
+misgivings concerning his contributions, which later repeated themselves
+with too much reason, though not with the reason that was in his own
+mind.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+He lived twenty-five years after that self-question at sixty, and after
+eighty he continued to prove that threescore was not the limit of a man's
+intellectual activity or literary charm. During all that time the work
+he did in mere quantity was the work that a man in the prime of life
+might well have been vain of doing, and it was of a quality not less
+surprising. If I asked him with any sort of fair notice I could rely
+upon him always for something for the January number, and throughout the
+year I could count upon him for those occasional pieces in which he so
+easily excelled all former writers of occasional verse, and which he
+liked to keep from the newspapers for the magazine. He had a pride in
+his promptness with copy, and you could always trust his promise. The
+printer's toe never galled the author's kibe in his case; he wished to
+have an early proof, which he corrected fastidiously, but not overmuch,
+and he did not keep it long. He had really done all his work in the
+manuscript, which came print-perfect and beautifully clear from his pen,
+in that flowing, graceful hand which to the last kept a suggestion of the
+pleasure he must have had in it. Like all wise contributors, he was not
+only patient, but very glad of all the queries and challenges that
+proof-reader and editor could accumulate on the margin of his proofs, and
+when they were both altogether wrong he was still grateful. In one of
+his poems there was some Latin-Quarter French, which our collective
+purism questioned, and I remember how tender of us he was in maintaining
+that in his Parisian time, at least, some ladies beyond the Seine said
+"Eh, b'en," instead of "Eh, bien." He knew that we must be always on the
+lookout for such little matters, and he would not wound our ignorance. I
+do not think any one enjoyed praise more than he. Of course he would not
+provoke it, but if it came of itself, he would not deny himself the
+pleasure, as long as a relish of it remained. He used humorously to
+recognize his delight in it, and to say of the lecture audiences which in
+earlier times hesitated applause, "Why don't they give me three times
+three? I can stand it!" He himself gave in the generous fulness he
+desired. He did not praise foolishly or dishonestly, though he would
+spare an open dislike; but when a thing pleased him he knew how to say so
+cordially and skilfully, so that it might help as well as delight. I
+suppose no great author has tried more sincerely and faithfully to
+befriend the beginner than he; and from time to time he would commend
+something to me that he thought worth looking at, but never insistently.
+In certain cases, where he had simply to ease a burden, from his own to
+the editorial shoulders, he would ask that the aspirant might be
+delicately treated. There might be personal reasons for this, but
+usually his kindness of heart moved him. His tastes had their
+geographical limit, but his sympathies were boundless, and the hopeless
+creature for whom he interceded was oftener remote from Boston and New
+England than otherwise.
+
+It seems to me that he had a nature singularly affectionate, and that it
+was this which was at fault if he gave somewhat too much of himself to
+the celebration of the Class of '29, and all the multitude of Boston
+occasions, large and little, embalmed in the clear amber of his verse,
+somewhat to the disadvantage of the amber. If he were asked he could not
+deny the many friendships and fellowships which united in the asking; the
+immediate reclame from these things was sweet to him; but he loved to
+comply as much as he loved to be praised. In the pleasure he got he
+could feel himself a prophet in his own country, but the country which
+owned him prophet began perhaps to feel rather too much as if it owned
+him, and did not prize his vaticinations at all their worth. Some polite
+Bostonians knew him chiefly on this side, and judged him to their own
+detriment from it.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+After we went to live in Cambridge, my life and the delight in it were so
+wholly there that in ten years I had hardly been in as many Boston
+houses. As I have said, I met Doctor Holmes at the Fieldses', and at
+Longfellow's, when he came out to a Dante supper, which was not often,
+and somewhat later at the Saturday Club dinners. One parlous time at the
+publisher's I have already recalled, when Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe and
+the Autocrat clashed upon homeopathy, and it required all the tact of the
+host to lure them away from the dangerous theme. As it was, a battle
+waged in the courteous forms of Fontenoy, went on pretty well through the
+dinner, and it was only over the coffee that a truce was called. I need
+not say which was heterodox, or that each had a deep and strenuous
+conscience in the matter. I have always felt it a proof of his extreme
+leniency to me, unworthy, that the doctor was able to tolerate my own
+defection from the elder faith in medicine; and I could not feel his
+kindness less caressing because I knew it a concession to an infirmity.
+He said something like, After all a good physician was the great matter;
+and I eagerly turned his clemency to praise of our family doctor.
+
+He was very constant at the Saturday Club, as long as his strength
+permitted, and few of its members missed fewer of its meetings. He
+continued to sit at its table until the ghosts of Hawthorne, of Agassiz,
+of Emerson, of Longfellow, of Lowell, out of others less famous, bore him
+company there among the younger men in the flesh. It must have been very
+melancholy, but nothing could deeply cloud his most cheerful spirit. His
+strenuous interest in life kept him alive to all the things of it, after
+so many of his friends were dead. The questions which he was wont to
+deal with so fondly, so wisely, the great problems of the soul, were all
+the more vital, perhaps, because the personal concern in them was
+increased by the translation to some other being of the men who had so
+often tried with him to fathom them here. The last time I was at that
+table he sat alone there among those great memories; but he was as gay as
+ever I saw him; his wit sparkled, his humor gleamed; the poetic touch was
+deft and firm as of old; the serious curiosity, the instant sympathy
+remained. To the witness he was pathetic, but to himself he could only
+have been interesting, as the figure of a man surviving, in an alien but
+not unfriendly present, the past which held so vast a part of all that
+had constituted him. If he had thought of himself in this way, it would
+have been without one emotion of self-pity, such as more maudlin souls
+indulge, but with a love of knowledge and wisdom as keenly alert as in
+his prime.
+
+For three privileged years I lived all but next-door neighbor of Doctor
+Holmes in that part of Beacon Street whither he removed after he left his
+old home in Charles Street, and during these years I saw him rather
+often. We were both on the water side, which means so much more than the
+words say, and our library windows commanded the same general view of the
+Charles rippling out into the Cambridge marshes and the sunsets, and
+curving eastward under Long Bridge, through shipping that increased
+onward to the sea. He said that you could count fourteen towns and
+villages in the compass of that view, with the three conspicuous
+monuments accenting the different attractions of it: the tower of
+Memorial Hall at Harvard; the obelisk on Bunker Hill; and in the centre
+of the picture that bulk of Tufts College which he said he expected to
+greet his eyes the first thing when he opened them in the other world.
+But the prospect, though generally the same, had certain precious
+differences for each of us, which I have no doubt he valued himself as
+much upon as I did. I have a notion that he fancied these were to be
+enjoyed best in his library through two oval panes let into the bay there
+apart from the windows, for he was apt to make you come and look out of
+them if you got to talking of the view before you left. In this pleasant
+study he lived among the books, which seemed to multiply from case to
+case and shelf to shelf, and climb from floor to ceiling. Everything was
+in exquisite order, and the desk where he wrote was as scrupulously neat
+as if the sloven disarray of most authors' desks were impossible to him.
+He had a number of ingenious little contrivances for helping his work,
+which he liked to show you; for a time a revolving book-case at the
+corner of his desk seemed to be his pet; and after that came his
+fountain-pen, which he used with due observance of its fountain
+principle, though he was tolerant of me when I said I always dipped mine
+in the inkstand; it was a merit in his eyes to use a fountain pen in
+anywise. After you had gone over these objects with him, and perhaps
+taken a peep at something he was examining through his microscope, he sat
+down at one corner of his hearth, and invited you to an easy chair at the
+other. His talk was always considerate of your wish to be heard, but the
+person who wished to talk when he could listen to Doctor Holmes was his
+own victim, and always the loser. If you were well advised you kept
+yourself to the question and response which manifested your interest in
+what he was saying, and let him talk on, with his sweet smile, and that
+husky laugh he broke softly into at times. Perhaps he was not very well
+when you came in upon him; then he would name his trouble, with a
+scientific zest and accuracy, and pass quickly to other matters. As I
+have noted, he was interested in himself only on the universal side; and
+he liked to find his peculiarity in you better than to keep it his own;
+he suffered a visible disappointment if he could not make you think or
+say you were so and so too. The querulous note was not in his most
+cheerful register; he would not dwell upon a specialized grief; though
+sometimes I have known him touch very lightly and currently upon a slight
+annoyance, or disrelish for this or that. As he grew older, he must have
+had, of course, an old man's disposition to speak of his infirmities; but
+it was fine to see him catch himself up in this, when he became conscious
+of it, and stop short with an abrupt turn to something else. With a real
+interest, which he gave humorous excess, he would celebrate some little
+ingenious thing that had fallen in his way, and I have heard him
+expatiate with childlike delight upon the merits of a new razor he had
+got: a sort of mower, which he could sweep recklessly over cheek and chin
+without the least danger of cutting himself. The last time I saw him he
+asked me if he had ever shown me that miraculous razor; and I doubt if he
+quite liked my saying I had seen one of the same kind.
+
+It seemed to me that he enjoyed sitting at his chimney-corner rather as
+the type of a person having a good time than as such a person; he would
+rather be up and about something, taking down a book, making a note,
+going again to his little windows, and asking you if you had seen the
+crows yet that sometimes alighted on the shoals left bare by the ebb-tide
+behind the house. The reader will recall his lovely poem, "My Aviary,"
+which deals with the winged life of that pleasant prospect. I shared
+with him in the flock of wild-ducks which used to come into our neighbor
+waters in spring, when the ice broke up, and stayed as long as the
+smallest space of brine remained unfrozen in the fall. He was graciously
+willing I should share in them, and in the cloud of gulls which drifted
+about in the currents of the sea and sky there, almost the whole year
+round. I did not pretend an original right to them, coming so late as I
+did to the place, and I think my deference pleased him.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+As I have said, he liked his fences, or at least liked you to respect
+them, or to be sensible of them. As often as I went to see him I was
+made to wait in the little reception-room below, and never shown at once
+to his study. My name would be carried up, and I would hear him
+verifying my presence from the maid through the opened door; then there
+came a cheery cry of wellcome: "Is that you? Come up, come up!" and I
+found him sometimes half-way down the stairs to meet me. He would make
+an excuse for having kept me below a moment, and say something about the
+rule he had to observe in all cases, as if he would not have me feel his
+fence a personal thing. I was aware how thoroughly his gentle spirit
+pervaded the whole house; the Irish maid who opened the door had the
+effect of being a neighbor too, and of being in the joke of the little
+formality; she apologized in her turn for the reception-room; there was
+certainly nothing trampled upon in her manner, but affection and
+reverence for him whose gate she guarded, with something like the
+sentiment she would have cherished for a dignitary of the Church, but
+nicely differenced and adjusted to the Autocrat's peculiar merits.
+
+The last time I was in that place, a visitant who had lately knocked at
+my own door was about to enter. I met the master of the house on the
+landing of the stairs outside his study, and he led me in for the few
+moments we could spend together. He spoke of the shadow so near, and
+said he supposed there could be no hope, but he did not refuse the cheer
+I offered him from my ignorance against his knowledge, and at something
+that was thought or said he smiled, with even a breath of laughter, so
+potent is the wont of a lifetime, though his eyes were full of tears, and
+his voice broke with his words. Those who have sorrowed deepest will
+understand this best.
+
+It was during the few years of our Beacon Street neighborhood that he
+spent those hundred days abroad in his last visit to England and France.
+He was full of their delight when he came back, and my propinquity gave
+me the advantage of hearing him speak of them at first hand. He
+whimsically pleased himself most with his Derby-day experiences, and
+enjoyed contrasting the crowd and occasion with that of forty or fifty
+years earlier, when he had seen some famous race of the Derby won;
+nothing else in England seemed to have moved him so much, though all that
+royalties, dignities, and celebrities could well do for him had been
+done. Of certain things that happened to him, characteristic of the
+English, and interesting to him in their relation to himself through his
+character of universally interested man, he spoke freely; but he has said
+what he chose to the public about them, and I have no right to say more.
+The thing that most vexed him during his sojourn apparently was to have
+been described in one of the London papers as quite deaf; and I could
+truly say to him that I had never imagined him at all deaf, or heard him
+accused of it before. "Oh, yes," he said, "I am a little hard of hearing
+on one side. But it isn't deafness."
+
+He had, indeed, few or none of the infirmities of age that make
+themselves painfully or inconveniently evident. He carried his slight
+figure erect, and until his latest years his step was quick and sure.
+Once he spoke of the lessened height of old people, apropos of something
+that was said, and "They will shrink, you know," he added, as if he were
+not at all concerned in the fact himself. If you met him in the street,
+you encountered a spare, carefully dressed old gentleman, with a
+clean-shaven face and a friendly smile, qualified by the involuntary
+frown of his thick, senile brows; well coated, lustrously shod, well
+gloved, in a silk hat, latterly wound with a mourning-weed. Sometimes he
+did not know you when he knew you quite well, and at such times I think
+it was kind to spare his years the fatigue of recalling your identity; at
+any rate, I am glad of the times when I did so. In society he had the
+same vagueness, the same dimness; but after the moment he needed to make
+sure of you, he was as vivid as ever in his life. He made me think of a
+bed of embers on which the ashes have thinly gathered, and which, when
+these are breathed away, sparkles and tinkles keenly up with all the
+freshness of a newly kindled fire. He did not mind talking about his
+age, and I fancied rather enjoyed doing so. Its approaches interested
+him; if he was going, he liked to know just how and when he was going.
+Once he spoke of his lasting strength in terms of imaginative humor: he
+was still so intensely interested in nature, the universe, that it seemed
+to him he was not like an old man so much as a lusty infant which
+struggles against having the breast snatched from it. He laughed at the
+notion of this, with that impersonal relish which seemed to me singularly
+characteristic of the self-consciousness so marked in him. I never heard
+one lugubrious word from him in regard to his years. He liked your
+sympathy on all grounds where he could have it self-respectfully, but he
+was a most manly spirit, and he would not have had it even as a type of
+the universal decay. Possibly he would have been interested to have you
+share in that analysis of himself which he was always making, if such a
+thing could have been.
+
+He had not much patience with the unmanly craving for sympathy in others,
+and chiefly in our literary craft, which is somewhat ignobly given to it,
+though he was patient, after all. He used to say, and I believe he has
+said it in print,--[Holmes said it in print many times, in his three
+novels and scattered through the "Breakfast Table" series. D.W.]--that
+unless a man could show a good reason for writing verse, it was rather
+against him, and a proof of weakness. I suppose this severe conclusion
+was something he had reached after dealing with innumerable small poets
+who sought the light in him with verses that no editor would admit to
+print. Yet of morbidness he was often very tender; he knew it to be
+disease, something that must be scientifically rather than ethically
+treated. He was in the same degree kind to any sensitiveness, for he was
+himself as sensitive as he was manly, and he was most delicately
+sensitive to any rightful social claim upon him. I was once at a dinner
+with him, where he was in some sort my host, in a company of people whom
+he had not seen me with before, and he made a point of acquainting me
+with each of them. It did not matter that I knew most of them already;
+the proof of his thoughtfulness was precious, and I was sorry when I had
+to disappoint it by confessing a previous knowledge.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+I had three memorable meetings with him not very long before he died: one
+a year before, and the other two within a few months of the end. The
+first of these was at luncheon in the summer-house of a friend whose
+hospitality made it summer the year round, and we all went out to meet
+him, when he drove up in his open carriage, with the little sunshade in
+his hand, which he took with him for protection against the heat, and
+also, a little, I think, for the whim of it. He sat a moment after he
+arrived, as if to orient himself in respect to each of us. Beside the
+gifted hostess, there was the most charming of all the American
+essayists, and the Autocrat seemed at once to find himself singularly at
+home with the people who greeted him. There was no interval needed for
+fanning away the ashes; he tinkled up before he entered the house, and at
+the table he was as vivid and scintillant as I ever saw him, if indeed I
+ever saw him as much so. The talk began at once, and we had made him
+believe that there was nothing egotistic in his taking the word, or
+turning it in illustration from himself upon universal matters. I spoke
+among other things of some humble ruins on the road to Gloucester, which
+gave the way-side a very aged look; the tumbled foundation-stones of poor
+bits of houses, and "Ah," he said, "the cellar and the well?" He added,
+to the company generally, "Do you know what I think are the two lines of
+mine that go as deep as any others, in a certain direction?" and he began
+to repeat stragglingly certain verses from one of his earlier poems,
+until he came to the closing couplet. But I will give them in full,
+because in going to look them up I have found them so lovely, and because
+I can hear his voice again in every fondly accented syllable:
+
+     "Who sees unmoved, a ruin at his feet,
+     The lowliest home where human hearts have beat?
+     Its hearth-stone, shaded with the bistre stain,
+     A century's showery torrents wash in vain;
+     Its starving orchard where the thistle blows,
+     And mossy trunks still mark the broken rows;
+     Its chimney-loving poplar, oftenest seen
+     Next an old roof, or where a roof has been;
+     Its knot-grass, plantain,--all the social weeds,
+     Man's mute companions following where he leads;
+     Its dwarfed pale flowers, that show their straggling heads,
+     Sown by the wind from grass-choked garden-beds;
+     Its woodbine creeping where it used to climb;
+     Its roses breathing of the olden time;
+     All the poor shows the curious idler sees,
+     As life's thin shadows waste by slow degrees,
+     Till naught remains, the saddening tale to tell,
+     Save home's last wrecks--the CELLAR AND THE WELL!"
+
+The poet's chanting voice rose with a triumphant swell in the climax, and
+"There," he said, "isn't it so? The cellar and the well--they can't be
+thrown down or burnt up; they are the human monuments that last longest
+and defy decay." He rejoiced openly in the sympathy that recognized with
+him the divination of a most pathetic, most signal fact, and he repeated
+the last couplet again at our entreaty, glad to be entreated for it. I do
+not know whether all will agree with him concerning the relative
+importance of the lines, but I think all must feel the exquisite beauty
+of the picture to which they give the final touch.
+
+He said a thousand witty and brilliant things that day, but his pleasure
+in this gave me the most pleasure, and I recall the passage distinctly
+out of the dimness that covers the rest. He chose to figure us younger
+men, in touching upon the literary circumstance of the past and present,
+as representative of modern feeling and thinking, and himself as no
+longer contemporary. We knew he did this to be contradicted, and we
+protested, affectionately, fervently, with all our hearts and minds; and
+indeed there were none of his generation who had lived more widely into
+ours. He was not a prophet like Emerson, nor ever a voice crying in the
+wilderness like Whittier or Lowell. His note was heard rather amid the
+sweet security of streets, but it was always for a finer and gentler
+civility. He imagined no new rule of life, and no philosophy or theory
+of life will be known by his name. He was not constructive; he was
+essentially observant, and in this he showed the scientific nature. He
+made his reader known to himself, first in the little, and then in the
+larger things. From first to last he was a censor, but a most winning
+and delightful censor, who could make us feel that our faults were other
+people's, and who was not wont
+
+     "To bait his homilies with his brother worms."
+
+At one period he sat in the seat of the scorner, as far as Reform was
+concerned, or perhaps reformers, who are so often tedious and ridiculous;
+but he seemed to get a new heart with the new mind which came to him when
+he began to write the Autocrat papers, and the light mocker of former
+days became the serious and compassionate thinker, to whom most truly
+nothing that was human was alien. His readers trusted and loved him; few
+men have ever written so intimately with so much dignity, and perhaps
+none has so endeared himself by saying just the thing for his reader that
+his reader could not say for himself. He sought the universal through
+himself in others, and he found to his delight and theirs that the most
+universal thing was often, if not always, the most personal thing.
+
+In my later meetings with him I was struck more and more by his
+gentleness. I believe that men are apt to grow gentler as they grow
+older, unless they are of the curmudgeon type, which rusts and crusts
+with age, but with Doctor Holmes the gentleness was peculiarly marked. He
+seemed to shrink from all things that could provoke controversy, or even
+difference; he waived what might be a matter of dispute, and rather
+sought the things that he could agree with you upon. In the last talk I
+had with him he appeared to have no grudge left, except for the puritanic
+orthodoxy in which he had been bred as a child. This he was not able to
+forgive, though its tradition was interwoven with what was tenderest and
+dearest in his recollections of childhood. We spoke of puritanism, and I
+said I sometimes wondered what could be the mind of a man towards life
+who had not been reared in its awful shadow, say an English Churchman, or
+a Continental Catholic; and he said he could not imagine, and that he did
+not believe such a man could at all enter into our feelings; puritanism,
+he seemed to think, made an essential and ineradicable difference. I do
+not believe he had any of that false sentiment which attributes virtue of
+character to severity of creed, while it owns the creed to be wrong.
+
+He differed from Longfellow in often speaking of his contemporaries. He
+spoke of them frankly, but with an appreciative rather than a censorious
+criticism. Of Longfellow himself he said that day, when I told him I had
+been writing about him, and he seemed to me a man without error, that he
+could think of but one error in him, and that was an error of taste, of
+almost merely literary taste. It was at an earlier time that he talked
+of Lowell, after his death, and told me that Lowell once in the fever of
+his anti-slavery apostolate had written him, urging him strongly, as a
+matter of duty, to come out for the cause he had himself so much at
+heart. Afterwards Lowell wrote again, owning himself wrong in his
+appeal, which he had come to recognize as invasive. "He was ten years
+younger than I," said the doctor.
+
+I found him that day I speak of in his house at Beverly Farms, where he
+had a pleasant study in a corner by the porch, and he met me with all the
+cheeriness of old. But he confessed that he had been greatly broken up
+by the labor of preparing something that might be read at some
+commemorative meeting, and had suffered from finding first that he could
+not write something specially for it. Even the copying and adapting an
+old poem had overtaxed him, and in this he showed the failing powers of
+age. But otherwise he was still young, intellectually; that is, there
+was no failure of interest in intellectual things, especially literary
+things. Some new book lay on the table at his elbow, and he asked me if
+I had seen it, and made some joke about his having had the good luck to
+read it, and have it lying by him a few days before when the author
+called. I do not know whether he schooled himself against an old man's
+tendency to revert to the past or not, but I know that he seldom did so.
+That morning, however, he made several excursions into it, and told me
+that his youthful satire of the 'Spectre Pig' had been provoked by a poem
+of the elder Dana's, where a phantom horse had been seriously employed,
+with an effect of anticlimax which he had found irresistible. Another
+foray was to recall the oppression and depression of his early religious
+associations, and to speak with moving tenderness of his father, whose
+hard doctrine as a minister was without effect upon his own kindly
+nature.
+
+In a letter written to me a few weeks after this time, upon an occasion
+when he divined that some word from him would be more than commonly dear,
+he recurred to the feeling he then expressed: "Fifty-six years ago--more
+than half a century--I lost my own father, his age being seventy-three
+years. As I have reached that period of life, passed it, and now left it
+far behind, my recollections seem to brighten and bring back my boyhood
+and early manhood in a clearer and fairer light than it came to me in my
+middle decades. I have often wished of late years that I could tell him
+how I cherished his memory; perhaps I may have the happiness of saying
+all I long to tell him on the other side of that thin partition which I
+love to think is all that divides us."
+
+Men are never long together without speaking of women, and I said how
+inevitably men's lives ended where they began, in the keeping of women,
+and their strength failed at last and surrendered itself to their care. I
+had not finished before I was made to feel that I was poaching, and
+"Yes," said the owner of the preserve, "I have spoken of that," and he
+went on to tell me just where. He was not going to have me suppose I had
+invented those notions, and I could not do less than own that I must have
+found them in his book, and forgotten it.
+
+He spoke of his pleasant summer life in the air, at once soft and fresh,
+of that lovely coast, and of his drives up and down the country roads.
+Sometimes this lady and sometimes that came for him, and one or two
+habitually, but he always had his own carriage ordered, if they failed,
+that he might not fail of his drive in any fair weather. His cottage was
+not immediately on the sea, but in full sight of it, and there was a
+sense of the sea about it, as there is in all that incomparable region,
+and I do not think he could have been at home anywhere beyond the reach
+of its salt breath.
+
+I was anxious not to outstay his strength, and I kept my eye on the clock
+in frequent glances. I saw that he followed me in one of these, and I
+said that I knew what his hours were, and I was watching so that I might
+go away in time, and then he sweetly protested. Did I like that chair I
+was sitting in? It was a gift to him, and he said who gave it, with a
+pleasure in the fact that was very charming, as if he liked the
+association of the thing with his friend. He was disposed to excuse the
+formal look of his bookcases, which were filled with sets, and presented
+some phalanxes of fiction in rather severe array.
+
+When I rose to go, he was concerned about my being able to find my way
+readily to the station, and he told me how to go, and what turns to take,
+as if he liked realizing the way to himself. I believe he did not walk
+much of late years, and I fancy he found much the same pleasure in
+letting his imagination make this excursion to the station with me that
+he would have found in actually going.
+
+I saw him once more, but only once, when a day or two later he drove up
+by our hotel in Magnolia toward the cottage where his secretary was
+lodging. He saw us from his carriage, and called us gayly to him, to
+make us rejoice with him at having finally got that commemorative poem
+off his mind. He made a jest of the trouble it had cost him, even some
+sleeplessness, and said he felt now like a convalescent. He was all
+brightness, and friendliness, and eagerness to make us feel his mood,
+through what was common to us all; and I am glad that this last
+impression of him is so one with the first I ever had, and with that
+which every reader receives from his work.
+
+That is bright, and friendly and eager too, for it is throughout the very
+expression of himself. I think it is a pity if an author disappoints
+even the unreasonable expectation of the reader, whom his art has invited
+to love him; but I do not believe that Doctor Holmes could inflict this
+disappointment. Certainly he could disappoint no reasonable expectation,
+no intelligent expectation. What he wrote, that he was, and every one
+felt this who met him. He has therefore not died, as some men die, the
+remote impersonal sort, but he is yet thrillingly alive in every page of
+his books. The quantity of his literature is not great, but the quality
+is very surprising, and surprising first of all as equality. From the
+beginning to the end he wrote one man, of course in his successive
+consciousnesses. Perhaps every one does this, but his work gives the
+impression of an uncommon continuity, in spite of its being the effect of
+a later and an earlier impulse so very marked as to have made the later
+an astonishing revelation to those who thought they knew him.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+It is not for me in such a paper as this to attempt any judgment of his
+work. I have loved it, as I loved him, with a sense of its limitations
+which is by no means a censure of its excellences. He was not a man who
+cared to transcend; he liked bounds, he liked horizons, the constancy of
+shores. If he put to sea, he kept in sight of land, like the ancient
+navigators. He did not discover new continents; and I will own that I,
+for my part, should not have liked to sail with Columbus. I think one
+can safely affirm that as great and as useful men stayed behind, and
+found an America of the mind without stirring from their thresholds.
+
+
+
+
+THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW
+
+We had expected to stay in Boston only until we could find a house in Old
+Cambridge. This was not so simple a matter as it might seem; for the
+ancient town had not yet quickened its scholarly pace to the modern step.
+Indeed, in the spring of 1866 the impulse of expansion was not yet
+visibly felt anywhere; the enormous material growth that followed the
+civil war had not yet begun. In Cambridge the houses to be let were few,
+and such as there were fell either below our pride or rose above our
+purse. I wish I might tell how at last we bought a house; we had no
+money, but we were rich in friends, who are still alive to shrink from
+the story of their constant faith in a financial future which we
+sometimes doubted, and who backed their credulity with their credit. It
+is sufficient for the present record, which professes to be strictly
+literary, to notify the fact that on the first day of May, 1866, we went
+out to Cambridge and began to live in a house which we owned in fee if
+not in deed, and which was none the less valuable for being covered with
+mortgages. Physically, it was a carpenter's box, of a sort which is
+readily imagined by the Anglo-American genius for ugliness, but which it
+is not so easy to impart a just conception of. A trim hedge of
+arbor-vita; tried to hide it from the world in front, and a tall board
+fence behind; the little lot was well planted (perhaps too well planted)
+with pears, grapes, and currants, and there was a small open space which
+I lost no time in digging up for a kitchen-garden. On one side of us
+were the open fields; on the other a brief line of neighbor-houses;
+across the street before us was a grove of stately oaks, which I never
+could persuade Aldrich had painted leaves on them in the fall. We were
+really in a poor suburb of a suburb; but such is the fascination of
+ownership, even the ownership of a fully mortgaged property, that we
+calculated the latitude and longitude of the whole earth from the spot we
+called ours. In our walks about Cambridge we saw other places where we
+might have been willing to live; only, we said, they were too far off: We
+even prized the architecture of our little box, though we had but so
+lately lived in a Gothic palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, and were
+not uncritical of beauty in the possessions of others. Positive beauty
+we could not have honestly said we thought our cottage had as a whole,
+though we might have held out for something of the kind in the brackets
+of turned wood under its eaves. But we were richly content with it; and
+with life in Cambridge, as it began to open itself to us, we were
+infinitely more than content. This life, so refined, so intelligent, so
+gracefully simple, I do not suppose has anywhere else had its parallel.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+It was the moment before the old American customs had been changed by
+European influences among people of easier circumstances; and in
+Cambridge society kept what was best of its village traditions, and chose
+to keep them in the full knowledge of different things. Nearly every one
+had been abroad; and nearly every one had acquired the taste for olives
+without losing a relish for native sauces; through the intellectual life
+there was an entire democracy, and I do not believe that since the
+capitalistic era began there was ever a community in which money counted
+for less. There was little show of what money could buy; I remember but
+one private carriage (naturally, a publisher's); and there was not one
+livery, except a livery in the larger sense kept by the stableman Pike,
+who made us pay now a quarter and now a half dollar for a seat in his
+carriages, according as he lost or gathered courage for the charge. We
+thought him extortionate, and we mostly walked through snow and mud of
+amazing depth and thickness.
+
+The reader will imagine how acceptable this circumstance was to a young
+literary man beginning life with a fully mortgaged house and a salary of
+untried elasticity. If there were distinctions made in Cambridge they
+were not against literature, and we found ourselves in the midst of a
+charming society, indifferent, apparently, to all questions but those of
+the higher education which comes so largely by nature. That is to say,
+in the Cambridge of that day (and, I dare say, of this) a mind cultivated
+in some sort was essential, and after that came civil manners, and the
+willingness and ability to be agreeable and interesting; but the question
+of riches or poverty did not enter. Even the question of family, which
+is of so great concern in New England, was in abeyance. Perhaps it was
+taken for granted that every one in Old Cambridge society must be of good
+family, or he could not be there; perhaps his mere residence tacitly
+ennobled him; certainly his acceptance was an informal patent of
+gentility. To my mind, the structure of society was almost ideal, and
+until we have a perfectly socialized condition of things I do not believe
+we shall ever have a more perfect society. The instincts which governed
+it were not such as can arise from the sordid competition of interests;
+they flowed from a devotion to letters, and from a self-sacrifice in
+material things which I can give no better notion of than by saying that
+the outlay of the richest college magnate seemed to be graduated to the
+income of the poorest.
+
+In those days, the men whose names have given splendor to Cambridge were
+still living there. I shall forget some of them in the alphabetical
+enumeration of Louis Agassiz, Francis J. Child, Richard Henry Dana, Jun.,
+John Fiske, Dr. Asa Gray, the family of the Jameses, father and sons,
+Lowell, Longfellow, Charles Eliot Norton, Dr. John G. Palfrey, James
+Pierce, Dr. Peabody, Professor Parsons, Professor Sophocles. The variety
+of talents and of achievements was indeed so great that Mr. Bret Harte,
+when fresh from his Pacific slope, justly said, after listening to a
+partial rehearsal of them, "Why, you couldn't fire a revolver from your
+front porch anywhere without bringing down a two-volumer!" Everybody had
+written a book, or an article, or a poem; or was in the process or
+expectation of doing it, and doubtless those whose names escape me will
+have greater difficulty in eluding fame. These kindly, these gifted folk
+each came to see us and to make us at home among them; and my home is
+still among them, on this side and on that side of the line between the
+living and the dead which invisibly passes through all the streets of the
+cities of men.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+We had the whole summer for the exploration of Cambridge before society
+returned from the mountains and the sea-shore, and it was not till
+October that I saw Longfellow. I heard again, as I heard when I first
+came to Boston, that he was at Nahant, and though Nahant was no longer so
+far away, now, as it was then, I did not think of seeking him out even
+when we went for a day to explore that coast during the summer. It seems
+strange that I cannot recall just when and where I saw him, but early
+after his return to Cambridge I had a message from him asking me to come
+to a meeting of the Dante Club at Craigie House.
+
+Longfellow was that winter (1866-7) revising his translation of the
+'Paradiso', and the Dante Club was the circle of Italianate friends and
+scholars whom he invited to follow him and criticise his work from the
+original, while he read his version aloud. Those who were most
+constantly present were Lowell and Professor Norton, but from time to
+time others came in, and we seldom sat down at the nine-o'clock supper
+that followed the reading of the canto in less number than ten or twelve.
+
+The criticism, especially from the accomplished Danteists I have named,
+was frank and frequent. I believe they neither of them quite agreed with
+Longfellow as to the form of version he had chosen, but, waiving that,
+the question was how perfectly he had done his work upon the given lines:
+I myself, with whatever right, great or little, I may have to an opinion,
+believe thoroughly in Longfellow's plan. When I read his version my
+sense aches for the rhyme which he rejected, but my admiration for his
+fidelity to Dante otherwise is immeasurable. I remember with equal
+admiration the subtle and sympathetic scholarship of his critics, who
+scrutinized every shade of meaning in a word or phrase that gave them
+pause, and did not let it pass till all the reasons and facts had been
+considered. Sometimes, and even often, Longfellow yielded to their
+censure, but for the most part, when he was of another mind, he held to
+his mind, and the passage had to go as he said. I make a little haste to
+say that in all the meetings of the Club, during a whole winter of
+Wednesday evenings, I myself, though I faithfully followed in an Italian
+Dante with the rest, ventured upon one suggestion only. This was kindly,
+even seriously, considered by the poet, and gently rejected. He could
+not do anything otherwise than gently, and I was not suffered to feel
+that I had done a presumptuous thing. I can see him now, as he looked up
+from the proof-sheets on the round table before him, and over at me,
+growing consciously smaller and smaller, like something through a
+reversed opera-glass. He had a shaded drop-light in front of him, and in
+its glow his beautiful and benignly noble head had a dignity peculiar to
+him.
+
+All the portraits of Longfellow are likenesses more or less bad and good,
+for there was something as simple in the physiognomy as in the nature of
+the man. His head, after he allowed his beard to grow and wore his hair
+long in the manner of elderly men, was leonine, but mildly leonine, as
+the old painters conceived the lion of St. Mark. Once Sophocles, the
+ex-monk of Mount Athos, so long a Greek professor at Harvard, came in for
+supper, after the reading was over, and he was leonine too, but of a
+fierceness that contrasted finely with Longfellow's mildness. I remember
+the poet's asking him something about the punishment of impaling, in
+Turkey, and his answering, with an ironical gleam of his fiery eyes,
+"Unhappily, it is obsolete." I dare say he was not so leonine, either,
+as he looked.
+
+When Longfellow read verse, it was with a hollow, with a mellow resonant
+murmur, like the note of some deep-throated horn. His voice was very
+lulling in quality, and at the Dante Club it used to have early effect
+with an old scholar who sat in a cavernous armchair at the corner of the
+fire, and who drowsed audibly in the soft tone and the gentle heat. The
+poet had a fat terrier who wished always to be present at the meetings of
+the Club, and he commonly fell asleep at the same moment with that dear
+old scholar, so that when they began to make themselves heard in concert,
+one could not tell which it was that most took our thoughts from the text
+of the Paradiso. When the duet opened, Longfellow would look up with an
+arch recognition of the fact, and then go gravely on to the end of the
+canto. At the close he would speak to his friend and lead him out to
+supper as if he had not seen or heard anything amiss.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+In that elect company I was silent, partly because I was conscious of my
+youthful inadequacy, and partly because I preferred to listen. But
+Longfellow always behaved as if I were saying a succession of edifying
+and delightful things, and from time to time he addressed himself to me,
+so that I should not feel left out. He did not talk much himself, and I
+recall nothing that he said. But he always spoke both wisely and simply,
+without the least touch of pose, and with no intention of effect, but
+with something that I must call quality for want of a better word; so
+that at a table where Holmes sparkled, and Lowell glowed, and Agassiz
+beamed, he cast the light of a gentle gaiety, which seemed to dim all
+these vivider luminaries. While he spoke you did not miss Fields's story
+or Tom Appleton's wit, or even the gracious amity of Mr. Norton, with his
+unequalled intuitions.
+
+The supper was very plain: a cold turkey, which the host carved, or a
+haunch of venison, or some braces of grouse, or a platter of quails, with
+a deep bowl of salad, and the sympathetic companionship of those elect
+vintages which Longfellow loved, and which he chose with the inspiration
+of affection. We usually began with oysters, and when some one who was
+expected did not come promptly, Longfellow invited us to raid his plate,
+as a just punishment of his delay. One evening Lowell remarked, with the
+cayenne poised above his bluepoints, "It's astonishing how fond these
+fellows are of pepper."
+
+The old friend of the cavernous arm-chair was perhaps not wide enough
+awake to repress an "Ah?" of deep interest in this fact of natural
+history, and Lowell was provoked to go on. "Yes, I've dropped a red
+pepper pod into a barrel of them, before now, and then taken them out in
+a solid mass, clinging to it like a swarm of bees to their queen."
+
+"Is it possible?" cried the old friend; and then Longfellow intervened to
+save him from worse, and turned the talk.
+
+I reproach myself that I made no record of the talk, for I find that only
+a few fragments of it have caught in my memory, and that the sieve which
+should have kept the gold has let it wash away with the gravel. I
+remember once Doctor Holmes's talking of the physician as the true seer,
+whose awful gift it was to behold with the fatal second sight of science
+the shroud gathering to the throat of many a doomed man apparently in
+perfect health, and happy in the promise of unnumbered days. The thought
+may have been suggested by some of the toys of superstition which
+intellectual people like to play with.
+
+I never could be quite sure at first that Longfellow's brother-in-law,
+Appleton, was seriously a spiritualist, even when he disputed the most
+strenuously with the unbelieving Autocrat. But he really was in earnest
+about it, though he relished a joke at the expense of his doctrine, like
+some clerics when they are in the safe company of other clerics. He told
+me once of having recounted to Agassiz the facts of a very remarkable
+seance, where the souls of the departed outdid themselves in the
+athletics and acrobatics they seem so fond of over there, throwing large
+stones across the room, moving pianos, and lifting dinner-tables and
+setting them a-twirl under the chandelier. "And now," he demanded, "what
+do you say to that?" "Well, Mr. Appleton," Agassiz answered, to
+Appleton's infinite delight, "I say that it did not happen."
+
+One night they began to speak at the Dante supper of the unhappy man
+whose crime is a red stain in the Cambridge annals, and one and another
+recalled their impressions of Professor Webster. It was possibly with a
+retroactive sense that they had all felt something uncanny in him, but,
+apropos of the deep salad-bowl in the centre of the table, Longfellow
+remembered a supper Webster was at, where he lighted some chemical in
+such a dish and held his head over it, with a handkerchief noosed about
+his throat and lifted above it with one hand, while his face, in the pale
+light, took on the livid ghastliness of that of a man hanged by the neck.
+
+Another night the talk wandered to the visit which an English author (now
+with God) paid America at the height of a popularity long since toppled
+to the ground, with many another. He was in very good humor with our
+whole continent, and at Longfellow's table he found the champagne even
+surprisingly fine. "But," he said to his host, who now told the story,
+"it cawn't be genuine, you know!"
+
+Many years afterwards this author revisited our shores, and I dined with
+him at Longfellow's, where he was anxious to constitute himself a guest
+during his sojourn in our neighborhood. Longfellow was equally anxious
+that he should not do so, and he took a harmless pleasure in
+out-manoeuvring him. He seized a chance to speak with me alone, and
+plotted to deliver him over to me without apparent unkindness, when the
+latest horse-car should be going in to Boston, and begged me to walk him
+to Harvard Square and put him aboard. "Put him aboard, and don't leave
+him till the car starts, and then watch that he doesn't get off."
+
+These instructions he accompanied with a lifting of the eyebrows, and a
+pursing of the mouth, in an anxiety not altogether burlesque. He knew
+himself the prey of any one who chose to batten on him, and his
+hospitality was subject to frightful abuse. Perhaps Mr. Norton has
+somewhere told how, when he asked if a certain person who had been
+outstaying his time was not a dreadful bore, Longfellow answered, with
+angelic patience, "Yes; but then you know I have been bored so often!"
+
+There was one fatal Englishman whom I shared with him during the great
+part of a season: a poor soul, not without gifts, but always ready for
+more, especially if they took the form of meat and drink. He had brought
+letters from one of the best English men alive, who withdrew them too
+late to save his American friends from the sad consequences of welcoming
+him. So he established himself impregnably in a Boston club, and came
+out every day to dine with Longfellow in Cambridge, beginning with his
+return from Nahant in October and continuing far into December. That was
+the year of the great horse-distemper, when the plague disabled the
+transportation in Boston, and cut off all intercourse between the suburb
+and the city on the street railways. "I did think," Longfellow
+pathetically lamented, "that when the horse-cars stopped running, I
+should have a little respite from L., but he walks out."
+
+In the midst of his own suffering he was willing to advise with me
+concerning some poems L. had offered to the Atlantic Monthly, and after
+we had desperately read them together he said, with inspiration, "I think
+these things are more adapted to music than the magazine," and this
+seemed so good a notion that when L. came to know their fate from me, I
+answered, confidently, "I think they are rather more adapted to music."
+He calmly asked, "Why?" and as this was an exigency which Longfellow had
+not forecast for me, I was caught in it without hope of escape. I really
+do not know what I said, but I know that I did not take the poems, such
+was my literary conscience in those days; I am afraid I should be weaker
+now.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+The suppers of the Dante Club were a relaxation from the severity of
+their toils on criticism, and I will not pretend that their table-talk
+was of that seriousness which duller wits might have given themselves up
+to. The passing stranger, especially if a light or jovial person, was
+always welcome, and I never knew of the enforcement of the rule I heard
+of, that if you came in without question on the Club nights, you were a
+guest; but if you rang or knocked, you could not get in.
+
+Any sort of diversion was hailed, and once Appleton proposed that
+Longfellow should show us his wine-cellar. He took up the candle burning
+on the table for the cigars, and led the way into the basement of the
+beautiful old Colonial mansion, doubly memorable as Washington's
+headquarters while he was in Cambridge, and as the home of Longfellow for
+so many years. The taper cast just the right gleams on the darkness,
+bringing into relief the massive piers of brick, and the solid walls of
+stone, which gave the cellar the effect of a casemate in some fortress,
+and leaving the corners and distances to a romantic gloom. This basement
+was a work of the days when men built more heavily if not more
+substantially than now, but I forget, if I ever knew, what date the
+wine-cellar was of. It was well stored with precious vintages, aptly
+cobwebbed and dusty; but I could not find that it had any more charm than
+the shelves of a library: it is the inside of bottles and of books that
+makes its appeal. The whole place witnessed a bygone state and luxury,
+which otherwise lingered in a dim legend or two. Longfellow once spoke
+of certain old love-letters which dropped down on the basement stairs
+from some place overhead; and there was the fable or the fact of a
+subterranean passage under the street from Craigie House to the old
+Batchelder House, which I relate to these letters with no authority I can
+allege. But in Craigie House dwelt the proud fair lady who was buried in
+the Cambridge church-yard with a slave at her head and a slave at her
+feet.
+
+        "Dust is in her beautiful eyes,"
+
+and whether it was they that smiled or wept in their time over those
+love-letters, I will leave the reader to say. The fortunes of her Tory
+family fell with those of their party, and the last Vassal ended his days
+a prisoner from his creditors in his own house, with a weekly enlargement
+on Sundays, when the law could not reach him. It is known how the place
+took Longfellow's fancy when he first came to be professor in Harvard,
+and how he was a lodger of the last Mistress Craigie there, long before
+he became its owner. The house is square, with Longfellow's study where
+he read and wrote on the right of the door, and a statelier library
+behind it; on the left is the drawing-room, with the dining-room in its
+rear; from its square hall climbs a beautiful stairway with twisted
+banisters, and a tall clock in their angle.
+
+The study where the Dante Club met, and where I mostly saw Longfellow,
+was a plain, pleasant room, with broad panelling in white painted pine;
+in the centre before the fireplace stood his round table, laden with
+books, papers, and proofs; in the farthest corner by the window was a
+high desk which he sometimes stood at to write. In this room Washington
+held his councils and transacted his business with all comers; in the
+chamber overhead he slept. I do not think Longfellow associated the
+place much with him, and I never heard him speak of Washington in
+relation to it except once, when he told me with peculiar relish what he
+called the true version of a pious story concerning the aide-de-camp who
+blundered in upon him while he knelt in prayer. The father of his
+country rose and rebuked the young man severely, and then resumed his
+devotions. "He rebuked him," said Longfellow, lifting his brows and
+making rings round the pupils of his eyes, "by throwing his scabbard at
+his head."
+
+All the front windows of Craigie House look, out over the open fields
+across the Charles, which is now the Longfellow Memorial Garden. The
+poet used to be amused with the popular superstition that he was holding
+this vacant ground with a view to a rise in the price of lots, while all
+he wanted was to keep a feature of his beloved landscape unchanged. Lofty
+elms drooped at the corners of the house; on the lawn billowed clumps of
+the lilac, which formed a thick hedge along the fence. There was a
+terrace part way down this lawn, and when a white-painted balustrade was
+set some fifteen years ago upon its brink, it seemed always to have been
+there. Long verandas stretched on either side of the mansion; and behind
+was an old-fashioned garden with beds primly edged with box after a
+design of the poet's own. Longfellow had a ghost story of this quaint
+plaisance, which he used to tell with an artful reserve of the
+catastrophe. He was coming home one winter night, and as he crossed the
+garden he was startled by a white figure swaying before him. But he knew
+that the only way was to advance upon it. He pushed boldly forward, and
+was suddenly caught under the throat-by the clothes-line with a long
+night-gown on it.
+
+Perhaps it was at the end of a long night of the Dante Club that I heard
+him tell this story. The evenings were sometimes mornings before the
+reluctant break-up came, but they were never half long enough for me. I
+have given no idea of the high reasoning of vital things which I must
+often have heard at that table, and that I have forgotten it is no proof
+that I did not hear it. The memory will not be ruled as to what it shall
+bind and what it shall loose, and I should entreat mine in vain for
+record of those meetings other than what I have given. Perhaps it would
+be well, in the interest of some popular conceptions of what the social
+intercourse of great wits must be, for me to invent some ennobling and
+elevating passages of conversation at Longfellow's; perhaps I ought to do
+it for the sake of my own repute as a serious and adequate witness. But
+I am rather helpless in the matter; I must set down what I remember, and
+surely if I can remember no phrase from Holmes that a reader could live
+or die by, it is something to recall how, when a certain potent cheese
+was passing, he leaned over to gaze at it, and asked: "Does it kick? Does
+it kick?" No strain of high poetic thinking remains to me from Lowell,
+but he made me laugh unforgettably with his passive adventure one night
+going home late, when a man suddenly leaped from the top of a high fence
+upon the sidewalk at his feet, and after giving him the worst fright of
+his life, disappeared peaceably into the darkness. To be sure, there was
+one most memorable supper, when he read the "Bigelow Paper" he had
+finished that day, and enriched the meaning of his verse with the beauty
+of his voice. There lingers yet in my sense his very tone in giving the
+last line of the passage lamenting the waste of the heroic lives which in
+those dark hours of Johnson's time seemed to have been
+
+     "Butchered to make a blind man's holiday."
+
+The hush that followed upon his ceasing was of that finest quality which
+spoken praise always lacks; and I suppose that I could not give a just
+notion of these Dante Club evenings without imparting the effect of such
+silences. This I could not hopefully undertake to do; but I am tempted
+to some effort of the kind by my remembrance of Longfellow's old friend
+George Washington Greene, who often came up from his home in Rhode
+Island, to be at those sessions, and who was a most interesting and
+amiable fact of those delicate silences. A full half of his earlier life
+had been passed in Italy, where he and Longfellow met and loved each
+other in their youth with an affection which the poet was constant to in
+his age, after many vicissitudes, with the beautiful fidelity of his
+nature. Greene was like an old Italian house-priest in manner, gentle,
+suave, very suave, smooth as creamy curds, cultivated in the elegancies
+of literary taste, and with a certain meek abeyance. I think I never
+heard him speak, in all those evenings, except when Longfellow addressed
+him, though he must have had the Dante scholarship for an occasional
+criticism. It was at more recent dinners, where I met him with the
+Longfellow family alone, that he broke now and then into a quotation from
+some of the modern Italian poets he knew by heart (preferably Giusti),
+and syllabled their verse with an exquisite Roman accent and a bewitching
+Florentine rhythm. Now and then at these times he brought out a faded
+Italian anecdote, faintly smelling of civet, and threadbare in its
+ancient texture. He liked to speak of Goldoni and of Nota, of Niccolini
+and Manzoni, of Monti and Leopardi; and if you came to America, of the
+Revolution and his grandfather, the Quaker General Nathaniel Greene,
+whose life he wrote (and I read) in three volumes: He worshipped
+Longfellow, and their friendship continued while they lived, but towards
+the last of his visits at Craigie House it had a pathos for the witness
+which I should grieve to wrong. Greene was then a quivering paralytic,
+and he clung tremulously to Longfellow's arm in going out to dinner,
+where even the modern Italian poets were silent upon his lips. When we
+rose from table, Longfellow lifted him out of his chair, and took him
+upon his arm again for their return to the study.
+
+He was of lighter metal than most other members of the Dante Club, and he
+was not of their immediate intimacy, living away from Cambridge, as he
+did, and I shared his silence in their presence with full sympathy. I was
+by far the youngest of their number, and I cannot yet quite make out why
+I was of it at all. But at every moment I was as sensible of my good
+fortune as of my ill desert. They were the men whom of all men living I
+most honored, and it seemed to be impossible that I at my age should be
+so perfectly fulfilling the dream of my life in their company. Often, the
+nights were very cold, and as I returned home from Craigie House to the
+carpenter's box on Sacramento Street, a mile or two away, I was as if
+soul-borne through the air by my pride and joy, while the frozen blocks
+of snow clinked and tinkled before my feet stumbling along the middle of
+the road. I still think that was the richest moment of my life, and I
+look back at it as the moment, in a life not unblessed by chance, which I
+would most like to live over again--if I must live any. The next winter
+the sessions of the Dante Club were transferred to the house of Mr.
+Norton, who was then completing his version of the 'Vita Nuova'. This
+has always seemed to me a work of not less graceful art than Longfellow's
+translation of the 'Commedia'. In fact, it joins the effect of a
+sympathy almost mounting to divination with a patient scholarship and a
+delicate skill unknown to me elsewhere in such work. I do not know
+whether Mr. Norton has satisfied himself better in his prose version of
+the 'Commedia' than in this of the 'Vita Nuova', but I do not believe he
+could have satisfied Dante better, unless he had rhymed his sonnets and
+canzonets. I am sure he might have done this if he had chosen. He has
+always pretended that it was impossible, but miracles are never
+impossible in the right hands.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+After three or four years we sold the carpenter's box on Sacramento
+Street, and removed to a larger house near Harvard Square, and in the
+immediate neighborhood of Longfellow. He gave me an easement across that
+old garden behind his house, through an opening in the high board fence
+which enclosed it, and I saw him oftener than ever, though the meetings
+of the Dante Club had come to an end. At the last of them, Lowell had
+asked him, with fond regret in his jest, "Longfellow, why don't you do
+that Indian poem in forty thousand verses?" The demand but feebly
+expressed the reluctance in us all, though I suspect the Indian poem
+existed only by the challenger's invention. Before I leave my faint and
+unworthy record of these great times I am tempted to mention an incident
+poignant with tragical associations. The first night after Christmas the
+holly and the pine wreathed about the chandelier above the supper-table
+took fire from the gas, just as we came out from the reading, and
+Longfellow ran forward and caught the burning garlands down and bore them
+out. No one could speak for thinking what he must be thinking of when
+the ineffable calamity of his home befell it. Curtis once told me that a
+little while before Mrs. Longfellow's death he was driving by Craigie
+House with Holmes, who said be trembled to look at it, for those who
+lived there had their happiness so perfect that no change, of all the
+changes which must come to them, could fail to be for the worse. I did
+not know Longfellow before that fatal time, and I shall not say that his
+presence bore record of it except in my fancy. He may always have had
+that look of one who had experienced the utmost harm that fate can do,
+and henceforth could possess himself of what was left of life in peace.
+He could never have been a man of the flowing ease that makes all comers
+at home; some people complained of a certain 'gene' in him; and he had a
+reserve with strangers, which never quite lost itself in the abandon of
+friendship, as Lowell's did. He was the most perfectly modest man I ever
+saw, ever imagined, but he had a gentle dignity which I do not believe
+any one, the coarsest, the obtusest, could trespass upon. In the years
+when I began to know him, his long hair and the beautiful beard which
+mixed with it were of one iron-gray, which I saw blanch to a perfect
+silver, while that pearly tone of his complexion, which Appleton so
+admired, lost itself in the wanness of age and pain. When he walked, he
+had a kind of spring in his gait, as if now and again a buoyant thought
+lifted him from the ground. It was fine to meet him coming down a
+Cambridge street; you felt that the encounter made you a part of literary
+history, and set you apart with him for the moment from the poor and
+mean. When he appeared in Harvard Square, he beatified if not beautified
+the ugliest and vulgarest looking spot on the planet outside of New York.
+You could meet him sometimes at the market, if you were of the same
+provision-man as he; and Longfellow remained as constant to his
+tradespeople as to any other friends. He rather liked to bring his
+proofs back to the printer's himself, and we often found ourselves
+together at the University Press, where the Atlantic Monthly used to be
+printed. But outside of his own house Longfellow seemed to want a fit
+atmosphere, and I love best to think of him in his study, where he
+wrought at his lovely art with a serenity expressed in his smooth,
+regular, and scrupulously perfect handwriting. It was quite vertical,
+and rounded, with a slope neither to the right nor left, and at the time
+I knew him first, he was fond of using a soft pencil on printing paper,
+though commonly he wrote with a quill. Each letter was distinct in
+shape, and between the verses was always the exact space of half an inch.
+I have a good many of his poems written in this fashion, but whether they
+were the first drafts or not I cannot say; very likely not. Towards the
+last he no longer sent his poems to the magazines in his own hand; but
+they were always signed in autograph.
+
+I once asked him if he were not a great deal interrupted, and he said,
+with a faint sigh, Not more than was good for him, he fancied; if it were
+not for the interruptions, he might overwork. He was not a friend to
+stated exercise, I believe, nor fond of walking, as Lowell was; he had
+not, indeed, the childish associations of the younger poet with the
+Cambridge neighborhoods; and I never saw him walking for pleasure except
+on the east veranda of his house, though I was told he loved walking in
+his youth. In this and in some other things Longfellow was more European
+than American, more Latin than Saxon. He once said quaintly that one got
+a great deal of exercise in putting on and off one's overcoat and
+overshoes.
+
+I suppose no one who asked decently at his door was denied access to him,
+and there must have been times when he was overrun with volunteer
+visitors; but I never heard him complain of them. He was very charitable
+in the immediate sort which Christ seems to have meant; but he had his
+preferences; humorously owned, among beggars. He liked the German
+beggars least, and the Italian beggars most, as having most savair-faire;
+in fact, we all loved the Italians in Cambridge. He was pleased with the
+accounts I could give him of the love and honor I had known for him in
+Italy, and one day there came a letter from an Italian admirer, addressed
+to "Mr. Greatest Poet Longfellow," which he said was the very most
+amusing superscription he had ever seen.
+
+It is known that the King of Italy offered Longfellow the cross of San
+Lazzaro, which is the Italian literary decoration. It came through the
+good offices of my old acquaintance Professor Messadaglia, then a deputy
+in the Italian Parliament, whom, for some reason I cannot remember, I had
+put in correspondence with Longfellow. The honor was wholly unexpected,
+and it brought Longfellow a distress which was chiefly for the gentleman
+who had procured him the impossible distinction. He showed me the pretty
+collar and cross, not, I think, without a natural pleasure in it. No man
+was ever less a bigot in things civil or religious than he, but he said,
+firmly, "Of course, as a republican and a Protestant, I can't accept a
+decoration from a Catholic prince." His decision was from his
+conscience, and I think that all Americans who think duly about it will
+approve his decision.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+Such honors as he could fitly permit himself he did not refuse, and I
+recall what zest he had in his election to the Arcadian Academy, which
+had made him a shepherd of its Roman Fold, with the title, as he said, of
+"Olimipico something." But I fancy his sweetest pleasure in his vast
+renown came from his popular recognition everywhere. Few were the lands,
+few the languages he was unknown to: he showed me a version of the "Psalm
+of Life" in Chinese. Apparently even the poor lost autograph-seeker was
+not denied by his universal kindness; I know that he kept a store of
+autographs ready written on small squares of paper for all who applied by
+letter or in person; he said it was no trouble; but perhaps he was to be
+excused for refusing the request of a lady for fifty autographs, which
+she wished to offer as a novel attraction to her guests at a lunch party.
+
+Foreigners of all kinds thronged upon him at their pleasure, apparently,
+and with perfect impunity. Sometimes he got a little fun, very, very
+kindly, out of their excuses and reasons; and the Englishman who came to
+see him because there were no ruins to visit in America was no fable, as
+I can testify from the poet himself. But he had no prejudice against
+Englishmen, and even at a certain time when the coarse-handed British
+criticism began to blame his delicate art for the universal acceptance of
+his verse, and to try to sneer him into the rank of inferior poets, he
+was without rancor for the clumsy misliking that he felt. He could not
+understand rudeness; he was too finely framed for that; he could know it
+only as Swedenborg's most celestial angels perceived evil, as something
+distressful, angular. The ill-will that seemed nearly always to go with
+adverse criticism made him distrust criticism, and the discomfort which
+mistaken or blundering praise gives probably made him shy of all
+criticism. He said that in his early life as an author he used to seek
+out and save all the notices of his poems, but in his latter days he read
+only those that happened to fall in his way; these he cut out and amused
+his leisure by putting together in scrapbooks. He was reluctant to make
+any criticism of other poets; I do not remember ever to have heard him
+make one; and his writings show no trace of the literary dislikes or
+contempts which we so often mistake in ourselves for righteous judgments.
+No doubt he had his resentments, but he hushed them in his heart, which
+he did not suffer them to embitter. While Poe was writing of "Longfellow
+and other Plagiarists," Longfellow was helping to keep Poe alive by the
+loans which always made themselves gifts in Poe's case. He very, very
+rarely spoke of himself at all, and almost never of the grievances which
+he did not fail to share with all who live.
+
+He was patient, as I said, of all things, and gentle beyond all mere
+gentlemanliness. But it would have been a great mistake to mistake his
+mildness for softness. It was most manly and firm; and of course it was
+braced with the New England conscience he was born to. If he did not
+find it well to assert himself, he was prompt in behalf of his friends,
+and one of the fine things told of him was his resenting some censures of
+Sumner at a dinner in Boston during the old pro-slavery times: he said to
+the gentlemen present that Sumner was his friend, and he must leave their
+company if they continued to assail him.
+
+But he spoke almost as rarely of his friends as of himself. He liked the
+large, impersonal topics which could be dealt with on their human side,
+and involved characters rather than individuals. This was rather strange
+in Cambridge, where we were apt to take our instances from the
+environment. It was not the only thing he was strange in there; he was
+not to that manner born; he lacked the final intimacies which can come
+only of birth and lifelong association, and which make the men of the
+Boston breed seem exclusive when they least feel so; he was Longfellow to
+the friends who were James, and Charles, and Wendell to one another. He
+and Hawthorne were classmates at college, but I never heard him mention
+Hawthorne; I never heard him mention Whittier or Emerson. I think his
+reticence about his contemporaries was largely due to his reluctance from
+criticism: he was the finest artist of them all, and if he praised he
+must have praised with the reservations of an honest man. Of younger
+writers he was willing enough to speak. No new contributor made his mark
+in the magazine unnoted by him, and sometimes I showed him verse in
+manuscript which gave me peculiar pleasure. I remember his liking for
+the first piece that Mr. Maurice Thompson sent me, and how he tasted the
+fresh flavor of it, and inhaled its wild new fragrance. He admired the
+skill of some of the young story-tellers; he praised the subtlety of one
+in working out an intricate character, and said modestly that he could
+never have done that sort of thing himself. It was entirely safe to
+invite his judgment when in doubt, for he never suffered it to become
+aggressive, or used it to urge upon me the manuscripts that must often
+have been urged upon him.
+
+Longfellow had a house at Nahant where he went every summer for more than
+a quarter of a century. He found the slight transition change enough
+from Cambridge, and liked it perhaps because it did not take him beyond
+the range of the friends and strangers whose company he liked. Agassiz
+was there, and Appleton; Sumner came to sojourn with him; and the
+tourists of all nations found him there in half an hour after they
+reached Boston. His cottage was very plain and simple, but was rich in
+the sight of the illimitable, sea, and it had a luxury of rocks at the
+foot of its garden, draped with sea-weed, and washed with the
+indefatigable tides. As he grew older and feebler he ceased to go to
+Nahant; he remained the whole year round at Cambridge; he professed to
+like the summer which he said warmed him through there, better than the
+cold spectacle of summer which had no such effect at Nahant.
+
+The hospitality which was constant at either house was not merely of the
+worldly sort. Longfellow loved good cheer; he tasted history and poetry
+in a precious wine; and he liked people who were acquainted with manners
+and men, and brought the air of capitals with them. But often the man
+who dined with Longfellow was the man who needed a dinner; and from what
+I have seen of the sweet courtesy that governed at that board, I am sure
+that such a man could never have felt himself the least honored guest.
+The poet's heart was open to all the homelessness of the world; and I
+remember how once when we sat at his table and I spoke of his poem of
+"The Challenge," then a new poem, and said how I had been touched by the
+fancy of
+
+       "The poverty-stricken millions
+        Who challenge our wine and bread,
+        And impeach us all as traitors,
+        Both the living and the dead,"
+
+his voice sank in grave humility as he answered, "Yes, I often think of
+those things." He had thought of them in the days of the slave, when he
+had taken his place with the friends of the hopeless and hapless, and as
+long as he lived he continued of the party which had freed the slave. He
+did not often speak of politics, but when the movement of some of the
+best Republicans away from their party began, he said that he could not
+see the wisdom of their course. But this was said without censure or
+criticism of them, and so far as I know he never permitted himself
+anything like denunciation of those who in any wise differed from him. On
+a matter of yet deeper interest, I do not feel authorized to speak for
+him, but I think that as he grew older, his hold upon anything like a
+creed weakened, though he remained of the Unitarian philosophy concerning
+Christ. He did not latterly go to church, I believe; but then, very few
+of his circle were church-goers. Once he said something very vague and
+uncertain concerning the doctrine of another life when I affirmed my hope
+of it, to the effect that he wished he could be sure, with the sigh that
+so often clothed the expression of a misgiving with him.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+When my acquaintance with Longfellow began he had written the things that
+made his fame, and that it will probably rest upon: "Evangeline,"
+"Hiawatha," and the "Courtship of Miles Standish" were by that time old
+stories. But during the eighteen years that I knew him he produced the
+best of his minor poems, the greatest of his sonnets, the sweetest of his
+lyrics. His art ripened to the last, it grew richer and finer, and it
+never knew decay. He rarely read anything of his own aloud, but in three
+or four cases he read to me poems he had just finished, as if to give
+himself the pleasure of hearing them with the sympathetic sense of
+another. The hexameter piece, "Elizabeth," in the third part of "Tales
+of a Wayside Inn," was one of these, and he liked my liking its
+rhythmical form, which I believed one of the measures best adapted to the
+English speech, and which he had used himself with so much pleasure and
+success.
+
+About this time he was greatly interested in the slight experiments I was
+beginning to make in dramatic form, and he said that if he were himself a
+young man he should write altogether for the stage; he thought the drama
+had a greater future with us. He was pleased when a popular singer
+wished to produce his "Masque of Pandora," with music, and he was patient
+when it failed of the effect hoped for it as an opera. When the late
+Lawrence Barrett, in the enthusiasm which was one of the fine traits of
+his generous character, had taken my play of "A Counterfeit Presentment,"
+and came to the Boston Museum with it, Longfellow could not apparently
+have been more zealous for its popular acceptance if it had been his own
+work. He invited himself to one of the rehearsals with me, and he sat
+with me on the stage through the four acts with a fortitude which I still
+wonder at, and with the keenest zest for all the details of the
+performance. No finer testimony to the love and honor which all kinds of
+people had for him could have been given than that shown by the actors
+and employees of the theatre, high and low. They thronged the scenery,
+those who were not upon the stage, and at the edge of every wing were
+faces peering round at the poet, who sat unconscious of their adoration,
+intent upon the play. He was intercepted at every step in going out, and
+made to put his name to the photographs of himself which his worshippers
+produced from their persons.
+
+He came to the first night of the piece, and when it seemed to be finding
+favor with the public, he leaned forward out of his line to nod and smile
+at the author; when they, had the author up, it was the sweetest flattery
+of the applause which abused his fondness that Longfellow clapped first
+and loudest.
+
+Where once he had given his kindness he could not again withhold it, and
+he was anxious no fact should be interpreted as withdrawal. When the
+Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil, who was so great a lover of Longfellow, came
+to Boston, he asked himself out to dine with the poet, who had expected
+to offer him some such hospitality. Soon after, Longfellow met me, and
+as if eager to forestall a possible feeling in me, said, "I wanted to ask
+you to dinner with the Emperor, but he not only sent word he was coming,
+he named his fellow-guests!" I answered that though I should probably
+never come so near dining with an emperor again, I prized his wish to ask
+me much more than the chance I had missed; and with this my great and
+good friend seemed a little consoled. I believe that I do not speak too
+confidently of our relation. He was truly the friend of all men, but I
+had certainly the advantage of my propinquity. We were near neighbors, as
+the pleonasm has it, both when I lived on Berkeley Street and after I had
+built my own house on Concord Avenue; and I suppose he found my youthful
+informality convenient. He always asked me to dinner when his old friend
+Greene came to visit him, and then we had an Italian time together, with
+more or less repetition in our talk, of what we had said before of
+Italian poetry and Italian character. One day there came a note from him
+saying, in effect, "Salvini is coming out to dine with me tomorrow night,
+and I want you to come too. There will be no one else but Greene and
+myself, and we will have an Italian dinner."
+
+Unhappily I had accepted a dinner in Boston for that night, and this
+invitation put me in great misery. I must keep my engagement, but how
+could I bear to miss meeting Salvini at Longfellow's table on terms like
+these? We consulted at home together and questioned whether I might not
+rush into Boston, seek out my host there, possess him of the facts, and
+frankly throw myself on his mercy. Then a sudden thought struck us: Go
+to Longfellow, and submit the case to him! I went, and he entered with
+delicate sympathy into the affair. But he decided that, taking the large
+view of it, I must keep my engagement, lest I should run even a remote
+risk of wounding my friend's susceptibilities. I obeyed, and I had a
+very good time, but I still feel that I missed the best time of my life,
+and that I ought to be rewarded for my sacrifice, somewhere.
+
+Longfellow so rarely spoke of himself in any way that one heard from him
+few of those experiences of the distinguished man in contact with the
+undistinguished, which he must have had so abundantly. But he told,
+while it was fresh in his mind, an incident that happened to him one day
+in Boston at a tobacconist's, where a certain brand of cigars was
+recommended to him as the kind Longfellow smoked. "Ah, then I must have
+some of them; and I will ask you to send me a box," said Longfellow, and
+he wrote down his name and address. The cigar-dealer read it with the
+smile of a worsted champion, and said, "Well, I guess you had me, that
+time." At a funeral a mourner wished to open conversation, and by way of
+suggesting a theme of common interest, began, "You've buried, I believe?"
+
+Sometimes people were shown by the poet through Craigie House who had no
+knowledge of it except that it had been Washington's headquarters. Of
+course Longfellow was known by sight to every one in Cambridge. He was
+daily in the streets, while his health endured, and as he kept no
+carriage, he was often to be met in the horse-cars, which were such
+common ground in Cambridge that they were often like small invited
+parties of friends when they left Harvard Square, so that you expected
+the gentlemen to jump up and ask the ladies whether they would have
+chicken salad. In civic and political matters he mingled so far as to
+vote regularly, and he voted with his party, trusting it for a general
+regard to the public welfare.
+
+I fancy he was somewhat shy of his fellow-men, as the scholar seems
+always to be, from the sequestered habit of his life; but I think
+Longfellow was incapable of marking any difference between himself and
+them. I never heard from him anything that was 'de haut en bas', when he
+spoke of people, and in Cambridge, where there was a good deal of
+contempt for the less lettered, and we liked to smile though we did not
+like to sneer, and to analyze if we did not censure, Longfellow and
+Longfellow's house were free of all that. Whatever his feeling may have
+been towards other sorts and conditions of men, his effect was of an
+entire democracy. He was always the most unassuming person in any
+company, and at some large public dinners where I saw him I found him
+patient of the greater attention that more public men paid themselves and
+one another. He was not a speaker, and I never saw him on his feet at
+dinner, except once, when he read a poem for Whittier, who was absent. He
+disliked after-dinner speaking, and made conditions for his own exemption
+from it.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+Once your friend, Longfellow was always your friend; he would not think
+evil of you, and if he knew evil of you, he would be the last of all that
+knew it to judge you for it. This may have been from the impersonal
+habit of his mind, but I believe it was also the effect of principle, for
+he would do what he could to arrest the delivery of judgment from others,
+and would soften the sentences passed in his presence. Naturally this
+brought him under some condemnation with those of a severer cast; and I
+have heard him criticised for his benevolence towards all, and his
+constancy to some who were not quite so true to themselves, perhaps. But
+this leniency of Longfellow's was what constituted him great as well as
+good, for it is not our wisdom that censures others. As for his
+goodness, I never saw a fault in him. I do not mean to say that he had
+no faults, or that there were no better men, but only to give the witness
+of my knowledge concerning him. I claim in no wise to have been his
+intimate; such a thing was not possible in my case for quite apparent
+reasons; and I doubt if Longfellow was capable of intimacy in the sense
+we mostly attach to the word. Something more of egotism than I ever
+found in him must go to the making of any intimacy which did not come
+from the tenderest affections of his heart. But as a man shows himself
+to those often with him, and in his noted relations with other men, he
+showed himself without blame. All men that I have known, besides, have
+had some foible (it often endeared them the more), or some meanness, or
+pettiness, or bitterness; but Longfellow had none, nor the suggestion of
+any. No breath of evil ever touched his name; he went in and out among
+his fellow-men without the reproach that follows wrong; the worst thing I
+ever heard said of him was that he had 'gene', and this was said by one
+of those difficult Cambridge men who would have found 'gene' in a
+celestial angel. Something that Bjornstjerne Bjornson wrote to me when
+he was leaving America after a winter in Cambridge, comes nearer
+suggesting Longfellow than all my talk. The Norsemen, in the days of
+their stormy and reluctant conversion, used always to speak of Christ as
+the White Christ, and Bjornson said in his letter, "Give my love to the
+White Mr. Longfellow."
+
+A good many, years before Longfellow's death he began to be sleepless,
+and he suffered greatly. He said to me once that he felt as if he were
+going about with his heart in a kind of mist. The whole night through he
+would not be aware of having slept. "But," he would add, with his
+heavenly patience, "I always get a good deal of rest from lying down so
+long." I cannot say whether these conditions persisted, or how much his
+insomnia had to do with his breaking health; three or four years before
+the end came, we left Cambridge for a house farther in the country, and I
+saw him less frequently than before. He did not allow our meetings to
+cease; he asked me to dinner from time to time, as if to keep them up,
+but it could not be with the old frequency. Once he made a point of
+coming to see us in our cottage on the hill west of Cambridge, but it was
+with an effort not visible in the days when he could end one of his brief
+walks at our house on Concord Avenue; he never came but he left our house
+more luminous for his having been there. Once he came to supper there to
+meet Garfield (an old family friend of mine in Ohio), and though he was
+suffering from a heavy cold, he would not scant us in his stay. I had
+some very bad sherry which he drank with the serenity of a martyr, and I
+shudder to this day to think what his kindness must have cost him. He
+told his story of the clothes-line ghost, and Garfield matched it with
+the story of an umbrella ghost who sheltered a friend of his through a
+midnight storm, but was not cheerful company to his beneficiary, who
+passed his hand through him at one point in the effort to take his arm.
+
+After the end of four years I came to Cambridge to be treated for a long
+sickness, which had nearly been my last, and when I could get about I
+returned the visit Longfellow had not failed to pay me. But I did not
+find him, and I never saw him again in life. I went into Boston to
+finish the winter of 1881-2, and from time to time I heard that the poet
+was failing in health. As soon as I felt able to bear the horse-car
+journey I went out to Cambridge to see him. I had knocked once at his
+door, the friendly door that had so often opened to his welcome, and
+stood with the knocker in my hand when the door was suddenly set ajar,
+and a maid showed her face wet with tears. "How is Mr. Longfellow?" I
+palpitated, and with a burst of grief she answered, "Oh, the poor
+gentleman has just departed!" I turned away as if from a helpless
+intrusion at a death-bed.
+
+At the services held in the house before the obsequies at the cemetery, I
+saw the poet for the last time, where
+
+        "Dead he lay among his books,"
+
+in the library behind his study. Death seldom fails to bring serenity to
+all, and I will not pretend that there was a peculiar peacefulness in
+Longfellow's noble mask, as I saw it then. It was calm and benign as it
+had been in life; he could not have worn a gentler aspect in going out of
+the world than he had always worn in it; he had not to wait for death to
+dignify it with "the peace of God." All who were left of his old
+Cambridge were present, and among those who had come farther was Emerson.
+He went up to the bier, and with his arms crossed on his breast, and his
+elbows held in either hand, stood with his head pathetically fallen
+forward, looking down at the dead face. Those who knew how his memory
+was a mere blank, with faint gleams of recognition capriciously coming
+and going in it, must have felt that he was struggling to remember who it
+was lay there before him; and for me the electly simple words confessing
+his failure will always be pathetic with his remembered aspect: "The
+gentleman we have just been burying," he said, to the friend who had come
+with him, "was a sweet and beautiful soul; but I forget his name."
+
+I had the privilege and honor of looking over the unprinted poems
+Longfellow left behind him, and of helping to decide which of them should
+be published.
+
+There were not many of them, and some of these few were quite
+fragmentary. I gave my voice for the publication of all that had any
+sort of completeness, for in every one there was a touch of his exquisite
+art, the grace of his most lovely spirit. We have so far had two men
+only who felt the claim of their gift to the very best that the most
+patient skill could give its utterance: one was Hawthorne and the other
+was Longfellow. I shall not undertake to say which was the greater
+artist of these two; but I am sure that every one who has studied it must
+feel with me that the art of Longfellow held out to the end with no touch
+of decay in it, and that it equalled the art of any other poet of his
+time. It knew when to give itself, and more and more it knew when to
+withhold itself.
+
+What Longfellow's place in literature will be, I shall not offer to say;
+that is Time's affair, not mine; but I am sure that with Tennyson and
+Browning he fully shared in the expression of an age which more
+completely than any former age got itself said by its poets.
+
+
+
+
+STUDIES OF LOWELL
+
+I have already spoken of my earliest meetings with Lowell at Cambridge
+when I came to New England on a literary pilgrimage from the West in
+1860. I saw him more and more after I went to live in Cambridge in 1866;
+and I now wish to record what I knew of him during the years that passed
+between this date and that of his death. If the portrait I shall try to
+paint does not seem a faithful likeness to others who knew him, I shall
+only claim that so he looked to me, at this moment and at that. If I do
+not keep myself quite out of the picture, what painter ever did?
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+It was in the summer of 1865 that I came home from my consular post at
+Venice; and two weeks after I landed in Boston, I went out to see Lowell
+at Elmwood, and give him an inkstand that I had brought him from Italy.
+The bronze lobster whose back opened and disclosed an inkpot and a
+sand-box was quite ugly; but I thought it beautiful then, and if Lowell
+thought otherwise he never did anything to let me know it. He put the
+thing in the middle of his writing-table (he nearly always wrote on a
+pasteboard pad resting upon his knees), and there it remained as long as
+I knew the place--a matter of twenty-five years; but in all that time I
+suppose the inkpot continued as dry as the sand-box.
+
+My visit was in the heat of August, which is as fervid in Cambridge as it
+can well be anywhere, and I still have a sense of his study windows
+lifted to the summer night, and the crickets and grasshoppers crying in
+at them from the lawns and the gardens outside. Other people went away
+from Cambridge in the summer to the sea and to the mountains, but Lowell
+always stayed at Elmwood, in an impassioned love for his home and for his
+town. I must have found him there in the afternoon, and he must have
+made me sup with him (dinner was at two o'clock) and then go with him for
+a long night of talk in his study. He liked to have some one help him
+idle the time away, and keep him as long as possible from his work; and
+no doubt I was impersonally serving his turn in this way, aside from any
+pleasure he might have had in my company as some one he had always been
+kind to, and as a fresh arrival from the Italy dear to us both.
+
+He lighted his pipe, and from the depths of his easychair, invited my shy
+youth to all the ease it was capable of in his presence. It was not
+much; I loved him, and he gave me reason to think that he was fond of me,
+but in Lowell I was always conscious of an older and closer and stricter
+civilization than my own, an unbroken tradition, a more authoritative
+status. His democracy was more of the head and mine more of the heart,
+and his denied the equality which mine affirmed. But his nature was so
+noble and his reason so tolerant that whenever in our long acquaintance I
+found it well to come to open rebellion, as I more than once did, he
+admitted my right of insurrection, and never resented the outbreak. I
+disliked to differ with him, and perhaps he subtly felt this so much that
+he would not dislike me for doing it. He even suffered being taxed with
+inconsistency, and where he saw that he had not been quite just, he would
+take punishment for his error, with a contrition that was sometimes
+humorous and always touching.
+
+Just then it was the dark hour before the dawn with Italy, and he was
+interested but not much encouraged by what I could tell him of the
+feeling in Venice against the Austrians. He seemed to reserve a like
+scepticism concerning the fine things I was hoping for the Italians in
+literature, and he confessed an interest in the facts treated which in
+the retrospect, I am aware, was more tolerant than participant of my
+enthusiasm. That was always Lowell's attitude towards the opinions of
+people he liked, when he could not go their lengths with them, and
+nothing was more characteristic of his affectionate nature and his just
+intelligence. He was a man of the most strenuous convictions, but he
+loved many sorts of people whose convictions he disagreed with, and he
+suffered even prejudices counter to his own if they were not ignoble. In
+the whimsicalities of others he delighted as much as in his own.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+Our associations with Italy held over until the next day, when after
+breakfast he went with me towards Boston as far as "the village": for so
+he liked to speak of Cambridge in the custom of his younger days when
+wide tracts of meadow separated Harvard Square from his life-long home at
+Elmwood. We stood on the platform of the horsecar together, and when I
+objected to his paying my fare in the American fashion, he allowed that
+the Italian usage of each paying for himself was the politer way. He
+would not commit himself about my returning to Venice (for I had not
+given up my place, yet, and was away on leave), but he intimated his
+distrust of the flattering conditions of life abroad. He said it was
+charming to be treated 'da signore', but he seemed to doubt whether it
+was well; and in this as in all other things he showed his final fealty
+to the American ideal.
+
+It was that serious and great moment after the successful close of the
+civil war when the republican consciousness was more robust in us than
+ever before or since; but I cannot recall any reference to the historical
+interest of the time in Lowell's talk. It had been all about literature
+and about travel; and now with the suggestion of the word village it
+began to be a little about his youth. I have said before how reluctant
+he was to let his youth go from him; and perhaps the touch with my
+juniority had made him realize how near he was to fifty, and set him
+thinking of the past which had sorrows in it to age him beyond his years.
+He would never speak of these, though he often spoke of the past. He
+told once of having been on a brief journey when he was six years old,
+with his father, and of driving up to the gate of Elmwood in the evening,
+and his father saying, "Ah, this is a pleasant place! I wonder who lives
+here--what little boy?" At another time he pointed out a certain window
+in his study, and said he could see himself standing by it when he could
+only get his chin on the window-sill. His memories of the house, and of
+everything belonging to it, were very tender; but he could laugh over an
+escapade of his youth when he helped his fellow-students pull down his
+father's fences, in the pure zeal of good-comradeship.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+My fortunes took me to New York, and I spent most of the winter of 1865-6
+writing in the office of 'The Nation'. I contributed several sketches of
+Italian travel to that paper; and one of these brought me a precious
+letter from Lowell. He praised my sketch, which he said he had read
+without the least notion who had written it, and he wanted me to feel the
+full value of such an impersonal pleasure in it. At the same time he did
+not fail to tell me that he disliked some pseudo-cynical verses of mine
+which he had read in another place; and I believe it was then that he
+bade me "sweat the Heine out of" me, "as men sweat the mercury out of
+their bones."
+
+When I was asked to be assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and came
+on to Boston to talk the matter over with the publishers, I went out to
+Cambridge and consulted Lowell. He strongly urged me to take the
+position (I thought myself hopefully placed in New York on The Nation);
+and at the same time he seemed to have it on his heart to say that he had
+recommended some one else for it, never, he owned, having thought of me.
+
+He was most cordial, but after I came to live in Cambridge (where the
+magazine was printed, and I could more conveniently look over the
+proofs), he did not call on me for more than a month, and seemed quite to
+have forgotten me. We met one night at Mr. Norton's, for one of the
+Dante readings, and he took no special notice of me till I happened to
+say something that offered him a chance to give me a little humorous
+snub. I was speaking of a paper in the Magazine on the "Claudian
+Emissary," and I demanded (no doubt a little too airily) something like
+"Who in the world ever heard of the Claudian Emissary?" "You are in
+Cambridge, Mr. Howells," Lowell answered, and laughed at my confusion.
+Having put me down, he seemed to soften towards me, and at parting he
+said, with a light of half-mocking tenderness in his beautiful eyes,
+"Goodnight, fellow-townsman." "I hardly knew we were fellow-townsmen," I
+returned. He liked that, apparently, and said he had been meaning to
+call upon me; and that he was coming very soon.
+
+He was as good as his word, and after that hardly a week of any kind of
+weather passed but he mounted the steps to the door of the ugly little
+house in which I lived, two miles away from him, and asked me to walk.
+These walks continued, I suppose, until Lowell went abroad for a winter
+in the early seventies. They took us all over Cambridge, which he knew
+and loved every inch of, and led us afield through the straggling,
+unhandsome outskirts, bedrabbled with squalid Irish neighborhoods, and
+fraying off into marshes and salt meadows. He liked to indulge an excess
+of admiration for the local landscape, and though I never heard him
+profess a preference for the Charles River flats to the finest Alpine
+scenery, I could well believe he would do so under provocation of a fit
+listener's surprise. He had always so much of the boy in him that he
+liked to tease the over-serious or over-sincere. He liked to tease and
+he liked to mock, especially his juniors, if any touch of affectation, or
+any little exuberance of manner gave him the chance; when he once came to
+fetch me, and the young mistress of the house entered with a certain
+excessive elasticity, he sprang from his seat, and minced towards her,
+with a burlesque of her buoyant carriage which made her laugh. When he
+had given us his heart in trust of ours, he used us like a younger
+brother and sister; or like his own children. He included our children
+in his affection, and he enjoyed our fondness for them as if it were
+something that had come back to him from his own youth. I think he had
+also a sort of artistic, a sort of ethical pleasure in it, as being of
+the good tradition, of the old honest, simple material, from which
+pleasing effects in literature and civilization were wrought. He liked
+giving the children books, and writing tricksy fancies in these, where he
+masked as a fairy prince; and as long as he lived he remembered his early
+kindness for them.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+In those walks of ours I believe he did most of the talking, and from his
+talk then and at other times there remains to me an impression of his
+growing conservatism. I had in fact come into his life when it had spent
+its impulse towards positive reform, and I was to be witness of its
+increasing tendency towards the negative sort. He was quite past the
+storm and stress of his anti-slavery age; with the close of the war which
+had broken for him all his ideals of inviolable peace, he had reached the
+age of misgiving. I do not mean that I ever heard him express doubt of
+what he had helped to do, or regret for what he had done; but I know that
+he viewed with critical anxiety what other men were doing with the
+accomplished facts. His anxiety gave a cast of what one may call
+reluctance from the political situation, and turned him back towards
+those civic and social defences which he had once seemed willing to
+abandon. I do not mean that he lost faith in democracy; this faith he
+constantly then and signally afterwards affirmed; but he certainly had no
+longer any faith in insubordination as a means of grace. He preached a
+quite Socratic reverence for law, as law, and I remember that once when I
+had got back from Canada in the usual disgust for the American
+custom-house, and spoke lightly of smuggling as not an evil in itself,
+and perhaps even a right under our vexatious tariff, he would not have
+it, but held that the illegality of the act made it a moral of fence.
+This was not the logic that would have justified the attitude of the
+anti-slavery men towards the fugitive slave act; but it was in accord
+with Lowell's feeling about John Brown, whom he honored while always
+condemning his violation of law; and it was in the line of all his later
+thinking. In this, he wished you to agree with him, or at least he
+wished to make you; but he did not wish you to be more of his mind than
+he was himself. In one of those squalid Irish neighborhoods I confessed
+a grudge (a mean and cruel grudge, I now think it) for the increasing
+presence of that race among us, but this did not please him; and I am
+sure that whatever misgiving he had as to the future of America, he would
+not have had it less than it had been the refuge and opportunity of the
+poor of any race or color. Yet he would not have had it this alone.
+There was a line in his poem on Agassiz which he left out of the printed
+version, at the fervent entreaty of his friends, as saying too bitterly
+his disappointment with his country. Writing at the distance of Europe,
+and with America in the perspective which the alien environment clouded,
+he spoke of her as "The Land of Broken Promise." It was a splendid
+reproach, but perhaps too dramatic to bear the full test of analysis, and
+yet it had the truth in it, and might, I think, have usefully stood, to
+the end of making people think. Undoubtedly it expressed his sense of
+the case, and in the same measure it would now express that of many who
+love their country most among us. It is well to hold one's country to
+her promises, and if there are any who think she is forgetting them it is
+their duty to say so, even to the point of bitter accusation. I do not
+suppose it was the "common man" of Lincoln's dream that Lowell thought
+America was unfaithful to, though as I have suggested he could be tender
+of the common man's hopes in her; but he was impeaching in that blotted
+line her sincerity with the uncommon man: the man who had expected of her
+a constancy to the ideals of her youth end to the high martyr-moods of
+the war which had given an unguarded and bewildering freedom to a race of
+slaves. He was thinking of the shame of our municipal corruptions, the
+debased quality of our national statesmanship, the decadence of our whole
+civic tone, rather than of the increasing disabilities of the
+hard-working poor, though his heart when he thought of them was with
+them, too, as it was in "the time when the slave would not let him
+sleep."
+
+He spoke very rarely of those times, perhaps because their political and
+social associations were so knit up with the saddest and tenderest
+personal memories, which it was still anguish to touch. Not only was he
+
+                  "--not of the race
+        That hawk, their sorrows in the market place,"
+
+but so far as my witness went he shrank from mention of them. I do not
+remember hearing him speak of the young wife who influenced him so
+potently at the most vital moment, and turned him from his whole
+scholarly and aristocratic tradition to an impassioned championship of
+the oppressed; and he never spoke of the children he had lost. I recall
+but one allusion to the days when he was fighting the anti-slavery battle
+along the whole line, and this was with a humorous relish of his Irish
+servant's disgust in having to wait upon a negro whom he had asked to his
+table.
+
+He was rather severe in his notions of the subordination his domestics
+owed him. They were "to do as they were bid," and yet he had a
+tenderness for such as had been any time with him, which was wounded when
+once a hired man long in his employ greedily overreached him in a certain
+transaction. He complained of that with a simple grief for the man's
+indelicacy after so many favors from him, rather than with any
+resentment. His hauteur towards his dependents was theoretic; his actual
+behavior was of the gentle consideration common among Americans of good
+breeding, and that recreant hired man had no doubt never been suffered to
+exceed him in shows of mutual politeness. Often when the maid was about
+weightier matters, he came and opened his door to me himself, welcoming
+me with the smile that was like no other. Sometimes he said, "Siete il
+benvenuto," or used some other Italian phrase, which put me at ease with
+him in the region where we were most at home together.
+
+Looking back I must confess that I do not see what it was he found to
+make him wish for my company, which he presently insisted upon having
+once a week at dinner. After the meal we turned into his study where we
+sat before a wood fire in winter, and he smoked and talked. He smoked a
+pipe which was always needing tobacco, or going out, so that I have the
+figure of him before my eyes constantly getting out of his deep chair to
+rekindle it from the fire with a paper lighter. He was often out of his
+chair to get a book from the shelves that lined the walls, either for a
+passage which he wished to read, or for some disputed point which he
+wished to settle. If I had caused the dispute, he enjoyed putting me in
+the wrong; if he could not, he sometimes whimsically persisted in his
+error, in defiance of all authority; but mostly he had such reverence for
+the truth that he would not question it even in jest.
+
+If I dropped in upon him in the afternoon I was apt to find him reading
+the old French poets, or the plays of Calderon, or the 'Divina Commedia',
+which he magnanimously supposed me much better acquainted with than I was
+because I knew some passages of it by heart. One day I came in quoting
+
+        "Io son, cantava, io son dolce Sirena,
+        Che i marinai in mezzo al mar dismago."
+
+He stared at me in a rapture with the matchless music, and then uttered
+all his adoration and despair in one word. "Damn!" he said, and no more.
+I believe he instantly proposed a walk that day, as if his study walls
+with all their vistas into the great literatures cramped his soul
+liberated to a sense of ineffable beauty of the verse of the 'somma
+poeta'. But commonly be preferred to have me sit down with him there
+among the mute witnesses of the larger part of his life. As I have
+suggested in my own case, it did not matter much whether you brought
+anything to the feast or not. If he liked you he liked being with you,
+not for what he got, but for what he gave. He was fond of one man whom I
+recall as the most silent man I ever met. I never heard him say
+anything, not even a dull thing, but Lowell delighted in him, and would
+have you believe that he was full of quaint humor.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+While Lowell lived there was a superstition, which has perhaps survived
+him, that he was an indolent man, wasting himself in barren studies and
+minor efforts instead of devoting his great powers to some monumental
+work worthy of them. If the robust body of literature, both poetry and
+prose, which lives after him does not yet correct this vain delusion, the
+time will come when it must; and in the meantime the delusion cannot vex
+him now. I think it did vex him, then, and that he even shared it, and
+tried at times to meet such shadowy claim as it had. One of the things
+that people urged upon him was to write some sort of story, and it is
+known how he attempted this in verse. It is less known that he attempted
+it in prose, and that he went so far as to write the first chapter of a
+novel. He read this to me, and though I praised it then, I have a
+feeling now that if he had finished the novel it would have been a
+failure. "But I shall never finish it," he sighed, as if he felt
+irremediable defects in it, and laid the manuscript away, to turn and
+light his pipe. It was a rather old-fashioned study of a whimsical
+character, and it did not arrive anywhere, so far as it went; but I
+believe that it might have been different with a Yankee story in verse
+such as we have fragmentarily in 'The Nooning' and 'FitzAdam's Story'.
+Still, his gift was essentially lyrical and meditative, with the
+universal New England tendency to allegory. He was wholly undramatic in
+the actuation of the characters which he imagined so dramatically. He
+liked to deal with his subject at first hand, to indulge through himself
+all the whim and fancy which the more dramatic talent indulges through
+its personages.
+
+He enjoyed writing such a poem as "The Cathedral," which is not of his
+best, but which is more immediately himself, in all his moods, than some
+better poems. He read it to me soon after it was written, and in the
+long walk which we went hard upon the reading (our way led us through the
+Port far towards East Cambridge, where he wished to show me a tupelo-tree
+of his acquaintance, because I said I had never seen one), his talk was
+still of the poem which he was greatly in conceit of. Later his
+satisfaction with it received a check from the reserves of other friends
+concerning some whimsical lines which seemed to them too great a drop
+from the higher moods of the piece. Their reluctance nettled him;
+perhaps he agreed with them; but he would not change the lines, and they
+stand as he first wrote them. In fact, most of his lines stand as he
+first wrote them; he would often change them in revision, and then, in a
+second revision go back to the first version.
+
+He was very sensitive to criticism, especially from those he valued
+through his head or heart. He would try to hide his hurt, and he would
+not let you speak of it, as though your sympathy unmanned him, but you
+could see that he suffered. This notably happened in my remembrance from
+a review in a journal which he greatly esteemed; and once when in a
+notice of my own I had put one little thorny point among the flowers, he
+confessed a puncture from it. He praised the criticism hardily, but I
+knew that he winced under my recognition of the didactic quality which he
+had not quite guarded himself against in the poetry otherwise praised. He
+liked your liking, and he openly rejoiced in it; and I suppose he made
+himself believe that in trying his verse with his friends he was testing
+it; but I do not believe that he was, and I do not think he ever
+corrected his judgment by theirs, however he suffered from it.
+
+In any matter that concerned literary morals he was more than eager to
+profit by another eye. One summer he sent me for the Magazine a poem
+which, when I read it, I trembled to find in motive almost exactly like
+one we had lately printed by another contributor. There was nothing for
+it but to call his attention to the resemblance, and I went over to
+Elmwood with the two poems. He was not at home, and I was obliged to
+leave the poems, I suppose with some sort of note, for the next morning's
+post brought me a delicious letter from him, all one cry of confession,
+the most complete, the most ample. He did not trouble himself to say
+that his poem was an unconscious reproduction of the other; that was for
+every reason unnecessary, but he had at once rewritten it upon wholly
+different lines; and I do not think any reader was reminded of Mrs.
+Akers's "Among the Laurels" by Lowell's "Foot-path." He was not only
+much more sensitive of others' rights than his own, but in spite of a
+certain severity in him, he was most tenderly regardful of their
+sensibilities when he had imagined them: he did not always imagine them.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+At this period, between the years 1866 and 1874, when he unwillingly went
+abroad for a twelvemonth, Lowell was seen in very few Cambridge houses,
+and in still fewer Boston houses. He was not an unsocial man, but he was
+most distinctly not a society man. He loved chiefly the companionship of
+books, and of men who loved books; but of women generally he had an
+amusing diffidence; he revered them and honored them, but he would rather
+not have had them about. This is over-saying it, of course, but the
+truth is in what I say. There was never a more devoted husband, and he
+was content to let his devotion to the sex end with that. He especially
+could not abide difference of opinion in women; he valued their taste,
+their wit, their humor, but he would have none of their reason. I was by
+one day when he was arguing a point with one of his nieces, and after it
+had gone on for some time, and the impartial witness must have owned that
+she was getting the better of him he closed the controversy by giving her
+a great kiss, with the words, "You are a very good girl, my dear," and
+practically putting her out of the room. As to women of the flirtatious
+type, he did not dislike them; no man, perhaps, does; but he feared them,
+and he said that with them there was but one way, and that was to run.
+
+I have a notion that at this period Lowell was more freely and fully
+himself than at any other. The passions and impulses of his younger
+manhood had mellowed, the sorrows of that time had softened; he could
+blamelessly live to himself in his affections and his sobered ideals. His
+was always a duteous life; but he had pretty well given up making man
+over in his own image, as we all wish some time to do, and then no longer
+wish it. He fulfilled his obligations to his fellow-men as these sought
+him out, but he had ceased to seek them. He loved his friends and their
+love, but he had apparently no desire to enlarge their circle. It was
+that hour of civic suspense, in which public men seemed still actuated by
+unselfish aims, and one not essentially a politician might contentedly
+wait to see what would come of their doing their best. At any rate,
+without occasionally withholding open criticism or acclaim Lowell waited
+among his books for the wounds of the war to heal themselves, and the
+nation to begin her healthfuller and nobler life. With slavery gone,
+what might not one expect of American democracy!
+
+His life at Elmwood was of an entire simplicity. In the old colonial
+mansion in which he was born, he dwelt in the embowering leafage, amid
+the quiet of lawns and garden-plots broken by few noises ruder than those
+from the elms and the syringas where
+
+     "The oriole clattered and the cat-bird sang."
+
+From the tracks on Brattle Street, came the drowsy tinkle of horse-car
+bells; and sometimes a funeral trailed its black length past the corner
+of his grounds, and lost itself from sight under the shadows of the
+willows that hid Mount Auburn from his study windows. In the winter the
+deep New England snows kept their purity in the stretch of meadow behind
+the house, which a double row of pines guarded in a domestic privacy. All
+was of a modest dignity within and without the house, which Lowell loved
+but did not imagine of a manorial presence; and he could not conceal his
+annoyance with an over-enthusiastic account of his home in which the
+simple chiselling of some panels was vaunted as rich wood-carving. There
+was a graceful staircase, and a good wide hall, from which the
+dining-room and drawing-room opened by opposite doors; behind the last,
+in the southwest corner of the house, was his study.
+
+There, literally, he lived during the six or seven years in which I knew
+him after my coming to Cambridge. Summer and winter he sat there among
+his books, seldom stirring abroad by day except for a walk, and by night
+yet more rarely. He went to the monthly mid-day dinner of the Saturday
+Club in Boston; he was very constant at the fortnightly meetings of his
+whist-club, because he loved the old friends who formed it; he came
+always to the Dante suppers at Longfellow's, and he was familiarly in and
+out at Mr. Norton's, of course. But, otherwise, he kept to his study,
+except for some rare and almost unwilling absences upon university
+lecturing at Johns Hopkins or at Cornell.
+
+For four years I did not take any summer outing from Cambridge myself,
+and my associations with Elmwood and with Lowell are more of summer than
+of winter weather meetings. But often we went our walks through the
+snows, trudging along between the horsecar tracks which enclosed the only
+well-broken-out paths in that simple old Cambridge. I date one memorable
+expression of his from such a walk, when, as we were passing Longfellow's
+house, in mid-street, he came as near the declaration of his religious
+faith as he ever did in my presence. He was speaking of the New
+Testament, and he said, The truth was in it; but they had covered it up
+with their hagiology. Though he had been bred a Unitarian, and had more
+and more liberated himself from all creeds, he humorously affected an
+abiding belief in hell, and similarly contended for the eternal
+punishment of the wicked. He was of a religious nature, and he was very
+reverent of other people's religious feelings. He expressed a special
+tolerance for my own inherited faith, no doubt because Mrs. Lowell was
+also a Swedenborgian; but I do not think he was interested in it, and I
+suspect that all religious formulations bored him. In his earlier poems
+are many intimations and affirmations of belief in an overruling
+providence, and especially in the God who declares vengeance His and will
+repay men for their evil deeds, and will right the weak against the
+strong. I think he never quite lost this, though when, in the last years
+of his life, I asked him if he believed there was a moral government of
+the universe, he answered gravely and with a sort of pain, The scale was
+so vast, and we saw such a little part of it.
+
+As to tine notion of a life after death, I never had any direct or
+indirect expression from him; but I incline to the opinion that his hold
+upon this weakened with his years, as it is sadly apt to do with men who
+have read much and thought much: they have apparently exhausted their
+potentialities of psychological life. Mystical Lowell was, as every poet
+must be, but I do not think he liked mystery. One morning he told me
+that when he came home the night before he had seen the Doppelganger of
+one of his household: though, as he joked, he was not in a state to see
+double.
+
+He then said he used often to see people's Doppelganger; at another time,
+as to ghosts, he said, He was like Coleridge: he had seen too many of
+'em. Lest any weaker brethren should be caused to offend by the
+restricted oath which I have reported him using in a moment of transport
+it may be best to note here that I never heard him use any other
+imprecation, and this one seldom.
+
+Any grossness of speech was inconceivable of him; now and then, but only
+very rarely, the human nature of some story "unmeet for ladies" was too
+much for his sense of humor, and overcame him with amusement which he was
+willing to impart, and did impart, but so that mainly the human nature of
+it reached you. In this he was like the other great Cambridge men,
+though he was opener than the others to contact with the commoner life.
+He keenly delighted in every native and novel turn of phrase, and he
+would not undervalue a vital word or a notion picked up out of the road
+even if it had some dirt sticking to it.
+
+He kept as close to the common life as a man of his patrician instincts
+and cloistered habits could. I could go to him with any new find about
+it and be sure of delighting him; after I began making my involuntary and
+all but unconscious studies of Yankee character, especially in the
+country, he was always glad to talk them over with me. Still, when I had
+discovered a new accent or turn of speech in the fields he had
+cultivated, I was aware of a subtle grudge mingling with his pleasure;
+but this was after all less envy than a fine regret.
+
+At the time I speak of there was certainly nothing in Lowell's dress or
+bearing that would have kept the common life aloof from him, if that life
+were not always too proud to make advances to any one. In this
+retrospect, I see him in the sack coat and rough suit which he wore upon
+all out-door occasions, with heavy shoes, and a round hat. I never saw
+him with a high hat on till he came home after his diplomatic stay in
+London; then he had become rather rigorously correct in his costume, and
+as conventional as he had formerly been indifferent. In both epochs he
+was apt to be gloved, and the strong, broad hands, which left the
+sensation of their vigor for some time after they had clasped yours, were
+notably white. At the earlier period, he still wore his auburn hair
+somewhat long; it was darker than his beard, which was branching and
+full, and more straw-colored than auburn, as were his thick eyebrows;
+neither hair nor beard was then touched with gray, as I now remember.
+When he uncovered, his straight, wide, white forehead showed itself one
+of the most beautiful that could be; his eyes were gay with humor, and
+alert with all intelligence. He had an enchanting smile, a laugh that
+was full of friendly joyousness, and a voice that was exquisite music.
+Everything about him expressed his strenuous physical condition: he would
+not wear an overcoat in the coldest Cambridge weather; at all times he
+moved vigorously, and walked with a quick step, lifting his feet well
+from the ground.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+It gives me a pleasure which I am afraid I cannot impart, to linger in
+this effort to materialize his presence from the fading memories of the
+past. I am afraid I can as little impart a due sense of what he
+spiritually was to my knowledge. It avails nothing for me to say that I
+think no man of my years and desert had ever so true and constant a
+friend. He was both younger and older than I by insomuch as he was a
+poet through and through, and had been out of college before I was born.
+But he had already come to the age of self-distrust when a man likes to
+take counsel with his juniors as with his elders, and fancies he can
+correct his perspective by the test of their fresher vision. Besides,
+Lowell was most simply and pathetically reluctant to part with youth, and
+was willing to cling to it wherever he found it. He could not in any
+wise bear to be left-out. When Mr. Bret Harte came to Cambridge, and the
+talk was all of the brilliant character-poems with which he had then
+first dazzled the world, Lowell casually said, with a most touching,
+however ungrounded sense of obsolescence, He could remember when the
+'Biglow Papers' were all the talk. I need not declare that there was
+nothing ungenerous in that. He was only too ready to hand down his
+laurels to a younger man; but he wished to do it himself. Through the
+modesty that is always a quality of such a nature, he was magnanimously
+sensitive to the appearance of fading interest; he could not take it
+otherwise than as a proof of his fading power. I had a curious hint of
+this when one year in making up the prospectus of the Magazine for the
+next, I omitted his name because I had nothing special to promise from
+him, and because I was half ashamed to be always flourishing it in the
+eyes of the public. "I see that you have dropped me this year," he
+wrote, and I could see that it had hurt, and I knew that he was glad to
+believe the truth when I told him.
+
+He did not care so much for popularity as for the praise of his friends.
+If he liked you he wished you not only to like what he wrote, but to say
+so. He was himself most cordial in his recognition of the things that
+pleased him. What happened to me from him, happened to others, and I am
+only describing his common habit when I say that nothing I did to his
+liking failed to bring me a spoken or oftener a written acknowledgment.
+This continued to the latest years of his life when the effort even to
+give such pleasure must have cost him a physical pang.
+
+He was of a very catholic taste; and he was apt to be carried away by a
+little touch of life or humor, and to overvalue the piece in which he
+found it; but, mainly his judgments of letters and men were just. One of
+the dangers of scholarship was a peculiar danger in the Cambridge
+keeping, but Lowell was almost as averse as Longfellow from contempt. He
+could snub, and pitilessly, where he thought there was presumption and
+apparently sometimes merely because he was in the mood; but I cannot
+remember ever to have heard him sneer. He was often wonderfully patient
+of tiresome people, and sometimes celestially insensible to vulgarity. In
+spite of his reserve, he really wished people to like him; he was keenly
+alive to neighborly good-will or ill-will; and when there was a question
+of widening Elmwood avenue by taking part of his grounds, he was keenly
+hurt by hearing that some one who lived near him had said he hoped the
+city would cut down Lowell's elms: his English elms, which his father had
+planted, and with which he was himself almost one blood!
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+In the period of which I am speaking, Lowell was constantly writing and
+pretty constantly printing, though still the superstition held that he
+was an idle man. To this time belongs the publication of some of his
+finest poems, if not their inception: there were cases in which their
+inception dated far back, even to ten or twenty years. He wrote his
+poems at a heat, and the manuscript which came to me for the magazine was
+usually the first draft, very little corrected. But if the cold fit took
+him quickly it might hold him so fast that he would leave the poem in
+abeyance till he could slowly live back to a liking for it.
+
+The most of his best prose belongs to the time between 1866 and 1874, and
+to this time we owe the several volumes of essays and criticisms called
+'Among My Books' and 'My Study Windows'. He wished to name these more
+soberly, but at the urgence of his publishers he gave them titles which
+they thought would be attractive to the public, though he felt that they
+took from the dignity of his work. He was not a good business man in a
+literary way, he submitted to others' judgment in all such matters. I
+doubt if he ever put a price upon anything he sold, and I dare say he was
+usually surprised at the largeness of the price paid him; but sometimes
+if his need was for a larger sum, he thought it too little, without
+reference to former payments. This happened with a long poem in the
+Atlantic, which I had urged the counting-room authorities to deal
+handsomely with him for. I did not know how many hundred they gave him,
+and when I met him I ventured to express the hope that the publishers had
+done their part. He held up four fingers, "Quattro," he said in Italian,
+and then added with a disappointment which he tried to smile away, "I
+thought they might have made it cinque."
+
+Between me and me I thought quattro very well, but probably Lowell had in
+mind some end which cinque would have fitted better. It was pretty sure
+to be an unselfish end, a pleasure to some one dear to him, a gift that
+he had wished to make. Long afterwards when I had been the means of
+getting him cinque for a poem one-tenth the length, he spoke of the
+payment to me. "It came very handily; I had been wanting to give a
+watch."
+
+I do not believe at any time Lowell was able to deal with money
+
+     "Like wealthy men, not knowing what they give."
+
+more probably he felt a sacredness in the money got by literature, which
+the literary man never quite rids him self of, even when he is not a
+poet, and which made him wish to dedicate it to something finer than the
+every day uses. He lived very quietly, but he had by no means more than
+he needed to live upon, and at that time he had pecuniary losses. He was
+writing hard, and was doing full work in his Harvard professorship, and
+he was so far dependent upon his salary, that he felt its absence for the
+year he went abroad. I do not know quite how to express my sense of
+something unworldly, of something almost womanlike in his relation to
+money.
+
+He was not only generous of money, but he was generous of himself, when
+he thought he could be of use, or merely of encouragement. He came all
+the way into Boston to hear certain lectures of mine on the Italian
+poets, which he could not have found either edifying or amusing, that he
+might testify his interest in me, and show other people that they were
+worth coming to. He would go carefully over a poem with me, word by
+word, and criticise every turn of phrase, and after all be magnanimously
+tolerant of my sticking to phrasings that he disliked. In a certain line
+
+     "The silvern chords of the piano trembled,"
+
+he objected to silvern. Why not silver? I alleged leathern, golden, and
+like adjectives in defence of my word; but still he found an affectation
+in it, and suffered it to stand with extreme reluctance. Another line of
+another piece:
+
+     "And what she would, would rather that she would not"
+
+he would by no means suffer. He said that the stress falling on the last
+word made it "public-school English," and he mocked it with the answer a
+maid had lately given him when he asked if the master of the house was at
+home. She said, "No, sir, he is not," when she ought to have said "No,
+sir, he isn't." He was appeased when I came back the next day with the
+stanza amended so that the verse could read:
+
+     "And what she would, would rather she would not so"
+
+but I fancy he never quite forgave my word silvern. Yet, he professed
+not to have prejudices in such matters, but to use any word that would
+serve his turn, without wincing; and he certainly did use and defend
+words, as undisprivacied and disnatured, that made others wince.
+
+He was otherwise such a stickler for the best diction that he would not
+have had me use slovenly vernacular even in the dialogue in my stories:
+my characters must not say they wanted to do so and so, but wished, and
+the like. In a copy of one of my books which I found him reading, I saw
+he had corrected my erring Western woulds and shoulds; as he grew old he
+was less and less able to restrain himself from setting people right to
+their faces. Once, in the vast area of my ignorance, he specified my
+small acquaintance with a certain period of English poetry, saying,
+"You're rather shady, there, old fellow." But he would not have had me
+too learned, holding that he had himself been hurt for literature by his
+scholarship.
+
+His patience in analyzing my work with me might have been the easy effort
+of his habit of teaching; and his willingness to give himself and his own
+was no doubt more signally attested in his asking a brother man of
+letters who wished to work up a subject in the college library, to stay a
+fortnight in his house, and to share his study, his beloved study, with
+him. This must truly have cost him dear, as any author of fixed habits
+will understand. Happily the man of letters was a good fellow, and knew
+how to prize the favor-done him, but if he had been otherwise, it would
+have been the same to Lowell. He not only endured, but did many things
+for the weaker brethren, which were amusing enough to one in the secret
+of his inward revolt. Yet in these things he was considerate also of the
+editor whom he might have made the sharer of his self-sacrifice, and he
+seldom offered me manuscripts for others. The only real burden of the
+kind that he put upon me was the diary of a Virginian who had travelled
+in New England during the early thirties, and had set down his
+impressions of men and manners there. It began charmingly, and went on
+very well under Lowell's discreet pruning, but after a while he seemed to
+fall in love with the character of the diarist so much that he could not
+bear to cut anything.
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+He had a great tenderness for the broken and ruined South, whose sins he
+felt that he had had his share in visiting upon her, and he was willing
+to do what he could to ease her sorrows in the case of any particular
+Southerner. He could not help looking askance upon the dramatic shows of
+retribution which some of the Northern politicians were working, but with
+all his misgivings he continued to act with the Republican party until
+after the election of Hayes; he was away from the country during the
+Garfield campaign. He was in fact one of the Massachusetts electors
+chosen by the Republican majority in 1816, and in that most painful hour
+when there was question of the policy and justice of counting Hayes in
+for the presidency, it was suggested by some of Lowell's friends that he
+should use the original right of the electors under the constitution, and
+vote for Tilden, whom one vote would have chosen president over Hayes.
+After he had cast his vote for Hayes, he quietly referred to the matter
+one day, in the moment of lighting his pipe, with perhaps the faintest
+trace of indignation in his tone. He said that whatever the first intent
+of the constitution was, usage had made the presidential electors
+strictly the instruments of the party which chose them, and that for him
+to have voted for Tilden when he had been chosen to vote for Hayes would
+have-been an act of bad faith.
+
+He would have resumed for me all the old kindness of our relations before
+the recent year of his absence, but this had inevitably worked a little
+estrangement. He had at least lost the habit of me, and that says much
+in such matters. He was not so perfectly at rest in the Cambridge
+environment; in certain indefinable ways it did not so entirely suffice
+him, though he would have been then and always the last to allow this. I
+imagine his friends realized more than he, that certain delicate but
+vital filaments of attachment had frayed and parted in alien air, and
+left him heart-loose as he had not been before.
+
+I do not know whether it crossed his mind after the election of Hayes
+that he might be offered some place abroad, but it certainly crossed the
+minds of some of his friends, and I could not feel that I was acting for
+myself alone when I used a family connection with the President, very
+early in his term, to let him know that I believed Lowell would accept a
+diplomatic mission. I could assure him that I was writing wholly without
+Lowell's privity or authority, and I got back such a letter as I could
+wish in its delicate sense of the situation. The President said that he
+had already thought of offering Lowell something, and he gave me the
+pleasure, a pleasure beyond any other I could imagine, of asking Lowell
+whether he would accept the mission to Austria. I lost no time carrying
+his letter to Elmwood, where I found Lowell over his coffee at dinner. He
+saw me at the threshold, and called to me through the open door to come
+in, and I handed him the letter, and sat down at table while he ran it
+through. When he had read it, he gave a quick "Ah!" and threw it over
+the length of the table to Mrs. Lowell. She read it in a smiling and
+loyal reticence, as if she would not say one word of all she might wish
+to say in urging his acceptance, though I could see that she was
+intensely eager for it. The whole situation was of a perfect New England
+character in its tacit significance; after Lowell had taken his coffee we
+turned into his study without further allusion to the matter.
+
+A day or two later he came to my house to say that he could not accept
+the Austrian mission, and to ask me to tell the President so for him, and
+make his acknowledgments, which he would also write himself. He remained
+talking a little while of other things, and when he rose to go, he said
+with a sigh of vague reluctance, "I should like to see a play of
+Calderon," as if it had nothing to do with any wish of his that could
+still be fulfilled. "Upon this hint I acted," and in due time it was
+found in Washington, that the gentleman who had been offered the Spanish
+mission would as lief go to Austria, and Lowell was sent to Madrid.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+When we met in London, some years later, he came almost every afternoon
+to my lodging, and the story of our old-time Cambridge walks began again
+in London phrases. There were not the vacant lots and outlying fields of
+his native place, but we made shift with the vast, simple parks, and we
+walked on the grass as we could not have done in an American park, and
+were glad to feel the earth under our feet. I said how much it was like
+those earlier tramps; and that pleased him, for he wished, whenever a
+thing delighted him, to find a Cambridge quality in it.
+
+But he was in love with everything English, and was determined I should
+be so too, beginning with the English weather, which in summer cannot be
+overpraised. He carried, of course, an umbrella, but he would not put it
+up in the light showers that caught us at times, saying that the English
+rain never wetted you. The thick short turf delighted him; he would
+scarcely allow that the trees were the worse for foliage blighted by a
+vile easterly storm in the spring of that year. The tender air, the
+delicate veils that the moisture in it cast about all objects at the
+least remove, the soft colors of the flowers, the dull blue of the low
+sky showing through the rifts of the dirty white clouds, the hovering
+pall of London smoke, were all dear to him, and he was anxious that I
+should not lose anything of their charm.
+
+He was anxious that I should not miss the value of anything in England,
+and while he volunteered that the aristocracy had the corruptions of
+aristocracies everywhere, he insisted upon my respectful interest in it
+because it was so historical. Perhaps there was a touch of irony in this
+demand, but it is certain that he was very happy in England. He had come
+of the age when a man likes smooth, warm keeping, in which he need make
+no struggle for his comfort; disciplined and obsequious service; society,
+perfectly ascertained within the larger society which we call
+civilization; and in an alien environment, for which he was in no wise
+responsible, he could have these without a pang of the self-reproach
+which at home makes a man unhappy amidst his luxuries, when he considers
+their cost to others. He had a position which forbade thought of
+unfairness in the conditions; he must not wake because of the slave, it
+was his duty to sleep. Besides, at that time Lowell needed all the rest
+he could get, for he had lately passed through trials such as break the
+strength of men, and how them with premature age. He was living alone in
+his little house in Lowndes Square, and Mrs. Lowell was in the country,
+slowly recovering from the effects of the terrible typhus which she had
+barely survived in Madrid. He was yet so near the anguish of that
+experience that he told me he had still in his nerves the expectation of
+a certain agonized cry from her which used to rend them. But he said he
+had adjusted himself to this, and he went on to speak with a patience
+which was more affecting in him than in men of more phlegmatic
+temperament, of how we were able to adjust ourselves to all our trials
+and to the constant presence of pain. He said he was never free of a
+certain distress, which was often a sharp pang, in one of his shoulders,
+but his physique had established such relations with it that, though he
+was never unconscious of it, he was able to endure it without a
+recognition of it as suffering.
+
+He seemed to me, however, very well, and at his age of sixty-three, I
+could not see that he was less alert and vigorous than he was when I
+first knew him in Cambridge. He had the same brisk, light step, and
+though his beard was well whitened and his auburn hair had grown ashen
+through the red, his face had the freshness and his eyes the clearness of
+a young man's. I suppose the novelty of his life kept him from thinking
+about his years; or perhaps in contact with those great, insenescent
+Englishmen, he could not feel himself old. At any rate he did not once
+speak of age, as he used to do ten years earlier, and I, then half
+through my forties, was still "You young dog" to him. It was a bright
+and cheerful renewal of the early kindliness between us, on which indeed
+there had never been a shadow, except such as distance throws. He wished
+apparently to do everything he could to assure us of his personal
+interest; and we were amused to find him nervously apprehensive of any
+purpose, such as was far from us, to profit by him officially. He
+betrayed a distinct relief when he found we were not going to come upon
+him even for admissions to the houses of parliament, which we were to see
+by means of an English acquaintance. He had not perhaps found some other
+fellow-citizens so considerate; he dreaded the half-duties of his place,
+like presentations to the queen, and complained of the cheap ambitions he
+had to gratify in that way.
+
+He was so eager to have me like England in every way, and seemed so fond
+of the English, that I thought it best to ask him whether he minded my
+quoting, in a paper about Lexington, which I was just then going to print
+in a London magazine, some humorous lines of his expressing the mounting
+satisfaction of an imaginary Yankee story-teller who has the old fight
+terminate in Lord Percy's coming
+
+     "To hammer stone for life in Concord jail."
+
+It had occurred to me that it might possibly embarrass him to have this
+patriotic picture presented to a public which could not take our Fourth
+of July pleasure in it, and I offered to suppress it, as I did afterwards
+quite for literary reasons. He said, No, let it stand, and let them make
+the worst of it; and I fancy that much of his success with a people who
+are not gingerly with other people's sensibilities came from the
+frankness with which he trampled on their prejudice when he chose. He
+said he always told them, when there was question of such things, that
+the best society he had ever known was in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He
+contended that the best English was spoken there; and so it was, when he
+spoke it.
+
+We were in London out of the season, and he was sorry that he could not
+have me meet some titles who he declared had found pleasure in my books;
+when we returned from Italy in the following June, he was prompt to do me
+this honor. I dare say he wished me to feel it to its last implication,
+and I did my best, but there was nothing in the evening I enjoyed so much
+as his coming up to Mrs. Lowell, at the close, when there was only a
+title or two left, and saying to her as he would have said to her at
+Elmwood, where she would have personally planned it, "Fanny, that was a
+fine dinner you gave us." Of course, this was in a tender burlesque; but
+it remains the supreme impression of what seemed to me a cloudlessly
+happy period for Lowell. His wife was quite recovered of her long
+suffering, and was again at the head of his house, sharing in his
+pleasures, and enjoying his successes for his sake; successes so great
+that people spoke of him seriously, as "an addition to society" in
+London, where one man more or less seemed like a drop in the sea. She was
+a woman perfectly of the New England type and tradition: almost
+repellantly shy at first, and almost glacially cold with new
+acquaintance, but afterwards very sweet and cordial. She was of a dark
+beauty with a regular face of the Spanish outline; Lowell was of an ideal
+manner towards her, and of an admiration which delicately travestied
+itself and which she knew how to receive with smiling irony. After her
+death, which occurred while he was still in England, he never spoke of
+her to me, though before that he used to be always bringing her name in,
+with a young lover-like fondness.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+In the hurry of the London season I did not see so much of Lowell on our
+second sojourn as on our first, but once when we were alone in his study
+there was a return to the terms of the old meetings in Cambridge. He
+smoked his pipe, and sat by his fire and philosophized; and but for the
+great London sea swirling outside and bursting through our shelter, and
+dashing him with notes that must be instantly answered, it was a very
+fair image of the past. He wanted to tell me about his coachman whom he
+had got at on his human side with great liking and amusement, and there
+was a patient gentleness in his manner with the footman who had to keep
+coming in upon him with those notes which was like the echo of his young
+faith in the equality of men. But he always distinguished between the
+simple unconscious equality of the ordinary American and its assumption
+by a foreigner. He said he did not mind such an American's coming into
+his house with his hat on; but if a German or Englishman did it, he
+wanted to knock it off. He was apt to be rather punctilious in his shows
+of deference towards others, and at one time he practised removing his
+own hat when he went into shops in Cambridge. It must have mystified the
+Cambridge salesmen, and I doubt if he kept it up.
+
+With reference to the doctrine of his young poetry, the fierce and the
+tender humanity of his storm and stress period, I fancy a kind of baffle
+in Lowell, which I should not perhaps find it easy to prove. I never
+knew him by word or hint to renounce this doctrine, but he could not come
+to seventy years without having seen many high hopes fade, and known many
+inspired prophecies fail. When we have done our best to make the world
+over, we are apt to be dismayed by finding it in much the old shape. As
+he said of the moral government of the universe, the scale is so vast,
+and a little difference, a little change for the better, is scarcely
+perceptible to the eager consciousness of the wholesale reformer. But
+with whatever sense of disappointment, of doubt as to his own deeds for
+truer freedom and for better conditions I believe his sympathy was still
+with those who had some heart for hoping and striving. I am sure that
+though he did not agree with me in some of my own later notions for the
+redemption of the race, he did not like me the less but rather the more
+because (to my own great surprise I confess) I had now and then the
+courage of my convictions, both literary and social.
+
+He was probably most at odds with me in regard to my theories of fiction,
+though he persisted in declaring his pleasure in my own fiction. He was
+in fact, by nature and tradition, thoroughly romantic, and he could not
+or would not suffer realism in any but a friend. He steadfastly refused
+even to read the Russian masters, to his immense loss, as I tried to
+persuade him, and even among the modern Spaniards, for whom he might have
+had a sort of personal kindness from his love of Cervantes, he chose one
+for his praise the least worthy, of it, and bore me down with his heavier
+metal in argument when I opposed to Alarcon's factitiousness the
+delightful genuineness of Valdes. Ibsen, with all the Norwegians, he put
+far from him; he would no more know them than the Russians; the French
+naturalists he abhorred. I thought him all wrong, but you do not try
+improving your elders when they have come to three score and ten years,
+and I would rather have had his affection unbroken by our difference of
+opinion than a perfect agreement. Where he even imagined that this
+difference could work me harm, he was anxious to have me know that he
+meant me none; and he was at the trouble to write me a letter when a
+Boston paper had perverted its report of what he said in a public lecture
+to my disadvantage, and to assure me that he had not me in mind. When
+once he had given his liking, he could not bear that any shadow of change
+should seem to have come upon him. He had a most beautiful and endearing
+ideal of friendship; he desired to affirm it and to reaffirm it as often
+as occasion offered, and if occasion did not offer, he made occasion. It
+did not matter what you said or did that contraried him; if he thought he
+had essentially divined you, you were still the same: and on his part he
+was by no means exacting of equal demonstration, but seemed not even to
+wish it.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+After he was replaced at London by a minister more immediately
+representative of the Democratic administration, he came home. He made a
+brave show of not caring to have remained away, but in truth he had
+become very fond of England, where he had made so many friends, and where
+the distinction he had, in that comfortably padded environment, was so
+agreeable to him.
+
+It would have been like him to have secretly hoped that the new President
+might keep him in London, but he never betrayed any ignoble
+disappointment, and he would not join in any blame of him. At our first
+meeting after he came home he spoke of the movement which had made Mr.
+Cleveland president, and said he supposed that if he had been here, he
+should have been in it. All his friends were, he added, a little
+helplessly; but he seemed not to dislike my saying I knew one of his
+friends who was not: in fact, as I have told, he never disliked a plump
+difference--unless he disliked the differer.
+
+For several years he went back to England every summer, and it was not
+until he took up his abode at Elmwood again that he spent a whole year at
+home. One winter he passed at his sister's home in Boston, but mostly he
+lived with his daughter at Southborough. I have heard a story of his
+going to Elmwood soon after his return in 1885, and sitting down in his
+old study, where he declared with tears that the place was full of
+ghosts. But four or five years later it was well for family reasons that
+he should live there; and about the same time it happened that I had
+taken a house for the summer in his neighborhood. He came to see me, and
+to assure me, in all tacit forms of his sympathy in a sorrow for which
+there could be no help; but it was not possible that the old intimate
+relations should be resumed. The affection was there, as much on his
+side as on mine, I believe; but he was now an old man and I was an
+elderly man, and we could not, without insincerity, approach each other
+in the things that had drawn us together in earlier and happier years.
+His course was run; my own, in which he had taken such a generous
+pleasure, could scarcely move his jaded interest. His life, so far as it
+remained to him, had renewed itself in other air; the later friendships
+beyond seas sufficed him, and were without the pang, without the effort
+that must attend the knitting up of frayed ties here.
+
+He could never have been anything but American, if he had tried, and he
+certainly never tried; but he certainly did not return to the outward
+simplicities of his life as I first knew it. There was no more
+round-hat-and-sack-coat business for him; he wore a frock and a high hat,
+and whatever else was rather like London than Cambridge; I do not know
+but drab gaiters sometimes added to the effect of a gentleman of the old
+school which he now produced upon the witness. Some fastidiousnesses
+showed themselves in him, which were not so surprising. He complained of
+the American lower class manner; the conductor and cabman would be kind
+to you but they would not be respectful, and he could not see the fun of
+this in the old way. Early in our acquaintance he rather stupified me by
+saying, "I like you because you don't put your hands on me," and I heard
+of his consenting to some sort of reception in those last years, "Yes, if
+they won't shake hands."
+
+Ever since his visit to Rome in 1875 he had let his heavy mustache grow
+long till it dropped below the corners of his beard, which was now almost
+white; his face had lost the ruddy hue so characteristic of him. I fancy
+he was then ailing with premonitions of the disorder which a few years
+later proved mortal, but he still bore himself with sufficient vigor, and
+he walked the distance between his house and mine, though once when I
+missed his visit the family reported that after he came in he sat a long
+time with scarcely a word, as if too weary to talk. That winter, I went
+into Boston to live, and I saw him only at infrequent intervals, when I
+could go out to Elmwood. At such times I found him sitting in the room
+which was formerly the drawing-room, but which had been joined with his
+study by taking away the partitions beside the heavy mass of the old
+colonial chimney. He told me that when he was a newborn babe, the nurse
+had carried him round this chimney, for luck, and now in front of the
+same hearth, the white old man stretched himself in an easy-chair, with
+his writing-pad on his knees and his books on the table at his elbow, and
+was willing to be entreated not to rise. I remember the sun used to come
+in at the eastern windows full pour, and bathe the air in its warmth.
+
+He always hailed me gayly, and if I found him with letters newly come
+from England, as I sometimes did, he glowed and sparkled with fresh life.
+He wanted to read passages from those letters, he wanted to talk about
+their writers, and to make me feel their worth and charm as he did. He
+still dreamed of going back to England the next summer, but that was not
+to be. One day he received me not less gayly than usual, but with a
+certain excitement, and began to tell me about an odd experience he had
+had, not at all painful, but which had very much mystified him. He had
+since seen the doctor, and the doctor had assured him that there was
+nothing alarming in what had happened, and in recalling this assurance,
+he began to look at the humorous aspects of the case, and to make some
+jokes about it. He wished to talk of it, as men do of their maladies,
+and very fully, and I gave him such proof of my interest as even inviting
+him to talk of it would convey. In spite of the doctor's assurance, and
+his joyful acceptance of it, I doubt if at the bottom of his heart there
+was not the stir of an uneasy misgiving; but he had not for a long time
+shown himself so cheerful.
+
+It was the beginning of the end. He recovered and relapsed, and
+recovered again; but never for long. Late in the spring I came out, and
+he had me stay to dinner, which was somehow as it used to be at two
+o'clock; and after dinner we went out on his lawn. He got a long-handled
+spud, and tried to grub up some dandelions which he found in his turf,
+but after a moment or two he threw it down, and put his hand upon his
+back with a groan. I did not see him again till I came out to take leave
+of him before going away for the summer, and then I found him sitting on
+the little porch in a western corner of his house, with a volume of Scott
+closed upon his finger. There were some other people, and our meeting
+was with the constraint of their presence. It was natural in nothing so
+much as his saying very significantly to me, as if he knew of my heresies
+concerning Scott, and would have me know he did not approve of them, that
+there was nothing he now found so much pleasure in as Scott's novels.
+Another friend, equally heretical, was by, but neither of us attempted to
+gainsay him. Lowell talked very little, but he told of having been a
+walk to Beaver Brook, and of having wished to jump from one stone to
+another in the stream, and of having had to give it up. He said, without
+completing the sentence, If it had come to that with him! Then he fell
+silent again; and with some vain talk of seeing him when I came back in
+the fall, I went away sick at heart. I was not to see him again, and I
+shall not look upon his like.
+
+I am aware that I have here shown him from this point and from that in a
+series of sketches which perhaps collectively impart, but do not assemble
+his personality in one impression. He did not, indeed, make one
+impression upon me, but a thousand impressions, which I should seek in
+vain to embody in a single presentment. What I have cloudily before me
+is the vision of a very lofty and simple soul, perplexed, and as it were
+surprised and even dismayed at the complexity of the effects from motives
+so single in it, but escaping always to a clear expression of what was
+noblest and loveliest in itself at the supreme moments, in the divine
+exigencies. I believe neither in heroes nor in saints; but I believe in
+great and good men, for I have known them, and among such men Lowell was
+of the richest nature I have known. His nature was not always serene or
+pellucid; it was sometimes roiled by the currents that counter and cross
+in all of us; but it was without the least alloy of insincerity, and it
+was never darkened by the shadow of a selfish fear. His genius was an
+instrument that responded in affluent harmony to the power that made him
+a humorist and that made him a poet, and appointed him rarely to be quite
+either alone.
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+A BELATED GUEST
+
+It is doubtful whether the survivor of any order of things finds
+compensation in the privilege, however undisputed by his contemporaries,
+of recording his memories of it. This is, in the first two or three
+instances, a pleasure. It is sweet to sit down, in the shade or by the
+fire, and recall names, looks, and tones from the past; and if the
+Absences thus entreated to become Presences are those of famous people,
+they lend to the fond historian a little of their lustre, in which he
+basks for the time with an agreeable sense of celebrity. But another
+time comes, and comes very soon, when the pensive pleasure changes to the
+pain of duty, and the precious privilege converts itself into a grievous
+obligation. You are unable to choose your company among those immortal
+shades; if one, why not another, where all seem to have a right to such
+gleams of this 'dolce lome' as your reminiscences can shed upon them?
+Then they gather so rapidly, as the years pass, in these pale realms,
+that one, if one continues to survive, is in danger of wearing out such
+welcome, great or small, as met ones recollections in the first two or
+three instances, if one does one's duty by each. People begin to say,
+and not without reason, in a world so hurried and wearied as this: "Ah,
+here he is again with his recollections!" Well, but if the recollections
+by some magical good-fortune chance to concern such a contemporary of his
+as, say, Bret Harte, shall not he be partially justified, or at least
+excused?
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+My recollections of Bret Harte begin with the arrest, on the Atlantic
+shore, of that progress of his from the Pacific Slope, which, in the
+simple days of 1871, was like the progress of a prince, in the universal
+attention and interest which met and followed it. He was indeed a
+prince, a fairy prince in whom every lover of his novel and enchanting
+art felt a patriotic property, for his promise and performance in those
+earliest tales of 'The Luck of Roaring Camp', and 'Tennessee's Partner',
+and 'Maggles', and 'The Outcasts of Poker Flat', were the earnests of an
+American literature to come. If it is still to come, in great measure,
+that is not Harte's fault, for he kept on writing those stories, in one
+form or another, as long as he lived. He wrote them first and last in
+the spirit of Dickens, which no man of his time could quite help doing,
+but he wrote them from the life of Bret Harte, on the soil and in the air
+of the newest kind of new world, and their freshness took the soul of his
+fellow-countrymen not only with joy, but with pride such as the
+Europeans, who adored him much longer, could never know in him.
+
+When the adventurous young editor who had proposed being his host for
+Cambridge and the Boston neighborhood, while Harte was still in San
+Francisco, and had not yet begun his princely progress eastward, read of
+the honors that attended his coming from point to point, his courage
+fell, as if he had perhaps, committed himself in too great an enterprise.
+Who was he, indeed, that he should think of making this
+
+        "Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,"
+
+his guest, especially when he heard that in Chicago Harte failed of
+attending a banquet of honor because the givers of it had not sent a
+carriage to fetch him to it, as the alleged use was in San Francisco?
+Whether true or not, and it was probably not true in just that form, it
+must have been this rumor which determined his host to drive into Boston
+for him with the handsomest hack which the livery of Cambridge afforded,
+and not trust to the horse-car and the local expressman to get him and
+his baggage out, as he would have done with a less portentous guest.
+However it was, he instantly lost all fear when they met at the station,
+and Harte pressed forward with his cordial hand-clasp, as if he were not
+even a fairy prince, and with that voice and laugh which were surely the
+most winning in the world. He was then, as always, a child of extreme
+fashion as to his clothes and the cut of his beard, which he wore in a
+mustache and the drooping side-whiskers of the day, and his jovial
+physiognomy was as winning as his voice, with its straight nose and
+fascinating thrust of the under lip, its fine eyes, and good forehead,
+then thickly crowned with the black hair which grew early white, while
+his mustache remained dark the most enviable and consoling effect
+possible in the universal mortal necessity of either aging or dying. He
+was, as one could not help seeing, thickly pitted, but after the first
+glance one forgot this, so that a lady who met him for the first time
+could say to him, "Mr. Harte, aren't you afraid to go about in the cars
+so recklessly when there is this scare about smallpox?" "No, madam," he
+could answer in that rich note of his, with an irony touched by
+pseudo-pathos, "I bear a charmed life."
+
+The drive out from Boston was not too long for getting on terms of
+personal friendship with the family which just filled the hack, the two
+boys intensely interested in the novelties of a New England city and
+suburb, and the father and mother continually exchanging admiration of
+such aspects of nature as presented themselves in the leafless sidewalk
+trees, and patches of park and lawn. They found everything so fine, so
+refined, after the gigantic coarseness of California, where the natural
+forms were so vast that one could not get on companionable terms with
+them. Their host heard them without misgiving for the world of romance
+which Harte had built up among those huge forms, and with a subtle
+perception that this was no excursion of theirs to the East, but a
+lifelong exodus from the exile which he presently understood they must
+always have felt California to be. It is different now, when people are
+every day being born in California, and must begin to feel it home from
+the first breath, but it is notable that none of the Californians of that
+great early day have gone back to live amid the scenes which inspired and
+prospered them.
+
+Before they came in sight of the editor's humble roof he had mocked
+himself to his guest for his trepidations, and Harte with burlesque
+magnanimity had consented to be for that occasion only something less
+formidable than he had loomed afar. He accepted with joy the theory of
+passing a week in the home of virtuous poverty, and the week began as
+delightfully as it went on. From first to last Cambridge amused him as
+much as it charmed him by that air of academic distinction which was
+stranger to him even than the refined trees and grass. It has already
+been told how, after a list of the local celebrities had been recited to
+him, he said, "why, you couldn't stand on your front porch and fire off
+your revolver without bringing down a two volumer," and no doubt the
+pleasure he had in it was the effect of its contrast with the wild
+California he had known, and perhaps, when he had not altogether known
+it, had invented.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+Cambridge began very promptly to show him those hospitalities which he
+could value, and continued the fable of his fairy princeliness in the
+curiosity of those humbler admirers who could not hope to be his hosts or
+his fellow-guests at dinner or luncheon. Pretty presences in the
+tie-backs of the period were seen to flit before the home of virtuous
+poverty, hungering for any chance sight of him which his outgoings or
+incomings might give. The chances were better with the outgoings than
+with the incomings, for these were apt to be so hurried, in the final
+result of his constitutional delays, as to have the rapidity of the
+homing pigeon's flight, and to afford hardly a glimpse to the quickest
+eye. It cannot harm him, or any one now, to own that Harte was nearly
+always late for those luncheons and dinners which he was always going out
+to, and it needed the anxieties and energies of both families to get him
+into his clothes, and then into the carriage where a good deal of final
+buttoning must have been done, in order that he might not arrive so very
+late. He was the only one concerned who was quite unconcerned; his
+patience with his delays was inexhaustible; he arrived at the expected
+houses smiling, serenely jovial, radiating a bland gaiety from his whole
+person, and ready to ignore any discomfort he might have occasioned.
+
+Of course, people were glad to have him on his own terms, and it may be
+truly said that it was worth while to have him on any terms. There never
+was a more charming companion, an easier or more delightful guest.
+
+It was not from what he said, for he was not much of a talker, and almost
+nothing of a story-teller; but he could now and then drop the fittest
+word, and with a glance or smile of friendly intelligence express the
+appreciation of another's fit word which goes far to establish for a man
+the character of boon humorist. It must be said of him that if he took
+the honors easily that were paid him he took them modestly, and never by
+word or look invited them, or implied that he expected them. It was fine
+to see him humorously accepting the humorous attribution of scientific
+sympathies from Agassiz, in compliment of his famous epic describing the
+incidents that "broke up the society upon the Stanislow." It was a
+little fearsome to hear him frankly owning to Lowell his dislike for
+something over-literary in the phrasing of certain verses of 'The
+Cathedral.' But Lowell could stand that sort of thing from a man who
+could say the sort of things that Harte said to him of that delicious
+line picturing the bobolink as he
+
+     "Runs down a brook of laughter in the air."
+
+This, Harte told him, was the line he liked best of all his lines, and
+Lowell smoked well content with the praise. Yet they were not men to get
+on easily together, Lowell having limitations in directions where Harte
+had none. Afterward in London they did not meet often or willingly.
+Lowell owned the brilliancy and uncommonness of Harte's gift, while he
+sumptuously surfeited his passion of finding everybody more or less a Jew
+by finding that Harte was at least half a Jew on his father's side; he
+had long contended for the Hebraicism of his name.
+
+With all his appreciation of the literary eminences whom Fields used to
+class together as "the old saints," Harte had a spice of irreverence that
+enabled him to take them more ironically than they might have liked, and
+to see the fun of a minor literary man's relation to them. Emerson's
+smoking amused him, as a Jovian self-indulgence divinely out of character
+with so supreme a god, and he shamelessly burlesqued it, telling how
+Emerson at Concord had proposed having a "wet night" with him over a
+glass of sherry, and had urged the scant wine upon his young friend with
+a hospitable gesture of his cigar. But this was long after the Cambridge
+episode, in which Longfellow alone escaped the corrosive touch of his
+subtle irreverence, or, more strictly speaking, had only the effect of
+his reverence. That gentle and exquisitely modest dignity, of
+Longfellow's he honored with as much veneration as it was in him to
+bestow, and he had that sense of Longfellow's beautiful and perfected art
+which is almost a test of a critic's own fineness.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+As for Harte's talk, it was mostly ironical, not to the extreme of
+satire, but tempered to an agreeable coolness even for the things he
+admired. He did not apparently care to hear himself praised, but he
+could very accurately and perfectly mark his discernment of excellence in
+others. He was at times a keen observer of nature and again not,
+apparently. Something was said before him and Lowell of the beauty of
+his description of a rabbit, startled with fear among the ferns, and
+lifting its head with the pulsation of its frightened heart visibly
+shaking it; then the talk turned on the graphic homeliness of Dante's
+noticing how the dog's skin moves upon it, and Harte spoke of the
+exquisite shudder with which a horse tries to rid itself of a fly.
+
+But once again, when an azalea was shown to him as the sort of bush that
+Sandy drunkenly slept under in 'The Idyl of Iced Gulch', he asked, "Why,
+is that an azalea?" To be sure, this might have been less from his
+ignorance or indifference concerning the quality of the bush he had sent
+Sandy to sleep under than from his willingness to make a mock of an
+azalea in a very small pot, so disproportionate to uses which an azalea
+of Californian size could easily lend itself to.
+
+You never could be sure of Harte; he could only by chance be caught in
+earnest about anything or anybody. Except for those slight recognitions
+of literary, traits in his talk with Lowell, nothing remained from his
+conversation but the general criticism he passed upon his brilliant
+fellow-Hebrew Heine, as "rather scorbutic." He preferred to talk about
+the little matters of common incident and experience. He amused himself
+with such things as the mystification of the postman of whom he asked his
+way to Phillips Avenue, where he adventurously supposed his host to be
+living. "Why," the postman said, "there is no Phillips Avenue in
+Cambridge. There's Phillips Place." "Well," Harte assented, "Phillips
+Place will do; but there is a Phillips Avenue." He entered eagerly into
+the canvass of the distinctions and celebrities asked to meet him at the
+reception made for him, but he had even a greater pleasure in
+compassionating his host for the vast disparity between the caterer's
+china and plated ware and the simplicities and humilities of the home of
+virtuous poverty; and he spluttered with delight at the sight of the
+lofty 'epergnes' set up and down the supper-table when he was brought in
+to note the preparations made in his honor. Those monumental structures
+were an inexhaustible joy to him; he walked round and round the room, and
+viewed them in different perspectives, so as to get the full effect of
+the towering forms that dwarfed it so.
+
+He was a tease, as many a sweet and fine wit is apt to be, but his
+teasing was of the quality of a caress, so much kindness went with it. He
+lamented as an irreparable loss his having missed seeing that night an
+absent-minded brother in literature, who came in rubber shoes, and
+forgetfully wore them throughout the evening. That hospitable soul of
+Ralph Keeler, who had known him in California, but had trembled for their
+acquaintance when he read of all the honors that might well have spoiled
+Harte for the friends of his simpler days, rejoiced in the unchanged
+cordiality of his nature when they met, and presently gave him one of
+those restaurant lunches in Boston, which he was always sumptuously
+providing out of his destitution. Harte was the life of a time which was
+perhaps less a feast of reason than a flow of soul. The truth is, there
+was nothing but careless stories carelessly told, and jokes and laughing,
+and a great deal of mere laughing without the jokes, the whole as unlike
+the ideal of a literary symposium as well might be; but there was present
+one who met with that pleasant Boston company for the first time, and to
+whom Harte attributed a superstition of Boston seriousness not realized
+then and there. "Look at him," he said, from time to time. "This is the
+dream of his life," and then shouted and choked with fun at the
+difference between the occasion and the expectation he would have
+imagined in his commensal's mind. At a dinner long after in London,
+where several of the commensals of that time met again, with other
+literary friends of a like age and stature, Harte laid his arms well
+along their shoulders as they formed in a half-circle before him, and
+screamed out in mocking mirth at the bulbous favor to which the slim
+shapes of the earlier date had come. The sight was not less a rapture to
+him that he was himself the prey of the same practical joke from the
+passing years. The hair which the years had wholly swept from some of
+those thoughtful brows, or left spindling autumnal spears, "or few or
+none," to "shake against the cold," had whitened to a wintry snow on his,
+while his mustache had kept its youthful black. "He looks," one of his
+friends said to another as they walked home together, "like a French
+marquis of the ancien regime." "Yes," the other assented, thoughtfully,
+"or like an American actor made up for the part."
+
+The saying closely fitted the outward fact, but was of a subtle injustice
+in its implication of anything histrionic in Harte's nature. Never was
+any man less a 'poseur'; he made simply and helplessly known what he was
+at any and every moment, and he would join the witness very cheerfully in
+enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself. In the
+course of events, which were in his case so very human, it came about on
+a subsequent visit of his to Boston that an impatient creditor decided to
+right himself out of the proceeds of the lecture which was to be given,
+and had the law corporeally present at the house of the friend where
+Harte dined, and in the anteroom at the lecture-hall, and on the
+platform, where the lecture was delivered with beautiful aplomb and
+untroubled charm. He was indeed the only one privy to the law's presence
+who was not the least affected by it, so that when his host of an earlier
+time ventured to suggest, "Well, Harte, this is the old literary
+tradition; this is the Fleet business over again," he joyously smote his
+thigh and crowed out, "Yes, the Fleet!" No doubt he tasted all the
+delicate humor of the situation, and his pleasure in it was quite
+unaffected.
+
+If his temperament was not adapted to the harsh conditions of the elder
+American world, it might very well be that his temperament was not
+altogether in the wrong. If it disabled him for certain experiences of
+life, it was the source of what was most delightful in his personality,
+and perhaps most beautiful in his talent. It enabled him to do such
+things as he did without being at all anguished for the things he did not
+do, and indeed could not. His talent was not a facile gift; he owned
+that he often went day after day to his desk, and sat down before that
+yellow post-office paper on which he liked to write his literature, in
+that exquisitely refined script of his, without being able to inscribe a
+line. It may be owned for him that though he came to the East at
+thirty-four, which ought to have been the very prime of his powers, he
+seemed to have arrived after the age of observation was past for him. He
+saw nothing aright, either in Newport, where he went to live, or in New
+York, where he sojourned, or on those lecturing tours which took him
+about the whole country; or if he saw it aright, he could not report it
+aright, or would not. After repeated and almost invariable failures to
+deal with the novel characters and circumstances which he encountered he
+left off trying, and frankly went back to the semi-mythical California he
+had half discovered, half created, and wrote Bret Harte over and over as
+long as he lived. This, whether he did it from instinct or from reason,
+was the best thing he could do, and it went as nearly as might be to
+satisfy the insatiable English fancy for the wild America no longer to be
+found on our map.
+
+It is imaginable of Harte that this temperament defended him from any
+bitterness in the disappointment he may have shared with that simple
+American public which in the early eighteen-seventies expected any and
+everything of him in fiction and drama. The long breath was not his; he
+could not write a novel, though he produced the like of one or two, and
+his plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it. At any
+rate, they could not keep it, even when they got it, and they denoted the
+fatigue or the indifference of their author in being dramatizations of
+his longer or shorter fictions, and not originally dramatic efforts. The
+direction in which his originality lasted longest, and most strikingly
+affirmed his power, was in the direction of his verse.
+
+Whatever minds there may be about Harte's fiction finally, there can
+hardly be more than one mind about his poetry. He was indeed a poet;
+whether he wrote what drolly called itself "dialect," or wrote language,
+he was a poet of a fine and fresh touch. It must be allowed him that in
+prose as well he had the inventive gift, but he had it in verse far more
+importantly. There are lines, phrases, turns in his poems,
+characterizations, and pictures which will remain as enduringly as
+anything American, if that is not saying altogether too little for them.
+In poetry he rose to all the occasions he made for himself, though he
+could not rise to the occasions made for him, and so far failed in the
+demands he acceded to for a Phi Beta Kappa poem, as to come to that
+august Harvard occasion with a jingle so trivial, so out of keeping, so
+inadequate that his enemies, if he ever truly had any, must have suffered
+from it almost as much as his friends. He himself did not suffer from
+his failure, from having read before the most elect assembly of the
+country a poem which would hardly have served the careless needs of an
+informal dinner after the speaking had begun; he took the whole
+disastrous business lightly, gayly, leniently, kindly, as that golden
+temperament of his enabled him to take all the good or bad of life.
+
+The first year of his Eastern sojourn was salaried in a sum which took
+the souls of all his young contemporaries with wonder, if no baser
+passion, in the days when dollars were of so much farther flight than
+now, but its net result in a literary return to his publishers was one
+story and two or three poems. They had not profited much by his book,
+which, it will doubtless amaze a time of fifty thousand editions selling
+before their publication, to learn had sold only thirty-five hundred in
+the sixth month of its career, as Harte himself,
+
+     "With sick and scornful looks averse,"
+
+confided to his Cambridge host after his first interview with the Boston
+counting-room. It was the volume which contained "The Luck of Roaring
+Camp," and the other early tales which made him a continental, and then
+an all but a world-wide fame. Stories that had been talked over, and
+laughed over, and cried over all up and down the land, that had been
+received with acclaim by criticism almost as boisterous as their
+popularity, and recognized as the promise of greater things than any done
+before in their kind, came to no more than this pitiful figure over the
+booksellers' counters. It argued much for the publishers that in spite
+of this stupefying result they were willing, they were eager, to pay him
+ten thousand dollars for whatever, however much or little, he chose to
+write in a year: Their offer was made in Boston, after some offers
+mortifyingly mean, and others insultingly vague, had been made in New
+York.
+
+It was not his fault that their venture proved of such slight return in
+literary material. Harte was in the midst of new and alien
+conditions,--[See a corollary in M. Froude who visited the U.S. for a few
+months and then published a comprehensive analysis of the nation and its
+people. Twain's rebuttal (Mr. Froude's Progress) would have been 'a
+propos' for Harte in Cambridge. D.W.]--and he had always his temperament
+against him, as well as the reluctant if not the niggard nature of his
+muse. He would no doubt have been only too glad to do more than he did
+for the money, but actually if not literally he could not do more. When
+it came to literature, all the gay improvidence of life forsook him, and
+he became a stern, rigorous, exacting self-master, who spared himself
+nothing to achieve the perfection at which he aimed. He was of the order
+of literary men like Goldsmith and De Quincey, and Sterne and Steele, in
+his relations with the outer world, but in his relations with the inner
+world he was one of the most duteous and exemplary citizens. There was
+nothing of his easy-going hilarity in that world; there he was of a
+Puritanic severity, and of a conscience that forgave him no pang. Other
+California writers have testified to the fidelity with which he did his
+work as editor. He made himself not merely the arbiter but the
+inspiration of his contributors, and in a region where literature had
+hardly yet replaced the wild sage-brush of frontier journalism, he made
+the sand-lots of San Francisco to blossom as the rose, and created a
+literary periodical of the first class on the borders of civilization.
+
+It is useless to wonder now what would have been his future if the
+publisher of the Overland Monthly had been of imagination or capital
+enough to meet the demand which Harte dimly intimated to his Cambridge
+host as the condition of his remaining in California. Publishers, men
+with sufficient capital, are of a greatly varying gift in the regions of
+prophecy, and he of the Overland Monthly was not to be blamed if he could
+not foresee his account in paying Harte ten thousand a year to continue
+editing the magazine. He did according to his lights, and Harte came to
+the East, and then went to England, where his last twenty-five years were
+passed in cultivating the wild plant of his Pacific Slope discovery. It
+was always the same plant, leaf and flower and fruit, but it perennially
+pleased the constant English world, and thence the European world, though
+it presently failed of much delighting these fastidious States. Probably
+he would have done something else if he could; he did not keep on doing
+the wild mining-camp thing because it was the easiest, but because it was
+for him the only possible thing. Very likely he might have preferred not
+doing anything.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+The joyous visit of a week, which has been here so poorly recovered from
+the past, came to an end, and the host went with his guest to the station
+in as much vehicular magnificence as had marked his going to meet him
+there. Harte was no longer the alarming portent of the earlier time, but
+an experience of unalloyed delight. You must love a person whose worst
+trouble-giving was made somehow a favor by his own unconsciousness of the
+trouble, and it was a most flattering triumph to have got him in time, or
+only a little late, to so many luncheons and dinners. If only now he
+could be got to the train in time the victory would be complete, the
+happiness of the visit without a flaw. Success seemed to crown the
+fondest hope in this respect. The train had not yet left the station;
+there stood the parlor-car which Harte had seats in; and he was followed
+aboard for those last words in which people try to linger out pleasures
+they have known together. In this case the sweetest of the pleasures had
+been sitting up late after those dinners, and talking them over, and then
+degenerating from that talk into the mere giggle and making giggle which
+Charles Lamb found the best thing in life. It had come to this as the
+host and guest sat together for those parting moments, when Harte
+suddenly started up in the discovery of having forgotten to get some
+cigars. They rushed out of the train together, and after a wild descent
+upon the cigar-counter of the restaurant, Harte rushed back to his car.
+But by this time the train was already moving with that deceitful
+slowness of the departing train, and Harte had to clamber up the steps of
+the rearmost platform. His host clambered after, to make sure that he
+was aboard, which done, he dropped to the ground, while Harte drew out of
+the station, blandly smiling, and waving his hand with a cigar in it, in
+picturesque farewell from the platform.
+
+Then his host realized that he had dropped to the ground barely in time
+to escape being crushed against the side of the archway that sharply
+descended beside the steps of the train, and he went and sat down in that
+handsomest hack, and was for a moment deathly sick at the danger that had
+not realized itself to him in season. To be sure, he was able, long
+after, to adapt the incident to the exigencies of fiction, and to have a
+character, not otherwise to be conveniently disposed of, actually crushed
+to death between a moving train and such an archway.
+
+Besides, he had then and always afterward, the immense super-compensation
+of the memories of that visit from one of the most charming personalities
+in the world,
+
+     "In life's morning march when his bosom was young,"
+
+and when infinitely less would have sated him. Now death has come to
+join its vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life, and that
+blithe spirit is elsewhere. But nothing can take from him who remains
+the witchery of that most winning presence. Still it looks smiling from
+the platform of the car, and casts a farewell of mock heartbreak from it.
+Still a gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years that are now
+numbered, and out of somewhere the hearer's sense is rapt with the mellow
+cordial of a voice that was like no other.
+
+[This last paragraph reminds one again that, as with Holmes: a great poet
+writes the best prose. D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+MY MARK TWAIN
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+It was in the little office of James T. Fields, over the bookstore of
+Ticknor & Fields, at 124 Tremont Street, Boston, that I first met my
+friend of now forty-four years, Samuel L. Clemens. Mr. Fields was then
+the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and I was his proud and glad
+assistant, with a pretty free hand as to manuscripts, and an unmanacled
+command of the book-notices at the end of the magazine. I wrote nearly
+all of them myself, and in 1869 I had written rather a long notice of a
+book just winning its way to universal favor. In this review I had
+intimated my reservations concerning the 'Innocents Abroad', but I had
+the luck, if not the sense, to recognize that it was such fun as we had
+not had before. I forget just what I said in praise of it, and it does
+not matter; it is enough that I praised it enough to satisfy the author.
+He now signified as much, and he stamped his gratitude into my memory
+with a story wonderfully allegorizing the situation, which the mock
+modesty of print forbids my repeating here. Throughout my long
+acquaintance with him his graphic touch was always allowing itself a
+freedom which I cannot bring my fainter pencil to illustrate. He had the
+Southwestern, the Lincolnian, the Elizabethan breadth of parlance, which
+I suppose one ought not to call coarse without calling one's self
+prudish; and I was often hiding away in discreet holes and corners the
+letters in which he had loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank
+suggestion; I could not bear to burn them, and I could not, after the
+first reading, quite bear to look at them. I shall best give my feeling
+on this point by saying that in it he was Shakespearian, or if his ghost
+will not suffer me the word, then he was Baconian.
+
+At the time of our first meeting, which must have been well toward the
+winter, Clemens (as I must call him instead of Mark Twain, which seemed
+always somehow to mask him from my personal sense) was wearing a sealskin
+coat, with the fur out, in the satisfaction of a caprice, or the love of
+strong effect which he was apt to indulge through life. I do not know
+what droll comment was in Fields's mind with respect to this garment, but
+probably he felt that here was an original who was not to be brought to
+any Bostonian book in the judgment of his vivid qualities. With his
+crest of dense red hair, and the wide sweep of his flaming mustache,
+Clemens was not discordantly clothed in that sealskin coat, which
+afterward, in spite of his own warmth in it, sent the cold chills through
+me when I once accompanied it down Broadway, and shared the immense
+publicity it won him. He had always a relish for personal effect, which
+expressed itself in the white suit of complete serge which he wore in his
+last years, and in the Oxford gown which he put on for every possible
+occasion, and said he would like to wear all the time. That was not
+vanity in him, but a keen feeling for costume which the severity of our
+modern tailoring forbids men, though it flatters women to every excess in
+it; yet he also enjoyed the shock, the offence, the pang which it gave
+the sensibilities of others. Then there were times he played these
+pranks for pure fun, and for the pleasure of the witness. Once I
+remember seeing him come into his drawing-room at Hartford in a pair of
+white cowskin slippers, with the hair out, and do a crippled colored
+uncle to the joy of all beholders. Or, I must not say all, for I
+remember also the dismay of Mrs. Clemens, and her low, despairing cry of,
+"Oh, Youth!" That was her name for him among their friends, and it
+fitted him as no other would, though I fancied with her it was a
+shrinking from his baptismal Samuel, or the vernacular Sam of his earlier
+companionships. He was a youth to the end of his days, the heart of a
+boy with the head of a sage; the heart of a good boy, or a bad boy, but
+always a wilful boy, and wilfulest to show himself out at every time for
+just the boy he was.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+There is a gap in my recollections of Clemens, which I think is of a year
+or two, for the next thing I remember of him is meeting him at a lunch in
+Boston, given us by that genius of hospitality, the tragically destined
+Ralph Keeler, author of one of the most unjustly forgotten books,
+'Vagabond Adventures', a true bit of picaresque autobiography. Keeler
+never had any money, to the general knowledge, and he never borrowed, and
+he could not have had credit at the restaurant where he invited us to
+feast at his expense. There was T. B. Aldrich, there was J. T. Fields,
+much the oldest of our company, who had just freed himself from the
+trammels of the publishing business, and was feeling his freedom in every
+word; there was Bret Harte, who had lately come East in his princely
+progress from California; and there was Clemens. Nothing remains to me
+of the happy time but a sense of idle and aimless and joyful talk-play,
+beginning and ending nowhere, of eager laughter, of countless good
+stories from Fields, of a heat-lightning shimmer of wit from Aldrich, of
+an occasional concentration of our joint mockeries upon our host, who
+took it gladly; and amid the discourse, so little improving, but so full
+of good fellowship, Bret Harte's fleeting dramatization of Clemens's
+mental attitude toward a symposium of Boston illuminates. "Why,
+fellows," he spluttered, "this is the dream of Mark's life," and I
+remember the glance from under Clemens's feathery eyebrows which betrayed
+his enjoyment of the fun. We had beefsteak with mushrooms, which in
+recognition of their shape Aldrich hailed as shoe-pegs, and to crown the
+feast we had an omelette souse, which the waiter brought in as flat as a
+pancake, amid our shouts of congratulations to poor Keeler, who took them
+with appreciative submission. It was in every way what a Boston literary
+lunch ought not to have been in the popular ideal which Harte attributed
+to Clemens.
+
+Our next meeting was at Hartford, or, rather, at Springfield, where
+Clemens greeted us on the way to Hartford. Aldrich was going on to be
+his guest, and I was going to be Charles Dudley Warner's, but Clemens had
+come part way to welcome us both. In the good fellowship of that cordial
+neighborhood we had two such days as the aging sun no longer shines on in
+his round. There was constant running in and out of friendly houses
+where the lively hosts and guests called one another by their Christian
+names or nicknames, and no such vain ceremony as knocking or ringing at
+doors. Clemens was then building the stately mansion in which he
+satisfied his love of magnificence as if it had been another sealskin
+coat, and he was at the crest of the prosperity which enabled him to
+humor every whim or extravagance. The house was the design of that most
+original artist, Edward Potter, who once, when hard pressed by
+incompetent curiosity for the name of his style in a certain church,
+proposed that it should be called the English violet order of
+architecture; and this house was so absolutely suited to the owner's
+humor that I suppose there never was another house like it; but its
+character must be for recognition farther along in these reminiscences.
+The vividest impression which Clemens gave us two ravenous young Boston
+authors was of the satisfying, the surfeiting nature of subscription
+publication. An army of agents was overrunning the country with the
+prospectuses of his books, and delivering them by the scores of thousands
+in completed sale. Of the 'Innocents Abroad' he said, "It sells right
+along just like the Bible," and 'Roughing It' was swiftly following,
+without perhaps ever quite overtaking it in popularity. But he lectured
+Aldrich and me on the folly of that mode of publication in the trade
+which we had thought it the highest success to achieve a chance in.
+"Anything but subscription publication is printing for private
+circulation," he maintained, and he so won upon our greed and hope that
+on the way back to Boston we planned the joint authorship of a volume
+adapted to subscription publication. We got a very good name for it, as
+we believed, in Memorable Murders, and we never got farther with it, but
+by the time we reached Boston we were rolling in wealth so deep that we
+could hardly walk home in the frugal fashion by which we still thought it
+best to spare car fare; carriage fare we did not dream of even in that
+opulence.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+The visits to Hartford which had begun with this affluence continued
+without actual increase of riches for me, but now I went alone, and in
+Warner's European and Egyptian absences I formed the habit of going to
+Clemens. By this time he was in his new house, where he used to give me
+a royal chamber on the ground floor, and come in at night after I had
+gone to bed to take off the burglar alarm so that the family should not
+be roused if anybody tried to get in at my window. This would be after
+we had sat up late, he smoking the last of his innumerable cigars, and
+soothing his tense nerves with a mild hot Scotch, while we both talked
+and talked and talked, of everything in the heavens and on the earth, and
+the waters under the earth. After two days of this talk I would come
+away hollow, realizing myself best in the image of one of those
+locust-shells which you find sticking to the bark of trees at the end of
+summer. Once, after some such bout of brains, we went down to New York
+together, and sat facing each other in the Pullman smoker without passing
+a syllable till we had occasion to say, "Well, we're there." Then, with
+our installation in a now vanished hotel (the old Brunswick, to be
+specific), the talk began again with the inspiration of the novel
+environment, and went on and on. We wished to be asleep, but we could
+not stop, and he lounged through the rooms in the long nightgown which he
+always wore in preference to the pajamas which he despised, and told the
+story of his life, the inexhaustible, the fairy, the Arabian Nights
+story, which I could never tire of even when it began to be told over
+again. Or at times he would reason high--
+
+       "Of Providence, foreknowledge, will and fate,
+        Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,"
+
+walking up and down, and halting now and then, with a fine toss and slant
+of his shaggy head, as some bold thought or splendid joke struck him.
+
+He was in those days a constant attendant at the church of his great
+friend, the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, and at least tacitly far from the
+entire negation he came to at last. I should say he had hardly yet
+examined the grounds of his passive acceptance of his wife's belief, for
+it was hers and not his, and he held it unscanned in the beautiful and
+tender loyalty to her which was the most moving quality of his most
+faithful soul. I make bold to speak of the love between them, because
+without it I could not make him known to others as he was known to me. It
+was a greater part of him than the love of most men for their wives, and
+she merited all the worship he could give her, all the devotion, all the
+implicit obedience, by her surpassing force and beauty of character. She
+was in a way the loveliest person I have ever seen, the gentlest, the
+kindest, without a touch of weakness; she united wonderful tact with
+wonderful truth; and Clemens not only accepted her rule implicitly, but
+he rejoiced, he gloried in it. I am not sure that he noticed all her
+goodness in the actions that made it a heavenly vision to others, he so
+had the habit of her goodness; but if there was any forlorn and helpless
+creature in the room Mrs. Clemens was somehow promptly at his side or
+hers; she was always seeking occasion of kindness to those in her
+household or out of it; she loved to let her heart go beyond the reach of
+her hand, and imagined the whole hard and suffering world with compassion
+for its structural as well as incidental wrongs. I suppose she had her
+ladyhood limitations, her female fears of etiquette and convention, but
+she did not let them hamper the wild and splendid generosity with which
+Clemens rebelled against the social stupidities and cruelties. She had
+been a lifelong invalid when he met her, and he liked to tell the
+beautiful story of their courtship to each new friend whom he found
+capable of feeling its beauty or worthy of hearing it. Naturally, her
+father had hesitated to give her into the keeping of the young strange
+Westerner, who had risen up out of the unknown with his giant reputation
+of burlesque humorist, and demanded guaranties, demanded proofs. "He
+asked me," Clemens would say, "if I couldn't give him the names of people
+who knew me in California, and when it was time to hear from them I heard
+from him. 'Well, Mr. Clemens,' he said, 'nobody seems to have a very
+good word for you.' I hadn't referred him to people that I thought were
+going to whitewash me. I thought it was all up with me, but I was
+disappointed. 'So I guess I shall have to back you myself.'"
+
+Whether this made him faithfuler to the trust put in him I cannot say,
+but probably not; it was always in him to be faithful to any trust, and
+in proportion as a trust of his own was betrayed he was ruthlessly and
+implacably resentful. But I wish now to speak of the happiness of that
+household in Hartford which responded so perfectly to the ideals of the
+mother when the three daughters, so lovely and so gifted, were yet little
+children. There had been a boy, and "Yes, I killed him," Clemens once
+said, with the unsparing self-blame in which he would wreak an unavailing
+regret. He meant that he had taken the child out imprudently, and the
+child had taken the cold which he died of, but it was by no means certain
+this was through its father's imprudence. I never heard him speak of his
+son except that once, but no doubt in his deep heart his loss was
+irreparably present. He was a very tender father and delighted in the
+minds of his children, but he was wise enough to leave their training
+altogether to the wisdom of their mother. He left them to that in
+everything, keeping for himself the pleasure of teaching them little
+scenes of drama, learning languages with them, and leading them in
+singing. They came to the table with their parents, and could have set
+him an example in behavior when, in moments of intense excitement, he
+used to leave his place and walk up and down the room, flying his napkin
+and talking and talking.
+
+It was after his first English sojourn that I used to visit him, and he
+was then full of praise of everything English: the English personal
+independence and public spirit, and hospitality, and truth. He liked to
+tell stories in proof of their virtues, but he was not blind to the
+defects of their virtues: their submissive acceptance of caste, their
+callousness with strangers; their bluntness with one another. Mrs.
+Clemens had been in a way to suffer socially more than he, and she
+praised the English less. She had sat after dinner with ladies who
+snubbed and ignored one another, and left her to find her own amusement
+in the absence of the attention with which Americans perhaps cloy their
+guests, but which she could not help preferring. In their successive
+sojourns among them I believe he came to like the English less and she
+more; the fine delight of his first acceptance among them did not renew
+itself till his Oxford degree was given him; then it made his cup run
+over, and he was glad the whole world should see it.
+
+His wife would not chill the ardor of his early Anglomania, and in this,
+as in everything, she wished to humor him to the utmost. No one could
+have realized more than she his essential fineness, his innate nobleness.
+Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know them to be, but
+from the outside I should say that this marriage was one of the most
+perfect. It lasted in his absolute devotion to the day of her death,
+that delayed long in cruel suffering, and that left one side of him in
+lasting night. From Florence there came to me heartbreaking letters from
+him about the torture she was undergoing, and at last a letter saying she
+was dead, with the simple-hearted cry, "I wish I was with Livy." I do
+not know why I have left saying till now that she was a very beautiful
+woman, classically regular in features, with black hair smooth over her
+forehead, and with tenderly peering, myopia eyes, always behind glasses,
+and a smile of angelic kindness. But this kindness went with a sense of
+humor which qualified her to appreciate the self-lawed genius of a man
+who will be remembered with the great humorists of all time, with
+Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy his company; none of
+them was his equal in humanity.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+Clemens had appointed himself, with the architect's connivance, a
+luxurious study over the library in his new house, but as his children
+grew older this study, with its carved and cushioned arm-chairs, was
+given over to them for a school-room, and he took the room above his
+stable, which had been intended for his coachman. There we used to talk
+together, when we were not walking and talking together, until he
+discovered that he could make a more commodious use of the billiard-room
+at the top of his house, for the purposes of literature and friendship.
+It was pretty cold up there in the early spring and late fall weather
+with which I chiefly associate the place, but by lighting up all the
+gas-burners and kindling a reluctant fire on the hearth we could keep it
+well above freezing. Clemens could also push the balls about, and,
+without rivalry from me, who could no more play billiards than smoke,
+could win endless games of pool, while he carried points of argument
+against imaginable differers in opinion. Here he wrote many of his tales
+and sketches, and for anything I know some of his books. I particularly
+remember his reading me here his first rough sketch of Captain
+Stormfield's Visit to Heaven, with the real name of the captain, whom I
+knew already from his many stories about him.
+
+We had a peculiar pleasure in looking off from the high windows on the
+pretty Hartford landscape, and down from them into the tops of the trees
+clothing the hillside by which his house stood. We agreed that there was
+a novel charm in trees seen from such a vantage, far surpassing that of
+the farther scenery. He had not been a country boy for nothing; rather
+he had been a country boy, or, still better, a village boy, for
+everything that Nature can offer the young of our species, and no aspect
+of her was lost on him. We were natives of the same vast Mississippi
+Valley; and Missouri was not so far from Ohio but that we were akin in
+our first knowledges of woods and fields as we were in our early
+parlance. I had outgrown the use of mine through my greater bookishness,
+but I gladly recognized the phrases which he employed for their lasting
+juiciness and the long-remembered savor they had on his mental palate.
+
+I have elsewhere sufficiently spoken of his unsophisticated use of words,
+of the diction which forms the backbone of his manly style. If I mention
+my own greater bookishness, by which I mean his less quantitative
+reading, it is to give myself better occasion to note that he was always
+reading some vital book. It might be some out-of-the-way book, but it
+had the root of the human matter in it: a volume of great trials; one of
+the supreme autobiographies; a signal passage of history, a narrative of
+travel, a story of captivity, which gave him life at first-hand. As I
+remember, he did not care much for fiction, and in that sort he had
+certain distinct loathings; there were certain authors whose names he
+seemed not so much to pronounce as to spew out of his mouth. Goldsmith
+was one of these, but his prime abhorrence was my dear and honored prime
+favorite, Jane Austen. He once said to me, I suppose after he had been
+reading some of my unsparing praises of her--I am always praising her,
+"You seem to think that woman could write," and he forbore withering me
+with his scorn, apparently because we had been friends so long, and he
+more pitied than hated me for my bad taste. He seemed not to have any
+preferences among novelists; or at least I never heard him express any.
+He used to read the modern novels I praised, in or out of print; but I do
+not think he much liked reading fiction. As for plays, he detested the
+theatre, and said he would as lief do a sum as follow a plot on the
+stage. He could not, or did not, give any reasons for his literary
+abhorrences, and perhaps he really had none. But he could have said very
+distinctly, if he had needed, why he liked the books he did. I was away
+at the time of his great Browning passion, and I know of it chiefly from
+hearsay; but at the time Tolstoy was doing what could be done to make me
+over Clemens wrote, "That man seems to have been to you what Browning was
+to me." I do not know that he had other favorites among the poets, but
+he had favorite poems which he liked to read to you, and he read, of
+course, splendidly. I have forgotten what piece of John Hay's it was
+that he liked so much, but I remembered how he fiercely revelled in the
+vengefulness of William Morris's 'Sir Guy of the Dolorous Blast,' and how
+he especially exalted in the lines which tell of the supposed speaker's
+joy in slaying the murderer of his brother:
+
+       "I am threescore years and ten,
+        And my hair is 'nigh turned gray,
+        But I am glad to think of the moment when
+        I took his life away."
+
+Generally, I fancy his pleasure in poetry was not great, and I do not
+believe he cared much for the conventionally accepted masterpieces of
+literature. He liked to find out good things and great things for
+himself; sometimes he would discover these in a masterpiece new to him
+alone, and then, if you brought his ignorance home to him, he enjoyed it,
+and enjoyed it the more the more you rubbed it in.
+
+Of all the literary men I have known he was the most unliterary in his
+make and manner. I do not know whether he had any acquaintance with
+Latin, but I believe not the least; German he knew pretty well, and
+Italian enough late in life to have fun with it; but he used English in
+all its alien derivations as if it were native to his own air, as if it
+had come up out of American, out of Missourian ground. His style was
+what we know, for good and for bad, but his manner, if I may difference
+the two, was as entirely his own as if no one had ever written before. I
+have noted before this how he was not enslaved to the consecutiveness in
+writing which the rest of us try to keep chained to. That is, he wrote
+as he thought, and as all men think, without sequence, without an eye to
+what went before or should come after. If something beyond or beside
+what he was saying occurred to him, he invited it into his page, and made
+it as much at home there as the nature of it would suffer him. Then, when
+he was through with the welcoming of this casual and unexpected guest, he
+would go back to the company he was entertaining, and keep on with what
+he had been talking about. He observed this manner in the construction
+of his sentences, and the arrangement of his chapters, and the ordering
+or disordering of his compilations.--[Nowhere is this characteristic
+better found than in Twain's 'Autobiography,' it was not a "style" it was
+unselfconscious thought D.W.]--I helped him with a Library of Humor,
+which he once edited, and when I had done my work according to tradition,
+with authors, times, and topics carefully studied in due sequence, he
+tore it all apart, and "chucked" the pieces in wherever the fancy, for
+them took him at the moment. He was right: we were not making a
+text-book, but a book for the pleasure rather than the instruction of the
+reader, and he did not see why the principle on which he built his
+travels and reminiscences and tales and novels should not apply to it;
+and I do not now see, either, though at the time it confounded me. On
+minor points he was, beyond any author I have known, without favorite
+phrases or pet words. He utterly despised the avoidance of repetitions
+out of fear of tautology. If a word served his turn better than a
+substitute, he would use it as many times in a page as he chose.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+At that time I had become editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and I had
+allegiances belonging to the conduct of what was and still remains the
+most scrupulously cultivated of our periodicals. When Clemens began to
+write for it he came willingly under its rules, for with all his
+wilfulness there never was a more biddable man in things you could show
+him a reason for. He never made the least of that trouble which so
+abounds for the hapless editor from narrower-minded contributors. If you
+wanted a thing changed, very good, he changed it; if you suggested that a
+word or a sentence or a paragraph had better be struck out, very good, he
+struck it out. His proof-sheets came back each a veritable "mush of
+concession," as Emerson says. Now and then he would try a little
+stronger language than 'The Atlantic' had stomach for, and once when I
+sent him a proof I made him observe that I had left out the profanity. He
+wrote back: "Mrs. Clemens opened that proof, and lit into the room with
+danger in her eye. What profanity? You see, when I read the manuscript
+to her I skipped that." It was part of his joke to pretend a violence in
+that gentlest creature which the more amusingly realized the situation to
+their friends.
+
+I was always very glad of him and proud of him as a contributor, but I
+must not claim the whole merit, or the first merit of having him write
+for us. It was the publisher, the late H. O. Houghton, who felt the
+incongruity of his absence from the leading periodical of the country,
+and was always urging me to get him to write. I will take the credit of
+being eager for him, but it is to the publisher's credit that he tried,
+so far as the modest traditions of 'The Atlantic' would permit, to meet
+the expectations in pay which the colossal profits of Clemens's books
+might naturally have bred in him. Whether he was really able to do this
+he never knew from Clemens himself, but probably twenty dollars a page
+did not surfeit the author of books that "sold right along just like the
+Bible."
+
+We had several short contributions from Clemens first, all of capital
+quality, and then we had the series of papers which went mainly to the
+making of his great book, 'Life on the Mississippi'. Upon the whole I
+have the notion that Clemens thought this his greatest book, and he was
+supported in his opinion by that of the 'portier' in his hotel at Vienna,
+and that of the German Emperor, who, as he told me with equal respect for
+the preference of each, united in thinking it his best; with such
+far-sundered social poles approaching in its favor, he apparently found
+himself without standing for opposition. At any rate, the papers won
+instant appreciation from his editor and publisher, and from the readers
+of their periodical, which they expected to prosper beyond precedent in
+its circulation. But those were days of simpler acceptance of the
+popular rights of newspapers than these are, when magazines strictly
+guard their vested interests against them. 'The New York Times' and the
+'St. Louis Democrat' profited by the advance copies of the magazine sent
+them to reprint the papers month by month. Together they covered nearly
+the whole reading territory of the Union, and the terms of their daily
+publication enabled them to anticipate the magazine in its own restricted
+field. Its subscription list was not enlarged in the slightest measure,
+and The Atlantic Monthly languished on the news-stands as undesired as
+ever.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+It was among my later visits to Hartford that we began to talk up the
+notion of collaborating a play, but we did not arrive at any clear
+intention, and it was a telegram out of the clear sky that one day
+summoned me from Boston to help with a continuation of Colonel Sellers. I
+had been a witness of the high joy of Clemens in the prodigious triumph
+of the first Colonel Sellers, which had been dramatized from the novel of
+'The Gilded Age.' This was the joint work of Clemens and Charles Dudley
+Warner, and the story had been put upon the stage by some one in Utah,
+whom Clemens first brought to book in the courts for violation of his
+copyright, and then indemnified for such rights as his adaptation of the
+book had given him. The structure of the play as John T. Raymond gave it
+was substantially the work of this unknown dramatist. Clemens never
+pretended, to me at any rate, that he had the least hand in it; he
+frankly owned that he was incapable of dramatization; yet the vital part
+was his, for the characters in the play were his as the book embodied
+them, and the success which it won with the public was justly his. This
+he shared equally with the actor, following the company with an agent,
+who counted out the author's share of the gate money, and sent him a note
+of the amount every day by postal card. The postals used to come about
+dinner-time, and Clemens would read them aloud to us in wild triumph.
+
+One hundred and fifty dollars--two hundred dollars--three hundred dollars
+were the gay figures which they bore, and which he flaunted in the air
+before he sat down at table, or rose from it to brandish, and then,
+flinging his napkin into his chair, walked up and down to exult in.
+
+By-and-by the popularity, of the play waned, and the time came when he
+sickened of the whole affair, and withdrew his agent, and took whatever
+gain from it the actor apportioned him. He was apt to have these sudden
+surceases, following upon the intensities of his earlier interest; though
+he seemed always to have the notion of making something more of Colonel
+Sellers. But when I arrived in Hartford in answer to his summons, I
+found him with no definite idea of what he wanted to do with him. I
+represented that we must have some sort of plan, and he agreed that we
+should both jot down a scenario overnight and compare our respective
+schemes the next morning. As the author of a large number of little
+plays which have been privately presented throughout the United States
+and in parts of the United Kingdom, without ever getting upon the public
+stage except for the noble ends of charity, and then promptly getting off
+it, I felt authorized to make him observe that his scheme was as nearly
+nothing as chaos could be. He agreed hilariously with me, and was
+willing to let it stand in proof of his entire dramatic inability. At the
+same time he liked my plot very much, which ultimated Sellers, according
+to Clemens's intention, as a man crazed by his own inventions and by his
+superstition that he was the rightful heir to an English earldom. The
+exuberant nature of Sellers and the vast range of his imagination served
+our purpose in other ways. Clemens made him a spiritualist, whose
+specialty in the occult was materialization; he became on impulse an
+ardent temperance reformer, and he headed a procession of temperance
+ladies after disinterestedly testing the deleterious effects of liquor
+upon himself until he could not walk straight; always he wore a
+marvellous fire-extinguisher strapped on his back, to give proof in any
+emergency of the effectiveness of his invention in that way.
+
+We had a jubilant fortnight in working the particulars of these things
+out. It was not possible for Clemens to write like anybody else, but I
+could very easily write like Clemens, and we took the play scene and
+scene about, quite secure of coming out in temperamental agreement. The
+characters remained for the most part his, and I varied them only to make
+them more like his than, if possible, he could. Several years after,
+when I looked over a copy of the play, I could not always tell my work
+from his; I only knew that I had done certain scenes. We would work all
+day long at our several tasks, and then at night, before dinner, read
+them over to each other. No dramatists ever got greater joy out of their
+creations, and when I reflect that the public never had the chance of
+sharing our joy I pity the public from a full heart. I still believe
+that the play was immensely funny; I still believe that if it could once
+have got behind the footlights it would have continued to pack the house
+before them for an indefinite succession of nights. But this may be my
+fondness.
+
+At any rate, it was not to be. Raymond had identified himself with
+Sellers in the play-going imagination, and whether consciously or
+unconsciously we constantly worked with Raymond in our minds. But before
+this time bitter displeasures had risen between Clemens and Raymond, and
+Clemens was determined that Raymond should never have the play. He first
+offered it to several other actors, who eagerly caught it, only to give
+it back with the despairing renunciation, "That is a Raymond play." We
+tried managers with it, but their only question was whether they could
+get Raymond to do it. In the mean time Raymond had provided himself with
+a play for the winter--a very good play, by Demarest Lloyd; and he was in
+no hurry for ours. Perhaps he did not really care for it perhaps he knew
+when he heard of it that it must come to him in the end. In the end it
+did, from my hand, for Clemens would not meet him. I found him in a mood
+of sweet reasonableness, perhaps the more softened by one of those
+lunches which our publisher, the hospitable James R. Osgood, was always
+bringing people together over in Boston. He said that he could not do
+the play that winter, but he was sure that he should like it, and he had
+no doubt he would do it the next winter. So I gave him the manuscript,
+in spite of Clemens's charges, for his suspicions and rancors were such
+that he would not have had me leave it for a moment in the actor's hands.
+But it seemed a conclusion that involved success and fortune for us. In
+due time, but I do not remember how long after, Raymond declared himself
+delighted with the piece; he entered into a satisfactory agreement for
+it, and at the beginning of the next season he started with it to
+Buffalo, where he was to give a first production. At Rochester he paused
+long enough to return it, with the explanation that a friend had noted to
+him the fact that Colonel Sellers in the play was a lunatic, and insanity
+was so serious a thing that it could not be represented on the stage
+without outraging the sensibilities of the audience; or words to that
+effect. We were too far off to allege Hamlet to the contrary, or King
+Lear, or to instance the delight which generations of readers throughout
+the world had taken in the mad freaks of Don Quixote. Whatever were the
+real reasons of Raymond for rejecting the play, we had to be content with
+those he gave, and to set about getting it into other hands. In this
+effort we failed even more signally than before, if that were possible.
+At last a clever and charming elocutionist, who had long wished to get
+himself on the stage, heard of it and asked to see it. We would have
+shown it to any one by this time, and we very willingly showed it to him.
+He came to Hartford and did some scenes from it for us. I must say he
+did them very well, quite as well as Raymond could have done them, in
+whose manner he did them. But now, late toward spring, the question was
+where he could get an engagement with the play, and we ended by hiring a
+theatre in New York for a week of trial performances.
+
+Clemens came on with me to Boston, where we were going to make some
+changes in the piece, and where we made them to our satisfaction, but not
+to the effect of that high rapture which we had in the first draft. He
+went back to Hartford, and then the cold fit came upon me, and "in
+visions of the night, in slumberings upon the bed," ghastly forms of
+failure appalled me, and when I rose in the morning I wrote him: "Here is
+a play which every manager has put out-of-doors and which every actor
+known to us has refused, and now we go and give it to an elocutioner. We
+are fools." Whether Clemens agreed with me or not in my conclusion, he
+agreed with me in my premises, and we promptly bought our play off the
+stage at a cost of seven hundred dollars, which we shared between us. But
+Clemens was never a man to give up. I relinquished gratis all right and
+title I had in the play, and he paid its entire expenses for a week of
+one-night stands in the country. It never came to New York; and yet I
+think now that if it had come, it would have succeeded. So hard does the
+faith of the unsuccessful dramatist in his work die.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+There is an incident of this time so characteristic of both men that I
+will yield to the temptation of giving it here. After I had gone to
+Hartford in response to Clemens's telegram, Matthew Arnold arrived in
+Boston, and one of my family called on his, to explain why I was not at
+home to receive his introduction: I had gone to see Mark Twain. "Oh, but
+he doesn't like that sort of thing, does he?" "He likes Mr. Clemens very
+much," my representative answered, "and he thinks him one of the greatest
+men he ever knew." I was still Clemens's guest at Hartford when Arnold
+came there to lecture, and one night we went to meet him at a reception.
+While his hand laxly held mine in greeting, I saw his eyes fixed
+intensely on the other side of the room. "Who-who in the world is that?"
+I looked and said, "Oh, that is Mark Twain." I do not remember just how
+their instant encounter was contrived by Arnold's wish, but I have the
+impression that they were not parted for long during the evening, and the
+next night Arnold, as if still under the glamour of that potent presence,
+was at Clemens's house. I cannot say how they got on, or what they made
+of each other; if Clemens ever spoke of Arnold, I do not recall what he
+said, but Arnold had shown a sense of him from which the incredulous
+sniff of the polite world, now so universally exploded, had already
+perished. It might well have done so with his first dramatic vision of
+that prodigious head. Clemens was then hard upon fifty, and he had kept,
+as he did to the end, the slender figure of his youth, but the ashes of
+the burnt-out years were beginning to gray the fires of that splendid
+shock of red hair which he held to the height of a stature apparently
+greater than it was, and tilted from side to side in his undulating walk.
+He glimmered at you from the narrow slits of fine blue-greenish eyes,
+under branching brows, which with age grew more and more like a sort of
+plumage, and he was apt to smile into your face with a subtle but amiable
+perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence; you were all there for
+him, but he was not all there for you.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+I shall, not try to give chronological order to my recollections of him,
+but since I am just now with him in Hartford I will speak of him in
+association with the place. Once when I came on from Cambridge he
+followed me to my room to see that the water was not frozen in my bath,
+or something of the kind, for it was very cold weather, and then
+hospitably lingered. Not to lose time in banalities I began at once from
+the thread of thought in my mind. "I wonder why we hate the past so,"
+and he responded from the depths of his own consciousness, "It's so
+damned humiliating," which is what any man would say of his past if he
+were honest; but honest men are few when it comes to themselves. Clemens
+was one of the few, and the first of them among all the people I have
+known. I have known, I suppose, men as truthful, but not so promptly, so
+absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful. He could
+lie, of course, and did to save others from grief or harm; he was, not
+stupidly truthful; but his first impulse was to say out the thing and
+everything that was in him. To those who can understand it will not be
+contradictory of his sense of humiliation from the past, that he was not
+ashamed for anything he ever did to the point of wishing to hide it. He
+could be, and he was, bitterly sorry for his errors, which he had enough
+of in his life, but he was not ashamed in that mean way. What he had
+done he owned to, good, bad, or indifferent, and if it was bad he was
+rather amused than troubled as to the effect in your mind. He would not
+obtrude the fact upon you, but if it were in the way of personal history
+he would not dream of withholding it, far less of hiding it.
+
+He was the readiest of men to allow an error if he were found in it. In
+one of our walks about Hartford, when he was in the first fine flush of
+his agnosticism, he declared that Christianity had done nothing to
+improve morals and conditions, and that the world under the highest pagan
+civilization was as well off as it was under the highest Christian
+influences. I happened to be fresh from the reading of Charles Loring
+Brace's 'Gesta Christi'; or, 'History of Humane Progress', and I could
+offer him abundant proofs that he was wrong. He did not like that
+evidently, but he instantly gave way, saying he had not known those
+things. Later he was more tolerant in his denials of Christianity, but
+just then he was feeling his freedom from it, and rejoicing in having
+broken what he felt to have been the shackles of belief worn so long. He
+greatly admired Robert Ingersoll, whom he called an angelic orator, and
+regarded as an evangel of a new gospel--the gospel of free thought. He
+took the warmest interest in the newspaper controversy raging at the time
+as to the existence of a hell; when the noes carried the day, I suppose
+that no enemy of perdition was more pleased. He still loved his old
+friend and pastor, Mr. Twichell, but he no longer went to hear him preach
+his sage and beautiful sermons, and was, I think, thereby the greater
+loser. Long before that I had asked him if he went regularly to church,
+and he groaned out: "Oh yes, I go. It 'most kills me, but I go," and I
+did not need his telling me to understand that he went because his wife
+wished it. He did tell me, after they both ceased to go, that it had
+finally come to her saying, "Well, if you are to be lost, I want to be
+lost with you." He could accept that willingness for supreme sacrifice
+and exult in it because of the supreme truth as he saw it. After they had
+both ceased to be formal Christians, she was still grieved by his denial
+of immortality, so grieved that he resolved upon one of those heroic
+lies, which for love's sake he held above even the truth, and he went to
+her, saying that he had been thinking the whole matter over, and now he
+was convinced that the soul did live after death. It was too late. Her
+keen vision pierced through his ruse, as it did when he brought the
+doctor who had diagnosticated her case as organic disease of the heart,
+and, after making him go over the facts of it again with her, made him
+declare it merely functional.
+
+To make an end of these records as to Clemens's beliefs, so far as I knew
+them, I should say that he never went back to anything like faith in the
+Christian theology, or in the notion of life after death, or in a
+conscious divinity. It is best to be honest in this matter; he would
+have hated anything else, and I do not believe that the truth in it can
+hurt any one. At one period he argued that there must have been a cause,
+a conscious source of things; that the universe could not have come by
+chance. I have heard also that in his last hours or moments he said, or
+his dearest ones hoped he had said, something about meeting again. But
+the expression, of which they could not be certain, was of the vaguest,
+and it was perhaps addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness.
+All his expressions to me were of a courageous, renunciation of any hope
+of living again, or elsewhere seeing those he had lost. He suffered
+terribly in their loss, and he was not fool enough to try ignoring his
+grief. He knew that for this there were but two medicines; that it would
+wear itself out with the years, and that meanwhile there was nothing for
+it but those respites in which the mourner forgets himself in slumber. I
+remember that in a black hour of my own when I was called down to see
+him, as he thought from sleep, he said with an infinite, an exquisite
+compassion, "Oh, did I wake you, did I wake, you?" Nothing more, but the
+look, the voice, were everything; and while I live they cannot pass from
+my sense.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+He was the most caressing of men in his pity, but he had the fine
+instinct, which would have pleased Lowell, of never putting his hands on
+you--fine, delicate hands, with taper fingers, and pink nails, like a
+girl's, and sensitively quivering in moments of emotion; he did not paw
+you with them to show his affection, as so many of us Americans are apt
+to do. Among the half-dozen, or half-hundred, personalities that each of
+us becomes, I should say that Clemens's central and final personality was
+something exquisite. His casual acquaintance might know him, perhaps,
+from his fierce intensity, his wild pleasure in shocking people with his
+ribaldries and profanities, or from the mere need of loosing his
+rebellious spirit in that way, as anything but exquisite, and yet that
+was what in the last analysis he was. They might come away loathing or
+hating him, but one could not know him well without realizing him the
+most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men. He was
+Southwestern, and born amid the oppression of a race that had no rights
+as against ours, but I never saw a man more regardful of negroes. He had
+a yellow butler when I first began to know him, because he said he could
+not bear to order a white man about, but the terms of his ordering George
+were those of the softest entreaty which command ever wore. He loved to
+rely upon George, who was such a broken reed in some things, though so
+stanch in others, and the fervent Republican in politics that Clemens
+then liked him to be. He could interpret Clemens's meaning to the public
+without conveying his mood, and could render his roughest answer smooth
+to the person denied his presence. His general instructions were that
+this presence was to be denied all but personal friends, but the soft
+heart of George was sometimes touched by importunity, and once he came up
+into the billiard-room saying that Mr. Smith wished to see Clemens. Upon
+inquiry, Mr. Smith developed no ties of friendship, and Clemens said,
+"You go and tell Mr. Smith that I wouldn't come down to see the Twelve
+Apostles." George turned from the threshold where he had kept himself,
+and framed a paraphrase of this message which apparently sent Mr. Smith
+away content with himself and all the rest of the world.
+
+The part of him that was Western in his Southwestern origin Clemens kept
+to the end, but he was the most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew. No
+man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery, and no one
+has ever poured such scorn upon the second-hand, Walter-Scotticized,
+pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal. He held himself responsible for
+the wrong which the white race had done the black race in slavery, and he
+explained, in paying the way of a negro student through Yale, that he was
+doing it as his part of the reparation due from every white to every
+black man. He said he had never seen this student, nor ever wished to
+see him or know his name; it was quite enough that he was a negro. About
+that time a colored cadet was expelled from West Point for some point of
+conduct "unbecoming an officer and gentleman," and there was the usual
+shabby philosophy in a portion of the press to the effect that a negro
+could never feel the claim of honor. The man was fifteen parts white,
+but, "Oh yes," Clemens said, with bitter irony, "it was that one part
+black that undid him." It made him a "nigger" and incapable of being a
+gentleman. It was to blame for the whole thing. The fifteen parts white
+were guiltless.
+
+Clemens was entirely satisfied with the result of the Civil War, and he
+was eager to have its facts and meanings brought out at once in history.
+He ridiculed the notion, held by many, that "it was not yet time" to
+philosophize the events of the great struggle; that we must "wait till
+its passions had cooled," and "the clouds of strife had cleared away." He
+maintained that the time would never come when we should see its motives
+and men and deeds more clearly, and that now, now, was the hour to
+ascertain them in lasting verity. Picturesquely and dramatically he
+portrayed the imbecility of deferring the inquiry at any point to the
+distance of future years when inevitably the facts would begin to put on
+fable.
+
+He had powers of sarcasm and a relentless rancor in his contempt which
+those who knew him best appreciated most. The late Noah Brooks, who had
+been in California at the beginning of Clemens's career, and had
+witnessed the effect of his ridicule before he had learned to temper it,
+once said to me that he would rather have any one else in the world down
+on him than Mark Twain. But as Clemens grew older he grew more merciful,
+not to the wrong, but to the men who were in it. The wrong was often the
+source of his wildest drolling. He considered it in such hopelessness of
+ever doing it justice that his despair broke in laughter.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+I go back to that house in Hartford, where I was so often a happy guest,
+with tenderness for each of its endearing aspects. Over the chimney in
+the library which had been cured of smoking by so much art and science,
+Clemens had written in perennial brass the words of Emerson, "The
+ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it," and he gave his
+guests a welcome of the simplest and sweetest cordiality: but I must not
+go aside to them from my recollections of him, which will be of
+sufficient garrulity, if I give them as fully as I wish. The windows of
+the library looked northward from the hillside above which the house
+stood, and over the little valley with the stream in it, and they showed
+the leaves of the trees that almost brushed them as in a Claude Lorraine
+glass. To the eastward the dining-room opened amply, and to the south
+there was a wide hall, where the voices of friends made themselves heard
+as they entered without ceremony and answered his joyous hail. At the
+west was a little semicircular conservatory of a pattern invented by Mrs.
+Harriet Beecher Stowe, and adopted in most of the houses of her kindly
+neighborhood. The plants were set in the ground, and the flowering vines
+climbed up the sides and overhung the roof above the silent spray of a
+fountain companied by callas and other water-loving lilies. There, while
+we breakfasted, Patrick came in from the barn and sprinkled the pretty
+bower, which poured out its responsive perfume in the delicate accents of
+its varied blossoms. Breakfast was Clemens's best meal, and he sat
+longer at his steak and coffee than at the courses of his dinner;
+luncheon was nothing to him, unless, as might happen, he made it his
+dinner, and reserved the later repast as the occasion of walking up and
+down the room, and discoursing at large on anything that came into his
+head. Like most good talkers, he liked other people to have their say;
+he did not talk them down; he stopped instantly at another's remark and
+gladly or politely heard him through; he even made believe to find
+suggestion or inspiration in what was said. His children came to the
+table, as I have told, and after dinner he was apt to join his fine tenor
+to their trebles in singing.
+
+Fully half our meetings were at my house in Cambridge, where he made
+himself as much at home as in Hartford. He would come ostensibly to stay
+at the Parker House, in Boston, and take a room, where he would light the
+gas and leave it burning, after dressing, while he drove out to Cambridge
+and stayed two or three days with us. Once, I suppose it was after a
+lecture, he came in evening dress and passed twenty-four hours with us in
+that guise, wearing an overcoat to hide it when we went for a walk.
+Sometimes he wore the slippers which he preferred to shoes at home, and
+if it was muddy, as it was wont to be in Cambridge, he would put a pair
+of rubbers over them for our rambles. He liked the lawlessness and our
+delight in allowing it, and he rejoiced in the confession of his hostess,
+after we had once almost worn ourselves out in our pleasure with the
+intense talk, with the stories and the laughing, that his coming almost
+killed her, but it was worth it.
+
+In those days he was troubled with sleeplessness, or, rather, with
+reluctant sleepiness, and he had various specifics for promoting it. At
+first it had been champagne just before going to bed, and we provided
+that, but later he appeared from Boston with four bottles of lager-beer
+under his arms; lager-beer, he said now, was the only thing to make you
+go to sleep, and we provided that. Still later, on a visit I paid him at
+Hartford, I learned that hot Scotch was the only soporific worth
+considering, and Scotch-whiskey duly found its place on our sideboard.
+One day, very long afterward, I asked him if he were still taking hot
+Scotch to make him sleep. He said he was not taking anything. For a
+while he had found going to bed on the bath-room floor a soporific; then
+one night he went to rest in his own bed at ten o'clock, and had gone
+promptly to sleep without anything. He had done the like with the like
+effect ever since. Of course, it amused him; there were few experiences
+of life, grave or gay, which did not amuse him, even when they wronged
+him.
+
+He came on to Cambridge in April, 1875, to go with me to the centennial
+ceremonies at Concord in celebration of the battle of the Minute Men with
+the British troops a hundred years before. We both had special
+invitations, including passage from Boston; but I said, Why bother to go
+into Boston when we could just as well take the train for Concord at the
+Cambridge station? He equally decided that it would be absurd; so we
+breakfasted deliberately, and then walked to the station, reasoning of
+many things as usual. When the train stopped, we found it packed inside
+and out. People stood dense on the platforms of the cars; to our
+startled eyes they seemed to project from the windows, and unless memory
+betrays me they lay strewn upon the roofs like brakemen slain at the post
+of duty.
+
+Whether this was really so or not, it is certain that the train presented
+an impenetrable front even to our imagination, and we left it to go its
+way without the slightest effort to board. We remounted the fame-worn
+steps of Porter's Station, and began exploring North Cambridge for some
+means of transportation overland to Concord, for we were that far on the
+road by which the British went and came on the day of the battle. The
+liverymen whom we appealed to received us, some with compassion, some
+with derision, but in either mood convinced us that we could not have
+hired a cat to attempt our conveyance, much less a horse, or vehicle of
+any description. It was a raw, windy day, very unlike the exceptionally
+hot April day when the routed redcoats, pursued by the Colonials, fled
+panting back to Boston, with "their tongues hanging out like dogs," but
+we could not take due comfort in the vision of their discomfiture; we
+could almost envy them, for they had at least got to Concord. A swift
+procession of coaches, carriages, and buggies, all going to Concord,
+passed us, inert and helpless, on the sidewalk in the peculiarly cold mud
+of North Cambridge. We began to wonder if we might not stop one of them
+and bribe it to take us, but we had not the courage to try, and Clemens
+seized the opportunity to begin suffering with an acute indigestion,
+which gave his humor a very dismal cast. I felt keenly the shame of
+defeat, and the guilt of responsibility for our failure, and when a gay
+party of students came toward us on the top of a tally ho, luxuriously
+empty inside, we felt that our chance had come, and our last chance. He
+said that if I would stop them and tell them who I was they would gladly,
+perhaps proudly, give us passage; I contended that if with his far vaster
+renown he would approach them, our success would be assured. While we
+stood, lost in this "contest of civilities," the coach passed us, with
+gay notes blown from the horns of the students, and then Clemens started
+in pursuit, encouraged with shouts from the merry party who could not
+imagine who was trying to run them down, to a rivalry in speed. The
+unequal match could end only in one way, and I am glad I cannot recall
+what he said when he came back to me. Since then I have often wondered
+at the grief which would have wrung those blithe young hearts if they
+could have known that they might have had the company of Mark Twain to
+Concord that day and did not.
+
+We hung about, unavailingly, in the bitter wind a while longer, and then
+slowly, very slowly, made our way home. We wished to pass as much time
+as possible, in order to give probability to the deceit we intended to
+practise, for we could not bear to own ourselves baffled in our boasted
+wisdom of taking the train at Porter's Station, and had agreed to say
+that we had been to Concord and got back. Even after coming home to my
+house, we felt that our statement would be wanting in verisimilitude
+without further delay, and we crept quietly into my library, and made up
+a roaring fire on the hearth, and thawed ourselves out in the heat of it
+before we regained our courage for the undertaking. With all these
+precautions we failed, for when our statement was imparted to the
+proposed victim she instantly pronounced it unreliable, and we were left
+with it on our hands intact. I think the humor of this situation was
+finally a greater pleasure to Clemens than an actual visit to Concord
+would have been; only a few weeks before his death he laughed our defeat
+over with one of my family in Bermuda, and exulted in our prompt
+detection.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+From our joint experience in failing I argue that Clemens's affection for
+me must have been great to enable him to condone in me the final
+defection which was apt to be the end of our enterprises. I have fancied
+that I presented to him a surface of such entire trustworthiness that he
+could not imagine the depths of unreliability beneath it; and that never
+realizing it, he always broke through with fresh surprise but unimpaired
+faith. He liked, beyond all things, to push an affair to the bitter end,
+and the end was never too bitter unless it brought grief or harm to
+another. Once in a telegraph office at a railway station he was treated
+with such insolent neglect by the young lady in charge, who was
+preoccupied in a flirtation with a "gentleman friend," that emulous of
+the public spirit which he admired in the English, he told her he should
+report her to her superiors, and (probably to her astonishment) he did
+so. He went back to Hartford, and in due time the poor girl came to me
+in, terror and in tears; for I had abetted Clemens in his action, and had
+joined my name to his in his appeal to the authorities. She was
+threatened with dismissal unless she made full apology to him and brought
+back assurance of its acceptance. I felt able to give this, and, of
+course, he eagerly approved; I think he telegraphed his approval. Another
+time, some years afterward, we sat down together in places near the end
+of a car, and a brakeman came in looking for his official note-book.
+Clemens found that he had sat down upon it, and handed it to him; the man
+scolded him very abusively, and came back again and again, still scolding
+him for having no more sense than to sit down on a note-book. The
+patience of Clemens in bearing it was so angelic that I saw fit to
+comment, "I suppose you will report this fellow." "Yes," he answered,
+slowly and sadly. "That's what I should have done once. But now I
+remember that he gets twenty dollars a month."
+
+Nothing could have been wiser, nothing tenderer, and his humanity was not
+for humanity alone. He abhorred the dull and savage joy of the sportsman
+in a lucky shot, an unerring aim, and once when I met him in the country
+he had just been sickened by the success of a gunner in bringing down a
+blackbird, and he described the poor, stricken, glossy thing, how it lay
+throbbing its life out on the grass, with such pity as he might have
+given a wounded child. I find this a fit place to say that his mind and
+soul were with those who do the hard work of the world, in fear of those
+who give them a chance for their livelihoods and underpay them all they
+can. He never went so far in socialism as I have gone, if he went that
+way at all, but he was fascinated with Looking Backward and had Bellamy
+to visit him; and from the first he had a luminous vision of organized
+labor as the only present help for working-men. He would show that side
+with such clearness and such force that you could not say anything in
+hopeful contradiction; he saw with that relentless insight of his that
+with Unions was the working-man's only present hope of standing up like a
+man against money and the power of it. There was a time when I was
+afraid that his eyes were a little holden from the truth; but in the very
+last talk I heard from him I found that I was wrong, and that this great
+humorist was as great a humanist as ever. I wish that all the work-folk
+could know this, and could know him their friend in life as he was in
+literature; as he was in such a glorious gospel of equality as the
+'Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.'
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+Whether I will or no I must let things come into my story thoughtwise, as
+he would have let them, for I cannot remember them in their order. One
+night, while we were giving a party, he suddenly stormed in with a friend
+of his and mine, Mr. Twichell, and immediately began to eat and drink of
+our supper, for they had come straight to our house from walking to
+Boston, or so great a part of the way as to be a-hungered and a-thirst. I
+can see him now as he stood up in the midst of our friends, with his head
+thrown back, and in his hand a dish of those escalloped oysters without
+which no party in Cambridge was really a party, exulting in the tale of
+his adventure, which had abounded in the most original characters and
+amusing incidents at every mile of their progress. They had broken their
+journey with a night's rest, and they had helped themselves lavishly out
+by rail in the last half; but still it had been a mighty walk to do in
+two days. Clemens was a great walker, in those years, and was always
+telling of his tramps with Mr. Twichell to Talcott's Tower, ten miles out
+of Hartford. As he walked of course he talked, and of course he smoked.
+Whenever he had been a few days with us, the whole house had to be aired,
+for he smoked all over it from breakfast to bedtime. He always went to
+bed with a cigar in his mouth, and sometimes, mindful of my fire
+insurance, I went up and took it away, still burning, after he had fallen
+asleep. I do not know how much a man may smoke and live, but apparently
+he smoked as much as a man could, for he smoked incessantly.
+
+He did not care much to meet people, as I fancied, and we were greedy of
+him for ourselves; he was precious to us; and I would not have exposed
+him to the critical edge of that Cambridge acquaintance which might not
+have appreciated him at, say, his transatlantic value. In America his
+popularity was as instant as it was vast. But it must be acknowledged
+that for a much longer time here than in England polite learning
+hesitated his praise. In England rank, fashion, and culture rejoiced in
+him. Lord mayors, lord chief justices, and magnates of many kinds were
+his hosts; he was desired in country houses, and his bold genius
+captivated the favor of periodicals which spurned the rest of our nation.
+But in his own country it was different. In proportion as people thought
+themselves refined they questioned that quality which all recognize in
+him now, but which was then the inspired knowledge of the simple-hearted
+multitude. I went with him to see Longfellow, but I do not think
+Longfellow made much of him, and Lowell made less. He stopped as if with
+the long Semitic curve of Clemens's nose, which in the indulgence of his
+passion for finding every one more or less a Jew he pronounced
+unmistakably racial. It was two of my most fastidious Cambridge friends
+who accepted him with the English, the European entirety--namely, Charles
+Eliot Norton and Professor Francis J. Child. Norton was then newly back
+from a long sojourn abroad, and his judgments were delocalized. He met
+Clemens as if they had both been in England, and rejoiced in his bold
+freedom from environment, and in the rich variety and boundless reach of
+his talk. Child was of a personal liberty as great in its fastidious way
+as that of Clemens himself, and though he knew him only at second hand,
+he exulted in the most audacious instance of his grotesquery, as I shall
+have to tell by-and-by, almost solely. I cannot say just why Clemens
+seemed not to hit the favor of our community of scribes and scholars, as
+Bret Harte had done, when he came on from California, and swept them
+before him, disrupting their dinners and delaying their lunches with
+impunity; but it is certain he did not, and I had better say so.
+
+I am surprised to find from the bibliographical authorities that it was
+so late as 1875 when he came with the manuscript of Tom Sawyer, and asked
+me to read it, as a friend and critic, and not as an editor. I have an
+impression that this was at Mrs. Clemens's instance in his own
+uncertainty about printing it. She trusted me, I can say with a
+satisfaction few things now give me, to be her husband's true and cordial
+adviser, and I was so. I believe I never failed him in this part, though
+in so many of our enterprises and projects I was false as water through
+my temperamental love of backing out of any undertaking. I believe this
+never ceased to astonish him, and it has always astonished me; it appears
+to me quite out of character; though it is certain that an undertaking,
+when I have entered upon it, holds me rather than I it. But however this
+immaterial matter may be, I am glad to remember that I thoroughly liked
+Tom Sawyer, and said so with every possible amplification. Very likely,
+I also made my suggestions for its improvement; I could not have been a
+real critic without that; and I have no doubt they were gratefully
+accepted and, I hope, never acted upon. I went with him to the horse-car
+station in Harvard Square, as my frequent wont was, and put him aboard a
+car with his MS. in his hand, stayed and reassured, so far as I counted,
+concerning it. I do not know what his misgivings were; perhaps they were
+his wife's misgivings, for she wished him to be known not only for the
+wild and boundless humor that was in him, but for the beauty and
+tenderness and "natural piety"; and she would not have had him judged by
+a too close fidelity to the rude conditions of Tom Sawyer's life. This
+is the meaning that I read into the fact of his coming to me with those
+doubts.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+Clemens had then and for many years the habit of writing to me about what
+he was doing, and still more of what he was experiencing. Nothing struck
+his imagination, in or out of the daily routine, but he wished to write
+me of it, and he wrote with the greatest fulness and a lavish
+dramatization, sometimes to the length of twenty or forty pages, so that
+I have now perhaps fifteen hundred pages of his letters. They will no
+doubt some day be published, but I am not even referring to them in these
+records, which I think had best come to the reader with an old man's
+falterings and uncertainties. With his frequent absences and my own
+abroad, and the intrusion of calamitous cares, the rich tide of his
+letters was more and more interrupted. At times it almost ceased, and
+then it would come again, a torrent. In the very last weeks of his life
+he burst forth, and, though too weak himself to write, he dictated his
+rage with me for recommending to him a certain author whose truthfulness
+he could not deny, but whom he hated for his truthfulness to sordid and
+ugly conditions. At heart Clemens was romantic, and he would have had
+the world of fiction stately and handsome and whatever the real world was
+not; but he was not romanticistic, and he was too helplessly an artist
+not to wish his own work to show life as he had seen it. I was preparing
+to rap him back for these letters when I read that he had got home to
+die; he would have liked the rapping back.
+
+He liked coming to Boston, especially for those luncheons and dinners in
+which the fertile hospitality of our publisher, Osgood, abounded. He
+dwelt equidistant from Boston and New York, and he had special friends in
+New York, but he said he much preferred coming to Boston; of late years
+he never went there, and he had lost the habit of it long before he came
+home from Europe to live in New York. At these feasts, which were often
+of after-dinner-speaking measure, he could always be trusted for
+something of amazing delightfulness. Once, when Osgood could think of no
+other occasion for a dinner, he gave himself a birthday dinner, and asked
+his friends and authors. The beautiful and splendid trooper-like blaring
+was there, and I recall how in the long, rambling speech in which Clemens
+went round the table hitting every head at it, and especially visiting
+Osgood with thanks for his ingenious pretext for our entertainment, he
+congratulated blaring upon his engineering genius and his hypnotic
+control of municipal governments. He said that if there was a plan for
+draining a city at a cost of a million, by seeking the level of the water
+in the down-hill course of the sewers, blaring would come with a plan to
+drain that town up-hill at twice the cost and carry it through the Common
+Council without opposition. It is hard to say whether the time was
+gladder at these dinners, or at the small lunches at which Osgood and
+Aldrich and I foregathered with him and talked the afternoon away till
+well toward the winter twilight.
+
+He was a great figure, and the principal figure, at one of the first of
+the now worn-out Authors' Readings, which was held in the Boston Museum
+to aid a Longfellow memorial. It was the late George Parsons Lathrop
+(everybody seems to be late in these sad days) who imagined the reading,
+but when it came to a price for seats I can always claim the glory of
+fixing it at five dollars. The price if not the occasion proved
+irresistible, and the museum was packed from the floor to the topmost
+gallery. Norton presided, and when it came Clemens's turn to read he
+introduced him with such exquisite praises as he best knew how to give,
+but before he closed he fell a prey to one of those lapses of tact which
+are the peculiar peril of people of the greatest tact. He was reminded
+of Darwin's delight in Mark Twain, and how when he came from his long
+day's exhausting study, and sank into bed at midnight, he took up a
+volume of Mark Twain, whose books he always kept on a table beside him,
+and whatever had been his tormenting problem, or excess of toil, he felt
+secure of a good night's rest from it. A sort of blank ensued which
+Clemens filled in the only possible way. He said he should always be
+glad that he had contributed to the repose of that great man, whom
+science owed so much, and then without waiting for the joy in every
+breast to burst forth, he began to read. It was curious to watch his
+triumph with the house. His carefully studied effects would reach the
+first rows in the orchestra first, and ripple in laughter back to the
+standees against the wall, and then with a fine resurgence come again to
+the rear orchestra seats, and so rise from gallery to gallery till it
+fell back, a cataract of applause from the topmost rows of seats. He was
+such a practised speaker that he knew all the stops of that simple
+instrument man, and there is no doubt that these results were accurately
+intended from his unerring knowledge. He was the most consummate public
+performer I ever saw, and it was an incomparable pleasure to hear him
+lecture; on the platform he was the great and finished actor which he
+probably would not have been on the stage. He was fond of private
+theatricals, and liked to play in them with his children and their
+friends, in dramatizations of such stories of his as 'The Prince and the
+Pauper;' but I never saw him in any of these scenes. When he read his
+manuscript to you, it was with a thorough, however involuntary,
+recognition of its dramatic qualities; he held that an actor added fully
+half to the character the author created. With my own hurried and
+half-hearted reading of passages which I wished to try on him from
+unprinted chapters (say, out of 'The Undiscovered Country' or 'A Modern
+Instance') he said frankly that my reading could spoil anything. He was
+realistic, but he was essentially histrionic, and he was rightly so.
+What we have strongly conceived we ought to make others strongly imagine,
+and we ought to use every genuine art to that end.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+There came a time when the lecturing which had been the joy of his prime
+became his loathing, loathing unutterable, and when he renounced it with
+indescribable violence. Yet he was always hankering for those fleshpots
+whose savor lingered on his palate and filled his nostrils after his
+withdrawal from the platform. The Authors' Readings when they had won
+their brief popularity abounded in suggestion for him. Reading from
+one's book was not so bad as giving a lecture written for a lecture's
+purpose, and he was willing at last to compromise. He had a magnificent
+scheme for touring the country with Aldrich and Mr. G. W. Cable and
+myself, in a private car, with a cook of our own, and every facility for
+living on the fat of the land. We should read only four times a week, in
+an entertainment that should not last more than an hour and a half. He
+would be the impresario, and would guarantee us others at least
+seventy-five dollars a day, and pay every expense of the enterprise,
+which he provisionally called the Circus, himself. But Aldrich and I
+were now no longer in those earlier thirties when we so cheerfully
+imagined 'Memorable Murders' for subscription publication; we both
+abhorred public appearances, and, at any rate, I was going to Europe for
+a year. So the plan fell through except as regarded Mr. Cable, who, in
+his way, was as fine a performer as Clemens, and could both read and sing
+the matter of his books. On a far less stupendous scale they two made
+the rounds of the great lecturing circuit together. But I believe a
+famous lecture-manager had charge of them and travelled with them.
+
+He was a most sanguine man, a most amiable person, and such a believer in
+fortune that Clemens used to say of him, as he said of one of his early
+publishers, that you could rely upon fifty per cent. of everything he
+promised. I myself many years later became a follower of this hopeful
+prophet, and I can testify that in my case at least he was able to keep
+ninety-nine, and even a hundred, per cent. of his word. It was I who was
+much nearer failing of mine, for I promptly began to lose sleep from the
+nervous stress of my lecturing and from the gratifying but killing
+receptions afterward, and I was truly in that state from insomnia which
+Clemens recognized in the brief letter I got from him in the Western
+city, after half a dozen wakeful nights. He sardonically congratulated
+me on having gone into "the lecture field," and then he said: "I know
+where you are now. You are in hell."
+
+It was this perdition which he re-entered when he undertook that
+round-the-world lecturing tour for the payment of the debts left to him
+by the bankruptcy of his firm in the publishing business. It was not
+purely perdition for him, or, rather, it was perdition for only one-half
+of him, the author-half; for the actor-half it was paradise. The author
+who takes up lecturing without the ability to give histrionic support to
+the literary reputation which he brings to the crude test of his reader's
+eyes and ears, invokes a peril and a misery unknown to the lecturer who
+has made his first public from the platform. Clemens was victorious on
+the platform from the beginning, and it would be folly to pretend that he
+did not exult in his triumphs there. But I suppose, with the wearing
+nerves of middle life, he hated more and more the personal swarming of
+interest upon him, and all the inevitable clatter of the thing. Yet he
+faced it, and he labored round our tiresome globe that he might pay the
+uttermost farthing of debts which he had not knowingly contracted, the
+debts of his partners who had meant well and done ill, not because they
+were evil, but because they were unwise, and as unfit for their work as
+he was. "Pay what thou owest." That is right, even when thou owest it
+by the error of others, and even when thou owest it to a bank, which had
+not lent it from love of thee, but in the hard line of business and thy
+need.
+
+Clemens's behavior in this matter redounded to his glory among the
+nations of the whole earth, and especially in this nation, so wrapped in
+commerce and so little used to honor among its many thieves. He had
+behaved like Walter Scott, as millions rejoiced to know, who had not
+known how Walter Scott had behaved till they knew it was like Clemens. No
+doubt it will be put to his credit in the books of the Recording Angel,
+but what the Judge of all the Earth will say of it at the Last Day there
+is no telling. I should not be surprised if He accounted it of less
+merit than some other things that Clemens did and was: less than his
+abhorrence of the Spanish War, and the destruction of the South-African
+republics, and our deceit of the Filipinos, and his hate of slavery, and
+his payment of his portion of our race's debt to the race of the colored
+student whom he saw through college, and his support of a poor artist for
+three years in Paris, and his loan of opportunity to the youth who became
+the most brilliant of our actor-dramatists, and his eager pardon of the
+thoughtless girl who was near paying the penalty of her impertinence with
+the loss of her place, and his remembering that the insolent brakeman got
+so few dollars a month, and his sympathy for working-men standing up to
+money in their Unions, and even his pity for the wounded bird throbbing
+out its little life on the grass for the pleasure of the cruel fool who
+shot it. These and the thousand other charities and beneficences in
+which he abounded, openly or secretly, may avail him more than the
+discharge of his firm's liabilities with the Judge of all the Earth, who
+surely will do right, but whose measures and criterions no man knows, and
+I least of all men.
+
+He made no great show of sympathy with people in their anxieties, but it
+never failed, and at a time when I lay sick for many weeks his letters
+were of comfort to those who feared I might not rise again. His hand was
+out in help for those who needed help, and in kindness for those who
+needed kindness. There remains in my mind the dreary sense of a long,
+long drive to the uttermost bounds of the South End at Boston, where he
+went to call upon some obscure person whose claim stretched in a
+lengthening chain from his early days in Missouri--a most inadequate
+person, in whose vacuity the gloom of the dull day deepened till it was
+almost too deep for tears. He bore the ordeal with grim heroism, and
+silently smoked away the sense of it, as we drove back to Cambridge, in
+his slippered feet, sombrely musing, sombrely swearing. But he knew he
+had done the right, the kind thing, and he was content. He came the
+whole way from Hartford to go with me to a friendless play of mine, which
+Alessandro Salvini was giving in a series of matinees to houses never
+enlarging themselves beyond the count of the brave two hundred who sat it
+through, and he stayed my fainting spirit with a cheer beyond flagons,
+joining me in my joke at the misery of it, and carrying the fun farther.
+
+Before that he had come to witness the aesthetic suicide of Anna
+Dickinson, who had been a flaming light of the political platform in the
+war days, and had been left by them consuming in a hapless ambition for
+the theatre. The poor girl had had a play written especially for her,
+and as Anne Boleyn she ranted and exhorted through the five acts, drawing
+ever nearer the utter defeat of the anticlimax. We could hardly look at
+each other for pity, Clemens sitting there in the box he had taken, with
+his shaggy head out over the corner and his slippered feet curled under
+him: he either went to a place in his slippers or he carried them with
+him, and put them on as soon as he could put off his boots. When it was
+so that we could not longer follow her failure and live, he began to talk
+of the absolute close of her career which the thing was, and how probably
+she had no conception that it was the end. He philosophized the
+mercifulness of the fact, and of the ignorance of most of us, when
+mortally sick or fatally wounded. We think it is not the end, because we
+have never ended before, and we do not see how we can end. Some can push
+by the awful hour and live again, but for Anna Dickinson there could be,
+and was, no such palingenesis. Of course we got that solemn joy out of
+reading her fate aright which is the compensation of the wise spectator
+in witnessing the inexorable doom of others.
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+When Messrs. Houghton & Mifflin became owners of The Atlantic Monthly,
+Mr. Houghton fancied having some breakfasts and dinners, which should
+bring the publisher and the editor face to face with the contributors,
+who were bidden from far and near. Of course, the subtle fiend of
+advertising, who has now grown so unblushing bold, lurked under the
+covers at these banquets, and the junior partner and the young editor had
+their joint and separate fine anguishes of misgiving as to the taste and
+the principle of them; but they were really very simple-hearted and
+honestly meant hospitalities, and they prospered as they ought, and gave
+great pleasure and no pain. I forget some of the "emergent occasions,"
+but I am sure of a birthday dinner most unexpectedly accepted by
+Whittier, and a birthday luncheon to Mrs. Stowe, and I think a birthday
+dinner to Longfellow; but the passing years have left me in the dark as
+to the pretext of that supper at which Clemens made his awful speech, and
+came so near being the death of us all. At the breakfasts and luncheons
+we had the pleasure of our lady contributors' company, but that night
+there were only men, and because of our great strength we survived.
+
+I suppose the year was about 1879, but here the almanac is unimportant,
+and I can only say that it was after Clemens had become a very valued
+contributor of the magazine, where he found himself to his own great
+explicit satisfaction. He had jubilantly accepted our invitation, and
+had promised a speech, which it appeared afterward he had prepared with
+unusual care and confidence. It was his custom always to think out his
+speeches, mentally wording them, and then memorizing them by a peculiar
+system of mnemonics which he had invented. On the dinner-table a certain
+succession of knife, spoon, salt-cellar, and butter-plate symbolized a
+train of ideas, and on the billiard-table a ball, a cue, and a piece of
+chalk served the same purpose. With a diagram of these printed on the
+brain he had full command of the phrases which his excogitation had
+attached to them, and which embodied the ideas in perfect form. He
+believed he had been particularly fortunate in his notion for the speech
+of that evening, and he had worked it out in joyous self-reliance. It was
+the notion of three tramps, three deadbeats, visiting a California
+mining-camp, and imposing themselves upon the innocent miners as
+respectively Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver
+Wendell, Holmes. The humor of the conception must prosper or must fail
+according to the mood of the hearer, but Clemens felt sure of compelling
+this to sympathy, and he looked forward to an unparalleled triumph.
+
+But there were two things that he had not taken into account. One was
+the species of religious veneration in which these men were held by those
+nearest them, a thing that I should not be able to realize to people
+remote from them in time and place. They were men of extraordinary
+dignity, of the thing called presence, for want of some clearer word, so
+that no one could well approach them in a personally light or trifling
+spirit. I do not suppose that anybody more truly valued them or more
+piously loved them than Clemens himself, but the intoxication of his
+fancy carried him beyond the bounds of that regard, and emboldened him to
+the other thing which he had not taken into account-namely, the immense
+hazard of working his fancy out before their faces, and expecting them to
+enter into the delight of it. If neither Emerson, nor Longfellow, nor
+Holmes had been there, the scheme might possibly have carried, but even
+this is doubtful, for those who so devoutly honored them would have
+overcome their horror with difficulty, and perhaps would not have
+overcome it at all.
+
+The publisher, with a modesty very ungrateful to me, had abdicated his
+office of host, and I was the hapless president, fulfilling the abhorred.
+function of calling people to their feet and making them speak. When I
+came to Clemens I introduced him with the cordial admiring I had for him
+as one of my greatest contributors and dearest friends. Here, I said, in
+sum, was a humorist who never left you hanging your head for having
+enjoyed his joke; and then the amazing mistake, the bewildering blunder,
+the cruel catastrophe was upon us. I believe that after the scope of the
+burlesque made itself clear, there was no one there, including the
+burlesquer himself, who was not smitten with a desolating dismay. There
+fell a silence, weighing many tons to the square inch, which deepened
+from moment to moment, and was broken only by the hysterical and
+blood-curdling laughter of a single guest, whose name shall not be handed
+down to infamy. Nobody knew whether to look at the speaker or down at
+his plate. I chose my plate as the least affliction, and so I do not
+know how Clemens looked, except when I stole a glance at him, and saw him
+standing solitary amid his appalled and appalling listeners, with his
+joke dead on his hands. From a first glance at the great three whom his
+jest had made its theme, I was aware of Longfellow sitting upright, and
+regarding the humorist with an air of pensive puzzle, of Holmes busily
+writing on his menu, with a well-feigned effect of preoccupation, and of
+Emerson, holding his elbows, and listening with a sort of Jovian oblivion
+of this nether world in that lapse of memory which saved him in those
+later years from so much bother. Clemens must have dragged his joke to
+the climax and left it there, but I cannot say this from any sense of the
+fact. Of what happened afterward at the table where the immense, the
+wholly innocent, the truly unimagined affront was offered, I have no
+longer the least remembrance. I next remember being in a room of the
+hotel, where Clemens was not to sleep, but to toss in despair, and
+Charles Dudley Warner's saying, in the gloom, "Well, Mark, you're a funny
+fellow." It was as well as anything else he could have said, but Clemens
+seemed unable to accept the tribute.
+
+I stayed the night with him, and the next morning, after a haggard
+breakfast, we drove about and he made some purchases of bric-a-brac for
+his house in Hartford, with a soul as far away from bric-a-brac as ever
+the soul of man was. He went home by an early train, and he lost no time
+in writing back to the three divine personalities which he had so
+involuntarily seemed to flout. They all wrote back to him, making it as
+light for him as they could. I have heard that Emerson was a good deal
+mystified, and in his sublime forgetfulness asked, Who was this gentleman
+who appeared to think he had offered him some sort of annoyance! But I
+am not sure that this is accurate. What I am sure of is that Longfellow,
+a few days after, in my study, stopped before a photograph of Clemens and
+said, "Ah, he is a wag!" and nothing more. Holmes told me, with deep
+emotion, such as a brother humorist might well feel, that he had not lost
+an instant in replying to Clemens's letter, and assuring him that there
+had not been the least offence, and entreating him never to think of the
+matter again. "He said that he was a fool, but he was God's fool,"
+Holmes quoted from the letter, with a true sense of the pathos and the
+humor of the self-abasement.
+
+To me Clemens wrote a week later, "It doesn't get any better; it burns
+like fire." But now I understand that it was not shame that burnt, but
+rage for a blunder which he had so incredibly committed. That to have
+conceived of those men, the most dignified in our literature, our
+civilization, as impersonable by three hoboes, and then to have imagined
+that he could ask them personally to enjoy the monstrous travesty, was a
+break, he saw too late, for which there was no repair. Yet the time
+came, and not so very long afterward, when some mention was made of the
+incident as a mistake, and he said, with all his fierceness, "But I don't
+admit that it was a mistake," and it was not so in the minds of all
+witnesses at second hand. The morning after the dreadful dinner there
+came a glowing note from Professor Child, who had read the newspaper
+report of it, praising Clemens's burlesque as the richest piece of humor
+in the world, and betraying no sense of incongruity in its perpetration
+in the presence of its victims. I think it must always have ground in
+Clemens's soul, that he was the prey of circumstances, and that if he had
+some more favoring occasion he could retrieve his loss in it by giving
+the thing the right setting. Not more than two or three years ago, he
+came to try me as to trying it again at a meeting of newspaper men in
+Washington. I had to own my fears, while I alleged Child's note on the
+other hand, but in the end he did not try it with the newspaper men. I
+do not know whether he has ever printed it or not, but since the thing
+happened I have often wondered how much offence there really was in it. I
+am not sure but the horror of the spectators read more indignation into
+the subjects of the hapless drolling than they felt. But it must have
+been difficult for them to bear it with equanimity. To be sure, they
+were not themselves mocked; the joke was, of course, beside them;
+nevertheless, their personality was trifled with, and I could only end by
+reflecting that if I had been in their place I should not have liked it
+myself. Clemens would have liked it himself, for he had the heart for
+that sort of wild play, and he so loved a joke that even if it took the
+form of a liberty, and was yet a good joke, he would have loved it. But
+perhaps this burlesque was not a good joke.
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+Clemens was oftenest at my house in Cambridge, but he was also sometimes
+at my house in Belmont; when, after a year in Europe, we went to live in
+Boston, he was more rarely with us. We could never be long together
+without something out of the common happening, and one day something far
+out of the common happened, which fortunately refused the nature of
+absolute tragedy, while remaining rather the saddest sort of comedy. We
+were looking out of my library window on that view of the Charles which I
+was so proud of sharing with my all-but-next-door neighbor, Doctor
+Holmes, when another friend who was with us called out with curiously
+impersonal interest, "Oh, see that woman getting into the water!" This
+would have excited curiosity and alarmed anxiety far less lively than
+ours, and Clemens and I rushed downstairs and out through my basement and
+back gate. At the same time a coachman came out of a stable next door,
+and grappled by the shoulders a woman who was somewhat deliberately
+getting down the steps to the water over the face of the embankment.
+Before we could reach them he had pulled her up to the driveway, and
+stood holding her there while she crazily grieved at her rescue. As soon
+as he saw us he went back into his stable, and left us with the poor wild
+creature on our hands. She was not very young and not very pretty, and
+we could not have flattered ourselves with the notion of anything
+romantic in her suicidal mania, but we could take her on the broad human
+level, and on this we proposed to escort her up Beacon Street till we
+could give her into the keeping of one of those kindly policemen whom our
+neighborhood knew. Naturally there was no policeman known to us or
+unknown the whole way to the Public Garden. We had to circumvent our
+charge in her present design of drowning herself, and walk her past the
+streets crossing Beacon to the river. At these points it needed
+considerable reasoning to overcome her wish and some active manoeuvring
+in both of us to enforce our arguments. Nobody else appeared to be
+interested, and though we did not court publicity in the performance of
+the duty so strangely laid upon us, still it was rather disappointing to
+be so entirely ignored.
+
+There are some four or five crossings to the river between 302 Beacon
+Street and the Public Garden, and the suggestions at our command were
+pretty well exhausted by the time we reached it. Still the expected
+policeman was nowhere in sight; but a brilliant thought occurred to
+Clemens. He asked me where the nearest police station was, and when I
+told him, he started off at his highest speed, leaving me in sole charge
+of our hapless ward. All my powers of suasion were now taxed to the
+utmost, and I began attracting attention as a short, stout gentleman in
+early middle life endeavoring to distrain a respectable female of her
+personal liberty, when his accomplice had abandoned him to his wicked
+design. After a much longer time than I thought I should have taken to
+get a policeman from the station, Clemens reappeared in easy conversation
+with an officer who had probably realized that he was in the company of
+Mark Twain, and was in no hurry to end the interview. He took possession
+of our captive, and we saw her no more. I now wonder that with our joint
+instinct for failure we ever got rid of her; but I am sure we did, and
+few things in life have given me greater relief. When we got back to my
+house we found the friend we had left there quite unruffled and not much
+concerned to know the facts of our adventure. My impression is that he
+had been taking a nap on my lounge; he appeared refreshed and even gay;
+but if I am inexact in these details he is alive to refute me.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+A little after this Clemens went abroad with his family, and lived
+several years in Germany. His letters still came, but at longer
+intervals, and the thread of our intimate relations was inevitably
+broken. He would write me when something I had written pleased him, or
+when something signal occurred to him, or some political or social
+outrage stirred him to wrath, and he wished to free his mind in pious
+profanity. During this sojourn he came near dying of pneumonia in
+Berlin, and he had slight relapses from it after coming home. In Berlin
+also he had the honor of dining with the German Emperor at the table of a
+cousin married to a high officer of the court. Clemens was a man to
+enjoy such a distinction; he knew how to take it as a delegated
+recognition from the German people; but as coming from a rather cockahoop
+sovereign who had as yet only his sovereignty to value himself upon, he
+was not very proud of it. He expressed a quiet disdain of the event as
+between the imperiality and himself, on whom it was supposed to confer
+such glory, crowning his life with the topmost leaf of laurel. He was in
+the same mood in his account of an English dinner many years before,
+where there was a "little Scotch lord" present, to whom the English
+tacitly referred Clemens's talk, and laughed when the lord laughed, and
+were grave when he failed to smile. Of all the men I have known he was
+the farthest from a snob, though he valued recognition, and liked the
+flattery of the fashionable fair when it came in his way. He would not
+go out of his way for it, but like most able and brilliant men he loved
+the minds of women, their wit, their agile cleverness, their sensitive
+perception, their humorous appreciation, the saucy things they would say,
+and their pretty, temerarious defiances. He had, of course, the keenest
+sense of what was truly dignified and truly undignified in people; but he
+was not really interested in what we call society affairs; they scarcely
+existed for him, though his books witness how he abhorred the dreadful
+fools who through some chance of birth or wealth hold themselves
+different from other men.
+
+Commonly he did not keep things to himself, especially dislikes and
+condemnations. Upon most current events he had strong opinions, and he
+uttered them strongly. After a while he was silent in them, but if you
+tried him you found him in them still. He was tremendously worked up by
+a certain famous trial, as most of us were who lived in the time of it.
+He believed the accused guilty, but when we met some months after it was
+over, and I tempted him to speak his mind upon it, he would only say. The
+man had suffered enough; as if the man had expiated his wrong, and he was
+not going to do anything to renew his penalty. I found that very
+curious, very delicate. His continued blame could not come to the
+sufferer's knowledge, but he felt it his duty to forbear it.
+
+He was apt to wear himself out in the vehemence of his resentments; or,
+he had so spent himself in uttering them that he had literally nothing
+more to say. You could offer Clemens offences that would anger other men
+and he did not mind; he would account for them from human nature; but if
+he thought you had in any way played him false you were anathema and
+maranatha forever. Yet not forever, perhaps, for by and-by, after years,
+he would be silent. There were two men, half a generation apart in their
+succession, whom he thought equally atrocious in their treason to him,
+and of whom he used to talk terrifyingly, even after they were out of the
+world. He went farther than Heine, who said that he forgave his enemies,
+but not till they were dead. Clemens did not forgive his dead enemies;
+their death seemed to deepen their crimes, like a base evasion, or a
+cowardly attempt to escape; he pursued them to the grave; he would like
+to dig them up and take vengeance upon their clay. So he said, but no
+doubt he would not have hurt them if he had had them living before him.
+He was generous without stint; he trusted without measure, but where his
+generosity was abused, or his trust betrayed, he was a fire of vengeance,
+a consuming flame of suspicion that no sprinkling of cool patience from
+others could quench; it had to burn itself out. He was eagerly and
+lavishly hospitable, but if a man seemed willing to batten on him, or in
+any way to lie down upon him, Clemens despised him unutterably. In his
+frenzies of resentment or suspicion he would not, and doubtless could
+not, listen to reason. But if between the paroxysms he were confronted
+with the facts he would own them, no matter how much they told against
+him. At one period he fancied that a certain newspaper was hounding him
+with biting censure and poisonous paragraphs, and he was filling himself
+up with wrath to be duly discharged on the editor's head. Later, he
+wrote me with a humorous joy in his mistake that Warner had advised him
+to have the paper watched for these injuries. He had done so, and how
+many mentions of him did I reckon he had found in three months? Just
+two, and they were rather indifferent than unfriendly. So the paper was
+acquitted, and the editor's life was spared. The wretch never knew how
+near he was to losing it, with incredible preliminaries of obloquy, and a
+subsequent devotion to lasting infamy.
+
+His memory for favors was as good as for injuries, and he liked to return
+your friendliness with as loud a band of music as could be bought or
+bribed for the occasion. All that you had to do was to signify that you
+wanted his help. When my father was consul at Toronto during Arthur's
+administration, he fancied that his place was in danger, and he appealed
+to me. In turn I appealed to Clemens, bethinking myself of his
+friendship with Grant and Grant's friendship with Arthur. I asked him to
+write to Grant in my father's behalf, but No, he answered me, I must come
+to Hartford, and we would go on to New York together and see Grant
+personally. This was before, and long before, Clemens became Grant's
+publisher and splendid benefactor, but the men liked each other as such
+men could not help doing. Clemens made the appointment, and we went to
+find Grant in his business office, that place where his business
+innocence was afterward so betrayed. He was very simple and very
+cordial, and I was instantly the more at home with him, because his voice
+was the soft, rounded, Ohio River accent to which my years were earliest
+used from my steamboating uncles, my earliest heroes. When I stated my
+business he merely said, Oh no; that must not be; he would write to Mr.
+Arthur; and he did so that day; and my father lived to lay down his
+office, when he tired of it, with no urgence from above.
+
+It is not irrelevant to Clemens to say that Grant seemed to like finding
+himself in company with two literary men, one of whom at least he could
+make sure of, and unlike that silent man he was reputed, he talked
+constantly, and so far as he might he talked literature. At least he
+talked of John Phoenix, that delightfulest of the early Pacific Slope
+humorists, whom he had known under his real name of George H. Derby, when
+they were fellow-cadets at West Point. It was mighty pretty, as Pepys
+would say, to see the delicate deference Clemens paid our plain hero, and
+the manly respect with which he listened. While Grant talked, his
+luncheon was brought in from some unassuming restaurant near by, and he
+asked us to join him in the baked beans and coffee which were served us
+in a little room out of the office with about the same circumstance as at
+a railroad refreshment-counter. The baked beans and coffee were of about
+the railroad-refreshment quality; but eating them with Grant was like
+sitting down to baked beans and coffee with Julius Caesar, or Alexander,
+or some other great Plutarchan captain. One of the highest satisfactions
+of Clemens's often supremely satisfactory life was his relation to Grant.
+It was his proud joy to tell how he found Grant about to sign a contract
+for his book on certainly very good terms, and said to him that he would
+himself publish the book and give him a percentage three times as large.
+He said Grant seemed to doubt whether he could honorably withdraw from
+the negotiation at that point, but Clemens overbore his scruples, and it
+was his unparalleled privilege, his princely pleasure, to pay the author
+a far larger check for his work than had ever been paid to an author
+before. He valued even more than this splendid opportunity the sacred
+moments in which their business brought him into the presence of the
+slowly dying, heroically living man whom he was so befriending; and he
+told me in words which surely lost none of their simple pathos through
+his report how Grant described his suffering.
+
+The prosperity, of this venture was the beginning of Clemens's adversity,
+for it led to excesses of enterprise which were forms of dissipation. The
+young sculptor who had come back to him from Paris modelled a small bust
+of Grant, which Clemens multiplied in great numbers to his great loss,
+and the success of Grant's book tempted him to launch on publishing seas
+where his bark presently foundered. The first and greatest of his
+disasters was the Life of Pope Leo XIII, which he came to tell me of,
+when he had imagined it, in a sort of delirious exultation. He had no
+words in which to paint the magnificence of the project, or to forecast
+its colossal success. It would have a currency bounded only by the
+number of Catholics in Christendom. It would be translated into every
+language which was anywhere written or printed; it would be circulated
+literally in every country of the globe, and Clemens's book agents would
+carry the prospectuses and then the bound copies of the work to the ends
+of the whole earth. Not only would every Catholic buy it, but every
+Catholic must, as he was a good Catholic, as he hoped to be saved. It
+was a magnificent scheme, and it captivated me, as it had captivated
+Clemens; it dazzled us both, and neither of us saw the fatal defect in
+it. We did not consider how often Catholics could not read, how often
+when they could, they might not wish to read. The event proved that
+whether they could read or not the immeasurable majority did not wish to
+read the life of the Pope, though it was written by a dignitary of the
+Church and issued to the world with every sanction from the Vatican. The
+failure was incredible to Clemens; his sanguine soul was utterly
+confounded, and soon a silence fell upon it where it had been so
+exuberantly jubilant.
+
+
+
+
+XIX.
+
+The occasions which brought us to New York together were not nearly so
+frequent as those which united us in Boston, but there was a dinner given
+him by a friend which remains memorable from the fatuity of two men
+present, so different in everything but their fatuity. One was the sweet
+old comedian Billy Florence, who was urging the unsuccessful dramatist
+across the table to write him a play about Oliver Cromwell, and giving
+the reasons why he thought himself peculiarly fitted to portray the
+character of Cromwell. The other was a modestly millioned rich man who
+was then only beginning to amass the moneys afterward heaped so high, and
+was still in the condition to be flattered by the condescension of a yet
+greater millionaire. His contribution to our gaiety was the verbatim
+report of a call he had made upon William H. Vanderbilt, whom he had
+found just about starting out of town, with his trunks actually in the
+front hall, but who had stayed to receive the narrator. He had, in fact,
+sat down on one of the trunks, and talked with the easiest friendliness,
+and quite, we were given to infer, like an ordinary human being. Clemens
+often kept on with some thread of the talk when we came away from a
+dinner, but now he was silent, as if "high sorrowful and cloyed"; and it
+was not till well afterward that I found he had noted the facts from the
+bitterness with which he mocked the rich man, and the pity he expressed
+for the actor.
+
+He had begun before that to amass those evidences against mankind which
+eventuated with him in his theory of what he called "the damned human
+race." This was not an expression of piety, but of the kind contempt to
+which he was driven by our follies and iniquities as he had observed them
+in himself as well as in others. It was as mild a misanthropy, probably,
+as ever caressed the objects of its malediction. But I believe it was
+about the year 1900 that his sense of our perdition became insupportable
+and broke out in a mixed abhorrence and amusement which spared no
+occasion, so that I could quite understand why Mrs. Clemens should have
+found some compensation, when kept to her room by sickness, in the
+reflection that now she should not hear so much about "the damned human
+race." He told of that with the same wild joy that he told of
+overhearing her repetition of one of his most inclusive profanities, and
+her explanation that she meant him to hear it so that he might know how
+it sounded. The contrast of the lurid blasphemy with her heavenly
+whiteness should have been enough to cure any one less grounded than he
+in what must be owned was as fixed a habit as smoking with him. When I
+first knew him he rarely vented his fury in that sort, and I fancy he was
+under a promise to her which he kept sacred till the wear and tear of his
+nerves with advancing years disabled him. Then it would be like him to
+struggle with himself till he could struggle no longer and to ask his
+promise back, and it would be like her to give it back. His profanity
+was the heritage of his boyhood and young manhood in social conditions
+and under the duress of exigencies in which everybody swore about as
+impersonally as he smoked. It is best to recognize the fact of it, and I
+do so the more readily because I cannot suppose the Recording Angel
+really minded it much more than that Guardian. Angel of his. It
+probably grieved them about equally, but they could equally forgive it.
+Nothing came of his pose regarding "the damned human race" except his
+invention of the Human Race Luncheon Club. This was confined to four
+persons who were never all got together, and it soon perished of their
+indifference.
+
+In the earlier days that I have more specially in mind one of the
+questions that we used to debate a good deal was whether every human
+motive was not selfish. We inquired as to every impulse, the noblest,
+the holiest in effect, and he found them in the last analysis of selfish
+origin. Pretty nearly the whole time of a certain railroad run from New
+York to Hartford was taken up with the scrutiny of the self-sacrifice of
+a mother for her child, of the abandon of the lover who dies in saving
+his mistress from fire or flood, of the hero's courage in the field and
+the martyr's at the stake. Each he found springing from the unconscious
+love of self and the dread of the greater pain which the self-sacrificer
+would suffer in-forbearing the sacrifice. If we had any time left from
+this inquiry that day, he must have devoted it to a high regret that
+Napoleon did not carry out his purpose of invading England, for then he
+would have destroyed the feudal aristocracy, or "reformed the lords," as
+it might be called now. He thought that would have been an incalculable
+blessing to the English people and the world. Clemens was always
+beautifully and unfalteringly a republican. None of his occasional
+misgivings for America implicated a return to monarchy. Yet he felt
+passionately the splendor of the English monarchy, and there was a time
+when he gloried in that figurative poetry by which the king was phrased
+as "the Majesty of England." He rolled the words deep-throatedly out,
+and exulted in their beauty as if it were beyond any other glory of the
+world. He read, or read at, English history a great deal, and one of the
+by-products of his restless invention was a game of English Kings (like
+the game of Authors) for children. I do not know whether he ever
+perfected this, but I am quite sure it was not put upon the market. Very
+likely he brought it to a practicable stage, and then tired of it, as he
+was apt to do in the ultimation of his vehement undertakings.
+
+
+
+
+XX.
+
+He satisfied the impassioned demand of his nature for incessant
+activities of every kind by taking a personal as well as a pecuniary
+interest in the inventions of others. At one moment "the damned human
+race" was almost to be redeemed by a process of founding brass without
+air bubbles in it; if this could once be accomplished, as I understood,
+or misunderstood, brass could be used in art-printing to a degree
+hitherto impossible. I dare say I have got it wrong, but I am not
+mistaken as to Clemens's enthusiasm for the process, and his heavy losses
+in paying its way to ultimate failure. He was simultaneously absorbed in
+the perfection of a type-setting machine, which he was paying the
+inventor a salary to bring to a perfection so expensive that it was
+practically impracticable. We were both printers by trade, and I could
+take the same interest in this wonderful piece of mechanism that he
+could; and it was so truly wonderful that it did everything but walk and
+talk. Its ingenious creator was so bent upon realizing the highest ideal
+in it that he produced a machine of quite unimpeachable efficiency. But
+it was so costly, when finished, that it could not be made for less than
+twenty thousand dollars, if the parts were made by hand. This sum was
+prohibitive of its introduction, unless the requisite capital could be
+found for making the parts by machinery, and Clemens spent many months in
+vainly trying to get this money together. In the mean time simpler
+machines had been invented and the market filled, and his investment of
+three hundred thousand dollars in the beautiful miracle remained
+permanent but not profitable. I once went with him to witness its
+performance, and it did seem to me the last word in its way, but it had
+been spoken too exquisitely, too fastidiously. I never heard him devote
+the inventor to the infernal gods, as he was apt to do with the geniuses
+he lost money by, and so I think he did not regard him as a traitor.
+
+In these things, and in his other schemes for the 'subiti guadagni' of
+the speculator and the "sudden making of splendid names" for the
+benefactors of our species, Clemens satisfied the Colonel Sellers nature
+in himself (from which he drew the picture of that wild and lovable
+figure), and perhaps made as good use of his money as he could. He did
+not care much for money in itself, but he luxuriated in the lavish use of
+it, and he was as generous with it as ever a man was. He liked giving it,
+but he commonly wearied of giving it himself, and wherever he lived he
+established an almoner, whom he fully trusted to keep his left hand
+ignorant of what his right hand was doing. I believe he felt no finality
+in charity, but did it because in its provisional way it was the only
+thing a man could do. I never heard him go really into any sociological
+inquiry, and I have a feeling that that sort of thing baffled and
+dispirited him. No one can read The Connecticut Yankee and not be aware
+of the length and breadth of his sympathies with poverty, but apparently
+he had not thought out any scheme for righting the economic wrongs we
+abound in. I cannot remember our ever getting quite down to a discussion
+of the matter; we came very near it once in the day of the vast wave of
+emotion sent over the world by 'Looking Backward,' and again when we were
+all so troubled by the great coal strike in Pennsylvania; in considering
+that he seemed to be for the time doubtful of the justice of the
+workingman's cause. At all other times he seemed to know that whatever
+wrongs the workingman committed work was always in the right.
+
+When Clemens returned to America with his family, after lecturing round
+the world, I again saw him in New York, where I so often saw him while he
+was shaping himself for that heroic enterprise. He would come to me, and
+talk sorrowfully over his financial ruin, and picture it to himself as
+the stuff of some unhappy dream, which, after long prosperity, had
+culminated the wrong way. It was very melancholy, very touching, but the
+sorrow to which he had come home from his long journey had not that
+forlorn bewilderment in it. He was looking wonderfully well, and when I
+wanted the name of his elixir, he said it was plasmon. He was apt, for a
+man who had put faith so decidedly away from him, to take it back and pin
+it to some superstition, usually of a hygienic sort. Once, when he was
+well on in years, he came to New York without glasses, and announced that
+he and all his family, so astigmatic and myopic and old-sighted, had, so
+to speak, burned their spectacles behind them upon the instruction of
+some sage who had found out that they were a delusion. The next time he
+came he wore spectacles freely, almost ostentatiously, and I heard from
+others that the whole Clemens family had been near losing their eyesight
+by the miracle worked in their behalf. Now, I was not surprised to learn
+that "the damned human race" was to be saved by plasmon, if anything, and
+that my first duty was to visit the plasmon agency with him, and procure
+enough plasmon to secure my family against the ills it was heir to for
+evermore. I did not immediately understand that plasmon was one of the
+investments which he had made from "the substance of things hoped for,"
+and in the destiny of a disastrous disappointment. But after paying off
+the creditors of his late publishing firm, he had to do something with
+his money, and it was not his fault if he did not make a fortune out of
+plasmon.
+
+
+
+
+XXI.
+
+For a time it was a question whether he should not go back with his
+family to their old home in Hartford. Perhaps the father's and mother's
+hearts drew them there all the more strongly because of the grief written
+ineffaceably over it, but for the younger ones it was no longer the
+measure of the world. It was easier for all to stay on indefinitely in
+New York, which is a sojourn without circumstance, and equally the home
+of exile and of indecision. The Clemenses took a pleasant, spacious
+house at Riverdale, on the Hudson, and there I began to see them again on
+something like the sweet old terms. They lived far more unpretentiously
+than they used, and I think with a notion of economy, which they had
+never very successfully practised. I recall that at the end of a certain
+year in Hartford, when they had been saving and paying cash for
+everything, Clemens wrote, reminding me of their avowed experiment, and
+asking me to guess how many bills they had at New Year's; he hastened to
+say that a horse-car would not have held them. At Riverdale they kept no
+carriage, and there was a snowy night when I drove up to their handsome
+old mansion in the station carryall, which was crusted with mud as from
+the going down of the Deluge after transporting Noah and his family from
+the Ark to whatever point they decided to settle at provisionally. But
+the good talk, the rich talk, the talk that could never suffer poverty of
+mind or soul, was there, and we jubilantly found ourselves again in our
+middle youth. It was the mighty moment when Clemens was building his
+engines of war for the destruction of Christian Science, which
+superstition nobody, and he least of all, expected to destroy. It would
+not be easy to say whether in his talk of it his disgust for the
+illiterate twaddle of Mrs. Eddy's book, or his admiration of her genius
+for organization was the greater. He believed that as a religious
+machine the Christian Science Church was as perfect as the Roman Church
+and destined to be, more formidable in its control of the minds of men.
+He looked for its spread over the whole of Christendom, and throughout
+the winter he spent at Riverdale he was ready to meet all listeners more
+than half-way with his convictions of its powerful grasp of the average
+human desire to get something for nothing. The vacuous vulgarity of its
+texts was a perpetual joy to him, while he bowed with serious respect to
+the sagacity which built so securely upon the everlasting rock of human
+credulity and folly.
+
+An interesting phase of his psychology in this business was not only his
+admiration for the masterly, policy of the Christian Science hierarchy,
+but his willingness to allow the miracles of its healers to be tried on
+his friends and family, if they wished it. He had a tender heart for the
+whole generation of empirics, as well as the newer sorts of scientitians,
+but he seemed to base his faith in them largely upon the failure of the
+regulars rather than upon their own successes, which also he believed in.
+He was recurrently, but not insistently, desirous that you should try
+their strange magics when you were going to try the familiar medicines.
+
+
+
+
+XXII.
+
+The order of my acquaintance, or call it intimacy, with Clemens was this:
+our first meeting in Boston, my visits to him in Hartford, his visits to
+me in Cambridge, in Belmont, and in Boston, our briefer and less frequent
+meetings in Paris and New York, all with repeated interruptions through
+my absences in Europe, and his sojourns in London, Berlin, Vienna, and
+Florence, and his flights to the many ends, and odds and ends, of the
+earth. I will not try to follow the events, if they were not rather the
+subjective experiences, of those different periods and points of time
+which I must not fail to make include his summer at York Harbor, and his
+divers residences in New York, on Tenth Street and on Fifth Avenue, at
+Riverdale, and at Stormfield, which his daughter has told me he loved
+best of all his houses and hoped to make his home for long years.
+
+Not much remains to me of the week or so that we had together in Paris
+early in the summer of 1904. The first thing I got at my bankers was a
+cable message announcing that my father was stricken with paralysis, but
+urging my stay for further intelligence, and I went about, till the final
+summons came, with my head in a mist of care and dread. Clemens was very
+kind and brotherly through it all. He was living greatly to his mind in
+one of those arcaded little hotels in the Rue de Rivoli, and he was free
+from all household duties to range with me. We drove together to make
+calls of digestion at many houses where he had got indigestion through
+his reluctance from their hospitality, for he hated dining out. But, as
+he explained, his wife wanted him to make these visits, and he did it, as
+he did everything she wanted. 'At one place, some suburban villa, he
+could get no answer to his ring, and he "hove" his cards over the gate
+just as it opened, and he had the shame of explaining in his
+unexplanatory French to the man picking them up. He was excruciatingly
+helpless with his cabmen, but by very cordially smiling and casting
+himself on the drivers' mercy he always managed to get where he wanted.
+The family was on the verge of their many moves, and he was doing some
+small errands; he said that the others did the main things, and left him
+to do what the cat might.
+
+It was with that return upon the buoyant billow of plasmon, renewed in
+look and limb, that Clemens's universally pervasive popularity began in
+his own country. He had hitherto been more intelligently accepted or
+more largely imagined in Europe, and I suppose it was my sense of this
+that inspired the stupidity of my saying to him when we came to consider
+"the state of polite learning" among us, "You mustn't expect people to
+keep it up here as they do in England." But it appeared that his
+countrymen were only wanting the chance, and they kept it up in honor of
+him past all precedent. One does not go into a catalogue of dinners,
+receptions, meetings, speeches, and the like, when there are more vital
+things to speak of. He loved these obvious joys, and he eagerly strove
+with the occasions they gave him for the brilliancy which seemed so
+exhaustless and was so exhausting. His friends saw that he was wearing
+himself out, and it was not because of Mrs. Clemens's health alone that
+they were glad to have him take refuge at Riverdale. The family lived
+there two happy, hopeless years, and then it was ordered that they should
+change for his wife's sake to some less exacting climate. Clemens was
+not eager to go to Florence, but his imagination was taken as it would
+have been in the old-young days by the notion of packing his furniture
+into flexible steel cages from his house in Hartford and unpacking it
+from them untouched at his villa in Fiesole. He got what pleasure any
+man could out of that triumph of mind over matter, but the shadow was
+creeping up his life. One sunny afternoon we sat on the grass before the
+mansion, after his wife had begun to get well enough for removal, and we
+looked up toward a balcony where by-and-by that lovely presence made
+itself visible, as if it had stooped there from a cloud. A hand frailly
+waved a handkerchief; Clemens ran over the lawn toward it, calling
+tenderly: "What? What?" as if it might be an asking for him instead of
+the greeting it really was for me. It was the last time I saw her, if
+indeed I can be said to have seen her then, and long afterward when I
+said how beautiful we all thought her, how good, how wise, how
+wonderfully perfect in every relation of life, he cried out in a breaking
+voice: "Oh, why didn't you ever tell her? She thought you didn't like
+her." What a pang it was then not to have told her, but how could we
+have told her? His unreason endeared him to me more than all his wisdom.
+
+To that Riverdale sojourn belong my impressions of his most violent
+anti-Christian Science rages, which began with the postponement of his
+book, and softened into acceptance of the delay till he had well-nigh
+forgotten his wrath when it come out. There was also one of those joint
+episodes of ours, which, strangely enough, did not eventuate in entire
+failure, as most of our joint episodes did. He wrote furiously to me of
+a wrong which had been done to one of the most helpless and one of the
+most helped of our literary brethren, asking me to join with him in
+recovering the money paid over by that brother's publisher to a false
+friend who had withheld it and would not give any account of it. Our
+hapless brother had appealed to Clemens, as he had to me, with the facts,
+but not asking our help, probably because he knew he need not ask; and
+Clemens enclosed to me a very taking-by-the-throat message which he
+proposed sending to the false friend. For once I had some sense, and
+answered that this would never do, for we had really no power in the
+matter, and I contrived a letter to the recreant so softly diplomatic
+that I shall always think of it with pride when my honesties no longer
+give me satisfaction, saying that this incident had come to our
+knowledge, and suggesting that we felt sure he would not finally wish to
+withhold the money. Nothing more, practically, than that, but that was
+enough; there came promptly back a letter of justification, covering a
+very substantial check, which we hilariously forwarded to our
+beneficiary. But the helpless man who was so used to being helped did
+not answer with the gladness I, at least, expected of him. He
+acknowledged the check as he would any ordinary payment, and then he made
+us observe that there was still a large sum due him out of the moneys
+withheld. At this point I proposed to Clemens that we should let the
+nonchalant victim collect the remnant himself. Clouds of sorrow had
+gathered about the bowed head of the delinquent since we began on him,
+and my fickle sympathies were turning his way from the victim who was
+really to blame for leaving his affairs so unguardedly to him in the
+first place. Clemens made some sort of grit assent, and we dropped the
+matter. He was more used to ingratitude from those he helped than I was,
+who found being lain down upon not so amusing as he found my revolt. He
+reckoned I was right, he said, and after that I think we never recurred
+to the incident. It was not ingratitude that he ever minded; it was
+treachery, that really maddened him past forgiveness.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII.
+
+During the summer he spent at York Harbor I was only forty minutes away
+at Kittery Point, and we saw each other often; but this was before the
+last time at Riverdale. He had a wide, low cottage in a pine grove
+overlooking York River, and we used to sit at a corner of the veranda
+farthest away from Mrs. Clemens's window, where we could read our
+manuscripts to each other, and tell our stories, and laugh our hearts out
+without disturbing her. At first she had been about the house, and there
+was one gentle afternoon when she made tea for us in the parlor, but that
+was the last time I spoke with her. After that it was really a question
+of how soonest and easiest she could be got back to Riverdale; but, of
+course, there were specious delays in which she seemed no worse and
+seemed a little better, and Clemens could work at a novel he had begun.
+He had taken a room in the house of a friend and neighbor, a fisherman
+and boatman; there was a table where he could write, and a bed where he
+could lie down and read; and there, unless my memory has played me one of
+those constructive tricks that people's memories indulge in, he read me
+the first chapters of an admirable story. The scene was laid in a
+Missouri town, and the characters such as he had known in boyhood; but as
+often as I tried to make him own it, he denied having written any such
+story; it is possible that I dreamed it, but I hope the MS. will yet be
+found. Upon reflection I cannot believe that I dreamed it, and I cannot
+believe that it was an effect of that sort of pseudomnemonics which I
+have mentioned. The characters in the novel are too clearly outlined in
+my recollection, together with some critical reservations of my own
+concerning them. Not only does he seem to have read me those first
+chapters, but to have talked them over with me and outlined the whole
+story.
+
+I cannot say whether or not he believed that his wife would recover; he
+fought the fear of her death to the end; for her life was far more
+largely his than the lives of most men's wives are theirs. For his own
+life I believe he would never have much cared, if I may trust a saying of
+one who was so absolutely without pose as he was. He said that he never
+saw a dead man whom he did not envy for having had it over and being done
+with it. Life had always amused him, and in the resurgence of its
+interests after his sorrow had ebbed away he was again deeply interested
+in the world and in the human race, which, though damned, abounded in
+subjects of curious inquiry. When the time came for his wife's removal
+from York Harbor I went with him to Boston, where he wished to look up
+the best means of her conveyance to New York. The inquiry absorbed him:
+the sort of invalid car he could get; how she could be carried to the
+village station; how the car could be detached from the eastern train at
+Boston and carried round to the southern train on the other side of the
+city, and then how it could be attached to the Hudson River train at New
+York and left at Riverdale. There was no particular of the business
+which he did not scrutinize and master, not only with his poignant
+concern for her welfare, but with his strong curiosity as to how these
+unusual things were done with the usual means. With the inertness that
+grows upon an aging man he had been used to delegating more and more
+things, but of that thing I perceived that he would not delegate the
+least detail.
+
+He had meant never to go abroad again, but when it came time to go he did
+not look forward to returning; he expected to live in Florence always
+after that; they were used to the life and they had been happy there some
+years earlier before he went with his wife for the cure of Nauheim. But
+when he came home again it was for good and all. It was natural that he
+should wish to live in New York, where they had already had a pleasant
+year in Tenth Street. I used to see him there in an upper room, looking
+south over a quiet open space of back yards where we fought our battles
+in behalf of the Filipinos and the Boers, and he carried on his campaign
+against the missionaries in China. He had not yet formed his habit of
+lying for whole days in bed and reading and writing there, yet he was a
+good deal in bed, from weakness, I suppose, and for the mere comfort of
+it.
+
+My perspectives are not very clear, and in the foreshortening of events
+which always takes place in our review of the past I may not always time
+things aright. But I believe it was not until he had taken his house at
+21 Fifth Avenue that he began to talk to me of writing his autobiography.
+He meant that it should be a perfectly veracious record of his life and
+period; for the first time in literature there should be a true history
+of a man and a true presentation of the men the man had known. As we
+talked it over the scheme enlarged itself in our riotous fancy. We said
+it should be not only a book, it should be a library, not only a library,
+but a literature. It should make good the world's loss through Omar's
+barbarity at Alexandria; there was no image so grotesque, so extravagant
+that we did not play with it; and the work so far as he carried it was
+really done on a colossal scale. But one day he said that as to veracity
+it was a failure; he had begun to lie, and that if no man ever yet told
+the truth about himself it was because no man ever could. How far he had
+carried his autobiography I cannot say; he dictated the matter several
+hours each day; and the public has already seen long passages from it,
+and can judge, probably, of the make and matter of the whole from these.
+It is immensely inclusive, and it observes no order or sequence. Whether
+now, after his death, it will be published soon or late I have no means
+of knowing. Once or twice he said in a vague way that it was not to be
+published for twenty years, so that the discomfort of publicity might be
+minimized for all the survivors. Suddenly he told me he was not working
+at it; but I did not understand whether he had finished it or merely
+dropped it; I never asked.
+
+We lived in the same city, but for old men rather far apart, he at Tenth
+Street and I at Seventieth, and with our colds and other disabilities we
+did not see each other often. He expected me to come to him, and I would
+not without some return of my visits, but we never ceased to be friends,
+and good friends, so far as I know. I joked him once as to how I was
+going to come out in his autobiography, and he gave me some sort of
+joking reassurance. There was one incident, however, that brought us
+very frequently and actively together. He came one Sunday afternoon to
+have me call with him on Maxim Gorky, who was staying at a hotel a few
+streets above mine. We were both interested in Gorky, Clemens rather
+more as a revolutionist and I as a realist, though I too wished the
+Russian Tsar ill, and the novelist well in his mission to the Russian
+sympathizers in this republic. But I had lived through the episode of
+Kossuth's visit to us and his vain endeavor to raise funds for the
+Hungarian cause in 1851, when we were a younger and nobler nation than
+now, with hearts if not hands, opener to the "oppressed of Europe"; the
+oppressed of America, the four or five millions of slaves, we did not
+count. I did not believe that Gorky could get the money for the cause of
+freedom in Russia which he had come to get; as I told a valued friend of
+his and mine, I did not believe he could get twenty-five hundred dollars,
+and I think now I set the figure too high. I had already refused to sign
+the sort of general appeal his friends were making to our principles and
+pockets because I felt it so wholly idle, and when the paper was produced
+in Gorky's presence and Clemens put his name to it I still refused. The
+next day Gorky was expelled from his hotel with the woman who was not his
+wife, but who, I am bound to say, did not look as if she were not, at
+least to me, who am, however, not versed in those aspects of human
+nature.
+
+I might have escaped unnoted, but Clemens's familiar head gave us away to
+the reporters waiting at the elevator's mouth for all who went to see
+Gorky. As it was, a hunt of interviewers ensued for us severally and
+jointly. I could remain aloof in my hotel apartment, returning answer to
+such guardians of the public right to know everything that I had nothing
+to say of Gorky's domestic affairs; for the public interest had now
+strayed far from the revolution, and centred entirely upon these. But
+with Clemens it was different; he lived in a house with a street door
+kept by a single butler, and he was constantly rung for. I forget how
+long the siege lasted, but long enough for us to have fun with it. That
+was the moment of the great Vesuvian eruption, and we figured ourselves
+in easy reach of a volcano which was every now and then "blowing a cone
+off," as the telegraphic phrase was. The roof of the great market in
+Naples had just broken in under its load of ashes and cinders, and
+crashed hundreds of people; and we asked each other if we were not sorry
+we had not been there, where the pressure would have been far less
+terrific than it was with us in Fifth Avenue. The forbidden butler came
+up with a message that there were some gentlemen below who wanted to see
+Clemens.
+
+"How many?" he demanded.
+
+"Five," the butler faltered.
+
+"Reporters?"
+
+The butler feigned uncertainty.
+
+"What would you do?" he asked me.
+
+"I wouldn't see them," I said, and then Clemens went directly down to
+them. How or by what means he appeased their voracity I cannot say, but
+I fancy it was by the confession of the exact truth, which was harmless
+enough. They went away joyfully, and he came back in radiant
+satisfaction with having seen them. Of course he was right and I wrong,
+and he was right as to the point at issue between Gorky and those who had
+helplessly treated him with such cruel ignominy. In America it is not
+the convention for men to live openly in hotels with women who are not
+their wives. Gorky had violated this convention and he had to pay the
+penalty; and concerning the destruction of his efficiency as an emissary
+of the revolution, his blunder was worse than a crime.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV.
+
+To the period of Clemens's residence in Fifth Avenue belongs his
+efflorescence in white serge. He was always rather aggressively
+indifferent about dress, and at a very early date in our acquaintance
+Aldrich and I attempted his reform by clubbing to buy him a cravat. But
+he would not put away his stiff little black bow, and until he imagined
+the suit of white serge, he wore always a suit of black serge, truly
+deplorable in the cut of the sagging frock. After his measure had once
+been taken he refused to make his clothes the occasion of personal
+interviews with his tailor; he sent the stuff by the kind elderly woman
+who had been in the service of the family from the earliest days of his
+marriage, and accepted the result without criticism. But the white serge
+was an inspiration which few men would have had the courage to act upon.
+The first time I saw him wear it was at the authors' hearing before the
+Congressional Committee on Copyright in Washington. Nothing could have
+been more dramatic than the gesture with which he flung off his long
+loose overcoat, and stood forth in white from his feet to the crown of
+his silvery head. It was a magnificent coup, and he dearly loved a coup;
+but the magnificent speech which he made, tearing to shreds the venerable
+farrago of nonsense about nonproperty in ideas which had formed the basis
+of all copyright legislation, made you forget even his spectacularity.
+
+It is well known how proud he was of his Oxford gown, not merely because
+it symbolized the honor in which he was held by the highest literary body
+in the world, but because it was so rich and so beautiful. The red and
+the lavender of the cloth flattered his eyes as the silken black of the
+same degree of Doctor of Letters, given him years before at Yale, could
+not do. His frank, defiant happiness in it, mixed with a due sense of
+burlesque, was something that those lacking his poet-soul could never
+imagine; they accounted it vain, weak; but that would not have mattered
+to him if he had known it. In his London sojourn he had formed the
+top-hat habit, and for a while he lounged splendidly up and down Fifth
+Avenue in that society emblem; but he seemed to tire of it, and to return
+kindly to the soft hat of his Southwestern tradition.
+
+He disliked clubs; I don't know whether he belonged to any in New York,
+but I never met him in one. As I have told, he himself had formed the
+Human Race Club, but as he never could get it together it hardly counted.
+There was to have been a meeting of it the time of my only visit to
+Stormfield in April of last year; but of three who were to have come I
+alone came. We got on very well without the absentees, after finding
+them in the wrong, as usual, and the visit was like those I used to have
+with him so many years before in Hartford, but there was not the old
+ferment of subjects. Many things had been discussed and put away for
+good, but we had our old fondness for nature and for each other, who were
+so differently parts of it. He showed his absolute content with his
+house, and that was the greater pleasure for me because it was my son who
+designed it. The architect had been so fortunate as to be able to plan
+it where a natural avenue of savins, the closeknit, slender, cypress-like
+cedars of New England, led away from the rear of the villa to the little
+level of a pergola, meant some day to be wreathed and roofed with vines.
+But in the early spring days all the landscape was in the beautiful
+nakedness of the northern winter. It opened in the surpassing loveliness
+of wooded and meadowed uplands, under skies that were the first days
+blue, and the last gray over a rainy and then a snowy floor. We walked
+up and down, up and down, between the villa terrace and the pergola, and
+talked with the melancholy amusement, the sad tolerance of age for the
+sort of men and things that used to excite us or enrage us; now we were
+far past turbulence or anger. Once we took a walk together across the
+yellow pastures to a chasmal creek on his grounds, where the ice still
+knit the clayey banks together like crystal mosses; and the stream far
+down clashed through and over the stones and the shards of ice. Clemens
+pointed out the scenery he had bought to give himself elbow-room, and
+showed me the lot he was going to have me build on. The next day we came
+again with the geologist he had asked up to Stormfield to analyze its
+rocks. Truly he loved the place, though he had been so weary of change
+and so indifferent to it that he never saw it till he came to live in it.
+He left it all to the architect whom he had known from a child in the
+intimacy which bound our families together, though we bodily lived far
+enough apart. I loved his little ones and he was sweet to mine and was
+their delighted-in and wondered-at friend. Once and once again, and yet
+again and again, the black shadow that shall never be lifted where it
+falls, fell in his house and in mine, during the forty years and more
+that we were friends, and endeared us the more to each other.
+
+
+
+
+XXV.
+
+My visit at Stormfield came to an end with tender relucting on his part
+and on mine. Every morning before I dressed I heard him sounding my name
+through the house for the fun of it and I know for the fondness; and if I
+looked out of my door, there he was in his long nightgown swaying up and
+down the corridor, and wagging his great white head like a boy that
+leaves his bed and comes out in the hope of frolic with some one. The
+last morning a soft sugarsnow had fallen and was falling, and I drove
+through it down to the station in the carriage which had been given him
+by his wife's father when they were first married, and been kept all
+those intervening years in honorable retirement for this final use. Its
+springs had not grown yielding with time; it had rather the stiffness and
+severity of age; but for him it must have swung low like the sweet
+chariot of the negro "spiritual" which I heard him sing with such fervor,
+when those wonderful hymns of the slaves began to make their way
+northward. 'Go Down, Daniel', was one in which I can hear his quavering
+tenor now. He was a lover of the things he liked, and full of a passion
+for them which satisfied itself in reading them matchlessly aloud. No
+one could read 'Uncle Remus' like him; his voice echoed the voices of the
+negro nurses who told his childhood the wonderful tales. I remember
+especially his rapture with Mr. Cable's 'Old Creole Days,' and the
+thrilling force with which he gave the forbidding of the leper's brother
+when the city's survey ran the course of an avenue through the cottage
+where the leper lived in hiding: "Strit must not pass!"
+
+Out of a nature rich and fertile beyond any I have known, the material
+given him by the Mystery that makes a man and then leaves him to make
+himself over, he wrought a character of high nobility upon a foundation
+of clear and solid truth. At the last day he will not have to confess
+anything, for all his life was the free knowledge of any one who would
+ask him of it. The Searcher of hearts will not bring him to shame at
+that day, for he did not try to hide any of the things for which he was
+often so bitterly sorry. He knew where the Responsibility lay, and he
+took a man's share of it bravely; but not the less fearlessly he left the
+rest of the answer to the God who had imagined men.
+
+It is in vain that I try to give a notion of the intensity with which he
+pierced to the heart of life, and the breadth of vision with which he
+compassed the whole world, and tried for the reason of things, and then
+left trying. We had other meetings, insignificantly sad and brief; but
+the last time I saw him alive was made memorable to me by the kind, clear
+judicial sense with which he explained and justified the labor-unions as
+the sole present help of the weak against the strong.
+
+Next I saw him dead, lying in his coffin amid those flowers with which we
+garland our despair in that pitiless hour. After the voice of his old
+friend Twichell had been lifted in the prayer which it wailed through in
+broken-hearted supplication, I looked a moment at the face I knew so
+well; and it was patient with the patience I had so often seen in it:
+something of puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be
+from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the
+laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him. Emerson,
+Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes--I knew them all and all the rest of our
+sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and
+like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln
+of our literature.
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+
+   Absolute devotion to the day of her death,
+   Absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful
+   Addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness
+   Amiable perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence
+   Amuse him, even when they wronged him
+   Amusingly realized the situation to their friends
+   But now I remember that he gets twenty dollars a month
+   Christianity had done nothing to improve morals and conditions
+   Church: "Oh yes, I go. It 'most kills me, but I go,"
+   Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature
+   Despair broke in laughter
+   Despised the avoidance of repetitions out of fear of tautology
+   Everlasting rock of human credulity and folly
+   Flowers with which we garland our despair in that pitiless hour
+   He did not care much for fiction
+   He did not paw you with his hands to show his affection
+   He was a youth to the end of his days
+   Heroic lies
+   His coming almost killed her, but it was worth it
+   Honest men are few when it comes to themselves
+   It was mighty pretty, as Pepys would say
+   Jane Austen
+   Left him to do what the cat might
+   Lie, of course, and did to save others from grief or harm
+   Liked to find out good things and great things for himself
+   Livy Clemens: nthe loveliest person I have ever seen
+   Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know
+   Mind and soul were with those who do the hard work of the world
+   Mock modesty of print forbids my repeating here
+   Most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew
+   Most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men
+   Nearly nothing as chaos could be
+   Never saw a dead man whom he did not envy
+   Never saw a man more regardful of negroes
+   No man ever yet told the truth about himself
+   No man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery
+   Not possible for Clemens to write like anybody else
+   Ought not to call coarse without calling one's self prudish
+   Polite learning hesitated his praise
+   Praised it enough to satisfy the author
+   Reparation due from every white to every black man
+   Shackles of belief worn so long
+   Some superstition, usually of a hygienic sort
+   Stupidly truthful
+   The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it
+   Truthful
+   Used to ingratitude from those he helped
+   Vacuous vulgarity of its texts
+   Walter-Scotticized, pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal
+   We have never ended before, and we do not see how we can end
+   Well, if you are to be lost, I want to be lost with you
+   What he had done he owned to, good, bad, or indifferent
+   Whether every human motive was not selfish
+   Wonder why we hate the past so--"It's so damned humiliating!"
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS
+
+   Absolute devotion to the day of her death,
+   Absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful
+   Abstract, the air-drawn, afflicted me like physical discomforts
+   Act officiously, not officially
+   Addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness
+   Always sumptuously providing out of his destitution
+   Amiable perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence
+   Amuse him, even when they wronged him
+   Amusingly realized the situation to their friends
+   Anglo-American genius for ugliness
+   Appeal, which he had come to recognize as invasive
+   Appeared to have no grudge left
+   Backed their credulity with their credit
+   Bayard Taylor: incomparable translation of Faust
+   Became gratefully strange
+   Best talkers are willing that you should talk if you like
+   But now I remember that he gets twenty dollars a month"
+   Candle burning on the table for the cigars
+   Celia Thaxter
+   Charles Reade
+   Charles F. Browne
+   Christianity had done nothing to improve morals and conditions
+   Church: "Oh yes, I go It 'most kills me, but I go,"
+   Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature
+   Cold-slaw
+   Collective opacity
+   Confidence I have nearly always felt when wrong
+   Could make us feel that our faults were other people's
+   Could easily believe now that it was some one else who saw it
+   Could only by chance be caught in earnest about anything
+   Couldn't fire your revolver without bringing down a two volumer
+   Dawn upon him through a cloud of other half remembered faces
+   Death of the joy that ought to come from work
+   Death's vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life
+   Despair broke in laughter
+   Despised the avoidance of repetitions out of fear of tautology
+   Did not feel the effect I would so willingly have experienced
+   Dinner was at the old-fashioned Boston hour of two
+   Discomfort which mistaken or blundering praise
+   Dollars were of so much farther flight than now
+   Edmund Quincy
+   Edward Everett Hale
+   Either to deny the substance of things unseen, or to affirm it
+   Emerson
+   Enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself
+   Espoused the theory of Bacon's authorship of Shakespeare
+   Ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense
+   Everlasting rock of human credulity and folly
+   Expectation of those who will come no more
+   Express the appreciation of another's fit word
+   Feigned the gratitude which I could see that he expected
+   Fell either below our pride or rose above our purse
+   Felt that this was my misfortune more than my fault
+   Few men last over from one reform to another
+   First dinner served in courses that I had sat down to
+   Flowers with which we garland our despair in that pitiless hour
+   Forbearance of a wise man content to bide his time
+   Forebore to speak needlessly to him, or to shake his hand
+   Found life was not all poetry
+   Francis Parkman
+   Gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years
+   Generous lover of all that was excellent in literature
+   George William Curtis
+   Giggle which Charles Lamb found the best thing in life
+   Give him your best wine
+   Got out of it all the fun there was in it
+   Greeting of great impersonal cordiality
+   Grieving that there could be such ire in heavenly minds
+   Hard of hearing on one side. But it isn't deafness
+   Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Autocrat clashed upon homeopathy
+   Hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love
+   He was not bored because he would not be
+   He did not care much for fiction
+   He was not constructive; he was essentially observant
+   He had no time to make money
+   He was a youth to the end of his days
+   He did not paw you with his hands to show his affection
+   Heine
+   Heroic lies
+   His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event
+   His readers trusted and loved him
+   His enemies suffered from it almost as much as his friends
+   His coming almost killed her, but it was worth it
+   His plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it
+   Hollowness, the hopelessness, the unworthiness of life
+   Honest men are few when it comes to themselves
+   I find this young man worthy
+   I believe neither in heroes nor in saints
+   I did not know, and I hated to ask
+   If he was half as bad, he would have been too bad to be
+   If he was not there to your touch, it was no fault of his
+   In the South there was nothing but a mistaken social ideal
+   Incredible in their insipidity
+   Industrial slavery
+   Insatiable English fancy for the wild America no longer there
+   Intellectual poseurs
+   It is well to hold one's country to her promises
+   It was mighty pretty, as Pepys would say
+   Jane Austen
+   Julia Ward Howe
+   Left him to do what the cat might
+   Lie, of course, and did to save others from grief or harm
+   Liked being with you, not for what he got, but for what he gave
+   Liked to find out good things and great things for himself
+   Lincoln
+   Literary dislikes or contempts
+   Livy Clemens: nthe loveliest person I have ever seen
+   Long breath was not his; he could not write a novel
+   Longfellow
+   Looked as if Destiny had sat upon it
+   Love of freedom and the hope of justice
+   Love and gratitude are only semi-articulate at the best
+   Lowell
+   Made all men trust him when they doubted his opinions
+   Man who may any moment be out of work is industrially a slave
+   Man who had so much of the boy in him
+   Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know
+   Mellow cordial of a voice that was like no other
+   Memory will not be ruled
+   Men who took themselves so seriously as that need
+   Men's lives ended where they began, in the keeping of women
+   Met with kindness, if not honor
+   Might so far forget myself as to be a novelist
+   Mind and soul were with those who do the hard work of the world
+   Mock modesty of print forbids my repeating here
+   Most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew
+   Most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men
+   Motley
+   Napoleonic height which spiritually overtops the Alps
+   Nearly nothing as chaos could be
+   Never saw a man more regardful of negroes
+   Never saw a dead man whom he did not envy
+   Never paid in anything but hopes of paying
+   No man ever yet told the truth about himself
+   No time to make money
+   No man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery
+   Not quite himself till he had made you aware of his quality
+   Not a man who cared to transcend; he liked bounds
+   Not much patience with the unmanly craving for sympathy
+   Not much of a talker, and almost nothing of a story-teller
+   Not possible for Clemens to write like anybody else
+   Now death has come to join its vague conjectures
+   NYC, a city where money counts for more and goes for less
+   Odious hilarity, without meaning and without remission
+   Offers mortifyingly mean, and others insultingly vague
+   Old man's tendency to revert to the past
+   Old man's disposition to speak of his infirmities
+   One could be openly poor in Cambridge without open shame
+   Only one concerned who was quite unconcerned
+   Ought not to call coarse without calling one's self prudish
+   Pathos of revolt from the colorless rigidities
+   Person who wished to talk when he could listen
+   Plain-speaking or Rude Speaking
+   Pointed the moral in all they did
+   Polite learning hesitated his praise
+   Praised it enough to satisfy the author
+   Praised extravagantly, and in the wrong place
+   Put your finger on the present moment and enjoy it
+   Quarrel was with error, and not with the persons who were in it
+   Quebec was a bit of the seventeenth century
+   Reformers, who are so often tedious and ridiculous
+   Remember the dinner-bell
+   Reparation due from every white to every black man
+   Secret of the man who is universally interesting
+   Seen through the wrong end of the telescope
+   Shackles of belief worn so long
+   Shy of his fellow-men, as the scholar seems always to be
+   So refined, after the gigantic coarseness of California
+   Some superstition, usually of a hygienic sort
+   Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the sermon
+   Sought the things that he could agree with you upon
+   Spare his years the fatigue of recalling your identity
+   Standards were their own, and they were satisfied with them
+   Stoddard
+   Study in a corner by the porch
+   Stupidly truthful
+   The world is well lost whenever the world is wrong
+   The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it
+   Things common to all, however peculiar in each
+   Thoreau
+   Those who have sorrowed deepest will understand this best
+   Times when a man's city was a man's country
+   Tired themselves out in trying to catch up with him
+   True to an ideal of life rather than to life itself
+   Truthful
+   Turn of the talk toward the mystical
+   Used to ingratitude from those he helped
+   Vacuous vulgarity of its texts
+   Visited one of the great mills
+   Walter-Scotticized, pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal
+   Wasted face, and his gay eyes had the death-look
+   We have never ended before, and we do not see how we can end
+   Welcome me, and make the least of my shyness and strangeness
+   Well, if you are to be lost, I want to be lost with you
+   What he had done he owned to, good, bad, or indifferent
+   When to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast
+   Whether every human motive was not selfish
+   Whitman's public use of his privately written praise
+   Wit that tries its teeth upon everything
+   Women's rights
+   Wonder why we hate the past so--"It's so damned humiliating!"
+   Wonderful to me how it should remain so unintelligible
+   Work gives the impression of an uncommon continuity
+   Wrote them first and last in the spirit of Dickens
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Literary Friends And Acquaintances, by 
+William Dean Howells
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Literary Friends, by Howells, Entire
+#57 in our series by William Dean Howells
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+Title: Literary Friends
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+Author: William Dean Howells
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+
+LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+     Biographical
+     My First Visit to New England
+     First Impressions of Literary New York
+     Roundabout to Boston
+     Literary Boston As I Knew It
+     Oliver Wendell Holmes
+     The White Mr. Longfellow
+     Studies of Lowell
+     Cambridge Neighbors
+     A Belated Guest
+     My Mark Twain
+
+
+
+
+LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--First Visit to New England
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
+
+Long before I began the papers which make up this volume, I had meant to
+write of literary history in New England as I had known it in the lives
+of its great exemplars during the twenty-five years I lived near them.
+In fact, I had meant to do this from the time I came among them; but I
+let the days in which I almost constantly saw them go by without record
+save such as I carried in a memory retentive, indeed, beyond the common,
+but not so full as I could have wished when I began to invoke it for my
+work.  Still, upon insistent appeal, it responded in sufficient
+abundance; and, though I now wish I could have remembered more instances,
+I think my impressions were accurate enough.  I am sure of having tried
+honestly to impart them in the ten years or more when I was desultorily
+endeavoring to share them with the reader.
+
+The papers were written pretty much in the order they have here,
+beginning with My First Visit to New England, which dates from the
+earliest eighteen-nineties, if I may trust my recollection of reading it
+from the manuscript to the editor of Harper's Magazine, where we lay
+under the willows of Magnolia one pleasant summer morning in the first
+years of that decade.  It was printed no great while after in that
+periodical; but I was so long in finishing the study of Lowell that it
+had been anticipated in Harper's by other reminiscences of him, and it
+was therefore first printed in Scribner's Magazine.  It was the paper
+with which I took the most pains, and when it was completed I still felt
+it so incomplete that I referred it to his closest and my best friend,
+the late Charles Eliot Norton, for his criticism.  He thought it wanting
+in unity; it was a group of studies instead of one study, he said; I must
+do something to draw the different sketches together in a single effect
+of portraiture; and this I did my best to do.
+
+It was the latest written of the three articles which give the volume
+substance, and it represents mare finally and fully than the others my
+sense of the literary importance of the men whose like we shall not look
+upon again.  Longfellow was easily the greatest poet of the three, Holmes
+often the most brilliant and felicitous, but Lowell, in spite of his
+forays in politics, was the finest scholar and the most profoundly
+literary, as he was above the others most deeply and thoroughly New
+England in quality.
+
+While I was doing these sketches, sometimes slighter and sometimes less
+slight, of all those poets and essayists and novelists I had known in
+Cambridge and Boston and Concord and New York, I was doing many other
+things: half a dozen novels, as many more novelettes and shorter stories,
+with essays and criticisms and verses; so that in January, 1900, I had
+not yet done the paper on Lowell, which, with another, was to complete my
+reminiscences of American literary life as I had witnessed it.  When they
+were all done at last they were republished in a volume which found
+instant favor beyond my deserts if not its own.
+
+There was a good deal of trouble with the name, but Literary Friends and
+Acquaintance was an endeavor for modest accuracy with which I remained
+satisfied until I thought, long too late, of Literary Friends and
+Neighbors.  Then I perceived that this would have been still more
+accurate and quite as modest, and I gladly give any reader leave to call
+the book by that name who likes.
+
+Since the collection was first made, I have written little else quite of
+the kind, except the paper on Bret Harte, which was first printed shortly
+after his death; and the study of Mark Twain, which I had been preparing
+to make for forty years and more, and wrote in two weeks of the spring of
+1910.  Others of my time and place have now passed whither there is
+neither time nor place, and there are moments when I feel that I must try
+to call them back and pay them such honor as my sense of their worth may
+give; but the impulse has as yet failed to effect itself, and I do not
+know how long I shall spare myself the supreme pleasure-pain, the "hochst
+angenehmer Schmerz," of seeking to live here with those who live here no
+more.
+
+W. D. H.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE--My First Visit to New England
+
+
+
+MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
+
+
+If there was any one in the world who had his being more wholly in
+literature than I had in 1860, I am sure I should not have known where to
+find him, and I doubt if he could have been found nearer the centres of
+literary activity than I then was, or among those more purely devoted to
+literature than myself.  I had been for three years a writer of news
+paragraphs, book notices, and political leaders on a daily paper in an
+inland city, and I do not know that my life differed outwardly from that
+of any other young journalist, who had begun as I had in a country
+printing-office, and might be supposed to be looking forward to
+advancement in his profession or in public affairs.  But inwardly it was
+altogether different with me.  Inwardly I was a poet, with no wish to be
+anything else, unless in a moment of careless affluence I might so far
+forget myself as to be a novelist.  I was, with my friend J. J. Piatt,
+the half-author of a little volume of very unknown verse, and Mr. Lowell
+had lately accepted and had begun to print in the Atlantic Monthly five
+or six poems of mine.  Besides this I had written poems, and sketches,
+and criticisms for the Saturday Press of New York, a long-forgotten but
+once very lively expression of literary intention in an extinct bohemia
+of that city; and I was always writing poems, and sketches, and
+criticisms in our own paper.  These, as well as my feats in the renowned
+periodicals of the East, met with kindness, if not honor, in my own city
+which ought to have given me grave doubts whether I was any real prophet.
+But it only intensified my literary ambition, already so strong that my
+veins might well have run ink rather than blood, and gave me a higher
+opinion of my fellow-citizens, if such a thing could be.  They were
+indeed very charming people, and such of them as I mostly saw were
+readers and lovers of books.  Society in Columbus at that day had a
+pleasant refinement which I think I do not exaggerate in the fond
+retrospect.  It had the finality which it seems to have had nowhere since
+the war; it had certain fixed ideals, which were none the less graceful
+and becoming because they were the simple old American ideals, now
+vanished, or fast vanishing, before the knowledge of good and evil as
+they have it in Europe, and as it has imparted itself to American travel
+and sojourn.  There was a mixture of many strains in the capital of Ohio,
+as there was throughout the State.  Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, New
+York, and New England all joined to characterize the manners and customs.
+I suppose it was the South which gave the social tone; the intellectual
+taste among the elders was the Southern taste for the classic and the
+standard in literature; but we who were younger preferred the modern
+authors: we read Thackeray, and George Eliot, and Hawthorne, and Charles
+Reade, and De Quincey, and Tennyson, and Browning, and Emerson, and
+Longfellow, and I--I read Heine, and evermore Heine, when there was not
+some new thing from the others.  Now and then an immediate French book
+penetrated to us: we read Michelet and About, I remember.  We looked to
+England and the East largely for our literary opinions; we accepted the
+Saturday Review as law if we could not quite receive it as gospel.  One
+of us took the Cornhill Magazine, because Thackeray was the editor; the
+Atlantic Monthly counted many readers among us; and a visiting young lady
+from New England, who screamed at sight of the periodical in one of our
+houses, "Why, have you got the Atlantic Monthly out here?" could be
+answered, with cold superiority, "There are several contributors to the
+Atlantic in Columbus."  There were in fact two: my room-mate, who wrote
+Browning for it, while I wrote Heine and Longfellow.  But I suppose two
+are as rightfully several as twenty are.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+That was the heyday of lecturing, and now and then a literary light from
+the East swam into our skies.  I heard and saw Emerson, and I once met
+Bayard Taylor socially, at the hospitable house where he was a guest
+after his lecture.  Heaven knows how I got through the evening.  I do not
+think I opened my mouth to address him a word; it was as much as I could
+do to sit and look at him, while he tranquilly smoked, and chatted with
+our host, and quaffed the beer which we had very good in the Nest.  All
+the while I did him homage as the first author by calling whom I had met.
+I longed to tell him how much I liked his poems, which we used to get by
+heart in those days, and I longed (how much more I longed!) to have him
+know that:
+
+          "Auch ich war in Arkadien geboren,"
+
+that I had printed poems in the Atlantic Monthly and the Saturday Press,
+and was the potential author of things destined to eclipse all literature
+hitherto attempted.  But I could not tell him; and there was no one else
+who thought to tell him.  Perhaps it was as well so; I might have
+perished of his recognition, for my modesty was equal to my merit.
+
+In fact I think we were all rather modest young fellows, we who formed
+the group wont to spend some part of every evening at that house, where
+there was always music, or whist, or gay talk, or all three.  We had our
+opinions of literary matters, but (perhaps because we had mostly accepted
+them from England or New England, as I have said) we were not vain of
+them; and we would by no means have urged them before a living literary
+man like that.  I believe none of us ventured to speak, except the poet,
+my roommate, who said, He believed so and so was the original of so and
+so; and was promptly told, He had no right to say such a thing.
+Naturally, we came away rather critical of our host's guest, whom I
+afterwards knew as the kindliest heart in the world.  But we had not
+shone in his presence, and that galled us; and we chose to think that he
+had not shone in ours.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+At that time he was filling a large space in the thoughts of the young
+people who had any thoughts about literature.  He had come to his full
+repute as an agreeable and intelligent traveller, and he still wore the
+halo of his early adventures afoot in foreign lands when they were yet
+really foreign.  He had not written his novels of American life, once so
+welcomed, and now so forgotten; it was very long before he had achieved
+that incomparable translation of Faust which must always remain the
+finest and best, and which would keep his name alive with Goethe's, if he
+had done nothing else worthy of remembrance.  But what then most
+commended him to the regard of us star-eyed youth (now blinking sadly
+toward our seventies) was the poetry which he printed in the magazines
+from time to time: in the first Putnam's (where there was a dashing
+picture of him in an Arab burnoose and, a turban), and in Harper's, and
+in the Atlantic.  It was often very lovely poetry, I thought, and I still
+think so; and it was rightfully his, though it paid the inevitable
+allegiance to the manner of the great masters of the day.  It was graced
+for us by the pathetic romance of his early love, which some of its
+sweetest and saddest numbers confessed, for the young girl he married
+almost in her death hour; and we who were hoping to have our hearts
+broken, or already had them so, would have been glad of something more of
+the obvious poet in the popular lecturer we had seen refreshing himself
+after his hour on the platform.
+
+He remained for nearly a year the only author I had seen, and I met him
+once again before I saw any other.  Our second meeting was far from
+Columbus, as far as remote Quebec, when I was on my way to New England by
+way of Niagara and the Canadian rivers and cities.  I stopped in Toronto,
+and realized myself abroad without any signal adventures; but at Montreal
+something very pretty happened to me.  I came into the hotel office, the
+evening of a first day's lonely sight-seeing, and vainly explored the
+register for the name of some acquaintance; as I turned from it two
+smartly dressed young fellows embraced it, and I heard one of them say,
+to my great amaze and happiness, "Hello, here's Howells!"
+
+"Oh," I broke out upon him, "I was just looking for some one I knew.  I
+hope you are some one who knows me!"
+
+"Only through your contributions to the Saturday Press," said the young
+fellow, and with these golden words, the precious first personal
+recognition of my authorship I had ever received from a stranger, and the
+rich reward of all my literary endeavor, he introduced himself and his
+friend.  I do not know what be came of this friend, or where or how he
+eliminated himself; but we two others were inseparable from that moment.
+He was a young lawyer from New York, and when I came back from Italy,
+four or five years later, I used to see his sign in Wall Street, with a
+never-fulfilled intention of going in to see him.  In whatever world he
+happens now to be, I should like to send him my greetings, and confess to
+him that my art has never since brought me so sweet a recompense, and
+nothing a thousandth part so much like Fame, as that outcry of his over
+the hotel register in Montreal. We were comrades for four or five rich
+days, and shared our pleasures and expenses in viewing the monuments of
+those ancient Canadian capitals, which I think we valued at all their
+picturesque worth.  We made jokes to mask our emotions; we giggled and
+made giggle, in the right way; we fell in and out of love with all the
+pretty faces and dresses we saw; and we talked evermore about literature
+and literary people.  He had more acquaintance with the one, and more
+passion for the other, but he could tell me of Pfaff's lager-beer cellar
+on Broadway, where the Saturday Press fellows and the other Bohemians
+met; and this, for the time, was enough: I resolved to visit it as soon
+as I reached New York, in spite of the tobacco and beer (which I was
+given to understand were de rigueur), though they both, so far as I had
+known them, were apt to make me sick.
+
+I was very desolate after I parted from this good fellow, who returned to
+Montreal on his way to New York, while I remained in Quebec to continue
+later on mine to New England.  When I came in from seeing him off in a
+calash for the boat, I discovered Bayard Taylor in the readingroom, where
+he sat sunken in what seemed a somewhat weary muse.  He did not know
+me, or even notice me, though I made several errands in and out of the
+reading-room in the vain hope that be might do so: doubly vain, for I am
+aware now that I was still flown with the pride of that pretty experience
+in Montreal, and trusted in a repetition of something like it.  At last,
+as no chance volunteered to help me, I mustered courage to go up to him
+and name myself, and say I had once had the pleasure of meeting him at
+Doctor -------'s in Columbus.  The poet gave no sign of consciousness at
+the sound of a name which I had fondly begun to think might not be so all
+unknown.  He looked up with an unkindling eye, and asked, Ah, how was the
+Doctor?  and when I had reported favorably of the Doctor, our
+conversation ended.
+
+He was probably as tired as he looked, and he must have classed me with
+that multitude all over the country who had shared the pleasure I
+professed in meeting him before; it was surely my fault that I did not
+speak my name loud enough to be recognized, if I spoke it at all; but the
+courage I had mustered did not quite suffice for that.  In after years he
+assured me, first by letter and then by word, of his grief for an
+incident which I can only recall now as the untoward beginning of a
+cordial friendship.  It was often my privilege, in those days, as
+reviewer and editor, to testify my sense of the beautiful things he did
+in so many kinds of literature, but I never liked any of them better than
+I liked him.  He had a fervent devotion to his art, and he was always
+going to do the greatest things in it, with an expectation of effect that
+never failed him.  The things he actually did were none of them mean,
+or wanting in quality, and some of them are of a lasting charm that any
+one may feel who will turn to his poems; but no doubt many of them fell
+short of his hopes of them with the reader.  It was fine to meet him when
+he was full of a new scheme; he talked of it with a single-hearted joy,
+and tried to make you see it of the same colors and proportions it wore
+to his eyes.  He spared no toil to make it the perfect thing he dreamed
+it, and he was not discouraged by any disappointment he suffered with the
+critic or the public.
+
+He was a tireless worker, and at last his health failed under his labors
+at the newspaper desk, beneath the midnight gas, when he should long have
+rested from such labors.  I believe he was obliged to do them through one
+of those business fortuities which deform and embitter all our lives;
+but he was not the man to spare himself in any case.  He was always
+attempting new things, and he never ceased endeavoring to make his
+scholarship reparation for the want of earlier opportunity and training.
+I remember that I met him once in a Cambridge street with a book in his
+hand which he let me take in mine.  It was a Greek author, and he said he
+was just beginning to read the language at fifty: a patriarchal age to me
+of the early thirties!
+
+I suppose I intimated the surprise I felt at his taking it up so late in
+the day, for he said, with charming seriousness, "Oh, but you know,
+I expect to use it in the other world."  Yea, that made it worth while,
+I consented; but was he sure of the other world?  "As sure as I am of
+this," he said; and I have always kept the impression of the young faith
+which spoke in his voice and was more than his words.
+
+I saw him last in the hour of those tremendous adieux which were paid him
+in New York before he sailed to be minister in Germany.  It was one of
+the most graceful things done by President Hayes, who, most of all our
+Presidents after Lincoln, honored himself in honoring literature by his
+appointments, to give that place to Bayard Taylor.  There was no one more
+fit for it, and it was peculiarly fit that he should be so distinguished
+to a people who knew and valued his scholarship and the service he had
+done German letters.  He was as happy in it, apparently, as a man could
+be in anything here below, and he enjoyed to the last drop the many cups
+of kindness pressed to his lips in parting; though I believe these
+farewells, at a time when he was already fagged with work and excitement,
+were notably harmful to him, and helped to hasten his end.  Some of us
+who were near of friendship went down to see him off when he sailed, as
+the dismal and futile wont of friends is; and I recall the kind, great
+fellow standing in the cabin, amid those sad flowers that heaped the
+tables, saying good-by to one after another, and smiling fondly, smiling
+wearily, upon all.  There was champagne, of course, and an odious
+hilarity, without meaning and without remission, till the warning bell
+chased us ashore, and our brave poet escaped with what was left of his
+life.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+I have followed him far from the moment of our first meeting; but even on
+my way to venerate those New England luminaries, which chiefly drew my
+eyes, I could not pay a less devoir to an author who, if Curtis was not,
+was chief of the New York group of authors in that day.  I distinguished
+between the New-Englanders and the New-Yorkers, and I suppose there is no
+question but our literary centre was then in Boston, wherever it is, or
+is not, at present.  But I thought Taylor then, and I think him now, one
+of the first in our whole American province of the republic of letters,
+in a day when it was in a recognizably flourishing state, whether we
+regard quantity or quality in the names that gave it lustre.  Lowell was
+then in perfect command of those varied forces which will long, if not
+lastingly, keep him in memory as first among our literary men, and master
+in more kinds than any other American.  Longfellow was in the fulness of
+his world-wide fame, and in the ripeness of the beautiful genius which
+was not to know decay while life endured.  Emerson had emerged from the
+popular darkness which had so long held him a hopeless mystic, and was
+shining a lambent star of poesy and prophecy at the zenith.  Hawthorne,
+the exquisite artist, the unrivalled dreamer, whom we still always liken
+this one and that one to, whenever this one or that one promises greatly
+to please us, and still leave without a rival, without a companion, had
+lately returned from his long sojourn abroad, and had given us the last
+of the incomparable romances which the world was to have perfect from his
+hand.  Doctor Holmes had surpassed all expectations in those who most
+admired his brilliant humor and charming poetry by the invention of a new
+attitude if not a new sort in literature.  The turn that civic affairs
+had taken was favorable to the widest recognition of Whittier's splendid
+lyrical gift; and that heart of fire, doubly snow-bound by Quaker
+tradition and Puritan environment; was penetrating every generous breast
+with its flamy impulses, and fusing all wills in its noble purpose.  Mrs.
+Stowe, who far outfamed the rest as the author of the most renowned novel
+ever written, was proving it no accident or miracle by the fiction she
+was still writing.
+
+This great New England group might be enlarged perhaps without loss of
+quality by the inclusion of Thoreau, who came somewhat before his time,
+and whose drastic criticism of our expediential and mainly futile
+civilization would find more intelligent acceptance now than it did then,
+when all resentment of its defects was specialized in enmity to Southern
+slavery.  Doctor Edward Everett Hale belonged in this group too, by
+virtue of that humor, the most inventive and the most fantastic, the
+sanest, the sweetest, the truest, which had begun to find expression in
+the Atlantic Monthly; and there a wonderful young girl had written a
+series of vivid sketches and taken the heart of youth everywhere with
+amaze and joy, so that I thought it would be no less an event to meet
+Harriet Prescott than to meet any of those I have named.
+
+I expected somehow to meet them all, and I imagined them all easily
+accessible in the office of the Atlantic Monthly, which had lately
+adventured in the fine air of high literature where so many other
+periodicals had gasped and died before it.  The best of these, hitherto,
+and better even than the Atlantic for some reasons, the lamented Putnam's
+Magazine, had perished of inanition at New York, and the claim of the
+commercial capital to the literary primacy had passed with that brilliant
+venture.  New York had nothing distinctive to show for American
+literature but the decrepit and doting Knickerbocker Magazine.  Harper's
+New Monthly, though Curtis had already come to it from the wreck of
+Putnam's, and it had long ceased to be eclectic in material, and had
+begun to stand for native work in the allied arts which it has since so
+magnificently advanced, was not distinctively literary, and the Weekly
+had just begun to make itself known.  The Century, Scribner's, the
+Cosmopolitan, McClure's, and I know not what others, were still
+unimagined by five, and ten, and twenty years, and the Galaxy was to
+flash and fade before any of them should kindle its more effectual fires.
+The Nation, which was destined to chastise rather than nurture our young
+literature, had still six years of dreamless potentiality before it; and
+the Nation was always more Bostonian than New-Yorkish by nature, whatever
+it was by nativity.
+
+Philadelphia had long counted for nothing in the literary field.
+Graham's Magazine at one time showed a certain critical force, but it
+seemed to perish of this expression of vitality; and there remained
+Godey's Lady's Book and Peterson's Magazine, publications really
+incredible in their insipidity.  In the South there was nothing but a
+mistaken social ideal, with the moral principles all standing on their
+heads in defence of slavery; and in the West there was a feeble and
+foolish notion that Western talent was repressed by Eastern jealousy.
+At Boston chiefly, if not at Boston alone, was there a vigorous
+intellectual life among such authors as I have named.  Every young writer
+was ambitious to join his name with theirs in the Atlantic Monthly, and
+in the lists of Ticknor & Fields, who were literary publishers in a sense
+such as the business world has known nowhere else before or since.  Their
+imprint was a warrant of quality to the reader and of immortality to the
+author, so that if I could have had a book issued by them at that day I
+should now be in the full enjoyment of an undying fame.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+Such was the literary situation as the passionate pilgrim from the West
+approached his holy land at Boston, by way of the Grand Trunk Railway
+from Quebec to Portland.  I have no recollection of a sleeping-car, and I
+suppose I waked and watched during the whole of that long, rough journey;
+but I should hardly have slept if there had been a car for the purpose.
+I was too eager to see what New England was like, and too anxious not to
+lose the least glimpse of it, to close my eyes after I crossed the border
+at Island Pond.  I found that in the elm-dotted levels of Maine it was
+very like the Western Reserve in northern Ohio, which is, indeed, a
+portion of New England transferred with all its characteristic features,
+and flattened out along the lake shore.  It was not till I began to run
+southward into the older regions of the country that it lost this look,
+and became gratefully strange to me.  It never had the effect of hoary
+antiquity which I had expected of a country settled more than two
+centuries; with its wood-built farms and villages it looked newer than
+the coal-smoked brick of southern Ohio.  I had prefigured the New England
+landscape bare of forests, relieved here and there with the tees of
+orchards or plantations; but I found apparently as much woodland as at
+home.
+
+At Portland I first saw the ocean, and this was a sort of disappointment.
+Tides and salt water I had already had at Quebec, so that I was no longer
+on the alert for them; but the color and the vastness of the sea I was
+still to try upon my vision.  When I stood on the Promenade at Portland
+with the kind young Unitarian minister whom I had brought a letter to,
+and who led me there for a most impressive first view of the ocean, I
+could not make more of it than there was of Lake Erie; and I have never
+thought the color of the sea comparable to the tender blue of the lake.
+I did not hint my disappointment to my friend; I had too much regard for
+the feelings of an Eastern man to decry his ocean to his face, and I felt
+besides that it would be vulgar and provincial to make comparisons.  I am
+glad now that I held my tongue, for that kind soul is no longer in this
+world, and I should not like to think he knew how far short of my
+expectations the sea he was so proud of had fallen.  I went up with him
+into a tower or belvedere there was at hand; and when he pointed to the
+eastern horizon and said, Now there was nothing but sea between us and
+Africa, I pretended to expand with the thought, and began to sound myself
+for the emotions which I ought to have felt at such a sight.  But in my
+heart I was empty, and Heaven knows whether I saw the steamer which the
+ancient mariner in charge of that tower invited me to look at through his
+telescope.  I never could see anything but a vitreous glare through a
+telescope, which has a vicious habit of dodging about through space, and
+failing to bring down anything of less than planetary magnitude.
+
+But there was something at Portland vastly more to me than seas or
+continents, and that was the house where Longfellow was born.  I believe,
+now, I did not get the right house, but only the house he went to live in
+later; but it served, and I rejoiced in it with a rapture that could not
+have been more genuine if it had been the real birthplace of the poet.  I
+got my friend to show me
+
+              "----the breezy dome of groves,
+               The shadows of Deering's woods,"
+
+because they were in one of Longfellow's loveliest and tenderest poems;
+and I made an errand to the docks, for the sake of the
+
+              "---black wharves and the slips,
+               And the sea-tides tossing free,
+               And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
+               And the beauty and mystery of the ships,
+               And the magic of the sea,"
+
+mainly for the reason that these were colors and shapes of the fond
+vision of the poet's past.  I am in doubt whether it was at this time or
+a later time that I went to revere
+
+              "--the dead captains as they lay
+               In their graves o'erlooking the tranquil bay,
+               where they in battle died,"
+
+but I am quite sure it was now that I wandered under
+
+              "--the trees which shadow each well-known street,
+               As they balance up and down,"
+
+for when I was next in Portland the great fire had swept the city avenues
+bare of most of those beautiful elms, whose Gothic arches and traceries I
+well remember.
+
+The fact is that in those days I was bursting with the most romantic
+expectations of life in every way, and I looked at the whole world as
+material that might be turned into literature, or that might be
+associated with it somehow.  I do not know how I managed to keep these
+preposterous hopes within me, but perhaps the trick of satirizing them,
+which I had early learnt, helped me to do it.  I was at that particular
+moment resolved above all things to see things as Heinrich Heine saw
+them, or at least to report them as he did, no matter how I saw them;
+and I went about framing phrases to this end, and trying to match the
+objects of interest to them whenever there was the least chance of
+getting them together.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+I do not know how I first arrived in Boston, or whether it was before or
+after I had passed a day or two in Salem.  As Salem is on the way from
+Portland, I will suppose that I stopped there first, and explored the
+quaint old town (quainter then than now, but still quaint enough) for the
+memorials of Hawthorne and of the witches which united to form the Salem
+I cared for.  I went and looked up the House of Seven Gables, and
+suffered an unreasonable disappointment that it had not a great many more
+of them; but there was no loss in the death-warrant of Bridget Bishop,
+with the sheriff's return of execution upon it, which I found at the
+Court-house; if anything, the pathos of that witness of one of the
+cruelest delusions in the world was rather in excess of my needs; I could
+have got on with less.  I saw the pins which the witches were sworn to
+have thrust into the afflicted children, and I saw Gallows Hill, where
+the hapless victims of the perjury were hanged.  But that death-warrant
+remained the most vivid color of my experience of the tragedy; I had no
+need to invite myself to a sense of it, and it is still like a stain of
+red in my memory.
+
+The kind old ship's captain whose guest I was, and who was transfigured
+to poetry in my sense by the fact that he used to voyage to the African
+coast for palm-oil in former days, led me all about the town, and showed
+me the Custom-house, which I desired to see because it was in the preface
+to the Scarlet Letter.  But I perceived that he did not share my
+enthusiasm for the author, and I became more and more sensible that in
+Salem air there was a cool undercurrent of feeling about him.  No doubt
+the place was not altogether grateful for the celebrity his romance had
+given it, and would have valued more the uninterrupted quiet of its own
+flattering thoughts of itself; but when it came to hearing a young lady
+say she knew a girl who said she would like to poison Hawthorne, it
+seemed to the devout young pilgrim from the West that something more of
+love for the great romancer would not have been too much for him.
+Hawthorne had already had his say, however, and he had not used his
+native town with any great tenderness.  Indeed, the advantages to any
+place of having a great genius born and reared in its midst are so
+doubtful that it might be well for localities designing to become the
+birthplaces of distinguished authors to think twice about it.  Perhaps
+only the largest capitals, like London and Paris, and New York and
+Chicago, ought to risk it.  But the authors have an unaccountable
+perversity, and will seldom come into the world in the large cities,
+which are alone without the sense of neighborhood, and the personal
+susceptibilities so unfavorable to the practice of the literary art.
+I dare say that it was owing to the local indifference to her greatest
+name, or her reluctance from it, that I got a clearer impression of Salem
+in some other respects than I should have had if I had been invited there
+to devote myself solely to the associations of Hawthorne.  For the first
+time I saw an old New England town, I do not know, but the most
+characteristic, and took into my young Western consciousness the fact of
+a more complex civilization than I had yet known.  My whole life had been
+passed in a region where men were just beginning ancestors, and the
+conception of family was very imperfect.  Literature, of course, was full
+of it, and it was not for a devotee of Thackeray to be theoretically
+ignorant of its manifestations; but I had hitherto carelessly supposed
+that family was nowhere regarded seriously in America except in Virginia,
+where it furnished a joke for the rest of the nation.  But now I found
+myself confronted with it in its ancient houses, and heard its names
+pronounced with a certain consideration, which I dare say was as much
+their due in Salem as it could be anywhere.  The names were all strange,
+and all indifferent to me, but those fine square wooden mansions, of a
+tasteful architecture, and a pale buff-color, withdrawing themselves in
+quiet reserve from the quiet street, gave me an impression of family as
+an actuality and a force which I had never had before, but which no
+Westerner can yet understand the East without taking into account.  I do
+not suppose that I conceived of family as a fact of vital import then;
+I think I rather regarded it as a color to be used in any aesthetic study
+of the local conditions.  I am not sure that I valued it more even for
+literary purposes, than the steeple which the captain pointed out as the
+first and last thing he saw when he came and went on his long voyages, or
+than the great palm-oil casks, which he showed me, and which I related to
+the tree that stood
+
+               "Auf brennender Felsenwand."
+
+Whether that was the kind of palm that gives the oil, or was a sort only
+suitable to be the dream of a lonely fir-tree in the North on a cold
+height, I am in doubt to this day.
+
+I heard, not without concern, that the neighboring industry of Lynn was
+penetrating Salem, and that the ancient haunt of the witches and the
+birthplace of our subtlest and somberest wizard was becoming a great
+shoe-town; but my concern was less for its memories and sensibilities
+than for an odious duty which I owed that industry, together with all the
+others in New England.  Before I left home I had promised my earliest
+publisher that I would undertake to edit, or compile, or do something
+literary to, a work on the operation of the more distinctive mechanical
+inventions of our country, which he had conceived the notion of
+publishing by subscription.  He had furnished me, the most immechanical
+of humankind, with a letter addressed generally to the great mills and
+factories of the East, entreating their managers to unfold their
+mysteries to me for the purposes of this volume.  His letter had the
+effect of shutting up some of them like clams, and others it put upon
+their guard against my researches, lest I should seize the secret of
+their special inventions and publish it to the world.  I could not tell
+the managers that I was both morally and mentally incapable of this;
+that they might have explained and demonstrated the properties and
+functions of their most recondite machinery, and upon examination
+afterwards found me guiltless of having anything but a few verses of
+Heine or Tennyson or Longfellow in my head.  So I had to suffer in
+several places from their unjust anxieties, and from my own weariness of
+their ingenious engines, or else endure the pangs of a bad conscience
+from ignoring them.  As long as I was in Canada I was happy, for there
+was no industry in Canada that I saw, except that of the peasant girls,
+in their Evangeline hats and kirtles, tossing the hay in the way-side
+fields; but when I reached Portland my troubles began.  I went with that
+young minister of whom I have spoken to a large foundry, where they were
+casting some sort of ironmongery, and inspected the process from a
+distance beyond any chance spurt of the molten metal, and came away sadly
+uncertain of putting the rather fine spectacle to any practical use.
+A manufactory where they did something with coal-oil (which I now heard
+for the first time called kerosene) refused itself to me, and I said to
+myself that probably all the other industries of Portland were as
+reserved, and I would not seek to explore them; but when I got to Salem,
+my conscience stirred again.  If I knew that there were shoe-shops in
+Salem, ought not I to go and inspect their processes?  This was a
+question which would not answer itself to my satisfaction, and I had no
+peace till I learned that I could see shoemaking much better at Lynn, and
+that Lynn was such a little way from Boston that I could readily run up
+there, if I did not wish to examine the shoe machinery at once.
+I promised myself that I would run up from Boston, but in order to do
+this I must first go to Boston.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+I am supposing still that I saw Salem before I saw Boston, but however
+the fact may be, I am sure that I decided it would be better to see
+shoemaking in Lynn, where I really did see it, thirty years later.  For
+the purposes of the present visit, I contented myself with looking at a
+machine in Haverhill, which chewed a shoe sole full of pegs, and dropped
+it out of its iron jaws with an indifference as great as my own, and
+probably as little sense of how it had done its work.  I may be unjust to
+that machine; Heaven knows I would not wrong it; and I must confess that
+my head had no room in it for the conception of any machinery but the
+mythological, which also I despised, in my revulsion from the eighteenth-
+century poets to those of my own day.
+
+I cannot quite make out after the lapse of so many years just how or when
+I got to Haverhill, or whether it was before or after I had been in
+Salem.  There is an apparitional quality in my presences, at this point
+or that, in the dim past; but I hope that, for the credit of their order,
+ghosts are not commonly taken with such trivial things as I was.  For
+instance, in Haverhill I was much interested by the sight of a young man,
+coming gayly down the steps of the hotel where I lodged, in peg-top
+trousers so much more peg top than my own that I seemed to be wearing
+mere spring-bottoms in comparison; and in a day when every one who
+respected himself had a necktie as narrow as he could get, this youth had
+one no wider than a shoestring, and red at that, while mine measured
+almost an inch, and was black.  To be sure, he was one of a band of negro
+minstrels, who were to give a concert that night, and he had a light to
+excel in fashion.
+
+I will suppose, for convenience' sake, that I visited Haverhill, too,
+before I reached Boston: somehow that shoe-pegging machine must come in,
+and it may as well come in here.  When I actually found myself in Boston,
+there were perhaps industries which it would have been well for me to
+celebrate, but I either made believe there were none, or else I honestly
+forgot all about them.  In either case I released myself altogether to
+the literary and historical associations of the place.  I need not say
+that I gave myself first to the first, and it rather surprised me to find
+that the literary associations of Boston referred so largely to
+Cambridge.  I did not know much about Cambridge, except that it was the
+seat of the university where Lowell was, and Longfellow had been,
+professor; and somehow I had not realized it as the home of these poets.
+That was rather stupid of me, but it is best to own the truth, and
+afterward I came to know the place so well that I may safely confess my
+earlier ignorance.
+
+I had stopped in Boston at the Tremont House, which was still one of the
+first hostelries of the country, and I must have inquired my way to
+Cambridge there; but I was sceptical of the direction the Cambridge
+horse-car took when I found it, and I hinted to the driver my anxieties
+as to why he should be starting east when I had been told that Cambridge
+was west of Boston.  He reassured me in the laconic and sarcastic manner
+of his kind, and we really reached Cambridge by the route he had taken.
+
+The beautiful elms that shaded great part of the way massed themselves in
+the "groves of academe" at the Square, and showed pleasant glimpses of
+"Old Harvard's scholar factories red," then far fewer than now.  It must
+have been in vacation, for I met no one as I wandered through the college
+yard, trying to make up my mind as to how I should learn where Lowell
+lived; for it was he whom I had come to find.  He had not only taken the
+poems I sent him, but he had printed two of them in a single number of
+the Atlantic, and had even written me a little note about them, which I
+wore next my heart in my breast pocket till I almost wore it out; and so
+I thought I might fitly report myself to him.  But I have always been
+helpless in finding my way, and I was still depressed by my failure to
+convince the horse-car driver that he had taken the wrong road.  I let
+several people go by without questioning them, and those I did ask
+abashed me farther by not knowing what I wanted to know.  When I had
+remitted my search for the moment, an ancient man, with an open mouth and
+an inquiring eye, whom I never afterwards made out in Cambridge,
+addressed me with a hospitable offer to show me the Washington Elm.
+I thought this would give me time to embolden myself for the meeting with
+the editor of the Atlantic if I should ever find him, and I went with
+that kind old man, who when he had shown me the tree, and the spot where
+Washington stood when he took command of the Continental forces, said
+that he had a branch of it, and that if I would come to his house with
+him he would give me a piece.  In the end, I meant merely to flatter him
+into telling me where I could find Lowell, but I dissembled my purpose
+and pretended a passion for a piece of the historic elm, and the old man
+led me not only to his house but his wood-house, where he sawed me off a
+block so generous that I could not get it into my pocket.  I feigned the
+gratitude which I could see that he expected, and then I took courage to
+put my question to him.  Perhaps that patriarch lived only in the past,
+and cared for history and not literature.  He confessed that he could not
+tell me where to find Lowell; but he did not forsake me; he set forth
+with me upon the street again, and let no man pass without asking him.
+In the end we met one who was able to say where Mr. Lowell was, and I
+found him at last in a little study at the rear of a pleasant,
+old-fashioned house near the Delta.
+
+Lowell was not then at the height of his fame; he had just reached this
+thirty years after, when he died; but I doubt if he was ever after a
+greater power in his own country, or more completely embodied the
+literary aspiration which would not and could not part itself from the
+love of freedom and the hope of justice.  For the sake of these he had
+been willing to suffer the reproach which followed their friends in the
+earlier days of the anti-slavery struggle: He had outlived the reproach
+long before; but the fear of his strength remained with those who had
+felt it, and he had not made himself more generally loved by the 'Fable
+for Critics' than by the 'Biglow Papers', probably.  But in the 'Vision
+of Sir Launfal' and the 'Legend of Brittany' he had won a liking if not a
+listening far wider than his humor and his wit had got him; and in his
+lectures on the English poets, given not many years before he came to the
+charge of the Atlantic, he had proved himself easily the wisest and
+finest critic in our language.  He was already, more than any American
+poet,
+
+               "Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
+                                   The love of love,"
+
+and he held a place in the public sense which no other author among us
+has held.  I had myself never been a great reader of his poetry, when I
+met him, though when I was a boy of ten years I had heard my father
+repeat passages from the Biglow Papers against war and slavery and the
+war for slavery upon Mexico, and later I had read those criticisms of
+English poetry, and I knew Sir Launfal must be Lowell in some sort; but
+my love for him as a poet was chiefly centred in my love for his tender
+rhyme, 'Auf Wiedersehen', which I can not yet read without something of
+the young pathos it first stirred in me.  I knew and felt his greatness
+some how apart from the literary proofs of it; he ruled my fancy and held
+my allegiance as a character, as a man; and I am neither sorry nor
+ashamed that I was abashed when I first came into his presence; and that
+in spite of his words of welcome I sat inwardly quaking before him.  He
+was then forty-one years old, and nineteen my senior, and if there had
+been nothing else to awe me, I might well have been quelled by the
+disparity of our ages.  But I have always been willing and even eager to
+do homage to men who have done something, and notably to men who have
+done something.  in the sort I wished to do something in, myself.  I
+could never recognize any other sort of superiority; but that I am proud
+to recognize; and I had before Lowell some such feeling as an obscure
+subaltern might have before his general.  He was by nature a bit of a
+disciplinarian, and the effect was from him as well as in me; I dare say
+he let me feel whatever difference there was as helplessly as I felt it.
+At the first encounter with people he always was apt to have a certain
+frosty shyness, a smiling cold, as from the long, high-sunned winters of
+his Puritan race; he was not quite himself till he had made you aware of
+his quality: then no one could be sweeter, tenderer, warmer than he; then
+he made you free of his whole heart; but you must be his captive before
+he could do that.  His whole personality had now an instant charm for me;
+I could not keep my eyes from those beautiful eyes of his, which had a
+certain starry serenity, and looked out so purely from under his white
+forehead, shadowed with auburn hair untouched by age; or from the smile
+that shaped the auburn beard, and gave the face in its form and color the
+Christ-look which Page's portrait has flattered in it.
+
+His voice had as great a fascination for me as his face.  The vibrant
+tenderness and the crisp clearness of the tones, the perfect modulation,
+the clear enunciation, the exquisite accent, the elect diction--I did not
+know enough then to know that these were the gifts, these were the
+graces, of one from whose tongue our rough English came music such as I
+should never hear from any other.  In this speech there was nothing of
+our slipshod American slovenliness, but a truly Italian conscience and an
+artistic sense of beauty in the instrument.
+
+I saw, before he sat down across his writing-table from me, that he was
+not far from the medium height; but his erect carriage made the most of
+his five feet and odd inches.  He had been smoking the pipe he loved, and
+he put it back in his mouth, presently, as if he found himself at greater
+ease with it, when he began to chat, or rather to let me show what manner
+of young man I was by giving me the first word.  I told him of the
+trouble I had in finding him, and I could not help dragging in something
+about Heine's search for Borne, when he went to see him in Frankfort; but
+I felt at once this was a false start, for Lowell was such an impassioned
+lover of Cambridge, which was truly his patria, in the Italian sense,
+that it must have hurt him to be unknown to any one in it; he said,
+a little dryly, that he should not have thought I would have so much
+difficulty; but he added, forgivingly, that this was not his own house,
+which he was out of for the time.  Then he spoke to me of Heine, and when
+I showed my ardor for him, he sought to temper it with some judicious
+criticisms, and told me that he had kept the first poem I sent him, for
+the long time it had been unacknowledged, to make sure that it was not a
+translation.  He asked me about myself, and my name, and its Welsh
+origin, and seemed to find the vanity I had in this harmless enough.
+When I said I had tried hard to believe that I was at least the literary
+descendant of Sir James Howels, he corrected me gently with "James
+Howel," and took down a volume of the 'Familiar Letters' from the shelves
+behind him to prove me wrong.  This was always his habit, as I found
+afterwards when he quoted anything from a book he liked to get it and
+read the passage over, as if he tasted a kind of hoarded sweetness in the
+words.  It visibly vexed him if they showed him in the least mistaken;
+but
+
+               "The love he bore to learning was at fault"
+
+for this foible, and that other of setting people right if he thought
+them wrong.  I could not assert myself against his version of Howels's
+name, for my edition of his letters was far away in Ohio, and I was
+obliged to own that the name was spelt in several different ways in it.
+He perceived, no doubt, why I had chosen the form liked my own, with the
+title which the pleasant old turncoat ought to have had from the many
+masters he served according to their many minds, but never had except
+from that erring edition.  He did not afflict me for it, though; probably
+it amused him too much; he asked me about the West, and when he found
+that I was as proud of the West as I was of Wales, he seemed even better
+pleased, and said he had always fancied that human nature was laid out on
+rather a larger scale there than in the East, but he had seen very little
+of the West.  In my heart I did not think this then, and I do not think
+it now; human nature has had more ground to spread over in the West; that
+is all; but "it was not for me to bandy words with my sovereign."  He
+said he liked to hear of the differences between the different sections,
+for what we had most to fear in our country was a wearisome sameness of
+type.
+
+He did not say now, or at any other time during the many years I knew
+him, any of those slighting things of the West which I had so often to
+suffer from Eastern people, but suffered me to praise it all I would.  He
+asked me what way I had taken in coming to New England, and when I told
+him, and began to rave of the beauty and quaintness of French Canada,
+and to pour out my joy in Quebec, he said, with a smile that had now lost
+all its frost, Yes, Quebec was a bit of the seventeenth century; it was
+in many ways more French than France, and its people spoke the language
+of Voltaire, with the accent of Voltaire's time.
+
+I do not remember what else he talked of, though once I remembered it
+with what I believed an ineffaceable distinctness.  I set nothing of it
+down at the time; I was too busy with the letters I was writing for a
+Cincinnati paper; and I was severely bent upon keeping all personalities
+out of them.  This was very well, but I could wish now that I had
+transgressed at least so far as to report some of the things that Lowell
+said; for the paper did not print my letters, and it would have been
+perfectly safe, and very useful for the present purpose.  But perhaps he
+did not say anything very memorable; to do that you must have something
+positive in your listener; and I was the mere response, the hollow echo,
+that youth must be in like circumstances.  I was all the time afraid of
+wearing my welcome out, and I hurried to go when I would so gladly have
+staid.  I do not remember where I meant to go, or why he should have
+undertaken to show me the way across-lots, but this was what he did; and
+when we came to a fence, which I clambered gracelessly over, he put his
+hands on the top, and tried to take it at a bound.  He tried twice, and
+then laughed at his failure, but not with any great pleasure, and he was
+not content till a third trial carried him across.  Then he said,
+"I commonly do that the first time," as if it were a frequent habit with
+him, while I remained discreetly silent, and for that moment at least
+felt myself the elder of the man who had so much of the boy in him.  He
+had, indeed, much of the boy in him to the last, and he parted with each
+hour of his youth reluctantly, pathetically.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+We walked across what must have been Jarvis Field to what must have been
+North Avenue, and there he left me.  But before he let me go he held my
+hand while he could say that he wished me to dine with him; only, he was
+not in his own house, and he would ask me to dine with him at the Parker
+House in Boston, and would send me word of the time later.
+
+I suppose I may have spent part of the intervening time in viewing the
+wonders of Boston, and visiting the historic scenes and places in it and
+about it.  I certainly went over to Charleston, and ascended Bunker Hill
+monument, and explored the navy-yard, where the immemorial man-of-war
+begun in Jackson's time was then silently stretching itself under its
+long shed in a poetic arrest, as if the failure of the appropriation for
+its completion had been some kind of enchantment.  In Boston, I early
+presented my letter of credit to the publisher it was drawn upon, not
+that I needed money at the moment, but from a young eagerness to see if
+it would be honored; and a literary attache of the house kindly went
+about with me, and showed me the life of the city.  A great city it
+seemed to me then, and a seething vortex of business as well as a whirl
+of gaiety, as I saw it in Washington Street, and in a promenade concert
+at Copeland's restaurant in Tremont Row.  Probably I brought some
+idealizing force to bear upon it, for I was not all so strange to the
+world as I must seem; perhaps I accounted for quality as well as quantity
+in my impressions of the New England metropolis, and aggrandized it in
+the ratio of its literary importance.  It seemed to me old, even after
+Quebec, and very likely I credited the actual town with all the dead and
+gone Bostonians in my sentimental census.  If I did not, it was no fault
+of my cicerone, who thought even more of the city he showed me than I
+did.  I do not know now who he was, and I never saw him after I came to
+live there, with any certainty that it was he, though I was often
+tormented with the vision of a spectacled face like his, but not like
+enough to warrant me in addressing him.
+
+He became part of that ghostly Boston of my first visit, which would
+sometimes return and possess again the city I came to know so familiarly
+in later years, and to be so passionately interested in.  Some color of
+my prime impressions has tinged the fictitious experiences of people in
+my books, but I find very little of it in my memory.  This is like a web
+of frayed old lace, which I have to take carefully into my hold for fear
+of its fragility, and make out as best I can the figure once so distinct
+in it.  There are the narrow streets, stretching saltworks to the docks,
+which I haunted for their quaintness, and there is Faunal Hall, which I
+cared to see so much more because Wendell Phillips had spoken in it than
+because Otis and Adams had.  There is the old Colonial House, and there
+is the State House, which I dare say I explored, with the Common sloping
+before it.  There is Beacon Street, with the Hancock House where it is
+incredibly no more, and there are the beginnings of Commonwealth Avenue,
+and the other streets of the Back Bay, laid out with their basements left
+hollowed in the made land, which the gravel trains were yet making out of
+the westward hills.  There is the Public Garden, newly planned and
+planted, but without the massive bridge destined to make so ungratefully
+little of the lake that occasioned it.  But it is all very vague, and I
+could easily believe now that it was some one else who saw it then in my
+place.
+
+I think that I did not try to see Cambridge the same day that I saw
+Lowell, but wisely came back to my hotel in Boston, and tried to realize
+the fact.  I went out another day, with an acquaintance from Ohio; whom I
+ran upon in the street.  We went to Mount Auburn together, and I viewed
+its monuments with a reverence which I dare say their artistic quality
+did not merit.  But I am, not sorry for this, for perhaps they are not
+quite so bad as some people pretend.  The Gothic chapel of the cemetery,
+unsorted as it was, gave me, with its half-dozen statues standing or
+sitting about, an emotion such as I am afraid I could not receive now
+from the Acropolis, Westminster Abbey, and Santa Crocea in one.  I tried
+hard for some aesthetic sense of it, and I made believe that I thought
+this thing and that thing in the place moved me with its fitness or
+beauty; but the truth is that I had no taste in anything but literature,
+and did not feel the effect I would so willingly have experienced.
+
+I did genuinely love the elmy quiet of the dear old Cambridge streets,
+though, and I had a real and instant pleasure in the yellow colonial
+houses, with their white corners and casements and their green blinds,
+that lurked behind the shrubbery of the avenue I passed through to Mount
+Auburn.  The most beautiful among them was the most interesting for me,
+for it was the house of Longfellow; my companion, who had seen it before,
+pointed it out to me with an air of custom, and I would not let him see
+that I valued the first sight of it as I did.  I had hoped that somehow I
+might be so favored as to see Longfellow himself, but when I asked about
+him of those who knew, they said, "Oh, he is at Nahant," and I thought
+that Nahant must be a great way off, and at any rate I did not feel
+authorized to go to him there.  Neither did I go to see the author of
+'The Amber Gods' who lived at Newburyport, I was told, as if I should
+know where Newburyport was; I did not know, and I hated to ask.  Besides,
+it did not seem so simple as it had seemed in Ohio, to go and see a young
+lady simply because I was infatuated with her literature; even as the
+envoy of all the infatuated young people of Columbus, I could not quite
+do this; and when I got home, I had to account for my failure as best I
+could.  Another failure of mine was the sight of Whittier, which I then
+very much longed to have.  They said, "Oh, Whittier lives at Amesbury,"
+but that put him at an indefinite distance, and without the introduction
+I never would ask for, I found it impossible to set out in quest of him.
+In the end, I saw no one in New England whom I was not presented to in
+the regular way, except Lowell, whom I thought I had a right to call upon
+in my quality of contributor, and from the acquaintance I had with him by
+letter.  I neither praise nor blame myself for this; it was my shyness
+that with held me rather than my merit.  There is really no harm in
+seeking the presence of a famous man, and I doubt if the famous man
+resents the wish of people to look upon him without some measure, great
+or little, of affectation.  There are bores everywhere, but he is
+likelier to find them in the wonted figures of society than in those
+young people, or old people, who come to him in the love of what he has
+done.  I am well aware how furiously Tennyson sometimes met his
+worshippers, and how insolently Carlyle, but I think these facts are
+little specks in their sincerity.  Our own gentler and honester
+celebrities did not forbid approach, and I have known some of them caress
+adorers who seemed hardly worthy of their kindness; but that was better
+than to have hurt any sensitive spirit who had ventured too far, by the
+rules that govern us with common men.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+My business relations were with the house that so promptly honored my
+letter of credit.  This house had published in the East the campaign life
+of Lincoln which I had lately written, and I dare say would have
+published the volume of poems I had written earlier with my friend Piatt,
+if there had been any public for it; at least, I saw large numbers of the
+book on the counters.  But all my literary affiliations were with Ticknor
+& Fields, and it was the Old Corner Book-Store on Washington Street that
+drew my heart as soon as I had replenished my pocket in Cornhill.  After
+verifying the editor of the Atlantic Monthly I wised to verify its
+publishers, and it very fitly happened that when I was shown into Mr.
+Fields's little room at the back of the store, with its window looking
+upon School Street, and its scholarly keeping in books and prints, he had
+just got the magazine sheets of a poem of mine from the Cambridge
+printers.  He was then lately from abroad, and he had the zest for
+American things which a foreign sojourn is apt to renew in us, though I
+did not know this then, and could not account for it in the kindness he
+expressed for my poem.  He introduced me to Mr. Ticknor, who I fancied
+had not read my poem; but he seemed to know what it was from the junior
+partner, and he asked me whether I had been paid for it.  I confessed
+that I had not, and then he got out a chamois-leather bag, and took from
+it five half-eagles in gold and laid them on the green cloth top of the
+desk, in much the shape and of much the size of the Great Bear.  I have
+never since felt myself paid so lavishly for any literary work, though I
+have had more for a single piece than the twenty-five dollars that
+dazzled me in this constellation.  The publisher seemed aware of the
+poetic character of the transaction; he let the pieces lie a moment,
+before he gathered them up and put them into my hand, and said, "I always
+think it is pleasant to have it in gold."
+
+But a terrible experience with the poem awaited me, and quenched for the
+moment all my pleasure and pride.  It was 'The Pilot's Story,' which I
+suppose has had as much acceptance as anything of mine in verse (I do not
+boast of a vast acceptance for it), and I had attempted to treat in it a
+phase of the national tragedy of slavery, as I had imagined it on a
+Mississippi steamboat.  A young planter has gambled away the slave-girl
+who is the mother of his child, and when he tells her, she breaks out
+upon him with the demand:
+
+     "What will you say to our boy when he cries for me, there in Saint
+     Louis?"
+
+I had thought this very well, and natural and simple, but a fatal
+proof-reader had not thought it well enough, or simple and natural
+enough, and he had made the line read:
+
+     "What will you say to our boy when he cries for 'Ma,' there in Saint
+     Louis?"
+
+He had even had the inspiration to quote the word he preferred to the one
+I had written, so that there was no merciful possibility of mistaking it
+for a misprint, and my blood froze in my veins at sight of it.  Mr.
+Fields had given me the sheets to read while he looked over some letters,
+and he either felt the chill of my horror, or I made some sign or sound
+of dismay that caught his notice, for he looked round at me.  I could
+only show him the passage with a gasp.  I dare say he might have liked to
+laugh, for it was cruelly funny, but he did not; he was concerned for the
+magazine as well as for me.  He declared that when he first read the line
+he had thought I could not have written it so, and he agreed with me that
+it would kill the poem if it came out in that shape.  He instantly set
+about repairing the mischief, so far as could be.  He found that the
+whole edition of that sheet had been printed, and the air blackened round
+me again, lighted up here and there with baleful flashes of the newspaper
+wit at my cost, which I previsioned in my misery; I knew what I should
+have said of such a thing myself, if it had been another's.  But the
+publisher at once decided that the sheet must be reprinted, and I went
+away weak as if in the escape from some deadly peril.  Afterwards it
+appeared that the line had passed the first proof-reader as I wrote it,
+but that the final reader had entered so sympathetically into the
+realistic intention of my poem as to contribute the modification which
+had nearly been my end.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+As it fell out, I lived without farther difficulty to the day and hour of
+the dinner Lowell made for me; and I really think, looking at myself
+impersonally, and remembering the sort of young fellow I was, that it
+would have been a great pity if I had not.  The dinner was at the
+old-fashioned Boston hour of two, and the table was laid for four people
+in some little upper room at Parker's, which I was never afterwards able
+to make sure of.  Lowell was already, there when I came, and he presented
+me, to my inexpressible delight and surprise, to Dr. Holmes, who was
+there with him.
+
+Holmes was in the most brilliant hour of that wonderful second youth
+which his fame flowered into long after the world thought he had
+completed the cycle of his literary life.  He had already received full
+recognition as a poet of delicate wit, nimble humor, airy imagination,
+and exquisite grace, when the Autocrat papers advanced his name
+indefinitely beyond the bounds which most immortals would have found
+range enough.  The marvel of his invention was still fresh in the minds
+of men, and time had not dulled in any measure the sense of its novelty.
+His readers all fondly identified him with his work; and I fully expected
+to find myself in the Autocrat's presence when I met Dr.  Holmes.  But
+the fascination was none the less for that reason; and the winning smile,
+the wise and humorous glance, the whole genial manner was as important to
+me as if I had foreboded something altogether different.  I found him
+physically of the Napoleonic height which spiritually overtops the Alps,
+and I could look into his face without that unpleasant effort which
+giants of inferior mind so often cost the man of five feet four.
+
+A little while after, Fields came in, and then our number and my pleasure
+were complete.
+
+Nothing else so richly satisfactory, indeed, as the whole affair could
+have happened to a like youth at such a point in his career; and when I
+sat down with Doctor Holmes and Mr. Fields, on Lowell's right, I felt
+through and through the dramatic perfection of the event.  The kindly
+Autocrat recognized some such quality of it in terms which were not the
+less precious and gracious for their humorous excess.  I have no reason
+to think that he had yet read any of my poor verses, or had me otherwise
+than wholly on trust from Lowell; but he leaned over towards his host,
+and said, with a laughing look at me, "Well, James, this is something
+like the apostolic succession; this is the laying on of hands."  I took
+his sweet and caressing irony as he meant it; but the charm of it went to
+my head long before any drop of wine, together with the charm of hearing
+him and Lowell calling each other James and Wendell, and of finding them
+still cordially boys together.
+
+I would gladly have glimmered before those great lights in the talk that
+followed, if I could have thought of anything brilliant to say, but I
+could not, and so I let them shine without a ray of reflected splendor
+from me.  It was such talk as I had, of course, never heard before, and
+it is not saying enough to say that I have never heard such talk since
+except from these two men.  It was as light and kind as it was deep and
+true, and it ranged over a hundred things, with a perpetual sparkle of
+Doctor Holmes's wit, and the constant glow of Lowell's incandescent
+sense.  From time to time Fields came in with one of his delightful
+stories (sketches of character they were, which he sometimes did not mind
+caricaturing), or with some criticism of the literary situation from his
+stand-point of both lover and publisher of books.  I heard fames that I
+had accepted as proofs of power treated as factitious, and witnessed a
+frankness concerning authorship, far and near, that I had not dreamed of
+authors using.  When Doctor Holmes understood that I wrote for the
+'Saturday Press', which was running amuck among some Bostonian
+immortalities of the day, he seemed willing that I should know they were
+not thought so very undying in Boston, and that I should not take the
+notion of a Mutual Admiration Society too seriously, or accept the New
+York Bohemian view of Boston as true.  For the most part the talk did not
+address itself to me, but became an exchange of thoughts and fancies
+between himself and Lowell.  They touched, I remember, on certain matters
+of technique, and the doctor confessed that he had a prejudice against
+some words that he could not overcome; for instance, he said, nothing
+could induce him to use 'neath for beneath, no exigency of versification
+or stress of rhyme.  Lowell contended that he would use any word that
+carried his meaning; and I think he did this to the hurt of some of his
+earlier things.  He was then probably in the revolt against too much
+literature in literature, which every one is destined sooner or later to
+share; there was a certain roughness, very like crudeness, which he
+indulged before his thought and phrase mellowed to one music in his later
+work.  I tacitly agreed rather with the doctor, though I did not swerve
+from my allegiance to Lowell, and if I had spoken I should have sided
+with him: I would have given that or any other proof of my devotion.
+Fields casually mentioned that he thought "The Dandelion" was the most
+popularly liked of Lowell's briefer poems, and I made haste to say that I
+thought so too, though I did not really think anything about it; and then
+I was sorry, for I could see that the poet did not like it, quite; and I
+felt that I was duly punished for my dishonesty.
+
+Hawthorne was named among other authors, probably by Fields, whose house
+had just published his "Marble Faun," and who had recently come home on
+the same steamer with him.  Doctor Holmes asked if I had met Hawthorne
+yet, and when I confessed that I had hardly yet even hoped for such a
+thing, he smiled his winning smile, and said: "Ah, well! I don't know
+that you will ever feel you have really met him.  He is like a dim room
+with a little taper of personality burning on the corner of the mantel."
+
+They all spoke of Hawthorne, and with the same affection, but the same
+sense of something mystical and remote in him; and every word was
+priceless to me.  But these masters of the craft I was 'prentice to
+probably could not have said anything that I should not have found wise
+and well, and I am sure now I should have been the loser if the talk had
+shunned any of the phases of human nature which it touched.  It is best
+to find that all men are of the same make, and that there are certain
+universal things which interest them as much as the supernal things, and
+amuse them even more.  There was a saying of Lowell's which he was fond
+of repeating at the menace of any form of the transcendental, and he
+liked to warn himself and others with his homely, "Remember the
+dinner-bell."  What I recall of the whole effect of a time so happy for
+me is that in all that was said, however high, however fine, we were
+never out of hearing of the dinner-bell; and perhaps this is the best
+effect I can leave with the reader.  It was the first dinner served in
+courses that I had sat down to, and I felt that this service gave it a
+romantic importance which the older fashion of the West still wanted.
+Even at Governor Chase's table in Columbus the Governor carved; I knew of
+the dinner 'a la Russe', as it was then called, only from books; and it
+was a sort of literary flavor that I tasted in the successive dishes.
+When it came to the black coffee, and then to the 'petits verres' of
+cognac, with lumps of sugar set fire to atop, it was something that so
+far transcended my home-kept experience that it began to seem altogether
+visionary.
+
+Neither Fields nor Doctor Holmes smoked, and I had to confess that I did
+not; but Lowell smoked enough for all three, and the spark of his cigar
+began to show in the waning light before we rose from the table.  The
+time that never had, nor can ever have, its fellow for me, had to come to
+an end, as all times must, and when I shook hands with Lowell in parting,
+he overwhelmed me by saying that if I thought of going to Concord he
+would send me a letter to Hawthorne.  I was not to see Lowell again
+during my stay in Boston; but Doctor Holmes asked me to tea for the next
+evening, and Fields said I must come to breakfast with him in the
+morning.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+I recall with the affection due to his friendly nature, and to the
+kindness afterwards to pass between us for many years, the whole aspect
+of the publisher when I first saw him.  His abundant hair, and his full
+"beard as broad as ony spade," that flowed from his throat in Homeric
+curls, were touched with the first frost.  He had a fine color, and his
+eyes, as keen as they were kind, twinkled restlessly above the wholesome
+russet-red of his cheeks.  His portly frame was clad in those Scotch
+tweeds which had not yet displaced the traditional broadcloth with us in
+the West, though I had sent to New York for a rough suit, and so felt
+myself not quite unworthy to meet a man fresh from the hands of the
+London tailor.
+
+Otherwise I stood as much in awe of him as his jovial soul would let me;
+and if I might I should like to suggest to the literary youth of this day
+some notion of the importance of his name to the literary youth of my
+day.  He gave aesthetic character to the house of Ticknor & Fields, but
+he was by no means a silent partner on the economic side.  No one can
+forecast the fortune of a new book, but he knew as well as any publisher
+can know not only whether a book was good, but whether the reader would
+think so; and I suppose that his house made as few bad guesses, along
+with their good ones, as any house that ever tried the uncertain temper
+of the public with its ventures.  In the minds of all who loved the plain
+brown cloth and tasteful print of its issues he was more or less
+intimately associated with their literature; and those who were not
+mistaken in thinking De Quincey one of the delightfulest authors in the
+world, were especially grateful to the man who first edited his writings
+in book form, and proud that this edition was the effect of American
+sympathy with them.  At that day, I believed authorship the noblest
+calling in the world, and I should still be at a loss to name any nobler.
+The great authors I had met were to me the sum of greatness, and if I
+could not rank their publisher with them by virtue of equal achievement,
+I handsomely brevetted him worthy of their friendship, and honored him in
+the visible measure of it.
+
+In his house beside the Charles, and in the close neighborhood of Doctor
+Holmes, I found an odor and an air of books such as I fancied might
+belong to the famous literary houses of London.  It is still there, that
+friendly home of lettered refinement, and the gracious spirit which knew
+how to welcome me, and make the least of my shyness and strangeness, and
+the most of the little else there was in me, illumines it still, though
+my host of that rapturous moment has many years been of those who are
+only with us unseen and unheard.  I remember his burlesque pretence that
+morning of an inextinguishable grief when I owned that I had never eaten
+blueberry cake before, and how he kept returning to the pathos of the
+fact that there should be a region of the earth where blueberry cake was
+unknown.  We breakfasted in the pretty room whose windows look out
+through leaves and flowers upon the river's coming and going tides, and
+whose walls were covered with the faces and the autographs of all the
+contemporary poets and novelists.  The Fieldses had spent some days with
+Tennyson in their recent English sojourn, and Mrs. Fields had much to
+tell of him, how he looked, how he smoked, how he read aloud, and how he
+said, when he asked her to go with him to the tower of his house, "Come
+up and see the sad English sunset!" which had an instant value to me such
+as some rich verse of his might have had.  I was very new to it all, how
+new I could not very well say, but I flattered myself that I breathed in
+that atmosphere as if in the return from life-long exile.  Still I
+patriotically bragged of the West a little, and I told them proudly that
+in Columbus no book since Uncle Tom's Cabin had sold so well as 'The
+Marble Faun'.  This made the effect that I wished, but whether it was
+true or not, Heaven knows; I only know that I heard it from our leading
+bookseller, and I made no question of it myself.
+
+After breakfast, Fields went away to the office, and I lingered, while
+Mrs. Fields showed me from shelf to shelf in the library, and dazzled me
+with the sight of authors' copies, and volumes invaluable with the
+autographs and the pencilled notes of the men whose names were dear to me
+from my love of their work.  Everywhere was some souvenir of the living
+celebrities my hosts had met; and whom had they not met in that English
+sojourn in days before England embittered herself to us during our civil
+war?  Not Tennyson only, but Thackeray, but Dickens, but Charles Reade,
+but Carlyle, but many a minor fame was in my ears from converse so recent
+with them that it was as if I heard their voices in their echoed words.
+
+I do not remember how long I stayed; I remember I was afraid of staying
+too long, and so I am sure I did not stay as long as I should have liked.
+But I have not the least notion how I got away, and I am not certain
+where I spent the rest of a day that began in the clouds, but had to be
+ended on the common earth.  I suppose I gave it mostly to wandering about
+the city, and partly to recording my impressions of it for that newspaper
+which never published them.  The summer weather in Boston, with its sunny
+heat struck through and through with the coolness of the sea, and its
+clear air untainted with a breath of smoke, I have always loved, but it
+had then a zest unknown before; and I should have thought it enough
+simply to be alive in it.  But everywhere I came upon something that fed
+my famine for the old, the quaint, the picturesque, and however the day
+passed it was a banquet, a festival.  I can only recall my breathless
+first sight of the Public Library and of the Athenaeum Gallery: great
+sights then, which the Vatican and the Pitti hardly afterwards eclipsed
+for mere emotion.  In fact I did not see these elder treasuries of
+literature and art between breakfasting with the Autocrat's publisher in
+the morning, and taking tea with the Autocrat himself in the evening, and
+that made a whole world's difference.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+The tea of that simpler time is wholly inconceivable to this generation,
+which knows the thing only as a mild form of afternoon reception; but I
+suppose that in 1860 very few dined late in our whole pastoral republic.
+Tea was the meal people asked people to when they wished to sit at long
+leisure and large ease; it came at the end of the day, at six o'clock, or
+seven; and one went to it in morning dress.  It had an unceremonied
+domesticity in the abundance of its light dishes, and I fancy these did
+not vary much from East to West, except that we had a Southern touch in
+our fried chicken and corn bread; but at the Autocrat's tea table the
+cheering cup had a flavor unknown to me before that day.  He asked me if
+I knew it, and I said it was English breakfast tea; for I had drunk it at
+the publisher's in the morning, and was willing not to seem strange to
+it.  "Ah, yes," he said; "but this is the flower of the souchong; it is
+the blossom, the poetry of tea," and then he told me how it had been
+given him by a friend, a merchant in the China trade, which used to
+flourish in Boston, and was the poetry of commerce, as this delicate
+beverage was of tea.  That commerce is long past, and I fancy that the
+plant ceased to bloom when the traffic fell into decay.
+
+The Autocrat's windows had the same outlook upon the Charles as the
+publisher's, and after tea we went up into a back parlor of the same
+orientation, and saw the sunset die over the water, and the westering
+flats and hills.  Nowhere else in the world has the day a lovelier close,
+and our talk took something of the mystic coloring that the heavens gave
+those mantling expanses.  It was chiefly his talk, but I have always
+found the best talkers are willing that you should talk if you like, and
+a quick sympathy and a subtle sense met all that I had to say from him
+and from the unbroken circle of kindred intelligences about him.  I saw
+him then in the midst of his family, and perhaps never afterwards to
+better advantage, or in a finer mood.  We spoke of the things that people
+perhaps once liked to deal with more than they do now; of the intimations
+of immortality, of the experiences of morbid youth, and of all those
+messages from the tremulous nerves which we take for prophecies.  I was
+not ashamed, before his tolerant wisdom, to acknowledge the effects that
+had lingered so long with me in fancy and even in conduct, from a time of
+broken health and troubled spirit; and I remember the exquisite tact in
+him which recognized them as things common to all, however peculiar in
+each, which left them mine for whatever obscure vanity I might have in
+them, and yet gave me the companionship of the whole race in their
+experience.  We spoke of forebodings and presentiments; we approached the
+mystic confines of the world from which no traveller has yet returned
+with a passport 'en regle' and properly 'vise'; and he held his light
+course through these filmy impalpabilities with a charming sincerity,
+with the scientific conscience that refuses either to deny the substance
+of things unseen, or to affirm it.  In the gathering dusk, so weird did
+my fortune of being there and listening to him seem, that I might well
+have been a blessed ghost, for all the reality I felt in myself.
+
+I tried to tell him how much I had read him from my boyhood, and with
+what joy and gain; and he was patient of these futilities, and I have no
+doubt imagined the love that inspired them, and accepted that instead of
+the poor praise.  When the sunset passed, and the lamps were lighted, and
+we all came back to our dear little firm-set earth, he began to question
+me about my native region of it.  From many forgotten inquiries I recall
+his asking me what was the fashionable religion in Columbus, or the
+Church that socially corresponded to the Unitarian Church in Boston.
+He had first to clarify my intelligence as to-what Unitarianism was; we
+had Universalists but not Unitarians; but when I understood, I answered
+from such vantage as my own wholly outside Swedenborgianism gave me, that
+I thought most of the most respectable people with us were of the
+Presbyterian Church; some were certainly Episcopalians, but upon the
+whole the largest number were Presbyterians.  He found that very strange
+indeed; and said that he did not believe there was a Presbyterian Church
+in Boston; that the New England Calvinists were all of the Orthodox
+Church.  He had to explain Oxthodoxy to me, and then I could confess to
+one Congregational Church in Columbus.
+
+Probably I failed to give the Autocrat any very clear image of our social
+frame in the West, but the fault was altogether mine, if I did.  Such
+lecturing tours as he had made had not taken him among us, as those of
+Emerson and other New-Englanders had, and my report was positive rather
+than comparative.  I was full of pride in journalism at that day, and I
+dare say that I vaunted the brilliancy and power of our newspapers more
+than they merited; I should not have been likely to wrong them otherwise.
+It is strange that in all the talk I had with him and Lowell, or rather
+heard from them, I can recall nothing said of political affairs, though
+Lincoln had then been nominated by the Republicans, and the Civil War had
+practically begun.  But we did not imagine such a thing in the North; we
+rested secure in the belief that if Lincoln were elected the South would
+eat all its fiery words, perhaps from the mere love and inveterate habit
+of fireeating.
+
+I rent myself away from the Autocrat's presence as early as I could,
+and as my evening had been too full of happiness to sleep upon at once,
+I spent the rest of the night till two in the morning wandering about the
+streets and in the Common with a Harvard Senior whom I had met.  He was a
+youth of like literary passions with myself, but of such different
+traditions in every possible way that his deeply schooled and definitely
+regulated life seemed as anomalous to me as my own desultory and
+self-found way must have seemed to him.  We passed the time in the
+delight of trying to make ourselves known to each other, and in a promise
+to continue by letter the effort, which duly lapsed into silent patience
+with the necessarily insoluble problem.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+I must have lingered in Boston for the introduction to Hawthorne which
+Lowell had offered me, for when it came, with a little note of kindness
+and counsel for myself such as only Lowell had the gift of writing,
+it was already so near Sunday that I stayed over till Monday before I
+started.  I do not recall what I did with the time, except keep myself
+from making it a burden to the people I knew, and wandering about the
+city alone.  Nothing of it remains to me except the fortune that favored
+me that Sunday night with a view of the old Granary Burying-ground on
+Tremont Street.  I found the gates open, and I explored every path in the
+place, wreaking myself in such meagre emotion as I could get from the
+tomb of the Franklin family, and rejoicing with the whole soul of my
+Western modernity in the evidence of a remote antiquity which so many of
+the dim inscriptions afforded.  I do not think that I have ever known
+anything practically older than these monuments, though I have since
+supped so full of classic and mediaeval ruin.  I am sure that I was more
+deeply touched by the epitaph of a poor little Puritan maiden who died at
+sixteen in the early sixteen-thirties than afterwards by the tomb of
+Caecilia Metella, and that the heartache which I tried to put into verse
+when I got back to my room in the hotel was none the less genuine because
+it would not lend itself to my literary purpose, and remains nothing but
+pathos to this day.
+
+I am not able to say how I reached the town of Lowell, where I went
+before going to Concord, that I might ease the unhappy conscience I had
+about those factories which I hated so much to see, and have it clean for
+the pleasure of meeting the fabricator of visions whom I was authorized
+to molest in any air-castle where I might find him.  I only know that I
+went to Lowell, and visited one of the great mills, which with their
+whirring spools, the ceaseless flight of their shuttles, and the
+bewildering sight and sound of all their mechanism have since seemed to
+me the death of the joy that ought to come from work, if not the
+captivity of those who tended them.  But then I thought it right and well
+for me to be standing by,
+
+               "With sick and scornful looks averse,"
+
+while these others toiled; I did not see the tragedy in it, and I got my
+pitiful literary antipathy away as soon as I could, no wiser for the
+sight of the ingenious contrivances I inspected, and I am sorry to say no
+sadder.  In the cool of the evening I sat at the door of my hotel, and
+watched the long files of the work-worn factory-girls stream by, with no
+concern for them but to see which was pretty and which was plain, and
+with no dream of a truer order than that which gave them ten hours' work
+a day in those hideous mills and lodged them in the barracks where they
+rested from their toil.
+
+I wonder if there is a stage that still runs between Lowell and Concord,
+past meadow walls, and under the caressing boughs of way-side elms, and
+through the bird-haunted gloom of woodland roads, in the freshness of the
+summer morning?  By a blessed chance I found that there was such a stage
+in 1860, and I took it from my hotel, instead of going back to Boston and
+up to Concord as I must have had to do by train.  The journey gave me the
+intimacy of the New England country as I could have had it in no other
+fashion, and for the first time I saw it in all the summer sweetness
+which I have often steeped my soul in since.  The meadows were newly
+mown, and the air was fragrant with the grass, stretching in long winrows
+among the brown bowlders, or capped with canvas in the little haycocks it
+had been gathered into the day before.  I was fresh from the affluent
+farms of the Western Reserve, and this care of the grass touched me with
+a rude pity, which I also bestowed on the meagre fields of corn and
+wheat; but still the land was lovelier than any I had ever seen, with its
+old farmhouses, and brambled gray stone walls, its stony hillsides, its
+staggering orchards, its wooded tops, and its thick-brackened valleys.
+From West to East the difference was as great as I afterwards found it
+from America to Europe, and my impression of something quaint and strange
+was no keener when I saw Old England the next year than when I saw New
+England now.  I had imagined the landscape bare of trees, and I was
+astonished to find it almost as full of them as at home, though they all
+looked very little, as they well might to eyes used to the primeval
+forests of Ohio.  The road ran through them from time to time, and took
+their coolness on its smooth hard reaches, and then issued again in the
+glisten of the open fields.
+
+I made phrases to myself about the scenery as we drove along; and yes, I
+suppose I made phrases about the young girl who was one of the inside
+passengers, and who, when the common strangeness had somewhat worn off,
+began to sing, and sang most of the way to Concord.  Perhaps she was not
+very sage, and I am sure she was not of the caste of Vere de Vere, but
+she was pretty enough, and she had a voice of a bird-like tunableness,
+so that I would not have her out of the memory of that pleasant journey
+if I could.  She was long ago an elderly woman, if she lives, and I
+suppose she would not now point out her fellow-passenger if he strolled
+in the evening by the house where she had dismounted, upon her arrival in
+Concord, and laugh and pull another girl away from the window, in the
+high excitement of the prodigious adventure.
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+Her fellow-passenger was in far other excitement; he was to see
+Hawthorne, and in a manner to meet Priscilla and Zenobia, and Hester
+Prynne and little Pearl, and Miriam and Hilda, and Hollingsworth and
+Coverdale, and Chillingworth and Dimmesdale, and Donatello and Kenyon;
+and he had no heart for any such poor little reality as that, who could
+not have been got into any story that one could respect, and must have
+been difficult even in a Heinesque poem.
+
+I wasted that whole evening and the next morning in fond delaying, and it
+was not until after the indifferent dinner I got at the tavern where I
+stopped, that I found courage to go and present Lowell's letter to
+Hawthorne.  I would almost have foregone meeting the weird genius only to
+have kept that letter, for it said certain infinitely precious things of
+me with such a sweetness, such a grace, as Lowell alone could give his
+praise.  Years afterwards, when Hawthorne was dead, I met Mrs. Hawthorne,
+and told her of the pang I had in parting with it, and she sent it me,
+doubly enriched by Hawthorne's keeping.  But now if I were to see him at
+all I must give up my letter, and I carried it in my hand to the door of
+the cottage he called The Wayside.  It was never otherwise than a very
+modest place, but the modesty was greater then than to-day, and there was
+already some preliminary carpentry at one end of the cottage, which I saw
+was to result in an addition to it.  I recall pleasant fields across the
+road before it; behind rose a hill wooded with low pines, such as is made
+in Septimius Felton the scene of the involuntary duel between Septimius
+and the young British officer.  I have a sense of the woods coming quite
+down to the house, but if this was so I do not know what to do with a
+grassy slope which seems to have stretched part way up the hill.  As I
+approached, I looked for the tower which the author was fabled to climb
+into at sight of the coming guest, and pull the ladder up after him; and
+I wondered whether he would fly before me in that sort, or imagine some
+easier means of escaping me.
+
+The door was opened to my ring by a tall handsome boy whom I suppose to
+have been Mr. Julian Hawthorne; and the next moment I found myself in the
+presence of the romancer, who entered from some room beyond.  He advanced
+carrying his head with a heavy forward droop, and with a pace for which I
+decided that the word would be pondering.  It was the pace of a bulky man
+of fifty, and his head was that beautiful head we all know from the many
+pictures of it.  But Hawthorne's look was different from that of any
+picture of him that I have seen.  It was sombre and brooding, as the look
+of such a poet should have been; it was the look of a man who had dealt
+faithfully and therefore sorrowfully with that problem of evil which
+forever attracted, forever evaded Hawthorne.  It was by no means
+troubled; it was full of a dark repose.  Others who knew him better and
+saw him oftener were familiar with other aspects, and I remember that one
+night at Longfellow's table, when one of the guests happened to speak of
+the photograph of Hawthorne which hung in a corner of the room, Lowell
+said, after a glance at it, "Yes, it's good; but it hasn't his fine
+'accipitral' [pertaining to the look of a bird of prey; hawklike.  D.W.]
+look."
+
+In the face that confronted me, however, there was nothing of keen
+alertness; but only a sort of quiet, patient intelligence, for which I
+seek the right word in vain.  It was a very regular face, with beautiful
+eyes; the mustache, still entirely dark, was dense over the fine mouth.
+Hawthorne was dressed in black, and he had a certain effect which I
+remember, of seeming to have on a black cravat with no visible collar.
+He was such a man that if I had ignorantly met him anywhere I should have
+instantly felt him to be a personage.
+
+I must have given him the letter myself, for I have no recollection of
+parting with it before, but I only remember his offering me his hand, and
+making me shyly and tentatively welcome.  After a few moments of the
+demoralization which followed his hospitable attempts in me, he asked if
+I would not like to go up on his hill with him and sit there, where he
+smoked in the afternoon.  He offered me a cigar, and when I said that I
+did not smoke, he lighted it for himself, and we climbed the hill
+together.  At the top, where there was an outlook in the pines over the
+Concord meadows, we found a log, and he invited me to a place on it
+beside him, and at intervals of a minute or so he talked while he smoked.
+Heaven preserved me from the folly of trying to tell him how much his
+books had been to me, and though we got on rapidly at no time, I think we
+got on better for this interposition.  He asked me about Lowell, I dare
+say, for I told him of my joy in meeting him and Doctor Holmes, and this
+seemed greatly to interest him.  Perhaps because he was so lately from
+Europe, where our great men are always seen through the wrong end of the
+telescope, he appeared surprised at my devotion, and asked me whether I
+cared as much for meeting them as I should care for meeting the famous
+English authors.  I professed that I cared much more, though whether this
+was true, I now have my doubts, and I think Hawthorne doubted it at the
+time.  But he said nothing in comment, and went on to speak generally of
+Europe and America.  He was curious about the West, which be seemed to
+fancy much more purely American, and said he would like to see some part
+of the country on which the shadow (or, if I must be precise, the damned
+shadow) of Europe had not fallen.  I told him I thought the West must
+finally be characterized by the Germans, whom we had in great numbers,
+and, purely from my zeal for German poetry, I tried to allege some proofs
+of their present influence, though I could think of none outside of
+politics, which I thought they affected wholesomely.  I knew Hawthorne
+was a Democrat, and I felt it well to touch politics lightly, but he had
+no more to say about the fateful election then pending than Holmes or
+Lowell had.
+
+With the abrupt transition of his talk throughout, he began somehow to
+speak of women, and said he had never seen a woman whom he thought quite
+beautiful.  In the same way he spoke of the New England temperament, and
+suggested that the apparent coldness in it was also real, and that the
+suppression of emotion for generations would extinguish it at last.  Then
+he questioned me as to my knowledge of Concord, and whether I had seen
+any of the notable people.  I answered that I had met no one but himself,
+as yet, but I very much wished to see Emerson and Thoreau.  I did not
+think it needful to say that I wished to see Thoreau quite as much
+because he had suffered in the cause of John Brown as because he had
+written the books which had taken me; and when he said that Thoreau
+prided himself on coming nearer the heart of a pine-tree than any other
+human being, I could say honestly enough that I would rather come near
+the heart of a man.  This visibly pleased him, and I saw that it did not
+displease him, when he asked whether I was not going to see his next
+neighbor, Mr. Alcott, and I confessed that I had never heard of him.
+That surprised as well as pleased him; be remarked, with whatever
+intention, that there was nothing like recognition to make a man modest;
+and he entered into some account of the philosopher, whom I suppose I
+need not be much ashamed of not knowing then, since his influence was of
+the immediate sort that makes a man important to his townsmen while he is
+still strange to his countrymen.
+
+Hawthorne descanted a little upon the landscape, and said certain of the
+pleasant fields below us be longed to him; but he preferred his hill-top,
+and if he could have his way those arable fields should be grown up to
+pines too.  He smoked fitfully, and slowly, and in the hour that we spent
+together, his whiffs were of the desultory and unfinal character of his
+words.  When we went down, he asked me into his house again, and would
+have me stay to tea, for which we found the table laid.  But there was a
+great deal of silence in it all, and at times, in spite of his shadowy
+kindness, I felt my spirits sink.  After tea, he showed me a book case,
+where there were a few books toppling about on the half-filled shelves,
+and said, coldly, "This is my library."  I knew that men were his books,
+and though I myself cared for books so much, I found it fit and fine that
+he should care so little, or seem to care so little.  Some of his own
+romances were among the volumes on these shelves, and when I put my
+finger on the 'Blithedale Romance' and said that I preferred that to the
+others, his face lighted up, and he said that he believed the Germans
+liked that best too.
+
+Upon the whole we parted such good friends that when I offered to take
+leave he asked me how long I was to be in Concord, and not only bade me
+come to see him again, but said he would give me a card to Emerson, if I
+liked.  I answered, of course, that I should like it beyond all things;
+and he wrote on the back of his card something which I found, when I got
+away, to be, "I find this young man worthy."  The quaintness, the little
+stiffness of it, if one pleases to call it so, was amusing to one who was
+not without his sense of humor, but the kindness filled me to the throat
+with joy.  In fact, I entirely liked Hawthorne.  He had been as cordial
+as so shy a man could show himself; and I perceived, with the repose
+that nothing else can give, the entire sincerity of his soul.
+
+Nothing could have been further from the behavior of this very great man
+than any sort of posing, apparently, or a wish to affect me with a sense
+of his greatness.  I saw that he was as much abashed by our encounter as
+I was; he was visibly shy to the point of discomfort, but in no ignoble
+sense was he conscious, and as nearly as he could with one so much his
+younger he made an absolute equality between us.  My memory of him is
+without alloy one of the finest pleasures of my life:  In my heart I paid
+him the same glad homage that I paid Lowell and Holmes, and he did
+nothing to make me think that I had overpaid him.  This seems perhaps
+very little to say in his praise, but to my mind it is saying everything,
+for I have known but few great men, especially of those I met in early
+life, when I wished to lavish my admiration upon them, whom I have not
+the impression of having left in my debt.  Then, a defect of the Puritan
+quality, which I have found in many New-Englanders, is that, wittingly or
+unwittingly, they propose themselves to you as an example, or if not
+quite this, that they surround themselves with a subtle ether of
+potential disapprobation, in which, at the first sign of unworthiness in
+you, they helplessly suffer you to gasp and perish; they have good
+hearts, and they would probably come to your succor out of humanity, if
+they knew how, but they do not know how.  Hawthorne had nothing of this
+about him; he was no more tacitly than he was explicitly didactic.
+I thought him as thoroughly in keeping with his romances as Doctor Holmes
+had seemed with his essays and poems, and I met him as I had met the
+Autocrat in the supreme hour of his fame.  He had just given the world
+the last of those incomparable works which it was to have finished from
+his hand; the 'Marble Faun' had worthily followed, at a somewhat longer
+interval than usual, the 'Blithedale Romance', and the 'House of Seven
+Gables', and the 'Scarlet Letter', and had, perhaps carried his name
+higher than all the rest, and certainly farther.  Everybody was reading
+it, and more or less bewailing its indefinite close, but yielding him
+that full honor and praise which a writer can hope for but once in his
+life.  Nobody dreamed that thereafter only precious fragments, sketches
+more or less faltering, though all with the divine touch in them, were
+further to enrich a legacy which in its kind is the finest the race has
+received from any mind.  As I have said, we are always finding new
+Hawthornes, but the illusion soon wears away, and then we perceive that
+they were not Hawthornes at all; that he had some peculiar difference
+from them, which, by and-by, we shall no doubt consent must be his
+difference from all men evermore.
+
+I am painfully aware that I have not summoned before the reader the image
+of the man as it has always stood in my memory, and I feel a sort of
+shame for my failure.  He was so altogether simple that it seems as if it
+would be easy to do so; but perhaps a spirit from the other world would
+be simple too, and yet would no more stand at parle, or consent to be
+sketched, than Hawthorne.  In fact, he was always more or less merging
+into the shadow, which was in a few years wholly to close over him; there
+was nothing uncanny in his presence, there was nothing even unwilling,
+but he had that apparitional quality of some great minds which kept
+Shakespeare largely unknown to those who thought themselves his
+intimates, and has at last left him a sort of doubt.  There was nothing
+teasing or wilfully elusive in Hawthorne's impalpability, such as I
+afterwards felt in Thoreau; if he was not there to your touch, it was no
+fault of his; it was because your touch was dull, and wanted the use of
+contact with such natures.  The hand passes through the veridical phantom
+without a sense of its presence, but the phantom is none the less
+veridical for all that.
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+I kept the evening of the day I met Hawthorne wholly for the thoughts of
+him, or rather for that reverberation which continues in the young
+sensibilities after some important encounter.  It must have been the next
+morning that I went to find Thoreau, and I am dimly aware of making one
+or two failures to find him, if I ever really found him at all.
+
+He is an author who has fallen into that abeyance, awaiting all authors,
+great or small, at some time or another; but I think that with him, at
+least in regard to his most important book, it can be only transitory.
+I have not read the story of his hermitage beside Walden Pond since the
+year 1858, but I have a fancy that if I should take it up now, I should
+think it a wiser and truer conception of the world than I thought it
+then.  It is no solution of the problem; men are not going to answer the
+riddle of the painful earth by building themselves shanties and living
+upon beans and watching ant-fights; but I do not believe Tolstoy himself
+has more clearly shown the hollowness, the hopelessness, the unworthiness
+of the life of the world than Thoreau did in that book.  If it were newly
+written it could not fail of a far vaster acceptance than it had then,
+when to those who thought and felt seriously it seemed that if slavery
+could only be controlled, all things else would come right of themselves
+with us.  Slavery has not only been controlled, but it has been
+destroyed, and yet things have not begun to come right with us; but it
+was in the order of Providence that chattel slavery should cease before
+industrial slavery, and the infinitely crueler and stupider vanity and
+luxury bred of it, should be attacked.  If there was then any prevision
+of the struggle now at hand, the seers averted their eyes, and strove
+only to cope with the less evil.  Thoreau himself, who had so clear a
+vision of the falsity and folly of society as we still have it, threw
+himself into the tide that was already, in Kansas and Virginia, reddened
+with war; he aided and abetted the John Brown raid, I do not recall how
+much or in what sort; and he had suffered in prison for his opinions and
+actions.  It was this inevitable heroism of his that, more than his
+literature even, made me wish to see him and revere him; and I do not
+believe that I should have found the veneration difficult, when at last
+I met him in his insufficient person, if he had otherwise been present to
+my glowing expectation.  He came into the room a quaint, stump figure of
+a man, whose effect of long trunk and short limbs was heightened by his
+fashionless trousers being let down too low.  He had a noble face, with
+tossed hair, a distraught eye, and a fine aquilinity of profile, which
+made me think at once of Don Quixote and of Cervantes; but his nose
+failed to add that foot to his stature which Lamb says a nose of that
+shape will always give a man.  He tried to place me geographically after
+he had given me a chair not quite so far off as Ohio, though still across
+the whole room, for he sat against one wall, and I against the other;
+but apparently he failed to pull himself out of his revery by the effort,
+for he remained in a dreamy muse, which all my attempts to say something
+fit about John Brown and Walden Pond seemed only to deepen upon him.
+I have not the least doubt that I was needless and valueless about both,
+and that what I said could not well have prompted an important response;
+but I did my poor best, and I was terribly disappointed in the result.
+The truth is that in those days I was a helplessly concrete young person,
+and all forms of the abstract, the air-drawn, afflicted me like physical
+discomforts.  I do not remember that Thoreau spoke of his books or of
+himself at all, and when he began to speak of John Brown, it was not the
+warm, palpable, loving, fearful old man of my conception, but a sort of
+John Brown type, a John Brown ideal, a John Brown principle, which we
+were somehow (with long pauses between the vague, orphic phrases) to
+cherish, and to nourish ourselves upon.
+
+It was not merely a defeat of my hopes, it was a rout, and I felt myself
+so scattered over the field of thought that I could hardly bring my
+forces together for retreat.  I must have made some effort, vain and
+foolish enough, to rematerialize my old demigod, but when I came away it
+was with the feeling that there was very little more left of John Brown
+than there was of me.  His body was not mouldering in the grave, neither
+was his soul marching on; his ideal, his type, his principle alone
+existed, and I did not know what to do with it.  I am not blaming
+Thoreau; his words were addressed to a far other understanding than mine,
+and it was my misfortune if I could not profit by them.  I think, or I
+venture to hope, that I could profit better by them now; but in this
+record I am trying honestly to report their effect with the sort of youth
+I was then.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+Such as I was, I rather wonder that I had the courage, after this
+experiment of Thoreau, to present the card Hawthorne had given me to
+Emerson.  I must have gone to him at once, however, for I cannot make out
+any interval of time between my visit to the disciple and my visit to the
+master.  I think it was Emerson himself who opened his door to me, for I
+have a vision of the fine old man standing tall on his threshold, with
+the card in his hand, and looking from it to me with a vague serenity,
+while I waited a moment on the door-step below him.  He must then have
+been about sixty, but I remember nothing of age in his aspect, though I
+have called him an old man.  His hair, I am sure, was still entirely
+dark, and his face had a kind of marble youthfulness, chiselled to a
+delicate intelligence by the highest and noblest thinking that any man
+has done.  There was a strange charm in Emerson's eyes, which I felt then
+and always, something like that I saw in Lincoln's, but shyer, but
+sweeter and less sad.  His smile was the very sweetest I have ever
+beheld, and the contour of the mask and the line of the profile were in
+keeping with this incomparable sweetness of the mouth, at once grave and
+quaint, though quaint is not quite the word for it either, but subtly,
+not unkindly arch, which again is not the word.
+
+It was his great fortune to have been mostly misunderstood, and to have
+reached the dense intelligence of his fellow-men after a whole lifetime
+of perfectly simple and lucid appeal, and his countenance expressed the
+patience and forbearance of a wise man content to bide his time.  It
+would be hard to persuade people now that Emerson once represented to the
+popular mind all that was most hopelessly impossible, and that in a
+certain sort he was a national joke, the type of the incomprehensible,
+the byword of the poor paragrapher.  He had perhaps disabused the
+community somewhat by presenting himself here and there as a lecturer,
+and talking face to face with men in terms which they could not refuse to
+find as clear as they were wise; he was more and more read, by certain
+persons, here and there; but we are still so far behind him in the reach
+of his far-thinking that it need not be matter of wonder that twenty
+years before his death he was the most misunderstood man in America.
+Yet in that twilight where he dwelt he loomed large upon the imagination;
+the minds that could not conceive him were still aware of his greatness.
+I myself had not read much of him, but I knew the essays he was printing
+in the Atlantic, and I knew certain of his poems, though by no means
+many; yet I had this sense of him, that he was somehow, beyond and above
+my ken, a presence of force and beauty and wisdom, uncompanioned in our
+literature.  He had lately stooped from his ethereal heights to take part
+in the battle of humanity, and I suppose that if the truth were told he
+was more to my young fervor because he had said that John Brown had made
+the gallows glorious like the cross, than because he had uttered all
+those truer and wiser things which will still a hundred years hence be
+leading the thought of the world.
+
+I do not know in just what sort he made me welcome, but I am aware of
+sitting with him in his study or library, and of his presently speaking
+of Hawthorne, whom I probably celebrated as I best could, and whom he
+praised for his personal excellence, and for his fine qualities as a
+neighbor.  "But his last book," he added, reflectively, "is a mere mush,"
+and I perceived that this great man was no better equipped to judge an
+artistic fiction than the groundlings who were then crying out upon the
+indefinite close of the Marble Faun.  Apparently he had read it, as they
+had, for the story, but it seems to me now, if it did not seem to me
+then, that as far as the problem of evil was involved, the book must
+leave it where it found it.  That is forever insoluble, and it was rather
+with that than with his more or less shadowy people that the romancer was
+concerned.  Emerson had, in fact, a defective sense as to specific pieces
+of literature; he praised extravagantly, and in the wrong place,
+especially among the new things, and he failed to see the worth of much
+that was fine and precious beside the line of his fancy.
+
+He began to ask me about the West, and about some unknown man in
+Michigan; who had been sending him poems, and whom he seemed to think
+very promising, though he has not apparently kept his word to do great
+things.  I did not find what Emerson had to say of my section very
+accurate or important, though it was kindly enough, and just enough as to
+what the West ought to do in literature.  He thought it a pity that a
+literary periodical which had lately been started in Cincinnati should be
+appealing to the East for contributions, instead of relying upon the
+writers nearer home; and he listened with what patience he could to my
+modest opinion that we had not the writers nearer home.  I never was of
+those Westerners who believed that the West was kept out of literature by
+the jealousy of the East, and I tried to explain why we had not the men
+to write that magazine full in Ohio.  He alleged the man in Michigan as
+one who alone could do much to fill it worthily, and again I had to say
+that I had never heard of him.
+
+I felt rather guilty in my ignorance, and I had a notion that it did not
+commend me, but happily at this moment Mr. Emerson was called to dinner,
+and he asked me to come with him.  After dinner we walked about in his
+"pleached garden" a little, and then we came again into his library,
+where I meant to linger only till I could fitly get away.  He questioned
+me about what I had seen of Concord, and whom besides Hawthorne I had
+met, and when I told him only Thoreau, he asked me if I knew the poems of
+Mr. William Ellery Channing.  I have known them since, and felt their
+quality, which I have gladly owned a genuine and original poetry; but I
+answered then truly that I knew them only from Poe's criticisms: cruel
+and spiteful things which I should be ashamed of enjoying as I once did.
+
+"Whose criticisms?" asked Emerson.
+
+"Poe's," I said again.
+
+"Oh," he cried out, after a moment, as if he had returned from a far
+search for my meaning, "you mean the jingle-man!"
+
+I do not know why this should have put me to such confusion, but if I had
+written the criticisms myself I do not think I could have been more
+abashed.  Perhaps I felt an edge of reproof, of admonition, in a
+characterization of Poe which the world will hardly agree with; though I
+do not agree with the world about him, myself, in its admiration.  At any
+rate, it made an end of me for the time, and I remained as if already
+absent, while Emerson questioned me as to what I had written in the
+Atlantic Monthly.  He had evidently read none of my contributions, for he
+looked at them, in the bound volume of the magazine which he got down,
+with the effect of being wholly strange to them, and then gravely affixed
+my initials to each.  He followed me to the door, still speaking of
+poetry, and as he took a kindly enough leave of me, he said one might
+very well give a pleasant hour to it now and then.
+
+A pleasant hour to poetry!  I was meaning to give all time and all
+eternity to poetry, and I should by no means have wished to find pleasure
+in it; I should have thought that a proof of inferior quality in the
+work; I should have preferred anxiety, anguish even, to pleasure.  But if
+Emerson thought from the glance he gave my verses that I had better not
+lavish myself upon that kind of thing, unless there was a great deal more
+of me than I could have made apparent in our meeting, no doubt he was
+right.  I was only too painfully aware of my shortcoming, but I felt that
+it was shorter-coming than it need have been.  I had somehow not
+prospered in my visit to Emerson as I had with Hawthorne, and I came away
+wondering in what sort I had gone wrong.  I was not a forth-putting
+youth, and I could not blame myself for anything in my approaches that
+merited withholding; indeed, I made no approaches; but as I must needs
+blame myself for something, I fell upon the fact that in my confused
+retreat from Emerson's presence I had failed in a certain slight point of
+ceremony, and I magnified this into an offence of capital importance.
+I went home to my hotel, and passed the afternoon in pure misery.  I had
+moments of wild question when I debated whether it would be better to go
+back and own my error, or whether it would be better to write him a note,
+and try to set myself right in that way.  But in the end I did neither,
+and I have since survived my mortal shame some forty years or more.  But
+at the time it did not seem possible that I should live through the day
+with it, and I thought that I ought at least to go and confess it to
+Hawthorne, and let, him disown the wretch who had so poorly repaid the
+kindness of his introduction by such misbehavior.  I did indeed walk down
+by the Wayside, in the cool of the evening, and there I saw Hawthorne for
+the last time.  He was sitting on one of the timbers beside his cottage,
+and smoking with an air of friendly calm.  I had got on very well with
+him, and I longed to go in, and tell him how ill I had got on with
+Emerson; I believed that though he cast me off, he would understand me,
+and would perhaps see some hope for me in another world, though there
+could be none in this.
+
+But I had not the courage to speak of the affair to any one but Fields,
+to whom I unpacked my heart when I got back to Boston, and he asked me
+about my adventures in Concord.  By this time I could see it in a
+humorous light, and I did not much mind his lying back in his chair and
+laughing and laughing, till I thought he would roll out of it.  He
+perfectly conceived the situation, and got an amusement from it that I
+could get only through sympathy with him.  But I thought it a favorable
+moment to propose myself as the assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly,
+which I had the belief I could very well become, with advantage to myself
+if not to the magazine.  He seemed to think so too; he said that if the
+place had not just been filled, I should certainly have had it; and it
+was to his recollection of this prompt ambition of mine that I suppose
+I may have owed my succession to a like vacancy some four years later.
+He was charmingly kind; he entered with the sweetest interest into the
+story of my economic life, which had been full of changes and chances
+already.  But when I said very seriously that now I was tired of these
+fortuities, and would like to be settled in something, he asked, with
+dancing eyes,
+
+"Why, how old are you?"
+
+"I am twenty-three," I answered, and then the laughing fit took him
+again.
+
+"Well," he said, "you begin young, out there!"
+
+In my heart I did not think that twenty-three was so very young, but
+perhaps it was; and if any one were to say that I had been portraying
+here a youth whose aims were certainly beyond his achievements, who was
+morbidly sensitive, and if not conceited was intolerably conscious, who
+had met with incredible kindness, and had suffered no more than was good
+for him, though he might not have merited his pain any more than his joy,
+I do not know that I should gainsay him, for I am not at all sure that I
+was not just that kind of youth when I paid my first visit to New
+England.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--First Impressions of Literary New York
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK
+
+It was by boat that I arrived from Boston, on an August morning of 1860,
+which was probably of the same quality as an August morning of 1900.
+I used not to mind the weather much in those days; it was hot or it was
+cold, it was wet or it was dry, but it was not my affair; and I suppose
+that I sweltered about the strange city, with no sense of anything very
+personal in the temperature, until nightfall.  What I remember is being
+high up in a hotel long since laid low, listening in the summer dark,
+after the long day was done, to the Niagara roar of the omnibuses whose
+tide then swept Broadway from curb to curb, for all the miles of its
+length.  At that hour the other city noises were stilled, or lost in this
+vaster volume of sound, which seemed to fill the whole night.  It had a
+solemnity which the modern comer to New York will hardly imagine, for
+that tide of omnibuses has long since ebbed away, and has left the air to
+the strident discords of the elevated trains and the irregular alarum of
+the grip-car gongs, which blend to no such harmonious thunder as rose
+from the procession of those ponderous and innumerable vans.  There was a
+sort of inner quiet in the sound, and when I chose I slept off to it, and
+woke to it in the morning refreshed and strengthened to explore the
+literary situation in the metropolis.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+Not that I think I left this to the second day.  Very probably I lost no
+time in going to the office of the Saturday Press, as soon as I had my
+breakfast after arriving, and I have a dim impression of anticipating the
+earliest of the Bohemians, whose gay theory of life obliged them to a
+good many hardships in lying down early in the morning, and rising up
+late in the day.  If it was the office-boy who bore me company during the
+first hour of my visit, by-and-by the editors and contributors actually
+began to come in.  I would not be very specific about them if I could,
+for since that Bohemia has faded from the map of the republic of letters,
+it has grown more and more difficult to trace its citizenship to any
+certain writer.  There are some living who knew the Bohemians and even
+loved them, but there are increasingly few who were of them, even in the
+fond retrospect of youthful follies and errors.  It was in fact but a
+sickly colony, transplanted from the mother asphalt of Paris, and never
+really striking root in the pavements of New York; it was a colony of
+ideas, of theories, which had perhaps never had any deep root anywhere.
+What these ideas, these theories, were in art and in life, it would not
+be very easy to say; but in the Saturday Press they came to violent
+expression, not to say explosion, against all existing forms of
+respectability.  If respectability was your 'bete noire', then you were a
+Bohemian; and if you were in the habit of rendering yourself in prose,
+then you necessarily shredded your prose into very fine paragraphs of a
+sentence each, or of a very few words, or even of one word.  I believe
+this fashion prevailed till very lately with some of the dramatic
+critics, who thought that it gave a quality of epigram to the style; and
+I suppose it was borrowed from the more spasmodic moments of Victor Hugo
+by the editor of the Press.  He brought it back with him when he came
+home from one of those sojourns in Paris which possess one of the French
+accent rather than the French language; I long desired to write in that
+fashion myself, but I had not the courage.
+
+This editor was a man of such open and avowed cynicism that he may have
+been, for all I know, a kindly optimist at heart; some say, however, that
+he had really talked himself into being what he seemed.  I only know that
+his talk, the first day I saw him, was of such a sort that if he was half
+as bad, he would have been too bad to be.  He walked up and down his room
+saying what lurid things he would directly do if any one accused him of
+respectability, so that he might disabuse the minds of all witnesses.
+There were four or five of his assistants and contributors listening to
+the dreadful threats, which did not deceive even so great innocence as
+mine, but I do not know whether they found it the sorry farce that I did.
+They probably felt the fascination for him which I could not disown,
+in spite of my inner disgust; and were watchful at the same time for the
+effect of his words with one who was confessedly fresh from Boston,
+and was full of delight in the people he had seen there.  It appeared,
+with him, to be proof of the inferiority of Boston that if you passed
+down Washington Street, half a dozen men in the crowd would know you were
+Holmes, or Lowell, or Longfellow, or Wendell Phillips; but in Broadway no
+one would know who you were, or care to the measure of his smallest
+blasphemy.  I have since heard this more than once urged as a signal
+advantage of New York for the aesthetic inhabitant, but I am not sure,
+yet, that it is so.  The unrecognized celebrity probably has his mind
+quite as much upon himself as if some one pointed him out, and otherwise
+I cannot think that the sense of neighborhood is such a bad thing for the
+artist in any sort.  It involves the sense of responsibility, which
+cannot be too constant or too keen.  If it narrows, it deepens; and this
+may be the secret of Boston.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+It would not be easy to say just why the Bohemian group represented New
+York literature to my imagination; for I certainly associated other names
+with its best work, but perhaps it was because I had written for the
+Saturday Press myself, and had my pride in it, and perhaps it was because
+that paper really embodied the new literary life of the city.  It was
+clever, and full of the wit that tries its teeth upon everything.  It
+attacked all literary shams but its own, and it made itself felt and
+feared.  The young writers throughout the country were ambitious to be
+seen in it, and they gave their best to it; they gave literally, for the
+Saturday Press never paid in anything but hopes of paying, vaguer even
+than promises.  It is not too much to say that it was very nearly as well
+for one to be accepted by the Press as to be accepted by the Atlantic,
+and for the time there was no other literary comparison.  To be in it was
+to be in the company of Fitz James O'Brien, Fitzhugh Ludlow, Mr. Aldrich,
+Mr. Stedman, and whoever else was liveliest in prose or loveliest in
+verse at that day in New York.  It was a power, and although it is true
+that, as Henry Giles said of it, "Man cannot live by snapping-turtle
+alone," the Press was very good snapping-turtle.  Or, it seemed so then;
+I should be almost afraid to test it now, for I do not like snapping-
+turtle so much as I once did, and I have grown nicer in my taste, and
+want my snapping-turtle of the very best.  What is certain is that I went
+to the office of the Saturday Press in New York with much the same sort
+of feeling I had in going to the office of the Atlantic Monthly in
+Boston, but I came away with a very different feeling.  I had found there
+a bitterness against Boston as great as the bitterness against
+respectability, and as Boston was then rapidly becoming my second
+country, I could not join in the scorn thought of her and said of her by
+the Bohemians.  I fancied a conspiracy among them to shock the literary
+pilgrim, and to minify the precious emotions he had experienced in
+visiting other shrines; but I found no harm in that, for I knew just how
+much to be shocked, and I thought I knew better how to value certain
+things of the soul than they.  Yet when their chief asked me how I got on
+with Hawthorne, and I began to say that he was very shy and I was rather
+shy, and the king of Bohemia took his pipe out to break in upon me with
+"Oh, a couple of shysters!" and the rest laughed, I was abashed all they
+could have wished, and was not restored to myself till one of them said
+that the thought of Boston made him as ugly as sin; then I began to hope
+again that men who took themselves so seriously as that need not be taken
+very seriously by me.
+
+In fact I had heard things almost as desperately cynical in other
+newspaper offices before that, and I could not see what was so
+distinctively Bohemian in these 'anime prave', these souls so baleful by
+their own showing.  But apparently Bohemia was not a state that you could
+well imagine from one encounter, and since my stay in New York was to be
+very short, I lost no time in acquainting myself further with it.  That
+very night I went to the beer-cellar, once very far up Broadway, where I
+was given to know that the Bohemian nights were smoked and quaffed away.
+It was said, so far West as Ohio, that the queen of Bohemia sometimes
+came to Pfaff's: a young girl of a sprightly gift in letters, whose name
+or pseudonym had made itself pretty well known at that day, and whose
+fate, pathetic at all times, out-tragedies almost any other in the
+history of letters.  She was seized with hydrophobia from the bite of her
+dog, on a railroad train; and made a long journey home in the paroxysms
+of that agonizing disease, which ended in her death after she reached New
+York.  But this was after her reign had ended, and no such black shadow
+was cast forward upon Pfaff's, whose name often figured in the verse and
+the epigrammatically paragraphed prose of the 'Saturday Press'.  I felt
+that as a contributor and at least a brevet Bohemian I ought not to go
+home without visiting the famous place, and witnessing if I could not
+share the revels of my comrades.  As I neither drank beer nor smoked, my
+part in the carousal was limited to a German pancake, which I found they
+had very good at Pfaff's, and to listening to the whirling words of my
+commensals, at the long board spread for the Bohemians in a cavernous
+space under the pavement. There were writers for the 'Saturday Press' and
+for Vanity Fair (a hopefully comic paper of that day), and some of the
+artists who drew for the illustrated periodicals.  Nothing of their talk
+remains with me, but the impression remains that it was not so good talk
+as I had heard in Boston.  At one moment of the orgy, which went but
+slowly for an orgy, we were joined by some belated Bohemians whom the
+others made a great clamor over; I was given to understand they were just
+recovered from a fearful debauch; their locks were still damp from the
+wet towels used to restore them, and their eyes were very frenzied.
+I was presented to these types, who neither said nor did anything worthy
+of their awful appearance, but dropped into seats at the table, and ate
+of the supper with an appetite that seemed poor.  I stayed hoping vainly
+for worse things till eleven o'clock, and then I rose and took my leave
+of a literary condition that had distinctly disappointed me.  I do not
+say that it may not have been wickeder and wittier than I found it;
+I only report what I saw and heard in Bohemia on my first visit to New
+York, and I know that my acquaintance with it was not exhaustive.  When I
+came the next year the Saturday Press was no more, and the editor and his
+contributors had no longer a common centre.  The best of the young
+fellows whom I met there confessed, in a pleasant exchange of letters
+which we had afterwards, that he thought the pose a vain and unprofitable
+one; and when the Press was revived, after the war, it was without any of
+the old Bohemian characteristics except that of not paying for material.
+It could not last long upon these terms, and again it passed away, and
+still waits its second palingenesis.
+
+The editor passed away too, not long after, and the thing that he had
+inspired altogether ceased to be.  He was a man of a certain sardonic
+power, and used it rather fiercely and freely, with a joy probably more
+apparent than real in the pain it gave.  In my last knowledge of him he
+was much milder than when I first knew him, and I have the feeling that
+he too came to own before he died that man cannot live by snapping-turtle
+alone.  He was kind to some neglected talents, and befriended them with
+a vigor and a zeal which he would have been the last to let you call
+generous.  The chief of these was Walt Whitman, who, when the Saturday
+Press took it up, had as hopeless a cause with the critics on either side
+of the ocean as any man could have.  It was not till long afterwards that
+his English admirers began to discover him, and to make his countrymen
+some noisy reproaches for ignoring him; they were wholly in the dark
+concerning him when the Saturday Press, which first stood his friend,
+and the young men whom the Press gathered about it, made him their cult.
+No doubt he was more valued because he was so offensive in some ways than
+he would have been if he had been in no way offensive, but it remains a
+fact that they celebrated him quite as much as was good for them.  He was
+often at Pfaff's with them, and the night of my visit he was the chief
+fact of my experience.  I did not know he was there till I was on my way
+out, for he did not sit at the table under the pavement, but at the head
+of one farther into the room.  There, as I passed, some friendly fellow
+stopped me and named me to him, and I remember how he leaned back in his
+chair, and reached out his great hand to me, as if he were going to give
+it me for good and all.  He had a fine head, with a cloud of Jovian hair
+upon it, and a branching beard and mustache, and gentle eyes that looked
+most kindly into mine, and seemed to wish the liking which I instantly
+gave him, though we hardly passed a word, and our acquaintance was summed
+up in that glance and the grasp of his mighty fist upon my hand.  I doubt
+if he had any notion who or what I was beyond the fact that I was a young
+poet of some sort, but he may possibly have remembered seeing my name
+printed after some very Heinesque verses in the Press.  I did not meet
+him again for twenty years, and then I had only a moment with him when he
+was reading the proofs of his poems in Boston.  Some years later I saw
+him for the last time, one day after his lecture on Lincoln, in that
+city, when he came down from the platform to speak with some handshaking
+friends who gathered about him.  Then and always he gave me the sense of
+a sweet and true soul, and I felt in him a spiritual dignity which I will
+not try to reconcile with his printing in the forefront of his book a
+passage from a private letter of Emerson's, though I believe he would not
+have seen such a thing as most other men would, or thought ill of it in
+another.  The spiritual purity which I felt in him no less than the
+dignity is something that I will no more try to reconcile with what
+denies it in his page; but such things we may well leave to the
+adjustment of finer balances than we have at hand.  I will make sure only
+of the greatest benignity in the presence of the man.  The apostle of the
+rough, the uncouth, was the gentlest person; his barbaric yawp,
+translated into the terms of social encounter, was an address of singular
+quiet, delivered in a voice of winning and endearing friendliness.
+
+As to his work itself, I suppose that I do not think it so valuable in
+effect as in intention.  He was a liberating force, a very "imperial
+anarch" in literature; but liberty is never anything but a means, and
+what Whitman achieved was a means and not an end, in what must be called
+his verse.  I like his prose, if there is a difference, much better;
+there he is of a genial and comforting quality, very rich and cordial,
+such as I felt him to be when I met him in person.  His verse seems to me
+not poetry, but the materials of poetry, like one's emotions; yet I would
+not misprize it, and I am glad to own that I have had moments of great
+pleasure in it.  Some French critic quoted in the Saturday Press (I
+cannot think of his name) said the best thing of him when he said that he
+made you a partner of the enterprise, for that is precisely what he does,
+and that is what alienates and what endears in him, as you like or
+dislike the partnership.  It is still something neighborly, brotherly,
+fatherly, and so I felt him to be when the benign old man looked on me
+and spoke to me.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+That night at Pfaff's must have been the last of the Bohemians for me,
+and it was the last of New York authorship too, for the time.  I do not
+know why I should not have imagined trying to see Curtis, whom I knew so
+much by heart, and whom I adored, but I may not have had the courage,
+or I may have heard that he was out of town; Bryant, I believe, was then
+out of the country; but at any rate I did not attempt him either.  The
+Bohemians were the beginning and the end of the story for me, and to tell
+the truth I did not like the story..  I remember that as I sat at that
+table.  under the pavement, in Pfaff's beer-cellar, and listened to the
+wit that did not seem very funny, I thought of the dinner with Lowell,
+the breakfast with Fields, the supper at the Autocrat's, and felt that I
+had fallen very far.  In fact it can do no harm at this distance of time
+to confess that it seemed to me then, and for a good while afterwards,
+that a person who had seen the men and had the things said before him
+that I had in Boston, could not keep himself too carefully in cotton; and
+this was what I did all the following winter, though of course it was a
+secret between me and me.  I dare say it was not the worst thing I could
+have done, in some respects.
+
+My sojourn in New York could not have been very long, and the rest of it
+was mainly given to viewing the monuments of the city from the windows of
+omnibuses and the platforms of horse-cars.  The world was so simple then
+that there were perhaps only a half-dozen cities that had horse-cars in
+them, and I travelled in those conveyances at New York with an unfaded
+zest, even after my journeys back and forth between Boston and Cambridge.
+I have not the least notion where I went or what I saw, but I suppose
+that it was up and down the ugly east and west avenues, then lying open
+to the eye in all the hideousness now partly concealed by the elevated
+roads, and that I found them very stately and handsome.  Indeed, New York
+was really handsomer then than it is now, when it has so many more pieces
+of beautiful architecture, for at that day the skyscrapers were not yet,
+and there was a fine regularity in the streets that these brute bulks
+have robbed of all shapeliness.  Dirt and squalor there were a plenty,
+but there was infinitely more comfort.  The long succession of cross
+streets was yet mostly secure from business, after you passed Clinton
+Place; commerce was just beginning to show itself in Union Square, and
+Madison Square was still the home of the McFlimsies, whose kin and kind
+dwelt unmolested in the brownstone stretches of Fifth Avenue.  I tried
+hard to imagine them from the acquaintance Mr. Butler's poem had given
+me, and from the knowledge the gentle satire of The 'Potiphar Papers' had
+spread broadcast through a community shocked by the excesses of our best
+society; it was not half so bad then as the best now, probably.  But I do
+not think I made very much of it, perhaps because most of the people who
+ought to have been in those fine mansions were away at the seaside and
+the mountains.
+
+The mountains I had seen on my way down from Canada, but the sea-side
+not, and it would never do to go home without visiting some famous summer
+resort.  I must have fixed upon Long Branch because I must have heard of
+it as then the most fashionable; and one afternoon I took the boat for
+that place.  By this means I not only saw sea-bathing for the first time,
+but I saw a storm at sea: a squall struck us so suddenly that it blew
+away all the camp-stools of the forward promenade; it was very exciting,
+and I long meant to use in literature the black wall of cloud that
+settled on the water before us like a sort of portable midnight; I now
+throw it away upon the reader, as it were; it never would come in
+anywhere.  I stayed all night at Long Branch, and I had a bath the next
+morning before breakfast: an extremely cold one, with a life-line to keep
+me against the undertow.  In this rite I had the company of a young New-
+Yorker, whom I had met on the boat coming down, and who was of the light,
+hopeful, adventurous business type which seems peculiar to the city, and
+which has always attracted me.  He told me much about his life, and how
+he lived, and what it cost him to live.  He had a large room at a
+fashionable boardinghouse, and he paid fourteen dollars a week.
+In Columbus I had such a room at such a house, and paid three and a half,
+and I thought it a good deal.  But those were the days before the war,
+when America was the cheapest country in the world, and the West was
+incredibly inexpensive.
+
+After a day of lonely splendor at this scene of fashion and gaiety,
+I went back to New York, and took the boat for Albany on my way home.
+I noted that I had no longer the vivid interest in nature and human
+nature which I had felt in setting out upon my travels, and I said to
+myself that this was from having a mind so crowded with experiences and
+impressions that it could receive no more; and I really suppose that if
+the happiest phrase had offered itself to me at some moments, I should
+scarcely have looked about me for a landscape or a figure to fit it to.
+I was very glad to get back to my dear little city in the West (I found
+it seething in an August sun that was hot enough to have calcined the
+limestone State House), and to all the friends I was so fond of.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+I did what I could to prove myself unworthy of them by refusing their
+invitations, and giving myself wholly to literature, during the early
+part of the winter that followed; and I did not realize my error till the
+invitations ceased to come, and I found myself in an unbroken
+intellectual solitude.  The worst of it was that an ungrateful Muse did
+little in return for the sacrifices I made her, and the things I now
+wrote were not liked by the editors I sent them to.  The editorial taste
+is not always the test of merit, but it is the only one we have, and I am
+not saying the editors were wrong in my case.  There were then such a
+very few places where you could market your work: the Atlantic in Boston
+and Harper's in New York were the magazines that paid, though the
+Independent newspaper bought literary material; the Saturday Press
+printed it without buying, and so did the old Knickerbocker Magazine,
+though there was pecuniary good-will in both these cases.  I toiled much
+that winter over a story I had long been writing, and at last sent it to
+the Atlantic, which had published five poems for me the year before.
+After some weeks, or it may have been months, I got it back with a note
+saying that the editors had the less regret in returning it because they
+saw that in the May number of the Knickerbocker the first chapter of the
+story had appeared.  Then I remembered that, years before, I had sent
+this chapter to that magazine, as a sketch to be printed by itself, and
+afterwards had continued the story from it.  I had never heard of its
+acceptance, and supposed of course that it was rejected; but on my second
+visit to New York I called at the Knickerbocker office, and a new editor,
+of those that the magazine was always having in the days of its failing
+fortunes, told me that he had found my sketch in rummaging about in a
+barrel of his predecessors  manuscripts, and had liked it, and printed
+it.  He said that there were fifteen dollars coming to me for that
+sketch, and might he send the money to me?  I said that he might, though
+I do not see, to this day, why he did not give it me on the spot; and he
+made a very small minute in a very large sheet of paper (really like Dick
+Swiveller), and promised I should have it that night; but I sailed the
+next day for Liverpool without it.  I sailed without the money for some
+verses that Vanity Fair bought of me, but I hardly expected that, for the
+editor, who was then Artemus Ward, had frankly told me in taking my
+address that ducats were few at that moment with Vanity Fair.
+I was then on my way to be consul at Venice, where I spent the next four
+years in a vigilance for Confederate privateers which none of them ever
+surprised.  I had asked for the consulate at Munich, where I hoped to
+steep myself yet longer in German poetry, but when my appointment came,
+I found it was for Rome.  I was very glad to get Rome even; but the
+income of the office was in fees, and I thought I had better go on to
+Washington and find out how much the fees amounted to.  People in
+Columbus who had been abroad said that on five hundred dollars you could
+live in Rome like a prince, but I doubted this; and when I learned at the
+State Department that the fees of the Roman consulate came to only three
+hundred, I perceived that I could not live better than a baron, probably,
+and I despaired.  The kindly chief of the consular bureau said that the
+President's secretaries, Mr. John Nicolay and Mr. John Hay, were
+interested in my appointment, and he advised my going over to the White
+House and seeing them.  I lost no time in doing that, and I learned that
+as young Western men they were interested in me because I was a young
+Western man who had done something in literature, and they were willing
+to help me for that reason, and for no other that I ever knew.  They
+proposed my going to Venice; the salary was then seven hundred and fifty,
+but they thought they could get it put up to a thousand.  In the end they
+got it put up to fifteen hundred, and so I went to Venice, where if I did
+not live like a prince on that income, I lived a good deal more like a
+prince than I could have done at Rome on a fifth of it.
+
+If the appointment was not present fortune, it was the beginning of the
+best luck I have had in the world, and I am glad to owe it all to those
+friends of my verse, who could have been no otherwise friends of me.
+They were then beginning very early careers of distinction which have not
+been wholly divided.  Mr. Nicolay could have been about twenty-five, and
+Mr. Hay nineteen or twenty.  No one dreamed as yet of the opportunity
+opening to them in being so constantly near the man whose life they have
+written, and with whose fame they have imperishably interwrought their
+names.  I remember the sobered dignity of the one, and the humorous
+gaiety of the other, and how we had some young men's joking and laughing
+together, in the anteroom where they received me, with the great soul
+entering upon its travail beyond the closed door.  They asked me if I had
+ever seen the President, and I said that I had seen him at Columbus, the
+year before; but I could not say how much I should like to see him again,
+and thank him for the favor which I had no claim to at his hands, except
+such as the slight campaign biography I had written could be thought to
+have given me.  That day or another, as I left my friends, I met him in
+the corridor without, and he looked at the space I was part of with his
+ineffably melancholy eyes, without knowing that I was the
+indistinguishable person in whose "integrity and abilities he had reposed
+such special confidence" as to have appointed him consul for Venice and
+the ports of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom, though he might have
+recognized the terms of my commission if I had reminded him of them.
+I faltered a moment in my longing to address him, and then I decided that
+every one who forebore to speak needlessly to him, or to shake his hand,
+did him a kindness; and I wish I could be as sure of the wisdom of all my
+past behavior as I am of that piece of it.  He walked up to the
+watercooler that stood in the corner, and drew himself a full goblet from
+it, which he poured down his throat with a backward tilt of his head, and
+then went wearily within doors.  The whole affair, so simple, has always
+remained one of a certain pathos in my memory, and I would rather have
+seen Lincoln in that unconscious moment than on some statelier occasion.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+I went home to Ohio; and sent on the bond I was to file in the Treasury
+Department; but it was mislaid there, and to prevent another chance of
+that kind I carried on the duplicate myself.  It was on my second visit
+that I met the generous young Irishman William D. O'Connor, at the house
+of my friend Piatt, and heard his ardent talk.  He was one of the
+promising men of that day, and he had written an anti-slavery novel in
+the heroic mood of Victor Hugo, which greatly took my fancy; and I
+believe he wrote poems too.  He had not yet risen to be the chief of Walt
+Whitman's champions outside of the Saturday Press, but he had already
+espoused the theory of Bacon's authorship of Shakespeare, then newly
+exploited by the poor lady of Bacon's name, who died constant to it in an
+insane asylum.  He used to speak of the reputed dramatist as "the fat
+peasant of Stratford," and he was otherwise picturesque of speech in a
+measure that consoled, if it did not convince.  The great war was then
+full upon us, and when in the silences of our literary talk its awful
+breath was heard, and its shadow fell upon the hearth where we gathered
+round the first fires of autumn, O'Connor would lift his beautiful head
+with a fine effect of prophecy, and say, "Friends, I feel a sense of
+victory in the air."  He was not wrong; only the victory was for the
+other aide.
+
+Who beside O'Connor shared in these saddened symposiums I cannot tell
+now; but probably other young journalists and office-holders, intending
+litterateurs, since more or less extinct.  I make certain only of the
+young Boston publisher who issued a very handsome edition of 'Leaves of
+Grass', and then failed promptly if not consequently.  But I had already
+met, in my first sojourn at the capital, a young journalist who had given
+hostages to poetry, and whom I was very glad to see and proud to know.
+Mr. Stedman and I were talking over that meeting the other day, and I can
+be surer than I might have been without his memory, that I found him at a
+friend's house, where he was nursing himself for some slight sickness,
+and that I sat by his bed while our souls launched together into the
+joyful realms of hope and praise.  In him I found the quality of Boston,
+the honor and passion of literature, and not a mere pose of the literary
+life; and the world knows without my telling how true he has been to his
+ideal of it.  His earthly mission then was to write letters from
+Washington for the New York World, which started in life as a good young
+evening paper, with a decided religious tone, so that the Saturday Press
+could call it the Night-blooming Serious.  I think Mr. Stedman wrote for
+its editorial page at times, and his relation to it as a Washington
+correspondent had an authority which is wanting to the function in these
+days of perfected telegraphing.  He had not yet achieved that seat in the
+Stock Exchange whose possession has justified his recourse to business,
+and has helped him to mean something more single in literature than many
+more singly devoted to it.  I used sometimes to speak about that with
+another eager young author in certain middle years when we were chafing
+in editorial harness, and we always decided that Stedman had the best of
+it in being able to earn his living in a sort so alien to literature that
+he could come to it unjaded, and with a gust unspoiled by kindred savors.
+But no man shapes his own life, and I dare say that Stedman may have been
+all the time envying us our tripods from his high place in the Stock
+Exchange.  What is certain is that he has come to stand for literature
+and to embody New York in it as no one else does.  In a community which
+seems never to have had a conscious relation to letters, he has kept the
+faith with dignity and fought the fight with constant courage.  Scholar
+and poet at once, he has spoken to his generation with authority which we
+can forget only in the charm which makes us forget everything else.
+
+But his fame was still before him when we met, and I could bring to him
+an admiration for work which had not yet made itself known to so many;
+but any admirer was welcome.  We talked of what we had done, and each
+said how much he liked certain thing of the other's; I even seized my
+advantage of his helplessness to read him a poem of mine which I had in
+my pocket; he advised me where to place it; and if the reader will not
+think it an unfair digression, I will tell here what became of that poem,
+for I think its varied fortunes were amusing, and I hope my own
+sufferings and final triumph with it will not be without encouragement to
+the young literary endeavorer.  It was a poem called, with no prophetic
+sense of fitness, "Forlorn," and I tried it first with the 'Atlantic
+Monthly', which would not have it.  Then I offered it in person to a
+former editor of 'Harper's Monthly', but he could not see his advantage
+in it, and I carried it overseas to Venice with me.  From that point I
+sent it to all the English magazines as steadily as the post could carry
+it away and bring it back.  On my way home, four years later, I took it
+to London with me, where a friend who knew Lewes, then just beginning
+with the 'Fortnightly Review', sent it to him for me.  It was promptly
+returned, with a letter wholly reserved as to its quality, but full of a
+poetic gratitude for my wish to contribute to the Fortnightly.  Then I
+heard that a certain Mr. Lucas was about to start a magazine, and I
+offered the poem to him.  The kindest letter of acceptance followed me to
+America, and I counted upon fame and fortune as usual, when the news of
+Mr. Lucas's death came.  I will not poorly joke an effect from my poem in
+the fact; but the fact remains.  By this time I was a writer in the
+office of the 'Nation' newspaper, and after I left this place to be Mr.
+Fields's assistant on the Atlantic, I sent my poem to the Nation, where
+it was printed at last.  In such scant measure as my verses have pleased
+it has found rather unusual favor, and I need not say that its
+misfortunes endeared it to its author.
+
+But all this is rather far away from my first meeting with Stedman in
+Washington.  Of course I liked him, and I thought him very handsome and
+fine, with a full beard cut in the fashion he has always worn it, and
+with poet's eyes lighting an aquiline profile.  Afterwards, when I saw
+him afoot, I found him of a worldly splendor in dress, and envied him,
+as much as I could envy him anything, the New York tailor whose art had
+clothed him: I had a New York tailor too, but with a difference.  He had
+a worldly dash along with his supermundane gifts, which took me almost as
+much, and all the more because I could see that he valued himself nothing
+upon it.  He was all for literature, and for literary men as the
+superiors of every one.  I must have opened my heart to him a good deal,
+for when I told him how the newspaper I had written for from Canada and
+New England had ceased to print my letters, he said, "Think of a man like
+sitting in judgment on a man like you!" I thought of it, and was avenged
+if not comforted; and at any rate I liked Stedman's standing up so
+stiffly for the honor of a craft that is rather too limp in some of its
+votaries.
+
+I suppose it was he who introduced me to the Stoddards, whom I met in New
+York just before I sailed, and who were then in the glow of their early
+fame as poets.  They knew about my poor beginnings, and they were very,
+very good to me.  Stoddard went with me to Franklin Square, and gave the
+sanction of his presence to the ineffectual offer of my poem there.
+But what I relished most was the long talks I had with them both about
+authorship in all its phases, and the exchange of delight in this poem
+and that, this novel and that, with gay, wilful runs away to make some
+wholly irrelevant joke, or fire puns into the air at no mark whatever.
+Stoddard had then a fame, with the sweetness of personal affection in it,
+from the lyrics and the odes that will perhaps best keep him known, and
+Mrs. Stoddard was beginning to make her distinct and special quality felt
+in the magazines, in verse and fiction.  In both it seems to me that she
+has failed of the recognition which her work merits.  Her tales and
+novels have in them a foretaste of realism, which was too strange for the
+palate of their day, and is now too familiar, perhaps.  It is a peculiar
+fate, and would form the scheme of a pretty study in the history of
+literature.  But in whatever she did she left the stamp of a talent like
+no other, and of a personality disdainful of literary environment.  In a
+time when most of us had to write like Tennyson, or Longfellow, or
+Browning, she never would write like any one but herself.
+
+I remember very well the lodging over a corner of Fourth Avenue and some
+downtown street where I visited these winning and gifted people, and
+tasted the pleasure of their racy talk, and the hospitality of their
+good-will toward all literature, which certainly did not leave me out.
+We sat before their grate in the chill of the last October days, and they
+set each other on to one wild flight of wit after another, and again I
+bathed my delighted spirit in the atmosphere of a realm where for the
+time at least no
+
+              "----rumor of oppression or defeat,
+               Of unsuccessful or successful war,"
+
+could penetrate.  I liked the Stoddards because they were frankly not of
+that Bohemia which I disliked so much, and thought it of no promise or
+validity; and because I was fond of their poetry and found them in it.
+I liked the absolutely literary keeping of their lives.  He had then,
+and for long after, a place in the Custom house, but he was no more of
+that than Lamb was of India House.  He belonged to that better world
+where there is no interest but letters, and which was as much like heaven
+for me as anything I could think of.
+
+The meetings with the Stoddards repeated themselves when I came back to
+sail from New York, early in November.  Mixed up with the cordial
+pleasure of them in my memory is a sense of the cold and wet outdoors,
+and the misery of being in those infamous New York streets, then as for
+long afterwards the squalidest in the world.  The last night I saw my
+friends they told me of the tragedy which had just happened at the camp
+in the City Hall Park.  Fitz James O'Brien, the brilliant young Irishman
+who had dazzled us with his story of "The Diamond Lens," and frozen our
+blood with his ingenious tale of a ghost--"What was It"--a ghost that
+could be felt and heard, but not seen--had enlisted for the war, and
+risen to be an officer with the swift process of the first days of it.
+In that camp he had just then shot and killed a man for some infraction
+of discipline, and it was uncertain what the end would be.  He was
+acquitted, however, and it is known how he afterwards died of lockjaw
+from a wound received in battle.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+Before this last visit in New York there was a second visit to Boston,
+which I need not dwell upon, because it was chiefly a revival of the
+impressions of the first.  Again I saw the Fieldses in their home; again
+the Autocrat in his, and Lowell now beneath his own roof, beside the
+study fire where I was so often to sit with him in coming years.  At
+dinner (which we had at two o'clock) the talk turned upon my appointment,
+and he said of me to his wife: "Think of his having got Stillman's place!
+We ought to put poison in his wine," and he told me of the wish the
+painter had to go to Venice and follow up Ruskin's work there in a book
+of his own.  But he would not let me feel very guilty, and I will not
+pretend that I had any personal regret for my good fortune.
+
+The place was given me perhaps because I had not nearly so many other
+gifts as he who lost it, and who was at once artist, critic, journalist,
+traveller, and eminently each.  I met him afterwards in Rome, which the
+powers bestowed upon him instead of Venice, and he forgave me, though I
+do not know whether he forgave the powers.  We walked far and long over
+the Campagna, and I felt the charm of a most uncommon mind in talk which
+came out richest and fullest in the presence of the wild nature which he
+loved and knew so much better than most other men.  I think that the book
+he would have written about Venice is forever to be regretted, and I do
+not at all console myself for its loss with the book I have written
+myself.
+
+At Lowell's table that day they spoke of what sort of winter I should
+find in Venice, and he inclined to the belief that I should want a fire
+there.  On his study hearth a very brisk one burned when we went back to
+it, and kept out the chill of a cold easterly storm.  We looked through
+one of the windows at the rain, and he said he could remember standing
+and looking out of that window at such a storm when he was a child; for
+he was born in that house, and his life had kept coming back to it.  He
+died in it, at last.
+
+In a lifting of the rain he walked with me down to the village, as he
+always called the denser part of the town about Harvard Square, and saw
+me aboard a horse-car for Boston.  Before we parted he gave me two
+charges: to open my mouth when I began to speak Italian, and to think
+well of women.  He said that our race spoke its own tongue with its teeth
+shut, and so failed to master the languages that wanted freer utterance.
+As to women, he said there were unworthy ones, but a good woman was the
+best thing in the world, and a man was always the better for honoring
+women.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Abstract, the air-drawn, afflicted me like physical discomforts
+Bayard Taylor: incomparable translation of Faust
+Became gratefully strange
+Best talkers are willing that you should talk if you like
+Charles Reade
+Could easily believe now that it was some one else who saw it
+Death of the joy that ought to come from work
+Did not feel the effect I would so willingly have experienced
+Dinner was at the old-fashioned Boston hour of two
+Edward Everett Hale
+Either to deny the substance of things unseen, or to affirm it
+Emerson
+Espoused the theory of Bacon's authorship of Shakespeare
+Feigned the gratitude which I could see that he expected
+First dinner served in courses that I had sat down to
+Forbearance of a wise man content to bide his time
+Forebore to speak needlessly to him, or to shake his hand
+Hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love
+Heine
+Hollowness, the hopelessness, the unworthiness of  life
+I did not know, and I hated to ask
+I find this young man worthy
+If he was half as bad, he would have been too bad to be
+If he was not there to your touch, it was no fault of his
+In the South there was nothing but a mistaken social ideal
+Incredible in their insipidity
+Industrial slavery
+Lincoln
+Love of freedom and the hope of justice
+Lowell
+Man who had so much of the boy in him
+Men who took themselves so seriously as that need
+Met with kindness, if not honor
+Might so far forget myself as to be a novelist
+Napoleonic height which spiritually overtops the Alps
+Never paid in anything but hopes of paying
+Not quite himself till he had made you aware of his quality
+Odious hilarity, without meaning and without remission
+Praised extravagantly, and in the wrong place
+Quebec was a bit of the seventeenth century
+Remember the dinner-bell
+Seen through the wrong end of the telescope
+Stoddard
+Things common to all, however peculiar in each
+Thoreau
+Visited one of the great mills
+Welcome me, and make the least of my shyness and strangeness
+Wit that tries its teeth upon everything
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of First Visit to New England
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--Roundabout to Boston
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+ROUNDABOUT TO BOSTON
+
+During the four years of my life in Venice the literary intention was
+present with me at all times and in all places.  I wrote many things in
+verse, which I sent to the magazines in every part of the English-
+speaking world, but they came unerringly back to me, except in three
+instances only, when they were kept by the editors who finally printed
+them.  One of these pieces was published in the Atlantic Monthly; another
+in Harpers Magazine; the third was got into the New York Ledger through
+the kindness of Doctor Edward Everett Hale, who used I know not what
+mighty magic to that end.  I had not yet met him; but he interested
+himself in my ballad as if it had been his own.  His brother, Charles
+Hale, later Consul-General for Egypt, whom I saw almost every moment of
+the two visits he paid Venice in my time, had sent it to him, after
+copying it in his own large, fair hand, so that it could be read.
+He was not quite of that literary Boston which I so fondly remembered my
+glimpses of; he was rather of a journalistic and literary Boston which I
+had never known; but he was of Boston, after all.  He had been in
+Lowell's classes at Harvard; he had often met Longfellow in Cambridge; he
+knew Doctor Holmes, of course; and he let me talk of my idols to my
+heart's content.  I think he must have been amused by my raptures; most
+people would have been; but he was kind and patient, and he listened to
+me with a sweet intelligence which I shall always gratefully remember.
+He died too young, with his life's possibilities mainly unfulfilled; but
+none who knew him could fail to imagine them, or to love him for what he
+was.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+Besides those few pitiful successes, I had nothing but defeats in the
+sort of literature which I supposed was to be my calling, and the defeats
+threw me upon prose; for some sort of literary thing, if not one, then
+another, I must do if I lived; and I began to write those studies of
+Venetian life which afterwards became a book, and which I contributed as
+letters to the 'Boston Advertiser', after vainly offering them to more
+aesthetic periodicals.  However, I do not imagine that it was a very
+smiling time for any literary endeavorer at home in the life-and-death
+civil war then waging.  Some few young men arose who made themselves
+heard amid the din of arms even as far as Venice, but most of these were
+hushed long ago.  I fancy Theodore Winthrop, who began to speak, as it
+were, from his soldier's grave, so soon did his death follow the earliest
+recognition by the public, and so many were his posthumous works, was
+chief of these; but there were others whom the present readers must make
+greater effort to remember.  Forceythe Willson, who wrote The Old
+Sergeant, became known for the rare quality of his poetry; and now and
+then there came a poem from Aldrich, or Stedman, or Stoddard.  The great
+new series of the 'Biglow Papers' gathered volume with the force they had
+from the beginning.  The Autocrat was often in the pages of the Atlantic,
+where one often found Whittier and Emerson, with many a fresh name now
+faded.  In Washington the Piatts were writing some of the most beautiful
+verse of the war, and Brownell was sounding his battle lyrics like so
+many trumpet blasts.  The fiction which followed the war was yet all to
+come.  Whatever was done in any kind had some hint of the war in it,
+inevitably; though in the very heart of it Longfellow was setting about
+his great version of Dante peacefully, prayerfully, as he has told in the
+noble sonnets which register the mood of his undertaking.
+
+At Venice, if I was beyond the range of literary recognition I was in
+direct relations with one of our greatest literary men, who was again of
+that literary Boston which mainly represented American literature to me.
+The official chief of the consul at Venice was the United States Minister
+at Vienna, and in my time this minister was John Lothrop Motley, the
+historian.  He was removed, later, by that Johnson administration which
+followed Lincoln's so forgottenly that I name it with a sense of
+something almost prehistoric.  Among its worst errors was the attempted
+discredit of a man who had given lustre to our name by his work, and who
+was an ardent patriot as well as accomplished scholar.  He visited Venice
+during my first year, which was the darkest period of the civil war, and
+I remember with what instant security, not to say severity, he rebuked my
+scarcely whispered misgivings of the end, when I ventured to ask him what
+he thought it would be.  Austria had never recognized the Secessionists
+as belligerents, and in the complications with France and England there
+was little for our minister but to share the home indignation at the
+sympathy of those powers with the South.  In Motley this was heightened
+by that feeling of astonishment, of wounded faith, which all Americans
+with English friendships experienced in those days, and which he, whose
+English friendships were many, experienced in peculiar degree.
+
+I drifted about with him in his gondola, and refreshed myself, long
+a-hungered for such talk, with his talk of literary life in London.
+Through some acquaintance I had made in Venice I was able to be of use to
+him in getting documents copied for him in the Venetian Archives,
+especially the Relations of the Venetian Ambassadors at different courts
+during the period and events he was studying.  All such papers passed
+through my hands in transmission to the historian, though now I do not
+quite know why they need have done so; but perhaps he was willing to give
+me the pleasure of being a partner, however humble, in the enterprise.
+My recollection of him is of courtesy to a far younger man unqualified by
+patronage, and of a presence of singular dignity and grace.  He was one
+of the handsomest men I ever saw, with beautiful eyes, a fine blond beard
+of modish cut, and a sensitive nose, straight and fine.  He was
+altogether a figure of worldly splendor; and I had reason to know that he
+did not let the credit of our nation suffer at the most aristocratic
+court in Europe for want of a fit diplomatic costume, when some of our
+ministers were trying to make their office do its full effect upon all
+occasions in "the dress of an American gentleman."  The morning after his
+arrival Mr. Motley came to me with a handful of newspapers which,
+according to the Austrian custom at that day, had been opened in the
+Venetian post-office.  He wished me to protest against this on his behalf
+as an infringement of his diplomatic extra-territoriality, and I proposed
+to go at once to the director of the post: I had myself suffered in the
+same way, and though I knew that a mere consul was helpless, I was
+willing to see the double-headed eagle trodden under foot by a Minister
+Plenipotentiary.  Mr. Motley said that he would go with me, and we put
+off in his gondola to the post-office.  The director received us with the
+utmost deference.  He admitted the irregularity which the minister
+complained of, and declared that he had no choice but to open every
+foreign newspaper, to whomsoever addressed.  He suggested, however, that
+if the minister made his appeal to the Lieutenant-Governor of Venice,
+Count Toggenburg would no doubt instantly order the exemption of his
+newspapers from the general rule.
+
+Mr. Motley said he would give himself the pleasure of calling upon the
+Lieutenant-Governor, and "How fortunate," he added, when we were got back
+into the gondola, "that I should have happened to bring my court dress
+with me!" I did not see the encounter of the high contending powers, but
+I know that it ended in a complete victory for our minister.
+
+I had no further active relations of an official kind with Mr. Motley,
+except in the case of a naturalized American citizen, whose property was
+slowly but surely wasting away in the keeping of the Venetian courts.
+An order had at last been given for the surrender of the remnant to the
+owner; but the Lombardo-Venetian authorities insisted that this should be
+done through the United States Minister at Vienna, and Mr. Motley held as
+firmly that it must be done through the United States Consul at Venice.
+I could only report to him from time to time the unyielding attitude of
+the Civil Tribunal, and at last he consented, as he wrote, "to act
+officiously, not officially, in the matter," and the hapless claimant got
+what was left of his estate.
+
+I had a glimpse of the historian afterwards in Boston, but it was only
+for a moment, just before his appointment to England, where he was made
+to suffer for Sumner in his quarrel with Grant.  That injustice crowned
+the injuries his country had done a most faithful patriot and high-
+spirited gentleman, whose fame as an historian once filled the ear of the
+English-speaking world.  His books seemed to have been written in a
+spirit already no longer modern; and I did not find the greatest of them
+so moving as I expected when I came to it with all the ardor of my
+admiration for the historian.  William the Silent seemed to me, by his
+worshipper's own showing, scarcely level with the popular movement which
+he did not so much direct as follow; but it is a good deal for a prince
+to be able even to follow his people; and it cannot be said that Motley
+does not fully recognize the greatness of the Dutch people, though he may
+see the Prince of Orange too large.  The study of their character made at
+least a theoretical democrat of a scholar whose instincts were not
+perhaps democratic, and his sympathy with that brave little republic
+between the dikes strengthened him in his fealty to the great
+commonwealth between the oceans.  I believe that so far as he was of any
+political tradition, he was of the old Boston Whig tradition; but when I
+met him at Venice he was in the glow of a generous pride in our war as a
+war against slavery.  He spoke of the negroes and their simple-hearted,
+single-minded devotion to the Union cause in terms that an original
+abolitionist might have used, at a time when original abolitionists were
+not so many as they have since become.
+
+For the rest, I fancy it was very well for us to be represented at Vienna
+in those days by an ideal democrat who was also a real swell, and who was
+not likely to discredit us socially when we so much needed to be well
+thought of in every way.
+
+
+At a court where the family of Count Schmerling, the Prime Minister,
+could not be received for want of the requisite descents, it was well to
+have a minister who would not commit the mistake of inviting the First
+Society to meet the Second Society, as a former Envoy Extraordinary had
+done, with the effect of finding himself left entirely to the Second
+Society during the rest of his stay in Vienna.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+One of my consular colleagues under Motley was another historian, of no
+such popularity, indeed, nor even of such success, but perhaps not of
+inferior powers.  This was Richard Hildreth, at Trieste, the author of
+one of the sincerest if not the truest histories of the United States,
+according to the testimony both of his liking and his misliking critics.
+I have never read his history, and I speak of it only at second hand; but
+I had read, before I met him, his novel of 'Archy Moore, or The White
+Slave', which left an indelible impression of his imaginative verity upon
+me.  The impression is still so deep that after the lapse of nearly forty
+years since I saw the book, I have no misgiving in speaking of it as a
+powerful piece of realism.  It treated passionately, intensely, though
+with a superficial coldness, of wrongs now so remote from us in the
+abolition of slavery that it is useless to hope it will ever beg
+generally read hereafter, but it can safely be praised to any one who
+wishes to study that bygone condition, and the literature which grew out
+of it.  I fancy it did not lack recognition in its time, altogether, for
+I used to see it in Italian and French translations on the bookstalls.
+I believe neither his history nor his novel brought the author more gain
+than fame.  He had worn himself out on a newspaper when he got his
+appointment at Trieste, and I saw him in the shadow of the cloud that was
+wholly to darken him before he died.  He was a tall thin man, absent,
+silent: already a phantom of himself, but with a scholarly serenity and
+dignity amidst the ruin, when the worst came.
+
+I first saw him at the pretty villa where he lived in the suburbs of
+Trieste, and where I passed several days, and I remember him always
+reading, reading, reading.  He could with difficulty be roused from his
+book by some strenuous appeal from his family to his conscience as a
+host.  The last night he sat with Paradise Lost in his hand, and nothing
+could win him from it till he had finished it.  Then he rose to go to
+bed.  Would not he bid his parting guest good-bye?  The idea of farewell
+perhaps dimly penetrated to him.  He responded without looking round,
+
+              "They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
+               Through Eden took their solitary way,"
+
+and so left the room.
+
+I had earlier had some dealings with him as a fellow-consul concerning a
+deserter from an American ship whom I inherited from my predecessor at
+Venice.  The man had already been four or five months in prison, and he
+was in a fair way to end his life there; for it is our law that a
+deserting sailor must be kept in the consul's custody till some vessel of
+our flag arrives, when the consul can oblige the master to take the
+deserter and let him work his passage home.  Such a vessel rarely came to
+Venice even in times of peace, and in times of war there was no hope of
+any.  So I got leave of the consul at Trieste to transfer my captive to
+that port, where now and then an American ship did touch.  The flag
+determines the nationality of the sailor, and this unhappy wretch was
+theoretically our fellow-citizen; but when he got to Trieste he made a
+clean breast of it to the consul.  He confessed that when he shipped
+under our flag he was a deserter from a British regiment at Malta; and he
+begged piteously not to be sent home to America, where he had never been
+in his life, nor ever wished to be.  He wished to be sent back to his
+regiment at Malta, and to whatever fate awaited him there.  The case
+certainly had its embarrassments; but the American consul contrived to
+let our presumptive compatriot slip into the keeping of the British
+consul, who promptly shipped him to Malta.  In view of the strained
+relations between England and America at that time this was a piece of
+masterly diplomacy.
+
+Besides my old Ohio-time friend Moncure D. Conway, who paid us a visit,
+and in his immediate relations with literary Boston seemed to bring the
+mountain to Mahomet, I saw no one else more literary than Henry Ward
+Beecher.  He was passing through Venice on his way to those efforts in
+England in behalf of the Union which had a certain great effect at the
+time; and in the tiny parlor of our apartment on the Grand Canal, I can
+still see him sitting athletic, almost pugilistic, of presence, with his
+strong face, but kind, framed in long hair that swept above his massive
+forehead, and fell to the level of his humorously smiling mouth.  His
+eyes quaintly gleamed at the things we told him of our life in the
+strange place; but he only partly relaxed from his strenuous pose, and
+the hands that lay upon his knees were clinched.  Afterwards, as he
+passed our balcony in a gondola, he lifted the brave red fez he was
+wearing (many people wore the fez for one caprice or another) and saluted
+our eagle and us: we were often on the balcony behind the shield to
+attest the authenticity of the American eagle.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+Before I left Venice, however, there came a turn in my literary luck, and
+from the hand I could most have wished to reverse the adverse wheel of
+fortune.  I had labored out with great pains a paper on recent Italian
+comedy, which I sent to Lowell, then with his friend Professor Norton
+jointly editor of the North American Review; and he took it and wrote me
+one of his loveliest letters about it, consoling me in an instant for all
+the defeat I had undergone, and making it sweet and worthy to have lived
+through that misery.  It is one of the hard conditions of this state that
+while we can mostly make out to let people taste the last drop of
+bitterness and ill-will that is in us, our love and gratitude are only
+semi-articulate at the best, and usually altogether tongue-tied.  As
+often as I tried afterwards to tell Lowell of the benediction, the
+salvation, his letter was to me, I failed.  But perhaps he would not have
+understood, if I had spoken out all that was in me with the fulness I
+could have given a resentment.  His message came after years of thwarted
+endeavor, and reinstated me in the belief that I could still do something
+in literature.  To be sure, the letters in the Advertiser had begun to
+make their impression; among the first great pleasures they brought me
+was a recognition from my diplomatic chief at Vienna; but I valued my
+admission to the North American peculiarly because it was Lowell let me
+in, and because I felt that in his charge it must be the place of highest
+honor.  He spoke of the pay for my article, in his letter, and asked me
+where he should send it, and I answered, to my father-in-law, who put it
+in his savings-bank, where he lived, in Brattleboro, Vermont.  There it
+remained, and I forgot all about it, so that when his affairs were
+settled some years later and I was notified that there was a sum to my
+credit in the bank, I said, with the confidence I have nearly always felt
+when wrong, that I had no money there.  The proof of my error was sent me
+in a check, and then I bethought me of the pay for "Recent Italian
+Comedy."
+
+It was not a day when I could really afford to forget money due me, but
+then it was not a great deal of money.  The Review was as poor as it was
+proud, and I had two dollars a printed page for my paper.  But this was
+more than I got from the Advertiser, which gave me five dollars a column
+for my letters, printed in a type so fine that the money, when translated
+from greenbacks into gold at a discount of $2.80, must have been about a
+dollar a thousand words.  However, I was richly content with that, and
+would gladly have let them have the letters for nothing.
+
+Before I left Venice I had made my sketches into a book, which I sent on
+to Messrs. Trubner & Co., in London.  They had consented to look at it to
+oblige my friend Conway, who during his sojourn with us in Venice, before
+his settlement in London, had been forced to listen to some of it.  They
+answered me in due time that they would publish an edition of a thousand,
+at half profits, if I could get some American house to take five hundred
+copies.  When I stopped in London I had so little hope of being able to
+do this that I asked the Trubners if I might, without losing their offer,
+try to get some other London house to publish my book.  They said Yes,
+almost joyously; and I began to take my manuscript about.  At most places
+they would not look at me or it, and they nowhere consented to read it.
+The house promptest in refusing to consider it afterwards pirated one of
+my novels, and with some expressions of good intention in that direction,
+never paid me anything for it; though I believe the English still think
+that this sort of behavior was peculiar to the American publisher in the
+old buccaneering times.  I was glad to go back to the Trubners with my
+book, and on my way across the Atlantic I met a publisher who finally
+agreed to take those five hundred copies.  This was Mr. M. M. Hurd, of
+Hurd & Houghton, a house then newly established in New York and
+Cambridge.  We played ring-toss and shuffleboard together, and became of
+a friendship which lasts to this day.  But it was not till some months
+later, when I saw him in New York, that he consented to publish my book.
+I remember how he said, with an air of vague misgiving, and an effect of
+trying to justify himself in an imprudence, that it was not a great
+matter anyway.  I perceived that he had no faith in it, and to tell the
+truth I had not much myself.  But the book had an instant success, and it
+has gone on from edition to edition ever since.  There was just then the
+interest of a not wholly generous surprise at American things among the
+English.  Our success in putting down the great Confederate rebellion had
+caught the fancy of our cousins, and I think it was to this mood of
+theirs that I owed largely the kindness they showed my book.  There were
+long and cordial reviews in all the great London journals, which I used
+to carry about with me like love-letters; when I tried to show them to
+other people, I could not understand their coldness concerning them.
+
+At Boston, where we landed on our return home, there was a moment when it
+seemed as if my small destiny might be linked at once with that of the
+city which later became my home.  I ran into the office of the Advertiser
+to ask what had become of some sketches of Italian travel I had sent the
+paper, and the managing editor made me promise not to take a place
+anywhere before I had heard from him.  I gladly promised, but I did not
+hear from him, and when I returned to Boston a fortnight later, I found
+that a fatal partner had refused to agree with him in engaging me upon
+the paper.  They even gave me back half a dozen unprinted letters of
+mine, and I published them in the Nation, of New York, and afterwards in
+the book called Italian Journeys.
+
+But after I had encountered fortune in this frowning disguise, I had a
+most joyful little visit with Lowell, which made me forget there was
+anything in the world but the delight and glory of sitting with him in
+his study at Elmwood and hearing him talk.  It must have been my
+freshness from Italy which made him talk chiefly of his own happy days in
+the land which so sympathetically brevets all its lovers fellow-citizens.
+At any rate he would talk of hardly anything else, and he talked late
+into the night, and early into the morning.  About two o'clock, when all
+the house was still, he lighted a candle, and went down into the cellar,
+and came back with certain bottles under his arms.  I had not a very
+learned palate in those days (or in these, for that matter), but I knew
+enough of wine to understand that these bottles had been chosen upon that
+principle which Longfellow put in verse, and used to repeat with a
+humorous lifting of the eyebrows and hollowing of the voice:
+
+              "If you have a friend to dine,
+               Give him your best wine;
+               If you have two,
+               The second-best will do."
+
+As we sat in their mellow afterglow, Lowell spoke to me of my own life
+and prospects, wisely and truly, as he always spoke.  He said that it was
+enough for a man who had stuff in him to be known to two or three people,
+for they would not suffer him to be forgotten, and it would rest with
+himself to get on.  I told him that though I had not given up my place at
+Venice, I was not going back, if I could find anything to do at home,
+and I was now on my way to Ohio, where I should try my best to find
+something; at the worst, I could turn to my trade of printer.  He did not
+think it need ever come to that; and he said that he believed I should
+have an advantage with readers, if not with editors, in hailing from the
+West; I should be more of a novelty.  I knew very well that even in my
+own West I should not have this advantage unless I appeared there with an
+Eastern imprint, but I could not wish to urge my misgiving against his
+faith.  Was I not already richly successful?  What better thing
+personally could befall me, if I lived forever after on milk and honey,
+than to be sitting there with my hero, my master, and having him talk to
+me as if we were equal in deed and in fame?
+
+The cat-bird called in the syringa thicket at his door, before we said
+the good-night which was good morning, using the sweet Italian words, and
+bidding each other the 'Dorma bene' which has the quality of a
+benediction.  He held my hand, and looked into my eyes with the sunny
+kindness which never failed me, worthy or unworthy; and I went away to
+bed.  But not to sleep; only to dream such dreams as fill the heart of
+youth when the recognition of its endeavor has come from the achievement
+it holds highest and best.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+I found nothing to do in Ohio; some places that I heard of proved
+impossible one way or another, in Columbus and Cleveland, and Cincinnati;
+there was always the fatal partner; and after three weeks I was again in
+the East.  I came to New York, resolved to fight my way in, somewhere,
+and I did not rest a moment before I began the fight.
+
+My notion was that which afterwards became Bartley Hubbard's.  "Get a
+basis," said the softening cynic of the Saturday Press, when I advised
+with him, among other acquaintances.  "Get a salaried place, something
+regular on some paper, and then you can easily make up the rest."  But it
+was a month before I achieved this vantage, and then I got it in a
+quarter where I had not looked for it.  I wrote editorials on European
+and literary topics for different papers, but mostly for the Times, and
+they paid me well and more than well; but I was nowhere offered a basis,
+though once I got so far towards it as to secure a personal interview
+with the editor-in-chief, who made me feel that I had seldom met so busy
+a man.  He praised some work of mine that he had read in his paper, but I
+was never recalled to his presence; and now I think he judged rightly
+that I should not be a lastingly good journalist.  My point of view was
+artistic; I wanted time to prepare my effects.
+
+There was another and clearer prospect opened to me on a literary paper,
+then newly come to the light, but long since gone out in the dark.  Here
+again my work was taken, and liked so much that I was offered the basis
+(at twenty dollars a week) that I desired; I was even assigned to a desk
+where I should write in the office; and the next morning I came joyfully
+down to Spruce Street to occupy it.  But I was met at the door by one of
+the editors, who said lightly, as if it were a trifling affair, "Well,
+we've concluded to waive the idea of an engagement," and once more my
+bright hopes of a basis dispersed themselves.  I said, with what calm
+I could, that they must do what they thought best, and I went on
+skirmishing baselessly about for this and the other papers which had been
+buying my material.
+
+I had begun printing in the 'Nation' those letters about my Italian
+journeys left over from the Boston Advertiser; they had been liked in the
+office, and one day the editor astonished and delighted me by asking how
+I would fancy giving up outside work to come there and write only for the
+'Nation'.  We averaged my gains from all sources at forty dollars a week,
+and I had my basis as unexpectedly as if I had dropped upon it from the
+skies.
+
+This must have been some time in November, and the next three or four
+months were as happy a time for me as I have ever known.  I kept on
+printing my Italian material in the Nation; I wrote criticisms for it
+(not very good criticisms, I think now), and I amused myself very much
+with the treatment of social phases and events in a department which grew
+up under my hand.  My associations personally were of the most agreeable
+kind.  I worked with joy, with ardor, and I liked so much to be there, in
+that place and in that company, that I hated to have each day come to an
+end.
+
+I believed that my lines were cast in New York for good and all; and I
+renewed my relations with the literary friends I had made before going
+abroad.  I often stopped, on my way up town, at an apartment the
+Stoddards had in Lafayette Place, or near it; I saw Stedman, and reasoned
+high, to my heart's content, of literary things with them and him.
+
+With the winter Bayard Taylor came on from his home in Kennett and took
+an apartment in East Twelfth Street, and once a week Mrs. Taylor and he
+received all their friends there, with a simple and charming hospitality.
+There was another house which we much resorted to--the house of James
+Lorrimer Graham, afterwards Consul-General at Florence, where he died.
+I had made his acquaintance at Venice three years before, and I came in
+for my share of that love for literary men which all their perversities
+could not extinguish in him.  It was a veritable passion, which I used to
+think he could not have felt so deeply if he had been a literary man
+himself.  There were delightful dinners at his house, where the wit of
+the Stoddards shone, and Taylor beamed with joyous good-fellowship and
+overflowed with invention; and Huntington, long Paris correspondent of
+the Tribune, humorously tried to talk himself into the resolution of
+spending the rest of his life in his own country.  There was one evening
+when C. P. Cranch, always of a most pensive presence and aspect, sang the
+most killingly comic songs; and there was another evening when, after we
+all went into the library, something tragical happened.  Edwin Booth was
+of our number, a gentle, rather silent person in company, or with at
+least little social initiative, who, as his fate would, went up to the
+cast of a huge hand that lay upon one of the shelves.  "Whose hand is
+this, Lorry?" he asked our host, as he took it up and turned it over in
+both his own hands.  Graham feigned not to hear, and Booth asked again,
+"whose hand is this?"  Then there was nothing for Graham but to say,
+"It's Lincoln's hand," and the man for whom it meant such unspeakable
+things put it softly down without a word.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+It was one of the disappointments of a time which was nearly all joy that
+I did not then meet a man who meant hardly less than Lowell himself for
+me.  George William Curtis was during my first winter in New York away on
+one of the long lecturing rounds to which he gave so many of his winters,
+and I did not see him till seven years afterwards, at Mr. Norton's in
+Cambridge.  He then characteristically spent most of the evening in
+discussing an obscure point in Browning's poem of 'My Last Duchess'.
+I have long forgotten what the point was, but not the charm of Curtis's
+personality, his fine presence, his benign politeness, his almost
+deferential tolerance of difference in opinion.  Afterwards I saw him
+again and again in Boston and New York, but always with a sense of
+something elusive in his graciousness, for which something in me must
+have been to blame.  Cold, he was not, even to the youth that in those
+days was apt to shiver in any but the higher temperatures, and yet I felt
+that I made no advance in his kindness towards anything like the
+friendship I knew in the Cambridge men.  Perhaps I was so thoroughly
+attuned to their mood that I could not be put in unison with another; and
+perhaps in Curtis there was really not the material of much intimacy.
+
+He had the potentiality of publicity in the sort of welcome he gave
+equally to all men; and if I asked more I was not reasonable.  Yet he was
+never far from any man of good-will, and he was the intimate of
+multitudes whose several existence he never dreamt of.  In this sort he
+had become my friend when he made his first great speech on the Kansas
+question in 1855, which will seen as remote to the young men of this day
+as the Thermopylae question to which he likened it.  I was his admirer,
+his lover, his worshipper before that for the things he had done in
+literature, for the 'Howadji' books, and for the lovely fantasies of
+'Prue and I', and for the sound-hearted satire of the 'Potiphar Papers',
+and now suddenly I learnt that this brilliant and graceful talent, this
+travelled and accomplished gentleman, this star of society who had
+dazzled me with his splendor far off in my Western village obscurity, was
+a man with the heart to feel the wrongs of men so little friended then as
+to be denied all the rights of men.  I do not remember any passage of the
+speech, or any word of it, but I remember the joy, the pride with which
+the soul of youth recognizes in the greatness it has honored the goodness
+it may love.  Mere politicians might be pro-slavery or anti-slavery
+without touching me very much, but here was the citizen of a world far
+greater than theirs, a light of the universal republic of letters, who
+was willing and eager to stand or fall with the just cause, and that was
+all in all to me.  His country was my country, and his kindred my
+kindred, and nothing could have kept me from following after him.
+
+His whole life taught the lesson that the world is well lost whenever the
+world is wrong; but never, I think, did any life teach this so sweetly,
+so winningly.  The wrong world itself might have been entreated by him to
+be right, for he was one of the few reformers who have not in some
+measure mixed their love of man with hate of men; his quarrel was with
+error, and not with the persons who were in it.  He was so gently
+steadfast in his opinions that no one ever thought of him as a fanatic,
+though many who held his opinions were assailed as fanatics, and suffered
+the shame if they did not win the palm of martyrdom.  In early life he
+was a communist, and then when he came out of Brook Farm into the world
+which he was so well fitted to adorn, and which would so gladly have kept
+him all its own, he became an abolitionist in the very teeth of the world
+which abhorred abolitionists.  He was a believer in the cause of women's
+rights, which has no picturesqueness, and which chiefly appeals to the
+sense of humor in the men who never dreamt of laughing at him.  The man
+who was in the last degree amiable was to the last degree unyielding
+where conscience was concerned; the soul which was so tender had no
+weakness in it; his lenity was the divination of a finer justice.  His
+honesty made all men trust him when they doubted his opinions; his good
+sense made them doubt their own opinions, when they had as little
+question of their own honesty.
+
+I should not find it easy to speak of him as a man of letters only, for
+humanity was above the humanities with him, and we all know how he turned
+from the fairest career in literature to tread the thorny path of
+politics because he believed that duty led the way, and that good
+citizens were needed more than good romancers.  No doubt they are,
+and yet it must always be a keen regret with the men of my generation who
+witnessed with such rapture the early proofs of his talent, that he could
+not have devoted it wholly to the beautiful, and let others look after
+the true.  Now that I have said this I am half ashamed of it, for I know
+well enough that what he did was best; but if my regret is mean, I will
+let it remain, for it is faithful to the mood which many have been in
+concerning him.
+
+There can be no dispute, I am sure, as to the value of some of the
+results he achieved in that other path.  He did indeed create anew for us
+the type of good-citizenship, well-nigh effaced in a sordid and selfish
+time, and of an honest politician and a pure-minded journalist.  He never
+really forsook literature, and the world of actual interests and
+experiences afforded him outlooks and perspectives, without which
+aesthetic endeavor is self-limited and purblind.  He was a great man of
+letters, he was a great orator, he was a great political journalist, he
+was a great citizen, he was a great philanthropist.  But that last word
+with its conventional application scarcely describes the brave and gentle
+friend of men that he was.  He was one that helped others by all that he
+did, and said, and was, and the circle of his use was as wide as his
+fame.  There are other great men, plenty of them, common great men, whom
+we know as names and powers, and whom we willingly let the ages have when
+they die, for, living or dead, they are alike remote from us.  They have
+never been with us where we live; but this great man was the neighbor,
+the contemporary, and the friend of all who read him or heard him; and
+even in the swift forgetting of this electrical age the stamp of his
+personality will not be effaced from their minds or hearts.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+Of those evenings at the Taylors' in New York, I can recall best the one
+which was most significant for me, and even fatefully significant.
+Mr. and Mrs. Fields were there, from Boston, and I renewed all the
+pleasure of my earlier meetings with them.  At the end Fields said,
+mockingly, "Don't despise Boston!" and I answered, as we shook hands,
+"Few are worthy to live in Boston."  It was New-Year's eve, and that
+night it came on to snow so heavily that my horse-car could hardly plough
+its way up to Forty-seventh Street through the drifts.  The next day, and
+the next, I wrote at home, because it was so hard to get down-town.  The
+third day I reached the office and found a letter on my desk from Fields,
+asking how I should like to come to Boston and be his assistant on the
+'Atlantic Monthly'.  I submitted the matter at once to my chief on the
+'Nation', and with his frank goodwill I talked it over with Mr. Osgood,
+of Ticknor & Fields, who was to see me further about it if I wished, when
+he came to New York; and then I went to Boston to see Mr. Fields
+concerning details.  I was to sift all the manuscripts and correspond
+with contributors; I was to do the literary proof-reading of the
+magazine; and I was to write the four or five pages of book-notices,
+which were then printed at the end of the periodical in finer type; and I
+was to have forty dollars a week.  I said that I was getting that already
+for less work, and then Mr. Fields offered me ten dollars more.  Upon
+these terms we closed, and on the 1st of March, which was my twenty-ninth
+birthday, I went to Boston and began my work.  I had not decided to
+accept the place without advising with Lowell; he counselled the step,
+and gave me some shrewd and useful suggestions.  The whole affair was
+conducted by Fields with his unfailing tact and kindness, but it could
+not be kept from me that the qualification I had as practical printer for
+the work was most valued, if not the most valued, and that as proof-
+reader I was expected to make it avail on the side of economy.  Somewhere
+in life's feast the course of humble-pie must always come in; and if I
+did not wholly relish this, bit of it, I dare say it was good for me, and
+I digested it perfectly.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Act officiously, not officially
+Confidence I have nearly always felt when wrong
+George William Curtis
+Give him your best wine
+Longfellow
+Love and gratitude are only semi-articulate at the best
+Made all men trust him when they doubted his opinions
+Motley
+Quarrel was with error, and not with the persons who were in it
+The world is well lost whenever the world is wrong
+Women's rights
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Roundabout to Boston
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--Literary Boston As I Knew It
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT
+
+Among my fellow-passengers on the train from New York to Boston, when I
+went to begin my work there in 1866, as the assistant editor of the
+Atlantic Monthly, was the late Samuel Bowles, of the Springfield
+Republican, who created in a subordinate city a journal of metropolitan
+importance.  I had met him in Venice several years earlier, when he was
+suffering from the cruel insomnia which had followed his overwork on that
+newspaper, and when he told me that he was sleeping scarcely more than
+one hour out of the twenty-four.  His worn face attested the misery which
+this must have been, and which lasted in some measure while he lived,
+though I believe that rest and travel relieved him in his later years.
+He was always a man of cordial friendliness, and he now expressed a most
+gratifying interest when I told him what I was going to do in Boston.
+He gave himself the pleasure of descanting upon the dramatic quality of
+the fact that a young newspaper man from Ohio was about to share in the
+destinies of the great literary periodical of New England.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+I do not think that such a fact would now move the fancy of the liveliest
+newspaper man, so much has the West since returned upon the East in a
+refluent wave of authorship.  But then the West was almost an unknown
+quality in our literary problem; and in fact there was scarcely any
+literature outside of New England.  Even this was of New England origin,
+for it was almost wholly the work of New England men and women in the
+"splendid exile" of New York.  The Atlantic Monthly, which was
+distinctively literary, was distinctively a New England magazine, though
+from the first it had been characterized by what was more national, what
+was more universal, in the New England temperament.  Its chief
+contributors for nearly twenty years were Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes,
+Whittier, Emerson, Doctor Hale, Colonel Higginson, Mrs. Stowe, Whipple,
+Rose Terry Cooke, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Prescott Spofford, Mrs.
+Phelps Ward, and other New England writers who still lived in New
+England, and largely in the region of Boston.  Occasionally there came a
+poem from Bryant, at New York, from Mr. Stedman, from Mr. Stoddard and
+Mrs. Stoddard, from Mr. Aldrich, and from Bayard Taylor.  But all these,
+except the last, were not only of New England race, but of New England
+birth.  I think there was no contributor from the South but Mr. M. D.
+Conway, and as yet the West scarcely counted, though four young poets
+from Ohio, who were not immediately or remotely of Puritan origin, had
+appeared in early numbers; Alice Cary, living with her sister in New
+York, had written now and then from the beginning.  Mr. John Hay solely
+represented Illinois by a single paper, and he was of Rhode Island stock.
+It was after my settlement at Boston that Mark Twain, of Missouri, became
+a figure of world-wide fame at Hartford; and longer after, that Mr. Bret
+Harte made that progress Eastward from California which was telegraphed
+almost from hour to hour, as if it were the progress of a prince.
+Miss Constance F.  Woolson had not yet begun to write.  Mr. James
+Whitcomb Riley, Mr. Maurice Thompson, Miss Edith Thomas, Octave Thanet,
+Mr. Charles Warren Stoddard, Mr. H. B. Fuller, Mrs. Catherwood,
+Mr. Hamlin Garland, all whom I name at random among other Western
+writers, were then as unknown as Mr. Cable, Miss Murfree, Mrs. Rives
+Chanler, Miss Grace King, Mr. Joel Chandler Harris, Mr. Thomas Nelson
+Page, in the South, which they by no means fully represent.
+
+The editors of the Atlantic had been eager from the beginning to discover
+any outlying literature; but, as I have said, there was in those days
+very little good writing done beyond the borders of New England.  If the
+case is now different, and the best known among living American writers
+are no longer New-Englanders, still I do not think the South and West
+have yet trimmed the balance; and though perhaps the news writers now
+more commonly appear in those quarters, I should not be so very sure that
+they are not still characterized by New England ideals and examples.
+On the other hand, I am very sure that in my early day we were
+characterized by them, and wished to be so; we even felt that we failed
+in so far as we expressed something native quite in our own way.
+The literary theories we accepted were New England theories,
+the criticism we valued was New England criticism, or, more strictly
+speaking, Boston theories, Boston criticism.
+
+Of those more constant contributors to the Atlantic whom I have
+mentioned, it is of course known that Longfellow and Lowell lived in
+Cambridge, Emerson at Concord, and Whittier at Amesbury.  Colonel
+Higginson was still and for many years afterwards at Newport; Mrs. Stowe
+was then at Andover; Miss Prescott of Newburyport had become Mrs.
+Spofford, and was presently in Boston, where her husband was a member of
+the General Court; Mrs. Phelps Ward, as Miss Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,
+dwelt in her father's house at Andover.  The chief of the Bostonians were
+Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Doctor Holmes, and Doctor Hale.  Yet Boston stood
+for the whole Massachusetts group, and Massachusetts, in the literary
+impulse, meant New England.  I suppose we must all allow, whether we like
+to do so or not, that the impulse seems now to have pretty well spent
+itself.  Certainly the city of Boston has distinctly waned in literature,
+though it has waxed in wealth and population.  I do not think there are
+in Boston to-day even so many talents with a literary coloring in law,
+science, theology, and journalism as there were formerly; though I have
+no belief that the Boston talents are fewer or feebler than before.
+I arrived in Boston, however, when all talents had more or less a
+literary coloring, and when the greatest talents were literary.  These
+expressed with ripened fulness a civilization conceived in faith and
+brought forth in good works; but that moment of maturity was the
+beginning of a decadence which could only show itself much later.  New
+England has ceased to be a nation in itself, and it will perhaps never
+again have anything like a national literature; but that was something
+like a national literature; and it will probably be centuries yet before
+the life of the whole country, the American life as distinguished from
+the New England life, shall have anything so like a national literature.
+It will be long before our larger life interprets itself in such
+imagination as Hawthorne's, such wisdom as Emerson's, such poetry as
+Longfellow's, such prophecy as Whittier's, such wit and grace as
+Holmes's, such humor and humanity as Lowell's.
+
+The literature of those great men was, if I may suffer myself the figure,
+the Socinian graft of a Calvinist stock.  Their faith, in its varied
+shades, was Unitarian, but their art was Puritan.  So far as it was
+imperfect--and great and beautiful as it was, I think it had its
+imperfections--it was marred by the intense ethicism that pervaded the
+New England mind for two hundred years, and that still characterizes it.
+They or their fathers had broken away from orthodoxy in the great schism
+at the beginning of the century, but, as if their heterodoxy were
+conscience-stricken, they still helplessly pointed the moral in all they
+did; some pointed it more directly, some less directly; but they all
+pointed it.  I should be far from blaming them for their ethical
+intention, though I think they felt their vocation as prophets too much
+for their good as poets.  Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the
+sermon, though not always, nor nearly always.  It was in poetry and in
+romance that they excelled; in the novel, so far as they attempted it,
+they failed.  I say this with the names of all the Bostonian group, and
+those they influenced, in mind, and with a full sense of their greatness.
+It may be ungracious to say that they have left no heirs to their
+peculiar greatness; but it would be foolish to say that they left an
+estate where they had none to bequeath.  One cannot take account of such
+a fantasy as Judd's Margaret.  The only New-Englander who has attempted
+the novel on a scale proportioned to the work of the New-Englanders in
+philosophy, in poetry, in romance, is Mr. De Forest, who is of New Haven,
+and not of Boston.  I do not forget the fictions of Doctor Holmes, or the
+vivid inventions of Doctor Hale, but I do not call them novels; and I do
+not forget the exquisitely realistic art of Miss Jewett or Miss Wilkins,
+which is free from the ethicism of the great New England group, but which
+has hardly the novelists's scope.  New England, in Hawthorne's work,
+achieved supremacy in romance; but the romance is always an allegory,
+and the novel is a picture in which the truth to life is suffered to do
+its unsermonized office for conduct; and New England yet lacks her
+novelist, because it was her instinct and her conscience in fiction to be
+true to an ideal of life rather than to life itself.
+
+Even when we come to the exception that proves the rule, even to such a
+signal exception as 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', I think that what I say holds
+true.  That is almost the greatest work of imagination that we have
+produced in prose, and it is the work of a New England woman, writing
+from all the inspirations and traditions of New England.  It is like
+begging the question to say that I do not call it a novel, however; but
+really, is it a novel, in the sense that 'War and Peace' is a novel, or
+'Madame Flaubert', or 'L'Assommoir', or 'Phineas Finn', or 'Dona
+Perfecta', or 'Esther Waters', or 'Marta y Maria', or 'The Return of the
+Native', or 'Virgin Soil', or 'David Grieve'?  In a certain way it is
+greater than any of these except the first; but its chief virtue, or its
+prime virtue, is in its address to the conscience, and not its address to
+the taste; to the ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense.
+
+This does not quite say the thing, but it suggests it, and I should be
+sorry if it conveyed to any reader a sense of slight; for I believe no
+one has felt more deeply than myself the value of New England in
+literature.  The comparison of the literary situation at Boston to the
+literary situation at Edinburgh in the times of the reviewers has never
+seemed to me accurate or adequate, and it holds chiefly in the fact that
+both seem to be of the past.  Certainly New York is yet no London in
+literature, and I think Boston was once vastly more than Edinburgh ever
+was, at least in quality.  The Scotch literature of the palmy days was
+not wholly Scotch, and even when it was rooted in Scotch soil it flowered
+in the air of an alien speech.  But the New England literature of the
+great day was the blossom of a New England root; and the language which
+the Bostonians wrote was the native English of scholars fitly the heirs
+of those who had brought the learning of the universities to
+Massachusetts Bay two hundred years before, and was of as pure a lineage
+as the English of the mother-country.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+The literary situation which confronted me when I came to Boston was,
+then, as native as could well be; and whatever value I may be able to
+give a personal study of it will be from the effect it made upon me as
+one strange in everything but sympathy.  I will not pretend that I saw it
+in its entirety, and I have no hope of presenting anything like a
+kinetoscopic impression of it.  What I can do is to give here and there a
+glimpse of it; and I shall wish the reader to keep in mind the fact that
+it was in a "state of transition," as everything is always and
+everywhere.  It was no sooner recognizably native than it ceased to be
+fully so; and I became a witness of it after the change had begun.  The
+publishing house which so long embodied New England literature was
+already attempting enterprises out of the line of its traditions, and one
+of these had brought Mr. T. B. Aldrich from New York, a few weeks before
+I arrived upon the scene in that dramatic quality which I think never
+impressed any one but Mr. Bowles.  Mr. Aldrich was the editor of 'Every
+Saturday' when I came to be assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly.
+We were of nearly the same age, but he had a distinct and distinguished
+priority of reputation, insomuch that in my Western remoteness I had
+always ranged him with such elders and betters of mine as Holmes and
+Lowell, and never imagined him the blond, slight youth I found him, with
+every imaginable charm of contemporaneity.  It is no part of the office
+which I have intended for these slight and sufficiently wandering
+glimpses of the past to show any writer in his final place; and above all
+I do not presume to assign any living man his rank or station.  But I
+should be false to my own grateful sense of beauty in the work of this
+poet if I did not at all times recognize his constancy to an ideal which
+his name stands for.  He is known in several kinds, but to my thinking he
+is best in a certain nobler kind of poetry; a serious sort in which the
+thought holds him above the scrupulosities of the art he loves and honors
+so much.  Sometimes the file slips in his hold, as the file must and
+will; it is but an instrument at the best; but there is no mistouch in
+the hand that lays itself upon the reader's heart with the pulse of the
+poet's heart quick and true in it.  There are sonnets of his, grave, and
+simple, and lofty, which I think of with the glow and thrill possible
+only from very beautiful poetry, and which impart such an emotion as we
+can feel only
+
+              "When a great thought strikes along the brain
+               And flushes all the cheek."
+
+When I had the fortune to meet him first, I suppose that in the employ of
+the kindly house we were both so eager to serve, our dignities were about
+the same; for if the 'Atlantic Monthly' was a somewhat prouder affair
+than an eclectic weekly like 'Every Saturday', he was supreme in his
+place, and I was subordinate in mine.  The house was careful, in the
+attitude of its senior partner, not to distinguish between us, and we
+were not slow to perceive the tact used in managing us; we had our own
+joke of it; we compared notes to find whether we were equally used in
+this thing or that; and we promptly shared the fun of our discovery with
+Fields himself.
+
+We had another impartial friend (no less a friend of joy in the life
+which seems to have been pretty nearly all joy, as I look back upon it)
+in the partner who became afterwards the head of the house, and who
+forecast in his bold enterprises the change from a New England to an
+American literary situation.  In the end James R. Osgood failed, though
+all his enterprises succeeded.  The anomaly is sad, but it is not
+infrequent.  They were greater than his powers and his means, and before
+they could reach their full fruition, they had to be enlarged to men of
+longer purse and longer patience.  He was singularly fitted both by
+instinct and by education to become a great publisher; and he early
+perceived that if a leading American house were to continue at Boston,
+it must be hospitable to the talents of the whole country.  He founded
+his future upon those generous lines; but he wanted the qualities as well
+as the resources for rearing the superstructure.  Changes began to follow
+each other rapidly after he came into control of the house.  Misfortune
+reduced the size and number of its periodicals.  'The Young Folks' was
+sold outright, and the 'North American Review' (long before Mr. Rice
+bought it and carried it to New York) was cut down one-half, so that
+Aldrich said, it looked as if Destiny had sat upon it.  His own
+periodical, 'Every Saturday', was first enlarged to a stately quarto and
+illustrated; and then, under stress of the calamities following the great
+Boston fire, It collapsed to its former size.  Then both the 'Atlantic
+Monthly' and 'Every Saturday' were sold away from their old ownership,
+and 'Every Saturday' was suppressed altogether, and we two ceased to be
+of the same employ.  There was some sort of evening rite (more funereal
+than festive) the day after they were sold, and we followed Osgood away
+from it, under the lamps.  We all knew that it was his necessity that had
+caused him to part with the periodicals; but he professed that it was his
+pleasure, and he said he had not felt so light-hearted since he was a
+boy.  We asked him, How could he feel gay when he was no longer paying us
+our salaries, and how could he justify it to his conscience?  He liked
+our mocking, and limped away from us with a rheumatic easing of his
+weight from one foot to another: a figure pathetic now that it has gone
+the way to dusty death, and dear to memory through benefactions unalloyed
+by one unkindness.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+But when I came to Boston early in 1866, the 'Atlantic Monthly' and
+'Harper's' then divided our magazine world between them; the 'North
+American Review', in the control of Lowell and Professor Norton, had
+entered upon a new life; 'Every Saturday' was an instant success in the
+charge of Mr. Aldrich, who was by taste and training one of the best
+editors; and 'Our Young Folks' had the field of juvenile periodical
+literature to itself.
+
+It was under the direction of Miss Lucy Larcom and of Mr. J. T.
+Trowbridge, who had come from western New York, where he was born, and
+must be noted as one of the first returners from the setting to the
+rising sun.  He naturalized himself in Boston in his later boyhood, and
+he still breathes Boston air, where he dwells in the street called
+Pleasant, on the shore of Spy Pond, at Arlington, and still weaves the
+magic web of his satisfying stories for boys.  He merges in their
+popularity the fame of a poet which I do not think will always suffer
+that eclipse, for his poems show him to have looked deeply into the heart
+of common humanity, with a true and tender sense of it.
+
+Miss Larcom scarcely seemed to change from date to date in the generation
+that elapsed between the time I first saw her and the time I saw her
+last, a year or two before her death.  A goodness looked out of her
+comely face, which made me think of the Madonna's in Titian's
+"Assumption," and her whole aspect expressed a mild and friendly spirit
+which I find it hard to put in words.  She was never of the fine world of
+literature; she dwelt where she was born, in that unfashionable Beverly
+which is not Beverly Farms, and was of a simple, sea-faring, God-fearing
+race, as she has told in one of the loveliest autobiographies I know,
+"A New England Girlhood."  She was the author of many poems, whose number
+she constantly enlarged, but she was chiefly, and will be most lastingly,
+famed for the one poem, 'Hannah Binding Shoes', which years before my
+days in Boston had made her so widely known.  She never again struck so
+deep or so true a note; but if one has lodged such a note in the ear of
+time, it is enough; and if we are to speak of eternity, one might very
+well hold up one's head in the fields of asphodel, if one could say to
+the great others there, "I wrote Hannah Binding Shoes."  Her poem is
+very, very sad, as all who have read it will remember; but Miss Larcom
+herself was above everything cheerful, and she had a laugh of mellow
+richness which willingly made itself heard.  She was not only of true New
+England stock, and a Boston author by right of race, but she came up to
+that city every winter from her native town.
+
+By the same right and on the same terms, another New England poetess,
+whom I met those first days in Boston, was a Boston author.  When I saw
+Celia Thaxter she was just beginning to make her effect with those poems
+and sketches which the sea sings and flashes through as it sings and
+flashes around the Isles of Shoals, her summer home, where her girlhood
+had been passed in a freedom as wild as the curlew's.  She was a most
+beautiful creature, still very young, with a slender figure, and an
+exquisite perfection of feature; she was in presence what her work was:
+fine, frank, finished.  I do not know whether other witnesses of our
+literary history feel that the public has failed to keep her as fully in
+mind as her work merited; but I do not think there can be any doubt but
+our literature would be sensibly the poorer without her work.  It is
+interesting to remember how closely she kept to her native field, and it
+is wonderful to consider how richly she made those sea-beaten rocks to
+blossom.  Something strangely full and bright came to her verse from the
+mystical environment of the ocean, like the luxury of leaf and tint that
+it gave the narrower flower-plots of her native isles.  Her gift, indeed,
+could not satisfy itself with the terms of one art alone, however varied,
+and she learned to express in color the thoughts and feelings impatient
+of the pallor of words.
+
+She remains in my memories of that far Boston a distinct and vivid
+personality; as the authoress of 'Amber Gods', and 'In a Cellar', and
+'Circumstance', and those other wild romantic tales, remains the gentle
+and somewhat evanescent presence I found her.  Miss Prescott was now Mrs.
+Spofford, and her husband was a rising young politician of the day.  It
+was his duties as member of the General Court that had brought them up
+from Newburyport to Boston for that first winter; and I remember that the
+evening when we met he was talking of their some time going to Italy that
+she might study for imaginative literature certain Italian cities he
+named.  I have long since ceased to own those cities, but at the moment I
+felt a pang of expropriation which I concealed as well as I could; and
+now I heartily wish she could have fulfilled that purpose if it was a
+purpose, or realized that dream if it was only a dream.  Perhaps,
+however, that sumptuous and glowing fancy of hers, which had taken the
+fancy of the young readers of that day, needed the cold New England
+background to bring out all its intensities of tint, all its splendors of
+light.  Its effects were such as could not last, or could not be farther
+evolved; they were the expression of youth musing away from its
+environment and smitten with the glories of a world afar and beyond, the
+great world, the fine world, the impurpled world of romantic motives and
+passions.  But for what they were, I can never think them other than what
+they appeared: the emanations of a rarely gifted and singularly poetic
+mind.  I feel better than I can say how necessarily they were the
+emanations of a New England mind, and how to the subtler sense they must
+impart the pathos of revolt from the colorless rigidities which are the
+long result of puritanism in the physiognomy of New England life.
+
+Their author afterwards gave herself to the stricter study of this life
+in many tales and sketches which showed an increasing mastery; but they
+could not have the flush, the surprise, the delight of a young talent
+trying itself in a kind native and, so far as I know, peculiar to it.
+From time to time I still come upon a poem of hers which recalls that
+earlier strain of music, of color, and I am content to trust it for my
+abiding faith in the charm of things I have not read for thirty years.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+I speak of this one and that, as it happens, and with no thought of
+giving a complete prospect of literary Boston thirty years ago.  I am
+aware that it will seem sparsely peopled in the effect I impart, and I
+would have the reader always keep in mind the great fames at Cambridge
+and at Concord, which formed so large a part of the celebrity of Boston.
+I would also like him to think of it as still a great town, merely, where
+every one knew every one else, and whose metropolitan liberation from
+neighborhood was just begun.
+
+Most distinctly of that yet uncitified Boston was the critic Edwin P.
+Whipple, whose sympathies were indefinitely wider than his traditions.
+He was a most generous lover of all that was excellent in literature; and
+though I suppose we should call him an old-fashioned critic now, I
+suspect it would be with no distinct sense of what is newer fashioned.
+He was certainly as friendly to what promised well in the younger men as
+he was to what was done well in their elders; and there was no one
+writing in his day whose virtues failed of his recognition, though it
+might happen that his foibles would escape Whipple's censure.  He wrote
+strenuously and of course conscientiously; his point of view was solely
+and always that which enabled him best to discern qualities.  I doubt if
+he had any theory of criticism except to find out what was good in an
+author and praise it; and he rather blamed what was ethically bad than
+what was aesthetically bad.  In this he was strictly of New England, and
+he was of New England in a certain general intelligence, which constantly
+grew with an interrogative habit of mind.
+
+He liked to talk to you of what he had found characteristic in your work,
+to analyze you to yourself; and the very modesty of the man, which made
+such a study impersonal as far as he was concerned, sometimes rendered
+him insensible to the sufferings of his subject.  He had a keen
+perception of humor in others, but he had very little humor; he had a
+love of the beautiful in literature which was perhaps sometimes greater
+than his sense of it.
+
+I write from a cursory acquaintance with his work, not recently renewed.
+Of the presence of the man I have a vivider remembrance: a slight, short,
+ecclesiasticized figure in black; with a white neckcloth and a silk hat
+of strict decorum, and between the two a square face with square
+features, intensified in their regard by a pair of very large glasses,
+and the prominent, myopic eyes staring through them.  He was a type of
+out-dated New England scholarship in these aspects, but in the hospitable
+qualities of his mind and heart, the sort of man to be kept fondly in the
+memory of all who ever knew him.
+
+Out of the vague of that far-off time another face and figure, as
+essentially New En&land as this, and yet so different, relieve
+themselves.  Charles F. Browne, whose drollery wafted his pseudonym as
+far as the English speech could carry laughter, was a Westernized Yankee.
+He added an Ohio way of talking to the Maine way of thinking, and he so
+became a literary product of a rarer and stranger sort than our
+literature had otherwise known.  He had gone from Cleveland to London,
+with intervals of New York and the lecture platform, four or five years
+before I saw him in Boston, shortly after I went there.  We had met in
+Ohio, and he had personally explained to me the ducatless well-meaning of
+Vanity Fair in New York; but many men had since shaken the weary hand of
+Artemus Ward when I grasped it one day in front of the Tremont Temple.
+He did not recognize me, but he gave me at once a greeting of great
+impersonal cordiality, with "How do you do?  When did you come?" and
+other questions that had no concern in them, till I began to dawn upon
+him through a cloud of other half remembered faces.  Then he seized my
+hand and wrung it all over again, and repeated his friendly demands with
+an intonation that was now "Why, how are you; how are you?" for me alone.
+It was a bit of comedy, which had the fit pathetic relief of his
+impending doom: this was already stamped upon his wasted face, and his
+gay eyes had the death-look.  His large, loose mouth was drawn, for all
+its laughter at the fact which he owned; his profile, which burlesqued.
+an eagle's, was the profile of a drooping eagle; his lank length of limb
+trembled away with him when we parted.  I did not see him again;
+I scarcely heard of him till I heard of his death, and this sad image
+remains with me of the humorist who first gave the world a taste of the
+humor which characterizes the whole American people.
+
+I was meeting all kinds of distinguished persons, in my relation to the
+magazine, and early that winter I met one who remains in my mind above
+all others a person of distinction.  He was scarcely a celebrity, but he
+embodied certain social traits which were so characteristic of literary
+Boston that it could not be approached without their recognition.
+The Muses have often been acknowledged to be very nice young persons,
+but in Boston they were really ladies; in Boston literature was of good
+family and good society in a measure it has never been elsewhere.
+It might be said even that reform was of good family in Boston;
+and literature and reform equally shared the regard of Edmund Quincy,
+whose race was one of the most aristocratic in New England.  I had known
+him by his novel of 'Wensley' (it came so near being a first-rate novel),
+and by his Life of Josiah Quincy, then a new book, but still better by
+his Boston letters to the New York Tribune.  These dealt frankly, in the
+old anti-slavery days between 1850 and 1860, with other persons of
+distinction in Boston, who did not see the right so clearly as Quincy
+did, or who at least let their interests darken them to the ugliness of
+slavery.  Their fault was all the more comical because it was the error
+of men otherwise so correct, of characters so stainless, of natures so
+upright; and the Quincy letters got out of it all the fun there was in
+it.  Quincy himself affected me as the finest patrician type I had ever
+met.  He was charmingly handsome, with a nose of most fit aquilinity,
+smooth-shaven lips, "educated whiskers," and perfect glasses; his manner
+was beautiful, his voice delightful, when at our first meeting he made me
+his reproaches in terms of lovely kindness for having used in my
+'Venetian Life' the Briticism 'directly' for 'as soon as.'
+
+Lowell once told me that Quincy had never had any calling or profession,
+because when he found himself in the enjoyment of a moderate income on
+leaving college, he decided to be simply a gentleman.  He was too much of
+a man to be merely that, and he was an abolitionist, a journalist, and
+for conscience' sake a satirist.  Of that political mood of society which
+he satirized was an eminent man whom it was also my good fortune to meet
+in my early days in Boston; and if his great sweetness and kindness had
+not instantly won my liking, I should still have been glad of the glimpse
+of the older and statelier Boston which my slight acquaintance with
+George Ticknor gave me.  The historian of Spanish literature, the friend
+and biographer of Prescott, and a leading figure of the intellectual
+society of an epoch already closed, dwelt in the fine old square brick
+mansion which yet stands at the corner of Park Street and Beacon, though
+sunk now to a variety of business uses, and lamentably changed in aspect.
+The interior was noble, and there was an air of scholarly quiet and of
+lettered elegance in the library, where the host received his guests,
+which seemed to pervade the whole house, and which made its appeal to the
+imagination of one of them most potently.  It seemed to me that to be
+master of such circumstance and keeping would be enough of life in a
+certain way; and it all lingers in my memory yet, as if it were one with
+the gentle courtesy which welcomed me.
+
+Among my fellow-guests one night was George S. Hillard, now a faded
+reputation, and even then a life defeated of the high expectation of its
+youth.  I do not know whether his 'Six Months in Italy' still keeps
+itself in print; but it was a book once very well known; and he was
+perhaps the more gracious to me, as our host was, because of our common
+Italian background.  He was of the old Silver-gray Whig society too, and
+I suppose that order of things imparted its tone to what I felt and saw
+in that place.  The civil war had come and gone, and that order accepted
+the result if not with faith, then with patience.  There were two young
+English noblemen there that night, who had been travelling in the South,
+and whose stories of the wretched conditions they had seen moved our host
+to some open misgiving.  But the Englishmen had no question; in spite of
+all, they defended the accomplished fact, and when I ventured to say that
+now at least there could be a hope of better things, while the old order
+was only the perpetuation of despair, he mildly assented, with a gesture
+of the hand that waived the point, and a deeply sighed, "Perhaps;
+perhaps."
+
+He was a presence of great dignity, which seemed to recall the past with
+a steadfast allegiance, and yet to relax itself towards the present in
+the wisdom of the accumulated years.  His whole life had been passed in
+devotion to polite literature and in the society of the polite world; and
+he was a type of scholar such as only the circumstances of Boston could
+form.  Those circumstances could alone form such another type as Quincy;
+and I wish I could have felt then as I do now the advantage of meeting
+them so contemporaneously.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+The historian of Spanish literature was an old man nearer eighty than
+seventy when I saw him, and I recall of him personally his dark tint,
+and the scholarly refinement of his clean-shaven face, which seemed to me
+rather English than American in character.  He was quite exterior to the
+Atlantic group of writers, and had no interest in me as one of it.
+Literary Boston of that day was not a solidarity, as I soon perceived;
+and I understood that it was only in my quality of stranger that I saw
+the different phases of it.  I should not be just to a vivid phase if I
+failed to speak of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe and the impulse of reform which
+she personified.  I did not sympathize with this then so much as I do
+now, but I could appreciate it on the intellectual side.  Once, many
+years later, I heard Mrs. Howe speak in public, and it seemed to me that
+she made one of the best speeches I had ever heard.  It gave me for the
+first time a notion of what women might do in that sort if they entered
+public life; but when we met in those earlier days I was interested in
+her as perhaps our chief poetess.  I believe she did not care much to
+speak of literature; she was alert for other meanings in life, and I
+remember how she once brought to book a youthful matron who had perhaps
+unduly lamented the hardships of housekeeping, with the sharp demand,
+"Child, where is your religion?"  After the many years of an acquaintance
+which had not nearly so many meetings as years, it was pleasant to find
+her, at the latest, as strenuous as ever for the faith of works, and as
+eager to aid Stepniak as John Brown.  In her beautiful old age she
+survives a certain literary impulse of Boston, but a still higher impulse
+of Boston she will not survive, for that will last while the city
+endures.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+The Cambridge men were curiously apart from others that formed the great
+New England group, and with whom in my earlier ignorance I had always
+fancied them mingling.  Now and then I met Doctor Holmes at Longfellow's
+table, but not oftener than now and then, and I never saw Emerson in
+Cambridge at all except at Longfellow's funeral.  In my first years on
+the Atlantic I sometimes saw him, when he would address me some grave,
+rather retrorsive civilities, after I had been newly introduced to him,
+as I had always to be on these occasions.  I formed the belief that he
+did not care for me, either in my being or doing, and I am far from
+blaming him for that: on such points there might easily be two opinions,
+and I was myself often of the mind I imagined in him.
+
+If Emerson forgot me, it was perhaps because I was not of those qualities
+of things which even then, it was said, he could remember so much better
+than things themselves.  In his later years I sometimes saw him in the
+Boston streets with his beautiful face dreamily set, as he moved like one
+to whose vision
+
+              "Heaven opens inward, chasms yawn,
+               Vast images in glimmering dawn,
+               Half shown, are broken and withdrawn."
+
+It is known how before the end the eclipse became total and from moment
+to moment the record inscribed upon his mind was erased.  Some years
+before he died I sat between him and Mrs. Rose Terry Cooke, at an
+'Atlantic Breakfast' where it was part of my editorial function to
+preside.  When he was not asking me who she was, I could hear him asking
+her who I was.  His great soul worked so independently of memory as we
+conceive it, and so powerfully and essentially, that one could not help
+wondering if; after all, our personal continuity, our identity hereafter,
+was necessarily trammeled up with our enduring knowledge of what happens
+here.  His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event, and yet his
+character, his personality, his identity fully persisted.
+
+I do not know, whether the things that we printed for Emerson after his
+memory began to fail so utterly were the work of earlier years or not,
+but I know that they were of his best.  There were certain poems which
+could not have been more electly, more exquisitely his, or fashioned with
+a keener and juster self-criticism.  His vision transcended his time so
+far that some who have tired themselves out in trying to catch up with
+him have now begun to say that he was no seer at all; but I doubt if
+these form the last court of appeal in his case.  In manner, he was very
+gentle, like all those great New England men, but he was cold, like many
+of them, to the new-comer, or to the old-comer who came newly.  As I have
+elsewhere recorded, I once heard him speak critically of Hawthorne, and
+once he expressed his surprise at the late flowering brilliancy of
+Holmes's gift in the Autocrat papers after all his friends supposed it
+had borne its best fruit.  But I recall no mention of Longfellow, or
+Lowell, or Whittier from him.  At a dinner where the talk glanced upon
+Walt Whitman he turned to me as perhaps representing the interest
+posterity might take in the matter, and referred to Whitman's public use
+of his privately written praise as something altogether unexpected.  He
+did not disown it or withdraw it, but seemed to feel (not indignantly)
+that there had been an abuse of it.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+The first time I saw Whittier was in Fields's room at the publishing
+office, where I had come upon some editorial errand to my chief.  He
+introduced me to the poet: a tall, spare figure in black of Quaker cut,
+with a keen, clean-shaven face, black hair, and vivid black eyes.  It was
+just after his poem, 'Snow Bound', had made its great success, in the
+modest fashion of those days, and had sold not two hundred thousand but
+twenty thousand, and I tried to make him my compliment.  I contrived to
+say that I could not tell him how much I liked it; and he received the
+inadequate expression of my feeling with doubtless as much effusion as he
+would have met something more explicit and abundant.  If he had judged
+fit to take my contract off my hands in any way, I think he would have
+been less able to do so than any of his New England contemporaries.
+In him, as I have suggested, the Quaker calm was bound by the frosty
+Puritanic air, and he was doubly cold to the touch of the stranger,
+though he would thaw out to old friends, and sparkle in laugh and joke.
+I myself never got so far with him as to experience this geniality,
+though afterwards we became such friends as an old man and a young man
+could be who rarely met. Our better acquaintance began with some talk,
+at a second meeting, about Bayard Taylor's 'Story of Kennett', which had
+then lately appeared, and which he praised for its fidelity to Quaker
+character in its less amiable aspects.  No doubt I had made much of my
+own Quaker descent (which I felt was one of the few things I had to be
+proud of), and he therefore spoke the more frankly of those traits of
+brutality into which the primitive sincerity of the sect sometimes
+degenerated.  He thought the habit of plain-speaking had to be jealously
+guarded to keep it from becoming rude-speaking, and he matched with
+stories of his own some things I had heard my father tell of Friends in
+the backwoods who were Foes to good manners.
+
+Whittier was one of the most generous of men towards the work of others,
+especially the work of a new man, and if I did anything that he liked,
+I could count upon him for cordial recognition.  In the quiet of his
+country home at Danvers he apparently read all the magazines, and kept
+himself fully abreast of the literary movement, but I doubt if he so
+fully appreciated the importance of the social movement.  Like some
+others of the great anti-slavery men, he seemed to imagine that mankind
+had won itself a clear field by destroying chattel slavery, and he had.
+no sympathy with those who think that the man who may any moment be out
+of work is industrially a slave.  This is not strange; so few men last
+over from one reform to another that the wonder is that any should, not
+that one should not.  Whittier was prophet for one great need of the
+divine to man, and he spoke his message with a fervor that at times was
+like the trembling of a flame, or the quivering of midsummer sunshine.
+It was hard to associate with the man as one saw him, still, shy, stiff,
+the passion of his verse.  This imbued not only his antislavery
+utterances, but equally his ballads of the old witch and Quaker
+persecution, and flashed a far light into the dimness where his
+interrogations of Mystery pierced.  Whatever doubt there can be of the
+fate of other New England poets in the great and final account, it seems
+to me that certain of these pieces make his place secure.
+
+There is great inequality in his work, and I felt this so strongly that
+when I came to have full charge of the Magazine, I ventured once to
+distinguish.  He sent me a poem, and I had the temerity to return it, and
+beg him for something else.  He magnanimously refrained from all show of
+offence, and after a while, when he had printed the poem elsewhere,
+he gave me another.  By this time, I perceived that I had been wrong,
+not as to the poem returned, but as to my function regarding him and such
+as he.  I had made my reflections, and never again did I venture to pass
+upon what contributors of his quality sent me.  I took it and printed it,
+and praised the gods; and even now I think that with such men it was not
+my duty to play the censor in the periodical which they had made what it
+was.  They had set it in authority over American literature, and it was
+not for me to put myself in authority over them.  Their fame was in their
+own keeping, and it was not my part to guard it against them.
+
+After that experience I not only practised an eager acquiescence in their
+wish to reach the public through the Atlantic, but I used all the
+delicacy I was master of in bowing the way to them.  Sometimes my utmost
+did not avail, or more strictly speaking it did not avail in one instance
+with Emerson.  He had given me upon much entreaty a poem which was one of
+his greatest and best, but the proof-reader found a nominative at odds
+with its verb.  We had some trouble in reconciling them, and some other
+delays, and meanwhile Doctor Holmes offered me a poem for the same
+number.  I now doubted whether I should get Emerson's poem back in time
+for it, but unluckily the proof did come back in time, and then I had to
+choose between my poets, or acquaint them with the state of the case, and
+let them choose what I should do.  I really felt that Doctor Holmes had
+the right to precedence, since Emerson had withheld his proof so long
+that I could not count upon it; but I wrote to Emerson, and asked (as
+nearly as I can remember) whether he would consent to let me put his poem
+over to the next number, or would prefer to have it appear in the same
+number with Doctor Holmes's; the subjects were cognate, and I had my
+misgivings.  He wrote me back to "return the proofs and break up the
+forms."  I could not go to this iconoclastic extreme with the
+electrotypes of the magazine, but I could return the proofs.  I did so,
+feeling that I had done my possible, and silently grieving that there
+could be such ire in heavenly minds.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+Emerson, as I say, I had once met in Cambridge, but Whittier never;
+and I have a feeling that poet as Cambridge felt him to be, she had her
+reservations concerning him.  I cannot put these into words which would
+not oversay them, but they were akin to those she might have refined upon
+in regard to Mrs. Stowe.  Neither of these great writers would have
+appeared to Cambridge of the last literary quality; their fame was with a
+world too vast to be the test that her own
+
+               "One entire and perfect crysolite"
+
+would have formed.  Whittier in fact had not arrived at the clear
+splendor of his later work without some earlier turbidity; he was still
+from time to time capable of a false rhyme, like morn and dawn.  As for
+the author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' her syntax was such a snare to her that
+it sometimes needed the combined skill of all the proof-readers and the
+assistant editor to extricate her.  Of course, nothing was ever written
+into her work, but in changes of diction, in correction of solecisms, in
+transposition of phrases, the text was largely rewritten on the margin of
+her proofs.  The soul of her art was present, but the form was so often
+absent, that when it was clothed on anew, it would have been hard to say
+whose cut the garment was of in many places.  In fact, the proof-reading
+of the 'Atlantic Monthly' was something almost fearfully scrupulous and
+perfect.  The proofs were first read by the under proof-reader in the
+printing-office; then the head reader passed them to me perfectly clean
+as to typography, with his own abundant and most intelligent comments on
+the literature; and then I read them, making what changes I chose, and
+verifying every quotation, every date, every geographical and
+biographical name, every foreign word to the last accent, every technical
+and scientific term.  Where it was possible or at all desirable the proof
+was next submitted to the author.  When it came back to me, I revised it,
+accepting or rejecting the author's judgment according as he was entitled
+by his ability and knowledge or not to have them.  The proof now went to
+the printers for correction; they sent it again to the head reader, who
+carefully revised it and returned it again to me.  I read it a second
+time, and it was again corrected.  After this it was revised in the
+office and sent to the stereotyper, from whom it came to the head reader
+for a last revision in the plates.
+
+It would not do to say how many of the first American writers owed their
+correctness in print to the zeal of our proof-reading, but I may say that
+there were very few who did not owe something.  The wisest and ablest
+were the most patient and grateful, like Mrs. Stowe, under correction;
+it was only the beginners and the more ignorant who were angry; and
+almost always the proof-reading editor had his way on disputed points.
+I look back now, with respectful amazement at my proficiency in detecting
+the errors of the great as well as the little.  I was able to discover
+mistakes even in the classical quotations of the deeply lettered Sumner,
+and I remember, in the earliest years of my service on the Atlantic,
+waiting in this statesman's study amidst the prints and engravings that
+attested his personal resemblance to Edmund Burke, with his proofs in my
+hand and my heart in my mouth, to submit my doubts of his Latinity.  I
+forget how he received them; but he was not a very gracious person.
+
+Mrs. Stowe was a gracious person, and carried into age the inalienable
+charm of a woman who must have been very, charming earlier.  I met her
+only at the Fieldses' in Boston, where one night I witnessed a
+controversy between her and Doctor Holmes concerning homoeopathy and
+allopathy which lasted well through dinner.  After this lapse of time,
+I cannot tell how the affair ended, but I feel sure of the liking with
+which Mrs. Stowe inspired me.  There was something very simple, very
+motherly in her, and something divinely sincere.  She was quite the
+person to take 'au grand serieux' the monstrous imaginations of Lady
+Byron's jealousy and to feel it on her conscience to make public report
+of them when she conceived that the time had come to do so.
+
+In Francis Parkman I knew much later than in some others a
+differentiation of the New England type which was not less
+characteristic.  He, like so many other Boston men of letters, was of
+patrician family, and of those easy fortunes which Clio prefers her sons
+to be of; but he paid for these advantages by the suffering in which he
+wrought at what is, I suppose, our greatest history.  He wrought at it
+piecemeal, and sometimes only by moments, when the terrible head aches
+which tormented him, and the disorder of the heart which threatened his
+life, allowed him a brief respite for the task which was dear to him.
+He must have been more than a quarter of a century in completing it, and
+in this time, as he once told me, it had given him a day-laborer's wages;
+but of course money was the least return he wished from it.  I read the
+regularly successive volumes of 'The Jesuits in North America, The Old
+Regime in Canada', the 'Wolfe and Montcalm', and the others that went to
+make up the whole history with a sufficiently noisy enthusiasm, and our
+acquaintance began by his expressing his gratification with the praises
+of them that I had put in print.  We entered into relations as
+contributor and editor, and I know that he was pleased with my eagerness
+to get as many detachable chapters from the book in hand as he could give
+me for the magazine, but he was of too fine a politeness to make this the
+occasion of his first coming to see me.  He had walked out to Cambridge,
+where I then lived, in pursuance of a regimen which, I believe, finally
+built up his health; that it was unsparing, I can testify from my own
+share in one of his constitutionals in Boston, many years later.
+
+His experience in laying the groundwork for his history, and his
+researches in making it thorough, were such as to have liberated him to
+the knowledge of other manners and ideals, but he remained strictly a
+Bostonian, and as immutably of the Boston social and literary faith as
+any I knew in that capital of accomplished facts.  He had lived like an
+Indian among the wild Western tribes; he consorted with the Canadian
+archaeologists in their mousings among the colonial archives of their
+fallen state; every year he went to Quebec or Paris to study the history
+of New France in the original documents; European society was open to him
+everywhere; but he had those limitations which I nearly always found in
+the Boston men, I remember his talking to me of 'The Rise of Silas
+Lapham', in a somewhat troubled and uncertain strain, and interpreting
+his rise as the achievement of social recognition, without much or at all
+liking it or me for it.  I did not think it my part to point out that I
+had supposed the rise to be a moral one; and later I fell under his
+condemnation for certain high crimes and misdemeanors I had been guilty
+of against a well-known ideal in fiction.  These in fact constituted
+lese-majesty of romanticism, which seemed to be disproportionately dear
+to a man who was in his own way trying to tell the truth of human nature
+as I was in mine.  His displeasures passed, however, and my last meeting
+with our greatest historian, as I think him, was of unalloyed
+friendliness.  He came to me during my final year in Boston for nothing
+apparently but to tell me of his liking for a book of mine describing
+boy-life in Southern Ohio a half-century ago.  He wished to talk about
+many points of this, which he found the same as his own boylife in the
+neighborhood of Boston; and we could agree that the life of the Anglo-
+Saxon boy was pretty much the same everywhere.  He had helped himself
+into my apartment with a crutch, but I do not remember how he had fallen
+lame.  It was the end of his long walks, I believe, and not long
+afterwards I had the grief to read of his death.  I noticed that perhaps
+through his enforced quiet, he had put on weight; his fine face was full;
+whereas when I first knew him he was almost delicately thin of figure and
+feature.  He was always of a distinguished presence, and his face had a
+great distinction.
+
+It had not the appealing charm I found in the face of James Parton,
+another historian I knew earlier in my Boston days.  I cannot say how
+much his books, once so worthily popular, are now known but I have an
+abiding sense of their excellence.  I have not read the 'Life of
+Voltaire', which was the last, but all the rest, from the first, I have
+read, and if there are better American biographies than those of Franklin
+or of Jefferson, I could not say where to find them. The Greeley and the
+Burr were younger books, and so was the Jackson, and they were not nearly
+so good; but to all the author had imparted the valuable humanity in
+which he abounded.  He was never of the fine world of literature, the
+world that sniffs and sneers, and abashes the simpler-hearted reader.
+But he was a true artist, and English born as he was, he divined American
+character as few Americans have done.  He was a man of eminent courage,
+and in the days when to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast, he
+had the heart to say of the Mysteries, that he did not know.  He outlived
+the condemnation that this brought, and I think that no man ever came
+near him without in some measure loving him.  To me he was of a most
+winning personality, which his strong, gentle face expressed, and a cast
+in the eye which he could not bring to bear directly upon his vis-a-vis,
+endeared.  I never met him without wishing more of his company, for he
+seldom failed to say something to whatever was most humane and most
+modern in me.  Our last meeting was at Newburyport, whither he had long
+before removed from New York, and where in the serene atmosphere of the
+ancient Puritan town he found leisure and inspiration for his work.
+He was not then engaged upon any considerable task, and he had aged and
+broken somewhat.  But the old geniality, the old warmth glowed in him,
+and made a summer amidst the storm of snow that blinded the wintry air
+without.  A new light had then lately come into my life, by which I saw
+all things that did not somehow tell for human brotherhood dwarfish and
+ugly, and he listened, as I imagined, to what I had to say with the
+tolerant sympathy of a man who has been a long time thinking those
+things, and views with a certain amusement the zeal of the fresh
+discoverer.
+
+There was yet another historian in Boston, whose acquaintance I made
+later than either Parkman's or Parton's, and whose very recent death
+leaves me with the grief of a friend.  No ones indeed, could meet John
+Codman Ropes without wishing to be his friend, or without finding a
+friend in him.  He had his likes and his dislikes, but he could have had
+no enmities except for evil and meanness.  I never knew a man of higher
+soul, of sweeter nature, and his whole life was a monument of character.
+It cannot wound him now to speak of the cruel deformity which came upon
+him in his boyhood, and haunted all his after days with suffering.  His
+gentle face showed the pain which is always the part of the hunchback,
+but nothing else in him confessed a sense of his affliction, and the
+resolute activity of his mind denied it in every way.  He was, as is well
+known, a very able lawyer, in full practice, while he was making his
+studies of military history, and winning recognition for almost unique
+insight and thoroughness in that direction, though I believe that when he
+came to embody the results in those extraordinary volumes recording the
+battles of our civil war, he retired from the law in some measure.  He
+knew these battles more accurately than the generals who fought them, and
+he was of a like proficiency in the European wars from the time of
+Napoleon down to our own time.  I have heard a story, which I cannot
+vouch for, that when foreknowledge of his affliction, at the outbreak of
+our civil war, forbade him to be a soldier, he became a student of
+soldiership, and wreaked in that sort the passion of his most gallant
+spirit.  But whether this was true or not, it is certain that he pursued
+the study with a devotion which never blinded him to the atrocity of war.
+Some wars he could excuse and even justify, but for any war that seemed
+wanton or aggressive, he had only abhorrence.
+
+The last summer of a score that I had known him, we sat on the veranda of
+his cottage at York Harbor, and looked out over the moonlit sea, and he
+talked of the high and true things, with the inextinguishable zest for
+the inquiry which I always found in him, though he was then feeling the
+approaches of the malady which was so soon to end all groping in these
+shadows for him.  He must have faced the fact with the same courage and
+the same trust with which he faced all facts.  From the first I found him
+a deeply religious man, not only in the ecclesiastical sense, but in the
+more mystical meanings of the word, and he kept his faith as he kept his
+youth to the last.  Every one who knew him, knows how young he was in
+heart, and how he liked to have those that were young in years about him.
+He wished to have his house in Boston, as well as his cottage at York,
+full of young men and young girls, whose joy of life he made his own, and
+whose society he preferred to his contemporaries'.  One could not blame
+him for that, or for seeking the sun, wherever he could, but it would be
+a false notion of him to suppose that his sympathies were solely or
+chiefly with the happy.  In every sort, as I knew him, he was fine and
+good.  The word is not worthy of him, after some of its uses and
+associations, but if it were unsmutched by these, and whitened to its
+primitive significance, I should say he was one of the most perfect
+gentlemen I ever knew.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Celia Thaxter
+Charles F. Browne
+Dawn upon him through a cloud of other half remembered faces
+Edmund Quincy
+Ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense
+Few men last over from one reform to another
+Francis Parkman
+Generous lover of all that was excellent in literature
+Got out of it all the fun there was in it
+Greeting of great impersonal cordiality
+Grieving that there could be such ire in heavenly minds
+His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event
+Julia Ward Howe
+Looked as if Destiny had sat upon it
+Man who may any moment be out of work is industrially a slave
+Pathos of revolt from the colorless rigidities
+Plain-speaking or Rude Speaking
+Pointed the moral in all they did
+Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the sermon
+Tired themselves out in trying to catch up with him
+True to an ideal of life rather than to life itself
+Wasted face, and his gay eyes had the death-look
+When to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast
+Whitman's public use of his privately written praise
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Literary Boston
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
+
+
+Elsewhere we literary folk are apt to be such a common lot, with
+tendencies here and there to be a shabby lot; we arrive from all sorts of
+unexpected holes and corners of the earth, remote, obscure; and at the
+best we do so often come up out of the ground; but at Boston we were of
+ascertained and noted origin, and good part of us dropped from the skies.
+Instead of holding horses before the doors of theatres; or capping verses
+at the plough-tail; or tramping over Europe with nothing but a flute in
+the pocket; or walking up to the metropolis with no luggage but the MS.
+of a tragedy; or sleeping in doorways or under the arches of bridges; or
+serving as apothecaries' 'prentices--we were good society from the
+beginning.  I think this was none the worse for us, and it was vastly the
+better for good society.
+
+Literature in Boston, indeed, was so respectable, and often of so high a
+lineage, that to be a poet was not only to be good society, but almost to
+be good family.  If one names over the men who gave Boston her supremacy
+in literature during that Unitarian harvest-time of the old Puritanic
+seed-time which was her Augustan age, one names the people who were and
+who had been socially first in the city ever since the self-exile of the
+Tories at the time of the Revolution.  To say Prescott, Motley, Parkman,
+Lowell, Norton, Higginson, Dana, Emerson, Channing, was to say patrician,
+in the truest and often the best sense, if not the largest.  Boston was
+small, but these were of her first citizens, and their primacy, in its
+way, was of the same quality as that, say, of the chief families of
+Venice.  But these names can never have the effect for the stranger that
+they had for one to the manner born.  I say had, for I doubt whether in
+Boston they still mean all that they once meant, and that their
+equivalents meant in science, in law, in politics.  The most famous, if
+not the greatest of all the literary men of Boston, I have not mentioned
+with them, for Longfellow was not of the place, though by his sympathies
+and relations he became of it; and I have not mentioned Oliver Wendell
+Holmes, because I think his name would come first into the reader's
+thought with the suggestion of social quality in the humanities.
+
+Holmes was of the Brahminical caste which his humorous recognition
+invited from its subjectivity in the New England consciousness into the
+light where all could know it and own it, and like Longfellow he was
+allied to the patriciate of Boston by the most intimate ties of life.
+For a long time, for the whole first period of his work, he stood for
+that alone, its tastes, its prejudices, its foibles even, and when he
+came to stand in his 'second period, for vastly, for infinitely more,
+and to make friends with the whole race, as few men have ever done,
+it was always, I think, with a secret shiver of doubt, a backward look of
+longing, and an eye askance.  He was himself perfectly aware of this at
+times, and would mark his several misgivings with a humorous sense of the
+situation.  He was essentially too kind to be of a narrow world, too
+human to be finally of less than humanity, too gentle to be of the finest
+gentility.  But such limitations as he had were in the direction I have
+hinted, or perhaps more than hinted; and I am by no means ready to make a
+mock of them, as it would be so easy to do for some reasons that he has
+himself suggested.  To value aright the affection which the old Bostonian
+had for Boston one must conceive of something like the patriotism of men
+in the times when a man's city was a man's country, something Athenian,
+something Florentine.  The war that nationalized us liberated this love
+to the whole country, but its first tenderness remained still for Boston,
+and I suppose a Bostonian still thinks of himself first as a Bostonian
+and then as an American, in a way that no New-Yorker could deal with
+himself.  The rich historical background dignifies and ennobles the
+intense public spirit of the place, and gives it a kind of personality.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+In literature Doctor Holmes survived all the Bostonians who had given the
+city her primacy in letters, but when I first knew him there was no
+apparent ground for questioning it.  I do not mean now the time when I
+visited New England, but when I came to live near Boston, and to begin
+the many happy years which I spent in her fine, intellectual air.
+I found time to run in upon him, while I was there arranging to take my
+place on the Atlantic Monthly, and I remember that in this brief moment
+with him he brought me to book about some vaunting paragraph in the
+'Nation' claiming the literary primacy for New York.  He asked me if I
+knew who wrote it, and I was obliged to own that I had written it myself,
+when with the kindness he always showed me he protested against my
+position.  To tell the truth, I do not think now I had any very good
+reasons for it, and I certainly could urge none that would stand against
+his.  I could only fall back upon the saving clause that this primacy was
+claimed mainly if not wholly for New York in the future.  He was willing
+to leave me the connotations of prophecy, but I think he did even this
+out of politeness rather than conviction, and I believe he had always a
+sensitiveness where Boston was concerned, which could not seem ungenerous
+to any generous mind.  Whatever lingering doubt of me he may have had,
+with reference to Boston, seemed to satisfy itself when several years
+afterwards he happened to speak of a certain character in an early novel
+of mine, who was not quite the kind of Bostonian one could wish to be.
+The thing came up in talk with another person, who had referred to my
+Bostonian, and the doctor had apparently made his acquaintance in the
+book, and not liked him.  "I understood, of course," he said, "that he
+was a Bostonian, not the Bostonian," and I could truthfully answer that
+this was by all means my own understanding too.
+
+His fondness for his city, which no one could appreciate better than
+myself, I hope, often found expression in a burlesque excess in his
+writings, and in his talk perhaps oftener still.  Hard upon my return
+from Venice I had a half-hour with him in his old study on Charles
+Street, where he still lived in 1865, and while I was there a young man
+came in for the doctor's help as a physician, though he looked so very
+well, and was so lively and cheerful, that I have since had my doubts
+whether he had not made a pretext for a glimpse of him as the Autocrat.
+The doctor took him upon his word, however, and said he had been so long
+out of practice that he could not do anything for him, but he gave him
+the address of another physician, somewhere near Washington Street.
+"And if you don't know where Washington Street is," he said, with a gay
+burst at a certain vagueness which had come into the young man's face,
+"you don't know anything."
+
+We had been talking of Venice, and what life was like there, and he made
+me tell him in some detail.  He was especially interested in what I had
+to say of the minute subdivision and distribution of the necessaries,
+the small coins, and the small values adapted to their purchase,
+the intensely retail character, in fact, of household provisioning;
+and I could see how he pleased himself in formulating the theory that the
+higher a civilization the finer the apportionment of the demands and
+supplies.  The ideal, he said, was a civilization in which you could buy
+two cents' worth of beef, and a divergence from this standard was towards
+barbarism.
+
+The secret of the man who is universally interesting is that he is
+universally interested, and this was, above all, the secret of the charm
+that Doctor Holmes had for every one.  No doubt he knew it, for what that
+most alert intelligence did not know of itself was scarcely worth
+knowing.  This knowledge was one of his chief pleasures, I fancy; he
+rejoiced in the consciousness which is one of the highest attributes of
+the highly organized man, and he did not care for the consequences in
+your mind, if you were so stupid as not to take him aright.  I remember
+the delight Henry James, the father of the novelist, had in reporting to
+me the frankness of the doctor, when he had said to him, "Holmes, you are
+intellectually the most alive man I ever knew."  "I am, I am," said the
+doctor.  "From the crown of my head to the sole of my foot, I'm alive,
+I'm alive!"  Any one who ever saw him will imagine the vivid relish he
+had in recognizing the fact.  He could not be with you a moment without
+shedding upon you the light of his flashing wit, his radiant humor, and
+he shone equally upon the rich and poor in mind.  His gaiety of heart
+could not withhold itself from any chance of response, but he did wish
+always to be fully understood, and to be liked by those he liked.  He
+gave his liking cautiously, though, for the affluence of his sympathies
+left him without the reserves of colder natures, and he had to make up
+for these with careful circumspection.  He wished to know the character
+of the person who made overtures to his acquaintance, for he was aware
+that his friendship lay close to it; he wanted to be sure that he was a
+nice person, and though I think he preferred social quality in his
+fellow-man, he did not refuse himself to those who had merely a sweet and
+wholesome humanity.  He did not like anything that tasted or smelt of
+Bohemianism in the personnel of literature, but he did not mind the scent
+of the new-ploughed earth, or even of the barn-yard.  I recall his
+telling me once that after two younger brothers-in-letters had called
+upon him in the odor of an habitual beeriness and smokiness, he opened
+the window; and the very last time I saw him he remembered at eighty-five
+the offence he had found on his first visit to New York, when a
+metropolitan poet had asked him to lunch in a basement restaurant.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+He seemed not to mind, however, climbing to the little apartment we had
+in Boston when we came there in 1866, and he made this call upon us in
+due form, bringing Mrs. Holmes with him as if to accent the recognition
+socially.  We were then incredibly young, much younger than I find people
+ever are nowadays, and in the consciousness of our youth we felt, to the
+last exquisite value of the fact, what it was to have the Autocrat come
+to see us; and I believe he was not displeased to perceive this; he liked
+to know that you felt his quality in every way.  That first winter,
+however, I did not see him often, and in the spring we went to live in
+Cambridge, and thereafter I met him chiefly at Longfellow's, or when I
+came in to dine at the Fieldses', in Boston.  It was at certain meetings
+of the Dante Club, when Longfellow read aloud his translation for
+criticism, and there was supper later, that one saw the doctor; and his
+voice was heard at the supper rather than at the criticism, for he was no
+Italianate.  He always seemed to like a certain turn of the talk toward
+the mystical, but with space for the feet on a firm ground of fact this
+side of the shadows; when it came to going over among them, and laying
+hold of them with the band of faith, as if they were substance, he was
+not of the excursion.  It is well known how fervent, I cannot say devout,
+a spiritualist Longfellow's brother-in-law, Appleton, was; and when he
+was at the table too, it took all the poet's delicate skill to keep him
+and the Autocrat from involving themselves in a cataclysmal controversy
+upon the matter of manifestations.  With Doctor Holmes the inquiry was
+inquiry, to the last, I believe, and the burden of proof was left to the
+ghosts and their friends.  His attitude was strictly scientific; he
+denied nothing, but he expected the supernatural to be at least as
+convincing as the natural.
+
+There was a time in his history when the popular ignorance classed him
+with those who were once rudely called infidels; but the world has since
+gone so fast and so far that the mind he was of concerning religious
+belief would now be thought religious by a good half of the religious
+world.  It is true that he had and always kept a grudge against the
+ancestral Calvinism which afflicted his youth; and he was through all
+rises and lapses of opinion essentially Unitarian; but of the honest
+belief of any one, I am sure he never felt or spoke otherwise than most
+tolerantly, most tenderly.  As often as he spoke of religion, and his
+talk tended to it very often, I never heard an irreligious word from him,
+far less a scoff or sneer at religion; and I am certain that this was not
+merely because he would have thought it bad taste, though undoubtedly he
+would have thought it bad taste; I think it annoyed, it hurt him, to be
+counted among the iconoclasts, and he would have been profoundly grieved
+if he could have known how widely this false notion of him once
+prevailed.  It can do no harm at this late day to impart from the secrets
+of the publishing house the fact that a supposed infidelity in the tone
+of his story The Guardian Angel cost the Atlantic Monthly many
+subscribers.  Now the tone of that story would not be thought even mildly
+agnostic, I fancy; and long before his death the author had outlived the
+error concerning him.
+
+It was not the best of his stories, by any means, and it would not be too
+harsh to say that it was the poorest.  His novels all belonged to an
+order of romance which was as distinctly his own as the form of
+dramatized essay which he invented in the Autocrat.  If he did not think
+poorly of them, he certainly did not think too proudly, and I heard him
+quote with relish the phrase of a lady who had spoken of them to him as
+his "medicated novels."  That, indeed, was perhaps what they were; a
+faint, faint odor of the pharmacopoeia clung to their pages; their magic
+was scientific.  He knew this better than any one else, of course, and if
+any one had said it in his turn he would hardly have minded it.  But what
+he did mind was the persistent misinterpretation of his intention in
+certain quarters where he thought he had the right to respectful
+criticism in stead of the succession of sneers that greeted the
+successive numbers of his story; and it was no secret that he felt the
+persecution keenly.  Perhaps he thought that he had already reached that
+time in his literary life when he was a fact rather than a question,
+and when reasons and not feelings must have to do with his acceptance or
+rejection.  But he had to live many years yet before he reached this
+state.  When he did reach it, happily a good while before his death,
+I do not believe any man ever enjoyed the like condition more. He loved
+to feel himself out of the fight, with much work before him still,
+but with nothing that could provoke ill-will in his activities.  He loved
+at all times to take himself objectively, if I may so express my sense of
+a mental attitude that misled many.  As I have said before, he was
+universally interested, and he studied the universe from himself.  I do
+not know how one is to study it otherwise; the impersonal has really no
+existence; but with all his subtlety and depth he was of a make so
+simple, of a spirit so naive, that he could not practise the feints some
+use to conceal that interest in self which, after all, every one knows is
+only concealed.  He frankly and joyously made himself the starting-point
+in all his inquest of the hearts and minds of other men, but so far from
+singling himself out in this, and standing apart in it, there never was
+any one who was more eagerly and gladly your fellow-being in the things
+of the soul.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+In the things of the world, he had fences, and looked at some people
+through palings and even over the broken bottles on the tops of walls;
+and I think he was the loser by this, as well as they.  But then I think
+all fences are bad, and that God has made enough differences between men;
+we need not trouble ourselves to multiply them.  Even behind his fences,
+however, Holmes had a heart kind for the outsiders, and I do not believe
+any one came into personal relations with him who did not experience this
+kindness.  In that long and delightful talk I had with him on my return
+from Venice (I can praise the talk because it was mainly his), we spoke
+of the status of domestics in the Old World, and how fraternal the
+relation of high and low was in Italy, while in England, between master
+and man, it seemed without acknowledgment of their common humanity.
+"Yes," he said, "I always felt as if English servants expected to be
+trampled on; but I can't do that.  If they want to be trampled on, they
+must get some one else."  He thought that our American way was infinitely
+better; and I believe that in spite of the fences there was always an
+instinctive impulse with him to get upon common ground with his fellow-
+man.  I used to notice in the neighborhood cabman who served our block on
+Beacon Street a sort of affectionate reverence for the Autocrat, which
+could have come from nothing but the kindly terms between them; if you
+went to him when he was engaged to Doctor Holmes, he told you so with a
+sort of implication in his manner that the thought of anything else for
+the time was profanation.  The good fellow who took him his drives about
+the Beverly and Manchester shores seemed to be quite in the joke of the
+doctor's humor, and within the bounds of his personal modesty and his
+functional dignity permitted himself a smile at the doctor's sallies,
+when you stood talking with him, or listening to him at the carriage-
+side.
+
+The civic and social circumstance that a man values himself on is
+commonly no part of his value, and certainly no part of his greatness.
+Rather, it is the very thing that limits him, and I think that Doctor
+Holmes appeared in the full measure of his generous personality to those
+who did not and could not appreciate his circumstance, and not to those
+who formed it, and who from life-long association were so dear and
+comfortable to him.  Those who best knew how great a man he was were
+those who came from far to pay him their duty, or to thank him for some
+help they had got from his books, or to ask his counsel or seek his
+sympathy.  With all such he was most winningly tender, most intelligently
+patient.  I suppose no great author was ever more visited by letter and
+in person than he, or kept a faithfuler conscience for his guests.  With
+those who appeared to him in the flesh he used a miraculous tact, and I
+fancy in his treatment of all the physician native in him bore a
+characteristic part.  No one seemed to be denied access to him, but it
+was after a moment of preparation that one was admitted, and any one who
+was at all sensitive must have felt from the first moment in his presence
+that there could be no trespassing in point of time.  If now and then
+some insensitive began to trespass, there was a sliding-scale of
+dismissal that never failed of its work, and that really saved the author
+from the effect of intrusion.  He was not bored because he would not be.
+
+I transfer at random the impressions of many years to my page, and I
+shall not try to observe a chronological order in these memories.  Vivid
+among them is that of a visit which I paid him with Osgood the publisher,
+then newly the owner of the Atlantic Monthly, when I had newly become the
+sole editor.  We wished to signalize our accession to the control of the
+magazine by a stroke that should tell most in the public eye, and we
+thought of asking Doctor Holmes to do something again in the manner of
+the Autocrat and the Professor at the Breakfast Table.  Some letters had
+passed between him and the management concerning our wish, and then
+Osgood thought that it would be right and fit for us to go to him in
+person.  He proposed the visit, and Doctor Holmes received us with a mind
+in which he had evidently formulated all his thoughts upon the matter.
+His main question was whether at his age of sixty years a man was
+justified in seeking to recall a public of the past, or to create a new
+public in the present.  He seemed to have looked the ground over not only
+with a personal interest in the question, but with a keen scientific zest
+for it as something which it was delightful to consider in its generic
+relations; and I fancy that the pleasure of this inquiry more than
+consoled him for such pangs of misgiving as he must have had in the
+personal question.  As commonly happens in the solution of such problems,
+it was not solved; he was very willing to take our minds upon it, and to
+incur the risk, if we thought it well and were willing to share it.
+
+We came away rejoicing, and the new series began with the new year
+following.  It was by no means the popular success that we had hoped;
+not because the author had not a thousand new things to say, or failed to
+say them with the gust and freshness of his immortal youth, but because
+it was not well to disturb a form associated in the public mind with an
+achievement which had become classic.  It is of the Autocrat of the
+Breakfast Table that people think, when they think of the peculiar
+species of dramatic essay which the author invented, and they think also
+of the Professor at the Breakfast Table, because he followed so soon;
+but the Poet at the Breakfast Table came so long after that his advent
+alienated rather than conciliated liking.  Very likely, if the Poet had
+come first he would have had no second place in the affections of his
+readers, for his talk was full of delightful matter; and at least one of
+the poems which graced each instalment was one of the finest and greatest
+that Doctor Holmes ever wrote.  I mean "Homesick in Heaven," which seems
+to me not only what I have said, but one of the most important, the most
+profoundly pathetic in the language.  Indeed, I do not know any other
+that in the same direction goes so far with suggestion so penetrating.
+The other poems were mainly of a cast which did not win; the metaphysics
+in them were too much for the human interest, and again there rose a
+foolish clamor of the creeds against him on account of them.  The great
+talent, the beautiful and graceful fancy, the eager imagination of the
+Autocrat could not avail in this third attempt, and I suppose the Poet at
+the Breakfast Table must be confessed as near a failure as Doctor Holmes
+could come.  It certainly was so in the magazine which the brilliant
+success of the first had availed to establish in the high place the
+periodical must always hold in the history of American literature.
+Lowell was never tired of saying, when he recurred to the first days of
+his editorship, that the magazine could never have gone at all without
+the Autocrat papers.  He was proud of having insisted upon Holmes's doing
+something for the new venture, and he was fond of recalling the author's
+misgivings concerning his contributions, which later repeated themselves
+with too much reason, though not with the reason that was in his own
+mind.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+He lived twenty-five years after that self-question at sixty, and after
+eighty he continued to prove that threescore was not the limit of a man's
+intellectual activity or literary charm.  During all that time the work
+he did in mere quantity was the work that a man in the prime of life
+might well have been vain of doing, and it was of a quality not less
+surprising.  If I asked him with any sort of fair notice I could rely
+upon him always for something for the January number, and throughout the
+year I could count upon him for those occasional pieces in which he so
+easily excelled all former writers of occasional verse, and which he
+liked to keep from the newspapers for the magazine.  He had a pride in
+his promptness with copy, and you could always trust his promise.  The
+printer's toe never galled the author's kibe in his case; he wished to
+have an early proof, which he corrected fastidiously, but not overmuch,
+and he did not keep it long.  He had really done all his work in the
+manuscript, which came print-perfect and beautifully clear from his pen,
+in that flowing, graceful hand which to the last kept a suggestion of the
+pleasure he must have had in it.  Like all wise contributors, he was not
+only patient, but very glad of all the queries and challenges that proof-
+reader and editor could accumulate on the margin of his proofs, and when
+they were both altogether wrong he was still grateful.  In one of his
+poems there was some Latin-Quarter French, which our collective purism
+questioned, and I remember how tender of us he was in maintaining that in
+his Parisian time, at least, some ladies beyond the Seine said "Eh,
+b'en," instead of "Eh, bien."  He knew that we must be always on the
+lookout for such little matters, and he would not wound our ignorance.
+I do not think any one enjoyed praise more than he.  Of course he would
+not provoke it, but if it came of itself, he would not deny himself the
+pleasure, as long as a relish of it remained.  He used humorously to
+recognize his delight in it, and to say of the lecture audiences which
+in earlier times hesitated applause, "Why don't they give me three times
+three?  I can stand it!"  He himself gave in the generous fulness he
+desired.  He did not praise foolishly or dishonestly, though he would
+spare an open dislike; but when a thing pleased him he knew how to say so
+cordially and skilfully, so that it might help as well as delight.
+I suppose no great author has tried more sincerely and faithfully to
+befriend the beginner than he; and from time to time he would commend
+something to me that he thought worth looking at, but never insistently.
+In certain cases, where he had simply to ease a burden, from his own to
+the editorial shoulders, he would ask that the aspirant might be
+delicately treated.  There might be personal reasons for this, but
+usually his kindness of heart moved him.  His tastes had their
+geographical limit, but his sympathies were boundless, and the hopeless
+creature for whom he interceded was oftener remote from Boston and New
+England than otherwise.
+
+It seems to me that he had a nature singularly affectionate, and that it
+was this which was at fault if he gave somewhat too much of himself to
+the celebration of the Class of '29, and all the multitude of Boston
+occasions, large and little, embalmed in the clear amber of his verse,
+somewhat to the disadvantage of the amber.  If he were asked he could not
+deny the many friendships and fellowships which united in the asking;
+the immediate reclame from these things was sweet to him; but he loved
+to comply as much as he loved to be praised.  In the pleasure he got he
+could feel himself a prophet in his own country, but the country which
+owned him prophet began perhaps to feel rather too much as if it owned
+him, and did not prize his vaticinations at all their worth.  Some polite
+Bostonians knew him chiefly on this side, and judged him to their own
+detriment from it.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+After we went to live in Cambridge, my life and the delight in it were so
+wholly there that in ten years I had hardly been in as many Boston
+houses.  As I have said, I met Doctor Holmes at the Fieldses', and at
+Longfellow's, when he came out to a Dante supper, which was not often,
+and somewhat later at the Saturday Club dinners.  One parlous time at the
+publisher's I have already recalled, when Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe and
+the Autocrat clashed upon homeopathy, and it required all the tact of the
+host to lure them away from the dangerous theme.  As it was, a battle
+waged in the courteous forms of Fontenoy, went on pretty well through the
+dinner, and it was only over the coffee that a truce was called.  I need
+not say which was heterodox, or that each had a deep and strenuous
+conscience in the matter.  I have always felt it a proof of his extreme
+leniency to me, unworthy, that the doctor was able to tolerate my own
+defection from the elder faith in medicine; and I could not feel his
+kindness less caressing because I knew it a concession to an infirmity.
+He said something like, After all a good physician was the great matter;
+and I eagerly turned his clemency to praise of our family doctor.
+
+He was very constant at the Saturday Club, as long as his strength
+permitted, and few of its members missed fewer of its meetings.
+He continued to sit at its table until the ghosts of Hawthorne,
+of Agassiz, of Emerson, of Longfellow, of Lowell, out of others less
+famous, bore him company there among the younger men in the flesh.
+It must have been very melancholy, but nothing could deeply cloud his
+most cheerful spirit.  His strenuous interest in life kept him alive to
+all the things of it, after so many of his friends were dead.  The
+questions which he was wont to deal with so fondly, so wisely, the great
+problems of the soul, were all the more vital, perhaps, because the
+personal concern in them was increased by the translation to some other
+being of the men who had so often tried with him to fathom them here.
+The last time I was at that table he sat alone there among those great
+memories; but he was as gay as ever I saw him; his wit sparkled, his
+humor gleamed; the poetic touch was deft and firm as of old; the serious
+curiosity, the instant sympathy remained.  To the witness he was
+pathetic, but to himself he could only have been interesting, as the
+figure of a man surviving, in an alien but not unfriendly present, the
+past which held so vast a part of all that had constituted him.  If he
+had thought of himself in this way, it would have been without one
+emotion of self-pity, such as more maudlin souls indulge, but with a love
+of knowledge and wisdom as keenly alert as in his prime.
+
+For three privileged years I lived all but next-door neighbor of Doctor
+Holmes in that part of Beacon Street whither he removed after he left his
+old home in Charles Street, and during these years I saw him rather
+often.  We were both on the water side, which means so much more than the
+words say, and our library windows commanded the same general view of the
+Charles rippling out into the Cambridge marshes and the sunsets, and
+curving eastward under Long Bridge, through shipping that increased
+onward to the sea.  He said that you could count fourteen towns and
+villages in the compass of that view, with the three conspicuous
+monuments accenting the different attractions of it: the tower of
+Memorial Hall at Harvard; the obelisk on Bunker Hill; and in the centre
+of the picture that bulk of Tufts College which he said he expected to
+greet his eyes the first thing when he opened them in the other world.
+But the prospect, though generally the same, had certain precious
+differences for each of us, which I have no doubt he valued himself as
+much upon as I did.  I have a notion that he fancied these were to be
+enjoyed best in his library through two oval panes let into the bay there
+apart from the windows, for he was apt to make you come and look out of
+them if you got to talking of the view before you left.  In this pleasant
+study he lived among the books, which seemed to multiply from case to
+case and shelf to shelf, and climb from floor to ceiling.  Everything was
+in exquisite order, and the desk where he wrote was as scrupulously neat
+as if the sloven disarray of most authors' desks were impossible to him.
+He had a number of ingenious little contrivances for helping his work,
+which he liked to show you; for a time a revolving book-case at the
+corner of his desk seemed to be his pet; and after that came his
+fountain-pen, which he used with due observance of its fountain
+principle, though he was tolerant of me when I said I always dipped mine
+in the inkstand; it was a merit in his eyes to use a fountain pen in
+anywise.  After you had gone over these objects with him, and perhaps
+taken a peep at something he was examining through his microscope, he sat
+down at one corner of his hearth, and invited you to an easy chair at the
+other.  His talk was always considerate of your wish to be heard, but the
+person who wished to talk when he could listen to Doctor Holmes was his
+own victim, and always the loser.  If you were well advised you kept
+yourself to the question and response which manifested your interest in
+what he was saying, and let him talk on, with his sweet smile, and that
+husky laugh he broke softly into at times.  Perhaps he was not very well
+when you came in upon him; then he would name his trouble, with a
+scientific zest and accuracy, and pass quickly to other matters.  As I
+have noted, he was interested in himself only on the universal side; and
+he liked to find his peculiarity in you better than to keep it his own;
+he suffered a visible disappointment if he could not make you think or
+say you were so and so too.  The querulous note was not in his most
+cheerful register; he would not dwell upon a specialized grief; though
+sometimes I have known him touch very lightly and currently upon a slight
+annoyance, or disrelish for this or that.  As he grew older, he must have
+had, of course, an old man's disposition to speak of his infirmities; but
+it was fine to see him catch himself up in this, when he became conscious
+of it, and stop short with an abrupt turn to something else.  With a real
+interest, which he gave humorous excess, he would celebrate some little
+ingenious thing that had fallen in his way, and I have heard him
+expatiate with childlike delight upon the merits of a new razor he had
+got: a sort of mower, which he could sweep recklessly over cheek and chin
+without the least danger of cutting himself.  The last time I saw him he
+asked me if he had ever shown me that miraculous razor; and I doubt if he
+quite liked my saying I had seen one of the same kind.
+
+It seemed to me that he enjoyed sitting at his chimney-corner rather as
+the type of a person having a good time than as such a person; he would
+rather be up and about something, taking down a book, making a note,
+going again to his little windows, and asking you if you had seen the
+crows yet that sometimes alighted on the shoals left bare by the ebb-tide
+behind the house.  The reader will recall his lovely poem, "My Aviary,"
+which deals with the winged life of that pleasant prospect.  I shared
+with him in the flock of wild-ducks which used to come into our neighbor
+waters in spring, when the ice broke up, and stayed as long as the
+smallest space of brine remained unfrozen in the fall.  He was graciously
+willing I should share in them, and in the cloud of gulls which drifted
+about in the currents of the sea and sky there, almost the whole year
+round.  I did not pretend an original right to them, coming so late as I
+did to the place, and I think my deference pleased him.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+As I have said, he liked his fences, or at least liked you to respect
+them, or to be sensible of them.  As often as I went to see him I was
+made to wait in the little reception-room below, and never shown at once
+to his study.  My name would be carried up, and I would hear him
+verifying my presence from the maid through the opened door; then there
+came a cheery cry of wellcome: "Is that you?  Come up, come up!" and I
+found him sometimes half-way down the stairs to meet me.  He would make
+an excuse for having kept me below a moment, and say something about the
+rule he had to observe in all cases, as if he would not have me feel his
+fence a personal thing.  I was aware how thoroughly his gentle spirit
+pervaded the whole house; the Irish maid who opened the door had the
+effect of being a neighbor too, and of being in the joke of the little
+formality; she apologized in her turn for the reception-room; there was
+certainly nothing trampled upon in her manner, but affection and
+reverence for him whose gate she guarded, with something like the
+sentiment she would have cherished for a dignitary of the Church, but
+nicely differenced and adjusted to the Autocrat's peculiar merits.
+
+The last time I was in that place, a visitant who had lately knocked at
+my own door was about to enter.  I met the master of the house on the
+landing of the stairs outside his study, and he led me in for the few
+moments we could spend together.  He spoke of the shadow so near, and
+said he supposed there could be no hope, but he did not refuse the cheer
+I offered him from my ignorance against his knowledge, and at something
+that was thought or said he smiled, with even a breath of laughter, so
+potent is the wont of a lifetime, though his eyes were full of tears, and
+his voice broke with his words.  Those who have sorrowed deepest will
+understand this best.
+
+It was during the few years of our Beacon Street neighborhood that he
+spent those hundred days abroad in his last visit to England and France.
+He was full of their delight when he came back, and my propinquity gave
+me the advantage of hearing him speak of them at first hand.  He
+whimsically pleased himself most with his Derby-day experiences, and
+enjoyed contrasting the crowd and occasion with that of forty or fifty
+years earlier, when he had seen some famous race of the Derby won;
+nothing else in England seemed to have moved him so much, though all that
+royalties, dignities, and celebrities could well do for him had been
+done.  Of certain things that happened to him, characteristic of the
+English, and interesting to him in their relation to himself through his
+character of universally interested man, he spoke freely; but he has said
+what he chose to the public about them, and I have no right to say more.
+The thing that most vexed him during his sojourn apparently was to have
+been described in one of the London papers as quite deaf; and I could
+truly say to him that I had never imagined him at all deaf, or heard him
+accused of it before.  "Oh, yes," he said, "I am a little hard of hearing
+on one side.  But it isn't deafness."
+
+He had, indeed, few or none of the infirmities of age that make
+themselves painfully or inconveniently evident.  He carried his slight
+figure erect, and until his latest years his step was quick and sure.
+Once he spoke of the lessened height of old people, apropos of something
+that was said, and "They will shrink, you know," he added, as if he were
+not at all concerned in the fact himself.  If you met him in the street,
+you encountered a spare, carefully dressed old gentleman, with a clean-
+shaven face and a friendly smile, qualified by the involuntary frown of
+his thick, senile brows; well coated, lustrously shod, well gloved, in a
+silk hat, latterly wound with a mourning-weed.  Sometimes he did not know
+you when he knew you quite well, and at such times I think it was kind to
+spare his years the fatigue of recalling your identity; at any rate, I am
+glad of the times when I did so.  In society he had the same vagueness,
+the same dimness; but after the moment he needed to make sure of you, he
+was as vivid as ever in his life.  He made me think of a bed of embers on
+which the ashes have thinly gathered, and which, when these are breathed
+away, sparkles and tinkles keenly up with all the freshness of a newly
+kindled fire.  He did not mind talking about his age, and I fancied
+rather enjoyed doing so.  Its approaches interested him; if he was going,
+he liked to know just how and when he was going.  Once he spoke of his
+lasting strength in terms of imaginative humor: he was still so intensely
+interested in nature, the universe, that it seemed to him he was not like
+an old man so much as a lusty infant which struggles against having the
+breast snatched from it.  He laughed at the notion of this, with that
+impersonal relish which seemed to me singularly characteristic of the
+self-consciousness so marked in him.  I never heard one lugubrious word
+from him in regard to his years.  He liked your sympathy on all grounds
+where he could have it self-respectfully, but he was a most manly spirit,
+and he would not have had it even as a type of the universal decay.
+Possibly he would have been interested to have you share in that analysis
+of himself which he was always making, if such a thing could have been.
+
+He had not much patience with the unmanly craving for sympathy in others,
+and chiefly in our literary craft, which is somewhat ignobly given to it,
+though he was patient, after all.  He used to say, and I believe he has
+said it in print,--[Holmes said it in print many times, in his three
+novels and scattered through the "Breakfast Table" series.  D.W.]--that
+unless a man could show a good reason for writing verse, it was rather
+against him, and a proof of weakness.  I suppose this severe conclusion
+was something he had reached after dealing with innumerable small poets
+who sought the light in him with verses that no editor would admit to
+print.  Yet of morbidness he was often very tender; he knew it to be
+disease, something that must be scientifically rather than ethically
+treated.  He was in the same degree kind to any sensitiveness, for he was
+himself as sensitive as he was manly, and he was most delicately
+sensitive to any rightful social claim upon him.  I was once at a dinner
+with him, where he was in some sort my host, in a company of people whom
+he had not seen me with before, and he made a point of acquainting me
+with each of them.  It did not matter that I knew most of them already;
+the proof of his thoughtfulness was precious, and I was sorry when I had
+to disappoint it by confessing a previous knowledge.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+I had three memorable meetings with him not very long before he died: one
+a year before, and the other two within a few months of the end.  The
+first of these was at luncheon in the summer-house of a friend whose
+hospitality made it summer the year round, and we all went out to meet
+him, when he drove up in his open carriage, with the little sunshade in
+his hand, which he took with him for protection against the heat, and
+also, a little, I think, for the whim of it.  He sat a moment after he
+arrived, as if to orient himself in respect to each of us.  Beside the
+gifted hostess, there was the most charming of all the American
+essayists, and the Autocrat seemed at once to find himself singularly at
+home with the people who greeted him.  There was no interval needed for
+fanning away the ashes; he tinkled up before he entered the house, and at
+the table he was as vivid and scintillant as I ever saw him, if indeed I
+ever saw him as much so.  The talk began at once, and we had made him
+believe that there was nothing egotistic in his taking the word, or
+turning it in illustration from himself upon universal matters.  I spoke
+among other things of some humble ruins on the road to Gloucester, which
+gave the way-side a very aged look; the tumbled foundation-stones of poor
+bits of houses, and "Ah," he said, "the cellar and the well?"  He added,
+to the company generally, "Do you know what I think are the two lines of
+mine that go as deep as any others, in a certain direction?" and he began
+to repeat stragglingly certain verses from one of his earlier poems,
+until he came to the closing couplet.  But I will give them in full,
+because in going to look them up I have found them so lovely, and because
+I can hear his voice again in every fondly accented syllable:
+
+         "Who sees unmoved, a ruin at his feet,
+          The lowliest home where human hearts have beat?
+          Its hearth-stone, shaded with the bistre stain,
+          A century's showery torrents wash in vain;
+          Its starving orchard where the thistle blows,
+          And mossy trunks still mark the broken rows;
+          Its chimney-loving poplar, oftenest seen
+          Next an old roof, or where a roof has been;
+          Its knot-grass, plantain,--all the social weeds,
+          Man's mute companions following where he leads;
+          Its dwarfed pale flowers, that show their straggling heads,
+          Sown by the wind from grass-choked garden-beds;
+          Its woodbine creeping where it used to climb;
+          Its roses breathing of the olden time;
+          All the poor shows the curious idler sees,
+          As life's thin shadows waste by slow degrees,
+          Till naught remains, the saddening tale to tell,
+          Save home's last wrecks--the CELLAR AND THE WELL!"
+
+The poet's chanting voice rose with a triumphant swell in the climax, and
+"There," he said, "isn't it so?  The cellar and the well--they can't be
+thrown down or burnt up; they are the human monuments that last longest
+and defy decay."  He rejoiced openly in the sympathy that recognized with
+him the divination of a most pathetic, most signal fact, and he repeated
+the last couplet again at our entreaty, glad to be entreated for it.
+I do not know whether all will agree with him concerning the relative
+importance of the lines, but I think all must feel the exquisite beauty
+of the picture to which they give the final touch.
+
+He said a thousand witty and brilliant things that day, but his pleasure
+in this gave me the most pleasure, and I recall the passage distinctly
+out of the dimness that covers the rest.  He chose to figure us younger
+men, in touching upon the literary circumstance of the past and present,
+as representative of modern feeling and thinking, and himself as no
+longer contemporary.  We knew he did this to be contradicted, and we
+protested, affectionately, fervently, with all our hearts and minds; and
+indeed there were none of his generation who had lived more widely into
+ours.  He was not a prophet like Emerson, nor ever a voice crying in the
+wilderness like Whittier or Lowell.  His note was heard rather amid the
+sweet security of streets, but it was always for a finer and gentler
+civility.  He imagined no new rule of life, and no philosophy or theory
+of life will be known by his name.  He was not constructive; he was
+essentially observant, and in this he showed the scientific nature.
+He made his reader known to himself, first in the little, and then in the
+larger things.  From first to last he was a censor, but a most winning
+and delightful censor, who could make us feel that our faults were other
+people's, and who was not wont
+
+          "To bait his homilies with his brother worms."
+
+At one period he sat in the seat of the scorner, as far as Reform was
+concerned, or perhaps reformers, who are so often tedious and ridiculous;
+but he seemed to get a new heart with the new mind which came to him when
+he began to write the Autocrat papers, and the light mocker of former
+days became the serious and compassionate thinker, to whom most truly
+nothing that was human was alien.  His readers trusted and loved him; few
+men have ever written so intimately with so much dignity, and perhaps
+none has so endeared himself by saying just the thing for his reader that
+his reader could not say for himself.  He sought the universal through
+himself in others, and he found to his delight and theirs that the most
+universal thing was often, if not always, the most personal thing.
+
+In my later meetings with him I was struck more and more by his
+gentleness.  I believe that men are apt to grow gentler as they grow
+older, unless they are of the curmudgeon type, which rusts and crusts
+with age, but with Doctor Holmes the gentleness was peculiarly marked.
+He seemed to shrink from all things that could provoke controversy, or
+even difference; he waived what might be a matter of dispute, and rather
+sought the things that he could agree with you upon.  In the last talk I
+had with him he appeared to have no grudge left, except for the puritanic
+orthodoxy in which he had been bred as a child.  This he was not able to
+forgive, though its tradition was interwoven with what was tenderest and
+dearest in his recollections of childhood.  We spoke of puritanism, and
+I said I sometimes wondered what could be the mind of a man towards life
+who had not been reared in its awful shadow, say an English Churchman, or
+a Continental Catholic; and he said he could not imagine, and that he did
+not believe such a man could at all enter into our feelings; puritanism,
+he seemed to think, made an essential and ineradicable difference.  I do
+not believe he had any of that false sentiment which attributes virtue of
+character to severity of creed, while it owns the creed to be wrong.
+
+He differed from Longfellow in often speaking of his contemporaries.  He
+spoke of them frankly, but with an appreciative rather than a censorious
+criticism.  Of Longfellow himself he said that day, when I told him I had
+been writing about him, and he seemed to me a man without error, that he
+could think of but one error in him, and that was an error of taste, of
+almost merely literary taste.  It was at an earlier time that he talked
+of Lowell, after his death, and told me that Lowell once in the fever of
+his anti-slavery apostolate had written him, urging him strongly, as a
+matter of duty, to come out for the cause he had himself so much at
+heart.  Afterwards Lowell wrote again, owning himself wrong in his
+appeal, which he had come to recognize as invasive.  "He was ten years
+younger than I," said the doctor.
+
+I found him that day I speak of in his house at Beverly Farms, where he
+had a pleasant study in a corner by the porch, and he met me with all the
+cheeriness of old.  But he confessed that he had been greatly broken up
+by the labor of preparing something that might be read at some
+commemorative meeting, and had suffered from finding first that he could
+not write something specially for it.  Even the copying and adapting an
+old poem had overtaxed him, and in this he showed the failing powers of
+age.  But otherwise he was still young, intellectually; that is, there
+was no failure of interest in intellectual things, especially literary
+things.  Some new book lay on the table at his elbow, and he asked me if
+I had seen it, and made some joke about his having had the good luck to
+read it, and have it lying by him a few days before when the author
+called.  I do not know whether he schooled himself against an old man's
+tendency to revert to the past or not, but I know that he seldom did so.
+That morning, however, he made several excursions into it, and told me
+that his youthful satire of the 'Spectre Pig' had been provoked by a poem
+of the elder Dana's, where a phantom horse had been seriously employed,
+with an effect of anticlimax which he had found irresistible.  Another
+foray was to recall the oppression and depression of his early religious
+associations, and to speak with moving tenderness of his father, whose
+hard doctrine as a minister was without effect upon his own kindly
+nature.
+
+In a letter written to me a few weeks after this time, upon an occasion
+when he divined that some word from him would be more than commonly dear,
+he recurred to the feeling he then expressed: "Fifty-six years ago--more
+than half a century--I lost my own father, his age being seventy-three
+years.  As I have reached that period of life, passed it, and now left it
+far behind, my recollections seem to brighten and bring back my boyhood
+and early manhood in a clearer and fairer light than it came to me in my
+middle decades.  I have often wished of late years that I could tell him
+how I cherished his memory; perhaps I may have the happiness of saying
+all I long to tell him on the other side of that thin partition which I
+love to think is all that divides us."
+
+Men are never long together without speaking of women, and I said how
+inevitably men's lives ended where they began, in the keeping of women,
+and their strength failed at last and surrendered itself to their care.
+I had not finished before I was made to feel that I was poaching, and
+"Yes," said the owner of the preserve, "I have spoken of that," and he
+went on to tell me just where.  He was not going to have me suppose I had
+invented those notions, and I could not do less than own that I must have
+found them in his book, and forgotten it.
+
+He spoke of his pleasant summer life in the air, at once soft and fresh,
+of that lovely coast, and of his drives up and down the country roads.
+Sometimes this lady and sometimes that came for him, and one or two
+habitually, but he always had his own carriage ordered, if they failed,
+that he might not fail of his drive in any fair weather.  His cottage was
+not immediately on the sea, but in full sight of it, and there was a
+sense of the sea about it, as there is in all that incomparable region,
+and I do not think he could have been at home anywhere beyond the reach
+of its salt breath.
+
+I was anxious not to outstay his strength, and I kept my eye on the clock
+in frequent glances.  I saw that he followed me in one of these, and I
+said that I knew what his hours were, and I was watching so that I might
+go away in time, and then he sweetly protested.  Did I like that chair I
+was sitting in?  It was a gift to him, and he said who gave it, with a
+pleasure in the fact that was very charming, as if he liked the
+association of the thing with his friend.  He was disposed to excuse the
+formal look of his bookcases, which were filled with sets, and presented
+some phalanxes of fiction in rather severe array.
+
+When I rose to go, he was concerned about my being able to find my way
+readily to the station, and he told me how to go, and what turns to take,
+as if he liked realizing the way to himself.  I believe he did not walk
+much of late years, and I fancy he found much the same pleasure in
+letting his imagination make this excursion to the station with me that
+he would have found in actually going.
+
+I saw him once more, but only once, when a day or two later he drove up
+by our hotel in Magnolia toward the cottage where his secretary was
+lodging.  He saw us from his carriage, and called us gayly to him, to
+make us rejoice with him at having finally got that commemorative poem
+off his mind.  He made a jest of the trouble it had cost him, even some
+sleeplessness, and said he felt now like a convalescent.  He was all
+brightness, and friendliness, and eagerness to make us feel his mood,
+through what was common to us all; and I am glad that this last
+impression of him is so one with the first I ever had, and with that
+which every reader receives from his work.
+
+That is bright, and friendly and eager too, for it is throughout the very
+expression of himself.  I think it is a pity if an author disappoints
+even the unreasonable expectation of the reader, whom his art has invited
+to love him; but I do not believe that Doctor Holmes could inflict this
+disappointment.  Certainly he could disappoint no reasonable expectation,
+no intelligent expectation.  What he wrote, that he was, and every one
+felt this who met him.  He has therefore not died, as some men die, the
+remote impersonal sort, but he is yet thrillingly alive in every page of
+his books.  The quantity of his literature is not great, but the quality
+is very surprising, and surprising first of all as equality.  From the
+beginning to the end he wrote one man, of course in his successive
+consciousnesses.  Perhaps every one does this, but his work gives the
+impression of an uncommon continuity, in spite of its being the effect of
+a later and an earlier impulse so very marked as to have made the later
+an astonishing revelation to those who thought they knew him.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+It is not for me in such a paper as this to attempt any judgment of his
+work.  I have loved it, as I loved him, with a sense of its limitations
+which is by no means a censure of its excellences.  He was not a man who
+cared to transcend; he liked bounds, he liked horizons, the constancy of
+shores.  If he put to sea, he kept in sight of land, like the ancient
+navigators.  He did not discover new continents; and I will own that I,
+for my part, should not have liked to sail with Columbus.  I think one
+can safely affirm that as great and as useful men stayed behind, and
+found an America of the mind without stirring from their thresholds.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Appeal, which he had come to recognize as invasive
+Appeared to have no grudge left
+Could make us feel that our faults were other people's
+Hard of hearing on one side.  But it isn't deafness
+Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Autocrat clashed upon homeopathy
+He was not bored because he would not be
+He was not constructive; he was essentially observant
+His readers trusted and loved him
+Men's lives ended where they began, in the keeping of women
+Not a man who cared to transcend; he liked bounds
+Not much patience with the unmanly craving for sympathy
+Old man's disposition to speak of his infirmities
+Old man's tendency to revert to the past
+Person who wished to talk when he could listen
+Reformers, who are so often tedious and ridiculous
+Secret of the man who is universally interesting
+Sought the things that he could agree with you upon
+Spare his years the fatigue of recalling your identity
+Study in a corner by the porch
+Those who have sorrowed deepest will understand this best
+Times when a man's city was a man's country
+Turn of the talk toward the mystical
+Work gives the impression of an uncommon continuity
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Oliver Wendell Holmes
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--The White Mr. Longfellow
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW
+
+
+We had expected to stay in Boston only until we could find a house in Old
+Cambridge.  This was not so simple a matter as it might seem; for the
+ancient town had not yet quickened its scholarly pace to the modern step.
+Indeed, in the spring of 1866 the impulse of expansion was not yet
+visibly felt anywhere; the enormous material growth that followed the
+civil war had not yet begun.  In Cambridge the houses to be let were few,
+and such as there were fell either below our pride or rose above our
+purse.  I wish I might tell how at last we bought a house; we had no
+money, but we were rich in friends, who are still alive to shrink from
+the story of their constant faith in a financial future which we
+sometimes doubted, and who backed their credulity with their credit.
+It is sufficient for the present record, which professes to be strictly
+literary, to notify the fact that on the first day of May, 1866, we went
+out to Cambridge and began to live in a house which we owned in fee if
+not in deed, and which was none the less valuable for being covered with
+mortgages.  Physically, it was a carpenter's box, of a sort which is
+readily imagined by the Anglo-American genius for ugliness, but which it
+is not so easy to impart a just conception of.  A trim hedge of arbor-
+vita; tried to hide it from the world in front, and a tall board fence
+behind; the little lot was well planted (perhaps too well planted) with
+pears, grapes, and currants, and there was a small open space which I
+lost no time in digging up for a kitchen-garden.  On one side of us were
+the open fields; on the other a brief line of neighbor-houses; across the
+street before us was a grove of stately oaks, which I never could
+persuade Aldrich had painted leaves on them in the fall.  We were really
+in a poor suburb of a suburb; but such is the fascination of ownership,
+even the ownership of a fully mortgaged property, that we calculated the
+latitude and longitude of the whole earth from the spot we called ours.
+In our walks about Cambridge we saw other places where we might have been
+willing to live; only, we said, they were too far off: We even prized the
+architecture of our little box, though we had but so lately lived in a
+Gothic palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, and were not uncritical of
+beauty in the possessions of others.  Positive beauty we could not have
+honestly said we thought our cottage had as a whole, though we might have
+held out for something of the kind in the brackets of turned wood under
+its eaves.  But we were richly content with it; and with life in
+Cambridge, as it began to open itself to us, we were infinitely more than
+content.  This life, so refined, so intelligent, so gracefully simple, I
+do not suppose has anywhere else had its parallel.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+It was the moment before the old American customs had been changed by
+European influences among people of easier circumstances; and in
+Cambridge society kept what was best of its village traditions, and chose
+to keep them in the full knowledge of different things.  Nearly every one
+had been abroad; and nearly every one had acquired the taste for olives
+without losing a relish for native sauces; through the intellectual life
+there was an entire democracy, and I do not believe that since the
+capitalistic era began there was ever a community in which money counted
+for less.  There was little show of what money could buy; I remember but
+one private carriage (naturally, a publisher's); and there was not one
+livery, except a livery in the larger sense kept by the stableman Pike,
+who made us pay now a quarter and now a half dollar for a seat in his
+carriages, according as he lost or gathered courage for the charge.  We
+thought him extortionate, and we mostly walked through snow and mud of
+amazing depth and thickness.
+
+The reader will imagine how acceptable this circumstance was to a young
+literary man beginning life with a fully mortgaged house and a salary of
+untried elasticity.  If there were distinctions made in Cambridge they
+were not against literature, and we found ourselves in the midst of a
+charming society, indifferent, apparently, to all questions but those of
+the higher education which comes so largely by nature.  That is to say,
+in the Cambridge of that day (and, I dare say, of this) a mind cultivated
+in some sort was essential, and after that came civil manners, and the
+willingness and ability to be agreeable and interesting; but the question
+of riches or poverty did not enter.  Even the question of family, which
+is of so great concern in New England, was in abeyance.  Perhaps it was
+taken for granted that every one in Old Cambridge society must be of good
+family, or he could not be there; perhaps his mere residence tacitly
+ennobled him; certainly his acceptance was an informal patent of
+gentility.  To my mind, the structure of society was almost ideal, and
+until we have a perfectly socialized condition of things I do not believe
+we shall ever have a more perfect society.  The instincts which governed
+it were not such as can arise from the sordid competition of interests;
+they flowed from a devotion to letters, and from a self-sacrifice in
+material things which I can give no better notion of than by saying that
+the outlay of the richest college magnate seemed to be graduated to the
+income of the poorest.
+
+In those days, the men whose names have given splendor to Cambridge were
+still living there.  I shall forget some of them in the alphabetical
+enumeration of Louis Agassiz, Francis J. Child, Richard Henry Dana, Jun.,
+John Fiske, Dr. Asa Gray, the family of the Jameses, father and sons,
+Lowell, Longfellow, Charles Eliot Norton, Dr. John G. Palfrey, James
+Pierce, Dr. Peabody, Professor Parsons, Professor Sophocles.  The variety
+of talents and of achievements was indeed so great that Mr. Bret Harte,
+when fresh from his Pacific slope, justly said, after listening to a
+partial rehearsal of them, "Why, you couldn't fire a revolver from your
+front porch anywhere without bringing down a two-volumer!"  Everybody had
+written a book, or an article, or a poem; or was in the process or
+expectation of doing it, and doubtless those whose names escape me will
+have greater difficulty in eluding fame.  These kindly, these gifted folk
+each came to see us and to make us at home among them; and my home is
+still among them, on this side and on that side of the line between the
+living and the dead which invisibly passes through all the streets of the
+cities of men.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+We had the whole summer for the exploration of Cambridge before society
+returned from the mountains and the sea-shore, and it was not till
+October that I saw Longfellow.  I heard again, as I heard when I first
+came to Boston, that he was at Nahant, and though Nahant was no longer so
+far away, now, as it was then, I did not think of seeking him out even
+when we went for a day to explore that coast during the summer.  It seems
+strange that I cannot recall just when and where I saw him, but early
+after his return to Cambridge I had a message from him asking me to come
+to a meeting of the Dante Club at Craigie House.
+
+Longfellow was that winter (1866-7) revising his translation of the
+'Paradiso', and the Dante Club was the circle of Italianate friends and
+scholars whom he invited to follow him and criticise his work from the
+original, while he read his version aloud.  Those who were most
+constantly present were Lowell and Professor Norton, but from time to
+time others came in, and we seldom sat down at the nine-o'clock supper
+that followed the reading of the canto in less number than ten or twelve.
+
+The criticism, especially from the accomplished Danteists I have named,
+was frank and frequent.  I believe they neither of them quite agreed with
+Longfellow as to the form of version he had chosen, but, waiving that,
+the question was how perfectly he had done his work upon the given lines:
+I myself, with whatever right, great or little, I may have to an opinion,
+believe thoroughly in Longfellow's plan.  When I read his version my
+sense aches for the rhyme which he rejected, but my admiration for his
+fidelity to Dante otherwise is immeasurable.  I remember with equal
+admiration the subtle and sympathetic scholarship of his critics, who
+scrutinized every shade of meaning in a word or phrase that gave them
+pause, and did not let it pass till all the reasons and facts had been
+considered.  Sometimes, and even often, Longfellow yielded to their
+censure, but for the most part, when he was of another mind, he held to
+his mind, and the passage had to go as he said.  I make a little haste to
+say that in all the meetings of the Club, during a whole winter of
+Wednesday evenings, I myself, though I faithfully followed in an Italian
+Dante with the rest, ventured upon one suggestion only.  This was kindly,
+even seriously, considered by the poet, and gently rejected.  He could
+not do anything otherwise than gently, and I was not suffered to feel
+that I had done a presumptuous thing.  I can see him now, as he looked up
+from the proof-sheets on the round table before him, and over at me,
+growing consciously smaller and smaller, like something through a
+reversed opera-glass.  He had a shaded drop-light in front of him, and in
+its glow his beautiful and benignly noble head had a dignity peculiar to
+him.
+
+All the portraits of Longfellow are likenesses more or less bad and good,
+for there was something as simple in the physiognomy as in the nature of
+the man.  His head, after he allowed his beard to grow and wore his hair
+long in the manner of elderly men, was leonine, but mildly leonine, as
+the old painters conceived the lion of St. Mark.  Once Sophocles, the ex-
+monk of Mount Athos, so long a Greek professor at Harvard, came in for
+supper, after the reading was over, and he was leonine too, but of a
+fierceness that contrasted finely with Longfellow's mildness.  I remember
+the poet's asking him something about the punishment of impaling, in
+Turkey, and his answering, with an ironical gleam of his fiery eyes,
+"Unhappily, it is obsolete."  I dare say he was not so leonine, either,
+as he looked.
+
+When Longfellow read verse, it was with a hollow, with a mellow resonant
+murmur, like the note of some deep-throated horn.  His voice was very
+lulling in quality, and at the Dante Club it used to have early effect
+with an old scholar who sat in a cavernous armchair at the corner of the
+fire, and who drowsed audibly in the soft tone and the gentle heat.  The
+poet had a fat terrier who wished always to be present at the meetings of
+the Club, and he commonly fell asleep at the same moment with that dear
+old scholar, so that when they began to make themselves heard in concert,
+one could not tell which it was that most took our thoughts from the text
+of the Paradiso.  When the duet opened, Longfellow would look up with an
+arch recognition of the fact, and then go gravely on to the end of the
+canto.  At the close he would speak to his friend and lead him out to
+supper as if he had not seen or heard anything amiss.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+In that elect company I was silent, partly because I was conscious of my
+youthful inadequacy, and partly because I preferred to listen.  But
+Longfellow always behaved as if I were saying a succession of edifying
+and delightful things, and from time to time he addressed himself to me,
+so that I should not feel left out.  He did not talk much himself, and I
+recall nothing that he said.  But he always spoke both wisely and simply,
+without the least touch of pose, and with no intention of effect, but
+with something that I must call quality for want of a better word; so
+that at a table where Holmes sparkled, and Lowell glowed, and Agassiz
+beamed, he cast the light of a gentle gaiety, which seemed to dim all
+these vivider luminaries.  While he spoke you did not miss Fields's story
+or Tom Appleton's wit, or even the gracious amity of Mr. Norton, with his
+unequalled intuitions.
+
+The supper was very plain: a cold turkey, which the host carved, or a
+haunch of venison, or some braces of grouse, or a platter of quails, with
+a deep bowl of salad, and the sympathetic companionship of those elect
+vintages which Longfellow loved, and which he chose with the inspiration
+of affection.  We usually began with oysters, and when some one who was
+expected did not come promptly, Longfellow invited us to raid his plate,
+as a just punishment of his delay.  One evening Lowell remarked, with the
+cayenne poised above his bluepoints, "It's astonishing how fond these
+fellows are of pepper."
+
+The old friend of the cavernous arm-chair was perhaps not wide enough
+awake to repress an "Ah?" of deep interest in this fact of natural
+history, and Lowell was provoked to go on.  "Yes, I've dropped a red
+pepper pod into a barrel of them, before now, and then taken them out in
+a solid mass, clinging to it like a swarm of bees to their queen."
+
+"Is it possible?" cried the old friend; and then Longfellow intervened to
+save him from worse, and turned the talk.
+
+I reproach myself that I made no record of the talk, for I find that only
+a few fragments of it have caught in my memory, and that the sieve which
+should have kept the gold has let it wash away with the gravel.
+I remember once Doctor Holmes's talking of the physician as the true
+seer, whose awful gift it was to behold with the fatal second sight of
+science the shroud gathering to the throat of many a doomed man
+apparently in perfect health, and happy in the promise of unnumbered
+days.  The thought may have been suggested by some of the toys of
+superstition which intellectual people like to play with.
+
+I never could be quite sure at first that Longfellow's brother-in-law,
+Appleton, was seriously a spiritualist, even when he disputed the most
+strenuously with the unbelieving Autocrat.  But he really was in earnest
+about it, though he relished a joke at the expense of his doctrine, like
+some clerics when they are in the safe company of other clerics.  He told
+me once of having recounted to Agassiz the facts of a very remarkable
+seance, where the souls of the departed outdid themselves in the
+athletics and acrobatics they seem so fond of over there, throwing large
+stones across the room, moving pianos, and lifting dinner-tables and
+setting them a-twirl under the chandelier.  "And now," he demanded, "what
+do you say to that?"  "Well, Mr. Appleton," Agassiz answered, to
+Appleton's infinite delight, "I say that it did not happen."
+
+One night they began to speak at the Dante supper of the unhappy man
+whose crime is a red stain in the Cambridge annals, and one and another
+recalled their impressions of Professor Webster.  It was possibly with a
+retroactive sense that they had all felt something uncanny in him, but,
+apropos of the deep salad-bowl in the centre of the table, Longfellow
+remembered a supper Webster was at, where he lighted some chemical in
+such a dish and held his head over it, with a handkerchief noosed about
+his throat and lifted above it with one hand, while his face, in the pale
+light, took on the livid ghastliness of that of a man hanged by the neck.
+
+Another night the talk wandered to the visit which an English author (now
+with God) paid America at the height of a popularity long since toppled
+to the ground, with many another.  He was in very good humor with our
+whole continent, and at Longfellow's table he found the champagne even
+surprisingly fine.  "But," he said to his host, who now told the story,
+"it cawn't be genuine, you know!"
+
+Many years afterwards this author revisited our shores, and I dined with
+him at Longfellow's, where he was anxious to constitute himself a guest
+during his sojourn in our neighborhood.  Longfellow was equally anxious
+that he should not do so, and he took a harmless pleasure in out-
+manoeuvring him.  He seized a chance to speak with me alone, and plotted
+to deliver him over to me without apparent unkindness, when the latest
+horse-car should be going in to Boston, and begged me to walk him to
+Harvard Square and put him aboard.  "Put him aboard, and don't leave him
+till the car starts, and then watch that he doesn't get off."
+
+These instructions he accompanied with a lifting of the eyebrows, and a
+pursing of the mouth, in an anxiety not altogether burlesque.  He knew
+himself the prey of any one who chose to batten on him, and his
+hospitality was subject to frightful abuse.  Perhaps Mr. Norton has
+somewhere told how, when he asked if a certain person who had been
+outstaying his time was not a dreadful bore, Longfellow answered, with
+angelic patience, "Yes; but then you know I have been bored so often!"
+
+There was one fatal Englishman whom I shared with him during the great
+part of a season: a poor soul, not without gifts, but always ready for
+more, especially if they took the form of meat and drink.  He had brought
+letters from one of the best English men alive, who withdrew them too
+late to save his American friends from the sad consequences of welcoming
+him.  So he established himself impregnably in a Boston club, and came
+out every day to dine with Longfellow in Cambridge, beginning with his
+return from Nahant in October and continuing far into December.  That was
+the year of the great horse-distemper, when the plague disabled the
+transportation in Boston, and cut off all intercourse between the suburb
+and the city on the street railways.  "I did think," Longfellow
+pathetically lamented, "that when the horse-cars stopped running, I
+should have a little respite from L., but he walks out."
+
+In the midst of his own suffering he was willing to advise with me
+concerning some poems L. had offered to the Atlantic Monthly, and after
+we had desperately read them together he said, with inspiration, "I think
+these things are more adapted to music than the magazine," and this
+seemed so good a notion that when L. came to know their fate from me,
+I answered, confidently, "I think they are rather more adapted to music."
+He calmly asked, "Why?" and as this was an exigency which Longfellow had
+not forecast for me, I was caught in it without hope of escape.  I really
+do not know what I said, but I know that I did not take the poems, such
+was my literary conscience in those days; I am afraid I should be weaker
+now.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+The suppers of the Dante Club were a relaxation from the severity of
+their toils on criticism, and I will not pretend that their table-talk
+was of that seriousness which duller wits might have given themselves up
+to.  The passing stranger, especially if a light or jovial person, was
+always welcome, and I never knew of the enforcement of the rule I heard
+of, that if you came in without question on the Club nights, you were a
+guest; but if you rang or knocked, you could not get in.
+
+Any sort of diversion was hailed, and once Appleton proposed that
+Longfellow should show us his wine-cellar.  He took up the candle burning
+on the table for the cigars, and led the way into the basement of the
+beautiful old Colonial mansion, doubly memorable as Washington's
+headquarters while he was in Cambridge, and as the home of Longfellow for
+so many years.  The taper cast just the right gleams on the darkness,
+bringing into relief the massive piers of brick, and the solid walls of
+stone, which gave the cellar the effect of a casemate in some fortress,
+and leaving the corners and distances to a romantic gloom.  This basement
+was a work of the days when men built more heavily if not more
+substantially than now, but I forget, if I ever knew, what date the wine-
+cellar was of.  It was well stored with precious vintages, aptly
+cobwebbed and dusty; but I could not find that it had any more charm than
+the shelves of a library: it is the inside of bottles and of books that
+makes its appeal.  The whole place witnessed a bygone state and luxury,
+which otherwise lingered in a dim legend or two.  Longfellow once spoke
+of certain old love-letters which dropped down on the basement stairs
+from some place overhead; and there was the fable or the fact of a
+subterranean passage under the street from Craigie House to the old
+Batchelder House, which I relate to these letters with no authority I can
+allege.  But in Craigie House dwelt the proud fair lady who was buried in
+the Cambridge church-yard with a slave at her head and a slave at her
+feet.
+
+               "Dust is in her beautiful eyes,"
+
+and whether it was they that smiled or wept in their time over those
+love-letters, I will leave the reader to say.  The fortunes of her Tory
+family fell with those of their party, and the last Vassal ended his days
+a prisoner from his creditors in his own house, with a weekly enlargement
+on Sundays, when the law could not reach him.  It is known how the place
+took Longfellow's fancy when he first came to be professor in Harvard,
+and how he was a lodger of the last Mistress Craigie there, long before
+he became its owner.  The house is square, with Longfellow's study where
+he read and wrote on the right of the door, and a statelier library
+behind it; on the left is the drawing-room, with the dining-room in its
+rear; from its square hall climbs a beautiful stairway with twisted
+banisters, and a tall clock in their angle.
+
+The study where the Dante Club met, and where I mostly saw Longfellow,
+was a plain, pleasant room, with broad panelling in white painted pine;
+in the centre before the fireplace stood his round table, laden with
+books, papers, and proofs; in the farthest corner by the window was a
+high desk which he sometimes stood at to write.  In this room Washington
+held his councils and transacted his business with all comers; in the
+chamber overhead he slept.  I do not think Longfellow associated the
+place much with him, and I never heard him speak of Washington in
+relation to it except once, when he told me with peculiar relish what he
+called the true version of a pious story concerning the aide-de-camp who
+blundered in upon him while he knelt in prayer.  The father of his
+country rose and rebuked the young man severely, and then resumed his
+devotions.  "He rebuked him," said Longfellow, lifting his brows and
+making rings round the pupils of his eyes, "by throwing his scabbard at
+his head."
+
+All the front windows of Craigie House look, out over the open fields
+across the Charles, which is now the Longfellow Memorial Garden.  The
+poet used to be amused with the popular superstition that he was holding
+this vacant ground with a view to a rise in the price of lots, while all
+he wanted was to keep a feature of his beloved landscape unchanged.
+Lofty elms drooped at the corners of the house; on the lawn billowed
+clumps of the lilac, which formed a thick hedge along the fence.  There
+was a terrace part way down this lawn, and when a white-painted
+balustrade was set some fifteen years ago upon its brink, it seemed
+always to have been there.  Long verandas stretched on either side of the
+mansion; and behind was an old-fashioned garden with beds primly edged
+with box after a design of the poet's own.  Longfellow had a ghost story
+of this quaint plaisance, which he used to tell with an artful reserve of
+the catastrophe.  He was coming home one winter night, and as he crossed
+the garden he was startled by a white figure swaying before him.  But he
+knew that the only way was to advance upon it.  He pushed boldly forward,
+and was suddenly caught under the throat-by the clothes-line with a long
+night-gown on it.
+
+Perhaps it was at the end of a long night of the Dante Club that I heard
+him tell this story.  The evenings were sometimes mornings before the
+reluctant break-up came, but they were never half long enough for me.
+I have given no idea of the high reasoning of vital things which I must
+often have heard at that table, and that I have forgotten it is no proof
+that I did not hear it.  The memory will not be ruled as to what it shall
+bind and what it shall loose, and I should entreat mine in vain for
+record of those meetings other than what I have given.  Perhaps it would
+be well, in the interest of some popular conceptions of what the social
+intercourse of great wits must be, for me to invent some ennobling and
+elevating passages of conversation at Longfellow's; perhaps I ought to do
+it for the sake of my own repute as a serious and adequate witness.  But
+I am rather helpless in the matter; I must set down what I remember, and
+surely if I can remember no phrase from Holmes that a reader could live
+or die by, it is something to recall how, when a certain potent cheese
+was passing, he leaned over to gaze at it, and asked: "Does it kick?
+Does it kick?"  No strain of high poetic thinking remains to me from
+Lowell, but he made me laugh unforgettably with his passive adventure one
+night going home late, when a man suddenly leaped from the top of a high
+fence upon the sidewalk at his feet, and after giving him the worst
+fright of his life, disappeared peaceably into the darkness.  To be sure,
+there was one most memorable supper, when he read the "Bigelow Paper"
+he had finished that day, and enriched the meaning of his verse with the
+beauty of his voice.  There lingers yet in my sense his very tone in
+giving the last line of the passage lamenting the waste of the heroic
+lives which in those dark hours of Johnson's time seemed to have been
+
+          "Butchered to make a blind man's holiday."
+
+The hush that followed upon his ceasing was of that finest quality which
+spoken praise always lacks; and I suppose that I could not give a just
+notion of these Dante Club evenings without imparting the effect of such
+silences.  This I could not hopefully undertake to do; but I am tempted
+to some effort of the kind by my remembrance of Longfellow's old friend
+George Washington Greene, who often came up from his home in Rhode
+Island, to be at those sessions, and who was a most interesting and
+amiable fact of those delicate silences.  A full half of his earlier life
+had been passed in Italy, where he and Longfellow met and loved each
+other in their youth with an affection which the poet was constant to in
+his age, after many vicissitudes, with the beautiful fidelity of his
+nature.  Greene was like an old Italian house-priest in manner, gentle,
+suave, very suave, smooth as creamy curds, cultivated in the elegancies
+of literary taste, and with a certain meek abeyance.  I think I never
+heard him speak, in all those evenings, except when Longfellow addressed
+him, though he must have had the Dante scholarship for an occasional
+criticism.  It was at more recent dinners, where I met him with the
+Longfellow family alone, that he broke now and then into a quotation from
+some of the modern Italian poets he knew by heart (preferably Giusti),
+and syllabled their verse with an exquisite Roman accent and a bewitching
+Florentine rhythm.  Now and then at these times he brought out a faded
+Italian anecdote, faintly smelling of civet, and threadbare in its
+ancient texture.  He liked to speak of Goldoni and of Nota, of Niccolini
+and Manzoni, of Monti and Leopardi; and if you came to America, of the
+Revolution and his grandfather, the Quaker General Nathaniel Greene,
+whose life he wrote (and I read) in three volumes:  He worshipped
+Longfellow, and their friendship continued while they lived, but towards
+the last of his visits at Craigie House it had a pathos for the witness
+which I should grieve to wrong.  Greene was then a quivering paralytic,
+and he clung tremulously to Longfellow's arm in going out to dinner,
+where even the modern Italian poets were silent upon his lips.  When we
+rose from table, Longfellow lifted him out of his chair, and took him
+upon his arm again for their return to the study.
+
+He was of lighter metal than most other members of the Dante Club, and he
+was not of their immediate intimacy, living away from Cambridge, as he
+did, and I shared his silence in their presence with full sympathy.
+I was by far the youngest of their number, and I cannot yet quite make
+out why I was of it at all.  But at every moment I was as sensible of my
+good fortune as of my ill desert.  They were the men whom of all men
+living I most honored, and it seemed to be impossible that I at my age
+should be so perfectly fulfilling the dream of my life in their company.
+Often, the nights were very cold, and as I returned home from Craigie
+House to the carpenter's box on Sacramento Street, a mile or two away,
+I was as if soul-borne through the air by my pride and joy, while the
+frozen blocks of snow clinked and tinkled before my feet stumbling along
+the middle of the road.  I still think that was the richest moment of my
+life, and I look back at it as the moment, in a life not unblessed by
+chance, which I would most like to live over again--if I must live any.
+The next winter the sessions of the Dante Club were transferred to the
+house of Mr. Norton, who was then completing his version of the 'Vita
+Nuova'.  This has always seemed to me a work of not less graceful art
+than Longfellow's translation of the 'Commedia'.  In fact, it joins the
+effect of a sympathy almost mounting to divination with a patient
+scholarship and a delicate skill unknown to me elsewhere in such work.
+I do not know whether Mr. Norton has satisfied himself better in his
+prose version of the 'Commedia' than in this of the 'Vita Nuova', but I
+do not believe he could have satisfied Dante better, unless he had rhymed
+his sonnets and canzonets.  I am sure he might have done this if he had
+chosen.  He has always pretended that it was impossible, but miracles are
+never impossible in the right hands.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+After three or four years we sold the carpenter's box on Sacramento
+Street, and removed to a larger house near Harvard Square, and in the
+immediate neighborhood of Longfellow.  He gave me an easement across that
+old garden behind his house, through an opening in the high board fence
+which enclosed it, and I saw him oftener than ever, though the meetings
+of the Dante Club had come to an end.  At the last of them, Lowell had
+asked him, with fond regret in his jest, "Longfellow, why don't you do
+that Indian poem in forty thousand verses?"  The demand but feebly
+expressed the reluctance in us all, though I suspect the Indian poem
+existed only by the challenger's invention.  Before I leave my faint and
+unworthy record of these great times I am tempted to mention an incident
+poignant with tragical associations.  The first night after Christmas the
+holly and the pine wreathed about the chandelier above the supper-table
+took fire from the gas, just as we came out from the reading, and
+Longfellow ran forward and caught the burning garlands down and bore them
+out.  No one could speak for thinking what he must be thinking of when
+the ineffable calamity of his home befell it.  Curtis once told me that a
+little while before Mrs. Longfellow's death he was driving by Craigie
+House with Holmes, who said be trembled to look at it, for those who
+lived there had their happiness so perfect that no change, of all the
+changes which must come to them, could fail to be for the worse.
+I did not know Longfellow before that fatal time, and I shall not say
+that his presence bore record of it except in my fancy.  He may always
+have had that look of one who had experienced the utmost harm that fate
+can do, and henceforth could possess himself of what was left of life in
+peace.  He could never have been a man of the flowing ease that makes all
+comers at home; some people complained of a certain 'gene' in him; and he
+had a reserve with strangers, which never quite lost itself in the
+abandon of friendship, as Lowell's did.  He was the most perfectly modest
+man I ever saw, ever imagined, but he had a gentle dignity which I do not
+believe any one, the coarsest, the obtusest, could trespass upon.  In the
+years when I began to know him, his long hair and the beautiful beard
+which mixed with it were of one iron-gray, which I saw blanch to a
+perfect silver, while that pearly tone of his complexion, which Appleton
+so admired, lost itself in the wanness of age and pain.  When he walked,
+he had a kind of spring in his gait, as if now and again a buoyant
+thought lifted him from the ground.  It was fine to meet him coming down
+a Cambridge street; you felt that the encounter made you a part of
+literary history, and set you apart with him for the moment from the poor
+and mean.  When he appeared in Harvard Square, he beatified if not
+beautified the ugliest and vulgarest looking spot on the planet outside
+of New York.  You could meet him sometimes at the market, if you were of
+the same provision-man as he; and Longfellow remained as constant to his
+tradespeople as to any other friends.  He rather liked to bring his
+proofs back to the printer's himself, and we often found ourselves
+together at the University Press, where the Atlantic Monthly used to be
+printed.  But outside of his own house Longfellow seemed to want a fit
+atmosphere, and I love best to think of him in his study, where he
+wrought at his lovely art with a serenity expressed in his smooth,
+regular, and scrupulously perfect handwriting.  It was quite vertical,
+and rounded, with a slope neither to the right nor left, and at the time
+I knew him first, he was fond of using a soft pencil on printing paper,
+though commonly he wrote with a quill.  Each letter was distinct in
+shape, and between the verses was always the exact space of half an inch.
+I have a good many of his poems written in this fashion, but whether they
+were the first drafts or not I cannot say; very likely not.  Towards the
+last he no longer sent his poems to the magazines in his own hand; but
+they were always signed in autograph.
+
+I once asked him if he were not a great deal interrupted, and he said,
+with a faint sigh, Not more than was good for him, he fancied; if it were
+not for the interruptions, he might overwork.  He was not a friend to
+stated exercise, I believe, nor fond of walking, as Lowell was; he had
+not, indeed, the childish associations of the younger poet with the
+Cambridge neighborhoods; and I never saw him walking for pleasure except
+on the east veranda of his house, though I was told he loved walking in
+his youth.  In this and in some other things Longfellow was more European
+than American, more Latin than Saxon.  He once said quaintly that one got
+a great deal of exercise in putting on and off one's overcoat and
+overshoes.
+
+I suppose no one who asked decently at his door was denied access to him,
+and there must have been times when he was overrun with volunteer
+visitors; but I never heard him complain of them.  He was very charitable
+in the immediate sort which Christ seems to have meant; but he had his
+preferences; humorously owned, among beggars.  He liked the German
+beggars least, and the Italian beggars most, as having most savair-faire;
+in fact, we all loved the Italians in Cambridge.  He was pleased with the
+accounts I could give him of the love and honor I had known for him in
+Italy, and one day there came a letter from an Italian admirer, addressed
+to "Mr. Greatest Poet Longfellow," which he said was the very most
+amusing superscription he had ever seen.
+
+It is known that the King of Italy offered Longfellow the cross of San
+Lazzaro, which is the Italian literary decoration.  It came through the
+good offices of my old acquaintance Professor Messadaglia, then a deputy
+in the Italian Parliament, whom, for some reason I cannot remember, I had
+put in correspondence with Longfellow.  The honor was wholly unexpected,
+and it brought Longfellow a distress which was chiefly for the gentleman
+who had procured him the impossible distinction.  He showed me the pretty
+collar and cross, not, I think, without a natural pleasure in it.  No man
+was ever less a bigot in things civil or religious than he, but he said,
+firmly, "Of course, as a republican and a Protestant, I can't accept a
+decoration from a Catholic prince."  His decision was from his
+conscience, and I think that all Americans who think duly about it will
+approve his decision.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+Such honors as he could fitly permit himself he did not refuse, and I
+recall what zest he had in his election to the Arcadian Academy, which
+had made him a shepherd of its Roman Fold, with the title, as he said, of
+"Olimipico something."  But I fancy his sweetest pleasure in his vast
+renown came from his popular recognition everywhere.  Few were the lands,
+few the languages he was unknown to: he showed me a version of the "Psalm
+of Life" in Chinese.  Apparently even the poor lost autograph-seeker was
+not denied by his universal kindness; I know that he kept a store of
+autographs ready written on small squares of paper for all who applied by
+letter or in person; he said it was no trouble; but perhaps he was to be
+excused for refusing the request of a lady for fifty autographs, which
+she wished to offer as a novel attraction to her guests at a lunch party.
+
+Foreigners of all kinds thronged upon him at their pleasure, apparently,
+and with perfect impunity.  Sometimes he got a little fun, very, very
+kindly, out of their excuses and reasons; and the Englishman who came to
+see him because there were no ruins to visit in America was no fable, as
+I can testify from the poet himself.  But he had no prejudice against
+Englishmen, and even at a certain time when the coarse-handed British
+criticism began to blame his delicate art for the universal acceptance of
+his verse, and to try to sneer him into the rank of inferior poets, he
+was without rancor for the clumsy misliking that he felt.  He could not
+understand rudeness; he was too finely framed for that; he could know it
+only as Swedenborg's most celestial angels perceived evil, as something
+distressful, angular.  The ill-will that seemed nearly always to go with
+adverse criticism made him distrust criticism, and the discomfort which
+mistaken or blundering praise gives probably made him shy of all
+criticism.  He said that in his early life as an author he used to seek
+out and save all the notices of his poems, but in his latter days he read
+only those that happened to fall in his way; these he cut out and amused
+his leisure by putting together in scrapbooks.  He was reluctant to make
+any criticism of other poets; I do not remember ever to have heard him
+make one; and his writings show no trace of the literary dislikes or
+contempts which we so often mistake in ourselves for righteous judgments.
+No doubt he had his resentments, but he hushed them in his heart, which
+he did not suffer them to embitter.  While Poe was writing of "Longfellow
+and other Plagiarists," Longfellow was helping to keep Poe alive by the
+loans which always made themselves gifts in Poe's case.  He very, very
+rarely spoke of himself at all, and almost never of the grievances which
+he did not fail to share with all who live.
+
+He was patient, as I said, of all things, and gentle beyond all mere
+gentlemanliness.  But it would have been a great mistake to mistake his
+mildness for softness.  It was most manly and firm; and of course it was
+braced with the New England conscience he was born to.  If he did not
+find it well to assert himself, he was prompt in behalf of his friends,
+and one of tho fine things told of him was his resenting some censures of
+Sumner at a dinner in Boston during the old pro-slavery times: he said to
+the gentlemen present that Sumner was his friend, and he must leave their
+company if they continued to assail him.
+
+But he spoke almost as rarely of his friends as of himself.  He liked the
+large, impersonal topics which could be dealt with on their human side,
+and involved characters rather than individuals.  This was rather strange
+in Cambridge, where we were apt to take our instances from the
+environment.  It was not the only thing he was strange in there; he was
+not to that manner born; he lacked the final intimacies which can come
+only of birth and lifelong association, and which make the men of the
+Boston breed seem exclusive when they least feel so; he was Longfellow to
+the friends who were James, and Charles, and Wendell to one another.  He
+and Hawthorne were classmates at college, but I never heard him mention
+Hawthorne; I never heard him mention Whittier or Emerson.  I think his
+reticence about his contemporaries was largely due to his reluctance from
+criticism: he was the finest artist of them all, and if he praised he
+must have praised with the reservations of an honest man.  Of younger
+writers he was willing enough to speak.  No new contributor made his mark
+in the magazine unnoted by him, and sometimes I showed him verse in
+manuscript which gave me peculiar pleasure.  I remember his liking for
+the first piece that Mr. Maurice Thompson sent me, and how he tasted the
+fresh flavor of it, and inhaled its wild new fragrance.  He admired the
+skill of some of the young story-tellers; he praised the subtlety of one
+in working out an intricate character, and said modestly that he could
+never have done that sort of thing himself.  It was entirely safe to
+invite his judgment when in doubt, for he never suffered it to become
+aggressive, or used it to urge upon me the manuscripts that must often
+have been urged upon him.
+
+Longfellow had a house at Nahant where he went every summer for more than
+a quarter of a century.  He found the slight transition change enough
+from Cambridge, and liked it perhaps because it did not take him beyond
+the range of the friends and strangers whose company he liked.  Agassiz
+was there, and Appleton; Sumner came to sojourn with him; and the
+tourists of all nations found him there in half an hour after they
+reached Boston.  His cottage was very plain and simple, but was rich in
+the sight of the illimitable, sea, and it had a luxury of rocks at the
+foot of its garden, draped with sea-weed, and washed with the
+indefatigable tides.  As he grew older and feebler he ceased to go to
+Nahant; he remained the whole year round at Cambridge; he professed to
+like the summer which he said warmed him through there, better than the
+cold spectacle of summer which had no such effect at Nahant.
+
+The hospitality which was constant at either house was not merely of the
+worldly sort.  Longfellow loved good cheer; he tasted history and poetry
+in a precious wine; and he liked people who were acquainted with manners
+and men, and brought the air of capitals with them.  But often the man
+who dined with Longfellow was the man who needed a dinner; and from what
+I have seen of the sweet courtesy that governed at that board, I am sure
+that such a man could never have felt himself the least honored guest.
+The poet's heart was open to all the homelessness of the world; and I
+remember how once when we sat at his table and I spoke of his poem of
+"The Challenge," then a new poem, and said how I had been touched by the
+fancy of
+
+              "The poverty-stricken millions
+               Who challenge our wine and bread,
+               And impeach us all as traitors,
+               Both the living and the dead,"
+
+his voice sank in grave humility as he answered, "Yes, I often think of
+those things."  He had thought of them in the days of the slave, when he
+had taken his place with the friends of the hopeless and hapless, and as
+long as he lived he continued of the party which had freed the slave.
+He did not often speak of politics, but when the movement of some of the
+best Republicans away from their party began, he said that he could not
+see the wisdom of their course.  But this was said without censure or
+criticism of them, and so far as I know he never permitted himself
+anything like denunciation of those who in any wise differed from him.
+On a matter of yet deeper interest, I do not feel authorized to speak for
+him, but I think that as he grew older, his hold upon anything like a
+creed weakened, though he remained of the Unitarian philosophy concerning
+Christ.  He did not latterly go to church, I believe; but then, very few
+of his circle were church-goers.  Once he said something very vague and
+uncertain concerning the doctrine of another life when I affirmed my hope
+of it, to the effect that he wished he could be sure, with the sigh that
+so often clothed the expression of a misgiving with him.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+When my acquaintance with Longfellow began he had written the things that
+made his fame, and that it will probably rest upon: "Evangeline,"
+"Hiawatha," and the "Courtship of Miles Standish" were by that time old
+stories.  But during the eighteen years that I knew him he produced the
+best of his minor poems, the greatest of his sonnets, the sweetest of his
+lyrics.  His art ripened to the last, it grew richer and finer, and it
+never knew decay.  He rarely read anything of his own aloud, but in three
+or four cases he read to me poems he had just finished, as if to give
+himself the pleasure of hearing them with the sympathetic sense of
+another.  The hexameter piece, "Elizabeth," in the third part of "Tales
+of a Wayside Inn," was one of these, and he liked my liking its
+rhythmical form, which I believed one of the measures best adapted to the
+English speech, and which he had used himself with so much pleasure and
+success.
+
+About this time he was greatly interested in the slight experiments I was
+beginning to make in dramatic form, and he said that if he were himself a
+young man he should write altogether for the stage; he thought the drama
+had a greater future with us.  He was pleased when a popular singer
+wished to produce his "Masque of Pandora," with music, and he was patient
+when it failed of the effect hoped for it as an opera.  When the late
+Lawrence Barrett, in the enthusiasm which was one of the fine traits of
+his generous character, had taken my play of "A Counterfeit Presentment,"
+and came to the Boston Museum with it, Longfellow could not apparently
+have been more zealous for its popular acceptance if it had been his own
+work.  He invited himself to one of the rehearsals with me, and he sat
+with me on the stage through the four acts with a fortitude which I still
+wonder at, and with the keenest zest for all the details of the
+performance.  No finer testimony to the love and honor which all kinds of
+people had for him could have been given than that shown by the actors
+and employees of the theatre, high and low.  They thronged the scenery,
+those who were not upon the stage, and at the edge of every wing were
+faces peering round at the poet, who sat unconscious of their adoration,
+intent upon the play.  He was intercepted at every step in going out, and
+made to put his name to the photographs of himself which his worshippers
+produced from their persons.
+
+He came to the first night of the piece, and when it seemed to be finding
+favor with the public, he leaned forward out of his line to nod and smile
+at the author; when they, had the author up, it was the sweetest flattery
+of the applause which abused his fondness that Longfellow clapped first
+and loudest.
+
+Where once he had given his kindness he could not again withhold it, and
+he was anxious no fact should be interpreted as withdrawal.  When the
+Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil, who was so great a lover of Longfellow,
+came to Boston, he asked himself out to dine with the poet, who had
+expected to offer him some such hospitality.  Soon after, Longfellow met
+me, and as if eager to forestall a possible feeling in me, said,
+"I wanted to ask you to dinner with the Emperor, but he not only sent
+word he was coming, he named his fellow-guests!"  I answered that though
+I should probably never come so near dining with an emperor again, I
+prized his wish to ask me much more than the chance I had missed; and
+with this my great and good friend seemed a little consoled.  I believe
+that I do not speak too confidently of our relation.  He was truly the
+friend of all men, but I had certainly the advantage of my propinquity.
+We were near neighbors, as the pleonasm has it, both when I lived on
+Berkeley Street and after I had built my own house on Concord Avenue;
+and I suppose he found my youthful informality convenient.  He always
+asked me to dinner when his old friend Greene came to visit him, and then
+we had an Italian time together, with more or less repetition in our
+talk, of what we had said before of Italian poetry and Italian character.
+One day there came a note from him saying, in effect, "Salvini is coming
+out to dine with me tomorrow night, and I want you to come too.  There
+will be no one else but Greene and myself, and we will have an Italian
+dinner."
+
+Unhappily I had accepted a dinner in Boston for that night, and this
+invitation put me in great misery.  I must keep my engagement, but how
+could I bear to miss meeting Salvini at Longfellow's table on terms like
+these?  We consulted at home together and questioned whether I might not
+rush into Boston, seek out my host there, possess him of the facts, and
+frankly throw myself on his mercy.  Then a sudden thought struck us:
+Go to Longfellow, and submit the case to him!  I went, and he entered
+with delicate sympathy into the affair.  But he decided that, taking the
+large view of it, I must keep my engagement, lest I should run even a
+remote risk of wounding my friend's susceptibilities.  I obeyed, and I
+had a very good time, but I still feel that I missed the best time of my
+life, and that I ought to be rewarded for my sacrifice, somewhere.
+
+Longfellow so rarely spoke of himself in any way that one heard from him
+few of those experiences of the distinguished man in contact with the
+undistinguished, which he must have had so abundantly.  But he told,
+while it was fresh in his mind, an incident that happened to him one day
+in Boston at a tobacconist's, where a certain brand of cigars was
+recommended to him as the kind Longfellow smoked.  "Ah, then I must have
+some of them; and I will ask you to send me a box," said Longfellow, and
+he wrote down his name and address.  The cigar-dealer read it with the
+smile of a worsted champion, and said, "Well, I guess you had me, that
+time."  At a funeral a mourner wished to open conversation, and by way of
+suggesting a theme of common interest, began, "You've buried, I believe?"
+
+Sometimes people were shown by the poet through Craigie House who had no
+knowledge of it except that it had been Washington's headquarters.  Of
+course Longfellow was known by sight to every one in Cambridge.  He was
+daily in the streets, while his health endured, and as he kept no
+carriage, he was often to be met in the horse-cars, which were such
+common ground in Cambridge that they were often like small invited
+parties of friends when they left Harvard Square, so that you expected
+the gentlemen to jump up and ask the ladies whether they would have
+chicken salad.  In civic and political matters he mingled so far as to
+vote regularly, and he voted with his party, trusting it for a general
+regard to the public welfare.
+
+I fancy he was somewhat shy of his fellow-men, as the scholar seems
+always to be, from the sequestered habit of his life; but I think
+Longfellow was incapable of marking any difference between himself and
+them.  I never heard from him anything that was 'de haut en bas', when he
+spoke of people, and in Cambridge, where there was a good deal of
+contempt for the less lettered, and we liked to smile though we did not
+like to sneer, and to analyze if we did not censure, Longfellow and
+Longfellow's house were free of all that.  Whatever his feeling may have
+been towards other sorts and conditions of men, his effect was of an
+entire democracy.  He was always the most unassuming person in any
+company, and at some large public dinners where I saw him I found him
+patient of the greater attention that more public men paid themselves and
+one another.  He was not a speaker, and I never saw him on his feet at
+dinner, except once, when he read a poem for Whittier, who was absent.
+He disliked after-dinner speaking, and made conditions for his own
+exemption from it.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+Once your friend, Longfellow was always your friend; he would not think
+evil of you, and if he knew evil of you, he would be the last of all that
+knew it to judge you for it.  This may have been from the impersonal
+habit of his mind, but I believe it was also the effect of principle, for
+he would do what he could to arrest the delivery of judgment from others,
+and would soften the sentences passed in his presence.  Naturally this
+brought him under some condemnation with those of a severer cast; and I
+have heard him criticised for his benevolence towards all, and his
+constancy to some who were not quite so true to themselves, perhaps.
+But this leniency of Longfellow's was what constituted him great as well
+as good, for it is not our wisdom that censures others.  As for his
+goodness, I never saw a fault in him.  I do not mean to say that he had
+no faults, or that there were no better men, but only to give the witness
+of my knowledge concerning him.  I claim in no wise to have been his
+intimate; such a thing was not possible in my case for quite apparent
+reasons; and I doubt if Longfellow was capable of intimacy in the sense
+we mostly attach to the word.  Something more of egotism than I ever
+found in him must go to the making of any intimacy which did not come
+from the tenderest affections of his heart.  But as a man shows himself
+to those often with him, and in his noted relations with other men, he
+showed himself without blame.  All men that I have known, besides, have
+had some foible (it often endeared them the more), or some meanness, or
+pettiness, or bitterness; but Longfellow had none, nor the suggestion of
+any.  No breath of evil ever touched his name; he went in and out among
+his fellow-men without the reproach that follows wrong; the worst thing I
+ever heard said of him was that he had 'gene', and this was said by one
+of those difficult Cambridge men who would have found 'gene' in a
+celestial angel.  Something that Bjornstjerne Bjornson wrote to me when
+he was leaving America after a winter in Cambridge, comes nearer
+suggesting Longfellow than all my talk.  The Norsemen, in the days of
+their stormy and reluctant conversion, used always to speak of Christ as
+the White Christ, and Bjornson said in his letter, "Give my love to the
+White Mr. Longfellow."
+
+A good many, years before Longfellow's death he began to be sleepless,
+and he suffered greatly.  He said to me once that he felt as if he were
+going about with his heart in a kind of mist.  The whole night through he
+would not be aware of having slept.  "But," he would add, with his
+heavenly patience, "I always get a good deal of rest from lying down so
+long."  I cannot say whether these conditions persisted, or how much his
+insomnia had to do with his breaking health; three or four years before
+the end came, we left Cambridge for a house farther in the country, and I
+saw him less frequently than before.  He did not allow our meetings to
+cease; he asked me to dinner from time to time, as if to keep them up,
+but it could not be with the old frequency.  Once he made a point of
+coming to see us in our cottage on the hill west of Cambridge, but it was
+with an effort not visible in the days when he could end one of his brief
+walks at our house on Concord Avenue; he never came but he left our house
+more luminous for his having been there.  Once he came to supper there to
+meet Garfield (an old family friend of mine in Ohio), and though he was
+suffering from a heavy cold, he would not scant us in his stay.  I had
+some very bad sherry which he drank with the serenity of a martyr, and I
+shudder to this day to think what his kindness must have cost him.  He
+told his story of the clothes-line ghost, and Garfield matched it with
+the story of an umbrella ghost who sheltered a friend of his through a
+midnight storm, but was not cheerful company to his beneficiary, who
+passed his hand through him at one point in the effort to take his arm.
+
+After the end of four years I came to Cambridge to be treated for a long
+sickness, which had nearly been my last, and when I could get about I
+returned the visit Longfellow had not failed to pay me.  But I did not
+find him, and I never saw him again in life.  I went into Boston to
+finish the winter of 1881-2, and from time to time I heard that the poet
+was failing in health.  As soon as I felt able to bear the horse-car
+journey I went out to Cambridge to see him.  I had knocked once at his
+door, the friendly door that had so often opened to his welcome, and
+stood with the knocker in my hand when the door was suddenly set ajar,
+and a maid showed her face wet with tears.  "How is Mr. Longfellow?"
+I palpitated, and with a burst of grief she answered, "Oh, the poor
+gentleman has just departed!"  I turned away as if from a helpless
+intrusion at a death-bed.
+
+At the services held in the house before the obsequies at the cemetery, I
+saw the poet for the last time, where
+
+               "Dead he lay among his books,"
+
+in the library behind his study.  Death seldom fails to bring serenity to
+all, and I will not pretend that there was a peculiar peacefulness in
+Longfellow's noble mask, as I saw it then.  It was calm and benign as it
+had been in life; he could not have worn a gentler aspect in going out of
+the world than he had always worn in it; he had not to wait for death to
+dignify it with "the peace of God."  All who were left of his old
+Cambridge were present, and among those who had come farther was Emerson.
+He went up to the bier, and with his arms crossed on his breast, and his
+elbows held in either hand, stood with his head pathetically fallen
+forward, looking down at the dead face.  Those who knew how his memory
+was a mere blank, with faint gleams of recognition capriciously coming
+and going in it, must have felt that he was struggling to remember who
+it was lay there before him; and for me the electly simple words
+confessing his failure will always be pathetic with his remembered
+aspect: "The gentleman we have just been burying," he said, to the friend
+who had come with him, "was a sweet and beautiful soul; but I forget his
+name."
+
+I had the privilege and honor of looking over the unprinted poems
+Longfellow left behind him, and of helping to decide which of them should
+be published.
+
+There were not many of them, and some of these few were quite
+fragmentary.  I gave my voice for the publication of all that had any
+sort of completeness, for in every one there was a touch of his exquisite
+art, the grace of his most lovely spirit.  We have so far had two men
+only who felt the claim of their gift to the very best that the most
+patient skill could give its utterance: one was Hawthorne and the other
+was Longfellow.  I shall not undertake to say which was the greater
+artist of these two; but I am sure that every one who has studied it must
+feel with me that the art of Longfellow held out to the end with no touch
+of decay in it, and that it equalled the art of any other poet of his
+time.  It knew when to give itself, and more and more it knew when to
+withhold itself.
+
+What Longfellow's place in literature will be, I shall not offer to say;
+that is Time's affair, not mine; but I am sure that with Tennyson and
+Browning he fully shared in the expression of an age which more
+completely than any former age got itself said by its poets.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Anglo-American genius for ugliness
+Backed their credulity with their credit
+Candle burning on the table for the cigars
+Discomfort which mistaken or blundering praise
+Fell either below our pride or rose above our purse
+Literary dislikes or contempts
+Memory will not be ruled
+Shy of his fellow-men, as the scholar seems always to be
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of The White Mr. Longfellow
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--Studies of Lowell
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+STUDIES OF LOWELL
+
+I have already spoken of my earliest meetings with Lowell at Cambridge
+when I came to New England on a literary pilgrimage from the West in
+1860.  I saw him more and more after I went to live in Cambridge in 1866;
+and I now wish to record what I knew of him during the years that passed
+between this date and that of his death.  If the portrait I shall try to
+paint does not seem a faithful likeness to others who knew him, I shall
+only claim that so he looked to me, at this moment and at that.  If I do
+not keep myself quite out of the picture, what painter ever did?
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+It was in the summer of 1865 that I came home from my consular post at
+Venice; and two weeks after I landed in Boston, I went out to see Lowell
+at Elmwood, and give him an inkstand that I had brought him from Italy.
+The bronze lobster whose back opened and disclosed an inkpot and a sand-
+box was quite ugly; but I thought it beautiful then, and if Lowell
+thought otherwise he never did anything to let me know it.  He put the
+thing in the middle of his writing-table (he nearly always wrote on a
+pasteboard pad resting upon his knees), and there it remained as long as
+I knew the place--a matter of twenty-five years; but in all that time I
+suppose the inkpot continued as dry as the sand-box.
+
+My visit was in the heat of August, which is as fervid in Cambridge as it
+can well be anywhere, and I still have a sense of his study windows
+lifted to the summer night, and the crickets and grasshoppers crying in
+at them from the lawns and the gardens outside.  Other people went away
+from Cambridge in the summer to the sea and to the mountains, but Lowell
+always stayed at Elmwood, in an impassioned love for his home and for his
+town.  I must have found him there in the afternoon, and he must have
+made me sup with him (dinner was at two o'clock) and then go with him for
+a long night of talk in his study.  He liked to have some one help him
+idle the time away, and keep him as long as possible from his work; and
+no doubt I was impersonally serving his turn in this way, aside from any
+pleasure he might have had in my company as some one he had always been
+kind to, and as a fresh arrival from the Italy dear to us both.
+
+He lighted his pipe, and from the depths of his easychair, invited my shy
+youth to all the ease it was capable of in his presence.  It was not
+much; I loved him, and he gave me reason to think that he was fond of me,
+but in Lowell I was always conscious of an older and closer and stricter
+civilization than my own, an unbroken tradition, a more authoritative
+status.  His democracy was more of the head and mine more of the heart,
+and his denied the equality which mine affirmed.  But his nature was so
+noble and his reason so tolerant that whenever in our long acquaintance
+I found it well to come to open rebellion, as I more than once did,
+he admitted my right of insurrection, and never resented the outbreak.
+I disliked to differ with him, and perhaps he subtly felt this so much
+that he would not dislike me for doing it.  He even suffered being taxed
+with inconsistency, and where he saw that he had not been quite just, he
+would take punishment for his error, with a contrition that was sometimes
+humorous and always touching.
+
+Just then it was the dark hour before the dawn with Italy, and he was
+interested but not much encouraged by what I could tell him of the
+feeling in Venice against the Austrians.  He seemed to reserve a like
+scepticism concerning the fine things I was hoping for the Italians in
+literature, and he confessed an interest in the facts treated which in
+the retrospect, I am aware, was more tolerant than participant of my
+enthusiasm.  That was always Lowell's attitude towards the opinions of
+people he liked, when he could not go their lengths with them, and
+nothing was more characteristic of his affectionate nature and his just
+intelligence.  He was a man of the most strenuous convictions, but he
+loved many sorts of people whose convictions he disagreed with, and he
+suffered even prejudices counter to his own if they were not ignoble.
+In the whimsicalities of others he delighted as much as in his own.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+Our associations with Italy held over until the next day, when after
+breakfast he went with me towards Boston as far as "the village": for so
+he liked to speak of Cambridge in the custom of his younger days when
+wide tracts of meadow separated Harvard Square from his life-long home at
+Elmwood.  We stood on the platform of the horsecar together, and when I
+objected to his paying my fare in the American fashion, he allowed that
+the Italian usage of each paying for himself was the politer way.
+He would not commit himself about my returning to Venice (for I had not
+given up my place, yet, and was away on leave), but he intimated his
+distrust of the flattering conditions of life abroad.  He said it was
+charming to be treated 'da signore', but he seemed to doubt whether it
+was well; and in this as in all other things he showed his final fealty
+to the American ideal.
+
+It was that serious and great moment after the successful close of the
+civil war when the republican consciousness was more robust in us than
+ever before or since; but I cannot recall any reference to the historical
+interest of the time in Lowell's talk.  It had been all about literature
+and about travel; and now with the suggestion of the word village it
+began to be a little about his youth.  I have said before how reluctant
+he was to let his youth go from him; and perhaps the touch with my
+juniority had made him realize how near he was to fifty, and set him
+thinking of the past which had sorrows in it to age him beyond his years.
+He would never speak of these, though he often spoke of the past.  He
+told once of having been on a brief journey when he was six years old,
+with his father, and of driving up to the gate of Elmwood in the evening,
+and his father saying, "Ah, this is a pleasant place!  I wonder who
+lives here--what little boy?"  At another time he pointed out a certain
+window in his study, and said he could see himself standing by it when he
+could only get his chin on the window-sill.  His memories of the house,
+and of everything belonging to it, were very tender; but he could laugh
+over an escapade of his youth when he helped his fellow-students pull
+down his father's fences, in the pure zeal of good-comradeship.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+My fortunes took me to New York, and I spent most of the winter of 1865-6
+writing in the office of 'The Nation'.  I contributed several sketches of
+Italian travel to that paper; and one of these brought me a precious
+letter from Lowell.  He praised my sketch, which he said he had read
+without the least notion who had written it, and he wanted me to feel the
+full value of such an impersonal pleasure in it.  At the same time he did
+not fail to tell me that he disliked some pseudo-cynical verses of mine
+which he had read in another place; and I believe it was then that he
+bade me "sweat the Heine out of" me, "as men sweat the mercury out of
+their bones."
+
+When I was asked to be assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and came
+on to Boston to talk the matter over with the publishers, I went out to
+Cambridge and consulted Lowell.  He strongly urged me to take the
+position (I thought myself hopefully placed in New York on The Nation);
+and at the same time he seemed to have it on his heart to say that he had
+recommended some one else for it, never, he owned, having thought of me.
+
+He was most cordial, but after I came to live in Cambridge (where the
+magazine was printed, and I could more conveniently look over the
+proofs), he did not call on me for more than a month, and seemed quite to
+have forgotten me.  We met one night at Mr. Norton's, for one of the
+Dante readings, and he took no special notice of me till I happened to
+say something that offered him a chance to give me a little humorous
+snub.  I was speaking of a paper in the Magazine on the "Claudian
+Emissary," and I demanded (no doubt a little too airily) something like
+"Who in the world ever heard of the Claudian Emissary?"  "You are in
+Cambridge, Mr. Howells," Lowell answered, and laughed at my confusion.
+Having put me down, he seemed to soften towards me, and at parting he
+said, with a light of half-mocking tenderness in his beautiful eyes,
+"Goodnight, fellow-townsman."  "I hardly knew we were fellow-townsmen," I
+returned.  He liked that, apparently, and said he had been meaning to
+call upon me; and that he was coming very soon.
+
+He was as good as his word, and after that hardly a week of any kind of
+weather passed but he mounted the steps to the door of the ugly little
+house in which I lived, two miles away from him, and asked me to walk.
+These walks continued, I suppose, until Lowell went abroad for a winter
+in the early seventies.  They took us all over Cambridge, which he knew
+and loved every inch of, and led us afield through the straggling,
+unhandsome outskirts, bedrabbled with squalid Irish neighborhoods, and
+fraying off into marshes and salt meadows.  He liked to indulge an excess
+of admiration for the local landscape, and though I never heard him
+profess a preference for the Charles River flats to the finest Alpine
+scenery, I could well believe he would do so under provocation of a fit
+listener's surprise.  He had always so much of the boy in him that he
+liked to tease the over-serious or over-sincere.  He liked to tease and
+he liked to mock, especially his juniors, if any touch of affectation, or
+any little exuberance of manner gave him the chance; when he once came to
+fetch me, and the young mistress of the house entered with a certain
+excessive elasticity, he sprang from his seat, and minced towards her,
+with a burlesque of her buoyant carriage which made her laugh.  When he
+had given us his heart in trust of ours, he used us like a younger
+brother and sister; or like his own children.  He included our children
+in his affection, and he enjoyed our fondness for them as if it were
+something that had come back to him from his own youth.  I think he had
+also a sort of artistic, a sort of ethical pleasure in it, as being of
+the good tradition, of the old honest, simple material, from which
+pleasing effects in literature and civilization were wrought.  He liked
+giving the children books, and writing tricksy fancies in these, where he
+masked as a fairy prince; and as long as he lived he remembered his early
+kindness for them.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+In those walks of ours I believe he did most of the talking, and from his
+talk then and at other times there remains to me an impression of his
+growing conservatism.  I had in fact come into his life when it had spent
+its impulse towards positive reform, and I was to be witness of its
+increasing tendency towards the negative sort.  He was quite past the
+storm and stress of his anti-slavery age; with the close of the war which
+had broken for him all his ideals of inviolable peace, he had reached the
+age of misgiving.  I do not mean that I ever heard him express doubt of
+what he had helped to do, or regret for what he had done; but I know that
+he viewed with critical anxiety what other men were doing with the
+accomplished facts.  His anxiety gave a cast of what one may call
+reluctance from the political situation, and turned him back towards
+those civic and social defences which he had once seemed willing to
+abandon.  I do not mean that he lost faith in democracy; this faith he
+constantly then and signally afterwards affirmed; but he certainly had no
+longer any faith in insubordination as a means of grace.  He preached a
+quite Socratic reverence for law, as law, and I remember that once when
+I had got back from Canada in the usual disgust for the American custom-
+house, and spoke lightly of smuggling as not an evil in itself, and
+perhaps even a right under our vexatious tariff, he would not have it,
+but held that the illegality of the act made it a moral of fence.  This
+was not the logic that would have justified the attitude of the anti-
+slavery men towards the fugitive slave act; but it was in accord with
+Lowell's feeling about John Brown, whom he honored while always
+condemning his violation of law; and it was in the line of all his later
+thinking.  In this, he wished you to agree with him, or at least he
+wished to make you; but he did not wish you to be more of his mind than
+he was himself.  In one of those squalid Irish neighborhoods I confessed
+a grudge (a mean and cruel grudge, I now think it) for the increasing
+presence of that race among us, but this did not please him; and I am
+sure that whatever misgiving he had as to the future of America, he would
+not have had it less than it had been the refuge and opportunity of the
+poor of any race or color.  Yet he would not have had it this alone.
+There was a line in his poem on Agassiz which he left out of the printed
+version, at the fervent entreaty of his friends, as saying too bitterly
+his disappointment with his country.  Writing at the distance of Europe,
+and with America in the perspective which the alien environment clouded,
+he spoke of her as "The Land of Broken Promise."  It was a splendid
+reproach, but perhaps too dramatic to bear the full test of analysis,
+and yet it had the truth in it, and might, I think, have usefully stood,
+to the end of making people think.  Undoubtedly it expressed his sense of
+the case, and in the same measure it would now express that of many who
+love their country most among us.  It is well to hold one's country to
+her promises, and if there are any who think she is forgetting them it is
+their duty to say so, even to the point of bitter accusation.  I do not
+suppose it was the "common man" of Lincoln's dream that Lowell thought
+America was unfaithful to, though as I have suggested he could be tender
+of the common man's hopes in her; but he was impeaching in that blotted
+line her sincerity with the uncommon man: the man who had expected of her
+a constancy to the ideals of her youth end to the high martyr-moods of
+the war which had given an unguarded and bewildering freedom to a race of
+slaves.  He was thinking of the shame of our municipal corruptions, the
+debased quality of our national statesmanship, the decadence of our whole
+civic tone, rather than of the increasing disabilities of the hard-
+working poor, though his heart when he thought of them was with them,
+too, as it was in "the time when the slave would not let him sleep."
+
+He spoke very rarely of those times, perhaps because their political and
+social associations were so knit up with the saddest and tenderest
+personal memories, which it was still anguish to touch.  Not only was he
+
+                                   "--not of the race
+               That hawk, their sorrows in the market place,"
+
+but so far as my witness went he shrank from mention of them.  I do not
+remember hearing him speak of the young wife who influenced him so
+potently at the most vital moment, and turned him from his whole
+scholarly and aristocratic tradition to an impassioned championship of
+the oppressed; and he never spoke of the children he had lost.  I recall
+but one allusion to the days when he was fighting the anti-slavery battle
+along the whole line, and this was with a humorous relish of his Irish
+servant's disgust in having to wait upon a negro whom he had asked to his
+table.
+
+He was rather severe in his notions of the subordination his domestics
+owed him.  They were "to do as they were bid," and yet he had a
+tenderness for such as had been any time with him, which was wounded when
+once a hired man long in his employ greedily overreached him in a certain
+transaction.  He complained of that with a simple grief for the man's
+indelicacy after so many favors from him, rather than with any
+resentment.  His hauteur towards his dependents was theoretic; his actual
+behavior was of the gentle consideration common among Americans of good
+breeding, and that recreant hired man had no doubt never been suffered to
+exceed him in shows of mutual politeness.  Often when the maid was about
+weightier matters, he came and opened his door to me himself, welcoming
+me with the smile that was like no other.  Sometimes he said, "Siete il
+benvenuto," or used some other Italian phrase, which put me at ease with
+him in the region where we were most at home together.
+
+Looking back I must confess that I do not see what it was he found to
+make him wish for my company, which he presently insisted upon having
+once a week at dinner.  After the meal we turned into his study where we
+sat before a wood fire in winter, and he smoked and talked.  He smoked a
+pipe which was always needing tobacco, or going out, so that I have the
+figure of him before my eyes constantly getting out of his deep chair to
+rekindle it from the fire with a paper lighter.  He was often out of his
+chair to get a book from the shelves that lined the walls, either for a
+passage which he wished to read, or for some disputed point which he
+wished to settle.  If I had caused the dispute, he enjoyed putting me in
+the wrong; if he could not, he sometimes whimsically persisted in his
+error, in defiance of all authority; but mostly he had such reverence for
+the truth that he would not question it even in jest.
+
+If I dropped in upon him in the afternoon I was apt to find him reading
+the old French poets, or the plays of Calderon, or the 'Divina Commedia',
+which he magnanimously supposed me much better acquainted with than I was
+because I knew some passages of it by heart.  One day I came in quoting
+
+               "Io son, cantava, io son dolce Sirena,
+               Che i marinai in mezzo al mar dismago."
+
+He stared at me in a rapture with the matchless music, and then uttered
+all his adoration and despair in one word.  "Damn!" he said, and no more.
+I believe he instantly proposed a walk that day, as if his study walls
+with all their vistas into the great literatures cramped his soul
+liberated to a sense of ineffable beauty of the verse of the 'somma
+poeta'.  But commonly be preferred to have me sit down with him there
+among the mute witnesses of the larger part of his life.  As I have
+suggested in my own case, it did not matter much whether you brought
+anything to the feast or not.  If he liked you he liked being with you,
+not for what he got, but for what he gave.  He was fond of one man whom I
+recall as the most silent man I ever met.  I never heard him say
+anything, not even a dull thing, but Lowell delighted in him, and would
+have you believe that he was full of quaint humor.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+While Lowell lived there was a superstition, which has perhaps survived
+him, that he was an indolent man, wasting himself in barren studies and
+minor efforts instead of devoting his great powers to some monumental
+work worthy of them.  If the robust body of literature, both poetry and
+prose, which lives after him does not yet correct this vain delusion, the
+time will come when it must; and in the meantime the delusion cannot vex
+him now.  I think it did vex him, then, and that he even shared it, and
+tried at times to meet such shadowy claim as it had.  One of the things
+that people urged upon him was to write some sort of story, and it is
+known how he attempted this in verse.  It is less known that he attempted
+it in prose, and that he went so far as to write the first chapter of a
+novel.  He read this to me, and though I praised it then, I have a
+feeling now that if he had finished the novel it would have been a
+failure.  "But I shall never finish it," he sighed, as if he felt
+irremediable defects in it, and laid the manuscript away, to turn and
+light his pipe.  It was a rather old-fashioned study of a whimsical
+character, and it did not arrive anywhere, so far as it went; but I
+believe that it might have been different with a Yankee story in verse
+such as we have fragmentarily in 'The Nooning' and 'FitzAdam's Story'.
+Still, his gift was essentially lyrical and meditative, with the
+universal New England tendency to allegory.  He was wholly undramatic in
+the actuation of the characters which he imagined so dramatically.  He
+liked to deal with his subject at first hand, to indulge through himself
+all the whim and fancy which the more dramatic talent indulges through
+its personages.
+
+He enjoyed writing such a poem as "The Cathedral," which is not of his
+best, but which is more immediately himself, in all his moods, than some
+better poems.  He read it to me soon after it was written, and in the
+long walk which we went hard upon the reading (our way led us through the
+Port far towards East Cambridge, where he wished to show me a tupelo-tree
+of his acquaintance, because I said I had never seen one), his talk was
+still of the poem which he was greatly in conceit of.  Later his
+satisfaction with it received a check from the reserves of other friends
+concerning some whimsical lines which seemed to them too great a drop
+from the higher moods of the piece.  Their reluctance nettled him;
+perhaps he agreed with them; but he would not change the lines, and they
+stand as he first wrote them.  In fact, most of his lines stand as he
+first wrote them; he would often change them in revision, and then, in a
+second revision go back to the first version.
+
+He was very sensitive to criticism, especially from those he valued
+through his head or heart.  He would try to hide his hurt, and he would
+not let you speak of it, as though your sympathy unmanned him, but you
+could see that he suffered.  This notably happened in my remembrance from
+a review in a journal which he greatly esteemed; and once when in a
+notice of my own I had put one little thorny point among the flowers, he
+confessed a puncture from it.  He praised the criticism hardily, but I
+knew that he winced under my recognition of the didactic quality which he
+had not quite guarded himself against in the poetry otherwise praised.
+He liked your liking, and he openly rejoiced in it; and I suppose he made
+himself believe that in trying his verse with his friends he was testing
+it; but I do not believe that he was, and I do not think he ever
+corrected his judgment by theirs, however he suffered from it.
+
+In any matter that concerned literary morals he was more than eager to
+profit by another eye.  One summer he sent me for the Magazine a poem
+which, when I read it, I trembled to find in motive almost exactly like
+one we had lately printed by another contributor.  There was nothing for
+it but to call his attention to the resemblance, and I went over to
+Elmwood with the two poems.  He was not at home, and I was obliged to
+leave the poems, I suppose with some sort of note, for the next morning's
+post brought me a delicious letter from him, all one cry of confession,
+the most complete, the most ample.  He did not trouble himself to say
+that his poem was an unconscious reproduction of the other; that was for
+every reason unnecessary, but he had at once rewritten it upon wholly
+different lines; and I do not think any reader was reminded of Mrs.
+Akers's "Among the Laurels" by Lowell's "Foot-path."  He was not only
+much more sensitive of others' rights than his own, but in spite of a
+certain severity in him, he was most tenderly regardful of their
+sensibilities when he had imagined them: he did not always imagine them.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+At this period, between the years 1866 and 1874, when he unwillingly went
+abroad for a twelvemonth, Lowell was seen in very few Cambridge houses,
+and in still fewer Boston houses.  He was not an unsocial man, but he was
+most distinctly not a society man.  He loved chiefly the companionship of
+books, and of men who loved books; but of women generally he had an
+amusing diffidence; he revered them and honored them, but he would rather
+not have had them about.  This is over-saying it, of course, but the
+truth is in what I say. There was never a more devoted husband, and he
+was content to let his devotion to the sex end with that.  He especially
+could not abide difference of opinion in women; he valued their taste,
+their wit, their humor, but he would have none of their reason.  I was by
+one day when he was arguing a point with one of his nieces, and after it
+had gone on for some time, and the impartial witness must have owned that
+she was getting the better of him he closed the controversy by giving her
+a great kiss, with the words, "You are a very good girl, my dear," and
+practically putting her out of the room.  As to women of the flirtatious
+type, he did not dislike them; no man, perhaps, does; but he feared them,
+and he said that with them there was but one way, and that was to run.
+
+I have a notion that at this period Lowell was more freely and fully
+himself than at any other.  The passions and impulses of his younger
+manhood had mellowed, the sorrows of that time had softened; he could
+blamelessly live to himself in his affections and his sobered ideals.
+His was always a duteous life; but he had pretty well given up making man
+over in his own image, as we all wish some time to do, and then no longer
+wish it.  He fulfilled his obligations to his fellow-men as these sought
+him out, but he had ceased to seek them.  He loved his friends and their
+love, but he had apparently no desire to enlarge their circle.  It was
+that hour of civic suspense, in which public men seemed still actuated by
+unselfish aims, and one not essentially a politician might contentedly
+wait to see what would come of their doing their best.  At any rate,
+without occasionally withholding open criticism or acclaim Lowell waited
+among his books for the wounds of the war to heal themselves, and the
+nation to begin her healthfuller and nobler life.  With slavery gone,
+what might not one expect of American democracy!
+
+His life at Elmwood was of an entire simplicity.  In the old colonial
+mansion in which he was born, he dwelt in the embowering leafage, amid
+the quiet of lawns and garden-plots broken by few noises ruder than those
+from the elms and the syringas where
+
+          "The oriole clattered and the cat-bird sang."
+
+From the tracks on Brattle Street, came the drowsy tinkle of horse-car
+bells; and sometimes a funeral trailed its black length past the corner
+of his grounds, and lost itself from sight under the shadows of the
+willows that hid Mount Auburn from his study windows.  In the winter the
+deep New England snows kept their purity in the stretch of meadow behind
+the house, which a double row of pines guarded in a domestic privacy.
+All was of a modest dignity within and without the house, which Lowell
+loved but did not imagine of a manorial presence; and he could not
+conceal his annoyance with an over-enthusiastic account of his home in
+which the simple chiselling of some panels was vaunted as rich wood-
+carving.  There was a graceful staircase, and a good wide hall, from
+which the dining-room and drawing-room opened by opposite doors; behind
+the last, in the southwest corner of the house, was his study.
+
+There, literally, he lived during the six or seven years in which I knew
+him after my coming to Cambridge.  Summer and winter he sat there among
+his books, seldom stirring abroad by day except for a walk, and by night
+yet more rarely.  He went to the monthly mid-day dinner of the Saturday
+Club in Boston; he was very constant at the fortnightly meetings of his
+whist-club, because he loved the old friends who formed it; he came
+always to the Dante suppers at Longfellow's, and he was familiarly in and
+out at Mr. Norton's, of course.  But, otherwise, he kept to his study,
+except for some rare and almost unwilling absences upon university
+lecturing at Johns Hopkins or at Cornell.
+
+For four years I did not take any summer outing from Cambridge myself,
+and my associations with Elmwood and with Lowell are more of summer than
+of winter weather meetings.  But often we went our walks through the
+snows, trudging along between the horsecar tracks which enclosed the only
+well-broken-out paths in that simple old Cambridge.  I date one memorable
+expression of his from such a walk, when, as we were passing Longfellow's
+house, in mid-street, he came as near the declaration of his religious
+faith as he ever did in my presence.  He was speaking of the New
+Testament, and he said, The truth was in it; but they had covered it up
+with their hagiology.  Though he had been bred a Unitarian, and had more
+and more liberated himself from all creeds, he humorously affected an
+abiding belief in hell, and similarly contended for the eternal
+punishment of the wicked.  He was of a religious nature, and he was very
+reverent of other people's religious feelings.  He expressed a special
+tolerance for my own inherited faith, no doubt because Mrs. Lowell was
+also a Swedenborgian; but I do not think he was interested in it, and I
+suspect that all religious formulations bored him.  In his earlier poems
+are many intimations and affirmations of belief in an overruling
+providence, and especially in the God who declares vengeance His and will
+repay men for their evil deeds, and will right the weak against the
+strong.  I think he never quite lost this, though when, in the last years
+of his life, I asked him if he believed there was a moral government of
+the universe, he answered gravely and with a sort of pain, The scale was
+so vast, and we saw such a little part of it.
+
+As to tine notion of a life after death, I never had any direct or
+indirect expression from him; but I incline to the opinion that his hold
+upon this weakened with his years, as it is sadly apt to do with men who
+have read much and thought much: they have apparently exhausted their
+potentialities of psychological life.  Mystical Lowell was, as every poet
+must be, but I do not think he liked mystery.  One morning he told me
+that when he came home the night before he had seen the Doppelganger of
+one of his household: though, as he joked, he was not in a state to see
+double.
+
+He then said he used often to see people's Doppelganger; at another time,
+as to ghosts, he said, He was like Coleridge: he had seen too many of
+'em.  Lest any weaker brethren should be caused to offend by the
+restricted oath which I have reported him using in a moment of transport
+it may be best to note here that I never heard him use any other
+imprecation, and this one seldom.
+
+Any grossness of speech was inconceivable of him; now and then, but only
+very rarely, the human nature of some story "unmeet for ladies" was too
+much for his sense of humor, and overcame him with amusement which he was
+willing to impart, and did impart, but so that mainly the human nature of
+it reached you.  In this he was like the other great Cambridge men,
+though he was opener than the others to contact with the commoner life.
+He keenly delighted in every native and novel turn of phrase, and he
+would not undervalue a vital word or a notion picked up out of the road
+even if it had some dirt sticking to it.
+
+He kept as close to the common life as a man of his patrician instincts
+and cloistered habits could.  I could go to him with any new find about
+it and be sure of delighting him; after I began making my involuntary and
+all but unconscious studies of Yankee character, especially in the
+country, he was always glad to talk them over with me.  Still, when I had
+discovered a new accent or turn of speech in the fields he had
+cultivated, I was aware of a subtle grudge mingling with his pleasure;
+but this was after all less envy than a fine regret.
+
+At the time I speak of there was certainly nothing in Lowell's dress or
+bearing that would have kept the common life aloof from him, if that life
+were not always too proud to make advances to any one.  In this
+retrospect, I see him in the sack coat and rough suit which he wore upon
+all out-door occasions, with heavy shoes, and a round hat.  I never saw
+him with a high hat on till he came home after his diplomatic stay in
+London; then he had become rather rigorously correct in his costume, and
+as conventional as he had formerly been indifferent.  In both epochs he
+was apt to be gloved, and the strong, broad hands, which left the
+sensation of their vigor for some time after they had clasped yours,
+were notably white.  At the earlier period, he still wore his auburn hair
+somewhat long; it was darker than his beard, which was branching and
+full, and more straw-colored than auburn, as were his thick eyebrows;
+neither hair nor beard was then touched with gray, as I now remember.
+When he uncovered, his straight, wide, white forehead showed itself one
+of the most beautiful that could be; his eyes were gay with humor, and
+alert with all intelligence.  He had an enchanting smile, a laugh that
+was full of friendly joyousness, and a voice that was exquisite music.
+Everything about him expressed his strenuous physical condition: he would
+not wear an overcoat in the coldest Cambridge weather; at all times he
+moved vigorously, and walked with a quick step, lifting his feet well
+from the ground.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+It gives me a pleasure which I am afraid I cannot impart, to linger in
+this effort to materialize his presence from the fading memories of the
+past.  I am afraid I can as little impart a due sense of what he
+spiritually was to my knowledge.  It avails nothing for me to say that
+I think no man of my years and desert had ever so true and constant a
+friend.  He was both younger and older than I by insomuch as he was a
+poet through and through, and had been out of college before I was born.
+But he had already come to the age of self-distrust when a man likes to
+take counsel with his juniors as with his elders, and fancies he can
+correct his perspective by the test of their fresher vision.  Besides,
+Lowell was most simply and pathetically reluctant to part with youth,
+and was willing to cling to it wherever he found it.  He could not in any
+wise bear to be left-out.  When Mr. Bret Harte came to Cambridge, and the
+talk was all of the brilliant character-poems with which he had then
+first dazzled the world, Lowell casually said, with a most touching,
+however ungrounded sense of obsolescence, He could remember when the
+'Biglow Papers' were all the talk.  I need not declare that there was
+nothing ungenerous in that.  He was only too ready to hand down his
+laurels to a younger man; but he wished to do it himself.  Through the
+modesty that is always a quality of such a nature, he was magnanimously
+sensitive to the appearance of fading interest; he could not take it
+otherwise than as a proof of his fading power.  I had a curious hint of
+this when one year in making up the prospectus of the Magazine for the
+next, I omitted his name because I had nothing special to promise from
+him, and because I was half ashamed to be always flourishing it in the
+eyes of the public.  "I see that you have dropped me this year," he
+wrote, and I could see that it had hurt, and I knew that he was glad to
+believe the truth when I told him.
+
+He did not care so much for popularity as for the praise of his friends.
+If he liked you he wished you not only to like what he wrote, but to say
+so.  He was himself most cordial in his recognition of the things that
+pleased him.  What happened to me from him, happened to others, and I am
+only describing his common habit when I say that nothing I did to his
+liking failed to bring me a spoken or oftener a written acknowledgment.
+This continued to the latest years of his life when the effort even to
+give such pleasure must have cost him a physical pang.
+
+He was of a very catholic taste; and he was apt to be carried away by a
+little touch of life or humor, and to overvalue the piece in which he
+found it; but, mainly his judgments of letters and men were just.
+One of the dangers of scholarship was a peculiar danger in the Cambridge
+keeping, but Lowell was almost as averse as Longfellow from contempt.
+He could snub, and pitilessly, where he thought there was presumption and
+apparently sometimes merely because he was in the mood; but I cannot
+remember ever to have heard him sneer.  He was often wonderfully patient
+of tiresome people, and sometimes celestially insensible to vulgarity.
+In spite of his reserve, he really wished people to like him; he was
+keenly alive to neighborly good-will or ill-will; and when there was a
+question of widening Elmwood avenue by taking part of his grounds, he was
+keenly hurt by hearing that some one who lived near him had said he hoped
+the city would cut down Lowell's elms: his English elms, which his father
+had planted, and with which he was himself almost one blood!
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+In the period of which I am speaking, Lowell was constantly writing and
+pretty constantly printing, though still the superstition held that he
+was an idle man.  To this time belongs the publication of some of his
+finest poems, if not their inception: there were cases in which their
+inception dated far back, even to ten or twenty years.  He wrote his
+poems at a heat, and the manuscript which came to me for the magazine was
+usually the first draft, very little corrected.  But if the cold fit took
+him quickly it might hold him so fast that he would leave the poem in
+abeyance till he could slowly live back to a liking for it.
+
+The most of his best prose belongs to the time between 1866 and 1874, and
+to this time we owe the several volumes of essays and criticisms called
+'Among My Books' and 'My Study Windows'.  He wished to name these more
+soberly, but at the urgence of his publishers he gave them titles which
+they thought would be attractive to the public, though he felt that they
+took from the dignity of his work.  He was not a good business man in a
+literary way, he submitted to others' judgment in all such matters.
+I doubt if he ever put a price upon anything he sold, and I dare say he
+was usually surprised at the largeness of the price paid him; but
+sometimes if his need was for a larger sum, he thought it too little,
+without reference to former payments.  This happened with a long poem in
+the Atlantic, which I had urged the counting-room authorities to deal
+handsomely with him for.  I did not know how many hundred they gave him,
+and when I met him I ventured to express the hope that the publishers had
+done their part.  He held up four fingers, "Quattro," he said in Italian,
+and then added with a disappointment which he tried to smile away,
+"I thought they might have made it cinque."
+
+Between me and me I thought quattro very well, but probably Lowell had in
+mind some end which cinque would have fitted better.  It was pretty sure
+to be an unselfish end, a pleasure to some one dear to him, a gift that
+he had wished to make.  Long afterwards when I had been the means of
+getting him cinque for a poem one-tenth the length, he spoke of the
+payment to me.  "It came very handily; I had been wanting to give a
+watch."
+
+I do not believe at any time Lowell was able to deal with money
+
+          "Like wealthy men, not knowing what they give."
+
+more probably he felt a sacredness in the money got by literature, which
+the literary man never quite rids him self of, even when he is not a
+poet, and which made him wish to dedicate it to something finer than the
+every day uses.  He lived very quietly, but he had by no means more than
+he needed to live upon, and at that time he had pecuniary losses.  He was
+writing hard, and was doing full work in his Harvard professorship, and
+he was so far dependent upon his salary, that he felt its absence for the
+year he went abroad.  I do not know quite how to express my sense of
+something unworldly, of something almost womanlike in his relation to
+money.
+
+He was not only generous of money, but he was generous of himself, when
+he thought he could be of use, or merely of encouragement.  He came all
+the way into Boston to hear certain lectures of mine on the Italian
+poets, which he could not have found either edifying or amusing, that he
+might testify his interest in me, and show other people that they were
+worth coming to.  He would go carefully over a poem with me, word by
+word, and criticise every turn of phrase, and after all be magnanimously
+tolerant of my sticking to phrasings that he disliked.  In a certain line
+
+          "The silvern chords of the piano trembled,"
+
+he objected to silvern.  Why not silver?  I alleged leathern, golden, and
+like adjectives in defence of my word; but still he found an affectation
+in it, and suffered it to stand with extreme reluctance.  Another line of
+another piece:
+
+          "And what she would, would rather that she would not"
+
+he would by no means suffer.  He said that the stress falling on the last
+word made it "public-school English," and he mocked it with the answer a
+maid had lately given him when he asked if the master of the house was at
+home.  She said, "No, sir, he is not," when she ought to have said "No,
+sir, he isn't."  He was appeased when I came back the next day with the
+stanza amended so that the verse could read:
+
+          "And what she would, would rather she would not so"
+
+but I fancy he never quite forgave my word silvern.  Yet, he professed
+not to have prejudices in such matters, but to use any word that would
+serve his turn, without wincing; and he certainly did use and defend
+words, as undisprivacied and disnatured, that made others wince.
+
+He was otherwise such a stickler for the best diction that he would not
+have had me use slovenly vernacular even in the dialogue in my stories:
+my characters must not say they wanted to do so and so, but wished, and
+the like.  In a copy of one of my books which I found him reading, I saw
+he had corrected my erring Western woulds and shoulds; as he grew old he
+was less and less able to restrain himself from setting people right to
+their faces.  Once, in the vast area of my ignorance, he specified my
+small acquaintance with a certain period of English poetry, saying,
+"You're rather shady, there, old fellow."  But he would not have had me
+too learned, holding that he had himself been hurt for literature by his
+scholarship.
+
+His patience in analyzing my work with me might have been the easy effort
+of his habit of teaching; and his willingness to give himself and his own
+was no doubt more signally attested in his asking a brother man of
+letters who wished to work up a subject in the college library, to stay a
+fortnight in his house, and to share his study, his beloved study, with
+him.  This must truly have cost him dear, as any author of fixed habits
+will understand.  Happily the man of letters was a good fellow, and knew
+how to prize the favor-done him, but if he had been otherwise, it would
+have been the same to Lowell.  He not only endured, but did many things
+for the weaker brethren, which were amusing enough to one in the secret
+of his inward revolt.  Yet in these things he was considerate also of the
+editor whom he might have made the sharer of his self-sacrifice, and he
+seldom offered me manuscripts for others.  The only real burden of the
+kind that he put upon me was the diary of a Virginian who had travelled
+in New England during the early thirties, and had set down his
+impressions of men and manners there.  It began charmingly, and went on
+very well under Lowell's discreet pruning, but after a while he seemed to
+fall in love with the character of the diarist so much that he could not
+bear to cut anything.
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+He had a great tenderness for the broken and ruined South, whose sins he
+felt that he had had his share in visiting upon her, and he was willing
+to do what he could to ease her sorrows in the case of any particular
+Southerner.  He could not help looking askance upon the dramatic shows of
+retribution which some of the Northern politicians were working, but with
+all his misgivings he continued to act with the Republican party until
+after the election of Hayes; he was away from the country during the
+Garfield campaign.  He was in fact one of the Massachusetts electors
+chosen by the Republican majority in 1816, and in that most painful hour
+when there was question of the policy and justice of counting Hayes in
+for the presidency, it was suggested by some of Lowell's friends that he
+should use the original right of the electors under the constitution,
+and vote for Tilden, whom one vote would have chosen president over
+Hayes.  After he had cast his vote for Hayes, he quietly referred to the
+matter one day, in the moment of lighting his pipe, with perhaps the
+faintest trace of indignation in his tone.  He said that whatever the
+first intent of the constitution was, usage had made the presidential
+electors strictly the instruments of the party which chose them, and that
+for him to have voted for Tilden when he had been chosen to vote for
+Hayes would have-been an act of bad faith.
+
+He would have resumed for me all the old kindness of our relations before
+the recent year of his absence, but this had inevitably worked a little
+estrangement.  He had at least lost the habit of me, and that says much
+in such matters.  He was not so perfectly at rest in the Cambridge
+environment; in certain indefinable ways it did not so entirely suffice
+him, though he would have been then and always the last to allow this.
+I imagine his friends realized more than he, that certain delicate but
+vital filaments of attachment had frayed and parted in alien air, and
+left him heart-loose as he had not been before.
+
+I do not know whether it crossed his mind after the election of Hayes
+that he might be offered some place abroad, but it certainly crossed the
+minds of some of his friends, and I could not feel that I was acting for
+myself alone when I used a family connection with the President, very
+early in his term, to let him know that I believed Lowell would accept a
+diplomatic mission.  I could assure him that I was writing wholly without
+Lowell's privity or authority, and I got back such a letter as I could
+wish in its delicate sense of the situation.  The President said that he
+had already thought of offering Lowell something, and he gave me the
+pleasure, a pleasure beyond any other I could imagine, of asking Lowell
+whether he would accept the mission to Austria.  I lost no time carrying
+his letter to Elmwood, where I found Lowell over his coffee at dinner.
+He saw me at the threshold, and called to me through the open door to
+come in, and I handed him the letter, and sat down at table while he ran
+it through.  When he had read it, he gave a quick "Ah!" and threw it
+over the length of the table to Mrs. Lowell.  She read it in a smiling
+and loyal reticence, as if she would not say one word of all she might
+wish to say in urging his acceptance, though I could see that she was
+intensely eager for it.  The whole situation was of a perfect New England
+character in its tacit significance; after Lowell had taken his coffee we
+turned into his study without further allusion to the matter.
+
+A day or two later he came to my house to say that he could not accept
+the Austrian mission, and to ask me to tell the President so for him, and
+make his acknowledgments, which he would also write himself.  He remained
+talking a little while of other things, and when he rose to go, he said
+with a sigh of vague reluctance, "I should like to see a play of
+Calderon," as if it had nothing to do with any wish of his that could
+still be fulfilled.  "Upon this hint I acted," and in due time it was
+found in Washington, that the gentleman who had been offered the Spanish
+mission would as lief go to Austria, and Lowell was sent to Madrid.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+When we met in London, some years later, he came almost every afternoon
+to my lodging, and the story of our old-time Cambridge walks began again
+in London phrases.  There were not the vacant lots and outlying fields of
+his native place, but we made shift with the vast, simple parks, and we
+walked on the grass as we could not have done in an American park, and
+were glad to feel the earth under our feet.  I said how much it was like
+those earlier tramps; and that pleased him, for he wished, whenever a
+thing delighted him, to find a Cambridge quality in it.
+
+But he was in love with everything English, and was determined I should
+be so too, beginning with the English weather, which in summer cannot be
+overpraised.  He carried, of course, an umbrella, but he would not put it
+up in the light showers that caught us at times, saying that the English
+rain never wetted you.  The thick short turf delighted him; he would
+scarcely allow that the trees were the worse for foliage blighted by a
+vile easterly storm in the spring of that year.  The tender air, the
+delicate veils that the moisture in it cast about all objects at the
+least remove, the soft colors of the flowers, the dull blue of the low
+sky showing through the rifts of the dirty white clouds, the hovering
+pall of London smoke, were all dear to him, and he was anxious that I
+should not lose anything of their charm.
+
+He was anxious that I should not miss the value of anything in England,
+and while he volunteered that the aristocracy had the corruptions of
+aristocracies everywhere, he insisted upon my respectful interest in it
+because it was so historical.  Perhaps there was a touch of irony in this
+demand, but it is certain that he was very happy in England.  He had come
+of the age when a man likes smooth, warm keeping, in which he need make
+no struggle for his comfort; disciplined and obsequious service; society,
+perfectly ascertained within the larger society which we call
+civilization; and in an alien environment, for which he was in no wise
+responsible, he could have these without a pang of the self-reproach
+which at home makes a man unhappy amidst his luxuries, when he considers
+their cost to others.  He had a position which forbade thought of
+unfairness in the conditions; he must not wake because of the slave, it
+was his duty to sleep.  Besides, at that time Lowell needed all the rest
+he could get, for he had lately passed through trials such as break the
+strength of men, and how them with premature age.  He was living alone in
+his little house in Lowndes Square, and Mrs. Lowell was in the country,
+slowly recovering from the effects of the terrible typhus which she had
+barely survived in Madrid.  He was yet so near the anguish of that
+experience that he told me he had still in his nerves the expectation of
+a certain agonized cry from her which used to rend them.  But he said he
+had adjusted himself to this, and he went on to speak with a patience
+which was more affecting in him than in men of more phlegmatic
+temperament, of how we were able to adjust ourselves to all our trials
+and to the constant presence of pain.  He said he was never free of a
+certain distress, which was often a sharp pang, in one of his shoulders,
+but his physique had established such relations with it that, though he
+was never unconscious of it, he was able to endure it without a
+recognition of it as suffering.
+
+He seemed to me, however, very well, and at his age of sixty-three, I
+could not see that he was less alert and vigorous than he was when I
+first knew him in Cambridge.  He had the same brisk, light step, and
+though his beard was well whitened and his auburn hair had grown ashen
+through the red, his face had the freshness and his eyes the clearness of
+a young man's.  I suppose the novelty of his life kept him from thinking
+about his years; or perhaps in contact with those great, insenescent
+Englishmen, he could not feel himself old.  At any rate he did not once
+speak of age, as he used to do ten years earlier, and I, then half
+through my forties, was still "You young dog" to him.  It was a bright
+and cheerful renewal of the early kindliness between us, on which indeed
+there had never been a shadow, except such as distance throws.  He wished
+apparently to do everything he could to assure us of his personal
+interest; and we were amused to find him nervously apprehensive of any
+purpose, such as was far from us, to profit by him officially.  He
+betrayed a distinct relief when he found we were not going to come upon
+him even for admissions to the houses of parliament, which we were to see
+by means of an English acquaintance.  He had not perhaps found some other
+fellow-citizens so considerate; he dreaded the half-duties of his place,
+like presentations to the queen, and complained of the cheap ambitions he
+had to gratify in that way.
+
+He was so eager to have me like England in every way, and seemed so fond
+of the English, that I thought it best to ask him whether he minded my
+quoting, in a paper about Lexington, which I was just then going to print
+in a London magazine, some humorous lines of his expressing the mounting
+satisfaction of an imaginary Yankee story-teller who has the old fight
+terminate in Lord Percy's coming
+
+          "To hammer stone for life in Concord jail."
+
+It had occurred to me that it might possibly embarrass him to have this
+patriotic picture presented to a public which could not take our Fourth
+of July pleasure in it, and I offered to suppress it, as I did afterwards
+quite for literary reasons.  He said, No, let it stand, and let them make
+the worst of it; and I fancy that much of his success with a people who
+are not gingerly with other people's sensibilities came from the
+frankness with which he trampled on their prejudice when he chose.
+He said he always told them, when there was question of such things,
+that the best society he had ever known was in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
+He contended that the best English was spoken there; and so it was, when
+he spoke it.
+
+We were in London out of the season, and he was sorry that he could not
+have me meet some titles who he declared had found pleasure in my books;
+when we returned from Italy in the following June, he was prompt to do me
+this honor.  I dare say he wished me to feel it to its last implication,
+and I did my best, but there was nothing in the evening I enjoyed so much
+as his coming up to Mrs. Lowell, at the close, when there was only a
+title or two left, and saying to her as he would have said to her at
+Elmwood, where she would have personally planned it, "Fanny, that was a
+fine dinner you gave us."  Of course, this was in a tender burlesque;
+but it remains the supreme impression of what seemed to me a cloudlessly
+happy period for Lowell.  His wife was quite recovered of her long
+suffering, and was again at the head of his house, sharing in his
+pleasures, and enjoying his successes for his sake; successes so great
+that people spoke of him seriously, as "an addition to society" in
+London, where one man more or less seemed like a drop in the sea.
+She was a woman perfectly of the New England type and tradition: almost
+repellantly shy at first, and almost glacially cold with new
+acquaintance, but afterwards very sweet and cordial.  She was of a dark
+beauty with a regular face of the Spanish outline; Lowell was of an ideal
+manner towards her, and of an admiration which delicately travestied
+itself and which she knew how to receive with smiling irony.  After her
+death, which occurred while he was still in England, he never spoke of
+her to me, though before that he used to be always bringing her name in,
+with a young lover-like fondness.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+In the hurry of the London season I did not see so much of Lowell on our
+second sojourn as on our first, but once when we were alone in his study
+there was a return to the terms of the old meetings in Cambridge.  He
+smoked his pipe, and sat by his fire and philosophized; and but for the
+great London sea swirling outside and bursting through our shelter, and
+dashing him with notes that must be instantly answered, it was a very
+fair image of the past.  He wanted to tell me about his coachman whom he
+had got at on his human side with great liking and amusement, and there
+was a patient gentleness in his manner with the footman who had to keep
+coming in upon him with those notes which was like the echo of his young
+faith in the equality of men.  But he always distinguished between the
+simple unconscious equality of the ordinary American and its assumption
+by a foreigner.  He said he did not mind such an American's coming into
+his house with his hat on; but if a German or Englishman did it, he
+wanted to knock it off.  He was apt to be rather punctilious in his shows
+of deference towards others, and at one time he practised removing his
+own hat when he went into shops in Cambridge.  It must have mystified the
+Cambridge salesmen, and I doubt if he kept it up.
+
+With reference to the doctrine of his young poetry, the fierce and the
+tender humanity of his storm and stress period, I fancy a kind of baffle
+in Lowell, which I should not perhaps find it easy to prove.  I never
+knew him by word or hint to renounce this doctrine, but he could not come
+to seventy years without having seen many high hopes fade, and known many
+inspired prophecies fail.  When we have done our best to make the world
+over, we are apt to be dismayed by finding it in much the old shape.
+As he said of the moral government of the universe, the scale is so vast,
+and a little difference, a little change for the better, is scarcely
+perceptible to the eager consciousness of the wholesale reformer.
+But with whatever sense of disappointment, of doubt as to his own deeds
+for truer freedom and for better conditions I believe his sympathy was
+still with those who had some heart for hoping and striving.  I am sure
+that though he did not agree with me in some of my own later notions for
+the redemption of the race, he did not like me the less but rather the
+more because (to my own great surprise I confess) I had now and then the
+courage of my convictions, both literary and social.
+
+He was probably most at odds with me in regard to my theories of fiction,
+though he persisted in declaring his pleasure in my own fiction.  He was
+in fact, by nature and tradition, thoroughly romantic, and he could not
+or would not suffer realism in any but a friend.  He steadfastly refused
+even to read the Russian masters, to his immense loss, as I tried to
+persuade him, and even among the modern Spaniards, for whom he might have
+had a sort of personal kindness from his love of Cervantes, he chose one
+for his praise the least worthy, of it, and bore me down with his heavier
+metal in argument when I opposed to Alarcon's factitiousness the
+delightful genuineness of Valdes.  Ibsen, with all the Norwegians, he put
+far from him; he would no more know them than the Russians; the French
+naturalists he abhorred.  I thought him all wrong, but you do not try
+improving your elders when they have come to three score and ten years,
+and I would rather have had his affection unbroken by our difference of
+opinion than a perfect agreement.  Where he even imagined that this
+difference could work me harm, he was anxious to have me know that he
+meant me none; and he was at the trouble to write me a letter when a
+Boston paper had perverted its report of what he said in a public lecture
+to my disadvantage, and to assure me that he had not me in mind.  When
+once he had given his liking, he could not bear that any shadow of change
+should seem to have come upon him.  He had a most beautiful and endearing
+ideal of friendship; he desired to affirm it and to reaffirm it as often
+as occasion offered, and if occasion did not offer, he made occasion.
+It did not matter what you said or did that contraried him; if he thought
+he had essentially divined you, you were still the same: and on his part
+he was by no means exacting of equal demonstration, but seemed not even
+to wish it.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+After he was replaced at London by a minister more immediately
+representative of the Democratic administration, he came home.  He made a
+brave show of not caring to have remained away, but in truth he had
+become very fond of England, where he had made so many friends, and where
+the distinction he had, in that comfortably padded environment, was so
+agreeable to him.
+
+It would have been like him to have secretly hoped that the new President
+might keep him in London, but he never betrayed any ignoble
+disappointment, and he would not join in any blame of him.  At our first
+meeting after he came home he spoke of the movement which had made Mr.
+Cleveland president, and said he supposed that if he had been here,
+he should have been in it.  All his friends were, he added, a little
+helplessly; but he seemed not to dislike my saying I knew one of his
+friends who was not: in fact, as I have told, he never disliked a plump
+difference--unless he disliked the differer.
+
+For several years he went back to England every summer, and it was not
+until he took up his abode at Elmwood again that he spent a whole year at
+home.  One winter he passed at his sister's home in Boston, but mostly he
+lived with his daughter at Southborough.  I have heard a story of his
+going to Elmwood soon after his return in 1885, and sitting down in his
+old study, where he declared with tears that the place was full of
+ghosts.  But four or five years later it was well for family reasons that
+he should live there; and about the same time it happened that I had
+taken a house for the summer in his neighborhood.  He came to see me,
+and to assure me, in all tacit forms of his sympathy in a sorrow for
+which there could be no help; but it was not possible that the old
+intimate relations should be resumed.  The affection was there, as much
+on his side as on mine, I believe; but he was now an old man and I was an
+elderly man, and we could not, without insincerity, approach each other
+in the things that had drawn us together in earlier and happier years.
+His course was run; my own, in which he had taken such a generous
+pleasure, could scarcely move his jaded interest.  His life, so far as it
+remained to him, had renewed itself in other air; the later friendships
+beyond seas sufficed him, and were without the pang, without the effort
+that must attend the knitting up of frayed ties here.
+
+He could never have been anything but American, if he had tried, and he
+certainly never tried; but he certainly did not return to the outward
+simplicities of his life as I first knew it.  There was no more round-
+hat-and-sack-coat business for him; he wore a frock and a high hat, and
+whatever else was rather like London than Cambridge; I do not know but
+drab gaiters sometimes added to the effect of a gentleman of the old
+school which he now produced upon the witness.  Some fastidiousnesses
+showed themselves in him, which were not so surprising.  He complained of
+the American lower class manner; the conductor and cabman would be kind
+to you but they would not be respectful, and he could not see the fun of
+this in the old way.  Early in our acquaintance he rather stupified me by
+saying, "I like you because you don't put your hands on me," and I heard
+of his consenting to some sort of reception in those last years, "Yes,
+if they won't shake hands."
+
+Ever since his visit to Rome in 1875 he had let his heavy mustache grow
+long till it dropped below the corners of his beard, which was now almost
+white; his face had lost the ruddy hue so characteristic of him.  I fancy
+he was then ailing with premonitions of the disorder which a few years
+later proved mortal, but he still bore himself with sufficient vigor,
+and he walked the distance between his house and mine, though once when I
+missed his visit the family reported that after he came in he sat a long
+time with scarcely a word, as if too weary to talk.  That winter, I went
+into Boston to live, and I saw him only at infrequent intervals, when I
+could go out to Elmwood.  At such times I found him sitting in the room
+which was formerly the drawing-room, but which had been joined with his
+study by taking away the partitions beside the heavy mass of the old
+colonial chimney.  He told me that when he was a newborn babe, the nurse
+had carried him round this chimney, for luck, and now in front of the
+same hearth, the white old man stretched himself in an easy-chair, with
+his writing-pad on his knees and his books on the table at his elbow, and
+was willing to be entreated not to rise.  I remember the sun used to come
+in at the eastern windows full pour, and bathe the air in its warmth.
+
+He always hailed me gayly, and if I found him with letters newly come
+from England, as I sometimes did, he glowed and sparkled with fresh life.
+He wanted to read passages from those letters, he wanted to talk about
+their writers, and to make me feel their worth and charm as he did.
+He still dreamed of going back to England the next summer, but that was
+not to be.  One day he received me not less gayly than usual, but with a
+certain excitement, and began to tell me about an odd experience he had
+had, not at all painful, but which had very much mystified him.  He had
+since seen the doctor, and the doctor had assured him that there was
+nothing alarming in what had happened, and in recalling this assurance,
+he began to look at the humorous aspects of the case, and to make some
+jokes about it.  He wished to talk of it, as men do of their maladies,
+and very fully, and I gave him such proof of my interest as even inviting
+him to talk of it would convey.  In spite of the doctor's assurance,
+and his joyful acceptance of it, I doubt if at the bottom of his heart
+there was not the stir of an uneasy misgiving; but he had not for a long
+time shown himself so cheerful.
+
+It was the beginning of the end.  He recovered and relapsed, and
+recovered again; but never for long.  Late in the spring I came out,
+and he had me stay to dinner, which was somehow as it used to be at two
+o'clock; and after dinner we went out on his lawn.  He got a long-handled
+spud, and tried to grub up some dandelions which he found in his turf,
+but after a moment or two he threw it down, and put his hand upon his
+back with a groan.  I did not see him again till I came out to take leave
+of him before going away for the summer, and then I found him sitting on
+the little porch in a western corner of his house, with a volume of Scott
+closed upon his finger.  There were some other people, and our meeting
+was with the constraint of their presence.  It was natural in nothing so
+much as his saying very significantly to me, as if he knew of my heresies
+concerning Scott, and would have me know he did not approve of them, that
+there was nothing he now found so much pleasure in as Scott's novels.
+Another friend, equally heretical, was by, but neither of us attempted to
+gainsay him.  Lowell talked very little, but he told of having been a
+walk to Beaver Brook, and of having wished to jump from one stone to
+another in the stream, and of having had to give it up.  He said, without
+completing the sentence, If it had come to that with him!  Then he fell
+silent again; and with some vain talk of seeing him when I came back in
+the fall, I went away sick at heart.  I was not to see him again, and I
+shall not look upon his like.
+
+I am aware that I have here shown him from this point and from that in a
+series of sketches which perhaps collectively impart, but do not assemble
+his personality in one impression.  He did not, indeed, make one
+impression upon me, but a thousand impressions, which I should seek in
+vain to embody in a single presentment.  What I have cloudily before me
+is the vision of a very lofty and simple soul, perplexed, and as it were
+surprised and even dismayed at the complexity of the effects from motives
+so single in it, but escaping always to a clear expression of what was
+noblest and loveliest in itself at the supreme moments, in the divine
+exigencies.  I believe neither in heroes nor in saints; but I believe in
+great and good men, for I have known them, and among such men Lowell was
+of the richest nature I have known.  His nature was not always serene or
+pellucid; it was sometimes roiled by the currents that counter and cross
+in all of us; but it was without the least alloy of insincerity, and it
+was never darkened by the shadow of a selfish fear.  His genius was an
+instrument that responded in affluent harmony to the power that made him
+a humorist and that made him a poet, and appointed him rarely to be quite
+either alone.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+I believe neither in heroes nor in saints
+It is well to hold one's country to her promises
+Liked being with you, not for what he got, but for what he gave
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Studies of Lowell
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--A Belated Guest
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+A BELATED GUEST
+
+It is doubtful whether the survivor of any order of things finds
+compensation in the privilege, however undisputed by his contemporaries,
+of recording his memories of it.  This is, in the first two or three
+instances, a pleasure.  It is sweet to sit down, in the shade or by the
+fire, and recall names, looks, and tones from the past; and if the
+Absences thus entreated to become Presences are those of famous people,
+they lend to the fond historian a little of their lustre, in which he
+basks for the time with an agreeable sense of celebrity.  But another
+time comes, and comes very soon, when the pensive pleasure changes to the
+pain of duty, and the precious privilege converts itself into a grievous
+obligation.  You are unable to choose your company among those immortal
+shades; if one, why not another, where all seem to have a right to such
+gleams of this 'dolce lome' as your reminiscences can shed upon them?
+Then they gather so rapidly, as the years pass, in these pale realms,
+that one, if one continues to survive, is in danger of wearing out such
+welcome, great or small, as met ones recollections in the first two or
+three instances, if one does one's duty by each.  People begin to say,
+and not without reason, in a world so hurried and wearied as this: "Ah,
+here he is again with his recollections!"  Well, but if the recollections
+by some magical good-fortune chance to concern such a contemporary of his
+as, say, Bret Harte, shall not he be partially justified, or at least
+excused?
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+My recollections of Bret Harte begin with the arrest, on the Atlantic
+shore, of that progress of his from the Pacific Slope, which, in the
+simple days of 1871, was like the progress of a prince, in the universal
+attention and interest which met and followed it.  He was indeed a
+prince, a fairy prince in whom every lover of his novel and enchanting
+art felt a patriotic property, for his promise and performance in those
+earliest tales of 'The Luck of Roaring Camp', and 'Tennessee's Partner',
+and 'Maggles', and 'The Outcasts of Poker Flat', were the earnests of an
+American literature to come.  If it is still to come, in great measure,
+that is not Harte's fault, for he kept on writing those stories, in one
+form or another, as long as he lived.  He wrote them first and last in
+the spirit of Dickens, which no man of his time could quite help doing,
+but he wrote them from the life of Bret Harte, on the soil and in the air
+of the newest kind of new world, and their freshness took the soul of his
+fellow-countrymen not only with joy, but with pride such as the
+Europeans, who adored him much longer, could never know in him.
+
+When the adventurous young editor who had proposed being his host for
+Cambridge and the Boston neighborhood, while Harte was still in San
+Francisco, and had not yet begun his princely progress eastward, read of
+the honors that attended his coming from point to point, his courage
+fell, as if he had perhaps, committed himself in too great an enterprise.
+Who was he, indeed, that he should think of making this
+
+               "Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,"
+
+his guest, especially when he heard that in Chicago Harte failed of
+attending a banquet of honor because the givers of it had not sent a
+carriage to fetch him to it, as the alleged use was in San Francisco?
+Whether true or not, and it was probably not true in just that form,
+it must have been this rumor which determined his host to drive into
+Boston for him with the handsomest hack which the livery of Cambridge
+afforded, and not trust to the horse-car and the local expressman to get
+him and his baggage out, as he would have done with a less portentous
+guest.  However it was, he instantly lost all fear when they met at the
+station, and Harte pressed forward with his cordial hand-clasp, as if he
+were not even a fairy prince, and with that voice and laugh which were
+surely the most winning in the world.  He was then, as always, a child of
+extreme fashion as to his clothes and the cut of his beard, which he wore
+in a mustache and the drooping side-whiskers of the day, and his jovial
+physiognomy was as winning as his voice, with its straight nose and
+fascinating thrust of the under lip, its fine eyes, and good forehead,
+then thickly crowned with the black hair which grew early white, while
+his mustache remained dark the most enviable and consoling effect
+possible in the universal mortal necessity of either aging or dying.
+He was, as one could not help seeing, thickly pitted, but after the first
+glance one forgot this, so that a lady who met him for the first time
+could say to him, "Mr. Harte, aren't you afraid to go about in the cars
+so recklessly when there is this scare about smallpox?"  "No, madam," he
+could answer in that rich note of his, with an irony touched by pseudo-
+pathos, "I bear a charmed life."
+
+The drive out from Boston was not too long for getting on terms of
+personal friendship with the family which just filled the hack, the two
+boys intensely interested in the novelties of a New England city and
+suburb, and the father and mother continually exchanging admiration of
+such aspects of nature as presented themselves in the leafless sidewalk
+trees, and patches of park and lawn.  They found everything so fine, so
+refined, after the gigantic coarseness of California, where the natural
+forms were so vast that one could not get on companionable terms with
+them.  Their host heard them without misgiving for the world of romance
+which Harte had built up among those huge forms, and with a subtle
+perception that this was no excursion of theirs to the East, but a
+lifelong exodus from the exile which he presently understood they must
+always have felt California to be.  It is different now, when people are
+every day being born in California, and must begin to feel it home from
+the first breath, but it is notable that none of the Californians of that
+great early day have gone back to live amid the scenes which inspired and
+prospered them.
+
+Before they came in sight of the editor's humble roof he had mocked
+himself to his guest for his trepidations, and Harte with burlesque
+magnanimity had consented to be for that occasion only something less
+formidable than he had loomed afar.  He accepted with joy the theory of
+passing a week in the home of virtuous poverty, and the week began as
+delightfully as it went on.  From first to last Cambridge amused him as
+much as it charmed him by that air of academic distinction which was
+stranger to him even than the refined trees and grass.  It has already
+been told how, after a list of the local celebrities had been recited to
+him, he said, "why, you couldn't stand on your front porch and fire off
+your revolver without bringing down a two volumer," and no doubt the
+pleasure he had in it was the effect of its contrast with the wild
+California he had known, and perhaps, when he had not altogether known
+it, had invented.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+Cambridge began very promptly to show him those hospitalities which he
+could value, and continued the fable of his fairy princeliness in the
+curiosity of those humbler admirers who could not hope to be his hosts or
+his fellow-guests at dinner or luncheon.  Pretty presences in the tie-
+backs of the period were seen to flit before the home of virtuous
+poverty, hungering for any chance sight of him which his outgoings or
+incomings might give.  The chances were better with the outgoings than
+with the incomings, for these were apt to be so hurried, in the final
+result of his constitutional delays, as to have the rapidity of the
+homing pigeon's flight, and to afford hardly a glimpse to the quickest
+eye.  It cannot harm him, or any one now, to own that Harte was nearly
+always late for those luncheons and dinners which he was always going out
+to, and it needed the anxieties and energies of both families to get him
+into his clothes, and then into the carriage where a good deal of final
+buttoning must have been done, in order that he might not arrive so very
+late.  He was the only one concerned who was quite unconcerned; his
+patience with his delays was inexhaustible; he arrived at the expected
+houses smiling, serenely jovial, radiating a bland gaiety from his whole
+person, and ready to ignore any discomfort he might have occasioned.
+
+Of course, people were glad to have him on his own terms, and it may be
+truly said that it was worth while to have him on any terms.  There never
+was a more charming companion, an easier or more delightful guest.
+
+It was not from what he said, for he was not much of a talker, and almost
+nothing of a story-teller; but he could now and then drop the fittest
+word, and with a glance or smile of friendly intelligence express the
+appreciation of another's fit word which goes far to establish for a man
+the character of boon humorist.  It must be said of him that if he took
+the honors easily that were paid him he took them modestly, and never by
+word or look invited them, or implied that he expected them.  It was fine
+to see him humorously accepting the humorous attribution of scientific
+sympathies from Agassiz, in compliment of his famous epic describing the
+incidents that "broke up the society upon the Stanislow."  It was a
+little fearsome to hear him frankly owning to Lowell his dislike for
+something over-literary in the phrasing of certain verses of 'The
+Cathedral.'  But Lowell could stand that sort of thing from a man who
+could say the sort of things that Harte said to him of that delicious
+line picturing the bobolink as he
+
+          "Runs down a brook of laughter in the air."
+
+This, Harte told him, was the line he liked best of all his lines, and
+Lowell smoked well content with the praise.  Yet they were not men to get
+on easily together, Lowell having limitations in directions where Harte
+had none.  Afterward in London they did not meet often or willingly.
+Lowell owned the brilliancy and uncommonness of Harte's gift, while he
+sumptuously surfeited his passion of finding everybody more or less a Jew
+by finding that Harte was at least half a Jew on his father's side; he
+had long contended for the Hebraicism of his name.
+
+With all his appreciation of the literary eminences whom Fields used to
+class together as "the old saints," Harte had a spice of irreverence that
+enabled him to take them more ironically than they might have liked, and
+to see the fun of a minor literary man's relation to them.  Emerson's
+smoking amused him, as a Jovian self-indulgence divinely out of character
+with so supreme a god, and he shamelessly burlesqued it, telling how
+Emerson at Concord had proposed having a "wet night" with him over a
+glass of sherry, and had urged the scant wine upon his young friend with
+a hospitable gesture of his cigar.  But this was long after the Cambridge
+episode, in which Longfellow alone escaped the corrosive touch of his
+subtle irreverence, or, more strictly speaking, had only the effect of
+his reverence.  That gentle and exquisitely modest dignity, of
+Longfellow's he honored with as much veneration as it was in him to
+bestow, and he had that sense of Longfellow's beautiful and perfected art
+which is almost a test of a critic's own fineness.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+As for Harte's talk, it was mostly ironical, not to the extreme of
+satire, but tempered to an agreeable coolness even for the things he
+admired.  He did not apparently care to hear himself praised, but he
+could very accurately and perfectly mark his discernment of excellence in
+others.  He was at times a keen observer of nature and again not,
+apparently.  Something was said before him and Lowell of the beauty of
+his description of a rabbit, startled with fear among the ferns, and
+lifting its head with the pulsation of its frightened heart visibly
+shaking it; then the talk turned on the graphic homeliness of Dante's
+noticing how the dog's skin moves upon it, and Harte spoke of the
+exquisite shudder with which a horse tries to rid itself of a fly.
+
+But once again, when an azalea was shown to him as the sort of bush that
+Sandy drunkenly slept under in 'The Idyl of Iced Gulch', he asked, "Why,
+is that an azalea?"  To be sure, this might have been less from his
+ignorance or indifference concerning the quality of the bush he had sent
+Sandy to sleep under than from his willingness to make a mock of an
+azalea in a very small pot, so disproportionate to uses which an azalea
+of Californian size could easily lend itself to.
+
+You never could be sure of Harte; he could only by chance be caught in
+earnest about anything or anybody.  Except for those slight recognitions
+of literary, traits in his talk with Lowell, nothing remained from his
+conversation but the general criticism he passed upon his brilliant
+fellow-Hebrew Heine, as "rather scorbutic."  He preferred to talk about
+the little matters of common incident and experience.  He amused himself
+with such things as the mystification of the postman of whom he asked his
+way to Phillips Avenue, where he adventurously supposed his host to be
+living.  "Why," the postman said, "there is no Phillips Avenue in
+Cambridge.  There's Phillips Place."  "Well," Harte assented, "Phillips
+Place will do; but there is a Phillips Avenue."  He entered eagerly into
+the canvass of the distinctions and celebrities asked to meet him at the
+reception made for him, but he had even a greater pleasure in
+compassionating his host for the vast disparity between the caterer's
+china and plated ware and the simplicities and humilities of the home of
+virtuous poverty; and he spluttered with delight at the sight of the
+lofty 'epergnes' set up and down the supper-table when he was brought in
+to note the preparations made in his honor.  Those monumental structures
+were an inexhaustible joy to him; he walked round and round the room, and
+viewed them in different perspectives, so as to get the full effect of
+the towering forms that dwarfed it so.
+
+He was a tease, as many a sweet and fine wit is apt to be, but his
+teasing was of the quality of a caress, so much kindness went with it.
+He lamented as an irreparable loss his having missed seeing that night an
+absent-minded brother in literature, who came in rubber shoes, and
+forgetfully wore them throughout the evening.  That hospitable soul of
+Ralph Keeler, who had known him in California, but had trembled for their
+acquaintance when he read of all the honors that might well have spoiled
+Harte for the friends of his simpler days, rejoiced in the unchanged
+cordiality of his nature when they met, and presently gave him one of
+those restaurant lunches in Boston, which he was always sumptuously
+providing out of his destitution.  Harte was the life of a time which was
+perhaps less a feast of reason than a flow of soul.  The truth is, there
+was nothing but careless stories carelessly told, and jokes and laughing,
+and a great deal of mere laughing without the jokes, the whole as unlike
+the ideal of a literary symposium as well might be; but there was present
+one who met with that pleasant Boston company for the first time, and to
+whom Harte attributed a superstition of Boston seriousness not realized
+then and there.  "Look at him," he said, from time to time.  "This is the
+dream of his life," and then shouted and choked with fun at the
+difference between the occasion and the expectation he would have
+imagined in his commensal's mind.  At a dinner long after in London,
+where several of the commensals of that time met again, with other
+literary friends of a like age and stature, Harte laid his arms well
+along their shoulders as they formed in a half-circle before him, and
+screamed out in mocking mirth at the bulbous favor to which the slim
+shapes of the earlier date had come.  The sight was not less a rapture to
+him that he was himself the prey of the same practical joke from the
+passing years.  The hair which the years had wholly swept from some of
+those thoughtful brows, or left spindling autumnal spears, "or few or
+none," to "shake against the cold," had whitened to a wintry snow on his,
+while his mustache had kept its youthful black.  "He looks," one of his
+friends said to another as they walked home together, "like a French
+marquis of the ancien regime."  "Yes," the other assented, thoughtfully,
+"or like an American actor made up for the part."
+
+The saying closely fitted the outward fact, but was of a subtle injustice
+in its implication of anything histrionic in Harte's nature.  Never was
+any man less a 'poseur'; he made simply and helplessly known what he was
+at any and every moment, and he would join the witness very cheerfully in
+enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself.  In the
+course of events, which were in his case so very human, it came about on
+a subsequent visit of his to Boston that an impatient creditor decided to
+right himself out of the proceeds of the lecture which was to be given,
+and had the law corporeally present at the house of the friend where
+Harte dined, and in the anteroom at the lecture-hall, and on the
+platform, where the lecture was delivered with beautiful aplomb and
+untroubled charm.  He was indeed the only one privy to the law's presence
+who was not the least affected by it, so that when his host of an earlier
+time ventured to suggest, "Well, Harte, this is the old literary
+tradition; this is the Fleet business over again," he joyously smote his
+thigh and crowed out, "Yes, the Fleet!"  No doubt he tasted all the
+delicate humor of the situation, and his pleasure in it was quite
+unaffected.
+
+If his temperament was not adapted to the harsh conditions of the elder
+American world, it might very well be that his temperament was not
+altogether in the wrong.  If it disabled him for certain experiences of
+life, it was the source of what was most delightful in his personality,
+and perhaps most beautiful in his talent.  It enabled him to do such
+things as he did without being at all anguished for the things he did not
+do, and indeed could not.  His talent was not a facile gift; he owned
+that he often went day after day to his desk, and sat down before that
+yellow post-office paper on which he liked to write his literature, in
+that exquisitely refined script of his, without being able to inscribe a
+line.  It may be owned for him that though he came to the East at thirty-
+four, which ought to have been the very prime of his powers, he seemed to
+have arrived after the age of observation was past for him.  He saw
+nothing aright, either in Newport, where he went to live, or in New York,
+where he sojourned, or on those lecturing tours which took him about the
+whole country; or if he saw it aright, he could not report it aright, or
+would not.  After repeated and almost invariable failures to deal with
+the novel characters and circumstances which he encountered he left off
+trying, and frankly went back to the semi-mythical California he had half
+discovered, half created, and wrote Bret Harte over and over as long as
+he lived.  This, whether he did it from instinct or from reason, was the
+best thing he could do, and it went as nearly as might be to satisfy the
+insatiable English fancy for the wild America no longer to be found on
+our map.
+
+It is imaginable of Harte that this temperament defended him from any
+bitterness in the disappointment he may have shared with that simple
+American public which in the early eighteen-seventies expected any and
+everything of him in fiction and drama.  The long breath was not his; he
+could not write a novel, though he produced the like of one or two, and
+his plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it.  At any
+rate, they could not keep it, even when they got it, and they denoted the
+fatigue or the indifference of their author in being dramatizations of
+his longer or shorter fictions, and not originally dramatic efforts.
+The direction in which his originality lasted longest, and most
+strikingly affirmed his power, was in the direction of his verse.
+
+Whatever minds there may be about Harte's fiction finally, there can
+hardly be more than one mind about his poetry.  He was indeed a poet;
+whether he wrote what drolly called itself "dialect," or wrote language,
+he was a poet of a fine and fresh touch.  It must be allowed him that in
+prose as well he had the inventive gift, but he had it in verse far more
+importantly.  There are lines, phrases, turns in his poems,
+characterizations, and pictures which will remain as enduringly as
+anything American, if that is not saying altogether too little for them.
+In poetry he rose to all the occasions he made for himself, though he
+could not rise to the occasions made for him, and so far failed in the
+demands he acceded to for a Phi Beta Kappa poem, as to come to that
+august Harvard occasion with a jingle so trivial, so out of keeping, so
+inadequate that his enemies, if he ever truly had any, must have suffered
+from it almost as much as his friends.  He himself did not suffer from
+his failure, from having read before the most elect assembly of the
+country a poem which would hardly have served the careless needs of an
+informal dinner after the speaking had begun; he took the whole
+disastrous business lightly, gayly, leniently, kindly, as that golden
+temperament of his enabled him to take all the good or bad of life.
+
+The first year of his Eastern sojourn was salaried in a sum which took
+the souls of all his young contemporaries with wonder, if no baser
+passion, in the days when dollars were of so much farther flight than
+now, but its net result in a literary return to his publishers was one
+story and two or three poems.  They had not profited much by his book,
+which, it will doubtless amaze a time of fifty thousand editions selling
+before their publication, to learn had sold only thirty-five hundred in
+the sixth month of its career, as Harte himself,
+
+          "With sick and scornful looks averse,"
+
+confided to his Cambridge host after his first interview with the Boston
+counting-room.  It was the volume which contained "The Luck of Roaring
+Camp," and the other early tales which made him a continental, and then
+an all but a world-wide fame.  Stories that had been talked over, and
+laughed over, and cried over all up and down the land, that had been
+received with acclaim by criticism almost as boisterous as their
+popularity, and recognized as the promise of greater things than any done
+before in their kind, came to no more than this pitiful figure over the
+booksellers' counters.  It argued much for the publishers that in spite
+of this stupefying result they were willing, they were eager, to pay him
+ten thousand dollars for whatever, however much or little, he chose to
+write in a year: Their offer was made in Boston, after some offers
+mortifyingly mean, and others insultingly vague, had been made in New
+York.
+
+It was not his fault that their venture proved of such slight return in
+literary material.  Harte was in the midst of new and alien conditions,
+--[See a corollary in M. Froude who visited the U.S. for a few months and
+then published a comprehensive analysis of the nation and its people.
+Twain's rebuttal (Mr. Froude's Progress) would have been 'a propos' for
+Harte in Cambridge.  D.W.]--and he had always his temperament against
+him, as well as the reluctant if not the niggard nature of his muse.  He
+would no doubt have been only too glad to do more than he did for the
+money, but actually if not literally he could not do more.  When it came
+to literature, all the gay improvidence of life forsook him, and be
+became a stern, rigorous, exacting self-master, who spared himself
+nothing to achieve the perfection at which he aimed.  He was of the order
+of literary men like Goldsmith and De Quincey, and Sterne and Steele, in
+his relations with the outer world, but in his relations with the inner
+world he was one of the most duteous and exemplary citizens.  There was
+nothing of his easy-going hilarity in that world; there he was of a
+Puritanic severity, and of a conscience that forgave him no pang.  Other
+California writers have testified to the fidelity with which he did his
+work as editor.  He made himself not merely the arbiter but the
+inspiration of his contributors, and in a region where literature had
+hardly yet replaced the wild sage-brush of frontier journalism, he made
+the sand-lots of San Francisco to blossom as the rose, and created a
+literary periodical of the first class on the borders of civilization.
+
+It is useless to wonder now what would have been his future if the
+publisher of the Overland Monthly had been of imagination or capital
+enough to meet the demand which Harte dimly intimated to his Cambridge
+host as the condition of his remaining in California.  Publishers, men
+with sufficient capital, are of a greatly varying gift in the regions of
+prophecy, and he of the Overland Monthly was not to be blamed if he could
+not foresee his account in paying Harte ten thousand a year to continue
+editing the magazine.  He did according to his lights, and Harte came to
+the East, and then went to England, where his last twenty-five years were
+passed in cultivating the wild plant of his Pacific Slope discovery.  It
+was always the same plant, leaf and flower and fruit, but it perennially
+pleased the constant English world, and thence the European world, though
+it presently failed of much delighting these fastidious States.  Probably
+he would have done something else if he could; he did not keep on doing
+the wild mining-camp thing because it was the easiest, but because it was
+for him the only possible thing.  Very likely he might have preferred not
+doing anything.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+The joyous visit of a week, which has been here so poorly recovered from
+the past, came to an end, and the host went with his guest to the station
+in as much vehicular magnificence as had marked his going to meet him
+there.  Harte was no longer the alarming portent of the earlier time, but
+an experience of unalloyed delight.  You must love a person whose worst
+trouble-giving was made somehow a favor by his own unconsciousness of the
+trouble, and it was a most flattering triumph to have got him in time, or
+only a little late, to so many luncheons and dinners.  If only now he
+could be got to the train in time the victory would be complete, the
+happiness of the visit without a flaw.  Success seemed to crown the
+fondest hope in this respect.  The train had not yet left the station;
+there stood the parlor-car which Harte had seats in; and he was followed
+aboard for those last words in which people try to linger out pleasures
+they have known together.  In this case the sweetest of the pleasures had
+been sitting up late after those dinners, and talking them over, and then
+degenerating from that talk into the mere giggle and making giggle which
+Charles Lamb found the best thing in life.  It had come to this as the
+host and guest sat together for those parting moments, when Harte
+suddenly started up in the discovery of having forgotten to get some
+cigars.  They rushed out of the train together, and after a wild descent
+upon the cigar-counter of the restaurant, Harte rushed back to his car.
+But by this time the train was already moving with that deceitful
+slowness of the departing train, and Harte had to clamber up the steps of
+the rearmost platform.  His host clambered after, to make sure that he
+was aboard, which done, he dropped to the ground, while Harte drew out of
+the station, blandly smiling, and waving his hand with a cigar in it, in
+picturesque farewell from the platform.
+
+Then his host realized that he had dropped to the ground barely in time
+to escape being crushed against the side of the archway that sharply
+descended beside the steps of the train, and he went and sat down in that
+handsomest hack, and was for a moment deathly sick at the danger that had
+not realized itself to him in season.  To be sure, he was able, long
+after, to adapt the incident to the exigencies of fiction, and to have a
+character, not otherwise to be conveniently disposed of, actually crushed
+to death between a moving train and such an archway.
+
+Besides, he had then and always afterward, the immense super-compensation
+of the memories of that visit from one of the most charming personalities
+in the world,
+
+          "In life's morning march when his bosom was young,"
+
+and when infinitely less would have sated him.  Now death has come to
+join its vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life, and that
+blithe spirit is elsewhere.  But nothing can take from him who remains
+the witchery of that most winning presence.  Still it looks smiling from
+the platform of the car, and casts a farewell of mock heartbreak from it.
+Still a gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years that are now
+numbered, and out of somewhere the hearer's sense is rapt with the mellow
+cordial of a voice that was like no other.
+
+[This last paragraph reminds one again that, as with Holmes: a great poet
+writes the best prose.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Always sumptuously providing out of his destitution
+Could only by chance be caught in earnest about anything
+Couldn't fire your revolver without bringing down a two volumer
+Death's vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life
+Dollars were of so much farther flight than now
+Enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself
+Express the appreciation of another's fit word
+Gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years
+Giggle which Charles Lamb found the best thing in life
+His enemies suffered from it almost as much as his friends
+His plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it
+Insatiable English fancy for the wild America no longer there
+Long breath was not his; he could not write a novel
+Mellow cordial of a voice that was like no other
+Not much of a talker, and almost nothing of a story-teller
+Now death has come to join its vague conjectures
+Offers mortifyingly mean, and others insultingly vague
+Only one concerned who was quite unconcerned
+So refined, after the gigantic coarseness of California
+Wrote them first and last in the spirit of Dickens
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of A Belated Guest
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--My Mark Twain
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+MY MARK TWAIN
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+It was in the little office of James T. Fields, over the bookstore of
+Ticknor & Fields, at 124 Tremont Street, Boston, that I first met my
+friend of now forty-four years, Samuel L. Clemens.  Mr. Fields was then
+the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and I was his proud and glad
+assistant, with a pretty free hand as to manuscripts, and an unmanacled
+command of the book-notices at the end of the magazine.  I wrote nearly
+all of them myself, and in 1869 I had written rather a long notice of a
+book just winning its way to universal favor.  In this review I had
+intimated my reservations concerning the 'Innocents Abroad', but I had
+the luck, if not the sense, to recognize that it was such fun as we had
+not had before.  I forget just what I said in praise of it, and it does
+not matter; it is enough that I praised it enough to satisfy the author.
+He now signified as much, and he stamped his gratitude into my memory
+with a story wonderfully allegorizing the situation, which the mock
+modesty of print forbids my repeating here.  Throughout my long
+acquaintance with him his graphic touch was always allowing itself a
+freedom which I cannot bring my fainter pencil to illustrate.  He had the
+Southwestern, the Lincolnian, the Elizabethan breadth of parlance, which
+I suppose one ought not to call coarse without calling one's self
+prudish; and I was often hiding away in discreet holes and corners the
+letters in which he had loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank
+suggestion; I could not bear to burn them, and I could not, after the
+first reading, quite bear to look at them.  I shall best give my feeling
+on this point by saying that in it he was Shakespearian, or if his ghost
+will not suffer me the word, then he was Baconian.
+
+At the time of our first meeting, which must have been well toward the
+winter, Clemens (as I must call him instead of Mark Twain, which seemed
+always somehow to mask him from my personal sense) was wearing a sealskin
+coat, with the fur out, in the satisfaction of a caprice, or the love of
+strong effect which he was apt to indulge through life.  I do not know
+what droll comment was in Fields's mind with respect to this garment,
+but probably he felt that here was an original who was not to be brought
+to any Bostonian book in the judgment of his vivid qualities.  With his
+crest of dense red hair, and the wide sweep of his flaming mustache,
+Clemens was not discordantly clothed in that sealskin coat, which
+afterward, in spite of his own warmth in it, sent the cold chills through
+me when I once accompanied it down Broadway, and shared the immense
+publicity it won him.  He had always a relish for personal effect, which
+expressed itself in the white suit of complete serge which he wore in his
+last years, and in the Oxford gown which he put on for every possible
+occasion, and said he would like to wear all the time.  That was not
+vanity in him, but a keen feeling for costume which the severity of our
+modern tailoring forbids men, though it flatters women to every excess in
+it; yet he also enjoyed the shock, the offence, the pang which it gave
+the sensibilities of others.  Then there were times he played these
+pranks for pure fun, and for the pleasure of the witness.  Once I
+remember seeing him come into his drawing-room at Hartford in a pair of
+white cowskin slippers, with the hair out, and do a crippled colored
+uncle to the joy of all beholders.  Or, I must not say all, for I
+remember also the dismay of Mrs. Clemens, and her low, despairing cry of,
+"Oh, Youth!"  That was her name for him among their friends, and it
+fitted him as no other would, though I fancied with her it was a
+shrinking from his baptismal Samuel, or the vernacular Sam of his earlier
+companionships.  He was a youth to the end of his days, the heart of a
+boy with the head of a sage; the heart of a good boy, or a bad boy, but
+always a wilful boy, and wilfulest to show himself out at every, time for
+just the boy he was.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+There is a gap in my recollections of Clemens, which I think is of a year
+or two, for the next thing I remember of him is meeting him at a lunch in
+Boston, given us by that genius of hospitality, the tragically destined
+Ralph Keeler, author of one of the most unjustly forgotten books,
+'Vagabond Adventures', a true bit of picaresque autobiography.  Keeler
+never had any money, to the general knowledge, and he never borrowed, and
+he could not have had credit at the restaurant where he invited us to
+feast at his expense.  There was T. B. Aldrich, there was J. T. Fields,
+much the oldest of our company, who had just freed himself from the
+trammels of the publishing business, and was feeling his freedom in every
+word; there was Bret Harte, who had lately come East in his princely
+progress from California; and there was Clemens.  Nothing remains to me
+of the happy time but a sense of idle and aimless and joyful talk-play,
+beginning and ending nowhere, of eager laughter, of countless good
+stories from Fields, of a heat-lightning shimmer of wit from Aldrich,
+of an occasional concentration of our joint mockeries upon our host,
+who took it gladly; and amid the discourse, so little improving, but so
+full of good fellowship, Bret Harte's fleeting dramatization of Clemens's
+mental attitude toward a symposium of Boston illuminates.  "Why,
+fellows," he spluttered, "this is the dream of Mark's life," and I
+remember the glance from under Clemens's feathery eyebrows which betrayed
+his enjoyment of the fun.  We had beefsteak with mushrooms, which in
+recognition of their shape Aldrich hailed as shoe-pegs, and to crown the
+feast we had an omelette souse, which the waiter brought in as flat as a
+pancake, amid our shouts of congratulations to poor Keeler, who took them
+with appreciative submission.  It was in every way what a Boston literary
+lunch ought not to have been in the popular ideal which Harte attributed
+to Clemens.
+
+Our next meeting was at Hartford, or, rather, at Springfield, where
+Clemens greeted us on the way to Hartford.  Aldrich was going on to be
+his guest, and I was going to be Charles Dudley Warner's, but Clemens had
+come part way to welcome us both.  In the good fellowship of that cordial
+neighborhood we had two such days as the aging sun no longer shines on in
+his round.  There was constant running in and out of friendly houses
+where the lively hosts and guests called one another by their Christian
+names or nicknames, and no such vain ceremony as knocking or ringing at
+doors.  Clemens was then building the stately mansion in which he
+satisfied his love of magnificence as if it had been another sealskin
+coat, and he was at the crest of the prosperity which enabled him to
+humor every whim or extravagance.  The house was the design of that most
+original artist, Edward Potter, who once, when hard pressed by
+incompetent curiosity for the name of his style in a certain church,
+proposed that it should be called the English violet order of
+architecture; and this house was so absolutely suited to the owner's
+humor that I suppose there never was another house like it; but its
+character must be for recognition farther along in these reminiscences.
+The vividest impression which Clemens gave us two ravenous young Boston
+authors was of the satisfying, the surfeiting nature of subscription
+publication.  An army of agents was overrunning the country with the
+prospectuses of his books, and delivering them by the scores of thousands
+in completed sale.  Of the 'Innocents Abroad' he said, "It sells right
+along just like the Bible," and 'Roughing It' was swiftly following,
+without perhaps ever quite overtaking it in popularity.  But he lectured
+Aldrich and me on the folly of that mode of publication in the trade
+which we had thought it the highest success to achieve a chance in.
+"Anything but subscription publication is printing for private
+circulation," he maintained, and he so won upon our greed and hope that
+on the way back to Boston we planned the joint authorship of a volume
+adapted to subscription publication.  We got a very good name for it, as
+we believed, in Memorable Murders, and we never got farther with it, but
+by the time we reached Boston we were rolling in wealth so deep that we
+could hardly walk home in the frugal fashion by which we still thought it
+best to spare car fare; carriage fare we did not dream of even in that
+opulence.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+The visits to Hartford which had begun with this affluence continued
+without actual increase of riches for me, but now I went alone, and in
+Warner's European and Egyptian absences I formed the habit of going to
+Clemens.  By this time he was in his new house, where he used to give me
+a royal chamber on the ground floor, and come in at night after I had
+gone to bed to take off the burglar alarm so that the family should not
+be roused if anybody tried to get in at my window.  This would be after
+we had sat up late, he smoking the last of his innumerable cigars, and
+soothing his tense nerves with a mild hot Scotch, while we both talked
+and talked and talked, of everything in the heavens and on the earth,
+and the waters under the earth.  After two days of this talk I would come
+away hollow, realizing myself best in the image of one of those locust-
+shells which you find sticking to the bark of trees at the end of summer.
+Once, after some such bout of brains, we went down to New York together,
+and sat facing each other in the Pullman smoker without passing a
+syllable till we had occasion to say, "Well, we're there."  Then, with
+our installation in a now vanished hotel (the old Brunswick, to be
+specific), the talk began again with the inspiration of the novel
+environment, and went on and on.  We wished to be asleep, but we could
+not stop, and he lounged through the rooms in the long nightgown which he
+always wore in preference to the pajamas which he despised, and told the
+story of his life, the inexhaustible, the fairy, the Arabian Nights
+story, which I could never tire of even when it began to be told over
+again.  Or at times he would reason high--
+
+              "Of Providence, foreknowledge, will and fate,
+               Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,"
+
+walking up and down, and halting now and then, with a fine toss and slant
+of his shaggy head, as some bold thought or splendid joke struck him.
+
+He was in those days a constant attendant at the church of his great
+friend, the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, and at least tacitly far from the
+entire negation he came to at last.  I should say he had hardly yet
+examined the grounds of his passive acceptance of his wife's belief,
+for it was hers and not his, and he held it unscanned in the beautiful
+and tender loyalty to her which was the most moving quality of his most
+faithful soul.  I make bold to speak of the love between them, because
+without it I could not make him known to others as he was known to me.
+It was a greater part of him than the love of most men for their wives,
+and she merited all the worship he could give her, all the devotion, all
+the implicit obedience, by her surpassing force and beauty of character.
+She was in a way the loveliest person I have ever seen, the gentlest, the
+kindest, without a touch of weakness; she united wonderful tact with
+wonderful truth; and Clemens not only accepted her rule implicitly, but
+he rejoiced, he gloried in it.  I am not sure that he noticed all her
+goodness in the actions that made it a heavenly vision to others, he so
+had the habit of her goodness; but if there was any forlorn and helpless
+creature in the room Mrs. Clemens was somehow promptly at his side or
+hers; she was always seeking occasion of kindness to those in her
+household or out of it; she loved to let her heart go beyond the reach of
+her hand, and imagined the whole hard and suffering world with compassion
+for its structural as well as incidental wrongs.  I suppose she had her
+ladyhood limitations, her female fears of etiquette and convention, but
+she did not let them hamper the wild and splendid generosity with which
+Clemens rebelled against the social stupidities and cruelties.  She had
+been a lifelong invalid when he met her, and he liked to tell the
+beautiful story of their courtship to each new friend whom he found
+capable of feeling its beauty or worthy of hearing it.  Naturally, her
+father had hesitated to give her into the keeping of the young strange
+Westerner, who had risen up out of the unknown with his giant reputation
+of burlesque humorist, and demanded guaranties, demanded proofs.  "He
+asked me," Clemens would say, "if I couldn't give him the names of people
+who knew me in California, and when it was time to hear from them I heard
+from him.  'Well, Mr. Clemens,' he said, 'nobody seems to have a very
+good word for you.'  I hadn't referred him to people that I thought were
+going to whitewash me.  I thought it was all up with me, but I was
+disappointed.  'So I guess I shall have to back you myself.'"
+
+Whether this made him faithfuler to the trust put in him I cannot say,
+but probably not; it was always in him to be faithful to any trust, and
+in proportion as a trust of his own was betrayed he was ruthlessly and
+implacably resentful.  But I wish now to speak of the happiness of that
+household in Hartford which responded so perfectly to the ideals of the
+mother when the three daughters, so lovely and so gifted, were yet little
+children.  There had been a boy, and "Yes, I killed him," Clemens once
+said, with the unsparing self-blame in which he would wreak an unavailing
+regret.  He meant that he had taken the child out imprudently, and the
+child had taken the cold which he died of, but it was by no means certain
+this was through its father's imprudence.  I never heard him speak of his
+son except that once, but no doubt in his deep heart his loss was
+irreparably present.  He was a very tender father and delighted in the
+minds of his children, but he was wise enough to leave their training
+altogether to the wisdom of their mother.  He left them to that in
+everything, keeping for himself the pleasure of teaching them little
+scenes of drama, learning languages with them, and leading them in
+singing.  They came to the table with their parents, and could have set
+him an example in behavior when, in moments of intense excitement, he
+used to leave his place and walk up and down the room, flying his napkin
+and talking and talking.
+
+It was after his first English sojourn that I used to visit him, and he
+was then full of praise of everything English: the English personal
+independence and public spirit, and hospitality, and truth.  He liked to
+tell stories in proof of their virtues, but he was not blind to the
+defects of their virtues: their submissive acceptance of caste, their
+callousness with strangers; their bluntness with one another.  Mrs.
+Clemens had been in a way to suffer socially more than he, and she
+praised the English less.  She had sat after dinner with ladies who
+snubbed and ignored one another, and left her to find her own amusement
+in the absence of the attention with which Americans perhaps cloy their
+guests, but which she could not help preferring.  In their successive
+sojourns among them I believe he came to like the English less and she
+more; the fine delight of his first acceptance among them did not renew
+itself till his Oxford degree was given him; then it made his cup run
+over, and he was glad the whole world should see it.
+
+His wife would not chill the ardor of his early Anglomania, and in this,
+as in everything, she wished to humor him to the utmost.  No one could
+have realized more than she his essential fineness, his innate nobleness.
+Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know them to be, but
+from the outside I should say that this marriage was one of the most
+perfect.  It lasted in his absolute devotion to the day of her death,
+that delayed long in cruel suffering, and that left one side of him in
+lasting night.  From Florence there came to me heartbreaking letters from
+him about the torture she was undergoing, and at last a letter saying she
+was dead, with the simple-hearted cry, "I wish I was with Livy."  I do
+not know why I have left saying till now that she was a very beautiful
+woman, classically regular in features, with black hair smooth over her
+forehead, and with tenderly peering, myopia eyes, always behind glasses,
+and a smile of angelic kindness.  But this kindness went with a sense of
+humor which qualified her to appreciate the self-lawed genius of a man
+who will be remembered with the great humorists of all time, with
+Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy his company; none of
+them was his equal in humanity.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+Clemens had appointed himself, with the architect's connivance, a
+luxurious study over the library in his new house, but as his children
+grew older this study, with its carved and cushioned arm-chairs, was
+given over to them for a school-room, and he took the room above his
+stable, which had been intended for his coachman.  There we used to talk
+together, when we were not walking and talking together, until he
+discovered that he could make a more commodious use of the billiard-room
+at the top of his house, for the purposes of literature and friendship.
+It was pretty cold up there in the early spring and late fall weather
+with which I chiefly associate the place, but by lighting up all the gas-
+burners and kindling a reluctant fire on the hearth we could keep it well
+above freezing.  Clemens could also push the balls about, and, without
+rivalry from me, who could no more play billiards than smoke, could win
+endless games of pool, while he carried points of argument against
+imaginable differers in opinion.  Here he wrote many of his tales and
+sketches, and for anything I know some of his books.  I particularly
+remember his reading me here his first rough sketch of Captain
+Stormfield's Visit to Heaven, with the real name of the captain, whom I
+knew already from his many stories about him.
+
+We had a peculiar pleasure in looking off from the high windows on the
+pretty Hartford landscape, and down from them into the tops of the trees
+clothing the hillside by which his house stood.  We agreed that there was
+a novel charm in trees seen from such a vantage, far surpassing that of
+the farther scenery.  He had not been a country boy for nothing; rather
+he had been a country boy, or, still better, a village boy, for
+everything that Nature can offer the young of our species, and no aspect
+of her was lost on him.  We were natives of the same vast Mississippi
+Valley; and Missouri was not so far from Ohio but that we were akin in
+our first knowledges of woods and fields as we were in our early
+parlance.  I had outgrown the use of mine through my greater bookishness,
+but I gladly recognized the phrases which he employed for their lasting
+juiciness and the long-remembered savor they had on his mental palate.
+
+I have elsewhere sufficiently spoken of his unsophisticated use of words,
+of the diction which forms the backbone of his manly style.  If I mention
+my own greater bookishness, by which I mean his less quantitative
+reading, it is to give myself better occasion to note that he was always
+reading some vital book.  It might be some out-of-the-way book, but it
+had the root of the human matter in it: a volume of great trials; one of
+the supreme autobiographies; a signal passage of history, a narrative of
+travel, a story of captivity, which gave him life at first-hand.  As I
+remember, he did not care much for fiction, and in that sort he had
+certain distinct loathings; there were certain authors whose names he
+seemed not so much to pronounce as to spew out of his mouth.  Goldsmith
+was one of these, but his prime abhorrence was my dear and honored prime
+favorite, Jane Austen.  He once said to me, I suppose after he had been
+reading some of my unsparing praises of her--I am always praising her,
+"You seem to think that woman could write," and he forbore withering me
+with his scorn, apparently because we had been friends so long, and he
+more pitied than hated me for my bad taste.  He seemed not to have any
+preferences among novelists; or at least I never heard him express any.
+He used to read the modern novels I praised, in or out of print; but I do
+not think he much liked reading fiction.  As for plays, he detested the
+theatre, and said he would as lief do a sum as follow a plot on the
+stage.  He could not, or did not, give any reasons for his literary
+abhorrences, and perhaps he really had none.  But he could have said very
+distinctly, if he had needed, why he liked the books he did.  I was away
+at the time of his great Browning passion, and I know of it chiefly from
+hearsay; but at the time Tolstoy was doing what could be done to make me
+over Clemens wrote, "That man seems to have been to you what Browning was
+to me."  I do not know that he had other favorites among the poets, but
+he had favorite poems which he liked to read to you, and he read, of
+course, splendidly.  I have forgotten what piece of John Hay's it was
+that he liked so much, but I remembered how he fiercely revelled in the
+vengefulness of William Morris's 'Sir Guy of the Dolorous Blast,' and how
+he especially exalted in the lines which tell of the supposed speaker's
+joy in slaying the murderer of his brother:
+
+              "I am threescore years and ten,
+               And my hair is 'nigh turned gray,
+               But I am glad to think of the moment when
+               I took his life away."
+
+Generally, I fancy his pleasure in poetry was not great, and I do not
+believe he cared much for the conventionally accepted masterpieces of
+literature.  He liked to find out good things and great things for
+himself; sometimes he would discover these in a masterpiece new to him
+alone, and then, if you brought his ignorance home to him, he enjoyed it,
+and enjoyed it the more the more you rubbed it in.
+
+Of all the literary men I have known he was the most unliterary in his
+make and manner.  I do not know whether he had any acquaintance with
+Latin, but I believe not the least; German he knew pretty well, and
+Italian enough late in life to have fun with it; but he used English in
+all its alien derivations as if it were native to his own air, as if it
+had come up out of American, out of Missourian ground.  His style was
+what we know, for good and for bad, but his manner, if I may difference
+the two, was as entirely his own as if no one had ever written before.
+I have noted before this how he was not enslaved to the consecutiveness
+in writing which the rest of us try to keep chained to.  That is, he
+wrote as he thought, and as all men think, without sequence, without an
+eye to what went before or should come after.  If something beyond or
+beside what he was saying occurred to him, he invited it into his page,
+and made it as much at home there as the nature of it would suffer him.
+Then, when he was through with the welcoming of this casual and
+unexpected guest, he would go back to the company he was entertaining,
+and keep on with what he had been talking about.  He observed this manner
+in the construction of his sentences, and the arrangement of his
+chapters, and the ordering or disordering of his compilations.--[Nowhere
+is this characteristic better found than in Twain's 'Autobiography,' it
+was not a "style" it was unselfconscious thought  D.W.]--I helped him
+with a Library of Humor, which he once edited, and when I had done my
+work according to tradition, with authors, times, and topics carefully
+studied in due sequence, he tore it all apart, and "chucked" the pieces
+in wherever the fancy, for them took him at the moment.  He was right: we
+were not making a text-book, but a book for the pleasure rather than the
+instruction of the reader, and he did not see why the principle on which
+he built his travels and reminiscences and tales and novels should not
+apply to it; and I do not now see, either, though at the time it
+confounded me.  On minor points he was, beyond any author I have known,
+without favorite phrases or pet words.  He utterly despised the avoidance
+of repetitions out of fear of tautology.  If a word served his turn
+better than a substitute, he would use it as many times in a page as he
+chose.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+At that time I had become editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and I had
+allegiances belonging to the conduct of what was and still remains the
+most scrupulously cultivated of our periodicals.  When Clemens began to
+write for it he came willingly under its rules, for with all his
+wilfulness there never was a more biddable man in things you could show
+him a reason for.  He never made the least of that trouble which so
+abounds for the hapless editor from narrower-minded contributors.  If you
+wanted a thing changed, very good, he changed it; if you suggested that a
+word or a sentence or a paragraph had better be struck out, very good,
+he struck it out.  His proof-sheets came back each a veritable "mush of
+concession," as Emerson says.  Now and then he would try a little
+stronger language than 'The Atlantic' had stomach for, and once when I
+sent him a proof I made him observe that I had left out the profanity.
+He wrote back: "Mrs. Clemens opened that proof, and lit into the room
+with danger in her eye.  What profanity?  You see, when I read the
+manuscript to her I skipped that."  It was part of his joke to pretend a
+violence in that gentlest creature which the more amusingly realized the
+situation to their friends.
+
+I was always very glad of him and proud of him as a contributor, but I
+must not claim the whole merit, or the first merit of having him write
+for us.  It was the publisher, the late H. O. Houghton, who felt the
+incongruity of his absence from the leading periodical of the country,
+and was always urging me to get him to write.  I will take the credit of
+being eager for him, but it is to the publisher's credit that he tried,
+so far as the modest traditions of 'The Atlantic' would permit, to meet
+the expectations in pay which the colossal profits of Clemens's books
+might naturally have bred in him.  Whether he was really able to do this
+he never knew from Clemens himself, but probably twenty dollars a page
+did not surfeit the author of books that "sold right along just like the
+Bible."
+
+We had several short contributions from Clemens first, all of capital
+quality, and then we had the series of papers which went mainly to the
+making of his great book, 'Life on the Mississippi'.  Upon the whole I
+have the notion that Clemens thought this his greatest book, and he was
+supported in his opinion by that of the 'portier' in his hotel at Vienna,
+and that of the German Emperor, who, as he told me with equal respect for
+the preference of each, united in thinking it his best; with such far-
+sundered social poles approaching in its favor, he apparently found
+himself without standing for opposition.  At any rate, the papers won
+instant appreciation from his editor and publisher, and from the readers
+of their periodical, which they expected to prosper beyond precedent in
+its circulation.  But those were days of simpler acceptance of the
+popular rights of newspapers than these are, when magazines strictly
+guard their vested interests against them.  'The New York Times' and the
+'St. Louis Democrat' profited by the advance copies of the magazine sent
+them to reprint the papers month by month.  Together they covered nearly
+the whole reading territory of the Union, and the terms of their daily
+publication enabled them to anticipate the magazine in its own restricted
+field.  Its subscription list was not enlarged in the slightest measure,
+and The Atlantic Monthly languished on the news-stands as undesired as
+ever.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+It was among my later visits to Hartford that we began to talk up the
+notion of collaborating a play, but we did not arrive at any clear
+intention, and it was a telegram out of the clear sky that one day
+summoned me from Boston to help with a continuation of Colonel Sellers.
+I had been a witness of the high joy of Clemens in the prodigious triumph
+of the first Colonel Sellers, which had been dramatized from the novel of
+'The Gilded Age.'  This was the joint work of Clemens and Charles Dudley
+Warner, and the story had been put upon the stage by some one in Utah,
+whom Clemens first brought to book in the courts for violation of his
+copyright, and then indemnified for such rights as his adaptation of the
+book had given him.  The structure of the play as John T. Raymond gave it
+was substantially the work of this unknown dramatist.  Clemens never
+pretended, to me at any rate, that he had the least hand in it; he
+frankly owned that he was incapable of dramatization; yet the vital part
+was his, for the characters in the play were his as the book embodied
+them, and the success which it won with the public was justly his.
+This he shared equally with the actor, following the company with an
+agent, who counted out the author's share of the gate money, and sent him
+a note of the amount every day by postal card.  The postals used to come
+about dinner-time, and Clemens would read them aloud to us in wild
+triumph.
+
+One hundred and fifty dollars--two hundred dollars--three hundred dollars
+were the gay figures which they bore, and which he flaunted in the air
+before he sat down at table, or rose from it to brandish, and then,
+flinging his napkin into his chair, walked up and down to exult in.
+
+By-and-by the popularity, of the play waned, and the time came when he
+sickened of the whole affair, and withdrew his agent, and took whatever
+gain from it the actor apportioned him.  He was apt to have these sudden
+surceases, following upon the intensities of his earlier interest; though
+he seemed always to have the notion of making something more of Colonel
+Sellers.  But when I arrived in Hartford in answer to his summons,
+I found him with no definite idea of what he wanted to do with him.
+I represented that we must have some sort of plan, and he agreed that we
+should both jot down a scenario overnight and compare our respective
+schemes the next morning.  As the author of a large number of little
+plays which have been privately presented throughout the United States
+and in parts of the United Kingdom, without ever getting upon the public
+stage except for the noble ends of charity, and then promptly getting off
+it, I felt authorized to make him observe that his scheme was as nearly
+nothing as chaos could be.  He agreed hilariously with me, and was
+willing to let it stand in proof of his entire dramatic inability.
+At the same time he liked my plot very much, which ultimated Sellers,
+according to Clemens's intention, as a man crazed by his own inventions
+and by his superstition that he was the rightful heir to an English
+earldom.  The exuberant nature of Sellers and the vast range of his
+imagination served our purpose in other ways.  Clemens made him a
+spiritualist, whose specialty in the occult was materialization;
+he became on impulse an ardent temperance reformer, and he headed a
+procession of temperance ladies after disinterestedly testing the
+deleterious effects of liquor upon himself until he could not walk
+straight; always he wore a marvellous fire-extinguisher strapped on his
+back, to give proof in any emergency of the effectiveness of his
+invention in that way.
+
+We had a jubilant fortnight in working the particulars of these things
+out.  It was not possible for Clemens to write like anybody else, but I
+could very easily write like Clemens, and we took the play scene and
+scene about, quite secure of coming out in temperamental agreement.
+The characters remained for the most part his, and I varied them only to
+make them more like his than, if possible, he could.  Several years
+after, when I looked over a copy of the play, I could not always tell my
+work from his; I only knew that I had done certain scenes.  We would work
+all day long at our several tasks, and then at night, before dinner, read
+them over to each other.  No dramatists ever got greater joy out of their
+creations, and when I reflect that the public never had the chance of
+sharing our joy I pity the public from a full heart.  I still believe
+that the play was immensely funny; I still believe that if it could once
+have got behind the footlights it would have continued to pack the house
+before them for an indefinite succession of nights.  But this may be my
+fondness.
+
+At any rate, it was not to be.  Raymond had identified himself with
+Sellers in the play-going imagination, and whether consciously or
+unconsciously we constantly worked with Raymond in our minds.  But before
+this time bitter displeasures had risen between Clemens and Raymond, and
+Clemens was determined that Raymond should never have the play.  He first
+offered it to several other actors, who eagerly caught it, only to give
+it back with the despairing renunciation, "That is a Raymond play."  We
+tried managers with it, but their only question was whether they could
+get Raymond to do it.  In the mean time Raymond had provided himself with
+a play for the winter--a very good play, by Demarest Lloyd; and he was in
+no hurry for ours.  Perhaps he did not really care for it perhaps he knew
+when he heard of it that it must come to him in the end.  In the end it
+did, from my hand, for Clemens would not meet him.  I found him in a mood
+of sweet reasonableness, perhaps the more softened by one of those
+lunches which our publisher, the hospitable James R. Osgood, was always
+bringing people together over in Boston.  He said that he could not do
+the play that winter, but he was sure that he should like it, and he had
+no doubt he would do it the next winter.  So I gave him the manuscript,
+in spite of Clemens's charges, for his suspicions and rancors were such
+that he would not have had me leave it for a moment in the actor's hands.
+But it seemed a conclusion that involved success and fortune for us.
+In due time, but I do not remember how long after, Raymond declared
+himself delighted with the piece; he entered into a satisfactory
+agreement for it, and at the beginning of the next season he started with
+it to Buffalo, where he was to give a first production.  At Rochester he
+paused long enough to return it, with the explanation that a friend had
+noted to him the fact that Colonel Sellers in the play was a lunatic, and
+insanity was so serious a thing that it could not be represented on the
+stage without outraging the sensibilities of the audience; or words to
+that effect.  We were too far off to allege Hamlet to the contrary, or
+King Lear, or to instance the delight which generations of readers
+throughout the world had taken in the mad freaks of Don Quixote.
+Whatever were the real reasons of Raymond for rejecting the play, we had
+to be content with those he gave, and to set about getting it into other
+hands.  In this effort we failed even more signally than before, if that
+were possible.  At last a clever and charming elocutionist, who had long
+wished to get himself on the stage, heard of it and asked to see it.
+We would have shown it to any one by this time, and we very willingly
+showed it to him.  He came to Hartford and did some scenes from it for
+us.  I must say he did them very well, quite as well as Raymond could
+have done them, in whose manner he did them.  But now, late toward
+spring, the question was where he could get an engagement with the play,
+and we ended by hiring a theatre in New York for a week of trial
+performances.
+
+Clemens came on with me to Boston, where we were going to make some
+changes in the piece, and where we made them to our satisfaction, but not
+to the effect of that high rapture which we had in the first draft.
+He went back to Hartford, and then the cold fit came upon me, and "in
+visions of the night, in slumberings upon the bed," ghastly forms of
+failure appalled me, and when I rose in the morning I wrote him: "Here is
+a play which every manager has put out-of-doors and which every actor
+known to us has refused, and now we go and give it to an elocutioner.
+We are fools."  Whether Clemens agreed with me or not in my conclusion,
+he agreed with me in my premises, and we promptly bought our play off the
+stage at a cost of seven hundred dollars, which we shared between us.
+But Clemens was never a man to give up.  I relinquished gratis all right
+and title I had in the play, and he paid its entire expenses for a week
+of one-night stands in the country.  It never came to New York; and yet I
+think now that if it had come, it would have succeeded.  So hard does the
+faith of the unsuccessful dramatist in his work die.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+There is an incident of this time so characteristic of both men that I
+will yield to the temptation of giving it here.  After I had gone to
+Hartford in response to Clemens's telegram, Matthew Arnold arrived in
+Boston, and one of my family called on his, to explain why I was not at
+home to receive his introduction: I had gone to see Mark Twain.  "Oh, but
+he doesn't like that sort of thing, does he?"  "He likes Mr. Clemens very
+much," my representative answered, "and he thinks him one of the greatest
+men he ever knew."  I was still Clemens's guest at Hartford when Arnold
+came there to lecture, and one night we went to meet him at a reception.
+While his hand laxly held mine in greeting, I saw his eyes fixed
+intensely on the other side of the room.  "Who-who in the world is that?"
+I looked and said, "Oh, that is Mark Twain."  I do not remember just how
+their instant encounter was contrived by Arnold's wish, but I have the
+impression that they were not parted for long during the evening, and the
+next night Arnold, as if still under the glamour of that potent presence,
+was at Clemens's house.  I cannot say how they got on, or what they made
+of each other; if Clemens ever spoke of Arnold, I do not recall what he
+said, but Arnold had shown a sense of him from which the incredulous
+sniff of the polite world, now so universally exploded, had already
+perished.  It might well have done so with his first dramatic vision of
+that prodigious head.  Clemens was then hard upon fifty, and he had kept,
+as he did to the end, the slender figure of his youth, but the ashes of
+the burnt-out years were beginning to gray the fires of that splendid
+shock of red hair which he held to the height of a stature apparently
+greater than it was, and tilted from side to side in his undulating walk.
+He glimmered at you from the narrow slits of fine blue-greenish eyes,
+under branching brows, which with age grew more and more like a sort of
+plumage, and he was apt to smile into your face with a subtle but amiable
+perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence; you were all there for
+him, but he was not all there for you.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+I shall, not try to give chronological order to my recollections of him,
+but since I am just now with him in Hartford I will speak of him in
+association with the place.  Once when I came on from Cambridge he
+followed me to my room to see that the water was not frozen in my bath,
+or something of the kind, for it was very cold weather, and then
+hospitably lingered.  Not to lose time in banalities I began at once from
+the thread of thought in my mind.  "I wonder why we hate the past so,"
+and he responded from the depths of his own consciousness, "It's so
+damned humiliating," which is what any man would say of his past if he
+were honest; but honest men are few when it comes to themselves.  Clemens
+was one of the few, and the first of them among all the people I have
+known.  I have known, I suppose, men as truthful, but not so promptly, so
+absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful.  He could
+lie, of course, and did to save others from grief or harm; he was, not
+stupidly truthful; but his first impulse was to say out the thing and
+everything that was in him.  To those who can understand it will not be
+contradictory of his sense of humiliation from the past, that he was not
+ashamed for anything he ever did to the point of wishing to hide it.  He
+could be, and he was, bitterly sorry for his errors, which he had enough
+of in his life, but he was not ashamed in that mean way.  What he had
+done he owned to, good, bad, or indifferent, and if it was bad he was
+rather amused than troubled as to the effect in your mind.  He would not
+obtrude the fact upon you, but if it were in the way of personal history
+he would not dream of withholding it, far less of hiding it.
+
+He was the readiest of men to allow an error if he were found in it.  In
+one of our walks about Hartford, when he was in the first fine flush of
+his agnosticism, be declared that Christianity had done nothing to
+improve morals and conditions, and that the world under the highest pagan
+civilization was as well off as it was under the highest Christian
+influences.  I happened to be fresh from the reading of Charles Loring
+Brace's 'Gesta Christi'; or, 'History of Humane Progress', and I could
+offer him abundant proofs that he was wrong.  He did not like that
+evidently, but he instantly gave way, saying be had not known those
+things.  Later be was more tolerant in his denials of Christianity, but
+just then he was feeling his freedom from it, and rejoicing in having
+broken what he felt to have been the shackles of belief worn so long.
+He greatly admired Robert Ingersoll, whom he called an angelic orator,
+and regarded as an evangel of a new gospel--the gospel of free thought.
+He took the warmest interest in the newspaper controversy raging at the
+time as to the existence of a hell; when the noes carried the day, I
+suppose that no enemy of perdition was more pleased.  He still loved his
+old friend and pastor, Mr. Twichell, but he no longer went to hear him
+preach his sage and beautiful sermons, and was, I think, thereby the
+greater loser.  Long before that I had asked him if he went regularly to
+church, and he groaned out: "Oh yes, I go.  It 'most kills me, but I go,"
+and I did not need his telling me to understand that he went because his
+wife wished it.  He did tell me, after they both ceased to go, that it
+had finally come to her saying, "Well, if you are to be lost, I want to
+be lost with you."  He could accept that willingness for supreme
+sacrifice and exult in it because of the supreme truth as he saw it.
+After they had both ceased to be formal Christians, she was still grieved
+by his denial of immortality, so grieved that he resolved upon one of
+those heroic lies, which for love's sake he held above even the truth,
+and he went to her, saying that he had been thinking the whole matter
+over, and now he was convinced that the soul did live after death.  It
+was too late.  Her keen vision pierced through his ruse, as it did when
+he brought the doctor who had diagnosticated her case as organic disease
+of the heart, and, after making him go over the facts of it again with
+her, made him declare it merely functional.
+
+To make an end of these records as to Clemens's beliefs, so far as I knew
+them, I should say that he never went back to anything like faith in the
+Christian theology, or in the notion of life after death, or in a
+conscious divinity.  It is best to be honest in this matter; he would
+have hated anything else, and I do not believe that the truth in it can
+hurt any one.  At one period he argued that there must have been a cause,
+a conscious source of things; that the universe could not have come by
+chance.  I have heard also that in his last hours or moments he said, or
+his dearest ones hoped he had said, something about meeting again.  But
+the expression, of which they could not be certain, was of the vaguest,
+and it was perhaps addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness.
+All his expressions to me were of a courageous, renunciation of any hope
+of living again, or elsewhere seeing those he had lost.  He suffered
+terribly in their loss, and he was not fool enough to try ignoring his
+grief.  He knew that for this there were but two medicines; that it would
+wear itself out with the years, and that meanwhile there was nothing for
+it but those respites in which the mourner forgets himself in slumber.
+I remember that in a black hour of my own when I was called down to see
+him, as he thought from sleep, he said with an infinite, an exquisite
+compassion, "Oh, did I wake you, did I wake, you?"  Nothing more, but the
+look, the voice, were everything; and while I live they cannot pass from
+my sense.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+He was the most caressing of men in his pity, but he had the fine
+instinct, which would have pleased Lowell, of never putting his hands on
+you--fine, delicate hands, with taper fingers, and pink nails, like a
+girl's, and sensitively quivering in moments of emotion; he did not paw
+you with them to show his affection, as so many of us Americans are apt
+to do.  Among the half-dozen, or half-hundred, personalities that each of
+us becomes, I should say that Clemens's central and final personality was
+something exquisite.  His casual acquaintance might know him, perhaps,
+from his fierce intensity, his wild pleasure in shocking people with his
+ribaldries and profanities, or from the mere need of loosing his
+rebellious spirit in that way, as anything but exquisite, and yet that
+was what in the last analysis he was.  They might come away loathing or
+hating him, but one could not know him well without realizing him the
+most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men.  He was
+Southwestern, and born amid the oppression of a race that had no rights
+as against ours, but I never saw a man more regardful of negroes.  He had
+a yellow butler when I first began to know him, because he said he could
+not bear to order a white man about, but the terms of his ordering George
+were those of the softest entreaty which command ever wore.  He loved to
+rely upon George, who was such a broken reed in some things, though so
+stanch in others, and the fervent Republican in politics that Clemens
+then liked him to be.  He could interpret Clemens's meaning to the public
+without conveying his mood, and could render his roughest answer smooth
+to the person denied his presence.  His general instructions were that
+this presence was to be denied all but personal friends, but the soft
+heart of George was sometimes touched by importunity, and once he came up
+into the billiard-room saying that Mr. Smith wished to see Clemens.  Upon
+inquiry, Mr. Smith developed no ties of friendship, and Clemens said,
+"You go and tell Mr. Smith that I wouldn't come down to see the Twelve
+Apostles."  George turned from the threshold where he had kept himself,
+and framed a paraphrase of this message which apparently sent Mr. Smith
+away content with himself and all the rest of the world.
+
+The part of him that was Western in his Southwestern origin Clemens kept
+to the end, but he was the most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew.
+No man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery, and no
+one has ever poured such scorn upon the second-hand, Walter-Scotticized,
+pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal.  He held himself responsible for
+the wrong which the white race had done the black race in slavery, and he
+explained, in paying the way of a negro student through Yale, that he was
+doing it as his part of the reparation due from every white to every
+black man.  He said he had never seen this student, nor ever wished to
+see him or know his name; it was quite enough that he was a negro.  About
+that time a colored cadet was expelled from West Point for some point of
+conduct "unbecoming an officer and gentleman," and there was the usual
+shabby philosophy in a portion of the press to the effect that a negro
+could never feel the claim of honor.  The man was fifteen parts white,
+but, "Oh yes," Clemens said, with bitter irony, "it was that one part
+black that undid him."  It made him a "nigger" and incapable of being a
+gentleman.  It was to blame for the whole thing.  The fifteen parts white
+were guiltless.
+
+Clemens was entirely satisfied with the result of the Civil War, and he
+was eager to have its facts and meanings brought out at once in history.
+He ridiculed the notion, held by many, that "it was not yet time" to
+philosophize the events of the great struggle; that we must "wait till
+its passions had cooled," and "the clouds of strife had cleared away."
+He maintained that the time would never come when we should see its
+motives and men and deeds more clearly, and that now, now, was the hour
+to ascertain them in lasting verity.  Picturesquely and dramatically he
+portrayed the imbecility of deferring the inquiry at any point to the
+distance of future years when inevitably the facts would begin to put on
+fable.
+
+He had powers of sarcasm and a relentless rancor in his contempt which
+those who knew him best appreciated most.  The late Noah Brooks, who had
+been in California at the beginning of Clemens's career, and had
+witnessed the effect of his ridicule before he had learned to temper it,
+once said to me that he would rather have any one else in the world down
+on him than Mark Twain.  But as Clemens grew older he grew more merciful,
+not to the wrong, but to the men who were in it.  The wrong was often the
+source of his wildest drolling.  He considered it in such hopelessness of
+ever doing it justice that his despair broke in laughter.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+I go back to that house in Hartford, where I was so often a happy guest,
+with tenderness for each of its endearing aspects.  Over the chimney in
+the library which had been cured of smoking by so much art and science,
+Clemens had written in perennial brass the words of Emerson, "The
+ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it," and he gave his
+guests a welcome of the simplest and sweetest cordiality: but I must not
+go aside to them from my recollections of him, which will be of
+sufficient garrulity, if I give them as fully as I wish.  The windows of
+the library looked northward from the hillside above which the house
+stood, and over the little valley with the stream in it, and they showed
+the leaves of the trees that almost brushed them as in a Claude Lorraine
+glass.  To the eastward the dining-room opened amply, and to the south
+there was a wide hall, where the voices of friends made themselves heard
+as they entered without ceremony and answered his joyous hail.  At the
+west was a little semicircular conservatory of a pattern invented by Mrs.
+Harriet Beecher Stowe, and adopted in most of the houses of her kindly
+neighborhood.  The plants were set in the ground, and the flowering vines
+climbed up the sides and overhung the roof above the silent spray of a
+fountain companied by callas and other water-loving lilies.  There, while
+we breakfasted, Patrick came in from the barn and sprinkled the pretty
+bower, which poured out its responsive perfume in the delicate accents of
+its varied blossoms.  Breakfast was Clemens's best meal, and he sat
+longer at his steak and coffee than at the courses of his dinner;
+luncheon was nothing to him, unless, as might happen, he made it his
+dinner, and reserved the later repast as the occasion of walking up and
+down the room, and discoursing at large on anything that came into his
+head.  Like most good talkers, he liked other people to have their say;
+he did not talk them down; he stopped instantly at another's remark and
+gladly or politely heard him through; he even made believe to find
+suggestion or inspiration in what was said.  His children came to the
+table, as I have told, and after dinner he was apt to join his fine tenor
+to their trebles in singing.
+
+Fully half our meetings were at my house in Cambridge, where he made
+himself as much at home as in Hartford.  He would come ostensibly to stay
+at the Parker House, in Boston, and take a room, where he would light the
+gas and leave it burning, after dressing, while he drove out to Cambridge
+and stayed two or three days with us.  Once, I suppose it was after a
+lecture, he came in evening dress and passed twenty-four hours with us in
+that guise, wearing an overcoat to hide it when we went for a walk.
+Sometimes he wore the slippers which he preferred to shoes at home, and
+if it was muddy, as it was wont to be in Cambridge, he would put a pair
+of rubbers over them for our rambles.  He liked the lawlessness and our
+delight in allowing it, and he rejoiced in the confession of his hostess,
+after we had once almost worn ourselves out in our pleasure with the
+intense talk, with the stories and the laughing, that his coming almost
+killed her, but it was worth it.
+
+In those days he was troubled with sleeplessness, or, rather, with
+reluctant sleepiness, and he had various specifics for promoting it.
+At first it had been champagne just before going to bed, and we provided
+that, but later he appeared from Boston with four bottles of lager-beer
+under his arms; lager-beer, he said now, was the only thing to make you
+go to sleep, and we provided that.  Still later, on a visit I paid him at
+Hartford, I learned that hot Scotch was the only soporific worth
+considering, and Scotch-whiskey duly found its place on our sideboard.
+One day, very long afterward, I asked him if he were still taking hot
+Scotch to make him sleep.  He said he was not taking anything.  For a
+while he had found going to bed on the bath-room floor a soporific; then
+one night he went to rest in his own bed at ten o'clock, and had gone
+promptly to sleep without anything.  He had done the like with the like
+effect ever since.  Of course, it amused him; there were few experiences
+of life, grave or gay, which did not amuse him, even when they wronged
+him.
+
+He came on to Cambridge in April, 1875, to go with me to the centennial
+ceremonies at Concord in celebration of the battle of the Minute Men with
+the British troops a hundred years before.  We both had special
+invitations, including passage from Boston; but I said, Why bother to go
+into Boston when we could just as well take the train for Concord at the
+Cambridge station?  He equally decided that it would be absurd; so we
+breakfasted deliberately, and then walked to the station, reasoning of
+many things as usual.  When the train stopped, we found it packed inside
+and out.  People stood dense on the platforms of the cars; to our
+startled eyes they seemed to project from the windows, and unless memory
+betrays me they lay strewn upon the roofs like brakemen slain at the post
+of duty.
+
+Whether this was really so or not, it is certain that the train presented
+an impenetrable front even to our imagination, and we left it to go its
+way without the slightest effort to board.  We remounted the fame-worn
+steps of Porter's Station, and began exploring North Cambridge for some
+means of transportation overland to Concord, for we were that far on the
+road by which the British went and came on the day of the battle.  The
+liverymen whom we appealed to received us, some with compassion, some
+with derision, but in either mood convinced us that we could not have
+hired a cat to attempt our conveyance, much less a horse, or vehicle of
+any description.  It was a raw, windy day, very unlike the exceptionally
+hot April day when the routed redcoats, pursued by the Colonials, fled
+panting back to Boston, with "their tongues hanging out like dogs,"
+but we could not take due comfort in the vision of their discomfiture;
+we could almost envy them, for they had at least got to Concord.  A swift
+procession of coaches, carriages, and buggies, all going to Concord,
+passed us, inert and helpless, on the sidewalk in the peculiarly cold mud
+of North Cambridge.  We began to wonder if we might not stop one of them
+and bribe it to take us, but we had not the courage to try, and Clemens
+seized the opportunity to begin suffering with an acute indigestion,
+which gave his humor a very dismal cast.  I felt keenly the shame of
+defeat, and the guilt of responsibility for our failure, and when a gay
+party of students came toward us on the top of a tally ho, luxuriously
+empty inside, we felt that our chance had come, and our last chance.
+He said that if I would stop them and tell them who I was they would
+gladly, perhaps proudly, give us passage; I contended that if with his
+far vaster renown he would approach them, our success would be assured.
+While we stood, lost in this "contest of civilities," the coach passed
+us, with gay notes blown from the horns of the students, and then Clemens
+started in pursuit, encouraged with shouts from the merry party who could
+not imagine who was trying to run them down, to a rivalry in speed.  The
+unequal match could end only in one way, and I am glad I cannot recall
+what he said when he came back to me.  Since then I have often wondered
+at the grief which would have wrung those blithe young hearts if they
+could have known that they might have had the company of Mark Twain to
+Concord that day and did not.
+
+We hung about, unavailingly, in the bitter wind a while longer, and then
+slowly, very slowly, made our way home.  We wished to pass as much time
+as possible, in order to give probability to the deceit we intended to
+practise, for we could not bear to own ourselves baffled in our boasted
+wisdom of taking the train at Porter's Station, and had agreed to say
+that we had been to Concord and got back.  Even after coming home to my
+house, we felt that our statement would be wanting in verisimilitude
+without further delay, and we crept quietly into my library, and made up
+a roaring fire on the hearth, and thawed ourselves out in the heat of it
+before we regained our courage for the undertaking.  With all these
+precautions we failed, for when our statement was imparted to the
+proposed victim she instantly pronounced it unreliable, and we were left
+with it on our hands intact.  I think the humor of this situation was
+finally a greater pleasure to Clemens than an actual visit to Concord
+would have been; only a few weeks before his death he laughed our defeat
+over with one of my family in Bermuda, and exulted in our prompt
+detection.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+From our joint experience in failing I argue that Clemens's affection for
+me must have been great to enable him to condone in me the final
+defection which was apt to be the end of our enterprises.  I have fancied
+that I presented to him a surface of such entire trustworthiness that he
+could not imagine the depths of unreliability beneath it; and that never
+realizing it, he always broke through with fresh surprise but unimpaired
+faith.  He liked, beyond all things, to push an affair to the bitter end,
+and the end was never too bitter unless it brought grief or harm to
+another.  Once in a telegraph office at a railway station he was treated
+with such insolent neglect by the young lady in charge, who was
+preoccupied in a flirtation with a "gentleman friend," that emulous of
+the public spirit which he admired in the English, he told her he should
+report her to her superiors, and (probably to her astonishment) he did
+so.  He went back to Hartford, and in due time the poor girl came to me
+in, terror and in tears; for I had abetted Clemens in his action, and had
+joined my name to his in his appeal to the authorities.  She was
+threatened with dismissal unless she made full apology to him and brought
+back assurance of its acceptance.  I felt able to give this, and, of
+course, he eagerly approved; I think he telegraphed his approval.
+Another time, some years afterward, we sat down together in places near
+the end of a car, and a brakeman came in looking for his official note-
+book.  Clemens found that he had sat down upon it, and handed it to him;
+the man scolded him very abusively, and came back again and again, still
+scolding him for having no more sense than to sit down on a note-book.
+The patience of Clemens in bearing it was so angelic that I saw fit to
+comment, "I suppose you will report this fellow."  "Yes," he answered,
+slowly and sadly.  "That's what I should have done once.  But now I
+remember that he gets twenty dollars a month."
+
+Nothing could have been wiser, nothing tenderer, and his humanity was
+not for humanity alone.  He abhorred the dull and savage joy of the
+sportsman in a lucky shot, an unerring aim, and once when I met him in
+the country he had just been sickened by the success of a gunner in
+bringing down a blackbird, and he described the poor, stricken, glossy
+thing, how it lay throbbing its life out on the grass, with such pity as
+he might have given a wounded child.  I find this a fit place to say that
+his mind and soul were with those who do the hard work of the world, in
+fear of those who give them a chance for their livelihoods and underpay
+them all they can.  He never went so far in socialism as I have gone, if
+he went that way at all, but he was fascinated with Looking Backward and
+had Bellamy to visit him; and from the first he had a luminous vision of
+organized labor as the only present help for working-men.  He would show
+that side with such clearness and such force that you could not say
+anything in hopeful contradiction; he saw with that relentless insight of
+his that with Unions was the working-man's only present hope of standing
+up like a man against money and the power of it.  There was a time when I
+was afraid that his eves were a little holden from the truth; but in the
+very last talk I heard from him I found that I was wrong, and that this
+great humorist was as great a humanist as ever.  I wish that all the
+work-folk could know this, and could know him their friend in life as he
+was in literature; as he was in such a glorious gospel of equality as the
+'Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.'
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+Whether I will or no I must let things come into my story thoughtwise, as
+he would have let them, for I cannot remember them in their order.  One
+night, while we were giving a party, he suddenly stormed in with a friend
+of his and mine, Mr. Twichell, and immediately began to eat and drink of
+our supper, for they had come straight to our house from walking to
+Boston, or so great a part of the way as to be a-hungered and a-thirst.
+I can see him now as he stood up in the midst of our friends, with his
+head thrown back, and in his hand a dish of those escalloped oysters
+without which no party in Cambridge was really a party, exulting in the
+tale of his adventure, which had abounded in the most original characters
+and amusing incidents at every mile of their progress.  They had broken
+their journey with a night's rest, and they had helped themselves
+lavishly out by rail in the last half; but still it had been a mighty
+walk to do in two days.  Clemens was a great walker, in those years, and
+was always telling of his tramps with Mr. Twichell to Talcott's Tower,
+ten miles out of Hartford.  As he walked of course he talked, and of
+course he smoked.  Whenever he had been a few days with us, the whole
+house had to be aired, for he smoked all over it from breakfast to
+bedtime.  He always went to bed with a cigar in his mouth, and sometimes,
+mindful of my fire insurance, I went up and took it away, still burning,
+after he had fallen asleep.  I do not know how much a man may smoke and
+live, but apparently he smoked as much as a man could, for he smoked
+incessantly.
+
+He did not care much to meet people, as I fancied, and we were greedy of
+him for ourselves; he was precious to us; and I would not have exposed
+him to the critical edge of that Cambridge acquaintance which might not
+have appreciated him at, say, his transatlantic value.  In America his
+popularity was as instant as it was vast.  But it must be acknowledged
+that for a much longer time here than in England polite learning
+hesitated his praise.  In England rank, fashion, and culture rejoiced in
+him.  Lord mayors, lord chief justices, and magnates of many kinds were
+his hosts; he was desired in country houses, and his bold genius
+captivated the favor of periodicals which spurned the rest of our nation.
+But in his own country it was different.  In proportion as people thought
+themselves refined they questioned that quality which all recognize in
+him now, but which was then the inspired knowledge of the simple-hearted
+multitude.  I went with him to see Longfellow, but I do not think
+Longfellow made much of him, and Lowell made less.  He stopped as if with
+the long Semitic curve of Clemens's nose, which in the indulgence of his
+passion for finding every one more or less a Jew he pronounced
+unmistakably racial.  It was two of my most fastidious Cambridge friends
+who accepted him with the English, the European entirety--namely, Charles
+Eliot Norton and Professor Francis J. Child.  Norton was then newly back
+from a long sojourn abroad, and his judgments were delocalized.  He met
+Clemens as if they had both been in England, and rejoiced in his bold
+freedom from environment, and in the rich variety and boundless reach of
+his talk.  Child was of a personal liberty as great in its fastidious way
+as that of Clemens himself, and though he knew him only at second hand,
+he exulted in the most audacious instance of his grotesquery, as I shall
+have to tell by-and-by, almost solely.  I cannot say just why Clemens
+seemed not to hit the favor of our community of scribes and scholars, as
+Bret Harte had done, when he came on from California, and swept them
+before him, disrupting their dinners and delaying their lunches with
+impunity; but it is certain he did not, and I had better say so.
+
+I am surprised to find from the bibliographical authorities that it was
+so late as 1875 when he came with the manuscript of Tom Sawyer, and asked
+me to read it, as a friend and critic, and not as an editor.  I have an
+impression that this was at Mrs. Clemens's instance in his own
+uncertainty about printing it.  She trusted me, I can say with a
+satisfaction few things now give me, to be her husband's true and cordial
+adviser, and I was so.  I believe I never failed him in this part, though
+in so many of our enterprises and projects I was false as water through
+my temperamental love of backing out of any undertaking.  I believe this
+never ceased to astonish him, and it has always astonished me; it appears
+to me quite out of character; though it is certain that an undertaking,
+when I have entered upon it, holds me rather than I it.  But however this
+immaterial matter may be, I am glad to remember that I thoroughly liked
+Tom Sawyer, and said so with every possible amplification.  Very likely,
+I also made my suggestions for its improvement; I could not have been a
+real critic without that; and I have no doubt they were gratefully
+accepted and, I hope, never acted upon.  I went with him to the horse-car
+station in Harvard Square, as my frequent wont was, and put him aboard a
+car with his MS. in his hand, stayed and reassured, so far as I counted,
+concerning it.  I do not know what his misgivings were; perhaps they were
+his wife's misgivings, for she wished him to be known not only for the
+wild and boundless humor that was in him, but for the beauty and
+tenderness and "natural piety"; and she would not have had him judged by
+a too close fidelity to the rude conditions of Tom Sawyer's life.  This
+is the meaning that I read into the fact of his coming to me with those
+doubts.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+Clemens had then and for many years the habit of writing to me about what
+he was doing, and still more of what he was experiencing.  Nothing struck
+his imagination, in or out of the daily routine, but he wished to write
+me of it, and he wrote with the greatest fulness and a lavish
+dramatization, sometimes to the length of twenty or forty pages, so that
+I have now perhaps fifteen hundred pages of his letters.  They will no
+doubt some day be published, but I am not even referring to them in these
+records, which I think had best come to the reader with an old man's
+falterings and uncertainties.  With his frequent absences and my own
+abroad, and the intrusion of calamitous cares, the rich tide of his
+letters was more and more interrupted.  At times it almost ceased, and
+then it would come again, a torrent.  In the very last weeks of his life
+he burst forth, and, though too weak himself to write, he dictated his
+rage with me for recommending to him a certain author whose truthfulness
+he could not deny, but whom he hated for his truthfulness to sordid and
+ugly conditions.  At heart Clemens was romantic, and he would have had
+the world of fiction stately and handsome and whatever the real world was
+not; but he was not romanticistic, and he was too helplessly an artist
+not to wish his own work to show life as he had seen it.  I was preparing
+to rap him back for these letters when I read that he had got home to
+die; he would have liked the rapping back.
+
+He liked coming to Boston, especially for those luncheons and dinners in
+which the fertile hospitality of our publisher, Osgood, abounded.  He
+dwelt equidistant from Boston and New York, and he had special friends in
+New York, but he said he much preferred coming to Boston; of late years
+he never went there, and he had lost the habit of it long before he came
+home from Europe to live in New York.  At these feasts, which were often
+of after-dinner-speaking measure, he could always be trusted for
+something of amazing delightfulness.  Once, when Osgood could think of no
+other occasion for a dinner, he gave himself a birthday dinner, and asked
+his friends and authors.  The beautiful and splendid trooper-like blaring
+was there, and I recall how in the long, rambling speech in which Clemens
+went round the table hitting every head at it, and especially visiting
+Osgood with thanks for his ingenious pretext for our entertainment,
+he congratulated blaring upon his engineering genius and his hypnotic
+control of municipal governments.  He said that if there was a plan for
+draining a city at a cost of a million, by seeking the level of the water
+in the down-hill course of the sewers, blaring would come with a plan to
+drain that town up-hill at twice the cost and carry it through the Common
+Council without opposition.  It is hard to say whether the time was
+gladder at these dinners, or at the small lunches at which Osgood and
+Aldrich and I foregathered with him and talked the afternoon away till
+well toward the winter twilight.
+
+He was a great figure, and the principal figure, at one of the first of
+the now worn-out Authors' Readings, which was held in the Boston Museum
+to aid a Longfellow memorial.  It was the late George Parsons Lathrop
+(everybody seems to be late in these sad days) who imagined the reading,
+but when it came to a price for seats I can always claim the glory of
+fixing it at five dollars.  The price if not the occasion proved
+irresistible, and the museum was packed from the floor to the topmost
+gallery.  Norton presided, and when it came Clemens's turn to read he
+introduced him with such exquisite praises as he best knew how to give,
+but before he closed he fell a prey to one of those lapses of tact which
+are the peculiar peril of people of the greatest tact.  He was reminded
+of Darwin's delight in Mark Twain, and how when he came from his long
+day's exhausting study, and sank into bed at midnight, he took up a
+volume of Mark Twain, whose books he always kept on a table beside him,
+and whatever had been his tormenting problem, or excess of toil, he felt
+secure of a good night's rest from it.  A sort of blank ensued which
+Clemens filled in the only possible way.  He said he should always be
+glad that he had contributed to the repose of that great man, whom
+science owed so much, and then without waiting for the joy in every
+breast to burst forth, he began to read.  It was curious to watch his
+triumph with the house.  His carefully studied effects would reach the
+first rows in the orchestra first, and ripple in laughter back to the
+standees against the wall, and then with a fine resurgence come again to
+the rear orchestra seats, and so rise from gallery to gallery till it
+fell back, a cataract of applause from the topmost rows of seats.  He was
+such a practised speaker that he knew all the stops of that simple
+instrument man, and there is no doubt that these results were accurately
+intended from his unerring knowledge.  He was the most consummate public
+performer I ever saw, and it was an incomparable pleasure to hear him
+lecture; on the platform he was the great and finished actor which he
+probably would not have been on the stage.  He was fond of private
+theatricals, and liked to play in them with his children and their
+friends, in dramatizations of such stories of his as 'The Prince and the
+Pauper;' but I never saw him in any of these scenes.  When he read his
+manuscript to you, it was with a thorough, however involuntary,
+recognition of its dramatic qualities; he held that an actor added fully
+half to the character the author created.  With my own hurried and half-
+hearted reading of passages which I wished to try on him from unprinted
+chapters (say, out of 'The Undiscovered Country' or 'A Modern Instance')
+he said frankly that my reading could spoil anything.  He was realistic,
+but he was essentially histrionic, and he was rightly so.  What we have
+strongly conceived we ought to make others strongly imagine, and we ought
+to use every genuine art to that end.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+There came a time when the lecturing which had been the joy of his prime
+became his loathing, loathing unutterable, and when he renounced it with
+indescribable violence.  Yet he was always hankering for those fleshpots
+whose savor lingered on his palate and filled his nostrils after his
+withdrawal from the platform.  The Authors' Readings when they had won
+their brief popularity abounded in suggestion for him.  Reading from
+one's book was not so bad as giving a lecture written for a lecture's
+purpose, and he was willing at last to compromise.  He had a magnificent
+scheme for touring the country with Aldrich and Mr. G. W. Cable and
+myself, in a private car, with a cook of our own, and every facility for
+living on the fat of the land.  We should read only four times a week, in
+an entertainment that should not last more than an hour and a half.  He
+would be the impresario, and would guarantee us others at least seventy-
+five dollars a day, and pay every expense of the enterprise, which he
+provisionally called the Circus, himself.  But Aldrich and I were now no
+longer in those earlier thirties when we so cheerfully imagined
+'Memorable Murders' for subscription publication; we both abhorred public
+appearances, and, at any rate, I was going to Europe for a year.  So the
+plan fell through except as regarded Mr. Cable, who, in his way, was as
+fine a performer as Clemens, and could both read and sing the matter of
+his books.  On a far less stupendous scale they two made the rounds of
+the great lecturing circuit together.  But I believe a famous lecture-
+manager had charge of them and travelled with them.
+
+He was a most sanguine man, a most amiable person, and such a believer in
+fortune that Clemens used to say of him, as he said of one of his early
+publishers, that you could rely upon fifty per cent. of everything he
+promised.  I myself many years later became a follower of this hopeful
+prophet, and I can testify that in my case at least he was able to keep
+ninety-nine, and even a hundred, per cent. of his word.  It was I who was
+much nearer failing of mine, for I promptly began to lose sleep from the
+nervous stress of my lecturing and from the gratifying but killing
+receptions afterward, and I was truly in that state from insomnia which
+Clemens recognized in the brief letter I got from him in the Western
+city, after half a dozen wakeful nights.  He sardonically congratulated
+me on having gone into "the lecture field," and then he said: "I know
+where you are now.  You are in hell."
+
+It was this perdition which he re-entered when he undertook that round-
+the-world lecturing tour for the payment of the debts left to him by the
+bankruptcy of his firm in the publishing business.  It was not purely
+perdition for him, or, rather, it was perdition for only one-half of him,
+the author-half; for the actor-half it was paradise.  The author who
+takes up lecturing without the ability to give histrionic support to the
+literary reputation which he brings to the crude test of his reader's
+eyes and ears, invokes a peril and a misery unknown to the lecturer who
+has made his first public from the platform.  Clemens was victorious on
+the platform from the beginning, and it would be folly to pretend that he
+did not exult in his triumphs there.  But I suppose, with the wearing
+nerves of middle life, he hated more and more the personal swarming of
+interest upon him, and all the inevitable clatter of the thing.  Yet he
+faced it, and he labored round our tiresome globe that he might pay the
+uttermost farthing of debts which he had not knowingly contracted, the
+debts of his partners who had meant well and done ill, not because they
+were evil, but because they were unwise, and as unfit for their work as
+he was.  "Pay what thou owest."  That is right, even when thou owest it
+by the error of others, and even when thou owest it to a bank, which had
+not lent it from love of thee, but in the hard line of business and thy
+need.
+
+Clemens's behavior in this matter redounded to his glory among the
+nations of the whole earth, and especially in this nation, so wrapped in
+commerce and so little used to honor among its many thieves.  He had
+behaved like Walter Scott, as millions rejoiced to know, who had not
+known how Walter Scott had behaved till they knew it was like Clemens.
+No doubt it will be put to his credit in the books of the Recording
+Angel, but what the Judge of all the Earth will say of it at the Last Day
+there is no telling.  I should not be surprised if He accounted it of
+less merit than some other things that Clemens did and was: less than his
+abhorrence of the Spanish War, and the destruction of the South-African
+republics, and our deceit of the Filipinos, and his hate of slavery, and
+his payment of his portion of our race's debt to the race of the colored
+student whom he saw through college, and his support of a poor artist for
+three years in Paris, and his loan of opportunity to the youth who became
+the most brilliant of our actor-dramatists, and his eager pardon of the
+thoughtless girl who was near paying the penalty of her impertinence with
+the loss of her place, and his remembering that the insolent brakeman got
+so few dollars a month, and his sympathy for working-men standing up to
+money in their Unions, and even his pity for the wounded bird throbbing
+out its little life on the grass for the pleasure of the cruel fool who
+shot it.  These and the thousand other charities and beneficences in
+which he abounded, openly or secretly, may avail him more than the
+discharge of his firm's liabilities with the Judge of all the Earth, who
+surely will do right, but whose measures and criterions no man knows, and
+I least of all men.
+
+He made no great show of sympathy with people in their anxieties, but it
+never failed, and at a time when I lay sick for many weeks his letters
+were of comfort to those who feared I might not rise again.  His hand was
+out in help for those who needed help, and in kindness for those who
+needed kindness.  There remains in my mind the dreary sense of a long,
+long drive to the uttermost bounds of the South End at Boston, where he
+went to call upon some obscure person whose claim stretched in a
+lengthening chain from his early days in Missouri--a most inadequate
+person, in whose vacuity the gloom of the dull day deepened till it was
+almost too deep for tears.  He bore the ordeal with grim heroism, and
+silently smoked away the sense of it, as we drove back to Cambridge, in
+his slippered feet, sombrely musing, sombrely swearing.  But he knew he
+had done the right, the kind thing, and he was content.  He came the
+whole way from Hartford to go with me to a friendless play of mine, which
+Alessandro Salvini was giving in a series of matinees to houses never
+enlarging themselves beyond the count of the brave two hundred who sat it
+through, and he stayed my fainting spirit with a cheer beyond flagons,
+joining me in my joke at the misery of it, and carrying the fun farther.
+
+Before that he had come to witness the aesthetic suicide of Anna
+Dickinson, who had been a flaming light of the political platform in the
+war days, and had been left by them consuming in a hapless ambition for
+the theatre.  The poor girl had had a play written especially for her,
+and as Anne Boleyn she ranted and exhorted through the five acts, drawing
+ever nearer the utter defeat of the anticlimax.  We could hardly look at
+each other for pity, Clemens sitting there in the box he had taken, with
+his shaggy head out over the corner and his slippered feet curled under
+him: he either went to a place in his slippers or he carried them with
+him, and put them on as soon as he could put off his boots.  When it was
+so that we could not longer follow her failure and live, he began to talk
+of the absolute close of her career which the thing was, and how probably
+she had no conception that it was the end.  He philosophized the
+mercifulness of the fact, and of the ignorance of most of us, when
+mortally sick or fatally wounded.  We think it is not the end, because we
+have never ended before, and we do not see how we can end.  Some can push
+by the awful hour and live again, but for Anna Dickinson there could be,
+and was, no such palingenesis.  Of course we got that solemn joy out of
+reading her fate aright which is the compensation of the wise spectator
+in witnessing the inexorable doom of others.
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+When Messrs. Houghton & Mifflin became owners of The Atlantic Monthly,
+Mr. Houghton fancied having some breakfasts and dinners, which should
+bring the publisher and the editor face to face with the contributors,
+who were bidden from far and near.  Of course, the subtle fiend of
+advertising, who has now grown so unblushing bold, lurked under the
+covers at these banquets, and the junior partner and the young editor had
+their joint and separate fine anguishes of misgiving as to the taste and
+the principle of them; but they were really very simple-hearted and
+honestly meant hospitalities, and they prospered as they ought, and gave
+great pleasure and no pain.  I forget some of the "emergent occasions,"
+but I am sure of a birthday dinner most unexpectedly accepted by
+Whittier, and a birthday luncheon to Mrs. Stowe, and I think a birthday
+dinner to Longfellow; but the passing years have left me in the dark as
+to the pretext of that supper at which Clemens made his awful speech, and
+came so near being the death of us all.  At the breakfasts and luncheons
+we had the pleasure of our lady contributors' company, but that night
+there were only men, and because of our great strength we survived.
+
+I suppose the year was about 1879, but here the almanac is unimportant,
+and I can only say that it was after Clemens had become a very valued
+contributor of the magazine, where he found himself to his own great
+explicit satisfaction.  He had jubilantly accepted our invitation, and
+had promised a speech, which it appeared afterward he had prepared with
+unusual care and confidence.  It was his custom always to think out his
+speeches, mentally wording them, and then memorizing them by a peculiar
+system of mnemonics which he had invented.  On the dinner-table a certain
+succession of knife, spoon, salt-cellar, and butter-plate symbolized a
+train of ideas, and on the billiard-table a ball, a cue, and a piece of
+chalk served the same purpose.  With a diagram of these printed on the
+brain he had full command of the phrases which his excogitation had
+attached to them, and which embodied the ideas in perfect form.  He
+believed he had been particularly fortunate in his notion for the speech
+of that evening, and he had worked it out in joyous self-reliance.
+It was the notion of three tramps, three deadbeats, visiting a California
+mining-camp, and imposing themselves upon the innocent miners as
+respectively Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver
+Wendell, Holmes.  The humor of the conception must prosper or must fail
+according to the mood of the hearer, but Clemens felt sure of compelling
+this to sympathy, and he looked forward to an unparalleled triumph.
+
+But there were two things that he had not taken into account.  One was
+the species of religious veneration in which these men were held by those
+nearest them, a thing that I should not be able to realize to people
+remote from them in time and place.  They were men of extraordinary
+dignity, of the thing called presence, for want of some clearer word,
+so that no one could well approach them in a personally light or trifling
+spirit.  I do not suppose that anybody more truly valued them or more
+piously loved them than Clemens himself, but the intoxication of his
+fancy carried him beyond the bounds of that regard, and emboldened him to
+the other thing which he had not taken into account-namely, the immense
+hazard of working his fancy out before their faces, and expecting them to
+enter into the delight of it.  If neither Emerson, nor Longfellow, nor
+Holmes had been there, the scheme might possibly have carried, but even
+this is doubtful, for those who so devoutly honored them would have
+overcome their horror with difficulty, and perhaps would not have
+overcome it at all.
+
+The publisher, with a modesty very ungrateful to me, had abdicated his
+office of host, and I was the hapless president, fulfilling the abhorred.
+function of calling people to their feet and making them speak.  When I
+came to Clemens I introduced him with the cordial admiring I had for him
+as one of my greatest contributors and dearest friends.  Here, I said,
+in sum, was a humorist who never left you hanging your head for having
+enjoyed his joke; and then the amazing mistake, the bewildering blunder,
+the cruel catastrophe was upon us.  I believe that after the scope of the
+burlesque made itself clear, there was no one there, including the
+burlesquer himself, who was not smitten with a desolating dismay.  There
+fell a silence, weighing many tons to the square inch, which deepened
+from moment to moment, and was broken only by the hysterical and blood-
+curdling laughter of a single guest, whose name shall not be handed down
+to infamy.  Nobody knew whether to look at the speaker or down at his
+plate.  I chose my plate as the least affliction, and so I do not know
+how Clemens looked, except when I stole a glance at him, and saw him
+standing solitary amid his appalled and appalling listeners, with his
+joke dead on his hands.  From a first glance at the great three whom his
+jest had made its theme, I was aware of Longfellow sitting upright, and
+regarding the humorist with an air of pensive puzzle, of Holmes busily
+writing on his menu, with a well-feigned effect of preoccupation, and of
+Emerson, holding his elbows, and listening with a sort of Jovian oblivion
+of this nether world in that lapse of memory which saved him in those
+later years from so much bother.  Clemens must have dragged his joke to
+the climax and left it there, but I cannot say this from any sense of the
+fact.  Of what happened afterward at the table where the immense, the
+wholly innocent, the truly unimagined affront was offered, I have no
+longer the least remembrance.  I next remember being in a room of the
+hotel, where Clemens was not to sleep, but to toss in despair, and
+Charles Dudley Warner's saying, in the gloom, "Well, Mark, you're a funny
+fellow."  It was as well as anything else he could have said, but Clemens
+seemed unable to accept the tribute.
+
+I stayed the night with him, and the next morning, after a haggard
+breakfast, we drove about and he made some purchases of bric-a-brac for
+his house in Hartford, with a soul as far away from bric-a-brac as ever
+the soul of man was.  He went home by an early train, and he lost no time
+in writing back to the three divine personalities which he had so
+involuntarily seemed to flout.  They all wrote back to him, making it as
+light for him as they could.  I have heard that Emerson was a good deal
+mystified, and in his sublime forgetfulness asked, Who was this gentleman
+who appeared to think he had offered him some sort of annoyance!  But I
+am not sure that this is accurate.  What I am sure of is that Longfellow,
+a few days after, in my study, stopped before a photograph of Clemens and
+said, "Ah, he is a wag!" and nothing more.  Holmes told me, with deep
+emotion, such as a brother humorist might well feel, that he had not lost
+an instant in replying to Clemens's letter, and assuring him that there
+had not been the least offence, and entreating him never to think of the
+matter again.  "He said that he was a fool, but he was God's fool,"
+Holmes quoted from the letter, with a true sense of the pathos and the
+humor of the self-abasement.
+
+To me Clemens wrote a week later, "It doesn't get any better; it burns
+like fire."  But now I understand that it was not shame that burnt, but
+rage for a blunder which he had so incredibly committed.  That to have
+conceived of those men, the most dignified in our literature, our
+civilization, as impersonable by three hoboes, and then to have imagined
+that he could ask them personally to enjoy the monstrous travesty, was a
+break, he saw too late, for which there was no repair.  Yet the time
+came, and not so very long afterward, when some mention was made of the
+incident as a mistake, and he said, with all his fierceness, "But I don't
+admit that it was a mistake," and it was not so in the minds of all
+witnesses at second hand.  The morning after the dreadful dinner there
+came a glowing note from Professor Child, who had read the newspaper
+report of it, praising Clemens's burlesque as the richest piece of humor
+in the world, and betraying no sense of incongruity in its perpetration
+in the presence of its victims.  I think it must always have ground in
+Clemens's soul, that he was the prey of circumstances, and that if he had
+some more favoring occasion he could retrieve his loss in it by giving
+the thing the right setting.  Not more than two or three years ago, he
+came to try me as to trying it again at a meeting of newspaper men in
+Washington.  I had to own my fears, while I alleged Child's note on the
+other hand, but in the end he did not try it with the newspaper men.  I
+do not know whether he has ever printed it or not, but since the thing
+happened I have often wondered how much offence there really was in it.
+I am not sure but the horror of the spectators read more indignation into
+the subjects of the hapless drolling than they felt.  But it must have
+been difficult for them to bear it with equanimity.  To be sure, they
+were not themselves mocked; the joke was, of course, beside them;
+nevertheless, their personality was trifled with, and I could only end by
+reflecting that if I had been in their place I should not have liked it
+myself.  Clemens would have liked it himself, for he had the heart for
+that sort of wild play, and he so loved a joke that even if it took the
+form of a liberty, and was yet a good joke, he would have loved it.  But
+perhaps this burlesque was not a good joke.
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+Clemens was oftenest at my house in Cambridge, but he was also sometimes
+at my house in Belmont; when, after a year in Europe, we went to live in
+Boston, he was more rarely with us.  We could never be long together
+without something out of the common happening, and one day something far
+out of the common happened, which fortunately refused the nature of
+absolute tragedy, while remaining rather the saddest sort of comedy.  We
+were looking out of my library window on that view of the Charles which I
+was so proud of sharing with my all-but-next-door neighbor, Doctor
+Holmes, when another friend who was with us called out with curiously
+impersonal interest, "Oh, see that woman getting into the water!"  This
+would have excited curiosity and alarmed anxiety far less lively than
+ours, and Clemens and I rushed downstairs and out through my basement and
+back gate.  At the same time a coachman came out of a stable next door,
+and grappled by the shoulders a woman who was somewhat deliberately
+getting down the steps to the water over the face of the embankment.
+Before we could reach them he had pulled her up to the driveway, and
+stood holding her there while she crazily grieved at her rescue.  As soon
+as he saw us he went back into his stable, and left us with the poor wild
+creature on our hands.  She was not very young and not very pretty, and
+we could not have flattered ourselves with the notion of anything
+romantic in her suicidal mania, but we could take her on the broad human
+level, and on this we proposed to escort her up Beacon Street till we
+could give her into the keeping of one of those kindly policemen whom our
+neighborhood knew.  Naturally there was no policeman known to us or
+unknown the whole way to the Public Garden.  We had to circumvent our
+charge in her present design of drowning herself, and walk her past the
+streets crossing Beacon to the river.  At these points it needed
+considerable reasoning to overcome her wish and some active manoeuvring
+in both of us to enforce our arguments.  Nobody else appeared to be
+interested, and though we did not court publicity in the performance of
+the duty so strangely laid upon us, still it was rather disappointing to
+be so entirely ignored.
+
+There are some four or five crossings to the river between 302 Beacon
+Street and the Public Garden, and the suggestions at our command were
+pretty well exhausted by the time we reached it.  Still the expected
+policeman was nowhere in sight; but a brilliant thought occurred to
+Clemens.  He asked me where the nearest police station was, and when I
+told him, he started off at his highest speed, leaving me in sole charge
+of our hapless ward.  All my powers of suasion were now taxed to the
+utmost, and I began attracting attention as a short, stout gentleman in
+early middle life endeavoring to distrain a respectable female of her
+personal liberty, when his accomplice had abandoned him to his wicked
+design.  After a much longer time than I thought I should have taken to
+get a policeman from the station, Clemens reappeared in easy conversation
+with an officer who had probably realized that he was in the company of
+Mark Twain, and was in no hurry to end the interview.  He took possession
+of our captive, and we saw her no more.  I now wonder that with our joint
+instinct for failure we ever got rid of her; but I am sure we did, and
+few things in life have given me greater relief.  When we got back to my
+house we found the friend we had left there quite unruffled and not much
+concerned to know the facts of our adventure.  My impression is that he
+had been taking a nap on my lounge; be appeared refreshed and even gay;
+but if I am inexact in these details he is alive to refute me.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+A little after this Clemens went abroad with his family, and lived
+several years in Germany.  His letters still came, but at longer
+intervals, and the thread of our intimate relations was inevitably
+broken.  He would write me when something I had written pleased him,
+or when something signal occurred to him, or some political or social
+outrage stirred him to wrath, and he wished to free his mind in pious
+profanity.  During this sojourn he came near dying of pneumonia in
+Berlin, and he had slight relapses from it after coming home.  In Berlin
+also he had the honor of dining with the German Emperor at the table of
+a cousin married to a high officer of the court.  Clemens was a man to
+enjoy such a distinction; he knew how to take it as a delegated
+recognition from the German people; but as coming from a rather cockahoop
+sovereign who had as yet only his sovereignty to value himself upon, he
+was not very proud of it.  He expressed a quiet disdain of the event as
+between the imperiality and himself, on whom it was supposed to confer
+such glory, crowning his life with the topmost leaf of laurel.  He was in
+the same mood in his account of an English dinner many years before,
+where there was a "little Scotch lord" present, to whom the English
+tacitly referred Clemens's talk, and laughed when the lord laughed, and
+were grave when he failed to smile.  Of all the men I have known he was
+the farthest from a snob, though he valued recognition, and liked the
+flattery of the fashionable fair when it came in his way.  He would not
+go out of his way for it, but like most able and brilliant men he loved
+the minds of women, their wit, their agile cleverness, their sensitive
+perception, their humorous appreciation, the saucy things they would say,
+and their pretty, temerarious defiances.  He had, of course, the keenest
+sense of what was truly dignified and truly undignified in people; but he
+was not really interested in what we call society affairs; they scarcely
+existed for him, though his books witness how he abhorred the dreadful
+fools who through some chance of birth or wealth hold themselves
+different from other men.
+
+Commonly he did not keep things to himself, especially dislikes and
+condemnations.  Upon most current events he had strong opinions, and he
+uttered them strongly.  After a while he was silent in them, but if you
+tried him you found him in them still.  He was tremendously worked up by
+a certain famous trial, as most of us were who lived in the time of it.
+He believed the accused guilty, but when we met some months after it was
+over, and I tempted him to speak his mind upon it, he would only say.
+The man had suffered enough; as if the man had expiated his wrong, and he
+was not going to do anything to renew his penalty.  I found that very
+curious, very delicate.  His continued blame could not come to the
+sufferer's knowledge, but he felt it his duty to forbear it.
+
+He was apt to wear himself out in the vehemence of his resentments; or,
+he had so spent himself in uttering them that he had literally nothing
+more to say.  You could offer Clemens offences that would anger other men
+and he did not mind; he would account for them from human nature; but if
+he thought you had in any way played him false you were anathema and
+maranatha forever.  Yet not forever, perhaps, for by and-by, after years,
+he would be silent.  There were two men, half a generation apart in their
+succession, whom he thought equally atrocious in their treason to him,
+and of whom he used to talk terrifyingly, even after they were out of the
+world.  He went farther than Heine, who said that he forgave his enemies,
+but not till they were dead.  Clemens did not forgive his dead enemies;
+their death seemed to deepen their crimes, like a base evasion, or a
+cowardly attempt to escape; he pursued them to the grave; he would like
+to dig them up and take vengeance upon their clay.  So he said, but no
+doubt he would not have hurt them if he had had them living before him.
+He was generous without stint; he trusted without measure, but where his
+generosity was abused, or his trust betrayed, he was a fire of vengeance,
+a consuming flame of suspicion that no sprinkling of cool patience from
+others could quench; it had to burn itself out.  He was eagerly and
+lavishly hospitable, but if a man seemed willing to batten on him, or in
+any way to lie down upon him, Clemens despised him unutterably.  In his
+frenzies of resentment or suspicion he would not, and doubtless could
+not, listen to reason.  But if between the paroxysms he were confronted
+with the facts he would own them, no matter how much they told against
+him.  At one period he fancied that a certain newspaper was hounding him
+with biting censure and poisonous paragraphs, and he was filling himself
+up with wrath to be duly discharged on the editor's head.  Later, he
+wrote me with a humorous joy in his mistake that Warner had advised him
+to have the paper watched for these injuries.  He had done so, and how
+many mentions of him did I reckon he had found in three months?  Just
+two, and they were rather indifferent than unfriendly.  So the paper was
+acquitted, and the editor's life was spared.  The wretch never knew how
+near he was to losing it, with incredible preliminaries of obloquy, and a
+subsequent devotion to lasting infamy.
+
+His memory for favors was as good as for injuries, and he liked to return
+your friendliness with as loud a band of music as could be bought or
+bribed for the occasion.  All that you had to do was to signify that you
+wanted his help.  When my father was consul at Toronto during Arthur's
+administration, he fancied that his place was in danger, and he appealed
+to me.  In turn I appealed to Clemens, bethinking myself of his
+friendship with Grant and Grant's friendship with Arthur.  I asked him to
+write to Grant in my father's behalf, but No, he answered me, I must come
+to Hartford, and we would go on to New York together and see Grant
+personally.  This was before, and long before, Clemens became Grant's
+publisher and splendid benefactor, but the men liked each other as such
+men could not help doing.  Clemens made the appointment, and we went to
+find Grant in his business office, that place where his business
+innocence was afterward so betrayed.  He was very simple and very
+cordial, and I was instantly the more at home with him, because his voice
+was the soft, rounded, Ohio River accent to which my years were earliest
+used from my steamboating uncles, my earliest heroes.  When I stated my
+business he merely said, Oh no; that must not be; he would write to Mr.
+Arthur; and he did so that day; and my father lived to lay down his
+office, when he tired of it, with no urgence from above.
+
+It is not irrelevant to Clemens to say that Grant seemed to like finding
+himself in company with two literary men, one of whom at least he could
+make sure of, and unlike that silent man he was reputed, he talked
+constantly, and so far as he might he talked literature.  At least he
+talked of John Phoenix, that delightfulest of the early Pacific Slope
+humorists, whom he had known under his real name of George H. Derby, when
+they were fellow-cadets at West Point.  It was mighty pretty, as Pepys
+would say, to see the delicate deference Clemens paid our plain hero, and
+the manly respect with which he listened.  While Grant talked, his
+luncheon was brought in from some unassuming restaurant near by, and he
+asked us to join him in the baked beans and coffee which were served us
+in a little room out of the office with about the same circumstance as at
+a railroad refreshment-counter.  The baked beans and coffee were of about
+the railroad-refreshment quality; but eating them with Grant was like
+sitting down to baked beans and coffee with Julius Caesar, or Alexander,
+or some other great Plutarchan captain.  One of the highest satisfactions
+of Clemens's often supremely satisfactory life was his relation to Grant.
+It was his proud joy to tell how he found Grant about to sign a contract
+for his book on certainly very good terms, and said to him that he would
+himself publish the book and give him a percentage three times as large.
+He said Grant seemed to doubt whether he could honorably withdraw from
+the negotiation at that point, but Clemens overbore his scruples, and it
+was his unparalleled privilege, his princely pleasure, to pay the author
+a far larger check for his work than had ever been paid to an author
+before.  He valued even more than this splendid opportunity the sacred
+moments in which their business brought him into the presence of the
+slowly dying, heroically living man whom he was so befriending; and he
+told me in words which surely lost none of their simple pathos through
+his report how Grant described his suffering.
+
+The prosperity, of this venture was the beginning of Clemens's adversity,
+for it led to excesses of enterprise which were forms of dissipation.
+The young sculptor who had come back to him from Paris modelled a small
+bust of Grant, which Clemens multiplied in great numbers to his great
+loss, and the success of Grant's book tempted him to launch on publishing
+seas where his bark presently foundered.  The first and greatest of his
+disasters was the Life of Pope Leo XIII, which he came to tell me of,
+when he had imagined it, in a sort of delirious exultation.  He had no
+words in which to paint the magnificence of the project, or to forecast
+its colossal success.  It would have a currency bounded only by the
+number of Catholics in Christendom.  It would be translated into every
+language which was anywhere written or printed; it would be circulated
+literally in every country of the globe, and Clemens's book agents would
+carry the prospectuses and then the bound copies of the work to the ends
+of the whole earth.  Not only would every Catholic buy it, but every
+Catholic must, as he was a good Catholic, as he hoped to be saved.  It
+was a magnificent scheme, and it captivated me, as it had captivated
+Clemens; it dazzled us both, and neither of us saw the fatal defect in
+it.  We did not consider how often Catholics could not read, how often
+when they could, they might not wish to read.  The event proved that
+whether they could read or not the immeasurable majority did not wish to
+read the life of the Pope, though it was written by a dignitary of the
+Church and issued to the world with every sanction from the Vatican.
+The failure was incredible to Clemens; his sanguine soul was utterly
+confounded, and soon a silence fell upon it where it had been so
+exuberantly jubilant.
+
+
+
+
+XIX.
+
+The occasions which brought us to New York together were not nearly so
+frequent as those which united us in Boston, but there was a dinner given
+him by a friend which remains memorable from the fatuity of two men
+present, so different in everything but their fatuity.  One was the sweet
+old comedian Billy Florence, who was urging the unsuccessful dramatist
+across the table to write him a play about Oliver Cromwell, and giving
+the reasons why he thought himself peculiarly fitted to portray the
+character of Cromwell.  The other was a modestly millioned rich man who
+was then only beginning to amass the moneys afterward heaped so high, and
+was still in the condition to be flattered by the condescension of a yet
+greater millionaire.  His contribution to our gaiety was the verbatim
+report of a call he had made upon William H. Vanderbilt, whom he had
+found just about starting out of town, with his trunks actually in the
+front hall, but who had stayed to receive the narrator.  He had, in fact,
+sat down on one of the trunks, and talked with the easiest friendliness,
+and quite, we were given to infer, like an ordinary human being.  Clemens
+often kept on with some thread of the talk when we came away from a
+dinner, but now he was silent, as if "high sorrowful and cloyed"; and it
+was not till well afterward that I found he had noted the facts from the
+bitterness with which he mocked the rich man, and the pity he expressed
+for the actor.
+
+He had begun before that to amass those evidences against mankind which
+eventuated with him in his theory of what he called "the damned human
+race."  This was not an expression of piety, but of the kind contempt to
+which he was driven by our follies and iniquities as he had observed them
+in himself as well as in others.  It was as mild a misanthropy, probably,
+as ever caressed the objects of its malediction.  But I believe it was
+about the year 1900 that his sense of our perdition became insupportable
+and broke out in a mixed abhorrence and amusement which spared no
+occasion, so that I could quite understand why Mrs. Clemens should have
+found some compensation, when kept to her room by sickness, in the
+reflection that now she should not hear so much about "the damned human
+race."  He told of that with the same wild joy that he told of
+overhearing her repetition of one of his most inclusive profanities, and
+her explanation that she meant him to hear it so that he might know how
+it sounded.  The contrast of the lurid blasphemy with her heavenly
+whiteness should have been enough to cure any one less grounded than he
+in what must be owned was as fixed a habit as smoking with him.  When I
+first knew him he rarely vented his fury in that sort, and I fancy he was
+under a promise to her which he kept sacred till the wear and tear of his
+nerves with advancing years disabled him.  Then it would be like him to
+struggle with himself till he could struggle no longer and to ask his
+promise back, and it would be like her to give it back.  His profanity
+was the heritage of his boyhood and young manhood in social conditions
+and under the duress of exigencies in which everybody swore about as
+impersonally as he smoked.  It is best to recognize the fact of it, and I
+do so the more readily because I cannot suppose the Recording Angel
+really minded it much more than that Guardian.  Angel of his.  It
+probably grieved them about equally, but they could equally forgive it.
+Nothing came of his pose regarding "the damned human race" except his
+invention of the Human Race Luncheon Club.  This was confined to four
+persons who were never all got together, and it soon perished of their
+indifference.
+
+In the earlier days that I have more specially in mind one of the
+questions that we used to debate a good deal was whether every human
+motive was not selfish.  We inquired as to every impulse, the noblest,
+the holiest in effect, and he found them in the last analysis of selfish
+origin.  Pretty nearly the whole time of a certain railroad run from New
+York to Hartford was taken up with the scrutiny of the self-sacrifice of
+a mother for her child, of the abandon of the lover who dies in saving
+his mistress from fire or flood, of the hero's courage in the field and
+the martyr's at the stake.  Each he found springing from the unconscious
+love of self and the dread of the greater pain which the self-sacrificer
+would suffer in-forbearing the sacrifice.  If we had any time left from
+this inquiry that day, he must have devoted it to a high regret that
+Napoleon did not carry out his purpose of invading England, for then he
+would have destroyed the feudal aristocracy, or "reformed the lords," as
+it might be called now.  He thought that would have been an incalculable
+blessing to the English people and the world.  Clemens was always
+beautifully and unfalteringly a republican.  None of his occasional
+misgivings for America implicated a return to monarchy.  Yet he felt
+passionately the splendor of the English monarchy, and there was a time
+when he gloried in that figurative poetry by which the king was phrased
+as "the Majesty of England."  He rolled the words deep-throatedly out,
+and exulted in their beauty as if it were beyond any other glory of the
+world.  He read, or read at, English history a great deal, and one of the
+by-products of his restless invention was a game of English Kings (like
+the game of Authors) for children.  I do not know whether he ever
+perfected this, but I am quite sure it was not put upon the market.  Very
+likely he brought it to a practicable stage, and then tired of it, as he
+was apt to do in the ultimation of his vehement undertakings.
+
+
+
+
+XX.
+
+He satisfied the impassioned demand of his nature for incessant
+activities of every kind by taking a personal as well as a pecuniary
+interest in the inventions of others.  At one moment "the damned human
+race" was almost to be redeemed by a process of founding brass without
+air bubbles in it; if this could once be accomplished, as I understood,
+or misunderstood, brass could be used in art-printing to a degree
+hitherto impossible.  I dare say I have got it wrong, but I am not
+mistaken as to Clemens's enthusiasm for the process, and his heavy losses
+in paying its way to ultimate failure.  He was simultaneously absorbed in
+the perfection of a type-setting machine, which he was paying the
+inventor a salary to bring to a perfection so expensive that it was
+practically impracticable.  We were both printers by trade, and I could
+take the same interest in this wonderful piece of mechanism that he
+could; and it was so truly wonderful that it did everything but walk and
+talk.  Its ingenious creator was so bent upon realizing the highest ideal
+in it that he produced a machine of quite unimpeachable efficiency.  But
+it was so costly, when finished, that it could not be made for less than
+twenty thousand dollars, if the parts were made by hand.  This sum was
+prohibitive of its introduction, unless the requisite capital could be
+found for making the parts by machinery, and Clemens spent many months in
+vainly trying to get this money together.  In the mean time simpler
+machines had been invented and the market filled, and his investment of
+three hundred thousand dollars in the beautiful miracle remained
+permanent but not profitable.  I once went with him to witness its
+performance, and it did seem to me the last word in its way, but it had
+been spoken too exquisitely, too fastidiously.  I never heard him devote
+the inventor to the infernal gods, as he was apt to do with the geniuses
+he lost money by, and so I think he did not regard him as a traitor.
+
+In these things, and in his other schemes for the 'subiti guadagni' of
+the speculator and the "sudden making of splendid names" for the
+benefactors of our species, Clemens satisfied the Colonel Sellers nature
+in himself (from which he drew the picture of that wild and lovable
+figure), and perhaps made as good use of his money as he could.  He did
+not care much for money in itself, but he luxuriated in the lavish use of
+it, and he was as generous with it as ever a man was. He liked giving it,
+but he commonly wearied of giving it himself, and wherever he lived he
+established an almoner, whom he fully trusted to keep his left hand
+ignorant of what his right hand was doing.  I believe he felt no finality
+in charity, but did it because in its provisional way it was the only
+thing a man could do. I never heard him go really into any sociological
+inquiry, and I have a feeling that that sort of thing baffled and
+dispirited him.  No one can read The Connecticut Yankee and not be aware
+of the length and breadth of his sympathies with poverty, but apparently
+he had not thought out any scheme for righting the economic wrongs we
+abound in.  I cannot remember our ever getting quite down to a discussion
+of the matter; we came very near it once in the day of the vast wave of
+emotion sent over the world by 'Looking Backward,' and again when we were
+all so troubled by the great coal strike in Pennsylvania; in considering
+that he seemed to be for the time doubtful of the justice of the
+workingman's cause.  At all other times he seemed to know that whatever
+wrongs the workingman committed work was always in the right.
+
+When Clemens returned to America with his family, after lecturing round
+the world, I again saw him in New York, where I so often saw him while he
+was shaping himself for that heroic enterprise.  He would come to me, and
+talk sorrowfully over his financial ruin, and picture it to himself as
+the stuff of some unhappy dream, which, after long prosperity, had
+culminated the wrong way.  It was very melancholy, very touching, but the
+sorrow to which he had come home from his long journey had not that
+forlorn bewilderment in it.  He was looking wonderfully well, and when I
+wanted the name of his elixir, he said it was plasmon.  He was apt, for a
+man who had put faith so decidedly away from him, to take it back and pin
+it to some superstition, usually of a hygienic sort.  Once, when he was
+well on in years, he came to New York without glasses, and announced that
+he and all his family, so astigmatic and myopic and old-sighted, had, so
+to speak, burned their spectacles behind them upon the instruction of
+some sage who had found out that they were a delusion.  The next time he
+came he wore spectacles freely, almost ostentatiously, and I heard from
+others that the whole Clemens family had been near losing their eyesight
+by the miracle worked in their behalf.  Now, I was not surprised to learn
+that "the damned human race" was to be saved by plasmon, if anything, and
+that my first duty was to visit the plasmon agency with him, and procure
+enough plasmon to secure my family against the ills it was heir to for
+evermore.  I did not immediately understand that plasmon was one of the
+investments which he had made from "the substance of things hoped for,"
+and in the destiny of a disastrous disappointment.  But after paying off
+the creditors of his late publishing firm, he had to do something with
+his money, and it was not his fault if he did not make a fortune out of
+plasmon.
+
+
+
+
+XXI.
+
+For a time it was a question whether he should not go back with his
+family to their old home in Hartford.  Perhaps the father's and mother's
+hearts drew them there all the more strongly because of the grief written
+ineffaceably over it, but for the younger ones it was no longer the
+measure of the world.  It was easier for all to stay on indefinitely in
+New York, which is a sojourn without circumstance, and equally the home
+of exile and of indecision.  The Clemenses took a pleasant, spacious
+house at Riverdale, on the Hudson, and there I began to see them again on
+something like the sweet old terms.  They lived far more unpretentiously
+than they used, and I think with a notion of economy, which they had
+never very successfully practised.  I recall that at the end of a certain
+year in Hartford, when they had been saving and paying cash for
+everything, Clemens wrote, reminding me of their avowed experiment, and
+asking me to guess how many bills they had at New Year's; he hastened to
+say that a horse-car would not have held them.  At Riverdale they kept no
+carriage, and there was a snowy night when I drove up to their handsome
+old mansion in the station carryall, which was crusted with mud as from
+the going down of the Deluge after transporting Noah and his family from
+the Ark to whatever point they decided to settle at provisionally.  But
+the good talk, the rich talk, the talk that could never suffer poverty of
+mind or soul, was there, and we jubilantly found ourselves again in our
+middle youth.  It was the mighty moment when Clemens was building his
+engines of war for the destruction of Christian Science, which
+superstition nobody, and he least of all, expected to destroy.  It would
+not be easy to say whether in his talk of it his disgust for the
+illiterate twaddle of Mrs. Eddy's book, or his admiration of her genius
+for organization was the greater.  He believed that as a religious
+machine the Christian Science Church was as perfect as the Roman Church
+and destined to be, more formidable in its control of the minds of men.
+He looked for its spread over the whole of Christendom, and throughout
+the winter he spent at Riverdale he was ready to meet all listeners more
+than half-way with his convictions of its powerful grasp of the average
+human desire to get something for nothing.  The vacuous vulgarity of its
+texts was a perpetual joy to him, while he bowed with serious respect to
+the sagacity which built so securely upon the everlasting rock of human
+credulity and folly.
+
+An interesting phase of his psychology in this business was not only his
+admiration for the masterly, policy of the Christian Science hierarchy,
+but his willingness to allow the miracles of its healers to be tried on
+his friends and family, if they wished it.  He had a tender heart for the
+whole generation of empirics, as well as the newer sorts of scientitians,
+but he seemed to base his faith in them largely upon the failure of the
+regulars rather than upon their own successes, which also he believed in.
+He was recurrently, but not insistently, desirous that you should try
+their strange magics when you were going to try the familiar medicines.
+
+
+
+
+XXII.
+
+The order of my acquaintance, or call it intimacy, with Clemens was this:
+our first meeting in Boston, my visits to him in Hartford, his visits to
+me in Cambridge, in Belmont, and in Boston, our briefer and less frequent
+meetings in Paris and New York, all with repeated interruptions through
+my absences in Europe, and his sojourns in London, Berlin, Vienna, and
+Florence, and his flights to the many ends, and odds and ends, of the
+earth.  I will not try to follow the events, if they were not rather the
+subjective experiences, of those different periods and points of time
+which I must not fail to make include his summer at York Harbor, and his
+divers residences in New York, on Tenth Street and on Fifth Avenue, at
+Riverdale, and at Stormfield, which his daughter has told me he loved
+best of all his houses and hoped to make his home for long years.
+
+Not much remains to me of the week or so that we had together in Paris
+early in the summer of 1904.  The first thing I got at my bankers was a
+cable message announcing that my father was stricken with paralysis, but
+urging my stay for further intelligence, and I went about, till the final
+summons came, with my head in a mist of care and dread.  Clemens was very
+kind and brotherly through it all.  He was living greatly to his mind in
+one of those arcaded little hotels in the Rue de Rivoli, and he was free
+from all household duties to range with me.  We drove together to make
+calls of digestion at many houses where he had got indigestion through
+his reluctance from their hospitality, for he hated dining out.  But,
+as he explained, his wife wanted him to make these visits, and he did it,
+as he did everything she wanted.  'At one place, some suburban villa,
+he could get no answer to his ring, and he "hove" his cards over the gate
+just as it opened, and he had the shame of explaining in his
+unexplanatory French to the man picking them up.  He was excruciatingly
+helpless with his cabmen, but by very cordially smiling and casting
+himself on the drivers' mercy he always managed to get where he wanted.
+The family was on the verge of their many moves, and he was doing some
+small errands; he said that the others did the main things, and left him
+to do what the cat might.
+
+It was with that return upon the buoyant billow of plasmon, renewed in
+look and limb, that Clemens's universally pervasive popularity began in
+his own country.  He had hitherto been more intelligently accepted or
+more largely imagined in Europe, and I suppose it was my sense of this
+that inspired the stupidity of my saying to him when we came to consider
+"the state of polite learning" among us, "You mustn't expect people to
+keep it up here as they do in England."  But it appeared that his
+countrymen were only wanting the chance, and they kept it up in honor of
+him past all precedent.  One does not go into a catalogue of dinners,
+receptions, meetings, speeches, and the like, when there are more vital
+things to speak of.  He loved these obvious joys, and he eagerly strove
+with the occasions they gave him for the brilliancy which seemed so
+exhaustless and was so exhausting.  His friends saw that he was wearing
+himself out, and it was not because of Mrs. Clemens's health alone that
+they were glad to have him take refuge at Riverdale.  The family lived
+there two happy, hopeless years, and then it was ordered that they should
+change for his wife's sake to some less exacting climate.  Clemens was
+not eager to go to Florence, but his imagination was taken as it would
+have been in the old-young days by the notion of packing his furniture
+into flexible steel cages from his house in Hartford and unpacking it
+from them untouched at his villa in Fiesole.  He got what pleasure any
+man could out of that triumph of mind over matter, but the shadow was
+creeping up his life.  One sunny afternoon we sat on the grass before the
+mansion, after his wife had begun to get well enough for removal, and we
+looked up toward a balcony where by-and-by that lovely presence made
+itself visible, as if it had stooped there from a cloud.  A hand frailly
+waved a handkerchief; Clemens ran over the lawn toward it, calling
+tenderly: "What?  What?" as if it might be an asking for him instead of
+the greeting it really was for me.  It was the last time I saw her, if
+indeed I can be said to have seen her then, and long afterward when I
+said how beautiful we all thought her, how good, how wise, how
+wonderfully perfect in every relation of life, he cried out in a breaking
+voice: "Oh, why didn't you ever tell her?  She thought you didn't like
+her."  What a pang it was then not to have told her, but how could we
+have told her?  His unreason endeared him to me more than all his wisdom.
+
+To that Riverdale sojourn belong my impressions of his most violent anti-
+Christian Science rages, which began with the postponement of his book,
+and softened into acceptance of the delay till he had well-nigh forgotten
+his wrath when it come out.  There was also one of those joint episodes
+of ours, which, strangely enough, did not eventuate in entire failure, as
+most of our joint episodes did.  He wrote furiously to me of a wrong
+which had been done to one of the most helpless and one of the most
+helped of our literary brethren, asking me to join with him in recovering
+the money paid over by that brother's publisher to a false friend who had
+withheld it and would not give any account of it.  Our hapless brother
+had appealed to Clemens, as he had to me, with the facts, but not asking
+our help, probably because he knew he need not ask; and Clemens enclosed
+to me a very taking-by-the-throat message which he proposed sending to
+the false friend.  For once I had some sense, and answered that this
+would never do, for we had really no power in the matter, and I contrived
+a letter to the recreant so softly diplomatic that I shall always think
+of it with pride when my honesties no longer give me satisfaction, saying
+that this incident had come to our knowledge, and suggesting that we felt
+sure he would not finally wish to withhold the money.  Nothing more,
+practically, than that, but that was enough; there came promptly back a
+letter of justification, covering a very substantial check, which we
+hilariously forwarded to our beneficiary.  But the helpless man who was
+so used to being helped did not answer with the gladness I, at least,
+expected of him.  He acknowledged the check as he would any ordinary
+payment, and then he made us observe that there was still a large sum due
+him out of the moneys withheld.  At this point I proposed to Clemens that
+we should let the nonchalant victim collect the remnant himself.  Clouds
+of sorrow had gathered about the bowed head of the delinquent since we
+began on him, and my fickle sympathies were turning his way from the
+victim who was really to blame for leaving his affairs so unguardedly to
+him in the first place.  Clemens made some sort of grit assent, and we
+dropped the matter.  He was more used to ingratitude from those he helped
+than I was, who found being lain down upon not so amusing as he found my
+revolt.  He reckoned I was right, he said, and after that I think we
+never recurred to the incident.  It was not ingratitude that he ever
+minded; it was treachery, that really maddened him past forgiveness.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII.
+
+During the summer he spent at York Harbor I was only forty minutes away
+at Kittery Point, and we saw each other often; but this was before the
+last time at Riverdale.  He had a wide, low cottage in a pine grove
+overlooking York River, and we used to sit at a corner of the veranda
+farthest away from Mrs. Clemens's window, where we could read our
+manuscripts to each other, and tell our stories, and laugh our hearts out
+without disturbing her.  At first she had been about the house, and there
+was one gentle afternoon when she made tea for us in the parlor, but that
+was the last time I spoke with her.  After that it was really a question
+of how soonest and easiest she could be got back to Riverdale; but, of
+course, there were specious delays in which she seemed no worse and
+seemed a little better, and Clemens could work at a novel he had begun.
+He had taken a room in the house of a friend and neighbor, a fisherman
+and boatman; there was a table where he could write, and a bed where he
+could lie down and read; and there, unless my memory has played me one of
+those constructive tricks that people's memories indulge in, he read me
+the first chapters of an admirable story.  The scene was laid in a
+Missouri town, and the characters such as he had known in boyhood; but as
+often as I tried to make him own it, he denied having written any such
+story; it is possible that I dreamed it, but I hope the MS. will yet be
+found.  Upon reflection I cannot believe that I dreamed it, and I cannot
+believe that it was an effect of that sort of pseudomnemonics which I
+have mentioned.  The characters in the novel are too clearly outlined in
+my recollection, together with some critical reservations of my own
+concerning them.  Not only does he seem to have read me those first
+chapters, but to have talked them over with me and outlined the whole
+story.
+
+I cannot say whether or not he believed that his wife would recover; he
+fought the fear of her death to the end; for her life was far more
+largely his than the lives of most men's wives are theirs.  For his own
+life I believe he would never have much cared, if I may trust a saying of
+one who was so absolutely without pose as he was.  He said that he never
+saw a dead man whom he did not envy for having had it over and being done
+with it.  Life had always amused him, and in the resurgence of its
+interests after his sorrow had ebbed away he was again deeply interested
+in the world and in the human race, which, though damned, abounded in
+subjects of curious inquiry.  When the time came for his wife's removal
+from York Harbor I went with him to Boston, where he wished to look up
+the best means of her conveyance to New York.  The inquiry absorbed him:
+the sort of invalid car he could get; how she could be carried to the
+village station; how the car could be detached from the eastern train at
+Boston and carried round to the southern train on the other side of the
+city, and then how it could be attached to the Hudson River train at New
+York and left at Riverdale.  There was no particular of the business
+which he did not scrutinize and master, not only with his poignant
+concern for her welfare, but with his strong curiosity as to how these
+unusual things were done with the usual means.  With the inertness that
+grows upon an aging man he had been used to delegating more and more
+things, but of that thing I perceived that he would not delegate the
+least detail.
+
+He had meant never to go abroad again, but when it came time to go he did
+not look forward to returning; he expected to live in Florence always
+after that; they were used to the life and they had been happy there some
+years earlier before he went with his wife for the cure of Nauheim.  But
+when he came home again it was for good and all.  It was natural that he
+should wish to live in New York, where they had already had a pleasant
+year in Tenth Street.  I used to see him there in an upper room, looking
+south over a quiet open space of back yards where we fought our battles
+in behalf of the Filipinos and the Boers, and he carried on his campaign
+against the missionaries in China.  He had not yet formed his habit of
+lying for whole days in bed and reading and writing there, yet he was a
+good deal in bed, from weakness, I suppose, and for the mere comfort of
+it.
+
+My perspectives are not very clear, and in the foreshortening of events
+which always takes place in our review of the past I may not always time
+things aright.  But I believe it was not until he had taken his house at
+21 Fifth Avenue that he began to talk to me of writing his autobiography.
+He meant that it should be a perfectly veracious record of his life and
+period; for the first time in literature there should be a true history
+of a man and a true presentation of the men the man had known.  As we
+talked it over the scheme enlarged itself in our riotous fancy.  We said
+it should be not only a book, it should be a library, not only a library,
+but a literature.  It should make good the world's loss through Omar's
+barbarity at Alexandria; there was no image so grotesque, so extravagant
+that we did not play with it; and the work so far as he carried it was
+really done on a colossal scale.  But one day he said that as to veracity
+it was a failure; he had begun to lie, and that if no man ever yet told
+the truth about himself it was because no man ever could.  How far he had
+carried his autobiography I cannot say; he dictated the matter several
+hours each day; and the public has already seen long passages from it,
+and can judge, probably, of the make and matter of the whole from these.
+It is immensely inclusive, and it observes no order or sequence.  Whether
+now, after his death, it will be published soon or late I have no means
+of knowing.  Once or twice he said in a vague way that it was not to be
+published for twenty years, so that the discomfort of publicity might be
+minimized for all the survivors.  Suddenly he told me he was not working
+at it; but I did not understand whether he had finished it or merely
+dropped it; I never asked.
+
+We lived in the same city, but for old men rather far apart, he at Tenth
+Street and I at Seventieth, and with our colds and other disabilities we
+did not see each other often.  He expected me to come to him, and I would
+not without some return of my visits, but we never ceased to be friends,
+and good friends, so far as I know.  I joked him once as to how I was
+going to come out in his autobiography, and he gave me some sort of
+joking reassurance.  There was one incident, however, that brought us
+very frequently and actively together.  He came one Sunday afternoon to
+have me call with him on Maxim Gorky, who was staying at a hotel a few
+streets above mine.  We were both interested in Gorky, Clemens rather
+more as a revolutionist and I as a realist, though I too wished the
+Russian Tsar ill, and the novelist well in his mission to the Russian
+sympathizers in this republic.  But I had lived through the episode of
+Kossuth's visit to us and his vain endeavor to raise funds for the
+Hungarian cause in 1851, when we were a younger and nobler nation than
+now, with hearts if not hands, opener to the "oppressed of Europe"; the
+oppressed of America, the four or five millions of slaves, we did not
+count.  I did not believe that Gorky could get the money for the cause of
+freedom in Russia which he had come to get; as I told a valued friend of
+his and mine, I did not believe he could get twenty-five hundred dollars,
+and I think now I set the figure too high.  I had already refused to sign
+the sort of general appeal his friends were making to our principles and
+pockets because I felt it so wholly idle, and when the paper was produced
+in Gorky's presence and Clemens put his name to it I still refused.  The
+next day Gorky was expelled from his hotel with the woman who was not his
+wife, but who, I am bound to say, did not look as if she were not, at
+least to me, who am, however, not versed in those aspects of human
+nature.
+
+I might have escaped unnoted, but Clemens's familiar head gave us away to
+the reporters waiting at the elevator's mouth for all who went to see
+Gorky.  As it was, a hunt of interviewers ensued for us severally and
+jointly.  I could remain aloof in my hotel apartment, returning answer to
+such guardians of the public right to know everything that I had nothing
+to say of Gorky's domestic affairs; for the public interest had now
+strayed far from the revolution, and centred entirely upon these.  But
+with Clemens it was different; he lived in a house with a street door
+kept by a single butler, and he was constantly rung for.  I forget how
+long the siege lasted, but long enough for us to have fun with it.  That
+was the moment of the great Vesuvian eruption, and we figured ourselves
+in easy reach of a volcano which was every now and then "blowing a cone
+off," as the telegraphic phrase was.  The roof of the great market in
+Naples had just broken in under its load of ashes and cinders, and
+crashed hundreds of people; and we asked each other if we were not sorry
+we had not been there, where the pressure would have been far less
+terrific than it was with us in Fifth Avenue.  The forbidden butler came
+up with a message that there were some gentlemen below who wanted to see
+Clemens.
+
+"How many?" he demanded.
+
+"Five," the butler faltered.
+
+"Reporters?"
+
+The butler feigned uncertainty.
+
+"What would you do?" he asked me.
+
+"I wouldn't see them," I said, and then Clemens went directly down to
+them.  How or by what means he appeased their voracity I cannot say, but
+I fancy it was by the confession of the exact truth, which was harmless
+enough.  They went away joyfully, and he came back in radiant
+satisfaction with having seen them.  Of course he was right and I wrong,
+and he was right as to the point at issue between Gorky and those who had
+helplessly treated him with such cruel ignominy.  In America it is not
+the convention for men to live openly in hotels with women who are not
+their wives.  Gorky had violated this convention and he had to pay the
+penalty; and concerning the destruction of his efficiency as an emissary
+of the revolution, his blunder was worse than a crime.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV.
+
+To the period of Clemens's residence in Fifth Avenue belongs his
+efflorescence in white serge.  He was always rather aggressively
+indifferent about dress, and at a very early date in our acquaintance
+Aldrich and I attempted his reform by clubbing to buy him a cravat.
+But he would not put away his stiff little black bow, and until he
+imagined the suit of white serge, he wore always a suit of black serge,
+truly deplorable in the cut of the sagging frock.  After his measure had
+once been taken he refused to make his clothes the occasion of personal
+interviews with his tailor; he sent the stuff by the kind elderly woman
+who had been in the service of the family from the earliest days of his
+marriage, and accepted the result without criticism.  But the white serge
+was an inspiration which few men would have had the courage to act upon.
+The first time I saw him wear it was at the authors' hearing before the
+Congressional Committee on Copyright in Washington.  Nothing could have
+been more dramatic than the gesture with which he flung off his long
+loose overcoat, and stood forth in white from his feet to the crown of
+his silvery head.  It was a magnificent coup, and he dearly loved a coup;
+but the magnificent speech which he made, tearing to shreds the venerable
+farrago of nonsense about nonproperty in ideas which had formed the basis
+of all copyright legislation, made you forget even his spectacularity.
+
+It is well known how proud he was of his Oxford gown, not merely because
+it symbolized the honor in which he was held by the highest literary body
+in the world, but because it was so rich and so beautiful.  The red and
+the lavender of the cloth flattered his eyes as the silken black of the
+same degree of Doctor of Letters, given him years before at Yale, could
+not do.  His frank, defiant happiness in it, mixed with a due sense of
+burlesque, was something that those lacking his poet-soul could never
+imagine; they accounted it vain, weak; but that would not have mattered
+to him if he had known it.  In his London sojourn he had formed the top-
+hat habit, and for a while he lounged splendidly up and down Fifth Avenue
+in that society emblem; but he seemed to tire of it, and to return kindly
+to the soft hat of his Southwestern tradition.
+
+He disliked clubs; I don't know whether he belonged to any in New York,
+but I never met him in one.  As I have told, he himself had formed the
+Human Race Club, but as he never could get it together it hardly counted.
+There was to have been a meeting of it the time of my only visit to
+Stormfield in April of last year; but of three who were to have come I
+alone came.  We got on very well without the absentees, after finding
+them in the wrong, as usual, and the visit was like those I used to have
+with him so many years before in Hartford, but there was not the old
+ferment of subjects.  Many things had been discussed and put away for
+good, but we had our old fondness for nature and for each other, who were
+so differently parts of it.  He showed his absolute content with his
+house, and that was the greater pleasure for me because it was my son who
+designed it.  The architect had been so fortunate as to be able to plan
+it where a natural avenue of savins, the closeknit, slender, cypress-like
+cedars of New England, led away from the rear of the villa to the little
+level of a pergola, meant some day to be wreathed and roofed with vines.
+But in the early spring days all the landscape was in the beautiful
+nakedness of the northern winter.  It opened in the surpassing loveliness
+of wooded and meadowed uplands, under skies that were the first days
+blue, and the last gray over a rainy and then a snowy floor.  We walked
+up and down, up and down, between the villa terrace and the pergola, and
+talked with the melancholy amusement, the sad tolerance of age for the
+sort of men and things that used to excite us or enrage us; now we were
+far past turbulence or anger.  Once we took a walk together across the
+yellow pastures to a chasmal creek on his grounds, where the ice still
+knit the clayey banks together like crystal mosses; and the stream far
+down clashed through and over the stones and the shards of ice.  Clemens
+pointed out the scenery he had bought to give himself elbow-room, and
+showed me the lot he was going to have me build on.  The next day we came
+again with the geologist he had asked up to Stormfield to analyze its
+rocks.  Truly he loved the place, though he had been so weary of change
+and so indifferent to it that he never saw it till he came to live in it.
+He left it all to the architect whom he had known from a child in the
+intimacy which bound our families together, though we bodily lived far
+enough apart.  I loved his little ones and he was sweet to mine and was
+their delighted-in and wondered-at friend.  Once and once again, and yet
+again and again, the black shadow that shall never be lifted where it
+falls, fell in his house and in mine, during the forty years and more
+that we were friends, and endeared us the more to each other.
+
+
+
+
+XXV.
+
+My visit at Stormfield came to an end with tender relucting on his part
+and on mine.  Every morning before I dressed I heard him sounding my name
+through the house for the fun of it and I know for the fondness; and if I
+looked out of my door, there he was in his long nightgown swaying up and
+down the corridor, and wagging his great white head like a boy that
+leaves his bed and comes out in the hope of frolic with some one.  The
+last morning a soft sugarsnow had fallen and was falling, and I drove
+through it down to the station in the carriage which had been given him
+by his wife's father when they were first married, and been kept all
+those intervening years in honorable retirement for this final use.  Its
+springs had not grown yielding with time; it had rather the stiffness and
+severity of age; but for him it must have swung low like the sweet
+chariot of the negro "spiritual" which I heard him sing with such fervor,
+when those wonderful hymns of the slaves began to make their way
+northward.  'Go Down, Daniel', was one in which I can hear his quavering
+tenor now.  He was a lover of the things he liked, and full of a passion
+for them which satisfied itself in reading them matchlessly aloud.  No
+one could read 'Uncle Remus' like him; his voice echoed the voices of the
+negro nurses who told his childhood the wonderful tales.  I remember
+especially his rapture with Mr. Cable's 'Old Creole Days,' and the
+thrilling force with which he gave the forbidding of the leper's brother
+when the city's survey ran the course of an avenue through the cottage
+where the leper lived in hiding: "Strit must not pass!"
+
+Out of a nature rich and fertile beyond any I have known, the material
+given him by the Mystery that makes a man and then leaves him to make
+himself over, he wrought a character of high nobility upon a foundation
+of clear and solid truth.  At the last day he will not have to confess
+anything, for all his life was the free knowledge of any one who would
+ask him of it.  The Searcher of hearts will not bring him to shame at
+that day, for he did not try to hide any of the things for which he was
+often so bitterly sorry.  He knew where the Responsibility lay, and he
+took a man's share of it bravely; but not the less fearlessly he left the
+rest of the answer to the God who had imagined men.
+
+It is in vain that I try to give a notion of the intensity with which he
+pierced to the heart of life, and the breadth of vision with which he
+compassed the whole world, and tried for the reason of things, and then
+left trying.  We had other meetings, insignificantly sad and brief; but
+the last time I saw him alive was made memorable to me by the kind, clear
+judicial sense with which he explained and justified the labor-unions as
+the sole present help of the weak against the strong.
+
+Next I saw him dead, lying in his coffin amid those flowers with which we
+garland our despair in that pitiless hour.  After the voice of his old
+friend Twichell had been lifted in the prayer which it wailed through in
+broken-hearted supplication, I looked a moment at the face I knew so
+well; and it was patient with the patience I had so often seen in it:
+something of puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be
+from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the
+laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him.  Emerson,
+Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes--I knew them all and all the rest of our
+sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and
+like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln
+of our literature.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Absolute devotion to the day of her death,
+Absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful
+Addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness
+Amiable perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence
+Amuse him, even when they wronged him
+Amusingly realized the situation to their friends
+But now I remember that he gets twenty dollars a month"
+Christianity had done nothing to improve morals and conditions
+Church: "Oh yes, I go  It 'most kills me, but I go,"
+Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature
+Despair broke in laughter
+Despised the avoidance of repetitions out of fear of tautology
+Everlasting rock of human credulity and folly
+Flowers with which we garland our despair in that pitiless hour
+He did not care much for fiction
+He did not paw you with his hands to show his affection
+He was a youth to the end of his days
+Heroic lies
+His coming almost killed her, but it was worth it
+Honest men are few when it comes to themselves
+It was mighty pretty, as Pepys would say
+Jane Austen
+Left him to do what the cat might
+Lie, of course, and did to save others from grief or harm
+Liked to find out good things and great things for himself
+Livy Clemens: nthe loveliest person I have ever seen
+Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know
+Mind and soul were with those who do the hard work of the world
+Mock modesty of print forbids my repeating here
+Most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew
+Most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men
+Nearly nothing as chaos could be
+Never saw a dead man whom he did not envy
+Never saw a man more regardful of negroes
+No man ever yet told the truth about himself
+No man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery
+Not possible for Clemens to write like anybody else
+Ought not to call coarse without calling one's self prudish
+Polite learning hesitated his praise
+Praised it enough to satisfy the author
+Reparation due from every white to every black man
+Shackles of belief worn so long
+Some superstition, usually of a hygienic sort
+Stupidly truthful
+The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it
+Truthful
+Used to ingratitude from those he helped
+Vacuous vulgarity of its texts
+Walter-Scotticized, pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal
+We have never ended before, and we do not see how we can end
+Well, if you are to be lost, I want to be lost with you
+What he had done he owned to, good, bad, or indifferent
+Whether every human motive was not selfish
+Wonder why we hate the past so--"It's so damned humiliating!"
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of My Mark Twain
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Absolute devotion to the day of her death,
+Absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful
+Abstract, the air-drawn, afflicted me like physical discomforts
+Act officiously, not officially
+Addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness
+Always sumptuously providing out of his destitution
+Amiable perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence
+Amuse him, even when they wronged him
+Amusingly realized the situation to their friends
+Anglo-American genius for ugliness
+Appeal, which he had come to recognize as invasive
+Appeared to have no grudge left
+Backed their credulity with their credit
+Bayard Taylor: incomparable translation of Faust
+Became gratefully strange
+Best talkers are willing that you should talk if you like
+But now I remember that he gets twenty dollars a month"
+Candle burning on the table for the cigars
+Celia Thaxter
+Charles Reade
+Charles F. Browne
+Christianity had done nothing to improve morals and conditions
+Church: "Oh yes, I go  It 'most kills me, but I go,"
+Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature
+Cold-slaw
+Collective opacity
+Confidence I have nearly always felt when wrong
+Could make us feel that our faults were other people's
+Could easily believe now that it was some one else who saw it
+Could only by chance be caught in earnest about anything
+Couldn't fire your revolver without bringing down a two volumer
+Dawn upon him through a cloud of other half remembered faces
+Death of the joy that ought to come from work
+Death's vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life
+Despair broke in laughter
+Despised the avoidance of repetitions out of fear of tautology
+Did not feel the effect I would so willingly have experienced
+Dinner was at the old-fashioned Boston hour of two
+Discomfort which mistaken or blundering praise
+Dollars were of so much farther flight than now
+Edmund Quincy
+Edward Everett Hale
+Either to deny the substance of things unseen, or to affirm it
+Emerson
+Enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself
+Espoused the theory of Bacon's authorship of Shakespeare
+Ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense
+Everlasting rock of human credulity and folly
+Expectation of those who will come no more
+Express the appreciation of another's fit word
+Feigned the gratitude which I could see that he expected
+Fell either below our pride or rose above our purse
+Felt that this was my misfortune more than my fault
+Few men last over from one reform to another
+First dinner served in courses that I had sat down to
+Flowers with which we garland our despair in that pitiless hour
+Forbearance of a wise man content to bide his time
+Forebore to speak needlessly to him, or to shake his hand
+Found life was not all poetry
+Francis Parkman
+Gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years
+Generous lover of all that was excellent in literature
+George William Curtis
+Giggle which Charles Lamb found the best thing in life
+Give him your best wine
+Got out of it all the fun there was in it
+Greeting of great impersonal cordiality
+Grieving that there could be such ire in heavenly minds
+Hard of hearing on one side.  But it isn't deafness
+Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Autocrat clashed upon homeopathy
+Hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love
+He was not bored because he would not be
+He did not care much for fiction
+He was not constructive; he was essentially observant
+He had no time to make money
+He was a youth to the end of his days
+He did not paw you with his hands to show his affection
+Heine
+Heroic lies
+His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event
+His readers trusted and loved him
+His enemies suffered from it almost as much as his friends
+His coming almost killed her, but it was worth it
+His plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it
+Hollowness, the hopelessness, the unworthiness of  life
+Honest men are few when it comes to themselves
+I find this young man worthy
+I believe neither in heroes nor in saints
+I did not know, and I hated to ask
+If he was half as bad, he would have been too bad to be
+If he was not there to your touch, it was no fault of his
+In the South there was nothing but a mistaken social ideal
+Incredible in their insipidity
+Industrial slavery
+Insatiable English fancy for the wild America no longer there
+Intellectual poseurs
+It is well to hold one's country to her promises
+It was mighty pretty, as Pepys would say
+Jane Austen
+Julia Ward Howe
+Left him to do what the cat might
+Lie, of course, and did to save others from grief or harm
+Liked being with you, not for what he got, but for what he gave
+Liked to find out good things and great things for himself
+Lincoln
+Literary dislikes or contempts
+Livy Clemens: nthe loveliest person I have ever seen
+Long breath was not his; he could not write a novel
+Longfellow
+Looked as if Destiny had sat upon it
+Love of freedom and the hope of justice
+Love and gratitude are only semi-articulate at the best
+Lowell
+Made all men trust him when they doubted his opinions
+Man who may any moment be out of work is industrially a slave
+Man who had so much of the boy in him
+Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know
+Mellow cordial of a voice that was like no other
+Memory will not be ruled
+Men who took themselves so seriously as that need
+Men's lives ended where they began, in the keeping of women
+Met with kindness, if not honor
+Might so far forget myself as to be a novelist
+Mind and soul were with those who do the hard work of the world
+Mock modesty of print forbids my repeating here
+Most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew
+Most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men
+Motley
+Napoleonic height which spiritually overtops the Alps
+Nearly nothing as chaos could be
+Never saw a man more regardful of negroes
+Never saw a dead man whom he did not envy
+Never paid in anything but hopes of paying
+No man ever yet told the truth about himself
+No time to make money
+No man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery
+Not quite himself till he had made you aware of his quality
+Not a man who cared to transcend; he liked bounds
+Not much patience with the unmanly craving for sympathy
+Not much of a talker, and almost nothing of a story-teller
+Not possible for Clemens to write like anybody else
+Now death has come to join its vague conjectures
+NYC, a city where money counts for more and goes for less
+Odious hilarity, without meaning and without remission
+Offers mortifyingly mean, and others insultingly vague
+Old man's tendency to revert to the past
+Old man's disposition to speak of his infirmities
+One could be openly poor in Cambridge without open shame
+Only one concerned who was quite unconcerned
+Ought not to call coarse without calling one's self prudish
+Pathos of revolt from the colorless rigidities
+Person who wished to talk when he could listen
+Plain-speaking or Rude Speaking
+Pointed the moral in all they did
+Polite learning hesitated his praise
+Praised it enough to satisfy the author
+Praised extravagantly, and in the wrong place
+Put your finger on the present moment and enjoy it
+Quarrel was with error, and not with the persons who were in it
+Quebec was a bit of the seventeenth century
+Reformers, who are so often tedious and ridiculous
+Remember the dinner-bell
+Reparation due from every white to every black man
+Secret of the man who is universally interesting
+Seen through the wrong end of the telescope
+Shackles of belief worn so long
+Shy of his fellow-men, as the scholar seems always to be
+So refined, after the gigantic coarseness of California
+Some superstition, usually of a hygienic sort
+Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the sermon
+Sought the things that he could agree with you upon
+Spare his years the fatigue of recalling your identity
+Standards were their own, and they were satisfied with them
+Stoddard
+Study in a corner by the porch
+Stupidly truthful
+The world is well lost whenever the world is wrong
+The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it
+Things common to all, however peculiar in each
+Thoreau
+Those who have sorrowed deepest will understand this best
+Times when a man's city was a man's country
+Tired themselves out in trying to catch up with him
+True to an ideal of life rather than to life itself
+Truthful
+Turn of the talk toward the mystical
+Used to ingratitude from those he helped
+Vacuous vulgarity of its texts
+Visited one of the great mills
+Walter-Scotticized, pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal
+Wasted face, and his gay eyes had the death-look
+We have never ended before, and we do not see how we can end
+Welcome me, and make the least of my shyness and strangeness
+Well, if you are to be lost, I want to be lost with you
+What he had done he owned to, good, bad, or indifferent
+When to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast
+Whether every human motive was not selfish
+Whitman's public use of his privately written praise
+Wit that tries its teeth upon everything
+Women's rights
+Wonder why we hate the past so--"It's so damned humiliating!"
+Wonderful to me how it should remain so unintelligible
+Work gives the impression of an uncommon continuity
+Wrote them first and last in the spirit of Dickens
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Literary Friends, Entire
+by William Dean Howells
+
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