Complete Project Gutenberg William Dean Howells Literature Essays (2024)

This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>

[NOTE: There are short lists of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end ofthe major sections for those who may wish to sample the author's ideasbefore making an entire meal of them. D.W.]

The Project Gutenberg Anthology of the Literary Essays of Howells

Literary Friends And Acquaintance
Literature And Life [Studies]
My Literary Passions/Criticism & Fiction

CONTENTS:
Literary Friends and Acquaintances
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

Literature and Life
Man of Letters in Business
Confessions of a Summer Colonist
The Young Contributor
Last Days in a Dutch Hotel
Anomalies of the Short Story
Spanish Prisoners of War
American Literary Centers
Standard Household Effect Co.
Notes of a Vanished Summer
Worries of a Winter Walk
Summer Isles of Eden
Wild Flowers of the Asphalt
A Circus in the Suburbs
A She Hamlet
The Midnight Platoon
The Beach at Rockaway
Sawdust in the Arena
At a Dime Museum
American Literature in Exile
The Horse Show
The Problem of the Summer
Aesthetic New York Fifty-odd Years Ago
From New York into New England
The Art of the Adsmith
The Psychology of Plagiarism
Puritanism in American Fiction
The What and How in Art
Politics in American Authors
Storage
"Floating down the River on the O-hi-o"

My Literary Passions
The Bookcase at Home
Goldsmith
Cervantes
Irving
First Fiction and Drama
Longfellow's "Spanish Student"
Scott
Lighter Fancies
Pope
Various Preferences
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Ossian
Shakespeare
Ik Marvel
Dickens
Wordsworth, Lowell, Chaucer
Macaulay.
Critics and Reviews.
A Non-literary Episode
Thackeray
"Lazarillo De Tormes"
Curtis, Longfellow, Schlegel
Tennyson
Heine
De Quincey, Goethe, Longfellow.
George Eliot, Hawthorne, Goethe, Heine
Charles Reade
Dante
Goldoni, Manzoni, D'azeglio
"Pastor Fido," "Aminta," "Romola," "Yeast," "Paul Ferroll"
Erckmann-chatrian, Bjorstjerne Bjornson
Tourguenief, Auerbach
Certain Preferences and Experiences
Valdes, Galdos, Verga, Zola, Trollope, Hardy
Tolstoy

Criticism and Fiction

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 towrite of literary history in New England as I had known it in the livesof 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 Ilet the days in which I almost constantly saw them go by without recordsave 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 mywork. Still, upon insistent appeal, it responded in sufficientabundance; and, though I now wish I could have remembered more instances,I think my impressions were accurate enough. I am sure of having triedhonestly to impart them in the ten years or more when I was desultorilyendeavoring 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 theearliest eighteen-nineties, if I may trust my recollection of reading itfrom the manuscript to the editor of Harper's Magazine, where we layunder the willows of Magnolia one pleasant summer morning in the firstyears of that decade. It was printed no great while after in thatperiodical; but I was so long in finishing the study of Lowell that ithad been anticipated in Harper's by other reminiscences of him, and itwas therefore first printed in Scribner's Magazine. It was the paperwith which I took the most pains, and when it was completed I still feltit so incomplete that I referred it to his closest and my best friend,the late Charles Eliot Norton, for his criticism. He thought it wantingin unity; it was a group of studies instead of one study, he said; I mustdo something to draw the different sketches together in a single effectof portraiture; and this I did my best to do.

It was the latest written of the three articles which give the volumesubstance, and it represents mare finally and fully than the others mysense of the literary importance of the men whose like we shall not lookupon again. Longfellow was easily the greatest poet of the three, Holmesoften the most brilliant and felicitous, but Lowell, in spite of hisforays in politics, was the finest scholar and the most profoundlyliterary, as he was above the others most deeply and thoroughly NewEngland in quality.

While I was doing these sketches, sometimes slighter and sometimes lessslight, of all those poets and essayists and novelists I had known inCambridge and Boston and Concord and New York, I was doing many otherthings: half a dozen novels, as many more novelettes and shorter stories,with essays and criticisms and verses; so that in January, 1900, I hadnot yet done the paper on Lowell, which, with another, was to complete myreminiscences of American literary life as I had witnessed it. When theywere all done at last they were republished in a volume which foundinstant favor beyond my deserts if not its own.

There was a good deal of trouble with the name, but Literary Friends andAcquaintance was an endeavor for modest accuracy with which I remainedsatisfied until I thought, long too late, of Literary Friends andNeighbors. Then I perceived that this would have been still moreaccurate and quite as modest, and I gladly give any reader leave to callthe book by that name who likes.

Since the collection was first made, I have written little else quite ofthe kind, except the paper on Bret Harte, which was first printed shortlyafter his death; and the study of Mark Twain, which I had been preparingto make for forty years and more, and wrote in two weeks of the spring of1910. Others of my time and place have now passed whither there isneither time nor place, and there are moments when I feel that I must tryto call them back and pay them such honor as my sense of their worth maygive; but the impulse has as yet failed to effect itself, and I do notknow how long I shall spare myself the supreme pleasure-pain, the "hochstangenehmer Schmerz," of seeking to live here with those who live here nomore.

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 inliterature than I had in 1860, I am sure I should not have known where tofind him, and I doubt if he could have been found nearer the centres ofliterary activity than I then was, or among those more purely devoted toliterature than myself. I had been for three years a writer of newsparagraphs, book notices, and political leaders on a daily paper in aninland city, and I do not know that my life differed outwardly from thatof any other young journalist, who had begun as I had in a countryprinting-office, and might be supposed to be looking forward toadvancement in his profession or in public affairs. But inwardly it wasaltogether different with me. Inwardly I was a poet, with no wish to beanything else, unless in a moment of careless affluence I might so farforget 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. Lowellhad lately accepted and had begun to print in the Atlantic Monthly fiveor six poems of mine. Besides this I had written poems, and sketches,and criticisms for the Saturday Press of New York, a long-forgotten butonce very lively expression of literary intention in an extinct bohemiaof that city; and I was always writing poems, and sketches, andcriticisms in our own paper. These, as well as my feats in the renownedperiodicals of the East, met with kindness, if not honor, in my own citywhich ought to have given me grave doubts whether I was any real prophet.But it only intensified my literary ambition, already so strong that myveins might well have run ink rather than blood, and gave me a higheropinion of my fellow-citizens, if such a thing could be. They wereindeed very charming people, and such of them as I mostly saw werereaders and lovers of books. Society in Columbus at that day had apleasant refinement which I think I do not exaggerate in the fondretrospect. It had the finality which it seems to have had nowhere sincethe war; it had certain fixed ideals, which were none the less gracefuland becoming because they were the simple old American ideals, nowvanished, or fast vanishing, before the knowledge of good and evil asthey have it in Europe, and as it has imparted itself to American traveland sojourn. There was a mixture of many strains in the capital of Ohio,as there was throughout the State. Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, NewYork, and New England all joined to characterize the manners and customs.I suppose it was the South which gave the social tone; the intellectualtaste among the elders was the Southern taste for the classic and thestandard in literature; but we who were younger preferred the modernauthors: we read Thackeray, and George Eliot, and Hawthorne, and CharlesReade, and De Quincey, and Tennyson, and Browning, and Emerson, andLongfellow, and I—I read Heine, and evermore Heine, when there was notsome new thing from the others. Now and then an immediate French bookpenetrated to us: we read Michelet and About, I remember. We looked toEngland and the East largely for our literary opinions; we accepted theSaturday Review as law if we could not quite receive it as gospel. Oneof us took the Cornhill Magazine, because Thackeray was the editor; theAtlantic Monthly counted many readers among us; and a visiting young ladyfrom New England, who screamed at sight of the periodical in one of ourhouses, "Why, have you got the Atlantic Monthly out here?" could beanswered, with cold superiority, "There are several contributors to theAtlantic in Columbus." There were in fact two: my room-mate, who wroteBrowning for it, while I wrote Heine and Longfellow. But I suppose twoare as rightfully several as twenty are.

II.

That was the heyday of lecturing, and now and then a literary light fromthe East swam into our skies. I heard and saw Emerson, and I once metBayard Taylor socially, at the hospitable house where he was a guestafter his lecture. Heaven knows how I got through the evening. I do notthink I opened my mouth to address him a word; it was as much as I coulddo to sit and look at him, while he tranquilly smoked, and chatted withour host, and quaffed the beer which we had very good in the Nest. Allthe 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 byheart in those days, and I longed (how much more I longed!) to have himknow 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 literaturehitherto attempted. But I could not tell him; and there was no one elsewho thought to tell him. Perhaps it was as well so; I might haveperished of his recognition, for my modesty was equal to my merit.

In fact I think we were all rather modest young fellows, we who formedthe group wont to spend some part of every evening at that house, wherethere was always music, or whist, or gay talk, or all three. We had ouropinions of literary matters, but (perhaps because we had mostly acceptedthem from England or New England, as I have said) we were not vain ofthem; and we would by no means have urged them before a living literaryman 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 andso; 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 Iafterwards knew as the kindliest heart in the world. But we had notshone in his presence, and that galled us; and we chose to think that hehad not shone in ours.

III

At that time he was filling a large space in the thoughts of the youngpeople who had any thoughts about literature. He had come to his fullrepute as an agreeable and intelligent traveller, and he still wore thehalo of his early adventures afoot in foreign lands when they were yetreally foreign. He had not written his novels of American life, once sowelcomed, and now so forgotten; it was very long before he had achievedthat incomparable translation of Faust which must always remain thefinest and best, and which would keep his name alive with Goethe's, if hehad done nothing else worthy of remembrance. But what then mostcommended him to the regard of us star-eyed youth (now blinking sadlytoward our seventies) was the poetry which he printed in the magazinesfrom time to time: in the first Putnam's (where there was a dashingpicture of him in an Arab burnoose and, a turban), and in Harper's, andin the Atlantic. It was often very lovely poetry, I thought, and I stillthink so; and it was rightfully his, though it paid the inevitableallegiance to the manner of the great masters of the day. It was gracedfor us by the pathetic romance of his early love, which some of itssweetest and saddest numbers confessed, for the young girl he marriedalmost in her death hour; and we who were hoping to have our heartsbroken, or already had them so, would have been glad of something more ofthe obvious poet in the popular lecturer we had seen refreshing himselfafter his hour on the platform.

He remained for nearly a year the only author I had seen, and I met himonce again before I saw any other. Our second meeting was far fromColumbus, as far as remote Quebec, when I was on my way to New England byway of Niagara and the Canadian rivers and cities. I stopped in Toronto,and realized myself abroad without any signal adventures; but at Montrealsomething very pretty happened to me. I came into the hotel office, theevening of a first day's lonely sight-seeing, and vainly explored theregister for the name of some acquaintance; as I turned from it twosmartly 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. Ihope you are some one who knows me!"

"Only through your contributions to the Saturday Press," said the youngfellow, and with these golden words, the precious first personalrecognition of my authorship I had ever received from a stranger, and therich reward of all my literary endeavor, he introduced himself and hisfriend. I do not know what be came of this friend, or where or how heeliminated 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 anever-fulfilled intention of going in to see him. In whatever world hehappens now to be, I should like to send him my greetings, and confess tohim that my art has never since brought me so sweet a recompense, andnothing a thousandth part so much like Fame, as that outcry of his overthe hotel register in Montreal. We were comrades for four or five richdays, and shared our pleasures and expenses in viewing the monuments ofthose ancient Canadian capitals, which I think we valued at all theirpicturesque worth. We made jokes to mask our emotions; we giggled andmade giggle, in the right way; we fell in and out of love with all thepretty faces and dresses we saw; and we talked evermore about literatureand literary people. He had more acquaintance with the one, and morepassion for the other, but he could tell me of Pfaff's lager-beer cellaron Broadway, where the Saturday Press fellows and the other Bohemiansmet; and this, for the time, was enough: I resolved to visit it as soonas I reached New York, in spite of the tobacco and beer (which I wasgiven to understand were de rigueur), though they both, so far as I hadknown them, were apt to make me sick.

I was very desolate after I parted from this good fellow, who returned toMontreal on his way to New York, while I remained in Quebec to continuelater on mine to New England. When I came in from seeing him off in acalash for the boat, I discovered Bayard Taylor in the readingroom, wherehe sat sunken in what seemed a somewhat weary muse. He did not knowme, or even notice me, though I made several errands in and out of thereading-room in the vain hope that be might do so: doubly vain, for I amaware now that I was still flown with the pride of that pretty experiencein 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 himand name myself, and say I had once had the pleasure of meeting him atDoctor ———-'s in Columbus. The poet gave no sign of consciousness atthe sound of a name which I had fondly begun to think might not be so allunknown. He looked up with an unkindling eye, and asked, Ah, how was theDoctor? and when I had reported favorably of the Doctor, ourconversation ended.

He was probably as tired as he looked, and he must have classed me withthat multitude all over the country who had shared the pleasure Iprofessed in meeting him before; it was surely my fault that I did notspeak my name loud enough to be recognized, if I spoke it at all; but thecourage I had mustered did not quite suffice for that. In after years heassured me, first by letter and then by word, of his grief for anincident which I can only recall now as the untoward beginning of acordial friendship. It was often my privilege, in those days, asreviewer and editor, to testify my sense of the beautiful things he didin so many kinds of literature, but I never liked any of them better thanI liked him. He had a fervent devotion to his art, and he was alwaysgoing to do the greatest things in it, with an expectation of effect thatnever 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 anyone may feel who will turn to his poems; but no doubt many of them fellshort of his hopes of them with the reader. It was fine to meet him whenhe 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 woreto his eyes. He spared no toil to make it the perfect thing he dreamedit, and he was not discouraged by any disappointment he suffered with thecritic or the public.

He was a tireless worker, and at last his health failed under his laborsat the newspaper desk, beneath the midnight gas, when he should long haverested from such labors. I believe he was obliged to do them through oneof those business fortuities which deform and embitter all our lives;but he was not the man to spare himself in any case. He was alwaysattempting new things, and he never ceased endeavoring to make hisscholarship reparation for the want of earlier opportunity and training.I remember that I met him once in a Cambridge street with a book in hishand which he let me take in mine. It was a Greek author, and he said hewas just beginning to read the language at fifty: a patriarchal age to meof the early thirties!

I suppose I intimated the surprise I felt at his taking it up so late inthe 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 ofthis," he said; and I have always kept the impression of the young faithwhich spoke in his voice and was more than his words.

I saw him last in the hour of those tremendous adieux which were paid himin New York before he sailed to be minister in Germany. It was one ofthe most graceful things done by President Hayes, who, most of all ourPresidents after Lincoln, honored himself in honoring literature by hisappointments, to give that place to Bayard Taylor. There was no one morefit for it, and it was peculiarly fit that he should be so distinguishedto a people who knew and valued his scholarship and the service he haddone German letters. He was as happy in it, apparently, as a man couldbe in anything here below, and he enjoyed to the last drop the many cupsof kindness pressed to his lips in parting; though I believe thesefarewells, at a time when he was already fa*gged with work and excitement,were notably harmful to him, and helped to hasten his end. Some of uswho were near of friendship went down to see him off when he sailed, asthe dismal and futile wont of friends is; and I recall the kind, greatfellow standing in the cabin, amid those sad flowers that heaped thetables, saying good-by to one after another, and smiling fondly, smilingwearily, upon all. There was champagne, of course, and an odioushilarity, without meaning and without remission, till the warning bellchased us ashore, and our brave poet escaped with what was left of hislife.

IV

I have followed him far from the moment of our first meeting; but even onmy way to venerate those New England luminaries, which chiefly drew myeyes, 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 distinguishedbetween the New-Englanders and the New-Yorkers, and I suppose there is noquestion but our literary centre was then in Boston, wherever it is, oris not, at present. But I thought Taylor then, and I think him now, oneof the first in our whole American province of the republic of letters,in a day when it was in a recognizably flourishing state, whether weregard quantity or quality in the names that gave it lustre. Lowell wasthen in perfect command of those varied forces which will long, if notlastingly, keep him in memory as first among our literary men, and masterin more kinds than any other American. Longfellow was in the fulness ofhis world-wide fame, and in the ripeness of the beautiful genius whichwas not to know decay while life endured. Emerson had emerged from thepopular darkness which had so long held him a hopeless mystic, and wasshining a lambent star of poesy and prophecy at the zenith. Hawthorne,the exquisite artist, the unrivalled dreamer, whom we still always likenthis one and that one to, whenever this one or that one promises greatlyto please us, and still leave without a rival, without a companion, hadlately returned from his long sojourn abroad, and had given us the lastof the incomparable romances which the world was to have perfect from hishand. Doctor Holmes had surpassed all expectations in those who mostadmired his brilliant humor and charming poetry by the invention of a newattitude if not a new sort in literature. The turn that civic affairshad taken was favorable to the widest recognition of Whittier's splendidlyrical gift; and that heart of fire, doubly snow-bound by Quakertradition and Puritan environment; was penetrating every generous breastwith 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 novelever written, was proving it no accident or miracle by the fiction shewas still writing.

This great New England group might be enlarged perhaps without loss ofquality by the inclusion of Thoreau, who came somewhat before his time,and whose drastic criticism of our expediential and mainly futilecivilization would find more intelligent acceptance now than it did then,when all resentment of its defects was specialized in enmity to Southernslavery. Doctor Edward Everett Hale belonged in this group too, byvirtue of that humor, the most inventive and the most fantastic, thesanest, the sweetest, the truest, which had begun to find expression inthe Atlantic Monthly; and there a wonderful young girl had written aseries of vivid sketches and taken the heart of youth everywhere withamaze and joy, so that I thought it would be no less an event to meetHarriet Prescott than to meet any of those I have named.

I expected somehow to meet them all, and I imagined them all easilyaccessible in the office of the Atlantic Monthly, which had latelyadventured in the fine air of high literature where so many otherperiodicals had gasped and died before it. The best of these, hitherto,and better even than the Atlantic for some reasons, the lamented Putnam'sMagazine, had perished of inanition at New York, and the claim of thecommercial capital to the literary primacy had passed with that brilliantventure. New York had nothing distinctive to show for Americanliterature but the decrepit and doting Knickerbocker Magazine. Harper'sNew Monthly, though Curtis had already come to it from the wreck ofPutnam's, and it had long ceased to be eclectic in material, and hadbegun to stand for native work in the allied arts which it has since somagnificently advanced, was not distinctively literary, and the Weeklyhad just begun to make itself known. The Century, Scribner's, theCosmopolitan, McClure's, and I know not what others, were stillunimagined by five, and ten, and twenty years, and the Galaxy was toflash and fade before any of them should kindle its more effectual fires.The Nation, which was destined to chastise rather than nurture our youngliterature, had still six years of dreamless potentiality before it; andthe Nation was always more Bostonian than New-Yorkish by nature, whateverit 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 itseemed to perish of this expression of vitality; and there remainedGodey's Lady's Book and Peterson's Magazine, publications reallyincredible in their insipidity. In the South there was nothing but amistaken social ideal, with the moral principles all standing on theirheads in defence of slavery; and in the West there was a feeble andfoolish notion that Western talent was repressed by Eastern jealousy.At Boston chiefly, if not at Boston alone, was there a vigorousintellectual life among such authors as I have named. Every young writerwas ambitious to join his name with theirs in the Atlantic Monthly, andin the lists of Ticknor & Fields, who were literary publishers in a sensesuch as the business world has known nowhere else before or since. Theirimprint was a warrant of quality to the reader and of immortality to theauthor, so that if I could have had a book issued by them at that day Ishould now be in the full enjoyment of an undying fame.

V.

Such was the literary situation as the passionate pilgrim from the Westapproached his holy land at Boston, by way of the Grand Trunk Railwayfrom Quebec to Portland. I have no recollection of a sleeping-car, and Isuppose 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 tolose the least glimpse of it, to close my eyes after I crossed the borderat Island Pond. I found that in the elm-dotted levels of Maine it wasvery like the Western Reserve in northern Ohio, which is, indeed, aportion of New England transferred with all its characteristic features,and flattened out along the lake shore. It was not till I began to runsouthward into the older regions of the country that it lost this look,and became gratefully strange to me. It never had the effect of hoaryantiquity which I had expected of a country settled more than twocenturies; with its wood-built farms and villages it looked newer thanthe coal-smoked brick of southern Ohio. I had prefigured the New Englandlandscape bare of forests, relieved here and there with the tees oforchards or plantations; but I found apparently as much woodland as athome.

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 longeron the alert for them; but the color and the vastness of the sea I wasstill to try upon my vision. When I stood on the Promenade at Portlandwith 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, Icould not make more of it than there was of Lake Erie; and I have neverthought 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 forthe feelings of an Eastern man to decry his ocean to his face, and I feltbesides that it would be vulgar and provincial to make comparisons. I amglad now that I held my tongue, for that kind soul is no longer in thisworld, and I should not like to think he knew how far short of myexpectations the sea he was so proud of had fallen. I went up with himinto a tower or belvedere there was at hand; and when he pointed to theeastern horizon and said, Now there was nothing but sea between us andAfrica, I pretended to expand with the thought, and began to sound myselffor the emotions which I ought to have felt at such a sight. But in myheart I was empty, and Heaven knows whether I saw the steamer which theancient mariner in charge of that tower invited me to look at through histelescope. I never could see anything but a vitreous glare through atelescope, which has a vicious habit of dodging about through space, andfailing to bring down anything of less than planetary magnitude.

But there was something at Portland vastly more to me than seas orcontinents, 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 inlater; but it served, and I rejoiced in it with a rapture that could nothave been more genuine if it had been the real birthplace of the poet. Igot 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 fondvision of the poet's past. I am in doubt whether it was at this time ora 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 avenuesbare of most of those beautiful elms, whose Gothic arches and traceries Iwell remember.

The fact is that in those days I was bursting with the most romanticexpectations of life in every way, and I looked at the whole world asmaterial that might be turned into literature, or that might beassociated with it somehow. I do not know how I managed to keep thesepreposterous hopes within me, but perhaps the trick of satirizing them,which I had early learnt, helped me to do it. I was at that particularmoment resolved above all things to see things as Heinrich Heine sawthem, 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 theobjects of interest to them whenever there was the least chance ofgetting them together.

VI.

I do not know how I first arrived in Boston, or whether it was before orafter I had passed a day or two in Salem. As Salem is on the way fromPortland, I will suppose that I stopped there first, and explored thequaint old town (quainter then than now, but still quaint enough) for thememorials of Hawthorne and of the witches which united to form the SalemI cared for. I went and looked up the House of Seven Gables, andsuffered an unreasonable disappointment that it had not a great many moreof 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 theCourt-house; if anything, the pathos of that witness of one of thecruelest delusions in the world was rather in excess of my needs; I couldhave got on with less. I saw the pins which the witches were sworn tohave thrust into the afflicted children, and I saw Gallows Hill, wherethe hapless victims of the perjury were hanged. But that death-warrantremained the most vivid color of my experience of the tragedy; I had noneed to invite myself to a sense of it, and it is still like a stain ofred in my memory.

The kind old ship's captain whose guest I was, and who was transfiguredto poetry in my sense by the fact that he used to voyage to the Africancoast for palm-oil in former days, led me all about the town, and showedme the Custom-house, which I desired to see because it was in the prefaceto the Scarlet Letter. But I perceived that he did not share myenthusiasm for the author, and I became more and more sensible that inSalem air there was a cool undercurrent of feeling about him. No doubtthe place was not altogether grateful for the celebrity his romance hadgiven it, and would have valued more the uninterrupted quiet of its ownflattering thoughts of itself; but when it came to hearing a young ladysay she knew a girl who said she would like to poison Hawthorne, itseemed to the devout young pilgrim from the West that something more oflove for the great romancer would not have been too much for him.Hawthorne had already had his say, however, and he had not used hisnative town with any great tenderness. Indeed, the advantages to anyplace of having a great genius born and reared in its midst are sodoubtful that it might be well for localities designing to become thebirthplaces of distinguished authors to think twice about it. Perhapsonly the largest capitals, like London and Paris, and New York andChicago, ought to risk it. But the authors have an unaccountableperversity, and will seldom come into the world in the large cities,which are alone without the sense of neighborhood, and the personalsusceptibilities so unfavorable to the practice of the literary art.I dare say that it was owing to the local indifference to her greatestname, or her reluctance from it, that I got a clearer impression of Salemin some other respects than I should have had if I had been invited thereto devote myself solely to the associations of Hawthorne. For the firsttime I saw an old New England town, I do not know, but the mostcharacteristic, and took into my young Western consciousness the fact ofa more complex civilization than I had yet known. My whole life had beenpassed in a region where men were just beginning ancestors, and theconception of family was very imperfect. Literature, of course, was fullof it, and it was not for a devotee of Thackeray to be theoreticallyignorant of its manifestations; but I had hitherto carelessly supposedthat family was nowhere regarded seriously in America except in Virginia,where it furnished a joke for the rest of the nation. But now I foundmyself confronted with it in its ancient houses, and heard its namespronounced with a certain consideration, which I dare say was as muchtheir 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 atasteful architecture, and a pale buff-color, withdrawing themselves inquiet reserve from the quiet street, gave me an impression of family asan actuality and a force which I had never had before, but which noWesterner can yet understand the East without taking into account. I donot 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 studyof the local conditions. I am not sure that I valued it more even forliterary purposes, than the steeple which the captain pointed out as thefirst and last thing he saw when he came and went on his long voyages, orthan the great palm-oil casks, which he showed me, and which I related tothe tree that stood

"Auf brennender Felsenwand."

Whether that was the kind of palm that gives the oil, or was a sort onlysuitable to be the dream of a lonely fir-tree in the North on a coldheight, I am in doubt to this day.

I heard, not without concern, that the neighboring industry of Lynn waspenetrating Salem, and that the ancient haunt of the witches and thebirthplace of our subtlest and somberest wizard was becoming a greatshoe-town; but my concern was less for its memories and sensibilitiesthan for an odious duty which I owed that industry, together with all theothers in New England. Before I left home I had promised my earliestpublisher that I would undertake to edit, or compile, or do somethingliterary to, a work on the operation of the more distinctive mechanicalinventions of our country, which he had conceived the notion ofpublishing by subscription. He had furnished me, the most immechanicalof humankind, with a letter addressed generally to the great mills andfactories of the East, entreating their managers to unfold theirmysteries to me for the purposes of this volume. His letter had theeffect of shutting up some of them like clams, and others it put upontheir guard against my researches, lest I should seize the secret oftheir special inventions and publish it to the world. I could not tellthe managers that I was both morally and mentally incapable of this;that they might have explained and demonstrated the properties andfunctions of their most recondite machinery, and upon examinationafterwards found me guiltless of having anything but a few verses ofHeine or Tennyson or Longfellow in my head. So I had to suffer inseveral places from their unjust anxieties, and from my own weariness oftheir ingenious engines, or else endure the pangs of a bad consciencefrom ignoring them. As long as I was in Canada I was happy, for therewas 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-sidefields; but when I reached Portland my troubles began. I went with thatyoung minister of whom I have spoken to a large foundry, where they werecasting some sort of ironmongery, and inspected the process from adistance beyond any chance spurt of the molten metal, and came away sadlyuncertain of putting the rather fine spectacle to any practical use.A manufactory where they did something with coal-oil (which I now heardfor the first time called kerosene) refused itself to me, and I said tomyself that probably all the other industries of Portland were asreserved, 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 inSalem, ought not I to go and inspect their processes? This was aquestion which would not answer itself to my satisfaction, and I had nopeace till I learned that I could see shoemaking much better at Lynn, andthat Lynn was such a little way from Boston that I could readily run upthere, 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 dothis I must first go to Boston.

VII.

I am supposing still that I saw Salem before I saw Boston, but howeverthe fact may be, I am sure that I decided it would be better to seeshoemaking in Lynn, where I really did see it, thirty years later. Forthe purposes of the present visit, I contented myself with looking at amachine in Haverhill, which chewed a shoe sole full of pegs, and droppedit out of its iron jaws with an indifference as great as my own, andprobably as little sense of how it had done its work. I may be unjust tothat machine; Heaven knows I would not wrong it; and I must confess thatmy head had no room in it for the conception of any machinery but themythological, 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 whenI got to Haverhill, or whether it was before or after I had been inSalem. There is an apparitional quality in my presences, at this pointor 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. Forinstance, 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-toptrousers so much more peg top than my own that I seemed to be wearingmere spring-bottoms in comparison; and in a day when every one whor*spected himself had a necktie as narrow as he could get, this youth hadone no wider than a shoestring, and red at that, while mine measuredalmost an inch, and was black. To be sure, he was one of a band of negrominstrels, who were to give a concert that night, and he had a light toexcel 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 tocelebrate, but I either made believe there were none, or else I honestlyforgot all about them. In either case I released myself altogether tothe literary and historical associations of the place. I need not saythat I gave myself first to the first, and it rather surprised me to findthat the literary associations of Boston referred so largely toCambridge. I did not know much about Cambridge, except that it was theseat 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, andafterward I came to know the place so well that I may safely confess myearlier ignorance.

I had stopped in Boston at the Tremont House, which was still one of thefirst hostelries of the country, and I must have inquired my way toCambridge there; but I was sceptical of the direction the Cambridgehorse-car took when I found it, and I hinted to the driver my anxietiesas to why he should be starting east when I had been told that Cambridgewas west of Boston. He reassured me in the laconic and sarcastic mannerof 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 inthe "groves of academe" at the Square, and showed pleasant glimpses of"Old Harvard's scholar factories red," then far fewer than now. It musthave been in vacation, for I met no one as I wandered through the collegeyard, trying to make up my mind as to how I should learn where Lowelllived; for it was he whom I had come to find. He had not only taken thepoems I sent him, but he had printed two of them in a single number ofthe Atlantic, and had even written me a little note about them, which Iwore next my heart in my breast pocket till I almost wore it out; and soI thought I might fitly report myself to him. But I have always beenhelpless in finding my way, and I was still depressed by my failure toconvince the horse-car driver that he had taken the wrong road. I letseveral people go by without questioning them, and those I did askabashed me farther by not knowing what I wanted to know. When I hadremitted my search for the moment, an ancient man, with an open mouth andan 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 withthe editor of the Atlantic if I should ever find him, and I went withthat kind old man, who when he had shown me the tree, and the spot whereWashington stood when he took command of the Continental forces, saidthat he had a branch of it, and that if I would come to his house withhim he would give me a piece. In the end, I meant merely to flatter himinto telling me where I could find Lowell, but I dissembled my purposeand pretended a passion for a piece of the historic elm, and the old manled me not only to his house but his wood-house, where he sawed me off ablock so generous that I could not get it into my pocket. I feigned thegratitude which I could see that he expected, and then I took courage toput my question to him. Perhaps that patriarch lived only in the past,and cared for history and not literature. He confessed that he could nottell me where to find Lowell; but he did not forsake me; he set forthwith 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 Ifound 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 thisthirty years after, when he died; but I doubt if he was ever after agreater power in his own country, or more completely embodied theliterary aspiration which would not and could not part itself from thelove of freedom and the hope of justice. For the sake of these he hadbeen willing to suffer the reproach which followed their friends in theearlier days of the anti-slavery struggle: He had outlived the reproachlong before; but the fear of his strength remained with those who hadfelt it, and he had not made himself more generally loved by the 'Fablefor Critics' than by the 'Biglow Papers', probably. But in the 'Visionof Sir Launfal' and the 'Legend of Brittany' he had won a liking if not alistening far wider than his humor and his wit had got him; and in hislectures on the English poets, given not many years before he came to thecharge of the Atlantic, he had proved himself easily the wisest andfinest critic in our language. He was already, more than any Americanpoet,

"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 ushas held. I had myself never been a great reader of his poetry, when Imet him, though when I was a boy of ten years I had heard my fatherrepeat passages from the Biglow Papers against war and slavery and thewar for slavery upon Mexico, and later I had read those criticisms ofEnglish poetry, and I knew Sir Launfal must be Lowell in some sort; butmy love for him as a poet was chiefly centred in my love for his tenderrhyme, 'Auf Wiedersehen', which I can not yet read without something ofthe young pathos it first stirred in me. I knew and felt his greatnesssome how apart from the literary proofs of it; he ruled my fancy and heldmy allegiance as a character, as a man; and I am neither sorry norashamed that I was abashed when I first came into his presence; and thatin spite of his words of welcome I sat inwardly quaking before him. Hewas then forty-one years old, and nineteen my senior, and if there hadbeen nothing else to awe me, I might well have been quelled by thedisparity of our ages. But I have always been willing and even eager todo homage to men who have done something, and notably to men who havedone something. in the sort I wished to do something in, myself. Icould never recognize any other sort of superiority; but that I am proudto recognize; and I had before Lowell some such feeling as an obscuresubaltern might have before his general. He was by nature a bit of adisciplinarian, and the effect was from him as well as in me; I dare sayhe 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 certainfrosty shyness, a smiling cold, as from the long, high-sunned winters ofhis Puritan race; he was not quite himself till he had made you aware ofhis quality: then no one could be sweeter, tenderer, warmer than he; thenhe made you free of his whole heart; but you must be his captive beforehe 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 acertain starry serenity, and looked out so purely from under his whiteforehead, shadowed with auburn hair untouched by age; or from the smilethat shaped the auburn beard, and gave the face in its form and color theChrist-look which Page's portrait has flattered in it.

His voice had as great a fascination for me as his face. The vibranttenderness and the crisp clearness of the tones, the perfect modulation,the clear enunciation, the exquisite accent, the elect diction—I did notknow enough then to know that these were the gifts, these were thegraces, of one from whose tongue our rough English came music such as Ishould never hear from any other. In this speech there was nothing ofour slipshod American slovenliness, but a truly Italian conscience and anartistic sense of beauty in the instrument.

I saw, before he sat down across his writing-table from me, that he wasnot far from the medium height; but his erect carriage made the most ofhis five feet and odd inches. He had been smoking the pipe he loved, andhe put it back in his mouth, presently, as if he found himself at greaterease with it, when he began to chat, or rather to let me show what mannerof young man I was by giving me the first word. I told him of thetrouble I had in finding him, and I could not help dragging in somethingabout Heine's search for Borne, when he went to see him in Frankfort; butI felt at once this was a false start, for Lowell was such an impassionedlover 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 muchdifficulty; 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 whenI showed my ardor for him, he sought to temper it with some judiciouscriticisms, and told me that he had kept the first poem I sent him, forthe long time it had been unacknowledged, to make sure that it was not atranslation. He asked me about myself, and my name, and its Welshorigin, 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 literarydescendant of Sir James Howels, he corrected me gently with "JamesHowel," and took down a volume of the 'Familiar Letters' from the shelvesbehind him to prove me wrong. This was always his habit, as I foundafterwards when he quoted anything from a book he liked to get it andread the passage over, as if he tasted a kind of hoarded sweetness in thewords. 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 thoughtthem wrong. I could not assert myself against his version of Howels'sname, for my edition of his letters was far away in Ohio, and I wasobliged 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 thetitle which the pleasant old turncoat ought to have had from the manymasters he served according to their many minds, but never had exceptfrom that erring edition. He did not afflict me for it, though; probablyit amused him too much; he asked me about the West, and when he foundthat I was as proud of the West as I was of Wales, he seemed even betterpleased, and said he had always fancied that human nature was laid out onrather a larger scale there than in the East, but he had seen very littleof the West. In my heart I did not think this then, and I do not thinkit now; human nature has had more ground to spread over in the West; thatis all; but "it was not for me to bandy words with my sovereign." Hesaid 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 oftype.

He did not say now, or at any other time during the many years I knewhim, any of those slighting things of the West which I had so often tosuffer from Eastern people, but suffered me to praise it all I would. Heasked me what way I had taken in coming to New England, and when I toldhim, 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 lostall its frost, Yes, Quebec was a bit of the seventeenth century; it wasin many ways more French than France, and its people spoke the languageof Voltaire, with the accent of Voltaire's time.

I do not remember what else he talked of, though once I remembered itwith what I believed an ineffaceable distinctness. I set nothing of itdown at the time; I was too busy with the letters I was writing for aCincinnati paper; and I was severely bent upon keeping all personalitiesout of them. This was very well, but I could wish now that I hadtransgressed at least so far as to report some of the things that Lowellsaid; for the paper did not print my letters, and it would have beenperfectly safe, and very useful for the present purpose. But perhaps hedid not say anything very memorable; to do that you must have somethingpositive in your listener; and I was the mere response, the hollow echo,that youth must be in like circ*mstances. I was all the time afraid ofwearing my welcome out, and I hurried to go when I would so gladly havestaid. I do not remember where I meant to go, or why he should haveundertaken to show me the way across-lots, but this was what he did; andwhen we came to a fence, which I clambered gracelessly over, he put hishands on the top, and tried to take it at a bound. He tried twice, andthen laughed at his failure, but not with any great pleasure, and he wasnot 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 withhim, while I remained discreetly silent, and for that moment at leastfelt myself the elder of the man who had so much of the boy in him. Hehad, indeed, much of the boy in him to the last, and he parted with eachhour of his youth reluctantly, pathetically.

VIII.

We walked across what must have been Jarvis Field to what must have beenNorth Avenue, and there he left me. But before he let me go he held myhand while he could say that he wished me to dine with him; only, he wasnot in his own house, and he would ask me to dine with him at the ParkerHouse in Boston, and would send me word of the time later.

I suppose I may have spent part of the intervening time in viewing thewonders of Boston, and visiting the historic scenes and places in it andabout it. I certainly went over to Charleston, and ascended Bunker Hillmonument, and explored the navy-yard, where the immemorial man-of-warbegun in Jackson's time was then silently stretching itself under itslong shed in a poetic arrest, as if the failure of the appropriation forits completion had been some kind of enchantment. In Boston, I earlypresented my letter of credit to the publisher it was drawn upon, notthat I needed money at the moment, but from a young eagerness to see ifit would be honored; and a literary attache of the house kindly wentabout with me, and showed me the life of the city. A great city itseemed to me then, and a seething vortex of business as well as a whirlof gaiety, as I saw it in Washington Street, and in a promenade concertat Copeland's restaurant in Tremont Row. Probably I brought someidealizing force to bear upon it, for I was not all so strange to theworld as I must seem; perhaps I accounted for quality as well as quantityin my impressions of the New England metropolis, and aggrandized it inthe ratio of its literary importance. It seemed to me old, even afterQuebec, and very likely I credited the actual town with all the dead andgone Bostonians in my sentimental census. If I did not, it was no faultof my cicerone, who thought even more of the city he showed me than Idid. I do not know now who he was, and I never saw him after I came tolive there, with any certainty that it was he, though I was oftentormented with the vision of a spectacled face like his, but not likeenough to warrant me in addressing him.

He became part of that ghostly Boston of my first visit, which wouldsometimes return and possess again the city I came to know so familiarlyin later years, and to be so passionately interested in. Some color ofmy prime impressions has tinged the fictitious experiences of people inmy books, but I find very little of it in my memory. This is like a webof frayed old lace, which I have to take carefully into my hold for fearof its fragility, and make out as best I can the figure once so distinctin it. There are the narrow streets, stretching saltworks to the docks,which I haunted for their quaintness, and there is Faunal Hall, which Icared to see so much more because Wendell Phillips had spoken in it thanbecause Otis and Adams had. There is the old Colonial House, and thereis the State House, which I dare say I explored, with the Common slopingbefore it. There is Beacon Street, with the Hanco*ck House where it isincredibly no more, and there are the beginnings of Commonwealth Avenue,and the other streets of the Back Bay, laid out with their basem*nts lefthollowed in the made land, which the gravel trains were yet making out ofthe westward hills. There is the Public Garden, newly planned andplanted, but without the massive bridge destined to make so ungratefullylittle of the lake that occasioned it. But it is all very vague, and Icould easily believe now that it was some one else who saw it then in myplace.

I think that I did not try to see Cambridge the same day that I sawLowell, but wisely came back to my hotel in Boston, and tried to realizethe fact. I went out another day, with an acquaintance from Ohio; whom Iran upon in the street. We went to Mount Auburn together, and I viewedits monuments with a reverence which I dare say their artistic qualitydid not merit. But I am, not sorry for this, for perhaps they are notquite so bad as some people pretend. The Gothic chapel of the cemetery,unsorted as it was, gave me, with its half-dozen statues standing orsitting about, an emotion such as I am afraid I could not receive nowfrom the Acropolis, Westminster Abbey, and Santa Crocea in one. I triedhard for some aesthetic sense of it, and I made believe that I thoughtthis thing and that thing in the place moved me with its fitness orbeauty; 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 colonialhouses, with their white corners and casem*nts and their green blinds,that lurked behind the shrubbery of the avenue I passed through to MountAuburn. 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 seethat I valued the first sight of it as I did. I had hoped that somehow Imight be so favored as to see Longfellow himself, but when I asked abouthim of those who knew, they said, "Oh, he is at Nahant," and I thoughtthat Nahant must be a great way off, and at any rate I did not feelauthorized 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 shouldknow 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 younglady simply because I was infatuated with her literature; even as theenvoy of all the infatuated young people of Columbus, I could not quitedo this; and when I got home, I had to account for my failure as best Icould. Another failure of mine was the sight of Whittier, which I thenvery much longed to have. They said, "Oh, Whittier lives at Amesbury,"but that put him at an indefinite distance, and without the introductionI 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 inthe regular way, except Lowell, whom I thought I had a right to call uponin my quality of contributor, and from the acquaintance I had with him byletter. I neither praise nor blame myself for this; it was my shynessthat with held me rather than my merit. There is really no harm inseeking the presence of a famous man, and I doubt if the famous manresents the wish of people to look upon him without some measure, greator little, of affectation. There are bores everywhere, but he islikelier to find them in the wonted figures of society than in thoseyoung people, or old people, who come to him in the love of what he hasdone. I am well aware how furiously Tennyson sometimes met hisworshippers, and how insolently Carlyle, but I think these facts arelittle specks in their sincerity. Our own gentler and honestercelebrities did not forbid approach, and I have known some of them caressadorers who seemed hardly worthy of their kindness; but that was betterthan to have hurt any sensitive spirit who had ventured too far, by therules that govern us with common men.

IX.

My business relations were with the house that so promptly honored myletter of credit. This house had published in the East the campaign lifeof Lincoln which I had lately written, and I dare say would havepublished 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 thebook on the counters. But all my literary affiliations were with Ticknor& Fields, and it was the Old Corner Book-Store on Washington Street thatdrew my heart as soon as I had replenished my pocket in Cornhill. Afterverifying the editor of the Atlantic Monthly I wised to verify itspublishers, 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 lookingupon School Street, and its scholarly keeping in books and prints, he hadjust got the magazine sheets of a poem of mine from the Cambridgeprinters. He was then lately from abroad, and he had the zest forAmerican things which a foreign sojourn is apt to renew in us, though Idid not know this then, and could not account for it in the kindness heexpressed for my poem. He introduced me to Mr. Ticknor, who I fanciedhad not read my poem; but he seemed to know what it was from the juniorpartner, and he asked me whether I had been paid for it. I confessedthat I had not, and then he got out a chamois-leather bag, and took fromit five half-eagles in gold and laid them on the green cloth top of thedesk, in much the shape and of much the size of the Great Bear. I havenever since felt myself paid so lavishly for any literary work, though Ihave had more for a single piece than the twenty-five dollars thatdazzled me in this constellation. The publisher seemed aware of thepoetic 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 alwaysthink it is pleasant to have it in gold."

But a terrible experience with the poem awaited me, and quenched for themoment all my pleasure and pride. It was 'The Pilot's Story,' which Isuppose has had as much acceptance as anything of mine in verse (I do notboast of a vast acceptance for it), and I had attempted to treat in it aphase of the national tragedy of slavery, as I had imagined it on aMississippi steamboat. A young planter has gambled away the slave-girlwho is the mother of his child, and when he tells her, she breaks outupon 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 fatalproof-reader had not thought it well enough, or simple and naturalenough, 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 oneI had written, so that there was no merciful possibility of mistaking itfor 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 soundof dismay that caught his notice, for he looked round at me. I couldonly show him the passage with a gasp. I dare say he might have liked tolaugh, for it was cruelly funny, but he did not; he was concerned for themagazine as well as for me. He declared that when he first read the linehe had thought I could not have written it so, and he agreed with me thatit would kill the poem if it came out in that shape. He instantly setabout repairing the mischief, so far as could be. He found that thewhole edition of that sheet had been printed, and the air blackened roundme again, lighted up here and there with baleful flashes of the newspaperwit at my cost, which I previsioned in my misery; I knew what I shouldhave said of such a thing myself, if it had been another's. But thepublisher at once decided that the sheet must be reprinted, and I wentaway weak as if in the escape from some deadly peril. Afterwards itappeared that the line had passed the first proof-reader as I wrote it,but that the final reader had entered so sympathetically into therealistic intention of my poem as to contribute the modification whichhad nearly been my end.

X.

As it fell out, I lived without farther difficulty to the day and hour ofthe dinner Lowell made for me; and I really think, looking at myselfimpersonally, and remembering the sort of young fellow I was, that itwould have been a great pity if I had not. The dinner was at theold-fashioned Boston hour of two, and the table was laid for four peoplein some little upper room at Parker's, which I was never afterwards ableto make sure of. Lowell was already, there when I came, and he presentedme, to my inexpressible delight and surprise, to Dr. Holmes, who wasthere with him.

Holmes was in the most brilliant hour of that wonderful second youthwhich his fame flowered into long after the world thought he hadcompleted the cycle of his literary life. He had already received fullrecognition as a poet of delicate wit, nimble humor, airy imagination,and exquisite grace, when the Autocrat papers advanced his nameindefinitely beyond the bounds which most immortals would have foundrange enough. The marvel of his invention was still fresh in the mindsof 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 expectedto find myself in the Autocrat's presence when I met Dr. Holmes. Butthe fascination was none the less for that reason; and the winning smile,the wise and humorous glance, the whole genial manner was as important tome as if I had foreboded something altogether different. I found himphysically of the Napoleonic height which spiritually overtops the Alps,and I could look into his face without that unpleasant effort whichgiants 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 pleasurewere complete.

Nothing else so richly satisfactory, indeed, as the whole affair couldhave happened to a like youth at such a point in his career; and when Isat down with Doctor Holmes and Mr. Fields, on Lowell's right, I feltthrough and through the dramatic perfection of the event. The kindlyAutocrat recognized some such quality of it in terms which were not theless precious and gracious for their humorous excess. I have no reasonto think that he had yet read any of my poor verses, or had me otherwisethan wholly on trust from Lowell; but he leaned over towards his host,and said, with a laughing look at me, "Well, James, this is somethinglike the apostolic succession; this is the laying on of hands." I tookhis sweet and caressing irony as he meant it; but the charm of it went tomy head long before any drop of wine, together with the charm of hearinghim and Lowell calling each other James and Wendell, and of finding themstill cordially boys together.

I would gladly have glimmered before those great lights in the talk thatfollowed, if I could have thought of anything brilliant to say, but Icould not, and so I let them shine without a ray of reflected splendorfrom me. It was such talk as I had, of course, never heard before, andit is not saying enough to say that I have never heard such talk sinceexcept from these two men. It was as light and kind as it was deep andtrue, and it ranged over a hundred things, with a perpetual sparkle ofDoctor Holmes's wit, and the constant glow of Lowell's incandescentsense. From time to time Fields came in with one of his delightfulstories (sketches of character they were, which he sometimes did not mindcaricaturing), or with some criticism of the literary situation from hisstand-point of both lover and publisher of books. I heard fames that Ihad accepted as proofs of power treated as factitious, and witnessed afrankness concerning authorship, far and near, that I had not dreamed ofauthors using. When Doctor Holmes understood that I wrote for the'Saturday Press', which was running amuck among some Bostonianimmortalities of the day, he seemed willing that I should know they werenot thought so very undying in Boston, and that I should not take thenotion of a Mutual Admiration Society too seriously, or accept the NewYork Bohemian view of Boston as true. For the most part the talk did notaddress itself to me, but became an exchange of thoughts and fanciesbetween himself and Lowell. They touched, I remember, on certain mattersof technique, and the doctor confessed that he had a prejudice againstsome words that he could not overcome; for instance, he said, nothingcould induce him to use 'neath for beneath, no exigency of versificationor stress of rhyme. Lowell contended that he would use any word thatcarried his meaning; and I think he did this to the hurt of some of hisearlier things. He was then probably in the revolt against too muchliterature in literature, which every one is destined sooner or later toshare; there was a certain roughness, very like crudeness, which heindulged before his thought and phrase mellowed to one music in his laterwork. I tacitly agreed rather with the doctor, though I did not swervefrom my allegiance to Lowell, and if I had spoken I should have sidedwith him: I would have given that or any other proof of my devotion.Fields casually mentioned that he thought "The Dandelion" was the mostpopularly liked of Lowell's briefer poems, and I made haste to say that Ithought so too, though I did not really think anything about it; and thenI was sorry, for I could see that the poet did not like it, quite; and Ifelt that I was duly punished for my dishonesty.

Hawthorne was named among other authors, probably by Fields, whose househad just published his "Marble Faun," and who had recently come home onthe same steamer with him. Doctor Holmes asked if I had met Hawthorneyet, and when I confessed that I had hardly yet even hoped for such athing, he smiled his winning smile, and said: "Ah, well! I don't knowthat you will ever feel you have really met him. He is like a dim roomwith a little taper of personality burning on the corner of the mantel."

They all spoke of Hawthorne, and with the same affection, but the samesense of something mystical and remote in him; and every word waspriceless to me. But these masters of the craft I was 'prentice toprobably could not have said anything that I should not have found wiseand well, and I am sure now I should have been the loser if the talk hadshunned any of the phases of human nature which it touched. It is bestto find that all men are of the same make, and that there are certainuniversal things which interest them as much as the supernal things, andamuse them even more. There was a saying of Lowell's which he was fondof repeating at the menace of any form of the transcendental, and heliked to warn himself and others with his homely, "Remember thedinner-bell." What I recall of the whole effect of a time so happy forme is that in all that was said, however high, however fine, we werenever out of hearing of the dinner-bell; and perhaps this is the besteffect I can leave with the reader. It was the first dinner served incourses that I had sat down to, and I felt that this service gave it aromantic importance which the older fashion of the West still wanted.Even at Governor Chase's table in Columbus the Governor carved; I knew ofthe dinner 'a la Russe', as it was then called, only from books; and itwas a sort of literary flavor that I tasted in the successive dishes.When it came to the black coffee, and then to the 'petit* verres' ofcognac, with lumps of sugar set fire to atop, it was something that sofar transcended my home-kept experience that it began to seem altogethervisionary.

Neither Fields nor Doctor Holmes smoked, and I had to confess that I didnot; but Lowell smoked enough for all three, and the spark of his cigarbegan to show in the waning light before we rose from the table. Thetime that never had, nor can ever have, its fellow for me, had to come toan 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 hewould send me a letter to Hawthorne. I was not to see Lowell againduring my stay in Boston; but Doctor Holmes asked me to tea for the nextevening, and Fields said I must come to breakfast with him in themorning.

XI.

I recall with the affection due to his friendly nature, and to thekindness afterwards to pass between us for many years, the whole aspectof 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 Homericcurls, were touched with the first frost. He had a fine color, and hiseyes, as keen as they were kind, twinkled restlessly above the wholesomerusset-red of his cheeks. His portly frame was clad in those Scotchtweeds which had not yet displaced the traditional broadcloth with us inthe West, though I had sent to New York for a rough suit, and so feltmyself not quite unworthy to meet a man fresh from the hands of theLondon 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 daysome notion of the importance of his name to the literary youth of myday. He gave aesthetic character to the house of Ticknor & Fields, buthe was by no means a silent partner on the economic side. No one canforecast the fortune of a new book, but he knew as well as any publishercan know not only whether a book was good, but whether the reader wouldthink so; and I suppose that his house made as few bad guesses, alongwith their good ones, as any house that ever tried the uncertain temperof the public with its ventures. In the minds of all who loved the plainbrown cloth and tasteful print of its issues he was more or lessintimately associated with their literature; and those who were notmistaken in thinking De Quincey one of the delightfulest authors in theworld, were especially grateful to the man who first edited his writingsin book form, and proud that this edition was the effect of Americansympathy with them. At that day, I believed authorship the noblestcalling 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 Icould not rank their publisher with them by virtue of equal achievement,I handsomely brevetted him worthy of their friendship, and honored him inthe visible measure of it.

In his house beside the Charles, and in the close neighborhood of DoctorHolmes, I found an odor and an air of books such as I fancied mightbelong to the famous literary houses of London. It is still there, thatfriendly home of lettered refinement, and the gracious spirit which knewhow to welcome me, and make the least of my shyness and strangeness, andthe most of the little else there was in me, illumines it still, thoughmy host of that rapturous moment has many years been of those who areonly with us unseen and unheard. I remember his burlesque pretence thatmorning of an inextinguishable grief when I owned that I had never eatenblueberry cake before, and how he kept returning to the pathos of thefact that there should be a region of the earth where blueberry cake wasunknown. We breakfasted in the pretty room whose windows look outthrough leaves and flowers upon the river's coming and going tides, andwhose walls were covered with the faces and the autographs of all thecontemporary poets and novelists. The Fieldses had spent some days withTennyson in their recent English sojourn, and Mrs. Fields had much totell of him, how he looked, how he smoked, how he read aloud, and how hesaid, when he asked her to go with him to the tower of his house, "Comeup and see the sad English sunset!" which had an instant value to me suchas some rich verse of his might have had. I was very new to it all, hownew I could not very well say, but I flattered myself that I breathed inthat atmosphere as if in the return from life-long exile. Still Ipatriotically bragged of the West a little, and I told them proudly thatin Columbus no book since Uncle Tom's Cabin had sold so well as 'TheMarble Faun'. This made the effect that I wished, but whether it wastrue or not, Heaven knows; I only know that I heard it from our leadingbookseller, and I made no question of it myself.

After breakfast, Fields went away to the office, and I lingered, whileMrs. Fields showed me from shelf to shelf in the library, and dazzled mewith the sight of authors' copies, and volumes invaluable with theautographs and the pencilled notes of the men whose names were dear to mefrom my love of their work. Everywhere was some souvenir of the livingcelebrities my hosts had met; and whom had they not met in that Englishsojourn in days before England embittered herself to us during our civilwar? Not Tennyson only, but Thackeray, but Dickens, but Charles Reade,but Carlyle, but many a minor fame was in my ears from converse so recentwith 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 stayingtoo 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 certainwhere I spent the rest of a day that began in the clouds, but had to beended on the common earth. I suppose I gave it mostly to wandering aboutthe city, and partly to recording my impressions of it for that newspaperwhich never published them. The summer weather in Boston, with its sunnyheat struck through and through with the coolness of the sea, and itsclear air untainted with a breath of smoke, I have always loved, but ithad then a zest unknown before; and I should have thought it enoughsimply to be alive in it. But everywhere I came upon something that fedmy famine for the old, the quaint, the picturesque, and however the daypassed it was a banquet, a festival. I can only recall my breathlessfirst sight of the Public Library and of the Athenaeum Gallery: greatsights then, which the Vatican and the Pitti hardly afterwards eclipsedfor mere emotion. In fact I did not see these elder treasuries ofliterature and art between breakfasting with the Autocrat's publisher inthe morning, and taking tea with the Autocrat himself in the evening, andthat 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 Isuppose 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 longleisure and large ease; it came at the end of the day, at six o'clock, orseven; and one went to it in morning dress. It had an unceremonieddomesticity in the abundance of its light dishes, and I fancy these didnot vary much from East to West, except that we had a Southern touch inour fried chicken and corn bread; but at the Autocrat's tea table thecheering cup had a flavor unknown to me before that day. He asked me ifI knew it, and I said it was English breakfast tea; for I had drunk it atthe publisher's in the morning, and was willing not to seem strange toit. "Ah, yes," he said; "but this is the flower of the souchong; it isthe blossom, the poetry of tea," and then he told me how it had beengiven him by a friend, a merchant in the China trade, which used toflourish in Boston, and was the poetry of commerce, as this delicatebeverage was of tea. That commerce is long past, and I fancy that theplant ceased to bloom when the traffic fell into decay.

The Autocrat's windows had the same outlook upon the Charles as thepublisher's, and after tea we went up into a back parlor of the sameorientation, and saw the sunset die over the water, and the westeringflats 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 gavethose mantling expanses. It was chiefly his talk, but I have alwaysfound the best talkers are willing that you should talk if you like, anda quick sympathy and a subtle sense met all that I had to say from himand from the unbroken circle of kindred intelligences about him. I sawhim then in the midst of his family, and perhaps never afterwards tobetter advantage, or in a finer mood. We spoke of the things that peopleperhaps once liked to deal with more than they do now; of the intimationsof immortality, of the experiences of morbid youth, and of all thosemessages from the tremulous nerves which we take for prophecies. I wasnot ashamed, before his tolerant wisdom, to acknowledge the effects thathad lingered so long with me in fancy and even in conduct, from a time ofbroken health and troubled spirit; and I remember the exquisite tact inhim which recognized them as things common to all, however peculiar ineach, which left them mine for whatever obscure vanity I might have inthem, and yet gave me the companionship of the whole race in theirexperience. We spoke of forebodings and presentiments; we approached themystic confines of the world from which no traveller has yet returnedwith a passport 'en regle' and properly 'vise'; and he held his lightcourse through these filmy impalpabilities with a charming sincerity,with the scientific conscience that refuses either to deny the substanceof things unseen, or to affirm it. In the gathering dusk, so weird didmy fortune of being there and listening to him seem, that I might wellhave 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 withwhat joy and gain; and he was patient of these futilities, and I have nodoubt imagined the love that inspired them, and accepted that instead ofthe poor praise. When the sunset passed, and the lamps were lighted, andwe all came back to our dear little firm-set earth, he began to questionme about my native region of it. From many forgotten inquiries I recallhis asking me what was the fashionable religion in Columbus, or theChurch that socially corresponded to the Unitarian Church in Boston.He had first to clarify my intelligence as to-what Unitarianism was; wehad Universalists but not Unitarians; but when I understood, I answeredfrom such vantage as my own wholly outside Swedenborgianism gave me, thatI thought most of the most respectable people with us were of thePresbyterian Church; some were certainly Episcopalians, but upon thewhole the largest number were Presbyterians. He found that very strangeindeed; and said that he did not believe there was a Presbyterian Churchin Boston; that the New England Calvinists were all of the OrthodoxChurch. He had to explain Oxthodoxy to me, and then I could confess toone Congregational Church in Columbus.

Probably I failed to give the Autocrat any very clear image of our socialframe in the West, but the fault was altogether mine, if I did. Suchlecturing tours as he had made had not taken him among us, as those ofEmerson and other New-Englanders had, and my report was positive ratherthan comparative. I was full of pride in journalism at that day, and Idare say that I vaunted the brilliancy and power of our newspapers morethan 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 ratherheard from them, I can recall nothing said of political affairs, thoughLincoln had then been nominated by the Republicans, and the Civil War hadpractically begun. But we did not imagine such a thing in the North; werested secure in the belief that if Lincoln were elected the South wouldeat all its fiery words, perhaps from the mere love and inveterate habitof 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 thestreets and in the Common with a Harvard Senior whom I had met. He was ayouth of like literary passions with myself, but of such differenttraditions in every possible way that his deeply schooled and definitelyregulated life seemed as anomalous to me as my own desultory andself-found way must have seemed to him. We passed the time in thedelight of trying to make ourselves known to each other, and in a promiseto continue by letter the effort, which duly lapsed into silent patiencewith the necessarily insoluble problem.

XIII.

I must have lingered in Boston for the introduction to Hawthorne whichLowell had offered me, for when it came, with a little note of kindnessand 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 Istarted. I do not recall what I did with the time, except keep myselffrom making it a burden to the people I knew, and wandering about thecity alone. Nothing of it remains to me except the fortune that favoredme that Sunday night with a view of the old Granary Burying-ground onTremont Street. I found the gates open, and I explored every path in theplace, wreaking myself in such meagre emotion as I could get from thetomb of the Franklin family, and rejoicing with the whole soul of myWestern modernity in the evidence of a remote antiquity which so many ofthe dim inscriptions afforded. I do not think that I have ever knownanything practically older than these monuments, though I have sincesupped so full of classic and mediaeval ruin. I am sure that I was moredeeply touched by the epitaph of a poor little Puritan maiden who died atsixteen in the early sixteen-thirties than afterwards by the tomb ofCaecilia Metella, and that the heartache which I tried to put into versewhen I got back to my room in the hotel was none the less genuine becauseit would not lend itself to my literary purpose, and remains nothing butpathos to this day.

I am not able to say how I reached the town of Lowell, where I wentbefore going to Concord, that I might ease the unhappy conscience I hadabout those factories which I hated so much to see, and have it clean forthe pleasure of meeting the fabricator of visions whom I was authorizedto molest in any air-castle where I might find him. I only know that Iwent to Lowell, and visited one of the great mills, which with theirwhirring spools, the ceaseless flight of their shuttles, and thebewildering sight and sound of all their mechanism have since seemed tome the death of the joy that ought to come from work, if not thecaptivity of those who tended them. But then I thought it right and wellfor 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 mypitiful literary antipathy away as soon as I could, no wiser for thesight of the ingenious contrivances I inspected, and I am sorry to say nosadder. In the cool of the evening I sat at the door of my hotel, andwatched the long files of the work-worn factory-girls stream by, with noconcern for them but to see which was pretty and which was plain, andwith no dream of a truer order than that which gave them ten hours' worka day in those hideous mills and lodged them in the barracks where theyrested 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, andthrough the bird-haunted gloom of woodland roads, in the freshness of thesummer morning? By a blessed chance I found that there was such a stagein 1860, and I took it from my hotel, instead of going back to Boston andup to Concord as I must have had to do by train. The journey gave me theintimacy of the New England country as I could have had it in no otherfashion, and for the first time I saw it in all the summer sweetnesswhich I have often steeped my soul in since. The meadows were newlymown, and the air was fragrant with the grass, stretching in long winrowsamong the brown bowlders, or capped with canvas in the little hayco*cks ithad been gathered into the day before. I was fresh from the affluentfarms of the Western Reserve, and this care of the grass touched me witha rude pity, which I also bestowed on the meagre fields of corn andwheat; but still the land was lovelier than any I had ever seen, with itsold farmhouses, and brambled gray stone walls, its stony hillsides, itsstaggering orchards, its wooded tops, and its thick-brackened valleys.From West to East the difference was as great as I afterwards found itfrom America to Europe, and my impression of something quaint and strangewas no keener when I saw Old England the next year than when I saw NewEngland now. I had imagined the landscape bare of trees, and I wasastonished to find it almost as full of them as at home, though they alllooked very little, as they well might to eyes used to the primevalforests of Ohio. The road ran through them from time to time, and tooktheir coolness on its smooth hard reaches, and then issued again in theglisten of the open fields.

I made phrases to myself about the scenery as we drove along; and yes, Isuppose I made phrases about the young girl who was one of the insidepassengers, and who, when the common strangeness had somewhat worn off,began to sing, and sang most of the way to Concord. Perhaps she was notvery sage, and I am sure she was not of the caste of Vere de Vere, butshe 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 journeyif I could. She was long ago an elderly woman, if she lives, and Isuppose she would not now point out her fellow-passenger if he strolledin the evening by the house where she had dismounted, upon her arrival inConcord, and laugh and pull another girl away from the window, in thehigh excitement of the prodigious adventure.

XV.

Her fellow-passenger was in far other excitement; he was to seeHawthorne, and in a manner to meet Priscilla and Zenobia, and HesterPrynne and little Pearl, and Miriam and Hilda, and Hollingsworth andCoverdale, and Chillingworth and Dimmesdale, and Donatello and Kenyon;and he had no heart for any such poor little reality as that, who couldnot have been got into any story that one could respect, and must havebeen difficult even in a Heinesque poem.

I wasted that whole evening and the next morning in fond delaying, and itwas not until after the indifferent dinner I got at the tavern where Istopped, that I found courage to go and present Lowell's letter toHawthorne. I would almost have foregone meeting the weird genius only tohave kept that letter, for it said certain infinitely precious things ofme with such a sweetness, such a grace, as Lowell alone could give hispraise. 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 atall I must give up my letter, and I carried it in my hand to the door ofthe cottage he called The Wayside. It was never otherwise than a verymodest place, but the modesty was greater then than to-day, and there wasalready some preliminary carpentry at one end of the cottage, which I sawwas to result in an addition to it. I recall pleasant fields across theroad before it; behind rose a hill wooded with low pines, such as is madein Septimius Felton the scene of the involuntary duel between Septimiusand the young British officer. I have a sense of the woods coming quitedown to the house, but if this was so I do not know what to do with agrassy slope which seems to have stretched part way up the hill. As Iapproached, I looked for the tower which the author was fabled to climbinto at sight of the coming guest, and pull the ladder up after him; andI wondered whether he would fly before me in that sort, or imagine someeasier means of escaping me.

The door was opened to my ring by a tall handsome boy whom I suppose tohave been Mr. Julian Hawthorne; and the next moment I found myself in thepresence of the romancer, who entered from some room beyond. He advancedcarrying his head with a heavy forward droop, and with a pace for which Idecided that the word would be pondering. It was the pace of a bulky manof fifty, and his head was that beautiful head we all know from the manypictures of it. But Hawthorne's look was different from that of anypicture of him that I have seen. It was sombre and brooding, as the lookof such a poet should have been; it was the look of a man who had dealtfaithfully and therefore sorrowfully with that problem of evil whichforever attracted, forever evaded Hawthorne. It was by no meanstroubled; it was full of a dark repose. Others who knew him better andsaw him oftener were familiar with other aspects, and I remember that onenight at Longfellow's table, when one of the guests happened to speak ofthe photograph of Hawthorne which hung in a corner of the room, Lowellsaid, 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 keenalertness; but only a sort of quiet, patient intelligence, for which Iseek the right word in vain. It was a very regular face, with beautifuleyes; the mustache, still entirely dark, was dense over the fine mouth.Hawthorne was dressed in black, and he had a certain effect which Iremember, 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 haveinstantly felt him to be a personage.

I must have given him the letter myself, for I have no recollection ofparting with it before, but I only remember his offering me his hand, andmaking me shyly and tentatively welcome. After a few moments of thedemoralization which followed his hospitable attempts in me, he asked ifI would not like to go up on his hill with him and sit there, where hesmoked in the afternoon. He offered me a cigar, and when I said that Idid not smoke, he lighted it for himself, and we climbed the hilltogether. At the top, where there was an outlook in the pines over theConcord meadows, we found a log, and he invited me to a place on itbeside 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 hisbooks had been to me, and though we got on rapidly at no time, I think wegot on better for this interposition. He asked me about Lowell, I daresay, for I told him of my joy in meeting him and Doctor Holmes, and thisseemed greatly to interest him. Perhaps because he was so lately fromEurope, where our great men are always seen through the wrong end of thetelescope, he appeared surprised at my devotion, and asked me whether Icared as much for meeting them as I should care for meeting the famousEnglish authors. I professed that I cared much more, though whether thiswas true, I now have my doubts, and I think Hawthorne doubted it at thetime. But he said nothing in comment, and went on to speak generally ofEurope and America. He was curious about the West, which be seemed tofancy much more purely American, and said he would like to see some partof the country on which the shadow (or, if I must be precise, the damnedshadow) of Europe had not fallen. I told him I thought the West mustfinally be characterized by the Germans, whom we had in great numbers,and, purely from my zeal for German poetry, I tried to allege some proofsof their present influence, though I could think of none outside ofpolitics, which I thought they affected wholesomely. I knew Hawthornewas a Democrat, and I felt it well to touch politics lightly, but he hadno more to say about the fateful election then pending than Holmes orLowell had.

With the abrupt transition of his talk throughout, he began somehow tospeak of women, and said he had never seen a woman whom he thought quitebeautiful. In the same way he spoke of the New England temperament, andsuggested that the apparent coldness in it was also real, and that thesuppression of emotion for generations would extinguish it at last. Thenhe questioned me as to my knowledge of Concord, and whether I had seenany 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 notthink it needful to say that I wished to see Thoreau quite as muchbecause he had suffered in the cause of John Brown as because he hadwritten the books which had taken me; and when he said that Thoreauprided himself on coming nearer the heart of a pine-tree than any otherhuman being, I could say honestly enough that I would rather come nearthe heart of a man. This visibly pleased him, and I saw that it did notdisplease him, when he asked whether I was not going to see his nextneighbor, Mr. Alcott, and I confessed that I had never heard of him.That surprised as well as pleased him; be remarked, with whateverintention, that there was nothing like recognition to make a man modest;and he entered into some account of the philosopher, whom I suppose Ineed not be much ashamed of not knowing then, since his influence was ofthe immediate sort that makes a man important to his townsmen while he isstill strange to his countrymen.

Hawthorne descanted a little upon the landscape, and said certain of thepleasant 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 topines too. He smoked fitfully, and slowly, and in the hour that we spenttogether, his whiffs were of the desultory and unfinal character of hiswords. When we went down, he asked me into his house again, and wouldhave me stay to tea, for which we found the table laid. But there was agreat deal of silence in it all, and at times, in spite of his shadowykindness, 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 thathe should care so little, or seem to care so little. Some of his ownromances were among the volumes on these shelves, and when I put myfinger on the 'Blithedale Romance' and said that I preferred that to theothers, his face lighted up, and he said that he believed the Germansliked that best too.

Upon the whole we parted such good friends that when I offered to takeleave he asked me how long I was to be in Concord, and not only bade mecome to see him again, but said he would give me a card to Emerson, if Iliked. 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 gotaway, to be, "I find this young man worthy." The quaintness, the littlestiffness of it, if one pleases to call it so, was amusing to one who wasnot without his sense of humor, but the kindness filled me to the throatwith joy. In fact, I entirely liked Hawthorne. He had been as cordialas so shy a man could show himself; and I perceived, with the reposethat nothing else can give, the entire sincerity of his soul.

Nothing could have been further from the behavior of this very great manthan any sort of posing, apparently, or a wish to affect me with a senseof his greatness. I saw that he was as much abashed by our encounter asI was; he was visibly shy to the point of discomfort, but in no ignoblesense was he conscious, and as nearly as he could with one so much hisyounger he made an absolute equality between us. My memory of him iswithout alloy one of the finest pleasures of my life: In my heart I paidhim the same glad homage that I paid Lowell and Holmes, and he didnothing to make me think that I had overpaid him. This seems perhapsvery 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 earlylife, when I wished to lavish my admiration upon them, whom I have notthe impression of having left in my debt. Then, a defect of the Puritanquality, which I have found in many New-Englanders, is that, wittingly orunwittingly, they propose themselves to you as an example, or if notquite this, that they surround themselves with a subtle ether ofpotential disapprobation, in which, at the first sign of unworthiness inyou, they helplessly suffer you to gasp and perish; they have goodhearts, and they would probably come to your succor out of humanity, ifthey knew how, but they do not know how. Hawthorne had nothing of thisabout him; he was no more tacitly than he was explicitly didactic.I thought him as thoroughly in keeping with his romances as Doctor Holmeshad seemed with his essays and poems, and I met him as I had met theAutocrat in the supreme hour of his fame. He had just given the worldthe last of those incomparable works which it was to have finished fromhis hand; the 'Marble Faun' had worthily followed, at a somewhat longerinterval than usual, the 'Blithedale Romance', and the 'House of SevenGables', and the 'Scarlet Letter', and had, perhaps carried his namehigher than all the rest, and certainly farther. Everybody was readingit, and more or less bewailing its indefinite close, but yielding himthat full honor and praise which a writer can hope for but once in hislife. Nobody dreamed that thereafter only precious fragments, sketchesmore or less faltering, though all with the divine touch in them, werefurther to enrich a legacy which in its kind is the finest the race hasreceived from any mind. As I have said, we are always finding newHawthornes, but the illusion soon wears away, and then we perceive thatthey were not Hawthornes at all; that he had some peculiar differencefrom them, which, by and-by, we shall no doubt consent must be hisdifference from all men evermore.

I am painfully aware that I have not summoned before the reader the imageof the man as it has always stood in my memory, and I feel a sort ofshame for my failure. He was so altogether simple that it seems as if itwould be easy to do so; but perhaps a spirit from the other world wouldbe simple too, and yet would no more stand at parle, or consent to besketched, than Hawthorne. In fact, he was always more or less merginginto the shadow, which was in a few years wholly to close over him; therewas nothing uncanny in his presence, there was nothing even unwilling,but he had that apparitional quality of some great minds which keptShakespeare largely unknown to those who thought themselves hisintimates, and has at last left him a sort of doubt. There was nothingteasing or wilfully elusive in Hawthorne's impalpability, such as Iafterwards felt in Thoreau; if he was not there to your touch, it was nofault of his; it was because your touch was dull, and wanted the use ofcontact with such natures. The hand passes through the veridical phantomwithout a sense of its presence, but the phantom is none the lessveridical for all that.

XVI.

I kept the evening of the day I met Hawthorne wholly for the thoughts ofhim, or rather for that reverberation which continues in the youngsensibilities after some important encounter. It must have been the nextmorning that I went to find Thoreau, and I am dimly aware of making oneor 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, atleast 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 theyear 1858, but I have a fancy that if I should take it up now, I shouldthink it a wiser and truer conception of the world than I thought itthen. It is no solution of the problem; men are not going to answer theriddle of the painful earth by building themselves shanties and livingupon beans and watching ant-fights; but I do not believe Tolstoy himselfhas more clearly shown the hollowness, the hopelessness, the unworthinessof the life of the world than Thoreau did in that book. If it were newlywritten 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 slaverycould only be controlled, all things else would come right of themselveswith us. Slavery has not only been controlled, but it has beendestroyed, and yet things have not begun to come right with us; but itwas in the order of Providence that chattel slavery should cease beforeindustrial slavery, and the infinitely crueler and stupider vanity andluxury bred of it, should be attacked. If there was then any previsionof the struggle now at hand, the seers averted their eyes, and stroveonly to cope with the less evil. Thoreau himself, who had so clear avision of the falsity and folly of society as we still have it, threwhimself into the tide that was already, in Kansas and Virginia, reddenedwith war; he aided and abetted the John Brown raid, I do not recall howmuch or in what sort; and he had suffered in prison for his opinions andactions. It was this inevitable heroism of his that, more than hisliterature even, made me wish to see him and revere him; and I do notbelieve that I should have found the veneration difficult, when at lastI met him in his insufficient person, if he had otherwise been present tomy glowing expectation. He came into the room a quaint, stump figure ofa man, whose effect of long trunk and short limbs was heightened by hisfashionless trousers being let down too low. He had a noble face, withtossed hair, a distraught eye, and a fine aquilinity of profile, whichmade me think at once of Don Quixote and of Cervantes; but his nosefailed to add that foot to his stature which Lamb says a nose of thatshape will always give a man. He tried to place me geographically afterhe had given me a chair not quite so far off as Ohio, though still acrossthe 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 somethingfit 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 physicaldiscomforts. I do not remember that Thoreau spoke of his books or ofhimself at all, and when he began to speak of John Brown, it was not thewarm, palpable, loving, fearful old man of my conception, but a sort ofJohn Brown type, a John Brown ideal, a John Brown principle, which wewere somehow (with long pauses between the vague, orphic phrases) tocherish, and to nourish ourselves upon.

It was not merely a defeat of my hopes, it was a rout, and I felt myselfso scattered over the field of thought that I could hardly bring myforces together for retreat. I must have made some effort, vain andfoolish enough, to rematerialize my old demigod, but when I came away itwas with the feeling that there was very little more left of John Brownthan there was of me. His body was not mouldering in the grave, neitherwas his soul marching on; his ideal, his type, his principle aloneexisted, and I did not know what to do with it. I am not blamingThoreau; 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 Iventure to hope, that I could profit better by them now; but in thisrecord I am trying honestly to report their effect with the sort of youthI was then.

XVII.

Such as I was, I rather wonder that I had the courage, after thisexperiment of Thoreau, to present the card Hawthorne had given me toEmerson. I must have gone to him at once, however, for I cannot make outany interval of time between my visit to the disciple and my visit to themaster. I think it was Emerson himself who opened his door to me, for Ihave a vision of the fine old man standing tall on his threshold, withthe 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 havebeen about sixty, but I remember nothing of age in his aspect, though Ihave called him an old man. His hair, I am sure, was still entirelydark, and his face had a kind of marble youthfulness, chiselled to adelicate intelligence by the highest and noblest thinking that any manhas done. There was a strange charm in Emerson's eyes, which I felt thenand always, something like that I saw in Lincoln's, but shyer, butsweeter and less sad. His smile was the very sweetest I have everbeheld, and the contour of the mask and the line of the profile were inkeeping with this incomparable sweetness of the mouth, at once grave andquaint, 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 havereached the dense intelligence of his fellow-men after a whole lifetimeof perfectly simple and lucid appeal, and his countenance expressed thepatience and forbearance of a wise man content to bide his time. Itwould be hard to persuade people now that Emerson once represented to thepopular mind all that was most hopelessly impossible, and that in acertain sort he was a national joke, the type of the incomprehensible,the byword of the poor paragrapher. He had perhaps disabused thecommunity somewhat by presenting himself here and there as a lecturer,and talking face to face with men in terms which they could not refuse tofind as clear as they were wise; he was more and more read, by certainpersons, here and there; but we are still so far behind him in the reachof his far-thinking that it need not be matter of wonder that twentyyears 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 printingin the Atlantic, and I knew certain of his poems, though by no meansmany; yet I had this sense of him, that he was somehow, beyond and abovemy ken, a presence of force and beauty and wisdom, uncompanioned in ourliterature. He had lately stooped from his ethereal heights to take partin the battle of humanity, and I suppose that if the truth were told hewas more to my young fervor because he had said that John Brown had madethe gallows glorious like the cross, than because he had uttered allthose truer and wiser things which will still a hundred years hence beleading the thought of the world.

I do not know in just what sort he made me welcome, but I am aware ofsitting with him in his study or library, and of his presently speakingof Hawthorne, whom I probably celebrated as I best could, and whom hepraised for his personal excellence, and for his fine qualities as aneighbor. "But his last book," he added, reflectively, "is a mere mush,"and I perceived that this great man was no better equipped to judge anartistic fiction than the groundlings who were then crying out upon theindefinite close of the Marble Faun. Apparently he had read it, as theyhad, for the story, but it seems to me now, if it did not seem to methen, that as far as the problem of evil was involved, the book mustleave it where it found it. That is forever insoluble, and it was ratherwith that than with his more or less shadowy people that the romancer wasconcerned. Emerson had, in fact, a defective sense as to specific piecesof literature; he praised extravagantly, and in the wrong place,especially among the new things, and he failed to see the worth of muchthat was fine and precious beside the line of his fancy.

He began to ask me about the West, and about some unknown man inMichigan; who had been sending him poems, and whom he seemed to thinkvery promising, though he has not apparently kept his word to do greatthings. I did not find what Emerson had to say of my section veryaccurate or important, though it was kindly enough, and just enough as towhat the West ought to do in literature. He thought it a pity that aliterary periodical which had lately been started in Cincinnati should beappealing to the East for contributions, instead of relying upon thewriters nearer home; and he listened with what patience he could to mymodest opinion that we had not the writers nearer home. I never was ofthose Westerners who believed that the West was kept out of literature bythe jealousy of the East, and I tried to explain why we had not the mento write that magazine full in Ohio. He alleged the man in Michigan asone who alone could do much to fill it worthily, and again I had to saythat I had never heard of him.

I felt rather guilty in my ignorance, and I had a notion that it did notcommend 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 questionedme about what I had seen of Concord, and whom besides Hawthorne I hadmet, and when I told him only Thoreau, he asked me if I knew the poems ofMr. William Ellery Channing. I have known them since, and felt theirquality, which I have gladly owned a genuine and original poetry; but Ianswered then truly that I knew them only from Poe's criticisms: crueland 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 farsearch for my meaning, "you mean the jingle-man!"

I do not know why this should have put me to such confusion, but if I hadwritten the criticisms myself I do not think I could have been moreabashed. Perhaps I felt an edge of reproof, of admonition, in acharacterization of Poe which the world will hardly agree with; though Ido not agree with the world about him, myself, in its admiration. At anyrate, it made an end of me for the time, and I remained as if alreadyabsent, while Emerson questioned me as to what I had written in theAtlantic Monthly. He had evidently read none of my contributions, for helooked 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 affixedmy initials to each. He followed me to the door, still speaking ofpoetry, and as he took a kindly enough leave of me, he said one mightvery well give a pleasant hour to it now and then.

A pleasant hour to poetry! I was meaning to give all time and alleternity to poetry, and I should by no means have wished to find pleasurein it; I should have thought that a proof of inferior quality in thework; I should have preferred anxiety, anguish even, to pleasure. But ifEmerson thought from the glance he gave my verses that I had better notlavish myself upon that kind of thing, unless there was a great deal moreof me than I could have made apparent in our meeting, no doubt he wasright. I was only too painfully aware of my shortcoming, but I felt thatit was shorter-coming than it need have been. I had somehow notprospered in my visit to Emerson as I had with Hawthorne, and I came awaywondering in what sort I had gone wrong. I was not a forth-puttingyouth, and I could not blame myself for anything in my approaches thatmerited withholding; indeed, I made no approaches; but as I must needsblame myself for something, I fell upon the fact that in my confusedretreat from Emerson's presence I had failed in a certain slight point ofceremony, and I magnified this into an offence of capital importance.I went home to my hotel, and passed the afternoon in pure misery. I hadmoments of wild question when I debated whether it would be better to goback 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. Butat the time it did not seem possible that I should live through the daywith it, and I thought that I ought at least to go and confess it toHawthorne, and let, him disown the wretch who had so poorly repaid thekindness of his introduction by such misbehavior. I did indeed walk downby the Wayside, in the cool of the evening, and there I saw Hawthorne forthe 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 withhim, and I longed to go in, and tell him how ill I had got on withEmerson; I believed that though he cast me off, he would understand me,and would perhaps see some hope for me in another world, though therecould 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 meabout my adventures in Concord. By this time I could see it in ahumorous light, and I did not much mind his lying back in his chair andlaughing and laughing, till I thought he would roll out of it. Heperfectly conceived the situation, and got an amusem*nt from it that Icould get only through sympathy with him. But I thought it a favorablemoment to propose myself as the assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly,which I had the belief I could very well become, with advantage to myselfif not to the magazine. He seemed to think so too; he said that if theplace had not just been filled, I should certainly have had it; and itwas to his recollection of this prompt ambition of mine that I supposeI may have owed my succession to a like vacancy some four years later.He was charmingly kind; he entered with the sweetest interest into thestory of my economic life, which had been full of changes and chancesalready. But when I said very seriously that now I was tired of thesefortuities, and would like to be settled in something, he asked, withdancing eyes,

"Why, how old are you?"

"I am twenty-three," I answered, and then the laughing fit took himagain.

"Well," he said, "you begin young, out there!"

In my heart I did not think that twenty-three was so very young, butperhaps it was; and if any one were to say that I had been portrayinghere a youth whose aims were certainly beyond his achievements, who wasmorbidly sensitive, and if not conceited was intolerably conscious, whohad met with incredible kindness, and had suffered no more than was goodfor 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 Iwas not just that kind of youth when I paid my first visit to NewEngland.

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 wascold, it was wet or it was dry, but it was not my affair; and I supposethat I sweltered about the strange city, with no sense of anything verypersonal in the temperature, until nightfall. What I remember is beinghigh 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 whosetide then swept Broadway from curb to curb, for all the miles of itslength. At that hour the other city noises were stilled, or lost in thisvaster volume of sound, which seemed to fill the whole night. It had asolemnity which the modern comer to New York will hardly imagine, forthat tide of omnibuses has long since ebbed away, and has left the air tothe strident discords of the elevated trains and the irregular alarum ofthe grip-car gongs, which blend to no such harmonious thunder as rosefrom the procession of those ponderous and innumerable vans. There was asort of inner quiet in the sound, and when I chose I slept off to it, andwoke to it in the morning refreshed and strengthened to explore theliterary situation in the metropolis.

I.

Not that I think I left this to the second day. Very probably I lost notime in going to the office of the Saturday Press, as soon as I had mybreakfast after arriving, and I have a dim impression of anticipating theearliest of the Bohemians, whose gay theory of life obliged them to agood many hardships in lying down early in the morning, and rising uplate in the day. If it was the office-boy who bore me company during thefirst hour of my visit, by-and-by the editors and contributors actuallybegan 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 anycertain writer. There are some living who knew the Bohemians and evenloved them, but there are increasingly few who were of them, even in thefond retrospect of youthful follies and errors. It was in fact but asickly colony, transplanted from the mother asphalt of Paris, and neverreally striking root in the pavements of New York; it was a colony ofideas, of theories, which had perhaps never had any deep root anywhere.What these ideas, these theories, were in art and in life, it would notbe very easy to say; but in the Saturday Press they came to violentexpression, not to say explosion, against all existing forms ofrespectability. If respectability was your 'bete noire', then you were aBohemian; and if you were in the habit of rendering yourself in prose,then you necessarily shredded your prose into very fine paragraphs of asentence each, or of a very few words, or even of one word. I believethis fashion prevailed till very lately with some of the dramaticcritics, who thought that it gave a quality of epigram to the style; andI suppose it was borrowed from the more spasmodic moments of Victor Hugoby the editor of the Press. He brought it back with him when he camehome from one of those sojourns in Paris which possess one of the Frenchaccent rather than the French language; I long desired to write in thatfashion myself, but I had not the courage.

This editor was a man of such open and avowed cynicism that he may havebeen, for all I know, a kindly optimist at heart; some say, however, thathe had really talked himself into being what he seemed. I only know thathis talk, the first day I saw him, was of such a sort that if he was halfas bad, he would have been too bad to be. He walked up and down his roomsaying what lurid things he would directly do if any one accused him ofrespectability, so that he might disabuse the minds of all witnesses.There were four or five of his assistants and contributors listening tothe dreadful threats, which did not deceive even so great innocence asmine, 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 theeffect 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 passeddown Washington Street, half a dozen men in the crowd would know you wereHolmes, or Lowell, or Longfellow, or Wendell Phillips; but in Broadway noone would know who you were, or care to the measure of his smallestblasphemy. I have since heard this more than once urged as a signaladvantage of New York for the aesthetic inhabitant, but I am not sure,yet, that it is so. The unrecognized celebrity probably has his mindquite as much upon himself as if some one pointed him out, and otherwiseI cannot think that the sense of neighborhood is such a bad thing for theartist in any sort. It involves the sense of responsibility, whichcannot be too constant or too keen. If it narrows, it deepens; and thismay be the secret of Boston.

II.

It would not be easy to say just why the Bohemian group represented NewYork literature to my imagination; for I certainly associated other nameswith its best work, but perhaps it was because I had written for theSaturday Press myself, and had my pride in it, and perhaps it was becausethat paper really embodied the new literary life of the city. It wasclever, and full of the wit that tries its teeth upon everything. Itattacked all literary shams but its own, and it made itself felt andfeared. The young writers throughout the country were ambitious to beseen in it, and they gave their best to it; they gave literally, for theSaturday Press never paid in anything but hopes of paying, vaguer eventhan promises. It is not too much to say that it was very nearly as wellfor 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 wasto be in the company of Fitz James O'Brien, Fitzhugh Ludlow, Mr. Aldrich,Mr. Stedman, and whoever else was liveliest in prose or loveliest inverse at that day in New York. It was a power, and although it is truethat, as Henry Giles said of it, "Man cannot live by snapping-turtlealone," 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, andwant my snapping-turtle of the very best. What is certain is that I wentto the office of the Saturday Press in New York with much the same sortof feeling I had in going to the office of the Atlantic Monthly inBoston, but I came away with a very different feeling. I had found therea bitterness against Boston as great as the bitterness againstrespectability, and as Boston was then rapidly becoming my secondcountry, I could not join in the scorn thought of her and said of her bythe Bohemians. I fancied a conspiracy among them to shock the literarypilgrim, and to minify the precious emotions he had experienced invisiting other shrines; but I found no harm in that, for I knew just howmuch to be shocked, and I thought I knew better how to value certainthings of the soul than they. Yet when their chief asked me how I got onwith Hawthorne, and I began to say that he was very shy and I was rathershy, 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 theycould have wished, and was not restored to myself till one of them saidthat the thought of Boston made him as ugly as sin; then I began to hopeagain that men who took themselves so seriously as that need not be takenvery seriously by me.

In fact I had heard things almost as desperately cynical in othernewspaper offices before that, and I could not see what was sodistinctively Bohemian in these 'anime prave', these souls so baleful bytheir own showing. But apparently Bohemia was not a state that you couldwell imagine from one encounter, and since my stay in New York was to bevery short, I lost no time in acquainting myself further with it. Thatvery night I went to the beer-cellar, once very far up Broadway, where Iwas 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 sometimescame to Pfaff's: a young girl of a sprightly gift in letters, whose nameor pseudonym had made itself pretty well known at that day, and whosefate, pathetic at all times, out-tragedies almost any other in thehistory of letters. She was seized with hydrophobia from the bite of herdog, on a railroad train; and made a long journey home in the paroxysmsof that agonizing disease, which ended in her death after she reached NewYork. But this was after her reign had ended, and no such black shadowwas cast forward upon Pfaff's, whose name often figured in the verse andthe epigrammatically paragraphed prose of the 'Saturday Press'. I feltthat as a contributor and at least a brevet Bohemian I ought not to gohome without visiting the famous place, and witnessing if I could notshare the revels of my comrades. As I neither drank beer nor smoked, mypart in the carousal was limited to a German pancake, which I found theyhad very good at Pfaff's, and to listening to the whirling words of mycommensals, at the long board spread for the Bohemians in a cavernousspace under the pavement. There were writers for the 'Saturday Press' andfor Vanity Fair (a hopefully comic paper of that day), and some of theartists who drew for the illustrated periodicals. Nothing of their talkremains with me, but the impression remains that it was not so good talkas I had heard in Boston. At one moment of the orgy, which went butslowly for an orgy, we were joined by some belated Bohemians whom theothers made a great clamor over; I was given to understand they were justrecovered from a fearful debauch; their locks were still damp from thewet towels used to restore them, and their eyes were very frenzied.I was presented to these types, who neither said nor did anything worthyof their awful appearance, but dropped into seats at the table, and ateof the supper with an appetite that seemed poor. I stayed hoping vainlyfor worse things till eleven o'clock, and then I rose and took my leaveof a literary condition that had distinctly disappointed me. I do notsay 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 NewYork, and I know that my acquaintance with it was not exhaustive. When Icame the next year the Saturday Press was no more, and the editor and hiscontributors had no longer a common centre. The best of the youngfellows whom I met there confessed, in a pleasant exchange of letterswhich we had afterwards, that he thought the pose a vain and unprofitableone; and when the Press was revived, after the war, it was without any ofthe old Bohemian characteristics except that of not paying for material.It could not last long upon these terms, and again it passed away, andstill waits its second palingenesis.

The editor passed away too, not long after, and the thing that he hadinspired altogether ceased to be. He was a man of a certain sardonicpower, and used it rather fiercely and freely, with a joy probably moreapparent than real in the pain it gave. In my last knowledge of him hewas much milder than when I first knew him, and I have the feeling thathe too came to own before he died that man cannot live by snapping-turtlealone. He was kind to some neglected talents, and befriended them witha vigor and a zeal which he would have been the last to let you callgenerous. The chief of these was Walt Whitman, who, when the SaturdayPress took it up, had as hopeless a cause with the critics on either sideof the ocean as any man could have. It was not till long afterwards thathis English admirers began to discover him, and to make his countrymensome noisy reproaches for ignoring him; they were wholly in the darkconcerning 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 thanhe would have been if he had been in no way offensive, but it remains afact that they celebrated him quite as much as was good for them. He wasoften at Pfaff's with them, and the night of my visit he was the chieffact of my experience. I did not know he was there till I was on my wayout, for he did not sit at the table under the pavement, but at the headof one farther into the room. There, as I passed, some friendly fellowstopped me and named me to him, and I remember how he leaned back in hischair, and reached out his great hand to me, as if he were going to giveit me for good and all. He had a fine head, with a cloud of Jovian hairupon it, and a branching beard and mustache, and gentle eyes that lookedmost kindly into mine, and seemed to wish the liking which I instantlygave him, though we hardly passed a word, and our acquaintance was summedup in that glance and the grasp of his mighty fist upon my hand. I doubtif he had any notion who or what I was beyond the fact that I was a youngpoet of some sort, but he may possibly have remembered seeing my nameprinted after some very Heinesque verses in the Press. I did not meethim again for twenty years, and then I had only a moment with him when hewas reading the proofs of his poems in Boston. Some years later I sawhim for the last time, one day after his lecture on Lincoln, in thatcity, when he came down from the platform to speak with some handshakingfriends who gathered about him. Then and always he gave me the sense ofa sweet and true soul, and I felt in him a spiritual dignity which I willnot try to reconcile with his printing in the forefront of his book apassage from a private letter of Emerson's, though I believe he would nothave seen such a thing as most other men would, or thought ill of it inanother. The spiritual purity which I felt in him no less than thedignity is something that I will no more try to reconcile with whatdenies it in his page; but such things we may well leave to theadjustment of finer balances than we have at hand. I will make sure onlyof the greatest benignity in the presence of the man. The apostle of therough, the uncouth, was the gentlest person; his barbaric yawp,translated into the terms of social encounter, was an address of singularquiet, delivered in a voice of winning and endearing friendliness.

As to his work itself, I suppose that I do not think it so valuable ineffect as in intention. He was a liberating force, a very "imperialanarch" in literature; but liberty is never anything but a means, andwhat Whitman achieved was a means and not an end, in what must be calledhis 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 menot poetry, but the materials of poetry, like one's emotions; yet I wouldnot misprize it, and I am glad to own that I have had moments of greatpleasure in it. Some French critic quoted in the Saturday Press (Icannot think of his name) said the best thing of him when he said that hemade 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 ordislike the partnership. It is still something neighborly, brotherly,fatherly, and so I felt him to be when the benign old man looked on meand 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 notknow why I should not have imagined trying to see Curtis, whom I knew somuch 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 thenout of the country; but at any rate I did not attempt him either. TheBohemians were the beginning and the end of the story for me, and to tellthe truth I did not like the story.. I remember that as I sat at thattable. under the pavement, in Pfaff's beer-cellar, and listened to thewit 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 Ihad fallen very far. In fact it can do no harm at this distance of timeto 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 himthat I had in Boston, could not keep himself too carefully in cotton; andthis was what I did all the following winter, though of course it was asecret between me and me. I dare say it was not the worst thing I couldhave done, in some respects.

My sojourn in New York could not have been very long, and the rest of itwas mainly given to viewing the monuments of the city from the windows ofomnibuses and the platforms of horse-cars. The world was so simple thenthat there were perhaps only a half-dozen cities that had horse-cars inthem, and I travelled in those conveyances at New York with an unfadedzest, 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 supposethat it was up and down the ugly east and west avenues, then lying opento the eye in all the hideousness now partly concealed by the elevatedroads, and that I found them very stately and handsome. Indeed, New Yorkwas really handsomer then than it is now, when it has so many more piecesof beautiful architecture, for at that day the skyscrapers were not yet,and there was a fine regularity in the streets that these brute bulkshave robbed of all shapeliness. Dirt and squalor there were a plenty,but there was infinitely more comfort. The long succession of crossstreets was yet mostly secure from business, after you passed ClintonPlace; commerce was just beginning to show itself in Union Square, andMadison Square was still the home of the McFlimsies, whose kin and kinddwelt unmolested in the brownstone stretches of Fifth Avenue. I triedhard to imagine them from the acquaintance Mr. Butler's poem had givenme, and from the knowledge the gentle satire of The 'Potiphar Papers' hadspread broadcast through a community shocked by the excesses of our bestsociety; it was not half so bad then as the best now, probably. But I donot think I made very much of it, perhaps because most of the people whoought to have been in those fine mansions were away at the seaside andthe mountains.

The mountains I had seen on my way down from Canada, but the sea-sidenot, and it would never do to go home without visiting some famous summerresort. I must have fixed upon Long Branch because I must have heard ofit as then the most fashionable; and one afternoon I took the boat forthat 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 blewaway 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 thatsettled on the water before us like a sort of portable midnight; I nowthrow it away upon the reader, as it were; it never would come inanywhere. I stayed all night at Long Branch, and I had a bath the nextmorning before breakfast: an extremely cold one, with a life-line to keepme 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, andwhich has always attracted me. He told me much about his life, and howhe lived, and what it cost him to live. He had a large room at afashionable 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 wasincredibly 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 humannature which I had felt in setting out upon my travels, and I said tomyself that this was from having a mind so crowded with experiences andimpressions that it could receive no more; and I really suppose that ifthe happiest phrase had offered itself to me at some moments, I shouldscarcely 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 foundit seething in an August sun that was hot enough to have calcined thelimestone 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 theirinvitations, and giving myself wholly to literature, during the earlypart of the winter that followed; and I did not realize my error till theinvitations ceased to come, and I found myself in an unbrokenintellectual solitude. The worst of it was that an ungrateful Muse didlittle in return for the sacrifices I made her, and the things I nowwrote were not liked by the editors I sent them to. The editorial tasteis not always the test of merit, but it is the only one we have, and I amnot saying the editors were wrong in my case. There were then such avery few places where you could market your work: the Atlantic in Bostonand Harper's in New York were the magazines that paid, though theIndependent newspaper bought literary material; the Saturday Pressprinted it without buying, and so did the old Knickerbocker Magazine,though there was pecuniary good-will in both these cases. I toiled muchthat winter over a story I had long been writing, and at last sent it tothe 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 notesaying that the editors had the less regret in returning it because theysaw that in the May number of the Knickerbocker the first chapter of thestory had appeared. Then I remembered that, years before, I had sentthis chapter to that magazine, as a sketch to be printed by itself, andafterwards had continued the story from it. I had never heard of itsacceptance, and supposed of course that it was rejected; but on my secondvisit 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 failingfortunes, told me that he had found my sketch in rummaging about in abarrel of his predecessors manuscripts, and had liked it, and printedit. He said that there were fifteen dollars coming to me for thatsketch, and might he send the money to me? I said that he might, thoughI do not see, to this day, why he did not give it me on the spot; and hemade a very small minute in a very large sheet of paper (really like DickSwiveller), and promised I should have it that night; but I sailed thenext day for Liverpool without it. I sailed without the money for someverses that Vanity Fair bought of me, but I hardly expected that, for theeditor, who was then Artemus Ward, had frankly told me in taking myaddress 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 fouryears in a vigilance for Confederate privateers which none of them eversurprised. I had asked for the consulate at Munich, where I hoped tosteep 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 theincome of the office was in fees, and I thought I had better go on toWashington and find out how much the fees amounted to. People inColumbus who had been abroad said that on five hundred dollars you couldlive in Rome like a prince, but I doubted this; and when I learned at theState Department that the fees of the Roman consulate came to only threehundred, I perceived that I could not live better than a baron, probably,and I despaired. The kindly chief of the consular bureau said that thePresident's secretaries, Mr. John Nicolay and Mr. John Hay, wereinterested in my appointment, and he advised my going over to the WhiteHouse and seeing them. I lost no time in doing that, and I learned thatas young Western men they were interested in me because I was a youngWestern man who had done something in literature, and they were willingto help me for that reason, and for no other that I ever knew. Theyproposed 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 theygot it put up to fifteen hundred, and so I went to Venice, where if I didnot live like a prince on that income, I lived a good deal more like aprince than I could have done at Rome on a fifth of it.

If the appointment was not present fortune, it was the beginning of thebest luck I have had in the world, and I am glad to owe it all to thosefriends of my verse, who could have been no otherwise friends of me.They were then beginning very early careers of distinction which have notbeen wholly divided. Mr. Nicolay could have been about twenty-five, andMr. Hay nineteen or twenty. No one dreamed as yet of the opportunityopening to them in being so constantly near the man whose life they havewritten, and with whose fame they have imperishably interwrought theirnames. I remember the sobered dignity of the one, and the humorousgaiety of the other, and how we had some young men's joking and laughingtogether, in the anteroom where they received me, with the great soulentering upon its travail beyond the closed door. They asked me if I hadever seen the President, and I said that I had seen him at Columbus, theyear 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, exceptsuch as the slight campaign biography I had written could be thought tohave given me. That day or another, as I left my friends, I met him inthe corridor without, and he looked at the space I was part of with hisineffably melancholy eyes, without knowing that I was theindistinguishable person in whose "integrity and abilities he had reposedsuch special confidence" as to have appointed him consul for Venice andthe ports of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom, though he might haverecognized 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 thatevery 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 mypast behavior as I am of that piece of it. He walked up to thewatercooler that stood in the corner, and drew himself a full goblet fromit, which he poured down his throat with a backward tilt of his head, andthen went wearily within doors. The whole affair, so simple, has alwaysremained one of a certain pathos in my memory, and I would rather haveseen 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 TreasuryDepartment; but it was mislaid there, and to prevent another chance ofthat kind I carried on the duplicate myself. It was on my second visitthat I met the generous young Irishman William D. O'Connor, at the houseof my friend Piatt, and heard his ardent talk. He was one of thepromising men of that day, and he had written an anti-slavery novel inthe heroic mood of Victor Hugo, which greatly took my fancy; and Ibelieve he wrote poems too. He had not yet risen to be the chief of WaltWhitman's champions outside of the Saturday Press, but he had alreadyespoused the theory of Bacon's authorship of Shakespeare, then newlyexploited by the poor lady of Bacon's name, who died constant to it in aninsane asylum. He used to speak of the reputed dramatist as "the fatpeasant of Stratford," and he was otherwise picturesque of speech in ameasure that consoled, if it did not convince. The great war was thenfull upon us, and when in the silences of our literary talk its awfulbreath was heard, and its shadow fell upon the hearth where we gatheredround the first fires of autumn, O'Connor would lift his beautiful headwith a fine effect of prophecy, and say, "Friends, I feel a sense ofvictory in the air." He was not wrong; only the victory was for theother aide.

Who beside O'Connor shared in these saddened symposiums I cannot tellnow; but probably other young journalists and office-holders, intendinglitterateurs, since more or less extinct. I make certain only of theyoung Boston publisher who issued a very handsome edition of 'Leaves ofGrass', and then failed promptly if not consequently. But I had alreadymet, in my first sojourn at the capital, a young journalist who had givenhostages 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 canbe surer than I might have been without his memory, that I found him at afriend's house, where he was nursing himself for some slight sickness,and that I sat by his bed while our souls launched together into thejoyful 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 literarylife; and the world knows without my telling how true he has been to hisideal of it. His earthly mission then was to write letters fromWashington for the New York World, which started in life as a good youngevening paper, with a decided religious tone, so that the Saturday Presscould call it the Night-blooming Serious. I think Mr. Stedman wrote forits editorial page at times, and his relation to it as a Washingtoncorrespondent had an authority which is wanting to the function in thesedays of perfected telegraphing. He had not yet achieved that seat in theStock Exchange whose possession has justified his recourse to business,and has helped him to mean something more single in literature than manymore singly devoted to it. I used sometimes to speak about that withanother eager young author in certain middle years when we were chafingin editorial harness, and we always decided that Stedman had the best ofit in being able to earn his living in a sort so alien to literature thathe 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 beenall the time envying us our tripods from his high place in the StockExchange. What is certain is that he has come to stand for literatureand to embody New York in it as no one else does. In a community whichseems never to have had a conscious relation to letters, he has kept thefaith with dignity and fought the fight with constant courage. Scholarand poet at once, he has spoken to his generation with authority which wecan 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 himan 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 eachsaid how much he liked certain thing of the other's; I even seized myadvantage of his helplessness to read him a poem of mine which I had inmy pocket; he advised me where to place it; and if the reader will notthink 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 ownsufferings and final triumph with it will not be without encouragement tothe young literary endeavorer. It was a poem called, with no propheticsense of fitness, "Forlorn," and I tried it first with the 'AtlanticMonthly', which would not have it. Then I offered it in person to aformer editor of 'Harper's Monthly', but he could not see his advantagein it, and I carried it overseas to Venice with me. From that point Isent it to all the English magazines as steadily as the post could carryit away and bring it back. On my way home, four years later, I took itto London with me, where a friend who knew Lewes, then just beginningwith the 'Fortnightly Review', sent it to him for me. It was promptlyreturned, with a letter wholly reserved as to its quality, but full of apoetic gratitude for my wish to contribute to the Fortnightly. Then Iheard that a certain Mr. Lucas was about to start a magazine, and Ioffered the poem to him. The kindest letter of acceptance followed me toAmerica, and I counted upon fame and fortune as usual, when the news ofMr. Lucas's death came. I will not poorly joke an effect from my poem inthe fact; but the fact remains. By this time I was a writer in theoffice 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, whereit was printed at last. In such scant measure as my verses have pleasedit has found rather unusual favor, and I need not say that itsmisfortunes endeared it to its author.

But all this is rather far away from my first meeting with Stedman inWashington. Of course I liked him, and I thought him very handsome andfine, with a full beard cut in the fashion he has always worn it, andwith poet's eyes lighting an aquiline profile. Afterwards, when I sawhim 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 hadclothed him: I had a New York tailor too, but with a difference. He hada worldly dash along with his supermundane gifts, which took me almost asmuch, and all the more because I could see that he valued himself nothingupon it. He was all for literature, and for literary men as thesuperiors 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 andNew England had ceased to print my letters, he said, "Think of a man likesitting in judgment on a man like you!" I thought of it, and was avengedif not comforted; and at any rate I liked Stedman's standing up sostiffly for the honor of a craft that is rather too limp in some of itsvotaries.

I suppose it was he who introduced me to the Stoddards, whom I met in NewYork just before I sailed, and who were then in the glow of their earlyfame 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 thesanction 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 aboutauthorship in all its phases, and the exchange of delight in this poemand that, this novel and that, with gay, wilful runs away to make somewholly 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, andMrs. Stoddard was beginning to make her distinct and special quality feltin the magazines, in verse and fiction. In both it seems to me that shehas failed of the recognition which her work merits. Her tales andnovels have in them a foretaste of realism, which was too strange for thepalate of their day, and is now too familiar, perhaps. It is a peculiarfate, and would form the scheme of a pretty study in the history ofliterature. But in whatever she did she left the stamp of a talent likeno other, and of a personality disdainful of literary environment. In atime when most of us had to write like Tennyson, or Longfellow, orBrowning, she never would write like any one but herself.

I remember very well the lodging over a corner of Fourth Avenue and somedowntown street where I visited these winning and gifted people, andtasted the pleasure of their racy talk, and the hospitality of theirgood-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 theyset each other on to one wild flight of wit after another, and again Ibathed my delighted spirit in the atmosphere of a realm where for thetime at least no

"——rumor of oppression or defeat, Of unsuccessful or successful war,"

could penetrate. I liked the Stoddards because they were frankly not ofthat Bohemia which I disliked so much, and thought it of no promise orvalidity; 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 ofthat than Lamb was of India House. He belonged to that better worldwhere there is no interest but letters, and which was as much like heavenfor me as anything I could think of.

The meetings with the Stoddards repeated themselves when I came back tosail from New York, early in November. Mixed up with the cordialpleasure 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 forlong afterwards the squalidest in the world. The last night I saw myfriends they told me of the tragedy which had just happened at the campin the City Hall Park. Fitz James O'Brien, the brilliant young Irishmanwho had dazzled us with his story of "The Diamond Lens," and frozen ourblood with his ingenious tale of a ghost—"What was It"—a ghost thatcould be felt and heard, but not seen—had enlisted for the war, andrisen 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 infractionof discipline, and it was uncertain what the end would be. He wasacquitted, however, and it is known how he afterwards died of lockjawfrom 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 theimpressions of the first. Again I saw the Fieldses in their home; againthe Autocrat in his, and Lowell now beneath his own roof, beside thestudy fire where I was so often to sit with him in coming years. Atdinner (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 thepainter had to go to Venice and follow up Ruskin's work there in a bookof his own. But he would not let me feel very guilty, and I will notpretend that I had any personal regret for my good fortune.

The place was given me perhaps because I had not nearly so many othergifts as he who lost it, and who was at once artist, critic, journalist,traveller, and eminently each. I met him afterwards in Rome, which thepowers bestowed upon him instead of Venice, and he forgave me, though Ido not know whether he forgave the powers. We walked far and long overthe Campagna, and I felt the charm of a most uncommon mind in talk whichcame out richest and fullest in the presence of the wild nature which heloved and knew so much better than most other men. I think that the bookhe would have written about Venice is forever to be regretted, and I donot at all console myself for its loss with the book I have writtenmyself.

At Lowell's table that day they spoke of what sort of winter I shouldfind in Venice, and he inclined to the belief that I should want a firethere. On his study hearth a very brisk one burned when we went back toit, and kept out the chill of a cold easterly storm. We looked throughone of the windows at the rain, and he said he could remember standingand looking out of that window at such a storm when he was a child; forhe was born in that house, and his life had kept coming back to it. Hedied in it, at last.

In a lifting of the rain he walked with me down to the village, as healways called the denser part of the town about Harvard Square, and sawme aboard a horse-car for Boston. Before we parted he gave me twocharges: to open my mouth when I began to speak Italian, and to thinkwell of women. He said that our race spoke its own tongue with its teethshut, 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 thebest thing in the world, and a man was always the better for honoringwomen.

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