This was well worth while for me, desiring to see the Parliament of England in its most interesting moods, but something came later which I treasure more. While the conflict proceeded, in his place near the mace but a yard or two distant from the conspicuous figure sat Gladstone. I had seen him enter the House, a massive frame dressed in a dark frock-coat which hung handsomely upon his broad shoulders, with the strong head and face above, set in a lion-like mane of disordered hair. He sat unmoved and quiet throughout the conflict as he might have done at a ladies' tea-party, but now he rose to speak. At once complete silence pervaded the Chamber. I believe I have never seen so impressive an exhibition of the power of a great personality. Foes as well as friends waited almost breathless for the words that were to come. It was a time of crisis. He had just met defeat. What could the discredited leader say?

He began in a voice scarcely above a whisper, though in the silence it was distinctly audible, but the tones strengthened and deepened as he proceeded. His audience hung upon his every word, and so he discoursed for half an hour. It was not a great speech,—a series of calm, unimpassioned statements in which clearness of phrase and absolute abstention from aggressive attack upon his opponents were the most marked characteristics. It was courteous toward friend and foe, and foes no less than friends received each clear-cut sentence with attention most respectful. I was a bit disappointed not to see the old lion aroused and in his grandeur. But it is a thing to prize that I witnessed a manifestation made in his full strength and in the acme of his dominance. It was worth while to see that even in no great mood, the force of his leadership was recognised and reserve power of the man fully felt. Like every Achilles, Gladstone was held by the heel when dipped. One may well feel that he came short as a theologian. The scholars slight his Homeric disquisitions. Consistency was a virtue which he probably too often scouted, but his high purpose, his spotlessness of spirit, and strong control of men no one can gainsay. In the slang of the street of that time he was the "G.O.M.," the Grand Old Man as well to those who fought him as to those who loved him. An impressive incident of the session occurred in the address of the "Mover of the Queen's Speech." The orator in brilliant court attire, a suit of plum-coloured velvet with full wig and small-clothes which seemed almost the only bit of colour in the soberly, sometimes rather shabbily, dressed assemblage, a costume which through long tradition attaches to the function which he discharged, prefaced his remarks with this tribute: "However we may differ from the honourable member for Midlothian, we are all willing to admit that he is the most illustrious of living Englishmen." In spite of the general bitterness of the tumultuous controversy, one felt that there lay beneath it all a certain fine magnanimity. Both Liberal and Tory believed in the substantial patriotism and good purpose of the adversary as a fundamental concession and that all were seeking the best welfare of England. The differences regarded only the expedients which were proper for the moment. One could see that foes furious in the arena might at the same time be closest personal friends. It was not a riddle that in the tea-rooms and the smoking-rooms Greek and Trojan could sit together in friendly tete-a-tete, or that such incidents could occur as the genial congratulations extended by Gladstone to Joseph Chamberlain over the fine promise of his son Austin Chamberlain making his debut in Parliament; congratulations extended when the two statesmen were at swords' points,—a friendly talk as it were, through helmet bars when the slash was at the sharpest.

As I went home that night, through the streets of London, my mind and heart were full. My special studies at the moment were familiarising me with what lay behind the scene which I had just beheld. In similar fashion in the days of Edward I. and Simon De Montfort, the Commons of England, then struggling up, had wrestled in the narrow Chapter House. And so they had fought in the Lancastrian time; and after the Tudor incubus had been lifted off. So under the Stuarts had the wrangling proceeded from which came at length the "Petition of Right." Substituting the doublet and the steeple hat for their modern equivalents, the spectacle of the Long Parliament must have been very similar. Speaker Lenthall no doubt shouted "Order! Order!" as did his successor Speaker Peel, while Pym, Hampden, Cromwell, and Vane passionately inveighed against Prelacy and the "Man of Blood," as I had just heard the Radicals of the Victorian era overwhelm with diatribe the obstructors of the popular will. Then, during the subsoiling which the land, growing arid and worthless through mediaeval blight, underwent in 1832 and after, when the Reform Bill and its successors, like deeply penetrating plows, threw to the surface much that was unsightly, yet full of potentialities for good, the spot was the same. The conditions and the environment looking at it in the large were not widely different, the ancient Anglo-Saxon freedom struggling ever for its foothold as the centuries lapse, now precariously uncertain as Privilege and Prerogative push hotly, now fixed and strong in great moments of triumph; and the end is not yet. In the earlier time the destinies of America were closely interlocked with England and came up no less for decision in the great arena at Westminster. The destinies of the two peoples are scarcely less interlocked at the present moment. We are gravitating toward closer brotherhood, and the thoughtful American sees reason to study with the deepest interest each passage of arms in the ancient memorable arena.

* * * * *

I saw in Germany in 1870, usually through the good offices of Bancroft, our minister, the most eminent historians of that day. Giesebrecht and von Raumur were no longer living, but men were still in the foreground to the full as illustrious. Heidelberg in those days was relatively a more conspicuous university than at present. Its great men remain to it, though the process of absorption was beginning which at last carried the more distinguished lights to Berlin. The lovely little town, whose streets for nearly six hundred years have throbbed with the often boisterous life of the student population, is at its best in the spring and early summer. The Neckar ripples tumultuously into the broad Rhine plain, from which towers to the height of two thousand feet the romantic Odenwald. From some ruin of ancient watch-tower or cloister on the height, entrancing views spread out, the landscape holding the venerable towns of Worms and Speyer, each with its cathedral dominating the clustered dwellings, while the lordly Rhine pours its flood northward—a stream of gold when in the late afternoon it glows in the sunset. The old castle stands on its height, more beautiful in its decay, with ivy clinging about the broken arches, and the towers wrecked by the powder-bursts of ancient wars, than it could ever have been when unshaken.

Among the professors at Heidelberg, von Treitschke was one of the most eminent, and it was my privilege one day to hear him lecture on a theme which stirred him—the battle of Leipsic, the great Voelkerschlacht of 1813, when Germany cruelly clipped the pinions of the Napoleonic eagle. The hall was crowded with young men, corps-studenten being especially numerous, robust youths in caps and badges, and many of the faces were patched and scarred from duels in the Hirsch-Gasse. Von Treitschke, a dark, energetic figure, was received with great respect. Deafness, from which he suffered, affected somewhat his delivery. He told the story of the great battle, the frantic effort against combined Europe of the crippled French, the defection of the Saxons in the midst of the fight, the final driving of Napoleon across the Elster, the death of Poniatowski and the retreat to France. His voice was a deep, sonorous monotone and every syllable was caught eagerly by his auditors. They and the speaker were thoroughly at one in their intense German feeling. It was a celebration of triumph of the Fatherland. The significance of it all was not apparent, that sunny spring morning, but we were on the eve of a catastrophe which apparently no one foreboded; Metz, Gravelotte, and Sedan were only a few months away. The fire which I saw burning so hot in the souls of both speaker and hearers was part of the conflagration destined to consume widely and thoroughly before the summer closed.

Ernst Curtius was probably the most distinguished Hellenist of his time. He had studied the Greeks on their own soil and gone with German thoroughness into their literature, history, and art. He had excellent powers of presentment, wrote exhaustively and yet attractively and won early recognition. He was selected for the post of tutor to the Crown Prince, an honour of the highest. The Crown Prince, afterwards Emperor Frederick, held him in high regard and in 1870 his position in the world of scholars was of the best. I had the honour to pay him a visit in his home one pleasant Sunday afternoon in company with Bancroft. I remember Bancroft's crisp German enunciation as he presented me; "Ich stelle Ihnen einen Amerikaner vor," and he mentioned my name. I bowed and felt my hand grasped cordially in a warm, well-conditioned palm, while a round, genial face beamed good-naturedly. The interview was in the Professor's handsome garden, his accomplished wife and daughters were of the party, and I remember Maiwein with pretzels on a lawn with rose-bushes close beside and music coming through the open windows of the house. The hospitality was graceful, there was no profound talk but only pleasant chatter. The daughters were glad to have a chance to try their English and I was glad for the moment to slip out of the foreign bond and disport myself for their benefit in my vernacular, but the Professor needed no practice. His English was quite adequate, as, on the other hand, the German of Bancroft was well in hand.

"What other university people would you like to see?" said Bancroft to me one day. I mentioned von Ranke, Lepsius, and Mommsen as men whose names were familiar, whose faces I should like to look upon.

"Find out the sprech-stunden of these men," said Bancroft to his secretary, and presently a slip was put into my hand containing the hours at which I could be conveniently received. Following the direction, I was one day admitted to the library of von Ranke, a plain apartment walled by books from floor to ceiling, with a desk well-worn by days and nights of work. As I awaited his entrance the facts of his career were vivid in my mind. He was a man of seventy-five and had been a scholar almost from his cradle. He was known to me particularly through his history of the popes, which was and perhaps is still the judicial authority with regard to the line of pontiffs, but that was only one book among many. He belonged to a class of which Germany has been prolific, whose consciences assault them if they let their pens lie idle, and who have no recourse in self-defence but building about themselves a barricade of books. After researches in various fields, von Ranke now was undertaking a history of the world, with no thought apparently of a probable touch from the dart of death in the near future; and he did indeed live until nearly ninety and long produced a volume a year.

He entered presently from an inner room, rather a short, well-rounded figure with a face marked by a clear eye and much vivacity. He conversed well in English and was curious about American education and offered, rather ludicrously, I remember, to exchange the publications of the University of Berlin with those of the little fresh-water college in which I was at that time a young teacher. Could the scholar be aiming a sly sarcastic hit at the bareness of our educational outposts in the West? But no, his frank look and voice showed that he was unaware of the real conditions. The talk was not long, there was a hearty expression of regard for Mr. Bancroft who was fully accepted by the German learned world as one of their Gelehrten, trained as he had been in youth in their schools, and in that day our best-known historian. I bowed myself out respectfully from the presence of the little man and sincerely hope that the merit of his great history is in no way abated because I took a half-hour of his time.

I met Lepsius, the great Egyptian scholar, one afternoon in his garden, a hale, straight man of sixty with abundant grey hair surmounting a fine forehead, with blue eyes full of penetration behind his spectacles. I had little knowledge of the subject he had studied so profoundly and almost laughed outright when his pretty daughter asked me if I had read her father's translation of the Book of the Dead. Of von Ranke's themes I thought I knew something and was more at ease with him, as with Mommsen whom I met about the same time.

Theodor Mommsen, more than any other, forty years ago, was the leading historian of Germany. He began his career as a student of law, in the antiquities of which he became thoroughly versed. In particular Justinian and the Roman authorities, among whom he stands as chief, were the objects of Mommsen's research. From jurisprudence he passed to the study of general history, and of the most interesting period of Rome he absorbed into his mind all the lore that has survived. This he digested and set forth in a monumental work, which, translated into English, has been, in the English-speaking world of scholars at least, as familiar as household words. At a still later time he was an active striver in the political agitations of his day.

I sent in my card to Mommsen with some trepidation and was at once admitted. I found him sitting at leisure among his books and Bancroft's introduction brought to pass for me a genial welcome. He was a man not large in frame with dark eyes, and black hair streaked with grey. No doubt but that like German scholars in general he could talk English, but he stuck to German and I was rather glad he did so; I could take him in better as he discoursed fluently in his mother-tongue. Mommsen was a man of sharp corners who often in his political career brought grief to adversaries who tried to handle him without gloves. I was fortunate in catching him in a softer mood and witnessed an amiability with which he was not usually credited. His little daughters were in the room, pretty children with whom the father played with evident pride and joy, interrupting the conversation to caress the curly pates, and trotting them on his knee. He put keen questions to me as regards America, showing that while busy with Caesar and the on-goings of the ancient forum he had been wide awake also to modern happenings. He expressed much regard for Bancroft and praised Grant for selecting as minister to Germany a personality so agreeable to European scholars. He told me of the jubilee of Bancroft which was about to be celebrated with marked honours. Fifty years before Bancroft had "made his doctor" at Goettingen, one of the earliest Americans to achieve that distinction, and the German universities meant to show emphatically their recognition of his merit. The celebration afterwards took place, not interrupted by the warlike uproar in which the land was about to be involved. A proud honour indeed for the American minister. It was a noteworthy occasion to talk thus familiarly with one of the most illustrious scholars of the time, and I recall fondly the pleasant details of the picture.

At Heidelberg the February before I had had an interview with Schenkel, then the leading theologian of that university. Him I found in his Studir-Zimmer without fire on a cold day. He seemed to scorn the use of the Kachelofen, the great porcelain stove, and was wrapped from head to foot in a heavy woollen robe which enveloped him and was prolonged about his head into a kind of cowl. He presented a figure closely like the portraits of some old reformers heavily mantled in a garb approaching the monkish Tracht which they had forsaken. It seemed out of character for Schenkel, for he was an avowed liberal and particularly far away from old standards, but the sharp winter drove a champion of heterodoxy into this outer conformity with the old. In the case of the Berlin Gelehrten, however, the mediaeval dress was quite discarded. I chanced to see them in the spring with their windows wide open to the perfume of gardens and songs of nightingales, and in the case of Mommsen, my picture of his environment has traits of geniality, for he sat in light summer attire, his face aglow with fatherly impulses as he played in the soft air with his children.

One of the most interesting men whom I met in Berlin was Hermann Grimm, then just rising among the characters of mark, but best known at that time as the son of the famous Wilhelm Grimm and the nephew of Jakob Grimm,—the "Brothers Grimm," whose names through their connection with the fairy tales are stamped in the memories not only of men and women, but of children throughout the civilised world. The "Brothers Grimm," it must be remembered, were scholars of the profoundest. The Teutonic folk-lore engaged them not simply or mainly as a source of amusement, but as a subject proper for deep investigation. They painfully gathered in out-of-the-way nooks from the lips of old grandames in chimney corners and wandering singers in obscure villages, the survivals of the primitive superstitions of the people. These they subjected to scientific study as illustrating the evolution of society, a deep persistent search with results elaborately systematised, of which the delightful tales so widely circulated are only a by-product. Aside from their service in the field of folk-lore they grappled with many another mighty task. The vast dictionary, in which German words are not only set down in their present meaning but followed throughout every stage of their etymology with their relations to their congeners in other tongues indefatigably traced out, is a marvel of erudition. Theirs also was the great Deutsche Grammatik, a philosophical setting forth of the German tongue in its connection with its far-spreading Aryan affinities. The "Brothers Grimm" were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their deaths they are not divided. Jakob was never married. Wilhelm was married, the child of the union being the distinguished man with whom it was my fortune to talk.

They worked together affectionately until far into old age, and I have described their graves in the Matthai Kirchhof where they lie side by side.

I found Hermann Grimm in the study which had been the workshop through long years of his father and uncle. He was a handsome man in his vigorous years and had married the daughter of Bettine von Arnim, the Bettine of Goethe. It is not strictly right to class him as a historian. He was poet, playwright, critic, and novelist, perhaps mainly these, but soon after, in his position as a professor in the university, he was to produce his well-known Vorlesungen ueber Goethe, a work which though mainly critical, at the present time is a biography of conspicuous merit, which envisages the events of a famous epoch. I may, therefore, properly include him here, though the wide range of his activities makes it difficult to place him accurately. It paved the way for our interview that I knew Ralph Waldo Emerson, of whom he was, in Germany, the special admirer and student. He had just translated Emerson into German and sat at the feet of the Concord sage, infused by his inspiration. Hermann Grimm had never seen Emerson, and listened eagerly to such details as I could give him of his personality. He dwelt with enthusiasm upon passages in poems and essays by which he had been especially kindled, and hung upon my account of the voice and refined outward traits of the teacher whom he so reverenced. I afterwards procured a fine photograph of Hermann Grimm which I sent to Emerson. A kind letter from him, which I still treasure, let me know that I had put Emerson deeply in my debt; up to that time he had never seen a portrait of his German disciple, though the two men had been in affectionate correspondence. At a later time they met and cemented a friendship which was very dear to both. Hermann Grimm showed me with pride the relics of his father and uncle; the rows of well-thumbed volumes; the wellscored Heften over which their hands had moved; their inkstands and pens; the rough arm-chairs and tables where they had sat. I think a trace from the smoke of their pipes and midnight lamp still adhered to the ceiling, and possibly cobwebs still hung in the corners of the bookcases which had been there from an ancient day.

Quaint portraits of the "Brothers Grimm" at work in their caps and rough dressing-gowns were at hand, but Hermann Grimm had rather the appearance of a well-groomed man of the world. His coat was fashionable, his abundant hair and flowing beard were carefully trimmed. He was not a recluse, though faithful to his heredity and devoted mainly to scholarly research. He was at ease in the clubs and also at Court and enjoyed the give and take of a social hour with friends.



CHAPTER VIII

POETS AND PROPHETS

When, in 1851, I arrived as a freshman in Cambridge, I encountered on my first visit to the post-office a figure standing on the steps, which at once drew my attention. It was that of a man in his best years, handsome, genial of countenance, and well-groomed. A silk hat surmounted his well-barbered head and visage, a dark frock-coat was buttoned about his form, his shoes were carefully polished and he twirled a little cane. To my surprise he bowed to me courteously as I glanced up. I was very humble, young westerner that I was in the scholastic town, and puzzled by the friendly nod. The man was no other than Longfellow, and in his politeness to me he was only following his invariable custom of greeting in a friendly way every student he met. His niceness of attire rather amused the boys of those days who, however, responded warmly to his friendliness and loved him much. This story was current. He had for some time been a famous man and was subjected to much persecution from sight-seers which he bore good-naturedly. Standing one day at the Craigie House gate he was accosted by a lank backwoodsman: "Say, stranger, I have come from way back; kin you tell me how I kin git to see the great North American poet?" Longfellow, entering into the humour of the situation, gave to the stranger his ready bow and responded: "Why, I am the great North American poet," at the same time inviting him into the garden with its pleasant outlook across the Charles toward the Brookline Hills. It would be quite unjust to think that there was any conceit in his remark, it was all a joke, but the thoughtless boys of those days took it up, commemorating it in a song, a parody of the air Trancadillo.

"Professor Longfellow is an excellent man, He scratches off verses as fast as he can, With a hat on one whisker and an air that says go it,— He says I'm the great North American poet. Hey, fellow, bright fellow, Professor Longfellow, He's the man that wrote Evangeline, Professor Longfellow."

This was my first introduction to college music and I often bore a quavering tenor as we shouted it out in our freshman enthusiasm. The ridicule, however, was only on the surface; we thoroughly liked and respected the genial poet and it was a great sorrow to us that he resigned during our course, although his successor was no other than James Russell Lowell, whose star was then rising rapidly with the Biglow Papers. It was our misfortune that the succession was not close. We had two professors of modern literature, both famous men, but the usual calamity befell us which attaches to those who have two stools to sit upon. We fell to the ground. We had a little of Longfellow and a little of Lowell, the gap in the succession unfortunately opening for us. I did, however, hear Longfellow lecture and it is a delightful memory. His voice was rich and resonant, bespeaking refinement, and it was particularly in reading poetry that it told. I recall a discussion of German lyrics, the criticism interspersed with many readings from the poets noted, which was deeply impressive. At one time he quoted the "Shepherd's Song" from Faust, "Der Schaefer putzte sich zum Tanz." This he gave with exquisite modulation, dwelling upon the refrain at the end of each stanza, "Juchhe, Juchhe, Juchheise, heise, he, so ging der Fiedelbogen!" This he recited with such effect that one imagined he heard the touch of the bow upon the strings of the 'cello with the mellow, long-drawn cadence. He read to us, too, with great feeling, the simple lyric, Die wandelnde Glocke; upon me at least this made so deep an impression that soon after having the class poem to write, I based upon it my composition, devoting to it far too assiduously the best part of my last college term. I have always felt that I was near the incubation of Longfellow's best-known poem, perhaps his masterpiece, the all-pervading Hiawatha. The college chapel of those days was in University Hall and is now the Faculty Room, a beautiful little chamber which sufficed sixty years ago for the small company which then composed the student body. At either end above the floor-space was a gallery. One fronted the pulpit, curving widely and arranged with pews for the accommodation of the professors and their families. Opposite this was the choir loft over the preacher's head, a smaller gallery containing the strident old-fashioned reed organ, and seats for the dozen or so who made up the college choir. Places in the choir were much sought after, for a student could stretch his legs and indulge in a comfortable yawn unmolested by the scrutiny of the proctors who kept a sharp watch on their brethren on the settees below. The professors brought their families, and the daughters were sometimes pretty. Behind the green curtains of the choir loft one could scan to his heart's content quite unobserved the beauties at their devotions. The college choir of my time contained sometimes boys who had interesting careers. The organist who, while he manipulated the keys, growled at the same time an abysmal bass, afterward became a zealous Catholic, dying in Rome as Chamberlain in the Vatican of Pope Leo XIII. Horace Howard Furness was the principal stay of the treble, his clear, strong voice carrying far; my function was to afford to him a rather uncertain support. My voice was not of the best nor was my ear quite sure. I ventured once to criticise a fellow-singer as being off the pitch; he retorted that I was tarred from the same stick and he proved it true, but there we sang together above the heads of venerable men who preached. They were good men, sometimes great scholars, but the ears they addressed were not always willing. A somewhat machine-like sermoniser who, it was irreverently declared, ran as if wound up but sometimes slipped a cog, had been known to pray "that the intemperate might become temperate, the intolerant tolerant, the industrious dustrious." Longfellow always came with his beautiful wife, the heroine of Hyperion, whose tragic fate a few years later shocked the world. He used to sit withdrawn into the corner of his high-backed pew, separated from us in the choir loft by only a short intervening space, motionless, absorbed in some far-away thought. Though his eyes were sometimes closed I knew that he was not asleep; what could be the topic on which his meditation was so intent? Not long after Hiawatha appeared, and I shall always believe that in those Sunday musings in the quiet little chapel while the service droned on he was far away.

"In the land of the Dakotas, By the stream of Laughing Water."

Some years after came the affliction which. cast a deep shadow upon his happy successful life. His wife one evening in light summer dress was writing a letter, and, lighting a candle to seal it, dropped the match among her draperies. The flame spread at once and she expired in agony; Longfellow was himself badly burned in his effort to extinguish the flames and always carried the scars. I did not see him in those years but have heard that his mood changed, he was no longer careful and debonair but often melancholy and dishevelled. Yet the sweetness of his spirit persisted to the end. The critics of late have been busy with Longfellow. His gift was inferior, they say, and his sentiment shallow. Let them carp as they will, he holds, as few poets have done, the hearts of men and women; still more he holds the hearts of children, and the life of multitudes continues to be softened and beautified by the gentle power of what he has written. Two or three years since it was my good fortune to be present at the celebration in Sanders Theatre of the centenary of Longfellow's birth. There was fine encomium from distinguished men, but to me the charming part of the occasion was the tribute of the school children who thronged upon the stage and sang with fresh, pure voices, the Village Blacksmith, the simple lines set to as simple music, "Under the spreading chestnut-tree, the village smithy stands." In my time the old tree still cast its shade over the highway which had scarcely yet ceased to be a village street. The smithy, too, was at hand and the clink of hammer upon anvil often audible; the blacksmith, I suppose had gone to his account. During the children's performance a voice noticeably clear and fine sounded in the high upper gallery, a happy suggestion of the voice of the mother singing in paradise as the daughter sang below. Honour to the poet who, while so many singers of our time vex us with entanglements metaphysical and exasperating, had thought always for the simplest hearts and attuned his lyre for them!

When I was in the Divinity School we organised a boat club, a proceeding looked upon askance by sedate doctors of divinity and church-goers who thought the young men would do better to stick to their Hebrew, but T.W. Higginson exclaimed that now he had some hope for the school. It did take time. It was a long walk from Divinity Hall to the river nor was the exercise brief, I have found rarely more rapturous pleasure than in the strenuous pulls I had on the Charles, and I witnessed the development of much sturdy manliness among those who, forsaking for a time their hermeneutics and homilies, gave themselves to the outdoor sport. Our club included a number of law-students and a young instructor or two; among the latter Charles W. Eliot, then with his foot on the first round of the ladder which he has climbed so high. Eliot pulled a capital stroke; my place was at the bow oar where a rather light weight was required who at the same time had head and strength enough to steer the boat among the perplexing currents. Our excursions were sometimes long. Once we went down the Back Bay, thence around Charlestown up the Mystic to Medford, during which trip I steered the Orion without a single rub, going and coming under I think some forty draw-bridges. I have scarcely ever received a compliment in which I took more pride than when Eliot at the end, as we stood sweating and happy at the boathouse, told me that I had proved myself a good pilot. One evening, I remember, the sun had gone down and the surface of Back Bay perfectly placid at full tide glowed with rich tints; the boats were shooting numerously over the surface, cutting it sharply, the cut presently closing behind in a faint cicatrice that extended far. I thought of the beautiful simile in the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, just then appearing in the Atlantic. Holmes had seen such things too, and said that they were like the wounds of the angels during the wars in heaven as described in Paradise Lost, gashes deep in the celestial bodies but closing instantly. In those years Dr. Holmes was himself an enthusiastic oarsman and that night whom should we encounter alone in his little skiff but the Autocrat himself, out for his pleasure; he was plainly recognisable, though in most informal athletic dress, and as we sped past him a few rods away, Eliot from the stroke shouted a greeting over the water. "Why, Charlie," came ringing back the Autocrat's voice, "I did not know you were old enough to be out in a boat!" Charlie was old enough, in fact our best oar, and took pleasure in demonstrating his maturity to the family friend who had seen him grow up.

Dr. Holmes was one of the most versatile of men. We saw him here at home with the oar in the open. He was an excellent professor of anatomy, renowned for his insight and readiness in adapting means to ends in the difficult science where his main work lay. Literature was merely his hobby, and he was wit, critic, philosopher, historian, poet, good in all. Many a brilliant man has come to wreck through being too versatile. "Ne sutor ultra crepidam" is undoubtedly a good motto for the ordinary man, but sticking to his last was something to which Dr. Holmes could never bring himself, and in a marvellous way his abounding genius proved masterful in a score of varying fields. But I have no purpose here to discuss or account for Dr. Holmes. He was a delightful phenomenon in the life of the nineteenth century, with whom I chanced to be somewhat in touch, and it is for me only to note a bit of the scintillation which I saw brilliantly diffused. He was frequently under my gaze, a low-statured, nimble figure, a vivacious, always cheerful face with a pronounced chin, seemingly ever on the brink of some outburst of merriment. I have heard him described as an "incarnate pun," but that hardly did him justice; punster he was, but he had a wit of a far higher kind and moods of grave dignity. His literary fame in those years was only incipient, his better work was just then beginning. The world appreciated him as a humourist of the lighter kind and capable, too, of spirited verse like Old Ironsides; it was not understood that he possessed profounder powers and could stir men to the depths. I have a vivid image of him at a banquet of the Harvard Alumni Association of which he was Second Vice-President, clothed in white summer garb, standing in a chair that his little figure might be in evidence in the crowd, merrily rattling off a string of amusing verses.

"I thank you, Mr. President, You kindly broke the ice, Virtue should always go before, I'm only second vice."

These were the opening lines and the audience responded with roars to the inimitable fun-maker. In later years we learned to accord him a higher appreciation. The Autocrat and the Professor at the Breakfast Table have deep and acute thought as well as wit, and what one of our poets has produced a grander or more solemn lyric than the Chambered Nautilus? I dwell with emotion upon the funeral of Lowell, in itself a touching occasion, because it so happened that I saw on that day three great men for the last time, Justin Winsor, Phillips Brooks, and Dr. Holmes. I stood on the stairs at the rear of Appleton Chapel as the audience came down the aisle at the close. The coffin of Lowell rested for a moment on the grass under its wreaths, President Eliot and Holmes walked side by side; I have a distinct image of the countenance of Holmes as they came slowly out. It was no longer a young face but it had all the old vivacity and even at the moment was cheerful rather than serious; it had not, however, the cheerfulness of a man who looks lightly on life, but that of one whose philosophy enables him to conquer sorrow and look beyond, the face of a man who might write a triumphant hymn even in an atmosphere of death. These lines ran in my thought:

"Build thee more stately mansions, oh my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low vaulted past, Let each new temple, nobler than the last Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine out-grown shell By life's unresting sea!"

The fame of James Russell Lowell, too, in these years was incipient. As a writer he had shown himself to be elegantly schooled, but in the Fable for Critics and the Biglow Papers, he had burst forth as a most effective and slashing satirist. His culture was closely and perfectly fitted, but when scratched, revealing in full proportions the "Whang-doodle" Yankee. The whang, however, handling with all the deftness in the world the broadest and subtlest themes, and the doodle standing for a patriotism of the noblest. Those who came into close connection with him say that he grew morbidly fastidious, shrinking from coarse contacts and was happy at last only in a delicate environment. When in health, nevertheless, he was a Yankee of the truest, though sublimated by his genius and superb accomplishments. I know a little inn far away among the hills on whose porch half concealed by the honeysuckle, Lowell is said often to have sat listening to the dialect of the farmers who "vanned" and "vummed" as they disputed together in the evenings after the chores were done. Lowell had the dialect in his very bones, and loved it, but took pains to confirm his knowledge of it by studying on the sod.

"An' yit I love the unhighschooled ways Ol' farmers hed when I was younger— Their talk wuz meatier and would stay, While book-froth seems to whet your hunger. For puttin' in a downright lick 'twixt humbug's eyes, there's few can metch it. An' then it helves my thoughts as slick, ez stret grained hickory does a hetchet."

On one occasion I heard Lowell tell a story in which he surrendered himself fully to the rustic heredity that was in him, flinging aside the accretions of culture. "It is strange," he said, "how even the moral sense of men may become warped. In a certain Cape Cod village, for instance, it had long been the custom to profit from the wrecks that happened upon the dangerous shore, until at last the setting of false lights and the appropriation of the lost cargoes became a legitimate business. One Sunday a congregation at church (they were rigid Puritans and punctilious about worship) was startled by the news that a West India ship loaded with sugar was going to pieces on the rocks near by. The birds of prey flocked to make prize of the booty. A good deacon bagged a large quantity of sugar, piling it on the shore while he went for his oxen to carry it home. The bad boys, however, resolved to play a trick on the deacon; they emptied out the sugar and filled the bags with clean, brown sand, which counterfeited well. This the deacon laboriously carted to his barn, and only came to a sense of his loss when his wife at night attempted to sweeten his tea from the bags. This brought out from the deacon the following remark: 'I declare, when I felt that 'ar sand agrittin' between my teeth, I don't know but it was wicked, but I e'en a'most wished that there wouldn't never be another wreck!'" Lowell told the story with all the humour possible, rendering the deacon's remark with a twang and an emphatic dwelling on the double negative (a thing which Lowell believed we had suffered to drop out of polite speech unfortunately) with inimitable effect and most evident enjoyment. The substratum of the man was Yankee but probably no other of the stock has so enriched himself with the best of all lands and times. He had a most delicate sense of what was best worth while in all literatures and absorbed it to the full. One of the greatest mistakes I ever made was in neglecting to become a member of his class in Dante when the opportunity came to me. What an interpreter he was of the soul of the great Italian, and with what unerring instinct he penetrated to what was best in the sages and poets of the world everywhere! His own gifts as poet and thinker were of the finest, and they were set off with acquirements marvellous in their range and in the unerring precision with which they were selected. I recall him at a very impressive moment. Many regard Lowell's Commemoration Ode, read at the Commemoration in 1865 of the Harvard soldiers who had taken part in the Civil War, as the high-water mark of American poetry. Whether or not that claim is just I shall not debate, but it is a great composition and perhaps Lowell's best. The occasion was indeed a noble one. A multitude had collected in the college-yard and through it wound the brilliant procession of soldiers who had taken part in the war, marching to the drum and wearing for the last time the uniform in which they had fought. From Major-Generals and Admirals down to the high privates, all were in blue, and the sun glittered resplendent on epaulet and lace worn often by men who walked with difficulty, halting from old wounds. The exercises in the church, the singing of Luther's hymn, A Mighty Fortress is our God, the oration and the impressive prayer of Phillips Brooks were finished. The assembly collected under the great tent which filled the quadrangle formed by the street, Harvard and Hollis Halls and Holden Chapel. I sat at the corner by the side of Phillips Brooks. He was the Chaplain of the day and I had been honoured by a commission to speak for the rank and file. The speeches, though not always happy, preserved a good level of excellence. At length came Lowell. He stood with his back toward Hollis about midway of the space. He was then in his best years, brown-haired, dark-eyed, rather short-necked, with a full strong beard, his intellectual face, an Elizabethan face, surmounting a sturdy body. His manner was not impassioned, he read from a manuscript with distinctness which could be heard everywhere, but I do not recall that his face kindled or his voice trembled. Even in the more elevated passages, I think we hardly felt as he proceeded that it was the culmination of the day's utterances and that we were really then and there in an epoch-making event. Unfortunately for me my speech was yet to come and, unpractised as I was, I was uncomfortably nervous as to what I should say. I lost therefore the full effect of the masterpiece. One or two of the speakers on the programme had dropped out and behold it was my turn. The announcement of my name with a brief introduction from the chairman struck my ear, and it was for me to stand on my feet and do my best. My voice sounded out into the great space in which the echo of Lowell's was scarcely silent. I spoke for the rank and file and in my whole career of nearly eighty years it was perhaps the culminating moment, when fate placed me in a juxtaposition so memorable.

In 1857 I sent a poem to the Atlantic then just beginning under his editorship. My poem came back with the comment, "Hardly good enough, but the writer certainly deserves encouragement." This frost, though not unkind, nipped my budding aspirations in that direction. I hung my modest harp on the willows and have almost never since twanged the strings. At a later time in England I came into pleasant relations with Lowell and saw his tender side. His term as Minister to England had come to a close. He had just lost his wife and was in deep affliction, the sorrow telling upon his health, but he took kind thought for me and helped me zealously in my quest of materials for a considerable historical work. He enable me to approach august personages whom otherwise I could not have reached; in particular securing for me a great courtesy from the Duke of Cleveland, a descendant of Vane, who gave me carte blanche to visit Raby Castle in Durham, Vane's former home, a magnificent seat not usually open to visitors but which I saw thoroughly. I have already mentioned the funeral of Lowell. It took place on a lovely day in the August of 1891. The procession passed from Appleton Chapel to Mount Auburn, and I, hurrying on reached the open grave before the line arrived. It was a spot of great beauty in a dell below the pleasant Indian Ridge on which just above lies the grave of Longfellow. At a few rods' distance is the sunny bank where later was laid to rest Oliver Wendell Holmes. Close at hand to the grave of Lowell lay his gifted wife, Maria White who wrote the lovely poem "The Alpine Shepherd," and the three brilliant and intrepid nephews who were slain in the Civil War. The old horn-beams, quaint and unusual trees, stand sentry on either hand. I saw the coffin lowered. Standing just behind Phillips Brooks, I heard for the last time the voice of my boyhood friend reading with tenderness the burial service. One final experience remained for me on that day which I especially treasure. Leaving the cemetery I walked the short distance to the gate of Elmwood, the birthplace and always the home of Lowell. This spot he especially loved, he knew its trees, every one, and the birds and squirrels that came to visit them. I stood at the gate looking toward the old mansion aloof among the woods. I had often stood there and looked toward the house, but now it had a different aspect; usually its doors and windows were tightly closed, but now everything was wide open, the mourners had not returned to the house and at the moment no living being was visible. The windows and the portal looked out upon the late afternoon, in the dead silence; in the heightened feeling of the moment it seemed to me that the mansion had come to life, that it missed the fine spirit that had so lately flown forth from it, that with lids widely apart and distressful it looked forth into the great spacious heavens after a loved soul that had passed from it into the world beyond. It was only a dream of my excited fancy, but I shall always think of Elmwood as it was that afternoon.

I am so fortunate as to have a close association with the town of Concord. My first American ancestor, landing from his ship in 1635, went thither with the earliest settlers and established himself on the level at the west of the town, at that time I suppose the outmost Anglo-Saxon frontier of the Western continent. Seven generations of his descendants have lived in the town. I am in the eighth, and, though not native, and only transiently resident, I have a love for it and it is a town worth loving. It is fair by nature, pleasant hills rising among green levels and the placid river creeping toward the sea. It still maintains its vigorous town-meeting and holds well to the ancient traditions. The thirteen colonies made on its soil their first forcible resistance to British aggression and there is no village in America so associated with great men of letters. When a boy of ten in 1844 I was swapped with a cousin, he going for a year to western New York, while I went for a year to the house of my aunt in Concord, the ancient homestead out of which eighty years before my great-grandfather had gone with gun in hand to take his part with the Minute Men. Emerson had just become famous through Nature, Thoreau was then a young man quite unknown to fame. The Alcotts the year before had lived next door to my aunt, Louisa, a child of twelve, and her sisters the "Little Women" whom the world now knows so well. Close to the Battle Ground stood the two tall gate-posts behind which lay the "Old Manse" whose "Mosses" Hawthorne was just then preserving for immortality. With all these I then, or a little later, came into touch and I can tell how the figures looked as scanned by the eyes of a boy.

Thoreau in those days was known in the town as an irregular, eccentric spirit, rather hopeless for any practical purpose. He could make a good lead-pencil but having mastered the art he dropped it, preferring to lead a vagabond life, loitering on the river and in the woods, rather to the disquietude of the community, though he had a comfortable home cared for by his good mother and sister. He housed himself in a wigwam at Walden Pond and was suspected of having started from the brands of his camp a forest fire which had spread far. This strange man, rumour said, had written a book no copy of which had ever been sold. It described a week on the Concord and Merrimac rivers. The edition fell dead from the press, and all the books, one thousand or more, he had collected in his mother's house, a queer library of these unsold books which he used to exhibit to visitors laughing grimly over his unfortunate venture in the field of letters. My aunt sent me one day to carry a message to Mrs. Thoreau and my rap on her door was answered by no other man than this odd son who, on the threshold received my message. He stood in the doorway with hair which looked as if it had been dressed with a pine-cone, inattentive grey eyes, hazy with far-away musings, an emphatic nose and disheveled attire that bore signs of tramps in woods and swamps. Thinking of the forest fire I fancied he smelled of smoke and peered curiously up the staircase behind him hoping I might get a glimpse of that queer library all of one book duplicated one thousand times. The story went that his artless mother used to say that Emerson, when he talked, imitated Henry, and I well recall a certain slow hesitation and peculiar upward intonation which made me think of Emerson at whose house I had often been. The Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers found its public at last and I suppose a copy of the first edition, authenticated as having belonged to that queer library, would easily bring to-day in the market its weight in gold. Whether or not Thoreau deserves great fame the critics sometimes discuss. I heard a distinguished man say that he was greatly inferior to Gilbert White of Selbourne, and I myself feel that Lowell in some of his essays recording his study of the nature life at Elmwood equalled in fine insight, and surpassed in expression the observer at Concord. Then in these later years we have had John Muir and John Burroughs who cannot be set low, but among American writers Thoreau was the pioneer of nature-study. Audubon had preceded him but he worked mainly with the brush; to multitudes Thoreau opened the gate to the secrets of our natural environment. The subtle delicacy of the grass-blade, the crystals of the snowflake, the icicle, the marvel of the weird lines traced by the flocks of wild geese athwart the heavens as they migrated, these he watched and recorded with loving accuracy and sensitive poetic feeling as no one in our land before had done. I have thrown a stone upon the cairn at Walden Pond which has now grown so high through the tributes of his grateful admirers. I shall throw still others in grateful admiration if the opportunity comes to me.

Many years ago I used to feel that Louisa Alcott and I were in a certain way bracketed together. Both were children of Concord in a sense, she by adoption and I through the fact that it had been the home of my forbears for seven generations. We were nearly of the same age and simultaneously made our first ventures into the world of letters, taking the same theme, the Civil War. One phase of this she portrayed in her Hospital Sketches, another, I in my Colour Guard. So we started in the race together but Louisa soon distanced me, emerging presently into matchless proficiency in her books for children. I sometimes saw her after she had become famous when she was attuning sweetly the hearts of multitudes of children with her fine humanity. She was a stately handsome woman with a most gracious and unobtrusive manner. She mingled with her neighbours, one of the quietest members of the circle. Said a kinswoman of mine who lived within a few doors:

It is so hard to think of Louisa as being a distinguished personage; she sits down here with her knitting or brings over her bread to be baked in my oven as anybody might do, and chats about village matters, as interested over the engagements of the girls and sympathising with those in sorrow as if she had no broader interest.

She was indeed one of those who bore her honours meekly. I recall her vividly when she was well past youth, in the enjoyment of the substantial gains success had brought. In her childhood she had known pinching poverty, for her philosophic father could never exchange his lucubrations for bread and clothes, philosophising, however, none the less. But her success brought with it no flush, only an opportunity for her pleasant service. In these years my mood toward her had quite changed; at first I had thought of her as a competitor, perhaps as on my level. When I learned, however, that about that time she had been reading my History of German Literature with approval, I felt that I was greatly honoured, that a mind of high distinction had condescended to notice my pages. During the '80s when the "School of Philosophy" was holding its sessions in the rustic temple on the Lexington Road where her Orphic father was hierophant, it was rumoured that Louisa looked somewhat askance upon the sublimated discussions of the brotherhood that gathered. What was said was very wise, but far removed from what one finds in children's books, but Louisa was sometimes present, a dignified hostess to the strangers who came, taking her modest part among the women in the entertainment of the guests but never in the conclave as a participant. Alas! that she went so prematurely to her grave in "Sleepy Hollow"!

Hawthorne came into my consciousness when I was a boy of ten at school near the tall stone gate-posts immortalised by the great novelist as guarding the entrance to the Old Manse. The big gambrel-roofed building standing close to the Battle Ground as it stood on the 19th of April, 1775, was unpainted and weather-stained, the structure showing dark among the trees as one looked from the road. All the world knows it as described outside and in by its famous tenant. It is a shrine which may well evoke breathless interest. The ancient wainscoting, the ample low-studded rooms, the quaint fireplace, and at the rear toward the west the windows with their small panes on some of which Hawthorne made inscriptions. "Every leaf and twig is outlined against the sky," or words to that effect, "scratched with my wife's diamond ring"; here the sunset pours in gorgeously but there is more of shadow than sunlight about the Old Manse, and that is befitting for a dwelling with associations somewhat sombre. In later years Hawthorne occupied a house on the Lexington Road, new and modern, writing there some famous books in an upper study said to be accessible only through a trap-door, but the Old Manse was the appropriate home for him. It was there that his young genius produced its earlier fruit and it deserves to be particularly cherished. As a little child I went once with my father and mother to Brook Farm in West Roxbury, at the time when the community was most interesting. The famous disciples of Fourier were then, I suppose, for the most part present, Margaret Fuller, Hawthorne, George Ripley, George William Curtis, Charles A. Dana and the rest, but I was too young to take note of them. I recall only George Ripley, the head of the enterprise, in a rough working-blouse who welcomed us at the gate. My father and he were old friends and as supper-time came and the community gathered singly and in groups in the dining-hall from the fields and groves outside, he said to my father: "Your seat at the table will be next to Hawthorne, but I shall not introduce you, Mr. Hawthorne prefers not to be introduced to people." It was a cropping out of the strange aloofness for which Hawthorne was marked. He could do his part in the day's work, be a man among men, dicker with the importers at the Salem Custom House and as Consul at Liverpool, rub effectively with the traders, but his choice was always for solitude, he liked to go for days without speaking to a human being and to live withdrawn from the contacts of the world, even from his neighbours and family. Probably it was because he was so thoroughly a recluse that I recall seeing Hawthorne only once, although he was in the village in whose streets I was constantly passing. Driving one day on the road near his home a companion exclaimed, "There goes Mr. Hawthorne on the sidewalk!" I put my head forward quickly to get a glimpse from the cover of the carriage of so famous a personage, and at the roadside was a fine, tall, athletic person with handsome features. My quick movement forward in the carriage he took for a bow and he returned it raising his hat with gentlemanly courtesy, it was all through a mistake that I got this bow from Hawthorne but all the same I treasure it. A sister-in-law of his, who was often an inmate of his home, told me that Hawthorne really believed in ghosts. It will be remembered that in the introduction to the Mosses from an Old Manse, Hawthorne speaks of the spectre of an ancient minister who haunted it, the rustling of his silken gown was sometimes heard in the hallways. My friend attributed this passage to something which happened during one of her visits. She sat one evening with her sister and Hawthorne in the low-studded living-room, and, as was often the case, in silence. She thought she heard in the entry the rustling of silk, it might have been a whistling of the wind or the swaying of a drapery, but it seemed to her like the sweeping along of a train of silk. At the moment she thought that Mrs. Hawthorne was passing through the entry, but rousing herself from her abstraction she saw her sister sitting quiet and remembered that she had been so sitting for a considerable interval. "Why, I distinctly heard," said she, "the rustling of a silk gown in the entry!" The sisters rose and went into the hallway for an explanation, but all was dark and still, no draperies were stirring, no wind whistled, and they returned to their chairs, talking for a moment over the mysterious sound, then relapsing into their former quiet. Hawthorne meantime sat dreaming, apparently not noticing the light ripple in the quiet of the evening; but not long after—when my friend read the Mosses from an Old Manse, she found that the incident had made an impression upon him and that he interpreted the sound as a ghostly happening. She told me another story which she said she had directly from Hawthorne. During a sojourn in Boston he often went to the reading-room of the Athenaeum and was particularly interested to see a certain newspaper. This paper he often found in the hands of an old man and he was sometimes annoyed because the old man retained it so long. The old man lived in a suburb and for some reason was equally interested with himself in that paper. This went on for weeks until one day Hawthorne, entering the room, found the paper as usual in the hands of this man. Hawthorne sat down and waited patiently as often before until the old man had finished. After a time the man rose, put on his hat and overcoat, and took his departure. As the door of the reading-room closed behind him Hawthorne took up the paper which lay in disorder as the man had left it, when, lo and behold, his eye fell in the first column on a notice of the old man's death. He was at the moment lying dead in his house in the suburbs and yet Hawthorne had beheld him but a moment before in his usual guise reading the paper in the Athenaeum! My friend said that Hawthorne told her the story quietly without attempt at explanation and she believed his thought was that he had actually seen a ghost. The readers of Hawthorne will recall passages which are consonant with the idea that Hawthorne believed in ghosts.

No other author has affected me quite so profoundly as did Hawthorne. The period of my development from childhood through youth to maturity was coeval with the time of his literary activities. The first vivid impression I received from books came from his stories for children, Grandfather's Chair, Famous Old People, and The Liberty Tree; when somewhat older I read The Rill from the Town Pump and Little Annie's Ramble, still later came the weird creations in which Hawthorne's expanding genius manifested itself, such as The Minister's Black Veil, Rappaccini's Daughter, and The Celestial Railroad. And not less in young manhood I was awed and absorbed in the great works of his maturity, The Scarlet Letter, The Blithedale Romance, The House of the Seven Gables, and the Marble Faun. Meat and drink as they were to me in my youth and first entrance into life, I naturally feel that the author of these books was in mind profoundly powerful. In point of genius among our Americans I should set no man before him. He was not a moral inspirer nor a leader, he gave to no one directly any spiritual uplift, nor did he help one directly to strength in fighting the battles of life. He was a peerless artist portraying marvellously the secret things of the human soul, his concrete pictures taken from the old Puritan society, from the New England of his day and from the passionate Italian life. He portrays but he draws no lesson any more than Shakespeare, his books are pictures of the souls of men, of the sweet and wholesome things and also the weakness, the sin and the morbid defect. These having been revealed the reader is left to his own inferences. It is fully made plain that he was a soft-hearted man, at any rate in his earlier time. The stories he wrote at the outset for children are often full of sweetness and sympathy. But as he went on with his work these qualities are less apparent, the spirit of the artist more and more prevailing, until he paints with relentless realism even what is hideous, not approving or condemning; it is part of life and must be set down. Many have thought it strange that Hawthorne apparently had no patriotism. In our Civil War he stood quite indifferent, a marked contrast with the men among whom he lived and who like him have literary eminence. These passages stand in his diary and letters. "February 14, 1862, Frank Pierce came here to-night.... He is bigoted as to the Union and sees nothing but ruin without it. Whereas I should not much regret an ultimate separation." "At present we have no country.... New England is really quite as large a lump of earth as my heart can take in. I have no kindred with or leaning toward the abolitionists." But his coolness to his country's welfare was of a piece with the general coolness toward well and ill in the affairs of the world. Humanity rolls before him as it did before Shakespeare, sometimes weak, sometimes heroic, depressed, exultant, suffering, happy. He did not concern himself to regulate its movement, to heighten its joy, or mitigate its sorrow. His work was to portray it as it moved, and in that conception of his mission he established his masterfulness as an artist, though it abates somewhat, does it not? from his wholeness as a man.

Some years ago in introducing Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson to an audience in St. Louis, I said that our great-grandfathers had stood together with the Minute Men of Concord at the North Bridge on the 19th of April, 1775. His ancestor as their minister inspiring them with the idea of freedom, my ancestor as an officer, who by word and deed kept the farmers firm before the British volleys. The old-time connection between the two families persisted. Ralph Waldo Emerson and my father were contemporaries coming through the Harvard gate into the small company of Unitarian ministers at about the same period and somewhat associated in their young manhood. Mrs. Emerson had been Lydia Jackson of Plymouth, baptised, into the old Pilgrim Parish by the father of my mother. Lydia Jackson and my mother had been girls together, and good friends. It was natural, therefore, that, with these antecedents when I as a young boy arrived in Concord, I should come into touch with the Emersons. They were indeed pleasant friends to me, both Mr. and Mrs. Emerson receiving with kindness the child whose parents they had known when children. The Emerson house on the Lexington Road is to-day a world-renowned shrine, sixty years ago it was the quiet home of a peaceful family, lovely as now through its natural beauty but not yet sought out by many pilgrims. The fame of Emerson, only recently established by his Nature and the earlier poems, was just beginning to spread into world-wide proportions.

I have before me his image, in his vigorous years, the sloping rather narrow shoulders, the slender frame erect and sinewy but never robust, and a keen, firm face. In his glance was complete kindliness and also profound penetration. His nose was markedly expressive, sharp, and well to the fore. In his lips there was geniality as well as firmness. His smooth hair concealed a head and brow not large but well rounded. His face was always without beard. Though slight, he was vigorous and the erect figure striding at a rapid pace could be encountered any day in all weathers, not only on the streets but in the fields and woods. Unlike his neighbour Hawthorne his instincts were always social. He mingled affably with low and high and I have never heard a more hearty tribute to him than came from an Irish washwoman, his neighbour, who only knew him as he chatted with her over the fence about the round of affairs that interested her. He always had a smile and a pleasant word for the school-children and at town-meeting bore his part among the farmers in discussing the affairs of the community. His voice in particular bespoke the man. It had a rich resonance and a subtle quality that gave to the most cursory listener an impression of culture. His speech was deliberate, sometimes hesitating, and his phrases often, even when he talked on simple themes, had especial point and appropriateness.

As a child I recall him among groups of children in his garden a little aloof but beaming with a happy smile. At a later time, when I was in college, we used sometimes to walk the twenty miles from Cambridge to Concord and the student group always found in him a hospitable entertainer. By that time he had reached the height of his fame. Those of us who sought him had been readers of Nature or the poems, of Representative Men, and of English Traits. For my own part while I did not always understand his thought, much of it was entering into my very fibre. In particular the essays on self-reliance and idealism were moulding my life. We approached him with some awe, "If he asks me where I live," said one of our number, a boy who was slain in the Civil War, "I shall tell him I can be found at No. So-and-so of such an alley, but if you mean to predicate concerning the spiritual entity, I dwell in the temple of the infinite and I breathe the breath of truth." But when Emerson met us at the gate, things were not at all on a high transcendental plane. There was a hearty "Good-morning," significant from him as he stood among the syringas, and there were sandwiches and strawberries in profusion, a plain bread-and-butter atmosphere very pleasant to us after a long and dusty tramp. On one occasion Emerson withdrew into the background, we thought too much, while he gave the front place in the library, after he had superintended royally the satisfaction of our bodily needs, to his neighbour Bronson Alcott. Mr. Alcott white-haired and oracular, talked to us about Shakespeare. There was probably a secondary sense in every line of Shakespeare which would become apparent to all such as attained the necessary fineness of soul. Perhaps we should find in this the gospel of a new Covenant in which Shakespeare would be the great teacher and leader. Mysteries were gathering about him, who was he? Who really wrote his plays and poems? The adumbrations of a new supernatural figure were looming in the conception of the world. Mr. Alcott mused through the afternoon in characteristic fashion and Emerson sat with us, silently absorbing the mystic speculation.

But Mr. Emerson was not always silent. A good friend of his who was akin to me and over partial, invited him to her house with a little circle of neighbours and lo, I was to furnish the entertainment! I had written a college poem and with some sinking of heart I learned that I was to read it to this company of which Emerson was to be a member. I faced the music and for half an hour rolled off my stanzas. At the close, my kinswoman arranged that I should talk with Emerson in a corner by ourselves and for another half-hour he talked to me. I am bound to say that he said little about my poem, but devoted himself almost entirely to an enthusiastic outpouring over Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, an advance copy of which had just been sent him. A stronger commendation of a piece of literary work than he gave it would be hard to conceive. He had been moved by it to the depths and his forecast for its author was a fame of the brightest. It was then I first heard of Walt Whitman. Soon after the world heard much of him and it still hears much of him. Emerson did not confine the expression of his admiration of Walt Whitman to me, as the world knows; he expressed it with an equal outspokenness to the poet, who curiously enough thought it proper to print it in gilt letters on the cover of his book, "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." To do that was certainly a violation of literary comity, but who shall give laws to rough-riding genius! It is a penalty of eminence to be made sponsor unwittingly before the public for men and things when reticence would seem better. At any rate it brought Whitman well into notice and I have never heard, rough diamond though he undoubtedly was, that Walt Whitman's withers were wrung by this breach of confidence.

There is a little nook by Gore Hall in Cambridge with which I have a queer medley of associations. One night I was tossed in a blanket there during my initiation into the Hasty Pudding Club. Precisely there I met Emerson rather memorably on the Commemoration Day in 1865 when he said to me, glancing at my soldier's uniform, in very simple words but with an intonation that betrayed deep feeling, "This day belongs to you." Immediately after, hard by I shook hands with Meade, the towering stately victor of Gettysburg in the full uniform of a corps commander, in contrast indeed to the slight, plainly-dressed philosopher. And only the other day I helped my little granddaughter to feed the grey squirrels in the same green nook from which the rollicking boys, the sage, and the warrior have so long since vanished.

I have heard it remarked by a man of much literary discrimination that Emerson's poetic gift was pre-eminent and that he should have made verse and not prose his principal medium for expression. As it is his poems are few, his habitual medium being prose. The critic attributed this to a distrust which Emerson felt of his power of dealing with poetic form, the harmonious arrangement of lines. He felt that Emerson was right in his judgment of himself, that there was a defect here, and that it was well for him to choose as he did. All this I hesitate to accept. As regards form, while the verse of Emerson certainly is sometimes rough, few things in poetry are more exquisite than many verses which all will recall. What stanzas ever flowed more sweetly than these written for the dedication of the Concord monument? "By the rude bridge that arched the flood," or the little poem on the snow-storm, "Announced by all the trumpets of the sky arrives the snow." The Boston Hymn, too, though in parts informal to the point of carelessness, has passages of the finest music,

"The rocky nook with hill-tops three, Looked eastward from the farms And twice each day the flowing sea Took Boston in its arms."

Emerson when he gave his mind to it could sing as harmoniously as the best. Possibly we ought to regret that he did not write for the most part in verse. It is verse which comes and clings most closely to our souls and which memory holds most permanently. Prose is the inferior medium when a great utterance is addressed to men, it is the singer pre-eminently who holds our hearts and lives forever. But Emerson chose to be what he was and we are thankful for him. Many were vexed with Matthew Arnold whom we thought depreciatory, but I find no fault with his summing up of Emerson, "as the friend of all those who seek to live in the spirit." His prose and poetry are a precious possession and we should be grateful for both, and for him. But my purpose here as always is not to criticise but only to touch the light outside things, pausing at the edge of profundities.

I knew Emerson when I was a child and I also knew him when I was well advanced in years at a time when, of course, he was close upon his end. His old age was pathetic. As often happens his memory failed while his other faculties were strong and the embarrassment of the thinker aroused sadness in those who came near him as the trusty servant fell short, though the mind in general was active. Emerson felt that I had put him under some obligation by giving him the first portrait he had ever seen of his faithful German disciple and translator Hermann Grimm. Perhaps that helped the welcome with which I was received when I went to see him not far from the end.

I had as a fellow-guest a man who had long been intimate with him and whom he was very glad to see; talking after tea in the library Emerson said, "I want to tell you about a friend in Germany, his name I cannot remember," and he moved to and fro uneasily, in his effort to recall it. "This friend with whom we have taken tea to-night, whose name also I cannot remember," here again came a distressed look at the failure of his faculty, "I cannot remember his name either, but he can tell you of this German friend whose name I have also forgotten." It was a sorrow to see the breaking down of a great spirit and his agitation as he was conscious of his waning power. And yet so far as I could see, it was only the memory that was going; the intellectual strength was still apparent and the amiability of his spirit was perhaps even more manifest than in the years when he was in the full possession of himself. This came out in little things; he was over-anxious at the table lest the hospitality should come short, troubled about the supply of butter and apple-sauce, and soon after I saw him on his knees on the hearth taking care that the fire should catch the wood to abate the evening coolness that was gathering in the room. At the same time his mood was playful. Mrs. Emerson sat at hand, a woman in her old age of striking beauty, with her silver hair beneath a cap of lace, her violet eyes, and her white face. Miss Ellen Emerson, too, was present, shielding her father in his decline like a guardian angel. Mrs. Emerson spoke with pleasure of her old life at Plymouth. "Ah, Plymouth," broke in Emerson, "that town of towns. We shall never hear the last of Plymouth!" And so he rallied his wife merrily over her patriotic love for her birthplace. The time was coming for him to go and he went serenely, the vital cord softly and gradually disengaged. In Sleepy Hollow lie near each other the four memorable graves, Hawthorne's, Thoreau's, Louisa Alcott's, and Emerson's. I know the spot well, on the ridge which slopes up from the lower ground, for there my own kin lie buried. Upon the same ridge rise the tall oracular pines and there is always a sweet murmur which the feeling heart understands as a sub-conscious requiem breathed by the "Nature" of which these fine spirits were the interpreters.

A day or two after entering college I made one of a group of freshmen, who, as the dusk fell, were working off their surplus energy by jumping over the posts along the curbstone of a quiet street. One of our number had an unfair advantage, his length of leg being so great that as he bestrode the post, he scarcely needed to take his feet from the ground, while for the rest of us a good hop was necessary fairly to clear the top. That is my earliest memory of Phillips Brooks. Big as he was, he was a year, perhaps two years, younger than most of us, and had the boyishness proper to his immaturity. He had come from his long training in the Boston Latin School, was reputed, like the rest of his class, to be able to repeat the Latin and Greek grammars from beginning to end, exceptions, examples, and all, and to have at his tongue's end other acquirements equally wonderful in the eyes of us boys who in our distant Western homes had had a smaller chance. He was an excellent scholar without needing to apply himself, and perhaps had more distinction in the student societies than in the class-room. Socially he was good-natured and playful, never aggressive, too modest to be a leader, rather reticent. It was with surprise that I heard Brooks for the first time in a college society. The quiet fellow of a sudden poured out a torrent of words and, young though I was, I felt that they were not empty. There was plenty of thought and well-arranged knowledge. This pregnant fluency always characterised his public deliverances. Of late years it has been reported that he had at first a defect of speech, and to this the extraordinary momentum of his utterance was due. In the early time I never heard of this. He did not stammer, nor was there other impediment; only this preternaturally rapid outpouring on occasion, from a man usually quiet. When I heard him preach in later years the peculiarity remained. It was the Phillips Brooks of the Institute of 1770, matured, however, into noble spiritual power.

Brooks had attained nearly or quite his full height on entering college, nor was he slender. His large frame was too loosely knit to admit of his becoming an athlete. He had no interest in outdoor sports. I do not recall that he was warmly diligent in study or general reading. His mind worked quickly and easily. Without effort he stood well in the class, absorbing whatever other knowledge he touched without much searching. His countenance and head in boyhood were noticeably fine, the forehead broad and full, the beardless face lighting up readily with an engaging smile, the eyes large and lustrous. It was evident that a good and able man must come out from the boy Phillips Brooks, but no one, not even President Walker, who was credited with an almost uncanny penetration in divining the future of his boys, would have predicted the career of Brooks. Though decorous and high-minded he was not marked as a religious man. If he were so, he kept it to himself. Though sometimes hilarious, he was never ungentle or inconsiderate, a wholesome, happy youth, having due thought for others and for his own walk and conversation, but without touch of formal piety. When I was initiated into the Hasty Pudding Club, I recognised in a tall fiend whose trouser legs were very apparent beneath the too scanty black drapery which enveloped him, no other than Phillips Brooks. He was one of the most vociferous of the imps who tossed me in the blanket, and later, when the elaborate manuscript I had prepared was brought forth, was conspicuously energetic in daubing with hot mush from a huge wooden spoon the sheets I had composed with much painstaking. The grand event in the "Pudding" of our time was the performance of Fielding's extravaganza of Tom Thumb. I think it was the club's first attempt at an operatic performance, and it was prepared with great care. I suppose I am to-day the only survivor among those who took part, and it is a sombre pleasure to recall the old-time frolic. The great promoter of the undertaking was Theodore Lyman, able and forceful afterward as soldier, scientist, and congressman, who died prematurely; but the music and details were arranged by Joseph C. Heywood, later a devout Catholic, ending his career in Rome as Chamberlain of Pope Leo XIII. In the cast Heywood was King Arthur and Lyman, general of the army. There were besides, a throng of warriors, lords, and ladies wonderful to behold. The costumes were elaborate. Old trunks and attics of our friends were ransacked for ancient finery and appointments that might be made to serve. Provision was made for thrilling stage effects, chief among them a marvellous cow which at a critical moment swallowed Tom Thumb, and then with much eructation worked out painfully on the bass-viol, belched him forth as if discharged from a catapult. The music was an adaptation of popular airs, operatic and otherwise, to the words of Fielding, and was fairly good, rendered as it was by fresh young voices and an orchestra whose members played in the Pierian Sodality. The merriment of the lines was more robust than delicate, but with some pruning it passed. The bill of announcement, which was hung up in the Pudding room, and which possibly is still preserved, was very elaborately and handsomely designed, and I think was the work of Alexander Agassiz, who had much skill of that kind. The performers were all strenuous and some capable, but the hit of the evening was Phillips Brooks, who personated the giantess Glumdalca to perfection. He was then nineteen, and had reached his full stature. He was attired in flowing skirts and befitting bodice, and wore a towering head-dress of feather dusters or something similar, which swept the ceiling as he strode. I had been cast originally for the Queen, but it was afterwards judged that I had special qualifications for the part of Princess. Like the youths in Comus, my unrazored lips in those days were as smooth as Hebe's, and I had a slenderness that was quite in keeping. Dressed in an old brocade gown, an heirloom from the century before, with a lofty white wig, and proper patches upon my pink cheeks, I essayed the role of une belle dame sans merci. Brooks and I were rivals for the affection of Tom Thumb, and I do not recall which succeeded. The tragedy was most extreme. In the closing scene the entire cast underwent destruction, strewing the stage with a picturesque heap of slain. We were not so very dead, for the victims near the foot-lights in order to give the curtain room to fall, drew up their legs or rolled out of the way, in a spirit of polite accommodation. The most impressive part of the spectacle was the defunct giantess, whose wide-spreading draperies and head-gear, as Brooks came down with a well-studied crash, took up so much of the floor that the rest of us had no room left to die in dignity. The piece was so much of a success that we performed it again at the house of Theodore Lyman, in Brookline,—and still again, at Chickering Hall in Boston.

Though Brooks could frolic upon occasion, his mood in his student days was prevailingly grave, and as he matured, warmed, and deepened into earnest religious conviction. My own close association with him came to an end at our graduation. Our respective fates led us in fields widely apart, and we met only at rare intervals. Ten years after graduation we came together in a way for me memorable. He was already held in the affectionate reverence of multitudes, and perhaps established in the position in which he so long stood as the most moving and venerated of American preachers. At the commemoration for the Harvard soldiers, in 1865, he was the chaplain, and his prayer shares with the Commemoration Ode of Lowell the admiration of men as an utterance especially uplifting. My humble function on that day was to speak for the rank and file, and Brooks and I, as classmates, sat elbow to elbow at the table under the great tent. He was charmingly genial and brotherly. His old playfulness came out as he rallied me on the deterioration he noticed in my table manners, due no doubt to my life in camp, and rebuked me with mock sternness for appropriating his portion of our common chicken. With evident pleasure, he drew out of his pocket the Nation, then just beginning, and showed me a kind notice of my Thinking Bayonet, written by Charles Eliot Norton. But behind the smile and the joke lay a new dignity and earnestness, a quality he had taken on since the days of our old comradeship. So it always was as we met transiently while the decades passed until the threshold of old age lay across the path for both of us. Now and then I had from him an affectionate letter. One of these I found profoundly touching. Theodore Lyman lay prostrate with a lingering and painful illness from which he never rose. Brooks wrote that he had carried to him my Life of Young Sir Henry Vane, and read from it to our dying friend. My story had interest for them, and I felt that whatever might befall my book I had not worked in vain if two such men found it worthy.

Phillips Brooks early had recognition as the most important religious influence of his time, and his spirit was not less broad-minded than it was fervent. In the multitudes that felt the power of his impassioned address were included men and women of the most various views, and he quickened the life of the spirit in all households of faith. His sympathies were most catholic, and this anecdote clearly illuminates his broad-mindedness. I had dropped into a Boston bookstore on a quiet morning; Brooks presently came in to browse over the new issues on the counters. There was no one to disturb us, as we enjoyed this our last conversation together. He spoke of Channing. "Do you know," said he, "when Dean Stanley came over here I went to East Boston to see him on his ship. He said to me almost at once, 'Where is Mount Auburn?' Why, said I, how strange that the first thing you inquire about as you arrive is a cemetery! 'But is not Channing buried there?' said he. I told him I did not know. 'Well, he is and I want to go at once to the grave of Channing!' So as soon as we could," continued Phillips Brooks, "we took a carriage and drove to Mount Auburn to visit the grave of Channing." He sympathised fully with the admiration felt by his friend, the great English churchman, for Channing, and gladly did him homage, and his talk flowed on in channels that showed his heart was warm toward men of all creeds who were inspired by the higher life. This noble candour of mind was a marked element of his power, and has endeared his memory among scores of sects that too often clash. How sweetly unifying in the midst of a jarring Christendom has been the spirit of Phillips Brooks!

After this I saw him only once. It was at the funeral of James Russell Lowell. In Appleton Chapel he stood in his robes, gentle and powerful, as he read the burial service. When the body was committed to the grave I stood just behind him and heard his voice in the last hallowed sentences, "Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, and the spirit to the God who gave it." I never heard that voice again.



CHAPTER IX

MEN OF SCIENCE

In England, in the fall of 1870, I missed an opportunity to see the great scientific men of the time. Faraday was still active, and in the full ripeness of his fame. Huxley, Tyndall, Darwin, Sir Joseph Hooker, Joule, Lyell, Murchison were in the midst of their best work, and probably all or most of them were present at the meeting of the British Association, which took place that year somewhere in the west of England. Miss Frances Power Cobbe, with whom I had for some time maintained a correspondence, growing out of the interest I felt in her Intuitive Morals, and other writings, invited me to accompany her to the meeting, at which, introduced by her, I might have had interesting interviews. I let the chance go by, and feel to-day that my memory stands impoverished in that it holds no first-hand knowledge of the lights, who in their century were the glory of their country and the world.

In Germany I was more fortunate. Arriving at Heidelberg at a time before its high prestige had suffered much diminution, I found in all the four Faculties men of great distinction. One hears that in the stern centralising to which since 1870 Germany has been subjected the outer universities have suffered, their strength, their able teachers, namely, being drawn away for a brilliant concentration at Berlin. In the little university town of those days students and professors rubbed closely and great men were sometimes found in odd environments. Expressing once a desire to see a certain venerable theologian of wide fame, I was told he was sure to be found on such and such evenings in a well-known bier locale, and there I had opportunity to observe him, an aged and withered figure, with a proper stein of the amber fluid frothing at his side, and a halo from an active pipe enwreathing his grey hair, as he joked and gossiped familiarly with his fellow-loiterers about the heavy oak table. At another time I was among surroundings less rough, the guest-room of a club of the finer world, curtained and carpeted, and made attractive with pictures, flowers, and music. A company of ladies and gentlemen sat sipping Maiwein and Mark graefler, while a conjurer entertained them with his tricks. During one of these, desiring a confederate from the lookers-on, he approached a slender and refined-looking man, who was following the necromancer's proceedings with as much interest as anybody. The wizard's air of deference, and the respectful looks of the company led me to infer that he was a man above the common, but he took part affably in what was going on, helped out the trick, and laughed and wondered with the rest when it succeeded. I presently learned to my surprise and amusement that the amiable confederate of the conjurer was no other than the physicist Kirchoff, then in fresh and brilliant fame as the inventor of the spectroscope and the initiator of the scientific method known as spectrolysis. The fact has long been known that a prism properly contrived will decompose a ray of white light into the seven primary colours, but the broad and narrow bands running across the variegated scheme of the spectrum had either escaped notice or been neglected as phenomena not significant. Now came, however, my genial fellow-guest of the Heidelberg Club, detecting that the lines of the spectrum were one thing or another according to the substance emitting the light, and forthwith the world became aware of a discovery of vast moment. The light of the sun, and of the stars more distant than the sun, could be analysed or spectrolised, and a certain knowledge was shed of what was burning there in the immensely distant spaces. We can know what constitutes a star as unerringly as we know the constituents of the earth. Still more, among the supposed elements to which painstaking chemists had reduced composite matter, many were found by the all-discerning prism to be not ultimate, but themselves susceptible of subtler division. In fact here was a method of chemical and physical analysis, much more powerful, and also more delicate, than had before been known, and the idea of the scientists as to the make-up of the material universe deepened and widened wondrously. I sat often among the crowd of students in Kirchoff's lecture-room, watching the play of his delicate features as he unravelled mysteries which till he showed the way were a mere hopeless knot. Near him as he spoke, on a table were the wand, the rings, the vials, above all a spectroscope with its prisms, the apparatus with which the magician solved the universe. Once, as I stood near him, he indicated in a polite sentence, with a gesture toward the table, that I was free to use these appliances. In the depth of my unknowledge I felt I could not claim to be even a tyro, and was duly abashed beneath the penetrating eye. But it is interesting to think that for a moment once I held the attention of so potent a Prospero.

In those days the name of Kirchoff was coupled always with that of an associate, the chemist Bunsen, when there was mention of spectrum-analysis; and in my time at Heidelberg, Bunsen was at hand and I became as familiar with his figure as with Kirchoff. In frame Bunsen was of the burly burgomaster type not rare among the Teutons, and as I saw him in his laboratory to which I sometimes gained access through students of his, he moved about in some kind of informal schlafrock or working dress of ample dimensions, with his large head crowned by a peculiar cap. On the tables within the spaces flickered numerously the "Bunsen burners," his invention, and it was easy to fancy as one saw him, surrounded by the large company of reverent disciples, that you were in the presence of the hierophant of some abstruse and mysterious cult, in whose honour waved the many lambent flames. I think he was unmarried, without domestic ties, and lived almost night and day among his crucibles and retorts, devoted to his science and pupils toward whom he showed a regard almost fatherly. In his lecture-room, in more formal dress he was less picturesque, but still a man to arouse deep interest. He was in the front rank of the chemists of all time, and I suppose had equal merit with Kirchoff in the momentous discovery in which their names are linked.

There was, however, at this time in Heidelberg a scientist probably of greater prestige than even these, whose contemporary influence was more dominant, and whose repute is now, and likely to be hereafter more prevailing. In my walks in a certain quiet street, I sometimes met a man who made an unusual impression of dignity and power. He had the bearing of a leader of men in whatever sphere he might move, massive and well-statured, his dress not obtrusive but carefully appointed, with an eye and face to command. His manner was courteous, not domineering, and I wondered who the able, high-bred gentleman might be, for he carried all that in his air as he passed along the street. It was the illustrious Helmholtz, then in his best years, with great achievements behind him and before. His researches in many fields were profound and far extending. I suppose his genius was at its best when dealing with the pervasive imponderable ether that extends out from the earth into the vast planetary spaces in whose vibrations are conditioned the phenomena of light. No subject of investigation can be more elusive. The mind that could grapple with this and arrive at the secrets and laws of the subtle medium through which the human eye receives impression is indeed worthy of our veneration. Probably, excepting Humboldt, no German scientist in these later centuries has reached such eminence. The fields of the two men were widely different. The one we know best as the scientific traveller, roaming the earth over, and reducing to ordered knowledge what can be perceived of its fauna and flora, of the strata that underlie it, the oceans that toss upon it, the atmosphere that surrounds it. The other roved not widely, but keeping to his lenses and calculations, penetrated perhaps more profoundly. Helmholtz, a well-born youth, began his career as a surgeon in the Prussian army, and his service there, no doubt, contributed to the manly carriage for which he was conspicuous. He married a lady of a noble house of Wuertemberg, and moved in an environment conducive to courtly manners. Heidelberg, like the German universities in general well understood that ability in its teachers, and not a pompous architectural display, makes a great institution. Its buildings were scattered and unpretending. Helmholtz had a lecture-room and laboratory apart, in a structure modern and graceful, but modest in its appeal. Here he discoursed to reverent throngs in tones never loud or confident. It is for wiseacres and charlatans to declaim and domineer. The masters are deferential in the presence of the sublimities and of the intelligences they are striving to enlighten.