marked belief in a personal existence hereafter is recalled by our observer. The elder poet was" sure of the other world." In the case of Lowell, on the other hand, Mr. Howells thinks that the notion of a life after death weakened with his years,

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as it is sadly apt to do with men who have read much and thought much; they have apparently exhausted their potentialities of psychological life."

Howells's own start was not unlike Taylor's, as respects purpose, breeding, and the steadfast, wholesome stock from which he derived. Both had to do with type and ink in printing-offices. The Ohioan had a scholar's bent, and his poems, in the volume made by himself and his comrade Piatt, were more elusive and artistic than those of Taylor's early collections. There are worse lots, for such a young man, than to be bred apart from great centres, and in due season to go

From "Literary Friends and Acquaintance."-Copyright, 1900, by Harper & Brothers. RICHARD HENRY DANA, JR.

forth like Rasselas from his valley. This one's wander-jahr,-crowded into a halfsummer, was the outcome of a longing for the seaboard, and for poets and men of letters above all. It was in that divisional year of the rise of Lincoln,-the prime of our noble elder school of writers, the springtime of those next in age. The Taylors and Howellses of American life,our D'Artagnans of the pen,-were not born and reared like Motley, Sumner, Curtis, Lowell, Norton. These never could have quite felt the matriculant impulse; at all events, their ingrained habit would have prevented them from giving it play. It was a shy, but self-contained young palmer that neared the down-east Athens, and with a true passion saw the ocean, the woods and slips of Portland, the Salem gables, before seeking out Longfellow and Hawthorne themselves. His detours were revelatory acts of faith; and in the case

From "Literary Friends and Acquaintance."-Copyright, 1900, by Harper & Brothers.

HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD

From "Literary Friends and Acquaintance."-Copyright, 1900, by Harper & Brothers.

JAMES R. OSGOOD

of Longfellow,-in whose measures he had written, subject to the spell of Heine against which the master now warned him, -the pupil in after years never cried out o' that young enthusiasm. I recall his estimate of Longfellow's genius, written not so long ago, which some of us thought too high. Yet it would be hard to impugn the closing statement of the beautiful chapter on "The White Mr. Longfellow," -a chapter that, with those on Holmes and Lowell, belongs to the culminative portion of this retrospect. The pupil had lived to be one of the judges of the fragmentary reliquiæ of the dead poet, and so gave his voice for the publication of all that had any completeness, since "in every one there was a touch of his exquisite art, the grace of his most exquisite spirit." One felt that "the art of Longfellow held out to the end with no touch of decay in it, and that it equalled the art of any other poet of his time. It knew when to give

itself, and more and more it knew when to withhold itself." Howells still is "sure that with Tennyson and Browning Longfellow shared in the expression of an age which more completely than any former age got itself said by its poets." Throughout this volume its writer is tenax amicitiarum,-as loyal to friendships and associations once formed as to judgments which he sees no reason for disturbing, as true to the humble memory of a Keeler as to a Curtis, Quincy, or Child. And on his last page we have an enviable tribute to Norton, "our chief citizen," rendered at a time when it is like moving to the side of an almost unattended champion. A like independence braces the full characterization of Boyesen, and bestows upon that alert Scandinavian a justice long due to one who held his University chair by sheer merit, who was devoted to letters and his guild, yet who received too frigid recognition from those who censored the social life in which his lot was cast.

At the time when our pilgrim reached

From "Literary Friends and Acquaintance."-Copyright, 1900, by Harper & Brothers.

CHARLES HALE

gentlemen think of Mr. Smith." No armor could better hazard such a thrust than that of our visitor to shrines of the Old Colony and Manhattan. The benign skalds and sages of the former saw that he was a neophyte not to be disdained. They found him strong and clean; modest, but with parts that warranted his ambition to be among and of them. In New York he also passed for what he was, and as one whose judgment would be worth as much as any judgment passed upon him.

It was, however, scarcely a fair test of the second station of his pilgrimage that he should pass from the shaded midsummer academe to the toil, swelter and abandon of New York in the dog days. As against the secure dii majores, the quipsters of the newspaper underworld

success could not have yielded him more "true joy" than his primal welcome by Ticknor and Fields, and from the whole Round Table of his quest. He was accepted of Lowell, who made a dinner for him, inviting Holmes and Fields,-and afterwards there was a tea à deux with the delightful Autocrat. At Concord he found Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and to the last-named two his pilgrimage was none too soon. After forty years we should be loth to miss his story of it.

A palpable hit, in rejoinder to personal strictures, has been made so often as somewhat to lose its force-that of saying, "We have heard what Mr. Smith thinks of Messrs. Brown & Jones. It would now be interesting to learn what these

Harper & Brothers.

MRS. STODDARD

made a sorry contrast. Yet here was life, and, with the spirit of his maturer years, an equal field of human interest. In appeal, the record may be cited of his own experience in the unremunerative market, and of conditions that forced the Bohemians to their wits for subsistence, to Pfaff's cellar for companionship, to an alliance against the classes in default of any recognition from them. As for the leisure for producing, and the chance for marketing, the better grade of work, their visitor himself held unawares the vantageground. The present writer,-who perhaps, on the score of some light successes, was thought by Mr. Howells to be on terms with the book-trade,-remembers his abject reluctance to expose the narrow

THEODORE WINTHROP

From "Literary Friends and Acquaintance."-Copyright, 1900, by Harper & Brothers.

RICHARD HENRY STODDARD

ness of his own foothold to a comrade (whom, as when Pantagruel found Panurge, he was to love all his lifetime); remembers, too, how earnestly he sought, during Mr. Howells's Venetian residence, to find a publisher for a certain metrical story not without charm, and failed in all directions. To this day, he feels that he never quite made clear to its author, whose absence in time proved so mighty, why a friend's presence was so weak.

We have touched upon the first portion of this retrospect; a subsequent and larger course is left to the reader. Its narrative, anecdote, comment, successive portraitures, make up a volume eminently adapted to the fullest précis of a modern reviewer. It covers forty years, divided into the author's life in Venice, his brief probation in New York and on the staff of the Nation, his many years of editorial service. and literary production in Cambridge and the vicinage. If there were an index to the book, a glance would show that there