ay to dusty death, and dear to memory through benefactions unalloyed
by one unkindness.

IV.

But when I came to Boston early in 1866, the 'Atlantic Monthly' and
'Harper's' then divided our magazine world between them; the 'North
American Review', in the control of Lowell and Professor Norton, had
entered upon a new life; 'Every Saturday' was an instant success in the
charge of Mr. Aldrich, who was by taste and training one of the best
editors; and 'Our Young Folks' had the field of juvenile periodical
literature to itself.

It was under the direction of Miss Lucy Larcom and of Mr. J. T.
Trowbridge, who had come from western New York, where he was born, and
must be noted as one of the first returners from the setting to the
rising sun. He naturalized himself in Boston in his later boyhood, and
he still breathes Boston air, where he dwells in the street called
Pleasant, on the shore of Spy Pond, at Arlington, and still weaves the
magic web of his satisfying stories for boys. He merges in their
popularity the fame of a poet which I do not think will always suffer
that eclipse, for his poems show him to have looked deeply into the heart
of common humanity, with a true and tender sense of it.

Miss Larcom scarcely seemed to change from date to date in the generation
that elapsed between the time I first saw her and the time I saw her
last, a year or two before her death. A goodness looked out of her
comely face, which made me think of the Madonna's in Titian's
"Assumption," and her whole aspect expressed a mild and friendly spirit
which I find it hard to put in words. She was never of the fine world of
literature; she dwelt where she was born, in that unfashionable Beverly
which is not Beverly Farms, and was of a simple, sea-faring, God-fearing
race, as she has told in one of the loveliest autobiographies I know, "A
New England Girlhood." She was the author of many poems, whose number
she constantly enlarged, but she was chiefly, and will be most lastingly,
famed for the one poem, 'Hannah Binding Shoes', which years before my
days in Boston had made her so widely known. She never again struck so
deep or so true a note; but if one has lodged such a note in the ear of
time, it is enough; and if we are to speak of eternity, one might very
well hold up one's head in the fields of asphodel, if one could say to
the great others there, "I wrote Hannah Binding Shoes." Her poem is
very, very sad, as all who have read it wi