with human passion, and given to the
worship of nature, confirmed the general impression of coldness which
his manner suggested. I never saw him in anger, but I felt that the
barrier which prevented it was too slight to make it safe for any
one to venture to touch it. A supreme sense of justice went with a
somewhat narrow personal horizon, a combination which, while it made
him hold the balance of judgment level, so far as the large world of
politics was concerned, made him often too bitter in his controversies
touching political questions; but the American political daily paper
has never had a nobler type than the "Evening Post" under Bryant.
Demonstrative he never was, even with his intimates, but to the
constancy and firmness of his friendship all who knew him well could
testify, and, as long as he lived, our relations were unchanged,
though my wandering ways brought me seldom near him in later years.

It was about this time that I had become acquainted with the Browns.
Of Mrs. Brown I have, in anticipation of events, spoken in connection
with spiritism, apart from which she had a remarkable individuality
in many ways. She had those instantaneous perceptions of truth in the
higher regions of thought, the spiritual and moral, which seem to be
either instinct or inspiration. Their house was the meeting place of
a school of transcendental thinkers (and I use the word in its full
sense) of a very remarkable character. As the Browns lived on the
Brooklyn side of the East River, we used to call it the "Brooklyn
School," though there were residents of Philadelphia and Boston among
the friends who met there. Now and then we had formal _conversazioni_,
and at these I soon took a prominent part, though the inquiring spirit
strongly predominated over the oracular, which is likely to monopolize
such assemblies. I was in that eagerness of early and incomplete
knowledge which is more ready in expression than that of riper years,
and it is probable that I distinguished myself by fluency of verbiage.
It became customary to look to me for the most hazardous reaches of
conjecture or inquiry, though certainly Mrs. Brown was worth far more
than I was. I had already solved several problems which to-day are not
clear to me, and I had always a ready answer to most mysteries. Talk I
certainly could, and Mrs. Brown, who had the most sincere friendship
for me, and believed in my possibilities if not in my attainment,
delighted to put me forw