the hottest
antagonism without rudeness, and the most intense indignation without
quickening his speech or raising his tone; grasping and exhausting
with imaginative activity whatever object furnished him with
matter for thought, and throwing to the rubbish heap whatever was
superficial; indifferent to form or polish if only he could find a
diamond; reveling in mystery, and with eyes that penetrated like the
X-ray through all obscurities, and found at the bottom of them what
there was to find; arrested by no surfaces, inflexible in his
devotion to truth, and indifferent to all personalities or artificial
conditions of men or things. Nothing but the roots of things, their
inmost anatomy, attracted him; he brushed away contemptuously the
beauties on which Longfellow spent the tenderness of his character,
and threw aside like an empty nutshell the form to which an artist
might have given the devotion of his best art, for the art's sake.
In his temper there was no patience with shams, little toleration
of forms. It would, I should think, be clear to one who was well
acquainted with both men, that there was little in common between them
beyond culture, but I never heard Emerson speak of Longfellow, and can
only judge by induction that he never occupied himself much with him.

We tried also to get Dr. Holmes to join us; but the Doctor was devoted
to Boston, and could not have lived long out of its atmosphere, and
with the woods and savagery he had no sympathy. He loved his Cambridge
friends serenely, Lowell, Agassiz, and Wyman, I think, above others;
but he enjoyed himself most of all, and Boston more than any other
thing on earth. He was lifted above ennui and discontent by a most
happy satisfaction with the rounded world of his own individuality and
belongings. Of the three men whom I have personally known in the
world who seemed most satisfied with what fate and fortune had made
them,--viz., Gladstone, Professor Freeman, and Holmes,--I think Holmes
enjoyed himself the most. There was a tinge of dandyism in the Doctor;
not enough to be considered a weakness, but enough to show that he
enjoyed his personal appearance and was content with what he had
become, and this in so delightful a way that one accepted him at once
at his own terms. The Doctor stood for Boston as Lowell for Cambridge,
the archetype of the Hub. Nobody represented it as he did. Tom
Appleton was nearest him, but Tom loved Paris better, and was a
"globe-tro