that a vast gulf interposed between
the Freshman and upper-class man. I used to pass his door with
reverence, for the story went that, even as a boy, he had written a
history of Duxbury, Massachusetts. Once during his temporary absence,
his door standing open, I dared to step into the apartment and
surveyed with awe the well-filled shelves and scribbled papers; but in
later years when I had won some small title to notice I found him most
kind and approachable. The abundance of the Harvard Library and still
better the rich accumulations in the cells of his own memory he held
for general use. He loaned me once for months at St. Louis a rarely
precious seventeenth-century book, which had belonged to Carlyle, and
whose margins were sometimes filled with Carlyle's notes. He imparted
freely from his own vast information and it was pleasant indeed to
hold a chair for an hour or two in his hospitable home. In our last
interview the prose and the solemn romance of life were strangely
blended. We had just heard the burial service in Appleton Chapel read
by Phillips Brooks over the coffin of James Russell Lowell; then we
rode together on the crowded platform of a street-car to the grave at
Mount Auburn; a rough and jostling company on the platform, and in my
mind a throng of deep and melancholy thoughts. I never saw him again.
In his calling he was a master of research extracting with unlimited
toil the last fragment of evidence from the blindest scribblings of
earlier times. These results, painfully accumulated, he set down
with absolute faithfulness; his bibliographies supplementing his own
contributions and also those of the many writers whom he inspired and
guided in like labours are exhaustive. Rarely is there a wisp to be
gleaned where Winsor has garnered. If he was deficient in the power of
vivid and picturesque presentment, it is only that like all men he had
his limitations.

John Fiske I met soon after his graduation at Cambridge. It is odd
to recall him when one thinks of his later physique, as a youth with
fresh ruddy face, tall and not broad, a rather slender pillar of a
man, corniced with an abundant pompadour of brown hair. He was just
then making fame for himself in the domain of philosophy, contributing
to the New York World papers well charged with revolutionary ideas
which were then causing consternation, so lucidly and attractively
formulated that they interested the most cursory reader. Perhaps John
Fiske ou