liarly marked leaf, nor any rich
bed of leafy mould. He sees everything with his poet's eye, even to
"those rifts where unregarded mosses be." He has never been what is
called a society man, though latterly he has gone more into general
society. Formerly, dinner-parties and balls were his pet aversions, as
one might suspect from his poem "Without and Within:"--

"My coachman, in the moonlight there,
Looks through the sidelight of the door;
I hear him with his brethren swear,
As I could do,--but only more.

"Flattening his nose against the pane,
He envies me my brilliant lot;
Blows on his aching fists in vain,
And dooms me to a place more hot.

* * * * *

"Meanwhile, I inly curse the bore
Of hunting still the same old coon;
And envy him outside the door,
In golden quiets of the moon.

"I envy him the ungyved prance
By which his freezing feet he warms,
And drag my lady's chain and dance,--
The galley-slave of dreary forms.

"Oh, could he have my share of din,
And I his quiet!--past a doubt,
'T would still be one man bored within,
And just another bored without."

But he was always fond of good company, and collected around him in
Cambridge, in the old days, a brilliant circle of congenial friends. Of
these, Longfellow, and Professor Felton, and Agassiz, and Dr. Estes Howe
his brother-in-law, were perhaps the closest; but John Holmes and Edmund
Quincy and Robert Carter were very warm friends,--members of the famous
Whist Club, and royal companions all. Dr. Holmes was not far away, and
always a constant visitor at Cambridge; and James T. Fields was a
cherished friend. William Page, the painter, and W. W. Story, the
sculptor, were also among his earlier friends. It was to the latter that
the series of letters collected under the title of "Fireside Travels"
were addressed. But there is scarcely a man of note in the literary
world whom he has not known in the course of his life; and he has made
friends of nearly all he has known. He has been a busy worker, too, all
his life,--industrious, concentrated, and indefatigable. A man who could
write the whole of "Sir Launfal" in two days knows how to toil, and has
been accustomed to concentrate his faculties. Mr. Lowell has an utter
disbelief in the materialistic theory of the Universe, and expresses it
many times in his later poems. He at least--

"envies science not