de his hurt, and he would
not let you speak of it, as though your sympathy unmanned him, but you
could see that he suffered. This notably happened in my remembrance from
a review in a journal which he greatly esteemed; and once when in a
notice of my own I had put one little thorny point among the flowers, he
confessed a puncture from it. He praised the criticism hardily, but I
knew that he winced under my recognition of the didactic quality which he
had not quite guarded himself against in the poetry otherwise praised. He
liked your liking, and he openly rejoiced in it; and I suppose he made
himself believe that in trying his verse with his friends he was testing
it; but I do not believe that he was, and I do not think he ever
corrected his judgment by theirs, however he suffered from it.

In any matter that concerned literary morals he was more than eager to
profit by another eye. One summer he sent me for the Magazine a poem
which, when I read it, I trembled to find in motive almost exactly like
one we had lately printed by another contributor. There was nothing for
it but to call his attention to the resemblance, and I went over to
Elmwood with the two poems. He was not at home, and I was obliged to
leave the poems, I suppose with some sort of note, for the next morning's
post brought me a delicious letter from him, all one cry of confession,
the most complete, the most ample. He did not trouble himself to say
that his poem was an unconscious reproduction of the other; that was for
every reason unnecessary, but he had at once rewritten it upon wholly
different lines; and I do not think any reader was reminded of Mrs.
Akers's "Among the Laurels" by Lowell's "Foot-path." He was not only
much more sensitive of others' rights than his own, but in spite of a
certain severity in him, he was most tenderly regardful of their
sensibilities when he had imagined them: he did not always imagine them.

VI.

At this period, between the years 1866 and 1874, when he unwillingly went
abroad for a twelvemonth, Lowell was seen in very few Cambridge houses,
and in still fewer Boston houses. He was not an unsocial man, but he was
most distinctly not a society man. He loved chiefly the companionship of
books, and of men who loved books; but of women generally he had an
amusing diffidence; he revered them and honored them, but he would rather
not have had them about. This is over-saying it, of course, but the
truth is in what I sa