een sense of the
grotesque which often goes with the kindliest nature. He told of his
dining, early in life, next a fellow-man from Cape Cod at the Astor
House, where such a man could seldom have found himself. When they were
served with meat this neighbor asked if he would mind his putting his fat
on James's plate: he disliked fat. James said that he considered the
request, and seeing no good reason against it, consented.

He could be cruel with his tongue when he fancied insincerity or
pretence, and then cruelly sorry for the hurt he gave. He was indeed
tremulously sensitive, not only for himself but for others, and would
offer atonement far beyond the measure of the offence he supposed himself
to have given.

At all times he thought originally in words of delightful originality,
which painted a fact with the greatest vividness. Of a person who had a
nervous twitching of the face, and who wished to call up a friend to
them, he said, "He spasmed to the fellow across the room, and introduced
him." His written style had traits of the same bold adventurousness, but
it was his speech which was most captivating. As I write of him I see
him before me: his white bearded face, with a kindly intensity which at
first glance seemed fierce, the mouth humorously shaping the mustache,
the eyes vague behind the glasses; his sensitive hand gripping the stick
on which he rested his weight to ease it from the artificial limb he
wore.

V.

The Goethean face and figure of Louis Agassiz were in those days to be
seen in the shady walks of Cambridge to which for me they lent a
Weimarish quality, in the degree that in Weimar itself a few years ago, I
felt a quality of Cambridge. Agassiz, of course, was Swiss and Latin,
and not Teutonic, but he was of the Continental European civilization,
and was widely different from the other Cambridge men in everything but
love of the place. "He is always an Europaen," said Lowell one day, in
distinguishing concerning him; and for any one who had tasted the flavor
of the life beyond the ocean and the channel, this had its charm. Yet he
was extremely fond of his adoptive compatriots, and no alien born had a
truer or tenderer sense of New England character. I have an idea that no
one else of his day could have got so much money for science out of the
General Court of Massachusetts; and I have heard him speak with the
wisest and warmest appreciation of the hard material from which he was
able to ex