n manifested itself in a delicate
reticence on the part of our Northern friends; and as the war had by no
means constituted their lives as it had constituted ours for four long
years, the success in avoiding the disagreeable topic would have been
considerable, if it had not been for awkward allusions on the part of
the Southerners, who, having been shut out for all that time from the
study of literature and art and other elegant and uncompromising
subjects, could hardly keep from speaking of this and that incident of
the war. Whereupon a discreet, or rather an embarrassed silence, as if a
pardoned convict had playfully referred to the arson or burglary, not to
say worse, that had been the cause of his seclusion.

[Note: In these days of mutual understanding and mutual forgiveness, I
shall hardly be believed when I say that as late as 1885, twenty years
after the close of the war, some of my Northern friends who had been
taught the duty of "making treason odious" advised me to suppress or
modify the following passage in my Introduction to Pindar (p. xii) as
savoring of disloyalty:

The man whose love for his country knows no local root, is a man
whose love for his country is a poor abstraction; and it is no
discredit to Pindar that he went honestly with his state in the
struggle. It was no treason to Medize before there was a Greece,
and the Greece that came out of the Persian war was a very
different thing from the cantons that ranged themselves on this
side and on that of a quarrel which, we may be sure, bore another
aspect to those who stood aloof from it than it wears in the eyes
of moderns, who have all learned to be Hellenic patriots. A little
experience of a losing side might aid historical vision. That
Pindar should have had an intense admiration of the New Greece,
should have felt the impulse of the grand period that followed
Salamis and Plataia, should have appreciated the woe that would
have come on Greece had the Persians been successful, and should
have seen the finger of God in the new evolution of Hellas--all
this is not incompatible with an attitude during the Persian war
that those who see the end and do not understand the beginning may
not consider respectable.]

Some fifteen years ago Mr. Lowell was lecturing in Baltimore, and during
the month of his stay I learned to know the charm of his manner and the
de