ink of a
bed of embers on which the ashes have thinly gathered, and which, when
these are breathed away, sparkles and tinkles keenly up with all the
freshness of a newly kindled fire. He did not mind talking about his
age, and I fancied rather enjoyed doing so. Its approaches interested
him; if he was going, he liked to know just how and when he was going.
Once he spoke of his lasting strength in terms of imaginative humor: he
was still so intensely interested in nature, the universe, that it seemed
to him he was not like an old man so much as a lusty infant which
struggles against having the breast snatched from it. He laughed at the
notion of this, with that impersonal relish which seemed to me singularly
characteristic of the self-consciousness so marked in him. I never heard
one lugubrious word from him in regard to his years. He liked your
sympathy on all grounds where he could have it self-respectfully, but he
was a most manly spirit, and he would not have had it even as a type of
the universal decay. Possibly he would have been interested to have you
share in that analysis of himself which he was always making, if such a
thing could have been.

He had not much patience with the unmanly craving for sympathy in others,
and chiefly in our literary craft, which is somewhat ignobly given to it,
though he was patient, after all. He used to say, and I believe he has
said it in print,--[Holmes said it in print many times, in his three
novels and scattered through the "Breakfast Table" series. D.W.]--that
unless a man could show a good reason for writing verse, it was rather
against him, and a proof of weakness. I suppose this severe conclusion
was something he had reached after dealing with innumerable small poets
who sought the light in him with verses that no editor would admit to
print. Yet of morbidness he was often very tender; he knew it to be
disease, something that must be scientifically rather than ethically
treated. He was in the same degree kind to any sensitiveness, for he was
himself as sensitive as he was manly, and he was most delicately
sensitive to any rightful social claim upon him. I was once at a dinner
with him, where he was in some sort my host, in a company of people whom
he had not seen me with before, and he made a point of acquainting me
with each of them. It did not matter that I knew most of them already;
the proof of his thoughtfulness was precious, and I was sorry when I had
to disappoint it