with the reader. It was fine to meet him when he
was full of a new scheme; he talked of it with a single-hearted joy, and
tried to make you see it of the same colors and proportions it wore to
his eyes. He spared no toil to make it the perfect thing he dreamed it,
and he was not discouraged by any disappointment he suffered with the
critic or the public.

He was a tireless worker, and at last his health failed under his labors
at the newspaper desk, beneath the midnight gas, when he should long have
rested from such labors. I believe he was obliged to do them through one
of those business fortuities which deform and embitter all our lives; but
he was not the man to spare himself in any case. He was always
attempting new things, and he never ceased endeavoring to make his
scholarship reparation for the want of earlier opportunity and training.
I remember that I met him once in a Cambridge street with a book in his
hand which he let me take in mine. It was a Greek author, and he said he
was just beginning to read the language at fifty: a patriarchal age to me
of the early thirties!

I suppose I intimated the surprise I felt at his taking it up so late in
the day, for he said, with charming seriousness, "Oh, but you know, I
expect to use it in the other world." Yea, that made it worth while, I
consented; but was he sure of the other world? "As sure as I am of
this," he said; and I have always kept the impression of the young faith
which spoke in his voice and was more than his words.

I saw him last in the hour of those tremendous adieux which were paid him
in New York before he sailed to be minister in Germany. It was one of
the most graceful things done by President Hayes, who, most of all our
Presidents after Lincoln, honored himself in honoring literature by his
appointments, to give that place to Bayard Taylor. There was no one more
fit for it, and it was peculiarly fit that he should be so distinguished
to a people who knew and valued his scholarship and the service he had
done German letters. He was as happy in it, apparently, as a man could
be in anything here below, and he enjoyed to the last drop the many cups
of kindness pressed to his lips in parting; though I believe these
farewells, at a time when he was already fagged with work and excitement,
were notably harmful to him, and helped to hasten his end. Some of us
who were near of friendship went down to see him off when he sailed, as
the dismal and futile w