ear of a pleasant, old-fashioned
house near the Delta.

Lowell was not then at the height of his fame; he had just reached this
thirty years after, when he died; but I doubt if he was ever after a
greater power in his own country, or more completely embodied the
literary aspiration which would not and could not part itself from the
love of freedom and the hope of justice. For the sake of these he had
been willing to suffer the reproach which followed their friends in the
earlier days of the anti-slavery struggle: He had outlived the reproach
long before; but the fear of his strength remained with those who had
felt it, and he had not made himself more generally loved by the 'Fable
for Critics' than by the 'Biglow Papers', probably. But in the 'Vision
of Sir Launfal' and the 'Legend of Brittany' he had won a liking if not a
listening far wider than his humor and his wit had got him; and in his
lectures on the English poets, given not many years before he came to the
charge of the Atlantic, he had proved himself easily the wisest and
finest critic in our language. He was already, more than any American
poet,

"Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
The love of love,"

and he held a place in the public sense which no other author among us
has held. I had myself never been a great reader of his poetry, when I
met him, though when I was a boy of ten years I had heard my father
repeat passages from the Biglow Papers against war and slavery and the
war for slavery upon Mexico, and later I had read those criticisms of
English poetry, and I knew Sir Launfal must be Lowell in some sort; but
my love for him as a poet was chiefly centred in my love for his tender
rhyme, 'Auf Wiedersehen', which I can not yet read without something of
the young pathos it first stirred in me. I knew and felt his greatness
some how apart from the literary proofs of it; he ruled my fancy and held
my allegiance as a character, as a man; and I am neither sorry nor
ashamed that I was abashed when I first came into his presence; and that
in spite of his words of welcome I sat inwardly quaking before him. He
was then forty-one years old, and nineteen my senior, and if there had
been nothing else to awe me, I might well have been quelled by the
disparity of our ages. But I have always been willing and even eager to
do homage to men who have done something, and notably to men who have
done something in the sort I wishe