sy
musicians always select in the audience some one who seems to be most
appreciative, at whom they play (they call it _de o kan_), so Professors
Dodd and James Alexander afterwards, in their aesthetic, or more erudite
disquisitions, rarely failed to fiddle at me--Dodd looking right in my
eyes, and Alexander at the ceiling, ending, however, with a very brief
glance, as if for conscience' sake. I feel proud of this, and it affects
me more now than it did then, when it produced no effect of vanity, and
seemed to me to be perfectly natural.

I heard certain mutterings and hoots among the students as I went out of
the lecture-room, but did not know what it meant. George Boker informed
me afterwards that there had been great indignation expressed that "a
green ignorant Freshman" had dared to intrude, as I had done, among his
intellectual superiors and betters, but that he had at once explained
that I was a great friend of Professor Dodd, and a kind of marvellous
_rara avis_, not to be classed with common little Freshmen; so that in
future I was allowed to go my way in peace.

A man of culture who had known Coleridge well, declared that as a
conversationalist on varied topics Professor Albert Dodd was his
superior. When in the pulpit, or in the lengthened "addresses" of
lecturing, there was a marvellous fascination in his voice--an Italian
witch, or red Indian, or a gypsy would have at once recognised in him a
sorcerer. Yet his manner was subdued, his voice monotonous, never loud,
a running stream without babbling stones or rapids; but when it came to a
climax cataract he cleared it with grandeur, leaving a stupendous
impression. In the ordinary monotony of that deep voice there was soon
felt an indescribable charm. In saying this I only repeat what I have
heard in more or less different phrase from others. There was always in
his eyes (and in this as in other points he resembled Emerson) a strange
indefinable suspicion of a smile, though he, like the Sage of Concord,
rarely laughed. Owing to these black eyes, and his sallow complexion,
his sobriquet among the students was "the royal Bengal tiger." He was
not unlike Emerson as a lecturer. I heard the latter deliver his great
course of lectures in London in 1848--including the famous one on
Napoleon--but he had not to the same perfection the music of the voice,
nor the indefinable mysterious charm which characterised the style of
Professor Dodd, who played with emot