and the
talk was all of the brilliant character-poems with which he had then
first dazzled the world, Lowell casually said, with a most touching,
however ungrounded sense of obsolescence, He could remember when the
'Biglow Papers' were all the talk. I need not declare that there was
nothing ungenerous in that. He was only too ready to hand down his
laurels to a younger man; but he wished to do it himself. Through the
modesty that is always a quality of such a nature, he was magnanimously
sensitive to the appearance of fading interest; he could not take it
otherwise than as a proof of his fading power. I had a curious hint of
this when one year in making up the prospectus of the Magazine for the
next, I omitted his name because I had nothing special to promise from
him, and because I was half ashamed to be always flourishing it in the
eyes of the public. "I see that you have dropped me this year," he
wrote, and I could see that it had hurt, and I knew that he was glad to
believe the truth when I told him.

He did not care so much for popularity as for the praise of his friends.
If he liked you he wished you not only to like what he wrote, but to say
so. He was himself most cordial in his recognition of the things that
pleased him. What happened to me from him, happened to others, and I am
only describing his common habit when I say that nothing I did to his
liking failed to bring me a spoken or oftener a written acknowledgment.
This continued to the latest years of his life when the effort even to
give such pleasure must have cost him a physical pang.

He was of a very catholic taste; and he was apt to be carried away by a
little touch of life or humor, and to overvalue the piece in which he
found it; but, mainly his judgments of letters and men were just. One of
the dangers of scholarship was a peculiar danger in the Cambridge
keeping, but Lowell was almost as averse as Longfellow from contempt. He
could snub, and pitilessly, where he thought there was presumption and
apparently sometimes merely because he was in the mood; but I cannot
remember ever to have heard him sneer. He was often wonderfully patient
of tiresome people, and sometimes celestially insensible to vulgarity. In
spite of his reserve, he really wished people to like him; he was keenly
alive to neighborly good-will or ill-will; and when there was a question
of widening Elmwood avenue by taking part of his grounds, he was keenly
hurt by hearing that some