ther people, and our meeting
was with the constraint of their presence. It was natural in nothing so
much as his saying very significantly to me, as if he knew of my heresies
concerning Scott, and would have me know he did not approve of them, that
there was nothing he now found so much pleasure in as Scott's novels.
Another friend, equally heretical, was by, but neither of us attempted to
gainsay him. Lowell talked very little, but he told of having been a
walk to Beaver Brook, and of having wished to jump from one stone to
another in the stream, and of having had to give it up. He said, without
completing the sentence, If it had come to that with him! Then he fell
silent again; and with some vain talk of seeing him when I came back in
the fall, I went away sick at heart. I was not to see him again, and I
shall not look upon his like.

I am aware that I have here shown him from this point and from that in a
series of sketches which perhaps collectively impart, but do not assemble
his personality in one impression. He did not, indeed, make one
impression upon me, but a thousand impressions, which I should seek in
vain to embody in a single presentment. What I have cloudily before me
is the vision of a very lofty and simple soul, perplexed, and as it were
surprised and even dismayed at the complexity of the effects from motives
so single in it, but escaping always to a clear expression of what was
noblest and loveliest in itself at the supreme moments, in the divine
exigencies. I believe neither in heroes nor in saints; but I believe in
great and good men, for I have known them, and among such men Lowell was
of the richest nature I have known. His nature was not always serene or
pellucid; it was sometimes roiled by the currents that counter and cross
in all of us; but it was without the least alloy of insincerity, and it
was never darkened by the shadow of a selfish fear. His genius was an
instrument that responded in affluent harmony to the power that made him
a humorist and that made him a poet, and appointed him rarely to be quite
either alone.

ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

I believe neither in heroes nor in saints
It is well to hold one's country to her promises
Liked being with you, not for what he got, but for what he gave

End of Project Gutenberg's Studies of Lowell, by William Dean Howells

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STUDIES OF LOWELL ***

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