country and generation, still
remaining with us and still in full voice. It is rendered to the
comrade--to the man who, with his modesty and fortitude and the absence
of self-seeking--with the quips and quirks that cover his gravest moods,
with his attachment for the city which has given him that which Lamb so
loved, "the sweet security of streets"--it is rendered, I say, to the
man who best preserves for us, in his living presence, the traditions of
all that an English-speaking poet and book-fellow should be to
constitute a satisfying type.

There is, perhaps, a special fitness in our gathering at this time. I
sometimes have thought upon the possible career of our poet if his life
had been passed in the suburbs of the down-east Athens, among serenities
and mutualities so auspicious to the genius and repute of that shining
group lately gathered to the past. One thing is certain, he would not
have weathered his seventieth birthday, at any season, without receiving
such a tribute as this, nor would a public dinner have reminded him of
days when a poet was glad to get any dinner at all. Through his birth,
Massachusetts claims her share in his distinction. But, having been
brought to New York in childhood, he seems to have reasoned out for
himself the corollary to a certain famous epigram, and to have thought
it just as well to stay in the city which resident Bostonians keep as
the best place to go to while still in the flesh. Probably he had not
then realized the truth, since expressed in his own lines:--

"Yes, there's a luck in most things, and in none
More than in being born at the right time!"

His birthday, in fact, comes in midsummer, when New York is more inert
than an analytic novel. This dinner, then, is one of those gifts of love
which are all the more unstinted because by chance deferred.

It was in the order of things, and no cause for blame, that, after this
town passed from the provincial stage, there was so long a period when
it had to be, as De Quincey said of Oxford Street, a stony-hearted
mother to her bookmen and poets; that she had few posts for them and
little of a market. Even her colleges had not the means, if they had the
will, to utilize their talents and acquirements. We do owe to her
newspapers and magazines, and now and then to the traditional liking of
Uncle Sam for his bookish offspring, that some of them did not fall by
the way, even in that arid time succeeding the Civil War, when we