ed in corners by the privileged, but, when bruited about, it has a damaging effect on that air of historic repose and classic dignity which, by a singular tacit consensus, it has been agreed is the proper one for Boston to assume before the rest of the world. This outward appearance must be kept up, even at an occasional expense to truth. The contrast between Parker's intrepid tone and the careful self-adornment and guarded speech of a George Ticknor or an Edward Everett indicates precisely the difference between the Boston atmosphere and that of London or New York. There is a tendency here to make dignity an incumbrance, instead of a natural outgrowth of character strong enough to support a little freedom. Most people, in all places, are sensitive to social opinion; they are to some extent afraid of others. But the Bostonian goes farther than that: he is afraid of himself. It is only about ten years since Ticknor ceased to walk the streets-a tall, stately figure, instinct with this Boston dignity. The mention of his name should remind us to discriminate somewhat the groups and tendencies of the earlier date to which we have just been reverting. Although, as has been said, Boston was small and its intellectual enthusiasms spread rapidly, it must not be inferred that it was a unit. The party of thinkers and agitators humorously dubbed "The Jacobins' Club,' which about 1840 used to assemble at the Tremont House and George Ripley's house, and once met in the parlors of Miss E. P. Peabody, the enthusiastic educator, the sister-in-law of Hawthorne, and friend of Channing, embraced the most extreme and radical reformers, "come-outers," revolutionists, some of them strong men and afterward useful citizens, but others mereon-lookers attracted by the music of progress, and trying to keep step with the procession, or even to run ahead of it. Between the generality of these theorists. and Emerson there was a wide gap; although he, like Hawthorne, if less practically, sympathized with Ripley's Brook Farm experiment. If among the more progressive minds themselves there was division, still greater was the distance at which Ticknor stood, representing in letters the spirit of the wealthy merchant and professional class, who have long made great pretensions to inherited aristocracy. George Bancroft, for his part, was under a ban, stood somewhat apart, because he was a Democratic office-holder; suffering from the same narrow rigor of Massachusetts judgment (a legacy from the seventeenth century) which twice ostracized Sumner, from the most opposite causes, and perhaps escaped doing it again only because he did not live. But Bancroft, from his point of view, sympathized with the intense realistic idealism of Ripley. The lyrists, excepting Whittier, had their eyes cleared by Unitarianism and its successor Transcendentalism; and all of them were abolitionists. They occupied, however, individual grounds. One of the most noticeable things about the whole period, in fact, is the isolation in which the halfdozen men who have shone like a constellation over Boston grew up to power. Because of his shy temperament and his poverty Hawthorne was obscure, and during his Boston custom-house days unknown, his chief distinction to the popular eye, so far as I can learn, having been that he was extremely fond of martial music, and could generally be founda tall, shapely figure, rendered military by the thick mustache-following any procession headed by a band. Longfellow made his appearance at about this time in Cambridge as the young professor just home from Germany, imbued with the romance of that land, and saying, as we know, a good word to the public for his friend Hawthorne; also settling down to the teaching of under-graduates. Among these last was James Russell Lowell, soon after a youthful lawyer without a practice, somewhat exquisite in matters of dress, and given to penning odes instead of briefs. He also published a novel called My First Client-a subject that probably gave free play for the imagina tion-which has since disappeared from mortal ken. Emerson turned his back on Boston with as much bitterness, perhaps, as we can conceive of in him, for what he considered the city's shams. Holmes was busy with pen and scalpel; man of wit, man of science, keen scholar, writing a good many songs, but not yet known as a brilliant prose author. Meetings and greetings and correspondence took place, of course; but no coterie was formed; the RALPH WALDO EMERSON. that irrepressible merriment which the native New - Englander lacks in himself, but heartily enjoys in others; his voice was the mellow signal of good-fellowship; and he was wont to hail with glee the entrance of the lights which were handed around in a half-mystic ceremony, to furnish the "gloria" for coffee, at the end of dinner. Mr. Fields also tells me that the great naturalist always insisted on having a huge joint of roast mutton served entire, from which he cut his own slice, requiring the meat to be cooked more and more rare as he got on in years. The Saturday met, and continues to meet, every month, at two of the clock on the day its name would indicate, in the mirrorroom at Parker's. Its gatherings, rife with wit and sense and high spirits, must have been, until the death of Agassiz, a fine source of cheer and mental stimulus to the members; for they dom, getting the good out of it, and none of the harm. men were not bound together by a common | knew how to use conviviality with wisdefinition of purpose and mutual criticism, stimulating mutually. These things were reserved for the era of the Saturday Club, which drew together the wise and dazzling circle when they had begun to be famous. It is a pity that this club has had no historian. Among its members, besides those just named, were Felton (professor and president at Harvard, and the friend whose cordiality and humor Dickens so appreciated); Judge Hoar, one of the keenest minds and most pungent after-dinner speakers in the country; E. P. Whipple, the critic; Professor Benjamin Peirce, Rev. James Freeman Clarke; Chief Justice Gray; Agassiz. In the rich reminiscence of his threnody on Agassiz, Lowell has briefly pictured Holmes's "rockets" curving "their long ellipse" at this board so thickly begirt with wonderful men, and has recalled the "face, half rustic, half divine," of Emerson, as he listened, "Pricked with the cider of the judge's wit." Agassiz, with his large, generous, and sensitive countenance, suggesting that of an intellectualized god Pan, was the life of the feast. Stored up within him was Possibly their earlier isolation may have assisted in guarding their individuality, just as the smallness and simplicity of the town encouraged that fresh eagerness and sincerity which make the soul of originality. Too much stress can not be laid on this latter influence. Now that the capital has expanded into a large city, and its suburban villages into smaller cities and towns, we see the great difference in the action of the new surroundings on new minds. They are more sophisticated. When the university was called a college, or "the colleges," and that institution was a sort of higher academy, set in a quaint, sleepy village separated from town by the terrors of the "hourly," or omnibus, and bounded on three sides by breezy groves, open country, and huckleberry pastures, the whole atmosphere was-one can imagine what: not Greek, nursing poets terrible as the son of Agamemnon, but yet healthier than it is now. Still, even in these later times, glimpses of old Cambridge when it kept its primitive traits are not wholly wanting. On the northeastern verge of the city, in an ample stretch of natural woods, stands Shady Hill, the home of Charles Eliot Norton, where, under the suave hospitality of the scholarly host, amid the treasures of the library, and with original Tintorettos and Titians looking down from the walls, one seems transported to a corner of the fifteenth-century Italy. Within that congenial demesne, in an avenue of tall, rusty-coated pines, a party of four young people (of whom the writer was one) were strolling and sitting one day, a few years since, when Mr. Lowell came down the path, and halted to speak to them. He had in his hand Carlyon's Early Years and Late Reflections, which was oddly appropriate to his mood; for he dwelt on the fact of thus encountering a group of the younger generation, saying that it was like coming upon his own vanished youth there in the wood. From this he went on to chat for an hour, telling about the Adirondac expedition recorded in verse by Emerson, and shared in by himself, Judge Hoar, and Mr. W. J. Stillman, who was a genuine Deerslayer with the rifle. He also spoke of poetry; of Browning, Donne, Tennyson, and Morris; quoting from "Pippa Passes" Ottima's lines in the scene with Sebald, where she tells how "ever and anon some bright white shaft Burnt thro' the pine-tree roof-here burnt and there, T. B. ALDRICH. 'Here is a new poet!" Yet, somewhat contradictorily, he next branched out into a theory that modern life offered no such intensity of passion for the poet's uses as the world of the Elizabethan age still retained. It would be impossible to reproduce the eloquent glow of his monologue at this distance of time; but the incident is mentioned here to suggest how casually on the Cambridge thoroughfares, or in a little patch of unhistoric woodland like the one referred to, any day or hour may bring the pleasure of unexpected converse with some rare mind-of poet, philosopher, critic, or worker in science. Mr. Lowell's pockets that day were full of proofs. "I'm printing," he explained; and he was, in fact, just preparing his essay on Wordsworth for the North American Review. So, in the spacious university town, the routine of life goes on: the students study and the professors profess, the street cars trundle, the hucksters patiently trade, the birds build and sing in the fruit trees, and literature grows up and blossoms under your very eyes. Seeing this, the mind naturally turns back to the time when Longfellow's village smithy really stood under its spreading chestnut in what is now the city of Cambridge (with its improved appliances of a City Hall "Ring"); when the diurnal and nocturnal sights and sounds of their neigh borhood passed living into his verse and that of his brother poet at Elmwood, and Harvard fixed upon Parnassus a less myopic and philological eye than at present. Mr. Longfellow's stately dwelling, Craigie House, occupied, as every one knows, by Washington at the siege of Boston-("This," said the poet, laughingly, to some visitors, "is the head-quarters, and the houses which he occupied during his retreat were the hind quarters") - has yielded more to the prevailing suburban-villa style of its neighbors than Elmwood or Shady Hill. It is fitting enough that it should, since by reason of its distinguished owner's accessibility, his constant and varied hospitality, and his social position, it forms perhaps the strongest connecting link between society and literature in or about Boston. The days follow in something like a continuous levee at this old colonial mansion, whose heavy brass door-knocker is plied (or more often gazed at by a deteriorating generation, in ignorance as to the mode of handling it) by a long stream of pilgrims of high and low degree, drawn by reverence, or curiosity, or the wish for literary advice. But across the street a piece of pasture-land, with some cows munching among the clover and buttercups, and a vista of the sliding Charles and Brighton meadows beyond-upon which the poet can look from behind his magnificent lilacs and lofty elms-still keep the rural aroma in the air he breathes. It may be noticed here that Mr. T. B. Aldrich, who for a time occupied Elmwood, during its owner's absence, and had previously lived in Boston, has gone to Ponkapog, a spot more absolutely removed from human aggregations than the outskirts of Cambridge, or even of Concord. There, in a library as perfect as anything in a French novel, looking out on a landscape that might be a Jacques, he works with loving leisure at his poetry and prose, sallying forth just enough to remind people of what they lose by not oftener enjoying the dry and sparkling wit and drollery of his talk. Mr. Howells, whose ready humor and cordial laugh and singularly modest presence were for a dozen years familiar to Cambridge, has betaken himself to the heights of Belmont, a few miles to the westward. There, in the |