she once brought to book a youthful matron who had perhaps
unduly lamented the hardships of housekeeping, with the sharp demand,
"Child, where is your religion?" After the many years of an acquaintance
which had not nearly so many meetings as years, it was pleasant to find
her, at the latest, as strenuous as ever for the faith of works, and as
eager to aid Stepniak as John Brown. In her beautiful old age she
survives a certain literary impulse of Boston, but a still higher impulse
of Boston she will not survive, for that will last while the city
endures.

VIII.

The Cambridge men were curiously apart from others that formed the great
New England group, and with whom in my earlier ignorance I had always
fancied them mingling. Now and then I met Doctor Holmes at Longfellow's
table, but not oftener than now and then, and I never saw Emerson in
Cambridge at all except at Longfellow's funeral. In my first years on
the Atlantic I sometimes saw him, when he would address me some grave,
rather retrorsive civilities, after I had been newly introduced to him,
as I had always to be on these occasions. I formed the belief that he
did not care for me, either in my being or doing, and I am far from
blaming him for that: on such points there might easily be two opinions,
and I was myself often of the mind I imagined in him.

If Emerson forgot me, it was perhaps because I was not of those qualities
of things which even then, it was said, he could remember so much better
than things themselves. In his later years I sometimes saw him in the
Boston streets with his beautiful face dreamily set, as he moved like one
to whose vision

"Heaven opens inward, chasms yawn,
Vast images in glimmering dawn,
Half shown, are broken and withdrawn."

It is known how before the end the eclipse became total and from moment
to moment the record inscribed upon his mind was erased. Some years
before he died I sat between him and Mrs. Rose Terry Cooke, at an
'Atlantic Breakfast' where it was part of my editorial function to
preside. When he was not asking me who she was, I could hear him asking
her who I was. His great soul worked so independently of memory as we
conceive it, and so powerfully and essentially, that one could not help
wondering if; after all, our personal continuity, our identity hereafter,
was necessarily trammeled up with our enduring knowledge of what happens
here. His remembrance absolutely ceased with a