l that New England world, so hospitable, so brotherly to me that
if I had been born in Cambridge it could hardly have been more kind,
Lowell and Norton were those who most made my welcome free from any
embarrassment to myself. Norton, almost exactly my contemporary, is
still living, and which of us two shall say the last word for the
other is in the lap of the gods, but in the Adirondack Club life he
does not appear. No kinder or wiser friend have I ever had. Himself
the son of one of the most distinguished of the great Unitarian
leaders of liberal New England, his broad, common-sense views of
sectarian questions first widened my religious horizon, emancipated me
from the tithes of mint and cummin, and helped me to see the value
of observances, and his hand was always held out to me in those
straitened moments in which my impulsive and ill-regulated manner of
life continually landed me. I shall not disturb the serenity of his
old age by the indiscreet garrulity of mine. But the brotherhood
between him and Lowell brought our lives together, and Lowell was the
pole to which both our needles swung. Norton's delicate health made it
impossible for him to take part in the excursions made by the Club,
though he was enrolled as a member.

Of Lowell much has been said by many people, some of whom were less,
and others, perhaps, better acquainted with him than I was, but of him
I can speak at least without restraint, other than that which love and
gratitude impose. And to-day, more than forty years since I found his
friendship what it ever remained, the judgment I formed of him at
first acquaintance comes up again in one point dominant. He seemed to
me a man whom good fortune, and especially the favor of society, had
prevented from filling the role that fate had intended for him. There
was in not a few of his poems the promise of reaching a height which
was attainable only to a man who climbs light. There was in him the
possible making of a great reformer, an evangelist, which possibility
never became actuality, owing to the weight which social success laid
on him.

All through his early poems runs the thread of a fine morality, the
perception of the highest obligations of religion and philanthropy,
the subtle distinction of the purest Christianity, the defense of the
weak and oppressed, the succor of the poor; in fine, the creed of a
practical religion which required its adherent to go into the slums
and out on the highways to