before the students and the
public (the popularity of Lowell as a lecturer was immense) solidified
an education which, as he himself humorously avowed, was often broken
by freaks of irrepressible youthful spirit; and the saddening and
indelible effects of the war, which came between and sharply divided
those phases of his career, had so modified his character for the
graver and more profound that I agree with those of his friends who
consider his entry into the diplomatic career as a misfortune for
American letters, and that his mind flowed to waste in those later
years. Nor was he at home in diplomacy. It was a reversal of all the
conditions of his habitual existence; but it flattered his _amour
propre_ that the country should recognize the part he had taken in the
cultivation of the anti-slavery sentiment of the nation, and the trace
of worldly feeling which I have noted grew under the stimulus to a
motive in life. His social gifts were very great, and his patriotic
pride intensified the pleasure of his successes in a line of life
which was really secondary in his nature.

In those years of his diplomatic life we saw little of each other. Our
intimate intercourse was suspended by my going to Europe in 1859. We
were nearest each other in our Adirondack life, in which he had all
the zest of a boy. He was the soul of the merriment of the company,
fullest of witticisms, keenest in appreciation of the liberty of
the occasion, and the _genius loci_. One sees through all his
nature-poetry the traces of the heredity of the early settler, the
keen enjoyment of the fresh and unhackneyed in nature, even of the
angularity of the New England farmhouse and the brightness and newness
of the villages, so crude to the tastes founded in the picturesqueness
of the Old World. Not even Emerson, with all his indifference to the
mere form of things, took to unimproved and uncivilized nature as
Lowell did, and his free delight in the Wilderness was a thing to
remember, and perhaps by none so keenly appreciated as by me, to whom
the joy of forest life was a satisfactory motive for living.

CHAPTER XV

THE ADIRONDACK AND FLORIDA

Of the rest of our company in that famous old camp by "Follansbee
Water" there is little more to be said which will interest others or
recall names known to the world. I painted a study of the camp and its
inhabitants, with the intention of making from it, at a future time, a
picture which should commemor