here hitting off aptly a prominent personality or historic
event mooted in our little human world was at the same time in the
planetary confidences, and that when you shook his hand at parting,
he would turn to interpreting the sweet influences of the Pleiades
and the mysteries of the bands that hold Orion. Coming home from an
interview with Simon Newcomb, late at night I paused on the terrace at
the west front of the Capitol and looked back upon the heavens widely
stretching above the city. The stars glittered cold, far, and silent,
but I had been with a man who in a sense walked and talked with them
and found them sympathetic. In the power of pure intellect I felt I
had never known a greater man.

On an autumn day in the early fifties, as I loitered in the
green-house of the Botanic Garden at Cambridge, a lithe bare-headed
man, in rough brown attire, came quickly stepping in from the
flower-beds outside. He was in his fullest vigour, his hair more
inclined to stand erect than to lie smooth, his dark eyes full of
animation. It was a noticeably vivid and alert personality, and as he
tossed on to a working-table a heavy sheaf of long-stemmed plants, wet
from a recent shower and bent over them in sharp scrutiny, I knew I
was in the presence of Asa Gray, the first of American botanists.
He had come as a boy from a remote rural district, and with few
advantages, following the bent of a marked scientific genius, he had
won for himself before reaching middle life a leading place. I was
soon to know him better, for it was my fortunate lot to be one in the
crowd of juniors which for a term lined up before him once a week
or so in Holden Chapel. The small peculiarities of great men have an
interest, and the function I am seeking now to fulfil is to make sharp
the ordinary presentment of the eminent characters I touch. I
recall of Asa Gray, that with the class, he sat at his desk behind a
substantial rail, which fenced him in from the boys in the front row,
his seat a little raised and the notes before him made plain by a
narrow light-well, which in the Holden of those days opened over the
teacher's head to a sky-light in the roof. Gray's utterance was rather
hesitant. He would catch for his word often, reiterating meanwhile
the article, "the-a, the-a, the-a," his gaze meanwhile fixed upon
the sky-light, and a nervously gyrating forefinger raised high and
brightly illuminated. The thought suggested was that he had a prompter
on