light of his conversation. If I had been even more prejudiced than I
was, I could not have withstood that easy grace, that winning
cordiality. Every one knew where he had stood during the war, and how he
had wielded the flail of his "lashing hail" against the South and the
Southern cause and "Southern sympathizers." But that warfare was over
for him, and out of kindly regard for my feelings he made no allusion to
the great quarrel, with two exceptions. Once, just before he left
Baltimore, he was talking as no other man could talk about the Yankee
dialect, and turning to me he said with a half smile and a deep twinkle
in his eye, "I should like to have you read what I have written about
the Yankee dialect, but I am afraid you might not like the context." A
few days afterwards I received from him the well-known preface to the
Second Series of The Biglow Papers, cut out from the volume. It was a
graceful concession to Southern weakness, and after all I may have been
mistaken in thinking that I could read the Second Series as literature,
just as I should read the Anti-Jacobin or the Two-penny Post Bag. In
fact, on looking into the Second Series again, I must confess that I
cannot even now discover the same merits that I could not help
acknowledging in the First Series, which I read for the first time in
1850, when I was a student in Berlin. By that time I had recovered from
my boyish enthusiasm over the Mexican war, and as my party had been
successful, I could afford to enjoy the wit and humor of the book, from
the inimitable Notices of an Independent Press to the last utterance of
Birdofredum Sawin; and I have always remembered enough of the contents
to make a psychological study of the Second Series a matter of interest,
if it were not for other things.

On the second occasion we were passing together under the shadow of the
Washington Monument, and the name of Lee came by some chance into the
current of talk. Here Mr. Lowell could not refrain from expressing his
view of Lee's course in turning against the government to which he had
sworn allegiance. Doubtless he felt it to be his duty to emphasize his
conviction as to a vital clause of his creed, but it instantly became
evident that this was a theme that could not be profitably pursued, and
we walked in silence the rest of the way,--the author of the line

Virginia gave us this imperial man,

and the follower of that other imperial man Virginia gave the world;