reclame from these things was sweet to him; but he loved to
comply as much as he loved to be praised. In the pleasure he got he
could feel himself a prophet in his own country, but the country which
owned him prophet began perhaps to feel rather too much as if it owned
him, and did not prize his vaticinations at all their worth. Some polite
Bostonians knew him chiefly on this side, and judged him to their own
detriment from it.

VI.

After we went to live in Cambridge, my life and the delight in it were so
wholly there that in ten years I had hardly been in as many Boston
houses. As I have said, I met Doctor Holmes at the Fieldses', and at
Longfellow's, when he came out to a Dante supper, which was not often,
and somewhat later at the Saturday Club dinners. One parlous time at the
publisher's I have already recalled, when Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe and
the Autocrat clashed upon homeopathy, and it required all the tact of the
host to lure them away from the dangerous theme. As it was, a battle
waged in the courteous forms of Fontenoy, went on pretty well through the
dinner, and it was only over the coffee that a truce was called. I need
not say which was heterodox, or that each had a deep and strenuous
conscience in the matter. I have always felt it a proof of his extreme
leniency to me, unworthy, that the doctor was able to tolerate my own
defection from the elder faith in medicine; and I could not feel his
kindness less caressing because I knew it a concession to an infirmity.
He said something like, After all a good physician was the great matter;
and I eagerly turned his clemency to praise of our family doctor.

He was very constant at the Saturday Club, as long as his strength
permitted, and few of its members missed fewer of its meetings. He
continued to sit at its table until the ghosts of Hawthorne, of Agassiz,
of Emerson, of Longfellow, of Lowell, out of others less famous, bore him
company there among the younger men in the flesh. It must have been very
melancholy, but nothing could deeply cloud his most cheerful spirit. His
strenuous interest in life kept him alive to all the things of it, after
so many of his friends were dead. The questions which he was wont to
deal with so fondly, so wisely, the great problems of the soul, were all
the more vital, perhaps, because the personal concern in them was
increased by the translation to some other being of the men who had so
often tried with him to fathom t