the one
I had written, so that there was no merciful possibility of mistaking it
for a misprint, and my blood froze in my veins at sight of it. Mr.
Fields had given me the sheets to read while he looked over some letters,
and he either felt the chill of my horror, or I made some sign or sound
of dismay that caught his notice, for he looked round at me. I could
only show him the passage with a gasp. I dare say he might have liked to
laugh, for it was cruelly funny, but he did not; he was concerned for the
magazine as well as for me. He declared that when he first read the line
he had thought I could not have written it so, and he agreed with me that
it would kill the poem if it came out in that shape. He instantly set
about repairing the mischief, so far as could be. He found that the
whole edition of that sheet had been printed, and the air blackened round
me again, lighted up here and there with baleful flashes of the newspaper
wit at my cost, which I previsioned in my misery; I knew what I should
have said of such a thing myself, if it had been another's. But the
publisher at once decided that the sheet must be reprinted, and I went
away weak as if in the escape from some deadly peril. Afterwards it
appeared that the line had passed the first proof-reader as I wrote it,
but that the final reader had entered so sympathetically into the
realistic intention of my poem as to contribute the modification which
had nearly been my end.

X.

As it fell out, I lived without farther difficulty to the day and hour of
the dinner Lowell made for me; and I really think, looking at myself
impersonally, and remembering the sort of young fellow I was, that it
would have been a great pity if I had not. The dinner was at the
old-fashioned Boston hour of two, and the table was laid for four people
in some little upper room at Parker's, which I was never afterwards able
to make sure of. Lowell was already, there when I came, and he presented
me, to my inexpressible delight and surprise, to Dr. Holmes, who was
there with him.

Holmes was in the most brilliant hour of that wonderful second youth
which his fame flowered into long after the world thought he had
completed the cycle of his literary life. He had already received full
recognition as a poet of delicate wit, nimble humor, airy imagination,
and exquisite grace, when the Autocrat papers advanced his name
indefinitely beyond the bounds which most immortals would have found
ra