he must have had the Dante scholarship for an occasional
criticism. It was at more recent dinners, where I met him with the
Longfellow family alone, that he broke now and then into a quotation from
some of the modern Italian poets he knew by heart (preferably Giusti),
and syllabled their verse with an exquisite Roman accent and a bewitching
Florentine rhythm. Now and then at these times he brought out a faded
Italian anecdote, faintly smelling of civet, and threadbare in its
ancient texture. He liked to speak of Goldoni and of Nota, of Niccolini
and Manzoni, of Monti and Leopardi; and if you came to America, of the
Revolution and his grandfather, the Quaker General Nathaniel Greene,
whose life he wrote (and I read) in three volumes: He worshipped
Longfellow, and their friendship continued while they lived, but towards
the last of his visits at Craigie House it had a pathos for the witness
which I should grieve to wrong. Greene was then a quivering paralytic,
and he clung tremulously to Longfellow's arm in going out to dinner,
where even the modern Italian poets were silent upon his lips. When we
rose from table, Longfellow lifted him out of his chair, and took him
upon his arm again for their return to the study.

He was of lighter metal than most other members of the Dante Club, and he
was not of their immediate intimacy, living away from Cambridge, as he
did, and I shared his silence in their presence with full sympathy. I was
by far the youngest of their number, and I cannot yet quite make out why
I was of it at all. But at every moment I was as sensible of my good
fortune as of my ill desert. They were the men whom of all men living I
most honored, and it seemed to be impossible that I at my age should be
so perfectly fulfilling the dream of my life in their company. Often, the
nights were very cold, and as I returned home from Craigie House to the
carpenter's box on Sacramento Street, a mile or two away, I was as if
soul-borne through the air by my pride and joy, while the frozen blocks
of snow clinked and tinkled before my feet stumbling along the middle of
the road. I still think that was the richest moment of my life, and I
look back at it as the moment, in a life not unblessed by chance, which I
would most like to live over again--if I must live any. The next winter
the sessions of the Dante Club were transferred to the house of Mr.
Norton, who was then completing his version of the 'Vita Nuova'. This
has always