ich remain unknown to most
Americans. When he died he had been a journalist in Chicago, and a
teacher in Ohio; he had been a professor in Cornell University and a
literary free lance in New York; and everywhere his eyes and ears had
kept themselves open. As a teacher he learned to know the more fortunate
or the more ambitious of our youth, and as a lecturer his knowledge was
continually extending itself among all ages and classes of Americans.

He was through and through a Norseman, but he was none the less a very
American. Between Norsk and Yankee there is an affinity of spirit more
intimate than the ties of race. Both have the common-sense view of life;
both are unsentimental. When Boyesen told me that among the Norwegians
men never kissed each other, as the Germans, and the Frenchmen, and the
Italians do, I perceived that we stood upon common ground. When he
explained the democratic character of society in Norway, I could well
understand how he should find us a little behind his own countrymen in
the practice, if not the theory of equality, though they lived under a
king and we under a president. But he was proud of his American
citizenship; he knew all that it meant, at its best, for humanity. He
divined that the true expression of America was not civic, not social,
but domestic almost, and that the people in the simplest homes, or those
who remained in the tradition of a simple home life, were the true
Americans as yet, whatever the future Americans might be.

When I first knew him he was chafing with the impatience of youth and
ambition at what he thought his exile in the West. There was, to be
sure, a difference between Urbana, Ohio, and Cambridge, Massachusetts,
and he realized the difference in the extreme and perhaps beyond it. I
tried to make him believe that if a man had one or two friends anywhere
who loved letters and sympathized with him in his literary attempts, it
was incentive enough; but of course he wished to be in the centres of
literature, as we all do; and he never was content until he had set his
face and his foot Eastward. It was a great step for him from the
Swedenborgian school at Urbana to the young university at Ithaca; and I
remember his exultation in making it. But he could not rest there, and
in a few years he resigned his professorship, and came to New York, where
he entered high-heartedly upon the struggle with fortune which ended in
his appointment in Columbia.

New York is a mart an