d not a capital, in literature as well as in other
things, and doubtless he increasingly felt this. I know that there came
a time when he no longer thought the West must be exile for a literary
man; and his latest visits to its summer schools as a lecturer impressed
him with the genuineness of the interest felt there in culture of all
kinds. He spoke of this, with a due sense of what was pathetic as well
as what was grotesque in some of its manifestations; and I think that in
reconciling himself to our popular crudeness for the sake of our popular
earnestness, he completed his naturalization, in the only sense in which
our citizenship is worth having.

I do not wish to imply that he forgot his native land, or ceased to love
it proudly and tenderly. He kept for Norway the fondness which the man
sitting at his own hearth feels for the home of his boyhood. He was of
good family; his people were people of substance and condition, and he
could have had an easier life there than here. He could have won even
wider fame, and doubtless if he had remained in Norway, he would have
been one of that group of great Norwegians who have given their little
land renown surpassed by that of no other in the modern republic of
letters. The name of Boyesen would have been set with the names of
Bjornson, of Ibsen, of Kielland, and of Lie. But when once he had seen
America (at the wish of his father, who had visited the United States
before him), he thought only of becoming an American. When I first knew
him he was full of the poetry of his mother-land; his talk was of fjords
and glaciers, of firs and birches, of hulders and nixies, of housemen and
gaardsmen; but he was glad to be here, and I think he never regretted
that he had cast his lot with us. Always, of course, he had the deepest
interest in his country and countrymen. He stood the friend of every
Norwegian who came to him in want or trouble, and they, came to him
freely and frequently. He sympathized strongly with Norway in her
quarrel with Sweden, and her wish for equality as well as autonomy; and
though he did not go all lengths with the national party, he was decided
in his feeling that Sweden was unjust to her sister kingdom, and
strenuous for the principles of the Norwegian leaders.

But, as I have said, poetry, was what his ardent spirit mainly meditated
in that hour when I first knew him in Cambridge, before we had either of
us grown old and sad, if not wise. He overflowed with