it, and he talked
as little as he dreamed of anything else in the vast half-summer we spent
together. He was constantly at my house, where in an absence of my
family I was living bachelor, and where we sat indoors and talked, or
sauntered outdoors and talked, with our heads in a cloud of fancies, not
unmixed with the mosquitoes of Cambridge: if I could have back the
fancies, I would be willing to have the mosquitoes with them. He looked
the poetry he lived: his eyes were the blue of sunlit fjords; his brown
silken hair was thick on the crown which it later abandoned to a
scholarly baldness; his soft, red lips half hid a boyish pout in the
youthful beard and mustache. He was short of stature, but of a stalwart
breadth of frame, and his voice was of a peculiar and endearing quality,
indescribably mellow and tender when he read his verse.

I have hardly the right to dwell so long upon him here, for he was only a
sojourner in Cambridge, but the memory of that early intimacy is too much
for my sense of proportion. As I have hinted, our intimacy was renewed
afterwards, when I too came to live in New York, where as long as he was
in this 'dolce lome', he hardly let a week go by without passing a long
evening with me. Our talk was still of literature and life, but more of
life than of literature, and we seldom spoke of those old times. I still
found him true to the ideals which had clarified themselves to both of us
as the duty of unswerving fealty to the real thing in whatever we did.
This we felt, as we had felt it long before, to be the sole source of
beauty and of art, and we warmed ourselves at each other's hearts in our
devotion to it, amidst a misunderstanding environment which we did not
characterize by so mild an epithet. Boyesen, indeed, out-realisted me,
in the polemics of our aesthetics, and sometimes when an unbeliever was
by, I willingly left to my friend the affirmation of our faith, not
without some quaking at his unsparing strenuousness in disciplining the
heretic. But now that ardent and active soul is Elsewhere, and I have
ceased even to expect the ring, which, making itself heard at the late
hour of his coming, I knew always to be his and not another's. That
mechanical expectation of those who will come no more is something
terrible, but when even that ceases, we know the irreparability of our
loss, and begin to realize how much of ourselves they have taken with
them.

IV.

It was some years before