e in those days to be
seen in the shady walks of Cambridge to which for me they lent a
Weimarish quality, in the degree that in Weimar itself a few years ago, I
felt a quality of Cambridge. Agassiz, of course, was Swiss and Latin,
and not Teutonic, but he was of the Continental European civilization,
and was widely different from the other Cambridge men in everything but
love of the place. "He is always an Europaen," said Lowell one day, in
distinguishing concerning him; and for any one who had tasted the flavor
of the life beyond the ocean and the channel, this had its charm. Yet he
was extremely fond of his adoptive compatriots, and no alien born had a
truer or tenderer sense of New England character. I have an idea that no
one else of his day could have got so much money for science out of the
General Court of Massachusetts; and I have heard him speak with the
wisest and warmest appreciation of the hard material from which he was
able to extract this treasure. The legislators who voted appropriations
for his Museum and his other scientific objects were not usually lawyers
or professional men, with the perspectives of a liberal education, but
were hard-fisted farmers, who had a grip of the State's money as if it
were their own, and yet gave it with intelligent munificence. They
understood that he did not want it for himself, and had no interested aim
in getting it; they knew that, as he once said, he had no time to make
money, and wished to use it solely for the advancement of learning; and
with this understanding they were ready, to help him generously. He
compared their liberality with that of kings and princes, when these
patronized science, with a recognition of the superior plebeian
generosity. It was on the veranda of his summer house at Nahant, while
he lay in the hammock, talking of this, that I heard him refer also to
the offer which Napoleon III. had made him, inviting him upon certain
splendid conditions to come to Paris after he had established himself in
Cambridge. He said that he had not come to America without going over
every such possibility in his own mind, and deciding beforehand against
it. He was a republican, by nationality and by preference, and was
entirely satisfied with his position and environment in New England.

Outside of his scientific circle in Cambridge he was more friends with
Longfellow than with any one else, I believe, and Longfellow told me how,
after the doctors had condemned Agas