all scientific, and yet towards the close of his life, Agassiz may be
said to have led that movement towards the new position of science in
matters of mystery which is now characteristic of it. He was ancestrally
of the Swiss "Brahminical caste," as so many of his friends in Cambridge
were of the Brahminical caste of New England; and perhaps it was the line
of ancestral pasteurs which at last drew him back, or on, to the
affirmation of an unformulated faith of his own. At any rate, before
most other savants would say that they had souls of their own he became,
by opening a summer school of science with prayer, nearly as consolatory
to the unscientific who wished to believe they had souls, as Mr. John
Fiske himself, though Mr. Fiske, as the arch-apostle of Darwinism, had
arrived at nearly the same point by such a very different road.

Mr. Fiske had been our neighbor in our first Cambridge home, and when we
went to live in Berkeley Street, he followed with his family and placed
himself across the way in a house which I already knew as the home of
Richard Henry Dana, the author of 'Two Years Before the Mast.' Like
nearly all the other Cambridge men of my acquaintance Dana was very much
my senior, and like the rest he welcomed my literary promise as cordially
as if it were performance, with no suggestion of the condescension which
was said to be his attitude towards many of his fellow-men. I never saw
anything of this, in fact, and I suppose he may have been a blend of
those patrician qualities and democratic principles which made Lowell
anomalous even to himself. He is part of the anti-slavery history of his
time, and he gave to the oppressed his strenuous help both as a man and a
politician; his gifts and learning in the law were freely at their
service. He never lost his interest in those white slaves, whose brutal
bondage he remembered as bound with them in his 'Two Years Before the
Mast,' and any luckless seaman with a case or cause might count upon his
friendship as surely as the black slaves of the South. He was able to
temper his indignation for their oppression with a humorous perception of
what was droll in its agents and circumstances; and I wish I could recall
all that he said once about sea-etiquette on merchant vessels, where the
chief mate might no more speak to the captain at table without being
addressed by him than a subject might put a question to his sovereign. He
was amusing in his stories of the Pacific