on
which he gave to letters and literary pursuits. He was no _mere_ lawyer:
no stringer of professional centos. He never hid his heart with the veil
of dignity; nor smothered his fresh impulses (preserved intact from
worldly rust since boyhood) with the weight of his judicial and
professional labors. While he believed that the law was a jealous
mistress, he knew that this mistress was too stable and sensible to decree
that a gentle dalliance or seasonable flirtation with her maids of
honor--Poetry, or the Arts, or Literature, or Love--was an unloyal act. He
could turn from Grotius to Dickens, from Vattel to Thackeray. He could
digest the points of the elaborate arguments of eminent counsel, and then
turn aside to a gentle tonic from the administrating hand of Smollett or
Walter Scott. Method was his master-key to all the combinations in the
locks of labor.

Twice married he never ceased to eulogize the bliss of domesticity.
Surrounded by loving eyes, the currents of his freshened affection flowed
deeper and clearer every year. How he treasured home and home joys may be
collected in the following lines from his poem on solitude (before
referred to), written in his twenty-second year.

"Grandeur may dazzle with its transient glare
The herd of folly, and the tribe of care,
Who sport and flutter through their listless days,
Like motes that bask in Summer's noontide blaze,
With anxious steps round vacant splendor while,
Live on a look, and banquet on a smile;
But the firm race whose high endowments claim
The laurel-wreath that decks the brow of fame;
Who warmed by sympathy's electric glow,
In rapture tremble, and dissolve in woe,
Blest in _retirement_, scorn the frowns of fate,
And feel a transport power can ne'er create."

Touching the poem from which these lines are taken, we remember being
shown the only copy of the published book which was known to exist, by the
family of the Judge. The Assistant Librarian (who was born for his station
in all that regards enthusiastic love of his duties), of the Harvard
College library, showed us, with great triumph, a small sheep-bound
volume, entitled "Solitude and other Poems, by Joseph Story," printed
sometime in the commencement of this century: saying, "the Judge has
burned all the copies he can pick up, and this is only to be read here."
This poem was a sore subject to the author. He viewed it as not only a
blot upon his dignity, but an annoyance to h