both, their friendship and their respect one for the other held out through the strain. Gray's kind but plain-spoken words had an enlightening effect. Scientific interchange was unbroken, through the letters. At the end of 1862 Dr. Gray writes, 'No, dear Darwin, we don't scorn your joining in the prayer that we daily offer that "God would help our poor Country," and I know and appreciate your honest and right feeling.'

Writing to De Candolle on Christmas Day, 1863, Dr. Gray tells him of the relief and the pleasure that the year has brought him. Anxious for the safety from destruction, by fire or other causes, of his own herbarium, the collection gathered through years, he had offered it as his gift to Harvard University together with his botanical library, if a fireproof building were built in the Botanic Garden for their keeping and a small fund assured for its maintenance. To his delight, a generous Boston banker provided the building, and friends gathered the funds needed for its support. Dr. Gray said, "To secure this I gladly divest myself of the ownership of collections which have absorbed most of my small spare means for the last thirty years, and which are valued at $20,000 or more.'

Dr. Gray continued his instruction at the college with no assistant until 1871, when he offered his resignation; but he was induced to remain, and soon afterwards was relieved of part of his work by Dr. Goodale and Dr. Farlow. With occasional trips, in which his recreation was mainly the gain to his botanical knowledge, Dr. Gray bore steadily in mind the completion of his great work, 'The Flora of North America.' Though genial and of wide interests, he was a great worker all his days. Absolutely loyal to truth, as he and others seemed to find it, at a time when worldwide exploration was fast increasing, and when theories, unheard of before, were on trial, his work not only grew enormously on his hands, but required frequent revision. This his delicate conscience exacted from him, yet he did not allow himself to be discouraged. He was singularly free from scientific jealousies, and rejoiced in others' work.

Dr. Gray was elected into the Saturday Club in 1873, at the same time as Mr. William D. Howells. His qualities made him an admirable member.

When the Doctor was nearly seventy years old, he wrote to a friend, 'I like an article to begin or end with a snapper.' The following lines shall serve, written to him on his seventy-fifth birthday by Lowell:

'Just Fate, prolong his life well-spent,

Whose indefatigable hours

Have been as gaily innocent

And fragrant as the flowers.'

EDWARD W. EMERSON

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

1837-1920

DR. EMERSON in his 'Early Years of the Saturday Club' quotes the following passage from a letter by Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1865 to John Lothrop Motley, then our Minister to England: 'Mr. Howells from Venice was here not long ago... This is a young man of no small talent. In fact his letters from Venice are as good travellers' letters as I remember since Eothen.' The young man thus lauded was not elected to the Saturday Club until nine years later, but in 1865 he was not wholly strange to Boston and he had already met in the flesh and even lunched with the great and kindly Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. The later Dean of American Letters, as he came to be termed, has set down for us most engagingly how he broke into the august literary circles of Boston and Cambridge when but twenty-two on the strength of self-introduction and two poems printed in a single number of the Atlantic. He has told us that, wearing in his breast pocket next his heart the little note which James Russell Lowell, the editor, had written him about them, he forayed forth from the Western Reserve where he had lived from youth as a printer and newspaper correspondent and which was still a wildernesss to the imagination of Boston, and penetrated to the old Tremont House, the 'groves of academe' at Harvard Square, and ‘Old Harvard's scholar factories red.' Thence he proceeded, with proper awe, to Elmwood, where the author of the 'Biglow Papers' and 'Sir Launfal,' notwithstanding 'a certain frosty shyness, a smiling cold, as from the long, high-sunned winters of his Puritan race,' made him free of his whole heart, and at parting invited him to dine at the Parker House.

'I could not keep my eyes from those beautiful eyes of his, which had a certain starry serenity, and looked out so purely from under his white forehead, shadowed with auburn hair untouched by age; or from the smile that shaped the auburn beard, and gave the face in its form and color the Christ-like look which Page's portrait has flattered in it.' Such was the reverent memory of ardent

youth. But 'age' forsooth! For, as the ardent youth admits, Lowell was then but forty-one and did not reach 'the height of his fame' until 'thirty years after.' There was no fly in the ointment of the reception unless in the gentle correction 'when I said I had tried hard to believe that I was at least the literary descendant of Sir James Howels,' that I meant 'James Howel,' and his taking down the 'Familiar Letters' from the shelves behind to prove me wrong. This was always his habit, as I found afterwards. I, too, can add a gloss upon that practice, for I never felt more irate in my life than when a callow youth, yet not so young as I looked, and very sophisticated as to how polite society is clothed, I called on Lowell in London while he was Minister to England, and also was invited to dinner. But as I rose to end my call he felt constrained to add, 'You know we always dress for dinner here. It was on the tip of my tongue, and still lingers there, to reply, 'I was aware of that before you were born.'

At Parker's in a little upper room and at the old-fashioned Boston hour of two, the dinner table was laid for four. Besides Lowell and his guest there were Dr. Holmes and James T. Fields. It was at this introduction that the Autocrat, leaning over towards his host, said 'with a laughing look at me,' so the ardent youth records, 'Well, James, this is something like the apostolic succession; this is the laying-on of hands.' Sweet and caressing irony, according to the modest visitor, but veritable words of prophecy, nevertheless. Destiny had already in reserve, and not far away, as the chief lineal heir and successor to the genius and distinction of the great New England group then in its flower the guest of this occasion from the Western Reserve and son of a Swedenborgian, then partaking of 'the first dinner served in courses that [he] had ever sat down to.' Already he had faced the senior partner of Ticknor and Fields, the publishers of the Atlantic, in the little room at the back of the store, with its window looking upon School Street, who asked him if he had been paid for one of his poems, and, when 'I confessed that I had not, ... got out a chamois leather bag and took from it five half-eagles in gold and laid them on the green cloth top of the desk in much the shape and of much the size of the Great Bear.' The dazzling lavishness of this twenty-five dollars,