cars, sometimes for two hours, in order to get out of town. It is a paradise to the Parker House, for no smoking is allowed, and there is far more retirement. A large and respectable club of us hire it (Town and Country Club), and I am pretty sure to find some one there whose face is set the same way as my own.

Have you found at last in your wanderings a place where the solitude is sweet?

What mountain are you camping on nowadays? Though I had a good time at the mountains, I confess that the journey did not bear any fruit that I know of. I did not expect it would. The mode of it was not simple and adventurous enough. You must first have made an infinite demand, and not unreasonably, but after a corresponding outlay, have an all-absorbing purpose, and at the same time that your feet bear you hither and thither, travel much more in imagination.

To let the mountains slide, - live at home like a traveler. It should not be in vain that these things are shown us from day to day. Is not each withered leaf that I see in my walks something which I have traveled to find?. traveled, who can tell how far? What a fool he must be who thinks that his El Dorado is anywhere but where he lives! . .

I

(To Ralph Waldo Emerson)

CANNOT forbear to say a word I want to say about Hawthorne and Ellery Channing. Hawthorne isn't a handsome man, nor an engaging one, personally. He has the look all the time, to one who doesn't know him, of a rogue who suddenly finds himself in a company of detec

Hawthorne the Only Oasis

tives. But in spite of his rusticity, I felt a sympathy for him amounting to anguish, and couldn't take my eyes off him all the dinner, nor my rapt attention, as that indecisive little found, I am afraid, to his cost, for I hardly heard a word of what he kept on saying to me, and felt at one time very much like sending down to Parker to have him removed from the room as måliciously putting his little artificial person between me and a profitable object of study. Yet I feel now no ill-will to and could recommend any one (but myself) to go and hear him preach. Hawthorne, however, seemed to me to possess human substance, and not to have dissipated it all away, as that debauched X. Y. and the good, inoffensive, comforting Longfellow. He seemed much nearer the human being than any one at that end of the table, — much nearer. John Forbes and yourself kept up the balance at the other end; but that end was a desert, with him for its only oasis. It was so pathetic to see him, contented, sprawling, Concord owl that he was and always has been, brought blindfold into the brilliant daylight, and expected to wink and be lively like any little dapper Tommy Titmouse or Jenny Wren. How he buried his eyes in his plate, and ate with a voracity that no person should dare to ask him a question! My heart broke for him as that attenuated X. Y. kept putting forth his long antennæ toward him, stroking his face, and trying whether his eyes were shut.

The idea I got was, and it was very powerfully impressed on me, that we are all monstrously corrupt, hopelessly bereft of human consciousness, and that it is the intention of the Divine Providence to overrun us and obliterate us in a new Gothic and Vandalic invasion, of which this Concord specimen is a first fruit. It was heavenly to see him persist in ignoring X. Y. and shutting his eyes against his spectral smiles; eating his dinner and doing absolutely

nothing but that, and then going home to his Concord den to fall on his knees and ask his Heavenly Father why it was that an owl couldn't remain an owl, and not be forced into the diversions of a canary. I have no doubt that all the tenderest angels saw to his case that night, and poured oil into his wounds more soothing than gentlemen ever know.

Ellery Channing, too, seemed so human and good, sweet as sunshine, and fragrant as pine woods. He is more sophisticated than the other, of course, but still he was kin; and I felt the world richer by two men who had not yet lost themselves in mere members of society. This is what I suspect, — that we are fast getting so fearful one to another, we members of society, that we shall ere long begin to kill one another in self defence, and give place in that way to a more veracious state of things. The old world is breaking up on all hands, the glimpse of the everlasting granite I caught in Hawthorne shows me that there is stock enough for fifty better. Let the old imposter go, bag and baggage, for a very real and substantial one is aching to come in, in which the churl shall not be exalted to a place of dignity, in which innocence shall never be tarnished nor trafficked in, in which every man's freedom shall be respected down to its feeblest filament as the radiant altar of God. To the angels, says Swedenborg, Death means Resurrection to life; by that necessary rule of inversion which keeps them separate from us and us from them, and so prevents our being mutual nuisances.

A Furious Frank

James Russell Lowell speaks French too politely

I

(To Edwin Lawrence Godkin)

ELMWOOD, 29th Dec., 1871

WAS to have started last Monday, but there is a furious Frank here who has opened a school for his detestable lingo in which Mesdames Lowell and Gurney are pupils. He dines with us on alternate Wednesdays and compels us to talk French till we are black in the face. Last Wednesday week was our day and then came a fortnight of vacances. As I pressed his hand at parting, of course I told him that we should be glad to see him during that halcyon period, and murmured à bientôt like an ass as I was. That he should not have perceived that I was talking French was perhaps excusable enough, but that he should take what I said in a brutal Anglo-Saxon way as if I meant it — that I cannot so easily forgive. Anyhow, he told Fanny next day that he should have the happiness of accepting my ravishing invitation for the next Wednesday, as if I had not left the matter as much in the air (to use their own phrase) as a balloon that may come down weeks away from where it started. So there I was planted for this week. If you will let me perch with you, I shall come next Monday. Company - except yours and that of two or three more I do not want except on the most unwhitechokery terms and I come on the express understanding that you are to return my visit in the course of the winter.

"The changed perspective" o

(John G. Whittier to Elizabeth Stuart Phelps)

I

4th mo., 7, 1878

AGREE with Canon Farrar that "life is worth living," even if one cannot sleep the biggest part of it away. Thee and I get more out of it, after all, than those "sleek-headed folks who sleep o' nights." Against all my natural inclinations, I have been fighting for the " causes," half my life. "Woe is me, my mother," I can say with the old prophet, "who hast borne me a man of strife and contention." I have suffered dreadfully from coarseness, self-seeking vanity, and asinine stupidity among associates, as well as from the coldness or open hostility, and, worst, the ridicule of the outside world, but I now see that it was best, and that I needed it all.

...

Mrs. Briggs listens to Phillips Brooks

ROXBURY, January, 11, 1880

OW, you can't guess what I have done to-day,

Now,

and such a blessed time as I have had I could never tell you about. I announced last night my intention to hear Phillips Brooks preach, if I went on foot and alone, figuratively speaking. I was not quite so saucy as that, but I was emphatic because I meant to do it. So it was all nicely arranged; the next-door neighbor having a seat there, and a car going expressly to the church, we all went together; and I found myself in the beautiful church in a pew very near the chancel, so there could be no difficulty about hearing, and had an opportunity to take in the rich, warm, soft coloring and the whole subdued tone of the building before the service commenced.