Literary Friends and Acquaintance: A Personal Retrospect of American Authorship |
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acquaintance afterwards Agassiz American asked Atlantic Monthly Autocrat BAYARD TAYLOR beautiful began believe Boston Boyesen Cambridge CELIA THAXTER charm criticism Dante Club delight dinner Doctor Holmes doubt editor Emerson England English eyes face fact faith fame fancy feel felt fond gave hand Harvard Square Hawthorne heard heart horse-car humor imagined interest Italian Julia Ward kind knew less letters literary literature lived Longfellow look Lowell Lowell's magazine meet ment mind never novel once PARK STREET CHURCH perhaps person pleasure poem poet poetry praise reader recall remember RICHARD HENRY DANA Saturday Press seemed sense smile sort speak spoke story Street suppose sure T. B. Aldrich talk things thought tion told tonian took Venice verse W. D. HOWELLS'S walked wished word write wrote York young youth
Popular passages
Page 149 - From the crown of my head to the sole of my foot, I'm alive, I'm alive!
Page 48 - I wonder if there is a stage that still runs between Lowell and Concord, past meadow walls, and under the caressing boughs of way-side elms, and through the bird-haunted gloom of woodland roads, in the freshness of the summer morning? By a blessed chance I found that there was such a stage in 1860, and I took it from my hotel, instead of going back to Boston and up to Concord as I must have had to do by train. The journey gave me the intimacy of the New England country as I could have had it in no...
Page 71 - Oh, a couple of shysters!" and the rest laughed, I was abashed all they could have wished, and was not restored to myself till one of them said that the thought of Boston made him as ugly as sin; then I began to hope again that men who took themselves so seriously as that need not be taken very seriously by me.
Page 74 - I remember how he leaned back in his chair, and reached out his great hand to me, as if he were going to give it me for good and all. He had a fine head, with a cloud of Jovian hair upon it, and a branching beard and mustache, and gentle eyes that looked most kindly into mine, and seemed to wish the liking which I instantly gave him, though we hardly passed a word, and our acquaintance was summed up in that glance and the grasp of his mighty fist upon my hand.
Page 248 - Lowell was of the richest nature I have known. His nature was not always serene or pellucid; it was sometimes roiled by the currents that counter and cross in all of us; but it was without the least alloy of insincerity, and it was never darkened by the shadow of a selfish fear.
Page 48 - Wayside. It was never otherwise than a very modest place, but the modesty was greater then than to-day, and there was already some preliminary carpentry at one end of the cottage, which I saw was to result in an addition to it. I recall pleasant fields across the road before it; behind rose a hill wooded with low pines, such as is made in Septimius Felton the scene of the involuntary duel between Septimius and the young British officer.
Page 206 - All men that I have known, besides, have had some foible (it often endeared them the more), or some meanness, or pettiness, or bitterness; but Longfellow had none, nor the suggestion of any.
Page 38 - Ah, well! I don't know that you will ever feel that you have really met him. He is like a dim room with a little taper of personality burning on the corner of the mantel.
Page 15 - I remember the black wharves and the slips, And the sea-tides tossing free ; And Spanish sailors with bearded lips, And the beauty and mystery of the ships, And the magic of the sea. And the voice of that wayward song Is singing and saying still : " A boy's will is the wmd's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.
Page 48 - House of Seven Gables', and the 'Scarlet Letter', and had, perhaps carried his name higher than all the rest, and certainly farther. Everybody was reading it, and more or less bewailing its indefinite close, but yielding him that full honor and praise which a writer can hope for but once in his life. Nobody dreamed that thereafter only precious fragments, sketches more or less faltering, though all with the divine touch in them, were further to enrich a legacy which in its kind is the finest the...