He had always been writing.  In college and upon his travels he kept diaries; and he has left behind him several novels, tales, sketches of travel, and journals.  The first published writing of his which is well known is his description, in the June number of this magazine, of the March of the Seventh Regiment of New York to Washington.  It was charming by its graceful, sparkling, crisp, off-hand dash and ease.  But it is only the practised hand that can “dash off” effectively.  Let any other clever member of the clever regiment, who has never written, try to dash off the story of a day or a week in the life of the regiment, and he will see that the writer did that little thing well because he had done large things carefully.  Yet, amid all the hurry and brilliant bustle of the articles, the author is, as he was in the most bustling moment of the life they described, a spectator, an artist.  He looks on at himself and the scene of which he is part.  He is willing to merge his individuality; but he does not merge it, for he could not.

So, wandering, hoping, trying, waiting, thirty-two years of his life went by, and they left him true, sympathetic, patient.  The sharp private griefs that sting the heart so deeply, and leave a little poison behind, did not spare him.  But he bore everything so bravely, so silently,—­often silent for a whole evening in the midst of pleasant talkers, but not impertinently sad, nor ever sullen,—­that we all loved him a little more at such times.  The ill-health from which he always suffered, and a flower-like delicacy of temperament, the yearning desire to be of some service in the world, coupled with the curious, critical introspection which marks every sensitive and refined nature and paralyzes action, overcast his life and manner to the common eye with pensiveness and even sternness.  He wrote verses in which his heart seems to exhale in a sigh of sadness.  But he was not in the least a sentimentalist.  The womanly grace of temperament merely enhanced the unusual manliness of his character and impression.  It was like a delicate carnation upon the cheek of a robust man.  For his humor was exuberant.  He seldom laughed loud, but his smile was sweet and appreciative.  Then the range of his sympathies was so large, that he enjoyed every kind of life and person, and was everywhere at home.  In walking and riding, in skating and running, in games out of doors and in, no one of us all in the neighborhood was so expert, so agile as he.  For, above all things, he had what we Yankees call faculty,—­the knack of doing everything.  If he rode with a neighbor who was a good horseman, Theodore, who was a Centaur, when he mounted, would put any horse at any gate or fence; for it did not occur to him that he could not do whatever was to be done.  Often, after writing for a few hours in the morning, he stepped out of doors, and, from pure love of the fun, leaped and turned summersaults on the grass, before going up to town.  In walking about the island, he constantly stopped by the roadside fences, and, grasping the highest rail, swung himself swiftly and neatly over and back again, resuming the walk and the talk without delay.