and the saddening and indelible effects of the war, which came between and sharply divided those phases of his career, had so modified his character for the graver and more profound that I agree with those of his friends who consider his entry into the diplomatic career as a misfortune for American letters, and that his mind flowed to waste in those later years.  Nor was he at home in diplomacy.  It was a reversal of all the conditions of his habitual existence; but it flattered his amour propre that the country should recognize the part he had taken in the cultivation of the anti-slavery sentiment of the nation, and the trace of worldly feeling which I have noted grew under the stimulus to a motive in life.  His social gifts were very great, and his patriotic pride intensified the pleasure of his successes in a line of life which was really secondary in his nature.

In those years of his diplomatic life we saw little of each other.  Our intimate intercourse was suspended by my going to Europe in 1859.  We were nearest each other in our Adirondack life, in which he had all the zest of a boy.  He was the soul of the merriment of the company, fullest of witticisms, keenest in appreciation of the liberty of the occasion, and the genius loci.  One sees through all his nature-poetry the traces of the heredity of the early settler, the keen enjoyment of the fresh and unhackneyed in nature, even of the angularity of the New England farmhouse and the brightness and newness of the villages, so crude to the tastes founded in the picturesqueness of the Old World.  Not even Emerson, with all his indifference to the mere form of things, took to unimproved and uncivilized nature as Lowell did, and his free delight in the Wilderness was a thing to remember, and perhaps by none so keenly appreciated as by me, to whom the joy of forest life was a satisfactory motive for living.

CHAPTER XV

THE ADIRONDACK AND FLORIDA

Of the rest of our company in that famous old camp by “Follansbee Water” there is little more to be said which will interest others or recall names known to the world.  I painted a study of the camp and its inhabitants, with the intention of making from it, at a future time, a picture which should commemorate the meeting; but, owing to changes in my plans, it remained a study, and was purchased by Judge Hoar, the most eminent of my companions still to be described.  He had been a justice of the Superior Court of Massachusetts,—­a man as well known for his intellectual fibre and sympathy with letters as for his judicial abilities.  He was one of the most brilliant members of the old Saturday Club, of which ours might be considered the offspring and succursal; of wit the most spontaneous and electric, whose sallies burst in the merriment of our al fresco camp dinners with the flash and surprise of rockets, and left behind them the perfume of erudition