but I do not recall that his face kindled or his voice trembled.  Even in the more elevated passages, I think we hardly felt as he proceeded that it was the culmination of the day’s utterances and that we were really then and there in an epoch-making event.  Unfortunately for me my speech was yet to come and, unpractised as I was, I was uncomfortably nervous as to what I should say.  I lost therefore the full effect of the masterpiece.  One or two of the speakers on the programme had dropped out and behold it was my turn.  The announcement of my name with a brief introduction from the chairman struck my ear, and it was for me to stand on my feet and do my best.  My voice sounded out into the great space in which the echo of Lowell’s was scarcely silent.  I spoke for the rank and file and in my whole career of nearly eighty years it was perhaps the culminating moment, when fate placed me in a juxtaposition so memorable.

In 1857 I sent a poem to the Atlantic then just beginning under his editorship.  My poem came back with the comment, “Hardly good enough, but the writer certainly deserves encouragement.”  This frost, though not unkind, nipped my budding aspirations in that direction.  I hung my modest harp on the willows and have almost never since twanged the strings.  At a later time in England I came into pleasant relations with Lowell and saw his tender side.  His term as Minister to England had come to a close.  He had just lost his wife and was in deep affliction, the sorrow telling upon his health, but he took kind thought for me and helped me zealously in my quest of materials for a considerable historical work.  He enable me to approach august personages whom otherwise I could not have reached; in particular securing for me a great courtesy from the Duke of Cleveland, a descendant of Vane, who gave me carte blanche to visit Raby Castle in Durham, Vane’s former home, a magnificent seat not usually open to visitors but which I saw thoroughly.  I have already mentioned the funeral of Lowell.  It took place on a lovely day in the August of 1891.  The procession passed from Appleton Chapel to Mount Auburn, and I, hurrying on reached the open grave before the line arrived.  It was a spot of great beauty in a dell below the pleasant Indian Ridge on which just above lies the grave of Longfellow.  At a few rods’ distance is the sunny bank where later was laid to rest Oliver Wendell Holmes.  Close at hand to the grave of Lowell lay his gifted wife, Maria White who wrote the lovely poem “The Alpine Shepherd,” and the three brilliant and intrepid nephews who were slain in the Civil War.  The old horn-beams, quaint and unusual trees, stand sentry on either hand.  I saw the coffin lowered.  Standing just behind Phillips Brooks, I heard for the last time the voice of my boyhood friend reading with tenderness the burial service.  One final experience remained for me on that day which I especially treasure.  Leaving the cemetery I walked the short distance to the gate