of Elmwood, the birthplace and always the home of Lowell.  This spot he especially loved, he knew its trees, every one, and the birds and squirrels that came to visit them.  I stood at the gate looking toward the old mansion aloof among the woods.  I had often stood there and looked toward the house, but now it had a different aspect; usually its doors and windows were tightly closed, but now everything was wide open, the mourners had not returned to the house and at the moment no living being was visible.  The windows and the portal looked out upon the late afternoon, in the dead silence; in the heightened feeling of the moment it seemed to me that the mansion had come to life, that it missed the fine spirit that had so lately flown forth from it, that with lids widely apart and distressful it looked forth into the great spacious heavens after a loved soul that had passed from it into the world beyond.  It was only a dream of my excited fancy, but I shall always think of Elmwood as it was that afternoon.

I am so fortunate as to have a close association with the town of Concord.  My first American ancestor, landing from his ship in 1635, went thither with the earliest settlers and established himself on the level at the west of the town, at that time I suppose the outmost Anglo-Saxon frontier of the Western continent.  Seven generations of his descendants have lived in the town.  I am in the eighth, and, though not native, and only transiently resident, I have a love for it and it is a town worth loving.  It is fair by nature, pleasant hills rising among green levels and the placid river creeping toward the sea.  It still maintains its vigorous town-meeting and holds well to the ancient traditions.  The thirteen colonies made on its soil their first forcible resistance to British aggression and there is no village in America so associated with great men of letters.  When a boy of ten in 1844 I was swapped with a cousin, he going for a year to western New York, while I went for a year to the house of my aunt in Concord, the ancient homestead out of which eighty years before my great-grandfather had gone with gun in hand to take his part with the Minute Men.  Emerson had just become famous through Nature, Thoreau was then a young man quite unknown to fame.  The Alcotts the year before had lived next door to my aunt, Louisa, a child of twelve, and her sisters the “Little Women” whom the world now knows so well.  Close to the Battle Ground stood the two tall gate-posts behind which lay the “Old Manse” whose “Mosses” Hawthorne was just then preserving for immortality.  With all these I then, or a little later, came into touch and I can tell how the figures looked as scanned by the eyes of a boy.