His old playfulness came out as he rallied me on the deterioration he noticed in my table manners, due no doubt to my life in camp, and rebuked me with mock sternness for appropriating his portion of our common chicken.  With evident pleasure, he drew out of his pocket the Nation, then just beginning, and showed me a kind notice of my Thinking Bayonet, written by Charles Eliot Norton.  But behind the smile and the joke lay a new dignity and earnestness, a quality he had taken on since the days of our old comradeship.  So it always was as we met transiently while the decades passed until the threshold of old age lay across the path for both of us.  Now and then I had from him an affectionate letter.  One of these I found profoundly touching.  Theodore Lyman lay prostrate with a lingering and painful illness from which he never rose.  Brooks wrote that he had carried to him my Life of Young Sir Henry Vane, and read from it to our dying friend.  My story had interest for them, and I felt that whatever might befall my book I had not worked in vain if two such men found it worthy.

Phillips Brooks early had recognition as the most important religious influence of his time, and his spirit was not less broad-minded than it was fervent.  In the multitudes that felt the power of his impassioned address were included men and women of the most various views, and he quickened the life of the spirit in all households of faith.  His sympathies were most catholic, and this anecdote clearly illuminates his broad-mindedness.  I had dropped into a Boston bookstore on a quiet morning; Brooks presently came in to browse over the new issues on the counters.  There was no one to disturb us, as we enjoyed this our last conversation together.  He spoke of Channing.  “Do you know,” said he, “when Dean Stanley came over here I went to East Boston to see him on his ship.  He said to me almost at once, ’Where is Mount Auburn?’ Why, said I, how strange that the first thing you inquire about as you arrive is a cemetery!  ’But is not Channing buried there?’ said he.  I told him I did not know.  ’Well, he is and I want to go at once to the grave of Channing!’ So as soon as we could,” continued Phillips Brooks, “we took a carriage and drove to Mount Auburn to visit the grave of Channing.”  He sympathised fully with the admiration felt by his friend, the great English churchman, for Channing, and gladly did him homage, and his talk flowed on in channels that showed his heart was warm toward men of all creeds who were inspired by the higher life.  This noble candour of mind was a marked element of his power, and has endeared his memory among scores of sects that too often clash.  How sweetly unifying in the midst of a jarring Christendom has been the spirit of Phillips Brooks!

After this I saw him only once.  It was at the funeral of James Russell Lowell.  In Appleton Chapel he stood in his robes, gentle and powerful, as he read the burial service.  When the body was committed to the grave I stood just behind him and heard his voice in the last hallowed sentences, “Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, and the spirit to the God who gave it.”  I never heard that voice again.