Adelaide Procter did not reach home in season to begin the dinner with us, but she came later in the evening, and sat for some time in earnest talk with Hawthorne.  It was a “goodly companie,” long to be remembered.  Hunt and Procter were in a mood for gossip over the ruddy port.  As the twilight deepened around the table, which was exquisitely decorated with flowers, the author of “Rimini” recalled to Procter’s recollection other memorable tables where they used to meet in vanished days with Lamb, Coleridge, and others of their set long since passed away.  As they talked on in rather low tones, I saw the two old poets take hands more than once at the mention of dead and beloved names.  I recollect they had a good deal of fine talk over the great singers whose voices had delighted them in bygone days; speaking with rapture of Pasta, whose tones in opera they thought incomparably the grandest musical utterances they had ever heard.  Procter’s tribute in verse to this

    “Queen and wonder of the enchanted world of sound”

is one of his best lyrics, and never was singer more divinely complimented by poet.  At the dinner I am describing he declared that she walked on the stage like an empress, “and when she sang,” said he, “I held my breath.”  Leigh Hunt, in one of his letters to Procter in 1831, says:  “As to Pasta, I love her, for she makes the ground firm under my feet, and the sky blue over my head.”

I cannot remember all the good things I heard that day, but some of them live in my recollection still.  Hunt quoted Hartley Coleridge, who said, “No boy ever imagined himself a poet while he was reading Shakespeare or Milton.”  And speaking of Landor’s oaths, he said, “They are so rich, they are really nutritious.”  Talking of criticism, he said he did not believe in spiteful imps, but in kindly elves who would “nod to him and do him courtesies.”  He laughed at Bishop Berkeley’s attempt to destroy the world in one octavo volume.  His doctrine to mankind always was, “Enlarge your tastes, that you may enlarge your hearts.”  He believed in reversing original propensities by education,—­as Spallanzani brought up eagles on bread and milk, and fed doves on raw meat.  “Don’t let us demand too much of human nature,” was a line in his creed; and he believed in Hood’s advice, that gentleness in a case of wrong direction is always better than vituperation.

    “Mid light, and by degrees, should be the plan
      To cure the dark and erring mind;
    But who would rush at a benighted man
      And give him two black eyes for being blind?”

I recollect there was much converse that day on the love of reading in old age, and Leigh Hunt observed that Sir Robert Walpole, seeing Mr. Fox busy in the library at Houghton, said to him:  “And you can read!  Ah, how I envy you!  I totally neglected the habit of reading when I was young, and now in my old age I cannot read a single page.”  Hunt himself was a man who could be “penetrated