which men heap together?  Where are Shakespeare’s imagination, Bacon’s learning, Galileo’s dream?  Where is the sweet fancy of Sidney, the airy spirit of Fletcher, and Milton’s thought severe?  Methinks such things should not die and dissipate, when a hair can live for centuries, and a brick of Egypt will last three thousand years!  I am content to believe that the mind of man survives (somewhere or other) his clay.

“I was once present at the death of a little child.  I will not pain the reader by portraying its agonies; but when its breath was gone, its life, (nothing more than a cloud of smoke!) and it lay like a waxen image before me, I turned my eyes to its moaning mother, and sighed out my few words of comfort.  But I am a beggar in grief.  I can feel and sigh and look kindly, I think; but I have nothing to give.  My tongue deserts me.  I know the inutility of too soon comforting.  I know that I should weep were I the loser, and I let the tears have their way.  Sometimes a word or two I can muster:  a ‘Sigh no more!’ and ‘Dear lady, do not grieve!’ but further I am mute and useless.”

I have many letters and kind little notes which Procter used to write me during the years I knew him best.  His tricksy fancies peeped out in his correspondence, and several of his old friends in England thought no literary man of his time had a better epistolary style.  His neat elegant chirography on the back of a letter was always a delightful foretaste of something good inside, and I never received one of his welcome missives that did not contain, no matter how brief it happened to be, welcome passages of wit or affectionate interest.

In one of his early letters to me he says:—­

“There is no one rising hereabouts in literature.  I suppose our national genius is taking a mechanical turn.  And, in truth, it is much better to make a good steam-engine than to manufacture a bad poem.  ‘Building the lofty rhyme’ is a good thing, but our present buildings are of a low order, and seldom reach the Attic.  This piece of wit will scarcely throw you into a fit, I imagine, your risible muscles being doubtless kept in good order.”

In another he writes:—­

“I see you have some capital names in the ‘Atlantic Monthly.’  If they will only put forth their strength, there is no doubt as to the result, but the misfortune is that persons who write anonymously don’t put forth their strength, in general.  I was a magazine writer for no less than a dozen years, and I felt that no personal credit or responsibility attached to my literary trifling, and although I sometimes did pretty well (for me), yet I never did my best.”

As I read over again the portfolio of his letters to me, bearing date from 1848 to 1866, I find many passages of interest, but most of them are too personal for type.  A few extracts, however, I cannot resist copying.  Some of his epistles are enriched with a song or a sonnet, then just written, and there are also frequent references in them to American editions of his poetical and prose works, which he collected at the request of his Boston publishers.