but never to my knowledge a novel, a romance, or a magazine article, except an occasional review; but Joanna Baillie,—­that female Shakespeare of a later age,—­and Beattie, and Campbell, and the British poets, and dramatic writers, were always at hand, when he had nothing better to do, with no seals to cut, no ciphers, no razor-strops, no stoves, and no clients.  Over that field of enchantment and illusion he wandered with lifted wings, month after month, and year after year.

At this time he was in his thirtieth year, and I in my twenty-second.  No two persons were ever more unlike; and yet we grew to be intimate friends after a while; and at the time of his death our friendship had lasted more than fifty years, with a single interruption of a twelvemonth or so while I was abroad, which was put an end to by our letters of reconciliation crossing each other almost on the same day.

With a young family on his hands, precarious health and a feeble constitution, as we then believed, which drove him to Saratoga every two or three years, and no property, what had he to look forward to, unless he could manage to go through a course of starvation at half-price, or diet with the chameleons?—­though great things were expected of him by those who knew him best, and the late Mr. Justice Story could not bear to think of his abandoning the profession, so long as there was a decent chance of living through such a course of preparation.

After all that he has done as a poet, as a preacher, as a reformer, and as a lecturer, I must say that I think he was made for a lawyer.  Vigorous and acute, clear-sighted, self-possessed, and logical to a fault, if he had not married so early, or if a respectable inheritance had fallen to him, after he had learned to do without help or patronage, as Dr. Samuel Johnson did, while undergoing Lord Chesterfield, he might have been at the head of the Massachusetts bar,—­a proud position, to be sure, at any time within the last fifty years,—­or, at any rate, in the foremost rank, long before his death.

He had, withal, a great fondness for mechanics, and one at least of his inventions, the “Pierpont or Doric Stove,” was a bit of concrete philosophy,—­a miniature temple glowing with perpetual fire,—­a cast-iron syllogism of itself, so classically just in its proportions, and so eminently characteristic, as to be a type of the author.  He had been led through a long course of experiment in the structure of grates and stoves, and in the consumption of fuel, with the hope of superseding Saratoga, for himself at least, by making our terrible winters and our east winds a little more endurable.  No man ever suffered more from what people sometimes call, without meaning to be naughty, damp cold weather.

In addition to the “Portrait,” he had written a New-Year’s Address or two, and a fine lyric, which was said or sung—­I forget which—­at the celebration of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow; so that after he went off to Baltimore, and the “Airs of Palestine” appeared in 1816, those who knew him best, instead of being astonished like the rest of the world, regarded it as nothing more than the fulfilment of a promise, and went about saying, or looking as if they wanted to say, “Didn’t we tell you so?”