about that genial board, and, as I failed, from conscientious motives, to record them in my journal, I will not invent, after thirty-four years have passed over my memory, with their crowds of other words and fancies.  Be this enough:  I recollect to have asked Longfellow why he wrote Excelsi_or_, and not the more grammatical Excelsi_us_, as the title to one of his most famous poems.  The reason is a curious one; he wrote those stirring verses, by request, on the motto for the New York coat-of-arms, which is legended not quite accurately, Excelsi_or_.  And when, in the same line of thought, I inquired why he named a German story “Hyperion,” with no apparent reason from classical associations, he pertinently enough answered me by pronouncing the name huper-iown, ("going higher"), the story being a tale of progress in human character.

And now to leap over twenty-five years, at which interval I paid my second visit to America in 1876, when again I had the privilege of being Longfellow’s guest in the same historic abode where Washington had once his headquarters.  My kind-hearted host insisted on my occupying the same arm-chair I had before, and which since, he said, had been the throne of Dickens and Thackeray, and every book-celebrity that had visited Cambridge.  Among invited guests unable to come was Oliver Wendell Holmes, but I soon after made up for this loss by having a long talk with that shrewd and amusing writer at Boston; and once more, alas! no Lowell, whom I missed again, though I had waited for him that quarter of a century!  Longfellow, out of compliment (so he kindly said) to his English guest, had specially provided pheasants and Stilton cheese, among such more Transatlantic delicacies as wild venison (from Tupper Lake, in the Adirondacks), and canvas-back ducks from Baltimore; to say less of terrapin soup, whereof the unhatched eggs of tortoises are the bonne-bouche!  After dinner he gave me an apple from Beaupre, Evangeline’s farm, the pips whereof I sent to Albury for planting.  Longfellow was much interested to hear that my collateral ancestor had married Martha, the heiress of “the Vineyard” in Rhode Island.  Mr. Fields, on this festive occasion, recited some of Mark Twain’s humour, and I had to give sundry of my American ballads, and the host himself his exquisite “Psalm of Life;” my “Venus,” in reply to his “Mars,” having appeared, and been praised by him, some years before.  And this meagre record is all I care, or have space, to give of that feast of reason and flow of soul.

With Charles Kingsley, however seldom we met, I had strong sympathy in many ways, as a man of men, to be loved and admired; but chiefly we could feel for each other in the matter of stammering,—­a sort of affliction not sufficiently appreciated.  Kingsley conquered his infirmity, as I did mine, and rose to frequent eloquence in his public ministrations:  privately his speech would often fail him, and was his “thorn in the flesh” to the end.