He did not care to make acquaintances, was haughty in manner and cynical in mood, at least as he appeared to those in whom he felt no special interest.  It is no wonder, therefore, that he was not a popular favorite, although recognized as having very brilliant qualities.  During all this period his mind was doubtless fermenting with projects which kept him in a fevered and irritable condition.  “He had a small writing-table,” Mr. Phillips says, “with a shallow drawer; I have often seen it half full of sketches, unfinished poems, soliloquies, a scene or two of a play, prose portraits of some pet character, etc.  These he would read to me, though he never volunteered to do so, and every now and then he burnt the whole and began to fill the drawer again.”

My friend, Mr. John Osborne Sargent, who was a year before him in college, says, in a very interesting letter with which he has favored me: 

“My first acquaintance with him [Motley] was at Cambridge, when he came from Mr. Cogswell’s school at Round Hill.  He then had a good deal of the shyness that was just pronounced enough to make him interesting, and which did not entirely wear off till he left college. . .  I soon became acquainted with him, and we used to take long walks together, sometimes taxing each other’s memory for poems or passages from poems that had struck our fancy.  Shelley was then a great favorite of his, and I remember that Praed’s verses then appearing in the ‘New Monthly’ he thought very clever and brilliant, and was fond of repeating them.  You have forgotten, or perhaps never knew, that Motley’s first appearance in print was in the ‘Collegian.’  He brought me one day, in a very modest mood, a translation from Goethe, which I was most happy to oblige him by inserting.  It was very prettily done, and will now be a curiosity. . . .  How it happened that Motley wrote only one piece I do not remember.  I had the pleasure about that time of initiating him as a member of the Knights of the Square Table,—­always my favorite college club, for the reason, perhaps, that I was a sometime Grand Master.  He was always a genial and jovial companion at our supper- parties at Fresh Pond and Gallagher’s.”

We who live in the days of photographs know how many faces belong to every individual.  We know too under what different aspects the same character appears to those who study it from different points of view and with different prepossessions.  I do not hesitate, therefore, to place side by side the impressions of two of his classmates as to one of his personal traits as they observed him at this period of his youth.

“He was a manly boy, with no love for or leaning to girls’ company; no care for dress; not a trace of personal vanity. . . .  He was, or at least seemed, wholly unconscious of his rare beauty and of the fascination of his manner; not a trace of pretence, the simplest and most natural creature in the world.”

Look on that picture and on this:—­