I got my appointment of Consul to Venice, and I went home to wait for my passport and to spend the last days, so full of civic trouble, before I should set out for my post.  If I hoped to serve my country there and sweep the Confederate cruisers from the Adriatic, I am afraid my prime intent was to add to her literature and to my own credit.  I intended, while keeping a sleepless eye out for privateers, to write poems. concerning American life which should eclipse anything yet done in that kind, and in the mean time I read voraciously and perpetually, to make the days go swiftly which I should have been so glad to have linger.  In this month I devoured all the ‘Waverley novels,’ but I must have been devouring a great many others, for Charles Reade’s ‘Christie Johnstone’ is associated with the last moment of the last days.

A few months ago I was at the old home, and I read that book again, after not looking at it for more than thirty years; and I read it with amazement at its prevailing artistic vulgarity, its prevailing aesthetic error shot here and there with gleams of light, and of the truth that Reade himself was always dimly groping for.  The book is written throughout on the verge of realism, with divinations and conjectures across its border, and with lapses into the fool’s paradise of romanticism, and an apparent content with its inanity and impossibility.  But then it was brilliantly new and surprising; it seemed to be the last word that could be said for the truth in fiction; and it had a spell that held us like an anesthetic above the ache of parting, and the anxiety for the years that must pass, with all their redoubled chances, before our home circle could be made whole again.  I read on, and the rest listened, till the wheels of the old stage made themselves heard in their approach through the absolute silence of the village street.  Then we shut the book and all went down to the gate together, and parted under the pale sky of the October night.  There was one of the home group whom I was not to see again:  the young brother who died in the blossom of his years before I returned from my far and strange sojourn.  He was too young then to share our reading of the novel, but when I ran up to his room to bid him good-by I found him awake, and, with aching hearts, we bade each other good-by forever!

XXVIII.  DANTE

I ran through an Italian grammar on my way across the Atlantic, and from my knowledge of Latin, Spanish, and French, I soon had a reading acquaintance with the language.  I had really wanted to go to Germany, that I might carry forward my studies in German literature, and I first applied for the consulate at Munich.  The powers at Washington thought it quite the same thing to offer me Rome; but I found that the income of the Roman consulate would not give me a living, and I was forced to decline it.  Then the President’s private secretaries, Mr. John Nicolay and Mr. John Hay, who did not know me except as a young Westerner who had written poems in the Atlantic Monthly, asked me how I would like Venice, and promised that they would have the salary put up to a thousand a year, under the new law to embarrass privateers.  It was really put up to fifteen hundred, and with this income assured me I went out to the city whose influence changed the whole course of my literary life.