and never by word or look invited them, or implied that he expected them.  It was fine to see him humorously accepting the humorous attribution of scientific sympathies from Agassiz, in compliment of his famous epic describing the incidents that “broke up the society upon the Stanislow.”  It was a little fearsome to hear him frankly owning to Lowell his dislike for something over-literary in the phrasing of certain verses of ’The Cathedral.’  But Lowell could stand that sort of thing from a man who could say the sort of things that Harte said to him of that delicious line picturing the bobolink as he

     “Runs down a brook of laughter in the air.”

This, Harte told him, was the line he liked best of all his lines, and Lowell smoked well content with the praise.  Yet they were not men to get on easily together, Lowell having limitations in directions where Harte had none.  Afterward in London they did not meet often or willingly.  Lowell owned the brilliancy and uncommonness of Harte’s gift, while he sumptuously surfeited his passion of finding everybody more or less a Jew by finding that Harte was at least half a Jew on his father’s side; he had long contended for the Hebraicism of his name.

With all his appreciation of the literary eminences whom Fields used to class together as “the old saints,” Harte had a spice of irreverence that enabled him to take them more ironically than they might have liked, and to see the fun of a minor literary man’s relation to them.  Emerson’s smoking amused him, as a Jovian self-indulgence divinely out of character with so supreme a god, and he shamelessly burlesqued it, telling how Emerson at Concord had proposed having a “wet night” with him over a glass of sherry, and had urged the scant wine upon his young friend with a hospitable gesture of his cigar.  But this was long after the Cambridge episode, in which Longfellow alone escaped the corrosive touch of his subtle irreverence, or, more strictly speaking, had only the effect of his reverence.  That gentle and exquisitely modest dignity, of Longfellow’s he honored with as much veneration as it was in him to bestow, and he had that sense of Longfellow’s beautiful and perfected art which is almost a test of a critic’s own fineness.

III.

As for Harte’s talk, it was mostly ironical, not to the extreme of satire, but tempered to an agreeable coolness even for the things he admired.  He did not apparently care to hear himself praised, but he could very accurately and perfectly mark his discernment of excellence in others.  He was at times a keen observer of nature and again not, apparently.  Something was said before him and Lowell of the beauty of his description of a rabbit, startled with fear among the ferns, and lifting its head with the pulsation of its frightened heart visibly shaking it; then the talk turned on the graphic homeliness of Dante’s noticing how the dog’s skin moves upon it, and Harte spoke of the exquisite shudder with which a horse tries to rid itself of a fly.