He had a philosophy which he liked to impress with a vivid touch on his listener’s shoulder:  “Put your finger on the present moment and enjoy it.  It’s the only one you’ve got, or ever will have.”  This light and joyous creature could not but be a Pariah among our Brahmins, and I need not say that I never met him in any of the great Cambridge houses.  I am not sure that he was a persona grata to every one in my own, for Keeler was framed rather for men’s liking, and Mr. Aldrich and I had our subtleties as to whether his mind about women was not so Chinese as somewhat to infect his manner.  Keeler was too really modest to be of any rebellious mind towards the society which ignored him, and of too sweet a cheerfulness to be greatly vexed by it.  He lived on in the house of a suave old actor, who oddly made his home in Cambridge, and he continued of a harmless Bohemianism in his daily walk, which included lunches at Boston restaurants as often as he could get you to let him give them you, if you were of his acquaintance.  On a Sunday he would appear coming out of the post-office usually at the hour when all cultivated Cambridge was coming for its letters, and wave a glad hand in air, and shout a blithe salutation to the friend he had marked for his companion in a morning stroll.  The stroll was commonly over the flats towards Brighton (I do not know why, except perhaps that it was out of the beat of the better element) and the talk was mainly of literature, in which he was doing less than he meant to do, and which he seemed never able quite to feel was not a branch of the Show Business, and might not be legitimately worked by like advertising, though he truly loved and honored it.

I suppose it was not altogether a happy life, and Keeler had his moments of amusing depression, which showed their shadows in his smiling face.  He was of a slight figure and low stature, with hands and feet of almost womanish littleness.  He was very blonde, and his restless eyes were blue; he wore his yellow beard in whiskers only, which he pulled nervously but perhaps did not get to droop so much as he wished.

VIII.

Keeler was a native of Ohio, and there lived at Cambridge when I first came there an Indianian, more accepted by literary society, who was of real quality as a poet.  Forceythe Willson, whose poem of “The Old Sergeant” Doctor Holmes used to read publicly in the closing year of the civil war, was of a Western altitude of figure, and of an extraordinary beauty of face in an oriental sort.  He had large, dark eyes with clouded whites; his full, silken beard was of a flashing Persian blackness.  He was excessively nervous, to such an extreme that when I first met him at Longfellow’s, he could not hold himself still in his chair.  I think this was an effect of shyness in him, as well as physical, for afterwards when I went to find him in his own house he was much more at ease.