He preferred to receive me in the dim, large hall after opening his door to me himself, and we sat down there and talked, I remember, of supernatural things.  He was much interested in spiritualism, and he had several stories to tell of his own experience in such matters.  But none was so good as one which I had at second hand from Lowell, who thought it almost the best ghost story he had ever heard.  The spirit of Willson’s father appeared to him, and stood before him.  Willson was accustomed to apparitions, and so he said simply, “Won’t you sit down, father?” The phantom put out his hand to lay hold of a chair-back as some people do in taking a seat, and his shadowy arm passed through the frame-work.  “Ah!” he said, “I forgot that I was not substance.”

I do not know whether “The Old Sergeant” is ever read now; it has probably passed with other great memories of the great war; and I am afraid none of Willson’s other verse is remembered.  But he was then a distinct literary figure, and not to be left out of the count of our poets.  I did not see him again.  Shortly afterwards I heard that he had left Cambridge with signs of consumption, which must have run a rapid course, for a very little later came the news of his death.

IX.

The most devoted Cantabrigian, after Lowell, whom I knew, would perhaps have contended that if he had stayed with us Willson might have lived; for John Holmes affirmed a faith in the virtues of the place which ascribed almost an aseptic character to its air, and when he once listened to my own complaints of an obstinate cold, he cheered himself, if not me, with the declaration, “Well, one thing, Mr. Howells, Cambridge never let a man keep a cold yet!”

If he had said it was better to live in Cambridge with a cold than elsewhere without one I should have believed him; as it was, Cambridge bore him out in his assertion, though she took her own time to do it.

Lowell had talked to me of him before I met him, celebrating his peculiar humor with that affection which was not always so discriminating, and Holmes was one of the first Cambridge men I knew.  I knew him first in the charming old Colonial house in which his famous brother and he were born.  It was demolished long before I left Cambridge, but in memory it still stands on the ground since occupied by the Hemenway Gymnasium, and shows for me through that bulk a phantom frame of Continental buff in the shadow of elms that are shadows themselves.  The ‘genius loci’ was limping about the pleasant mansion with the rheumatism which then expressed itself to his friends in a resolute smile, but which now insists upon being an essential trait of the full-length presence to my mind:  a short stout figure, helped out with a cane, and a grizzled head with features formed to win the heart rather than the eye of the beholder.

In one of his own eyes there was a cast of such winning humor and geniality that it took the liking more than any beauty could have done, and the sweetest, shy laugh in the world went with this cast.