III.

My fortunes took me to New York, and I spent most of the winter of 1865-6 writing in the office of ‘The Nation’.  I contributed several sketches of Italian travel to that paper; and one of these brought me a precious letter from Lowell.  He praised my sketch, which he said he had read without the least notion who had written it, and he wanted me to feel the full value of such an impersonal pleasure in it.  At the same time he did not fail to tell me that he disliked some pseudo-cynical verses of mine which he had read in another place; and I believe it was then that he bade me “sweat the Heine out of” me, “as men sweat the mercury out of their bones.”

When I was asked to be assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and came on to Boston to talk the matter over with the publishers, I went out to Cambridge and consulted Lowell.  He strongly urged me to take the position (I thought myself hopefully placed in New York on The Nation); and at the same time he seemed to have it on his heart to say that he had recommended some one else for it, never, he owned, having thought of me.

He was most cordial, but after I came to live in Cambridge (where the magazine was printed, and I could more conveniently look over the proofs), he did not call on me for more than a month, and seemed quite to have forgotten me.  We met one night at Mr. Norton’s, for one of the Dante readings, and he took no special notice of me till I happened to say something that offered him a chance to give me a little humorous snub.  I was speaking of a paper in the Magazine on the “Claudian Emissary,” and I demanded (no doubt a little too airily) something like “Who in the world ever heard of the Claudian Emissary?” “You are in Cambridge, Mr. Howells,” Lowell answered, and laughed at my confusion.  Having put me down, he seemed to soften towards me, and at parting he said, with a light of half-mocking tenderness in his beautiful eyes, “Goodnight, fellow-townsman.”  “I hardly knew we were fellow-townsmen,” I returned.  He liked that, apparently, and said he had been meaning to call upon me; and that he was coming very soon.

He was as good as his word, and after that hardly a week of any kind of weather passed but he mounted the steps to the door of the ugly little house in which I lived, two miles away from him, and asked me to walk.  These walks continued, I suppose, until Lowell went abroad for a winter in the early seventies.  They took us all over Cambridge, which he knew and loved every inch of, and led us afield through the straggling, unhandsome outskirts, bedrabbled with squalid Irish neighborhoods, and fraying off into marshes and salt meadows.  He liked to indulge an excess of admiration for the local landscape, and though I never heard him profess a preference for the Charles River flats to the finest Alpine scenery, I could well believe he would do so under provocation of a fit listener’s surprise.  He had always