He was rather severe in his notions of the subordination his domestics owed him.  They were “to do as they were bid,” and yet he had a tenderness for such as had been any time with him, which was wounded when once a hired man long in his employ greedily overreached him in a certain transaction.  He complained of that with a simple grief for the man’s indelicacy after so many favors from him, rather than with any resentment.  His hauteur towards his dependents was theoretic; his actual behavior was of the gentle consideration common among Americans of good breeding, and that recreant hired man had no doubt never been suffered to exceed him in shows of mutual politeness.  Often when the maid was about weightier matters, he came and opened his door to me himself, welcoming me with the smile that was like no other.  Sometimes he said, “Siete il benvenuto,” or used some other Italian phrase, which put me at ease with him in the region where we were most at home together.

Looking back I must confess that I do not see what it was he found to make him wish for my company, which he presently insisted upon having once a week at dinner.  After the meal we turned into his study where we sat before a wood fire in winter, and he smoked and talked.  He smoked a pipe which was always needing tobacco, or going out, so that I have the figure of him before my eyes constantly getting out of his deep chair to rekindle it from the fire with a paper lighter.  He was often out of his chair to get a book from the shelves that lined the walls, either for a passage which he wished to read, or for some disputed point which he wished to settle.  If I had caused the dispute, he enjoyed putting me in the wrong; if he could not, he sometimes whimsically persisted in his error, in defiance of all authority; but mostly he had such reverence for the truth that he would not question it even in jest.

If I dropped in upon him in the afternoon I was apt to find him reading the old French poets, or the plays of Calderon, or the ‘Divina Commedia’, which he magnanimously supposed me much better acquainted with than I was because I knew some passages of it by heart.  One day I came in quoting

        “Io son, cantava, io son dolce Sirena,
        Che i marinai in mezzo al mar dismago.”

He stared at me in a rapture with the matchless music, and then uttered all his adoration and despair in one word.  “Damn!” he said, and no more.  I believe he instantly proposed a walk that day, as if his study walls with all their vistas into the great literatures cramped his soul liberated to a sense of ineffable beauty of the verse of the ’somma poeta’.  But commonly be preferred to have me sit down with him there among the mute witnesses of the larger part of his life.  As I have suggested in my own case, it did not matter much whether you brought anything to the feast or not.  If he liked you he liked being with you, not for what he got, but for what he gave.  He was fond of one man whom I recall as the most silent man I ever met.  I never heard him say anything, not even a dull thing, but Lowell delighted in him, and would have you believe that he was full of quaint humor.