lived, but towards the last of his visits at Craigie House it had a pathos for the witness which I should grieve to wrong.  Greene was then a quivering paralytic, and he clung tremulously to Longfellow’s arm in going out to dinner, where even the modern Italian poets were silent upon his lips.  When we rose from table, Longfellow lifted him out of his chair, and took him upon his arm again for their return to the study.

He was of lighter metal than most other members of the Dante Club, and he was not of their immediate intimacy, living away from Cambridge, as he did, and I shared his silence in their presence with full sympathy.  I was by far the youngest of their number, and I cannot yet quite make out why I was of it at all.  But at every moment I was as sensible of my good fortune as of my ill desert.  They were the men whom of all men living I most honored, and it seemed to be impossible that I at my age should be so perfectly fulfilling the dream of my life in their company.  Often, the nights were very cold, and as I returned home from Craigie House to the carpenter’s box on Sacramento Street, a mile or two away, I was as if soul-borne through the air by my pride and joy, while the frozen blocks of snow clinked and tinkled before my feet stumbling along the middle of the road.  I still think that was the richest moment of my life, and I look back at it as the moment, in a life not unblessed by chance, which I would most like to live over again—­if I must live any.  The next winter the sessions of the Dante Club were transferred to the house of Mr. Norton, who was then completing his version of the ‘Vita Nuova’.  This has always seemed to me a work of not less graceful art than Longfellow’s translation of the ‘Commedia’.  In fact, it joins the effect of a sympathy almost mounting to divination with a patient scholarship and a delicate skill unknown to me elsewhere in such work.  I do not know whether Mr. Norton has satisfied himself better in his prose version of the ‘Commedia’ than in this of the ‘Vita Nuova’, but I do not believe he could have satisfied Dante better, unless he had rhymed his sonnets and canzonets.  I am sure he might have done this if he had chosen.  He has always pretended that it was impossible, but miracles are never impossible in the right hands.

V.

After three or four years we sold the carpenter’s box on Sacramento Street, and removed to a larger house near Harvard Square, and in the immediate neighborhood of Longfellow.  He gave me an easement across that old garden behind his house, through an opening in the high board fence which enclosed it, and I saw him oftener than ever, though the meetings of the Dante Club had come to an end.  At the last of them, Lowell had asked him, with fond regret in his jest, “Longfellow, why don’t you do that Indian poem in forty thousand verses?” The demand but feebly expressed the reluctance in us all, though