the rest, ventured upon one suggestion only.  This was kindly, even seriously, considered by the poet, and gently rejected.  He could not do anything otherwise than gently, and I was not suffered to feel that I had done a presumptuous thing.  I can see him now, as he looked up from the proof-sheets on the round table before him, and over at me, growing consciously smaller and smaller, like something through a reversed opera-glass.  He had a shaded drop-light in front of him, and in its glow his beautiful and benignly noble head had a dignity peculiar to him.

All the portraits of Longfellow are likenesses more or less bad and good, for there was something as simple in the physiognomy as in the nature of the man.  His head, after he allowed his beard to grow and wore his hair long in the manner of elderly men, was leonine, but mildly leonine, as the old painters conceived the lion of St. Mark.  Once Sophocles, the ex-monk of Mount Athos, so long a Greek professor at Harvard, came in for supper, after the reading was over, and he was leonine too, but of a fierceness that contrasted finely with Longfellow’s mildness.  I remember the poet’s asking him something about the punishment of impaling, in Turkey, and his answering, with an ironical gleam of his fiery eyes, “Unhappily, it is obsolete.”  I dare say he was not so leonine, either, as he looked.

When Longfellow read verse, it was with a hollow, with a mellow resonant murmur, like the note of some deep-throated horn.  His voice was very lulling in quality, and at the Dante Club it used to have early effect with an old scholar who sat in a cavernous armchair at the corner of the fire, and who drowsed audibly in the soft tone and the gentle heat.  The poet had a fat terrier who wished always to be present at the meetings of the Club, and he commonly fell asleep at the same moment with that dear old scholar, so that when they began to make themselves heard in concert, one could not tell which it was that most took our thoughts from the text of the Paradiso.  When the duet opened, Longfellow would look up with an arch recognition of the fact, and then go gravely on to the end of the canto.  At the close he would speak to his friend and lead him out to supper as if he had not seen or heard anything amiss.

III.

In that elect company I was silent, partly because I was conscious of my youthful inadequacy, and partly because I preferred to listen.  But Longfellow always behaved as if I were saying a succession of edifying and delightful things, and from time to time he addressed himself to me, so that I should not feel left out.  He did not talk much himself, and I recall nothing that he said.  But he always spoke both wisely and simply, without the least touch of pose, and with no intention of effect, but with something that I must call quality for want of a better word; so that at a table where Holmes sparkled, and Lowell glowed, and Agassiz beamed, he cast the light of a gentle gaiety, which seemed to dim all these vivider luminaries.  While he spoke you did not miss Fields’s story or Tom Appleton’s wit, or even the gracious amity of Mr. Norton, with his unequalled intuitions.