He differed from Longfellow in often speaking of his contemporaries.  He spoke of them frankly, but with an appreciative rather than a censorious criticism.  Of Longfellow himself he said that day, when I told him I had been writing about him, and he seemed to me a man without error, that he could think of but one error in him, and that was an error of taste, of almost merely literary taste.  It was at an earlier time that he talked of Lowell, after his death, and told me that Lowell once in the fever of his anti-slavery apostolate had written him, urging him strongly, as a matter of duty, to come out for the cause he had himself so much at heart.  Afterwards Lowell wrote again, owning himself wrong in his appeal, which he had come to recognize as invasive.  “He was ten years younger than I,” said the doctor.

I found him that day I speak of in his house at Beverly Farms, where he had a pleasant study in a corner by the porch, and he met me with all the cheeriness of old.  But he confessed that he had been greatly broken up by the labor of preparing something that might be read at some commemorative meeting, and had suffered from finding first that he could not write something specially for it.  Even the copying and adapting an old poem had overtaxed him, and in this he showed the failing powers of age.  But otherwise he was still young, intellectually; that is, there was no failure of interest in intellectual things, especially literary things.  Some new book lay on the table at his elbow, and he asked me if I had seen it, and made some joke about his having had the good luck to read it, and have it lying by him a few days before when the author called.  I do not know whether he schooled himself against an old man’s tendency to revert to the past or not, but I know that he seldom did so.  That morning, however, he made several excursions into it, and told me that his youthful satire of the ‘Spectre Pig’ had been provoked by a poem of the elder Dana’s, where a phantom horse had been seriously employed, with an effect of anticlimax which he had found irresistible.  Another foray was to recall the oppression and depression of his early religious associations, and to speak with moving tenderness of his father, whose hard doctrine as a minister was without effect upon his own kindly nature.

In a letter written to me a few weeks after this time, upon an occasion when he divined that some word from him would be more than commonly dear, he recurred to the feeling he then expressed:  “Fifty-six years ago—­more than half a century—­I lost my own father, his age being seventy-three years.  As I have reached that period of life, passed it, and now left it far behind, my recollections seem to brighten and bring back my boyhood and early manhood in a clearer and fairer light than it came to me in my middle decades.  I have often wished of late years that I could tell him how I cherished his memory; perhaps I may have the happiness of saying all I long to tell him on the other side of that thin partition which I love to think is all that divides us.”