There, literally, he lived during the six or seven years in which I knew him after my coming to Cambridge.  Summer and winter he sat there among his books, seldom stirring abroad by day except for a walk, and by night yet more rarely.  He went to the monthly mid-day dinner of the Saturday Club in Boston; he was very constant at the fortnightly meetings of his whist-club, because he loved the old friends who formed it; he came always to the Dante suppers at Longfellow’s, and he was familiarly in and out at Mr. Norton’s, of course.  But, otherwise, he kept to his study, except for some rare and almost unwilling absences upon university lecturing at Johns Hopkins or at Cornell.

For four years I did not take any summer outing from Cambridge myself, and my associations with Elmwood and with Lowell are more of summer than of winter weather meetings.  But often we went our walks through the snows, trudging along between the horsecar tracks which enclosed the only well-broken-out paths in that simple old Cambridge.  I date one memorable expression of his from such a walk, when, as we were passing Longfellow’s house, in mid-street, he came as near the declaration of his religious faith as he ever did in my presence.  He was speaking of the New Testament, and he said, The truth was in it; but they had covered it up with their hagiology.  Though he had been bred a Unitarian, and had more and more liberated himself from all creeds, he humorously affected an abiding belief in hell, and similarly contended for the eternal punishment of the wicked.  He was of a religious nature, and he was very reverent of other people’s religious feelings.  He expressed a special tolerance for my own inherited faith, no doubt because Mrs. Lowell was also a Swedenborgian; but I do not think he was interested in it, and I suspect that all religious formulations bored him.  In his earlier poems are many intimations and affirmations of belief in an overruling providence, and especially in the God who declares vengeance His and will repay men for their evil deeds, and will right the weak against the strong.  I think he never quite lost this, though when, in the last years of his life, I asked him if he believed there was a moral government of the universe, he answered gravely and with a sort of pain, The scale was so vast, and we saw such a little part of it.

As to tine notion of a life after death, I never had any direct or indirect expression from him; but I incline to the opinion that his hold upon this weakened with his years, as it is sadly apt to do with men who have read much and thought much:  they have apparently exhausted their potentialities of psychological life.  Mystical Lowell was, as every poet must be, but I do not think he liked mystery.  One morning he told me that when he came home the night before he had seen the Doppelganger of one of his household:  though, as he joked, he was not in a state to see double.

He then said he used often to see people’s Doppelganger; at another time, as to ghosts, he said, He was like Coleridge:  he had seen too many of ’em.  Lest any weaker brethren should be caused to offend by the restricted oath which I have reported him using in a moment of transport it may be best to note here that I never heard him use any other imprecation, and this one seldom.