“Like wealthy men, not knowing what they give.”

more probably he felt a sacredness in the money got by literature, which the literary man never quite rids him self of, even when he is not a poet, and which made him wish to dedicate it to something finer than the every day uses.  He lived very quietly, but he had by no means more than he needed to live upon, and at that time he had pecuniary losses.  He was writing hard, and was doing full work in his Harvard professorship, and he was so far dependent upon his salary, that he felt its absence for the year he went abroad.  I do not know quite how to express my sense of something unworldly, of something almost womanlike in his relation to money.

He was not only generous of money, but he was generous of himself, when he thought he could be of use, or merely of encouragement.  He came all the way into Boston to hear certain lectures of mine on the Italian poets, which he could not have found either edifying or amusing, that he might testify his interest in me, and show other people that they were worth coming to.  He would go carefully over a poem with me, word by word, and criticise every turn of phrase, and after all be magnanimously tolerant of my sticking to phrasings that he disliked.  In a certain line

     “The silvern chords of the piano trembled,”

he objected to silvern.  Why not silver?  I alleged leathern, golden, and like adjectives in defence of my word; but still he found an affectation in it, and suffered it to stand with extreme reluctance.  Another line of another piece: 

     “And what she would, would rather that she would not”

he would by no means suffer.  He said that the stress falling on the last word made it “public-school English,” and he mocked it with the answer a maid had lately given him when he asked if the master of the house was at home.  She said, “No, sir, he is not,” when she ought to have said “No, sir, he isn’t.”  He was appeased when I came back the next day with the stanza amended so that the verse could read: 

     “And what she would, would rather she would not so”

but I fancy he never quite forgave my word silvern.  Yet, he professed not to have prejudices in such matters, but to use any word that would serve his turn, without wincing; and he certainly did use and defend words, as undisprivacied and disnatured, that made others wince.

He was otherwise such a stickler for the best diction that he would not have had me use slovenly vernacular even in the dialogue in my stories:  my characters must not say they wanted to do so and so, but wished, and the like.  In a copy of one of my books which I found him reading, I saw he had corrected my erring Western woulds and shoulds; as he grew old he was less and less able to restrain himself from setting people right to their faces.  Once, in the vast area of my ignorance, he specified my small acquaintance with a certain period of English poetry, saying, “You’re rather shady, there, old fellow.”  But he would not have had me too learned, holding that he had himself been hurt for literature by his scholarship.