It was the beginning of the end.  He recovered and relapsed, and recovered again; but never for long.  Late in the spring I came out, and he had me stay to dinner, which was somehow as it used to be at two o’clock; and after dinner we went out on his lawn.  He got a long-handled spud, and tried to grub up some dandelions which he found in his turf, but after a moment or two he threw it down, and put his hand upon his back with a groan.  I did not see him again till I came out to take leave of him before going away for the summer, and then I found him sitting on the little porch in a western corner of his house, with a volume of Scott closed upon his finger.  There were some other people, and our meeting was with the constraint of their presence.  It was natural in nothing so much as his saying very significantly to me, as if he knew of my heresies concerning Scott, and would have me know he did not approve of them, that there was nothing he now found so much pleasure in as Scott’s novels.  Another friend, equally heretical, was by, but neither of us attempted to gainsay him.  Lowell talked very little, but he told of having been a walk to Beaver Brook, and of having wished to jump from one stone to another in the stream, and of having had to give it up.  He said, without completing the sentence, If it had come to that with him!  Then he fell silent again; and with some vain talk of seeing him when I came back in the fall, I went away sick at heart.  I was not to see him again, and I shall not look upon his like.

I am aware that I have here shown him from this point and from that in a series of sketches which perhaps collectively impart, but do not assemble his personality in one impression.  He did not, indeed, make one impression upon me, but a thousand impressions, which I should seek in vain to embody in a single presentment.  What I have cloudily before me is the vision of a very lofty and simple soul, perplexed, and as it were surprised and even dismayed at the complexity of the effects from motives so single in it, but escaping always to a clear expression of what was noblest and loveliest in itself at the supreme moments, in the divine exigencies.  I believe neither in heroes nor in saints; but I believe in great and good men, for I have known them, and among such men Lowell was of the richest nature I have known.  His nature was not always serene or pellucid; it was sometimes roiled by the currents that counter and cross in all of us; but it was without the least alloy of insincerity, and it was never darkened by the shadow of a selfish fear.  His genius was an instrument that responded in affluent harmony to the power that made him a humorist and that made him a poet, and appointed him rarely to be quite either alone.

ETEXT editor’s bookmarks: 

   I believe neither in heroes nor in saints
   It is well to hold one’s country to her promises
   Liked being with you, not for what he got, but for what he gave