Dana was not of the Cambridge men whose calling was in Cambridge.  He was a lawyer in active practice, and he went every day to Boston.  One was apt to meet him in those horse-cars which formerly tinkled back and forth between the two cities, and which were often so full of one’s acquaintance that they had all the social elements of an afternoon tea.  They were abusively overcrowded at times, of course, and one might easily see a prime literary celebrity swaying from, a strap, or hanging uneasily by the hand-rail to the lower steps of the back platform.  I do not mean that I ever happened to see the author of Two Years Before the Mast in either fact, but in his celebrity he had every qualification for the illustration of my point.  His book probably carried the American name farther and wider than any American books except those of Irving and Cooper at a day when our writers were very little known, and our literature was the only infant industry not fostered against foreign ravage, but expressly left to harden and strengthen itself as it best might in a heartless neglect even at home.  The book was delightful, and I remember it from a reading of thirty years ago, as of the stuff that classics are made of.  I venture no conjecture as to its present popularity, but of all books relating to the sea I think it, is the best.  The author when I knew him was still Richard Henry Dana, Jr., his father, the aged poet, who first established the name in the public recognition, being alive, though past literary activity.  It was distinctively a literary race, and in the actual generation it has given proofs of its continued literary vitality in the romance of ‘Espiritu Santo’ by the youngest daughter of the Dana I knew.

VII.

There could be no stronger contrast to him in origin, education, and character than a man who lived at the same time in Cambridge, and who produced a book which in its final fidelity to life is not unworthy to be named with ‘Two Years Before the Mast.’  Ralph Keeler wrote the ’Vagabond Adventures’ which he had lived.  I have it on my heart to name him in the presence of our great literary men not only because I had an affection for him, tenderer than I then knew, but because I believe his book is worthier of more remembrance than it seems to enjoy.  I was reading it only the other day, and I found it delightful, and much better than I imagined when I accepted for the Atlantic the several papers which it is made up of.  I am not sure but it belongs to the great literature in that fidelity to life which I have spoken of, and which the author brought himself to practise with such difficulty, and under so much stress from his editor.  He really wanted to fake it at times, but he was docile at last and did it so honestly that it tells the history of his strange career in much better terms than it can be given again.  He had been, as he claimed, “a cruel uncle’s ward” in his early orphan-hood, and while yet