I remember very well the lodging over a corner of Fourth Avenue and some downtown street where I visited these winning and gifted people, and tasted the pleasure of their racy talk, and the hospitality of their good-will toward all literature, which certainly did not leave me out.  We sat before their grate in the chill of the last October days, and they set each other on to one wild flight of wit after another, and again I bathed my delighted spirit in the atmosphere of a realm where for the time at least no

       “——­rumor of oppression or defeat,
        Of unsuccessful or successful war,”

could penetrate.  I liked the Stoddards because they were frankly not of that Bohemia which I disliked so much, and thought it of no promise or validity; and because I was fond of their poetry and found them in it.  I liked the absolutely literary keeping of their lives.  He had then, and for long after, a place in the Custom house, but he was no more of that than Lamb was of India House.  He belonged to that better world where there is no interest but letters, and which was as much like heaven for me as anything I could think of.

The meetings with the Stoddards repeated themselves when I came back to sail from New York, early in November.  Mixed up with the cordial pleasure of them in my memory is a sense of the cold and wet outdoors, and the misery of being in those infamous New York streets, then as for long afterwards the squalidest in the world.  The last night I saw my friends they told me of the tragedy which had just happened at the camp in the City Hall Park.  Fitz James O’Brien, the brilliant young Irishman who had dazzled us with his story of “The Diamond Lens,” and frozen our blood with his ingenious tale of a ghost—­“What was It”—­a ghost that could be felt and heard, but not seen—­had enlisted for the war, and risen to be an officer with the swift process of the first days of it.  In that camp he had just then shot and killed a man for some infraction of discipline, and it was uncertain what the end would be.  He was acquitted, however, and it is known how he afterwards died of lockjaw from a wound received in battle.

VI.

Before this last visit in New York there was a second visit to Boston, which I need not dwell upon, because it was chiefly a revival of the impressions of the first.  Again I saw the Fieldses in their home; again the Autocrat in his, and Lowell now beneath his own roof, beside the study fire where I was so often to sit with him in coming years.  At dinner (which we had at two o’clock) the talk turned upon my appointment, and he said of me to his wife:  “Think of his having got Stillman’s place!  We ought to put poison in his wine,” and he told me of the wish the painter had to go to Venice and follow up Ruskin’s work there in a book of his own.  But he would not let me feel very guilty, and I will not pretend that I had any personal regret for my good fortune.