The last summer of a score that I had known him, we sat on the veranda of his cottage at York Harbor, and looked out over the moonlit sea, and he talked of the high and true things, with the inextinguishable zest for the inquiry which I always found in him, though he was then feeling the approaches of the malady which was so soon to end all groping in these shadows for him.  He must have faced the fact with the same courage and the same trust with which he faced all facts.  From the first I found him a deeply religious man, not only in the ecclesiastical sense, but in the more mystical meanings of the word, and he kept his faith as he kept his youth to the last.  Every one who knew him, knows how young he was in heart, and how he liked to have those that were young in years about him.  He wished to have his house in Boston, as well as his cottage at York, full of young men and young girls, whose joy of life he made his own, and whose society he preferred to his contemporaries’.  One could not blame him for that, or for seeking the sun, wherever he could, but it would be a false notion of him to suppose that his sympathies were solely or chiefly with the happy.  In every sort, as I knew him, he was fine and good.  The word is not worthy of him, after some of its uses and associations, but if it were unsmutched by these, and whitened to its primitive significance, I should say he was one of the most perfect gentlemen I ever knew.

ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS: 

   Celia Thaxter
   Charles F. Browne
   Dawn upon him through a cloud of other half remembered faces
   Edmund Quincy
   Ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense
   Few men last over from one reform to another
   Francis Parkman
   Generous lover of all that was excellent in literature
   Got out of it all the fun there was in it
   Greeting of great impersonal cordiality
   Grieving that there could be such ire in heavenly minds
   His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event
   Julia Ward Howe
   Looked as if Destiny had sat upon it
   Man who may any moment be out of work is industrially a slave
   Pathos of revolt from the colorless rigidities
   Plain-speaking or Rude Speaking
   Pointed the moral in all they did
   Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the sermon
   Tired themselves out in trying to catch up with him
   True to an ideal of life rather than to life itself
   Wasted face, and his gay eyes had the death-look
   When to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast
   Whitman’s public use of his privately written praise

LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES—­Oliver Wendell Holmes

by William Dean Howells Oliver Wendell Holmes