his single diurnal solace. Nor would he trust himself with two on Saturdays, preferring (since he could not violate the Sabbath even by that infinitesimal traffic) to depend on Providential ravens, which were seldom wanting in the shape of some blackcoated friend who knew his need and honored the scruple that occasioned it. He was faithful also to his old hats, in which appeared the constant service of the antique world, and which he preserved for ever, piled like a black pagoda under his dressingtable. No scarecrow was ever the residuary legatee of his beavers, though one of them in any of the neighboring peachorchards would have been sovran against an attack of freshmen. He wore them all in turn, getting through all in the course of the year, like the sun through the signs of the Zodiac, modulating them according to seasons and celestial phenomena, so that never was spider-web or chickweed so sensitive a weather-gauge as they. Nor did his political party find him less loyal. Taking all the tickets, he would seat himself apart and carefully compare them with the list of regular nominations as printed in his Daily Advertiser before he dropped his ballot in the box. In less ambitious moments it almost seems to me that I would rather have had that slow, conscientious vote of P.'s alone, than have been chosen alderman of the ward!

If you had walked to what was then Sweet Auburn by the pleasant Old Road, on some June morning thirty years ago, you would, very likely, have met two other characteristic persons, both phantasmagoric now, and belonging to the Past. Fifty years earlier, the scarlet-coated, rapiered figures of Vassall, Oliver, and Brattle, creaked up and down there on red-heeled shoes, lifting the ceremonious three-cornered hat, and offering the fugacious hospitalities of the snuff-box. They are all shadowy alike now, not one of your Etruscan Lucumos or Roman Consuls more so, my dear Storg. First is W., his queue slender and tapering like the tail of a violet crab, held out horizontally, by the high collar of his shepherd's-gray overcoat, whose style was of the latest when he studied at Leyden in his hot youth. The age of cheap clothes sees no more of those faithful old garments, as proper to their wearers and as distinctive as the barks of trees, and by long use interpenetrated with their very nature. Nor do we see so many

Humors (still in the old sense) now that every man's soul belongs to the Public, as when social distinctions were more marked, and men felt that their personalities were their castles, in which they could entrench themselves against the world. Nowadays men are shy of letting their true selves be seen, as if in some former life they had committed a crime, and were all the time afraid of discovery and arrest in this. Formerly they used to insist on your giving the wall to their peculiarities, and you may still find examples of it in the parson or the doctor of retired villages. One of W.'s oddities was touching. A little brook used to run across the street, and the sidewalk was carried over it by a broad stone. Of course, there is no brook now. What use did that little glimpse of ripple serve, where the children used to launch their chip fleets? W., in going over this stone, which gave a hollow resonance to the tread, used to strike upon it three times with his cane, and mutter Tom! Tom! Tom! I used to think he was only mimicking with his voice the sound of the blows, and possibly it was that sound which suggested his thought— for he was remembering a favorite nephew prematurely dead. Perhaps Tom had sailed his boats there; perhaps the reverberation under the old man's foot hinted at the hollowness of life; perhaps the fleeting eddies of the water brought to mind the fugaces annos. W., like P., wore amazing spectacles, fit to transmit no smaller image than the page of mightiest folios of Dioscorides or Hercules de Saxoniâ, and rising full-disked upon the beholder like those prodigies of two moons at once, portending change to monarchs. The great collar disallowing any independent rotation of the head, I remember he used to turn his whole person in order to bring their foci to bear upon an object. One can fancy that terrified nature would have yielded up her secrets at once, without crossexamination, at their first glare. Through them he had gazed fondly into the great mare's-nest of Junius, publishing his observations upon the eggs found therein in a tall octavo. It was he who introduced vaccination to this Western World. He used to stop and say good-morning kindly, and pat the shoulder of the blushing school-boy who now, with the fierce snow-storm wildering without, sits and remembers sadly those old meetings and partings in the June sunshine.

Then, there was S., whose resounding "haw! haw! haw! by George!" positively enlarged the income of every dweller in Cambridge. In downright, honest good cheer and good neighborhood it was worth five hundred a year to every one of us. Its jovial thunders cleared the mental air of every sulky cloud. Perpetual childhood dwelt in him, the childhood of his native Southern France, and its fixed air was all the time bubbling up and sparkling and winking in his eyes. It seemed as if his placid old face were only a mask behind which a merry Cupid had ambushed himself, peeping out all the while, and ready to drop it when the play grew tiresome. Every word he uttered seemed to be hilarious, no matter what the occasion. If he were sick and you visited him, if he had met with a misfortune (and there are few men so wise that they can look even at the back of a retiring sorrow with composure), it was all one; his great laugh went off as if it were set like an alarum-clock, to run down, whether he would or no, at a certain nick. Even after an ordinary good morning! (especially if to an old pupil, and in French,) the wonderful haw! haw! haw! by George! would burst upon you unexpectedly like a salute of artillery on some holiday which you had forgotten. Every thing was a joke to him—that the oath of allegiance had been administered to him by your grandfather, — that he had taught Prescott his first Spanish (of which he was proud)—no matter what. Every thing came to him marked by nature - right side up, with care, and he kept it so. The world to him, as to all of us, was like a medal, on the obverse of which is stamped the image of Joy, and on the reverse that of Care. S. never took the foolish pains to look at that other side, even if he knew its existence; much less would it have occurred to him to turn it into view and insist that his friends should look at it with him. Nor was this a mere outside good-humor; its source was deeper in a true Christian kindliness and amenity. Once when he had been knocked down by a tipsily-driven sleigh, and was urged to prosecute the offenders-"No, no," he said, his wounds still fresh, "young blood! young blood! it must have its way; I was young myself.” Was! few men come into life so young as S. went out. He landed in Boston (then the front door of America) in '93, and, in honor of the ceremony, had his head powdered

afresh, and put on a suit of court-mourning before he set foot on the wharf. My fancy always dressed him in that violet silk, and his soul certainly wore a full court-suit. What was there ever like his bow? It was as if you had received a decoration, and could write yourself gentleman from that day forth. His hat rose, regreeting your own, and, having sailed through the stately curve of the old régime, sank gently back over that placid brain which harbored no thought less white than the powder which covered it. I have sometimes imagined that there was a graduated arc over his head, invisible to other eyes than his, by which he meted out to each his rightful share of castorial consideration. I carry in my memory three exemplary bows. The first is that of an old beggar, who already carrying in his hand a white hat, the gift of benevolence, took off the black one from his head also, and profoundly saluted me with both at once, giving me, in return for my alms, a dual benediction, puzzling as a nod from Janus Bifrons. The second I received from an old Cardinal who was taking his walk just outside the Porta San Giovanni at Rome. I paid him the courtesy due to his age and rank. Forthwith rose first, the Hat; second, the hat of his confessor; third, that of another priest who attended him; fourth, the fringed cocked-hat of his coachman; fifth and sixth, the ditto, ditto, of his two footmen. Here was an investment, indeed; six hundred per cent. interest on a single bow! The third bow, worthy to be noted in one's almanac among the other mirabilia, was that of S., in which courtesy had mounted to the last round of her ladder, and tried to draw it up after her.

But the genial veteran is gone even while I am writing this, and I will play Old Mortality no longer. Wandering among these recent graves, my dear friend, we may chance to

I will not end my sentence. I bid you heartily farewell!

but no,

[Fireside Travels: "Cambridge Thirty Years Ago." Putnam's Magazine, 1854, vol. iii.]

KEATS'S POETRY

The faults of Keats's poetry are obvious enough, but it should be remembered that he died at twenty-four, and that he offends by superabundance and not poverty. That he was overlanguaged at first there can be no doubt, and in this was implied the possibility of falling back to the perfect mean of diction. It is only by the rich that the costly plainness, which at once satisfies the taste and the imagination, is attainable.

Whether Keats was original or not we do not think it useful to discuss until it has been settled what originality is. Mr. Milnes tells us that this merit (whatever it is) has been denied to Keats because his poems take the color of the authors he happened to be reading at the time he wrote them. But men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several generations, In the parliament of the present, every man represents a constituency of the past. It is true that Keats has the accent of the men from whom he learned to speak, but this is to make originality a mere question of externals, and in this sense the author of a dictionary might bring an action of trover against every author who used his words. It is the man behind the words that gives them value, and if Shakspeare help himself to a verse or a phrase, it is with ears that have learned of him to listen that we feel the harmony of the one, and it is the mass of his intellect that makes the other weighty with meaning. Enough that we recognize in Keats that undefinable newness and unexpectedness that we call genius. The sunset is original every evening, though for thousands of years it has built out of the same light and vapor its visionary cities with domes and pinnacles, and its delectable mountains which night shall utterly abase and destroy.

Three men, almost contemporaneous with each other, Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron, were the great means of bringing back English poetry from the sandy deserts of rhetoric, and recovering for her her triple inheritance of simplicity, sensuousness and passion. Of these, Wordsworth was the only conscious reformer,