He was
not quite of that literary Boston which I so fondly remembered my
glimpses of; he was rather of a journalistic and literary Boston which I
had never known; but he was of Boston, after all. He had been in
Lowell's classes at Harvard; he had often met Longfellow in Cambridge; he
knew Doctor Holmes, of course; and he let me talk of my idols to my
heart's content. I think he must have been amused by my raptures; most
people would have been; but he was kind and patient, and he listened to
me with a sweet intelligence which I shall always gratefully remember. He
died too young, with his life's possibilities mainly unfulfilled; but
none who knew him could fail to imagine them, or to love him for what he
was.
I.
Besides those few pitiful successes, I had nothing but defeats in the
sort of literature which I supposed was to be my calling, and the defeats
threw me upon prose; for some sort of literary thing, if not one, then
another, I must do if I lived; and I began to write those studies of
Venetian life which afterwards became a book, and which I contributed as
letters to the 'Boston Advertiser', after vainly offering them to more
aesthetic periodicals.
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