greatest species of mammalia-long studied but as yet little known-of the very finest type, from the widely scattered genus of the race of MAN. The simplicity of Agassiz's mode of address captivated all hearers. He put himself at once in touch with the common-school teachers. He had none of that absurd conceit which has sometimes parted college professors from sympathetic work with their brothers and sisters who have the first duty, in the district and town schools, in the infinite work of instruction and education. Agassiz's Cambridge life brought into Cambridge a good many of his European friends, and broke up the strictness of a village coterie, by the accent, not to say the customs, of cosmopolitan life. To say true, the denizens of the forest sometimes intermixed closely with the well-trained European scholars. There used to be a fine story of a dinner-party at Dr. A. Guyot's when he lived at Cambridge. An admiring friend had sent Guyot as a present a black bear, which was confined in the cellar of his house. Another friend had sent him a little barrel of cider, which was also in the cellar. As the dinner went on upstairs, ominous rumblings were heard below, and suddenly an attendant rushed in on the feast announcing that the bear had got loose, had been drinking the cider, had got drunk, and was now coming up stairs. The guests fled, through windows and doors. I am not sure that Lowell was one of them, but the anecdote belongs in notices of his friends. I should not dare speak of a " village coterie," nor intimate that at Cambridge there were men who had never heard of Fujiyama, or of places, indeed, not twenty miles away, but that these anecdotes belong a generation and more ago. THE WASHINGTON ELM, CAMBRIDGE See "Under the Old Elm." From a photograph by Mr. J. Olssen, of Cambridge, One of Lowell's fellowprofessors told me this curious story, which will illustrate the narrowness of New England observation at that time. There appeared at Cambridge in June of 1860 a young gentleman named Robert Todd Lincoln, who has since been quite well known in this country and in England. This young man wished to enter Harvard College, and his father, one Abraham Lincoln, who has since been known in the larger world, had fortified him with a letter of introduction to Dr. Walker, the President of the College. This letter of introduction was given by one Stephen A. Douglas, who was a person also then quite well known in political life, and he presented the young man to Dr. Walker as being the son of his friend Abraham Lincoln, "with whom I have lately been canvassing the State of Illinois." When this letter, now so curious in history, was read, Lowell said to my friend who tells me the story, "I suppose I am the only man in this room who has ever heard of this Abraham Lincoln; but he is the person with whom Douglas has been traveling up and down in Illinois, canvassing the State in their new Western fashion, as representatives of the two parties, each of them being the candidate for the vacant seat in the Senate." What is more, my friend says it is probably true that at the moment when this letter was presented by young Robert Lincoln, none of the faculty of Harvard College, excepting Lowell, had ever heard of Abraham Lincoln. The story is a good one, as showing how far it was in those days possible for a circle of intelligent men to know little or nothing of what was happening in the world beyond the sound of their college bell. It would be almost of course that, in a series of articles which are not simply about Lowell but about his friends, I should include some careful history of the Saturday Club, which has held its regular meetings up to this time from the date of the dinner-party given by Mr. Phillips, as described in the July issue of The Outlook. But that story has been so well told by Mr. Morse in his memoir of Dr. Holmes, and is so well illustrated there, that I can hardly do more than repeat what has been said before. In his "Life of Dr. Holmes" there are two pages of admirably well selected pictures of some of the members best known. When the reader sees the names of gentlemen who have attended the Club more or less regularly in forty years, he will readily understand why Emerson and Holmes and Lowell and others of their contemporaries have spoken of the talk there as being as good talk as they had ever heard anywhere. Holmes's list, besides himself, was Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Motley, Whipple, Whittier, Professors Agassiz and Peirce; John S. Dwight, Governor Andrew, Richard H. Dana, Jr., and Charles Sumner, Presidents Felton and Eliot, Professors Norton and Goodwin, William H. Prescott, HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW From a photograph taken in 1860. T. G. Appleton, J. M. Forbes, J. Elliot Cabot, Henry James, W. D. Howells, T. B. Aldrich, William M. Hunt, Charles Francis Adams, Francis Parkman, James Freeman Clarke, Judge Lowell, Judge Hoar, George F. Hoar, and Bishop Brooks. Mr. Lowell's sympathetic habit and his thorough interest in everything connected with the College, his easy oratory, and the certainty that he never spoke without saying something worth hearing, made him of course a favorite officer in all college organizations, He was the President of the Harvard Alumni in the years 1874, 1875, 1876, and 1886. He was the President of the Harvard branch of Phi Beta Kappa from 1863 to 1871, and again in 1886-67. In such capacities he presided with admirable skill and good taste, and among the pleasan test recollections of his life are those of the happy addresses which he made at such times, almost wholly without premeditation. From two of these addresses I have already quoted in the fifth paper of this series. One of the last times when I saw him and Emerson together was on the 18th of July, 1867, when Emerson delivered his secord Phi Beta Kappa address. It had never happened before, I think, that the same orator should have spoken twice before Phi Beta Kappa with an interval of thirty years between the orations; nor is it probable that such a thing will ever happen again. In 1837 the word Transcendentalist was new, and it was considered "good form" to ridicule the Transcendentalists, and especially to ridicule Emerson. Yet he had his admirers then, especially his admirers in college, where the recollections of his poetry and philosophy, as shown when he was an undergraduate, had not, died out. A few years ago I printed his two Bowdoin prize dissertations, written when he was seventeen and eighteen years of age, and they are enough to show that the boy, at that age, was father of the man. When he spoke in 1837, the oration was received in a certain patronizing way by his seniors. Mr. Cabot says, "He was regarded as a promising young beginner, from whom a fair poetical speech might be expected," and the address was spoken of with a gay badinage such as could not be called criticism. I remember, at the frugal dinner-party of Phi Beta Kappa after the oration of 1837, Mr. Edward Everett, who was an enthusiastic Cambridge man and college man and Phi Beta man, said, with perfect good nature, of the Transcendentalists that their utterances seemed to him to be compounded like the bolts of Jupiter, Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosæ and made this extempore translation : But three were thirsty cloud, and three were empty wind! Emerson was too young and too modest, and had too much real regard and respect for Everett, to make the reply which one thinks of now: "Whatever the bolts were made of, they were thunderbolts; and from Vulcan's time to this time, people had better stand out from under when a thunderbolt is falling." I can see Emerson now, as he smiled and was silent. After thirty years, people did not say much about "thirsty cloud" or "empty wind." Emerson was in the zenith of his fame. He was "the Buddha of the West"-that is Doctor Holmes's phrase. He was "the Yankee Plato "-I believe that is Lowell's. And Phi Beta made amends for any vague questioning in the past by the enthusiasm with which it received him for the second time. A queer thing happened on that morning. Emerson had a passion to the last for changing the order of his utterances. He would put the tenth sheet in place of the fifth, and the fifth in place of the fifteenth, up to the issue of the last "extra" of an oration. It was Miss Ellen Emerson, I think, who took upon herself the duty of putting these sheets in order on this occasion, and sewing them so stiffly together that they could not be twitched apart by any sudden movement at the desk. But the fact that they were sewed together was an embarrassment to him. What was worse was that he met his brother, William Emerson, that morning. I think they looked over the address together, and in doing so it happened that Waldo Emerson took William Emerson's glasses and William took Waldo's. Waldo did not discover his error till he stood in the pulpit before the assembly. Worse than either. perhaps, some too-careful janitor had carried away the high desk from the pulpit of the church, and had left Emerson, tall and with the wrong spectacles, to read the address far below his eyes. It was not till the first passage of the address was finished that this difficulty of the desk could be rectified; but the whole audience was in sympathy with him, and the little hitch, if one may call it so, which this made seemed only to bring them closer together. The address will be found in the eighth volume of his works, and will be remembered by every one who heard it; but, on the whole, what impresses me the most in memory is the hearty thoroughness and cordiality of Lowell's congratulations when Emerson turned round after finishing the oration. "Par nobile fratrum," as one said; and one felt glad to have seen two such men together on such a day. Lowell himself said of it, a few days All through it I felt something in me that later: cried, Ha, ha! to the sound of trumpets!" On the 9th of July, 1872, Lowell and Mrs. Lowell sailed for Europe, without any plans, as he himself says. They remained abroad two years. They landed in England, but early in the winter he established himself, for six months as it proved, in Paris. They were in a nice little hotel there, where he is still remembered cordially-the Hotel de France et Lorraine. Here they lived quietly from November to the next summer. "Emerson's oration was more disjointed than usual even with him. It began nowhere and ended everywhere; and yet, as always with that divine man, it left you feeling that something beautiful had passed that way, something more beautiful than anything else, like the rising and setting of stars. Every possible criticism might have been made on it, except that it was not noble. There was a tone in it that awakened all elevating associations. He boggled, he lost his place, he had to put on his glasses; but it was as if a creature from some fairer world had lost his way in our fogs, and it was our fault and not his. It was chaotic, but it was all such stuff as stars are made of, and you could not help feeling that if you waited a while all that was nebulous would be hurled into planets, and would assume the mathematical gravity of system. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES From a photograph taken in 1862. He was in Paris in the last years of M. Thiers. The interes's of politics centered on the relations between President Thiers and the Commission of Thirty-long since, I am afraid, forgotten by this reader. Lowell writes of Thiers's resignation, which closed his long career of public life, "I think it was the egotism of Thiers that overset him rather than any policy he was supposed to have." Of this sojourn in Paris, a near friend of his gives me the following pleasant note: 66 In the little office of the Hotel France et Lorraine, Rue de Beaune, Paris, hangs a fairly good likeness of James Russell Lowell, a large photograph, I think, taken some years before his death. It is, and has been for twenty years and more, the presiding presence of the little sanctum where Madame and Monsieur sit and make out their (very reasonable) bills and count their gains. The hotel is still a most attractive retreat for a certain class of us, who like quiet and comfort without display. Rue de Beaune is a narrow little street leading off the Quai Voltaire, which runs parallel to the Seine. On the opposite shore of the river are the fine buildings of the Tuileries and the Louvre ; between flows the steady stream, covered with little steamers, pleasure - boats, bateaux-mouches, tugs. The great Pont-Neuf crosses the river, very near Rue de |