and has certainly repainted her dormitories. In truth, when I last
revisited that familiar scene and looked upon the flammantia mania of the
old halls, "Massachusetts" with the dummy clock-dial, "Harvard" with the
garrulous belfry, little "Holden" with the sculptured unpunishable cherub
over its portal, and the rest of my early brick-and-mortar acquaintances,
I could not help saying to myself that I had lived to see the peaceable
establishment of the Red Republic of Letters.

Many of the things I shall put down I have no doubt told before in a
fragmentary way, how many I cannot be quite sure, as I do not very often
read my own prose works. But when a man dies a great deal is said of him
which has often been said in other forms, and now this dear old house is
dead to me in one sense, and I want to gather up my recollections and
wind a string of narrative round them, tying them up like a nosegay for
the last tribute: the same blossoms in it I have often laid on its
threshold while it was still living for me.

We Americans are all cuckoos,--we make our homes in the nests of other
birds. I have read somewhere that the lineal descendants of the man who
carted off the body of William Rufus, with Walter Tyrrel's arrow sticking
in it, have driven a cart (not absolutely the same one, I suppose) in the
New Forest, from that day to this. I don't quite understand Mr. Ruskin's
saying (if he said it) that he couldn't get along in a country where
there were no castles, but I do think we lose a great deal in living
where there are so few permanent homes. You will see how much I parted
with which was not reckoned in the price paid for the old homestead.

I shall say many things which an uncharitable reader might find fault
with as personal. I should not dare to call myself a poet if I did not;
for if there is anything that gives one a title to that name, it is that