was efficient in positing the Puritans as of their time, and rather
better and not worse than other people of the same time. He was himself
a most tolerant man, and his tolerance was never weak or fond; it stopped
well short of condoning error, which he condemned when he preferred to
leave it to its own punishment. Personally he was without any flavor of
harshness; his mind was as gentle as his manner, which was one of the
gentlest I have ever known.

Of as gentle make but of more pensive temper, with unexpected bursts of
lyrical gaiety, was Christopher Pearse Cranch, the poet, whom I had known
in New York long before he came to live in Cambridge. He could not only
play and sing most amusing songs, but he wrote very good poems and
painted pictures perhaps not so good. I always liked his Venetian
pictures, for their poetic, unsentimentalized veracity, and I printed as
well as liked many of his poems. During the time that I knew him more
than his due share of troubles and sorrows accumulated themselves on his
fine head, which the years had whitened, and gave a droop to the
beautiful, white-bearded face. But he had the artist soul and the poet
heart, and no doubt he could take refuge in these from the cares that
shadowed his visage. My acquaintance with him in Cambridge renewed
itself upon the very terms of its beginning in New York. We met at
Longfellow's table, where he lifted up his voice in the Yankee folk-song,
"On Springfield Mountain there did dwell," which he gave with a perfectly
killing mock-gravity.




XI.