charge of the Atlantic, he had proved himself easily the wisest and
finest critic in our language. He was already, more than any American
poet,

"Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
The love of love,"

and he held a place in the public sense which no other author among us
has held. I had myself never been a great reader of his poetry, when I
met him, though when I was a boy of ten years I had heard my father
repeat passages from the Biglow Papers against war and slavery and the
war for slavery upon Mexico, and later I had read those criticisms of
English poetry, and I knew Sir Launfal must be Lowell in some sort; but
my love for him as a poet was chiefly centred in my love for his tender
rhyme, 'Auf Wiedersehen', which I can not yet read without something of
the young pathos it first stirred in me. I knew and felt his greatness
some how apart from the literary proofs of it; he ruled my fancy and held
my allegiance as a character, as a man; and I am neither sorry nor
ashamed that I was abashed when I first came into his presence; and that
in spite of his words of welcome I sat inwardly quaking before him. He
was then forty-one years old, and nineteen my senior, and if there had
been nothing else to awe me, I might well have been quelled by the
disparity of our ages. But I have always been willing and even eager to
do homage to men who have done something, and notably to men who have
done something in the sort I wished to do something in, myself. I
could never recognize any other sort of superiority; but that I am proud
to recognize; and I had before Lowell some such feeling as an obscure
subaltern might have before his general. He was by nature a bit of a
disciplinarian, and the effect was from him as well as in me; I dare say
he let me feel whatever difference there was as helplessly as I felt it.