have happened to a like youth at such a point in his career; and when I
sat down with Doctor Holmes and Mr. Fields, on Lowell's right, I felt
through and through the dramatic perfection of the event. The kindly
Autocrat recognized some such quality of it in terms which were not the
less precious and gracious for their humorous excess. I have no reason
to think that he had yet read any of my poor verses, or had me otherwise
than wholly on trust from Lowell; but he leaned over towards his host,
and said, with a laughing look at me, "Well, James, this is something
like the apostolic succession; this is the laying on of hands." I took
his sweet and caressing irony as he meant it; but the charm of it went to
my head long before any drop of wine, together with the charm of hearing
him and Lowell calling each other James and Wendell, and of finding them
still cordially boys together.

I would gladly have glimmered before those great lights in the talk that
followed, if I could have thought of anything brilliant to say, but I
could not, and so I let them shine without a ray of reflected splendor
from me. It was such talk as I had, of course, never heard before, and
it is not saying enough to say that I have never heard such talk since
except from these two men. It was as light and kind as it was deep and
true, and it ranged over a hundred things, with a perpetual sparkle of
Doctor Holmes's wit, and the constant glow of Lowell's incandescent
sense. From time to time Fields came in with one of his delightful
stories (sketches of character they were, which he sometimes did not mind
caricaturing), or with some criticism of the literary situation from his
stand-point of both lover and publisher of books. I heard fames that I
had accepted as proofs of power treated as factitious, and witnessed a
frankness concerning authorship, far and near, that I had not dreamed of
authors using. When Doctor Holmes understood that I wrote for the
'Saturday Press', which was running amuck among some Bostonian