the days in which I almost constantly saw them go by without record save
such as I carried in a memory retentive, indeed, beyond the common, but
not so full as I could have wished when I began to invoke it for my work.
Still, upon insistent appeal, it responded in sufficient abundance; and,
though I now wish I could have remembered more instances, I think my
impressions were accurate enough. I am sure of having tried honestly to
impart them in the ten years or more when I was desultorily endeavoring
to share them with the reader.

The papers were written pretty much in the order they have here,
beginning with My First Visit to New England, which dates from the
earliest eighteen-nineties, if I may trust my recollection of reading it
from the manuscript to the editor of Harper's Magazine, where we lay
under the willows of Magnolia one pleasant summer morning in the first
years of that decade. It was printed no great while after in that
periodical; but I was so long in finishing the study of Lowell that it
had been anticipated in Harper's by other reminiscences of him, and it
was therefore first printed in Scribner's Magazine. It was the paper
with which I took the most pains, and when it was completed I still felt
it so incomplete that I referred it to his closest and my best friend,
the late Charles Eliot Norton, for his criticism. He thought it wanting
in unity; it was a group of studies instead of one study, he said; I must
do something to draw the different sketches together in a single effect
of portraiture; and this I did my best to do.

It was the latest written of the three articles which give the volume
substance, and it represents mare finally and fully than the others my
sense of the literary importance of the men whose like we shall not look
upon again. Longfellow was easily the greatest poet of the three, Holmes
often the most brilliant and felicitous, but Lowell, in spite of his