not far from the medium height; but his erect carriage made the most of
his five feet and odd inches. He had been smoking the pipe he loved, and
he put it back in his mouth, presently, as if he found himself at greater
ease with it, when he began to chat, or rather to let me show what manner
of young man I was by giving me the first word. I told him of the
trouble I had in finding him, and I could not help dragging in something
about Heine's search for Borne, when he went to see him in Frankfort; but
I felt at once this was a false start, for Lowell was such an impassioned
lover of Cambridge, which was truly his patria, in the Italian sense,
that it must have hurt him to be unknown to any one in it; he said, a
little dryly, that he should not have thought I would have so much
difficulty; but he added, forgivingly, that this was not his own house,
which he was out of for the time. Then he spoke to me of Heine, and when
I showed my ardor for him, he sought to temper it with some judicious
criticisms, and told me that he had kept the first poem I sent him, for
the long time it had been unacknowledged, to make sure that it was not a
translation. He asked me about myself, and my name, and its Welsh
origin, and seemed to find the vanity I had in this harmless enough. When
I said I had tried hard to believe that I was at least the literary
descendant of Sir James Howels, he corrected me gently with "James
Howel," and took down a volume of the 'Familiar Letters' from the shelves
behind him to prove me wrong. This was always his habit, as I found
afterwards when he quoted anything from a book he liked to get it and
read the passage over, as if he tasted a kind of hoarded sweetness in the
words. It visibly vexed him if they showed him in the least mistaken;
but

"The love he bore to learning was at fault"

for this foible, and that other of setting people right if he thought