from the Acropolis, Westminster Abbey, and Santa Crocea in one. I tried
hard for some aesthetic sense of it, and I made believe that I thought
this thing and that thing in the place moved me with its fitness or
beauty; but the truth is that I had no taste in anything but literature,
and did not feel the effect I would so willingly have experienced.

I did genuinely love the elmy quiet of the dear old Cambridge streets,
though, and I had a real and instant pleasure in the yellow colonial
houses, with their white corners and casements and their green blinds,
that lurked behind the shrubbery of the avenue I passed through to Mount
Auburn. The most beautiful among them was the most interesting for me,
for it was the house of Longfellow; my companion, who had seen it before,
pointed it out to me with an air of custom, and I would not let him see
that I valued the first sight of it as I did. I had hoped that somehow I
might be so favored as to see Longfellow himself, but when I asked about
him of those who knew, they said, "Oh, he is at Nahant," and I thought
that Nahant must be a great way off, and at any rate I did not feel
authorized to go to him there. Neither did I go to see the author of
'The Amber Gods' who lived at Newburyport, I was told, as if I should
know where Newburyport was; I did not know, and I hated to ask. Besides,
it did not seem so simple as it had seemed in Ohio, to go and see a young
lady simply because I was infatuated with her literature; even as the
envoy of all the infatuated young people of Columbus, I could not quite
do this; and when I got home, I had to account for my failure as best I
could. Another failure of mine was the sight of Whittier, which I then
very much longed to have. They said, "Oh, Whittier lives at Amesbury,"
but that put him at an indefinite distance, and without the introduction
I never would ask for, I found it impossible to set out in quest of him.
In the end, I saw no one in New England whom I was not presented to in
the regular way, except Lowell, whom I thought I had a right to call upon