there he is of a genial and comforting quality, very rich and cordial,
such as I felt him to be when I met him in person. His verse seems to me
not poetry, but the materials of poetry, like one's emotions; yet I would
not misprize it, and I am glad to own that I have had moments of great
pleasure in it. Some French critic quoted in the Saturday Press (I
cannot think of his name) said the best thing of him when he said that he
made you a partner of the enterprise, for that is precisely what he does,
and that is what alienates and what endears in him, as you like or
dislike the partnership. It is still something neighborly, brotherly,
fatherly, and so I felt him to be when the benign old man looked on me
and spoke to me.




III.

That night at Pfaff's must have been the last of the Bohemians for me,
and it was the last of New York authorship too, for the time. I do not
know why I should not have imagined trying to see Curtis, whom I knew so
much by heart, and whom I adored, but I may not have had the courage, or
I may have heard that he was out of town; Bryant, I believe, was then out
of the country; but at any rate I did not attempt him either. The
Bohemians were the beginning and the end of the story for me, and to tell
the truth I did not like the story. I remember that as I sat at that
table under the pavement, in Pfaff's beer-cellar, and listened to the
wit that did not seem very funny, I thought of the dinner with Lowell,
the breakfast with Fields, the supper at the Autocrat's, and felt that I
had fallen very far. In fact it can do no harm at this distance of time
to confess that it seemed to me then, and for a good while afterwards,