JAMES ELLIOT CABOT. 649 



JAMES ELLIOT CABOT. 



Our late associate, Elliot Cabot, of whom I have been appointed to 

 write a sketch, was to me from my college days an object of peculiar 

 interest, on a variety of grounds. He was distantly related to me, in 

 more than one way, through the endless intermarriages -of the old Essex 

 county families. Though two years and a half older, he was but one 

 year in advance of me in Harvard College. He and his chum, Henry 

 Bryant, who had been my schoolmate, were among the early founders 

 of the Harvard Natural History Society, then lately established, of 

 which I was an ardent member ; and I have never had such a sensation 

 of earthly glory as when I succeeded Bryant in the responsible function 

 of Curator of Entomology in that august body. I used sometimes in 

 summer to encounter Cabot in the Fresh Pond marshes, then undrained, 

 which he afterwards described so delightfully in the "Atlantic Monthly" 

 in his paper entitled -'Sedge Birds" (XXIH. 384). On these occasions 

 he bore his gun, and I only the humbler weapon of a butterfly net. 

 After we had left college, I looked upon him with envy as one of the 

 early and successful aspirants to that German post-collegiate education 

 which was already earnestly desired, but rarely attained, by the more 

 studious among Harvard graduates. After his return, I was brought 

 more or less in contact with him, at the close of the " Dial " period, and 

 in the following years of Transcendentalism ; and, later still, I was ac- 

 tively associated with him for a time in that group of men who have 

 always dreamed of accomplishing something through the Harvard Visit- 

 ing Committee, and have retired from it with hopes unaccomplished. 

 Apart from his labors as Emerson's scribe and editor, he seemed to 

 withdraw himself more and more from active life as time went on, and 

 to accept gracefully the attitude which many men find so hard, — that of 

 being, in a manner, superseded by the rising generation. This he could 

 do more easily, since he left a family of sons to represent in various forms 

 the tastes and gifts that were combined in him ; and he also left a manu- 

 script autobiography, terse, simple, and modest, like himself, to represent 

 what was in its way a quite unique career. Of this sketch I have been 

 allowed to avail myself through the courtesy of his sons. 



James Elliot Cabot was born in Boston, June 18, 1821, his birthplace 

 being in Quincy Place, upon the slope of Fort Hill, in a house which 

 had belonged to his grandfather, Samuel Cabot, brother of George Cabot, 

 the well-known leader of the Federalists in his day. These brothers 



