THOMAS RAYNESFORD LOUNSBLKY. 835 



Pope — poets wlu) li:ne sur\ ived so surely that, whether you care for 

 them or not, their works are touchstones by which those who will may 

 test the wortli of works lesser or newer. And what he thought of the 

 trivial conventions of petty literary grace may be gathered from the 

 saying attributed to him by Professor Cross, that "a man who hasn't 

 brains enough to write a grammar writes a rhetoric." 



Those who knew Professor Lounsbury, e\en though slightly, can 

 ne^•er forget him. No one can remember him without interest, few 

 without affection. 



Ill 



Whoever, with such memory, turns now to the books where he has 

 left his record for future times must feel, more than usual, how little 

 books, even though deeply characteristic, can preserve the atmosphere 

 of a memorable personality. Something similar is true of two Harvard 

 worthies — Lowell and Norton. Lowell's poems and essays are 

 securely placed among the standards of literature in America, Norton's 

 books and letters are lasting records of the most gracious American 

 culture. But Har^'ard men who studied under Lowell or Norton, or 

 who know them as they lived and moved in the Cambridge they had 

 seen transformed from a unique college town to populous suburban 

 commonplace, grow impatient of their printed utterance. This is 

 doubtless good ; but the men themselves were so much better that the 

 sense of their loss grows heavier with each page. Lounsbury's books 

 are as characteristic as either of theirs — not least for his disdainful 

 disregard of conventional literary- pretension. He wrote, as he talked, 

 volubly and idiomatically. He did not attempt to make literature; 

 he was content to know it, to love it, to assert the standards of it and 

 to maintain them with all the power of his insatiable study and of his 

 unswerving common-sense. No man ever had a sounder appreciation 

 of literary and poetic values; none could insist on them more sanely 

 or more valiantly. ^Yhen he came to discussing them, however, he 

 was a little too apt to take them for granted. This, as one reflects, 

 was evident in his talk. There one felt nothing to seek; if he strayed 

 a bit from things themselves worth while to things about them, a word 

 or two would recall him to the heart of the matter; oftener, glatlly 

 yielding to the sweep of his utterance, one was content for the moment 

 to take for granted with him that there was no need to dwell on what 

 we all knew anyway. The pitiless impersonality of print, however, 

 reveals too clearlv this error, if indeed it be not a foible, of his strength. 



