CAMBRIDGE 31 



course of Lowell Lectures. He was unfamiliar with 

 the language. . . . He would often have been painfully 

 embarrassed but for his own simplicity of character. 

 Thinking only of his subject and never of himself, 

 when a critical pause came, he patiently waited for 

 the missing word, and rarely failed to find a phrase 

 which was expressive if not technically correct. . . . 

 His foreign accent rather added a charm to his address, 

 and the pauses in which he seemed to ask the forbear- 

 ance of the audience, while he sought to translate his 

 thought for them, enlisted their sympathy. Their 

 courtesy never failed him. His skill in drawing with 

 chalk on the blackboard was also a great help both 

 to him and to them. When his English was at fault 

 he could nevertheless explain his meaning by illus- 

 trations so graphic that the spoken word was hardly 

 missed. . . . 



After the first lecture in Boston there was no doubt 

 of his success. He carried his audience captive. 



Agassiz's popularity in the lecture-room opened for him 

 agreeable social relations, the pathway to which his genial 

 personality made all the more easy. That he was uncom- 

 monly prepossessing is illustrated by the story of the cruel 

 blow that Mrs. Gary received when on coming home from 

 church one Sunday morning shortly after his arrival in 

 Boston, she said to her daughter Elizabeth, '*I should like 

 to know who it was who sat in the Lowells' pew this morn- 

 ing, for he 's the first person I ever saw whom I should like 

 you to marry," only to be informed that the stranger was 

 none other than the popular Agassiz, who already had a 

 wife and children in Europe. 



