CAMBRIDGE 35 



easy to find in the Cambridge college circle of that day — 

 Agassiz, born in his father's parsonage in the little village 

 of Motier, in sight of the Bernese Oberland, spending his 

 boyhood among the mountains of Switzerland, inured to 

 scanty means, passing from the varied and absorbing life 

 of a young naturalist in Germany and Paris to that of 

 a professor at Neuchatel, and then, essentially a son of 

 the Old World, "accustomed to draw Europe's freer air," 

 transplanted to Boston; and Elizabeth Cary, the child of 

 New England ancestry, born into a sufficiency of this world's 

 goods, reared, as one of her sons-in-law has said, "among 

 silks and spices and cotton shirtings and sheetings," brought 

 up as a Bostonian of the Bostonians, having spent her 

 years between Temple Place and Nahant in a placid ebb 

 and flow of conventional circumstance in the midst of a 

 happy family life. Yet in her sincerity and sweetness the 

 simple, genial nature of Agassiz found its level, and his 

 eager, buoyant temperament was balanced by the quiet 

 steadiness of her own. 



On April 25, 1850, they were married in Boston in King's 

 Chapel, a church with which the Cary family had been 

 connected for more than a century. "Lizzie looked lovely," 

 Mrs. Curtis writes in her diary, "dressed in a green silk, 

 white camel's hair shawl, straw bonnet trimmed with white, 

 [with] feathers on each side. After the ceremony they drove 

 directly out of town." They began their married life in the 

 house on Oxford Street, of which we have read Mrs. Agassiz's 

 description. In a few letters that she wrote to Agassiz in one 

 of his absences on a lecturing tour just before their mar- 

 riage — letters which reveal her habitually high-minded 

 attitude toward all the relations and purposes of her life — 



