LONGFELLOW AND LOWELL 199 



Parsons of Cambridge, but that I should not enter those of the 

 Lowells or the Quincys or that of Mr. Longfellow. At the time, 

 this seemed to me the whimsy of the dear man's overmuch con- 

 sideration of me, and a perhaps excessive valuation of social 

 relations. But time proved that his reckoning was singularly 

 correct. I quickly took my way to the houses where he said I 

 should be welcomed, and there made valued friends, but I 

 never was invited to any of the other houses where he told me 

 I would find myself tabooed. 



I came to know Longfellow on the street, and had many 

 pleasant exchanges with him in our meetings; he would some- 

 times turn and walk with me, or bid me to go with him. We 

 often met in the houses of mutual friends, but he never bade 

 me to his own. In the same way I met Lowell, even more in- 

 teresting. He seemed to fancy talking with me in a fine swap- 

 ping of yarns and exchanging of judgments, and I always found 

 myself at my best with him. Several times he told me that we 

 were distantly kinsmen, as I remember it, through the marriage 

 of an Elizabeth Shaler of Connecticut with an ancestor of his, 

 Thomas Russell, of Charlestown. He said that this accounted for 

 the fact that his own father and William Shaler, my great-uncle, 

 were so curiously alike that they were gravely inconvenienced 

 by the mistakes it caused. In the College faculty, he was given 

 to seeking me for "a whack" of anecdote, and more than once 

 he walked with me to my door but never entered it, nor was I 

 ever in his house and this at a time when I was in near rela- 

 tion with all the other folk of Cambridge who were of the College 

 circle. Considering that I had been in the Union army, it is 

 hard to believe that the fact that I belonged to a slaveholding 

 family and did not regard holding slaves as infamous should 

 have been lifelong barriers to natural relations; yet the evi- 

 dence is that Mr. Ticknor was right; he had a marvellously 

 keen sense of human quality. 



Another home where I gladly went and often, was that of my 

 father's classmate Mr. Epes Sargent Dixwell, then the master of 



