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. Wken 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. Cary 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. 
