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 intoa 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 — 
