388 ELIZABETH CARY AGASSIZ 
(his and mine) which I could hardly read myself with- 
out emotion. 
April 8, 1906. —I am reading for the second time 
Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua. I confess I have 
found it difficult to understand how a man of so power- 
ful, so logical a nature could enter into the Catholic 
Church. Does he himself give us a clew? He says 
(p. 44 of the Apologia),‘‘From the age of fifteen dogma 
has been the foundation principle of my religion. I 
cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of reli- 
gion.”” How then should he find himself landed else- 
where than in the headquarters of dogma, creeds, 
sacraments, sacramental rites? 
May 22, 1906. —I am re-reading Emerson’s biog- 
raphy by Eliot Cabot. How far away and how de- 
lightful those days seem! 
May 25. — Finished Emerson today. He and his 
comrades made a most interesting set of men, and 
Eliot Cabot has put them together in a very effective 
and human sort of way. 
After 1904 Mrs. Agassiz did not return to Nahant, but 
on the advice of her physicians spent the remaining sum- 
mers of her life with her niece, Miss Louisa Felton, who 
owned an attractivecottage at Arlington Heights. Although 
Mrs. Agassiz at times thought wistfully of her beloved 
Nahant, she greatly enjoyed the beautiful view from Miss 
Felton’s verandah over woodland and distant hills, and at 
the end of her first season there, she wrote to a friend, “It 
has been a summer of health and happiness for me and I 
am grateful for it.” Eighty-three is not an age at which 
hew surroundings, however desirable, are usually wel- 
