When he uncovered, his straight, wide, white forehead showed itself one
of the most beautiful that could be; his eyes were gay with humor, and
alert with all intelligence. He had an enchanting smile, a laugh that
was full of friendly joyousness, and a voice that was exquisite music.
Everything about him expressed his strenuous physical condition: he would
not wear an overcoat in the coldest Cambridge weather; at all times he
moved vigorously, and walked with a quick step, lifting his feet well
from the ground.




VII.

It gives me a pleasure which I am afraid I cannot impart, to linger in
this effort to materialize his presence from the fading memories of the
past. I am afraid I can as little impart a due sense of what he
spiritually was to my knowledge. It avails nothing for me to say that I
think no man of my years and desert had ever so true and constant a
friend. He was both younger and older than I by insomuch as he was a
poet through and through, and had been out of college before I was born.
But he had already come to the age of self-distrust when a man likes to
take counsel with his juniors as with his elders, and fancies he can
correct his perspective by the test of their fresher vision. Besides,
Lowell was most simply and pathetically reluctant to part with youth, and
was willing to cling to it wherever he found it. He could not in any
wise bear to be left-out. When Mr. Bret Harte came to Cambridge, and the
talk was all of the brilliant character-poems with which he had then
first dazzled the world, Lowell casually said, with a most touching,
however ungrounded sense of obsolescence, He could remember when the