Before this last visit in New York there was a second visit to Boston,
which I need not dwell upon, because it was chiefly a revival of the
impressions of the first. Again I saw the Fieldses in their home; again
the Autocrat in his, and Lowell now beneath his own roof, beside the
study fire where I was so often to sit with him in coming years. At
dinner (which we had at two o’clock) the talk turned upon my appointment,
and he said of me to his wife: “Think of his having got Stillman’s place!
We ought to put poison in his wine,” and he told me of the wish the
painter had to go to Venice and follow up Ruskin’s work there in a book
of his own. But he would not let me feel very guilty, and I will not
pretend that I had any personal regret for my good fortune.
The place was given me perhaps because I had not nearly so many other
gifts as he who lost it, and who was at once artist, critic, journalist,
traveller, and eminently each. I met him afterwards in Rome, which the
powers bestowed upon him instead of Venice, and he forgave me, though I
do not know whether he forgave the powers. We walked far and long over
the Campagna, and I felt the charm of a most uncommon mind in talk which
came out richest and fullest in the presence of the wild nature which he
loved and knew so much better than most other men. I think that the book
he would have written about Venice is forever to be regretted, and I do
not at all console myself for its loss with the book I have written
myself.
At Lowell’s table that day they spoke of what sort of winter I should
find in Venice, and he inclined to the belief that I should want a fire
there. On his study hearth a very brisk one burned when we went back to
it, and kept out the chill of a cold easterly storm. We looked through
one of the windows at the rain, and he said he could remember standing
and looking out of that window at such a storm when he was a child; for
he was born in that house, and his life had kept coming back to it. He
died in it, at last.
In a lifting of the rain he walked with me down to the village, as he
always called the denser part of the town about Harvard Square, and saw
me aboard a horse-car for Boston. Before we parted he gave me two
charges: to open my mouth when I began to speak Italian, and to think
well of women. He said that our race spoke its own tongue with its teeth
shut, and so failed to master the languages that wanted freer utterance.
As to women, he said there were unworthy ones, but a good woman was the
best thing in the world, and a man was always the better for honoring
women.