The historian of Spanish literature was an old man nearer eighty than
seventy when I saw him, and I recall of him personally his dark tint, and
the scholarly refinement of his clean-shaven face, which seemed to me
rather English than American in character. He was quite exterior to the
Atlantic group of writers, and had no interest in me as one of it.
Literary Boston of that day was not a solidarity, as I soon perceived;
and I understood that it was only in my quality of stranger that I saw
the different phases of it. I should not be just to a vivid phase if I
failed to speak of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe and the impulse of reform which
she personified. I did not sympathize with this then so much as I do
now, but I could appreciate it on the intellectual side. Once, many
years later, I heard Mrs. Howe speak in public, and it seemed to me that
she made one of the best speeches I had ever heard. It gave me for the
first time a notion of what women might do in that sort if they entered
public life; but when we met in those earlier days I was interested in
her as perhaps our chief poetess. I believe she did not care much to
speak of literature; she was alert for other meanings in life, and I
remember how she once brought to book a youthful matron who had perhaps
unduly lamented the hardships of housekeeping, with the sharp demand,
“Child, where is your religion?” After the many years of an acquaintance
which had not nearly so many meetings as years, it was pleasant to find
her, at the latest, as strenuous as ever for the faith of works, and as
eager to aid Stepniak as John Brown. In her beautiful old age she
survives a certain literary impulse of Boston, but a still higher impulse
of Boston she will not survive, for that will last while the city
endures.