In 1827, he wrote in a despondent tone, thus:

"I bear in youth the sad infirmities

That use to undo the limb and sense of age."

But only a few years later he assumes a much loftier tone, and writes:

"Has God on thee conferred

A bodily presence mean as Paul's,

Yet made thee bearer of a word

Which sleepy nations as with trumpet calls?"

B. 1804. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

D. 1864.

IT would seem that Hawthorne did not win his solid reputation suddenly; and perhaps his brief "Campaign Life of Franklin Pierce" when that gentleman was a candidate for the Presidency, was up to that time his most profitable work, and fortunately won for him the consulship at Liverpool; but his later works have elevated his name to a high place among American authors. He was disposed to criticise and to depreciate, rather than to exalt, his literary productions. As an example, I take from the Preface to his "Twice-told Tales" the following:

"The author of Twice-told Tales' has a claim to one distinction, which, as none of his literary brethren will care about disputing it with him, he must not be afraid to mention. He was for a good many years the obscurest man of letters in America.

"This has been particularly the fortune of the 'Twice-told Tales.' They made no enemies, and were so little known and talked about, that those who read and chanced to like them were apt to conceive the sort of kindness for the book which a person naturally feels for a discovery of his own."

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.

B. 1807. D. 1882.

In his poem on the Fiftieth Anniversary of his College Class it will be seen how modestly and delicately he refers to the future::

Ye do not answer us! ye do not hear!
We are forgotten; and in your austere
And calm indifference ye little care

Whether we come or go, or whence or where.

What passing generations fill these halls,
What passing voices echo from these walls,
Ye heed not; we are only as the blast,

A moment heard, and then forever past."

This, at least, offers one illustration of the doctrine that "no really great man ever thought himself so;" but Longfellow need have no fear that his name will not be "fast anchored in the deep abyss of time."

B. 1810.

MARGARET FULLER.

D. 1850.

MARGARET FULLER is reported to have made this statement when quite young: "I have now met all the intellects of this country, and find none comparable to my own."

To a friend in Rome, in 1847, she wrote as follows: "I do not know whether I have ever loved at all in the sense of oneness, but I have loved enough to feel the joys of presence, the pangs of absence, the sweetness of hope, and the chill of disappointment. More than once my heart has bled and my bodily health has suffered from these things, but mentally I have always found myself the gainer, always younger and more noble. I have no wish about my future career but that it should be like the past, only always more full and deeper."

...

B. 1810. PHINEAS TAYLOR BARNUM.

THE Autobiography of Barnum is a faithful confession of his successful "humbuggery," including such schemes as "Joice Heth," the "Feejee Mermaid," and the "Woolly Horse." He says: "My grandfather was decidedly a wag. He was a practical joker. He would go farther, wait longer, work harder, and contrive deeper to carry out a practical joke, than for anything else under heaven. . . . It is said by all who knew him and have knowledge of me, that I am

a chip of the old block." He adds, "I was generally accounted a pretty apt scholar, and, as I increased in years, there were but two or three in school who were considered my superiors." And this is the way he summed up his career as author, orator, and showman, not yet finished, over thirty years ago:

"As a business man, undoubtedly my prime object has been to put money in my purse. I succeeded beyond my most sanguine anticipations, and am satisfied. But what I have here said will prepare the reader for what I conceive to be a just and altogether reasonable claim, that I have been a public benefactor, to an extent seldom paralleled in the histories of professed and professional philanthropists."

B. 1811.

OWEN LOVEJOY.

D. 1864.

OWEN LOVEJOY once told me, before he was in Congress, that when he preached a poor sermon he never let it out; for as likely as not half his congregation might call it very good.

Dr. Johnson advised Boswell, "Never speak ill of yourself, because, besides being exaggerated in repetition, it will probably be repeated as the result of direction or discovery by others, and not even your indiscreet frankness will be credited to you."

SAXE was the author of some poems as witty as any ever written by Dr. Holmes, and some of his punning pieces are not excelled even by anything of Tom Hood's. In his younger days, as he began to be appreciated in society, he not infrequently exhibited something of natural conceit. A friend met him one morning as he was coming from the sanctum of the "Boston Post," to which paper he was a frequent contributor, as well as to the "Knickerbocker," and upon asking him as to what he was doing, got this reply: "I have just left with Colonel Greene the finest sonnet that has been written since the days of Sir John Suckling."

B. 1817. HENRY DAVID THOREAU.

D. 1862.

THIS keen observer of the mysteries of Nature was a man of genius who led a quaint sort of semi-hermit life, writing much and with singular force. Unpretentious and modest, he appears only to have wanted a permanent place in the memory of those who knew he loved them in life. He loved the world as he found it. Here is what he says:

"My greatest skill has been to want but little. For joy I could embrace the earth. I shall rejoice. to be buried in it. And then I think of those among men who will know that I loved them though I tell them not."