me a higher opinion of my fellow-citizens, if such a thing could be.  They were indeed very charming people, and such of them as I mostly saw were readers and lovers of books.  Society in Columbus at that day had a pleasant refinement which I think I do not exaggerate in the fond retrospect.  It had the finality which it seems to have had nowhere since the war; it had certain fixed ideals, which were none the less graceful and becoming because they were the simple old American ideals, now vanished, or fast vanishing, before the knowledge of good and evil as they have it in Europe, and as it has imparted itself to American travel and sojourn.  There was a mixture of many strains in the capital of Ohio, as there was throughout the State.  Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, New York, and New England all joined to characterize the manners and customs.  I suppose it was the South which gave the social tone; the intellectual taste among the elders was the Southern taste for the classic and the standard in literature; but we who were younger preferred the modern authors:  we read Thackeray, and George Eliot, and Hawthorne, and Charles Reade, and De Quincey, and Tennyson, and Browning, and Emerson, and Longfellow, and I—­I read Heine, and evermore Heine, when there was not some new thing from the others.  Now and then an immediate French book penetrated to us:  we read Michelet and About, I remember.  We looked to England and the East largely for our literary opinions; we accepted the Saturday Review as law if we could not quite receive it as gospel.  One of us took the Cornhill Magazine, because Thackeray was the editor; the Atlantic Monthly counted many readers among us; and a visiting young lady from New England, who screamed at sight of the periodical in one of our houses, “Why, have you got the Atlantic Monthly out here?” could be answered, with cold superiority, “There are several contributors to the Atlantic in Columbus.”  There were in fact two:  my room-mate, who wrote Browning for it, while I wrote Heine and Longfellow.  But I suppose two are as rightfully several as twenty are.

II.

That was the heyday of lecturing, and now and then a literary light from the East swam into our skies.  I heard and saw Emerson, and I once met Bayard Taylor socially, at the hospitable house where he was a guest after his lecture.  Heaven knows how I got through the evening.  I do not think I opened my mouth to address him a word; it was as much as I could do to sit and look at him, while he tranquilly smoked, and chatted with our host, and quaffed the beer which we had very good in the Nest.  All the while I did him homage as the first author by calling whom I had met.  I longed to tell him how much I liked his poems, which we used to get by heart in those days, and I longed (how much more I longed!) to have him know that: 

     “Auch ich war in Arkadien geboren,”

that I had printed poems in the Atlantic Monthly and the Saturday Press, and was the potential author of things destined to eclipse all literature hitherto attempted.  But I could not tell him; and there was no one else who thought to tell him.  Perhaps it was as well so; I might have perished of his recognition, for my modesty was equal to my merit.