or obscurity; supremely above the general and commonplace by the exquisite refinement to which he carried the expression of what the general and commonplace world felt and thought; remote from roughness in the form or the substance of his thought; in short, the ne plus ultra of refinement as man and poet.  Emerson was too serene ever to be discourteous, and was capable of the hottest antagonism without rudeness, and the most intense indignation without quickening his speech or raising his tone; grasping and exhausting with imaginative activity whatever object furnished him with matter for thought, and throwing to the rubbish heap whatever was superficial; indifferent to form or polish if only he could find a diamond; reveling in mystery, and with eyes that penetrated like the X-ray through all obscurities, and found at the bottom of them what there was to find; arrested by no surfaces, inflexible in his devotion to truth, and indifferent to all personalities or artificial conditions of men or things.  Nothing but the roots of things, their inmost anatomy, attracted him; he brushed away contemptuously the beauties on which Longfellow spent the tenderness of his character, and threw aside like an empty nutshell the form to which an artist might have given the devotion of his best art, for the art’s sake.  In his temper there was no patience with shams, little toleration of forms.  It would, I should think, be clear to one who was well acquainted with both men, that there was little in common between them beyond culture, but I never heard Emerson speak of Longfellow, and can only judge by induction that he never occupied himself much with him.

We tried also to get Dr. Holmes to join us; but the Doctor was devoted to Boston, and could not have lived long out of its atmosphere, and with the woods and savagery he had no sympathy.  He loved his Cambridge friends serenely, Lowell, Agassiz, and Wyman, I think, above others; but he enjoyed himself most of all, and Boston more than any other thing on earth.  He was lifted above ennui and discontent by a most happy satisfaction with the rounded world of his own individuality and belongings.  Of the three men whom I have personally known in the world who seemed most satisfied with what fate and fortune had made them,—­viz., Gladstone, Professor Freeman, and Holmes,—­I think Holmes enjoyed himself the most.  There was a tinge of dandyism in the Doctor; not enough to be considered a weakness, but enough to show that he enjoyed his personal appearance and was content with what he had become, and this in so delightful a way that one accepted him at once at his own terms.  The Doctor stood for Boston as Lowell for Cambridge, the archetype of the Hub.  Nobody represented it as he did.  Tom Appleton was nearest him, but Tom loved Paris better, and was a “globe-trotter,” as often in Europe as in Massachusetts, while the Doctor hardly left the Hub even for a vacation; there was nothing beyond it that was of great import to him.  He was the