case, as when men who are or have been members of our club become Ambassadors, because they are undeniably fitted for the missions to Great Britain and France, even authors are made to sit in state.  To-night’s gathering, then, is, indeed, exceptional, being in public honor of an American author here resident—­of “one of our own”—­who is not booked for a foreign mission, nor leaving the country, nor returning, nor doing anything more unusual than to perform his stint of work, and to sing any song that comes to him—­as he tells us,

  “Not because he woos it long,
  But because it suits its will,
  Tired at last of being still.”

Our homage is rendered, with love and enthusiasm, for his service to “mere literature”—­for his indomitable devotion throughout half a century to the joy and toil of his profession, in which he has so fought the fight and kept the faith of a working man of letters.  It is rendered to the most distinguished poet, of his country and generation, still remaining with us and still in full voice.  It is rendered to the comrade—­to the man who, with his modesty and fortitude and the absence of self-seeking—­with the quips and quirks that cover his gravest moods, with his attachment for the city which has given him that which Lamb so loved, “the sweet security of streets”—­it is rendered, I say, to the man who best preserves for us, in his living presence, the traditions of all that an English-speaking poet and book-fellow should be to constitute a satisfying type.

There is, perhaps, a special fitness in our gathering at this time.  I sometimes have thought upon the possible career of our poet if his life had been passed in the suburbs of the down-east Athens, among serenities and mutualities so auspicious to the genius and repute of that shining group lately gathered to the past.  One thing is certain, he would not have weathered his seventieth birthday, at any season, without receiving such a tribute as this, nor would a public dinner have reminded him of days when a poet was glad to get any dinner at all.  Through his birth, Massachusetts claims her share in his distinction.  But, having been brought to New York in childhood, he seems to have reasoned out for himself the corollary to a certain famous epigram, and to have thought it just as well to stay in the city which resident Bostonians keep as the best place to go to while still in the flesh.  Probably he had not then realized the truth, since expressed in his own lines:—­

  “Yes, there’s a luck in most things, and in none
  More than in being born at the right time!”

His birthday, in fact, comes in midsummer, when New York is more inert than an analytic novel.  This dinner, then, is one of those gifts of love which are all the more unstinted because by chance deferred.