He sat a moment after he arrived, as if to orient himself in respect to each of us.  Beside the gifted hostess, there was the most charming of all the American essayists, and the Autocrat seemed at once to find himself singularly at home with the people who greeted him.  There was no interval needed for fanning away the ashes; he tinkled up before he entered the house, and at the table he was as vivid and scintillant as I ever saw him, if indeed I ever saw him as much so.  The talk began at once, and we had made him believe that there was nothing egotistic in his taking the word, or turning it in illustration from himself upon universal matters.  I spoke among other things of some humble ruins on the road to Gloucester, which gave the way-side a very aged look; the tumbled foundation-stones of poor bits of houses, and “Ah,” he said, “the cellar and the well?” He added, to the company generally, “Do you know what I think are the two lines of mine that go as deep as any others, in a certain direction?” and he began to repeat stragglingly certain verses from one of his earlier poems, until he came to the closing couplet.  But I will give them in full, because in going to look them up I have found them so lovely, and because I can hear his voice again in every fondly accented syllable: 

     “Who sees unmoved, a ruin at his feet,
     The lowliest home where human hearts have beat? 
     Its hearth-stone, shaded with the bistre stain,
     A century’s showery torrents wash in vain;
     Its starving orchard where the thistle blows,
     And mossy trunks still mark the broken rows;
     Its chimney-loving poplar, oftenest seen
     Next an old roof, or where a roof has been;
     Its knot-grass, plantain,—­all the social weeds,
     Man’s mute companions following where he leads;
     Its dwarfed pale flowers, that show their straggling heads,
     Sown by the wind from grass-choked garden-beds;
     Its woodbine creeping where it used to climb;
     Its roses breathing of the olden time;
     All the poor shows the curious idler sees,
     As life’s thin shadows waste by slow degrees,
     Till naught remains, the saddening tale to tell,
     Save home’s last wrecks—­the cellar and the well!”

The poet’s chanting voice rose with a triumphant swell in the climax, and “There,” he said, “isn’t it so?  The cellar and the well—­they can’t be thrown down or burnt up; they are the human monuments that last longest and defy decay.”  He rejoiced openly in the sympathy that recognized with him the divination of a most pathetic, most signal fact, and he repeated the last couplet again at our entreaty, glad to be entreated for it.  I do not know whether all will agree with him concerning the relative importance of the lines, but I think all must feel the exquisite beauty of the picture to which they give the final touch.