A Mortal Antipathy | Page 6

any
general attention. My first pages relate the effect of a certain literary
experience upon myself,--a series of partial metempsychoses of which I
have been the subject. Next follows a brief tribute to the memory of a
very dear and renowned friend from whom I have recently been parted.
The rest of the Introduction will be consecrated to the memory of my
birthplace.
I have just finished a Memoir, which will appear soon after this page is
written, and will have been the subject of criticism long before it is in
the reader's hands. The experience of thinking another man's thoughts
continuously for a long time; of living one's self into another man's life
for a month, or a year, or more, is a very curious one. No matter how
much superior to the biographer his subject may be, the man who
writes the life feels himself, in a certain sense, on the level of the
person whose life he is writing. One cannot fight over the battles of
Marengo or Austerlitz with Napoleon without feeling as if he himself
had a fractional claim to the victory, so real seems the transfer of his
personality into that of the conqueror while he reads. Still more must
this identification of "subject" and "object" take place when one is
writing of a person whose studies or occupations are not unlike his
own.
Here are some of my metempsychoses: Ten years ago I wrote what I
called A Memorial Outline of a remarkable student of nature. He was a
born observer, and such are far from common. He was also a man of
great enthusiasm and unwearying industry. His quick eye detected what
others passed by without notice: the Indian relic, where another would

see only pebbles and fragments; the rare mollusk, or reptile, which his
companion would poke with his cane, never suspecting that there was a
prize at the end of it. Getting his single facts together with marvellous
sagacity and long-breathed patience, he arranged them, classified them,
described them, studied them in their relations, and before those around
him were aware of it the collector was an accomplished naturalist.
When--he died his collections remained, and they still remain, as his
record in the hieratic language of science. In writing this memoir the
spirit of his quiet pursuits, the even temper they bred in him, gained
possession of my own mind, so that I seemed to look at nature through
his gold-bowed spectacles, and to move about his beautifully ordered
museum as if I had myself prepared and arranged its specimens. I felt
wise with his wisdom, fair-minded with his calm impartiality; it
seemed as if for the time his placid, observant, inquiring, keen-sighted
nature "slid into my soul," and if I had looked at myself in the glass I
should almost have expected to see the image of the Hersey professor
whose life and character I was sketching.
A few years hater I lived over the life of another friend in writing a
Memoir of which he was the subject. I saw him, the beautiful,
bright-eyed boy, with dark, waving hair; the youthful scholar, first at
Harvard, then at Gottingen and Berlin, the friend and companion of
Bismarck; the young author, making a dash for renown as a novelist,
and showing the elements which made his failures the promise of
success in a larger field of literary labor; the delving historian, burying
his fresh young manhood in the dusty alcoves of silent libraries, to
come forth in the face of Europe and America as one of the leading
historians of the time; the diplomatist, accomplished, of captivating
presence and manners, an ardent American, and in the time of trial an
impassioned and eloquent advocate of the cause of freedom; reaching
at last the summit of his ambition as minister at the Court of Saint
James. All this I seemed to share with him as I tracked his career from
his birthplace in Dorchester, and the house in Walnut Street where he
passed his boyhood, to the palaces of Vienna and London. And then the
cruel blow which struck him from the place he adorned; the great
sorrow that darkened his later years; the invasion of illness, a threat that
warned of danger, and after a period of invalidism, during a part of

which I shared his most intimate daily life, the sudden, hardly
unwelcome, final summons. Did not my own consciousness migrate, or
seem, at least, to transfer itself into this brilliant life history, as I traced
its glowing record? I, too, seemed to feel the delight of carrying with
me, as if they were my own, the charms of a presence which made its
own welcome everywhere. I shared his heroic toils, I partook of his
literary and social triumphs, I