Cambridge Neighbors | Page 9

spoke of this, with a due sense of what was pathetic as well as what
was grotesque in some of its manifestations; and I think that in
reconciling himself to our popular crudeness for the sake of our popular
earnestness, he completed his naturalization, in the only sense in which
our citizenship is worth having.
I do not wish to imply that he forgot his native land, or ceased to love it
proudly and tenderly. He kept for Norway the fondness which the man

sitting at his own hearth feels for the home of his boyhood. He was of
good family; his people were people of substance and condition, and he
could have had an easier life there than here. He could have won even
wider fame, and doubtless if he had remained in Norway, he would
have been one of that group of great Norwegians who have given their
little land renown surpassed by that of no other in the modern republic
of letters. The name of Boyesen would have been set with the names of
Bjornson, of Ibsen, of Kielland, and of Lie. But when once he had seen
America (at the wish of his father, who had visited the United States
before him), he thought only of becoming an American. When I first
knew him he was full of the poetry of his mother-land; his talk was of
fjords and glaciers, of firs and birches, of hulders and nixies, of
housemen and gaardsmen; but he was glad to be here, and I think he
never regretted that he had cast his lot with us. Always, of course, he
had the deepest interest in his country and countrymen. He stood the
friend of every Norwegian who came to him in want or trouble, and
they, came to him freely and frequently. He sympathized strongly with
Norway in her quarrel with Sweden, and her wish for equality as well
as autonomy; and though he did not go all lengths with the national
party, he was decided in his feeling that Sweden was unjust to her sister
kingdom, and strenuous for the principles of the Norwegian leaders.
But, as I have said, poetry, was what his ardent spirit mainly meditated
in that hour when I first knew him in Cambridge, before we had either
of us grown old and sad, if not wise. He overflowed with it, and he
talked as little as he dreamed of anything else in the vast half-summer
we spent together. He was constantly at my house, where in an absence
of my family I was living bachelor, and where we sat indoors and
talked, or sauntered outdoors and talked, with our heads in a cloud of
fancies, not unmixed with the mosquitoes of Cambridge: if I could have
back the fancies, I would be willing to have the mosquitoes with them.
He looked the poetry he lived: his eyes were the blue of sunlit fjords;
his brown silken hair was thick on the crown which it later abandoned
to a scholarly baldness; his soft, red lips half hid a boyish pout in the
youthful beard and mustache. He was short of stature, but of a stalwart
breadth of frame, and his voice was of a peculiar and endearing quality,
indescribably mellow and tender when he read his verse.
I have hardly the right to dwell so long upon him here, for he was only

a sojourner in Cambridge, but the memory of that early intimacy is too
much for my sense of proportion. As I have hinted, our intimacy was
renewed afterwards, when I too came to live in New York, where as
long as he was in this 'dolce lome', he hardly let a week go by without
passing a long evening with me. Our talk was still of literature and life,
but more of life than of literature, and we seldom spoke of those old
times. I still found him true to the ideals which had clarified themselves
to both of us as the duty of unswerving fealty to the real thing in
whatever we did. This we felt, as we had felt it long before, to be the
sole source of beauty and of art, and we warmed ourselves at each
other's hearts in our devotion to it, amidst a misunderstanding
environment which we did not characterize by so mild an epithet.
Boyesen, indeed, out-realisted me, in the polemics of our aesthetics,
and sometimes when an unbeliever was by, I willingly left to my friend
the affirmation of our faith, not without some quaking at his unsparing
strenuousness in disciplining the heretic. But now that ardent and active
soul is Elsewhere, and I have ceased even to expect the ring, which,
making itself heard at the late hour of his coming, I knew always