Literary Friends and Acquaintance | Page 4

just looking for some one I knew. I
hope you are some one who knows me!"
"Only through your contributions to the Saturday Press," said the young

fellow, and with these golden words, the precious first personal
recognition of my authorship I had ever received from a stranger, and
the rich reward of all my literary endeavor, he introduced himself and
his friend. I do not know what became of this friend, or where or how
he eliminated himself; but we two others were inseparable from that
moment. He was a young lawyer from New York, and when I came
back from Italy, four or five years later, I used to see his sign in Wall
Street, with a never-fulfilled intention of going in to see him. In
whatever world he happens now to be, I should like to send him my
greetings, and confess to him that my art has never since brought me so
sweet a recompense, and nothing a thousandth part so much like Fame,
as that outcry of his over the hotel register in Montreal. We were
comrades for four or five rich days, and shared our pleasures and
expenses in viewing the monuments of those ancient Canadian capitals,
which I think we valued at all their picturesque worth. We made jokes
to mask our emotions; we giggled and made giggle, in the right way;
we fell in and out of love with all the pretty faces and dresses we saw;
and we talked evermore about literature and literary people. He had
more acquaintance with the one, and more passion for the other, but he
could tell me of Pfaff's lager-beer cellar on Broadway, where the
Saturday Press fellows and the other Bohemians met; and this, for the
time, was enough: I resolved to visit it as soon as I reached New York,
in spite of the tobacco and beer (which I was given to understand were
de rigueur), though they both, so far as I had known them, were apt to
make me sick.
I was very desolate after I parted from this good fellow, who returned
to Montreal on his way to New York, while I remained in Quebec to
continue later on mine to New England. When I came in from seeing
him off in a calash for the boat, I discovered Bayard Taylor in the
reading-room, where he sat sunken in what seemed a somewhat weary
muse. He did not know me, or even notice me, though I made several
errands in and out of the reading-room in the vain hope that he might
do so: doubly vain, for I am aware now that I was still flown with the
pride of that pretty experience in Montreal, and trusted in a repetition of
something like it. At last, as no chance volunteered to help me, I
mustered courage to go up to him and name myself, and say I had once

had the pleasure of meeting him at Doctor-------'s in Columbus. The
poet gave no sign of consciousness at the sound of a name which I had
fondly begun to think might not be so all unknown. He looked up with
an unkindling eye, and asked, Ah, how was the Doctor? and when I had
reported favorably of the Doctor, our conversation ended.
He was probably as tired as he looked, and he must have classed me
with that multitude all over the country who had shared the pleasure I
professed in meeting him before; it was surely my fault that I did not
speak my name loud enough to be recognized, if I spoke it at all; but
the courage I had mustered did not quite suffice for that. In after years
he assured me, first by letter and then by word, of his grief for an
incident which I can only recall now as the untoward beginning of a
cordial friendship. It was often my privilege, in those days, as reviewer
and editor, to testify my sense of the beautiful things he did in so many
kinds of literature, but I never liked any of them better than I liked him.
He had a fervent devotion to his art, and he was always going to do the
greatest things in it, with an expectation of effect that never failed him.
The things he actually did were none of them mean, or wanting in
quality, and some of them are of a lasting charm that any one may feel
who will turn to his poems; but no doubt many of them fell short of his
hopes of them with the reader. It was fine to meet him when he was full
of a new scheme; he talked of it with a single-hearted joy, and tried to
make you see it of the same