with good but new neighbors, some of whom do not know that I am not as recent a comer to the town as themselves.

I have the pleasure of seeing before me an old friend, one of the most honored sons of Cambridge. He and I are now two of the oldest of the native-born inhabitants of the town. We were born, respectively, at the opposite ends of what is now Kirkland Street, and was then known by the more characteristic name of Professors' Row. The pleasant house in which Colonel Higginson was born still stands, - the last in the row toward Harvard Square, facing the Delta and the Yard. Between the house of Colonel Higginson's father and that of my father, when the Colonel and I were little boys, there were but four houses on Professors' Row, each of them occupied by a professor, the last toward my father's house being that on the corner of Divinity Avenue, lately occupied by Mr. Houghton, then by the Rev. Dr. Henry Ware, Sr., a venerable man, whose numerous descendants give evidence that among them the doctrine of original sin finds no support. Professors' Row, or Kirkland Street, was a part of what was known as the Old Charlestown Road, the oldest and most interesting road in the Commonwealth. When Winthrop's company of immigrants arrived in 1630, and part of it settled at Charlestown, and part went up the river, to make their new home at a place on its bank which they called Watertown, in order to establish communication between the two settlements a path was cut through the five or six miles of woods which lay between them. By degrees, as the country became peopled, this path became an open road, and to distinguish it from other thoroughfares it was called "the Old Charlestown Road." If the names of the people who have travelled over it were written out, the record would be a list of the chief worthies of the Commonwealth from its beginning to the present day, at first on foot or on horseback, or with ox-teams, later in one-horse chaises, and later still in the chariots of governors or notables who had established their homes along that part of the line which we know as Brattle Street. Few feet have travelled the Kirkland Street part of the road oftener than mine, and many an otherwise dull and commonplace walk has had its dulness relieved by the silent and invisible companionship of some one of these old travellers.

Professors' Row would deserve fame even if the record of emi

nent men and women who have lived for a longer or shorter time upon it extended no farther back than my own memory, for it would include two Henry Wares, three Presidents of the University (Sparks, Felton, and Eliot), many distinguished professors, among them that admirable scholar and delightful man, my classmate and dear friend, Francis James Child. A little earlier than he was Longfellow, who on his first coming to Cambridge, in 1836, took rooms in the house of Professor Stearns, which has only lately been moved to give place to the New Lecture hall. That large, square, three-story house afforded several suites of pleasant rooms, and has probably been the home for a time of more men whose names are well known in the annals of the College and the Commonwealth than any other in Cambridge. My earliest recollections of Mr. Longfellow are of the time when he was living there, and nothing but my later recollections of him could be pleasanter than those which I have of his kindness, he a man of thirty to a boy of eight or ten years old. I still preserve among my treasures gifts he made me in those days for the enrichment of my little museum, -precious objects which he had brought home from Europe, the most interesting of all of them, perhaps, being a seventeenth century medal of the three kings of Cologne, whose legend and names are familiar to the readers of his "Golden Legend."

-

Twenty years later (Oxford Street had been laid out meanwhile) Lowell took up his abode in the next house to the west, then owned and occupied by his brother-in-law, Dr. Estes Howe, now occupied by Professor Peabody; and here he lived for four or five years. Kirkland Street grew to know him well. No one ever loved his native town better than he, or was more familiar with it; and when I recall the innumerable walks we had together for many and many a year, not only when he was resident at Dr. Howe's, but during the longer period when his home was at Elmwood, one of the tenderest stanzas that Cowley wrote comes into my mind as curiously appropriate to them, alike in word and in sentiment:

"Ye fields of Cambridge, our dear Cambridge, say

Have ye not seen us walking every day?

Was there a tree about which did not know

The love betwixt us two?"

The fields, alas, grow scantier and scantier. In my boyhood, the whole space between Elmwood and the old Brattle House, now standing squeezed and rather disconsolate at the corner of Brattle and Hawthorn streets, was open field, mainly pasture-land, while on the other end of the way between Elmwood and Shady Hill, almost the whole space between Divinity Avenue and the Middlesex Turnpike, which ran behind my father's house, was similar open ground, stretching, wood and swamp, sandpit and field, along both sides of the willow-bordered Turnpike, far up, nearly to the then noted Porter's Tavern, which gave its name in later days to Porter's, or North Cambridge, Station.

ance.

But I must return to Professors' Row, in order to speak of the occupants of the house next on the east to that of Professor Stearns, -the home of Professor and Mrs. John Farrar. The house has recently come into the possession of the University, and has been this very year transformed and improved by changes made in it. But in the transformation it has lost the historic and quaintly monumental character given to it by its lofty wooden columns, so that the ghosts of its former occupants, should they pass along this way, might gaze with some bewilderment on its changed appearProfessor Farrar was a noted mathematician in his day, a kindly, good man, but socially a less considerable person than his wife, Mrs. Eliza Farrar, who was a figure of real importance in the Cambridge circle for more than thirty years. Mrs. Farrar was a daughter of Mr. Benjamin Rotch of New Bedford. Soon after his marriage her father had gone to England and established himself there in good business and pleasant social relations, and there her childhood and youth were passed. She was essentially of English breeding and an excellent representative of the cultivated and intelligent women, English or American, of the first half of the last century. I might describe her to one of my own generation as being like what one might imagine the mother of Harry and Lucy to have been; but I fear the actual generation is not so familiarly acquainted with Miss Edgeworth's admirable characters as to know for what their names stand. It is for something very good at its time, but which, at least in America, has almost disappeared. In such a woman as Mrs. Farrar it might perhaps be defined as a mingling of English Utilitarianism and American Unitarianism, with an English tradition of good manners and an

American freedom from purely conventional standards. Having no Harry or Lucy of her own to bring up, she turned her gifts to the service of the children of the community. She wrote a volume which I remember as of absorbing interest for those for whom it was intended called "The Child's Robinson Crusoe;" another of her excellent books was "The Youths' Letter-Writer," and another still, "The Young Ladies' Friend," full of good sense and plain counsel, each of which would be as useful to the present generation of girl-undergraduates as it was to their grandmothers, for whom the doors of the home had not been opened that they might go forth for good or for ill to seek entrance into the Women's College.

Another professor's wife with literary gifts and of motherly warmth of heart was the American wife of the excellent Dr. Follen, who, coming to Harvard from his native Germany, in 1825, not only quickened by his ardent enthusiasm zeal for the study of the German language and literature, but roused interest in gymnastics, and was instrumental in introducing the intelligent practice of them after the German method among the students of the College. The Delta, then an unoccupied field, was the exercise ground, and bars and poles and other gymnastic apparatus were erected upon it, remnants of which existed for many years. Mrs. Follen was a writer of charming verses for the nursery and of pleasant stories for elder children, one of which, called "The Well-Spent Hour," was a great favorite.

Other ladies belonging to the same social circle, as the two I have mentioned, possessed similar cultivation and literary taste, and made part of the group of men and women around the College which formed a society of exceptional pleasantness and of pure New England type. Few artificial distinctions existed in it; but the progress of democracy had not swept away the natural distinctions of good breeding and superior culture. The best traditions of the older days of New England were still maintained, and formed a common background of association and of mutual understanding. Its informing spirit was liberal and cheerful; there was general contentment and satisfaction with things as they were; there was much hopefulness and confidence that in the New World, in New England at least, men had entered not merely upon a land of promise, but one in which the promise was already in considerable measure fulfilled. There were evils, no doubt, but

2

they were not threatening of disaster. The most perplexing problems of society seemed to be in large measure solved; the future, though not absolutely cloudless, wore, for the most part, a fair aspect.

A broad statement of conditions such as this requires modifications to make it correct in particulars; but it at least indicates the prevailing temper of the time as it was manifest in the little circle of Old Cambridge society. The change was soon to come, but in the days of which I am speaking, there was simplicity of life in its best sense. The households were homes of thrift without parsimony, of hospitality without extravagance, of culture without pretence. The influence of the College gave to the society a bookish turn, and there was much reading,- much more of the reading which nourishes the intelligence than in these days of newspapers, magazines, and cheap novels. Everybody in the Cambridge circle was interested, for instance, in the quarterly numbers of the North American Review, each of which was likely to contain more than one article by a friend or neighbor. The standard of literary judgment set up in England was generally respected, and the Edinburgh Review was hardly less commonly read than the North American, and its verdicts were even more readily accepted.

Pleasant and cultivated as was the little circle of Cambridge society, it did not escape the defects incident to its conditions of comparative isolation. The neighborhood of Boston was, indeed, of advantage to it, for though the animating spirit of the little city was in many respects still characteristically provincial, yet its varied interests and active intelligence exercised a generally liberalizing influence. At the time of which I am speaking, the relations of city and College had become more intimate than ever through the election to the presidency of the College of Josiah Quincy, who had just rounded out by a term of five years as Mayor of Boston a long and distinguished career of public service. He was, in truth, as Mr. Lowell termed him, "a great public character,” and he had the aspect of one-he stood erect, a fine, commanding figure of six feet of vigorous manhood. He possessed the bearing which we attribute to the gentlemen of distinction of the early days of the Republic, a bearing of dignity, combined with scrupulous courtesy. He and his admirable wife occupied the first place in the little world of Old Cambridge, and kept it in touch with the