These walks continued, I suppose, until Lowell went abroad for a winter
in the early seventies. They took us all over Cambridge, which he knew
and loved every inch of, and led us afield through the straggling,
unhandsome outskirts, bedrabbled with squalid Irish neighborhoods, and
fraying off into marshes and salt meadows. He liked to indulge an excess
of admiration for the local landscape, and though I never heard him
profess a preference for the Charles River flats to the finest Alpine
scenery, I could well believe he would do so under provocation of a fit
listener's surprise. He had always so much of the boy in him that he
liked to tease the over-serious or over-sincere. He liked to tease and
he liked to mock, especially his juniors, if any touch of affectation, or
any little exuberance of manner gave him the chance; when he once came to
fetch me, and the young mistress of the house entered with a certain
excessive elasticity, he sprang from his seat, and minced towards her,
with a burlesque of her buoyant carriage which made her laugh. When he
had given us his heart in trust of ours, he used us like a younger
brother and sister; or like his own children.
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