This continued to the latest years of his life when the effort even to
give such pleasure must have cost him a physical pang.
He was of a very catholic taste; and he was apt to be carried away by a
little touch of life or humor, and to overvalue the piece in which he
found it; but, mainly his judgments of letters and men were just. One of
the dangers of scholarship was a peculiar danger in the Cambridge
keeping, but Lowell was almost as averse as Longfellow from contempt. He
could snub, and pitilessly, where he thought there was presumption and
apparently sometimes merely because he was in the mood; but I cannot
remember ever to have heard him sneer. He was often wonderfully patient
of tiresome people, and sometimes celestially insensible to vulgarity. In
spite of his reserve, he really wished people to like him; he was keenly
alive to neighborly good-will or ill-will; and when there was a question
of widening Elmwood avenue by taking part of his grounds, he was keenly
hurt by hearing that some one who lived near him had said he hoped the
city would cut down Lowell's elms: his English elms, which his father had
planted, and with which he was himself almost one blood!
VIII.
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