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of the quaintness of the whole affair at Brook Farm that an enterprise so physically insignificant should have for its organ a journal then rapidly on its way to becoming the most widely circulated in the nation. Yet Greeley's own externals, when he first stood at the door at Brook Farm, might have suggested a visitor from any part of the land rather than New York city, and a delegate from any other sphere rather than that of metropolitan journalism. Miss Amelia Russell, a member of Brook Farm, thus describes his appearance at first glance: “His hair was so light that it was almost white; he wore a white hat, his face was entirely colorless, even the eyes not adding much to save it from its ghostly hue. His coat was a very light drab, almost white, and his nether garments the same." No better samples could, perhaps, be given of the mirth-making aspects of that period than might be done by a series of extracts from Greeley's letters as published in the volume called Passages from the Correspondence of Rufus W. Griswold, in which you find Greeley alternately moving heaven and earth to get for the then unknown Thoreau the publication of his maiden essay on Carlyle in Graham's Magazine and himself giving $75 to pay for it in advance; and about the same time writing to Griswold, "Gris. make up for me a brief collection of the best Epigrams in the Language say three folio sheets of MSS.; " then cheerfully adding, "A page may be given to epitaphs, if you please, though I don't care!"

This suggests how much of the sunshine at that period came also to many from Thoreau himself, whose talk and letters, like his books, were full of delicate humor; and who gave to outdoor hours such an atmosphere of serene delight as made one feel that a wood-thrush was always soliloquizing somewhere in the background. Walks with him were singularly unlike those taken with Alcott, for instance, who only strolled serenely

to some hospitable fence at the entrance to some wood, and sat down there, oblivious whether frogs or wood-thrushes filled the air, so long as they did not withdraw attention from his own discourses. As Alcott carried his indoor meditations out of doors, so Thoreau brought his outward observations indoors, and I remember well the delightful mornings when his favorite correspondent, Harry Blake, my neighbor in Worcester, Mass., used to send round to a few of us to come in and hear extracts from Thoreau's last letter at the breakfast table; these extracts being the very materials that were afterwards to make up his choicest volume, Walden; letters that combined with breakfast and with sunrise to fill the day for us auditors with inexhaustible delight.

That period is long passed, and these few stray memories can at best give but a few glimpses of its sunnier side. The fact that it did pass and that it can never be reproduced is the very thing that makes its memories worth recalling. The great flood-tide of the civil war bore this all away, followed by the stupendous growth of a changed nation. Every age has its own point of interest; and the longest personal life, if lived wholesomely, can offer but a succession of these. But one question still remains, and will perhaps always remain, unanswered. Considering the part originally done by the English Lake Poets in bringing about this period of sunshine in America, why is it that the leaders of English literature on its native soil for the last half century have had a mournful and clouded tone? From Carlyle and Ruskin through Froude and Arnold to Meredith, Hardy, Stevenson, and Henley, all have had a prevailing air of sadness, and sometimes even of frightful gloom. Even Tennyson, during at least a portion of his reactionary later life, and Browning, toward the end of his, showed the same tendency. In America, on the other hand, during the same

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I.

THE COMMON LOT.1

FROM time to time the door opened to admit some tardy person. Then the May sunlight without flooded the dim, long hall with a sudden radiance, even to the arched recess in the rear, where the coffin was placed. The late-comers sank into the crowd of black-coated men, who filled the hall to the broad stairs. Most of these were plainly dressed, with thick, grizzled beards and lined faces: they were old hands from the Bridge Works on the West Side, where they had worked many years for Powers Jackson. In the parlors at the left of the hall there were more women than men, and more fashionable clothes than in the hall. But the faces were scarcely less rugged and lined. These friends of the old man who lay in the coffin were mostly life - worn and gnarled, like himself. Their luxuries had not sufficed to hide the scars of the battles they had waged with fortune.

When the minister ceased praying, the men and the women in the warm, flowerscented rooms moved gratefully, trying to get easier positions for their cramped bodies. Some members of the church choir, stationed at the landing on the stairs, began to sing. Once more the door opened silently in the stealthy

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hands of the undertaker, and this time it remained open for several seconds. A woman entered, dressed in fashionable widow's mourning. She moved deliberately, as if she realized exactly the full effect of her entrance at that hour among all these heated, tired people. The men crowded in the hall made way for her instinctively, so that she might enter the dining-room, to the right of the coffin, where the family and the nearest friends of the dead man were seated. Here, a young man, one of Powers Jackson's nephews, rose and surrendered his chair to the pretty widow, whispering:

"Take this, Mrs. Phillips! I am afraid there is nothing better."

She took his place by the door with a little deprecatory smile, which said many things at the same time: "I am very late, I know; but I really could n't help it! You will understand, won't you?"

And also: "You have come to be a handsome young man! When I saw you last you were only a raw boy, just out of college. Now we must reckon with you, as the old man's heir, - the heir of so much money!"

Then again: "I have had my sorrows, too, since we met over there across the sea."

All this her face seemed to speak

Copyright, 1903, by ROBERT HERRICK.

swiftly, especially to the young man, whose attention she had quite distracted, as indeed she had disturbed every one in the other rooms by her progress through the hall. By the time she had settled herself, and made a first survey of the scene, the hymn had come to an end, and the minister's deep voice broke forth in the words of ancient promise, "I am the Resurrection and the Life "

At these words of triumph the pretty widow's interruption was forgotten. Something new stirred in the weary faces of those standing in the hall, touching each one according to his soul, vibrating in his heart with a meaning personal to him, to her, quite apart from any feeling that they might have for their old friend, in the hope for whose immortality it had been spoken. . . .

"I am the Resurrection and the Life " ..."yet in my flesh shall I see God"... The words fell fatefully into the close rooms. The young man who had given his chair to Mrs. Phillips unconsciously threw back his head and raised his eyes from the floor, as though he were following some point of light which had burst into sight above his head. His gaze swept over his mother's large, inexpressive countenance, his cousin Everett's sharp features, the solemn, blank faces of the other mourners in the room. It rested on the face of a young woman, who was seated on the other side of the little room, almost hidden by the roses and the lilies that were banked on the table between them. She, too, had raised her face at the triumphant note, and was seeing something beyond the man's eyes, beyond the walls of the room. Her lips had parted in a little sigh of wonder; her blue eyes were filled with unwept tears. The man's attention was arrested by those eyes and trembling lips, and he forgot the feeling that the minister's words had roused, in sudden apprehension of the girl's beauty and tenderness. He had discovered the face in a moment of its finest illumination, excited by a vague yet pure emotion,

so that it became all at once more than it had ever promised. The tears trembled at the eyelids, then dropped unnoticed to the face. The young man looked away hastily, with an uncomfortable feeling at beholding all this emotion. He could not see why Helen Spellman should take his uncle's death so much to heart. The old man had always been kind to her and to her mother. She had been at the house a great deal, for her mother and his uncle were old friends, and the old man loved to have the girl about the house. Yet he did not feel his uncle's death that way; he wondered whether he ought to be affected by it as Helen was. He was certainly much nearer to the dead man than she, his nephew, the son of his sister Amelia, who had kept his house all the many years of her widowhood. And, he was aware that people were in the habit of saying it, - he was his favorite nephew, the one who would inherit the better part of the property. This last reflection set his mind to speculating on the impending change in his own world. The new future, which he pleasantly dreamed, would bring him nearer to her. For the last few days, ever since the doctors had given up all hope of the old man's recovery, he had not been able to keep his imagination from wandering in the fields of this strange, delightful future which was so near at hand.

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"There is a natural body," so the minister was saying solemnly, "and there is a spiritual body. . . . For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality."

The young man tried to curb his imagination, to feel the significance of the fact before him in some other way than as it might affect his own material fate. . . .

When the clergyman began his remarks about the dead man's personality, he roused the tired people and brought them back to their common earth. What could he say? The subject was full of thorns. Powers Jackson had not been a bad man, take his life all in all, but he

had been accused, justly, of some ruthless, selfish acts. His morality had never quite satisfied the ideals of his neighbors, and he could not be called, in any sense of the word known to the officiating minister, a religious man.

Yet there was scarcely a person present to whom Powers Jackson had not done some kind and generous act. Each one in his heart knew the dead man to have been good and human, and forgave him his sins, public and private. What did it matter to old Jim Ryan, the office porter, who was standing in the corner with his son and grandson, whether Powers Jackson had or had not conspired with certain other men to capture illegally a great grant of Texas land! He and his family had lived in the sun of the dead man's kindness.

While the minister was saying what every one agreed to in his heart, that their dead friend was a man of large stature, big in heart as in deed, strong for good, as for evil, —- his nephew's thoughts kept returning to that glowing, personal matter, what did it all mean to him? Of course, his uncle had been good to him, had given him the best kind of an education and training in his profession; but now he was about to give him the largest gift of all, freedom for his whole lifetime, freedom to do with himself what he pleased, freedom first of all to leave this dull, dirty city, to flee to those other parts of the earth which he knew so well how to enjoy!... The pretty widow beside him fidgeted. She was exceedingly uncomfortable in the close, stuffy room, and the minister's skillful words only roused a wicked sense of irony in her. She could have told the reverend doctor a thing or two about old Powers! She threw back her jacket, revealing an attractive neck and bust. She had scanned the faces of most of those in the rooms, and, with great rapidity, had cast up mentally their score with the dead. This handsome young nephew was the only one that counted in her own estimation.

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Across the room the girl's face had settled into sober thought, the tears drying on her cheeks where they had fallen. In that glorious promise of Life Everlasting, which was still reverberating in her soul, she felt that the only real Life which poor human beings might know was that life of the "spiritual body," the life of the good, which is all one and alike! To her, Powers Jackson was simply a good man, the best of men. For she had known him all her life, and had seen nothing but good in him. She loved him, and she knew that he could not be dead!

Finally, the minister rounded out his thought and came to the end of his remarks. The singers on the stairs began to chant softly, "Now, O Lord, let thy servant depart in peace!" And the tired faces relaxed from their tense seriousness. Somehow, the crisis of their emotion had been reached and passed. Comforted and reassured, the men and women were leaving this house of mourning. An old man, childless, a widower of many years, who had done his work successfully in this world, and reaped the rewards of it, what can one feel for his death but a solemn sense of mystery and peace! Perhaps to one only, the girl hidden behind the lilies and the roses in the dining-room, was it a matter of keen, personal grief. He had left her world, who had stroked her head and kissed her, who had loved her as a father might love her, who had always smiled when she had touched him.

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As he handed her into her carriage, she leaned toward him, with a very personal air:

"It is so different from the last time we met! Do you remember? You must come and see me, now that I am back in this place for good."

As the young man turned away from her, he met Helen Spellman descending the long flight of steps. She was carrying in her arms a great mass of loose flowers, and his cousin Everett was similarly burdened.

"Are you going on ahead of us?" Jackson asked anxiously.

"Yes. I want to put these flowers there first; so that it won't seem so bare and lonely when he comes. See! I have taken those he liked to have in his library, and yours and your mother's, too!"

She smiled, but her eyes were still dull with tears. Again she brought his thoughts back from self, from his futile, worldly preoccupations, back to her love for the dead man, which seemed so much greater, so much purer than his.

"That will be very nice," he said, taking the flowers from her hands and placing them in a carriage that had driven up to the curb. "I am sure he would have liked your thought for him. He was always so fond of what you did, of you."

"Dear uncle," she murmured to herself. Although the dead man was not connected with her by any ties of blood, she had grown into the habit of calling him uncle, first as a joke, then in affection.

"He always had me get the flowers when he wanted to give a really truly dinner!" she added, a smile coming to her face. "I know he will like to have me take these out to him there now."

She spoke of the dead in the present tense, with a strong feeling for the still living part of the one gone.

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When the heavy gates of the vault in Rose Hill had closed upon Powers Jackson forever, the little group of intimate friends, who had come with him to his grave, descended silently the granite steps to their carriages. Insensibly a wave of relief stole over the spirit of the young nephew, as he turned his back upon the ugly tomb, in the AmericanGreek style, with heavy capitals and false pillars. It was not a selfish or heartless desire to get away from the dead man, to forget him now that he no longer counted in this world; it was merely the reaction from a day of gloom and sober thought. He felt stifled in his tall silk hat, long frock coat, patent-leather shoes, and black gloves. His spirit shrank from the chill of the tomb, to which the day had brought him near.

"Let's send all the women back together, Everett," he suggested to his cousin, "and have a smoke. I am pretty nearly dead!"

As the three men in the party got into their carriage, Jackson took out his cigarette-case and offered it to his cousin; but Everett shook his head rather contemptuously and drew a cigar from his breast pocket.

"I never got in the habit of smoking those things," he remarked slowly. There was an implication in his cool tone that no grown man indulged himself in that boyish habit.

"He never liked cigarettes either, would n't have one in the house," Jackson commented lightly.

The other man, Hollister, had taken a cigar, and the three men smoked in

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