Charles Sumner,
Mr. Theodore Parker, Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Lowell, Mr. Greenough, Mr.
Samuel Ward, and several others making the shining list. His keen care
for the health of his forces induced him to hold back from visits even
to his best friends, if he were very deeply at work, or paying more
rapidly than usual from his capital of physical strength, which had
now begun to sink. Lowell tried to fascinate him out of seclusion, in
the frisky letter given in "A Study of Hawthorne;" but very likely did
not gain his point, since Longfellow and others had infrequent success
in similar attempts.
I chanced to discover the impression my father made upon Dr. Holmes,
as we sat beside each other at a dinner given by the Papyrus Club of
Boston more than fifteen years ago, on ladies' night. That same
evening I dashed down a verbatim account of part of our conversation,
which I will insert here.
He passed his card over to my goblet, and took mine. "That is the
simplest way, is it not?" he asked.
"I was just going to introduce myself," said I. Then Mrs. Elizabeth
Stoddard sat down by me, and I turned to speak with her.
In a moment Dr. Holmes held my card forward again. "Now let me see!"
he said.
"And you don't know who I am, yet?" I asked.
He smiled, gazed at the card through his eyeglasses, and leaned
towards me hesitatingly. "And what _was_ your name?" he ventured.
"Rose Hawthorne."
He started, and beamed. "There!--I _thought_--but you understand
how--if I had made a mistake--Could anything have been worse if you
had _not_ been? I was looking, you know, for the resemblance.
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