But this was long after the Cambridge
episode, in which Longfellow alone escaped the corrosive touch of his
subtle irreverence, or, more strictly speaking, had only the effect of
his reverence. That gentle and exquisitely modest dignity, of
Longfellow's he honored with as much veneration as it was in him to
bestow, and he had that sense of Longfellow's beautiful and perfected art
which is almost a test of a critic's own fineness.
III.
As for Harte's talk, it was mostly ironical, not to the extreme of
satire, but tempered to an agreeable coolness even for the things he
admired. He did not apparently care to hear himself praised, but he
could very accurately and perfectly mark his discernment of excellence in
others. He was at times a keen observer of nature and again not,
apparently. Something was said before him and Lowell of the beauty of
his description of a rabbit, startled with fear among the ferns, and
lifting its head with the pulsation of its frightened heart visibly
shaking it; then the talk turned on the graphic homeliness of Dante's
noticing how the dog's skin moves upon it, and Harte spoke of the
exquisite shudder with which a horse tries to rid itself of a fly.
But once again, when an azalea was shown to him as the sort of bush that
Sandy drunkenly slept under in 'The Idyl of Iced Gulch', he asked, "Why,
is that an azalea?" To be sure, this might have been less from his
ignorance or indifference concerning the quality of the bush he had sent
Sandy to sleep under than from his willingness to make a mock of an
azalea in a very small pot, so disproportionate to uses which an azalea
of Californian size could easily lend itself to.
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