IX.
The most devoted Cantabrigian, after Lowell, whom I knew, would perhaps
have contended that if he had stayed with us Willson might have lived;
for John Holmes affirmed a faith in the virtues of the place which
ascribed almost an aseptic character to its air, and when he once
listened to my own complaints of an obstinate cold, he cheered himself,
if not me, with the declaration, "Well, one thing, Mr. Howells, Cambridge
never let a man keep a cold yet!"
If he had said it was better to live in Cambridge with a cold than
elsewhere without one I should have believed him; as it was, Cambridge
bore him out in his assertion, though she took her own time to do it.
Lowell had talked to me of him before I met him, celebrating his peculiar
humor with that affection which was not always so discriminating, and
Holmes was one of the first Cambridge men I knew. I knew him first in
the charming old Colonial house in which his famous brother and he were
born. It was demolished long before I left Cambridge, but in memory it
still stands on the ground since occupied by the Hemenway Gymnasium, and
shows for me through that bulk a phantom frame of Continental buff in the
shadow of elms that are shadows themselves. The 'genius loci' was
limping about the pleasant mansion with the rheumatism which then
expressed itself to his friends in a resolute smile, but which now
insists upon being an essential trait of the full-length presence to my
mind: a short stout figure, helped out with a cane, and a grizzled head
with features formed to win the heart rather than the eye of the
beholder.
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