Page:Poems of Nature and Life.djvu/105

 THE RANDALL FAMILY 9/

meluis Jiabejnus, nihil jiicundius ; and no man ever better knew or obeyed Cicero's fundamental law of friendship, ntaxitmim est in aniicitia parent esse inferiori.

A signal instance of this putting of himself on the ground of perfect equality with one so much his inferior in age and in knowledge occurs to me. We spent several weeks together at Stow in the summer of 1855, occupying ourselves in the final revision of the " Consolations of Soli- tude " for the press. Over a hundred and fifty changes and corrections were made in the manuscript poems, and certainly as many more ought to have been made. In discussing and remedying the errors we discovered, I was profoundly impressed with one quality of John's mind — its singular freedom from the sensitiveness and irritable vanity which are often supposed to be inherent in the poetic temperament. To this discussion of imperfections in his own work, he brought what Virchow well described as the "spirit of the coldest objectivity" — the tempera- ment of a scientific man rather than that of a poet. A stanza on the paper was to him a purely objective fact, to be studied as coolly and critically as an insect, a plant, a shell. It did not seem to occur to him that he had any proprietorship or personal interest in it ; the only point to be considered was the goodness or badness of the stanza as a stanza, as a rhythmical expression of a poetical idea, and the possibility of making it any truer or more beau- tiful. What charmed me most of all, however, was the can- dor, the simplicity, the hospitality, the recognition of my equality with himself as an independent critic, with which he received my suggestions, however immature or value- less ; for I was only eighteen at the time. Many of these suggestions he actually adopted ; more, of course, he had to reject. But in all those weeks his only test of accept-

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