[13] In 1865 Alcott printed privately and anonymously the essay, Emerson, which appeared later in his acknowledged volume, Ralph Waldo Emerson, an Estimate of his Character and Genius (Boston, 1882). This was evidently The Rhapsodist.
[14] Thoreau’s older sister.
[15] Josiah Phillips Quincy.
[16] An allusion to the controversy over the claims of Dr. Jackson and Dr. Morton to the discovery of ether.
[17] Daughter of the Rev. William Henry Furness, of Philadelphia, and translator of German novels.
[18] One of Lowell’s reminiscences at the Saturday Club, recorded two years earlier by Mrs. Fields, suggests his essential youthfulness of spirit. Apropos of a story told by Dr. Holmes, “Lowell said that reminded him of experiments the boys at his school used to make on flies, to see how much weight they could carry. One day he attached a thread, which he pulled out of his silk handkerchief, to a fly’s leg, and to the other end a bit of paper with ‘the master is a fool’ written on it in small distinct letters. The fly flew away and lighted on the master’s nose; but he, regardless of all but the lessons, brushed him off, and the fly rose with his burden to the ceiling.”
[19] After an evening of high discussion at Mrs. Howe’s in an earlier year, Mrs. Fields wrote in her journal (October 4, 1863): “The talk grew deep, and after it was over, she [Mrs. Howe] recalled the saying of Mrs. Bell, after a like evening, when she called for ‘a fat idiot.’”
[20] If Mrs. Fields had lived to see The Early Years of the Saturday Club (Boston, 1918), she would have found that I drew from the notes in her own diary a large portion of the memoir of James T. Fields which it contains.
[21] This was in the midst of Aldrich’s occupancy of Elmwood, during Lowell’s two years’ absence in Europe.
[22] The greater part of this chapter appeared in Harper’s Magazine for May and June, 1922.