My dear Higginson,—Your friendly words about me in your Phi Beta poem give me so much pleasure that I cannot refrain from thanking you for them. I care for them specially as a memorial of our hereditary friendship. They bring to mind my Mother’s affection for your Mother, and for Aunt Nancy, who was as dear an Aunt to us children at Shady Hill as she was to you and your brothers and sisters. What dear and admirable women! What simple, happy lives they led! No one’s heart will be more deeply touched by your poem than mine.
One most agreeable result of Norton’s Cambridge boyhood has not been generally recognized by those who have written about him. His inherited estate was so large that he led a life absolutely free in respect to the study of nature, and as Lowell, too, had the same advantage, they could easily compare notes. In answer to a criticism of mine with reference to Longfellow’s poem, “The Herons of Elmwood,” on my theory that these herons merely flew over Elmwood and only built their nests in what were then the dense swamps east of Fresh Pond, he writes to me (January 4, 1899): “I cannot swear that I ever saw a heron’s nest at Elmwood. But Lowell told me of their nesting there, and only a few weeks ago Mrs. Burnett told me of the years when they had built in the pines and of the time of their final desertion of the place.” To this he adds in a note dated five days later: “As to the night-herons lighting on pines, for many years they were in the habit of lighting and staying for hours upon mine and then flying off towards the [Chelsea] beach.” This taste accounts for the immense zest and satisfaction with which Norton edited a hitherto unknown manuscript of the poet Gray’s on natural history, with admirable illustrations taken from the original book, seeming almost incredibly accurate from any but a professional naturalist, the book being entitled, “The Poet Gray as a Naturalist with Selections from His Notes on the Systema Naturæ of Linnæus with Facsimiles of Some of his Drawings.”
In the Charles Eliot Norton number of the “Harvard Graduates’ Magazine” commemorating his eightieth birthday, Professor Palmer, with that singular felicity which characterizes him, says of Norton: “He has been an epitome of the world’s best thought brought to our own doors and opened for our daily use.” Edith Wharton with equal felicity writes from Norton’s well-known dwelling at Ashfield, whose very name, “High Pasture,” gives a signal for what follows:—
“Come up—come up; in the dim vale below
The autumn mist muffles the fading trees,
But on this keen hill-pasture, though the breeze
Has stretched the thwart boughs bare to meet the snow,
Night is not, autumn is not—but the flow
Of vast, ethereal and irradiate seas,
Poured from the far world’s flaming boundaries