I had my answer. Never again did I venture on a personal question.
All our talks came round to poetry in the end. It was his deepest love as well. Sound lawyer he may have been, but inspired poet, to me at least, he certainly was. His own poems he severely deprecated, calling them, with the exception of the "Night Song," "poor things, though from my heart." His room, it seems, was littered with them in manuscript, which he rarely tried, and never wished, to sell. Some time later Mr. Alden, Editor of Harper's Magazine, questioned me for information "about a wonderful old gentleman who comes into the office like an emperor, and offers me a poem as though he were parting painfully with a treasure he hardly dared let out of his keeping, and certainly does not wish to sell for cash." To all, thus, he was a mystery. If he was uncared for, he was at the same time indifferent to human care. Great intellect, great mind, great heart, he seemed to me, a wraith perhaps, but an august, a giant wraith, draped by mysterious shadows, dwelling in a miserable slum, cut off from his kind amid the dim pomp and pageantry of majestic memories.
It was thus, at any rate, with the pardonable exaggeration of ignorant twenty-five, I saw and knew the Old Man of Visions. It was his deep heart of poetry, rather than his fine intellect I worshipped. The under-mind in him, the subconscious region, I think, was whole and healed; it was the upper-mind, the surface consciousness, that alone was damaged. If this mind was wrecked, this brain partly in ruins, the soul in him peered forth above the broken towers, remaining splendidly aware. Not even the imperfect instrument through which it worked could prevent this fine expression: behind the disproportion of various delusions, behind the outer tumbled ruins, there dwelt unaffected in him that greater thing than any intellect—Understanding.
