[Boston—Sunday, 27 November 1870]
Sunday night. Gay the painter & Lucy Bradlee came to tea—and then we went to hear Curtis’s lecture on Dickens—a trifle sentimental & much more of Scott & Curtis and other things unhappily than of Dickens but it is always a failure when men try to talk of him. Afterward Curtis passed the evening with us when we made a Dickens-punch and talked Dickens until near midnight. Curtis is so kindly and noble, so fired by supreme enthousiasm, so capable of death for a principle that he is to be loved wholly and with a true manly and womanly adherence. But last night the lecture was a disappointment being a trifle sentimental and so far away from the divine topic.
He talked deliciously afterward of Jenny Lind and those old days of rapture when he saw her bring in the bouquet he had hand made for her and sang “I know that My Redeemer liveth.” Those were never to be forgotten experiences.
