[Boston—Sunday, 14 December 1873]
Dec. 14. 1873 For the last two weeks the great tea-party of Faneuil Hall to celebrate the throwing over of the tea in 1773, wh. is to come off this week has occupied me entirely. Now the arrangements are completed and I sit down quietly.
I have had no time to sit down over afternoon tea with Salvini the great Italian actor and Longfellow. Salvini is a glorious creature and it was a great pleasure to hear the Tuscan language flow out in this beautiful voice. Miss Doria sang and we had a delightful day. Salvini has all the repose and finished grace of a really great actor. It is most interesting to compare the calmness of his manner, the power of control in short, with the power of passion as portrayed in his acting. I presume the two in a finely balanced nature are as one, but we have seen so many imperfect storm-wasted actors who were but a waste and a wreck apart from their business that it gives me a new sense of greatness to have known Salvini.
Agassiz is very ill—probably dying. What a different world it will be to us without him. Such a rich, expansive, loving nature. Longfellow feels this deeply of course—their ages are nearly the same.
The Saturday Club will find this their greatest blow—the first great blow and alas! the men who compose it as so nearly of the same age they will look sadly at each other and say, who next. Longfellow says “It is all Penekese. If any one gives you an island don’t take it”—smiling sadly.
I am always thinking and wishing to write down some of “J.”’s witty tales which he picks up lecturing but alas! how seldom I do it. He met a man a few days ago who told him he liked his lectures for there didn’t seem to be any of that “shy-canery” in ’em so many people now adays put in.
Another said—“his wife said it was amazin’ to see how interestid she got in hearing about these folks she’d never known notten’ about before; but she’d like to ask who that North was anyhow” (This was said after the lecture of Christopher North (John Wilson). My next door neighbour called in just before that lecture to say that Mr. Perkings (Perkins) and herself had been talking it over and had come to the conclusion that C. North was the same as Jeffrey but she would like to ask me if they were correct in this conclusion!!!
I should be sorry to have him forget his visit to the town of Athol Mass. where a long train of people came up to be introduced each with the same speech ready in their mouths “I wish to congratulate you for your success before an Athol audience” last in the line came a grandmother with her granddaughter by the hand to be introduced—when the child was presented and in a little piping voice said “I congratulate you” etc. it was a little too much for the gravity of the lectures. It was in Athol too that a man remarked “That’s what I call eloquence. I tell my wife I allers know what seems to me eloquence by kind o’ shivers which runs up and down my back. Well, in that piece about Cyrus Field now, I felt them shivers all over. That’s what I call real ellerquence.”
I must try to write down more as soon as possible. Dear J. goes to N.Y. to lecture tomorrow.
Tuesday is the tea-party and Philadelphia guests will be here. I shall try to write out more of his fun but how dry it is when written, how the life has utterly evaporated.
We are reading the life of Sara Coleridge. It contains much of the very first interest to me. The book is essentially womanly—of the best type of womanliness.
