His relations with Whittier remained always kindly and unbroken. They dined together at the Atlantic Club and Saturday Club, and Longfellow wrote of him in 1857, "He grows milder and mellower, as does his poetry." He went to Concord sometimes to dine with Emerson, "and meet his philosophers, Alcott, Thoreau, and Channing." Or Emerson came to Cambridge, "to take tea," giving a lecture at the Lyceum, of which Longfellow says, "The lecture good, but not of his richest and rarest. His subject 'Eloquence.' By turns he was grave and jocose, and had some striking views and passages. He lets in a thousand new lights, side-lights, and cross-lights, into every subject." When Emerson's collected poems are sent him, Longfellow has the book read to him all the evening and until late at night, and writes of it in his diary: "Throughout the volume, through the golden mist and sublimation of fancy, gleam bright veins of purest poetry, like rivers running through meadows. Truly, a rare volume; with many exquisite poems in it, among which I should single out 'Monadnoc,' 'Threnody,' 'The Humble-Bee,' as containing much of the quintessence of poetry." Emerson's was one of the five portraits drawn in crayon by Eastman Johnson, and always kept hanging in the library at Craigie House; the others being those of Hawthorne, Sumner, Felton, and Longfellow himself. No one can deny to our poet the merits of absolute freedom from all jealousy and of an invariable readiness to appreciate those classified by many critics as greater than himself. He was one of the first students of Browning in America, when the latter was known chiefly by his "Bells and Pomegranates," and instinctively selected the "Blot in the 'Scutcheon" as "a play of great power and beauty," as the critics would say, and as every one must say who reads it. He is an extraordinary genius, Browning, with dramatic power of the first order. "Paracelsus" he describes, with some justice, as "very lofty, but very diffuse." Of Browning's "Christmas Eve" he later writes, "A wonderful man is Browning, but too obscure," and later makes a similar remark on "The Ring and the Book." Of Tennyson he writes, as to "The Princess," calling it "a gentle satire, in the easiest and most flowing blank verse, with two delicious unrhymed songs, and many exquisite passages. I went to bed after it, with delightful music ringing in my ears; yet half disappointed in the poem, though not knowing why. There is a discordant note somewhere."