see? Science has scuttled the old Ship of Faith, and now they would fain persuade me that there is something dishonest as well as undignified in drifting about on the hencoop that I had contrived to secure in the confusion. They undertake to demonstrate to me that it’s a hencoop and an unworthy perch for a philosopher. But I shall cling fast. ’Tis as good as a line-of-battle ship if it only keep my head above water. I am so made that I allow no distinction between natural and supernatural. There is none for me. I am as supernatural a ghost as was ever met with. But I like Leslie’s book all the same. It is very able, honest, and clever--full of wit and trained muscle.” And to Mr. Stephen himself he wrote later: “My only objection to any part of your book is, that I think our beliefs more a matter of choice (natural selection, perhaps, but anyhow not logical) than you would admit, and that I find no fault with a judicious shutting of the eyes.”[54] When one compares the portraits in “Agassiz” with the earlier sketches, sometimes of the same persons, in “A Fable for Critics,” one finds it easy to mark the mellower, richer tints in the later work. The poem was indeed almost a real posthumous work. Lowell, removed by an ocean’s width from his old comrades and his familiar haunts, mingled the dead and the living in his imagination and found in the whole concourse, headed by Agassiz himself, a microcosm of that world in which he took the greatest delight, the world of friendly, wise, and witty men. As in the case of the Commemoration Ode, it drew virtue from him, for he had put into it a large part of himself, and had been possessed by it. Shortly after finishing it, he wrote of his experience in the composition to Mr. Norton,[55] and later, when there had been time for the sensation to cool, for an interchange of comment and criticism, and for the poem itself to meet his eyes in its printed form, he wrote again:--