These were the opening lines and the audience responded with roars to the inimitable fun-maker. In later years we learned to accord him a higher appreciation. The _Autocrat_ and the _Professor at the Breakfast Table_ have deep and acute thought as well as wit, and what one of our poets has produced a grander or more solemn lyric than the _Chambered Nautilus_? I dwell with emotion upon the funeral of Lowell, in itself a touching occasion, because it so happened that I saw on that day three great men for the last time, Justin Winsor, Phillips Brooks, and Dr. Holmes. I stood on the stairs at the rear of Appleton Chapel as the audience came down the aisle at the close. The coffin of Lowell rested for a moment on the grass under its wreaths, President Eliot and Holmes walked side by side; I have a distinct image of the countenance of Holmes as they came slowly out. It was no longer a young face but it had all the old vivacity and even at the moment was cheerful rather than serious; it had not, however, the cheerfulness of a man who looks lightly on life, but that of one whose philosophy enables him to conquer sorrow and look beyond, the face of a man who might write a triumphant hymn even in an atmosphere of death. These lines ran in my thought: "Build thee more stately mansions, oh my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low vaulted past, Let each new temple, nobler than the last Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine out-grown shell By life's unresting sea!" The fame of James Russell Lowell, too, in these years was incipient. As a writer he had shown himself to be elegantly schooled, but in the _Fable for Critics_ and the _Biglow Papers_, he had burst forth as a most effective and slashing satirist. His culture was closely and perfectly fitted, but when scratched, revealing in full proportions the "Whang-doodle" Yankee. The whang, however, handling with all the deftness in the world the broadest and subtlest themes, and the doodle standing for a patriotism of the noblest. Those who came into close connection with him say that he grew morbidly fastidious, shrinking from coarse contacts and was happy at last only in a delicate environment. When in health, nevertheless, he was a Yankee of the truest, though sublimated by his genius and superb accomplishments. I know a little inn far away among the hills on whose porch half concealed by the honeysuckle, Lowell is said often to have sat listening to the dialect of the farmers who "vanned" and "vummed" as they disputed together in the evenings after the chores were done. Lowell had the dialect in his very bones, and loved it, but took pains to confirm his knowledge of it by studying on the sod.