The poet came into the little drawing-room with a full blown red rose in his buttonhole. He took me by the hand and welcomed me very kindly. I commenced to apologize for coming on Sunday. “Tut--tut,” said he, “no apology; I hope we are not so puritanical as not to want to see our friends on a Sunday.” And then we sat down and talked about his nephew who had been in Switzerland. His language was vivacious, his eye clear, his cheeks rosy, his hair perfectly white. I was surprised to see how small was his figure, for I had always thought of Longfellow as a tall man with a great Leonine head; his pictures make him so. [Illustration: Vecchio Palace, Florence.] I could not wholly help a glance around the famous room. I am sure he saw it, for he offered to show me some of the things that he knew I had read about. They were not bought bric-a-brac, but souvenirs, or else things his poetry and life had immortalized. Somehow he seemed to me a man to love--simple, pure and beautiful as his verses. I also had letters to Mr. Bronson Alcott, the transcendentalist philosopher. He received me one morning in a very cordial manner. It was in his library. We talked of books and something of his life. I had just been out to the battlefield of Lexington, looked at the bronze monument of the “Minute Man” there, and was so struck with the verse on it as to commit it to memory. “And Mr. Emerson wrote it,” I said, somewhat uncertain as to my memory. “Certainly, certainly,” said Mr. Alcott. “Of course, that is Mr. Emerson’s. We Americans don’t half know what a poet we have in Mr. Emerson.” He went to the book shelves and brought a volume of Emerson’s poems, presented to him, with this particular poem marked in it, and showed it with evident pride. By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world. Shortly, he proposed to take a walk. He would show me the town, the old elms, the old, old graveyard and the famous Lecture Hall, “and then,” said he, “we will swing around and call on Mr. Emerson.” He showed me all about, talking, as only Mr. Alcott could talk. When we reached the unpretentious frame building called the Lecture Hall, in the edge of the bushes, I reflected what great things had been said there, what ideas given wing, and now I felt sure I was about to be overwhelmed with deep philosophy. Nothing of the kind. He spent a full half hour telling me about the cost of the wooden structure and its course of building, from the underpinning to the top of the chimney. I was anxious to move on and be sure to have our call on Mr. Emerson. We really started once, but immediately Mr. Alcott recalled something about the wonderful “Hall” he had not shown me, and we went back. At last we started in earnest, and reached the white frame house that neighbors and friends of Mr. Emerson had built in place of the one destroyed by fire.