To George H. Fisher.

Cambridge, May 8, 1853.

If you were ever so culpably negligent as I have been, you can conceive the difficulty of beginning this letter. If it were not for adding to other difficulties an inconvenience of posture, I should write this letter on my knees.

Proverbs have condemned procrastination (and critics have condemned proverbs), and so I will only tarry a moment to remark what a fearful object a long-neglected duty gets to be.

Perhaps in your own experience you may have noticed what a magnitude a little duty will assume, after we have left it far back in the distance, and turn to look at it through the mists of a guilty conscience.

Thus this letter has haunted with its fearful front (which now lies nearly finished before me) those leisure hours devoted to laziness and smoking.

The warm weather has begun to remind me forcibly of those lazy but palmy days of last year when . . . Holworthy was the scene of Eden from which too much knowledge forced us to part.

Last year I have seen very little of the so-called real life of the world, for I have hardly got out into the world yet, and as I am now disposed I never shall; for though there is a weary feeling in hours of leisure, and a longing for something more active and inspiriting than my pursuits, still the satisfactions of a man of active business only compensate in my opinion for the jostlings and the conflicts of his life.

Upon reconsidering the above sentence, I can’t see how it can be interpreted into a joke; and I must therefore inform you by way of explanation that I am not sentimental, but have written the aforegoing for want of aught else to say. ... I haven’t written much news, not knowing what is news to you; not knowing what you know, I can’t tell what to tell you. If you wish to be enlightened, you must show your darkness.

On December 4, 1853, he writes to Fisher, correcting the statement of a friend that he had a salary of $1,500 at the Nautical Almanac office and a good chance of being appointed to a tutorship in college. “Discount a third,” he says, “from the one, and a half from the other, and you have a fair view of the worldly advantages of your old chum. . . . Come to Cambridge, where many of our class still congregate. ... In the Law School there is a vigor of thought and a stimulus to study which can’t be found anywhere else.”

At the beginning of the fall of 1854, after a short absence, I returned to Cambridge for seven years, and, entering the Law School, took lodgings with Chauncey. We were now chums for a year or more. There is little in this period that I can recall as worthy of special mention. Although I was very busy in my own occupations, I saw much of Chauncey and thoroughly enjoyed our arrangement. We read together on Sundays; and in our walks about the country, according to an old habit, we examined machinery, gas-works, factories, the glass-works at East Cambridge, and the like. After a while, the need of economy and the kindness of a friend drew me to other quarters; and in a few years Chauncey went to lodge — where he continued for a good many years — in Little’s Block, at the corner of Main Street and Dunster. His classmate Gurney, then a tutor in the College, had been living in this building since the beginning of 1857, and remained there until the fall of 1863. During the whole of this period,

Chauncey had the advantage of constant intercourse with Gurney, — an opportunity which was of great benefit to him, and which he improved to the utmost, making great and almost unending draughts upon the hospitality of his friend by day and far into the night. Nor was Chauncey the only habitual visitor there. The evening light in the second-story, front-corner room on Dunster Street was now, for a number of years, the beacon to summon in as bright and goodly a company of young men as Cambridge could then supply.

During most of this time, up to 1861, Chauncey boarded with Mrs. Lyman, our old and most kind friend from Northampton, who had come to Cambridge in 1853. Here, in the summers that followed, Chauncey had the pleasure, more often than before, of meeting Mrs. Lesley and her husband Professor Lesley, of Philadelphia, with their two little girls, to whom Chauncey was devoted. Before this, the Lesleys had been his friends; but a more intimate acquaintance began now, which gladdened Chauncey’s days to the end.

Mrs. Lesley has given me some account of her acquaintance with Chauncey, from which I take a few passages: —

“I first saw Chauncey a good deal in 1853, the summer before Mary’s birth. I think he had then very few friends in Cambridge, and that he used to like to come and see my mother and me. It was a rare pleasure to listen to his conversation, at that time less assured than it afterwards became in tone, but full of a delicate tendency to speculation, always given with a modest hesitancy peculiar to his nature, and full of reverence and deference for the feelings of others. I left Cambridge the first of October.

“I think it was a very short time after I left Cambridge that he went to board with my mother. I spent the summers with my mother from that year until she went to the Asylum, in 1861; and I can hardly give you an idea how

difficult those summers would have been to get through, but for his constant and considerate kindness. I was always in ill-health in those days, scarcely hoping to get the better of tendencies which all expected would shorten my life. But I recall with unspeakable gratitude how, in every way, he tried to make things easy to me. I cannot recollect his ever alluding in any way to my being an invalid; but there never was any thing more evident than that it was in his mind, and that he was resolved to help me through the weary days. He brought books and read aloud; he took the children off for hours, if he saw I wanted rest; and when my poor mother was overcome with restlessness, he either diverted her, or took me to some place where I should not mind it. . . . Of personal talk, I never had much with him, even in those days of closer intimacy than came afterwards; and sometimes I have regretted a little that I had not come nearer to his personal history, as it might have given me some advantages of friendship in aiding him in his later years. But at that time any approach to personal subjects, which he never invited, would have seemed indelicate and unworthy of that fine character. As I now look back, I can think of no one who seemed to me more distinguished for disinterestedness, singleness of mind, and purity of heart, and who, in little things as in great, more habitually considered other people. He stood to me then as a noble type of the Christian gentleman.

“You know all about his love for little Mary, and his deep interest in her education. He used to tell me that he always had her in mind when he wrote about education. I told him one day that I thought all the old-fashioned talk and stories about impulse and principle were very harmful; that children and grown people, too, ought to be taught that principles were not good for much until they became impulses; then they would do their work and unconsciously. He seemed greatly

delighted at this very simple remark, and said, ‘ Well, we will have Mary brought up that way.’

“I felt that his life at my mother’s was very hard for him in some ways, and it made me anxious. When she went to the Asylum, in 1861, I wrote him that the one thought that it would sign a release for him reconciled me to her going more than any thing else. Since then, how much we had to mourn, not dreamed of then.”

In another letter, Mrs. Lesley writes: “I think very few persons can do entire justice to his sympathy and consideration for others. I can never recall without emotion a time when I had to go back from Cambridge to Philadelphia alone, — with Meggie, a baby in arms, — and so weak that I dreaded the journey, though I never said so to a living soul. At the last moment appeared Chauncey, saying decisively, but very quietly, that he was going with me. I shall never forget my sense of relief, as he took Meggie on one arm and my bags on the other, and assumed the entire care of us all. He scarcely spoke to me on the journey, because he divined I could not talk; but I think I never felt a kindness so deeply. And I found afterwards, by mere accident, that he had written or telegraphed to Mr. Lesley at different points of our route, my husband being then out surveying in Western Pennsylvania. When I think of his phlegmatic temperament, which always disinclined him to exertion, and his occupations at that time in the Nautical Almanac office, this incident rises before my memory with great force. It has often made me feel what he might have been in domestic life, and what that would have been to him.”

The first letter to Mrs. Lesley which has come to my hands was written while we were rooming together: —