there would come Charlotte Cushman and her faithful Emma Stebbins, the sculptor, and Harriet Hosmer, who gave us the "Puck" and many another lovely marble. It was a salon after the French fashion.
Before I leave the literati, let me record a most eventful day — an evening in 1864 — the celebration of the birthday of Mr. Bryant at the Century Club. He was seventy — a fine-looking, Homeric sage with a big white beard, a most venerable-looking personage, with brilliant eyes and a manner which, when he chose, could be smiling and agreeable, and which, when he did not choose, could be grave and repellent. The Century Club loved him to a man, and their elegant rooms in Fifteenth Street were wreathed with violets, immortelles, evergreens, and roses on that evening. Mr. Bryant and Mr. Bancroft entered together, and sat on a dais surrounded by such lights as Emerson, Holmes, Willis, Street, Tuckerman, Boker, Read, Stoddard, and Bayard Taylor. At the conclusion of some well-chosen music Mr. Bancroft addressed Mr. Bryant, and congratulated him and the world that the poet's eye was undimmed, his step as elastic as it was in his youth, his mind as strong, and his brain as prolific. Mr. Bryant answered in a very witty dissertation upon the folly of felicitating any one on being "seventy years old." He referred "to the beauty of youth, its quick senses, its perfect and pearly teeth, its flowing hair." He drew a graphic picture of what the world would be if it were made up of old men, and expressed his thankfulness that there were youths and maidens to laugh and be merry.
Yet those two wonderful old men were destined to live one of them to eighty-four, and the other to nearly ninety, while many a youth and maid who listened had gone to an early grave.
