THE RANDALL FAMILY
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��mer, throwing a merciful haziness over the too sharp out- lines of the mean, the false, and the inhumane in human life.
But I saw it tired him too much to converse very long, and I soon learned to suggest the reading aloud of his old poetical manuscripts to me, which to my surprise did not seem to tire him in the least. Most of these manuscripts, however, had become a puzzle to him ; more than once he complained that, in the removal from Boston, the servants must have " shuffled the leaves together — he could make neither head nor tail to them." The confusion, indeed, exists, as I have since found to my cost. But some of them he could make out, and I listened to these again and again, not only without satiety, but with a deeper enjoy- ment at every reading. Perhaps sometimes the past mingled with the present, as I sat watching the white, venerable, noble head, and listening to the wonderful voice which had lost nothing of its depth, richness, or sweetness, — nothing, even, of the perfect articulation or feeling emphasis that had once thrilled me in the olden days. To me it was perfect music, and I listened to it just as I had listened to Belinda's playing in the dimly lighted parlor of the old Boston home.
It gave the aged poet no little pleasure to be thus listened to. Something of the long unheeded charm of poetry asserted itself afresh in his heart, and he welcomed my unobtrusive coming. I was his solitary auditor, for Belinda seldom, if ever, remained to hear. Feeble as he was, he took pains to copy out for me a complete copy of " The Metamorphoses of Longing " in ink, though he preferred a pencil, and gave it to me on the first of March, 1 890, as a memento of our long companionship. This stirred many thoughts. I have brief memoranda of my last two visits while he yet lived.
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