But he was a true artist,and English born as he was,he divined American character as few Americans have done.He was a man of eminent courage,and in the days when to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast,he had the heart to say of the Mysteries,that he did not know.He outlived the condemnation that this brought,and I think that no man ever came near him without in some measure loving him.To me he was of a most winning personality,which his strong,gentle face expressed,and a cast in the eye which he could not bring to bear directly upon his vis-a-vis,endeared.I never met him without wishing more of his company,for he seldom failed to say something to whatever was most humane and most modern in me.Our last meeting was at Newburyport,whither he had long before removed from New York,and where in the serene atmosphere of the ancient Puritan town he found leisure and inspiration for his work.
He was not then engaged upon any considerable task,and he had aged and broken somewhat.But the old geniality,the old warmth glowed in him,and made a summer amidst the storm of snow that blinded the wintry air without.A new light had then lately come into my life,by which I saw all things that did not somehow tell for human brotherhood dwarfish and ugly,and he listened,as I imagined,to what I had to say with the tolerant sympathy of a man who has been a long time thinking those things,and views with a certain amusement the zeal of the fresh discoverer.
There was yet another historian in Boston,whose acquaintance I made later than either Parkman's or Parton's,and whose very recent death leaves me with the grief of a friend.No ones indeed,could meet John Codman Ropes without wishing to be his friend,or without finding a friend in him.He had his likes and his dislikes,but he could have had no enmities except for evil and meanness.I never knew a man of higher soul,of sweeter nature,and his whole life was a monument of character.
It cannot wound him now to speak of the cruel deformity which came upon him in his boyhood,and haunted all his after days with suffering.His gentle face showed the pain which is always the part of the hunchback,but nothing else in him confessed a sense of his affliction,and the resolute activity of his mind denied it in every way.He was,as is well known,a very able lawyer,in full practice,while he was making his studies of military history,and winning recognition for almost unique insight and thoroughness in that direction,though I believe that when he came to embody the results in those extraordinary volumes recording the battles of our civil war,he retired from the law in some measure.He knew these battles more accurately than the generals who fought them,and he was of a like proficiency in the European wars from the time of Napoleon down to our own time.I have heard a story,which I cannot vouch for,that when foreknowledge of his afliiction,at the outbreak of our civil war,forbade him to be a soldier,he became a student of soldiership,and wreaked in that sort the passion of his most gallant spirit.But whether this was true or not,it is certain that he pursued the study with a devotion which never blinded him to the atrocity of war.
Some wars he could excuse and even justify,but for any war that seemed wanton or aggressive,he had only abhorrence.
The last summer of a score that I had known him,we sat on the veranda of his cottage at York Harbor,and looked out over the moonlit sea,and he talked of the high and true things,with the inextinguishable zest for the inquiry which I always found in him,though he was then feeling the approaches of the malady which was so soon to end all groping in these shadows for him.He must have faced the fact with the same courage and the same trust with which he faced all facts.From the first I found him a deeply religious man,not only in the ecclesiastical sense,but in the more mystical meanings of the word,and he kept his faith as he kept his youth to the last.Every one who knew him,knows how young he was in heart,and how he liked to have those that were young in years about him.
He wished to have his house in Boston,as well as his cottage at York,full of young men and young girls,whose joy of life he made his own,and whose society he preferred to his contemporaries'.One could not blame him for that,or for seeking the sun,wherever he could,but it would be a false notion of him to suppose that his sympathies were solely or chiefly with the happy.In every sort,as I knew him,he was fine and good.The word is not worthy of him,after some of its uses and associations,but if it were unsmutched by these,and whitened to its primitive significance,I should say he was one of the most perfect gentlemen I ever knew.
