Hawthorne?”

“Hardly any at all. Personally, Hawthorne was very reticent in society. My own recollections of him, when I first saw him, were that he hardly spoke a word to anybody. This little scrap of Hawthorne’s, which you may use, if you care to, was sent to the ‘Boston Miscellany,’ a magazine that my brother edited, and to which all Young America at that time contributed. Lowell published his first stories and articles in the ‘Miscellany,’ after those in ‘Harvardiana.’

“But with Lowell my relations were singularly intimate. He was also intimate with my brother Nathan. Our 295 room in college was convenient for him, as his was at a distance from recitations. He was a class in advance of me. Those were the days when we borrowed Emerson’s volume of Tennyson’s first poems, and copied the poems in our scrap-books. Lowell was deep in the old dramatists then, and read papers on them in the Alpha Delta, which was the literary club to which we both belonged. The intimacy which was then begun lasted through our lives. He edited ‘The Atlantic’ when I published my first stories there.

“By the way, it is reported that Ruskin will be made poet laureate! My candidate, however, is Jean Ingelow. The Queen ought to have named a woman. Talking on the subject, I have seen with these eyes the original correspondence with which Prince Albert offered the laureateship to Samuel Rogers. Rogers was greatly pleased, but after consideration declined, because he was so old. The Prince then wrote to Rogers to ask him to name the laureate. Rogers named Tennyson. Then came a letter from the prime minister, in which he said: ‘We are not acquainted with the works of this gentleman, and will you be good enough to let me know whether he has ever written anything which would make it improper for a woman to name him for this post?’”

Mr. Hale stopped and laughed heartily. “Just think of that!” he added, with glee.

After some skirmishing about the bush—for the office of “interlocutor” is not very familiar to me—I asked Doctor Hale:

“What do you consider the best thing you ever did?” He did not seem annoyed or perplexed by the question. He thrust his arms behind his head, extended himself the full length of the lounge, and regarded me with his deep-set eyes. Doctor Hale’s face wrinkles in a curious way around his eyes. These are the features of his face. They are fine, deep, sad, careless of human opinion—except it has to be conciliated for a high purpose—and alert as a boy’s, ready for a truth or for a friend. I believe that a divine physiognomist would read Doctor Hale’s career in his gray eyes and their high ramparts. “Why, the young man’s head has an entirely different shape,” said the elder Darwin of his son Charles, on the young man’s return from his voyage in the “Beagle.” It struck me oddly that in a like manner Doctor Hale’s eyes had been a mirror of his life.

“I think,” began Doctor Hale thoughtfully, “that ‘In His Name,’ as a bit of literary work, is to be regarded as the best book I ever wrote. The story of ‘The Man Without a Country’ has circulated in much larger numbers. It was forged in the fire, and I think 296 its great popularity is due to the subject.”

“And what is your best literary work at present?”

After some hesitation Doctor Hale answered:

“I think my sermons are the best.”

This serious answer caused no little astonishment; for one naturally thinks of Doctor Hale as an author rather than as a hard-working minister.

“I attach a great deal of importance to the weekly printing and circulating of sermons,” he continued. “It is more than fifteen years since I began printing them for our people. It keeps a man at his best work. It does away with slipshod carelessness. I should advise every minister to print his sermons. The fact of it is,” he continued, with increasing vivacity, “five-sixths of my work in this office is parish work. I am a person who has never lost sight of my profession. People complain that my books always carry a moral. I wouldn’t write if they didn’t.”

“How did you come to write—as an author, I mean?”

“Until 1861 I was only known in Boston as an energetic minister of an active church. I didn’t want anything else. I believe now, as then, that if anything is going to be done, it is to be done through that agency. Then the war came along. I was in the Massachusetts Rifle Corps, and,” he said this with a pardonable twinkle of pride, “I have drilled a major-general. Then I was on the Sanitary Commission. To save the country—that brought me into public life, and I have never got back into simple parish life again. Then came ‘The Man Without a Country.’ In 1871 ‘Ten Times One is Ten’ was published. From that book came a peculiarity of my life. It brought me into close contact with all parts of the world. From it sprang the ‘Lend a Hand’ and the ‘King’s Daughters,’ and a dozen such working societies, and indirectly the Epworth League and the Christian Endeavor. They 297 copied the idea, with many of my mottoes.”

The speaker stopped while the writer pondered how many a girl, from East to West and North to South, carried upon her throat a plain silver cross tied with a purple ribbon, her proudest ornament. It is an inspiring picture and comes quickly to call. To make an era in Christian self-surrender, to girdle the world with unselfish crosses, to hammer high purposes into young souls, that is a better life than to have written the best novel of the decade.

“Yes,” said Doctor Hale, with the authority of his threescore years and eleven, “the parish is at the basis of my life, and takes five-sixths of my time. All this would have been impossible without it.”

In these days, when some of our eminent critics consider a moral purpose detrimental to the literary value of a story, it is refreshing to learn from the mouth of one of our most popular authors that his success is due entirely to the inspiration of a Christian ideal. It takes the modern school of critics to pat the Lord Jesus Christ upon the back. Charles Kingsley and Doctor Hale will not be snuffed out by them because they have chosen to Christianize their literary work.

Edward E. Hale regards the ministry as the most practical business in the world. The theory that the minister spends his mornings reading Hebrew, and his afternoons praying with dying old women, is exploded in his career. He knocks about in the most active of city life. It came out that the day before I called he went up to the State House to argue in favor of an honest bill of some kind. He then signed the lease of the “Noonday Rest,” a club where working girls are to get good food. He made himself responsible for fifteen hundred dollars a year because the poor girls had to be cared for, and he “knew it would come back to him all right.” Then the duties of Vice-President of the Industrial Aid called for his attention. “I am the man of business,” he said, with flashing eyes. Of such are the charities of his life.

Even while the writer was sitting in the chair that Dean Stanley occupied, and revolving the problem whether Doctor Hale summoned from some other planet the time in which to write his