A little farther out on the same street is the dwelling where William Lloyd Garrison spent his last years, and in this neighborhood lived Mrs. Blake, poet of "Verses Along the Way." Here also are the early home of Miss Guiney and the school to which she was first sent,--or rather "carried neck and heels," because she refused to walk. Close by we find the pleasant home in which Jane G. Austin wrote some of her famed colonial tales and where she died not many months ago; and in the same delightful suburb, a half-mile beyond Hale's house, is the retreat where the beloved author of "Little Women" breathed out her too brief life.
_Holmes's Church-yard--Bridge, Smithy, Chapel, and River of Longfellow's Verse--Abodes of Lettered Culture--Holmes--Higginson--Agassiz-- Norton--Clough--Howells--Fuller--Longfellow--Lowell--Longfellow's City of the Dead and its Precious Graves._
Crossing the Charles by "The Bridge" of Longfellow's popular poem, a stroll along elm-shaded streets brings us to the ancient Common of Cambridge and a vicinage which has much besides its historic traditions to allure the literary pilgrim. For centuries the site of a celebrated college and a conspicuous centre of learning, it has long been the abiding-place of representatives of the best and foremost in American culture and mental achievement.
Close by the Common, and opposite the remains of the elm beneath which Washington assumed the command of the patriot army, stood the old gambrel-roofed house in which that "gentlest of autocrats," Holmes, was born and reared, and upon whose door-post was first displayed his "shingle," on which he whimsically proposed to inscribe "The Smallest Fevers Thankfully Received;" across the college grounds is the home-like edifice where lived the erudite Professor Felton, loved by Dickens and oft mentioned in his letters; not far away, at the corner of Broadway, was the home of Agassiz, since occupied by his son; and a few rods eastward is the picturesque residence of the witty and profound Colonel Higginson,--poet, essayist, novelist, and reformer. In the adjacent Kirkland Street dwelt the delightful Dr. Estes Howe, brother-in-law to Lowell, with whom the poet sometime lived and whom he celebrated as "the Doctor" in the "Fable for Critics." Dr. C. C. Abbott formerly lived in this neighborhood, and the collections on which his best-known books are founded are preserved in the near-by Peabody Museum, beyond which we find the tasteful abode of Professor Charles Eliot Norton, the friend and literary executor of Lowell. Near the Common, too, dwelt for a year or so that rare poet Arthur Clough, author of "The Bothie" and "Qua Cursum Ventus;" and the sweet singer Charlotte Fiske Bates--the intimate friend of Longfellow--had her habitation in the same neighborhood. Opposite the southern end of the Common is the ancient village cemetery celebrated in the poetry of Holmes and Longfellow; a little way westward, Howells lived in a delightful rose-embowered cottage and pleasantly pictured many features of the old town in the "Charlesbridge" of his "Suburban Sketches." Two or three furlongs distant, within the grounds of the Botanic Garden, long lived the American Linnæus, Professor Asa Gray.