The other allurements to a like doom were hardly less gratifying. What indeed could have been more gratifying, except the Harvard offer of the professorship of the languages of the south of Europe (with the privilege of two years' preparation in the Latin countries, whose tongues I had tampered with), than the offer of the English professorship in Yale? It was Lounsbury, now lately lost forever to these skies, Lounsbury the fine scholar, the charming writer, the delightful wit, the critic unsurpassed in his kind, who came smiling with the kind eyes, dimmed almost to blindness on the field of Gettysburg in the forgotten soldiership of his youth, to do me this incredible honor. Later came the offer of the same chair in Johns Hopkins, twice repeated by the president of that university. When in my longing and my despair I asked, What was the nature of such a professorship, he answered, Whatever I chose to make it; and this still seems to me, however mistaken in my instance, the very measure of the wisest executive large-mindedness. President Gilman had written to me from New York, and had come to see me in London, and again written to me in Boston, and I could not do less than go down to Baltimore and look at the living body of the university and see what part in it I might become. A day sufficed; where so many men were busy with the work which they were so singularly qualified to do, I could not think of bringing my half-heartedness to an attempt for which all the common sense I had protested my unfitness, my entire unlikeness to the kind of man he had so magnanimously misimagined me. I turned from that shining opportunity of failure as I turned from the others, and if the reader thinks I have dwelt too vaingloriously upon them he shall have his revenge in the spectacle of my further endeavors not to be the stuff which professors are made of.
I could have been spared from the printing-office for the study of the law, when I could not be spared from it otherwise, because I might soon begin to make my living by practising before justices of the peace in the pettifogging which was then part of the study in the country offices. My labor, which was worth as much as a journeyman compositor's, could not have been otherwise spared; much less could my father have afforded the expense of my schooling; and I cannot recall that I thought it an unjust hardship when it was decided after due family counsel, that I could not be sent to an academy in a neighboring village. I had not the means of estimating my loss; but the event seemed to have remained a poignant regret with my brother, and in after years he lamented what he felt to have been an irreparable wrong done me: now he is dead, and it touches me to think he should have felt that, for I never blamed him, and I am glad he gave me the chance to tell him so. I may have shed some tears when first denied; I did shed a few very bitter ones when I once confessed the hope I had that the editor of the _Ohio Farmer_ might give me some sort of literary employment at a sum I named, and he said, "He would never pay you three dollars a week in the world for that," and I had to own in anguish of soul that he was doubtless right. He worked every day of the week and far into every night to help my father earn the property we were all trying to pay for, and he rightfully came into the eventual ownership of the newspaper. By an irony of fate not wholly unkind he continued for half a century in the printing-business, once so utterly renounced. Then, after a few years of escape to a consular post in the tropics which he used to say was the one post which, if it had been whittled out of the whole universe, would have suited him best, he died, and lies buried in the village, the best-beloved man who ever lived there.