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.