At our home he was with the children like a child, genial and
companionable as an elder brother. In the house of the Carey sisters,
where I saw him years later, he was happy and care-free. Phoebe and
Alice Carey, poets and essayists, had Sunday evening gatherings at their
home in New York, where the choice spirits of the literary world held
converse after the manner of their kind, as at the assemblies in the
Paris salons of the 18th century. In this company Mr. Greeley was at his
best, animated, witty and charmingly affable. He realized, only too
well, that his best was wasted in the strife which was his daily portion
and which ended in the disastrous defeat that cost him his life. The
flashes of aroused egotism that sometimes blazed out in red-hot words,
were only signs of impatience and regret that he had been deprived of
opportunity to cultivate the amenities and graces of life and to gain
control of the higher powers he consciously possessed. Any one who will
take the trouble to-day to read his later writings, his tribute to old
friends and his essays like that on "Growing Old Gracefully," will be
led to know that Horace Greeley had the soul of a poet.
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