Tuesday, February 18th

A LUGUBRIOUS DAY, warm, raining hard—the road out will be a morass. I did Mr. Palmer an injustice. He turned out to be a liberal, warm, kind man. He came really to tell me how delighted he had been to discover my work last summer. He was born in Maine, his father in the “wood business.” And I loved his talk about this father, now retired, who brought himself a house on two acres near Augusta, “one acre of lawn in front and one acre of garden in the back.” Strange how a phrase like that can set one dreaming! I enjoyed the hour and a half very much. I have been feeling tired and dull, having chewed my own fat for maybe a little too long lately. One thing that Mr. Palmer said that touched me was that people who do not read the Bible would miss a great deal in reading my work. I suppose there are a good many unconscious references and all this goes back to the Shady Hill School. Children who do not learn psalms by heart and are not steeped in the Bible are, in several ways, illiterate.

The other day a letter came from an unknown man who was moved to write to me about my father, after reading the poems about him in my Collected Poems. He says, “I took one course under George Sarton as an undergraduate at Harvard. He was for me a model of what a scholar should be and what I wanted to be. Although he was fantastically learned, he took such joy in his study that it was never labored or pedantic, but rather a means of grace. He was utterly modest and self-effacing: I think he never got over his surprise that so many students wanted to hear him speak on the history of science. And he was kind: when I was in military service in India in 1944 he twice wrote to me, something no other professor did.”

The writer apologized for writing fifteen years after my father’s death, but this letter, keeping a memory green, is far more precious now than it would have been fifteen years ago. So for the second time this year people have come to me to speak of one or the other of my parents with vivid memories they wanted to share.