CHAPTER II

SCHOOL AND COLLEGE

1826-1838

The outer world came early to the notice of Lowell in his garden enclosure. “I remember,” he writes on the fourth of July, 1876, “how, fifty years ago to-day, I, perched in a great ox-heart cherry-tree, long ago turned to mould, saw my father come home with the news of John Adams’s death.” Two or three journeys also carried him out into the world in his early boyhood. He remembered going to Portsmouth in his seventh year, for the visit was impressed on his memory by the startling effect produced by a skeleton which he confronted when he opened a long red chest in Dr. Brackett’s house; and it was the next year that his father took him to Washington and carried him out to Alexandria, where he spent some days with the Carroll family, who were connections on his mother’s side, and whence he made an excursion to Mount Vernon. It all came back to him fifty-nine years later when he took his grandson to the same shrine; he went straight to the key of the Bastile and to the honey-locusts in the garden.

The rambles, too, to Beaver Brook and the Waverley Oaks, in the country within easy stroll of Elmwood, were extended when he climbed into the chaise with his father and drove off to neighboring parishes at such times as Dr. Lowell exchanged with his brother ministers. In those little journeys he had an opportunity to see the lingering reverence still paid to the minister, when boys doffed their hats and girls dropped a curtsy by the roadside as his father passed by. These exchanges drew Dr. Lowell and his little son as far as Portsmouth on the east and Northampton on the west. “I can conceive,” says Lowell, “of nothing more delightful than those slow summer journeys through leafy lanes and over the stony hills, where we always got out and walked. In that way I think I gained a more intimate relation with what we may call pristine New England than has fallen to the fortune of most men of my age.”[12] Thirty years after these experiences he could give this graphic report of the contests he was wont to witness in the village choir:--

“Sometimes two ancient men, through glasses dim, In age’s treble deaconed off the hymn, Paused o’er long words and then with breathless pace Went down a slope of short ones at a race, While who could sing and who could not, but would, Rushed helter-skelter after as they could. Well I remember how their faces shone, Safe through some snare like _Re-sig-na-ti-on_, And how some graceless youth would mock the tones Of Deacon Jarvis or of Deacon Jones: In towns ambitious of more cultured strains, The gruff bass-viol told its inward pains As some enthusiast, deaf to catgut’s woe, Rasped its bare nerves with torture-rosined bow; Hard-by another, with strained eyeballs set, Blew devious discord through his clarinet, And the one fiddle, that was wont to seek In secular tunes its living all the week, Blind to the leader’s oft-repeated glance Mixed up the psalm-tune with a country dance.”[13]

More frequent journeys were those which he and his brothers and sisters invented for themselves by naming different parts of Elmwood after cities of the world and spending thus with their imagination the small geographical earnings of the schoolroom.

The first school which the boy attended was a dame school, which appears to have been somewhere not far from the river in the neighborhood of what is now Brattle Square. Once in verse and once in prose Lowell recorded his childish experience in and out of this primary school. In his introduction to “The Biglow Papers,” first series, is a fragment beginning--

“Propped on the marsh, a dwelling now, I see The humble school-house of my A, B, C;”

and in his “New England Two Centuries Ago” there is a passage often read and quoted, which is a faithful picture of the author’s life within and without one of the “martello towers that protect our coast,” but he does not add the personal touch of his own return from school, whistling as he came in sight of his home as a signal to the mother watching for him. A bit of childish sport may be added from an omitted extract from the same fragmentary poem, since it brings to view two of Lowell’s boy companions:--

“Where Felton puns in English or in Greek, And shakes with laughter till the timbers creak, The ‘Idle Man’ once lived; the man I knew, The author dwelt beyond my boyish view. There once, the college butler aided, too, My pony through his own front door he drew, I on her back, and strove with winning airs To coax my shaggy Shetlander upstairs; Rejected hospitality! the more He tugged in front, she backed toward the door. Had oats been offered, she had climbed at least Up to the garret, canny Scottish beast. Across the way, where once an Indian stood O’er Winthrop’s door, carved horribly in wood, On the green duck-pond’s sea, where water fails In droughty times, replenished then with pails, Richard the Second from their moorings cast His shingle fleets, and served before the mast, While Ned and I consigned a well-culled store Of choicest pebbles for the other shore. Then walked at leisure to the antipodes, Changing _en route_ to Chinese consignees.”

Both Richard and Edmund Dana were his neighbors and friends, and with these early playmates should be named William Story. To him, as to one who had journeyed with him “through the green secluded valley of boyhood,” he addressed his “Cambridge Thirty Years Ago.” Story and the two Higginsons, Thatcher and Thomas Wentworth, were the only day scholars with Lowell at the boarding-school, kept by Mr. William Wells, to which Lowell was sent to be prepared for entrance to college. Mr. Wells was an Englishman, who brought with him to this country attainments in scholarship which were disclosed in the making of a simple Latin grammar and in an edition of Tacitus. He engaged in publishing under the firm name of Wells & Lilly, but meeting with reverses, he opened a classical school in the old Fayerweather house in Cambridge. He was a man of robust and masterful habit, who kept up the English tradition of the rattan in school and manly sport out of doors. The school had its gentler side in the person of Mrs. Wells, to whom Lowell sent a copy of “The Vision of Sir Launfal” in 1866, with the words: “Will you please me by accepting this little book in memory of your constant kindness to a naughty little cub of a schoolboy more than thirty years ago? I hope you will forget his ill deserts as faithfully as he remembers how much he owes you.”

It was at the hands of Mr. Wells that Lowell received that severe drilling in Latin which was one of the traditions of English scholarship transported to New England by the early clergy, and reënforced from time to time by newcomers from England like Mr. Wells, elegant scholars like Mr. Dixwell, and stern disciplinarians like Dr. Francis Gardner, the latter two long holding the Boston Latin School fast bound to the old ways. Mr. George Ticknor Curtis, who was sixteen years old when Lowell was ten, at Mr. Wells’s school, in a reminiscence of that period says: “Mr. Wells always heard a recitation with the book in his left hand and a rattan in his right, and if the boy made a false quantity or did not know the meaning of a word, down came the rattan on his head. But this chastisement was never ministered to me or to ‘Jemmy Lowell.’ Not to me, because I was too old for it, and not to him because he was too young.” With his quickness of mind and linguistic agility, Lowell evidently acquired in school rather than in college a familiarity with Latin forms, to judge by the ease with which he handled the language later in mock heroics; his early letters, too, are sprinkled with Latin phrases, the well worn coin of the realm, it is true, but always jingling in his pocket.

The schoolroom to an imaginative boy is a starting point for mental rambles. Lowell studied the rime on the window panes as well as his Latin verses. From his readings with his elder sister, and out of his own fertile imagination, he told or made up stories for his young comrades. T. W. Higginson, recalling Lowell and Story, remembers “treading close behind them once, as they discussed Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene,’ which they had been reading, and which led us younger boys to christen a favorite play-place ‘the Bower of Bliss.’” Dr. Samuel Eliot, who was one of Mr. Wells’s pupils, was also one of the small boys who listened to Lowell’s imaginative tales. I remember nothing of them,” he told Dr. Hale, except one, which rejoiced in the central interest of a trap in the playground, which opened to subterranean marvels of various kinds.”

“I can conceive of no healthier reading for a boy, or girl either, than Scott’s novels,” says Lowell, and he had the good fortune to be introduced early to Scott, and to read him as a contemporary. When he was nine his mother gave him, one can guess with what Scottish eagerness, the “Tales of a Grandfather,” which had just been published; and the then great event of American history was not so remote but that the freckle-faced boy who lived in a house once a Tory’s, then a soldier’s hospital, and then the home of a governor of the commonwealth and vice-president of the United States, would have lively reminders of it in the veterans who turned out at muster, and in the rude village drama of the “Cornwallis.”[14]

Yet, as Lowell himself reminds us, the Cambridge of his boyhood, besides possessing the common characteristics of New England towns, had its special flavor from the presence there of the oldest college of New England. Like the Cambridge boys of to-day, he hovered about the skirts of Alma Mater, took in, year by year, the entertainment offered by the college at its annual Commencement festival,--a greater raree-show then than now,--and made the acquaintance of the queer misshapen minds that by some occult law of nature always seem to be found in the shade of a college town, as if the “Muses’ factories” must necessarily have their refuse heaps not far away. A boy who grows up in a college town, especially when the community and the town are somewhat isolated, hardly knows the wonder and gravity which assail one who comes up to college from a distant home. In Lowell’s youth Harvard College and Cambridge town were singularly isolated in spite of their geographical nearness to Boston. Once an hour a long omnibus, and twice an hour a short one, jogged back and forth between the village and the city, picking up passengers in a leisurely fashion, and going longer or shorter distances from the college yard, according to the importunity of the passenger or the good-nature of the driver. An hourly stage to the city meant much deliberation in making the journey, and Cambridge was by no means the bedchamber for city merchants and professional men which it has since become.

When Lowell entered Harvard from Mr. Wells’s school in 1834, the college was surrounded by houses and gardens which marked almost the bounds of the town as one went toward Boston. The college itself was within a straggling enclosure still known by the homely name of the Yard, and occupied seven buildings therein; the library was in Harvard Hall, for Gore Hall was not begun till just as Lowell was graduating. The chapel was a dignified apartment of University Hall, designed by the architect Charles Bulfinch, who left his mark in Boston and its neighborhood upon buildings which stand in serene reproof of much later architecture. In the chapel also were held the academic functions, one of which, Exhibition Day, was observed three times a year; on two of these occasions the Governor of the Commonwealth attended, and on all of them the President of the college in his academic dress, the Fellows, the Overseers, and the Faculty marched to the chapel with ceremony, there to listen, along with an indulgent crowd of parents and friends, to the youthful speakers, who discoursed in Latin or in English, but were always introduced in Latin.

During Lowell’s college course there were only about two hundred and twenty undergraduates, his own class entering with sixty-eight members and graduating with sixty-five; the whole list of the faculty, including the schools of law, divinity, and medicine, did not exceed thirty-four, and not half of these constituted the college faculty proper. But among them were names known then and later beyond the college enclosure. Felton was professor of Greek, Peirce of mathematics, and Ticknor of modern languages, to be succeeded, when Lowell was nearly through his college course, by Longfellow. Francis Sales, graphically set off by Lowell in his “Cambridge Thirty Years Ago,” was instructer [_sic_] in French and Spanish, and Pietro Bachi in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. The president of the college was Josiah Quincy, and when thirty years later Lowell reviewed his friend Edmund Quincy’s life of his father, in the article entitled “A Great Public Character,” he referred with a fine note of sincere feeling to the association with him which he bore away from his college days, in a passage which reflects a little of Lowell as well as pictures the figure of the president.

“Mr. Quincy had many qualities calculated to win him favor with the young,--that one above all which is sure to do it, indomitable pluck. With him the dignity was in the man, not in the office. He had some of those little oddities, too, which afford amusement without contempt, and which rather tend to heighten than diminish personal attachment to superiors in station. His punctuality at prayers, and in dropping asleep there, his forgetfulness of names, his singular inability to make even the shortest off-hand speech to the students,--all the more singular in a practised orator,--his occasional absorption of mind, leading him to hand you his sand-box instead of the leave of absence he had just dried with it, the old-fashioned courtesy of his ‘Sir, your servant,’ as he bowed you out of his study, all tended to make him popular. He had also a little of what is somewhat contradictorily called dry humor, not without influence in his relations with the students. In taking leave of the graduating class, he was in the habit of paying them whatever honest compliment he could. Who, of a certain year which shall be nameless, will ever forget the gravity with which he assured them that they were ‘the _best-dressed_ class that had passed through college during his administration’? How sincerely kind he was, how considerate of youthful levity, will always be gratefully remembered by whoever had occasion to experience it.”

The change from school to college, as I have intimated, was not such as to strike very deeply into the boy’s consciousness. He continued for a while to live at his father’s house, a mile away from the Yard, though he had a room of his own nearer, at Mr. Hancock’s in Church Street, and in the latter part of his course lived there altogether. Going to college, thus, was very much like going to school as he had always done. The college methods were not markedly different from those of a preparatory school. There were lessons to learn and recite; the text-book was the rule, and the fixed curriculum suggested no break from the ordinary course of formal instruction. Except in the senior year, there was a steady attention to Greek, Latin, and mathematics. In the first year Tytler’s History was studied; in the second year English grammar and modern languages were added; in the third year, besides Greek and Latin and modern languages, Paley’s Evidences, Butler’s Analogy, and chemistry appeared on the list, and themes and forensics were introduced. In the senior year the ancient languages were dropped, and natural philosophy, intellectual philosophy, astronomy, and political economy took their place, with lectures on rhetoric, criticism, theology, Story on the Constitution of the United States, mineralogy, and anatomy--a somewhat confused jumble on paper in the catalogue of the time, which it is to be hoped was reduced to some sort of order, though it looks as if the senior were suddenly released from too monotonous a course and bidden take a rapid survey of a wide range of intellectual pursuits.

In his school days Lowell had been under the close surveillance given to boys, and the partial freedom of college life brought with it a little more sense of personal rights, but throughout the four years he was boyish, frolicsome, very immature in expression, and disposed, in a fitful fashion, to assert an independence of authority. He won a “detur” in his sophomore year, and in a public exhibition in the first term of his senior year he took part in a conference bearing the labored title: “Ancient Epics, considered as Pictures of Manners, as Proofs of Genius, or as Sources of Entertainment,” but both in his sophomore and senior years he was at first privately and then publicly admonished for excessive absence from recitations and for general negligence in themes, forensics, and recitations. There was enough of the boy left in him at the beginning of his senior year to require the fine of a dollar for cutting seats in the recitation room; and the college discipline of the day frowned on Lowell as on others for wearing a brown coat on Sunday. It is difficult for one scanning the records of the faculty at that time to avoid a feeling of commiseration for these excellent gentlemen and scholars sitting, as if they were boarding-school masters, in serious consultation over the pranks and petty insubordination of a parcel of boys.

Meanwhile in his own fashion Lowell was stumbling on his way, gradually finding himself. He was a reader, as we have seen, before he went to college, and he continued to find his delight in books. “A college training,” he once said, is an excellent thing; but after all, the better part of every man’s education is that which he gives himself,”[15] and in college he was following, without much reflection, the instincts of his nature, both as regards his reading and his writing. His letters show him a schoolboy when attending to the enforced tasks of the college, with occasional outbreaks of enthusiasm for the more distinctly literary studies, but somewhat of an independent voyager when launched on the waters of general literature.

It was in the large leisure of his college days that he formed an acquaintance which ripened into intimacy with the great writers and with those secondary lights that often suit better the ordinary mood. “I was first directed to Landor’s works,” he says, in 1888, when introducing some letters of Landor to the readers of his own day, “by hearing how much store Emerson set by them. I grew acquainted with them fifty years ago in one of those arched alcoves in the old college library in Harvard Hall, which so pleasantly secluded without wholly isolating the student. That footsteps should pass across the mouth of his Aladdin’s Cave, or even enter it in search of treasure, so far from disturbing only deepened his sense of possession. These faint rumors of the world he had left served but as a pleasant reminder that he was the privileged denizen of another beyond ‘the flaming bounds of space and time.’ There, with my book lying at ease and in the expansion of intimacy on the broad window-shelf, shifting my cell from north to south with the season, I made friendships, that have lasted me for life, with Dodsley’s ‘Old Plays,’ with Cotton’s ‘Montaigne,’ with Hakluyt’s ‘Voyages,’ among others that were not in my father’s library. It was the merest browsing, no doubt, as Johnson called it, but how delightful it was!”[16]

The record of books withdrawn by Lowell from the college library during his four years’ residence would of course furnish a very incomplete account of his reading, since, as intimated above, he had his father’s well-stocked shelves, and access apparently to the alcoves of Harvard Hall. The record, nevertheless, is interesting as showing the range and the drift of his reading. Some of this reading is ancillary to his task work, but much is simply the gratification of an expanding taste, and covers such diverse works as Terence, Hume, the Anthologia Græca, Smollett, Hakluyt, Boileau, Scott, and Southey. It is noticeable that as his college course proceeded the emphasis was laid on the greater English literature.

Nor was he without the excellent ambition to collect a library of his own. “It is just fifty-one years ago,” he said 7 May, 1885, when unveiling the bust of Coleridge in Westminster Abbey, “that I became the possessor of an American reprint of Galignani’s edition of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats in one volume. It was a pirated book, and I trust I may be pardoned for the delight I had in it.”[17] His letters to his college friends during these years contain frequent references to the purchases of books he had made and the gifts from his family which he prized. He has been given a beautiful edition of Milton, which he had looked forward to buying; he has been purchasing Samuel Butler and Beattie; a new edition of Shakespeare has been announced, which he means to buy if he can afford it; he has had a “detur” of Akenside; he has laid his hands on a “very pretty edition of Cowper;” and his frequent quotations from the poets show the easy familiarity he had won in his reading.

Besides his continued friendship with Story and other neighbors’ sons, Lowell formed new alliances among his college mates, and in his correspondence with two of them in this period he discloses something of his character and tastes. One of these friends, W. H. Shackford, was his senior by two or three years, and Lowell’s letters to him show the boy’s side turned toward one whom he regarded with the friendly reverence which sixteen pays to nineteen. On his part, Shackford seems to have taken a violent fancy to Lowell, to have made indeed the first overtures of friendship. To this sager companion, who was a senior when Lowell was a freshman, he reveals his more studious side. Shackford left college to teach at Phillips Exeter Academy, and Lowell wrote to him from Cambridge and Boston, not much in the way of college gossip, but of his own studies, the treasures he picked up at book-stores or auctions, his plans for reading and travel, and brief comments on his instructors. Through the correspondence runs an affectionate current, an almost lover-like tone of self-exculpation, the warm feeling of a boy toward his mentor, and an impulse to make him somewhat of a confessor.[18]

The earliest of these letters was written in the middle of July, 1835, when Shackford had gone to Portsmouth. It was a hasty shot fired after his departing friend to assure him of his affection, written under stress of headache from his brother’s office, and was followed the same day by a longer letter. “When I wrote to you this morning,” he says, “I was laboring under three very bad complaints enumerated in my other letter. I was then at my brother’s office. I am now at home, sitting by an open window, with my coat off, my stock do., with Coleridge’s works before me wherewith to consume the rest of the day, and also as cool as a cucumber. Shack, if you are a victim to any _other_ disease, and are lying tossing with pain under some physician’s prescription (such, for instance, as the pleasing draught concocted by Wm. Rufus, or the Red King, composed of the following truly delectable compounds, viz., ‘rue, tansy, horehound, coltsfoot, hyssop, and camomile flowers, farther enriched by a handful of earthworms, half a dozen wood lice and four centipedes’), if, I say, you labor under all these misfortunes, devoutly thank your more fav’ring stars, that you are not the yawning victim of ennui, a disease which Æsculapius himself couldn’t cure, and which I therefore humbly opine to have been the disease of Achilles.... I hope you’ll be amused with this epistle (if perchance you are able to read it). But the fact is I can’t write anything serious to save my life. Answer this the very day you get it....”

At the end of the summer when more letters had passed between them, Lowell returned to his college work, and wrote from Cambridge a long letter dated 9 October, 1835, in reply to one long delayed. “My _dearest_ friend,” he writes, “I am rejoiced that you _have_ broken the long silence that existed between us, not because I should not have written to you first, but because it shows that you were not grievously offended with me. I willingly confess myself to blame, but not in so great a degree as you may suppose. I _did_ go to the White Mountains, and while travelling was not offended (do not use any stronger term) by not receiving any letters from you; on the contrary I expected none, for how could you have any knowledge of my ‘whereabouts’ unless I wrote to you as I went along and told you where to direct? This I did not do, nor did I write any letters on my journey except one which I was obliged to write to Bob because I _promised_ him I would. After I got home I was taken sick and kept my bed a week without being able to sleep most of the time on account of a raging sick headache which hardly allowed me to move. The day I saw you was the third time I had been out. I did go down, however, three times to see you, but could not find you, or saw you walking with somebody I did not know, and then I did not like to speak to you. Did you or could you think that I would forfeit your friendship, the most precious (because I believe it to be the truest) I ever enjoyed, because you did not find it convenient to write to me? I hope you will not think that I say all this because I am _ashamed_ to treat you coldly, or not to answer you. I am sure of one thing, that I have no such opinion of you. Your letter, Shack, was a _delight_ to me (though I am not ashamed to confess that it [made] me cry)....

“I like Prof. Channing very much indeed, inasmuch as I sit where I can see his marks, and he has given me an 8 every recitation this term except once, and then he gave me 7. I went up to ask him something so as to see whether I was not mistaken (as he makes a 6 something like his 8’s) and I found on the paper exactly what I expected. I have written one theme and got but two marks on the margin, one for a change required in the sentence, and another was a straight line drawn under the word ‘to,’ and also marked on the margin. Tell me whether you think this is good, as you have experienced. I study quite hard this term. I get on in German astonishingly; it comes quite easy to me now.... I have written the longest letter I ever wrote in my life. I translated an ode of Horace into poetry the other day, and it was pretty good. Mathematics are my only enemies now.... I hope I may subscribe myself your _dear_ friend.”

A month later he writes his friend a lively account of a town and gown row, and notes his progress in reading Shakespeare. “I was surprised on looking over Shakespeare to find that I had read all his plays but two or three, among them ‘Hamlet.’ Only think, I haven’t read Hamlet.’ I will go at it instanter.”

At the beginning of 1836, on returning to college after the holidays, he writes with a boyish bibliomaniac enthusiasm of the Milton and Coleridge which had been given him, and passes into comment on the books he is reading and those he means to buy. He grows more literary and political in the subjects of his letters, disclosing already not only a warm interest in public affairs, but a generous judgment. “I suppose you heard of the Seminoles massacring, as it is called, those companies of American troops. I think they are in the right of it; by ‘they’ I mean the Seminoles. Not much danger of war with France now.” Then follows an odd jumble of frank confessions of his likes and dislikes for his fellows, and his boyish passions, with a return to his hunt for books in special editions.

His letter of 22 April, 1836, is taken up with a long discussion in a semi-philological vein of love and friendship, but what would strike a reader of these letters most is the distinct change which now takes place in the handwriting, which has passed from a not always neat copy-book hand to one which suggests the delicacy of the hand he afterward wrote, though not its elegance; it is still constrained with the air of being the result of close attention. These gradual changes in style of handwriting rarely fail to mark a maturing of character, and it is interesting to observe, in Lowell’s case, how they register a long period of vacillation and immaturity.

There is a gap of nearly a year in this correspondence as preserved, and the next letter, under date of 26 February, 1837, is filled with extracts from a long poem he is writing, in Spenserian stanza, and even occasionally with a word borrowed from Spenser; but the spirit that stirs the lines is Campbell. The theme is an imaginary journey up the Hudson, and West Point suggests the two stanzas:

“Follow this narrow path to where the grass Grows fresher on yon gently-rising mound, To that lone brook, whose ripples as they pass Spread to the air a sleep-compelling sound; Here, Poland’s hero erst a refuge found. Go ask whose good right arm hurl’d back the slave, When Russia’s eagle o’er his country frown’d, Who led her little band of patriots brave; And weeping Freedom points to Kosciusko’s grave.

“Spirit of Freedom! who didst erst inspire Our nation ground beneath oppression’s sway, With trust in God, with thine own holy fire; Who nerv’dst the mother fond to send away Her first-born boy to brave the bloody fray, Bid him farewell, with full averted eyes, Ne ask, though longing, for a moment’s stay, Still hover o’er us, if thou didst not rise With Washington’s pure spirit to thy native skies!”

The other correspondent whose letters from Lowell are preserved was George Bailey Loring, a boy of his own age, the son of a clergyman who was Dr. Lowell’s friend, so that the friendship partook of an hereditary character; with him Lowell had frank intimacy during their college days and in the years immediately following. Their ways in life separated, and they had less community of interests and tastes when they came to manhood. Dr. Loring went early into public life and held various offices, being Commissioner of Agriculture at one time and at another United States Minister to Portugal.

In this fuller series of letters which is largely contained in Mr. Norton’s two volumes, Lowell is the frank, unformed boy, giving vent to nonsense, a lad’s hasty impulse, and the foolery which goes on in the name of sentiment. The equality of age created a different relation between them from that which Lowell bore to Shackford, and the familiarity of their intercourse called out all manner of intellectual pranks and youthful persiflage. The jingle and lively verses which Lowell threw out for the amusement of his comrade show him playing carelessly with the instrument which he was already beginning to discover as fitting his hand.

Lowell’s unaffected interest in boyish things is much more apparent in these random letters than in the more careful epistles to his older friend, though he is by no means silent on the side of his intellectual life. In his first letter, dated 23 July, 1836, he talks about the things that two college boys have on their minds at the beginning of vacation. “You must excuse me if this be not a very long or entertaining epistle, as I am writing from my brother’s office (with a very bad pen) in a great hurry. I shall not go to Canada and shall not start for P[ortsmouth] probably for three weeks. My circular came on last night, 14 prayers, _56_ recitations, whew! The class supper was glorious, toasts went off very well. Those about Parker and the Temperance Society were most applauded. I am going to join the ‘Anti-Wine’ I think. The ‘Good Schooner Susan, R. T. S. L. owner and master,’ will make an excursion to Nahant this day. _Distinguished_ Passenger etc. We shall go to church at Nahant Sunday and return Monday morning. By the way I ‘made up’ with ---- and ---- at the supper. I had a seat _reserved_ (!) for me (as an officer) on the right hand of the distinguished president (?) A prettier table I never saw.”

The letters to his college friends were naturally written mainly in vacation time, and in Christmas week of the same year, 1836, he writes: “I am going to a ball to-night at the house of a young lady whom I never heard of.... I’ve begun and written about forty lines of my H. P. C.[19] prœmium. I shall immortalize I----k W----. I extol him to the skies and _pari passu_ depreciate myself.” He went to the ball, and a few days later wrote: “I think I told you I was going to a party or ball (call it what you will): well, I went, made my bow, danced, talked nonsense with young ladies who could talk nothing but nonsense, grew heartily tired and came away. I saw a great many people make fools of themselves, and charitably took it for granted that I did the same.... I may add something in the morning, so no more from your aching headed and perhaps splenetic, but still affectionate friend, J. R. L.”

In these letters Lowell twits his friend with his attentions to girls, and intersperses his jibes with poor verses; he has become a zealous autograph hunter, and the letters he laid his hands on in his father’s house from home and foreign notabilities illustrate the wide connections of the family, and the part it had had in the great world. In the midst of it all he will burst forth into almost passionate expression of his love for nature and his strong attachment to his birthplace and its neighborhood; and again quote freely from the books he is reading, and tell of the progress he is making in his more serious poetical ventures, and the books he is adding to his library. He made no boast of immunity when he laughed at his friend for too much susceptibility. Here is a passage from a letter written in the summer of 1837, when he was closing his junior year:--

... “Didn’t I have a glorious time yesterday? That I did if smiles from certain lips I

‘prize Above almost, I don’t know what, on earth’

could make a day glorious. Excuse me for quoting my own nonsense, but ’twas more apt than anything I could think of.... Imagine yourself by the side of a young lady the perfection of beauty, virtue, modesty, etc., etc., in whom you entertain a pleasing interest, and you may form a ‘faint imagining’ of my situation. I am not calm yet. In fact, every time I think of her eyes--those eyes! Guido never could have conceived her. Well, a truce with all recollections when there is no hope.”

A month later he gave a brief account of Commencement to his friend, and then speaks of a letter his brother Rob had received from their sister, then in Glasgow. Lowell’s father, mother, and sister Rebecca went to Europe early in the summer of 1837. They were gone three years, and during that time the young collegian found in his brother Charles his nearest friend and adviser; his house indeed was the student’s home when he was not in college, and his wife was the best of sisters to him. Mrs. Anna Cabot Lowell was herself a woman of fine culture and of unwonted intellectual power. At a later period than this she opened a school for girls, which is looked upon by many now in mature life with warm gratitude. She edited a choice collection of poems for the reading of schoolgirls, and compiled also a little volume of suggestive thoughts called “Seed Grain.” Dr. Lowell, meanwhile, parted from his son with parental solicitude, and wrote him on the eve of sailing a letter which is quaintly expressive of his own ingenuous nature and of the simplicity of the day, and slightly indicative of his son’s weaknesses as they appeared to a father’s eyes:--

NEW YORK, May 29th, 1837.

MY DEAR SON,--I wish you to write us once a month, making an arrangement with Robert not to write at the same time he does. You know the necessity for economy, and you know that I shall never deny you, but from necessity, what will afford you pleasure. I shall direct Charles to pay you half a dollar a week. If you are one of the first eight admitted to the Φ Β Κ, $1.00 per week, as soon as you are admitted. If you are not, to pay you 75 cents per week as soon as you are admitted. If I find my finances will allow it, I shall buy you something abroad. If you graduate one of the first five in your class, I shall give you $100 on your graduation. If one of the first ten, $75. If one of the first twelve, $50. If the first or second scholar, $200. If you do not miss any exercises unexcused, you shall have Bryant’s ‘Mythology,’ or any book of equal value, unless it is one I may specially want.

My dear child, I wish you only to be faithful to yourself. You can easily be a fine scholar, and therefore in naming the smallest sum for your weekly expenses, I feel no hesitation, as it depends on yourself, with very little exertion, to secure the second highest sum, and with not more exertion than is perfectly compatible with health and sufficient recreation to secure the largest. _Use regular exercise. Associate with those who will exert the best influence upon you._ Say your prayers and read your Bible _every day_. I trust you have made up all your exercises. _If not, make them up in one week_, and let the president know it. Do not get anything charged except with Charles’s knowledge and approbation. I have given him instructions respecting your expenses....

Your affectionate father.

Dr. Lowell wrote many letters home and recounted the pleasant experiences of the little party in Scotland and England, their foregathering with the Traill family, and the visits they paid to Wordsworth, Southey, Sir David Brewster, and others. But he does not forget to continue his admonitions and encouragements, as he receives his son’s reports of his doings. “Your office,” he writes from London, 13 December, 1837, “as one of the editors of the ‘Harvardiana’ may give you a greater familiarity in composition. Be careful that it does not abstract you from severer pursuits, and that your style is not trifling, but the subject and the manner useful and dignified. I do not allow myself to doubt of your furnishing the criterion of good standing which a membership of the Φ Β Κ will furnish, and I trust you will leave college with a high part and a high reputation.

“God bless you, my dear child. _Aim high, very high._ I feel its importance for you more than ever.”

_Harvardiana_, to which Dr. Lowell refers, was the college magazine of the day, started just as Lowell entered college, and naturally inviting a scribbler like Lowell to become one of the editors when his senior year came round. His associates were Rufus King, who later attained a leading position in the bar of Cincinnati, and wrote “Ohio” in the _American Commonwealths_ series; George Warren Lippitt, afterward for a long time secretary of legation at Vienna; Charles Woodman Scates, a South Carolinian lawyer of great promise, who died young, and Nathan Hale, an older brother of Dr. Edward Everett Hale, and later a strong figure in Boston journalism. Lowell contributed twenty-four pieces in prose and verse, translations from the German, a bit of moralizing in the minor key which youth likes to pursue, some fierce sardonic verses, some sentiment, and then a mockery of sentiment. For the most part his contributions are the “larks” of students given to literature. With his associates he followed the example set by _Blackwood_, and imitated by the _Knickerbocker_ and similar magazines, aiming at the sauciness and jocularity which were assumed to be the ordinary temper of editors gathered about their table, whereas in actual experience such editors are painfully at their wits’ end. What most strikes one in these varied contributions is the apparent facility with which everything is thrown off, sense and nonsense coming with equal ease, but nonsense predominating.

Lowell’s letters to his friends in his last year at college have frequent reference to his willing and unwilling labors on this “perryodical,” as he was wont to call it in mimicry of Dr. Walker. In August, 1837, he sends Shackford a circular inviting subscriptions to _Harvardiana_, and on the blank leaf writes one of the imitative letters in verse, for which he had a penchant at this time:--

“Dear Shack, a circular I send ye The which I hope will not offend ye; If sae, ’t wad tak’ Auld Nick to mend ye O’ sic an ill But, gin ye are as when I kenn’d ye It never will!

“Gin ye could get ae body’s name ’T wad add forever to his fame To help to kindle up the flame O’ sic a journal, Whose reputation, though quite lame, _Will_ be eternal.

“Now if ye do your vera best In this waist glorious behest, By gettin’ names and a’ the rest I need na tell Yese thus fulfil the airn’st request O’ J. R. L.”

“King has been up here,” he writes from Elmwood, 22 December, 1837, “for an article for the ‘Perry,’ but was unsuccessful in the attempt. The fact is, it is impossible to read Lockhart’s ‘Life of Scott’ and attend to my illustrious nephew, ‘the corporal,’ who is a very prototype of Jack Falstaff, and write an article which requires such deep study and abstraction.”

The magazine was a part of that spontaneous literary activity which is pretty sure to find vent in college life outside of the class room, in independent reading, in societies sometimes secret, sometimes public, and in weekly, monthly, or quarterly journals. Lowell, with his growing consciousness of literary faculty and his naturally vagarious impulses, turned aside from the set tasks of college, as we have seen, and allowed himself to be indifferent to the routine imposed by college regulations. There are always men in college who undertake to be independent while living in it; sometimes the instinct is wise, sometimes it is merely the impulse of an indolent or conceited nature, but college authorities, like most constitutional governors, are bound to take more account of law than arbitrary and irresponsible rulers are, and their severity falls indiscriminately on the just and unjust. Lowell had made himself amenable to discipline on this score, but he might have escaped with reprimands only, had he not committed a breach of propriety in chapel which could not be overlooked. Such, at least, is the recollection of one of his college mates writing long afterward to Mr. T. W. Higginson, who prints his letter in “Old Cambridge.”

The circumstantial account given in this letter has a plausible air, and may be wholly true, but if so, it was probably the final occasion rather than the cause of Lowell’s suspension. The record of the Faculty is somewhat more general in its explanation. “25 June, 1838. Voted that Lowell, senior, on account of continued neglect of his college duties be suspended till the Saturday before Commencement, to pursue his studies with Mr. Frost of Concord, to recite to him twice a day, reviewing the whole of Locke’s ‘Essay’ [On the Human Understanding], and studying also Mackintosh’s ‘Review of Ethical Philosophy,’ to be examined in both on his return, and not to visit Cambridge during the period of his suspension.”

Lowell seems to have taken his exile philosophically. The fact that he would not be able to read the class poem he had been chosen to give did not prevent him from writing it, and the isolation of his life gave him plenty of time for working at it. The mild discipline of “rustication” included, as the record shows, the requisite amount of study, and Concord, to which he was sent for a couple of months of study and reflection, was only fifteen miles from Cambridge. The Rev. Barzillai Frost, to whose oversight he was committed and with whom he lodged, was a young man, recently graduated from the Harvard Divinity School, and Mrs. Frost endeared herself to the young culprit by her affectionate care. In a speech which Lowell made at Concord, on the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the town, he introduced this slight reminiscence of his work with Mr. Frost:--

“In rising to-day I could not help being reminded of one of my adventures with my excellent tutor when I was in Concord. I was obliged to read with him ‘Locke on the Human Understanding.’ My tutor was a great admirer of Locke, and thought he was the greatest Englishman that ever lived, and nothing pleased him more, consequently, than now and then to cross swords with Locke in argument. I was not slow, you may imagine, to encourage him in this laudable enterprise. Whenever a question arose between my tutor and Locke, I always took Locke’s side. I remember on one occasion, although I cannot now recall the exact passage in Locke,--it was something about continuity of ideas,--my excellent tutor told me that in that case Locke was quite mistaken in his views. My tutor said: ‘For instance, Locke says that the mind is never without an idea; now I am conscious frequently that my mind is without any idea at all.’ And I must confess that that anecdote came vividly to my mind when I got up on what Judge Hoar has justly characterized as the most important part of an orator’s person.”

Lowell knew something of Emerson when he went to Concord. His letters show him before that time going to hear him lecture in Boston, and years afterward he recalled with fervor the impression made upon him by Emerson’s address before the Φ Β Κ in Lowell’s junior year. It “was an event,” he says, “without any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent! It was our Yankee version of a lecture by Abelard, our Harvard parallel to the last public appearance of Schelling.”[20] But in 1838 Emerson had published little, his fame resting mainly on his public lectures and addresses. In the address at Concord, quoted above, Lowell records a memory of the personal relations which he then established with the elder poet:--

“I am not an adopted son of Concord. I cannot call myself that. But I can say, perhaps, that under the old fashion which still existed when I was young, I was ‘bound out’ to Concord for a period of time; and I must say that she treated me very kindly. I then for the first time made the acquaintance of Mr. Emerson, and I still recall with a kind of pathos, as Dante did that of his old teacher, Brunetto Latini, ‘La cara e buona imagine paterna,’ ‘The dear and good paternal image,’ which he showed me here; and I can also finish the quotation and say, ‘And shows me how man makes himself eternal.’ I remember he was so kind to me--I, rather a flighty and exceedingly youthful boy, as to take me with him on some of his walks, particularly a walk to the cliffs, which I shall never forget.”

Lowell formed at Concord the friendship which lasted for life with E. R. Hoar, and the lady who was to be Judge Hoar’s wife. These two indeed seemed to be excepted in his mind from the Concord people whom he met. He was plainly, as his letters show, in a restless mood, dissatisfied with himself, going through his appointed tasks with the obedience which was habitual, and writing, as the impulse took him, on his Class Poem, but moody, irritable, and chafing at the bonds which held him. There was the uncomfortable consciousness of serving out his time at Concord for a momentary jest, but there was also the profounder unrest which came from the friction of discipline with the awakening of powers not yet fully understood or determined. A few passages from his letters to G. B. Loring will partially disclose the way he tossed himself about.

July 1, 1838.

You mustn’t expect so long a letter from me as the one you favored me with (and I hope sincerely you’ll favor me with many more such (for nothing is more pleasant to me than a friend’s letters) (except himself) (there, I have got into one of my parentheses, which I can’t help to save my life--damnation! I’m only making the matter worse! so I’ll begin again.... This appears to be a pretty decent sort of a place--but I’ve no patience talking about. I shall fly into a passion on paper, and then--as Hamlet says--then what? You can’t guess, now you know you can’t! Why, I should be apt to “tear my passion to tatters.” Pretty good, eh! for an un-Sheridanic one? Well, as I was saying, the poem hasn’t progressed (they say that’s a Yankee word; it’s a damned good word, as most Yankee things are) a line since I left the shades of Alma Mater. I want the spirit up here, I want

‘Mine ancient chair, whose wide embracing arms,’ etc.

I shall take to smoking again for very spite. The only time I have felt the flow of song was when I heard the bull-frogs in the river last night....

I shall do my best to please Mr. F. since I find he does his best to please me and make me comfortable; “that’s the ground I stand on.” I feel in a shocking humor, that is, not grouty (I’m not such a damned fool; no offence I hope), but cursed queer. I damn Concord, and as the man in a story I read somewhere who was shot in a duel pathetically exclaimed in his last struggle, I--“damn everything.”... I have written you more than I intended, have two more to write to-night, and 50 pages in MacIntosh.... Don’t for heaven’s sake think I write in such a hurry from affectation. I wish with all my heart it were so.

July 8.

... I don’t know that I shan’t get gloomy up here, and be obliged, like the gallant old Sir Hudibras’s sword,

“To eat into myself, for lack Of something else to cut and hack.”

Everybody almost is calling me indolent,”[21] “blind, dependent on my own powers” and “on fate.”... I acknowledge that I have been something of a dreamer and have sacrificed perchance too assiduously on that altar to the “unknown God,” which the Divinity has builded not with hands in the bosom of every decent man, sometimes blazing out clear with flame (like Abel’s sacrifice) heaven seeking, sometimes smothered with green wood and earthward like that of Cain. Lazy, quotha! I haven’t dug, ’tis true, but I have done as well, and “since my free soul was mistress of her choice and could of books distinguish her election,” I have chosen what reading I pleased and what friends I pleased, sometimes scholars and sometimes not....

July 12.

For the Campbell I trust I needn’t let my thanks stare me in the face, so I shall leave you to put yourself in my place and imagine them. If you see Scates tell him to write, or I shall--excommunicate, or something dreadful. If you happen to go down by the bath house I wish you would take a look after the skiff and write me about it. Because perhaps I might come down to the Supper in a wagon and bring it up; at any rate, there will be nobody there to take care of it when you leave (or rather to lay claim to it), and it may be lost, for which I should be sorry, for I hope to have considerable navigation out of her yet.

August 9.

I shall be free as a bird in a fortnight, and ’twill be the last Concord will ever see of me I fancy.... I am again in doubt whether to have my “Poem” printed or no. I haven’t written a line since I have been in this horrible place. I feel as queer as a woman does probably (unmarried of course) when she finds herself in what Dante calls “mezzo cammin del nostro vita.”... I’m homesick and all that sort of thing. Miss ---- being the only being I have actually sympathized with since I have been in Concord has made me feel like a fool. I must go down and see Emerson, and if he doesn’t make me feel _more_ like a fool it won’t be for want of sympathy _in that respect_. He is a good-natured man, in spite of his doctrines. He travelled all the way up from his house to bring me a book which had been sent to me _via_ him.

August 17.

The first eight pages of the “Poem” are probably printed by this time, and the proof on its winding way, as Charlie Foster would say to me. I wrote to the President requesting him to let me go home to-morrow, but haven’t yet received any answer, and doubt much whether I ever shall.

I don’t know what to do with Miss ----. She runs in my head and heart more than she has any right to, but then

A pair of black eyes Of a charming size And a lip so prettily curled, O! Are enough to capsize The intention wise Of any man in the world, O!

For a pretty smile Is a mighty wile For a heart, for a heart that is light, O! And a girl like a dove Makes a man fall in love, Though he knows that it isn’t right, O!

For love is a thing That will quit the lonely king To make sunny the cot of the peasant, O! And it folds its gauzy wing-- In short--it is a thing-- ’Tis a thing--that is deuced pleasant, O!

Oh a gentle heart Is the better part Of a lovely woman’s looks, O! And I totter on the brink Of love when I think, When I think, when I think of Miss B----, O!

For a thousand girls Have hair that curls, And a sort of expressive face, O! But it isn’t the hair Nor the genteel air-- ’Tis the heart that looks bright and gives grace, O!

Ay, lasses are many Without e’en a penny, But with hearts worth their weight in gold, O! Whom I’d sooner wed-- Yea, and sooner bed Than a princess rich, ugly, and old, O!

No bee e’er sucked honey From gold or silver money, But he does from the lovely flower, O! Then give me a spouse Without fortune, land, or house, And her charming self for a dower, O!

By Jove, I like that better than anything I’ve written for two years! I wrote it _con amore_ and _currente calamo_. ’Tis yours now, but by your leave I’ll copy it off, alter it a little and send it down as “a song” for _Harvardiana_, for which I protested I would write nothing O! Why, it’s good! It sings itself! I don’t think I shall alter anything but Miss B.’s name, for it ran off the end of my pen so that it must be better than I can make it. Why, I _like_ it, I do. There isn’t anything good in it either, except in the last passage. It has really put me in good spirits. Between Sunday and Wednesday I added about 250 lines to the “Poem.” It is not finished yet. I wish it were.

The Class Poem, which he printed since he was not permitted to be present at his class celebration, when he would have read it, is a somewhat haphazard performance, as Lowell intimates in his letters. He says naïvely in one of the notes to the poem, of which there is a liberal supply in an appendix, that he suddenly discovered his subject after he had begun writing, by happening to refer in an off hand way to Kant.

“Kant, happy name! change but the K to C, And I will wring my poem out of thee. Thanks, vast Immanuel! thy name has given The thing for which my brains so long have striven.

* * * * *

Cant be my theme, and when she fails my song, Her sister Humbug shall the lay prolong.”

The satire of a young collegian is apt to be pretty severe, and Lowell runs amuck of Carlyle, Emerson, the Abolitionists, the advocates of Woman’s Rights, and the Teetotallers. For the most part the poem runs along glibly in the decasyllabic verse so handy to familiar poetry, and though there are many lame lines, there are more instances of the clever distichs which Lowell knocked off so easily in later years than one would have guessed from the examples of his verse which appear in his early letters. Here, for example, are some of his lines on Carlyle:--

“Hail too, great drummer in the mental march, Teufelsdröckh! worthy a triumphal arch, Who send’st forth prose encumbered with jackboots, To hobble round and pick up raw recruits, And, able both to battle and to teach, Mountest thy silent kettledrum to preach. Great conqueror of the English language, hail! How Caledonia’s goddess must turn pale To hear the German-Græco-Latin flung In _Revolutions_ from a Scottish tongue!”

In the more serious and practical part of the poem there is an impassioned burst imitative of Campbell, in which he imagines the farewell words of the Cherokee Indians, who at this time, to his indignation, were being pushed westward from Georgia.

To the debit of his youthful zeal may be set down the lines on Emerson which were his footnote to the famous address to the Divinity School delivered 15 July, 1838:--

“Woe for Religion, too, when men, who claim To place a ‘Reverend’ before their name, Ascend the Lord’s own holy place to preach In strains that Kneeland had been proud to reach, And which, if measured by Judge Thacher’s scale, Had doomed their author to the county jail! When men just girding for the holy strife, Their hands just cleansed to break the bread of life, Whose souls, made whole, should never count it loss With their own blood to witness for the cross, Invite a man their Christian zeal to crown By preaching earnestly the gospel-down, Applaud him when he calls of earthly make That ONE who spake as never yet man spake, And tamely hear the anointed Son of God Made like themselves an animated clod!”

To the credit of his manliness may be set down, _per contra_, the following letter which he wrote after the publication of the poem: a letter, which, for all its boyish assumption of the _toga virilis_, has a ring of sincerity about it:--

CAMBRIDGE, Sept. 1st, 1838.

DEAR SIR,--In my class poem are a few lines about your “address.” My friends have expressed surprise that after I had enjoyed your hospitality and spoken so highly of you in private, I should have been so ‘ungrateful’ as ever to have written anything of the kind. Could I have ever dreamed that a man’s private character should interfere with his public relations, I had never blotted paper so illy. But I really thought that I was doing rightly, for I consider it as virtual a lie to hold one’s tongue as to speak an untruth. I should have written the same of my own brother. Now, sir, I trouble you with this letter because I think you a man who would think nowise the worse of me for holding up my head and speaking the truth at any sacrifice. That I could wilfully malign a man whose salt I had eaten, and whose little child I had danced on my knee,--he must be a small man who would believe so small a thing of his fellow.

But this word “ingratitude” is a very harsh and grating word, and one which I hope would never be laid to my charge since I stood at my mother’s knee and learnt the first very alphabet, as it were, of goodness. I hope that if you have leisure, sir, you will answer this letter and put me at rest. I hope you will _acquit_ me (for I do not still think there is aught to _forgive_ or _pardon_, and I trust _you_ will not after reading this letter) of all uncharitableness.

Of course no one can feel it as strongly as I do, for since my friends have hinted at this “ingratitude” I have felt a great deal, and scarcely dare to look at the Tennyson you lent me without expecting some of the devils on the cover to make faces at me.

I hope you will find time to answer this and that I may still enjoy your friendship and be able to take you by the hand and look you in the face, as honest man should to honest man.

I remain yours with respect, JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

P. S. I have sent with this a copy of my “poem”--if it be not too tiresome, you would perhaps think better of me, if you were to read it _through_. I am not silly enough to suppose that this can be of any importance to you (if, indeed, you ever heard of the passage I refer to), but it is of very great importance to me.

J. R. L.

Lowell’s own comment on the poem years after was in the lines:--

“Behold the baby arrows of that wit Wherewith I dared assail the woundless Truth! Love hath refilled the quiver, and with it The man shall win atonement for the youth.”[22]

In this the earliest of his acknowledged publications, as so often in his later poems, satire and sentiment jostle each other. The predominant note, indeed, is satire in the lofty tone of nineteen, but the invocation and the close are in a different strain. Here, too, there is the exaltation of a very young man, and one may read phrases which perhaps said more than Lowell meant to say; but it was a ruffled youth with which his college career closed, and this period of his life was not to know as yet any steadying force. It is not strange that he grasped at somewhat illusory phantoms in his eagerness to stay himself. Here are the invocation and epilogue:--

“Oh thou! to whom, where’er my footstep roam, My restless soul would spread its pinions home,-- Reality! more fair than any seeming E’er blest the fancy of an angel’s dreaming,-- Be thou my muse, in whose blue eye I see The heaven of my heart’s eternity! Oh, hover like a spirit at my side, In all my wanderings a heavenly guide, Then, if in Cant’s dim mists I lose my way, Thy blessed smile shall lead me back to day, And, when I turn me from the land of night, Thou, morning star of love, shalt herald light!

“Lady! whom I have dared to call my muse, With thee my day began, with thee shall end-- Thou can’st not such a poor request refuse To let thine image with its closing blend! As turn the flowers to the quiet dews, Fairest, so turns my yearning heart to thee, For thee it pineth--as the homesick shell Mourns to be once again beneath the sea-- Oh let thine eyes upon this tribute dwell, And think--one moment kindly think of me! Alone--my spirit seeks thy company, And in all beautiful communes with thine, In crowds--it ever seeks alone to be To dream of gazing in thy gentle eyne!”

After all, the irregular impulses of the class poem point to what is of more consequence, the beginning of Lowell’s manhood. Until the summer of 1837, he had been a happy-go-lucky boy, sunning himself in literature, in nature, and in his friends; then there set in a period when he was at odds with fortune, and a stirring of half-understood desires arose; the consciousness of power was struggling with the wilfulness of youth.