CHAPTER III

LITERARY WORK IN COLLEGE

“Harvardiana,” a college magazine which ran for four years, belongs exactly to the period of Lowell’s college life. Looking over it now, it seems to me like all the rest of them. That is, it is as good as the best and as bad as the worst.

There is not any great range for such magazines. The articles have to be short. And the writers know very little of life. All the same, a college magazine gives excellent training. Lowell was one editor of the fourth volume of “Harvardiana.” I suppose he then read proof for the first time, and in a small way it introduced him into the life of an editor,—a life in which he afterwards did a great deal of hard work, which he did extremely well, as we shall presently see.

The editorial board of the year before, from whose hands the five editors of the class of ’38 took “Harvardiana,” was a very interesting circle of young men. They were, by the way, classmates and friends of Thoreau, who lived to be better known than they; but I think he was not of the editorial committee. The magazine was really edited in that year entirely by Charles Hayward, Samuel Tenney Hildreth, and Charles Stearns Wheeler. Horatio Hale, the philologist, was in the same class and belonged to the same set. He was named as one of the editors. But he was appointed to Wilkes’s exploring expedition a year before he graduated,—a remarkable testimony, this, to his early ability in the lines of study in which he won such distinction afterwards. It is interesting and amusing to observe that his first printed work was a vocabulary of the language of some Micmac Indians, who camped upon the college grounds in the summer of 1834. Hale learned the language from them, made a vocabulary, and then set up the type and printed the book with his own hand. Hayward, Hildreth, and Wheeler, who carried on the magazine for its third volume, all died young, before the age of thirty. Hayward had written one or more of the lives in Sparks’s “American Biography,” Wheeler had distinguished himself as a Greek scholar here and in Europe, and Hildreth, as a young poet, had given promise for what we all supposed was to be a remarkable future.

To this little circle somebody addressed himself who wanted to establish a chapter of Alpha Delta Phi in Cambridge in 1836. Who this somebody was, I do not know. I wish I did. But he came to Cambridge and met these leaders of the literary work of the classes of ’37 and ’38, and among them they agreed on the charter members for the formation of the Alpha Delta Phi chapter at Harvard. The list of the members from the Harvard classes of 1837 and 1838 shows that these youngsters knew already who their men of letters were. It consists of fourteen names: John Bacon, John Fenwick Eustis, Horatio Hale, Charles Hayward, Samuel Tenney Hildreth, Charles Stearns Wheeler, Henry Williams, James Ivers Trecothick Coolidge, Henry Lawrence Eustis, Nathan Hale, Rufus King, George Warren Lippitt, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Woodman Scates.

This is no place for a history of Alpha Delta Phi. At the moment when the Phi Beta Kappa fraternity, the oldest of the confederated college societies, gave up its secrets, Alpha Delta Phi was formed in Hamilton College of New York. I shall violate none of her secrets if I say, what the history of literature in America shows, that, in the earlier days at least, interest in literature was considered by those who directed the society as a very important condition in the selection of its members.

At Cambridge, when Lowell became one of its first members, there was a special charm in membership. Such societies were absolutely forbidden by a hard and fast rule. They must not be in Harvard College. The existence of the Alpha Delta chapter, therefore, was not to be known, even to the great body of the undergraduates. It had no public exercises. There was no public intimation of meetings. In truth, if its existence had been known, everybody connected with it would have been severely punished, under the college code of that day.

This element of secrecy gave, of course, a special charm to membership. I ought to say that, after sixty years, it makes it more difficult to write of its history. I was myself a member in ’37, ’38, and ’39. Yet, in a somewhat full private diary which I kept in those days, I do not find one reference to my attendance at any meeting; so great was the peril, to my boyish imagination, lest the myrmidons of the “Faculty” should seize upon my papers and examine them, and should learn from them any fact regarding the history of this secret society.

But now, after sixty years, I will risk the vengeance of the authorities of the university. Perhaps they will take away all our degrees, honorary and otherwise; but we will venture. This very secret society, after it was well at work, may have counted at once twenty members,—seniors, juniors, and sophomores. They clubbed their scanty means and hired a small student’s room in what is now Holyoke Street, put in a table and stove and some chairs, and subscribed for the English quarterlies and Blackwood. This room was very near the elegant and convenient club-house owned by the society to-day, if indeed this do not occupy the same ground, as I think it does. Everybody had a pass-key. It was thus a place where you could loaf and be quiet and read, and where once a week we held our literary meetings. Of other meetings, the obligations of secrecy do not permit me to speak. One of my friends, the other day, said that his earliest recollection of Lowell was finding him alone in this modest club-room reading some article in an English review. What happened was that we all took much more interest in the work which the Alpha Delta provided for us than we did in most of the work required of us by the college.

At that time the conventional division of classes at Cambridge made very hard and fast distinctions between students of different classes. Alpha Delta broke up all this and brought us together as gentlemen; and, naturally, the younger fellows did their very best when they were to read in the presence of their seniors. I think, though I am not certain, that I heard Lowell read there the first draft of his papers on Old English Dramatists, which he published afterwards in my brother’s magazine, the “Boston Miscellany,” and which were the subject of the last course of lectures which he delivered. –– From this little group of Alpha Delta men were selected the editors of “Harvardiana” for 1837–38. I suppose, indeed, that in some informal way Alpha Delta chose them. They were Rufus King, afterwards a leader of the bar in Ohio; George Warren Lippitt, so long our secretary of legation at Vienna; Charles Woodman Scates, who went into the practice of law in Carolina; James Russell Lowell; and my brother, Nathan Hale, Jr. All of them stood, when chosen, in what we call the first half of the class. This meant that they were within the number of twenty-four students who had had honors at the several exhibitions up to that time. In point of fact, twenty-four was not half the class. But that phrase long existed; I do not know how long. Practically, to say of a graduate that he was in “the first half of his class” meant that at these exhibitions, or at Commencement, he had received some college honor.

I rather think that the average senior of that year approved this selection of editors, and he would have said in a general way that King and Lippitt were expected to do that heavy work of long eight-page articles which is supposed by boys to make such magazines respected among the graduates; that Scates was relied upon for critical work; that my brother was supposed to have inherited a faculty for editing, and that on him and Lowell, in the general verdict of the class, was imposed the privilege of furnishing the poetry for the magazine and making it entertaining. Of course it was expected that their year’s “Harvardiana” would be better than those of any before.

The five editors had the further privilege of assuming the whole pecuniary responsibility for the undertaking. How this came out I do not know; perhaps I never did. I do not think they ever printed three hundred copies. I do not think they ever had two hundred and fifty subscribers. The volume contains the earliest of Lowell’s printed poems, some of which have never been reprinted, and a copy is regarded by collectors as one of the exceptionally rare nuggets in our literary history.

When this choice of editors was made, I lived with my brother in Stoughton 22. In September, at the time when the first number was published, we had moved to Massachusetts 27, where I lived for two years. Lowell had always been intimate in our room, and from this time until the next March he was there once or twice a day. Indeed, it was a good editor’s room,—we called it the best room in college; and all of them made it their headquarters.

Unfortunately for my readers, the daguerreotype and photograph had not even begun in their benevolent and beneficent career. It was in the next year that Daguerre, in Paris, first exhibited his pictures. The French government rewarded him for his great discovery and published his process to the world. His announcements compelled Mr. Talbot, in England, to make public his processes on paper, which were the beginning of what we now call photography. I think my classmate, Samuel Longfellow, and I took from the window of this same room, Massachusetts 27, the first photograph which was taken in New England. It was made by a little camera intended for draughtsmen. The picture was of Harvard Hall, opposite. And the first portrait taken in Massachusetts was the copy in this picture of a bust of Apollo standing in the window of the college library, in Harvard Hall.

The daguerreotype was announced by Daguerre in January, 1839. He thus forced W.H. Fox Talbot’s hand, and he read his paper on photographic drawings on January 31 of that year. This paper was at once published, and Longfellow and I worked from its suggestions.

Rufus King afterwards won for himself distinction and respect as a lawyer of eminence in Cincinnati. He was the grandson of the great Rufus King, the natural leader of the Federalists and of the North in the dark period of the reign of the House of Virginia. Our Rufus King’s mother was the daughter of Governor Worthington, of Ohio. King had begun his early education at Kenyon College, but came to Cambridge to complete his undergraduate course, and remained there in the law school under Story and Greenleaf. He then returned to Cincinnati, where he lived in distinguished practice in his profession until his death in 1891. “His junior partners were many of them men in the first rank of political, judicial, and professional eminence. But he himself steadily declined all political or even judicial trusts until, in 1874, he became a member of the Constitutional Convention of Ohio. Over this body he presided. He did not shrink from any work in education. He was active in the public schools. He was the chief workman in creating the Cincinnati Public Library, and, as one of the trustees of the McMicken bequest, he nursed it into the foundation of the University of Cincinnati. In 1875 he became Dean of the Faculty of the Law School, and served in that office for five years. Until his death he continued his lectures on Constitutional Law and the Law of Real Property. No citizen of Cincinnati was more useful or more honored.”

Lowell was with Mr. King in the Cambridge law school.

Of the five editors, four became lawyers—so far, at least, as to take the degree of Bachelor of Laws at Cambridge. The fifth, George Warren Lippitt, from Rhode Island, remained in Cambridge after he graduated and studied at the divinity school.

There were other clergymen in his class, who attained, as they deserved, distinction afterwards. Lowell frequently refers in his correspondence to Coolidge, Ellis, Renouf, and Washburn. Lippitt’s articles in “Harvardiana” show more maturity, perhaps, than those of any of the others. He had entered the class as a sophomore, and was the oldest, I believe, of the five. For ten years, from 1842 to 1852, he was a valuable preacher in the Unitarian church, quite unconventional, courageous, candid, and outspoken. He was without a trace of that ecclesiasticism, which the New Testament writers would call accursed, which is the greatest enemy of Christianity to-day, and does more to hinder it than any other device of Satan. In 1852 Lippitt sought and accepted an appointment as secretary of legation to Vienna. He married an Austrian lady, and represented the United States at the imperial court there in one and another capacity for the greater part of the rest of his life. He died there in 1891.

Charles Woodman Scates, also, like King and Lippitt, entered the class after the freshman year. There was a tender regard between him and Lowell. When they graduated, Scates went to South Carolina to study law. But for his delicate health, I think his name would be as widely known in the Southern states as Rufus King’s is in the valley of the Ohio. I count it as a great misfortune that almost all of Lowell’s letters to him, in an intimate and serious correspondence which covered many years, were lost when the house in Germantown was burned where he spent the last part of his life. Fortunately, however, Mr. Norton had made considerable extracts from them in the volume of Lowell’s published letters. From one of these letters which has been preserved, I copy a little poem, which I believe has never been printed. Lowell writes:—

“I will copy you a midnight improvisation, which must be judged kindly accordingly. It is a mere direct transcript of _actual_ feelings, and _so far_ good:—

“What is there in the midnight breeze That tells of things gone by? Why does the murmur of the trees Bring tears into my eye? O Night! my heart doth pant for thee, Thy stars are lights of memory!

“What is there in the setting moon Behind yon gloomy pine, That bringeth back the broad high noon Of hopes that once were mine? Seemeth my heart like that pale flower That opes not till the midnight hour.

“The day may make the eyes run o’er From hearts that laden be, The sunset doth a music pour Round rock and hill and tree; But in the night wind’s mournful blast There cometh somewhat of the Past.

“In garish day I often feel The Present’s full excess, And o’er my outer soul doth steal A deep life-weariness. But the great thoughts that midnight brings Look calmly down on earthly things.

“Oh, who may know the spell that lies In a few bygone years! These lines may one day fill my eyes With Memory’s doubtful tears— Tears which we know not if they be Of happiness or agony.

“Open thy melancholy eyes, O Night! and gaze on me! That I may feel the charm that lies In their dim mystery. Unveil thine eyes so gloomy bright And look upon my soul, O Night!”

“Have you ever felt this? I have, many and many a time.”

Of my dear brother, Nathan Hale, Jr., I will not permit myself to speak at any length. We shall meet him once and again as our sketch of Lowell’s life goes on. It is enough for our purpose now that, though he prepared himself carefully for the bar, and, as a young man, opened a lawyer’s office, the most of his life, until he died in 1872, was spent in the work of an editor. Our father had been an editor from 1809, and of all his children, boys and girls, it might be said that they were cradled in the sheets of a newspaper.

My brother was the editor of the “Boston Miscellany” in 1841, when Lowell and Story of their class were his chief coöperators. From that time forward he served the Boston “Advertiser,” frequently as its chief; and when he died, he was one of the editors of “Old and New,” his admirable literary taste and his delicate judgment presiding over that discrimination, so terrible to magazine editors, in the accepting or rejecting of the work of contributors.

All of these five boys, or young men, were favorite pupils of Professor Edward Tyrrell Channing. When, in September, 1837, they undertook the publication of “Harvardiana,” Lowell was eighteen, Hale was eighteen, Scates, King, and Lippitt but little older.

With such recourse the fourth volume started. It cost each subscriber two dollars a year. I suppose the whole volume contained about as much “reading matter,” as a cold world calls it, as one number of “Harper’s Magazine.” These young fellows’ reputations were not then made. But as times have gone by, the people who “do the magazines” in newspaper offices would have felt a certain wave of languid interest if a single number of “Harper” should bring them a story and a poem and a criticism by Lowell; something like this from William Story; a political paper by Rufus King; with General Loring, Dr. Washburn, Dr. Coolidge, and Dr. Ellis to make up the number.

Lowell’s intimate relations with George Bailey Loring began, I think, even earlier than their meeting in college. They continued long after his college life, and I may refer to them better in another chapter.

The year worked along. They had the dignity of seniors now, and the wider range of seniors. This means that they no longer had to construe Latin and Greek, and that the college studies were of rather a broader scope than before. It meant with these young fellows that they took more liberty in long excursions from Cambridge, which would sacrifice two or three recitations for a sea-beach in the afternoon, or perhaps for an evening party twenty miles away.

Young editors always think that they have a great deal of unpublished writing in their desks or portfolios, which is of the very best type, and which, “with a little dressing over,” will bring great credit to the magazine. Alas! the first and second numbers always exhaust these reserves. Yet in the case of “Harvardiana” no eager body of contributors appeared, and the table of contents shows that the five editors contributed much more than half the volume.

Lowell’s connection with this volume ought to rescue it from oblivion. It has a curiously old-fashioned engraving on the meagre title-page. It represents University Hall as it then was—before the convenient shelter of the corridor in front was removed. “Blackwood,” and perhaps other magazines, had given popularity to the plan, which all young editors like, of an imagined conference between readers and editors, in which the editors tell what is passing in the month. Christopher North had given an appetite among youngsters for this sort of thing, and the new editors fancied that “Skillygoliana,” such an imagined dialogue, would be very bright, funny, and attractive. But the fun has long since evaporated; the brightness has long since tarnished. I think they themselves found that the papers became a bore to them, and did not attract the readers.

The choice of the title “Skillygoliana” was, without doubt, Lowell’s own. “Skillygolee” is defined in the Century Dictionary in words which give the point to his use of it: “A poor, thin, watery kind of broth or soup ... served out to prisoners in the hulks, paupers in workhouses, and the like; a drink made of oatmeal, sugar, and water, formerly served out to sailors in the British navy.”

Here is a scrap which must serve as a bit of mosaic carried off from this half-built temple:—

SKILLYGOLIANA—III.

Since Friday morning, on each busy tongue, “Shameful!” “Outrageous!” has incessant rung. But what’s the matter? Why should words like these Of dreadful omen hang on every breeze? Has our Bank failed, and shown, to cash her notes, Not cents enough to buy three Irish votes? Or, worse than that, and worst of human ills, Will not the lordly Suffolk take her bills? Sooner expect, than see her credit die, Proud Bunker’s pile to creep an inch more high. Has want of patronage, or payments lean, Put out the rushlight of our Magazine? No, though Penumbra swears “the thing is flat,” Thank Heaven, taste has not sunk so low as that! ... Has Texas, freed by Samuel the great, Entered the Union as another State? No, still she trades in slaves as free as air, And Sam still fills the presidential chair, Rules o’er the realm, the freeman’s proudest hope, In dread of naught but bailiffs and a rope. ... What is the matter, then? Why, Thursday night Some chap or other strove to vent his spite By blowing up the chapel with a shell, But unsuccessfully—he might as well With popgun threat the noble bird of Jove, Or warm his fingers at a patent stove, As try to shake old Harvard’s deep foundations With such poor, despicable machinations.... Long may she live, and Harvard’s morning star Light learning’s wearied pilgrims from afar! Long may the chapel echo to the sound Of sermon lengthy or of part profound, And long may Dana’s gowns survive to grace Each future runner in the learned race!

I believe Lowell afterwards printed among his collected poems one or two which first appeared in “Harvardiana.” Here is a specimen which I believe has never been reprinted until now:—

“Perchance improvement, in some future time, May soften down the rugged path of rhyme, Build a nice railroad to the sacred mount, And run a steamboat to the muses’ fount!

* * * * * * * *

Fain would I more—but could my muse aspire To praise in fitting strains our College choir? Ah, happy band! securely hid from sight, Ye pour your melting strains with all your might; And as the prince, on Prosper’s magic isle, Stood spellbound, listening with a raptured smile To Ariel’s witching notes, as through the trees They stole like angel voices on the breeze, So when some strange divine the hymn gives out, Pleased with the strains he casts his eyes about, All round the chapel gives an earnest stare, And wonders where the deuce the singers are, Nor dreams that o’er his own bewildered pate There hangs suspended such a tuneful weight!”

_From “A Hasty Pudding Poem.”_

In the winter of the senior year the class made its selection of its permanent committees and of the orator, poet, and other officers for “Class Day,” already the greatest, or one of the greatest, of the Cambridge festivals. I do not remember that there was any controversy as to the selection of either orator or poet. It seemed quite of course that James Ivers Trecothick Coolidge, now the Rev. Dr. Coolidge, should be the orator; and no opposition was possible to the choice of Lowell as poet.

Some thirty years later, in Lowell’s absence from Cambridge, I had to take his place as president of a Phi Beta Kappa dinner at Cambridge. One of those young friends to whom I always give the privilege of advising me begged me with some feeling, before the dinner, not to be satisfied with “trotting out the old war-horses,” but to be sure to call out enough of the younger men to speak or to read verses. I said, in reply, that the old war-horses were not a bad set after all, that I had Longfellow and Holmes and Joe Choate and James Carter and President Eliot and Professor Thayer and Dr. Everett on my string, of whom I was sure. But I added, “The year Lowell graduated we were as sure as we are now that in him was firstrate poetical genius and that here was to be one of the leaders of the literature of the time.” And I said, “You know this year’s senior class better than I do, and if you will name to me the man who is going to fill that bill twenty years hence, you may be sure that I will call upon him to-morrow.”

I like to recall this conversation here, because it describes precisely the confidence which we who then knew Lowell had in his future. I think that the government of the college, that “Faculty” of which undergraduates always talk so absurdly, was to be counted among those who knew him. I think they thought of his power as highly as we did. I think they did all that they could in decency to bring Lowell through his undergraduate course without public disapprobation. President Quincy would send for him to give him what we called “privates,” by which we meant private admonitions. But Lowell somehow hardened himself to these, the more so because he found them in themselves easy to bear.

The Faculty had in it such men as Quincy, Sparks and Felton, who were Quincy’s successors; Peirce and Longfellow and Channing, all of them men of genius and foresight; and I think they meant to pull Lowell through. In Lowell’s case it was simply indifference to college regulations which they were compelled to notice. He would not go to morning prayers. We used to think he meant to go. The fellows said he would screw himself up to go on Monday morning, as if his presence there might propitiate the Faculty, who met always on Monday night. How could they be hard on him, if he had been at chapel that very morning! But, of course, if they meant to have any discipline, if there were to be any rule for attendance at chapel, the absence of a senior six days in seven must be noticed.

And so, to the horror of all of us, of his nearest friends most of all, Lowell was “rusticated,” as the old phrase was. That meant that he was told that he must reside in Concord until Commencement, which would come in the last week in August. It meant no class poet, no good-by suppers, no vacation rambles in the six weeks preceding Commencement. It meant regular study in the house of the Rev. Barzillai Frost, of Concord, until Commencement Day! And it meant that he was not even to come to Cambridge in the interval.

I have gone into this detail because I have once or twice stumbled upon perfectly absurd stories about Lowell’s suspension. And it is as well to put your thumb upon them at once. Thus, I have heard it said that there was some mysterious offense which he had committed. And, again, I have heard it said that he had become grossly intemperate; all of which is the sheerest nonsense. I think I saw him every day of his life for the first six months of his senior year, frequently half a dozen times a day, excepting in the winter vacation. He lived out of college; our room was in college, and it was a convenient loafing place. Now, let me say that from his birth to his death I never saw him in the least under any influence of liquor which could be detected in any way. I never, till within five years, heard any suggestion of the gossip which I have referred to above. There is in the letters boyish joking about cocktails and glasses of beer. But here there is nothing more than might ordinarily come into the foolery of anybody in college familiarly addressing a classmate.

It is as well to say here that a careful examination of the private records of the Faculty of the time entirely confirms the statement I have made above.

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