CHAPTER II. HARVARD COLLEGE

From such life, quite familiar with Cambridge and its interests, Lowell presented himself for entrance at Harvard College in the summer of 1834, and readily passed the somewhat strict examination which was required.

Remember, if you please, or learn now, if you never knew, that "Harvard College was a College by itself, or "Seminary," as President Quincy used to call it, and had no vital connection with the Law School, the School of Medicine, or the Divinity Schoolthough they were governed by the same Board of Fellows, and, with the College, made up Harvard University. Harvard College was made of four classes-numbering, all told, some two hundred and fifty young men, of all ages from fourteen to thirty-five. Most of them were between sixteen and twenty-two. In this college they studied Latin, Greek, and mathematics chiefly. But on "modern language days," which were Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, there appeared teachers of French, Italian, Spanish, German, and Portuguese; and everybody not a Freshman must take his choice in these studies. They were called "voluntaries," not because you could shirk if you wanted to, for you could not, but because you chose

German or Italian or Spanish or French. When you had once chosen, you had to keep on for four terms. But, as to college "marks" and the rank which followed, a modern language was "worth" only half a classical language.

Beside these studies, as you advanced you read more or less in Rhetoric, Logic, "Moral Philosophy," Political Economy, Chemistry, and Natural History-less rather than more. There was no study whatever of English Literature, but the best possible drill in the writing of the English language. There was a well-selected library of about fifty thousand volumes, into which you might go on any weekday at any time before four o'clock and read anything you wanted. You took down the book with your own red right hand, and you put it back when you were done.

Then there were three or four society libraries. To these you contributed an entrance fee, when you were chosen a member, and an annual fee of perhaps two dollars. With this money the society bought almost all the current novels of the time. Novels were then published in America in two volumes, and they cost more than any individual student liked to pay. One great object in joining a college society was to have a steady supply of novels. For my part, I undoubtedly averaged eighty novels a year in my college course. They were much better novels, in my judgment, than the average novels of to-day are, and I know I received great advantage from the time I devoted to

reading them. I think Lowell would have said the same thing. But I do not mean to imply that such reading was his principal reading. He very soon began delving in the stores which the College library afforded him in the older literature of England.

You had to attend morning chapel and evening chapel. Half the year these offices were at six in the morning and six at night. But, as the days shortened, morning prayers came later and later-even as late as half past seven in the morning, while afternoon prayers came as early as quarter past four, so that the chapel need not be artificially lighted. On this it followed that breakfast, which was an hour and twenty minutes after prayers, might be after eight in the morning, and supper at half past four in the afternoon. This left enormously long evenings for winter reading.

Lowell found in the government some interesting and remarkable men.

Josiah Quincy had been the Mayor of Boston who had most to do with ordering the system and precedents of its government under the new city charter. From a New England town, governed by the fierce democracy of Town Meetings, he changed it into a "city," as America calls it, ruled by an intricate system of Mayor, Aldermen, Council, School Committee, and Overseers of the Poor. Of a distinguished patriot family, Mr. Quincy had, for years of gallant battle, been a leader in Congress of the defeated and disconcerted wrecks of the Federal party. His white plume never went down, and he fought the Southern oligarchy as cheerfully as Amadis ever fought with his uncounted

MR. HANCOCK'S HOUSE, CAMBRIDGE Where Lowell lived while at Harvard

enemies. He was old enough to have been an aid to Governor Hancock when Washington visited Boston in 1792. In Congress he had defied John Randolph, who was an antagonist worthy of him; and he hated Jefferson, and despised him, I think, with a happy union of scorn and hatred, till he died. When he was more than ninety, after the Civil War began, I had my last interview with him. He was rejoiced that the boil had at last suppurated and was ready to be lanced, and that the thing was to be settled in the right way. "Gouverneur Morris once said to me that we made our mistake when we began, when we united eight republics with five oligarchies."

It is interesting now to know, what I did not know till after his death, that this gallant leader of men believed that he was directed, in important crises, by his own " Daimon," quite as Socrates believed. In the choice of his wife, which proved indeed to have been made in heaven, he knew he was so led. And, in after life, he ascribed some measures of importance and success to his prompt obedience to the wise Daimon's directions.

His wife was most amiable in her kind interest in the students' lives. The daughters who resided with him were favorites in the social circles of Cambridge. To Miss Susan Quincy's pencil we owe some of the pictures of Cambridge which illustrate this paper.

Most of the work of the College was then done in rather dreary recitations, such as you might expect in a somewhat mechanical school for boys to-day. But Edward Tyrrel Channing, brother of the great divine, met his pupils face to face and hand to hand. He

deserves the credit of the English of Emerson, Holmes, Sumner, Clarke, Bellows, Lowell, Higginson, and other men whom he trained. Their English did more credit to Harvard College, I think, than any other of its achievements for those thirty-two years. You sat, physically,, at his side. He read your theme aloud with youso loud, if he pleased, that all of the class who were present could hear his remarks of praise or ridicule. "Yes, we used to have white paper and black ink; now we have blue paper, blue ink." I wonder if Mr. Emerson did not get from him the oracle, "Leave out the adjectives, and let the nouns do

with Longfellow in those boyish days. He shared, of course, as every one could, in the little Renaissance, if one may call it so, of interest in modern Continental literature, on Longfellow's arrival in Cambridge.

I cannot remember-I wish I couldwhether it were Longfellow or Emerson who introduced Tennyson in college. That first ittle, thin volume of Tennyson's poems, with Airy, Fairy Lillian" and the rest, was printed n London in 1830. It was not at once reprinted in America. I think it was Emerson's copy which somebody borrowed in Cambridge and which we passed reverently from hand to hand. Everybody who had any sense knew that a great poet had been born as well as we know it now. And it is always pleasant to me to remember that those first poems of his were handed about in manuscript as a new ode of Horace might have been handed round among the young gentlemen of Rome. Carlyle's books were reprinted in America, thanks to Emerson, as fast as they were written. Lowell read every one of them attentively, and the traces of Carlyle's philosophy of life are to be found in all Lowell's life, as in the life of all educated Americans of his time.

I have written what I have of Channing and Longfellow with the feeling that Lowell would himself have said much more of the good which they and Longfellow did to all of us. I do not know how much his clear, simple, unaffected English style owes to Channing, but I am quite sure that he would have spoken most gratefully of his teacher.

Now as to the atmosphere of the College itself. I write these words in the same weeks in which I am reading the life of Jowett at Oxford. It is curious, it is pathetic, to compare Balliol College in 1836-7 with Harvard College at the same time. So clear is it that the impulse and direction were given in Oxford by the teachers, while with us the impulse and direction were given by the boys. The boys invariably called themselves "men," even when they were, as Lowell was when he entered, but fifteen years old.

Let it be remembered, then, that the whole drift of fashion, occupation, and habit among the undergraduates ran in lines suggested by literature. Athletics and sociology are, I suppose, now the fashion at Cambridge. But literature was the fashion then. In November, when the State election came round, there would be a little spasm of political interest, but you might really say that nobody

cared for politics. Not five " men in college saw a daily newspaper. My classmate, William Francis Channing, would have been spoken of, I think, as the only Abolitionist in College in 1838, the year when Lowell graduated. I remember that Dr. Walter Channing, the brother of our Professor, came out to lecture one day on Temperance. There was a decent attendance of the undergraduates, but it was an attendance of pure condescension on their part.

Literature was, as I said, the fashion. The books which the fellows took out of the library, the books which they bought for their own subscription libraries, were not books of science, nor history, nor sociology, nor politics; they were books of literature. Some Philadelphia publisher had printed in one volume Coleridge's poems, Shelley's, and Keats's—a queer enough combination, but for its chronological fitness. And you saw this book pretty much everywhere. At this hour you will find men of seventy who can quote their Shelley as the youngsters of to-day cannot quote, shall I say, their Swinburne, their Watson, or their Walt Whitman. In the way of what is now called science (we then spoke of the moral sciences also) Daniel Treadwell read once a year some interesting technological lectures. The Natural History Society founded itself while Lowell was in college; but there was no general interest in science, except so far as it came in by way of the pure mathematics.

In the year 1840 I was at West Point for the first time, with William Story, Lowell's classmate and friend, and with his sister and mine. We enjoyed to the full the matchless hospitality of West Point, seeing its lions under the special care of two young officers of our own age. They had just finished their course, as we had recently finished ours at Harvard. One day when Story and I were by ourselves, after we had been talking of our studies with these gentlemen, Story said to me: " Ned, it is all very well to keep a stiff upper lip with these fellows, but how did you dare tell them that we studied about projectiles at Cambridge ?"

"Because we did," said I.

"Did I ever study projectiles?" asked Story, puzzled.

66

Certainly you did," said I. "You used to go up to Pierce Tuesday and Thursday afternoons in the summer when you were a junior, with a blue book which had a white back."