all times from quarter past six, when morning prayers were over, up to any hour you please of the night. His father's house was, as I say, rather more than a mile away. Lowell had a college room, but it was outside the yard, and he used our room almost as if it were his own, and I need not say that we liked to have him. I should say that he was at that time my brother's most intimate college friend. Their tastes were similar, their home life was similar, their friends in Boston and Cambridge circles were the same. From that time until he died I was on intimate terms with Lowell. After we all graduated, until he married, my father's house in Boston was his home, somewhat as Stoughton 22 and Massachusetts 27 had been in our college days. I came to know very soon of the very wide range of his reading and of his diligent interest in literature. His acquaintance with modern literature was far beyond what any of the rest of us had, even in the little circle of his friends. He was one of the charter members of Alpha Delta Phi, then a new-born literary society. It was really a literary society. There was nobody among our teachers, except Longfellow, who cared a straw whether we knew the difference between Voltaire and Volta, and we did our best work in the study of modern literature, not for the college classes, but for our own gratification or for Alpha Delta. What we did in what we may call the range of modern literature, was done in our own way. At the evening literary meetings, Alpha Delta Phi, as early as 1837, I must have heard Lowell's papers on Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger, and the other English poets, which afterward he printed in more completed form. When the time came for a Hasty Pudding Poem or for an any thing-else poem, he was always, as a matter of course, asked to write it. And when he graduated, we of that inner circle knew that he was to be the poet for the whole Nation, as we know now that he has been. When in Rome, in 1838, his dear old father was told that his classmates had chosen him class poet, he said: "Oh, dear, James promised me that he would quit writing poetry and would go to work." What father is there in a million who would not, on the whole, be glad if at seventeen years of age his son had made him such a promise! But alas and alas! where would our American world of 1902 be if James had been willing to hold to such wellmeant intention! I should like to correct definitely and squarely the impression that he was a lounger, loafer, or lazy in any regard. It is quite true that he was indifferent to college rank, and neglected such and such college exercises which he did not fancy, so far that he did not take high place in the rank list; but he was in no sense lazy. When he read, it was not superficial reading; and I am quite sure that he used the library when he was an undergraduate as very few of us did. In his after life he speaks somewhere of his working fifteen hours a day, when he was at |