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 school,—though 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 or Portuguese. 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 week-day 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 of
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 long 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, the president, had been the mayor of Boston who had 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 been, for years of gallant battle, 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 enemies. He was
old enough to have been an aide 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. He said: “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.
[Illustration: EDWARD TYRREL CHANNING]
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 you,—so 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 the fighting.”
I think that is Emerson’s. Or whose is it?
In 1836, when Lowell was a sophomore, Mr. Longfellow came to Cambridge,
a young man, to begin his long and valuable life in the college. His
presence there proved a benediction, and, I might say, marks an epoch
in the history of Harvard. In the first place, he was fresh from
Europe, and he gave the best possible stimulus to the budding interest
in German literature. In the second place, he came from Bowdoin
College, and in those days it was a very good thing for a Harvard
undergraduate to know that there were people not bred in Cambridge
quite as well read, as intelligent, as elegant and accomplished as any
Harvard graduate. In the third place, Longfellow, though he was so
young, ranked already distinctly as a man of letters. This was no
broken-winded minister who had been made professor. He was not a lawyer
without clients, or a doctor without patients, for whom “a place” had
to be found. He was already known as a poet by all educated people in
America. The boys had read in their “First Class Book” his “Summer
Shower” verses. By literature, pure and simple, and the work of
literature, he had won his way to the chair of the Smith professorship
of modern literature, to which Mr. George Ticknor had already given
distinction. Every undergraduate knew all this, and felt that young
Longfellow’s presence was a new feather in our cap, as one did not feel
when one of our own seniors was made a tutor, or one of our own tutors
was made a professor.
But, better than this for the college, Longfellow succeeded, as no
other man did, in breaking that line of belt ice which parted the
students from their teachers. Partly, perhaps, because he was so young;
partly because he was agreeable and charming; partly because he had the
manners of a man of the world, because he had spoken French in Paris
and Italian in Florence; but chief of all because he chose, he was
companion and friend of the undergraduates. He would talk with them and
walk with them; would sit with them and smoke with them. You played
whist with him if you met him of an evening. You never spoke
contemptuously of him, and he never patronized you.
Lowell intimates, however, in some of his letters, that he had no close
companionship 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 could—whether it were Longfellow or Emerson
who introduced Tennyson in college. That first little, thin volume of
Tennyson’s poems, with “Airy, fairy Lillian” and the rest, was printed
in London in 1830. It was not at once reprinted in America. It was
Emerson’s copy which somebody borrowed in Cambridge and which we passed
reverently from hand to hand.[1] 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 them attentively, and the traces of
Carlyle study are to be found in all Lowell’s life, as in the life of
all well 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
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 the least possible 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 Story’s 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.
“Certainly you did,” said I. “You used to go up to Peirce Tuesday and
Thursday afternoons in the summer when you were a junior, with a blue
book which had a white back.”
“I know I did,” said Story; “and was I studying projectiles then? This
is the first time I ever heard of it.”
And I tell that story because it illustrates well enough the divorce
between theory and fact which is possible in education. I do not tell
it by way of blaming Professor Peirce or Harvard College. Story was not
to be an artilleryman, nor were any of the rest of us, so far as we
knew. Anyway, the choice of our specialty in life was to be kept as far
distant as was possible.
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