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.
[Illustration: NATHAN HALE]
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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