The happiness of Lowell’s happy home was shattered by the death of his wife, October 27, 1853. He spent the summer of the next year at Beverly, on the seashore of Massachusetts, in the summer of 1855 went again to Europe, and returned in 1856. He at once resumed his residence at Cambridge, and, with the opening term of the autumn, entered heartily and energetically on his duty as “Smith Professor.”

For there was once a gentleman named Abiel Smith. He is wholly unknown to fame. But I wish at this late moment to express the gratitude, hitherto never fitly spoken, of thousands upon thousands of those whom he has blessed. He left to Harvard College, as early as 1815, the foundation for the Smith Professorship of the Modern Languages.

He was himself a graduate of Harvard College in the year 1764, “went into business,” as our New England phrase has it, and became rich, as that word was used in those early days. He is spoken of by Mr. Quincy as a man “of strong sense and steady purpose, guiding his life by his own convictions of duty, with little esteem for popular opinion or posthumous fame; scrupulously just and honest; practicing habits of frugality less from regard to wealth than out of respect to the example.”

It is the fashion to laugh at the name of Smith; but it must be confessed that a good many people who have had to go through life under that banner have done the world good service.

This is the Smith couplet in the fine account of the Beefsteak Club. If Abiel Smith never did as much thinking as Adam, he must, all the same, be remembered as a benefactor. He certainly never did so much harm as Adam Smith has done, if he has not done more good.

I am apt to think that this modest man was the first person in the English-speaking world to recognize the value of the systematic study of the modern languages in any university of England or America. A smattering of French was taught at our Cambridge as early as 1780, and Jefferson studied some French at William and Mary’s at about the same time. Charles Bellini was made Professor of the Modern Languages there in 1781. This recognition of the foreign languages of civilization was due probably to the Philistine fact that we were the allies of a Bourbon king.

The first professor under this Smith foundation was George Ticknor, a graduate of Dartmouth College of the year 1807, now known everywhere in the world of letters by his history of Spanish literature. I found this book the working book of reference in the Royal Library at Madrid—which, by the way, is the most elegant working public library I ever saw. Ticknor was professor from 1820 to 1835. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was his immediate successor, and, when Longfellow resigned in 1854, Lowell was appointed to succeed him. This is a brilliant series, the honors of which have been well sustained since Lowell died.

I have seen it somewhere said that Lowell disliked the work of a college professor. In a way, I suppose this statement may be literally true. That is to say, like other men who know how to work hard, it was not agreeable to him to be called off at a particular hour to do a particular thing for a particular length of time, and so far to interrupt the regular line of his study or thought for the day. But he was not a fool, and he accepted the universe frankly. So that, if it were his duty to walk down from Elmwood to the college and see how a particular class was getting on in Spanish, or how the particular teacher handled the beginners in French, he could do that as well as another. He would scold, in his funny way, about such interruption of his more interesting work,—so do the rest of us,—but if the thing were to be done, he did it. I say this at the beginning of what I want to say about his position at Cambridge as a teacher.

In describing the four years between 1834 and 1838, the years of his undergraduate life, I tried to give some idea of what an American college was in those prehistoric times. Simply, it was a somewhat enlarged country “academy.” The wonder was that the boys did not study in the rooms in which they recited, as they would have done in such an academy. That would have completed the resemblance to such a school. The distinction that you studied your lesson in your own room and recited it in another building was the principal distinction between your work at the Boston Latin School, or Leicester Academy, and the work which you did in college. Thus, you were told that your lesson was to be eighty lines of Euripides’s “Hecuba.” You sat down at your task in the evening, looked out the words and found out how to read it, you went down the next day and recited it, and went back again. That was all which Hecuba was to you, or you to Hecuba. I can conceive of nothing more dull.

Governor Everett once said very well that a school was a place where you recited a lesson which somebody outside had taught you. This was quite true in those days. For one, as I ought to have said in an earlier chapter, I had but four teachers in college,—Channing, Longfellow, Peirce, and Bachi. The rest heard me recite but taught me nothing.

In the twenty years between 1834 and 1855, the change had begun at Cambridge which has made of the college of to-day an entirely different place, with entirely different customs and traditions. It was in a great address delivered by Dr. Hedge at the Phi Beta Kappa in 1840 that the first visible token of this change appeared before the somewhat startled gaze of corporation, overseers, and graduates. Dr. Hedge said squarely then that this sort of schoolboy work could not long continue in a civilized country like ours, and that everybody must go to work to lift the college to a higher grade.

I think he thought that the age of undergraduates was to be greater than it was before. I think we all thought so. I am told, however, now, that the experience of the years since that time has not justified this supposition. I believe that the average of the age of the boys in the college classes is but a few months older than it proved to be then. But I am disposed to think that in the prehistoric days there came in more grown men—rather sporadic instances, indeed, but still a good many of them—and that the presence of these grown men in the classes raised the statistics of average of those periods. If two or three queer antediluvian fellows of thirty-five came into the midst of a class of fifty boys of sixteen, why, they screwed up the average age by several months. I do not understand that such sporadic cases occur very often now. Anyway, the doctrine of Dr. Hedge’s address is that the college shall open its doors to teach what it can teach; that there shall be a chance for the teachers themselves to be learning something in the lines of original research, and that every encouragement shall be given to the learner to follow the “bent of his genius,” as Mr. Emerson says somewhere, and that he shall not be made to do certain things because somebody else has done them.

The line of Presidents of short periods, which followed, was a line of men not disinclined to these larger views. Neither Dr. Sparks, nor Dr. Felton, nor Dr. Hill had a long enough term of office to do much in the direction in which President Eliot has so boldly stepped forward. But they were not averse to enlarging the life of the University. Certainly Lowell was in sympathy with any such endeavor.

The Smith professorship, as I have intimated, gave opportunity for a pretty wide range of duty on the part of the professor. He had, indeed, a wider range than any other professor had in any other department. He was virtually responsible, as a superintendent, for the verbal instruction about nominative cases and verbs and der and die and das, which had to be given, if young men were to know anything about the literature of the languages taught. These languages were French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. But the real detail of the instruction in these languages was given by people who were called assistant professors or instructors; and the professor himself, so far as he had a function of his own, was a lecturer on important themes bearing on the literary life of the last two or three centuries. As early as Longfellow’s day, he delivered in college a series of lectures on Dante, which embodied much of what one finds in the notes to his translation of the poet. Lowell began his course by reading to the students the lectures which he had delivered in Boston. In the twenty years of his active professorship he delivered to them several courses of similar lectures.

If you talk with any of the men now on the stage who were with him in college, you find that they associate him especially with these brilliant lectures which students liked to attend. But you find much more than this. Those who knew him at all, and who took any interest in the line of study to which he was committed, remember him from their personal intimacies with him. I was myself much interested, in the years between 1866 and 1870, in the college fortunes of Frederick Wadsworth Loring, a young fellow who died, too soon as it seemed, only a year after he graduated. He has left behind quite enough to justify those of us who remember him in what we say of his remarkable promise. I saw that boy when he was seven years old, sitting on a footstool at his mother’s feet, reading Shakespeare eagerly. I said to her, “Take care! Pray take care!” And she said to me, with an expression which I have never forgotten, “Oh, we know the danger, and I think we are careful!” And they were. She died, alas! in the year 1859. He was, so to speak, pitchforked into college, and found himself there, with his passionate enthusiasm for literature and poetry, after very hard and uncomfortable discipline at a poor country academy. And at Cambridge, as in Lowell’s time, there was chapel which must be attended, there was this and that which must be learned, and so-and-so which must be done. And here was Loring, wild about the majestic achievements of the great poets. He was utterly indifferent as to the systems of Ptolemy or of Newton; and the world might have rolled backward for five years without his caring. Yet must is must, and he had to pretend to study mathematics. What would have happened to the dear boy but for the existence of two men, I do not know; but, fortunately for him and for those who loved him, here was Lowell at the head of the department of modern languages, and Elbridge Jefferson Cutler at the head of the English subdivision. And, after four years of Loring’s college life, which was of value to him that no man can pretend to describe, he graduated. I think, indeed, that they gave him a poem at Commencement. I have never forgotten that when I was at the “spread” in Holworthy, where Loring modestly entertained his friends on Class Day, I met Cutler, and I said to him, “Well, Cutler, you have got Fred through.” “Yes,” he said, “we have dragged him through by the hair of his head.”

“We” meant Lowell and himself. They were perfectly determined that this brilliant young poet should get what could be got out of the university. They were perfectly determined that no waywardness of his own should break up the regular course of life which offered such promise. And if I told some of the stories of the affectionate way in which those two distinguished men cared for the life of this distinguished boy, it would be a story out of which some one who knew how to hold a pen could make a fascinating romance or drama. It would, perhaps, do something to remove the preposterous and ridiculous impression of the more foolish undergraduate that “the faculty” hates him.

On the catalogue Mr. Lowell’s position as Smith Professor covers thirty years. In 1886 he resigned to be appointed “Professor Emeritus,” and so his name remains on the college catalogue until his death. In 1865 he had the welcome relief of the appointment of Mr. Cutler as an assistant. The department was gradually enlarged with the enlargement of the college, but for thirty years it was under Mr. Lowell’s general administration, excepting during his journeys in Europe and his diplomatic residence in Madrid and in London.

This boy of 1838 left college to try the experiments of life, not really knowing what life had for him. In the seventeen years between 1838 and 1855 he had been in Europe two or three times, and, as the reader knows, he had spent a part of one winter in Philadelphia. But Cambridge had been his home most of the time, and he had seen step by step the changes which made this “academy” or “seminary” into a university. Some of the officers still remained to whom he had recited when in college.

Josiah Quincy had been succeeded as President by Edward Everett, and Jared Sparks, and James Walker, the last of whom was now the President.

Dr. Walker’s name may not be universally known among students in all parts of this country, especially by men of those religious schools who made it a duty to brand him and the men of his communion as infidels. But it is safe to say that no man was in college during the twenty-two years in which he was professor and president who does not remember him with gratitude and speak of him with enthusiasm. From 1838 to 1853 he was the Professor of Natural Religion and Moral Philosophy. He lectured on these subjects in the Lowell Institute. He often preached in the college pulpit, and to this day, when you meet any of his old hearers, you will find that they hark back to him and what he said to them with distinct memory of the lessons, practical and profound, which he enforced.

Not long before the close of his life he supplied for one winter the pulpit of a church a little away from the centre of Boston. Every Sunday saw a procession of his old pupils, twenty years older, perhaps, than they were as undergraduates, who gladly seized this occasion to profit by the wisdom of their old counselor.

Cornelius Conway Felton, to whom I have already referred in speaking of the Mutual Admiration Society, succeeded Dr. Walker. He had been Greek Professor when Lowell was an undergraduate. His successor, Dr. Thomas Hill, graduated five years after Lowell.

Of his old professors Lowell found in office Lovering and Benjamin Peirce. There were one or two instructors in the modern languages who had survived the interval, but for the rest his coadjutors had been appointed since his graduation.

The college had been taking on her larger methods in those seventeen years, and during what was left of his life he saw and assisted in other changes larger yet. From the beginning he cut red tape or threw it away. He cultivated close acquaintance with the young men whom he met in his classes, and he and the men of his type have done much to bring about interest and sympathy between teacher and taught, such as was hardly dreamed of in Cambridge in the first half of the century. The two volumes of his published letters give a charming view of his relations with Longfellow, Norton, Cutler, and other professors of his time, and, indeed, of the cordial social life of Cambridge. Of these gentlemen I have something I should like to say in another paper of this series. But this is the better place to allude to the young poet, Hugh Clough, who is alluded to in Lowell’s correspondence with his associates in Cambridge. Clough came to Cambridge, as I have always supposed, in the real hope of adapting himself to American life, or life in a republic, where “I am as good as the other fellow, and the other fellow is as good as I.” Alas and alas! how many of us have seen Englishmen who tried this great experiment, who made the great emigration, and then were obliged to go back to the leeks of Egypt! I do not know that it was so with Clough, but I think it was.

People who remember his “Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich” (and they are not so many as there should be) will recollect that that charming poem closes as white handkerchiefs are waved in an adieu when the English steamer leaves her dock and sails with the hero and heroine for Australia—“a brave new land,” without fuss and without feathers, without feudalism and the follies of feudalism; a land of freedom.

And other readers will remember that, for nearly a generation, more than half the English novels which turned out well, ended thus, in a flourish of trumpets in which anybody who was good for anything went away from England. Even Carlyle’s Chartism had nothing better to propose than that England should send away the people she did not know how to take care of at home. Among them Clough came, but apparently he was too old. He went back to England, and, I think, accepted a government office—not, perhaps, inspector of slate-pencils, but something not more edifying. He died in 1862, in Florence.

He was a charming poet, and I cannot but think a charming companion. I always think of him as a bishop “in partibus,” a bishop without a mitre or a see. For Mr. Emerson told me an interesting story of Clough. He was one of a cluster of young men who had taken great delight in Emerson, on his visit in 1848 in England. When that visit was over, and Mr. Emerson sailed for America on his return, Clough accompanied him to Liverpool and bade him good-by on the deck of the steamer. As they walked up and down the deck together, Clough said sadly, “What shall we do without you? Think where we are. Carlyle has led us all out into the desert, and he has left us there”—a remark which was exactly true. Emerson said in reply that very many of the fine young men in England had said this to him as he went up and down in his journeyings there. “And I put my hand upon his head as we walked, and I said, ‘Clough, I consecrate you Bishop of all England. It shall be your part to go up and down through the desert to find out these wanderers and to lead them into the promised land.’”

I do not know, but I am afraid that Clough never thought himself in the promised land, nor scarcely upon any Pisgah looking down upon it. But I tell the story, as showing how highly Emerson thought of Clough as far back as 1849.

As I have said, Lowell succeeded Longfellow, who had come to Cambridge when Lowell was a sophomore; and Lowell, like every one else who worked under Longfellow, was always grateful to him. Longfellow began, all too early, the habit of speaking of himself as an old man. But the published volumes of his own life show how diligent and active he was, and that he considered his relief from the daily work of his professorship as simply an opportunity for wider work in literature.

By his boundless liberality to every child of sorrow he had made Cambridge the Mecca of a polyglot pilgrimage in which any European exiles who could read or write came of course to the Craigie House to ask for his patronage and assistance. With Mr. Lowell’s arrival there were, I think, no fewer of such visitors at the Craigie House; but by the law of the instrument they found their way by the pleasant shady walk which leads from Longfellow’s home to Elmwood and Mount Auburn.

I remember among these an accomplished gentleman, who worked in America in the anti-slavery cause, in ante-bellum days. He always was grateful to Longfellow for his assistance to him, which came at a time when it was most needed. Heinrich von Hutten was a lineal descendant, I think, of Ulrich von Hutten, the poet of the Reformation. He came to this country in the suite of Kossuth, who ought, perhaps, to have been spoken of elsewhere in this series. Von Hutten gave his life and strength, and perhaps his blood, to the Hungarian cause. After his arrival here he was employed by a publishing firm to translate Mrs. Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” into the German language. After he had begun, there was a terror lest a rival translation should be finished before his, and the good Von Hutten worked day and night—too much, alas! by night—in completing the work assigned to him. The story always reminds me of Milton’s sonnet,

for he really lost his eyes in the cause of freedom.

Longfellow was kind to him, Lowell was kind to him, and, indeed, he was a man who deserved to have friends everywhere. When I was in Europe in 1873, I was glad to hear that the good Von Hutten was living again in the castle of his ancestors upon the Danube River. It was one of the minor misfortunes of my life that I was not able to accept his invitation to visit him there.

As I have said, it has been intimated that Lowell chafed under the regular requisitions of the duties of a professor. And, as I have said, most men do chafe a little when they find that on a given day they are expected to do a given thing where they want to do something else. It must be discouraging to have a class of boys around you to whom a lesson is simply a bore, and to know that you will hear, at twenty-seven minutes after eleven, the same stupid mistake which you heard made at twenty-six minutes after eleven, three hundred and sixty-five days ago. In his private letters there is occasionally an expression, sometimes serious and sometimes gay, of the dislike of the necessary slavery which follows on such work. But he had accepted it, for better for worse, and went through with it loyally. He liked the intercourse which his work gave him with young men of promise, and availed himself gladly of every opportunity to make the intercourse of advantage to them. In a charming and suggestive paper by Professor Barrett Wendell, which was published in “Scribner’s” immediately after Lowell’s death, there is such detail as only a college professor could write of some of the methods and habits in which Lowell grew into a friendly intimacy with his pupils. He assigned one evening in a week when they might call to see him, and he was so cordial then that they took the impression that he liked to see them, and would go up on any evening when they chose. I am favored with the private journal of one of these pupils, in which are many anecdotes, some even pathetic, of the cordial intercourse he had with them. Professor Wendell gives a valuable account of his own experience with Lowell. He had never studied any Italian, and yet he boldly resolved that he would ask Lowell’s permission to attend his lectures on Dante, though he had no knowledge of the Italian language. Lowell was pleased, perhaps was interested in seeing what so bright a boy would do under such circumstances; and the result of this was, as Mr. Wendell says, “at the end of a month I could read Dante better than I ever learned to read Greek or Latin or German.” Remember this, gentlemen who are taking nine years to teach a boy to read Latin; and reflect that Mr. Wendell reads his Latin as well as the best of you.

I think the reader may indulge me in a little excursus when I say a few words seriously to the undergraduates of to-day with regard to this form of cordial intercourse between them and their professors. We used to say, when I was in college, that we wished the professors would treat us as gentlemen. The wish is a very natural one. I have had many classes myself in the fifty or sixty years which have followed, and I have always tried to live up to that undergraduate theory. I have treated my pupils as if they wanted to learn and were gentlemen, and their honor could be relied upon. Looking back on it, I think I should say that about half of them have met me more than halfway. But—and here lies the warning which I wish to give to undergraduates—the other half have taken an ell where I gave an inch. Because I did not crowd them they did nothing; they considered me a “soft” person, and my course a “soft” course. In other words, they shirked, simply because I did not treat them with the methods of a low-grade grammar-school.

Young gentlemen, then, ought to consider how far they are themselves responsible for any supposed harshness or mechanical habit on the part of the gentlemen who really know more than they do, and who are willing to trust them in their work. I had the honor last spring of being appointed as one of the judges of some prose exercises in one of our older colleges. I was proud and glad to give the time which the examination of these exercises required. What did I find? I found, of three different papers submitted to me in competition on the same subject, that all the writers had stolen, from reviews which they supposed would not be known, long passages, and copied them as their own. In this particular case, it happened that the three writers were so ignorant of the literature of the last half-century that they copied the same passage, hoping that the judges of their exercises would be ignorant enough to be deceived. Is it not rather hard to be told that you are to “treat as gentlemen” blackguards like these, who are willing to tell lies for so petty a purpose as was involved in this endeavor? I should say that the Greek-letter societies have it in their power to do a good deal to tone up the undergraduate conscience in such affairs.

To return to Lowell: He was quite beyond and above confining himself to the requisitions of his profession. As an instance of his generosity in this way, in the winter of 1865 he offered to the divinity students to come round to them and lecture familiarly to them on the mediÆval idea of hell as it may be gathered from Dante. This was no part of the business of his chair. He volunteered for it as the reader of these lines might offer to take a class in a Sunday-school. I remember that some of the students took a notion that he pinched himself by his generous help to those whom he thought in need. One of his pupils told me that Lowell offered him a Christmas present of valuable books, under the pretext that he was thinning out his book-shelves. “I declined them,” said my friend, “simply from the feeling that he could not afford to give them. I need not say,” he says, “that I am sorry for this now.”

I am favored by Mr. Robert Lincoln, who was fortunate enough to be one of his pupils, with the following memoranda of the impression which he made upon them:—

Dear Doctor Hale,—My only association with Mr. Lowell in college was as a member of a small class who “went through” Dante under his supervision. Our duty was to prepare ourselves to translate the text, and Mr. Lowell heard our blunderings with a wonderful patience, and rewarded us with delightful talks on matters suggested in the poem; but we had no set lecture. My experience (that is, at Harvard), therefore, only permits me to speak of him as a professor in the recitation-room. In that relation his erudition, humor, and kindness made me, and I am sure all my associates, enjoy the hour with him as we did no other college exercise. I can sincerely say that it is one of my most highly cherished experiences. With us he was always conversational, and flattered us and gained us by an assumption that what interested him interested us. When now I take up my Dante, Mr. Lowell seems to be with me....

Always sincerely yours,

It will be seen that the impression made on Mr. Lincoln, and his memories of Lowell, are similar to those of Mr. Wendell.

From the journal to which I have referred I copy the following passages:—

“June 12, 1865, I went to look at the scenery from Mount Auburn tower. Returning, I found the serene possessor of Elmwood in good spirits, ate a Graham biscuit and drank some delicious milk with him and his wife, then enjoyed a very pleasant conversation. He read some of Shakespeare’s sonnets, to make me think better of them, and succeeded. His noble old dog Argus had been poisoned, and in Argus’s place he had a young Newfoundland pup which he called Bessie, as black Aggy Green, on Port Royal Island, named her pet sow! He gave me a very welcome copy of Macaulay’s essays and poems, and the little visit was another oasis in school life’s dearth of home sociability. Mabel, his only child, was not there at supper, but came home some time after: ‘Salute your progenitor!’ and the answer was a daughter’s kiss.

“In September, 1865, he offered to conduct the divinity students into Dante’s conception of hell, and as far out as time would allow. He read the first canto through for introduction, and gave me the second for our first trial. I went, because I wanted to become inured, lest I might have to conduct somebody else. He had too many other duties, was somewhat unwell, cut the Dante for both days of a week three or four times, some of the readers were not Italian enough to read easily, and on December 13 he gave us up as a lost tribe of the race of Adam. January 19, 1866, I was his guest again, clear even of the central frozen bolgia. After dinner he gave me a card to Longfellow, whom I found about four o’clock at his dinner.”

The same accurate critic writes:—

“In Lowell’s college work the weakest part was his class teaching. While no teacher in the university was more willing to help his boys, his habit of doing most of the reading, when a boy labored, with friction, breaking right into his reading, was not agreeable to the boy. But even in that he at least had the courage of mastery, and never shirked the hard passages. His corrections and remarks were often lost from the want of clearness and open-mouthed carefulness of articulation. When he spoke in public he always made himself heard; but to a small, almost private class, speaking without effort, his modest stillness and his smothering mustache would make us wish that men’s hair had been forbidden to grow forward of the corner of their mouths.”

I must postpone other references to Mr. Lowell’s life with his students to the next chapter, which will speak of him in his relations to the civil war, which followed so soon after his appointment at Cambridge. His home at Cambridge for much of the first two years of his professorship had been with Dr. and Mrs. Howe, in Kirkland Street. In September, 1857, he was able to return to Elmwood and reËstablish family life, after his fortunate and happy marriage to Miss Frances Dunlap.

Every person who has had any experience in teaching knows that the great danger to a schoolmaster or a professor is that he shall know but little of what passes outside his own cocoon. There is an old satirical fling which says that a schoolmaster is a man who does not take the voyage of life himself, but stands on the gangway of the steamer to pass those along who are going to take it. This is not true, but it has just foundation enough to give point to the satire, and to give suggestion to those who are in danger.

The danger is that a man shall think that half the world is contained in the ring-fence which incloses the territory where they hear his academy bell. Can you conceive of a better antidote for his sweet poison, or a better rescue from his dangers, than the occupation of an editor? Mr. Lowell, in handling the “North American” and the “Atlantic,” had to see that there were people quite as much interested in life as he, who lived in Texas and in Washington Territory and in the Sandwich Islands and in New Zealand. He did not open a morning’s mail but it taught him that the world, while it is a very small place, is a small place which has some very large conditions. He was that sort of a man that his nature could never have been petty or provincial; but the avocations which editorial life brought him would of themselves have made him cosmopolitan.