Lowell first saw Maria White on the first of December, 1839. At the moment, I suppose, he did not know that it was preordained that they two should be one. Mr. Norton has hunted out an early letter of his which he wrote the day after that meeting: “I went up to Watertown on Saturday with W.A. White, and spent the Sabbath with him.... His sister is a very pleasant and pleasing young lady, and knows more poetry than any one I am acquainted with. I mean, she is able to repeat more. She is more familiar, however, with modern poets than with the pure wellsprings of English poesy.” The truth is that their union was made in heaven, that it was a perfect marriage, that they belonged together and lived one life. She was exquisitely beautiful; her tastes and habits were perfectly simple; her education, as I look back on what I know of it, seems to me as perfect as any education can be. Among other experiences which did her no harm, she was one of the frightened girls who fled from the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown before it was destroyed by a mob, in 1834. Her mother was one of the most charming women who ever lived. A cluster of sisters, of all ages down to romping little girls, young women of exquisite sensitiveness and character, and with such a training as such a mother would be sure to give, made the great Watertown house the most homelike of homes. In such a home Lowell found his beautiful wife, and they loved each other from the beginning.

With another classmate Lowell was on the most intimate terms—Dr. George Bailey Loring, since distinguished as the head of the Department of Agriculture in Washington. Loring studied medicine at the same time when Lowell went to the Law School; but Lowell frequently visited Loring’s beautiful home in Andover, and from schooldays forward the similarity of their tastes brought them into almost constant correspondence in matters of literature. Dr. Loring was the son of the minister of Andover, and that gentleman and Lowell’s father had been friends. For us now, this has proved singularly fortunate; for Loring carefully preserved all his letters from Lowell, and Mr. Norton has selected from them many for publication, which throw valuable light upon these early days, in which Lowell really revealed everything to this friend. He was always frank to the utmost with his correspondents, and relied upon their discretion. He was never more annoyed than when a correspondent or an interviewer presumed upon this frankness in repeating, or half repeating, anything, where Lowell had relied on the discretion of a gentleman. Dr. Loring sympathized entirely with Lowell’s growing determination to devote himself to literary work, and this sympathy naturally encouraged him, as he broke off, sooner than he perhaps expected, from the practice of law.

Lowell once wrote a funny story which he called “My First Client.” I guess that at the bottom it was true. I think that when the painter who had painted his sign came in with his bill, Lowell thought for a moment that he had a client. Out of this he spun an amusing “short story.”

This little sketch of his has, in itself, given the impression, perhaps, that he cared nothing about the law, and that his LL. B. on the college catalogue and his admission to the Suffolk bar were purely perfunctory. It is true that he never practiced, and that before long he stopped paying office rent, and that his sign was taken down. But it is not true that he threw away the three years when he pretended to be studying for his profession. In those days the Massachusetts custom was that a young lawyer who sought the best studied for a year and a half at Cambridge under Story and Greenleaf, then spent as much time in a lawyer’s office, and then entered at the bar after a formal examination. In this way Lowell spent three or four terms at Cambridge, and then he spent as much time in regular attendance in the office of his father’s friend and parishioner, the Hon. Charles Greeley Loring, for many years a leader at the Boston bar. It is not difficult to trace the results of Lowell’s faithful work in these three years in his after writing. Any person makes a great mistake who infers from the abandon of some of his literary fun that he did not know how to work, steadily and faithfully, better than the worst Philistine who was ever born.

But the stars in their courses did not propose that he should be a chief justice, or a celebrated writer on torts, or that he should make brilliant pleas before a jury. They had other benefits in store for the world.

It is pathetic now to see how little welcome there was then for a young poet, or how little temptation for a literary career. It was thought a marvel that the first “New England Magazine” and the “North American Review” should pay a dollar a page to their writers. In Longfellow’s Life, as in Mr. Lowell’s early letters, you find notes of the “Knickerbocker,” “Godey,” and “Graham,” at Philadelphia, and the “Southern Literary,” as willing to print what was good, but there is evidence enough that the writers wrote for fame in the intervals spared them from earning their bread and butter. Holmes speaks as if he should have lost caste in his profession in those early days had he been known as a literary man. He even implies that Lowell himself dragged him back to his literary career.

But better times for American letters or for the independent profession of literary men were at hand. “Graham’s Magazine” and “Godey’s Lady’s Book” had achieved what was called a large circulation. Stimulated by their success, two young publishers in Boston, named Bradbury and Soden, determined to try a magazine in New England which should appeal for its support to the supposed literary class of the country, as Blackwood did, and, in America, the “Portfolio,” the “Knickerbocker,” and the “Literary Messenger.” But it was also to print fashion-plates, and so appeal to the women of the country, even if they did not care for literature. So it was to be called “The Boston Miscellany of Literature and Fashion.” There were to be forty-six pages of literature, with a good steel engraving, in every number, and two pages of fashion, with a fashion-plate.

My brother was to be responsible for the literature, and somebody, I think in New York, for the fashion, with which the former had nothing to do. I remember he had to explain this to Mrs. Stowe, whom he had asked to contribute. She had declined because she had been shocked by a dÉcolletÉe figure on one of these plates. Dear Mrs. Stowe, in her English progress ten years afterwards, had an opportunity to reconcile herself with dresses much more pronounced.

The “Atlantic” to-day calls itself a journal of literature, art, science, and politics. It does not undertake to reconcile fashion with literature. If Messrs. Bradbury and Soden had been questioned, they would have said, what was true, that there was no class of readers who could sustain creditably a purely literary magazine. The rate at which the poor “Knickerbocker” was expiring was evidence of this. But they would have said that there were a great many factory-girls in the country for whom there was no journal of fashion. They would have said that these girls could be relied upon to float the literary magazine, if in each number there was a love-story which they would be glad to read. And I remember that there was great glee in the counting-room when it was announced that a thousand copies of the new magazine had been sold in Lowell.

My brother was very stiff about concessions to the fashionable side. Two pages might be fashion, and as bad fashion as the publishers wanted, but his forty-six pages were to be the best which he could command. After a few numbers had been issued, he made a negotiation with Duyckinck, the editor of the “Arcturus,” by which the short-lived magazine was transferred to him. This gave him the help of some of the bright New Yorkers. They sent to him their accumulated manuscripts, and I then saw the handwriting of Elizabeth Barrett—Mrs. Browning—for the first time. Soon after this these young men in Boston made the personal acquaintance of their New York correspondents, and from that time began Lowell’s close friendship with Mr. Charles F. Briggs.

Of other writers rising to fame, who were secured for the “Miscellany,” was Hawthorne, who, to the great pleasure of all of us, contributed the article “A Virtuoso’s Collection.” Lowell probably met him for the first time at Elizabeth Peabody’s. Hawthorne soon after married her charming sister. As a nom de plume for a great deal of his work, Hawthorne assumed the French translation of his name. His stories in the “Democratic Review” of this time were attributed to “Monsieur d’AubÉpine.” Lowell says of him in his Concord address: “You would think me extravagant, I fear, if I said how highly I rate the genius of Hawthorne in the history of literature. At any rate, Hawthorne taught us one great and needful lesson; and that is, that our own past was an ample storehouse for the brightest works of imagination or fancy.”

The page of the “Miscellany” was an imitation as precise as possible of the page which Edward Moxon in London had adopted for several of his popular series. All these young men had read and enjoyed the first part of Browning’s “Bells and Pomegranates,” which had appeared with Moxon’s imprint in this form in 1842.

I speak at this length of the “Miscellany,” of which we print a facsimile of one page, because in that year Lowell really made his determination to lead a literary life. It was not the life of a poet simply, but a life of letters, to which from this time he looked forward. To the volume of the “Miscellany” published in 1842 he contributed the following: three articles on “Old English Dramatists,” the two sketches “My First Client” and “Getting Up,” and, in verse, the sonnet to Keats, “The Two,” “To Perdita Singing,” “Fantasy,” “The Shepherd of King Admetus,” and two unnamed sonnets.

In the second number of the “Miscellany,” under the date of December, 1841, appeared also the “Ode” which he afterwards thought worth reprinting in the collected edition of his works. One cannot but see in it a careful statement of his own hopes and resolves for his future. It was originally printed in stanzas of four lines; as he recast it subsequently, the breaks between the stanzas disappear. The following characteristic verses show what was central in his thought and feeling at this time:—

In a private note on the 8th of July he says of this Ode: “I esteem it the best I ever wrote.” And he adds, “I find that my pen follows my soul more easily the older I grow. I know that I have a mission to accomplish, and if I live I will do the work my Father giveth me to do.”

At the end of the year, when my brother resigned the management of the “Miscellany,” Lowell and his friend Robert Carter ventured on the “Pioneer,” which was to be a magazine of “literature and art.” Fashion was thrown out of the window; and for illustrations, they began with some good pictures from Flaxman.

Lowell was already engaged to be married to Miss White. Their lives were wholly bound up in each other. He was writing to her charming letters in poetry and in prose, and she to him in letters as charming. They read together, they dreamed together, they forecast the future together. In such a daily atmosphere it was natural that he should choose that future rightly.

He knew what was in him. By this time he knew he could work steadily, and when he wrote in triumph,

he wrote in that frank confidence in his future which his future wholly justified.

In the fifth volume of the present series of the “New England Magazine” Mr. Mead has given us a charming article on the three numbers of the “Pioneer.” These numbers are now among the rarities most prized by American book collectors. And there is hardly a page of the “Pioneer” which one does not read with a certain interest, in view of what has followed. At the end of three numbers the journal died, because it had not subscribers enough to pay for it. It may be observed in this history of our early magazines that all these publishers lived on what we may call placer gold-washings, for nobody here had yet discovered the quartz rock of an advertising patronage. In the “Miscellany” and the “Pioneer” no enterprising advertiser assisted in the payment of the bills. There was not one advertisement in either. The English magazines printed advertisements long before.

In Lowell’s Introductory, written, as will be observed, when he was not yet twenty-four years old, he gives what Mr. Mead well calls a characteristic expression of those views of American literature which always controlled him afterward: “Everything that tends to encourage the sentiment of caste should be steadily resisted by all good men. But we do long for a natural literature. One green leaf, though of the veriest weed, is worth all the crape and wire flowers of the daintiest Paris milliners.” The whole article is well worth study by the young critics now.

It is rather funny to see, in these days, that Nathaniel Parker Willis, who then considered himself as the leader of the young literature of America, gave this opinion of Lowell in reviewing the first number of the “Pioneer:”—

“J.R. Lowell, a man of original and decided genius, has started a monthly magazine in Boston. The first number lies before us, and it justifies our expectation,—namely, that a man of genius, who is merely a man of genius, is a very unfit editor for a periodical.”

This remark of Willis is interesting now, since Lowell has proved himself perhaps the best literary editor whom the history of American journalism has yet discovered. It is just possible, as the reader will see, that Willis did not write this himself.

Lowell’s connection with the “Pioneer” occupied him for the closing months of 1842 and the beginning of 1843. This was at a period when his eyes troubled him badly. Writing from New York, he says: “Every morning I go to Dr. Elliott’s (who, by the way, is very kind) and wait for my turn to be operated upon. This sometimes consumes a great deal of time, the Doctor being overrun with patients. After being made stone blind for the space of fifteen minutes, I have the rest of the day to myself.”

On the 17th of January he writes, “My eyes, having been operated on yesterday with the knife, must be used charily;” and again on the 22d he writes that he had had a second operation performed on the 20th.

“Handbills of the ‘Pioneer’ in red and black, with a spread eagle at the head of them, face me everywhere. I could not but laugh to see a drayman standing with his hands in his pockets diligently spelling it out, being attracted thereto doubtless by the bird of America, which probably led him to think it the Proclamation of the President, a delusion from which he probably did not awake after perusing the document.”

And on the 24th he says: “I can scarcely get through with one letter without pain, and everything that I write retards my cure, and so keeps me the longer here. But I love Keats so much that I think I can write something good about him.... If you knew how I am placed, you would not write me so. I am forbidden to write under pain of staying here forever or losing my eyes.” And in the same letter, “I must not write any more.”

“Have you got any copy for the third number? Do not ask any conservatives to write, for it will mar the unity of the magazine. We shall be surer of success if we maintain a uniform course and have a decided tendency either one way or the other. We shall at least gain more influence in that way.”

In New York he often met Willis personally, and the more he saw of him the better he liked him. I think this was what happened with most people who met Willis. It certainly was so with me. In personal intimacy the studied affectation of his printed work disappeared. It was studied, as almost any one could guess without seeing him. Willis also was at this time under Dr. Elliott’s care for treatment of his eyes. He told Dr. Elliott that Lowell had written the most remarkable poetry that had been written in this country, and that he was destined to be the brightest star that had yet risen in American literature. He told Lowell himself that he was more popular and more talked about than any other poet in the land, and promised him that he would help the “Pioneer” in every way. At this time Willis was as highly regarded by young people, especially by the sort of people who read magazines, as any literary man in America.

Elizabeth Barrett, not yet married, had written for the Boston “Miscellany,” and on the 20th of January Lowell acknowledges four poems from her.^[7] There were but three numbers of the “Pioneer” published. It has been the fashion to speak of it in a pitying tone, as if it were a mere foolish enterprise of two callow boys. But if between the numbers or between the articles one reads, as I have done, the correspondence between Lowell and his “true friend and brother,” Robert Carter, one feels that the “Pioneer” failed of success only from a series of misfortunes. Looking back upon it now, it is easy to say that it needed capital for a beginning. Most things do in our modern world. It is clear enough in this case that the strongest reason for undertaking it was that Lowell lived and was at the beginning of his successful career. Without him there would have been no “Pioneer.” Knowing this, when you find that through January and February he was prohibited from writing, that week after week he was submitting to operations on his eyes, and that he was in actual danger of permanent blindness, you cease to ask why the “Pioneer” died at the end of its third number, and you wonder, on the other hand, that it lived at all.

When one remembers the currency which Lowell’s volumes of essays have had from the very beginning, he reads with special interest more than amusement the following note from Miss White, who had seen the publisher, which is pathetic. It describes the persuasion necessary to induce anybody to attempt the bold venture of issuing the first in that remarkable series:—

“I went to see Mr. Owen this afternoon, to talk to him about publishing James’s prose volume. He expressed himself greatly pleased with the articles, but said he wished to wait until James’s prose was better known to the public before he ventured upon it. Then I told him of the flattering notices of his ‘Old Dramatists’ that appeared at the time they came out, and of the lavish praise his prose style received. He said that changed the face of affairs wholly; that if he were as sure of the public as himself he should not hesitate. He said he wished to see you and talk about it with you also.”

Let all young writers remember this, that the public knows what it wants, whether publishers are doubtful or no. I may add the remark, which I believe to be wholly true, of one of the most successful publishers of our day, “No one on earth knows, when a book is published, whether it will sell five thousand copies or not. But if five thousand copies are sold, nothing is more certain than that twenty-five thousand can be.”

Mr. Lowell and Miss White were married in the end of December, 1844, with the good wishes, I might say, of everybody. Among her other exquisite faculties she had a sense of humor as keen as his, and both of them would run on, in the funniest way, about their plans for economical housekeeping. Sheet-iron air-tight stoves had just come into being. I believe I never see one to this day without recollecting in what an amusing vein of absurd exaggeration she once showed, in her lively talk, how much they were going to save in the detail of domestic life by the use of that most unromantic bit of household machinery.

“A Year’s Life,” his maiden volume of poems, had been published in 1841, about the time of their engagement. We used to pretend that weeks in advance of the publication multitudes of young girls who took a tender interest in this most romantic of marriages walked daily from one to another of the half-dozen book-shops in little Boston to inquire if “A Year’s Life” were ready, and thus to stimulate the interest and curiosity of booksellers and their clerks. I think that the larger publishers of to-day even would say that the sale was more than is to be expected from any new volume of short poems. This was, of course, only a retail sale in Boston and the neighboring towns. There was as yet no demand for “Lowell’s Poems” in New York, Philadelphia, or London.

Seeing the future of the author’s poetical reputation, I think that young authors may be interested in reading the letter in which he first proposes modestly to print this book:—

“I think, nay I am sure, that I have written some worthy things, and though I feel well enough pleased with myself, yet it is a great joy to us all to be known and understood by others. I do long for somebody to like what I have written, and me for what I have written, who does not know me. You and I were cured of the mere cacoethes imprimendi (Rufus) by our connection with ‘Harvardiana:’ I think that so far we should be thankful to it, as it taught us that print was no proof of worthiness, and that we need not look for a movement of the world when our pieces were made known in print.

“Now, if you will find out how much it would cost to print 400 copies (if you think I could sell so many; if not, 300) in decent style (150 pages—less if printed closely), like Jones Very’s book, for instance, I could find out if I could get an indorser. I should not charge less than $1 per vol.—should you? I don’t care so much for the style of printing as to get it printed in any way.

“Jones Very’s style would be good, too, because it might be printed by our old printers, and that would be convenient about the proofs.”

In the subsequent collections of his poems he omitted many of those which are in this pioneer volume. And for this reason, among others, the volume is in great demand among collectors. But it is easy to see that he had even then—two years only after the class poem—outgrown the crudities of younger days which we find in turning over “Harvardiana.” There is serious purpose now, though it be expressed only in two or three words together. Some of these are the poems of a lover. Yes! but they are also the poems of a serious young man who knows that there is duty next his hand, and who is determined, with God’s help and with the help of her he loves best, to carry that duty through.

The spirit of the book reflects thus the same sense of a mission to mankind which appears in the letters which have been preserved from a full correspondence which he maintained with Heath, a young Virginian. Frank Heath, as his friends called him, graduated at Cambridge while Lowell was in the Law School, and a close intimacy had grown up between them. When Heath left college in August, 1840, he returned to Virginia. There is a careful letter from Lowell to him which has a curious interest now, in the light of the history which followed. Lowell begs him to lead the way and to make himself the typical man in the new history of Virginia by emancipating his own slaves and leading in the establishment of a new civilization there. In fact, Heath soon went to Europe, and was lost to his friends here for nearly twenty years in one or another German university. He returned to his own country in time to take a prominent post in the Confederate army, and I think he lost an arm in one of the battles of the rebellion.

The publication of “A Year’s Life” showed that Lowell was a poet. This was now beyond discussion. The papers in the “Miscellany” and the “Pioneer” now showed, what people in the little literary circles of America knew, that he wrote prose well and that he had more than an amateur’s knowledge of the older English literature. He could work steadily and faithfully.

In the autumn of 1843 and the winter of 1843–44, however, as has been said, he had trouble with his eyes, and he lived for some time in New York for their better treatment. Mrs. Lowell also, always of delicate health, required a more genial climate than Elmwood or Watertown would give her. Her lungs were delicate, and after their marriage, to escape the harsh climate of Boston, they spent the winter of 1844-45 in Philadelphia. It need not be said that in each city they made very near personal friends who felt and treasured the personal attraction of each of them,—an attraction which it is impossible to describe.

In the same winter the Southern party in Congress and the speculators who had bought Texan bonds for next to nothing were engaged in driving through the last Congress of President Tyler’s administration the “joint resolutions” by which Texas was annexed to the United States. There were no precedents for such annexation. What would seem the natural course in an agreement between two republics would have been a formal treaty between them. But it was known that no treaty for such a purpose could pass the United States Senate. It was determined, therefore, by the friends of annexation, who had such support as Mr. Tyler and his Cabinet could give, that they would drive these “joint resolutions” through Congress. And this was done. The resolutions passed the Senate by a majority of one only. They passed the day before Mr. Tyler went out of office. Here was the first pitched battle in Congress on a definite national issue between the North and South since that defeat of the North in the Missouri Compromise which had so excited Charles Lowell the year after his son was born. The whole country, North and South, was wild with excitement, as well it might be.

Lowell was ready to give himself to the side of freedom with his pen or with his voice. At this time he engaged in the service first of the “Liberty Bell,” an anti-slavery annual published in Boston, and afterwards of the “National Anti-Slavery Standard.” Mrs. Lowell also wrote for both journals.

The “Standard” was a weekly journal of great originality and ability, published in New York under the auspices of one of the national anti-slavery societies. The editor was Sydney Howard Gay, afterwards so distinguished as a historian, and holding all his life the most important trusts as a journalist in New York. He worked with Bryant in the “Evening Post.” He worked with Greeley in the “Tribune.” It is not too late to hope that his memoirs will be collected and published. They will throw a flood of light on points not yet fully revealed in the history of the twenty years which led up to the fall of Richmond and the emancipation of America.

Most organs, so called, of a special philanthropy are narrow and bigoted, and so, by the divine law which rules narrowness and bigotry, are preËminently dull. Witness most missionary journals and all temperance journals, so far as this writer has observed. We owed it to Gay, I suppose, that the “Anti-Slavery Standard,” while pitiless in its denunciation of slavery, was neither narrow, bigoted, nor dull. Lydia Maria Child’s letters from New York, which were published in it once a week, are still remembered among editors. They give an ideal type for writing in that line, in a series of papers which may well be studied by young journalists, for, though often imitated, they have never been equaled. They are the despair of “leading editors” who try to get such work done for them and never succeed.

Lowell engaged himself to write regularly for the “Standard,” and did so for some years. His prose papers in that journal have never been collected, but they would be well worth collection. And the poems he wrote at this time, sometimes political, but not always so, generally appeared in the “Standard.” The headquarters of the young people were now at Elmwood in Cambridge. Here their oldest children were born, and here their oldest child died. It was then that Maria Lowell wrote that charming poem which has been read with sympathetic tears in so many homes from which “the Good Shepherd” has called away one of his lambs.

I have often heard it said that the “Biglow Papers,” which followed soon after, introduced Lowell in England, and I suppose it was so. You never can tell what they will like in England, or what they will not like. But this is clear, that, having little or no humor of their own, they are curiously alive for humor in others. And the dialect of the “Biglow Papers,” which is no burlesque or exaggeration, but simply perfect New England talk, is in itself curious enough and suggestive enough to have introduced letters on any theme.

Literary people in England still fancied that they were opposed to the principle of slavery, as, in truth, a considerable number of them were. And between the outspoken abolitionists of America and those of England there was then a freemasonry tender and charming, though sometimes absurd and amusing. I suppose this first introduced the Biglow letters, with their rollicking fun, their absolute good sense and vigorous suggestions, into England. Once introduced, they took care of themselves, and went wherever there were readers of sense or even intelligence. They began in a spurt of fun about a little local passage in Massachusetts politics.

The success of the first numbers naturally led Lowell to carry them further, and they became in the end an important factor in the anti-slavery politics of New England.

Meanwhile, as our next chapter will show, what we now look back upon as the “lecture system” was developing itself in the Northern States. With the ordinary stupidity of ecclesiasticism, most of the organized churches had succeeded in shutting out from their services the ultra speakers on whatever question. They confined their sermons on Sunday to the decorous wish-wash in which average men treated in a harmless way subjects to which the people were indifferent. Speaking of the English pulpit at the same period, under conditions not far different, Jowett says: “Really, I never hear a sermon of which it is possible to conceive that the writer has a serious belief about things. If you could but cross-examine him, he would perjure himself every other sentence.” The indifference with which wide-awake Americans, particularly of the younger generation, regarded such preaching, resulted in the development of the “lyceum system” of the North. Of this I will speak in some detail in the next chapter. It is enough to say here that the organized churches might thank themselves if they found, introduced into every community on weekdays, the most radical views, and frequently by speakers who would not have pretended to address them on Sundays. I am trying not to travel outside the line which I have marked for myself in these papers; but I do not pass that line when I say that a sort of indignation was aroused through the whole Northern community because the established church, in its various communions, was unwilling to devote itself to what was clearly its business, the fair discussion of the most important subject bearing on right and wrong which could possibly come before any people. The reader will find some valuable notes by Mr. Higginson, interesting of course, in “Cheerful Yesterdays.” “All of which he saw, and much of which he was.”

I refer to this now not because Lowell was often engaged in lecturing as one of the anti-slavery speakers. It must be remembered that this book is not so much a history of his life, as an effort to show the circumstances which surrounded his life and which account for the course of it. In his weekly contributions to the press, whether in prose or in verse, he kept in touch with the men and women who were quite in advance in forming the Northern or national sentiment of the crisis.

The “Liberty Bell” and the “Standard,” with his bright and suggestive articles, went into the circles which summoned Parker and Phillips and Garrison to give them instruction or inspiration which they would have sought in vain from the more decorous pulpits of that day. So it happened that, although he did not “enter the lecture field” as early as some of his companions and friends in the anti-slavery cause, he was, in those years of the awakening, perfectly well known among those interested in that cause.

In this connection it interests me to remember that the last time I saw his father, Dr. Lowell, was at the house in Elmwood in 1855. I went to him to ask for his assent and signature in a memorial relating to the freedom of Kansas, which was addressed to what we then called “The Three Thousand New England Clergymen.” I went to him because he was one of the oldest Congregational ministers in New England, and because he had always deprecated the separation between the evangelical and liberal branches of that body. He sympathized heartily in what we were doing, signed his name at the head of our circular-letter, and then put his hand on my head, and in the most cordial and pathetic way gave me and our cause an old man’s benediction. This, the reader should note, took place in the spring of 1855.