In 1856, the year when Lowell’s name first appears as a professor in the Harvard catalogue, he is one of eleven professors. In 1891, the year of his death, there were fifty-seven professors and assistant professors. The number of “tutors” and “instructors,” to follow the college titles, increases in the same proportion. Lowell’s name does not appear on the list of the “Faculty” in 1855, I suppose because he was in Europe. The Faculty consisted of thirteen gentlemen, of whom President Eliot, then one of the junior members, and Professor James Mills Peirce are now the only survivors. Of his associates in the Faculty, Dr. Walker and Professors Felton, Peirce, Bowen, and Lovering had been his teachers when he was himself an undergraduate twenty years before. Of the others, Professor Sophocles, older than he, had been Greek professor in Amherst before Lowell was at Cambridge. Professors Child, Lane, Jennison, Cooke, Chase, Eliot, and James Peirce were his juniors. In the cordial and simple courtesies of Cambridge life, all these gentlemen are to be spoken of in any calendar of his friends. After his college work begins, his name appears on the list of the Faculty. And it remains on the catalogue during the eight years when he was in Spain and England as American minister. He went to Europe in 1855, after his appointment as professor, and remained there more than a year; he made another visit in August, 1872, and remained abroad until July, 1874. His proper duties at Cambridge, therefore, were between September, 1856, and the summer of 1872, and from October, 1874, to his appointment as minister to Spain in the spring of 1877, covering in both periods nearly nineteen years.

The earlier of these periods—that from 1856 to 1872—includes the whole civil war and the most acute of the struggles which preceded it. He watched with great interest the Kansas trials, and had at one time the idea of taking Hosea Biglow out to Kansas to send his prophecies from what was really the seat of war. He was himself learning, and the world was learning, that Minerva was not unwilling when he wrote prose; although it was as late as 1846 that he expressed himself so doubtfully in that matter. It is a pity that the best of his political essays, in the “Standard,” in the “Atlantic,” and in the “North American,” cannot be published together in a volume for popular circulation. In one volume of the Riverside edition of his collected works are four of the best. If these were in a separate volume, and a few more of the same sort were printed with them, it would be good reading for the New Stuarts, for Philistines, Pharisees, and Lynch-men. It will be many years, I fear, before we are done with them.

His cousin, Mr. Lawrence Lowell, thus characterizes these essays:—

“During the period of war and reconstruction Lowell wrote a number of political essays, but these are not as remarkable as his poetry or his criticism. Although very influential in forming public opinion, and although containing many wise sayings and many striking aphorisms on government, they are, in the main, a forcible exposition of the opinions held by intelligent Republicans. Beginning with a distrust of Lincoln’s tentative policy, they finally express unbounded admiration for the statesmanship that could wait until the times were ripe, and give the lead when the people were ready to follow. The essays show how thoroughly the writer had become estranged from the abolitionists. He regards the conflict at the outset, not as a crusade against slavery, but as a struggle to restore order and maintain the unity of the nation as a question of national existence, in which the peculiar institution of the South is not at issue; and, although before the war was over he saw that no lasting peace was possible unless slavery was forever destroyed, he held that opinion in common with men who had never harbored a thought of abolition before the secession of South Carolina. In short, he no longer writes as the prophet of 1848, but as a citizen and a statesman.”

In an earlier chapter I have already referred to the “Anti-Slavery Standard,” so long a brilliant exception to the dullness, almost proverbial, of what are called the “organs” of causes or of societies. Lowell’s connection with the “Standard” for many years brought him into close connection with a man after his own heart, Sydney Howard Gay, well known among all journalists, historians, and men of letters in America. He will be remembered for the untold services which he rendered to the country in and after the civil war, and to good letters, good history, and good journalism before the war, in the war, after the war, and, indeed, as long as he lived.

In 1840 it would have been difficult, even for a person inside the sacred circle of the abolitionists, to explain, in a manner satisfactory to every one, the difference between “old organization,” “new organization,” and the shades of feeling and thought in either, or among “come-outers” or “come-outer” societies, which were neither of the new nor old. For an outsider it would have been impossible to make such explanations then. And, fortunately, any such discrimination is now as unnecessary as it is impossible. They were all free lances, who obeyed any leader when they chose, and, if they did not like his direction, told him so and refused to follow. A sufficient section of anti-slavery people, however, to carry out their purposes, established the “Anti-Slavery Standard.”

At a meeting quite celebrated in those times, in which the original Anti-Slavery Society divided itself between what was called the “old organization” and the “new organization,” the old organization, sometimes called the “Garrisonians,” determined to establish this paper. This was in the year 1840, and the first editor was a gentleman named Nathaniel P. Rogers, a brilliant and vigorous writer from New Hampshire. He died in 1846. His essays have been published, with a Life by John Pierpont.

The motto of the new journal was “Without concealment and without compromise.” It was under the general superintendence of what is spoken of afterwards as the “executive committee;” and, if I understand it rightly, this executive committee was chosen annually at the meetings of the “old organization.” An outsider, perhaps, would have said that Garrison’s “Liberator” would answer the purpose of an organ; and, so far as devotion to the main cause went, of course it would. But Garrison, on his part, would never have ground the crank of anybody’s organ. And, on the other side, the Anti-Slavery Society did not want, as such, to accompany him on such side-crusades as he might wish to undertake in the course of the great enterprise. For an instance, most, if not all, of the people who united to establish the “Standard” would choose to vote, if they wanted to do so, and frequently did vote. But he whom in those days men called an abolitionist pure and simple, whom one could underwrite as A 1, would have abominated any vote at any election.

This was the explanation given me by the person best qualified to answer my question when I asked, “Why the ’National Anti-Slavery Standard’ and the ‘Liberator’?”

In 1844 Mr. Gay became the editor of the “Standard.” He was an abolitionist through and through. He even gave up the study of law, because he felt that he could not swear to sustain the Constitution of the United States, and so could not enter at the bar. He had very rare gifts of editorial promptness and sagacity; and, as the “Standard” itself shows, had the unselfishness and the knowledge of men which enabled him to engage as fellow-workmen men and women of remarkable ability. Henry Wilson speaks of him as the man who deserved well of his country because he kept the “Tribune” a war paper in spite of Greeley.

Lowell had written before 1846 for the anti-slavery papers, as the reader knows. Mrs. Chapman, a lady distinguished among the abolitionists, had suggested to Gay that Lowell would give strength to the “Standard.” How droll it seems now that anybody should be advising anybody to engage his services! All the same, Mrs. Chapman did, and he was retained to write once a week for the “Standard.” In an early letter of his to Gay, as early as June of 1846, he says that he is “totally unfitted” for the position of an “editorial contributor.” He was sure that Garrison and Mrs. Chapman overrated his popularity. “In the next place,”—this is edifying now,—“if I have any vocation, it is the making of verse. When I take my pen for that, the world opens itself ungrudgingly before me, everything seems clear and easy, as it seems sinking to the bottom would be as one leans over the edge of his boat in one of those dear coves at Fresh Pond. But when I do prose, it is invit MinervÂ. My true place is to serve the cause as a poet.”

In the same letter he suggests what we now call a “funny column.” He calls it a “Weekly Pasquil.” “I am sure I come across enough comical thoughts in a week to make up a good share of such a corner, and Briggs and yourself [Gay] and Quincy could help.”

Edmund Quincy began in the “Standard” that series of letters signed “Byles,” which with infinite fun and spirit revealed Boston to the decorous senses of those people who had supposed that they were the “upper four hundred.” The letters were afterward carried on in the “Tribune” for many years. In this instance, as in the transfer of Mr. Gay’s services to the “Tribune,” the “Standard” led the way for some of the signal achievements in the interesting history of that paper.

Lowell’s correspondence with Gay is excellent reading for young men who have fallen in love with their own picture of journalism, and are fascinated by the charm of that picture. To us, reading after fifty years, it is edifying, not to say amusing, to find that, after rather more than a year, the “Executive Committee” of the “Standard” feared that they were flinging their money away in paying this young poet four dollars and eighty cents a week for his contributions. Think of that, gentlemen who manage the treasuries of weekly or monthly journals now! James Lowell, in the very prime of his life, is writing for you. He is just beginning on the “Biglow Papers.” And you find that the work is not worth five dollars a week, and notify your working editor that he must be dropped!

Lowell’s letter in reply is manly and courteous. He even says that he has felt somewhat cramped by the knowledge that a corresponding editor ought to recognize the views of an “Executive Committee.” “I have felt that I ought to work in my own way, and yet I have also felt that I ought to try to work in their way, so that I have failed of working in either.”

Young authors may read with interest these words,—not too proud: “I think the Executive Committee would have found it hard to get some two or three of the poems I have furnished from any other quarter.” “Beaver Brook,” for instance, “To Lamartine,” or several of the early Biglow papers! No! It would be hard to get them furnished “from any other quarter.” And the anonymous Executive Committee flinched at the four dollars and eighty cents which had to be paid for each of these! With one and another such jar, however, the connection between Lowell and the “Standard” lasted, in one or another form, for four or five years.

I hope it is not too late for us still to expect a full memoir of Mr. Gay’s life and work. As a permanent contribution to literature, “The Popular History of America” will preserve his memory. It is the first of the composite histories wrought by the hands of many experts; but it all went under his careful supervision, and ought to be called by his name. At Chicago, at New York, in the “Tribune,” and as coadjutor with Mr. Bryant in the “Evening Post” office, he showed what his great capacity as an editor was.

I have never seen in print his story of that fearful night when Lincoln was killed. But one hears it freely repeated in conversation, and I see no reason why it should not be printed now.

With the news of the murder of Lincoln, there came to New York every other terrible message. The office of the “Tribune,” of course, received echoes from all the dispatches which showed the alarm at Washington. There were orders for the arrest of this man, there were suspicions of the loyalty of that man. No one knew what the morrow might bring.

In the midst of the anxieties of such hours, to Mr. Gay, the acting-editor of that paper, there entered the foreman of the typesetting-room. He brought with him the proof of Mr. Greeley’s leading article, as he had left it before leaving the city for the day. It was a brutal, bitter, sarcastic, personal attack on President Lincoln,—the man who, when Gay read the article, was dying in Washington.

Gay read the article, and asked the foreman if he had any private place where he could lock up the type, to which no one but himself had access. The foreman said he had. Gay bade him tie up the type, lock the galley with this article in his cupboard, and tell no one what he had told him. Of course no such article appeared in the “Tribune” the next morning.

“Are you there, Mr. Gay? I have been looking for you. They tell me that you ordered my leader out of this morning’s paper. Is it your paper or mine? I should like to know if I cannot print what I choose in my own newspaper!” This in great rage.

“The paper is yours, Mr. Greeley. The article is in type upstairs, and you can use it when you choose. Only this, Mr. Greeley: I know New York, and I hope and believe, before God, that there is so much virtue in New York that, if I had let that article go into this morning’s paper, there would not be one brick upon another in the ‘Tribune’ office now. Certainly I should be sorry if there were.”

Mr. Greeley was cowed. He said not a word, nor ever alluded to the subject again. I suppose the type is locked up in the cupboard of the “Tribune” office at this hour.

It was by this sort of service that Mr. Gay earned Mr. Wilson’s praise that “he kept Mr. Greeley up to the war.”

Mr. Lowell’s correspondence with Mr. Gay makes one wish that we had Mr. Gay’s side as well. The letters which are printed in Lowell’s correspondence are well worthy the study of young journalists.

It will be readily seen that here was a college professor well in touch with the responsibilities of the time. Writing occasionally for such a paper as the “Standard,” responsible for the tone and politics of the “Atlantic,” and afterwards of the “North American,” he could tell the world what he thought in those times of storm and earthquake; and he did not fail to use his opportunity. Meanwhile the war was drawing nearer and nearer. Strictly speaking, the war began when Franklin Pierce, on the part of the government of the United States, acting by the United States marshal, took possession of the Hotel of the Emigrant Aid Company, in Lawrence, Kansas, in May, 1856, and destroyed it.

The class of youngsters who entered Harvard College in 1856, when Lowell began his work there, graduated in 1860, and were eager to go into the army. Of that class sixty-four enlisted, of whom thirteen were killed. Thirty-six of the next class enlisted in the army or navy; thirty of the next class; and thirty-two of the class of 1863. Lowell was in personal relations with most of these young men. He had five young relatives who died in the service,—General Charles Russell Lowell and his brother James Jackson Lowell, William Lowell Putnam, Warren Dutton Russell, and Francis Lowell Dutton Russell, who was only twenty when he died. William Putnam was the son of the sister whose account of the childhood of Lowell has been already referred to.

Mr. Leslie Stephen has referred pathetically to Lowell’s white-heat patriotism as the war went on,—he watching it with such associations. “The language of the most widely known English newspapers at the time could hardly have been more skillfully framed for the purpose of irritating Lowell, if it had been consciously designed to that end.... He showed me the photograph of a young man in the uniform of the United States army, and asked me whether I thought that that lad looked like ‘a blackguard.’ On my giving the obvious reply, he told me that the portrait represented one of the nephews he had lost in the war. Not long afterward I read his verses in the second series of the ‘Biglow Papers,’ the most pathetic, I think, that he ever wrote, in which he speaks of the ‘three likely lads,’

These “three likely lads” were General Charles Russell Lowell, his brother James Jackson Lowell, and William Lowell Putnam, their cousin and the poet’s nephew.

In the autumn of 1860 Charles Lowell took charge of the Mount Savage Iron Works at Cumberland, Maryland. On the 20th of April, 1861, hearing of the attack made the preceding day in Baltimore on the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment, Lowell instantly abandoned his position and set out for Washington. He put himself at once at the disposal of the government, and about the middle of June received his commission as captain in the Third Regiment of United States Cavalry. For distinguished services at Williamsburg and Slatersville he was nominated for the brevet of Major. At South Mountain, in bearing orders to General Reno, he showed a bravery which excited universal admiration. In recognition of his gallantry in this battle, General McClellan assigned to Lowell the duty of presenting to the President the trophies of the campaign. In November, 1862, he was ordered to report to Governor Andrew for the purpose of organizing the Second Massachusetts Cavalry, of which he was appointed Colonel. In the May following he left Boston with his regiment, and was soon placed in command of the cavalry of the Department of Washington. For many months he was occupied in resisting the incursions of Mosby. “I have often said,” writes Colonel Mosby, “that of all the Federal commanders opposed to me, I had the highest respect for Colonel Lowell, both as an officer and as a gentleman.” It was at Cedar Creek, while leading his command, that he received his mortal wound. His commission as Brigadier-General of Volunteers, “determined on days before,” was signed on the 19th of October, too late for him to wear the honor he had earned so well. “We all shed tears,” said Custer, “when we knew we had lost him.”

General Lowell’s brother, James Jackson Lowell, was but twenty-three years old when the war began. He was born in the very Elmwood where, as this writer hopes, this reader feels at home. His early youth was spent in Boston, where he was a student in the public Latin School. Before he entered college, the family had removed to Cambridge again.

He spent the four years from 1854 as an undergraduate in Cambridge, taking his bachelor’s degree in 1858, at the second Commencement after his uncle entered on his duties there. He took the highest place in his class when he graduated; a favorite with his class, “liked as much as he was admired.” “While he would walk a dozen miles for wild flowers, skate all day, and dance as long as the music would play, he found no study too dry, and would have liked to embrace all science and all literature.”

He showed the interest in public affairs which such a young man ought to show, and such as was suggested to him by his ancestry on his father’s side and his mother’s alike. He was at the Dane Law School,—the school connected with the University at Cambridge,—when the war broke out. James Lowell and his cousin, William Putnam, also at the Law School, undertook to raise recruits for a Massachusetts regiment. After some delay they and their recruits were assigned to the Twentieth Regiment, Lowell taking a commission as First Lieutenant, and Putnam that of Second. They received their commissions on the 10th of July. They were sent to the front in September.

After a few days in Washington they were ordered to Poolesville in Maryland, and they were encamped there until October 20. On the 21st of October they were led across the Potomac by General Lane, who atoned for this mistake by his life. The wretched and useless battle of Ball’s Bluff was fought, Putnam was so severely wounded that he died in a few days, Schmitt, their captain, was wounded, and Lowell shot in his thigh. He returned home until his wound was healed, and joined his regiment on the Potomac as the movement of McClellan against Richmond went forward. He saw rather than joined in the fighting at Fair Oaks, and on the 26th of June writes, in good spirits, that he has hopes of seeing Richmond before the month is over. But, alas! on the 29th the regiment was ordered to join McClellan’s retreat to the Potomac, and on the 30th he received a mortal wound at Glendale.

His cousin, William Lowell Putnam, was an only son. The friend and teacher of the two, Professor Child, says: “A nobler pair never took the field. Putnam, with his fair hair, deep eyes, and uncontaminated countenance, was the impersonation of knightly youth. He was our Euryalus, quo pulchrior alter non fuit Æneadum. The cousins were beautifully matched in person, mental accomplishments, and pure heroism of character.”

I copy Professor Child’s words with a certain special tenderness for a personal remembrance of “Willie Putnam,” as most of his friends called him. I was in Salignac’s drill corps, before the war began, at a time when the drill was carried on in a large hall, at the corner of Summer Street and Washington Street in Boston. The hall was not long enough for the battalion to form in line, and two right angles were necessary, so that we stood at parade with our backs to three sides of the wall. Day by day, for I know not how many weeks, in presenting arms at parade, I “presented arms,” not so much to the commanding officer, as to this beautiful boy, who at the distance of thirty or forty yards presented arms to me. Among three or four hundred young men, most of them younger than I, I did not know his name. In June he was enlisting men, and Salignac and the drill corps, and I among the rest, saw him no longer. In October he was killed; and then for the first time, when I saw his picture, did I know that the noble, cheerful face I had so often saluted was that of this fine young man, in whose career, for many reasons, I was interested so deeply.

Professor Child, whom I cited in the passage above, took the most eager interest in the war, as, indeed, in one way or another, all the professors at Cambridge did. He was one of the Faculty who had joined it since they dragged Lowell through college “by the hair of his head,” as he and Cutler dragged Loring through. Eager in everything in the way of public spirit, Professor Child made it his special duty to prepare a “Song-book” for the soldiers who were going to the field. Who is doing it now for the liberators of to-day? He made everybody who could, write a war-song, and he printed a little book of these songs, with the music, which he used to send to the front with every marching regiment. I had the pleasure of telling him once that I had heard one of his songs sung by some privates of our Twenty-fourth in the camp before Bermuda Hundred. This curious collection is already rare. It was called “War Songs for Freemen,” and was dedicated to the army of the United States. Professor Child enlisted Charles T. Brooks, the Newport poet, Dr. Hedge, Dr. Holmes, and Mrs. Howe, both the Lelands, Mrs. T. Sedgwick, and some anonymous writers, to join in furnishing songs. He included some good translations from the German. He wrote two or three himself, which show his fun and audacity. Here is the last verse of “The Lass of the Pamunky:”—

Here is a new verse of “Lilliburlero:”—

Mr. Child was appointed professor in rhetoric in 1851, and by a new appointment in 1876 professor of the English language and literature. It is interesting to see that, although the use of the English language had been admirably taught at Harvard long before, there was no professor of English literature for two centuries and a half after the college was founded. Is there one at Oxford or at the English Cambridge to-day?

How well fitted Mr. Child was for these positions his published series of ballads and other works show. His recent death gives me a right to speak here of the tender love with which he was regarded by all the Cambridge circle, and of the unselfish interest with which he gave time and work to the help of all around him. One is glad to see this interest surviving in the lives of his children.

I am not sure that this story of those days is quite decorous enough for print. But I will risk it. Professor Calvin Ellis Stowe, who was a classmate of Longfellow’s, told me that in the early days of ’61 he met Longfellow in the streets of Boston. Both of them were in haste, but Longfellow had time enough to ask if the Andover gentlemen were all alive to their duty to the nation. Stowe said he thought they were, and Longfellow said, “If the New Testament won’t do, you must give them the Old.” Professor Stowe told me this in August of 1861, after the anniversary exercises of the class at Andover. The division between Rehoboam and Jeroboam had naturally played a very important part in the chapel exercises, with the obvious distinction that in our time it was the North which was in the right and the South which was in the wrong.

I am permitted to copy the following scraps from the journal of one of Lowell’s pupils at that time:—

“In ’64, when I had come back from a service mostly civil, but under direction of General Saxton, on Port Royal Islands, I had to give the college steward a bond to secure whatever dues I might incur. Lowell volunteered to sign the bond, and to say that he had perfect confidence in me. December 22 he called at Divinity Hall, to invite me to a five o’clock Christmas dinner; again on Christmas to turn the hour into four o’clock. The other guests were John Holmes and Caroline Norton, a young man and a niece of the host. Each man was impressed into escort duty to a woman, and I was Mabel’s escort to the table.

“The dinner and the chat were delightful. Holmes and Lowell sharpened their wits upon each other, while the rest of us ate and laughed. I was the only obdurate that would not take a smile of wine. After dinner we were entertained with some of Blake’s curious pictures, with snowflake shapes, and with books. Lowell had been ’weeding his back garden,’ and he offered me the little stock of duplicates and obsoletes: a Webster’s quarto dictionary was one of the books, and the evening was Christmas; but the boys had a notion that his income was almost pinchingly small for a man in his place; so, in the hope that he might second-hand them off for five or ten dollars, I declined them, and have been sorry ever since. I should have known that if he wanted to sell them he would not even have shown them to me, and that he did want to put them where they would be helpful and well used.”

I might almost say that such daily associations with the war account for the form and spirit alike of the “Commemoration Ode.” No one who was present when that ode was delivered can forget the occasion. It was in every regard historical. Peace was concluded, and the country drew a long breath with joy for the first time. An immense assembly of the graduates came together. As many of them as could filed into the church for religious services. Under the lead of Mr. Paine, the professor of music, a college chorus sang “Salvam fac rempublicam.” I think this was the first time that the music now well known was used for those words. On such occasions at Cambridge the graduates entered the church in the order of their seniority. I remember that on that occasion the attendance was so large that my own class, which was twenty-six years out of college, were among the last persons who could enter the building. We stood in the aisles, because there were no seats for us.

After these services the whole body of the alumni sat at a Spartan college feast in that part of “the yard,” as we say at Cambridge, which is between Harvard and Holden Halls. And there Lowell delivered his “Commemoration Ode.” His own intense interest was evident enough, but it was reflected in what I might call the passionate interest with which people heard. It was said afterwards, and I think this appears in his letters, that the final business of writing this wonderful poem had all been done in forty-eight hours before he delivered it. But then, as the reader sees, it had been more than four years in the writing. The inspiration had come from day to day, and he poured out here the expression of what he had been thinking and feeling, in joy and sorrow, in hope and fear, in learning and forgetting, for all that period of crisis and strain.

I believe I may tell—and it shall close these broken reminiscences of the war—a story which was familiarly told at the time, and which is true. I have heard it in one or two forms, and to secure accuracy now I have asked the gentleman whom I may call the hero of the story for his own account of it. He was one of Lowell’s pupils, in the “battle class” of 1862. He has sent it to me in the following words:—

“I spent the night before Commemoration Day on a lounge in Hollis 21, the room of my classmate Hudson, who was a tutor. I could not afterwards remember dreaming of anything in particular; but as I woke I heard,

“‘Rather a good sentiment,’ I said to myself; ‘and it seems to be appropriate to the day,’—then just dawning. And so I dropped off again.

“The dinner was spread, as you remember, in the green bounded by Harvard, Hollis, and Holden. My seat was just about in the middle. Mr. Lowell was a few rods nearer Holden and a good deal nearer Hollis,—about under the more southerly window of Hollis 21. When he rose, there was a prolonged closing of the ranks,—I remember the rustle of many feet on the grass,—and Mr. Lowell waited till all was quiet before he began reading. As he read, when he came to the words,

I began to feel, not that I had heard this before, but that something familiar was coming.

went on the reader. ‘Hullo!’ said I to myself, ‘I ought to know the next line.’

“‘Yes, but it isn’t going to rhyme,’ and this without distinctly repeating the rest of the line.”

When my friend had observed that “die for” would not rhyme with “true,” Lowell came to his relief by saying,

So well authenticated a story of sympathy and telepathy seems worth repeating.