Rufus King afterwards won for himself distinction and respect as a lawyer of eminence in Cincinnati. He was the grandson of the great Rufus King, the natural leader of the Federalists and of the North in the dark period of the reign of the House of Virginia. Our Rufus King’s mother was the daughter of Governor Worthington, of Ohio. King had begun his early education at Kenyon College, but came to Cambridge to complete his undergraduate course, and remained there in the law school under Story and Greenleaf. He then returned to Cincinnati, where he lived in distinguished practice in his profession until his death in 1891. “His junior partners were many of them men in the first rank of political, judicial, and professional eminence. But he himself steadily declined all political or even judicial trusts until, in 1874, he became a member of the Constitutional Convention of Ohio. Over this body he presided. He did not shrink from any work in education. He was active in the public schools. He was the chief workman in creating the Cincinnati Public Library, and, as one of the trustees of the McMicken bequest, he nursed it into the foundation of the University of Cincinnati. In 1875 he became Dean of the Faculty of the Law School, and served in that office for five years. Until his death he continued his lectures on Constitutional Law and the Law of Real Property. No citizen of Cincinnati was more useful or more honored.”
Lowell was with Mr. King in the Cambridge law school.
Of the five editors, four became lawyers—so far, at least, as to take the degree of Bachelor of Laws at Cambridge. The fifth, George Warren Lippitt, from Rhode Island, remained in Cambridge after he graduated and studied at the divinity school.
There were other clergymen in his class, who attained, as they deserved, distinction afterwards. Lowell frequently refers in his correspondence to Coolidge, Ellis, Renouf, and Washburn. Lippitt’s articles in “Harvardiana” show more maturity, perhaps, than those of any of the others. He had entered the class as a sophomore, and was the oldest, I believe, of the five. For ten years, from 1842 to 1852, he was a valuable preacher in the Unitarian church, quite unconventional, courageous, candid, and outspoken. He was without a trace of that ecclesiasticism, which the New Testament writers would call accursed, which is the greatest enemy of Christianity to-day, and does more to hinder it than any other device of Satan. In 1852 Lippitt sought and accepted an appointment as secretary of legation to Vienna. He married an Austrian lady, and represented the United States at the imperial court there in one and another capacity for the greater part of the rest of his life. He died there in 1891.
Charles Woodman Scates, also, like King and Lippitt, entered the class after the freshman year. There was a tender regard between him and Lowell. When they graduated, Scates went to South Carolina to study law. But for his delicate health, I think his name would be as widely known in the Southern states as Rufus King’s is in the valley of the Ohio. I count it as a great misfortune that almost all of Lowell’s letters to him, in an intimate and serious correspondence which covered many years, were lost when the house in Germantown was burned where he spent the last part of his life. Fortunately, however, Mr. Norton had made considerable extracts from them in the volume of Lowell’s published letters. From one of these letters which has been preserved, I copy a little poem, which I believe has never been printed. Lowell writes:—
“I will copy you a midnight improvisation, which must be judged kindly accordingly. It is a mere direct transcript of actual feelings, and so far good:—
“What is there in the midnight breeze
That tells of things gone by?
Why does the murmur of the trees
Bring tears into my eye?