The firm, then Ticknor & Fields, were Tennyson’s American publishers. They had just brought out “In Memoriam.” One of the five gentlemen looked in as he went down town, took up the book, and said, “Tennyson has done for friendship what Petrarch did for love, Mr. Fields,” to which Mr. Fields assented; and his friend—say Mr. Hillard—went his way. Not displeased with his own remark, when he came to his office—if it were Hillard—he repeated it to Sumner, who in turn repeated it to Cleveland, perhaps, when he looked in. Going home to lunch, Sumner goes in at the shop, takes up the new book, and says, “Your Tennyson is out, Mr. Fields. What Petrarch did for love, Tennyson has done for friendship.” Mr. Fields again assents, and it is half an hour before Mr. Cleveland enters. He also is led to say that Tennyson has done for friendship what Petrarch has done for love; and before the sun sets Mr. Fields receives the same suggestion from Longfellow, and then from Felton, who have fallen in with their accustomed friends, and look in to see the new books, on their way out to Cambridge.
This story belongs, of course, to the year 1850. In 1841, when Lowell begins to be counted as a Bostonian, the Corner Bookstore was already the centre of a younger group of men who were earning for themselves an honorable place in American letters. I believe they were first brought together in the government of the Mercantile Library Association. This association started in a modest way to provide books and a reading-room for merchants’ clerks. To a beginning so simple this group of young fellows, when hardly of age, gave dignity and importance. Under their lead the association established a large and valuable lending library, set on foot what were the most popular lectures in Boston, and kept up a well-arranged reading-room. It was virtually a large literary club, which occupied a building, the whole of which was devoted to books or to education. With the passage of two generations much of the work which the association thus took in hand has devolved upon the Public Library and its branches and upon the Lowell Institute. The Mercantile Library has been transferred to the city and is administered as its South End Branch. The winter courses under the Lowell foundation take the place of the Mercantile courses, so that this association now shows its existence in a comfortable club-house in Tremont Street.
In the ten years between 1840 and 1850 it was an important factor in Boston life. The initiative in its work was given by James T. Fields, Edwin Percy Whipple, Daniel N. Haskell, Warren Sawyer, Thomas J. Allen, George O. Carpenter, Edward Stearns, and George Warren, who had at command the ready service of younger fellows among their companions, loyal to the interests of the club, and keeping up the best interests of society better than they knew. The club engaged Webster, Everett, Choate, Sumner, Channing, Emerson, Holmes, and Winthrop to lecture to them, arranging for “honorariums” such as had never been heard of before.
The group of officers whom I have named was in itself a little coterie of young fellows who were reading and talking with one another on the best lines of English literature. Fields and Whipple soon became known to the public by their own printed work. All the group were well read in the best English books of the time, and I think I am right in saying that the existence of such a group around him strengthened Fields’s hands, as he compelled the firm to which he belonged to introduce in America some of the lesser known English authors. In 1845 Thomas Starr King removed to Boston. His rare genius, insight, and marvelous power of expression gave him a welcome everywhere. In this little circle of the Mercantile Library managers he was the intimate friend of all.
Older than either of these groups of men, there was a set of careful scholars in Boston whom I may distinguish as the historians. Dr. Palfrey once said to me that it was a sort of accident, as he thought, which turned the young literary men of Boston so much in the direction of history. The accident was that the two principal public libraries before 1850 were the Library of the Historical Society, and that of the Boston Athenæum, which was much larger. It so happened that in its earlier years the Athenæum collection was much strongest on the side of history. It also happened that in 1818 Mr. Israel Thorndike bought for Harvard College in one purchase the collection of early American authorities which had been made by Ebeling, a German collector in the first quarter of the century. This collection is still unrivaled. There was thus, so Dr. Palfrey said, a sort of temptation to young Bostonians to read and study American history. And it is almost fair to speak of the Boston “school of history” which was thus formed.
I was a boy of eleven, reading to my mother on a summer afternoon, when my father brought into the room a black-haired, olive-complexioned, handsome young man, and said: “Here is Mr. Bancroft, my dear! The first volume of the History is finished, and he has come in to talk about printing and publishers.” This was the beginning of my acquaintance, I believe I may say friendship, with Mr. Bancroft, which lasted until he died in 1891.[[3]]
It is convenient to remember that he was as old as the century. In 1833, the time of which I speak, Prescott was already at work on “Ferdinand and Isabella.” Sparks had edited the “Diplomatic Correspondence,” and was collecting the materials for his “Washington.” Richard Hildreth, who edited the Boston “Atlas,” was preparing for his history of the United States. Palfrey in 1839 gave up his professorship at Cambridge that he might devote himself to the history of New England. Lothrop Motley is younger, but he published “Merrymount” as early as 1848. I may add that the patriotic anniversary orations of both the Everetts are historical studies. Edward Everett, in particular, had the historic sense and tact very delicately developed. Mr. Emerson once said of him that “for a man who threw out so many facts he was seldom convicted of a blunder.” To which remark I will add that Mr. Emerson also is always accurate in his frequent references to American history.
It seems best to attempt this sketch of the literary surroundings of the life on which the young law student is now to enter. With every person who has been named, and, indeed, with almost everybody who had anything to do with letters in Boston, Lowell was personally acquainted; with many of them he was intimately acquainted.