CHAPTER VII
A MAN OF LETTERS
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.
MARIA LOWELL
From the crayon by S.W. Rowse, in the possession of Miss Georgina Lowell Putnam, Boston
I remember, while I am writing these lines, that all the five young men spoken of in the last chapter entered their names, on graduating, on the books of the Law School. They spent more or less of the next eighteen months at Cambridge. Their intimacy, however, did not spring from this. It might be said, indeed, that they all went to the Law School because they were intimate, rather than that they were intimate because they went to the Law School. Of the five, King only was a professional lawyer through his life. His honored father before him, John Glen King, of the Harvard class of 1807, a learned and scholarly man, had been a distinguished leader at the Essex bar. Story gave most of his life to letters and to art, but his earliest publication is a series of Law Reports, and he afterwards published—in 1844—a book on Contracts. My brother, after he opened his law office, was early turned away from his profession to the management of the “Daily Advertiser;” and White, who died at the age of thirty-six, before any of the rest of them, gave so much of his time to the temperance and anti-slavery reforms, and to political work, that he cannot be spoken of as a practicing lawyer. None of them are now living.
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.