Shatters the blueness of a sky serene.”
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.
CONTENTS PAGE OF THE BOSTON “MISCELLANY”
The Authors’ names are in the handwriting of Nathan Hale
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.
“Perhaps then first he understood
Himself how wondrously endued.”
He knew what was in him. By this time he knew he could work steadily, and when he wrote in triumph,
“I am a maker and a poet,