Not long before the close of his life he supplied for one winter the pulpit of a church a little away from the centre of Boston. Every Sunday saw a procession of his old pupils, twenty years older, perhaps, than they were as undergraduates, who gladly seized this occasion to profit by the wisdom of their old counselor.
Cornelius Conway Felton, to whom I have already referred in speaking of the Mutual Admiration Society, succeeded Dr. Walker. He had been Greek Professor when Lowell was an undergraduate. His successor, Dr. Thomas Hill, graduated five years after Lowell.
Of his old professors Lowell found in office Lovering and Benjamin Peirce. There were one or two instructors in the modern languages who had survived the interval, but for the rest his coadjutors had been appointed since his graduation.
CORNELIUS CONWAY FELTON
The college had been taking on her larger methods in those seventeen years, and during what was left of his life he saw and assisted in other changes larger yet. From the beginning he cut red tape or threw it away. He cultivated close acquaintance with the young men whom he met in his classes, and he and the men of his type have done much to bring about interest and sympathy between teacher and taught, such as was hardly dreamed of in Cambridge in the first half of the century. The two volumes of his published letters give a charming view of his relations with Longfellow, Norton, Cutler, and other professors of his time, and, indeed, of the cordial social life of Cambridge. Of these gentlemen I have something I should like to say in another paper of this series. But this is the better place to allude to the young poet, Hugh Clough, who is alluded to in Lowell’s correspondence with his associates in Cambridge. Clough came to Cambridge, as I have always supposed, in the real hope of adapting himself to American life, or life in a republic, where “I am as good as the other fellow, and the other fellow is as good as I.” Alas and alas! how many of us have seen Englishmen who tried this great experiment, who made the great emigration, and then were obliged to go back to the leeks of Egypt! I do not know that it was so with Clough, but I think it was.
People who remember his “Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich” (and they are not so many as there should be) will recollect that that charming poem closes as white handkerchiefs are waved in an adieu when the English steamer leaves her dock and sails with the hero and heroine for Australia—“a brave new land,” without fuss and without feathers, without feudalism and the follies of feudalism; a land of freedom.
“Five hundred pounds in pocket, with books, and two or three pictures,
Tool-box, plow, and the rest, they rounded the sphere to New Zealand...
“There hath he farmstead and land, and fields of corn and flax fields,