Always sincerely yours,
Robert T. Lincoln.
It will be seen that the impression made on Mr. Lincoln, and his memories of Lowell, are similar to those of Mr. Wendell.
From the journal to which I have referred I copy the following passages:—
“June 12, 1865, I went to look at the scenery from Mount Auburn tower. Returning, I found the serene possessor of Elmwood in good spirits, ate a Graham biscuit and drank some delicious milk with him and his wife, then enjoyed a very pleasant conversation. He read some of Shakespeare’s sonnets, to make me think better of them, and succeeded. His noble old dog Argus had been poisoned, and in Argus’s place he had a young Newfoundland pup which he called Bessie, as black Aggy Green, on Port Royal Island, named her pet sow! He gave me a very welcome copy of Macaulay’s essays and poems, and the little visit was another oasis in school life’s dearth of home sociability. Mabel, his only child, was not there at supper, but came home some time after: ‘Salute your progenitor!’ and the answer was a daughter’s kiss.
“In September, 1865, he offered to conduct the divinity students into Dante’s conception of hell, and as far out as time would allow. He read the first canto through for introduction, and gave me the second for our first trial. I went, because I wanted to become inured, lest I might have to conduct somebody else. He had too many other duties, was somewhat unwell, cut the Dante for both days of a week three or four times, some of the readers were not Italian enough to read easily, and on December 13 he gave us up as a lost tribe of the race of Adam. January 19, 1866, I was his guest again, clear even of the central frozen bolgia. After dinner he gave me a card to Longfellow, whom I found about four o’clock at his dinner.”
The same accurate critic writes:—
“In Lowell’s college work the weakest part was his class teaching. While no teacher in the university was more willing to help his boys, his habit of doing most of the reading, when a boy labored, with friction, breaking right into his reading, was not agreeable to the boy. But even in that he at least had the courage of mastery, and never shirked the hard passages. His corrections and remarks were often lost from the want of clearness and open-mouthed carefulness of articulation. When he spoke in public he always made himself heard; but to a small, almost private class, speaking without effort, his modest stillness and his smothering mustache would make us wish that men’s hair had been forbidden to grow forward of the corner of their mouths.”
I must postpone other references to Mr. Lowell’s life with his students to the next chapter, which will speak of him in his relations to the civil war, which followed so soon after his appointment at Cambridge. His home at Cambridge for much of the first two years of his professorship had been with Dr. and Mrs. Howe, in Kirkland Street. In September, 1857, he was able to return to Elmwood and reëstablish family life, after his fortunate and happy marriage to Miss Frances Dunlap.
Every person who has had any experience in teaching knows that the great danger to a schoolmaster or a professor is that he shall know but little of what passes outside his own cocoon. There is an old satirical fling which says that a schoolmaster is a man who does not take the voyage of life himself, but stands on the gangway of the steamer to pass those along who are going to take it. This is not true, but it has just foundation enough to give point to the satire, and to give suggestion to those who are in danger.