"When my brother Jonathan was married, and went to New Hampshire, twenty couples on horseback followed them to Haverhill, on the Merrimac, but when your father and I were married, we came home alone through these dark Concord woods."[6]
The son of this lively Lucy Hosmer, Rufus Hosmer, of Stow, was a classmate, at Cambridge, of Washington Allston, the late Chief Justice Shaw, and Dr. Charles Lowell, father of Lowell the poet. They graduated in 1798, and Dr. Lowell afterwards wrote:—
"I can recall with peculiar pleasure a vacation passed in Concord in my senior year, which Loammi Baldwin, Lemuel Shaw, Washington Allston, and myself spent with Rufus Hosmer at his father's house. I recall the benign face of Major Hosmer, as he stood in the door to receive us, with his handsome daughter-in-law (the wife of Capt. Cyrus Hosmer) on his arm. There was a charming circle of young people then living in Concord, and we boys enjoyed this very much; but we liked best of all to stay at home and listen to the Major's stories. It was very pleasant to have a rainy day come for this, and hard to tell which seemed the happier, he or we."
Forty years afterward, in 1838, Dr. Lowell's son, James Russell Lowell, coming under college discipline, was sent to Concord to spend a similar summer vacation, and wrote his class poem in that town.
Major Hosmer died in 1821, at the age of eighty-five. Mr. Samuel Hoar, long the leader of the Middlesex County bar, who knew him in his later life, once said,—
"In two respects he excelled any one I have ever known; he was more entirely free from prejudice, and also the best reader of men. So clear was his mind and so strong his reasoning power, that I would have defied the most eloquent pleader at the bar to have puzzled him, no matter how skillfully he concealed the weak points of the case. I can imagine him listening quietly, and saying in his slow way, 'It's a pity so many fine words should be wasted, for, you see, the man's on the wrong side.'"
Another old lawyer of Concord, who first saw Major Hosmer when he was a child of ten, and the Major was sixty years old, said,—
"I then formed an opinion of him in two respects that I never altered: First, that he had the handsomest eyes I ever saw; second, those eyes saw the inside of my head as clearly as they did the outside."