"I have been attending courts of all kinds and assisting as junior counsel in trying cases and all the drudgery of a lawyer's life. One end of my labor has been happily attained, for about three weeks ago I arrived at the age of twenty-one, and last week I mustered courage to stand an examination of my qualifications for an attorney, and the result (unlike that of some examinations during my college life) was fortunate, with compliments from the judge. I feel a certain vanity (not unmixed, by the way, with self-contempt) at my success, for I well remember I and a dear friend of mine used to mourn over the impossibility of our ever becoming business men, and lo, I am a lawyer.— I have a right to bestow my tediousness on any court of the Commonwealth, and they are bound to hear me."
From 1843 to 1847 he practiced at the Middlesex Bar, and from 1847, when he went to live in Boston, until 1863, he was a member of the Suffolk Bar. On November 25, 1851, he had his name changed by act of the Legislature. There were eleven other lawyers by the name of Smith, practicing in Boston, and two of them were Henry Smiths. To avoid the inevitable confusion, Henry Welles Smith became Henry Fowle Durant, both Fowle and Durant being family names.
In 1852 Mr. Durant was a member of the Boston City Council, but did not again hold political office. On May 28, 1854, he married his cousin, Pauline Adeline Fowle, of Virginia, daughter of the late Lieutenant-colonel John Fowle of the United States Army and Paulina Cazenove. On March 2, 1855, the little boy, Henry Fowle Durant, Jr., was born, and on October 10, 1857, a little girl, Pauline Cazenove Durant, who lived less than two months. On June 21, 1862, we find the Boston Evening Courier saying of the prominent lawyer: "What the future has in store for Mr. Durant can of course be only predicted, but his past is secure, and if he never rises higher, he can rest in the consciousness that no man ever rose more rapidly at the Suffolk Bar than he has." And within a year he had put it all behind him,—a sinful and unworthy life,—and had set out to be a new man. That there was sin and unworthiness in the old life we, who look into our own hearts, need not doubt; but how much of sin, how much of unworthiness, happily we need not determine. Mr. Durant was probably his own severest critic.
Miss Conant's characterization of Mr. Durant, in his own words describing James Otis, is particularly illuminating in its revelation of his temperament. In February, 1860, he said of James Otis, in an address delivered in the Boston Mercantile Library Lecture course:
"One cannot study his writings and history and escape the conviction that there were two natures in this great man. There was the trained lawyer, man of action, prompt and brave in every emergency. But there was in him another nature higher than this. In all times men have entertained angels unawares, ministering spirits, whose missions are not wholly known to themselves even, men living beyond and in advance of their age.
"We call them prophets, inspired seers,—in the widest and largest sense poets, for they come to create new empires of thought, new realms in the history of the mind.... But more ample traditions remain of his powers as an orator and of the astonishing effects of his eloquence. He was eminently an orator of action in its finest sense; his contemporaries speak of him as a flame of fire and repeat the phrase as if it were the only one which could express the intense passion of his eloquence, the electric flames which his genius kindled, the magical power which swayed the great assemblies with the irresistible sweep of the whirlwind."
Mr. Durant's attitude toward education is also elucidated for us by Miss Conant in her apt quotations from his address on the American Scholar, delivered at Bowdoin College, August, 1862:
"The cause of God's poor is the sublime gospel of American freedom. It is our faith that national greatness has its only enduring foundation in the intelligence and integrity of the whole people. It is our faith that our institutions approach perfection only when every child can be educated and elevated to the station of a free and intelligent citizen, and we mourn for each one who goes astray as a loss to the country that cannot be repaired.... From this fundamental truth that the end of our Republic is to educate and elevate all our people, you can deduce the future of the American scholar.
"The great dangers in the future of America which we have to fear are from our own neglect of our duty. Foes from within are the most deadly enemies, and suicide is the great danger of our Republic. With the increase of wealth and commerce comes the growing power of gold, and it is a fearful truth for states as well as for individual men that 'gold rusts deeper than iron.' Wealth breeds sensuality, degradation, ignorance, and crime.
"The first object and duty of the true patriot should be to elevate and educate the poor. Ignorance is the modern devil, and the inkstand that Martin Luther hurled at his head in the Castle of Wartburg is the true weapon to fight him with."