could make a day glorious. Excuse me for quoting my own nonsense, but ’twas more apt than anything I could think of.... Imagine yourself by the side of a young lady the perfection of beauty, virtue, modesty, etc., etc., in whom you entertain a pleasing interest, and you may form a ‘faint imagining’ of my situation. I am not calm yet. In fact, every time I think of her eyes—those eyes! Guido never could have conceived her. Well, a truce with all recollections when there is no hope.”
A month later he gave a brief account of Commencement to his friend, and then speaks of a letter his brother Rob had received from their sister, then in Glasgow. Lowell’s father, mother, and sister Rebecca went to Europe early in the summer of 1837. They were gone three years, and during that time the young collegian found in his brother Charles his nearest friend and adviser; his house indeed was the student’s home when he was not in college, and his wife was the best of sisters to him. Mrs. Anna Cabot Lowell was herself a woman of fine culture and of unwonted intellectual power. At a later period than this she opened a school for girls, which is looked upon by many now in mature life with warm gratitude. She edited a choice collection of poems for the reading of schoolgirls, and compiled also a little volume of suggestive thoughts called “Seed Grain.” Dr. Lowell, meanwhile, parted from his son with parental solicitude, and wrote him on the eve of sailing a letter which is quaintly expressive of his own ingenuous nature and of the simplicity of the day, and slightly indicative of his son’s weaknesses as they appeared to a father’s eyes:—
New York, May 29th, 1837.
My dear Son,—I wish you to write us once a month, making an arrangement with Robert not to write at the same time he does. You know the necessity for economy, and you know that I shall never deny you, but from necessity, what will afford you pleasure. I shall direct Charles to pay you half a dollar a week. If you are one of the first eight admitted to the Φ Β Κ, $1.00 per week, as soon as you are admitted. If you are not, to pay you 75 cents per week as soon as you are admitted. If I find my finances will allow it, I shall buy you something abroad. If you graduate one of the first five in your class, I shall give you $100 on your graduation. If one of the first ten, $75. If one of the first twelve, $50. If the first or second scholar, $200. If you do not miss any exercises unexcused, you shall have Bryant’s ‘Mythology,’ or any book of equal value, unless it is one I may specially want.
My dear child, I wish you only to be faithful to yourself. You can easily be a fine scholar, and therefore in naming the smallest sum for your weekly expenses, I feel no hesitation, as it depends on yourself, with very little exertion, to secure the second highest sum, and with not more exertion than is perfectly compatible with health and sufficient recreation to secure the largest. Use regular exercise. Associate with those who will exert the best influence upon you. Say your prayers and read your Bible every day. I trust you have made up all your exercises. If not, make them up in one week, and let the president know it. Do not get anything charged except with Charles’s knowledge and approbation. I have given him instructions respecting your expenses....
Your affectionate father.
Dr. Lowell wrote many letters home and recounted the pleasant experiences of the little party in Scotland and England, their foregathering with the Traill family, and the visits they paid to Wordsworth, Southey, Sir David Brewster, and others. But he does not forget to continue his admonitions and encouragements, as he receives his son’s reports of his doings. “Your office,” he writes from London, 13 December, 1837, “as one of the editors of the ‘Harvardiana’ may give you a greater familiarity in composition. Be careful that it does not abstract you from severer pursuits, and that your style is not trifling, but the subject and the manner useful and dignified. I do not allow myself to doubt of your furnishing the criterion of good standing which a membership of the Φ Β Κ will furnish, and I trust you will leave college with a high part and a high reputation.
“God bless you, my dear child. Aim high, very high. I feel its importance for you more than ever.”
Harvardiana, to which Dr. Lowell refers, was the college magazine of the day, started just as Lowell entered college, and naturally inviting a scribbler like Lowell to become one of the editors when his senior year came round. His associates were Rufus King, who later attained a leading position in the bar of Cincinnati, and wrote “Ohio” in the American Commonwealths series; George Warren Lippitt, afterward for a long time secretary of legation at Vienna; Charles Woodman Scates, a South Carolinian lawyer of great promise, who died young, and Nathan Hale, an older brother of Dr. Edward Everett Hale, and later a strong figure in Boston journalism. Lowell contributed twenty-four pieces in prose and verse, translations from the German, a bit of moralizing in the minor key which youth likes to pursue, some fierce sardonic verses, some sentiment, and then a mockery of sentiment. For the most part his contributions are the “larks” of students given to literature. With his associates he followed the example set by Blackwood, and imitated by the Knickerbocker and similar magazines, aiming at the sauciness and jocularity which were assumed to be the ordinary temper of editors gathered about their table, whereas in actual experience such editors are painfully at their wits’ end. What most strikes one in these varied contributions is the apparent facility with which everything is thrown off, sense and nonsense coming with equal ease, but nonsense predominating.
Lowell’s letters to his friends in his last year at college have frequent reference to his willing and unwilling labors on this “perryodical,” as he was wont to call it in mimicry of Dr. Walker. In August, 1837, he sends Shackford a circular inviting subscriptions to Harvardiana, and on the blank leaf writes one of the imitative letters in verse, for which he had a penchant at this time:—