Lowell formed at Concord the friendship which lasted for life with E. R. Hoar, and the lady who was to be Judge Hoar’s wife. These two indeed seemed to be excepted in his mind from the Concord people whom he met. He was plainly, as his letters show, in a restless mood, dissatisfied with himself, going through his appointed tasks with the obedience which was habitual, and writing, as the impulse took him, on his Class Poem, but moody, irritable, and chafing at the bonds which held him. There was the uncomfortable consciousness of serving out his time at Concord for a momentary jest, but there was also the profounder unrest which came from the friction of discipline with the awakening of powers not yet fully understood or determined. A few passages from his letters to G. B. Loring will partially disclose the way he tossed himself about.
July 1, 1838.
You mustn’t expect so long a letter from me as the one you favored me with (and I hope sincerely you’ll favor me with many more such (for nothing is more pleasant to me than a friend’s letters) (except himself) (there, I have got into one of my parentheses, which I can’t help to save my life—damnation! I’m only making the matter worse! so I’ll begin again.... This appears to be a pretty decent sort of a place—but I’ve no patience talking about. I shall fly into a passion on paper, and then—as Hamlet says—then what? You can’t guess, now you know you can’t! Why, I should be apt to “tear my passion to tatters.” Pretty good, eh! for an un-Sheridanic one? Well, as I was saying, the poem hasn’t progressed (they say that’s a Yankee word; it’s a damned good word, as most Yankee things are) a line since I left the shades of Alma Mater. I want the spirit up here, I want
‘Mine ancient chair, whose wide embracing arms,’ etc.
I shall take to smoking again for very spite. The only time I have felt the flow of song was when I heard the bull-frogs in the river last night....
I shall do my best to please Mr. F. since I find he does his best to please me and make me comfortable; “that’s the ground I stand on.” I feel in a shocking humor, that is, not grouty (I’m not such a damned fool; no offence I hope), but cursed queer. I damn Concord, and as the man in a story I read somewhere who was shot in a duel pathetically exclaimed in his last struggle, I—“damn everything.”... I have written you more than I intended, have two more to write to-night, and 50 pages in MacIntosh.... Don’t for heaven’s sake think I write in such a hurry from affectation. I wish with all my heart it were so.
July 8.
... I don’t know that I shan’t get gloomy up here, and be obliged, like the gallant old Sir Hudibras’s sword,
“To eat into myself, for lack
Of something else to cut and hack.”
Everybody almost is calling me indolent,”[21] “blind, dependent on my own powers” and “on fate.”... I acknowledge that I have been something of a dreamer and have sacrificed perchance too assiduously on that altar to the “unknown God,” which the Divinity has builded not with hands in the bosom of every decent man, sometimes blazing out clear with flame (like Abel’s sacrifice) heaven seeking, sometimes smothered with green wood and earthward like that of Cain. Lazy, quotha! I haven’t dug, ’tis true, but I have done as well, and “since my free soul was mistress of her choice and could of books distinguish her election,” I have chosen what reading I pleased and what friends I pleased, sometimes scholars and sometimes not....