Give my best regards and happy New Years and all kinds of things at Shady Hill (and mine, too; how mad he’d be if he knew I put that in).
“Always yours,
“The Amanuensis of J. R. Lowell, esquire.”
Two days after giving the first lecture, Lowell wrote to Stillman:—
“I have been so fearfully busy with my lectures! and so nervous about them, too! I had never spoken in public, there was a great rush for tickets (the lectures are gratis), only one in five of the applicants being supplied—and altogether I was taken quite aback. I had no idea there would be such a desire to hear me. I delivered my first lecture to a crowded hall on Tuesday night, and I believe I have succeeded. The lecture was somewhat abstract, but I kept the audience perfectly still for an hour and a quarter. (They are in the habit of going out at the end of the hour.) I delivered it again yesterday afternoon to another crowd,[102] and was equally successful—so I think I am safe now. But I have six yet to write, and am consequently very busy and pressed for time. I felt anxious, of course, for I had a double responsibility. The lectures were founded by a cousin of mine, and the trustee is another cousin—so I wished not only to do credit to myself and my name, but to justify my relative in appointing me to lecture. It is all over now—and, as far as the public are concerned, I have succeeded; but the lectures keep me awake and make me lean.”
Mr. Longfellow was a very interested auditor, and his diary bears witness to the attention which he gave to the course:—
“January 8, 1855. Lowell came in the evening and we talked about his lectures on poetry which begin to-morrow.
“January 9. Mr. Richard Grant White, of New York, author of ‘Shakespeare’s Scholar,’ came to tea. He drove in with us to hear Lowell’s first lecture: an admirable performance, and a crowded audience. After it, we drove out to Norton’s, where, with T. and the lecturer, we had a pleasant supper.
“January 20. Lowell’s lecture, on the old English ballads, one of the best of the course.”
Charles Sumner appears also to have been one of the auditors. At any rate, he wrote to Longfellow from Washington, 6 February, 1855: “Lowell’s lecture on Milton lifted me for a whole day. It was the utterance of genius in honor of genius.”