[14] “’Tis near midnight, and I hear a bass-drum, kettle-drum and fife in the distance, playing the dear old boongalang tune of my earliest days, the very one to which General Gage marched out of Boston. It is delightful. I think it is the noise Wagner is always trying to make and failing.”—J. R. L. to C. E. Norton, 16 April, 1889.
[15] “Books and Libraries” in Literary and Political Addresses, Works, vi. 83.
[16] Latest Literary Essays and Addresses, p. 43.
[17] Literary and Political Addresses, pp. 69, 70.
[18] Mr. Shackford did not live to continue his friendship with Lowell. He died in 1842.
[19] The Hasty Pudding Club, a Harvard students’ club, which has always made much of literature of the lighter sort, its specialty now being amateur theatricals.
[20] “Thoreau,” in Literary Essays, i. 366.
[21] There is a letter from Mrs. Anna Cabot Lowell, 3 July, 1838, to her brother-in-law, which throws a little light on the way in which his friends regarded Lowell at this time: “Aunt S. was here last evening and depicted in a lively manner the grief of Scates for your idle courses. She says he went to you with tears in his eyes to implore you to persevere, and that he told his friends in faltering accents that you had but this one fault in the world. Being desirous to know the exact nature of that fault, that you might apply the specific remedy, I asked her what the fault was. She said ‘indolence to be sure: indolence and the Spence negligence.’ I quote her very words. My opinion of the case is that it proceeds more from negligence than indolence, and more from a blind confidence in your powers and your destiny than either.”
[22] Letters, ii. 302.
[23] It was not uncommon in those days and long after for a student to take his degree at the Law School after a year or two only of study and then to continue to hear lectures. Lowell’s name is on the catalogue of the school for the year following his degree.