spirit which belongs to such life. They had, therefore, absolute confidence that God’s kingdom was to come, and they saw no reason why it should not come soon. There were still some people, and one or two teachers in the pulpit and in what is technically called the religious press, who believed, or said they believed, that all men are born in sin and are incapable of good. But practically, and in general, the people of Boston believed in the infinite capacity of human nature, and they knew “salvation’s free,” and “free for you and me.”
As a direct result of this belief, and of the cos mopolitan habit which comes to people who send their ships all over the world, the leaders of this little community attempted everything on a generous scale. If they made a school for the blind, they made it for all the blind people in Massachusetts. They expected to succeed. They always had succeeded. Why should they not succeed? If, then, they opened a “House of Reformation,” they really supposed that they should reform the boys and girls who were sent to it. Observe that here was a man who had bought skins in Nootka Sound and sold them in China, and brought home silks and teas where he carried away tin pans and jackknives. There was a man who had fastened his schooner to an iceberg off Labrador, and had sold the ice he cut in Calcutta or Havana. Now, that sort of men look at life in its possibilities with a different habit from that of the man who reads in the newspaper that stocks have fallen, who buys them promptly, and sells them the next week because the newspaper tells him that they have risen.
With this sense that all things are possible to him who believes, the little town became the headquarters for New England, and in a measure for the country, of every sort of enthusiasm, not to say of every sort of fanaticism. Thus, Boston, as Boston, hated abolitionism. The stevedores and longshoremen on the wharves hated a “nigger” as much as their ancestors in 1770 hated a “lobster.” But, all the same, Garrison came to Boston to publish the “Liberator.” There was not an “ism” but had its shrine, nor a cause but had its prophet. And, as in the rest of the world at that time, the madness was at its height which forms a “society” to do the work of an individual. People really supposed that if you could make a hundred men give each the hundredth part of his life to do something, the loose combination would do more work than one stalwart man would do who was ready to give one whole life in devotion to the “cause.”
The town was so small that practically everybody knew everybody. “A town,” as a bright man used to say, “where you could go anywhere in ten minutes.”
Cambridge was within forty-five minutes’ walk of this little self-poised metropolis, and was really a part of it, in all “its busy life, its fluctuations, and its vast concerns”—and in its pettiest concerns as well.
Lowell could talk with Wendell Phillips, or applaud him when he spoke. He could go into Garrison’s printing-office with a communication. He could discuss metaphysics or ethics with Brownson. He could hear a Latter-Day Church preacher on Sunday. He could listen while Miller, the prophet of the day, explained from Rollin’s history and the Book of Daniel that the world would come to an end on the twenty-first of March, 1842. He could lounge into the “Corner Bookstore,” where James T. Fields would show him the new Tennyson, or where the Mutual Admiration Society would leave an epigram or two behind. Or he could hear Everett or Holmes or Parsons or Webster or Silliman or Walker read poem or lecture at the “Odeon.” He could discuss with a partner in a dance the moral significance of the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven in comparison with the lessons of the Second or the Seventh. Another partner in the next quadrille would reconcile for him the conflict of free will and foreknowledge. In saying such things, I am not inventing the instances. I could almost tell where the conversations were held. At Miss Peabody’s foreign bookstore he could take out for a week Strauss’s “Leben Jesu,” if he had not the shekels for its purchase, as probably he had not. Or, under the same hospitable roof, he could in the evening hear Hawthorne tell the story of Parson Moody’s veil, or discuss the origin of the Myth of Ceres with Margaret Fuller.[2] Or, when he danced “the pastorale” at Judge Jackson’s, was he renewing the memories of an Aryan tradition, or did the figure suggest, more likely, the social arrangements of the followers of Hermann? Mr. Emerson lectured for him; Allston’s pictures were hung in galleries for him; Mr. Tudor imported ice for him; Fanny Elssler danced for him, and Braham sang for him. The world worked for him—or labored for him. And he entered into the labors of all sorts and conditions of men.
In one of his letters to his friend Loring, written in October, 1838, he expresses a doubt whether he would continue his studies of law. “I have been thinking seriously of the ministry,” he writes; “I have also thought of medicine—but there—still worse!” But on the 9th of November “I went into town to look out for a place”—this means to see some of his friends “in business,” and to try mercantile life—“and was induced en passant to step into the United States District Court, where there was a case pending, in which Webster was one of the counsel retained. I had not been there an hour before I determined to continue in my profession and study as well as I could.” Observe that he is now nineteen years old, going on to twenty.
I will not include Mr. Webster among the company of Mr. Lowell’s early friends, though the hour spent in the United States Court seems to have been a very important hour in his life. Who shall say what would have come had he “found a place,” and begun on life by rising early, “sweeping out the store,” filling and trimming the oil lamps, and then running the errands for some treasurer of a woolen factory or dealer in teas or spices? Such was the precise experience of many of his young companions in college, who “elected,” on graduation, to “go into business.”
Of the literary circles into which he was naturally introduced I will say something. First, of some of the men who, in practice, wrote the “North American Review” in those days—say for the ten years after he left college. Dr. John Gorham Palfrey was the editor, and Lowell would have called the men themselves the “Mutual Admiration Society.” Most of them, I think, have recognized this name in their own correspondence. It was a club of five men, who liked to call themselves “The Five of Clubs.” But they very soon earned this name of the Mutual Admiration Society, which I think was invented for them.
Dr. Palfrey was living at Cambridge all through the period of Lowell’s college and law-school life. He had been a member of the divinity Faculty until 1839, and he assumed the charge of the “Review” in 1835. He had written for it as early as the fifth volume. A gentleman through and through, of very wide information, hospitable and courteous, he and the ladies of his family made his house in Divinity Avenue one of the few places where students of whatever school of the college liked to visit. I remember that one of my own classmates said, after making a Sunday evening call there, “Palfrey makes you think that you are the best fellow in the world—and, by Jove, he makes you think that he is the next best!” He resigned his professorship about the time when he made the romantic voyage by which he emancipated more than forty slaves whom he had “inherited.” Like most men with whom he lived, he had opposed the “abolitionists” with all his might, with pen and with voice. But he knew how to do the duty next his hand better than some men who had talked more about theirs.
He was most kind to me, boy and man, and gave me instance on instance which showed that his unflinching firmness in duty was accompanied with entire readiness to recognize the truth wherever he found it. All of us youngsters were enthusiastic about Carlyle. All of the “oldsters” turned up their noses—“such affectation of style,” “Germanisms picked up cheaply,” and so on. But he said he knew that the editor of the “North American” must read the “French Revolution,” and he said that if you had to read a book, a good way was to take it as your only reading when you had a long journey. Mark that you could not then write books on the way, as I am writing this.
So he took his two volumes with him on this voyage of emancipation. And, before he came to Cincinnati, he had forgotten the eccentricities and was as eager as the youngest of us to praise the historian. I remember as well how, as he explained to my father his plans for the “North American Review,” he said he had secured Emerson to write, and that Emerson would let him have some of his lectures. He had taken care to provide, however, that these were to be from the historical lectures and not the speculative ones. If he had been pressed, I am afraid he would have been found to be of the large circle of those