James Russell Lowell and His Friends. Edward Everett Hale
of furnishing the poetry for the magazine and making it entertaining. Of course it was expected that their year’s “Harvardiana” would be better than those of any before.
The five editors had the further privilege of assuming the whole pecuniary responsibility for the undertaking. How this came out I do not know; perhaps I never did. I do not think they ever printed three hundred copies. I do not think they ever had two hundred and fifty subscribers. The volume contains the earliest of Lowell’s printed poems, some of which have never been reprinted, and a copy is regarded by collectors as one of the exceptionally rare nuggets in our literary history.
When this choice of editors was made, I lived with my brother in Stoughton 22. In September, at the time when the first number was published, we had moved to Massachusetts 27, where I lived for two years. Lowell had always been intimate in our room, and from this time until the next March he was there once or twice a day. Indeed, it was a good editor’s room—we called it the best room in college; and all of them made it their headquarters.
Unfortunately for my readers, the daguerreotype and photograph had not even begun in their benevolent and beneficent career. It was in the next year that Daguerre, in Paris, first exhibited his pictures. The French government rewarded him for his great discovery and published his process to the world. His announcements compelled Mr. Talbot, in England, to make public his processes on paper, which were the beginning of what we now call photography. I think my classmate, Samuel Longfellow, and I took from the window of this same room, Massachusetts 27, the first photograph which was taken in New England. It was made by a little camera intended for draughtsmen. The picture was of Harvard Hall, opposite. And the first portrait taken in Massachusetts was the copy in this picture of a bust of Apollo standing in the window of the college library, in Harvard Hall.
The daguerreotype was announced by Daguerre in January, 1839. He thus forced W.H. Fox Talbot’s hand, and he read his paper on photographic drawings on January 31 of that year. This paper was at once published, and Longfellow and I worked from its suggestions.
Rufus King afterwards won for himself distinction and respect as a lawyer of eminence in Cincinnati. He was the grandson of the great Rufus King, the natural leader of the Federalists and of the North in the dark period of the reign of the House of Virginia. Our Rufus King’s mother was the daughter of Governor Worthington, of Ohio. King had begun his early education at Kenyon College, but came to Cambridge to complete his undergraduate course, and remained there in the law school under Story and Greenleaf. He then returned to Cincinnati, where he lived in distinguished practice in his profession until his death in 1891. “His junior partners were many of them men in the first rank of political, judicial, and professional eminence. But he himself steadily declined all political or even judicial trusts until, in 1874, he became a member of the Constitutional Convention of Ohio. Over this body he presided. He did not shrink from any work in education. He was active in the public schools. He was the chief workman in creating the Cincinnati Public Library, and, as one of the trustees of the McMicken bequest, he nursed it into the foundation of the University of Cincinnati. In 1875 he became Dean of the Faculty of the Law School, and served in that office for five years. Until his death he continued his lectures on Constitutional Law and the Law of Real Property. No citizen of Cincinnati was more useful or more honored.”
Lowell was with Mr. King in the Cambridge law school.
Of the five editors, four became lawyers—so far, at least, as to take the degree of Bachelor of Laws at Cambridge. The fifth, George Warren Lippitt, from Rhode Island, remained in Cambridge after he graduated and studied at the divinity school.
There were other clergymen in his class, who attained, as they deserved, distinction afterwards. Lowell frequently refers in his correspondence to Coolidge, Ellis, Renouf, and Washburn. Lippitt’s articles in “Harvardiana” show more maturity, perhaps, than those of any of the others. He had entered the class as a sophomore, and was the oldest, I believe, of the five. For ten years, from 1842 to 1852, he was a valuable preacher in the Unitarian church, quite unconventional, courageous, candid, and outspoken. He was without a trace of that ecclesiasticism, which the New Testament writers would call accursed, which is the greatest enemy of Christianity to-day, and does more to hinder it than any other device of Satan. In 1852 Lippitt sought and accepted an appointment as secretary of legation to Vienna. He married an Austrian lady, and represented the United States at the imperial court there in one and another capacity for the greater part of the rest of his life. He died there in 1891.
Charles Woodman Scates, also, like King and Lippitt, entered the class after the freshman year. There was a tender regard between him and Lowell. When they graduated, Scates went to South Carolina to study law. But for his delicate health, I think his name would be as widely known in the Southern states as Rufus King’s is in the valley of the Ohio. I count it as a great misfortune that almost all of Lowell’s letters to him, in an intimate and serious correspondence which covered many years, were lost when the house in Germantown was burned where he spent the last part of his life. Fortunately, however, Mr. Norton had made considerable extracts from them in the volume of Lowell’s published letters. From one of these letters which has been preserved, I copy a little poem, which I believe has never been printed. Lowell writes:—
“I will copy you a midnight improvisation, which must be judged kindly accordingly. It is a mere direct transcript of actual feelings, and so far good:—
“What is there in the midnight breeze
That tells of things gone by?
Why does the murmur of the trees
Bring tears into my eye?
O Night! my heart doth pant for thee,
Thy stars are lights of memory!
“What is there in the setting moon
Behind yon gloomy pine,
That bringeth back the broad high noon
Of hopes that once were mine?
Seemeth my heart like that pale flower
That opes not till the midnight hour.
“The day may make the eyes run o’er
From hearts that laden be,
The sunset doth a music pour
Round rock and hill and tree;
But in the night wind’s mournful blast
There cometh somewhat of the Past.
“In garish day I often feel
The Present’s full excess,
And o’er my outer soul doth steal
A deep life-weariness.
But the great thoughts that midnight brings
Look calmly down on earthly things.
“Oh, who may know the spell that lies
In a few bygone years!
These lines may one day fill my eyes
With Memory’s doubtful tears—
Tears which we know not if they be
Of happiness or agony.
“Open thy melancholy eyes,
O Night! and gaze on me!
That I may feel the charm that lies
In their dim mystery.
Unveil thine eyes so gloomy bright
And look upon my soul, O Night!”
“Have you ever felt this? I have, many and many a time.”
Of my dear brother, Nathan Hale, Jr., I will not permit myself to speak at any length. We shall meet him once and again as our sketch of Lowell’s life goes on. It is enough for our purpose now that, though he prepared himself carefully for the bar, and, as a young man, opened a lawyer’s office, the most of his life, until he died in 1872, was spent in the work of an editor. Our father had been an editor from 1809,