“men,” even when they were, as Lowell was when he entered, but fifteen years old.
Let it be remembered, then, that the whole drift of fashion, occupation, and habit among the undergraduates ran in lines suggested by literature. Athletics and sociology are, I suppose, now the fashion at Cambridge. But literature was the fashion then. In November, when the state election came round, there would be the least possible spasm of political interest, but you might really say that nobody cared for politics. Not five “men” in college saw a daily newspaper. My classmate, William Francis Channing, would have been spoken of, I think, as the only Abolitionist in college in 1838, the year when Lowell graduated. I remember that Dr. Walter Channing, the brother of our professor, came out to lecture one day on temperance. There was a decent attendance of the undergraduates, but it was an attendance of pure condescension on their part.
Literature was, as I said, the fashion. The books which the fellows took out of the library, the books which they bought for their own subscription libraries, were not books of science, nor history, nor sociology, nor politics; they were books of literature. Some Philadelphia publisher had printed in one volume Coleridge’s poems, Shelley’s, and Keats’s—a queer enough combination, but for its chronological fitness. And you saw this book pretty much everywhere. At this hour you will find men of seventy who can quote their Shelley as the youngsters of to-day cannot quote, shall I say, their Swinburne, their Watson, or their Walt Whitman. In the way of what is now called science (we then spoke of the moral sciences also) Daniel Treadwell read once a year some interesting technological lectures. The Natural History Society founded itself while Lowell was in college; but there was no general interest in science, except so far as it came in by way of the pure mathematics.
In the year 1840 I was at West Point for the first time, with William Story, Lowell’s classmate and friend, and with Story’s sister and mine. We enjoyed to the full the matchless hospitality of West Point, seeing its lions under the special care of two young officers of our own age. They had just finished their course, as we had recently finished ours at Harvard. One day when Story and I were by ourselves, after we had been talking of our studies with these gentlemen, Story said to me: “Ned, it is all very well to keep a stiff upper lip with these fellows, but how did you dare tell them that we studied about projectiles at Cambridge?”
“Because we did,” said I.
“Did I ever study projectiles?” asked Story, puzzled.
“Certainly you did,” said I. “You used to go up to Peirce Tuesday and Thursday afternoons in the summer when you were a junior, with a blue book which had a white back.”
“I know I did,” said Story; “and was I studying projectiles then? This is the first time I ever heard of it.”
And I tell that story because it illustrates well enough the divorce between theory and fact which is possible in education. I do not tell it by way of blaming Professor Peirce or Harvard College. Story was not to be an artilleryman, nor were any of the rest of us, so far as we knew. Anyway, the choice of our specialty in life was to be kept as far distant as was possible.
CHAPTER III
LITERARY WORK IN COLLEGE
“Harvardiana,” a college magazine which ran for four years, belongs exactly to the period of Lowell’s college life. Looking over it now, it seems to me like all the rest of them. That is, it is as good as the best and as bad as the worst.
There is not any great range for such magazines. The articles have to be short. And the writers know very little of life. All the same, a college magazine gives excellent training. Lowell was one editor of the fourth volume of “Harvardiana.” I suppose he then read proof for the first time, and in a small way it introduced him into the life of an editor—a life in which he afterwards did a great deal of hard work, which he did extremely well, as we shall presently see.
The editorial board of the year before, from whose hands the five editors of the class of ’38 took “Harvardiana,” was a very interesting circle of young men. They were, by the way, classmates and friends of Thoreau, who lived to be better known than they; but I think he was not of the editorial committee. The magazine was really edited in that year entirely by Charles Hayward, Samuel Tenney Hildreth, and Charles Stearns Wheeler. Horatio Hale, the philologist, was in the same class and belonged to the same set. He was named as one of the editors. But he was appointed to Wilkes’s exploring expedition a year before he graduated—a remarkable testimony, this, to his early ability in the lines of study in which he won such distinction afterwards. It is interesting and amusing to observe that his first printed work was a vocabulary of the language of some Micmac Indians, who camped upon the college grounds in the summer of 1834. Hale learned the language from them, made a vocabulary, and then set up the type and printed the book with his own hand. Hayward, Hildreth, and Wheeler, who carried on the magazine for its third volume, all died young, before the age of thirty. Hayward had written one or more of the lives in Sparks’s “American Biography,” Wheeler had distinguished himself as a Greek scholar here and in Europe, and Hildreth, as a young poet, had given promise for what we all supposed was to be a remarkable future.
To this little circle somebody addressed himself who wanted to establish a chapter of Alpha Delta Phi in Cambridge in 1836. Who this somebody was, I do not know. I wish I did. But he came to Cambridge and met these leaders of the literary work of the classes of ’37 and ’38, and among them they agreed on the charter members for the formation of the Alpha Delta Phi chapter at Harvard. The list of the members from the Harvard classes of 1837 and 1838 shows that these youngsters knew already who their men of letters were. It consists of fourteen names: John Bacon, John Fenwick Eustis, Horatio Hale, Charles Hayward, Samuel Tenney Hildreth, Charles Stearns Wheeler, Henry Williams, James Ivers Trecothick Coolidge, Henry Lawrence Eustis, Nathan Hale, Rufus King, George Warren Lippitt, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Woodman Scates.
This is no place for a history of Alpha Delta Phi. At the moment when the Phi Beta Kappa fraternity, the oldest of the confederated college societies, gave up its secrets, Alpha Delta Phi was formed in Hamilton College of New York. I shall violate none of her secrets if I say, what the history of literature in America shows, that, in the earlier days at least, interest in literature was considered by those who directed the society as a very important condition in the selection of its members.
At Cambridge, when Lowell became one of its first members, there was a special charm in membership. Such societies were absolutely forbidden by a hard and fast rule. They must not be in Harvard College. The existence of the Alpha Delta chapter, therefore, was not to be known, even to the great body of the undergraduates. It had no public exercises. There was no public intimation of meetings. In truth, if its existence had been known, everybody connected with it would have been severely punished, under the college code of that day.
This element of secrecy gave, of course, a special charm to membership. I ought to say that, after sixty years, it makes it more difficult to write of its history. I was myself a member in ’37, ’38, and ’39. Yet, in a somewhat full private diary which I kept in those days, I do not find one reference to my attendance at any meeting; so great was the peril, to my boyish imagination, lest the myrmidons of the “Faculty” should seize upon my papers and examine them, and should learn from them any fact regarding the history of this secret society.
But now, after sixty years, I will risk the vengeance of the authorities of the university. Perhaps they will take away all our degrees, honorary and otherwise; but we will venture. This very secret society, after it was well at work, may have counted at once twenty members—seniors, juniors, and sophomores. They clubbed their scanty means and hired a small student’s room in what is now Holyoke Street, put
