style="font-size:15px;"> 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, and of all his children, boys and girls, it might be said that they were cradled in the sheets of a newspaper.
My brother was the editor of the “Boston Miscellany” in 1841, when Lowell and Story of their class were his chief coöperators. From that time forward he served the Boston “Advertiser,” frequently as its chief; and when he died, he was one of the editors of “Old and New,” his admirable literary taste and his delicate judgment presiding over that discrimination, so terrible to magazine editors, in the accepting or rejecting of the work of contributors.
All of these five boys, or young men, were favorite pupils of Professor Edward Tyrrell Channing. When, in September, 1837, they undertook the publication of “Harvardiana,” Lowell was eighteen, Hale was eighteen, Scates, King, and Lippitt but little older.
With such recourse the fourth volume started. It cost each subscriber two dollars a year. I suppose the whole volume contained about as much “reading matter,” as a cold world calls it, as one number of “Harper’s Magazine.” These young fellows’ reputations were not then made. But as times have gone by, the people who “do the magazines” in newspaper offices would have felt a certain wave of languid interest if a single number of “Harper” should bring them a story and a poem and a criticism by Lowell; something like this from William Story; a political paper by Rufus King; with General Loring, Dr. Washburn, Dr. Coolidge, and Dr. Ellis to make up the number.
Lowell’s intimate relations with George Bailey Loring began, I think, even earlier than their meeting in college. They continued long after his college life, and I may refer to them better in another chapter.
The year worked along. They had the dignity of seniors now, and the wider range of seniors. This means that they no longer had to construe Latin and Greek, and that the college studies were of rather a broader scope than before. It meant with these young fellows that they took more liberty in long excursions from Cambridge, which would sacrifice two or three recitations for a sea-beach in the afternoon, or perhaps for an evening party twenty miles away.
NATHAN HALE
Young editors always think that they have a great deal of unpublished writing in their desks or portfolios, which is of the very best type, and which, “with a little dressing over,” will bring great credit to the magazine. Alas! the first and second numbers always exhaust these reserves. Yet in the case of “Harvardiana” no eager body of contributors appeared, and the table of contents shows that the five editors contributed much more than half the volume.
Lowell’s connection with this volume ought to rescue it from oblivion. It has a curiously old-fashioned engraving on the meagre title-page. It represents University Hall as it then was—before the convenient shelter of the corridor in front was removed. “Blackwood,” and perhaps other magazines, had given popularity to the plan, which all young editors like, of an imagined conference between readers and editors, in which the editors tell what is passing in the month. Christopher North had given an appetite among youngsters for this sort of thing, and the new editors fancied that “Skillygoliana,” such an imagined dialogue, would be very bright, funny, and attractive. But the fun has long since evaporated; the brightness has long since tarnished. I think they themselves found that the papers became a bore to them, and did not attract the readers.
The choice of the title “Skillygoliana” was, without doubt, Lowell’s own. “Skillygolee” is defined in the Century Dictionary in words which give the point to his use of it: “A poor, thin, watery kind of broth or soup … served out to prisoners in the hulks, paupers in workhouses, and the like; a drink made of oatmeal, sugar, and water, formerly served out to sailors in the British navy.”
Here is a scrap which must serve as a bit of mosaic carried off from this half-built temple:—
SKILLYGOLIANA—III.
Since Friday morning, on each busy tongue,
“Shameful!” “Outrageous!” has incessant rung.
But what’s the matter? Why should words like these
Of dreadful omen hang on every breeze?
Has our Bank failed, and shown, to cash her notes,
Not cents enough to buy three Irish votes?
Or, worse than that, and worst of human ills,
Will not the lordly Suffolk take her bills?
Sooner
