Page:Letter of Maria White (Mrs. James Russell) Lowell to Sophia (Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne; with remarks by F. B. Sanborn.djvu/12

 the Declaration, after the Revolution; and from his family it came to Dr. Lowell. Miss White lived at home, in a house with a fine garden, along the highway from Mount Auburn to Watertown Village. Before Lowell met her, he was inclined to be a gay and thoughtless youth, who had neglected his duties in Harvard, where he graduated in 1838, a year after Thoreau; and, as Class Poet, had satirized Emerson and the serious reformers of the period, in verse of the traditional type, but with far less point than Doctor Holmes used in similar satire.

I met in after years, at Peterboro' in rural New York, a classmate of Lowell who did not graduate, having carried neglect of study even farther than Lowell could venture, in a town so bookish as Cambridge. This Charles Dudley Miller, the son-in-law of Gerrit Smith, told me of the gayeties and songs of his boon companion in those days. For no very serious offense, but for some public indecorum, the college faculty sent Lowell to spend his last term in Concord, under the tutelage of the village pastor, Barzillai Frost; and there the fluent Muse dictated to him the Class Poem, which he [ 4 ]