JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 425 



"Though lightly prized the ribboned parchments three, 

 Yet collegisse juvat, I am glad 

 That here what colleging was mine I had, — 

 It linked another tie, dear native town, with thee ! " 



Whether or no there was a reaction from the discipline of school days, 

 it is certain that the independence which characterized Lowell through- 

 out his life found expression now, not in insubordination, but in a frank 

 pursuit of those courses of study and lines of reading which four years 

 of academic leisure and the tolerable equipment of the college and 

 home library put in his power. " Never," says Lowell in his essay, 

 " A Great Public Character," when speaking of college life, — " Never 

 were we ourselves so capable of the various great things we have 

 never done " ; and however much he may have been generalizing for 

 college youth, he recalled well his own spiritual experience ; with an 

 impulse which outwardly was wayward, he obeyed that law of his being 

 which his growing consciousness of intellectual power disclosed to 

 him. In his penetrating discrimination between talent and genius, he 

 says profoundly : " The man of talents possesses them like so many 

 tools, does his job with them, and there an end ; but the man of genius 

 is possessed by it, and it makes him into a book or a life according to 

 its whim. Talent takes the existing moulds and makes its castings, 

 better or worse, of richer or baser metal, according to knack and 

 opportunity ; but genius is always shaping new ones and runs the man 

 in them, so that there is always that human feel in the results which 

 give us a kindred thrill. What it will make, we can only conjecture, 

 contented always with knowing the infinite balance of possibility 

 against which it can draw at pleasure." His was a singularly self- 

 centred nature, and he was always true to that large ideal which was 

 his consciousness of greatness projected in history and literature ; but 

 there was a whimsical uncertainty in his mind as to the precise direc- 

 tion in which his genius would at any time take him. 



It is interesting to observe this self-centred nature in its early 

 struggle after equipoise. So far as outward activity was concerned, he 

 took a degree in law, but confessed to an aversion from the practice, 

 and for a while busied himself in a counting-room. His vacillation of 

 mind regarding his vocation, his apparent fickleness of purpose, the 

 conflict going on between his nature craving expression and the world 

 with its imperious demands, the stirring within him of large designs, 

 and the happy contentment in the pleasures of the day, all seek outlet 

 in his natural yet uneasy letters. He was finding himself in these 

 early days, as many another young man, and there are glimpses all 



