How happy the parents were in their anticipation may be read in the affectionate terms in which Lowell had confided their hopes late in August to his friend Briggs. “Never mind what our child will be (if it should be born safely), we can at least enjoy our parentship now and fancy what glories we please of our little darling. We have christened it long ago. If she is a girl she is to be named Blanche (White), a sweet name, thus uniting Maria’s family name with mine. If a boy we shall call him Perceval, that being the given name of the first Lowle who set foot in America, and having, moreover, a pretty diminutive (Percie), an important thing for a boy. Now, do not set your wits at work to discover prophetically the unhearworthy nickname which the perverse ingenuity of boys will twist out of it at school. He shall never go to school. The only reason I have for a preference of sex is that girls ordinarily resemble the father most, and boys the mother. Therefore I hope for a boy, and if you knew Maria (I call her mother already) as well as I do, you would hope so too. It is true I can never persuade her of the force of this argument--because she does not know how good she is. When people arrive at that pitch of consciousness they are generally good for nothing.” And then follows the half-prophetic passage: I have never forgotten the sympathy I felt with your hopes and your disappointment in a similar case.... I look upon death so constantly and surely as but a continuation of life (after the glad removal or subsidence of the plethora of flesh which now chokes half the spirit out of us) that I shall be quite willing to send before us such an ambassador as our little angel would be if he goes sooner than we do. At all events, nothing can ever take away from me the joy I have already had in it.” The haunting fear which every young father has at such a time, and which Lowell intimates in these lines, was not made real at once, but the child lived with them only a brief fourteen months. It is touching to find Mrs. Lowell a month before the birth of her child writing verses of profound sympathy entitled “The Slave Mother,” in which she reflects the anguish such a mother feels on the birth of her child; and on the same day Lowell was writing his poem “The Falcon,” though in its original form, entitled “The Falconer,” it was longer and filled with a certain savage indignation over the quarry upon which the falcon, Truth, descends. Both poems were contributed to “The Liberty Bell,” published for the anti-slavery bazaar which was held each December in Boston. This was the social rally of the abolitionists and a resource with which to meet the modest demands of a crusade into which men and women threw themselves without counting the cost. Before and after her marriage Mrs. Lowell took an active part in the bazaar under the generalship of Mrs. Chapman. Lowell hits off the characteristics of those who were conspicuous in the local movement most wittily in his