Nor was he without the excellent ambition to collect a library of his own. “It is just fifty-one years ago,” he said 7 May, 1885, when unveiling the bust of Coleridge in Westminster Abbey, “that I became the possessor of an American reprint of Galignani’s edition of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats in one volume. It was a pirated book, and I trust I may be pardoned for the delight I had in it.”[17] His letters to his college friends during these years contain frequent references to the purchases of books he had made and the gifts from his family which he prized. He has been given a beautiful edition of Milton, which he had looked forward to buying; he has been purchasing Samuel Butler and Beattie; a new edition of Shakespeare has been announced, which he means to buy if he can afford it; he has had a “detur” of Akenside; he has laid his hands on a “very pretty edition of Cowper;” and his frequent quotations from the poets show the easy familiarity he had won in his reading. Besides his continued friendship with Story and other neighbors’ sons, Lowell formed new alliances among his college mates, and in his correspondence with two of them in this period he discloses something of his character and tastes. One of these friends, W. H. Shackford, was his senior by two or three years, and Lowell’s letters to him show the boy’s side turned toward one whom he regarded with the friendly reverence which sixteen pays to nineteen. On his part, Shackford seems to have taken a violent fancy to Lowell, to have made indeed the first overtures of friendship. To this sager companion, who was a senior when Lowell was a freshman, he reveals his more studious side. Shackford left college to teach at Phillips Exeter Academy, and Lowell wrote to him from Cambridge and Boston, not much in the way of college gossip, but of his own studies, the treasures he picked up at book-stores or auctions, his plans for reading and travel, and brief comments on his instructors. Through the correspondence runs an affectionate current, an almost lover-like tone of self-exculpation, the warm feeling of a boy toward his mentor, and an impulse to make him somewhat of a confessor.[18]