And the listeners? They went away, a few carelessly amused at the loose scholastic exercise and complacent over the evasion of work, but some stirred, quickened in their thought, and full of admiration for this brilliant interpreter of life as seen through the verse of Dante. One charm was in the unexpectedness of it all. There was no predicting what direction his talk would take. “Now and again,” says Mr. Wendell, “some word or some passage would suggest to him a line of thought--sometimes very earnest, sometimes paradoxically comical--that it never would have suggested to any one else; and he would lean back in his chair, and talk away across country till he felt like stopping; or he would thrust his hands into the pockets of his rather shabby sack-coat, and pace the end of the room with his heavy laced boots, and look at nothing in particular, and discourse of things in general.” The formalities of academic work were of little concern to Lowell. To be sure, after the first year of neglect he yielded to Dr. Walker’s persuasion, and attended Faculty meetings with commendable regularity, and took his share in the little details of discipline which were gravely discussed. It must have brought a smile to his mind, if not to his face, when he found himself called upon to join in a public admonition of ----, junior, “for wearing an illegal coat after repeated warnings.” And examinations of his classes were wearisome functions. “Perhaps,” says Mr. Wendell, “from unwillingness to degrade the text of Dante to such use, Mr. Lowell set us, when we had read the Inferno and part of the Purgatorio, a paper consisting of nothing but a long passage from Massimo d’Azeglio, which we had three hours to translate. This task we performed as best we might. Weeks passed, and no news came of our marks. At last one of the class, who was not quite at ease concerning his academic standing, ventured at the close of a recitation to ask if Mr. Lowell had assigned him a mark. Mr. Lowell looked at the youth very gravely, and inquired what he really thought his work deserved. The student rather diffidently said that he hoped it was worth sixty per cent. ‘You may take it,’ said Mr. Lowell, ‘I don’t want the bother of reading your book.’”