Nevertheless, indifferent as he may have been to the customary details of academic work, and not a little impatient of dry formalities, Lowell gave to the college liberally of the best he had to give. Not merely did he go through with his appointed tasks; he was always ready to take additional labor on himself and to perform works of supererogation. He had men come to read with him in his house, and one season at least offered to conduct a group of divinity students through the Inferno. It must be remembered, moreover, that Lowell’s instruction was of two sorts, one in a special author or group, to small select classes, the other general lectures upon literature to large classes. Something of the character of his free handling of subjects may be seen in the extracts from these lectures preserved in _The Harvard Crimson_ in 1894; and the attitude which he took toward this side of his work is recorded in the introductory passage to a lecture on the Study of Literature. “I confess,” he says, “it is with more and more diffidence that I rise every year to have my little talk with you about books and the men that have written them. If I remember my terrestrial globe rightly, one gets into his temperate zone after passing the parallel of forty, and arrives at that, shall I call it, Sheltered Haven of Middle Age, when, in proportion as one is more careful of the conclusions he arrives at, he is less zealous in his desire that all mankind should agree with him. Moreover, the longer one studies, the more thoroughly does one persuade himself that till he knows everything, he knows nothing--that after twenty years of criticism, one is still a mere weigher and gauger: skilled only to judge what he may chance to have been in the habit of inspecting at his own little provincial custom-house. And as one gets older he is apt to allow more for personal idiosyncrasy, and to have less certainty that the truth he had reached is not a one-sided one, and that there are not fifty others equally important, and (perhaps) equally unsatisfactory. Every bait is not for every fish. We begin by admitting the old doctor’s apothegm that Art is long; we gradually become persuaded that it is like the Irishman’s rope, the other end of which was cut off. So different is Art, whose concern is with the ideal and potential, from Science, which is limited by the actual and positive. Life is so short that it may be fairly doubted whether any man has a right to talk an hour, and I have learned at least so much,--that I hope less to teach than to suggest.”