[16] _Latest Literary Essays and Addresses_, p. 43. [17] _Literary and Political Addresses_, pp. 69, 70. [18] Mr. Shackford did not live to continue his friendship with Lowell. He died in 1842. [19] The Hasty Pudding Club, a Harvard students’ club, which has always made much of literature of the lighter sort, its specialty now being amateur theatricals. [20] “Thoreau,” in _Literary Essays_, i. 366. [21] There is a letter from Mrs. Anna Cabot Lowell, 3 July, 1838, to her brother-in-law, which throws a little light on the way in which his friends regarded Lowell at this time: “Aunt S. was here last evening and depicted in a lively manner the grief of Scates for your idle courses. She says he went to you with tears in his eyes to implore you to persevere, and that he told his friends in faltering accents that you had but this one fault in the world. Being desirous to know the exact nature of that fault, that you might apply the specific remedy, I asked her what the fault was. She said ‘indolence to be sure: indolence and the Spence negligence.’ I quote her very words. My opinion of the case is that it proceeds more from negligence than indolence, and more from a blind confidence in your powers and your destiny than either.” [22] _Letters_, ii. 302. [23] It was not uncommon in those days and long after for a student to take his degree at the Law School after a year or two only of study and then to continue to hear lectures. Lowell’s name is on the catalogue of the school for the year following his degree. [24] William Page, the artist, whom Lowell first knew through the Whites. [25] “Goethe’s poetic sense was the Minotaur to which he sacrificed everything. To make a study he would soil the maiden petals of a woman’s soul.”--“Lessing,” in _Literary Essays_, ii. 195. [26] It is very likely under the impetus given by Maria White that Lowell took a place as delegate to the Anti-Slavery Convention held in Boston, 17 November, 1840. [27] _Letters_, i. 67-69. [28] _James Russell Lowell and His Friends_, pp. 72-76. [29] “I have enjoyed the society of my fair cousin Maria very much. She has shown me several of James’s letters, and I think I never saw such perfect specimens of _love-letters_,--those in any novel you ever read are perfectly indifferent compared to them. Without being silly in the least, they are full of all the fervor and extatification which you would expect from the most ardent lover.”--L. L. Thaxter to T. W. Higginson, 19 January, 1842. [30] “I am obliged to stay at home whenever Father goes to Boston, and as he usually goes thither on the four first days of the week, I am rather closely prisoned.”--J. R. L. to R. Carter, 31 December, 1843. [31] Thomas W. White, the editor. [32] The sonnet, “To the Spirit of Keats,” was the first of the two; the other was “Sunset and Moonshine,” not retained by the poet in his final collection.