The satire of a young collegian is apt to be pretty severe, and Lowell runs amuck of Carlyle, Emerson, the Abolitionists, the advocates of Woman’s Rights, and the Teetotallers. For the most part the poem runs along glibly in the decasyllabic verse so handy to familiar poetry, and though there are many lame lines, there are more instances of the clever distichs which Lowell knocked off so easily in later years than one would have guessed from the examples of his verse which appear in his early letters. Here, for example, are some of his lines on Carlyle:-- “Hail too, great drummer in the mental march, Teufelsdröckh! worthy a triumphal arch, Who send’st forth prose encumbered with jackboots, To hobble round and pick up raw recruits, And, able both to battle and to teach, Mountest thy silent kettledrum to preach. Great conqueror of the English language, hail! How Caledonia’s goddess must turn pale To hear the German-Græco-Latin flung In _Revolutions_ from a Scottish tongue!” In the more serious and practical part of the poem there is an impassioned burst imitative of Campbell, in which he imagines the farewell words of the Cherokee Indians, who at this time, to his indignation, were being pushed westward from Georgia. To the debit of his youthful zeal may be set down the lines on Emerson which were his footnote to the famous address to the Divinity School delivered 15 July, 1838:-- “Woe for Religion, too, when men, who claim To place a ‘Reverend’ before their name, Ascend the Lord’s own holy place to preach In strains that Kneeland had been proud to reach, And which, if measured by Judge Thacher’s scale, Had doomed their author to the county jail! When men just girding for the holy strife, Their hands just cleansed to break the bread of life, Whose souls, made whole, should never count it loss With their own blood to witness for the cross, Invite a man their Christian zeal to crown By preaching earnestly the gospel-down, Applaud him when he calls of earthly make That ONE who spake as never yet man spake, And tamely hear the anointed Son of God Made like themselves an animated clod!” To the credit of his manliness may be set down, _per contra_, the following letter which he wrote after the publication of the poem: a letter, which, for all its boyish assumption of the _toga virilis_, has a ring of sincerity about it:-- CAMBRIDGE, Sept. 1st, 1838.