DEAR SIR,--In my class poem are a few lines about your “address.” My friends have expressed surprise that after I had enjoyed your hospitality and spoken so highly of you in private, I should have been so ‘ungrateful’ as ever to have written anything of the kind. Could I have ever dreamed that a man’s private character should interfere with his public relations, I had never blotted paper so illy. But I really thought that I was doing rightly, for I consider it as virtual a lie to hold one’s tongue as to speak an untruth. I should have written the same of my own brother. Now, sir, I trouble you with this letter because I think you a man who would think nowise the worse of me for holding up my head and speaking the truth at any sacrifice. That I could wilfully malign a man whose salt I had eaten, and whose little child I had danced on my knee,--he must be a small man who would believe so small a thing of his fellow. But this word “ingratitude” is a very harsh and grating word, and one which I hope would never be laid to my charge since I stood at my mother’s knee and learnt the first very alphabet, as it were, of goodness. I hope that if you have leisure, sir, you will answer this letter and put me at rest. I hope you will _acquit_ me (for I do not still think there is aught to _forgive_ or _pardon_, and I trust _you_ will not after reading this letter) of all uncharitableness. Of course no one can feel it as strongly as I do, for since my friends have hinted at this “ingratitude” I have felt a great deal, and scarcely dare to look at the Tennyson you lent me without expecting some of the devils on the cover to make faces at me. I hope you will find time to answer this and that I may still enjoy your friendship and be able to take you by the hand and look you in the face, as honest man should to honest man. I remain yours with respect, JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. P. S. I have sent with this a copy of my “poem”--if it be not too tiresome, you would perhaps think better of me, if you were to read it _through_. I am not silly enough to suppose that this can be of any importance to you (if, indeed, you ever heard of the passage I refer to), but it is of very great importance to me. J. R. L. Lowell’s own comment on the poem years after was in the lines:-- “Behold the baby arrows of that wit Wherewith I dared assail the woundless Truth! Love hath refilled the quiver, and with it The man shall win atonement for the youth.”[22]