In this the earliest of his acknowledged publications, as so often in his later poems, satire and sentiment jostle each other. The predominant note, indeed, is satire in the lofty tone of nineteen, but the invocation and the close are in a different strain. Here, too, there is the exaltation of a very young man, and one may read phrases which perhaps said more than Lowell meant to say; but it was a ruffled youth with which his college career closed, and this period of his life was not to know as yet any steadying force. It is not strange that he grasped at somewhat illusory phantoms in his eagerness to stay himself. Here are the invocation and epilogue:-- “Oh thou! to whom, where’er my footstep roam, My restless soul would spread its pinions home,-- Reality! more fair than any seeming E’er blest the fancy of an angel’s dreaming,-- Be thou my muse, in whose blue eye I see The heaven of my heart’s eternity! Oh, hover like a spirit at my side, In all my wanderings a heavenly guide, Then, if in Cant’s dim mists I lose my way, Thy blessed smile shall lead me back to day, And, when I turn me from the land of night, Thou, morning star of love, shalt herald light! “Lady! whom I have dared to call my muse, With thee my day began, with thee shall end-- Thou can’st not such a poor request refuse To let thine image with its closing blend! As turn the flowers to the quiet dews, Fairest, so turns my yearning heart to thee, For thee it pineth--as the homesick shell Mourns to be once again beneath the sea-- Oh let thine eyes upon this tribute dwell, And think--one moment kindly think of me! Alone--my spirit seeks thy company, And in all beautiful communes with thine, In crowds--it ever seeks alone to be To dream of gazing in thy gentle eyne!” After all, the irregular impulses of the class poem point to what is of more consequence, the beginning of Lowell’s manhood. Until the summer of 1837, he had been a happy-go-lucky boy, sunning himself in literature, in nature, and in his friends; then there set in a period when he was at odds with fortune, and a stirring of half-understood desires arose; the consciousness of power was struggling with the wilfulness of youth. CHAPTER III FIRST VENTURES 1838-1844 As his college course drew near its close, Lowell began to forecast his immediate future. His growing devotion to letters, especially to poetry, and perhaps the wish to linger a little longer within the shelter of the academic life, led him to cherish the notion of studying a while in Germany, and he wrote to his father, who was still abroad, in pursuance of this plan; but he received no encouragement. Germany, it was properly said to him, was no place for the study of law by an American, and the law was regarded as his vocation.