So, in the fall of 1838, when he was living at Elmwood with his brother Charles, he began to read Blackstone “with as good a grace and as few wry faces” as he could. But suddenly, a fortnight only after making this assertion, he had abandoned the notion of studying law, out of utter distaste for it. It was after a great struggle, he says, but the struggle was evidently one of those occasional self-communings of the young man who is not predestined to any profession, and yet is unable to respond to the half articulate demands of his nature. We can read Lowell’s mind at this time in the fragmentary confessions of his letters, and see that the controlling influence was to secure ultimately the right to devote himself to literature. The law is a jealous mistress, and Lowell was sagacious enough to perceive that to secure success in the profession he must needs devote himself to it with long and unremitting attention, and he was sure a real love for the study of law was a condition precedent to success. So again he weighed the chances. Once more he considered the ministry; he even speculated over the possibilities of medicine--his friend Loring had taken up that for his profession; but with a certain common-sense view of the matter, he argued that if his occupation were to be merely a means to an end, why, trade was the logical road to money-making, and he set about looking for a “place in a store.” “I must expect,” he writes ruefully, “to give up almost entirely all literary pursuits, and instead of making rhymes, devote myself to making money.” But with a whimsical attempt after all to join his ideals with this practical course, after saying that in abandoning the law he gives up the chance of going to Europe, since his father had promised him this plum if he would stick to the law for three years, he closes his letter: “I intend to go into a foreign store so that I may be able to go to Europe yet. I shall have to brush up my French so as to write foreign letters.” This was written on Tuesday the 30th of October. The next Monday, when he had gone to Boston to look for a place, he dropped in at the United States court where a case was on in which Webster was one of the counsel. His imagination took fire. “I had not been there an hour,” he writes, “before I determined to continue in my profession and study as well as I could.” By an unexpected circumstance, however, he was within a month interrupted in his study. His brother Robert, who was in the counting-room of a coal merchant, was laid up with a lame hand, and so James took his place at the desk. It is not impossible that he was secretly glad of making thus, with a good conscience, a little test of his aptitude for business.