The vacillation and apparent irresolution outlined in his fickle pursuit of a profession in the months after his graduation are unmistakable, but there are expressions now and then in the letters we have quoted that strike one as a little exaggerated even to one so open to attacks from conscience as was Lowell. Why such a pother, one might ask, over an embarrassment which is not very uncommon, and after all touches chiefly the prudential side of character? “Nobody knows or can know my motives for changing, and the struggle which kept me irresolute;” but the boyish companion to whom he wrote undoubtedly had an inkling of his friend’s perturbation, though frank as that friend was in his correspondence and intercourse, he could surely have said, “the heart knoweth its own bitterness.” The solution is simple enough in statement. Before his last year in college Lowell had met and fallen fiercely in love with a beautiful girl, one of the circle in which his family moved, and endowed with intellectual grace and great charm of manner. Then something came between them, and separation became inevitable, at least it became so in Lowell’s own view of the situation. The shock of this rupture left not a shade of reproach for the girl in Lowell’s mind, but it broke up the fountains of the deep in his own life. He was scarcely more than a boy in years, but he had in temperament and capacity for emotion a far greater maturity. He could write of himself a few years later: “Brought up in a very reserved and conventional family, I cannot in society appear what I really am. I go out sometimes with my heart so full of yearning toward my fellows that the indifferent look with which even entire strangers pass me brings tears to my eyes.” There was indeed an extraordinary frankness about him in these early days, filling his letters with expressions which might easily have made him wince in later years; but the spontaneity of his nature, which was always seen in the unguardedness of his familiar writing and his conversation, had in these days the added ingenuousness of youth. The experience thus referred to in the summer of 1837 was no short, sharp passion burning itself out in quick rage; it smouldered and leaped up into flame at intervals for two years, fed moreover by the consciousness of his own impotence and the predicament into which he was helplessly drawn; and it was during these two years that this restlessness and vacillation of temper were almost ungovernable. Later in life even he looked back with horror upon this time, saying half in pity, half in contempt for himself, that he put a cocked pistol to his forehead in 1839, and had not finally the courage to pull the trigger.