“This Present is becoming Past; Live then each moment manfully If you would wish your deeds to last, Sowing good seed continually Whose harvest time is yet to be. * * * * * “In our great pride we think that we Build up our high or low estate, Dimly half conscious that we see The paths which lead to small and great Through the fixed eye of settled Fate. “The Past may guide the Future’s ways: Seeds cast far up the stream of time, Returning after many days, May grow to their ordained prime Of fruitage in another clime.” As if to reinforce our confidence in the genuineness of the emotion which prompted these moral verses, written apparently to the sound of Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life,” which had just appeared in the _Knickerbocker_, we come in a few weeks to a rhymed letter in which a reminiscence of the same experience is recorded with simplicity and naturalness in a homely poetic strain:-- “Two years ago, in days how like to these, Yet how unlike! beneath the changing trees I walked with her full many a happy hour, Pausing to gather some belated flower, Or to pick up some nut half eaten, dropt By a scared squirrel as away he hopt. The jest, the laugh, and the more high debate To which the forest aisles seem consecrate, Nay, even the jest, and the dark plaided shawl That loved her light form--I remember all: For then I entered that fair gate of love On whose bright arch should be inscribed above, As o’er that other in the Tuscan’s story-- ‘Per me si va ne l’eterno dolore.’ The leaves were falling round us then, and we Talked of their many meanings musingly. Ah, woe is me! we did not speak at all Of how love’s leaves will wither, change, and fall-- Full silently--and how the pent up breast Will hide the tears that cannot be represt.” In this same letter Lowell enumerates at the close the books he is reading and about to read:-- “I’m reading now the Grecian tragedies, Stern, gloomy Æschylus, great Sophocles, And him of Salamis whose works remain More perfect to us than the other twain. (Time’s a gourmand, at least he was so then, And thinks his leavings good enough for men.) When I have critically read all these, I’ll dip in cloudy Aristophanes, And then the Latin dramatists, and next With mathematics shall my brain be vext. So if I carry all my projects through I shall do pretty well, I think, don’t you?”