What most impresses the attentive reader of Lowell’s verses and letters as the two years, to which he so often refers, draw to a close, is the evidence that the young man was finally emerging from the mist and cloud through which he had been struggling, and was getting his feet upon solid ground, so that not only was his irresolution changed for a fairly diligent pursuit of his profession, but he had acquired a greater robustness of spirit and was squaring himself with life in earnest. The internal conflict had been fought out and the substantial victory gained was showing itself in greater self-reliance and a growth in manly ways. It is therefore with especial satisfaction that the chronicler of his external history comes upon an event which was to mark emphatically the attainment of his intellectual and spiritual majority. Near the end of the year 1839 he made the acquaintance of Maria White. She was the daughter of Mr. Abijah White, a farmer in Watertown, whom Lowell characterized on first meeting him as “the most perfect specimen of a bluff, honest, hospitable country squire you can possibly imagine.” Mr. White had a family of sons and daughters who thenceforward became Lowell’s familiar acquaintance. One of the sons, William A. White, had been a classmate at Harvard,--he speaks of him once as his “quondam chum,”--and it was by him that Lowell was introduced to his home. As Lowell had written with great freedom to his friend Loring of his troubled experience, so now one may trace in this very frank correspondence the manner in which this new affection displaced the mournfulness of that experience and substituted great peace and content for the soreness which still remained after a struggle that had resulted in substantial self-mastery. In his earliest, hardly more than casual reference to Maria White he characterizes her as “a very pleasant and pleasing young lady” who “knows more poetry” than any one he is acquainted with. “I mean,” he says, “she is able to repeat more. She is more familiar, however, with modern poets than with the pure well-springs of English poesy.” His changing mood during the winter months that follow is visible in the poetry which he writes and copies in his letters, but in the early summer there is a bolder and franker tone, until the acquaintance which has ripened into intimacy culminates in an engagement not long after the completion of the lover’s law studies.