Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life

[49] class; and my college diary records him as coming as a senior into our freshman debating club and keeping us supplied with amusement for the whole evening. It is enough to say that he was secretary of the Hasty Pudding Club — the reverse of a recluse position-and kept its records in verse. After leaving college he and Maria White were the “King and Queen” of what was probably the most brilliant circle of young people — the “Brother and sister” club-ever brought together in the neighborhood of Boston.

After his marriage, too, Elmwood became the scene of a modest but delightful hospitality; for Mrs. Lowell had hosts of friends and loved to meet them. Eminent strangers were entertained there; Ole Bull, for instance, on his first arrival. Then followed by degrees the deaths of his older children, and the illness and death of his wife; then the sinking of Dr. Lowell into that sorrowful condition described in one of his son's most remarkable poems, “The Darkened mind.” It was the closing in of these shadows which changed for many years the life of Lowell, and made him, so far as he ever was, a recluse.

For a time it made a reaction which took him positively away from his early associations;