But considerable portions of the earlier as well as of the later lectures remain unprinted, partly, no doubt, because his points of view changed with the growth of his learning, and the increasing depth as well as breadth of his vision.  There is but little in manuscript which he would himself, I believe, have been inclined to print without substantial change.  Yet these unprinted remains contain so much that seems to me to possess permanent value that, after some question and hesitation, I have come to the conclusion that selections from them should be published.  The fragments must be read with the fact constantly held in mind that they do not always represent Lowell’s mature opinions; that, in some instances, they give but the first form of thoughts developed in other connections in one or other of his later essays; that they have not received his last revision; that they have the form of discourse addressed to the ear, rather than that of literary work finished for the eye.

If so read, I trust that the reader, while he may find little in them to increase Lowell’s well-established reputation, may find much in them to confirm a high estimate of his position as one of the rare masters of English prose as well as one of the most capable of critics; much to interest him alike in their intrinsic character, and in their illustration of the life and thought of the writer; and much to make him feel a keen regret that they are the final contributions of their author to the treasures of English literature.

Charles Eliot Norton

* * * * *

Hippel, the German satirist, divides the life of man into five periods, according to the ruling desires which successively displace each other in the human soul.  Our first longing, he says, is for trousers, the second for a watch, the third for an angel in pink muslin, the fourth for money, and the fifth for a “place” in the country.  I think he has overlooked one, which I should be inclined to place second in point of time—­the ambition to escape the gregarious nursery, and to be master of a chamber to one’s self.

How charming is the memory of that cloistered freedom, of that independence, wide as desire, though, perhaps, only ten feet by twelve!  How much of future tastes and powers lay in embryo there in that small chamber!  It is the egg of the coming life.  There the young sailor pores over the “Narratives of Remarkable Shipwrecks,” his longing heightened as the storm roars on the roof, or blows its trumpet in the chimney.  There the unfledged naturalist gathers his menagerie, and empties his pockets of bugs and turtles that awaken the ignorant animosity of the housemaid.  There the commencing chemist rehearses the experiment of Schwarz, and singes off those eyebrows which shall some day feel the cool shadow of the discoverer’s laurel.  There the antiquary begins his collections with a bullet from Bunker Hill, as genuine as the epistles