Lowell’s first two years out of college were troubled with rather more than the usual doubts and questionings that attend a young man’s choice of a profession.  He studied for a bachelor’s degree in law, which he obtained in two years.  But the work was done reluctantly.  Law books, he says, “I am reading with as few wry faces as I may.”  Though he was nominally practicing law for two years, there is no evidence that he ever had a client, except the fictitious one so pleasantly described in his first magazine article, entitled My First Client.  From Coke and Blackstone his mind would inevitably slip away to hold more congenial communion with the poets.  He became intensely interested in the old English dramatists, an interest that resulted in his first series of literary articles, The Old English Dramatists, published in the Boston Miscellany.  The favor with which these articles were received increased, he writes, the “hope of being able one day to support myself by my pen, and to leave a calling which I hate, and for which I am not well fitted, to say the least.”

During this struggle between law and literature an influence came into Lowell’s life that settled his purposes, directed his aspirations and essentially determined his career.  In 1839 he writes to a friend about a “very pleasant young lady,” who “knows more poetry than any one I am acquainted with.”  This pleasant young lady was Maria White, who became his wife in 1844.  The loves of this young couple constitute one of the most pleasing episodes in the history of our literature, idyllic in its simple beauty and inspiring in its spiritual perfectness.  “Miss White was a woman of unusual loveliness,” says Mr. Norton, “and of gifts of mind and heart still more unusual, which enabled her to enter with complete sympathy into her lover’s intellectual life and to direct his genius to its highest aims.”  She was herself a poet, and a little volume of her poems published privately after her death is an evidence of her refined intellectual gifts and lofty spirit.

In 1841 Lowell published his first collection of poems, entitled A Year’s Life.  The volume was dedicated to “Una,” a veiled admission of indebtedness for its inspiration to Miss White.  Two poems particularly, Irene and My Love, and the best in the volume, are rapturous expressions of his new inspiration.  In later years he referred to the collection as “poor windfalls of unripe experience.”  Only nine of the sixty-eight poems were preserved in subsequent collections.  In 1843, with a young friend, Robert Carter, Lowell launched a new magazine, The Pioneer, with the high purpose, as the prospectus stated, of giving the public “a rational substitute” for the “namby-pamby love tales and sketches monthly poured out to them by many of our popular magazines.”  These young reformers did not know how strongly the great reading public is attached to its literary flesh-pots,