These pieces were usually dictated to each other, the poet recumbent upon the bed and a classmate ready to carry off the manuscript for the paper of the following day.  ‘Blackwood’s’ was then in its glory, its pages redolent of ‘mountain dew’ in every sense; the humor of the Shepherd, the elegantly brutal onslaughts upon Whigs and Cockney poets by Christopher North, intoxicated us youths.

“It was young writing, and made for the young.  The opinions were charmingly wrong, and its enthusiasm was half Glenlivet.  But this delighted the boys.  There were no reprints then, and to pass the paper-cutter up the fresh inviting pages was like swinging over the heather arm in arm with Christopher himself.  It is a little singular that though we had a college magazine of our own, Motley rarely if ever wrote for it.  I remember a translation from Goethe, ‘The Ghost-Seer,’ which he may have written for it, and a poem upon the White Mountains.  Motley spoke at one of the college exhibitions an essay on Goethe so excellent that Mr. Joseph Cogswell sent it to Madam Goethe, who, after reading it, said, ’I wish to see the first book that young man will write.’”

Although Motley did not aim at or attain a high college rank, the rules of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, which confine the number of members to the first sixteen of each class, were stretched so as to include him,—­a tribute to his recognized ability, and an evidence that a distinguished future was anticipated for him.

III.

1832-1833.  AEt. 18-19.  Study and travel in Europe.

Of the two years divided between the Universities of Berlin and Gottingen I have little to record.  That he studied hard I cannot doubt; that he found himself in pleasant social relations with some of his fellow-students seems probable from the portraits he has drawn in his first story, “Morton’s Hope,” and is rendered certain so far as one of his companions is concerned.  Among the records of the past to which he referred during his last visit to this country was a letter which he took from a collection of papers and handed me to read one day when I was visiting him.  The letter was written in a very lively and exceedingly familiar vein.  It implied such intimacy, and called up in such a lively way the gay times Motley and himself had had together in their youthful days, that I was puzzled to guess who could have addressed him from Germany in that easy and off-hand fashion.  I knew most of his old friends who would be likely to call him by his baptismal name in its most colloquial form, and exhausted my stock of guesses unsuccessfully before looking at the signature.  I confess that I was surprised, after laughing at the hearty and almost boyish tone of the letter, to read at the bottom of the page the signature of Bismarck.  I will not say that I suspect Motley of having drawn the portrait of his friend in one of the characters of “Morton’s Hope,” but it is not hard to point out traits in one of them which we can believe may have belonged to the great Chancellor at an earlier period of life than that at which the world contemplates his overshadowing proportions.