“In his Sophomore year he kept abreast of the prescribed studies, but his heart was out of bounds, as it often had been at Round Hill when chasing squirrels or rabbits through forbidden forests.  Already his historical interest was shaping his life.  A tutor coming-by chance, let us hope—­to his room remonstrated with him upon the heaps of novels upon his table.

“‘Yes,’ said Motley, ’I am reading historically, and have come to the novels of the nineteenth century.  Taken in the lump, they are very hard reading.’”

All Old Cambridge people know the Brattle House, with its gambrel roof, its tall trees, its perennial spring, its legendary fame of good fare and hospitable board in the days of the kindly old bon vivant, Major Brattle.  In this house the two young students, Appleton and Motley, lived during a part of their college course.

“Motley’s room was on the ground floor, the room to the left of the entrance.  He led a very pleasant life there, tempering his college duties with the literature he loved, and receiving his friends amidst elegant surroundings, which added to the charm of his society.  Occasionally we amused ourselves by writing for the magazines and papers of the day.  Mr. Willis had just started a slim monthly, written chiefly by himself, but with the true magazine flavor.  We wrote for that, and sometimes verses in the corner of a paper called ‘The Anti-Masonic Mirror,’ and in which corner was a woodcut of Apollo, and inviting to destruction ambitious youths by the legend underneath,—­

‘Much yet remains unsung.’

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.