Charles Russell Lowell was in the class preceding mine; his father had
been my father's classmate, and had done me many a favour; his mother
was Mrs. Anna Jackson Lowell, one of the best and ablest Boston women
of her time. In her house I had been a guest. Charles and James, the
sons, were youths of the rarest intellectual gifts, each first scholar
of his class, of whom the utmost was expected. How strange that
fate should have made them soldiers! They both perished on the
battle-field. As I remember Charlie Lowell, the boy was fitly the
father of the man. We were playing football one day on the Delta, the
old-fashioned game of those days, at which modern athletes smile, but
which we old fellows think was a good tough game for all that. I had
secured the ball, and thinking I had time, placed it rather leisurely,
promising myself an effective kick. A slight figure bounded with
lightning rush from the opposing line, and from under my very foot
drove the ball far behind me to a point which secured victory.

How little I knew that I had just witnessed a small exhibition of the
quickness and prompt decision which no long time after on critical
battle-fields were to be put to splendid use. He proved to be a nearly
perfect soldier; Sheridan said of him, that he knew of no virtue that
could be added to Lowell. To us he seems one of the manliest of men,
thoughtful for others, even for dumb beasts. In Edward Emerson's
charming life of him, nothing, perhaps, is sweeter than his affection
for his horses, of which it was said that thirteen were killed under
him before he came to death himself. He studied their characters as
if they had been human beings, and dwells in his letters on the
particular lovable traits each one showed--these mute companions who
stood so closely by him in life and death.