head of the list of his published works, was curiously unprophetic of
his later tendencies. It was written in the neatly, polished couplets
of the Pope type and other imitative metres, and aimed to satirize the
radical movements of the period, especially the transcendentalists and
abolitionists, with both of whom he was soon to be in active sympathy.

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