was not permitted to deliver, or even to hear; but, during the Class Day amusements in the college yard, Lowell, according to tradition, sat outside the wooden fence in a "one-horse shay" of the kind immortalized by Holmes, in which he had driven down along the Cambridge Turnpike, from "Emerson's Corner" in Concord, and past the birthplace of Theodore Parker in Lexington, five miles from Concord Village, that summer morning. In course of his attempts at wit, Lowell set down this lament over Emerson's theology:
Alas! that Christian ministers should dare
To preach the views of Gibbon and Voltaire!
Alas! that one whose life and gentle ways
E'en Hate could find it in its heart to praise,
Whose intellect is equalled but by few,
Should strive for what he'd weep to find were true!
Lowell had lived in Concord near Judge Hoar and Colonel Whiting, and had frequented Emerson's house, at the east end of the village, where the Turnpike left the main Lexington road (now Massachusetts Avenue), up and down which the Redcoats had marched on that eventful 19th of April, which, opened the War of Independence. In years ensuing, Lowell followed
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