vigorous pen, and had a very
thoughtful mind; his contribution was of a very kindly and wise article
on the religious character of Lord Byron,--an article well worth
republication as an introduction to any complete collection of the works
of that great poet. One would say such a combination of the literary
strength of Massachusetts was a good setting off for a new magazine.

The gentlemen above named, all or most of them, continued their
contributions for other months and years. In addition to these whose
names I have given, there were in succeeding numbers articles from
Richard Hildreth, the historian, Park Benjamin, the poet, John G.
Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Professor Longfellow, Miss Hannah F.
Gould, Dr. W. B. O. Peabody, of Springfield, Dr. Andrew P. Peabody, long
known and honored and loved in his position in Cambridge as guardian and
friend of the young men in college. But the list would be too long to
enumerate all the fine scholars and eminent writers who gathered to make
up the NEW ENGLAND MAGAZINE. My father and brother were very successful
in securing the labors especially of young men,--my brother, because he
was young himself,--my father, because always he was quick to discern
rising merit, and ready and earnest to help forward young men to success
and eminence. The list above given is that mostly of men who at that
time were still in early youth.

The fifth volume of the Magazine, in July, 1833, records my brother's
death and the solitude of the senior editor. The number is prefaced by a
picture of my brother, which shows him as a handsome young man, at the
age of twenty-two; but the lithograph cannot give his fair complexion,
the clearness of his large blue eyes. It was accompanied by an elegiac
poem, by Charles Sprague, well known then, and not forgotten since, as
one of our most finished poets, and one of our most pathetic writers.
The work that then devolved upon my father, not only as editor of a
daily paper, but as a man of public activity and usefulness, member as
he was for many years of the Legislature, chairman of committees, to
whose reports he devoted an immensity of labor, was sufficient to
require him to give up the Magazine. Besides its more strictly literary
articles, contributed mostly by others, though my father wrote some of
the literary articles himself, the Magazine presented every month a
review of the public proceedings of Congress and of many of the State
governments, the m