too. Opening his eyes, he saw a triangle of flames down below. Lowell scrambled out of the classroom and down the stone stairs of University Hall. Down in Harvard Yard, a bonfire crackled voraciously.
Surrounding it, a semicircle of august men stared down at the flames with great attention. They were feeding books from a large pile to the fire. There were local Unitarian and Congregationalist ministers, fellows from the Harvard Corporation, and a few representatives of the Harvard Board of Overseers. One picked up a pamphlet, crushed it, and flung it like a ball. Everyone cheered as it hit the flames. Rushing forward, Lowell got down on one knee and pulled it out. The cover was too charred to read, so he opened the seared title page: In Defense of Charles Darwin and His Evolutionary Theory.
Lowell couldn't hold it any longer. Professor Louis Agassiz stood across from him on the other side of the fire, his face blurred and bent by fumes. The scientist waved amiably with both hands. "How fares your leg, Mr. Lowell? Ah, this - this is a must, Mr. Lowell, though a peety to waste good paper."
From a steam-filled window of the grotesquely Gothic granite Gore Hall, the College library, Dr. Augustus Manning, treasurer of the Corporation, looked down over the scene. Lowell rushed toward the massive entrance and through the nave, thankful for the composure and reason that came with each giant tread. No candles or gaslights were permitted in Gore Hall because of the danger of fire, so the library alcoves and the books were dim as the winter.
"Manning!" Lowell bellowed, educing a reprimand from the librarian.
Manning lurked on the platform above the reading room, gathering several books. "You have a lecture now, Professor Lowell. Leaving the students unsupervised shan't be deemed acceptable conduct by the Harvard Corporation."
Lowell had to wipe his face with a handkerchief before climbing to the platform. "You dare burn books in an institution of learning!" The copper tubes of Gore Hall's pioneering heating system always leaked steam, filling the library with billowing vapor that condensed into hot droplets on the windows, the books, and the students.
"The religious world owes us, and owes especially your friend Professor Agassiz, a debt of gratitude for triumphantly combating the monstrous teaching that we are descended from monkeys, Professor. Your father certainly would have agreed."
"Agassiz is too smart," Lowell said as he reached the top of the platform, breaking through the vapor. "He shall abandon you yet - count on it! Nothing that keeps thought out will ever be safe from thought!"
Manning smiled, and his smile seemed to cut inward into his head. "Do you know, I raised a hundred thousand dollars for Agassiz's museum through the Corporation. I daresay Agassiz will go exactly where I tell him."
"What is it, Manning? What makes you hate other men's ideas?"
Manning looked at Lowell sideways. As he answered, he lost the tight control of his voice. "We have been a noble country, with a simplicity of morals and justice, the last orphan child of the great Roman republic. Our world is strangled and demolished by infiltrators, newfangled notions of immorality coming in with every foreigner and every new idea against all the principles America was built upon. You see it yourself, Professor. Do you think we could have warred against ourselves twenty years ago? We have been poisoned. The war, our war, is far from over. It is just beginning. We have released demons into the very air we breathe. Revolutions, murders, thievery begin in our souls and move into the streets and our houses." This was the closest to being emotional that Lowell had ever seen Manning. "Chief Justice Healey was in my graduating class, Lowell - he was one of our finest overseers - and now he has been done in by some mere beast whose only knowledge is the knowledge of death! The minds in Boston are under constant assault. Harvard is the last fortress for the protection of our sublimity. And that is under my charge!"
Manning capped his sentiment: "You, Professor, have the luxury of rebellion only in absence of responsibility. You are truly a poet."
Lowell felt himself standing erect for the first time since Phineas Jennison's death. This gave him a rush of new strength. "We put a race of men in chains a hundred years ago, and there began the war. America will continue to grow no matter how many minds you chain up now, Manning. I know you threatened Oscar