riend, "I shall study
law for the present to oblige father; he is in some trouble, and
I wish to make him as happy as possible. The future course of
my life is undetermined, except that all shall yield to holy poetry.
Indeed it is a sacred duty. I have begun studying law; don't be
afraid, however, that I intend to give up poetry. I shall always
be a worshiper of that divinity, and I hope in a few years to be
able to give up everything and be a priest in her temple." After
a year he writes, "I have not written any poetry this whole summer.
Old Mrs. Themis says that I shall not visit any more at the
Miss Muses. I'll see the old catamaran hanged, though, but what
I will, and I'll write a sonnet to my old shoe directly, out of
mere desperation. Pity and sympathize with me." And on March 28,
1843, we find him writing to a college friend:

"I have been attending courts of all kinds and assisting as junior
counsel in trying cases and all the drudgery of a lawyer's life.
One end of my labor has been happily attained, for about three
weeks ago I arrived at the age of twenty-one, and last week I
mustered courage to stand an examination of my qualifications
for an attorney, and the result (unlike that of some examinations
during my college life) was fortunate, with compliments from the
judge. I feel a certain vanity (not unmixed, by the way, with
self-contempt) at my success, for I well remember I and a dear
friend of mine used to mourn over the impossibility of our ever
becoming business men, and lo, I am a lawyer.-- I have a right
to bestow my tediousness on any court of the Commonwealth, and
they are bound to hear me."

From 1843 to 1847 he practiced at the Middlesex Bar, and from
1847, when he went to live in Boston, until 1863, he was a member
of the Suffolk Bar. On November 25, 1851, he had his name changed
by act of the Legislature. There were eleven other lawyers by
the name of Smith, practicing in Boston, and two of them were
Henry Smiths. To avoid the inevitable confusion, Henry Welles Smith
became Henry Fowle Durant, both Fowle and Durant being family names.

In 1852 Mr. Durant was a member of the Boston City Council, but
did not again hold political office. On May 28, 1854, he married
his cousin, Pauline Adeline Fowle, of Virginia, daughter of the
late Lieutenant-colonel John Fowle of the United States Army and
Paulina Cazenove. On March 2, 1855, the little boy, Henry Fowle
Durant, Jr., was born, and