SCHOOL AND COLLEGE
1826-1838
The outer world came early to the notice of Lowell in his garden
enclosure. “I remember,” he writes on the fourth of July, 1876, “how,
fifty years ago to-day, I, perched in a great ox-heart cherry-tree, long
ago turned to mould, saw my father come home with the news of John
Adams’s death.” Two or three journeys also carried him out into the
world in his early boyhood. He remembered going to Portsmouth in his
seventh year, for the visit was impressed on his memory by the startling
effect produced by a skeleton which he confronted when he opened a long
red chest in Dr. Brackett’s house; and it was the next year that his
father took him to Washington and carried him out to Alexandria, where
he spent some days with the Carroll family, who were connections on his
mother’s side, and whence he made an excursion to Mount Vernon. It all
came back to him fifty-nine years later when he took his grandson to the
same shrine; he went straight to the key of the Bastile and to the
honey-locusts in the garden.
The rambles, too, to Beaver Brook and the Waverley Oaks, in the country
within easy stroll of Elmwood, were extended when he climbed into the
chaise with his father and drove off to neighboring parishes at such
times as Dr. Lowell exchanged with his brother ministers. In those
little journeys he had an opportunity to see the lingering reverence
still paid to the minister, when boys doffed their hats and girls
dropped a curtsy by the roadside as his father passed by. These
exchanges drew Dr. Lowell and his little son as far as Portsmouth on the
east and Northampton on the west. “I can conceive,” says Lowell, “of
nothing more delightful than those slow summer journeys through leafy
lanes and over the stony hills, where we always got out and walked. In
that way I think I gained a more intimate relation with what we may call
pristine New England than has fallen to the fortune of most men of my
age.”[12] Thirty years after these experiences he could give this
graphic report of the contests he was wont to witness in the village
choir:--
“Sometimes two ancient men, through glasses dim,
In age’s treble deaconed off the hymn,
Paused o’er long words and then with breathless pace
Went down a slope of short ones at a race,
While who could sing and who could not, but would,
Rushed helter-skelter after as they could.
Well I remember how their faces shone,
Safe through some snare like _Re-sig-na-ti-on_,
And how some graceless youth would mock the tones
Of Deacon Jarvis or of Deacon Jones:
In towns ambitious of more cultured strains,
The gruff bass-viol told its inward pains
As some enthusiast, deaf to catgut’s woe,
Rasped its bare nerves with torture-rosined bow;
Hard-by another, with strained eyeballs set,
Blew devious discord through his clarinet,
And the one fiddle, that was wont to seek
In secular tunes its living all the week,
Blind to the leader’s oft-repeated glance
Mixed up the psalm-tune with a country dance.”[13]
More frequent journeys were those which he and his brothers and sisters
invented for themselves by naming different parts of Elmwood after
cities of the world and spending thus with their imagination the small
geographical earnings of the schoolroom.
The first school which the boy attended was a dame school, which appears
to have been somewhere not far from the river in the neighborhood of
what is now Brattle Square. Once in verse and once in prose Lowell
recorded his childish experience in and out of this primary school. In
his introduction to “The Biglow Papers,” first series, is a fragment
beginning--
“Propped on the marsh, a dwelling now, I see
The humble school-house of my A, B, C;”
and in his “New England Two Centuries Ago” there is a passage often read
and quoted, which is a faithful picture of the author’s life within and
without one of the “martello towers that protect our coast,” but he does
not add the personal touch of his own return from school, whistling as
he came in sight of his home as a signal to the mother watching for him.
A bit of childish sport may be added from an omitted extract from the
same fragmentary poem, since it brings to view two of Lowell’s boy
companions:--
“Where Felton puns in English or in Greek,
And shakes with laughter till the timbers creak,
The ‘Idle Man’ once lived; the man I knew,
The author dwelt beyond my boyish view.
There once, the college butler aided, too,
My pony through his own front door he drew,
I on her back, and strove with winning airs
To coax my shaggy Shetlander upstairs;
Rejected hospitality! the more
He tugged in front, she backed toward the door.
Had oats been offered, she had climbed at least
Up to the garret, canny Scottish beast.
Across the way, where once an Indian stood
O’er Winthrop’s door, carved horribly in wood,
On the green duck-pond’s sea, where water fails
In droughty times, replenished then with pails,
Richard the Second from their moorings cast
His shingle fleets, and served before the mast,
While Ned and I consigned a well-culled store
Of choicest pebbles for the other shore.
Then walked at leisure to the antipodes,
Changing _en route_ to Chinese consignees.”
Both Richard and Edmund Dana were his neighbors and friends, and with
these early playmates should be named William Story. To him, as to one
who had journeyed with him “through the green secluded valley of
boyhood,” he addressed his “Cambridge Thirty Years Ago.” Story and the
two Higginsons, Thatcher and Thomas Wentworth, were the only day
scholars with Lowell at the boarding-school, kept by Mr. William Wells,
to which Lowell was sent to be prepared for entrance to college. Mr.
Wells was an Englishman, who brought with him to this country
attainments in scholarship which were disclosed in the making of a
simple Latin grammar and in an edition of Tacitus. He engaged in
publishing under the firm name of Wells & Lilly, but meeting with
reverses, he opened a classical school in the old Fayerweather house in
Cambridge. He was a man of robust and masterful habit, who kept up the
English tradition of the rattan in school and manly sport out of doors.
The school had its gentler side in the person of Mrs. Wells, to whom
Lowell sent a copy of “The Vision of Sir Launfal” in 1866, with the
words: “Will you please me by accepting this little book in memory of
your constant kindness to a naughty little cub of a schoolboy more than
thirty years ago? I hope you will forget his ill deserts as faithfully
as he remembers how much he owes you.”
It was at the hands of Mr. Wells that Lowell received that severe
drilling in Latin which was one of the traditions of English scholarship
transported to New England by the early clergy, and reënforced from time
to time by newcomers from England like Mr. Wells, elegant scholars like
Mr. Dixwell, and stern disciplinarians like Dr. Francis Gardner, the
latter two long holding the Boston Latin School fast bound to the old
ways. Mr. George Ticknor Curtis, who was sixteen years old when Lowell
was ten, at Mr. Wells’s school, in a reminiscence of that period says:
“Mr. Wells always heard a recitation with the book in his left hand and
a rattan in his right, and if the boy made a false quantity or did not
know the meaning of a word, down came the rattan on his head. But this
chastisement was never ministered to me or to ‘Jemmy Lowell.’ Not to me,
because I was too old for it, and not to him because he was too young.”
With his quickness of mind and linguistic agility, Lowell evidently
acquired in school rather than in college a familiarity with Latin
forms, to judge by the ease with which he handled the language later in
mock heroics; his early letters, too, are sprinkled with Latin phrases,
the well worn coin of the realm, it is true, but always jingling in his
pocket.
The schoolroom to an imaginative boy is a starting point for mental
rambles. Lowell studied the rime on the window panes as well as his
Latin verses. From his readings with his elder sister, and out of his
own fertile imagination, he told or made up stories for his young
comrades. T. W. Higginson, recalling Lowell and Story, remembers
“treading close behind them once, as they discussed Spenser’s ‘Faerie
Queene,’ which they had been reading, and which led us younger boys to
christen a favorite play-place ‘the Bower of Bliss.’” Dr. Samuel Eliot,
who was one of Mr. Wells’s pupils, was also one of the small boys who
listened to Lowell’s imaginative tales. I remember nothing of them,” he
told Dr. Hale, except one, which rejoiced in the central interest of a
trap in the playground, which opened to subterranean marvels of various
kinds.”
“I can conceive of no healthier reading for a boy, or girl either, than
Scott’s novels,” says Lowell, and he had the good fortune to be
introduced early to Scott, and to read him as a contemporary. When he
was nine his mother gave him, one can guess with what Scottish
eagerness, the “Tales of a Grandfather,” which had just been published;
and the then great event of American history was not so remote but that
the freckle-faced boy who lived in a house once a Tory’s, then a
soldier’s hospital, and then the home of a governor of the commonwealth
and vice-president of the United States, would have lively reminders of
it in the veterans who turned out at muster, and in the rude village
drama of the “Cornwallis.”[14]
Yet, as Lowell himself reminds us, the Cambridge of his boyhood, besides
possessing the common characteristics of New England towns, had its
special flavor from the presence there of the oldest college of New
England. Like the Cambridge boys of to-day, he hovered about the skirts
of Alma Mater, took in, year by year, the entertainment offered by the
college at its annual Commencement festival,--a greater raree-show then
than now,--and made the acquaintance of the queer misshapen minds that
by some occult law of nature always seem to be found in the shade of a
college town, as if the “Muses’ factories” must necessarily have their
refuse heaps not far away. A boy who grows up in a college town,
especially when the community and the town are somewhat isolated, hardly
knows the wonder and gravity which assail one who comes up to college
from a distant home. In Lowell’s youth Harvard College and Cambridge
town were singularly isolated in spite of their geographical nearness to
Boston. Once an hour a long omnibus, and twice an hour a short one,
jogged back and forth between the village and the city, picking up
passengers in a leisurely fashion, and going longer or shorter distances
from the college yard, according to the importunity of the passenger or
the good-nature of the driver. An hourly stage to the city meant much
deliberation in making the journey, and Cambridge was by no means the
bedchamber for city merchants and professional men which it has since
become.
When Lowell entered Harvard from Mr. Wells’s school in 1834, the college
was surrounded by houses and gardens which marked almost the bounds of
the town as one went toward Boston. The college itself was within a
straggling enclosure still known by the homely name of the Yard, and
occupied seven buildings therein; the library was in Harvard Hall, for
Gore Hall was not begun till just as Lowell was graduating. The chapel
was a dignified apartment of University Hall, designed by the architect
Charles Bulfinch, who left his mark in Boston and its neighborhood upon
buildings which stand in serene reproof of much later architecture. In
the chapel also were held the academic functions, one of which,
Exhibition Day, was observed three times a year; on two of these
occasions the Governor of the Commonwealth attended, and on all of them
the President of the college in his academic dress, the Fellows, the
Overseers, and the Faculty marched to the chapel with ceremony, there
to listen, along with an indulgent crowd of parents and friends, to the
youthful speakers, who discoursed in Latin or in English, but were
always introduced in Latin.
During Lowell’s college course there were only about two hundred and
twenty undergraduates, his own class entering with sixty-eight members
and graduating with sixty-five; the whole list of the faculty, including
the schools of law, divinity, and medicine, did not exceed thirty-four,
and not half of these constituted the college faculty proper. But among
them were names known then and later beyond the college enclosure.
Felton was professor of Greek, Peirce of mathematics, and Ticknor of
modern languages, to be succeeded, when Lowell was nearly through his
college course, by Longfellow. Francis Sales, graphically set off by
Lowell in his “Cambridge Thirty Years Ago,” was instructer [_sic_] in
French and Spanish, and Pietro Bachi in Italian, Spanish, and
Portuguese. The president of the college was Josiah Quincy, and when
thirty years later Lowell reviewed his friend Edmund Quincy’s life of
his father, in the article entitled “A Great Public Character,” he
referred with a fine note of sincere feeling to the association with him
which he bore away from his college days, in a passage which reflects a
little of Lowell as well as pictures the figure of the president.
“Mr. Quincy had many qualities calculated to win him favor with the
young,--that one above all which is sure to do it, indomitable pluck.
With him the dignity was in the man, not in the office. He had some of
those little oddities, too, which afford amusement without contempt, and
which rather tend to heighten than diminish personal attachment to
superiors in station. His punctuality at prayers, and in dropping asleep
there, his forgetfulness of names, his singular inability to make even
the shortest off-hand speech to the students,--all the more singular in
a practised orator,--his occasional absorption of mind, leading him to
hand you his sand-box instead of the leave of absence he had just dried
with it, the old-fashioned courtesy of his ‘Sir, your servant,’ as he
bowed you out of his study, all tended to make him popular. He had also
a little of what is somewhat contradictorily called dry humor, not
without influence in his relations with the students. In taking leave of
the graduating class, he was in the habit of paying them whatever honest
compliment he could. Who, of a certain year which shall be nameless,
will ever forget the gravity with which he assured them that they were
‘the _best-dressed_ class that had passed through college during his
administration’? How sincerely kind he was, how considerate of youthful
levity, will always be gratefully remembered by whoever had occasion to
experience it.”
The change from school to college, as I have intimated, was not such as
to strike very deeply into the boy’s consciousness. He continued for a
while to live at his father’s house, a mile away from the Yard, though
he had a room of his own nearer, at Mr. Hancock’s in Church Street, and
in the latter part of his course lived there altogether. Going to
college, thus, was very much like going to school as he had always done.
The college methods were not markedly different from those of a
preparatory school. There were lessons to learn and recite; the
text-book was the rule, and the fixed curriculum suggested no break from
the ordinary course of formal instruction. Except in the senior year,
there was a steady attention to Greek, Latin, and mathematics. In the
first year Tytler’s History was studied; in the second year English
grammar and modern languages were added; in the third year, besides
Greek and Latin and modern languages, Paley’s Evidences, Butler’s
Analogy, and chemistry appeared on the list, and themes and forensics
were introduced. In the senior year the ancient languages were dropped,
and natural philosophy, intellectual philosophy, astronomy, and
political economy took their place, with lectures on rhetoric,
criticism, theology, Story on the Constitution of the United States,
mineralogy, and anatomy--a somewhat confused jumble on paper in the
catalogue of the time, which it is to be hoped was reduced to some sort
of order, though it looks as if the senior were suddenly released from
too monotonous a course and bidden take a rapid survey of a wide range
of intellectual pursuits.
In his school days Lowell had been under the close surveillance given to
boys, and the partial freedom of college life brought with it a little
more sense of personal rights, but throughout the four years he was
boyish, frolicsome, very immature in expression, and disposed, in a
fitful fashion, to assert an independence of authority. He won a “detur”
in his sophomore year, and in a public exhibition in the first term of
his senior year he took part in a conference bearing the labored title:
“Ancient Epics, considered as Pictures of Manners, as Proofs of Genius,
or as Sources of Entertainment,” but both in his sophomore and senior
years he was at first privately and then publicly admonished for
excessive absence from recitations and for general negligence in themes,
forensics, and recitations. There was enough of the boy left in him at
the beginning of his senior year to require the fine of a dollar for
cutting seats in the recitation room; and the college discipline of the
day frowned on Lowell as on others for wearing a brown coat on Sunday.
It is difficult for one scanning the records of the faculty at that time
to avoid a feeling of commiseration for these excellent gentlemen and
scholars sitting, as if they were boarding-school masters, in serious
consultation over the pranks and petty insubordination of a parcel of
boys.
Meanwhile in his own fashion Lowell was stumbling on his way, gradually
finding himself. He was a reader, as we have seen, before he went to
college, and he continued to find his delight in books. “A college
training,” he once said, is an excellent thing; but after all, the
better part of every man’s education is that which he gives
himself,”[15] and in college he was following, without much reflection,
the instincts of his nature, both as regards his reading and his
writing. His letters show him a schoolboy when attending to the enforced
tasks of the college, with occasional outbreaks of enthusiasm for the
more distinctly literary studies, but somewhat of an independent voyager
when launched on the waters of general literature.
It was in the large leisure of his college days that he formed an
acquaintance which ripened into intimacy with the great writers and with
those secondary lights that often suit better the ordinary mood. “I was
first directed to Landor’s works,” he says, in 1888, when introducing
some letters of Landor to the readers of his own day, “by hearing how
much store Emerson set by them. I grew acquainted with them fifty years
ago in one of those arched alcoves in the old college library in Harvard
Hall, which so pleasantly secluded without wholly isolating the student.
That footsteps should pass across the mouth of his Aladdin’s Cave, or
even enter it in search of treasure, so far from disturbing only
deepened his sense of possession. These faint rumors of the world he had
left served but as a pleasant reminder that he was the privileged
denizen of another beyond ‘the flaming bounds of space and time.’ There,
with my book lying at ease and in the expansion of intimacy on the broad
window-shelf, shifting my cell from north to south with the season, I
made friendships, that have lasted me for life, with Dodsley’s ‘Old
Plays,’ with Cotton’s ‘Montaigne,’ with Hakluyt’s ‘Voyages,’ among
others that were not in my father’s library. It was the merest browsing,
no doubt, as Johnson called it, but how delightful it was!”[16]
The record of books withdrawn by Lowell from the college library during
his four years’ residence would of course furnish a very incomplete
account of his reading, since, as intimated above, he had his father’s
well-stocked shelves, and access apparently to the alcoves of Harvard
Hall. The record, nevertheless, is interesting as showing the range and
the drift of his reading. Some of this reading is ancillary to his task
work, but much is simply the gratification of an expanding taste, and
covers such diverse works as Terence, Hume, the Anthologia Græca,
Smollett, Hakluyt, Boileau, Scott, and Southey. It is noticeable that as
his college course proceeded the emphasis was laid on the greater
English literature.
Nor was he without the excellent ambition to collect a library of his
own. “It is just fifty-one years ago,” he said 7 May, 1885, when
unveiling the bust of Coleridge in Westminster Abbey, “that I became the
possessor of an American reprint of Galignani’s edition of Coleridge,
Shelley, and Keats in one volume. It was a pirated book, and I trust I
may be pardoned for the delight I had in it.”[17] His letters to his
college friends during these years contain frequent references to the
purchases of books he had made and the gifts from his family which he
prized. He has been given a beautiful edition of Milton, which he had
looked forward to buying; he has been purchasing Samuel Butler and
Beattie; a new edition of Shakespeare has been announced, which he means
to buy if he can afford it; he has had a “detur” of Akenside; he has
laid his hands on a “very pretty edition of Cowper;” and his frequent
quotations from the poets show the easy familiarity he had won in his
reading.
Besides his continued friendship with Story and other neighbors’ sons,
Lowell formed new alliances among his college mates, and in his
correspondence with two of them in this period he discloses something of
his character and tastes. One of these friends, W. H. Shackford, was his
senior by two or three years, and Lowell’s letters to him show the boy’s
side turned toward one whom he regarded with the friendly reverence
which sixteen pays to nineteen. On his part, Shackford seems to have
taken a violent fancy to Lowell, to have made indeed the first overtures
of friendship. To this sager companion, who was a senior when Lowell was
a freshman, he reveals his more studious side. Shackford left college to
teach at Phillips Exeter Academy, and Lowell wrote to him from Cambridge
and Boston, not much in the way of college gossip, but of his own
studies, the treasures he picked up at book-stores or auctions, his
plans for reading and travel, and brief comments on his instructors.
Through the correspondence runs an affectionate current, an almost
lover-like tone of self-exculpation, the warm feeling of a boy toward
his mentor, and an impulse to make him somewhat of a confessor.[18]
The earliest of these letters was written in the middle of July, 1835,
when Shackford had gone to Portsmouth. It was a hasty shot fired after
his departing friend to assure him of his affection, written under
stress of headache from his brother’s office, and was followed the same
day by a longer letter. “When I wrote to you this morning,” he says, “I
was laboring under three very bad complaints enumerated in my other
letter. I was then at my brother’s office. I am now at home, sitting by
an open window, with my coat off, my stock do., with Coleridge’s works
before me wherewith to consume the rest of the day, and also as cool as
a cucumber. Shack, if you are a victim to any _other_ disease, and are
lying tossing with pain under some physician’s prescription (such, for
instance, as the pleasing draught concocted by Wm. Rufus, or the Red
King, composed of the following truly delectable compounds, viz., ‘rue,
tansy, horehound, coltsfoot, hyssop, and camomile flowers, farther
enriched by a handful of earthworms, half a dozen wood lice and four
centipedes’), if, I say, you labor under all these misfortunes, devoutly
thank your more fav’ring stars, that you are not the yawning victim of
ennui, a disease which Æsculapius himself couldn’t cure, and which I
therefore humbly opine to have been the disease of Achilles.... I hope
you’ll be amused with this epistle (if perchance you are able to read
it). But the fact is I can’t write anything serious to save my life.
Answer this the very day you get it....”
At the end of the summer when more letters had passed between them,
Lowell returned to his college work, and wrote from Cambridge a long
letter dated 9 October, 1835, in reply to one long delayed. “My
_dearest_ friend,” he writes, “I am rejoiced that you _have_ broken the
long silence that existed between us, not because I should not have
written to you first, but because it shows that you were not grievously
offended with me. I willingly confess myself to blame, but not in so
great a degree as you may suppose. I _did_ go to the White Mountains,
and while travelling was not offended (do not use any stronger term) by
not receiving any letters from you; on the contrary I expected none, for
how could you have any knowledge of my ‘whereabouts’ unless I wrote to
you as I went along and told you where to direct? This I did not do, nor
did I write any letters on my journey except one which I was obliged to
write to Bob because I _promised_ him I would. After I got home I was
taken sick and kept my bed a week without being able to sleep most of
the time on account of a raging sick headache which hardly allowed me to
move. The day I saw you was the third time I had been out. I did go
down, however, three times to see you, but could not find you, or saw
you walking with somebody I did not know, and then I did not like to
speak to you. Did you or could you think that I would forfeit your
friendship, the most precious (because I believe it to be the truest) I
ever enjoyed, because you did not find it convenient to write to me? I
hope you will not think that I say all this because I am _ashamed_ to
treat you coldly, or not to answer you. I am sure of one thing, that I
have no such opinion of you. Your letter, Shack, was a _delight_ to me
(though I am not ashamed to confess that it [made] me cry)....
“I like Prof. Channing very much indeed, inasmuch as I sit where I can
see his marks, and he has given me an 8 every recitation this term
except once, and then he gave me 7. I went up to ask him something so as
to see whether I was not mistaken (as he makes a 6 something like his
8’s) and I found on the paper exactly what I expected. I have written
one theme and got but two marks on the margin, one for a change required
in the sentence, and another was a straight line drawn under the word
‘to,’ and also marked on the margin. Tell me whether you think this is
good, as you have experienced. I study quite hard this term. I get on in
German astonishingly; it comes quite easy to me now.... I have written
the longest letter I ever wrote in my life. I translated an ode of
Horace into poetry the other day, and it was pretty good. Mathematics
are my only enemies now.... I hope I may subscribe myself your _dear_
friend.”
A month later he writes his friend a lively account of a town and gown
row, and notes his progress in reading Shakespeare. “I was surprised on
looking over Shakespeare to find that I had read all his plays but two
or three, among them ‘Hamlet.’ Only think, I haven’t read Hamlet.’ I
will go at it instanter.”
At the beginning of 1836, on returning to college after the holidays, he
writes with a boyish bibliomaniac enthusiasm of the Milton and Coleridge
which had been given him, and passes into comment on the books he is
reading and those he means to buy. He grows more literary and political
in the subjects of his letters, disclosing already not only a warm
interest in public affairs, but a generous judgment. “I suppose you
heard of the Seminoles massacring, as it is called, those companies of
American troops. I think they are in the right of it; by ‘they’ I mean
the Seminoles. Not much danger of war with France now.” Then follows an
odd jumble of frank confessions of his likes and dislikes for his
fellows, and his boyish passions, with a return to his hunt for books in
special editions.
His letter of 22 April, 1836, is taken up with a long discussion in a
semi-philological vein of love and friendship, but what would strike a
reader of these letters most is the distinct change which now takes
place in the handwriting, which has passed from a not always neat
copy-book hand to one which suggests the delicacy of the hand he
afterward wrote, though not its elegance; it is still constrained with
the air of being the result of close attention. These gradual changes in
style of handwriting rarely fail to mark a maturing of character, and
it is interesting to observe, in Lowell’s case, how they register a long
period of vacillation and immaturity.
There is a gap of nearly a year in this correspondence as preserved, and
the next letter, under date of 26 February, 1837, is filled with
extracts from a long poem he is writing, in Spenserian stanza, and even
occasionally with a word borrowed from Spenser; but the spirit that
stirs the lines is Campbell. The theme is an imaginary journey up the
Hudson, and West Point suggests the two stanzas:
“Follow this narrow path to where the grass
Grows fresher on yon gently-rising mound,
To that lone brook, whose ripples as they pass
Spread to the air a sleep-compelling sound;
Here, Poland’s hero erst a refuge found.
Go ask whose good right arm hurl’d back the slave,
When Russia’s eagle o’er his country frown’d,
Who led her little band of patriots brave;
And weeping Freedom points to Kosciusko’s grave.
“Spirit of Freedom! who didst erst inspire
Our nation ground beneath oppression’s sway,
With trust in God, with thine own holy fire;
Who nerv’dst the mother fond to send away
Her first-born boy to brave the bloody fray,
Bid him farewell, with full averted eyes,
Ne ask, though longing, for a moment’s stay,
Still hover o’er us, if thou didst not rise
With Washington’s pure spirit to thy native skies!”
The other correspondent whose letters from Lowell are preserved was
George Bailey Loring, a boy of his own age, the son of a clergyman who
was Dr. Lowell’s friend, so that the friendship partook of an hereditary
character; with him Lowell had frank intimacy during their college days
and in the years immediately following. Their ways in life separated,
and they had less community of interests and tastes when they came to
manhood. Dr. Loring went early into public life and held various
offices, being Commissioner of Agriculture at one time and at another
United States Minister to Portugal.
In this fuller series of letters which is largely contained in Mr.
Norton’s two volumes, Lowell is the frank, unformed boy, giving vent to
nonsense, a lad’s hasty impulse, and the foolery which goes on in the
name of sentiment. The equality of age created a different relation
between them from that which Lowell bore to Shackford, and the
familiarity of their intercourse called out all manner of intellectual
pranks and youthful persiflage. The jingle and lively verses which
Lowell threw out for the amusement of his comrade show him playing
carelessly with the instrument which he was already beginning to
discover as fitting his hand.
Lowell’s unaffected interest in boyish things is much more apparent in
these random letters than in the more careful epistles to his older
friend, though he is by no means silent on the side of his intellectual
life. In his first letter, dated 23 July, 1836, he talks about the
things that two college boys have on their minds at the beginning of
vacation. “You must excuse me if this be not a very long or entertaining
epistle, as I am writing from my brother’s office (with a very bad pen)
in a great hurry. I shall not go to Canada and shall not start for
P[ortsmouth] probably for three weeks. My circular came on last night,
14 prayers, _56_ recitations, whew! The class supper was glorious,
toasts went off very well. Those about Parker and the Temperance Society
were most applauded. I am going to join the ‘Anti-Wine’ I think. The
‘Good Schooner Susan, R. T. S. L. owner and master,’ will make an
excursion to Nahant this day. _Distinguished_ Passenger etc. We shall go
to church at Nahant Sunday and return Monday morning. By the way I ‘made
up’ with ---- and ---- at the supper. I had a seat _reserved_ (!) for me
(as an officer) on the right hand of the distinguished president (?) A
prettier table I never saw.”
The letters to his college friends were naturally written mainly in
vacation time, and in Christmas week of the same year, 1836, he writes:
“I am going to a ball to-night at the house of a young lady whom I never
heard of.... I’ve begun and written about forty lines of my H. P. C.[19]
prœmium. I shall immortalize I----k W----. I extol him to the skies and
_pari passu_ depreciate myself.” He went to the ball, and a few days
later wrote: “I think I told you I was going to a party or ball (call it
what you will): well, I went, made my bow, danced, talked nonsense with
young ladies who could talk nothing but nonsense, grew heartily tired
and came away. I saw a great many people make fools of themselves, and
charitably took it for granted that I did the same.... I may add
something in the morning, so no more from your aching headed and perhaps
splenetic, but still affectionate friend, J. R. L.”
In these letters Lowell twits his friend with his attentions to girls,
and intersperses his jibes with poor verses; he has become a zealous
autograph hunter, and the letters he laid his hands on in his father’s
house from home and foreign notabilities illustrate the wide connections
of the family, and the part it had had in the great world. In the midst
of it all he will burst forth into almost passionate expression of his
love for nature and his strong attachment to his birthplace and its
neighborhood; and again quote freely from the books he is reading, and
tell of the progress he is making in his more serious poetical ventures,
and the books he is adding to his library. He made no boast of immunity
when he laughed at his friend for too much susceptibility. Here is a
passage from a letter written in the summer of 1837, when he was closing
his junior year:--
... “Didn’t I have a glorious time yesterday? That I did if smiles from
certain lips I
‘prize
Above almost, I don’t know what, on earth’
could make a day glorious. Excuse me for quoting my own nonsense, but
’twas more apt than anything I could think of.... Imagine yourself by
the side of a young lady the perfection of beauty, virtue, modesty,
etc., etc., in whom you entertain a pleasing interest, and you may form
a ‘faint imagining’ of my situation. I am not calm yet. In fact, every
time I think of her eyes--those eyes! Guido never could have conceived
her. Well, a truce with all recollections when there is no hope.”
A month later he gave a brief account of Commencement to his friend, and
then speaks of a letter his brother Rob had received from their sister,
then in Glasgow. Lowell’s father, mother, and sister Rebecca went to
Europe early in the summer of 1837. They were gone three years, and
during that time the young collegian found in his brother Charles his
nearest friend and adviser; his house indeed was the student’s home when
he was not in college, and his wife was the best of sisters to him. Mrs.
Anna Cabot Lowell was herself a woman of fine culture and of unwonted
intellectual power. At a later period than this she opened a school for
girls, which is looked upon by many now in mature life with warm
gratitude. She edited a choice collection of poems for the reading of
schoolgirls, and compiled also a little volume of suggestive thoughts
called “Seed Grain.” Dr. Lowell, meanwhile, parted from his son with
parental solicitude, and wrote him on the eve of sailing a letter which
is quaintly expressive of his own ingenuous nature and of the simplicity
of the day, and slightly indicative of his son’s weaknesses as they
appeared to a father’s eyes:--
NEW YORK, May 29th, 1837.
MY DEAR SON,--I wish you to write us once a month, making an
arrangement with Robert not to write at the same time he does. You
know the necessity for economy, and you know that I shall never
deny you, but from necessity, what will afford you pleasure. I
shall direct Charles to pay you half a dollar a week. If you are
one of the first eight admitted to the Φ Β Κ, $1.00 per week, as
soon as you are admitted. If you are not, to pay you 75 cents per
week as soon as you are admitted. If I find my finances will allow
it, I shall buy you something abroad. If you graduate one of the
first five in your class, I shall give you $100 on your graduation.
If one of the first ten, $75. If one of the first twelve, $50. If
the first or second scholar, $200. If you do not miss any exercises
unexcused, you shall have Bryant’s ‘Mythology,’ or any book of
equal value, unless it is one I may specially want.
My dear child, I wish you only to be faithful to yourself. You can
easily be a fine scholar, and therefore in naming the smallest sum
for your weekly expenses, I feel no hesitation, as it depends on
yourself, with very little exertion, to secure the second highest
sum, and with not more exertion than is perfectly compatible with
health and sufficient recreation to secure the largest. _Use
regular exercise. Associate with those who will exert the best
influence upon you._ Say your prayers and read your Bible _every
day_. I trust you have made up all your exercises. _If not, make
them up in one week_, and let the president know it. Do not get
anything charged except with Charles’s knowledge and approbation. I
have given him instructions respecting your expenses....
Your affectionate father.
Dr. Lowell wrote many letters home and recounted the pleasant
experiences of the little party in Scotland and England, their
foregathering with the Traill family, and the visits they paid to
Wordsworth, Southey, Sir David Brewster, and others. But he does not
forget to continue his admonitions and encouragements, as he receives
his son’s reports of his doings. “Your office,” he writes from London,
13 December, 1837, “as one of the editors of the ‘Harvardiana’ may give
you a greater familiarity in composition. Be careful that it does not
abstract you from severer pursuits, and that your style is not trifling,
but the subject and the manner useful and dignified. I do not allow
myself to doubt of your furnishing the criterion of good standing which
a membership of the Φ Β Κ will furnish, and I trust you will leave
college with a high part and a high reputation.
“God bless you, my dear child. _Aim high, very high._ I feel its
importance for you more than ever.”
_Harvardiana_, to which Dr. Lowell refers, was the college magazine of
the day, started just as Lowell entered college, and naturally inviting
a scribbler like Lowell to become one of the editors when his senior
year came round. His associates were Rufus King, who later attained a
leading position in the bar of Cincinnati, and wrote “Ohio” in the
_American Commonwealths_ series; George Warren Lippitt, afterward for a
long time secretary of legation at Vienna; Charles Woodman Scates, a
South Carolinian lawyer of great promise, who died young, and Nathan
Hale, an older brother of Dr. Edward Everett Hale, and later a strong
figure in Boston journalism. Lowell contributed twenty-four pieces in
prose and verse, translations from the German, a bit of moralizing in
the minor key which youth likes to pursue, some fierce sardonic verses,
some sentiment, and then a mockery of sentiment. For the most part his
contributions are the “larks” of students given to literature. With his
associates he followed the example set by _Blackwood_, and imitated by
the _Knickerbocker_ and similar magazines, aiming at the sauciness and
jocularity which were assumed to be the ordinary temper of editors
gathered about their table, whereas in actual experience such editors
are painfully at their wits’ end. What most strikes one in these varied
contributions is the apparent facility with which everything is thrown
off, sense and nonsense coming with equal ease, but nonsense
predominating.
Lowell’s letters to his friends in his last year at college have
frequent reference to his willing and unwilling labors on this
“perryodical,” as he was wont to call it in mimicry of Dr. Walker. In
August, 1837, he sends Shackford a circular inviting subscriptions to
_Harvardiana_, and on the blank leaf writes one of the imitative
letters in verse, for which he had a penchant at this time:--
“Dear Shack, a circular I send ye
The which I hope will not offend ye;
If sae, ’t wad tak’ Auld Nick to mend ye
O’ sic an ill
But, gin ye are as when I kenn’d ye
It never will!
“Gin ye could get ae body’s name
’T wad add forever to his fame
To help to kindle up the flame
O’ sic a journal,
Whose reputation, though quite lame,
_Will_ be eternal.
“Now if ye do your vera best
In this waist glorious behest,
By gettin’ names and a’ the rest
I need na tell
Yese thus fulfil the airn’st request
O’ J. R. L.”
“King has been up here,” he writes from Elmwood, 22 December, 1837, “for
an article for the ‘Perry,’ but was unsuccessful in the attempt. The
fact is, it is impossible to read Lockhart’s ‘Life of Scott’ and attend
to my illustrious nephew, ‘the corporal,’ who is a very prototype of
Jack Falstaff, and write an article which requires such deep study and
abstraction.”
The magazine was a part of that spontaneous literary activity which is
pretty sure to find vent in college life outside of the class room, in
independent reading, in societies sometimes secret, sometimes public,
and in weekly, monthly, or quarterly journals. Lowell, with his growing
consciousness of literary faculty and his naturally vagarious impulses,
turned aside from the set tasks of college, as we have seen, and allowed
himself to be indifferent to the routine imposed by college regulations.
There are always men in college who undertake to be independent while
living in it; sometimes the instinct is wise, sometimes it is merely the
impulse of an indolent or conceited nature, but college authorities,
like most constitutional governors, are bound to take more account of
law than arbitrary and irresponsible rulers are, and their severity
falls indiscriminately on the just and unjust. Lowell had made himself
amenable to discipline on this score, but he might have escaped with
reprimands only, had he not committed a breach of propriety in chapel
which could not be overlooked. Such, at least, is the recollection of
one of his college mates writing long afterward to Mr. T. W. Higginson,
who prints his letter in “Old Cambridge.”
The circumstantial account given in this letter has a plausible air, and
may be wholly true, but if so, it was probably the final occasion rather
than the cause of Lowell’s suspension. The record of the Faculty is
somewhat more general in its explanation. “25 June, 1838. Voted that
Lowell, senior, on account of continued neglect of his college duties be
suspended till the Saturday before Commencement, to pursue his studies
with Mr. Frost of Concord, to recite to him twice a day, reviewing the
whole of Locke’s ‘Essay’ [On the Human Understanding], and studying also
Mackintosh’s ‘Review of Ethical Philosophy,’ to be examined in both on
his return, and not to visit Cambridge during the period of his
suspension.”
Lowell seems to have taken his exile philosophically. The fact that he
would not be able to read the class poem he had been chosen to give did
not prevent him from writing it, and the isolation of his life gave him
plenty of time for working at it. The mild discipline of “rustication”
included, as the record shows, the requisite amount of study, and
Concord, to which he was sent for a couple of months of study and
reflection, was only fifteen miles from Cambridge. The Rev. Barzillai
Frost, to whose oversight he was committed and with whom he lodged, was
a young man, recently graduated from the Harvard Divinity School, and
Mrs. Frost endeared herself to the young culprit by her affectionate
care. In a speech which Lowell made at Concord, on the celebration of
the 250th anniversary of the founding of the town, he introduced this
slight reminiscence of his work with Mr. Frost:--
“In rising to-day I could not help being reminded of one of my
adventures with my excellent tutor when I was in Concord. I was obliged
to read with him ‘Locke on the Human Understanding.’ My tutor was a
great admirer of Locke, and thought he was the greatest Englishman that
ever lived, and nothing pleased him more, consequently, than now and
then to cross swords with Locke in argument. I was not slow, you may
imagine, to encourage him in this laudable enterprise. Whenever a
question arose between my tutor and Locke, I always took Locke’s side.
I remember on one occasion, although I cannot now recall the exact
passage in Locke,--it was something about continuity of ideas,--my
excellent tutor told me that in that case Locke was quite mistaken in
his views. My tutor said: ‘For instance, Locke says that the mind is
never without an idea; now I am conscious frequently that my mind is
without any idea at all.’ And I must confess that that anecdote came
vividly to my mind when I got up on what Judge Hoar has justly
characterized as the most important part of an orator’s person.”
Lowell knew something of Emerson when he went to Concord. His letters
show him before that time going to hear him lecture in Boston, and years
afterward he recalled with fervor the impression made upon him by
Emerson’s address before the Φ Β Κ in Lowell’s junior year. It “was an
event,” he says, “without any former parallel in our literary annals, a
scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and
its inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows
clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim
silence of foregone dissent! It was our Yankee version of a lecture by
Abelard, our Harvard parallel to the last public appearance of
Schelling.”[20] But in 1838 Emerson had published little, his fame
resting mainly on his public lectures and addresses. In the address at
Concord, quoted above, Lowell records a memory of the personal
relations which he then established with the elder poet:--
“I am not an adopted son of Concord. I cannot call myself that. But I
can say, perhaps, that under the old fashion which still existed when I
was young, I was ‘bound out’ to Concord for a period of time; and I must
say that she treated me very kindly. I then for the first time made the
acquaintance of Mr. Emerson, and I still recall with a kind of pathos,
as Dante did that of his old teacher, Brunetto Latini, ‘La cara e buona
imagine paterna,’ ‘The dear and good paternal image,’ which he showed me
here; and I can also finish the quotation and say, ‘And shows me how man
makes himself eternal.’ I remember he was so kind to me--I, rather a
flighty and exceedingly youthful boy, as to take me with him on some of
his walks, particularly a walk to the cliffs, which I shall never
forget.”
Lowell formed at Concord the friendship which lasted for life with E. R.
Hoar, and the lady who was to be Judge Hoar’s wife. These two indeed
seemed to be excepted in his mind from the Concord people whom he met.
He was plainly, as his letters show, in a restless mood, dissatisfied
with himself, going through his appointed tasks with the obedience which
was habitual, and writing, as the impulse took him, on his Class Poem,
but moody, irritable, and chafing at the bonds which held him. There was
the uncomfortable consciousness of serving out his time at Concord for a
momentary jest, but there was also the profounder unrest which came
from the friction of discipline with the awakening of powers not yet
fully understood or determined. A few passages from his letters to G. B.
Loring will partially disclose the way he tossed himself about.
July 1, 1838.
You mustn’t expect so long a letter from me as the one you favored
me with (and I hope sincerely you’ll favor me with many more such
(for nothing is more pleasant to me than a friend’s letters)
(except himself) (there, I have got into one of my parentheses,
which I can’t help to save my life--damnation! I’m only making the
matter worse! so I’ll begin again.... This appears to be a pretty
decent sort of a place--but I’ve no patience talking about. I shall
fly into a passion on paper, and then--as Hamlet says--then what?
You can’t guess, now you know you can’t! Why, I should be apt to
“tear my passion to tatters.” Pretty good, eh! for an un-Sheridanic
one? Well, as I was saying, the poem hasn’t progressed (they say
that’s a Yankee word; it’s a damned good word, as most Yankee
things are) a line since I left the shades of Alma Mater. I want
the spirit up here, I want
‘Mine ancient chair, whose wide embracing arms,’ etc.
I shall take to smoking again for very spite. The only time I have
felt the flow of song was when I heard the bull-frogs in the river
last night....
I shall do my best to please Mr. F. since I find he does his best
to please me and make me comfortable; “that’s the ground I stand
on.” I feel in a shocking humor, that is, not grouty (I’m not such
a damned fool; no offence I hope), but cursed queer. I damn
Concord, and as the man in a story I read somewhere who was shot in
a duel pathetically exclaimed in his last struggle, I--“damn
everything.”... I have written you more than I intended, have two
more to write to-night, and 50 pages in MacIntosh.... Don’t for
heaven’s sake think I write in such a hurry from affectation. I
wish with all my heart it were so.
July 8.
... I don’t know that I shan’t get gloomy up here, and be obliged,
like the gallant old Sir Hudibras’s sword,
“To eat into myself, for lack
Of something else to cut and hack.”
Everybody almost is calling me indolent,”[21] “blind, dependent on
my own powers” and “on fate.”... I acknowledge that I have been
something of a dreamer and have sacrificed perchance too
assiduously on that altar to the “unknown God,” which the Divinity
has builded not with hands in the bosom of every decent man,
sometimes blazing out clear with flame (like Abel’s sacrifice)
heaven seeking, sometimes smothered with green wood and earthward
like that of Cain. Lazy, quotha! I haven’t dug, ’tis true, but I
have done as well, and “since my free soul was mistress of her
choice and could of books distinguish her election,” I have chosen
what reading I pleased and what friends I pleased, sometimes
scholars and sometimes not....
July 12.
For the Campbell I trust I needn’t let my thanks stare me in the
face, so I shall leave you to put yourself in my place and imagine
them. If you see Scates tell him to write, or I
shall--excommunicate, or something dreadful. If you happen to go
down by the bath house I wish you would take a look after the skiff
and write me about it. Because perhaps I might come down to the
Supper in a wagon and bring it up; at any rate, there will be
nobody there to take care of it when you leave (or rather to lay
claim to it), and it may be lost, for which I should be sorry, for
I hope to have considerable navigation out of her yet.
August 9.
I shall be free as a bird in a fortnight, and ’twill be the last
Concord will ever see of me I fancy.... I am again in doubt whether
to have my “Poem” printed or no. I haven’t written a line since I
have been in this horrible place. I feel as queer as a woman does
probably (unmarried of course) when she finds herself in what Dante
calls “mezzo cammin del nostro vita.”... I’m homesick and all that
sort of thing. Miss ---- being the only being I have actually
sympathized with since I have been in Concord has made me feel like
a fool. I must go down and see Emerson, and if he doesn’t make me
feel _more_ like a fool it won’t be for want of sympathy _in that
respect_. He is a good-natured man, in spite of his doctrines. He
travelled all the way up from his house to bring me a book which
had been sent to me _via_ him.
August 17.
The first eight pages of the “Poem” are probably printed by this
time, and the proof on its winding way, as Charlie Foster would say
to me. I wrote to the President requesting him to let me go home
to-morrow, but haven’t yet received any answer, and doubt much
whether I ever shall.
I don’t know what to do with Miss ----. She runs in my head and
heart more than she has any right to, but then
A pair of black eyes
Of a charming size
And a lip so prettily curled, O!
Are enough to capsize
The intention wise
Of any man in the world, O!
For a pretty smile
Is a mighty wile
For a heart, for a heart that is light, O!
And a girl like a dove
Makes a man fall in love,
Though he knows that it isn’t right, O!
For love is a thing
That will quit the lonely king
To make sunny the cot of the peasant, O!
And it folds its gauzy wing--
In short--it is a thing--
’Tis a thing--that is deuced pleasant, O!
Oh a gentle heart
Is the better part
Of a lovely woman’s looks, O!
And I totter on the brink
Of love when I think,
When I think, when I think of Miss B----, O!
For a thousand girls
Have hair that curls,
And a sort of expressive face, O!
But it isn’t the hair
Nor the genteel air--
’Tis the heart that looks bright and gives grace, O!
Ay, lasses are many
Without e’en a penny,
But with hearts worth their weight in gold, O!
Whom I’d sooner wed--
Yea, and sooner bed
Than a princess rich, ugly, and old, O!
No bee e’er sucked honey
From gold or silver money,
But he does from the lovely flower, O!
Then give me a spouse
Without fortune, land, or house,
And her charming self for a dower, O!
By Jove, I like that better than anything I’ve written for two
years! I wrote it _con amore_ and _currente calamo_. ’Tis yours
now, but by your leave I’ll copy it off, alter it a little and send
it down as “a song” for _Harvardiana_, for which I protested I
would write nothing O! Why, it’s good! It sings itself! I don’t
think I shall alter anything but Miss B.’s name, for it ran off the
end of my pen so that it must be better than I can make it. Why, I
_like_ it, I do. There isn’t anything good in it either, except in
the last passage. It has really put me in good spirits. Between
Sunday and Wednesday I added about 250 lines to the “Poem.” It is
not finished yet. I wish it were.
The Class Poem, which he printed since he was not permitted to be
present at his class celebration, when he would have read it, is a
somewhat haphazard performance, as Lowell intimates in his letters. He
says naïvely in one of the notes to the poem, of which there is a
liberal supply in an appendix, that he suddenly discovered his subject
after he had begun writing, by happening to refer in an off hand way to
Kant.
“Kant, happy name! change but the K to C,
And I will wring my poem out of thee.
Thanks, vast Immanuel! thy name has given
The thing for which my brains so long have striven.
* * * * *
Cant be my theme, and when she fails my song,
Her sister Humbug shall the lay prolong.”
The satire of a young collegian is apt to be pretty severe, and Lowell
runs amuck of Carlyle, Emerson, the Abolitionists, the advocates of
Woman’s Rights, and the Teetotallers. For the most part the poem runs
along glibly in the decasyllabic verse so handy to familiar poetry, and
though there are many lame lines, there are more instances of the clever
distichs which Lowell knocked off so easily in later years than one
would have guessed from the examples of his verse which appear in his
early letters. Here, for example, are some of his lines on Carlyle:--
“Hail too, great drummer in the mental march,
Teufelsdröckh! worthy a triumphal arch,
Who send’st forth prose encumbered with jackboots,
To hobble round and pick up raw recruits,
And, able both to battle and to teach,
Mountest thy silent kettledrum to preach.
Great conqueror of the English language, hail!
How Caledonia’s goddess must turn pale
To hear the German-Græco-Latin flung
In _Revolutions_ from a Scottish tongue!”
In the more serious and practical part of the poem there is an
impassioned burst imitative of Campbell, in which he imagines the
farewell words of the Cherokee Indians, who at this time, to his
indignation, were being pushed westward from Georgia.
To the debit of his youthful zeal may be set down the lines on Emerson
which were his footnote to the famous address to the Divinity School
delivered 15 July, 1838:--
“Woe for Religion, too, when men, who claim
To place a ‘Reverend’ before their name,
Ascend the Lord’s own holy place to preach
In strains that Kneeland had been proud to reach,
And which, if measured by Judge Thacher’s scale,
Had doomed their author to the county jail!
When men just girding for the holy strife,
Their hands just cleansed to break the bread of life,
Whose souls, made whole, should never count it loss
With their own blood to witness for the cross,
Invite a man their Christian zeal to crown
By preaching earnestly the gospel-down,
Applaud him when he calls of earthly make
That ONE who spake as never yet man spake,
And tamely hear the anointed Son of God
Made like themselves an animated clod!”
To the credit of his manliness may be set down, _per contra_, the
following letter which he wrote after the publication of the poem: a
letter, which, for all its boyish assumption of the _toga virilis_, has
a ring of sincerity about it:--
CAMBRIDGE, Sept. 1st, 1838.
DEAR SIR,--In my class poem are a few lines about your “address.”
My friends have expressed surprise that after I had enjoyed your
hospitality and spoken so highly of you in private, I should have
been so ‘ungrateful’ as ever to have written anything of the kind.
Could I have ever dreamed that a man’s private character should
interfere with his public relations, I had never blotted paper so
illy. But I really thought that I was doing rightly, for I consider
it as virtual a lie to hold one’s tongue as to speak an untruth. I
should have written the same of my own brother. Now, sir, I trouble
you with this letter because I think you a man who would think
nowise the worse of me for holding up my head and speaking the
truth at any sacrifice. That I could wilfully malign a man whose
salt I had eaten, and whose little child I had danced on my
knee,--he must be a small man who would believe so small a thing of
his fellow.
But this word “ingratitude” is a very harsh and grating word, and
one which I hope would never be laid to my charge since I stood at
my mother’s knee and learnt the first very alphabet, as it were, of
goodness. I hope that if you have leisure, sir, you will answer
this letter and put me at rest. I hope you will _acquit_ me (for I
do not still think there is aught to _forgive_ or _pardon_, and I
trust _you_ will not after reading this letter) of all
uncharitableness.
Of course no one can feel it as strongly as I do, for since my
friends have hinted at this “ingratitude” I have felt a great deal,
and scarcely dare to look at the Tennyson you lent me without
expecting some of the devils on the cover to make faces at me.
I hope you will find time to answer this and that I may still enjoy
your friendship and be able to take you by the hand and look you in
the face, as honest man should to honest man.
I remain yours with respect,
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.
P. S. I have sent with this a copy of my “poem”--if it be not too
tiresome, you would perhaps think better of me, if you were to read
it _through_. I am not silly enough to suppose that this can be of
any importance to you (if, indeed, you ever heard of the passage I
refer to), but it is of very great importance to me.
J. R. L.
Lowell’s own comment on the poem years after was in the lines:--
“Behold the baby arrows of that wit
Wherewith I dared assail the woundless Truth!
Love hath refilled the quiver, and with it
The man shall win atonement for the youth.”[22]
In this the earliest of his acknowledged publications, as so often in
his later poems, satire and sentiment jostle each other. The predominant
note, indeed, is satire in the lofty tone of nineteen, but the
invocation and the close are in a different strain. Here, too, there is
the exaltation of a very young man, and one may read phrases which
perhaps said more than Lowell meant to say; but it was a ruffled youth
with which his college career closed, and this period of his life was
not to know as yet any steadying force. It is not strange that he
grasped at somewhat illusory phantoms in his eagerness to stay himself.
Here are the invocation and epilogue:--
“Oh thou! to whom, where’er my footstep roam,
My restless soul would spread its pinions home,--
Reality! more fair than any seeming
E’er blest the fancy of an angel’s dreaming,--
Be thou my muse, in whose blue eye I see
The heaven of my heart’s eternity!
Oh, hover like a spirit at my side,
In all my wanderings a heavenly guide,
Then, if in Cant’s dim mists I lose my way,
Thy blessed smile shall lead me back to day,
And, when I turn me from the land of night,
Thou, morning star of love, shalt herald light!
“Lady! whom I have dared to call my muse,
With thee my day began, with thee shall end--
Thou can’st not such a poor request refuse
To let thine image with its closing blend!
As turn the flowers to the quiet dews,
Fairest, so turns my yearning heart to thee,
For thee it pineth--as the homesick shell
Mourns to be once again beneath the sea--
Oh let thine eyes upon this tribute dwell,
And think--one moment kindly think of me!
Alone--my spirit seeks thy company,
And in all beautiful communes with thine,
In crowds--it ever seeks alone to be
To dream of gazing in thy gentle eyne!”
After all, the irregular impulses of the class poem point to what is of
more consequence, the beginning of Lowell’s manhood. Until the summer of
1837, he had been a happy-go-lucky boy, sunning himself in literature,
in nature, and in his friends; then there set in a period when he was at
odds with fortune, and a stirring of half-understood desires arose; the
consciousness of power was struggling with the wilfulness of youth.