FIRST VENTURES
1838-1844
As his college course drew near its close, Lowell began to forecast his
immediate future. His growing devotion to letters, especially to poetry,
and perhaps the wish to linger a little longer within the shelter of the
academic life, led him to cherish the notion of studying a while in
Germany, and he wrote to his father, who was still abroad, in pursuance
of this plan; but he received no encouragement. Germany, it was properly
said to him, was no place for the study of law by an American, and the
law was regarded as his vocation.
Vaguely conscious of his real calling, Lowell passed in review the two
professions of the ministry and the law, which at that time would be
likely to attract one who had begun to use his pen with as much
assiduity as an embryo artist plies his pencil in sketches.
Unquestionably the ministry opened a fair way of life to him, somewhat
as it had, less than a score of years earlier, to Emerson, though the
conditions had already begun to change. Lowell shrank from adopting that
calling with an instinct which sprang in part from his sense of its
traditional sacredness, in part from an increasing consciousness of his
own separation from the form of religious teaching which would naturally
be looked for in him. There was a preacher in Lowell not merely by
inheritance, but, even at this time of nonsense and idle levity, in the
stirring of a soul that hated evil, and longed to exercise an active
influence in righting wrongs. The full strength of this impulse was to
be developed shortly, and thenceforward to find constant expression
through his life, for a preacher at bottom he was throughout his career.
An undercurrent of feeling persuaded him that he might even take to
preaching, if he could be sure of being a celibate, and independent of
any harassing anxiety respecting his support. But as he wrote of himself
a few years later to his friend Briggs: “I believe my religion (I am an
infidel, you know, to the Christianity of to-day, and so my religion is
something palpable to me in case of strait) arms me against any sorrows
to come.” The youthful protest in the parenthesis must be taken
seriously, but not subjected to microscopic analysis. Reverence was an
abiding element in his nature, and it was early displayed, but it was
reverence for what was intrinsically to be revered, and that very spirit
carried with it an impatient reaction against conventional religion. In
the letter to Dr. Loring, in which he discussed the question of going
into the Divinity School, he was led, from a slight reference to the
doctrines which Emerson was announcing, to speak more directly of
personal religion.
“I don’t know,” he says, “whether we poor little worms (who though but
little lower than the angels are [but] a little higher than those whom
our every step annihilates) ought not to _condescend_ to allow that
there may be something _above_ his reason. We must sometimes receive
light like the Aurora without knowing where it comes from. And then, on
the other hand, we may be allowed to doubt whether our wise Creator
would have given us a dispensation by which to govern our everyday life,
any part of which was repugnant to our reason. It is a question which
every man must settle for himself: indeed he were mad to let any settle
it for him.”
An independence of judgment did not lead him to throw away a fundamental
faith in spiritual realities, but it made him ready to refuse conformity
with the nearest form of religion. At the time he was writing, Lowell
thought he saw the churches, if not tolerant of a great evil, at least
mainly silent before it, and with the radicalism which was as integral a
part of him as his conservatism, he broke away from associations which
seemed thus inert and false to the very ideals they professed to
cherish. Had not the poetic impulse and the artistic temper been so
strong in him, it is quite possible that as Emerson in his philosophic
idealism had let the minister’s gown slip from his shoulders, yet had
remained on the platform, so Lowell in his moral earnestness might, if
he had really gone into the ministry, have shortly become a witty
reformer, preaching with the prophet’s leathern girdle and not in the
priest’s cassock.
But heredity and an impulse to deliver his mind were not strong enough
to take him into the pulpit against the clear dictates of a reasonable
judgment, and with apparently no disposition toward medicine, he turned
almost from necessity to the law. The law, at first, at any rate, did
not so much attract him, as it was reached by a process of elimination.
The substantial motive which urged him was his need of a livelihood.
Although his father at this time was in what is quaintly termed
“comfortable circumstances,” Lowell, like his fellows everywhere in
America, most certainly in New England, never would have entertained the
notion of living indefinitely at his father’s expense. As a matter of
course he must earn his living, and he was so meagrely supplied even
with pocket money at this time that his letters contain frequent
illustration of his inability to indulge in petty pleasures--a short
journey, for instance, the purchase of a book or pamphlet, even postage
on letters.
So, in the fall of 1838, when he was living at Elmwood with his brother
Charles, he began to read Blackstone “with as good a grace and as few
wry faces” as he could. But suddenly, a fortnight only after making this
assertion, he had abandoned the notion of studying law, out of utter
distaste for it. It was after a great struggle, he says, but the
struggle was evidently one of those occasional self-communings of the
young man who is not predestined to any profession, and yet is unable to
respond to the half articulate demands of his nature. We can read
Lowell’s mind at this time in the fragmentary confessions of his
letters, and see that the controlling influence was to secure ultimately
the right to devote himself to literature. The law is a jealous
mistress, and Lowell was sagacious enough to perceive that to secure
success in the profession he must needs devote himself to it with long
and unremitting attention, and he was sure a real love for the study of
law was a condition precedent to success. So again he weighed the
chances. Once more he considered the ministry; he even speculated over
the possibilities of medicine--his friend Loring had taken up that for
his profession; but with a certain common-sense view of the matter, he
argued that if his occupation were to be merely a means to an end, why,
trade was the logical road to money-making, and he set about looking for
a “place in a store.”
“I must expect,” he writes ruefully, “to give up almost entirely all
literary pursuits, and instead of making rhymes, devote myself to making
money.” But with a whimsical attempt after all to join his ideals with
this practical course, after saying that in abandoning the law he gives
up the chance of going to Europe, since his father had promised him this
plum if he would stick to the law for three years, he closes his letter:
“I intend to go into a foreign store so that I may be able to go to
Europe yet. I shall have to brush up my French so as to write foreign
letters.”
This was written on Tuesday the 30th of October. The next Monday, when
he had gone to Boston to look for a place, he dropped in at the United
States court where a case was on in which Webster was one of the
counsel. His imagination took fire. “I had not been there an hour,” he
writes, “before I determined to continue in my profession and study as
well as I could.” By an unexpected circumstance, however, he was within
a month interrupted in his study. His brother Robert, who was in the
counting-room of a coal merchant, was laid up with a lame hand, and so
James took his place at the desk. It is not impossible that he was
secretly glad of making thus, with a good conscience, a little test of
his aptitude for business.
His position as a substitute gave him a breathing spell, and he plunged
again into rhyming. His letters during the winter were full of
experiments in verse, and he was, moreover, giving serious attention to
the technique of poetry, having recourse to such manuals as Sidney’s
“Defense of Poesie” and Puttenham’s “Art of English Poesie,” a
characteristic act, for he had the same instinct for the great genetic
period of English poetry as Lamb and his fellows in England had a
generation earlier. He even began to throw out lines in the direction of
self-support through literature. Besides his trials in the newspapers
and magazines, he took the chance given him to lecture in Concord, and
he wondered if his friend Loring could get him an opportunity at
Andover. He had “quitted the law forever” on the 26th of February, 1839,
but the mood of exhilaration over a possible maintenance through
lecturing evaporated after a return from Concord with four dollars, less
his travelling expenses, as the result of his first experiment. And yet
business was as repellent to him as law. In a letter to G. B. Loring of
March, 1839, he bursts forth into a cry of bitterness:--
“I don’t know what to do with myself. I am afraid people will think me a
fool if I change again, and yet I can hardly hope ever to be satisfied
where I am. I shouldn’t wonder if next Monday saw me with Kent’s
Commentaries under my arm. I think I might get to take an interest in
it, and then I should not fear at all about the living. If I had not
been thrice a fool, I should have been in Dane Law College reciting at
this very moment. And what makes me feel still worse is that nobody
knows or can know my motive for changing, and the struggle which kept me
irresolute.
“I am certainly just at present in a miserable state, and I won’t live
so long. You must excuse the shortness of this letter, for my feelings
are in such a distracted sort of a state that the more I write the less
do I feel able to write.
“Dear George, when I am set at table
I am indeed quite miserable,
And when as that I lie in bed,
Strife and confusion whirl my head;
When I am getting up at morn
I feel confoundedly forlorn,
And when I go to bed at eve
I can do nought but sigh and grieve.
When I am walking into town
I feel all utterly cast down,
And when I’m walking out from it
I feel full many a sorrow fit.”
The struggle in his mind went on through the rest of the spring. He
kept doggedly at his desk, apparently, but wrote more verse, especially
of a serious sort. At last, on the 20th of May, he could write in a
somewhat forced strain of exultation: “Rejoice with me! For to-morrow I
shall be free. Without saying a word to any one, I shall quietly proceed
to Dane Law College to recitation. Now shall I be happy again as far as
_that_ is concerned. Nature will smile for me yet again. I shall hear
the merry tinkle of the brook and think not of the tinkle of dollars and
cents. Upon the ocean I may look, nor dream of the rates of freight. Let
us rejoice, George, in the days of our youth. We shall find it very
different when we come to support ourselves. Good old Homer in the
Odyssey makes Telemachus tell Minerva, ‘Well may they laugh and sing and
dance, for they are eating the bread of another man.’ Now we who eat our
father’s bread at present may be as merry as we will. But very different
will it be when every potato that we eat (lucky if we can get even
those) shall seem watersoaked with the sweat of our brow. I am going to
be as happy as the days are long.”
A little later he wrote: “I am now a law student, and am really studying
and intend to study. I shall now be able to come and spend some Saturday
with you and come down Monday morning.... To-day I have been engaged an
hour in recitation, 9 to 10, and then from 11 to 3-1/2 o’clock in
studying law, which, as we only have one recitation a day, is pretty
well. I have determined that I will now _do_ something. I am lazy
enough, heaven knows, but not half so much so as some of my friends
suppose. At all events, I was never made for a merchant, and I even
begin to doubt whether I was made for anything in particular but to
loiter through life and then become manure.”
From this time forward Lowell did not relinquish his study of law. He
confessed, indeed, to a doubt if he should ever practice. He had a
“blind presentiment of becoming independent in some other way,” and he
allowed himself to dream of cultivating literature in solitude on a
little oatmeal, but he pushed through to the nominal end, and took his
degree of bachelor of laws at commencement in August, 1840.[23] Not long
after, he entered the law office in Boston of Mr. Charles Greely Loring,
and when the winter came he went himself to Boston to live.
The vacillation and apparent irresolution outlined in his fickle pursuit
of a profession in the months after his graduation are unmistakable, but
there are expressions now and then in the letters we have quoted that
strike one as a little exaggerated even to one so open to attacks from
conscience as was Lowell. Why such a pother, one might ask, over an
embarrassment which is not very uncommon, and after all touches chiefly
the prudential side of character? “Nobody knows or can know my motives
for changing, and the struggle which kept me irresolute;” but the boyish
companion to whom he wrote undoubtedly had an inkling of his friend’s
perturbation, though frank as that friend was in his correspondence and
intercourse, he could surely have said, “the heart knoweth its own
bitterness.”
The solution is simple enough in statement. Before his last year in
college Lowell had met and fallen fiercely in love with a beautiful
girl, one of the circle in which his family moved, and endowed with
intellectual grace and great charm of manner. Then something came
between them, and separation became inevitable, at least it became so in
Lowell’s own view of the situation. The shock of this rupture left not a
shade of reproach for the girl in Lowell’s mind, but it broke up the
fountains of the deep in his own life. He was scarcely more than a boy
in years, but he had in temperament and capacity for emotion a far
greater maturity. He could write of himself a few years later: “Brought
up in a very reserved and conventional family, I cannot in society
appear what I really am. I go out sometimes with my heart so full of
yearning toward my fellows that the indifferent look with which even
entire strangers pass me brings tears to my eyes.” There was indeed an
extraordinary frankness about him in these early days, filling his
letters with expressions which might easily have made him wince in later
years; but the spontaneity of his nature, which was always seen in the
unguardedness of his familiar writing and his conversation, had in
these days the added ingenuousness of youth.
The experience thus referred to in the summer of 1837 was no short,
sharp passion burning itself out in quick rage; it smouldered and leaped
up into flame at intervals for two years, fed moreover by the
consciousness of his own impotence and the predicament into which he was
helplessly drawn; and it was during these two years that this
restlessness and vacillation of temper were almost ungovernable. Later
in life even he looked back with horror upon this time, saying half in
pity, half in contempt for himself, that he put a cocked pistol to his
forehead in 1839, and had not finally the courage to pull the trigger.
It would be easy to fill many pages with illustrations drawn from
unprinted poems written during this period, and they would have the
added value of disclosing the fact that poetry was fast becoming the
natural expression of his mind, even while he was fashioning it with
constantly better art. In a letter written to Loring, 26 July, 1839,
containing two bits of verse lyrically interpretative of his experience,
he says: “You must not be surprised if I don’t write again for some
time, but the next time I do write I trust my letters will be better
worth the postage. At any rate, it shall be filled more with my _real_
than with my _poetical_ me; although now they are synonymous terms, as
they should be, for my poetry answers me very much as a sort of journal
or rather nousometer.”
It is hard for most of us to escape the lurking judgment that the man,
or boy either, who throws his spiritual experience into verse is more or
less consciously dramatizing, and we are apt to credit greater honesty
to the one who does not than to the one who does poetize his
disappointments; but in spite of the artfulness which betrays itself in
the effort of one who has not yet perfect command of his instrument,
there is a ring of sincerity about Lowell’s poetic journal which,
without juggling, we both infer from his nature as it is otherwise
disclosed, and make illustrative of the real life of the spirit. Here
are some verses which occur in a letter to Dr. Loring in the summer of
1839. In writing of them to his friend a few days later, Lowell says:
“The lines I wrote to you the other day were improvised, and you must
judge them leniently accordingly. I do not think now, as I did ‘two
years ago,’ that poetry _must_ be an inspiration, but am convinced that
somewhat of care, nay, even of thought, is requisite in a _poem_.”
“Turn back your eyes, my friend, with me
Upon those two late parted years--
Nay, look alone, for I can see
But inward through these bitter tears:
Deep grief sometimes our mind’s eye clears.
“How much lies in that one word ‘Past’!
More than in all that waits before;
How many a saddened glance is cast
To that stern wall of nevermore,
Whose shadow glooms our heart’s deep core.
* * * * *
“As hard it is for mortal glance
To pierce the Has been’s mystery
And force of iron circumstance
Which said let these and these things be,
As to resolve futurity.
“A many streams that once ran full
Of joy or Marah waves of pain,
Wasting or making beautiful,
Have sunk no more to flow again,
And scarce the tracks they wore remain.
“And many shades of joy and woe
Pass cloudlike, silent, o’er my soul,
Which not one being else may know,
And into utter darkness roll,
Links lost from out my being’s whole.
* * * * *
“This Present is becoming Past;
Live then each moment manfully
If you would wish your deeds to last,
Sowing good seed continually
Whose harvest time is yet to be.
* * * * *
“In our great pride we think that we
Build up our high or low estate,
Dimly half conscious that we see
The paths which lead to small and great
Through the fixed eye of settled Fate.
“The Past may guide the Future’s ways:
Seeds cast far up the stream of time,
Returning after many days,
May grow to their ordained prime
Of fruitage in another clime.”
As if to reinforce our confidence in the genuineness of the emotion
which prompted these moral verses, written apparently to the sound of
Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life,” which had just appeared in the
_Knickerbocker_, we come in a few weeks to a rhymed letter in which a
reminiscence of the same experience is recorded with simplicity and
naturalness in a homely poetic strain:--
“Two years ago, in days how like to these,
Yet how unlike! beneath the changing trees
I walked with her full many a happy hour,
Pausing to gather some belated flower,
Or to pick up some nut half eaten, dropt
By a scared squirrel as away he hopt.
The jest, the laugh, and the more high debate
To which the forest aisles seem consecrate,
Nay, even the jest, and the dark plaided shawl
That loved her light form--I remember all:
For then I entered that fair gate of love
On whose bright arch should be inscribed above,
As o’er that other in the Tuscan’s story--
‘Per me si va ne l’eterno dolore.’
The leaves were falling round us then, and we
Talked of their many meanings musingly.
Ah, woe is me! we did not speak at all
Of how love’s leaves will wither, change, and fall--
Full silently--and how the pent up breast
Will hide the tears that cannot be represt.”
In this same letter Lowell enumerates at the close the books he is
reading and about to read:--
“I’m reading now the Grecian tragedies,
Stern, gloomy Æschylus, great Sophocles,
And him of Salamis whose works remain
More perfect to us than the other twain.
(Time’s a gourmand, at least he was so then,
And thinks his leavings good enough for men.)
When I have critically read all these,
I’ll dip in cloudy Aristophanes,
And then the Latin dramatists, and next
With mathematics shall my brain be vext.
So if I carry all my projects through
I shall do pretty well, I think, don’t you?”
What most impresses the attentive reader of Lowell’s verses and letters
as the two years, to which he so often refers, draw to a close, is the
evidence that the young man was finally emerging from the mist and cloud
through which he had been struggling, and was getting his feet upon
solid ground, so that not only was his irresolution changed for a fairly
diligent pursuit of his profession, but he had acquired a greater
robustness of spirit and was squaring himself with life in earnest. The
internal conflict had been fought out and the substantial victory gained
was showing itself in greater self-reliance and a growth in manly ways.
It is therefore with especial satisfaction that the chronicler of his
external history comes upon an event which was to mark emphatically the
attainment of his intellectual and spiritual majority. Near the end of
the year 1839 he made the acquaintance of Maria White. She was the
daughter of Mr. Abijah White, a farmer in Watertown, whom Lowell
characterized on first meeting him as “the most perfect specimen of a
bluff, honest, hospitable country squire you can possibly imagine.” Mr.
White had a family of sons and daughters who thenceforward became
Lowell’s familiar acquaintance. One of the sons, William A. White, had
been a classmate at Harvard,--he speaks of him once as his “quondam
chum,”--and it was by him that Lowell was introduced to his home. As
Lowell had written with great freedom to his friend Loring of his
troubled experience, so now one may trace in this very frank
correspondence the manner in which this new affection displaced the
mournfulness of that experience and substituted great peace and content
for the soreness which still remained after a struggle that had resulted
in substantial self-mastery.
In his earliest, hardly more than casual reference to Maria White he
characterizes her as “a very pleasant and pleasing young lady” who
“knows more poetry” than any one he is acquainted with. “I mean,” he
says, “she is able to repeat more. She is more familiar, however, with
modern poets than with the pure well-springs of English poesy.” His
changing mood during the winter months that follow is visible in the
poetry which he writes and copies in his letters, but in the early
summer there is a bolder and franker tone, until the acquaintance which
has ripened into intimacy culminates in an engagement not long after the
completion of the lover’s law studies.
June 13, 1840. I got back from Watertown, whither I went to a
gathering at Miss Hale’s (whose family are boarding at the
Nonantum). I spent the night at W. A. W.’s. Lovely indeed it was
with its fair moon and stars and floating cloud mist. I walked back
with M. W. on my arm, and not only did my body go back, but my
spirit also over the footsteps of other years. Were not the nights
_then_ as lovely ... and the river that we gazed down into--think
you those water-parties are so soon forgotten? When we got to the
house we sat upon the steps and talked,--
And then like a Spring-swollen river
Roll the full waves of her tumultuous thought,
Crested with glittering spray;
Her wild lips curve and quiver,
And my rapt soul on the deep stream upcaught,
Lulled by a dreamful music ever,
Unwittingly is borne away.
* * * * *
I float to a delicious land,
By a sunset Heaven spanned,
And musical with streams.
Around, the calm majestic forms
And Godlike eyes of early Greece I see,
Or listen till my spirit warms
To songs of courtly chivalry,
Or weep, unmindful if my tears be seen,
For the meek suffering love of poor Undine.
She is truly a glorious girl with her spirit eyes. On the mantel is
a moss rose she gave me and which when it withers I shall enshrine
in my Homer. This morning I drove her up to Waltham. They tell me I
shall be in love with her. But there is but one _Love_. I love her
because she is a woman, and so was another being I loved.
August 18, 1840. Since you heard from me I have been at Nantasket
and had a fine time. I found M. W., her brother, and Page,[24] down
there, and I carried Heath with me. I had one glorious ride on the
beach with M. W., I having hired a horse and gig at Hingham.
Hingham is a strange place. I walked through the greater part of it
one day and did not even see a living soul....
Nantasket is a beautiful place. The beach is five miles long,
smooth, hard sand without a pebble. When the wind blows on shore
you may see one line of unbroken white foam, five miles long, roll
up the beach at once. I spent one whole evening alone on the rocks
with M. W. A glorious evening it was. Page’s portrait of M. W. is
going to be fine, at least I hope so. It _ought_ to be....
August 25, 1840. I have just finished reading Goethe’s
correspondence with a child, Bettina Brentano. I had long tried
(rather wished) to get it, the more so from some beautiful extracts
which M. W. read to me, but had never seen it till now. It is
_beautiful_. It is wonderful when we think that Bettina was a
child. It is like sunshine on grass newly rained upon--like the
smell of a flower--like the song of a bird. We are given to look
into the very core of the most loving heart that ever came directly
from God and _forgot not whence it came_.
But it was mournful to think that all this love should have been
given to the cold, hard Goethe.[25] I wanted such a soul for
myself. M. W.’s is nearer to it than any I have ever seen. But I
should have seen her three years ago. If that other love could
raise such a tempest in my soul as to fling up the foul and slimy
weeds from the bottom, and make it for so long sluggish and muddy,
a disappointment from her would I think have broken my heart.
George, twice lately I have had a very strange dream. Byron says
that dreams “shake us with the vision of the past.” Do they not
also shake us with the vision of what is to come? I dreamed that I
went to see M. W., that I saw her walking just before me, and that
when I strove to overtake her, she vanished. I asked a man whom I
met if he had seen her (describing her). He said “yes, she has gone
down the happy road.” I followed, but could get no glimpse of her.
Does this mean that I shall love M. W. and that she will die? Homer
says that there are two gates of quickly fading dreams, one of sawn
ivory, and the other of polished horn. Those dreams that pass thro’
the ivory gate are liars, but those that forth issue from the
polished horn tell truth to any one of mortals who sees them. Did
my dream come thro’ the horn or the ivory? Are you oneirocritical
enough to say? At any rate, remember this. M. W. lent me a “sweet”
book (_she_ did not call it so and I don’t know why _I_ did),
“Philothea,” by Mrs. Child. If you ever come across it, read it. It
is, as Mr. Emerson called it, “a divine book.”... To-day is (or
was) Commencement. I was standing in the pew listening to the music
when I looked round and saw a pair of eyes fixed on me that made me
feel glad; they were M. W.’s. I thought she was in Beverly. I
managed to squeeze my way up to her at last and walked with her to
Judge Fay’s, stayed there a little while and then went to take my
degree of LL. B. After dining with the alumni, I walked round to
the President’s in the faint hope of seeing her again. Just as I
got nearly there, I saw her go in. I went in after. The man she was
with left her, and I enjoyed her for more than two hours. Scates
made his appearance here to-day, so that my day has been a very
happy one.
P. S. There are more lies contained in the piece of parchment on
which my degree is written than I ever before saw in a like
compass. It praises me for assiduous attention at recitations,
etc., etc. (This letter seems to be all about M. W.)
Good by, J. R. L.
Sunday, [31 August, 1840.] I have received your letter and had also
written an answer to it, which I just burnt. It was written when I
was not in a fit state of mind to write. I had been feeling very
strongly that
“Custom lies about us with a weight
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life.”
If I had written this an hour ago, it would have been black and
melancholy enough, but I have smoked three cigars and ruminated and
am calm--almost....
If I had seen her three years ago things might have been not thus.
But yet I would not give up the bitter knowledge I gained last
summer for much--very much.
“Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
Who never passed the lonesome hours,
Weeping and watching for the morrow,
He knows ye not, ye Heavenly powers.”
I have been calmer and stronger ever since. Oh the glory of a calm,
still soul! If we could keep our souls ever in a holy silence, we
should be wise, we should hear the music of the spheres. But they
will ever be talking to themselves. If we could but become so, we
should then ever have at our beck those divine messengers which
visit us also as well as Abraham....
Do “they say” that she is “transcendental”? Yes, she does indeed go
beyond them. They cannot understand a being like her. But if they
mean that she is unfit for the duties of life, they are entirely
wrong. She has more “common sense” than any woman I have ever seen.
Genius always has. Hear what Maria herself says in one of her
glorious letters to me. “When I said that I loved you, I almost
felt as if I had said ‘and I will espouse sorrow for thy sake,’ for
I have lived long enough and observed life keenly enough to know
that not the truest and most exalted love can bar the approach of
much care and sorrow.” And all these she is ready and able to bear.
Yes, she will love you, for she loves everything that I love.
The first volume of poetry which Lowell published, “A Year’s Life,” is,
as its name intimates, a poetic record of the time covered by these and
other passages from his correspondence. It appeared in January, 1841,
and he was moved to print it both because Miss White desired it, and
because it was so full of her. The love which found expression, as we
have seen, in letters to a familiar friend, could not fail of an outlet
in verse, and was but thinly concealed from the public in a volume
which, from Dedication to Epilogue, was glowing with it. Many of the
poems he had already printed in the magazines for which he had been
diligently writing, and these poems, as they appeared, were
announcements, to those who knew both the lovers, of the pure passion
which was flaming.
Two of the poems in particular reflect Lowell’s idealization of the lady
and his consciousness of what this experience meant to him. “‘Ianthe,’”
he writes to Loring, “is good as far as it goes. I did not know her
then. She _is_ a glorious creature indeed!”
“Dear, glorious creature!”
he exclaims, near the close of the poem,
“With eyes so dewy bright,
And tenderest feeling
Itself revealing
In every look and feature,
Welcome as a homestead light
To one long-wandering in a clouded night;
O, lovelier far her woman’s weakness,
Which yet is strongly mailed
In armor of courageous meekness
And faith that never failed!”
The lines on pages 77, 78 are from the same poem, which was written thus
when the acquaintance was ripening into intimacy. The whole poem is a
tribute to the visionary beauty of her face and character as revealed to
him. “There is a light,” thus the poem opens:--
“There is a light within her eyes
Like gleams of wandering fire-flies;
From light to shade it leaps and moves
Whenever in her soul arise
The holy shapes of things she loves.”
Throughout the poem runs, moreover, an undercurrent of holy awe and a
presage of her short life, which drew from him the reflections on death
that occur in his letters:--
“I may not tell the blessedness
Her mild eyes send to mine,
The sunset-tinted haziness
Of their mysterious shine,
The dim and holy mournfulness
Of their mellow light divine;
The shadows of the lashes lie
Over them so lovingly,
That they seem to melt away
In a doubtful twilight-gray,
While I watch the stars arise
In the evening of her eyes.
I love it, yet I almost dread
To think what it foreshadoweth;
And, when I muse how I have read
That such strange light betokened death,--
Instead of fire-fly gleams, I see
Wild corpse lights gliding waveringly.”
The closing section of the poem holds a reflection of that image which
is after all most enshrined in the poet’s heart, as one may gather not
only from his after words concerning her, but from the influence
manifest in his own early career from this time forward.
“Early and late, at her soul’s gate
Sits Chastity in warderwise,
No thought unchallenged, small or great,
Goes thence into her eyes;
Nor may a low, unworthy thought
Beyond that virgin warder win,
Nor one, whose passion is not ‘ought,’
May go without, or enter in.
I call her, seeing those pure eyes,
The Eve of a new Paradise,
Which she by gentle word and deed,
And look no less, doth still create
About her, for her great thoughts breed
A calm that lifts us from our fallen state,
And makes us while with her both good and great,--
Nor is their memory wanting in our need:
With stronger loving, every hour,
Turneth my heart to this frail flower,
Which, thoughtless of the world, hath grown
To beauty and meek gentleness,
Here in a fair world of its own,--
By woman’s instinct trained alone,--
A lily fair which God did bless,
And which from Nature’s heart did draw
Love, wisdom, peace, and Heaven’s perfect law.”
Lowell did not retain “Ianthe” in his later collections, but he
reprinted to the last the other poem especially identified with Miss
White which bears the significant title “Irene.” This, as the reader
perceives, is more distinctly a piece of characterization, and its
closing lines, wherein Irene is likened to the lone star seen by sailors
tempest-tost, may be read as carrying more than a pretty poetic simile,
for it cannot be doubted that the love which now possessed the poet was
in a profound sense a word of peace to him. Something of the same
strain, though more remote and dramatic, may be read in the poem “The
Sirens,” which is also retained by Lowell in his later collections, and
is dated in “A Year’s Life” “Nantasket, July, 1840,” a date which has an
added interest when one refers to the letter given above on page 78. One
more passage may be read from his letters as giving his own final word
of retrospect and prospect. It occurs in a letter to G. B. Loring, 2
January, 1841.
“Yes, my friend, it is most true that I have changed. I thank _her_ and
one other, under God, for it.... Had the love I bore to a woman you know
of three years ago, been as pure, true, and holy as that I bear to her
who ‘never from me shall be divided,’ I had been a man sooner. My love
for her was fierce and savage. It rose not like the fair evening star on
the evening I first saw her (I remember it well), but (as _she_ has said
of such love) like a lurid meteor. And it fell as suddenly. For a time I
was dazed by its glare and startled by the noise of its bursting. But I
grew calm and soon morning dawned....
“And I mean to live as one beloved by such a woman should live. She is
every way noble. People have called ‘Irene’ a beautiful piece of poetry.
And so it is. It owes all its beauty to her, and were it a thousand
times as beautiful would not be so much so as she is to me.”
The strong emotional experience which thus possessed Lowell came to him
when he was largely under the sway of sentiment, but though, as we have
seen, it was translated into poetry very freely, it is not so much the
immediate expression in literary form which concerns us as it is the
infusion of an element in the formation of character. Lowell was
overcharged in his youth with sensitiveness in affection. There was a
fitfulness in his demonstration of it, an almost ungovernable outflow of
feeling, which left him in danger of coming under the control of morbid
impulse. What he required, and what most happily he found, was the
serenity and steadfastness of a nature, exalted like his own, but
glowing with an ardor which had other than purely personal aim.
Miss White was a highly sensitive girl of a type not unknown, especially
at that time, in New England. Of delicate sensibility, she listened
eagerly to the voices rising about her which found their choragus in
Emerson. It was before the time of much organization among women, but
not before the time when one and another woman, inheritors of a refined
conscience, stirred by the movement in the air, sought to do justice to
their convictions in espousing this or that moral cause, not at all
necessarily in public championship, but in the eloquent zeal of domestic
life. As her brother William was to become an active reformer, so she
fed her spirit with aspirations for temperance, and for that abolition
of slavery which was already beginning to dominate the moral earnestness
of the community, holding all other reforms as subordinate to this.
Lowell, seeing in her a Una, was quickened in the spirit which had
already been awakened, and instantly donned his armor as her Red Cross
Knight.[26]
At this period there was a much greater homogeneity in New England life,
than there has been at any time since. The democratizing of society had
been going on under favoring conditions, for industry was still at the
basis of order, less was made of the distinction of wealth, more of the
distinction of education, the aristocratic element was under the same
general law of hard work, and a proletariat class had not been created
by an inflow of the waste of Europe which inevitably accompanied the
sturdy peasants. The city had not yet swept ardent youth into its
rapids, and the simplicity of modes of life was hardly more marked in
the country than in the town. Whoever recalls the now old-fashioned
tales by Miss Catherine Sedgwick will have a truthful picture of a
social order which seems Arcadian in the haze of sixty years since.
It was, in some aspects, the culmination of the ingrowing New England
just before the Atlantic ocean became contracted to a broad stream, the
West was clutched by iron hands, and all manner of forces conspired to
render this secluded corner of the earth a cosmopolitan part of a larger
community.
One of the most characteristic phases of this life was the attention
paid by all classes to the awakening which was going on in education,
reform, politics, and religion. Mr. Norton has printed a letter[27] of
Lowell’s in which he gives an animated picture of a temperance
celebration in Watertown, at which Maria White appeared in a sort of New
England translation of a Queen of the May, as the celebration itself was
a festival in the moral vernacular. Lowell’s own delight in her was
unbounded, and the scene as he depicts it, was a New England idyl.
Maria White and her brother belonged to a group of young people on most
friendly terms with one another, and known offhand by themselves as the
Band. They lived in various places, Boston, Cambridge, Watertown, Salem,
and were constantly seeking occasions for familiar intercourse. Dr. Hale
has given a lively account of their fellowship and summons a witness who
was herself a member of the company.[28] To this coterie Lowell was now
introduced, and the relations between him and Miss White made the pair
the centre of attraction. Miss White’s spirituelle beauty and poetic
temperament and Lowell’s spontaneity of wit and sentiment were
heightened in the eyes of these young people by the attachment between
them, and they were known with affectionate jesting as the Queen and
King of the Band. In the exalted air upon which the two trod,
stimulating each other, their devotion came to have, by a paradox, an
almost impersonal character, as if they were creatures of romance; their
life was led thus in the open, so much so that, as has been said more
than once, the letters exchanged by them were passed about also among
the other young people of the circle.[29] Be this as it may, the
assertion is rendered credible by the highly charged atmosphere in
which they were living. The two young poets--for Maria White was not
only of poetic temperament, but wrote verses, some of which found place
in current magazines--were lifted upon a platform by their associates,
and were themselves so open in their consciousness of poetic thinking
and acting that they took little pains to abscond from this friendly
publicity. It is a curious instance of freedom from shamefacedness in so
native a New Englander as Lowell, but his letters, his poems, and common
report, all testify to an ingenuousness of sentiment at this time, which
was a radical trait, and less conspicuous later in life only because
like other men he became subject to convention.
But though Lowell lived in this exhilarated state, he was not likely to
be led away into any wholly impracticable scheme of living. His own good
sense could be relied on, and his independence of spirit, as could his
detestation of debt, which kept him all his life a frugal liver. He was,
besides, brought up sharply at this time by the necessity suddenly laid
on him to earn his living, if he would be married, since his father,
always generous to him, had now lost almost all his personal property,
and was land poor; it was clearly understood, too, that the young people
must rely on themselves for support. Fortunate was it for him that he
was to have a wife who shared to the full his views on living. “It is
easy enough,” wrote Maria White to Levi Thaxter, “to be married--the
newspaper columns show us that every day; but to live and be happy as
simple King and Queen without the gifts of fortune, this is, I confess,
a triumph which suits my nature better.”
Lowell, who had been lodging in Cambridge, moved into Boston when he was
established in Mr. Loring’s office, but in the spring of 1842 went back
to Elmwood to live. Dr. Lowell had returned from Europe with his wife
and daughter in the early summer of 1840. It is probable that the return
of Lowell to his father’s house was due to the declining health of his
mother, who showed symptoms of that disorder of the brain which clouded
her last years, and is graphically depicted in her son’s poem, “The
Darkened Mind.” From this time her husband and children watched her with
solicitude and tried various remedies. She was taken on little journeys
to Saratoga and elsewhere, in search of restoration, but in vain. In
this case, as so often happens, the sufferer who draws largely on one’s
sympathy is the faithful, despairing husband.[30]
Although Lowell had been admitted to the bar, and was ready to practice,
clients were slow in coming, and with his resources in literature it was
natural enough that he should use his enforced leisure in writing for
publication. There were few periodicals in America in 1840 that could
afford to pay their contributors, and the sums paid were moderate. But
the zeal of the editors was not measured by their ability to reward
contributors, and both editors and writers fed a good deal at the table
of the Barmecides spread in the somewhat ramshackle House of Fame. The
_Southern Literary Messenger_ was one of these impecunious but ambitious
journals, and the editor teased Lowell constantly for contributions.
Lowell gave them freely, for writing was his delight, and he was not
unwilling to have a hospitable and reputable magazine in which to print
what he wrote, both for the slight incentive which publication gave, and
because he could thus with little effort “make believe” that he was a
popular author. He used frequently the signature Hugh Perceval. He liked
the name Perceval, which had been borne by his earliest American
ancestor, and regretted that it had not been given him at his birth, as
had then been proposed. In the _Southern Literary Messenger_ he could
publish half personal poems to be read between the lines by his intimate
friends; but he grew impatient of this unprofitable business.
“Have you got the August S. L. M. yet?” he writes to Loring, 18 August,
1840. “I have not. White[31] wrote to me a short time since that the
July and August numbers were coming out together, and at the same time
asking me to translate a long poem of Victor Hugo’s. I have not answered
him yet. But when I do I shall tell him that ‘reading and writing come
by nature, but to be a translator is the gift of Fortune,’ so that if he
chooses to pay me he shall have translations. I don’t think I shall
write any more for him. ’Tis a bad habit to get into for a poor man,
this writing for nothing. Perhaps if I hang off he may offer me
somewhat.”
The publication of “A Year’s Life” was a more definite assertion of his
place as a poet. He had been encouraged to publish both by the
confidence of Miss White and by the practical aid of friends, like his
friend J. F. Heath, who engaged to secure the sale of at least a hundred
copies. Lowell watched the fortunes of his first open venture eagerly,
from a conviction that it would have some influence on his further
efforts. “I have already,” he writes to Loring, 18 February, 1841, “been
asked to write for an annual to be published in Boston, and ‘which is to
be a fair specimen of the arts in this country.’ It is to be edited
(_sub rosa_) by Longfellow, Felton, Hillard, and that set. Hawthorne and
Emerson are writing for it, and Bryant and Halleck have promised to
write. The pay for poetry is five dollars a page, at any rate, and more
if the work succeeds according to the publishers’ expectation. So you
see my book has done me some good, although it does not sell so fast as
it ought, considering how everybody praises it. If you get a chance to
persuade anybody to buy it, do so. The praise I don’t Care so much
about, because I knew just how good and how bad the book was before I
printed it. But I wish, if possible, to get out a second edition, which
will do me more good, as an author, than all the praise and merit in the
world. My father is so very much pleased with the book that he wishes me
to publish a second edition at any rate, and he will pay all expenses,
and be responsible for its selling.”
The little volume was the first fruits of Lowell’s poetic harvesting,
and the promise it gave of poetical genius was by no means
inconsiderable. In his maturer judgment, to be sure, Lowell preserved
but seven of the thirty-three poems and two of the thirty-five sonnets
contained in it,--in all, thirty-five of the one hundred and eighty-two
pages of the book, and had he been drawn off from poetry, supposing this
possible, the book would have been reckoned as lightly in the general
account of his production as Motley’s fiction was in his full measure.
But he was not drawn off from poetry, and the early note here struck was
a dominant one afterward. In most poets of any consequence the disciple
is pretty sure to be evident in early work, and Lowell in “A Year’s
Life” unmistakably owned himself an ardent lover of Keats and to a less
degree of Tennyson, who had been caught up by the lively circle in which
he moved with the eagerness of an American discovering, as one so often
did, the old world of contemporary England. In copying Keats, Lowell was
indeed copying the Keats who copied, and it is not at all unlikely that
when he was enamored of “Fancy,” “Lines on the Mermaid Tavern,” “Robin
Hood,” and the like, and echoed them faintly in “The Bobolink,”
“Ianthe,” “Irene,” and others, he was harking back also to Wither and
other Elizabethans whom Keats loved, and whose light touch was caught so
deftly by Milton in his “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” Be this as it
may, Lowell was most outspoken at this time in his admiration of Keats.
He had become acquainted with him, as we have seen, in that volume which
contained the triad, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, which was the
fountain of modern English poetry to which so many thirsty Americans
went. Lord Houghton’s memoir of Keats had not appeared, and Lowell
himself, in 1840, contemplated writing a life, going so far as to
concoct a letter to Keats’s brother George, which, however, he never
sent. His admiration, besides taking the form of frank imitation,
displayed itself in his early sonnet, “To the Spirit of Keats,” which he
contributed to the New York literary journal _Arcturus_, conducted by
the brothers Duyckinck. His letter to Evert A. Duyckinck, accompanying
the sonnet, is interesting for its tribute to the two modern English
poets who, after Spenser, were his nearest friends.
BOSTON, Dec. 5, 1841.
MY DEAR SIR,--I address you rather than your brother editor,
because I judge that the poetical department of _Arcturus_ is more
especially under your charge. I have to thank you for your
sympathizing notice of my verses last spring. I thought then that
you might like to have a contribution occasionally from me, but
other engagements which it were tedious to specify hindered me
from doing what my sympathy with the aim of your magazine dictated.
I subscribed for your _Arcturus_ before I had seen a number of it
(though I can ill afford many such indulgences of taste) because I
liked the spirit of your prospectus. For the same reason I sent you
my volume--of which I sent but a bare half-dozen to “the
press”--because I despise our system of literary puffing. Your
notice of Keats, in the number for this month, a poet whom I
especially love and whom I consider to be one of the true old Titan
brood--made me wish to see two of my own sonnets enshrined in the
same volume. One of them you will see is addressed to the same
“marvellous day.” I cannot help thinking that you will like both of
them.[32]
In your “News Gong” I see that you suggest a reprint of Tennyson. I
wish you would say in your next that he is about to reprint a new
and correct edition of his poems with many new ones which will
appear in a few months. I think it would be a pity to reprint his
poems at all--for he is poor and that would deprive him of what
little profit he might make by their sale in this
country--especially would it be wrong to reprint an incorrect
edition. (Moxon will be his publisher.)
I do not wish you to state your authority for this--but you may
depend on it, for my authority is the poet himself. I have the
great satisfaction of thinking that the publication is in some
measure owing to myself, for it was by my means that he was
written to about it, and he says that “his American friends” are
the chief cause of his reprinting.
Wishing you all success in the cause of true and good literature,
I remain your friend,
J. R. LOWELL.
The little book was received with an attention which seems to suggest
the paucity of hopeful literature at the time and the Marchioness spirit
of the critics. Lowell’s eager friends came forward with their notices,
but there were then fewer journals even than now that could be looked to
for careful judgment. In _Graham’s Magazine_ there was a long account of
the book headed “A New School of Poetry at hand,” and the writer, who
hides behind the letter C., after crediting Lowell with ideality,
enthusiasm, love for his fellow men, freshness, and delicacy, finds
fault with him chiefly for affectation of language and carelessness; but
he welcomes him as the herald of a new school which is to be
humanitarian and idealistic. It is amusing to find our familiar friend,
the “great original American poem,” looked for confidently from this new
poet. Lowell warmed himself with this praise.[33]
The most serviceable vehicle for Lowell’s literary endeavors at this
time was _The Boston Miscellany_ projected by Nathan Hale, Lowell’s
associate in _Harvardiana_, and published by two young Boston men,
Bradbury and Soden. The _Miscellany_ had the short life characteristic
of American literary magazines in the early half of the century, but it
showed the sound literary judgment of its editor in the list of
contributors he attracted. Lowell entered heartily into the plans for
the new magazine. He wrote for it, among other things, a sketch, “My
First Client,” which is in its form as near an approach to fiction as he
ever attempted, and is a slightly embellished narrative of his own
clientless experience as a lawyer. He thought so ill of it that he
refused to allow it to be reprinted, a few years later, in one of the
annuals then popular.
The most significant contribution which he made to the _Miscellany_ was
a series of papers on the Old English Dramatists, begun anonymously, but
continued with his name. These were readings in Massinger, Marlowe, and
others, with running comments, and reflected the keen interest which he
took then and all his life in that great quarry of noble thoughts and
brave images. The series was the forerunner of his labors in the field
of criticism of literature, and the pleasure which he took in the work,
as well as the appreciation which the papers received, gave him a
hopeful sense that he might trust to letters for support, and abandon
the law, which he hated, and which naturally returned the compliment. In
September, 1842, he had become so sanguine that, after mysteriously
hinting at an even more substantial means of support, he wrote to his
friend Loring:--
“I think I may safely reckon on earning four hundred dollars by my pen
the next year, which will support me. Between this and June, 1843, I
think I shall have freed myself of debt and become an independent man. I
am to have fifteen dollars a poem from the _Miscellany_, ten dollars
from _Graham_, and I have made an arrangement with the editor of the
_Democratic Review_, by which I shall probably get ten or fifteen
dollars more. Prospects are brightening, you see.”
It was the prophecy of a sanguine young man, but unhappily the plan
which seemed to him to promise most was instead to plunge him into debt.
The _Miscellany_ had closed its short career by merging itself in the
_Arcturus_ of New York, and taking courage from the brilliancy of the
journal rather than caution from its brevity of life, Lowell, in company
with Mr. Robert Carter, projected a new Boston literary and critical
magazine to be issued monthly. The Prospectus has all the bravery and
gallant dash of these forlorn hopes in literature.
The contents of each number will be entirely Original, and will
consist of articles chiefly from American authors of the highest
reputation.
The object of the Subscribers in establishing _The Pioneer_, is to
furnish the intelligent and reflecting portion of the Reading
Public with a rational substitute for the enormous quantity of
thrice-diluted trash, in the shape of namby-pamby love tales and
sketches, which is monthly poured out to them by many of our
popular magazines,--and to offer instead thereof, a healthy and
manly Periodical Literature, whose perusal will not necessarily
involve a loss of time and a deterioration of every moral and
intellectual faculty.
The Critical Department of _The Pioneer_ will be conducted with
great care and impartiality, and while satire and personality will
be sedulously avoided, opinions of merit or demerit will be
candidly and fearlessly expressed.
_The Pioneer_ will be issued punctually on the day of publication,
in the principal cities of the Union. Each number will contain 48
pages, royal octavo, double columns, handsomely printed on fine
paper, and will be illustrated with Engravings of the highest
character, both on wood and steel.
_Terms_: Three Dollars a year, payable, in all cases, in advance.
The usual discount made to Agents. Communications for the Editors,
letters, orders, &c., must be addressed, _postpaid_, to the
Publishers, 67 Washington St. (opposite the Post Office,) Boston.
LELAND & WHITING.
October 15th, 1842.
The publishers appear to have had no pecuniary interest in the venture,
the editors being the proprietors as well. Mr. Carter was a young man of
Lowell’s age, living at the time in Cambridge, where he afterward
married a daughter of Mr. George Nichols, long known for his scholarly
attainments as printer and corrector of the press, and for a short time
also as a publisher. Mr. Carter was a man of wide reading and tenacious
memory and a good writer, as his breezy book, “A Summer Cruise on the
Coast of New England,” testifies. His encyclopædic mind stood him in
good stead when, later, he held a position in the publishing house of D.
Appleton & Co., and superintended the “New American Encyclopædia.”
The _Pioneer_, though it might be called a continuation of _The Boston
Miscellany_, had characteristics of its own which show that its
conductors had a clearly defined ideal in their minds and did not lack
the courage and energy to pursue it. The _Miscellany_ had made
concessions to the supposed taste of the day, and had tried to catch
subscribers with fashion plates and articles, while really caring only
for good literature. The _Pioneer_ discarded all adventitious aid, and,
with fidelity to its name, determined to break its way through the woods
of ignorance and prejudice to some fair land beyond. Upon-its cover page
it bore a sentence from Bacon: “Reform, therefore, without bravery or
scandal of former times and persons; but yet set it down to thyself as
well to create good precedents as to follow them.” It is easy to see
that Lowell, with his love of good letters, and with a zeal for reform
just now quickened by the fine fervor of Maria White, meant with his
individual means to do very much what the proprietors and conductors of
the _Atlantic Monthly_ attempted on a larger scale fifteen years later.
But those fifteen years made a good deal of difference in the attitude
of men toward the greatest of national evils, and in 1843 Lowell was not
likely to be a trenchant political writer, or to think of literature and
anti-slavery sentiment in the same breath. The vague spirit of reform
which stirred him was rather a recurrence to fundamental ideas of
freedom which made him impatient of formality and provincialism in
literature, and led him to associate American political ideas with large
independence of intellectual life. He had been breathing the atmosphere
of the spacious England of the dramatists, and it was the nature of this
literature which attracted him, as it was its art which drew Lamb,
Hazlitt, and Keats.[34] Hence, when he planned the _Pioneer_, he was not
projecting a journal of national reform under the mask of literature; he
was ambitious to bear his testimony to the ideal of a national
literature springing from a soil of political independence, and akin to
great literature the world over. In a word, he knew the exhilaration of
a native spirit, not in spite but because of his feeding upon great and
not superficial, modish letters, and he was eager to demonstrate both
creatively and critically the possibility of a genuine and unaffected
American literature. In the Introduction to the _Pioneer_, for every new
journal then had its salutatory,--and the valedictory was likely to
follow shortly,--he sets forth this principle of a native literature.
After complaining of the derivative character of current criticism and
opinions, derived, that is, from the latest English quarterlies and
monthlies,--he continues:--
“We are the farthest from wishing to see what many so ardently pray for,
namely, a _National_ literature: for the same mighty lyre of the human
heart answers the touch of the master in all ages and in every clime,
and any literature, as far as it is national, is diseased, inasmuch as
it appeals to some climatic peculiarity, rather than to the universal
nature. Moreover, everything that tends to encourage the sentiment of
caste, to widen the boundary between races, and so to put farther off
the hope of one great brotherhood, should be steadily resisted by all
good men. But we do long for a _natural_ literature. One green leaf,
though of the veriest weed, is worth all the crape and wire flowers of
the daintiest Paris milliners. For it is the glory of nature that in her
least part she gives us all, and in that simple love-token of hers we
may behold the type of all her sublime mysteries; as in the least
fragment of the true artist we discern the working of the same forces
which culminate gloriously in a Hamlet or a Faust. We would no longer
see the spirit of our people held up as a mirror to the Old World; but
rather lying like one of our own inland oceans, reflecting not only the
mountain and the rock, the forest and the red man, but also the
steamboat and the rail car, the cornfield and the factory. Let us learn
that romance is not married to the past, that it is not the birthright
of ferocious ignorance and chivalric barbarity, but that it ever was and
is an inward quality, the darling child of the sweetest refinements and
most gracious amenities of peaceful gentleness, and that it can never
die till only water runs in these red rivers of the heart, that cunning
adept which can make vague cathedrals with blazing oriels and streaming
spires out of our square meeting-boxes,--
“‘Whose rafters sprout upon the shady side.’
“In this country where freedom of thought does not shiver at the cold
shadow of Spielberg (unless we name this prison of ‘public opinion’ so),
there is no danger to be apprehended from an excess of it. It is only
where there is no freedom that anarchy is to be dreaded. The mere sense
of freedom is of too fine and holy a nature to consist with injustice
and wrong. We would fain have our journal, in some sort at least, a
journal of progress, one that shall keep pace with the spirit of the
age, and sometimes go near its deeper heart. Yet, while we shall aim at
that gravity which is becoming of a manly literature, we shall hope also
to satisfy that lighter and sprightlier element of the soul, without
whose due culture the character is liable to degenerate into a morose
bigotry and selfish precisianism. To be one exponent of a young spirit
which shall aim at power through gentleness, the only means for its
secure attainment, and in which freedom shall be attempered to love by
a reverence for all beauty wherever it may exist, is our humble
hope....”