CHAPTER VIII

AN END AND A BEGINNING

1852-1857

Lowell had the good fortune to have for a companion at sea Thackeray,

who was on his way to America to give his lectures on the English

Humourists; he liked the man very much, and his occasional references to

the author in his letters and critical papers intimate the high regard

he had for his work. Another congenial companion on shipboard was Arthur

Hugh Clough, with whom he formed a warm and enduring friendship. It was

a thirteen days’ passage, and on the 12th of November the Lowells were

again at home in Elmwood. The coming of the two Englishmen gave occasion

for many little festivities in Boston and Cambridge. A glimpse is given

of them in Mr. Longfellow’s printed journal, when the poet summoned

Clough, Lowell, Felton, and C. E. Norton to feast on some English grouse

and pheasant sent him from Liverpool by Mr. Henry Bright, and in the

evening at the Nortons’ there were private theatricals with a “nice

little epilogue written by Mr. Clough,” who shortly established himself

indefinitely in Cambridge.

Clough has left a little picture of the interior of Elmwood: “Yesterday

I had a walk with James Lowell to a very pretty spot, Beaver Brook. Then

I dined with him, his wife, and his father, a fine old minister who is

stone deaf, but talks to you. He began by saying that he was born an

Englishman, i. e. before the end of the Revolution. Then he went on to

say, ‘I have stood as near to George III. as to you now;’ ‘I saw

Napoleon crowned Emperor;’ then, ‘Old men are apt to be garrulous,

especially about themselves;’ ‘I saw the present Sultan ride through

Constantinople on assuming the throne;’ and so on,--all in a strong

clear voice, and in perfect sentences, which you saw him making

beforehand. And all one could do was to bow and look expressive, for he

could only just hear when his son got up and shouted in his ear.”[95]

Lowell gave briefly his estimate of Clough’s genius when he wrote a few

weeks later to Mr. Briggs: “I wish to write a review of his ‘Bothie,’ to

serve him in event of a new edition. It is one of the most charming

books ever written,--to my thinking quite as much by itself as the

‘Vicar of Wakefield.’”

With his European experience behind him Lowell was eager to plunge into

literature, and his intention at first was to try his hand at fiction,

possibly turning his experience to account somewhat after the manner of

his neighbor’s “Hyperion.” At any rate, Longfellow notes in his diary

under date of 29 November, 1852: “Met Lowell in the street and brought

him home to smoke a pipe. He had been to the bookseller’s to buy a

blank book to begin a Novel, on the writing of which his mind is bent.

He seems rather sad and says he does not take an interest in anything.

This is the reaction after the excitement of foreign travel. Lowell will

write a capital novel, and when he gets warm in the harness will feel

happier;” and a fortnight later he makes the entry: “Lowell came in. He

has begun his novel.”

It is to be suspected that he never went far in the attempt. A dozen

years later, when Mr. Fields wanted him to write a novel for the

_Atlantic Monthly_, he made the summary answer: “I can’t write one nor

conceive how any one else can.” Yet he could not have abandoned the

trial immediately, for in June he was writing to Briggs: “I have got so

far as to have written the first chapter of a prose book,--a sort of New

England autobiography, which may turn out well.”[96]

Meanwhile, he was met on his arrival in America with a piece of literary

news which was welcome for its own sake and because it promised an

outlet for his productions. His friend Briggs as editor-in-chief, with

G. W. Curtis and Parke Godwin for assistants, was just about launching a

new magazine in New York, which was likely to come nearer fulfilling the

ideal Lowell had long cherished than anything thus far issued in

America. _Putnam’s Monthly_ had behind it an active publishing house,

whose head, Mr. G. P. Putnam, had that indefinable quality which makes a

publisher, if not an author himself, a genuine appreciator of good

literature, and a man whose friendship with authors rested on a basis

which was social as well as commercial. He had shown his sagacity and

business insight by taking up the writings of Washington Irving when

that author was in neglect, and winning a substantial success with them.

He cared for the books he published and listened willingly to Mr. Briggs

when that gentleman, who had been engaged in many editorial enterprises,

argued that the time was ripe for a literary monthly which should stand

for American literature of the best sort, and should at the same time

concern itself with public affairs and furnish also that miscellaneous

entertainment of narrative and description for which the American public

showed a liking. _Harper’s New Monthly Magazine_ had been started a

couple of years before, but it was almost wholly a reprint of English

current literature, and even its cover was a copy of _Bentley’s_. It

had, however, struck a popular taste, and its success made other

publishers jealous, while its easy use of foreign matter made the men of

letters angry.

The prospectus of _Putnam’s Monthly_, in which the fact that it was to

be “an entirely original work” was emphasized, announced that it was

“intended to combine the more various and amusing characteristics of a

popular magazine with the higher and graver qualities of a quarterly

review,” and that when a subject needed illustrations or pictorial

examples, such illustrations would occasionally be given. The rate of

payment was fair for the time: poetry had no fixed rates, but Lowell

received fifty dollars for a poem of two hundred and fifty lines or so,

and prose was paid at the rate of three dollars a page. Hawthorne and

Emerson were among those who promised their work, though neither seems

to have contributed, but Longfellow printed several poems. The articles

and poems were all unsigned. The early numbers gave good promise, and

Curtis, with his “Prue and I” papers gave a distinction of lightness and

added the flavor which every literary magazine covets but can rarely

command. The first number, Briggs declared with elation, had run up to

twenty thousand copies, and the second number had one of those articles,

“Have we a Bourbon among us?” which are the joy of the magazine editor

for the buzz which they create in the reading community. But the high

hopes with which _Putnam’s_ started out somehow faded. There were

exceptionally good poems and the general average of writing was high,

but the magazine soon satisfied curiosity without creating a demand, and

the financial embarrassment of the publisher after two years compelled a

transfer of the publishing interest which was followed by a steady

decline in quality.

Meanwhile, Mr. Briggs looked eagerly to Lowell for help, and for his

first number received the poem “The Fountain of Youth,” which had been

lying in the poet’s portfolio for three years. He suggested that Lowell

should publish “The Nooning” as a serial. This was not to be, but

whether from this suggestion or not, Lowell suddenly took it into his

head to start a serio-comic poem in Alexandrines, under the heading “Our

Own, his Wanderings and Personal Adventures,” in which he intended to

personate a correspondent of the magazine, who should travel in Europe,

and employ his nonsense and satire on men and things. He began leisurely

enough, heading his page with a Greek, a Latin, and an English motto,

each cleverly hinting at the plan and the name of the piece. The Latin

“_Quæ regio in terris Nostri non plena laboris?_” was Englished in

“Full many cities he hath seen and many great men known;

What place on earth but testifies the labors of _our own_?”

Then he makes a doggerel verse under Digression A which slyly imitates

Spenser’s verse table-of-contents, and so with Digressions, Invocation,

and Progression he saunters carelessly along. “The last few days,” he

writes to Briggs, 17 February, 1853, “I have worked in earnest. I wrote

one hundred and fifty lines yesterday, and it is thought funny by the

constituency in my little Buncombe here. I have hopes that it will be

the best thing I have done in the satiric way after I once get fairly

agoing. I am thus far taking the run back for the jump. I have enlarged

my plan and, if you like it, can make it run through several numbers. It

is cruel, impudent,--sassy, I meant to write. Some parts of it I have

flavored slightly with Yankee,--but not in dialect. I wish to make it

something more than ephemeral, and shall put more thinking into it as I

go along. My idea for it is a glass of punch, sweetness, sourness,

spirit, and a dash of that Chinese herb favorable to meditation.”

There were three numbers only published of “Our Own,” though the last

carried the legend “To be continued” at its foot. The perplexed editor

hardly knew how to answer Lowell’s demand for criticism. He himself was

immensely entertained, he averred, but nobody else was; although he had

heard of one or two, and Lowell added the names of two or three more, it

was clear to Mr. Briggs that the verses did not take, and he grew

petulant over the stupidity of the public. Lowell’s own ardor cooled.

The style of composition was indeed to real writing what the pun is to

real wit. In the heat of firing off these fire-crackers, ever so much

execution seems to be done, but the laugh that follows is not repeated,

and the cleverness and point seem dulled when the bristling jests crowd

each other, giving no relief to each.

Lowell could not quite agree with Briggs in the deference which the

latter was disposed to pay to the expressions of the public upon the

contents of his magazine: “I doubt if your magazine,” he writes, “will

become really popular if you edit it for the mob. Nothing is more

certain than that popularity goes downward and not up (I mean permanent

popularity), and it is what the few like now that the many have got to

like by and by. Now don’t turn the tables on me and say that,--not the

_very_ few. I have pretty much given up the notion that I can be popular

either upward or downward, and what I say has no reference to myself. I

wish I could be. But it strikes me that you want as much variety as

possible. It is not merely necessary that the matter should be good, but

that it should be individual.”

A good many years afterward when Lowell was making up a volume of poems,

he looked again at “Our Own” to see if it was worth preserving, and out

of the whole six hundred lines he saved only the verses now headed

“Fragments of an Unfinished Poem” and the two charming stanzas

“Aladdin.”[97] The insertion of this little poem in the midst of his

nonsense indicates that if Lowell had found sufficient encouragement he

might, especially after reaching Europe in his plan, have worked off the

surplusage of high spirits and thrown into his rambling discourse both

caustic satire and genial humor.

A more satisfactory and successful contribution which was

enthusiastically received by the editor was “A Moosehead Journal,” which

was in effect a journal, sent home to his wife, of an excursion made by

Lowell in the summer of 1853 with his nephew Charles; and in the spring

of 1854 appeared in two parts the well-known sketch of “Cambridge

Thirty Years Ago,” under the title, “Fireside Travels.” The paper seems

to have grown out of an unused sketch of Allston which Lowell had begun

for _Putnam’s_ in September, 1853. “What I have written (or part of

it),” he says to the editor, “would make a unique article for your

magazine, if the other thing is given up. It is a sketch of Cambridge as

it was twenty-five years ago, and is done as nobody but I could do it,

for nobody knows the old town so well. I mean one of these days to draw

a Commencement as it used to be.” Lowell does not appear to have

contributed to _Putnam’s_ after December, 1854, when his portrait, an

engraving by Hall after Page’s painting, served as frontispiece to the

number, being one of a series of portraits of contributors to the

magazine.

Meanwhile, when _Putnam’s_ was at the top of its brief tide, another

attempt at a good literary magazine was made in Boston. The

extraordinary success of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had emboldened its

publisher, Mr. John P. Jewett, to undertake what its projector, Mr. F.

H. Underwood, called a “Literary and Anti-Slavery Magazine.” It was the

intention to issue the first number in January, 1854, and to use the

great reputation of Mrs. Stowe to float it by printing a new novel by

her. Mr. Underwood[98] was particularly desirous of securing Lowell’s

aid, especially as he esteemed his poetry quite the best to be had in

America, and he was elated at receiving from him the poem “The Oriole’s

Nest,” afterward called simply “The Nest.” But the design which had been

germinating for two or three years was suddenly brought to naught by the

failure of the luckless publishers, whose success with “Uncle Tom’s

Cabin” seems to have been thrust upon them, rather than to have been due

to their business ability. So a fortnight after sending his poem, Lowell

was forced to write the disconcerted editor: “I cannot help writing a

word to say how truly sorry I was to hear of the blowing up of your

magazine. But it is not so irreparable as if it had been a

powder-magazine, though perhaps all the harder to be borne because it

was only _in posse_ and not _in esse_. The explosion of one of those

Castles in Spain sometimes sprinkles dust on all the rest of our lives,

but I hope you are of better heart, and will rather look upon the affair

as a burning of your ships which makes victory the more imperative.

Although I could prove by a syllogism in _barbara_ that you are no worse

off than you were before, I know very well that you _are_, for if it be

bad to lose mere coin, it is still worse to lose hope, which is the mint

in which most gold is manufactured.

“But, after all, is it a hopeless case? Consider yourself to be in the

position of all the world before the Mansion of our Uncle Thomas (as I

suppose we must call it now, it has grown so respectable) was published,

and never to have heard of this Mr. Jew-wit. I think he ought to

be--that something ought to be done for him: but for that matter nearly

all booksellers stand in the same condemnation. There are as good fish

in that buccaneering sea of Bibliopoly as ever were caught, and if one

of them has broken away from your harpoon, I hope the next may prove a

downright kraaken, on whom, if needful, you can pitch your tent and

live.

“Don’t think that I am trifling with you. God knows any jests of mine

would be of a bitter sort just now; but I know that it is a good thing

for a man to be made to look at his misfortune till it assumes its true

relations to things about it. So don’t think me intrusive if I nudge

your elbow among the rest.”

* * * * *

A few weeks after the return of the Lowells to America, Longfellow took

Clough on a walk to Elmwood. “Lowell,” he says, “we found musing before

his fire in his study. His wife came in, slender and pale as a lily.” In

reading “A Year’s Life” one is struck by the frequency with which the

shadow of death falls across the page. It is true that when he wrote the

poems, when indeed he fell in with Maria White, Lowell was struggling

out of an atmosphere which was full of damp mist, and the image of death

naturally rose constantly before him. Yet it remains that from the

beginning of his passion he associated this love with the idea of death.

So frail, so almost ethereal was the woman who came thus into his life,

that from the first he was constantly sheltering her from the cold

blast. The solicitude deepened his passion; it accustomed him at the

same time to the idea of transitoriness in the life he led. It is

entirely possible, nay, very probable, that this spiritually-bodied girl

was permitted to develop into a gracious womanhood through the very fact

of her marriage and her motherhood: Lowell’s own mood during the nine

years of married life was, as we have seen, often irrepressibly gay and

sanguine, and after the death of each of their children the two seemed

to spring back into a wholesome delight in life. Still, the fear could

never have long been out of their minds, and, after Walter died in Rome,

the mother seems steadily to have drooped. When Lowell sent “The Nest”

to Underwood, he speaks of it as an old poem: “Perhaps,” he says, “it

seems better to me than it deserves, for an intense meaning has been

added to it.” The meaning had then indeed been deepened, but when it was

written, there was more than remote prophecy in the lines--

“When springs of life that gleamed and gushed

Run chilled, and slower, and are hushed.”

The year that passed after the return from Europe saw Mrs. Lowell

declining in strength, though it was not till September, 1853, that his

letters betray Lowell’s deepening anxiety, and it was not till the end

of the month that he fully realized the progress disease had made. Mrs.

Lowell died 27 October, and Lowell was left alone with his little

daughter. The visionary faculty, which all his life had been what might

almost be called another sense, came now to his help and for awhile he

lived as if the companion of thirteen years, though shut out from his

daily sight, visited him in the solitude and silence of the night. “I

have the most beautiful dreams,” he writes, “and never as if any change

had come to us. Once I saw her sitting with Walter on her knee, and she

said to me, ‘See what a fine strong boy he is grown.’ And one night as I

was lying awake and straining my eyes through the gloom, and the

palpable darkness was surging and gathering and dispersing as it will, I

suddenly saw far, far off a crescent of angels standing and shining

silently. But oh! it is a million times better to have had her and lost

her, than to have had and kept any other woman I ever saw.”

It had given both husband and wife a great pleasure to see one and

another of Mrs. Lowell’s poems printed during the last year in _Putnam’s

Monthly_. Mr. Briggs, with his affectionate regard for both, was eager

to print the verses as they were sent him, and reported all the

agreeable words that came to him respecting the poems. The latest to be

printed was one on Avignon, in which the poet kept turning back from the

historic and spectacular sights to some oleanders which stood by her

window. “How beautiful it was,” Lowell wrote to Briggs, “and how fitting

for the last. I am going to print them all--but not publish them

yet--she did not wish it. I shall give a copy, with a calotype from a

drawing which Cheney is to make from Page’s picture, to all her

friends.”

It was a year and more before the volume was printed, bearing the title

“The Poems of Maria Lowell,” and inscribed to Mrs. Story, Mrs. Putnam,

and Mrs. Shaw, three friends of whose loving appreciation Lowell had had

many assurances. There are only twenty poems in the volume. Most had

been printed before, one, “The Morning-Glory,” in Lowell’s own

collection. None of her translations were included. One looks naturally

in such a volume rather for intimations of the writer’s character, and

for touches of personal feeling, than for poetic art. Mrs. Lowell

herself plainly had but a humble conceit of her poetic gift, and it does

not appear that poetry was an abundant resource with her. But art there

is of no mean order in this little book. It is a delicate instrument on

which she plays; there are not many stops, but there is a vibrant tone

which thrills the ear. Tenderness indeed is the prevailing note, but in

one poem, “Africa,” there is a massiveness of structure, and a sonorous

dignity of measure which appeal powerfully to the imagination. The poems

have, here and there, an autobiographic value. One written in Rome,

shortly after the travellers had reached that city and the dream of

childhood had come true, ended with the verses:--

“And Rome lay all before us in its glory,

Its glory and its beautiful decay,

But, like the student in the oft-read story,

I could have turned away,

“To the still chamber with its half-closed shutter

Where the beloved father lay in pain,

To sit beside him in contentment utter,

Never to part again.”

There are four sonnets in which her love for her husband glows with a

deep, steady passion, one of them written doubtless in the solemn days

near the end, in the spirit recorded by Lowell when he wrote to Briggs

after her death: “She promised to be with me if that were possible.”

“In the deep flushing of the Western sky

The new moon stands as she would fain be gone,

And, dropping earthward, greet Endymion:

If Death uplift me, even thus should I,

Companioned by the silver spirits high,

And stationed on the sunset’s crimson towers,

Bend longing over earth’s broad stretch of bowers,

To where my love beneath their shades might lie:

For I should weary of the endless blue,

Should weary of my ever-growing light,

If that one soul, so beautiful and true,

Were hidden by earth’s vapors from my sight,

Should wane and wane as changeful planets do,

And move on slowly, wrapt in mine own night.”

What most impresses the reader who takes all these poems at a sitting is

the reserve, the just balance of sentiment which controls them. Passion

is here, but it is not stormy, and love and tenderness, but they are not

feeble and tearful. Depth of feeling and strength of character lie open

to view in the firm lines, and the fine light and shade of the verse

come incontrovertibly from a nature evenly poised, whose companionship

must have been to Lowell that of a kindred spirit, capable indeed of

guiding and not merely of seconding his resolves.

[Illustration: _Mrs. Maria White Lowell_]

The frontispiece to the volume, which is here reproduced, was a

crystallotype of a drawing by Cheney after Page’s portrait. “It is

like,” Lowell wrote at the time, “as far as there can be any likeness

made of a face so full of spiritual beauty, and in which so much of the

charm was subterficial.” He tried to convey to a friend, with whom his

association was purely literary, some notion of her when he wrote: “All

that was written of Lady Digby, all that Taylor said of the Countess of

Carbery and Donne of Elizabeth Drury--belongs as well to her, she was so

beautiful and good. She was born 8th July, 1821, married 26th December,

1844, and went home 27th October, 1853. ‘The Pilgrim they laid in a

large upper chamber whose windows opened toward the sunrising: and the

name of the chamber was Peace.’”

This was written more than a year after the event. He made use of the

same allusion just after his wife’s death, when writing to his friend

Briggs, but added mournfully that he himself was not in that chamber.

Indeed, in the first months of his desolation he was in a most unhappy

state, and endured a loneliness from which now and then an

uncontrollably passionate cry would be uttered. His father was perfectly

deaf and often alarmingly excitable, and his sister Rebecca eccentric to

a degree which made her preserve for days an absolute silence. He would

rush out into the world, and there showed an artificial gayety which

bewildered his friends, only to come back to despise himself. “I know

perfectly well,” he wrote to his most intimate friend, “that my nature

is naturally joyous and susceptible of all happy impressions; but that

is the very reason I am wretched. I am afraid of myself. I dread the

world and its temptations, for I do long to keep myself pure enough to

satisfy her who was better than all I can say of her. I often troubled

her while she was here, but I cannot bear to now that she is in entire

felicity.” He was, as he afterward said of himself, in great agony of

mind, and he had to force himself into those laborious hours which one

instinctively feels contain a wise restorative.

He was, in a measure, undergoing solitary confinement. He sat in his

lonely study, or walked up and down, pencilling sentences on the wall as

if he were really a prisoner, and finding a strange consolation in

repeating the Service for the Dead, which he had learned by heart. “I

remember,” he wrote long after,[99] “the ugly fancy I had sometimes that

I was another person, and used to hesitate at the door when I came back

from my late night walks, lest I should find the real owner of the room

sitting in my chair before the fire. A well-nigh hermit life I had led

till then.” There were but few who could approach his real self in those

days, but there came from Longfellow a gentle word of consolation in his

poem “The Two Angels,” written on the coincidence of the birth of his

own daughter and the death of Mrs. Lowell.

Meanwhile, his letters, even when disclosing his misery, contained happy

references to his sturdy, affectionate child. True, all the losses he

had suffered seemed now to be but the messengers of a final disaster. “I

have only one lamb left of four,” he wrote to an occasional

correspondent, “and think I hear the foot of the inexorable wolf if a

leaf rustle;” but as the days went by this sensitiveness subsided. He

was fortunate in having for her a most admirable governess, and he found

the child’s companionship an unfailing joy. “I said as I sat down to

dinner,” he writes in one of his letters; “‘This is a rare day, I have

positively had an idea.’ Not knowing the meaning of ‘idea,’ and I being

in the habit of telling her (when she is _hypt_, no rare thing) that she

has some disease to which I give a very hard name,--she thought I was

joking, and said, ‘Nonsense, papa, you haven’t got an idea,’--evidently

thinking it some terrible complaint. ‘Why, shouldn’t you like a papa

that had ideas?’ She threw her arms round my neck and said: ‘You dear

papa! you’re just the kind of papa that I love!’” “Mabel,” he writes

again, “has just begun to have ‘Robinson Crusoe’ read to her. Think of

that and burst with envy! What have you and I left in life like that?

She has already arranged a coronet of feathers, and proposes to play

Indian Chief in future. Her great part lately has been the Great Wild

Goat of the Parlor,--produced every evening with unbounded applause,

especially from the chief actor. With a pair of newspaper horns she

chases her father (who knows what it is to be tossed on the horns of the

newspapers), qualifying his too excessive terrors with a kiss at last

to show that it is really not _real_, but only play.... She has been in

the habit of hearing her grandfather always say, ‘If Providence permit,’

of course not knowing what it meant. But one day, having made an

uncommonly successful slide, she turned triumphantly to her aunt and

cried, ‘There, _that_ time I went like Providence permit.’ The doctor

ordered her a blanket bath. She had already tried one and said, ‘If you

please, papa, I had rather not.’ ‘But, darling, most people like them

very much.’ ‘Well, papa, _I_ don’t; people have different tastes you

know. I’ve often noticed that everybody has a different mind.’”

Added to the need of wresting his mind from the despondency of grief was

the pecuniary pressure. He had an income at this time from such little

property as he possessed of six hundred dollars a year, and that plainly

would not suffice. So he shook his portfolio, and even began writing new

poems which he sent to his friend Briggs for _Putnam’s_, and he set

about working over the letters he had written in Italy, publishing them

in _Graham’s Magazine_, under the title “Leaves from my Italian

Journal.” It was easier to do such mechanical work as this, and he began

to speculate on the possibility of editing Shakespeare, and meditated a

life of Dean Swift. He did during 1854 edit Marvell for the series of

_British Poets_ which his friend Professor Child was preparing for

Little, Brown & Co., expending a good deal of loving care on the text,

and editing Henry Rogers’s brief memoir by omissions, illustrations

from Marvell’s writings, and a slight addition. He wrote also at this

time, for use in the same series, the brief sketch of Keats which

afterward he placed with his collected essays. As an introduction to

Keats’s poems, it was designedly more biographical than critical, and

did little more than set forth in a lively fashion the facts gathered by

Milnes. When one considers Lowell’s early appreciation of Keats, it

seems a little singular that he should have contented himself with so

slight an expression.

Lowell spent the last week of June, 1854, at Newport, R. I., on a visit

to the Nortons, and then went for the summer to Beverly, chiefly to be

near his sister, Mrs. Charles Lowell. At this time the north shore of

Massachusetts Bay had all the charm of rock and beach which it now has,

with a pristine simplicity of life which it has lost. To-day the visitor

drives through the woods near Beverly by well-kept roads, meeting at

every turn other carriages and pleasure parties. Then, the woods were as

beautiful, but had unbroken solitude. “At Newport,” Lowell wrote to Miss

Norton, “you have no woods, and ours are so grand and deep and

unconverted! They have those long pauses of conscious silence that are

so fine, as if the spirit that inhabits them were hiding from you and

holding its breath,--and then all the leaves stir again, and the pines

cheat the rocks with their mock surf, and that invisible bird that

haunts such solitudes calls once and is answered, and then silence

again.”

A letter to Mr. Norton, dated 14 August, 1854, hints at the restful

character of this seaside sojourn. “This is an outlying dependency of

the Castle of Indolence, and even more lazy,--in proportion as the

circulation is more languid at the extremities. By dint of counting on

my fingers, and with the aid of an old newspaper and an almanac, I have

approximated, I believe, to the true date of your world out there, and

that seems to me quite a sufficient mental achievement for one morning.

The chief food of the people here is Lotus. It is cunning to take

various shapes,--sometimes fish, sometimes flesh, fowl, eggs, or what

not,--but is always Lotus. It does not make us forget, only Memory is no

longer recollection, it is passive, not active, and mixes real with

feigned things, just as in perfectly still pools the images of clouds

filter down through the transparent water and make one perspective with

the matter-of-fact weeds at the bottom. I feel as if I had sunk in a

diving-bell provisioned and aired for three months, and knew not of

storm or calm, or of the great keels, loaded, perhaps, with fate, that

sigh hoarsely overhead toward their appointed haven....

“What do I do? Tarry at Jericho chiefly. Also I row and fish, and have

learned to understand the life of a shore fisherman thoroughly.

Sometimes I get my dinner with my lines,--a rare fate for a poet.

Sometimes I watch the _net_ result when the tritons draw their seine.

Also I grow brown, and have twice lost and renewed the skin of my hands

and, alas, my nose, Also I know what hunger is and, reversing the

Wordsworthian sheep, am one feeding like forty.”

He went on one or two short cruises and enjoyed the genuine country life

with its salt flavor, but was back at Elmwood in the fall. The year had

found some intimate expression in his verse, as well as the more

objective poems like “Pictures from Appledore,” suggested in part it may

be by one of his summer cruises, though the last section was written

four years before. Mr. Stillman, who made his acquaintance at this time,

when he was foraging for _The Crayon_, the new literary and art journal

which his enthusiasm had projected, speaks warmly of the princely

courtesy with which Lowell received him. “Out of the depth of the shadow

over his life,” he writes,[100] “in the solitude of his study, with

nothing but associations of his wrecked happiness permitted around him,

the kindly sympathy with a new aspiration wakened him to a momentary

gaiety, his humor flashed out irrepressible, and his large heart turned

its warmest side to the new friend, who came only to make new calls on

his benevolence; that is, to give him another opportunity to bestow

himself on others.” On his part, Lowell welcomed heartily this ingenuous

lover of art and letters. They took long walks together over the country

Lowell knew so well, to Beaver Brook, the Waverley Oaks, and the Waltham

hills. “You made me fifteen years younger,” he wrote, “while you stayed.

When a man gets to my age, enthusiasms don’t often knock at the door of

his garret. I am all the more charmed with them when they come. A youth

full of such pure intensity of hope and faith and purpose, what is he

but the breath of a resurrection-trumpet to stiffened old fellows,

bidding us up out of our clay and earth if we would not be too late?”

The poems which register the tranquillity of a return to common life,

like “The Windharp” and “Auf Wiedersehen,” are tremulous with the

emotion which he could bear to express. Indeed, when Lowell came to

print the former of these poems he omitted one stanza, possibly as going

farther than he cared to with his contemporaneous public. In the letter

last quoted, he sent it to Mr. Stillman.

“O tress that so oft on my heart hath lain,

Rocked to rest within rest by its thankful beating,

Say, which is harder,--to bear the pain

Of laughter and light, or to wait in vain,

’Neath the unleaved tree, the impossible meeting?

If Death’s lips be icy, Life gives, iwis,

Some kisses more clay-cold and darkening than his!”

But as a comprehensive record of this whole experience, the “Ode to

Happiness” written at this time may be taken as most conclusive. The

very form of the ode, a form to which Lowell was wont to resort in the

great passages of his life, aided the expression, for its gravity, its

classic reserve, even its labored lines served best to hold that

sustained mood which impelled the poet to stand as it were before an

altar and make his sacrificial hymn. Tranquillity, he avers, is the

elder sister of Happiness. “She is not that,” he says:--

“She is not that for which youth hoped,

But she hath blessings all her own,

Thoughts pure as lilies newly oped,

And faith to sorrow given alone:

* * * * *

‘I am she

Whom the gods love, Tranquillity:

That other whom you seek forlorn

Half earthly was: but I am born

Of the immortals, and our race

Wears still some sadness on its face:

He wins me late, but keeps me long,

Who, dowered with every gift of passion,

In that fierce flame can forge and fashion

Of sin and self the anchor strong;

Can thence compel the driving force

Of daily life’s mechanic course,

Nor less the nobler energies

Of needful toil and culture wise;

Whose soul is worth the tempter’s lure,

Who can renounce, and yet endure,

To him I come, not lightly wooed,

But won by silent fortitude.’”[101]

From this time forward, however he might be subject to transient moods,

as one with so much sensibility would inevitably be, Lowell was yet free

from the violent and tempestuous fluctuations of mood which heretofore

had marked his course. The first desolation over, that influence which

during Mrs. Lowell’s lifetime had always been accompanied by the dark

shadow of a threatened loss, now became, paradoxical as the phrase may

be, permanent and profound. No human accident could affect it, and as

Lowell’s own powers had passed through the experimental stage, there

came a steadiness of aim and a maturity of expression which thenceforth

were registered in successive sure and firm-footed performances. It may

truly be said that Lowell had now found himself, and that from this

period dates the full orbit of a course which had heretofore been more

or less eccentric, but now could be reasonably calculated. Surprises

there were to be, but surprises of excellent achievement, rather than of

new ventures.

It is therefore with special interest that one notes the character of

the work which occupied Lowell in this eventful season of 1854-1855.

Some time before he had been asked by his kinsman who directed the

Lowell Institute to give a course of lectures before it, and had been

paid in advance; he had made some movement toward preparation, but now

he set about it in earnest, and began the delivery 9 January, 1855.

There were to be twelve lectures, and he was to discourse on poetry in

general and English poetry in particular. Something of the exhilaration

with which he entered upon the engagement may be seen in a note written

to Mr. Norton three days before the first lecture, and inclosing a

ticket to the course.

“This will admit you to one of the _posti distinti_ to witness the

celebrated _tableau vivant_ of the sacrifice of Iphigenia

(Iphigenia, by particular request, Mr. J. R. Lowell). It is well

known that this interesting ceremony was originally performed for

the sake of raising the wind, and Mr. L. will communicate a spirit

of classic reality to the performance by going through it with the

same end in view.

“I write this by the hand of an amanuensis whom I have had in my

employment for some time, and who has learned how to catch my ideas

without my being obliged to speak--a great gain.

“(A great gain indeed! the greatest bore in the world! He thinks I

am writing what he dictates at this moment because he hears the pen

scratch. He pretends to be a good-natured fellow--but if you only

knew him as I do! He has no more feeling than a horseradish.)

“I should have come last Saturday to Shady Hill--but you may guess

how busy I have been. (It is _I_ who have had all the work, and

only my board and tobacco for wages: _he_ pretend to hate slavery!)

“I have only just got the flood on, and feel as if I might deliver

a course that will not disgrace me.

“(I almost hope they will, for what right has he to keep me shut up

here? I get no walks, and he begins to keep me awake at nights with

his cursed ideas as he calls them. What _is_ an idea, I should like

to know?)

“I have only one _private_ entrance ticket to spare--but I suppose

you do not want any more.

Give my best regards and happy New Years and all kinds of things at

Shady Hill (and mine, too; how mad he’d be if he knew I put that

in).

“Always yours,

“The Amanuensis of J. R. Lowell, esquire.”

Two days after giving the first lecture, Lowell wrote to Stillman:--

“I have been so fearfully busy with my lectures! and so nervous

about them, too! I had never spoken in public, there was a great

rush for tickets (the lectures are gratis), only one in five of the

applicants being supplied--and altogether I was taken quite aback.

I had no idea there would be such a desire to hear me. I delivered

my first lecture to a crowded hall on Tuesday night, and I believe

I have succeeded. The lecture was somewhat abstract, but I kept the

audience perfectly still for an hour and a quarter. (They are in

the habit of going out at the end of the hour.) I delivered it

again yesterday afternoon to another crowd,[102] and was equally

successful--so I think I am safe now. But I have six yet to write,

and am consequently very busy and pressed for time. I felt anxious,

of course, for I had a double responsibility. The lectures were

founded by a cousin of mine, and the trustee is another cousin--so

I wished not only to do credit to myself and my name, but to

justify my relative in appointing me to lecture. It is all over

now--and, as far as the public are concerned, I have succeeded; but

the lectures keep me awake and make me lean.”

Mr. Longfellow was a very interested auditor, and his diary bears

witness to the attention which he gave to the course:--

“January 8, 1855. Lowell came in the evening and we talked about his

lectures on poetry which begin to-morrow.

“January 9. Mr. Richard Grant White, of New York, author of

‘Shakespeare’s Scholar,’ came to tea. He drove in with us to hear

Lowell’s first lecture: an admirable performance, and a crowded

audience. After it, we drove out to Norton’s, where, with T. and the

lecturer, we had a pleasant supper.

“January 20. Lowell’s lecture, on the old English ballads, one of the

best of the course.”

Charles Sumner appears also to have been one of the auditors. At any

rate, he wrote to Longfellow from Washington, 6 February, 1855:

“Lowell’s lecture on Milton lifted me for a whole day. It was the

utterance of genius in honor of genius.”

Mr. Fields asked Lowell for the lectures for publication, but he put him

off “till they were better,” and never published them. They were

reported at the time by Lowell’s old friend, Robert Carter, in the

_Boston Daily Advertiser_, and some time after Lowell’s death these

reports were gathered into a volume and printed privately for the

Rowfant Club of Cleveland, Ohio.

The form in which the lectures were reported, sometimes direct,

sometimes indirect, undoubtedly robs them of some of the charm which the

hearers acknowledged, but enough remains to give one a tolerably clear

impression of Lowell’s mode of treatment. The first lecture was occupied

with definitions, and in a familiar way Lowell set about distinguishing

poetry from prose, and by a variety of illustrations gave some notion of

the great operations of the imagination. Having cleared the way, he took

up the consideration of English poetry in the historical order, dealing

with the forerunners, Piers Ploughman’s Vision, the Metrical Romances,

and the Ballads; and then devoting one lecture each to Chaucer, Spenser,

Milton, Butler, and Pope. The discussion of Pope led him to interrupt

himself, and in the next lecture take up the subject of Poetic Diction,

for after expressing his admiration of the consummate art of Pope’s

artificiality, he wished to inquire whether there might not be a real,

vital distinction between the language of prose raised to a high degree

of metrical efficiency and the language of poetry. His readers will

recall the amusing passage in an article on “Swinburne’s Tragedies,” in

which, when wishing to illustrate the Greek battledoor and shuttlecock

style of dialogue, he finds it easier to make a burlesque imitation than

to hunt up some passage in Sophocles. In like manner he invents a piece

of descriptive verse--a Lapland sketch--as an instance of the artificial

manner brought in by Pope, but lacking his wonderful manipulation of

language. It is a felicitous example of Lowell’s imitative faculty,

which led him, when he began to write, to throw off lines in Burns’s

manner, but which never betrayed him when he was in earnest in poetry.

The imitation was in itself a criticism. He liked to emphasize the

essential element of poetry by instancing the empty form. Mr. Dante

Rossetti once overpowered me by producing a thin volume of verse by T.

H. Chivers, M. D., and reading aloud from it and demanding information

about the author. When I applied to Lowell afterward, he said that Dr.

Chivers had been wont to send him his books, and he read them aloud to

his classes as illustrations of the shell of Shelley. A lecture followed

on Wordsworth, and then the twelfth was devoted to the Function of the

Poet, which in its brief report intimates that Lowell was thinking less

of himself than of the country with its need of a seer.

The delivery of the lectures had one immediate and important result. Mr.

Longfellow had been Smith Professor of the French and Spanish Languages

and Literatures and Professor of Belles Lettres in Harvard College since

1836, having come to the work when Lowell was midway through his course,

but he made up his mind in 1854 that he must give up the post, not from

ill-health, but because he wished to try the effect of change on his

mind, and of freedom from routine. “Household occupations,” he wrote to

Freiligrath, “children, relatives, friends, strangers, and college

lectures, so completely fill up my days that I have no time for poetry,

and, consequently, the last two years have been very unproductive with

me.” Freiligrath had heard rumors of Longfellow’s resignation, and had

put in an application to be his successor. Longfellow could not give

him any encouragement, since, though foreigners were employed to teach

the several languages, the professor himself must be an American. There

were, he said, six candidates for the position, all friends of his.

Lowell was not one of these, but his lectures had marked him as the fit

successor, and so Longfellow wrote with satisfaction in his diary, 31

January, 1855: “Lowell is to be my successor! Dr. Walker talked with me

about it this morning, and I have been to see Lowell about the

preliminaries, and the matter is as good as settled. I am sorry for some

of my friends who want the place. But for lectures, I think Lowell the

best of the candidates. He has won his spurs and will give the college

just what it needs.” Lowell himself told the news to his friend Briggs

in the following letter, dated 9 February, 1855:--

“I have been silent ever so long because I could not help it. I have

been lecturing four times a week (and am now), and, with my usual

discretion, put off writing my lectures till the last moment, so that

for five weeks I have been with the bayonet pricking me on close behind,

and have hardly dared to _think_ even of anything else. But I have not

forgotten you, my dear old friend, nor my love of you, and I have felt a

kind of pang now and then because I said in my last note that I would

soon write to you--as, indeed, I am always intending to do.

“I write now because I have something pleasant to tell, and did not wish

you to hear it first from any one but me--though you always seem to

live at one end of an ear of Dionysius that brings you all the news of

itself. The news is this: The Corporation of the college have asked me

to take Longfellow’s place, and my nomination will go to the Overseers

next Thursday.

“The thing has come about in the pleasantest way, and the place has

sought me, not I, it. There were seven applicants for the place, but I

was not one of them. On the contrary, I had refused to be a candidate

when it was proposed to me.

“I have accepted the offer, and am to go abroad for a year to prepare

myself. _That_ is the hardest part, but I did not feel competent without

it.

“And the duties are pleasant. I am not to have anything to do with

teaching, as Longfellow had, but only to deliver two courses of lectures

in the year--on pretty much any subject I choose, and my salary is to be

$1200.00.

“Everybody seems pleased. My first thought was a sad one, for the heart

that would have beat warmest is still. Then I thought of my father, and

then of you. I think it will be all the better for Mabel that I should

have enough to live on, without being forced to write, and I shall have

time enough after the first year to do pretty much what I like....

“My lectures have succeeded quite beyond my expectation. One or two have

been pretty good, but I have felt sad in writing them, and somehow feel

as if I had not got _myself_ into them very much. However, folks are

pleased.”

Very likely the fame of his lectures brought him invitations to go

elsewhere; at any rate, when his course in Boston was finished, he made

a tour in the West, and became so desperately out of conceit with the

business before a week had passed that he tried to escape the remaining

lectures, but he was not released and had at least the satisfaction of

carrying home six hundred dollars as the proceeds. “I hate this business

of lecturing,” he wrote from Madison, Wisconsin, to Miss Norton. “To be

received at a bad inn by a solemn committee, in a room with a stove that

smokes but not exhilarates, to have three cold fish-tails laid in your

hand to shake, to be carried to a cold lecture-room, to read a cold

lecture to a cold audience, to be carried back to your smoke-side, paid,

and the three fish-tails again--well, it is not delightful exactly.”

Lowell does not seem to have written anything in the short time that

elapsed after the close of his lecture tour before he sailed for Europe,

though he showed a lively interest in Mr. Stillman’s paper _The Crayon_,

and sent it his poem “Invita Minerva,” in which Longfellow discovered a

reminder of Emerson’s “Forerunners.” The fact that Lowell was to be the

elder poet’s successor naturally drew them together much at this time.

“A beautiful morning,” wrote Longfellow on the 17th of May. “Went and

sat an hour with Lowell in his upper chamber among the treetops. He

sails for Havre the first of June; “and on the 29th he records:

“Lowell’s friends gave him a farewell dinner at the Revere, whereat I

had the honor of presiding. A joyous banquet: one of the pleasantest I

ever attended,--a meeting of friends to take leave of a friend whom we

all love.” Lowell himself refers briefly to the occasion in a note

written the next day: “Everything went off finely after you left. Holmes

sang another song and repeated some very charming verses,[103] and

Rölker to his own intense delight got through two stanzas of ‘a helf to

ve nortward boun’,’ William White having incautiously supplied him with

the initial line. He gave it with so much sentiment that we were all

entirely overcome and laughed so immoderately that the brave Rölker at

length sat down. We sang ‘Auld lang syne’ in true college style and so

parted. On the whole I renewed my youth last night--and my recollections

of ‘1790’ this morning, for I only had four hours’ sleep. However,

aboard ship I shall have leisure enough to emulate Chaucer’s Morpheus

‘That slept and did no other work.’”

That day Longfellow drove into town with Lowell and saw him off for New

York, whence he was to sail.

But the weeks before Lowell’s departure brought other things to mind

than leaving home and affectionate friends. He had been asked to

pronounce a poem before the senior class of Hamilton College at the

coming commencement. The invitation reached him on the memorable day

when the runaway slave Burns was captured in the streets of Boston, and

he wrote in reply to the invitation: “In six months I shall be in

Switzerland; an ocean between me and a slave hunt, thank God!”

* * * * *

Lowell again took passage in a sailing vessel, the St. Nicholas,

Bragdon, master, which left New York 4 June, 1855, bound for Havre.

Among his companions was Dr. Elliott, under whose care he had been a

dozen years before, when his eyes were in a bad way. It was a four

weeks’ voyage, and Lowell amused himself with Lever’s novels from

beginning to end, as he lay stretched in a hammock on the quarter-deck.

Reaching France, he spent three weeks in Paris among the pictures

chiefly, and made an excursion to Chartres, apparently his first visit,

but one which left so deep an impression on his mind that fourteen years

later, when he wrote “The Cathedral,” which he wished at first to call

“A Day at Chartres,” the same images which sprang to his mind when he

wrote of his visit directly after in a letter to Mr. Norton, recurred

and found poetic expression. “It is the home now,” he wrote, “of

innumerable swallows and sparrows, who build upon the shoulders of those

old great ones (the stone angels and saints)--as we little folks do too,

I am afraid. Even here I found the Norman--for when I mounted to the

spire, I saw numbers of hawks who dwell in the higher parts, as in their

castles, and prey on the poor Saxons below.” So in the poem he takes a

parting look

“At those old weather-pitted images

Of by-gone struggle, now so sternly calm.

About their shoulders sparrows had built nests,

And fluttered, chirping, from gray perch to perch,

Now on a mitre poising, now a crown,

Irreverently happy. While I thought

How confident they were, what careless hearts

Flew on those lightsome wings and shared the sun,

A larger shadow crossed; and looking up

I saw where, nesting in the hoary towers,

The sparrow-hawk slid forth on noiseless air,

With sidelong head that watched the joy below,

Grim Norman baron o’er this clan of Kelts.”

From Paris Lowell ran over to London, chiefly to see the Storys, who

were there, and renewed his acquaintance with Thackeray and the

Brownings, and fell in with Leigh Hunt. But his main business was to

make himself proficient in German, and so having taken his academic

vacation in advance, he journeyed through the Low Countries, and settled

himself in Dresden for the autumn and winter. The quiet Saxon city was a

favorite resort for Americans then even more than now, and for the first

few weeks his sister, Mrs. Putnam, was there with her family. It was

with a dull, heavy feeling that he gave himself to his tasks, seeing

very little of society. “I confess frankly,” he wrote, shortly after his

establishment there, “that I am good for nothing, and have been for some

time, and that there are times almost every day when I wish to die, be

out of the world once for all.... I fear I shall come back with my

eremitical tendencies more developed than ever.” But dogged persistence

in work was something better than an anodyne, and work hard he did. “A

man of my age,” he wrote to his father, “has to study very hard in

acquiring a new language, and I cannot be satisfied without knowing

thoroughly all I undertake to know. I am very well and constantly busy.”

Mr. Norton with his sisters crossed the Atlantic in the autumn, and

Lowell wrote to him at Paris: “Did I tell you that I had a room on the

ground floor, with a glass door giving upon a large garden? that I have

a flock of sparrows that come to breakfast with me every morning, and

eat loaf sugar to the detriment of my coffee? That I go to hear lectures

on the Natural Sciences and have even assisted at the anatomical

class,--beginning with horror and ending with interest? That we have the

best theatre here I ever saw? And by the way, if Bouffé acts the _Abbé

Galant_ while you are in Paris, go and see it by all means. It is a

truly artistic piece of representation. If it be not too cold, go down

to Chartres. It is simply the best thing in France, and must have come

out of some fine old Norman brain,--I am sure no Frenchman could ever

have conceived it. After all, there are no such poets as the elements.

Leave a thing to them, and they redress all imperfections and expunge

all prose.”

He had planned spending a portion of his time in Spain, and took lessons

in Spanish in Dresden, but finally abandoned the notion. His host and

hostess, with whom he talked, assured him that he made astonishing

progress in German. “What a language it is to be sure!” he wrote; “with

nominatives sending out as many roots as that witch-grass which is the

pest of all child-gardens, and sentences in which one sets sail like an

admiral with sealed orders, not knowing, where the devil he is going to

till he is in mid-ocean!” To his friend Stillman he wrote, as the winter

wore away: “To say all in one word, I have been passing a very wretched

winter. I have been out of health and out of spirits, gnawed a great

part of the time by an insatiable homesickness, and deprived of my usual

means of ridding myself of bad thoughts by putting them into verse, for

I have always felt that I was here for the specific end of learning

German, and not of pleasing myself.” Fifteen years later, looking back,

he wrote: “I once spent a winter in Dresden, a southern climate compared

with England, and really almost lost my respect for the sun when I saw

him groping among the chimney-pots opposite my windows as he described

his impoverished arc in the sky.”[104]

As spring drew on he was possessed with a longing for Italy, especially

for the near friends who were there, his sister Mary who had left

Dresden for Rome, the Storys, the Nortons, and others. He turned his

face thitherward the first of March, meaning to be absent for two or

three weeks only, but he was not back in Dresden till the beginning of

June. “My journey in Italy,” he wrote to his father on his return, “was

of much benefit to me. I spent a fortnight with Mary in Rome, went with

her to Naples and spent another fortnight with her there. At Naples we

parted. I went to Sicily and made the tour of the island, hoping to

find Mary still in Naples when I returned. But Sicily required much

more time than I had expected, and when I came back I found Mary gone

back to Rome. I could not follow her thither, but took the steamer to

Genoa, and so over the Alps back to Germany. I found Sicily very

interesting in scenery and associations, and very saddening in its

political aspect. I believe it is the worst governed country in Europe.

With every advantage of climate and soil, it is miserably poor,--there

are no roads, and vexatious restrictions repress trade in every

direction. The people struck me as looking more depressed than any I

have seen.”

His itinerary, to be a little more detailed, was to Venice, then by rail

to Verona, and to Mantua. There he hired a vettura to take him to Parma,

and in the same mode he went to Bologna, sleeping at Modena on the way.

From Bologna he went to Ravenna and thence to Florence. He went to Siena

by the slow, roundabout rail, and then was driven to Orvieto by Chiusi.

At Orvieto he was greeted by Mr. Norton, Mr. Page, and Mr. John W.

Field, who had come out to meet him and to escort him to Rome. On his

return from Genoa he made a stop at Nuremberg. He lingered in Dresden a

few weeks, made another brief stay in Paris, and was once more in

Cambridge, in August, 1856.

* * * * *

On his return from Europe Lowell did not resume life at Elmwood, but

took up his quarters with his brother-in-law, Dr. Estes Howe, on

[Illustration: _House of Dr. Estes Howe_]

Kirkland Street, in Cambridge. Longfellow was in his summer home at

Nahant, and Lowell ran down to see him, looking, as the elder poet notes

in his diary, “as if he had not been gone a week.” He took renewed

delight in his country walks, and tingled afresh at contact with nature.

“How I do love the earth!” he writes to Mr. Norton, who was still in

Europe. “I feel it thrill under my feet. I feel somehow as if it were

conscious of my love, as if something passed into my dancing blood from

it, and I get rid of that duty-feeling,--‘What right have I to be?’--and

not a goldenrod of them all soaks in the sunshine or feels the blue

currents of the air eddy about him more thoughtlessly than I.”

The college year opened a few weeks after his return, and he began his

duties by repeating the course of lectures which he had delivered before

the Lowell Institute the winter of 1855, before taking up his more

specific work in German literature and Dante.

It was in the teaching of Dante that Lowell made the strongest

impression on the students who gathered about him, if we may judge by

the reminiscences which more than one has printed; and the methods he

adopted in his teaching never greatly varied, for he came to the work of

teaching without any specific training, when he had been nearly twenty

years out of college, and when the kind of interest in literature, which

in his college days had disputed for supremacy with the docile habit of

the schoolboy, had now become confirmed by study, by travel, and by his

own productions.

In an address which he gave in 1889 before the Modern Language

Association of America, he recorded his judgment on the vexed question

of the distribution of emphasis upon the philological and the æsthetic

pursuit of the study of literature. It was twelve years since he had

discontinued the practice of teaching, and it is reasonable to infer

that he was distilling in a few sentences the experience which his

method of study and his method of teaching recalled to him.

“In reading such books,” he says, “as chiefly deserve to be read in any

foreign language, it is wise to translate consciously and in words as we

read. There is no such help to a fuller mastery of our vernacular. It

compels us to such a choosing and testing, to so nice a discrimination

of sound, propriety, position, and shade of meaning, that we now first

learn the secret of the words we have been using or misusing all our

lives, and are gradually made aware that to set forth even the plainest

matter as it should be set forth is not only a very difficult thing,

calling for thought and practice, but an affair of conscience as well.

Translating teaches us as nothing else can, not only that there is a

best way, but that it is the only way.”

Again, in the same address, thinking no doubt of the expansion of the

curriculum at Harvard, even since he laid aside the teacher’s gown: “We

have every reason to congratulate ourselves on the progress the modern

languages have made as well in academic as in popular consideration.

They are now taught (as they could not formerly be taught) in a way

that demands toil and thought of the student, as Greek and Latin, and

they only, used to be taught, and they also open the way to higher

intellectual joys, to pastures new, and not the worse for being so, as

Greek and Latin, and they only, used to do.... If I did not rejoice in

the wonderful advance made in the comparative philology of the modern

languages, I should not have the face to be standing here. But neither

should I if I shrank from saying what I believed to be the truth,

whether here or elsewhere. I think that the purely linguistic side in

the teaching of them seems in the way to get more than its fitting

share. I insist only that in our college courses this should be a

separate study, and that, good as it is in itself, it should, in the

scheme of general instruction, be restrained to its own function as the

guide to something better, and that something better is Literature. The

blossoms of language have certainly as much value as its roots, for if

the roots secrete food and thereby transmit life to the plant, yet the

joyous consummation of that life is in the blossoms, which alone bear

the seeds that distribute and renew it in other growths. Exercise is

good for the muscles of mind and to keep it well in hand for work, but

the true end of Culture is to give it play, a thing quite as needful.

What I would urge, therefore, is that no invidious distinction should be

made between the Old Learning and the New, but that students, due regard

being had to their temperaments and faculties, should be encouraged to

take the course in modern languages as being quite as good in point of

mental discipline as any other, if pursued with the same thoroughness

and to the same end. And that end is Literature, for there language

first attains to a full consciousness of its powers and to the delighted

exercise of them. Literature has escaped that doom of Shinar which made

our Association possible, and still everywhere speaks in the universal

tongue of civilized man.”

Lowell’s office did not require of him elementary instruction in modern

languages, nor indeed was it expected that he should do drill work in

linguistics. There were competent instructors then in the several

languages, some of whom afterward came to be eminent professors, as the

department was divided. He was not indifferent in the choice of

assistants, but once they were at work he left them to their own

devices, and exercised the slightest sort of supervision of them. There

was no very nice division of labor, except that, as I have said, these

assistants took the more exact grammatical details, yet they all

included more or less of literature in their work with students. It can

hardly be said that Lowell did more than flavor his instruction of

literature with a pinch of grammar. Words in their origin and changing

meanings he did comment on, but inflections, paradigms, and all the

apparatus of grammar formed no part of his interest in his work.

In his essay on “Shakespeare Once More” he has said: “There would be no

dispute about the advantages of that Greek culture which Schiller

advocated with such generous eloquence, if the great authors of

antiquity had not been degraded from teachers of thinking to drillers in

grammar, and made the ruthless pedagogues of root and inflection,

instead of companions for whose society the mind must put on her highest

mood.... There is much that is deciduous in books, but all that gives

them a title to rank as literature, in the highest sense, is perennial.

Their vitality is the vitality not of one or another blood or tongue,

but of human nature; their truth is not topical and transitory, but of

universal acceptation; and thus all great authors seem the coevals not

only of each other, but of whoever reads them, growing wiser with him as

he grows wise, and unlocking to him one secret after another as his own

life and experience give him the key, but on no other condition.”

Now Lowell’s own interest in literature had been direct. It would be

idle to say that literature was interesting or valuable to him only so

far as it was a criticism of life. It would be equally idle to say that

his pleasure in it was derived only from his perception of it as great

art. He carried to it the same kind of interest which he carried into

his own production of literature. He was at once full of that human

sense which made him delight in a fine expression of humanity, and he

had the craftsman’s pleasure in excellent work, so that on the one hand,

though in his youth he raged against Pope, in his more mature judgment

he rejoiced in the patience in careful finish which characterized him:

and, on the other hand, he gave himself with the fullest abandonment to

an admiration of Dante as “the highest spiritual nature that has

expressed itself in rhythmical form.” He thought him “the first great

poet who ever made a poem wholly out of himself.” In one of his

unpublished lectures Lowell uses Dante as a text for a discourse on the

pursuit of literature, and mingles with it a slight element of

autobiography, which makes it specially fitting to repeat the passage

here:--

“One is sometimes asked by young men to recommend to them a course of

reading. My advice would always be to confine yourself to the supreme

books in whatever literature; still better, to choose some one great

author and grow thoroughly familiar with him. For as all roads lead to

Rome, so they all likewise lead thence; and you will find that in order

to understand perfectly and weigh exactly any really vital piece of

literature, you will be gradually and pleasantly persuaded to studies

and explorations of which you little dreamed when you began, and will

find yourselves scholars before you are aware. If I may be allowed a

personal illustration, it was my own profound admiration for the ‘Divina

Commedia’ of Dante that lured me into what little learning I possess.

For remember that there is nothing less fruitful than scholarship for

the sake of mere scholarship, nor anything more wearisome in the

attainment. But the moment you have an object and a centre, attention is

quickened, the mother of memory; and whatever you acquire groups and

arranges itself in an order which is lucid because it is everywhere in

intelligent relation to an object of constant and growing interest.

Thus, as respects Dante, I asked myself, What are his points of likeness

or unlikeness with the authors of classical antiquity? in how far is

either of these an advantage or defect? What and how much modern

literature had preceded him? How much was he indebted to it? How far had

the Italian language been subdued and suppled to the uses of poetry or

prose before his time? How much did he color the style or thought of the

authors who followed him? Is it a fault or a merit that he is so

thoroughly impregnated with the opinions, passions, and even prejudices

not only of his age but his country? Was he right or wrong in being a

Ghibelline? To what extent is a certain freedom of opinion which he

shows sometimes on points of religious doctrine to be attributed to the

humanizing influences of the Crusades in enlarging the horizon of the

Western mind by bringing it in contact with other races, religions, and

social arrangements? These and a hundred other such questions were

constant stimulants to thought and inquiry, stimulants such as no merely

objectless and, so to speak, impersonal study could have supplied.”

When, therefore, Lowell was brought face to face with a company of young

men, in the relation of teacher, he appears not to have cast about to

see how he could adjust his powers to some prevailing method of

teaching, but to have used the material of literature as an instrument

of association, and naturally, untrammelled by pedagogic theory, to

have tried to communicate to the minds about him the kind of interest

which the literature he was handling inspired in him. So far was he from

a professional teacher that it is doubtful if he individualized his

students much, or made any attempt to find entrance into this or that

mind by first trying to detect what opening the mind offered.

Undoubtedly, one or another with special aptitude or appreciation may

have stimulated him and quickened his faculty of instruction, but for

the most part these young men gave him the occasion for utterance, and

the text before him gave the theme of discourse. Mr. Barrett Wendell, in

his illuminating paper on Lowell as a teacher, confesses with a generous

chagrin, that though he had been an enthusiastic pupil and had used

Lowell’s hospitality fully, the acquaintance was very one-sided. He came

to know Lowell well, but Lowell when he met him again after no great

interval of time, had quite forgotten his face, and almost forgotten his

name.[105]

Though he could scarcely be said to have resorted to any set or

customary methods of a professional sort, he was not without recourse to

simple aids in his teaching. “Thirty odd years ago,” he wrote in

1889,[106] “I brought home with me from Nuremberg photographs of Peter

Fischer’s statuettes of the twelve apostles. These I used to show to my

pupils and ask for a guess at their size. The invariable answer was

‘larger than life.’ They were really about eighteen inches high, and

this grandiose effect was wrought by simplicity of treatment, dignity of

pose, a large unfretted sweep of drapery. This object lesson I found

more telling than much argument and exhortation.” He made also some

attempt, when the method was much more of a novelty than it is to-day,

to bring in the aid of illustration from art. He interested himself to

rid his class-room in University Hall of some dismal charts that hung on

the walls, and brought down from Elmwood a number of engravings and

photographs which he had collected in his travels abroad, especially

illustrations of Florence and Rome; one year he presented each of his

class who had persevered with a copy of the recently discovered portrait

of Dante by Giotto; and again he gave to each of his small class in

Dante a copy of Mr. Norton’s privately printed volume on the “New Life.”

The actual exercise in the class-room was simple enough and

unconventional. The classes were not large, and the relation of the

teacher to his students was that of an older friend who knew in a large

way the author they were studying, and drew upon his own knowledge and

familiarity with the text for comment and suggestion, rather than

troubled himself much to find out how much his pupils knew. A student

would trudge blunderingly along some passage, and Lowell would break

in, taking up the translation himself very likely, and quickly find some

suggestion for criticism, for elaboration or incidental and remote

comment. Toward the close of the hour, question and answer, or free

discussion yielded to the stream of personal reminiscence or abundant

reflection upon which Lowell would by this time be launched. Especially

would he recall scenes in Florence, sketch in words the effects of the

Arno, Giotto’s Tower, the church in which Dante was baptized, where he

himself had seen children held at the same font; and so Lowell gave out

of his treasures, using that form of literature which was perhaps the

most perfectly fitted to his mind, free, unconstrained talk. Suddenly,

glancing at his watch before him,--a time-piece which was as idly

whimsical as its owner,--he would stop, bow and walk quickly out of the

room, the men rising respectfully as he left.

And the listeners? They went away, a few carelessly amused at the loose

scholastic exercise and complacent over the evasion of work, but some

stirred, quickened in their thought, and full of admiration for this

brilliant interpreter of life as seen through the verse of Dante. One

charm was in the unexpectedness of it all. There was no predicting what

direction his talk would take. “Now and again,” says Mr. Wendell, “some

word or some passage would suggest to him a line of thought--sometimes

very earnest, sometimes paradoxically comical--that it never would have

suggested to any one else; and he would lean back in his chair, and

talk away across country till he felt like stopping; or he would thrust

his hands into the pockets of his rather shabby sack-coat, and pace the

end of the room with his heavy laced boots, and look at nothing in

particular, and discourse of things in general.”

The formalities of academic work were of little concern to Lowell. To be

sure, after the first year of neglect he yielded to Dr. Walker’s

persuasion, and attended Faculty meetings with commendable regularity,

and took his share in the little details of discipline which were

gravely discussed. It must have brought a smile to his mind, if not to

his face, when he found himself called upon to join in a public

admonition of ----, junior, “for wearing an illegal coat after repeated

warnings.” And examinations of his classes were wearisome functions.

“Perhaps,” says Mr. Wendell, “from unwillingness to degrade the text of

Dante to such use, Mr. Lowell set us, when we had read the Inferno and

part of the Purgatorio, a paper consisting of nothing but a long passage

from Massimo d’Azeglio, which we had three hours to translate. This task

we performed as best we might. Weeks passed, and no news came of our

marks. At last one of the class, who was not quite at ease concerning

his academic standing, ventured at the close of a recitation to ask if

Mr. Lowell had assigned him a mark. Mr. Lowell looked at the youth very

gravely, and inquired what he really thought his work deserved. The

student rather diffidently said that he hoped it was worth sixty per

cent. ‘You may take it,’ said Mr. Lowell, ‘I don’t want the bother of

reading your book.’”

Nevertheless, indifferent as he may have been to the customary details

of academic work, and not a little impatient of dry formalities, Lowell

gave to the college liberally of the best he had to give. Not merely did

he go through with his appointed tasks; he was always ready to take

additional labor on himself and to perform works of supererogation. He

had men come to read with him in his house, and one season at least

offered to conduct a group of divinity students through the Inferno. It

must be remembered, moreover, that Lowell’s instruction was of two

sorts, one in a special author or group, to small select classes, the

other general lectures upon literature to large classes. Something of

the character of his free handling of subjects may be seen in the

extracts from these lectures preserved in _The Harvard Crimson_ in 1894;

and the attitude which he took toward this side of his work is recorded

in the introductory passage to a lecture on the Study of Literature.

“I confess,” he says, “it is with more and more diffidence that I rise

every year to have my little talk with you about books and the men that

have written them. If I remember my terrestrial globe rightly, one gets

into his temperate zone after passing the parallel of forty, and arrives

at that, shall I call it, Sheltered Haven of Middle Age, when, in

proportion as one is more careful of the conclusions he arrives at, he

is less zealous in his desire that all mankind should agree with him.

Moreover, the longer one studies, the more thoroughly does one persuade

himself that till he knows everything, he knows nothing--that after

twenty years of criticism, one is still a mere weigher and gauger:

skilled only to judge what he may chance to have been in the habit of

inspecting at his own little provincial custom-house. And as one gets

older he is apt to allow more for personal idiosyncrasy, and to have

less certainty that the truth he had reached is not a one-sided one, and

that there are not fifty others equally important, and (perhaps) equally

unsatisfactory. Every bait is not for every fish. We begin by admitting

the old doctor’s apothegm that Art is long; we gradually become

persuaded that it is like the Irishman’s rope, the other end of which

was cut off. So different is Art, whose concern is with the ideal and

potential, from Science, which is limited by the actual and positive.

Life is so short that it may be fairly doubted whether any man has a

right to talk an hour, and I have learned at least so much,--that I hope

less to teach than to suggest.”

The tone of distrustfulness which is an undercurrent in this passage is

familiar enough to the conscientious teacher, and Lowell, measuring the

vastness of literature and his own inadequacy to press it home to his

students, was fearful that the outcome was slight in proportion to the

cost to himself. Yet he did not therefore spare himself. During the

years of his teaching, he was more than ever the scholar, taking

generous draughts of the literature he was to teach, for long stretches

of time even engaged with his books twelve hours out of the twenty-four.

And so quickening was his imagination that he went to his classes not to

decant the wine of learning from bottles just filled, but to give them

of his own rare essence distilled from the hours of study. Hence he was

a strong and vivifying influence to the best men under him, and to all

he communicated something of that rich culture which is not easily

measured by lessons learned and recited. No one could listen to his

teaching, as has been well said, without becoming conscious that he was

listening to a man not less wise than accomplished and gifted.

In this matter of teaching, as in all the other undertakings of his

life, Lowell kept no strict debit and credit account. He gave his

measure not according to the stipulated return, but freely, generously.

Especially did he overflow in friendliness. As he turned the lecture and

recitation hour into a _causerie_, and was careless in his exactions, so

he not only suffered but encouraged encroachment on his unprofessional

hours. At first in Kirkland Street, afterward at Elmwood, he made his

students welcome, and the only difference it may be between an hour in

University Hall and an hour by the wood fire at Elmwood, was in the

wider range of talk. It was here that his students came nearest to him,

for it was the men he quickened in the class-room who were avid of more

just such talk, and sought him in the greater intimacy of his study.

Yet, nearer as they came to him as he sat with his pipe in slippered

ease, and much as they drew from him, it is doubtful if there was much

reciprocity in the intercourse. As a comparative stranger might draw

from Lowell one of his most delightful letters, if some question he sent

him happened to catch him at a favorable moment, when he needed only an

occasion for the letter that was on tap, so these students, one or more,

offered an easy audience, and Lowell, rarely out of the mood for talk,

would spin his gossamer or weave his strong fabric for them as well as

for any one else, without paying very close heed to them personally. In

fine, the twenty years of college work made little inroad on Lowell

himself. He was furnished with occupation, he was made comparatively

easy in his simple need of a livelihood, and for the rest his class-room

work offered a natural outlet for his abundant intellectual activity. He

grumbled sometimes over its demands on his time, but it is doubtful if

the reading world would have had very much more from him had he never

been subject to this demand. It is even quite possible that the work

kept him very much more alive than he might otherwise have been, saving

him from a species of intellectual luxury of an unproductive sort; it is

certain that the hours added thus to his other productive time were a

stimulus and inspiration to many men, and that as a practical matter the

work done for his classes in the way of direct preparation was the

foundation of a good deal of his published criticism.

And yet it is not so certain that his mood for poetry was helped by his

academic life. He wrote to Mr. Stillman 14 May, 1857: “While my

lectures are on my mind I am not myself, and I seem to see all the

poetry drying out of me. I droop on my rocks and hear the surge of the

living waters, but they will not reach me till some extraordinary

springtide, and maybe not then.” It is true, this expression must not be

pressed too hardly--it may have been only the mood of the moment; but it

is evident that the time of freedom in poetic composition had largely

passed for him; it returned once and again, as for instance in “Agassiz”

and the “Commemoration Ode,” it was compelled for him by the occasion

which drew out the second series of the “Biglow Papers,” but for the

most part his poetry after this date bears rather more the touch of

deliberation and less the abandon of his early enthusiasm. How far this

is to be referred to the circumstance of the constraint of academic

work, and how far to the change which came over his life in the passage

from ebullient youth to chastened manhood one would not care to say. But

the period of his next twenty years was the period of prose in his

production.

The regular, punctual life which the daily college exercise demands came

as a steadying influence after the vagrancy and informality of the

previous years, and now there was added the gracious and helpful

presence of a self-contained, sympathetic, congenial woman. Mrs. Lowell,

before her death, had wished her daughter to be under the oversight of

an intimate friend, Miss Elizabeth Dunlap, but before the arrangements

could be completed, Miss Dunlap died, and her sister Frances took the

place and had had charge of Mabel Lowell ever since her father had left

America for his year of study in Germany. He had thought himself most

fortunate in making the arrangement, and the friendly intercourse which

naturally sprang from this relation ripened steadily into affection. In

September, 1857, they were married, and now he was enabled to resume the

old life at Elmwood.

One or two passages from letters written at this time by Lowell to Mr.

Norton give a glimpse of this new relation: “I have told you once or

twice that I should not be married again if I could help it. The time

has come when I cannot. A great many things (which I cannot write about)

have conspired to bring me to this resolution, and I rejoice in it, for

I feel already stronger and better, with an equability of mind that I

have not felt for years.”[107] “I was glad as I could be to get your

heartily sympathizing letter. I had taken a step of great import to my

life and character, and though I am careless of Mrs. Grundy’s sentiments

on the occasion, I do care intensely for the opinion of the few friends

whom I value. With its personal results to myself I am more than

satisfied, and I was convinced of the wisdom of what I was about to do

before I did it. I already begin to feel like my old self again in

health and spirits, and feel secure now, if I die, of leaving Mabel to

wise and loving government. So intimate an acquaintance as mine has been

with Miss Dunlap for nearly four years has made me know and love her,

and she certainly must know me well enough to be safe in committing her

happiness to my hands.... I went down last week to Portland to make the

acquaintance of her family, and like them, especially her mother, who is

a person of great character. They live in a little bit of a house in a

little bit of a street, behind the great house (the biggest in town) in

which they were brought up, and not one of them seemed conscious that

they were not welcoming me to a palace. There were no apologies for want

of room, no Dogberry hints at losses, nor anything of that kind, but all

was simple, ladylike, and hearty. A family of girls who expected to be

rich, and have had to support themselves and (I suspect) their mother in

part, are not likely to have any nonsense in them. I find Miss Dunlap’s

education very complete in having had the two great teachers, Wealth and

Poverty--one has taught not to value money, the other to be independent

of it.”[108] “I am more and more in love with Fanny, whose nature is so

delightfully cheerful that it is impossible for me to get into the dumps

even if I wished.”[109]

Mr. Stillman, a keen observer, has given a good estimate of Mrs.

Lowell’s nature in these words: “She was one of the rarest and most

sympathetic creatures I have ever known. She was the governess of

Lowell’s daughter, when I first went to stay at Elmwood, and I then felt

the charm of her character. She was a sincere Swedenborgian, with the

serene faith and spiritual outlook I have generally found to be

characteristic of that sect; with a warmth of spiritual sympathy of

which I have known few so remarkable instances; a fine and subtle

faculty of appreciation, serious and tender, which was to Lowell like an

enfolding of the Divine Spirit. The only particular in which the

sympathy failed was in the feeling that she had in regard to his

humorous poems. She disliked the vein. It was not that she lacked humor

or the appreciation of his, but she thought that kind of literature

unworthy of him. This she said to me more than once. But, aside from

this, she fitted him like the air around him. He had felt the charm of

her character before he went to Europe, and had begun to bend to it; but

as he said to me after his marriage, he would make no sign till he had

tested by a prolonged absence the solidity of the feeling he had felt

growing up. He waited, therefore, till his visit to Germany had

satisfied him that it was sympathy, and not propinquity, that lay at the

root of his inclination for her, before declaring himself. No married

life could be more fortunate in all respects except one--they had no

children. But for all that his life required she was to him healing from

sorrow and a defence against all trouble, a very spring of life and

hope.”[110]

Mr. Howells also, who first knew her a decade later, has sketched her in

these lines: “She was a woman perfectly of the New England type and

tradition: almost repellently shy at first, and almost glacially cold

with new acquaintance, but afterward very sweet and cordial. She was of

a dark beauty, with a regular face of the Spanish outline; Lowell was of

an ideal manner toward her, and of an admiration which delicately

travestied itself and which she knew how to receive with smiling

irony.”[111] Mrs. Herrick, in an unpublished reminiscence, speaks of her

in similar terms: “She was a noble and beautiful woman eminently

practical in all the affairs of life. Commanding in presence, gracious

in her hospitality, highly cultured, and full of a keen appreciation of

every word of Mr. Lowell, and always charming and womanly.”

Stillman’s tender sketch of Mrs. Lowell brings to mind that it was in

the summer of his marriage that Lowell joined this friend in a

reconnaissance of the Adirondacks which was followed by the formation of

the Adirondack Club, and the successive sojourns in the wilderness which

Emerson has enshrined in his poem “The Adirondacs,” and Stillman himself

has recorded delightfully in his Autobiography as well as in magazine

articles.[112]

“Ten men, ten guides, our company all told,”

says Emerson, but his chronicle was of the next year when the club was

fully organized, and Stillman, Emerson, Lowell, Jeffries Wyman, E. R.

Hoar, Dr. Howe, Binney, Woodman, Agassiz, and John Holmes, went into the

wilderness. In 1857, the tentative exploring party; led by Stillman,

consisted of John Holmes, Dr. Estes Howe, Lowell, and his two nephews,

Charles and James Lowell, forever immortalized in the passionate verse

of the second “Biglow Papers.” Lowell, who had known the near charms of

nature in the Waverley Oaks and Beaver Brook, and had tasted the wild

wood in his Maine excursion, entered with frolic delight into this

forest picnic. The conditions were such as to bring out the best that

was in him, for he had the freedom of the woods and the satisfaction of

congenial society. “He was the soul,” says Stillman, “of the merriment

of the company, fullest of witticisms, keenest in appreciation of the

liberty of the occasion and the _genius loci_.... Not even Emerson, with

all his indifference to the mere form of things, took to unimproved and

uncivilized nature as Lowell did, and his free delight in the Wilderness

was a thing to remember.” To these companions, quick to appreciate and

respond, Lowell, light-hearted with the new promise of happiness and set

free in his mind by the large privacy of the woods, brought the

treasures of his fancy, his wit, his imagination. He revelled especially

in recounting those visionary experiences which seemed all the more real

under the starry skies and in the companionship of trees and silent

forest creatures. Yet with it all, his inquisitive, searching mind,

quickened too by the presence of scientific and philosophic comrades,

was forever probing these phenomena to discover what was their ultimate

rationale.

There can be little doubt that at this period of his life Lowell was

poised for flight, as it were, having reached a stage when all the

conditions were most favorable for the full expression of his powers. It

is true that his academic work, as I have said, did in a measure

supplant a freer poetic movement. But it may not unfairly be affirmed

that Lowell’s attitude toward poetry was always that of expectation of

some greater gift to come. His poems “Fancy’s Casuistry,” “In the

Twilight,” “To the Muse,” all written about this time, record with

iteration his restless pursuit of the elusive dream. His academic work

afforded indeed a daily outlet, but it could not satisfy the demand for

expression. Best of all, there was a pleasure-house in which he dwelt

with his wife and daughter, perfectly fitted to the contentment of his

spirit, and to furnishing that ease of mind which gives health of

nature. Stillman has in another passage drawn a picture which may well

be given here in evidence.

“Lowell was indeed very happy in his married life, and amongst the

pictures Memory will keep on her tablet for me, till Death passes his

sponge over it once for all, is one of his wife lying in a long chair

under the trees at Dr. Howe’s, when the sun was getting cool, and

laughing with her low, musical laugh at a contest in punning between

Lowell and myself, _haud passibus æquis_, but in which he found enough

to provoke his wit to activity; her almost Oriental eyes twinkling with

fun, half-closed and flashing from one to the other of us; her low,

sweet forehead, wide between the temples; mouth wreathing with humor;

and the whole frame, lithe and fragile, laughing with her eyes at his

extravagant and rollicking word-play. One would hardly have said that

she was a beautiful woman, but fascinating she was in the happiest sense

of the word, with all the fascination of pure and perfect womanhood and

perfect happiness.”