Our associations with Italy held over until the next day, when after
breakfast he went with me towards Boston as far as “the village”: for so
he liked to speak of Cambridge in the custom of his younger days when
wide tracts of meadow separated Harvard Square from his life-long home at
Elmwood. We stood on the platform of the horsecar together, and when I
objected to his paying my fare in the American fashion, he allowed that
the Italian usage of each paying for himself was the politer way. He
would not commit himself about my returning to Venice (for I had not
given up my place, yet, and was away on leave), but he intimated his
distrust of the flattering conditions of life abroad. He said it was
charming to be treated ‘da signore’, but he seemed to doubt whether it
was well; and in this as in all other things he showed his final fealty
to the American ideal.
It was that serious and great moment after the successful close of the
civil war when the republican consciousness was more robust in us than
ever before or since; but I cannot recall any reference to the historical
interest of the time in Lowell’s talk. It had been all about literature
and about travel; and now with the suggestion of the word village it
began to be a little about his youth. I have said before how reluctant
he was to let his youth go from him; and perhaps the touch with my
juniority had made him realize how near he was to fifty, and set him
thinking of the past which had sorrows in it to age him beyond his years.
He would never speak of these, though he often spoke of the past. He
told once of having been on a brief journey when he was six years old,
with his father, and of driving up to the gate of Elmwood in the evening,
and his father saying, “Ah, this is a pleasant place! I wonder who lives
here--what little boy?” At another time he pointed out a certain window
in his study, and said he could see himself standing by it when he could
only get his chin on the window-sill. His memories of the house, and of
everything belonging to it, were very tender; but he could laugh over an
escapade of his youth when he helped his fellow-students pull down his
father’s fences, in the pure zeal of good-comradeship.