He had a great tenderness for the broken and ruined South, whose sins he
felt that he had had his share in visiting upon her, and he was willing
to do what he could to ease her sorrows in the case of any particular
Southerner. He could not help looking askance upon the dramatic shows of
retribution which some of the Northern politicians were working, but with
all his misgivings he continued to act with the Republican party until
after the election of Hayes; he was away from the country during the
Garfield campaign. He was in fact one of the Massachusetts electors
chosen by the Republican majority in 1816, and in that most painful hour
when there was question of the policy and justice of counting Hayes in
for the presidency, it was suggested by some of Lowell’s friends that he
should use the original right of the electors under the constitution, and
vote for Tilden, whom one vote would have chosen president over Hayes.
After he had cast his vote for Hayes, he quietly referred to the matter
one day, in the moment of lighting his pipe, with perhaps the faintest
trace of indignation in his tone. He said that whatever the first intent
of the constitution was, usage had made the presidential electors
strictly the instruments of the party which chose them, and that for him
to have voted for Tilden when he had been chosen to vote for Hayes would
have-been an act of bad faith.
He would have resumed for me all the old kindness of our relations before
the recent year of his absence, but this had inevitably worked a little
estrangement. He had at least lost the habit of me, and that says much
in such matters. He was not so perfectly at rest in the Cambridge
environment; in certain indefinable ways it did not so entirely suffice
him, though he would have been then and always the last to allow this. I
imagine his friends realized more than he, that certain delicate but
vital filaments of attachment had frayed and parted in alien air, and
left him heart-loose as he had not been before.
I do not know whether it crossed his mind after the election of Hayes
that he might be offered some place abroad, but it certainly crossed the
minds of some of his friends, and I could not feel that I was acting for
myself alone when I used a family connection with the President, very
early in his term, to let him know that I believed Lowell would accept a
diplomatic mission. I could assure him that I was writing wholly without
Lowell’s privity or authority, and I got back such a letter as I could
wish in its delicate sense of the situation. The President said that he
had already thought of offering Lowell something, and he gave me the
pleasure, a pleasure beyond any other I could imagine, of asking Lowell
whether he would accept the mission to Austria. I lost no time carrying
his letter to Elmwood, where I found Lowell over his coffee at dinner. He
saw me at the threshold, and called to me through the open door to come
in, and I handed him the letter, and sat down at table while he ran it
through. When he had read it, he gave a quick “Ah!” and threw it over
the length of the table to Mrs. Lowell. She read it in a smiling and
loyal reticence, as if she would not say one word of all she might wish
to say in urging his acceptance, though I could see that she was
intensely eager for it. The whole situation was of a perfect New England
character in its tacit significance; after Lowell had taken his coffee we
turned into his study without further allusion to the matter.
A day or two later he came to my house to say that he could not accept
the Austrian mission, and to ask me to tell the President so for him, and
make his acknowledgments, which he would also write himself. He remained
talking a little while of other things, and when he rose to go, he said
with a sigh of vague reluctance, “I should like to see a play of
Calderon,” as if it had nothing to do with any wish of his that could
still be fulfilled. “Upon this hint I acted,” and in due time it was
found in Washington, that the gentleman who had been offered the Spanish
mission would as lief go to Austria, and Lowell was sent to Madrid.