CONCORD
Concord was then and is now one of the most charming places in the
world. But to poor Lowell it was exile. He must leave all the gayeties
of the life of a college senior, just ready to graduate, and he must
give up what he valued more—the freedom of that life as he had chosen
to conduct it. He was but just nineteen years old. And even to the
gravest critic or biographer, though writing after half a century,
there seems something droll in the idea of directing such a boy as
that, with his head full of Tennyson and Wordsworth, provoked that he
had to leave Beaumont and Fletcher and Massinger behind him—to set him
to reciting every day ten pages of “Locke on the Human Understanding”
in the quiet study of the Rev. Barzillai Frost. So is it,—as one has to
say that Lowell hated Concord when he went there, and when he came away
he was quite satisfied that he had had a very agreeable visit among
very agreeable people.
Concord is now a place of curious interest to travelers, and the stream
of intelligent visitors from all parts of the English-speaking world
passes through it daily. It has been the home, first of all, of Emerson
and then of the poet Channing, of Alcott, of Thoreau, of Hawthorne,
known by their writings to almost every one who dabbles in literature.
It has been the home of the Hoars, father and sons, honored and valued
in government and in law. Two railways carry the stream of pilgrims
there daily, and at each station you find two or three carriages ready
to take you to the different shrines, with friendly, well-read
“drivers” quite as intelligent as you are yourself, and well informed
as to the interests which bring you there.
But this page belongs to the last half-century. Lowell went to a quiet
country village, the home of charming people, and a type of the best
social order in the world; but to him it was simply the place of his
exile. Dear Charles Brooks of Newport, who loved every grain of its
sand and every drop of its spray, used to say that St. John hated
Patmos only because it was his prison. He used to say that John wrote
of heaven, “There shall be no more sea,” only that he might say, There
shall be no chains there; all men shall be free. Lowell looked on
Concord as St. John looked on the loveliness of Patmos. His boyish
letters of the time steadily called it his prison or the place of his
exile.
He was consigned, as has been said, to the oversight and tuition of the
Rev. Barzillai Frost, in whose house he was to make his home. Mr. Frost
was a scholar unusually well read, who had been an instructor in
history in Harvard College, where he graduated in the year 1830. In our
own time people are apt to say that Parson Wilbur, of the “Biglow
Papers,” represents Mr. Frost. I do not recollect that this was said
when they were published. But I dare say that the little details of
Parson Wilbur’s life, the constant reference to the College Triennial
Catalogue and other such machinery, may have come from the simple
arrangements of the Concord parsonage. Mr. Frost had no sense of
congruity. He would connect in the same sentence some very lofty
thoughts with some as absurd. He would say in a Thanksgiving sermon,
“We have been free from the pestilence that walketh in darkness, and
the destruction that wasteth at noonday; it is true that we have had
some chicken-pox and some measles.”
Imagine the boy Lowell, with his fine sense of humor, listening to Mr.
Frost’s sermon describing Niagara after he had made the unusual journey
thither. He could rise at times into lofty eloquence, but his sense of
truth was such that he would not go a hair’s breadth beyond what he was
sure of, for any effect of rhetoric. So in this sermon, which is still
remembered, he described the cataract with real feeling and great
eloquence. You had the mighty flood discharging the waters of the vast
lake in a torrent so broad and grand—and then, forgetting the precise
statistics, he ended the majestic sentence with the words “and several
feet deep.”
Lowell could not help entering into conflict with his tutor, but they
were both gentlemen, and the conflicts were never quarrels. In one of
the earliest letters he says: “I get along very well with Barzillai
(your orthography is correct), or, rather, he gets along very well with
me. He has just gone off to Boston to exchange, and left me in charge
of the ‘family.’ The man’s cardinal fault is that he delights to hear
the sound of his own voice. When I recite Locke, he generally spends
three quarters of the time in endeavoring to row up that delectable
writer.” To _row up_, in the slang of that time, meant to row an
adversary up the Salt River. The phrase was Western. “Sometimes I think
that silence is the best plan. So I hold my tongue till he brings up
such a flimsy argument that I can stand it, or sit it, no longer. So
out I burst, with greater fury for having been pent up so long, like a
simmering volcano. However, both he and his wife try to make me as
comfortable and as much at home as they can.... I think it was Herder
who called Hoffman’s life a prolonged shriek of thirty volumes. Carlyle
borrowed the idea, and calls Rousseau’s life a soliloquy of—so long.
Now I should call Barzillai’s life one stretched syllogism. He is one
of those men who walk through this world with a cursed ragged undersuit
of natural capacity entirely concealed in a handsome borrowed surtout
of other men’s ideas, buttoned up to the chin.”
This bitterness came in early in the exile. In after times Lowell could
speak of Mr. Frost more fairly. In speaking at Concord, on the
celebration of the 250th anniversary of the incorporation of the town,
he said:—
“In rising to-day I could not help being reminded of one of my
adventures with my excellent tutor when I was here in Concord. I was
obliged to read with him ‘Locke on the Human Understanding.’ My tutor
was a great admirer of Locke, and thought that he was the greatest
Englishman that ever lived, and nothing pleased him more, consequently,
than now and then to cross swords with Locke in argument. I was not
slow, you may imagine, to encourage him in this laudable enterprise.
Whenever a question arose between my tutor and Locke, I always took
Locke’s side. I remember on one occasion, although I cannot now recall
the exact passage in Locke,—it was something about continuity of
ideas,—my excellent tutor told me that in that case Locke was quite
mistaken in his views. My tutor said: ‘For instance, Locke says that
the mind is never without an idea; now I am conscious frequently that
my mind is without any idea at all.’ And I must confess that that
anecdote came vividly to my mind when I got up on what Judge Hoar has
justly characterized as the most important part of an orator’s person.”
Of Mrs. Frost, then a young mother with a baby two months old, he says:
“Mrs. Frost is simply the best woman I ever set my eyes on. Always
pleasant, always striving to make me happy and comfortable, and always
with a sweet smile, a very sweet smile! She is a jewel! Then, too, I
love her all the better for that she loves that husband of hers, and
she does love him and cherish him. If she were not married and old
enough to be my mother—no! my eldest sister—I’d marry her myself as a
reward for so much virtue. That woman has really reconciled me to
Concord. Nay! made me even almost like it, could such things be.”
By this time, the 15th of August, the poor boy, though robbed of his
vacation, was coming round to see that there were few places in the
world where one would more gladly spend the summer than the Concord of
his time.
But we must not look in the boy’s letters for any full appreciation of
Mr. Emerson. While he was at Concord Mr. Emerson delivered an address
before the Cambridge divinity school which challenged the fury of
conservative divines and was only shyly defended even by people who
soon found out that Emerson is the prophet of our century. In one of
Lowell’s letters of that summer written before that address was
printed, and before Lowell had heard a word of it, he says: “I think of
writing a snub for it, having it all cut and dried, and then inserting
the necessary extracts.”
I need not say that this was mere banter. But it shows the mood of the
day. Privately, and to this reader only, I will venture the statement
that if the most orthodox preacher who reads the “Observer” should
accidentally “convey” any passage from this forgotten address into next
Sunday’s sermon in the First Church of Slabville, his hearers will be
greatly obliged to him and will never dream that what he says is
radical. For time advances in sermons, and has its revenges.
Lowell speaks of Mr. Emerson as very kind to him. He describes a visit
to him in which Lowell seems to have introduced some fellow-students.
These were among the earliest of that endless train of bores who in
forty years never irritated our Plato. But, alas! Lowell’s letter
preserves no drop of the honey which fell from Plato’s lips. It is only
a most amusing burlesque of the homage rendered by the four or five
visitors. I may say in passing that the characteristics of the five men
could hardly have been seized upon more vividly after they had lived
forty years than they appear in the hundred words then written by this
bright boy.
In the address at Concord, delivered forty-seven years afterward, he
said:—
“I am not an adopted son of Concord. I cannot call myself that. But I
can say, perhaps, that under the old fashion which still existed when I
was young, I was ‘bound out’ to Concord for a period of time; and I
must say that she treated me very kindly.... I then for the first time
made the acquaintance of Mr. Emerson; and I still recall, with a kind
of pathos, as Dante did that of his old teacher, Brunetto Latini, ‘La
cara e buona imagine paterna,’ ‘The dear and good paternal image,’
which he showed me here; and I can also finish the quotation and say,
‘And shows me how man makes himself eternal.’ I remember he was so kind
to me—I, rather a flighty and exceedingly youthful boy—as to take me
with him on some of his walks, particularly a walk to the cliffs, which
I shall never forget. And perhaps this feeling of gratitude which I
have to Concord gives me some sort of claim to appear here to-day.”
Under Barzillai’s tuition he settled down to his college work. He had
the class poem to write. As he was not to be permitted to deliver it,
it may be imagined that he did not write it with much enthusiasm. He
put it off, and he put it off. That was the way, it must be confessed,
he sometimes met such exigencies afterward.
July 8 he wrote: “Nor have I said anything about the poem. I have not
written a line since my ostracism, and, in fact, doubt very much
whether I can write even the half of one.” It had been proposed that it
should be read by some one else on Class Day; but to this Lowell
objected, and the faculty of the college objected also. On the 23d he
writes: “As for the poem, you will see the whole of it when it is
printed, as it will be as soon as Scates gets back to superintend it.
Do you know, I am more than half a mind to dedicate it to Bowen.” Then
on the 15th of August: “I have such a headache that I will not write
any more to-night, though after I go to bed I am in hopes to finish my
poem. Thinking does not interfere so much with a headache as writing.”
Then, on the next line: “August 18. The ‘poem’ is in the hands of the
printer. I received a proof-sheet to-day from the ‘Harvardiana’ press,
containing the first eight pages.” But in the same letter afterwards:
“How under the sun, or, more appropriately, perhaps, the moon, which
is, or appears to be, the muse of so many of the tuneful, I shall
finish the poem I don’t know. Stearns came up here last Saturday, a
week ago to-day, and stirred me up about the printing of it, whereupon
I began Sunday to finish it in earnest, and straightway scratched off
about two hundred and fifty lines. But now I have come to a dead stand
and am as badly off as ever, without so much hope. ‘Nothing so
difficult, etc., etc., except the end,’ you know. And here I am, as it
were, at the tail end of nothing, and not a pillow of consolation
whereon to lay the aching head of despair.”
[Illustration:
LOWELL’S POEM TO HIS COLLEGE CLASS]
These words are perhaps a fair enough description of the poem. It has
in it a good deal of very crude satire, particularly a bitter invective
against abolitionists who talked and did nothing. But the ode of the
Cherokee warrior, bewailing the savage transfer of his nation which had
been consummated under Andrew Jackson’s rule, seems to be worth
preserving. At the time, be it remembered, the poem was most cordially
received by the Lilliput circle of Boston and Cambridge:—
“Oh abolitionists, both men and maids,
Who leave your desks, your parlors, and your trades,
To wander restless through the land and shout—
But few of you could tell us what about!
Can ye not hear where on the Southern breeze
Swells the last wailing of the Cherokees?
Hark! the sad Indian sighs a last adieu
To scenes which memory gilds with brighter hue,
The giant trees whose hoary branches keep
Their quiet vigil where his fathers sleep,
’Neath the green sod upon whose peaceful breast
He too had hoped to lay him down to rest—
The woods through whose dark shades, unknown to fear,
He roamed as freely as the bounding deer,
The streams so well his boyish footsteps knew,
Pleased with the tossings of the mock canoe,
And the vast mountains, round whose foreheads proud
Curled the dark grandeur of the roaming cloud,
From whose unfathomed breast he oft has heard
In thunder-tones the good Great Spirit’s word.
Lo, where he stands upon yon towering peak
That echoes with the startled eagle’s shriek,
His scalp-tuft floating wildly to the gale
Which howls an answer to his mournful wail,
Leaning his arm upon an unbent bow,
He thus begins in accents sad and low:
“‘We must go! for already more near and more near
The tramp of the paleface falls thick on the ear—
Like the roar of the blast when the storm-spirit comes
In the clang of the trumps and the death-rolling drums.
Farewell to the spot where the pine-trees are sighing
O’er the flowery turf where our fathers are lying!
Farewell to the forests our young hunters love,
We shall soon chase the deer with our fathers above!
“‘We must go! and no more shall our council-fires glance
On the senate of chiefs or the warriors’ dance,
No more in its light shall youth’s eagle eye gleam,
Or the glazed eye of age become young in its beam.
Wail! wail! for our nation; its glory is o’er,
These hills with our war-songs shall echo no more,
And the eyes of our bravest no more shall look bright
As they hear of the deeds of their fathers in fight!
“‘In the home of our sires we have lingered our last,
Our death-song is swelling the moan of the blast,
Yet to each hallowed spot clings fond memory still,
Like the mist that makes lovely yon far distant hill.
The eyes of our maidens are heavy with weeping,
The fire ’neath the brow of our young men is sleeping,
And the half-broken hearts of the aged are swelling,
As the smoke curls its last round their desolate dwelling!
“‘We must go! but the wailings ye wring from us here
Shall crowd your foul prayers from the Great Spirit’s ear,
And when ye pray for mercy, remember that Heaven
Will forgive (so ye taught us) as ye have forgiven!
Ay, slay! and our souls on the pinions of prayer
Shall mount freely to Heaven and seek justice there,
For the flame of our wigwams points sadly on high
To the sole path of mercy ye’ve left us—to die!
“‘God’s glad sun shone as warm on our once peaceful homes
As when gilding the pomp of your proud swelling domes,
And His wind sang a pleasanter song to the trees
Than when rustling the silk in your temples of ease;
For He judges not souls by their flesh-garment’s hue,
And His heart is as open for us as for you;
Though He fashioned the Redman of duskier skin,
Yet the Paleface’s breast is far darker within!
“‘We are gone! the proud Redman hath melted like snow
From the soil that is tracked by the foot of his foe;
Like a summer cloud spreading its sails to the wind,
We shall vanish and leave not a shadow behind.
The blue old Pacific roars loud for his prey,
As he taunts the tall cliffs with his glittering spray,
And the sun of our glory sinks fast to his rest,
All darkly and dim in the clouds of the west!’
“The cadence ends, and where the Indian stood
The rock looks calmly down on lake and wood,
Meet emblem of that lone and haughty race
Whose strength hath passed in sorrow from its place.”
The exile ended with the last week in August. “I shall be coming down
next week, Thursday or Friday at farthest.”
[Illustration:
VALEDICTORY EXERCISES OF THE HARVARD CLASS OF 1838.]
Commencement fell that year on the 29th of August, and Lowell received
his degree of Bachelor of Arts with the rest of his class.
I believe it is fair to tell an anecdote here of that summer, because
the one person who could be offended by it is himself the only
authority for it, and he used to tell the story with great personal
gusto.
This cynic was in Rome that spring, where Dr. Lowell and Mrs. Lowell
had been spending the winter. Indeed, I suppose if Dr. Lowell had been
in Cambridge, the episode of rustication in Concord would never have
come into his son’s life. The cynic was one of those men who seem to
like to say disagreeable things whenever they can, and he thus
described, I think in print, a visit he made to Dr. Lowell:—
“Dr. Lowell had not received his letters from Boston, and I had mine;
so I thought I would go and tell him the Boston news. I told him that
the parts for Commencement were assigned, and that Rufus Ellis was the
first scholar and was to have the oration. But I told him that his son,
James Lowell, had been rusticated and would not return to Cambridge
until Commencement week! And I told him that the class had chosen James
their class poet. ‘Oh dear!’ said Dr. Lowell, ‘James promised me that
he would quit writing poetry and would go to work.’”
I am afraid that most fathers, even at the end of this century, would
be glad to receive such a promise from a son. In this case, James
Lowell certainly went to work, but, fortunately for the rest of us, he
did not “quit writing poetry.”
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