CHAPTER X

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JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

_A BIOGRAPHY_

BY

HORACE ELISHA SCUDDER

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. II

[Illustration: _Mr. Lowell in his Oxford Gown_]

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

A Biography

BY

HORACE ELISHA SCUDDER

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. II.

[Illustration]

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

The Riverside Press, Cambridge

1901

COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY HORACE E. SCUDDER

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER, 1901

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

X. LOWELL AND THE WAR FOR THE UNION 1

XI. POETRY AND PROSE 74

XII. THIRD JOURNEY IN EUROPE 151

XIII. POLITICS 185

XIV. THE SPANISH MISSION 221

XV. THE ENGLISH MISSION 259

XVI. RETURN TO PRIVATE LIFE 322

XVII. THE LAST YEARS 379

APPENDIX

_A._ The Lowell Ancestry 409

_B._ “List of Copies of the Conversations to be

given away by the ‘Don’” 419

_C._ A List of the Writings of James Russell

Lowell, arranged as nearly as may be in

order of Publication 421

_D._ The Lowell Memorial in Westminster Abbey 448

INDEX 453

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL IN 1882. _Frontispiece_

From the painting by Mrs. Anna Lea Merritt.

FACSIMILE OF THE SOWER 64

ELMWOOD 120

From a photograph.

MR. LOWELL IN HIS STUDY 186

From a photograph.

MRS. FRANCES DUNLAP LOWELL 318

From a crayon by S. W. Rowse.

THE HALL AT ELMWOOD 394

From a photograph.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

CHAPTER X

LOWELL AND THE WAR FOR THE UNION

1858-1865

When the _Atlantic Monthly_ was founded, its conductors did not conceal

their intention to make it a political magazine. It bore as its sub-head

a title it has never relinquished, “A Magazine of Literature, Art, and

Politics.” The combination under Lowell’s superintendence did not denote

that articles were to be grouped under these heads; it intimated that in

the attitude taken by the magazine both art and politics were to be

discussed by men having the literary faculty, and that apprehension of

subjects which finds its natural training not exclusively in practice

and affairs but in acquaintance with great literature which is, after

all, the express image of art and politics. Thus, the magazine did not

become, as it might in lesser hands, a mere propaganda of reform, or the

organ of a political party, neither did it assume the air of

philosophical absenteeism. If one examines the early numbers he is

struck with the preponderance of imaginative literature aid of that

artistic element which finds expression in historical narrative or in

the essay. The space given to discussion of affairs is not considerable,

but evidently the subjects are chosen with deliberation, and they are

treated if not with distinction yet with a good deal more than merely

newspaper care.

Such articles are found at the latter end of the magazine, a place

indeed naturally adapted to them, since in the practice of printing

opportunity would thus be given for the latest possible consideration of

current events; still, though the latest articles in the successive

numbers, they were written at least a month, and more likely six weeks

or two months even before they could come into the hands of readers, so

that the authors were compelled to see things in the large far more than

writers who might change their judgments over night on the receipt of a

telegram.

These articles, corresponding, as far as a monthly could parallel a

daily, to the leader of a journal, were usually one to a number. In the

November, 1857, _Atlantic_, the first to be issued, was “The Financial

Flurry,” by Mr. Parke Godwin, who had been an important writer on the

staff of _Putnam’s Monthly_. In December appeared “Where will it End?”

by Edmund Quincy, an enquiry into the outcome of slavery in America,

somewhat in the nature of that gentleman’s contributions to the

_Anti-Slavery Standard_, when he and Lowell were associated there,

though somewhat more moderate in manner. It was vigorous, pointed, and a

reasonable summary of the situation politically, but it was an appeal

to fundamental principles, not to temporary political conditions. In

January Mr. Godwin again wrote the political leader, this time on “The

President’s Message,” which had been delivered by Mr. Buchanan at the

coming together of Congress early in December, and the paper could

therefore be regarded as a prompt consideration of the policy of the new

administration. The article was brief and passed in review the three

main topics of the currency, our foreign relations, and the

Kansas-Nebraska difficulties. In February Mr. Godwin took up more in

detail an examination of the Kansas Usurpation; there was no political

article in March, but in April Lowell took a hand in a characteristic

fashion.

Mr. Buchanan had been in office a year, and the momentous hour was

approaching when the forces for and against the Union, with all that the

Union stood for in the progress of freedom, were to be marshalled. The

preliminary test of strength was already offered in Kansas, and the

moral and intellectual debate was apparent in Washington. The principles

for which the _Atlantic_ stood were those for which the _Anti-Slavery

Standard_ had stood ten years before, but Lowell was now on a broader

platform, since the _Atlantic_ represented freedom, history, law, and

civilization, where the _Standard_ had represented the attack upon a

pernicious system. Mr. Godwin was again called on to review the first

year of the Buchanan administration, which he did in an article of about

eight _Atlantic_ pages, with the caption “Mr. Buchanan’s

Administration.” The review was methodical and severe. It examined the

record upon four leading points, the Mormon question, the Financial

question, the Filibuster question, and the Kansas question. Mr. Godwin,

a trained journalist of the older school, a man of resources in reading

and scholarship, and a vigorous thinker, handled his subject with skill

and analyzed the situation with clearness, giving the results in an

incisive manner. The article accomplished what it set out to do, and is

a capital example of a shrewd, forcible political leader.

Then Lowell took up the parable, and it is hardly likely that any

observant reader of the April _Atlantic_ failed to note that in stepping

over the white line which separated the first eight from the latter six

pages of the article, he had passed from the domain of one writer to

that of another. It is quite as likely that, however he may have been

impressed with the good sense and virility of the former part of the

article, he was not so piqued by curiosity to know who wrote it, as he

was in the case of the latter part, for that portion is instinct with a

vivid personal note. If the reader of that day were familiar with

Lowell’s political writings of ten years before, he would not fail to

attribute these pages to the editor of the magazine. The same note is

struck in each, though the insouciance of wit is somewhat hidden by a

fiery earnestness here, as if the author could not stop to play by the

way, as he was wont to do when the political thunder-clouds were not

gathering so ominously in the west.

Lowell did not preserve his share of the article among his “Political

Essays,” and this is not strange, not only because his writing was a

detachment of a fuller article, but because with all its undoubted

eloquence it was not so careful and rounded a piece of work as his later

essays in the same field. In the absence of any correspondence on the

subject, it is reasonable to conjecture that, having received Mr.

Godwin’s article and assigned it to the number, he was constrained to

think that forcible as it was in its indictment of Mr. Buchanan’s

administration for errors and blunders, it might well afford the

starting-point for a further arraignment, not of the administration in

particular but of the nation itself so far as that was _particeps

criminis_ with the administration in its rôle of attorney for the

slave-power.

But any such indictment as this must be drawn under the provisions of

the moral law and find its precedents in history, and make its appeal to

the conscience of the people as the final court. Into this business,

therefore, Lowell threw himself with vehemence. He knew his own

country’s history, he knew also the history of man; and the moral ardor,

the almost prophetic power which had been both his inheritance, and the

characteristic of his early manhood when he was almost persuaded to be a

Reformer, now flamed out. It was as if he had been storing energy during

the ten years of comparative silence since the issue of the “Biglow

Papers” and the contributions to the _Standard_.

“Looking at the administration of Mr. Buchanan,” he begins, “from the

point of view of enlightened statesmanship” (which was Mr. Godwin’s),

“we find nothing in it that is not contemptible; but when we regard it

as the accredited exponent of the moral sense of a majority of our

people, it is saved from contempt, indeed, but saved only because

contempt is merged in a deeper feeling of humiliation and apprehension.

Unparallelled as the outrages in Kansas have been, we regard them as

insignificant in comparison with the deadlier fact that the Chief

Magistrate of the Republic should strive to defend them by the small

wiles of a village attorney,--that, when the honor of a nation and the

principle of self-government are at stake, he should show himself

unconscious of a higher judicature or a nobler style of pleading than

those which would serve for a case of petty larceny,--and that he should

be abetted by more than half the national representatives, while he

brings down a case of public conscience to the moral level of those who

are content with the maculate safety which they owe to a flaw in an

indictment, or with the dingy innocence which is certified to by the

disagreement of a jury.”

Regarding this as a logical consequence of the profound national

demoralization which followed the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Bill,

and warming to his subject as he rehearses that deplorable business, he

clears the way for his first proposition, by which he aims to lift the

discussion into the higher air of history and elemental morality. “The

capacity of the English race for self-government,” he proceeds, “is

measured by their regard as well for the forms as the essence of law. A

race conservative beyond all others of what is established, averse

beyond all others to the heroic remedy of forcible revolution, they have

yet three times in the space of a century and a half assumed the chances

of rebellion and the certain perils of civil war, rather than submit to

have Right infringed by Prerogative, and the scales of Justice made a

cheat by false weights that kept the shape but lacked the substance of

legitimate precedent. We are forced to think that there must be a bend

sinister in the escutcheon of the descendants of such men, when we find

them setting the form above the substance, and accepting as law that

which is deadly to the spirit while it is true to the letter of

legality. It is a spectacle portentous of moral lapse and social

disorganization, to see a statesman, who has had fifty years’ experience

of American politics, quibbling in defence of Executive violence against

a free community, as if the conscience of the nation were no more august

a tribunal than a police justice sitting upon a paltry case of

assault.... There is a Fate which spins and cuts the threads of national

as of individual life, and the case of God against the people of these

United States is not to be debated before any such petty tribunal as Mr.

Buchanan and his advisers seem to suppose.”

The difficulty, Lowell sees, is in the lack of any organized public

sentiment, and thus in the weakness of the sense of responsibility. “The

guilt of every national sin comes back to the voter in a fraction, the

denominator of which is several millions,” and the need is of a thorough

awakening of the individual conscience. It is the moral aspect of the

great question before the country which is cardinal, yet the moral must

go hand in hand with common sense, and Lowell contrasts the solidarity

of the South, created by the gravitation of private interest, with the

perpetual bickering of the Northern enemies of slavery amongst

themselves. He calls for less scrutiny of the character of the allies

the anti-slavery people draw to themselves, and more political

forethought and practical sense. “The advantage of our opponents has

been that they have always had some sharp practical measure, some

definite and immediate object, to oppose to our voluminous propositions

of abstract right. Again and again the whirlwind of oratorical

enthusiasm has roused and heaped up the threatening masses of the Free

States, and again and again we have seen them collapse like a waterspout

into a crumbling heap of disintegrated bubbles before the compact bullet

of political audacity.[1] While our legislatures have been resolving and

re-resolving the principles of the Declaration of Independence, our

adversaries have pushed their trenches, parallel after parallel, against

the very citadel of our political equality.”

Hence he calls for an offensive attitude on the part of the lovers of

freedom. “Are we to be terrified any longer,” he asks, “by such Chinese

devices of warfare as the cry of Disunion,--a threat as hollow as the

mask from which it issues, as harmless as the periodical suicides of

Mantalini, as insincere as the spoiled child’s refusal of his supper? We

have no desire for a dissolution of our confederacy, though it is not

for us to fear it. We will not allow it: we will not permit the Southern

half of our dominion to become a Hayti. But there is no danger; the law

that binds our system of confederate stars together is of stronger fibre

than to be snapped by the trembling finger of Toombs or cut by the

bloodless sword of Davis; the march of the Universe is not to be stayed

because some gentleman in Buncombe declares that his sweet-potato patch

shall not go along with it. The sweet attraction which knits the sons of

Virginia to the Treasury has lost none of its controlling force. We must

make up our minds to keep these deep-descended gentlemen in the Union,

and must convince them that we have a work to accomplish in it and by

means of it. If our Southern brethren have the curse of Canaan in their

pious keeping, if the responsibility lie upon them to avenge the insults

of Noah, on us devolves a more comprehensive obligation and the

vindication of an elder doom;--it is for us to assert and to secure the

claim of every son of Adam to the common inheritance ratified by the

sentence, ‘In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy bread.’ We are

to establish no aristocracy of race or complexion, no caste which nature

and Revelation alike refuse to recognize, but the indefeasible right of

man to the soil which he subdues, and the muscles with which he subdues

it. If this be a sectional creed, it is a sectionality which at least

includes three hundred and fifty-nine degrees of the circle of man’s

political aspiration and physical activity, and we may as well be easy

under the imputation.”

The contempt with which Lowell treats the renewed threats of secession

illustrates the blindness which he shared with most of his friends, and

it is not likely that in after years he would have been so confident

that the South had no higher principles mingled with the baser ones of

love of prosperity and power. The “bloodless sword” of Davis also gave

way in his phrase to the “drippin’ red han’,” and the deep gravity of

war caused him to strike profounder notes. But it is not easy for men of

this generation to realize the galling sense of humiliation which the

men of Lowell’s day felt at the manner in which the general government

was made subservient to the demands of the slave power. So conscious

were they of the steady degeneration of the political sense, that they

were scarcely aware of the counter force of the rising tide of

anti-slavery and union sentiment, so that the great wave which swept

over the North after the attack upon Sumter came with almost as much a

surprise to them as to the South.

It is in confession of this political degeneracy that the article

proceeds, and Lowell lashes his countrymen with scorn for it, but he

refuses to believe that this is to be the fate of the republic. “When we

look back upon the providential series of events which prepared this

continent for the experiment of Democracy,--when we think of those

forefathers for whom our mother England shed down from her august

breasts the nutriment of ordered liberty, not unmixed with her best

blood in the day of her trial,--when we remember the first two acts of

our drama, that cost one king his head and his son a throne, and that

third which cost another the fairest appanage of his crown and gave a

new Hero to mankind,--we cannot believe it possible that this great

scene, stretching from ocean to ocean, was prepared by the Almighty only

for such men as Mr. Buchanan and his peers to show their feats of

juggling on, even though the thimble-rig be on so colossal a scale that

the stake is a territory larger than Britain. We cannot believe that

this unhistoried continent,--this virgin leaf in the great diary of

man’s conquest over the planet, on which our fathers wrote two words of

epic grandeur,--Plymouth and Bunker Hill,--is to bear for its colophon

the record of men who inherited greatness and left it pusillanimity,--a

republic, and made it anarchy--freedom, and were content as serfs,--of

men who, born to the noblest estate of grand ideas and fair expectancies

the world had ever seen, bequeathed the sordid price of them in gold.

The change is sad ’twixt now and then; the Great Republic is without

influence in the councils of the world; to be an American, in Europe, is

to be the accomplice of filibusters and slave-traders; instead of men

and thought, as was hoped of us, we send to the Old World cotton, corn,

and tobacco, and are but as one of her outlying farms. Are we basely

content with our pecuniary good-fortune? Do we look on the tall column

of figures on the credit side of our national ledger as a sufficing

monument of our glory as a people? Are we of the North better off as

provinces of the Slave-holding States than as colonies of Great Britain?

Are we content with our share in the administration of national affairs,

because we are to have the ministry to Austria, and because the

newspapers promise that James Gordon Bennett shall be sent out of the

country to fill it?”

The subordination of the Free States in the administration of the

government is traced to the moral disintegration which has set in, and

after a recital in incisive terms of the act in subversion of true

democracy which they have been compelled to witness, he closes with this

appeal: “It lies in the hands of the people of the Free States to rescue

themselves and the country by peaceable reform, ere it be too late, and

there be no remedy left but that dangerous one of revolution, toward

which Mr. Buchanan and his advisers seem bent on driving them....

Prosperity has deadened and bewildered us. It is time we remembered that

History does not concern herself about material wealth,--that the

life-blood of a nation is not that yellow tide which fluctuates in the

arteries of Trade,--that its true revenues are religion, justice,

sobriety, magnanimity, and the fair amenities of Art,--that it is only

by the soul that any people has achieved greatness and made lasting

conquests over the future. We believe there is virtue enough left in

the North and West to infuse health into our body politic; we believe

that America will reassume that moral influence among the nations which

she has allowed to fall into abeyance; and that our eagle, whose

morning-flight the world watched with hope and expectation, shall no

longer troop with unclean buzzards, but rouse himself and seek his eyrie

to brood new eaglets that in time shall share with him the lordship of

these Western heavens, and shall learn of him to shake the thunder from

their invincible wings.”

The merits and the defects of Lowell’s political writings appear in this

article. There is the divination of the real question, the reference to

moral principles, and the witty phrase; but also there is that sort of

coruscation of language which tends to conceal point and application.

The writing is that of a good talker rather than of a good pleader. The

very breadth of the play of mind in Lowell militated against directness

of attack. He finds the seat of the difficulty not in this or that

political blunder, but in a disintegration of the public conscience

which had long been going on, and he sees no remedy for this but in the

arousing of the individual responsibility. It is the voice of the

preacher, and even so not of the crusading preacher.

He was more in his own field when writing the article on “The American

Tract Society,” since here his wit and satire were engaged on a theme

where fundamental morals and expediency were at issue, and two articles

which followed on Rufus Choate and Caleb Cushing[2] had the incisiveness

of brilliant newspaper work, and a breadth not to be looked for in a

newspaper. “Phillips [the publisher] was so persuaded,” he writes to Mr.

Norton after the first had appeared, “of the stand given to the magazine

by the Choate article that he has been at me ever since for another. So

I have written a still longer one on Cushing. I think you will like

it--though, on looking over the Choate article this morning, I am

inclined to think that on the whole the better of the two. Better as a

whole, I mean, for there are passages in this beyond any in that, I

think. These personal things are not such as I should choose to do, for

they subject me to all manner of vituperation; but one must take what

immediate texts the newspapers afford him, and I accepted the

responsibility in accepting my post.”

It must be remembered that these articles were written two or three

years before the great crisis was reached, and when in the minds of

nearly all public men the question was one of everlasting debate, not

yet of action, except so far as the debate found concrete expression in

the struggle for possession in Kansas. In writing these personal papers

Lowell therefore was using his scorn and satire in defence of the

political idealists of whom he was one, and in attack of the political

trimmers of whom he took Choate and Cushing as representatives. Yet

even in these papers he recurs again and again to those fundamental

political questions which underlie all notions of persons and parties.

This is especially evident in the conclusion of the article on Caleb

Cushing.

“The ethical aspects of slavery,” he contends, “are not and cannot be

the subject of consideration with any party which proposes to act under

the Constitution of the United States. Nor are they called upon to

consider its ethnological aspect. Their concern with it is confined to

the domain of politics, and they are not called to the discussion of

abstract principles, but of practical measures. The question, even in

its political aspect, is one which goes to the very foundation of our

theories and our institutions. It is simply, shall the course of the

Republic be so directed as to subserve the interests of aristocracy or

of democracy? Shall our territories be occupied by lord and serf or by

intelligent freemen? by laborers who are owned, or by men who own

themselves? The Republican party has no need of appealing to prejudice

or passion. In this case there is a meaning in the phrase, ‘Manifest

Destiny.’ America is to be the land of the workers, the country where,

of all others, the intelligent brain and skilled hand of the mechanic,

and the patient labor of those who till their own fields, are to stand

them in greatest stead. We are to inaugurate and carry on the new system

which makes Man of more value than Property, which will one day put the

living value of industry above the dead value of capital. Our republic

was not born under Cancer, to go backward. Perhaps we do not like the

prospect? Perhaps we love the picturesque charm with which novelists and

poets have invested the old feudal order of things? That is not the

question. This New World of ours is to be the world of great workers and

small estates. The freemen whose capital is their two hands must

inevitably become hostile to a system clumsy and barbarous like that of

Slavery, which only carries to its last result the pitiless logic of

selfishness, sure at last to subject the toil of the many to the

irresponsible power of the few.”

In these papers Lowell again separated himself instinctively from the

extreme Abolitionists, the men, that is, who concentrated their

attention exclusively upon the sin of slavery, and refused to use any

political weapons for the overthrow of the system. He did not delay much

over the economic aspects of the matter, but based his attacks almost

wholly upon the eternal principles of Freedom. It was for Freedom,

almost as a personal figure, that he had been a free lance from his

youth, and he had come in his manhood to identify freedom with his

country till he had a passionate jealousy for the fair name of the

nation. He was not blind to the inconsistency which slavery created, but

he refused to accept slavery as a permanent condition, and was strenuous

in his belief that the fundamental, historical, and prophetic life of

the nation was aggressively free, and made for freedom.

Hence he identified himself with the Republican party, in its early

days, with cheerful alacrity, supporting it by his pen and his vote, and

hence, also, as the lines were drawn more closely at the time of the

election of Mr. Lincoln, his political articles in the _Atlantic_ became

more direct and more charged with a statesmanlike rather than with a

merely opportune character. In October, 1860, he printed a paper on “The

Election in November,” which is preserved in his “Political Essays.” It

is a survey of the field on the eve of the great election, in which he

aims to present the issue clearly. He finds it in the death struggle of

the slaveholding interest, which has so long dominated national

politics, but it is to him not a question of political preponderancy,

but of the moral integrity of the non-slaveholding States. “We believe,”

he says, “that this election is a turning-point in our history; for,

although there are four candidates, there are really, as everybody

knows, but two parties, and a single question that divides them.... The

cardinal question on which the whole policy of the country is to turn--a

question, too, which this very election must decide in one way or the

other--is the interpretation to be put upon certain clauses of the

Constitution.” After a witty analysis of the parties which trade most in

the term “conservative,” he makes a keen inquiry into the basis of

Southern civilization, with the purpose of considering what degree of

permanence there is in the society which rests on it, and reaches the

conclusion that “in such communities the seeds of an ‘irrepressible

conflict’ are surely, if slowly, ripening, and signs are daily

multiplying that the true peril to their social organization is looked

for, less in a revolt of the owned labor than in an insurrection of

intelligence in the labor that owns itself and finds itself none the

richer for it. To multiply such communities is to multiply weakness. The

election in November turns on the single and simple question, Whether we

shall consent to the indefinite multiplication of them; and the only

party which stands plainly and unequivocally pledged against such a

policy, nay, which is not either openly or impliedly in favor of it;--is

the Republican party.”

It is interesting to note that Lowell frankly expresses in this article

his regret that Lincoln instead of Seward should have been selected as

candidate for the presidency. He saw in Seward a reasonable and

persistent exponent of the cardinal doctrines of the party, and hence he

wished him at the front as the most conspicuous representative. “It was

assumed that his nomination would have embittered the contest, and

tainted the Republican creed with radicalism; but we doubt it. We cannot

think that a party gains by not hitting its hardest, or by sugaring its

opinions. Republicanism is not a conspiracy to obtain office under false

pretences. It has a definite aim, an earnest purpose, and the

unflinching tenacity of profound conviction.” Evidently he had not yet,

as very few at the East had, made the acquaintance of Mr. Lincoln, but

he accepts the nomination with confidence. “Mr. Lincoln,” he says, “has

proved both his ability and his integrity; he has had experience enough

in public affairs to make him a statesman, and not enough to make him a

politician.... He represents a party who know that true policy is

gradual in its advances, that it is conditional and not absolute, that

it must deal with facts and not with sentiments, but who know also that

it is wiser to stamp out evil in the spark than to wait till there is no

help but in fighting fire with fire. They are the only conservative

party, because they are the only one that is not willing to pawn

to-morrow for the means to gamble with to-day. They have no hostility to

the South, but a determined one to doctrines of whose ruinous tendency

every day more and more convinces them.” And again he emphatically

declares of the members of the party which he believes about to triumph

at the polls: “They believe that slavery is a wrong morally, a mistake

politically, and a misfortune practically, wherever it exists; that it

has nullified our influence abroad and forced us to compromise with our

better instincts at home; that it has perverted our government from its

legitimate objects, weakened the respect for the laws by making them the

tools of its purposes, and sapped the faith of men in any higher

political morality than interest or any better statesmanship than

chicane. They mean in every lawful way to hem it within its present

limits.”

Lowell confessed in a letter to Mr. Nordhoff,[3] written a few weeks

after the election, when it will be remembered there was very little

evidence to show that the Republican party had not recoiled from its own

success, that he was greatly puzzled to gauge the actual mind of the

public. “But one thing seems to me clear,” he says, “that we have been

running long enough by dead reckoning, and that it is time to take the

height of the sun of righteousness.” It was the time of Buchanan’s

attitude of helplessness, the logical result of a life spent in

adjustment of principle to occasion. “Is it the effect of democracy,”

Lowell asks, “to make all our public men cowards? An ounce of pluck just

now were worth a king’s ransom. There is one comfort, though a shabby

one, in the feeling that matters will come to such a pass that courage

will be forced upon us, and that when there is no hope left we shall

learn a little self-confidence from despair. That in such a crisis the

fate of the country should be in the hands of a sneak! If the

Republicans stand firm we shall be saved, even at the cost of disunion.

If they yield, it is all up with us and with the experiment of

democracy.”

When he wrote this letter, he had already written and indeed printed his

paper on “The Question of the Hour” in the _Atlantic_ for January, 1861.

However apparently inert and even dazed the North might be, and however

paralyzed the federal government, there was little indecision at the

South. South Carolina had already taken steps to “withdraw from the

Union,” and the Southern public men were in a high state of activity.

In this article, which has not been reprinted, Lowell considers briefly

the possibility of disunion through the action of the South. He is

somewhat incredulous of the imminence of this danger, and the real

question of the hour to him is whether the Free States, having taken a

stand for freedom, will maintain their self-possession and spirit. He

groans over the miserable straits to which the nation is reduced by

having at its head in this critical hour a man of such mediocrity as Mr.

Buchanan. Again he makes his familiar point that the political training

of the party in power has caused a distinct degeneration in politics,

and thus has brought about a state of things which renders resistance to

the treasonable conduct of the leaders of secession weak and

ineffective; and he points out with sagacity a source of weakness, which

nearly a generation later was to draw from him a new political moral.

“It has been the misfortune of the United States that the conduct of

their public affairs has passed more and more exclusively into the hands

of men who have looked on politics as a game to be played rather than as

a trust to be administered, and whose capital, whether of personal

consideration or of livelihood, has been staked on a turn of the cards.

A general skepticism has been induced, exceedingly dangerous in times

like these. The fatal doctrine of rotation in office has transferred the

loyalty of the numberless servants of the Government, and of those

dependent on or influenced by them, from the nation to a party. For

thousands of families, every change in the National Administration is

as disastrous as revolution, and the Government has thus lost that

influence which the idea of permanence and stability would exercise in a

crisis like the present. At the present moment, the whole body of

office-holders at the South is changed from a conservative to a

disturbing element by a sense of the insecurity of their tenure. Their

allegiance having always been to the party in power at Washington, and

not to the Government of the Nation, they find it easy to transfer it to

the dominant faction at home.”

Even granting that the secessionists carry out their schemes, the

losers, he points out, would not be the Free States. “The laws of trade

cannot be changed, and the same causes which have built up their

agriculture, commerce, and manufactures will not cease to be operative.

The real wealth and strength of states, other things being equal,

depends upon homogeneousness of population and variety of occupation,

with a common interest and common habits of thought. The cotton-growing

States, with their single staple, are at the mercy of chance. India,

Australia, nay Africa herself, may cut the thread of their prosperity.

Their population consists of two hostile races, and their bone and

muscle, instead of being the partners, are the unwilling tools of their

capital and intellect. The logical consequence of this political theory

is despotism, which the necessity of coercing the subject race will make

a military one.”

A month later the situation had become still more serious, and in his

article “E Pluribus Unum,” which is reprinted in “Political Essays,”

Lowell writes with an earnestness which appears even in the wit and

humor that play over the surface. After discussing with an impatient

scorn the sophisms of secession, he inquires if any new facts have come

to light since the election which would lead the people to reconsider

the resolution then made. “Since the election of Mr. Lincoln, not one of

the arguments has lost its force, not a cipher of the statistics has

been proved mistaken, on which the judgment of the people was made up.”

And then, after reaffirming the limitations of the power to be assumed

by the Republican party, he bursts forth:--

“But the present question is one altogether transcending all limits of

party and all theories of party policy. It is a question of national

existence; it is a question whether Americans shall govern America, or

whether a disappointed clique shall nullify all government now, and

render a stable government difficult hereafter; it is a question, not

whether we shall have civil war under certain contingencies, but whether

we shall prevent it under any. It is idle, and worse than idle, to talk

about Central Republics that can never be formed. We want neither

Central Republics nor Northern Republics, but our own Republic and that

of our fathers, destined one day to gather the whole continent under a

flag that shall be the most august in the world. Having once known what

it was to be members of a grand and peaceful constellation, we shall

not believe, without further proof, that the laws of our gravitation are

to be abolished, and we flung forth into chaos, a hurly-burly of

jostling and splintering stars, whenever Robert Toombs or Robert Rhett,

or any other Bob of the secession kite, may give a flirt of

self-importance. The first and greatest benefit of government is that it

keeps the peace, that it insures every man his right, and not only that

but the permanence of it. In order to do this, its first requisite is

stability; and this once firmly settled, the greater the extent of

conterminous territory that can be subjected to one system and one

language and inspired by one patriotism, the better.... Slavery is no

longer the matter in debate, and we must beware of being led off upon

that side-issue. The matter now in hand is the reëstablishment of order,

the reaffirmation of national unity, and the settling once for all

whether there can be such a thing as a government without the right to

use its power in self-defence.” And he closes with the solemn words:

“Peace is the greatest of blessings, when it is won and kept by manhood

and wisdom; but it is a blessing that will not long be the housemate of

cowardice. It is God alone who is powerful enough to let His authority

slumber; it is only His laws that are strong enough to protect and

avenge themselves. Every human government is bound to make its laws so

far resemble His that they shall be uniform, certain, and unquestionable

in their operations; and this it can do only by a timely show of power,

and by an appeal to that authority which is of divine right, inasmuch

as its office is to maintain that order which is the single attribute of

that Infinite Reason which we can clearly apprehend and of which we have

hourly example.”

The article headed “The Pickens-and-Stealins’ Rebellion,” which appeared

in the _Atlantic_ for June, 1861, was the latest of the political

articles contributed by Lowell to the magazine while he was editor, and

appeared just as he surrendered his charge to Mr. Fields. It was written

immediately after the attack on Fort Sumter and in the glow of that

popular rising which swept away all the flimsy structure of the

politicians and showed the might of that conviction which Lowell never

doubted to lie in the minds of the American people. He longed then for a

great leader. Major Anderson served for a brief hour to typify the

spirit of uncompromising fidelity to duty, but Lowell was disappointed

in Lincoln’s public utterances. He was impatient at the President’s

caution, and especially at the temporizing policy which he pursued

toward the Border States, and he traced the course of events before the

first gun was fired on Sumter with the evident conviction that a firmer

policy would have been surer to defeat the plans of the Confederacy; but

the splendid assertion of the Union spirit fills him with an almost awed

sense of joy. “We have no doubt of the issue,” he writes. “We believe

that the strongest battalions are always on the side of God. The

Southern army will be fighting for Jefferson Davis, or at most for the

liberty of self-misgovernment, while we go forth for the defence of

principles which alone make government august and civil society

possible. It is the very life of the nation that is at stake. There is

no question here of dynasties, races, religions, but simply whether we

will consent to include in our Bill of Rights--not merely as of equal

validity with all other rights, whether natural or acquired, but by its

very nature transcending and abrogating them all--the Right of Anarchy.

We must convince men that treason against the ballot-box is as dangerous

as treason against a throne, and that, if they play so desperate a game,

they must stake their lives on the hazard.... A ten years’ war would be

cheap that gave us a country to be proud of, and a flag that should

command the respect of the world because it was the symbol of the

enthusiastic unity of a great nation.... We cannot think that the war we

are entering on can end without some radical change in the system of

African slavery. Whether it be doomed to a sudden extinction, or to a

gradual abolition through economical causes, this war will not leave it

where it was before. As a power in the state its reign is already over.

The fiery tongue of the batteries in Charleston harbor accomplished in

one day a conversion which the constancy of Garrison and the eloquence

of Phillips had failed to bring about in thirty years. And whatever

other result this war is destined to produce, it has already won for us

a blessing worth everything to us as a nation in emancipating the public

opinion of the North.” Thus in his last sentence he reiterates the

judgment which he had over and over again pronounced in the whole series

of these political papers, for he never lost sight of the fundamental

fact that freedom resides in the spirit of man and is but recorded in

his institutions.

Once more he wrote a prose paper for the _Atlantic_, moved by the

attitude in England, for with others of his kind Lowell took grievously

to heart the comments of the English press and the actions of the

British government. In this paper, published December, 1861, entitled

“Self-Possession _vs._ Prepossession,” he finds unmistakable symptoms of

reaction in England, since 1848, against liberalism in politics, and

tries the criticism of the United States government in which the press

indulged by the action of England toward Ireland and India; and finally

he points out the restrictions imposed on any constitutional government

by the very conditions of its existence, forbidding it to act in advance

of the convictions of its people. This he does to defend the

administration against the charge that it is indifferent to the question

of emancipation. He is impatient indeed of the extreme caution of Mr.

Lincoln and his associates, but he is nevertheless of the opinion that

the time has not yet come for turning the war into a crusade. It is

interesting to mark how uppermost in Lowell’s mind is the cause of

national unity. Time was when he drew near to the position taken by some

of his anti-slavery associates that disunion was preferable to

complicity with slavery; but as the conflict between the two opposing

forces deepened, he took more and more steadily the larger view, and his

democratic principles became bound up with the unity of the nation, and

at last with the supremacy of law as represented by the national cause.

“Is this then,” he breaks out fervently at the close of his paper, “to

be a commonplace war, a prosaic and peddling quarrel about cotton? Shall

there be nothing to enlist enthusiasm or kindle fanaticism? Are we to

have no cause like that for which our English republican ancestors died

so gladly on the field, with such dignity on the scaffold?--no cause

that shall give us a hero, who knows but a Cromwell? To our minds,

though it may be obscure to Englishmen, who look on Lancashire as the

centre of the universe, no army was ever enlisted for a nobler service

than ours. Not only is it national life and a foremost place among

nations that is at stake, but the vital principle of Law itself, the

august foundation on which the very possibility of government, above all

of self-government, rests as in the hollow of God’s own hand. If

democracy shall prove itself capable of having raised twenty millions of

people to a level of thought where they can appreciate this cardinal

truth, and can believe no sacrifice too great for its defence and

establishment, then democracy will have vindicated itself beyond all

chance of future cavil. Here, we think, is a Cause the experience of

whose vicissitudes and the grandeur of whose triumph will be able to

give us heroes and statesmen. The Slave-Power must be humbled, must be

punished,--so humbled and so punished as to be a warning forever; but

slavery is an evil transient in its cause and its consequence, compared

with those which would result from unsettling the faith of a nation in

its own manhood, and setting a whole generation of men hopelessly adrift

in the formless void of anarchy.”

The reserve with which he speaks of the President’s policy is the wise

tone to be adopted in a printed article. In his private letters, where

such caution is not needed, he gives expression openly to his

impatience. In a letter written at the same time as this article, he

says: “I confess that my opinion of the Government does not rise, to say

the least. If we are saved it will be God’s doing, not man’s, and will

He save those who are not worth saving? Lincoln may be right, for aught

I know,--prudence is certainly a good drag upon virtue,--but I guess an

ounce of Frémont is worth a pound of long Abraham. Mr. L. seems to have

a theory of carrying on war without hurting the enemy. He is incapable,

apparently, of understanding that they _ought_ to be hurt. The doing

good to those that despitefully entreat us was not meant for enemies of

the commonwealth. The devil’s angels are those that do his work, and for

such there is a lake of fire and brimstone prepared. We have been

undertaking to frighten the Devil with cold pitch.

“At the same time it looks as if the rebels must be losing more than we.

They _must_ be poorly off for most things that go to make up the

efficiency of an army, and if they can’t attack us what can they do? I

am in a constant state of _un_pleasurable excitement. Jemmy[4] and

Willy[5] are at Leesburg, in full sight of the enemy’s pickets, and I

can’t bear to think of either of them being hurt. Mary was here last

night, and though she puts a good face on it, there was something very

painful to me in the hoarse hollowness of her voice. If they should die

in battle well on into the enemy’s lines, it would be all that one could

ask, but it would be dreadful to have them picked off by those murdering

cowards. Let’s think of something else.”

A month later, and the boys he spoke of so affectionately and

tremulously had fallen. In that most affecting of the second series of

the “Biglow Papers,” “Mr. Hosea Biglow to the Editor of the _Atlantic

Monthly_,” printed at the close of the war, he could refer to them in

verse which holds all the passion of tears. Now, he can only send

tidings to his most intimate friend in a few restrained words: “We have

the worst news. Dear Willie is killed, and James badly wounded. They

must have behaved like men. Think of poor Mary, whose husband is so ill

that he cannot be told of it. She does not _know_ it yet, though she is

prepared. But he will be brought home this afternoon. He was truly a

noble young fellow. Simple, brave, and pure I knew him to be in a very

rare measure. We have the pride of knowing that our men _must_ have

done well. Of the officers of the 20th, two were drowned, and _all_ the

rest (except Col. Lee) wounded. Willie was the only one killed. Wendell

Holmes wounded. Last despatch says, ‘Lowell and Holmes doing well this

morning,’--that’s to-day. Thank God for that, and that they all did

their duty.” Two days later he added: “He came home yesterday afternoon,

his face little changed, they tell me, and with a smile on it. He got

his wound as we could wish. The adjutant of the regiment was hit, Willie

sprang forward to help him, and was shot instantly. Jamie sprang to help

him, and was hit, but will be about again in ten days or so.... It is

some consolation to think that he was struck in so graceful an action,

and his wound is in front, as I knew it would be.”

The depth of feeling which appears in his prose at this time, as he

tries to set forth the essential character of the great conflict, could

scarcely fail to find manifestation in poetry, since that was his native

speech. Yet it required genuine possession of mind. In the years just

preceding the actual breaking out of war Lowell could, as we have seen,

treat with badinage such manifestations as the American Tract Society,

and the speech-making of Choate and Cushing; he could, indeed, pass in

these papers from satire to earnest examination of fundamentals; but

somehow he could not bring himself to use the keener weapon which he had

handled so skilfully in the discussion over Texas and the Mexican War.

“Friendly people say to me sometimes,” he writes to Thomas Hughes, 13

September, 1859, “‘write us more “Biglow Papers,”’ and I have even been

simple enough to try, only to find that I could not.” And a couple of

months later R. G. White writes: “The _Atlantic_ has just come in, and I

miss what you led me to expect from your friend B. O. F. Sawin.” He had

plainly made a deliberate attempt, for in July of this year he was

writing to Mr. Norton: “I have a new ‘Biglow’ running in my head, and I

shall write it as soon as my brain clears off. At present I feel all the

time like the next morning without having had the day before, which is

too bad. I _think_ my new ‘Biglow’ will be funny. If not you will never

see it. It will be on the reopening of the slave trade, and some rather

humorous combinations have come into my mind. We shall see.”

It is not improbable that the impetus to verse came from the stirring of

his personal emotions in the autumn of 1861, when he was following with

anxious yet proud emotions the career of the two nephews whom he loved

with that freedom which an uncle bestows on those who, not his own

children, are yet his children’s nearest kin. It was on 20 September

that he wrote of the “constant state of _un_pleasurable excitement”

under which he labored. On 8 October he writes to Mr. Fields, who had

been urging him to send a contribution to the _Atlantic_: “I set about a

poem last night,--_apropos_ of the times,--and hope to finish it

to-morrow, and if it turn out to be good for anything, I will send it

at once, and you can print it or no as you like.”

This poem was “The Washers of the Shroud,” which appeared in the

November _Atlantic_. The same thought prevails in this poem which found

ampler expression in his prose, as we have seen, a conviction that his

country was not to “join the waiting ghosts of names,” but was to have

the

“larger manhood, saved for those

That walk unblenching through the trial-fires.”[6]

How deeply he felt the poem may be seen not only in the solemn measure

of the verse itself, but in the confession of physical exhaustion in

which the writing of it left him.[7] Most impressive was the coincidence

of the final stanza with the news which reached Elmwood just as the poem

itself fell under the eye of the great public. “God, give us peace!” he

had said in the penultimate stanza,--

“God, give us peace!--not such as lulls to sleep,

But sword on thigh, and brow with purpose knit!

And let our Ship of State to harbor sweep,

Her ports all up, her battle-lanterns lit,

And her leashed thunders gathering for their leap!”

And then,

“So cried I, with clenched hands and passionate pain,

Thinking of dear ones by Potomac’s side:

Again the loon laughed mocking, and again

The echoes bayed far down the night and died,

While waking I recalled my wandering brain.”[8]

There is a single sentence in a letter written four days before the

fatal news came which helps to show that side of Lowell’s nature out of

which his best work sprang, the attitude of receptivity to the large

elemental life. Taken in connection with the sudden blow so soon to

fall, it enables one to understand better the power by which Lowell was

aroused to action: “These last rains have been _lifting_ the leaves (si

levan le foglie) with a vengeance, making as clean work as ever Highland

Cateran with cattle. I can’t understand people who call autumn a

melancholy season unless they are cockneys indeed. To a country-bred

fellow like me, the exquisite atmosphere and the dear associations with

nutting and fishing and _trying_ to shoot ducks, and lying under warm

hillsides, make it anything but sad. Even to see the leaves fall is a

pleasure to me which few others match.”

Certain it is that from this time there seemed to be a new and, I think,

loftier and more sustained spirit in his writing upon the great issues

of the day. For one thing, he found vent in a rapid succession of poems

which form the second series of the “Biglow Papers.” Early in December,

1861, he wrote the first, apparently under pressure to return to this

form. “It was clean against my critical judgment,” he writes, “for I

don’t believe in resuscitations--we hear no good of the _posthumous_

Lazarus--but I may get into the vein and do some good;” and it is clear

that the effort did seat him again in the saddle, for he followed his

first paper, which appeared in January, 1862, with five more in

successive months, which were in effect pungent comments on the course

of events in that dark period. He had apparently the stimulus of an

engagement with Mr. Fields, the editor of the _Atlantic_, for we find

him in August confessing his inability to bring to light another paper

which was confined somewhere in his perplexed brain.

Lowell could not of course escape his own shadow cast by the brilliant

success of the first series, although fourteen years in a man’s memory

does not raise such an accumulation of fame as it does in the memory of

spectators. He was doubtless a bit nervous as he essayed to repeat an

earlier impromptu, for such the first series may fairly be called, but

the nervousness really attacked only the beginning of his effort; once

he was fairly under way, the old assurance all came back, and it was

easy enough to indulge in that vernacular which was so imbedded in his

early consciousness as to be not an acquisition but an inheritance. The

Yankee dialect and macaronics, both of which were the lingo of his

boyhood, were so native to his wit that he handled them in maturity as

freely as one’s hand grasps in a return to the country the scythe which

has been swung in boyhood.

It is perhaps more to the point to observe that, as in the earlier

series, the figures of this pastoral had been developed from suddenly

designed sketches until they stood full formed to the reader in the

resultant book, now, upon the resumption of the art, they became simply

accepted types to be illustrated rather than developed; and there is

therefore from the start a firmness of touch and a solidity of modelling

which give to the entire series an air of certainty and ease, as if the

author had no need to add or rub out. There is possibly a little loss of

buoyancy and spontaneity, but if so there is compensation in the touch

of wisdom and especially of deep feeling characteristic of the series as

a whole. Lowell is so sure of the rustic form he is using, and of the

old-fashioned pedantry of Mr. Wilbur, that he can draw more confidently

from deeper soundings, as indeed the very growth of his own nature

compels him to do. Thus, while the satire of the earlier series is more

amusing, that of the second is more biting. For when he was dealing with

the iniquities of the Mexican war, he was after all contemplating what

might be deemed a cutaneous disease as compared with the deadly virus

now attacking the most vital part of the national body, and, moreover,

fourteen years of personal experience such as he had known could

scarcely fail to give him more penetration.

There are one or two surface indications of all this which may be

noticed. Thus, though the Reverend Homer Wilbur of the second series is

the same serene, absconding sort of parson as in the first, now and

then Lowell forgets the impersonation and speaks in his own voice. This

is especially observable in the second of the papers. What Mr. Wilbur

says there respecting the English and their criticism of America can

scarcely be distinguished in manner from Lowell’s own utterances in

prose papers already referred to. And again, in the first number,

written when Lowell was freshly grieving over the loss of his nephews,

there is a trumpet note in the voice of Mr. Wilbur which is both the

perfection of art and the sincerity of feeling. The parson is defending

himself against the charge of inconsistency in allowing his youngest son

to raise a company for the war. He refers with characteristic

complacency to the example he himself had set by serving as a chaplain

in the war of 1812, and adds: “It was, indeed, grievous to send my

Benjamin, the child of my old age; but after the discomfiture of

Manassas, I with my own hands did buckle on his armor, trusting in the

great Comforter and Commander for strength according to my need. For

truly the memory of a brave son dead in his shroud were a greater staff

of my declining years than a living coward (if those may be said to have

lived who carry all of themselves into the grave with them), though his

days might be long in the land, and he should get much goods. It is not

till our earthen vessels are broken that we find and truly possess the

treasure that was laid up in them.”

It is possible that Lowell took a little alarm when he read over the

prose introduction to his second paper, for thereafter there is a

studied care to make Mr. Wilbur speak in his own measured tones, even to

an indulgence in the introduction to the fifth paper in a piece of most

elaborate nonsense mocking the antiquary’s enthusiasm. The manner, at

last, in which Mr. Wilbur’s death is announced, the bringing upon the

scenes for obituary purposes of his colleague the Reverend Jeduthun

Hitchcock, who is deliciously discriminated from his senior yet shown to

have been formed out of the same clay, the posthumous sayings from Mr.

Wilbur’s Table Talk,--all this is conceived in a most sympathetic and

genuine spirit of art. The delineation of old age, indeed, in this

character was, one may guess, something more than artistic imagining.

There is a bit of nonsense which Lowell wrote to Miss Norton in 1864,

which for its full effect ought to be reproduced in facsimile, for he

took the most elaborate pains to transform his hand into that of a poor

trembling old nonagenarian: “Since I lost my last tooth, I am a great

deal more comfortable, I thank you. The new sett maide for me Doctor

Tucker’s great granson works well and I eat comfortable. Let me

recommend Tinto’s hair dyes. It makes all black to be sure, and you look

like your fotograms. My palsy hardly troubles me at all now. My memory

is as good as it ever was, and my hand-writing as good as in my earliest

years. I wrote a little poem last week which Fanny thinks as good as

anything I ever did. It begins

Let dogs delight to bark and bite

For ’tis _their_ nature, too.

But I don’t think she hears very well with her new trumpet.

“Certainly I will dine with you on Sunday and shall expect you on

Thursday if Tuesday should be a fair day. The death of Holmes is an

awful warning, but one can’t expect to be very strong at ninety nine. I

remember his mother who died near fifty years ago.”

The fun we make often discloses the gravity that lies behind, as if we

could exorcise a spirit by jesting at it, and Lowell was tormented,

strange to say, by the apprehension of old age long before he approached

it. There is, therefore, something pathetic as well as humorous in the

fragment of Mr. Wilbur’s letter which introduces the “Latest Views of

Mr. Biglow.” It is the imitation palsy again, and yet behind Mr.

Wilbur’s tremulous phrases one reads those strong convictions which

Lowell held to throughout the perplexing days before Gettysburg. “Though

I believe Slavery,” Mr. Wilbur says, “to have been the cause of it [the

war] by so thoroughly demoralizing Northern politicks for its own

purposes as to give opportunity and hope to treason, yet I would not

have our thought and purpose diverted from their true object,--the

maintenance of the idea of Government. We are not merely suppressing an

enormous riot, but contending for the possibility of permanent order

coexisting with democratical fickleness; and while I would not

superstitiously venerate form to the sacrifice of substance, neither

would I forget that an adherence to precedent and prescription can

alone give that continuity and coherence under a democratic constitution

which are inherent in the person of a despotick monarch and the

selfishness of an aristocratical class. _Stet pro ratione voluntas_ is

as dangerous in a majority as in a tyrant.”

Distinct as are the judgments of Mr. Wilbur, it is after all in the

poems from Hosea Biglow and his foil Birdofredom Sawin that we get the

freest and most luminous expression of Lowell’s mind. He began the new

series in a low key by recounting the experience of the renegade Yankee

during the years since the Mexican war, but the affair of the Trent

happened immediately after he had written the first paper, and before

completing Birdofredom’s story he dashed off that quaint fable of the

dialogue between the Bridge and the Monument, ending with the verses

“Jonathan to John,” which was a genuine delivery of his mind. “If I am

not mistaken,” he wrote to Mr. Fields on sending it, “it will _take_.

’Tis about Mason and Slidell, and I have ended it with a refrain that I

hope has a kind of _tang_ to it.” The judgments which he passed in it

were not momentary impulses. Three years later he wrote a letter[9]

which repeats in prose much the same sentiments. It would be difficult

to find a better exponent than Lowell of the temper of educated

Americans toward England, a temper which discriminates sharply between

the England of history and of personal affection and the England that

registered in the nineteenth century the prejudices of a lingering

bureaucratic régime.

In the third, fourth, and fifth papers Lowell used his satire

effectively to sting his countrymen into a perception of the meaner side

of politics, for his incessant cry throughout his political career was

for independence and idealism, and the obverse was an unfailing

denunciation of shams and cowardly truckling to popular views. It was

when he came to the close of the six numbers which he appears to have

agreed to write that he gave himself up to the luxury of that bobolink

song which always swelled in his throat when spring melted into summer.

“Sunthin’ in the Pastoral Line,” like the opening notes of “The Vision

of Sir Launfal,” like “Under the Willows,” “Al Fresco,” and similar

poems, is the insistent call of Nature which is perhaps the most

unmistakable witness in Lowell of a voice most his own because least

subject to his own volition. To be sure, Lowell had a truth he wished to

press,--the need of crushing the rattlesnake in its head of slavery; but

he must needs first clear his throat by a long sweet draught of nature,

and the mingling of pure delight in out of doors with the perplexities

of the hour renders this number of the “Biglow Papers” one that goes

very straight to the reader’s heart.

There is no flagging in this monthly succession, as one reads the

“Papers” now, but Lowell hated the compulsory business of a poem a

month,--as he says in this latest number:--

“I thought ef this ’ere milkin’ o’ the wits

So much a month, war n’t givin’ Natur’ fits,--

Ef folks war n’t druv, findin’ their own milk fail,

To work the cow that hez an iron tail,

An’ ef idees ’thout ripenin’ in the pan

Would send up cream to humor ary man.”

And he wrote to Fields, 5 June, 1862: “It’s no use. I reverse the gospel

difficulty, and while the flesh is willing enough, the spirit is weak.

My brain must lie fallow a spell,--there is no super-phosphate for those

worn-out fields. Better no crop than small potatoes. I want to have the

_passion_ of the thing on me again and beget lusty Biglows. I am all the

more dejected because you have treated me so well. But I must rest

awhile. My brain is out of kilter.” And again in August he wrote to the

same: “Give me a victory and I will give you a poem: but I am now clear

down in the bottom of the well, where I see the Truth too near to make

verses of.”

So it was six months before he wrote again, this time the “Latest Views

of Mr. Biglow.” He carried out his plan, after this interval, of putting

an end to Mr. Wilbur. The verses repeat his impatience for some action,

some great leader, but at the close he bursts forth into exultation over

Lincoln’s proclamation of emancipation. And then, for two years and

more, Hosea keeps silence.

Yet if victory did not arouse him, the greater theme of sacrifice called

out one of his most solemn and stirring odes, that dedicated to the

memory of Robert Gould Shaw, and entitled “Memoriæ Positum R. G. Shaw.”

It may well be read in connection with the other poem suggested by the

events of the war in 1863, “Two Scenes from the Life of Blondel.” There

is in this parable a half confession of failure, a reflection upon

ideals once held gallantly and then trailed in the dust of

disappointment. He seems to have written the first scene, in which

Lincoln is the ideal captain, without at first designing the second, for

he writes to Mr. Fields, who already had the first: “I have written a

Palinode to ‘Blondel,’ and so made two poems of it. The latter half is

half-humorous and, I think, will help the effect. You see how dangerous

it is to pay a poet handsomely beforehand. I don’t know where I shall

stop. I shall be sending an epic presently.... I should like your notion

of the second part of Blondel, which (in the first relief of incubation)

I am inclined to think clever. But there was nothing wiser than Horace’s

ninth year--only it overwhelms us like a ninth wave (that’s Wendell’s,

_tenth_ the Latins said, but I wanted nine), and if we kept our verses

so long we should print none of them. A strong argument for monthly

magazines, you see.” There is so little of the essentially dramatic

about Lowell’s poetry that it is not unfair to hear his voice only

slightly changed in such a poem as this. But all such speculative and

half-moody expressions gave way before the dignity of Shaw’s death. “I

would rather have my name known and blest, as his will be,” Lowell

writes to Colonel Shaw’s mother, “through all the hovels of an outcast

race, than blaring from all the trumpets of repute.” And the ultimate

judgment which he held, despite the confusion wrought by all the meaner

passions of the time which vext his soul, rings out clearly in the final

lines:--

“Dear Land, whom triflers now make bold to scorn,

(Thee! from whose forehead Earth awaits her morn,)

How nobler shall the sun

Flame in thy sky, how braver breathe thy air,

That thou bred’st children who for thee couldst dare

And die as thine have done!”[10]

For the one note, in the discord of the war, heard more and more clearly

by Lowell, was that of triumph for democracy as incarnate in his

country. No one can read his writings from this time forward without

observing how deep a passion this love of his country was. In earlier

life he had had a passion for Freedom, and the Freedom which was to him

as the Lady to her knight, was very comprehensive and took many forms.

Now, in his maturity, and when he saw the one great blot fading from the

escutcheon, there was a steady concentration of passion upon that

incorporation of freedom in the fair land which seemed to his

imagination to have gotten her soul, and no longer Earth’s biggest

country, but to have

“risen up Earth’s greatest nation.”

“The Biglow Papers” had appeared in the _Atlantic_. There also had been

printed his “Blondel” and “Memoriæ Positum R. G. Shaw;” but since the

article in December, 1861, “Self-Possession _vs._ Prepossession,” and

another in January, 1863,[11] he had not made that magazine the vehicle

for prose articles on public affairs, as had been his practice during

his editorship of it. Now, at the close of 1863, he entered upon an

engagement which was to give him a new medium for communication, and one

which he used effectively for the next ten years. The _North American

Review_, which had been founded by a number of cultivated gentlemen in

Boston in 1815, was modelled on the famous quarterlies of Great Britain,

and had for fifty years been the leading representative in America of

dignified scholarship and literature. At times it had been spirited and

aggressive, but for the most part it had stood rather for elegant

leisure and a somewhat remote criticism. For the last ten years it had

been conducted in a temperate and careful way by the Rev. Dr. Andrew P.

Peabody, who held by the old traditions. But its fortunes were at a low

ebb, it no longer was a power, and the publishers, hoping to reinstate

it in authority, applied to Lowell to take charge of it. He saw the

opportunity it would give him, and he accepted the offer, but only on

condition that Mr. Norton should be associated with him as active

editor. The advertisement put forth by the publishers was such as to

quiet the minds of any who might be uneasy over a change of conduct;

for, after naming the now editors, it characterized them as “gentlemen

who, for sound and elegant scholarship, have achieved an enviable

reputation, both in this country and in Europe; and whose taste,

education, and experience eminently qualify them for the position they

have assumed. Of the former it may be said that his essays in the

periodical which, under his editorship, reached the summit of its fame,

surpassed in vigor and force those of any contributor; of the latter,

that he has ‘added new honors to the name he bears by the extent and

variety of his knowledge, and by the force and elegance which he has

exhibited both as a writer and a speaker.’ And of both, that their

thorough loyalty to the liberal institutions of our country, and their

sympathy with the progressive element of the times, renders them

peculiarly fitted to conduct the _Review_, which has by competent

authority been pronounced ‘the leading literary organ of the country,’

and of which it has been said ‘it has not its equal in America, nor its

superior in the world.’” The advertisement continued in measured phrases

to announce the policy of the review, and it would have been difficult

for its old subscribers to detect any promise of change, though as a

matter of fact, while the term scholarly could equally well be applied

to it in the next ten years, the scholarship was more exact, the scope

of the review was greatly widened, and for pungency and thoroughness of

criticism, for good English and for breadth of view, it was so

strikingly marked, that it became a signal example of how a magazine

may at once be lifted to a higher level without being compelled to turn

a somersault.

The advertisement, however, which Crosby & Nichols put forth no doubt

with a dignified elation, excited Lowell’s ire, and he gave vent to his

annoyance in a rhymed letter to his colleague:--

“DEAR CHARLES,--

I am mad as a piper

And could bite those old files like a viper,

Reading their d--d advertisement

For donkeys, and not for the wise, meant,

(Which undoubtedly tickles

Messrs. Crosby and Nichols

To the innermost jecur

Or brain--where they’re weaker!)

I feel as if the rogues meant to work us

Like the clowns of a travelling circus,

Blowing their trumpets before us

In a brazen and asinine chorus,

Sending advance troops of blackguards

To blear all the fences with placards,--

‘This is the famous Dan Rice, sirs,

Whose jokes are beyond any price, sirs,

And this is that eminent man Joe

Grimes, so sublime on the banjo,

And especially great in the prances

Of the best Ethiopian dances!’

Why, I feel my shamed visage o’erdarkle

With my last evening’s waterproof charcoal!

Dear Charles, all your articles toss by

And see Messrs. Nichols and Crosby:

Curl up your moustache like a bandit

And tell ’em we never will stand it

To be treated (I put here one _more_ curse)

Like a couple of literate porkers

(Nay, a literate one would much rather

Be made into pork like his father.)

I’d go, but must hurry to college

To help the confusion of knowledge,

So remain

Your true friend, as you know well,

!!!!‘The world famous James Russell Lowell

Shuperior every way vastly

To the late justly-favorite Astley!!!!’”

Though Mr. Norton took the laboring oar in editing, Lowell put in his

stroke now and then, as may be seen in a letter to Mr. Motley asking for

a contribution.[12] In that he sets forth the situation in a few

sentences: “You have heard,” he says, “that Norton and I have undertaken

to edit the _North American_,--a rather Sisyphian job, you will say. It

wanted three chief elements to be successful. It wasn’t thoroughly, that

is, thickly and thinly, loyal, it wasn’t lively, and it had no

particular opinions on any particular subject. It was an eminently safe

periodical, and accordingly was in great danger of running aground. It

was an easy matter, of course, to make it loyal,--even to give it

opinions (such as they were), but to make it alive is more difficult.

Perhaps the day of the quarterlies is gone by, and those megatheria of

letters may be in the mere course of nature withdrawing to their last

swamps to die in peace. Anyhow, here we are with our megatherium on our

hands, and we must strive to find what will fill his huge belly, and

keep him alive a little longer.”

That this and similar letters were not so much evidence of Lowell’s

energetic assumption of editorial tasks as special efforts coaxed out of

him by his associate, may be inferred from a letter to Mr. Norton

written three days later, in which he begins: “It is abominable that you

should have been gone a whole month without a letter from me,--and yet

so wholly in accordance with natural laws that you must be pleased when

I explain the reason of my silence. That I have thought of you I need

not say. Well, do you understand the nature of a cask, and accordingly

the analogous human nature of a ‘vessel of wrath?’ A cask has a bung

which is kept tight, and a spigot through which it delights to unbosom

itself into the can for refreshment or mirth. But this is not all. It

may be never so small,--a needle might stop it,--but _if_ stopped, not a

drop shall you coax out of the faucet for love or money. Now when I read

your letter, walking in the hot sun along the side of the graveyard, I

was full of good liquor reaming ripe to flow for you. But you bound me

by a vow to write to Motley ere I wrote to you, and in so doing

hermetically sealed the vent, and locked up all my vintage in myself. I

could have written to _you_, but Motley was another thing. And first

came Commencement, then Phi Beta, then the making of my salt hay, and at

last I got it done and a letter also to Howells.”

But if Lowell shirked the drudgery of editing he gave what was much more

worth while to the _Review_ in his frequent contributions. During the

remainder of the war, and during the early stages of the reconstruction

period, he had in nearly every number a political article. The new

editors issued their first number in January, 1864, and Lowell took for

his subject “The President’s Policy.” The last direct public expression

he had given of his estimate of Mr. Lincoln was in his _Atlantic_

article in December, 1861. Two years had passed since that time and the

question was now looming up of the election of Mr. Lincoln’s successor.

The election was to be held in November, 1864, and the four articles

which Lowell wrote in the quarterly numbers of that year are all

practically arguments for the reëlection of Mr. Lincoln. The January

article, combined (with some confusion of tenses) with what he wrote

after the President’s death, now appears under the title “Abraham

Lincoln,” in “Political Essays.” The estimate of the President, made for

the most part when Lincoln was under fire, not only from his political

opponents, but from those who might be expected to support him, is a

clear appreciation of those great qualities of patience and balance of

mind which have come to be recognized as the source of his strength.

Lowell, as we have seen, had not at the outset refrained from a critical

attitude toward Lincoln. Now he confesses his own blunder and throws the

confession into the scales when weighing him. “Mr. Lincoln, as it seems

to us in reviewing his career, though we have sometimes in our

impatience thought otherwise, has always waited, as a wise man should,

till the right moment brought up all his reserves;” and he reads well a

prime element of Lincoln’s power when he makes distinction between the

conscientiously rigid _doctrinaire_ and the statesman who achieves his

triumph by quietly accomplishing his ends. “Mr. Lincoln’s perilous task

has been to carry a rather shaky raft through the rapids, making fast

the unrulier logs as he could snatch opportunity, and the country is to

be congratulated that he did not think it his duty to run straight at

all hazards, but cautiously to assure himself with his setting pole

where the main current was, and keep steadily to that. He is still in

wild water, but we have faith that his skill and sureness of eye will

bring him out right at last.” What especially bound Lincoln’s policy to

Lowell’s confidence was the fact that its pole-star was national

integrity, and in tracing as he does the slow process by which the

President carried the nation with him till the abolition of slavery

became no longer the cry of a party but the logical necessity of a

nation, he practically unfolds the process of his own development.[13]

In the April number of the _North American_ Lowell took for his text

General McClellan’s Report, and applied his powers of analysis to this

for the purpose of constructing the figure of Lincoln’s opponent.

McClellan was no longer in the field, but he was the military critic of

the administration and the man about whom the forces in opposition were

gradually collecting, since he seemed to have been thrown up for this

purpose by the elements which were most active. McClellan’s report,

which had recently appeared, covered the period from July, 1861, to

November, 1862, a period which in the rapid progress of events was

already historical and could be examined in the light of later

movements. To McClellan, however, the Report was an _apologia pro vita

sua_, and nothing had happened since it was written, so essentially was

he a critic rather than a creator. Lowell was quick to see the weakness

of McClellan’s position in defending himself, preliminary to assuming a

position where he was to defend the country, and in making his defence

issue in charges against the authority under whose orders he had acted.

He saw not so much the politician under the soldier’s cloak as a man of

such calibre as fitted him to become the tool of politicians, and so

self-conscious that once he is possessed of the notion of his political

importance he looks at everything from a personal point of view. The

Report gave abundant evidence of this, and Lowell follows him through

the narrative, not as a military critic but as a student of human

nature, and in his summary asks the very pertinent question if a man of

this make-up is a man to put at the head of affairs. “Though we think,”

he says, “great injustice has been done by the public to General

McClellan’s really high merit as an officer, yet it seems to us that

those very merits show precisely the character of intellect to unfit

him for the task just now demanded of a statesman. His capacity for

organization may be conspicuous; but be it what it may, it is one thing

to bring order out of the confusion of mere inexperience, and quite

another to retrieve it from a chaos of elements mutually hostile, which

is the problem sure to present itself to the next administration. This

will constantly require precisely that judgment on the nail, and not to

be drawn for at three days’ sight, of which General McClellan has shown

least. Is our path to be so smooth for the next four years that a man

whose leading characteristic is an exaggeration of difficulties is

likely to be our surest guide?... The man who is fit for the office of

President in these times should be one who knows how to advance, an art

which General McClellan has never learned.”

In the July number Lowell recurs more distinctly to the fundamental

questions involved in the war, since his task is to place in comparison

two historical works issuing from opposite sides, Pollard’s initial

volume of “The Southern History of the War,” devoted to the first year,

and the first volume of Greeley’s treatise, “The American Conflict.” As

these two, and more especially the latter, naturally set about

accounting for the war, Lowell makes them the text for his article, “The

Rebellion: its Causes and Consequences.” The breadth of the theme tempts

him into an introductory discussion of the several modes of writing

history, and an inquiry into the spirit in which history in the making

should be interpreted, but his real business, when he gets at it, is to

examine the political character of the nation at the breaking out of the

war, and to trace the insidious influence of slavery on national

politics. He repeats in newer and more forcible phrases the contention,

so often made by him, that the corruption of government had been going

on steadily under this subtle solvent, and that the hope of the nation

was in the extinction of so disturbing an element. He applies the truth

to the political situation in the approaching election, and warns the

South that “there is no party at the North, considerable in numbers or

influence, which could come into power on the platform of making peace

with the Rebels on their own terms. No party can get possession of the

government which is not in sympathy with the temper of the people, and

the people, forced into war against their will by the unprovoked attack

of pro-slavery bigotry, are resolved on pushing it to its legitimate

conclusion. War means now, consciously with many, unconsciously with

most, but inevitably, abolition.... If the war be waged manfully, as

becomes a thoughtful people, without insult or childish triumph in

success, if we meet opinion with wiser opinion, waste no time in

badgering prejudice till it becomes hostility, and attack slavery as a

crime against the nation, and not as individual sin, it will end, we

believe, in making us the most powerful and prosperous community the

world ever saw.”

Though he wrote hopefully in his public articles, Lowell’s letters show

alternations of hope and discouragement, and intimate how much the war

disturbed his peace of mind. He wrote to Mr. Norton, midway between the

July and October numbers: “I shall say nothing about politics, my dear

Charles, for I feel rather down in the mouth, and moreover I have not

had an idea so long that I should not know one if I saw it. The war and

its constant expectation and anxiety oppress me. I cannot think. If I

had enough to leave behind me, I could enlist this very day and get

knocked in the head. I hear bad things about Mr. Lincoln and try not to

believe them.”

In July the two candidates for the presidency had not been formally

named, but when Lowell came to prepare his article for the October

number, which would appear on the eve of the election, the contest was

at its height, though events were rapidly throwing their votes against

the losing party. Lowell makes capital use of this fact in his article

“McClellan or Lincoln?” which gains in wit through the evident elation

which possesses the writer over the almost certain results. He had

written Motley at the end of July: “My own feeling has always been

confident, and it is now hopeful. If Mr. Lincoln is re-chosen, I think

the war will soon be over.... So far as I can see, the opposition to Mr.

Lincoln is both selfish and factious, but it is much in favor of the

right side that the Democratic party have literally not so much as a

single plank of principle to float on, and the sea runs high. They don’t

know what they are in favor of--hardly what they think it safe to be

against. And I doubt if they gain much by going into an election on

negatives.” By a series of eliminations, he leaves, in his article, the

single point of difference between the policy of Lincoln and that which

McClellan, according to his own showing, would pursue, namely, the

policy of conciliation concerning which McClellan made loud

protestations; and then he proceeds to riddle that assumption. The

article, however, is interesting chiefly for another summary of Lowell’s

judgment of Lincoln:--

“Mr. Lincoln, in our judgment, has shown from the first the considerate

wisdom of a practical statesman. If he has been sometimes slow in making

up his mind, it has saved him the necessity of being hasty to change it

when once made up, and he has waited till the gradual movement of the

popular sentiment should help him to his conclusions and sustain him in

them. To be moderate and unimpassioned in revolutionary times that

kindle natures of a more flimsy texture, may not be a romantic quality,

but it is a rare one, and goes with those massive understandings on

which a solid structure of achievement may be reared. Mr. Lincoln is a

long-headed and long-purposed man, who knows when he is ready,--a secret

General McClellan never learned.... We have seen no reason to change our

opinion of Mr. Lincoln since his wary scrupulousness won him the

applause of one party, or his decided action, when he was at last

convinced of its necessity, made him the momentary idol of the other. We

will not call him a great man, for over-hasty praise is too apt to sour

at last into satire, and greatness may be trusted safely to history and

the future; but an honest one we believe him to be, and with no aim save

to repair the glory and the greatness of his country.”

The reëlection of Lincoln with a convincing majority, and the rapid

crushing of the shell of the Confederacy, conspired at once to give

Lowell a spirit of exultation, tempered with profound regret, and a keen

interest in the results of the war. The one mood appears in the striking

paper on “Reconstruction” which he contributed to the _North American_

for April, 1865, the other in the new “Biglow Paper” which he

contributed to the _Atlantic_ for the same month. The latter was written

earlier and apparently was drawn out of him by the golden persuasion of

Mr. Fields, for we find Lowell writing him 2 February, 1865, when he

sends him No. X. of the “Biglow Papers,” “Mr. Hosea Biglow to the Editor

of the Atlantic Monthly:”

“You pulled the string of this cold shower-bath, so you can’t complain.

But if you don’t like it, I am willing to take back my machine. If on

the other hand you _do_,--and if you don’t, by Jove, count on my undying

hate,--why, suppose you send me the canvas--greenback, I mean, _before_

you print it. This would give us both a sensation which is desirable in

a world where an Emperor offered a kingdom for a new one. Remember in

future that asking poets for verses is almost as fatal as asking them to

read them. ‘Thyself art the cause of this anguish.’ _Item._ I have been

mulling over a fairy story, of which something may come and something

may not.[14] I begin to suspect the egg _may_ be chalk. I have heard of

such things. Even the muses in this degenerate age have learned to

sophisticate. The devil tempts me to tell you I have also a novel in

progress, and an epic poem and a tragedy--also a satire in which those

who don’t like the foregoing are ground to powder. But I have scared you

enough for once, and I really haven’t begun one of ’em, unless it may be

the tragedy which one goes on composing all his life.”

The ground-swell of emotion which stirs the verses written in that

winter of 1865, just before spring came, and when the buds of peace were

already beginning to open, is expressive of that strong personal feeling

which entered into Lowell’s measure of the sacrifice which had been made

when he reckoned on the great gain that was to accrue to the nation.

Poetry, and especially that cast in a homely mould, was his vent for

this feeling. He rarely showed emotion in his prose, but in the article

which he wrote a few weeks later when the end was just in sight, he

discloses in another way, and almost as strongly, the depth of his

nature, for in this article on “Reconstruction” there is scarcely any of

that play of wit which marks his earlier political papers.

“Come, while our country feels the lift

Of a gret instinct shoutin’ ‘Forwards!’”

Hosea Biglow had just sung with tearful eyes and firm set lips, and

Lowell’s whole nature seemed to rise in an eager desire to grapple with

the great problem which was to confront the nation as soon as the last

gun had been fired. The quiet, stately opening of the subject as he

recounts with deep pride the attitude of the country, and the splendid

attestation it had given of the staying power of democracy, is followed

by a close examination of the main lines of policy to be followed in the

reconstruction of the insurgent states. “We did not enter,” he says,

“upon war to open a new market, or fresh fields for speculators, or an

outlet for redundant population, but to save the experiment of democracy

from destruction, and put it in a fairer way of success by removing the

single disturbing element. Our business now is not to allow ourselves to

be turned aside from a purpose which our experience thus far has

demonstrated to have been as wise as it was necessary, and to see to it

that, whatever be the other conditions of reconstruction, democracy,

which is our real strength, receive no detriment.”

Hence, after some wise words regarding the treatment of the governing

class at the South, and a penetrating exposition of the relation between

these and the non-slaveholding class, he applies himself most closely to

a study of the situation as regards the blacks, with the conclusion that

the prime necessity is to make them land-holders and to give them the

ballot. There are some sentences which have a mournful sound read

to-day, thirty-five years after the discussion. “We believe the white

race, by their intellectual and traditional superiority, will retain

sufficient ascendancy to prevent any serious mischief from the new order

of things.” “As to any prejudices which should prevent the two races

from living together, it would soon yield to interest and necessity.” He

is aware of the difficulties which beset the subject, but he contends

that the large way is the only way. “If we are to try the experiment of

democracy fairly, it must be tried in its fullest extent, and not

halfway.... The opinion of the North is made up on the subject of

emancipation, and Mr. Lincoln has announced it as the one essential

preliminary to the readmission of the insurgent States. To our mind,

citizenship is the necessary consequence, as it is the only effectual

warranty, of freedom; and accordingly we are in favor of distinctly

settling beforehand some conditional right of admission to it. We have

purposely avoided any discussion on gradualism as an element in

emancipation, because we consider its evil results to have been

demonstrated in the British West Indies. True conservative policy is not

an anodyne hiding away our evil from us in a brief forgetfulness. It

looks to the long future of a nation, and dares the heroic remedy where

it is scientifically sure of the nature of the disease.”

Then came the triumphant close in the surrender of Lee, and he writes to

Mr. Norton: “The news, my dear Charles, is from Heaven. I felt a strange

and tender exaltation. I wanted to laugh and I wanted to cry, and ended

by holding my peace and feeling devoutly thankful. There is something

magnificent in having a country to love. It is almost like what one

feels for a woman. Not so tender, perhaps, but to the full as

self-forgetful. I worry a little about reconstruction, but am inclined

to think that matters will very much settle themselves.” He closed his

political articles of the war period with one in July, entitled “Scotch

the Snake, or kill it?” which is in a lighter vein than

“Reconstruction,” and is in its way a quick survey of the underlying

character of the great contest, suggested by an examination of that

scrapbook of the war, Frank Moore’s _The Rebellion Record_. This mirror

gives so many varied reflections that Lowell writes a little at random,

making felicitous comments, but coming back, as so often before, to the

paramount question of slavery and the treatment of the negro. As the

title of his article intimates, he contends for a radical solution of

the problem. “The more thought we bestow on the matter, the more

thoroughly are we persuaded that the only way to get rid of the negro is

to do him justice. Democracy is safe because it is just, and safe only

when it is just to all. Here is no question of white or black, but

simply of man. We have hitherto been strong in proportion as we dared be

true to the sublime thought of our own Declaration of Independence,

which for the first time proposed to embody Christianity in human laws,

and announced the discovery that the security of the state is based on

the moral instinct and the manhood of its members.”

The character, of the work he was noticing led him at the beginning of

his paper into some reflections on the part played by newspapers in

modern times, and the stimulus given to national sensitiveness by the

quick transmission of news. “It is no trifling matter,” he says, “that

thirty millions of men should be thinking the same thought and feeling

the same pang at a single moment of time, and that these vast parallels

of latitude should become a neighborhood more intimate than many a

country village. The dream of Human Brotherhood seems to be coming true

at last. The peasant who dipped his net in the Danube, or trapped the

beaver on its banks, perhaps never heard of Cæsar, or of Cæsar’s murder;

but the shot that shattered the forecasting brain, and curdled the warm,

sweet heart of the most American of Americans, echoed along the wires

through the length and breadth of a continent, swelling all eyes at once

with tears of indignant sorrow. Here was a tragedy fulfilling the

demands of Aristotle, and purifying with an instantaneous throb of pity

and terror a theatre of such proportions as the world never saw. We

doubt if history ever recorded an event so touching and awful as this

sympathy, so wholly emancipated from the toils of space and time that it

might seem as if earth were really sentient, as some have dreamed, or

the great god Pan alive again to make the hearts of nations stand still

with his shout. What is Beethoven’s ‘Funeral March for the Death of a

Hero’ to the symphony of love, pity, and wrathful resolve which the

telegraph of that April morning played on the pulses of a nation?”

It was perhaps with one of these phrases lingering in his mind that he

characterized Lincoln a few weeks later when he came to write his Ode

recited at the Harvard Commemoration. This commemoration was held by

Harvard College, 21 July, 1865, in honor of its sons who had died in the

war. Lowell was asked to write a poem for the occasion, and he has given

in a letter written a score of years later, to Mr. Gilder, a bit of

reminiscence respecting its composition. “The ode itself,” he says, “was

an improvisation. Two days before the commemoration I had told my friend

Child that it was impossible--that I was dull as a door-mat. But the

next day something gave me a jog, and the whole thing came out of me

with a rush. I sat up all night writing it out clear, and took it on the

morning of the day to Child. ‘I have something but don’t yet know what

it is, or whether it will do. Look at it and tell me.’ He went a little

way apart with it under an elm-tree in the College yard. He read a

passage here and there, brought it back to me, and said ‘Do? I should

think so! Don’t you be scared!’ And I wasn’t, but virtue enough had gone

out of me to make me weak for a fortnight after.” Something of this

reaction appears in a letter to Miss Norton, written four days after the

delivery of the poem: “I eat and smoke and sleep and go through all the

nobler functions of a man mechanically still, and wonder at myself as at

something outside of and alien to me. For have I not worked myself lean

on an ‘Ode for Commemoration?’ Was I not so rapt with the fervor of

conception as I have not been these ten years, losing my sleep, my

appetite, and my flesh, those attributes to which I before alluded as

nobly uniting us in a common nature with our kind? Did I not for two

days exasperate everybody that came near me by reciting passages in

order to try them on? Did I not even fall backward and downward to the

old folly of hopeful youth, and think I had written something _really_

good at last? And am I not now enduring those retributive dumps which

ever follow such sinful exaltations, the Erynnyes of Vanity? Did not I

make John Holmes and William Story shed tears by my recitation of it (my

ode) in the morning, both of ’em fervently declaring it was ‘noble’? Did

not even the silent Rowse declare ’twas in a higher mood than much or

most of later verse? Did not I think, in my nervous exhilaration, that

’twould be _the_ feature (as reporters call it) of the day? And, after

all, have I not a line in the _Daily Advertiser_ calling it a ‘graceful

poem’ (or ‘some graceful verses’ I forget which), which ‘was received

with applause?’ Why, Jane, my legs are those of grasshoppers, and my

head is an autumn threshing-floor, still beating with the alternate

flails of strophe and antistrophe, and an infinite virtue is gone out of

me somehow--but it seems _not_ into my verse as I dreamed. Well, well,

Charles will like it--but then he always does, so what’s the use? I am

Icarus now,

[Illustration: _Facsimile of Mr. Lowell’s handwriting_]

with the cold, salt sea over him instead of the warm exulting blue of

ether. I am gone under, and I never will be a fool again.... Like a boy,

I mistook my excitement for inspiration, and here I am in the mud. You

see, also, I am a little disappointed and a little few (un petit peu)

vexed. I did _not_ make the hit I expected, and am ashamed at having

been again tempted into thinking I could write _poetry_, a delusion from

which I have been tolerably free these dozen years.”[15]

There was one other comment made by Lowell on the ode which confirms

these impressions and adds a little to the record of his experience in

writing it. It occurs in a letter to J. B. Thayer, 8 December, 1868,

upon the occasion of a review by Mr. Thayer of the volume of verse just

published in which the ode was included: “I am not sure if I understand

what you say about the tenth strophe. You will observe that it leads

naturally to the eleventh, and that I there justify a certain

narrowness in it as an expression of the popular feeling as well as my

own. I confess I have never got over the feeling of wrath with which

(just after the death of my nephew Willie) I read in an English paper

that nothing was to be hoped of an army officered by tailors’

apprentices and butcher boys. The poem was written with a vehement

speed, which I thought I had lost in the skirts of my professor’s gown.

Till within two days of the celebration I was hopelessly dumb, and then

it all came with a rush, literally making me lean (mi fece magro), and

so nervous that I was weeks in getting over it. I was longer in getting

the new (eleventh) strophe to my mind than in writing the rest of my

poem. In _that_ I hardly changed a word, and it was so undeliberate that

I did not find out till after it was printed that some of the verses

lacked corresponding rhymes.[1]... I had put the ethical and political

view so often in prose that I was weary of it. The motives of the war? I

had impatiently urged them again and again,--but for an ode they must be

in the blood and not the memory. One of my great defects (I have always

been conscious of it) is an impatience of mind which makes me

contemptuously indifferent about arguing matters that have once become

convictions.”

Once more, in writing to the same correspondent in 1877, with regard to

the versification, he says: “My problem was to contrive a measure which

should not be tedious by uniformity, which should vary with varying

moods, in which the transitions (including those of the voice) should be

managed without jar. I at first thought of mixed rhymed and blank verses

of unequal measures, like those in the choruses of ‘Samson Agonistes,’

which are in the main masterly. Of course Milton _deliberately_ departed

from that stricter form of the Greek Chorus to which it was bound as

much (I suspect) by the law of its musical accompaniment as by any sense

of symmetry. I wrote some stanzas of the ‘Commemoration Ode’ on this

theory at first, leaving some verses without a rhyme to match. But my

ear was better pleased with the rhyme, coming at a longer interval, as a

far-off echo, rather than instant reverberation, produced the same

effect almost, and yet was grateful by unexpectedly recalling an

association and faint reminiscence of consonance.”[17]

The ode did at once assert its high character, yet it must be borne in

mind that the very reason of its form acted somewhat against its

immediate popularity. It is truly an ode to be recited, and as a chorus

depends for its power upon a volume of sound, so this ode needs, to

bring out its full value, a great delivery. Lowell himself, always a

sympathetic reader, had no such power of recitation as would at once

convey to his audience a notion of the stateliness and procession of

words which attaches to the ode. The impression of the hour was produced

by the spontaneous outpouring of the heart of Phillips Brooks in prayer.

“That,” says President Eliot, “was the most impressive utterance of a

proud and happy day. Even Lowell’s Commemoration Ode did not at the

moment so touch the hearts of his hearers; that one spontaneous and

intimate expression of Brooks’s noble spirit convinced all Harvard men

that a young prophet had risen up in Israel.”[18]

Lowell’s explanation of the form of the ode is significant. So native to

him was the most genuine literary spirit that he could conceive of the

ode and its delivery as one consistent whole without being perturbed by

the consideration that he was to deliver it and to a modern audience

trained in the reading of poetry, not in the hearing of it. Both the

poetic reciter and the recipients were wanting, and the ode remains, a

noble piece of declamation indeed for whoever has the great gift of

poetic declamation, yet after all as surely to be read and not spoken as

Browning’s dramas are to be read and not acted. It is this fine literary

sense, penetrating even to a supposititious occasion, which clings to

the ode and makes it so far caviare to the general. Yet it would be

false indeed to regard such a statement as final. The fire which burned

in Lowell’s members, leaving him cold afterward, glows in the great

lines, and certain it is that at no other single poem, unless it be

Whitman’s “My Captain,” does the young American of the generation born

since the war so kindle his patriotic emotions.

The sixth stanza was not recited, but was written immediately afterward.

It is so completely imbedded in the structure of the ode that it is

difficult to think of it as an afterthought. It is easy to perceive that

while the glow of composition and of recitation was still upon him

Lowell suddenly conceived this splendid illustration and indeed climax

of the utterance of the Ideal which is so impressive in the fifth

stanza. So free, so spontaneous is this characterization of Lincoln, and

so concrete in thought, that it has been most frequently read, we

suspect, of any single portion of the ode, and it is so eloquent that

one likes to fancy the whole force of the ode behind it, as if Lowell

needed the fire he had fanned to white heat, for the very purpose of

forging this last, firm tempered bit of steel.

Into these threescore lines Lowell has poured a conception of Lincoln

which may justly be said to be to-day the accepted idea which Americans

hold of their great President. It was the final expression of the

judgment which had slowly been forming in Lowell’s own mind, and when he

summed him up in his last line,--

“New birth of our new soul, the first American,”

he was honestly throwing away all the doubts which had from time to time

beset him, and letting his ardent pursuit of the ideal, his profound

faith in democracy as incarnate in his country, centre in this one man.

In April, 1887, the _Century Magazine_ had a brief article headed

“Lincoln and Lowell,” in which the editor, quoting the pregnant sentence

on Lincoln from Lowell’s recently published address on “Democracy,” is

reminded that Lowell “was the first of the leading American writers to

see clearly and fully, and clearly and fully and enthusiastically

proclaim the greatness of Abraham Lincoln.” And after quoting this sixth

stanza of the ode, he goes back and recalls the political papers in the

_Atlantic_ and _North American Review_, with their references to Lincoln

which we have already noted. The next number of the _Century_ contained

an article in the nature of a postscript, citing the early judgment of

Emerson also on the President. In publishing Nicolay and Hay’s “Life of

Lincoln” in the magazine, the editor naturally was interested to recover

the impression made by Lincoln when he was comparatively an untried

man, on the poets and seers, who have a clearer divination than

politicians. He was in correspondence with Lowell and wished if he could

to learn what Longfellow and Whittier had then said.

Lowell replied under date of 7 February, 1887: “I can recollect nothing

about Lincoln by either L. or W., though this would prove nothing. I

_do_ remember a debate with Dr. Holmes just after Lincoln’s nomination.

It was under the elms in front of the old Holmes house (where he took a

photograph of me by O. W. H. and Sun), and he was much exercised in mind

because Seward had not been the man. I, who had read Lincoln’s speeches,

was entirely content.” The extracts which I have given from Lowell’s

letters and essays make it, however, quite clear that the full

recognition of Lincoln’s greatness was a growth and not an immediate

insight. Nor is this strange. Lowell never saw Lincoln. Had he met him

early in his career, and enjoyed the advantage which comes from personal

sight, as Hawthorne for example did, there is little doubt that he would

have borne away from the interview the impression which was stamped on

so many ingenuous minds, and he would have read the President’s

utterances by the light of that illuminating countenance. That Lowell

did not at once throw away all doubts and accept Lincoln at the

valuation he later placed upon him was due to the facts that Lincoln

revealed himself only by degrees in his speech and act, and that while

he was then making himself known Lowell was cherishing an ideal of his

country and its destiny which called for the loftiest expression of

patriotism. He was above all eager for a demonstration of high courage

and fearless insistence upon national supremacy, when the country seemed

rocking with inconstancy. That he should confess in Lincoln the “new

American” was an evidence that the pure idealism which had marked

Lowell’s political thinking and writing, an idealism moreover conjoined

with shrewd practical sense, had at last found, to his profound

satisfaction, a great exemplar, and the life and death of this wonderful

product of the American soil presaged for him the development of a race

of freemen.