CHAPTER XI

POETRY AND PROSE

1858-1872

Lowell’s writing during the war, and very largely also during the four

previous years in which he had been engaged on the _Atlantic_, was

mainly of a political character, and it has seemed best not to interrupt

the record with much reference to his other writings and his pursuits

generally during these eight years. But though he felt keenly the great

movement which was breaking up the old union and making way for the new

and greater union, he was too established in his own order of life to

permit that to undergo any violent change. Even in his political

writing, as we have seen, he was first of all a man of letters, with an

imaginative foresight; his occupation both as a teacher and an editor

gave a certain steadying force to his powers, so that though he rebelled

against the irksomeness of routine he was delivered from what might have

been the waywardness of a too self-centred life.

His safety-valve during all this period was in his letters to his

familiar friends, as it was also in the free talk which he held with

them; and this, even though he chafed under restraint and pressure

which seemed to him to lessen his spontaneity. “How malicious you are,”

he writes to Miss Norton, 23 October, 1858, “about what I said of

women’s being good letter writers! What I meant was that they wrote more

unconsciously than we do. I don’t know how it is with other folks, but I

cannot sit down now and write a letter as if I were talking. Good

writing, I take it, can only result from necessity of expression, and an

author satisfies that in so many ways that his letters are apt to be

dull.

“I like ‘Miles Standish’ better than you do. I think it in some respects

the best long poem L. has written. It is so simple and picturesque, and

the story is not encumbered with unavailing description, which is a

fault in ‘Evangeline.’ But I quite agree with you about the metre. It is

too deceitfully easy.

“One might begin at dawn nor end till the purple twilight,

Stringing verses at will, nor know it was verse he was stringing.

This is the modern way, the way of steamer and railroad

Where all the work is done, you scarcely know how, by the Engine.

Ah, but the Hill of Fame, can they dig it down? can they grade it?

Difficult always is Good, and he, I guess, who attains it

Starts with two feet and a staff and bread for To-day in his wallet,

Footsore dropping at last, repaid by long hope of the summit.”

His college duties he performed with conscientious fidelity, and he

found at times a genuine satisfaction in the free intercourse with his

students over great subjects, yet he could not always overlook the

immaturity of his pupils, and he was impatient at the sort of work

outside of direct teaching which falls to the lot of college professors.

The task of lecturing itself was sure to suggest the incompleteness of

expression, and so offend all his genius as a writer. “Yesterday,” he

writes to Miss Norton, in the fall of 1859, “I began my lectures. I came

off better than I expected, for I am always a great coward beforehand. I

_hate_ lecturing, for I have discovered (entre nous) that it is almost

impossible to learn _all_ about anything, unless, indeed, it be some

piece of ill-luck, and then one has the help of one’s friends, you

know.... I am trying to reform the Spanish and Italian classes. Charles

would be astonished to hear me read the Castilian tongue, now wellnigh

as familiar to me as Castilian soap. If he wouldn’t be, _I am_. I am

about as much ‘Spanish,’ tell him, ‘as a Connecticut segar.’”

At the same time he wrote to Mr. Norton: “I am busier than ever, and, I

fear, fruitlessly. My Italian class are half of them drones, and this

hinders my getting on as I would with the rest. I am studying Spanish,

as I did German in Dresden, reading it in all my leisure time, and

before long mean to make myself thorough in it. At forty a man learns

fast. My Spanish class is a very good one. There are only five, and they

all do their best. _Vacare musis_--what does that mean? I have almost

forgotten.”

“I champ the bit sometimes here,” he writes to the same a year later,

“but God’s will be done! _Ancora imparo_, though I be in a go-cart. My

Spanish recitations cost me some time and trouble as yet, for I make the

students parse and construe with never-failing strictness. For this I

have to study the grammar harder than any of them, for my Italian is

always in my way with its slightly differing forms. However, I have

learned more already than I should have thought possible a year ago, and

I think some of the students seem to be interested.”

Now and then he could make his college work and his _Atlantic_ work play

into each other, but not often. “I have as yet only dipped into your

last four volumes,” he writes 12 June, 1860, to R. G. White, “and those

I keep for the same good time (i.e. vacation). I have to prepare some

lectures on Shakespeare, and shall kill two birds with one stone by

making use of your edition, and so enabling myself to write an

intelligent notice of it for the _Atlantic_.”

The _Atlantic_ itself gave him an agreeable change from his class-room

duties, even if it took him along somewhat the same road as when,

shortly after he undertook it, he received a contribution from

Sainte-Beuve on Béranger, and translated it for the number for February,

1858. Two months later he began that series of criticisms on the

successive volumes of Smith’s “Library of Old English Authors,” which he

completed in the _North American_ ten years afterward, and combined into

the long paper printed in the first volume of his “Literary Essays.” As

an instance of minute detective work in criticism, the article is

noteworthy, but we suspect that his readers to-day pass lightly over the

scoring of Hazlitt’s editorship to read the brilliant characterizations

of Elizabethan poets and dramatists, which crop out of the stony soil of

textual criticism. In writing these articles Lowell was recurring to

subjects which had, as we have seen, unfailing interest for him, and one

cannot compare these notes on Chapman, Webster, Marlowe, and others with

the observations that occur in “Conversations with the Old Dramatists,”

without marking the greater mellowness of nature from which the later

criticism proceeds. Lowell writes of them, not as in the first instance

when he was just returned from a voyage of discovery, but as one who has

lived long and familiarly in this rich country of the poetic mind.[19]

Excepting the “Biglow Papers,” a couple of political articles, two or

three poems, and a few brief reviews of books, Lowell did not contribute

to the _Atlantic_ during the four years of the war, and naturally he

turned his prose work into the _North American_ after he became one of

its editors. There, as we have seen, his work was mainly political,

though he also did much reviewing of books; but after the pressure of

war-time was lifted he made the review the vehicle for more strictly

literary articles, and it was plainly a relief to him to spring back to

subjects more congenial to his nature. In January, 1865, when Mr. Norton

supplied the main political paper, Lowell printed that most

characteristic article which in his collected writings bears the title

“New England Two Centuries Ago,” and is in outward form a review of the

third volume of Palfrey’s “History of New England” and of four volumes

of the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. In its

larger part a skilful florilegium of early writings, the paper is also

and emphatically the reflection of Lowell’s mind during the stress of

the war, when he was doubly concerned over the relation between the two

great English-speaking nations and the practical solutions of the

problems presented to democracy in the reëstablishment of order and

union in the United States. He had rising in him, as his Ode shows, a

great passion for the whole country; but as has been well said by

Colonel Higginson, that no one can be a true cosmopolitan who is not at

home in his own country, so it is equally true that national

consciousness has its basis in local pride and affection. The genius of

our political organism, by which one is called on for a double loyalty

to state and nation, a loyalty jeoparded by the heresy of an extreme

state-rights dogma, was finely disclosed in Lowell’s attitude.

Fortunately for us the locality, the community in which our fortune is

cast, has in itself a political essence, so that it is not mere

attachment to the place of birth and breeding which makes its natural

demand on us, but membership in an organism lacking only the crown of

absolute independence to make it a unit of politics. It is a subtle but

very real distinction between state and nation that permits not a

divided but a complex loyalty, and the profound meaning which lies in

the interplay of state and federal power is reflected in the

consciousness of Americans as they bear themselves toward one or the

other authority.

Now New England, though not an entity in politics, has so distinct a

character that each of the states included in that name is

representative of an order which is far more than a geographical

division. Largely by reason of its historic genesis and development, New

England is more an individual than any other group of commonwealths

unless it be the Cotton States, and a man of Massachusetts, clearly the

heart of the whole system, is very sure to think of himself as a New

Englander without prejudice to his loyalty to his own state. Lowell

certainly did. It was through New England, its history, its spirit, its

genius, that he apprehended the very nature of freedom and the

principles of democracy. Mr. Henry James has well said: “New England was

heroic to him, for he felt in his pulses the whole history of her

_origines_; it was impossible to know him without a sense that he had a

rare divination of the hard realities of her past.”[20] And this article

on “New England Two Centuries Ago,” designed to offer something of a

conspectus of a people and land from which he was sprung, whose life

was coursing in his veins, was also an interpretation of the political

faith he held, a faith which he postulated for the final manifestation

of the whole nation that in his imagination he saw rising out of the

confusion of struggle. “I have little sympathy,” he says at the close,

“with declaimers about the Pilgrim Fathers, who look upon them all as

men of grand conceptions and superhuman foresight. An entire ship’s

company of Columbuses is what the world never saw. It is not wise to

form any theory and fit our facts to it, as a man in a hurry is apt to

cram his travelling-bag, with a total disregard of shape or texture. But

perhaps it may be found that the facts will only fit comfortably

together on a single plan, namely, that the fathers did have a

conception (which those will call grand who regard simplicity as a

necessary element of grandeur) of founding here a commonwealth on those

two eternal bases of Faith and Work; that they had indeed no

revolutionary ideas of universal liberty, but yet, what answered the

purpose quite as well, an abiding faith in the brotherhood of man and

the fatherhood of God; and that they did not so much propose to make all

things new, as to develop the latent possibilities of English law and

English character, by clearing away the fences by which the abuse of the

one was gradually discommoning the other from the broad fields of

universal right. They were not in advance of their age, as it is called,

for no one who is so can ever work profitably in it; but they were alive

to the highest and most earnest thinking of their time.”

In this article, also, one may see something of Lowell’s feeling about

England, which again was almost a traditionary sentiment. He saw the

mother country through the glass of New England, and especially valued

that Puritan strain in English history which had found such free play in

New England. “Puritanism,” he says, “believing itself quick with the

seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of

democracy;” and he found in the governmental attitude of England toward

America in his own day a reminder of the policy exercised after the

Restoration toward New England.

Lowell’s letters make it clear that at this time he was not given to the

enjoyment of much hospitality. Mrs. Lowell was frequently an invalid,

and though he had familiar friends to stay with him, as Rowse the

painter, and gave cordial invitations to such as might be passing

through Cambridge, he neither entertained much himself nor accepted

entertainment at other houses. Now and then some man of letters came

over from England or France and Lowell was asked to meet him. He records

such an experience in a letter dated 20 September, 1861:--

“I dined the other day with Anthony Trollope, a big, red-faced, rather

underbred Englishman of the bald-with-spectacles type. A good roaring

positive fellow who deafened me (sitting on his right) till I thought of

Dante’s Cerberus. He says he goes to work on a novel ‘just like a

shoemaker on a shoe, only taking care to make honest stitches.’ Gets up

at 5 every day, does all his writing before breakfast, and always writes

just so many pages a day. He and Dr. Holmes were very entertaining. The

Autocrat started one or two hobbies, and charged, paradox in rest--but

it was pelting a rhinoceros with seed-pearl.

“_Dr._ You don’t know what Madeira is in England?

“_T._ I’m not so sure it’s worth knowing.

“_Dr._ Connoisseurship in it with us is a fine art. There are men who

will tell you a dozen kinds, as Dr. Waagen would know a Carlo Dolci from

a Guido.

“_T._ They might be better employed!

“_Dr._ Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well.

“_T._ Ay, but that’s begging the whole question. I don’t admit it’s

_worse_ doing at all. If they earn their bread by it, it may be _worse_

doing (roaring).

“_Dr._ But you may be assured--

“_T._ No, but I mayn’t be asshŏrred. I _won’t_ be asshored. I don’t

intend to be asshŏred (roaring louder)!

“And so they went it. It was very funny. Trollope wouldn’t give him any

chance. Meanwhile, Emerson and I, who sat between them, crouched down

out of range and had some very good talk, with the shot hurtling

overhead. I had one little passage at arms with T. _apropos_ of English

peaches. T. ended by roaring that England was the only country where

such a thing as a peach or a grape was known. I appealed to Hawthorne,

who sat opposite. His face mantled and trembled for a moment with some

droll fancy, as one sees bubbles rise and send off rings in still water

when a turtle stirs at the bottom, and then he said, ‘I asked an

Englishman once who was praising their peaches to describe to me exactly

what he meant by a peach, and he described something very like a

cucumber.’ I rather liked Trollope.”

Lowell found in the winter of 1865-1866 a most congenial occasion for

society in the meetings in Mr. Longfellow’s study, held for scrutiny of

the proofs of that poet’s translation of the “Divina Commedia.” Mr.

Longfellow records in his Diary, 25 October, 1865: “Lowell, Norton, and

myself had the first meeting of our Dante Club. We read the XXV.

_Purgatorio_; and then had a little supper. We are to meet every

Wednesday evening at my house.” In the first Report of the Dante

Society, Mr. Norton gives a full and interesting account of these

meetings, and of the task they set themselves.

“We paused,” he says, “over every doubtful passage, discussed the

various readings, considered the true meaning of obscure words and

phrases, sought for the most exact equivalent of Dante’s expression,

objected, criticised, praised, with a freedom that was made perfect by

Mr. Longfellow’s absolute sweetness, simplicity, and modesty, and by the

entire confidence that existed between us. Witte’s text was always

before us, and of the early commentators Buti was the one to whom we

had most frequent and most serviceable recourse. They were delightful

evenings; there could be no pleasanter occupation; the spirits of

poetry, of learning, of friendship, were with us. Now and then some

other friend or acquaintance would join us for the hours of study.

Almost always one or two guests would come in at ten o’clock, when the

work ended, and sit down with us to a supper, with which the evening

closed.”

With the _North American Review_ still making its quarterly demands upon

him, but the political impulse less urgent, Lowell turned naturally to

literary criticism. Thus far, he had not made any deliberate appraisal

of great writers, save in his short paper on Keats, which, from the

occasion that called it out, was rather biographical than critical. He

had in a fragmentary fashion in his “Conversations,” and in a discursive

manner in his lectures, given appreciations of the great poets and

dramatists of England, but in the next decade he was to print a series

of essays which should embody his reading, study, reflection, and poetic

insight in that field of human endeavor where his own work stands, and

which had been since his boyish days the one great subject of his

investigation.

History, which he read with avidity, was the background from which were

projected the great figures of literature. Philosophy was not for him a

system of independent reasoning, but rather the unclassified winged

thoughts on high themes embodied in great poetic and dramatic art.

Language, always a subject full of interest for him, was attacked, not

from the point of view of a man of science, but from that of one curious

of its human relations and its instrumentality in art. Nor was his

knowledge of the plastic arts more than that which comes incidentally to

a traveller and a general reader and observer, or his interest in them

especially keen. He was very likely to bring the canons of literary art

to bear upon them, sometimes indeed, as might be guessed, with

shrewdness and analogical truthfulness; or he was affected by personal

considerations, as when he writes of Story: “I saw the photographs of

William’s statues, and think them _very_ fine. They are really noble.

The Quincy is admirable--the best thing of the kind our modern times has

produced. In short, to my thinking, William is the only man of them all

who knows how to do the thing. It was a real pleasure to be so

thoroughly satisfied with the work of an old friend.” He recognized

frankly his own limitations in the matter, as indeed he was disposed to

think the defect almost ineradicable in the Saxon, who “has never shown

any capacity for art, nay, commonly commits ugly blunders when he is

tempted in that direction;” and apparently his only suggestion for

bettering the condition was to put before workmen good illustrations of

great art in the books they should find in their libraries, and give

them an acquaintance with Ruskin’s writings.

But literature stood to him as the great exponent of all that was

permanent in the human spirit. “There is much,” he says, “that is

deciduous in books, but all that gives them a title to rank as

literature in the highest sense is perennial. Their vitality is the

vitality not of one or another blood or tongue, but of human nature;

their truth is not topical and transitory, but of universal acceptation;

and thus all great authors seem the coevals not only of each other, but

of whoever reads them, growing wiser with him as he grows wise, and

unlocking to him one secret after another as his own life and experience

give him the key, but on no other condition.”[21] It was with this

principle determining his choice that he proceeded with more or less

conscious assembling to discourse on Carlyle, Emerson, Lessing,

Rousseau, Shakespeare, Dryden, Chaucer, Pope, Milton, Dante, Spenser,

and Wordsworth, as well as to write in many detached passages on the

genius of Goethe. Later he returned to the same general field, and

besides revising his judgment on some of these topics, treated also with

more or less fulness of Gray, Cervantes, Fielding, and Coleridge, while

any one who consults the elaborate index to his prose writings will

readily see how many other authors who belong in the great ranks have

been drawn upon for illustration of the one great theme.

To his reading of all this literature he brought the touchstone of his

own life and experience. In this word “experience,” moreover, must be

included his own highest experiments. His poetry, for the most part, as

we have already seen, does not have its roots in other literature; it

springs from that life which he held in common with those whom he

reverenced for their own acts of literary creation. He quotes the

recommendation of a friend that he should read poetry, feed himself on

bee bread so that he might get into the mood of writing poetry; but,

though all his life long Lowell fed, as by the most natural appetite, on

poetry and other forms of imaginative literature, his own poetry is not

bookish, nor does it borrow in form or phrase. Even when most

impressionable in his youth, the influence upon him of Keats and

Tennyson was more obvious than that of Shakespeare or Marlowe, only

because, eschewing the imitative, his verse took the color of his

generation. The likenesses were always general, and when he essayed

forms of verse most rigid in their historical development, as the sonnet

and the ode, he simply obeyed the law as his great progenitors had done,

finding his freedom within the law, and not in outbreaks and protests.

The conscious intention to be original, he himself says, seldom leads to

anything better than extravagance; and there is a passage in his paper

on Chaucer which sums up a large part of his literary philosophy.[22]

“Poets have forgotten that the first lesson of literature, no less than

of life, is the learning how to burn your own smoke; that the way to be

original is to be healthy; that the fresh color, so delightful in all

good writing, is won by escaping from the fixed air of self into the

brisk atmosphere of universal sentiments; and that to make the common

marvellous, as if it were a revelation, is the test of genius.”

With his large literary essays as works of art I do not purpose

concerning myself; such study lies somewhat outside the range of a

biography, but as these papers formed a considerable and very important

expression of his mind at one period of his life, it is worth while to

look at them with a view to discover how far they serve to disclose him,

to read them by the light of his experience, and to see if he put his

personality into this form of writing. The publication of Carlyle’s

“Frederick the Great” was the occasion of the first of these articles.

In writing of it to Leslie Stephen, when it was reprinted in “My Study

Windows,” he admits that he was harder on Carlyle than he meant to be,

because he was fighting against a secret partiality. The phrase lets one

a little into Lowell’s mind. As far back as in his college days he was

reading Carlyle with gusto, and the breezy description[23] which he gave

of Boston at the period when Carlyle’s “message” acted as a sort of

leaven in the new dough of New England, was a lively reminiscence of his

own tumultuous youth. Thus, upon writing of Carlyle when he himself was

nearing the line of fifty, there was an undercurrent of reminiscence of

his own callowness. He remembered his devotion to the Carlyle of the

“Miscellanies,” and was more or less conscious that he had outlived his

first enthusiasm. With all his admiration for the great critic who

stirred him when he was himself pricking on the plain of Reform, his

point of view was now changed, for he had left Carlyle’s side and come

into more complete possession of his own judgment. The secret influences

which forbade him to be preponderatingly ethical, which kept him from

abandoning himself to the anti-slavery cause, even when he was fighting

in the ranks, and made it impossible for him to be a great teacher,

though quite aware of what constitutes a great teacher, had lessened,

perhaps, his effectiveness in some single direction, but had given him

greater poise and enabled him on rare occasions to bring all his powers

into play, and then to do easily, without conscious effort, the thing he

wanted to do. The “Commemoration Ode” is an instance, and in this

judgment of Carlyle he seems to me unwittingly to be judging the Lowell

who seemed somewhat possible in the days when he first read Carlyle.

There is a sentence in the essay which puts the thing in a nutshell.

“The delicate skeleton of admirably articulated and related parts which

underlies and sustains every true work of art, and keeps it from sinking

on itself a shapeless heap, he [Carlyle] would crush remorselessly to

come at the marrow of meaning. With him the ideal sense is secondary to

the ethical and metaphysical, and he has but a faint conception of their

possible unity.”

It was in the growing conception of this unity that Lowell had moved

away from Carlyle. The constant adjustment of the ideal and the ethical

had been the ripening process in his mind, a process greatly stimulated

by the urgent need he felt during the past few years for finding some

common ground on which his visions of truth and freedom and his

practical sense could meet. It was largely through a great political

realization that Lowell came to be what thenceforth he was, a sane

critic of literature and a poet whose imagination instinctively sought

large moulds. This is not to say that he was indifferent to any other

expression; his nature was too free and spontaneous for that; but if one

is to be measured by the main incidents of his life, it is fair to say

that the Lowell who after this left his impress on his countrymen was a

man of such balance of mind that his judgments and his poems alike had

the weight that comes from this equipoise, and the man thus

characterized could scarcely fail in new relations to show the ease of

one self-centred, and not the restlessness and anxiety of an

experimenter with life.

It is this consciousness of art governed by great laws, whether applied

to life or to literature, that dominates Lowell’s expression, and in the

essay on Carlyle, his keenest criticism is called out by his perception

of Carlyle’s failure in this respect. “Had Mr. Carlyle been fitted out

completely by nature as an artist, he would have had an ideal in his

work which would have lifted his mind away from the muddier part of him,

and trained him to the habit of seeking and seeing the harmony rather

than the discord and contradiction of things.” Again we read in this

passage the unconscious reflection of its writer’s own mind, which once

had been far enough away from this habit. Nothing in Carlyle appears to

interest him more than the lawlessness into which his exuberant humor

had led him, and the narrow escape he had had of being a great poet, and

he sums up his judgment of “Frederick the Great” by saying that “it has

the one prime merit of being the work of a man who has every quality of

a great poet except that supreme one of rhythm, which shapes both matter

and manner to harmonious proportion, and that where it is good, it is

good as only genius knows how to be.”

In the same number of the _Review_ which holds this article on Carlyle

appears a shorter one on Swinburne, which, though dealing with a more

occasional subject, also illustrates the temper in which Lowell was now

writing, and has a special interest, since it deals directly with poetry

and intimates, that when treating of a contemporary writer his mind was

most set on that aspect of poetry which ignores the distinction of time.

The phenomenon of a new poet sends him back into an inquiry into the

very realities of poetry itself. Though he has a few specific criticisms

of Swinburne’s “Chastelard” and his “Atalanta in Calydon,” the theme

which interests him most is the possibility of reënacting antiquity in

poetry, and he devotes the larger part of his paper to a demonstration

of the truth that the result of all such endeavors is to produce the

artificial and not the artistic. In a letter to Mr. Stedman, written

apparently when this subject was fresh in his mind, he repeats his

conclusion with the force of a friendly letter writer. Mr. Stedman had

thanked him for a review of his poem, “Alice of Monmouth,” but asks his

judgment of another poem he had written on an antique theme. “I will

answer frankly,” wrote Lowell, “that I did not like Alektryon, and don’t

think him at all to be compared to his sister Alice,--a strutting fellow

that wants to make me believe he can crow in ancient Greek. Alice is

Christian, modern, American, and that’s why I like her. I don’t believe

in these modern antiques--no, not in Landor, not in Swinburne, not in

any of ’em. They are all wrong. It’s like writing Latin verses--the

material you work in is dead.”

Though Lowell had thus turned with avidity to his more congenial field

of letters, he was not yet to be released from the duty imposed upon him

by his editorship of the _Review_, and by his own political thought, of

taking part in the discussion which Reconstruction raised. In the same

number of the _North American_ which contained the two papers just

noted, he wrote also an article on “The President on the Stump,” which,

after a cursory consideration of the growing division between President

Johnson and Congress, closed with a hypothetical address delivered to a

Southern delegation by an imaginary President Johnson. Into this address

Lowell packed his convictions as to the attitude which should be taken

toward the Southern States by a President who had come from the South.

It was so unusual for Lowell to dramatize, even in poetry, that this

assumption has a singular interest, and, barring the element of Southern

birth, is a close copy of Lowell’s mind at this time. Every man of

thought has his dream of action, and we can read in this speech how

Lowell would have translated his ideals of truth, freedom, and justice

into executive acts, could he, who had watched the conflict closely,

have had the chance that poets picture of being king for a day.

Perhaps all this was in his mind when he wrote in his last “Biglow

Paper:”--

“Ez I wuz say’n’, I hain’t no chance to speak

So’s ’t all the country dreads me onct a week,

But I’ve consid’ble o’ thet sort o’ head

That sets to home an’ thinks wut _might_ be said.”

This last paper, “Mr. Hosea Biglow’s Speech in March Meeting,” followed

in the May _Atlantic_, and said over again the same lesson in the freer

form of verse and with the more familiar dramatic impersonation of the

Yankee countryman. It is an illustration of the greater carrying power

of Lowell’s verse over his prose that the shrewd political philosophy

which lies in the two series of the “Biglow Papers,” closely as it

applied to the political situations in 1846-1848 and 1861-1866, has come

again into play in the very different situation in national politics

following the war for the independence of Cuba, so that while one would

find in the newspapers but few quotations from Lowell’s “Political

Essays” he would find plenty of lines from the “Biglow Papers.”

These two productions were not to be the last of his political writings

at this period. One more was to follow in October, but the impulse to

take part in the discussion of national events was relaxed, and he was

falling back into his more congenial life of devotion to letters in the

quiet retreat of Elmwood. “My dear Charles,” he writes to Mr. Norton, 30

May, 1866, “I snatch a moment from the whirl of dissipation to bring up

for you the annals of Cambridge to the present date. In the first place,

Cranch and his daughters are staying with us--since last Saturday. On

that day I took him to club, where he saw many old friends (he has not

been here for twenty years, poor fellow!) and had a good time. We had a

pleasant time, I guess. With me it was a business meeting. I sat between

Hoar and Brimmer, that I might talk over college matters. Things will be

arranged to suit me, I rather think, and the salary (perhaps) left even

larger than I hoped.

“Cranch and I amuse me very much. They read their poems to each other

like a couple of boys, and so contrive for themselves a very

good-natured, if limited, public. I cannot help laughing to myself,

whenever I am alone, at these rhythmical debauches. The best of it is

that there is always one at least who is never bored. I like him very

much, though it always makes me a little sad that a man with so many

gifts should lack the one of being successful. He brought with him a

fairy story full of fancy, and illustrations, most of which are as

charming and original as can be. I hope to get Fields to publish

it.[24] Cranch wants some such encouragement very much. He begins to

think himself born under an ill star. I fancy the trouble is that he was

not brought up to work, in a nation of day laborers. You know I have a

natural sympathy with the butterflies as against the ants and the bees,

and I think they will all be put in a heavenly poor-house one of these

days, with the industrious rich to work for them, and buy their books

and pictures. Cranch always reminds me of Clough, so you may be sure I

like to have him here. We shall enjoy each other very much if we don’t

quarrel over our poems.

“You will see my verses to Bartlett in the next _Atlantic_,[25] and I

guess you will like ’em. They seemed to me fanciful and easy when I

corrected the proof, with some droll triple rhymes....

“It is now high time to change the conversation and speak of the

weather. We are having it of the rarest April sort--whims of sunshine

dappling a continuous mood of rain erratic thunderclaps ending like my

novel with the first chapter--promising notes of fine to-morrows ending

not in bankruptcy but liquidation. In short, the clerk of the weather

seems suddenly to have bethought him of his remissness with the

watering-pot for the last two years and is making it up all at once. All

the wells (except, of course, that of Truth) will be filled again and

milk will be plenty once more. The greenness of everything is

delicious. I feel as if I were sprouting myself, so keen is my farmer’s

sympathy with my beets and carrots, and especially with a new field of

grass which was becoming _too_ emblematic of flesh, and has been

snatched from the very jaws of death by this intervention of Jupiter

Pluvius. I had just had a new pump set in the well at the foot of the

garden, and had begun to think it would be merely a dry symbol, but this

will set all its arteries a-throbbing.

“Your dream of a stock-farm is a delightful one (there is a yellow-bird

in the cherry-tree by my window drinking the tremulous rain diamonds

that hang under the twigs), but I fear that the only stocks I am young

enough for now are in railroad companies and the like whose golden

fleeces yield a half yearly clip. I am satisfied, though, that nobody

has such a sympathy with the seasons and feels himself so truly a

partner in the trade of nature as a farmer. I find great pleasure in my

own little ventures in this Earth-ship of ours on her annual voyages,

and shall even grow jolly again if my college duties are so arranged

next year that I shall get rid of some of my worries, and be able to

give my trees and crops the encouragement of a cheerful face. Depend

upon it, they feel it and grow in proportion. Fancy the

disheartenmentof a regiment of cabbages or turnips when they see the

commander-in-chief with a long face! Where shall they find the cheerful

juices that shall carry them through a long drouth, or the happy temper

that is as good as an umbrella to ’em in dull wet spells of weather, if

their natural leader be as bloodless as the one, or show no better head

than the other? Doesn’t it stand to reason?”

Six weeks later he wrote to the same friend: “The hot weather we have

been having for some time--95° for nearly a week together--has pretty

nearly used me up. It has made me bilious and blue, my moral thermometer

sinking as the atmospheric rose. But Sunday afternoon we had one of the

finest thunderstorms I ever saw, beginning in the true way with a sudden

whirl of wind that filled the air with leaves and dust and twigs

(_dinanzi va superbo_), followed in due time by a burst of rain. One

flash struck close by us somewhere, and I heard distinctly the crack of

a bough at the moment of its most intense redness. Just at sunset the

cloud lifted in the west, and the effect was one that I always wish all

my friends could be at Elmwood to see. The tops of the English elms were

turned to sudden gold, which seen against a leaden background of

thundercloud had a supernatural look. Presently that faded, and after

the sun had set came a rainbow more extravagant than any I ever saw.

There were seven lines of the glory looking like the breaking of quiet

surf on the beach of a bay. First came one perfect bow--the more

brilliant that the landscape was dark everywhere by the absence of the

sunlight. Gradually another outlined itself at some distance above, and

then the first grew double, triple, till at last six arches of red could

be counted. The other colors I could only see in the two main bows. I

thought it a trick of vision, but Fanny and her sister counted as I

did. A triple arch was the most I had ever seen before. Here is a

diagram.... _d_ is the spectator for whom this wonderful show was

exhibited. I should have made _d_ a capital, thus, _D_, to indicate his

importance in the scene. For have I not read in some old moralist that

God would not have created so much beauty without also creating an eye

to see and a soul to feel it? As if God could not be a poet! The author

of the book of Genesis knew better. However, it is something to have had

an eye see what we are seeing; it seems to double the effect by some

occult sympathy, and my rainbows are always composed of one part rain,

one part sunshine, and one part blessed Henry Vaughan with his ‘Still

young and fine,’ and his ‘World’s gray fathers in one knot!’ The older I

grow the more I am convinced that (there) are no satisfactions so deep

and so permanent as our sympathies with outward nature....

“In some moods I heartily despise and hate myself, there is so much

woman in me ( ... I mean no harm. I was designed, sketched rather, for a

man). Why, I found myself the other day standing in a muse with

something like tears in my eyes, before a little _pirus_ that had rooted

itself on the steep edge of the runnel that drains the meadow above

Craigie’s pond, and thinking--what do you suppose? Why, how happy and

careless the life of such a poor shrub was compared with ours! But I was

in a melancholy and desponding mist of mind, and I snatched myself back

out of it to manlier thoughts. But the reality and sincerity of the

emotion struck me as I mused over it, and I set it down on the debtor

side of my account. Still, _can_ one get away from his nature? That

always puzzles me. Your close-grained, strong fellows tell you that you

can, but they forget that they are only acting out their complexion, not

escaping it. I did not expect to chase my rainbow into such a miserable

drizzle, but for that very reason I will let it go as I have written it,

though I am rather ashamed of having uncovered my nakedness so plumply.

In spite of the heat we have had rain enough to keep the country

beautiful, and my salt marshes have been in their glory. The salt grass

is to other grass like fur compared with hair, and the color of the

‘black grass,’ and even its texture at the right distance remind one of

sable. I have been making night studies of late, having enjoyed, as

folks say, a season of sleeplessness, and I saw the dawn begin the other

night at two o’clock. The first bird to sing was a sparrow. The cocks

followed close upon him, and the phœbe upon them. The crows were the

latest to shake the night out of them.

“The Corporation have given me a tutor and cut my salary down to $1500.

But I think they will give me what they call a ‘gratuity’ if the college

funds justify it. If not, I must take to lecturing.... I am called away

to the hayfield, so good-by. I work more or less every day out of doors

and like it. I am getting back as well as I can to my pristine ways of

life.”

He had wished to purchase a little immunity from the routine of college

duties, but he needed to increase his income, for the change in his

college work, though it gave him more liberty, left him with smaller

salary. Except for the months when his editorship of the _Atlantic_ and

his college professorship had jointly given him a fairly comfortable

livelihood, he had always been in an impecunious condition; his writings

had not been especially remunerative, and as he was somewhat dependent

on outside pressure for a stimulus to work, it is probable that his need

of money had furnished this stimulus.

So this summer he was not unwilling to help himself out with some

special tasks on the _British Poets_. “My job,” he writes, “is

correcting Dryden for the next edition. I enjoy it, to be sure, but it

is rather wearisome. I have always had a great respect for Dryden’s

solid ability, and I am glad to read him in this minute way as a study

of his language. I have long thought that he was the last writer of

really first-rate English prose. Make every possible deduction, and I

still think so, and I believe it is because of two things: first, that

the language had not yet been sophisticated by writing for the press;

and second, that he wrote as a gentleman rather than as an author. It is

easy to see why his verse has been so much admired, it is so vigorous

and easy, and there is such mastery of language. Dryden _knew_ a great

deal, and uses his knowledge with an ease of manner that is very

charming to me.

“The work takes about three days to a volume, and I have the first two

to go over again, because I corrected more than they are willing to pay

for (I mean to the printer). I find some strange nonsense, chiefly

caused by punctuation. The Donne, on which I spent three or four weeks

of unremitting work, I have literally lost. Little & Brown don’t want

the expense of printing, and I have lost the book; can’t find it

anywhere. I find another copy--but perfectly clean!”[26]

A proposal was made at this time that he should write the life of

Hawthorne. Longfellow suggested this to Mrs. Hawthorne, who talked with

Lowell about it. He was attracted by the subject, and saw that he would

have abundant material, for Mrs. Hawthorne told him that there were

seventeen volumes of notes, beside the letters which could be collected.

After consideration, however, Mrs. Hawthorne feared to take the risks

involved in having the precious manuscripts go out of her hands, and the

plan was abandoned, Mrs. Hawthorne contenting herself with printing a

portion of the notes in the _Atlantic_, and afterward issuing the

several volumes of Passages from the American, English, French, and

Italian Note-Books.

Lowell was busy also this summer getting ready for publication the

second series of the “Biglow Papers,” his chief labor being in the long

Introduction, which is a justification of his use of the rustic New

England form by a careful tracing of many of the words and phrases and

local pronunciation to the English usage of the seventeenth century,

brought over by the early settlers and domesticated under conditions

which served to preserve them in common speech. And here may be printed

an unfinished letter, written a few months later, in which he sets forth

more familiarly some of his linguistic views: “I am not obstinate, but

Shakespeare does not tack his ‘lesses’ to nouns but to verbs. He says

‘viewless winds’ in ‘Measure for Measure,’ and means as Milton does in

‘Comus’ (‘I must be viewless now’) ‘invisible.’ So in ‘Hamlet,’ when he

says ‘woundless air’ he means ‘invulnerable,’ as you will see by turning

to Act I., scene i. I admit that _less_ ought to be joined to a noun (as

in German _los_ always is), but I think one may sin with Shakespeare or

Milton, for my instance from which latter I have to thank Malone. I

grant that Whittier is no authority--though I suspect he is right in

rhyming for the ear and not for the eye, as used to be the fashion. So

long as we don’t pronounce _arrums_ Hibernice, why shouldn’t he rhyme it

with psalms? Not that I would. I would be conservative about

pronunciation,--the test of good-breeding,--and would leave idioms to

the grace of God, where they properly belong. Boys and blackguards have

always been my masters in language. I have always felt that if I could

attain to their unconscious freedom, I were safe. I would not insist

(for example) with our excellent _Daily Advertiser_ on ‘house to be

let,’ because it is unidiomatic and because it is glossologically wrong.

We took it directly from the French _maison à louer_. Nor would I say

‘by auction,’ because ‘at’ is quite as good. Nor would I say ‘the house

is in process of erection’ for ‘the house is building.’”

Lowell dedicated his second series of “Biglow Papers” to Judge Hoar. “A

very fit thing,” he writes, “it seems to me, for of all my friends he is

the most genuine Yankee.” In the same letter he writes with eagerness of

a new poetic enterprise he had undertaken, or rather of an old one

revived.[27] “I have been working hard, and if my liver will let me

alone, as it does now, am likely to go on all winter. And on _what_ do

you suppose? I have taken up one of the unfinished tales of the

‘Nooning,’ and it grew to a poem of near seven hundred lines! It is

mainly descriptive. First, a sketch of the narrator, then his ‘prelude,’

then his ‘tale.’ I describe an old inn and its landlord, barroom, etc.

It is very homely, but right from nature. I have lent it to Child and

hope he will like it, for if he doesn’t I shall feel discouraged. It was

very interesting to take up a thread dropt so long ago, and curious as a

phenomenon of memory to find how continuous it had remained in my mind,

and how I could go on as if I had let it fall only yesterday.” This was

“Fitz Adam’s Story,” which Mr. Child found no difficulty in liking, so

that Lowell sent it at once to Mr. Fields for the _Atlantic_, where it

appeared in January, 1867. “I mean to work ahead as fast as I can with

the rest,” he wrote to Mr. Fields, and in the spirit which then

possessed him he had high hopes of completing “The Nooning,” having

already, as we have seen, various parts of it ready for final

articulation. He wrote Mr. Fields again, 8 November, 1867, when urged to

send more of the poem: “I cannot get into the mood of my Nooning story

just now,” but evidently he hoped still to go on with it, for he did not

include “Fitz Adam’s Story” in his next collection of poems published in

1869; yet when twenty years more had gone by, and “The Nooning” was

still in fragments, he saw that there was no likelihood of his ever

producing the rounded whole, and so included “Fitz Adam’s Story” in his

latest collection with an apologetic note.

“I am already beginning to feel the relief from those confounded

recitations,” he wrote a month or so after the fall term at college

began, “both in better health and better spirits.” He sent Mr. Fields

not only this poem for the _Atlantic_, but a fairy tale and a poem for

_Our Young Folks_. “You asked me once,” he writes, “for a fairy story,

and I suppose never expected to hear of it again. But it is not safe to

cast bread on _my_ waters. I invented a kind of one at once, and

yesterday and the day before contrived to write it, partly to spite an

infernal pain I was suffering, and which got me under at last. I think I

have told it simply enough, and was surprised to find how easy it was to

write in words mostly of one syllable. I think there are some pleasant

humors in it, but it may have suffered from my being in such a wretched

condition while I wrote it. Please read it yourself, and show it to no

one. To tell the honest truth, I have never read _Our Young Folks_, and

so do not know whether it is suitable or not. Perhaps I could write it

over again, but that might spoil it, for I might not be able to fancy

myself so vividly telling it again as I did before.

“Also: I have a jolly little poem that would do for a Christmas number,

called ‘Hob Gobbling’s Song,’ written years ago for my nephews, now all

dead. Just think of it! and three of the four in battle. Who could have

dreamed it twenty years ago?

“You will think I am mad to bombard you thus, but no, I am only

beginning to feel the sort of spring impulse of my college freedom. I

mean to work off old scores this winter if I can.”

The fairy tale, “Uncle Cobus’s Story,” had pleasant fancy in it, but was

curiously literary in its allusions and in its thinly concealed moral a

parable of Lowell’s own life, with its struggle for supremacy of the two

fairies Fan-ta-si-a and El-bo-gres. The song might fairly be called a

New England survival of Elizabethan fairy lore.

As a result of his industry during the summer and early fall, he was

able to write at the end of October: “I have in my pocket $820 for my

last six weeks’ work, and mean for the first time in my life to make an

investment of money earned!”

The pain, by the way, which he tried to assuage by writing, was some

facial trouble which resulted in a swelling making him look, as he

said, “like a hornpout with the mumps.” He had an odd experience with

ether which he thus describes: “The ether didn’t deaden the pain a bit,

that I could discover. Its only effect was to make my head feel as if it

were violently waggled to and fro. One odd result there was. For a

moment, I lost entirely my present personal identity, and absolutely

_was_ (without anything of that sense of dualism which commonly goes

along with and criticises hallucination) twelve years old and getting

ready to go out shooting as I used. Odd as it seems, it was a most

painful sensation, and all the rest of the night I was haunted by a

feeling that my life was the merest illusion, and I a poor puppet worked

by some humorous higher power, who could by a jerk put me back at Mr.

Wells’s school if he liked.”

In the midst of all this congenial labor he was moved also to write one

more political article, which appeared in the _North American_ for

October, 1866. The President and the Secretary of State had formed that

curious combination which may be said still somewhat to baffle students

of our political history, and Lowell wrote of it,--the last of his

series of political writings growing out of the great conflict and the

early movements toward reconstruction. Under the title, “The

Seward-Johnson Reaction,” he examines all the elements in the situation,

the President, the Secretary, Congress, and the two parties, and, as

before, his study is less an analysis of the component parts than a

reassertion of those fundamental principles which it was his political

philosophy to seek for and expound. Trust in the people was the prime

article of his creed; hence he sought chiefly for evidence of the

settled drift of the nation’s conviction, conscience, and instinct. The

great stake played for in the war was, in his words, the

“Americanization of all America, nothing more and nothing less.” Yet

with all his clear sight of the ideal and his confidence in the ultimate

reason of national thought, Lowell was not a vague theorist nor a

contemner of political activity. On the contrary, one of the most

impassioned sentences in the paper is that in which he speaks of the

dignity of politics. “Now that the signs of the times,” he says, “show

unmistakably to what the popular mind is making itself up, they [members

of Congress] have once more a policy, if we may call that so which is

only a calculation of what it would be ‘safe to go before the people

with,’ as they call it. It is always safe to go before them with plain

principles of right, and with the conclusions that must be drawn from

them by common sense, though this is what too many of our public men can

never understand. Now joining a Know-Nothing ‘lodge,’ now hanging on the

outskirts of a Fenian ‘circle,’ they mistake the momentary eddies of

popular whimsy for the great current that sets always strongly in one

direction through the life and history of the nation. Is it, as

foreigners assert, the fatal defect of our system to fill our highest

offices with men whose views in politics are bounded by the next

district election? When we consider how noble the science is,--nobler

even than astronomy, for it deals with the mutual repulsions and

attractions, not of inert masses, but of bodies endowed with thought and

will, calculates moral forces, and reckons the orbits of God’s purposes

toward mankind,--we feel sure that it is to find nobler teachers and

students, and to find them even here.”[28]

With this paper Lowell took leave of political writing for a long

time.[29] When next we meet him in this field it will be after certain

practical experience in the field of politics has given its own color to

his mind. Now, as if he had shaken off an irksome task, he turned more

entirely to literature. The next three or four years were occupied, as

the calendar of his published writings shows, with diligent excursions

in letters, both in prose and verse. The article on Percival which

appeared in the _North American_ for January, 1867, was an amusing

treatment of a commonplace book, but it was worth preserving for its

humorous presentation of the touchstones of genuine poetry; and from

what Lowell says in his letters of the slight personal acquaintance he

had with Percival, it is quite likely that the encounter gave a little

fillip to his interest; yet one may be permitted to look a little more

closely and find in Lowell’s characterization of the poetic temperament

and sentimentalism, when laid bare through the absence of the clothing

of sound sense and humor, a distant reflection on weaknesses of which he

was conscious when in the depressed mood. There was an assimilating

faculty which he possessed that led him, when reading lives and records

especially of literary careers, to suffer somewhat as the young student

of medicine who is never quite sure that he is not acting as a sort of

proxy for the cases whose diagnosis is laid before him. It is curious to

find Lowell, when engaged on Lessing’s life and works, which he reviewed

in the April _North American_, writing to Mr. Norton:[30] “I find

somewhat to my surprise from his letters that he had the imaginative

temperament in all its force. Can’t work for months together, if he

tries, his forehead drips with _angstschweiss_; feels ill and looks

well--in short, is as pure a hypochondriac as the best. This has had a

kind of unhealthy interest for me, for I never read my own symptoms so

well described before.” And the article itself, if one reads it with

Lowell’s thought about himself in mind, becomes a curiously parallel

record, even to external circumstances, of the two men. It would, of

course, be untrue to say that Lowell was thinking of himself when he was

writing of Lessing, but I cannot help suspecting, as I read the article,

that there was a subconsciousness which gave a force to certain

passages, and that Lowell’s interest in his subject was heightened by

the plucking at his sleeve of his own memories and ambitions.

In writing for the _North American_ the articles on great literature

which were afterward reproduced in his books, Lowell was not only

drawing upon a liberal familiarity with most of the subjects from

repeated readings, but he was sometimes availing himself of earlier

treatment in the form of lectures which he had given in connection with

his college work. He complains, when preparing his article on Rousseau,

that he is always bothered when he tries to do anything with old

material, as he was in this case, inserting in his paper patches from

college lectures; and any one who has had the experience appreciates the

difficulty of turning the _oratio directa_ of the lecture into the

_oratio obliqua_ of the essay,--to mention but one of the “bothers” of

such work. But a comparison of the manuscript of Lowell’s college

lecture with the text of the printed article shows two things: first,

that in going back to his old lecture, Lowell easily took fire from his

own words and, in copying a sentence, ran on into a fuller, more

finished conclusion. For example, in comparing the sonnets of Petrarch

with those of Michelangelo, he says alike in lecture and in article: “In

them (i. e. in Michelangelo’s) the airiest pinnacles of sentiment and

speculation are buttressed with solid mason-work of thought, of an

actual, not fancied experience.” In the lecture, he goes on: “You seem

to feel the great architect in them. Petrarch’s in comparison are like

the sugared frostwork upon cake.” In the article, however, he adds to

“fancied experience,” “and the depth of feeling is measured by the

sobriety and reserve of expression, while in Petrarch’s all

ingenuousness is frittered away into ingenuity. Both are cold, but the

coldness of the one is self-restraint, while the other chills with

pretence of warmth. In Michelangelo’s you feel the great architect: in

Petrarch’s the artist who can best realize his conception in the limits

of a cherry-stone.”[31]

Again, it is evident from the comparison that Lowell’s direct address in

speaking to his class from the written lecture was in form of sentences

little different from what he used when writing for the public. In each

case, his spontaneity was uppermost; he was not especially aware, as he

wrote, either of audience or of readers. In revising his articles for

book publication he altered the impersonal _we_ of the reviewer to the

_I_ of the author, and in doing so merely strengthened the natural voice

in which he spoke. Such papers as “A Good Word for Winter,” or “My

Garden Acquaintance,” are scarcely more direct in the relation of author

and reader than are those papers which have the external form of book

reviews. It was the personality of the man at home in a hospitable

manner that found this expression, and just as some of his happiest

letters were written to persons whom he scarcely knew, but happened to

be called out by some apt occasion, so he wrote and lectured, except on

the most formal themes, with a freedom which was neither disturbed nor

excited by audience or readers. One may notice a difference in this

respect between the political papers and the literary essays. The _I_

scarcely is at home in the former.

The Dante Club had finished its task, and Longfellow’s translation was

published in 1867. The affectionate relation between the two men found

more than one poetic expression during their long neighborly existence,

and when Longfellow’s sixtieth birthday occurred in 1867 Lowell wrote a

poem, and printed it in the daily paper which he knew would be laid on

Longfellow’s breakfast-table. On the appearance of the Dante he wrote,

with Mr. Norton, a joint review which appeared in the _North American_.

Of his own brief part he wrote in humorous dismay to his collaborator:

“I could only wish that the latter part had been more critical if it

were but for Longfellow’s sake. It’s lucky, perhaps, that I got almost

crazy over the insertion I was to make in it, or I should have rushed

into the thing myself--for, though I think his version (as you know)

truly admirable, there are some things to be questioned in it. However,

all the better that I couldn’t. I say I was almost crazy. You see I went

up to Shady Hill--picking up Longfellow on the way and it was _very_

hot, and I brought away an armful of translations, just cutting out

Howells, who was on the same errand. I came home with my prize, wet

through with the only sure result of all earthly toils, and began to

compare. Good heavens! I had Cayley and Ford, and Dayman and Ramsay (and

lots of others that made me ’d--’ say), and Brooksbank and Wright, and

last Rossetti. Well, I addled my brains over ’em--my tables were heaped,

my floor stumbly with my a-versions, as I called them when I looked _at_

them, my in-versions when I read them. Now, to begin with, I have read

Dante so much that I can’t remember a line of him--in short, ’twas

_infandum renovare dolorem_. I spent three days in bothering through

what will make two pages.”

The critical reviews of Longfellow’s Dante from the hands of competent

scholars were few, but one published in a daily journal called out a

letter from Lowell to the friend who sent it to him, which gives with

frankness Lowell’s estimate of the translation. “The review,” he writes,

“does not change my opinion of Mr. Longfellow’s translation--not as the

best possible, by any means, but as the best probable.... Nobody who is

intimate with the original will find any translation of the ‘Divina

Commedia’ more refreshing than cobs. Has not Dante himself told us that

no poetry can be translated? But, after all is said, I think Mr.

Longfellow’s the best thus far as being the most accurate. It is to be

looked on, I think, as measured prose--like our version of Job, for

example, though without that mastery of measure in which our Bible

translators are unmatched except by Milton. I mean where they are at

their best, as in Job, the songs of Debórah and Barak, the death of

Sisera, and some parts of the Psalms. Mr. Longfellow is not a scholar in

the German sense of the word, that is to say, he is no pedant, but he

certainly _is_ a scholar in another and perhaps a higher sense, I mean

in range of acquirement and the flavor that comes of it.”

Specific criticism, with all the painstaking of which he was capable,

was but the obverse of the medal which Lowell struck in his literary

work. On the face was his generous delight in his books. “The

Nightingale in the Study,” written in the summer of 1867, holds in

capital form a genuine confession that there was an appeal to him from

nature in literature which did not antagonize the appeal made to him by

the world of natural beauty, yet sometimes constrained and invited him

in tones he could not resist, even though the birds without were calling

him. Mr. Leslie Stephen who visited him in the summer of 1868, renewing

an acquaintance begun five years earlier and ripening into a friendship

which meant much to Lowell ever after, has given a pleasant account of

the impression made upon him by the poet in his study at Elmwood. “All

round us,” he says, “were the crowded book-shelves, whose appearance

showed them to be the companions of the true literary workman, not of

the mere dilettante or fancy biographer. Their ragged bindings and

thumbed pages scored with frequent pencil marks implied that they were a

student’s tools, not mere ornamental playthings. He would sit among his

books, pipe in mouth, a book in hand, hour after hour; and I was soon

intimate enough to sit by him and enjoy intervals of silence as well as

periods of discussion and always delightful talk.”[32]

It was a quarter of a century since Lowell had collected his fugitive

poems, though he had meantime published the second series of “The Biglow

Papers,” and when 1868 came in he was moved to make a new volume which

should include the poems he had been printing, chiefly in the

_Atlantic_. It was with this in mind that he took up a fragment of a

poem written a score of years before, rewrote and added to it, designing

to make it the title poem in the volume. He printed it first in the June

_Atlantic_, under the title “A June Idyll.” In sending it he wrote to

Mr. Fields: “In the first flush of having just finished and copied it

(for which I was obliged to miss Dickens last night) I am inclined to

think there is something characteristic.... Surely there are good bits

in it, and it is good for more than usual, or good for nothing. If I

haven’t made a spoon, I have certainly spoiled a horn that would have

turned out a very good one. You sometimes find fault with my names. I

have called this ‘A June Idyll,’ which is just what it is. Do you

object?”

Mr. Fields, either himself or through a friend, wrote a very

appreciative notice of the poem in the _Boston Advertiser_, which drew

from Lowell this response to his friendly editor:--

“Such a notice of my Iddle

Met my eyes in the _Advertiser_!

“‘To order,’ thought I, ’no, fiddle!

’Tis the dull world growing wiser.

“‘My forehead they twine with bayses,

They’re eager to shout hosanna,

My style as pure epic they praises

Where they used to add acuanha.’

“‘’Tis always their fate whom at christening

Your genuine Helicon’s spilt on;

Long ears are the latest at listening,

_Vide_ Wordsworth _passim_ on Milton.’

“So I read it aloud to my family,

One delicate phrase after t’other,

And surely the good little Sammle he

Wasn’t sadder at leaving his mother

“Than I when I came to the close of it,

For I wanted, as I’m a sinner,

(Such poetry seemed in the prose of it)

To keep up my reading till dinner.

“But now, oh worst of collapses,

My Temple of Fame is in ruins,

Its forecourt, nave, transept, and apse is

A shelter for foxes and bruins!

“For all of my Public Opinion

With the wind in its sails to drive it

To the port of supreme dominion

Turns out most especially private.

“My Fame’s accoucheur sadly yields his

Place up to the Deputy Cor’ner,

For my Public Opinion was Fields’s,

My tradewind a puff from the ‘Corner.’”

That the poem at once found disinterested friends is evident from the

letter which Lowell writes in acknowledgment of the praise which the

poet, Dr. Parsons, gave it. “Something more than half of it,” Lowell

says, “was written more than twenty years ago, on the death of our

eldest daughter; but when I came to complete it, that other death, which

broke my life in two, _would_ come in against my will, so that you were

right in your surmise. I was very glad you liked it, and your letter

touched me deeply, as you may well conceive.”

In September Lowell made out a tentative list of the poems to be

included in the volume, and wrote to Mr. Fields: “I think it best not to

include any humorous poems in this collection. They can come by and by,

if they are wanted. They would jar here. Some I may be able to shorten

somewhat in printing, but commonly I find it hard work to improve them

after they are dry, though I seem to see well enough where and how much

they need it. The poems of the war I shall put by themselves at the end,

so as to close with the Ode as I begin with the Idyll. How I do wish the

whole of them were better--now that I am putting them between stiff

covers to help them stand alone! ‘Bad is the best’ is a good

proverb--but how if the best is bad? Well, here and there one catches a

good strain, but I feel very hopeless about them.”

Lowell meant to call his volume “A June Idyll and other Poems,” but Mr.

Fields pointed out that Whittier’s new volume just about to appear was

to carry the title of “A Summer Idyll.”[33] Lowell retorted: “Why the

devil should Whittier bag my title? I can’t claim a copyright in

‘Idyll,’ that is in the dictionary--but, June ‘Idyll’ was mine. It will

be thought his poem suggested mine, as it was with the ‘Present Crisis,’

though mine was written two years before. However, J. G. W. is welcome

to anything of mine, for he is a trump, and after all the milk is spilt.

But if his volume is not advertised, might I not insist? It’s of more

consequence to me than to him, for I have nothing else that will look so

well in the vanguard. But if it’s all up, how would ‘Appledore and other

Poems’ do? It is a pretty name enough, and the poem is one of my

longest,--though not, perhaps, the one I would otherwise have put first.

My dedication, I think, is good, and that will take the edge off.”

Mr. Fields suggested that he should give the volume the title of his

place, “Elmwood,” but Lowell replied: “I can’t bear ‘Elmwood,’ and the

more I think of it, the more I can’t bear it--’tis turning one’s

household gods upon the town, as it were. No, never! They have endured

me for fifty years, and I won’t desert ’em in their old age. Let me have

my hermitage to myself. (I had eight visitors this morning--one of whom

wanted me to read ‘The Biglow Papers’ to him.) But I have it now.

Instead of ‘June Idyll,’ which was the _pis aller_ of a prosaic mind, I

shall call it ‘Under the Willows.’ Like all great discoveries, it is

simple, and, you may depend upon it, it is _the_ thing. It means

everything and nothing. I can’t make the poem over so as to suit

‘Elmwood,’ and so I shall settle upon this, fixed as a butterfly, stable

as the Horse-railway stables. You can’t move me. The man that moved

Chicago couldn’t move me. I am happy, and discharge my mind of the whole

concern. I shall now devote my evening to the ‘Flying Dutchman’ in

peace, and write you something clever for the _Atlantic_. I snap my

fingers at you and Bazin,[34] wore he even the helmet of Mambrino.

Nothing can touch me further. ‘Under the Willows and other Poems’--it

satisfies every want, and will be immensely popular. The basketmakers

will buy up the first edition and the gunpowder makers the second. Then

comes the general public, mad with curiosity to know what the d--l I

mean. I am charmed with my own powers of invention. A duller man would

have said ‘Under the Elms,’ or some such things. Let me alone for

tickling the fancy of a purchaser. _I_ know what they want.”

To Mr. Norton he writes, reciting his tribulations over the name of his

book, and adds: “I was suddenly moved to finish my ‘Voyage to Vinland,’

part of which you remember was written eighteen years ago.[35] I meant

to have made it much longer, but maybe it is better as it is. I clapt a

beginning upon it, patched it in the middle, and then got to what had

always been my favorite part of the plan. This was to be a prophecy by

Gudrida, a woman who went with them, of the future America.

[Illustration: _Elmwood_]

I have written in an unrhymed alliterated measure, in very short verse

and stanzas of five lines each. It does not aim at following the law of

the Icelandic alliterated stave, but hints at it and also at the

_asonante_, without being properly either. But it runs well and is

melodious, and we think it pretty good here, as does Howells.”

Again we quote a passage from Emerson’s unprinted journal, dated

December, 1868: “In poetry, tone. I have been reading some of Lowell’s

new poems in which he shows unexpected advance on himself, but perhaps

most in technical skill and courage. It is in talent rather than in

poetic tone, and rather expresses his wish, his ambition, than the

uncontrollable interior impulse which is the authentic mark of a new

poem, and which is unanalyzable, and makes the merit of an ode of

Collins or Gray or Wordsworth or Herbert or Byron, and which is felt in

the pervading tone rather than in brilliant parts or lines; as if the

sound of a bell, or a certain cadence expressed in a low whistle, or

booming or humming to which the poet first timed his step as he looked

at the sunset, or thought, was the incipient form of the piece, and was

regnant through the whole.”

There were two essays written in the fall of 1868 which are very

expressive of Lowell’s nature. “My Garden Acquaintance” records

delightfully that attachment to one spot which was made possible not

merely by long life at Elmwood, but by that sympathy with life which

enabled him to suck the juices from nature, not by roving, but by that

attitude of listening and observing which sometimes belongs to

home-keeping wits. “A Certain Condescension in Foreigners,” though it

was at first sight a clearing of his mind such as his letters repeatedly

show, grows warm with that passion for his country and the ideas it

stood for, which had been burned into him by his personal experience in

the war and by his constant brooding over the deep realities which

underlay the meaning of the war. He returned to political writing under

stress of need for copy in the January _North American_ with “A Look

Before and After.” The _Review_ itself had become somewhat more of a

burden to him, for Mr. Norton went abroad in the summer of 1868 for an

indefinite stay, and though Mr. E. W. Gurney, who took his place, was

competent, Lowell felt the responsibility rather more than when he had

easily left the main business to Mr. Norton. Moreover, the special work

which he and his friend had undertaken had, in a measure, been

accomplished, and the _Review_, though winning a _succes d’estime_, had

not that worldly success which reconciles one to drudgery. There is a

half-vexed, half-humorous letter to Mr. Fields, dated Elmwood 10 P.M.

Thursday, 1868, which was 24 September. “The express has just brought,”

he writes, “your note asking for the log of the _North American_ on her

present voyage. The N. A. is teak-built, her extreme length from stem to

stern post 299 feet 6 inches, and her beam (I mean her breadth of beam)

286 feet 7 inches and a quarter. She is an A 1 _risk_ at the

Antediluvian. These statements will enable you to reckon her possible

rate of sailing. During the present trip I should say that all the knots

she made were Gordian, and of the tightest sort. I extract from log as

follows:--

“11 July. Lat. 42° 1´, the first officer, Mr. Norton, lost overboard in

a fog, with the compass, caboose, and studden-sails in his pocket, also

the key of the spirit-room.

“25 July. Lat. 42° 10´, spoke the Ark, Captain Noah, and got the latest

news. 26, 27, 28, dead calm. 29, 30, 31, and 1 August, head winds N. N.

E. to N. E. by N. 15 August. Double reef in foretopsl, spoke the good

ship Argo, Jason commander, from Colchos with wool.

“17 August, dead calm, schooner Pinta, Capt. Columbus, bound for the New

World, and a market, bearing Sou Sou West half South on our weather bow.

Got some stores from him.

“20. Capt. Lowell cut his throat with the fluke of the sheet anchor.

“So far the log.

“Now for the comment. Toward the 1st September I received notice that

the _Review_ was at a standstill. Mr. Gurney was at Beverly, ill and

engaged to be married. I had not a line of copy, nor knew where to get

one. I communicated with G. and got what he had--viz: two articles, one

on Herbert Spencer, and t’other on Leibnitz. I put the former in type,

but did not dare to follow with the latter, for I thought it would be

too much even for the readers of the N. A. By and by, I raked together

one or two more,--not what I _would_ have but what I _could_. James’s

article on Spanish G.”[36] is good and ought to go in. So of the Siege

of Delhi. We want _something_ interesting, and we must have some

literary notices. As I receive none of the books, of course I had to

depend on others for these, and I have got as many as I could. I have

edited the number for October because it was absolutely necessary,--not,

surely, because I desired it. I have read all the proof and have done

all that I agreed _not_ to do when I made my engagement with Crosby &

Nichols. All I promised to give them was my name on the cover, and I

supposed T. & F. succeeded to their agreement. I have much more than

kept my word. The October number can’t be printed by Saturday.

“But I am altogether willing that it should be, only in that case my

name must be withdrawn from the cover. I never desired to be its editor,

and I put my resignation in your hands. Get some better man, say----,

who can write on all subjects equally ill at a moment’s notice. I wash

my hands of the whole concern. I will read the rest of the proof of this

number if you wish, for that is in the bond, but for January look out

for somebody who can make something out of nothing. I recommend----.”

Six days later he wrote again:--

“Correct estimates from log thus: 25 September. Lat. 42° 10´. Captain

Lowell committed suicide by blowing out his brains with the gafftopsl

halyards. There can be no doubt of the fact, as the 2nd officer

recognized the brains for his (Cap. L.’s), he being familiar with them.

“30 September. Captain L. reappeared on the deck, having only been below

to oversee the storage of ballast, whereof on this trip the lading

mainly consists. What was thought to be his brains turned out on closer

examination to be pumpkin pie, though the second officer was unconvinced

and the Captain himself could not make up his mind.

“The fact is I was cross, and did not quite like being brought up with

such a round turn at my time of life. I had done all I could, and was

hoping that the literary notices would make up for the rest. I had been

disappointed in three body articles by Bigelow, Poole, and Willard (on

von Bismarck). Gurney will take hold of the next number and it will all

go right. Say beforehand how many sheets you are willing to allow, and

we will keep as near the wind as we can, but don’t--well, never mind,

but I am as touchy as if I were even poorer than I am.”

The publication of “Under the Willows” brought Lowell some of those

expressions of admiration and affection for which the friends of a

writer gladly use such occasions. The publishing of a book is like an

announcement of an engagement,--an opportunity for one’s friends to show

their affection unreservedly. Among the notes which pleased Lowell was

one from Mr. Aldrich who had lately come to Boston to edit _Every

Saturday_, and in his pleasure he sent a copy of the special edition of

the Commemoration Ode with this letter.

ELMWOOD, 23rd December, 1868.

MY DEAR SIR,--That note was so pleasant to an old fellow who

doesn’t think too well of himself, that I can’t help (with a very

good will and a very balky pen) telling you how much pleasure it

gave me. That I don’t deserve all the fine things you say of me

doesn’t make it any the less friendly in you to say them, and I,

for one, frankly confess that I like a little _lubrication_ now and

then. It makes our machine (as they used to call it in the last

century) run easier for a day or two, till its general

ramshackliness reproduces the familiar friction.

Now lest the twins should repeat the tragedy of Eteocles and

Polynikes, and the house of Aldrich be extinguished in an

internecine duel for the possession of that other fatal volume, I

send what will enable your paternal anxiety to make a fair division

between them. If they are proper twins (I am a kind of twins myself

divided between grave and gay) they will be the one sentimental and

t’other humorous. Bequeath one sacred tome to each, and keep for

yourself the cordial feeling that sends both.

This which you now receive has at least the value of rarity. It is

one of twelve copies printed in this form. Think of me after I am

gone on (for in the nature of things you will survive me) as one

who had a really friendly feeling for everything human. It is

better to be a good fellow than a good poet, and perhaps (I am not

sure) I might have shown a pretty fair talent that way, with

proper encouragement. Any how, I wish you and Mrs. Aldrich, and

_the_ Twins a Merry Christmas, and am

Cordially yours,

J. R. LOWELL.

That Lowell himself knew how to give pleasure with praise is evident

enough from the several letters which Mr. Norton has printed, to Mr.

Aldrich, to Mr. Howells, to Mr. Gilder, and to other younger writers. He

was constantly sending pleasant messages and writing notes with

unaffected expressions of enjoyment, and his friendly feeling made it

easy for the editor of the _Atlantic_ to consult him with reference to

contributions even from strangers. Thus he wrote to Mr. Howells: “I

would be burned at the stake--nay, I would agree to be shut up alone for

an hour with ---- before I would acknowledge (I spelt it without a d!) a

poem to be good unless it was so. I would be burned at two stakes, and

be shut up with ---- and ---- ere I would say a good word for the verses of

a _rising_ young author. But I expect to see and like your poem in the

next _Atlantic_. It _is_ good, despite Mrs. Howells and the

anapests,--or whatever other kind of pests they were.

“Go by your ear, my dear boy, or by Madam’s and leave Latin prosodies

to ---- and the other profound scholars who understand ’em, but be sure

that the plot of your little poem is so charming that it will take all

the lovers and loved, and who else is worth caring for?

“I tried it on Mrs. Lowell (you know we have a bit of Darby and Joan

left in us still) and she purred at once. No: it is good and subtle (or

subtile, I don’t know which, thanks to Mr. Nichols), but it is either

you like.

“P.S. You have a real vein, so don’t be bothered, but make it as good as

you can and thank the gods.”

And again, in answer to some questions Mr. Howells had asked him

respecting the Isles of Shoals, apropos of the articles by Mrs. Thaxter

then to appear in the _Atlantic_: “‘Londoner’s’ is right. The names of

the islands are ‘Haley’s,’ otherwise (and better) ‘Smutty-nose,’ ‘Star,’

always called ‘Star-island,’ ‘Hog,’ which Mrs. T. no doubt calls

‘Appledore,’--the name of a village that once stood on it,--‘Cedar,’

‘White,’ ‘Malaga,’ and ‘Duck.’ There you have ’em all.

“Now I have a favor to ask of you--_Se io meritai di voi assai o

poco_--and that is to have the sheets of the life of Landor sent me. I

guess I could make something out of them, which perhaps you _boys_

hardly could. By the way, I was very much pleased with your notice of

that fellow’s (Sebright,[37] I think) Congressional reminiscences. It

made me laugh, and was so fine (so subtile) that the man himself,

despite his name, will never feel the edge of it. I always had great

expectations of you,--but I am beginning to believe in you for good. You

are the only one that hasn’t cheated me by your blossom. I like your

flavor now, as once I did your perfume. You young fellows are

dreadfully irreverent--but don’t you laugh--I take a kind of credit to

myself in being the first to find you out. I am proud of you. But see

how Fate takes me down! As I wrote the words, it began to rain on my

hay. _Absit omen._ And may it be long before you are mown!

“As for your gigantic _boongalong_ there in Boston,--I fancy it is like

Niagara, a thing that one can reckon mathematically. It is but one voice

raised to the nth power or so. And I remember that the Colosseum was

where the early Christians used to be martyred. Now I got up this

morning at half past six, and therefore count myself among the early

Christians.

“I forgot to tell you that George Curtis liked your Venetian poem very

much. So did I.”

His position naturally made him the recipient of many commissions for

securing the publication of poems and other manuscripts, and his

friendliness drew him into many letters of counsel, and it might be

encouragement. To one whose acquaintance he had made through a

contribution which he had accepted when editor of the _Atlantic_, he

wrote in answer to a letter in which she had confessed to discouragement

over hostile attack on a more recent work:--

That my note gave you any pleasure gives me a sensible

satisfaction. I am glad to find it _was_ my Miss ---- after all.

You mustn’t be disheartened. If you had written a foolish thing,

don’t you see?--nobody would be attacking it. People don’t bring

artillery to bear on soap-bubbles, but wait till they burst of

themselves. Don’t allow yourself to be shaken from that equipoise

of good sense and good temper that drew my attention so strongly in

your first article. Above all, don’t be drawn into any controversy.

Keep straight on, as if nothing had happened, and if you have

anything in you be sure the world will find it out. Publicity is

one of the painful necessities of authorship. For my own part, I

would give all the praise I ever received for the right to be

valued simply for my personal good qualities alone. But you must

resign yourself. You have given everybody who can command pen, ink,

and paper the right to talk flippantly and ignorantly and

unfeelingly of things into which you have put your very heart’s

blood. But don’t be disheartened. If you honestly _try to think_

(and it was because you seemed to me to do so that I felt an

interest in you) you will come out right in the long run. If you

have the true quality you will at last get the power of _thinking_,

the only abiding satisfaction and security for happiness which this

life or the other for that matter affords, a thing rarer than is

generally supposed. Really to think is to see things as they are,

and when we have once got firm foot-hold on that rock of ages, our

own little trials and triumphs take their true proportions, and are

as indifferent to us, morally, I mean, as the changes of the

weather. I think you have the root of the matter in you, that is,

that you are in earnest to do honest work, and not to flaunt in

the newspapers. For that reason I wish to help you all I can. Don’t

think I am writing such letters as this every week. On the

contrary, I am shy of writing letters at all, especially to women.

But whenever a word from me will cheer you, you shall have it.

I have directed two books to be sent you by express and beg you to

accept them as a token of sincere esteem from your friend,

J. R. LOWELL.

There is another letter drawn out from him by a stranger who was

concerned over a case of literary honesty, which is interesting as

showing how sensitive Lowell was in all matters pertaining to his art.

“You ask,” he writes, “my judgment on a point of literary morals. In the

case you set forth I find it hard to judge of the facts without some

knowledge of the character of the man, because thoughtlessness, want of

moral sensibility, and loose habits of mind generally, may in the

particular instance tend to lenify our judgment of the ethical quality

of the offence, without in the least changing our opinion of its

discreditable nature as respects good scholarship and honest literature.

There can be no question that every article (such as you describe)

should have had the name of its true author at the head of it, so that

no man who read could fail to know whose work he was reading. Nay, I

think we should be so scrupulous in such matters as to acknowledge even

an apt quotation when we owe it to another man. For example, I suppose

I must have read the ‘Divinia Commedia’ of Dante at least thirty times

with minute attention and yet it had never occurred to me that _cima di

giudizie_ was literally Shakespeare’s phrase, ‘top of judgment,’ till

Mr. Dyce pointed it out in a note on ‘Measure for Measure.’ I should

never think of using it as an illustration without giving credit to Mr.

Dyce. Even had I found the coincidence noted on the margin of my own

copy of Dante, I should still have quoted Dyce for it as having first

mentioned it in print, in order to avoid even the appearance of evil. I

think an honest man can easily resolve any doubt he may have in such

matters by asking himself the simple question, Do I gain any credit that

does not belong to me by letting it pass for my own? If I do, it is

stealing, neither more nor less, for there is no real distinction

between picking a man’s pocket of his money and filching the fruits of

his industry or thought from a book.

“In literature proper, originality consists of such an energy of nature

as enables a man so to infuse thoughts or sentiments common to all with

his own individuality as to give them a new character--flavor would be

the better word--commending them anew to the general palate. Chaucer is

a capital instance in point. He formed himself wholly on foreign models,

helped himself to plots, incidents, and reflections from any and

everywhere, and yet is on the whole fresher than almost any of our

poets. I always liked him the better for remembering in his ‘House of

Fame’ the pipes of those

‘little heardgromes

That kepen bestes in the bromes,’

for he was, I doubt not, paying the debt he owed to some nameless

minstrel.

“In matters of research and scholarship, the question seems to present

itself under a somewhat different aspect. All _learning_ is of necessity

to a great extent second-hand--but here also there is a manifest

distinction between _appropriating_ another man’s scholarship and

_assimilating_ it. In the one case it lies a mere load of indigestible

rubbish upon the brain; in the other, it is dissolved and worked over

into a new substance, giving sustenance and impulse to one’s native

thought. So that after all, whether in literature or scholarship, the

point is not so much what a man has taken, as whether he has made

something new of what he has taken.[38] If he have _not_, then he should

make punctilious acknowledgment of the sources whence he drew. It is one

thing to be indebted to a man for a hint that sets us on a path of

original research and discovery, and quite another to rob him of his

journals and publish them as one’s own. So as to giving credit where it

is due; I would not thank a guide-post, but I must pay a guide. I may

read by a man’s lamp, but if I tap his gas pipe, I ought to attach a

gasometer that shall record precisely how much I borrow.

“The leading case in this branch of literary ethics is the famous one of

Schelling _et als._ against Coleridge. For the defence we should take

into account the defendant’s lifelong habits of mental dissipation, his

own really great learning which might make him careless alike in

borrowing and lending, and above all the effect of opium in blurring the

memory and deadening the nerves of moral sensation. On the other hand,

it would be urged that he _lifted_ (to borrow a word, peculiarly apt

here, from the loose dialect of the border) from foreigners whose

property would be least liable to identification by his countrymen; he

did it by translation and transfusion, thus, as it were, obliterating

the marks of former ownership; and above all (in the case of A. W.

Schlegel) he did it in oral lectures, thus driving his stolen cattle so

hurriedly by in a way to baffle detection.

“You will find in Mrs. Nelson Coleridge’s Introduction to the

‘Biographia Literaria’ an eloquent and even passionate vindication of

her father from the charge of plagiarism. It does her honor as a

daughter, but is hardly convincing. Coleridge’s acknowledgment of

general indebtedness to Schelling and others was, to speak mildly,

wholly inadequate, and his evasions in regard to Schlegel leave a very

painful impression on the mind. If he was not lying, he was so

shamefully inaccurate in dates (to his own advantage) as to have all the

appearance of it.

“Now, your case (I mean the one you present) is in many respects very

like this--almost identical with it indeed....

“In the old trials, one of the questions on which the jury were called

on to pass was, ‘Did he fly for it?’ That is, I suppose, ‘Did he give

that proof of conscious guilt?’ I should ask the same question in this

case. Is there any evidence of an attempt at concealment?

“But, abstractedly from any opinion we may form of the _person_, the

action was one altogether discreditable and contemptible. We cannot be

too scrupulous on any point of morals in a country where members of

Congress see no dishonor in selling appointments to the Army and Navy.”

Dr. Thomas Hill, who was president of Harvard in 1868, asked Lowell in

the summer of that year to look over some papers he had received from

Virginia and to give his opinion of them. They were the letters and

journals of a Virginian gentleman, Mr. John B. Minor, who had visited

New England in 1834, and Lowell found them exceedingly interesting. “Not

the least engaging thing in the journal,” he wrote to the lady who had

sent the papers, “is the character of the author, everywhere showing

itself and everywhere amiable. So far as he is concerned, the whole

journal might be printed _verbatim_, for there is not an indiscreet

word, much less a breach of hospitality, from beginning to end. At the

same time there are, of course, passages here and there which should be

omitted in printing--I think not more than two or three at most--where

he describes the personal appearance of those he met.”

The next day he wrote to Mr. Fields: “There has been put into my hands

to dispose of, the Journal of a Virginia gentleman during a short tour

in New England, partly on foot. The date--1834, which is now ages ago.

There is not a great deal of it, but I found it truly entertaining. I

think I could make selections from it that would run through four or

five numbers of the _Atlantic_.... Now, do you want it? and if so, what

do you think it would be worth? When I say it is entertaining, I do not

mean for fanatics like me, who would cradle I know not how many tons of

common earth for a grain of the gold of human nature, but for folks in

general. It is not only interesting but valuable, and the character of

the author, as it blinks out continually, most engaging. It seems to me

remarkable that there is positively not an ill-natured word from the

first page to the last. Now you know that I have once or twice pressed

Sibylline books upon you which you wouldn’t take. Don’t let this one

slip through your fingers. I think it might be published afterwards in a

small volume with advantage, but of its adaptation to the _Atlantic_ I

have no doubt.”

The journal was printed in the _Atlantic_ in the summer and fall of

1870, Lowell furnishing an introduction to the first number. It was no

doubt under the influence of this new acquaintance with a fine type of

Southern manhood, that Lowell wrote to Mr. Godkin, 20 November, 1868: “I

confess to a strong sympathy with men who sacrificed everything even to

a bad cause, which they could see only the good side of; and now the war

is over, I see no way to heal the old wounds but by frankly admitting

this and acting upon it. We can never reconstruct the South except

through its own leading men, nor ever hope to have them on our side till

we make it for their interest and compatible with their honor to be

so.”[39]

Mr. and Mrs. Fields were proposing to make a journey to Europe in the

spring and summer of 1869, and asked Lowell to send his daughter in

their company. Lowell wrote in reply, 19 January, 1869: “I have been

thinking over your very kind invitation to Mabel, and, after turning it

in every possible way, I have come to the conclusion that the only way

to treat a generous offer is to be generous enough to accept it. My

pride stood a little in the way, but my common sense whispered me that I

had no right to feed my pride at my daughter’s expense. And moreover, my

dear Fields, you left me a most delicate loophole for my pride to creep

out of, in conferring on me a kind of militia generalship of the

_Atlantic Monthly_ while you were away. Now, if you will let me make it

something real, that is, if you will let me read the proof-sheets, I can

be of some service in preventing ---- (for example, merely) from writing

such awful English, and mayhap in some other cases, as a consulting

physician. Moreover, I should like to translate for _Every Saturday_

something now and then, as, for instance, the article on Déak and the

dramatic sketch of Octave Feuillet, lately published in the _Revue de

Deux Mondes_. May I?”

While his daughter was travelling with Mr. and Mrs. Fields, Lowell wrote

to Mr. Fields a piece of news anticipative of what came to an event a

little less than ten years later: “Mabel’s letters overrun with

happiness, which I fully share in reading them. I wrote her a long

letter about nothing yesterday--but I did not tell her what you may (_as

a secret for you three_), that I came very near being sent to Spain, and

that in case the Senate should not confirm Sickles in December, the

chances for me are the best. Judge Hoar told me when he was here the

other day, that Mr. Fish was friendly, and that the Assistant Secretary

was ‘zealous even unto slaying,’ as he was himself. So who knows but my

name may get into capitals in the triennial catalogues yet? That, after

all, is the main thing--for is it not a kind of fame as good as the

next? For my own part, I can conceive of no place better to live or die

in than where I was born.

“I hope Mabel makes a jolly companion. She always does for _me_.[40] If

she is as happy as her letters show her, I think she must. Tell her I

should have told her about Spain--but I forgot it. I shall have my

choice of castles to live in, if I go there, of my own building.”

“For awhile last spring,” he wrote in December to Mr. Norton, “I

thought it possible I might be sent abroad. Hoar was strenuous for it,

and I should have been very glad of it then.... However, it all fell

through, and I am glad it did, for I should not have written my new

poem.”[41] The new poem was “The Cathedral” which was issued in book

form at Christmas, 1869, as well as in the _Atlantic_ for January, 1870.

He wrote it during the summer vacation and took great pleasure in the

writing. He had told Mr. Howells what he was about, and on being asked

for the poem for the _Atlantic_ replied: “Up to time, indeed! the fear

is not about time, but space. You won’t have room in your menagerie for

such a displeaseyousaurus. The verses, if stretched end to end in a

continuous line, would go clear round the Cathedral they celebrate, and

nobody (I fear) the wiser. I can’t tell yet what they are. There seems a

bit of clean carving here and there, a solid buttress or two, and

perhaps a gleam through painted glass--but I have not copied it out yet,

nor indeed read it over consecutively.”[42] A little later he could

write to Miss Norton: “The poem turned out to be something immense, as

the slang is nowadays, that is, it ran on to eight hundred lines of

blank verse. I hope it is good, for it fairly trussed me at last and

bore me up as high as my poor lungs will bear into the heaven of

invention. I was happy writing it, and so steeped in it that if I had

written to you it would have been in blank verse. It is a kind of

religious poem, and is called ‘A Day at Chartres.’”[43] He dedicated

the poem with special pleasure to Mr. Fields, who by the bye had

persuaded him to substitute the name used for that he had chosen, a

change which Lowell regretted in writing to Mr. Stephen, as depriving

the poem of certain definite, local, and historical justification. “The

Cathedral” drew from Mr. Ruskin warm praise. “The main substance of the

poem is most precious to me,” he wrote, “and its separate lines

sometimes unbetterable,” and he added some specific criticism on words,

which Lowell met with more of his favorite instances of long-lived words

brought over in the mental baggage of the early New England settlers.

The letter in which he conclusively justifies himself is an excellent

example of the reasoning of a philologist to whom words are alive, and

not specimens in a museum.[44]

A correspondent had enquired in behalf of a friend, as had Ruskin, for

his authority in using “decuman” in the line

“Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman,”

and he replied: “My friendly catechist has certainly put in a fair claim

to a speedy answer. Whence that word ‘decuman’ got into my memory I have

no notion. It seems to have got embedded there during my eocene period,

and hopped out lively as one of those toads we have all heard of the

moment it got a chance. And the likeness was the nearer that it had ‘a

precious jewel in its head.’ In short, the word was there--it was

canorous, and it expressed just what I meant. So I used it

unsuspiciously. I did not mean to make a conundrum--I never do, but I

had made one. When I was asked for the solution, the answer was ready

enough--‘the tenth wave,’ which was thought higher than the rest. But

when I was asked for my authority! I thought I had met with it in Ovid.

No! In Lucan. No! They both speak of the tenth wave, but not in that

absolute way. I looked in my dictionaries. I found it at last in

Forcellini. Then I went to my Ducange, and the authority cited was one

of the Latin Fathers, I forget which. However, there it was, and with

the meaning I had remembered.”

Although the title, “A Day at Chartres,” carries with it a notion of

less formality, and has a picturesque quality, there is a fitness in the

soberer title that permits the mind to play with the theme. For Lowell

here builds upon the foundation of human life a fane for worship, and in

the speculations which discriminate between the conventional and the

free aspirations of the soul, constructs out of living stones a house of

prayer. Nor is there absent that capricious mood which carved grotesques

upon the under side of the benches at which the worshippers kneeled, so

that when the reader, borne along by the high thought, stumbles over

such lines as

“Who, meeting Cæsar’s self, would slap his back,

Call him ‘Old Horse’ and challenge to a drink,”

he may, if he will, console himself with the reflection that the most

aspiring Gothic carries like grimacing touches within its majestic

walls.

“Imagination’s very self in stone.”

That is the epithet Lowell bestows on Chartres Cathedral, and in the few

spirited lines in which he contrasts the Greek with the Goth, and hints

at the historic evolution of the latter, he is in a large way reflecting

the native constitution of his own mind,

“Still climbing, luring fancy still to climb.”

In the letters which Lowell wrote when “The Cathedral” was stirring his

mind one sees most impressively the struggle which was always more or

less racking him of an unfulfilled poetic power. The very spontaneity of

his nature was in a way an obstacle to expression. He waited for the

waters to be troubled, he was critical of his moods, of his

opportunities, and when the moment was seized, if he could indeed hold

it, he was supremely happy. “How happy I was while I was writing it,” he

says just as the poem is to be published; “for weeks it and I were alone

in the world till Fanny well-nigh grew jealous.” And yet in the very

memory of this bliss he is haunted by the thought of that black care

which rides behind. “You don’t know, my dear Charles, what it is to have

sordid cares, to be shivering on the steep edge of your bank-book,

beyond which lies debt. I am willing to say it to you, because I know I

should have written more and better. They say it is good to be obliged

to do what we don’t like, but I am sure it is not good for me--it wastes

so much time in the mere forethought of what you are to do.” The matter

was not made easier by the pride and honorable resolve not to mortgage

the future for the sake of some present indulgence. Lowell went without

things he wanted rather than get into debt for them, and though he

chafed under the conditions which compelled him to the doing of irksome

tasks, he would borrow no short-lived ease. In making up an account with

Mr. Fields at the close of 1869, when he found himself on the wrong side

of the ledger, he wrote: “You must allow me also to clear off the rest

... as soon as I can. There is no earthly reason why I shouldn’t, and a

great many why I should. I hate any kind of money obligations between

friends. When I have paid this off, the kindness will be left, and the

obligation gone. I shall be able to manage it before long. I never could

see any reason why poets should claim immunity beyond other folks. It is

not wholesome for them.” Even in petty matters he disliked exceedingly

to be under pecuniary obligation. His letters to Mr. Godkin, as printed

by Mr. Norton, show an unconquerable aversion to being a “deadhead”

under any circumstances, and I remember once, when I went with him to

the Museum of Fine Arts for some special exhibition, his annoyance at

finding it was a free day and he could not pay the ordinary toll.

His prose work, in 1869, included his papers on Chaucer and Pope, and

his “Good Word for Winter,” and at the end of the year he issued a

selection from what he had already written, in the first series of

“Among My Books.” But his slowly growing collection of published

writings did not add materially to his income, and he continued to be

embarrassed by the poverty of a landholder who had heavy taxes to pay

and only the meagrest return from the productive part of his estate. The

only relief he could foresee was in the possible sale of some of his

land.

The point to be noted, however, is that with all this pressure of need,

Lowell knew himself so well that he would not, even when a golden bait

was dangled before him, accept invitations to write which required of

him the diligence and the punctuality of the hack workman. No. He would

attend to his college duties, do what he could for the _North American_,

and accept the occasional opportunity which offered for reading a

lecture. He honored his art, and he refused to make it a perfunctory

task. His old friend Robert Carter was now editor of _Appleton’s

Journal_, and very naturally sought contributions from Lowell, but

Lowell replied in a letter written 11 March, 1870:

“Many thanks for your _Journal_, which I have looked through with a

great deal of pleasure, and which I should think likely to do good in

raising the public taste.

“I am much obliged to you also for your proposal, though I cannot accept

it. I have not time. I have not that happy gift of inspired knowledge so

common in this country, and work more and more slowly toward

conclusions as I get older. I give on an average twelve hours a day to

study (after my own fashion), but I find real knowledge slow of

accumulation. Moreover, I shall be too busy in the college for a year or

two yet. It is not the career I should have chosen, and I half think I

was made for better things--but I must make the best of it. Between

ourselves, I declined lately an offer of $4000 a year from ---- to write

four pages monthly in----.

“It takes me a good while to be sure I am right. A five or six page

notice in the next N. A. R.[45] will have cost me a fortnight’s work of

a microscopic kind. My pay must be in a sense of honest thoroughness.”

Lowell lectured in the spring of 1870 at Baltimore, and before the

students of Cornell University. In the summer he enjoyed much making the

personal acquaintance of Thomas Hughes, who visited America at this

time. Lowell had known him by correspondence, and Hughes, who was an

ardent admirer of Lowell and had introduced the “Biglow Papers” to the

English public, somewhat embarrassed the author of those poems by

quoting from them on all occasions. For his work he gave himself to the

reading of old French metrical romances, but the year saw scarcely any

product, though at its close he brought together a group of indoor and

outdoor studies under the title of “My Study Windows.” “I long to give

myself to poetry again,” he writes in October to Miss Norton, “before I

am so old that I have only thought and no music left. I can’t say as

Milton did, ‘I am growing my wings.’” There is a phrase noting a curious

consciousness he had at this time in a letter to Mr. Norton, written 15

October, 1870: “I wrote Jane yesterday a kind of letter, but you must

wait till my ships come in before I can write the real thing. I can’t

get rid of myself enough when I am worried as I am a good part of the

time. It is curious, when I am in company I watch myself as if I were a

third person, and _hear the sound of my own voice_, which I never do in

a natural mood. However, I shall come out of it all in good time.”

His old correspondent, Mr. Richard Grant White, published this year his

“Words and their Uses,” and wrote to Lowell, asking permission to

dedicate the book to him. Lowell replied:--

ELMWOOD, 2 August, 1870.

MY DEAR SIR,--In the midst of my sallow grass and my leaves

crumpled with drought, a little spring seemed to bubble up at my

feet in your letter. How could I feel other than pleased and

honored with your proposal? I wish only I deserved it better--but

anyhow I can’t find it in my heart to wave aside my crown out of

modesty, lest Anthony might not offer it again. So I put it on my

head with many thanks, consoled with the reflection that a wreath

unmerited always avenges itself by looking confoundedly like a

foolscap in the eyes of every one but the wearer. So I bow my head

meekly to your laurels, and thank you very heartily for an honor as

agreeable as it is unexpected. I shall have the satisfaction of

knowing that the deserved popularity of your book will carry my

name into many a pleasant home where it is now unfamiliar, and if

my publisher’s accounts show a better figure hereafter, I shall say

it is your doing.

With a very sincere acknowledgment of the obligation you lay upon

me to do some credit to your second leaf,

I remain, my dear Sir,

Very cordially yours,

J. R. LOWELL.

RICHARD GRANT WHITE, ESQ.

After some delays attendant on such business, Lowell was able in the

summer of 1871 to make a sale of a portion of the original estate of

Elmwood which left him the house and a couple of acres for his home, and

an income of four or five thousand dollars a year. It was a modest

living, but it cleared his mind of fretting cares. As he wrote to Mr.

Stephen: “It is a life-preserver that will keep my head above water, and

the swimming I will do for myself.” Of the effect upon his mind he wrote

more freely to his friend Mr. Norton: “I cannot tell you how this sense

of my regained paradise of Independence enlivens me. It is something I

have not felt for years--hardly since I have been a professor. The

constant sense of a ball and chain jangling at my heels, and that those

who are inexpressibly dear to me were at the risk of my giving

satisfaction in an office where what is best in me was too often held in

abeyance by an uneasy self-consciousness forced upon me by my position,

have been greater hindrances than anybody else can ever know. But now I

can draw a full breath of natural air and discarbonate my lungs of the

heavy atmosphere of an unnatural confinement. I look forward to my next

year’s work with cheerfulness. I am no longer chained to the oar, but a

volunteer. Whether I shall recover the wholesome mental unrest which

kept me active when I was younger, I know not, but at least I shan’t

have to print before I am ready, nor to keep on with the spendthrift

habit of splitting up the furniture of my brain to keep the pot

boiling.... I mean to come abroad at the end of the next college year,

and shall pop in on you some day, bringing a familiar odor, half

Cambridge, half pipe. I shall read you my new poem--when it gets

written--and bore you with old French in which I am still plunged to the

ears. I am become a pretty thorough master of it, and wish I knew the

modern lingo half as well.”

“It takes a good while,” he writes to Miss Norton, “to slough off the

effect of seventeen years of pedagogy. I am grown learned (after a

fashion) and dull. The lead has entered into my soul. But I have great

faith in putting the sea between me and the stocks I have been sitting

in so long.” He worked steadily at his college duties, with some

thought, I suspect, of finishing with his professorial work, the

laboriously learned part of his life. The minute, painstaking care to

which he gave to the studies which underlay his college work, so evident

in the annotation of his books, was after all a severe drain upon a

nature that took the greatest delight in imaginative freedom. He seems

hardly to have allowed himself any relief. “I have been reading over

your book[46] again,” he writes to Mr. Fields, 29 February, 1872, “and

found it very interesting and queer. Queer, I say, because it is the

first volume I have read for some months later than the XIV. century,

and I was a little puzzled at first, like Selkirk when he got back among

his own people and heard his own language again. I am glad you have left

out the imaginary nephew. One was apt to stumble over him and apologize

with a ‘Beg pardon, but really had forgotten you were here.’ These

buffers between the reader and the first personal pronoun never lessen

the shock, though they are always in the way. But nobody wants them, for

egotism does not consist in never so many capital _I’s_. Moreover, I am

persuaded that everybody likes it in his secret heart (as he does

garlic), and says he doesn’t for appearances.

“Your Dickens letters are a great deal more interesting than Forster’s

for some reason or other. I fancy it is because they are more natural.

In writing to Forster, Dickens must have felt that he was writing to his

biographer, and had the constraint of sitting before a glass. Indeed, I

was very much disappointed in Forster’s volume.[47] It doesn’t leave an

agreeable impression, which is surely a fault in biography.

“What a dear old affectionate soul Miss Mitford was! I knew nothing

about her before. Even her little vanities are rather pleasant than

otherwise. It is surely a delightful gift to be made happy as easily as

she.

“We are all busy getting ready for Mabel’s departure. I hate to think of

it, though I believe she is as safe as human forethought could make her.

Burnett is all I could wish.”

Miss Lowell was married 2 April, 1872, to Mr. Edward Burnett, and went

with him to Southboro, Massachusetts, where he was carrying on a dairy

and stock farm. Miss Rebecca Lowell died in May, so that the household

at Elmwood was in a measure dissolved. Lowell was busy up to the last

over the long article on Dante which he contributed to the July _North

American_. He was released from his college work, having resigned his

professorship; he let Elmwood to Mr. Aldrich and sailed 9 July for

Europe with Mrs. Lowell, to be absent two years.