Initial content from January 24, 2021

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+  The Project Gutenberg eBook of James Russell Lowell; vol. 1, by Horace Elisha Scudder.
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of James Russell Lowell, A Biography; vol. 1/2, by 
+Horace Elisha Scudder
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+Title: James Russell Lowell, A Biography; vol. 1/2
+
+Author: Horace Elisha Scudder
+
+Release Date: August 26, 2018 [EBook #57776]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL V.1/2 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif, MWS, Bryan Ness and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
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+by The Internet Archive)
+
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+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<hr class="full" />
+
+<p class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="[Image of
+the book's cover unavailable.]" title="" />
+</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary=""
+style="border: 2px black solid;margin:auto auto;max-width:50%;
+padding:1%;">
+<tr><td>
+<p class="c"><a href="#CONTENTS">Contents.</a></p>
+<p class="c"><a href="#LIST_OF_ILLUSTRATIONS">List of Illustrations</a><br /> <span class="nonvis">(In certain versions of this etext [in certain browsers]
+clicking on the image will bring up a larger version.)</span></p>
+<p class="c">(etext transcriber's note)</p></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p class="cb">JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL</p>
+
+<p class="c"><i>A BIOGRAPHY</i></p>
+
+<p class="c">BY</p>
+
+<p class="c">HORACE ELISHA SCUDDER</p>
+
+<p class="c">IN TWO VOLUMES</p>
+
+<p class="c">VOL. I
+</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 363px;">
+<a name="JAMES" id="JAMES"></a>
+<a href="images/i_frontis_lg.jpg">
+<img src="images/i_frontis_sml.jpg" height="500" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
+<div class="caption"><p class="c"><i>Mr. Lowell in 1889</i></p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_i" id="page_i">{i}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_ii" id="page_ii">{ii}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_iii" id="page_iii">{iii}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
+
+<h1>
+JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL</h1>
+
+<p class="c"><span class="eng"><big>A Biography</big></span><br />
+<br />
+<small>BY</small><br />
+<br /><big>
+HORACE ELISHA SCUDDER</big><br />
+<br />
+IN TWO VOLUMES<br />
+<br />
+VOL. I.<br />
+<br />
+<img src="images/colophon.jpg" width="125" alt="[Image of colophon unavailable.]" />
+<br />
+<br />
+BOSTON AND NEW YORK<br />
+HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY<br />
+<span class="eng">The Riverside Press, Cambridge</span><br />
+1901<br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_iv" id="page_iv">{iv}</a></span><br />
+<br /><small>
+COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY HORACE E. SCUDDER<br />
+ALL RIGHTS RESERVED<br />
+PUBLISHED NOVEMBER, 1901</small><br />
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_v" id="page_v">{v}</a></span><br />
+<br /><br />
+TO<br />
+<br />
+<big>G·O·S·</big><br />
+<br />
+“NAUGHT CAN BE UNWORTHY, DONE FOR YOU.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_vi" id="page_vi">{vi}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_vii" id="page_vii">{vii}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
+
+<h2><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE"></a>PREFACE</h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> existence of the two volumes of <i>Letters of James Russell Lowell,
+edited by Charles Eliot Norton</i>, has determined the character of this
+biography. If they had not been published, I might have made a <i>Life and
+Letters</i> which would have been in the main Lowell’s own account of
+himself, in his voluminous correspondence, annotated only by such
+further account of him as his letters failed to supply. As it is, though
+I have had access to a great many letters not contained in Mr. Norton’s
+work, I have thought it desirable not so much to supplement the
+<i>Letters</i> with other letters, as to complement those volumes with a more
+formal biography, using such letters or portions of letters as I print
+for illustration of my subject, rather than as the basis of the
+narrative.</p>
+
+<p>I have kept the <i>Letters</i> always by my side as my main book of
+reference; by the courtesy of their editor and by arrangement with their
+publishers, Messrs. Harper &amp; Brothers, I have now and then drawn upon
+them where it seemed especially desirable that Lowell should speak for
+himself, but<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_viii" id="page_viii">{viii}</a></span> their greatest use to me has been in their disclosure of
+Lowell’s personality, for they undoubtedly contain the cream of his
+correspondence. I have, however, had other important material for my
+use. First of all, Lowell’s collected writings in verse and prose, and
+some uncollected writings, both in print and manuscript. After all that
+a biographer can do, after all that Lowell himself can do through his
+letters, the substantial and enduring revelation of the man is in that
+free converse which he had with the world in the many forms which his
+literary activity took.</p>
+
+<p>After this I must again thank Mr. Norton for his generosity in placing
+in my hands a large body of letters and papers, which he holds as
+Lowell’s literary executor; perhaps even more for the wise counsel with
+which he has freely aided me in the course of the work. Without his
+coöperation the biography could not have been written in its fulness.</p>
+
+<p>My thanks are due, also, to the friends and the children of the friends
+of Lowell who have sent me letters and other material; to Miss Charlotte
+P. Briggs, daughter of the late Charles F. Briggs, the warm friend of
+Lowell in his early literary life; to Mrs. Sydney Howard Gay, who sent
+me not only letters, but the original manuscript of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_ix" id="page_ix">{ix}</a></span> Lowell’s
+contributions to the <i>National Anti-Slavery Standard</i>; to Mrs. Richard
+Grant White; to Dr. Edward Everett Hale, whose <i>James Russell Lowell and
+his Friends</i> has been a pleasant accompaniment to my labors; to General
+James Lowell Carter for the use of his father’s letters; to Col. T. W.
+Higginson; to Mrs. S. B. Herrick; to Mrs. Mark H. Liddell for Lowell’s
+letters to Mr. John W. Field; to Mr. R. R. Bowker; to Mr. R. W. Gilder;
+to Mr. Edwin L. Godkin; to Mr. Howells, Mr. Aldrich, Mr. De Witt Miller,
+Mr. J. Spenser Trask, and others.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Cambridge, Mass.</span>, 27 September, 1901. </p></div><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xi" id="page_xi">{xi}</a></span></p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_x" id="page_x">{x}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="8" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td><small>CHAPTER</small></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">I.</a></td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_I"><span class="smcap">Elmwood and the Lowells</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_1">1</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">II.</a></td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_II"><span class="smcap">School and College</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_19">19</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">III.</a></td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_III"><span class="smcap">First Ventures</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_62">62</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">IV.</a></td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_IV"><span class="smcap">In the Anti-Slavery Ranks</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_151">151</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">V.</a></td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_V"><span class="smcap">A Fable for Critics, The Biglow Papers, and The Vision of Sir Launfal</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_238">238</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">VI.</a></td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_VI"><span class="smcap">Six Years</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_270">270</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">VII.</a></td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_VII"><span class="smcap">Fifteen Months in Europe</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_309">309</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">VIII.</a></td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII"><span class="smcap">An End and a Beginning</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_346">346</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">IX.</a></td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_IX"><span class="smcap">The Atlantic Monthly</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_408">408</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xiii" id="page_xiii">{xiii}</a></span><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xii" id="page_xii">{xii}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="LIST_OF_ILLUSTRATIONS" id="LIST_OF_ILLUSTRATIONS"></a>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="8" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td class="rt"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#JAMES"><span class="smcap">James Russell Lowell</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#JAMES"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="indd">From a photograph by Gutekunst taken in 1889.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#REV"><span class="smcap">Rev. Charles Lowell</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_10">10</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="indd">From a painting by Rand, in the possession of Charles Lowell.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#J1843"><span class="smcap">James Russell Lowell in 1843</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_116">116</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="indd">From the painting by William Page, in the possession of James B. Lowell.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#MRS"><span class="smcap">Mrs. Charles Lowell</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_306">306</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="indd">From a painting by Rand, in the possession of James Duane Lowell.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#MARIA"><span class="smcap">Mrs. Maria White Lowell</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_360">360</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td class="indd">From a drawing by Cheney, after a painting by William Page.</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#DR"><span class="smcap">House of Dr. Estes Howe, Cambridge</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_384">384</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xiv" id="page_xiv">{xiv}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_1" id="page_1">{1}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>
+
+<h1>JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL</h1>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I<br /><br />
+<small>ELMWOOD AND THE LOWELLS</small></h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">James Russell Lowell</span> was born at Elmwood in Cambridge, New England,
+Monday, 22 February, 1819. When he was about to leave England at the
+close of his term as American minister, he was begged by a friend to
+make Washington his home, for there he would find the world in which
+lately he had been living; but he answered: “I have but one home in
+America, and that is the house where I was born, and where, if it shall
+please God, I hope to die. I shouldn’t be happy anywhere else;” and at
+Elmwood he died, Wednesday, 12 August, 1891.</p>
+
+<p>The place was endeared to him by a thousand memories, and he liked it
+none the less for the historic associations, which lent it a flavor
+whimsically suggestive to him of his own lurking sympathy. “It will make
+a frightful Conservative of you before you know it,” he wrote in 1873 to
+Mr. Aldrich, then living at Elmwood; it was born a Tory and will die so.
+Don’t get too used to it. I often wish I had not grown into it so.”</p>
+
+<p>The house was one of a succession of spacious<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_2" id="page_2">{2}</a></span> dwellings set in broad
+fields, bordering on the Charles River, built in the eighteenth century,
+and occupied for the most part, before the War for Independence, by
+loyal merchants and officers of the Crown. They were generous country
+places, pleasantly remote from Boston, which was then reached only by a
+long détour through Brookline and Roxbury, and the owners of these
+estates left them, one by one, as they were forced out by the revolt of
+the province: but the name of Tory Row lingered about the group, and
+there had been no great change in the outward appearance of the
+neighborhood when Lowell was born in one of these old houses.</p>
+
+<p>From the colleges, past the unenclosed common, a road ran in the
+direction of Watertown. It skirted the graveyard, next to which was
+Christ Church, the ecclesiastical home of the occupants of Tory Row, and
+shortly turned again by an elm already old when Washington took command,
+under its shade, of the first American army. Along the line of what is
+now known as Mason Street, it passed into the thoroughfare upon which
+were strung the houses of Tory Row; a lane entered it at this point,
+down which one could have walked to the house of the vacillating Thomas
+Brattle, occupied during the siege of Boston by Quartermaster-General
+Mifflin; the main road, now known as Brattle Street, but in Lowell’s
+youth still called the Old Road, keeping on toward Watertown, passed
+between the estates of the two Vassalls, Henry and John, Colonel John
+Vassal<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_3" id="page_3">{3}</a></span>l’s house becoming in the siege of Boston the headquarters of
+Washington, and wreathing its sword later in the myrtle boughs of
+Longfellow. Then, at what is now the corner of Brattle and Sparks
+streets, stood the Lechmere house, afterward Jonathan Sewall’s, and
+occupied for a while by the Baron Riedesel, when he was a prisoner of
+war after the defeat of Burgoyne, in whose army he commanded the Hessian
+forces.</p>
+
+<p>The Baroness Riedesel, in her lively letters, rehearses the situation as
+it existed just before she and her husband were quartered in Cambridge:
+“Seven families, who were connected with each other, partly by the ties
+of relationship and partly by affection, had here farms, gardens, and
+magnificent houses, and not far off plantations of fruit. The owners of
+these were in the habit of daily meeting each other in the afternoon,
+now at the house of one, and now at another, and making themselves merry
+with music and the dance&mdash;living in prosperity, united and happy, until,
+alas! this ruinous war severed them, and left all their houses desolate,
+except two, the proprietors of which were also soon obliged to flee.”
+Beyond the Lechmere-Sewall estate was that of Judge Joseph Lee, where in
+Lowell’s middle day lived his friend and “corrector of the press” George
+Nichols, and then, just before the road made another bend, came the
+Fayerweather house, occupied in Lowell’s youth by William Wells, the
+schoolmaster. Here the road turned-to the south, and passed the last of
+the Row, known in later years as Elmwood.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_4" id="page_4">{4}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The house, square in form, was built in 1767 on the simple model which
+translated the English brick manor house of the Georgian period into the
+terms of New England wood; it was well proportioned, roomy, with a hall
+dividing it midway; and such features as abundant use of wood in the
+interior finish, and quaintly twisted banisters to its staircase,
+preserve the style of the best of domestic colonial buildings. Heavy
+oaken beams give the structure solidity and the spaces between them in
+the four outer walls are filled in with brick, while great chimneys are
+the poles which fasten to the earth the tent which seems likely still to
+shelter many generations.</p>
+
+<p>The house was built for Thomas Oliver, the son of a West India merchant,
+and a man of fortune, who came from the town of Dorchester, not far off,
+to live in Cambridge, probably because of his marriage to a daughter of
+Colonel John Vassall. He was lieutenant-governor of the Province, and
+had been appointed by George III. President of the Council, a position
+which rendered him especially obnoxious to the freemen of Massachusetts.
+In that contention for strict construction of the charter, which was one
+of the marks of the allegiance to law characteristic of the king’s
+American subjects, it was held that councillors were to be elected, not
+appointed. On the morning of 2 September, 1774, a large number of the
+freeholders of Middlesex County assembled at Cambridge and surrounded
+Oliver’s house. He had previously conferred with these zealous people
+and represented<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_5" id="page_5">{5}</a></span> that as his office of president was really the result
+of his being lieutenant-governor he would incur his Majesty’s
+displeasure if he resigned the one office and retained the other. The
+explanation seemed satisfactory for a while, but on the appearance of
+some signs of activity among his Majesty’s soldiers, the committee in
+charge renewed their demands, and drew up a paper containing a
+resignation of his office as president, which they called on the
+lieutenant-governor to sign. He did so, adding the significant clause:
+“my house at Cambridge being surrounded by about four thousand people,
+in compliance with their command I sign my name.”</p>
+
+<p>Oliver left Cambridge immediately, never to return. He succeeded to the
+civil government of Boston, and Sir William Howe to the military
+command, when Governor Gage returned to England, but when Boston was
+evacuated Oliver retired with the British forces. The estate, with
+others in the neighborhood, was seized for public use. When the American
+army was posted in Cambridge it was used as a hospital for soldiers.
+Afterwards it was leased by the Committee of Correspondence. A credit of
+£69 for rent was recorded in 1776. Subsequently the estate was
+confiscated and sold by the Commonwealth, the land contained in it then
+consisting of ninety-six acres. The purchaser was Arthur Cabot, of
+Salem, who later sold it to Elbridge Gerry, Governor of Massachusetts
+from 1810 to 1812, and Vice-President of the United States under
+Madison, from 4 March,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_6" id="page_6">{6}</a></span> 1813, until his sudden death, 23 November, 1814,
+a man personally liked, but politically detested by his neighbors. In
+1818 the estate, or rather the homestead and some ten acres of land, was
+sold by Gerry’s heirs to the Rev. Charles Lowell, minister of the West
+Church in Boston, who now made it his home, establishing himself there
+with his wife and five children. In the next year his youngest child,
+James Russell Lowell, was born in this house of many memories.</p>
+
+<p>The Rev. Charles Lowell was the seventh in descent from Percival Lowell,
+or Lowle, as the name sometimes was written, a well-to-do merchant of
+Bristol, who, with children and grandchildren, a goodly company, came
+from England in 1639, and settled in Newbury, Mass.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> Charles Lowell’s
+father, the Hon. John Lowell, had led a distinguished career as a lawyer
+and publicist; and as a member of the corporation of Harvard College,
+and of learned societies having their headquarters in Boston, had been a
+conspicuous figure in the community. One of his sons, Francis Cabot
+Lowell, was the organizer of the industries on the banks of the Merrimac
+which resulted in the building of the city of Lowell. A son of Francis
+Cabot Lowell was the originator of the Lowell Institute, a centre of
+diffusing light in Boston. Charles Lowell himself, springing from a
+stock which, by inheritance and accumulation of intellectual forces, was
+a leading family in the compact community of Boston, was endowed with a
+singu<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_7" id="page_7">{7}</a></span>larly pure and gracious spirit, and enjoyed an unusual training
+for the life of rich service he was to lead.</p>
+
+<p>Graduated at Harvard in 1800, his bent was toward the ministry; but
+yielding to the wishes of his father, he entered the law office of his
+elder brother, and spent a year or more in the study of the profession
+of law. His inclination, however, was not changed, and his father
+withdrew his opposition and consented to a plan by which the young man
+was to pursue his theological studies in Edinburgh. He had three years
+of study and travel abroad. He was a pupil of Sir David Brewster and of
+Dugald Stewart, and kept up a friendly acquaintance for many years with
+Stewart’s later colleague, Dr. Brown. He met Wilberforce, heard Pitt,
+Fox, and Sheridan in the House of Commons, and, as his letters show,
+made eager incursions into the world of art.</p>
+
+<p>He carried through all his experience a nature of great simplicity and
+of unquestioning faith. His son once wrote of him: “Nothing could shake
+my beloved and honored father’s trust in God and his sincere piety;” and
+his work as pastor of the West Church in Boston, to which he was called
+shortly after his return to America, was characterized by a
+single-minded devotion which made him, in the truest sense, a minister.
+All who have recorded their recollections of him agree in their
+impression of great distinction of manner and a singularly musical
+voice. He had a way, it was said, of uttering very familiar sentences,
+such as a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_8" id="page_8">{8}</a></span> quotation from the Bible, with singular effectiveness,&mdash;a
+manner which was peculiarly his own. After infirmities of sight and
+hearing had made his appearance in the pulpit rare, he would still, now
+and then, take part in the service by reciting in his melodious voice
+one or more of the hymns&mdash;he knew by heart all in the book. Emerson said
+of him that he was the most eloquent extemporaneous speaker he had ever
+heard. He had the natural gift of speech, but until one read by himself
+some sermon to which he had listened with delight, he would scarcely be
+aware that the spell lay in the pure tones of the voice that uttered
+it.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></p>
+
+<p>Above all, he was the parson, making his powers tell less in preaching
+than in the incessant care and cure of souls. In Edinburgh he had
+studied medicine as well as theology, and, as his church stood on the
+border of a district which was forlorn and unwholesome, Dr. Lowell was
+constantly extending the jurisdiction of his parochial authority,
+carrying the gospel in one hand and bread and pills in the other. He
+knew every child in his<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_9" id="page_9">{9}</a></span> parish, and if, as he said, his ministry was an
+unclouded one, it was because he was too busy with the needs of others
+ever to perplex himself greatly over his own cares. Indeed, it was the
+unremitting performance of his pastoral duties which impaired his health
+and led to the necessity of his removal from the city to the outskirts
+of the country village of Cambridge, four miles away, though doubtless
+he was largely influenced also by the needs of the growing family that
+surrounded him.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Lowell had seen something of the great world abroad, and he stood in
+an amiable relation to that self-centred, comfortable world of New
+England which held to the established order, even though there had begun
+within it already the agitation which was to shake the nation. Like many
+thus poised, he hated slavery in the abstract, but shrank back when it
+became a question of meddling with it: the instinct for the preservation
+of an established order was strong. The “abolitionism” which he saw
+rising was to him “harsh, dogmatic, uncharitable, unchristian,” and it
+disturbed his gentle, orderly nature. From the sheltered nook of
+Elmwood, he looked out on a restless, questioning world, but his own
+part seemed to be marked out for him. He had his parish, with a thousand
+petty disorders to rectify; he had his books, which he loved and read;
+he drove to town in his chaise to attend the meetings of the Historical
+Society, of which he was long secretary, and he watched the chickens and
+growing things in his green domain of Elmwood. The tall pines which<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_10" id="page_10">{10}</a></span>
+murmur about the old house were planted by him. He brought to the
+solution of the new problems which were vexing men the calm religious
+philosophy which had solved any doubts he may have had, and if his
+equanimity was disturbed he righted himself always with a cheerful
+optimistic piety. One of his parish who had grown to womanhood under his
+eye, and had married, made up her mind to take a stand in some reform as
+a public speaker, and from his chamber at Elmwood&mdash;for this was late in
+his life, when he was in retirement&mdash;he sent for her to come to him.</p>
+
+<p>“I shall never forget his greeting,” she wrote long after. As I opened
+the chamber door he rose from the old easy-chair, and standing erect,
+cried out: ‘Child! my child! what is this I hear? Why are you talking to
+the whole world?’ He was clothed in a long white flannel dressing-gown,
+with a short shoulder cape hardly reaching to his belt. His was no
+longer the piercing expression, aggressive to a degree, that Harding has
+portrayed. The curling locks that gave individuality to his forehead had
+been cut away, the gentle influence of a submissive spirit had impressed
+itself upon his features. In a moment I was seated at his feet, and then
+came a long and intimate talk of why and when and wherefore, which ended
+in a short prayer with his hand upon my head, and the words, ‘Now
+promise me that you will never enter the desk without first seeking
+God’s blessing!’ I answered only by a look.”<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 391px;">
+<a name="REV" id="REV"></a>
+<a href="images/i_010fp_lg.jpg">
+<img src="images/i_010fp_sml.jpg" width="391" height="500" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
+<div class="caption"><p class="c"><i>Rev. Charles Lowell</i></p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_11" id="page_11">{11}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This Dr. Primrose, as his son once affectionately called him, had for a
+companion one who was the farthest possibly removed from the fussy,
+ambitious wife of the Vicar of Wakefield. When he once made a journey to
+Europe with Mrs. Lowell and their eldest daughter, the little party took
+especial delight in a trip to the Orkney Islands, and in the enjoyment
+of friendly intercourse with the Traills from that region; for it was
+but a step that Mrs. Lowell needed to take to bring her into close
+kinship with the Orkney folk. Her grandfather, Robert Traill, whose
+name, together with her own name of Spence, she gave to one of her boys,
+had come from Orkney to America, had married there, and left a daughter,
+Mrs. Lowell’s mother,<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> when he went back to Great Britain at the
+revolt of the colonies. Thus, when Robert Traill’s granddaughter visited
+Orkney, she was returning to her own kin. Not only so, but her father,
+Keith Spence, came of Highland ancestry, and it was easy to find a
+forbear in the Sir Patrick Spens of the old ballad, as it was also to
+claim kinship with Minna Troil, whom the Wizard of the North had lifted
+out of the shadowy forms of life into the enduring reality of “The
+Pirate.”</p>
+
+<p>This close affiliation with the North disclosed itself in Mrs. Lowell in
+a rare beauty of person<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_12" id="page_12">{12}</a></span> and temperament, together with a suggestion of
+that occult power which haunts the people of the Orkney Isles. Whether
+or no Mrs. Lowell had, as was sometimes said, the faculty of second
+sight, she certainly had that love of ballads and delight in singing and
+reciting them which imparts a wild flower fragrance to the mind;<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> and
+her romantic nature may easily be reckoned as the brooding place of
+fancies which lived again in the poetic genius of her son. She had been
+bred in the Episcopal Church, and that may possibly have had its
+influence in the determination of her son Robert’s vocation, but in
+marrying Dr. Lowell she must have found much common ground with one who
+always resolutely refused to be identified with a sect almost local in
+its bounds. “I have adopted,” he wrote in 1855, “no other religious
+creed than the Bible, and no other name than Christian as denoting my
+religious faith.” The few letters from Mrs. Lowell’s pen which remain
+contain messages of endearment that flutter about the head of her “Babie
+Jammie,” as she called him, and betray a tremulous nature, anxious with
+pride and fond perplexity.</p>
+
+<p>The companionship of the elder Lowells began in a happy manner in their
+childhood. The grandfather of Charles Lowell was the Rev. John Lowell,
+of Newburyport, who was twice married. His<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_13" id="page_13">{13}</a></span> widow continued to make her
+home in Newburyport after her husband’s death, but when her husband’s
+son, John Lowell, the lawyer and jurist, left the place and established
+himself in Boston, she also left the town and went to live in Portsmouth
+near her niece, Mrs. Brackett. Mrs. Lowell had been John Lowell’s mother
+since his boyhood, and after the manner so common in New England
+households the titular grandmother ruled serenely without being
+subjected to nice distinctions. Charles Lowell, thus, when a boy, was a
+frequent visitor at his grandmother’s Portsmouth home, and his playmate
+was his grandmother’s great-niece, Harriet Brackett Spence. The intimacy
+deepened and before Charles Lowell sailed for Europe a betrothal had
+taken place.</p>
+
+<p>There were three sons and two daughters when James Russell,<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> the
+youngest in this family, was born. Charles was between eleven and
+twelve, Rebecca ten, Mary a little over eight, William between five and
+six, and Robert<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> between two and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_14" id="page_14">{14}</a></span> three. All these lived to maturity,
+excepting William, who died when James was four years old. Charles by
+his seniority was the mentor and guide of his younger brother during his
+adolescence, especially when their father was absent, as he was once for
+a journey in Europe, but Mary<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> was the sister to whom he was
+especially committed in his childhood. She was his little nurse, and as
+her own love of poetry came early, she was wont to read him to sleep,
+when he took his daily nap, from Spenser,<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> and she used to relate in
+after years how<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_15" id="page_15">{15}</a></span> hard the little boy found it to go to sleep under the
+charm of the stories, yet how firmly nature closed his eyes at last.</p>
+
+<p>His own recorded recollections of childhood are not many, yet as far
+back as he could remember he was visited by visions night and day. An
+oft-recurring dream was of having the earth put into his hand like an
+orange. Dr. Weir Mitchell notes that Lowell told him he had since
+boyhood been subject to visions, which appeared usually in the evening.
+Commonly he saw a figure in mediæval costume which kept on one side of
+him,&mdash;perhaps an outcome of his early familiarity with Spenser and
+Shakespeare. Most of all in his memories of childhood he recalled
+vividly the contact with nature in the enchanted realm of Elmwood, and
+the free country into which it passed easily. With the eye of a hawk he
+spied all the movements in that wide domain, and brooded over the
+lightest stir with an unconscious delight which was the presage of the
+poet in him. “The balancing of a yellow butterfly over a thistle broom
+was spiritual food and lodging for a whole forenoon.”</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, there could scarcely have been a better nesting-place for one
+who was all his life long to love the animation of nature and to portray
+in verse and prose its homely and friendly aspects rather than its
+large, solemn, or expansive scenes. In after life, especially when away
+from home, he recurred to his childish experiences in a tone which had
+the plaint of homesickness. From the upper windows of the house&mdash;that
+tower of enchantment<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_16" id="page_16">{16}</a></span> for many a child&mdash;he could see a long curve of the
+Charles, the wide marshes beyond the river, and the fields which lay
+between Elmwood and the village of Cambridge. Within the place itself
+were the rosebushes and asters, the heavy headed goat’s-beard, the lilac
+bushes and syringas which bordered the path from the door to what his
+father, in New England phrase, called the avenue, and which later became
+formally Elmwood Avenue; but chiefest were the shag-bark trees, the
+pines, the horse-chestnuts, and the elms, a young growth in part in his
+childhood, for his father took delight in giving this permanence to the
+home; and the boy himself caught the fancy, for when he was fifty-six
+years old he rejoiced in the huge stack of shade cast for him by a
+horse-chestnut, whose seed he had planted more than fifty years before.
+And in trees and bushes sang the birds that were to be his companions
+through life. Over the buttercups whistled the orioles; and bobolinks,
+catbirds, linnets, and robins were to teach him notes,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“The Aladdin’s trap-door of the past to lift.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">In those days bank swallows frequented the cliff of the gravel pit by
+the river, and Lowell remembered how his father would lead him out to
+see the barn swallows, which had been flying in and out of the mows,
+gather on the roof before their yearly migration. “I learned,” he wrote
+long after,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“I learned all weather-signs of day or night;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No bird but I could name him by his flight,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No distant tree but by his shape was known,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or, near at hand, by leaf or bark alone.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_17" id="page_17">{17}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This learning won by loving looks I hived<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As sweeter lore than all from books derived.”<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>When he was not far away from his childhood, and in a time of great
+sensitiveness, he wrote: I never shall forget the blind despair of a
+poor little humming-bird which flew through the open window of the
+nursery where I was playing when a child. I knew him at once, for the
+same gay-vested messenger from Fairy-land, whom I had often watched
+disputing with the elvish bees the treasures of the honeysuckle by the
+doorstep. His imprisoned agony scarce equalled my own; and the slender
+streaks of blood, which his innocent, frenzied suicide left upon the
+ceiling, were more terrible to me than the red witness which Rizzio left
+on the stair at Holyrood to cry out against his murderers.”<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a></p>
+
+<p>If we may trust the confession in “The Cathedral” as personal and not
+dramatic, Lowell was singularly sensitive in childhood to those subtle
+stirrings of nature which give eternity to single moments, and create
+impressions which are indelible but never repeated.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“The fleeting relish at sensation’s brim<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Had in it the best ferment of the wine.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>A spring morning which witnessed the sudden miracle of regeneration; an
+hour of summer, when he sat dappled with sunshine, in a cherry-tree; a
+day in autumn, when the falling leaves moved as an accompaniment to his
+thought; the creaking of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_18" id="page_18">{18}</a></span> the snow beneath his feet, when the familiar
+world was transformed as in a vision to a polar solitude:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Instant the candid chambers of my brain<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Were painted with these sovran images;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And later visions seem but copies pale<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From those unfading frescos of the past,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which I, young savage, in my age of flint,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Gazed at, and dimly felt a power in me<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Parted from Nature by the joy in her<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That doubtfully revealed me to myself.”<br /></span>
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_19" id="page_19">{19}</a></span></div></div>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II<br /><br />
+<small>SCHOOL AND COLLEGE</small><br /><br />
+<small>1826-1838</small></h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> outer world came early to the notice of Lowell in his garden
+enclosure. “I remember,” he writes on the fourth of July, 1876, “how,
+fifty years ago to-day, I, perched in a great ox-heart cherry-tree, long
+ago turned to mould, saw my father come home with the news of John
+Adams’s death.” Two or three journeys also carried him out into the
+world in his early boyhood. He remembered going to Portsmouth in his
+seventh year, for the visit was impressed on his memory by the startling
+effect produced by a skeleton which he confronted when he opened a long
+red chest in Dr. Brackett’s house; and it was the next year that his
+father took him to Washington and carried him out to Alexandria, where
+he spent some days with the Carroll family, who were connections on his
+mother’s side, and whence he made an excursion to Mount Vernon. It all
+came back to him fifty-nine years later when he took his grandson to the
+same shrine; he went straight to the key of the Bastile and to the
+honey-locusts in the garden.</p>
+
+<p>The rambles, too, to Beaver Brook and the Waverley Oaks, in the country
+within easy stroll<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_20" id="page_20">{20}</a></span> of Elmwood, were extended when he climbed into the
+chaise with his father and drove off to neighboring parishes at such
+times as Dr. Lowell exchanged with his brother ministers. In those
+little journeys he had an opportunity to see the lingering reverence
+still paid to the minister, when boys doffed their hats and girls
+dropped a curtsy by the roadside as his father passed by. These
+exchanges drew Dr. Lowell and his little son as far as Portsmouth on the
+east and Northampton on the west. “I can conceive,” says Lowell, “of
+nothing more delightful than those slow summer journeys through leafy
+lanes and over the stony hills, where we always got out and walked. In
+that way I think I gained a more intimate relation with what we may call
+pristine New England than has fallen to the fortune of most men of my
+age.”<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> Thirty years after these experiences he could give this
+graphic report of the contests he was wont to witness in the village
+choir:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Sometimes two ancient men, through glasses dim,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In age’s treble deaconed off the hymn,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Paused o’er long words and then with breathless pace<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Went down a slope of short ones at a race,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">While who could sing and who could not, but would,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rushed helter-skelter after as they could.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Well I remember how their faces shone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Safe through some snare like <i>Re-sig-na-ti-on</i>,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And how some graceless youth would mock the tones<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of Deacon Jarvis or of Deacon Jones:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In towns ambitious of more cultured strains,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The gruff bass-viol told its inward pains<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As some enthusiast, deaf to catgut’s woe,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_21" id="page_21">{21}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rasped its bare nerves with torture-rosined bow;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hard-by another, with strained eyeballs set,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Blew devious discord through his clarinet,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the one fiddle, that was wont to seek<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In secular tunes its living all the week,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Blind to the leader’s oft-repeated glance<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Mixed up the psalm-tune with a country dance.”<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>More frequent journeys were those which he and his brothers and sisters
+invented for themselves by naming different parts of Elmwood after
+cities of the world and spending thus with their imagination the small
+geographical earnings of the schoolroom.</p>
+
+<p>The first school which the boy attended was a dame school, which appears
+to have been somewhere not far from the river in the neighborhood of
+what is now Brattle Square. Once in verse and once in prose Lowell
+recorded his childish experience in and out of this primary school. In
+his introduction to “The Biglow Papers,” first series, is a fragment
+beginning&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Propped on the marsh, a dwelling now, I see<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The humble school-house of my A, B, C;”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">and in his “New England Two Centuries Ago” there is a passage often read
+and quoted, which is a faithful picture of the author’s life within and
+without one of the “martello towers that protect our coast,” but he does
+not add the personal touch of his own return from school, whistling as
+he came in sight of his home as a signal to the mother watching for him.
+A bit of childish sport may be added from an omitted extract from the
+same fragmentary poem, since it brings to view two of Lowell’s boy
+companions:<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_22" id="page_22">{22}</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Where Felton puns in English or in Greek,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And shakes with laughter till the timbers creak,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The ‘Idle Man’ once lived; the man I knew,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The author dwelt beyond my boyish view.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There once, the college butler aided, too,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My pony through his own front door he drew,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I on her back, and strove with winning airs<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To coax my shaggy Shetlander upstairs;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rejected hospitality! the more<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He tugged in front, she backed toward the door.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Had oats been offered, she had climbed at least<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Up to the garret, canny Scottish beast.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Across the way, where once an Indian stood<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O’er Winthrop’s door, carved horribly in wood,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On the green duck-pond’s sea, where water fails<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In droughty times, replenished then with pails,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Richard the Second from their moorings cast<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His shingle fleets, and served before the mast,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">While Ned and I consigned a well-culled store<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of choicest pebbles for the other shore.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then walked at leisure to the antipodes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Changing <i>en route</i> to Chinese consignees.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Both Richard and Edmund Dana were his neighbors and friends, and with
+these early playmates should be named William Story. To him, as to one
+who had journeyed with him “through the green secluded valley of
+boyhood,” he addressed his “Cambridge Thirty Years Ago.” Story and the
+two Higginsons, Thatcher and Thomas Wentworth, were the only day
+scholars with Lowell at the boarding-school, kept by Mr. William Wells,
+to which Lowell was sent to be prepared for entrance to college. Mr.
+Wells was an Englishman, who brought with him to this country
+attainments in scholarship which were disclosed in the making of a
+simple Latin grammar and in an edition of Tacitus.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_23" id="page_23">{23}</a></span> He engaged in
+publishing under the firm name of Wells &amp; Lilly, but meeting with
+reverses, he opened a classical school in the old Fayerweather house in
+Cambridge. He was a man of robust and masterful habit, who kept up the
+English tradition of the rattan in school and manly sport out of doors.
+The school had its gentler side in the person of Mrs. Wells, to whom
+Lowell sent a copy of “The Vision of Sir Launfal” in 1866, with the
+words: “Will you please me by accepting this little book in memory of
+your constant kindness to a naughty little cub of a schoolboy more than
+thirty years ago? I hope you will forget his ill deserts as faithfully
+as he remembers how much he owes you.”</p>
+
+<p>It was at the hands of Mr. Wells that Lowell received that severe
+drilling in Latin which was one of the traditions of English scholarship
+transported to New England by the early clergy, and reënforced from time
+to time by newcomers from England like Mr. Wells, elegant scholars like
+Mr. Dixwell, and stern disciplinarians like Dr. Francis Gardner, the
+latter two long holding the Boston Latin School fast bound to the old
+ways. Mr. George Ticknor Curtis, who was sixteen years old when Lowell
+was ten, at Mr. Wells’s school, in a reminiscence of that period says:
+“Mr. Wells always heard a recitation with the book in his left hand and
+a rattan in his right, and if the boy made a false quantity or did not
+know the meaning of a word, down came the rattan on his head. But this
+chastisement was never ministered to me or to ‘Jemmy Lowell.’ Not to me,
+because I was too old<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_24" id="page_24">{24}</a></span> for it, and not to him because he was too young.”
+With his quickness of mind and linguistic agility, Lowell evidently
+acquired in school rather than in college a familiarity with Latin
+forms, to judge by the ease with which he handled the language later in
+mock heroics; his early letters, too, are sprinkled with Latin phrases,
+the well worn coin of the realm, it is true, but always jingling in his
+pocket.</p>
+
+<p>The schoolroom to an imaginative boy is a starting point for mental
+rambles. Lowell studied the rime on the window panes as well as his
+Latin verses. From his readings with his elder sister, and out of his
+own fertile imagination, he told or made up stories for his young
+comrades. T. W. Higginson, recalling Lowell and Story, remembers
+“treading close behind them once, as they discussed Spenser’s ‘Faerie
+Queene,’ which they had been reading, and which led us younger boys to
+christen a favorite play-place ‘the Bower of Bliss.’<span class="lftspc">”</span> Dr. Samuel Eliot,
+who was one of Mr. Wells’s pupils, was also one of the small boys who
+listened to Lowell’s imaginative tales. I remember nothing of them,” he
+told Dr. Hale, except one, which rejoiced in the central interest of a
+trap in the playground, which opened to subterranean marvels of various
+kinds.”</p>
+
+<p>“I can conceive of no healthier reading for a boy, or girl either, than
+Scott’s novels,” says Lowell, and he had the good fortune to be
+introduced early to Scott, and to read him as a contemporary. When he
+was nine his mother gave him, one can guess with what Scottish
+eagerness, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_25" id="page_25">{25}</a></span> “Tales of a Grandfather,” which had just been published;
+and the then great event of American history was not so remote but that
+the freckle-faced boy who lived in a house once a Tory’s, then a
+soldier’s hospital, and then the home of a governor of the commonwealth
+and vice-president of the United States, would have lively reminders of
+it in the veterans who turned out at muster, and in the rude village
+drama of the “Cornwallis.”<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a></p>
+
+<p>Yet, as Lowell himself reminds us, the Cambridge of his boyhood, besides
+possessing the common characteristics of New England towns, had its
+special flavor from the presence there of the oldest college of New
+England. Like the Cambridge boys of to-day, he hovered about the skirts
+of Alma Mater, took in, year by year, the entertainment offered by the
+college at its annual Commencement festival,&mdash;a greater raree-show then
+than now,&mdash;and made the acquaintance of the queer misshapen minds that
+by some occult law of nature always seem to be found in the shade of a
+college town, as if the “Muses’ factories” must necessarily have their
+refuse heaps not far away. A boy who grows up in a college town,
+especially when the community and the town are somewhat isolated, hardly
+knows the wonder and gravity which assail one who comes up to college
+from a distant home. In Low<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_26" id="page_26">{26}</a></span>ell’s youth Harvard College and Cambridge
+town were singularly isolated in spite of their geographical nearness to
+Boston. Once an hour a long omnibus, and twice an hour a short one,
+jogged back and forth between the village and the city, picking up
+passengers in a leisurely fashion, and going longer or shorter distances
+from the college yard, according to the importunity of the passenger or
+the good-nature of the driver. An hourly stage to the city meant much
+deliberation in making the journey, and Cambridge was by no means the
+bedchamber for city merchants and professional men which it has since
+become.</p>
+
+<p>When Lowell entered Harvard from Mr. Wells’s school in 1834, the college
+was surrounded by houses and gardens which marked almost the bounds of
+the town as one went toward Boston. The college itself was within a
+straggling enclosure still known by the homely name of the Yard, and
+occupied seven buildings therein; the library was in Harvard Hall, for
+Gore Hall was not begun till just as Lowell was graduating. The chapel
+was a dignified apartment of University Hall, designed by the architect
+Charles Bulfinch, who left his mark in Boston and its neighborhood upon
+buildings which stand in serene reproof of much later architecture. In
+the chapel also were held the academic functions, one of which,
+Exhibition Day, was observed three times a year; on two of these
+occasions the Governor of the Commonwealth attended, and on all of them
+the President of the college in his academic dress, the Fellows, the
+Overseers, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_27" id="page_27">{27}</a></span> the Faculty marched to the chapel with ceremony, there
+to listen, along with an indulgent crowd of parents and friends, to the
+youthful speakers, who discoursed in Latin or in English, but were
+always introduced in Latin.</p>
+
+<p>During Lowell’s college course there were only about two hundred and
+twenty undergraduates, his own class entering with sixty-eight members
+and graduating with sixty-five; the whole list of the faculty, including
+the schools of law, divinity, and medicine, did not exceed thirty-four,
+and not half of these constituted the college faculty proper. But among
+them were names known then and later beyond the college enclosure.
+Felton was professor of Greek, Peirce of mathematics, and Ticknor of
+modern languages, to be succeeded, when Lowell was nearly through his
+college course, by Longfellow. Francis Sales, graphically set off by
+Lowell in his “Cambridge Thirty Years Ago,” was instructer [<i>sic</i>] in
+French and Spanish, and Pietro Bachi in Italian, Spanish, and
+Portuguese. The president of the college was Josiah Quincy, and when
+thirty years later Lowell reviewed his friend Edmund Quincy’s life of
+his father, in the article entitled “A Great Public Character,” he
+referred with a fine note of sincere feeling to the association with him
+which he bore away from his college days, in a passage which reflects a
+little of Lowell as well as pictures the figure of the president.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Quincy had many qualities calculated to win him favor with the
+young,&mdash;that one above all which is sure to do it, indomitable pluck.
+With<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_28" id="page_28">{28}</a></span> him the dignity was in the man, not in the office. He had some of
+those little oddities, too, which afford amusement without contempt, and
+which rather tend to heighten than diminish personal attachment to
+superiors in station. His punctuality at prayers, and in dropping asleep
+there, his forgetfulness of names, his singular inability to make even
+the shortest off-hand speech to the students,&mdash;all the more singular in
+a practised orator,&mdash;his occasional absorption of mind, leading him to
+hand you his sand-box instead of the leave of absence he had just dried
+with it, the old-fashioned courtesy of his ‘Sir, your servant,’ as he
+bowed you out of his study, all tended to make him popular. He had also
+a little of what is somewhat contradictorily called dry humor, not
+without influence in his relations with the students. In taking leave of
+the graduating class, he was in the habit of paying them whatever honest
+compliment he could. Who, of a certain year which shall be nameless,
+will ever forget the gravity with which he assured them that they were
+‘the <i>best-dressed</i> class that had passed through college during his
+administration’? How sincerely kind he was, how considerate of youthful
+levity, will always be gratefully remembered by whoever had occasion to
+experience it.”</p>
+
+<p>The change from school to college, as I have intimated, was not such as
+to strike very deeply into the boy’s consciousness. He continued for a
+while to live at his father’s house, a mile away from the Yard, though
+he had a room of his own nearer, at Mr. Hancock’s in Church Street, and
+in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_29" id="page_29">{29}</a></span> latter part of his course lived there altogether. Going to
+college, thus, was very much like going to school as he had always done.
+The college methods were not markedly different from those of a
+preparatory school. There were lessons to learn and recite; the
+text-book was the rule, and the fixed curriculum suggested no break from
+the ordinary course of formal instruction. Except in the senior year,
+there was a steady attention to Greek, Latin, and mathematics. In the
+first year Tytler’s History was studied; in the second year English
+grammar and modern languages were added; in the third year, besides
+Greek and Latin and modern languages, Paley’s Evidences, Butler’s
+Analogy, and chemistry appeared on the list, and themes and forensics
+were introduced. In the senior year the ancient languages were dropped,
+and natural philosophy, intellectual philosophy, astronomy, and
+political economy took their place, with lectures on rhetoric,
+criticism, theology, Story on the Constitution of the United States,
+mineralogy, and anatomy&mdash;a somewhat confused jumble on paper in the
+catalogue of the time, which it is to be hoped was reduced to some sort
+of order, though it looks as if the senior were suddenly released from
+too monotonous a course and bidden take a rapid survey of a wide range
+of intellectual pursuits.</p>
+
+<p>In his school days Lowell had been under the close surveillance given to
+boys, and the partial freedom of college life brought with it a little
+more sense of personal rights, but throughout the four<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_30" id="page_30">{30}</a></span> years he was
+boyish, frolicsome, very immature in expression, and disposed, in a
+fitful fashion, to assert an independence of authority. He won a “detur”
+in his sophomore year, and in a public exhibition in the first term of
+his senior year he took part in a conference bearing the labored title:
+“Ancient Epics, considered as Pictures of Manners, as Proofs of Genius,
+or as Sources of Entertainment,” but both in his sophomore and senior
+years he was at first privately and then publicly admonished for
+excessive absence from recitations and for general negligence in themes,
+forensics, and recitations. There was enough of the boy left in him at
+the beginning of his senior year to require the fine of a dollar for
+cutting seats in the recitation room; and the college discipline of the
+day frowned on Lowell as on others for wearing a brown coat on Sunday.
+It is difficult for one scanning the records of the faculty at that time
+to avoid a feeling of commiseration for these excellent gentlemen and
+scholars sitting, as if they were boarding-school masters, in serious
+consultation over the pranks and petty insubordination of a parcel of
+boys.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile in his own fashion Lowell was stumbling on his way, gradually
+finding himself. He was a reader, as we have seen, before he went to
+college, and he continued to find his delight in books. “A college
+training,” he once said, is an excellent thing; but after all, the
+better part of every man’s education is that which he gives
+himself,”<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a> and in college he was following, without<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_31" id="page_31">{31}</a></span> much reflection,
+the instincts of his nature, both as regards his reading and his
+writing. His letters show him a schoolboy when attending to the enforced
+tasks of the college, with occasional outbreaks of enthusiasm for the
+more distinctly literary studies, but somewhat of an independent voyager
+when launched on the waters of general literature.</p>
+
+<p>It was in the large leisure of his college days that he formed an
+acquaintance which ripened into intimacy with the great writers and with
+those secondary lights that often suit better the ordinary mood. “I was
+first directed to Landor’s works,” he says, in 1888, when introducing
+some letters of Landor to the readers of his own day, “by hearing how
+much store Emerson set by them. I grew acquainted with them fifty years
+ago in one of those arched alcoves in the old college library in Harvard
+Hall, which so pleasantly secluded without wholly isolating the student.
+That footsteps should pass across the mouth of his Aladdin’s Cave, or
+even enter it in search of treasure, so far from disturbing only
+deepened his sense of possession. These faint rumors of the world he had
+left served but as a pleasant reminder that he was the privileged
+denizen of another beyond ‘the flaming bounds of space and time.’ There,
+with my book lying at ease and in the expansion of intimacy on the broad
+window-shelf, shifting my cell from north to south with the season, I
+made friendships, that have lasted me for life, with Dodsley’s ‘Old
+Plays,’ with Cotton’s ‘Montaigne,’ with Hak<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_32" id="page_32">{32}</a></span>luyt’s ‘Voyages,’ among
+others that were not in my father’s library. It was the merest browsing,
+no doubt, as Johnson called it, but how delightful it was!”<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a></p>
+
+<p>The record of books withdrawn by Lowell from the college library during
+his four years’ residence would of course furnish a very incomplete
+account of his reading, since, as intimated above, he had his father’s
+well-stocked shelves, and access apparently to the alcoves of Harvard
+Hall. The record, nevertheless, is interesting as showing the range and
+the drift of his reading. Some of this reading is ancillary to his task
+work, but much is simply the gratification of an expanding taste, and
+covers such diverse works as Terence, Hume, the Anthologia Græca,
+Smollett, Hakluyt, Boileau, Scott, and Southey. It is noticeable that as
+his college course proceeded the emphasis was laid on the greater
+English literature.</p>
+
+<p>Nor was he without the excellent ambition to collect a library of his
+own. “It is just fifty-one years ago,” he said 7 May, 1885, when
+unveiling the bust of Coleridge in Westminster Abbey, “that I became the
+possessor of an American reprint of Galignani’s edition of Coleridge,
+Shelley, and Keats in one volume. It was a pirated book, and I trust I
+may be pardoned for the delight I had in it.”<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a> His letters to his
+college friends during these years contain frequent references to the
+purchases of books he had made and the gifts<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_33" id="page_33">{33}</a></span> from his family which he
+prized. He has been given a beautiful edition of Milton, which he had
+looked forward to buying; he has been purchasing Samuel Butler and
+Beattie; a new edition of Shakespeare has been announced, which he means
+to buy if he can afford it; he has had a “detur” of Akenside; he has
+laid his hands on a “very pretty edition of Cowper;” and his frequent
+quotations from the poets show the easy familiarity he had won in his
+reading.</p>
+
+<p>Besides his continued friendship with Story and other neighbors’ sons,
+Lowell formed new alliances among his college mates, and in his
+correspondence with two of them in this period he discloses something of
+his character and tastes. One of these friends, W. H. Shackford, was his
+senior by two or three years, and Lowell’s letters to him show the boy’s
+side turned toward one whom he regarded with the friendly reverence
+which sixteen pays to nineteen. On his part, Shackford seems to have
+taken a violent fancy to Lowell, to have made indeed the first overtures
+of friendship. To this sager companion, who was a senior when Lowell was
+a freshman, he reveals his more studious side. Shackford left college to
+teach at Phillips Exeter Academy, and Lowell wrote to him from Cambridge
+and Boston, not much in the way of college gossip, but of his own
+studies, the treasures he picked up at book-stores or auctions, his
+plans for reading and travel, and brief comments on his instructors.
+Through the correspondence runs an affectionate current, an almost
+lover-like<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_34" id="page_34">{34}</a></span> tone of self-exculpation, the warm feeling of a boy toward
+his mentor, and an impulse to make him somewhat of a confessor.<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a></p>
+
+<p>The earliest of these letters was written in the middle of July, 1835,
+when Shackford had gone to Portsmouth. It was a hasty shot fired after
+his departing friend to assure him of his affection, written under
+stress of headache from his brother’s office, and was followed the same
+day by a longer letter. “When I wrote to you this morning,” he says, “I
+was laboring under three very bad complaints enumerated in my other
+letter. I was then at my brother’s office. I am now at home, sitting by
+an open window, with my coat off, my stock do., with Coleridge’s works
+before me wherewith to consume the rest of the day, and also as cool as
+a cucumber. Shack, if you are a victim to any <i>other</i> disease, and are
+lying tossing with pain under some physician’s prescription (such, for
+instance, as the pleasing draught concocted by Wm. Rufus, or the Red
+King, composed of the following truly delectable compounds, viz., ‘rue,
+tansy, horehound, coltsfoot, hyssop, and camomile flowers, farther
+enriched by a handful of earthworms, half a dozen wood lice and four
+centipedes’), if, I say, you labor under all these misfortunes, devoutly
+thank your more fav’ring stars, that you are not the yawning victim of
+ennui, a disease which Æsculapius himself couldn’t cure, and which I
+therefore humbly opine to have been the disease of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_35" id="page_35">{35}</a></span> Achilles.... I hope
+you’ll be amused with this epistle (if perchance you are able to read
+it). But the fact is I can’t write anything serious to save my life.
+Answer this the very day you get it....”</p>
+
+<p>At the end of the summer when more letters had passed between them,
+Lowell returned to his college work, and wrote from Cambridge a long
+letter dated 9 October, 1835, in reply to one long delayed. “My
+<i>dearest</i> friend,” he writes, “I am rejoiced that you <i>have</i> broken the
+long silence that existed between us, not because I should not have
+written to you first, but because it shows that you were not grievously
+offended with me. I willingly confess myself to blame, but not in so
+great a degree as you may suppose. I <i>did</i> go to the White Mountains,
+and while travelling was not offended (do not use any stronger term) by
+not receiving any letters from you; on the contrary I expected none, for
+how could you have any knowledge of my ‘whereabouts’ unless I wrote to
+you as I went along and told you where to direct? This I did not do, nor
+did I write any letters on my journey except one which I was obliged to
+write to Bob because I <i>promised</i> him I would. After I got home I was
+taken sick and kept my bed a week without being able to sleep most of
+the time on account of a raging sick headache which hardly allowed me to
+move. The day I saw you was the third time I had been out. I did go
+down, however, three times to see you, but could not find you, or saw
+you walking with somebody I did not know, and then I did not like to
+speak to you. Did you or could you think<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_36" id="page_36">{36}</a></span> that I would forfeit your
+friendship, the most precious (because I believe it to be the truest) I
+ever enjoyed, because you did not find it convenient to write to me? I
+hope you will not think that I say all this because I am <i>ashamed</i> to
+treat you coldly, or not to answer you. I am sure of one thing, that I
+have no such opinion of you. Your letter, Shack, was a <i>delight</i> to me
+(though I am not ashamed to confess that it [made] me cry)....</p>
+
+<p>“I like Prof. Channing very much indeed, inasmuch as I sit where I can
+see his marks, and he has given me an 8 every recitation this term
+except once, and then he gave me 7. I went up to ask him something so as
+to see whether I was not mistaken (as he makes a 6 something like his
+8’s) and I found on the paper exactly what I expected. I have written
+one theme and got but two marks on the margin, one for a change required
+in the sentence, and another was a straight line drawn under the word
+‘to,’ and also marked on the margin. Tell me whether you think this is
+good, as you have experienced. I study quite hard this term. I get on in
+German astonishingly; it comes quite easy to me now.... I have written
+the longest letter I ever wrote in my life. I translated an ode of
+Horace into poetry the other day, and it was pretty good. Mathematics
+are my only enemies now.... I hope I may subscribe myself your <i>dear</i>
+friend.”</p>
+
+<p>A month later he writes his friend a lively account of a town and gown
+row, and notes his progress in reading Shakespeare. “I was sur<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_37" id="page_37">{37}</a></span>prised on
+looking over Shakespeare to find that I had read all his plays but two
+or three, among them ‘Hamlet.’ Only think, I haven’t read Hamlet.’ I
+will go at it instanter.”</p>
+
+<p>At the beginning of 1836, on returning to college after the holidays, he
+writes with a boyish bibliomaniac enthusiasm of the Milton and Coleridge
+which had been given him, and passes into comment on the books he is
+reading and those he means to buy. He grows more literary and political
+in the subjects of his letters, disclosing already not only a warm
+interest in public affairs, but a generous judgment. “I suppose you
+heard of the Seminoles massacring, as it is called, those companies of
+American troops. I think they are in the right of it; by ‘they’ I mean
+the Seminoles. Not much danger of war with France now.” Then follows an
+odd jumble of frank confessions of his likes and dislikes for his
+fellows, and his boyish passions, with a return to his hunt for books in
+special editions.</p>
+
+<p>His letter of 22 April, 1836, is taken up with a long discussion in a
+semi-philological vein of love and friendship, but what would strike a
+reader of these letters most is the distinct change which now takes
+place in the handwriting, which has passed from a not always neat
+copy-book hand to one which suggests the delicacy of the hand he
+afterward wrote, though not its elegance; it is still constrained with
+the air of being the result of close attention. These gradual changes in
+style of handwriting rarely fail to mark a maturing of character,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_38" id="page_38">{38}</a></span> and
+it is interesting to observe, in Lowell’s case, how they register a long
+period of vacillation and immaturity.</p>
+
+<p>There is a gap of nearly a year in this correspondence as preserved, and
+the next letter, under date of 26 February, 1837, is filled with
+extracts from a long poem he is writing, in Spenserian stanza, and even
+occasionally with a word borrowed from Spenser; but the spirit that
+stirs the lines is Campbell. The theme is an imaginary journey up the
+Hudson, and West Point suggests the two stanzas:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">“Follow this narrow path to where the grass<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Grows fresher on yon gently-rising mound,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To that lone brook, whose ripples as they pass<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Spread to the air a sleep-compelling sound;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Here, Poland’s hero erst a refuge found.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Go ask whose good right arm hurl’d back the slave,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">When Russia’s eagle o’er his country frown’d,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Who led her little band of patriots brave;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And weeping Freedom points to Kosciusko’s grave.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">“Spirit of Freedom! who didst erst inspire<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Our nation ground beneath oppression’s sway,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With trust in God, with thine own holy fire;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Who nerv’dst the mother fond to send away<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Her first-born boy to brave the bloody fray,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Bid him farewell, with full averted eyes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Ne ask, though longing, for a moment’s stay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Still hover o’er us, if thou didst not rise<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With Washington’s pure spirit to thy native skies!”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The other correspondent whose letters from Lowell are preserved was
+George Bailey Loring, a boy of his own age, the son of a clergyman who
+was Dr. Lowell’s friend, so that the friendship partook of an hereditary
+character; with him Lowell<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_39" id="page_39">{39}</a></span> had frank intimacy during their college days
+and in the years immediately following. Their ways in life separated,
+and they had less community of interests and tastes when they came to
+manhood. Dr. Loring went early into public life and held various
+offices, being Commissioner of Agriculture at one time and at another
+United States Minister to Portugal.</p>
+
+<p>In this fuller series of letters which is largely contained in Mr.
+Norton’s two volumes, Lowell is the frank, unformed boy, giving vent to
+nonsense, a lad’s hasty impulse, and the foolery which goes on in the
+name of sentiment. The equality of age created a different relation
+between them from that which Lowell bore to Shackford, and the
+familiarity of their intercourse called out all manner of intellectual
+pranks and youthful persiflage. The jingle and lively verses which
+Lowell threw out for the amusement of his comrade show him playing
+carelessly with the instrument which he was already beginning to
+discover as fitting his hand.</p>
+
+<p>Lowell’s unaffected interest in boyish things is much more apparent in
+these random letters than in the more careful epistles to his older
+friend, though he is by no means silent on the side of his intellectual
+life. In his first letter, dated 23 July, 1836, he talks about the
+things that two college boys have on their minds at the beginning of
+vacation. “You must excuse me if this be not a very long or entertaining
+epistle, as I am writing from my brother’s office (with a very bad pen)
+in a great hurry. I shall not go to Canada and shall<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_40" id="page_40">{40}</a></span> not start for
+P[ortsmouth] probably for three weeks. My circular came on last night,
+14 prayers, <i>56</i> recitations, whew! The class supper was glorious,
+toasts went off very well. Those about Parker and the Temperance Society
+were most applauded. I am going to join the ‘Anti-Wine’ I think. The
+‘Good Schooner Susan, R. T. S. L. owner and master,’ will make an
+excursion to Nahant this day. <i>Distinguished</i> Passenger etc. We shall go
+to church at Nahant Sunday and return Monday morning. By the way I ‘made
+up’ with &mdash;&mdash; and &mdash;&mdash; at the supper. I had a seat <i>reserved</i> (!) for me
+(as an officer) on the right hand of the distinguished president (?) A
+prettier table I never saw.”</p>
+
+<p>The letters to his college friends were naturally written mainly in
+vacation time, and in Christmas week of the same year, 1836, he writes:
+“I am going to a ball to-night at the house of a young lady whom I never
+heard of.... I’ve begun and written about forty lines of my H. P. C.<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a>
+prœmium. I shall immortalize I&mdash;&mdash;k W&mdash;&mdash;. I extol him to the skies and
+<i>pari passu</i> depreciate myself.” He went to the ball, and a few days
+later wrote: “I think I told you I was going to a party or ball (call it
+what you will): well, I went, made my bow, danced, talked nonsense with
+young ladies who could talk nothing but nonsense, grew heartily tired
+and came away. I saw a great many people<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_41" id="page_41">{41}</a></span> make fools of themselves, and
+charitably took it for granted that I did the same.... I may add
+something in the morning, so no more from your aching headed and perhaps
+splenetic, but still affectionate friend, J. R. L.”</p>
+
+<p>In these letters Lowell twits his friend with his attentions to girls,
+and intersperses his jibes with poor verses; he has become a zealous
+autograph hunter, and the letters he laid his hands on in his father’s
+house from home and foreign notabilities illustrate the wide connections
+of the family, and the part it had had in the great world. In the midst
+of it all he will burst forth into almost passionate expression of his
+love for nature and his strong attachment to his birthplace and its
+neighborhood; and again quote freely from the books he is reading, and
+tell of the progress he is making in his more serious poetical ventures,
+and the books he is adding to his library. He made no boast of immunity
+when he laughed at his friend for too much susceptibility. Here is a
+passage from a letter written in the summer of 1837, when he was closing
+his junior year:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>... “Didn’t I have a glorious time yesterday? That I did if smiles from
+certain lips I</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i11">‘prize<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Above almost, I don’t know what, on earth’<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">could make a day glorious. Excuse me for quoting my own nonsense, but
+’twas more apt than anything I could think of.... Imagine yourself by
+the side of a young lady the perfection of beauty, virtue, modesty,
+etc., etc., in whom you<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_42" id="page_42">{42}</a></span> entertain a pleasing interest, and you may form
+a ‘faint imagining’ of my situation. I am not calm yet. In fact, every
+time I think of her eyes&mdash;those eyes! Guido never could have conceived
+her. Well, a truce with all recollections when there is no hope.”</p>
+
+<p>A month later he gave a brief account of Commencement to his friend, and
+then speaks of a letter his brother Rob had received from their sister,
+then in Glasgow. Lowell’s father, mother, and sister Rebecca went to
+Europe early in the summer of 1837. They were gone three years, and
+during that time the young collegian found in his brother Charles his
+nearest friend and adviser; his house indeed was the student’s home when
+he was not in college, and his wife was the best of sisters to him. Mrs.
+Anna Cabot Lowell was herself a woman of fine culture and of unwonted
+intellectual power. At a later period than this she opened a school for
+girls, which is looked upon by many now in mature life with warm
+gratitude. She edited a choice collection of poems for the reading of
+schoolgirls, and compiled also a little volume of suggestive thoughts
+called “Seed Grain.” Dr. Lowell, meanwhile, parted from his son with
+parental solicitude, and wrote him on the eve of sailing a letter which
+is quaintly expressive of his own ingenuous nature and of the simplicity
+of the day, and slightly indicative of his son’s weaknesses as they
+appeared to a father’s eyes:<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_43" id="page_43">{43}</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="r">
+<span class="smcap">New York</span>, May 29th, 1837.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">My dear Son</span>,&mdash;I wish you to write us once a month, making an
+arrangement with Robert not to write at the same time he does. You
+know the necessity for economy, and you know that I shall never
+deny you, but from necessity, what will afford you pleasure. I
+shall direct Charles to pay you half a dollar a week. If you are
+one of the first eight admitted to the Φ Β Κ, $1.00 per week, as
+soon as you are admitted. If you are not, to pay you 75 cents per
+week as soon as you are admitted. If I find my finances will allow
+it, I shall buy you something abroad. If you graduate one of the
+first five in your class, I shall give you $100 on your graduation.
+If one of the first ten, $75. If one of the first twelve, $50. If
+the first or second scholar, $200. If you do not miss any exercises
+unexcused, you shall have Bryant’s ‘Mythology,’ or any book of
+equal value, unless it is one I may specially want.</p>
+
+<p>My dear child, I wish you only to be faithful to yourself. You can
+easily be a fine scholar, and therefore in naming the smallest sum
+for your weekly expenses, I feel no hesitation, as it depends on
+yourself, with very little exertion, to secure the second highest
+sum, and with not more exertion than is perfectly compatible with
+health and sufficient recreation to secure the largest. <i>Use
+regular exercise. Associate with those who will exert the best
+influence upon you.</i> Say your prayers and read your Bible <i>every
+day</i>. I trust you have made up all your exercises. <i>If not, make
+them up<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_44" id="page_44">{44}</a></span> in one week</i>, and let the president know it. Do not get
+anything charged except with Charles’s knowledge and approbation. I
+have given him instructions respecting your expenses....</p>
+
+<p class="r">
+Your affectionate father.<br />
+</p></div>
+
+<p>Dr. Lowell wrote many letters home and recounted the pleasant
+experiences of the little party in Scotland and England, their
+foregathering with the Traill family, and the visits they paid to
+Wordsworth, Southey, Sir David Brewster, and others. But he does not
+forget to continue his admonitions and encouragements, as he receives
+his son’s reports of his doings. “Your office,” he writes from London,
+13 December, 1837, “as one of the editors of the ‘Harvardiana’ may give
+you a greater familiarity in composition. Be careful that it does not
+abstract you from severer pursuits, and that your style is not trifling,
+but the subject and the manner useful and dignified. I do not allow
+myself to doubt of your furnishing the criterion of good standing which
+a membership of the Φ Β Κ will furnish, and I trust you will leave
+college with a high part and a high reputation.</p>
+
+<p>“God bless you, my dear child. <i>Aim high, very high.</i> I feel its
+importance for you more than ever.”</p>
+
+<p><i>Harvardiana</i>, to which Dr. Lowell refers, was the college magazine of
+the day, started just as Lowell entered college, and naturally inviting
+a scribbler like Lowell to become one of the editors when his senior
+year came round. His associates<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_45" id="page_45">{45}</a></span> were Rufus King, who later attained a
+leading position in the bar of Cincinnati, and wrote “Ohio” in the
+<i>American Commonwealths</i> series; George Warren Lippitt, afterward for a
+long time secretary of legation at Vienna; Charles Woodman Scates, a
+South Carolinian lawyer of great promise, who died young, and Nathan
+Hale, an older brother of Dr. Edward Everett Hale, and later a strong
+figure in Boston journalism. Lowell contributed twenty-four pieces in
+prose and verse, translations from the German, a bit of moralizing in
+the minor key which youth likes to pursue, some fierce sardonic verses,
+some sentiment, and then a mockery of sentiment. For the most part his
+contributions are the “larks” of students given to literature. With his
+associates he followed the example set by <i>Blackwood</i>, and imitated by
+the <i>Knickerbocker</i> and similar magazines, aiming at the sauciness and
+jocularity which were assumed to be the ordinary temper of editors
+gathered about their table, whereas in actual experience such editors
+are painfully at their wits’ end. What most strikes one in these varied
+contributions is the apparent facility with which everything is thrown
+off, sense and nonsense coming with equal ease, but nonsense
+predominating.</p>
+
+<p>Lowell’s letters to his friends in his last year at college have
+frequent reference to his willing and unwilling labors on this
+“perryodical,” as he was wont to call it in mimicry of Dr. Walker. In
+August, 1837, he sends Shackford a circular inviting subscriptions to
+<i>Harvardiana</i>, and on the blank<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_46" id="page_46">{46}</a></span> leaf writes one of the imitative
+letters in verse, for which he had a penchant at this time:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Dear Shack, a circular I send ye<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The which I hope will not offend ye;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If sae, ’t wad tak’ Auld Nick to mend ye<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">O’ sic an ill<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But, gin ye are as when I kenn’d ye<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">It never will!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Gin ye could get ae body’s name<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">’T wad add forever to his fame<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To help to kindle up the flame<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">O’ sic a journal,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose reputation, though quite lame,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3"><i>Will</i> be eternal.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Now if ye do your vera best<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In this waist glorious behest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By gettin’ names and a’ the rest<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">I need na tell<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yese thus fulfil the airn’st request<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">O’ J. R. L.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>“King has been up here,” he writes from Elmwood, 22 December, 1837, “for
+an article for the ‘Perry,’ but was unsuccessful in the attempt. The
+fact is, it is impossible to read Lockhart’s ‘Life of Scott’ and attend
+to my illustrious nephew, ‘the corporal,’ who is a very prototype of
+Jack Falstaff, and write an article which requires such deep study and
+abstraction.”</p>
+
+<p>The magazine was a part of that spontaneous literary activity which is
+pretty sure to find vent in college life outside of the class room, in
+independent reading, in societies sometimes secret, sometimes public,
+and in weekly, monthly, or quarterly journals. Lowell, with his growing
+consciousness<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_47" id="page_47">{47}</a></span> of literary faculty and his naturally vagarious impulses,
+turned aside from the set tasks of college, as we have seen, and allowed
+himself to be indifferent to the routine imposed by college regulations.
+There are always men in college who undertake to be independent while
+living in it; sometimes the instinct is wise, sometimes it is merely the
+impulse of an indolent or conceited nature, but college authorities,
+like most constitutional governors, are bound to take more account of
+law than arbitrary and irresponsible rulers are, and their severity
+falls indiscriminately on the just and unjust. Lowell had made himself
+amenable to discipline on this score, but he might have escaped with
+reprimands only, had he not committed a breach of propriety in chapel
+which could not be overlooked. Such, at least, is the recollection of
+one of his college mates writing long afterward to Mr. T. W. Higginson,
+who prints his letter in “Old Cambridge.”</p>
+
+<p>The circumstantial account given in this letter has a plausible air, and
+may be wholly true, but if so, it was probably the final occasion rather
+than the cause of Lowell’s suspension. The record of the Faculty is
+somewhat more general in its explanation. “25 June, 1838. Voted that
+Lowell, senior, on account of continued neglect of his college duties be
+suspended till the Saturday before Commencement, to pursue his studies
+with Mr. Frost of Concord, to recite to him twice a day, reviewing the
+whole of Locke’s ‘Essay’ [On the Human Understanding], and studying also
+Mackintosh’s ‘Review of Ethical Philosophy,’ to be<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_48" id="page_48">{48}</a></span> examined in both on
+his return, and not to visit Cambridge during the period of his
+suspension.”</p>
+
+<p>Lowell seems to have taken his exile philosophically. The fact that he
+would not be able to read the class poem he had been chosen to give did
+not prevent him from writing it, and the isolation of his life gave him
+plenty of time for working at it. The mild discipline of “rustication”
+included, as the record shows, the requisite amount of study, and
+Concord, to which he was sent for a couple of months of study and
+reflection, was only fifteen miles from Cambridge. The Rev. Barzillai
+Frost, to whose oversight he was committed and with whom he lodged, was
+a young man, recently graduated from the Harvard Divinity School, and
+Mrs. Frost endeared herself to the young culprit by her affectionate
+care. In a speech which Lowell made at Concord, on the celebration of
+the 250th anniversary of the founding of the town, he introduced this
+slight reminiscence of his work with Mr. Frost:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“In rising to-day I could not help being reminded of one of my
+adventures with my excellent tutor when I was in Concord. I was obliged
+to read with him ‘Locke on the Human Understanding.’ My tutor was a
+great admirer of Locke, and thought he was the greatest Englishman that
+ever lived, and nothing pleased him more, consequently, than now and
+then to cross swords with Locke in argument. I was not slow, you may
+imagine, to encourage him in this laudable enterprise. Whenever a
+question arose between my<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_49" id="page_49">{49}</a></span> tutor and Locke, I always took Locke’s side.
+I remember on one occasion, although I cannot now recall the exact
+passage in Locke,&mdash;it was something about continuity of ideas,&mdash;my
+excellent tutor told me that in that case Locke was quite mistaken in
+his views. My tutor said: ‘For instance, Locke says that the mind is
+never without an idea; now I am conscious frequently that my mind is
+without any idea at all.’ And I must confess that that anecdote came
+vividly to my mind when I got up on what Judge Hoar has justly
+characterized as the most important part of an orator’s person.”</p>
+
+<p>Lowell knew something of Emerson when he went to Concord. His letters
+show him before that time going to hear him lecture in Boston, and years
+afterward he recalled with fervor the impression made upon him by
+Emerson’s address before the Φ Β Κ in Lowell’s junior year. It “was an
+event,” he says, “without any former parallel in our literary annals, a
+scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and
+its inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows
+clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim
+silence of foregone dissent! It was our Yankee version of a lecture by
+Abelard, our Harvard parallel to the last public appearance of
+Schelling.”[20] But in 1838 Emerson had published little, his fame
+resting mainly on his public lectures and addresses. In the address at
+Concord, quoted above, Lowell re<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_50" id="page_50">{50}</a></span>cords a memory of the personal
+relations which he then established with the elder poet:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“I am not an adopted son of Concord. I cannot call myself that. But I
+can say, perhaps, that under the old fashion which still existed when I
+was young, I was ‘bound out’ to Concord for a period of time; and I must
+say that she treated me very kindly. I then for the first time made the
+acquaintance of Mr. Emerson, and I still recall with a kind of pathos,
+as Dante did that of his old teacher, Brunetto Latini, ‘La cara e buona
+imagine paterna,’ ‘The dear and good paternal image,’ which he showed me
+here; and I can also finish the quotation and say, ‘And shows me how man
+makes himself eternal.’ I remember he was so kind to me&mdash;I, rather a
+flighty and exceedingly youthful boy, as to take me with him on some of
+his walks, particularly a walk to the cliffs, which I shall never
+forget.”</p>
+
+<p>Lowell formed at Concord the friendship which lasted for life with E. R.
+Hoar, and the lady who was to be Judge Hoar’s wife. These two indeed
+seemed to be excepted in his mind from the Concord people whom he met.
+He was plainly, as his letters show, in a restless mood, dissatisfied
+with himself, going through his appointed tasks with the obedience which
+was habitual, and writing, as the impulse took him, on his Class Poem,
+but moody, irritable, and chafing at the bonds which held him. There was
+the uncomfortable consciousness of serving out his time at Concord for a
+momentary jest, but there was also the profounder<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_51" id="page_51">{51}</a></span> unrest which came
+from the friction of discipline with the awakening of powers not yet
+fully understood or determined. A few passages from his letters to G. B.
+Loring will partially disclose the way he tossed himself about.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="r">
+July 1, 1838.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>You mustn’t expect so long a letter from me as the one you favored
+me with (and I hope sincerely you’ll favor me with many more such
+(for nothing is more pleasant to me than a friend’s letters)
+(except himself) (there, I have got into one of my parentheses,
+which I can’t help to save my life&mdash;damnation! I’m only making the
+matter worse! so I’ll begin again.... This appears to be a pretty
+decent sort of a place&mdash;but I’ve no patience talking about. I shall
+fly into a passion on paper, and then&mdash;as Hamlet says&mdash;then what?
+You can’t guess, now you know you can’t! Why, I should be apt to
+“tear my passion to tatters.” Pretty good, eh! for an un-Sheridanic
+one? Well, as I was saying, the poem hasn’t progressed (they say
+that’s a Yankee word; it’s a damned good word, as most Yankee
+things are) a line since I left the shades of Alma Mater. I want
+the spirit up here, I want</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘Mine ancient chair, whose wide embracing arms,’ etc.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">I shall take to smoking again for very spite. The only time I have
+felt the flow of song was when I heard the bull-frogs in the river
+last night....</p>
+
+<p>I shall do my best to please Mr. F. since I find he does his best
+to please me and make me com<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_52" id="page_52">{52}</a></span>fortable; “that’s the ground I stand
+on.” I feel in a shocking humor, that is, not grouty (I’m not such
+a damned fool; no offence I hope), but cursed queer. I damn
+Concord, and as the man in a story I read somewhere who was shot in
+a duel pathetically exclaimed in his last struggle, I&mdash;“damn
+everything.”... I have written you more than I intended, have two
+more to write to-night, and 50 pages in MacIntosh.... Don’t for
+heaven’s sake think I write in such a hurry from affectation. I
+wish with all my heart it were so. </p></div>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="r">
+July 8.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>... I don’t know that I shan’t get gloomy up here, and be obliged,
+like the gallant old Sir Hudibras’s sword,</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“To eat into myself, for lack<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of something else to cut and hack.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">Everybody almost is calling me indolent,”<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a> “blind, dependent on
+my own powers” and “on <span class="pagenum"><a name="page_53" id="page_53">{53}</a></span>fate.”... I acknowledge that I have been
+something of a dreamer and have sacrificed perchance too
+assiduously on that altar to the “unknown God,” which the Divinity
+has builded not with hands in the bosom of every decent man,
+sometimes blazing out clear with flame (like Abel’s sacrifice)
+heaven seeking, sometimes smothered with green wood and earthward
+like that of Cain. Lazy, quotha! I haven’t dug, ’tis true, but I
+have done as well, and “since my free soul was mistress of her
+choice and could of books distinguish her election,” I have chosen
+what reading I pleased and what friends I pleased, sometimes
+scholars and sometimes not.... </p></div>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="r">
+July 12.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>For the Campbell I trust I needn’t let my thanks stare me in the
+face, so I shall leave you to put yourself in my place and imagine
+them. If you see Scates tell him to write, or I
+shall&mdash;excommunicate, or something dreadful. If you happen to go
+down by the bath house I wish you would take a look after the skiff
+and write me about it. Because perhaps I might come down to the
+Supper in a wagon and bring it up; at any rate, there will be
+nobody there to take care of it when you leave (or rather to lay
+claim to it), and it may be lost, for which I should be sorry, for
+I hope to have considerable navigation out of her yet. </p></div>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="r">
+August 9.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>I shall be free as a bird in a fortnight, and ’twill be the last
+Concord will ever see of me I fancy.... I am again in doubt whether
+to have my “Poem” printed or no. I haven’t written a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_54" id="page_54">{54}</a></span> line since I
+have been in this horrible place. I feel as queer as a woman does
+probably (unmarried of course) when she finds herself in what Dante
+calls “mezzo cammin del nostro vita.”... I’m homesick and all that
+sort of thing. Miss &mdash;&mdash; being the only being I have actually
+sympathized with since I have been in Concord has made me feel like
+a fool. I must go down and see Emerson, and if he doesn’t make me
+feel <i>more</i> like a fool it won’t be for want of sympathy <i>in that
+respect</i>. He is a good-natured man, in spite of his doctrines. He
+travelled all the way up from his house to bring me a book which
+had been sent to me <i>via</i> him. </p></div>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="r">
+August 17.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The first eight pages of the “Poem” are probably printed by this
+time, and the proof on its winding way, as Charlie Foster would say
+to me. I wrote to the President requesting him to let me go home
+to-morrow, but haven’t yet received any answer, and doubt much
+whether I ever shall.</p>
+
+<p>I don’t know what to do with Miss &mdash;&mdash;. She runs in my head and
+heart more than she has any right to, but then</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">A pair of black eyes<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Of a charming size<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And a lip so prettily curled, O!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Are enough to capsize<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The intention wise<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of any man in the world, O!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">For a pretty smile<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Is a mighty wile<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For a heart, for a heart that is light, O!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_55" id="page_55">{55}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And a girl like a dove<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Makes a man fall in love,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Though he knows that it isn’t right, O!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">For love is a thing<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That will quit the lonely king<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To make sunny the cot of the peasant, O!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And it folds its gauzy wing&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In short&mdash;it is a thing&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">’Tis a thing&mdash;that is deuced pleasant, O!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">Oh a gentle heart<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Is the better part<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of a lovely woman’s looks, O!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And I totter on the brink<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Of love when I think,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When I think, when I think of Miss B&mdash;&mdash;, O!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">For a thousand girls<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Have hair that curls,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And a sort of expressive face, O!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">But it isn’t the hair<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Nor the genteel air&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">’Tis the heart that looks bright and gives grace, O!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">Ay, lasses are many<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Without e’en a penny,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But with hearts worth their weight in gold, O!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Whom I’d sooner wed&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Yea, and sooner bed<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Than a princess rich, ugly, and old, O!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">No bee e’er sucked honey<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">From gold or silver money,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But he does from the lovely flower, O!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Then give me a spouse<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Without fortune, land, or house,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And her charming self for a dower, O!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">By Jove, I like that better than anything I’ve written for two
+years! I wrote it <i>con amore</i> and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_56" id="page_56">{56}</a></span> <i>currente calamo</i>. ’Tis yours
+now, but by your leave I’ll copy it off, alter it a little and send
+it down as “a song” for <i>Harvardiana</i>, for which I protested I
+would write nothing O! Why, it’s good! It sings itself! I don’t
+think I shall alter anything but Miss B.’s name, for it ran off the
+end of my pen so that it must be better than I can make it. Why, I
+<i>like</i> it, I do. There isn’t anything good in it either, except in
+the last passage. It has really put me in good spirits. Between
+Sunday and Wednesday I added about 250 lines to the “Poem.” It is
+not finished yet. I wish it were. </p></div>
+
+<p>The Class Poem, which he printed since he was not permitted to be
+present at his class celebration, when he would have read it, is a
+somewhat haphazard performance, as Lowell intimates in his letters. He
+says naïvely in one of the notes to the poem, of which there is a
+liberal supply in an appendix, that he suddenly discovered his subject
+after he had begun writing, by happening to refer in an off hand way to
+Kant.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Kant, happy name! change but the K to C,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And I will wring my poem out of thee.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thanks, vast Immanuel! thy name has given<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The thing for which my brains so long have striven.<br /></span>
+<span class="i8dt">. . . . . . . .<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Cant be my theme, and when she fails my song,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her sister Humbug shall the lay prolong.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The satire of a young collegian is apt to be pretty severe, and Lowell
+runs amuck of Carlyle, Emerson, the Abolitionists, the advocates of
+Wo<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_57" id="page_57">{57}</a></span>man’s Rights, and the Teetotallers. For the most part the poem runs
+along glibly in the decasyllabic verse so handy to familiar poetry, and
+though there are many lame lines, there are more instances of the clever
+distichs which Lowell knocked off so easily in later years than one
+would have guessed from the examples of his verse which appear in his
+early letters. Here, for example, are some of his lines on Carlyle:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Hail too, great drummer in the mental march,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Teufelsdröckh! worthy a triumphal arch,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who send’st forth prose encumbered with jackboots,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To hobble round and pick up raw recruits,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And, able both to battle and to teach,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Mountest thy silent kettledrum to preach.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Great conqueror of the English language, hail!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How Caledonia’s goddess must turn pale<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To hear the German-Græco-Latin flung<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In <i>Revolutions</i> from a Scottish tongue!”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>In the more serious and practical part of the poem there is an
+impassioned burst imitative of Campbell, in which he imagines the
+farewell words of the Cherokee Indians, who at this time, to his
+indignation, were being pushed westward from Georgia.</p>
+
+<p>To the debit of his youthful zeal may be set down the lines on Emerson
+which were his footnote to the famous address to the Divinity School
+delivered 15 July, 1838:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Woe for Religion, too, when men, who claim<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To place a ‘Reverend’ before their name,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ascend the Lord’s own holy place to preach<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In strains that Kneeland had been proud to reach,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And which, if measured by Judge Thacher’s scale,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_58" id="page_58">{58}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Had doomed their author to the county jail!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When men just girding for the holy strife,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Their hands just cleansed to break the bread of life,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose souls, made whole, should never count it loss<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With their own blood to witness for the cross,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Invite a man their Christian zeal to crown<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By preaching earnestly the gospel-down,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Applaud him when he calls of earthly make<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That <span class="smcap">One</span> who spake as never yet man spake,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And tamely hear the anointed Son of God<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Made like themselves an animated clod!”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>To the credit of his manliness may be set down, <i>per contra</i>, the
+following letter which he wrote after the publication of the poem: a
+letter, which, for all its boyish assumption of the <i>toga virilis</i>, has
+a ring of sincerity about it:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="r">
+<span class="smcap">Cambridge</span>, Sept. 1st, 1838.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Dear Sir</span>,&mdash;In my class poem are a few lines about your “address.”
+My friends have expressed surprise that after I had enjoyed your
+hospitality and spoken so highly of you in private, I should have
+been so ‘ungrateful’ as ever to have written anything of the kind.
+Could I have ever dreamed that a man’s private character should
+interfere with his public relations, I had never blotted paper so
+illy. But I really thought that I was doing rightly, for I consider
+it as virtual a lie to hold one’s tongue as to speak an untruth. I
+should have written the same of my own brother. Now, sir, I trouble
+you with this letter because I think you a man who would think
+nowise the worse of me for holding up my head and speaking the
+truth at any sacrifice. That I could wilfully malign a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_59" id="page_59">{59}</a></span> man whose
+salt I had eaten, and whose little child I had danced on my
+knee,&mdash;he must be a small man who would believe so small a thing of
+his fellow.</p>
+
+<p>But this word “ingratitude” is a very harsh and grating word, and
+one which I hope would never be laid to my charge since I stood at
+my mother’s knee and learnt the first very alphabet, as it were, of
+goodness. I hope that if you have leisure, sir, you will answer
+this letter and put me at rest. I hope you will <i>acquit</i> me (for I
+do not still think there is aught to <i>forgive</i> or <i>pardon</i>, and I
+trust <i>you</i> will not after reading this letter) of all
+uncharitableness.</p>
+
+<p>Of course no one can feel it as strongly as I do, for since my
+friends have hinted at this “ingratitude” I have felt a great deal,
+and scarcely dare to look at the Tennyson you lent me without
+expecting some of the devils on the cover to make faces at me.</p>
+
+<p>I hope you will find time to answer this and that I may still enjoy
+your friendship and be able to take you by the hand and look you in
+the face, as honest man should to honest man.</p>
+
+<p class="r">
+I remain yours with respect,<br />
+<span class="smcap">James Russell Lowell</span>.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>P. S. I have sent with this a copy of my “poem”&mdash;if it be not too
+tiresome, you would perhaps think better of me, if you were to read
+it <i>through</i>. I am not silly enough to suppose that this can be of
+any importance to you (if, indeed,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_60" id="page_60">{60}</a></span> you ever heard of the passage I
+refer to), but it is of very great importance to me.</p>
+
+<p class="r">
+J. R. L.<br />
+</p></div>
+
+<p>Lowell’s own comment on the poem years after was in the lines:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Behold the baby arrows of that wit<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Wherewith I dared assail the woundless Truth!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Love hath refilled the quiver, and with it<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The man shall win atonement for the youth.”<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>In this the earliest of his acknowledged publications, as so often in
+his later poems, satire and sentiment jostle each other. The predominant
+note, indeed, is satire in the lofty tone of nineteen, but the
+invocation and the close are in a different strain. Here, too, there is
+the exaltation of a very young man, and one may read phrases which
+perhaps said more than Lowell meant to say; but it was a ruffled youth
+with which his college career closed, and this period of his life was
+not to know as yet any steadying force. It is not strange that he
+grasped at somewhat illusory phantoms in his eagerness to stay himself.
+Here are the invocation and epilogue:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Oh thou! to whom, where’er my footstep roam,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My restless soul would spread its pinions home,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Reality! more fair than any seeming<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">E’er blest the fancy of an angel’s dreaming,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Be thou my muse, in whose blue eye I see<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The heaven of my heart’s eternity!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh, hover like a spirit at my side,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In all my wanderings a heavenly guide,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_61" id="page_61">{61}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then, if in Cant’s dim mists I lose my way,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thy blessed smile shall lead me back to day,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And, when I turn me from the land of night,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thou, morning star of love, shalt herald light!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Lady! whom I have dared to call my muse,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With thee my day began, with thee shall end&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thou can’st not such a poor request refuse<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To let thine image with its closing blend!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As turn the flowers to the quiet dews,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Fairest, so turns my yearning heart to thee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For thee it pineth&mdash;as the homesick shell<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Mourns to be once again beneath the sea&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh let thine eyes upon this tribute dwell,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And think&mdash;one moment kindly think of me!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Alone&mdash;my spirit seeks thy company,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And in all beautiful communes with thine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In crowds&mdash;it ever seeks alone to be<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To dream of gazing in thy gentle eyne!”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>After all, the irregular impulses of the class poem point to what is of
+more consequence, the beginning of Lowell’s manhood. Until the summer of
+1837, he had been a happy-go-lucky boy, sunning himself in literature,
+in nature, and in his friends; then there set in a period when he was at
+odds with fortune, and a stirring of half-understood desires arose; the
+consciousness of power was struggling with the wilfulness of youth.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_62" id="page_62">{62}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III<br /><br />
+<small>FIRST VENTURES</small><br /><br />
+<small>1838-1844</small></h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">As</span> his college course drew near its close, Lowell began to forecast his
+immediate future. His growing devotion to letters, especially to poetry,
+and perhaps the wish to linger a little longer within the shelter of the
+academic life, led him to cherish the notion of studying a while in
+Germany, and he wrote to his father, who was still abroad, in pursuance
+of this plan; but he received no encouragement. Germany, it was properly
+said to him, was no place for the study of law by an American, and the
+law was regarded as his vocation.</p>
+
+<p>Vaguely conscious of his real calling, Lowell passed in review the two
+professions of the ministry and the law, which at that time would be
+likely to attract one who had begun to use his pen with as much
+assiduity as an embryo artist plies his pencil in sketches.
+Unquestionably the ministry opened a fair way of life to him, somewhat
+as it had, less than a score of years earlier, to Emerson, though the
+conditions had already begun to change. Lowell shrank from adopting that
+calling with an instinct which sprang in part from his sense of its
+traditional sacredness, in part from<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_63" id="page_63">{63}</a></span> an increasing consciousness of his
+own separation from the form of religious teaching which would naturally
+be looked for in him. There was a preacher in Lowell not merely by
+inheritance, but, even at this time of nonsense and idle levity, in the
+stirring of a soul that hated evil, and longed to exercise an active
+influence in righting wrongs. The full strength of this impulse was to
+be developed shortly, and thenceforward to find constant expression
+through his life, for a preacher at bottom he was throughout his career.
+An undercurrent of feeling persuaded him that he might even take to
+preaching, if he could be sure of being a celibate, and independent of
+any harassing anxiety respecting his support. But as he wrote of himself
+a few years later to his friend Briggs: “I believe my religion (I am an
+infidel, you know, to the Christianity of to-day, and so my religion is
+something palpable to me in case of strait) arms me against any sorrows
+to come.” The youthful protest in the parenthesis must be taken
+seriously, but not subjected to microscopic analysis. Reverence was an
+abiding element in his nature, and it was early displayed, but it was
+reverence for what was intrinsically to be revered, and that very spirit
+carried with it an impatient reaction against conventional religion. In
+the letter to Dr. Loring, in which he discussed the question of going
+into the Divinity School, he was led, from a slight reference to the
+doctrines which Emerson was announcing, to speak more directly of
+personal religion.</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know,” he says, “whether we poor little<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_64" id="page_64">{64}</a></span> worms (who though but
+little lower than the angels are [but] a little higher than those whom
+our every step annihilates) ought not to <i>condescend</i> to allow that
+there may be something <i>above</i> his reason. We must sometimes receive
+light like the Aurora without knowing where it comes from. And then, on
+the other hand, we may be allowed to doubt whether our wise Creator
+would have given us a dispensation by which to govern our everyday life,
+any part of which was repugnant to our reason. It is a question which
+every man must settle for himself: indeed he were mad to let any settle
+it for him.”</p>
+
+<p>An independence of judgment did not lead him to throw away a fundamental
+faith in spiritual realities, but it made him ready to refuse conformity
+with the nearest form of religion. At the time he was writing, Lowell
+thought he saw the churches, if not tolerant of a great evil, at least
+mainly silent before it, and with the radicalism which was as integral a
+part of him as his conservatism, he broke away from associations which
+seemed thus inert and false to the very ideals they professed to
+cherish. Had not the poetic impulse and the artistic temper been so
+strong in him, it is quite possible that as Emerson in his philosophic
+idealism had let the minister’s gown slip from his shoulders, yet had
+remained on the platform, so Lowell in his moral earnestness might, if
+he had really gone into the ministry, have shortly become a witty
+reformer, preaching with the prophet’s leathern girdle and not in the
+priest’s cassock.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_65" id="page_65">{65}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But heredity and an impulse to deliver his mind were not strong enough
+to take him into the pulpit against the clear dictates of a reasonable
+judgment, and with apparently no disposition toward medicine, he turned
+almost from necessity to the law. The law, at first, at any rate, did
+not so much attract him, as it was reached by a process of elimination.
+The substantial motive which urged him was his need of a livelihood.
+Although his father at this time was in what is quaintly termed
+“comfortable circumstances,” Lowell, like his fellows everywhere in
+America, most certainly in New England, never would have entertained the
+notion of living indefinitely at his father’s expense. As a matter of
+course he must earn his living, and he was so meagrely supplied even
+with pocket money at this time that his letters contain frequent
+illustration of his inability to indulge in petty pleasures&mdash;a short
+journey, for instance, the purchase of a book or pamphlet, even postage
+on letters.</p>
+
+<p>So, in the fall of 1838, when he was living at Elmwood with his brother
+Charles, he began to read Blackstone “with as good a grace and as few
+wry faces” as he could. But suddenly, a fortnight only after making this
+assertion, he had abandoned the notion of studying law, out of utter
+distaste for it. It was after a great struggle, he says, but the
+struggle was evidently one of those occasional self-communings of the
+young man who is not predestined to any profession, and yet is unable to
+respond to the half articulate demands of his nature. We can read
+Lowell’s mind at this<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_66" id="page_66">{66}</a></span> time in the fragmentary confessions of his
+letters, and see that the controlling influence was to secure ultimately
+the right to devote himself to literature. The law is a jealous
+mistress, and Lowell was sagacious enough to perceive that to secure
+success in the profession he must needs devote himself to it with long
+and unremitting attention, and he was sure a real love for the study of
+law was a condition precedent to success. So again he weighed the
+chances. Once more he considered the ministry; he even speculated over
+the possibilities of medicine&mdash;his friend Loring had taken up that for
+his profession; but with a certain common-sense view of the matter, he
+argued that if his occupation were to be merely a means to an end, why,
+trade was the logical road to money-making, and he set about looking for
+a “place in a store.”</p>
+
+<p>“I must expect,” he writes ruefully, “to give up almost entirely all
+literary pursuits, and instead of making rhymes, devote myself to making
+money.” But with a whimsical attempt after all to join his ideals with
+this practical course, after saying that in abandoning the law he gives
+up the chance of going to Europe, since his father had promised him this
+plum if he would stick to the law for three years, he closes his letter:
+“I intend to go into a foreign store so that I may be able to go to
+Europe yet. I shall have to brush up my French so as to write foreign
+letters.”</p>
+
+<p>This was written on Tuesday the 30th of October. The next Monday, when
+he had gone to Boston to look for a place, he dropped in at the United<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_67" id="page_67">{67}</a></span>
+States court where a case was on in which Webster was one of the
+counsel. His imagination took fire. “I had not been there an hour,” he
+writes, “before I determined to continue in my profession and study as
+well as I could.” By an unexpected circumstance, however, he was within
+a month interrupted in his study. His brother Robert, who was in the
+counting-room of a coal merchant, was laid up with a lame hand, and so
+James took his place at the desk. It is not impossible that he was
+secretly glad of making thus, with a good conscience, a little test of
+his aptitude for business.</p>
+
+<p>His position as a substitute gave him a breathing spell, and he plunged
+again into rhyming. His letters during the winter were full of
+experiments in verse, and he was, moreover, giving serious attention to
+the technique of poetry, having recourse to such manuals as Sidney’s
+“Defense of Poesie” and Puttenham’s “Art of English Poesie,” a
+characteristic act, for he had the same instinct for the great genetic
+period of English poetry as Lamb and his fellows in England had a
+generation earlier. He even began to throw out lines in the direction of
+self-support through literature. Besides his trials in the newspapers
+and magazines, he took the chance given him to lecture in Concord, and
+he wondered if his friend Loring could get him an opportunity at
+Andover. He had “quitted the law forever” on the 26th of February, 1839,
+but the mood of exhilaration over a possible maintenance through
+lecturing evaporated after a return from Concord with four dollars, less
+his travelling<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_68" id="page_68">{68}</a></span> expenses, as the result of his first experiment. And yet
+business was as repellent to him as law. In a letter to G. B. Loring of
+March, 1839, he bursts forth into a cry of bitterness:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know what to do with myself. I am afraid people will think me a
+fool if I change again, and yet I can hardly hope ever to be satisfied
+where I am. I shouldn’t wonder if next Monday saw me with Kent’s
+Commentaries under my arm. I think I might get to take an interest in
+it, and then I should not fear at all about the living. If I had not
+been thrice a fool, I should have been in Dane Law College reciting at
+this very moment. And what makes me feel still worse is that nobody
+knows or can know my motive for changing, and the struggle which kept me
+irresolute.</p>
+
+<p>“I am certainly just at present in a miserable state, and I won’t live
+so long. You must excuse the shortness of this letter, for my feelings
+are in such a distracted sort of a state that the more I write the less
+do I feel able to write.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Dear George, when I am set at table<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I am indeed quite miserable,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And when as that I lie in bed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Strife and confusion whirl my head;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When I am getting up at morn<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I feel confoundedly forlorn,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And when I go to bed at eve<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I can do nought but sigh and grieve.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When I am walking into town<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I feel all utterly cast down,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And when I’m walking out from it<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I feel full many a sorrow fit.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The struggle in his mind went on through the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_69" id="page_69">{69}</a></span> rest of the spring. He
+kept doggedly at his desk, apparently, but wrote more verse, especially
+of a serious sort. At last, on the 20th of May, he could write in a
+somewhat forced strain of exultation: “Rejoice with me! For to-morrow I
+shall be free. Without saying a word to any one, I shall quietly proceed
+to Dane Law College to recitation. Now shall I be happy again as far as
+<i>that</i> is concerned. Nature will smile for me yet again. I shall hear
+the merry tinkle of the brook and think not of the tinkle of dollars and
+cents. Upon the ocean I may look, nor dream of the rates of freight. Let
+us rejoice, George, in the days of our youth. We shall find it very
+different when we come to support ourselves. Good old Homer in the
+Odyssey makes Telemachus tell Minerva, ‘Well may they laugh and sing and
+dance, for they are eating the bread of another man.’ Now we who eat our
+father’s bread at present may be as merry as we will. But very different
+will it be when every potato that we eat (lucky if we can get even
+those) shall seem watersoaked with the sweat of our brow. I am going to
+be as happy as the days are long.”</p>
+
+<p>A little later he wrote: “I am now a law student, and am really studying
+and intend to study. I shall now be able to come and spend some Saturday
+with you and come down Monday morning.... To-day I have been engaged an
+hour in recitation, 9 to 10, and then from 11 to 3-1/2 o’clock in
+studying law, which, as we only have one recitation a day, is pretty
+well. I have determined that I<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_70" id="page_70">{70}</a></span> will now <i>do</i> something. I am lazy
+enough, heaven knows, but not half so much so as some of my friends
+suppose. At all events, I was never made for a merchant, and I even
+begin to doubt whether I was made for anything in particular but to
+loiter through life and then become manure.”</p>
+
+<p>From this time forward Lowell did not relinquish his study of law. He
+confessed, indeed, to a doubt if he should ever practice. He had a
+“blind presentiment of becoming independent in some other way,” and he
+allowed himself to dream of cultivating literature in solitude on a
+little oatmeal, but he pushed through to the nominal end, and took his
+degree of bachelor of laws at commencement in August, 1840.<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> Not long
+after, he entered the law office in Boston of Mr. Charles Greely Loring,
+and when the winter came he went himself to Boston to live.</p>
+
+<p>The vacillation and apparent irresolution outlined in his fickle pursuit
+of a profession in the months after his graduation are unmistakable, but
+there are expressions now and then in the letters we have quoted that
+strike one as a little exaggerated even to one so open to attacks from
+conscience as was Lowell. Why such a pother, one might ask, over an
+embarrassment which is not very uncommon, and after all touches chiefly
+the prudential side of character? “Nobody knows or<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_71" id="page_71">{71}</a></span> can know my motives
+for changing, and the struggle which kept me irresolute;” but the boyish
+companion to whom he wrote undoubtedly had an inkling of his friend’s
+perturbation, though frank as that friend was in his correspondence and
+intercourse, he could surely have said, “the heart knoweth its own
+bitterness.”</p>
+
+<p>The solution is simple enough in statement. Before his last year in
+college Lowell had met and fallen fiercely in love with a beautiful
+girl, one of the circle in which his family moved, and endowed with
+intellectual grace and great charm of manner. Then something came
+between them, and separation became inevitable, at least it became so in
+Lowell’s own view of the situation. The shock of this rupture left not a
+shade of reproach for the girl in Lowell’s mind, but it broke up the
+fountains of the deep in his own life. He was scarcely more than a boy
+in years, but he had in temperament and capacity for emotion a far
+greater maturity. He could write of himself a few years later: “Brought
+up in a very reserved and conventional family, I cannot in society
+appear what I really am. I go out sometimes with my heart so full of
+yearning toward my fellows that the indifferent look with which even
+entire strangers pass me brings tears to my eyes.” There was indeed an
+extraordinary frankness about him in these early days, filling his
+letters with expressions which might easily have made him wince in later
+years; but the spontaneity of his nature, which was always seen in the
+unguardedness of his familiar writing<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_72" id="page_72">{72}</a></span> and his conversation, had in
+these days the added ingenuousness of youth.</p>
+
+<p>The experience thus referred to in the summer of 1837 was no short,
+sharp passion burning itself out in quick rage; it smouldered and leaped
+up into flame at intervals for two years, fed moreover by the
+consciousness of his own impotence and the predicament into which he was
+helplessly drawn; and it was during these two years that this
+restlessness and vacillation of temper were almost ungovernable. Later
+in life even he looked back with horror upon this time, saying half in
+pity, half in contempt for himself, that he put a cocked pistol to his
+forehead in 1839, and had not finally the courage to pull the trigger.</p>
+
+<p>It would be easy to fill many pages with illustrations drawn from
+unprinted poems written during this period, and they would have the
+added value of disclosing the fact that poetry was fast becoming the
+natural expression of his mind, even while he was fashioning it with
+constantly better art. In a letter written to Loring, 26 July, 1839,
+containing two bits of verse lyrically interpretative of his experience,
+he says: “You must not be surprised if I don’t write again for some
+time, but the next time I do write I trust my letters will be better
+worth the postage. At any rate, it shall be filled more with my <i>real</i>
+than with my <i>poetical</i> me; although now they are synonymous terms, as
+they should be, for my poetry answers me very much as a sort of journal
+or rather nousometer.”</p>
+
+<p>It is hard for most of us to escape the lurking<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_73" id="page_73">{73}</a></span> judgment that the man,
+or boy either, who throws his spiritual experience into verse is more or
+less consciously dramatizing, and we are apt to credit greater honesty
+to the one who does not than to the one who does poetize his
+disappointments; but in spite of the artfulness which betrays itself in
+the effort of one who has not yet perfect command of his instrument,
+there is a ring of sincerity about Lowell’s poetic journal which,
+without juggling, we both infer from his nature as it is otherwise
+disclosed, and make illustrative of the real life of the spirit. Here
+are some verses which occur in a letter to Dr. Loring in the summer of
+1839. In writing of them to his friend a few days later, Lowell says:
+“The lines I wrote to you the other day were improvised, and you must
+judge them leniently accordingly. I do not think now, as I did ‘two
+years ago,’ that poetry <i>must</i> be an inspiration, but am convinced that
+somewhat of care, nay, even of thought, is requisite in a <i>poem</i>.”</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Turn back your eyes, my friend, with me<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Upon those two late parted years&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nay, look alone, for I can see<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But inward through these bitter tears:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Deep grief sometimes our mind’s eye clears.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“How much lies in that one word ‘Past’!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">More than in all that waits before;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How many a saddened glance is cast<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To that stern wall of nevermore,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose shadow glooms our heart’s deep core.<br /></span>
+<span class="i6dt">. . . . . . . .<br /></span>
+<span class="iq">“As hard it is for mortal glance<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To pierce the Has been’s mystery<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And force of iron circumstance<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_74" id="page_74">{74}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which said let these and these things be,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As to resolve futurity.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“A many streams that once ran full<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of joy or Marah waves of pain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wasting or making beautiful,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Have sunk no more to flow again,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And scarce the tracks they wore remain.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“And many shades of joy and woe<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Pass cloudlike, silent, o’er my soul,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which not one being else may know,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And into utter darkness roll,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Links lost from out my being’s whole.<br /></span>
+<span class="i6dt">. . . . . . . .<br /></span>
+<span class="iq">“This Present is becoming Past;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Live then each moment manfully<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If you would wish your deeds to last,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sowing good seed continually<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose harvest time is yet to be.<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="iq">“In our great pride we think that we<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Build up our high or low estate,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dimly half conscious that we see<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The paths which lead to small and great<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Through the fixed eye of settled Fate.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“The Past may guide the Future’s ways:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Seeds cast far up the stream of time,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Returning after many days,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">May grow to their ordained prime<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of fruitage in another clime.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>As if to reinforce our confidence in the genuineness of the emotion
+which prompted these moral verses, written apparently to the sound of
+Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life,” which had just appeared in the
+<i>Knickerbocker</i>, we come in a few weeks to a rhymed letter in which a
+reminiscence of the same<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_75" id="page_75">{75}</a></span> experience is recorded with simplicity and
+naturalness in a homely poetic strain:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Two years ago, in days how like to these,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet how unlike! beneath the changing trees<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I walked with her full many a happy hour,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Pausing to gather some belated flower,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or to pick up some nut half eaten, dropt<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By a scared squirrel as away he hopt.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The jest, the laugh, and the more high debate<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To which the forest aisles seem consecrate,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nay, even the jest, and the dark plaided shawl<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That loved her light form&mdash;I remember all:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For then I entered that fair gate of love<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On whose bright arch should be inscribed above,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As o’er that other in the Tuscan’s story&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">‘Per me si va ne l’eterno dolore.’<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The leaves were falling round us then, and we<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Talked of their many meanings musingly.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ah, woe is me! we did not speak at all<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of how love’s leaves will wither, change, and fall&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Full silently&mdash;and how the pent up breast<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Will hide the tears that cannot be represt.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>In this same letter Lowell enumerates at the close the books he is
+reading and about to read:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“I’m reading now the Grecian tragedies,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Stern, gloomy Æschylus, great Sophocles,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And him of Salamis whose works remain<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">More perfect to us than the other twain.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">(Time’s a gourmand, at least he was so then,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And thinks his leavings good enough for men.)<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When I have critically read all these,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I’ll dip in cloudy Aristophanes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And then the Latin dramatists, and next<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With mathematics shall my brain be vext.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So if I carry all my projects through<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I shall do pretty well, I think, don’t you?”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>What most impresses the attentive reader of Lowell’s verses and letters
+as the two years, to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_76" id="page_76">{76}</a></span> which he so often refers, draw to a close, is the
+evidence that the young man was finally emerging from the mist and cloud
+through which he had been struggling, and was getting his feet upon
+solid ground, so that not only was his irresolution changed for a fairly
+diligent pursuit of his profession, but he had acquired a greater
+robustness of spirit and was squaring himself with life in earnest. The
+internal conflict had been fought out and the substantial victory gained
+was showing itself in greater self-reliance and a growth in manly ways.</p>
+
+<p>It is therefore with especial satisfaction that the chronicler of his
+external history comes upon an event which was to mark emphatically the
+attainment of his intellectual and spiritual majority. Near the end of
+the year 1839 he made the acquaintance of Maria White. She was the
+daughter of Mr. Abijah White, a farmer in Watertown, whom Lowell
+characterized on first meeting him as “the most perfect specimen of a
+bluff, honest, hospitable country squire you can possibly imagine.” Mr.
+White had a family of sons and daughters who thenceforward became
+Lowell’s familiar acquaintance. One of the sons, William A. White, had
+been a classmate at Harvard,&mdash;he speaks of him once as his “quondam
+chum,”&mdash;and it was by him that Lowell was introduced to his home. As
+Lowell had written with great freedom to his friend Loring of his
+troubled experience, so now one may trace in this very frank
+correspondence the manner in which this new affection displaced the
+mournfulness of that experience and substituted great peace and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_77" id="page_77">{77}</a></span> content
+for the soreness which still remained after a struggle that had resulted
+in substantial self-mastery.</p>
+
+<p>In his earliest, hardly more than casual reference to Maria White he
+characterizes her as “a very pleasant and pleasing young lady” who
+“knows more poetry” than any one he is acquainted with. “I mean,” he
+says, “she is able to repeat more. She is more familiar, however, with
+modern poets than with the pure well-springs of English poesy.” His
+changing mood during the winter months that follow is visible in the
+poetry which he writes and copies in his letters, but in the early
+summer there is a bolder and franker tone, until the acquaintance which
+has ripened into intimacy culminates in an engagement not long after the
+completion of the lover’s law studies.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>June 13, 1840. I got back from Watertown, whither I went to a
+gathering at Miss Hale’s (whose family are boarding at the
+Nonantum). I spent the night at W. A. W.’s. Lovely indeed it was
+with its fair moon and stars and floating cloud mist. I walked back
+with M. W. on my arm, and not only did my body go back, but my
+spirit also over the footsteps of other years. Were not the nights
+<i>then</i> as lovely ... and the river that we gazed down into&mdash;think
+you those water-parties are so soon forgotten? When we got to the
+house we sat upon the steps and talked,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And then like a Spring-swollen river<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Roll the full waves of her tumultuous thought,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_78" id="page_78">{78}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Crested with glittering spray;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her wild lips curve and quiver,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And my rapt soul on the deep stream upcaught,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lulled by a dreamful music ever,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Unwittingly is borne away.<br /></span>
+<span class="i6dt">. . . . . . .<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I float to a delicious land,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By a sunset Heaven spanned,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And musical with streams.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Around, the calm majestic forms<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Godlike eyes of early Greece I see,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or listen till my spirit warms<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To songs of courtly chivalry,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or weep, unmindful if my tears be seen,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For the meek suffering love of poor Undine.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">She is truly a glorious girl with her spirit eyes. On the mantel is
+a moss rose she gave me and which when it withers I shall enshrine
+in my Homer. This morning I drove her up to Waltham. They tell me I
+shall be in love with her. But there is but one <i>Love</i>. I love her
+because she is a woman, and so was another being I loved.</p>
+
+<p>August 18, 1840. Since you heard from me I have been at Nantasket
+and had a fine time. I found M. W., her brother, and Page,<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a> down
+there, and I carried Heath with me. I had one glorious ride on the
+beach with M. W., I having hired a horse and gig at Hingham.
+Hingham is a strange place. I walked through the greater part of it
+one day and did not even see a living soul....</p>
+
+<p>Nantasket is a beautiful place. The beach is five miles long,
+smooth, hard sand without a pebble. When the wind blows on shore
+you may see<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_79" id="page_79">{79}</a></span> one line of unbroken white foam, five miles long, roll
+up the beach at once. I spent one whole evening alone on the rocks
+with M. W. A glorious evening it was. Page’s portrait of M. W. is
+going to be fine, at least I hope so. It <i>ought</i> to be....</p>
+
+<p>August 25, 1840. I have just finished reading Goethe’s
+correspondence with a child, Bettina Brentano. I had long tried
+(rather wished) to get it, the more so from some beautiful extracts
+which M. W. read to me, but had never seen it till now. It is
+<i>beautiful</i>. It is wonderful when we think that Bettina was a
+child. It is like sunshine on grass newly rained upon&mdash;like the
+smell of a flower&mdash;like the song of a bird. We are given to look
+into the very core of the most loving heart that ever came directly
+from God and <i>forgot not whence it came</i>.</p>
+
+<p>But it was mournful to think that all this love should have been
+given to the cold, hard Goethe.<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> I wanted such a soul for
+myself. M. W.’s is nearer to it than any I have ever seen. But I
+should have seen her three years ago. If that other love could
+raise such a tempest in my soul as to fling up the foul and slimy
+weeds from the bottom, and make it for so long sluggish and muddy,
+a disappointment from her would I think have broken my heart.</p>
+
+<p>George, twice lately I have had a very strange<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_80" id="page_80">{80}</a></span> dream. Byron says
+that dreams “shake us with the vision of the past.” Do they not
+also shake us with the vision of what is to come? I dreamed that I
+went to see M. W., that I saw her walking just before me, and that
+when I strove to overtake her, she vanished. I asked a man whom I
+met if he had seen her (describing her). He said “yes, she has gone
+down the happy road.” I followed, but could get no glimpse of her.
+Does this mean that I shall love M. W. and that she will die? Homer
+says that there are two gates of quickly fading dreams, one of sawn
+ivory, and the other of polished horn. Those dreams that pass thro’
+the ivory gate are liars, but those that forth issue from the
+polished horn tell truth to any one of mortals who sees them. Did
+my dream come thro’ the horn or the ivory? Are you oneirocritical
+enough to say? At any rate, remember this. M. W. lent me a “sweet”
+book (<i>she</i> did not call it so and I don’t know why <i>I</i> did),
+“Philothea,” by Mrs. Child. If you ever come across it, read it. It
+is, as Mr. Emerson called it, “a divine book.”... To-day is (or
+was) Commencement. I was standing in the pew listening to the music
+when I looked round and saw a pair of eyes fixed on me that made me
+feel glad; they were M. W.’s. I thought she was in Beverly. I
+managed to squeeze my way up to her at last and walked with her to
+Judge Fay’s, stayed there a little while and then went to take my
+degree of LL. B. After dining with the alumni, I walked round to
+the President’s in the faint hope of seeing her again. Just as I<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_81" id="page_81">{81}</a></span>
+got nearly there, I saw her go in. I went in after. The man she was
+with left her, and I enjoyed her for more than two hours. Scates
+made his appearance here to-day, so that my day has been a very
+happy one.</p>
+
+<p>P. S. There are more lies contained in the piece of parchment on
+which my degree is written than I ever before saw in a like
+compass. It praises me for assiduous attention at recitations,
+etc., etc. (This letter seems to be all about M. W.)</p>
+
+<p class="r">
+Good by,  J. R. L.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Sunday, [31 August, 1840.] I have received your letter and had also
+written an answer to it, which I just burnt. It was written when I
+was not in a fit state of mind to write. I had been feeling very
+strongly that</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Custom lies about us with a weight<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>If I had written this an hour ago, it would have been black and
+melancholy enough, but I have smoked three cigars and ruminated and
+am calm&mdash;almost....</p>
+
+<p>If I had seen her three years ago things might have been not thus.
+But yet I would not give up the bitter knowledge I gained last
+summer for much&mdash;very much.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Who never ate his bread in sorrow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who never passed the lonesome hours,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Weeping and watching for the morrow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He knows ye not, ye Heavenly powers.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>I have been calmer and stronger ever since. Oh the glory of a calm,
+still soul! If we could keep<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_82" id="page_82">{82}</a></span> our souls ever in a holy silence, we
+should be wise, we should hear the music of the spheres. But they
+will ever be talking to themselves. If we could but become so, we
+should then ever have at our beck those divine messengers which
+visit us also as well as Abraham....</p>
+
+<p>Do “they say” that she is “transcendental”? Yes, she does indeed go
+beyond them. They cannot understand a being like her. But if they
+mean that she is unfit for the duties of life, they are entirely
+wrong. She has more “common sense” than any woman I have ever seen.
+Genius always has. Hear what Maria herself says in one of her
+glorious letters to me. “When I said that I loved you, I almost
+felt as if I had said ‘and I will espouse sorrow for thy sake,’ for
+I have lived long enough and observed life keenly enough to know
+that not the truest and most exalted love can bar the approach of
+much care and sorrow.” And all these she is ready and able to bear.
+Yes, she will love you, for she loves everything that I love. </p></div>
+
+<p>The first volume of poetry which Lowell published, “A Year’s Life,” is,
+as its name intimates, a poetic record of the time covered by these and
+other passages from his correspondence. It appeared in January, 1841,
+and he was moved to print it both because Miss White desired it, and
+because it was so full of her. The love which found expression, as we
+have seen, in letters to a familiar friend, could not fail of an outlet
+in verse, and was but thinly concealed from the public in a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_83" id="page_83">{83}</a></span> volume
+which, from Dedication to Epilogue, was glowing with it. Many of the
+poems he had already printed in the magazines for which he had been
+diligently writing, and these poems, as they appeared, were
+announcements, to those who knew both the lovers, of the pure passion
+which was flaming.</p>
+
+<p>Two of the poems in particular reflect Lowell’s idealization of the lady
+and his consciousness of what this experience meant to him. “<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Ianthe,’<span class="lftspc">”</span>
+he writes to Loring, “is good as far as it goes. I did not know her
+then. She <i>is</i> a glorious creature indeed!”</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Dear, glorious creature!”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">he exclaims, near the close of the poem,</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">“With eyes so dewy bright,<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">And tenderest feeling<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">&nbsp; &nbsp; Itself revealing<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">In every look and feature,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Welcome as a homestead light<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To one long-wandering in a clouded night;<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">O, lovelier far her woman’s weakness,<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">Which yet is strongly mailed<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">In armor of courageous meekness<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">And faith that never failed!”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">The lines on pages 77, 78 are from the same poem, which was written thus
+when the acquaintance was ripening into intimacy. The whole poem is a
+tribute to the visionary beauty of her face and character as revealed to
+him. “There is a light,” thus the poem opens:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“There is a light within her eyes<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Like gleams of wandering fire-flies;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From light to shade it leaps and moves<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_84" id="page_84">{84}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whenever in her soul arise<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The holy shapes of things she loves.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">Throughout the poem runs, moreover, an undercurrent of holy awe and a
+presage of her short life, which drew from him the reflections on death
+that occur in his letters:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“I may not tell the blessedness<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her mild eyes send to mine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The sunset-tinted haziness<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of their mysterious shine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The dim and holy mournfulness<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of their mellow light divine;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The shadows of the lashes lie<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Over them so lovingly,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That they seem to melt away<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In a doubtful twilight-gray,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">While I watch the stars arise<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the evening of her eyes.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I love it, yet I almost dread<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To think what it foreshadoweth;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And, when I muse how I have read<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That such strange light betokened death,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Instead of fire-fly gleams, I see<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wild corpse lights gliding waveringly.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The closing section of the poem holds a reflection of that image which
+is after all most enshrined in the poet’s heart, as one may gather not
+only from his after words concerning her, but from the influence
+manifest in his own early career from this time forward.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Early and late, at her soul’s gate<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sits Chastity in warderwise,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No thought unchallenged, small or great,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Goes thence into her eyes;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nor may a low, unworthy thought<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Beyond that virgin warder win,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nor one, whose passion is not ‘ought,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_85" id="page_85">{85}</a></span>’<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">May go without, or enter in.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I call her, seeing those pure eyes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Eve of a new Paradise,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which she by gentle word and deed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And look no less, doth still create<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">About her, for her great thoughts breed<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A calm that lifts us from our fallen state,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And makes us while with her both good and great,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nor is their memory wanting in our need:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With stronger loving, every hour,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Turneth my heart to this frail flower,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which, thoughtless of the world, hath grown<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To beauty and meek gentleness,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Here in a fair world of its own,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By woman’s instinct trained alone,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A lily fair which God did bless,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And which from Nature’s heart did draw<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Love, wisdom, peace, and Heaven’s perfect law.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Lowell did not retain “Ianthe” in his later collections, but he
+reprinted to the last the other poem especially identified with Miss
+White which bears the significant title “Irene.” This, as the reader
+perceives, is more distinctly a piece of characterization, and its
+closing lines, wherein Irene is likened to the lone star seen by sailors
+tempest-tost, may be read as carrying more than a pretty poetic simile,
+for it cannot be doubted that the love which now possessed the poet was
+in a profound sense a word of peace to him. Something of the same
+strain, though more remote and dramatic, may be read in the poem “The
+Sirens,” which is also retained by Lowell in his later collections, and
+is dated in “A Year’s Life” “Nantasket, July, 1840,” a date which has an
+added interest when one refers to the letter given above on page 78. One
+more<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_86" id="page_86">{86}</a></span> passage may be read from his letters as giving his own final word
+of retrospect and prospect. It occurs in a letter to G. B. Loring, 2
+January, 1841.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, my friend, it is most true that I have changed. I thank <i>her</i> and
+one other, under God, for it.... Had the love I bore to a woman you know
+of three years ago, been as pure, true, and holy as that I bear to her
+who ‘never from me shall be divided,’ I had been a man sooner. My love
+for her was fierce and savage. It rose not like the fair evening star on
+the evening I first saw her (I remember it well), but (as <i>she</i> has said
+of such love) like a lurid meteor. And it fell as suddenly. For a time I
+was dazed by its glare and startled by the noise of its bursting. But I
+grew calm and soon morning dawned....</p>
+
+<p>“And I mean to live as one beloved by such a woman should live. She is
+every way noble. People have called ‘Irene’ a beautiful piece of poetry.
+And so it is. It owes all its beauty to her, and were it a thousand
+times as beautiful would not be so much so as she is to me.”</p>
+
+<p>The strong emotional experience which thus possessed Lowell came to him
+when he was largely under the sway of sentiment, but though, as we have
+seen, it was translated into poetry very freely, it is not so much the
+immediate expression in literary form which concerns us as it is the
+infusion of an element in the formation of character. Lowell was
+overcharged in his youth with sensitiveness in affection. There was a
+fitfulness in his demonstration of it, an almost ungovernable outflow of
+feeling,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_87" id="page_87">{87}</a></span> which left him in danger of coming under the control of morbid
+impulse. What he required, and what most happily he found, was the
+serenity and steadfastness of a nature, exalted like his own, but
+glowing with an ardor which had other than purely personal aim.</p>
+
+<p>Miss White was a highly sensitive girl of a type not unknown, especially
+at that time, in New England. Of delicate sensibility, she listened
+eagerly to the voices rising about her which found their choragus in
+Emerson. It was before the time of much organization among women, but
+not before the time when one and another woman, inheritors of a refined
+conscience, stirred by the movement in the air, sought to do justice to
+their convictions in espousing this or that moral cause, not at all
+necessarily in public championship, but in the eloquent zeal of domestic
+life. As her brother William was to become an active reformer, so she
+fed her spirit with aspirations for temperance, and for that abolition
+of slavery which was already beginning to dominate the moral earnestness
+of the community, holding all other reforms as subordinate to this.
+Lowell, seeing in her a Una, was quickened in the spirit which had
+already been awakened, and instantly donned his armor as her Red Cross
+Knight.<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a></p>
+
+<p>At this period there was a much greater homogeneity in New England life,
+than there has been at any time since. The democratizing of society<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_88" id="page_88">{88}</a></span> had
+been going on under favoring conditions, for industry was still at the
+basis of order, less was made of the distinction of wealth, more of the
+distinction of education, the aristocratic element was under the same
+general law of hard work, and a proletariat class had not been created
+by an inflow of the waste of Europe which inevitably accompanied the
+sturdy peasants. The city had not yet swept ardent youth into its
+rapids, and the simplicity of modes of life was hardly more marked in
+the country than in the town. Whoever recalls the now old-fashioned
+tales by Miss Catherine Sedgwick will have a truthful picture of a
+social order which seems Arcadian in the haze of sixty years since.</p>
+
+<p>It was, in some aspects, the culmination of the ingrowing New England
+just before the Atlantic ocean became contracted to a broad stream, the
+West was clutched by iron hands, and all manner of forces conspired to
+render this secluded corner of the earth a cosmopolitan part of a larger
+community.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most characteristic phases of this life was the attention
+paid by all classes to the awakening which was going on in education,
+reform, politics, and religion. Mr. Norton has printed a letter<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a> of
+Lowell’s in which he gives an animated picture of a temperance
+celebration in Watertown, at which Maria White appeared in a sort of New
+England translation of a Queen of the May, as the celebration itself was
+a festival in the moral vernacular.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_89" id="page_89">{89}</a></span> Lowell’s own delight in her was
+unbounded, and the scene as he depicts it, was a New England idyl.</p>
+
+<p>Maria White and her brother belonged to a group of young people on most
+friendly terms with one another, and known offhand by themselves as the
+Band. They lived in various places, Boston, Cambridge, Watertown, Salem,
+and were constantly seeking occasions for familiar intercourse. Dr. Hale
+has given a lively account of their fellowship and summons a witness who
+was herself a member of the company.<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a> To this coterie Lowell was now
+introduced, and the relations between him and Miss White made the pair
+the centre of attraction. Miss White’s spirituelle beauty and poetic
+temperament and Lowell’s spontaneity of wit and sentiment were
+heightened in the eyes of these young people by the attachment between
+them, and they were known with affectionate jesting as the Queen and
+King of the Band. In the exalted air upon which the two trod,
+stimulating each other, their devotion came to have, by a paradox, an
+almost impersonal character, as if they were creatures of romance; their
+life was led thus in the open, so much so that, as has been said more
+than once, the letters exchanged by them were passed about also among
+the other young people of the circle.<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a> Be this as it may, the
+assertion is rendered<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_90" id="page_90">{90}</a></span> credible by the highly charged atmosphere in
+which they were living. The two young poets&mdash;for Maria White was not
+only of poetic temperament, but wrote verses, some of which found place
+in current magazines&mdash;were lifted upon a platform by their associates,
+and were themselves so open in their consciousness of poetic thinking
+and acting that they took little pains to abscond from this friendly
+publicity. It is a curious instance of freedom from shamefacedness in so
+native a New Englander as Lowell, but his letters, his poems, and common
+report, all testify to an ingenuousness of sentiment at this time, which
+was a radical trait, and less conspicuous later in life only because
+like other men he became subject to convention.</p>
+
+<p>But though Lowell lived in this exhilarated state, he was not likely to
+be led away into any wholly impracticable scheme of living. His own good
+sense could be relied on, and his independence of spirit, as could his
+detestation of debt, which kept him all his life a frugal liver. He was,
+besides, brought up sharply at this time by the necessity suddenly laid
+on him to earn his living, if he would be married, since his father,
+always generous to him, had now lost almost all his personal property,
+and was land poor; it was clearly understood, too, that the young people
+must rely on themselves for support. Fortunate was it for him that he
+was to have a wife who shared to the full his views on living. “It is
+easy enough,” wrote<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_91" id="page_91">{91}</a></span> Maria White to Levi Thaxter, “to be married&mdash;the
+newspaper columns show us that every day; but to live and be happy as
+simple King and Queen without the gifts of fortune, this is, I confess,
+a triumph which suits my nature better.”</p>
+
+<p>Lowell, who had been lodging in Cambridge, moved into Boston when he was
+established in Mr. Loring’s office, but in the spring of 1842 went back
+to Elmwood to live. Dr. Lowell had returned from Europe with his wife
+and daughter in the early summer of 1840. It is probable that the return
+of Lowell to his father’s house was due to the declining health of his
+mother, who showed symptoms of that disorder of the brain which clouded
+her last years, and is graphically depicted in her son’s poem, “The
+Darkened Mind.” From this time her husband and children watched her with
+solicitude and tried various remedies. She was taken on little journeys
+to Saratoga and elsewhere, in search of restoration, but in vain. In
+this case, as so often happens, the sufferer who draws largely on one’s
+sympathy is the faithful, despairing husband.<a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a></p>
+
+<p>Although Lowell had been admitted to the bar, and was ready to practice,
+clients were slow in coming, and with his resources in literature it was
+natural enough that he should use his enforced leisure in writing for
+publication. There were few<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_92" id="page_92">{92}</a></span> periodicals in America in 1840 that could
+afford to pay their contributors, and the sums paid were moderate. But
+the zeal of the editors was not measured by their ability to reward
+contributors, and both editors and writers fed a good deal at the table
+of the Barmecides spread in the somewhat ramshackle House of Fame. The
+<i>Southern Literary Messenger</i> was one of these impecunious but ambitious
+journals, and the editor teased Lowell constantly for contributions.
+Lowell gave them freely, for writing was his delight, and he was not
+unwilling to have a hospitable and reputable magazine in which to print
+what he wrote, both for the slight incentive which publication gave, and
+because he could thus with little effort “make believe” that he was a
+popular author. He used frequently the signature Hugh Perceval. He liked
+the name Perceval, which had been borne by his earliest American
+ancestor, and regretted that it had not been given him at his birth, as
+had then been proposed. In the <i>Southern Literary Messenger</i> he could
+publish half personal poems to be read between the lines by his intimate
+friends; but he grew impatient of this unprofitable business.</p>
+
+<p>“Have you got the August S. L. M. yet?” he writes to Loring, 18 August,
+1840. “I have not. White<a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a> wrote to me a short time since that the
+July and August numbers were coming out together, and at the same time
+asking me to translate a long poem of Victor Hugo’s. I have not answered
+him yet. But when I do I shall tell him<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_93" id="page_93">{93}</a></span> that ‘reading and writing come
+by nature, but to be a translator is the gift of Fortune,’ so that if he
+chooses to pay me he shall have translations. I don’t think I shall
+write any more for him. ’Tis a bad habit to get into for a poor man,
+this writing for nothing. Perhaps if I hang off he may offer me
+somewhat.”</p>
+
+<p>The publication of “A Year’s Life” was a more definite assertion of his
+place as a poet. He had been encouraged to publish both by the
+confidence of Miss White and by the practical aid of friends, like his
+friend J. F. Heath, who engaged to secure the sale of at least a hundred
+copies. Lowell watched the fortunes of his first open venture eagerly,
+from a conviction that it would have some influence on his further
+efforts. “I have already,” he writes to Loring, 18 February, 1841, “been
+asked to write for an annual to be published in Boston, and ‘which is to
+be a fair specimen of the arts in this country.’ It is to be edited
+(<i>sub rosa</i>) by Longfellow, Felton, Hillard, and that set. Hawthorne and
+Emerson are writing for it, and Bryant and Halleck have promised to
+write. The pay for poetry is five dollars a page, at any rate, and more
+if the work succeeds according to the publishers’ expectation. So you
+see my book has done me some good, although it does not sell so fast as
+it ought, considering how everybody praises it. If you get a chance to
+persuade anybody to buy it, do so. The praise I don’t Care so much
+about, because I knew just how good and how bad the book was before I
+printed it. But I wish, if<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_94" id="page_94">{94}</a></span> possible, to get out a second edition, which
+will do me more good, as an author, than all the praise and merit in the
+world. My father is so very much pleased with the book that he wishes me
+to publish a second edition at any rate, and he will pay all expenses,
+and be responsible for its selling.”</p>
+
+<p>The little volume was the first fruits of Lowell’s poetic harvesting,
+and the promise it gave of poetical genius was by no means
+inconsiderable. In his maturer judgment, to be sure, Lowell preserved
+but seven of the thirty-three poems and two of the thirty-five sonnets
+contained in it,&mdash;in all, thirty-five of the one hundred and eighty-two
+pages of the book, and had he been drawn off from poetry, supposing this
+possible, the book would have been reckoned as lightly in the general
+account of his production as Motley’s fiction was in his full measure.
+But he was not drawn off from poetry, and the early note here struck was
+a dominant one afterward. In most poets of any consequence the disciple
+is pretty sure to be evident in early work, and Lowell in “A Year’s
+Life” unmistakably owned himself an ardent lover of Keats and to a less
+degree of Tennyson, who had been caught up by the lively circle in which
+he moved with the eagerness of an American discovering, as one so often
+did, the old world of contemporary England. In copying Keats, Lowell was
+indeed copying the Keats who copied, and it is not at all unlikely that
+when he was enamored of “Fancy,” “Lines on the Mermaid Tavern,” “Robin
+Hood,” and the like, and echoed them faintly in “The Bobolink,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_95" id="page_95">{95}</a></span>”
+“Ianthe,” “Irene,” and others, he was harking back also to Wither and
+other Elizabethans whom Keats loved, and whose light touch was caught so
+deftly by Milton in his “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” Be this as it
+may, Lowell was most outspoken at this time in his admiration of Keats.
+He had become acquainted with him, as we have seen, in that volume which
+contained the triad, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, which was the
+fountain of modern English poetry to which so many thirsty Americans
+went. Lord Houghton’s memoir of Keats had not appeared, and Lowell
+himself, in 1840, contemplated writing a life, going so far as to
+concoct a letter to Keats’s brother George, which, however, he never
+sent. His admiration, besides taking the form of frank imitation,
+displayed itself in his early sonnet, “To the Spirit of Keats,” which he
+contributed to the New York literary journal <i>Arcturus</i>, conducted by
+the brothers Duyckinck. His letter to Evert A. Duyckinck, accompanying
+the sonnet, is interesting for its tribute to the two modern English
+poets who, after Spenser, were his nearest friends.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="r">
+<span class="smcap">Boston</span>, Dec. 5, 1841.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">My dear Sir</span>,&mdash;I address you rather than your brother editor,
+because I judge that the poetical department of <i>Arcturus</i> is more
+especially under your charge. I have to thank you for your
+sympathizing notice of my verses last spring. I thought then that
+you might like to have a contribution occasionally from me, but
+other engagements which<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_96" id="page_96">{96}</a></span> it were tedious to specify hindered me
+from doing what my sympathy with the aim of your magazine dictated.
+I subscribed for your <i>Arcturus</i> before I had seen a number of it
+(though I can ill afford many such indulgences of taste) because I
+liked the spirit of your prospectus. For the same reason I sent you
+my volume&mdash;of which I sent but a bare half-dozen to “the
+press”&mdash;because I despise our system of literary puffing. Your
+notice of Keats, in the number for this month, a poet whom I
+especially love and whom I consider to be one of the true old Titan
+brood&mdash;made me wish to see two of my own sonnets enshrined in the
+same volume. One of them you will see is addressed to the same
+“marvellous day.” I cannot help thinking that you will like both of
+them.<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a></p>
+
+<p>In your “News Gong” I see that you suggest a reprint of Tennyson. I
+wish you would say in your next that he is about to reprint a new
+and correct edition of his poems with many new ones which will
+appear in a few months. I think it would be a pity to reprint his
+poems at all&mdash;for he is poor and that would deprive him of what
+little profit he might make by their sale in this
+country&mdash;especially would it be wrong to reprint an incorrect
+edition. (Moxon will be his publisher.)</p>
+
+<p>I do not wish you to state your authority for this&mdash;but you may
+depend on it, for my authority is the poet himself. I have the
+great satisfaction of thinking that the publication is in some
+measure<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_97" id="page_97">{97}</a></span> owing to myself, for it was by my means that he was
+written to about it, and he says that “his American friends” are
+the chief cause of his reprinting.</p>
+
+<p>Wishing you all success in the cause of true and good literature,</p>
+
+<p class="r">
+<span style="margin-right: 3em;">I remain your friend,</span><br />
+<span class="smcap">J. R. Lowell</span>.<br />
+</p></div>
+
+<p>The little book was received with an attention which seems to suggest
+the paucity of hopeful literature at the time and the Marchioness spirit
+of the critics. Lowell’s eager friends came forward with their notices,
+but there were then fewer journals even than now that could be looked to
+for careful judgment. In <i>Graham’s Magazine</i> there was a long account of
+the book headed “A New School of Poetry at hand,” and the writer, who
+hides behind the letter C., after crediting Lowell with ideality,
+enthusiasm, love for his fellow men, freshness, and delicacy, finds
+fault with him chiefly for affectation of language and carelessness; but
+he welcomes him as the herald of a new school which is to be
+humanitarian and idealistic. It is amusing to find our familiar friend,
+the “great original American poem,” looked for confidently from this new
+poet. Lowell warmed himself with this praise.<a name="FNanchor_33_33" id="FNanchor_33_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_98" id="page_98">{98}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The most serviceable vehicle for Lowell’s literary endeavors at this
+time was <i>The Boston Miscellany</i> projected by Nathan Hale, Lowell’s
+associate in <i>Harvardiana</i>, and published by two young Boston men,
+Bradbury and Soden. The <i>Miscellany</i> had the short life characteristic
+of American literary magazines in the early half of the century, but it
+showed the sound literary judgment of its editor in the list of
+contributors he attracted. Lowell entered heartily into the plans for
+the new magazine. He wrote for it, among other things, a sketch, “My
+First Client,” which is in its form as near an approach to fiction as he
+ever attempted, and is a slightly embellished narrative of his own
+clientless experience as a lawyer. He thought so ill of it that he
+refused to allow it to be reprinted, a few years later, in one of the
+annuals then popular.</p>
+
+<p>The most significant contribution which he made to the <i>Miscellany</i> was
+a series of papers on the Old English Dramatists, begun anonymously, but
+continued with his name. These were readings in Massinger, Marlowe, and
+others, with running comments, and reflected the keen interest which he
+took then and all his life in that great quarry of noble thoughts and
+brave images. The series was the forerunner of his labors in the field
+of criticism of literature, and the pleasure which he took in the work,
+as well as the appreciation which the papers received, gave him a
+hopeful sense that he might trust to letters for support, and abandon
+the law, which he hated, and which naturally returned the compliment. In
+September, 1842, he had <span class="pagenum"><a name="page_99" id="page_99">{99}</a></span>become so sanguine that, after mysteriously
+hinting at an even more substantial means of support, he wrote to his
+friend Loring:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“I think I may safely reckon on earning four hundred dollars by my pen
+the next year, which will support me. Between this and June, 1843, I
+think I shall have freed myself of debt and become an independent man. I
+am to have fifteen dollars a poem from the <i>Miscellany</i>, ten dollars
+from <i>Graham</i>, and I have made an arrangement with the editor of the
+<i>Democratic Review</i>, by which I shall probably get ten or fifteen
+dollars more. Prospects are brightening, you see.”</p>
+
+<p>It was the prophecy of a sanguine young man, but unhappily the plan
+which seemed to him to promise most was instead to plunge him into debt.
+The <i>Miscellany</i> had closed its short career by merging itself in the
+<i>Arcturus</i> of New York, and taking courage from the brilliancy of the
+journal rather than caution from its brevity of life, Lowell, in company
+with Mr. Robert Carter, projected a new Boston literary and critical
+magazine to be issued monthly. The Prospectus has all the bravery and
+gallant dash of these forlorn hopes in literature.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The contents of each number will be entirely Original, and will
+consist of articles chiefly from American authors of the highest
+reputation.</p>
+
+<p>The object of the Subscribers in establishing <i>The Pioneer</i>, is to
+furnish the intelligent and reflecting portion of the Reading
+Public with a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_100" id="page_100">{100}</a></span> rational substitute for the enormous quantity of
+thrice-diluted trash, in the shape of namby-pamby love tales and
+sketches, which is monthly poured out to them by many of our
+popular magazines,&mdash;and to offer instead thereof, a healthy and
+manly Periodical Literature, whose perusal will not necessarily
+involve a loss of time and a deterioration of every moral and
+intellectual faculty.</p>
+
+<p>The Critical Department of <i>The Pioneer</i> will be conducted with
+great care and impartiality, and while satire and personality will
+be sedulously avoided, opinions of merit or demerit will be
+candidly and fearlessly expressed.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Pioneer</i> will be issued punctually on the day of publication,
+in the principal cities of the Union. Each number will contain 48
+pages, royal octavo, double columns, handsomely printed on fine
+paper, and will be illustrated with Engravings of the highest
+character, both on wood and steel.</p>
+
+<p><i>Terms</i>: Three Dollars a year, payable, in all cases, in advance.
+The usual discount made to Agents. Communications for the Editors,
+letters, orders, &amp;c., must be addressed, <i>postpaid</i>, to the
+Publishers, 67 Washington St. (opposite the Post Office,) Boston.</p>
+
+<p class="r">
+<span class="smcap">Leland &amp; Whiting.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>October 15th, 1842. </p></div>
+
+<p>The publishers appear to have had no pecuniary interest in the venture,
+the editors being the proprietors as well. Mr. Carter was a young man of
+Lowell’s age, living at the time in Cambridge, where he afterward
+married a daughter of Mr.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_101" id="page_101">{101}</a></span> George Nichols, long known for his scholarly
+attainments as printer and corrector of the press, and for a short time
+also as a publisher. Mr. Carter was a man of wide reading and tenacious
+memory and a good writer, as his breezy book, “A Summer Cruise on the
+Coast of New England,” testifies. His encyclopædic mind stood him in
+good stead when, later, he held a position in the publishing house of D.
+Appleton &amp; Co., and superintended the “New American Encyclopædia.”</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Pioneer</i>, though it might be called a continuation of <i>The Boston
+Miscellany</i>, had characteristics of its own which show that its
+conductors had a clearly defined ideal in their minds and did not lack
+the courage and energy to pursue it. The <i>Miscellany</i> had made
+concessions to the supposed taste of the day, and had tried to catch
+subscribers with fashion plates and articles, while really caring only
+for good literature. The <i>Pioneer</i> discarded all adventitious aid, and,
+with fidelity to its name, determined to break its way through the woods
+of ignorance and prejudice to some fair land beyond. Upon-its cover page
+it bore a sentence from Bacon: “Reform, therefore, without bravery or
+scandal of former times and persons; but yet set it down to thyself as
+well to create good precedents as to follow them.” It is easy to see
+that Lowell, with his love of good letters, and with a zeal for reform
+just now quickened by the fine fervor of Maria White, meant with his
+individual means to do very much what the proprietors and conductors of
+the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i> attempted on a larger scale fifteen<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_102" id="page_102">{102}</a></span> years later.
+But those fifteen years made a good deal of difference in the attitude
+of men toward the greatest of national evils, and in 1843 Lowell was not
+likely to be a trenchant political writer, or to think of literature and
+anti-slavery sentiment in the same breath. The vague spirit of reform
+which stirred him was rather a recurrence to fundamental ideas of
+freedom which made him impatient of formality and provincialism in
+literature, and led him to associate American political ideas with large
+independence of intellectual life. He had been breathing the atmosphere
+of the spacious England of the dramatists, and it was the nature of this
+literature which attracted him, as it was its art which drew Lamb,
+Hazlitt, and Keats.<a name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34_34" class="fnanchor">[34]</a> Hence, when he planned the <i>Pioneer</i>, he was not
+projecting a journal of national reform under the mask of literature; he
+was ambitious to bear his testimony to the ideal of a national
+literature springing from a soil of political independence, and akin to
+great literature the world over. In a word, he knew the exhilaration of
+a native spirit, not in spite but because of his feeding upon great and
+not superficial, modish letters, and he was eager to demonstrate both
+creatively and critically the possibility of a genuine and unaffected
+American literature. In the Introduction to the <i>Pioneer</i>, for every new
+journal then had its salutatory,&mdash;and the valedic<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_103" id="page_103">{103}</a></span>tory was likely to
+follow shortly,&mdash;he sets forth this principle of a native literature.
+After complaining of the derivative character of current criticism and
+opinions, derived, that is, from the latest English quarterlies and
+monthlies,&mdash;he continues:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“We are the farthest from wishing to see what many so ardently pray for,
+namely, a <i>National</i> literature: for the same mighty lyre of the human
+heart answers the touch of the master in all ages and in every clime,
+and any literature, as far as it is national, is diseased, inasmuch as
+it appeals to some climatic peculiarity, rather than to the universal
+nature. Moreover, everything that tends to encourage the sentiment of
+caste, to widen the boundary between races, and so to put farther off
+the hope of one great brotherhood, should be steadily resisted by all
+good men. But we do long for a <i>natural</i> literature. One green leaf,
+though of the veriest weed, is worth all the crape and wire flowers of
+the daintiest Paris milliners. For it is the glory of nature that in her
+least part she gives us all, and in that simple love-token of hers we
+may behold the type of all her sublime mysteries; as in the least
+fragment of the true artist we discern the working of the same forces
+which culminate gloriously in a Hamlet or a Faust. We would no longer
+see the spirit of our people held up as a mirror to the Old World; but
+rather lying like one of our own inland oceans, reflecting not only the
+mountain and the rock, the forest and the red man, but also the
+steamboat and the rail car, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_104" id="page_104">{104}</a></span> cornfield and the factory. Let us learn
+that romance is not married to the past, that it is not the birthright
+of ferocious ignorance and chivalric barbarity, but that it ever was and
+is an inward quality, the darling child of the sweetest refinements and
+most gracious amenities of peaceful gentleness, and that it can never
+die till only water runs in these red rivers of the heart, that cunning
+adept which can make vague cathedrals with blazing oriels and streaming
+spires out of our square meeting-boxes,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Whose rafters sprout upon the shady side.’<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>“In this country where freedom of thought does not shiver at the cold
+shadow of Spielberg (unless we name this prison of ‘public opinion’ so),
+there is no danger to be apprehended from an excess of it. It is only
+where there is no freedom that anarchy is to be dreaded. The mere sense
+of freedom is of too fine and holy a nature to consist with injustice
+and wrong. We would fain have our journal, in some sort at least, a
+journal of progress, one that shall keep pace with the spirit of the
+age, and sometimes go near its deeper heart. Yet, while we shall aim at
+that gravity which is becoming of a manly literature, we shall hope also
+to satisfy that lighter and sprightlier element of the soul, without
+whose due culture the character is liable to degenerate into a morose
+bigotry and selfish precisianism. To be one exponent of a young spirit
+which shall aim at power through gentleness, the only means for its
+secure attainment, and in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_105" id="page_105">{105}</a></span> which freedom shall be attempered to love by
+a reverence for all beauty wherever it may exist, is our humble
+hope....”</p>
+
+<p>Here was a literary creed, expressed in no very exact formulas, and
+really declarative of little more than an individual purpose that the
+<i>Pioneer</i> should contain good and not dull or imitative literature. A
+good beginning was made, for the three numbers which were published
+contained poems and papers by Dr. Parsons, Story, Poe, Hawthorne, Jones
+Very, John Neal, John S. Dwight, and the two editors. Lowell continued
+his studies in the Old English Dramatists, printed several poems, and
+wrote apparently much of the criticism, but there were no papers of a
+directly didactic character; it was clear that the editor relied on
+criticism for a medium of aggressive preaching of sound literary
+doctrine. Here also Lowell had his opportunity to fly the flag of
+anti-slavery, and he did it with a fine chivalry in a notice of
+Longfellow’s “Poems on Slavery,” when he used the occasion to pay
+glowing tribute to the earlier fighters. Garrison, “the half-inspired
+Luther of this reform, a man too remarkable to be appreciated in his
+generation, but whom the future will recognize as a great and wonderful
+spirit;” Whittier, “the fiery Koerner of this spiritual warfare, who,
+Scævola-like, has sacrificed on the altar of duty that right hand which
+might have made him acknowledged as the most passionate lyrist of his
+time;” the “tenderly-loving Maria Child, the author of that dear book,
+‘Philothea,’ a woman of genius, who lives with humble content<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_106" id="page_106">{106}</a></span> in the
+intellectual Coventry to which her conscientiousness has banished her&mdash;a
+fate the hardest for genius to bear. Nor ought the gentle spirit of
+Follen, a lion with a lamb’s heart, to be forgotten, whose fiery fate,
+from which the mind turns horror-stricken, was perhaps to his mild
+nature less dreadful than that stake and fagot of public opinion, in
+dragging him to which many whom he loved were not inactive, for silence
+at such times is action.”</p>
+
+<p>Lowell threw himself into this literary venture with resolution and
+hope. He had the double motive of making a vehicle for sound and
+generous literature, and of securing for himself a rational means of
+support. Those nearest to him watched the experiment with solicitude,
+for magazine making on a small scale was as perilous then as it is now
+on a scale of magnitude. His sister, Mrs. Putnam, wrote him a most
+anxious letter called out by the fact that her brother was in New York
+and Carter in charge, a man too easy and good-natured she thought for
+such a position. She begged him to consider that his first number was
+better than his second, and that in turn seemed likely to be better than
+the third, and she dreaded a decline in the magazine. As for Miss White,
+she looked upon the scheme, when it was taking shape, with mingled pride
+and anxiety. She shared Lowell’s lively trust in the pioneer character
+of the journal, but she had a prudent mind, and saw with a woman’s
+instinct the possibility of failure, where Lowell would listen to
+nothing but the note of success.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Pioneer</i> lived but three months. The os<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_107" id="page_107">{107}</a></span>tensible cause of its
+failure was the sudden and lamentable breakdown of its chief supporter,
+as shown in the following card printed at the close of the third number.</p>
+
+<p>“The absence of any prose in the present number of <i>The Pioneer</i> from
+the pen of Mr. Lowell, and the apparent neglect of many letters and
+contributions addressed to him personally, will be sufficiently
+explained by stating that, since the tenth of January, he has been in
+the city of New York in attendance upon Dr. Elliot, the distinguished
+oculist, who is endeavoring to cure him of a severe disease of the eyes,
+and that the medical treatment to which he is necessarily subjected
+precludes the use of his sight except to a very limited extent. He will,
+however, probably be enabled, in time for the fourth number, to resume
+his essays on the Poets and Dramatists, and his general supervision of
+the magazine. R. C.”</p>
+
+<p>It is plain that when the third number appeared the conductors expected
+to bring out a fourth, but the enforced abstention from work of the
+principal editor and writer and the lack of resources in money made the
+discontinuance of the magazine inevitable.<a name="FNanchor_35_35" id="FNanchor_35_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a> In spite, however, of the
+disastrous<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_108" id="page_108">{108}</a></span> experience and the debt which it entailed, the activity of
+mind which the venture called forth was worth much to Lowell. He had not
+a specially orderly or methodical habit, and he lacked thus the
+equipment which an editor requires, but he had great fertility, and was
+under an impulse which at this time he turned to account in literature.
+Could he have been associated with some well organized nature, it is not
+impossible that the <i>Pioneer</i> would have become established on a sound
+basis and have been the vehicle for Lowell’s creative and critical work
+in literature. Such work would have attracted the best that was to be
+had in America, and the periodical might have been an important factor
+in the intellectual life of the day.</p>
+
+<p>The persistence with which the magazine idea was exploited hints at the
+possibilities which lay for a rising literature in this particular form.
+The vigorous John Neal wrote to Lowell when he was projecting the
+<i>Pioneer</i>: “Persevere; be bold and fear not. A great change is
+foretelling itself in the literature of the day. Magazines are to
+supersede newspapers, and newspapers novels among light readers.” The
+criticism which Lowell wrote or commanded for the <i>Pioneer</i> was frank,
+fearless, and sure to arrest attention. It pointed the way, and might
+easily have done much to shape the course of letters and art. In the
+absence of such<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_109" id="page_109">{109}</a></span> a serviceable vehicle, Lowell was left to his own
+resources, and having no organ at hand he dropped criticism for the time
+and concentrated his mind on his poetry.</p>
+
+<p>As Mr. Carter’s apologetic note intimates, Lowell was obliged to go to
+New York early in January, 1843, for treatment at the hands of the
+oculist, Dr. Elliot. A few extracts from his letters to Mr. Carter
+during his absence show something of his life and interests in this
+enforced absence.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>January 15, 1843.... My course of life is this. Every morning I go
+to Dr. Elliot’s (who, by the way, is <i>very</i> kind) and wait for my
+turn to be operated upon. This sometimes consumes a great deal of
+time, the Dr. being overrun with patients. After being made stone
+blind for the space of fifteen minutes, I have the rest of the day
+to myself.</p>
+
+<p>Handbills of the <i>Pioneer</i> in red and black with a spread eagle at
+the head of them face me everywhere. I could not but laugh to see a
+drayman standing with his hands in his pockets diligently spelling
+it out, being attracted thereto doubtless by the bird of America,
+which probably led him to think it a proclamation of the
+President&mdash;a delusion from which he probably did not awake after
+perusing the document.... I shall endeavor while I am here to write
+an article on Pope. <i>Something</i> I will send you for the next
+number, besides what I may possibly glean from others. A new
+magazine has just been started here, but it is illiberal and will
+probably fail.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_110" id="page_110">{110}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>January 17, 1843. I shall only write a word or two, as I have
+already been writing, and my eyes, having been operated on
+yesterday <i>with the knife</i>, must be used charily.... I hope to hear
+better accounts of money matters in your next. Explain as to the
+500 copies you speak of as sold the day before. Remember how
+interesting the least particle of news is to me, and I may be at
+home under three weeks from this, though I hope to be in a
+fortnight....</p>
+
+<p>January 19. So you are fairly bewitched!<a name="FNanchor_36_36" id="FNanchor_36_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a> Well, I might have
+expected it, but still it was no reason that you should have told
+me so little about the magazine. <i>I</i> should not have talked wholly
+about one individual&mdash;of course not. <i>I</i> should not have been
+bewitched....</p>
+
+<p>Have you got any copy for the third number? Do not ask any
+conservatives to write, for it will mar the unity of the magazine.
+We shall be surer of success if we maintain a uniform course, and
+have a decided tendency either one way or the other. We shall, at
+least, gain more influence in that way.</p>
+
+<p>I have picked up a poem by Harry Franco against capital punishment.
+It has a good deal of humor in it and is striking. A woodcut of a
+poor devil hanging with the crows discussing his fate will perhaps
+accompany it. Prose I have got no scent of as yet....</p>
+
+<p>January <a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a>. I have received <i>all</i> your letters, and like to have
+you send by express. I<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_111" id="page_111">{111}</a></span> should like to see Miss Gray’s and Miss
+Peabody’s articles before they go to press. I am a better judge of
+that kind of merchandise than you. The second number is a good one,
+but <i>full</i> of misprints. The notices in the cover, if printed at
+all, should have been expurgated. See to it next time, and do not
+let your kind heart seduce you into printing any more puffs of <i>me</i>
+personally. What do you mean by that notice of Emerson? I shall
+have to write to him. Your notice of De Quincey was excellent.</p>
+
+<p>I send herewith a poem of Miss Barrett<a name="FNanchor_37_37" id="FNanchor_37_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a> which came with the
+letters you sent me. She sent <i>three</i> others, and promises more in
+a very pleasant letter. I shall send on quite a budget of prose, I
+hope, soon, but cannot use my eyes much. I am going to answer an
+article on the copyright question by O’Sullivan in the forthcoming
+<i>Democratic Review</i>. I must see proofs of Miss Barrett and all my
+own pieces.... I must not write any more or I shall not get home
+these six months.</p>
+
+<p>January 22.... My dear, good, kindest, best friend, you know that I
+would not write a word that should knowingly pain your loving
+heart. So forgive whatever there has been in my other letters to
+trouble, and only reflect how anxious I must naturally feel, away
+from home as I am, and left a great part of the time to the
+solitude of my own thoughts by the total deprivation of the use of
+my eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Willis is under Dr. E.’s care also, and yester<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_112" id="page_112">{112}</a></span>day introduced
+himself to me, and said all manner of kind things. He had meant to
+write to me, giving me his experience in editing, and had long been
+anxious to know me, &amp;c., &amp;c. This morning he came and took me to
+church with him, and altogether overwhelms me with attention. His
+wife is a very <i>nice</i> pretty little Englishwoman, with a very sweet
+voice. W. said he wrote the notice in the <i>Jonathan</i> as the most
+judicious way of helping the magazine, giving your own philosophic
+theory as to its possible results....</p>
+
+<p>January 24.... I <i>must</i> write an article for the next number, and
+yet I do not see very well how I am to do it. For I can scarcely
+get through one letter without pain, and everything that I write
+retards my case and so keeps me the longer here. But I love Keats
+so much that I think I can write something good about him.</p>
+
+<p>Willis continues very kind, and I begin to think that he really
+likes me. At least he said the same to Dr. E. about me that he told
+me to my face. He told the Dr. (I copy it the more readily that I
+know it will delight <i>you</i>) that I had written the most remarkable
+poem that had been written in this country, and that I was destined
+to be the brightest star that had yet risen in American literature.
+He told me, also, that I was more popular and more talked about and
+read at this time than any other poet in the land, and he is going
+(or was) to write an article in the <i>Jonathan</i> to that effect.
+These things <i>you must keep in your own heart</i>. He promises to help
+the <i>Pioneer</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_113" id="page_113">{113}</a></span> in every way he can, and he will be able to do us a
+great deal of good, as he has last week taken half the ownership of
+the <i>Jonathan</i> on condition of solely editing it. He talks of
+paying me to write letters for him from Boston....</p>
+
+<p>John Neal lectures here to-night. I have not seen him, and I do not
+know whether I shall hear him, for if I get a package from you
+to-day, as I hope I shall, I shall hardly have 25 cents left to buy
+a ticket with. So you think we have succeeded. They are the
+pleasantest words I have heard since I have been here. But we must
+not feel too sure yet. I think we <i>shall</i> succeed. Folks here (some
+of them) say that we shall beyond our utmost expectation....</p>
+
+<p>Saturday.... You shall have some copy from me on <i>Wednesday</i>
+morning if I get blind by it. Where is Brownson? Don’t print
+nonsense. Better not be out till the middle of March. But you are
+only trying to frighten me. Do not print nonsense, for God’s sake.
+Print the history of Mesmerism. Write an article on Japan. If I
+were to read over your letters again in order to answer them
+categorically, I should not be able to use my eyes for a week. You
+do not recollect that I undergo an application or an operation
+<i>every day</i>. If I could <i>see</i> you for ten minutes I could arrange
+all. I perhaps may come on and return hither again. <i>Do not hint</i>
+this to any one, for if Maria heard of it, she would be expecting
+anxiously every day. I am sick to death of this place, yet it does
+me good spiritually to stay here. I<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_114" id="page_114">{114}</a></span> <i>must</i> not write any more. In
+your next letter ask all questions and I will answer.... </p></div>
+
+<p>Lowell stayed on in New York on account of his eyes till the end of
+February. At a period when Mrs. Child could gravely write and publish in
+a book “Letters from New York,” to go to New York from Cambridge was
+nearly equivalent to a winter abroad. As his letters to Carter show,
+with the disabilities under which he labored Lowell could do little at
+reading or writing, and he used the opportunity for social occupation.
+Page he had already come to know, and he had made the acquaintance
+through the <i>Miscellany</i> of Charles F. Briggs, whom now he took into
+warm friendship. Mr. Briggs was a diligent man of letters, best known to
+the public of that day as “Harry Franco,” and through him Lowell fell in
+with many writers and book people. But he was most impatient to return,
+and now that his magazine had ceased he found himself with no routine
+labors, but with a mind full to overflowing.</p>
+
+<p>The real pursuit of Lowell during 1843 was poetry, and poetry of a lofty
+character. In the Ode which he wrote in 1841 beginning,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“In the old days of awe and keen-eyed wonder”&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">he had outlined the function of the poet; and the whole set of his
+nature in the months between his engagement and his marriage was in the
+direction of poetic earnestness. His conception was dominated by moral
+enthusiasm: the preacher in him<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_115" id="page_115">{115}</a></span> was always thrusting himself to the
+front, and the reformer of the day sometimes masqueraded in his verse in
+very antique forms. But his genuine love of art above all his unfailing
+apprehension of poetry as an end in itself saved him from a merely
+utilitarian notion of his high calling. And it is safe to say that he
+never was so happy as when he was abandoning himself to the full
+enjoyment of poetic composition. He diverted the streams of love and of
+anti-slavery fervor into this full current, and could say of his
+“Prometheus” that it was “overrunning with true radicalism and
+anti-slavery;” but the exhilaration which fanned his wings was the
+consciousness of youth and love finding an outlet in the natural voice
+of poetry. “I was never so happy as now,” he writes to Loring, 15 June,
+after telling of his “Prometheus” and “A Legend of Brittany,” on which
+he was at work. “I see Maria every other day. I am embowered in leaves,
+have a voluntary orchestra of birds and bees and frogs, and a little
+family of chickens to whom I have a sort of feeling of paternity, and
+begin to believe I had some share in begetting them.”</p>
+
+<p>Page painted Lowell’s portrait when he was in New York and exhibited it
+in the spring. This picture is at once a likeness of the poet and an
+expression of the painter. Page was an idealist who found a most
+congenial subject in Lowell. Out of the dark canvass&mdash;for the painter,
+pursuing the elusive phantom of a recovery of the art of the Venetians,
+succeeded at any rate in giving to his work an ancient air&mdash;there looks
+forth a face<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_116" id="page_116">{116}</a></span> which is the very apparition of poetry. Far removed from
+the sentimental aspect, it has depth of feeling, a serene assurance, and
+a Shakespearean ideality. It is not difficult to see that Page was not
+painting in Lowell a young Cambridge author, but the student of the
+English dramatists and the inheritor of all the ages of poetry. To his
+own neighbors and friends Lowell had much of this air in his presence.
+His flowing chestnut hair falling in rich masses from an equally
+dividing line, his unshorn face, his eyes with their kindly wistful
+look, his tremulous mouth,&mdash;all served to separate him in appearance
+from common men and to mark him as an unusual person.</p>
+
+<p>How affectionately Lowell regarded Page and what admiration he had for
+his genius may be read in the dedication to him which was prefixed to
+his “Poems” issued in 1843 and retained in later collections. The
+frankness with which he avows his love for his friend is a witness to
+that openness of Lowell’s nature which we have already noticed, and the
+terms in which he speaks of Page’s art and of the artistic faith which
+they held in common give a hint of the basis of their comradery. Lowell
+disclaimed any special knowledge of painting, and always brought to
+bear, in his discussions on art, the principles which he had learned
+through his devotion to the art of poetry. In the relation of the two
+men to each other one is half tempted to recall the friendship of Keats
+and Haydon. In each case the poet believed in the painter less by reason
+of the work done than because of the ideals</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 369px;">
+<a name="J1843" id="J1843"></a>
+<a href="images/i_116fp_lg.jpg">
+<img src="images/i_116fp_sml.jpg" width="369" height="500" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
+<div class="caption"><p class="c"><i>Mr. Lowell in 1843</i></p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_117" id="page_117">{117}</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="nind">held and aimed at. Page was an enthusiast, and a man of mingled
+imaginative and speculative powers. As Haydon preached the Elgin marbles
+to Keats, so Page discoursed on the old masters to Lowell. But the
+reciprocal admiration of Lowell and Page was really for the man behind
+the art. “I am glad you like my poems,” Lowell wrote to Mrs. Shaw; “Page
+is wiser than you and likes them because he knows I am better than
+they;” and to Mr. Briggs he had written shortly before: “You are a great
+deal better than anything you write, and Page than anything he paints,
+and I always think of you without your pen, and of him without his
+brushes.”</p>
+
+<p>The admiration and affection with which Page and Briggs regarded Lowell
+were only more intimate than the feelings which were generally aroused.
+He had come to be looked on as a new poet. So Hawthorne, in his “Hall of
+Fantasy,” as first published, characterized him as “the poet of the
+generation that now enters upon the stage.” When the <i>Pioneer</i> was
+started Lowell’s was a name to conjure with. “The principal editor,”
+says the <i>Tribune</i>, “is well and widely known as one of the most gifted
+and promising poets in America;” and a Philadelphia paper speaks of the
+journal as “edited by a man whose genius and originality is at once the
+praise and wonder of his countrymen.” To be sure, newspaper praise is
+apt to be pitched in a high key, and the army of independent admirers on
+closer examination turns out to be a company of the author’s
+enthusiastic friends marching and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_118" id="page_118">{118}</a></span> countermarching across the stage,
+disappearing in one wing only to come out from another. But after all
+allowance has been made, it is clear that in a community which was
+eagerly expecting great things in literature, Lowell, though he had
+published little and much of that anonymously, was already one of the
+candidates for fame. He himself did not need this incentive. He had the
+consciousness of power and that audience of one which stimulated him to
+the exercise of his power.</p>
+
+<p>“A Year’s Life” had been frankly autobiographic. The poems written
+afterward and now collected in the 1843 volume were the distinct
+outgrowth of a nature stimulated by this new experience of love and at
+last both fully alive to the consciousness of poetic feeling and eager
+with a desire to act out the aspirations which had been blown into flame
+by the breath of love. Hence the volume, in its contents, is of varied
+character, as the poet himself held within his restless life the
+somewhat contradictory elements which go to make up a poet and a
+reformer. “A Legend of Brittany,” which is the substantial piece, and
+stands at the front, is a piece of pure romance, pretty evidently sprung
+from the soil in which grew Keats’s “Isabella; or the Pot of Basil.” The
+underlying theme is not dissimilar, the measure is the same, and there
+is something of the same richness of color and delight in the beauty of
+single, even unfamiliar words. Yet the reader feels that Keats not only
+had the more vivid imagination, but a clearer sense of the beauty that
+lies in intensity of expres<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_119" id="page_119">{119}</a></span>sion&mdash;an intensity so great that one almost
+holds one’s breath as he reads. Lowell, as we know, rarely essayed
+anything in the nature of story-telling; the dramatic faculty was not
+his, and keen as was his appreciation of the power of the elder
+dramatists, his criticism shows that he dwelt most emphatically on those
+passages and lines which disclose poetic beauty, rather than the
+features of construction. But Keats’s warmth and richness of decorative
+painting appealed to him with peculiar force at a time when he himself
+had come out into the sunshine and was intoxicated with his own
+happiness. It is clear that when he was writing “A Legend of Brittany”
+he was revelling in the possession of poetic fancy, and drawing himself
+to the height of his enjoyment of pure poetry unmixed with elements of
+didacticism. He wrote to G. B. Loring, 15 June, 1843, “I am now at work
+on a still longer poem [than “Prometheus”] in the <i>ottava rima</i> to be
+the first in my forthcoming volume. I feel more and more assured every
+day that I shall yet do something that will keep my name (and perhaps my
+body) alive. My wings were never so light and strong as now. So hurrah
+for a niche and a laurel.” The poem did not apparently call out any
+strong response, nor has it, I suspect, ever been read with very great
+admiration&mdash;certainly it cannot for a moment be compared in popularity
+with “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” which followed five years later, and
+the explanation is perhaps to be found mainly in its derivative
+character, even though readers might not be acutely aware how far it
+owed its origin to Keats.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_120" id="page_120">{120}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Briggs, who was the stanchest of Lowell’s literary friends at this
+time, wrote with enthusiasm of the volume, using terms of admiration
+which must have been grateful indeed, since they were charged with
+discrimination and just appreciation; but he was frank and honest in his
+friendly judgment, and he wrote to Lowell of “A Legend of Brittany:” “It
+is too warm, rich, and full of sweet sounds and sights; the incense
+overpowers me, and the love and crime, and prayers and monks and
+glimpses of spirits oppress me. I am too much a clod of earth to mingle
+well in such elements. I feel while reading it as though I were lying
+upon a bed of down with a canopy of rose-colored silk above me, with
+gleams of sunshine darting in the room and half revealing and at times
+more than revealing strange figures painted upon the walls of my
+chamber. But I do not wonder that M. W. should like it. It is the proper
+reading for pure-minded loving creatures, from whose eyes knowledge with
+its hard besom has not yet swept away the golden cobwebs of fancy. I
+like her the better myself for liking it.”<a name="FNanchor_38_38" id="FNanchor_38_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a></p>
+
+<p>This long poem is not the only one in the book which springs from pure
+delight in poetic imagination; but it is by far the most full and
+unalloyed expression of this pleasure. When one reads, however, such a
+poem as “Rhœcus,” with its preface<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_121" id="page_121">{121}</a></span> apologizing for so much paganism,
+and its application, and especially when one reads “Prometheus,” one is
+aware how largely Lowell was dominated, even in this time when his soul
+was flushed with the sense of beauty and awake to the tendrils it was
+putting forth, by a strong purpose to read the lesson of beauty and love
+to his fellows. The seriousness of life was indeed charged with an
+exalted meaning by the revelation which came to him when he was admitted
+into the intimate companionship of a woman who had in her something of
+the spirit of a prophetess, but it would be untrue to say that Maria
+White handed him the torch; she kindled to a greater brilliancy that
+which he already held, and his love transmuted the vague stirrings of
+his own nature into more definite purpose. Keats, to refer again to one
+with whom Lowell certainly had spiritual kinship, was mildly affected
+somewhat in the same way by the friendship which he formed in his
+impressionable years with Hunt and his circle, and if we could imagine
+Fanny Brawne a Mary Wollstonecraft, we might speculate on the effect she
+would have had on his poetry. Even Keats, with his passionate devotion
+to beauty, could dig a subterranean passage under the opening of the
+third book of “Endymion” for the purpose of blowing up the “present
+ministers;” and Lowell, taking the world-worn myth of Prometheus, could
+write into it reflections apposite to what he regarded as a tremendous
+upheaving force just ready to manifest itself in society. The poem of
+“Prometheus,” however, justly stands high in the estimation of Lowel<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_122" id="page_122">{122}</a></span>l’s
+readers, for the thought involved in it rises above the level of a
+didactic utterance, and carries with it an impersonation of human
+dignity which saves it from the reproach of making the myth a mere text
+for a modern discourse. The poem is the most comprehensive and largest
+expression of the mind of the poet at this period of emancipation, and
+the fine images with which it abounds spring from the subject itself and
+are not mere decorations.</p>
+
+<p>Here, again, a comparison of “Prometheus” with Keats’s “Hyperion”
+illustrates the infusion of moral ardor which separates the disciple
+from the master. Keats summed up his poetic philosophy in the lines&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">“For ’tis the eternal law<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That first in beauty should be first in might,”&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">and he was fain to see the operation of Nature’s law by which one race
+of conquerors would dispossess another.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“So on our heels a fresh perfection treads.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">Lowell, speculating on the eternal struggle, figured in “Prometheus,” of
+right and wrong, of darkness and light, bids Jove heed that he&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“And all strength shall crumble except love”&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">and sees in a vision&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Peaceful commonwealths where sunburnt Toil<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Reaps for itself the rich earth made its own.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Mr. Briggs, writing to him on the appearance of the poem in the
+<i>Democratic Review</i>, reminds him that he had read a bit of it when
+visiting him in his house at Staten Island, and adds: “But I did<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_123" id="page_123">{123}</a></span> not
+anticipate that you could or would lengthen out those few lines into a
+poem so full of majesty and sweetness. So far as my observation will
+allow me to judge, it is the best sustained effort of the American Muse.
+The structure of the verse is exceedingly fine to my ear, although it
+may not be as acceptable to the public ear as the almost emasculate
+smoothness of Bryant, to which it has been accustomed. The bold bright
+images with which ‘Prometheus’ abounds would be sufficient of themselves
+to give you a name among the wielders of the pen, but the noble and true
+spirit of Philosophy which they help to develop makes them appear of
+secondary importance, and gives you a claim to a higher renown than the
+mere word-mongers of Parnassus can ever aspire to.” Lowell, in replying
+to this letter, wrote: “My ‘Prometheus’ has not received a single public
+notice yet, though I have been puffed to repletion for poems without a
+tithe of its merit. Your letter was the first sympathy I received.
+Although such great names as Goethe, Byron, and Shelley have all handled
+the subject in modern times, you will find that I have looked at it from
+a somewhat new point of view. I have made it <i>radical</i>, and I believe
+that no poet in this age can write much that is good unless he give
+himself up to this tendency. For radicalism has now for the first time
+taken a distinctive and acknowledged shape of its own. So much of its
+spirit as poets in former ages have attained (and from their purer
+organization they could not fail of some) was by instinct rather than by
+reason. It has never till<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_124" id="page_124">{124}</a></span> now been seen to be one of the two great
+wings that upbear the universe.” In the same letter he says: “The proof
+of poetry is, in my mind, whether it reduces to the essence of a single
+line the vague philosophy which is floating in all men’s minds, and so
+renders it portable and useful and ready to the hand. Is it not so? At
+least no poem ever makes me respect its author which does not in some
+way convey a truth of philosophy.”</p>
+
+<p>In the same temper which produced “Prometheus,” he wrote what he
+regarded as in some way a companion piece, “A Glance behind the
+Curtain,” in which he imagines a conversation between Cromwell and
+Hampden. There is no seeming endeavor at characterization of either
+figure, dramatically, but the poem, which is an attempt to read
+Cromwell’s mind, is a stirring and indignant demand that Freedom shall
+do her perfect work.</p>
+
+<p>“Freedom hath yet a work for me to do,” he makes Cromwell exclaim:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“So speaks that inward voice which never yet<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Spake falsely, when it urged the spirit on<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To noble deeds for country and mankind.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And for success, I ask no more than this,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To bear unflinching witness to the truth.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All true whole men succeed; for what is worth<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Success’s name, unless it be the thought,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The inward surety, to have carried out<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A noble purpose to a noble end,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Although it be the gallows or the block?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">’Tis only Falsehood that doth ever need<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">These outward shows of gain to bolster her.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Thus, in the guise of Cromwell, speaks the young man dimly conscious, in
+a travailing age, of work<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_125" id="page_125">{125}</a></span> needing to be done, and stirred too by the
+high emotions of the woman he loved, yet not quite able to translate his
+vague desire to be a champion of Truth into deeds. To be sure, at the
+close of this poem he remembers that Cromwell was the friend of Milton,</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“A man not second among those who lived<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To show us that the poet’s lyre demands<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">An arm of tougher sinew than the sword.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">In the dreams of his youth I think he saw himself playing a part in the
+drama that was opening, and wondering how he could wield the pen so as
+to make it a weapon for slaying wrong or defending right. Yet direct as
+he might wish his attack to be, he was held back by an equally potent
+impulse to fulfil the demands of art. “A Chippewa Legend,” in this same
+volume, though used as a parable for an impassioned denunciation of
+slavery, has touches of nature in the unfolding of the story which show
+clearly how much delight he took in the story itself, and how easily he
+might have stopped short as a singer, if the preacher in him had not
+made the song turn out a sermon.</p>
+
+<p>The autobiographic element in this volume of “Poems” is most distinctly
+summed up in a sonnet which dropped out of later collections containing
+most of the other poems. It bears the title “On my twenty-fourth
+Birthday, February 22, 1843,” and marks well his own sense of a certain
+transition which had taken place in his growth.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Now have I quite passed by that cloudy If<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That darkened the wild hope of boyish days,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_126" id="page_126">{126}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When first I launched my slender-sided skiff<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Upon the wide sea’s dim, unsounded ways;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Now doth Love’s sun my soul with splendor fill,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Hope bath struggled upward into Power,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Soft Wish is hardened into sinewy Will,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Longing into Certainty doth tower:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The love of beauty knoweth no despair;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My heart would break, if I should dare to doubt,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That from the Wrong, which makes its dragon’s lair<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Here on the Earth, fair Truth shall wander out,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Teaching mankind, that Freedom’s held in fee<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Only by those who labor to set free.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>In “A Year’s Life” the l’envoi of the volume is a timid poem, “Goe,
+little booke!” in which the poet, sending his venture out among
+strangers and most likely among apathetic readers, comforts himself with
+the reflection:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“But, if all others are unkind,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There’s <i>one</i> heart whither thou canst fly<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For shelter from the biting wind;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And, in that home of purity,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It were no bitter thing to die.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The “L’Envoi” of “Poems” is addressed to M. W. and is an open confession
+of the indebtedness of his love, three years after the veiled disclosure
+in “Ianthe,” “Irene,” “Isabel,” and other figurings of his affection,
+and runs like a golden thread through all the warp and woof of his
+imagination and fancy. In this serious poem, which he retained in his
+later collections, though without the declarative initials,<a name="FNanchor_39_39" id="FNanchor_39_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a> Lowell
+intimates very clearly that his maturer outlook on life, and his
+attitude toward poetry are due largely to the inspiration<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_127" id="page_127">{127}</a></span> which he has
+derived from the aspirations of his betrothed. Not only has his love for
+her quickened his eye of faith, but he has caught a wider view and a
+firmer hold on the great realities of the spirit through the contagion
+of her lofty idealism and its fervent expression in a moral ardor. This
+is especially manifest in a long passage which has been omitted from the
+poem in later collections. There are portions of this omitted passage
+which are little better than a dissertation on the poet’s mission, and
+they were wisely dropped, but they drew after them by necessity a few
+verses which have an interest as recording in a candid fashion the
+change which had come over the poet’s mind in these three years just
+past. After the introductory lines, in which he speaks rather
+disdainfully of “A Year’s Life,” and intimates that he has grown a
+sadder and a wiser man, yet with no lessening of that trust in God which
+was so marked a characteristic of his betrothed, he goes on:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Less of that feeling which the world calls love,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thou findest in my verse, but haply more<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of a more precious virtue, born of that,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The love of God, of Freedom, and of Man.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thou knowest well what these three years have been,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How we have filled and graced each other’s hearts,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And every day grown fuller of that bliss,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which, even at first, seemed more than we could bear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And thou, meantime, unchanged, except it be<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That thy large heart is larger, and thine eyes<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of palest blue, more tender with the love<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which taught me first how good it was to love;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And, if thy blessed name occur less oft,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet thou canst see the shadow of thy soul<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In all my song, and art well-pleased to feel<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_128" id="page_128">{128}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That I could ne’er be rightly true to thee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If I were recreant to higher aims.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thou didst not grant to me so rich a fief<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As thy full love, on any harder tenure<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Than that of rendering thee a single heart;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And I do service for thy queenly gift<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then best, when I obey my soul, and tread<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In reverence the path she beckons me.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>It would be joy enough, he proceeds, if he could so measure joy, to rest
+in this contentment of loving and being loved, but life had nobler
+destinies, and he rejoiced that she who gave him her love had a larger
+conception of poetry, and so he passes to an analysis of the true aims
+of poesy, which finally takes the turn of considering the possibility of
+satisfying these aims by rendering the landscape of America into
+verse,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“They tell us that our land was made for song,”&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">and so continues as preserved in the present form of the poem.</p>
+
+<p>It will be seen thus that this volume of “Poems,” taken as a register of
+Lowell’s development, marks a greater sureness of himself, a more
+definite determination of aim, a confidence in powers whose precise
+range he cannot yet measure, and with all this a swaying now toward the
+expression of pure delight in art, now toward the use of his art for the
+accomplishment of some great purpose. It is noticeable, also, that in “A
+Year’s Life” there is no trace of humor and scarcely any singular
+felicity of phrase; in “Poems,” wit and humor begin to play a little on
+the surface. There can be little doubt that the direct influence of
+Maria White was<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_129" id="page_129">{129}</a></span> toward what may without offence be called the practical
+issue, and this not because she was utilitarian&mdash;on the contrary, Lowell
+felt called on to defend her against the charge of being a
+transcendentalist, the charge implying a reproach as of a mere
+visionary; no, it was a certain high, even exalted and enthusiastic
+allegiance to Truth which dominated her nature, made her in a degree to
+accept this allegiance as sign of a mission which she was to fulfil,
+rendered her eager to have the close coöperation of her lover, and made
+him almost feverishly desirous of justifying her faith by his works. A
+letter which she wrote to Mr. Briggs, though it anticipates a little the
+course of this narrative, may be cited here as throwing some further
+light on her nature.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="r">
+<span class="smcap">Watertown</span>, Dec. 12th, 1844.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">My dear Friend</span>,&mdash;James is so hurried with his book that he has not
+an instant to spare, and has therefore commissioned me to answer
+your letter, and account to you for his long silence. The truth is,
+he delayed writing his articles on Poets and Old Dramatists, or
+rather delayed arranging them in the form of conversations, until
+he had only two months left for what really required four. The book
+must be out before we are married; he has three printers hard upon
+for copy, for which he has to rise early and sit up late, so that
+he can only spare time to see me twice a week, and then I have but
+transient glimpses of his dear face.</p>
+
+<p>The pears were thought delicious, and James would have told you
+that we all thought so, had<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_130" id="page_130">{130}</a></span> not these troubles about his book just
+been dawning upon him. The basket still remains upon a shelf in my
+closet, and when I look at it a pleasant train of thoughts comes up
+in regard to my housekeeping, in which I see it filled, with eggs
+white as snow, or apples from our little plot, though never again
+with pears like those which first consecrated it.</p>
+
+<p>Both James and myself feel greatly interested in your journal,<a name="FNanchor_40_40" id="FNanchor_40_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a>
+in spite of its proposed name. James told me to express his horror
+to you at the cockneyism of such a title. <i>The Broadway Chronicle</i>
+chronicles the thoughts and feelings of Broadway, not those of the
+New England people whom you seem willing to receive somewhat from.
+Should not a title have truth for its first recommendation? Do you
+write from the meridian of Broadway? I think you write from a
+sturdy New England heart, that has a good strong well-spring of old
+Puritan blood beating therein, with all its hatred to forms and
+cant, to fashion and show. If ‘Pistol speaks naught but truth,’
+should his name be a lie? Pistol’s is not; it expresses the man
+truly. I wish yours did as much to us here, though if it <i>really</i>
+gratifies your taste and judgment, if it is not a <i>whim</i>, but a
+<i>thought</i>, we shall all like it in time, I suppose, if we do not
+now. If it is good we shall of course come round to it. I always
+say just what I think, as you see, and I trust it will not seem
+harsh and unlovely to you in me as a woman. I do not wish to appear
+so ever, but I had rather<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_131" id="page_131">{131}</a></span> than give up what I think is truly and
+undeniably one of <i>woman’s</i> rights in common with man.</p>
+
+<p>James says he cannot say anything now with certainty in regard to
+his contributions to your paper, except that he will give you, of
+course, the best he has. Mrs. Putnam, I believe, has nothing
+translated at present, but James will ask her, also William Story
+and Nathan Hale. I have some translations I made from the German,
+songs, ballads, etc., which are at your service if you care to have
+them. I hope to write somewhat when I can have James always by my
+side to encourage me, and in time it may be something more than a
+source of pleasure to us. Carter has seen your letter, and I do not
+doubt will be ready to do all he can, ready and glad.</p>
+
+<p>I intended to have written to you and Mrs. Briggs expressly to
+invite you to our wedding, but I cannot do it now with much force
+or grace after your paragraph on the subject.<a name="FNanchor_41_41" id="FNanchor_41_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a> To us who have
+been married for nearly five years, it is of course no spiritual
+change; but if it were merely for the fact that from that day we
+can always be together, it would be well worth celebrating by some
+rite<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_132" id="page_132">{132}</a></span> and calling our friends about us to participate in it. What
+that rite is does not greatly matter, but I prefer that which time
+has consecrated.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“I can scorn nothing which a nation’s heart<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hath held for ages holy.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">That is, nothing in the form of rite or observance for things in
+themselves sacred, for you will tell me the Ages held the gibbet,
+the scourge and rack holy, if I let it pass without qualification.
+Still, I bid you to our marriage, though I trust even if you do not
+come you can see it whenever you see us. Some have great need to
+ask their friends at such a time, that they may afterwards certify
+such a thing has taken place because no trace of it remains. It can
+never be so with us, it could never be so with any who hold love
+sacred....</p>
+
+<p>We shall be married the night after Christmas, and go on to New
+York after one day and night spent at home. We should love to stop
+there to see you” as long as you would like to have us, but our
+present engagements in Philadelphia will take us directly on there.
+We shall be in New York on Sunday, <i>where</i> is not decided yet. With
+love to your wife, yours with friendly heart,</p>
+
+<p class="r">
+<span class="smcap">Maria White</span>.<br />
+</p></div>
+
+<p>The book which this letter speaks of as absorbing Lowell’s time and
+thought was his “Conversations on Some of the Old Poets,” for which Miss
+White made a cover design and which was published by John Owen early in
+January, 1845. It will be remembered that Lowell began in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_133" id="page_133">{133}</a></span> <i>Boston
+Miscellany</i> and continued in the <i>Pioneer</i> some studies on the Old
+Dramatists. The series might have gone on at greater length, for he was
+working a vein which yielded him great delight, and never indeed ceased
+to engage his attention. He resumed the theme in the last considerable
+venture of his life, and gave a course of lectures at the Lowell
+Institute in the spring of 1887, which was in effect a series of
+readings from the dramatists with running comments. “When I selected my
+topic for this new venture,” he said to his audience at the opening of
+the course, “I was returning to a first love. The second volume I ever
+printed, in 1843 I think it was,<a name="FNanchor_42_42" id="FNanchor_42_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42_42" class="fnanchor">[42]</a>&mdash;it is now a rare book, I am not
+sorry to know; I have not seen it for many years,&mdash;was mainly about the
+Old English Dramatists, if I am not mistaken. I dare say it was crude
+enough, but it was spontaneous and honest.”</p>
+
+<p>The suspension of the <i>Pioneer</i> left Lowell without any convenient
+vehicle for carrying further these appreciative papers, and he projected
+a book partly because the subject was in his mind, partly because he was
+anxious to turn his printed matter to fresh account, but chiefly, it
+must be inferred from the contents of the book, because he was eager to
+have freedom of speech on several matters which lay close to his mind.
+He resolved, therefore, to remodel his papers, so far as he used<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_134" id="page_134">{134}</a></span> them
+at all, into a series of conversations. His work upon the book was
+hurried, as the letter last quoted from Miss White intimates. In
+September, 1844, he was planning a course of four or five lectures on
+English poetry, beginning with Chaucer, which he proposed delivering in
+Philadelphia in the winter immediately after his marriage; but he seems
+suddenly to have changed his mind, and to have tossed what he might have
+prepared into this new book, which opens with a long conversation on
+Chaucer,&mdash;a conversation split in the next edition into two. The
+passages from Chaucer which he quotes are drawn sometimes from the
+modernization by Wordsworth, but are also, in some cases, his own much
+closer simplification of the original. To the ear they depart very
+little from the original, the widest departure being in getting rid of
+the final <i>e</i>. The talk on Chaucer is followed by comments on Chapman
+and Ford, with reference by easy suggestion to Shakespeare, Marlowe,
+Fletcher, Pope, and Wordsworth.</p>
+
+<p>But though the staple of the “Conversations” is poetry, and there are
+generous examples and much keen appreciation of the poets discussed, the
+book would interest a reader to-day less by its treatment of the
+subjects which gave it excuse for being than by its free and careless
+exhibition of Lowell’s mind on topics of current concern. There is very
+little of dramatic assumption in the interlocutors. Philip and John are
+simply convenient personages playing at a battledore and shuttlecock
+game of words. Philip is the major character, who does all of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_135" id="page_135">{135}</a></span>
+reading and advances most of the propositions, but John, whose chief
+part is to start Philip by questions, and to interpose occasional jibes
+or independent observations, is not differentiated in manner; he is
+another of Lowell’s many selves, and may be taken as the critical,
+interrupting side of his mind.<a name="FNanchor_43_43" id="FNanchor_43_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43_43" class="fnanchor">[43]</a> But both speakers are after the same
+game.</p>
+
+<p>One of the agreeable touches in the volume is in the asides with which
+Lowell refers to contemporary authors like Hawthorne and Longfellow, to
+Page, to Dwight, and to such beginners as W. W. Story and R. C., and
+when he takes up for discussion a recent address by the Rev. Mr. Putnam.
+These references and allusions help one to understand the attitude which
+Lowell took toward his book. He did not deceive himself as to its
+importance. It was a prolongation of his magazine work and gave him an
+opportunity to free his mind. The form, as I have intimated, was not
+that of a true conversation; it is far removed from such excellent
+exemplars as the “Imaginary Conversations” of Landor, the first of which
+had appeared a score of years before; it had but little of the graceful
+fencing which brings the talkers closer and closer to the heart of a
+subject, till one makes the final thrust that disarms his antagonist.
+No; it was simply a device to secure flexibility and dis<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_136" id="page_136">{136}</a></span>cursiveness,
+and is talk run mad, sometimes an harangue, sometimes an epigram, most
+often a rapid flow of views on literature and life. “If some of the
+topics introduced seem foreign to the subject,” says Lowell, in his
+prefatory address To the Reader, “I can only say that they are not so to
+my mind, and that an author’s object in writing criticisms is not only
+to bring to light the beauties of the works he is considering, but also
+to express his own opinions upon those and other matters.”</p>
+
+<p>The reading which lies behind the talk is varied, and the talker speaks
+from a full mind, but there is none of that restraint of art which gives
+weight to the words and makes one wish to read again and again the
+reflections. The cleverness is of the showy sort, and an interesting
+comparison could be drawn between the portions of the book which relate
+directly to the dramatists and the more mellow discussion of the same
+subject in the latest of Lowell’s published prose. But despite the
+crudeness which marks the earlier book, it shares with the later that
+delightful spontaneity and first hand intelligence which make Lowell
+always worth attention when he speaks on literary art. It was
+characteristic of him that when at sixty-eight he discoursed on the
+dramatists whom he had been reading all his life, he had not the need
+and apparently not the curiosity to turn back and see what he said about
+them at twenty-five. There was little, if any, of the careful husbandry
+of his ideas which marks some men of letters; out of the abundance of
+the heart his mouth spoke.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_137" id="page_137">{137}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In no one of his books can the reader discern better the spontaneous
+element in Lowell’s mind, and the length to which he could go under the
+impulse of the immediate thought. So fluent was he, so unaware of any
+effort, and so swept away for the time being by the stream of his ideas,
+that he seemed to himself as one possessed, and more than once he hinted
+darkly that he was not writing the book, but was the spokesman for sages
+and poets who used him as their means of communication. The visionary
+faculty which he possessed could easily be confused at this time with
+the half-rapt condition of the mind fed with emotional ardor. The book,
+as we have seen, was written at full speed, and it reflects the generous
+nature of the writer; but it reflects also the untempered thought, and
+registers judgments in the process of making.</p>
+
+<p>Running through the entire book, and making the real excuse for it, is
+Lowell’s study of the essence of poetry. This is what gives to the
+volume its chief interest; it is really a half-conscious explication of
+the concern which was most agitating his mind at this time. What was
+poetry? Could it be the substance of a man’s life? There is a
+prosecution of some of the same problems which recently he had been
+trying to solve in his own volume of poems. He had to ask himself if he
+was a poet. The witness for that was to be found not so much in his
+taste and his preferences in literature, nor solely in the delight which
+he took in versification; he felt the stirring in his nature of that
+high vocation of the poet which makes him a seer<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_138" id="page_138">{138}</a></span> and an interpreter.
+His impulse was to yield to it, but the question arose, What was he to
+interpret? What was there in life about him which was crying out for
+articulation? And here, if I mistake not, he fell into some confusion of
+mind through the insistence of one particular incarnation of divine
+thought. He was conscious and aware of a momentous idea, that of freedom
+expressed in terms of human brotherhood, words which even then had the
+dull ring of cant when they were used by counterfeit-minded men, yet had
+in the minds of genuine men and women a vibrant and exultant sound as if
+they were to pay all the debts of poor human nature. Remembering that
+this was on the eve of ’48, when the visionaries of Europe and America
+were very sure that they saw a great light, one sees how forcible this
+idea could be as a motive in the throbbing and ingenuous heart of a
+young American who was quite sure he was called to high endeavor.</p>
+
+<p>But with the shrewdness which belonged to his mother wit, Lowell could
+not satisfy himself with merely windy utterances. He needed emphatically
+to kindle something with his divine flame. As he says of Lessing: “His
+genius was not a St. Elmo’s fire, as it so often is with mere poets,&mdash;as
+it was in Shelley, for example, playing in ineffectual flame about the
+points of his thoughts, but was interfused with his whole nature and
+made a part of his very being.” Now he found himself confronting a
+monstrous denial of this truth of freedom issuing in human brotherhood
+when he<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_139" id="page_139">{139}</a></span> contemplated slavery in America, and his natural indignation
+was heightened by the ardor of the woman he loved. Was he not, after
+all, to be a reformer beyond everything else? and where was the point of
+contact between the poet and the reformer? His mind circled about this
+problem; his convictions called upon him with a loud voice to make good
+his professions; his instinctive sense of congruity, which is hardly
+more than an alternate form of the sense of humor, forbade him to make
+poetry the maid of all work for the anti-slavery cause, and he sought
+diligently to resolve this particular form of spiritual activity into
+the elemental properties of freedom, and so to find therein a true
+medium for the sustenance of poetry. Moreover, though he described
+himself not long after, in “A Fable for Critics,” as&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">“striving Parnassus to climb<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With a whole bale of <i>isms</i> tied together with rhyme,”&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">it must be said with emphasis that he held these <i>isms</i> too lightly for
+them to become the determining factor in his intellectual and spiritual
+growth. They did hamper him, as he says a little ruefully in the next
+line, and while it is idle business to speculate on what a man might
+have become in the absence of the very conditions that made him what he
+was, one is tempted to wonder if with his endowments Lowell might not,
+under less strenuous conditions, have been exclusively a poet. What is
+one man’s meat is another man’s poison, says the homely adage, and it is
+a curious fact that but for the same flame of anti-slavery passion
+Whittier<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_140" id="page_140">{140}</a></span> might never have been more than a verbose Quietist versifier.</p>
+
+<p>In his dedication of the volume to his father, Lowell speaks of it as
+“containing many opinions from which he will wholly, yet with the large
+charity of a Christian heart, dissent,” and the most flagrant of these
+is probably in a passage in which he speaks with vehemence of the church
+and religion. As falls to the hearer of many impulsive utterances of
+young men, one is apt to see in them rather the impatience of a generous
+heart (“why so hot, my little man?”) than the deliberate convictions
+into which one has been forced reluctantly, but the passage is so
+characteristic of Lowell at this period and so expressive of the
+turbulence of his mind that it may well be read here. John has been
+commenting on the innate piety of Chaucer as illustrated by his glowing
+words on the daisy, and Philip takes up the parable.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="chead">“PHILIP.</p>
+
+<p>“Piety is indifferent whether she enters at the eye or the ear.
+There is none of the senses at which she does not knock one day or
+other. The Puritans forgot this and thrust beauty out of the
+meeting-house, and slammed the door in her face. I love such
+sensuality as that which Chaucer shows in his love of nature.
+Surely, God did not give us these fine senses as so many posterns
+to the heart for the Devil to enter at. I believe that he has
+endowed us with no faculty but for his own glory. If the Devil has
+got false keys to them, we must<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_141" id="page_141">{141}</a></span> first have given him a model of
+the wards to make a mould by. The senses can do nothing unless the
+soul be an accomplice, and, in whatever the soul does, the body
+will have a voice....</p>
+
+<p class="chead">“JOHN.</p>
+
+<p>“All things that make us happy incline us also to be grateful, and
+I would rather enlarge than lessen the number of these. Morose and
+callous recluses have persuaded men that religion is a prude, and
+have forced her to lengthen her face, and contract her brows to
+suit the character. They have laid out a gloomy turnpike to heaven,
+upon which they and their heirs and assigns are privileged to levy
+tolls, and have set up guide-boards to make us believe that all
+other roads lead in quite an opposite direction. The pleasanter
+they are, the more dangerous. For my part, I am satisfied that I am
+upon the right path so long as I can see anything to make me
+happier, anything to make me love man, and therefore God, the more.
+I would stamp God’s name, and not Satan’s, upon every innocent
+pleasure, upon every legitimate gratification of sense, and God
+would be the better served for it. In what has Satan deserved so
+well of us, that we should set aside such first-fruits for him?
+Christianity differs not more widely from Plato than from the
+Puritans.</p>
+
+<p class="chead">“PHILIP.</p>
+
+<p>“The church needs reforming now as much as in Luther’s time, and
+sells her indulgences as readily.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_142" id="page_142">{142}</a></span> There are altars to which the
+slaveholder is admitted, while the Unitarian would be put forth as
+unclean. If it be God’s altar, both have a right there,&mdash;the sinner
+most of all,&mdash;but let him not go unrebuked. We hire our religion by
+the quarter, and if it tells any disagreeable truths, we dismiss
+it, for we did not pay it for such service as this. Christ scourged
+the sellers of doves out of the temple; we invite the sellers of
+men and women in. We have few such preachers now as Nathan was.
+They preach against sin in the abstract, shooting their arrows into
+the woundless air. Let sin wrap itself in superfine broadcloth, and
+put its name on charitable subscription papers, and it is safe. We
+bandy compliments with it, instead of saying sternly ‘Get thee
+behind me!’ The Devil might listen to some preaching I have heard
+without getting his appetite spoiled. There is a great deal of time
+and money expended to make men believe that this one or that one
+will be damned, and to scare or wheedle them into good Calvinists
+or Episcopalians; but very little pains is taken to make them good
+Christians....</p>
+
+<p class="chead">“JOHN.</p>
+
+<p>“It has never been a safe thing to breathe a whisper against the
+church, least of all in this country, where it has no prop from the
+state, but is founded only on the love, or, if you will have it so,
+the prejudices of the people. Religion has come to be esteemed
+synonymous with the church; there are few minds clear enough to
+separate it<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_143" id="page_143">{143}</a></span> from the building erected for its convenience and
+shelter. It is this which has made our Christianity external, a
+task-ceremony to be gone through with, and not a principle of life
+itself. The church has been looked on too much in the light of a
+machine, which only needs a little oil, now and then, on its joints
+and axles, to make it run glibly and perform all its functions
+without grating or creaking. Nothing that we can say will be of
+much service. The reformers must come from her own bosom; and there
+are many devout souls among her own priests now, who would lay down
+their lives to purify her. The names of infidel and heretic are the
+<i>San benitos</i> in which we dress offenders in the nineteenth
+century, and a bigoted public opinion furnishes the fagots and
+applies the match! The very cross itself, to which the sacred right
+of private judgment fled for sanctuary, has been turned into a
+whipping post. Doubtless, there are no nations on the earth so
+wicked as those which profess Christianity; and the blame may be
+laid in great measure at the door of the church, which has always
+sought temporal power, and has chosen rather to lean upon the arm
+of flesh than upon that of God. The church has corrupted
+Christianity. She has decked her person and embroidered her
+garments with the spoils of pagan altars, and has built her temples
+of blocks which paganism has squared ready to her hand. We are
+still Huns and Vandals, and Saxons and Celts, at heart. We have
+carved a cross upon our altars, but the smoke of our sacrifice goes
+up to Thor and Odin still. Lately I read in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_144" id="page_144">{144}</a></span> newspapers a toast
+given at a military festival, by one of those who claim to be the
+earthly representatives of the Prince of Peace. England and France
+send out the cannon and the bayonet, upon missionary enterprises,
+to India and Africa, and our modern Eliots and Brainerds among the
+red men are of the same persuasive metal.</p>
+
+<p class="chead">“PHILIP.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, well, let us hope for change. There are signs of it; there
+has been a growling of thunder round the horizon for many days. We
+are like the people in countries subject to earthquakes, who crowd
+into the churches for safety, but find that their sacred walls are
+as fragile as other works of human hands. Nay, the very massiveness
+of their architecture makes their destruction more sudden and their
+fall more dangerous. You and I have become convinced of this. Both
+of us, having certain reforms at heart, and believing them to be of
+vital interest to mankind, turned first to the church as the
+nearest helper under God. We have been disappointed. Let us not
+waste our time in throwing stones at its insensible doors. As you
+have said, the reformers must come from within. The prejudice of
+position is so strong that all her servants will unite against an
+exoteric assailant, melting up, if need be, the holy vessels for
+bullets, and using the leaves of the holy book itself for wadding.
+But I will never enter a church from which a prayer goes up for the
+prosperous only, or for the unfortunate among the oppressors, and
+not for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_145" id="page_145">{145}</a></span> oppressed and fallen; as if God had ordained our pride
+of caste and our distinctions of color, and as if Christ had
+forgotten those that are in bonds. We are bid to imitate God; let
+us in this also follow his example, whose only revenge upon error
+is the giving success to truth, and but strive more cheerfully for
+the triumph of what we believe to be right. Let us, above all
+things, imitate him in ascribing what we see of wrong-doing to
+blindness and error, rather than to wilful sin. The Devil loves
+nothing better than the intolerance of reformers, and dreads
+nothing so much as their charity and patience. The scourge is
+better upon our backs than in our hands.</p>
+
+<p class="chead">“JOHN.</p>
+
+<p>“When the air grows thick and heavy, and the clouds gather in the
+moral atmosphere, the tall steeples of the church are apt to
+attract the lightning first. Its pride and love of high places are
+the most fatal of conductors. That small upper room, in which the
+disciples were first gathered, would always be safe enough.” </p></div>
+
+<p>These kindling words are those of a reformer dealing with existing
+conditions. It would be much more to the point if we could have in
+definite terms that revelation of the inner verity of religion which
+visited Lowell a little earlier than this, as may be seen by a passage
+from a letter to Dr. Loring, 20 September, 1842. “I had a revelation
+last Friday evening. I was at Mary’s, and happening to say<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_146" id="page_146">{146}</a></span> something of
+the presence of spirits (of whom, I said, I was often dimly aware), Mr.
+Putnam entered into an argument with me on spiritual matters. As I was
+speaking the whole system rose up before me like a vague Destiny looming
+from the abyss. I never before so clearly felt the spirit of God in me
+and around me. The whole room seemed to me full of God. The air seemed
+to wave to and fro with the presence of Something, I knew not what. I
+spoke with the calmness and clearness of a prophet.”<a name="FNanchor_44_44" id="FNanchor_44_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44_44" class="fnanchor">[44]</a></p>
+
+<p>No doubt this ecstasy may be regarded as one manifestation of that
+psychical temper which caused him to see visions in his childhood, but
+it allied itself with intellectual processes, for he goes on to say: “I
+cannot tell you what this revelation was. I have not yet studied it
+enough. But I shall perfect it one day, and then you shall hear it and
+acknowledge its grandeur. It embraces all other systems.”</p>
+
+<p>We may not find a clear statement of this mystic revelation in the
+discursive “Conversations;” rather we should look for it in his poems of
+this period, and here, though we find nothing whatever to correspond to
+a system of divine order, we do find, recurring in various forms, a
+recognition of an all-embracing, all-penetrating power which through the
+poet transmutes nature into something finer and more eternal, and gives
+him a vantage ground from which to perceive more truly the realities of
+life. “The Token,” “An Incident in a Railroad<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_147" id="page_147">{147}</a></span> Car,” “The Shepherd of
+King Admetus,” all in a manner witness to this, and show how
+persistently in Lowell’s mind was present this aspect of the poet which
+makes him a seer. Perhaps there is a more direct attempt at expressing
+this truth in one of the poems not retained in later collections. It is
+entitled “A Dirge,” and is the imagined plaint over a poet who has died.
+In this tumultuous period of Lowell’s youth, when the tranquillity which
+a returned love brought was after all a very self-conscious
+tranquillity, there was always room for morbid fancies, and the
+frequency with which in his poetry he recurs to the images of death
+leads one to suspect that he experimented a little with the idea of his
+own death. And it may be that in this poem, which a healthier judgment
+later led him to suppress, he was dramatizing himself.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Poet! lonely is thy bed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the turf is overhead,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Cold earth is thy cover;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But thy heart hath found release,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And it slumbers full of peace<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">’Neath the rustle of green trees,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the warm hum of the bees<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Mid the drowsy clover;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Through thy chamber still as death<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A smooth gurgle wandereth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As the blue stream murmureth<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">To the blue sky over.<br /></span>
+<span class="i6dt">. . . . . . . .<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thou wast full of love and truth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of forgivingness and ruth,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thy great heart with hope and youth<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Tided to o’erflowing;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thou didst dwell in mysteries,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And there lingered on thine eyes<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_148" id="page_148">{148}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shadows of serener skies,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Awfully wild memories<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">That were like foreknowing;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thou didst remember well and long<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Some fragments of thine angel-song,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And strive, through want, and woe, and wrong,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">To win the world unto it;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thy curse it was to see and hear<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Beyond to-day’s scant hemisphere,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Beyond all mists of doubt and fear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Into a life more true and clear,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">And dearly thou didst rue it.<br /></span>
+<span class="i6dt">. . . . . . . .<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">“Poet! underneath the turf,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Soft thou sleepest, free from morrow;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thou hast struggled through the surf<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Of wild thoughts, and want, and sorrow;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Now, beneath the moaning pine<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Full of rest thy body lieth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">While, far up in pure sunshine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Underneath a sky divine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Her loosed wings thy spirit trieth;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oft she strove to spread them here,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But they were too white and clear<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For our dingy atmosphere.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The limitations of his theme and measure forbid more than a hint at this
+vocation of the poet, but it happens that we have a somewhat more
+explicit statement of the same general idea in a prose form. A very few
+weeks after the revelation referred to in the letter to Dr. Loring, too
+soon certainly for it to have faded from his mind, he sat down to write
+a paper on “The Plays of Thomas Middleton,” and the introductory
+passages contain what may fairly be taken as snatches from that music of
+the spheres which he seems suddenly to have overheard.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_149" id="page_149">{149}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>“Poets are the forerunners and prophets of changes in the moral world.
+Driven, by their finer nature, to search into and reverently contemplate
+the universal laws of soul, they find some fragments of the broken
+tables of God’s law, and interpret it, half conscious of its mighty
+import. While philosophers are wrangling, and politicians playing at
+snapdragon with the destinies of millions, the poet, in the silent deeps
+of his soul, listens to those mysterious pulses which, from one central
+heart, send life and beauty through the finest veins of the universe,
+and utters truths to be sneered at, perchance, by contemporaries, but
+which become religion to posterity....</p>
+
+<p>“The dreams of poets are morning-dreams, coming to them in the early
+dawn and day-breaking of great truths, and are surely fulfilled at last.
+They repeat them, as children do, and all Christendom, if it be not too
+busy with quarrelling about the meaning of creeds which have no meaning
+at all, listens with a shrug of the shoulders and a smile of pitying
+incredulity: for reformers are always madmen in their own age, and
+infallible saints in the next.”</p>
+
+<p>In such rhetorical terms did Lowell, all aflame himself with poetic
+zeal, try to outline the divine call of the poet, and the
+“Conversations” reënforce a doctrine which was held more firmly since
+the preacher was eager to display it in his own practice. At this time,
+certainly, Lowell’s conception of the function of the poet was blended
+with his apprehension of the divine order, and he entered<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_150" id="page_150">{150}</a></span> upon the
+discharge of poetic duties with the seriousness which a young priest
+might have carried to the sacred office. The very suppression of his
+native humor, so that it makes only a few furtive leaps in his poetry up
+to this time,&mdash;for we are setting aside his boyish pranks in
+verse,&mdash;illustrates the exalted mood in which he was living.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The “Conversations on Some of the Old Poets” was published, as we have
+seen, in January, 1845,<a name="FNanchor_45_45" id="FNanchor_45_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45_45" class="fnanchor">[45]</a> but as soon as his own part of the book was
+done, he was free for a more vital venture: on the 26th of December,
+1844, after a five years’ betrothal, he was married in her father’s
+house at Watertown to Maria White.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_151" id="page_151">{151}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV<br /><br />
+<small>IN THE ANTI-SLAVERY RANKS</small><br /><br />
+<small>1845-1849</small></h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">In</span> the spring of 1844 Mrs. White had taken her daughter Maria to
+Philadelphia to spare her the rigors of the North, and they had found
+lodgings at 127 Arch Street, with Friend Parker, a kindly Quakeress, who
+had made them acquainted with Mr. and Mrs. E. M. Davis, influential
+members of the Society of Friends. An intimacy grew up between them, for
+they had a strong bond of sympathy in their common zeal for the cause of
+anti-slavery and other reforms, and a few weeks after the return of the
+Whites to Watertown, Maria wrote to her new friends: “I have talked so
+much to James of Philadelphia, that I have inspired him with a desire to
+try its virtues if he has an opportunity. We shall probably be married
+in the spring and I wish very much to spend it there, instead of in our
+bleak New England, and we should do so if we heard of any opening or
+employment for him during so short a period as three months. I suppose
+the season for lectures would be over then, and I fear that Destiny has
+not been so kind as to arrange any exact labors for him then, simply
+because he wishes to go. But should you hear of any situa<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_152" id="page_152">{152}</a></span>tion for a
+literary man at that time, however small the recompense, might I not
+depend on your kindness to let us know of it?”</p>
+
+<p>For some reason the marriage took place as we have seen at the close of
+1844, and not in the spring of 1845. Mr. and Mrs. Lowell stayed a day or
+two in New York at the New York Hotel, whose splendor amazed them, and
+reached Philadelphia on the first day of the new year. By a happy
+augury, the weather had been delightful on their journey, and they had
+almost a breath of summer in midwinter. They went at once to Friend
+Parker’s, and settled down to happy work. The scheme of lecturing had
+come to nothing, but Mr. Davis had arranged that Lowell should do some
+editorial work on the <i>Pennsylvania Freeman</i>. That paper had taken the
+place of the <i>National Enquirer</i>, when Benjamin Lundy relinquished its
+management. Whittier went to Philadelphia in the spring of 1838 to edit
+the <i>Freeman</i>, and remained there two years, when his frail health
+compelled him to retire. The paper had been temporarily suspended in the
+interest of the <i>National Anti-Slavery Standard</i>, but had been revived
+and was now under the editorial control of C. C. Burleigh and J. Miller
+McKim.</p>
+
+<p>The situation of the young pair is sketched in the following letter to
+Robert Carter:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="r">
+<span class="smcap">127 Arch Street, Philadelphia</span>,<br />
+<span style="margin-right: 2em;">Jan’y 14, 1845.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">My dear Boy</span>,&mdash;Here we are situated as pleasantly as can be, and I
+write to inform you of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_153" id="page_153">{153}</a></span> fact a great deal sooner than you
+expected, having been in Philadelphia just a fortnight to-morrow. I
+shall not attempt to give you any statistical information with
+regard to anything here, for I know that if I should try to
+describe the Hall of Independence, or anything else, you would
+contradict me stoutly till I convicted you out of some Geography or
+other, and then you would manage to change sides and appear to be
+confuting me. You see that your obstinacy about Boston Common has
+cheated you out of a minute detail of all the curiosities of this
+city, together with an account of the riots, taken from the mouth
+of one of the leaders of the mob who was shot dead at the first
+fire of the military. But this is a melancholy subject.</p>
+
+<p>Why did you not (you rascal!) slip even so much as a little note
+into the package you sent through the Anti-Slavery office? Speaking
+of letters, I mailed one at Worcester from Maria to Sarah Page,
+directed to your care, and the Post Office being closed, I ventured
+to mail it without paying the postage, trusting that the kind
+providence which has hitherto taken care of you above your deserts
+may have enabled you to redeem it from the claws of the Brookline
+postmaster.</p>
+
+<p>Owen writes me that the “Conversations” is selling well, and
+Peterson<a name="FNanchor_46_46" id="FNanchor_46_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46_46" class="fnanchor">[46]</a> says that the notices are all of the most favorable
+kind. I have seen Graham and shall probably be able to make a good
+arrangement for him after my new book has been puffed a little
+more. He has grown fat, an evidence of suc<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_154" id="page_154">{154}</a></span>cess. He lives in one of
+the finest houses in Arch Street, and keeps his carriage. He says
+he would have given me $150.00 for the “Legend of Brittany” for his
+Magazine without the copyright. I am sorry I did not think of this
+at the time.</p>
+
+<p>I shall get along very easily while I am here. I am engaged to
+write leaders for the <i>Pennsylvania Freeman</i> (which comes out once
+a fortnight) and am to be paid $5.00 for each. I was unwilling to
+take anything, but they say I must and I suppose I ought. I wrote
+one for the next Thursday’s paper entitled “Our Position;” it is
+not very good, but I shall do better as I get used to it.</p>
+
+<p>I have not seen the first number of the <i>Broadway Journal</i> yet, but
+the second is quite entertaining and well done. The type is a
+little too large. Are you going to write a notice of my book for
+the paper? Briggs has written to me since I got here, but says
+nothing about it. I unfortunately missed seeing him in New York.</p>
+
+<p>We have a little room in the third story (back) with white muslin
+curtains trimmed with evergreen, and are as happy as two mortals
+can be. I think Maria is better, and I <i>know</i> I am&mdash;in health I
+mean, in spirit we both are. She is gaining flesh and so am I, and
+my cheeks are grown so preposterously red that I look as if I had
+rubbed them against all the red brick walls in the city.</p>
+
+<p>I have seen your friend &mdash;&mdash; since I came here. Somebody called on
+us the very evening after we arrived, and on going downstairs who
+should it be but our interesting friend. He attacked me upon<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_155" id="page_155">{155}</a></span> the
+subject of a vegetable diet, and I replied by fun, which rather
+disconcerted him. He has not been here since.</p>
+
+<p>I have felt a little of the swell of fashionable society since I
+have been here. Dr. Elwyn, a kinsman of mine, hearing that I was in
+town, called upon me and has been very attentive ever since. He is
+an agreeable man and somewhat literary for Philadelphia. His
+mother, who has lately quitted Episcopacy for Presbyterianism,
+called on us to-day, and told me that her “pastor,” the Rev. Dr.
+Bethune, was coming to see me. Authorship might have taken the
+place of misery in Shakespeare’s aphorism.</p>
+
+<p>The abolitionists here are very pleasant and kind.... Maria sends
+her best love. I mean Mrs. Lowell sends it. Give my kind
+remembrances to Austin and to Owen. The package of the latter came
+safe.</p>
+
+<p>God bless you! Most lovingly yours,</p>
+
+<p class="r">
+J. R. L.<br />
+</p></div>
+
+<p>Mrs. Lowell sings her second in this duet in a letter to Mrs. Hawthorne,
+written two days later, in which she says: “We are most delightfully
+situated here in every respect, surrounded with kind and sympathizing
+friends, yet allowed by them to be as quiet and retired as we choose;
+but it is always a pleasure to know you can have society if you wish for
+it, by walking a few steps beyond your own door. We live in a little
+chamber on the third story, quite low enough to be an attic, so that<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_156" id="page_156">{156}</a></span> we
+feel classical in our environment: and we have one of the sweetest and
+most motherly of Quaker women to anticipate all our wants, and make us
+comfortable outwardly as we are blest inwardly. James’s prospects are as
+good as an author’s <i>ought</i> to be, and I begin to fear we shall not have
+the satisfaction of being so <i>very</i> poor after all. But we are, in spite
+of this disappointment of our expectations, the happiest of mortals or
+spirits, and cling to the skirts of every passing hour, though we know
+the next will bring us still more joy.”<a name="FNanchor_47_47" id="FNanchor_47_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_47_47" class="fnanchor">[47]</a></p>
+
+<p>The young couple had no resources save their faculty for writing. Mrs.
+Lowell brought no dowry, but she had poetic sensibility, and fell to
+translating into verse from German poetry, especially from Uhland.
+Lowell, with increased confidence bred of the facility with which he had
+dashed off the “Conversations,” and with an unfailing spring of poetry,
+was ready for any sort of venture. His faithful friend, Mr. Briggs, who
+had just launched the first number of his new literary weekly, <i>The
+Broadway Journal</i>, was eager for contributions from both. “I am very
+proud,” he wrote on receiving Mrs. Lowell’s translation, “The Wreath,”
+from the German of Uhland, to be the first to introduce her new name to
+the public,” and he proposed all manner of topics for Lowell to write
+on, such as a paper on Hawthorne and one on Emerson, for a series of
+articles on “Our American Prose Writers,” which had been initiated with
+one on the now forgotten W. A. Jones.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_157" id="page_157">{157}</a></span> Lowell himself complained of a
+native indolence, and Briggs, who was skeptical of the force of this
+objection, proposed a very natural corrective:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“There is no such stimulus to execution,” he writes, “as a sure reward.
+Now I would like to make a contract with you to furnish me with a column
+or two, or more, of prose matter, to suit yourself, in the shape of
+criticism, gossip, or anything else, once a week for six months or a
+year. You have no idea how easy a thing of this kind becomes when you
+know that you must do it. If you get nothing else by such an undertaking
+than the business habit, it would be worth your while. What will you do
+it for? If our means were sufficient, or success were secure, I would
+make you an offer that would be sufficiently tempting, but I am loath to
+make you one that may seem too small. Consider now, and let me know.”</p>
+
+<p>Lowell’s affection for Briggs and his sympathy with him in his risky
+venture of a weekly literary journal made him at first well-disposed to
+contribute freely in response to the editor’s urgent invitation, and he
+was most generous in his attitude respecting payment. “You have been in
+business, my dear friend,” he writes to Briggs, “and know exactly how
+much you ought to give me with a proper regard to your own balance sheet
+at the end of the year. I know that your inclination will be to give me
+more than that. But more you ought not to give nor I to take. I leave it
+for you to decide. I should not like to bind myself to write every week,
+though I have no doubt that I shall<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_158" id="page_158">{158}</a></span> be able to, and I have some fears
+that a contingent want of money may hereafter prove as sharp a spur to
+me as a contract.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Briggs in reply was more explicit as to terms: “In regard to the
+compensation, it would be well to read Emerson’s essay on that subject.
+According to him, compensation is inevitable, therefore one need never
+give himself any trouble on the subject. Nature settles the whole
+business. You will be sure to receive due compensation for whatever you
+may do for the <i>B. J.</i> Poe writes for me at the rate of one dollar a
+column. If you will do so, I shall esteem it a capital bargain. The
+poetry I will pay for separately on a different principle.” Accordingly,
+a day or two after, Lowell wrote: “I send you the first of a series of
+four or five letters which you may print if you like it. If you do not
+like it, reject it without scruple. It may be a little too abolition for
+you as yet. I do not think it good at all, but Maria thinks better of it
+than I do (bating one or two coarse expressions in it). I do not
+consider it mine. I wrote it only in the hope of doing some good. So you
+may alter it as much as you please, if it will serve your turn. If, on
+the other hand, you like it, I think I may promise that the next will be
+better. I am in a great hurry, I have only time to say that I like your
+terms and am perfectly content to help you as much as I can.... I always
+expect to be taken at my word, so reject this without scruple.”</p>
+
+<p>The letter thus sent purported to be by one<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_159" id="page_159">{159}</a></span> Matthew Trueman, a country
+cousin to a supposed Member of Congress, scalping him for his vote on
+the question of the annexation of Texas. It was intended to be the first
+of a series in which the whole question of annexation was to be argued.
+It was addressed to no one in particular, but only to some hypothetical
+scoundrel. It will be remembered that annexation was the all-absorbing
+topic of political discussion during the winter of 1844-1845. Lowell
+could not do otherwise from his anti-slavery principles than bitterly
+condemn the action of Congress, and this letter was an outburst of
+satire and invective; but it did not see the light, and it was not
+followed by others in the same vein.</p>
+
+<p>The editor of <i>The Broadway Journal</i> began fencing with the author. He
+wondered to whom it was addressed. He thought perhaps it would be best
+not to print the whole. “Your satire,” he wrote, “bruises instead of
+cutting the flesh, and makes a confounded sore place without letting out
+any of the patient’s bad blood. I will make as full a selection as I
+can; but there are certain expressions that could not be safely used in
+public.” He regrets that his friend should have lost so much time over
+the letter, but thinks it must have done him good by drawing off his
+superfluous zeal. “I shall think better of you myself for knowing that
+you can feel so strongly and write so harshly,” he adds: “it justifies
+the opinion that I expressed of you in my notice of your
+‘Conversations;’<span class="lftspc">”</span> and after a further discussion of abolitionism in
+prin<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_160" id="page_160">{160}</a></span>ciple and practice, he begs him to write something about
+Philadelphia, or art, the academy, the abominable white doors, the poor
+watery oysters, everything and anything. “Put all your abolitionism into
+rhyme,” he concludes: “everybody will read it in that shape, and it will
+do good. Don’t forget that you are a poet and go to writing newspaper
+articles.”</p>
+
+<p>The letter was shrewd, kind, reasonable to an uninterested reader, but
+must have been exacerbating to Lowell. Mr. Briggs could not conceal the
+final ground of his refusal, that to publish this and similar letters
+would be to jeopard the fortunes of <i>The Broadway Journal</i>, and in the
+sensitive condition of the mind of the out and out abolitionist, this
+was arrant cowardice. A good deal of correspondence followed, and Lowell
+lost his interest in the <i>Journal</i>, though he retained his strong
+affection for his friend and sent him, as well as a few poems, a
+slashing criticism of the exhibition in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine
+Arts, and a review of Halleck’s “Alnwick Castle, with other Poems,” but
+<i>The Broadway Journal</i> itself died out of existence shortly, Mr. Briggs
+parting company with it at the end of a half year.<a name="FNanchor_48_48" id="FNanchor_48_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_48_48" class="fnanchor">[48]</a> In sending the
+former of the two prose articles mentioned above, Lowell wrote:<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_161" id="page_161">{161}</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="r">
+<span class="smcap">Philadelphia</span>, Feb’y 15.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">My dear Friend</span>,&mdash;I send you something which will help you fill up,
+and will show my <i>willingness</i> to help till I can send something
+better. I am so continually interrupted here, and have been so long
+used to having all my time to myself, that I have not been able yet
+to acquire the habit of using anything but the very titbits of my
+time. I have begun several articles for you, but failed in
+satisfying myself, but before long hope to send you something to
+your taste. I will send a poem at any rate. Halleck, I see, is
+about to publish a new edition, which I should like to write a
+notice of if you have made no other arrangement.</p>
+
+<p>This notice of the “Academy” I have written, you see, as editorial,
+and you can modify it as you please.</p>
+
+<p>It is hard to write when one is first married. The Jews gave a man
+a year’s vacation. I hope to serve you sooner, and meanwhile remain</p>
+
+<p class="r"><span style="margin-right: 2em;">
+Your loving friend,</span><br />
+J. R. L.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>P. S. Maria and I both like the <i>Journal</i> exceedingly. </p></div>
+
+<p>The other vehicle for Lowell’s more exclusively literary work during the
+winter of 1845 was <i>Graham’s Magazine</i>, published in Philadelphia. He
+had been a contributor since the spring of 1841, when he used the
+signature “H. Perceval,” which he had been employing in initial form in
+the <i>South<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_162" id="page_162">{162}</a></span>ern Literary Messenger</i>. His contributions were all poems,
+some of which he had preserved in the two volumes already published, but
+in the number for February, 1845, there appeared his biographical and
+critical sketch of Poe in the series “Our Contributors,” which ran for a
+score of numbers and was accompanied by steel portraits. Graham was
+desirous of including Lowell in the series with a portrait by Page, but
+for some reason the plan fell through. In this sketch of Poe, Lowell
+used a discursive manner, giving expression in a lively fashion to his
+judgments of other poets in the past, but not hesitating to speak
+emphatically of the genius of Poe, whom he did not know personally.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Poe,” he wrote, “is at once the most discriminating, philosophical,
+and fearless critic upon imaginative works who has written in America.
+It may be that we should qualify our remarks a little, and say that he
+<i>might be</i>, rather than that he always <i>is</i>, for he seems sometimes to
+mistake his phial of prussic acid for his inkstand.... Mr. Poe has that
+indescribable something which men have agreed to call genius.”</p>
+
+<p>Lowell had offered to write this sketch in May, 1844, and had been
+supplied with biographical material by Poe himself, who moreover read
+the article in manuscript which Lowell sent at the end of September
+through their common friend, Mr. Briggs. During this winter of 1845 Poe
+was a lively subject of discussion by Lowell and his friends, for he was
+the most conspicuous figure in American literature at that time. His
+“Raven<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_163" id="page_163">{163}</a></span>” appeared in <i>The American Review</i> for February, and his series
+of papers on plagiarism, with their acuteness, their ostentation of
+learning, and their malice, was trailing through the <i>Mirror</i> and <i>The
+Broadway Journal</i>. His name was linked with that of Briggs in the
+editorship of the <i>Journal</i>, and Briggs sometimes found it difficult to
+make clear to his friends just how responsibility was apportioned
+between them. It was impossible to regard this very insistent figure as
+an intellectual or æsthetic abstraction, and his personality was always
+getting in the way of a fair judgment. In a letter to Briggs, 16
+January, 1845, Lowell remarks: “From a paragraph I saw yesterday in the
+<i>Tribune</i> I find that Poe has been at me in the <i>Mirror</i>. He has at
+least that chief element of a critic&mdash;a disregard of persons. He will be
+a very valuable coadjutor to you.” Briggs, who was at this time a warm
+defender of Poe, had read the article in the <i>Mirror</i>, which was a
+review of the “Conversations,” and assured Lowell that it was extremely
+laudatory and discriminating, and a few days later, after strongly
+praising “The Gold Bug” which he had just read, he says: “Do not trouble
+yourself about anybody’s gloriometer.... I have always misunderstood Poe
+from thinking him one of the Graham and Godey species, but I find him as
+different as possible. I think that you will like him well when you come
+to know him personally.” Briggs copied “The Raven” into his magazine and
+wrote enthusiastically to Lowell about it. But Lowell was deeply
+offended by what<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_164" id="page_164">{164}</a></span> he termed “the grossness and vulgarity” of Poe’s
+treatment of Longfellow, especially in his offhand allusion to Mrs.
+Longfellow and her children. Briggs again came to Poe’s defence. “The
+allusion to Mrs. Longfellow,” he wrote, “was only a playful allusion to
+an abstract Mrs. Longfellow, for Poe did not know even that Longfellow
+was married; look at the thing again and you will see that it contains
+nothing offensive. Poe has, indeed, a very high admiration for
+Longfellow, and so he will say before he is done. For my own part I did
+not use to think well of Poe, but my love for you and implicit
+confidence in your judgment led me to abandon all my prejudices against
+him, when I read your account of him. The Rev. Mr. Griswold, of
+Philadelphia, told me some abominable lies about him, but a personal
+acquaintance with him has induced me to think highly of him. Perhaps
+some Philadelphian has been whispering foul things in your ear about
+him. Doubtless his sharp manner has made him many enemies. But you will
+think better of him when you meet him.”</p>
+
+<p>Lowell, however, refused to be convinced. “The Rev. Mr. Griswold,” he
+said petulantly, “is an ass, and, what’s more, a knave, and even if he
+had said anything against Poe, I should not have believed it. But
+neither he nor any one else ever did. I remain of my old opinion about
+the allusion to Mrs. Longfellow. I remain of my old opinion about Poe,
+and I have no doubt that Poe estimates Longfellow’s poetical abilities
+more highly than I do perhaps, but I nevertheless do not like his two
+last<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_165" id="page_165">{165}</a></span> articles. I still think Poe an invaluable contributor, but I like
+such articles as his review of Miss Barrett better than these last.”</p>
+
+<p>Up to this time Lowell appears to have known Poe only through
+correspondence.<a name="FNanchor_49_49" id="FNanchor_49_49"></a><a href="#Footnote_49_49" class="fnanchor">[49]</a> A few weeks later, when he was returning from
+Philadelphia to Cambridge, he called upon him, but the interview gave
+little satisfaction, due to the fact, mentioned by Mr. Briggs, that Poe
+was tipsy at the time. A few weeks later Lowell defended himself, in a
+letter to Briggs, against a charge of plagiarism made by Poe, and summed
+up his impressions as follows: “Poe, I am afraid, is wholly lacking in
+that element of manhood which, for want of a better name, we call
+character. It is something quite distinct from genius,&mdash;though all great
+geniuses are endowed with it. Hence we always think of Dante Alighieri,
+of Michelangelo, of Will Shakespeare, of John Milton,&mdash;while of such men
+as Gibbon and Hume we merely recall the works, and think of them as the
+author of this and that. As I prognosticated, I have made Poe my enemy
+by doing him a service.... Poe wishes to kick down the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_166" id="page_166">{166}</a></span> ladder by which
+he rose. He is welcome. But he does not attack me at a weak point. He
+probably cannot conceive of anybody’s writing for anything but a
+newspaper reputation or for posthumous fame, which is much the same
+thing magnified by distance. I have quite other aims.”</p>
+
+<p>Finally, Briggs himself lost all patience with Poe, and replied to this
+letter: “You have formed a correct estimate of Poe’s characterless
+character. I have never met a person so utterly deficient of high
+motive. He cannot conceive of anybody’s doing anything except for his
+own personal advantage; and he says, with perfect sincerity and entire
+unconsciousness of the exposition which it makes of his own mind and
+heart, that he looks upon all reformers as madmen; and it is for this
+reason that he is so great an egoist; he cannot conceive why the world
+should not feel an interest in whatever interests him, because he feels
+no interest himself in what does not personally concern him.”</p>
+
+<p>In all his critical writing after this time, Lowell never discussed Poe.
+His offhand characterization in “A Fable for Critics,”</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge,<br /></span>
+<span class="i8dt">. . . . . . . .<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who has written some things quite the best of their kind,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind,”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">passes at once into a lecture on his treatment of Longfellow. Poe was
+not a blackboard on which Lowell wrote his own virtues, but it is an
+illustration of the dominant ethical note in Lowell’s nature, especially
+at this time, that open as he was<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_167" id="page_167">{167}</a></span> to the influence of poetry, and
+keenly sensitive to the melody and color to be found in exquisite
+language, he could not detach poetry from character. In his leaning
+toward reform, he tried to take poetry with him as a fellow-worker, but
+I do not think this really affected his judgment of Poe, and Briggs’s
+amusing report of Poe’s consignment of reformers to the mad-house was
+not likely to gall him; his sense of humor would correct any irritation.
+But Lowell did hold his head high and was intoxicated with the spirit of
+idealism; he and his wife stimulated each other, and breathing this air,
+he was not in a mood to be indulgent toward what he conceived to be
+lower ideals. The biographical essay which a few years later he wrote on
+Keats shows clearly how desirous he was of bringing the few known facts
+of that poet’s life into accord with a lofty conception of the poetic
+spirit; standing uncomfortably near Poe, he was in danger of
+interpreting his poetry by the comment which his life afforded.</p>
+
+<p>Although literature then as always was the constant factor in Lowell’s
+resolve, the circumstances in which he was placed, and his own uneasy
+sense that he ought to bear his part in the moral uprising, led him to
+expend a good deal of energy this winter in political and ethical
+writing. He was living in the midst of the Society of Friends and
+breathing an atmosphere of anti-slavery reform; the great debate on
+Texas was raging, and, more than all, his wife by his side kept a steady
+flame of zeal burning. He let himself out once in verse<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_168" id="page_168">{168}</a></span> when he sent to
+the <i>Boston Courier</i> some stanzas headed “Another Rallying Cry by a
+Yankee,” in which, with a vehemence that allowed little breathing space
+for wit or humor, he declaimed against the iniquity of the Texas
+resolutions, then on the eve of passage, and made a passionate appeal to
+his native state to hold herself aloof from any compromise with slavery.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“O Spirit of the noble Past, when the old Bay State was free,”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">he began, and employed all the resources of type to make his protest
+heard:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“And though all other deeds of thine, dear Fatherland, should be<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Washed out, like writing upon sand, by Time’s encroaching sea,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That single word shall stand sublime, nor perish with the rest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">‘<span class="smcap">Though the whole world sanction slavery, in God’s name WE protest</span>!’<span class="lftspc">”</span><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">The final stanza was a burst of state independence:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">“No, if the old Bay State were sunk, and, as in days of yore,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">One single ship within her sides the hope of Freedom bore,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Run up again the pine tree flag, and on the chainless sea<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That flag should mark, where’er it waved, the island of the free!”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>In these verses, as in others of a similar nature, Lowell seems almost
+to have followed the lead of Whittier, who employed the same stanza in
+several of his anti-slavery poems written before this time.</p>
+
+<p>In his eager, impulsive desire to right wrongs, and his impatience at
+compromise, he chafed under the restraints laid upon him. The rebuff he
+received when he undertook to scarify the conscience of Congress in the
+pages of <i>The Broadway Journal</i> irritated him. He had hoped that the
+<i>Journal</i> would be a “powerful weapon in the hands of re<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_169" id="page_169">{169}</a></span>form,” and was
+disheartened. “The reason I have written no prose for him (Briggs),” he
+wrote his friend Carter, “has been because I knew not what to write
+about. The <i>Journal</i> shut its doors in the face of every subject in
+which I was mainly interested, and I could not bring myself (in writing
+for a friend especially) to undertake subjects in which, feeling no
+interest, I could not possibly write well.” He had engaged to write
+regularly for the <i>Pennsylvania Freeman</i>, but even here he did not, in
+his own mind, have a clear field. “I do not feel entirely free,” he says
+in a letter to Carter, “in what I write for the paper, as its conductors
+are rather timid.” That is the complaint of most young reformers, and
+yet the constraint which appears in his articles is due rather to the
+caution with which he feels his way along a path where he is likely to
+be misjudged than to any outside repressive influence. At least this may
+be inferred from a reading of two articles which he contributed to the
+<i>Freeman</i> and which were no doubt looked upon as very radical
+utterances. They had for their heading “The Church and Clergy,” and were
+deliberate inquiries into the nature of the religious bodies in America
+as tested by the attitude which they took, organically, toward the great
+question of political reform, especially as regarded the subject of
+slavery. In a letter to Longfellow written a few weeks after this date,
+Lowell puts his belief into two or three pregnant sentences. “Christ,”
+he says, “has declared war against the Christianity of the world, and it
+must down. There is no<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_170" id="page_170">{170}</a></span> help for it. The Church, that great bulwark of
+our practical Paganism, must be reformed from foundation to weathercock.
+Shall we not wield a trowel, nay, even carry the heavy bricks and mortar
+for such an enterprise? But I will not ride over you with my
+hard-mouthed hobby.”</p>
+
+<p>In the two editorial articles referred to, Lowell takes the ground that
+when there is dereliction to pure ideals on the part of the more refined
+and intellectual members of the church, especially of those in the
+priestly order, there will be the greater zeal of the more brutal and
+unintelligent in defence of the church, and instances the cries of the
+Jewish populace for the crucifixion of the Saviour, the mob at Athens
+that condemned Socrates to drink the hemlock, and, taking a very recent
+example: “It was the most brutal and degraded of the English population
+which assaulted the pure-minded Wesley, and cock-fighting, horse racing,
+drunken priests and justices established their orthodoxy to the
+satisfaction of so competent a constituency by reviling or indicting
+him. Now that it has become necessary to protest against Protestantism,
+it is the ignorant and unthinking who are so eager to defend the right
+of private judgment by tarring and feathering all who differ with them.”
+The mass of men, Lowell goes on to say, love an easy religion, which
+affords a cheap and marketable kind of respectability. “Puritanism has
+always been unpopular among them as a system which demands too much and
+pays too little.” The clergy, too, in the United States, being<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_171" id="page_171">{171}</a></span>
+dependent upon their hearers for support, unconsciously slip into the
+habit of adapting themselves to the prejudices and weaknesses of their
+supporters. Thus by degrees the church and religion are held to be
+synonymous terms, and the church becomes a kind of private estate,
+silent in the face of a great evil which the great body of Christian
+people has learned to tolerate. In point of fact true religious
+sentiment is the most powerful weapon in the world against slavery and
+all other social vices, but the religious system of the country as
+corrupted by connivance with evil is the greatest obstacle in the way.
+The only sure way of accomplishing its great object is for the church to
+keep in advance of popular morality, and “the surest and safest test for
+deciding when the time has arrived for the church to take another step
+forward is by observing whether it is reverenced by the wisest of its
+members as merely an external symbol of some former manifestation of
+Divinity, or is reverenced as containing in itself a present and living
+Divineness.”</p>
+
+<p>But why, it might be asked, should the clergy be picked out for blame in
+the matter of upholding slavery, rather than any other class, as that of
+the merchants for example? The answer is plain. If the church professed
+to be no more than a society of private citizens meeting once a week,
+the clergyman would be simply the chairman of the gathering, and a
+mouthpiece of the majority. But the church sets up the claim to be of
+divine origin and the depository of truth. If this be so, it should<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_172" id="page_172">{172}</a></span>
+always be in advance of public opinion. “It should not wait till the
+Washingtonians, by acting the part which, in virtue of the station it
+arrogates to itself, should have been its own, had driven it to sign the
+pledge and hold fellowship with the degraded and fallen. It should not
+wait until the Abolitionists, by working a change in the sentiment of
+the people, have convinced it that it is more politic to sympathize with
+the slave than with the slave-owner, before it ventures to lisp the
+alphabet of anti-slavery. The glorious privilege of leading the forlorn
+hope of truth, of facing the desperate waves of prejudice, of making
+itself vile in the eyes of men by choosing the humblest means of serving
+the despised cause of the master it professes to worship, all these
+belong to it in right of the position it assumes.” And he calls upon the
+clergy to produce certificates of martyrdom before he will accept the
+claims they set up for themselves.</p>
+
+<p>The whole discussion is characterized by sincerity and a scarcely veiled
+sarcasm, and is interesting not only as showing Lowell’s thought at the
+time on a burning subject, but also as disclosing a certain academic air
+as if he had written carefully and with restraint, perhaps thinking how
+it would sound to his father’s ear. There is hardly more than a faint
+suggestion of the wit and humor which marked his later political
+writing, and there is one passage which may be noted as distinctly
+literary in tone. “In many parts of Germany,” he writes, “there are
+legends of buried churches and convents, whose<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_173" id="page_173">{173}</a></span> bells are often heard,
+and in which, now and then, some person by a lucky chance can hear the
+monks chanting the ritual of many centuries ago. It seems to us that the
+religion of our churches is of very much the same subterranean and
+traditionary kind. To one walking in the pure light of upper day, the
+sound of their service seems dim and far off, and, if he catches a word
+here and there, it is an obsolete language which does not appeal to the
+present heart and soul, but only to a vague reverence for what is
+ancient, a mysterious awe for what is past.”</p>
+
+<p>The winter had been passed in this experimental fashion, Mrs. Lowell
+translating poems from the German by her husband’s side, as he wrote now
+verse, now prose, intent on the questions of the day, yet never really
+giving himself out except now and then in some spontaneous bit of
+poetry. They made hosts of friends in Philadelphia and spent the last
+few weeks of their stay on a visit to the Davis family, with whom they
+had become close companions. Mrs. Hallowell, who was a child at the
+time, recalled the delight that attended their stay, especially the
+pleasure given the children by Mrs. Lowell, who told them fairy tales
+and recited ballads, giving the Caldon Low in a soft crooning voice
+sweeter than singing. They took a short driving tour with their hosts
+through Chester County, but near the end of May set out on their return
+to Cambridge, stopping by the way for a week’s visit with Mr. and Mrs.
+Briggs in Staten Island. They went home by way of Albany in order<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_174" id="page_174">{174}</a></span> to
+see Page, and by the middle of June were established at Elmwood, where
+they formed one household with Lowell’s father, mother, and sister.</p>
+
+<p>Lowell had not found himself out yet. He had, indeed, a premonitory
+consciousness of his strength. “I shall do something as an author yet,”
+he wrote to Briggs, 21 August, 1845. “It is my laziness and my
+dissatisfaction at everything I write that prevents me from doing more.”
+But he adds, “there is something, too, in feeling that the best part of
+your nature and your performance lies unmined and unappreciated.” For
+the present he seems to have written chiefly under the impulse created
+by some sudden affair, as in the verses “On the Capture of Fugitive
+Slaves near Washington,” which appeared in the <i>Boston Courier</i>, 19
+July, 1845. The lines were prefaced by this note to the editor, Mr.
+Buckingham:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Reading lately in the newspapers an account of the capture of some
+fugitive slaves, within a few miles of the Capital of our Republic, I
+confess my astonishment at finding no comments made upon what seemed to
+me an act of unparalleled inhumanity. Thirty unfortunate disciples of
+the Declaration of Independence pursued and captured by some two hundred
+armed minions of tyranny! It seems strange that a burst of indignation
+from one end of our free country to the other did not follow so
+atrocious a deed. At least it seemed a proper occasion for sympathy on
+the part of one of our daily papers which a year or two ago indorsed
+Lord Morpeth’s sentiment that<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_175" id="page_175">{175}</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘Who would be free themselves must strike the blow.’<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Though such a mode of emancipation is totally abhorrent to my feelings,
+and though I would earnestly deprecate any attempt at insurrection on
+the part of our slave population, yet I confess to the weakness of being
+so far human in my feelings as to sympathize deeply with these unhappy
+beings who have been thwarted in their endeavor to convert themselves
+from chattels into men by the peaceful method of simply changing their
+geographical position. Under these feelings, and believing you to be a
+man with sufficient confidence in the justness of your own opinions not
+to fear to publish sentiments which may chance to go beyond or even
+directly contravene your own, I wrote the following lines.”</p>
+
+<p>There is a prophetic ring to the verses which indicates how surely
+Lowell’s poetic spirit had absorbed the underlying truth of
+abolitionism. The poem is far less declamatory, more profoundly
+indignant than the Texas verses which he had printed in the same paper.
+The intimation which he gave in his prefatory note, that his sentiment
+might be unacceptable even to so hearty and honest a hater of slavery as
+Mr. Buckingham, plainly points to the doubt expressed whether a higher
+allegiance might not demand a revolt from the constitution and union if
+they were found to be the impregnable defence of slavery,&mdash;a doubt which
+was already certainty in the minds of the most radical of the
+abolitionists; but the stage of doubt was as far as Lowell ever went,
+and this may be taken<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_176" id="page_176">{176}</a></span> as the utmost expression which he ever
+reached.<a name="FNanchor_50_50" id="FNanchor_50_50"></a><a href="#Footnote_50_50" class="fnanchor">[50]</a> The poem was vigorous enough to make an impression, and
+successive numbers of the <i>Courier</i> show two long-winded writers
+knocking away at the spectre of Dissolution which the poem had
+raised.<a name="FNanchor_51_51" id="FNanchor_51_51"></a><a href="#Footnote_51_51" class="fnanchor">[51]</a></p>
+
+<p>Although the summer of 1845 does not seem to have yielded much in the
+way of verse or prose, Lowell had quite definitely taken ground as a man
+of letters. There was no more talk of the law, and he even dropped lines
+of correspondence which had marked his old carelessness of occupation.
+“You hint in your last letter,” he wrote to E. M. Davis in October, that
+it must be very easy for me to write, because writing is my profession,
+while in truth this is precisely what makes it hard. You must recollect
+that it is vacation time with me when the pen is out of my hand. Before
+I became an author I used to write multitudes of letters to my friends.
+Then, wherever I set my foot, thoughts rose up before me short winged
+and chirping as the flights of grasshoppers which spring from the path
+of one who walks in September stubble-fields. The post-office was my
+safety-valve, which eased me in a trice of all my too explosive
+thoughts, humors, and moods. Now my thoughts take a higher and wider
+flight, and are not so easily followed and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_177" id="page_177">{177}</a></span> defined by the eye. I
+confess that my opinions seem to me of less importance.”<a name="FNanchor_52_52" id="FNanchor_52_52"></a><a href="#Footnote_52_52" class="fnanchor">[52]</a></p>
+
+<p>By his regular and his random writing Lowell had met the expense of his
+winter in Philadelphia, and with his simple mode of life and his horror
+of debt it was not a very serious problem which his livelihood
+presented. Elmwood gave shelter, and the young couple shared the family
+economy. A little more ease, however, was to come through the accession
+of Mrs. Lowell to a share in the estate of her father, who died suddenly
+in September of this year. “I suppose,” Lowell writes in the letter just
+quoted, “that when the estate is settled (Mr. White died intestate) we
+shall be the possessors of $20,000 or more. I confess I hardly feel so
+independent as before. I believe that in this age poverty needs to have
+apostles, and I had resolved to be one, but I suppose God knows what is
+best for me, or the event would not have happened. That I should ever
+have lived to be such a nabob!”<a name="FNanchor_53_53" id="FNanchor_53_53"></a><a href="#Footnote_53_53" class="fnanchor">[53]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_178" id="page_178">{178}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>One of the effects of this modest fortune was to give the Lowells a
+further sense of independence and to lead them to form plans of travel
+and life abroad, for from the first the frailty of Mrs. Lowell’s health
+had been a factor in all their problems. They meant to go again to
+Philadelphia the next spring, and they looked forward to going to Italy
+in the coming fall for a two or three years’ residence. “Now that we
+know the amount of our property,” Mrs. Lowell wrote shortly after to
+Mrs. Davis, “it seems quite doubtful whether we shall be able to travel
+much; but we can live in Italy as cheaply as at home, and have all the
+advantages of climate and beautiful works of art besides.”</p>
+
+<p>On the last day of the year their first child was born, and they gave
+her the name of Blanche in gentle allusion to Mrs. Lowell’s maiden name.
+Lowell wrote the news in a brief note on New Year’s Day, 1846, to Mr.
+Davis: “Our little daughter Blanche was born yesterday afternoon at
+3-1/2 o’clock. She is a very fine hearty child, very<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_179" id="page_179">{179}</a></span> fair and white,
+with red cheeks, and looks already a month old. Maria, thank God, is
+quite well.... Our fair has been eminently successful, more so than any
+hitherto. I received your tract only a day or two since, having only
+been to Boston once or twice for the last two months. I am much obliged
+to you for it, though my thankfulness is almost used up by the baby.”</p>
+
+<p>How happy the parents were in their anticipation may be read in the
+affectionate terms in which Lowell had confided their hopes late in
+August to his friend Briggs. “Never mind what our child will be (if it
+should be born safely), we can at least enjoy our parentship now and
+fancy what glories we please of our little darling. We have christened
+it long ago. If she is a girl she is to be named Blanche (White), a
+sweet name, thus uniting Maria’s family name with mine. If a boy we
+shall call him Perceval, that being the given name of the first Lowle
+who set foot in America, and having, moreover, a pretty diminutive
+(Percie), an important thing for a boy. Now, do not set your wits at
+work to discover prophetically the unhearworthy nickname which the
+perverse ingenuity of boys will twist out of it at school. He shall
+never go to school. The only reason I have for a preference of sex is
+that girls ordinarily resemble the father most, and boys the mother.
+Therefore I hope for a boy, and if you knew Maria (I call her mother
+already) as well as I do, you would hope so too. It is true I can never
+persuade her of the force of this argument&mdash;because she does not<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_180" id="page_180">{180}</a></span> know
+how good she is. When people arrive at that pitch of consciousness they
+are generally good for nothing.” And then follows the half-prophetic
+passage: I have never forgotten the sympathy I felt with your hopes and
+your disappointment in a similar case.... I look upon death so
+constantly and surely as but a continuation of life (after the glad
+removal or subsidence of the plethora of flesh which now chokes half the
+spirit out of us) that I shall be quite willing to send before us such
+an ambassador as our little angel would be if he goes sooner than we do.
+At all events, nothing can ever take away from me the joy I have already
+had in it.” The haunting fear which every young father has at such a
+time, and which Lowell intimates in these lines, was not made real at
+once, but the child lived with them only a brief fourteen months. It is
+touching to find Mrs. Lowell a month before the birth of her child
+writing verses of profound sympathy entitled “The Slave Mother,” in
+which she reflects the anguish such a mother feels on the birth of her
+child; and on the same day Lowell was writing his poem “The Falcon,”
+though in its original form, entitled “The Falconer,” it was longer and
+filled with a certain savage indignation over the quarry upon which the
+falcon, Truth, descends. Both poems were contributed to “The Liberty
+Bell,” published for the anti-slavery bazaar which was held each
+December in Boston. This was the social rally of the abolitionists and a
+resource with which to meet the modest demands of a crusade into which
+men and women threw them<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_181" id="page_181">{181}</a></span>selves without counting the cost. Before and
+after her marriage Mrs. Lowell took an active part in the bazaar under
+the generalship of Mrs. Chapman. Lowell hits off the characteristics of
+those who were conspicuous in the local movement most wittily in his
+“Letter from Boston,” which he sent to the <i>Pennsylvania Freeman</i>, at
+the close of 1846.</p>
+
+<p>The little child filled a large place in Lowell’s letters to his
+intimate friends. Briggs had sent a message to the newcomer, and Lowell
+replied: “Blanche was asleep when I read your kind wishes about her, and
+I did not dare to disturb her in an occupation in which she is
+sedulously perfecting herself by the most diligent practice. She has not
+yet learned our method of speech, and I to my sorrow have almost
+forgotten hers, so that I cannot honestly send any authentic messages
+from her to you. If you have been more happy than I in retaining a
+knowledge of the dialect of your infancy, you will perhaps be able to
+make something out of her remarks on hearing that she had loving friends
+so far away. ‘A <i>goo</i> (pianissimo) <i>ah</i> goo, errrrrr, ahg&mdash;(cut off by a
+kind of melodious jug-jug in her throat, as if she liked the phrase so
+well she must needs try to swallow it) ah! (fortissimo) a goo,’ followed
+by a smile which began in the dimple on her chin, and thence spread,
+like the circles round a pebble thrown into sunshiny water, with a
+golden ripple over the whole of her person, being most distinctly
+ecstatic in her fingers and toes. The speech was followed by a searching
+glance at her father, in whose arms she had her throne, to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_182" id="page_182">{182}</a></span> assure
+herself of his identity, and of her consequent security.”</p>
+
+<p>A more exact knowledge of the amount of the legacy received from Mr.
+White’s estate and the income to be derived from it led the Lowells to
+abandon their first intention of going abroad soon, but, apparently in
+anticipation of such an emergency, Lowell had resolved to acquire a
+better colloquial knowledge of French. “As an evidence of my
+proficiency,” he writes to Briggs, “let me set down here an impromptu
+translation of that Chevy Chace of the nursery, ‘Three children sliding
+on the ice.’ As it is my first attempt at the ‘higher walks’ of French
+poetry, you must read it with due allowance.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Trois enfants glissants sur la glace,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Tous en un jour d’été,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Tous tomberent, as it came to pass,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Les autres s’enfuyaient.”<a name="FNanchor_54_54" id="FNanchor_54_54"></a><a href="#Footnote_54_54" class="fnanchor">[54]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>There was an incident at this time which illustrates the sensitiveness
+of the anti-slavery mind. The weight of literature was thrown against
+slav<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_183" id="page_183">{183}</a></span>ery, and it was a matter of pride and rejoicing that the most
+popular American poet, Longfellow, should bear his testimony in a thin
+volume of “Poems on Slavery.” But a Philadelphia publishing house, Cary
+&amp; Hart, brought out a handsomely illustrated volume of his poetical
+works, from which this group of poems was omitted, and the leaders of
+the anti-slavery movement were indignant at what they regarded as the
+poet’s pusillanimity. Their journals attacked him bitterly, especially
+the <i>National Anti-Slavery Standard</i>, edited by Mrs. Chapman, Edmund
+Quincy, and Sydney Howard Gay. Lowell’s comments on the matter are
+interesting as throwing light on the attitude of his mind upon the
+question of the poet and his mission, which we have seen was so vital a
+one in his early history. He wrote to Briggs 18 February, 1846: ... “I
+never wrote a letter which was not a sincere portrait of my mind at the
+time, and therefore never one whose contents can hold a rod over me. My
+pen has not yet traced a line of which I am either proud or ashamed, nor
+do I believe that many authors have written less from <i>without</i> than I,
+and therefore more piously. And this puts me in mind of Longfellow’s
+suppression of his anti-slavery pieces. Sydney Gay wishes to know
+whether I think he spoke too harshly of the affair. I think he <i>did</i>,
+even supposing the case to be as he put it, and this not because I agree
+with what he tells me is your notion of the matter&mdash;that it is
+interfering with the freedom of an author’s will (though I think<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_184" id="page_184">{184}</a></span> you
+were <i>ironing</i> with that grave face of yours)&mdash;for I do not think that
+an author has a right to suppress anything that <i>God</i> has given him&mdash;but
+because I believe that Longfellow esteemed them of inferior quality to
+his other poems. For myself, when I was printing my second volume of
+poems, Owen wished to suppress a certain ‘Song sung at an Anti-Slavery
+Picnic.’ I never saw him, but he urged me with I know not what worldly
+arguments. My only answer was&mdash;‘Let all the others be suppressed if you
+will&mdash;<i>that</i> I will never suppress.’ I believe this was the first
+audible knock my character made at the door of Owen’s heart&mdash;he loves me
+now and I him. My calling is clear to me. I am never lifted up to any
+peak of vision and moments of almost fearful inward illumination I have
+sometimes&mdash;but that, when I look down, in hope to see some valley of the
+Beautiful Mountains, I behold nothing but blackened ruins, and the moans
+of the downtrodden the world over, but chiefly here in our own land,
+come up to my ear instead of the happy songs of the husbandmen reaping
+and binding the sheaves of light yet these, too, I hear not seldom. Then
+I feel how great is the office of Poet, could I but even dare to hope to
+fill it. Then it seems as if my heart would break in pouring out one
+glorious song that should be the gospel of Reform, full of consolation
+and strength to the oppressed, yet falling gently and restoringly as dew
+on the withered youth-flowers of the oppressor. That way my madness
+lies.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_185" id="page_185">{185}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>In the same letter, with the long-reaching speculation of a father over
+his first child, the subject of Blanche’s training is touched upon with
+a half serious, half playful exaggeration. Lowell had been writing
+humorously of his chivalric feelings toward dependents like the maid of
+all work in the house, and he breaks out: “I mean to bring up Blanche to
+be as independent as possible of all <i>man</i> kind. I was saying the other
+day to her mother (who has grown lovelier than ever) that I hoped she
+would be a great, strong, vulgar, mud-pudding-baking, tree-climbing
+little wench. I shall teach her to swim, to skate, and to walk twenty
+miles a day as her father can&mdash;and by the time she is old enough, I do
+not despair of seeing the world so good that she can walk about at night
+alone without any danger. You ask the color of her eyes. They are said
+to be like her father’s,&mdash;but, in my opinion, they are of quite too
+heavenly a blue for that. But I do not think the color of the eyes of
+much import. I never notice it in those I love, or in any eyes where I
+can see deeper than the cornea and iris. I do not know the color of my
+father’s eyes, or of any of my sisters’ (except from hearsay), nor
+should I know that of Maria’s except from observations for that special
+end. But where your glance is arrested at the surface, where these
+windows are, as it were, daubed over with paint (like those of rooms
+where menial or unsightly offices are performed which we do not wish the
+world to see, or where something is exhibited for pay) to balk
+insight&mdash;then the color is<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_186" id="page_186">{186}</a></span> the chief sight noticeable. I do not believe
+that the finest eyes have any special hue&mdash;and this is probably the
+ground for the fallacy that poets’ eyes are gray&mdash;a kind of neutral
+color.”</p>
+
+<p>In January, 1846, the publication was begun of the <i>London Daily News</i>,
+a paper which represented the most advanced liberal thought in politics
+and was for a short time conducted by Dickens. For this paper Lowell
+agreed to write a series of articles on “Anti-slavery in the United
+States.” His name was not to appear. Indeed, the scheme intended an
+historical sketch of the reform by one in sympathy with it, but not
+confessedly by an abolitionist. In pursuance of the plan four articles
+appeared in the months of February, March, April, and May, 1846, and the
+manner of treatment plainly supposed a much longer continuance, but it
+is probable that certain changes in the management of the paper rendered
+a continuance inexpedient; for in June the paper was lessened from a
+double sheet of eight pages to a single one of four, and the price
+reduced, leaving small opportunity for the leisurely essays which had
+formerly found place. The four papers did little more than clear the
+way, and really brought the historical sketch only down to the
+establishment of <i>The Liberator</i> by Mr. Garrison. For the most part the
+treatment is little more than an orderly and somewhat perfunctory
+recital of well-known facts, but once or twice the writer breaks forth
+into his more personal speech. Thus in the first article occurs this
+passage:<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_187" id="page_187">{187}</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Unless we draw an erring augury from the past, that devoted little band
+who have so long maintained the bleak Thermopylæ of Freedom, remembering
+those in bonds as bound with them, as now they are the scoff and by-word
+of prospering iniquity, so will they be reckoned the Saints, Confessors,
+and Martyrs in the calendar of coming time, and the statues of Garrison,
+Maria Chapman, Phillips, Quincy, and Abby Kelley will fill those niches
+in the National Valhalla which a degraded public sentiment has left
+empty for such earthen demi-gods as Jackson, Webster and Clay.” Again
+the final article, after dealing with the Missouri Compromise,
+introduces Mr. Garrison upon the scene by quoting the preface to the
+first number of <i>The Liberator</i>, and goes on to say:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Now for the first time indeed Slavery felt itself assailed genuinely
+and in thorough earnest. But editors and other proprietors of public
+opinion manufactories in the Free States were slower of perception. They
+had not the warning of that instinctive terror which informed the
+slaveholder of the approach of danger. But they were soon satisfied of
+the dreadful truth that there existed in their very midst one truly
+sincere and fearless man, and instantly a prolonged shriek of execration
+and horror quavered from the Aroostook to the Red River. They saw, with
+a thrill of apprehension for the security of their offices or of their
+hold upon public consideration what treasonable conclusions might be
+legitimately drawn from their own harmless premises, harmless only so
+long as<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_188" id="page_188">{188}</a></span> there was no man honest enough to make an application of them,
+and so cast suspicion on the motives of all. If the pitch and tow
+fulminations of Salmoneus had been suddenly converted into genuine bolts
+of Jupiter, he could not have dropped them from his hands with a more
+confounded alacrity. Here was a man gifted with a most excruciating
+sincerity and frankness, a hungry conscience that could not be sated
+with the cheap workhouse gruel of smooth words, and inconveniently
+addicted to thinking aloud.”</p>
+
+<p>The article closes with this striking diagnosis:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“The advent of Garrison was indeed an event of historical moment. The
+ban of outlawry was set on Slavery, and its doom was sealed. It matters
+not that since that time Slavery has won some of its most alarming
+victories. The nucleus of a sincere uncompromising hostility to it was
+formed. A clear issue between right and wrong, disentangled from the
+mists of extraneous interests, was presented to men’s minds. The
+question was removed from the dust and bewilderment of political strife
+to the clear and calm retirements of God’s justice and individual
+conscience. Henceforth the struggle must be not between the Northern and
+Southern States, but between barbarism and civilization, between cruelty
+and mercy, between evil and good. This was already in itself a victory,
+a triumph which would have been enough to round the long life struggle
+of a reformer with peace. Exaltation was achieved by the mere look, as
+it were, of an unknown, solitary, and friendless youth,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_189" id="page_189">{189}</a></span> so full was it
+of the potent conjuration of honesty and veracity. Whatever may be the
+contents of government mails and official bulletins, the shining feet of
+the messengers of Nature are constant and swift to bring to the ears of
+the lowly servant of Truth at least the sustaining news&mdash;that God still
+exists, and that He may select even the bruised reed for his
+instrument.”</p>
+
+<p>It is not materially anticipating to record here what Lowell wrote of
+Garrison a couple of years later, when he was defining his own position
+on abolitionism, to his friend Briggs: “Garrison is so used to standing
+alone that, like Daniel Boone, he moves away as the world creeps up to
+him, and goes farther into the wilderness. He considers every step a
+step forward, though it be over the edge of a precipice. But, with all
+his faults (and they are the faults of his position), he is a great and
+extraordinary man. His work may be over, but it has been a great work.
+Posterity will forget his hard words, and remember his hard work. I look
+upon him already as an historical personage, as one who is in his
+niche.... I love you (and love includes respect); I respect Garrison
+(respect does not include love). There never has been a leader of Reform
+who was not also a blackguard. Remember that Garrison was so long in a
+position where he alone was right and all the world wrong, that such a
+position has created in him a habit of mind which may remain, though
+circumstances have wholly changed. Indeed, a mind of that cast is
+essential to a Reformer. Luther<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_190" id="page_190">{190}</a></span> was as infallible as any man that ever
+held St. Peter’s keys.” But the most condensed expression of his feeling
+toward this remarkable man, who so dominated the anti-slavery movement,
+is to be found in the verses addressed to him beginning&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“In a small chamber, friendless and unseen.”<a name="FNanchor_55_55" id="FNanchor_55_55"></a><a href="#Footnote_55_55" class="fnanchor">[55]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>In May, 1846, occurred one of those personal incidents which stirred
+deeply the heart of the anti-slavery crusader and was made the occasion
+of public testimony. The Rev. Charles Turner Torrey, who had been an
+active writer and worker in the cause, and in 1834 was shut up in the
+penitentiary in Baltimore for having aided slaves to escape, died in
+May, 1846, of disease brought on by ill usage. He was of New England
+birth and his body was brought to Boston for burial. Besides the burial
+service there was a public meeting in Faneuil Hall on the evening of 18
+May. Dr. Henry I. Bowditch, an ardent supporter of the anti-slavery
+cause and one of the committee in charge, wrote to Lowell on the 3d of
+the month, telling him that private advices led them to expect hourly
+the news of Torrey’s death, and that the plan was on foot for a public
+funeral service. If this is done,” he says, “we shall hope to hear from
+the poets of our land, the true ministers of God and of Christ, at the
+present<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_191" id="page_191">{191}</a></span> era.... May I receive from your heart of love and high-souled
+honor sentiments such as I have not a few times obtained from your
+free-hearted poetry?” No appeal could have used so cogent an argument as
+that which thus characterized the poet, and Lowell responded with the
+lines, “On the Death of Charles Turner Torrey,” which were read at the
+meeting in Faneuil Hall by Dr. Channing. Dr. Bowditch thanked the poet
+for the response to his request, but doubted if the poem was not of too
+charitable a tenor. “Your poetry,” he says, “is a harbinger of better
+hours, but not for this century, as I fear we have missed the great idea
+of our existence and a new cycle of time must pass its round, and a new,
+a lovelier race of beings must settle on this earth ere man shall truly
+appreciate the divine doctrine you enunciate in the last line of your
+verses.”</p>
+
+<p>Lowell had now become clearly identified with the anti-slavery cause and
+did not shrink from using the phrase “we abolitionists.” His reputation
+as a poet had steadily risen. He was contemplating a second series of
+his “Conversations,” and though he rarely used the instrument of poetry
+in direct attack, much of his verse sounded those notes of freedom and
+truth which were, even when abstractly used, rightly regarded as
+dominant notes in the songs of the times. The leaders of the
+anti-slavery cause welcomed him as an important coadjutor. At this time
+the <i>National Anti-Slavery Standard</i> was passing through one of the
+several changes sure to overtake the management of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_192" id="page_192">{192}</a></span> journal which was
+the organ of such a bundle of individualities as would make up a reform
+party. The <i>Standard</i> was the official paper of the American
+Anti-Slavery Society, as the <i>Liberator</i> was the individual mouthpiece
+of Mr. Garrison. The <i>Standard</i> had been conducted successively by Mrs.
+Lydia Maria Child and her husband, David Lee Child. The former, who had
+marked literary ability and a fondness for the art of literature, had
+directed the paper in such a way as to win the attention of other than
+pronounced abolitionists; the latter had a stronger interest in legal
+and constitutional questions, and his disquisitions, which were
+inordinately long, must have wearied the readers whom it was desirable
+to gain over. Those who merely wished to hear their beliefs sounded may
+have had no fault to find, but these did not need conversion. The paper,
+therefore, passed in 1844 into the hands of Mrs. Chapman, Edmund
+Quincy,<a name="FNanchor_56_56" id="FNanchor_56_56"></a><a href="#Footnote_56_56" class="fnanchor">[56]</a> and Sydney Howard Gay, who augmented the energy and
+diversity of the journal, but did not succeed in arresting the decline
+of its subscription list. In the spring of 1846 the paper had only about
+1400 paying subscribers.</p>
+
+<p>A further change seemed desirable, and the sensible one was made of
+concentrating the responsibility in the hands of one person, Mr. Gay,
+and endeavoring to reënforce him with an imposing list of regular
+contributors. This list was published<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_193" id="page_193">{193}</a></span> 11 June, 1846, and comprised
+these names: Eliza Lee Follen, Rev. John Weiss, Charles F. Briggs,
+Wendell Phillips, James Russell Lowell, Maria Weston Chapman, Dr.
+William F. Channing, Rev. Thomas T. Stone, Edmund Quincy, and, a little
+later, Rev. Samuel May. It will be seen thus that there was a tolerable
+admixture of literature with polemics. Lowell had been urged to take a
+prominent place, and consented out of readiness to cast in his lot with
+the men and women who were heading the forlorn hope. He was perfectly
+aware, however, of a certain incompatibility of temper and aims which
+disqualified him from an unreserved submersion of his powers in this
+cause. The letter in which he gives in his adherence to the plan defines
+with much clearness his own consciousness of his vocation, and the very
+humorousness of the introduction intimates that he held off from the
+task of stating his position, as well as exhibits a mercurial
+temperament that would inevitably refuse to be kept within very exact
+limits. The letter is so important a disclosure of Lowell’s mind at this
+time that it must be given entire, though the most significant part has
+already been printed by Mr. Norton. Mr. Gay had written him under date
+of May, 1846: “It is with no little satisfaction that I welcome you into
+our company of standard-bearers to the anti-slavery host. I have long
+wished to see you actively engaged among us, and even had I no personal
+interest in the matter, the position you have chosen is precisely the
+one I should best like to see you in. You could nowhere do more good,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_194" id="page_194">{194}</a></span>
+and in no other way could you become so thoroughly identified with the
+cause. It is the historical cause of our day, and as the Future will
+know you as a Poet, she should find in our records additional evidence
+that you understood and fulfilled your mission.”</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p class="c">
+<i>To Sydney Howard Gay.</i><br />
+</p>
+
+<p class="r">
+<span class="smcap">Elmwood</span>, June 16, 1846.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">My dear Gay</span>,&mdash;if<a name="FNanchor_57_57" id="FNanchor_57_57"></a><a href="#Footnote_57_57" class="fnanchor">[57]</a> there be any disjointedness in this letter,
+you must lay it to the fact that I am officiating this morning as
+general nurseryman and babytender, and am consequently obliged
+every now and then to ripple the otherwise smooth current of my
+epistolary communications with such dishevelled oratorical
+flourishes as “kitser, kee&mdash;eetser!” “jigger jig, jigger jig!” and
+the like accompanied with whatever extemporary hushmoney may be
+within grasp in the shape of spoons, whistles, pieces of paper and
+rattles. As I can conceive of no severer punishment that could be
+inflicted on certain authors than to be Robinson Crusoed on some
+desolate island with no companion but the offspring of their brain,
+so I do not know of any blessing more absorbing of all the
+faculties, demanding more presence of mind and more of that eternal
+vigilance which is the price of liberty, but which in this case
+fails to attain it, than that of being islanded in a room eighteen
+feet square with the “sole daughter of one’s house and home.”
+Then,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_195" id="page_195">{195}</a></span> besides these parental responsibilities, there are the
+<i>aliena negotia centum</i> which have in the present instance made a
+gap of three hours between this sentence and the last. Added to all
+these is the metallic pen which I resisted manfully, but to which I
+have succumbed at last, and which, while it obliterates all
+distinctions of chirography, has, in conjunction with the other
+accoutrements of easy writing (such as Reviews and newspapers),
+hastened the decline and fall, and finally made complete shipwreck
+of the letterwriters, as well as of the foliomakers. It is no
+longer ‘the mob of <i>gentlemen</i> who write with ease,’ but the very
+mob itself&mdash;that <i>profanum vulgus</i> whom Horace Naso (<i>sic</i>) would
+have us hate and keep at arm’s length&mdash;can buy steel pens by the
+gross and proceed Master of arts <i>per saltum</i>. We have got now to
+that pitch when uneducated men (self-educated they are called) are
+all the rage, and the only learned animals who continue to be
+popular are pigs. The public will rush after a paper which they are
+told is edited by a practical printer, and is eager to shape its
+ideas after the model of men who have none. We shall ere long see
+advertised “Easy lessons in Latin by a gentleman who can bring
+testimonials that he knows no more of the language than Mr. Senator
+Webster;” “The High School Reader, being a selection of popular
+pieces for reading and declamation by a Lady, who is just learning
+the alphabet under the distinguished tuition of herself, and who is
+nearly mistress of that delightful <i>mélange</i> of literary
+miscellanies.” The injury to letters arising from<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_196" id="page_196">{196}</a></span> an author’s
+losing that space for meditation which was formerly afforded him by
+the wise necessity of mending his pen is incalculable. Every one
+nowadays can write decently and nobody writes well. “Painfulness”
+is obsolete as a thing as well as in the capacity of a noun. No
+more Horace Walpoles, no more Baxters, and Whole Duties of men!</p>
+
+<p>But one would think that I had the whole summer before me for the
+writing of this letter. Let me come a little nearer the matter in
+hand. I wish a distinct understanding to exist between us in regard
+to my contributions for the <i>Standard</i>. When Mrs. Chapman first
+proposed that I should become a contributor I told her frankly that
+it was a duty for which (having commenced author very early and got
+indurated in certain modes of authorship and life) I was totally
+unfitted. I was satisfied with the <i>Standard</i> as it was. The paper
+has never been so good since I have seen it, and no abolitionist
+could reasonably ask a better. I feared that an uncoalescing
+partnership of several minds might deprive the paper of that
+<i>unity</i> of conception and purpose in which the main strength of
+every understanding lies. This, however, I did not urge, because I
+knew that a change was to be made at any rate. At the same time I
+was not only willing but desirous that my name should appear,
+because I scorned to be indebted for any share of my modicum of
+popularity to my abolitionism without incurring at the same time
+whatever odium might be attached to a complete identification with
+a body<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_197" id="page_197">{197}</a></span> of heroic men and women whom not to love and admire would
+prove me unworthy of either of those sentiments, and whose
+superiors in all that constitutes true manhood and womanhood I
+believe never existed. There were other considerations which
+weighed heavily with me to decline the office altogether. In the
+first place, I was sure that Mrs. Chapman and Mr. Garrison greatly
+overrated my popularity and the advantage which it would be to the
+paper to have my name attached to it. I am not flattering myself (I
+have too good an opinion of myself to do so), but judge from
+something Garrison said to me. It is all nonsense. However it may
+be in that glorious Hereafter (toward which no man who is good for
+anything can help casting half an eye) the reputation of a poet who
+has a high idea of his vocation, is resolved to be true to that
+vocation and hates humbug, must be small in his generation. The
+thing matters nothing to me, one way or the other, except when it
+chances to <i>take in</i> those whom I respect, as in the present case.
+I am <i>teres atque rotundus</i>, a microcosm in myself, my own author,
+public, critic, and posterity, and care for no other. But we
+abolitionists must get rid of a habit we have fallen into of
+affirming all the geese who come to us from the magic circle of
+Respectability to be swans. I said so about Longfellow and I said
+so about myself. What does a man more than his simple duty in
+coming out for the truth? and if we exhaust our epithets of
+laudation at this stage of the business, what shall we do if the
+man turns out to be a real<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_198" id="page_198">{198}</a></span> reformer, and does <i>more</i> than his
+duty? Beside, is it any sacrifice to be in the right? Has not being
+an abolitionist (as Emerson says of hell) its “infinite
+satisfactions” as well as those <i>infiniti guai</i> that Dante tells us
+of? To my mind</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“All other pleasures are not worth its pains.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>In the next place (turn back a page or two and you will find that I
+have laid down a “firstly”), if I have any vocation, it is the
+making of verse. When I take my pen for that, the world opens
+itself ungrudgingly before me, everything seems clear and easy as
+it seems sinking to the bottom would be as one leans over the edge
+of his boat in one of those dear coves at Fresh Pond. But, when I
+do prose, it is <i>invitâ Minerva</i>. I feel as if I were wasting time
+and keeping back my message. My true place is to serve the cause as
+a poet. Then my heart leaps on before me into the conflict. I write
+to you frankly as becomes one who is to be your fellow-worker. I
+wish you to understand clearly my capabilities that you may not
+attribute that to lukewarmness or indolence which is truly but an
+obedience to my Demon. Thirdly (I believe it is thirdly), I have
+always been a very Quaker in following the Light and writing only
+when the Spirit moved. This is a tower of strength which one must
+march out of in working for a weekly newspaper, and every man owes
+it to himself, so long as he does the duty which he sees, to remain
+here impregnably intrenched.</p>
+
+<p>Now, it seems to me that we contributors should<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_199" id="page_199">{199}</a></span> write just enough
+to allow you this privilege of only writing when the wind sits
+fair. Having stated the poetical <i>cons</i>, I will now state the plain
+<i>pros</i> of the matter. I will help you as much as I can and ought. I
+had rather give the cause one good poem than a thousand indifferent
+prose articles. I mean to send all the poems I write (on whatever
+subject) first to the <i>Standard</i>, except such arrows as I may deem
+it better to shoot from the ambushment of the <i>Courier</i>, because
+the old Enemy offers me a fairer mark from that quarter. I will
+endeavor also to be of service to you in your literary selections.</p>
+
+<p>I have told you what <i>I</i> expect to do. You must tell me in return
+what <i>you</i> expect me to do. I agree with you entirely in your
+notions as to the imprint and the initials.<a name="FNanchor_58_58" id="FNanchor_58_58"></a><a href="#Footnote_58_58" class="fnanchor">[58]</a> The paper must seem
+to be unanimous. Garrison is point blank the other way. But his
+vocation has not been so much to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_200" id="page_200">{200}</a></span> feel the pulse of the public as
+to startle it into a quicker heat, and if we who make the paper
+can’t settle it, who shall? I have one or two suggestions to make,
+but shall only hint at them, hoping to see you at Dedham on the
+14th prox^o. It seems to me eminently necessary that there should
+be an entire concert among us, and that, to this end, we should
+meet to exchange thoughts (those of us who are hereabout) and to
+wind each other up. We ought to know what each one’s “beat” is, and
+what each is going to write.</p>
+
+<p>Then, too, would it not be well to have a <i>Weekly Pasquil</i> (I do
+not call it <i>Punch</i> to avoid confusion), in which squibs and
+facetiæ of one kind or other may be garnered up? I am sure I come
+across enough comical thoughts in a week to make up a good share of
+any such corner, and Briggs and yourself and Quincy could help.</p>
+
+<p>You will find a squib of mine in this week’s <i>Courier</i>. I wish it
+to continue anonymous, for I wish Slavery to think it has as many
+enemies as possible. If I may judge from the number of persons who
+have asked me if I wrote it, I have struck the old hulk of the
+Public between wind and water. I suppose you will copy it, and if
+so I wish you would correct a misprint or two.... Give our best
+regards to your wife, and believe me, very truly your friend,</p>
+
+<p class="r">
+<span class="smcap">J. R. Lowell</span>.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>I shall send you a poem next week.<a name="FNanchor_59_59" id="FNanchor_59_59"></a><a href="#Footnote_59_59" class="fnanchor">[59]</a> </p></div><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_201" id="page_201">{201}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The “squib” to which Lowell refers in this letter was the first of the
+afterward famous “Biglow Papers,” introduced by the rustic letter of
+Ezekiel Biglow to Mister Eddyter. The poem was the one beginning</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Thrash away, you’ll <i>hev</i> to rattle<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On them kettle-drums o’ yourn,”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">and the stanzas themselves have the inspiriting dash and electrifying
+rat-tat-tat of this new recruiting-sergeant in the little army of
+anti-slavery reformers. Lowell himself felt that he had sounded a real
+summons in these verses, yet singularly enough it was more than a
+twelvemonth before he followed with another in the same vein. The poem
+was at once copied into the <i>Standard</i> before the corrections its author
+sent could be made, and the next week appeared the first of Lowell’s
+prose contributions, a column and a half on Daniel Webster, whose
+intellectual strength made him the special mark of those men of New
+England who wished to turn all the artillery of native make against the
+great foe. Whittier’s two poems “Ichabod” and “The Lost Occasion”
+express nobly the mingled love, pride, and deep anger with which the
+anti-slavery men regarded this strong nature. “Ichabod” was written
+after Webster’s speech of 7 March, 1850, and Whittier may well have
+carried in his memory a sentence from Lowell’s trenchant unsigned
+article: “Shall not the Recording Angel write <i>Ichabod</i> after the name
+of this man in the great book of Doom?”</p>
+
+<p>For some unexplained reason, though the con<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_202" id="page_202">{202}</a></span>nection was now made, for
+eighteen months after this editorial article Lowell printed little in
+the <i>Standard</i> save an occasional poem. The real connection was not made
+till the spring of 1848. In the number of the paper for 6 April of that
+year it was announced that for the ensuing volume the <i>Standard</i> would
+be under the charge of the present editor, Sydney Howard Gay, but with
+James Russell Lowell as corresponding editor. His name appeared thus on
+the headline of the paper and continued to keep its place until 31 May,
+1849, when Edmund Quincy’s name was bracketed with it. For a while Mr.
+Quincy’s name took the second place, but as his contributions increased
+and Lowell’s diminished, they changed places in order, and finally
+Lowell’s name, though without any public announcement, was dropped from
+the headline 27 May, 1852, many months after he had practically ceased
+to contribute.</p>
+
+<p>The definite arrangement which Lowell made with the Executive Committee
+of the American Anti-Slavery Society, who were the general managers of
+the <i>Standard</i>, was effected in a personal interview with Mr. Gay, who
+had come on to Dedham and there met Lowell. The conditions were simple
+and are rehearsed in a letter to Briggs, 26 March, 1848. Lowell was to
+receive a salary of $500 a year, and for this was to furnish a weekly
+contribution, either in verse or prose, but the verse was not to be
+restricted to direct attacks on slavery, and in his prose he now and
+then went outside the line of domestic politics, and occasion<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_203" id="page_203">{203}</a></span>ally even
+took up a distinctly literary topic. “The Committee,” writes Mr. Gay,
+“accepts your proviso of a termination to the arrangement whenever
+either party please, and accord to you any reasonable latitude in the
+choice of subjects that you may desire.” It was plain from the outset
+that Lowell was not overconfident of his ability to make the agreement
+one of mutual satisfaction. He felt that in his independence of thought
+he was not likely always to be at one with his associates, yet he was so
+heartily in accord with them in the fundamental doctrine of opposition
+to slavery, morally and politically, that he was glad of the opportunity
+of taking an active part in the fight. And then he undoubtedly looked to
+some advantage from the stimulus he should receive from the necessity of
+a weekly contribution. “I did not like,” he writes to Briggs, “to take
+pay for anti-slavery work, but as my abolitionism has cut me off from
+the most profitable sources of my literary emoluments, as the offer was
+unsolicited on my part, and as I wanted the money, I thought I had a
+right to take it. I have spent more than my income every year since I
+have been married, and that only for necessities. If I can once get
+clear, I think I can keep so. I do not agree with the abolitionists in
+their disunion and non-voting theories. They treat ideas as ignorant
+persons do cherries. They think them unwholesome unless they are
+swallowed stones and all.”</p>
+
+<p>The first number of the <i>Standard</i> under this new arrangement, that for
+6 April, 1848, which contained the announcement, held as Lowell’s
+ini<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_204" id="page_204">{204}</a></span>tial contribution his “Ode to France,” which no doubt he had written
+without regard to this publication, for it bears date “February, 1848,”
+and indicates that in his study at Elmwood he was looking out on the
+large world, and was brooding over those great general ideas of freedom
+which were the intellectual and moral furniture of his being. He could
+exclaim:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Since first I heard our North-wind blow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Since first I saw Atlantic throw<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On our grim rocks his thunderous snow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I loved thee, Freedom: as a boy<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The rattle of thy shield at Marathon<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Did with a Grecian joy<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Through all my pulses run:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But I have learned to love thee now<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Without the helm upon thy gleaming brow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">A maiden mild and undefiled,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Like her who bore the world’s redeeming child.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">And in the next number of the paper he had an article on “The French
+Revolution of 1848,” in which he wrote wittily of the flight of the
+“broker-king,” and exultingly of the triumph of the idea of the people.
+“Louis Philippe,” he wrote, “extinguished the last sparks of loyalty in
+France as effectually as if that had been the one object of his eighteen
+years’ reign. He had made monarchy contemptible. He had been a
+stock-jobber, a family match-maker. The French had seen their royalty
+gradually</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i11">‘melt,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thaw, and resolve itself into a <i>Jew</i>.’<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">During a long and peaceful reign, the king had in no way contrived to
+<i>grow on to</i> the people. He<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_205" id="page_205">{205}</a></span> was in no sense of the word a Head to them.
+A nation can be loyal to a Man, or to the representative of an Idea.
+Louis Philippe was neither. When all the Royalty of France can be
+comfortably driven out of it in a street-cab, one would think the
+experiment of a Republic might be safely ventured upon. To us the late
+events in Paris seem less a Revolution, than the quiet opening of a
+flower, [which,] before it can blossom, must detrude the capsule which
+has hitherto enveloped and compressed it.” The article disclosed
+Lowell’s eager faith in the French people as receptive and swift to
+appreciate and assimilate an idea. When in the summer the news came of
+mob violence, he wrote again, defending the workmen of Paris, and
+insisting upon it that the social order was to blame. “The great problem
+of the over-supply of labor,” he wrote, “is not to be settled by a
+decimation of the laboring class, whether by gunpowder or starvation.
+Society in a healthy condition would feel the loss of every pair of
+willing and useful hands thrust violently out of it. That these Parisian
+<i>ouvriers</i> were driven to rebellion by desperation is palpable. That
+they had ideas in their heads is plain from their conduct immediately
+after the Revolution. They were suffering then. It was they who had
+achieved the victory over the old order of things. In the then
+anarchistic state of the capital, rapine, had that been their object,
+was within easy reach. But the revolution of February was not the
+chaotic movement of men to whom any change was preferable to the
+wretched present.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_206" id="page_206">{206}</a></span> Not so much subversion as subversion for the sake of
+organization was what they aimed at. The giant Labor did not merely turn
+over from one side to the other for an easier position. Rather he rose
+up</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘Like blind Orion hungry for the morn.’<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">It was <i>light</i> which the people demanded. Social <i>order</i> was precisely
+the thing they wished for in the place of social chaos. Government was
+what they asked. They had learned by bitter experience that it was on
+the body of old King Log Laissez-faire that King Stork perched to devour
+them. <i>Let-alone</i> is good policy after you have once got your perfect
+system established to let alone. There is not in all history an instance
+of such heroic self-denial as that which was displayed by what it is the
+fashion to call the Mob of Paris during the few days immediately
+following the flight of the Orleans dynasty. What was the shield which
+the noble Lamartine held up between the Provisional Government and the
+people? Simply the Idea of the Republic! And this Idea was respected by
+starving men with arms in their hands.”</p>
+
+<p>The verses “To Lamartine,” also, which appeared in August, illustrate
+the appeal which French idealism made to Lowell’s mind. It is not
+surprising that the year 1848, which seemed at the time to witness the
+lifting of the lid from the Republican pot which was at the boiling
+point, should not only have quickened the pulse of lovers of freedom in
+America, but should have given<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_207" id="page_207">{207}</a></span> generous-minded men here a twinge of
+envy as they contrasted the sanguine expectancy of Europe with what they
+saw of the seared conscience of America; and in the papers just quoted
+Lowell turns fiercely upon the public expressions of sympathy with the
+ruling powers of Europe. It was a natural transition from these
+reflections on the movements in France to ask bitterly in his next
+editorial article, “Shall we ever be Republicans?” In this he speculates
+on the extraordinary lack of agreement in the United States between
+names and things, and finds slavery the opiate which has made men’s
+minds drowsy.</p>
+
+<p>“The truth is,” he declares, “that we have never been more than nominal
+republicans. We have never got over a certain shamefacedness at the
+disrespectability of our position. We feel as if when we espoused
+Liberty we had contracted a <i>mésalliance</i>. The criticism of the
+traveller who looks at us from a monarchical point of view exasperates
+us. Instead of minding our own business we have been pitifully anxious
+as to what would be thought of us in Europe. We have had Europe in our
+minds fifty times, where we have had God and conscience once. Our
+literature has endeavored to convince Europeans that we are as like them
+as circumstances would admit. The men who have the highest and boldest
+bearing among us are the slaveholders. We are anxious to be acknowledged
+as one of the great Powers of Christendom, forgetful that all the fleets
+and navies in the world are weak in comparison with one sentence in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_208" id="page_208">{208}</a></span>
+Declaration of Independence. When every other argument in favor of our
+infamous Mexican war has been exhausted, there was this still left&mdash;that
+it would make us more respected abroad. We are as afraid of our own
+principles as a raw recruit of his musket. As far as the outward
+machinery of our government is concerned, we are democratic only in our
+predilection for little men.</p>
+
+<p>“When will men learn that the only true conservatism lies in growth and
+progress, that whatever has ceased growing has begun to die? It is not
+the conservative, but the retarding element which resides in the pocket.
+It is droll to witness the fate of this conservatism when the ship of
+any state goes to pieces. It lashes itself firmly to the ponderous
+anchor it has provided for such an emergency, cuts all loose, and&mdash;goes
+to the bottom. There are a great many things to be done in this country,
+but the first is the abolition of slavery. If it were not so arrant a
+sin as it is, we should abolish it (if for no other reason) that it
+accustoms our public men to being cowards. We are astonished, under the
+present system, when a Northern representative gets so far as to surmise
+that his soul is his own, and make a hero of him forthwith. But we shall
+never have that inward fortunateness without which all outward
+prosperity is a cheat and delusion, till we have torn up this deadly
+upas, no matter with what dear and sacred things its pestilential roots
+may be entwined.”</p>
+
+<p>Lowell had said to Briggs that he was not at one with the Abolitionists
+who favored disunion,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_209" id="page_209">{209}</a></span> and with that sanity of political judgment which
+made it impossible for him to be a revolutionist even in theory, he saw
+not in politics and political institutions that finality which rests in
+an organic national life. Thus he never could be a blind partisan, and
+he was quick to see the shams and concealments which were hidden in the
+conventions of political terms. A clever English publicist once said
+that the Constitution forms a sort of false bottom to American political
+thinking, and Lowell, who was as ardent and sensitive an American as
+ever lived, played most amusingly in one of the earliest of these
+newspaper articles with the conceit of “The Sacred Parasol.” He told Gay
+afterward that he wished he had put his paper into rhyme. If he had, he
+would doubtless have caught and held more attention by such a satire.
+Citing the marvellous incident reported by Father John de Peano Carpini
+of the people in the land of Kergis, who dwelt under ground because they
+could not endure the horrible noise made by the sun when it rose, he
+applied the parable to American politics, only it is the mode of thought
+that is subterranean, not the habit of living. “As we manage everything
+by Conventions, we get together and resolve that the sun has not risen,
+and so settle the matter, as far as we are concerned, definitively.
+Meanwhile, the sun of a new political truth got quietly above the
+horizon in our Declaration of Independence. Watchers upon the mountain
+tops had caught sight of a ray now and then before, but this was the
+first time that the heavenly light<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_210" id="page_210">{210}</a></span>bringer had gained an objective
+existence in the eyes of an entire people.” This was all very well,
+until the light began to penetrate dark places which it was for the
+interest of certain people to keep dark. “Fears in regard to
+<i>heliolites</i> became now very common, and a parasol of some kind was
+found necessary as a protection against this celestial bombardment. A
+stout machine of parchment was accordingly constructed, and, under the
+respectable name of a Constitution, was interposed wherever there seemed
+to be danger from the hostile incursions of Light. Whenever this is
+spread, a dim twilight, more perplexing than absolute darkness, reigns
+everywhere beneath its shadow.... It is amazing what importance
+anything, however simple, gains by being elevated into a symbol.
+Mahomet’s green breeches were doubtless in themselves common things
+enough and would perhaps have found an indifferent market in Brattle or
+Chatham Street. They might have hung stretched upon a pole at the door
+of one of those second-hand repositories without ever finding a customer
+or exciting any feeling but of wonder at the uncouthness of their cut.
+But lengthen the pole a little, and so raise the cast-off garment into a
+banner or symbol, and it becomes at once full of inspiration, and
+perhaps makes a Western General Taylor of the very tailor who cut and
+stitched it and had tossed it over carelessly a hundred times.... In the
+same way this contrivance of ours, though the work of our own hands, has
+acquired a superstitious potency in our eyes. The vitality of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_211" id="page_211">{211}</a></span> the state
+has been transferred from the citizens to this. Were a sacrilegious
+assault made upon it, our whole body politic would collapse at once.
+Gradually men are beginning to believe that, like the famous <i>ancile</i> at
+Rome, it fell down from heaven, and it is possible that it may have been
+brought thence by a distinguished personage who once made the descent.
+Meanwhile our Goddess of Liberty is never allowed to go abroad without
+the holy parasol over her head to prevent her from being tanned, since
+any darkening of complexion might be productive of serious inconvenience
+in the neighborhood of the Capitol.” With this grave banter Lowell goes
+on to instance cases where the Sacred Parasol has caused a shifting of
+relations in the twilight created by it, and warns people of the danger
+they would be in if exposed to the direct rays of the Sun of
+Righteousness.</p>
+
+<p>The article shows the kind of reënforcement which Lowell brought to the
+anti-slavery camp. Edmund Quincy had something of the same wit and
+irony, but he had also a greater love of detail and busied himself over
+current incidents with the eagerness of a political detective, running
+down fugitives from divine justice with an ardor which was always
+heightened by the complexities of the case. Lowell, though he did not
+neglect to use incidents for the illustration of his argument, never got
+far away from the elemental principles for which his wit and sense of
+justice and love of freedom stood. He played with his subject often, but
+it was the play of a cat with his captive&mdash;one<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_212" id="page_212">{212}</a></span> stroke of the paw, when
+the time came, and the mouse was dead.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the little band of the faithful, for whom the <i>Anti-Slavery
+Standard</i> was a weekly rally, read with delight the incisive editorial
+articles, and though they were not always supplied with downright
+arguments from this source, they had, what they scarcely got otherwise
+in the midst of their tremendous seriousness, the opportunity to rub
+their hands with glee over a telling rapier thrust, and also to have
+their horizon suddenly enlarged by the historical and literary
+comparisons which were swept into range by this active-minded scout.</p>
+
+<p>The grim earnest in which Mr. Gay was working, in preparing for this
+weekly bombardment, left him little leisure for sitting down and
+admiring the mechanism of his guns, and Lowell in his retirement at
+Elmwood was more or less conscious of a certain doubt whether he was not
+firing blank cartridges. “You see,” he wrote, “that I have fallen into
+the fault which I told you I should be in danger of, viz., dealing too
+much in generalities. The truth is, I see so few papers except what are
+on our side that I cannot write a controversial article. I intend to
+review Webster’s speech and to write an article on the Presidential
+nomination. Perhaps they will be more to the purpose. Meanwhile, how can
+you expect a man to work with any spirit if he never hears of his
+employer? Why don’t you write me and say frankly how you are satisfied
+or dissatisfied, and what you want?” Gay<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_213" id="page_213">{213}</a></span> wrote later: “You may be sure
+I shall write you fast enough when you write what you ought not; until I
+do you may be sure that I&mdash;so far as that is of any consequence&mdash;am
+pleased. I hear your articles spoken of highly from all quarters, and
+have heard only one criticism from one or two persons,&mdash;that they seemed
+to be written rather hastily. But that I believe is the way you write
+everything. It is a bad way to get into, though, and newspaper writing
+is a great temptation to it.”</p>
+
+<p>The political doctrines which Lowell advocated were naturally not those
+of expediency, but of downright frankness and honesty. It is true that
+he and his associates had the great advantage, in proclaiming
+principles, of being quite unable to carry them out successfully at the
+polls. Such a position reënforces candor. Just as the Gold Democrats in
+the political contest of 1896 could draw up the most admirable platform
+that has been seen for many years, since they were out in the open, and
+were neither on the defensive nor preparing to carry their candidates
+into office, so the Abolitionists in 1848 felt under no obligation to
+support either Taylor or Cass, and could speak their minds freely
+concerning both. But Lowell, in the article which he wrote on “The
+Nominations for the Presidency,” characteristically struck that note of
+independence in politics which was a cardinal point in his political
+creed and was to be exemplified forcibly his life through, both in
+speech and conduct. In this he was not illustrating a principle which he
+maintained, so much as he was living<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_214" id="page_214">{214}</a></span> a natural life. Independence was a
+fundamental note in his nature.</p>
+
+<p>“The word <span class="smcap">NO</span>,” he wrote, “is the shibboleth of politicians. There is
+some malformation or deficiency in their vocal organs which either
+prevents their uttering it at all, or gives it so thick a pronunciation
+as to be unintelligible. A mouth filled with the national pudding, or
+watering in the expectation of it, is wholly incompetent to this
+perplexing monosyllable. One might imagine that America had been
+colonized by a tribe of those nondescript African animals, the Aye Ayes.
+As Pius Ninth has not yet lost his popularity in this country by issuing
+a bull against slavery, our youth, who are always ready to hurrah for
+anything, might be practised in the formation of the refractory negative
+by being encouraged to shout <i>Viva Pio Nono</i>.<a name="FNanchor_60_60" id="FNanchor_60_60"></a><a href="#Footnote_60_60" class="fnanchor">[60]</a></p>
+
+<p>“If present indications are to be relied upon, no very general defection
+from the ranks of either party will result from the nominations.
+Politicians, who have so long been accustomed to weigh the expediency of
+any measure by its chance of success, are unable to perceive that there
+is a kind of victory in simple resistance. It is a great deal to conquer
+only the habit of slavish obedience to party. The great obstacle is the
+reluctance of politicians to assume moral rather than political
+grounds.”<a name="FNanchor_61_61" id="FNanchor_61_61"></a><a href="#Footnote_61_61" class="fnanchor">[61]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_215" id="page_215">{215}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was, after all, a man of letters and not a journalist who was engaged
+on these weekly diatribes, and Lowell showed his instinctive sense of
+literary art not only in the abundance of allusion and in the use of
+such special forms as irony, but even now and then in the very structure
+of his essays, for essays they were rather than editorial articles, for
+the most part. Thus, taking his suggestion in topic from an attempt at
+running away slaves from the District of Columbia, he composes an
+Imaginary Conversation between Mr. Calhoun, Mr. Foote, and General Cass.
+There is an amusing, faint reflection of Landor in the manner of the
+piece, and the three personages are decidedly more discriminated in
+character than his old men of straw, Philip and John, so that the reader
+really seems to hear these worthies discoursing together, and not
+struggling against the betrayal of the master of the show, who is
+shifting his voice from one to the other. To be sure, no one would
+mistake the delicious irony of Lowell’s Mr. Foote for the grave and
+pious language of the real Mr. Foote, but the imitation is given with an
+air of seriousness. “It is a sentiment of the Bible,” Mr. Foote is made
+to say, “that riches have the wings of the morning and fly to the
+uttermost parts of the earth. But the South labors under this greater
+misfortune, that her property is endowed with legs<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_216" id="page_216">{216}</a></span> of a kind of brute
+instinct (understanding I will not call it) to use them in a northerly
+direction. It is a crowning mercy that God has taken away the wings from
+our wealth. The elder patriarchs were doubtless deemed unworthy of this
+providential interference. It was reserved for Christians and Democrats.
+The legs we can generally manage, but it would have been inconvenient to
+be continually clipping the wings, not to mention possible damage to the
+stock. For these and other comforts make us duly thankful!</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="chead">“MR. CASS.</p>
+
+<p>“My friend Louis Philippe&mdash;ah, I had forgotten: I should have said
+my late friend.</p>
+
+<p class="chead">“MR. CALHOUN.</p>
+
+<p>“The unfortunate are never the friends of the wise man.</p>
+
+<p class="chead">“MR. CASS.</p>
+
+<p>“I was about to say that the Count de Neuilly has often remarked to
+me that we were fortunate in having so conservative an element as
+‘persons held to service or labor’ (I believe I do not venture
+beyond safe Constitutional ground) mingled in a just proportion
+with our otherwise too rapidly progressive institutions. There is
+no duty of a good statesman, he said, at once so difficult and so
+necessary as that of keeping steadily behind his age. But, however
+much satisfaction a sound politician who adheres to this theory may
+reap in the purity<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_217" id="page_217">{217}</a></span> of his own conscience, he will find that the
+dust incident to such a position will sometimes so choke him as to
+prevent his giving an intelligible answer to the often perplexing
+questions of his constituents. Yet I know not whether in such
+exigencies a cough be not the safest, as it is the readiest reply.
+It is an oracle susceptible of any retrospective interpretation.</p>
+
+<p class="chead">“MR. CALHOUN.</p>
+
+<p>“A politician who renders himself intelligible has put a rope round
+his own neck, and it would be strange indeed if his opponents
+should be unable to find a suitable tree. The present Revolutionary
+Government of France has taken many long strides towards the edge
+of that precipice which overhangs social and political chaos, but
+none longer than in bringing Government face to face with the
+people. That government is the most stable which is the most
+complicated and the most expensive. Men admire most what they do
+not understand, and cling tightest to what they have paid or are
+paying most for. They love to see money spent liberally by other
+people, and have no idea that every time Uncle Sam unbuttons his
+pocket, he has previously put his hand into their own. I have great
+fears for France. The Provisional Government talks too much and too
+well,&mdash;above all things it talks too clearly. In that wild
+enthusiasm generated by the turmoil of great and sudden social
+changes, and by contact with the magnetism of excited masses of
+men, sentiments are often uttered, which, however striking and
+beautiful they might be if<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_218" id="page_218">{218}</a></span> their application were restricted to
+the Utopias of poetry, are dangerous in their tendencies and
+results if once brought into contact with the realities of life.
+Despotisms profited more than the Catholic Church by shutting up
+Christ in the sepulchre of a dead language. A prudent and
+far-seeing man will confine his more inspired thoughts to the
+solitude of his closet. If once let loose, it is impossible to
+recall these winged messengers to the safer perch of his finger. He
+may keep an aviary of angels if he will, but he must be careful not
+to leave the door open. They have an unaccountable predilection for
+entering the hut of the slave, and for seating themselves beside
+the hearth of the laborer. Mr. Jefferson,<a name="FNanchor_62_62" id="FNanchor_62_62"></a><a href="#Footnote_62_62" class="fnanchor">[62]</a> by embodying some
+hasty expressions in the Declaration of Independence, introduced
+explosive matter into our system.” </p></div>
+
+<p>And so the conversation goes on touching upon current topics, all having
+some bearing on the great underlying theme. One sees the three men
+moving over the ice, cautiously, and not daring to try its firmness by
+stamping on it, Mr. Calhoun alone maintaining a rigidity of posture as
+if he<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_219" id="page_219">{219}</a></span> had satisfied himself that his theory of the probable thickness
+of the ice was irrefutable.</p>
+
+<p>Lowell complained to Gay that their position was so purely destructive
+as to require them to look at everything from a point of criticism, and
+that this became wearisome. In saying this, he was thinking probably of
+the general attitude which was by necessity taken by a small knot of
+political and moral agitators employing their engines against a strongly
+intrenched evil. Criticism, however, in its more comprehensive sense,
+was the weapon which he most naturally used, but he turned his critical
+inquiry rather upon men than upon institutions, or even upon political
+measures. In this Imaginary Conversation, for example, the public men
+satirized were examined for their mental and moral characteristics.
+Through his studies in literature and history, with his insight as a
+poet and man of imagination, and his habit of holding up before his mind
+fundamental ideas such as truth and freedom, Lowell was chiefly
+interested in the characters of public men; in applying his criticism to
+Foote, Cass, Calhoun, Clay, Webster, and other of his contemporaries,
+though he was mainly testing them by their attitude toward slavery, he
+was constantly measuring them by great and permanent standards. The
+larger the man, the more thoroughly interested was he in penetrating the
+man’s words and deeds, and seeking to come at the bottom facts of his
+nature.</p>
+
+<p>I have already referred to the early occasion he took, in his connection
+with the <i>Standard</i>, to try<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_220" id="page_220">{220}</a></span> his judgment upon Webster, and it is
+interesting to observe that no other statesman of the time was so
+constantly the subject of his criticism. In common with others, he
+watched with eagerness the course of Webster in connection with the Whig
+nomination for the presidency in 1848, when the disappointment of the
+Massachusetts senator was so little disguised. “What Will Mr. Webster
+Do?” was the title of the article which he published in the <i>Standard</i>
+after General Taylor had been nominated&mdash;that nomination “not fit to be
+made.” Lowell never had the modern journalist’s faculty for jumping at
+once into the centre of his subject. Like his own “musing organist,” he
+is very apt to “begin doubtfully and far away,” but he is also pretty
+sure to strike a note at the outset which has, it turns out, a real
+relation to the theme he means to play. Thus in this article he begins
+with the reflection: “It is astonishing to see how fond men are of
+company. We demand a select society even upon the fence, and will not
+jump on this side or that till we have made as accurate a prospective
+census as possible;” and so on for several paragraphs of acute and
+amusing variations, noting especially the disposition to set expediency
+in the place of principle, when looking out for the majority with whom
+we wish to side. “After all,” he goes on, “even in estimating
+expediencies, we are loath to trust ourselves. We desire rather the
+judgment of this or that notable person, and dare not so much as write
+<i>Honesty is the best policy</i>, or any other prudent morality, till he has
+set us a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_221" id="page_221">{221}</a></span> copy at the top of the page. In Massachusetts just now there
+are we know not how many people waiting for Mr. Webster’s action on the
+recent nomination for the Presidency, and no doubt there is hardly a
+village in the country which has not its little coterie of
+self-dispossessed politicians expecting in like manner the moment when
+the decision of some person, whose stomach does the thinking for theirs,
+shall allow them to take sides.</p>
+
+<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>What will Mr. Webster do?’ asks Smith. ‘Greatest man of the age!’ says
+Brown. ‘Of any age,’ adds Jones triumphantly. Meanwhile the greatest
+mind of any age is sulking at Marshfield. It has had its rattle taken
+away from it. It has been told that nominations were not good for it. It
+has not been allowed to climb up the back of the Presidential chair. We
+have a fancy that a truly great mind can move the world as well from a
+three-legged stool in a garret as from the easiest cushion in the White
+House. Where the great mind is, there is the President’s house, whether
+at Wood’s Hole or Washington.</p>
+
+<p>“We would not be understood as detracting in the least from Mr.
+Webster’s reputation as a man of great power. He has hitherto given
+evidence of a great force, it seems to us, rather than of a great
+intellect. But it is a force working without results. It is like a
+steam-engine<a name="FNanchor_63_63" id="FNanchor_63_63"></a><a href="#Footnote_63_63" class="fnanchor">[63]</a> which is connected by no band with the machinery which
+it ought to turn. A great intellect leaves behind it something more than
+a great reputation. The earth is in some way<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_222" id="page_222">{222}</a></span> the better for its having
+taken flesh upon itself. We cannot find that Mr. Webster has
+communicated an impulse to any of the great ideas which it is the
+destiny of the nineteenth century to incarnate in action. His energies
+have been absorbed by Tariff and Constitution and Party&mdash;dry bones into
+which the touch of no prophet could send life....</p>
+
+<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>What will Mr. Webster do?’ This is of more importance to him than to
+the great principle which is beginning to winnow the old parties. This,
+having God on its side, can do very well without Mr. Webster&mdash;but can he
+do as well without it? The truth of that principle will not be affected
+by his taking one side or the other. But <i>occasio celeris</i>, and the
+great man is always the man of the occasion. He mounts and guides that
+mad steed whose neck is clothed with thunder, and whose fierce <i>ha! ha!</i>
+at the sound of the trumpets appals weaker spirits. Two or three years
+ago we spoke of one occasion which Mr. Webster allowed to slip away from
+him. That was the annexation of Texas. Another is offered him now. We do
+not believe that party ever got what was meant for mankind. Mr. Webster
+has now once more an opportunity of showing which he was meant for. If
+party be large enough to hold him, then mankind can afford to let him
+go. Nevertheless, it is sad to imagine him still grinding for the
+Philistines. We cannot help thinking that his first appearance as Samson
+grasping the pillars of the idol temple would draw a fuller house than
+Mr. Van Buren in the same character....<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_223" id="page_223">{223}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>“Let us concede to Mr. Webster’s worshippers that he has heretofore
+given proof enough of a great intellect, and let us demand of him now
+that he make use of, perhaps, his last chance to become a great <i>Man</i>.
+Of what profit are the hands of a giant in the picking up of pins? Let
+him leave Banks and Tariffs to more slender fingers. If ever a man was
+intended for a shepherd of the people, Daniel Webster is. The people are
+fast awakening to great principles: what they want is a great man to
+concentrate and intensify their diffuse enthusiasm. And it is not every
+sort of greatness that will serve for the occasion. Webster, if he would
+only let himself go, has every qualification for a popular leader. The
+use of such a man would be that of a conductor to gather, from every
+part of the cloud of popular indignation, the scattered electricity
+which would waste itself in heat lightnings, and grasping it into one
+huge thunderbolt, let it fall like the messenger of an angry god among
+the triflers in the Capitol.</p>
+
+<p>“Let Mr. Webster give over at last the futile task of sowing the barren
+seashore of the present, and devote himself to the Future, the only
+legitimate seed-field of great minds. Slimmer and glibber men will slip
+through the labyrinth of politics more easily than he. He will always be
+outstripped and outwitted. Politics are in their nature transitory. He
+who writes his name on them, be the letters never so large, writes it on
+the sand. The next wind of shifting opinion puffs it out forever. It is
+never too late to do a wise or great action. We<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_224" id="page_224">{224}</a></span> do not yet wholly
+despair of hearing the voice of our Daniel reading the <i>Mene, Mene</i>,
+written on the wall of our political fabric.”</p>
+
+<p>The Buffalo Convention indorsed the nomination of Martin Van Buren, by
+the Barnburners, or anti-slavery wing of the Democratic party, with the
+result that the disaffected Whigs came to the support of General Taylor,
+and Webster rather tardily came forward and cast in his influence on
+that side. Lowell had been watching for his action, and at once wrote
+one of his bantering yet serious articles.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Webster,” he said, “with the tan of the Richmond October sun not
+yet out of his face, is shocked beyond measure at Mr. Van Buren’s former
+pro-slavery attitude. Sitting upon the fence at Marshfield, he tells his
+neighbors that, should he and Mr. Van Buren meet upon the same political
+platform, they could not look at each other without laughing. If Mr.
+Webster’s face looks as black as it is said to have done just after the
+Philadelphia nomination, we think it the last thing in the world that
+any one would venture even a smile at. Mr. Webster finds fault with Mr.
+Van Buren because Northern Democratic Senators voted in favor of the
+annexation of Texas. But where was Mr. Webster himself? If he foresaw
+that Texas would be a Trojan horse, why did he not say so? If people
+would not come to hear him in Faneuil Hall, could he not have gathered
+his friends and neighbors together at Marshfield, as he did last week?
+It is perfectly clear now by actual demonstration, as it was clear<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_225" id="page_225">{225}</a></span> then
+to persons who thought about the matter, that if Mr. Webster had put
+himself at the head of the opposers of annexation, Texas would never
+have been annexed, and he would have been the next President of the
+United States. The effect of the Free Soil movement, led by men with not
+a tithe of his influence, upon the Compromise Bill, puts this beyond a
+question. Where was the Wilmot Proviso then? At the Springfield
+Convention a year ago, Mr. Webster laid claim to this as ‘his thunder.’
+In the Marshfield speech he dates its origin as far back as 1787. A
+precocious Cyclops, truly, to be forging thunderbolts in his fifth year!
+If Mr. Webster should live till 1852, and his retrospective anti-slavery
+feeling go on increasing at its present ratio, he will tell us that he
+established the <i>Liberator</i> in 1831.”</p>
+
+<p>Quite at the end of Lowell’s stated contributions to the <i>Standard</i> came
+the longest of his articles in the form of a running comment on
+Webster’s fateful seventh of March speech, and in his comment he
+pronounced that judgment which was inevitable from an anti-slavery
+prophet. “It has been characterized,” he says, “like most of Mr.
+Webster’s speeches, as a ‘masterly effort.’ Some of them have been
+masterly successes, but this we sincerely hope and believe <i>was</i> an
+effort.... It is the plea of a lawyer and an advocate, but not of a
+statesman. It is not even the plea of an advocate on the side which he
+was retained to argue. We have heard enough of Democratic defalcations:
+here is a great Whig defalcation which dwarfs<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_226" id="page_226">{226}</a></span> them all, for it is not
+money which has disappeared in this instance, but professions, pledges,
+principles. Men do not defend themselves in advance against accusations
+of inconsistency unless they feel an uncomfortable sense that there is
+some justice in the charge. This feeling pervades a great part of Mr.
+Webster’s speech like a blush.” He uses a fine scorn in dissecting Mr.
+Webster’s specious plea that slavery is nowhere directly prohibited in
+the teachings of the New Testament, and quietly asks if incest is
+anywhere forbidden there. “But if,” he adds, Mr. Webster were really in
+search of a scriptural prohibition of slavery, we think he might find it
+in that commandment which forbids us to covet anything that is our
+neighbor’s. For if we may not do that, then <i>a fortiori</i> we may not
+covet our neighbor himself.... Mr. Webster, we have said, avoids
+carefully all the moral points of the argument. He falls in with the
+common assumption that this is a question of political preponderance
+between the North and the South.... It is not a question between the
+North and the South. It is a struggle between the South (we had almost
+said Calhoun) and the spirit of the nineteenth century after Christ....
+Is slavery the only thing whose sensitiveness is to be respected?
+Freedom has been thought by some to have her finer feelings also.” And
+he closes the discussion of the speech in these words:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“If Mr. Webster’s speech should not find any one to confute it in the
+Senate,&mdash;a hard task, for assumptions and tergiversations are not easily
+re<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_227" id="page_227">{227}</a></span>plied to,&mdash;it will not be without answers abundant and conclusive. It
+will be answered by every generous instinct of the human heart, by every
+principle which a New Englander has imbibed in the Church, the
+Schoolhouse, or the Home, but especially by those inextinguishable
+sentiments which move men’s hatred of treachery and contempt for the
+traitor.”</p>
+
+<p>The agreement which Lowell had with the <i>Standard</i> left him at liberty
+to send either prose or poetry, and as his prose had not necessarily a
+direct reference to the anti-slavery contest, so his poetry was to be
+independent of any polemic consideration. It was Lowell the writer whom
+Gay wished most to attach to the paper for the added weight and
+influence he would bring, and Lowell in making and holding to his
+agreement was not indifferent to the gentle stimulus which a regular
+engagement afforded. He was to send something on Friday if possible, on
+Saturday at any rate, of each week, and when the end of the week came, a
+sudden suggestion might turn him away from a half-finished article to
+let loose a poem in its place. The first five “Biglow Papers” were
+published in the <i>Courier</i>, the last four in the <i>Standard</i>, where also
+appeared, early in the connection, that poem entitled “Freedom,” which
+holds the essence of Lowell’s thought on this large subject, and is the
+best expression of the attitude of his mind as he entered with a certain
+sense of special enlistment upon the direct business of a crusade
+against slavery. The suggestion came from the revolution in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_228" id="page_228">{228}</a></span> France
+which swept Louis Philippe from his throne, and from that light blaze of
+revolutionary fire which for a moment kindled hopes in Germany and
+Italy. During this time appeared also several poems which reflected with
+varying lights the thought that stirred in him at the new birth, as it
+seemed, with which humanity was travailing. Such are the apologue of
+“Ambrose,” that grim poem “The Sower,” “Bibliolatres,” “A Parable,” but
+here also were “Beaver Brook,” first called “The Mill,” occasionally a
+poem like “Eurydice” which had been lying unprinted in his portfolio,
+and a few bits of rhymed satire which were thrown off by him on the spur
+of the moment, and were too careless in manner to be worth his gathering
+later into his volumes.</p>
+
+<p>The active members of the anti-slavery society who controlled the policy
+of the <i>Standard</i> were divided in their judgment of the value of
+Lowell’s contributions. Those who like Mr. Gay himself were thoroughly
+in earnest, but held their minds open on other sides than the
+north-north-east, regarded Lowell as an important acquisition. His fame
+was growing, and he could have found a ready market for his wares if he
+had chosen to turn them to the best commercial account, but he
+cheerfully gave his time and thought to a paper which was always in an
+impecunious condition, so that the editor found it hard enough to pay
+the very moderate stipend agreed upon. Lowell, as we have seen, hated to
+be paid for his services to the anti-slavery cause, and never complained
+of the inadequacy of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_229" id="page_229">{229}</a></span> his salary; but he took a rational view of the
+case, and accepted what the paper could give, not measuring his own
+contributions by the meagre standard of his pay. Nor did he show any
+sensitiveness when his work came under editorial stricture. The
+intensity of feeling which possessed the anti-slavery men who were in
+the thick of the fight made them abnormally critical of those who seemed
+in any way to hold back, and when Lowell wrote a long review, with
+hearty praise, of a new volume of Whittier’s poetry, signing it with his
+initials, Mr. Gay did not scruple to prefix an editorial note, in which
+he denounced Whittier for his course in 1840, when he refused to follow
+the lead of those abolitionists who insisted upon the acceptance of
+women delegates at the London convention. The quarrel then aroused led
+to a break in the unity of the anti-slavery group. “Older
+abolitionists,” wrote Gay, “cannot forget what Lowell cannot be aware
+of, that in the struggle of 1840, which was a struggle of life and death
+to the anti-slavery cause, Whittier the Quaker was found side by side
+with the men who would have sacrificed that cause to crush, according
+even to their own acknowledgment, the right of woman to plead publicly
+in behalf of the slave.” Lowell took the matter quietly enough: “I could
+not very well say less, and you could not say more,” was his comment.</p>
+
+<p>Yet how emphatically Mr. Gay valued Lowell’s contributions appears from
+all the letters of that anxious and harassed editor. Near the close of
+the connection, he wrote to Lowell: “I expected<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_230" id="page_230">{230}</a></span> much good for the paper
+when I proposed that you should lighten my editorial labor, but it has
+received, I know, far more benefit than I looked for, great as that was.
+The influence of the <i>Standard</i>&mdash;leaving myself out of the
+question&mdash;since it was established has been very great, and it would
+also, I am sure, have been very famous had its aim been other than it
+was. No small amount of energy and intellect have been bestowed upon it,
+and its nursing fathers and mothers have taken good care of its being.
+But of this I am sure, and nobody else is in a position to know it so
+well as I&mdash;that of all the good things ever done for it, no one so good
+ever was done, as making you its joint editor. Its influence through you
+has been felt where it never was before. Through you it has a reputation
+which in all its previous existence it had failed to gain. A respect and
+regard is accorded to it because of your efforts, which no other person
+ever had, and no other person probably would ever have gained for it.”</p>
+
+<p>But the <i>Standard</i> was not Mr. Gay’s paper to do with as he would, and
+there was a section of the committee in control that was impatient of a
+contributor who was not as they were, fighting away on foot, with stout
+oak staves in their hands, but was flying about as a sort of light-horse
+contingent, and sometimes seemed out of sight and yet not in the enemy’s
+country. “There is a small class,” Mr. Gay wrote,&mdash;“Stephen Foster is a
+good representative of it,&mdash;who did not consider you worth much, and
+many of whom confess they do<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_231" id="page_231">{231}</a></span> not understand what you would be at.” The
+portrait which Lowell had drawn of Stephen Foster in his letter to Mr.
+McKim is likely to help the reader understand that he might possibly
+even feel contempt for Lowell’s indirect method of attacking slavery.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Hard by, as calm as summer even,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Smiles the reviled and pelted Stephen,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The unappeasable Boanerges<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To all the Churches and the Clergies.<br /></span>
+<span class="i6dt">. . . . . . . .<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A man with caoutchouc endurance,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A perfect gem for life insurance,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A kind of maddened John the Baptist,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To whom the harshest word comes aptest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who, struck by stone or brick ill-starred,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hurls back an epithet as hard,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which, deadlier than stone or brick,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Has a propensity to stick.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His oratory is like the scream<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the iron-horse’s frenzied steam<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which warns the world to leave wide space<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For the black engine’s swerveless race.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Lowell himself was under no illusions. He was warmly attached to Gay,
+and he had a keen intellectual admiration for Edmund Quincy. He
+respected to the full his several associates, but he knew well that,
+though he identified himself cordially with the small knot of earnest
+men and women who cried aloud and spared not, his temperament, his
+ideals, and his humor forbade him to shut himself up within the bounds
+they set themselves. Despite the independence he claimed and that was
+granted him, he could not escape the sense of his restrictions. “I told
+you and the Executive Com<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_232" id="page_232">{232}</a></span>mittee honestly before I began,” he wrote Gay,
+“that they were setting me about a business for which I was not fitted.
+I feel as if the whole of them were looking over my shoulder whenever I
+sit down to write, and it quite paralyzes me.” And yet ten days later he
+could send his poem, “The Mill,” better known as “Beaver Brook,” and
+write, “I am just in time for the mail now, and I positively admire
+myself that I can sit down and write a poem to the <i>Standard’s</i> order so
+resolutely.”</p>
+
+<p>At the end of his first year’s engagement Lowell began to receive
+intimations that the paper was in a hard way financially. “I am very
+sorry to see,” he writes the editor, “that the <i>Standard</i> is raised on
+so insecure a staff. I did not expect, (and so told the Executive
+Committee) that my writing for it would increase the circulation, but, I
+say again, as I said before, that they ought to be entirely satisfied
+with <i>you</i>. Not only is your own editorial work dote with spirit and
+vigor, but your selections are such as to render the paper one of the
+most interesting I see. But they ought to do something themselves.
+Phillips and Quincy could do a great deal if they would. They can’t
+expect two persons to give the paper an infinite variety, nor me to
+devote myself wholly to it. I have continued to write after my year was
+up, but I have had no intimation from the Committee whether they wished
+my services any longer or not. I am very willing to continue, for if I
+were to give up this engagement, I must find some other, in order to
+make the two ends meet.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_233" id="page_233">{233}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>It then transpired that there had been a warm discussion in the
+Committee over the continuance of the arrangement, and Gay and his
+friends had at last effected a compromise by which the salary of $500
+was to be divided between Lowell and Quincy, Lowell being required to
+contribute every other week only. Lowell accepted the situation
+philosophically, and doubtless felt some relief. “All through the year,”
+he wrote to Gay, “I have felt that I worked under a disadvantage. I have
+missed that inspiration (or call it magnetism) which flows into one from
+a thoroughly sympathetic audience. Properly speaking, I have never had
+it as an author, for I have never been popular. But then I have never
+needed it, because I wrote to please myself and not to please the
+people: whereas, in writing for the <i>Standard</i>, I have felt that I ought
+in some degree to admit the whole Executive Committee into my workshop,
+and defer as much as possible to the opinion of persons whose opinion
+(however valuable on a point of morals) would not probably weigh a pin
+with me on an æsthetic question. I have felt that I ought to work in my
+own way, and yet I have also felt that I ought’ to <i>try</i> to work in
+<i>their</i> way, so that I have failed of working in either. Nevertheless, I
+think that the Executive Committee would have found it hard to get some
+two or three of the poems I have furnished from any other quarter.” The
+entire letter, which is printed by Mr. Norton,<a name="FNanchor_64_64" id="FNanchor_64_64"></a><a href="#Footnote_64_64" class="fnanchor">[64]</a> is interesting as
+further defining Lowell’s attitude<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_234" id="page_234">{234}</a></span> toward his associates in the
+anti-slavery cause, and his separation from them on some of the crucial
+points. But it is clear that the whole situation was complicated for him
+by the pecuniary embarrassment under which he labored. He was ready, if
+it would relieve the situation, to release the Committee altogether, but
+he was willing to write once a fortnight if they <i>wished</i> him to do so.
+“To tell the truth,” he says, “I need money more this year than last. My
+father has just resigned a quarter part of his salary,<a name="FNanchor_65_65" id="FNanchor_65_65"></a><a href="#Footnote_65_65" class="fnanchor">[65]</a> and a large
+part of the household expenses must devolve upon me. But I have resolved
+to turn as much of our land as I can into money, and invest it, though I
+confess I should prefer to leave it as it is, and where I am sure it
+would be safe for Mab and the rest.”</p>
+
+<p>At the end of his second year the engagement was ended, though, largely
+out of friendship for<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_235" id="page_235">{235}</a></span> Gay, Lowell contributed occasionally, and his
+name indeed was kept at the head of the paper, bracketed with that of
+Mr. Quincy, for another year. He laughed, by the way, at the designation
+“corresponding editor.” It has always seemed to me to be nonsense. There
+can, in the nature of the thing, be no such person as a <i>corresponding</i>
+editor. Moreover, in this particular case, my unhappy genius will keep
+seeing the double sense in the word <i>corresponding</i>, and suggesting that
+E. Q. and I correspond in very few particulars,&mdash;meaning no offence to
+either of us. ‘Contributor’ would be the fitting word.”</p>
+
+<p>The connection with the <i>Standard</i> had not altered Lowell’s position in
+politics. It found him independent, and left him so. He was no less a
+reformer at the end than he was at the beginning, but he was confirmed
+in his belief that the world must be healed by degrees; and as he was a
+disbeliever in the short cut to emancipation by way of disunion, so he
+was at once a firm believer in radical reform, but skeptical of ultimate
+success through the rooting out of individual evils. He found himself
+among people who were sure of their panaceas. He himself in the first
+flush of his restless desire for activity had been disposed, under the
+influence of the woman he loved, to attack the evil of intemperance by
+the method of total abstinence, but his zeal was short-lived. He appears
+never to have accepted woman suffrage as the solution of the problem of
+society, and it is doubtful if at any time he would have given his
+adhesion to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_236" id="page_236">{236}</a></span> mode of immediate emancipation if he had been called on
+to discuss it. His imagination and his sense of humor both prevented him
+from being a thick and thin reformer, and he refused to allow his hatred
+of slavery to be complicated with practical measures for the reform of
+various other evils which troubled society. It was because he saw in
+slavery in the United States the arch foe of freedom and the insidious
+corrupter of national life that he concentrated his reforming energy
+upon this evil. He has said of Wordsworth that “fortunately he gave up
+politics that he might devote himself to his own noble calling, to which
+politics are subordinate;” but it might be said with equal truth of
+Lowell that he never gave up poetry, and that when he was writing every
+week, or every other week, for the <i>Standard</i>, whether in verse or in
+prose, he was dominated by an imagination which kept steadily before his
+eyes great principles and doctrines which found in the anti-slavery
+movement an illustration but not an exclusive end. It is not surprising,
+therefore, that he should have seemed to others, and sometimes to
+himself, not to see the enemy just in front of him.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, the experience was worth much to him. It resulted, as it
+might not except for this stimulus, in the “Biglow Papers,” and it also
+demonstrated more clearly than ever the supremacy of the literary
+function with him, since he never laid it aside under the strong
+provocation which his journalistic work incited, and maintained from
+first to last the integrity of his spirit. The conserva<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_237" id="page_237">{237}</a></span>tism which
+underlay and indeed supported his radicalism was confirmed by his
+experience, and it issued moreover in a large comprehensiveness, so that
+he came out of the ranks not only with a greater sympathy with his
+comrades,<a name="FNanchor_66_66" id="FNanchor_66_66"></a><a href="#Footnote_66_66" class="fnanchor">[66]</a> but with a larger toleration for the men he attacked. “At
+this minute,” he writes to Gay, “the song of the bobolink comes rippling
+through my opening window and preaches peace. Two months ago the same
+missionary was in his South Carolina pulpit, and can I think that he
+chose another text, or delivered another sermon there? Hath not a
+slaveholder hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed
+with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same
+diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same summer
+and winter as an abolitionist? If you pinch them, do they not bleed? If
+you tickle them, do they not laugh? If you poison them, do they not die?
+If you wrong them, shall they not revenge? Nay, I will go a step
+farther, and ask if all this do not apply to parsons also? Even <i>they</i>
+are human.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_238" id="page_238">{238}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V<br /><br />
+<small>A FABLE FOR CRITICS, THE BIGLOW PAPERS, AND THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL</small><br /><br />
+<small>1847-1848</small></h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> was while he was most busily engaged in contributing to the
+<i>Standard</i> his weekly poems, criticisms, and editorial articles, that
+Lowell wrote and published a group of books, varied in subject and
+treatment, dashed off each and all with an eager abandonment to the
+intellectual excitement which produced them, and read by a later
+generation as capital illustrations not only of their author’s
+spontaneity, but also of the permanent direction of his nature. It is
+not unfair to suppose that the steady application to work in connection
+with a cause which appealed to moral enthusiasm aroused in a mind like
+Lowell’s an exhilaration of temper very provocative of creation. The
+poems which he sent, one after the other, in a continuous flight, were
+witnesses to this activity of imagination, and the very tension of his
+mind kept him in a state of excitement, so that his diversions took the
+form of intellectual amusement. Two or three numbers of the “Biglow
+Papers” had appeared, when Lowell wrote his friend Briggs that he was at
+work on a satirical poem, but apparently he did<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_239" id="page_239">{239}</a></span> not disclose its exact
+character, though he intimated at the beginning that he meant to give
+the poem to his friend. In point of fact, Lowell appears to have written
+at full speed five or six hundred lines of “A Fable for Critics” in
+October, 1847, and then to have been so busily engaged in getting ready
+his new volume of “Poems,” which appeared at the end of the year, that
+he laid it aside. “I have been waiting with a good deal of impatience,”
+Briggs writes, 7 November, 1847, “for the manuscript of the satirical
+poem which you promised to send me. As I have not seen anything
+advertised which sounds like you I am half afraid that you are not going
+to publish it. But you must be convinced from the great popularity that
+Hosea’s efforts have received that the sale of the poem will be large
+and profitable.”</p>
+
+<p>In his reply, 13 November, Lowell says: “My satire remains just as it
+was; about six hundred lines I think are written. I left it because I
+wished to finish it in one mood of mind, and not to get that and my
+serious poems in the new volume entangled. It is a rambling, disjointed
+affair, and I may alter the form of it, but if I can get it read I know
+it will take. I intend to give it some serial title and continue it at
+intervals.... I shall send you my satire in manuscript when it is
+finished. Meanwhile, here is a taste and I want your opinion. Here is
+Emerson. I think it good.&mdash;There, I have given you three or four
+specimen bricks&mdash;what think you of the house?... Remember that my satire
+is a secret. Read the extract to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_240" id="page_240">{240}</a></span> Page.” Mr. Briggs was delighted with
+what was shown him, and longed for more. “The characteristics of
+Alcott,” he says, “I could not judge of, although they are most happily
+expressed, as I have known nothing about him; but the character of
+Emerson was the best thing of the kind I have read.” He returns to the
+subject on Christmas day, but is still ignorant of Lowell’s intention as
+to the disposition of the manuscript. “I think that the book would be a
+very popular one, but still, it strikes me that your subjects are too
+localized to be widely understood; but they would have all the merit of
+fictions at least, and your method would make them universally
+acceptable.”</p>
+
+<p>But now Lowell gives his friend a more explicit statement of his
+intention as to the publication of his satire. The volume of poems was
+out of the way, and on the last day of 1847 he writes as follows: “I
+have not time left to say much more than happy New Year! I have been
+hard at work copying my satire that I might get it (what was finished of
+it, at least) to you by New Year’s day as a present. As it is, I can
+only send the first part. It was all written with one impulse, and was
+the work of not a great many hours; but it was written in good spirits
+(<i>con amore</i>, as Leupp said he used to smoke), and therefore seems to me
+to have a hearty and easy swing about it that is pleasant. But I was
+interrupted midway by being obliged to get ready the copy for my volume,
+and I have never been able to weld my present mood upon the old, without
+making an ugly swelling at the joint.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_241" id="page_241">{241}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>“I wish you to understand that I make you a New Year’s gift, not of the
+manuscript, but of the thing itself. I wish you to get it printed (if
+you think the sale will warrant it) for your own benefit. At the same
+time I am desirous of retaining my copyright, in order that if
+circumstances render it desirable, I may still possess a control over
+it. Therefore, if you think it would repay publishing (I have no doubt
+of it, or I should not offer it to you), I wish you would enter the
+copyright in your own name and then make a transfer to me ‘in
+consideration of etc.’</p>
+
+<p>“Now I know that you are as proud as&mdash;you ought to be, but if the
+proceeds of the sale would be of service to you, you have no right to
+refuse them. I don’t make you a pecuniary present, though I trust you
+would not hesitate to accept one from me, if you needed it, and I could
+raise the money, but I give you something which I have made myself, and
+made on purpose for you.</p>
+
+<p>“I know nothing about your circumstances. If beloved W. P. needs it
+most, let him have it, and I know that you would consider it the best
+gift I could make <i>you</i>. I will not consent to that disposal of it,
+however, unless he need it most. In case the proceeds amount to anything
+handsome (for it <i>may</i> be popular) and you intend them for W. P., let it
+be done in this way, which would please him and me too, and nobody but
+myself would be the gainer. Do you in that case sit to Page for your
+portrait&mdash;the said effigies to belong to your humble servant.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_242" id="page_242">{242}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>“I am making as particular directions as if I were drawing my will, but
+I have a sort of presentiment (which I never had in regard to anything
+else) that this little bit of pleasantry will <i>take</i>. Perhaps I have
+said too much of the Centurion.<a name="FNanchor_67_67" id="FNanchor_67_67"></a><a href="#Footnote_67_67" class="fnanchor">[67]</a> But it was only the comicality of
+his <i>character</i> that attracted me,&mdash;for the man himself personally never
+entered my head. But the sketch is clever?&mdash;I want your opinion on what
+I have sent immediately.”<a name="FNanchor_68_68" id="FNanchor_68_68"></a><a href="#Footnote_68_68" class="fnanchor">[68]</a></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Briggs replied at once, accepting the gift in the spirit in which it
+was given, delighting in the poem, and proposing to arrange immediately
+for its publication by Putnam. He was confident, as was Page, that the
+book would be a great hit, and promptly provided for the disposition of
+the profits. “One third,” he wrote, “should be invested for Queen Mab,
+to be given her on her eighteenth birthday; one third to be disposed of
+in the same manner for my little angel; and the other third to be given
+to Page, for which he should paint your portrait for me and mine for
+you. This would be making the best disposition of the fund that I could
+devise, and I think will not be displeasing to you. If the profits
+should be small, I will divide them equally between the little ones. It
+will be something quite new for two young ladies to receive their
+marriage portions from the profits of an American poem.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_243" id="page_243">{243}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>Lowell was highly entertained by this proposal. “I could not help
+laughing,” he wrote, “as I read your proposed disposition of the
+expected finances. To look at you in the character of Alnaschar was
+something so novel as to be quite captivating to my imagination. Not
+that I have any fear that you will kick over the basket, but I am afraid
+the contents will hardly be so attractive to the public as to allow the
+proceeds of the sale to be divided into three. It is really quite a
+triumph to be able to laugh at my practical friend. However, I will not
+impoverish your future, but will let you enjoy it as long as it
+lasts.... I have now, in addition to what I sent you, and exclusive of
+Emerson, etc., about a hundred lines written, chiefly about Willis and
+Longfellow. But in your arrangements with the printer, you must reckon
+on allowing me at least a month. I cannot write unless in the mood.”</p>
+
+<p>It was when about half the poem had been written that Lowell began his
+constant work for the <i>Standard</i>, and he was impatient to finish the
+poem, yet found it hard to get into the right mood. “I want to get my
+windows open,” he wrote to Briggs, 26 March, 1848, “and to write in the
+fresh air. I ought not to have sent you any part of it till I had
+finished it entirely. I feel a sense of responsibility which hinders my
+pen from running along as it ought in such a theme. I wish the last half
+to be as jolly and unconstrained as the first. If you had not praised
+what I sent you, I dare say you would have had the whole of it ere this.
+Praise is the only thing that can make me<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_244" id="page_244">{244}</a></span> feel any doubt of myself.”
+And then, recurring to Briggs’s air castle to be built with the
+proceeds: “As to your plan for dividing the profits I will have nothing
+to do with it. I wish they might be a thousand dollars with all my
+heart, but I do not see that they will be more than enough to buy
+something for my little niece there in New York. If I had not thought it
+the only poem I ever wrote on which there was like to be <i>some</i>
+immediate profit, I should never have given it to you at all. In making
+it a present to you, I was giving myself a <i>douceur</i>, and the greater
+the sale the larger the bribe to myself. A part of the condition is that
+if it make a loss&mdash;I pay it. If this be not agreed to, the bargain is
+null, and I never will finish it.... Now that I <i>have</i> let you into the
+secret of the ‘Fable’ before it was finished, I hope you will write and
+give me a spur. I suppose you did not wish to say anything about it till
+after it became yours. But I wish to be dunned. Tell me whether its
+being published at any particular time will make any difference, etc.,
+etc., and make any suggestions. I think I shall say nothing about
+Margaret Fuller (though she offer so fair a target), because she has
+done me an ill-natured turn.<a name="FNanchor_69_69" id="FNanchor_69_69"></a><a href="#Footnote_69_69" class="fnanchor">[69]</a> I shall revenge myself amply upon her
+by writing<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_245" id="page_245">{245}</a></span> better. She is a very foolish, conceited woman, who has got
+together a great deal of information, but not enough <i>knowledge</i> to save
+her from being ill-tempered. However, the temptation may be too strong
+for me. It certainly would have been if she had never said anything
+about me. Even Maria thinks I ought to give her a line or two.” Briggs
+begged him not to leave out Miss Fuller, “she will accuse you of doing
+it to spite her.”</p>
+
+<p>The spring months went by with occasional dashes at the “Fable” and on
+12 May, Lowell wrote to his friend: “I have begun upon the ‘Fable’ again
+fairly, and am making some headway. I think with what I sent you (which
+I believe was about 500 lines) it will make something over a thousand. I
+have done since I sent the first half, Willis, Longfellow, Bryant, Miss
+Fuller, and Mrs. Child. In Longfellow’s case I have attempted no
+characterization. The same (in a degree) may be said of S. M. F. With
+her I have been perfectly good humored, but I have a fancy that what I
+say will stick uncomfortably. It will make you laugh. So will L. M. C.
+After S. M. F. I make a short digression on bores in general which has
+some drollery in it. Willis I think good. Bryant is funny, and as far as
+I could make it immitigably just. Indeed I have endeavored to be so in
+all. I am glad I did B. before I got your letter.<a name="FNanchor_70_70" id="FNanchor_70_70"></a><a href="#Footnote_70_70" class="fnanchor">[70]</a> The only verses I
+shall<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_246" id="page_246">{246}</a></span> add regarding him are some complimentary ones which I left for a
+happier mood after I had written the comic part. I steal from him,
+indeed! If he knew me he would not say so. When I steal I shall go to a
+specie vault, not to a till. Does he think that he invented the past,
+and has a prescriptive title to it? Do not think I am provoked. I am
+simply amused. If he had <i>riled</i> me, I might have knocked him into a
+cocked hat in my satire. But that, on second thoughts, would be no
+revenge, for it might make him President, a cocked hat being now the
+chief qualification.<a name="FNanchor_71_71" id="FNanchor_71_71"></a><a href="#Footnote_71_71" class="fnanchor">[71]</a> It would be more severe to knock him into the
+middle of next week, as that is in the future, and he has such a
+partiality toward the past.”</p>
+
+<p>In the passage on bores, which follows the lines on Margaret Fuller,
+Lowell explains that&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“These sketches I made (not to be too explicit)<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From two honest fellows who made me a visit,”&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">but he is explicit enough regarding them in the same letter to Mr.
+Briggs: I had a horrible visitation the other evening from Mr. &mdash;&mdash;, of
+Philadelphia, accompanied by Messrs. &mdash;&mdash; and &mdash;&mdash;, of Boston. After their
+departure, I wrote the ‘digression on bores’ which I mentioned
+above. &mdash;&mdash;, I believe, likes my poetry, but likes his own too well to
+appreciate anybody’s else. He is about to start a magazine and has
+issued a prospectus of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_247" id="page_247">{247}</a></span> the very most prodigious description. One would
+think it to have been written with a quill plucked from the wing of ‘our
+country’s bird.’ He wished to have a portrait and memoir of me in his
+first number. I escaped from the more immediate crucifixion, however, on
+the ground that I had no sketch of myself that would answer his purpose.
+As his project may fail after the first number, I may get off
+altogether. I have sometimes given offence by answering such
+applications with a smile, so I have changed my tactics, and give
+assent.... I hope to finish the ‘Fable’ next week.”</p>
+
+<p>On 24 July, Lowell wrote to Gay, who was in the secret, that he had
+finished the “Fable,” and shortly after he made a visit to New York, but
+it was not till near the end of August that he sent the last instalment
+of copy. The proof followed, and Lowell took occasion to make at least
+one omission, due apparently to better knowledge which led him to revise
+his judgment. He was too late, apparently, for another correction, for
+he wrote to Briggs, 4 October, asking him to strike out the four lines
+relating to Miss Fuller, beginning</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“There is one thing she owns in her own single right,”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">which still stand. The poem was printed from type, so that as each sheet
+was printed, and the type distributed, it was not possible, as in the
+case of electrotype plates, to make corrections up to the last moment
+before printing the entire book. In the same letter he writes:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“I send half the proof to-day&mdash;t’ other to-mor<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_248" id="page_248">{248}</a></span>row with Irving and Judd.
+I am <i>druv like all possessed</i>. I am keeping up with the printers with
+Wilbur’s Notes, Glossary, Index, and Introduction. I have two sets of
+hands to satiate, one on the body of the book, one on the extremities.</p>
+
+<p>“I wish to see title-page and preface. Also, be sure and have a written
+acknowledgment from G. P. P. that the copyright remains with <i>you</i>. Then
+send me a transfer of it for value received. I will endorse in such a
+way that it shall remain to you and yours in case anything happen to me.
+Don’t think my precaution indelicate. I only wish to provide against
+accidents. Let Putnam take out copyright and let it stand in your name
+as far as he and the rest of the world are concerned. I am anxious about
+it (I need scarcely say) solely on these two accounts, that it may never
+fall into strangers’ hands, and that it may never be taken from you.
+More to-morrow.”</p>
+
+<p>Two days later he wrote to Briggs, “I am, you see, as good as my word
+and better. For, as I was copying the other verses this morning, I
+thought I might as well throw you in Holmes to boot. Let the new passage
+begin thus,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Here, ‘Forgive me, Apollo,’ I cried, ‘while I pour’ &amp;c., &amp;c.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Please make the alteration and put in marks of quotation at the
+beginning of each new paragraph if I have omitted them. Also in this
+line if it runs as I think it does,</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>So, compared to you moderns, is old Melesigines,’<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">insert ‘sounds’ instead of ‘is.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_249" id="page_249">{249}</a></span>’</p>
+
+<p>“I wish you would do up a copy with ‘author’s and so forths,’ <i>dated New
+York</i>, and put it into Ticknor’s first box directed to Dr. O. W. Holmes,
+Boston, and also one directed to Professor Felton, Cambridge, in
+Ticknor’s or Nichols’s as it may chance....</p>
+
+<p>“Print the title-page thus:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Reader, walk up’ etc., as far as ‘ruinous rate’ in large italics in
+old-fashioned style in an inverted cone</p>
+<div style="text-align:center;">
+<pre>
+   \     /
+   \   /
+   \ /
+   A
+
+down to     Fable for Critics      in very large</pre>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind"> caps. Then the rest in small
+caps properly broken up so as to conceal the fact of the rhyme.<a name="FNanchor_72_72" id="FNanchor_72_72"></a><a href="#Footnote_72_72" class="fnanchor">[72]</a></p>
+
+<p>You will like the tribute to our Massachusetts. It is clearly the best
+passage in the poem, and you will see how adroitly it comes back to the
+<i>theme</i>, the general comic and satiric tone, of the rest.”</p>
+
+<p>The date on the rhymed title-page was antici<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_250" id="page_250">{250}</a></span>pated a little, for the
+book was advertised for 20 October, and delivered on the 25th. A
+thousand copies had been printed from type and were quickly disposed of.
+The little book was then stereotyped and a second edition issued the
+first of the New Year, with the new preface which is still attached to
+the poem. In February it had gone to a third edition, but at the end of
+November, 1849, it had not sold beyond three thousand copies, though a
+fourth edition was then talked of. It is to be feared that Mr. Briggs’s
+golden eggs were addled.</p>
+
+<p>It will be remembered that in December, 1846, Lowell wrote the amusing
+lines to James Miller McKim, editor of the <i>Pennsylvania Freeman</i>, which
+were printed in that paper, and are included among his collected poems
+under the heading “Letter from Boston.” In the same frolicsome temper
+used in “A Fable for Critics,” Lowell made rapid sketches of the
+conspicuous anti-slavery people as seen at the bazaar just held in
+Faneuil Hall. The success of the squib very likely suggested to him the
+fun of playing the same game with the literati of the day. Both poems,
+indeed, may have taken a hint from Leigh Hunt’s “The Feast of the
+Poets,”<a name="FNanchor_73_73" id="FNanchor_73_73"></a><a href="#Footnote_73_73" class="fnanchor">[73]</a> which had been brought afresh to Lowell’s notice, if not
+disclosed to him for the first time, by the little volume “Rimini and
+other Poems by Leigh Hunt,” issued by Ticknor in 1844. The measure is
+the same. Phœbus Apollo also introduces the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_251" id="page_251">{251}</a></span> poets, though Hunt’s scheme
+is more deliberate than Lowell’s, and there is the same disposition to
+make use of unexpected rhymes. Hunt used his sauciness upon his
+contemporaries, Spencer, Rogers, Montgomery, Crabbe, Hayley, Gifford,
+Scott, Campbell, Moore, Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, and
+Rose. The reader can easily pick out the names here which have well
+outlived Hunt’s mockery, and those which were as well known to Hunt’s
+contemporaries as are some in the “Fable” to Lowell’s. Hunt, to be sure,
+confined himself to poets and poetasters, while Lowell drew his examples
+from the more conspicuous writers in the United States, whether of prose
+or of verse.</p>
+
+<p>There was little mystery about the authorship of the “Fable.” Lowell did
+not put his name on the title-page, but he wrote himself all over the
+book; and though the publication was anonymous, he made no objection to
+the disclosure to Putnam, and apparently was careless about confining
+the knowledge to Briggs, Gay, and Page. Longfellow records in his diary
+under 15 June, 1848, “Passed an hour or two with Lowell, who read to me
+his satire on American authors; full of fun, and with very true
+portraits, as seen from that side.” It does not appear if Lowell read to
+his guest what he had recently written about him in the satire. And Dr.
+Holmes, to whom a copy of the book, as we have seen, was sent with the
+“author’s and so forths,” acknowledged it in a letter to Lowell, in
+which he characterizes it as “capital&mdash;crammed full and rammed down
+hard&mdash;powder (lots of it)<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_252" id="page_252">{252}</a></span>&mdash;shot&mdash;slugs bullets&mdash;very little wadding,
+and that is gun-cotton&mdash;all crowded into a rusty looking blunderbuss
+barrel as it were,&mdash;capped with a percussion preface,&mdash;and cocked with a
+title-page as apropos as a wink to a joke.”<a name="FNanchor_74_74" id="FNanchor_74_74"></a><a href="#Footnote_74_74" class="fnanchor">[74]</a></p>
+
+<p>Clever as are the portraits,&mdash;some of the lines are bitten in with a
+little acid,&mdash;and though there are but few of the authors characterized
+who have not even a more secure place to-day than then, the “Fable” can
+scarcely be said ever to have had or retained much vogue as a whole. In
+the excitement of writing his crackling lines Lowell believed himself to
+be making a hit, but hardly had the ink dried than he saw it for what it
+was, intellectual effervescence that made one hilarious for the moment.
+“It seems bald and poor enough now, the Lord knows,” he wrote between
+the first and second editions. Forty years afterward, however, on<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_253" id="page_253">{253}</a></span>
+recalling it, he said it was the first popular thing he had written. He
+never was quite easy as to his treatment of Bryant: “I am quite sensible
+now,” he wrote in 1855, “that I did not do Mr. Bryant justice in the
+‘Fable.’ But there was no personal feeling in what I said, though I have
+regretted what I <i>did</i> say because it might seem personal.” And as late
+as 1887 he characterized his poem written for Bryant’s birthday as a
+kind of palinode to what he had said of him in the “Fable,” “which has
+something of youth’s infallibility in it, or at any rate of youth’s
+irresponsibility.” Aside from this slight uneasiness, Lowell does not
+appear to have repented of any of his judgments, nor did he ever revise
+the poem for subsequent editions. No doubt, the disregard of the poem
+has been due largely to the ephemeral nature of much of the jocoseness.
+The puns, good and bad, with which it is sprinkled, are so many notices
+of “good for this time only,” and the petty personalities and trivial
+bits of satire lower the average of the whole. The “Fable” must be taken
+for just what it was to the author and his friends, a piece of high
+spirits with which to make sport: the salt that savors it is to be found
+in the few masterly characterizations and criticisms.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, turning away from this <i>jeu d’esprit</i> as a piece of literature,
+and looking at it as a reflection of Lowell’s mind in a very ardent
+passage of his life, we may justly regard with strong interest so frank
+an expression, not merely of his likes and dislikes, but of the
+underlying principle of criticism<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_254" id="page_254">{254}</a></span> which was native to him and found
+abundant illustration from the days of the <i>Pioneer</i> to the later days
+of the <i>North American Review</i>. His impatience of yard-stick criticism
+and of a timid waiting upon foreign judgment, so hotly uttered in his
+rapid lines, sprang from the intuitive perception and the independence
+of spirit which lie at the basis of all his own criticism. This
+intuitive perception was indeed that of a man who often formed hasty
+impressions and was not without personal prejudice, but it was at least
+a first-hand judgment, and not the composite result of other men’s
+opinions, and it came from a mind through which the wind of a free
+nature was always blowing. The lightning flashes which disclose the
+inherent and lasting qualities of Emerson, Hawthorne, Cooper, Holmes,
+Whittier, Bryant, Longfellow are all witnesses to the penetration and
+clear intelligence which Lowell possessed. It must not be forgotten that
+Lowell, himself only just past the period of youth, was writing of men
+whose reputation is secure enough now, but who were at that time not
+wholly discriminated by the general public from a number of mediocrities
+who crowded about them, and there is an even-handed justice in the poem
+which not unfitly is put into the mouth of that court of last resort,
+Phœbus Apollo himself.</p>
+
+<p>The independence which goes along with the intuition is simply the
+integrity of a nature which is not given to the concealment of its
+judgments. As he laughingly said of himself later, he was very cock-sure
+of himself at this time. In after years,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_255" id="page_255">{255}</a></span> when he was speaking in his
+own voice from a more historic platform, he might choose his phrases
+more deliberately, but none the less did he speak his mind out. There
+was confidence in himself first and last, but the impetuous, almost
+reckless utterance of his youth, when he saw things clearly as youth
+does when it is conscious of breathing the air of freedom and bathing in
+the light of truth, yielded only to the temper which maturity brings and
+was more moderate and charitable in expression because it had the larger
+vision. When one considers the eagerness with which Lowell vented
+himself in the months of his close connection with the <i>Anti-Slavery
+Standard</i>, one is not surprised that in a book which is at once a
+defence of criticism and a swift survey of the whole field of American
+letters as it lay under the eye of this knight-errant of freedom and
+truth, Lowell should have displayed, with little reserve, the frankness
+and impetuosity of his nature. It is only after a closer inspection that
+one discovers also how sound and how generous is his judgment.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>How much satire gains from moral earnestness and a righteous scorn is
+easily seen in the book which followed close on the heels of “A Fable
+for Critics,” and with its pungency weakened the impression which might
+otherwise have been created by its companion in literature. We have
+already seen that the first number of the “Biglow Papers” appeared in
+the <i>Courier</i> of Boston in June, 1846, and that Lowell reckoned on
+producing a greater<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_256" id="page_256">{256}</a></span> effect by withholding his name. He told Gay that he
+might very likely continue to fire from this masked battery while he was
+openly keeping up with others a fusillade in the <i>Standard</i>. In point of
+fact the first five numbers were printed in the <i>Courier</i>, but when the
+fifth was printed, Lowell was at the beginning of his real connection
+with the <i>Standard</i>, and the remaining four were printed in that paper.</p>
+
+<p>The series, thus begun in the <i>Courier</i> in June, 1846, was closed in the
+<i>Standard</i> in September, 1848.<a name="FNanchor_75_75" id="FNanchor_75_75"></a><a href="#Footnote_75_75" class="fnanchor">[75]</a> Although Lowell did not sign his name
+to any of the numbers either in the <i>Courier</i> or in the <i>Standard</i>, the
+authorship was a very open secret indeed. Still, he had the pleasure
+which sprang from the dramatic assumption, and he took good care not to
+confuse the personalities in the little comedy, by thrusting his own
+real figure on the stage. As he wrote forty years later: “I had great
+fun out of it. I have often wished that I could have had a literary <i>nom
+de plume</i> and kept my own to myself. I shouldn’t have cared a doit what
+happened to him.”</p>
+
+<p>A dozen years later, on the eve of the war for the Union, Mr. Hughes,
+who was introducing the book to the English public, wanted Lowell to
+write an historical introduction. In declining to do this,<a name="FNanchor_76_76" id="FNanchor_76_76"></a><a href="#Footnote_76_76" class="fnanchor">[76]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_257" id="page_257">{257}</a></span> he gave
+a brief and clear statement of his political position at the time of
+writing the “Biglow Papers.” “I believed our war with Mexico (though we
+had as just ground for it as a strong nation ever has against a weak
+one) to be essentially a war of false pretences, and that it would
+result in widening the boundaries and so prolonging the life of slavery.
+Believing that it is the manifest destiny of the English race to occupy
+this whole continent, and to display there that practical understanding
+in matters of government and colonization which no other race has given
+such proof of possessing since the Romans, I hated to see a noble hope
+evaporated into a lying phrase to sweeten the foul breath of demagogues.
+Leaving the sin of it to God, I believed and still believe that slavery
+is the Achilles heel of our polity: that it is a temporary and false
+supremacy of the white races, sure to destroy that supremacy at last,
+because an enslaved people always prove themselves of more enduring
+fibre than their enslavers, as not suffering from the social vices sure
+to be engendered by oppression in the governing class. Against these and
+many other things I thought all honest men should protest. I was born
+and bred in the country, and the dialect was homely to me. I tried my
+first ‘Biglow Paper’ in a newspaper and found that it had a great run.
+So I wrote the others from time to time during the year which followed,
+always very rapidly, and sometimes (as with ‘What Mr. Robinson thinks’)
+at one sitting.”</p>
+
+<p>The cleverness of the refrain in this last named<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_258" id="page_258">{258}</a></span> poem started it on a
+hilarious career, and it is perhaps only in one of Gilbert’s topical
+songs that we can match the success of a collocation of words, where the
+quaintness of turn keeps a barren phrase perennially amusing. It was
+with an echo of it in his mind no doubt that when he had just done
+reading the proofs of the entire volume, Lowell snapped his whip in like
+fashion in a poem for the <i>Standard</i>, which he never reprinted, but
+which is interesting from the diversity shown in the handling of a
+single theme.</p>
+
+<p>In the fall of 1848, Harrison Gray Otis, writing in advocacy of the
+election of Zachary Taylor, referred to an incident in 1831, when, as
+Mayor of Boston, he answered an application from the Governors of
+Virginia and Georgia for information respecting the persons responsible
+for <i>The Liberator</i>. “Some time afterward,” he says, “it was reported to
+me by the city officers that they had ferreted out the paper and its
+editor: that his office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary
+a negro boy, and his supporters a very few insignificant persons of all
+colors.” Lowell saw the letter in one of the newspapers of the day,
+clipped out this sentence, pasted it on a sheet of paper, and wrote
+below it, with the title “the day of small things,” the notable lines
+which in his collected poems bear the heading “To W. L. Garrison.” The
+poem was published in the <i>Standard</i>, 19 October, 1848, but the incident
+evidently made a strong impression on him, especially when he considered
+what had taken place in seventeen years;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_259" id="page_259">{259}</a></span> for immediately afterward he
+wrote again, and in the number for 26 October, appeared</p>
+
+<p class="c">
+THE EX-MAYOR’S CRUMB OF CONSOLATION.</p>
+
+<p class="chead">A PATHETIC BALLAD.<a name="FNanchor_77_77" id="FNanchor_77_77"></a><a href="#Footnote_77_77" class="fnanchor">[77]</a><br />
+</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Two Governors once a letter writ<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To the Mayor of a distant city,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And told him a paper was published in it,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That was telling the truth, and ’t was therefore fit<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That the same should be crushed as dead as a nit<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">By an Aldermanic Committee:<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">‘Don’t say so?’ says Otis,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">‘I’ll enquire if so ’t is:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dreadful! telling the truth? What a pity!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>It can’t be the Atlas, that’s perfectly clear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And of course it isn’t the Advertiser,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">’T is out of the Transcript’s appropriate sphere,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Post is above suspicion: oh dear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To think of such accidents happening here!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I hoped that our people were wiser.<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">While we’re going,’ says Otis,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">‘<i>Faustissimis votis</i>,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How very annoying such flies are!’<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“So, without more ado, he enquired all round<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Among people of wealth and standing;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But wealth looked scornful, and standing frowned;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At last in a garret with smoke imbrowned,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The conspirators all together he found,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">One man with a colored boy banding;<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">‘<span class="lftspc">’</span>Pon my word,’ says Otis,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">‘Decidedly low t is,’<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As he groped for the stairs on the landing.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“So he wrote to the Governors back agen,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And told them t was something unworthy of mention;<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_260" id="page_260">{260}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That t was only a single man with a pen,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And a font of type in a sort of den,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A person unknown to Aldermen,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And, of course, beneath attention;<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">‘And therefore,’ wrote Otis,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4"><i>Annuentibus totis</i>,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">‘There’s no reason for apprehension.’<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“But one man with a pen is a terrible thing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">With a head and heart behind it,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And this one man’s words had an ominous ring,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That somehow in people’s ears would cling;&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">‘But the mob’s uncorrupted: they’ve eggs to fling;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">So t is hardly worth while to mind it;<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">As for freedom,’ says Otis,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">‘I’ve given her notice<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To leave town, in writing, and underlined it.’<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“But the one man’s helper grew into a sect,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That laughed at all efforts to check or scare it,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Old parties before it were scattered and wrecked,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And respectable folks knew not what to expect;&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">‘<span class="lftspc">’</span>Tis some consolation, at least to reflect<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And will help us, I think, to bear it,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">That all this,’ says Otis,<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">‘Though by no means <i>in votis</i>,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Began with one man and a boy in a garret.’<span class="lftspc">”</span><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Lowell himself, in the Introduction which he wrote to the Second Series,
+bears witness to the popularity of the “Biglow Papers” while they were
+still uncollected. “Very far,” he says, “from being a popular author
+under my own name, so far indeed as to be almost unread, I found the
+verses of my pseudonym copied everywhere: I saw them pinned up in
+workshops: I heard them quoted and their authorship debated.” It was, it
+may be said, no new thing to seek to arrest the public attention with
+the vernacular applied to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_261" id="page_261">{261}</a></span> public affairs. Major Jack Downing and Sam
+Slick had been notable exemplars, and they had many imitators; but party
+politics, or even local characteristics, may give rise to the merely
+idle jest of satire; the reader who laughed over the racy narrative of
+the unlettered Ezekiel, and then took up Hosea’s poem and caught the
+gust of Yankee wrath and humor blown fresh in his face, knew that he was
+in with the appearance of something new in American literature.</p>
+
+<p>After the first heat, Lowell began to distrust his mode a little. “As
+for Hosea,” he writes to Briggs, “I am sorry that I began by making him
+such a detestable speller. There is no fun in bad spelling of itself,
+but only where the misspelling suggests something else which is droll
+<i>per se</i>. You see I am getting him out of it gradually. I mean to
+altogether. Parson Wilbur is about to propose a subscription for fitting
+him for college, and has already commenced his education.”<a name="FNanchor_78_78" id="FNanchor_78_78"></a><a href="#Footnote_78_78" class="fnanchor">[78]</a> He
+dropped this intention, however, and the later numbers of the series
+show no marked departure from the general scheme of Yankee spelling.
+There is no doubt, though, that when it came to a revision of the papers
+for final book publication, Lowell did make an attempt to introduce some
+sort of consistency or effectiveness in the form. He groaned over the
+labor involved, and confessed that he<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_262" id="page_262">{262}</a></span> made a great many alterations in
+spelling even after the pages had been stereotyped. “It is the hardest
+book to print,” he wrote Mr. Gay, “that ever I had anything to do with,
+and, what with corrections and Mr. Wilbur’s annotations, keeps me more
+employed than I care to be.”</p>
+
+<p>The labor was partly of his own making, but after all was consequent
+chiefly upon the sense of art which led the author to do much more than
+simply collect and reprint what he had written <i>currente calamo</i> in the
+<i>Courier</i> and <i>Standard</i>. The great popularity attained by the
+successive numbers showed him that he had hit the mark, but also the
+conception of the whole grew in his mind, and he seized the opportunity
+which reprinting afforded, to shape his satire and give it a body, by
+filling out the characters who constituted his <i>dramatis personæ</i>. “When
+I came to collect [the papers] and publish them in a volume,” he wrote
+in 1859 to Mr. Hughes, in the letter already quoted, I conceived my
+parson-editor with his pedantry and verbosity, his amiable vanity and
+superiority to the verses he was editing, as a fitting artistic
+background and foil. It gave me the chance, too, of glancing obliquely
+at many things which were beyond the horizon of my other characters. I
+was told afterwards that my Parson Wilbur was only Jedediah Cleishbotham
+over again, and I dare say it may be so; but I drew him from the life as
+well as I could, and for the authentic reasons I have mentioned.”</p>
+
+<p>There was a slight undercurrent of reference<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_263" id="page_263">{263}</a></span> to his own father in this
+characterization. “My father,” he wrote Hughes, “was as proud of his
+pedigree as a Talbot or Stanley could be, and Parson Wilbur’s
+genealogical mania was a private joke between us.”<a name="FNanchor_79_79" id="FNanchor_79_79"></a><a href="#Footnote_79_79" class="fnanchor">[79]</a></p>
+
+<p>So thoroughly did he think himself into the artistic conception of the
+book that he even proposed at one time to put Jaalam on the title-page
+as place of publication, and to have it “printed on brownish paper with
+those little head and tail pieces which used to adorn our earlier
+publications&mdash;such as hives, scrolls, urns, and the like.” This external
+fitness he did not secure, but he elaborated a system of notes,
+glossary, and index, letting the fun lurk in every part, and completed
+the effect by the notices of an independent press, which must have made
+the actual writers of book notices hesitate a little before they dropped
+into their customary machine-made manner when treating of this special
+work. The burlesque of Carlyle in one of these is especially clever. In
+supplying all this apparatus he drew a little on his prose papers in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_264" id="page_264">{264}</a></span>
+the <i>Standard</i>, but it is doubtful if most readers get beyond the verse,
+or do more than glance at the drollery which lies <i>perdu</i> in the prose
+equipment, so much swifter is the flight of the arrows of satire when
+they are barbed with rhyme.</p>
+
+<p>The success of the book was immediate. The first edition of 1500 was
+gone in a week, and the author could say with satisfaction that “the
+book was actually out of print before a second edition could be struck
+off from the plates.” In later years the book was apt to fill him with a
+kind of amused astonishment. The unstinted praise which Hughes gave to
+the “Biglow Papers,” quotations from which were always on his tongue’s
+end, drew from Lowell the expression: “I was astonished to find what a
+heap of wisdom was accumulated in those admirable volumes.” It is not
+strange that, in looking back from the tranquil temper of older years,
+Lowell should be struck with the high spirits, the tension of feeling,
+and the abandon of utterance which characterize this work; but when he
+was in the thick of the fight a second time he was more impressed by the
+moral earnestness which underlay all this free lancing. “The success of
+my experiment,” he wrote, in the Introduction to the Second Series,
+“soon began not only to astonish me, but to make me feel the
+responsibility of knowing that I held in my hand a weapon instead of the
+mere fencing stick I had supposed.... If I put on the cap and bells, and
+made myself one of the court fools of King Demos, it was less to make
+his Majesty laugh than to win a passage to his royal ears<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_265" id="page_265">{265}</a></span> for certain
+serious things which I had deeply at heart.”</p>
+
+<p>The force which Lowell displayed in this satire made his book at once a
+powerful ally of a sentiment which heretofore had been crassly
+ridiculed; it turned the tables and put Anti-slavery, which had been
+fighting sturdily on foot with pikes, into the saddle, and gave it a
+flashing sabre. For Lowell himself it won an accolade from King Demos.
+He rose up a knight, and thenceforth possessed a freedom which was a
+freedom of nature, not a simple badge of service in a single cause. His
+patriotism and moral fervor found other vents in later life, and he
+never sheathed the sword which he had drawn from the scabbard; but it is
+significant of the stability of his genius that he was not misled into a
+limitation of his powers by the sudden distinction which came to him.
+For, though we naturally think first of the political significance of
+the “Biglow Papers,” the book, in its fullest meaning, is an expression
+of Lowell’s personality, and has in it the essence of New England. The
+character of the race from which its author sprang is preserved in its
+vernacular and in the characters of the <i>dramatis personæ</i>. Not
+unwittingly, but in the full consciousness of his own inheritance,
+Lowell became the spokesman of a racy people, whose moral force had a
+certain acrid quality, and, when thrown to the winds, as in the person
+of Birdofredom Sawin, was replaced by an insolent shrewdness. Nor is the
+exemplification of New England less complete for that infusion of homely
+sentiment and genuine<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_266" id="page_266">{266}</a></span> poetic sensibility which underlie and penetrate
+the sturdy moral force.</p>
+
+<p>The “Biglow Papers” threw “A Fable for Critics” into the shade. It was
+nearly through the press when the “Fable” was published, and Briggs, who
+kept a close watch of his friend’s production, wrote: “I am pretty
+confident that the ‘Fable’ will suit the market for which it is
+intended, unless it should be killed by Hosea, who will help to divert
+public attention from his own kind.” It is to be suspected that Lowell
+himself felt the strong contrast which lay in the two works when he was
+driving them through the press side by side, and rather lost interest in
+the ebullition of an hour, as he threw himself with an almost exhausted
+energy into a book which carried at its heart a flame of passionate
+scorn. The only passage in “A Fable for Critics” which he dwelt upon
+with genuine delight was his apostrophe to Massachusetts, and that is
+almost out of key with the rest of the poem. But a third book was
+shortly to follow and to divide with the other two the popularity which
+fell to Lowell as a writer.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>It does not appear just when “The Vision of Sir Launfal” was written,
+but in a letter to Briggs, dated 1 February, 1848, Lowell speaks of it
+as “a sort of story, and more likely to be popular than what I write
+generally. Maria thinks very highly of it. I shall probably publish it
+by itself next summer.” But it was not till the “Biglow Papers” were off
+his hands that Lowell took steps to print<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_267" id="page_267">{267}</a></span> the book, which was published
+17 December, 1848. It was not long after that he went to Watertown for
+the wedding of Mrs. Lowell’s sister with Dr. Estes Howe, and the next
+day he wrote to Briggs: “I walked to Watertown over the snow with the
+new moon before me and a sky exactly like that in Page’s evening
+landscape. Orion was rising behind me, and as I stood on the hill just
+before you enter the village, the stillness of the fields around me was
+delicious, broken only by the tinkle of a little brook which runs too
+swiftly for Frost to catch it. My picture of the brook in ‘Sir Launfal’
+was drawn from it. But why do I send you this description&mdash;like the
+bones of a chicken I had picked? Simply because I was so happy as I
+stood there, and felt so sure of doing something that would justify my
+friends. But why do I not say that I <i>have</i> done something? I believe I
+have done better than the world knows yet, but the past seems so little
+compared with the future.” And then referring to a recent notice of him
+which intimated that he was well to do, he says: “I wish I might be for
+a day or two. I should like such an income as Billy Lee desired, who,
+when some one asked his idea of a competence, replied, ‘A million a
+minute, and your expenses paid!’ But I am richer than he thinks for. I
+am the first poet who has endeavored to express the American Idea, and I
+shall be popular by and by. Only I suppose I must be dead first. But I
+do not want anything more than I have.”</p>
+
+<p>It is not very likely that Lowell was thinking<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_268" id="page_268">{268}</a></span> specifically of “Sir
+Launfal” when he wrote this. It is more likely that he would have named
+“Prometheus,” “Columbus,” or “Freedom” if he had been asked to name
+names; and yet it is not straining language too far to say that when he
+took up an Arthurian story he had a different attitude toward the whole
+cycle of legends from that of Tennyson who, a half dozen years before,
+had begun to revive the legends for the pleasure of English-reading
+people. The exuberance of the poet as he carols of June in the prelude
+to Part First is an expression of the joyous spring which was in the
+veins of the young American, glad in the sense of freedom and hope. As
+Tennyson threw into his retelling of Arthurian romance a moral sense, so
+Lowell, also a moralist in his poetic apprehension, made a parable of
+his tale, and, in the broadest interpretation of democracy, sang of the
+levelling of all ranks in a common divine humanity. There is a
+subterranean passage connecting the “Biglow Papers” with “Sir Launfal”;
+it is the holy zeal which attacks slavery issuing in this fable of a
+beautiful charity, Christ in the guise of a beggar.</p>
+
+<p>The invention is a very simple one, and appears to have been suggested
+by Tennyson’s “Sir Galahad,” but the verses in the poem which linger
+longest in the mind are not those connected with the fable, but rather
+the full-throated burst of song in praise of June. Indeed, one might
+seriously maintain from Lowell’s verse that there was an especial
+affinity which he held with this month. Witness the joyous rush of
+pleasure with which “Under<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_269" id="page_269">{269}</a></span> the Willows”<a name="FNanchor_80_80" id="FNanchor_80_80"></a><a href="#Footnote_80_80" class="fnanchor">[80]</a> is begun, and the
+light-heartedness with which Hosea Biglow leaves the half-catalogue
+manner rehearsing the movement of Spring in “Sunthin’ in the Pastoral
+Line,” and leaps almost vociferously into the warm, generous air of
+June, when “all comes crowdin’ in.” The poem entitled “Al Fresco” is but
+a variation on the same theme; when he first published it, save the
+opening stanza, in the <i>Anti-Slavery Standard</i>, he gave it the title of
+“A Day in June.” And when, compelled to lie indoors, he found a
+compensation in Calderon singing to him like a nightingale, it was still
+a wistful look he cast on his catbird that joined with the oriole and
+the cuckoo to call him out of doors, and he sighed to think that he
+could not like them be a pipe for June to play on. “The Nightingale in
+the Study” was written when he sought in illness for something that
+would seclude him from himself; but the three poems of 1848 were the
+outcome of a nature so tingling with vitality that expression was its
+necessity, and spontaneity the law of its being. Literature, freedom,
+and nature in turn appealed to the young enthusiast; the visions he saw
+stirred him, in the quiet of Elmwood, to eager, impetuous delivery; and
+his natural voice was a singing one.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_270" id="page_270">{270}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI<br /><br />
+<small>SIX YEARS</small><br /><br />
+<small>1845-1851</small></h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">When</span>, in the spring of 1845, the Lowells returned to Cambridge from
+Philadelphia, where they had spent the first four months of their
+married life, it was to share the family home of Elmwood for the next
+six years. Lowell’s father retired in the summer of 1845 from active
+charge of the West Parish in Boston, but retained his interest in
+various societies which gave him partial occupation, leaving him leisure
+for the indulgence of his taste for reading and for the pleasures of
+gardening and small farming. His mother, whose malady slowly but
+steadily increased, was under watchful care. She was taken to various
+health resorts in hopes of recovery, and spent a part of her last years
+under more constant treatment at an asylum for the mentally deranged.
+Miss Rebecca Lowell had charge of the little household, and now and then
+went on journeys with her father or mother or both, leaving the young
+couple to themselves. As one child after another came into the circle,
+the grandfather found a solace for the sorrow which lay heavily upon
+him, and his letters, when he was on one of his journeys, were filled
+with affectionate messages for his<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_271" id="page_271">{271}</a></span> new daughter and her children,
+mingled with careful charges to his son concerning the well-being of the
+cattle, small and large, and the proper harvesting of the little crops.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Lowell’s family lived near by in Watertown, and one by one her
+sisters married, one of them coming to Cambridge to live. The society of
+the college town was open, and it was in these early years that Lowell
+formed one of a whist club, which, with but slight variation in
+membership, continued its meetings to the end of his life, and the
+simple records of which were kept by Lowell. Its most constant members
+were Mr. John Holmes, a younger brother of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes,
+Mr. John Bartlett, who was for a while a bookseller in Cambridge, and
+afterward until his retirement a member of the publishing firm of
+Little, Brown &amp; Co. of Boston, and best known by his handbook of
+“Familiar Quotations” and his elaborate “Concordance to Shakespeare,”
+and finally Dr. Estes Howe, who married Mrs. Lowell’s sister.</p>
+
+<p>Lowell was much given to concealing in his verse or prose little
+allusions which might be passed over by readers unaware of what lay
+beneath, but would be taken as a whispered aside by his friends. Thus in
+a “Preliminary Note to the Second Edition” of “A Fable for Critics,” he
+says: “I can walk with the Doctor, get facts from the Don, or draw out
+the Lambish quintessence of John, and feel nothing more than a half
+comic sorrow, to think that they all<a name="FNanchor_81_81" id="FNanchor_81_81"></a><a href="#Footnote_81_81" class="fnanchor">[81]</a> will be lying to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_272" id="page_272">{272}</a></span>-morrow tossed
+carelessly up on the waste-paper shelves, and forgotten by all but their
+half dozen selves.”</p>
+
+<p>In the summer of 1846 the sickness of little Blanche took the family
+suddenly to Stockbridge in the Berkshire Hills, whence Lowell wrote to
+Carter: “Stockbridge is without exception the quietest place I was ever
+in, and the office of postmaster here one of the most congenial to my
+taste and habits of any I ever saw or heard of. The postmaster has no
+regular hours whatever. Even if engaged in sorting the mail, he will run
+out and lock the door behind him, to play with his grandchildren. I do
+not believe that in the cabinet of any postmaster-general there is a
+more unique specimen. He is a gray-bearded old gentleman of between
+sixty and seventy, wears the loose calico gown so much in vogue among
+the country clergy, and feels continually that he is an important limb
+of the great body politic. I do not mean that he is vain. There is too
+profound a responsibility attached to his office to allow of so light
+and unworthy a passion. There is a solemn, half-melancholy grandeur
+about him, a foreboding, perchance, of that change of administration
+which may lop him from the parent tree,&mdash;a Montezuma-like dread of that
+mysterious stranger into whose hands his sceptre must pass. In
+purchasing a couple of steel pens or a few cigars of him (for he keeps a
+small variety store) you feel that the parcel is done up and handed over
+the counter by one of the potent hands of government itself.... We have<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_273" id="page_273">{273}</a></span>
+found Stockbridge an exceedingly pleasant place and have made many
+agreeable acquaintances. Blanche is a favorite throughout the village
+and knows everybody.”</p>
+
+<p>Longfellow, who was near by in Pittsfield at this time, notes in his
+Diary, 16 August: “In the afternoon Lowell came with his wife from Lenox
+to see us. He looks as hale as a young farmer; she very pale and
+fragile. They are driving about the country and go southward to Great
+Barrington and the region of the Bash Bish.”</p>
+
+<p>The illness of Blanche which led her parents to take her into the
+country was slight and temporary. The child grew in beauty and winning
+grace, and endeared herself to her father in a manner which left its
+signs long afterward. Early in March, 1847, however, when she was
+vigorous and gave promise of a hearty life, she was seized suddenly with
+a malady consequent upon too rapid teething, and after a week’s sickness
+died. “In the fourteen months she was with us (for which God be
+thanked),” Lowell wrote to Briggs, “she showed no trace of any evil
+tendency, and it is wonderful how in so brief a space she could have
+twined her little life round so many hearts. Wherever she went everybody
+loved her. My poor father loved her so that he almost broke his heart in
+endeavoring to console Maria when it was at last decided the dear child
+was not to be spared to us.” After Blanche was buried, her father took
+her tiny shoes, the only ones she had ever worn, and hung them in his
+chamber. There they stayed till his own death.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_274" id="page_274">{274}</a></span> “The Changeling”
+preserves in poetry the experience of the father in this first great
+sorrow of his life, and “The First Snow-Fall” intimates the consolation
+which was shortly to be brought, for in September the second child,
+Mabel, was born.</p>
+
+<p>The literary product of 1847 was inconsiderable. A few poems appeared,
+and Lowell even contemplated trying his hand at a tragedy founded on the
+Conquest of Mexico,&mdash;the first conquest, as one of his friends slyly
+remarks,&mdash;suggested no doubt by Prescott’s history, which had appeared
+four years earlier, and had just been followed by the “Conquest of
+Peru.” He made some progress with the tragedy, and even purposed
+offering it in competition for the large prize promised by Forrest for a
+good acting tragedy, but no line of it appears to have been preserved.
+He contributed also two or three articles to the <i>North American
+Review</i>, and in the fall of the year he set about the collection of such
+poems as he had written since his previous volume appeared. In the midst
+of this work he wrote to his friend Carter, then in the little village
+of Pepperell, and his letter reflects pleasantly the attitude he always
+took toward New England country life, as well as shows the wistfulness
+of his regard for his lost child.</p>
+
+<p>“There are pleasanter ways of looking at a country village like
+Pepperell,” he writes to his somewhat discontented correspondent; “there
+are good studies both within doors and without, and either picture will
+be new to you. Talk to the men about farming, and you will find yourself
+in good<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_275" id="page_275">{275}</a></span> society at once. Inquire of the women about the mysteries of
+cheese&mdash;and butter-making, and you will be more entertained than with
+the Georgics. At first, you find yourself in a false relation with them.
+You touch at no points and bristle repellingly at all. They flounder in
+their conversation and seek shelter in the weather or the price of pork,
+because they consider themselves under a painful necessity to entertain
+you. They can’t converse because they try&mdash;effort being the untimely
+grave of all true interchange of natures. They make a well where there
+should be a fountain. Get them upon any common ground, and you will find
+there is genuine stuff in them. The essence of good society is simply a
+community in habits of thought and topics of interest. When we approach
+each other naturally, we meet easily and gracefully; if we hurry too
+much we are apt to come together with an unpleasant bump.</p>
+
+<p>“Who knows how much domestic interest was involved in that question the
+goodwife asked you about Mr. Praisegod’s servant? Perhaps she has a son,
+or a daughter betrothed to a neighbor’s son, who thinks of beginning
+life (as many of the farmers’ children in our country towns do) by
+entering into service in the city. Perhaps she wished and yet did not
+dare to ask of the temptations he would be exposed to. I love our
+Yankees with all their sharp angles.</p>
+
+<p>“Maria is and has been remarkably well ever since the birth of our
+little darling, if I may call her so when Blanche still holds the first
+place in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_276" id="page_276">{276}</a></span> our hearts. Little Miss Mabel thrives wonderfully. She is, I
+think, as good a child as her little sister&mdash;though I tremble to trace
+any likeness between the two. She certainly has not Blanche’s noble and
+thoughtful eyes, which were noticeable even when she was first born. But
+some of her ways are very like her sister’s. Those who have seen her say
+that she is a very beautiful child.”</p>
+
+<p>Toward the end of the year the volume of poems pressed hard upon him. “I
+should have written to you,” he writes to Briggs, 13 November, 1847, “at
+any rate just to say that I loved you still and to ask how you did, had
+I not been most preposterously busy with the printers. I had calculated
+in a loose way that I had ‘copy’ enough prepared to make as large a
+volume as I intended mine should be, but about three weeks ago the
+printers overtook me, and since then we have been neck and neck for
+something like a hundred pages&mdash;thirty page heats. It was only yesterday
+that I won the cup. Everybody has a notion that it is of advantage to be
+out before Christmas; and though I feel a sort of contempt for a demand
+so adventitiously created, and do not wish anybody to buy my book but
+those who buy to read, yet it is one of these little points which we
+find it convenient to yield in life, and not the less readily because it
+will be for our advantage not to be obstinate. I have a foolish kind of
+pride in these particulars. I had rather, for example, that you should
+have copied into the <i>Mirror</i> a column of abuse than those exaggerated
+commendations of my Louisville<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_277" id="page_277">{277}</a></span> friend. I do not know whether it is a
+common feeling or not, but I can never get to consider myself as
+anything more than a boy. My temperament is so youthful, that whenever I
+am addressed (I mean by mere acquaintances) as if my opinion were worth
+anything, I can hardly help laughing. I cannot but think to myself with
+an inward laugh: ‘My good friend, you would be as mad as a hornet with
+me, if you knew that I was only a boy of twelve behind a bearded vizor.’
+This feeling is so strong that I have got into a way of looking on the
+Poet Lowell as an altogether different personage from myself, and feel a
+little offended when my friends confound the two.”</p>
+
+<p>The volume of poems to which Lowell refers in this letter came out just
+before Christmas, 1847. It bore the words “Second Series” on the
+title-page, being coupled in the author’s mind with the Poems issued
+four years previous. It is in the main a collection of the poems which
+Lowell in the past four years had scattered through papers and
+magazines, though he omitted several which had appeared in print, one or
+two of which indeed he went back and picked up on issuing his next
+collection a score of years later. He did not draw on his Biglow poems,
+reserving them for a volume by themselves, and he omitted several that
+were in a similar vein. There was perhaps no single poem in the new
+series which struck a deeper note than is to be found in one or two of
+the poems in the earlier collection, yet the art of the second series is
+firmer than that of the first, and the book as a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_278" id="page_278">{278}</a></span> whole is distinctly
+more even and more free from the mere sentimentalism which marks the
+previous volume. Scattered through it are a few of the more serious of
+his anti-slavery poems, as if for a testimony; but he does not retain
+the violent, not to say turgid, songs which he had thrown out upon
+occasions of public excitement.</p>
+
+<p>There is one poem among the few contributed directly to the volume,
+which is familiar to lovers of Lowell himself rather than of Lowell the
+poet, if we may take his own discrimination, and it is most likely that
+it was written under conditions referred to in the letter just quoted.
+“An Indian-Summer Reverie,” which fills sixteen pages of the little
+volume, near its close, bears the marks of rapid writing. It is easy to
+believe that Lowell, coming away from the printing-office, where he had
+learned that the printers needed at once more copy, paused near the
+willows, and in the warm, hazy November afternoon let his mind drift
+idly over the scene and blend with it reflections on his own life. The
+poet, by virtue of his gift, is always young, and yet when young is the
+most retrospective of men. Not yet thirty, Lowell could remember his
+youth, and helped by the autumn that was in the air, could see nature
+and man and his own full life through a medium which has the mistiness
+and the color of the Indian Summer. There are poetic lines and phrases
+in the poem, and more than all the veil of the season hangs tremulously
+over the whole, so that one is gently stirred by the poetic feeling of
+the rambling verses; yet, after all, the most endur<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_279" id="page_279">{279}</a></span>ing impression is of
+the young man himself in that still hour of his life, when he was
+conscious, not so much of a reform to which he must put his hand, as of
+the love of beauty, and of the vague melancholy which mingles with
+beauty in the soul of a susceptible poet. The river winding through the
+marshes, the distant sound of the ploughman, the near chatter of the
+chipmunk, the individual trees, each living its own life, the march of
+the seasons flinging lights and shadows over the broad scene, the
+pictures of human life associated with his own experience, the hurried
+survey of his village years&mdash;all these pictures float before his vision;
+and then, with an abruptness which is like the choking of the singer’s
+voice with tears, there wells up the thought of the little life which
+held as in one precious drop the love and faith of his heart. Mr.
+Briggs, in a letter written upon receiving the volume, says: “I have
+just laid it aside with my eyes full of tears after reading ‘The
+Changeling,’ which appears to me the greatest poem in the collection,
+and I think that it will be so regarded by and by, a good many years
+hence, when I shall be wholly forgotten and you will only be known by
+the free thoughts you will leave behind you.” Mr. Briggs had himself
+lost a child, and his grief had been commemorated by Lowell; this same
+letter announces the birth of a daughter. One’s personal experience
+often colors if it does not obscure one’s critical judgment; but in
+taking account of Lowell’s life and its expression, we may not overlook
+the fact that up to this time certainly he was singu<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_280" id="page_280">{280}</a></span>larly ingenuous in
+making poetry, not simply a vehicle for the conveyance of large emotions
+generalized from personal experience, but a precipitation of his most
+intimate emotions. His love, his tender feelings for his friends, his
+generous and ardent hopes for humanity, his passion for freedom and
+truth, all lay at the depths of his being; but they rose to the surface
+perpetually in his poems and his letters, and he had scarcely learned to
+hold them in check by that hard mundane wisdom which comes to most
+through the attrition of daily living.</p>
+
+<p>Thus far Lowell had looked out on life pretty steadily from the
+sheltered privacy of a happy home, and he was not immediately to change
+his surroundings; but a certain induration was now to be effected which
+can scarcely be said to have arrested his spontaneity, but may fairly be
+looked upon as leading him to regard himself more as others regarded
+him, as no longer “a boy of twelve behind a bearded vizor,” but as grown
+up and become a man of the world. For it was not long after this that
+the relation into which he had entered with the <i>National Anti-Slavery
+Standard</i>, and which had undergone a sort of suspension as we have seen,
+became a very close and exacting one.</p>
+
+<p>The seclusion of his life satisfied Lowell; he was an infrequent visitor
+to Boston even, and made but few journeys. Now and then he went to New
+York, and, as we have seen, once to Stockbridge. To Canada also he made
+one journey; but it is clear from the circumstances attending these
+flittings that the Lowells had no money to spend on<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_281" id="page_281">{281}</a></span> luxuries. They
+could live simply and without much outlay of cash at Elmwood, but
+travelling meant hoarding first, and in those early married years the
+young couple was not often out of debt. Even a trip to New York had to
+be postponed again and again on this account. Mr. Gay’s drafts in
+payment of account for contributions to the <i>Standard</i> were irregular
+and always seemed to come just in the nick of time.</p>
+
+<p>“I thought to see you this week,” Lowell wrote to Gay, 8 June, 1848,
+when acknowledging one of these raven-flights,&mdash;“but cannot come yet. I
+cannot come without any money, and leave my wife with 62-1/2 cents, such
+being the budget brought in by my secretary of the treasury this
+week.... I am expecting some money daily&mdash;I always am&mdash;I always have
+been, and yet have never been fairly out of debt since I entered
+college.” And again, writing to the same, 26 February, 1849, “The truth
+is, that I have just been able to keep my head above water; but there is
+a hole in my life-preserver, and what wind I can raise from your quarter
+comes just in season to make up for leakage and save me from total
+submersion. Since the day after I received your remittance for December,
+I have literally not had a copper, except a small sum which I borrowed.
+It was all spent before I got it. So is the last one, too. As long as I
+have money I don’t think anything about it, except to fancy my present
+stock inexhaustible and capable of buying up the world.” A few days
+later, on receiving the draft which his half-humorous letter<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_282" id="page_282">{282}</a></span> called
+for, he wrote in the same strain: “I am not very often down in the
+mouth: but sometimes, at the end of the year, when I have done a
+tolerable share of work, and have nothing to show for it, I feel as if I
+had rather be a spruce clerk on India wharf than a man of letters.
+Regularly I look forward to New Year, and think that I shall begin the
+next January out of debt, and as regularly I am disappointed.”</p>
+
+<p>Yet all this time, with his frugal living and his vain effort to be even
+with the world, he could not refrain from obeying his generous impulses.
+His gift of “A Fable for Critics” to Briggs illustrates this spirit, and
+a passage in one of his letters shows the secret giver who is perhaps a
+little more lovable in the eyes of the Lord than the cheerful public
+one. Mr. Briggs had written to him 16 November, 1849: “On Monday evening
+Page and I were at Willis’s house, and in the course of a conversation
+about Poe, Willis mentioned that you had written him a very pleasant
+letter about Poe, and enclosed something really handsome for Mrs. Clemm.
+‘I could not help thinking,’ said Willis, ‘that if Lowell had known what
+Poe wrote to me about him just previous to his death, he would hardly
+have been so liberal.” “What a contemptible idea of me Willis must
+have,” Lowell replied, “to think that anything Poe might say of me would
+make any difference in my feeling pity for his poor mother-in-law. I
+confess it does not raise my opinion of Willis. I knew before as well as
+I know now, that Poe must have been abusing me,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_283" id="page_283">{283}</a></span> for he knew that ever
+since his conduct toward you about the <i>Broadway Journal</i> I had thought
+meanly of him. I think Willis would hardly care to see some letters of
+Poe to me in which <i>he</i> is spoken of. My ‘pleasant letter’ to W. was
+about ten lines, rather less than more I fancy, and my ‘generous
+donation’ was five dollars! I particularly requested of him that it
+should be anonymous, which I think a good principle, as it guards us
+against giving from any unworthy motive. That Willis should publish it
+at the street corners only proves the truth of Swift’s axiom that any
+man may gain the reputation of generosity by £20 a year spent
+judiciously.”</p>
+
+<p>When Hawthorne lost his place in the Salem Custom House, Lowell with
+other of his friends made active effort to set him on his feet. He wrote
+to Mr. Duyckinck, 13 January, 1850: “Perhaps you know that Hawthorne was
+last spring turned out of an office which he held in the Salem Custom
+House, and which was his sole support. He is now, I learn, very poor,
+and some money has just been raised for him by his friends in this
+neighborhood. Could not something be also done in New York? I know that
+you appreciate him, and that you will be glad to do anything in your
+power. I take it for granted that you know personally all those who
+would be most likely to give. I write also to Mr. O’Sullivan, who is a
+friend of Hawthorne’s, but am ignorant whether he is now in New York. Of
+course Hawthorne is entirely ignorant that anything of the kind is going
+on, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_284" id="page_284">{284}</a></span> it would be better that ‘a bird in the air’ should seem to have
+carried the news to New York, and that if anything be raised, it should
+go thence, directly, as a spontaneous gift.”</p>
+
+<p>The money which Lowell and others collected for Hawthorne was sent in
+the most anonymous fashion through Mr. George S. Hillard, and Hawthorne
+acknowledged the gift in a letter which moves one by its mingling of
+gratitude and humiliation. “I read your letter,” he writes to Hillard,
+“in the vestibule of the post office [at Salem]; and it drew&mdash;what my
+troubles never have&mdash;the water to my eyes; so that I was glad of the
+sharply cold west wind that blew into them as I came homeward, and gave
+them an excuse for being red and bleared.</p>
+
+<p>“There was much that was very sweet&mdash;and something too that was very
+bitter&mdash;mingled with that same moisture. It is sweet to be remembered
+and cared for by one’s friends&mdash;some of whom know me for what I am,
+while others, perhaps, know me only through a generous faith&mdash;sweet to
+think that they deem me worth upholding in my poor work through life.
+And it is bitter, nevertheless, to need their support. It is something
+else besides pride that teaches me that ill-success in life is really
+and justly a matter of shame. I am ashamed of it, and I ought to be. The
+fault of a failure is attributable&mdash;in a great degree at least&mdash;to the
+man who fails. I should apply this truth in judging of other men; and it
+behooves me not to shun its point or edge in taking it home<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_285" id="page_285">{285}</a></span> to my <i>own</i>
+heart. Nobody has a right to live in the world, unless he be strong and
+able, and applies his ability to good purpose.</p>
+
+<p>“The money, dear Hillard, will smooth my path for a long time to come.
+The only way in which a man can retain his self-respect, while availing
+himself of the generosity of his friends, is by making it an incitement
+to his utmost exertions, so that he may not need their help again. I
+shall look upon it so&mdash;nor will shun any drudgery that my hand shall
+find to do, if thereby I may win bread.”</p>
+
+<p>Nearly four years later, when Hawthorne had leapt into fame and
+prosperity after the publication of “The Scarlet Letter,” he wrote again
+to Hillard from Liverpool: “I herewith send you a draft on Ticknor for
+the sum (with interest included) which was so kindly given me by unknown
+friends, through you, about four years ago. I have always hoped and
+intended to do this, from the first moment when I made up my mind to
+accept the money. It would not have been right to speak of this purpose,
+before it was in my power to accomplish it; but it has never been out of
+my mind for a single day, nor hardly, I think, for a single working
+hour. I am most happy that this loan (as I may fairly call it, at this
+moment) can now be repaid without the risk on my part of leaving my wife
+and children utterly destitute. I should have done it sooner; but I felt
+that it would be selfish to purchase the great satisfaction for myself,
+at any fresh risk to them. We are not<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_286" id="page_286">{286}</a></span> rich, nor are we ever likely to
+be; but the miserable pinch is over.</p>
+
+<p>“The friends who were so generous to me must not suppose that I have not
+felt deeply grateful, nor that my delight at relieving myself from this
+pecuniary obligation is of any ungracious kind. I have been grateful all
+along, and am more so now than ever. This act of kindness did me an
+unspeakable amount of good; for it came when I most needed to be assured
+that anybody thought it worth while to keep me from sinking. And it did
+me even greater good than this, in making me sensible of the need of
+sterner efforts than my former ones, in order to establish a right for
+myself to live and be comfortable. For it is my creed (and was so even
+at that wretched time) that a man has no claim upon his fellow
+creatures, beyond bread and water, and a grave, unless he can win it by
+his own strength or skill. But so much the kinder were those unknown
+friends whom I thank again with all my heart.”<a name="FNanchor_82_82" id="FNanchor_82_82"></a><a href="#Footnote_82_82" class="fnanchor">[82]</a></p>
+
+<p>Aside from his modest salary from the <i>Standard</i>, Lowell’s income from
+his writings was meagre enough. In publishing his volumes of poetry, he
+appears to have been largely if not entirely at the expense of
+manufacture, and in the imperfectly organized condition of the book
+market at that time, he had himself to supervise arrangements for
+selling his volume of poems in New York. There<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_287" id="page_287">{287}</a></span> are one or two hints
+that, after his release from contributing to the <i>Standard</i>, he
+contemplated some new editorial position, perhaps even meditated a fresh
+periodical venture. At any rate, his friend Briggs remonstrated with
+him, in a letter written 15 March, 1849: “Don’t, my dear friend, think
+of selling yourself to a weekly or monthly periodical of any kind,
+except as a contributor <i>deo volente.</i> The drudgery of editorship would
+destroy you, and bring you no profit. Make up your mind resolutely to
+refuse any offers, let them be never so tempting. In a mere pecuniary
+point of view, it would be more profitable for you to sell your writings
+where you could procure the best pay for them; they will be worth more
+and more as your wants grow.” And in December, 1850, Emerson, who was
+enlisting Hawthorne’s interest in a new magazine projected by Mr. George
+Bradburn, “that impossible problem of a New England magazine,” as he
+calls it, writes: “I told him to go to Lowell, who had been for a year
+meditating the like project.”</p>
+
+<p>It is possible that there was some plan for turning the <i>Massachusetts
+Quarterly Review</i> into a brisker and more distinctly literary journal.
+At any rate, Lowell, writing to Emerson 19 February, 1850, says: “The
+plan seems a little more forward. I have seen Parker, who is as placable
+as the raven down of darkness, and not unwilling to shift his Old Man of
+the sea to other shoulders. Longfellow also is toward, and talks in a
+quite Californian manner of raising funds by voluntary subscription.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_288" id="page_288">{288}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Massachusetts Quarterly</i>, which had been started in 1847 as an
+organ of more progressive thought than the <i>North American Review</i>, was
+under the management of Theodore Parker, and Lowell was evidently a
+welcome though not constant contributor, as this letter to the editor
+intimates:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p class="r">
+<span class="smcap">Elmwood</span>, July 28, [1848].<br />
+</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">My dear Sir</span>:&mdash;Do <i>you</i> know where parsons go to who don’t believe
+in original sin? I think that your experience as an editor will
+bring you nearer orthodoxy by convincing you of the total depravity
+of contributors. I have no doubt that the plague of booksellers was
+sent to punish authors for their sins toward editors.</p>
+
+<p>Your note was so illegible that I was unable to make out that part
+of it in which you reproached me for my remissness. I shall choose
+rather to treasure it as containing I know not what commendations
+of my promptitude and punctuality. I will have it framed and glazed
+and exhibit it to editors inquiring my qualifications, as the
+enthusiastic testimony of the Rev. Theo. Parker, and fearlessly
+defy all detection.</p>
+
+<p>I assure you that it is not my fault that I did not send the
+enclosed<a name="FNanchor_83_83" id="FNanchor_83_83"></a><a href="#Footnote_83_83" class="fnanchor">[83]</a> earlier. I have suffered all this summer with a severe
+pain in the head, which has entirely crippled me for a great part
+of the time. It is what people call a <i>fullness</i> in the head, but
+its effect is to produce an entire emptiness.</p>
+
+<p>As it is, I am reluctant to send the article.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_289" id="page_289">{289}</a></span> I hardly know what
+is in it myself, but I am quite conscious that it is disjointed and
+wholly incomplete. I found it impossible to concentrate my mind
+upon it so as to give it any unity or entireness. Believe the
+writing it has worried me more than the not receiving it worried
+you.</p>
+
+<p>I send it as to a man in a strait to whom <i>anything</i> will be
+useful. I throw it <i>quasi lignum naufrago.</i> If I had one of the
+cedarn columns of the temple, I would cast it overboard to you; but
+having only a shapeless log, I give you that, as being as useful to
+a drowning man as if it were already made into a Mercury.</p>
+
+<p>I have, you see, given directions to the printer to copy “The
+Hamadryad.” My copy is a borrowed one, and if you own one I should
+be obliged to you if you would send it to the printing-office, as
+your warning about not smutching, etc., would probably have more
+weight with your printers than mine. If you have no copy please let
+me know through the P. O. and I will send the one I have, as I have
+obtained permission to do.</p>
+
+<p>I should like to see the proofs, and as I am going to New York on
+Monday next to be absent a week, I should like to have them sent to
+me there to the care of S. H. Gay, 142 Nassau St., if it should be
+necessary to print before I return. If there is too much hurry,
+will you be good enough to look at them yourself.</p>
+
+<p>If the article seem too short for a Review, you are welcome to
+insert it among your literary notices, or to return it.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_290" id="page_290">{290}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I must thank you before I close my note for the pleasure I received
+in reading a recent sermon of yours which I saw in the
+<i>Chronotype.</i> You have not so much mounted the pulpit as lifted it
+up to you.</p>
+
+<p>Very truly your Eumenides-driven contributor,</p>
+
+<p class="r">
+J. R. L.<a name="FNanchor_84_84" id="FNanchor_84_84"></a><a href="#Footnote_84_84" class="fnanchor">[84]</a><br />
+</p></div>
+
+<p>The most substantial magazine in his own neighborhood was the <i>North
+American Review</i>, and to that, in his early period, Lowell contributed
+but half a dozen articles. It is partly characteristic of the manner of
+the heavy reviewing of the day, and wholly characteristic of Lowell,
+that in each of these cases quite two thirds of the article is taken up
+with prolegomena. Before he could settle down to an examination of “The
+New Timon,” he must needs analyze at great length the quality of Pope,
+who had served as a sort of pattern: it is interesting, by the way, to
+note that in the last paragraph of his review, he guesses the book to
+have been written by Bulwer. So in reviewing Disraeli’s “Tancred,” he
+despatches the book itself somewhat summarily after a dozen pages of
+witty reflections on novel-writing. A review of Browning is more
+definitely an examination of this poet, with large extracts from
+“Luria,” though it has the inevitable long introduction on poetry in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_291" id="page_291">{291}</a></span>
+general; but its appreciation and discriminating judgment of Browning at
+a time when “Sordello,” “Paracelsus,” and “Bells and Pomegranates” were
+the only poems and collection by which to measure him, indicate surely
+how direct and at first hand were Lowell’s critical appraisals. “Above
+all,” he says, after a glowing rehearsal of the contents of “Bells and
+Pomegranates,” “his personages are not mere mouthpieces for the author’s
+idiosyncrasies. We take leave of Mr. Browning at the end of ‘Sordello,’
+and except in some shorter lyrics see no more of him. His men and women
+<i>are</i> men and women, and not Mr. Browning masquerading in different
+colored dominoes:” and in the same article occurs a passage which might
+lead one to think Lowell was musing over his own qualities: “Wit makes
+other men laugh, and that only once. It may be repeated indefinitely to
+new audiences and produce the same result. Humor makes the humorist
+himself laugh. He is a part of his humor, and it can never be repeated
+without loss.”</p>
+
+<p>In the more substantial literary criticism of his maturity Lowell
+occupied himself mainly with the great names of world literature, but at
+this time he was especially intent on his contemporaries in America and
+England, and he was keenly alive to manifestations of spirit which gave
+evidence of transcending the bounds of local reputation. In a review of
+Longfellow’s “Kavanagh” he made the book really only a peg from which to
+hang a long disquisition upon nationality in literature, a subject
+which, it will be remembered, receives considerable<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_292" id="page_292">{292}</a></span> attention in the
+book. Lowell’s own conclusion is that “Nationality is only a less narrow
+form of provincialism, a sublimer sort of clownishness and ill manners.”</p>
+
+<p>It was with the heartiest good-will that he welcomed Thoreau’s “Week on
+the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” just after the publication of that
+book. As in his other reviews of this period, he must needs preface his
+consideration of the book itself with some general remarks on
+travellers, which he liked well enough to preserve in his “Leaves from
+my Journal in Italy and Elsewhere,” published in “Fireside Travels;” but
+the main part of his article is a generous appreciation of Thoreau’s
+faculty of insight into the things of nature. “A graduate of
+Cambridge,&mdash;the fields and woods, the axe, the hoe, and the rake have
+since admitted him <i>ad eundem</i>. Mark how his imaginative sympathy goes
+beneath the crust, deeper down than that of Burns, and needs no plough
+to turn up the object of its muse.” He makes, however, a clear
+distinction between Thoreau the observer and man of reflection and
+Thoreau the bookman. “As long as he continues an honest Boswell, his
+book is delightful; but sometimes he serves his two rivers as Hazlitt
+did Northcote, and makes them run Thoreau or Emerson, or, indeed,
+anything but their own transparent element. What, for instance, have
+Concord and Merrimack to do with Boodh, themselves professors of an
+elder and to them wholly sufficient religion, namely, the willing
+subjects of watery laws, to seek their ocean? We have digres<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_293" id="page_293">{293}</a></span>sions on
+Boodh, on Anacreon (with translations hardly so good as Cowley), on
+Perseus, on Friendship, and we know not what. We come upon them like
+snags, jolting us headforemost out of our places as we are rowing
+placidly up stream, or drifting down. Mr. Thoreau becomes so absorbed in
+these discussions that he seems, as it were, to catch a crab, and
+disappears uncomfortably from his seat at the bow-oar. We could forgive
+them all, especially that on Books, and that on Friendship (which is
+worthy of one who has so long commerced with Nature and with Emerson),
+we could welcome them all, were they put by themselves at the end of the
+book. But as it is, they are out of proportion and out of place, and mar
+our Merrimacking dreadfully. We were bid to a river-party, not to be
+preached at. They thrust themselves obtrusively out of the narrative,
+like those quarries of red glass which the Bowery dandies (emulous of
+Sisyphus) push laboriously before them as breast-pins.” He finds fault
+with Thoreau for some of his verse, but regards with admiration his
+prose. “The style is compact, and the language has an antique purity
+like wine grown colorless with age.” Lowell expressed the same
+admiration for Thoreau’s style when he wrote again about him a dozen
+years later, after re-reading his books, but his point of view had by
+that time changed, and he was more concerned to look into Thoreau’s
+philosophy of life.</p>
+
+<p>The article on Landor, written at this time, was quite exclusively an
+examination of the genius of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_294" id="page_294">{294}</a></span> writer for whom he had long had a great
+admiration; and inasmuch as he had himself tried the form of
+conversation, it is worth while to note the excellent judgment he passes
+on Landor’s art. “Of his ‘Imaginary Conversations’ we may generally say
+that they would be better defined as dialogues between the imaginations
+of the persons introduced than between the persons themselves. There is
+a something in all men and women who deserve the much-abused title of
+<i>individuals</i>, which we call their character, something finer than the
+man or woman, and yet which <i>is</i> the man or woman nevertheless. We feel
+it in whatever they say or do, but it is better than their speech or
+deed, and can be conceived of apart from these. It is his own
+conceptions of the characters of different personages that Landor brings
+in as interlocutors. Between Shakespeare’s historical and ideal
+personages we perceive no difference in point of reality. They are alike
+historical to us. We allow him to substitute his Richard for the Richard
+of history, and we suspect that those are few who doubt whether Caliban
+ever existed. Whatever Hamlet and Cæsar say we feel to be theirs, though
+we know it to be Shakespeare’s. Whatever Landor puts into the mouth of
+Pericles and Michael Angelo and Tell, we know to be his, though we can
+conceive that it might have been theirs. Don Quixote would never have
+attacked any puppets of his. The hand which jerked the wires, and the
+mouth which uttered the speeches would have been too clearly visible.”
+Here again it is interesting to take up<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_295" id="page_295">{295}</a></span> the reminiscences of Landor and
+of his own early acquaintance with his writings, which he printed in
+1888, when introducing a group of Landor’s letters; for the comparison
+shows that though his enthusiasm for this writer had somewhat abated
+with years, the general tone of his judgment was the same.</p>
+
+<p>The article on Landor was a deferred one. It was to have been written
+for the June number of the <i>Massachusetts Quarterly Review</i>, but did not
+appear till December. His child’s sickness and work on the “Biglow
+Papers” drove other things out of his head. Indeed, as he wrote rapidly
+when he was moved to write at all, so he was afflicted with obstinate
+inertia when ideas did not come spontaneously. “I am again a
+delinquent,” he wrote to Gay, 25 November, 1848,&mdash;“and this time I am
+ashamed to say, out of pure laziness and having nothing to write about.
+But my next article I intend to write on Tuesday, so that you will be
+sure of it in time. Do forgive me this once more, and forgive also (if
+you can) the stupidity of my contribution. I feel like a squeezed turnip
+on which the experiment of extracting blood has been tried. I am
+haunted, like Barnaby Rudge’s father, with the sound of a <i>Bell</i>, not
+having sent anything yet to that horrible annual.<a name="FNanchor_85_85" id="FNanchor_85_85"></a><a href="#Footnote_85_85" class="fnanchor">[85]</a> Upon my word I am
+almost crazy with it. I have not an idea in my head, and believe firmly
+that I never shall have one again. And I obtained a reprieve ending a
+week ago last Friday!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_296" id="page_296">{296}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>But if he groaned thus over writing for publication, he was lavish of
+criticism and what might be called material for literature, when writing
+to his friends. The letters which Mr. Norton prints, dated in this
+period, abound in felicitous comment on men and incidents, and even a
+postscript will sometimes ramble on into the dimensions almost of a
+separate letter. After indulging in a long epistle to Mr. Briggs, dated
+12 May, 1848, he suddenly remembers that he means to send some poems of
+his wife’s for a collection which Griswold was making of the writings of
+the female poets of America; and after some lively comments on her
+contemporaries, he takes note of articles recently written by Briggs,
+and falls into a strain which he has disclosed elsewhere in somewhat
+similar terms: “You are wrong and N. P. W. is right (as I think) in the
+main, in what he says about American Society. There is as striking a
+want of external as of internal culture among our men. We ought to have
+produced the finest race of <i>gentlemen</i> in the world. But Europeans have
+laughed us into a nation of snobs. We are ashamed of our institutions.
+Our literature aims to convince Europe that America is as conservative
+and respectable as herself. I have often remarked that educated
+Americans have the least dignified bearing of any cultivated people.
+They all stoop in the shoulders, intellectually as well as physically. A
+nation of freemen, we alone of all others have the gait of slaves. The
+great power of the English aristocracy lies in their polish. That
+impresses the great middle class, who have a sort of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_297" id="page_297">{297}</a></span> dim conception of
+its value. A man gains in <i>power</i> as he gains in ease. It is a great
+advantage to him to be cultivated in all parts of his nature. Among
+scholars, R. W. E. has as fine a manner, as much poise, as I ever saw.
+Yet I have seen him quite dethroned by a pure man of the world. His face
+degenerated into a puzzled state. I go so far as to believe that all
+great men have felt the importance of the outward and visible impression
+they should produce. Socrates was as wise as Plato, indeed he was
+Plato’s master, but Plato dressed better, and has the greater name.
+Pericles was the first gentleman of Greece,&mdash;not the George IV. though,
+exactly. Remember Cæsar’s laurel-wig.</p>
+
+<p>“I might multiply instances, but I wish to have room to say how much I
+have been pleased with Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair.’ He has not Dickens’s
+talents as a caricaturist, but he draws with more truth. Dickens can
+take a character to pieces and make us laugh immoderately at the comic
+parts of it&mdash;or he takes only the comic part, as boys take the honey-bag
+of the bee, destroying the whole insect to get at it. But Thackeray can
+put a character together. He has more constructive power. D. is a
+satirizer, T. a satirist. I don’t think D. ever made anything equal to
+Becky Sharp. Rawdon Crawley, too, is admirable; so in truth are all the
+characters in their way, except Amelia, who is nothing in particular.</p>
+
+<p>“I liked ‘Wuthering Heights,’ too, as you did, though not so much. There
+is great power in it, but it is like looking at nature through a crooked
+pane<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_298" id="page_298">{298}</a></span> of glass. Some English journalist has nicknamed the author
+Salvator Rosa, and our journalists of course all repeat it. But it is
+nonsense. For it is not wildness and rudeness that the author is
+remarkable for, but delicacy. A character may be distorted without being
+wild or rude. Unnatural causes may crook a violet as well as an oak.
+Rochester is a truly refined character, and his roughness and coarseness
+are only the shields (scabs, as it were) over his finer nature. My sheet
+ends our conversation.”</p>
+
+<p>There is a picture of the Lowells at home at this time, drawn by Miss
+Fredrika Bremer. Lowell had reviewed her writings in their English
+dress&mdash;it was his first contribution to the <i>North American</i>,&mdash;and on
+her coming to America a meeting occurred, which resulted in a friendly
+visit paid by Miss Bremer to Elmwood. The form in which she recorded her
+impressions of travel was in letters home, afterward gathered into a
+book. It was on 15 December, 1849, that she wrote:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“The whole family assembles every day for morning and evening prayer
+around the venerable old man; and he it is who blesses every meal. His
+prayers, which are always extempore, are full of the true and inward
+life, and I felt them as a pleasant, refreshing dew upon my head, and
+seldom arose from my knees with dry eyes. With him live his youngest
+son, the poet, and his wife; such a handsome and happy young couple as
+one can hardly imagine. He is full of life and youthful ardor, she as
+gentle, as delicate, and as fair as a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_299" id="page_299">{299}</a></span> lily, and one of the most lovable
+women that I have seen in this country, because her beauty is full of
+soul and grace, as is everything which she does or says. This young
+couple belong to the class of those of whom one can be quite sure; one
+could not for an hour, nay, not for half an hour, be doubtful about
+them. She, like him, has a poetical tendency, and has also written
+anonymously some poems, remarkable for their deep and tender feeling,
+especially maternal, but her mind has more philosophical depth than his.
+Singularly enough, I did not discern in him that deeply earnest spirit
+which charmed me in many of his poems. He seems to me occasionally to be
+brilliant, witty, gay, especially in the evening, when he has what he
+calls his ‘evening fever,’ and his talk is then like an incessant play
+of fireworks. I find him very agreeable and amiable; he seems to have
+many friends, mostly young men.... There is a trace of beauty and taste
+in everything she [Mrs. L.] touches, whether of mind or body; and above
+all she beautifies life.... Pity it is that this much-loved young wife
+seems to have delicate lungs. Her low, weak voice tells of this. [Madame
+Lowell was plainly not at home.] Maria reads her husband’s poetry
+charmingly well.”<a name="FNanchor_86_86" id="FNanchor_86_86"></a><a href="#Footnote_86_86" class="fnanchor">[86]</a></p>
+
+<p>Near the close of 1849 Lowell reissued in two volumes, under the imprint
+of W. D. Ticknor &amp; Co., the two series which had appeared in 1843<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_300" id="page_300">{300}</a></span> and
+1847, and thus registered himself, as it were, among the regular
+vine-growers on the slopes of Parnassus. Moreover, with his former
+products thus formally garnered, he began to please himself with the
+prospect of some more thoroughgoing piece of poetical composition. He
+was practically clear of his regular engagement with the <i>Standard</i>, and
+his “Biglow Papers” had given him the opportunity to free his mind in an
+exhilarating fashion on the supreme question of the hour. There was
+something of a rebound from this in “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” but the
+free use of the Yankee vernacular with the immediate popularity which it
+secured must have set him thinking of the possibility of using this form
+in some freer and more genuinely poetic fashion. The little pastoral,
+“The Courtin’,” published in a fragmentary form, was an experiment in
+this direction at once highly successful, and accordingly we find him
+writing to Mr. Briggs on the eve of the publication of his two volumes
+of Poems: “I think you will find my poems improved in the new edition. I
+have not altered much, but I have left out the poorest and put others in
+their places. My next volume, I think, will show an advance. It is to be
+called ‘The Nooning.’ Now guess what it will be. The name suggests
+pleasant thoughts, does it not? But I shall not tell you anything about
+it yet, and you must not mention it.” And a few weeks later, with the
+project still high in his mind, he wrote to the same correspondent:
+“Maria invented the title for me, and is it not a pleasant<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_301" id="page_301">{301}</a></span> one? I am
+going to bring together a party of half a dozen old friends at Elmwood.
+They go down to the river and bathe, and then one proposes that they
+shall go up into a great willow-tree (which stands at the end of the
+causey near our house, and has seats in it) to take their nooning. There
+they agree that each shall tell a story or recite a poem of some sort.
+In the tree they find a countryman already resting himself, who enters
+into the plan and tells a humorous tale, with touches of Yankee
+character and habits in it. <i>I</i> am to read my poem of the ‘Voyage of
+Leif’ to Vinland, in which I mean to bring my hero straight into Boston
+Bay, as befits a Bay-state poet. Two of my poems are already
+written&mdash;one ‘The Fountain of Youth’ (no connection with any other
+firm), and the other an ‘Address to the Muse’ by the Transcendentalist
+of the party. I guess I am safe in saying that the first of these two is
+the best thing I have done yet. But you shall judge when you see it. But
+‘Leif’s Voyage’ is to be far better.” The scheme thus formed intended
+clearly a group of poems lightly tied together: indeed the plan, always
+a favorite one, was carried out on very nearly the same lines by Mr.
+Longfellow in his “Tales of a Wayside Inn” a dozen years later, and it
+is not impossible that Lowell, who had been interrupted in his plan, was
+still more reluctant to complete it, when it would have so much the air
+of being a copy of his neighbor’s design. At any rate, the <i>disjecta
+membra</i> of the poem found publication in a straggling fashion. Writing
+to Mr.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_302" id="page_302">{302}</a></span> J. B. Thayer, in reply to an inquiry about the poem, years
+after, Lowell says: “<span class="lftspc">‘</span>The June Idyl’ [renamed ‘Under the Willows’]
+(written in ’51 or ’52) is a part of what I had written as the induction
+to it. The description of spring in one of the ‘Biglow Papers’ is
+another fragment of the same, tagged with rhyme for the nonce. So is a
+passage in ‘Mason and Slidell,’ beginning ‘Oh strange new world.’ The
+‘Voyage to Vinland,’ the ‘Pictures from Appledore,’ and ‘Fitz-Adam’s
+Story’ were written for the ‘Nooning’ as originally planned. So, you
+see, I had made some progress. Perhaps it will come by and by&mdash;not in
+the shape I meant at first, for something broke my life in two, and I
+cannot piece it together again. Besides, the Muse asks <i>all</i> of a man,
+and for many years I have been unable to give myself up as I would.” To
+this list should be added “Fragments of an Unfinished Poem,” which was
+printed in the author’s final Riverside edition, when he had abandoned
+all thought of completing the “Nooning.”</p>
+
+<p>That Lowell was conscious of his vocation by this time, and that with
+the publication of his collected poems he was entering upon a new,
+resolute course of poetic action, is clear from a few pregnant sentences
+in a letter to Briggs, dated 23 January, 1850: My poems hitherto have
+been a true record of my life, and I mean that they shall continue to
+be.... I begin to feel that I must enter on a new year of my
+apprenticeship. My poems have thus far had a regular and natural
+sequence. First, Love and the mere happiness of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_303" id="page_303">{303}</a></span> existence beginning to
+be conscious of itself, then Freedom&mdash;both being the sides which Beauty
+presented to me&mdash;and now I am going to try more <i>wholly</i> after Beauty
+herself. Next, if I live, I shall present Life as I have seen it. In the
+‘Nooning’ I shall have not even a glance towards Reform. If the poems I
+have already written are good for anything they are perennial, and it is
+tedious as well as foolish to repeat one’s self. I have preached sermons
+enow, and now I am going to come down out of the pulpit and <i>go about
+among my parish</i>. I shall turn my barrel over and read my old
+discourses; it will be time to write new ones when my hearers have
+sucked all the meaning out of those old ones. Certainly I shall not
+grind for any Philistines, whether Reformers or Conservatives. I find
+that Reform cannot take up the whole of me, and I am quite sure that
+eyes were given us to look about us with sometimes, and not to be always
+looking forward. If some of my good red-hot friends were to see this
+they would call me a backslider, but there are other directions in which
+one may get away from people besides the rearward one.... I am not
+certain that my next appearance will not be in a pamphlet on the
+Hungarian question in answer to the <i>North American Review</i>. But I shall
+not write anything if I can help it. I am tired of controversy, and,
+though I have cut out the oars with which to row up my friend Bowen, yet
+I have enough to do, and, besides, am not so well as usual, being
+troubled in my head as I was summer before<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_304" id="page_304">{304}</a></span> last. I should like to play
+for a year, and after I have written and printed the ‘Nooning’ I mean to
+<i>take</i> a nooning and lie under the trees looking at the skies.”</p>
+
+<p>The Hungarian movement interested both Lowell and his sister, Mrs.
+Putnam, deeply. Lowell had printed in the <i>Standard</i> his verses to
+Kossuth, and Mrs. Putnam had written vigorously in the <i>Christian
+Examiner</i>. Robert Carter also printed a series of papers on the subject
+in the <i>Boston Atlas</i>, which were reprinted in a pamphlet. Lowell did
+not write the pamphlet he meditated, but a year later he wrote seven
+columns in the <i>Boston Daily Advertiser</i>, in defence of his sister
+against Professor Bowen’s attack. “It was the severest job I ever
+undertook,” he wrote Gay. “I believe I was longer at work in actual
+hours than in writing all Hosea Biglow and the ‘Fable for Critics.’<span class="lftspc">”</span> He
+had displayed his interest previously by a stirring appeal for funds in
+aid of the Hungarian exiles.<a name="FNanchor_87_87" id="FNanchor_87_87"></a><a href="#Footnote_87_87" class="fnanchor">[87]</a></p>
+
+<p>And now came three events to the little household at Elmwood that
+wrought a change in the life of Lowell and his wife. The first was the
+death of their third child, Rose, 2 February, 1850, after a half-year’s
+life only. The loss brought vividly to remembrance the experience which
+had entered so deeply into their lives when the first-born, Blanche, was
+taken away. “For Rose,” Lowell writes to Gay, “I would have no funeral;
+my father only made a prayer, and then I walked up alone to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_305" id="page_305">{305}</a></span> Mount
+Auburn and saw her body laid by her sister’s. She was a very lovely
+child&mdash;we think the loveliest of our three. She was more like Blanche
+than Mabel, and her disease was the same. Her illness lasted a week, but
+I never had any hope, so that she died to me the first day the doctor
+came. She was very beautiful&mdash;fair, with large dark gray eyes and fine
+features. Her smile was especially charming, and she was full of smiles
+till her sickness began. Dear little child! she had never spoken, only
+smiled.”</p>
+
+<p>Again death came that way, and on 30 March, 1850, Lowell’s mother died.
+The cloud which had for years hung over her had deepened, and her death
+was looked upon as a release, for whether at home or in seclusion she
+was alike separated from her family. As Lowell wrote:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“We can touch thee, still we are no nearer;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Gather round thee, still thou art alone;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The wide chasm of reason is between us;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thou confutest kindness with a moan;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We can speak to thee, and thou canst answer,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Like two prisoners through a wall of stone.”<a name="FNanchor_88_88" id="FNanchor_88_88"></a><a href="#Footnote_88_88" class="fnanchor">[88]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The third event was the birth of the fourth child and only son, Walter.
+Gay had lately lost a boy, and Lowell’s announcement to him of this
+birth was tempered by the fact. “I should have written you a note the
+other day,” he writes, 3 January, 1851, “to let you know that we have a
+son, only I could not somehow make up my mind to it. It pained me to
+think of the associations which such<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_306" id="page_306">{306}</a></span> news would revive in you. Yet I
+had rather you should hear it from me than from any one else.... The boy
+is a nice little fellow, and said (by his mother) to look like me. He
+was born on the 22d December, and I am doubting whether to name him
+Pilgrim Father or no. I have offered Maria her choice between that name
+and Larkin, which last I think would go uncommonly well with Lowell. She
+has not yet made up her mind.</p>
+
+<p>“But now for the tragic part of it. Just after we had got him cleverly
+born on the 22d, there springs me up an Antiquary (like a Jack in a box)
+and asserts that the Pilgrims landed on the 21st, that eleven days were
+added instead of ten in allowing for O. S., and that there is no use in
+disputing about it. But I appeal to any sensible person (I have no
+reference to antiquaries) whether, as applied to Larkin, this decision
+be not of the nature of an <i>ex post facto</i> law, by which he, the said
+Larkin, ought not of right to be concluded. What was he to know of it in
+his retirement, with no access to reading-rooms or newspapers?
+Inheriting from his father a taste for anniversaries, no doubt he laid
+his plans with deliberation, and is he now to give up his birthright for
+a mess of antiquarian pottage? Had proper notice been given, he would
+surely have bestirred himself to have arrived a day earlier. On the
+whole I shall advise Larkin to contest the point. For my part, I shall
+stick to the 22d, though it upset the whole Gregorian calendar, which to
+me, indeed, smacks a little too strongly of the Scarlet Woman. Would</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 345px;">
+<a name="MRS" id="MRS"></a>
+<a href="images/i_306fp_lg.jpg">
+<img src="images/i_306fp_sml.jpg" width="345" height="500" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
+<div class="caption"><p class="c"><i>Mrs. Charles Lowell</i></p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_307" id="page_307">{307}</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="nind">not the Pilgrim Fathers have sworn to the 22d, if they had known that
+ever a Pope of Rome would go for the 21st? Surely the Babe Unborn should
+not suffer for the want of accurate astronomical knowledge in them of
+old time. That other mythological character, the Oldest Inhabitant,
+should rather be held responsible as approaching nearer to a
+contemporaneousness with the guilty. However, till this matter is
+settled, I shall keep it to myself whether the 21st or the 22d were the
+day of his kindly nativity.”<a name="FNanchor_89_89" id="FNanchor_89_89"></a><a href="#Footnote_89_89" class="fnanchor">[89]</a></p>
+
+<p>Lowell had been longing for a holiday; Mrs. Lowell’s health, never
+robust, gave him now new cause of solicitude; the death of his mother
+severed one special cord that would tie him to his home, and thus, in
+the spring of 1851, it was decided to carry out a design formed more
+than once before, and spend a year at least in Europe. The Lowells tried
+to persuade the Gays to accompany them, but without success. “We are
+going,” Lowell wrote to Gay, “in a fine ship which will sail from Boston
+on the 1st July. She was built for a packet, has fine accommodations,
+and will land us at Genoa&mdash;a very fit spot for us New-Worlders to land
+at and make our first discovery of the Old.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">À Castilla y à Leon<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">(To Yankees also be it known)<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_308" id="page_308">{308}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nuevo Mundo dió Colon:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And so we Western men owe a<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Kind of debt to Genoa.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">Also people can live like princes (only more respectably) in Italy on
+fifteen hundred a year. We are going to travel on our own land. That is,
+we shall spend at the rate of about ten acres a year, selling our
+birthrights as we go along for messes of European pottage. Well, Raphael
+and the rest of them are worth it. My plan is to sit down in Florence
+(where, at least, the coral and bells and the gutta-percha dogs will be
+cheaper) till I have cut my eye (talian) teeth. <i>Tuscany</i> must be a good
+place for that. Then I shall be able to travel about without being too
+monstrously cheated.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_309" id="page_309">{309}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII<br /><br />
+<small>FIFTEEN MONTHS IN EUROPE</small><br /><br />
+<small>1851-1852</small></h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Mr. and Mrs. Lowell</span>, their two children, a nurse, and a goat sailed from
+Boston, Saturday, 12 July, 1851, in the barque Sultana, Watson, master,
+which went to the Mediterranean and dropped the little party at Malta.
+“We had a very good run from land to land,” Lowell wrote his father a
+few days before reaching Malta, “making the light at Cape St. Vincent on
+the night of the seventeenth day out. I stayed upon deck until we could
+see the light,&mdash;the cape we did not see at all, nor any land till the
+next morning. Then we saw the coast of Spain very dim and blue,&mdash;only
+the outline of a mountain and some high land here and there. The day
+before we made land we had a tolerably good specimen of a gale of wind,
+enough at any rate to get up so much sea that we were in danger of
+having our lee quarter boat washed away, the keel of which hangs above
+the level of the poop deck. As it was we lost the covering of one of our
+port-holes, which was knocked out by the water which was swashing about
+on the lower deck.</p>
+
+<p>“I was the only one of the party at table that day, and there was an
+amount of vivacity among<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_310" id="page_310">{310}</a></span> the dishes such as I never saw before. I took
+my soup by the process of absorption, the whole of it having suddenly
+leaped out of my plate into my lap. The table was literally at an angle
+of 45° all the time, with occasional eccentricities of the horizontal
+and the perpendicular, every change of level (or dip rather) being
+accomplished with a sudden jerk, which gave us a fine opportunity for
+studying the force of projectiles. Imagine the Captain, the First Mate,
+and myself at every one of these sudden hiccoughs (as it were) of the
+vessel, each endeavoring to think that he has six hands and finding too
+late that he has only two, during which interval between doubt and
+certainty, I have seen the contents of three dishes, A B C, change
+places, A taking the empty space left by B, B in like manner ejecting C,
+and C very naturally, having nowhere else to go, is thrown loose upon
+society and leads a nomadic life, first upon the tablecloth, then upon
+the seat, then upon the floor, every new position being a degradation,
+until at last it finds precarious lodging in one of the lee staterooms.
+You find your legs in a permanent condition of drunkenness, and that
+without any of the previous exhilaration. The surface of the country is
+such as I never saw described in any geographical work; the only thing
+at all approaching it which I have met with was the state of affairs
+during the great earthquake at Lisbon. You have just completed your
+arrangements for descending an inclined plane, when you find yourself
+climbing an almost perpendicular precipice, the surface of which being,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_311" id="page_311">{311}</a></span>
+by a curious freak of nature, of painted floor-cloth, renders your
+foothold quite precarious. It is like nothing but a nightmare.</p>
+
+<p>“Mabel was very sick, and her only comfort was to lie in my berth and
+take ‘strange food’ (which she immediately returned again) through a
+spoon which opens in a very mysterious and interesting manner out of the
+handle of a knife which John Holmes gave me the day we sailed.<a name="FNanchor_90_90" id="FNanchor_90_90"></a><a href="#Footnote_90_90" class="fnanchor">[90]</a>
+However, she was up again the next day, and has continued most devoted
+in her attendance at table, not to speak of little supernumerary lunches
+of crackers and toast which she contrives to extract from the compassion
+of the steward or cook. The galley is a favorite place of resort for
+her, to which she retires as one would to a summer-house, and where,
+inhaling the fumes from a cooking-stove of a very warm temperament, she
+converses with the cook (as well as I can learn) on cosmography, and
+picks up little separate bits of geography like disjointed fragments of
+several different dissected maps. With what extraordinary and thrilling
+narratives she repays him I can only guess, but I heard her this morning
+assuring Mary that she had seen two rats, one red and the other blue,
+running about the cabin. Indeed, her theories on the subject of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_312" id="page_312">{312}</a></span> natural
+history correspond with that era of the science when Goldsmith wrote his
+‘Animated Nature.’ She cultivates her vocal powers by singing ‘Jeannette
+and Jeannot’ with extraordinary vigor, and with a total irrecognition of
+the original air, which may arise from some hereditary contempt of the
+French. She assists regularly at ‘<span class="lftspc">’</span>bouting ship,’ as she calls it,
+standing at the wheel with admirable gravity. The Captain always takes
+the wheel and issues the orders when the ship is put about, and as this
+ceremony has taken place pretty regularly every few hours for the last
+eight days, Mabel has acquired all the requisite phrases. At intervals
+during the day, a shrill voice may be heard crying out, “Bout ship!’
+‘Mainsail ha-u-l!’ ‘Tacks and sheets!’ ‘Let go and ha-u-ll,’ the whole
+prefixed by an exceedingly emphatic ‘Ha-a-a-rd a lee!!’ There is no part
+of the vessel except the hold and the rigging which she has not
+repeatedly inspected. With all the sailors she is on intimate terms, and
+employs them at odd hours in the manufacture of various articles of
+furniture.... Nannie has been a constant source of interest and
+amusement to Mabel, who climbs up to visit her every day fifty times at
+least, and gives her little handfuls of hay and oats which Nannie seems
+to eat with a particular relish.”</p>
+
+<p>The humorous account of the chief mate which occurs in the section “In
+the Mediterranean,” in “Leaves from my Journal,” is taken from a full
+and lively letter written by Lowell a few days later on shipboard to his
+brother-in-law, Dr. Estes Howe.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_313" id="page_313">{313}</a></span> By that time they were off Tunis.
+“Perhaps the finest thing we have seen,” he writes to Dr. Howe, “was the
+first view of the African coast, which was Cape Espartel in Morocco.
+There were five mountains in the background, the highest being as tall
+as the Catskills, but the outlines much sharper and grander. They were
+heaped together as we saw the Adirondacks from Burlington. We were a
+whole day and half the night in beating through the Straits of
+Gibraltar, and had very fine views of the shores on both sides. The
+little Spanish town of Tarifa had a great charm for me, lying under a
+mountain opposite the Moorish coast, with its now useless walls all
+around it. The fires of the charcoal burners on the mountains were
+exceedingly picturesque, especially at night, when they gave to some
+dozen peaks on both sides the aspect of volcanoes. Apes Hill, opposite
+the rock of Gibraltar, is higher and more peculiar in its forms than the
+rock itself. In some views it is almost a perfect cone, and again, some
+of the lower peaks, when you can catch their individual outlines, are
+pyramidal. After getting through the Straits, we kept along the Spanish
+coast, with very light winds and a new moon, as far as Cape de Gat. We
+were four days in making these 150 miles (we ran 280 miles in one day on
+the Atlantic). All along there were noble mountains, with here and there
+a little white town sprinkled along their bases on the edge of the water
+like the grains of rice which the girl dropped in the fairy tale.
+Sometimes you see larger buildings on the slope of the mountain, which
+seem to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_314" id="page_314">{314}</a></span> be convents. All are white except the watch-towers, which you
+see now and then on points, and these are commonly of a soft brown, the
+color of the stone. The hues of the mountains at sunset and just after
+were exquisite. The nearer ones were of a deep purple, and I now
+understand what was meant by the Mediterranean atmosphere....”</p>
+
+<p>The travellers made a brief halt at Malta, whence they took steamer to
+Naples, and from there went by rail to Florence. There they stayed,
+living in the Via Maggio, from the 26th of August to the 30th of
+October. Neither in his letters nor in the sketches which he afterward
+published under the title of “Leaves from my Journal in Italy and
+Elsewhere” can one find more than a slight record of Lowell’s sojourn in
+a city which was especially endeared to him by that study of Dante which
+had been his real introduction to the great world. “I liked my
+Florentine better than my Roman walks,” he said; “apart from any
+difference in the men, I had a far deeper emotion when I stood on the
+<i>Sasso di Dante</i>, than at Horace’s Sabine farm, or by the tomb of
+Virgil;”<a name="FNanchor_91_91" id="FNanchor_91_91"></a><a href="#Footnote_91_91" class="fnanchor">[91]</a> for he found it harder “to bridge over the gulf of Paganism
+than of centuries,” and the marked individuality of mediæval Italian
+towns attracted him all the more for their being modern and Christian.
+In Florence there was an added pleasure in the companionship of Mr. and
+Mrs. Frank Shaw, and in the society of William Page.</p>
+
+<p>In a letter to Mr. John Holmes, written from<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_315" id="page_315">{315}</a></span> Rome half a year later,
+Lowell writes: “Once when I was in Florence, Page and Shaw and I took a
+walk out of the city to see a famous <i>Cenacolo</i> of Andrea del Sarto in
+the refectory of a suppressed convent, about a mile and a half outside
+the Porta Santa Croce. We took a roundabout course among the hills,
+going first to Galileo’s tower, and then to that of the old Church of
+San Miniato which Michelangelo defended. Thence we descended steeply
+toward the Arno, crossed it by a ferry-boat, and then found ourselves
+opposite a <i>trattoria</i>. It was a warm October day, and we unanimously
+turned in at the open door. There were three rooms, one upstairs, where
+one might dine ‘more obscurely and courageously’ the kitchen, and the
+room in which we were. As I sat upon the corner of the bench, I looked
+out through some grape-trailers which hung waving over the door, and saw
+first the Arno, then, beyond it a hill on which stood a villa with a
+garden laid out in squares with huge walls of box and a clump of tall
+black cypresses in the middle, then, to the right of this, the ruined
+tower of San Miniato, and beyond it that from which Milton had doubtless
+watched the moon rising ‘o’er the top of Fesole.’ This was my landscape.
+Behind me was the kitchen. The cook in his white linen cap was stirring
+alternately a huge cauldron of soup and a pan of sausages, which
+exploded into sudden flame now and then, as if by spontaneous
+combustion. A woman wound up at short intervals a jack which turned
+three or four chickens before<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_316" id="page_316">{316}</a></span> the fire, and attended a kind of lake of
+hot fat in which countless tiny fishes darted, squirmed, and turned
+topsy-turvy in a way so much more active and with an expression of so
+much more enjoyment than is wont to characterize living fish, that you
+would have said they had now for the first time found their element, and
+were created to revel in boiling oil. The wine sold here was the produce
+of the vineyard which you could see behind and on each side of the
+little <i>trattoria</i>. We had a large loaf of bread, and something like a
+quart and a half of pure cool wine for nine of our cents. During the
+whole time I was in Florence, though I never saw any one drink water, I
+also never saw a single drunken man, except some Austrian soldiers, and
+only four of these&mdash;two of them officers. In Rome, also, drunkenness is
+exceedingly rare, but less so, I think, than in Florence. Here you see
+everywhere the sign, <i>Spaccio d’ Acqua Vitæ</i>. In Florence I never
+remember to have seen spirits advertised for sale, except by those who
+dealt in the wants of the <i>Forestieri</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>Just before leaving the city for Rome, Lowell was filled with
+consternation at a letter received from home, telling him that his
+father had been stricken with paralysis. His first impulse was to take
+his family to Rome and then return at once to America, but a little
+reflection showed him how useless this would be. “I should never have
+left home,” he wrote his father from Pisa, where they had halted on
+their way to Leghorn, “if I had not thought that you wished it, or
+rather wished<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_317" id="page_317">{317}</a></span> that we should have been abroad and got back. I hope to
+find a letter awaiting us at Rome. But at any rate we shall come home as
+soon as we can. I hardly know what I am writing, for I have just got
+word from Mr. Black at Leghorn, saying that our places are engaged on
+board the steamer for Civita Vecchia, and that we must be there as soon
+as possible in the morning. I am going on in the early train, leaving
+Maria to come at one o’clock with a servant from the hotel. It is now
+between nine and ten, and the rain still falls heavily. I fear a bad day
+to-morrow, and what with that and thinking about you and home, my mind
+is confused. I find nothing abroad which, after being seen, would tempt
+me away from Elmwood again. I enjoy the Art here, but I shall equally
+enjoy it there in the retrospect. I wish some of the buildings were on
+the other side of the water, but I suppose we should be more contented
+not to see them if they were.”</p>
+
+<p>The voyage by steamer to Civita Vecchia was a very rough one, occupying
+five days instead of the eleven hours in which it sometimes was made. A
+letter from Dr. Howe was received a few days after the Lowells reached
+Rome, which gave more exact account of Dr. Lowell’s illness and left
+little hope of anything like permanent restoration. “Had it been
+possible,” Lowell replied to his brother-in-law, “I should have come
+home at once. But I could neither leave Maria here, nor safely expose
+her to the inclemencies of a winter passage across the Atlantic. There
+is nothing for it, but to hope and pray. But the thought that I have no
+right<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_318" id="page_318">{318}</a></span> to be here casts a deeper shadow over everything in the dreary
+city of ruin and of an activity that is more sad than ruin itself. The
+dear Elmwood that has always looked so sunny in my memory comes now
+between me and the sun, and the long shadow of its eclipse follows and
+falls upon me everywhere. It is a wonderful satisfaction to me now to
+feel that dear Father and I have been so much at one and have been
+sources of so much happiness to each other for so many years.”</p>
+
+<p>The entrance into Rome is thus described in a letter to Miss Maria
+Fay:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“It has been raining fast, but as we approach Rome, winding up and down
+among the hills and hollows of the Campagna between high stone walls,
+the clouds break and the moon shines out with supreme clearness. The
+tall reeds which lean over the road here and there glisten like steel,
+wet as they still are with the rain. The orange-trees have all silver
+leaves, and even the dark laurels and cypresses glitter. It is like an
+enchanted garden of the Arabian Nights. Presently we overtake other
+lumbering diligences (we are <i>posting</i> and have done the thirty-five
+miles from Civita Vecchia in ten hours), and rattling through the gate
+are stopped by cocked-hatted officials, who demand passports. Opposite
+are the high walls of the Inquisition. We are in Rome. One ought to have
+a sensation, and one has. It is that of chill. One climbs stiffly down
+from the coupé, and stamps about with short-skirted and long-booted
+postilions whose huge spurs are clanking in every direction.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_319" id="page_319">{319}</a></span> Very soon
+we, being armed with a <i>lascia passare</i>,&mdash;there are three coach loads of
+us,&mdash;drive off, leaving four other loads behind still wrangling and
+jangling with the cocked hats. As we rattle away, the light from the
+window of the <i>uffizio di polizia</i> gleams upon the musket of a blue
+overcoated French soldier marching to and fro on guard. Five minutes
+more rattle and the Dome glistens silverly in the moonlight, and the
+Titanic colonnade marches solemnly by us in ranks without end. Then a
+glimpse of feathery fountains, a turn to the right, a strip of gloomy
+street, a sudden turn to the left, and we are on the bridge of St.
+Angelo. Bernini’s angels polk gayly on their pedestals with the emblems
+of the Passion in their arms, and by wringing your neck you may see
+behind you on the left the huge castle refusing to be comforted by the
+moonlight, with its triumphant archangel just alighting on its summit.
+Another sharp turn to the left, and you are in a black slit of street
+again, which at last, after half a mile of unsavoriness, becomes the
+Corso, the main street of modern Rome. And everything thus far is
+palpably modern, especially the Hotel d’Angleterre, at which we
+presently alight. Next day we remove to lodgings already engaged for us
+by F. Boott, near the Pincio, in the highest part of the city. Here we
+manage to be comfortable through a month of never-ceasing rain. Then it
+clears, and we have a month of cloudless sunshine, with roses blooming
+in the gardens and daisies in the fields. To-day is the first rainy day,
+and I devote it to you.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_320" id="page_320">{320}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>The Lowells had their quarters at Capo le Case, No. 68, on the third
+<i>piano</i>, and were surrounded by a few English and American friends. Mr.
+and Mrs. Story were not in Rome when they first arrived, but joined them
+in about a fortnight, when the rains had ceased at last and so permitted
+walks in the Campagna. The first part of their stay had been dreary
+enough, and drew from Lowell the whimsical remark: “Sometimes as I look
+from the Pincian, I think that the best thing about [modern Rome] is
+that the hills look like Brighton.” And Mrs. Lowell draws a humorous
+picture of her husband, and their half homesick feelings, when she
+writes: “Through Mr. Black we have the English journals and papers, and
+it really gives me a little home feeling when I see a bundle of
+<i>Examiners</i> and <i>Athenæums</i> brought in just as they used to be from Mr.
+Wells’s, and see James selecting his cigar with particular satisfaction
+and giving the fire an express arrangement, and then drawing up his
+chair to it and putting his feet on the fender, beginning to read.”</p>
+
+<p>The anxiety, also, which Lowell felt over his father’s illness benumbed
+his faculties and made him restless; but with fair weather, better news
+came, and the travellers gave themselves up more unreservedly to the
+pleasures which the great city afforded them. But Rome does not thrill
+one from the start. It takes time for its ancient hands to get that
+clutch which at last never loosens, and Lowell at first seemed somewhat
+unaffected. “I like,” he wrote to his father, just before Christmas,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_321" id="page_321">{321}</a></span>
+“to walk about in the fine sunshine and get unexpected and
+unguide-booked glimpses of fine scenery, but systematic sight-seeing is
+very irksome to me. Though we have been in Rome now nearly as long as we
+were in Florence, I have not learned to like it as well. We were able to
+enjoy Florence sincerely and without any reproaches, because we had not
+heard of your illness. Then, too, the churches here are nearly all
+alike. Going to see them is like standing to watch a procession of
+monks,&mdash;the same thing over and over again, and when you have seen one
+you have seen all. There is a kind of clumsy magnificence about them,
+like that of an elephant with his castle on his back and his gilded
+trappings, and the heaviness somehow weighs on one. There is no spring
+and soar in their architecture as in that of the Lombard churches I have
+seen. The Roman columns standing here and there look gentleman-like
+beside them, and reproach them with their tawdry <i>parvenuism</i>. The
+finest interior in Rome is that of the Sta. Maria degli Angeli, which
+Michelangelo made out of a single room in the baths of Diocletian. Even
+the <i>size</i> of St. Peter’s seems inconsiderable in a city where the
+Coliseum still stands in crater-like ruin, and where one may trace the
+foundations of a palace large enough almost for a city.... Yesterday I
+walked out upon the Campagna, but by a different gate from my favorite
+San Sebastiano. Leaving the Porta del Popolo, we followed the road as
+far as the Ponte Molle, then turned to the right on the hither bank of
+the Tiber, which<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_322" id="page_322">{322}</a></span> we followed as far as the confluence of the Tiber and
+Anio, where was once the city of Antemnæ. As it had been destroyed by
+Romulus, however, there was nothing to be seen of the old Sabine
+stronghold except the flatiron-shaped bluff on which it stood, the
+natural height and steepness of which, aided no doubt by art, must have
+made the storming of it no very agreeable diversion. The view from the
+top is very beautiful, and it is a good place to study the Campagna
+scenery from,&mdash;I mean the Campagna in a state of nature. Below us flowed
+the swift and dirty Tiber, and the yet swifter and dirtier Anio. In
+front the Campagna wallowed away as far as the line of snow-streaked
+mountains which wall it in. Herds of cattle and of horses dotted it here
+and there, the gray cows looking like sheep in the distance to an eye
+used always to expect red in kine. Sometimes a sort of square tower
+rose, lonely and with no sign of life about it. Looking more carefully,
+however, it would turn out to be no tower at all, but only the cottage
+of a shepherd perched high above the inundation of malaria on the top of
+some ruinous tomb. Add malaria and the idea of desolation to an Illinois
+prairie, and you have the Campagna. Where Antemnæ had stood there now
+rose a conical wigwam built wholly of thatch, surmounted by a cross, at
+the door of which stood a woman in scarlet bodice and multitudinous
+petticoat, with a little girl ditto, ditto, but smaller. Seeing us get
+out a pocket spyglass, a boy of about eighteen years contrived to muster
+energy enough to come<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_323" id="page_323">{323}</a></span> out and stare at us. He was dressed in sheepskin
+breeches with the wool on, short wide jacket, red waistcoat, and hat
+turned up at the side, and would have looked extremely well in a
+landscape&mdash;but nowhere else. A smaller boy came up with more
+impetuosity&mdash;fat, rosy-cheeked, Puck-like, and with eyes that looked as
+if their normal condition was that of being close-shut, but which once
+opened to the width necessary to take in the extraordinary apparition of
+three <i>forestieri</i> at once, would require some maternal aid to get back
+again. Large hawks were sliding over the, air above us, and there was no
+sound except the sharp whistle of a peasant attending a drove of horses
+in the pasture below. Jemmy will like to know that the horses are belled
+here (I mean in the fields) as cows are with us, only that the bells are
+large enough for a town school. To-night I am going to make the <i>giro</i>
+of the churches to see the ceremonies with which Christmas is ushered
+in. First an illumination at Santa Maria Maggiore and the cradle of the
+Saviour carried in procession at ten o’clock, then mass at midnight in
+the San Luigi dei Francesi, then mass at St. Peter’s at three o’clock
+<small>A.M.</small> I have not seen a ceremony of the church yet that was impressive,
+and hope to be better pleased to-night.”</p>
+
+<p>How he spent his Christmas is told in a letter to Miss Fay:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Let me tell you about Christmas week, first premising that I go to
+church ceremonies here merely that I may see for myself that they are
+not<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_324" id="page_324">{324}</a></span> worth seeing. Otherwise they are great bores and fitter for
+children. The chief quality of the music is its interminableness, made
+up of rises and falls, and of the ceremonies generally you may take a
+yard anywhere as of printed cotton, certain that in figure and quality
+it will be precisely like what has gone before, and what will follow
+after. On Christmas eve the <i>Presepio</i>, a piece of the manger in which
+the Saviour was cradled, was carried in procession at the church of
+Santa Maria Maggiore. Torches were stuck in the ground for nearly a
+quarter of a mile from the church, and ghostly dragoons in their long
+white cloaks (like Leonora’s lover) appeared and vanished at intervals
+in the uncertain light. The interior of the church is fine, but
+completely ruined by the trumpery hangings put up for the occasion.
+There were ambassadors’ boxes, as at the opera, and rows of raised seats
+on each side near the high altar, for such ladies as chose to come in
+black, with black veils upon their heads. I stood among the
+undistinguished faithful, and it being a fast, there was such a smell as
+if Wethersfield had been first deluged and then cooked by subterranean
+fires. I stood wedged between some very strong devotees (who must have
+squandered the savings of a year in a garlic debauch) in abject terror
+lest my head should be colonized from some of the overpopulated
+districts around me.</p>
+
+<p>“At the end of the church I could dimly see the Pope, with a mitre on
+and off at intervals. There was endless Gregorian chanting, then
+comparative<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_325" id="page_325">{325}</a></span> silence, with sudden epidemics among the crowd of standing
+painfully on tiptoe to stare at nothing; then more endless Gregorian
+chantings, more epidemics, and a faint suspicion of frankincense among
+the garlic; then something incomprehensible performed in dumb show by
+what seemed automaton candles, then an exceedingly slim procession with
+the <i>Presepio</i>, which I could not see for the simple reason that it was
+inclosed in a silver case. At this point the Hallelujahs of the choir
+were fine. Having now fairly bagged my spectacle, I crowded my way out
+at the risk of my ribs (for stone doorways are not elastic), and went
+home to smoke a cigar preparatory to a midnight excursion to San Luigi
+dei Francesi, where, according to rumor, there was to be fine music.
+Here I found more sight-seeing Inglesi, more garlic, more populous
+neighbors, more endless Gregorian chanting, more automaton candles, and
+at midnight a clash of music from a French band, not so good as our
+Brigade Band at home.</p>
+
+<p>“Christmas day, went to St. Peter’s to hear mass celebrated by the Pope
+in person. Here were all kinds of antique costumes,&mdash;gentlemen in black
+velvet doublets with slashed sleeves and ruffs, other gentlemen in
+crimson ditto ditto, officers of the Swiss Guard in inlaid corselets,
+and privates of ditto in a kind of striped red and yellow barber’s pole
+uniform invented by Michelangelo, cardinals, bishops, ambassadors, etc.,
+but not nearly so large a crowd as I expected. The music was good, and
+the whole ended by the Pop<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_326" id="page_326">{326}</a></span>e’s being carried through the Basilica
+blessing the people at intervals as he went along. I stood quite near
+and had a good view of his face. He looks like a fatter Edward Everett.
+This is one of the greatest ceremonies of the year. After it was over I
+stood in the piazza watching the equipages of the cardinals. Speaking of
+cardinals: I was walking the other day with an English friend, and we
+saw a cardinal coming toward us accompanied by his confessor and two
+footmen. Behind followed his carriage with a cocked-hatted coachman and
+another footman. Should we bow? He was old enough to deserve it,
+cardinal or not, so we bowed. Never did man get such percentage for an
+investment. First came off his Eminence’s hat. At a respectful interval
+came that of the confessor, at another respectful interval those of the
+coachman and footmen. It was like a detachment of the allied army
+marching on Dunsinane with a <i>bough</i>.</p>
+
+<p>“I have spoken rather disrespectfully of the music here, but I have
+heard good since I came. On New Year’s day the Jesuits have a great
+celebration in the church of the Gesu. I took a two hours’ slice of it
+in the afternoon. The music was exceedingly fine, a remarkably
+well-trained choir accompanied by the finest organ in Rome. The soprano
+was a boy with a voice that, with my eyes shut, I could not have
+distinguished from that of a woman. We are having also, every Tuesday,
+concerts by the St. Peter’s choir, with music of Palestrina, Guglielmi,
+Mozart, etc.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_327" id="page_327">{327}</a></span> The music of Palestrina has a special charm for me,
+reminding me more than any I ever heard of the æolian harp with its
+dainty unexpectedness....</p>
+
+<p>“In its modern architecture Rome does not please me so much as Florence,
+Pisa, Lucca, or Siena, on all of which the religion and politics of the
+Middle Ages have stamped themselves ineffaceably. The characteristic of
+Roman architecture is ostentation, not splendor, much less grace. Of
+course I am speaking generally&mdash;there are exceptions. But even in size
+the Roman remains dwarf all modern attempts.... There is something epic
+in the gray procession of aqueduct arches across the Campagna. They seem
+almost like the building of Nature, and are worthy of men whose eyes
+were toned to the proportions of an amphitheatre of mountains and of a
+city which received tribute from the entire world. Exceeding beautiful
+are the mountains which sentinel Rome,&mdash;the purple Alban mount, the
+gray-peaked Monte Gennaro, the hoary Lionessa, and farther off the blue
+island-like Soracte.</p>
+
+<p>“In art also Rome is wondrously rich, especially in sculpture. For the
+study of painting I have seen no gallery like that of the Uffizi at
+Florence. And let me advise you, my dear Maria, to see all the Titians
+(of which there are many and good) in England. To me he is the greatest
+of the painters. This has one quality and that has another, but he
+combines more than any. I would rather be the owner of his ‘Sacred and
+Profane Love’ in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_328" id="page_328">{328}</a></span> the Borghese collection than of any single picture in
+Rome.<a name="FNanchor_92_92" id="FNanchor_92_92"></a><a href="#Footnote_92_92" class="fnanchor">[92]</a></p>
+
+<p>“What do I <i>do</i>? I walk out upon the Campagna, I go to churches and
+galleries inadvertently (for I will not convert Italy into a monster
+exhibition), and I walk upon the Pincio. Here one may see all the
+Fashion and the Title of Rome. Here one may meet magnificent wet-nurses,
+bareheaded and red-bodiced, and insignificant princesses Paris-bonneted
+and corseted. Here one may see ermine mantles with so many tails that
+they remind you of the Arabian Nights. Here one may see the neat,
+clean-shirted, short-whiskered, always-conceited Englishman, feeling
+himself quite a Luther if he have struggled into a wide-awake hat; or
+the other Englishman with years of careful shaving showing unconquerably
+through the newly-assumed beard which he wears as unconsciously as Mrs.
+Todd might the Bloomer costume for the first time. Here you may see the
+American, every inch of him, from his hat to his boots, looking anxious
+not to commit itself. Here you may see all the foreign children in Rome,
+and among them Mabel, seeming as if her whole diet were <i>capers</i>, and
+that they had gradually penetrated and inspired her whole constitution.
+I have seen no pair of legs there which compared with hers either for
+size or for untamable activity. Here you may see the worst riding you
+can possibly imagine: Italians emulating the English style of rising in
+the stirrups and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_329" id="page_329">{329}</a></span> bumping forlornly in every direction; French officers,
+reminding one of the proverb of setting a beggar on horseback, and John
+Bulls, with superfluous eyeglass wedged in the left eye, chins run out
+over white chokers, and a general upward tendency of all the features as
+who should say, ‘Regard me attentively but awfully; I am on intimate
+terms with Lord Fitzpollywog.’ On Saturday evenings we are ‘at home.’ We
+have tea, cake, and friends.... The evening before last I went to a
+musical party at Mrs. Rich’s. You know what an English musical party is.
+Your average Englishman enjoys nothing beyond ‘God save the Queen,’ and
+that because he can either beat time or swell the chorus with his own
+private contribution of discord. But I saw here the dogged resolution of
+the people who have conquered America and India. There was no shrinking
+under long variations on the pianoforte, and I could well imagine a
+roast beef and plum-pudding basis under the solid indifference which
+outlasted a half-hour’s fiddling. Miss Fanny Erskine, a niece of our
+hostess, sang well, especially in German, and Emiliani is really a fine
+artist with the violin.”</p>
+
+<p>In an earlier letter to Dr. Howe, Lowell had said: I begin to think
+myself too old to travel. As to men,&mdash;as I used to say at home,&mdash;the
+average of human nature to the square foot is very much the same
+everywhere; and as to buildings and such like monuments, I bring to them
+neither the mind nor the eye of twenty. In almost all such I find myself
+more interested, as they are<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_330" id="page_330">{330}</a></span> exponents and illustrations of the
+spiritual and political life and progress of the people who built them.
+The relations of races to the physical world do not excite me to study
+and observation (only to be fruitfully pursued on the spot) in any
+proportion to the interest I feel in those relations to the moral
+advance of mankind, which one may as easily trace at home, in their
+history and literature, as here. But of Rome hereafter. I feel as if I
+should continue a stranger and foreigner during my whole six months’
+residence here.” A month or so later he revised a little of this
+judgment in a letter to his father, in which he wrote: “You need not be
+afraid of our getting attached to Europe. I find the modes of life here
+more agreeable to me in some respects, but nothing can replace Elmwood.
+In regard to our coming home, the exact time will depend entirely on the
+accounts we get of your health. I do not wish to have the money we have
+spent thrown away, for I see no chance of our ever coming hither again,
+and so I wish to do everything as thoroughly as I can. I have profited
+already, I think, in the study of art. I make it a rule now on entering
+a gallery to endeavor to make out the painters of such pictures as I
+like by the internal characteristics of the works themselves. After I
+have made up my mind, I look at my catalogue. I find this an exceedingly
+good practice. Of all the more prominent painters, I can now distinguish
+the style and motive almost at a glance. Sometimes I make a particular
+study of a particular artist, if any gallery is especially rich in his<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_331" id="page_331">{331}</a></span>
+works. Life is rather more picturesque here than with us, and I find
+that I am accumulating a certain kind of wealth which may be useful to
+me hereafter. The condition and character of the people also interest me
+much, and I think that my understanding of European politics will be
+much clearer than before my visit to Europe. To understand properly,
+however, requires time and thought and the power of dissociating real
+from accidental causes. I wish to see well what I see at all&mdash;and, if
+possible, would like to visit Germany, France, and England before coming
+home.”</p>
+
+<p>The social life of Rome in the English and American circles engaged the
+travellers, and Lowell made his début as an actor. Private theatricals,”
+he writes his father, 1 February, 1852, “are all the rage now in Rome.
+There are three companies. I have an engagement in one of them under the
+management of Mr. Black, who has erected a pretty enough little theatre
+in the Palazzo Cini, where he has apartments,&mdash;or an apartment, as they
+would say here. We gave our first representation last Thursday night to
+a select audience of English and Americans. Our play was a portion of
+Midsummer Night’s Dream, including part of the fairy scenes, and the
+whole of the interlude of the clowns. In this interlude, I was the star,
+having the part of Bottom assigned to me. On the morning of Thursday, I
+wrote a prologue of some thirty lines which I recited to open the
+performances. This, to me, was the plum of the evening’s entertainment.
+In the first<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_332" id="page_332">{332}</a></span> place, I do not think that the audience had any idea that
+I was a prologue at all, till I had got nearly through; for I was
+obliged to speak it in the costume of Bottom, not having time to dress
+in the interval between the prologue and my first appearance in
+character. But even if they guessed what I was about, it never entered
+their heads that it was intended to be funny till about the middle, when
+a particularly well-defined pun touched off a series of
+laughter-explosions which kept going off at intervals during the rest of
+my recitation, as the train ran along from one mind to another. It was
+exceedingly diverting to me, for, knowing the requisitions of a
+prologue, I had written it down to the meanest capacity, and all the
+jokes were <i>a-b-abs</i>. I was very much struck with the difference between
+an English and an American audience. The minds of our countrymen are
+infinitely quicker both in perception and conception, and I am certain
+my prologue would have set a room full of them in roars of laughter.”</p>
+
+<p>The list of persons who engaged in these private theatricals is an
+interesting one. Mr. Charles C. Black, to whom Lowell refers, was the
+begetter of the entertainment, and with him were W. W. Story, Charles
+Hemans, Shakespeare Wood, W. Temple, J. Hayllar, and T. Crawford. There
+were two different representations of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and
+Lowell wrote two separate prologues. The first began:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“When Thespis rode upon his one-horse cart,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The first exponent of the Drama’s art,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_333" id="page_333">{333}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Earliest of managers, and happiest too,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Having a theatre which always drew.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">Then followed a comparison of the stationary theatre with the vagrant
+one, and the brief prologue ended with some jests on the actors, as on
+himself:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“If Pyramus be short, restrain your ire,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Remember none of us appear for hire;”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">and on Crawford:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Forgive our Thisbe the moustache she wears,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ladies, you know, <i>will</i> put on little ’airs.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">Story, who was to play Snug, hunted through Rome for a lion’s skin, and
+finally had to content himself with the skin of a tiger.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“But now comes one fact I proclaim with glory,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Snug is enacted by our attic Story,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who sought a lion’s hide through Rome, a week,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Quite a new way of playing hide and seek.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>In the first representation Lowell had the part of Pyramus, in the
+second he was Bottom, and as he intimates made his new prologue more
+comprehensible by his audience. He pretended to have received a request
+from Mr. Black to write the prologue, and so begins:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Dear Bottom, if you can, I wish you’d write<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A prologue for our comedy to-night;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Just tap that comic vein of yours which runs<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Discharging a continuous stream of puns.’<span class="lftspc">”</span><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">And that is what the second prologue consists of, with some repetition
+even of the jokes of the first, ending:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Now who plays Pyramus! no, that won’t go well,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I cannot get a good thing out of Lowell.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Faith, that’s too near the truth, it’s past my power,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_334" id="page_334">{334}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For I’ve been trying at it half an hour.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At all events I can proclaim with glory<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Snug is enacted by our Attic Story;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who sought a lion’s skin through Rome a week,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Quite a nice way of playing hide and seek.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But the last lion that was seen in Rome<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Was Dickens,&mdash;and he carried his skin home.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thisbe’s moustache. The Greek girls never had any?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I’ll just remind them of Miss Hairyadne.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But I can’t do it. Dite al Signore,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What’s more I won’t&mdash;che sono fuori.”<a name="FNanchor_93_93" id="FNanchor_93_93"></a><a href="#Footnote_93_93" class="fnanchor">[93]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>An undercurrent of anxiety and affection for his father runs through the
+correspondence at this time, and a month later he seeks to gratify a
+grandfather’s feelings by devoting a whole letter, written as clearly as
+possible that his father might read it himself, about the sayings and
+doings of the two children. Some theologic questions are beginning,” he
+writes, “to vex her [Mabel’s] mind somewhat. She inquired of me very
+gravely the other day, when I said something to her about her Heavenly
+Father, ‘Papa, have I got a Heavenly Grandfather?’ The pictures in the
+churches make a great impression (and not always a pleasant one) upon
+her. She said to me one day: ‘O my dear papa, I love you so very much,
+because you take care of me; and I love mamma very much because<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_335" id="page_335">{335}</a></span> she
+takes care of me; and I love Mary very much because she takes care of
+me; and I love Heavenly Father because he takes care of me; and I love
+the Madonna very much because she takes care of me; and I love the
+angels because they take care of me; and I love that one with the swords
+stuck into her, and that other one with the stick.’ These last were no
+doubt pictures she had seen somewhere. During Carnival, we did not let
+her go to the Corso much, because there was so much throwing of
+<i>confetti</i>, which are small seeds or pellets of clay about as large as
+peas, coated with plaster of Paris. However, she saw the edges of the
+great stream, here and there, as it overflowed into the side streets,
+and talked a great deal to Faustina about <i>Pulcinelli</i> and <i>Pagliacci</i>.
+She threatened rather sharply to pay back ‘Mister <i>Pulcinello</i>’ (as she
+always respectfully called him when she spoke of him in English) in his
+own coin, if he threw any <i>confetti</i>, or oftener, <i>nasty confetti</i>, at
+her. One day she was walking with me through the Piazza di Spagna, with
+half a roll in her hand, when she saw one of the lacqueys of the S. P.
+Q. R. in his queer costume. She instantly set him down for a
+<i>Pulcinello</i>, and I had much ado to hinder her from hurling the fragment
+of her roll at him, much as she once threw a dry bun at somebody else
+who shall be nameless. She is making great progress in Italian under the
+tuition of Dinda and Amelia, two nice little girls, daughters of our
+Padrone. One of the great events in her day is always the pudding&mdash;in
+<i>trattoria</i> Italian <i>il budino</i>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_336" id="page_336">{336}</a></span> As soon as the great tin <i>stufa</i> has
+safely made its descent from the head of the <i>facchino</i> to the floor,
+she begins a dance around it, shouting in a voice loud enough to be
+heard as far as the Trinità dei Monti, ‘<i>O Faustina, ditemi! C’è un
+puddino oggi?</i>’ And if it turn out that there be only a pie, which is a
+forbidden <i>dolce</i> to her, she forthwith drops her voice to its lowest
+key and growls&mdash;‘<i>Mi dispiace molto, mo-o-lto, Faustina; pudino non c’è:
+ce sono solamente pasticcie</i>.’ Sometimes I have heard her add with a
+good deal of dignity, ‘<i>Dite al cuoco che mi dispiace molto</i>.’ A day or
+two ago, when she saw a plum-pudding come upon the table, she could not
+contain herself, but, springing up into her chair (for she can never
+express satisfaction without using her legs&mdash;her intoxications seeming
+to take direction the reverse of common), she began dancing and waving
+her arms quite like a Bacchanal, at the same time singing&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘Oh, quanto mi piace, roba dolce, il puddino!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Quando lo mangio, sono felice, padrino!’<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">I offer this to Jemmy to translate, as an Italian exercise, for his
+paper. If it be not equal to Dante, upon my word I think it quite up to
+a good deal of Tasso, and much more to the point than nine tenths of
+Petrarca. Improvisations are seldom put to the test of being written
+down, but this bears it very well. The tender <i>padrino</i>&mdash;<i>Dear little
+Father</i>&mdash;was an adroit bribe, which got her a third piece of pudding by
+the unanimous vote of our household senate. Ask Charlie to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_337" id="page_337">{337}</a></span> read over
+the muddy stuff which Byron thought it necessary to pump up about St.
+Peter’s, etc., in ‘Childe Harold,’ and say if he do not agree with me
+that his lordship would have made a better hand of it if he had devoted
+himself to sincerities like this?...</p>
+
+<p>“As for Walter, he grows and thrives finely. He can say A, B, C, D, or
+something considerably like it&mdash;nearer, in fact, a good deal, than the
+first four letters of the Chinese alphabet would be. He has done, during
+the last week, what I have challenged many older persons to do, namely,
+cut a double tooth. I doubt if a cabinet minister in Europe can say the
+same of himself. He has grown very fond of his papa, and sometimes
+crawls to my door of a morning before I am out of bed, and then, getting
+upon his feet, knocks and calls ‘Papa! papa!’ laying the accent very
+strongly on the first syllable. If he hears my voice, he immediately
+springs up in Mary’s lap, and begins shouting lustily for me. He is the
+fairest boy that ever was seen, and has the bluest eyes, and is the
+baldest person in Rome except two middle-aged Englishmen, who, you know,
+have a great knack that way.... In a word, he is one of that countless
+number of extraordinary boys out of which the world contrives afterward
+to make such ordinary men. I think him rather intelligent&mdash;but, as the
+picture dealers say, <i>chi sa</i>? As he is mine, I shall do rather as the
+picture-buyers, and call what I have got by any name I please. One
+cannot say definitely so early. It is hard to tell of a green<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_338" id="page_338">{338}</a></span> shoot
+just worming out of the ground whether it will be an oak or an
+onion&mdash;they all look much alike at first.”</p>
+
+<p>Not an oak, but a plant and flower of light, Lowell might shortly have
+said, for this is the last reference in life to the child suddenly
+stricken down and left behind in a Roman grave by the mourning parents,
+when, on the 29th of April, they went away from Rome to Naples with the
+one child of their four who lived to them. On the 13th of the month
+Lowell wrote to his eldest sister: “We are now within a fortnight of
+bidding farewell to what I am now forced to call dear old Rome. In spite
+of its occupation by an army of ten thousand French soldiers, in spite
+of its invasion by that more terrible force, the column of English
+travellers, in spite of the eternal drumming and bugling and
+sentinelling in the streets, and the crowding of that insular Bull&mdash;<i>qui
+semper habet fœnum in cornu</i>&mdash;there is an insensible charm about the
+place which grows upon you from hour to hour. There must be few cities
+where one can command such absolute solitude as here. One cannot expect
+it, to be sure, in the Colosseum by moonlight, for thither the English
+go by carriage loads to be lonely with a footman in livery behind them,
+and to quote Byron’s stuff out of Murray’s Guide; there perch the French
+in voluble flocks, under the necessity (more painful to them than to any
+other people) of being poetical&mdash;chattering <i>Mon Dieu! qu’un joli
+effet!</i> But an hour’s walk will take one out into the Campagna, where
+you will<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_339" id="page_339">{339}</a></span> look across the motionless heave of the solitude dotted here
+and there with lazy cattle to the double wall of mountain, the nearest
+opaline with change of light and shadow, the farther Parian with snow
+that only grows whiter when the cloud shadows melt across it&mdash;the air
+overhead rippling with larks too countless to be watched, and the turf
+around you glowing with strange flowers, each a wonder, yet so
+numberless that you would as soon think of gathering a nosegay of grass
+blades. On Easter Sunday I spent an incomparable day at the Fountain of
+Egeria, stared at sullenly, now and then, by one of those great gray
+Campagna bulls, but totally safe from the English variety which had gone
+to get broken ribs at St. Peter’s. The show-box unholiness of Holy Week
+is at last well over. The best part of it was that on Holy Thursday all
+the Vatican was open at once&mdash;fifteen miles of incomparable art. For me
+the Pope washed perfumed feet, and the Cardinal Penitentiary wielded his
+long rod in vain. I dislike such spectacles naturally, and saw no reason
+why I should undergo every conceivable sort of discomfort and annoyance
+for the sake of another discomfort or annoyance at the end....</p>
+
+<p>“The finest <i>show</i> I have seen in Rome is the illumination of St.
+Peter’s. Just after sunset I saw from the head of the <i>scalinata</i>, the
+little points of light creeping down from the cross and lantern
+(trickling, as it were) over the dome. Then I walked over to the Piazza
+di San Pietro, and the first glimpse I caught of it again was from the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_340" id="page_340">{340}</a></span>
+Ponte Sant’ Angelo. I could not have believed it would have been so
+beautiful. There was no time or space to pause here. Foot passengers
+crowding hither and thither as they heard the shout of <i>Avanti!</i> from
+the coachmen behind&mdash;dragoon-horses getting unmanageable just where
+there were most women to be run over&mdash;and all the while the dome drawing
+all eyes and thoughts the wrong way, made a hubbub to be got out of as
+soon as possible. Five minutes more of starting and dodging, and we were
+in the piazza. You have seen it and know how it seems, as if the setting
+sun had lodged upon the horizon and then burnt out, the fire still
+clinging to its golden ribs as they stand out against the evening sky.
+You know how, as you come nearer, you can see the soft travertine of the
+façade suffused with a tremulous golden gloom like the innermost shrine
+of a water-lily. And then the change comes as if the wind had suddenly
+fanned what was embers before into flame. If you could see <i>one</i> sunset
+in a lifetime and were obliged to travel four thousand miles to see it,
+it would give you a similar sensation; but an everyday sunset does not,
+for we take the gifts of God as a matter of course.</p>
+
+<p>“After wondering long enough in the piazza, I went back to the Pincio
+(or rather the Trinità dei Monti) and watched it for an hour longer. I
+did not wish to see it go out. To me it seemed better to go home with
+the consciousness that it was still throbbing, as if I could make myself
+believe that there was a kind of permanence in it, and that I<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_341" id="page_341">{341}</a></span> should
+see it there again some happy evening. Before leaving it, I went away
+and came back several times, and at every return it was a new
+miracle&mdash;the more miraculous for being a human piece of fairy work.</p>
+
+<p>“Last night there was another wonder, the Girandola, which we saw
+excellently well from the windows of the American legation. Close behind
+me, by the way, stood Silvio Pellico (a Jesuit now), a little withered
+old man in spectacles, looking so very dry that I could scarce believe
+he had ever been shut up in a <i>damp</i> dungeon in his life. This was (I
+mean the Girandola) the most brilliant and at the same time tasteful
+display of fireworks I ever saw. I had no idea that so much powder could
+be burned to so good purpose. For the first time in my life I saw
+rockets that seemed endowed with life and intelligence. They might have
+been thought filled with the same vivacity and enjoyment so
+characteristic of the people. Our rockets at home seem business-like in
+comparison. They accomplish immense heights in a steady straight-forward
+way, explode as a matter of course, and then the stick hurries back to
+go about its terrestrial affairs again. And yet why should I malign
+those beautiful slow curves of fire, that I have watched with Charlie
+and Jemmie from Simonds’s Hill, and which I would rather see again than
+twenty Girandolas? If Michelangelo had designed our fireworks, and if it
+did not by some fatal coincidence always rain on the evening of 4th
+July, doubtless they would be better.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_342" id="page_342">{342}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>Something of the total impression made upon Lowell in this first visit
+to Rome may be seen in the fragment of a letter to Mr. John Holmes,
+written near the end of his stay:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“After all, this is a wonderful place. One feels disappointed at first,
+everything looks so modern. But as the mind, taking in ruin after ruin,
+gradually reconstructs for itself the grandeur and the glory, of which
+these city-like masses are but the splinters sprinkled here and there by
+the fall of the enormous fabric, and conceives the spiritual which has
+outlived that temporal domination, and even surpassed it, laying its
+foundations deeper than the reach of earthquake or Gaul, and conquering
+worlds beyond the ken of the Roman eagles in their proudest flight, a
+feeling of the sublime, vague and vast, takes the place of the first
+hurried curiosity and interest. Surely the American (and I feel myself
+more intensely American every day) is last of all at home among
+ruins&mdash;but he is at home in Rome. I cannot help believing that in some
+respects we represent more truly the old Roman Power and sentiment than
+any other people. Our art, our literature, are, as theirs, in some sort
+exotics; but our genius for politics, for law, and, above all, for
+colonization, our instinct for aggrandizement and for trade, are all
+Roman. I believe we are laying the basis of a more enduring power and
+prosperity, and that we shall not pass away till we have stamped
+ourselves upon the whole western hemisphere so deeply, so nobly, that
+if, in the far-away future, some Gibbon<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_343" id="page_343">{343}</a></span> shall muse among our ruins, the
+history of our Decline and Fall shall be more mournful and more epic
+than that of the huge Empire amid the dust of whose once world-shaking
+heart these feelings so often come upon me.”</p>
+
+<p>The last week before leaving Rome was spent in an excursion with Story
+to Subiaco, as related at length in “Leaves from my Journal in Italy.”
+On their way to Naples the Lowells made a halt at Terracina, from which
+place Lowell wrote to Robert Carter: “Here I am, with a magnificent
+cliff opposite my window crowned by twelve arches of what is called the
+Palace of Theodoric. I have just come in from seeing the Cathedral, the
+dirtiest church I have seen in Italy (with a very picturesque old
+Campanile, however), and the remains of the old Roman port, which
+astonished me by their size even after all I had seen of Roman hugeness.
+The port is now filled with soil, and there is a fine orange garden
+where vessels used to lie. Terracina is nothing like what I expected to
+see. The inn (or ‘Grand’ Albergo, as it is called) is one of the least
+cutthroat looking places I ever saw. It is quite out of the town,
+between the great cliff and the sea. Behind it, on the beach, the scene
+is quite Neapolitan&mdash;forty or fifty bare-legged fishermen are drawing a
+great seine out of the water, and forty or fifty dirty, laughing,
+ragged, happily-wretched children gather round you and beg for <i>caccose</i>
+or <span class="smcap">cecco</span>, by which they mean <i>qualche cosa</i>. The women sit round the
+doors, nasty and contented, urging on their offspring in their
+profes<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_344" id="page_344">{344}</a></span>sional career. They are the most obstinate beggars I have seen
+yet. In Rome the waving of the two first fingers of the hand and a
+decided <i>non c’è</i> is generally sufficient, but here I tried every
+expedient in vain. The prickly pear grows bloatedly in all the ledges of
+the cliff, an olive orchard climbs half-way up the back of it where the
+hill is less steep, and farther to the left there are tall palms in a
+convent garden, but I cannot see them.</p>
+
+<p>“The drive over the Pontine marshes is for more than twenty miles a
+perfectly straight, smooth avenue, between double rows of elms. I had
+been told it was very dull, but did not find it so; for there were
+mountains on one side of us, cultivated, or cattle and horse-covered
+fields or woods on the other, and the birds sang and the sun shone all
+the way. It seemed like the approach to some prince’s pleasure-house....
+On the whole, the result of my experience thus far is that I am glad
+that I came abroad, though the knowledge one acquires must rust for want
+of use in a great measure at home. To be sure, one’s political ideas are
+also somewhat modified&mdash;I don’t mean retrograded.”</p>
+
+<p>The progress of the travellers is but briefly recorded after this. They
+were in Naples early in May, and thence they appear to have made their
+way to Venice, and to have spent the summer in leisurely travel through
+the Italian lakes, Switzerland, Germany, Provence, and France, reaching
+England in the early autumn. Here they saw <span class="pagenum"><a name="page_345" id="page_345">{345}</a></span>London, Oxford, and
+Cambridge. “We have been also,” Lowell wrote to his father, “at Ely,
+where the cathedral is one of the most interesting I have seen. I know
+nothing for which I am more thankful than the opportunity I have had of
+seeing fine buildings. I think they give me a more absolute pleasure
+than anything except fine natural scenery. Perhaps I should not except
+even this, for the sense that it is a triumph of the brain and hand of
+man certainly heightens the delight we feel in them. I think that Ely,
+more than anything else, turned the scale and induced us to stay a month
+longer.” From London, Lowell made an excursion with Kenyon to Bath to
+see Landor, and thirty-six years later he jotted down some of the
+impressions he then received of the man, whose writings he had long
+admired.<a name="FNanchor_94_94" id="FNanchor_94_94"></a><a href="#Footnote_94_94" class="fnanchor">[94]</a></p>
+
+<p>A trip followed through England and into Scotland and Wales, which took
+in Peterborough, Lincoln, York, Ripon, Fountains Abbey, Durham,
+Edinburgh, and the haunts of Scott, the Scottish and English lakes, and
+then the Lowells took steamer from Liverpool, 30 October, 1852.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_346" id="page_346">{346}</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII<br /><br />
+<small>AN END AND A BEGINNING</small><br /><br />
+<small>1852-1857</small></h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Lowell</span> had the good fortune to have for a companion at sea Thackeray,
+who was on his way to America to give his lectures on the English
+Humourists; he liked the man very much, and his occasional references to
+the author in his letters and critical papers intimate the high regard
+he had for his work. Another congenial companion on shipboard was Arthur
+Hugh Clough, with whom he formed a warm and enduring friendship. It was
+a thirteen days’ passage, and on the 12th of November the Lowells were
+again at home in Elmwood. The coming of the two Englishmen gave occasion
+for many little festivities in Boston and Cambridge. A glimpse is given
+of them in Mr. Longfellow’s printed journal, when the poet summoned
+Clough, Lowell, Felton, and C. E. Norton to feast on some English grouse
+and pheasant sent him from Liverpool by Mr. Henry Bright, and in the
+evening at the Nortons’ there were private theatricals with a “nice
+little epilogue written by Mr. Clough,” who shortly established himself
+indefinitely in Cambridge.</p>
+
+<p>Clough has left a little picture of the interior<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_347" id="page_347">{347}</a></span> of Elmwood: “Yesterday
+I had a walk with James Lowell to a very pretty spot, Beaver Brook. Then
+I dined with him, his wife, and his father, a fine old minister who is
+stone deaf, but talks to you. He began by saying that he was born an
+Englishman, i. e. before the end of the Revolution. Then he went on to
+say, ‘I have stood as near to George III. as to you now;’ ‘I saw
+Napoleon crowned Emperor;’ then, ‘Old men are apt to be garrulous,
+especially about themselves;’ ‘I saw the present Sultan ride through
+Constantinople on assuming the throne;’ and so on,&mdash;all in a strong
+clear voice, and in perfect sentences, which you saw him making
+beforehand. And all one could do was to bow and look expressive, for he
+could only just hear when his son got up and shouted in his ear.”<a name="FNanchor_95_95" id="FNanchor_95_95"></a><a href="#Footnote_95_95" class="fnanchor">[95]</a>
+Lowell gave briefly his estimate of Clough’s genius when he wrote a few
+weeks later to Mr. Briggs: “I wish to write a review of his ‘Bothie,’ to
+serve him in event of a new edition. It is one of the most charming
+books ever written,&mdash;to my thinking quite as much by itself as the
+‘Vicar of Wakefield.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p>
+
+<p>With his European experience behind him Lowell was eager to plunge into
+literature, and his intention at first was to try his hand at fiction,
+possibly turning his experience to account somewhat after the manner of
+his neighbor’s “Hyperion.” At any rate, Longfellow notes in his diary
+under date of 29 November, 1852: “Met Lowell in the street and brought
+him home to smoke a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_348" id="page_348">{348}</a></span> pipe. He had been to the bookseller’s to buy a
+blank book to begin a Novel, on the writing of which his mind is bent.
+He seems rather sad and says he does not take an interest in anything.
+This is the reaction after the excitement of foreign travel. Lowell will
+write a capital novel, and when he gets warm in the harness will feel
+happier;” and a fortnight later he makes the entry: “Lowell came in. He
+has begun his novel.”</p>
+
+<p>It is to be suspected that he never went far in the attempt. A dozen
+years later, when Mr. Fields wanted him to write a novel for the
+<i>Atlantic Monthly</i>, he made the summary answer: “I can’t write one nor
+conceive how any one else can.” Yet he could not have abandoned the
+trial immediately, for in June he was writing to Briggs: “I have got so
+far as to have written the first chapter of a prose book,&mdash;a sort of New
+England autobiography, which may turn out well.”<a name="FNanchor_96_96" id="FNanchor_96_96"></a><a href="#Footnote_96_96" class="fnanchor">[96]</a></p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, he was met on his arrival in America with a piece of literary
+news which was welcome for its own sake and because it promised an
+outlet for his productions. His friend Briggs as editor-in-chief, with
+G. W. Curtis and Parke Godwin for assistants, was just about launching a
+new magazine in New York, which was likely to come nearer fulfilling the
+ideal Lowell had long cher<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_349" id="page_349">{349}</a></span>ished than anything thus far issued in
+America. <i>Putnam’s Monthly</i> had behind it an active publishing house,
+whose head, Mr. G. P. Putnam, had that indefinable quality which makes a
+publisher, if not an author himself, a genuine appreciator of good
+literature, and a man whose friendship with authors rested on a basis
+which was social as well as commercial. He had shown his sagacity and
+business insight by taking up the writings of Washington Irving when
+that author was in neglect, and winning a substantial success with them.
+He cared for the books he published and listened willingly to Mr. Briggs
+when that gentleman, who had been engaged in many editorial enterprises,
+argued that the time was ripe for a literary monthly which should stand
+for American literature of the best sort, and should at the same time
+concern itself with public affairs and furnish also that miscellaneous
+entertainment of narrative and description for which the American public
+showed a liking. <i>Harper’s New Monthly Magazine</i> had been started a
+couple of years before, but it was almost wholly a reprint of English
+current literature, and even its cover was a copy of <i>Bentley’s</i>. It
+had, however, struck a popular taste, and its success made other
+publishers jealous, while its easy use of foreign matter made the men of
+letters angry.</p>
+
+<p>The prospectus of <i>Putnam’s Monthly</i>, in which the fact that it was to
+be “an entirely original work” was emphasized, announced that it was
+“intended to combine the more various and amusing<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_350" id="page_350">{350}</a></span> characteristics of a
+popular magazine with the higher and graver qualities of a quarterly
+review,” and that when a subject needed illustrations or pictorial
+examples, such illustrations would occasionally be given. The rate of
+payment was fair for the time: poetry had no fixed rates, but Lowell
+received fifty dollars for a poem of two hundred and fifty lines or so,
+and prose was paid at the rate of three dollars a page. Hawthorne and
+Emerson were among those who promised their work, though neither seems
+to have contributed, but Longfellow printed several poems. The articles
+and poems were all unsigned. The early numbers gave good promise, and
+Curtis, with his “Prue and I” papers gave a distinction of lightness and
+added the flavor which every literary magazine covets but can rarely
+command. The first number, Briggs declared with elation, had run up to
+twenty thousand copies, and the second number had one of those articles,
+“Have we a Bourbon among us?” which are the joy of the magazine editor
+for the buzz which they create in the reading community. But the high
+hopes with which <i>Putnam’s</i> started out somehow faded. There were
+exceptionally good poems and the general average of writing was high,
+but the magazine soon satisfied curiosity without creating a demand, and
+the financial embarrassment of the publisher after two years compelled a
+transfer of the publishing interest which was followed by a steady
+decline in quality.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, Mr. Briggs looked eagerly to Lowell for help, and for his
+first number received the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_351" id="page_351">{351}</a></span> poem “The Fountain of Youth,” which had been
+lying in the poet’s portfolio for three years. He suggested that Lowell
+should publish “The Nooning” as a serial. This was not to be, but
+whether from this suggestion or not, Lowell suddenly took it into his
+head to start a serio-comic poem in Alexandrines, under the heading “Our
+Own, his Wanderings and Personal Adventures,” in which he intended to
+personate a correspondent of the magazine, who should travel in Europe,
+and employ his nonsense and satire on men and things. He began leisurely
+enough, heading his page with a Greek, a Latin, and an English motto,
+each cleverly hinting at the plan and the name of the piece. The Latin
+“<i>Quæ regio in terris Nostri non plena laboris?</i>” was Englished in</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Full many cities he hath seen and many great men known;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What place on earth but testifies the labors of <i>our own</i>?”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">Then he makes a doggerel verse under Digression A which slyly imitates
+Spenser’s verse table-of-contents, and so with Digressions, Invocation,
+and Progression he saunters carelessly along. “The last few days,” he
+writes to Briggs, 17 February, 1853, “I have worked in earnest. I wrote
+one hundred and fifty lines yesterday, and it is thought funny by the
+constituency in my little Buncombe here. I have hopes that it will be
+the best thing I have done in the satiric way after I once get fairly
+agoing. I am thus far taking the run back for the jump. I have enlarged
+my plan and, if you like it, can make it run through several numbers. It
+is cruel, impudent,&mdash;sassy, I meant to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_352" id="page_352">{352}</a></span> write. Some parts of it I have
+flavored slightly with Yankee,&mdash;but not in dialect. I wish to make it
+something more than ephemeral, and shall put more thinking into it as I
+go along. My idea for it is a glass of punch, sweetness, sourness,
+spirit, and a dash of that Chinese herb favorable to meditation.”</p>
+
+<p>There were three numbers only published of “Our Own,” though the last
+carried the legend “To be continued” at its foot. The perplexed editor
+hardly knew how to answer Lowell’s demand for criticism. He himself was
+immensely entertained, he averred, but nobody else was; although he had
+heard of one or two, and Lowell added the names of two or three more, it
+was clear to Mr. Briggs that the verses did not take, and he grew
+petulant over the stupidity of the public. Lowell’s own ardor cooled.
+The style of composition was indeed to real writing what the pun is to
+real wit. In the heat of firing off these fire-crackers, ever so much
+execution seems to be done, but the laugh that follows is not repeated,
+and the cleverness and point seem dulled when the bristling jests crowd
+each other, giving no relief to each.</p>
+
+<p>Lowell could not quite agree with Briggs in the deference which the
+latter was disposed to pay to the expressions of the public upon the
+contents of his magazine: “I doubt if your magazine,” he writes, “will
+become really popular if you edit it for the mob. Nothing is more
+certain than that popularity goes downward and not up (I mean per<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_353" id="page_353">{353}</a></span>manent
+popularity), and it is what the few like now that the many have got to
+like by and by. Now don’t turn the tables on me and say that,&mdash;not the
+<i>very</i> few. I have pretty much given up the notion that I can be popular
+either upward or downward, and what I say has no reference to myself. I
+wish I could be. But it strikes me that you want as much variety as
+possible. It is not merely necessary that the matter should be good, but
+that it should be individual.”</p>
+
+<p>A good many years afterward when Lowell was making up a volume of poems,
+he looked again at “Our Own” to see if it was worth preserving, and out
+of the whole six hundred lines he saved only the verses now headed
+“Fragments of an Unfinished Poem” and the two charming stanzas
+“Aladdin.”<a name="FNanchor_97_97" id="FNanchor_97_97"></a><a href="#Footnote_97_97" class="fnanchor">[97]</a> The insertion of this little poem in the midst of his
+nonsense indicates that if Lowell had found sufficient encouragement he
+might, especially after reaching Europe in his plan, have worked off the
+surplusage of high spirits and thrown into his rambling discourse both
+caustic satire and genial humor.</p>
+
+<p>A more satisfactory and successful contribution which was
+enthusiastically received by the editor was “A Moosehead Journal,” which
+was in effect a journal, sent home to his wife, of an excursion made by
+Lowell in the summer of 1853 with his nephew Charles; and in the spring
+of 1854 ap<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_354" id="page_354">{354}</a></span>peared in two parts the well-known sketch of “Cambridge
+Thirty Years Ago,” under the title, “Fireside Travels.” The paper seems
+to have grown out of an unused sketch of Allston which Lowell had begun
+for <i>Putnam’s</i> in September, 1853. “What I have written (or part of
+it),” he says to the editor, “would make a unique article for your
+magazine, if the other thing is given up. It is a sketch of Cambridge as
+it was twenty-five years ago, and is done as nobody but I could do it,
+for nobody knows the old town so well. I mean one of these days to draw
+a Commencement as it used to be.” Lowell does not appear to have
+contributed to <i>Putnam’s</i> after December, 1854, when his portrait, an
+engraving by Hall after Page’s painting, served as frontispiece to the
+number, being one of a series of portraits of contributors to the
+magazine.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, when <i>Putnam’s</i> was at the top of its brief tide, another
+attempt at a good literary magazine was made in Boston. The
+extraordinary success of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had emboldened its
+publisher, Mr. John P. Jewett, to undertake what its projector, Mr. F.
+H. Underwood, called a “Literary and Anti-Slavery Magazine.” It was the
+intention to issue the first number in January, 1854, and to use the
+great reputation of Mrs. Stowe to float it by printing a new novel by
+her. Mr. Underwood<a name="FNanchor_98_98" id="FNanchor_98_98"></a><a href="#Footnote_98_98" class="fnanchor">[98]</a> was particularly desirous of securing Lowell’s
+aid, especially as he esteemed his poetry quite<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_355" id="page_355">{355}</a></span> the best to be had in
+America, and he was elated at receiving from him the poem “The Oriole’s
+Nest,” afterward called simply “The Nest.” But the design which had been
+germinating for two or three years was suddenly brought to naught by the
+failure of the luckless publishers, whose success with “Uncle Tom’s
+Cabin” seems to have been thrust upon them, rather than to have been due
+to their business ability. So a fortnight after sending his poem, Lowell
+was forced to write the disconcerted editor: “I cannot help writing a
+word to say how truly sorry I was to hear of the blowing up of your
+magazine. But it is not so irreparable as if it had been a
+powder-magazine, though perhaps all the harder to be borne because it
+was only <i>in posse</i> and not <i>in esse</i>. The explosion of one of those
+Castles in Spain sometimes sprinkles dust on all the rest of our lives,
+but I hope you are of better heart, and will rather look upon the affair
+as a burning of your ships which makes victory the more imperative.
+Although I could prove by a syllogism in <i>barbara</i> that you are no worse
+off than you were before, I know very well that you <i>are</i>, for if it be
+bad to lose mere coin, it is still worse to lose hope, which is the mint
+in which most gold is manufactured.</p>
+
+<p>“But, after all, is it a hopeless case? Consider yourself to be in the
+position of all the world before the Mansion of our Uncle Thomas (as I
+suppose we must call it now, it has grown so respectable) was published,
+and never to have heard of this Mr. Jew-wit. I think he ought to
+be&mdash;that<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_356" id="page_356">{356}</a></span> something ought to be done for him: but for that matter nearly
+all booksellers stand in the same condemnation. There are as good fish
+in that buccaneering sea of Bibliopoly as ever were caught, and if one
+of them has broken away from your harpoon, I hope the next may prove a
+downright kraaken, on whom, if needful, you can pitch your tent and
+live.</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t think that I am trifling with you. God knows any jests of mine
+would be of a bitter sort just now; but I know that it is a good thing
+for a man to be made to look at his misfortune till it assumes its true
+relations to things about it. So don’t think me intrusive if I nudge
+your elbow among the rest.”</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>A few weeks after the return of the Lowells to America, Longfellow took
+Clough on a walk to Elmwood. “Lowell,” he says, “we found musing before
+his fire in his study. His wife came in, slender and pale as a lily.” In
+reading “A Year’s Life” one is struck by the frequency with which the
+shadow of death falls across the page. It is true that when he wrote the
+poems, when indeed he fell in with Maria White, Lowell was struggling
+out of an atmosphere which was full of damp mist, and the image of death
+naturally rose constantly before him. Yet it remains that from the
+beginning of his passion he associated this love with the idea of death.
+So frail, so almost ethereal was the woman who came thus into his life,
+that from the first he was constantly sheltering her<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_357" id="page_357">{357}</a></span> from the cold
+blast. The solicitude deepened his passion; it accustomed him at the
+same time to the idea of transitoriness in the life he led. It is
+entirely possible, nay, very probable, that this spiritually-bodied girl
+was permitted to develop into a gracious womanhood through the very fact
+of her marriage and her motherhood: Lowell’s own mood during the nine
+years of married life was, as we have seen, often irrepressibly gay and
+sanguine, and after the death of each of their children the two seemed
+to spring back into a wholesome delight in life. Still, the fear could
+never have long been out of their minds, and, after Walter died in Rome,
+the mother seems steadily to have drooped. When Lowell sent “The Nest”
+to Underwood, he speaks of it as an old poem: “Perhaps,” he says, “it
+seems better to me than it deserves, for an intense meaning has been
+added to it.” The meaning had then indeed been deepened, but when it was
+written, there was more than remote prophecy in the lines&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“When springs of life that gleamed and gushed<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Run chilled, and slower, and are hushed.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The year that passed after the return from Europe saw Mrs. Lowell
+declining in strength, though it was not till September, 1853, that his
+letters betray Lowell’s deepening anxiety, and it was not till the end
+of the month that he fully realized the progress disease had made. Mrs.
+Lowell died 27 October, and Lowell was left alone with his little
+daughter. The visionary faculty, which all his life had been what might
+almost be<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_358" id="page_358">{358}</a></span> called another sense, came now to his help and for awhile he
+lived as if the companion of thirteen years, though shut out from his
+daily sight, visited him in the solitude and silence of the night. “I
+have the most beautiful dreams,” he writes, “and never as if any change
+had come to us. Once I saw her sitting with Walter on her knee, and she
+said to me, ‘See what a fine strong boy he is grown.’ And one night as I
+was lying awake and straining my eyes through the gloom, and the
+palpable darkness was surging and gathering and dispersing as it will, I
+suddenly saw far, far off a crescent of angels standing and shining
+silently. But oh! it is a million times better to have had her and lost
+her, than to have had and kept any other woman I ever saw.”</p>
+
+<p>It had given both husband and wife a great pleasure to see one and
+another of Mrs. Lowell’s poems printed during the last year in <i>Putnam’s
+Monthly</i>. Mr. Briggs, with his affectionate regard for both, was eager
+to print the verses as they were sent him, and reported all the
+agreeable words that came to him respecting the poems. The latest to be
+printed was one on Avignon, in which the poet kept turning back from the
+historic and spectacular sights to some oleanders which stood by her
+window. “How beautiful it was,” Lowell wrote to Briggs, “and how fitting
+for the last. I am going to print them all&mdash;but not publish them
+yet&mdash;she did not wish it. I shall give a copy, with a calotype from a
+drawing which Cheney is to make from Page’s picture, to all her
+friends.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_359" id="page_359">{359}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>It was a year and more before the volume was printed, bearing the title
+“The Poems of Maria Lowell,” and inscribed to Mrs. Story, Mrs. Putnam,
+and Mrs. Shaw, three friends of whose loving appreciation Lowell had had
+many assurances. There are only twenty poems in the volume. Most had
+been printed before, one, “The Morning-Glory,” in Lowell’s own
+collection. None of her translations were included. One looks naturally
+in such a volume rather for intimations of the writer’s character, and
+for touches of personal feeling, than for poetic art. Mrs. Lowell
+herself plainly had but a humble conceit of her poetic gift, and it does
+not appear that poetry was an abundant resource with her. But art there
+is of no mean order in this little book. It is a delicate instrument on
+which she plays; there are not many stops, but there is a vibrant tone
+which thrills the ear. Tenderness indeed is the prevailing note, but in
+one poem, “Africa,” there is a massiveness of structure, and a sonorous
+dignity of measure which appeal powerfully to the imagination. The poems
+have, here and there, an autobiographic value. One written in Rome,
+shortly after the travellers had reached that city and the dream of
+childhood had come true, ended with the verses:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“And Rome lay all before us in its glory,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Its glory and its beautiful decay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But, like the student in the oft-read story,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I could have turned away,<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“To the still chamber with its half-closed shutter<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Where the beloved father lay in pain,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_360" id="page_360">{360}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To sit beside him in contentment utter,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Never to part again.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">There are four sonnets in which her love for her husband glows with a
+deep, steady passion, one of them written doubtless in the solemn days
+near the end, in the spirit recorded by Lowell when he wrote to Briggs
+after her death: “She promised to be with me if that were possible.”</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“In the deep flushing of the Western sky<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The new moon stands as she would fain be gone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And, dropping earthward, greet Endymion:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If Death uplift me, even thus should I,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Companioned by the silver spirits high,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And stationed on the sunset’s crimson towers,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bend longing over earth’s broad stretch of bowers,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To where my love beneath their shades might lie:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For I should weary of the endless blue,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Should weary of my ever-growing light,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If that one soul, so beautiful and true,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Were hidden by earth’s vapors from my sight,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Should wane and wane as changeful planets do,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And move on slowly, wrapt in mine own night.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>What most impresses the reader who takes all these poems at a sitting is
+the reserve, the just balance of sentiment which controls them. Passion
+is here, but it is not stormy, and love and tenderness, but they are not
+feeble and tearful. Depth of feeling and strength of character lie open
+to view in the firm lines, and the fine light and shade of the verse
+come incontrovertibly from a nature evenly poised, whose companionship
+must have been to Lowell that of a kindred spirit, capable indeed of
+guiding and not merely of seconding his resolves.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 366px;">
+<a name="MARIA" id="MARIA"></a>
+<a href="images/i_360_lg.jpg">
+<img src="images/i_360_sml.jpg" width="366" height="500" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
+<div class="caption"><p class="c"><i>Mrs. Maria White Lowell</i></p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_361" id="page_361">{361}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The frontispiece to the volume, which is here reproduced, was a
+crystallotype of a drawing by Cheney after Page’s portrait. “It is
+like,” Lowell wrote at the time, “as far as there can be any likeness
+made of a face so full of spiritual beauty, and in which so much of the
+charm was subterficial.” He tried to convey to a friend, with whom his
+association was purely literary, some notion of her when he wrote: “All
+that was written of Lady Digby, all that Taylor said of the Countess of
+Carbery and Donne of Elizabeth Drury&mdash;belongs as well to her, she was so
+beautiful and good. She was born 8th July, 1821, married 26th December,
+1844, and went home 27th October, 1853. ‘The Pilgrim they laid in a
+large upper chamber whose windows opened toward the sunrising: and the
+name of the chamber was Peace.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p>
+
+<p>This was written more than a year after the event. He made use of the
+same allusion just after his wife’s death, when writing to his friend
+Briggs, but added mournfully that he himself was not in that chamber.
+Indeed, in the first months of his desolation he was in a most unhappy
+state, and endured a loneliness from which now and then an
+uncontrollably passionate cry would be uttered. His father was perfectly
+deaf and often alarmingly excitable, and his sister Rebecca eccentric to
+a degree which made her preserve for days an absolute silence. He would
+rush out into the world, and there showed an artificial gayety which
+bewildered his friends, only to come back to despise himself. “I know
+perfectly well,” he wrote to his most inti<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_362" id="page_362">{362}</a></span>mate friend, “that my nature
+is naturally joyous and susceptible of all happy impressions; but that
+is the very reason I am wretched. I am afraid of myself. I dread the
+world and its temptations, for I do long to keep myself pure enough to
+satisfy her who was better than all I can say of her. I often troubled
+her while she was here, but I cannot bear to now that she is in entire
+felicity.” He was, as he afterward said of himself, in great agony of
+mind, and he had to force himself into those laborious hours which one
+instinctively feels contain a wise restorative.</p>
+
+<p>He was, in a measure, undergoing solitary confinement. He sat in his
+lonely study, or walked up and down, pencilling sentences on the wall as
+if he were really a prisoner, and finding a strange consolation in
+repeating the Service for the Dead, which he had learned by heart. “I
+remember,” he wrote long after,<a name="FNanchor_99_99" id="FNanchor_99_99"></a><a href="#Footnote_99_99" class="fnanchor">[99]</a> “the ugly fancy I had sometimes that
+I was another person, and used to hesitate at the door when I came back
+from my late night walks, lest I should find the real owner of the room
+sitting in my chair before the fire. A well-nigh hermit life I had led
+till then.” There were but few who could approach his real self in those
+days, but there came from Longfellow a gentle word of consolation in his
+poem “The Two Angels,” written on the coincidence of the birth of his
+own daughter and the death of Mrs. Lowell.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, his letters, even when disclosing his misery, contained happy
+references to his sturdy,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_363" id="page_363">{363}</a></span> affectionate child. True, all the losses he
+had suffered seemed now to be but the messengers of a final disaster. “I
+have only one lamb left of four,” he wrote to an occasional
+correspondent, “and think I hear the foot of the inexorable wolf if a
+leaf rustle;” but as the days went by this sensitiveness subsided. He
+was fortunate in having for her a most admirable governess, and he found
+the child’s companionship an unfailing joy. “I said as I sat down to
+dinner,” he writes in one of his letters; “<span class="lftspc">‘</span>This is a rare day, I have
+positively had an idea.’ Not knowing the meaning of ‘idea,’ and I being
+in the habit of telling her (when she is <i>hypt</i>, no rare thing) that she
+has some disease to which I give a very hard name,&mdash;she thought I was
+joking, and said, ‘Nonsense, papa, you haven’t got an idea,’&mdash;evidently
+thinking it some terrible complaint. ‘Why, shouldn’t you like a papa
+that had ideas?’ She threw her arms round my neck and said: ‘You dear
+papa! you’re just the kind of papa that I love!’<span class="lftspc">”</span> “Mabel,” he writes
+again, “has just begun to have ‘Robinson Crusoe’ read to her. Think of
+that and burst with envy! What have you and I left in life like that?
+She has already arranged a coronet of feathers, and proposes to play
+Indian Chief in future. Her great part lately has been the Great Wild
+Goat of the Parlor,&mdash;produced every evening with unbounded applause,
+especially from the chief actor. With a pair of newspaper horns she
+chases her father (who knows what it is to be tossed on the horns of the
+newspapers), qualifying his too exces<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_364" id="page_364">{364}</a></span>sive terrors with a kiss at last
+to show that it is really not <i>real</i>, but only play.... She has been in
+the habit of hearing her grandfather always say, ‘If Providence permit,’
+of course not knowing what it meant. But one day, having made an
+uncommonly successful slide, she turned triumphantly to her aunt and
+cried, ‘There, <i>that</i> time I went like Providence permit.’ The doctor
+ordered her a blanket bath. She had already tried one and said, ‘If you
+please, papa, I had rather not.’ ‘But, darling, most people like them
+very much.’ ‘Well, papa, <i>I</i> don’t; people have different tastes you
+know. I’ve often noticed that everybody has a different mind.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p>
+
+<p>Added to the need of wresting his mind from the despondency of grief was
+the pecuniary pressure. He had an income at this time from such little
+property as he possessed of six hundred dollars a year, and that plainly
+would not suffice. So he shook his portfolio, and even began writing new
+poems which he sent to his friend Briggs for <i>Putnam’s</i>, and he set
+about working over the letters he had written in Italy, publishing them
+in <i>Graham’s Magazine</i>, under the title “Leaves from my Italian
+Journal.” It was easier to do such mechanical work as this, and he began
+to speculate on the possibility of editing Shakespeare, and meditated a
+life of Dean Swift. He did during 1854 edit Marvell for the series of
+<i>British Poets</i> which his friend Professor Child was preparing for
+Little, Brown &amp; Co., expending a good deal of loving care on the text,
+and editing Henry Rogers’s brief me<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_365" id="page_365">{365}</a></span>moir by omissions, illustrations
+from Marvell’s writings, and a slight addition. He wrote also at this
+time, for use in the same series, the brief sketch of Keats which
+afterward he placed with his collected essays. As an introduction to
+Keats’s poems, it was designedly more biographical than critical, and
+did little more than set forth in a lively fashion the facts gathered by
+Milnes. When one considers Lowell’s early appreciation of Keats, it
+seems a little singular that he should have contented himself with so
+slight an expression.</p>
+
+<p>Lowell spent the last week of June, 1854, at Newport, R. I., on a visit
+to the Nortons, and then went for the summer to Beverly, chiefly to be
+near his sister, Mrs. Charles Lowell. At this time the north shore of
+Massachusetts Bay had all the charm of rock and beach which it now has,
+with a pristine simplicity of life which it has lost. To-day the visitor
+drives through the woods near Beverly by well-kept roads, meeting at
+every turn other carriages and pleasure parties. Then, the woods were as
+beautiful, but had unbroken solitude. “At Newport,” Lowell wrote to Miss
+Norton, “you have no woods, and ours are so grand and deep and
+unconverted! They have those long pauses of conscious silence that are
+so fine, as if the spirit that inhabits them were hiding from you and
+holding its breath,&mdash;and then all the leaves stir again, and the pines
+cheat the rocks with their mock surf, and that invisible bird that
+haunts such solitudes calls once and is answered, and then silence
+again.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_366" id="page_366">{366}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>A letter to Mr. Norton, dated 14 August, 1854, hints at the restful
+character of this seaside sojourn. “This is an outlying dependency of
+the Castle of Indolence, and even more lazy,&mdash;in proportion as the
+circulation is more languid at the extremities. By dint of counting on
+my fingers, and with the aid of an old newspaper and an almanac, I have
+approximated, I believe, to the true date of your world out there, and
+that seems to me quite a sufficient mental achievement for one morning.
+The chief food of the people here is Lotus. It is cunning to take
+various shapes,&mdash;sometimes fish, sometimes flesh, fowl, eggs, or what
+not,&mdash;but is always Lotus. It does not make us forget, only Memory is no
+longer recollection, it is passive, not active, and mixes real with
+feigned things, just as in perfectly still pools the images of clouds
+filter down through the transparent water and make one perspective with
+the matter-of-fact weeds at the bottom. I feel as if I had sunk in a
+diving-bell provisioned and aired for three months, and knew not of
+storm or calm, or of the great keels, loaded, perhaps, with fate, that
+sigh hoarsely overhead toward their appointed haven....</p>
+
+<p>“What do I do? Tarry at Jericho chiefly. Also I row and fish, and have
+learned to understand the life of a shore fisherman thoroughly.
+Sometimes I get my dinner with my lines,&mdash;a rare fate for a poet.
+Sometimes I watch the <i>net</i> result when the tritons draw their seine.
+Also I grow brown, and have twice lost and renewed the skin of my hands
+and, alas, my nose, Also I know<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_367" id="page_367">{367}</a></span> what hunger is and, reversing the
+Wordsworthian sheep, am one feeding like forty.”</p>
+
+<p>He went on one or two short cruises and enjoyed the genuine country life
+with its salt flavor, but was back at Elmwood in the fall. The year had
+found some intimate expression in his verse, as well as the more
+objective poems like “Pictures from Appledore,” suggested in part it may
+be by one of his summer cruises, though the last section was written
+four years before. Mr. Stillman, who made his acquaintance at this time,
+when he was foraging for <i>The Crayon</i>, the new literary and art journal
+which his enthusiasm had projected, speaks warmly of the princely
+courtesy with which Lowell received him. “Out of the depth of the shadow
+over his life,” he writes,<a name="FNanchor_100_100" id="FNanchor_100_100"></a><a href="#Footnote_100_100" class="fnanchor">[100]</a> “in the solitude of his study, with
+nothing but associations of his wrecked happiness permitted around him,
+the kindly sympathy with a new aspiration wakened him to a momentary
+gaiety, his humor flashed out irrepressible, and his large heart turned
+its warmest side to the new friend, who came only to make new calls on
+his benevolence; that is, to give him another opportunity to bestow
+himself on others.” On his part, Lowell welcomed heartily this ingenuous
+lover of art and letters. They took long walks together over the country
+Lowell knew so well, to Beaver Brook, the Waverley Oaks, and the Waltham
+hills. “You made me fifteen years younger,” he wrote, “while you stayed.
+When a man gets to my age,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_368" id="page_368">{368}</a></span> enthusiasms don’t often knock at the door of
+his garret. I am all the more charmed with them when they come. A youth
+full of such pure intensity of hope and faith and purpose, what is he
+but the breath of a resurrection-trumpet to stiffened old fellows,
+bidding us up out of our clay and earth if we would not be too late?”</p>
+
+<p>The poems which register the tranquillity of a return to common life,
+like “The Windharp” and “Auf Wiedersehen,” are tremulous with the
+emotion which he could bear to express. Indeed, when Lowell came to
+print the former of these poems he omitted one stanza, possibly as going
+farther than he cared to with his contemporaneous public. In the letter
+last quoted, he sent it to Mr. Stillman.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“O tress that so oft on my heart hath lain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rocked to rest within rest by its thankful beating,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Say, which is harder,&mdash;to bear the pain<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of laughter and light, or to wait in vain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">’Neath the unleaved tree, the impossible meeting?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If Death’s lips be icy, Life gives, iwis,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Some kisses more clay-cold and darkening than his!”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">But as a comprehensive record of this whole experience, the “Ode to
+Happiness” written at this time may be taken as most conclusive. The
+very form of the ode, a form to which Lowell was wont to resort in the
+great passages of his life, aided the expression, for its gravity, its
+classic reserve, even its labored lines served best to hold that
+sustained mood which impelled the poet to stand as it were before an
+altar and make his sacrificial hymn. Tranquillity, he avers, is the
+elder sister of Happiness. “She is not that,” he says:<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_369" id="page_369">{369}</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“She is not that for which youth hoped,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">But she hath blessings all her own,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thoughts pure as lilies newly oped,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And faith to sorrow given alone:<br /></span>
+<span class="i6dt">. . . . . . . .<br /></span>
+<span class="i11">‘I am she<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whom the gods love, Tranquillity:<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That other whom you seek forlorn<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Half earthly was: but I am born<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the immortals, and our race<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wears still some sadness on its face:<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">He wins me late, but keeps me long,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who, dowered with every gift of passion,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In that fierce flame can forge and fashion<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Of sin and self the anchor strong;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Can thence compel the driving force<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of daily life’s mechanic course,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nor less the nobler energies<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of needful toil and culture wise;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose soul is worth the tempter’s lure,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who can renounce, and yet endure,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To him I come, not lightly wooed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But won by silent fortitude.’<span class="lftspc">”</span><a name="FNanchor_101_101" id="FNanchor_101_101"></a><a href="#Footnote_101_101" class="fnanchor">[101]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>From this time forward, however he might be subject to transient moods,
+as one with so much sensibility would inevitably be, Lowell was yet free
+from the violent and tempestuous fluctuations of mood which heretofore
+had marked his course. The first desolation over, that influence which
+during Mrs. Lowell’s lifetime had always been accompanied by the dark
+shadow of a threatened loss, now became, paradoxical as the phrase may
+be, permanent and profound. No human accident could affect it, and as
+Lowell’s own powers had passed through the experimental stage, there
+came<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_370" id="page_370">{370}</a></span> a steadiness of aim and a maturity of expression which thenceforth
+were registered in successive sure and firm-footed performances. It may
+truly be said that Lowell had now found himself, and that from this
+period dates the full orbit of a course which had heretofore been more
+or less eccentric, but now could be reasonably calculated. Surprises
+there were to be, but surprises of excellent achievement, rather than of
+new ventures.</p>
+
+<p>It is therefore with special interest that one notes the character of
+the work which occupied Lowell in this eventful season of 1854-1855.
+Some time before he had been asked by his kinsman who directed the
+Lowell Institute to give a course of lectures before it, and had been
+paid in advance; he had made some movement toward preparation, but now
+he set about it in earnest, and began the delivery 9 January, 1855.
+There were to be twelve lectures, and he was to discourse on poetry in
+general and English poetry in particular. Something of the exhilaration
+with which he entered upon the engagement may be seen in a note written
+to Mr. Norton three days before the first lecture, and inclosing a
+ticket to the course.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>“This will admit you to one of the <i>posti distinti</i> to witness the
+celebrated <i>tableau vivant</i> of the sacrifice of Iphigenia
+(Iphigenia, by particular request, Mr. J. R. Lowell). It is well
+known that this interesting ceremony was originally performed for
+the sake of raising the wind, and Mr. L. will communicate a spirit
+of classic reality to the performance by going through it with the
+same end in view.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_371" id="page_371">{371}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>“I write this by the hand of an amanuensis whom I have had in my
+employment for some time, and who has learned how to catch my ideas
+without my being obliged to speak&mdash;a great gain.</p>
+
+<p>“(A great gain indeed! the greatest bore in the world! He thinks I
+am writing what he dictates at this moment because he hears the pen
+scratch. He pretends to be a good-natured fellow&mdash;but if you only
+knew him as I do! He has no more feeling than a horseradish.)</p>
+
+<p>“I should have come last Saturday to Shady Hill&mdash;but you may guess
+how busy I have been. (It is <i>I</i> who have had all the work, and
+only my board and tobacco for wages: <i>he</i> pretend to hate slavery!)</p>
+
+<p>“I have only just got the flood on, and feel as if I might deliver
+a course that will not disgrace me.</p>
+
+<p>“(I almost hope they will, for what right has he to keep me shut up
+here? I get no walks, and he begins to keep me awake at nights with
+his cursed ideas as he calls them. What <i>is</i> an idea, I should like
+to know?)</p>
+
+<p>“I have only one <i>private</i> entrance ticket to spare&mdash;but I suppose
+you do not want any more.</p>
+
+<p>Give my best regards and happy New Years and all kinds of things at
+Shady Hill (and mine, too; how mad he’d be if he knew I put that
+in).</p>
+
+<p class="c">
+“Always yours,<br />
+“The Amanuensis of J. R. Lowell, esquire.”<br />
+</p></div>
+
+<p>Two days after giving the first lecture, Lowell wrote to Stillman:<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_372" id="page_372">{372}</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>“I have been so fearfully busy with my lectures! and so nervous
+about them, too! I had never spoken in public, there was a great
+rush for tickets (the lectures are gratis), only one in five of the
+applicants being supplied&mdash;and altogether I was taken quite aback.
+I had no idea there would be such a desire to hear me. I delivered
+my first lecture to a crowded hall on Tuesday night, and I believe
+I have succeeded. The lecture was somewhat abstract, but I kept the
+audience perfectly still for an hour and a quarter. (They are in
+the habit of going out at the end of the hour.) I delivered it
+again yesterday afternoon to another crowd,<a name="FNanchor_102_102" id="FNanchor_102_102"></a><a href="#Footnote_102_102" class="fnanchor">[102]</a> and was equally
+successful&mdash;so I think I am safe now. But I have six yet to write,
+and am consequently very busy and pressed for time. I felt anxious,
+of course, for I had a double responsibility. The lectures were
+founded by a cousin of mine, and the trustee is another cousin&mdash;so
+I wished not only to do credit to myself and my name, but to
+justify my relative in appointing me to lecture. It is all over
+now&mdash;and, as far as the public are concerned, I have succeeded; but
+the lectures keep me awake and make me lean.” </p></div><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_373" id="page_373">{373}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Longfellow was a very interested auditor, and his diary bears
+witness to the attention which he gave to the course:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“January 8, 1855. Lowell came in the evening and we talked about his
+lectures on poetry which begin to-morrow.</p>
+
+<p>“January 9. Mr. Richard Grant White, of New York, author of
+‘Shakespeare’s Scholar,’ came to tea. He drove in with us to hear
+Lowell’s first lecture: an admirable performance, and a crowded
+audience. After it, we drove out to Norton’s, where, with T. and the
+lecturer, we had a pleasant supper.</p>
+
+<p>“January 20. Lowell’s lecture, on the old English ballads, one of the
+best of the course.”</p>
+
+<p>Charles Sumner appears also to have been one of the auditors. At any
+rate, he wrote to Longfellow from Washington, 6 February, 1855:
+“Lowell’s lecture on Milton lifted me for a whole day. It was the
+utterance of genius in honor of genius.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Fields asked Lowell for the lectures for publication, but he put him
+off “till they were better,” and never published them. They were
+reported at the time by Lowell’s old friend, Robert Carter, in the
+<i>Boston Daily Advertiser</i>, and some time after Lowell’s death these
+reports were gathered into a volume and printed privately for the
+Rowfant Club of Cleveland, Ohio.</p>
+
+<p>The form in which the lectures were reported, sometimes direct,
+sometimes indirect, undoubtedly robs them of some of the charm which the
+hearers acknowledged, but enough remains to give one a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_374" id="page_374">{374}</a></span> tolerably clear
+impression of Lowell’s mode of treatment. The first lecture was occupied
+with definitions, and in a familiar way Lowell set about distinguishing
+poetry from prose, and by a variety of illustrations gave some notion of
+the great operations of the imagination. Having cleared the way, he took
+up the consideration of English poetry in the historical order, dealing
+with the forerunners, Piers Ploughman’s Vision, the Metrical Romances,
+and the Ballads; and then devoting one lecture each to Chaucer, Spenser,
+Milton, Butler, and Pope. The discussion of Pope led him to interrupt
+himself, and in the next lecture take up the subject of Poetic Diction,
+for after expressing his admiration of the consummate art of Pope’s
+artificiality, he wished to inquire whether there might not be a real,
+vital distinction between the language of prose raised to a high degree
+of metrical efficiency and the language of poetry. His readers will
+recall the amusing passage in an article on “Swinburne’s Tragedies,” in
+which, when wishing to illustrate the Greek battledoor and shuttlecock
+style of dialogue, he finds it easier to make a burlesque imitation than
+to hunt up some passage in Sophocles. In like manner he invents a piece
+of descriptive verse&mdash;a Lapland sketch&mdash;as an instance of the artificial
+manner brought in by Pope, but lacking his wonderful manipulation of
+language. It is a felicitous example of Lowell’s imitative faculty,
+which led him, when he began to write, to throw off lines in Burns’s
+manner, but which never betrayed him when he was in earnest<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_375" id="page_375">{375}</a></span> in poetry.
+The imitation was in itself a criticism. He liked to emphasize the
+essential element of poetry by instancing the empty form. Mr. Dante
+Rossetti once overpowered me by producing a thin volume of verse by T.
+H. Chivers, M. D., and reading aloud from it and demanding information
+about the author. When I applied to Lowell afterward, he said that Dr.
+Chivers had been wont to send him his books, and he read them aloud to
+his classes as illustrations of the shell of Shelley. A lecture followed
+on Wordsworth, and then the twelfth was devoted to the Function of the
+Poet, which in its brief report intimates that Lowell was thinking less
+of himself than of the country with its need of a seer.</p>
+
+<p>The delivery of the lectures had one immediate and important result. Mr.
+Longfellow had been Smith Professor of the French and Spanish Languages
+and Literatures and Professor of Belles Lettres in Harvard College since
+1836, having come to the work when Lowell was midway through his course,
+but he made up his mind in 1854 that he must give up the post, not from
+ill-health, but because he wished to try the effect of change on his
+mind, and of freedom from routine. “Household occupations,” he wrote to
+Freiligrath, “children, relatives, friends, strangers, and college
+lectures, so completely fill up my days that I have no time for poetry,
+and, consequently, the last two years have been very unproductive with
+me.” Freiligrath had heard rumors of Longfellow’s resignation, and had
+put in an application to be his successor. Long<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_376" id="page_376">{376}</a></span>fellow could not give
+him any encouragement, since, though foreigners were employed to teach
+the several languages, the professor himself must be an American. There
+were, he said, six candidates for the position, all friends of his.
+Lowell was not one of these, but his lectures had marked him as the fit
+successor, and so Longfellow wrote with satisfaction in his diary, 31
+January, 1855: “Lowell is to be my successor! Dr. Walker talked with me
+about it this morning, and I have been to see Lowell about the
+preliminaries, and the matter is as good as settled. I am sorry for some
+of my friends who want the place. But for lectures, I think Lowell the
+best of the candidates. He has won his spurs and will give the college
+just what it needs.” Lowell himself told the news to his friend Briggs
+in the following letter, dated 9 February, 1855:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“I have been silent ever so long because I could not help it. I have
+been lecturing four times a week (and am now), and, with my usual
+discretion, put off writing my lectures till the last moment, so that
+for five weeks I have been with the bayonet pricking me on close behind,
+and have hardly dared to <i>think</i> even of anything else. But I have not
+forgotten you, my dear old friend, nor my love of you, and I have felt a
+kind of pang now and then because I said in my last note that I would
+soon write to you&mdash;as, indeed, I am always intending to do.</p>
+
+<p>“I write now because I have something pleasant to tell, and did not wish
+you to hear it first from any one but me&mdash;though you always seem to
+live<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_377" id="page_377">{377}</a></span> at one end of an ear of Dionysius that brings you all the news of
+itself. The news is this: The Corporation of the college have asked me
+to take Longfellow’s place, and my nomination will go to the Overseers
+next Thursday.</p>
+
+<p>“The thing has come about in the pleasantest way, and the place has
+sought me, not I, it. There were seven applicants for the place, but I
+was not one of them. On the contrary, I had refused to be a candidate
+when it was proposed to me.</p>
+
+<p>“I have accepted the offer, and am to go abroad for a year to prepare
+myself. <i>That</i> is the hardest part, but I did not feel competent without
+it.</p>
+
+<p>“And the duties are pleasant. I am not to have anything to do with
+teaching, as Longfellow had, but only to deliver two courses of lectures
+in the year&mdash;on pretty much any subject I choose, and my salary is to be
+$1200.00.</p>
+
+<p>“Everybody seems pleased. My first thought was a sad one, for the heart
+that would have beat warmest is still. Then I thought of my father, and
+then of you. I think it will be all the better for Mabel that I should
+have enough to live on, without being forced to write, and I shall have
+time enough after the first year to do pretty much what I like....</p>
+
+<p>“My lectures have succeeded quite beyond my expectation. One or two have
+been pretty good, but I have felt sad in writing them, and somehow feel
+as if I had not got <i>myself</i> into them very much. However, folks are
+pleased.”</p>
+
+<p>Very likely the fame of his lectures brought him<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_378" id="page_378">{378}</a></span> invitations to go
+elsewhere; at any rate, when his course in Boston was finished, he made
+a tour in the West, and became so desperately out of conceit with the
+business before a week had passed that he tried to escape the remaining
+lectures, but he was not released and had at least the satisfaction of
+carrying home six hundred dollars as the proceeds. “I hate this business
+of lecturing,” he wrote from Madison, Wisconsin, to Miss Norton. “To be
+received at a bad inn by a solemn committee, in a room with a stove that
+smokes but not exhilarates, to have three cold fish-tails laid in your
+hand to shake, to be carried to a cold lecture-room, to read a cold
+lecture to a cold audience, to be carried back to your smoke-side, paid,
+and the three fish-tails again&mdash;well, it is not delightful exactly.”</p>
+
+<p>Lowell does not seem to have written anything in the short time that
+elapsed after the close of his lecture tour before he sailed for Europe,
+though he showed a lively interest in Mr. Stillman’s paper <i>The Crayon</i>,
+and sent it his poem “Invita Minerva,” in which Longfellow discovered a
+reminder of Emerson’s “Forerunners.” The fact that Lowell was to be the
+elder poet’s successor naturally drew them together much at this time.
+“A beautiful morning,” wrote Longfellow on the 17th of May. “Went and
+sat an hour with Lowell in his upper chamber among the treetops. He
+sails for Havre the first of June; “and on the 29th he records:
+“Lowell’s friends gave him a farewell dinner at the Revere, whereat I
+had the honor of presiding. A joyous banquet: one of the plea<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_379" id="page_379">{379}</a></span>santest I
+ever attended,&mdash;a meeting of friends to take leave of a friend whom we
+all love.” Lowell himself refers briefly to the occasion in a note
+written the next day: “Everything went off finely after you left. Holmes
+sang another song and repeated some very charming verses,<a name="FNanchor_103_103" id="FNanchor_103_103"></a><a href="#Footnote_103_103" class="fnanchor">[103]</a> and
+Rölker to his own intense delight got through two stanzas of ‘a helf to
+ve nortward boun’,’ William White having incautiously supplied him with
+the initial line. He gave it with so much sentiment that we were all
+entirely overcome and laughed so immoderately that the brave Rölker at
+length sat down. We sang ‘Auld lang syne’ in true college style and so
+parted. On the whole I renewed my youth last night&mdash;and my recollections
+of ‘1790’ this morning, for I only had four hours’ sleep. However,
+aboard ship I shall have leisure enough to emulate Chaucer’s Morpheus</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘That slept and did no other work.’<span class="lftspc">”</span><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">That day Longfellow drove into town with Lowell and saw him off for New
+York, whence he was to sail.</p>
+
+<p>But the weeks before Lowell’s departure brought other things to mind
+than leaving home and affectionate friends. He had been asked to
+pronounce a poem before the senior class of Hamilton College at the
+coming commencement. The invitation reached him on the memorable day
+when the runaway slave Burns was captured in the streets<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_380" id="page_380">{380}</a></span> of Boston, and
+he wrote in reply to the invitation: “In six months I shall be in
+Switzerland; an ocean between me and a slave hunt, thank God!”</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Lowell again took passage in a sailing vessel, the St. Nicholas,
+Bragdon, master, which left New York 4 June, 1855, bound for Havre.
+Among his companions was Dr. Elliott, under whose care he had been a
+dozen years before, when his eyes were in a bad way. It was a four
+weeks’ voyage, and Lowell amused himself with Lever’s novels from
+beginning to end, as he lay stretched in a hammock on the quarter-deck.
+Reaching France, he spent three weeks in Paris among the pictures
+chiefly, and made an excursion to Chartres, apparently his first visit,
+but one which left so deep an impression on his mind that fourteen years
+later, when he wrote “The Cathedral,” which he wished at first to call
+“A Day at Chartres,” the same images which sprang to his mind when he
+wrote of his visit directly after in a letter to Mr. Norton, recurred
+and found poetic expression. “It is the home now,” he wrote, “of
+innumerable swallows and sparrows, who build upon the shoulders of those
+old great ones (the stone angels and saints)&mdash;as we little folks do too,
+I am afraid. Even here I found the Norman&mdash;for when I mounted to the
+spire, I saw numbers of hawks who dwell in the higher parts, as in their
+castles, and prey on the poor Saxons below.” So in the poem he takes a
+parting look</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“At those old weather-pitted images<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of by-gone struggle, now so sternly calm.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_381" id="page_381">{381}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">About their shoulders sparrows had built nests,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And fluttered, chirping, from gray perch to perch,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Now on a mitre poising, now a crown,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Irreverently happy. While I thought<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How confident they were, what careless hearts<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Flew on those lightsome wings and shared the sun,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A larger shadow crossed; and looking up<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I saw where, nesting in the hoary towers,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The sparrow-hawk slid forth on noiseless air,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With sidelong head that watched the joy below,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Grim Norman baron o’er this clan of Kelts.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>From Paris Lowell ran over to London, chiefly to see the Storys, who
+were there, and renewed his acquaintance with Thackeray and the
+Brownings, and fell in with Leigh Hunt. But his main business was to
+make himself proficient in German, and so having taken his academic
+vacation in advance, he journeyed through the Low Countries, and settled
+himself in Dresden for the autumn and winter. The quiet Saxon city was a
+favorite resort for Americans then even more than now, and for the first
+few weeks his sister, Mrs. Putnam, was there with her family. It was
+with a dull, heavy feeling that he gave himself to his tasks, seeing
+very little of society. “I confess frankly,” he wrote, shortly after his
+establishment there, “that I am good for nothing, and have been for some
+time, and that there are times almost every day when I wish to die, be
+out of the world once for all.... I fear I shall come back with my
+eremitical tendencies more developed than ever.” But dogged persistence
+in work was something better than an anodyne, and work hard he did. “A
+man of my age,” he wrote to his father, “has to study very hard in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_382" id="page_382">{382}</a></span>
+acquiring a new language, and I cannot be satisfied without knowing
+thoroughly all I undertake to know. I am very well and constantly busy.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Norton with his sisters crossed the Atlantic in the autumn, and
+Lowell wrote to him at Paris: “Did I tell you that I had a room on the
+ground floor, with a glass door giving upon a large garden? that I have
+a flock of sparrows that come to breakfast with me every morning, and
+eat loaf sugar to the detriment of my coffee? That I go to hear lectures
+on the Natural Sciences and have even assisted at the anatomical
+class,&mdash;beginning with horror and ending with interest? That we have the
+best theatre here I ever saw? And by the way, if Bouffé acts the <i>Abbé
+Galant</i> while you are in Paris, go and see it by all means. It is a
+truly artistic piece of representation. If it be not too cold, go down
+to Chartres. It is simply the best thing in France, and must have come
+out of some fine old Norman brain,&mdash;I am sure no Frenchman could ever
+have conceived it. After all, there are no such poets as the elements.
+Leave a thing to them, and they redress all imperfections and expunge
+all prose.”</p>
+
+<p>He had planned spending a portion of his time in Spain, and took lessons
+in Spanish in Dresden, but finally abandoned the notion. His host and
+hostess, with whom he talked, assured him that he made astonishing
+progress in German. “What a language it is to be sure!” he wrote; “with
+nominatives sending out as many roots as that witch-grass which is the
+pest of all child-gardens, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_383" id="page_383">{383}</a></span> sentences in which one sets sail like an
+admiral with sealed orders, not knowing, where the devil he is going to
+till he is in mid-ocean!” To his friend Stillman he wrote, as the winter
+wore away: “To say all in one word, I have been passing a very wretched
+winter. I have been out of health and out of spirits, gnawed a great
+part of the time by an insatiable homesickness, and deprived of my usual
+means of ridding myself of bad thoughts by putting them into verse, for
+I have always felt that I was here for the specific end of learning
+German, and not of pleasing myself.” Fifteen years later, looking back,
+he wrote: “I once spent a winter in Dresden, a southern climate compared
+with England, and really almost lost my respect for the sun when I saw
+him groping among the chimney-pots opposite my windows as he described
+his impoverished arc in the sky.”<a name="FNanchor_104_104" id="FNanchor_104_104"></a><a href="#Footnote_104_104" class="fnanchor">[104]</a></p>
+
+<p>As spring drew on he was possessed with a longing for Italy, especially
+for the near friends who were there, his sister Mary who had left
+Dresden for Rome, the Storys, the Nortons, and others. He turned his
+face thitherward the first of March, meaning to be absent for two or
+three weeks only, but he was not back in Dresden till the beginning of
+June. “My journey in Italy,” he wrote to his father on his return, “was
+of much benefit to me. I spent a fortnight with Mary in Rome, went with
+her to Naples and spent another fortnight with her there. At Naples we
+parted. I went to Sicily and made the tour of the island, hoping to
+find<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_384" id="page_384">{384}</a></span> Mary still in Naples when I returned. But Sicily required much
+more time than I had expected, and when I came back I found Mary gone
+back to Rome. I could not follow her thither, but took the steamer to
+Genoa, and so over the Alps back to Germany. I found Sicily very
+interesting in scenery and associations, and very saddening in its
+political aspect. I believe it is the worst governed country in Europe.
+With every advantage of climate and soil, it is miserably poor,&mdash;there
+are no roads, and vexatious restrictions repress trade in every
+direction. The people struck me as looking more depressed than any I
+have seen.”</p>
+
+<p>His itinerary, to be a little more detailed, was to Venice, then by rail
+to Verona, and to Mantua. There he hired a vettura to take him to Parma,
+and in the same mode he went to Bologna, sleeping at Modena on the way.
+From Bologna he went to Ravenna and thence to Florence. He went to Siena
+by the slow, roundabout rail, and then was driven to Orvieto by Chiusi.
+At Orvieto he was greeted by Mr. Norton, Mr. Page, and Mr. John W.
+Field, who had come out to meet him and to escort him to Rome. On his
+return from Genoa he made a stop at Nuremberg. He lingered in Dresden a
+few weeks, made another brief stay in Paris, and was once more in
+Cambridge, in August, 1856.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>On his return from Europe Lowell did not resume life at Elmwood, but
+took up his quarters with his brother-in-law, Dr. Estes Howe, on</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<a name="DR" id="DR"></a>
+<a href="images/i_384fp_lg.jpg">
+<img src="images/i_384fp_sml.jpg" width="500" height="325" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
+<div class="caption"><p class="c"><i>House of Dr. Estes Howe</i></p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_385" id="page_385">{385}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Kirkland Street, in Cambridge. Longfellow was in his summer home at
+Nahant, and Lowell ran down to see him, looking, as the elder poet notes
+in his diary, “as if he had not been gone a week.” He took renewed
+delight in his country walks, and tingled afresh at contact with nature.
+“How I do love the earth!” he writes to Mr. Norton, who was still in
+Europe. “I feel it thrill under my feet. I feel somehow as if it were
+conscious of my love, as if something passed into my dancing blood from
+it, and I get rid of that duty-feeling,&mdash;‘What right have I to be?’&mdash;and
+not a goldenrod of them all soaks in the sunshine or feels the blue
+currents of the air eddy about him more thoughtlessly than I.”</p>
+
+<p>The college year opened a few weeks after his return, and he began his
+duties by repeating the course of lectures which he had delivered before
+the Lowell Institute the winter of 1855, before taking up his more
+specific work in German literature and Dante.</p>
+
+<p>It was in the teaching of Dante that Lowell made the strongest
+impression on the students who gathered about him, if we may judge by
+the reminiscences which more than one has printed; and the methods he
+adopted in his teaching never greatly varied, for he came to the work of
+teaching without any specific training, when he had been nearly twenty
+years out of college, and when the kind of interest in literature, which
+in his college days had disputed for supremacy with the docile habit of
+the schoolboy, had now become confirmed by study, by travel, and by his
+own productions.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_386" id="page_386">{386}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In an address which he gave in 1889 before the Modern Language
+Association of America, he recorded his judgment on the vexed question
+of the distribution of emphasis upon the philological and the æsthetic
+pursuit of the study of literature. It was twelve years since he had
+discontinued the practice of teaching, and it is reasonable to infer
+that he was distilling in a few sentences the experience which his
+method of study and his method of teaching recalled to him.</p>
+
+<p>“In reading such books,” he says, “as chiefly deserve to be read in any
+foreign language, it is wise to translate consciously and in words as we
+read. There is no such help to a fuller mastery of our vernacular. It
+compels us to such a choosing and testing, to so nice a discrimination
+of sound, propriety, position, and shade of meaning, that we now first
+learn the secret of the words we have been using or misusing all our
+lives, and are gradually made aware that to set forth even the plainest
+matter as it should be set forth is not only a very difficult thing,
+calling for thought and practice, but an affair of conscience as well.
+Translating teaches us as nothing else can, not only that there is a
+best way, but that it is the only way.”</p>
+
+<p>Again, in the same address, thinking no doubt of the expansion of the
+curriculum at Harvard, even since he laid aside the teacher’s gown: “We
+have every reason to congratulate ourselves on the progress the modern
+languages have made as well in academic as in popular consideration.
+They are now taught (as they could not formerly be taught)<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_387" id="page_387">{387}</a></span> in a way
+that demands toil and thought of the student, as Greek and Latin, and
+they only, used to be taught, and they also open the way to higher
+intellectual joys, to pastures new, and not the worse for being so, as
+Greek and Latin, and they only, used to do.... If I did not rejoice in
+the wonderful advance made in the comparative philology of the modern
+languages, I should not have the face to be standing here. But neither
+should I if I shrank from saying what I believed to be the truth,
+whether here or elsewhere. I think that the purely linguistic side in
+the teaching of them seems in the way to get more than its fitting
+share. I insist only that in our college courses this should be a
+separate study, and that, good as it is in itself, it should, in the
+scheme of general instruction, be restrained to its own function as the
+guide to something better, and that something better is Literature. The
+blossoms of language have certainly as much value as its roots, for if
+the roots secrete food and thereby transmit life to the plant, yet the
+joyous consummation of that life is in the blossoms, which alone bear
+the seeds that distribute and renew it in other growths. Exercise is
+good for the muscles of mind and to keep it well in hand for work, but
+the true end of Culture is to give it play, a thing quite as needful.
+What I would urge, therefore, is that no invidious distinction should be
+made between the Old Learning and the New, but that students, due regard
+being had to their temperaments and faculties, should be encouraged to
+take the course in modern languages<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_388" id="page_388">{388}</a></span> as being quite as good in point of
+mental discipline as any other, if pursued with the same thoroughness
+and to the same end. And that end is Literature, for there language
+first attains to a full consciousness of its powers and to the delighted
+exercise of them. Literature has escaped that doom of Shinar which made
+our Association possible, and still everywhere speaks in the universal
+tongue of civilized man.”</p>
+
+<p>Lowell’s office did not require of him elementary instruction in modern
+languages, nor indeed was it expected that he should do drill work in
+linguistics. There were competent instructors then in the several
+languages, some of whom afterward came to be eminent professors, as the
+department was divided. He was not indifferent in the choice of
+assistants, but once they were at work he left them to their own
+devices, and exercised the slightest sort of supervision of them. There
+was no very nice division of labor, except that, as I have said, these
+assistants took the more exact grammatical details, yet they all
+included more or less of literature in their work with students. It can
+hardly be said that Lowell did more than flavor his instruction of
+literature with a pinch of grammar. Words in their origin and changing
+meanings he did comment on, but inflections, paradigms, and all the
+apparatus of grammar formed no part of his interest in his work.</p>
+
+<p>In his essay on “Shakespeare Once More” he has said: “There would be no
+dispute about the advantages of that Greek culture which Schiller<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_389" id="page_389">{389}</a></span>
+advocated with such generous eloquence, if the great authors of
+antiquity had not been degraded from teachers of thinking to drillers in
+grammar, and made the ruthless pedagogues of root and inflection,
+instead of companions for whose society the mind must put on her highest
+mood.... There is much 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.”</p>
+
+<p>Now Lowell’s own interest in literature had been direct. It would be
+idle to say that literature was interesting or valuable to him only so
+far as it was a criticism of life. It would be equally idle to say that
+his pleasure in it was derived only from his perception of it as great
+art. He carried to it the same kind of interest which he carried into
+his own production of literature. He was at once full of that human
+sense which made him delight in a fine expression of humanity, and he
+had the craftsman’s pleasure in excellent work, so that on the one hand,
+though in his youth he raged against Pope, in his more mature judgment
+he rejoiced in the patience in careful finish which characterized him:<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_390" id="page_390">{390}</a></span>
+and, on the other hand, he gave himself with the fullest abandonment to
+an admiration of Dante as “the highest spiritual nature that has
+expressed itself in rhythmical form.” He thought him “the first great
+poet who ever made a poem wholly out of himself.” In one of his
+unpublished lectures Lowell uses Dante as a text for a discourse on the
+pursuit of literature, and mingles with it a slight element of
+autobiography, which makes it specially fitting to repeat the passage
+here:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“One is sometimes asked by young men to recommend to them a course of
+reading. My advice would always be to confine yourself to the supreme
+books in whatever literature; still better, to choose some one great
+author and grow thoroughly familiar with him. For as all roads lead to
+Rome, so they all likewise lead thence; and you will find that in order
+to understand perfectly and weigh exactly any really vital piece of
+literature, you will be gradually and pleasantly persuaded to studies
+and explorations of which you little dreamed when you began, and will
+find yourselves scholars before you are aware. If I may be allowed a
+personal illustration, it was my own profound admiration for the ‘Divina
+Commedia’ of Dante that lured me into what little learning I possess.
+For remember that there is nothing less fruitful than scholarship for
+the sake of mere scholarship, nor anything more wearisome in the
+attainment. But the moment you have an object and a centre, attention is
+quickened, the mother of memory; and whatever you acquire groups and
+arranges itself in an order<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_391" id="page_391">{391}</a></span> which is lucid because it is everywhere in
+intelligent relation to an object of constant and growing interest.
+Thus, as respects Dante, I asked myself, What are his points of likeness
+or unlikeness with the authors of classical antiquity? in how far is
+either of these an advantage or defect? What and how much modern
+literature had preceded him? How much was he indebted to it? How far had
+the Italian language been subdued and suppled to the uses of poetry or
+prose before his time? How much did he color the style or thought of the
+authors who followed him? Is it a fault or a merit that he is so
+thoroughly impregnated with the opinions, passions, and even prejudices
+not only of his age but his country? Was he right or wrong in being a
+Ghibelline? To what extent is a certain freedom of opinion which he
+shows sometimes on points of religious doctrine to be attributed to the
+humanizing influences of the Crusades in enlarging the horizon of the
+Western mind by bringing it in contact with other races, religions, and
+social arrangements? These and a hundred other such questions were
+constant stimulants to thought and inquiry, stimulants such as no merely
+objectless and, so to speak, impersonal study could have supplied.”</p>
+
+<p>When, therefore, Lowell was brought face to face with a company of young
+men, in the relation of teacher, he appears not to have cast about to
+see how he could adjust his powers to some prevailing method of
+teaching, but to have used the material of literature as an instrument
+of association, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_392" id="page_392">{392}</a></span> naturally, untrammelled by pedagogic theory, to
+have tried to communicate to the minds about him the kind of interest
+which the literature he was handling inspired in him. So far was he from
+a professional teacher that it is doubtful if he individualized his
+students much, or made any attempt to find entrance into this or that
+mind by first trying to detect what opening the mind offered.
+Undoubtedly, one or another with special aptitude or appreciation may
+have stimulated him and quickened his faculty of instruction, but for
+the most part these young men gave him the occasion for utterance, and
+the text before him gave the theme of discourse. Mr. Barrett Wendell, in
+his illuminating paper on Lowell as a teacher, confesses with a generous
+chagrin, that though he had been an enthusiastic pupil and had used
+Lowell’s hospitality fully, the acquaintance was very one-sided. He came
+to know Lowell well, but Lowell when he met him again after no great
+interval of time, had quite forgotten his face, and almost forgotten his
+name.<a name="FNanchor_105_105" id="FNanchor_105_105"></a><a href="#Footnote_105_105" class="fnanchor">[105]</a></p>
+
+<p>Though he could scarcely be said to have resorted to any set or
+customary methods of a professional sort, he was not without recourse to
+simple aids in his teaching. “Thirty odd years ago,” he wrote in
+1889,<a name="FNanchor_106_106" id="FNanchor_106_106"></a><a href="#Footnote_106_106" class="fnanchor">[106]</a> “I brought home with me from Nuremberg photographs of Peter
+Fischer’s statu<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_393" id="page_393">{393}</a></span>ettes of the twelve apostles. These I used to show to my
+pupils and ask for a guess at their size. The invariable answer was
+‘larger than life.’ They were really about eighteen inches high, and
+this grandiose effect was wrought by simplicity of treatment, dignity of
+pose, a large unfretted sweep of drapery. This object lesson I found
+more telling than much argument and exhortation.” He made also some
+attempt, when the method was much more of a novelty than it is to-day,
+to bring in the aid of illustration from art. He interested himself to
+rid his class-room in University Hall of some dismal charts that hung on
+the walls, and brought down from Elmwood a number of engravings and
+photographs which he had collected in his travels abroad, especially
+illustrations of Florence and Rome; one year he presented each of his
+class who had persevered with a copy of the recently discovered portrait
+of Dante by Giotto; and again he gave to each of his small class in
+Dante a copy of Mr. Norton’s privately printed volume on the “New Life.”</p>
+
+<p>The actual exercise in the class-room was simple enough and
+unconventional. The classes were not large, and the relation of the
+teacher to his students was that of an older friend who knew in a large
+way the author they were studying, and drew upon his own knowledge and
+familiarity with the text for comment and suggestion, rather than
+troubled himself much to find out how much his pupils knew. A student
+would trudge blunderingly along some passage, and Lowell would break<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_394" id="page_394">{394}</a></span>
+in, taking up the translation himself very likely, and quickly find some
+suggestion for criticism, for elaboration or incidental and remote
+comment. Toward the close of the hour, question and answer, or free
+discussion yielded to the stream of personal reminiscence or abundant
+reflection upon which Lowell would by this time be launched. Especially
+would he recall scenes in Florence, sketch in words the effects of the
+Arno, Giotto’s Tower, the church in which Dante was baptized, where he
+himself had seen children held at the same font; and so Lowell gave out
+of his treasures, using that form of literature which was perhaps the
+most perfectly fitted to his mind, free, unconstrained talk. Suddenly,
+glancing at his watch before him,&mdash;a time-piece which was as idly
+whimsical as its owner,&mdash;he would stop, bow and walk quickly out of the
+room, the men rising respectfully as he left.</p>
+
+<p>And the listeners? They went away, a few carelessly amused at the loose
+scholastic exercise and complacent over the evasion of work, but some
+stirred, quickened in their thought, and full of admiration for this
+brilliant interpreter of life as seen through the verse of Dante. One
+charm was in the unexpectedness of it all. There was no predicting what
+direction his talk would take. “Now and again,” says Mr. Wendell, “some
+word or some passage would suggest to him a line of thought&mdash;sometimes
+very earnest, sometimes paradoxically comical&mdash;that it never would have
+suggested to any one else; and he would lean back in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_395" id="page_395">{395}</a></span> his chair, and
+talk away across country till he felt like stopping; or he would thrust
+his hands into the pockets of his rather shabby sack-coat, and pace the
+end of the room with his heavy laced boots, and look at nothing in
+particular, and discourse of things in general.”</p>
+
+<p>The formalities of academic work were of little concern to Lowell. To be
+sure, after the first year of neglect he yielded to Dr. Walker’s
+persuasion, and attended Faculty meetings with commendable regularity,
+and took his share in the little details of discipline which were
+gravely discussed. It must have brought a smile to his mind, if not to
+his face, when he found himself called upon to join in a public
+admonition of &mdash;&mdash;, junior, “for wearing an illegal coat after repeated
+warnings.” And examinations of his classes were wearisome functions.
+“Perhaps,” says Mr. Wendell, “from unwillingness to degrade the text of
+Dante to such use, Mr. Lowell set us, when we had read the Inferno and
+part of the Purgatorio, a paper consisting of nothing but a long passage
+from Massimo d’Azeglio, which we had three hours to translate. This task
+we performed as best we might. Weeks passed, and no news came of our
+marks. At last one of the class, who was not quite at ease concerning
+his academic standing, ventured at the close of a recitation to ask if
+Mr. Lowell had assigned him a mark. Mr. Lowell looked at the youth very
+gravely, and inquired what he really thought his work deserved. The
+student rather diffidently said that he hoped it was worth sixty<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_396" id="page_396">{396}</a></span> per
+cent. ‘You may take it,’ said Mr. Lowell, ‘I don’t want the bother of
+reading your book.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, indifferent as he may have been to the customary details
+of academic work, and not a little impatient of dry formalities, Lowell
+gave to the college liberally of the best he had to give. Not merely did
+he go through with his appointed tasks; he was always ready to take
+additional labor on himself and to perform works of supererogation. He
+had men come to read with him in his house, and one season at least
+offered to conduct a group of divinity students through the Inferno. It
+must be remembered, moreover, that Lowell’s instruction was of two
+sorts, one in a special author or group, to small select classes, the
+other general lectures upon literature to large classes. Something of
+the character of his free handling of subjects may be seen in the
+extracts from these lectures preserved in <i>The Harvard Crimson</i> in 1894;
+and the attitude which he took toward this side of his work is recorded
+in the introductory passage to a lecture on the Study of Literature.</p>
+
+<p>“I confess,” he says, “it is with more and more diffidence that I rise
+every year to have my little talk with you about books and the men that
+have written them. If I remember my terrestrial globe rightly, one gets
+into his temperate zone after passing the parallel of forty, and arrives
+at that, shall I call it, Sheltered Haven of Middle Age, when, in
+proportion as one is more careful of the conclusions he arrives at, he
+is less zealous in his desire that all mankind should agree with<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_397" id="page_397">{397}</a></span> him.
+Moreover, the longer one studies, the more thoroughly does one persuade
+himself that till he knows everything, he knows nothing&mdash;that after
+twenty years of criticism, one is still a mere weigher and gauger:
+skilled only to judge what he may chance to have been in the habit of
+inspecting at his own little provincial custom-house. And as one gets
+older he is apt to allow more for personal idiosyncrasy, and to have
+less certainty that the truth he had reached is not a one-sided one, and
+that there are not fifty others equally important, and (perhaps) equally
+unsatisfactory. Every bait is not for every fish. We begin by admitting
+the old doctor’s apothegm that Art is long; we gradually become
+persuaded that it is like the Irishman’s rope, the other end of which
+was cut off. So different is Art, whose concern is with the ideal and
+potential, from Science, which is limited by the actual and positive.
+Life is so short that it may be fairly doubted whether any man has a
+right to talk an hour, and I have learned at least so much,&mdash;that I hope
+less to teach than to suggest.”</p>
+
+<p>The tone of distrustfulness which is an undercurrent in this passage is
+familiar enough to the conscientious teacher, and Lowell, measuring the
+vastness of literature and his own inadequacy to press it home to his
+students, was fearful that the outcome was slight in proportion to the
+cost to himself. Yet he did not therefore spare himself. During the
+years of his teaching, he was more than ever the scholar, taking
+generous draughts of the literature he was to teach, for long stretches<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_398" id="page_398">{398}</a></span>
+of time even engaged with his books twelve hours out of the twenty-four.
+And so quickening was his imagination that he went to his classes not to
+decant the wine of learning from bottles just filled, but to give them
+of his own rare essence distilled from the hours of study. Hence he was
+a strong and vivifying influence to the best men under him, and to all
+he communicated something of that rich culture which is not easily
+measured by lessons learned and recited. No one could listen to his
+teaching, as has been well said, without becoming conscious that he was
+listening to a man not less wise than accomplished and gifted.</p>
+
+<p>In this matter of teaching, as in all the other undertakings of his
+life, Lowell kept no strict debit and credit account. He gave his
+measure not according to the stipulated return, but freely, generously.
+Especially did he overflow in friendliness. As he turned the lecture and
+recitation hour into a <i>causerie</i>, and was careless in his exactions, so
+he not only suffered but encouraged encroachment on his unprofessional
+hours. At first in Kirkland Street, afterward at Elmwood, he made his
+students welcome, and the only difference it may be between an hour in
+University Hall and an hour by the wood fire at Elmwood, was in the
+wider range of talk. It was here that his students came nearest to him,
+for it was the men he quickened in the class-room who were avid of more
+just such talk, and sought him in the greater intimacy of his study.
+Yet, nearer as they came to him as he sat with his pipe in slippered
+ease, and much as<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_399" id="page_399">{399}</a></span> they drew from him, it is doubtful if there was much
+reciprocity in the intercourse. As a comparative stranger might draw
+from Lowell one of his most delightful letters, if some question he sent
+him happened to catch him at a favorable moment, when he needed only an
+occasion for the letter that was on tap, so these students, one or more,
+offered an easy audience, and Lowell, rarely out of the mood for talk,
+would spin his gossamer or weave his strong fabric for them as well as
+for any one else, without paying very close heed to them personally. In
+fine, the twenty years of college work made little inroad on Lowell
+himself. He was furnished with occupation, he was made comparatively
+easy in his simple need of a livelihood, and for the rest his class-room
+work offered a natural outlet for his abundant intellectual activity. He
+grumbled sometimes over its demands on his time, but it is doubtful if
+the reading world would have had very much more from him had he never
+been subject to this demand. It is even quite possible that the work
+kept him very much more alive than he might otherwise have been, saving
+him from a species of intellectual luxury of an unproductive sort; it is
+certain that the hours added thus to his other productive time were a
+stimulus and inspiration to many men, and that as a practical matter the
+work done for his classes in the way of direct preparation was the
+foundation of a good deal of his published criticism.</p>
+
+<p>And yet it is not so certain that his mood for poetry was helped by his
+academic life. He wrote<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_400" id="page_400">{400}</a></span> to Mr. Stillman 14 May, 1857: “While my
+lectures are on my mind I am not myself, and I seem to see all the
+poetry drying out of me. I droop on my rocks and hear the surge of the
+living waters, but they will not reach me till some extraordinary
+springtide, and maybe not then.” It is true, this expression must not be
+pressed too hardly&mdash;it may have been only the mood of the moment; but it
+is evident that the time of freedom in poetic composition had largely
+passed for him; it returned once and again, as for instance in “Agassiz”
+and the “Commemoration Ode,” it was compelled for him by the occasion
+which drew out the second series of the “Biglow Papers,” but for the
+most part his poetry after this date bears rather more the touch of
+deliberation and less the abandon of his early enthusiasm. How far this
+is to be referred to the circumstance of the constraint of academic
+work, and how far to the change which came over his life in the passage
+from ebullient youth to chastened manhood one would not care to say. But
+the period of his next twenty years was the period of prose in his
+production.</p>
+
+<p>The regular, punctual life which the daily college exercise demands came
+as a steadying influence after the vagrancy and informality of the
+previous years, and now there was added the gracious and helpful
+presence of a self-contained, sympathetic, congenial woman. Mrs. Lowell,
+before her death, had wished her daughter to be under the oversight of
+an intimate friend, Miss Elizabeth Dunlap, but before the arrangements
+could be com<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_401" id="page_401">{401}</a></span>pleted, Miss Dunlap died, and her sister Frances took the
+place and had had charge of Mabel Lowell ever since her father had left
+America for his year of study in Germany. He had thought himself most
+fortunate in making the arrangement, and the friendly intercourse which
+naturally sprang from this relation ripened steadily into affection. In
+September, 1857, they were married, and now he was enabled to resume the
+old life at Elmwood.</p>
+
+<p>One or two passages from letters written at this time by Lowell to Mr.
+Norton give a glimpse of this new relation: “I have told you once or
+twice that I should not be married again if I could help it. The time
+has come when I cannot. A great many things (which I cannot write about)
+have conspired to bring me to this resolution, and I rejoice in it, for
+I feel already stronger and better, with an equability of mind that I
+have not felt for years.”<a name="FNanchor_107_107" id="FNanchor_107_107"></a><a href="#Footnote_107_107" class="fnanchor">[107]</a> “I was glad as I could be to get your
+heartily sympathizing letter. I had taken a step of great import to my
+life and character, and though I am careless of Mrs. Grundy’s sentiments
+on the occasion, I do care intensely for the opinion of the few friends
+whom I value. With its personal results to myself I am more than
+satisfied, and I was convinced of the wisdom of what I was about to do
+before I did it. I already begin to feel like my old self again in
+health and spirits, and feel secure now, if I die, of leaving Mabel to
+wise and loving government. So intimate an acquaintance as mine has been
+with Miss Dunlap for<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_402" id="page_402">{402}</a></span> nearly four years has made me know and love her,
+and she certainly must know me well enough to be safe in committing her
+happiness to my hands.... I went down last week to Portland to make the
+acquaintance of her family, and like them, especially her mother, who is
+a person of great character. They live in a little bit of a house in a
+little bit of a street, behind the great house (the biggest in town) in
+which they were brought up, and not one of them seemed conscious that
+they were not welcoming me to a palace. There were no apologies for want
+of room, no Dogberry hints at losses, nor anything of that kind, but all
+was simple, ladylike, and hearty. A family of girls who expected to be
+rich, and have had to support themselves and (I suspect) their mother in
+part, are not likely to have any nonsense in them. I find Miss Dunlap’s
+education very complete in having had the two great teachers, Wealth and
+Poverty&mdash;one has taught not to value money, the other to be independent
+of it.”<a name="FNanchor_108_108" id="FNanchor_108_108"></a><a href="#Footnote_108_108" class="fnanchor">[108]</a> “I am more and more in love with Fanny, whose nature is so
+delightfully cheerful that it is impossible for me to get into the dumps
+even if I wished.”<a name="FNanchor_109_109" id="FNanchor_109_109"></a><a href="#Footnote_109_109" class="fnanchor">[109]</a></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Stillman, a keen observer, has given a good estimate of Mrs.
+Lowell’s nature in these words: “She was one of the rarest and most
+sympathetic creatures I have ever known. She was the governess of
+Lowell’s daughter, when I first went to stay at Elmwood, and I then felt
+the charm of her character. She was a sincere Swedenborgian, with<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_403" id="page_403">{403}</a></span> the
+serene faith and spiritual outlook I have generally found to be
+characteristic of that sect; with a warmth of spiritual sympathy of
+which I have known few so remarkable instances; a fine and subtle
+faculty of appreciation, serious and tender, which was to Lowell like an
+enfolding of the Divine Spirit. The only particular in which the
+sympathy failed was in the feeling that she had in regard to his
+humorous poems. She disliked the vein. It was not that she lacked humor
+or the appreciation of his, but she thought that kind of literature
+unworthy of him. This she said to me more than once. But, aside from
+this, she fitted him like the air around him. He had felt the charm of
+her character before he went to Europe, and had begun to bend to it; but
+as he said to me after his marriage, he would make no sign till he had
+tested by a prolonged absence the solidity of the feeling he had felt
+growing up. He waited, therefore, till his visit to Germany had
+satisfied him that it was sympathy, and not propinquity, that lay at the
+root of his inclination for her, before declaring himself. No married
+life could be more fortunate in all respects except one&mdash;they had no
+children. But for all that his life required she was to him healing from
+sorrow and a defence against all trouble, a very spring of life and
+hope.”<a name="FNanchor_110_110" id="FNanchor_110_110"></a><a href="#Footnote_110_110" class="fnanchor">[110]</a></p>
+
+<p>Mr. Howells also, who first knew her a decade later, has sketched her in
+these lines: “She was<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_404" id="page_404">{404}</a></span> a woman perfectly of the New England type and
+tradition: almost repellently shy at first, and almost glacially cold
+with new acquaintance, but afterward very sweet and cordial. She was of
+a dark beauty, with a regular face of the Spanish outline; Lowell was of
+an ideal manner toward her, and of an admiration which delicately
+travestied itself and which she knew how to receive with smiling
+irony.”<a name="FNanchor_111_111" id="FNanchor_111_111"></a><a href="#Footnote_111_111" class="fnanchor">[111]</a> Mrs. Herrick, in an unpublished reminiscence, speaks of her
+in similar terms: “She was a noble and beautiful woman eminently
+practical in all the affairs of life. Commanding in presence, gracious
+in her hospitality, highly cultured, and full of a keen appreciation of
+every word of Mr. Lowell, and always charming and womanly.”</p>
+
+<p>Stillman’s tender sketch of Mrs. Lowell brings to mind that it was in
+the summer of his marriage that Lowell joined this friend in a
+reconnaissance of the Adirondacks which was followed by the formation of
+the Adirondack Club, and the successive sojourns in the wilderness which
+Emerson has enshrined in his poem “The Adirondacs,” and Stillman himself
+has recorded delightfully in his Autobiography as well as in magazine
+articles.<a name="FNanchor_112_112" id="FNanchor_112_112"></a><a href="#Footnote_112_112" class="fnanchor">[112]</a></p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Ten men, ten guides, our company all told,”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">says Emerson, but his chronicle was of the next<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_405" id="page_405">{405}</a></span> year when the club was
+fully organized, and Stillman, Emerson, Lowell, Jeffries Wyman, E. R.
+Hoar, Dr. Howe, Binney, Woodman, Agassiz, and John Holmes, went into the
+wilderness. In 1857, the tentative exploring party; led by Stillman,
+consisted of John Holmes, Dr. Estes Howe, Lowell, and his two nephews,
+Charles and James Lowell, forever immortalized in the passionate verse
+of the second “Biglow Papers.” Lowell, who had known the near charms of
+nature in the Waverley Oaks and Beaver Brook, and had tasted the wild
+wood in his Maine excursion, entered with frolic delight into this
+forest picnic. The conditions were such as to bring out the best that
+was in him, for he had the freedom of the woods and the satisfaction of
+congenial society. “He was the soul,” says Stillman, “of the merriment
+of the company, fullest of witticisms, keenest in appreciation of the
+liberty of the occasion and the <i>genius loci</i>.... Not even Emerson, with
+all his indifference to the mere form of things, took to unimproved and
+uncivilized nature as Lowell did, and his free delight in the Wilderness
+was a thing to remember.” To these companions, quick to appreciate and
+respond, Lowell, light-hearted with the new promise of happiness and set
+free in his mind by the large privacy of the woods, brought the
+treasures of his fancy, his wit, his imagination. He revelled especially
+in recounting those visionary experiences which seemed all the more real
+under the starry skies and in the companionship of trees and silent
+forest creatures. Yet with it all, his in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_406" id="page_406">{406}</a></span>quisitive, searching mind,
+quickened too by the presence of scientific and philosophic comrades,
+was forever probing these phenomena to discover what was their ultimate
+rationale.</p>
+
+<p>There can be little doubt that at this period of his life Lowell was
+poised for flight, as it were, having reached a stage when all the
+conditions were most favorable for the full expression of his powers. It
+is true that his academic work, as I have said, did in a measure
+supplant a freer poetic movement. But it may not unfairly be affirmed
+that Lowell’s attitude toward poetry was always that of expectation of
+some greater gift to come. His poems “Fancy’s Casuistry,” “In the
+Twilight,” “To the Muse,” all written about this time, record with
+iteration his restless pursuit of the elusive dream. His academic work
+afforded indeed a daily outlet, but it could not satisfy the demand for
+expression. Best of all, there was a pleasure-house in which he dwelt
+with his wife and daughter, perfectly fitted to the contentment of his
+spirit, and to furnishing that ease of mind which gives health of
+nature. Stillman has in another passage drawn a picture which may well
+be given here in evidence.</p>
+
+<p>“Lowell was indeed very happy in his married life, and amongst the
+pictures Memory will keep on her tablet for me, till Death passes his
+sponge over it once for all, is one of his wife lying in a long chair
+under the trees at Dr. Howe’s, when the sun was getting cool, and
+laughing with her low, musical laugh at a contest in punning between
+Lowell<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_407" id="page_407">{407}</a></span> and myself, <i>haud passibus æquis</i>, but in which he found enough
+to provoke his wit to activity; her almost Oriental eyes twinkling with
+fun, half-closed and flashing from one to the other of us; her low,
+sweet forehead, wide between the temples; mouth wreathing with humor;
+and the whole frame, lithe and fragile, laughing with her eyes at his
+extravagant and rollicking word-play. One would hardly have said that
+she was a beautiful woman, but fascinating she was in the happiest sense
+of the word, with all the fascination of pure and perfect womanhood and
+perfect happiness.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_408" id="page_408">{408}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX<br /><br />
+<small>THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY</small><br /><br />
+<small>1857-1861</small></h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Lowell</span> had not been a year in his professor’s chair when he was invited
+to take another position more closely identified with literature and
+having its own cares and drudgery. Under the present conditions of
+magazine editorship and of college professorship as well, the union of
+the two offices would be quite out of the question.<a name="FNanchor_113_113" id="FNanchor_113_113"></a><a href="#Footnote_113_113" class="fnanchor">[113]</a> But the
+condition in 1857 was different, and to install a professor in Harvard
+College as editor of a new magazine was both natural and in a measure
+traditional. I have already called attention to the effort made in 1853
+to establish a literary magazine, and to Lowell’s interest in the
+venture. The person most concerned in that effort did not lose sight of
+his project, and now pushed the matter through to a fortunate
+conclusion.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Francis Henry Underwood was in 1857 the literary adviser and reader
+for the firm of Phillips &amp; Sampson in Boston, and he was an ardent
+admirer of Lowell. He was a strong advocate of anti-slavery doctrines,
+and in his first proposals for<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_409" id="page_409">{409}</a></span> a magazine in 1853 was working in
+conjunction with the firm of John P. Jewett &amp; Co., that had just sprung
+into notice as publishers of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The firm with which he
+was now connected was active chiefly in the publication of cheap
+editions of standard works in literature. It had a large Southern
+constituency, and when “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was offered to it in the form
+of a scrap-book of clippings from <i>The National Era</i>, commercial
+prudence dictated a polite refusal. When, however, Mrs. Stowe’s name had
+become one of great value, it was easy for Phillips, Sampson &amp; Co. to
+publish, as they did, her “Sunny Memories” in 1854 and “Dred” in 1856.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Moses Dresser Phillips had been brought up in the book trade and
+knew it first as a bookseller. He was a man who had large business
+energy and laid his plans for wide connections and not merely a local
+trade. Mr. Charles Sampson, with whom he had formed his partnership, had
+died about five years before, and his only partner at this time was Mr.
+William Lee, well known for many years as the senior partner in the
+publishing house of Lee &amp; Shepard. He was nearer Mr. Underwood’s age and
+it was chiefly with him that Mr. Underwood talked over his cherished
+plan. It was through him, indeed, that Mr. Underwood expected to gain
+over Mr. Phillips, who had the practical man’s distrust of new
+enterprises suggested by authors, and a temperament which was calculated
+to chill enthusiasm. Mr. Underwood had already won consent to engage in
+the work from Lowell,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_410" id="page_410">{410}</a></span> Longfellow, Holmes, and others, and he
+represented strongly to Mr. Lee the possibilities of a magazine which
+should have at once a staff of writers of a character so eminent. I
+suspect he kept in the background any purpose he might have of making
+the magazine play a part in politics. Mr. Lee in turn at his daily lunch
+with Mr. Phillips kept that gentleman in mind of the project, though he
+was himself neither an advocate nor an opponent. He simply used Mr.
+Underwood’s arguments, the most effective of which may have been the
+prospect held up before Mr. Phillips of the association he should thus
+form with a distinguished group.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Phillips having been won over, the plans for the new magazine were
+rapidly pushed forward. In all this Mr. Underwood was the active
+manager, but Mr. Phillips as the head of the business now took the
+leading place. At an early date, Tuesday, 5 May, 1857, he called
+together the men on whom he most relied to give the enterprise
+distinction, and gave them a dinner at the Parker House. Fortunately an
+account of this meeting is in his own words in a letter to a niece:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“I must tell you about a little dinner party I gave about two weeks ago.
+It would be proper, perhaps, to state that the origin of it was a desire
+to confer with my literary friends on a somewhat extensive literary
+project, the particulars of which I shall reserve until you come. But to
+the party: my invitations included only R. W. Emerson,<a name="FNanchor_114_114" id="FNanchor_114_114"></a><a href="#Footnote_114_114" class="fnanchor">[114]</a> H.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_411" id="page_411">{411}</a></span> W.
+Longfellow, J. R. Lowell, Mr. Motley (the ‘Dutch Republic’ man), O. W.
+Holmes, Mr. Cabot,<a name="FNanchor_115_115" id="FNanchor_115_115"></a><a href="#Footnote_115_115" class="fnanchor">[115]</a> and Mr. Underwood, our literary man. Imagine
+your uncle as the head of such a table, with such guests. The above
+named were the only ones invited, and they were all present. We sat down
+at three <small>P.M.</small>, and rose at eight. The time occupied was longer by about
+four hours and thirty minutes than I am in the habit of consuming in
+that kind of occupation, but it was the richest time intellectually by
+all odds that I have ever had. Leaving myself and ‘literary man’ out of
+the group, I think you will agree with me that it would be difficult to
+duplicate that number of such conceded scholarship in the whole country
+beside.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr. Emerson took the first post of honor at my right, and Mr.
+Longfellow the second at my left. The exact arrangement of the table was
+as follows:&mdash;</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align="left">&nbsp;</td><td class="c">Mr. Underwood</td><td align="left">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">Cabot</td><td align="left">&nbsp;</td><td align="left">Lowell</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">Motley</td><td align="left">&nbsp;</td><td align="left">Holmes</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">Longfellow</td><td align="left">&nbsp;</td><td align="left">Emerson</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">&nbsp;</td><td class="c">Phillips</td><td align="left">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>“They seemed so well pleased that they adjourned, and invited me <i>to
+meet them</i> again to-morrow (the 20th), when I shall again meet the same
+persons, with one other (Whipple, the essayist) added to that brilliant
+constellation of philosophical, poetic, and historical talent. Each one
+is known alike on both sides of the Atlantic, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_412" id="page_412">{412}</a></span> is read beyond the
+limits of the English language. Though all this is known to you, you
+will pardon me for intruding it upon you. But still I have the vanity to
+believe that you will think them the most natural thoughts in the world
+to me. Though I say it that should not, it was the proudest day of my
+life.”<a name="FNanchor_116_116" id="FNanchor_116_116"></a><a href="#Footnote_116_116" class="fnanchor">[116]</a></p>
+
+<p>There was another writer not at the dinner whose coöperation it was
+important to secure. Mrs. Stowe returned in June to America from
+England, whither she had gone to secure copyright for “Dred,” and Mr.
+Phillips at once laid his plan before her. She approved it most heartily
+and promised to give it her cordial support. It is not impossible that
+she made a definite promise of a serial novel to begin with the first
+number, but the sudden death a month later of her son Henry brought such
+a mental strain upon her that it was nearly a year before she could
+undertake any continued writing. The first number of the <i>Atlantic
+Monthly</i> contained a brief allegory by her, “The Minister’s Mourning
+Veil,” and she contributed later an essay, but “The Minister’s Wooing”
+was not begun in the magazine till December, 1858.</p>
+
+<p>As a result of these preliminary plans, Mr. Underwood was dispatched in
+June to England to secure the aid of English authors, and Mr. Lowell was
+asked to take the position of editor. Lowell had already taken an active
+part in creating an interest in the venture among writers. Underwood had
+turned to him as his most important ally, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_413" id="page_413">{413}</a></span> Longfellow records in his
+diary, 29 April, 1857: “Lowell was here last evening to interest me in a
+new Magazine to be started in Boston by Phillips and Sampson. I told him
+I would write for it if I wrote for any Magazine.” Dr. Holmes christened
+the magazine, and Lowell, from the first, reckoned upon him for
+contributions. In 1885, when Dr. Holmes was resuming his regular prose
+contributions after a long intermission, he wrote in the introductory
+paper:<a name="FNanchor_117_117" id="FNanchor_117_117"></a><a href="#Footnote_117_117" class="fnanchor">[117]</a> “He (Mr. Lowell) thought there might be something in my old
+portfolio which would be not unacceptable in the new magazine. I ...
+wondered somewhat when Mr. Lowell urged me with such earnestness to
+become a contributor, and so, yielding to a pressure which I could not
+understand, and yet found myself unable to resist, I promised to take a
+part in the new venture, as an occasional writer in the columns of the
+magazine.” Lowell, reading this number of the <i>Atlantic</i> in London,
+wrote to Dr. Holmes: “The first number of your New Portfolio whets my
+appetite. Let me make one historical correction. When I accepted the
+editorship of the <i>Atlantic</i>, I made it a condition precedent that you
+were the first contributor to be engaged. Said I not well?”<a name="FNanchor_118_118" id="FNanchor_118_118"></a><a href="#Footnote_118_118" class="fnanchor">[118]</a></p>
+
+<p>Emerson apparently had asked if the contribu<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_414" id="page_414">{414}</a></span>tions were to be signed,
+for Lowell wrote him, 14 September, 1857: “All the articles will be
+anonymous, but you will be quite helpless, for your name is written in
+all kinds of self-betraying anagrams over yours. But as far as we are
+concerned there shall be as strict honor as the XIXth century allows of.
+Your wishes shall govern the position of the article [‘Illusions,’ in
+the first number], though I should have preferred to give it the
+precedence. I am afraid that where that is will be the head of the
+table, whether or no.”</p>
+
+<p>In the same first number appeared four of Emerson’s poems, printed in a
+group: “The Romany Girl,” “The Chartist’s Complaint,” “Days,” and
+“Brahma.” Emerson seems to have raised some question about this, for in
+the same letter Lowell writes: “About the poems I ought to say that when
+I spoke of printing all four I was perhaps greedy, and Mr. Underwood
+says we can’t afford it, reckoning each as a separate poem&mdash;which means
+giving $50 apiece for them. Forgive me for coming down into the kitchen
+thus, but as I got the magazine into the scrape I must get it out. My
+notion was that all the poems would be published at once in a volume,
+and that therefore it would be alike to you. I ought to have thought
+that you sent them for selection,&mdash;and I will never be so rapacious
+again till I have another so good chance. If I am to have only one, give
+me ‘Days.’ That is as limpid and complete as a Greek epigram. I quarrel,
+though, with one word ‘hypocritic,’ which I doubt does not give the very
+shade<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_415" id="page_415">{415}</a></span> of meaning you intended. I think you did wish to imply
+<i>intentional</i> taking-in? I will take the liberty to draw your notice to
+one or two things in the proofs (of the poems), leaving them to your own
+judgment entirely.... It is not often that a magazine carries such
+freight as your ‘Illusions.’... How about Mr. Thoreau?”</p>
+
+<p>It was not “Days” so much as “Brahma” that seized upon the imagination.
+Mr. Trowbridge, in his article on “The Author of Quabbin,” says it was
+“more talked about and puzzled over and parodied than any other poem of
+sixteen lines published within my recollection. ‘What does it mean?’ was
+the question readers everywhere asked; and if one had the reputation of
+seeing a little way into the Concord philosophy, he was liable at any
+time to be stopped on the street by some perplexed inquirer, who would
+draw him into the nearest doorway, produce a crumpled newspaper clipping
+from the recesses of a waistcoat pocket, and, with knitted brows,
+exclaim, ‘Here! you think you understand Emerson; now tell me what all
+this is about,&mdash;<i>If the red slayer think he slays</i>,’ and so forth.”</p>
+
+<p>The magazine appeared about the first of November, and on the 19th
+Lowell wrote to Emerson: “You have seen, no doubt, how the Philistines
+have been parodying your ‘Brahma,’ and showing how they still believe in
+their special god Baal, and are unable to arrive at a conception of an
+omnipresent Deity. I have not yet met with a single clever one or I
+would have sent it to you for your amuse<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_416" id="page_416">{416}</a></span>ment. Meanwhile, they are
+advertising the <i>Atlantic</i> in the very best way, and Mr. Underwood tells
+me that the orders for the second number are doubling on those for the
+first. I think you will find the second an improvement.... Your poem
+[“Two Rivers”] is to go into No. 3, simply as a matter of housewifery,
+because we had already three articles at $50. I think I told you which I
+chose&mdash;‘Musketaquit.’ The ‘Solitude and Society’ [published in No. 2]
+has only one fault, that it is not longer, but had it been only a page,
+there would have been enough in it. Did you use the word <i>daysman</i><a name="FNanchor_119_119" id="FNanchor_119_119"></a><a href="#Footnote_119_119" class="fnanchor">[119]</a>
+deliberately? It has a technical meaning, and I suppose you used it in
+that sense. Mr. Nichols (the vermilion pencil) was outraged, and
+appealed to me. I answered that you had a right to use any word you
+liked till we found some one who wrote better English to correct you. Or
+did you mean the word to be merely the English of <i>journeyman</i>?</p>
+
+<p>“I hope you will be able to give us something more for No. 3 before you
+go off to lecture. The number promises well thus far, but I wish to make
+it a decided advance. You have no notion how hard bestead we are. Out of
+297 manuscripts only at most six accepted. I begin to believe in the
+total depravity of contributions.</p>
+
+<p>“Let me thank you in especial for one line in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_417" id="page_417">{417}</a></span> ‘Brahma,’ which abides
+with me as an intimate&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘When me they fly, I am the wings.’<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">You have crammed meaning there with an hydraulic press. Will not Thoreau
+give us something from Moosehead?”</p>
+
+<p>Fourteen years earlier Lowell had welcomed Whittier as a contributor to
+the <i>Pioneer</i>, and now he renewed the old relation. He printed
+“Tritemius” in the first number and “Skipper Ireson’s Ride” in the
+second. Indeed, the <i>Atlantic</i> came into existence most fortunately for
+Whittier, whose fortunes it helped distinctly, as it gave him a medium
+for the publication of his purely literary poems, and thus not only
+filled his pocket but helped materially to place him before the public
+in another guise than that of an ardent reformer. Lowell’s letter upon
+receipt of “Skipper Ireson’s Ride” is interesting both for its
+cordiality and for the contrast in tone to his manner of addressing
+Emerson. It may not unfairly be said that Emerson was the only one of
+his contemporaries whom Lowell addressed as if he were profoundly
+conscious of his relation to him as a pupil to his master. Lowell’s
+letter to Whittier is dated 4 November, 1857.<a name="FNanchor_120_120" id="FNanchor_120_120"></a><a href="#Footnote_120_120" class="fnanchor">[120]</a></p>
+
+<p>“I thank you heartily for the ballad, which will go into the next
+number. I like it all the better for its provincialism,&mdash;in all fine
+pears, you know, we can taste the old <i>puckers</i>. I know the story<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_418" id="page_418">{418}</a></span> well.
+I am familiar with Marblehead and its dialect, and as the burthen is
+intentionally provincial I have taken the liberty to print it in such a
+way as shall give the peculiar accent, thus:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">‘Cap’n Ireson for his horrd horrt<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Was torred and feathered and corried in a corrt.’<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="nind">That’s the way I’ve always ‘horrd it,’&mdash;only it began ‘Old Flud Ireson.’
+What a good name Ireson (son of wrath) is for the hero of such a
+history!</p>
+
+<p>“You see that ‘Tritemius’ is going the rounds! I meant to have sent you
+the proofs, and to have asked you to make a change in it where these
+four rhymes come together (assonances I mean),&mdash;‘door,’ ‘poor,’ ‘store,’
+‘more.’ It annoyed me, but I do not find that any one else has been
+troubled by it, and everybody likes the poem. I am glad that the
+Philistines have chosen some verses of mine<a name="FNanchor_121_121" id="FNanchor_121_121"></a><a href="#Footnote_121_121" class="fnanchor">[121]</a> for their target, not
+being able to comprehend the bearing of then. I mean I am glad that they
+did it rather than pick out those of any one else for their scapegoat. I
+shall not let you rest till I have got a New England pastoral out of
+you. This last is cater-cousin to it, at least, being a piscatorial.</p>
+
+<p>“Will you be good enough to let me know how much Mr. Underwood shall
+send you? He will remit at once.</p>
+
+<p>“The sale of Maga has been very good considering the times, and I think
+you will find the second<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_419" id="page_419">{419}</a></span> number better than the first. If you do not
+wish the burthen so spelt, will you write me?”</p>
+
+<p>The year 1857 was one of great financial distress, and the magazine felt
+something of this influence even before it was published, for it was
+intended to bring it out earlier than its first number actually
+appeared. It was in May that the preliminary arrangements were made and
+Lowell secured as editor. As late, however, as the end of that month, he
+was writing to a foreign correspondent that the editorship was a dead
+secret. But as we have seen he had interested himself in the venture
+from the outset. From time to time after his attempt with the <i>Pioneer</i>
+he had revolved in his mind plans for magazines. It is safe to say that
+few prominent writers in America, Longfellow and Cooper being the chief
+exceptions, failed to dream of launching some vessel of this sort that
+should be freighted with the best of literature, and the initiative in
+almost all the cases of important magazines has been taken by the author
+rather than by the publisher. We have perhaps come to the close of the
+period when a new monthly magazine seems essential for the carrying of
+American thought and letters, and enterprise of this sort is more likely
+to seek an outlet in weekly journalism; but the men of letters who were
+at the front in the middle of the century not only had strong
+intellectual sympathy with the brilliant <i>Blackwood</i> of that
+day,&mdash;Lowell in his correspondence repeatedly uses the familiar form
+<i>Maga</i> when referring to the <i>Atlantic</i>,&mdash;and had<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_420" id="page_420">{420}</a></span> been brought up on
+<i>Tait</i>, <i>The London Journal</i>, <i>Fraser</i>, and other vehicles of
+contemporaneous English and Scottish letters, but they demanded some
+direct, open means of reaching readers, for they had a great deal to
+say, which was ill-adapted to daily journalism and for which they could
+not wait till it should cool for book publication.</p>
+
+<p>The conditions were favorable also from the point of view of the
+publisher, and Phillips &amp; Sampson were in a good position to know this.
+They were aware that the leading writers were in their neighborhood.
+Washington Irving was an old man, and Mr. Bryant by his associations was
+rather of New England than of New York. Excepting these two the men of
+national distinction, Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Prescott, Motley,
+Lowell, were New Englanders, and men known by these to have large gifts,
+Holmes, Higginson, Thoreau, Cabot, Norton, who were chiefly relied on to
+make the early numbers, were their neighbors and friends, while the
+commanding reputation of Mrs. Stowe could at once be counted on to give
+éclat to any magazine with which she was connected. Besides, the
+business of this house, which was largely that of a jobbing house, so
+called, that is, a house which sold miscellaneous books from whatever
+publishers all over the country, was of such a nature as to create a
+confidence in the existence of a widespread audience of intelligent
+readers.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the publishers were prepared to undertake the venture upon a
+somewhat liberal scale for<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_421" id="page_421">{421}</a></span> those days. They chose the best printer near
+by, Mr. Houghton, who had already given distinction to the name
+“Riverside,” and they proposed to make a handsome magazine, not wholly
+unlike in its appearance the Edinburgh <i>Blackwood</i>. They paid their
+editor a salary of $2500, and they expected to pay contributors on a
+scale not to be sure much in advance of what the best writers could
+secure in other periodicals in Philadelphia and New York, but more
+generous as regards the average contributor. I think the mean rate of
+prose was six dollars a page, though it may occasionally in the case of
+a tyro have dropped to five dollars, and for poems they paid usually
+fifty dollars apiece. In a letter to a contributor who took exception to
+the price paid him, Lowell wrote, when the magazine had been running
+three or four months, “You must be content. Six dollars a page is more
+than can be got elsewhere, and we only pay ten to folks whose <i>names</i>
+are worth the other four dollars. <i>Capite?</i> What we may be able to do
+hereafter, I know not. <i>I</i> shall always be for liberal pay.”</p>
+
+<p>It might seem as though the distinction thus referred to would hardly
+exist when all the articles were unsigned, but the authorship for the
+most part was an open secret. In those days the <i>North American Review</i>,
+as well as other like periodicals, used to print a little slip with the
+authorship of the separate articles set against the successive numbers
+of the articles, and this slip, though not inserted in all the copies
+sold or sent to subscrib<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_422" id="page_422">{422}</a></span>ers, was at the service of newspapers and the
+inner circle of contributors and near friends. In like manner the
+authorship of the principal articles and poems in the <i>Atlantic</i> leaked
+out, and for some, like Emerson’s poems and Holmes’s “Autocrat,” there
+could be no concealment.</p>
+
+<p>The authors themselves sometimes were glad of the privacy, as they
+thought it secured them more independence and possibility of frankness.
+Lowell thus wrote in September, 1859, to one of his contributors, who
+complained of what he thought want of care: “I am very sorry indeed for
+the mischance, but am quite sure it was no fault of mine. Where the
+‘copy’ passes through four or five hands, all of whose owners know the
+handwriting, the chances of leakage are great. I confess that in the
+worry of the last week or two, I did not remember to give any new
+caution just before the publication of the October number. I am the more
+sorry if it is to deprive us of your contributions. For myself, I have
+always been opposed to the publication of the authors’ names at all. I
+do as well as I can with so many things to think of at once.” The
+practice of withholding names publicly continued till 1862, when the
+index at the end of the volume disclosed the authorship of the articles
+in the body of the magazine, and in 1870, the practice was begun of
+signing contributions. The anonymous character of the early volumes
+served, however, to bury the authorship in some cases past resurrection,
+as I found when I undertook to prepare a General Index in 1877, and
+again in 1889.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_423" id="page_423">{423}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The ideal which Lowell formed for the magazine may best be inferred from
+the character of the numbers issued under his control, but in a few
+passages in his letters to contributors and friends he gives some
+glimpses of what was going on in his mind as he faced the very practical
+questions which arose in the conduct of the magazine. When I became
+editor of the <i>Atlantic</i>, in the spring of 1890, he contrasted my
+position with his own, and remarked on the very much larger number of
+writers on whom I could call for contributions, and the higher average
+of training in literary work. “Your task,” he wrote me, “will be in one
+respect at least easier than mine was thirty odd years ago, for there
+are now twenty people who can write English where there was one then.
+Indeed, there are so many, and they do it so well, that it looks as if
+literature as a profession or guild were near its end, and as if every
+man (and woman) would do his or her own on the principle of Every man
+his own washerwoman.” I thought and said, however, that it was not
+general average but distinction which gave a stamp to the magazine, and
+that in that respect he certainly had the advantage. In one of his
+letters to Mr. Richard Grant White, who feared a Shakespeare article he
+had furnished might be the one paper too much, he wrote: “I don’t care
+whether the public are tired of the Divine Villiams or not&mdash;a <i>part</i> of
+the magazine, as long as I have anything to do with it, shall be
+expressly <i>not</i> for the Mob (of well-dressed gentlemen who read with
+ease).<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_424" id="page_424">{424}</a></span>”</p>
+
+<p>At the outset, before any number had been published, he wrote to a
+friend from whom be solicited a contribution: “The magazine is going to
+be free without being fanatical, and we hope to unite in it all
+available talent of all shades of opinion. The magazine is to have
+opinions of its own, and not be afraid to speak them, but I think we
+shall be scholarly and gentlemanlike.” “This reading endless
+manuscripts,” he wrote to the same friend, when he was in full tide of
+preparation for the first number, “is hard work, and takes a great deal
+of time, but I am resolved that nothing shall go in which I have not
+first read. I wish to have nothing go in that will merely <i>do</i>,<a name="FNanchor_122_122" id="FNanchor_122_122"></a><a href="#Footnote_122_122" class="fnanchor">[122]</a> but
+I fear I can’t keep so high a standard. It is astonishing how much there
+is that keeps just short of the line of good and drops into the limbo of
+indifferent.”</p>
+
+<p>“There is a constant pressure on me,” he writes again, “to ‘popularize’
+the magazine, which I resist without clamor.” It is easy to understand
+this attitude. Lowell cared greatly for the success of the <i>Atlantic</i>,
+and he was governed in his conduct of it by prudential considerations.
+In the letter just quoted he had occasion to refer to a controversy
+which was then hot. “I am urged,” he says, “to take ground in the Albany
+controversy, but do not feel that there is any <i>ought</i> in the matter,
+and am sure the Trustees will beat in the end. I think it would be
+unwise to let the magazine take<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_425" id="page_425">{425}</a></span> a losing side unless clear justice
+required it. Am I not right?” But though he was not indifferent to the
+commercial prosperity of the <i>Atlantic</i>, and knew well that its
+opportunity for serving letters was largely conditioned on its
+subscription list, he did not make the fatal mistake of subordinating
+his own judgment to a supposititious judgment of the mysterious public
+which buys and reads magazines. It was his business to keep his own
+judgment free from the partisan bias of idiosyncrasy, but he perceived
+well the more subtle danger to which he was exposed of abdicating his
+authority while keeping his title in the supposed interest of the
+magazine. It was just because he was Lowell, a man whom the public was
+ready to follow in literary judgments, that he was in this place, and it
+was in the application of a well-seasoned taste that he demonstrated his
+fitness for the position. He cared greatly to be the instrument of
+organizing a body of first-rate literature, and the tone which he gave
+the <i>Atlantic</i> during the few months of his editorship became a
+tradition which powerfully affected its character after he retired from
+it. He put his own stamp on it emphatically.</p>
+
+<p>The public, meanwhile, began at once to exercise that censorship which
+is a somewhat whimsical but very substantial witness to the value of an
+enterprise which is only technically private. The Lowell Institute, for
+example, is on a foundation so exclusively personal that there is not
+even a nominal board of trustees to be consulted in its management: the
+courses of lectures which it offers are<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_426" id="page_426">{426}</a></span> absolutely free; yet ever since
+its establishment it has been subjected to criticism, good or ill
+natured, which would seem to imply some indefeasible right on the part
+of the public that criticises. Really, the criticism is simply an
+ingenuous expression of the profound interest which the public takes in
+a noble trust. Somewhat in the same way when the <i>Atlantic</i> was
+established, the public refused to regard it as offering wares which
+people might buy or not as they liked. It recognized it as a literary
+organon, as a power for good or ill; it was immensely interested in it,
+and showed its interest by attacking it severely on occasions.</p>
+
+<p>Such an occasion, especially, was the appearance of Dr. Holmes’s
+“Professor at the Breakfast-Table,” in which this writer, who had leaped
+into popularity through the “Autocrat,” delivered himself of opinions
+and judgments which were regarded by a good many as dangerous and
+subversive, all the more dangerous by reason of their wit and
+entertaining qualities. If one could believe many of the newspapers, Dr.
+Holmes was a sort of reincarnation of Voltaire, who stood for the most
+audacious enemy of Christianity in modern times.</p>
+
+<p>Some intimation of what Lowell was to encounter as editor may be
+gathered from a few words in a letter to T. W. Higginson, written at the
+end of his first year, when “The Autocrat” had already drawn the fire of
+one class of critic.</p>
+
+<p>“I only look upon my duty,” he says, “as a vicarious one for Phillips
+and Sampson, that nothing may go in (before we are firm on our feet)<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_427" id="page_427">{427}</a></span>
+that helps the ‘religious’ press in their warfare on us. Presently we
+shall be even with them, and have a <i>free</i> magazine in its true sense. I
+never allow any personal notion of mine to interfere, except in cases of
+obvious obscurity, bad taste, or bad grammar.” And Mr. Norton
+prints<a name="FNanchor_123_123" id="FNanchor_123_123"></a><a href="#Footnote_123_123" class="fnanchor">[123]</a> a letter written shortly after to Dr. Holmes, which shows
+clearly the cordial support which the editor gave his contributor.</p>
+
+<p>In one respect Lowell held a somewhat different position from that
+occupied by later editors. The <i>Atlantic</i> was so little troubled by
+competitors, and its company of contributors was so determined by a sort
+of natural selection, that Lowell’s editorial function was mainly
+discharged by the exercise of discrimination in the choice of articles,
+and the distribution of material through successive numbers; he had
+little to do in the way of foraging for matter. It must not be supposed,
+however, that there was anything perfunctory in his editorship. He was
+in love with literature, and his fine taste stood him in good stead, not
+only in the rejection of the commonplace, but in the perception of
+qualities which might redeem an otherwise undistinguished poem or paper.
+He had, too, that enthusiasm in the discovery of excellence which made
+him call his friends and neighbors together when he had found some pearl
+of great price; an enthusiasm which he was very sure to share with the
+author. He gave thus to the magazine that character of <i>distinction</i>
+which conscientiousness<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_428" id="page_428">{428}</a></span> alone on the part of the editor, or even
+careful study of conditions, cannot give.</p>
+
+<p>He was, to be sure, a trifle negligent of the business of writing to his
+contributors. He left as much of the correspondence as he could to Mr.
+Underwood, but in his somewhat capricious fashion he might make an
+article an excuse for a long and friendly letter. To one of his
+contributors who pursued him for his opinion upon some accepted
+manuscripts, he wrote a little testily: “You have a right to frankness
+and shall have it. I <i>did</i> like the article on &mdash;&mdash; better than the
+other, and I should like the &mdash;&mdash; one particularly. But what of that?
+other folks may have liked the other better, for aught I know. The fault
+of our tastes is in our stars, not in ourselves. My wife can’t endure
+‘The Biglow Papers,’ and somehow or other her dislike of them is a great
+refreshment to me and makes me like her all the better. But I think it
+is rather hard on an editor to expect him to give his opinion about
+everything he prints&mdash;I mean as to whether it is specially to his taste
+or not. How long would my contributors put up with me if I made
+Archbishops of Granada of them all? I tell you again, as I have told you
+before, that I am always glad of an article from you, let it be what it
+will, but (don’t you see?) I am gladdest when it is such a one as only
+you can write. If I could only print one number made of altogether such,
+I could sing my <i>nunc dimittis</i> with a joyful heart.” A little of the
+fret of his life in this particular appears in a whimsical tirade which
+he sent<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_429" id="page_429">{429}</a></span> to Mr. Norton on the eve of a flight to the Adirondacks in the
+summer of 1859:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“To-day is Sunday; at least the bells have been shouting it, but ‘the
+Sabbath dawns no Sabbath-day for me.’ I have been reading proof and
+picking out manuscripts all the morning. Do you ever get desperate? I
+feel so now that I have got all my manuscript-household in order. They
+appal me by their mass. I look first at one box, and then at another,
+and&mdash;fill my pipe. ‘It is dreadful!’ as Clough’s heroine says in the
+Bothie. And 128 pages which it would take one so long to fill with his
+own stuff eats up that of other folks&mdash;no, I don’t mean that and would
+not allow such a metaphor to a contributor&mdash;is satiated so soon with
+that of other folks&mdash;that is, uses it up so slowly. Mille-dam! Have not
+two articles of &mdash;&mdash; been on hand now for a year? He seems to spin out
+his brains as tenuously and uselessly as those creatures that streak the
+air with gossamer&mdash;no chance of catching even a stray fly of thought.
+Nay, his object is, I fancy, precisely what that of the aforesaid
+creatures may be&mdash;merely to swing himself over a gap. He is my ink&mdash;my
+pen-and-ink-ubus. I could scalp him the rather as he wears a wig and is
+deaf, and so would not be likely to hear of it. Then there is &mdash;&mdash; who
+can’t express himself in less than sixteen pages on any imaginable
+topic. It is a terrible thing this writing for the press, by which a
+man’s pen learns gradually to go by itself as those Chinese servants are
+said to fan and sleep at the same time. ‘No, no, by heaven I am not<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_430" id="page_430">{430}</a></span>
+ma-a-d!’ but I expect to be. I believe I have so far settled matters
+that everybody will think me a monster. But never mind, I get out of
+ear-shot to-morrow.”</p>
+
+<p>How fully and carefully he could and would write under special urgency
+may be seen by the long letter which he addressed to Mrs. Stowe when
+“The Minister’s Wooing” had been running three or four months in the
+<i>Atlantic</i>. The letter was published in C. E. Stowe’s life of his
+mother, and is quoted also in Mrs. Fields’s “Life and Letters of Harriet
+Beecher Stowe.”</p>
+
+<p>The criticism for which this letter was an excuse illustrates one very
+important element in Lowell’s editorial mind. However little he might
+exert himself to go afield for articles in the body of the magazine, he
+did not trust to luck for the critical notices. In that department he
+took great pains to secure competent workmen. To Lowell and his
+contemporaries this matter of book reviews was one of great consequence.
+In the evolution of literary periodical literature the article of the
+old <i>Quarterly</i> type, which was part a summary of a book, part a further
+contribution to the subject, and part a judgment on the author, had shed
+the first constituent, had lost much of the second, but preserved the
+third in a more condensed and, to a certain degree, in a more impersonal
+spirit. But criticism in its finest form was highly valued, and the form
+of the book review was accepted as recognized and permanent. When the
+<i>Atlantic</i>, therefore, was set up emphasis was laid on this serious<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_431" id="page_431">{431}</a></span>
+side of literary study, and the causerie, the light persiflage which
+serves as a relief in most magazines of a literary type&mdash;the <i>Atlantic</i>
+itself has now its Contributors’ Club&mdash;was disregarded. To be sure, in
+the first number, Lowell printed what seemed to promise a gay side to
+the magazine, a leaf entitled “The Round Table,” the purpose of which,
+in this instance, was to introduce an occasional poem by Dr. Holmes, but
+I suspect he was either a little alarmed at the prospect of setting his
+table monthly with a dessert, or was satisfied that the “Autocrat” would
+serve the same end. At any rate, no second number of “The Round Table”
+appeared. But each month the last few pages of each number were given
+up, after the well-accepted tradition, to notices of new books with
+occasional surveys of current music and pictures.</p>
+
+<p>Lowell’s estimate of the value of literary criticism is expressed in a
+letter to Mr. Richard Grant White, 10 June, 1858, apropos of a purpose
+Mr. White then had of starting a weekly literary journal in New York.
+“There is no one opprobrium of American scholarship and letters so
+great,” he says, “as the general laxity and debasement of criticism.
+With few exceptions our criticisms are venial (whether the pay be money
+or friendship) or partisan. An invitation to dinner may make a Milton
+out of the sorriest Flecknoe, and a difference in politics turn a
+creditable poet into a dunce.” Lowell relied on White for a certain
+amount of criticism and wrote him, 8 March, 1859,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_432" id="page_432">{432}</a></span> “There is nothing I
+so especially desire as to have ‘experts’ make the <i>Atlantic</i> their
+pulpit. As long as I continue editor, I wish you to understand that your
+contributions will always be welcome, on no ground of personal
+friendship, but because I know they will be of value. I particularly
+wish to have the department of ‘Lit. Notices’ made more full. I find so
+few people whom I can trust to write a review! Personal motives of one
+kind or other are always sure to peep out. I think I have gained one
+good from the fearful bore of reading manuscripts; it is gradually
+making me as impartial as a chemical test&mdash;as insensible, too, perhaps?
+That is the only fear.”</p>
+
+<p>As a result partly of his difficulty in securing satisfactory criticism
+and partly of his own aptitude for work of this kind, Lowell wrote more
+than forty reviews in the department during his editorship, besides
+several articles in the body of the magazine which were really reviews,
+like his careful study in two numbers of White’s Shakespeare. He was in
+such friendly communication with Mr. White regarding his work that it
+would have been idle to wear any mask in his presence, and Mr. White
+wrote him in great excitement over the first of the two articles. “I am
+very much obliged to you for your kind letter,” Lowell replied; “I never
+saw a man who did not think himself indifferent to praise, nor one who
+did not like it. In this country, where praise (or blame) is so cheap,
+one can’t think much of the old <i>laudari ab laudato</i>, for the <i>laudatus</i>
+himself may be the cele<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_433" id="page_433">{433}</a></span>brated Snooks, but I think I know how to value
+it from a man of discernment. I hope you will like the last half of my
+article as well as the first. It is honest, anyhow, and kindly meant,
+and I endeavored to avoid all picking of flaws. Years ago I laid to
+heart the saying of an old lady&mdash;‘that the eleventh commandment
+was&mdash;Don’t twit.’ ...</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t like reviewing, especially where the author is an acquaintance.
+I find it so hard to be impartial, but in your case I think my
+commendation would lose half its force were it not qualified with some
+adverse criticism. Please believe that I wrote all with the kindest
+feelings.”</p>
+
+<p>Lowell certainly had nothing of that superficial habit of reviewing
+which is at the bottom of most of the unsatisfactory work of this kind.
+In reviewing White’s Shakespeare, for example, he read over twice every
+word of the commentary and notes and then laid the book aside that his
+impression might settle and clarify before he wrote his criticism. Swift
+as he was in writing, there was, for the most part, a long period of
+brooding over his creative work and in study over his criticism. He
+wrote an article, for instance, on “Wedgwood’s Dictionary,” and
+complained regarding it to Mr. Norton: “You know my unfortunate weakness
+for doing things not quite superficially. So I have been a week about
+it&mdash;press waiting&mdash;devil at my elbow (I mean the printer’s)&mdash;every
+dictionary and vocabulary I own gradually gathering in a semicircle
+round my chair,&mdash;and three of the days of twelve solid hours each. And
+with what result?<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_434" id="page_434">{434}</a></span> at most six pages, which not six men will care
+anything about. And now it is done I feel as if I had taken hold of the
+book the wrong way, and that I should have devoted myself to his theory
+more and to particulars less; or, rather, that I ought to have had more
+space. But I had a gap to fill up,&mdash;just so much and no more. There is
+one passage<a name="FNanchor_124_124" id="FNanchor_124_124"></a><a href="#Footnote_124_124" class="fnanchor">[124]</a> in it that I wager will make all of you laugh, and
+heavens! what fun I could have made of the book if I had been
+unscrupulous! But I soon learned to respect Wedgwood’s attainments, and
+resisted all temptation.”</p>
+
+<p>Just as Lowell’s fun could find its way even into an index, so in his
+sober criticisms he would sometimes hide a jest for the delectation of
+especially discerning readers, as when in his article on White’s
+Shakespeare, he remarks incidentally: “To every commentator who has
+wantonly tampered with the text, or obscured it with his inky cloud of
+paraphrase, we feel inclined to apply the quadrisyllabic name of the
+brother of Agis, king of Sparta.” Felton, Longfellow tells us in a
+letter to Sumner, was the first to unearth the joke and to remember or
+discover that this name was Eudamidas.</p>
+
+<p>Apart from his considerable criticism Lowell contributed to the volumes
+which he edited chiefly poems and political articles. He printed the
+“Ode to Happiness” already referred to, the notable verses on “Italy,
+1859,” and the striking poem,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_435" id="page_435">{435}</a></span> “The Dead House,” which has an
+autobiographic interest, not from its being the record of an incident or
+even from the mood which it reflects, but from the fact that Lowell
+could write it at all and disclaim any personal connection with the
+theme. Mr. Norton has printed an interesting comment on the poem by
+Lowell,<a name="FNanchor_125_125" id="FNanchor_125_125"></a><a href="#Footnote_125_125" class="fnanchor">[125]</a> and in another letter written a few days later Lowell adds:
+“I have touched here and there the poem I sent, and think of putting it
+in the <i>Atlantic</i>. Did you like it? It is pure fancy, though founded on
+a feeling I have often had,&mdash;but for æsthetic reasons I put an
+‘inexpressive she’ into it.” In how healthy a mind must he have been,
+and how graciously healed in his new life to write thus without having
+his own great grief thrust itself between him and his poem.</p>
+
+<p>Yet there was a poem entitled “The Home,” written at the same time which
+was rather a record of personal experience than a universal mood caught
+in terms of common life, and he cast it aside therefore and never
+printed it. It has its place in a memoir of his life.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Here once my step was quickened,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Here beckoned the opening door,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And <i>welcome!</i> thrilled from the threshold<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To the foot it had felt before.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“A glow came forth to meet me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The blithe flame laughed in the grate,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And shadows that danced on the ceiling<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Danced faster with mine for a mate.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_436" id="page_436">{436}</a></span><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Glad to see you, old friend,’ yawned the armchair,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">‘This corner, you know, is your seat;’<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">‘Rest your slippers on me,’ beamed the fender,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">‘I brighten at touch of your feet.’<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>We know the practised finger,’<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Said the books, ‘that seems all brain,’<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the shy page rustled the secret<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">It had kept till I came again.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Hummed the pillow, ‘My down once trembled<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">On nightingales’ throats that flew<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Through the twilight gardens of Hafix<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To gather quaint dreams for you.’<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Ah me! if the Past have heartsease,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">It hath also rue for men:&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I come back: those unhealed ridges<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Were not in the churchyard then!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“But (I think) the house is unaltered&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I will go and ask to look<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At the rooms that were once familiar<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">To my life as its bed to the brook.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Unaltered! alas for the sameness<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That makes the change but more!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How estranged seems the look of the windows,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">How grates my foot on the floor!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“To learn this simple lesson<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Need I go to Paris or Rome,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That the many make a household,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">But only one the Home?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“<span class="lftspc">’</span>Twas a smile, ’twas a garment’s rustle,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">’Twas nothing that you could phrase,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But the whole dumb dwelling grew conscious<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And put on her looks and ways.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Were it mine, I would close the shutters<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">As you smooth the lids of the dead,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_437" id="page_437">{437}</a></span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the funeral fire should wind it,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">This corpse of a Home that is dead!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“For it died that summer morning<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">When she, its soul, was borne<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To lie all dark in the hillside<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">That looks over woodland and corn.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<p>“Is it anything?” he wrote to the friend to whom he sent it, or is it
+nothing? Or is it one of those nothings that is something? I think the
+last stanza should be last but one and begin ‘But it died,’ if
+‘dwelling’ will do for an antecedent. Is the first half too special?”</p>
+
+<p>There was indeed a gayer mood on him in the midst of his work which
+could make him turn his discomforts into a jest. “I cannot learn the
+knack of doing six things at once,” he wrote to a friend. “I had my
+whole time to myself for too many years, and the older I grow the
+unreadier writer I become. What a lucky dog Methusalem was! Nothing to
+know, and nine hundred years to learn it in.” He was writing to a
+somewhat dry-minded correspondent, but to a more congenial friend he
+wrote at the same time: “Nothing has happened to me since I saw you
+except manuscripts, and my mind is gradually becoming a blank. It is
+very depleting, I find, to read stuff week in and week out (I almost
+spelt week with an <i>a</i>), and does not help one to be a lively
+correspondent. But I believe I could dictate five love stories at the
+same time (as Napoleon the Other could despatches) without mixing them
+in the least&mdash;and indeed it would make no difference if I did. ‘Julie
+gazed<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_438" id="page_438">{438}</a></span> into the eyes of her lover, which sought in vain to escape her
+enquiring look, while the tears trembled on her long dark lashes, but
+fell not (that ‘fell not’ is new, I think). “And is it indeed so?” she
+said slowly, after a pause in which her heart leaped like an imprisoned
+bird.’&mdash;‘Meanwhile, the elder of the two, a stern-featured man of some
+forty winters, played with the hilt of his dagger, half drawing and then
+sheathing again the Damascus blade thin as the eloquence of Everett and
+elastic as the conscience of Cass. “Didst mark the old man tremble?”
+“Cospetto! my uncle, a noted leech, was wont to say that iron was a good
+tonic for unsteady nerves,” and still he trifled with the ominous
+looking weapon, etc., etc.’ I think of taking a contract to write all
+the stories myself at so much a dozen&mdash;a good murder or a happy marriage
+to be paid double.”</p>
+
+<p>One is reminded of Lamb’s famous letter to Manning when he reads a
+letter which Lowell wrote to his brother-in-law, Captain Parker, then in
+China: “A man who is eccentric enough to prefer a part of the world
+where folks walk with their heads down certainly deserves the
+commiseration of his friends, but as for letters&mdash;how to write and what
+to write about? I can’t write upside down, and I suppose you can’t read
+rightside up. So it is clearly a waste of time, but you will be able to
+read this after you get home again, when old age will have given all the
+news in it a kind of second-childhood, and it will have become fresh by
+dint of having been forgotten.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_439" id="page_439">{439}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>“Of course there isn’t any news&mdash;when was there ever any? For my own
+part, I don’t regret it, looking on news as generally only a short way
+of saying nuisance, and believing Noah to have been the happiest man
+that ever lived, for all the gossips were five thousand fathoms under
+water, and he knew that he should not hear anything when he got into
+port. The daughters must have been put to it, though, with nobody left
+but Shem, Ham, and Japhet to work slippers and smoking caps for, and
+never a new engagement to discuss.</p>
+
+<p>As for news here,&mdash;there was the College Exhibition day before
+yesterday, which was a good deal like other Exhibitions only that it
+rained. I suppose your wife has written you of the appointment of Caihee
+as professor of the Chinese language and literature with a salary of ten
+piculs a year, which she is allowed to raise in the college grounds, the
+Corporation finding cucumber seed and Theodore Parker the vinegar. A
+compromise has been effected in theological matters, and she is to
+worship Josh Bates the London banker instead of simple Josh, in
+consideration of which Mr. Bates will pay half the salary of a Bonze to
+be imported express. The students will be allowed to let off
+fire-crackers during her lectures. She begins with an exposition of the
+doctrine of the venerable confuse-us, which can hardly fail of being in
+harmony with all existing systems of philosophy and theology. As all the
+Professors are obliged to do something outside for a living, she will
+continue to be on duty with Maggie. This is<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_440" id="page_440">{440}</a></span> a great triumph for the
+Woman’s-Rights party, who have nominated Mrs. &mdash;&mdash; for Governess, with a
+Council of old women, including, I am told, Mr. &mdash;&mdash;. You see the world
+moves up here. As to other political intelligence, there is not
+much&mdash;that quality is commonly wanting in such matters: but the
+Charleston Convention is expected to nominate the Captain of the yacht
+Wanderer<a name="FNanchor_126_126" id="FNanchor_126_126"></a><a href="#Footnote_126_126" class="fnanchor">[126]</a> for President, as an exponent of the views of the more
+moderate wing of the party (I mean, of course, the Southern wing) on the
+subject of slavery. A Red River overseer is to adorn the ticket as
+candidate for the Vice-Presidency. We shall be likely at last to get a
+truly conservative administration. At home we have a rehearsal of
+‘Bonnie Doon,’ Banks being the Republican man, while the <i>brays</i> are
+well performed by Mr. B. F. Butler.</p>
+
+<p>“Cambridge meanwhile is all agog with a wedding to come off this
+afternoon, Darley the artist and Miss Jenny (I think) Colburn. There is
+to be a wonderful turn-out of handsome bridesmaids, the bride having the
+good luck to be beautifully cousined. A great crush of hoops is looked
+for at Christ Church, and the coopers, it is said, will take the
+occasion for a strike. All the girls are crazy to go, and many who go in
+with a diameter of ten feet will come out with only two. I have sent for
+a new pair of lemon-colored gloves for the wedding visit. There will be
+a jam, of course, but then I am one of the harder sex, and shan’t mind
+it.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_441" id="page_441">{441}</a></span> They have my best wishes for a crop of little Darleyings.</p>
+
+<p>“So you are to have another war over there. I think it a shabby piece of
+business. Can you thrash a nation into friendly relations? And if a man
+don’t like your society, can you change his views by giving him a black
+eye? The Chinese are not a nation of savages, and with two hundred and
+forty millions of people they can hold out a great while in killed,
+wounded, and missing. I think John Bull and Johnny Crapaud will have
+their hands full before they are done with it. What has a Bull to do in
+a China-shop?”</p>
+
+<p>There was an incompatibility of temper in Lowell which stood in the way
+of entire pleasure in editing the <i>Atlantic</i>. He was not averse to
+work&mdash;instances enough have been shown of this&mdash;but he chafed under
+methodical work. He could work hours and even days with scarcely a
+respite, but he could also help himself to large measures of loafing. A
+magazine, with its incessant inflow of letters and manuscripts, and the
+demand which it makes for periodic punctuality, ill befits such a
+temper, and Lowell found a good deal of irksomeness in his daily task.
+“I used to be able to answer letters in the month during which I
+received them,” he wrote ruefully to Mr. White, 6 April, 1859, “but now
+they pile up and make a jam behind the boom of my occupations, till they
+carry everything before them, and after a little confused whirling float
+placidly down to the ocean of Oblivion. I do not know if it be so with
+everybody,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_442" id="page_442">{442}</a></span> but with me the perpetual <i>chance</i> of interruption to which
+I am liable induces a kind of stolid despair. I am afraid that at this
+moment there are at least a hundred and fifty unanswered letters in and
+on and round my desk, whose blank [looks] seem to say ‘how long?’ Your
+letter came just in the midst of a bother in the <i>Atlantic</i>, which it
+took all my diplomacy to settle so that both sides should not bite their
+own noses off, to which mad meal they had violent appetites. It is all
+‘fixed’ now, and things go smoothly again&mdash;but meanwhile the hiatus in
+my correspondence grew daily wider.”</p>
+
+<p>“I am at last even with my manuscripts,” he wrote to another friend. “It
+is splendid. Such a heap as had gathered. It had snowed poems and tales
+and essays, and an eddy had drifted them into my study knee-deep. But I
+have shovelled myself out, and hope ’tis the last great storm of the
+season. I even found time to go to Dresel’s concert last evening, where
+I saw one of your cousins. The concert was nearly all Mendelssohn and
+seemed to me a little vague and cloudy&mdash;beautiful clouds, rose tinted
+and&mdash;indefinite. I longed for a good riving flash of Italian lightning.
+Fanny liked it, however, but I was rather bored. It seemed to me like
+reading manuscripts titillated with promise continually and finding no
+egregious and satisfying fulfilment.”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t come this way again,” he writes to Mr. White, “without letting me
+know you are coming. I want a talk with you, and I can’t talk by
+letter,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_443" id="page_443">{443}</a></span> for I can’t write them when I am tired, and I am tired all the
+time. If there be any truth in the doctrine of compensations, the
+bobolinks in some other stage of existence will all be caged in Grub
+Street and made editors. They are altogether too happy here. Well, maybe
+we shall be bobolinks. If ever we should be, I can show you a fine
+meadow for building in, a kind of grassy Venice with good tussock
+foundations jutting everywhere from the water.”</p>
+
+<p>After something more than a year’s experience, he wrote to Mr. Norton:
+“I am resolved that no motive of my own comfort or advantage shall
+influence me, but I hate the turmoil of such affairs, despise the
+notoriety they give one, and long for the day when I can be vacant to
+the Muses and to my books for their own sakes. I cannot stand the worry
+of it much longer without a lieutenant. To have questions of style,
+grammar, and punctuation in other people’s articles to decide, while I
+want all my concentration for what I am writing myself&mdash;to have added to
+this personal appeals, from ill-mannered correspondents whose articles
+have been declined, to attend to&mdash;to sit at work sometimes fifteen hours
+a day, as I have done lately&mdash;makes me nervous, takes away my pluck,
+compels my neglecting my friends, and induces the old fits of the
+blues.”<a name="FNanchor_127_127" id="FNanchor_127_127"></a><a href="#Footnote_127_127" class="fnanchor">[127]</a></p>
+
+<p>“If my letters seem dry,” he wrote again to Mr. White, “it is no fault
+of mine. I am overworked and overworried and overinterrupted. I <i>can’t</i>
+write<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_444" id="page_444">{444}</a></span> a genial letter, but I want you and like you all the same. If
+ever I get back to my old nest among the trees at Elmwood, and I am no
+longer professor or editor, with time enough to follow up a doubtful
+passage in Shakespeare or a bit of dilettante philology,&mdash;then what
+pleasure I should have in corresponding with you and exchanging thoughts
+and suggestions. But now, if anything occurs to me, I feel too tired to
+communicate it to anybody, for my days are so broken that I am forced
+sometimes to sit up till the birds sing to get any time for my own
+studies.”</p>
+
+<p>In one point of excellence Lowell was exceedingly particular. He told me
+once in later life, when we were discussing a proposed reissue of the
+British Poets, of which he was to be editor-in-chief, that I must not
+think he would accept any one’s proof-reading but his own. “I am really
+a very careful proof-reader,” he said, “though people fancy I am too
+indolent for such work.” In a letter to Mr. Norton, 18 October, 1859,
+presaging some changes, he writes: “As to proofs, I <i>must</i> read those
+myself, or I don’t feel safe. Yet a piece of bad grammar got into the
+October number in spite of Mr. Nichols and me together.” He had, indeed,
+a most admirable aid in Mr. George Nichols, who was a vigilant officer,
+carrying a search warrant for any and all literary misdemeanors. The
+<i>Atlantic</i> at this time was printed at Riverside, and there is a
+charming description, in a letter which Mr. Norton prints,<a name="FNanchor_128_128" id="FNanchor_128_128"></a><a href="#Footnote_128_128" class="fnanchor">[128]</a> of the
+morning<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_445" id="page_445">{445}</a></span> walk which Lowell was wont to take to the Press by the footpath
+that lay along the river bank.</p>
+
+<p>The pressure upon Lowell, which his college work and his editorship
+brought, did, during these four years, stop, somewhat, his spontaneity.
+He wrote but few poems, and his letters show the effort he needed to
+make to force some gayety. “I am that man among mortals,” he wrote to
+Miss Norton, “whose friends must forgive him the most treasons against
+friendship,&mdash;silence, staying away, dulness when he writes or comes&mdash;and
+I know not what else,&mdash;yet I do believe that my heart holds fire as long
+as another, and that I neither grow cool nor forget sooner than most. I
+cannot write unless I feel as if I could give the best part of myself to
+those who deserve it best, and I am so forever busy that I am either
+employed or weary, and who can write then? I believe that none but an
+idle man can write a good letter. I mean by idle, a man who is not under
+the necessity of tapping his brain on the public side, and tapping so
+freely that the runnings on the other cannot be sprightly for want of
+<i>head</i>. This is why women are such good letter-writers. Their ordinary
+employments do not suck them dry of all communicativeness,&mdash;I can’t
+think of any other word,&mdash;and their writing is their play, as it should
+be. As for me, nowadays, taking up my pen is only the reminder of work.
+This that I write with is one worn to a stump with my lectures three
+years&mdash;four years ago. I would not write with the same one I had used
+for Mr. Cushing and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_446" id="page_446">{446}</a></span> drudgery. So the fault is not in the quill that I
+am stupid. If I had only been laid away in a drawer these four years, as
+it had been! What a fury I should be in to declare myself on all manner
+of topics! But this exhaustion one feels from overwork extends itself to
+the receptive faculties as well. A dry sponge floats and is long in
+saturating. The mind, I think, goes even beyond this&mdash;it must be <i>full</i>
+to take up more.”</p>
+
+<p>The diversions which Lowell found in this period were not many. He made
+his yearly excursion to the Adirondacks, always looking forward eagerly
+to it, and working furiously just before home-leaving, that he might go
+with some serenity of mind. He saw scarcely anything of social life in
+Cambridge or Boston;<a name="FNanchor_129_129" id="FNanchor_129_129"></a><a href="#Footnote_129_129" class="fnanchor">[129]</a> he went frequently to Shady Hill, the home of
+the Nortons, but nowhere else to speak of, and he found true relaxation
+in his whist club. Aside from all this, he derived most entertainment
+from the very informal clubs, with their dinners, which had sprung
+chiefly out of the establishment of the <i>Atlantic</i>. For a short time,
+apparently, there were two of these loose organizations, the Atlantic
+Club, so called, which was the gathering of the contributors at dinner,
+under the auspices of the publishers, during the first months of strong
+interest,&mdash;dinners which seem to have sprung from the little one given
+by Mr. Phillips<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_447" id="page_447">{447}</a></span> at the institution of the magazine; and the Saturday
+Club, which still survives, a dining club, made up at first chiefly of
+literary men naturally connected with the <i>Atlantic</i>, and of congenial
+spirits, some of whom never and some rarely contributed. This latter
+club appears, after a while, to have supplanted the former. “Dined with
+the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i> people,” Longfellow writes in his diary, 21
+December, 1857, and again, 14 May, 1859, “Dined with the Atlantic Club,
+at Fondarivés’s. The ‘Atlantic’ is not the ‘Saturday’ club, though many
+members belong to both;” and on 9 July, 1859, he again notes that he
+dined with the Atlantic Club at the Revere House, but the references
+cease at this point, and the club dinners which he attends afterward are
+Saturday Club dinners, held on the last Saturday of the month at
+Parker’s Hotel. Dr. Holmes also, in later years, found the flourishing
+Saturday Club so constant in his recollection that he was disposed to
+deny the existence of any Atlantic Club. Properly speaking there never
+was any club, but only occasional dinners to which contributors were
+invited by the publishers. It was of one of the Saturday Club dinners
+that Lowell wrote 11 October, 1858: “You were good enough to tell me I
+might give you an account of our dinner. There at least was a topic, but
+I find that when I am full of work, I do not see the men I go among, but
+only shadows which make no impression. It is odd that when one’s mind is
+excited by writing so that one cannot sleep, one should see in the same
+way a constant succession<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_448" id="page_448">{448}</a></span> of figures without really seeing them. They
+come and change and go without any dependence on the will, without any
+relation to the preoccupying thought.</p>
+
+<p>“I remember one good thing at our last dinner. The dinner was for
+Stillman, and I proposed that Judge Hoar should propose his health in a
+speech. ‘<i>Sir!</i>’ (a long pause) ‘in what I have already said, I believe
+I speak the sentiments of every gentleman present, and lest I should
+fail to do so in what I might further say’&mdash;(another pause) ‘I sit
+down.’ And two days before at Agassiz’&mdash;the Autocrat giving an account
+of his having learned the fiddle, his brother John who sat opposite,
+exclaimed, ‘I can testify to it; he has often fiddled me out of the
+house as Orpheus did Eurydice out of the infernal regions.’ Isn’t that
+good? It makes me laugh to look at it now that I have written it down.
+The Autocrat relating how Simmons the Oak Hall man had sent him the two
+finest pears&mdash;‘of trowsers?’ interrupted somebody. But can one send
+poured-out Champagne all the way to Newport, and hope that one bubble
+will burst after it gets there to tell what it used to be? A dinner is
+never a good thing the next day. For the moment, though, what is better?
+We dissolve our pearls and drink them nobly&mdash;if we have them&mdash;but bring
+none away. A good talk is almost as much out of the question among
+clever men as among men who think themselves clever. Creation in pairs
+proves the foreordained superiority of the <i>tête-a-tête</i>. Nevertheless,
+we live and dine and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_449" id="page_449">{449}</a></span> die.” And a few months later he recorded a bit
+about a dinner of the Atlantic people, which has had more than one
+raconteur. “Our dinner the other day was very pleasant. Only Mrs. Stowe
+and Miss Prescott, author of ‘In a Cellar.’ She is very nice and bright.
+Mrs. Stowe would not let us have any wine, and I told her that I was
+sorry she should deprive herself of so many pleasant dinners in England
+(whither she goes 3d August) by so self-denying an ordinance. She <i>took</i>
+at once, colored a little, laughed, and asked me to order some
+champagne.”</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the very necessity for constant criticism, whether unrecorded,
+as where he determined the grounds for acceptance and rejection of
+manuscripts, or in his correspondence with contributors, and his own
+articles in the magazine, tended to stimulate Lowell’s critical faculty.
+At any rate, in the midst of his busy hours he would now and then yield
+to the impulse, created by some current publication it may be, and give
+expression to judgments, either publicly or in his letters to friends.
+Thus his interest in “The Minister’s Wooing” led him not only into
+writing the letter to Mrs. Stowe, already noticed, but into a careful,
+unsigned analysis of Mrs. Stowe’s power in the <i>New York Tribune</i>.<a name="FNanchor_130_130" id="FNanchor_130_130"></a><a href="#Footnote_130_130" class="fnanchor">[130]</a></p>
+
+<p>In August, 1859, Mr. Phillips, the publisher, died. Lowell characterized
+him as a man of great energy and pluck; but during the months previ<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_450" id="page_450">{450}</a></span>ous
+to his death Mr. Phillips had by no means been in sound health, and had
+fretted much over complications in his affairs. He seems to have had
+reason, for a few weeks after the death of Mr. Phillips, the firm of
+Phillips &amp; Sampson suspended payment, and went into the hands of an
+assignee, Mr. Harvey Jewell. “What is to come, or why they have done
+it,” Lowell wrote to Mr. Norton, “I cannot conjecture. I trust
+arrangements will be made to put the <i>Atlantic</i> in good hands. <i>That</i> at
+least is a paying thing. If it shall end in my losing the editorship, it
+would cause me little regret, for it would leave me more time to
+myself.” The assignee brought out the October number of the magazine,
+pending the settlement of affairs, and there was a lively competition
+among publishers to secure the publication. The Harpers proposed to buy
+it, to suppress their rival, it was said; there were offers from
+Philadelphia, and some of the younger men connected with the firm of
+Phillips &amp; Sampson made an effort to establish a new firm which should
+buy the whole business of Phillips &amp; Sampson, including the magazine.
+Mr. William Lee, who had left a large sum with the firm when he withdrew
+from it, was at the time travelling in Europe, and by a series of
+mischances did not even learn of the situation till it was too late for
+him to have a hand in any reorganization. There was even a plan mooted
+by which Lowell and his friends should buy the magazine, but Lowell’s
+own judgment was against this. “It ought,” he said, “to be in the hands
+of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_451" id="page_451">{451}</a></span> a practical publisher for we should be in danger of running
+aground.”</p>
+
+<p>In the end, Ticknor &amp; Fields bought the magazine. “As friend to friend,”
+Lowell wrote to Mr. Norton, I may say that I think it just the best
+arrangement possible, though I did not like to say so beforehand too
+plainly. I did not wish in any way to stand in &mdash;&mdash;’s light, but it is
+much better as it is. Whether T. will want <i>me</i> or not, is another
+question. I suppose that he will think that Fields will make a good
+editor, beside saving the salary, and F. may think so too. In certain
+respects he would, as the dining editor for example, to look after
+authors when they came to Boston and the like. I shall be quite
+satisfied, anyhow,&mdash;though the salary is a convenience, for I have done
+nothing to advance my own private interest in the matter.”</p>
+
+<p>The break-up of the business of Phillips &amp; Sampson naturally led to the
+distribution of their copyright books, and Emerson was one of the
+authors publishing with them, who was now considering the transfer of
+his books to Ticknor &amp; Fields. “I saw Ticknor yesterday,” Lowell wrote
+him, 21 October, 1859, “and he says he wants the magazine to go on as it
+has gone. I never talked so long with him before, and the impression he
+gave was that of a man very shrewd in business after it is once in
+train, but very inert of judgment. I rather think Fields is captain when
+at home.<a name="FNanchor_131_131" id="FNanchor_131_131"></a><a href="#Footnote_131_131" class="fnanchor">[131]</a> My opinion about your book is this. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_452" id="page_452">{452}</a></span> book is a sure
+one at any rate, and if Little &amp; Brown publish it, they will sell copies
+to all who would buy anything of yours at any rate. They are eminently
+respectable and trustworthy. Ticknor would have of course the same
+chance to start on that L. &amp; B. would have, but I should think it
+natural that he would be able to sell more copies because the <i>kind</i> of
+book he publishes is rather less of the library-completing sort than
+those of L. &amp; B., and because (I suppose) he has correspondents who
+always take a certain number of his books whether or no. In short, it
+seems to me that his chances in the way of distribution and putting the
+volume on many counters and under many eyes are the best. With an author
+like you this is not much, but it is something....</p>
+
+<p>“I have quite a prize in the December number&mdash;the story of a real
+filibuster written by himself.<a name="FNanchor_132_132" id="FNanchor_132_132"></a><a href="#Footnote_132_132" class="fnanchor">[132]</a> It is well done and will interest
+you. I wish to get together a few of our chief tritons at a dinner soon
+to make them acquainted with the new Poseidon. Will you come? At
+Porter’s or Parker’s, whichever you prefer, and as early as you like so
+that you may get back to Concord.”</p>
+
+<p>After Mr. Fields returned from Europe the question of the editorship
+came up anew. The times were lowering, every one who had ventures was
+taking in sail, Mr. Fields had been the editorial member of the book
+firm, his relations with authors both at home and abroad were of the
+most<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_453" id="page_453">{453}</a></span> friendly nature, and it was thus most reasonable and natural that
+he should take charge of the <i>Atlantic</i>, and Lowell resigned the
+editorship in a half-serious, half-whimsical letter which Mr. Norton has
+printed.<a name="FNanchor_133_133" id="FNanchor_133_133"></a><a href="#Footnote_133_133" class="fnanchor">[133]</a> It is clear that he had a divided mind. He had become so
+far wonted to his work that he had less anxiety in performing it, and he
+had an honest pride in maintaining the high standard which his own taste
+and judgment had created. He was glad also of the greater ease in money
+matters which the salary gave; and yet, as his letters show, he welcomed
+the freedom from the daily exactions of the editorial life, and the
+return to the more self-determined occupation which he had known most of
+his days.</p>
+
+<p>Yet in editing the <i>Atlantic</i>, Lowell was more or less consciously
+reënforcing the love of literature which commanded him, and the combined
+labor of academic study and teaching and the organization of literature
+undoubtedly enriched his life, and made him more ready for the large
+enterprises which lay before him.</p>
+
+<p>It was a great reënforcement of contentment that he had returned to his
+old home at Elmwood. There had been some talk of his taking the house
+which Professor Felton was to give up on getting a new one, but
+arrangement was made, finally, to go back to Elmwood, and there the new
+establishment was set up with Dr. Lowell and Miss Rebecca Lowell as
+joint occupants. This was a few months before Lowell retired from the
+editorship of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_454" id="page_454">{454}</a></span> <i>Atlantic</i>, and his content appears in a letter which
+he was writing to Mr. Richard Grant White, 15 March, 1861: “We are
+having,” he says, “the finest snowstorm of the winter. And what a
+delight to me to be here in my old garret at Elmwood, no college to go
+to (it is Saturday), sheltered by the very wings of the storm, and shut
+in from all the world by this white cloud of peace let down from heaven!
+The great chimney stacks roar a deep bass like Harlaem organ pipes. The
+old lightning rod thumps and rattles with every gust, as I used to hear
+it so long ago when there were no colleges nor magazines, nor any world
+outside our belt of pines. I am at <i>home</i> again. I like everything and
+everybody. Presently I shall draw on my Canada leggings and wade down to
+the post with this. I shall come back full of snow and northwest wind
+and appetite. I shall sit down at my own table in the old familiar room
+where I hope to welcome you one of these days.”<a name="FNanchor_134_134" id="FNanchor_134_134"></a><a href="#Footnote_134_134" class="fnanchor">[134]</a></p>
+
+<p>In his L’Envoi, “To the Muse,” which appears to have been written not
+far from this time, he has some bright reflections on the elusiveness of
+the spirit of poetry which beckoned him. In point of fact there was very
+little poetry written by him while he was at once professor and editor.
+His “Biglow Papers” had been republished in England, with an
+Introduction by T. Hughes. His old friend, Mr. Gay, was in England at
+the time and had a hand in the business. The publication natu<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_455" id="page_455">{455}</a></span>rally drew
+fresh attention to Lowell’s satiric verse, and he wrote, a trifle
+piqued: “I confess I am a little jealous of people who like my humorous
+poems best. I guess they are right ‘up to date,’ but I feel also as if
+it were a little unfair to t’other half of me, which has not fairly
+worked itself free so as to combine&mdash;here I was interrupted day before
+yesterday, and I believe I was going to say&mdash;so as to combine the
+results of life with those of study. However, I grow more and more
+persuaded that what a man is is of greater consequence than what he
+<i>does</i>, especially than what he writes. The secret is, I suppose, to
+work oneself out clear so that what he is may be one with what he
+writes.”</p>
+
+<p class="fint">END OF VOLUME I</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_456" id="page_456">{456}</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="c"><span class="eng">
+The Riverside Press</span><br />
+<i>Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton &amp; Co.</i><br />
+<i>Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.</i><br />
+</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><p class="cb">FOOTNOTES:</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> See Appendix A, The Lowell Ancestry.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> In 1853 Dr. Lowell contemplated the publication of a volume
+of sermons, and his then associate, Dr. Bartol, wrote privately to the
+son, discouraging the venture. He had not the heart openly to oppose Dr.
+Lowell. “I know,” he writes, “I can trust you to understand me fully
+when I say it is my persuasion and that of true and strong friends of
+your father in the parish, that a volume could never overtake his actual
+reputation, that what is best in him, his voice, his look, his manner,
+<i>himself</i>, cannot be printed, and that his peculiar glory is one that
+should scarcely be touched with ink.” There did appear, however, in 1855
+a volume by Dr. Lowell, entitled <i>Sermons; chiefly Occasional</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> <i>Alongside</i>, by Mrs. Caroline H. Dall. Privately printed.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> “My grandmother,” Lowell once said, “was a loyalist to her
+death, and whenever Independence Day came round, instead of joining in
+the general rejoicing, she would dress in deep black, fast all day, and
+loudly lament ‘our late unhappy differences with his most gracious
+Majesty.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> In a review of <i>the Book of British Ballads</i> in <i>The
+Pioneer</i>, Lowell says: “And the dear ‘Annie of Lochroyan,’ too, made
+thrice dear to us by the often hearing it from lips that gave an
+original beauty of their own to whatever they recited.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> He was named after his father’s maternal grandfather, Judge
+James Russell, of Charlestown.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> Robert Traill Spence Lowell was graduated at Harvard
+College in 1833. He became an Episcopal clergyman in 1842, went shortly
+after as a missionary to Newfoundland, had a parish later in New Jersey,
+then took the headmastership of S. Mark’s School, Southborough, Mass.,
+and finally was called to the chair of Latin language and literature in
+Union College. He remained in Schenectady till his death, 12 September,
+1891, just a month after the death of his younger brother. He had a
+distinct literary gift, and published several books, which were the
+outcome of his life in its varied scenes. <i>The New Priest in Conception
+Bay</i> has vivid pictures of Newfoundland, and contains one character,
+Elnathan Bangs, who is as racy a Yankee in his own way as Hosea Biglow
+himself. The book unfortunately was published by Philips &amp; Sampson just
+as Mr. Phillips died and the firm went into bankruptcy, and lost thus
+the advantage of a good start. It was revived a good many years later,
+but never enjoyed the vogue it might have had. Mr. Lowell’s experiences
+at S. Mark’s lay behind a story for schoolboys, <i>Antony Brade</i>, and his
+life in Schenectady suggested <i>A Story or Two from an Old Dutch Town.</i>
+He published also <i>Fresh Hearts that Failed Three Thousand Years Ago,
+and Other Poems</i>, a book which his brother had the pleasure of reviewing
+in the <i>Atlantic</i>. His best known poem, “The Relief of Lucknow,”
+appeared also in the <i>Atlantic</i>, under his brother’s editorship.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> Mary Traill Spence Lowell was born 3 December, 1810, was
+married to Samuel Raymond Putnam, 25 April, 1832, and died in Boston, 1
+June, 1898. She was a woman of intellectual power and literary
+accomplishment. She chose to write anonymously, but the books she wrote,
+<i>Records of an Obscure Man</i>, <i>The Tragedy of Errors</i>, <i>Fifteen Days</i>,
+and <i>The Tragedy of Success</i>, though remote from the current of popular
+taste in her day, not only disclose a most thoughtful nature, and one
+profoundly interested in great subjects of racial and philosophical
+moment, but not infrequently are exceedingly felicitous in expression.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> In a lecture on Spenser, given in 1856, Lowell said, “<i>The
+Faery Queene</i> was the first poem I ever read, and I had no suspicion of
+any double meaning in it.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> “An Epistle to George William Curtis,” 1874.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> <i>Conversations on Some of the Old Poets</i>, pp. 170, 171.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> Said at the commemoration of the one hundred and fiftieth
+anniversary of the foundation of the West Church, Boston, 1887.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> <i>The Power of Sound: a rhymed lecture</i>, pp. 22, 23.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> “<span class="lftspc">’</span>Tis near midnight, and I hear a bass-drum, kettle-drum
+and fife in the distance, playing the dear old <i>boongalang</i> tune of my
+earliest days, the very one to which General Gage marched out of Boston.
+It is delightful. I think it is the noise Wagner is always trying to
+make and failing.”&mdash;J. R. L. to C. E. Norton, 16 April, 1889.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> “Books and Libraries” in <i>Literary and Political
+Addresses, Works</i>, vi. 83.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> <i>Latest Literary Essays and Addresses</i>, p. 43.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> <i>Literary and Political Addresses</i>, pp. 69, 70.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> Mr. Shackford did not live to continue his friendship with
+Lowell. He died in 1842.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> The Hasty Pudding Club, a Harvard students’ club, which
+has always made much of literature of the lighter sort, its specialty
+now being amateur theatricals.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> “Thoreau,” in <i>Literary Essays</i>, i. 366.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> There is a letter from Mrs. Anna Cabot Lowell, 3 July,
+1838, to her brother-in-law, which throws a little light on the way in
+which his friends regarded Lowell at this time: “Aunt S. was here last
+evening and depicted in a lively manner the grief of Scates for your
+idle courses. She says he went to you with tears in his eyes to implore
+you to persevere, and that he told his friends in faltering accents that
+you had but this one fault in the world. Being desirous to know the
+exact nature of that fault, that you might apply the specific remedy, I
+asked her what the fault was. She said ‘indolence to be sure: indolence
+and the Spence negligence.’ I quote her very words. My opinion of the
+case is that it proceeds more from negligence than indolence, and more
+from a blind confidence in your powers and your destiny than either.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> <i>Letters</i>, ii. 302.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> It was not uncommon in those days and long after for a
+student to take his degree at the Law School after a year or two only of
+study and then to continue to hear lectures. Lowell’s name is on the
+catalogue of the school for the year following his degree.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> William Page, the artist, whom Lowell first knew through
+the Whites.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> “Goethe’s poetic sense was the Minotaur to which he
+sacrificed everything. To make a study he would soil the maiden petals
+of a woman’s soul.”&mdash;“Lessing,” in <i>Literary Essays</i>, ii. 195.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> It is very likely under the impetus given by Maria White
+that Lowell took a place as delegate to the Anti-Slavery Convention held
+in Boston, 17 November, 1840.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> <i>Letters</i>, i. 67-69.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> <i>James Russell Lowell and His Friends</i>, pp. 72-76.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> “I have enjoyed the society of my fair cousin Maria very
+much. She has shown me several of James’s letters, and I think I never
+saw such perfect specimens of <i>love-letters</i>,&mdash;those in any novel you
+ever read are perfectly indifferent compared to them. Without being
+silly in the least, they are full of all the fervor and extatification
+which you would expect from the most ardent lover.”&mdash;L. L. Thaxter to T.
+W. Higginson, 19 January, 1842.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">[30]</span></a> “I am obliged to stay at home whenever Father goes to
+Boston, and as he usually goes thither on the four first days of the
+week, I am rather closely prisoned.”&mdash;J. R. L. to R. Carter, 31
+December, 1843.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">[31]</span></a> Thomas W. White, the editor.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">[32]</span></a> The sonnet, “To the Spirit of Keats,” was the first of the
+two; the other was “Sunset and Moonshine,” not retained by the poet in
+his final collection.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_33_33"><span class="label">[33]</span></a> “[Mrs. Longfellow] was the first stranger that ever said a
+kind word to me about my poems. She spoke to me of my <i>Year’s Life</i>,
+then just published. I had then just emerged from the darkest and
+unhappiest period of my life, and was peculiarly sensitive to sympathy.
+My volume, I knew, was crude and immature, and did not do me justice;
+but I knew also that there was a <i>heart</i> in it, and I was grateful for
+her commendation.”&mdash;J. R. L. to H. W. Longfellow, 13 August, 1845.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_34_34" id="Footnote_34_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_34_34"><span class="label">[34]</span></a> “Especially grateful is the praise of one in whose
+conversation I have marked a hearty appreciation of those greatest
+reformers, our glorious old English Poets.”&mdash;J. R. L. to Robert Carter,
+2 September, 1842.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_35_35" id="Footnote_35_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_35_35"><span class="label">[35]</span></a> Mr. Woodberry, in editing “Lowell’s Letters to Poe,” in
+<i>Scribner’s Monthly</i> for August, 1894, explains the situation thus: “The
+contract bound Lowell and Carter to furnish the publishers five thousand
+copies on the twentieth of each month under a penalty of five hundred
+dollars in case of failure and the publishers to take that number at a
+certain price. The March number was eight days late, and the publishers,
+in the face of what was probably seen to be an unfortunate speculation,
+claimed the forfeit but offered to waive it if the contract should be
+altered so as to require them to take only so many copies as they could
+sell. The result was that the editors were obliged to stop printing from
+a lack of credit, and were left with a large indebtedness for
+manufacture as well as to contributors. It appears from Poe’s letters
+that he was paid his small claim a year later.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_36_36" id="Footnote_36_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_36_36"><span class="label">[36]</span></a> Carter had just been to see Maria White.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_37_37" id="Footnote_37_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_37_37"><span class="label">[37]</span></a> “The Maiden’s Death.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_38_38" id="Footnote_38_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_38_38"><span class="label">[38]</span></a> In a letter written after he had at last seen Miss White,
+Mr. Briggs writes: “I hardly know what I could say to M. W. unless what
+I felt inclined to when I saw her, ‘<i>Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis</i>.’<span class="lftspc">”</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_39_39" id="Footnote_39_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_39_39"><span class="label">[39]</span></a> “L’Envoi,” beginning
+</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“whether my heart hath wiser grown or not.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_40_40" id="Footnote_40_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_40_40"><span class="label">[40]</span></a> <i>The Broadway Journal</i>, which Mr. Briggs was just
+projecting.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_41_41" id="Footnote_41_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_41_41"><span class="label">[41]</span></a> Mr. Briggs had written to Lowell: “I suppose that you are
+going to impose upon yourselves the heathenish ceremonies of a wedding,
+and in the most solemn period of your lives, give yourselves up to the
+most foolish of all the world’s follies. Tut! you will be sick of white
+satins and raisins for the next century. Is’t the first of the month
+that you are to be married? I would like to know the day that I may keep
+you in remembrance. Page will be here and I will have him down to
+Bishop’s Terrace, and we will keep it up with becoming solemnity. One of
+my darling fowls shall be sacrificed.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_42_42" id="Footnote_42_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_42_42"><span class="label">[42]</span></a> The exact succession of his books was <i>A Year’s Life</i>,
+1841; <i>Poems</i>, 1843 (dated 1844); <i>Conversations on Some of the Old
+Poets</i>, 1845.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_43_43" id="Footnote_43_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_43_43"><span class="label">[43]</span></a> Mr. Evert A. Duyckinck, in March, 1846, replying to a
+suggestion by Lowell of “specimens of old translators” for Wiley &amp;
+Putnam’s Library, doubts the practicability, but adds, “You will, I
+hope, not lose sight of so good a topic which might provoke a new
+conversation between yourself and your Mrs. Harris (Philip and John)
+very profitably.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_44_44" id="Footnote_44_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_44_44"><span class="label">[44]</span></a> <i>Letters</i>, i. 69.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_45_45" id="Footnote_45_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_45_45"><span class="label">[45]</span></a> See Appendix B.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_46_46" id="Footnote_46_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_46_46"><span class="label">[46]</span></a> Editor of <i>Graham’s Magazine</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_47_47" id="Footnote_47_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor_47_47"><span class="label">[47]</span></a> <i>Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife</i>, i. 283.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_48_48" id="Footnote_48_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor_48_48"><span class="label">[48]</span></a> The circumstances pertaining to the close of Mr. Briggs’s
+connection with <i>The Broadway Journal</i> are detailed with some
+particularity in letters from Mr. Briggs to Lowell, printed in Mr. G. E.
+Woodberry’s <i>Edgar Allan Poe</i> in the <i>American Men of Letters</i> series.
+See pp. 234-239.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_49_49" id="Footnote_49_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor_49_49"><span class="label">[49]</span></a> Lowell’s letters to Poe may be found in an article with
+that title, edited by Mr. Woodberry, and printed in <i>Scribner’s
+Magazine</i>, August, 1894. Those of Poe to Lowell appear in Mr.
+Woodberry’s volume on Poe in the <i>American Men of Letters</i> series.
+Lowell’s letters, which run from 19 November, 1842, when he was
+beginning his <i>Pioneer</i> venture, to 12 December, 1844, just before his
+marriage, are occupied mainly with solicitation of contributions,
+interest in Poe’s work, and efforts at obtaining opportunities for Poe
+to lecture in Boston. They have slight value as illustrations of
+Lowell’s life, save as they show his eagerness to help a brother author,
+and his keen interest in letters.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_50_50" id="Footnote_50_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor_50_50"><span class="label">[50]</span></a> It may be noted that at the New England Anti-Slavery
+Convention held in Boston, 28 May, 1844, the issue of disunion was
+plainly presented in a set of resolutions. The vote stood 250 in favor
+to 24 in dissent. Among the number who voted “nay” were James Russell
+Lowell and Maria White. See <i>William Lloyd Garrison</i>, iii. 111, 112.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_51_51" id="Footnote_51_51"></a><a href="#FNanchor_51_51"><span class="label">[51]</span></a> For a striking use of the poem, see <i>infra</i>, vol. ii. p.
+137.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_52_52" id="Footnote_52_52"></a><a href="#FNanchor_52_52"><span class="label">[52]</span></a> But his talk went on as unrestrictedly as ever. Longfellow
+records in his diary under date of 23 October, 1845: “Lowell passed the
+morning with me. Amiable enthusiast! He proposes to write a book in
+favor of fanaticism.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_53_53" id="Footnote_53_53"></a><a href="#FNanchor_53_53"><span class="label">[53]</span></a> It is a comment on Lowell’s indifference to wealth that
+his imagination did not take fire at the announcement of the discovery
+of gold in California. It may be said that his mind was directed toward
+the immediate political consequences, but he had occasion to write upon
+the subject of the discovery, when this alone engaged his attention. He
+was struck with some of the picturesque situations, but his reflections
+were mainly summed up in these words: “We have never seen anything like
+the accounts from California since we read that chapter of <i>Candide</i>, in
+which Voltaire carries his hero to El Dorado. Supposing all we hear to
+be true, it is hardly probable that gold will continue to be found there
+in such large quantities for any great length of time. It will doubtless
+become more and more scarce, and the difficulty of obtaining it greater.
+After all, the gold mines which give the surest and richest yield are
+the brain and the common earth. The discovery of a new fertilizer is of
+more practical benefit than that of the philosopher’s stone would be;
+the invention of the steam-engine has created more wealth than the
+richest gold mines; and wise men are not wanting who believe that
+Fourier has given us something better than a California. And why travel
+fifteen thousand miles around Cape Horn for a place to dig in? Heaven
+knows the earth wants more washing here than at Sacramento River.
+Moreover, every one of us has a vein more or less profitable, if it were
+only diligently worked.”&mdash;“Eldorado,” in <i>National Anti-Slavery
+Standard</i>, 21 December, 1848.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_54_54" id="Footnote_54_54"></a><a href="#FNanchor_54_54"><span class="label">[54]</span></a> Mr. Briggs was highly entertained by the French exercise,
+and asked: “Who is your master? But never mind. Let me recommend you to
+an incomparable one who had the honor of teaching Talleyrand a new
+language (English) to help him conceal his thoughts. I mean Cobbett. If
+you have never seen his French grammar, get it by all means and read it,
+if you do not study it; and then read his English grammar, which you
+will find more amusing than the Comic Latin Grammar.” Lowell does not
+seem to have followed his advice immediately. At least he wrote to me
+three or four years before his death: “I never read any English grammar
+in my life, thank God, except Cobbett’s a few years ago, and in that I
+found errors of ignorance,&mdash;as was to be expected.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_55_55" id="Footnote_55_55"></a><a href="#FNanchor_55_55"><span class="label">[55]</span></a> At the close of 1866 a testimonial was presented to Mr.
+Garrison when he retired from active service, and Lowell was the medium
+of certain English subscriptions, among them that of John Bright. In
+sending this Lowell writes to Mr. Garrison: “Nothing could have been
+more in keeping with the uniform wisdom of your anti-slavery leadership
+than the time you chose for resigning it.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_56_56" id="Footnote_56_56"></a><a href="#FNanchor_56_56"><span class="label">[56]</span></a> It is greatly to be regretted that the important
+correspondence of Quincy and Lowell does not exist. By agreement each
+destroyed the letters of the other.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_57_57" id="Footnote_57_57"></a><a href="#FNanchor_57_57"><span class="label">[57]</span></a> The curious reader may see here one of the little
+idiosyncrasies in which Lowell indulged throughout his life, though this
+is one of the first instances I have noted.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_58_58" id="Footnote_58_58"></a><a href="#FNanchor_58_58"><span class="label">[58]</span></a> Mr. Gay had written: “I do not know how you feel about the
+Imprint, but my own opinion is that there had better be either no name,
+or only one there. Every one will know that yourself, Mrs. Chapman and
+Quincy and Briggs and others contribute to its columns. The more we can
+make believe contribute to it the better, and to put three or four names
+in the Imprint will seem to limit the number. I wish that all its
+readers shall believe that a variety of people have had a hand in the
+making up of every number, and not only those whose names are before
+them. For the same reason I wish that the initial system shall be done
+with. The readers will be prone to believe the best if they are not
+certain, and if there are none of these ‘small caps,’ as the printers
+say, to guide, they may sometimes be humbugged into eating my chaff for
+your and others’ wheat.” Mr. Gay had his way at first, but before long
+his readers’ curiosity drove him into the use of initials as
+signatures.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_59_59" id="Footnote_59_59"></a><a href="#FNanchor_59_59"><span class="label">[59]</span></a> See <i>Letters of James Russell Lowell</i>, i. 111-116.
+Copyright, 1893, by Harper &amp; Brothers.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_60_60" id="Footnote_60_60"></a><a href="#FNanchor_60_60"><span class="label">[60]</span></a> A little of this jest is preserved in Parson Wilbur’s note
+to the second <i>Biglow paper</i>, as published in book form.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_61_61" id="Footnote_61_61"></a><a href="#FNanchor_61_61"><span class="label">[61]</span></a> In his address on “The Place of the Independent in
+Politics,” delivered forty years later, Lowell pithily says: “A moral
+purpose multiplies us (Independents) by ten, as it multiplied the early
+Abolitionists. They emancipated the negro; and we mean to emancipate the
+respectable white man.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_62_62" id="Footnote_62_62"></a><a href="#FNanchor_62_62"><span class="label">[62]</span></a> There is a reference to Jefferson in a letter written ten
+years later, which is interesting as one of the rare apprizements by
+Lowell of American public men. “I have run through Randall’s <i>Jefferson</i>
+with the ends of my fingers&mdash;a perfect chaos of biography&mdash;but enough to
+confirm me in the belief that Jefferson was the first <i>American</i> man. I
+doubt if we have produced a better thinker or writer. His style is
+admirable in general, warmed with just enough enthusiasm for eloquence,
+not too much for conviction.”&mdash;J. R. L. to C. E. Norton, 11 October,
+1858.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_63_63" id="Footnote_63_63"></a><a href="#FNanchor_63_63"><span class="label">[63]</span></a> “A steam-engine in breeches,” was Sydney Smith’s
+characterization.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_64_64" id="Footnote_64_64"></a><a href="#FNanchor_64_64"><span class="label">[64]</span></a> <i>Letters</i>, i. 157, 21 May, 1849.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_65_65" id="Footnote_65_65"></a><a href="#FNanchor_65_65"><span class="label">[65]</span></a> Dr. Lowell’s course in this matter was characteristic of
+his fine sense of honor. Previous to the ordination of his colleague,
+Dr. Bartol, 1 March, 1837, he received from the West Church Society a
+salary of $2000 a year. At a meeting of the proprietors held 22 April,
+1849, a letter was read from Dr. Lowell, in which he says: “It was
+always a favorite object with me, in the event of the settlement of a
+colleague pastor, to resign the whole of my salary, or at most, to
+retain only a small portion of it, that you might have less hesitation
+in calling upon me for the services I might be able to render you.” It
+was with great reluctance, he added, that he then came to the conclusion
+it was his duty to accede to the request of the proprietors and retain
+all the salary he had been accustomed to receive; now he could do so no
+longer, and he insisted respectfully on an arrangement by which he
+should resign a quarter of his salary, “with the purpose at no distant
+day, if Providence permit, of resigning a further sum.” In 1854 Dr.
+Lowell resigned the whole of his salary, but the Society declined to
+accept the proposal.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_66_66" id="Footnote_66_66"></a><a href="#FNanchor_66_66"><span class="label">[66]</span></a> “I do not blame Foster or Philbrick or Jackson for not
+being satisfied with me; but, on the other hand, I thank God that he has
+gradually taught me to be quite satisfied with <i>them</i>.”&mdash;<i>Letters</i>, i.
+157.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_67_67" id="Footnote_67_67"></a><a href="#FNanchor_67_67"><span class="label">[67]</span></a> Cornelius Matthews.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_68_68" id="Footnote_68_68"></a><a href="#FNanchor_68_68"><span class="label">[68]</span></a> The greater part of this letter will be found in <i>Letters
+of James Russell Lowell</i>, i. 120. Copyright by Harper &amp; Brothers, 1893.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_69_69" id="Footnote_69_69"></a><a href="#FNanchor_69_69"><span class="label">[69]</span></a> The reference apparently is to Miss Fuller’s criticism of
+Lowell three years previously, in which she said: “His interest in the
+moral questions of the day has supplied the want of vitality in himself;
+his great facility at versification has enabled him to fill the ear with
+a copious stream of pleasant sound. But his verse is stereotyped: his
+thoughts sound no depth, and posterity will not remember him.”&mdash;<i>Papers
+on Literature and Art</i>, p. 308.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_70_70" id="Footnote_70_70"></a><a href="#FNanchor_70_70"><span class="label">[70]</span></a> Briggs did not like Bryant, and in this he was abetted by
+Page, to whom Bryant at this time was sitting. Page was angry because,
+in the brief notice of Lowell’s <i>Poems</i> which Bryant wrote, he commended
+only the “Morning Glory,” which was Mrs. Lowell’s, and because Bryant
+intimated that Lowell’s “To the Past” was suggested by a poem of his own
+with the same title.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_71_71" id="Footnote_71_71"></a><a href="#FNanchor_71_71"><span class="label">[71]</span></a> This was the year of General Taylor’s nomination.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_72_72" id="Footnote_72_72"></a><a href="#FNanchor_72_72"><span class="label">[72]</span></a> In a letter to me about the <i>Fable</i> written in 1890,
+Lowell says: “Mr. Putnam, I believe, never discovered that the
+title-page was in metre, nor that it was in rhyme either. Mr. Norton
+told me the other day that he had a copy of some later edition (after
+Putnam had changed his place of business), in which the imprint was ‘G.
+P. Putnam, Astor (or something) Place.’ I don’t remember whether I knew
+of it at the time, but had I known, I should have let it pass as adding
+to the humor of the book.” The first title-page ended
+</p>
+
+<p class="c">
+<span class="smcap">Set forth in</span><br />
+<i>October, the 31st day, in the year ’48</i><br />
+<small>G. P. PUTNAM, BROADWAY.</small><br />
+</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_73_73" id="Footnote_73_73"></a><a href="#FNanchor_73_73"><span class="label">[73]</span></a> Hunt’s poem again doubtless owed its being to Lord Byron’s
+<i>English Bards and Scotch Reviewers</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_74_74" id="Footnote_74_74"></a><a href="#FNanchor_74_74"><span class="label">[74]</span></a> Morse’s <i>Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes</i>, ii.
+107. In an unfinished letter to Dr. Holmes written from Madrid in 1878,
+Lowell refers to a recent criticism of Holmes’s poems, in which the
+characterization in the <i>Fable</i> was quoted. “I thought the young fellow
+who wrote it had some sense, especially as he quoted something I said of
+you in my impudence thirty years ago. It is an awful thought, but these
+who then were passing out of the baldness of infancy are now entering
+upon that of middle age, and here we both are as if nothing had
+happened. And probably precious little has happened,&mdash;I mean of any
+great account. The more one reads of history the more one sees mankind
+doing the same foolish things over again with admirable gravity and then
+contemplating themselves with the satisfaction of Jack Horner. I
+remember when I was writing the <i>Fable for Critics</i> and used to walk up
+and down the front walk at Elmwood, I paused to watch the ant-hills, and
+in the seemingly aimless and yet ceaseless activity of their citizens
+thought I saw a very close paraphrase of the life of men.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_75_75" id="Footnote_75_75"></a><a href="#FNanchor_75_75"><span class="label">[75]</span></a> The Bibliographical Note in the Appendix gives the dates
+of the successive numbers. See Appendix C.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_76_76" id="Footnote_76_76"></a><a href="#FNanchor_76_76"><span class="label">[76]</span></a> When he was supervising the final <i>Riverside</i> edition of
+his writings, he gladly accepted the services of a graduate student at
+Harvard, now Professor of Law in Western Reserve University, Mr. Frank
+Beverly Williams, who prepared a series of notes.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_77_77" id="Footnote_77_77"></a><a href="#FNanchor_77_77"><span class="label">[77]</span></a> Mr. Otis died October 28. “Only think of H. G. O!” wrote
+Lowell to Gay early in November; “I would not have squibbed him if I had
+known he was sick, but I never hear anything.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_78_78" id="Footnote_78_78"></a><a href="#FNanchor_78_78"><span class="label">[78]</span></a> Writing forty years later in excuse of a petty solecism,
+he said: “I think it must have been written when I was fresh from the
+last <i>Biglow Papers</i>. When my soul enters Mr. Biglow’s person, she
+divests herself for the time of all conventional speech, and for some
+time after she leaves it is apt to forget herself.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_79_79" id="Footnote_79_79"></a><a href="#FNanchor_79_79"><span class="label">[79]</span></a> He had the ill luck which not infrequently attends the
+writers of fiction, to make use of an actual name in one of his
+inventions, and received this protest from the Rev. H. Wilbur:&mdash;
+</p><p>
+“Unknown Sir, I believe there is no other clergyman in New England
+besides myself of the same name you sometimes associate with your
+writings. Perhaps with the scintillations of your genius my name would
+be more likely to descend to posterity than from writings or labours of
+my own. But if your edification could be as well promoted under the
+ministry of Parson Smith or some <i>fictitious</i> name not likely to be
+associated with individuality as with the <i>old Parson</i> you will much
+oblige yours very respectfully.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_80_80" id="Footnote_80_80"></a><a href="#FNanchor_80_80"><span class="label">[80]</span></a> He intended first to call this “A June Idyll.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_81_81" id="Footnote_81_81"></a><a href="#FNanchor_81_81"><span class="label">[81]</span></a> That is, the hostile criticisms of his book.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_82_82" id="Footnote_82_82"></a><a href="#FNanchor_82_82"><span class="label">[82]</span></a> These letters from Hawthorne were first printed in the
+London <i>Athenæum</i>, 10, 17 August, 1889, and have since been included in
+vol. xvii. of the <i>Old Manse Edition</i> of Hawthorne’s writings.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_83_83" id="Footnote_83_83"></a><a href="#FNanchor_83_83"><span class="label">[83]</span></a> An article on Landor.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_84_84" id="Footnote_84_84"></a><a href="#FNanchor_84_84"><span class="label">[84]</span></a> In a note to T. W. Higginson, who proposed an article in
+the <i>Atlantic</i> on Parker, Lowell wrote 28 June, 1860: “I think that
+folks have confounded (as they commonly do) <i>force</i> with <i>power</i> in
+estimating him, and so have overrated him.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_85_85" id="Footnote_85_85"></a><a href="#FNanchor_85_85"><span class="label">[85]</span></a> <i>The Liberty Bell.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_86_86" id="Footnote_86_86"></a><a href="#FNanchor_86_86"><span class="label">[86]</span></a> <i>The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America.</i> By
+Fredrika Bremer. New York: Harper &amp; Bros. 1853. Vol. i. pp. 130, 131.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_87_87" id="Footnote_87_87"></a><a href="#FNanchor_87_87"><span class="label">[87]</span></a> See <i>Boston Courier</i>, 3 January, 1850.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_88_88" id="Footnote_88_88"></a><a href="#FNanchor_88_88"><span class="label">[88]</span></a> “The Darkened Mind.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_89_89" id="Footnote_89_89"></a><a href="#FNanchor_89_89"><span class="label">[89]</span></a> Whether or no this started Mr. Gay on an historical
+investigation, he did inquire into the matter; for thirty years later he
+published in the <i>Atlantic</i> for November, 1881, an article entitled,
+“When did the Pilgrim Fathers land at Plymouth?” in which he established
+to his own satisfaction that the first landing was neither on the 21st
+or 22d, but on the 4th of January, 1621.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_90_90" id="Footnote_90_90"></a><a href="#FNanchor_90_90"><span class="label">[90]</span></a> In another letter written on shipboard, Lowell refers to
+the gift thus: “I held it in especial esteem because it was given in a
+way so characteristic of John, who sidled up to me as if he were asking
+a favor instead of doing one, and having slipped it into my hand in a
+particularly let-not-your-right-hand-know-what-your-left-hand-doeth kind
+of manner, instantly vanished and remained absconded for half an hour.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_91_91" id="Footnote_91_91"></a><a href="#FNanchor_91_91"><span class="label">[91]</span></a> <i>Leaves from my Journal, Works</i>, i. 213.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_92_92" id="Footnote_92_92"></a><a href="#FNanchor_92_92"><span class="label">[92]</span></a> It was more than thirty years later that Lowell wrote the
+significant poem suggested by this picture.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_93_93" id="Footnote_93_93"></a><a href="#FNanchor_93_93"><span class="label">[93]</span></a> Mr. Black’s daughter, Mrs. Hayllar, kindly sends the two
+prologues, which are in a way wholly from memory. Lowell afterwards, she
+writes, “tore up his notes, saying the lines were too insignificant for
+preservation, when to his astonishment, my father, who had a quite
+remarkable memory, repeated them both to him.” From her own memory Mrs.
+Hayllar recalled the bits of the first prologue, and afterward found
+amongst her father’s papers the whole of the second.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_94_94" id="Footnote_94_94"></a><a href="#FNanchor_94_94"><span class="label">[94]</span></a> See “Walter Savage Landor,” in <i>Latest Literary Essays and
+Addresses</i>, p. 51.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_95_95" id="Footnote_95_95"></a><a href="#FNanchor_95_95"><span class="label">[95]</span></a> <i>The Poems and Prose Remains of Arthur Hugh Clough</i>, i.
+188.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_96_96" id="Footnote_96_96"></a><a href="#FNanchor_96_96"><span class="label">[96]</span></a> Perhaps his partial friend Briggs was referring to this
+when he wrote, 18 March, 1860: “If you bring out that long promised
+volume of fireside travels, I hope you will not omit that racy chapter
+of the novel you read to me, but which you will never write. I think it
+was much better than anything of the Autocrat’s that I have read.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_97_97" id="Footnote_97_97"></a><a href="#FNanchor_97_97"><span class="label">[97]</span></a> The lines on pp. 80, 81, of “Cambridge Thirty Years Ago”
+are also saved from the same poem, but from the unprinted portion.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_98_98" id="Footnote_98_98"></a><a href="#FNanchor_98_98"><span class="label">[98]</span></a> See his two letters to T. W. Higginson, outlining his
+plan, and published by the latter in his <i>Old Cambridge</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_99_99" id="Footnote_99_99"></a><a href="#FNanchor_99_99"><span class="label">[99]</span></a> See letter to Mr. Norton, 13 April, 1884, <i>Letters</i>, ii.
+279.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_100_100" id="Footnote_100_100"></a><a href="#FNanchor_100_100"><span class="label">[100]</span></a> “A Few of Lowell’s Letters” in <i>The Old Rome and the New
+and other Studies</i>, p. 134.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_101_101" id="Footnote_101_101"></a><a href="#FNanchor_101_101"><span class="label">[101]</span></a> The poem was not printed till April, 1858, when it
+appeared in <i>The Atlantic Monthly</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_102_102" id="Footnote_102_102"></a><a href="#FNanchor_102_102"><span class="label">[102]</span></a> It was the custom when there was an unusual demand for
+tickets, for the lecturer, besides his Tuesday and Friday evening
+discourses, to repeat them on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons. In
+those days also, applicants for tickets registered their names during a
+certain number of days in advance, and at the close of the registry
+notification was made that persons holding numbers divisible by two,
+three, four, or five, as the case might be (in the ratio of applicants
+to the number of seats in the hall), might call and receive tickets.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_103_103" id="Footnote_103_103"></a><a href="#FNanchor_103_103"><span class="label">[103]</span></a> Probably the verses beginning,&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<div class="poetry">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="iq">“Farewell, for the bark has her breast to the tide.”<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_104_104" id="Footnote_104_104"></a><a href="#FNanchor_104_104"><span class="label">[104]</span></a> “A Good Word for Winter,” in <i>Literary Essays</i>, iii.
+267.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_105_105" id="Footnote_105_105"></a><a href="#FNanchor_105_105"><span class="label">[105]</span></a> “Mr. Lowell as a Teacher:” <i>Scribner’s Magazine</i>,
+November, 1891. Included in his volume <i>Stelligeri</i>: Charles Scribner’s
+Sons.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_106_106" id="Footnote_106_106"></a><a href="#FNanchor_106_106"><span class="label">[106]</span></a> “Address before the Modern Language Association of
+America.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_107_107" id="Footnote_107_107"></a><a href="#FNanchor_107_107"><span class="label">[107]</span></a> 21 August, 1857.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_108_108" id="Footnote_108_108"></a><a href="#FNanchor_108_108"><span class="label">[108]</span></a> 31 August, 1857.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_109_109" id="Footnote_109_109"></a><a href="#FNanchor_109_109"><span class="label">[109]</span></a> 31 December, 1857.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_110_110" id="Footnote_110_110"></a><a href="#FNanchor_110_110"><span class="label">[110]</span></a> “A Few of Lowell’s Letters,” in <i>The Old Rome and the
+New, and Other Studies</i>, by W. J. Stillman.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_111_111" id="Footnote_111_111"></a><a href="#FNanchor_111_111"><span class="label">[111]</span></a> <i>Literary Friends and Acquaintance</i>, p. 242.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_112_112" id="Footnote_112_112"></a><a href="#FNanchor_112_112"><span class="label">[112]</span></a> See especially “The Subjective of It,” first printed in
+the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i>, and “The Philosophers’ Camp,” printed in <i>The
+Century</i>, and both included in <i>The Old Rome and the New, and Other
+Studies</i>. And more particularly see the first volume of <i>The
+Autobiography of a Journalist</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_113_113" id="Footnote_113_113"></a><a href="#FNanchor_113_113"><span class="label">[113]</span></a> It is worth noting that the year in which this sentence
+was written, the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i> was, in a special contingency,
+edited by the Professor of English Literature at Princeton.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_114_114" id="Footnote_114_114"></a><a href="#FNanchor_114_114"><span class="label">[114]</span></a> Mr. Phillips was by marriage connected with Mr. Emerson’s
+family.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_115_115" id="Footnote_115_115"></a><a href="#FNanchor_115_115"><span class="label">[115]</span></a> Mr. J. Elliot Cabot.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_116_116" id="Footnote_116_116"></a><a href="#FNanchor_116_116"><span class="label">[116]</span></a> E. E. Hale’s <i>James Russell Lowell and his Friends</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_117_117" id="Footnote_117_117"></a><a href="#FNanchor_117_117"><span class="label">[117]</span></a> “The New Portfolio,” January, 1885.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_118_118" id="Footnote_118_118"></a><a href="#FNanchor_118_118"><span class="label">[118]</span></a> In publishing in book form <i>The Mortal Antipathy</i>, of
+which the first paper of “The New Portfolio” was made the Introduction,
+Dr. Holmes so far corrected his statement as to make it read: “I
+wondered somewhat when Mr. Lowell insisted upon my becoming a
+contributor.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_119_119" id="Footnote_119_119"></a><a href="#FNanchor_119_119"><span class="label">[119]</span></a> “He envied every daysman and drover in the tavern their
+manly speech.” In reprinting the paper in his volume <i>Society and
+Solitude</i>, Emerson corrected to “He envied every drover and lumberman.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_120_120" id="Footnote_120_120"></a><a href="#FNanchor_120_120"><span class="label">[120]</span></a> Most of this letter is given in Mr. Pickard’s <i>Life and
+Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_121_121" id="Footnote_121_121"></a><a href="#FNanchor_121_121"><span class="label">[121]</span></a> “The Origin of Didactic Poetry.”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_122_122" id="Footnote_122_122"></a><a href="#FNanchor_122_122"><span class="label">[122]</span></a> I recall the sententious principle which another editor
+announced to me as the rule by which he was governed. “The only question
+I ask myself is, <i>must</i> I take this?”</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_123_123" id="Footnote_123_123"></a><a href="#FNanchor_123_123"><span class="label">[123]</span></a> <i>Letters</i>, i. 288, 289.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_124_124" id="Footnote_124_124"></a><a href="#FNanchor_124_124"><span class="label">[124]</span></a> There are three or four witty passages, to which this is
+applicable.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_125_125" id="Footnote_125_125"></a><a href="#FNanchor_125_125"><span class="label">[125]</span></a> See <i>Letters</i>, i. 283, 284.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_126_126" id="Footnote_126_126"></a><a href="#FNanchor_126_126"><span class="label">[126]</span></a> The Wanderer was a slave-ship seized in New York harbor.
+A Charleston jury refused to convict the captain.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_127_127" id="Footnote_127_127"></a><a href="#FNanchor_127_127"><span class="label">[127]</span></a> <i>Letters</i>, i. 286.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_128_128" id="Footnote_128_128"></a><a href="#FNanchor_128_128"><span class="label">[128]</span></a> <i>Letters</i>, i. 281.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_129_129" id="Footnote_129_129"></a><a href="#FNanchor_129_129"><span class="label">[129]</span></a> He was elected into the American Academy of Arts and
+Sciences, 14 November, 1855, and into the Massachusetts Historical
+Society, 14 May, 1863, but he does not appear to have been a frequent
+attendant at the meetings of either of these bodies.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_130_130" id="Footnote_130_130"></a><a href="#FNanchor_130_130"><span class="label">[130]</span></a> This criticism also is given in C. E. Stowe’s <i>The Life
+of Harriet Beecher Stowe</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_131_131" id="Footnote_131_131"></a><a href="#FNanchor_131_131"><span class="label">[131]</span></a> Mr. Fields was in Europe when the transaction occurred.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_132_132" id="Footnote_132_132"></a><a href="#FNanchor_132_132"><span class="label">[132]</span></a> “Experience of Samuel Absalom, Filibuster,” by D.
+Deaderick.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_133_133" id="Footnote_133_133"></a><a href="#FNanchor_133_133"><span class="label">[133]</span></a> <i>Letters</i>, i. 310. May 23, 1861.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_134_134" id="Footnote_134_134"></a><a href="#FNanchor_134_134"><span class="label">[134]</span></a> The household at Elmwood was broken in upon apparently
+not long after the return of the Lowells, by the death of Dr. Charles
+Lowell, 20 January, 1861.</p></div>
+
+</div>
+
+<hr class="full" />
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of James Russell Lowell, A Biography;
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+</pre>
+
+</body>
+</html>
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author	nfenwick <nfenwick@pglaf.org>	2025-02-08 09:09:49 -0800
committer	nfenwick <nfenwick@pglaf.org>	2025-02-08 09:09:49 -0800
commit	9ee521e70b5cde598fa23b435e3fc2bf96b1ff6d (patch)
tree	b9ea3730ab34f1a687745c961ae52fef698286aa