JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

A BIOGRAPHY

BY

HORACE ELISHA SCUDDER

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. I

Mr. Lowell in 1889

{i} 

{ii} 

{iii} 

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

A Biography

BY

HORACE ELISHA SCUDDER

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. I.



BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1901
{iv}

COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY HORACE E. SCUDDER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER, 1901
{v}


TO

G·O·S·

“NAUGHT CAN BE UNWORTHY, DONE FOR YOU.”

{vi} 

{vii} 

PREFACE

The existence of the two volumes of Letters of James Russell Lowell, edited by Charles Eliot Norton, has determined the character of this biography. If they had not been published, I might have made a Life and Letters 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 Letters 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.

I have kept the Letters always by my side as my main book of reference; by the courtesy of their editor and by arrangement with their publishers, Messrs. Harper & Brothers, I have now and then drawn upon them where it seemed especially desirable that Lowell should speak for himself, but{viii} 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.

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.

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{ix} Lowell’s contributions to the National Anti-Slavery Standard; to Mrs. Richard Grant White; to Dr. Edward Everett Hale, whose James Russell Lowell and his Friends 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.

{xi}

{x}

CONTENTS

{xiii}{xii}

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

{xiv} 

{1} 

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

CHAPTER I

ELMWOOD AND THE LOWELLS

James Russell Lowell 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.

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.”

The house was one of a succession of spacious{2} 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.

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{3}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.

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—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.{4}

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.

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{5} 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.”

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,{6} 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.

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.[1] 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{7}larly pure and gracious spirit, and enjoyed an unusual training for the life of rich service he was to lead.

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.

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{8} quotation from the Bible, with singular effectiveness,—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—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.[2]

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{9} 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.

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{10} 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—for this was late in his life, when he was in retirement—he sent for her to come to him.

“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.”[3]

Rev. Charles Lowell

{11}

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,[4] 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.”

This close affiliation with the North disclosed itself in Mrs. Lowell in a rare beauty of person{12} 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;[5] 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.

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{13} 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.

There were three sons and two daughters when James Russell,[6] 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[7] between two and{14} 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[8] 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,[9] and she used to relate in after years how{15} 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.

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,—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.”

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—that tower of enchantment{16} for many a child—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,—

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,—

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.”[11]

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.

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{18} the snow beneath his feet, when the familiar world was transformed as in a vision to a polar solitude:—

CHAPTER II

SCHOOL AND COLLEGE

1826-1838

The 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.

The rambles, too, to Beaver Brook and the Waverley Oaks, in the country within easy stroll{20} 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.”[12] Thirty years after these experiences he could give this graphic report of the contests he was wont to witness in the village choir:—

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.

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—

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:{22}—

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.{23} He engaged in publishing under the firm name of Wells & 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.”

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{24} 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.

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.’” 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.”

“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{25} “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.”[14]

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,—a greater raree-show then than now,—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{26}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.

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{27} 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.

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 [sic] 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.

“Mr. Quincy had many qualities calculated to win him favor with the young,—that one above all which is sure to do it, indomitable pluck. With{28} 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,—all the more singular in a practised orator,—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 best-dressed 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.”

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{29} 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—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.

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{30} 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.

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,”[15] and in college he was following, without{31} 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.

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{32}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!”[16]

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.

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.”[17] His letters to his college friends during these years contain frequent references to the purchases of books he had made and the gifts{33} 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.

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{34} tone of self-exculpation, the warm feeling of a boy toward his mentor, and an impulse to make him somewhat of a confessor.[18]

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 other 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{35} 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....”

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 dearest friend,” he writes, “I am rejoiced that you have 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 did 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 promised 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{36} 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 ashamed 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 delight to me (though I am not ashamed to confess that it [made] me cry)....

“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 dear friend.”

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{37}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.”

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.

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,{38} and it is interesting to observe, in Lowell’s case, how they register a long period of vacillation and immaturity.

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:

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{39} 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.

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.

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{40} not start for P[ortsmouth] probably for three weeks. My circular came on last night, 14 prayers, 56 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. Distinguished Passenger etc. We shall go to church at Nahant Sunday and return Monday morning. By the way I ‘made up’ with —— and —— at the supper. I had a seat reserved (!) for me (as an officer) on the right hand of the distinguished president (?) A prettier table I never saw.”

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.[19] prœmium. I shall immortalize I——k W——. I extol him to the skies and pari passu 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{41} 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.”

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:—

... “Didn’t I have a glorious time yesterday? That I did if smiles from certain lips I

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{42} 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—those eyes! Guido never could have conceived her. Well, a truce with all recollections when there is no hope.”

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:{43}—

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.

“God bless you, my dear child. Aim high, very high. I feel its importance for you more than ever.”

Harvardiana, 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{45} were Rufus King, who later attained a leading position in the bar of Cincinnati, and wrote “Ohio” in the American Commonwealths 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 Blackwood, and imitated by the Knickerbocker 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.

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 Harvardiana, and on the blank{46} leaf writes one of the imitative letters in verse, for which he had a penchant at this time:—

“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.”

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{47} 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.”

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{48} examined in both on his return, and not to visit Cambridge during the period of his suspension.”

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:—

“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{49} tutor and Locke, I always took Locke’s side. I remember on one occasion, although I cannot now recall the exact passage in Locke,—it was something about continuity of ideas,—my excellent tutor told me that in that case Locke was quite mistaken in his views. My tutor said: ‘For instance, Locke says that the mind is never without an idea; now I am conscious frequently that my mind is without any idea at all.’ And I must confess that that anecdote came vividly to my mind when I got up on what Judge Hoar has justly characterized as the most important part of an orator’s person.”

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{50}cords a memory of the personal relations which he then established with the elder poet:—

“I am not an adopted son of Concord. I cannot call myself that. But I can say, perhaps, that under the old fashion which still existed when I was young, I was ‘bound out’ to Concord for a period of time; and I must say that she treated me very kindly. I then for the first time made the acquaintance of Mr. Emerson, and I still recall with a kind of pathos, as Dante did that of his old teacher, Brunetto Latini, ‘La cara e buona imagine paterna,’ ‘The dear and good paternal image,’ which he showed me here; and I can also finish the quotation and say, ‘And shows me how man makes himself eternal.’ I remember he was so kind to me—I, rather a flighty and exceedingly youthful boy, as to take me with him on some of his walks, particularly a walk to the cliffs, which I shall never forget.”

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{51} 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.

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.

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{57}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:—

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.

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:—

To the credit of his manliness may be set down, per contra, the following letter which he wrote after the publication of the poem: a letter, which, for all its boyish assumption of the toga virilis, has a ring of sincerity about it:—

Lowell’s own comment on the poem years after was in the lines:—

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:—

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.{62}

CHAPTER III

FIRST VENTURES

1838-1844

As 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.

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{63} 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.

“I don’t know,” he says, “whether we poor little{64} worms (who though but little lower than the angels are [but] a little higher than those whom our every step annihilates) ought not to condescend to allow that there may be something above 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.”

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.{65}

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—a short journey, for instance, the purchase of a book or pamphlet, even postage on letters.

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{66} 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—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.”

“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.”

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{67} 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.

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{68} 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:—

“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.

“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.

The struggle in his mind went on through the{69} 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 that 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.”

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{70} will now do 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.”

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.[23] 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.

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{71} 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.”

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{72} and his conversation, had in these days the added ingenuousness of youth.

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.

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 real than with my poetical 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.”

It is hard for most of us to escape the lurking{73} 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 must be an inspiration, but am convinced that somewhat of care, nay, even of thought, is requisite in a poem.”

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 Knickerbocker, we come in a few weeks to a rhymed letter in which a reminiscence of the same{75} experience is recorded with simplicity and naturalness in a homely poetic strain:—

In this same letter Lowell enumerates at the close the books he is reading and about to read:—

What most impresses the attentive reader of Lowell’s verses and letters as the two years, to{76} 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.

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,—he speaks of him once as his “quondam chum,”—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{77} content for the soreness which still remained after a struggle that had resulted in substantial self-mastery.

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.

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{83} 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.

Two of the poems in particular reflect Lowell’s idealization of the lady and his consciousness of what this experience meant to him. “‘Ianthe,’” he writes to Loring, “is good as far as it goes. I did not know her then. She is a glorious creature indeed!”

he exclaims, near the close of the poem,

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:—

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:—

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.

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{86} 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.

“Yes, my friend, it is most true that I have changed. I thank her 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 she 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....

“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.”

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,{87} 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.

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.[26]

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{88} 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.

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.

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[27] 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.{89} Lowell’s own delight in her was unbounded, and the scene as he depicts it, was a New England idyl.

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.[28] 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.[29] Be this as it may, the assertion is rendered{90} credible by the highly charged atmosphere in which they were living. The two young poets—for Maria White was not only of poetic temperament, but wrote verses, some of which found place in current magazines—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.

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{91} Maria White to Levi Thaxter, “to be married—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.”

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.[30]

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{92} 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 Southern Literary Messenger 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 Southern Literary Messenger he could publish half personal poems to be read between the lines by his intimate friends; but he grew impatient of this unprofitable business.

“Have you got the August S. L. M. yet?” he writes to Loring, 18 August, 1840. “I have not. White[31] 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{93} 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.”

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 (sub rosa) 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{94} 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.”

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,—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,{95}” “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 Arcturus, 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.

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 Graham’s Magazine 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.[33]{98}

The most serviceable vehicle for Lowell’s literary endeavors at this time was The Boston Miscellany projected by Nathan Hale, Lowell’s associate in Harvardiana, and published by two young Boston men, Bradbury and Soden. The Miscellany 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.

The most significant contribution which he made to the Miscellany 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 {99}become so sanguine that, after mysteriously hinting at an even more substantial means of support, he wrote to his friend Loring:—

“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 Miscellany, ten dollars from Graham, and I have made an arrangement with the editor of the Democratic Review, by which I shall probably get ten or fifteen dollars more. Prospects are brightening, you see.”

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 Miscellany had closed its short career by merging itself in the Arcturus 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.

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.{101} 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 & Co., and superintended the “New American Encyclopædia.”

The Pioneer, though it might be called a continuation of The Boston Miscellany, 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 Miscellany 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 Pioneer 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 Atlantic Monthly attempted on a larger scale fifteen{102} 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.[34] Hence, when he planned the Pioneer, 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 Pioneer, for every new journal then had its salutatory,—and the valedic{103}tory was likely to follow shortly,—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,—he continues:—

“We are the farthest from wishing to see what many so ardently pray for, namely, a National 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 natural 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{104} 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,—

“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{105} which freedom shall be attempered to love by a reverence for all beauty wherever it may exist, is our humble hope....”

Here was a literary creed, expressed in no very exact formulas, and really declarative of little more than an individual purpose that the Pioneer 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{106} in the intellectual Coventry to which her conscientiousness has banished her—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.”

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.

The Pioneer lived but three months. The os{107}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.

“The absence of any prose in the present number of The Pioneer 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.”

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.[35] In spite, however, of the disastrous{108} 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 Pioneer 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.

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 Pioneer: “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 Pioneer 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{109} 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.

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.

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 Miscellany 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.

The real pursuit of Lowell during 1843 was poetry, and poetry of a lofty character. In the Ode which he wrote in 1841 beginning,—

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{115} 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.”

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—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—there looks forth a face{116} 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,—all served to separate him in appearance from common men and to mark him as an unusual person.

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

Mr. Lowell in 1843

{117}

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.”

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 Pioneer was started Lowell’s was a name to conjure with. “The principal editor,” says the Tribune, “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{118} 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.

“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{119}sion—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 ottava rima 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—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.{120}

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.”[38]

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{121} 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{122}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.

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—

and he was fain to see the operation of Nature’s law by which one race of conquerors would dispossess another.

Lowell, speculating on the eternal struggle, figured in “Prometheus,” of right and wrong, of darkness and light, bids Jove heed that he—

and sees in a vision—

Mr. Briggs, writing to him on the appearance of the poem in the Democratic Review, reminds him that he had read a bit of it when visiting him in his house at Staten Island, and adds: “But I did{123} 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 radical, 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{124} 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.”

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.

“Freedom hath yet a work for me to do,” he makes Cromwell exclaim:—

Thus, in the guise of Cromwell, speaks the young man dimly conscious, in a travailing age, of work{125} 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,

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.

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.

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:—

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,[39] Lowell intimates very clearly that his maturer outlook on life, and his attitude toward poetry are due largely to the inspiration{127} 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:—

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,—

and so continues as preserved in the present form of the poem.

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{129} toward what may without offence be called the practical issue, and this not because she was utilitarian—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.

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{133} Boston Miscellany and continued in the Pioneer 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,[42]—it is now a rare book, I am not sorry to know; I have not seen it for many years,—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.”

The suspension of the Pioneer 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{134} 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,—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 e. The talk on Chaucer is followed by comments on Chapman and Ford, with reference by easy suggestion to Shakespeare, Marlowe, Fletcher, Pope, and Wordsworth.

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{135} 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.[43] But both speakers are after the same game.

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{136}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.”

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.{137}

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.

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{138} 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.

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,—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{139} 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—

it must be said with emphasis that he held these isms 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{140} might never have been more than a verbose Quietist versifier.

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.

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{146} 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.”[44]

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.”

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{147} 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.

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.{149}

“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....

“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.”

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{150} 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,—for we are setting aside his boyish pranks in verse,—illustrates the exalted mood in which he was living.

The “Conversations on Some of the Old Poets” was published, as we have seen, in January, 1845,[45] 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.{151}

CHAPTER IV

IN THE ANTI-SLAVERY RANKS

1845-1849

In 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{152}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?”

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 Pennsylvania Freeman. That paper had taken the place of the National Enquirer, when Benjamin Lundy relinquished its management. Whittier went to Philadelphia in the spring of 1838 to edit the Freeman, and remained there two years, when his frail health compelled him to retire. The paper had been temporarily suspended in the interest of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, but had been revived and was now under the editorial control of C. C. Burleigh and J. Miller McKim.

The situation of the young pair is sketched in the following letter to Robert Carter:—

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{156} 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 ought to be, and I begin to fear we shall not have the satisfaction of being so very 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.”[47]

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, The Broadway Journal, 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.{157} Lowell himself complained of a native indolence, and Briggs, who was skeptical of the force of this objection, proposed a very natural corrective:—

“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.”

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{158} 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.”

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 B. J. 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.”

The letter thus sent purported to be by one{159} 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.

The editor of The Broadway Journal 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;’” and after a further discussion of abolitionism in prin{160}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.”

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 The Broadway Journal, 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 Journal, 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 The Broadway Journal itself died out of existence shortly, Mr. Briggs parting company with it at the end of a half year.[48] In sending the former of the two prose articles mentioned above, Lowell wrote:{161}—

The other vehicle for Lowell’s more exclusively literary work during the winter of 1845 was Graham’s Magazine, 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 South{162}ern Literary Messenger. 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.

“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 might be, rather than that he always is, 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.”

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{163}” appeared in The American Review for February, and his series of papers on plagiarism, with their acuteness, their ostentation of learning, and their malice, was trailing through the Mirror and The Broadway Journal. His name was linked with that of Briggs in the editorship of the Journal, 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 Tribune I find that Poe has been at me in the Mirror. He has at least that chief element of a critic—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 Mirror, 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{164} 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.”

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{165} articles. I still think Poe an invaluable contributor, but I like such articles as his review of Miss Barrett better than these last.”

Up to this time Lowell appears to have known Poe only through correspondence.[49] 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,—though all great geniuses are endowed with it. Hence we always think of Dante Alighieri, of Michelangelo, of Will Shakespeare, of John Milton,—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{166} 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.”

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.”

In all his critical writing after this time, Lowell never discussed Poe. His offhand characterization in “A Fable for Critics,”

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{167} 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.

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{168} when he sent to the Boston Courier 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.

he began, and employed all the resources of type to make his protest heard:—

The final stanza was a burst of state independence:

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.

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 The Broadway Journal irritated him. He had hoped that the Journal would be a “powerful weapon in the hands of re{169}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 Journal 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 Pennsylvania Freeman, 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 Freeman 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{170} 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.”

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{171} 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.”

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{172} 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.

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{173} 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.”

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{174} 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.

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 Boston Courier, 19 July, 1845. The lines were prefaced by this note to the editor, Mr. Buckingham:—

“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{175}

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.”

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,—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{176} as the utmost expression which he ever reached.[50] The poem was vigorous enough to make an impression, and successive numbers of the Courier show two long-winded writers knocking away at the spectre of Dissolution which the poem had raised.[51]

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{177} defined by the eye. I confess that my opinions seem to me of less importance.”[52]

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!”[53]{178}

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.”

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{179} 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.”

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—because she does not{180} 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{181}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 Pennsylvania Freeman, at the close of 1846.

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 goo (pianissimo) ah goo, errrrrr, ahg—(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{182} assure herself of his identity, and of her consequent security.”

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.

There was an incident at this time which illustrates the sensitiveness of the anti-slavery mind. The weight of literature was thrown against slav{183}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 & 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 National Anti-Slavery Standard, 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 without 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 did, 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—that it is interfering with the freedom of an author’s will (though I think{184} you were ironing with that grave face of yours)—for I do not think that an author has a right to suppress anything that God has given him—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—‘Let all the others be suppressed if you will—that I will never suppress.’ I believe this was the first audible knock my character made at the door of Owen’s heart—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—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.{185}”

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 man 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—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,—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—then the color is{186} the chief sight noticeable. I do not believe that the finest eyes have any special hue—and this is probably the ground for the fallacy that poets’ eyes are gray—a kind of neutral color.”

In January, 1846, the publication was begun of the London Daily News, 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 The Liberator 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:{187}—

“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 The Liberator, and goes on to say:—

“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{188} 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.”

The article closes with this striking diagnosis:—

“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,{189} 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—that God still exists, and that He may select even the bruised reed for his instrument.”

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{190} 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—

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{191} 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.”

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 National Anti-Slavery Standard was passing through one of the several changes sure to overtake the management of a{192} journal which was the organ of such a bundle of individualities as would make up a reform party. The Standard was the official paper of the American Anti-Slavery Society, as the Liberator was the individual mouthpiece of Mr. Garrison. The Standard 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,[56] 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.

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{193} 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,{194} 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.”

{201}

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

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 Standard 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 Ichabod after the name of this man in the great book of Doom?”

For some unexplained reason, though the con{202}nection was now made, for eighteen months after this editorial article Lowell printed little in the Standard 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 Standard 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.

The definite arrangement which Lowell made with the Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society, who were the general managers of the Standard, 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{203}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.”

The first number of the Standard under this new arrangement, that for 6 April, 1848, which contained the announcement, held as Lowell’s ini{204}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:—

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

During a long and peaceful reign, the king had in no way contrived to grow on to the people. He{205} 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 ouvriers 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.{206} 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

It was light which the people demanded. Social order 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. Let-alone 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.”

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{207} 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.

“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 mésalliance. 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{208} Declaration of Independence. When every other argument in favor of our infamous Mexican war has been exhausted, there was this still left—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.

“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—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.”

Lowell had said to Briggs that he was not at one with the Abolitionists who favored disunion,{209} 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{210}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 heliolites 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{211} 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 ancile 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.

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—one{212} stroke of the paw, when the time came, and the mouse was dead.

Meanwhile the little band of the faithful, for whom the Anti-Slavery Standard 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.

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{213} 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—so far as that is of any consequence—am pleased. I hear your articles spoken of highly from all quarters, and have heard only one criticism from one or two persons,—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.”

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{214} a natural life. Independence was a fundamental note in his nature.

“The word NO,” 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 Viva Pio Nono.[60]

“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.”[61]{215}

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{216} 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!

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{219} had satisfied himself that his theory of the probable thickness of the ice was irrefutable.

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.

I have already referred to the early occasion he took, in his connection with the Standard, to try{220} 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 Standard after General Taylor had been nominated—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 Honesty is the best policy, or any other prudent morality, till he has set us a{221} 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.

“‘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.

“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[63] 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{222} 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—dry bones into which the touch of no prophet could send life....

“‘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—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 occasio celeris, 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 ha! ha! 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....{223}

“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 Man. 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.

“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{224} do not yet wholly despair of hearing the voice of our Daniel reading the Mene, Mene, written on the wall of our political fabric.”

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.

“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{225} 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 Liberator in 1831.”

Quite at the end of Lowell’s stated contributions to the Standard 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 was 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{226} 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 a fortiori 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:—

“If Mr. Webster’s speech should not find any one to confute it in the Senate,—a hard task, for assumptions and tergiversations are not easily re{227}plied to,—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.”

The agreement which Lowell had with the Standard 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 Courier, the last four in the Standard, 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{228} 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.

The active members of the anti-slavery society who controlled the policy of the Standard 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{229} 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.

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{230} 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 Standard—leaving myself out of the question—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—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.”

But the Standard 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,—“Stephen Foster is a good representative of it,—who did not consider you worth much, and many of whom confess they do{231} 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.

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{232}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 Standard’s order so resolutely.”

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 Standard 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 you. 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.{233}”

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 Standard, 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 try to work in their 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,[64] is interesting as further defining Lowell’s attitude{234} 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 wished 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,[65] 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.”

At the end of his second year the engagement was ended, though, largely out of friendship for{235} 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 corresponding editor. Moreover, in this particular case, my unhappy genius will keep seeing the double sense in the word corresponding, and suggesting that E. Q. and I correspond in very few particulars,—meaning no offence to either of us. ‘Contributor’ would be the fitting word.”

The connection with the Standard 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{236} 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 Standard, 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.

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{237}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,[66] 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 they are human.{238}”

CHAPTER V

A FABLE FOR CRITICS, THE BIGLOW PAPERS, AND THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL

1847-1848

It was while he was most busily engaged in contributing to the Standard 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{239} 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.”

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.—There, I have given you three or four specimen bricks—what think you of the house?... Remember that my satire is a secret. Read the extract to{240} 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.”

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 (con amore, 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.{241}

“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.’

“Now I know that you are as proud as—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.

“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 you. 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 may 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—the said effigies to belong to your humble servant.{242}

“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 take. Perhaps I have said too much of the Centurion.[67] But it was only the comicality of his character that attracted me,—for the man himself personally never entered my head. But the sketch is clever?—I want your opinion on what I have sent immediately.”[68]

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.{243}”

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.”

It was when about half the poem had been written that Lowell began his constant work for the Standard, 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{244} 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 some immediate profit, I should never have given it to you at all. In making it a present to you, I was giving myself a douceur, and the greater the sale the larger the bribe to myself. A part of the condition is that if it make a loss—I pay it. If this be not agreed to, the bargain is null, and I never will finish it.... Now that I have 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.[69] I shall revenge myself amply upon her by writing{245} better. She is a very foolish, conceited woman, who has got together a great deal of information, but not enough knowledge 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.”

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.[70] The only verses I shall{246} 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 riled 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.[71] 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.”

In the passage on bores, which follows the lines on Margaret Fuller, Lowell explains that—

but he is explicit enough regarding them in the same letter to Mr. Briggs: I had a horrible visitation the other evening from Mr. ——, of Philadelphia, accompanied by Messrs. —— and ——, of Boston. After their departure, I wrote the ‘digression on bores’ which I mentioned above. ——, 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{247} 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.”

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

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:—

“I send half the proof to-day—t’ other to-mor{248}row with Irving and Judd. I am druv like all possessed. 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.

“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 you. 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.”

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,—

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,

insert ‘sounds’ instead of ‘is.{249}’

“I wish you would do up a copy with ‘author’s and so forths,’ dated New York, 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....

“Print the title-page thus:—

“‘Reader, walk up’ etc., as far as ‘ruinous rate’ in large italics in old-fashioned style in an inverted cone