summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/57776-h/57776-h.htm
blob: 079d8edd6638e85c7c6383618ba650575043a5bb (plain) 
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331
332
333
334
335
336
337
338
339
340
341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
351
352
353
354
355
356
357
358
359
360
361
362
363
364
365
366
367
368
369
370
371
372
373
374
375
376
377
378
379
380
381
382
383
384
385
386
387
388
389
390
391
392
393
394
395
396
397
398
399
400
401
402
403
404
405
406
407
408
409
410
411
412
413
414
415
416
417
418
419
420
421
422
423
424
425
426
427
428
429
430
431
432
433
434
435
436
437
438
439
440
441
442
443
444
445
446
447
448
449
450
451
452
453
454
455
456
457
458
459
460
461
462
463
464
465
466
467
468
469
470
471
472
473
474
475
476
477
478
479
480
481
482
483
484
485
486
487
488
489
490
491
492
493
494
495
496
497
498
499
500
501
502
503
504
505
506
507
508
509
510
511
512
513
514
515
516
517
518
519
520
521
522
523
524
525
526
527
528
529
530
531
532
533
534
535
536
537
538
539
540
541
542
543
544
545
546
547
548
549
550
551
552
553
554
555
556
557
558
559
560
561
562
563
564
565
566
567
568
569
570
571
572
573
574
575
576
577
578
579
580
581
582
583
584
585
586
587
588
589
590
591
592
593
594
595
596
597
598
599
600
601
602
603
604
605
606
607
608
609
610
611
612
613
614
615
616
617
618
619
620
621
622
623
624
625
626
627
628
629
630
631
632
633
634
635
636
637
638
639
640
641
642
643
644
645
646
647
648
649
650
651
652
653
654
655
656
657
658
659
660
661
662
663
664
665
666
667
668
669
670
671
672
673
674
675
676
677
678
679
680
681
682
683
684
685
686
687
688
689
690
691
692
693
694
695
696
697
698
699
700
701
702
703
704
705
706
707
708
709
710
711
712
713
714
715
716
717
718
719
720
721
722
723
724
725
726
727
728
729
730
731
732
733
734
735
736
737
738
739
740
741
742
743
744
745
746
747
748
749
750
751
752
753
754
755
756
757
758
759
760
761
762
763
764
765
766
767
768
769
770
771
772
773
774
775
776
777
778
779
780
781
782
783
784
785
786
787
788
789
790
791
792
793
794
795
796
797
798
799
800
801
802
803
804
805
806
807
808
809
810
811
812
813
814
815
816
817
818
819
820
821
822
823
824
825
826
827
828
829
830
831
832
833
834
835
836
837
838
839
840
841
842
843
844
845
846
847
848
849
850
851
852
853
854
855
856
857
858
859
860
861
862
863
864
865
866
867
868
869
870
871
872
873
874
875
876
877
878
879
880
881
882
883
884
885
886
887
888
889
890
891
892
893
894
895
896
897
898
899
900
901
902
903
904
905
906
907
908
909
910
911
912
913
914
915
916
917
918
919
920
921
922
923
924
925
926
927
928
929
930
931
932
933
934
935
936
937
938
939
940
941
942
943
944
945
946
947
948
949
950
951
952
953
954
955
956
957
958
959
960
961
962
963
964
965
966
967
968
969
970
971
972
973
974
975
976
977
978
979
980
981
982
983
984
985
986
987
988
989
990
991
992
993
994
995
996
997
998
999
1000
1001
1002
1003
1004
1005
1006
1007
1008
1009
1010
1011
1012
1013
1014
1015
1016
1017
1018
1019
1020
1021
1022
1023
1024
1025
1026
1027
1028
1029
1030
1031
1032
1033
1034
1035
1036
1037
1038
1039
1040
1041
1042
1043
1044
1045
1046
1047
1048
1049
1050
1051
1052
1053
1054
1055
1056
1057
1058
1059
1060
1061
1062
1063
1064
1065
1066
1067
1068
1069
1070
1071
1072
1073
1074
1075
1076
1077
1078
1079
1080
1081
1082
1083
1084
1085
1086
1087
1088
1089
1090
1091
1092
1093
1094
1095
1096
1097
1098
1099
1100
1101
1102
1103
1104
1105
1106
1107
1108
1109
1110
1111
1112
1113
1114
1115
1116
1117
1118
1119
1120
1121
1122
1123
1124
1125
1126
1127
1128
1129
1130
1131
1132
1133
1134
1135
1136
1137
1138
1139
1140
1141
1142
1143
1144
1145
1146
1147
1148
1149
1150
1151
1152
1153
1154
1155
1156
1157
1158
1159
1160
1161
1162
1163
1164
1165
1166
1167
1168
1169
1170
1171
1172
1173
1174
1175
1176
1177
1178
1179
1180
1181
1182
1183
1184
1185
1186
1187
1188
1189
1190
1191
1192
1193
1194
1195
1196
1197
1198
1199
1200
1201
1202
1203
1204
1205
1206
1207
1208
1209
1210
1211
1212
1213
1214
1215
1216
1217
1218
1219
1220
1221
1222
1223
1224
1225
1226
1227
1228
1229
1230
1231
1232
1233
1234
1235
1236
1237
1238
1239
1240
1241
1242
1243
1244
1245
1246
1247
1248
1249
1250
1251
1252
1253
1254
1255
1256
1257
1258
1259
1260
1261
1262
1263
1264
1265
1266
1267
1268
1269
1270
1271
1272
1273
1274
1275
1276
1277
1278
1279
1280
1281
1282
1283
1284
1285
1286
1287
1288
1289
1290
1291
1292
1293
1294
1295
1296
1297
1298
1299
1300
1301
1302
1303
1304
1305
1306
1307
1308
1309
1310
1311
1312
1313
1314
1315
1316
1317
1318
1319
1320
1321
1322
1323
1324
1325
1326
1327
1328
1329
1330
1331
1332
1333
1334
1335
1336
1337
1338
1339
1340
1341
1342
1343
1344
1345
1346
1347
1348
1349
1350
1351
1352
1353
1354
1355
1356
1357
1358
1359
1360
1361
1362
1363
1364
1365
1366
1367
1368
1369
1370
1371
1372
1373
1374
1375
1376
1377
1378
1379
1380
1381
1382
1383
1384
1385
1386
1387
1388
1389
1390
1391
1392
1393
1394
1395
1396
1397
1398
1399
1400
1401
1402
1403
1404
1405
1406
1407
1408
1409
1410
1411
1412
1413
1414
1415
1416
1417
1418
1419
1420
1421
1422
1423
1424
1425
1426
1427
1428
1429
1430
1431
1432
1433
1434
1435
1436
1437
1438
1439
1440
1441
1442
1443
1444
1445
1446
1447
1448
1449
1450
1451
1452
1453
1454
1455
1456
1457
1458
1459
1460
1461
1462
1463
1464
1465
1466
1467
1468
1469
1470
1471
1472
1473
1474
1475
1476
1477
1478
1479
1480
1481
1482
1483
1484
1485
1486
1487
1488
1489
1490
1491
1492
1493
1494
1495
1496
1497
1498
1499
1500
1501
1502
1503
1504
1505
1506
1507
1508
1509
1510
1511
1512
1513
1514
1515
1516
1517
1518
1519
1520
1521
1522
1523
1524
1525
1526
1527
1528
1529
1530
1531
1532
1533
1534
1535
1536
1537
1538
1539
1540
1541
1542
1543
1544
1545
1546
1547
1548
1549
1550
1551
1552
1553
1554
1555
1556
1557
1558
1559
1560
1561
1562
1563
1564
1565
1566
1567
1568
1569
1570
1571
1572
1573
1574
1575
1576
1577
1578
1579
1580
1581
1582
1583
1584
1585
1586
1587
1588
1589
1590
1591
1592
1593
1594
1595
1596
1597
1598
1599
1600
1601
1602
1603
1604
1605
1606
1607
1608
1609
1610
1611
1612
1613
1614
1615
1616
1617
1618
1619
1620
1621
1622
1623
1624
1625
1626
1627
1628
1629
1630
1631
1632
1633
1634
1635
1636
1637
1638
1639
1640
1641
1642
1643
1644
1645
1646
1647
1648
1649
1650
1651
1652
1653
1654
1655
1656
1657
1658
1659
1660
1661
1662
1663
1664
1665
1666
1667
1668
1669
1670
1671
1672
1673
1674
1675
1676
1677
1678
1679
1680
1681
1682
1683
1684
1685
1686
1687
1688
1689
1690
1691
1692
1693
1694
1695
1696
1697
1698
1699
1700
1701
1702
1703
1704
1705
1706
1707
1708
1709
1710
1711
1712
1713
1714
1715
1716
1717
1718
1719
1720
1721
1722
1723
1724
1725
1726
1727
1728
1729
1730
1731
1732
1733
1734
1735
1736
1737
1738
1739
1740
1741
1742
1743
1744
1745
1746
1747
1748
1749
1750
1751
1752
1753
1754
1755
1756
1757
1758
1759
1760
1761
1762
1763
1764
1765
1766
1767
1768
1769
1770
1771
1772
1773
1774
1775
1776
1777
1778
1779
1780
1781
1782
1783
1784
1785
1786
1787
1788
1789
1790
1791
1792
1793
1794
1795
1796
1797
1798
1799
1800
1801
1802
1803
1804
1805
1806
1807
1808
1809
1810
1811
1812
1813
1814
1815
1816
1817
1818
1819
1820
1821
1822
1823
1824
1825
1826
1827
1828
1829
1830
1831
1832
1833
1834
1835
1836
1837
1838
1839
1840
1841
1842
1843
1844
1845
1846
1847
1848
1849
1850
1851
1852
1853
1854
1855
1856
1857
1858
1859
1860
1861
1862
1863
1864
1865
1866
1867
1868
1869
1870
1871
1872
1873
1874
1875
1876
1877
1878
1879
1880
1881
1882
1883
1884
1885
1886
1887
1888
1889
1890
1891
1892
1893
1894
1895
1896
1897
1898
1899
1900
1901
1902
1903
1904
1905
1906
1907
1908
1909
1910
1911
1912
1913
1914
1915
1916
1917
1918
1919
1920
1921
1922
1923
1924
1925
1926
1927
1928
1929
1930
1931
1932
1933
1934
1935
1936
1937
1938
1939
1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
1946
1947
1948
1949
1950
1951
1952
1953
1954
1955
1956
1957
1958
1959
1960
1961
1962
1963
1964
1965
1966
1967
1968
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025
2026
2027
2028
2029
2030
2031
2032
2033
2034
2035
2036
2037
2038
2039
2040
2041
2042
2043
2044
2045
2046
2047
2048
2049
2050
2051
2052
2053
2054
2055
2056
2057
2058
2059
2060
2061
2062
2063
2064
2065
2066
2067
2068
2069
2070
2071
2072
2073
2074
2075
2076
2077
2078
2079
2080
2081
2082
2083
2084
2085
2086
2087
2088
2089
2090
2091
2092
2093
2094
2095
2096
2097
2098
2099
2100
2101
2102
2103
2104
2105
2106
2107
2108
2109
2110
2111
2112
2113
2114
2115
2116
2117
2118
2119
2120
2121
2122
2123
2124
2125
2126
2127
2128
2129
2130
2131
2132
2133
2134
2135
2136
2137
2138
2139
2140
2141
2142
2143
2144
2145
2146
2147
2148
2149
2150
2151
2152
2153
2154
2155
2156
2157
2158
2159
2160
2161
2162
2163
2164
2165
2166
2167
2168
2169
2170
2171
2172
2173
2174
2175
2176
2177
2178
2179
2180
2181
2182
2183
2184
2185
2186
2187
2188
2189
2190
2191
2192
2193
2194
2195
2196
2197
2198
2199
2200
2201
2202
2203
2204
2205
2206
2207
2208
2209
2210
2211
2212
2213
2214
2215
2216
2217
2218
2219
2220
2221
2222
2223
2224
2225
2226
2227
2228
2229
2230
2231
2232
2233
2234
2235
2236
2237
2238
2239
2240
2241
2242
2243
2244
2245
2246
2247
2248
2249
2250
2251
2252
2253
2254
2255
2256
2257
2258
2259
2260
2261
2262
2263
2264
2265
2266
2267
2268
2269
2270
2271
2272
2273
2274
2275
2276
2277
2278
2279
2280
2281
2282
2283
2284
2285
2286
2287
2288
2289
2290
2291
2292
2293
2294
2295
2296
2297
2298
2299
2300
2301
2302
2303
2304
2305
2306
2307
2308
2309
2310
2311
2312
2313
2314
2315
2316
2317
2318
2319
2320
2321
2322
2323
2324
2325
2326
2327
2328
2329
2330
2331
2332
2333
2334
2335
2336
2337
2338
2339
2340
2341
2342
2343
2344
2345
2346
2347
2348
2349
2350
2351
2352
2353
2354
2355
2356
2357
2358
2359
2360
2361
2362
2363
2364
2365
2366
2367
2368
2369
2370
2371
2372
2373
2374
2375
2376
2377
2378
2379
2380
2381
2382
2383
2384
2385
2386
2387
2388
2389
2390
2391
2392
2393
2394
2395
2396
2397
2398
2399
2400
2401
2402
2403
2404
2405
2406
2407
2408
2409
2410
2411
2412
2413
2414
2415
2416
2417
2418
2419
2420
2421
2422
2423
2424
2425
2426
2427
2428
2429
2430
2431
2432
2433
2434
2435
2436
2437
2438
2439
2440
2441
2442
2443
2444
2445
2446
2447
2448
2449
2450
2451
2452
2453
2454
2455
2456
2457
2458
2459
2460
2461
2462
2463
2464
2465
2466
2467
2468
2469
2470
2471
2472
2473
2474
2475
2476
2477
2478
2479
2480
2481
2482
2483
2484
2485
2486
2487
2488
2489
2490
2491
2492
2493
2494
2495
2496
2497
2498
2499
2500
2501
2502
2503
2504
2505
2506
2507
2508
2509
2510
2511
2512
2513
2514
2515
2516
2517
2518
2519
2520
2521
2522
2523
2524
2525
2526
2527
2528
2529
2530
2531
2532
2533
2534
2535
2536
2537
2538
2539
2540
2541
2542
2543
2544
2545
2546
2547
2548
2549
2550
2551
2552
2553
2554
2555
2556
2557
2558
2559
2560
2561
2562
2563
2564
2565
2566
2567
2568
2569
2570
2571
2572
2573
2574
2575
2576
2577
2578
2579
2580
2581
2582
2583
2584
2585
2586
2587
2588
2589
2590
2591
2592
2593
2594
2595
2596
2597
2598
2599
2600
2601
2602
2603
2604
2605
2606
2607
2608
2609
2610
2611
2612
2613
2614
2615
2616
2617
2618
2619
2620
2621
2622
2623
2624
2625
2626
2627
2628
2629
2630
2631
2632
2633
2634
2635
2636
2637
2638
2639
2640
2641
2642
2643
2644
2645
2646
2647
2648
2649
2650
2651
2652
2653
2654
2655
2656
2657
2658
2659
2660
2661
2662
2663
2664
2665
2666
2667
2668
2669
2670
2671
2672
2673
2674
2675
2676
2677
2678
2679
2680
2681
2682
2683
2684
2685
2686
2687
2688
2689
2690
2691
2692
2693
2694
2695
2696
2697
2698
2699
2700
2701
2702
2703
2704
2705
2706
2707
2708
2709
2710
2711
2712
2713
2714
2715
2716
2717
2718
2719
2720
2721
2722
2723
2724
2725
2726
2727
2728
2729
2730
2731
2732
2733
2734
2735
2736
2737
2738
2739
2740
2741
2742
2743
2744
2745
2746
2747
2748
2749
2750
2751
2752
2753
2754
2755
2756
2757
2758
2759
2760
2761
2762
2763
2764
2765
2766
2767
2768
2769
2770
2771
2772
2773
2774
2775
2776
2777
2778
2779
2780
2781
2782
2783
2784
2785
2786
2787
2788
2789
2790
2791
2792
2793
2794
2795
2796
2797
2798
2799
2800
2801
2802
2803
2804
2805
2806
2807
2808
2809
2810
2811
2812
2813
2814
2815
2816
2817
2818
2819
2820
2821
2822
2823
2824
2825
2826
2827
2828
2829
2830
2831
2832
2833
2834
2835
2836
2837
2838
2839
2840
2841
2842
2843
2844
2845
2846
2847
2848
2849
2850
2851
2852
2853
2854
2855
2856
2857
2858
2859
2860
2861
2862
2863
2864
2865
2866
2867
2868
2869
2870
2871
2872
2873
2874
2875
2876
2877
2878
2879
2880
2881
2882
2883
2884
2885
2886
2887
2888
2889
2890
2891
2892
2893
2894
2895
2896
2897
2898
2899
2900
2901
2902
2903
2904
2905
2906
2907
2908
2909
2910
2911
2912
2913
2914
2915
2916
2917
2918
2919
2920
2921
2922
2923
2924
2925
2926
2927
2928
2929
2930
2931
2932
2933
2934
2935
2936
2937
2938
2939
2940
2941
2942
2943
2944
2945
2946
2947
2948
2949
2950
2951
2952
2953
2954
2955
2956
2957
2958
2959
2960
2961
2962
2963
2964
2965
2966
2967
2968
2969
2970
2971
2972
2973
2974
2975
2976
2977
2978
2979
2980
2981
2982
2983
2984
2985
2986
2987
2988
2989
2990
2991
2992
2993
2994
2995
2996
2997
2998
2999
3000
3001
3002
3003
3004
3005
3006
3007
3008
3009
3010
3011
3012
3013
3014
3015
3016
3017
3018
3019
3020
3021
3022
3023
3024
3025
3026
3027
3028
3029
3030
3031
3032
3033
3034
3035
3036
3037
3038
3039
3040
3041
3042
3043
3044
3045
3046
3047
3048
3049
3050
3051
3052
3053
3054
3055
3056
3057
3058
3059
3060
3061
3062
3063
3064
3065
3066
3067
3068
3069
3070
3071
3072
3073
3074
3075
3076
3077
3078
3079
3080
3081
3082
3083
3084
3085
3086
3087
3088
3089
3090
3091
3092
3093
3094
3095
3096
3097
3098
3099
3100
3101
3102
3103
3104
3105
3106
3107
3108
3109
3110
3111
3112
3113
3114
3115
3116
3117
3118
3119
3120
3121
3122
3123
3124
3125
3126
3127
3128
3129
3130
3131
3132
3133
3134
3135
3136
3137
3138
3139
3140
3141
3142
3143
3144
3145
3146
3147
3148
3149
3150
3151
3152
3153
3154
3155
3156
3157
3158
3159
3160
3161
3162
3163
3164
3165
3166
3167
3168
3169
3170
3171
3172
3173
3174
3175
3176
3177
3178
3179
3180
3181
3182
3183
3184
3185
3186
3187
3188
3189
3190
3191
3192
3193
3194
3195
3196
3197
3198
3199
3200
3201
3202
3203
3204
3205
3206
3207
3208
3209
3210
3211
3212
3213
3214
3215
3216
3217
3218
3219
3220
3221
3222
3223
3224
3225
3226
3227
3228
3229
3230
3231
3232
3233
3234
3235
3236
3237
3238
3239
3240
3241
3242
3243
3244
3245
3246
3247
3248
3249
3250
3251
3252
3253
3254
3255
3256
3257
3258
3259
3260
3261
3262
3263
3264
3265
3266
3267
3268
3269
3270
3271
3272
3273
3274
3275
3276
3277
3278
3279
3280
3281
3282
3283
3284
3285
3286
3287
3288
3289
3290
3291
3292
3293
3294
3295
3296
3297
3298
3299
3300
3301
3302
3303
3304
3305
3306
3307
3308
3309
3310
3311
3312
3313
3314
3315
3316
3317
3318
3319
3320
3321
3322
3323
3324
3325
3326
3327
3328
3329
3330
3331
3332
3333
3334
3335
3336
3337
3338
3339
3340
3341
3342
3343
3344
3345
3346
3347
3348
3349
3350
3351
3352
3353
3354
3355
3356
3357
3358
3359
3360
3361
3362
3363
3364
3365
3366
3367
3368
3369
3370
3371
3372
3373
3374
3375
3376
3377
3378
3379
3380
3381
3382
3383
3384
3385
3386
3387
3388
3389
3390
3391
3392
3393
3394
3395
3396
3397
3398
3399
3400
3401
3402
3403
3404
3405
3406
3407
3408
3409
3410
3411
3412
3413
3414
3415
3416
3417
3418
3419
3420
3421
3422
3423
3424
3425
3426
3427
3428
3429
3430
3431
3432
3433
3434
3435
3436
3437
3438
3439
3440
3441
3442
3443
3444
3445
3446
3447
3448
3449
3450
3451
3452
3453
3454
3455
3456
3457
3458
3459
3460
3461
3462
3463
3464
3465
3466
3467
3468
3469
3470
3471
3472
3473
3474
3475
3476
3477
3478
3479
3480
3481
3482
3483
3484
3485
3486
3487
3488
3489
3490
3491
3492
3493
3494
3495
3496
3497
3498
3499
3500
3501
3502
3503
3504
3505
3506
3507
3508
3509
3510
3511
3512
3513
3514
3515
3516
3517
3518
3519
3520
3521
3522
3523
3524
3525
3526
3527
3528
3529
3530
3531
3532
3533
3534
3535
3536
3537
3538
3539
3540
3541
3542
3543
3544
3545
3546
3547
3548
3549
3550
3551
3552
3553
3554
3555
3556
3557
3558
3559
3560
3561
3562
3563
3564
3565
3566
3567
3568
3569
3570
3571
3572
3573
3574
3575
3576
3577
3578
3579
3580
3581
3582
3583
3584
3585
3586
3587
3588
3589
3590
3591
3592
3593
3594
3595
3596
3597
3598
3599
3600
3601
3602
3603
3604
3605
3606
3607
3608
3609
3610
3611
3612
3613
3614
3615
3616
3617
3618
3619
3620
3621
3622
3623
3624
3625
3626
3627
3628
3629
3630
3631
3632
3633
3634
3635
3636
3637
3638
3639
3640
3641
3642
3643
3644
3645
3646
3647
3648
3649
3650
3651
3652
3653
3654
3655
3656
3657
3658
3659
3660
3661
3662
3663
3664
3665
3666
3667
3668
3669
3670
3671
3672
3673
3674
3675
3676
3677
3678
3679
3680
3681
3682
3683
3684
3685
3686
3687
3688
3689
3690
3691
3692
3693
3694
3695
3696
3697
3698
3699
3700
3701
3702
3703
3704
3705
3706
3707
3708
3709
3710
3711
3712
3713
3714
3715
3716
3717
3718
3719
3720
3721
3722
3723
3724
3725
3726
3727
3728
3729
3730
3731
3732
3733
3734
3735
3736
3737
3738
3739
3740
3741
3742
3743
3744
3745
3746
3747
3748
3749
3750
3751
3752
3753
3754
3755
3756
3757
3758
3759
3760
3761
3762
3763
3764
3765
3766
3767
3768
3769
3770
3771
3772
3773
3774
3775
3776
3777
3778
3779
3780
3781
3782
3783
3784
3785
3786
3787
3788
3789
3790
3791
3792
3793
3794
3795
3796
3797
3798
3799
3800
3801
3802
3803
3804
3805
3806
3807
3808
3809
3810
3811
3812
3813
3814
3815
3816
3817
3818
3819
3820
3821
3822
3823
3824
3825
3826
3827
3828
3829
3830
3831
3832
3833
3834
3835
3836
3837
3838
3839
3840
3841
3842
3843
3844
3845
3846
3847
3848
3849
3850
3851
3852
3853
3854
3855
3856
3857
3858
3859
3860
3861
3862
3863
3864
3865
3866
3867
3868
3869
3870
3871
3872
3873
3874
3875
3876
3877
3878
3879
3880
3881
3882
3883
3884
3885
3886
3887
3888
3889
3890
3891
3892
3893
3894
3895
3896
3897
3898
3899
3900
3901
3902
3903
3904
3905
3906
3907
3908
3909
3910
3911
3912
3913
3914
3915
3916
3917
3918
3919
3920
3921
3922
3923
3924
3925
3926
3927
3928
3929
3930
3931
3932
3933
3934
3935
3936
3937
3938
3939
3940
3941
3942
3943
3944
3945
3946
3947
3948
3949
3950
3951
3952
3953
3954
3955
3956
3957
3958
3959
3960
3961
3962
3963
3964
3965
3966
3967
3968
3969
3970
3971
3972
3973
3974
3975
3976
3977
3978
3979
3980
3981
3982
3983
3984
3985
3986
3987
3988
3989
3990
3991
3992
3993
3994
3995
3996
3997
3998
3999
4000
4001
4002
4003
4004
4005
4006
4007
4008
4009
4010
4011
4012
4013
4014
4015
4016
4017
4018
4019
4020
4021
4022
4023
4024
4025
4026
4027
4028
4029
4030
4031
4032
4033
4034
4035
4036
4037
4038
4039
4040
4041
4042
4043
4044
4045
4046
4047
4048
4049
4050
4051
4052
4053
4054
4055
4056
4057
4058
4059
4060
4061
4062
4063
4064
4065
4066
4067
4068
4069
4070
4071
4072
4073
4074
4075
4076
4077
4078
4079
4080
4081
4082
4083
4084
4085
4086
4087
4088
4089
4090
4091
4092
4093
4094
4095
4096
4097
4098
4099
4100
4101
4102
4103
4104
4105
4106
4107
4108
4109
4110
4111
4112
4113
4114
4115
4116
4117
4118
4119
4120
4121
4122
4123
4124
4125
4126
4127
4128
4129
4130
4131
4132
4133
4134
4135
4136
4137
4138
4139
4140
4141
4142
4143
4144
4145
4146
4147
4148
4149
4150
4151
4152
4153
4154
4155
4156
4157
4158
4159
4160
4161
4162
4163
4164
4165
4166
4167
4168
4169
4170
4171
4172
4173
4174
4175
4176
4177
4178
4179
4180
4181
4182
4183
4184
4185
4186
4187
4188
4189
4190
4191
4192
4193
4194
4195
4196
4197
4198
4199
4200
4201
4202
4203
4204
4205
4206
4207
4208
4209
4210
4211
4212
4213
4214
4215
4216
4217
4218
4219
4220
4221
4222
4223
4224
4225
4226
4227
4228
4229
4230
4231
4232
4233
4234
4235
4236
4237
4238
4239
4240
4241
4242
4243
4244
4245
4246
4247
4248
4249
4250
4251
4252
4253
4254
4255
4256
4257
4258
4259
4260
4261
4262
4263
4264
4265
4266
4267
4268
4269
4270
4271
4272
4273
4274
4275
4276
4277
4278
4279
4280
4281
4282
4283
4284
4285
4286
4287
4288
4289
4290
4291
4292
4293
4294
4295
4296
4297
4298
4299
4300
4301
4302
4303
4304
4305
4306
4307
4308
4309
4310
4311
4312
4313
4314
4315
4316
4317
4318
4319
4320
4321
4322
4323
4324
4325
4326
4327
4328
4329
4330
4331
4332
4333
4334
4335
4336
4337
4338
4339
4340
4341
4342
4343
4344
4345
4346
4347
4348
4349
4350
4351
4352
4353
4354
4355
4356
4357
4358
4359
4360
4361
4362
4363
4364
4365
4366
4367
4368
4369
4370
4371
4372
4373
4374
4375
4376
4377
4378
4379
4380
4381
4382
4383
4384
4385
4386
4387
4388
4389
4390
4391
4392
4393
4394
4395
4396
4397
4398
4399
4400
4401
4402
4403
4404
4405
4406
4407
4408
4409
4410
4411
4412
4413
4414
4415
4416
4417
4418
4419
4420
4421
4422
4423
4424
4425
4426
4427
4428
4429
4430
4431
4432
4433
4434
4435
4436
4437
4438
4439
4440
4441
4442
4443
4444
4445
4446
4447
4448
4449
4450
4451
4452
4453
4454
4455
4456
4457
4458
4459
4460
4461
4462
4463
4464
4465
4466
4467
4468
4469
4470
4471
4472
4473
4474
4475
4476
4477
4478
4479
4480
4481
4482
4483
4484
4485
4486
4487
4488
4489
4490
4491
4492
4493
4494
4495
4496
4497
4498
4499
4500
4501
4502
4503
4504
4505
4506
4507
4508
4509
4510
4511
4512
4513
4514
4515
4516
4517
4518
4519
4520
4521
4522
4523
4524
4525
4526
4527
4528
4529
4530
4531
4532
4533
4534
4535
4536
4537
4538
4539
4540
4541
4542
4543
4544
4545
4546
4547
4548
4549
4550
4551
4552
4553
4554
4555
4556
4557
4558
4559
4560
4561
4562
4563
4564
4565
4566
4567
4568
4569
4570
4571
4572
4573
4574
4575
4576
4577
4578
4579
4580
4581
4582
4583
4584
4585
4586
4587
4588
4589
4590
4591
4592
4593
4594
4595
4596
4597
4598
4599
4600
4601
4602
4603
4604
4605
4606
4607
4608
4609
4610
4611
4612
4613
4614
4615
4616
4617
4618
4619
4620
4621
4622
4623
4624
4625
4626
4627
4628
4629
4630
4631
4632
4633
4634
4635
4636
4637
4638
4639
4640
4641
4642
4643
4644
4645
4646
4647
4648
4649
4650
4651
4652
4653
4654
4655
4656
4657
4658
4659
4660
4661
4662
4663
4664
4665
4666
4667
4668
4669
4670
4671
4672
4673
4674
4675
4676
4677
4678
4679
4680
4681
4682
4683
4684
4685
4686
4687
4688
4689
4690
4691
4692
4693
4694
4695
4696
4697
4698
4699
4700
4701
4702
4703
4704
4705
4706
4707
4708
4709
4710
4711
4712
4713
4714
4715
4716
4717
4718
4719
4720
4721
4722
4723
4724
4725
4726
4727
4728
4729
4730
4731
4732
4733
4734
4735
4736
4737
4738
4739
4740
4741
4742
4743
4744
4745
4746
4747
4748
4749
4750
4751
4752
4753
4754
4755
4756
4757
4758
4759
4760
4761
4762
4763
4764
4765
4766
4767
4768
4769
4770
4771
4772
4773
4774
4775
4776
4777
4778
4779
4780
4781
4782
4783
4784
4785
4786
4787
4788
4789
4790
4791
4792
4793
4794
4795
4796
4797
4798
4799
4800
4801
4802
4803
4804
4805
4806
4807
4808
4809
4810
4811
4812
4813
4814
4815
4816
4817
4818
4819
4820
4821
4822
4823
4824
4825
4826
4827
4828
4829
4830
4831
4832
4833
4834
4835
4836
4837
4838
4839
4840
4841
4842
4843
4844
4845
4846
4847
4848
4849
4850
4851
4852
4853
4854
4855
4856
4857
4858
4859
4860
4861
4862
4863
4864
4865
4866
4867
4868
4869
4870
4871
4872
4873
4874
4875
4876
4877
4878
4879
4880
4881
4882
4883
4884
4885
4886
4887
4888
4889
4890
4891
4892
4893
4894
4895
4896
4897
4898
4899
4900
4901
4902
4903
4904
4905
4906
4907
4908
4909
4910
4911
4912
4913
4914
4915
4916
4917
4918
4919
4920
4921
4922
4923
4924
4925
4926
4927
4928
4929
4930
4931
4932
4933
4934
4935
4936
4937
4938
4939
4940
4941
4942
4943
4944
4945
4946
4947
4948
4949
4950
4951
4952
4953
4954
4955
4956
4957
4958
4959
4960
4961
4962
4963
4964
4965
4966
4967
4968
4969
4970
4971
4972
4973
4974
4975
4976
4977
4978
4979
4980
4981
4982
4983
4984
4985
4986
4987
4988
4989
4990
4991
4992
4993
4994
4995
4996
4997
4998
4999
5000
5001
5002
5003
5004
5005
5006
5007
5008
5009
5010
5011
5012
5013
5014
5015
5016
5017
5018
5019
5020
5021
5022
5023
5024
5025
5026
5027
5028
5029
5030
5031
5032
5033
5034
5035
5036
5037
5038
5039
5040
5041
5042
5043
5044
5045
5046
5047
5048
5049
5050
5051
5052
5053
5054
5055
5056
5057
5058
5059
5060
5061
5062
5063
5064
5065
5066
5067
5068
5069
5070
5071
5072
5073
5074
5075
5076
5077
5078
5079
5080
5081
5082
5083
5084
5085
5086
5087
5088
5089
5090
5091
5092
5093
5094
5095
5096
5097
5098
5099
5100
5101
5102
5103
5104
5105
5106
5107
5108
5109
5110
5111
5112
5113
5114
5115
5116
5117
5118
5119
5120
5121
5122
5123
5124
5125
5126
5127
5128
5129
5130
5131
5132
5133
5134
5135
5136
5137
5138
5139
5140
5141
5142
5143
5144
5145
5146
5147
5148
5149
5150
5151
5152
5153
5154
5155
5156
5157
5158
5159
5160
5161
5162
5163
5164
5165
5166
5167
5168
5169
5170
5171
5172
5173
5174
5175
5176
5177
5178
5179
5180
5181
5182
5183
5184
5185
5186
5187
5188
5189
5190
5191
5192
5193
5194
5195
5196
5197
5198
5199
5200
5201
5202
5203
5204
5205
5206
5207
5208
5209
5210
5211
5212
5213
5214
5215
5216
5217
5218
5219
5220
5221
5222
5223
5224
5225
5226
5227
5228
5229
5230
5231
5232
5233
5234
5235
5236
5237
5238
5239
5240
5241
5242
5243
5244
5245
5246
5247
5248
5249
5250
5251
5252
5253
5254
5255
5256
5257
5258
5259
5260
5261
5262
5263
5264
5265
5266
5267
5268
5269
5270
5271
5272
5273
5274
5275
5276
5277
5278
5279
5280
5281
5282
5283
5284
5285
5286
5287
5288
5289
5290
5291
5292
5293
5294
5295
5296
5297
5298
5299
5300
5301
5302
5303
5304
5305
5306
5307
5308
5309
5310
5311
5312
5313
5314
5315
5316
5317
5318
5319
5320
5321
5322
5323
5324
5325
5326
5327
5328
5329
5330
5331
5332
5333
5334
5335
5336
5337
5338
5339
5340
5341
5342
5343
5344
5345
5346
5347
5348
5349
5350
5351
5352
5353
5354
5355
5356
5357
5358
5359
5360
5361
5362
5363
5364
5365
5366
5367
5368
5369
5370
5371
5372
5373
5374
5375
5376
5377
5378
5379
5380
5381
5382
5383
5384
5385
5386
5387
5388
5389
5390
5391
5392
5393
5394
5395
5396
5397
5398
5399
5400
5401
5402
5403
5404
5405
5406
5407
5408
5409
5410
5411
5412
5413
5414
5415
5416
5417
5418
5419
5420
5421
5422
5423
5424
5425
5426
5427
5428
5429
5430
5431
5432
5433
5434
5435
5436
5437
5438
5439
5440
5441
5442
5443
5444
5445
5446
5447
5448
5449
5450
5451
5452
5453
5454
5455
5456
5457
5458
5459
5460
5461
5462
5463
5464
5465
5466
5467
5468
5469
5470
5471
5472
5473
5474
5475
5476
5477
5478
5479
5480
5481
5482
5483
5484
5485
5486
5487
5488
5489
5490
5491
5492
5493
5494
5495
5496
5497
5498
5499
5500
5501
5502
5503
5504
5505
5506
5507
5508
5509
5510
5511
5512
5513
5514
5515
5516
5517
5518
5519
5520
5521
5522
5523
5524
5525
5526
5527
5528
5529
5530
5531
5532
5533
5534
5535
5536
5537
5538
5539
5540
5541
5542
5543
5544
5545
5546
5547
5548
5549
5550
5551
5552
5553
5554
5555
5556
5557
5558
5559
5560
5561
5562
5563
5564
5565
5566
5567
5568
5569
5570
5571
5572
5573
5574
5575
5576
5577
5578
5579
5580
5581
5582
5583
5584
5585
5586
5587
5588
5589
5590
5591
5592
5593
5594
5595
5596
5597
5598
5599
5600
5601
5602
5603
5604
5605
5606
5607
5608
5609
5610
5611
5612
5613
5614
5615
5616
5617
5618
5619
5620
5621
5622
5623
5624
5625
5626
5627
5628
5629
5630
5631
5632
5633
5634
5635
5636
5637
5638
5639
5640
5641
5642
5643
5644
5645
5646
5647
5648
5649
5650
5651
5652
5653
5654
5655
5656
5657
5658
5659
5660
5661
5662
5663
5664
5665
5666
5667
5668
5669
5670
5671
5672
5673
5674
5675
5676
5677
5678
5679
5680
5681
5682
5683
5684
5685
5686
5687
5688
5689
5690
5691
5692
5693
5694
5695
5696
5697
5698
5699
5700
5701
5702
5703
5704
5705
5706
5707
5708
5709
5710
5711
5712
5713
5714
5715
5716
5717
5718
5719
5720
5721
5722
5723
5724
5725
5726
5727
5728
5729
5730
5731
5732
5733
5734
5735
5736
5737
5738
5739
5740
5741
5742
5743
5744
5745
5746
5747
5748
5749
5750
5751
5752
5753
5754
5755
5756
5757
5758
5759
5760
5761
5762
5763
5764
5765
5766
5767
5768
5769
5770
5771
5772
5773
5774
5775
5776
5777
5778
5779
5780
5781
5782
5783
5784
5785
5786
5787
5788
5789
5790
5791
5792
5793
5794
5795
5796
5797
5798
5799
5800
5801
5802
5803
5804
5805
5806
5807
5808
5809
5810
5811
5812
5813
5814
5815
5816
5817
5818
5819
5820
5821
5822
5823
5824
5825
5826
5827
5828
5829
5830
5831
5832
5833
5834
5835
5836
5837
5838
5839
5840
5841
5842
5843
5844
5845
5846
5847
5848
5849
5850
5851
5852
5853
5854
5855
5856
5857
5858
5859
5860
5861
5862
5863
5864
5865
5866
5867
5868
5869
5870
5871
5872
5873
5874
5875
5876
5877
5878
5879
5880
5881
5882
5883
5884
5885
5886
5887
5888
5889
5890
5891
5892
5893
5894
5895
5896
5897
5898
5899
5900
5901
5902
5903
5904
5905
5906
5907
5908
5909
5910
5911
5912
5913
5914
5915
5916
5917
5918
5919
5920
5921
5922
5923
5924
5925
5926
5927
5928
5929
5930
5931
5932
5933
5934
5935
5936
5937
5938
5939
5940
5941
5942
5943
5944
5945
5946
5947
5948
5949
5950
5951
5952
5953
5954
5955
5956
5957
5958
5959
5960
5961
5962
5963
5964
5965
5966
5967
5968
5969
5970
5971
5972
5973
5974
5975
5976
5977
5978
5979
5980
5981
5982
5983
5984
5985
5986
5987
5988
5989
5990
5991
5992
5993
5994
5995
5996
5997
5998
5999
6000
6001
6002
6003
6004
6005
6006
6007
6008
6009
6010
6011
6012
6013
6014
6015
6016
6017
6018
6019
6020
6021
6022
6023
6024
6025
6026
6027
6028
6029
6030
6031
6032
6033
6034
6035
6036
6037
6038
6039
6040
6041
6042
6043
6044
6045
6046
6047
6048
6049
6050
6051
6052
6053
6054
6055
6056
6057
6058
6059
6060
6061
6062
6063
6064
6065
6066
6067
6068
6069
6070
6071
6072
6073
6074
6075
6076
6077
6078
6079
6080
6081
6082
6083
6084
6085
6086
6087
6088
6089
6090
6091
6092
6093
6094
6095
6096
6097
6098
6099
6100
6101
6102
6103
6104
6105
6106
6107
6108
6109
6110
6111
6112
6113
6114
6115
6116
6117
6118
6119
6120
6121
6122
6123
6124
6125
6126
6127
6128
6129
6130
6131
6132
6133
6134
6135
6136
6137
6138
6139
6140
6141
6142
6143
6144
6145
6146
6147
6148
6149
6150
6151
6152
6153
6154
6155
6156
6157
6158
6159
6160
6161
6162
6163
6164
6165
6166
6167
6168
6169
6170
6171
6172
6173
6174
6175
6176
6177
6178
6179
6180
6181
6182
6183
6184
6185
6186
6187
6188
6189
6190
6191
6192
6193
6194
6195
6196
6197
6198
6199
6200
6201
6202
6203
6204
6205
6206
6207
6208
6209
6210
6211
6212
6213
6214
6215
6216
6217
6218
6219
6220
6221
6222
6223
6224
6225
6226
6227
6228
6229
6230
6231
6232
6233
6234
6235
6236
6237
6238
6239
6240
6241
6242
6243
6244
6245
6246
6247
6248
6249
6250
6251
6252
6253
6254
6255
6256
6257
6258
6259
6260
6261
6262
6263
6264
6265
6266
6267
6268
6269
6270
6271
6272
6273
6274
6275
6276
6277
6278
6279
6280
6281
6282
6283
6284
6285
6286
6287
6288
6289
6290
6291
6292
6293
6294
6295
6296
6297
6298
6299
6300
6301
6302
6303
6304
6305
6306
6307
6308
6309
6310
6311
6312
6313
6314
6315
6316
6317
6318
6319
6320
6321
6322
6323
6324
6325
6326
6327
6328
6329
6330
6331
6332
6333
6334
6335
6336
6337
6338
6339
6340
6341
6342
6343
6344
6345
6346
6347
6348
6349
6350
6351
6352
6353
6354
6355
6356
6357
6358
6359
6360
6361
6362
6363
6364
6365
6366
6367
6368
6369
6370
6371
6372
6373
6374
6375
6376
6377
6378
6379
6380
6381
6382
6383
6384
6385
6386
6387
6388
6389
6390
6391
6392
6393
6394
6395
6396
6397
6398
6399
6400
6401
6402
6403
6404
6405
6406
6407
6408
6409
6410
6411
6412
6413
6414
6415
6416
6417
6418
6419
6420
6421
6422
6423
6424
6425
6426
6427
6428
6429
6430
6431
6432
6433
6434
6435
6436
6437
6438
6439
6440
6441
6442
6443
6444
6445
6446
6447
6448
6449
6450
6451
6452
6453
6454
6455
6456
6457
6458
6459
6460
6461
6462
6463
6464
6465
6466
6467
6468
6469
6470
6471
6472
6473
6474
6475
6476
6477
6478
6479
6480
6481
6482
6483
6484
6485
6486
6487
6488
6489
6490
6491
6492
6493
6494
6495
6496
6497
6498
6499
6500
6501
6502
6503
6504
6505
6506
6507
6508
6509
6510
6511
6512
6513
6514
6515
6516
6517
6518
6519
6520
6521
6522
6523
6524
6525
6526
6527
6528
6529
6530
6531
6532
6533
6534
6535
6536
6537
6538
6539
6540
6541
6542
6543
6544
6545
6546
6547
6548
6549
6550
6551
6552
6553
6554
6555
6556
6557
6558
6559
6560
6561
6562
6563
6564
6565
6566
6567
6568
6569
6570
6571
6572
6573
6574
6575
6576
6577
6578
6579
6580
6581
6582
6583
6584
6585
6586
6587
6588
6589
6590
6591
6592
6593
6594
6595
6596
6597
6598
6599
6600
6601
6602
6603
6604
6605
6606
6607
6608
6609
6610
6611
6612
6613
6614
6615
6616
6617
6618
6619
6620
6621
6622
6623
6624
6625
6626
6627
6628
6629
6630
6631
6632
6633
6634
6635
6636
6637
6638
6639
6640
6641
6642
6643
6644
6645
6646
6647
6648
6649
6650
6651
6652
6653
6654
6655
6656
6657
6658
6659
6660
6661
6662
6663
6664
6665
6666
6667
6668
6669
6670
6671
6672
6673
6674
6675
6676
6677
6678
6679
6680
6681
6682
6683
6684
6685
6686
6687
6688
6689
6690
6691
6692
6693
6694
6695
6696
6697
6698
6699
6700
6701
6702
6703
6704
6705
6706
6707
6708
6709
6710
6711
6712
6713
6714
6715
6716
6717
6718
6719
6720
6721
6722
6723
6724
6725
6726
6727
6728
6729
6730
6731
6732
6733
6734
6735
6736
6737
6738
6739
6740
6741
6742
6743
6744
6745
6746
6747
6748

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
  <head>  <link rel="coverpage" href="images/cover.jpg" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
<title>
  The Project Gutenberg eBook of James Russell Lowell; vol. 1, by Horace Elisha Scudder.
</title>
<style type="text/css">
 p {margin-top:.2em;text-align:justify;margin-bottom:.2em;text-indent:4%;}

.c {text-align:center;text-indent:0%;}

.cb {text-align:center;text-indent:0%;font-weight:bold;}

.chead {text-align:center;text-indent:0%;
margin:1em auto 1em auto;font-size:90%;}

.eng  {font-family: "Old English Text MT",fantasy,sans-serif;}

.indd {padding-left:2em;}

.fint {text-align:center;text-indent:0%;font-size:90%;
margin:2em auto 2em auto;}

.lftspc {margin-left:.25em;}

.nind {text-indent:0%;}

.nonvis {display:inline;}
 @media print, handheld
 {.nonvis
 {display: none;}
 }

.r {text-align:right;margin-right: 5%;}

.rt {text-align:right;}

small {font-size: 70%;}

big {font-size: 130%;}

 h1 {margin-top:5%;text-align:center;clear:both;}

 h2 {margin-top:2em;margin-bottom:2em;text-align:center;clear:both;
 font-size:120%;}

 hr {width:18%;margin:1em auto 1em auto;clear:both;color:black;}

 hr.full {width: 60%;margin:2% auto 2% auto;border-top:1px solid black;
padding:.1em;border-bottom:1px solid black;border-left:none;border-right:none;}

 table {margin-top:2%;margin-bottom:2%;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;border:none;}

 body{margin-left:4%;margin-right:6%;background:#ffffff;color:black;font-family:"Times New Roman", serif;font-size:medium;}

a:link {background-color:#ffffff;color:blue;text-decoration:none;}

  link {background-color:#ffffff;color:blue;text-decoration:none;}

a:visited {background-color:#ffffff;color:purple;text-decoration:none;}

a:hover {background-color:#ffffff;color:#FF0000;text-decoration:underline;}

.smcap  {font-variant:small-caps;font-size:110%;}

 img {border:none;}

.blockquot {margin-top:2%;margin-bottom:2%;}

.caption  {font-weight:bold;font-size:90%;}

.figcenter   {margin-top:3%;margin-bottom:3%;clear:both;
margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;text-align:center;text-indent:0%;}
 @media handheld, print
 {.figcenter
 {page-break-before: avoid;}
 }

.footnotes  {border:dotted 3px gray;margin-top:5%;clear:both;}

.footnote   {width:95%;margin:auto 3% 1% auto;font-size:0.9em;position:relative;}

.label  {position:relative;left:-.5em;top:0;text-align:left;font-size:.8em;}

.fnanchor   {vertical-align:30%;font-size:.8em;}

div.poetry {text-align:center;}
div.poem {font-size:90%;margin:auto auto;text-indent:0%;
display: inline-block; text-align: left;}
.poem .stanza     {margin-top: 1em;margin-bottom:1em;}
.poem span.i0     {display: block; margin-left: 0em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
.poem span.i1     {display: block; margin-left: .5em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
.poem span.i2     {display: block; margin-left: 1em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
.poem span.i3     {display: block; margin-left: 2em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
.poem span.i4     {display: block; margin-left: 3em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
.poem span.i6     {display: block; margin-left: 4em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
.poem span.i10     {display: block; margin-left: 8em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
.poem span.iq     {display: block; margin-left: -.45em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
.poem span.i8dt    {letter-spacing:.5em;
display: block; margin-left: 4em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
.poem span.i6dt    {letter-spacing:.5em;
display: block; margin-left: 1em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
.poem span.i11     {display: block; margin-left: 11em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}

.pagenum  {font-style:normal;position:absolute;
left:95%;font-size:55%;text-align:right;color:gray;
background-color:#ffffff;font-variant:normal;font-style:normal;font-weight:normal;text-decoration:none;text-indent:0em;}
@media print, handheld
{.pagenum
 {display: none;}
 }
</style>
  </head>
<body>


<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 57776 ***</div>

<hr class="full" />

<p class="figcenter">
<img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="[Image of
the book's cover unavailable.]" title="" />
</p>

<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary=""
style="border: 2px black solid;margin:auto auto;max-width:50%;
padding:1%;">
<tr><td>
<p class="c"><a href="#CONTENTS">Contents.</a></p>
<p class="c"><a href="#LIST_OF_ILLUSTRATIONS">List of Illustrations</a><br /> <span class="nonvis">(In certain versions of this etext [in certain browsers]
clicking on the image will bring up a larger version.)</span></p>
<p class="c">(etext transcriber's note)</p></td></tr>
</table>

<p class="cb">JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL</p>

<p class="c"><i>A BIOGRAPHY</i></p>

<p class="c">BY</p>

<p class="c">HORACE ELISHA SCUDDER</p>

<p class="c">IN TWO VOLUMES</p>

<p class="c">VOL. I
</p>

<div class="figcenter" style="width: 363px;">
<a name="JAMES" id="JAMES"></a>
<a href="images/i_frontis_lg.jpg">
<img src="images/i_frontis_sml.jpg" height="500" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
<div class="caption"><p class="c"><i>Mr. Lowell in 1889</i></p></div>
</div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_i" id="page_i">{i}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_ii" id="page_ii">{ii}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_iii" id="page_iii">{iii}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>

<h1>
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL</h1>

<p class="c"><span class="eng"><big>A Biography</big></span><br />
<br />
<small>BY</small><br />
<br /><big>
HORACE ELISHA SCUDDER</big><br />
<br />
IN TWO VOLUMES<br />
<br />
VOL. I.<br />
<br />
<img src="images/colophon.jpg" width="125" alt="[Image of colophon unavailable.]" />
<br />
<br />
BOSTON AND NEW YORK<br />
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY<br />
<span class="eng">The Riverside Press, Cambridge</span><br />
1901<br />
<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_iv" id="page_iv">{iv}</a></span><br />
<br /><small>
COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY HORACE E. SCUDDER<br />
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED<br />
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER, 1901</small><br />
<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_v" id="page_v">{v}</a></span><br />
<br /><br />
TO<br />
<br />
<big>G·O·S·</big><br />
<br />
“NAUGHT CAN BE UNWORTHY, DONE FOR YOU.”</p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_vi" id="page_vi">{vi}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_vii" id="page_vii">{vii}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>

<h2><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE"></a>PREFACE</h2>

<p><span class="smcap">The</span> existence of the two volumes of <i>Letters of James Russell Lowell,
edited by Charles Eliot Norton</i>, has determined the character of this
biography. If they had not been published, I might have made a <i>Life and
Letters</i> which would have been in the main Lowell’s own account of
himself, in his voluminous correspondence, annotated only by such
further account of him as his letters failed to supply. As it is, though
I have had access to a great many letters not contained in Mr. Norton’s
work, I have thought it desirable not so much to supplement the
<i>Letters</i> with other letters, as to complement those volumes with a more
formal biography, using such letters or portions of letters as I print
for illustration of my subject, rather than as the basis of the
narrative.</p>

<p>I have kept the <i>Letters</i> always by my side as my main book of
reference; by the courtesy of their editor and by arrangement with their
publishers, Messrs. Harper &amp; Brothers, I have now and then drawn upon
them where it seemed especially desirable that Lowell should speak for
himself, but<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_viii" id="page_viii">{viii}</a></span> their greatest use to me has been in their disclosure of
Lowell’s personality, for they undoubtedly contain the cream of his
correspondence. I have, however, had other important material for my
use. First of all, Lowell’s collected writings in verse and prose, and
some uncollected writings, both in print and manuscript. After all that
a biographer can do, after all that Lowell himself can do through his
letters, the substantial and enduring revelation of the man is in that
free converse which he had with the world in the many forms which his
literary activity took.</p>

<p>After this I must again thank Mr. Norton for his generosity in placing
in my hands a large body of letters and papers, which he holds as
Lowell’s literary executor; perhaps even more for the wise counsel with
which he has freely aided me in the course of the work. Without his
coöperation the biography could not have been written in its fulness.</p>

<p>My thanks are due, also, to the friends and the children of the friends
of Lowell who have sent me letters and other material; to Miss Charlotte
P. Briggs, daughter of the late Charles F. Briggs, the warm friend of
Lowell in his early literary life; to Mrs. Sydney Howard Gay, who sent
me not only letters, but the original manuscript of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_ix" id="page_ix">{ix}</a></span> Lowell’s
contributions to the <i>National Anti-Slavery Standard</i>; to Mrs. Richard
Grant White; to Dr. Edward Everett Hale, whose <i>James Russell Lowell and
his Friends</i> has been a pleasant accompaniment to my labors; to General
James Lowell Carter for the use of his father’s letters; to Col. T. W.
Higginson; to Mrs. S. B. Herrick; to Mrs. Mark H. Liddell for Lowell’s
letters to Mr. John W. Field; to Mr. R. R. Bowker; to Mr. R. W. Gilder;
to Mr. Edwin L. Godkin; to Mr. Howells, Mr. Aldrich, Mr. De Witt Miller,
Mr. J. Spenser Trask, and others.</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p><span class="smcap">Cambridge, Mass.</span>, 27 September, 1901. </p></div><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xi" id="page_xi">{xi}</a></span></p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_x" id="page_x">{x}</a></span></p>

<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>

<table border="0" cellpadding="8" cellspacing="0" summary="">
<tr><td><small>CHAPTER</small></td><td>&nbsp;</td>
<td><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>

<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">I.</a></td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_I"><span class="smcap">Elmwood and the Lowells</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_1">1</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">II.</a></td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_II"><span class="smcap">School and College</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_19">19</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">III.</a></td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_III"><span class="smcap">First Ventures</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_62">62</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">IV.</a></td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_IV"><span class="smcap">In the Anti-Slavery Ranks</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_151">151</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">V.</a></td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_V"><span class="smcap">A Fable for Critics, The Biglow Papers, and The Vision of Sir Launfal</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_238">238</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">VI.</a></td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_VI"><span class="smcap">Six Years</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_270">270</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">VII.</a></td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_VII"><span class="smcap">Fifteen Months in Europe</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_309">309</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">VIII.</a></td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII"><span class="smcap">An End and a Beginning</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_346">346</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="rt" valign="top"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">IX.</a></td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_IX"><span class="smcap">The Atlantic Monthly</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_408">408</a></td></tr>
</table>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xiii" id="page_xiii">{xiii}</a></span><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xii" id="page_xii">{xii}</a></span></p>

<h2><a name="LIST_OF_ILLUSTRATIONS" id="LIST_OF_ILLUSTRATIONS"></a>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>

<table border="0" cellpadding="8" cellspacing="0" summary="">

<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td class="rt"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>

<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#JAMES"><span class="smcap">James Russell Lowell</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#JAMES"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="indd">From a photograph by Gutekunst taken in 1889.</td></tr>

<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#REV"><span class="smcap">Rev. Charles Lowell</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_10">10</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="indd">From a painting by Rand, in the possession of Charles Lowell.</td></tr>

<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#J1843"><span class="smcap">James Russell Lowell in 1843</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_116">116</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="indd">From the painting by William Page, in the possession of James B. Lowell.</td></tr>

<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#MRS"><span class="smcap">Mrs. Charles Lowell</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_306">306</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="indd">From a painting by Rand, in the possession of James Duane Lowell.</td></tr>

<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#MARIA"><span class="smcap">Mrs. Maria White Lowell</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_360">360</a></td></tr>

<tr><td class="indd">From a drawing by Cheney, after a painting by William Page.</td></tr>

<tr><td valign="top"><a href="#DR"><span class="smcap">House of Dr. Estes Howe, Cambridge</span></a></td><td class="rt" valign="bottom"><a href="#page_384">384</a></td></tr>
</table>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_xiv" id="page_xiv">{xiv}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_1" id="page_1">{1}</a></span>&nbsp; </p>

<h1>JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL</h1>

<hr />

<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I<br /><br />
<small>ELMWOOD AND THE LOWELLS</small></h2>

<p><span class="smcap">James Russell Lowell</span> was born at Elmwood in Cambridge, New England,
Monday, 22 February, 1819. When he was about to leave England at the
close of his term as American minister, he was begged by a friend to
make Washington his home, for there he would find the world in which
lately he had been living; but he answered: “I have but one home in
America, and that is the house where I was born, and where, if it shall
please God, I hope to die. I shouldn’t be happy anywhere else;” and at
Elmwood he died, Wednesday, 12 August, 1891.</p>

<p>The place was endeared to him by a thousand memories, and he liked it
none the less for the historic associations, which lent it a flavor
whimsically suggestive to him of his own lurking sympathy. “It will make
a frightful Conservative of you before you know it,” he wrote in 1873 to
Mr. Aldrich, then living at Elmwood; it was born a Tory and will die so.
Don’t get too used to it. I often wish I had not grown into it so.”</p>

<p>The house was one of a succession of spacious<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_2" id="page_2">{2}</a></span> dwellings set in broad
fields, bordering on the Charles River, built in the eighteenth century,
and occupied for the most part, before the War for Independence, by
loyal merchants and officers of the Crown. They were generous country
places, pleasantly remote from Boston, which was then reached only by a
long détour through Brookline and Roxbury, and the owners of these
estates left them, one by one, as they were forced out by the revolt of
the province: but the name of Tory Row lingered about the group, and
there had been no great change in the outward appearance of the
neighborhood when Lowell was born in one of these old houses.</p>

<p>From the colleges, past the unenclosed common, a road ran in the
direction of Watertown. It skirted the graveyard, next to which was
Christ Church, the ecclesiastical home of the occupants of Tory Row, and
shortly turned again by an elm already old when Washington took command,
under its shade, of the first American army. Along the line of what is
now known as Mason Street, it passed into the thoroughfare upon which
were strung the houses of Tory Row; a lane entered it at this point,
down which one could have walked to the house of the vacillating Thomas
Brattle, occupied during the siege of Boston by Quartermaster-General
Mifflin; the main road, now known as Brattle Street, but in Lowell’s
youth still called the Old Road, keeping on toward Watertown, passed
between the estates of the two Vassalls, Henry and John, Colonel John
Vassal<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_3" id="page_3">{3}</a></span>l’s house becoming in the siege of Boston the headquarters of
Washington, and wreathing its sword later in the myrtle boughs of
Longfellow. Then, at what is now the corner of Brattle and Sparks
streets, stood the Lechmere house, afterward Jonathan Sewall’s, and
occupied for a while by the Baron Riedesel, when he was a prisoner of
war after the defeat of Burgoyne, in whose army he commanded the Hessian
forces.</p>

<p>The Baroness Riedesel, in her lively letters, rehearses the situation as
it existed just before she and her husband were quartered in Cambridge:
“Seven families, who were connected with each other, partly by the ties
of relationship and partly by affection, had here farms, gardens, and
magnificent houses, and not far off plantations of fruit. The owners of
these were in the habit of daily meeting each other in the afternoon,
now at the house of one, and now at another, and making themselves merry
with music and the dance&mdash;living in prosperity, united and happy, until,
alas! this ruinous war severed them, and left all their houses desolate,
except two, the proprietors of which were also soon obliged to flee.”
Beyond the Lechmere-Sewall estate was that of Judge Joseph Lee, where in
Lowell’s middle day lived his friend and “corrector of the press” George
Nichols, and then, just before the road made another bend, came the
Fayerweather house, occupied in Lowell’s youth by William Wells, the
schoolmaster. Here the road turned-to the south, and passed the last of
the Row, known in later years as Elmwood.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_4" id="page_4">{4}</a></span></p>

<p>The house, square in form, was built in 1767 on the simple model which
translated the English brick manor house of the Georgian period into the
terms of New England wood; it was well proportioned, roomy, with a hall
dividing it midway; and such features as abundant use of wood in the
interior finish, and quaintly twisted banisters to its staircase,
preserve the style of the best of domestic colonial buildings. Heavy
oaken beams give the structure solidity and the spaces between them in
the four outer walls are filled in with brick, while great chimneys are
the poles which fasten to the earth the tent which seems likely still to
shelter many generations.</p>

<p>The house was built for Thomas Oliver, the son of a West India merchant,
and a man of fortune, who came from the town of Dorchester, not far off,
to live in Cambridge, probably because of his marriage to a daughter of
Colonel John Vassall. He was lieutenant-governor of the Province, and
had been appointed by George III. President of the Council, a position
which rendered him especially obnoxious to the freemen of Massachusetts.
In that contention for strict construction of the charter, which was one
of the marks of the allegiance to law characteristic of the king’s
American subjects, it was held that councillors were to be elected, not
appointed. On the morning of 2 September, 1774, a large number of the
freeholders of Middlesex County assembled at Cambridge and surrounded
Oliver’s house. He had previously conferred with these zealous people
and represented<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_5" id="page_5">{5}</a></span> that as his office of president was really the result
of his being lieutenant-governor he would incur his Majesty’s
displeasure if he resigned the one office and retained the other. The
explanation seemed satisfactory for a while, but on the appearance of
some signs of activity among his Majesty’s soldiers, the committee in
charge renewed their demands, and drew up a paper containing a
resignation of his office as president, which they called on the
lieutenant-governor to sign. He did so, adding the significant clause:
“my house at Cambridge being surrounded by about four thousand people,
in compliance with their command I sign my name.”</p>

<p>Oliver left Cambridge immediately, never to return. He succeeded to the
civil government of Boston, and Sir William Howe to the military
command, when Governor Gage returned to England, but when Boston was
evacuated Oliver retired with the British forces. The estate, with
others in the neighborhood, was seized for public use. When the American
army was posted in Cambridge it was used as a hospital for soldiers.
Afterwards it was leased by the Committee of Correspondence. A credit of
£69 for rent was recorded in 1776. Subsequently the estate was
confiscated and sold by the Commonwealth, the land contained in it then
consisting of ninety-six acres. The purchaser was Arthur Cabot, of
Salem, who later sold it to Elbridge Gerry, Governor of Massachusetts
from 1810 to 1812, and Vice-President of the United States under
Madison, from 4 March,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_6" id="page_6">{6}</a></span> 1813, until his sudden death, 23 November, 1814,
a man personally liked, but politically detested by his neighbors. In
1818 the estate, or rather the homestead and some ten acres of land, was
sold by Gerry’s heirs to the Rev. Charles Lowell, minister of the West
Church in Boston, who now made it his home, establishing himself there
with his wife and five children. In the next year his youngest child,
James Russell Lowell, was born in this house of many memories.</p>

<p>The Rev. Charles Lowell was the seventh in descent from Percival Lowell,
or Lowle, as the name sometimes was written, a well-to-do merchant of
Bristol, who, with children and grandchildren, a goodly company, came
from England in 1639, and settled in Newbury, Mass.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> Charles Lowell’s
father, the Hon. John Lowell, had led a distinguished career as a lawyer
and publicist; and as a member of the corporation of Harvard College,
and of learned societies having their headquarters in Boston, had been a
conspicuous figure in the community. One of his sons, Francis Cabot
Lowell, was the organizer of the industries on the banks of the Merrimac
which resulted in the building of the city of Lowell. A son of Francis
Cabot Lowell was the originator of the Lowell Institute, a centre of
diffusing light in Boston. Charles Lowell himself, springing from a
stock which, by inheritance and accumulation of intellectual forces, was
a leading family in the compact community of Boston, was endowed with a
singu<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_7" id="page_7">{7}</a></span>larly pure and gracious spirit, and enjoyed an unusual training
for the life of rich service he was to lead.</p>

<p>Graduated at Harvard in 1800, his bent was toward the ministry; but
yielding to the wishes of his father, he entered the law office of his
elder brother, and spent a year or more in the study of the profession
of law. His inclination, however, was not changed, and his father
withdrew his opposition and consented to a plan by which the young man
was to pursue his theological studies in Edinburgh. He had three years
of study and travel abroad. He was a pupil of Sir David Brewster and of
Dugald Stewart, and kept up a friendly acquaintance for many years with
Stewart’s later colleague, Dr. Brown. He met Wilberforce, heard Pitt,
Fox, and Sheridan in the House of Commons, and, as his letters show,
made eager incursions into the world of art.</p>

<p>He carried through all his experience a nature of great simplicity and
of unquestioning faith. His son once wrote of him: “Nothing could shake
my beloved and honored father’s trust in God and his sincere piety;” and
his work as pastor of the West Church in Boston, to which he was called
shortly after his return to America, was characterized by a
single-minded devotion which made him, in the truest sense, a minister.
All who have recorded their recollections of him agree in their
impression of great distinction of manner and a singularly musical
voice. He had a way, it was said, of uttering very familiar sentences,
such as a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_8" id="page_8">{8}</a></span> quotation from the Bible, with singular effectiveness,&mdash;a
manner which was peculiarly his own. After infirmities of sight and
hearing had made his appearance in the pulpit rare, he would still, now
and then, take part in the service by reciting in his melodious voice
one or more of the hymns&mdash;he knew by heart all in the book. Emerson said
of him that he was the most eloquent extemporaneous speaker he had ever
heard. He had the natural gift of speech, but until one read by himself
some sermon to which he had listened with delight, he would scarcely be
aware that the spell lay in the pure tones of the voice that uttered
it.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></p>

<p>Above all, he was the parson, making his powers tell less in preaching
than in the incessant care and cure of souls. In Edinburgh he had
studied medicine as well as theology, and, as his church stood on the
border of a district which was forlorn and unwholesome, Dr. Lowell was
constantly extending the jurisdiction of his parochial authority,
carrying the gospel in one hand and bread and pills in the other. He
knew every child in his<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_9" id="page_9">{9}</a></span> parish, and if, as he said, his ministry was an
unclouded one, it was because he was too busy with the needs of others
ever to perplex himself greatly over his own cares. Indeed, it was the
unremitting performance of his pastoral duties which impaired his health
and led to the necessity of his removal from the city to the outskirts
of the country village of Cambridge, four miles away, though doubtless
he was largely influenced also by the needs of the growing family that
surrounded him.</p>

<p>Dr. Lowell had seen something of the great world abroad, and he stood in
an amiable relation to that self-centred, comfortable world of New
England which held to the established order, even though there had begun
within it already the agitation which was to shake the nation. Like many
thus poised, he hated slavery in the abstract, but shrank back when it
became a question of meddling with it: the instinct for the preservation
of an established order was strong. The “abolitionism” which he saw
rising was to him “harsh, dogmatic, uncharitable, unchristian,” and it
disturbed his gentle, orderly nature. From the sheltered nook of
Elmwood, he looked out on a restless, questioning world, but his own
part seemed to be marked out for him. He had his parish, with a thousand
petty disorders to rectify; he had his books, which he loved and read;
he drove to town in his chaise to attend the meetings of the Historical
Society, of which he was long secretary, and he watched the chickens and
growing things in his green domain of Elmwood. The tall pines which<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_10" id="page_10">{10}</a></span>
murmur about the old house were planted by him. He brought to the
solution of the new problems which were vexing men the calm religious
philosophy which had solved any doubts he may have had, and if his
equanimity was disturbed he righted himself always with a cheerful
optimistic piety. One of his parish who had grown to womanhood under his
eye, and had married, made up her mind to take a stand in some reform as
a public speaker, and from his chamber at Elmwood&mdash;for this was late in
his life, when he was in retirement&mdash;he sent for her to come to him.</p>

<p>“I shall never forget his greeting,” she wrote long after. As I opened
the chamber door he rose from the old easy-chair, and standing erect,
cried out: ‘Child! my child! what is this I hear? Why are you talking to
the whole world?’ He was clothed in a long white flannel dressing-gown,
with a short shoulder cape hardly reaching to his belt. His was no
longer the piercing expression, aggressive to a degree, that Harding has
portrayed. The curling locks that gave individuality to his forehead had
been cut away, the gentle influence of a submissive spirit had impressed
itself upon his features. In a moment I was seated at his feet, and then
came a long and intimate talk of why and when and wherefore, which ended
in a short prayer with his hand upon my head, and the words, ‘Now
promise me that you will never enter the desk without first seeking
God’s blessing!’ I answered only by a look.”<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></p>

<div class="figcenter" style="width: 391px;">
<a name="REV" id="REV"></a>
<a href="images/i_010fp_lg.jpg">
<img src="images/i_010fp_sml.jpg" width="391" height="500" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
<div class="caption"><p class="c"><i>Rev. Charles Lowell</i></p></div>
</div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_11" id="page_11">{11}</a></span></p>

<p>This Dr. Primrose, as his son once affectionately called him, had for a
companion one who was the farthest possibly removed from the fussy,
ambitious wife of the Vicar of Wakefield. When he once made a journey to
Europe with Mrs. Lowell and their eldest daughter, the little party took
especial delight in a trip to the Orkney Islands, and in the enjoyment
of friendly intercourse with the Traills from that region; for it was
but a step that Mrs. Lowell needed to take to bring her into close
kinship with the Orkney folk. Her grandfather, Robert Traill, whose
name, together with her own name of Spence, she gave to one of her boys,
had come from Orkney to America, had married there, and left a daughter,
Mrs. Lowell’s mother,<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> when he went back to Great Britain at the
revolt of the colonies. Thus, when Robert Traill’s granddaughter visited
Orkney, she was returning to her own kin. Not only so, but her father,
Keith Spence, came of Highland ancestry, and it was easy to find a
forbear in the Sir Patrick Spens of the old ballad, as it was also to
claim kinship with Minna Troil, whom the Wizard of the North had lifted
out of the shadowy forms of life into the enduring reality of “The
Pirate.”</p>

<p>This close affiliation with the North disclosed itself in Mrs. Lowell in
a rare beauty of person<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_12" id="page_12">{12}</a></span> and temperament, together with a suggestion of
that occult power which haunts the people of the Orkney Isles. Whether
or no Mrs. Lowell had, as was sometimes said, the faculty of second
sight, she certainly had that love of ballads and delight in singing and
reciting them which imparts a wild flower fragrance to the mind;<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> and
her romantic nature may easily be reckoned as the brooding place of
fancies which lived again in the poetic genius of her son. She had been
bred in the Episcopal Church, and that may possibly have had its
influence in the determination of her son Robert’s vocation, but in
marrying Dr. Lowell she must have found much common ground with one who
always resolutely refused to be identified with a sect almost local in
its bounds. “I have adopted,” he wrote in 1855, “no other religious
creed than the Bible, and no other name than Christian as denoting my
religious faith.” The few letters from Mrs. Lowell’s pen which remain
contain messages of endearment that flutter about the head of her “Babie
Jammie,” as she called him, and betray a tremulous nature, anxious with
pride and fond perplexity.</p>

<p>The companionship of the elder Lowells began in a happy manner in their
childhood. The grandfather of Charles Lowell was the Rev. John Lowell,
of Newburyport, who was twice married. His<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_13" id="page_13">{13}</a></span> widow continued to make her
home in Newburyport after her husband’s death, but when her husband’s
son, John Lowell, the lawyer and jurist, left the place and established
himself in Boston, she also left the town and went to live in Portsmouth
near her niece, Mrs. Brackett. Mrs. Lowell had been John Lowell’s mother
since his boyhood, and after the manner so common in New England
households the titular grandmother ruled serenely without being
subjected to nice distinctions. Charles Lowell, thus, when a boy, was a
frequent visitor at his grandmother’s Portsmouth home, and his playmate
was his grandmother’s great-niece, Harriet Brackett Spence. The intimacy
deepened and before Charles Lowell sailed for Europe a betrothal had
taken place.</p>

<p>There were three sons and two daughters when James Russell,<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> the
youngest in this family, was born. Charles was between eleven and
twelve, Rebecca ten, Mary a little over eight, William between five and
six, and Robert<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> between two and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_14" id="page_14">{14}</a></span> three. All these lived to maturity,
excepting William, who died when James was four years old. Charles by
his seniority was the mentor and guide of his younger brother during his
adolescence, especially when their father was absent, as he was once for
a journey in Europe, but Mary<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> was the sister to whom he was
especially committed in his childhood. She was his little nurse, and as
her own love of poetry came early, she was wont to read him to sleep,
when he took his daily nap, from Spenser,<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> and she used to relate in
after years how<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_15" id="page_15">{15}</a></span> hard the little boy found it to go to sleep under the
charm of the stories, yet how firmly nature closed his eyes at last.</p>

<p>His own recorded recollections of childhood are not many, yet as far
back as he could remember he was visited by visions night and day. An
oft-recurring dream was of having the earth put into his hand like an
orange. Dr. Weir Mitchell notes that Lowell told him he had since
boyhood been subject to visions, which appeared usually in the evening.
Commonly he saw a figure in mediæval costume which kept on one side of
him,&mdash;perhaps an outcome of his early familiarity with Spenser and
Shakespeare. Most of all in his memories of childhood he recalled
vividly the contact with nature in the enchanted realm of Elmwood, and
the free country into which it passed easily. With the eye of a hawk he
spied all the movements in that wide domain, and brooded over the
lightest stir with an unconscious delight which was the presage of the
poet in him. “The balancing of a yellow butterfly over a thistle broom
was spiritual food and lodging for a whole forenoon.”</p>

<p>Indeed, there could scarcely have been a better nesting-place for one
who was all his life long to love the animation of nature and to portray
in verse and prose its homely and friendly aspects rather than its
large, solemn, or expansive scenes. In after life, especially when away
from home, he recurred to his childish experiences in a tone which had
the plaint of homesickness. From the upper windows of the house&mdash;that
tower of enchantment<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_16" id="page_16">{16}</a></span> for many a child&mdash;he could see a long curve of the
Charles, the wide marshes beyond the river, and the fields which lay
between Elmwood and the village of Cambridge. Within the place itself
were the rosebushes and asters, the heavy headed goat’s-beard, the lilac
bushes and syringas which bordered the path from the door to what his
father, in New England phrase, called the avenue, and which later became
formally Elmwood Avenue; but chiefest were the shag-bark trees, the
pines, the horse-chestnuts, and the elms, a young growth in part in his
childhood, for his father took delight in giving this permanence to the
home; and the boy himself caught the fancy, for when he was fifty-six
years old he rejoiced in the huge stack of shade cast for him by a
horse-chestnut, whose seed he had planted more than fifty years before.
And in trees and bushes sang the birds that were to be his companions
through life. Over the buttercups whistled the orioles; and bobolinks,
catbirds, linnets, and robins were to teach him notes,&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“The Aladdin’s trap-door of the past to lift.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="nind">In those days bank swallows frequented the cliff of the gravel pit by
the river, and Lowell remembered how his father would lead him out to
see the barn swallows, which had been flying in and out of the mows,
gather on the roof before their yearly migration. “I learned,” he wrote
long after,&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“I learned all weather-signs of day or night;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">No bird but I could name him by his flight,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">No distant tree but by his shape was known,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Or, near at hand, by leaf or bark alone.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_17" id="page_17">{17}</a></span><br /></span>
<span class="i0">This learning won by loving looks I hived<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As sweeter lore than all from books derived.”<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>When he was not far away from his childhood, and in a time of great
sensitiveness, he wrote: I never shall forget the blind despair of a
poor little humming-bird which flew through the open window of the
nursery where I was playing when a child. I knew him at once, for the
same gay-vested messenger from Fairy-land, whom I had often watched
disputing with the elvish bees the treasures of the honeysuckle by the
doorstep. His imprisoned agony scarce equalled my own; and the slender
streaks of blood, which his innocent, frenzied suicide left upon the
ceiling, were more terrible to me than the red witness which Rizzio left
on the stair at Holyrood to cry out against his murderers.”<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a></p>

<p>If we may trust the confession in “The Cathedral” as personal and not
dramatic, Lowell was singularly sensitive in childhood to those subtle
stirrings of nature which give eternity to single moments, and create
impressions which are indelible but never repeated.</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“The fleeting relish at sensation’s brim<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Had in it the best ferment of the wine.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>A spring morning which witnessed the sudden miracle of regeneration; an
hour of summer, when he sat dappled with sunshine, in a cherry-tree; a
day in autumn, when the falling leaves moved as an accompaniment to his
thought; the creaking of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_18" id="page_18">{18}</a></span> the snow beneath his feet, when the familiar
world was transformed as in a vision to a polar solitude:&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Instant the candid chambers of my brain<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Were painted with these sovran images;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And later visions seem but copies pale<br /></span>
<span class="i0">From those unfading frescos of the past,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which I, young savage, in my age of flint,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Gazed at, and dimly felt a power in me<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Parted from Nature by the joy in her<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That doubtfully revealed me to myself.”<br /></span>
<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_19" id="page_19">{19}</a></span></div></div>
</div>

<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II<br /><br />
<small>SCHOOL AND COLLEGE</small><br /><br />
<small>1826-1838</small></h2>

<p><span class="smcap">The</span> outer world came early to the notice of Lowell in his garden
enclosure. “I remember,” he writes on the fourth of July, 1876, “how,
fifty years ago to-day, I, perched in a great ox-heart cherry-tree, long
ago turned to mould, saw my father come home with the news of John
Adams’s death.” Two or three journeys also carried him out into the
world in his early boyhood. He remembered going to Portsmouth in his
seventh year, for the visit was impressed on his memory by the startling
effect produced by a skeleton which he confronted when he opened a long
red chest in Dr. Brackett’s house; and it was the next year that his
father took him to Washington and carried him out to Alexandria, where
he spent some days with the Carroll family, who were connections on his
mother’s side, and whence he made an excursion to Mount Vernon. It all
came back to him fifty-nine years later when he took his grandson to the
same shrine; he went straight to the key of the Bastile and to the
honey-locusts in the garden.</p>

<p>The rambles, too, to Beaver Brook and the Waverley Oaks, in the country
within easy stroll<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_20" id="page_20">{20}</a></span> of Elmwood, were extended when he climbed into the
chaise with his father and drove off to neighboring parishes at such
times as Dr. Lowell exchanged with his brother ministers. In those
little journeys he had an opportunity to see the lingering reverence
still paid to the minister, when boys doffed their hats and girls
dropped a curtsy by the roadside as his father passed by. These
exchanges drew Dr. Lowell and his little son as far as Portsmouth on the
east and Northampton on the west. “I can conceive,” says Lowell, “of
nothing more delightful than those slow summer journeys through leafy
lanes and over the stony hills, where we always got out and walked. In
that way I think I gained a more intimate relation with what we may call
pristine New England than has fallen to the fortune of most men of my
age.”<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> Thirty years after these experiences he could give this
graphic report of the contests he was wont to witness in the village
choir:&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Sometimes two ancient men, through glasses dim,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In age’s treble deaconed off the hymn,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Paused o’er long words and then with breathless pace<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Went down a slope of short ones at a race,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">While who could sing and who could not, but would,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Rushed helter-skelter after as they could.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Well I remember how their faces shone,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Safe through some snare like <i>Re-sig-na-ti-on</i>,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And how some graceless youth would mock the tones<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of Deacon Jarvis or of Deacon Jones:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In towns ambitious of more cultured strains,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The gruff bass-viol told its inward pains<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As some enthusiast, deaf to catgut’s woe,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_21" id="page_21">{21}</a></span><br /></span>
<span class="i0">Rasped its bare nerves with torture-rosined bow;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hard-by another, with strained eyeballs set,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Blew devious discord through his clarinet,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And the one fiddle, that was wont to seek<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In secular tunes its living all the week,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Blind to the leader’s oft-repeated glance<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Mixed up the psalm-tune with a country dance.”<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>More frequent journeys were those which he and his brothers and sisters
invented for themselves by naming different parts of Elmwood after
cities of the world and spending thus with their imagination the small
geographical earnings of the schoolroom.</p>

<p>The first school which the boy attended was a dame school, which appears
to have been somewhere not far from the river in the neighborhood of
what is now Brattle Square. Once in verse and once in prose Lowell
recorded his childish experience in and out of this primary school. In
his introduction to “The Biglow Papers,” first series, is a fragment
beginning&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Propped on the marsh, a dwelling now, I see<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The humble school-house of my A, B, C;”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="nind">and in his “New England Two Centuries Ago” there is a passage often read
and quoted, which is a faithful picture of the author’s life within and
without one of the “martello towers that protect our coast,” but he does
not add the personal touch of his own return from school, whistling as
he came in sight of his home as a signal to the mother watching for him.
A bit of childish sport may be added from an omitted extract from the
same fragmentary poem, since it brings to view two of Lowell’s boy
companions:<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_22" id="page_22">{22}</a></span>&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Where Felton puns in English or in Greek,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And shakes with laughter till the timbers creak,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The ‘Idle Man’ once lived; the man I knew,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The author dwelt beyond my boyish view.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">There once, the college butler aided, too,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">My pony through his own front door he drew,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I on her back, and strove with winning airs<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To coax my shaggy Shetlander upstairs;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Rejected hospitality! the more<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He tugged in front, she backed toward the door.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Had oats been offered, she had climbed at least<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Up to the garret, canny Scottish beast.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Across the way, where once an Indian stood<br /></span>
<span class="i0">O’er Winthrop’s door, carved horribly in wood,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">On the green duck-pond’s sea, where water fails<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In droughty times, replenished then with pails,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Richard the Second from their moorings cast<br /></span>
<span class="i0">His shingle fleets, and served before the mast,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">While Ned and I consigned a well-culled store<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of choicest pebbles for the other shore.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Then walked at leisure to the antipodes,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Changing <i>en route</i> to Chinese consignees.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>Both Richard and Edmund Dana were his neighbors and friends, and with
these early playmates should be named William Story. To him, as to one
who had journeyed with him “through the green secluded valley of
boyhood,” he addressed his “Cambridge Thirty Years Ago.” Story and the
two Higginsons, Thatcher and Thomas Wentworth, were the only day
scholars with Lowell at the boarding-school, kept by Mr. William Wells,
to which Lowell was sent to be prepared for entrance to college. Mr.
Wells was an Englishman, who brought with him to this country
attainments in scholarship which were disclosed in the making of a
simple Latin grammar and in an edition of Tacitus.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_23" id="page_23">{23}</a></span> He engaged in
publishing under the firm name of Wells &amp; Lilly, but meeting with
reverses, he opened a classical school in the old Fayerweather house in
Cambridge. He was a man of robust and masterful habit, who kept up the
English tradition of the rattan in school and manly sport out of doors.
The school had its gentler side in the person of Mrs. Wells, to whom
Lowell sent a copy of “The Vision of Sir Launfal” in 1866, with the
words: “Will you please me by accepting this little book in memory of
your constant kindness to a naughty little cub of a schoolboy more than
thirty years ago? I hope you will forget his ill deserts as faithfully
as he remembers how much he owes you.”</p>

<p>It was at the hands of Mr. Wells that Lowell received that severe
drilling in Latin which was one of the traditions of English scholarship
transported to New England by the early clergy, and reënforced from time
to time by newcomers from England like Mr. Wells, elegant scholars like
Mr. Dixwell, and stern disciplinarians like Dr. Francis Gardner, the
latter two long holding the Boston Latin School fast bound to the old
ways. Mr. George Ticknor Curtis, who was sixteen years old when Lowell
was ten, at Mr. Wells’s school, in a reminiscence of that period says:
“Mr. Wells always heard a recitation with the book in his left hand and
a rattan in his right, and if the boy made a false quantity or did not
know the meaning of a word, down came the rattan on his head. But this
chastisement was never ministered to me or to ‘Jemmy Lowell.’ Not to me,
because I was too old<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_24" id="page_24">{24}</a></span> for it, and not to him because he was too young.”
With his quickness of mind and linguistic agility, Lowell evidently
acquired in school rather than in college a familiarity with Latin
forms, to judge by the ease with which he handled the language later in
mock heroics; his early letters, too, are sprinkled with Latin phrases,
the well worn coin of the realm, it is true, but always jingling in his
pocket.</p>

<p>The schoolroom to an imaginative boy is a starting point for mental
rambles. Lowell studied the rime on the window panes as well as his
Latin verses. From his readings with his elder sister, and out of his
own fertile imagination, he told or made up stories for his young
comrades. T. W. Higginson, recalling Lowell and Story, remembers
“treading close behind them once, as they discussed Spenser’s ‘Faerie
Queene,’ which they had been reading, and which led us younger boys to
christen a favorite play-place ‘the Bower of Bliss.’<span class="lftspc">”</span> Dr. Samuel Eliot,
who was one of Mr. Wells’s pupils, was also one of the small boys who
listened to Lowell’s imaginative tales. I remember nothing of them,” he
told Dr. Hale, except one, which rejoiced in the central interest of a
trap in the playground, which opened to subterranean marvels of various
kinds.”</p>

<p>“I can conceive of no healthier reading for a boy, or girl either, than
Scott’s novels,” says Lowell, and he had the good fortune to be
introduced early to Scott, and to read him as a contemporary. When he
was nine his mother gave him, one can guess with what Scottish
eagerness, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_25" id="page_25">{25}</a></span> “Tales of a Grandfather,” which had just been published;
and the then great event of American history was not so remote but that
the freckle-faced boy who lived in a house once a Tory’s, then a
soldier’s hospital, and then the home of a governor of the commonwealth
and vice-president of the United States, would have lively reminders of
it in the veterans who turned out at muster, and in the rude village
drama of the “Cornwallis.”<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a></p>

<p>Yet, as Lowell himself reminds us, the Cambridge of his boyhood, besides
possessing the common characteristics of New England towns, had its
special flavor from the presence there of the oldest college of New
England. Like the Cambridge boys of to-day, he hovered about the skirts
of Alma Mater, took in, year by year, the entertainment offered by the
college at its annual Commencement festival,&mdash;a greater raree-show then
than now,&mdash;and made the acquaintance of the queer misshapen minds that
by some occult law of nature always seem to be found in the shade of a
college town, as if the “Muses’ factories” must necessarily have their
refuse heaps not far away. A boy who grows up in a college town,
especially when the community and the town are somewhat isolated, hardly
knows the wonder and gravity which assail one who comes up to college
from a distant home. In Low<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_26" id="page_26">{26}</a></span>ell’s youth Harvard College and Cambridge
town were singularly isolated in spite of their geographical nearness to
Boston. Once an hour a long omnibus, and twice an hour a short one,
jogged back and forth between the village and the city, picking up
passengers in a leisurely fashion, and going longer or shorter distances
from the college yard, according to the importunity of the passenger or
the good-nature of the driver. An hourly stage to the city meant much
deliberation in making the journey, and Cambridge was by no means the
bedchamber for city merchants and professional men which it has since
become.</p>

<p>When Lowell entered Harvard from Mr. Wells’s school in 1834, the college
was surrounded by houses and gardens which marked almost the bounds of
the town as one went toward Boston. The college itself was within a
straggling enclosure still known by the homely name of the Yard, and
occupied seven buildings therein; the library was in Harvard Hall, for
Gore Hall was not begun till just as Lowell was graduating. The chapel
was a dignified apartment of University Hall, designed by the architect
Charles Bulfinch, who left his mark in Boston and its neighborhood upon
buildings which stand in serene reproof of much later architecture. In
the chapel also were held the academic functions, one of which,
Exhibition Day, was observed three times a year; on two of these
occasions the Governor of the Commonwealth attended, and on all of them
the President of the college in his academic dress, the Fellows, the
Overseers, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_27" id="page_27">{27}</a></span> the Faculty marched to the chapel with ceremony, there
to listen, along with an indulgent crowd of parents and friends, to the
youthful speakers, who discoursed in Latin or in English, but were
always introduced in Latin.</p>

<p>During Lowell’s college course there were only about two hundred and
twenty undergraduates, his own class entering with sixty-eight members
and graduating with sixty-five; the whole list of the faculty, including
the schools of law, divinity, and medicine, did not exceed thirty-four,
and not half of these constituted the college faculty proper. But among
them were names known then and later beyond the college enclosure.
Felton was professor of Greek, Peirce of mathematics, and Ticknor of
modern languages, to be succeeded, when Lowell was nearly through his
college course, by Longfellow. Francis Sales, graphically set off by
Lowell in his “Cambridge Thirty Years Ago,” was instructer [<i>sic</i>] in
French and Spanish, and Pietro Bachi in Italian, Spanish, and
Portuguese. The president of the college was Josiah Quincy, and when
thirty years later Lowell reviewed his friend Edmund Quincy’s life of
his father, in the article entitled “A Great Public Character,” he
referred with a fine note of sincere feeling to the association with him
which he bore away from his college days, in a passage which reflects a
little of Lowell as well as pictures the figure of the president.</p>

<p>“Mr. Quincy had many qualities calculated to win him favor with the
young,&mdash;that one above all which is sure to do it, indomitable pluck.
With<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_28" id="page_28">{28}</a></span> him the dignity was in the man, not in the office. He had some of
those little oddities, too, which afford amusement without contempt, and
which rather tend to heighten than diminish personal attachment to
superiors in station. His punctuality at prayers, and in dropping asleep
there, his forgetfulness of names, his singular inability to make even
the shortest off-hand speech to the students,&mdash;all the more singular in
a practised orator,&mdash;his occasional absorption of mind, leading him to
hand you his sand-box instead of the leave of absence he had just dried
with it, the old-fashioned courtesy of his ‘Sir, your servant,’ as he
bowed you out of his study, all tended to make him popular. He had also
a little of what is somewhat contradictorily called dry humor, not
without influence in his relations with the students. In taking leave of
the graduating class, he was in the habit of paying them whatever honest
compliment he could. Who, of a certain year which shall be nameless,
will ever forget the gravity with which he assured them that they were
‘the <i>best-dressed</i> class that had passed through college during his
administration’? How sincerely kind he was, how considerate of youthful
levity, will always be gratefully remembered by whoever had occasion to
experience it.”</p>

<p>The change from school to college, as I have intimated, was not such as
to strike very deeply into the boy’s consciousness. He continued for a
while to live at his father’s house, a mile away from the Yard, though
he had a room of his own nearer, at Mr. Hancock’s in Church Street, and
in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_29" id="page_29">{29}</a></span> latter part of his course lived there altogether. Going to
college, thus, was very much like going to school as he had always done.
The college methods were not markedly different from those of a
preparatory school. There were lessons to learn and recite; the
text-book was the rule, and the fixed curriculum suggested no break from
the ordinary course of formal instruction. Except in the senior year,
there was a steady attention to Greek, Latin, and mathematics. In the
first year Tytler’s History was studied; in the second year English
grammar and modern languages were added; in the third year, besides
Greek and Latin and modern languages, Paley’s Evidences, Butler’s
Analogy, and chemistry appeared on the list, and themes and forensics
were introduced. In the senior year the ancient languages were dropped,
and natural philosophy, intellectual philosophy, astronomy, and
political economy took their place, with lectures on rhetoric,
criticism, theology, Story on the Constitution of the United States,
mineralogy, and anatomy&mdash;a somewhat confused jumble on paper in the
catalogue of the time, which it is to be hoped was reduced to some sort
of order, though it looks as if the senior were suddenly released from
too monotonous a course and bidden take a rapid survey of a wide range
of intellectual pursuits.</p>

<p>In his school days Lowell had been under the close surveillance given to
boys, and the partial freedom of college life brought with it a little
more sense of personal rights, but throughout the four<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_30" id="page_30">{30}</a></span> years he was
boyish, frolicsome, very immature in expression, and disposed, in a
fitful fashion, to assert an independence of authority. He won a “detur”
in his sophomore year, and in a public exhibition in the first term of
his senior year he took part in a conference bearing the labored title:
“Ancient Epics, considered as Pictures of Manners, as Proofs of Genius,
or as Sources of Entertainment,” but both in his sophomore and senior
years he was at first privately and then publicly admonished for
excessive absence from recitations and for general negligence in themes,
forensics, and recitations. There was enough of the boy left in him at
the beginning of his senior year to require the fine of a dollar for
cutting seats in the recitation room; and the college discipline of the
day frowned on Lowell as on others for wearing a brown coat on Sunday.
It is difficult for one scanning the records of the faculty at that time
to avoid a feeling of commiseration for these excellent gentlemen and
scholars sitting, as if they were boarding-school masters, in serious
consultation over the pranks and petty insubordination of a parcel of
boys.</p>

<p>Meanwhile in his own fashion Lowell was stumbling on his way, gradually
finding himself. He was a reader, as we have seen, before he went to
college, and he continued to find his delight in books. “A college
training,” he once said, is an excellent thing; but after all, the
better part of every man’s education is that which he gives
himself,”<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a> and in college he was following, without<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_31" id="page_31">{31}</a></span> much reflection,
the instincts of his nature, both as regards his reading and his
writing. His letters show him a schoolboy when attending to the enforced
tasks of the college, with occasional outbreaks of enthusiasm for the
more distinctly literary studies, but somewhat of an independent voyager
when launched on the waters of general literature.</p>

<p>It was in the large leisure of his college days that he formed an
acquaintance which ripened into intimacy with the great writers and with
those secondary lights that often suit better the ordinary mood. “I was
first directed to Landor’s works,” he says, in 1888, when introducing
some letters of Landor to the readers of his own day, “by hearing how
much store Emerson set by them. I grew acquainted with them fifty years
ago in one of those arched alcoves in the old college library in Harvard
Hall, which so pleasantly secluded without wholly isolating the student.
That footsteps should pass across the mouth of his Aladdin’s Cave, or
even enter it in search of treasure, so far from disturbing only
deepened his sense of possession. These faint rumors of the world he had
left served but as a pleasant reminder that he was the privileged
denizen of another beyond ‘the flaming bounds of space and time.’ There,
with my book lying at ease and in the expansion of intimacy on the broad
window-shelf, shifting my cell from north to south with the season, I
made friendships, that have lasted me for life, with Dodsley’s ‘Old
Plays,’ with Cotton’s ‘Montaigne,’ with Hak<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_32" id="page_32">{32}</a></span>luyt’s ‘Voyages,’ among
others that were not in my father’s library. It was the merest browsing,
no doubt, as Johnson called it, but how delightful it was!”<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a></p>

<p>The record of books withdrawn by Lowell from the college library during
his four years’ residence would of course furnish a very incomplete
account of his reading, since, as intimated above, he had his father’s
well-stocked shelves, and access apparently to the alcoves of Harvard
Hall. The record, nevertheless, is interesting as showing the range and
the drift of his reading. Some of this reading is ancillary to his task
work, but much is simply the gratification of an expanding taste, and
covers such diverse works as Terence, Hume, the Anthologia Græca,
Smollett, Hakluyt, Boileau, Scott, and Southey. It is noticeable that as
his college course proceeded the emphasis was laid on the greater
English literature.</p>

<p>Nor was he without the excellent ambition to collect a library of his
own. “It is just fifty-one years ago,” he said 7 May, 1885, when
unveiling the bust of Coleridge in Westminster Abbey, “that I became the
possessor of an American reprint of Galignani’s edition of Coleridge,
Shelley, and Keats in one volume. It was a pirated book, and I trust I
may be pardoned for the delight I had in it.”<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a> His letters to his
college friends during these years contain frequent references to the
purchases of books he had made and the gifts<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_33" id="page_33">{33}</a></span> from his family which he
prized. He has been given a beautiful edition of Milton, which he had
looked forward to buying; he has been purchasing Samuel Butler and
Beattie; a new edition of Shakespeare has been announced, which he means
to buy if he can afford it; he has had a “detur” of Akenside; he has
laid his hands on a “very pretty edition of Cowper;” and his frequent
quotations from the poets show the easy familiarity he had won in his
reading.</p>

<p>Besides his continued friendship with Story and other neighbors’ sons,
Lowell formed new alliances among his college mates, and in his
correspondence with two of them in this period he discloses something of
his character and tastes. One of these friends, W. H. Shackford, was his
senior by two or three years, and Lowell’s letters to him show the boy’s
side turned toward one whom he regarded with the friendly reverence
which sixteen pays to nineteen. On his part, Shackford seems to have
taken a violent fancy to Lowell, to have made indeed the first overtures
of friendship. To this sager companion, who was a senior when Lowell was
a freshman, he reveals his more studious side. Shackford left college to
teach at Phillips Exeter Academy, and Lowell wrote to him from Cambridge
and Boston, not much in the way of college gossip, but of his own
studies, the treasures he picked up at book-stores or auctions, his
plans for reading and travel, and brief comments on his instructors.
Through the correspondence runs an affectionate current, an almost
lover-like<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_34" id="page_34">{34}</a></span> tone of self-exculpation, the warm feeling of a boy toward
his mentor, and an impulse to make him somewhat of a confessor.<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a></p>

<p>The earliest of these letters was written in the middle of July, 1835,
when Shackford had gone to Portsmouth. It was a hasty shot fired after
his departing friend to assure him of his affection, written under
stress of headache from his brother’s office, and was followed the same
day by a longer letter. “When I wrote to you this morning,” he says, “I
was laboring under three very bad complaints enumerated in my other
letter. I was then at my brother’s office. I am now at home, sitting by
an open window, with my coat off, my stock do., with Coleridge’s works
before me wherewith to consume the rest of the day, and also as cool as
a cucumber. Shack, if you are a victim to any <i>other</i> disease, and are
lying tossing with pain under some physician’s prescription (such, for
instance, as the pleasing draught concocted by Wm. Rufus, or the Red
King, composed of the following truly delectable compounds, viz., ‘rue,
tansy, horehound, coltsfoot, hyssop, and camomile flowers, farther
enriched by a handful of earthworms, half a dozen wood lice and four
centipedes’), if, I say, you labor under all these misfortunes, devoutly
thank your more fav’ring stars, that you are not the yawning victim of
ennui, a disease which Æsculapius himself couldn’t cure, and which I
therefore humbly opine to have been the disease of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_35" id="page_35">{35}</a></span> Achilles.... I hope
you’ll be amused with this epistle (if perchance you are able to read
it). But the fact is I can’t write anything serious to save my life.
Answer this the very day you get it....”</p>

<p>At the end of the summer when more letters had passed between them,
Lowell returned to his college work, and wrote from Cambridge a long
letter dated 9 October, 1835, in reply to one long delayed. “My
<i>dearest</i> friend,” he writes, “I am rejoiced that you <i>have</i> broken the
long silence that existed between us, not because I should not have
written to you first, but because it shows that you were not grievously
offended with me. I willingly confess myself to blame, but not in so
great a degree as you may suppose. I <i>did</i> go to the White Mountains,
and while travelling was not offended (do not use any stronger term) by
not receiving any letters from you; on the contrary I expected none, for
how could you have any knowledge of my ‘whereabouts’ unless I wrote to
you as I went along and told you where to direct? This I did not do, nor
did I write any letters on my journey except one which I was obliged to
write to Bob because I <i>promised</i> him I would. After I got home I was
taken sick and kept my bed a week without being able to sleep most of
the time on account of a raging sick headache which hardly allowed me to
move. The day I saw you was the third time I had been out. I did go
down, however, three times to see you, but could not find you, or saw
you walking with somebody I did not know, and then I did not like to
speak to you. Did you or could you think<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_36" id="page_36">{36}</a></span> that I would forfeit your
friendship, the most precious (because I believe it to be the truest) I
ever enjoyed, because you did not find it convenient to write to me? I
hope you will not think that I say all this because I am <i>ashamed</i> to
treat you coldly, or not to answer you. I am sure of one thing, that I
have no such opinion of you. Your letter, Shack, was a <i>delight</i> to me
(though I am not ashamed to confess that it [made] me cry)....</p>

<p>“I like Prof. Channing very much indeed, inasmuch as I sit where I can
see his marks, and he has given me an 8 every recitation this term
except once, and then he gave me 7. I went up to ask him something so as
to see whether I was not mistaken (as he makes a 6 something like his
8’s) and I found on the paper exactly what I expected. I have written
one theme and got but two marks on the margin, one for a change required
in the sentence, and another was a straight line drawn under the word
‘to,’ and also marked on the margin. Tell me whether you think this is
good, as you have experienced. I study quite hard this term. I get on in
German astonishingly; it comes quite easy to me now.... I have written
the longest letter I ever wrote in my life. I translated an ode of
Horace into poetry the other day, and it was pretty good. Mathematics
are my only enemies now.... I hope I may subscribe myself your <i>dear</i>
friend.”</p>

<p>A month later he writes his friend a lively account of a town and gown
row, and notes his progress in reading Shakespeare. “I was sur<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_37" id="page_37">{37}</a></span>prised on
looking over Shakespeare to find that I had read all his plays but two
or three, among them ‘Hamlet.’ Only think, I haven’t read Hamlet.’ I
will go at it instanter.”</p>

<p>At the beginning of 1836, on returning to college after the holidays, he
writes with a boyish bibliomaniac enthusiasm of the Milton and Coleridge
which had been given him, and passes into comment on the books he is
reading and those he means to buy. He grows more literary and political
in the subjects of his letters, disclosing already not only a warm
interest in public affairs, but a generous judgment. “I suppose you
heard of the Seminoles massacring, as it is called, those companies of
American troops. I think they are in the right of it; by ‘they’ I mean
the Seminoles. Not much danger of war with France now.” Then follows an
odd jumble of frank confessions of his likes and dislikes for his
fellows, and his boyish passions, with a return to his hunt for books in
special editions.</p>

<p>His letter of 22 April, 1836, is taken up with a long discussion in a
semi-philological vein of love and friendship, but what would strike a
reader of these letters most is the distinct change which now takes
place in the handwriting, which has passed from a not always neat
copy-book hand to one which suggests the delicacy of the hand he
afterward wrote, though not its elegance; it is still constrained with
the air of being the result of close attention. These gradual changes in
style of handwriting rarely fail to mark a maturing of character,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_38" id="page_38">{38}</a></span> and
it is interesting to observe, in Lowell’s case, how they register a long
period of vacillation and immaturity.</p>

<p>There is a gap of nearly a year in this correspondence as preserved, and
the next letter, under date of 26 February, 1837, is filled with
extracts from a long poem he is writing, in Spenserian stanza, and even
occasionally with a word borrowed from Spenser; but the spirit that
stirs the lines is Campbell. The theme is an imaginary journey up the
Hudson, and West Point suggests the two stanzas:</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“Follow this narrow path to where the grass<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Grows fresher on yon gently-rising mound,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">To that lone brook, whose ripples as they pass<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Spread to the air a sleep-compelling sound;<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Here, Poland’s hero erst a refuge found.<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Go ask whose good right arm hurl’d back the slave,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">When Russia’s eagle o’er his country frown’d,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Who led her little band of patriots brave;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And weeping Freedom points to Kosciusko’s grave.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i1">“Spirit of Freedom! who didst erst inspire<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Our nation ground beneath oppression’s sway,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">With trust in God, with thine own holy fire;<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Who nerv’dst the mother fond to send away<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Her first-born boy to brave the bloody fray,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Bid him farewell, with full averted eyes,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Ne ask, though longing, for a moment’s stay,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Still hover o’er us, if thou didst not rise<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With Washington’s pure spirit to thy native skies!”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>The other correspondent whose letters from Lowell are preserved was
George Bailey Loring, a boy of his own age, the son of a clergyman who
was Dr. Lowell’s friend, so that the friendship partook of an hereditary
character; with him Lowell<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_39" id="page_39">{39}</a></span> had frank intimacy during their college days
and in the years immediately following. Their ways in life separated,
and they had less community of interests and tastes when they came to
manhood. Dr. Loring went early into public life and held various
offices, being Commissioner of Agriculture at one time and at another
United States Minister to Portugal.</p>

<p>In this fuller series of letters which is largely contained in Mr.
Norton’s two volumes, Lowell is the frank, unformed boy, giving vent to
nonsense, a lad’s hasty impulse, and the foolery which goes on in the
name of sentiment. The equality of age created a different relation
between them from that which Lowell bore to Shackford, and the
familiarity of their intercourse called out all manner of intellectual
pranks and youthful persiflage. The jingle and lively verses which
Lowell threw out for the amusement of his comrade show him playing
carelessly with the instrument which he was already beginning to
discover as fitting his hand.</p>

<p>Lowell’s unaffected interest in boyish things is much more apparent in
these random letters than in the more careful epistles to his older
friend, though he is by no means silent on the side of his intellectual
life. In his first letter, dated 23 July, 1836, he talks about the
things that two college boys have on their minds at the beginning of
vacation. “You must excuse me if this be not a very long or entertaining
epistle, as I am writing from my brother’s office (with a very bad pen)
in a great hurry. I shall not go to Canada and shall<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_40" id="page_40">{40}</a></span> not start for
P[ortsmouth] probably for three weeks. My circular came on last night,
14 prayers, <i>56</i> recitations, whew! The class supper was glorious,
toasts went off very well. Those about Parker and the Temperance Society
were most applauded. I am going to join the ‘Anti-Wine’ I think. The
‘Good Schooner Susan, R. T. S. L. owner and master,’ will make an
excursion to Nahant this day. <i>Distinguished</i> Passenger etc. We shall go
to church at Nahant Sunday and return Monday morning. By the way I ‘made
up’ with &mdash;&mdash; and &mdash;&mdash; at the supper. I had a seat <i>reserved</i> (!) for me
(as an officer) on the right hand of the distinguished president (?) A
prettier table I never saw.”</p>

<p>The letters to his college friends were naturally written mainly in
vacation time, and in Christmas week of the same year, 1836, he writes:
“I am going to a ball to-night at the house of a young lady whom I never
heard of.... I’ve begun and written about forty lines of my H. P. C.<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a>
prœmium. I shall immortalize I&mdash;&mdash;k W&mdash;&mdash;. I extol him to the skies and
<i>pari passu</i> depreciate myself.” He went to the ball, and a few days
later wrote: “I think I told you I was going to a party or ball (call it
what you will): well, I went, made my bow, danced, talked nonsense with
young ladies who could talk nothing but nonsense, grew heartily tired
and came away. I saw a great many people<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_41" id="page_41">{41}</a></span> make fools of themselves, and
charitably took it for granted that I did the same.... I may add
something in the morning, so no more from your aching headed and perhaps
splenetic, but still affectionate friend, J. R. L.”</p>

<p>In these letters Lowell twits his friend with his attentions to girls,
and intersperses his jibes with poor verses; he has become a zealous
autograph hunter, and the letters he laid his hands on in his father’s
house from home and foreign notabilities illustrate the wide connections
of the family, and the part it had had in the great world. In the midst
of it all he will burst forth into almost passionate expression of his
love for nature and his strong attachment to his birthplace and its
neighborhood; and again quote freely from the books he is reading, and
tell of the progress he is making in his more serious poetical ventures,
and the books he is adding to his library. He made no boast of immunity
when he laughed at his friend for too much susceptibility. Here is a
passage from a letter written in the summer of 1837, when he was closing
his junior year:&mdash;</p>

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

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i11">‘prize<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Above almost, I don’t know what, on earth’<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="nind">could make a day glorious. Excuse me for quoting my own nonsense, but
’twas more apt than anything I could think of.... Imagine yourself by
the side of a young lady the perfection of beauty, virtue, modesty,
etc., etc., in whom you<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_42" id="page_42">{42}</a></span> entertain a pleasing interest, and you may form
a ‘faint imagining’ of my situation. I am not calm yet. In fact, every
time I think of her eyes&mdash;those eyes! Guido never could have conceived
her. Well, a truce with all recollections when there is no hope.”</p>

<p>A month later he gave a brief account of Commencement to his friend, and
then speaks of a letter his brother Rob had received from their sister,
then in Glasgow. Lowell’s father, mother, and sister Rebecca went to
Europe early in the summer of 1837. They were gone three years, and
during that time the young collegian found in his brother Charles his
nearest friend and adviser; his house indeed was the student’s home when
he was not in college, and his wife was the best of sisters to him. Mrs.
Anna Cabot Lowell was herself a woman of fine culture and of unwonted
intellectual power. At a later period than this she opened a school for
girls, which is looked upon by many now in mature life with warm
gratitude. She edited a choice collection of poems for the reading of
schoolgirls, and compiled also a little volume of suggestive thoughts
called “Seed Grain.” Dr. Lowell, meanwhile, parted from his son with
parental solicitude, and wrote him on the eve of sailing a letter which
is quaintly expressive of his own ingenuous nature and of the simplicity
of the day, and slightly indicative of his son’s weaknesses as they
appeared to a father’s eyes:<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_43" id="page_43">{43}</a></span>&mdash;</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p class="r">
<span class="smcap">New York</span>, May 29th, 1837.<br />
</p>

<p><span class="smcap">My dear Son</span>,&mdash;I wish you to write us once a month, making an
arrangement with Robert not to write at the same time he does. You
know the necessity for economy, and you know that I shall never
deny you, but from necessity, what will afford you pleasure. I
shall direct Charles to pay you half a dollar a week. If you are
one of the first eight admitted to the Φ Β Κ, $1.00 per week, as
soon as you are admitted. If you are not, to pay you 75 cents per
week as soon as you are admitted. If I find my finances will allow
it, I shall buy you something abroad. If you graduate one of the
first five in your class, I shall give you $100 on your graduation.
If one of the first ten, $75. If one of the first twelve, $50. If
the first or second scholar, $200. If you do not miss any exercises
unexcused, you shall have Bryant’s ‘Mythology,’ or any book of
equal value, unless it is one I may specially want.</p>

<p>My dear child, I wish you only to be faithful to yourself. You can
easily be a fine scholar, and therefore in naming the smallest sum
for your weekly expenses, I feel no hesitation, as it depends on
yourself, with very little exertion, to secure the second highest
sum, and with not more exertion than is perfectly compatible with
health and sufficient recreation to secure the largest. <i>Use
regular exercise. Associate with those who will exert the best
influence upon you.</i> Say your prayers and read your Bible <i>every
day</i>. I trust you have made up all your exercises. <i>If not, make
them up<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_44" id="page_44">{44}</a></span> in one week</i>, and let the president know it. Do not get
anything charged except with Charles’s knowledge and approbation. I
have given him instructions respecting your expenses....</p>

<p class="r">
Your affectionate father.<br />
</p></div>

<p>Dr. Lowell wrote many letters home and recounted the pleasant
experiences of the little party in Scotland and England, their
foregathering with the Traill family, and the visits they paid to
Wordsworth, Southey, Sir David Brewster, and others. But he does not
forget to continue his admonitions and encouragements, as he receives
his son’s reports of his doings. “Your office,” he writes from London,
13 December, 1837, “as one of the editors of the ‘Harvardiana’ may give
you a greater familiarity in composition. Be careful that it does not
abstract you from severer pursuits, and that your style is not trifling,
but the subject and the manner useful and dignified. I do not allow
myself to doubt of your furnishing the criterion of good standing which
a membership of the Φ Β Κ will furnish, and I trust you will leave
college with a high part and a high reputation.</p>

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

<p><i>Harvardiana</i>, to which Dr. Lowell refers, was the college magazine of
the day, started just as Lowell entered college, and naturally inviting
a scribbler like Lowell to become one of the editors when his senior
year came round. His associates<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_45" id="page_45">{45}</a></span> were Rufus King, who later attained a
leading position in the bar of Cincinnati, and wrote “Ohio” in the
<i>American Commonwealths</i> series; George Warren Lippitt, afterward for a
long time secretary of legation at Vienna; Charles Woodman Scates, a
South Carolinian lawyer of great promise, who died young, and Nathan
Hale, an older brother of Dr. Edward Everett Hale, and later a strong
figure in Boston journalism. Lowell contributed twenty-four pieces in
prose and verse, translations from the German, a bit of moralizing in
the minor key which youth likes to pursue, some fierce sardonic verses,
some sentiment, and then a mockery of sentiment. For the most part his
contributions are the “larks” of students given to literature. With his
associates he followed the example set by <i>Blackwood</i>, and imitated by
the <i>Knickerbocker</i> and similar magazines, aiming at the sauciness and
jocularity which were assumed to be the ordinary temper of editors
gathered about their table, whereas in actual experience such editors
are painfully at their wits’ end. What most strikes one in these varied
contributions is the apparent facility with which everything is thrown
off, sense and nonsense coming with equal ease, but nonsense
predominating.</p>

<p>Lowell’s letters to his friends in his last year at college have
frequent reference to his willing and unwilling labors on this
“perryodical,” as he was wont to call it in mimicry of Dr. Walker. In
August, 1837, he sends Shackford a circular inviting subscriptions to
<i>Harvardiana</i>, and on the blank<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_46" id="page_46">{46}</a></span> leaf writes one of the imitative
letters in verse, for which he had a penchant at this time:&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Dear Shack, a circular I send ye<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The which I hope will not offend ye;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">If sae, ’t wad tak’ Auld Nick to mend ye<br /></span>
<span class="i4">O’ sic an ill<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But, gin ye are as when I kenn’d ye<br /></span>
<span class="i4">It never will!<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Gin ye could get ae body’s name<br /></span>
<span class="i0">’T wad add forever to his fame<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To help to kindle up the flame<br /></span>
<span class="i3">O’ sic a journal,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whose reputation, though quite lame,<br /></span>
<span class="i3"><i>Will</i> be eternal.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Now if ye do your vera best<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In this waist glorious behest,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By gettin’ names and a’ the rest<br /></span>
<span class="i4">I need na tell<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Yese thus fulfil the airn’st request<br /></span>
<span class="i4">O’ J. R. L.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>“King has been up here,” he writes from Elmwood, 22 December, 1837, “for
an article for the ‘Perry,’ but was unsuccessful in the attempt. The
fact is, it is impossible to read Lockhart’s ‘Life of Scott’ and attend
to my illustrious nephew, ‘the corporal,’ who is a very prototype of
Jack Falstaff, and write an article which requires such deep study and
abstraction.”</p>

<p>The magazine was a part of that spontaneous literary activity which is
pretty sure to find vent in college life outside of the class room, in
independent reading, in societies sometimes secret, sometimes public,
and in weekly, monthly, or quarterly journals. Lowell, with his growing
consciousness<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_47" id="page_47">{47}</a></span> of literary faculty and his naturally vagarious impulses,
turned aside from the set tasks of college, as we have seen, and allowed
himself to be indifferent to the routine imposed by college regulations.
There are always men in college who undertake to be independent while
living in it; sometimes the instinct is wise, sometimes it is merely the
impulse of an indolent or conceited nature, but college authorities,
like most constitutional governors, are bound to take more account of
law than arbitrary and irresponsible rulers are, and their severity
falls indiscriminately on the just and unjust. Lowell had made himself
amenable to discipline on this score, but he might have escaped with
reprimands only, had he not committed a breach of propriety in chapel
which could not be overlooked. Such, at least, is the recollection of
one of his college mates writing long afterward to Mr. T. W. Higginson,
who prints his letter in “Old Cambridge.”</p>

<p>The circumstantial account given in this letter has a plausible air, and
may be wholly true, but if so, it was probably the final occasion rather
than the cause of Lowell’s suspension. The record of the Faculty is
somewhat more general in its explanation. “25 June, 1838. Voted that
Lowell, senior, on account of continued neglect of his college duties be
suspended till the Saturday before Commencement, to pursue his studies
with Mr. Frost of Concord, to recite to him twice a day, reviewing the
whole of Locke’s ‘Essay’ [On the Human Understanding], and studying also
Mackintosh’s ‘Review of Ethical Philosophy,’ to be<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_48" id="page_48">{48}</a></span> examined in both on
his return, and not to visit Cambridge during the period of his
suspension.”</p>

<p>Lowell seems to have taken his exile philosophically. The fact that he
would not be able to read the class poem he had been chosen to give did
not prevent him from writing it, and the isolation of his life gave him
plenty of time for working at it. The mild discipline of “rustication”
included, as the record shows, the requisite amount of study, and
Concord, to which he was sent for a couple of months of study and
reflection, was only fifteen miles from Cambridge. The Rev. Barzillai
Frost, to whose oversight he was committed and with whom he lodged, was
a young man, recently graduated from the Harvard Divinity School, and
Mrs. Frost endeared herself to the young culprit by her affectionate
care. In a speech which Lowell made at Concord, on the celebration of
the 250th anniversary of the founding of the town, he introduced this
slight reminiscence of his work with Mr. Frost:&mdash;</p>

<p>“In rising to-day I could not help being reminded of one of my
adventures with my excellent tutor when I was in Concord. I was obliged
to read with him ‘Locke on the Human Understanding.’ My tutor was a
great admirer of Locke, and thought he was the greatest Englishman that
ever lived, and nothing pleased him more, consequently, than now and
then to cross swords with Locke in argument. I was not slow, you may
imagine, to encourage him in this laudable enterprise. Whenever a
question arose between my<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_49" id="page_49">{49}</a></span> tutor and Locke, I always took Locke’s side.
I remember on one occasion, although I cannot now recall the exact
passage in Locke,&mdash;it was something about continuity of ideas,&mdash;my
excellent tutor told me that in that case Locke was quite mistaken in
his views. My tutor said: ‘For instance, Locke says that the mind is
never without an idea; now I am conscious frequently that my mind is
without any idea at all.’ And I must confess that that anecdote came
vividly to my mind when I got up on what Judge Hoar has justly
characterized as the most important part of an orator’s person.”</p>

<p>Lowell knew something of Emerson when he went to Concord. His letters
show him before that time going to hear him lecture in Boston, and years
afterward he recalled with fervor the impression made upon him by
Emerson’s address before the Φ Β Κ in Lowell’s junior year. It “was an
event,” he says, “without any former parallel in our literary annals, a
scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and
its inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows
clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim
silence of foregone dissent! It was our Yankee version of a lecture by
Abelard, our Harvard parallel to the last public appearance of
Schelling.”[20] But in 1838 Emerson had published little, his fame
resting mainly on his public lectures and addresses. In the address at
Concord, quoted above, Lowell re<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_50" id="page_50">{50}</a></span>cords a memory of the personal
relations which he then established with the elder poet:&mdash;</p>

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

<p>Lowell formed at Concord the friendship which lasted for life with E. R.
Hoar, and the lady who was to be Judge Hoar’s wife. These two indeed
seemed to be excepted in his mind from the Concord people whom he met.
He was plainly, as his letters show, in a restless mood, dissatisfied
with himself, going through his appointed tasks with the obedience which
was habitual, and writing, as the impulse took him, on his Class Poem,
but moody, irritable, and chafing at the bonds which held him. There was
the uncomfortable consciousness of serving out his time at Concord for a
momentary jest, but there was also the profounder<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_51" id="page_51">{51}</a></span> unrest which came
from the friction of discipline with the awakening of powers not yet
fully understood or determined. A few passages from his letters to G. B.
Loring will partially disclose the way he tossed himself about.</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p class="r">
July 1, 1838.<br />
</p>

<p>You mustn’t expect so long a letter from me as the one you favored
me with (and I hope sincerely you’ll favor me with many more such
(for nothing is more pleasant to me than a friend’s letters)
(except himself) (there, I have got into one of my parentheses,
which I can’t help to save my life&mdash;damnation! I’m only making the
matter worse! so I’ll begin again.... This appears to be a pretty
decent sort of a place&mdash;but I’ve no patience talking about. I shall
fly into a passion on paper, and then&mdash;as Hamlet says&mdash;then what?
You can’t guess, now you know you can’t! Why, I should be apt to
“tear my passion to tatters.” Pretty good, eh! for an un-Sheridanic
one? Well, as I was saying, the poem hasn’t progressed (they say
that’s a Yankee word; it’s a damned good word, as most Yankee
things are) a line since I left the shades of Alma Mater. I want
the spirit up here, I want</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">‘Mine ancient chair, whose wide embracing arms,’ etc.<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="nind">I shall take to smoking again for very spite. The only time I have
felt the flow of song was when I heard the bull-frogs in the river
last night....</p>

<p>I shall do my best to please Mr. F. since I find he does his best
to please me and make me com<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_52" id="page_52">{52}</a></span>fortable; “that’s the ground I stand
on.” I feel in a shocking humor, that is, not grouty (I’m not such
a damned fool; no offence I hope), but cursed queer. I damn
Concord, and as the man in a story I read somewhere who was shot in
a duel pathetically exclaimed in his last struggle, I&mdash;“damn
everything.”... I have written you more than I intended, have two
more to write to-night, and 50 pages in MacIntosh.... Don’t for
heaven’s sake think I write in such a hurry from affectation. I
wish with all my heart it were so. </p></div>

<div class="blockquot"><p class="r">
July 8.<br />
</p>

<p>... I don’t know that I shan’t get gloomy up here, and be obliged,
like the gallant old Sir Hudibras’s sword,</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“To eat into myself, for lack<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of something else to cut and hack.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="nind">Everybody almost is calling me indolent,”<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a> “blind, dependent on
my own powers” and “on <span class="pagenum"><a name="page_53" id="page_53">{53}</a></span>fate.”... I acknowledge that I have been
something of a dreamer and have sacrificed perchance too
assiduously on that altar to the “unknown God,” which the Divinity
has builded not with hands in the bosom of every decent man,
sometimes blazing out clear with flame (like Abel’s sacrifice)
heaven seeking, sometimes smothered with green wood and earthward
like that of Cain. Lazy, quotha! I haven’t dug, ’tis true, but I
have done as well, and “since my free soul was mistress of her
choice and could of books distinguish her election,” I have chosen
what reading I pleased and what friends I pleased, sometimes
scholars and sometimes not.... </p></div>

<div class="blockquot"><p class="r">
July 12.<br />
</p>

<p>For the Campbell I trust I needn’t let my thanks stare me in the
face, so I shall leave you to put yourself in my place and imagine
them. If you see Scates tell him to write, or I
shall&mdash;excommunicate, or something dreadful. If you happen to go
down by the bath house I wish you would take a look after the skiff
and write me about it. Because perhaps I might come down to the
Supper in a wagon and bring it up; at any rate, there will be
nobody there to take care of it when you leave (or rather to lay
claim to it), and it may be lost, for which I should be sorry, for
I hope to have considerable navigation out of her yet. </p></div>

<div class="blockquot"><p class="r">
August 9.<br />
</p>

<p>I shall be free as a bird in a fortnight, and ’twill be the last
Concord will ever see of me I fancy.... I am again in doubt whether
to have my “Poem” printed or no. I haven’t written a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_54" id="page_54">{54}</a></span> line since I
have been in this horrible place. I feel as queer as a woman does
probably (unmarried of course) when she finds herself in what Dante
calls “mezzo cammin del nostro vita.”... I’m homesick and all that
sort of thing. Miss &mdash;&mdash; being the only being I have actually
sympathized with since I have been in Concord has made me feel like
a fool. I must go down and see Emerson, and if he doesn’t make me
feel <i>more</i> like a fool it won’t be for want of sympathy <i>in that
respect</i>. He is a good-natured man, in spite of his doctrines. He
travelled all the way up from his house to bring me a book which
had been sent to me <i>via</i> him. </p></div>

<div class="blockquot"><p class="r">
August 17.<br />
</p>

<p>The first eight pages of the “Poem” are probably printed by this
time, and the proof on its winding way, as Charlie Foster would say
to me. I wrote to the President requesting him to let me go home
to-morrow, but haven’t yet received any answer, and doubt much
whether I ever shall.</p>

<p>I don’t know what to do with Miss &mdash;&mdash;. She runs in my head and
heart more than she has any right to, but then</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">A pair of black eyes<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Of a charming size<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And a lip so prettily curled, O!<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Are enough to capsize<br /></span>
<span class="i2">The intention wise<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of any man in the world, O!<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">For a pretty smile<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Is a mighty wile<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For a heart, for a heart that is light, O!<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_55" id="page_55">{55}</a></span><br /></span>
<span class="i2">And a girl like a dove<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Makes a man fall in love,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Though he knows that it isn’t right, O!<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">For love is a thing<br /></span>
<span class="i2">That will quit the lonely king<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To make sunny the cot of the peasant, O!<br /></span>
<span class="i2">And it folds its gauzy wing&mdash;<br /></span>
<span class="i2">In short&mdash;it is a thing&mdash;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">’Tis a thing&mdash;that is deuced pleasant, O!<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">Oh a gentle heart<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Is the better part<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of a lovely woman’s looks, O!<br /></span>
<span class="i2">And I totter on the brink<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Of love when I think,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When I think, when I think of Miss B&mdash;&mdash;, O!<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">For a thousand girls<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Have hair that curls,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And a sort of expressive face, O!<br /></span>
<span class="i2">But it isn’t the hair<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Nor the genteel air&mdash;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">’Tis the heart that looks bright and gives grace, O!<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">Ay, lasses are many<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Without e’en a penny,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But with hearts worth their weight in gold, O!<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Whom I’d sooner wed&mdash;<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Yea, and sooner bed<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Than a princess rich, ugly, and old, O!<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="i2">No bee e’er sucked honey<br /></span>
<span class="i2">From gold or silver money,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But he does from the lovely flower, O!<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Then give me a spouse<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Without fortune, land, or house,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And her charming self for a dower, O!<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="nind">By Jove, I like that better than anything I’ve written for two
years! I wrote it <i>con amore</i> and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_56" id="page_56">{56}</a></span> <i>currente calamo</i>. ’Tis yours
now, but by your leave I’ll copy it off, alter it a little and send
it down as “a song” for <i>Harvardiana</i>, for which I protested I
would write nothing O! Why, it’s good! It sings itself! I don’t
think I shall alter anything but Miss B.’s name, for it ran off the
end of my pen so that it must be better than I can make it. Why, I
<i>like</i> it, I do. There isn’t anything good in it either, except in
the last passage. It has really put me in good spirits. Between
Sunday and Wednesday I added about 250 lines to the “Poem.” It is
not finished yet. I wish it were. </p></div>

<p>The Class Poem, which he printed since he was not permitted to be
present at his class celebration, when he would have read it, is a
somewhat haphazard performance, as Lowell intimates in his letters. He
says naïvely in one of the notes to the poem, of which there is a
liberal supply in an appendix, that he suddenly discovered his subject
after he had begun writing, by happening to refer in an off hand way to
Kant.</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Kant, happy name! change but the K to C,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And I will wring my poem out of thee.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thanks, vast Immanuel! thy name has given<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The thing for which my brains so long have striven.<br /></span>
<span class="i8dt">. . . . . . . .<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Cant be my theme, and when she fails my song,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Her sister Humbug shall the lay prolong.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>The satire of a young collegian is apt to be pretty severe, and Lowell
runs amuck of Carlyle, Emerson, the Abolitionists, the advocates of
Wo<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_57" id="page_57">{57}</a></span>man’s Rights, and the Teetotallers. For the most part the poem runs
along glibly in the decasyllabic verse so handy to familiar poetry, and
though there are many lame lines, there are more instances of the clever
distichs which Lowell knocked off so easily in later years than one
would have guessed from the examples of his verse which appear in his
early letters. Here, for example, are some of his lines on Carlyle:&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Hail too, great drummer in the mental march,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Teufelsdröckh! worthy a triumphal arch,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Who send’st forth prose encumbered with jackboots,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To hobble round and pick up raw recruits,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, able both to battle and to teach,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Mountest thy silent kettledrum to preach.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Great conqueror of the English language, hail!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">How Caledonia’s goddess must turn pale<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To hear the German-Græco-Latin flung<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In <i>Revolutions</i> from a Scottish tongue!”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>In the more serious and practical part of the poem there is an
impassioned burst imitative of Campbell, in which he imagines the
farewell words of the Cherokee Indians, who at this time, to his
indignation, were being pushed westward from Georgia.</p>

<p>To the debit of his youthful zeal may be set down the lines on Emerson
which were his footnote to the famous address to the Divinity School
delivered 15 July, 1838:&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Woe for Religion, too, when men, who claim<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To place a ‘Reverend’ before their name,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Ascend the Lord’s own holy place to preach<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In strains that Kneeland had been proud to reach,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And which, if measured by Judge Thacher’s scale,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_58" id="page_58">{58}</a></span><br /></span>
<span class="i0">Had doomed their author to the county jail!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When men just girding for the holy strife,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Their hands just cleansed to break the bread of life,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whose souls, made whole, should never count it loss<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With their own blood to witness for the cross,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Invite a man their Christian zeal to crown<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By preaching earnestly the gospel-down,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Applaud him when he calls of earthly make<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That <span class="smcap">One</span> who spake as never yet man spake,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And tamely hear the anointed Son of God<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Made like themselves an animated clod!”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>To the credit of his manliness may be set down, <i>per contra</i>, the
following letter which he wrote after the publication of the poem: a
letter, which, for all its boyish assumption of the <i>toga virilis</i>, has
a ring of sincerity about it:&mdash;</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p class="r">
<span class="smcap">Cambridge</span>, Sept. 1st, 1838.<br />
</p>

<p><span class="smcap">Dear Sir</span>,&mdash;In my class poem are a few lines about your “address.”
My friends have expressed surprise that after I had enjoyed your
hospitality and spoken so highly of you in private, I should have
been so ‘ungrateful’ as ever to have written anything of the kind.
Could I have ever dreamed that a man’s private character should
interfere with his public relations, I had never blotted paper so
illy. But I really thought that I was doing rightly, for I consider
it as virtual a lie to hold one’s tongue as to speak an untruth. I
should have written the same of my own brother. Now, sir, I trouble
you with this letter because I think you a man who would think
nowise the worse of me for holding up my head and speaking the
truth at any sacrifice. That I could wilfully malign a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_59" id="page_59">{59}</a></span> man whose
salt I had eaten, and whose little child I had danced on my
knee,&mdash;he must be a small man who would believe so small a thing of
his fellow.</p>

<p>But this word “ingratitude” is a very harsh and grating word, and
one which I hope would never be laid to my charge since I stood at
my mother’s knee and learnt the first very alphabet, as it were, of
goodness. I hope that if you have leisure, sir, you will answer
this letter and put me at rest. I hope you will <i>acquit</i> me (for I
do not still think there is aught to <i>forgive</i> or <i>pardon</i>, and I
trust <i>you</i> will not after reading this letter) of all
uncharitableness.</p>

<p>Of course no one can feel it as strongly as I do, for since my
friends have hinted at this “ingratitude” I have felt a great deal,
and scarcely dare to look at the Tennyson you lent me without
expecting some of the devils on the cover to make faces at me.</p>

<p>I hope you will find time to answer this and that I may still enjoy
your friendship and be able to take you by the hand and look you in
the face, as honest man should to honest man.</p>

<p class="r">
I remain yours with respect,<br />
<span class="smcap">James Russell Lowell</span>.<br />
</p>

<p>P. S. I have sent with this a copy of my “poem”&mdash;if it be not too
tiresome, you would perhaps think better of me, if you were to read
it <i>through</i>. I am not silly enough to suppose that this can be of
any importance to you (if, indeed,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_60" id="page_60">{60}</a></span> you ever heard of the passage I
refer to), but it is of very great importance to me.</p>

<p class="r">
J. R. L.<br />
</p></div>

<p>Lowell’s own comment on the poem years after was in the lines:&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Behold the baby arrows of that wit<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Wherewith I dared assail the woundless Truth!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Love hath refilled the quiver, and with it<br /></span>
<span class="i2">The man shall win atonement for the youth.”<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>In this the earliest of his acknowledged publications, as so often in
his later poems, satire and sentiment jostle each other. The predominant
note, indeed, is satire in the lofty tone of nineteen, but the
invocation and the close are in a different strain. Here, too, there is
the exaltation of a very young man, and one may read phrases which
perhaps said more than Lowell meant to say; but it was a ruffled youth
with which his college career closed, and this period of his life was
not to know as yet any steadying force. It is not strange that he
grasped at somewhat illusory phantoms in his eagerness to stay himself.
Here are the invocation and epilogue:&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Oh thou! to whom, where’er my footstep roam,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">My restless soul would spread its pinions home,&mdash;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Reality! more fair than any seeming<br /></span>
<span class="i0">E’er blest the fancy of an angel’s dreaming,&mdash;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Be thou my muse, in whose blue eye I see<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The heaven of my heart’s eternity!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Oh, hover like a spirit at my side,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In all my wanderings a heavenly guide,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_61" id="page_61">{61}</a></span><br /></span>
<span class="i0">Then, if in Cant’s dim mists I lose my way,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thy blessed smile shall lead me back to day,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, when I turn me from the land of night,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou, morning star of love, shalt herald light!<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Lady! whom I have dared to call my muse,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">With thee my day began, with thee shall end&mdash;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou can’st not such a poor request refuse<br /></span>
<span class="i2">To let thine image with its closing blend!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As turn the flowers to the quiet dews,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Fairest, so turns my yearning heart to thee,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For thee it pineth&mdash;as the homesick shell<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Mourns to be once again beneath the sea&mdash;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Oh let thine eyes upon this tribute dwell,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">And think&mdash;one moment kindly think of me!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Alone&mdash;my spirit seeks thy company,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">And in all beautiful communes with thine,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In crowds&mdash;it ever seeks alone to be<br /></span>
<span class="i2">To dream of gazing in thy gentle eyne!”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>After all, the irregular impulses of the class poem point to what is of
more consequence, the beginning of Lowell’s manhood. Until the summer of
1837, he had been a happy-go-lucky boy, sunning himself in literature,
in nature, and in his friends; then there set in a period when he was at
odds with fortune, and a stirring of half-understood desires arose; the
consciousness of power was struggling with the wilfulness of youth.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_62" id="page_62">{62}</a></span></p>

<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III<br /><br />
<small>FIRST VENTURES</small><br /><br />
<small>1838-1844</small></h2>

<p><span class="smcap">As</span> his college course drew near its close, Lowell began to forecast his
immediate future. His growing devotion to letters, especially to poetry,
and perhaps the wish to linger a little longer within the shelter of the
academic life, led him to cherish the notion of studying a while in
Germany, and he wrote to his father, who was still abroad, in pursuance
of this plan; but he received no encouragement. Germany, it was properly
said to him, was no place for the study of law by an American, and the
law was regarded as his vocation.</p>

<p>Vaguely conscious of his real calling, Lowell passed in review the two
professions of the ministry and the law, which at that time would be
likely to attract one who had begun to use his pen with as much
assiduity as an embryo artist plies his pencil in sketches.
Unquestionably the ministry opened a fair way of life to him, somewhat
as it had, less than a score of years earlier, to Emerson, though the
conditions had already begun to change. Lowell shrank from adopting that
calling with an instinct which sprang in part from his sense of its
traditional sacredness, in part from<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_63" id="page_63">{63}</a></span> an increasing consciousness of his
own separation from the form of religious teaching which would naturally
be looked for in him. There was a preacher in Lowell not merely by
inheritance, but, even at this time of nonsense and idle levity, in the
stirring of a soul that hated evil, and longed to exercise an active
influence in righting wrongs. The full strength of this impulse was to
be developed shortly, and thenceforward to find constant expression
through his life, for a preacher at bottom he was throughout his career.
An undercurrent of feeling persuaded him that he might even take to
preaching, if he could be sure of being a celibate, and independent of
any harassing anxiety respecting his support. But as he wrote of himself
a few years later to his friend Briggs: “I believe my religion (I am an
infidel, you know, to the Christianity of to-day, and so my religion is
something palpable to me in case of strait) arms me against any sorrows
to come.” The youthful protest in the parenthesis must be taken
seriously, but not subjected to microscopic analysis. Reverence was an
abiding element in his nature, and it was early displayed, but it was
reverence for what was intrinsically to be revered, and that very spirit
carried with it an impatient reaction against conventional religion. In
the letter to Dr. Loring, in which he discussed the question of going
into the Divinity School, he was led, from a slight reference to the
doctrines which Emerson was announcing, to speak more directly of
personal religion.</p>

<p>“I don’t know,” he says, “whether we poor little<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_64" id="page_64">{64}</a></span> worms (who though but
little lower than the angels are [but] a little higher than those whom
our every step annihilates) ought not to <i>condescend</i> to allow that
there may be something <i>above</i> his reason. We must sometimes receive
light like the Aurora without knowing where it comes from. And then, on
the other hand, we may be allowed to doubt whether our wise Creator
would have given us a dispensation by which to govern our everyday life,
any part of which was repugnant to our reason. It is a question which
every man must settle for himself: indeed he were mad to let any settle
it for him.”</p>

<p>An independence of judgment did not lead him to throw away a fundamental
faith in spiritual realities, but it made him ready to refuse conformity
with the nearest form of religion. At the time he was writing, Lowell
thought he saw the churches, if not tolerant of a great evil, at least
mainly silent before it, and with the radicalism which was as integral a
part of him as his conservatism, he broke away from associations which
seemed thus inert and false to the very ideals they professed to
cherish. Had not the poetic impulse and the artistic temper been so
strong in him, it is quite possible that as Emerson in his philosophic
idealism had let the minister’s gown slip from his shoulders, yet had
remained on the platform, so Lowell in his moral earnestness might, if
he had really gone into the ministry, have shortly become a witty
reformer, preaching with the prophet’s leathern girdle and not in the
priest’s cassock.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_65" id="page_65">{65}</a></span></p>

<p>But heredity and an impulse to deliver his mind were not strong enough
to take him into the pulpit against the clear dictates of a reasonable
judgment, and with apparently no disposition toward medicine, he turned
almost from necessity to the law. The law, at first, at any rate, did
not so much attract him, as it was reached by a process of elimination.
The substantial motive which urged him was his need of a livelihood.
Although his father at this time was in what is quaintly termed
“comfortable circumstances,” Lowell, like his fellows everywhere in
America, most certainly in New England, never would have entertained the
notion of living indefinitely at his father’s expense. As a matter of
course he must earn his living, and he was so meagrely supplied even
with pocket money at this time that his letters contain frequent
illustration of his inability to indulge in petty pleasures&mdash;a short
journey, for instance, the purchase of a book or pamphlet, even postage
on letters.</p>

<p>So, in the fall of 1838, when he was living at Elmwood with his brother
Charles, he began to read Blackstone “with as good a grace and as few
wry faces” as he could. But suddenly, a fortnight only after making this
assertion, he had abandoned the notion of studying law, out of utter
distaste for it. It was after a great struggle, he says, but the
struggle was evidently one of those occasional self-communings of the
young man who is not predestined to any profession, and yet is unable to
respond to the half articulate demands of his nature. We can read
Lowell’s mind at this<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_66" id="page_66">{66}</a></span> time in the fragmentary confessions of his
letters, and see that the controlling influence was to secure ultimately
the right to devote himself to literature. The law is a jealous
mistress, and Lowell was sagacious enough to perceive that to secure
success in the profession he must needs devote himself to it with long
and unremitting attention, and he was sure a real love for the study of
law was a condition precedent to success. So again he weighed the
chances. Once more he considered the ministry; he even speculated over
the possibilities of medicine&mdash;his friend Loring had taken up that for
his profession; but with a certain common-sense view of the matter, he
argued that if his occupation were to be merely a means to an end, why,
trade was the logical road to money-making, and he set about looking for
a “place in a store.”</p>

<p>“I must expect,” he writes ruefully, “to give up almost entirely all
literary pursuits, and instead of making rhymes, devote myself to making
money.” But with a whimsical attempt after all to join his ideals with
this practical course, after saying that in abandoning the law he gives
up the chance of going to Europe, since his father had promised him this
plum if he would stick to the law for three years, he closes his letter:
“I intend to go into a foreign store so that I may be able to go to
Europe yet. I shall have to brush up my French so as to write foreign
letters.”</p>

<p>This was written on Tuesday the 30th of October. The next Monday, when
he had gone to Boston to look for a place, he dropped in at the United<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_67" id="page_67">{67}</a></span>
States court where a case was on in which Webster was one of the
counsel. His imagination took fire. “I had not been there an hour,” he
writes, “before I determined to continue in my profession and study as
well as I could.” By an unexpected circumstance, however, he was within
a month interrupted in his study. His brother Robert, who was in the
counting-room of a coal merchant, was laid up with a lame hand, and so
James took his place at the desk. It is not impossible that he was
secretly glad of making thus, with a good conscience, a little test of
his aptitude for business.</p>

<p>His position as a substitute gave him a breathing spell, and he plunged
again into rhyming. His letters during the winter were full of
experiments in verse, and he was, moreover, giving serious attention to
the technique of poetry, having recourse to such manuals as Sidney’s
“Defense of Poesie” and Puttenham’s “Art of English Poesie,” a
characteristic act, for he had the same instinct for the great genetic
period of English poetry as Lamb and his fellows in England had a
generation earlier. He even began to throw out lines in the direction of
self-support through literature. Besides his trials in the newspapers
and magazines, he took the chance given him to lecture in Concord, and
he wondered if his friend Loring could get him an opportunity at
Andover. He had “quitted the law forever” on the 26th of February, 1839,
but the mood of exhilaration over a possible maintenance through
lecturing evaporated after a return from Concord with four dollars, less
his travelling<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_68" id="page_68">{68}</a></span> expenses, as the result of his first experiment. And yet
business was as repellent to him as law. In a letter to G. B. Loring of
March, 1839, he bursts forth into a cry of bitterness:&mdash;</p>

<p>“I don’t know what to do with myself. I am afraid people will think me a
fool if I change again, and yet I can hardly hope ever to be satisfied
where I am. I shouldn’t wonder if next Monday saw me with Kent’s
Commentaries under my arm. I think I might get to take an interest in
it, and then I should not fear at all about the living. If I had not
been thrice a fool, I should have been in Dane Law College reciting at
this very moment. And what makes me feel still worse is that nobody
knows or can know my motive for changing, and the struggle which kept me
irresolute.</p>

<p>“I am certainly just at present in a miserable state, and I won’t live
so long. You must excuse the shortness of this letter, for my feelings
are in such a distracted sort of a state that the more I write the less
do I feel able to write.</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Dear George, when I am set at table<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I am indeed quite miserable,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And when as that I lie in bed,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Strife and confusion whirl my head;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When I am getting up at morn<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I feel confoundedly forlorn,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And when I go to bed at eve<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I can do nought but sigh and grieve.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When I am walking into town<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I feel all utterly cast down,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And when I’m walking out from it<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I feel full many a sorrow fit.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>The struggle in his mind went on through the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_69" id="page_69">{69}</a></span> rest of the spring. He
kept doggedly at his desk, apparently, but wrote more verse, especially
of a serious sort. At last, on the 20th of May, he could write in a
somewhat forced strain of exultation: “Rejoice with me! For to-morrow I
shall be free. Without saying a word to any one, I shall quietly proceed
to Dane Law College to recitation. Now shall I be happy again as far as
<i>that</i> is concerned. Nature will smile for me yet again. I shall hear
the merry tinkle of the brook and think not of the tinkle of dollars and
cents. Upon the ocean I may look, nor dream of the rates of freight. Let
us rejoice, George, in the days of our youth. We shall find it very
different when we come to support ourselves. Good old Homer in the
Odyssey makes Telemachus tell Minerva, ‘Well may they laugh and sing and
dance, for they are eating the bread of another man.’ Now we who eat our
father’s bread at present may be as merry as we will. But very different
will it be when every potato that we eat (lucky if we can get even
those) shall seem watersoaked with the sweat of our brow. I am going to
be as happy as the days are long.”</p>

<p>A little later he wrote: “I am now a law student, and am really studying
and intend to study. I shall now be able to come and spend some Saturday
with you and come down Monday morning.... To-day I have been engaged an
hour in recitation, 9 to 10, and then from 11 to 3-1/2 o’clock in
studying law, which, as we only have one recitation a day, is pretty
well. I have determined that I<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_70" id="page_70">{70}</a></span> will now <i>do</i> something. I am lazy
enough, heaven knows, but not half so much so as some of my friends
suppose. At all events, I was never made for a merchant, and I even
begin to doubt whether I was made for anything in particular but to
loiter through life and then become manure.”</p>

<p>From this time forward Lowell did not relinquish his study of law. He
confessed, indeed, to a doubt if he should ever practice. He had a
“blind presentiment of becoming independent in some other way,” and he
allowed himself to dream of cultivating literature in solitude on a
little oatmeal, but he pushed through to the nominal end, and took his
degree of bachelor of laws at commencement in August, 1840.<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> Not long
after, he entered the law office in Boston of Mr. Charles Greely Loring,
and when the winter came he went himself to Boston to live.</p>

<p>The vacillation and apparent irresolution outlined in his fickle pursuit
of a profession in the months after his graduation are unmistakable, but
there are expressions now and then in the letters we have quoted that
strike one as a little exaggerated even to one so open to attacks from
conscience as was Lowell. Why such a pother, one might ask, over an
embarrassment which is not very uncommon, and after all touches chiefly
the prudential side of character? “Nobody knows or<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_71" id="page_71">{71}</a></span> can know my motives
for changing, and the struggle which kept me irresolute;” but the boyish
companion to whom he wrote undoubtedly had an inkling of his friend’s
perturbation, though frank as that friend was in his correspondence and
intercourse, he could surely have said, “the heart knoweth its own
bitterness.”</p>

<p>The solution is simple enough in statement. Before his last year in
college Lowell had met and fallen fiercely in love with a beautiful
girl, one of the circle in which his family moved, and endowed with
intellectual grace and great charm of manner. Then something came
between them, and separation became inevitable, at least it became so in
Lowell’s own view of the situation. The shock of this rupture left not a
shade of reproach for the girl in Lowell’s mind, but it broke up the
fountains of the deep in his own life. He was scarcely more than a boy
in years, but he had in temperament and capacity for emotion a far
greater maturity. He could write of himself a few years later: “Brought
up in a very reserved and conventional family, I cannot in society
appear what I really am. I go out sometimes with my heart so full of
yearning toward my fellows that the indifferent look with which even
entire strangers pass me brings tears to my eyes.” There was indeed an
extraordinary frankness about him in these early days, filling his
letters with expressions which might easily have made him wince in later
years; but the spontaneity of his nature, which was always seen in the
unguardedness of his familiar writing<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_72" id="page_72">{72}</a></span> and his conversation, had in
these days the added ingenuousness of youth.</p>

<p>The experience thus referred to in the summer of 1837 was no short,
sharp passion burning itself out in quick rage; it smouldered and leaped
up into flame at intervals for two years, fed moreover by the
consciousness of his own impotence and the predicament into which he was
helplessly drawn; and it was during these two years that this
restlessness and vacillation of temper were almost ungovernable. Later
in life even he looked back with horror upon this time, saying half in
pity, half in contempt for himself, that he put a cocked pistol to his
forehead in 1839, and had not finally the courage to pull the trigger.</p>

<p>It would be easy to fill many pages with illustrations drawn from
unprinted poems written during this period, and they would have the
added value of disclosing the fact that poetry was fast becoming the
natural expression of his mind, even while he was fashioning it with
constantly better art. In a letter written to Loring, 26 July, 1839,
containing two bits of verse lyrically interpretative of his experience,
he says: “You must not be surprised if I don’t write again for some
time, but the next time I do write I trust my letters will be better
worth the postage. At any rate, it shall be filled more with my <i>real</i>
than with my <i>poetical</i> me; although now they are synonymous terms, as
they should be, for my poetry answers me very much as a sort of journal
or rather nousometer.”</p>

<p>It is hard for most of us to escape the lurking<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_73" id="page_73">{73}</a></span> judgment that the man,
or boy either, who throws his spiritual experience into verse is more or
less consciously dramatizing, and we are apt to credit greater honesty
to the one who does not than to the one who does poetize his
disappointments; but in spite of the artfulness which betrays itself in
the effort of one who has not yet perfect command of his instrument,
there is a ring of sincerity about Lowell’s poetic journal which,
without juggling, we both infer from his nature as it is otherwise
disclosed, and make illustrative of the real life of the spirit. Here
are some verses which occur in a letter to Dr. Loring in the summer of
1839. In writing of them to his friend a few days later, Lowell says:
“The lines I wrote to you the other day were improvised, and you must
judge them leniently accordingly. I do not think now, as I did ‘two
years ago,’ that poetry <i>must</i> be an inspiration, but am convinced that
somewhat of care, nay, even of thought, is requisite in a <i>poem</i>.”</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Turn back your eyes, my friend, with me<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Upon those two late parted years&mdash;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Nay, look alone, for I can see<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But inward through these bitter tears:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Deep grief sometimes our mind’s eye clears.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“How much lies in that one word ‘Past’!<br /></span>
<span class="i0">More than in all that waits before;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">How many a saddened glance is cast<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To that stern wall of nevermore,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whose shadow glooms our heart’s deep core.<br /></span>
<span class="i6dt">. . . . . . . .<br /></span>
<span class="iq">“As hard it is for mortal glance<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To pierce the Has been’s mystery<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And force of iron circumstance<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_74" id="page_74">{74}</a></span><br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which said let these and these things be,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As to resolve futurity.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“A many streams that once ran full<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of joy or Marah waves of pain,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Wasting or making beautiful,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Have sunk no more to flow again,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And scarce the tracks they wore remain.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“And many shades of joy and woe<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Pass cloudlike, silent, o’er my soul,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which not one being else may know,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And into utter darkness roll,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Links lost from out my being’s whole.<br /></span>
<span class="i6dt">. . . . . . . .<br /></span>
<span class="iq">“This Present is becoming Past;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Live then each moment manfully<br /></span>
<span class="i0">If you would wish your deeds to last,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sowing good seed continually<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whose harvest time is yet to be.<br /></span>
<span class="i6">&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;<br /></span>
<span class="iq">“In our great pride we think that we<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Build up our high or low estate,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Dimly half conscious that we see<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The paths which lead to small and great<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Through the fixed eye of settled Fate.<br /></span>
</div><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“The Past may guide the Future’s ways:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Seeds cast far up the stream of time,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Returning after many days,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">May grow to their ordained prime<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of fruitage in another clime.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>As if to reinforce our confidence in the genuineness of the emotion
which prompted these moral verses, written apparently to the sound of
Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life,” which had just appeared in the
<i>Knickerbocker</i>, we come in a few weeks to a rhymed letter in which a
reminiscence of the same<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_75" id="page_75">{75}</a></span> experience is recorded with simplicity and
naturalness in a homely poetic strain:&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Two years ago, in days how like to these,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Yet how unlike! beneath the changing trees<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I walked with her full many a happy hour,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Pausing to gather some belated flower,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Or to pick up some nut half eaten, dropt<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By a scared squirrel as away he hopt.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The jest, the laugh, and the more high debate<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To which the forest aisles seem consecrate,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Nay, even the jest, and the dark plaided shawl<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That loved her light form&mdash;I remember all:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For then I entered that fair gate of love<br /></span>
<span class="i0">On whose bright arch should be inscribed above,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As o’er that other in the Tuscan’s story&mdash;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">‘Per me si va ne l’eterno dolore.’<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The leaves were falling round us then, and we<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Talked of their many meanings musingly.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Ah, woe is me! we did not speak at all<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of how love’s leaves will wither, change, and fall&mdash;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Full silently&mdash;and how the pent up breast<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Will hide the tears that cannot be represt.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>In this same letter Lowell enumerates at the close the books he is
reading and about to read:&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“I’m reading now the Grecian tragedies,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Stern, gloomy Æschylus, great Sophocles,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And him of Salamis whose works remain<br /></span>
<span class="i0">More perfect to us than the other twain.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">(Time’s a gourmand, at least he was so then,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And thinks his leavings good enough for men.)<br /></span>
<span class="i0">When I have critically read all these,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I’ll dip in cloudy Aristophanes,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And then the Latin dramatists, and next<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With mathematics shall my brain be vext.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">So if I carry all my projects through<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I shall do pretty well, I think, don’t you?”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>What most impresses the attentive reader of Lowell’s verses and letters
as the two years, to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_76" id="page_76">{76}</a></span> which he so often refers, draw to a close, is the
evidence that the young man was finally emerging from the mist and cloud
through which he had been struggling, and was getting his feet upon
solid ground, so that not only was his irresolution changed for a fairly
diligent pursuit of his profession, but he had acquired a greater
robustness of spirit and was squaring himself with life in earnest. The
internal conflict had been fought out and the substantial victory gained
was showing itself in greater self-reliance and a growth in manly ways.</p>

<p>It is therefore with especial satisfaction that the chronicler of his
external history comes upon an event which was to mark emphatically the
attainment of his intellectual and spiritual majority. Near the end of
the year 1839 he made the acquaintance of Maria White. She was the
daughter of Mr. Abijah White, a farmer in Watertown, whom Lowell
characterized on first meeting him as “the most perfect specimen of a
bluff, honest, hospitable country squire you can possibly imagine.” Mr.
White had a family of sons and daughters who thenceforward became
Lowell’s familiar acquaintance. One of the sons, William A. White, had
been a classmate at Harvard,&mdash;he speaks of him once as his “quondam
chum,”&mdash;and it was by him that Lowell was introduced to his home. As
Lowell had written with great freedom to his friend Loring of his
troubled experience, so now one may trace in this very frank
correspondence the manner in which this new affection displaced the
mournfulness of that experience and substituted great peace and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_77" id="page_77">{77}</a></span> content
for the soreness which still remained after a struggle that had resulted
in substantial self-mastery.</p>

<p>In his earliest, hardly more than casual reference to Maria White he
characterizes her as “a very pleasant and pleasing young lady” who
“knows more poetry” than any one he is acquainted with. “I mean,” he
says, “she is able to repeat more. She is more familiar, however, with
modern poets than with the pure well-springs of English poesy.” His
changing mood during the winter months that follow is visible in the
poetry which he writes and copies in his letters, but in the early
summer there is a bolder and franker tone, until the acquaintance which
has ripened into intimacy culminates in an engagement not long after the
completion of the lover’s law studies.</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p>June 13, 1840. I got back from Watertown, whither I went to a
gathering at Miss Hale’s (whose family are boarding at the
Nonantum). I spent the night at W. A. W.’s. Lovely indeed it was
with its fair moon and stars and floating cloud mist. I walked back
with M. W. on my arm, and not only did my body go back, but my
spirit also over the footsteps of other years. Were not the nights
<i>then</i> as lovely ... and the river that we gazed down into&mdash;think
you those water-parties are so soon forgotten? When we got to the
house we sat upon the steps and talked,&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">And then like a Spring-swollen river<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Roll the full waves of her tumultuous thought,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_78" id="page_78">{78}</a></span><br /></span>
<span class="i0">Crested with glittering spray;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Her wild lips curve and quiver,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And my rapt soul on the deep stream upcaught,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Lulled by a dreamful music ever,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Unwittingly is borne away.<br /></span>
<span class="i6dt">. . . . . . .<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I float to a delicious land,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By a sunset Heaven spanned,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And musical with streams.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Around, the calm majestic forms<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And Godlike eyes of early Greece I see,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Or listen till my spirit warms<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To songs of courtly chivalry,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Or weep, unmindful if my tears be seen,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For the meek suffering love of poor Undine.<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="nind">She is truly a glorious girl with her spirit eyes. On the mantel is
a moss rose she gave me and which when it withers I shall enshrine
in my Homer. This morning I drove her up to Waltham. They tell me I
shall be in love with her. But there is but one <i>Love</i>. I love her
because she is a woman, and so was another being I loved.</p>

<p>August 18, 1840. Since you heard from me I have been at Nantasket
and had a fine time. I found M. W., her brother, and Page,<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a> down
there, and I carried Heath with me. I had one glorious ride on the
beach with M. W., I having hired a horse and gig at Hingham.
Hingham is a strange place. I walked through the greater part of it
one day and did not even see a living soul....</p>

<p>Nantasket is a beautiful place. The beach is five miles long,
smooth, hard sand without a pebble. When the wind blows on shore
you may see<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_79" id="page_79">{79}</a></span> one line of unbroken white foam, five miles long, roll
up the beach at once. I spent one whole evening alone on the rocks
with M. W. A glorious evening it was. Page’s portrait of M. W. is
going to be fine, at least I hope so. It <i>ought</i> to be....</p>

<p>August 25, 1840. I have just finished reading Goethe’s
correspondence with a child, Bettina Brentano. I had long tried
(rather wished) to get it, the more so from some beautiful extracts
which M. W. read to me, but had never seen it till now. It is
<i>beautiful</i>. It is wonderful when we think that Bettina was a
child. It is like sunshine on grass newly rained upon&mdash;like the
smell of a flower&mdash;like the song of a bird. We are given to look
into the very core of the most loving heart that ever came directly
from God and <i>forgot not whence it came</i>.</p>

<p>But it was mournful to think that all this love should have been
given to the cold, hard Goethe.<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> I wanted such a soul for
myself. M. W.’s is nearer to it than any I have ever seen. But I
should have seen her three years ago. If that other love could
raise such a tempest in my soul as to fling up the foul and slimy
weeds from the bottom, and make it for so long sluggish and muddy,
a disappointment from her would I think have broken my heart.</p>

<p>George, twice lately I have had a very strange<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_80" id="page_80">{80}</a></span> dream. Byron says
that dreams “shake us with the vision of the past.” Do they not
also shake us with the vision of what is to come? I dreamed that I
went to see M. W., that I saw her walking just before me, and that
when I strove to overtake her, she vanished. I asked a man whom I
met if he had seen her (describing her). He said “yes, she has gone
down the happy road.” I followed, but could get no glimpse of her.
Does this mean that I shall love M. W. and that she will die? Homer
says that there are two gates of quickly fading dreams, one of sawn
ivory, and the other of polished horn. Those dreams that pass thro’
the ivory gate are liars, but those that forth issue from the
polished horn tell truth to any one of mortals who sees them. Did
my dream come thro’ the horn or the ivory? Are you oneirocritical
enough to say? At any rate, remember this. M. W. lent me a “sweet”
book (<i>she</i> did not call it so and I don’t know why <i>I</i> did),
“Philothea,” by Mrs. Child. If you ever come across it, read it. It
is, as Mr. Emerson called it, “a divine book.”... To-day is (or
was) Commencement. I was standing in the pew listening to the music
when I looked round and saw a pair of eyes fixed on me that made me
feel glad; they were M. W.’s. I thought she was in Beverly. I
managed to squeeze my way up to her at last and walked with her to
Judge Fay’s, stayed there a little while and then went to take my
degree of LL. B. After dining with the alumni, I walked round to
the President’s in the faint hope of seeing her again. Just as I<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_81" id="page_81">{81}</a></span>
got nearly there, I saw her go in. I went in after. The man she was
with left her, and I enjoyed her for more than two hours. Scates
made his appearance here to-day, so that my day has been a very
happy one.</p>

<p>P. S. There are more lies contained in the piece of parchment on
which my degree is written than I ever before saw in a like
compass. It praises me for assiduous attention at recitations,
etc., etc. (This letter seems to be all about M. W.)</p>

<p class="r">
Good by,  J. R. L.<br />
</p>

<p>Sunday, [31 August, 1840.] I have received your letter and had also
written an answer to it, which I just burnt. It was written when I
was not in a fit state of mind to write. I had been feeling very
strongly that</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Custom lies about us with a weight<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>If I had written this an hour ago, it would have been black and
melancholy enough, but I have smoked three cigars and ruminated and
am calm&mdash;almost....</p>

<p>If I had seen her three years ago things might have been not thus.
But yet I would not give up the bitter knowledge I gained last
summer for much&mdash;very much.</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Who never ate his bread in sorrow,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Who never passed the lonesome hours,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Weeping and watching for the morrow,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">He knows ye not, ye Heavenly powers.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>I have been calmer and stronger ever since. Oh the glory of a calm,
still soul! If we could keep<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_82" id="page_82">{82}</a></span> our souls ever in a holy silence, we
should be wise, we should hear the music of the spheres. But they
will ever be talking to themselves. If we could but become so, we
should then ever have at our beck those divine messengers which
visit us also as well as Abraham....</p>

<p>Do “they say” that she is “transcendental”? Yes, she does indeed go
beyond them. They cannot understand a being like her. But if they
mean that she is unfit for the duties of life, they are entirely
wrong. She has more “common sense” than any woman I have ever seen.
Genius always has. Hear what Maria herself says in one of her
glorious letters to me. “When I said that I loved you, I almost
felt as if I had said ‘and I will espouse sorrow for thy sake,’ for
I have lived long enough and observed life keenly enough to know
that not the truest and most exalted love can bar the approach of
much care and sorrow.” And all these she is ready and able to bear.
Yes, she will love you, for she loves everything that I love. </p></div>

<p>The first volume of poetry which Lowell published, “A Year’s Life,” is,
as its name intimates, a poetic record of the time covered by these and
other passages from his correspondence. It appeared in January, 1841,
and he was moved to print it both because Miss White desired it, and
because it was so full of her. The love which found expression, as we
have seen, in letters to a familiar friend, could not fail of an outlet
in verse, and was but thinly concealed from the public in a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_83" id="page_83">{83}</a></span> volume
which, from Dedication to Epilogue, was glowing with it. Many of the
poems he had already printed in the magazines for which he had been
diligently writing, and these poems, as they appeared, were
announcements, to those who knew both the lovers, of the pure passion
which was flaming.</p>

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

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Dear, glorious creature!”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="nind">he exclaims, near the close of the poem,</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“With eyes so dewy bright,<br /></span>
<span class="i6">And tenderest feeling<br /></span>
<span class="i6">&nbsp; &nbsp; Itself revealing<br /></span>
<span class="i4">In every look and feature,<br /></span>
<span class="i4">Welcome as a homestead light<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To one long-wandering in a clouded night;<br /></span>
<span class="i4">O, lovelier far her woman’s weakness,<br /></span>
<span class="i6">Which yet is strongly mailed<br /></span>
<span class="i4">In armor of courageous meekness<br /></span>
<span class="i6">And faith that never failed!”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="nind">The lines on pages 77, 78 are from the same poem, which was written thus
when the acquaintance was ripening into intimacy. The whole poem is a
tribute to the visionary beauty of her face and character as revealed to
him. “There is a light,” thus the poem opens:&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“There is a light within her eyes<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Like gleams of wandering fire-flies;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">From light to shade it leaps and moves<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_84" id="page_84">{84}</a></span><br /></span>
<span class="i0">Whenever in her soul arise<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The holy shapes of things she loves.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="nind">Throughout the poem runs, moreover, an undercurrent of holy awe and a
presage of her short life, which drew from him the reflections on death
that occur in his letters:&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“I may not tell the blessedness<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Her mild eyes send to mine,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The sunset-tinted haziness<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of their mysterious shine,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The dim and holy mournfulness<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of their mellow light divine;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The shadows of the lashes lie<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Over them so lovingly,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That they seem to melt away<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In a doubtful twilight-gray,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">While I watch the stars arise<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In the evening of her eyes.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I love it, yet I almost dread<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To think what it foreshadoweth;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, when I muse how I have read<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That such strange light betokened death,&mdash;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Instead of fire-fly gleams, I see<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Wild corpse lights gliding waveringly.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>The closing section of the poem holds a reflection of that image which
is after all most enshrined in the poet’s heart, as one may gather not
only from his after words concerning her, but from the influence
manifest in his own early career from this time forward.</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Early and late, at her soul’s gate<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Sits Chastity in warderwise,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">No thought unchallenged, small or great,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Goes thence into her eyes;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Nor may a low, unworthy thought<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Beyond that virgin warder win,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Nor one, whose passion is not ‘ought,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_85" id="page_85">{85}</a></span>’<br /></span>
<span class="i0">May go without, or enter in.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">I call her, seeing those pure eyes,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The Eve of a new Paradise,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which she by gentle word and deed,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And look no less, doth still create<br /></span>
<span class="i0">About her, for her great thoughts breed<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A calm that lifts us from our fallen state,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And makes us while with her both good and great,&mdash;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Nor is their memory wanting in our need:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With stronger loving, every hour,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Turneth my heart to this frail flower,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which, thoughtless of the world, hath grown<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To beauty and meek gentleness,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Here in a fair world of its own,&mdash;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">By woman’s instinct trained alone,&mdash;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A lily fair which God did bless,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And which from Nature’s heart did draw<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Love, wisdom, peace, and Heaven’s perfect law.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>Lowell did not retain “Ianthe” in his later collections, but he
reprinted to the last the other poem especially identified with Miss
White which bears the significant title “Irene.” This, as the reader
perceives, is more distinctly a piece of characterization, and its
closing lines, wherein Irene is likened to the lone star seen by sailors
tempest-tost, may be read as carrying more than a pretty poetic simile,
for it cannot be doubted that the love which now possessed the poet was
in a profound sense a word of peace to him. Something of the same
strain, though more remote and dramatic, may be read in the poem “The
Sirens,” which is also retained by Lowell in his later collections, and
is dated in “A Year’s Life” “Nantasket, July, 1840,” a date which has an
added interest when one refers to the letter given above on page 78. One
more<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_86" id="page_86">{86}</a></span> passage may be read from his letters as giving his own final word
of retrospect and prospect. It occurs in a letter to G. B. Loring, 2
January, 1841.</p>

<p>“Yes, my friend, it is most true that I have changed. I thank <i>her</i> and
one other, under God, for it.... Had the love I bore to a woman you know
of three years ago, been as pure, true, and holy as that I bear to her
who ‘never from me shall be divided,’ I had been a man sooner. My love
for her was fierce and savage. It rose not like the fair evening star on
the evening I first saw her (I remember it well), but (as <i>she</i> has said
of such love) like a lurid meteor. And it fell as suddenly. For a time I
was dazed by its glare and startled by the noise of its bursting. But I
grew calm and soon morning dawned....</p>

<p>“And I mean to live as one beloved by such a woman should live. She is
every way noble. People have called ‘Irene’ a beautiful piece of poetry.
And so it is. It owes all its beauty to her, and were it a thousand
times as beautiful would not be so much so as she is to me.”</p>

<p>The strong emotional experience which thus possessed Lowell came to him
when he was largely under the sway of sentiment, but though, as we have
seen, it was translated into poetry very freely, it is not so much the
immediate expression in literary form which concerns us as it is the
infusion of an element in the formation of character. Lowell was
overcharged in his youth with sensitiveness in affection. There was a
fitfulness in his demonstration of it, an almost ungovernable outflow of
feeling,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_87" id="page_87">{87}</a></span> which left him in danger of coming under the control of morbid
impulse. What he required, and what most happily he found, was the
serenity and steadfastness of a nature, exalted like his own, but
glowing with an ardor which had other than purely personal aim.</p>

<p>Miss White was a highly sensitive girl of a type not unknown, especially
at that time, in New England. Of delicate sensibility, she listened
eagerly to the voices rising about her which found their choragus in
Emerson. It was before the time of much organization among women, but
not before the time when one and another woman, inheritors of a refined
conscience, stirred by the movement in the air, sought to do justice to
their convictions in espousing this or that moral cause, not at all
necessarily in public championship, but in the eloquent zeal of domestic
life. As her brother William was to become an active reformer, so she
fed her spirit with aspirations for temperance, and for that abolition
of slavery which was already beginning to dominate the moral earnestness
of the community, holding all other reforms as subordinate to this.
Lowell, seeing in her a Una, was quickened in the spirit which had
already been awakened, and instantly donned his armor as her Red Cross
Knight.<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a></p>

<p>At this period there was a much greater homogeneity in New England life,
than there has been at any time since. The democratizing of society<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_88" id="page_88">{88}</a></span> had
been going on under favoring conditions, for industry was still at the
basis of order, less was made of the distinction of wealth, more of the
distinction of education, the aristocratic element was under the same
general law of hard work, and a proletariat class had not been created
by an inflow of the waste of Europe which inevitably accompanied the
sturdy peasants. The city had not yet swept ardent youth into its
rapids, and the simplicity of modes of life was hardly more marked in
the country than in the town. Whoever recalls the now old-fashioned
tales by Miss Catherine Sedgwick will have a truthful picture of a
social order which seems Arcadian in the haze of sixty years since.</p>

<p>It was, in some aspects, the culmination of the ingrowing New England
just before the Atlantic ocean became contracted to a broad stream, the
West was clutched by iron hands, and all manner of forces conspired to
render this secluded corner of the earth a cosmopolitan part of a larger
community.</p>

<p>One of the most characteristic phases of this life was the attention
paid by all classes to the awakening which was going on in education,
reform, politics, and religion. Mr. Norton has printed a letter<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a> of
Lowell’s in which he gives an animated picture of a temperance
celebration in Watertown, at which Maria White appeared in a sort of New
England translation of a Queen of the May, as the celebration itself was
a festival in the moral vernacular.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_89" id="page_89">{89}</a></span> Lowell’s own delight in her was
unbounded, and the scene as he depicts it, was a New England idyl.</p>

<p>Maria White and her brother belonged to a group of young people on most
friendly terms with one another, and known offhand by themselves as the
Band. They lived in various places, Boston, Cambridge, Watertown, Salem,
and were constantly seeking occasions for familiar intercourse. Dr. Hale
has given a lively account of their fellowship and summons a witness who
was herself a member of the company.<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a> To this coterie Lowell was now
introduced, and the relations between him and Miss White made the pair
the centre of attraction. Miss White’s spirituelle beauty and poetic
temperament and Lowell’s spontaneity of wit and sentiment were
heightened in the eyes of these young people by the attachment between
them, and they were known with affectionate jesting as the Queen and
King of the Band. In the exalted air upon which the two trod,
stimulating each other, their devotion came to have, by a paradox, an
almost impersonal character, as if they were creatures of romance; their
life was led thus in the open, so much so that, as has been said more
than once, the letters exchanged by them were passed about also among
the other young people of the circle.<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a> Be this as it may, the
assertion is rendered<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_90" id="page_90">{90}</a></span> credible by the highly charged atmosphere in
which they were living. The two young poets&mdash;for Maria White was not
only of poetic temperament, but wrote verses, some of which found place
in current magazines&mdash;were lifted upon a platform by their associates,
and were themselves so open in their consciousness of poetic thinking
and acting that they took little pains to abscond from this friendly
publicity. It is a curious instance of freedom from shamefacedness in so
native a New Englander as Lowell, but his letters, his poems, and common
report, all testify to an ingenuousness of sentiment at this time, which
was a radical trait, and less conspicuous later in life only because
like other men he became subject to convention.</p>

<p>But though Lowell lived in this exhilarated state, he was not likely to
be led away into any wholly impracticable scheme of living. His own good
sense could be relied on, and his independence of spirit, as could his
detestation of debt, which kept him all his life a frugal liver. He was,
besides, brought up sharply at this time by the necessity suddenly laid
on him to earn his living, if he would be married, since his father,
always generous to him, had now lost almost all his personal property,
and was land poor; it was clearly understood, too, that the young people
must rely on themselves for support. Fortunate was it for him that he
was to have a wife who shared to the full his views on living. “It is
easy enough,” wrote<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_91" id="page_91">{91}</a></span> Maria White to Levi Thaxter, “to be married&mdash;the
newspaper columns show us that every day; but to live and be happy as
simple King and Queen without the gifts of fortune, this is, I confess,
a triumph which suits my nature better.”</p>

<p>Lowell, who had been lodging in Cambridge, moved into Boston when he was
established in Mr. Loring’s office, but in the spring of 1842 went back
to Elmwood to live. Dr. Lowell had returned from Europe with his wife
and daughter in the early summer of 1840. It is probable that the return
of Lowell to his father’s house was due to the declining health of his
mother, who showed symptoms of that disorder of the brain which clouded
her last years, and is graphically depicted in her son’s poem, “The
Darkened Mind.” From this time her husband and children watched her with
solicitude and tried various remedies. She was taken on little journeys
to Saratoga and elsewhere, in search of restoration, but in vain. In
this case, as so often happens, the sufferer who draws largely on one’s
sympathy is the faithful, despairing husband.<a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a></p>

<p>Although Lowell had been admitted to the bar, and was ready to practice,
clients were slow in coming, and with his resources in literature it was
natural enough that he should use his enforced leisure in writing for
publication. There were few<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_92" id="page_92">{92}</a></span> periodicals in America in 1840 that could
afford to pay their contributors, and the sums paid were moderate. But
the zeal of the editors was not measured by their ability to reward
contributors, and both editors and writers fed a good deal at the table
of the Barmecides spread in the somewhat ramshackle House of Fame. The
<i>Southern Literary Messenger</i> was one of these impecunious but ambitious
journals, and the editor teased Lowell constantly for contributions.
Lowell gave them freely, for writing was his delight, and he was not
unwilling to have a hospitable and reputable magazine in which to print
what he wrote, both for the slight incentive which publication gave, and
because he could thus with little effort “make believe” that he was a
popular author. He used frequently the signature Hugh Perceval. He liked
the name Perceval, which had been borne by his earliest American
ancestor, and regretted that it had not been given him at his birth, as
had then been proposed. In the <i>Southern Literary Messenger</i> he could
publish half personal poems to be read between the lines by his intimate
friends; but he grew impatient of this unprofitable business.</p>

<p>“Have you got the August S. L. M. yet?” he writes to Loring, 18 August,
1840. “I have not. White<a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a> wrote to me a short time since that the
July and August numbers were coming out together, and at the same time
asking me to translate a long poem of Victor Hugo’s. I have not answered
him yet. But when I do I shall tell him<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_93" id="page_93">{93}</a></span> that ‘reading and writing come
by nature, but to be a translator is the gift of Fortune,’ so that if he
chooses to pay me he shall have translations. I don’t think I shall
write any more for him. ’Tis a bad habit to get into for a poor man,
this writing for nothing. Perhaps if I hang off he may offer me
somewhat.”</p>

<p>The publication of “A Year’s Life” was a more definite assertion of his
place as a poet. He had been encouraged to publish both by the
confidence of Miss White and by the practical aid of friends, like his
friend J. F. Heath, who engaged to secure the sale of at least a hundred
copies. Lowell watched the fortunes of his first open venture eagerly,
from a conviction that it would have some influence on his further
efforts. “I have already,” he writes to Loring, 18 February, 1841, “been
asked to write for an annual to be published in Boston, and ‘which is to
be a fair specimen of the arts in this country.’ It is to be edited
(<i>sub rosa</i>) by Longfellow, Felton, Hillard, and that set. Hawthorne and
Emerson are writing for it, and Bryant and Halleck have promised to
write. The pay for poetry is five dollars a page, at any rate, and more
if the work succeeds according to the publishers’ expectation. So you
see my book has done me some good, although it does not sell so fast as
it ought, considering how everybody praises it. If you get a chance to
persuade anybody to buy it, do so. The praise I don’t Care so much
about, because I knew just how good and how bad the book was before I
printed it. But I wish, if<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_94" id="page_94">{94}</a></span> possible, to get out a second edition, which
will do me more good, as an author, than all the praise and merit in the
world. My father is so very much pleased with the book that he wishes me
to publish a second edition at any rate, and he will pay all expenses,
and be responsible for its selling.”</p>

<p>The little volume was the first fruits of Lowell’s poetic harvesting,
and the promise it gave of poetical genius was by no means
inconsiderable. In his maturer judgment, to be sure, Lowell preserved
but seven of the thirty-three poems and two of the thirty-five sonnets
contained in it,&mdash;in all, thirty-five of the one hundred and eighty-two
pages of the book, and had he been drawn off from poetry, supposing this
possible, the book would have been reckoned as lightly in the general
account of his production as Motley’s fiction was in his full measure.
But he was not drawn off from poetry, and the early note here struck was
a dominant one afterward. In most poets of any consequence the disciple
is pretty sure to be evident in early work, and Lowell in “A Year’s
Life” unmistakably owned himself an ardent lover of Keats and to a less
degree of Tennyson, who had been caught up by the lively circle in which
he moved with the eagerness of an American discovering, as one so often
did, the old world of contemporary England. In copying Keats, Lowell was
indeed copying the Keats who copied, and it is not at all unlikely that
when he was enamored of “Fancy,” “Lines on the Mermaid Tavern,” “Robin
Hood,” and the like, and echoed them faintly in “The Bobolink,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_95" id="page_95">{95}</a></span>”
“Ianthe,” “Irene,” and others, he was harking back also to Wither and
other Elizabethans whom Keats loved, and whose light touch was caught so
deftly by Milton in his “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” Be this as it
may, Lowell was most outspoken at this time in his admiration of Keats.
He had become acquainted with him, as we have seen, in that volume which
contained the triad, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, which was the
fountain of modern English poetry to which so many thirsty Americans
went. Lord Houghton’s memoir of Keats had not appeared, and Lowell
himself, in 1840, contemplated writing a life, going so far as to
concoct a letter to Keats’s brother George, which, however, he never
sent. His admiration, besides taking the form of frank imitation,
displayed itself in his early sonnet, “To the Spirit of Keats,” which he
contributed to the New York literary journal <i>Arcturus</i>, conducted by
the brothers Duyckinck. His letter to Evert A. Duyckinck, accompanying
the sonnet, is interesting for its tribute to the two modern English
poets who, after Spenser, were his nearest friends.</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p class="r">
<span class="smcap">Boston</span>, Dec. 5, 1841.<br />
</p>

<p><span class="smcap">My dear Sir</span>,&mdash;I address you rather than your brother editor,
because I judge that the poetical department of <i>Arcturus</i> is more
especially under your charge. I have to thank you for your
sympathizing notice of my verses last spring. I thought then that
you might like to have a contribution occasionally from me, but
other engagements which<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_96" id="page_96">{96}</a></span> it were tedious to specify hindered me
from doing what my sympathy with the aim of your magazine dictated.
I subscribed for your <i>Arcturus</i> before I had seen a number of it
(though I can ill afford many such indulgences of taste) because I
liked the spirit of your prospectus. For the same reason I sent you
my volume&mdash;of which I sent but a bare half-dozen to “the
press”&mdash;because I despise our system of literary puffing. Your
notice of Keats, in the number for this month, a poet whom I
especially love and whom I consider to be one of the true old Titan
brood&mdash;made me wish to see two of my own sonnets enshrined in the
same volume. One of them you will see is addressed to the same
“marvellous day.” I cannot help thinking that you will like both of
them.<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a></p>

<p>In your “News Gong” I see that you suggest a reprint of Tennyson. I
wish you would say in your next that he is about to reprint a new
and correct edition of his poems with many new ones which will
appear in a few months. I think it would be a pity to reprint his
poems at all&mdash;for he is poor and that would deprive him of what
little profit he might make by their sale in this
country&mdash;especially would it be wrong to reprint an incorrect
edition. (Moxon will be his publisher.)</p>

<p>I do not wish you to state your authority for this&mdash;but you may
depend on it, for my authority is the poet himself. I have the
great satisfaction of thinking that the publication is in some
measure<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_97" id="page_97">{97}</a></span> owing to myself, for it was by my means that he was
written to about it, and he says that “his American friends” are
the chief cause of his reprinting.</p>

<p>Wishing you all success in the cause of true and good literature,</p>

<p class="r">
<span style="margin-right: 3em;">I remain your friend,</span><br />
<span class="smcap">J. R. Lowell</span>.<br />
</p></div>

<p>The little book was received with an attention which seems to suggest
the paucity of hopeful literature at the time and the Marchioness spirit
of the critics. Lowell’s eager friends came forward with their notices,
but there were then fewer journals even than now that could be looked to
for careful judgment. In <i>Graham’s Magazine</i> there was a long account of
the book headed “A New School of Poetry at hand,” and the writer, who
hides behind the letter C., after crediting Lowell with ideality,
enthusiasm, love for his fellow men, freshness, and delicacy, finds
fault with him chiefly for affectation of language and carelessness; but
he welcomes him as the herald of a new school which is to be
humanitarian and idealistic. It is amusing to find our familiar friend,
the “great original American poem,” looked for confidently from this new
poet. Lowell warmed himself with this praise.<a name="FNanchor_33_33" id="FNanchor_33_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_98" id="page_98">{98}</a></span></p>

<p>The most serviceable vehicle for Lowell’s literary endeavors at this
time was <i>The Boston Miscellany</i> projected by Nathan Hale, Lowell’s
associate in <i>Harvardiana</i>, and published by two young Boston men,
Bradbury and Soden. The <i>Miscellany</i> had the short life characteristic
of American literary magazines in the early half of the century, but it
showed the sound literary judgment of its editor in the list of
contributors he attracted. Lowell entered heartily into the plans for
the new magazine. He wrote for it, among other things, a sketch, “My
First Client,” which is in its form as near an approach to fiction as he
ever attempted, and is a slightly embellished narrative of his own
clientless experience as a lawyer. He thought so ill of it that he
refused to allow it to be reprinted, a few years later, in one of the
annuals then popular.</p>

<p>The most significant contribution which he made to the <i>Miscellany</i> was
a series of papers on the Old English Dramatists, begun anonymously, but
continued with his name. These were readings in Massinger, Marlowe, and
others, with running comments, and reflected the keen interest which he
took then and all his life in that great quarry of noble thoughts and
brave images. The series was the forerunner of his labors in the field
of criticism of literature, and the pleasure which he took in the work,
as well as the appreciation which the papers received, gave him a
hopeful sense that he might trust to letters for support, and abandon
the law, which he hated, and which naturally returned the compliment. In
September, 1842, he had <span class="pagenum"><a name="page_99" id="page_99">{99}</a></span>become so sanguine that, after mysteriously
hinting at an even more substantial means of support, he wrote to his
friend Loring:&mdash;</p>

<p>“I think I may safely reckon on earning four hundred dollars by my pen
the next year, which will support me. Between this and June, 1843, I
think I shall have freed myself of debt and become an independent man. I
am to have fifteen dollars a poem from the <i>Miscellany</i>, ten dollars
from <i>Graham</i>, and I have made an arrangement with the editor of the
<i>Democratic Review</i>, by which I shall probably get ten or fifteen
dollars more. Prospects are brightening, you see.”</p>

<p>It was the prophecy of a sanguine young man, but unhappily the plan
which seemed to him to promise most was instead to plunge him into debt.
The <i>Miscellany</i> had closed its short career by merging itself in the
<i>Arcturus</i> of New York, and taking courage from the brilliancy of the
journal rather than caution from its brevity of life, Lowell, in company
with Mr. Robert Carter, projected a new Boston literary and critical
magazine to be issued monthly. The Prospectus has all the bravery and
gallant dash of these forlorn hopes in literature.</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p>The contents of each number will be entirely Original, and will
consist of articles chiefly from American authors of the highest
reputation.</p>

<p>The object of the Subscribers in establishing <i>The Pioneer</i>, is to
furnish the intelligent and reflecting portion of the Reading
Public with a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_100" id="page_100">{100}</a></span> rational substitute for the enormous quantity of
thrice-diluted trash, in the shape of namby-pamby love tales and
sketches, which is monthly poured out to them by many of our
popular magazines,&mdash;and to offer instead thereof, a healthy and
manly Periodical Literature, whose perusal will not necessarily
involve a loss of time and a deterioration of every moral and
intellectual faculty.</p>

<p>The Critical Department of <i>The Pioneer</i> will be conducted with
great care and impartiality, and while satire and personality will
be sedulously avoided, opinions of merit or demerit will be
candidly and fearlessly expressed.</p>

<p><i>The Pioneer</i> will be issued punctually on the day of publication,
in the principal cities of the Union. Each number will contain 48
pages, royal octavo, double columns, handsomely printed on fine
paper, and will be illustrated with Engravings of the highest
character, both on wood and steel.</p>

<p><i>Terms</i>: Three Dollars a year, payable, in all cases, in advance.
The usual discount made to Agents. Communications for the Editors,
letters, orders, &amp;c., must be addressed, <i>postpaid</i>, to the
Publishers, 67 Washington St. (opposite the Post Office,) Boston.</p>

<p class="r">
<span class="smcap">Leland &amp; Whiting.</span><br />
</p>

<p>October 15th, 1842. </p></div>

<p>The publishers appear to have had no pecuniary interest in the venture,
the editors being the proprietors as well. Mr. Carter was a young man of
Lowell’s age, living at the time in Cambridge, where he afterward
married a daughter of Mr.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_101" id="page_101">{101}</a></span> George Nichols, long known for his scholarly
attainments as printer and corrector of the press, and for a short time
also as a publisher. Mr. Carter was a man of wide reading and tenacious
memory and a good writer, as his breezy book, “A Summer Cruise on the
Coast of New England,” testifies. His encyclopædic mind stood him in
good stead when, later, he held a position in the publishing house of D.
Appleton &amp; Co., and superintended the “New American Encyclopædia.”</p>

<p>The <i>Pioneer</i>, though it might be called a continuation of <i>The Boston
Miscellany</i>, had characteristics of its own which show that its
conductors had a clearly defined ideal in their minds and did not lack
the courage and energy to pursue it. The <i>Miscellany</i> had made
concessions to the supposed taste of the day, and had tried to catch
subscribers with fashion plates and articles, while really caring only
for good literature. The <i>Pioneer</i> discarded all adventitious aid, and,
with fidelity to its name, determined to break its way through the woods
of ignorance and prejudice to some fair land beyond. Upon-its cover page
it bore a sentence from Bacon: “Reform, therefore, without bravery or
scandal of former times and persons; but yet set it down to thyself as
well to create good precedents as to follow them.” It is easy to see
that Lowell, with his love of good letters, and with a zeal for reform
just now quickened by the fine fervor of Maria White, meant with his
individual means to do very much what the proprietors and conductors of
the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i> attempted on a larger scale fifteen<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_102" id="page_102">{102}</a></span> years later.
But those fifteen years made a good deal of difference in the attitude
of men toward the greatest of national evils, and in 1843 Lowell was not
likely to be a trenchant political writer, or to think of literature and
anti-slavery sentiment in the same breath. The vague spirit of reform
which stirred him was rather a recurrence to fundamental ideas of
freedom which made him impatient of formality and provincialism in
literature, and led him to associate American political ideas with large
independence of intellectual life. He had been breathing the atmosphere
of the spacious England of the dramatists, and it was the nature of this
literature which attracted him, as it was its art which drew Lamb,
Hazlitt, and Keats.<a name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34_34" class="fnanchor">[34]</a> Hence, when he planned the <i>Pioneer</i>, he was not
projecting a journal of national reform under the mask of literature; he
was ambitious to bear his testimony to the ideal of a national
literature springing from a soil of political independence, and akin to
great literature the world over. In a word, he knew the exhilaration of
a native spirit, not in spite but because of his feeding upon great and
not superficial, modish letters, and he was eager to demonstrate both
creatively and critically the possibility of a genuine and unaffected
American literature. In the Introduction to the <i>Pioneer</i>, for every new
journal then had its salutatory,&mdash;and the valedic<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_103" id="page_103">{103}</a></span>tory was likely to
follow shortly,&mdash;he sets forth this principle of a native literature.
After complaining of the derivative character of current criticism and
opinions, derived, that is, from the latest English quarterlies and
monthlies,&mdash;he continues:&mdash;</p>

<p>“We are the farthest from wishing to see what many so ardently pray for,
namely, a <i>National</i> literature: for the same mighty lyre of the human
heart answers the touch of the master in all ages and in every clime,
and any literature, as far as it is national, is diseased, inasmuch as
it appeals to some climatic peculiarity, rather than to the universal
nature. Moreover, everything that tends to encourage the sentiment of
caste, to widen the boundary between races, and so to put farther off
the hope of one great brotherhood, should be steadily resisted by all
good men. But we do long for a <i>natural</i> literature. One green leaf,
though of the veriest weed, is worth all the crape and wire flowers of
the daintiest Paris milliners. For it is the glory of nature that in her
least part she gives us all, and in that simple love-token of hers we
may behold the type of all her sublime mysteries; as in the least
fragment of the true artist we discern the working of the same forces
which culminate gloriously in a Hamlet or a Faust. We would no longer
see the spirit of our people held up as a mirror to the Old World; but
rather lying like one of our own inland oceans, reflecting not only the
mountain and the rock, the forest and the red man, but also the
steamboat and the rail car, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_104" id="page_104">{104}</a></span> cornfield and the factory. Let us learn
that romance is not married to the past, that it is not the birthright
of ferocious ignorance and chivalric barbarity, but that it ever was and
is an inward quality, the darling child of the sweetest refinements and
most gracious amenities of peaceful gentleness, and that it can never
die till only water runs in these red rivers of the heart, that cunning
adept which can make vague cathedrals with blazing oriels and streaming
spires out of our square meeting-boxes,&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Whose rafters sprout upon the shady side.’<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>“In this country where freedom of thought does not shiver at the cold
shadow of Spielberg (unless we name this prison of ‘public opinion’ so),
there is no danger to be apprehended from an excess of it. It is only
where there is no freedom that anarchy is to be dreaded. The mere sense
of freedom is of too fine and holy a nature to consist with injustice
and wrong. We would fain have our journal, in some sort at least, a
journal of progress, one that shall keep pace with the spirit of the
age, and sometimes go near its deeper heart. Yet, while we shall aim at
that gravity which is becoming of a manly literature, we shall hope also
to satisfy that lighter and sprightlier element of the soul, without
whose due culture the character is liable to degenerate into a morose
bigotry and selfish precisianism. To be one exponent of a young spirit
which shall aim at power through gentleness, the only means for its
secure attainment, and in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_105" id="page_105">{105}</a></span> which freedom shall be attempered to love by
a reverence for all beauty wherever it may exist, is our humble
hope....”</p>

<p>Here was a literary creed, expressed in no very exact formulas, and
really declarative of little more than an individual purpose that the
<i>Pioneer</i> should contain good and not dull or imitative literature. A
good beginning was made, for the three numbers which were published
contained poems and papers by Dr. Parsons, Story, Poe, Hawthorne, Jones
Very, John Neal, John S. Dwight, and the two editors. Lowell continued
his studies in the Old English Dramatists, printed several poems, and
wrote apparently much of the criticism, but there were no papers of a
directly didactic character; it was clear that the editor relied on
criticism for a medium of aggressive preaching of sound literary
doctrine. Here also Lowell had his opportunity to fly the flag of
anti-slavery, and he did it with a fine chivalry in a notice of
Longfellow’s “Poems on Slavery,” when he used the occasion to pay
glowing tribute to the earlier fighters. Garrison, “the half-inspired
Luther of this reform, a man too remarkable to be appreciated in his
generation, but whom the future will recognize as a great and wonderful
spirit;” Whittier, “the fiery Koerner of this spiritual warfare, who,
Scævola-like, has sacrificed on the altar of duty that right hand which
might have made him acknowledged as the most passionate lyrist of his
time;” the “tenderly-loving Maria Child, the author of that dear book,
‘Philothea,’ a woman of genius, who lives with humble content<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_106" id="page_106">{106}</a></span> in the
intellectual Coventry to which her conscientiousness has banished her&mdash;a
fate the hardest for genius to bear. Nor ought the gentle spirit of
Follen, a lion with a lamb’s heart, to be forgotten, whose fiery fate,
from which the mind turns horror-stricken, was perhaps to his mild
nature less dreadful than that stake and fagot of public opinion, in
dragging him to which many whom he loved were not inactive, for silence
at such times is action.”</p>

<p>Lowell threw himself into this literary venture with resolution and
hope. He had the double motive of making a vehicle for sound and
generous literature, and of securing for himself a rational means of
support. Those nearest to him watched the experiment with solicitude,
for magazine making on a small scale was as perilous then as it is now
on a scale of magnitude. His sister, Mrs. Putnam, wrote him a most
anxious letter called out by the fact that her brother was in New York
and Carter in charge, a man too easy and good-natured she thought for
such a position. She begged him to consider that his first number was
better than his second, and that in turn seemed likely to be better than
the third, and she dreaded a decline in the magazine. As for Miss White,
she looked upon the scheme, when it was taking shape, with mingled pride
and anxiety. She shared Lowell’s lively trust in the pioneer character
of the journal, but she had a prudent mind, and saw with a woman’s
instinct the possibility of failure, where Lowell would listen to
nothing but the note of success.</p>

<p>The <i>Pioneer</i> lived but three months. The os<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_107" id="page_107">{107}</a></span>tensible cause of its
failure was the sudden and lamentable breakdown of its chief supporter,
as shown in the following card printed at the close of the third number.</p>

<p>“The absence of any prose in the present number of <i>The Pioneer</i> from
the pen of Mr. Lowell, and the apparent neglect of many letters and
contributions addressed to him personally, will be sufficiently
explained by stating that, since the tenth of January, he has been in
the city of New York in attendance upon Dr. Elliot, the distinguished
oculist, who is endeavoring to cure him of a severe disease of the eyes,
and that the medical treatment to which he is necessarily subjected
precludes the use of his sight except to a very limited extent. He will,
however, probably be enabled, in time for the fourth number, to resume
his essays on the Poets and Dramatists, and his general supervision of
the magazine. R. C.”</p>

<p>It is plain that when the third number appeared the conductors expected
to bring out a fourth, but the enforced abstention from work of the
principal editor and writer and the lack of resources in money made the
discontinuance of the magazine inevitable.<a name="FNanchor_35_35" id="FNanchor_35_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a> In spite, however, of the
disastrous<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_108" id="page_108">{108}</a></span> experience and the debt which it entailed, the activity of
mind which the venture called forth was worth much to Lowell. He had not
a specially orderly or methodical habit, and he lacked thus the
equipment which an editor requires, but he had great fertility, and was
under an impulse which at this time he turned to account in literature.
Could he have been associated with some well organized nature, it is not
impossible that the <i>Pioneer</i> would have become established on a sound
basis and have been the vehicle for Lowell’s creative and critical work
in literature. Such work would have attracted the best that was to be
had in America, and the periodical might have been an important factor
in the intellectual life of the day.</p>

<p>The persistence with which the magazine idea was exploited hints at the
possibilities which lay for a rising literature in this particular form.
The vigorous John Neal wrote to Lowell when he was projecting the
<i>Pioneer</i>: “Persevere; be bold and fear not. A great change is
foretelling itself in the literature of the day. Magazines are to
supersede newspapers, and newspapers novels among light readers.” The
criticism which Lowell wrote or commanded for the <i>Pioneer</i> was frank,
fearless, and sure to arrest attention. It pointed the way, and might
easily have done much to shape the course of letters and art. In the
absence of such<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_109" id="page_109">{109}</a></span> a serviceable vehicle, Lowell was left to his own
resources, and having no organ at hand he dropped criticism for the time
and concentrated his mind on his poetry.</p>

<p>As Mr. Carter’s apologetic note intimates, Lowell was obliged to go to
New York early in January, 1843, for treatment at the hands of the
oculist, Dr. Elliot. A few extracts from his letters to Mr. Carter
during his absence show something of his life and interests in this
enforced absence.</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p>January 15, 1843.... My course of life is this. Every morning I go
to Dr. Elliot’s (who, by the way, is <i>very</i> kind) and wait for my
turn to be operated upon. This sometimes consumes a great deal of
time, the Dr. being overrun with patients. After being made stone
blind for the space of fifteen minutes, I have the rest of the day
to myself.</p>

<p>Handbills of the <i>Pioneer</i> in red and black with a spread eagle at
the head of them face me everywhere. I could not but laugh to see a
drayman standing with his hands in his pockets diligently spelling
it out, being attracted thereto doubtless by the bird of America,
which probably led him to think it a proclamation of the
President&mdash;a delusion from which he probably did not awake after
perusing the document.... I shall endeavor while I am here to write
an article on Pope. <i>Something</i> I will send you for the next
number, besides what I may possibly glean from others. A new
magazine has just been started here, but it is illiberal and will
probably fail.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_110" id="page_110">{110}</a></span></p>

<p>January 17, 1843. I shall only write a word or two, as I have
already been writing, and my eyes, having been operated on
yesterday <i>with the knife</i>, must be used charily.... I hope to hear
better accounts of money matters in your next. Explain as to the
500 copies you speak of as sold the day before. Remember how
interesting the least particle of news is to me, and I may be at
home under three weeks from this, though I hope to be in a
fortnight....</p>

<p>January 19. So you are fairly bewitched!<a name="FNanchor_36_36" id="FNanchor_36_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a> Well, I might have
expected it, but still it was no reason that you should have told
me so little about the magazine. <i>I</i> should not have talked wholly
about one individual&mdash;of course not. <i>I</i> should not have been
bewitched....</p>

<p>Have you got any copy for the third number? Do not ask any
conservatives to write, for it will mar the unity of the magazine.
We shall be surer of success if we maintain a uniform course, and
have a decided tendency either one way or the other. We shall, at
least, gain more influence in that way.</p>

<p>I have picked up a poem by Harry Franco against capital punishment.
It has a good deal of humor in it and is striking. A woodcut of a
poor devil hanging with the crows discussing his fate will perhaps
accompany it. Prose I have got no scent of as yet....</p>

<p>January <a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a>. I have received <i>all</i> your letters, and like to have
you send by express. I<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_111" id="page_111">{111}</a></span> should like to see Miss Gray’s and Miss
Peabody’s articles before they go to press. I am a better judge of
that kind of merchandise than you. The second number is a good one,
but <i>full</i> of misprints. The notices in the cover, if printed at
all, should have been expurgated. See to it next time, and do not
let your kind heart seduce you into printing any more puffs of <i>me</i>
personally. What do you mean by that notice of Emerson? I shall
have to write to him. Your notice of De Quincey was excellent.</p>

<p>I send herewith a poem of Miss Barrett<a name="FNanchor_37_37" id="FNanchor_37_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a> which came with the
letters you sent me. She sent <i>three</i> others, and promises more in
a very pleasant letter. I shall send on quite a budget of prose, I
hope, soon, but cannot use my eyes much. I am going to answer an
article on the copyright question by O’Sullivan in the forthcoming
<i>Democratic Review</i>. I must see proofs of Miss Barrett and all my
own pieces.... I must not write any more or I shall not get home
these six months.</p>

<p>January 22.... My dear, good, kindest, best friend, you know that I
would not write a word that should knowingly pain your loving
heart. So forgive whatever there has been in my other letters to
trouble, and only reflect how anxious I must naturally feel, away
from home as I am, and left a great part of the time to the
solitude of my own thoughts by the total deprivation of the use of
my eyes.</p>

<p>Willis is under Dr. E.’s care also, and yester<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_112" id="page_112">{112}</a></span>day introduced
himself to me, and said all manner of kind things. He had meant to
write to me, giving me his experience in editing, and had long been
anxious to know me, &amp;c., &amp;c. This morning he came and took me to
church with him, and altogether overwhelms me with attention. His
wife is a very <i>nice</i> pretty little Englishwoman, with a very sweet
voice. W. said he wrote the notice in the <i>Jonathan</i> as the most
judicious way of helping the magazine, giving your own philosophic
theory as to its possible results....</p>

<p>January 24.... I <i>must</i> write an article for the next number, and
yet I do not see very well how I am to do it. For I can scarcely
get through one letter without pain, and everything that I write
retards my case and so keeps me the longer here. But I love Keats
so much that I think I can write something good about him.</p>

<p>Willis continues very kind, and I begin to think that he really
likes me. At least he said the same to Dr. E. about me that he told
me to my face. He told the Dr. (I copy it the more readily that I
know it will delight <i>you</i>) that I had written the most remarkable
poem that had been written in this country, and that I was destined
to be the brightest star that had yet risen in American literature.
He told me, also, that I was more popular and more talked about and
read at this time than any other poet in the land, and he is going
(or was) to write an article in the <i>Jonathan</i> to that effect.
These things <i>you must keep in your own heart</i>. He promises to help
the <i>Pioneer</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_113" id="page_113">{113}</a></span> in every way he can, and he will be able to do us a
great deal of good, as he has last week taken half the ownership of
the <i>Jonathan</i> on condition of solely editing it. He talks of
paying me to write letters for him from Boston....</p>

<p>John Neal lectures here to-night. I have not seen him, and I do not
know whether I shall hear him, for if I get a package from you
to-day, as I hope I shall, I shall hardly have 25 cents left to buy
a ticket with. So you think we have succeeded. They are the
pleasantest words I have heard since I have been here. But we must
not feel too sure yet. I think we <i>shall</i> succeed. Folks here (some
of them) say that we shall beyond our utmost expectation....</p>

<p>Saturday.... You shall have some copy from me on <i>Wednesday</i>
morning if I get blind by it. Where is Brownson? Don’t print
nonsense. Better not be out till the middle of March. But you are
only trying to frighten me. Do not print nonsense, for God’s sake.
Print the history of Mesmerism. Write an article on Japan. If I
were to read over your letters again in order to answer them
categorically, I should not be able to use my eyes for a week. You
do not recollect that I undergo an application or an operation
<i>every day</i>. If I could <i>see</i> you for ten minutes I could arrange
all. I perhaps may come on and return hither again. <i>Do not hint</i>
this to any one, for if Maria heard of it, she would be expecting
anxiously every day. I am sick to death of this place, yet it does
me good spiritually to stay here. I<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_114" id="page_114">{114}</a></span> <i>must</i> not write any more. In
your next letter ask all questions and I will answer.... </p></div>

<p>Lowell stayed on in New York on account of his eyes till the end of
February. At a period when Mrs. Child could gravely write and publish in
a book “Letters from New York,” to go to New York from Cambridge was
nearly equivalent to a winter abroad. As his letters to Carter show,
with the disabilities under which he labored Lowell could do little at
reading or writing, and he used the opportunity for social occupation.
Page he had already come to know, and he had made the acquaintance
through the <i>Miscellany</i> of Charles F. Briggs, whom now he took into
warm friendship. Mr. Briggs was a diligent man of letters, best known to
the public of that day as “Harry Franco,” and through him Lowell fell in
with many writers and book people. But he was most impatient to return,
and now that his magazine had ceased he found himself with no routine
labors, but with a mind full to overflowing.</p>

<p>The real pursuit of Lowell during 1843 was poetry, and poetry of a lofty
character. In the Ode which he wrote in 1841 beginning,&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“In the old days of awe and keen-eyed wonder”&mdash;<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="nind">he had outlined the function of the poet; and the whole set of his
nature in the months between his engagement and his marriage was in the
direction of poetic earnestness. His conception was dominated by moral
enthusiasm: the preacher in him<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_115" id="page_115">{115}</a></span> was always thrusting himself to the
front, and the reformer of the day sometimes masqueraded in his verse in
very antique forms. But his genuine love of art above all his unfailing
apprehension of poetry as an end in itself saved him from a merely
utilitarian notion of his high calling. And it is safe to say that he
never was so happy as when he was abandoning himself to the full
enjoyment of poetic composition. He diverted the streams of love and of
anti-slavery fervor into this full current, and could say of his
“Prometheus” that it was “overrunning with true radicalism and
anti-slavery;” but the exhilaration which fanned his wings was the
consciousness of youth and love finding an outlet in the natural voice
of poetry. “I was never so happy as now,” he writes to Loring, 15 June,
after telling of his “Prometheus” and “A Legend of Brittany,” on which
he was at work. “I see Maria every other day. I am embowered in leaves,
have a voluntary orchestra of birds and bees and frogs, and a little
family of chickens to whom I have a sort of feeling of paternity, and
begin to believe I had some share in begetting them.”</p>

<p>Page painted Lowell’s portrait when he was in New York and exhibited it
in the spring. This picture is at once a likeness of the poet and an
expression of the painter. Page was an idealist who found a most
congenial subject in Lowell. Out of the dark canvass&mdash;for the painter,
pursuing the elusive phantom of a recovery of the art of the Venetians,
succeeded at any rate in giving to his work an ancient air&mdash;there looks
forth a face<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_116" id="page_116">{116}</a></span> which is the very apparition of poetry. Far removed from
the sentimental aspect, it has depth of feeling, a serene assurance, and
a Shakespearean ideality. It is not difficult to see that Page was not
painting in Lowell a young Cambridge author, but the student of the
English dramatists and the inheritor of all the ages of poetry. To his
own neighbors and friends Lowell had much of this air in his presence.
His flowing chestnut hair falling in rich masses from an equally
dividing line, his unshorn face, his eyes with their kindly wistful
look, his tremulous mouth,&mdash;all served to separate him in appearance
from common men and to mark him as an unusual person.</p>

<p>How affectionately Lowell regarded Page and what admiration he had for
his genius may be read in the dedication to him which was prefixed to
his “Poems” issued in 1843 and retained in later collections. The
frankness with which he avows his love for his friend is a witness to
that openness of Lowell’s nature which we have already noticed, and the
terms in which he speaks of Page’s art and of the artistic faith which
they held in common give a hint of the basis of their comradery. Lowell
disclaimed any special knowledge of painting, and always brought to
bear, in his discussions on art, the principles which he had learned
through his devotion to the art of poetry. In the relation of the two
men to each other one is half tempted to recall the friendship of Keats
and Haydon. In each case the poet believed in the painter less by reason
of the work done than because of the ideals</p>

<div class="figcenter" style="width: 369px;">
<a name="J1843" id="J1843"></a>
<a href="images/i_116fp_lg.jpg">
<img src="images/i_116fp_sml.jpg" width="369" height="500" alt="[Image unavailable.]" /></a>
<div class="caption"><p class="c"><i>Mr. Lowell in 1843</i></p></div>
</div>

<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_117" id="page_117">{117}</a></span></p>

<p class="nind">held and aimed at. Page was an enthusiast, and a man of mingled
imaginative and speculative powers. As Haydon preached the Elgin marbles
to Keats, so Page discoursed on the old masters to Lowell. But the
reciprocal admiration of Lowell and Page was really for the man behind
the art. “I am glad you like my poems,” Lowell wrote to Mrs. Shaw; “Page
is wiser than you and likes them because he knows I am better than
they;” and to Mr. Briggs he had written shortly before: “You are a great
deal better than anything you write, and Page than anything he paints,
and I always think of you without your pen, and of him without his
brushes.”</p>

<p>The admiration and affection with which Page and Briggs regarded Lowell
were only more intimate than the feelings which were generally aroused.
He had come to be looked on as a new poet. So Hawthorne, in his “Hall of
Fantasy,” as first published, characterized him as “the poet of the
generation that now enters upon the stage.” When the <i>Pioneer</i> was
started Lowell’s was a name to conjure with. “The principal editor,”
says the <i>Tribune</i>, “is well and widely known as one of the most gifted
and promising poets in America;” and a Philadelphia paper speaks of the
journal as “edited by a man whose genius and originality is at once the
praise and wonder of his countrymen.” To be sure, newspaper praise is
apt to be pitched in a high key, and the army of independent admirers on
closer examination turns out to be a company of the author’s
enthusiastic friends marching and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_118" id="page_118">{118}</a></span> countermarching across the stage,
disappearing in one wing only to come out from another. But after all
allowance has been made, it is clear that in a community which was
eagerly expecting great things in literature, Lowell, though he had
published little and much of that anonymously, was already one of the
candidates for fame. He himself did not need this incentive. He had the
consciousness of power and that audience of one which stimulated him to
the exercise of his power.</p>

<p>“A Year’s Life” had been frankly autobiographic. The poems written
afterward and now collected in the 1843 volume were the distinct
outgrowth of a nature stimulated by this new experience of love and at
last both fully alive to the consciousness of poetic feeling and eager
with a desire to act out the aspirations which had been blown into flame
by the breath of love. Hence the volume, in its contents, is of varied
character, as the poet himself held within his restless life the
somewhat contradictory elements which go to make up a poet and a
reformer. “A Legend of Brittany,” which is the substantial piece, and
stands at the front, is a piece of pure romance, pretty evidently sprung
from the soil in which grew Keats’s “Isabella; or the Pot of Basil.” The
underlying theme is not dissimilar, the measure is the same, and there
is something of the same richness of color and delight in the beauty of
single, even unfamiliar words. Yet the reader feels that Keats not only
had the more vivid imagination, but a clearer sense of the beauty that
lies in intensity of expres<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_119" id="page_119">{119}</a></span>sion&mdash;an intensity so great that one almost
holds one’s breath as he reads. Lowell, as we know, rarely essayed
anything in the nature of story-telling; the dramatic faculty was not
his, and keen as was his appreciation of the power of the elder
dramatists, his criticism shows that he dwelt most emphatically on those
passages and lines which disclose poetic beauty, rather than the
features of construction. But Keats’s warmth and richness of decorative
painting appealed to him with peculiar force at a time when he himself
had come out into the sunshine and was intoxicated with his own
happiness. It is clear that when he was writing “A Legend of Brittany”
he was revelling in the possession of poetic fancy, and drawing himself
to the height of his enjoyment of pure poetry unmixed with elements of
didacticism. He wrote to G. B. Loring, 15 June, 1843, “I am now at work
on a still longer poem [than “Prometheus”] in the <i>ottava rima</i> to be
the first in my forthcoming volume. I feel more and more assured every
day that I shall yet do something that will keep my name (and perhaps my
body) alive. My wings were never so light and strong as now. So hurrah
for a niche and a laurel.” The poem did not apparently call out any
strong response, nor has it, I suspect, ever been read with very great
admiration&mdash;certainly it cannot for a moment be compared in popularity
with “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” which followed five years later, and
the explanation is perhaps to be found mainly in its derivative
character, even though readers might not be acutely aware how far it
owed its origin to Keats.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_120" id="page_120">{120}</a></span></p>

<p>Mr. Briggs, who was the stanchest of Lowell’s literary friends at this
time, wrote with enthusiasm of the volume, using terms of admiration
which must have been grateful indeed, since they were charged with
discrimination and just appreciation; but he was frank and honest in his
friendly judgment, and he wrote to Lowell of “A Legend of Brittany:” “It
is too warm, rich, and full of sweet sounds and sights; the incense
overpowers me, and the love and crime, and prayers and monks and
glimpses of spirits oppress me. I am too much a clod of earth to mingle
well in such elements. I feel while reading it as though I were lying
upon a bed of down with a canopy of rose-colored silk above me, with
gleams of sunshine darting in the room and half revealing and at times
more than revealing strange figures painted upon the walls of my
chamber. But I do not wonder that M. W. should like it. It is the proper
reading for pure-minded loving creatures, from whose eyes knowledge with
its hard besom has not yet swept away the golden cobwebs of fancy. I
like her the better myself for liking it.”<a name="FNanchor_38_38" id="FNanchor_38_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a></p>

<p>This long poem is not the only one in the book which springs from pure
delight in poetic imagination; but it is by far the most full and
unalloyed expression of this pleasure. When one reads, however, such a
poem as “Rhœcus,” with its preface<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_121" id="page_121">{121}</a></span> apologizing for so much paganism,
and its application, and especially when one reads “Prometheus,” one is
aware how largely Lowell was dominated, even in this time when his soul
was flushed with the sense of beauty and awake to the tendrils it was
putting forth, by a strong purpose to read the lesson of beauty and love
to his fellows. The seriousness of life was indeed charged with an
exalted meaning by the revelation which came to him when he was admitted
into the intimate companionship of a woman who had in her something of
the spirit of a prophetess, but it would be untrue to say that Maria
White handed him the torch; she kindled to a greater brilliancy that
which he already held, and his love transmuted the vague stirrings of
his own nature into more definite purpose. Keats, to refer again to one
with whom Lowell certainly had spiritual kinship, was mildly affected
somewhat in the same way by the friendship which he formed in his
impressionable years with Hunt and his circle, and if we could imagine
Fanny Brawne a Mary Wollstonecraft, we might speculate on the effect she
would have had on his poetry. Even Keats, with his passionate devotion
to beauty, could dig a subterranean passage under the opening of the
third book of “Endymion” for the purpose of blowing up the “present
ministers;” and Lowell, taking the world-worn myth of Prometheus, could
write into it reflections apposite to what he regarded as a tremendous
upheaving force just ready to manifest itself in society. The poem of
“Prometheus,” however, justly stands high in the estimation of Lowel<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_122" id="page_122">{122}</a></span>l’s
readers, for the thought involved in it rises above the level of a
didactic utterance, and carries with it an impersonation of human
dignity which saves it from the reproach of making the myth a mere text
for a modern discourse. The poem is the most comprehensive and largest
expression of the mind of the poet at this period of emancipation, and
the fine images with which it abounds spring from the subject itself and
are not mere decorations.</p>

<p>Here, again, a comparison of “Prometheus” with Keats’s “Hyperion”
illustrates the infusion of moral ardor which separates the disciple
from the master. Keats summed up his poetic philosophy in the lines&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i4">“For ’tis the eternal law<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That first in beauty should be first in might,”&mdash;<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="nind">and he was fain to see the operation of Nature’s law by which one race
of conquerors would dispossess another.</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“So on our heels a fresh perfection treads.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="nind">Lowell, speculating on the eternal struggle, figured in “Prometheus,” of
right and wrong, of darkness and light, bids Jove heed that he&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“And all strength shall crumble except love”&mdash;<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="nind">and sees in a vision&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Peaceful commonwealths where sunburnt Toil<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Reaps for itself the rich earth made its own.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>Mr. Briggs, writing to him on the appearance of the poem in the
<i>Democratic Review</i>, reminds him that he had read a bit of it when
visiting him in his house at Staten Island, and adds: “But I did<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_123" id="page_123">{123}</a></span> not
anticipate that you could or would lengthen out those few lines into a
poem so full of majesty and sweetness. So far as my observation will
allow me to judge, it is the best sustained effort of the American Muse.
The structure of the verse is exceedingly fine to my ear, although it
may not be as acceptable to the public ear as the almost emasculate
smoothness of Bryant, to which it has been accustomed. The bold bright
images with which ‘Prometheus’ abounds would be sufficient of themselves
to give you a name among the wielders of the pen, but the noble and true
spirit of Philosophy which they help to develop makes them appear of
secondary importance, and gives you a claim to a higher renown than the
mere word-mongers of Parnassus can ever aspire to.” Lowell, in replying
to this letter, wrote: “My ‘Prometheus’ has not received a single public
notice yet, though I have been puffed to repletion for poems without a
tithe of its merit. Your letter was the first sympathy I received.
Although such great names as Goethe, Byron, and Shelley have all handled
the subject in modern times, you will find that I have looked at it from
a somewhat new point of view. I have made it <i>radical</i>, and I believe
that no poet in this age can write much that is good unless he give
himself up to this tendency. For radicalism has now for the first time
taken a distinctive and acknowledged shape of its own. So much of its
spirit as poets in former ages have attained (and from their purer
organization they could not fail of some) was by instinct rather than by
reason. It has never till<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_124" id="page_124">{124}</a></span> now been seen to be one of the two great
wings that upbear the universe.” In the same letter he says: “The proof
of poetry is, in my mind, whether it reduces to the essence of a single
line the vague philosophy which is floating in all men’s minds, and so
renders it portable and useful and ready to the hand. Is it not so? At
least no poem ever makes me respect its author which does not in some
way convey a truth of philosophy.”</p>

<p>In the same temper which produced “Prometheus,” he wrote what he
regarded as in some way a companion piece, “A Glance behind the
Curtain,” in which he imagines a conversation between Cromwell and
Hampden. There is no seeming endeavor at characterization of either
figure, dramatically, but the poem, which is an attempt to read
Cromwell’s mind, is a stirring and indignant demand that Freedom shall
do her perfect work.</p>

<p>“Freedom hath yet a work for me to do,” he makes Cromwell exclaim:&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“So speaks that inward voice which never yet<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Spake falsely, when it urged the spirit on<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To noble deeds for country and mankind.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And for success, I ask no more than this,&mdash;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To bear unflinching witness to the truth.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">All true whole men succeed; for what is worth<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Success’s name, unless it be the thought,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The inward surety, to have carried out<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A noble purpose to a noble end,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Although it be the gallows or the block?<br /></span>
<span class="i0">’Tis only Falsehood that doth ever need<br /></span>
<span class="i0">These outward shows of gain to bolster her.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>Thus, in the guise of Cromwell, speaks the young man dimly conscious, in
a travailing age, of work<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_125" id="page_125">{125}</a></span> needing to be done, and stirred too by the
high emotions of the woman he loved, yet not quite able to translate his
vague desire to be a champion of Truth into deeds. To be sure, at the
close of this poem he remembers that Cromwell was the friend of Milton,</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“A man not second among those who lived<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To show us that the poet’s lyre demands<br /></span>
<span class="i0">An arm of tougher sinew than the sword.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="nind">In the dreams of his youth I think he saw himself playing a part in the
drama that was opening, and wondering how he could wield the pen so as
to make it a weapon for slaying wrong or defending right. Yet direct as
he might wish his attack to be, he was held back by an equally potent
impulse to fulfil the demands of art. “A Chippewa Legend,” in this same
volume, though used as a parable for an impassioned denunciation of
slavery, has touches of nature in the unfolding of the story which show
clearly how much delight he took in the story itself, and how easily he
might have stopped short as a singer, if the preacher in him had not
made the song turn out a sermon.</p>

<p>The autobiographic element in this volume of “Poems” is most distinctly
summed up in a sonnet which dropped out of later collections containing
most of the other poems. It bears the title “On my twenty-fourth
Birthday, February 22, 1843,” and marks well his own sense of a certain
transition which had taken place in his growth.</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Now have I quite passed by that cloudy If<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That darkened the wild hope of boyish days,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_126" id="page_126">{126}</a></span><br /></span>
<span class="i0">When first I launched my slender-sided skiff<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Upon the wide sea’s dim, unsounded ways;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Now doth Love’s sun my soul with splendor fill,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And Hope bath struggled upward into Power,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Soft Wish is hardened into sinewy Will,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And Longing into Certainty doth tower:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The love of beauty knoweth no despair;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">My heart would break, if I should dare to doubt,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That from the Wrong, which makes its dragon’s lair<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Here on the Earth, fair Truth shall wander out,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Teaching mankind, that Freedom’s held in fee<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Only by those who labor to set free.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>In “A Year’s Life” the l’envoi of the volume is a timid poem, “Goe,
little booke!” in which the poet, sending his venture out among
strangers and most likely among apathetic readers, comforts himself with
the reflection:&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“But, if all others are unkind,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">There’s <i>one</i> heart whither thou canst fly<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For shelter from the biting wind;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, in that home of purity,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">It were no bitter thing to die.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>The “L’Envoi” of “Poems” is addressed to M. W. and is an open confession
of the indebtedness of his love, three years after the veiled disclosure
in “Ianthe,” “Irene,” “Isabel,” and other figurings of his affection,
and runs like a golden thread through all the warp and woof of his
imagination and fancy. In this serious poem, which he retained in his
later collections, though without the declarative initials,<a name="FNanchor_39_39" id="FNanchor_39_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a> Lowell
intimates very clearly that his maturer outlook on life, and his
attitude toward poetry are due largely to the inspiration<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_127" id="page_127">{127}</a></span> which he has
derived from the aspirations of his betrothed. Not only has his love for
her quickened his eye of faith, but he has caught a wider view and a
firmer hold on the great realities of the spirit through the contagion
of her lofty idealism and its fervent expression in a moral ardor. This
is especially manifest in a long passage which has been omitted from the
poem in later collections. There are portions of this omitted passage
which are little better than a dissertation on the poet’s mission, and
they were wisely dropped, but they drew after them by necessity a few
verses which have an interest as recording in a candid fashion the
change which had come over the poet’s mind in these three years just
past. After the introductory lines, in which he speaks rather
disdainfully of “A Year’s Life,” and intimates that he has grown a
sadder and a wiser man, yet with no lessening of that trust in God which
was so marked a characteristic of his betrothed, he goes on:&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Less of that feeling which the world calls love,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou findest in my verse, but haply more<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of a more precious virtue, born of that,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The love of God, of Freedom, and of Man.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou knowest well what these three years have been,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">How we have filled and graced each other’s hearts,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And every day grown fuller of that bliss,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which, even at first, seemed more than we could bear,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And thou, meantime, unchanged, except it be<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That thy large heart is larger, and thine eyes<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of palest blue, more tender with the love<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which taught me first how good it was to love;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And, if thy blessed name occur less oft,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Yet thou canst see the shadow of thy soul<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In all my song, and art well-pleased to feel<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_128" id="page_128">{128}</a></span><br /></span>
<span class="i0">That I could ne’er be rightly true to thee,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">If I were recreant to higher aims.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou didst not grant to me so rich a fief<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As thy full love, on any harder tenure<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Than that of rendering thee a single heart;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And I do service for thy queenly gift<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Then best, when I obey my soul, and tread<br /></span>
<span class="i0">In reverence the path she beckons me.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>It would be joy enough, he proceeds, if he could so measure joy, to rest
in this contentment of loving and being loved, but life had nobler
destinies, and he rejoiced that she who gave him her love had a larger
conception of poetry, and so he passes to an analysis of the true aims
of poesy, which finally takes the turn of considering the possibility of
satisfying these aims by rendering the landscape of America into
verse,&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“They tell us that our land was made for song,”&mdash;<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="nind">and so continues as preserved in the present form of the poem.</p>

<p>It will be seen thus that this volume of “Poems,” taken as a register of
Lowell’s development, marks a greater sureness of himself, a more
definite determination of aim, a confidence in powers whose precise
range he cannot yet measure, and with all this a swaying now toward the
expression of pure delight in art, now toward the use of his art for the
accomplishment of some great purpose. It is noticeable, also, that in “A
Year’s Life” there is no trace of humor and scarcely any singular
felicity of phrase; in “Poems,” wit and humor begin to play a little on
the surface. There can be little doubt that the direct influence of
Maria White was<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_129" id="page_129">{129}</a></span> toward what may without offence be called the practical
issue, and this not because she was utilitarian&mdash;on the contrary, Lowell
felt called on to defend her against the charge of being a
transcendentalist, the charge implying a reproach as of a mere
visionary; no, it was a certain high, even exalted and enthusiastic
allegiance to Truth which dominated her nature, made her in a degree to
accept this allegiance as sign of a mission which she was to fulfil,
rendered her eager to have the close coöperation of her lover, and made
him almost feverishly desirous of justifying her faith by his works. A
letter which she wrote to Mr. Briggs, though it anticipates a little the
course of this narrative, may be cited here as throwing some further
light on her nature.</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p class="r">
<span class="smcap">Watertown</span>, Dec. 12th, 1844.<br />
</p>

<p><span class="smcap">My dear Friend</span>,&mdash;James is so hurried with his book that he has not
an instant to spare, and has therefore commissioned me to answer
your letter, and account to you for his long silence. The truth is,
he delayed writing his articles on Poets and Old Dramatists, or
rather delayed arranging them in the form of conversations, until
he had only two months left for what really required four. The book
must be out before we are married; he has three printers hard upon
for copy, for which he has to rise early and sit up late, so that
he can only spare time to see me twice a week, and then I have but
transient glimpses of his dear face.</p>

<p>The pears were thought delicious, and James would have told you
that we all thought so, had<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_130" id="page_130">{130}</a></span> not these troubles about his book just
been dawning upon him. The basket still remains upon a shelf in my
closet, and when I look at it a pleasant train of thoughts comes up
in regard to my housekeeping, in which I see it filled, with eggs
white as snow, or apples from our little plot, though never again
with pears like those which first consecrated it.</p>

<p>Both James and myself feel greatly interested in your journal,<a name="FNanchor_40_40" id="FNanchor_40_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a>
in spite of its proposed name. James told me to express his horror
to you at the cockneyism of such a title. <i>The Broadway Chronicle</i>
chronicles the thoughts and feelings of Broadway, not those of the
New England people whom you seem willing to receive somewhat from.
Should not a title have truth for its first recommendation? Do you
write from the meridian of Broadway? I think you write from a
sturdy New England heart, that has a good strong well-spring of old
Puritan blood beating therein, with all its hatred to forms and
cant, to fashion and show. If ‘Pistol speaks naught but truth,’
should his name be a lie? Pistol’s is not; it expresses the man
truly. I wish yours did as much to us here, though if it <i>really</i>
gratifies your taste and judgment, if it is not a <i>whim</i>, but a
<i>thought</i>, we shall all like it in time, I suppose, if we do not
now. If it is good we shall of course come round to it. I always
say just what I think, as you see, and I trust it will not seem
harsh and unlovely to you in me as a woman. I do not wish to appear
so ever, but I had rather<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_131" id="page_131">{131}</a></span> than give up what I think is truly and
undeniably one of <i>woman’s</i> rights in common with man.</p>

<p>James says he cannot say anything now with certainty in regard to
his contributions to your paper, except that he will give you, of
course, the best he has. Mrs. Putnam, I believe, has nothing
translated at present, but James will ask her, also William Story
and Nathan Hale. I have some translations I made from the German,
songs, ballads, etc., which are at your service if you care to have
them. I hope to write somewhat when I can have James always by my
side to encourage me, and in time it may be something more than a
source of pleasure to us. Carter has seen your letter, and I do not
doubt will be ready to do all he can, ready and glad.</p>

<p>I intended to have written to you and Mrs. Briggs expressly to
invite you to our wedding, but I cannot do it now with much force
or grace after your paragraph on the subject.<a name="FNanchor_41_41" id="FNanchor_41_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a> To us who have
been married for nearly five years, it is of course no spiritual
change; but if it were merely for the fact that from that day we
can always be together, it would be well worth celebrating by some
rite<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_132" id="page_132">{132}</a></span> and calling our friends about us to participate in it. What
that rite is does not greatly matter, but I prefer that which time
has consecrated.</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“I can scorn nothing which a nation’s heart<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hath held for ages holy.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="nind">That is, nothing in the form of rite or observance for things in
themselves sacred, for you will tell me the Ages held the gibbet,
the scourge and rack holy, if I let it pass without qualification.
Still, I bid you to our marriage, though I trust even if you do not
come you can see it whenever you see us. Some have great need to
ask their friends at such a time, that they may afterwards certify
such a thing has taken place because no trace of it remains. It can
never be so with us, it could never be so with any who hold love
sacred....</p>

<p>We shall be married the night after Christmas, and go on to New
York after one day and night spent at home. We should love to stop
there to see you” as long as you would like to have us, but our
present engagements in Philadelphia will take us directly on there.
We shall be in New York on Sunday, <i>where</i> is not decided yet. With
love to your wife, yours with friendly heart,</p>

<p class="r">
<span class="smcap">Maria White</span>.<br />
</p></div>

<p>The book which this letter speaks of as absorbing Lowell’s time and
thought was his “Conversations on Some of the Old Poets,” for which Miss
White made a cover design and which was published by John Owen early in
January, 1845. It will be remembered that Lowell began in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_133" id="page_133">{133}</a></span> <i>Boston
Miscellany</i> and continued in the <i>Pioneer</i> some studies on the Old
Dramatists. The series might have gone on at greater length, for he was
working a vein which yielded him great delight, and never indeed ceased
to engage his attention. He resumed the theme in the last considerable
venture of his life, and gave a course of lectures at the Lowell
Institute in the spring of 1887, which was in effect a series of
readings from the dramatists with running comments. “When I selected my
topic for this new venture,” he said to his audience at the opening of
the course, “I was returning to a first love. The second volume I ever
printed, in 1843 I think it was,<a name="FNanchor_42_42" id="FNanchor_42_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42_42" class="fnanchor">[42]</a>&mdash;it is now a rare book, I am not
sorry to know; I have not seen it for many years,&mdash;was mainly about the
Old English Dramatists, if I am not mistaken. I dare say it was crude
enough, but it was spontaneous and honest.”</p>

<p>The suspension of the <i>Pioneer</i> left Lowell without any convenient
vehicle for carrying further these appreciative papers, and he projected
a book partly because the subject was in his mind, partly because he was
anxious to turn his printed matter to fresh account, but chiefly, it
must be inferred from the contents of the book, because he was eager to
have freedom of speech on several matters which lay close to his mind.
He resolved, therefore, to remodel his papers, so far as he used<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_134" id="page_134">{134}</a></span> them
at all, into a series of conversations. His work upon the book was
hurried, as the letter last quoted from Miss White intimates. In
September, 1844, he was planning a course of four or five lectures on
English poetry, beginning with Chaucer, which he proposed delivering in
Philadelphia in the winter immediately after his marriage; but he seems
suddenly to have changed his mind, and to have tossed what he might have
prepared into this new book, which opens with a long conversation on
Chaucer,&mdash;a conversation split in the next edition into two. The
passages from Chaucer which he quotes are drawn sometimes from the
modernization by Wordsworth, but are also, in some cases, his own much
closer simplification of the original. To the ear they depart very
little from the original, the widest departure being in getting rid of
the final <i>e</i>. The talk on Chaucer is followed by comments on Chapman
and Ford, with reference by easy suggestion to Shakespeare, Marlowe,
Fletcher, Pope, and Wordsworth.</p>

<p>But though the staple of the “Conversations” is poetry, and there are
generous examples and much keen appreciation of the poets discussed, the
book would interest a reader to-day less by its treatment of the
subjects which gave it excuse for being than by its free and careless
exhibition of Lowell’s mind on topics of current concern. There is very
little of dramatic assumption in the interlocutors. Philip and John are
simply convenient personages playing at a battledore and shuttlecock
game of words. Philip is the major character, who does all of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_135" id="page_135">{135}</a></span>
reading and advances most of the propositions, but John, whose chief
part is to start Philip by questions, and to interpose occasional jibes
or independent observations, is not differentiated in manner; he is
another of Lowell’s many selves, and may be taken as the critical,
interrupting side of his mind.<a name="FNanchor_43_43" id="FNanchor_43_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43_43" class="fnanchor">[43]</a> But both speakers are after the same
game.</p>

<p>One of the agreeable touches in the volume is in the asides with which
Lowell refers to contemporary authors like Hawthorne and Longfellow, to
Page, to Dwight, and to such beginners as W. W. Story and R. C., and
when he takes up for discussion a recent address by the Rev. Mr. Putnam.
These references and allusions help one to understand the attitude which
Lowell took toward his book. He did not deceive himself as to its
importance. It was a prolongation of his magazine work and gave him an
opportunity to free his mind. The form, as I have intimated, was not
that of a true conversation; it is far removed from such excellent
exemplars as the “Imaginary Conversations” of Landor, the first of which
had appeared a score of years before; it had but little of the graceful
fencing which brings the talkers closer and closer to the heart of a
subject, till one makes the final thrust that disarms his antagonist.
No; it was simply a device to secure flexibility and dis<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_136" id="page_136">{136}</a></span>cursiveness,
and is talk run mad, sometimes an harangue, sometimes an epigram, most
often a rapid flow of views on literature and life. “If some of the
topics introduced seem foreign to the subject,” says Lowell, in his
prefatory address To the Reader, “I can only say that they are not so to
my mind, and that an author’s object in writing criticisms is not only
to bring to light the beauties of the works he is considering, but also
to express his own opinions upon those and other matters.”</p>

<p>The reading which lies behind the talk is varied, and the talker speaks
from a full mind, but there is none of that restraint of art which gives
weight to the words and makes one wish to read again and again the
reflections. The cleverness is of the showy sort, and an interesting
comparison could be drawn between the portions of the book which relate
directly to the dramatists and the more mellow discussion of the same
subject in the latest of Lowell’s published prose. But despite the
crudeness which marks the earlier book, it shares with the later that
delightful spontaneity and first hand intelligence which make Lowell
always worth attention when he speaks on literary art. It was
characteristic of him that when at sixty-eight he discoursed on the
dramatists whom he had been reading all his life, he had not the need
and apparently not the curiosity to turn back and see what he said about
them at twenty-five. There was little, if any, of the careful husbandry
of his ideas which marks some men of letters; out of the abundance of
the heart his mouth spoke.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_137" id="page_137">{137}</a></span></p>

<p>In no one of his books can the reader discern better the spontaneous
element in Lowell’s mind, and the length to which he could go under the
impulse of the immediate thought. So fluent was he, so unaware of any
effort, and so swept away for the time being by the stream of his ideas,
that he seemed to himself as one possessed, and more than once he hinted
darkly that he was not writing the book, but was the spokesman for sages
and poets who used him as their means of communication. The visionary
faculty which he possessed could easily be confused at this time with
the half-rapt condition of the mind fed with emotional ardor. The book,
as we have seen, was written at full speed, and it reflects the generous
nature of the writer; but it reflects also the untempered thought, and
registers judgments in the process of making.</p>

<p>Running through the entire book, and making the real excuse for it, is
Lowell’s study of the essence of poetry. This is what gives to the
volume its chief interest; it is really a half-conscious explication of
the concern which was most agitating his mind at this time. What was
poetry? Could it be the substance of a man’s life? There is a
prosecution of some of the same problems which recently he had been
trying to solve in his own volume of poems. He had to ask himself if he
was a poet. The witness for that was to be found not so much in his
taste and his preferences in literature, nor solely in the delight which
he took in versification; he felt the stirring in his nature of that
high vocation of the poet which makes him a seer<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_138" id="page_138">{138}</a></span> and an interpreter.
His impulse was to yield to it, but the question arose, What was he to
interpret? What was there in life about him which was crying out for
articulation? And here, if I mistake not, he fell into some confusion of
mind through the insistence of one particular incarnation of divine
thought. He was conscious and aware of a momentous idea, that of freedom
expressed in terms of human brotherhood, words which even then had the
dull ring of cant when they were used by counterfeit-minded men, yet had
in the minds of genuine men and women a vibrant and exultant sound as if
they were to pay all the debts of poor human nature. Remembering that
this was on the eve of ’48, when the visionaries of Europe and America
were very sure that they saw a great light, one sees how forcible this
idea could be as a motive in the throbbing and ingenuous heart of a
young American who was quite sure he was called to high endeavor.</p>

<p>But with the shrewdness which belonged to his mother wit, Lowell could
not satisfy himself with merely windy utterances. He needed emphatically
to kindle something with his divine flame. As he says of Lessing: “His
genius was not a St. Elmo’s fire, as it so often is with mere poets,&mdash;as
it was in Shelley, for example, playing in ineffectual flame about the
points of his thoughts, but was interfused with his whole nature and
made a part of his very being.” Now he found himself confronting a
monstrous denial of this truth of freedom issuing in human brotherhood
when he<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_139" id="page_139">{139}</a></span> contemplated slavery in America, and his natural indignation
was heightened by the ardor of the woman he loved. Was he not, after
all, to be a reformer beyond everything else? and where was the point of
contact between the poet and the reformer? His mind circled about this
problem; his convictions called upon him with a loud voice to make good
his professions; his instinctive sense of congruity, which is hardly
more than an alternate form of the sense of humor, forbade him to make
poetry the maid of all work for the anti-slavery cause, and he sought
diligently to resolve this particular form of spiritual activity into
the elemental properties of freedom, and so to find therein a true
medium for the sustenance of poetry. Moreover, though he described
himself not long after, in “A Fable for Critics,” as&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i10">“striving Parnassus to climb<br /></span>
<span class="i0">With a whole bale of <i>isms</i> tied together with rhyme,”&mdash;<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="nind">it must be said with emphasis that he held these <i>isms</i> too lightly for
them to become the determining factor in his intellectual and spiritual
growth. They did hamper him, as he says a little ruefully in the next
line, and while it is idle business to speculate on what a man might
have become in the absence of the very conditions that made him what he
was, one is tempted to wonder if with his endowments Lowell might not,
under less strenuous conditions, have been exclusively a poet. What is
one man’s meat is another man’s poison, says the homely adage, and it is
a curious fact that but for the same flame of anti-slavery passion
Whittier<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_140" id="page_140">{140}</a></span> might never have been more than a verbose Quietist versifier.</p>

<p>In his dedication of the volume to his father, Lowell speaks of it as
“containing many opinions from which he will wholly, yet with the large
charity of a Christian heart, dissent,” and the most flagrant of these
is probably in a passage in which he speaks with vehemence of the church
and religion. As falls to the hearer of many impulsive utterances of
young men, one is apt to see in them rather the impatience of a generous
heart (“why so hot, my little man?”) than the deliberate convictions
into which one has been forced reluctantly, but the passage is so
characteristic of Lowell at this period and so expressive of the
turbulence of his mind that it may well be read here. John has been
commenting on the innate piety of Chaucer as illustrated by his glowing
words on the daisy, and Philip takes up the parable.</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p class="chead">“PHILIP.</p>

<p>“Piety is indifferent whether she enters at the eye or the ear.
There is none of the senses at which she does not knock one day or
other. The Puritans forgot this and thrust beauty out of the
meeting-house, and slammed the door in her face. I love such
sensuality as that which Chaucer shows in his love of nature.
Surely, God did not give us these fine senses as so many posterns
to the heart for the Devil to enter at. I believe that he has
endowed us with no faculty but for his own glory. If the Devil has
got false keys to them, we must<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_141" id="page_141">{141}</a></span> first have given him a model of
the wards to make a mould by. The senses can do nothing unless the
soul be an accomplice, and, in whatever the soul does, the body
will have a voice....</p>

<p class="chead">“JOHN.</p>

<p>“All things that make us happy incline us also to be grateful, and
I would rather enlarge than lessen the number of these. Morose and
callous recluses have persuaded men that religion is a prude, and
have forced her to lengthen her face, and contract her brows to
suit the character. They have laid out a gloomy turnpike to heaven,
upon which they and their heirs and assigns are privileged to levy
tolls, and have set up guide-boards to make us believe that all
other roads lead in quite an opposite direction. The pleasanter
they are, the more dangerous. For my part, I am satisfied that I am
upon the right path so long as I can see anything to make me
happier, anything to make me love man, and therefore God, the more.
I would stamp God’s name, and not Satan’s, upon every innocent
pleasure, upon every legitimate gratification of sense, and God
would be the better served for it. In what has Satan deserved so
well of us, that we should set aside such first-fruits for him?
Christianity differs not more widely from Plato than from the
Puritans.</p>

<p class="chead">“PHILIP.</p>

<p>“The church needs reforming now as much as in Luther’s time, and
sells her indulgences as readily.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_142" id="page_142">{142}</a></span> There are altars to which the
slaveholder is admitted, while the Unitarian would be put forth as
unclean. If it be God’s altar, both have a right there,&mdash;the sinner
most of all,&mdash;but let him not go unrebuked. We hire our religion by
the quarter, and if it tells any disagreeable truths, we dismiss
it, for we did not pay it for such service as this. Christ scourged
the sellers of doves out of the temple; we invite the sellers of
men and women in. We have few such preachers now as Nathan was.
They preach against sin in the abstract, shooting their arrows into
the woundless air. Let sin wrap itself in superfine broadcloth, and
put its name on charitable subscription papers, and it is safe. We
bandy compliments with it, instead of saying sternly ‘Get thee
behind me!’ The Devil might listen to some preaching I have heard
without getting his appetite spoiled. There is a great deal of time
and money expended to make men believe that this one or that one
will be damned, and to scare or wheedle them into good Calvinists
or Episcopalians; but very little pains is taken to make them good
Christians....</p>

<p class="chead">“JOHN.</p>

<p>“It has never been a safe thing to breathe a whisper against the
church, least of all in this country, where it has no prop from the
state, but is founded only on the love, or, if you will have it so,
the prejudices of the people. Religion has come to be esteemed
synonymous with the church; there are few minds clear enough to
separate it<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_143" id="page_143">{143}</a></span> from the building erected for its convenience and
shelter. It is this which has made our Christianity external, a
task-ceremony to be gone through with, and not a principle of life
itself. The church has been looked on too much in the light of a
machine, which only needs a little oil, now and then, on its joints
and axles, to make it run glibly and perform all its functions
without grating or creaking. Nothing that we can say will be of
much service. The reformers must come from her own bosom; and there
are many devout souls among her own priests now, who would lay down
their lives to purify her. The names of infidel and heretic are the
<i>San benitos</i> in which we dress offenders in the nineteenth
century, and a bigoted public opinion furnishes the fagots and
applies the match! The very cross itself, to which the sacred right
of private judgment fled for sanctuary, has been turned into a
whipping post. Doubtless, there are no nations on the earth so
wicked as those which profess Christianity; and the blame may be
laid in great measure at the door of the church, which has always
sought temporal power, and has chosen rather to lean upon the arm
of flesh than upon that of God. The church has corrupted
Christianity. She has decked her person and embroidered her
garments with the spoils of pagan altars, and has built her temples
of blocks which paganism has squared ready to her hand. We are
still Huns and Vandals, and Saxons and Celts, at heart. We have
carved a cross upon our altars, but the smoke of our sacrifice goes
up to Thor and Odin still. Lately I read in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_144" id="page_144">{144}</a></span> newspapers a toast
given at a military festival, by one of those who claim to be the
earthly representatives of the Prince of Peace. England and France
send out the cannon and the bayonet, upon missionary enterprises,
to India and Africa, and our modern Eliots and Brainerds among the
red men are of the same persuasive metal.</p>

<p class="chead">“PHILIP.</p>

<p>“Well, well, let us hope for change. There are signs of it; there
has been a growling of thunder round the horizon for many days. We
are like the people in countries subject to earthquakes, who crowd
into the churches for safety, but find that their sacred walls are
as fragile as other works of human hands. Nay, the very massiveness
of their architecture makes their destruction more sudden and their
fall more dangerous. You and I have become convinced of this. Both
of us, having certain reforms at heart, and believing them to be of
vital interest to mankind, turned first to the church as the
nearest helper under God. We have been disappointed. Let us not
waste our time in throwing stones at its insensible doors. As you
have said, the reformers must come from within. The prejudice of
position is so strong that all her servants will unite against an
exoteric assailant, melting up, if need be, the holy vessels for
bullets, and using the leaves of the holy book itself for wadding.
But I will never enter a church from which a prayer goes up for the
prosperous only, or for the unfortunate among the oppressors, and
not for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_145" id="page_145">{145}</a></span> oppressed and fallen; as if God had ordained our pride
of caste and our distinctions of color, and as if Christ had
forgotten those that are in bonds. We are bid to imitate God; let
us in this also follow his example, whose only revenge upon error
is the giving success to truth, and but strive more cheerfully for
the triumph of what we believe to be right. Let us, above all
things, imitate him in ascribing what we see of wrong-doing to
blindness and error, rather than to wilful sin. The Devil loves
nothing better than the intolerance of reformers, and dreads
nothing so much as their charity and patience. The scourge is
better upon our backs than in our hands.</p>

<p class="chead">“JOHN.</p>

<p>“When the air grows thick and heavy, and the clouds gather in the
moral atmosphere, the tall steeples of the church are apt to
attract the lightning first. Its pride and love of high places are
the most fatal of conductors. That small upper room, in which the
disciples were first gathered, would always be safe enough.” </p></div>

<p>These kindling words are those of a reformer dealing with existing
conditions. It would be much more to the point if we could have in
definite terms that revelation of the inner verity of religion which
visited Lowell a little earlier than this, as may be seen by a passage
from a letter to Dr. Loring, 20 September, 1842. “I had a revelation
last Friday evening. I was at Mary’s, and happening to say<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_146" id="page_146">{146}</a></span> something of
the presence of spirits (of whom, I said, I was often dimly aware), Mr.
Putnam entered into an argument with me on spiritual matters. As I was
speaking the whole system rose up before me like a vague Destiny looming
from the abyss. I never before so clearly felt the spirit of God in me
and around me. The whole room seemed to me full of God. The air seemed
to wave to and fro with the presence of Something, I knew not what. I
spoke with the calmness and clearness of a prophet.”<a name="FNanchor_44_44" id="FNanchor_44_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44_44" class="fnanchor">[44]</a></p>

<p>No doubt this ecstasy may be regarded as one manifestation of that
psychical temper which caused him to see visions in his childhood, but
it allied itself with intellectual processes, for he goes on to say: “I
cannot tell you what this revelation was. I have not yet studied it
enough. But I shall perfect it one day, and then you shall hear it and
acknowledge its grandeur. It embraces all other systems.”</p>

<p>We may not find a clear statement of this mystic revelation in the
discursive “Conversations;” rather we should look for it in his poems of
this period, and here, though we find nothing whatever to correspond to
a system of divine order, we do find, recurring in various forms, a
recognition of an all-embracing, all-penetrating power which through the
poet transmutes nature into something finer and more eternal, and gives
him a vantage ground from which to perceive more truly the realities of
life. “The Token,” “An Incident in a Railroad<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_147" id="page_147">{147}</a></span> Car,” “The Shepherd of
King Admetus,” all in a manner witness to this, and show how
persistently in Lowell’s mind was present this aspect of the poet which
makes him a seer. Perhaps there is a more direct attempt at expressing
this truth in one of the poems not retained in later collections. It is
entitled “A Dirge,” and is the imagined plaint over a poet who has died.
In this tumultuous period of Lowell’s youth, when the tranquillity which
a returned love brought was after all a very self-conscious
tranquillity, there was always room for morbid fancies, and the
frequency with which in his poetry he recurs to the images of death
leads one to suspect that he experimented a little with the idea of his
own death. And it may be that in this poem, which a healthier judgment
later led him to suppress, he was dramatizing himself.</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Poet! lonely is thy bed,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And the turf is overhead,&mdash;<br /></span>
<span class="i4">Cold earth is thy cover;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But thy heart hath found release,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And it slumbers full of peace<br /></span>
<span class="i0">’Neath the rustle of green trees,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And the warm hum of the bees<br /></span>
<span class="i4">Mid the drowsy clover;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Through thy chamber still as death<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A smooth gurgle wandereth,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">As the blue stream murmureth<br /></span>
<span class="i4">To the blue sky over.<br /></span>
<span class="i6dt">. . . . . . . .<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou wast full of love and truth,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of forgivingness and ruth,&mdash;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thy great heart with hope and youth<br /></span>
<span class="i4">Tided to o’erflowing;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou didst dwell in mysteries,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And there lingered on thine eyes<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_148" id="page_148">{148}</a></span><br /></span>
<span class="i0">Shadows of serener skies,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Awfully wild memories<br /></span>
<span class="i4">That were like foreknowing;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou didst remember well and long<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Some fragments of thine angel-song,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">And strive, through want, and woe, and wrong,<br /></span>
<span class="i4">To win the world unto it;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thy curse it was to see and hear<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Beyond to-day’s scant hemisphere,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Beyond all mists of doubt and fear,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Into a life more true and clear,&mdash;<br /></span>
<span class="i4">And dearly thou didst rue it.<br /></span>
<span class="i6dt">. . . . . . . .<br /></span>
<span class="i0">“Poet! underneath the turf,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Soft thou sleepest, free from morrow;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thou hast struggled through the surf<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Of wild thoughts, and want, and sorrow;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Now, beneath the moaning pine<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Full of rest thy body lieth,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">While, far up in pure sunshine,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Underneath a sky divine,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">Her loosed wings thy spirit trieth;<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Oft she strove to spread them here,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But they were too white and clear<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For our dingy atmosphere.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>The limitations of his theme and measure forbid more than a hint at this
vocation of the poet, but it happens that we have a somewhat more
explicit statement of the same general idea in a prose form. A very few
weeks after the revelation referred to in the letter to Dr. Loring, too
soon certainly for it to have faded from his mind, he sat down to write
a paper on “The Plays of Thomas Middleton,” and the introductory
passages contain what may fairly be taken as snatches from that music of
the spheres which he seems suddenly to have overheard.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_149" id="page_149">{149}</a></span></p>

<p>“Poets are the forerunners and prophets of changes in the moral world.
Driven, by their finer nature, to search into and reverently contemplate
the universal laws of soul, they find some fragments of the broken
tables of God’s law, and interpret it, half conscious of its mighty
import. While philosophers are wrangling, and politicians playing at
snapdragon with the destinies of millions, the poet, in the silent deeps
of his soul, listens to those mysterious pulses which, from one central
heart, send life and beauty through the finest veins of the universe,
and utters truths to be sneered at, perchance, by contemporaries, but
which become religion to posterity....</p>

<p>“The dreams of poets are morning-dreams, coming to them in the early
dawn and day-breaking of great truths, and are surely fulfilled at last.
They repeat them, as children do, and all Christendom, if it be not too
busy with quarrelling about the meaning of creeds which have no meaning
at all, listens with a shrug of the shoulders and a smile of pitying
incredulity: for reformers are always madmen in their own age, and
infallible saints in the next.”</p>

<p>In such rhetorical terms did Lowell, all aflame himself with poetic
zeal, try to outline the divine call of the poet, and the
“Conversations” reënforce a doctrine which was held more firmly since
the preacher was eager to display it in his own practice. At this time,
certainly, Lowell’s conception of the function of the poet was blended
with his apprehension of the divine order, and he entered<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_150" id="page_150">{150}</a></span> upon the
discharge of poetic duties with the seriousness which a young priest
might have carried to the sacred office. The very suppression of his
native humor, so that it makes only a few furtive leaps in his poetry up
to this time,&mdash;for we are setting aside his boyish pranks in
verse,&mdash;illustrates the exalted mood in which he was living.</p>

<p>&nbsp;</p>

<p>The “Conversations on Some of the Old Poets” was published, as we have
seen, in January, 1845,<a name="FNanchor_45_45" id="FNanchor_45_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45_45" class="fnanchor">[45]</a> but as soon as his own part of the book was
done, he was free for a more vital venture: on the 26th of December,
1844, after a five years’ betrothal, he was married in her father’s
house at Watertown to Maria White.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_151" id="page_151">{151}</a></span></p>

<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV<br /><br />
<small>IN THE ANTI-SLAVERY RANKS</small><br /><br />
<small>1845-1849</small></h2>

<p><span class="smcap">In</span> the spring of 1844 Mrs. White had taken her daughter Maria to
Philadelphia to spare her the rigors of the North, and they had found
lodgings at 127 Arch Street, with Friend Parker, a kindly Quakeress, who
had made them acquainted with Mr. and Mrs. E. M. Davis, influential
members of the Society of Friends. An intimacy grew up between them, for
they had a strong bond of sympathy in their common zeal for the cause of
anti-slavery and other reforms, and a few weeks after the return of the
Whites to Watertown, Maria wrote to her new friends: “I have talked so
much to James of Philadelphia, that I have inspired him with a desire to
try its virtues if he has an opportunity. We shall probably be married
in the spring and I wish very much to spend it there, instead of in our
bleak New England, and we should do so if we heard of any opening or
employment for him during so short a period as three months. I suppose
the season for lectures would be over then, and I fear that Destiny has
not been so kind as to arrange any exact labors for him then, simply
because he wishes to go. But should you hear of any situa<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_152" id="page_152">{152}</a></span>tion for a
literary man at that time, however small the recompense, might I not
depend on your kindness to let us know of it?”</p>

<p>For some reason the marriage took place as we have seen at the close of
1844, and not in the spring of 1845. Mr. and Mrs. Lowell stayed a day or
two in New York at the New York Hotel, whose splendor amazed them, and
reached Philadelphia on the first day of the new year. By a happy
augury, the weather had been delightful on their journey, and they had
almost a breath of summer in midwinter. They went at once to Friend
Parker’s, and settled down to happy work. The scheme of lecturing had
come to nothing, but Mr. Davis had arranged that Lowell should do some
editorial work on the <i>Pennsylvania Freeman</i>. That paper had taken the
place of the <i>National Enquirer</i>, when Benjamin Lundy relinquished its
management. Whittier went to Philadelphia in the spring of 1838 to edit
the <i>Freeman</i>, and remained there two years, when his frail health
compelled him to retire. The paper had been temporarily suspended in the
interest of the <i>National Anti-Slavery Standard</i>, but had been revived
and was now under the editorial control of C. C. Burleigh and J. Miller
McKim.</p>

<p>The situation of the young pair is sketched in the following letter to
Robert Carter:&mdash;</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p class="r">
<span class="smcap">127 Arch Street, Philadelphia</span>,<br />
<span style="margin-right: 2em;">Jan’y 14, 1845.</span><br />
</p>

<p><span class="smcap">My dear Boy</span>,&mdash;Here we are situated as pleasantly as can be, and I
write to inform you of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_153" id="page_153">{153}</a></span> fact a great deal sooner than you
expected, having been in Philadelphia just a fortnight to-morrow. I
shall not attempt to give you any statistical information with
regard to anything here, for I know that if I should try to
describe the Hall of Independence, or anything else, you would
contradict me stoutly till I convicted you out of some Geography or
other, and then you would manage to change sides and appear to be
confuting me. You see that your obstinacy about Boston Common has
cheated you out of a minute detail of all the curiosities of this
city, together with an account of the riots, taken from the mouth
of one of the leaders of the mob who was shot dead at the first
fire of the military. But this is a melancholy subject.</p>

<p>Why did you not (you rascal!) slip even so much as a little note
into the package you sent through the Anti-Slavery office? Speaking
of letters, I mailed one at Worcester from Maria to Sarah Page,
directed to your care, and the Post Office being closed, I ventured
to mail it without paying the postage, trusting that the kind
providence which has hitherto taken care of you above your deserts
may have enabled you to redeem it from the claws of the Brookline
postmaster.</p>

<p>Owen writes me that the “Conversations” is selling well, and
Peterson<a name="FNanchor_46_46" id="FNanchor_46_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46_46" class="fnanchor">[46]</a> says that the notices are all of the most favorable
kind. I have seen Graham and shall probably be able to make a good
arrangement for him after my new book has been puffed a little
more. He has grown fat, an evidence of suc<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_154" id="page_154">{154}</a></span>cess. He lives in one of
the finest houses in Arch Street, and keeps his carriage. He says
he would have given me $150.00 for the “Legend of Brittany” for his
Magazine without the copyright. I am sorry I did not think of this
at the time.</p>

<p>I shall get along very easily while I am here. I am engaged to
write leaders for the <i>Pennsylvania Freeman</i> (which comes out once
a fortnight) and am to be paid $5.00 for each. I was unwilling to
take anything, but they say I must and I suppose I ought. I wrote
one for the next Thursday’s paper entitled “Our Position;” it is
not very good, but I shall do better as I get used to it.</p>

<p>I have not seen the first number of the <i>Broadway Journal</i> yet, but
the second is quite entertaining and well done. The type is a
little too large. Are you going to write a notice of my book for
the paper? Briggs has written to me since I got here, but says
nothing about it. I unfortunately missed seeing him in New York.</p>

<p>We have a little room in the third story (back) with white muslin
curtains trimmed with evergreen, and are as happy as two mortals
can be. I think Maria is better, and I <i>know</i> I am&mdash;in health I
mean, in spirit we both are. She is gaining flesh and so am I, and
my cheeks are grown so preposterously red that I look as if I had
rubbed them against all the red brick walls in the city.</p>

<p>I have seen your friend &mdash;&mdash; since I came here. Somebody called on
us the very evening after we arrived, and on going downstairs who
should it be but our interesting friend. He attacked me upon<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_155" id="page_155">{155}</a></span> the
subject of a vegetable diet, and I replied by fun, which rather
disconcerted him. He has not been here since.</p>

<p>I have felt a little of the swell of fashionable society since I
have been here. Dr. Elwyn, a kinsman of mine, hearing that I was in
town, called upon me and has been very attentive ever since. He is
an agreeable man and somewhat literary for Philadelphia. His
mother, who has lately quitted Episcopacy for Presbyterianism,
called on us to-day, and told me that her “pastor,” the Rev. Dr.
Bethune, was coming to see me. Authorship might have taken the
place of misery in Shakespeare’s aphorism.</p>

<p>The abolitionists here are very pleasant and kind.... Maria sends
her best love. I mean Mrs. Lowell sends it. Give my kind
remembrances to Austin and to Owen. The package of the latter came
safe.</p>

<p>God bless you! Most lovingly yours,</p>

<p class="r">
J. R. L.<br />
</p></div>

<p>Mrs. Lowell sings her second in this duet in a letter to Mrs. Hawthorne,
written two days later, in which she says: “We are most delightfully
situated here in every respect, surrounded with kind and sympathizing
friends, yet allowed by them to be as quiet and retired as we choose;
but it is always a pleasure to know you can have society if you wish for
it, by walking a few steps beyond your own door. We live in a little
chamber on the third story, quite low enough to be an attic, so that<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_156" id="page_156">{156}</a></span> we
feel classical in our environment: and we have one of the sweetest and
most motherly of Quaker women to anticipate all our wants, and make us
comfortable outwardly as we are blest inwardly. James’s prospects are as
good as an author’s <i>ought</i> to be, and I begin to fear we shall not have
the satisfaction of being so <i>very</i> poor after all. But we are, in spite
of this disappointment of our expectations, the happiest of mortals or
spirits, and cling to the skirts of every passing hour, though we know
the next will bring us still more joy.”<a name="FNanchor_47_47" id="FNanchor_47_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_47_47" class="fnanchor">[47]</a></p>

<p>The young couple had no resources save their faculty for writing. Mrs.
Lowell brought no dowry, but she had poetic sensibility, and fell to
translating into verse from German poetry, especially from Uhland.
Lowell, with increased confidence bred of the facility with which he had
dashed off the “Conversations,” and with an unfailing spring of poetry,
was ready for any sort of venture. His faithful friend, Mr. Briggs, who
had just launched the first number of his new literary weekly, <i>The
Broadway Journal</i>, was eager for contributions from both. “I am very
proud,” he wrote on receiving Mrs. Lowell’s translation, “The Wreath,”
from the German of Uhland, to be the first to introduce her new name to
the public,” and he proposed all manner of topics for Lowell to write
on, such as a paper on Hawthorne and one on Emerson, for a series of
articles on “Our American Prose Writers,” which had been initiated with
one on the now forgotten W. A. Jones.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_157" id="page_157">{157}</a></span> Lowell himself complained of a
native indolence, and Briggs, who was skeptical of the force of this
objection, proposed a very natural corrective:&mdash;</p>

<p>“There is no such stimulus to execution,” he writes, “as a sure reward.
Now I would like to make a contract with you to furnish me with a column
or two, or more, of prose matter, to suit yourself, in the shape of
criticism, gossip, or anything else, once a week for six months or a
year. You have no idea how easy a thing of this kind becomes when you
know that you must do it. If you get nothing else by such an undertaking
than the business habit, it would be worth your while. What will you do
it for? If our means were sufficient, or success were secure, I would
make you an offer that would be sufficiently tempting, but I am loath to
make you one that may seem too small. Consider now, and let me know.”</p>

<p>Lowell’s affection for Briggs and his sympathy with him in his risky
venture of a weekly literary journal made him at first well-disposed to
contribute freely in response to the editor’s urgent invitation, and he
was most generous in his attitude respecting payment. “You have been in
business, my dear friend,” he writes to Briggs, “and know exactly how
much you ought to give me with a proper regard to your own balance sheet
at the end of the year. I know that your inclination will be to give me
more than that. But more you ought not to give nor I to take. I leave it
for you to decide. I should not like to bind myself to write every week,
though I have no doubt that I shall<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_158" id="page_158">{158}</a></span> be able to, and I have some fears
that a contingent want of money may hereafter prove as sharp a spur to
me as a contract.”</p>

<p>Mr. Briggs in reply was more explicit as to terms: “In regard to the
compensation, it would be well to read Emerson’s essay on that subject.
According to him, compensation is inevitable, therefore one need never
give himself any trouble on the subject. Nature settles the whole
business. You will be sure to receive due compensation for whatever you
may do for the <i>B. J.</i> Poe writes for me at the rate of one dollar a
column. If you will do so, I shall esteem it a capital bargain. The
poetry I will pay for separately on a different principle.” Accordingly,
a day or two after, Lowell wrote: “I send you the first of a series of
four or five letters which you may print if you like it. If you do not
like it, reject it without scruple. It may be a little too abolition for
you as yet. I do not think it good at all, but Maria thinks better of it
than I do (bating one or two coarse expressions in it). I do not
consider it mine. I wrote it only in the hope of doing some good. So you
may alter it as much as you please, if it will serve your turn. If, on
the other hand, you like it, I think I may promise that the next will be
better. I am in a great hurry, I have only time to say that I like your
terms and am perfectly content to help you as much as I can.... I always
expect to be taken at my word, so reject this without scruple.”</p>

<p>The letter thus sent purported to be by one<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_159" id="page_159">{159}</a></span> Matthew Trueman, a country
cousin to a supposed Member of Congress, scalping him for his vote on
the question of the annexation of Texas. It was intended to be the first
of a series in which the whole question of annexation was to be argued.
It was addressed to no one in particular, but only to some hypothetical
scoundrel. It will be remembered that annexation was the all-absorbing
topic of political discussion during the winter of 1844-1845. Lowell
could not do otherwise from his anti-slavery principles than bitterly
condemn the action of Congress, and this letter was an outburst of
satire and invective; but it did not see the light, and it was not
followed by others in the same vein.</p>

<p>The editor of <i>The Broadway Journal</i> began fencing with the author. He
wondered to whom it was addressed. He thought perhaps it would be best
not to print the whole. “Your satire,” he wrote, “bruises instead of
cutting the flesh, and makes a confounded sore place without letting out
any of the patient’s bad blood. I will make as full a selection as I
can; but there are certain expressions that could not be safely used in
public.” He regrets that his friend should have lost so much time over
the letter, but thinks it must have done him good by drawing off his
superfluous zeal. “I shall think better of you myself for knowing that
you can feel so strongly and write so harshly,” he adds: “it justifies
the opinion that I expressed of you in my notice of your
‘Conversations;’<span class="lftspc">”</span> and after a further discussion of abolitionism in
prin<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_160" id="page_160">{160}</a></span>ciple and practice, he begs him to write something about
Philadelphia, or art, the academy, the abominable white doors, the poor
watery oysters, everything and anything. “Put all your abolitionism into
rhyme,” he concludes: “everybody will read it in that shape, and it will
do good. Don’t forget that you are a poet and go to writing newspaper
articles.”</p>

<p>The letter was shrewd, kind, reasonable to an uninterested reader, but
must have been exacerbating to Lowell. Mr. Briggs could not conceal the
final ground of his refusal, that to publish this and similar letters
would be to jeopard the fortunes of <i>The Broadway Journal</i>, and in the
sensitive condition of the mind of the out and out abolitionist, this
was arrant cowardice. A good deal of correspondence followed, and Lowell
lost his interest in the <i>Journal</i>, though he retained his strong
affection for his friend and sent him, as well as a few poems, a
slashing criticism of the exhibition in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine
Arts, and a review of Halleck’s “Alnwick Castle, with other Poems,” but
<i>The Broadway Journal</i> itself died out of existence shortly, Mr. Briggs
parting company with it at the end of a half year.<a name="FNanchor_48_48" id="FNanchor_48_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_48_48" class="fnanchor">[48]</a> In sending the
former of the two prose articles mentioned above, Lowell wrote:<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_161" id="page_161">{161}</a></span>&mdash;</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p class="r">
<span class="smcap">Philadelphia</span>, Feb’y 15.<br />
</p>

<p><span class="smcap">My dear Friend</span>,&mdash;I send you something which will help you fill up,
and will show my <i>willingness</i> to help till I can send something
better. I am so continually interrupted here, and have been so long
used to having all my time to myself, that I have not been able yet
to acquire the habit of using anything but the very titbits of my
time. I have begun several articles for you, but failed in
satisfying myself, but before long hope to send you something to
your taste. I will send a poem at any rate. Halleck, I see, is
about to publish a new edition, which I should like to write a
notice of if you have made no other arrangement.</p>

<p>This notice of the “Academy” I have written, you see, as editorial,
and you can modify it as you please.</p>

<p>It is hard to write when one is first married. The Jews gave a man
a year’s vacation. I hope to serve you sooner, and meanwhile remain</p>

<p class="r"><span style="margin-right: 2em;">
Your loving friend,</span><br />
J. R. L.<br />
</p>

<p>P. S. Maria and I both like the <i>Journal</i> exceedingly. </p></div>

<p>The other vehicle for Lowell’s more exclusively literary work during the
winter of 1845 was <i>Graham’s Magazine</i>, published in Philadelphia. He
had been a contributor since the spring of 1841, when he used the
signature “H. Perceval,” which he had been employing in initial form in
the <i>South<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_162" id="page_162">{162}</a></span>ern Literary Messenger</i>. His contributions were all poems,
some of which he had preserved in the two volumes already published, but
in the number for February, 1845, there appeared his biographical and
critical sketch of Poe in the series “Our Contributors,” which ran for a
score of numbers and was accompanied by steel portraits. Graham was
desirous of including Lowell in the series with a portrait by Page, but
for some reason the plan fell through. In this sketch of Poe, Lowell
used a discursive manner, giving expression in a lively fashion to his
judgments of other poets in the past, but not hesitating to speak
emphatically of the genius of Poe, whom he did not know personally.</p>

<p>“Mr. Poe,” he wrote, “is at once the most discriminating, philosophical,
and fearless critic upon imaginative works who has written in America.
It may be that we should qualify our remarks a little, and say that he
<i>might be</i>, rather than that he always <i>is</i>, for he seems sometimes to
mistake his phial of prussic acid for his inkstand.... Mr. Poe has that
indescribable something which men have agreed to call genius.”</p>

<p>Lowell had offered to write this sketch in May, 1844, and had been
supplied with biographical material by Poe himself, who moreover read
the article in manuscript which Lowell sent at the end of September
through their common friend, Mr. Briggs. During this winter of 1845 Poe
was a lively subject of discussion by Lowell and his friends, for he was
the most conspicuous figure in American literature at that time. His
“Raven<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_163" id="page_163">{163}</a></span>” appeared in <i>The American Review</i> for February, and his series
of papers on plagiarism, with their acuteness, their ostentation of
learning, and their malice, was trailing through the <i>Mirror</i> and <i>The
Broadway Journal</i>. His name was linked with that of Briggs in the
editorship of the <i>Journal</i>, and Briggs sometimes found it difficult to
make clear to his friends just how responsibility was apportioned
between them. It was impossible to regard this very insistent figure as
an intellectual or æsthetic abstraction, and his personality was always
getting in the way of a fair judgment. In a letter to Briggs, 16
January, 1845, Lowell remarks: “From a paragraph I saw yesterday in the
<i>Tribune</i> I find that Poe has been at me in the <i>Mirror</i>. He has at
least that chief element of a critic&mdash;a disregard of persons. He will be
a very valuable coadjutor to you.” Briggs, who was at this time a warm
defender of Poe, had read the article in the <i>Mirror</i>, which was a
review of the “Conversations,” and assured Lowell that it was extremely
laudatory and discriminating, and a few days later, after strongly
praising “The Gold Bug” which he had just read, he says: “Do not trouble
yourself about anybody’s gloriometer.... I have always misunderstood Poe
from thinking him one of the Graham and Godey species, but I find him as
different as possible. I think that you will like him well when you come
to know him personally.” Briggs copied “The Raven” into his magazine and
wrote enthusiastically to Lowell about it. But Lowell was deeply
offended by what<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_164" id="page_164">{164}</a></span> he termed “the grossness and vulgarity” of Poe’s
treatment of Longfellow, especially in his offhand allusion to Mrs.
Longfellow and her children. Briggs again came to Poe’s defence. “The
allusion to Mrs. Longfellow,” he wrote, “was only a playful allusion to
an abstract Mrs. Longfellow, for Poe did not know even that Longfellow
was married; look at the thing again and you will see that it contains
nothing offensive. Poe has, indeed, a very high admiration for
Longfellow, and so he will say before he is done. For my own part I did
not use to think well of Poe, but my love for you and implicit
confidence in your judgment led me to abandon all my prejudices against
him, when I read your account of him. The Rev. Mr. Griswold, of
Philadelphia, told me some abominable lies about him, but a personal
acquaintance with him has induced me to think highly of him. Perhaps
some Philadelphian has been whispering foul things in your ear about
him. Doubtless his sharp manner has made him many enemies. But you will
think better of him when you meet him.”</p>

<p>Lowell, however, refused to be convinced. “The Rev. Mr. Griswold,” he
said petulantly, “is an ass, and, what’s more, a knave, and even if he
had said anything against Poe, I should not have believed it. But
neither he nor any one else ever did. I remain of my old opinion about
the allusion to Mrs. Longfellow. I remain of my old opinion about Poe,
and I have no doubt that Poe estimates Longfellow’s poetical abilities
more highly than I do perhaps, but I nevertheless do not like his two
last<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_165" id="page_165">{165}</a></span> articles. I still think Poe an invaluable contributor, but I like
such articles as his review of Miss Barrett better than these last.”</p>

<p>Up to this time Lowell appears to have known Poe only through
correspondence.<a name="FNanchor_49_49" id="FNanchor_49_49"></a><a href="#Footnote_49_49" class="fnanchor">[49]</a> A few weeks later, when he was returning from
Philadelphia to Cambridge, he called upon him, but the interview gave
little satisfaction, due to the fact, mentioned by Mr. Briggs, that Poe
was tipsy at the time. A few weeks later Lowell defended himself, in a
letter to Briggs, against a charge of plagiarism made by Poe, and summed
up his impressions as follows: “Poe, I am afraid, is wholly lacking in
that element of manhood which, for want of a better name, we call
character. It is something quite distinct from genius,&mdash;though all great
geniuses are endowed with it. Hence we always think of Dante Alighieri,
of Michelangelo, of Will Shakespeare, of John Milton,&mdash;while of such men
as Gibbon and Hume we merely recall the works, and think of them as the
author of this and that. As I prognosticated, I have made Poe my enemy
by doing him a service.... Poe wishes to kick down the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_166" id="page_166">{166}</a></span> ladder by which
he rose. He is welcome. But he does not attack me at a weak point. He
probably cannot conceive of anybody’s writing for anything but a
newspaper reputation or for posthumous fame, which is much the same
thing magnified by distance. I have quite other aims.”</p>

<p>Finally, Briggs himself lost all patience with Poe, and replied to this
letter: “You have formed a correct estimate of Poe’s characterless
character. I have never met a person so utterly deficient of high
motive. He cannot conceive of anybody’s doing anything except for his
own personal advantage; and he says, with perfect sincerity and entire
unconsciousness of the exposition which it makes of his own mind and
heart, that he looks upon all reformers as madmen; and it is for this
reason that he is so great an egoist; he cannot conceive why the world
should not feel an interest in whatever interests him, because he feels
no interest himself in what does not personally concern him.”</p>

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

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge,<br /></span>
<span class="i8dt">. . . . . . . .<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Who has written some things quite the best of their kind,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind,”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="nind">passes at once into a lecture on his treatment of Longfellow. Poe was
not a blackboard on which Lowell wrote his own virtues, but it is an
illustration of the dominant ethical note in Lowell’s nature, especially
at this time, that open as he was<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_167" id="page_167">{167}</a></span> to the influence of poetry, and
keenly sensitive to the melody and color to be found in exquisite
language, he could not detach poetry from character. In his leaning
toward reform, he tried to take poetry with him as a fellow-worker, but
I do not think this really affected his judgment of Poe, and Briggs’s
amusing report of Poe’s consignment of reformers to the mad-house was
not likely to gall him; his sense of humor would correct any irritation.
But Lowell did hold his head high and was intoxicated with the spirit of
idealism; he and his wife stimulated each other, and breathing this air,
he was not in a mood to be indulgent toward what he conceived to be
lower ideals. The biographical essay which a few years later he wrote on
Keats shows clearly how desirous he was of bringing the few known facts
of that poet’s life into accord with a lofty conception of the poetic
spirit; standing uncomfortably near Poe, he was in danger of
interpreting his poetry by the comment which his life afforded.</p>

<p>Although literature then as always was the constant factor in Lowell’s
resolve, the circumstances in which he was placed, and his own uneasy
sense that he ought to bear his part in the moral uprising, led him to
expend a good deal of energy this winter in political and ethical
writing. He was living in the midst of the Society of Friends and
breathing an atmosphere of anti-slavery reform; the great debate on
Texas was raging, and, more than all, his wife by his side kept a steady
flame of zeal burning. He let himself out once in verse<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_168" id="page_168">{168}</a></span> when he sent to
the <i>Boston Courier</i> some stanzas headed “Another Rallying Cry by a
Yankee,” in which, with a vehemence that allowed little breathing space
for wit or humor, he declaimed against the iniquity of the Texas
resolutions, then on the eve of passage, and made a passionate appeal to
his native state to hold herself aloof from any compromise with slavery.</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“O Spirit of the noble Past, when the old Bay State was free,”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="nind">he began, and employed all the resources of type to make his protest
heard:&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“And though all other deeds of thine, dear Fatherland, should be<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Washed out, like writing upon sand, by Time’s encroaching sea,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">That single word shall stand sublime, nor perish with the rest,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">‘<span class="smcap">Though the whole world sanction slavery, in God’s name WE protest</span>!’<span class="lftspc">”</span><br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="nind">The final stanza was a burst of state independence:</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">“No, if the old Bay State were sunk, and, as in days of yore,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">One single ship within her sides the hope of Freedom bore,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Run up again the pine tree flag, and on the chainless sea<br /></span>
<span class="i0">That flag should mark, where’er it waved, the island of the free!”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>In these verses, as in others of a similar nature, Lowell seems almost
to have followed the lead of Whittier, who employed the same stanza in
several of his anti-slavery poems written before this time.</p>

<p>In his eager, impulsive desire to right wrongs, and his impatience at
compromise, he chafed under the restraints laid upon him. The rebuff he
received when he undertook to scarify the conscience of Congress in the
pages of <i>The Broadway Journal</i> irritated him. He had hoped that the
<i>Journal</i> would be a “powerful weapon in the hands of re<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_169" id="page_169">{169}</a></span>form,” and was
disheartened. “The reason I have written no prose for him (Briggs),” he
wrote his friend Carter, “has been because I knew not what to write
about. The <i>Journal</i> shut its doors in the face of every subject in
which I was mainly interested, and I could not bring myself (in writing
for a friend especially) to undertake subjects in which, feeling no
interest, I could not possibly write well.” He had engaged to write
regularly for the <i>Pennsylvania Freeman</i>, but even here he did not, in
his own mind, have a clear field. “I do not feel entirely free,” he says
in a letter to Carter, “in what I write for the paper, as its conductors
are rather timid.” That is the complaint of most young reformers, and
yet the constraint which appears in his articles is due rather to the
caution with which he feels his way along a path where he is likely to
be misjudged than to any outside repressive influence. At least this may
be inferred from a reading of two articles which he contributed to the
<i>Freeman</i> and which were no doubt looked upon as very radical
utterances. They had for their heading “The Church and Clergy,” and were
deliberate inquiries into the nature of the religious bodies in America
as tested by the attitude which they took, organically, toward the great
question of political reform, especially as regarded the subject of
slavery. In a letter to Longfellow written a few weeks after this date,
Lowell puts his belief into two or three pregnant sentences. “Christ,”
he says, “has declared war against the Christianity of the world, and it
must down. There is no<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_170" id="page_170">{170}</a></span> help for it. The Church, that great bulwark of
our practical Paganism, must be reformed from foundation to weathercock.
Shall we not wield a trowel, nay, even carry the heavy bricks and mortar
for such an enterprise? But I will not ride over you with my
hard-mouthed hobby.”</p>

<p>In the two editorial articles referred to, Lowell takes the ground that
when there is dereliction to pure ideals on the part of the more refined
and intellectual members of the church, especially of those in the
priestly order, there will be the greater zeal of the more brutal and
unintelligent in defence of the church, and instances the cries of the
Jewish populace for the crucifixion of the Saviour, the mob at Athens
that condemned Socrates to drink the hemlock, and, taking a very recent
example: “It was the most brutal and degraded of the English population
which assaulted the pure-minded Wesley, and cock-fighting, horse racing,
drunken priests and justices established their orthodoxy to the
satisfaction of so competent a constituency by reviling or indicting
him. Now that it has become necessary to protest against Protestantism,
it is the ignorant and unthinking who are so eager to defend the right
of private judgment by tarring and feathering all who differ with them.”
The mass of men, Lowell goes on to say, love an easy religion, which
affords a cheap and marketable kind of respectability. “Puritanism has
always been unpopular among them as a system which demands too much and
pays too little.” The clergy, too, in the United States, being<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_171" id="page_171">{171}</a></span>
dependent upon their hearers for support, unconsciously slip into the
habit of adapting themselves to the prejudices and weaknesses of their
supporters. Thus by degrees the church and religion are held to be
synonymous terms, and the church becomes a kind of private estate,
silent in the face of a great evil which the great body of Christian
people has learned to tolerate. In point of fact true religious
sentiment is the most powerful weapon in the world against slavery and
all other social vices, but the religious system of the country as
corrupted by connivance with evil is the greatest obstacle in the way.
The only sure way of accomplishing its great object is for the church to
keep in advance of popular morality, and “the surest and safest test for
deciding when the time has arrived for the church to take another step
forward is by observing whether it is reverenced by the wisest of its
members as merely an external symbol of some former manifestation of
Divinity, or is reverenced as containing in itself a present and living
Divineness.”</p>

<p>But why, it might be asked, should the clergy be picked out for blame in
the matter of upholding slavery, rather than any other class, as that of
the merchants for example? The answer is plain. If the church professed
to be no more than a society of private citizens meeting once a week,
the clergyman would be simply the chairman of the gathering, and a
mouthpiece of the majority. But the church sets up the claim to be of
divine origin and the depository of truth. If this be so, it should<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_172" id="page_172">{172}</a></span>
always be in advance of public opinion. “It should not wait till the
Washingtonians, by acting the part which, in virtue of the station it
arrogates to itself, should have been its own, had driven it to sign the
pledge and hold fellowship with the degraded and fallen. It should not
wait until the Abolitionists, by working a change in the sentiment of
the people, have convinced it that it is more politic to sympathize with
the slave than with the slave-owner, before it ventures to lisp the
alphabet of anti-slavery. The glorious privilege of leading the forlorn
hope of truth, of facing the desperate waves of prejudice, of making
itself vile in the eyes of men by choosing the humblest means of serving
the despised cause of the master it professes to worship, all these
belong to it in right of the position it assumes.” And he calls upon the
clergy to produce certificates of martyrdom before he will accept the
claims they set up for themselves.</p>

<p>The whole discussion is characterized by sincerity and a scarcely veiled
sarcasm, and is interesting not only as showing Lowell’s thought at the
time on a burning subject, but also as disclosing a certain academic air
as if he had written carefully and with restraint, perhaps thinking how
it would sound to his father’s ear. There is hardly more than a faint
suggestion of the wit and humor which marked his later political
writing, and there is one passage which may be noted as distinctly
literary in tone. “In many parts of Germany,” he writes, “there are
legends of buried churches and convents, whose<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_173" id="page_173">{173}</a></span> bells are often heard,
and in which, now and then, some person by a lucky chance can hear the
monks chanting the ritual of many centuries ago. It seems to us that the
religion of our churches is of very much the same subterranean and
traditionary kind. To one walking in the pure light of upper day, the
sound of their service seems dim and far off, and, if he catches a word
here and there, it is an obsolete language which does not appeal to the
present heart and soul, but only to a vague reverence for what is
ancient, a mysterious awe for what is past.”</p>

<p>The winter had been passed in this experimental fashion, Mrs. Lowell
translating poems from the German by her husband’s side, as he wrote now
verse, now prose, intent on the questions of the day, yet never really
giving himself out except now and then in some spontaneous bit of
poetry. They made hosts of friends in Philadelphia and spent the last
few weeks of their stay on a visit to the Davis family, with whom they
had become close companions. Mrs. Hallowell, who was a child at the
time, recalled the delight that attended their stay, especially the
pleasure given the children by Mrs. Lowell, who told them fairy tales
and recited ballads, giving the Caldon Low in a soft crooning voice
sweeter than singing. They took a short driving tour with their hosts
through Chester County, but near the end of May set out on their return
to Cambridge, stopping by the way for a week’s visit with Mr. and Mrs.
Briggs in Staten Island. They went home by way of Albany in order<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_174" id="page_174">{174}</a></span> to
see Page, and by the middle of June were established at Elmwood, where
they formed one household with Lowell’s father, mother, and sister.</p>

<p>Lowell had not found himself out yet. He had, indeed, a premonitory
consciousness of his strength. “I shall do something as an author yet,”
he wrote to Briggs, 21 August, 1845. “It is my laziness and my
dissatisfaction at everything I write that prevents me from doing more.”
But he adds, “there is something, too, in feeling that the best part of
your nature and your performance lies unmined and unappreciated.” For
the present he seems to have written chiefly under the impulse created
by some sudden affair, as in the verses “On the Capture of Fugitive
Slaves near Washington,” which appeared in the <i>Boston Courier</i>, 19
July, 1845. The lines were prefaced by this note to the editor, Mr.
Buckingham:&mdash;</p>

<p>“Reading lately in the newspapers an account of the capture of some
fugitive slaves, within a few miles of the Capital of our Republic, I
confess my astonishment at finding no comments made upon what seemed to
me an act of unparalleled inhumanity. Thirty unfortunate disciples of
the Declaration of Independence pursued and captured by some two hundred
armed minions of tyranny! It seems strange that a burst of indignation
from one end of our free country to the other did not follow so
atrocious a deed. At least it seemed a proper occasion for sympathy on
the part of one of our daily papers which a year or two ago indorsed
Lord Morpeth’s sentiment that<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_175" id="page_175">{175}</a></span></p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">‘Who would be free themselves must strike the blow.’<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>Though such a mode of emancipation is totally abhorrent to my feelings,
and though I would earnestly deprecate any attempt at insurrection on
the part of our slave population, yet I confess to the weakness of being
so far human in my feelings as to sympathize deeply with these unhappy
beings who have been thwarted in their endeavor to convert themselves
from chattels into men by the peaceful method of simply changing their
geographical position. Under these feelings, and believing you to be a
man with sufficient confidence in the justness of your own opinions not
to fear to publish sentiments which may chance to go beyond or even
directly contravene your own, I wrote the following lines.”</p>

<p>There is a prophetic ring to the verses which indicates how surely
Lowell’s poetic spirit had absorbed the underlying truth of
abolitionism. The poem is far less declamatory, more profoundly
indignant than the Texas verses which he had printed in the same paper.
The intimation which he gave in his prefatory note, that his sentiment
might be unacceptable even to so hearty and honest a hater of slavery as
Mr. Buckingham, plainly points to the doubt expressed whether a higher
allegiance might not demand a revolt from the constitution and union if
they were found to be the impregnable defence of slavery,&mdash;a doubt which
was already certainty in the minds of the most radical of the
abolitionists; but the stage of doubt was as far as Lowell ever went,
and this may be taken<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_176" id="page_176">{176}</a></span> as the utmost expression which he ever
reached.<a name="FNanchor_50_50" id="FNanchor_50_50"></a><a href="#Footnote_50_50" class="fnanchor">[50]</a> The poem was vigorous enough to make an impression, and
successive numbers of the <i>Courier</i> show two long-winded writers
knocking away at the spectre of Dissolution which the poem had
raised.<a name="FNanchor_51_51" id="FNanchor_51_51"></a><a href="#Footnote_51_51" class="fnanchor">[51]</a></p>

<p>Although the summer of 1845 does not seem to have yielded much in the
way of verse or prose, Lowell had quite definitely taken ground as a man
of letters. There was no more talk of the law, and he even dropped lines
of correspondence which had marked his old carelessness of occupation.
“You hint in your last letter,” he wrote to E. M. Davis in October, that
it must be very easy for me to write, because writing is my profession,
while in truth this is precisely what makes it hard. You must recollect
that it is vacation time with me when the pen is out of my hand. Before
I became an author I used to write multitudes of letters to my friends.
Then, wherever I set my foot, thoughts rose up before me short winged
and chirping as the flights of grasshoppers which spring from the path
of one who walks in September stubble-fields. The post-office was my
safety-valve, which eased me in a trice of all my too explosive
thoughts, humors, and moods. Now my thoughts take a higher and wider
flight, and are not so easily followed and<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_177" id="page_177">{177}</a></span> defined by the eye. I
confess that my opinions seem to me of less importance.”<a name="FNanchor_52_52" id="FNanchor_52_52"></a><a href="#Footnote_52_52" class="fnanchor">[52]</a></p>

<p>By his regular and his random writing Lowell had met the expense of his
winter in Philadelphia, and with his simple mode of life and his horror
of debt it was not a very serious problem which his livelihood
presented. Elmwood gave shelter, and the young couple shared the family
economy. A little more ease, however, was to come through the accession
of Mrs. Lowell to a share in the estate of her father, who died suddenly
in September of this year. “I suppose,” Lowell writes in the letter just
quoted, “that when the estate is settled (Mr. White died intestate) we
shall be the possessors of $20,000 or more. I confess I hardly feel so
independent as before. I believe that in this age poverty needs to have
apostles, and I had resolved to be one, but I suppose God knows what is
best for me, or the event would not have happened. That I should ever
have lived to be such a nabob!”<a name="FNanchor_53_53" id="FNanchor_53_53"></a><a href="#Footnote_53_53" class="fnanchor">[53]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_178" id="page_178">{178}</a></span></p>

<p>One of the effects of this modest fortune was to give the Lowells a
further sense of independence and to lead them to form plans of travel
and life abroad, for from the first the frailty of Mrs. Lowell’s health
had been a factor in all their problems. They meant to go again to
Philadelphia the next spring, and they looked forward to going to Italy
in the coming fall for a two or three years’ residence. “Now that we
know the amount of our property,” Mrs. Lowell wrote shortly after to
Mrs. Davis, “it seems quite doubtful whether we shall be able to travel
much; but we can live in Italy as cheaply as at home, and have all the
advantages of climate and beautiful works of art besides.”</p>

<p>On the last day of the year their first child was born, and they gave
her the name of Blanche in gentle allusion to Mrs. Lowell’s maiden name.
Lowell wrote the news in a brief note on New Year’s Day, 1846, to Mr.
Davis: “Our little daughter Blanche was born yesterday afternoon at
3-1/2 o’clock. She is a very fine hearty child, very<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_179" id="page_179">{179}</a></span> fair and white,
with red cheeks, and looks already a month old. Maria, thank God, is
quite well.... Our fair has been eminently successful, more so than any
hitherto. I received your tract only a day or two since, having only
been to Boston once or twice for the last two months. I am much obliged
to you for it, though my thankfulness is almost used up by the baby.”</p>

<p>How happy the parents were in their anticipation may be read in the
affectionate terms in which Lowell had confided their hopes late in
August to his friend Briggs. “Never mind what our child will be (if it
should be born safely), we can at least enjoy our parentship now and
fancy what glories we please of our little darling. We have christened
it long ago. If she is a girl she is to be named Blanche (White), a
sweet name, thus uniting Maria’s family name with mine. If a boy we
shall call him Perceval, that being the given name of the first Lowle
who set foot in America, and having, moreover, a pretty diminutive
(Percie), an important thing for a boy. Now, do not set your wits at
work to discover prophetically the unhearworthy nickname which the
perverse ingenuity of boys will twist out of it at school. He shall
never go to school. The only reason I have for a preference of sex is
that girls ordinarily resemble the father most, and boys the mother.
Therefore I hope for a boy, and if you knew Maria (I call her mother
already) as well as I do, you would hope so too. It is true I can never
persuade her of the force of this argument&mdash;because she does not<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_180" id="page_180">{180}</a></span> know
how good she is. When people arrive at that pitch of consciousness they
are generally good for nothing.” And then follows the half-prophetic
passage: I have never forgotten the sympathy I felt with your hopes and
your disappointment in a similar case.... I look upon death so
constantly and surely as but a continuation of life (after the glad
removal or subsidence of the plethora of flesh which now chokes half the
spirit out of us) that I shall be quite willing to send before us such
an ambassador as our little angel would be if he goes sooner than we do.
At all events, nothing can ever take away from me the joy I have already
had in it.” The haunting fear which every young father has at such a
time, and which Lowell intimates in these lines, was not made real at
once, but the child lived with them only a brief fourteen months. It is
touching to find Mrs. Lowell a month before the birth of her child
writing verses of profound sympathy entitled “The Slave Mother,” in
which she reflects the anguish such a mother feels on the birth of her
child; and on the same day Lowell was writing his poem “The Falcon,”
though in its original form, entitled “The Falconer,” it was longer and
filled with a certain savage indignation over the quarry upon which the
falcon, Truth, descends. Both poems were contributed to “The Liberty
Bell,” published for the anti-slavery bazaar which was held each
December in Boston. This was the social rally of the abolitionists and a
resource with which to meet the modest demands of a crusade into which
men and women threw them<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_181" id="page_181">{181}</a></span>selves without counting the cost. Before and
after her marriage Mrs. Lowell took an active part in the bazaar under
the generalship of Mrs. Chapman. Lowell hits off the characteristics of
those who were conspicuous in the local movement most wittily in his
“Letter from Boston,” which he sent to the <i>Pennsylvania Freeman</i>, at
the close of 1846.</p>

<p>The little child filled a large place in Lowell’s letters to his
intimate friends. Briggs had sent a message to the newcomer, and Lowell
replied: “Blanche was asleep when I read your kind wishes about her, and
I did not dare to disturb her in an occupation in which she is
sedulously perfecting herself by the most diligent practice. She has not
yet learned our method of speech, and I to my sorrow have almost
forgotten hers, so that I cannot honestly send any authentic messages
from her to you. If you have been more happy than I in retaining a
knowledge of the dialect of your infancy, you will perhaps be able to
make something out of her remarks on hearing that she had loving friends
so far away. ‘A <i>goo</i> (pianissimo) <i>ah</i> goo, errrrrr, ahg&mdash;(cut off by a
kind of melodious jug-jug in her throat, as if she liked the phrase so
well she must needs try to swallow it) ah! (fortissimo) a goo,’ followed
by a smile which began in the dimple on her chin, and thence spread,
like the circles round a pebble thrown into sunshiny water, with a
golden ripple over the whole of her person, being most distinctly
ecstatic in her fingers and toes. The speech was followed by a searching
glance at her father, in whose arms she had her throne, to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_182" id="page_182">{182}</a></span> assure
herself of his identity, and of her consequent security.”</p>

<p>A more exact knowledge of the amount of the legacy received from Mr.
White’s estate and the income to be derived from it led the Lowells to
abandon their first intention of going abroad soon, but, apparently in
anticipation of such an emergency, Lowell had resolved to acquire a
better colloquial knowledge of French. “As an evidence of my
proficiency,” he writes to Briggs, “let me set down here an impromptu
translation of that Chevy Chace of the nursery, ‘Three children sliding
on the ice.’ As it is my first attempt at the ‘higher walks’ of French
poetry, you must read it with due allowance.</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Trois enfants glissants sur la glace,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Tous en un jour d’été,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Tous tomberent, as it came to pass,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Les autres s’enfuyaient.”<a name="FNanchor_54_54" id="FNanchor_54_54"></a><a href="#Footnote_54_54" class="fnanchor">[54]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>There was an incident at this time which illustrates the sensitiveness
of the anti-slavery mind. The weight of literature was thrown against
slav<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_183" id="page_183">{183}</a></span>ery, and it was a matter of pride and rejoicing that the most
popular American poet, Longfellow, should bear his testimony in a thin
volume of “Poems on Slavery.” But a Philadelphia publishing house, Cary
&amp; Hart, brought out a handsomely illustrated volume of his poetical
works, from which this group of poems was omitted, and the leaders of
the anti-slavery movement were indignant at what they regarded as the
poet’s pusillanimity. Their journals attacked him bitterly, especially
the <i>National Anti-Slavery Standard</i>, edited by Mrs. Chapman, Edmund
Quincy, and Sydney Howard Gay. Lowell’s comments on the matter are
interesting as throwing light on the attitude of his mind upon the
question of the poet and his mission, which we have seen was so vital a
one in his early history. He wrote to Briggs 18 February, 1846: ... “I
never wrote a letter which was not a sincere portrait of my mind at the
time, and therefore never one whose contents can hold a rod over me. My
pen has not yet traced a line of which I am either proud or ashamed, nor
do I believe that many authors have written less from <i>without</i> than I,
and therefore more piously. And this puts me in mind of Longfellow’s
suppression of his anti-slavery pieces. Sydney Gay wishes to know
whether I think he spoke too harshly of the affair. I think he <i>did</i>,
even supposing the case to be as he put it, and this not because I agree
with what he tells me is your notion of the matter&mdash;that it is
interfering with the freedom of an author’s will (though I think<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_184" id="page_184">{184}</a></span> you
were <i>ironing</i> with that grave face of yours)&mdash;for I do not think that
an author has a right to suppress anything that <i>God</i> has given him&mdash;but
because I believe that Longfellow esteemed them of inferior quality to
his other poems. For myself, when I was printing my second volume of
poems, Owen wished to suppress a certain ‘Song sung at an Anti-Slavery
Picnic.’ I never saw him, but he urged me with I know not what worldly
arguments. My only answer was&mdash;‘Let all the others be suppressed if you
will&mdash;<i>that</i> I will never suppress.’ I believe this was the first
audible knock my character made at the door of Owen’s heart&mdash;he loves me
now and I him. My calling is clear to me. I am never lifted up to any
peak of vision and moments of almost fearful inward illumination I have
sometimes&mdash;but that, when I look down, in hope to see some valley of the
Beautiful Mountains, I behold nothing but blackened ruins, and the moans
of the downtrodden the world over, but chiefly here in our own land,
come up to my ear instead of the happy songs of the husbandmen reaping
and binding the sheaves of light yet these, too, I hear not seldom. Then
I feel how great is the office of Poet, could I but even dare to hope to
fill it. Then it seems as if my heart would break in pouring out one
glorious song that should be the gospel of Reform, full of consolation
and strength to the oppressed, yet falling gently and restoringly as dew
on the withered youth-flowers of the oppressor. That way my madness
lies.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_185" id="page_185">{185}</a></span>”</p>

<p>In the same letter, with the long-reaching speculation of a father over
his first child, the subject of Blanche’s training is touched upon with
a half serious, half playful exaggeration. Lowell had been writing
humorously of his chivalric feelings toward dependents like the maid of
all work in the house, and he breaks out: “I mean to bring up Blanche to
be as independent as possible of all <i>man</i> kind. I was saying the other
day to her mother (who has grown lovelier than ever) that I hoped she
would be a great, strong, vulgar, mud-pudding-baking, tree-climbing
little wench. I shall teach her to swim, to skate, and to walk twenty
miles a day as her father can&mdash;and by the time she is old enough, I do
not despair of seeing the world so good that she can walk about at night
alone without any danger. You ask the color of her eyes. They are said
to be like her father’s,&mdash;but, in my opinion, they are of quite too
heavenly a blue for that. But I do not think the color of the eyes of
much import. I never notice it in those I love, or in any eyes where I
can see deeper than the cornea and iris. I do not know the color of my
father’s eyes, or of any of my sisters’ (except from hearsay), nor
should I know that of Maria’s except from observations for that special
end. But where your glance is arrested at the surface, where these
windows are, as it were, daubed over with paint (like those of rooms
where menial or unsightly offices are performed which we do not wish the
world to see, or where something is exhibited for pay) to balk
insight&mdash;then the color is<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_186" id="page_186">{186}</a></span> the chief sight noticeable. I do not believe
that the finest eyes have any special hue&mdash;and this is probably the
ground for the fallacy that poets’ eyes are gray&mdash;a kind of neutral
color.”</p>

<p>In January, 1846, the publication was begun of the <i>London Daily News</i>,
a paper which represented the most advanced liberal thought in politics
and was for a short time conducted by Dickens. For this paper Lowell
agreed to write a series of articles on “Anti-slavery in the United
States.” His name was not to appear. Indeed, the scheme intended an
historical sketch of the reform by one in sympathy with it, but not
confessedly by an abolitionist. In pursuance of the plan four articles
appeared in the months of February, March, April, and May, 1846, and the
manner of treatment plainly supposed a much longer continuance, but it
is probable that certain changes in the management of the paper rendered
a continuance inexpedient; for in June the paper was lessened from a
double sheet of eight pages to a single one of four, and the price
reduced, leaving small opportunity for the leisurely essays which had
formerly found place. The four papers did little more than clear the
way, and really brought the historical sketch only down to the
establishment of <i>The Liberator</i> by Mr. Garrison. For the most part the
treatment is little more than an orderly and somewhat perfunctory
recital of well-known facts, but once or twice the writer breaks forth
into his more personal speech. Thus in the first article occurs this
passage:<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_187" id="page_187">{187}</a></span>&mdash;</p>

<p>“Unless we draw an erring augury from the past, that devoted little band
who have so long maintained the bleak Thermopylæ of Freedom, remembering
those in bonds as bound with them, as now they are the scoff and by-word
of prospering iniquity, so will they be reckoned the Saints, Confessors,
and Martyrs in the calendar of coming time, and the statues of Garrison,
Maria Chapman, Phillips, Quincy, and Abby Kelley will fill those niches
in the National Valhalla which a degraded public sentiment has left
empty for such earthen demi-gods as Jackson, Webster and Clay.” Again
the final article, after dealing with the Missouri Compromise,
introduces Mr. Garrison upon the scene by quoting the preface to the
first number of <i>The Liberator</i>, and goes on to say:&mdash;</p>

<p>“Now for the first time indeed Slavery felt itself assailed genuinely
and in thorough earnest. But editors and other proprietors of public
opinion manufactories in the Free States were slower of perception. They
had not the warning of that instinctive terror which informed the
slaveholder of the approach of danger. But they were soon satisfied of
the dreadful truth that there existed in their very midst one truly
sincere and fearless man, and instantly a prolonged shriek of execration
and horror quavered from the Aroostook to the Red River. They saw, with
a thrill of apprehension for the security of their offices or of their
hold upon public consideration what treasonable conclusions might be
legitimately drawn from their own harmless premises, harmless only so
long as<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_188" id="page_188">{188}</a></span> there was no man honest enough to make an application of them,
and so cast suspicion on the motives of all. If the pitch and tow
fulminations of Salmoneus had been suddenly converted into genuine bolts
of Jupiter, he could not have dropped them from his hands with a more
confounded alacrity. Here was a man gifted with a most excruciating
sincerity and frankness, a hungry conscience that could not be sated
with the cheap workhouse gruel of smooth words, and inconveniently
addicted to thinking aloud.”</p>

<p>The article closes with this striking diagnosis:&mdash;</p>

<p>“The advent of Garrison was indeed an event of historical moment. The
ban of outlawry was set on Slavery, and its doom was sealed. It matters
not that since that time Slavery has won some of its most alarming
victories. The nucleus of a sincere uncompromising hostility to it was
formed. A clear issue between right and wrong, disentangled from the
mists of extraneous interests, was presented to men’s minds. The
question was removed from the dust and bewilderment of political strife
to the clear and calm retirements of God’s justice and individual
conscience. Henceforth the struggle must be not between the Northern and
Southern States, but between barbarism and civilization, between cruelty
and mercy, between evil and good. This was already in itself a victory,
a triumph which would have been enough to round the long life struggle
of a reformer with peace. Exaltation was achieved by the mere look, as
it were, of an unknown, solitary, and friendless youth,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_189" id="page_189">{189}</a></span> so full was it
of the potent conjuration of honesty and veracity. Whatever may be the
contents of government mails and official bulletins, the shining feet of
the messengers of Nature are constant and swift to bring to the ears of
the lowly servant of Truth at least the sustaining news&mdash;that God still
exists, and that He may select even the bruised reed for his
instrument.”</p>

<p>It is not materially anticipating to record here what Lowell wrote of
Garrison a couple of years later, when he was defining his own position
on abolitionism, to his friend Briggs: “Garrison is so used to standing
alone that, like Daniel Boone, he moves away as the world creeps up to
him, and goes farther into the wilderness. He considers every step a
step forward, though it be over the edge of a precipice. But, with all
his faults (and they are the faults of his position), he is a great and
extraordinary man. His work may be over, but it has been a great work.
Posterity will forget his hard words, and remember his hard work. I look
upon him already as an historical personage, as one who is in his
niche.... I love you (and love includes respect); I respect Garrison
(respect does not include love). There never has been a leader of Reform
who was not also a blackguard. Remember that Garrison was so long in a
position where he alone was right and all the world wrong, that such a
position has created in him a habit of mind which may remain, though
circumstances have wholly changed. Indeed, a mind of that cast is
essential to a Reformer. Luther<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_190" id="page_190">{190}</a></span> was as infallible as any man that ever
held St. Peter’s keys.” But the most condensed expression of his feeling
toward this remarkable man, who so dominated the anti-slavery movement,
is to be found in the verses addressed to him beginning&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“In a small chamber, friendless and unseen.”<a name="FNanchor_55_55" id="FNanchor_55_55"></a><a href="#Footnote_55_55" class="fnanchor">[55]</a><br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>In May, 1846, occurred one of those personal incidents which stirred
deeply the heart of the anti-slavery crusader and was made the occasion
of public testimony. The Rev. Charles Turner Torrey, who had been an
active writer and worker in the cause, and in 1834 was shut up in the
penitentiary in Baltimore for having aided slaves to escape, died in
May, 1846, of disease brought on by ill usage. He was of New England
birth and his body was brought to Boston for burial. Besides the burial
service there was a public meeting in Faneuil Hall on the evening of 18
May. Dr. Henry I. Bowditch, an ardent supporter of the anti-slavery
cause and one of the committee in charge, wrote to Lowell on the 3d of
the month, telling him that private advices led them to expect hourly
the news of Torrey’s death, and that the plan was on foot for a public
funeral service. If this is done,” he says, “we shall hope to hear from
the poets of our land, the true ministers of God and of Christ, at the
present<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_191" id="page_191">{191}</a></span> era.... May I receive from your heart of love and high-souled
honor sentiments such as I have not a few times obtained from your
free-hearted poetry?” No appeal could have used so cogent an argument as
that which thus characterized the poet, and Lowell responded with the
lines, “On the Death of Charles Turner Torrey,” which were read at the
meeting in Faneuil Hall by Dr. Channing. Dr. Bowditch thanked the poet
for the response to his request, but doubted if the poem was not of too
charitable a tenor. “Your poetry,” he says, “is a harbinger of better
hours, but not for this century, as I fear we have missed the great idea
of our existence and a new cycle of time must pass its round, and a new,
a lovelier race of beings must settle on this earth ere man shall truly
appreciate the divine doctrine you enunciate in the last line of your
verses.”</p>

<p>Lowell had now become clearly identified with the anti-slavery cause and
did not shrink from using the phrase “we abolitionists.” His reputation
as a poet had steadily risen. He was contemplating a second series of
his “Conversations,” and though he rarely used the instrument of poetry
in direct attack, much of his verse sounded those notes of freedom and
truth which were, even when abstractly used, rightly regarded as
dominant notes in the songs of the times. The leaders of the
anti-slavery cause welcomed him as an important coadjutor. At this time
the <i>National Anti-Slavery Standard</i> was passing through one of the
several changes sure to overtake the management of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_192" id="page_192">{192}</a></span> journal which was
the organ of such a bundle of individualities as would make up a reform
party. The <i>Standard</i> was the official paper of the American
Anti-Slavery Society, as the <i>Liberator</i> was the individual mouthpiece
of Mr. Garrison. The <i>Standard</i> had been conducted successively by Mrs.
Lydia Maria Child and her husband, David Lee Child. The former, who had
marked literary ability and a fondness for the art of literature, had
directed the paper in such a way as to win the attention of other than
pronounced abolitionists; the latter had a stronger interest in legal
and constitutional questions, and his disquisitions, which were
inordinately long, must have wearied the readers whom it was desirable
to gain over. Those who merely wished to hear their beliefs sounded may
have had no fault to find, but these did not need conversion. The paper,
therefore, passed in 1844 into the hands of Mrs. Chapman, Edmund
Quincy,<a name="FNanchor_56_56" id="FNanchor_56_56"></a><a href="#Footnote_56_56" class="fnanchor">[56]</a> and Sydney Howard Gay, who augmented the energy and
diversity of the journal, but did not succeed in arresting the decline
of its subscription list. In the spring of 1846 the paper had only about
1400 paying subscribers.</p>

<p>A further change seemed desirable, and the sensible one was made of
concentrating the responsibility in the hands of one person, Mr. Gay,
and endeavoring to reënforce him with an imposing list of regular
contributors. This list was published<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_193" id="page_193">{193}</a></span> 11 June, 1846, and comprised
these names: Eliza Lee Follen, Rev. John Weiss, Charles F. Briggs,
Wendell Phillips, James Russell Lowell, Maria Weston Chapman, Dr.
William F. Channing, Rev. Thomas T. Stone, Edmund Quincy, and, a little
later, Rev. Samuel May. It will be seen thus that there was a tolerable
admixture of literature with polemics. Lowell had been urged to take a
prominent place, and consented out of readiness to cast in his lot with
the men and women who were heading the forlorn hope. He was perfectly
aware, however, of a certain incompatibility of temper and aims which
disqualified him from an unreserved submersion of his powers in this
cause. The letter in which he gives in his adherence to the plan defines
with much clearness his own consciousness of his vocation, and the very
humorousness of the introduction intimates that he held off from the
task of stating his position, as well as exhibits a mercurial
temperament that would inevitably refuse to be kept within very exact
limits. The letter is so important a disclosure of Lowell’s mind at this
time that it must be given entire, though the most significant part has
already been printed by Mr. Norton. Mr. Gay had written him under date
of May, 1846: “It is with no little satisfaction that I welcome you into
our company of standard-bearers to the anti-slavery host. I have long
wished to see you actively engaged among us, and even had I no personal
interest in the matter, the position you have chosen is precisely the
one I should best like to see you in. You could nowhere do more good,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_194" id="page_194">{194}</a></span>
and in no other way could you become so thoroughly identified with the
cause. It is the historical cause of our day, and as the Future will
know you as a Poet, she should find in our records additional evidence
that you understood and fulfilled your mission.”</p>

<div class="blockquot">
<p class="c">
<i>To Sydney Howard Gay.</i><br />
</p>

<p class="r">
<span class="smcap">Elmwood</span>, June 16, 1846.<br />
</p>

<p><span class="smcap">My dear Gay</span>,&mdash;if<a name="FNanchor_57_57" id="FNanchor_57_57"></a><a href="#Footnote_57_57" class="fnanchor">[57]</a> there be any disjointedness in this letter,
you must lay it to the fact that I am officiating this morning as
general nurseryman and babytender, and am consequently obliged
every now and then to ripple the otherwise smooth current of my
epistolary communications with such dishevelled oratorical
flourishes as “kitser, kee&mdash;eetser!” “jigger jig, jigger jig!” and
the like accompanied with whatever extemporary hushmoney may be
within grasp in the shape of spoons, whistles, pieces of paper and
rattles. As I can conceive of no severer punishment that could be
inflicted on certain authors than to be Robinson Crusoed on some
desolate island with no companion but the offspring of their brain,
so I do not know of any blessing more absorbing of all the
faculties, demanding more presence of mind and more of that eternal
vigilance which is the price of liberty, but which in this case
fails to attain it, than that of being islanded in a room eighteen
feet square with the “sole daughter of one’s house and home.”
Then,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_195" id="page_195">{195}</a></span> besides these parental responsibilities, there are the
<i>aliena negotia centum</i> which have in the present instance made a
gap of three hours between this sentence and the last. Added to all
these is the metallic pen which I resisted manfully, but to which I
have succumbed at last, and which, while it obliterates all
distinctions of chirography, has, in conjunction with the other
accoutrements of easy writing (such as Reviews and newspapers),
hastened the decline and fall, and finally made complete shipwreck
of the letterwriters, as well as of the foliomakers. It is no
longer ‘the mob of <i>gentlemen</i> who write with ease,’ but the very
mob itself&mdash;that <i>profanum vulgus</i> whom Horace Naso (<i>sic</i>) would
have us hate and keep at arm’s length&mdash;can buy steel pens by the
gross and proceed Master of arts <i>per saltum</i>. We have got now to
that pitch when uneducated men (self-educated they are called) are
all the rage, and the only learned animals who continue to be
popular are pigs. The public will rush after a paper which they are
told is edited by a practical printer, and is eager to shape its
ideas after the model of men who have none. We shall ere long see
advertised “Easy lessons in Latin by a gentleman who can bring
testimonials that he knows no more of the language than Mr. Senator
Webster;” “The High School Reader, being a selection of popular
pieces for reading and declamation by a Lady, who is just learning
the alphabet under the distinguished tuition of herself, and who is
nearly mistress of that delightful <i>mélange</i> of literary
miscellanies.” The injury to letters arising from<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_196" id="page_196">{196}</a></span> an author’s
losing that space for meditation which was formerly afforded him by
the wise necessity of mending his pen is incalculable. Every one
nowadays can write decently and nobody writes well. “Painfulness”
is obsolete as a thing as well as in the capacity of a noun. No
more Horace Walpoles, no more Baxters, and Whole Duties of men!</p>

<p>But one would think that I had the whole summer before me for the
writing of this letter. Let me come a little nearer the matter in
hand. I wish a distinct understanding to exist between us in regard
to my contributions for the <i>Standard</i>. When Mrs. Chapman first
proposed that I should become a contributor I told her frankly that
it was a duty for which (having commenced author very early and got
indurated in certain modes of authorship and life) I was totally
unfitted. I was satisfied with the <i>Standard</i> as it was. The paper
has never been so good since I have seen it, and no abolitionist
could reasonably ask a better. I feared that an uncoalescing
partnership of several minds might deprive the paper of that
<i>unity</i> of conception and purpose in which the main strength of
every understanding lies. This, however, I did not urge, because I
knew that a change was to be made at any rate. At the same time I
was not only willing but desirous that my name should appear,
because I scorned to be indebted for any share of my modicum of
popularity to my abolitionism without incurring at the same time
whatever odium might be attached to a complete identification with
a body<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_197" id="page_197">{197}</a></span> of heroic men and women whom not to love and admire would
prove me unworthy of either of those sentiments, and whose
superiors in all that constitutes true manhood and womanhood I
believe never existed. There were other considerations which
weighed heavily with me to decline the office altogether. In the
first place, I was sure that Mrs. Chapman and Mr. Garrison greatly
overrated my popularity and the advantage which it would be to the
paper to have my name attached to it. I am not flattering myself (I
have too good an opinion of myself to do so), but judge from
something Garrison said to me. It is all nonsense. However it may
be in that glorious Hereafter (toward which no man who is good for
anything can help casting half an eye) the reputation of a poet who
has a high idea of his vocation, is resolved to be true to that
vocation and hates humbug, must be small in his generation. The
thing matters nothing to me, one way or the other, except when it
chances to <i>take in</i> those whom I respect, as in the present case.
I am <i>teres atque rotundus</i>, a microcosm in myself, my own author,
public, critic, and posterity, and care for no other. But we
abolitionists must get rid of a habit we have fallen into of
affirming all the geese who come to us from the magic circle of
Respectability to be swans. I said so about Longfellow and I said
so about myself. What does a man more than his simple duty in
coming out for the truth? and if we exhaust our epithets of
laudation at this stage of the business, what shall we do if the
man turns out to be a real<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_198" id="page_198">{198}</a></span> reformer, and does <i>more</i> than his
duty? Beside, is it any sacrifice to be in the right? Has not being
an abolitionist (as Emerson says of hell) its “infinite
satisfactions” as well as those <i>infiniti guai</i> that Dante tells us
of? To my mind</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“All other pleasures are not worth its pains.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>In the next place (turn back a page or two and you will find that I
have laid down a “firstly”), if I have any vocation, it is the
making of verse. When I take my pen for that, the world opens
itself ungrudgingly before me, everything seems clear and easy as
it seems sinking to the bottom would be as one leans over the edge
of his boat in one of those dear coves at Fresh Pond. But, when I
do prose, it is <i>invitâ Minerva</i>. I feel as if I were wasting time
and keeping back my message. My true place is to serve the cause as
a poet. Then my heart leaps on before me into the conflict. I write
to you frankly as becomes one who is to be your fellow-worker. I
wish you to understand clearly my capabilities that you may not
attribute that to lukewarmness or indolence which is truly but an
obedience to my Demon. Thirdly (I believe it is thirdly), I have
always been a very Quaker in following the Light and writing only
when the Spirit moved. This is a tower of strength which one must
march out of in working for a weekly newspaper, and every man owes
it to himself, so long as he does the duty which he sees, to remain
here impregnably intrenched.</p>

<p>Now, it seems to me that we contributors should<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_199" id="page_199">{199}</a></span> write just enough
to allow you this privilege of only writing when the wind sits
fair. Having stated the poetical <i>cons</i>, I will now state the plain
<i>pros</i> of the matter. I will help you as much as I can and ought. I
had rather give the cause one good poem than a thousand indifferent
prose articles. I mean to send all the poems I write (on whatever
subject) first to the <i>Standard</i>, except such arrows as I may deem
it better to shoot from the ambushment of the <i>Courier</i>, because
the old Enemy offers me a fairer mark from that quarter. I will
endeavor also to be of service to you in your literary selections.</p>

<p>I have told you what <i>I</i> expect to do. You must tell me in return
what <i>you</i> expect me to do. I agree with you entirely in your
notions as to the imprint and the initials.<a name="FNanchor_58_58" id="FNanchor_58_58"></a><a href="#Footnote_58_58" class="fnanchor">[58]</a> The paper must seem
to be unanimous. Garrison is point blank the other way. But his
vocation has not been so much to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_200" id="page_200">{200}</a></span> feel the pulse of the public as
to startle it into a quicker heat, and if we who make the paper
can’t settle it, who shall? I have one or two suggestions to make,
but shall only hint at them, hoping to see you at Dedham on the
14th prox^o. It seems to me eminently necessary that there should
be an entire concert among us, and that, to this end, we should
meet to exchange thoughts (those of us who are hereabout) and to
wind each other up. We ought to know what each one’s “beat” is, and
what each is going to write.</p>

<p>Then, too, would it not be well to have a <i>Weekly Pasquil</i> (I do
not call it <i>Punch</i> to avoid confusion), in which squibs and
facetiæ of one kind or other may be garnered up? I am sure I come
across enough comical thoughts in a week to make up a good share of
any such corner, and Briggs and yourself and Quincy could help.</p>

<p>You will find a squib of mine in this week’s <i>Courier</i>. I wish it
to continue anonymous, for I wish Slavery to think it has as many
enemies as possible. If I may judge from the number of persons who
have asked me if I wrote it, I have struck the old hulk of the
Public between wind and water. I suppose you will copy it, and if
so I wish you would correct a misprint or two.... Give our best
regards to your wife, and believe me, very truly your friend,</p>

<p class="r">
<span class="smcap">J. R. Lowell</span>.<br />
</p>

<p>I shall send you a poem next week.<a name="FNanchor_59_59" id="FNanchor_59_59"></a><a href="#Footnote_59_59" class="fnanchor">[59]</a> </p></div><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_201" id="page_201">{201}</a></span></p>

<p>The “squib” to which Lowell refers in this letter was the first of the
afterward famous “Biglow Papers,” introduced by the rustic letter of
Ezekiel Biglow to Mister Eddyter. The poem was the one beginning</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Thrash away, you’ll <i>hev</i> to rattle<br /></span>
<span class="i0">On them kettle-drums o’ yourn,”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="nind">and the stanzas themselves have the inspiriting dash and electrifying
rat-tat-tat of this new recruiting-sergeant in the little army of
anti-slavery reformers. Lowell himself felt that he had sounded a real
summons in these verses, yet singularly enough it was more than a
twelvemonth before he followed with another in the same vein. The poem
was at once copied into the <i>Standard</i> before the corrections its author
sent could be made, and the next week appeared the first of Lowell’s
prose contributions, a column and a half on Daniel Webster, whose
intellectual strength made him the special mark of those men of New
England who wished to turn all the artillery of native make against the
great foe. Whittier’s two poems “Ichabod” and “The Lost Occasion”
express nobly the mingled love, pride, and deep anger with which the
anti-slavery men regarded this strong nature. “Ichabod” was written
after Webster’s speech of 7 March, 1850, and Whittier may well have
carried in his memory a sentence from Lowell’s trenchant unsigned
article: “Shall not the Recording Angel write <i>Ichabod</i> after the name
of this man in the great book of Doom?”</p>

<p>For some unexplained reason, though the con<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_202" id="page_202">{202}</a></span>nection was now made, for
eighteen months after this editorial article Lowell printed little in
the <i>Standard</i> save an occasional poem. The real connection was not made
till the spring of 1848. In the number of the paper for 6 April of that
year it was announced that for the ensuing volume the <i>Standard</i> would
be under the charge of the present editor, Sydney Howard Gay, but with
James Russell Lowell as corresponding editor. His name appeared thus on
the headline of the paper and continued to keep its place until 31 May,
1849, when Edmund Quincy’s name was bracketed with it. For a while Mr.
Quincy’s name took the second place, but as his contributions increased
and Lowell’s diminished, they changed places in order, and finally
Lowell’s name, though without any public announcement, was dropped from
the headline 27 May, 1852, many months after he had practically ceased
to contribute.</p>

<p>The definite arrangement which Lowell made with the Executive Committee
of the American Anti-Slavery Society, who were the general managers of
the <i>Standard</i>, was effected in a personal interview with Mr. Gay, who
had come on to Dedham and there met Lowell. The conditions were simple
and are rehearsed in a letter to Briggs, 26 March, 1848. Lowell was to
receive a salary of $500 a year, and for this was to furnish a weekly
contribution, either in verse or prose, but the verse was not to be
restricted to direct attacks on slavery, and in his prose he now and
then went outside the line of domestic politics, and occasion<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_203" id="page_203">{203}</a></span>ally even
took up a distinctly literary topic. “The Committee,” writes Mr. Gay,
“accepts your proviso of a termination to the arrangement whenever
either party please, and accord to you any reasonable latitude in the
choice of subjects that you may desire.” It was plain from the outset
that Lowell was not overconfident of his ability to make the agreement
one of mutual satisfaction. He felt that in his independence of thought
he was not likely always to be at one with his associates, yet he was so
heartily in accord with them in the fundamental doctrine of opposition
to slavery, morally and politically, that he was glad of the opportunity
of taking an active part in the fight. And then he undoubtedly looked to
some advantage from the stimulus he should receive from the necessity of
a weekly contribution. “I did not like,” he writes to Briggs, “to take
pay for anti-slavery work, but as my abolitionism has cut me off from
the most profitable sources of my literary emoluments, as the offer was
unsolicited on my part, and as I wanted the money, I thought I had a
right to take it. I have spent more than my income every year since I
have been married, and that only for necessities. If I can once get
clear, I think I can keep so. I do not agree with the abolitionists in
their disunion and non-voting theories. They treat ideas as ignorant
persons do cherries. They think them unwholesome unless they are
swallowed stones and all.”</p>

<p>The first number of the <i>Standard</i> under this new arrangement, that for
6 April, 1848, which contained the announcement, held as Lowell’s
ini<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_204" id="page_204">{204}</a></span>tial contribution his “Ode to France,” which no doubt he had written
without regard to this publication, for it bears date “February, 1848,”
and indicates that in his study at Elmwood he was looking out on the
large world, and was brooding over those great general ideas of freedom
which were the intellectual and moral furniture of his being. He could
exclaim:&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Since first I heard our North-wind blow,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Since first I saw Atlantic throw<br /></span>
<span class="i0">On our grim rocks his thunderous snow,<br /></span>
<span class="i2">I loved thee, Freedom: as a boy<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The rattle of thy shield at Marathon<br /></span>
<span class="i4">Did with a Grecian joy<br /></span>
<span class="i4">Through all my pulses run:<br /></span>
<span class="i0">But I have learned to love thee now<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Without the helm upon thy gleaming brow,<br /></span>
<span class="i4">A maiden mild and undefiled,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Like her who bore the world’s redeeming child.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="nind">And in the next number of the paper he had an article on “The French
Revolution of 1848,” in which he wrote wittily of the flight of the
“broker-king,” and exultingly of the triumph of the idea of the people.
“Louis Philippe,” he wrote, “extinguished the last sparks of loyalty in
France as effectually as if that had been the one object of his eighteen
years’ reign. He had made monarchy contemptible. He had been a
stock-jobber, a family match-maker. The French had seen their royalty
gradually</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i11">‘melt,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Thaw, and resolve itself into a <i>Jew</i>.’<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="nind">During a long and peaceful reign, the king had in no way contrived to
<i>grow on to</i> the people. He<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_205" id="page_205">{205}</a></span> was in no sense of the word a Head to them.
A nation can be loyal to a Man, or to the representative of an Idea.
Louis Philippe was neither. When all the Royalty of France can be
comfortably driven out of it in a street-cab, one would think the
experiment of a Republic might be safely ventured upon. To us the late
events in Paris seem less a Revolution, than the quiet opening of a
flower, [which,] before it can blossom, must detrude the capsule which
has hitherto enveloped and compressed it.” The article disclosed
Lowell’s eager faith in the French people as receptive and swift to
appreciate and assimilate an idea. When in the summer the news came of
mob violence, he wrote again, defending the workmen of Paris, and
insisting upon it that the social order was to blame. “The great problem
of the over-supply of labor,” he wrote, “is not to be settled by a
decimation of the laboring class, whether by gunpowder or starvation.
Society in a healthy condition would feel the loss of every pair of
willing and useful hands thrust violently out of it. That these Parisian
<i>ouvriers</i> were driven to rebellion by desperation is palpable. That
they had ideas in their heads is plain from their conduct immediately
after the Revolution. They were suffering then. It was they who had
achieved the victory over the old order of things. In the then
anarchistic state of the capital, rapine, had that been their object,
was within easy reach. But the revolution of February was not the
chaotic movement of men to whom any change was preferable to the
wretched present.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_206" id="page_206">{206}</a></span> Not so much subversion as subversion for the sake of
organization was what they aimed at. The giant Labor did not merely turn
over from one side to the other for an easier position. Rather he rose
up</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="i0">‘Like blind Orion hungry for the morn.’<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="nind">It was <i>light</i> which the people demanded. Social <i>order</i> was precisely
the thing they wished for in the place of social chaos. Government was
what they asked. They had learned by bitter experience that it was on
the body of old King Log Laissez-faire that King Stork perched to devour
them. <i>Let-alone</i> is good policy after you have once got your perfect
system established to let alone. There is not in all history an instance
of such heroic self-denial as that which was displayed by what it is the
fashion to call the Mob of Paris during the few days immediately
following the flight of the Orleans dynasty. What was the shield which
the noble Lamartine held up between the Provisional Government and the
people? Simply the Idea of the Republic! And this Idea was respected by
starving men with arms in their hands.”</p>

<p>The verses “To Lamartine,” also, which appeared in August, illustrate
the appeal which French idealism made to Lowell’s mind. It is not
surprising that the year 1848, which seemed at the time to witness the
lifting of the lid from the Republican pot which was at the boiling
point, should not only have quickened the pulse of lovers of freedom in
America, but should have given<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_207" id="page_207">{207}</a></span> generous-minded men here a twinge of
envy as they contrasted the sanguine expectancy of Europe with what they
saw of the seared conscience of America; and in the papers just quoted
Lowell turns fiercely upon the public expressions of sympathy with the
ruling powers of Europe. It was a natural transition from these
reflections on the movements in France to ask bitterly in his next
editorial article, “Shall we ever be Republicans?” In this he speculates
on the extraordinary lack of agreement in the United States between
names and things, and finds slavery the opiate which has made men’s
minds drowsy.</p>

<p>“The truth is,” he declares, “that we have never been more than nominal
republicans. We have never got over a certain shamefacedness at the
disrespectability of our position. We feel as if when we espoused
Liberty we had contracted a <i>mésalliance</i>. The criticism of the
traveller who looks at us from a monarchical point of view exasperates
us. Instead of minding our own business we have been pitifully anxious
as to what would be thought of us in Europe. We have had Europe in our
minds fifty times, where we have had God and conscience once. Our
literature has endeavored to convince Europeans that we are as like them
as circumstances would admit. The men who have the highest and boldest
bearing among us are the slaveholders. We are anxious to be acknowledged
as one of the great Powers of Christendom, forgetful that all the fleets
and navies in the world are weak in comparison with one sentence in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_208" id="page_208">{208}</a></span>
Declaration of Independence. When every other argument in favor of our
infamous Mexican war has been exhausted, there was this still left&mdash;that
it would make us more respected abroad. We are as afraid of our own
principles as a raw recruit of his musket. As far as the outward
machinery of our government is concerned, we are democratic only in our
predilection for little men.</p>

<p>“When will men learn that the only true conservatism lies in growth and
progress, that whatever has ceased growing has begun to die? It is not
the conservative, but the retarding element which resides in the pocket.
It is droll to witness the fate of this conservatism when the ship of
any state goes to pieces. It lashes itself firmly to the ponderous
anchor it has provided for such an emergency, cuts all loose, and&mdash;goes
to the bottom. There are a great many things to be done in this country,
but the first is the abolition of slavery. If it were not so arrant a
sin as it is, we should abolish it (if for no other reason) that it
accustoms our public men to being cowards. We are astonished, under the
present system, when a Northern representative gets so far as to surmise
that his soul is his own, and make a hero of him forthwith. But we shall
never have that inward fortunateness without which all outward
prosperity is a cheat and delusion, till we have torn up this deadly
upas, no matter with what dear and sacred things its pestilential roots
may be entwined.”</p>

<p>Lowell had said to Briggs that he was not at one with the Abolitionists
who favored disunion,<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_209" id="page_209">{209}</a></span> and with that sanity of political judgment which
made it impossible for him to be a revolutionist even in theory, he saw
not in politics and political institutions that finality which rests in
an organic national life. Thus he never could be a blind partisan, and
he was quick to see the shams and concealments which were hidden in the
conventions of political terms. A clever English publicist once said
that the Constitution forms a sort of false bottom to American political
thinking, and Lowell, who was as ardent and sensitive an American as
ever lived, played most amusingly in one of the earliest of these
newspaper articles with the conceit of “The Sacred Parasol.” He told Gay
afterward that he wished he had put his paper into rhyme. If he had, he
would doubtless have caught and held more attention by such a satire.
Citing the marvellous incident reported by Father John de Peano Carpini
of the people in the land of Kergis, who dwelt under ground because they
could not endure the horrible noise made by the sun when it rose, he
applied the parable to American politics, only it is the mode of thought
that is subterranean, not the habit of living. “As we manage everything
by Conventions, we get together and resolve that the sun has not risen,
and so settle the matter, as far as we are concerned, definitively.
Meanwhile, the sun of a new political truth got quietly above the
horizon in our Declaration of Independence. Watchers upon the mountain
tops had caught sight of a ray now and then before, but this was the
first time that the heavenly light<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_210" id="page_210">{210}</a></span>bringer had gained an objective
existence in the eyes of an entire people.” This was all very well,
until the light began to penetrate dark places which it was for the
interest of certain people to keep dark. “Fears in regard to
<i>heliolites</i> became now very common, and a parasol of some kind was
found necessary as a protection against this celestial bombardment. A
stout machine of parchment was accordingly constructed, and, under the
respectable name of a Constitution, was interposed wherever there seemed
to be danger from the hostile incursions of Light. Whenever this is
spread, a dim twilight, more perplexing than absolute darkness, reigns
everywhere beneath its shadow.... It is amazing what importance
anything, however simple, gains by being elevated into a symbol.
Mahomet’s green breeches were doubtless in themselves common things
enough and would perhaps have found an indifferent market in Brattle or
Chatham Street. They might have hung stretched upon a pole at the door
of one of those second-hand repositories without ever finding a customer
or exciting any feeling but of wonder at the uncouthness of their cut.
But lengthen the pole a little, and so raise the cast-off garment into a
banner or symbol, and it becomes at once full of inspiration, and
perhaps makes a Western General Taylor of the very tailor who cut and
stitched it and had tossed it over carelessly a hundred times.... In the
same way this contrivance of ours, though the work of our own hands, has
acquired a superstitious potency in our eyes. The vitality of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_211" id="page_211">{211}</a></span> the state
has been transferred from the citizens to this. Were a sacrilegious
assault made upon it, our whole body politic would collapse at once.
Gradually men are beginning to believe that, like the famous <i>ancile</i> at
Rome, it fell down from heaven, and it is possible that it may have been
brought thence by a distinguished personage who once made the descent.
Meanwhile our Goddess of Liberty is never allowed to go abroad without
the holy parasol over her head to prevent her from being tanned, since
any darkening of complexion might be productive of serious inconvenience
in the neighborhood of the Capitol.” With this grave banter Lowell goes
on to instance cases where the Sacred Parasol has caused a shifting of
relations in the twilight created by it, and warns people of the danger
they would be in if exposed to the direct rays of the Sun of
Righteousness.</p>

<p>The article shows the kind of reënforcement which Lowell brought to the
anti-slavery camp. Edmund Quincy had something of the same wit and
irony, but he had also a greater love of detail and busied himself over
current incidents with the eagerness of a political detective, running
down fugitives from divine justice with an ardor which was always
heightened by the complexities of the case. Lowell, though he did not
neglect to use incidents for the illustration of his argument, never got
far away from the elemental principles for which his wit and sense of
justice and love of freedom stood. He played with his subject often, but
it was the play of a cat with his captive&mdash;one<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_212" id="page_212">{212}</a></span> stroke of the paw, when
the time came, and the mouse was dead.</p>

<p>Meanwhile the little band of the faithful, for whom the <i>Anti-Slavery
Standard</i> was a weekly rally, read with delight the incisive editorial
articles, and though they were not always supplied with downright
arguments from this source, they had, what they scarcely got otherwise
in the midst of their tremendous seriousness, the opportunity to rub
their hands with glee over a telling rapier thrust, and also to have
their horizon suddenly enlarged by the historical and literary
comparisons which were swept into range by this active-minded scout.</p>

<p>The grim earnest in which Mr. Gay was working, in preparing for this
weekly bombardment, left him little leisure for sitting down and
admiring the mechanism of his guns, and Lowell in his retirement at
Elmwood was more or less conscious of a certain doubt whether he was not
firing blank cartridges. “You see,” he wrote, “that I have fallen into
the fault which I told you I should be in danger of, viz., dealing too
much in generalities. The truth is, I see so few papers except what are
on our side that I cannot write a controversial article. I intend to
review Webster’s speech and to write an article on the Presidential
nomination. Perhaps they will be more to the purpose. Meanwhile, how can
you expect a man to work with any spirit if he never hears of his
employer? Why don’t you write me and say frankly how you are satisfied
or dissatisfied, and what you want?” Gay<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_213" id="page_213">{213}</a></span> wrote later: “You may be sure
I shall write you fast enough when you write what you ought not; until I
do you may be sure that I&mdash;so far as that is of any consequence&mdash;am
pleased. I hear your articles spoken of highly from all quarters, and
have heard only one criticism from one or two persons,&mdash;that they seemed
to be written rather hastily. But that I believe is the way you write
everything. It is a bad way to get into, though, and newspaper writing
is a great temptation to it.”</p>

<p>The political doctrines which Lowell advocated were naturally not those
of expediency, but of downright frankness and honesty. It is true that
he and his associates had the great advantage, in proclaiming
principles, of being quite unable to carry them out successfully at the
polls. Such a position reënforces candor. Just as the Gold Democrats in
the political contest of 1896 could draw up the most admirable platform
that has been seen for many years, since they were out in the open, and
were neither on the defensive nor preparing to carry their candidates
into office, so the Abolitionists in 1848 felt under no obligation to
support either Taylor or Cass, and could speak their minds freely
concerning both. But Lowell, in the article which he wrote on “The
Nominations for the Presidency,” characteristically struck that note of
independence in politics which was a cardinal point in his political
creed and was to be exemplified forcibly his life through, both in
speech and conduct. In this he was not illustrating a principle which he
maintained, so much as he was living<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_214" id="page_214">{214}</a></span> a natural life. Independence was a
fundamental note in his nature.</p>

<p>“The word <span class="smcap">NO</span>,” he wrote, “is the shibboleth of politicians. There is
some malformation or deficiency in their vocal organs which either
prevents their uttering it at all, or gives it so thick a pronunciation
as to be unintelligible. A mouth filled with the national pudding, or
watering in the expectation of it, is wholly incompetent to this
perplexing monosyllable. One might imagine that America had been
colonized by a tribe of those nondescript African animals, the Aye Ayes.
As Pius Ninth has not yet lost his popularity in this country by issuing
a bull against slavery, our youth, who are always ready to hurrah for
anything, might be practised in the formation of the refractory negative
by being encouraged to shout <i>Viva Pio Nono</i>.<a name="FNanchor_60_60" id="FNanchor_60_60"></a><a href="#Footnote_60_60" class="fnanchor">[60]</a></p>

<p>“If present indications are to be relied upon, no very general defection
from the ranks of either party will result from the nominations.
Politicians, who have so long been accustomed to weigh the expediency of
any measure by its chance of success, are unable to perceive that there
is a kind of victory in simple resistance. It is a great deal to conquer
only the habit of slavish obedience to party. The great obstacle is the
reluctance of politicians to assume moral rather than political
grounds.”<a name="FNanchor_61_61" id="FNanchor_61_61"></a><a href="#Footnote_61_61" class="fnanchor">[61]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="page_215" id="page_215">{215}</a></span></p>

<p>It was, after all, a man of letters and not a journalist who was engaged
on these weekly diatribes, and Lowell showed his instinctive sense of
literary art not only in the abundance of allusion and in the use of
such special forms as irony, but even now and then in the very structure
of his essays, for essays they were rather than editorial articles, for
the most part. Thus, taking his suggestion in topic from an attempt at
running away slaves from the District of Columbia, he composes an
Imaginary Conversation between Mr. Calhoun, Mr. Foote, and General Cass.
There is an amusing, faint reflection of Landor in the manner of the
piece, and the three personages are decidedly more discriminated in
character than his old men of straw, Philip and John, so that the reader
really seems to hear these worthies discoursing together, and not
struggling against the betrayal of the master of the show, who is
shifting his voice from one to the other. To be sure, no one would
mistake the delicious irony of Lowell’s Mr. Foote for the grave and
pious language of the real Mr. Foote, but the imitation is given with an
air of seriousness. “It is a sentiment of the Bible,” Mr. Foote is made
to say, “that riches have the wings of the morning and fly to the
uttermost parts of the earth. But the South labors under this greater
misfortune, that her property is endowed with legs<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_216" id="page_216">{216}</a></span> of a kind of brute
instinct (understanding I will not call it) to use them in a northerly
direction. It is a crowning mercy that God has taken away the wings from
our wealth. The elder patriarchs were doubtless deemed unworthy of this
providential interference. It was reserved for Christians and Democrats.
The legs we can generally manage, but it would have been inconvenient to
be continually clipping the wings, not to mention possible damage to the
stock. For these and other comforts make us duly thankful!</p>

<div class="blockquot"><p class="chead">“MR. CASS.</p>

<p>“My friend Louis Philippe&mdash;ah, I had forgotten: I should have said
my late friend.</p>

<p class="chead">“MR. CALHOUN.</p>

<p>“The unfortunate are never the friends of the wise man.</p>

<p class="chead">“MR. CASS.</p>

<p>“I was about to say that the Count de Neuilly has often remarked to
me that we were fortunate in having so conservative an element as
‘persons held to service or labor’ (I believe I do not venture
beyond safe Constitutional ground) mingled in a just proportion
with our otherwise too rapidly progressive institutions. There is
no duty of a good statesman, he said, at once so difficult and so
necessary as that of keeping steadily behind his age. But, however
much satisfaction a sound politician who adheres to this theory may
reap in the purity<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_217" id="page_217">{217}</a></span> of his own conscience, he will find that the
dust incident to such a position will sometimes so choke him as to
prevent his giving an intelligible answer to the often perplexing
questions of his constituents. Yet I know not whether in such
exigencies a cough be not the safest, as it is the readiest reply.
It is an oracle susceptible of any retrospective interpretation.</p>

<p class="chead">“MR. CALHOUN.</p>

<p>“A politician who renders himself intelligible has put a rope round
his own neck, and it would be strange indeed if his opponents
should be unable to find a suitable tree. The present Revolutionary
Government of France has taken many long strides towards the edge
of that precipice which overhangs social and political chaos, but
none longer than in bringing Government face to face with the
people. That government is the most stable which is the most
complicated and the most expensive. Men admire most what they do
not understand, and cling tightest to what they have paid or are
paying most for. They love to see money spent liberally by other
people, and have no idea that every time Uncle Sam unbuttons his
pocket, he has previously put his hand into their own. I have great
fears for France. The Provisional Government talks too much and too
well,&mdash;above all things it talks too clearly. In that wild
enthusiasm generated by the turmoil of great and sudden social
changes, and by contact with the magnetism of excited masses of
men, sentiments are often uttered, which, however striking and
beautiful they might be if<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_218" id="page_218">{218}</a></span> their application were restricted to
the Utopias of poetry, are dangerous in their tendencies and
results if once brought into contact with the realities of life.
Despotisms profited more than the Catholic Church by shutting up
Christ in the sepulchre of a dead language. A prudent and
far-seeing man will confine his more inspired thoughts to the
solitude of his closet. If once let loose, it is impossible to
recall these winged messengers to the safer perch of his finger. He
may keep an aviary of angels if he will, but he must be careful not
to leave the door open. They have an unaccountable predilection for
entering the hut of the slave, and for seating themselves beside
the hearth of the laborer. Mr. Jefferson,<a name="FNanchor_62_62" id="FNanchor_62_62"></a><a href="#Footnote_62_62" class="fnanchor">[62]</a> by embodying some
hasty expressions in the Declaration of Independence, introduced
explosive matter into our system.” </p></div>

<p>And so the conversation goes on touching upon current topics, all having
some bearing on the great underlying theme. One sees the three men
moving over the ice, cautiously, and not daring to try its firmness by
stamping on it, Mr. Calhoun alone maintaining a rigidity of posture as
if he<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_219" id="page_219">{219}</a></span> had satisfied himself that his theory of the probable thickness
of the ice was irrefutable.</p>

<p>Lowell complained to Gay that their position was so purely destructive
as to require them to look at everything from a point of criticism, and
that this became wearisome. In saying this, he was thinking probably of
the general attitude which was by necessity taken by a small knot of
political and moral agitators employing their engines against a strongly
intrenched evil. Criticism, however, in its more comprehensive sense,
was the weapon which he most naturally used, but he turned his critical
inquiry rather upon men than upon institutions, or even upon political
measures. In this Imaginary Conversation, for example, the public men
satirized were examined for their mental and moral characteristics.
Through his studies in literature and history, with his insight as a
poet and man of imagination, and his habit of holding up before his mind
fundamental ideas such as truth and freedom, Lowell was chiefly
interested in the characters of public men; in applying his criticism to
Foote, Cass, Calhoun, Clay, Webster, and other of his contemporaries,
though he was mainly testing them by their attitude toward slavery, he
was constantly measuring them by great and permanent standards. The
larger the man, the more thoroughly interested was he in penetrating the
man’s words and deeds, and seeking to come at the bottom facts of his
nature.</p>

<p>I have already referred to the early occasion he took, in his connection
with the <i>Standard</i>, to try<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_220" id="page_220">{220}</a></span> his judgment upon Webster, and it is
interesting to observe that no other statesman of the time was so
constantly the subject of his criticism. In common with others, he
watched with eagerness the course of Webster in connection with the Whig
nomination for the presidency in 1848, when the disappointment of the
Massachusetts senator was so little disguised. “What Will Mr. Webster
Do?” was the title of the article which he published in the <i>Standard</i>
after General Taylor had been nominated&mdash;that nomination “not fit to be
made.” Lowell never had the modern journalist’s faculty for jumping at
once into the centre of his subject. Like his own “musing organist,” he
is very apt to “begin doubtfully and far away,” but he is also pretty
sure to strike a note at the outset which has, it turns out, a real
relation to the theme he means to play. Thus in this article he begins
with the reflection: “It is astonishing to see how fond men are of
company. We demand a select society even upon the fence, and will not
jump on this side or that till we have made as accurate a prospective
census as possible;” and so on for several paragraphs of acute and
amusing variations, noting especially the disposition to set expediency
in the place of principle, when looking out for the majority with whom
we wish to side. “After all,” he goes on, “even in estimating
expediencies, we are loath to trust ourselves. We desire rather the
judgment of this or that notable person, and dare not so much as write
<i>Honesty is the best policy</i>, or any other prudent morality, till he has
set us a<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_221" id="page_221">{221}</a></span> copy at the top of the page. In Massachusetts just now there
are we know not how many people waiting for Mr. Webster’s action on the
recent nomination for the Presidency, and no doubt there is hardly a
village in the country which has not its little coterie of
self-dispossessed politicians expecting in like manner the moment when
the decision of some person, whose stomach does the thinking for theirs,
shall allow them to take sides.</p>

<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>What will Mr. Webster do?’ asks Smith. ‘Greatest man of the age!’ says
Brown. ‘Of any age,’ adds Jones triumphantly. Meanwhile the greatest
mind of any age is sulking at Marshfield. It has had its rattle taken
away from it. It has been told that nominations were not good for it. It
has not been allowed to climb up the back of the Presidential chair. We
have a fancy that a truly great mind can move the world as well from a
three-legged stool in a garret as from the easiest cushion in the White
House. Where the great mind is, there is the President’s house, whether
at Wood’s Hole or Washington.</p>

<p>“We would not be understood as detracting in the least from Mr.
Webster’s reputation as a man of great power. He has hitherto given
evidence of a great force, it seems to us, rather than of a great
intellect. But it is a force working without results. It is like a
steam-engine<a name="FNanchor_63_63" id="FNanchor_63_63"></a><a href="#Footnote_63_63" class="fnanchor">[63]</a> which is connected by no band with the machinery which
it ought to turn. A great intellect leaves behind it something more than
a great reputation. The earth is in some way<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_222" id="page_222">{222}</a></span> the better for its having
taken flesh upon itself. We cannot find that Mr. Webster has
communicated an impulse to any of the great ideas which it is the
destiny of the nineteenth century to incarnate in action. His energies
have been absorbed by Tariff and Constitution and Party&mdash;dry bones into
which the touch of no prophet could send life....</p>

<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>What will Mr. Webster do?’ This is of more importance to him than to
the great principle which is beginning to winnow the old parties. This,
having God on its side, can do very well without Mr. Webster&mdash;but can he
do as well without it? The truth of that principle will not be affected
by his taking one side or the other. But <i>occasio celeris</i>, and the
great man is always the man of the occasion. He mounts and guides that
mad steed whose neck is clothed with thunder, and whose fierce <i>ha! ha!</i>
at the sound of the trumpets appals weaker spirits. Two or three years
ago we spoke of one occasion which Mr. Webster allowed to slip away from
him. That was the annexation of Texas. Another is offered him now. We do
not believe that party ever got what was meant for mankind. Mr. Webster
has now once more an opportunity of showing which he was meant for. If
party be large enough to hold him, then mankind can afford to let him
go. Nevertheless, it is sad to imagine him still grinding for the
Philistines. We cannot help thinking that his first appearance as Samson
grasping the pillars of the idol temple would draw a fuller house than
Mr. Van Buren in the same character....<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_223" id="page_223">{223}</a></span></p>

<p>“Let us concede to Mr. Webster’s worshippers that he has heretofore
given proof enough of a great intellect, and let us demand of him now
that he make use of, perhaps, his last chance to become a great <i>Man</i>.
Of what profit are the hands of a giant in the picking up of pins? Let
him leave Banks and Tariffs to more slender fingers. If ever a man was
intended for a shepherd of the people, Daniel Webster is. The people are
fast awakening to great principles: what they want is a great man to
concentrate and intensify their diffuse enthusiasm. And it is not every
sort of greatness that will serve for the occasion. Webster, if he would
only let himself go, has every qualification for a popular leader. The
use of such a man would be that of a conductor to gather, from every
part of the cloud of popular indignation, the scattered electricity
which would waste itself in heat lightnings, and grasping it into one
huge thunderbolt, let it fall like the messenger of an angry god among
the triflers in the Capitol.</p>

<p>“Let Mr. Webster give over at last the futile task of sowing the barren
seashore of the present, and devote himself to the Future, the only
legitimate seed-field of great minds. Slimmer and glibber men will slip
through the labyrinth of politics more easily than he. He will always be
outstripped and outwitted. Politics are in their nature transitory. He
who writes his name on them, be the letters never so large, writes it on
the sand. The next wind of shifting opinion puffs it out forever. It is
never too late to do a wise or great action. We<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_224" id="page_224">{224}</a></span> do not yet wholly
despair of hearing the voice of our Daniel reading the <i>Mene, Mene</i>,
written on the wall of our political fabric.”</p>

<p>The Buffalo Convention indorsed the nomination of Martin Van Buren, by
the Barnburners, or anti-slavery wing of the Democratic party, with the
result that the disaffected Whigs came to the support of General Taylor,
and Webster rather tardily came forward and cast in his influence on
that side. Lowell had been watching for his action, and at once wrote
one of his bantering yet serious articles.</p>

<p>“Mr. Webster,” he said, “with the tan of the Richmond October sun not
yet out of his face, is shocked beyond measure at Mr. Van Buren’s former
pro-slavery attitude. Sitting upon the fence at Marshfield, he tells his
neighbors that, should he and Mr. Van Buren meet upon the same political
platform, they could not look at each other without laughing. If Mr.
Webster’s face looks as black as it is said to have done just after the
Philadelphia nomination, we think it the last thing in the world that
any one would venture even a smile at. Mr. Webster finds fault with Mr.
Van Buren because Northern Democratic Senators voted in favor of the
annexation of Texas. But where was Mr. Webster himself? If he foresaw
that Texas would be a Trojan horse, why did he not say so? If people
would not come to hear him in Faneuil Hall, could he not have gathered
his friends and neighbors together at Marshfield, as he did last week?
It is perfectly clear now by actual demonstration, as it was clear<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_225" id="page_225">{225}</a></span> then
to persons who thought about the matter, that if Mr. Webster had put
himself at the head of the opposers of annexation, Texas would never
have been annexed, and he would have been the next President of the
United States. The effect of the Free Soil movement, led by men with not
a tithe of his influence, upon the Compromise Bill, puts this beyond a
question. Where was the Wilmot Proviso then? At the Springfield
Convention a year ago, Mr. Webster laid claim to this as ‘his thunder.’
In the Marshfield speech he dates its origin as far back as 1787. A
precocious Cyclops, truly, to be forging thunderbolts in his fifth year!
If Mr. Webster should live till 1852, and his retrospective anti-slavery
feeling go on increasing at its present ratio, he will tell us that he
established the <i>Liberator</i> in 1831.”</p>

<p>Quite at the end of Lowell’s stated contributions to the <i>Standard</i> came
the longest of his articles in the form of a running comment on
Webster’s fateful seventh of March speech, and in his comment he
pronounced that judgment which was inevitable from an anti-slavery
prophet. “It has been characterized,” he says, “like most of Mr.
Webster’s speeches, as a ‘masterly effort.’ Some of them have been
masterly successes, but this we sincerely hope and believe <i>was</i> an
effort.... It is the plea of a lawyer and an advocate, but not of a
statesman. It is not even the plea of an advocate on the side which he
was retained to argue. We have heard enough of Democratic defalcations:
here is a great Whig defalcation which dwarfs<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_226" id="page_226">{226}</a></span> them all, for it is not
money which has disappeared in this instance, but professions, pledges,
principles. Men do not defend themselves in advance against accusations
of inconsistency unless they feel an uncomfortable sense that there is
some justice in the charge. This feeling pervades a great part of Mr.
Webster’s speech like a blush.” He uses a fine scorn in dissecting Mr.
Webster’s specious plea that slavery is nowhere directly prohibited in
the teachings of the New Testament, and quietly asks if incest is
anywhere forbidden there. “But if,” he adds, Mr. Webster were really in
search of a scriptural prohibition of slavery, we think he might find it
in that commandment which forbids us to covet anything that is our
neighbor’s. For if we may not do that, then <i>a fortiori</i> we may not
covet our neighbor himself.... Mr. Webster, we have said, avoids
carefully all the moral points of the argument. He falls in with the
common assumption that this is a question of political preponderance
between the North and the South.... It is not a question between the
North and the South. It is a struggle between the South (we had almost
said Calhoun) and the spirit of the nineteenth century after Christ....
Is slavery the only thing whose sensitiveness is to be respected?
Freedom has been thought by some to have her finer feelings also.” And
he closes the discussion of the speech in these words:&mdash;</p>

<p>“If Mr. Webster’s speech should not find any one to confute it in the
Senate,&mdash;a hard task, for assumptions and tergiversations are not easily
re<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_227" id="page_227">{227}</a></span>plied to,&mdash;it will not be without answers abundant and conclusive. It
will be answered by every generous instinct of the human heart, by every
principle which a New Englander has imbibed in the Church, the
Schoolhouse, or the Home, but especially by those inextinguishable
sentiments which move men’s hatred of treachery and contempt for the
traitor.”</p>

<p>The agreement which Lowell had with the <i>Standard</i> left him at liberty
to send either prose or poetry, and as his prose had not necessarily a
direct reference to the anti-slavery contest, so his poetry was to be
independent of any polemic consideration. It was Lowell the writer whom
Gay wished most to attach to the paper for the added weight and
influence he would bring, and Lowell in making and holding to his
agreement was not indifferent to the gentle stimulus which a regular
engagement afforded. He was to send something on Friday if possible, on
Saturday at any rate, of each week, and when the end of the week came, a
sudden suggestion might turn him away from a half-finished article to
let loose a poem in its place. The first five “Biglow Papers” were
published in the <i>Courier</i>, the last four in the <i>Standard</i>, where also
appeared, early in the connection, that poem entitled “Freedom,” which
holds the essence of Lowell’s thought on this large subject, and is the
best expression of the attitude of his mind as he entered with a certain
sense of special enlistment upon the direct business of a crusade
against slavery. The suggestion came from the revolution in<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_228" id="page_228">{228}</a></span> France
which swept Louis Philippe from his throne, and from that light blaze of
revolutionary fire which for a moment kindled hopes in Germany and
Italy. During this time appeared also several poems which reflected with
varying lights the thought that stirred in him at the new birth, as it
seemed, with which humanity was travailing. Such are the apologue of
“Ambrose,” that grim poem “The Sower,” “Bibliolatres,” “A Parable,” but
here also were “Beaver Brook,” first called “The Mill,” occasionally a
poem like “Eurydice” which had been lying unprinted in his portfolio,
and a few bits of rhymed satire which were thrown off by him on the spur
of the moment, and were too careless in manner to be worth his gathering
later into his volumes.</p>

<p>The active members of the anti-slavery society who controlled the policy
of the <i>Standard</i> were divided in their judgment of the value of
Lowell’s contributions. Those who like Mr. Gay himself were thoroughly
in earnest, but held their minds open on other sides than the
north-north-east, regarded Lowell as an important acquisition. His fame
was growing, and he could have found a ready market for his wares if he
had chosen to turn them to the best commercial account, but he
cheerfully gave his time and thought to a paper which was always in an
impecunious condition, so that the editor found it hard enough to pay
the very moderate stipend agreed upon. Lowell, as we have seen, hated to
be paid for his services to the anti-slavery cause, and never complained
of the inadequacy of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_229" id="page_229">{229}</a></span> his salary; but he took a rational view of the
case, and accepted what the paper could give, not measuring his own
contributions by the meagre standard of his pay. Nor did he show any
sensitiveness when his work came under editorial stricture. The
intensity of feeling which possessed the anti-slavery men who were in
the thick of the fight made them abnormally critical of those who seemed
in any way to hold back, and when Lowell wrote a long review, with
hearty praise, of a new volume of Whittier’s poetry, signing it with his
initials, Mr. Gay did not scruple to prefix an editorial note, in which
he denounced Whittier for his course in 1840, when he refused to follow
the lead of those abolitionists who insisted upon the acceptance of
women delegates at the London convention. The quarrel then aroused led
to a break in the unity of the anti-slavery group. “Older
abolitionists,” wrote Gay, “cannot forget what Lowell cannot be aware
of, that in the struggle of 1840, which was a struggle of life and death
to the anti-slavery cause, Whittier the Quaker was found side by side
with the men who would have sacrificed that cause to crush, according
even to their own acknowledgment, the right of woman to plead publicly
in behalf of the slave.” Lowell took the matter quietly enough: “I could
not very well say less, and you could not say more,” was his comment.</p>

<p>Yet how emphatically Mr. Gay valued Lowell’s contributions appears from
all the letters of that anxious and harassed editor. Near the close of
the connection, he wrote to Lowell: “I expected<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_230" id="page_230">{230}</a></span> much good for the paper
when I proposed that you should lighten my editorial labor, but it has
received, I know, far more benefit than I looked for, great as that was.
The influence of the <i>Standard</i>&mdash;leaving myself out of the
question&mdash;since it was established has been very great, and it would
also, I am sure, have been very famous had its aim been other than it
was. No small amount of energy and intellect have been bestowed upon it,
and its nursing fathers and mothers have taken good care of its being.
But of this I am sure, and nobody else is in a position to know it so
well as I&mdash;that of all the good things ever done for it, no one so good
ever was done, as making you its joint editor. Its influence through you
has been felt where it never was before. Through you it has a reputation
which in all its previous existence it had failed to gain. A respect and
regard is accorded to it because of your efforts, which no other person
ever had, and no other person probably would ever have gained for it.”</p>

<p>But the <i>Standard</i> was not Mr. Gay’s paper to do with as he would, and
there was a section of the committee in control that was impatient of a
contributor who was not as they were, fighting away on foot, with stout
oak staves in their hands, but was flying about as a sort of light-horse
contingent, and sometimes seemed out of sight and yet not in the enemy’s
country. “There is a small class,” Mr. Gay wrote,&mdash;“Stephen Foster is a
good representative of it,&mdash;who did not consider you worth much, and
many of whom confess they do<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_231" id="page_231">{231}</a></span> not understand what you would be at.” The
portrait which Lowell had drawn of Stephen Foster in his letter to Mr.
McKim is likely to help the reader understand that he might possibly
even feel contempt for Lowell’s indirect method of attacking slavery.</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Hard by, as calm as summer even,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Smiles the reviled and pelted Stephen,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">The unappeasable Boanerges<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To all the Churches and the Clergies.<br /></span>
<span class="i6dt">. . . . . . . .<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A man with caoutchouc endurance,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A perfect gem for life insurance,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">A kind of maddened John the Baptist,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">To whom the harshest word comes aptest,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Who, struck by stone or brick ill-starred,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Hurls back an epithet as hard,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which, deadlier than stone or brick,<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Has a propensity to stick.<br /></span>
<span class="i0">His oratory is like the scream<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Of the iron-horse’s frenzied steam<br /></span>
<span class="i0">Which warns the world to leave wide space<br /></span>
<span class="i0">For the black engine’s swerveless race.”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>Lowell himself was under no illusions. He was warmly attached to Gay,
and he had a keen intellectual admiration for Edmund Quincy. He
respected to the full his several associates, but he knew well that,
though he identified himself cordially with the small knot of earnest
men and women who cried aloud and spared not, his temperament, his
ideals, and his humor forbade him to shut himself up within the bounds
they set themselves. Despite the independence he claimed and that was
granted him, he could not escape the sense of his restrictions. “I told
you and the Executive Com<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_232" id="page_232">{232}</a></span>mittee honestly before I began,” he wrote Gay,
“that they were setting me about a business for which I was not fitted.
I feel as if the whole of them were looking over my shoulder whenever I
sit down to write, and it quite paralyzes me.” And yet ten days later he
could send his poem, “The Mill,” better known as “Beaver Brook,” and
write, “I am just in time for the mail now, and I positively admire
myself that I can sit down and write a poem to the <i>Standard’s</i> order so
resolutely.”</p>

<p>At the end of his first year’s engagement Lowell began to receive
intimations that the paper was in a hard way financially. “I am very
sorry to see,” he writes the editor, “that the <i>Standard</i> is raised on
so insecure a staff. I did not expect, (and so told the Executive
Committee) that my writing for it would increase the circulation, but, I
say again, as I said before, that they ought to be entirely satisfied
with <i>you</i>. Not only is your own editorial work dote with spirit and
vigor, but your selections are such as to render the paper one of the
most interesting I see. But they ought to do something themselves.
Phillips and Quincy could do a great deal if they would. They can’t
expect two persons to give the paper an infinite variety, nor me to
devote myself wholly to it. I have continued to write after my year was
up, but I have had no intimation from the Committee whether they wished
my services any longer or not. I am very willing to continue, for if I
were to give up this engagement, I must find some other, in order to
make the two ends meet.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_233" id="page_233">{233}</a></span>”</p>

<p>It then transpired that there had been a warm discussion in the
Committee over the continuance of the arrangement, and Gay and his
friends had at last effected a compromise by which the salary of $500
was to be divided between Lowell and Quincy, Lowell being required to
contribute every other week only. Lowell accepted the situation
philosophically, and doubtless felt some relief. “All through the year,”
he wrote to Gay, “I have felt that I worked under a disadvantage. I have
missed that inspiration (or call it magnetism) which flows into one from
a thoroughly sympathetic audience. Properly speaking, I have never had
it as an author, for I have never been popular. But then I have never
needed it, because I wrote to please myself and not to please the
people: whereas, in writing for the <i>Standard</i>, I have felt that I ought
in some degree to admit the whole Executive Committee into my workshop,
and defer as much as possible to the opinion of persons whose opinion
(however valuable on a point of morals) would not probably weigh a pin
with me on an æsthetic question. I have felt that I ought to work in my
own way, and yet I have also felt that I ought’ to <i>try</i> to work in
<i>their</i> way, so that I have failed of working in either. Nevertheless, I
think that the Executive Committee would have found it hard to get some
two or three of the poems I have furnished from any other quarter.” The
entire letter, which is printed by Mr. Norton,<a name="FNanchor_64_64" id="FNanchor_64_64"></a><a href="#Footnote_64_64" class="fnanchor">[64]</a> is interesting as
further defining Lowell’s attitude<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_234" id="page_234">{234}</a></span> toward his associates in the
anti-slavery cause, and his separation from them on some of the crucial
points. But it is clear that the whole situation was complicated for him
by the pecuniary embarrassment under which he labored. He was ready, if
it would relieve the situation, to release the Committee altogether, but
he was willing to write once a fortnight if they <i>wished</i> him to do so.
“To tell the truth,” he says, “I need money more this year than last. My
father has just resigned a quarter part of his salary,<a name="FNanchor_65_65" id="FNanchor_65_65"></a><a href="#Footnote_65_65" class="fnanchor">[65]</a> and a large
part of the household expenses must devolve upon me. But I have resolved
to turn as much of our land as I can into money, and invest it, though I
confess I should prefer to leave it as it is, and where I am sure it
would be safe for Mab and the rest.”</p>

<p>At the end of his second year the engagement was ended, though, largely
out of friendship for<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_235" id="page_235">{235}</a></span> Gay, Lowell contributed occasionally, and his
name indeed was kept at the head of the paper, bracketed with that of
Mr. Quincy, for another year. He laughed, by the way, at the designation
“corresponding editor.” It has always seemed to me to be nonsense. There
can, in the nature of the thing, be no such person as a <i>corresponding</i>
editor. Moreover, in this particular case, my unhappy genius will keep
seeing the double sense in the word <i>corresponding</i>, and suggesting that
E. Q. and I correspond in very few particulars,&mdash;meaning no offence to
either of us. ‘Contributor’ would be the fitting word.”</p>

<p>The connection with the <i>Standard</i> had not altered Lowell’s position in
politics. It found him independent, and left him so. He was no less a
reformer at the end than he was at the beginning, but he was confirmed
in his belief that the world must be healed by degrees; and as he was a
disbeliever in the short cut to emancipation by way of disunion, so he
was at once a firm believer in radical reform, but skeptical of ultimate
success through the rooting out of individual evils. He found himself
among people who were sure of their panaceas. He himself in the first
flush of his restless desire for activity had been disposed, under the
influence of the woman he loved, to attack the evil of intemperance by
the method of total abstinence, but his zeal was short-lived. He appears
never to have accepted woman suffrage as the solution of the problem of
society, and it is doubtful if at any time he would have given his
adhesion to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_236" id="page_236">{236}</a></span> mode of immediate emancipation if he had been called on
to discuss it. His imagination and his sense of humor both prevented him
from being a thick and thin reformer, and he refused to allow his hatred
of slavery to be complicated with practical measures for the reform of
various other evils which troubled society. It was because he saw in
slavery in the United States the arch foe of freedom and the insidious
corrupter of national life that he concentrated his reforming energy
upon this evil. He has said of Wordsworth that “fortunately he gave up
politics that he might devote himself to his own noble calling, to which
politics are subordinate;” but it might be said with equal truth of
Lowell that he never gave up poetry, and that when he was writing every
week, or every other week, for the <i>Standard</i>, whether in verse or in
prose, he was dominated by an imagination which kept steadily before his
eyes great principles and doctrines which found in the anti-slavery
movement an illustration but not an exclusive end. It is not surprising,
therefore, that he should have seemed to others, and sometimes to
himself, not to see the enemy just in front of him.</p>

<p>Nevertheless, the experience was worth much to him. It resulted, as it
might not except for this stimulus, in the “Biglow Papers,” and it also
demonstrated more clearly than ever the supremacy of the literary
function with him, since he never laid it aside under the strong
provocation which his journalistic work incited, and maintained from
first to last the integrity of his spirit. The conserva<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_237" id="page_237">{237}</a></span>tism which
underlay and indeed supported his radicalism was confirmed by his
experience, and it issued moreover in a large comprehensiveness, so that
he came out of the ranks not only with a greater sympathy with his
comrades,<a name="FNanchor_66_66" id="FNanchor_66_66"></a><a href="#Footnote_66_66" class="fnanchor">[66]</a> but with a larger toleration for the men he attacked. “At
this minute,” he writes to Gay, “the song of the bobolink comes rippling
through my opening window and preaches peace. Two months ago the same
missionary was in his South Carolina pulpit, and can I think that he
chose another text, or delivered another sermon there? Hath not a
slaveholder hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed
with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same
diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same summer
and winter as an abolitionist? If you pinch them, do they not bleed? If
you tickle them, do they not laugh? If you poison them, do they not die?
If you wrong them, shall they not revenge? Nay, I will go a step
farther, and ask if all this do not apply to parsons also? Even <i>they</i>
are human.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_238" id="page_238">{238}</a></span>”</p>

<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V<br /><br />
<small>A FABLE FOR CRITICS, THE BIGLOW PAPERS, AND THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL</small><br /><br />
<small>1847-1848</small></h2>

<p><span class="smcap">It</span> was while he was most busily engaged in contributing to the
<i>Standard</i> his weekly poems, criticisms, and editorial articles, that
Lowell wrote and published a group of books, varied in subject and
treatment, dashed off each and all with an eager abandonment to the
intellectual excitement which produced them, and read by a later
generation as capital illustrations not only of their author’s
spontaneity, but also of the permanent direction of his nature. It is
not unfair to suppose that the steady application to work in connection
with a cause which appealed to moral enthusiasm aroused in a mind like
Lowell’s an exhilaration of temper very provocative of creation. The
poems which he sent, one after the other, in a continuous flight, were
witnesses to this activity of imagination, and the very tension of his
mind kept him in a state of excitement, so that his diversions took the
form of intellectual amusement. Two or three numbers of the “Biglow
Papers” had appeared, when Lowell wrote his friend Briggs that he was at
work on a satirical poem, but apparently he did<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_239" id="page_239">{239}</a></span> not disclose its exact
character, though he intimated at the beginning that he meant to give
the poem to his friend. In point of fact, Lowell appears to have written
at full speed five or six hundred lines of “A Fable for Critics” in
October, 1847, and then to have been so busily engaged in getting ready
his new volume of “Poems,” which appeared at the end of the year, that
he laid it aside. “I have been waiting with a good deal of impatience,”
Briggs writes, 7 November, 1847, “for the manuscript of the satirical
poem which you promised to send me. As I have not seen anything
advertised which sounds like you I am half afraid that you are not going
to publish it. But you must be convinced from the great popularity that
Hosea’s efforts have received that the sale of the poem will be large
and profitable.”</p>

<p>In his reply, 13 November, Lowell says: “My satire remains just as it
was; about six hundred lines I think are written. I left it because I
wished to finish it in one mood of mind, and not to get that and my
serious poems in the new volume entangled. It is a rambling, disjointed
affair, and I may alter the form of it, but if I can get it read I know
it will take. I intend to give it some serial title and continue it at
intervals.... I shall send you my satire in manuscript when it is
finished. Meanwhile, here is a taste and I want your opinion. Here is
Emerson. I think it good.&mdash;There, I have given you three or four
specimen bricks&mdash;what think you of the house?... Remember that my satire
is a secret. Read the extract to<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_240" id="page_240">{240}</a></span> Page.” Mr. Briggs was delighted with
what was shown him, and longed for more. “The characteristics of
Alcott,” he says, “I could not judge of, although they are most happily
expressed, as I have known nothing about him; but the character of
Emerson was the best thing of the kind I have read.” He returns to the
subject on Christmas day, but is still ignorant of Lowell’s intention as
to the disposition of the manuscript. “I think that the book would be a
very popular one, but still, it strikes me that your subjects are too
localized to be widely understood; but they would have all the merit of
fictions at least, and your method would make them universally
acceptable.”</p>

<p>But now Lowell gives his friend a more explicit statement of his
intention as to the publication of his satire. The volume of poems was
out of the way, and on the last day of 1847 he writes as follows: “I
have not time left to say much more than happy New Year! I have been
hard at work copying my satire that I might get it (what was finished of
it, at least) to you by New Year’s day as a present. As it is, I can
only send the first part. It was all written with one impulse, and was
the work of not a great many hours; but it was written in good spirits
(<i>con amore</i>, as Leupp said he used to smoke), and therefore seems to me
to have a hearty and easy swing about it that is pleasant. But I was
interrupted midway by being obliged to get ready the copy for my volume,
and I have never been able to weld my present mood upon the old, without
making an ugly swelling at the joint.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_241" id="page_241">{241}</a></span></p>

<p>“I wish you to understand that I make you a New Year’s gift, not of the
manuscript, but of the thing itself. I wish you to get it printed (if
you think the sale will warrant it) for your own benefit. At the same
time I am desirous of retaining my copyright, in order that if
circumstances render it desirable, I may still possess a control over
it. Therefore, if you think it would repay publishing (I have no doubt
of it, or I should not offer it to you), I wish you would enter the
copyright in your own name and then make a transfer to me ‘in
consideration of etc.’</p>

<p>“Now I know that you are as proud as&mdash;you ought to be, but if the
proceeds of the sale would be of service to you, you have no right to
refuse them. I don’t make you a pecuniary present, though I trust you
would not hesitate to accept one from me, if you needed it, and I could
raise the money, but I give you something which I have made myself, and
made on purpose for you.</p>

<p>“I know nothing about your circumstances. If beloved W. P. needs it
most, let him have it, and I know that you would consider it the best
gift I could make <i>you</i>. I will not consent to that disposal of it,
however, unless he need it most. In case the proceeds amount to anything
handsome (for it <i>may</i> be popular) and you intend them for W. P., let it
be done in this way, which would please him and me too, and nobody but
myself would be the gainer. Do you in that case sit to Page for your
portrait&mdash;the said effigies to belong to your humble servant.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_242" id="page_242">{242}</a></span></p>

<p>“I am making as particular directions as if I were drawing my will, but
I have a sort of presentiment (which I never had in regard to anything
else) that this little bit of pleasantry will <i>take</i>. Perhaps I have
said too much of the Centurion.<a name="FNanchor_67_67" id="FNanchor_67_67"></a><a href="#Footnote_67_67" class="fnanchor">[67]</a> But it was only the comicality of
his <i>character</i> that attracted me,&mdash;for the man himself personally never
entered my head. But the sketch is clever?&mdash;I want your opinion on what
I have sent immediately.”<a name="FNanchor_68_68" id="FNanchor_68_68"></a><a href="#Footnote_68_68" class="fnanchor">[68]</a></p>

<p>Mr. Briggs replied at once, accepting the gift in the spirit in which it
was given, delighting in the poem, and proposing to arrange immediately
for its publication by Putnam. He was confident, as was Page, that the
book would be a great hit, and promptly provided for the disposition of
the profits. “One third,” he wrote, “should be invested for Queen Mab,
to be given her on her eighteenth birthday; one third to be disposed of
in the same manner for my little angel; and the other third to be given
to Page, for which he should paint your portrait for me and mine for
you. This would be making the best disposition of the fund that I could
devise, and I think will not be displeasing to you. If the profits
should be small, I will divide them equally between the little ones. It
will be something quite new for two young ladies to receive their
marriage portions from the profits of an American poem.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_243" id="page_243">{243}</a></span>”</p>

<p>Lowell was highly entertained by this proposal. “I could not help
laughing,” he wrote, “as I read your proposed disposition of the
expected finances. To look at you in the character of Alnaschar was
something so novel as to be quite captivating to my imagination. Not
that I have any fear that you will kick over the basket, but I am afraid
the contents will hardly be so attractive to the public as to allow the
proceeds of the sale to be divided into three. It is really quite a
triumph to be able to laugh at my practical friend. However, I will not
impoverish your future, but will let you enjoy it as long as it
lasts.... I have now, in addition to what I sent you, and exclusive of
Emerson, etc., about a hundred lines written, chiefly about Willis and
Longfellow. But in your arrangements with the printer, you must reckon
on allowing me at least a month. I cannot write unless in the mood.”</p>

<p>It was when about half the poem had been written that Lowell began his
constant work for the <i>Standard</i>, and he was impatient to finish the
poem, yet found it hard to get into the right mood. “I want to get my
windows open,” he wrote to Briggs, 26 March, 1848, “and to write in the
fresh air. I ought not to have sent you any part of it till I had
finished it entirely. I feel a sense of responsibility which hinders my
pen from running along as it ought in such a theme. I wish the last half
to be as jolly and unconstrained as the first. If you had not praised
what I sent you, I dare say you would have had the whole of it ere this.
Praise is the only thing that can make me<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_244" id="page_244">{244}</a></span> feel any doubt of myself.”
And then, recurring to Briggs’s air castle to be built with the
proceeds: “As to your plan for dividing the profits I will have nothing
to do with it. I wish they might be a thousand dollars with all my
heart, but I do not see that they will be more than enough to buy
something for my little niece there in New York. If I had not thought it
the only poem I ever wrote on which there was like to be <i>some</i>
immediate profit, I should never have given it to you at all. In making
it a present to you, I was giving myself a <i>douceur</i>, and the greater
the sale the larger the bribe to myself. A part of the condition is that
if it make a loss&mdash;I pay it. If this be not agreed to, the bargain is
null, and I never will finish it.... Now that I <i>have</i> let you into the
secret of the ‘Fable’ before it was finished, I hope you will write and
give me a spur. I suppose you did not wish to say anything about it till
after it became yours. But I wish to be dunned. Tell me whether its
being published at any particular time will make any difference, etc.,
etc., and make any suggestions. I think I shall say nothing about
Margaret Fuller (though she offer so fair a target), because she has
done me an ill-natured turn.<a name="FNanchor_69_69" id="FNanchor_69_69"></a><a href="#Footnote_69_69" class="fnanchor">[69]</a> I shall revenge myself amply upon her
by writing<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_245" id="page_245">{245}</a></span> better. She is a very foolish, conceited woman, who has got
together a great deal of information, but not enough <i>knowledge</i> to save
her from being ill-tempered. However, the temptation may be too strong
for me. It certainly would have been if she had never said anything
about me. Even Maria thinks I ought to give her a line or two.” Briggs
begged him not to leave out Miss Fuller, “she will accuse you of doing
it to spite her.”</p>

<p>The spring months went by with occasional dashes at the “Fable” and on
12 May, Lowell wrote to his friend: “I have begun upon the ‘Fable’ again
fairly, and am making some headway. I think with what I sent you (which
I believe was about 500 lines) it will make something over a thousand. I
have done since I sent the first half, Willis, Longfellow, Bryant, Miss
Fuller, and Mrs. Child. In Longfellow’s case I have attempted no
characterization. The same (in a degree) may be said of S. M. F. With
her I have been perfectly good humored, but I have a fancy that what I
say will stick uncomfortably. It will make you laugh. So will L. M. C.
After S. M. F. I make a short digression on bores in general which has
some drollery in it. Willis I think good. Bryant is funny, and as far as
I could make it immitigably just. Indeed I have endeavored to be so in
all. I am glad I did B. before I got your letter.<a name="FNanchor_70_70" id="FNanchor_70_70"></a><a href="#Footnote_70_70" class="fnanchor">[70]</a> The only verses I
shall<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_246" id="page_246">{246}</a></span> add regarding him are some complimentary ones which I left for a
happier mood after I had written the comic part. I steal from him,
indeed! If he knew me he would not say so. When I steal I shall go to a
specie vault, not to a till. Does he think that he invented the past,
and has a prescriptive title to it? Do not think I am provoked. I am
simply amused. If he had <i>riled</i> me, I might have knocked him into a
cocked hat in my satire. But that, on second thoughts, would be no
revenge, for it might make him President, a cocked hat being now the
chief qualification.<a name="FNanchor_71_71" id="FNanchor_71_71"></a><a href="#Footnote_71_71" class="fnanchor">[71]</a> It would be more severe to knock him into the
middle of next week, as that is in the future, and he has such a
partiality toward the past.”</p>

<p>In the passage on bores, which follows the lines on Margaret Fuller,
Lowell explains that&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“These sketches I made (not to be too explicit)<br /></span>
<span class="i0">From two honest fellows who made me a visit,”&mdash;<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="nind">but he is explicit enough regarding them in the same letter to Mr.
Briggs: I had a horrible visitation the other evening from Mr. &mdash;&mdash;, of
Philadelphia, accompanied by Messrs. &mdash;&mdash; and &mdash;&mdash;, of Boston. After their
departure, I wrote the ‘digression on bores’ which I mentioned
above. &mdash;&mdash;, I believe, likes my poetry, but likes his own too well to
appreciate anybody’s else. He is about to start a magazine and has
issued a prospectus of<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_247" id="page_247">{247}</a></span> the very most prodigious description. One would
think it to have been written with a quill plucked from the wing of ‘our
country’s bird.’ He wished to have a portrait and memoir of me in his
first number. I escaped from the more immediate crucifixion, however, on
the ground that I had no sketch of myself that would answer his purpose.
As his project may fail after the first number, I may get off
altogether. I have sometimes given offence by answering such
applications with a smile, so I have changed my tactics, and give
assent.... I hope to finish the ‘Fable’ next week.”</p>

<p>On 24 July, Lowell wrote to Gay, who was in the secret, that he had
finished the “Fable,” and shortly after he made a visit to New York, but
it was not till near the end of August that he sent the last instalment
of copy. The proof followed, and Lowell took occasion to make at least
one omission, due apparently to better knowledge which led him to revise
his judgment. He was too late, apparently, for another correction, for
he wrote to Briggs, 4 October, asking him to strike out the four lines
relating to Miss Fuller, beginning</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“There is one thing she owns in her own single right,”<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="nind">which still stand. The poem was printed from type, so that as each sheet
was printed, and the type distributed, it was not possible, as in the
case of electrotype plates, to make corrections up to the last moment
before printing the entire book. In the same letter he writes:&mdash;</p>

<p>“I send half the proof to-day&mdash;t’ other to-mor<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_248" id="page_248">{248}</a></span>row with Irving and Judd.
I am <i>druv like all possessed</i>. I am keeping up with the printers with
Wilbur’s Notes, Glossary, Index, and Introduction. I have two sets of
hands to satiate, one on the body of the book, one on the extremities.</p>

<p>“I wish to see title-page and preface. Also, be sure and have a written
acknowledgment from G. P. P. that the copyright remains with <i>you</i>. Then
send me a transfer of it for value received. I will endorse in such a
way that it shall remain to you and yours in case anything happen to me.
Don’t think my precaution indelicate. I only wish to provide against
accidents. Let Putnam take out copyright and let it stand in your name
as far as he and the rest of the world are concerned. I am anxious about
it (I need scarcely say) solely on these two accounts, that it may never
fall into strangers’ hands, and that it may never be taken from you.
More to-morrow.”</p>

<p>Two days later he wrote to Briggs, “I am, you see, as good as my word
and better. For, as I was copying the other verses this morning, I
thought I might as well throw you in Holmes to boot. Let the new passage
begin thus,&mdash;</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“Here, ‘Forgive me, Apollo,’ I cried, ‘while I pour’ &amp;c., &amp;c.<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p>Please make the alteration and put in marks of quotation at the
beginning of each new paragraph if I have omitted them. Also in this
line if it runs as I think it does,</p>

<div class="poetry">
<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
<span class="iq">“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>So, compared to you moderns, is old Melesigines,’<br /></span>
</div></div>
</div>

<p class="nind">insert ‘sounds’ instead of ‘is.<span class="pagenum"><a name="page_249" id="page_249">{249}</a></span>’</p>

<p>“I wish you would do up a copy with ‘author’s and so forths,’ <i>dated New
York</i>, and put it into Ticknor’s first box directed to Dr. O. W. Holmes,
Boston, and also one directed to Professor Felton, Cambridge, in
Ticknor’s or Nichols’s as it may chance....</p>

<p>“Print the title-page thus:&mdash;</p>

<p>“<span class="lftspc">‘</span>Reader, walk up’ etc., as far as ‘ruinous rate’ in large italics in
old-fashioned style in an inverted cone</p>
<div style="text-align:center;">
<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 57776 ***</div>

</body>
</html>
generated by cgit v1.2.3 (git 2.25.1) at 2026-02-05 08:36:56 +0000