CHAPTER VIII

AN END AND A BEGINNING

1852-1857

Lowell had the good fortune to have for a companion at sea Thackeray, who was on his way to America to give his lectures on the English Humourists; he liked the man very much, and his occasional references to the author in his letters and critical papers intimate the high regard he had for his work. Another congenial companion on shipboard was Arthur Hugh Clough, with whom he formed a warm and enduring friendship. It was a thirteen days’ passage, and on the 12th of November the Lowells were again at home in Elmwood. The coming of the two Englishmen gave occasion for many little festivities in Boston and Cambridge. A glimpse is given of them in Mr. Longfellow’s printed journal, when the poet summoned Clough, Lowell, Felton, and C. E. Norton to feast on some English grouse and pheasant sent him from Liverpool by Mr. Henry Bright, and in the evening at the Nortons’ there were private theatricals with a “nice little epilogue written by Mr. Clough,” who shortly established himself indefinitely in Cambridge.

Clough has left a little picture of the interior of Elmwood: “Yesterday I had a walk with James Lowell to a very pretty spot, Beaver Brook. Then I dined with him, his wife, and his father, a fine old minister who is stone deaf, but talks to you. He began by saying that he was born an Englishman, i. e. before the end of the Revolution. Then he went on to say, ‘I have stood as near to George III. as to you now;’ ‘I saw Napoleon crowned Emperor;’ then, ‘Old men are apt to be garrulous, especially about themselves;’ ‘I saw the present Sultan ride through Constantinople on assuming the throne;’ and so on,--all in a strong clear voice, and in perfect sentences, which you saw him making beforehand. And all one could do was to bow and look expressive, for he could only just hear when his son got up and shouted in his ear.”[95] Lowell gave briefly his estimate of Clough’s genius when he wrote a few weeks later to Mr. Briggs: “I wish to write a review of his ‘Bothie,’ to serve him in event of a new edition. It is one of the most charming books ever written,--to my thinking quite as much by itself as the ‘Vicar of Wakefield.’”

With his European experience behind him Lowell was eager to plunge into literature, and his intention at first was to try his hand at fiction, possibly turning his experience to account somewhat after the manner of his neighbor’s “Hyperion.” At any rate, Longfellow notes in his diary under date of 29 November, 1852: “Met Lowell in the street and brought him home to smoke a pipe. He had been to the bookseller’s to buy a blank book to begin a Novel, on the writing of which his mind is bent. He seems rather sad and says he does not take an interest in anything. This is the reaction after the excitement of foreign travel. Lowell will write a capital novel, and when he gets warm in the harness will feel happier;” and a fortnight later he makes the entry: “Lowell came in. He has begun his novel.”

It is to be suspected that he never went far in the attempt. A dozen years later, when Mr. Fields wanted him to write a novel for the _Atlantic Monthly_, he made the summary answer: “I can’t write one nor conceive how any one else can.” Yet he could not have abandoned the trial immediately, for in June he was writing to Briggs: “I have got so far as to have written the first chapter of a prose book,--a sort of New England autobiography, which may turn out well.”[96]

Meanwhile, he was met on his arrival in America with a piece of literary news which was welcome for its own sake and because it promised an outlet for his productions. His friend Briggs as editor-in-chief, with G. W. Curtis and Parke Godwin for assistants, was just about launching a new magazine in New York, which was likely to come nearer fulfilling the ideal Lowell had long cherished than anything thus far issued in America. _Putnam’s Monthly_ had behind it an active publishing house, whose head, Mr. G. P. Putnam, had that indefinable quality which makes a publisher, if not an author himself, a genuine appreciator of good literature, and a man whose friendship with authors rested on a basis which was social as well as commercial. He had shown his sagacity and business insight by taking up the writings of Washington Irving when that author was in neglect, and winning a substantial success with them. He cared for the books he published and listened willingly to Mr. Briggs when that gentleman, who had been engaged in many editorial enterprises, argued that the time was ripe for a literary monthly which should stand for American literature of the best sort, and should at the same time concern itself with public affairs and furnish also that miscellaneous entertainment of narrative and description for which the American public showed a liking. _Harper’s New Monthly Magazine_ had been started a couple of years before, but it was almost wholly a reprint of English current literature, and even its cover was a copy of _Bentley’s_. It had, however, struck a popular taste, and its success made other publishers jealous, while its easy use of foreign matter made the men of letters angry.

The prospectus of _Putnam’s Monthly_, in which the fact that it was to be “an entirely original work” was emphasized, announced that it was “intended to combine the more various and amusing characteristics of a popular magazine with the higher and graver qualities of a quarterly review,” and that when a subject needed illustrations or pictorial examples, such illustrations would occasionally be given. The rate of payment was fair for the time: poetry had no fixed rates, but Lowell received fifty dollars for a poem of two hundred and fifty lines or so, and prose was paid at the rate of three dollars a page. Hawthorne and Emerson were among those who promised their work, though neither seems to have contributed, but Longfellow printed several poems. The articles and poems were all unsigned. The early numbers gave good promise, and Curtis, with his “Prue and I” papers gave a distinction of lightness and added the flavor which every literary magazine covets but can rarely command. The first number, Briggs declared with elation, had run up to twenty thousand copies, and the second number had one of those articles, “Have we a Bourbon among us?” which are the joy of the magazine editor for the buzz which they create in the reading community. But the high hopes with which _Putnam’s_ started out somehow faded. There were exceptionally good poems and the general average of writing was high, but the magazine soon satisfied curiosity without creating a demand, and the financial embarrassment of the publisher after two years compelled a transfer of the publishing interest which was followed by a steady decline in quality.

Meanwhile, Mr. Briggs looked eagerly to Lowell for help, and for his first number received the poem “The Fountain of Youth,” which had been lying in the poet’s portfolio for three years. He suggested that Lowell should publish “The Nooning” as a serial. This was not to be, but whether from this suggestion or not, Lowell suddenly took it into his head to start a serio-comic poem in Alexandrines, under the heading “Our Own, his Wanderings and Personal Adventures,” in which he intended to personate a correspondent of the magazine, who should travel in Europe, and employ his nonsense and satire on men and things. He began leisurely enough, heading his page with a Greek, a Latin, and an English motto, each cleverly hinting at the plan and the name of the piece. The Latin “_Quæ regio in terris Nostri non plena laboris?_” was Englished in

“Full many cities he hath seen and many great men known; What place on earth but testifies the labors of _our own_?”

Then he makes a doggerel verse under Digression A which slyly imitates Spenser’s verse table-of-contents, and so with Digressions, Invocation, and Progression he saunters carelessly along. “The last few days,” he writes to Briggs, 17 February, 1853, “I have worked in earnest. I wrote one hundred and fifty lines yesterday, and it is thought funny by the constituency in my little Buncombe here. I have hopes that it will be the best thing I have done in the satiric way after I once get fairly agoing. I am thus far taking the run back for the jump. I have enlarged my plan and, if you like it, can make it run through several numbers. It is cruel, impudent,--sassy, I meant to write. Some parts of it I have flavored slightly with Yankee,--but not in dialect. I wish to make it something more than ephemeral, and shall put more thinking into it as I go along. My idea for it is a glass of punch, sweetness, sourness, spirit, and a dash of that Chinese herb favorable to meditation.”

There were three numbers only published of “Our Own,” though the last carried the legend “To be continued” at its foot. The perplexed editor hardly knew how to answer Lowell’s demand for criticism. He himself was immensely entertained, he averred, but nobody else was; although he had heard of one or two, and Lowell added the names of two or three more, it was clear to Mr. Briggs that the verses did not take, and he grew petulant over the stupidity of the public. Lowell’s own ardor cooled. The style of composition was indeed to real writing what the pun is to real wit. In the heat of firing off these fire-crackers, ever so much execution seems to be done, but the laugh that follows is not repeated, and the cleverness and point seem dulled when the bristling jests crowd each other, giving no relief to each.

Lowell could not quite agree with Briggs in the deference which the latter was disposed to pay to the expressions of the public upon the contents of his magazine: “I doubt if your magazine,” he writes, “will become really popular if you edit it for the mob. Nothing is more certain than that popularity goes downward and not up (I mean permanent popularity), and it is what the few like now that the many have got to like by and by. Now don’t turn the tables on me and say that,--not the _very_ few. I have pretty much given up the notion that I can be popular either upward or downward, and what I say has no reference to myself. I wish I could be. But it strikes me that you want as much variety as possible. It is not merely necessary that the matter should be good, but that it should be individual.”

A good many years afterward when Lowell was making up a volume of poems, he looked again at “Our Own” to see if it was worth preserving, and out of the whole six hundred lines he saved only the verses now headed “Fragments of an Unfinished Poem” and the two charming stanzas “Aladdin.”[97] The insertion of this little poem in the midst of his nonsense indicates that if Lowell had found sufficient encouragement he might, especially after reaching Europe in his plan, have worked off the surplusage of high spirits and thrown into his rambling discourse both caustic satire and genial humor.

A more satisfactory and successful contribution which was enthusiastically received by the editor was “A Moosehead Journal,” which was in effect a journal, sent home to his wife, of an excursion made by Lowell in the summer of 1853 with his nephew Charles; and in the spring of 1854 appeared in two parts the well-known sketch of “Cambridge Thirty Years Ago,” under the title, “Fireside Travels.” The paper seems to have grown out of an unused sketch of Allston which Lowell had begun for _Putnam’s_ in September, 1853. “What I have written (or part of it),” he says to the editor, “would make a unique article for your magazine, if the other thing is given up. It is a sketch of Cambridge as it was twenty-five years ago, and is done as nobody but I could do it, for nobody knows the old town so well. I mean one of these days to draw a Commencement as it used to be.” Lowell does not appear to have contributed to _Putnam’s_ after December, 1854, when his portrait, an engraving by Hall after Page’s painting, served as frontispiece to the number, being one of a series of portraits of contributors to the magazine.

Meanwhile, when _Putnam’s_ was at the top of its brief tide, another attempt at a good literary magazine was made in Boston. The extraordinary success of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had emboldened its publisher, Mr. John P. Jewett, to undertake what its projector, Mr. F. H. Underwood, called a “Literary and Anti-Slavery Magazine.” It was the intention to issue the first number in January, 1854, and to use the great reputation of Mrs. Stowe to float it by printing a new novel by her. Mr. Underwood[98] was particularly desirous of securing Lowell’s aid, especially as he esteemed his poetry quite the best to be had in America, and he was elated at receiving from him the poem “The Oriole’s Nest,” afterward called simply “The Nest.” But the design which had been germinating for two or three years was suddenly brought to naught by the failure of the luckless publishers, whose success with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” seems to have been thrust upon them, rather than to have been due to their business ability. So a fortnight after sending his poem, Lowell was forced to write the disconcerted editor: “I cannot help writing a word to say how truly sorry I was to hear of the blowing up of your magazine. But it is not so irreparable as if it had been a powder-magazine, though perhaps all the harder to be borne because it was only _in posse_ and not _in esse_. The explosion of one of those Castles in Spain sometimes sprinkles dust on all the rest of our lives, but I hope you are of better heart, and will rather look upon the affair as a burning of your ships which makes victory the more imperative. Although I could prove by a syllogism in _barbara_ that you are no worse off than you were before, I know very well that you _are_, for if it be bad to lose mere coin, it is still worse to lose hope, which is the mint in which most gold is manufactured.

“But, after all, is it a hopeless case? Consider yourself to be in the position of all the world before the Mansion of our Uncle Thomas (as I suppose we must call it now, it has grown so respectable) was published, and never to have heard of this Mr. Jew-wit. I think he ought to be--that something ought to be done for him: but for that matter nearly all booksellers stand in the same condemnation. There are as good fish in that buccaneering sea of Bibliopoly as ever were caught, and if one of them has broken away from your harpoon, I hope the next may prove a downright kraaken, on whom, if needful, you can pitch your tent and live.

“Don’t think that I am trifling with you. God knows any jests of mine would be of a bitter sort just now; but I know that it is a good thing for a man to be made to look at his misfortune till it assumes its true relations to things about it. So don’t think me intrusive if I nudge your elbow among the rest.”

* * * * *

A few weeks after the return of the Lowells to America, Longfellow took Clough on a walk to Elmwood. “Lowell,” he says, “we found musing before his fire in his study. His wife came in, slender and pale as a lily.” In reading “A Year’s Life” one is struck by the frequency with which the shadow of death falls across the page. It is true that when he wrote the poems, when indeed he fell in with Maria White, Lowell was struggling out of an atmosphere which was full of damp mist, and the image of death naturally rose constantly before him. Yet it remains that from the beginning of his passion he associated this love with the idea of death. So frail, so almost ethereal was the woman who came thus into his life, that from the first he was constantly sheltering her from the cold blast. The solicitude deepened his passion; it accustomed him at the same time to the idea of transitoriness in the life he led. It is entirely possible, nay, very probable, that this spiritually-bodied girl was permitted to develop into a gracious womanhood through the very fact of her marriage and her motherhood: Lowell’s own mood during the nine years of married life was, as we have seen, often irrepressibly gay and sanguine, and after the death of each of their children the two seemed to spring back into a wholesome delight in life. Still, the fear could never have long been out of their minds, and, after Walter died in Rome, the mother seems steadily to have drooped. When Lowell sent “The Nest” to Underwood, he speaks of it as an old poem: “Perhaps,” he says, “it seems better to me than it deserves, for an intense meaning has been added to it.” The meaning had then indeed been deepened, but when it was written, there was more than remote prophecy in the lines--

“When springs of life that gleamed and gushed Run chilled, and slower, and are hushed.”

The year that passed after the return from Europe saw Mrs. Lowell declining in strength, though it was not till September, 1853, that his letters betray Lowell’s deepening anxiety, and it was not till the end of the month that he fully realized the progress disease had made. Mrs. Lowell died 27 October, and Lowell was left alone with his little daughter. The visionary faculty, which all his life had been what might almost be called another sense, came now to his help and for awhile he lived as if the companion of thirteen years, though shut out from his daily sight, visited him in the solitude and silence of the night. “I have the most beautiful dreams,” he writes, “and never as if any change had come to us. Once I saw her sitting with Walter on her knee, and she said to me, ‘See what a fine strong boy he is grown.’ And one night as I was lying awake and straining my eyes through the gloom, and the palpable darkness was surging and gathering and dispersing as it will, I suddenly saw far, far off a crescent of angels standing and shining silently. But oh! it is a million times better to have had her and lost her, than to have had and kept any other woman I ever saw.”

It had given both husband and wife a great pleasure to see one and another of Mrs. Lowell’s poems printed during the last year in _Putnam’s Monthly_. Mr. Briggs, with his affectionate regard for both, was eager to print the verses as they were sent him, and reported all the agreeable words that came to him respecting the poems. The latest to be printed was one on Avignon, in which the poet kept turning back from the historic and spectacular sights to some oleanders which stood by her window. “How beautiful it was,” Lowell wrote to Briggs, “and how fitting for the last. I am going to print them all--but not publish them yet--she did not wish it. I shall give a copy, with a calotype from a drawing which Cheney is to make from Page’s picture, to all her friends.”

It was a year and more before the volume was printed, bearing the title “The Poems of Maria Lowell,” and inscribed to Mrs. Story, Mrs. Putnam, and Mrs. Shaw, three friends of whose loving appreciation Lowell had had many assurances. There are only twenty poems in the volume. Most had been printed before, one, “The Morning-Glory,” in Lowell’s own collection. None of her translations were included. One looks naturally in such a volume rather for intimations of the writer’s character, and for touches of personal feeling, than for poetic art. Mrs. Lowell herself plainly had but a humble conceit of her poetic gift, and it does not appear that poetry was an abundant resource with her. But art there is of no mean order in this little book. It is a delicate instrument on which she plays; there are not many stops, but there is a vibrant tone which thrills the ear. Tenderness indeed is the prevailing note, but in one poem, “Africa,” there is a massiveness of structure, and a sonorous dignity of measure which appeal powerfully to the imagination. The poems have, here and there, an autobiographic value. One written in Rome, shortly after the travellers had reached that city and the dream of childhood had come true, ended with the verses:--

“And Rome lay all before us in its glory, Its glory and its beautiful decay, But, like the student in the oft-read story, I could have turned away,

“To the still chamber with its half-closed shutter Where the beloved father lay in pain, To sit beside him in contentment utter, Never to part again.”

There are four sonnets in which her love for her husband glows with a deep, steady passion, one of them written doubtless in the solemn days near the end, in the spirit recorded by Lowell when he wrote to Briggs after her death: “She promised to be with me if that were possible.”

“In the deep flushing of the Western sky The new moon stands as she would fain be gone, And, dropping earthward, greet Endymion: If Death uplift me, even thus should I, Companioned by the silver spirits high, And stationed on the sunset’s crimson towers, Bend longing over earth’s broad stretch of bowers, To where my love beneath their shades might lie: For I should weary of the endless blue, Should weary of my ever-growing light, If that one soul, so beautiful and true, Were hidden by earth’s vapors from my sight, Should wane and wane as changeful planets do, And move on slowly, wrapt in mine own night.”

What most impresses the reader who takes all these poems at a sitting is the reserve, the just balance of sentiment which controls them. Passion is here, but it is not stormy, and love and tenderness, but they are not feeble and tearful. Depth of feeling and strength of character lie open to view in the firm lines, and the fine light and shade of the verse come incontrovertibly from a nature evenly poised, whose companionship must have been to Lowell that of a kindred spirit, capable indeed of guiding and not merely of seconding his resolves.

The frontispiece to the volume, which is here reproduced, was a crystallotype of a drawing by Cheney after Page’s portrait. “It is like,” Lowell wrote at the time, “as far as there can be any likeness made of a face so full of spiritual beauty, and in which so much of the charm was subterficial.” He tried to convey to a friend, with whom his association was purely literary, some notion of her when he wrote: “All that was written of Lady Digby, all that Taylor said of the Countess of Carbery and Donne of Elizabeth Drury--belongs as well to her, she was so beautiful and good. She was born 8th July, 1821, married 26th December, 1844, and went home 27th October, 1853. ‘The Pilgrim they laid in a large upper chamber whose windows opened toward the sunrising: and the name of the chamber was Peace.’”

This was written more than a year after the event. He made use of the same allusion just after his wife’s death, when writing to his friend Briggs, but added mournfully that he himself was not in that chamber. Indeed, in the first months of his desolation he was in a most unhappy state, and endured a loneliness from which now and then an uncontrollably passionate cry would be uttered. His father was perfectly deaf and often alarmingly excitable, and his sister Rebecca eccentric to a degree which made her preserve for days an absolute silence. He would rush out into the world, and there showed an artificial gayety which bewildered his friends, only to come back to despise himself. “I know perfectly well,” he wrote to his most intimate friend, “that my nature is naturally joyous and susceptible of all happy impressions; but that is the very reason I am wretched. I am afraid of myself. I dread the world and its temptations, for I do long to keep myself pure enough to satisfy her who was better than all I can say of her. I often troubled her while she was here, but I cannot bear to now that she is in entire felicity.” He was, as he afterward said of himself, in great agony of mind, and he had to force himself into those laborious hours which one instinctively feels contain a wise restorative.

He was, in a measure, undergoing solitary confinement. He sat in his lonely study, or walked up and down, pencilling sentences on the wall as if he were really a prisoner, and finding a strange consolation in repeating the Service for the Dead, which he had learned by heart. “I remember,” he wrote long after,[99] “the ugly fancy I had sometimes that I was another person, and used to hesitate at the door when I came back from my late night walks, lest I should find the real owner of the room sitting in my chair before the fire. A well-nigh hermit life I had led till then.” There were but few who could approach his real self in those days, but there came from Longfellow a gentle word of consolation in his poem “The Two Angels,” written on the coincidence of the birth of his own daughter and the death of Mrs. Lowell.

Meanwhile, his letters, even when disclosing his misery, contained happy references to his sturdy, affectionate child. True, all the losses he had suffered seemed now to be but the messengers of a final disaster. “I have only one lamb left of four,” he wrote to an occasional correspondent, “and think I hear the foot of the inexorable wolf if a leaf rustle;” but as the days went by this sensitiveness subsided. He was fortunate in having for her a most admirable governess, and he found the child’s companionship an unfailing joy. “I said as I sat down to dinner,” he writes in one of his letters; “‘This is a rare day, I have positively had an idea.’ Not knowing the meaning of ‘idea,’ and I being in the habit of telling her (when she is _hypt_, no rare thing) that she has some disease to which I give a very hard name,--she thought I was joking, and said, ‘Nonsense, papa, you haven’t got an idea,’--evidently thinking it some terrible complaint. ‘Why, shouldn’t you like a papa that had ideas?’ She threw her arms round my neck and said: ‘You dear papa! you’re just the kind of papa that I love!’” “Mabel,” he writes again, “has just begun to have ‘Robinson Crusoe’ read to her. Think of that and burst with envy! What have you and I left in life like that? She has already arranged a coronet of feathers, and proposes to play Indian Chief in future. Her great part lately has been the Great Wild Goat of the Parlor,--produced every evening with unbounded applause, especially from the chief actor. With a pair of newspaper horns she chases her father (who knows what it is to be tossed on the horns of the newspapers), qualifying his too excessive terrors with a kiss at last to show that it is really not _real_, but only play.... She has been in the habit of hearing her grandfather always say, ‘If Providence permit,’ of course not knowing what it meant. But one day, having made an uncommonly successful slide, she turned triumphantly to her aunt and cried, ‘There, _that_ time I went like Providence permit.’ The doctor ordered her a blanket bath. She had already tried one and said, ‘If you please, papa, I had rather not.’ ‘But, darling, most people like them very much.’ ‘Well, papa, _I_ don’t; people have different tastes you know. I’ve often noticed that everybody has a different mind.’”

Added to the need of wresting his mind from the despondency of grief was the pecuniary pressure. He had an income at this time from such little property as he possessed of six hundred dollars a year, and that plainly would not suffice. So he shook his portfolio, and even began writing new poems which he sent to his friend Briggs for _Putnam’s_, and he set about working over the letters he had written in Italy, publishing them in _Graham’s Magazine_, under the title “Leaves from my Italian Journal.” It was easier to do such mechanical work as this, and he began to speculate on the possibility of editing Shakespeare, and meditated a life of Dean Swift. He did during 1854 edit Marvell for the series of _British Poets_ which his friend Professor Child was preparing for Little, Brown & Co., expending a good deal of loving care on the text, and editing Henry Rogers’s brief memoir by omissions, illustrations from Marvell’s writings, and a slight addition. He wrote also at this time, for use in the same series, the brief sketch of Keats which afterward he placed with his collected essays. As an introduction to Keats’s poems, it was designedly more biographical than critical, and did little more than set forth in a lively fashion the facts gathered by Milnes. When one considers Lowell’s early appreciation of Keats, it seems a little singular that he should have contented himself with so slight an expression.

Lowell spent the last week of June, 1854, at Newport, R. I., on a visit to the Nortons, and then went for the summer to Beverly, chiefly to be near his sister, Mrs. Charles Lowell. At this time the north shore of Massachusetts Bay had all the charm of rock and beach which it now has, with a pristine simplicity of life which it has lost. To-day the visitor drives through the woods near Beverly by well-kept roads, meeting at every turn other carriages and pleasure parties. Then, the woods were as beautiful, but had unbroken solitude. “At Newport,” Lowell wrote to Miss Norton, “you have no woods, and ours are so grand and deep and unconverted! They have those long pauses of conscious silence that are so fine, as if the spirit that inhabits them were hiding from you and holding its breath,--and then all the leaves stir again, and the pines cheat the rocks with their mock surf, and that invisible bird that haunts such solitudes calls once and is answered, and then silence again.”

A letter to Mr. Norton, dated 14 August, 1854, hints at the restful character of this seaside sojourn. “This is an outlying dependency of the Castle of Indolence, and even more lazy,--in proportion as the circulation is more languid at the extremities. By dint of counting on my fingers, and with the aid of an old newspaper and an almanac, I have approximated, I believe, to the true date of your world out there, and that seems to me quite a sufficient mental achievement for one morning. The chief food of the people here is Lotus. It is cunning to take various shapes,--sometimes fish, sometimes flesh, fowl, eggs, or what not,--but is always Lotus. It does not make us forget, only Memory is no longer recollection, it is passive, not active, and mixes real with feigned things, just as in perfectly still pools the images of clouds filter down through the transparent water and make one perspective with the matter-of-fact weeds at the bottom. I feel as if I had sunk in a diving-bell provisioned and aired for three months, and knew not of storm or calm, or of the great keels, loaded, perhaps, with fate, that sigh hoarsely overhead toward their appointed haven....

“What do I do? Tarry at Jericho chiefly. Also I row and fish, and have learned to understand the life of a shore fisherman thoroughly. Sometimes I get my dinner with my lines,--a rare fate for a poet. Sometimes I watch the _net_ result when the tritons draw their seine. Also I grow brown, and have twice lost and renewed the skin of my hands and, alas, my nose, Also I know what hunger is and, reversing the Wordsworthian sheep, am one feeding like forty.”

He went on one or two short cruises and enjoyed the genuine country life with its salt flavor, but was back at Elmwood in the fall. The year had found some intimate expression in his verse, as well as the more objective poems like “Pictures from Appledore,” suggested in part it may be by one of his summer cruises, though the last section was written four years before. Mr. Stillman, who made his acquaintance at this time, when he was foraging for _The Crayon_, the new literary and art journal which his enthusiasm had projected, speaks warmly of the princely courtesy with which Lowell received him. “Out of the depth of the shadow over his life,” he writes,[100] “in the solitude of his study, with nothing but associations of his wrecked happiness permitted around him, the kindly sympathy with a new aspiration wakened him to a momentary gaiety, his humor flashed out irrepressible, and his large heart turned its warmest side to the new friend, who came only to make new calls on his benevolence; that is, to give him another opportunity to bestow himself on others.” On his part, Lowell welcomed heartily this ingenuous lover of art and letters. They took long walks together over the country Lowell knew so well, to Beaver Brook, the Waverley Oaks, and the Waltham hills. “You made me fifteen years younger,” he wrote, “while you stayed. When a man gets to my age, enthusiasms don’t often knock at the door of his garret. I am all the more charmed with them when they come. A youth full of such pure intensity of hope and faith and purpose, what is he but the breath of a resurrection-trumpet to stiffened old fellows, bidding us up out of our clay and earth if we would not be too late?”

The poems which register the tranquillity of a return to common life, like “The Windharp” and “Auf Wiedersehen,” are tremulous with the emotion which he could bear to express. Indeed, when Lowell came to print the former of these poems he omitted one stanza, possibly as going farther than he cared to with his contemporaneous public. In the letter last quoted, he sent it to Mr. Stillman.

“O tress that so oft on my heart hath lain, Rocked to rest within rest by its thankful beating, Say, which is harder,--to bear the pain Of laughter and light, or to wait in vain, ’Neath the unleaved tree, the impossible meeting? If Death’s lips be icy, Life gives, iwis, Some kisses more clay-cold and darkening than his!”

But as a comprehensive record of this whole experience, the “Ode to Happiness” written at this time may be taken as most conclusive. The very form of the ode, a form to which Lowell was wont to resort in the great passages of his life, aided the expression, for its gravity, its classic reserve, even its labored lines served best to hold that sustained mood which impelled the poet to stand as it were before an altar and make his sacrificial hymn. Tranquillity, he avers, is the elder sister of Happiness. “She is not that,” he says:--

“She is not that for which youth hoped, But she hath blessings all her own, Thoughts pure as lilies newly oped, And faith to sorrow given alone:

* * * * *

‘I am she Whom the gods love, Tranquillity: That other whom you seek forlorn Half earthly was: but I am born Of the immortals, and our race Wears still some sadness on its face: He wins me late, but keeps me long, Who, dowered with every gift of passion, In that fierce flame can forge and fashion Of sin and self the anchor strong; Can thence compel the driving force Of daily life’s mechanic course, Nor less the nobler energies Of needful toil and culture wise; Whose soul is worth the tempter’s lure, Who can renounce, and yet endure, To him I come, not lightly wooed, But won by silent fortitude.’”[101]

From this time forward, however he might be subject to transient moods, as one with so much sensibility would inevitably be, Lowell was yet free from the violent and tempestuous fluctuations of mood which heretofore had marked his course. The first desolation over, that influence which during Mrs. Lowell’s lifetime had always been accompanied by the dark shadow of a threatened loss, now became, paradoxical as the phrase may be, permanent and profound. No human accident could affect it, and as Lowell’s own powers had passed through the experimental stage, there came a steadiness of aim and a maturity of expression which thenceforth were registered in successive sure and firm-footed performances. It may truly be said that Lowell had now found himself, and that from this period dates the full orbit of a course which had heretofore been more or less eccentric, but now could be reasonably calculated. Surprises there were to be, but surprises of excellent achievement, rather than of new ventures.

It is therefore with special interest that one notes the character of the work which occupied Lowell in this eventful season of 1854-1855. Some time before he had been asked by his kinsman who directed the Lowell Institute to give a course of lectures before it, and had been paid in advance; he had made some movement toward preparation, but now he set about it in earnest, and began the delivery 9 January, 1855. There were to be twelve lectures, and he was to discourse on poetry in general and English poetry in particular. Something of the exhilaration with which he entered upon the engagement may be seen in a note written to Mr. Norton three days before the first lecture, and inclosing a ticket to the course.

“This will admit you to one of the _posti distinti_ to witness the celebrated _tableau vivant_ of the sacrifice of Iphigenia (Iphigenia, by particular request, Mr. J. R. Lowell). It is well known that this interesting ceremony was originally performed for the sake of raising the wind, and Mr. L. will communicate a spirit of classic reality to the performance by going through it with the same end in view.

“I write this by the hand of an amanuensis whom I have had in my employment for some time, and who has learned how to catch my ideas without my being obliged to speak--a great gain.

“(A great gain indeed! the greatest bore in the world! He thinks I am writing what he dictates at this moment because he hears the pen scratch. He pretends to be a good-natured fellow--but if you only knew him as I do! He has no more feeling than a horseradish.)

“I should have come last Saturday to Shady Hill--but you may guess how busy I have been. (It is _I_ who have had all the work, and only my board and tobacco for wages: _he_ pretend to hate slavery!)

“I have only just got the flood on, and feel as if I might deliver a course that will not disgrace me.

“(I almost hope they will, for what right has he to keep me shut up here? I get no walks, and he begins to keep me awake at nights with his cursed ideas as he calls them. What _is_ an idea, I should like to know?)

“I have only one _private_ entrance ticket to spare--but I suppose you do not want any more.

Give my best regards and happy New Years and all kinds of things at Shady Hill (and mine, too; how mad he’d be if he knew I put that in).

“Always yours, “The Amanuensis of J. R. Lowell, esquire.”

Two days after giving the first lecture, Lowell wrote to Stillman:--

“I have been so fearfully busy with my lectures! and so nervous about them, too! I had never spoken in public, there was a great rush for tickets (the lectures are gratis), only one in five of the applicants being supplied--and altogether I was taken quite aback. I had no idea there would be such a desire to hear me. I delivered my first lecture to a crowded hall on Tuesday night, and I believe I have succeeded. The lecture was somewhat abstract, but I kept the audience perfectly still for an hour and a quarter. (They are in the habit of going out at the end of the hour.) I delivered it again yesterday afternoon to another crowd,[102] and was equally successful--so I think I am safe now. But I have six yet to write, and am consequently very busy and pressed for time. I felt anxious, of course, for I had a double responsibility. The lectures were founded by a cousin of mine, and the trustee is another cousin--so I wished not only to do credit to myself and my name, but to justify my relative in appointing me to lecture. It is all over now--and, as far as the public are concerned, I have succeeded; but the lectures keep me awake and make me lean.”

Mr. Longfellow was a very interested auditor, and his diary bears witness to the attention which he gave to the course:--

“January 8, 1855. Lowell came in the evening and we talked about his lectures on poetry which begin to-morrow.

“January 9. Mr. Richard Grant White, of New York, author of ‘Shakespeare’s Scholar,’ came to tea. He drove in with us to hear Lowell’s first lecture: an admirable performance, and a crowded audience. After it, we drove out to Norton’s, where, with T. and the lecturer, we had a pleasant supper.

“January 20. Lowell’s lecture, on the old English ballads, one of the best of the course.”

Charles Sumner appears also to have been one of the auditors. At any rate, he wrote to Longfellow from Washington, 6 February, 1855: “Lowell’s lecture on Milton lifted me for a whole day. It was the utterance of genius in honor of genius.”

Mr. Fields asked Lowell for the lectures for publication, but he put him off “till they were better,” and never published them. They were reported at the time by Lowell’s old friend, Robert Carter, in the _Boston Daily Advertiser_, and some time after Lowell’s death these reports were gathered into a volume and printed privately for the Rowfant Club of Cleveland, Ohio.

The form in which the lectures were reported, sometimes direct, sometimes indirect, undoubtedly robs them of some of the charm which the hearers acknowledged, but enough remains to give one a tolerably clear impression of Lowell’s mode of treatment. The first lecture was occupied with definitions, and in a familiar way Lowell set about distinguishing poetry from prose, and by a variety of illustrations gave some notion of the great operations of the imagination. Having cleared the way, he took up the consideration of English poetry in the historical order, dealing with the forerunners, Piers Ploughman’s Vision, the Metrical Romances, and the Ballads; and then devoting one lecture each to Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Butler, and Pope. The discussion of Pope led him to interrupt himself, and in the next lecture take up the subject of Poetic Diction, for after expressing his admiration of the consummate art of Pope’s artificiality, he wished to inquire whether there might not be a real, vital distinction between the language of prose raised to a high degree of metrical efficiency and the language of poetry. His readers will recall the amusing passage in an article on “Swinburne’s Tragedies,” in which, when wishing to illustrate the Greek battledoor and shuttlecock style of dialogue, he finds it easier to make a burlesque imitation than to hunt up some passage in Sophocles. In like manner he invents a piece of descriptive verse--a Lapland sketch--as an instance of the artificial manner brought in by Pope, but lacking his wonderful manipulation of language. It is a felicitous example of Lowell’s imitative faculty, which led him, when he began to write, to throw off lines in Burns’s manner, but which never betrayed him when he was in earnest in poetry. The imitation was in itself a criticism. He liked to emphasize the essential element of poetry by instancing the empty form. Mr. Dante Rossetti once overpowered me by producing a thin volume of verse by T. H. Chivers, M. D., and reading aloud from it and demanding information about the author. When I applied to Lowell afterward, he said that Dr. Chivers had been wont to send him his books, and he read them aloud to his classes as illustrations of the shell of Shelley. A lecture followed on Wordsworth, and then the twelfth was devoted to the Function of the Poet, which in its brief report intimates that Lowell was thinking less of himself than of the country with its need of a seer.

The delivery of the lectures had one immediate and important result. Mr. Longfellow had been Smith Professor of the French and Spanish Languages and Literatures and Professor of Belles Lettres in Harvard College since 1836, having come to the work when Lowell was midway through his course, but he made up his mind in 1854 that he must give up the post, not from ill-health, but because he wished to try the effect of change on his mind, and of freedom from routine. “Household occupations,” he wrote to Freiligrath, “children, relatives, friends, strangers, and college lectures, so completely fill up my days that I have no time for poetry, and, consequently, the last two years have been very unproductive with me.” Freiligrath had heard rumors of Longfellow’s resignation, and had put in an application to be his successor. Longfellow could not give him any encouragement, since, though foreigners were employed to teach the several languages, the professor himself must be an American. There were, he said, six candidates for the position, all friends of his. Lowell was not one of these, but his lectures had marked him as the fit successor, and so Longfellow wrote with satisfaction in his diary, 31 January, 1855: “Lowell is to be my successor! Dr. Walker talked with me about it this morning, and I have been to see Lowell about the preliminaries, and the matter is as good as settled. I am sorry for some of my friends who want the place. But for lectures, I think Lowell the best of the candidates. He has won his spurs and will give the college just what it needs.” Lowell himself told the news to his friend Briggs in the following letter, dated 9 February, 1855:--

“I have been silent ever so long because I could not help it. I have been lecturing four times a week (and am now), and, with my usual discretion, put off writing my lectures till the last moment, so that for five weeks I have been with the bayonet pricking me on close behind, and have hardly dared to _think_ even of anything else. But I have not forgotten you, my dear old friend, nor my love of you, and I have felt a kind of pang now and then because I said in my last note that I would soon write to you--as, indeed, I am always intending to do.

“I write now because I have something pleasant to tell, and did not wish you to hear it first from any one but me--though you always seem to live at one end of an ear of Dionysius that brings you all the news of itself. The news is this: The Corporation of the college have asked me to take Longfellow’s place, and my nomination will go to the Overseers next Thursday.

“The thing has come about in the pleasantest way, and the place has sought me, not I, it. There were seven applicants for the place, but I was not one of them. On the contrary, I had refused to be a candidate when it was proposed to me.

“I have accepted the offer, and am to go abroad for a year to prepare myself. _That_ is the hardest part, but I did not feel competent without it.

“And the duties are pleasant. I am not to have anything to do with teaching, as Longfellow had, but only to deliver two courses of lectures in the year--on pretty much any subject I choose, and my salary is to be $1200.00.

“Everybody seems pleased. My first thought was a sad one, for the heart that would have beat warmest is still. Then I thought of my father, and then of you. I think it will be all the better for Mabel that I should have enough to live on, without being forced to write, and I shall have time enough after the first year to do pretty much what I like....

“My lectures have succeeded quite beyond my expectation. One or two have been pretty good, but I have felt sad in writing them, and somehow feel as if I had not got _myself_ into them very much. However, folks are pleased.”

Very likely the fame of his lectures brought him invitations to go elsewhere; at any rate, when his course in Boston was finished, he made a tour in the West, and became so desperately out of conceit with the business before a week had passed that he tried to escape the remaining lectures, but he was not released and had at least the satisfaction of carrying home six hundred dollars as the proceeds. “I hate this business of lecturing,” he wrote from Madison, Wisconsin, to Miss Norton. “To be received at a bad inn by a solemn committee, in a room with a stove that smokes but not exhilarates, to have three cold fish-tails laid in your hand to shake, to be carried to a cold lecture-room, to read a cold lecture to a cold audience, to be carried back to your smoke-side, paid, and the three fish-tails again--well, it is not delightful exactly.”

Lowell does not seem to have written anything in the short time that elapsed after the close of his lecture tour before he sailed for Europe, though he showed a lively interest in Mr. Stillman’s paper _The Crayon_, and sent it his poem “Invita Minerva,” in which Longfellow discovered a reminder of Emerson’s “Forerunners.” The fact that Lowell was to be the elder poet’s successor naturally drew them together much at this time. “A beautiful morning,” wrote Longfellow on the 17th of May. “Went and sat an hour with Lowell in his upper chamber among the treetops. He sails for Havre the first of June; “and on the 29th he records: “Lowell’s friends gave him a farewell dinner at the Revere, whereat I had the honor of presiding. A joyous banquet: one of the pleasantest I ever attended,--a meeting of friends to take leave of a friend whom we all love.” Lowell himself refers briefly to the occasion in a note written the next day: “Everything went off finely after you left. Holmes sang another song and repeated some very charming verses,[103] and Rölker to his own intense delight got through two stanzas of ‘a helf to ve nortward boun’,’ William White having incautiously supplied him with the initial line. He gave it with so much sentiment that we were all entirely overcome and laughed so immoderately that the brave Rölker at length sat down. We sang ‘Auld lang syne’ in true college style and so parted. On the whole I renewed my youth last night--and my recollections of ‘1790’ this morning, for I only had four hours’ sleep. However, aboard ship I shall have leisure enough to emulate Chaucer’s Morpheus

‘That slept and did no other work.’”

That day Longfellow drove into town with Lowell and saw him off for New York, whence he was to sail.

But the weeks before Lowell’s departure brought other things to mind than leaving home and affectionate friends. He had been asked to pronounce a poem before the senior class of Hamilton College at the coming commencement. The invitation reached him on the memorable day when the runaway slave Burns was captured in the streets of Boston, and he wrote in reply to the invitation: “In six months I shall be in Switzerland; an ocean between me and a slave hunt, thank God!”

* * * * *

Lowell again took passage in a sailing vessel, the St. Nicholas, Bragdon, master, which left New York 4 June, 1855, bound for Havre. Among his companions was Dr. Elliott, under whose care he had been a dozen years before, when his eyes were in a bad way. It was a four weeks’ voyage, and Lowell amused himself with Lever’s novels from beginning to end, as he lay stretched in a hammock on the quarter-deck. Reaching France, he spent three weeks in Paris among the pictures chiefly, and made an excursion to Chartres, apparently his first visit, but one which left so deep an impression on his mind that fourteen years later, when he wrote “The Cathedral,” which he wished at first to call “A Day at Chartres,” the same images which sprang to his mind when he wrote of his visit directly after in a letter to Mr. Norton, recurred and found poetic expression. “It is the home now,” he wrote, “of innumerable swallows and sparrows, who build upon the shoulders of those old great ones (the stone angels and saints)--as we little folks do too, I am afraid. Even here I found the Norman--for when I mounted to the spire, I saw numbers of hawks who dwell in the higher parts, as in their castles, and prey on the poor Saxons below.” So in the poem he takes a parting look

“At those old weather-pitted images Of by-gone struggle, now so sternly calm. About their shoulders sparrows had built nests, And fluttered, chirping, from gray perch to perch, Now on a mitre poising, now a crown, Irreverently happy. While I thought How confident they were, what careless hearts Flew on those lightsome wings and shared the sun, A larger shadow crossed; and looking up I saw where, nesting in the hoary towers, The sparrow-hawk slid forth on noiseless air, With sidelong head that watched the joy below, Grim Norman baron o’er this clan of Kelts.”

From Paris Lowell ran over to London, chiefly to see the Storys, who were there, and renewed his acquaintance with Thackeray and the Brownings, and fell in with Leigh Hunt. But his main business was to make himself proficient in German, and so having taken his academic vacation in advance, he journeyed through the Low Countries, and settled himself in Dresden for the autumn and winter. The quiet Saxon city was a favorite resort for Americans then even more than now, and for the first few weeks his sister, Mrs. Putnam, was there with her family. It was with a dull, heavy feeling that he gave himself to his tasks, seeing very little of society. “I confess frankly,” he wrote, shortly after his establishment there, “that I am good for nothing, and have been for some time, and that there are times almost every day when I wish to die, be out of the world once for all.... I fear I shall come back with my eremitical tendencies more developed than ever.” But dogged persistence in work was something better than an anodyne, and work hard he did. “A man of my age,” he wrote to his father, “has to study very hard in acquiring a new language, and I cannot be satisfied without knowing thoroughly all I undertake to know. I am very well and constantly busy.”

Mr. Norton with his sisters crossed the Atlantic in the autumn, and Lowell wrote to him at Paris: “Did I tell you that I had a room on the ground floor, with a glass door giving upon a large garden? that I have a flock of sparrows that come to breakfast with me every morning, and eat loaf sugar to the detriment of my coffee? That I go to hear lectures on the Natural Sciences and have even assisted at the anatomical class,--beginning with horror and ending with interest? That we have the best theatre here I ever saw? And by the way, if Bouffé acts the _Abbé Galant_ while you are in Paris, go and see it by all means. It is a truly artistic piece of representation. If it be not too cold, go down to Chartres. It is simply the best thing in France, and must have come out of some fine old Norman brain,--I am sure no Frenchman could ever have conceived it. After all, there are no such poets as the elements. Leave a thing to them, and they redress all imperfections and expunge all prose.”

He had planned spending a portion of his time in Spain, and took lessons in Spanish in Dresden, but finally abandoned the notion. His host and hostess, with whom he talked, assured him that he made astonishing progress in German. “What a language it is to be sure!” he wrote; “with nominatives sending out as many roots as that witch-grass which is the pest of all child-gardens, and sentences in which one sets sail like an admiral with sealed orders, not knowing, where the devil he is going to till he is in mid-ocean!” To his friend Stillman he wrote, as the winter wore away: “To say all in one word, I have been passing a very wretched winter. I have been out of health and out of spirits, gnawed a great part of the time by an insatiable homesickness, and deprived of my usual means of ridding myself of bad thoughts by putting them into verse, for I have always felt that I was here for the specific end of learning German, and not of pleasing myself.” Fifteen years later, looking back, he wrote: “I once spent a winter in Dresden, a southern climate compared with England, and really almost lost my respect for the sun when I saw him groping among the chimney-pots opposite my windows as he described his impoverished arc in the sky.”[104]

As spring drew on he was possessed with a longing for Italy, especially for the near friends who were there, his sister Mary who had left Dresden for Rome, the Storys, the Nortons, and others. He turned his face thitherward the first of March, meaning to be absent for two or three weeks only, but he was not back in Dresden till the beginning of June. “My journey in Italy,” he wrote to his father on his return, “was of much benefit to me. I spent a fortnight with Mary in Rome, went with her to Naples and spent another fortnight with her there. At Naples we parted. I went to Sicily and made the tour of the island, hoping to find Mary still in Naples when I returned. But Sicily required much more time than I had expected, and when I came back I found Mary gone back to Rome. I could not follow her thither, but took the steamer to Genoa, and so over the Alps back to Germany. I found Sicily very interesting in scenery and associations, and very saddening in its political aspect. I believe it is the worst governed country in Europe. With every advantage of climate and soil, it is miserably poor,--there are no roads, and vexatious restrictions repress trade in every direction. The people struck me as looking more depressed than any I have seen.”

His itinerary, to be a little more detailed, was to Venice, then by rail to Verona, and to Mantua. There he hired a vettura to take him to Parma, and in the same mode he went to Bologna, sleeping at Modena on the way. From Bologna he went to Ravenna and thence to Florence. He went to Siena by the slow, roundabout rail, and then was driven to Orvieto by Chiusi. At Orvieto he was greeted by Mr. Norton, Mr. Page, and Mr. John W. Field, who had come out to meet him and to escort him to Rome. On his return from Genoa he made a stop at Nuremberg. He lingered in Dresden a few weeks, made another brief stay in Paris, and was once more in Cambridge, in August, 1856.

* * * * *

On his return from Europe Lowell did not resume life at Elmwood, but took up his quarters with his brother-in-law, Dr. Estes Howe, on

Kirkland Street, in Cambridge. Longfellow was in his summer home at Nahant, and Lowell ran down to see him, looking, as the elder poet notes in his diary, “as if he had not been gone a week.” He took renewed delight in his country walks, and tingled afresh at contact with nature. “How I do love the earth!” he writes to Mr. Norton, who was still in Europe. “I feel it thrill under my feet. I feel somehow as if it were conscious of my love, as if something passed into my dancing blood from it, and I get rid of that duty-feeling,--‘What right have I to be?’--and not a goldenrod of them all soaks in the sunshine or feels the blue currents of the air eddy about him more thoughtlessly than I.”

The college year opened a few weeks after his return, and he began his duties by repeating the course of lectures which he had delivered before the Lowell Institute the winter of 1855, before taking up his more specific work in German literature and Dante.

It was in the teaching of Dante that Lowell made the strongest impression on the students who gathered about him, if we may judge by the reminiscences which more than one has printed; and the methods he adopted in his teaching never greatly varied, for he came to the work of teaching without any specific training, when he had been nearly twenty years out of college, and when the kind of interest in literature, which in his college days had disputed for supremacy with the docile habit of the schoolboy, had now become confirmed by study, by travel, and by his own productions.

In an address which he gave in 1889 before the Modern Language Association of America, he recorded his judgment on the vexed question of the distribution of emphasis upon the philological and the æsthetic pursuit of the study of literature. It was twelve years since he had discontinued the practice of teaching, and it is reasonable to infer that he was distilling in a few sentences the experience which his method of study and his method of teaching recalled to him.

“In reading such books,” he says, “as chiefly deserve to be read in any foreign language, it is wise to translate consciously and in words as we read. There is no such help to a fuller mastery of our vernacular. It compels us to such a choosing and testing, to so nice a discrimination of sound, propriety, position, and shade of meaning, that we now first learn the secret of the words we have been using or misusing all our lives, and are gradually made aware that to set forth even the plainest matter as it should be set forth is not only a very difficult thing, calling for thought and practice, but an affair of conscience as well. Translating teaches us as nothing else can, not only that there is a best way, but that it is the only way.”

Again, in the same address, thinking no doubt of the expansion of the curriculum at Harvard, even since he laid aside the teacher’s gown: “We have every reason to congratulate ourselves on the progress the modern languages have made as well in academic as in popular consideration. They are now taught (as they could not formerly be taught) in a way that demands toil and thought of the student, as Greek and Latin, and they only, used to be taught, and they also open the way to higher intellectual joys, to pastures new, and not the worse for being so, as Greek and Latin, and they only, used to do.... If I did not rejoice in the wonderful advance made in the comparative philology of the modern languages, I should not have the face to be standing here. But neither should I if I shrank from saying what I believed to be the truth, whether here or elsewhere. I think that the purely linguistic side in the teaching of them seems in the way to get more than its fitting share. I insist only that in our college courses this should be a separate study, and that, good as it is in itself, it should, in the scheme of general instruction, be restrained to its own function as the guide to something better, and that something better is Literature. The blossoms of language have certainly as much value as its roots, for if the roots secrete food and thereby transmit life to the plant, yet the joyous consummation of that life is in the blossoms, which alone bear the seeds that distribute and renew it in other growths. Exercise is good for the muscles of mind and to keep it well in hand for work, but the true end of Culture is to give it play, a thing quite as needful. What I would urge, therefore, is that no invidious distinction should be made between the Old Learning and the New, but that students, due regard being had to their temperaments and faculties, should be encouraged to take the course in modern languages as being quite as good in point of mental discipline as any other, if pursued with the same thoroughness and to the same end. And that end is Literature, for there language first attains to a full consciousness of its powers and to the delighted exercise of them. Literature has escaped that doom of Shinar which made our Association possible, and still everywhere speaks in the universal tongue of civilized man.”

Lowell’s office did not require of him elementary instruction in modern languages, nor indeed was it expected that he should do drill work in linguistics. There were competent instructors then in the several languages, some of whom afterward came to be eminent professors, as the department was divided. He was not indifferent in the choice of assistants, but once they were at work he left them to their own devices, and exercised the slightest sort of supervision of them. There was no very nice division of labor, except that, as I have said, these assistants took the more exact grammatical details, yet they all included more or less of literature in their work with students. It can hardly be said that Lowell did more than flavor his instruction of literature with a pinch of grammar. Words in their origin and changing meanings he did comment on, but inflections, paradigms, and all the apparatus of grammar formed no part of his interest in his work.

In his essay on “Shakespeare Once More” he has said: “There would be no dispute about the advantages of that Greek culture which Schiller advocated with such generous eloquence, if the great authors of antiquity had not been degraded from teachers of thinking to drillers in grammar, and made the ruthless pedagogues of root and inflection, instead of companions for whose society the mind must put on her highest mood.... There is much that is deciduous in books, but all that gives them a title to rank as literature, in the highest sense, is perennial. Their vitality is the vitality not of one or another blood or tongue, but of human nature; their truth is not topical and transitory, but of universal acceptation; and thus all great authors seem the coevals not only of each other, but of whoever reads them, growing wiser with him as he grows wise, and unlocking to him one secret after another as his own life and experience give him the key, but on no other condition.”

Now Lowell’s own interest in literature had been direct. It would be idle to say that literature was interesting or valuable to him only so far as it was a criticism of life. It would be equally idle to say that his pleasure in it was derived only from his perception of it as great art. He carried to it the same kind of interest which he carried into his own production of literature. He was at once full of that human sense which made him delight in a fine expression of humanity, and he had the craftsman’s pleasure in excellent work, so that on the one hand, though in his youth he raged against Pope, in his more mature judgment he rejoiced in the patience in careful finish which characterized him: and, on the other hand, he gave himself with the fullest abandonment to an admiration of Dante as “the highest spiritual nature that has expressed itself in rhythmical form.” He thought him “the first great poet who ever made a poem wholly out of himself.” In one of his unpublished lectures Lowell uses Dante as a text for a discourse on the pursuit of literature, and mingles with it a slight element of autobiography, which makes it specially fitting to repeat the passage here:--

“One is sometimes asked by young men to recommend to them a course of reading. My advice would always be to confine yourself to the supreme books in whatever literature; still better, to choose some one great author and grow thoroughly familiar with him. For as all roads lead to Rome, so they all likewise lead thence; and you will find that in order to understand perfectly and weigh exactly any really vital piece of literature, you will be gradually and pleasantly persuaded to studies and explorations of which you little dreamed when you began, and will find yourselves scholars before you are aware. If I may be allowed a personal illustration, it was my own profound admiration for the ‘Divina Commedia’ of Dante that lured me into what little learning I possess. For remember that there is nothing less fruitful than scholarship for the sake of mere scholarship, nor anything more wearisome in the attainment. But the moment you have an object and a centre, attention is quickened, the mother of memory; and whatever you acquire groups and arranges itself in an order which is lucid because it is everywhere in intelligent relation to an object of constant and growing interest. Thus, as respects Dante, I asked myself, What are his points of likeness or unlikeness with the authors of classical antiquity? in how far is either of these an advantage or defect? What and how much modern literature had preceded him? How much was he indebted to it? How far had the Italian language been subdued and suppled to the uses of poetry or prose before his time? How much did he color the style or thought of the authors who followed him? Is it a fault or a merit that he is so thoroughly impregnated with the opinions, passions, and even prejudices not only of his age but his country? Was he right or wrong in being a Ghibelline? To what extent is a certain freedom of opinion which he shows sometimes on points of religious doctrine to be attributed to the humanizing influences of the Crusades in enlarging the horizon of the Western mind by bringing it in contact with other races, religions, and social arrangements? These and a hundred other such questions were constant stimulants to thought and inquiry, stimulants such as no merely objectless and, so to speak, impersonal study could have supplied.”

When, therefore, Lowell was brought face to face with a company of young men, in the relation of teacher, he appears not to have cast about to see how he could adjust his powers to some prevailing method of teaching, but to have used the material of literature as an instrument of association, and naturally, untrammelled by pedagogic theory, to have tried to communicate to the minds about him the kind of interest which the literature he was handling inspired in him. So far was he from a professional teacher that it is doubtful if he individualized his students much, or made any attempt to find entrance into this or that mind by first trying to detect what opening the mind offered. Undoubtedly, one or another with special aptitude or appreciation may have stimulated him and quickened his faculty of instruction, but for the most part these young men gave him the occasion for utterance, and the text before him gave the theme of discourse. Mr. Barrett Wendell, in his illuminating paper on Lowell as a teacher, confesses with a generous chagrin, that though he had been an enthusiastic pupil and had used Lowell’s hospitality fully, the acquaintance was very one-sided. He came to know Lowell well, but Lowell when he met him again after no great interval of time, had quite forgotten his face, and almost forgotten his name.[105]

Though he could scarcely be said to have resorted to any set or customary methods of a professional sort, he was not without recourse to simple aids in his teaching. “Thirty odd years ago,” he wrote in 1889,[106] “I brought home with me from Nuremberg photographs of Peter Fischer’s statuettes of the twelve apostles. These I used to show to my pupils and ask for a guess at their size. The invariable answer was ‘larger than life.’ They were really about eighteen inches high, and this grandiose effect was wrought by simplicity of treatment, dignity of pose, a large unfretted sweep of drapery. This object lesson I found more telling than much argument and exhortation.” He made also some attempt, when the method was much more of a novelty than it is to-day, to bring in the aid of illustration from art. He interested himself to rid his class-room in University Hall of some dismal charts that hung on the walls, and brought down from Elmwood a number of engravings and photographs which he had collected in his travels abroad, especially illustrations of Florence and Rome; one year he presented each of his class who had persevered with a copy of the recently discovered portrait of Dante by Giotto; and again he gave to each of his small class in Dante a copy of Mr. Norton’s privately printed volume on the “New Life.”

The actual exercise in the class-room was simple enough and unconventional. The classes were not large, and the relation of the teacher to his students was that of an older friend who knew in a large way the author they were studying, and drew upon his own knowledge and familiarity with the text for comment and suggestion, rather than troubled himself much to find out how much his pupils knew. A student would trudge blunderingly along some passage, and Lowell would break in, taking up the translation himself very likely, and quickly find some suggestion for criticism, for elaboration or incidental and remote comment. Toward the close of the hour, question and answer, or free discussion yielded to the stream of personal reminiscence or abundant reflection upon which Lowell would by this time be launched. Especially would he recall scenes in Florence, sketch in words the effects of the Arno, Giotto’s Tower, the church in which Dante was baptized, where he himself had seen children held at the same font; and so Lowell gave out of his treasures, using that form of literature which was perhaps the most perfectly fitted to his mind, free, unconstrained talk. Suddenly, glancing at his watch before him,--a time-piece which was as idly whimsical as its owner,--he would stop, bow and walk quickly out of the room, the men rising respectfully as he left.

And the listeners? They went away, a few carelessly amused at the loose scholastic exercise and complacent over the evasion of work, but some stirred, quickened in their thought, and full of admiration for this brilliant interpreter of life as seen through the verse of Dante. One charm was in the unexpectedness of it all. There was no predicting what direction his talk would take. “Now and again,” says Mr. Wendell, “some word or some passage would suggest to him a line of thought--sometimes very earnest, sometimes paradoxically comical--that it never would have suggested to any one else; and he would lean back in his chair, and talk away across country till he felt like stopping; or he would thrust his hands into the pockets of his rather shabby sack-coat, and pace the end of the room with his heavy laced boots, and look at nothing in particular, and discourse of things in general.”

The formalities of academic work were of little concern to Lowell. To be sure, after the first year of neglect he yielded to Dr. Walker’s persuasion, and attended Faculty meetings with commendable regularity, and took his share in the little details of discipline which were gravely discussed. It must have brought a smile to his mind, if not to his face, when he found himself called upon to join in a public admonition of ----, junior, “for wearing an illegal coat after repeated warnings.” And examinations of his classes were wearisome functions. “Perhaps,” says Mr. Wendell, “from unwillingness to degrade the text of Dante to such use, Mr. Lowell set us, when we had read the Inferno and part of the Purgatorio, a paper consisting of nothing but a long passage from Massimo d’Azeglio, which we had three hours to translate. This task we performed as best we might. Weeks passed, and no news came of our marks. At last one of the class, who was not quite at ease concerning his academic standing, ventured at the close of a recitation to ask if Mr. Lowell had assigned him a mark. Mr. Lowell looked at the youth very gravely, and inquired what he really thought his work deserved. The student rather diffidently said that he hoped it was worth sixty per cent. ‘You may take it,’ said Mr. Lowell, ‘I don’t want the bother of reading your book.’”

Nevertheless, indifferent as he may have been to the customary details of academic work, and not a little impatient of dry formalities, Lowell gave to the college liberally of the best he had to give. Not merely did he go through with his appointed tasks; he was always ready to take additional labor on himself and to perform works of supererogation. He had men come to read with him in his house, and one season at least offered to conduct a group of divinity students through the Inferno. It must be remembered, moreover, that Lowell’s instruction was of two sorts, one in a special author or group, to small select classes, the other general lectures upon literature to large classes. Something of the character of his free handling of subjects may be seen in the extracts from these lectures preserved in _The Harvard Crimson_ in 1894; and the attitude which he took toward this side of his work is recorded in the introductory passage to a lecture on the Study of Literature.

“I confess,” he says, “it is with more and more diffidence that I rise every year to have my little talk with you about books and the men that have written them. If I remember my terrestrial globe rightly, one gets into his temperate zone after passing the parallel of forty, and arrives at that, shall I call it, Sheltered Haven of Middle Age, when, in proportion as one is more careful of the conclusions he arrives at, he is less zealous in his desire that all mankind should agree with him. Moreover, the longer one studies, the more thoroughly does one persuade himself that till he knows everything, he knows nothing--that after twenty years of criticism, one is still a mere weigher and gauger: skilled only to judge what he may chance to have been in the habit of inspecting at his own little provincial custom-house. And as one gets older he is apt to allow more for personal idiosyncrasy, and to have less certainty that the truth he had reached is not a one-sided one, and that there are not fifty others equally important, and (perhaps) equally unsatisfactory. Every bait is not for every fish. We begin by admitting the old doctor’s apothegm that Art is long; we gradually become persuaded that it is like the Irishman’s rope, the other end of which was cut off. So different is Art, whose concern is with the ideal and potential, from Science, which is limited by the actual and positive. Life is so short that it may be fairly doubted whether any man has a right to talk an hour, and I have learned at least so much,--that I hope less to teach than to suggest.”

The tone of distrustfulness which is an undercurrent in this passage is familiar enough to the conscientious teacher, and Lowell, measuring the vastness of literature and his own inadequacy to press it home to his students, was fearful that the outcome was slight in proportion to the cost to himself. Yet he did not therefore spare himself. During the years of his teaching, he was more than ever the scholar, taking generous draughts of the literature he was to teach, for long stretches of time even engaged with his books twelve hours out of the twenty-four. And so quickening was his imagination that he went to his classes not to decant the wine of learning from bottles just filled, but to give them of his own rare essence distilled from the hours of study. Hence he was a strong and vivifying influence to the best men under him, and to all he communicated something of that rich culture which is not easily measured by lessons learned and recited. No one could listen to his teaching, as has been well said, without becoming conscious that he was listening to a man not less wise than accomplished and gifted.

In this matter of teaching, as in all the other undertakings of his life, Lowell kept no strict debit and credit account. He gave his measure not according to the stipulated return, but freely, generously. Especially did he overflow in friendliness. As he turned the lecture and recitation hour into a _causerie_, and was careless in his exactions, so he not only suffered but encouraged encroachment on his unprofessional hours. At first in Kirkland Street, afterward at Elmwood, he made his students welcome, and the only difference it may be between an hour in University Hall and an hour by the wood fire at Elmwood, was in the wider range of talk. It was here that his students came nearest to him, for it was the men he quickened in the class-room who were avid of more just such talk, and sought him in the greater intimacy of his study. Yet, nearer as they came to him as he sat with his pipe in slippered ease, and much as they drew from him, it is doubtful if there was much reciprocity in the intercourse. As a comparative stranger might draw from Lowell one of his most delightful letters, if some question he sent him happened to catch him at a favorable moment, when he needed only an occasion for the letter that was on tap, so these students, one or more, offered an easy audience, and Lowell, rarely out of the mood for talk, would spin his gossamer or weave his strong fabric for them as well as for any one else, without paying very close heed to them personally. In fine, the twenty years of college work made little inroad on Lowell himself. He was furnished with occupation, he was made comparatively easy in his simple need of a livelihood, and for the rest his class-room work offered a natural outlet for his abundant intellectual activity. He grumbled sometimes over its demands on his time, but it is doubtful if the reading world would have had very much more from him had he never been subject to this demand. It is even quite possible that the work kept him very much more alive than he might otherwise have been, saving him from a species of intellectual luxury of an unproductive sort; it is certain that the hours added thus to his other productive time were a stimulus and inspiration to many men, and that as a practical matter the work done for his classes in the way of direct preparation was the foundation of a good deal of his published criticism.

And yet it is not so certain that his mood for poetry was helped by his academic life. He wrote to Mr. Stillman 14 May, 1857: “While my lectures are on my mind I am not myself, and I seem to see all the poetry drying out of me. I droop on my rocks and hear the surge of the living waters, but they will not reach me till some extraordinary springtide, and maybe not then.” It is true, this expression must not be pressed too hardly--it may have been only the mood of the moment; but it is evident that the time of freedom in poetic composition had largely passed for him; it returned once and again, as for instance in “Agassiz” and the “Commemoration Ode,” it was compelled for him by the occasion which drew out the second series of the “Biglow Papers,” but for the most part his poetry after this date bears rather more the touch of deliberation and less the abandon of his early enthusiasm. How far this is to be referred to the circumstance of the constraint of academic work, and how far to the change which came over his life in the passage from ebullient youth to chastened manhood one would not care to say. But the period of his next twenty years was the period of prose in his production.

The regular, punctual life which the daily college exercise demands came as a steadying influence after the vagrancy and informality of the previous years, and now there was added the gracious and helpful presence of a self-contained, sympathetic, congenial woman. Mrs. Lowell, before her death, had wished her daughter to be under the oversight of an intimate friend, Miss Elizabeth Dunlap, but before the arrangements could be completed, Miss Dunlap died, and her sister Frances took the place and had had charge of Mabel Lowell ever since her father had left America for his year of study in Germany. He had thought himself most fortunate in making the arrangement, and the friendly intercourse which naturally sprang from this relation ripened steadily into affection. In September, 1857, they were married, and now he was enabled to resume the old life at Elmwood.

One or two passages from letters written at this time by Lowell to Mr. Norton give a glimpse of this new relation: “I have told you once or twice that I should not be married again if I could help it. The time has come when I cannot. A great many things (which I cannot write about) have conspired to bring me to this resolution, and I rejoice in it, for I feel already stronger and better, with an equability of mind that I have not felt for years.”[107] “I was glad as I could be to get your heartily sympathizing letter. I had taken a step of great import to my life and character, and though I am careless of Mrs. Grundy’s sentiments on the occasion, I do care intensely for the opinion of the few friends whom I value. With its personal results to myself I am more than satisfied, and I was convinced of the wisdom of what I was about to do before I did it. I already begin to feel like my old self again in health and spirits, and feel secure now, if I die, of leaving Mabel to wise and loving government. So intimate an acquaintance as mine has been with Miss Dunlap for nearly four years has made me know and love her, and she certainly must know me well enough to be safe in committing her happiness to my hands.... I went down last week to Portland to make the acquaintance of her family, and like them, especially her mother, who is a person of great character. They live in a little bit of a house in a little bit of a street, behind the great house (the biggest in town) in which they were brought up, and not one of them seemed conscious that they were not welcoming me to a palace. There were no apologies for want of room, no Dogberry hints at losses, nor anything of that kind, but all was simple, ladylike, and hearty. A family of girls who expected to be rich, and have had to support themselves and (I suspect) their mother in part, are not likely to have any nonsense in them. I find Miss Dunlap’s education very complete in having had the two great teachers, Wealth and Poverty--one has taught not to value money, the other to be independent of it.”[108] “I am more and more in love with Fanny, whose nature is so delightfully cheerful that it is impossible for me to get into the dumps even if I wished.”[109]

Mr. Stillman, a keen observer, has given a good estimate of Mrs. Lowell’s nature in these words: “She was one of the rarest and most sympathetic creatures I have ever known. She was the governess of Lowell’s daughter, when I first went to stay at Elmwood, and I then felt the charm of her character. She was a sincere Swedenborgian, with the serene faith and spiritual outlook I have generally found to be characteristic of that sect; with a warmth of spiritual sympathy of which I have known few so remarkable instances; a fine and subtle faculty of appreciation, serious and tender, which was to Lowell like an enfolding of the Divine Spirit. The only particular in which the sympathy failed was in the feeling that she had in regard to his humorous poems. She disliked the vein. It was not that she lacked humor or the appreciation of his, but she thought that kind of literature unworthy of him. This she said to me more than once. But, aside from this, she fitted him like the air around him. He had felt the charm of her character before he went to Europe, and had begun to bend to it; but as he said to me after his marriage, he would make no sign till he had tested by a prolonged absence the solidity of the feeling he had felt growing up. He waited, therefore, till his visit to Germany had satisfied him that it was sympathy, and not propinquity, that lay at the root of his inclination for her, before declaring himself. No married life could be more fortunate in all respects except one--they had no children. But for all that his life required she was to him healing from sorrow and a defence against all trouble, a very spring of life and hope.”[110]

Mr. Howells also, who first knew her a decade later, has sketched her in these lines: “She was a woman perfectly of the New England type and tradition: almost repellently shy at first, and almost glacially cold with new acquaintance, but afterward very sweet and cordial. She was of a dark beauty, with a regular face of the Spanish outline; Lowell was of an ideal manner toward her, and of an admiration which delicately travestied itself and which she knew how to receive with smiling irony.”[111] Mrs. Herrick, in an unpublished reminiscence, speaks of her in similar terms: “She was a noble and beautiful woman eminently practical in all the affairs of life. Commanding in presence, gracious in her hospitality, highly cultured, and full of a keen appreciation of every word of Mr. Lowell, and always charming and womanly.”

Stillman’s tender sketch of Mrs. Lowell brings to mind that it was in the summer of his marriage that Lowell joined this friend in a reconnaissance of the Adirondacks which was followed by the formation of the Adirondack Club, and the successive sojourns in the wilderness which Emerson has enshrined in his poem “The Adirondacs,” and Stillman himself has recorded delightfully in his Autobiography as well as in magazine articles.[112]

“Ten men, ten guides, our company all told,”

says Emerson, but his chronicle was of the next year when the club was fully organized, and Stillman, Emerson, Lowell, Jeffries Wyman, E. R. Hoar, Dr. Howe, Binney, Woodman, Agassiz, and John Holmes, went into the wilderness. In 1857, the tentative exploring party; led by Stillman, consisted of John Holmes, Dr. Estes Howe, Lowell, and his two nephews, Charles and James Lowell, forever immortalized in the passionate verse of the second “Biglow Papers.” Lowell, who had known the near charms of nature in the Waverley Oaks and Beaver Brook, and had tasted the wild wood in his Maine excursion, entered with frolic delight into this forest picnic. The conditions were such as to bring out the best that was in him, for he had the freedom of the woods and the satisfaction of congenial society. “He was the soul,” says Stillman, “of the merriment of the company, fullest of witticisms, keenest in appreciation of the liberty of the occasion and the _genius loci_.... Not even Emerson, with all his indifference to the mere form of things, took to unimproved and uncivilized nature as Lowell did, and his free delight in the Wilderness was a thing to remember.” To these companions, quick to appreciate and respond, Lowell, light-hearted with the new promise of happiness and set free in his mind by the large privacy of the woods, brought the treasures of his fancy, his wit, his imagination. He revelled especially in recounting those visionary experiences which seemed all the more real under the starry skies and in the companionship of trees and silent forest creatures. Yet with it all, his inquisitive, searching mind, quickened too by the presence of scientific and philosophic comrades, was forever probing these phenomena to discover what was their ultimate rationale.

There can be little doubt that at this period of his life Lowell was poised for flight, as it were, having reached a stage when all the conditions were most favorable for the full expression of his powers. It is true that his academic work, as I have said, did in a measure supplant a freer poetic movement. But it may not unfairly be affirmed that Lowell’s attitude toward poetry was always that of expectation of some greater gift to come. His poems “Fancy’s Casuistry,” “In the Twilight,” “To the Muse,” all written about this time, record with iteration his restless pursuit of the elusive dream. His academic work afforded indeed a daily outlet, but it could not satisfy the demand for expression. Best of all, there was a pleasure-house in which he dwelt with his wife and daughter, perfectly fitted to the contentment of his spirit, and to furnishing that ease of mind which gives health of nature. Stillman has in another passage drawn a picture which may well be given here in evidence.

“Lowell was indeed very happy in his married life, and amongst the pictures Memory will keep on her tablet for me, till Death passes his sponge over it once for all, is one of his wife lying in a long chair under the trees at Dr. Howe’s, when the sun was getting cool, and laughing with her low, musical laugh at a contest in punning between Lowell and myself, _haud passibus æquis_, but in which he found enough to provoke his wit to activity; her almost Oriental eyes twinkling with fun, half-closed and flashing from one to the other of us; her low, sweet forehead, wide between the temples; mouth wreathing with humor; and the whole frame, lithe and fragile, laughing with her eyes at his extravagant and rollicking word-play. One would hardly have said that she was a beautiful woman, but fascinating she was in the happiest sense of the word, with all the fascination of pure and perfect womanhood and perfect happiness.”