CHAPTER IX

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY

1857-1861

Lowell had not been a year in his professor’s chair when he was invited to take another position more closely identified with literature and having its own cares and drudgery. Under the present conditions of magazine editorship and of college professorship as well, the union of the two offices would be quite out of the question.[113] But the condition in 1857 was different, and to install a professor in Harvard College as editor of a new magazine was both natural and in a measure traditional. I have already called attention to the effort made in 1853 to establish a literary magazine, and to Lowell’s interest in the venture. The person most concerned in that effort did not lose sight of his project, and now pushed the matter through to a fortunate conclusion.

Mr. Francis Henry Underwood was in 1857 the literary adviser and reader for the firm of Phillips & Sampson in Boston, and he was an ardent admirer of Lowell. He was a strong advocate of anti-slavery doctrines, and in his first proposals for a magazine in 1853 was working in conjunction with the firm of John P. Jewett & Co., that had just sprung into notice as publishers of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The firm with which he was now connected was active chiefly in the publication of cheap editions of standard works in literature. It had a large Southern constituency, and when “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was offered to it in the form of a scrap-book of clippings from _The National Era_, commercial prudence dictated a polite refusal. When, however, Mrs. Stowe’s name had become one of great value, it was easy for Phillips, Sampson & Co. to publish, as they did, her “Sunny Memories” in 1854 and “Dred” in 1856.

Mr. Moses Dresser Phillips had been brought up in the book trade and knew it first as a bookseller. He was a man who had large business energy and laid his plans for wide connections and not merely a local trade. Mr. Charles Sampson, with whom he had formed his partnership, had died about five years before, and his only partner at this time was Mr. William Lee, well known for many years as the senior partner in the publishing house of Lee & Shepard. He was nearer Mr. Underwood’s age and it was chiefly with him that Mr. Underwood talked over his cherished plan. It was through him, indeed, that Mr. Underwood expected to gain over Mr. Phillips, who had the practical man’s distrust of new enterprises suggested by authors, and a temperament which was calculated to chill enthusiasm. Mr. Underwood had already won consent to engage in the work from Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes, and others, and he represented strongly to Mr. Lee the possibilities of a magazine which should have at once a staff of writers of a character so eminent. I suspect he kept in the background any purpose he might have of making the magazine play a part in politics. Mr. Lee in turn at his daily lunch with Mr. Phillips kept that gentleman in mind of the project, though he was himself neither an advocate nor an opponent. He simply used Mr. Underwood’s arguments, the most effective of which may have been the prospect held up before Mr. Phillips of the association he should thus form with a distinguished group.

Mr. Phillips having been won over, the plans for the new magazine were rapidly pushed forward. In all this Mr. Underwood was the active manager, but Mr. Phillips as the head of the business now took the leading place. At an early date, Tuesday, 5 May, 1857, he called together the men on whom he most relied to give the enterprise distinction, and gave them a dinner at the Parker House. Fortunately an account of this meeting is in his own words in a letter to a niece:--

“I must tell you about a little dinner party I gave about two weeks ago. It would be proper, perhaps, to state that the origin of it was a desire to confer with my literary friends on a somewhat extensive literary project, the particulars of which I shall reserve until you come. But to the party: my invitations included only R. W. Emerson,[114] H. W. Longfellow, J. R. Lowell, Mr. Motley (the ‘Dutch Republic’ man), O. W. Holmes, Mr. Cabot,[115] and Mr. Underwood, our literary man. Imagine your uncle as the head of such a table, with such guests. The above named were the only ones invited, and they were all present. We sat down at three P.M., and rose at eight. The time occupied was longer by about four hours and thirty minutes than I am in the habit of consuming in that kind of occupation, but it was the richest time intellectually by all odds that I have ever had. Leaving myself and ‘literary man’ out of the group, I think you will agree with me that it would be difficult to duplicate that number of such conceded scholarship in the whole country beside.

“Mr. Emerson took the first post of honor at my right, and Mr. Longfellow the second at my left. The exact arrangement of the table was as follows:--

Mr. Underwood

Cabot Lowell

Motley Holmes

Longfellow Emerson

Phillips

“They seemed so well pleased that they adjourned, and invited me _to meet them_ again to-morrow (the 20th), when I shall again meet the same persons, with one other (Whipple, the essayist) added to that brilliant constellation of philosophical, poetic, and historical talent. Each one is known alike on both sides of the Atlantic, and is read beyond the limits of the English language. Though all this is known to you, you will pardon me for intruding it upon you. But still I have the vanity to believe that you will think them the most natural thoughts in the world to me. Though I say it that should not, it was the proudest day of my life.”[116]

There was another writer not at the dinner whose coöperation it was important to secure. Mrs. Stowe returned in June to America from England, whither she had gone to secure copyright for “Dred,” and Mr. Phillips at once laid his plan before her. She approved it most heartily and promised to give it her cordial support. It is not impossible that she made a definite promise of a serial novel to begin with the first number, but the sudden death a month later of her son Henry brought such a mental strain upon her that it was nearly a year before she could undertake any continued writing. The first number of the _Atlantic Monthly_ contained a brief allegory by her, “The Minister’s Mourning Veil,” and she contributed later an essay, but “The Minister’s Wooing” was not begun in the magazine till December, 1858.

As a result of these preliminary plans, Mr. Underwood was dispatched in June to England to secure the aid of English authors, and Mr. Lowell was asked to take the position of editor. Lowell had already taken an active part in creating an interest in the venture among writers. Underwood had turned to him as his most important ally, and Longfellow records in his diary, 29 April, 1857: “Lowell was here last evening to interest me in a new Magazine to be started in Boston by Phillips and Sampson. I told him I would write for it if I wrote for any Magazine.” Dr. Holmes christened the magazine, and Lowell, from the first, reckoned upon him for contributions. In 1885, when Dr. Holmes was resuming his regular prose contributions after a long intermission, he wrote in the introductory paper:[117] “He (Mr. Lowell) thought there might be something in my old portfolio which would be not unacceptable in the new magazine. I ... wondered somewhat when Mr. Lowell urged me with such earnestness to become a contributor, and so, yielding to a pressure which I could not understand, and yet found myself unable to resist, I promised to take a part in the new venture, as an occasional writer in the columns of the magazine.” Lowell, reading this number of the _Atlantic_ in London, wrote to Dr. Holmes: “The first number of your New Portfolio whets my appetite. Let me make one historical correction. When I accepted the editorship of the _Atlantic_, I made it a condition precedent that you were the first contributor to be engaged. Said I not well?”[118]

Emerson apparently had asked if the contributions were to be signed, for Lowell wrote him, 14 September, 1857: “All the articles will be anonymous, but you will be quite helpless, for your name is written in all kinds of self-betraying anagrams over yours. But as far as we are concerned there shall be as strict honor as the XIXth century allows of. Your wishes shall govern the position of the article [‘Illusions,’ in the first number], though I should have preferred to give it the precedence. I am afraid that where that is will be the head of the table, whether or no.”

In the same first number appeared four of Emerson’s poems, printed in a group: “The Romany Girl,” “The Chartist’s Complaint,” “Days,” and “Brahma.” Emerson seems to have raised some question about this, for in the same letter Lowell writes: “About the poems I ought to say that when I spoke of printing all four I was perhaps greedy, and Mr. Underwood says we can’t afford it, reckoning each as a separate poem--which means giving $50 apiece for them. Forgive me for coming down into the kitchen thus, but as I got the magazine into the scrape I must get it out. My notion was that all the poems would be published at once in a volume, and that therefore it would be alike to you. I ought to have thought that you sent them for selection,--and I will never be so rapacious again till I have another so good chance. If I am to have only one, give me ‘Days.’ That is as limpid and complete as a Greek epigram. I quarrel, though, with one word ‘hypocritic,’ which I doubt does not give the very shade of meaning you intended. I think you did wish to imply _intentional_ taking-in? I will take the liberty to draw your notice to one or two things in the proofs (of the poems), leaving them to your own judgment entirely.... It is not often that a magazine carries such freight as your ‘Illusions.’... How about Mr. Thoreau?”

It was not “Days” so much as “Brahma” that seized upon the imagination. Mr. Trowbridge, in his article on “The Author of Quabbin,” says it was “more talked about and puzzled over and parodied than any other poem of sixteen lines published within my recollection. ‘What does it mean?’ was the question readers everywhere asked; and if one had the reputation of seeing a little way into the Concord philosophy, he was liable at any time to be stopped on the street by some perplexed inquirer, who would draw him into the nearest doorway, produce a crumpled newspaper clipping from the recesses of a waistcoat pocket, and, with knitted brows, exclaim, ‘Here! you think you understand Emerson; now tell me what all this is about,--_If the red slayer think he slays_,’ and so forth.”

The magazine appeared about the first of November, and on the 19th Lowell wrote to Emerson: “You have seen, no doubt, how the Philistines have been parodying your ‘Brahma,’ and showing how they still believe in their special god Baal, and are unable to arrive at a conception of an omnipresent Deity. I have not yet met with a single clever one or I would have sent it to you for your amusement. Meanwhile, they are advertising the _Atlantic_ in the very best way, and Mr. Underwood tells me that the orders for the second number are doubling on those for the first. I think you will find the second an improvement.... Your poem [“Two Rivers”] is to go into No. 3, simply as a matter of housewifery, because we had already three articles at $50. I think I told you which I chose--‘Musketaquit.’ The ‘Solitude and Society’ [published in No. 2] has only one fault, that it is not longer, but had it been only a page, there would have been enough in it. Did you use the word _daysman_[119] deliberately? It has a technical meaning, and I suppose you used it in that sense. Mr. Nichols (the vermilion pencil) was outraged, and appealed to me. I answered that you had a right to use any word you liked till we found some one who wrote better English to correct you. Or did you mean the word to be merely the English of _journeyman_?

“I hope you will be able to give us something more for No. 3 before you go off to lecture. The number promises well thus far, but I wish to make it a decided advance. You have no notion how hard bestead we are. Out of 297 manuscripts only at most six accepted. I begin to believe in the total depravity of contributions.

“Let me thank you in especial for one line in ‘Brahma,’ which abides with me as an intimate--

‘When me they fly, I am the wings.’

You have crammed meaning there with an hydraulic press. Will not Thoreau give us something from Moosehead?”

Fourteen years earlier Lowell had welcomed Whittier as a contributor to the _Pioneer_, and now he renewed the old relation. He printed “Tritemius” in the first number and “Skipper Ireson’s Ride” in the second. Indeed, the _Atlantic_ came into existence most fortunately for Whittier, whose fortunes it helped distinctly, as it gave him a medium for the publication of his purely literary poems, and thus not only filled his pocket but helped materially to place him before the public in another guise than that of an ardent reformer. Lowell’s letter upon receipt of “Skipper Ireson’s Ride” is interesting both for its cordiality and for the contrast in tone to his manner of addressing Emerson. It may not unfairly be said that Emerson was the only one of his contemporaries whom Lowell addressed as if he were profoundly conscious of his relation to him as a pupil to his master. Lowell’s letter to Whittier is dated 4 November, 1857.[120]

“I thank you heartily for the ballad, which will go into the next number. I like it all the better for its provincialism,--in all fine pears, you know, we can taste the old _puckers_. I know the story well. I am familiar with Marblehead and its dialect, and as the burthen is intentionally provincial I have taken the liberty to print it in such a way as shall give the peculiar accent, thus:--

‘Cap’n Ireson for his horrd horrt Was torred and feathered and corried in a corrt.’

That’s the way I’ve always ‘horrd it,’--only it began ‘Old Flud Ireson.’ What a good name Ireson (son of wrath) is for the hero of such a history!

“You see that ‘Tritemius’ is going the rounds! I meant to have sent you the proofs, and to have asked you to make a change in it where these four rhymes come together (assonances I mean),--‘door,’ ‘poor,’ ‘store,’ ‘more.’ It annoyed me, but I do not find that any one else has been troubled by it, and everybody likes the poem. I am glad that the Philistines have chosen some verses of mine[121] for their target, not being able to comprehend the bearing of then. I mean I am glad that they did it rather than pick out those of any one else for their scapegoat. I shall not let you rest till I have got a New England pastoral out of you. This last is cater-cousin to it, at least, being a piscatorial.

“Will you be good enough to let me know how much Mr. Underwood shall send you? He will remit at once.

“The sale of Maga has been very good considering the times, and I think you will find the second number better than the first. If you do not wish the burthen so spelt, will you write me?”

The year 1857 was one of great financial distress, and the magazine felt something of this influence even before it was published, for it was intended to bring it out earlier than its first number actually appeared. It was in May that the preliminary arrangements were made and Lowell secured as editor. As late, however, as the end of that month, he was writing to a foreign correspondent that the editorship was a dead secret. But as we have seen he had interested himself in the venture from the outset. From time to time after his attempt with the _Pioneer_ he had revolved in his mind plans for magazines. It is safe to say that few prominent writers in America, Longfellow and Cooper being the chief exceptions, failed to dream of launching some vessel of this sort that should be freighted with the best of literature, and the initiative in almost all the cases of important magazines has been taken by the author rather than by the publisher. We have perhaps come to the close of the period when a new monthly magazine seems essential for the carrying of American thought and letters, and enterprise of this sort is more likely to seek an outlet in weekly journalism; but the men of letters who were at the front in the middle of the century not only had strong intellectual sympathy with the brilliant _Blackwood_ of that day,--Lowell in his correspondence repeatedly uses the familiar form _Maga_ when referring to the _Atlantic_,--and had been brought up on _Tait_, _The London Journal_, _Fraser_, and other vehicles of contemporaneous English and Scottish letters, but they demanded some direct, open means of reaching readers, for they had a great deal to say, which was ill-adapted to daily journalism and for which they could not wait till it should cool for book publication.

The conditions were favorable also from the point of view of the publisher, and Phillips & Sampson were in a good position to know this. They were aware that the leading writers were in their neighborhood. Washington Irving was an old man, and Mr. Bryant by his associations was rather of New England than of New York. Excepting these two the men of national distinction, Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Prescott, Motley, Lowell, were New Englanders, and men known by these to have large gifts, Holmes, Higginson, Thoreau, Cabot, Norton, who were chiefly relied on to make the early numbers, were their neighbors and friends, while the commanding reputation of Mrs. Stowe could at once be counted on to give éclat to any magazine with which she was connected. Besides, the business of this house, which was largely that of a jobbing house, so called, that is, a house which sold miscellaneous books from whatever publishers all over the country, was of such a nature as to create a confidence in the existence of a widespread audience of intelligent readers.

Thus the publishers were prepared to undertake the venture upon a somewhat liberal scale for those days. They chose the best printer near by, Mr. Houghton, who had already given distinction to the name “Riverside,” and they proposed to make a handsome magazine, not wholly unlike in its appearance the Edinburgh _Blackwood_. They paid their editor a salary of $2500, and they expected to pay contributors on a scale not to be sure much in advance of what the best writers could secure in other periodicals in Philadelphia and New York, but more generous as regards the average contributor. I think the mean rate of prose was six dollars a page, though it may occasionally in the case of a tyro have dropped to five dollars, and for poems they paid usually fifty dollars apiece. In a letter to a contributor who took exception to the price paid him, Lowell wrote, when the magazine had been running three or four months, “You must be content. Six dollars a page is more than can be got elsewhere, and we only pay ten to folks whose _names_ are worth the other four dollars. _Capite?_ What we may be able to do hereafter, I know not. _I_ shall always be for liberal pay.”

It might seem as though the distinction thus referred to would hardly exist when all the articles were unsigned, but the authorship for the most part was an open secret. In those days the _North American Review_, as well as other like periodicals, used to print a little slip with the authorship of the separate articles set against the successive numbers of the articles, and this slip, though not inserted in all the copies sold or sent to subscribers, was at the service of newspapers and the inner circle of contributors and near friends. In like manner the authorship of the principal articles and poems in the _Atlantic_ leaked out, and for some, like Emerson’s poems and Holmes’s “Autocrat,” there could be no concealment.

The authors themselves sometimes were glad of the privacy, as they thought it secured them more independence and possibility of frankness. Lowell thus wrote in September, 1859, to one of his contributors, who complained of what he thought want of care: “I am very sorry indeed for the mischance, but am quite sure it was no fault of mine. Where the ‘copy’ passes through four or five hands, all of whose owners know the handwriting, the chances of leakage are great. I confess that in the worry of the last week or two, I did not remember to give any new caution just before the publication of the October number. I am the more sorry if it is to deprive us of your contributions. For myself, I have always been opposed to the publication of the authors’ names at all. I do as well as I can with so many things to think of at once.” The practice of withholding names publicly continued till 1862, when the index at the end of the volume disclosed the authorship of the articles in the body of the magazine, and in 1870, the practice was begun of signing contributions. The anonymous character of the early volumes served, however, to bury the authorship in some cases past resurrection, as I found when I undertook to prepare a General Index in 1877, and again in 1889.

The ideal which Lowell formed for the magazine may best be inferred from the character of the numbers issued under his control, but in a few passages in his letters to contributors and friends he gives some glimpses of what was going on in his mind as he faced the very practical questions which arose in the conduct of the magazine. When I became editor of the _Atlantic_, in the spring of 1890, he contrasted my position with his own, and remarked on the very much larger number of writers on whom I could call for contributions, and the higher average of training in literary work. “Your task,” he wrote me, “will be in one respect at least easier than mine was thirty odd years ago, for there are now twenty people who can write English where there was one then. Indeed, there are so many, and they do it so well, that it looks as if literature as a profession or guild were near its end, and as if every man (and woman) would do his or her own on the principle of Every man his own washerwoman.” I thought and said, however, that it was not general average but distinction which gave a stamp to the magazine, and that in that respect he certainly had the advantage. In one of his letters to Mr. Richard Grant White, who feared a Shakespeare article he had furnished might be the one paper too much, he wrote: “I don’t care whether the public are tired of the Divine Villiams or not--a _part_ of the magazine, as long as I have anything to do with it, shall be expressly _not_ for the Mob (of well-dressed gentlemen who read with ease).”

At the outset, before any number had been published, he wrote to a friend from whom be solicited a contribution: “The magazine is going to be free without being fanatical, and we hope to unite in it all available talent of all shades of opinion. The magazine is to have opinions of its own, and not be afraid to speak them, but I think we shall be scholarly and gentlemanlike.” “This reading endless manuscripts,” he wrote to the same friend, when he was in full tide of preparation for the first number, “is hard work, and takes a great deal of time, but I am resolved that nothing shall go in which I have not first read. I wish to have nothing go in that will merely _do_,[122] but I fear I can’t keep so high a standard. It is astonishing how much there is that keeps just short of the line of good and drops into the limbo of indifferent.”

“There is a constant pressure on me,” he writes again, “to ‘popularize’ the magazine, which I resist without clamor.” It is easy to understand this attitude. Lowell cared greatly for the success of the _Atlantic_, and he was governed in his conduct of it by prudential considerations. In the letter just quoted he had occasion to refer to a controversy which was then hot. “I am urged,” he says, “to take ground in the Albany controversy, but do not feel that there is any _ought_ in the matter, and am sure the Trustees will beat in the end. I think it would be unwise to let the magazine take a losing side unless clear justice required it. Am I not right?” But though he was not indifferent to the commercial prosperity of the _Atlantic_, and knew well that its opportunity for serving letters was largely conditioned on its subscription list, he did not make the fatal mistake of subordinating his own judgment to a supposititious judgment of the mysterious public which buys and reads magazines. It was his business to keep his own judgment free from the partisan bias of idiosyncrasy, but he perceived well the more subtle danger to which he was exposed of abdicating his authority while keeping his title in the supposed interest of the magazine. It was just because he was Lowell, a man whom the public was ready to follow in literary judgments, that he was in this place, and it was in the application of a well-seasoned taste that he demonstrated his fitness for the position. He cared greatly to be the instrument of organizing a body of first-rate literature, and the tone which he gave the _Atlantic_ during the few months of his editorship became a tradition which powerfully affected its character after he retired from it. He put his own stamp on it emphatically.

The public, meanwhile, began at once to exercise that censorship which is a somewhat whimsical but very substantial witness to the value of an enterprise which is only technically private. The Lowell Institute, for example, is on a foundation so exclusively personal that there is not even a nominal board of trustees to be consulted in its management: the courses of lectures which it offers are absolutely free; yet ever since its establishment it has been subjected to criticism, good or ill natured, which would seem to imply some indefeasible right on the part of the public that criticises. Really, the criticism is simply an ingenuous expression of the profound interest which the public takes in a noble trust. Somewhat in the same way when the _Atlantic_ was established, the public refused to regard it as offering wares which people might buy or not as they liked. It recognized it as a literary organon, as a power for good or ill; it was immensely interested in it, and showed its interest by attacking it severely on occasions.

Such an occasion, especially, was the appearance of Dr. Holmes’s “Professor at the Breakfast-Table,” in which this writer, who had leaped into popularity through the “Autocrat,” delivered himself of opinions and judgments which were regarded by a good many as dangerous and subversive, all the more dangerous by reason of their wit and entertaining qualities. If one could believe many of the newspapers, Dr. Holmes was a sort of reincarnation of Voltaire, who stood for the most audacious enemy of Christianity in modern times.

Some intimation of what Lowell was to encounter as editor may be gathered from a few words in a letter to T. W. Higginson, written at the end of his first year, when “The Autocrat” had already drawn the fire of one class of critic.

“I only look upon my duty,” he says, “as a vicarious one for Phillips and Sampson, that nothing may go in (before we are firm on our feet) that helps the ‘religious’ press in their warfare on us. Presently we shall be even with them, and have a _free_ magazine in its true sense. I never allow any personal notion of mine to interfere, except in cases of obvious obscurity, bad taste, or bad grammar.” And Mr. Norton prints[123] a letter written shortly after to Dr. Holmes, which shows clearly the cordial support which the editor gave his contributor.

In one respect Lowell held a somewhat different position from that occupied by later editors. The _Atlantic_ was so little troubled by competitors, and its company of contributors was so determined by a sort of natural selection, that Lowell’s editorial function was mainly discharged by the exercise of discrimination in the choice of articles, and the distribution of material through successive numbers; he had little to do in the way of foraging for matter. It must not be supposed, however, that there was anything perfunctory in his editorship. He was in love with literature, and his fine taste stood him in good stead, not only in the rejection of the commonplace, but in the perception of qualities which might redeem an otherwise undistinguished poem or paper. He had, too, that enthusiasm in the discovery of excellence which made him call his friends and neighbors together when he had found some pearl of great price; an enthusiasm which he was very sure to share with the author. He gave thus to the magazine that character of _distinction_ which conscientiousness alone on the part of the editor, or even careful study of conditions, cannot give.

He was, to be sure, a trifle negligent of the business of writing to his contributors. He left as much of the correspondence as he could to Mr. Underwood, but in his somewhat capricious fashion he might make an article an excuse for a long and friendly letter. To one of his contributors who pursued him for his opinion upon some accepted manuscripts, he wrote a little testily: “You have a right to frankness and shall have it. I _did_ like the article on ---- better than the other, and I should like the ---- one particularly. But what of that? other folks may have liked the other better, for aught I know. The fault of our tastes is in our stars, not in ourselves. My wife can’t endure ‘The Biglow Papers,’ and somehow or other her dislike of them is a great refreshment to me and makes me like her all the better. But I think it is rather hard on an editor to expect him to give his opinion about everything he prints--I mean as to whether it is specially to his taste or not. How long would my contributors put up with me if I made Archbishops of Granada of them all? I tell you again, as I have told you before, that I am always glad of an article from you, let it be what it will, but (don’t you see?) I am gladdest when it is such a one as only you can write. If I could only print one number made of altogether such, I could sing my _nunc dimittis_ with a joyful heart.” A little of the fret of his life in this particular appears in a whimsical tirade which he sent to Mr. Norton on the eve of a flight to the Adirondacks in the summer of 1859:--

“To-day is Sunday; at least the bells have been shouting it, but ‘the Sabbath dawns no Sabbath-day for me.’ I have been reading proof and picking out manuscripts all the morning. Do you ever get desperate? I feel so now that I have got all my manuscript-household in order. They appal me by their mass. I look first at one box, and then at another, and--fill my pipe. ‘It is dreadful!’ as Clough’s heroine says in the Bothie. And 128 pages which it would take one so long to fill with his own stuff eats up that of other folks--no, I don’t mean that and would not allow such a metaphor to a contributor--is satiated so soon with that of other folks--that is, uses it up so slowly. Mille-dam! Have not two articles of ---- been on hand now for a year? He seems to spin out his brains as tenuously and uselessly as those creatures that streak the air with gossamer--no chance of catching even a stray fly of thought. Nay, his object is, I fancy, precisely what that of the aforesaid creatures may be--merely to swing himself over a gap. He is my ink--my pen-and-ink-ubus. I could scalp him the rather as he wears a wig and is deaf, and so would not be likely to hear of it. Then there is ---- who can’t express himself in less than sixteen pages on any imaginable topic. It is a terrible thing this writing for the press, by which a man’s pen learns gradually to go by itself as those Chinese servants are said to fan and sleep at the same time. ‘No, no, by heaven I am not ma-a-d!’ but I expect to be. I believe I have so far settled matters that everybody will think me a monster. But never mind, I get out of ear-shot to-morrow.”

How fully and carefully he could and would write under special urgency may be seen by the long letter which he addressed to Mrs. Stowe when “The Minister’s Wooing” had been running three or four months in the _Atlantic_. The letter was published in C. E. Stowe’s life of his mother, and is quoted also in Mrs. Fields’s “Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe.”

The criticism for which this letter was an excuse illustrates one very important element in Lowell’s editorial mind. However little he might exert himself to go afield for articles in the body of the magazine, he did not trust to luck for the critical notices. In that department he took great pains to secure competent workmen. To Lowell and his contemporaries this matter of book reviews was one of great consequence. In the evolution of literary periodical literature the article of the old _Quarterly_ type, which was part a summary of a book, part a further contribution to the subject, and part a judgment on the author, had shed the first constituent, had lost much of the second, but preserved the third in a more condensed and, to a certain degree, in a more impersonal spirit. But criticism in its finest form was highly valued, and the form of the book review was accepted as recognized and permanent. When the _Atlantic_, therefore, was set up emphasis was laid on this serious side of literary study, and the causerie, the light persiflage which serves as a relief in most magazines of a literary type--the _Atlantic_ itself has now its Contributors’ Club--was disregarded. To be sure, in the first number, Lowell printed what seemed to promise a gay side to the magazine, a leaf entitled “The Round Table,” the purpose of which, in this instance, was to introduce an occasional poem by Dr. Holmes, but I suspect he was either a little alarmed at the prospect of setting his table monthly with a dessert, or was satisfied that the “Autocrat” would serve the same end. At any rate, no second number of “The Round Table” appeared. But each month the last few pages of each number were given up, after the well-accepted tradition, to notices of new books with occasional surveys of current music and pictures.

Lowell’s estimate of the value of literary criticism is expressed in a letter to Mr. Richard Grant White, 10 June, 1858, apropos of a purpose Mr. White then had of starting a weekly literary journal in New York. “There is no one opprobrium of American scholarship and letters so great,” he says, “as the general laxity and debasement of criticism. With few exceptions our criticisms are venial (whether the pay be money or friendship) or partisan. An invitation to dinner may make a Milton out of the sorriest Flecknoe, and a difference in politics turn a creditable poet into a dunce.” Lowell relied on White for a certain amount of criticism and wrote him, 8 March, 1859, “There is nothing I so especially desire as to have ‘experts’ make the _Atlantic_ their pulpit. As long as I continue editor, I wish you to understand that your contributions will always be welcome, on no ground of personal friendship, but because I know they will be of value. I particularly wish to have the department of ‘Lit. Notices’ made more full. I find so few people whom I can trust to write a review! Personal motives of one kind or other are always sure to peep out. I think I have gained one good from the fearful bore of reading manuscripts; it is gradually making me as impartial as a chemical test--as insensible, too, perhaps? That is the only fear.”

As a result partly of his difficulty in securing satisfactory criticism and partly of his own aptitude for work of this kind, Lowell wrote more than forty reviews in the department during his editorship, besides several articles in the body of the magazine which were really reviews, like his careful study in two numbers of White’s Shakespeare. He was in such friendly communication with Mr. White regarding his work that it would have been idle to wear any mask in his presence, and Mr. White wrote him in great excitement over the first of the two articles. “I am very much obliged to you for your kind letter,” Lowell replied; “I never saw a man who did not think himself indifferent to praise, nor one who did not like it. In this country, where praise (or blame) is so cheap, one can’t think much of the old _laudari ab laudato_, for the _laudatus_ himself may be the celebrated Snooks, but I think I know how to value it from a man of discernment. I hope you will like the last half of my article as well as the first. It is honest, anyhow, and kindly meant, and I endeavored to avoid all picking of flaws. Years ago I laid to heart the saying of an old lady--‘that the eleventh commandment was--Don’t twit.’ ...

“I don’t like reviewing, especially where the author is an acquaintance. I find it so hard to be impartial, but in your case I think my commendation would lose half its force were it not qualified with some adverse criticism. Please believe that I wrote all with the kindest feelings.”

Lowell certainly had nothing of that superficial habit of reviewing which is at the bottom of most of the unsatisfactory work of this kind. In reviewing White’s Shakespeare, for example, he read over twice every word of the commentary and notes and then laid the book aside that his impression might settle and clarify before he wrote his criticism. Swift as he was in writing, there was, for the most part, a long period of brooding over his creative work and in study over his criticism. He wrote an article, for instance, on “Wedgwood’s Dictionary,” and complained regarding it to Mr. Norton: “You know my unfortunate weakness for doing things not quite superficially. So I have been a week about it--press waiting--devil at my elbow (I mean the printer’s)--every dictionary and vocabulary I own gradually gathering in a semicircle round my chair,--and three of the days of twelve solid hours each. And with what result? at most six pages, which not six men will care anything about. And now it is done I feel as if I had taken hold of the book the wrong way, and that I should have devoted myself to his theory more and to particulars less; or, rather, that I ought to have had more space. But I had a gap to fill up,--just so much and no more. There is one passage[124] in it that I wager will make all of you laugh, and heavens! what fun I could have made of the book if I had been unscrupulous! But I soon learned to respect Wedgwood’s attainments, and resisted all temptation.”

Just as Lowell’s fun could find its way even into an index, so in his sober criticisms he would sometimes hide a jest for the delectation of especially discerning readers, as when in his article on White’s Shakespeare, he remarks incidentally: “To every commentator who has wantonly tampered with the text, or obscured it with his inky cloud of paraphrase, we feel inclined to apply the quadrisyllabic name of the brother of Agis, king of Sparta.” Felton, Longfellow tells us in a letter to Sumner, was the first to unearth the joke and to remember or discover that this name was Eudamidas.

Apart from his considerable criticism Lowell contributed to the volumes which he edited chiefly poems and political articles. He printed the “Ode to Happiness” already referred to, the notable verses on “Italy, 1859,” and the striking poem, “The Dead House,” which has an autobiographic interest, not from its being the record of an incident or even from the mood which it reflects, but from the fact that Lowell could write it at all and disclaim any personal connection with the theme. Mr. Norton has printed an interesting comment on the poem by Lowell,[125] and in another letter written a few days later Lowell adds: “I have touched here and there the poem I sent, and think of putting it in the _Atlantic_. Did you like it? It is pure fancy, though founded on a feeling I have often had,--but for æsthetic reasons I put an ‘inexpressive she’ into it.” In how healthy a mind must he have been, and how graciously healed in his new life to write thus without having his own great grief thrust itself between him and his poem.

Yet there was a poem entitled “The Home,” written at the same time which was rather a record of personal experience than a universal mood caught in terms of common life, and he cast it aside therefore and never printed it. It has its place in a memoir of his life.

“Here once my step was quickened, Here beckoned the opening door, And _welcome!_ thrilled from the threshold To the foot it had felt before.

“A glow came forth to meet me, The blithe flame laughed in the grate, And shadows that danced on the ceiling Danced faster with mine for a mate.

“‘Glad to see you, old friend,’ yawned the armchair, ‘This corner, you know, is your seat;’ ‘Rest your slippers on me,’ beamed the fender, ‘I brighten at touch of your feet.’

“‘We know the practised finger,’ Said the books, ‘that seems all brain,’ And the shy page rustled the secret It had kept till I came again.

“Hummed the pillow, ‘My down once trembled On nightingales’ throats that flew Through the twilight gardens of Hafix To gather quaint dreams for you.’

“Ah me! if the Past have heartsease, It hath also rue for men:-- I come back: those unhealed ridges Were not in the churchyard then!

“But (I think) the house is unaltered-- I will go and ask to look At the rooms that were once familiar To my life as its bed to the brook.

“Unaltered! alas for the sameness That makes the change but more! How estranged seems the look of the windows, How grates my foot on the floor!

“To learn this simple lesson Need I go to Paris or Rome, That the many make a household, But only one the Home?

“‘Twas a smile, ’twas a garment’s rustle, ’Twas nothing that you could phrase, But the whole dumb dwelling grew conscious And put on her looks and ways.

“Were it mine, I would close the shutters As you smooth the lids of the dead, And the funeral fire should wind it, This corpse of a Home that is dead!

“For it died that summer morning When she, its soul, was borne To lie all dark in the hillside That looks over woodland and corn.”

“Is it anything?” he wrote to the friend to whom he sent it, or is it nothing? Or is it one of those nothings that is something? I think the last stanza should be last but one and begin ‘But it died,’ if ‘dwelling’ will do for an antecedent. Is the first half too special?”

There was indeed a gayer mood on him in the midst of his work which could make him turn his discomforts into a jest. “I cannot learn the knack of doing six things at once,” he wrote to a friend. “I had my whole time to myself for too many years, and the older I grow the unreadier writer I become. What a lucky dog Methusalem was! Nothing to know, and nine hundred years to learn it in.” He was writing to a somewhat dry-minded correspondent, but to a more congenial friend he wrote at the same time: “Nothing has happened to me since I saw you except manuscripts, and my mind is gradually becoming a blank. It is very depleting, I find, to read stuff week in and week out (I almost spelt week with an _a_), and does not help one to be a lively correspondent. But I believe I could dictate five love stories at the same time (as Napoleon the Other could despatches) without mixing them in the least--and indeed it would make no difference if I did. ‘Julie gazed into the eyes of her lover, which sought in vain to escape her enquiring look, while the tears trembled on her long dark lashes, but fell not (that ‘fell not’ is new, I think). “And is it indeed so?” she said slowly, after a pause in which her heart leaped like an imprisoned bird.’--‘Meanwhile, the elder of the two, a stern-featured man of some forty winters, played with the hilt of his dagger, half drawing and then sheathing again the Damascus blade thin as the eloquence of Everett and elastic as the conscience of Cass. “Didst mark the old man tremble?” “Cospetto! my uncle, a noted leech, was wont to say that iron was a good tonic for unsteady nerves,” and still he trifled with the ominous looking weapon, etc., etc.’ I think of taking a contract to write all the stories myself at so much a dozen--a good murder or a happy marriage to be paid double.”

One is reminded of Lamb’s famous letter to Manning when he reads a letter which Lowell wrote to his brother-in-law, Captain Parker, then in China: “A man who is eccentric enough to prefer a part of the world where folks walk with their heads down certainly deserves the commiseration of his friends, but as for letters--how to write and what to write about? I can’t write upside down, and I suppose you can’t read rightside up. So it is clearly a waste of time, but you will be able to read this after you get home again, when old age will have given all the news in it a kind of second-childhood, and it will have become fresh by dint of having been forgotten.

“Of course there isn’t any news--when was there ever any? For my own part, I don’t regret it, looking on news as generally only a short way of saying nuisance, and believing Noah to have been the happiest man that ever lived, for all the gossips were five thousand fathoms under water, and he knew that he should not hear anything when he got into port. The daughters must have been put to it, though, with nobody left but Shem, Ham, and Japhet to work slippers and smoking caps for, and never a new engagement to discuss.

As for news here,--there was the College Exhibition day before yesterday, which was a good deal like other Exhibitions only that it rained. I suppose your wife has written you of the appointment of Caihee as professor of the Chinese language and literature with a salary of ten piculs a year, which she is allowed to raise in the college grounds, the Corporation finding cucumber seed and Theodore Parker the vinegar. A compromise has been effected in theological matters, and she is to worship Josh Bates the London banker instead of simple Josh, in consideration of which Mr. Bates will pay half the salary of a Bonze to be imported express. The students will be allowed to let off fire-crackers during her lectures. She begins with an exposition of the doctrine of the venerable confuse-us, which can hardly fail of being in harmony with all existing systems of philosophy and theology. As all the Professors are obliged to do something outside for a living, she will continue to be on duty with Maggie. This is a great triumph for the Woman’s-Rights party, who have nominated Mrs. ---- for Governess, with a Council of old women, including, I am told, Mr. ----. You see the world moves up here. As to other political intelligence, there is not much--that quality is commonly wanting in such matters: but the Charleston Convention is expected to nominate the Captain of the yacht Wanderer[126] for President, as an exponent of the views of the more moderate wing of the party (I mean, of course, the Southern wing) on the subject of slavery. A Red River overseer is to adorn the ticket as candidate for the Vice-Presidency. We shall be likely at last to get a truly conservative administration. At home we have a rehearsal of ‘Bonnie Doon,’ Banks being the Republican man, while the _brays_ are well performed by Mr. B. F. Butler.

“Cambridge meanwhile is all agog with a wedding to come off this afternoon, Darley the artist and Miss Jenny (I think) Colburn. There is to be a wonderful turn-out of handsome bridesmaids, the bride having the good luck to be beautifully cousined. A great crush of hoops is looked for at Christ Church, and the coopers, it is said, will take the occasion for a strike. All the girls are crazy to go, and many who go in with a diameter of ten feet will come out with only two. I have sent for a new pair of lemon-colored gloves for the wedding visit. There will be a jam, of course, but then I am one of the harder sex, and shan’t mind it. They have my best wishes for a crop of little Darleyings.

“So you are to have another war over there. I think it a shabby piece of business. Can you thrash a nation into friendly relations? And if a man don’t like your society, can you change his views by giving him a black eye? The Chinese are not a nation of savages, and with two hundred and forty millions of people they can hold out a great while in killed, wounded, and missing. I think John Bull and Johnny Crapaud will have their hands full before they are done with it. What has a Bull to do in a China-shop?”

There was an incompatibility of temper in Lowell which stood in the way of entire pleasure in editing the _Atlantic_. He was not averse to work--instances enough have been shown of this--but he chafed under methodical work. He could work hours and even days with scarcely a respite, but he could also help himself to large measures of loafing. A magazine, with its incessant inflow of letters and manuscripts, and the demand which it makes for periodic punctuality, ill befits such a temper, and Lowell found a good deal of irksomeness in his daily task. “I used to be able to answer letters in the month during which I received them,” he wrote ruefully to Mr. White, 6 April, 1859, “but now they pile up and make a jam behind the boom of my occupations, till they carry everything before them, and after a little confused whirling float placidly down to the ocean of Oblivion. I do not know if it be so with everybody, but with me the perpetual _chance_ of interruption to which I am liable induces a kind of stolid despair. I am afraid that at this moment there are at least a hundred and fifty unanswered letters in and on and round my desk, whose blank [looks] seem to say ‘how long?’ Your letter came just in the midst of a bother in the _Atlantic_, which it took all my diplomacy to settle so that both sides should not bite their own noses off, to which mad meal they had violent appetites. It is all ‘fixed’ now, and things go smoothly again--but meanwhile the hiatus in my correspondence grew daily wider.”

“I am at last even with my manuscripts,” he wrote to another friend. “It is splendid. Such a heap as had gathered. It had snowed poems and tales and essays, and an eddy had drifted them into my study knee-deep. But I have shovelled myself out, and hope ’tis the last great storm of the season. I even found time to go to Dresel’s concert last evening, where I saw one of your cousins. The concert was nearly all Mendelssohn and seemed to me a little vague and cloudy--beautiful clouds, rose tinted and--indefinite. I longed for a good riving flash of Italian lightning. Fanny liked it, however, but I was rather bored. It seemed to me like reading manuscripts titillated with promise continually and finding no egregious and satisfying fulfilment.”

“Don’t come this way again,” he writes to Mr. White, “without letting me know you are coming. I want a talk with you, and I can’t talk by letter, for I can’t write them when I am tired, and I am tired all the time. If there be any truth in the doctrine of compensations, the bobolinks in some other stage of existence will all be caged in Grub Street and made editors. They are altogether too happy here. Well, maybe we shall be bobolinks. If ever we should be, I can show you a fine meadow for building in, a kind of grassy Venice with good tussock foundations jutting everywhere from the water.”

After something more than a year’s experience, he wrote to Mr. Norton: “I am resolved that no motive of my own comfort or advantage shall influence me, but I hate the turmoil of such affairs, despise the notoriety they give one, and long for the day when I can be vacant to the Muses and to my books for their own sakes. I cannot stand the worry of it much longer without a lieutenant. To have questions of style, grammar, and punctuation in other people’s articles to decide, while I want all my concentration for what I am writing myself--to have added to this personal appeals, from ill-mannered correspondents whose articles have been declined, to attend to--to sit at work sometimes fifteen hours a day, as I have done lately--makes me nervous, takes away my pluck, compels my neglecting my friends, and induces the old fits of the blues.”[127]

“If my letters seem dry,” he wrote again to Mr. White, “it is no fault of mine. I am overworked and overworried and overinterrupted. I _can’t_ write a genial letter, but I want you and like you all the same. If ever I get back to my old nest among the trees at Elmwood, and I am no longer professor or editor, with time enough to follow up a doubtful passage in Shakespeare or a bit of dilettante philology,--then what pleasure I should have in corresponding with you and exchanging thoughts and suggestions. But now, if anything occurs to me, I feel too tired to communicate it to anybody, for my days are so broken that I am forced sometimes to sit up till the birds sing to get any time for my own studies.”

In one point of excellence Lowell was exceedingly particular. He told me once in later life, when we were discussing a proposed reissue of the British Poets, of which he was to be editor-in-chief, that I must not think he would accept any one’s proof-reading but his own. “I am really a very careful proof-reader,” he said, “though people fancy I am too indolent for such work.” In a letter to Mr. Norton, 18 October, 1859, presaging some changes, he writes: “As to proofs, I _must_ read those myself, or I don’t feel safe. Yet a piece of bad grammar got into the October number in spite of Mr. Nichols and me together.” He had, indeed, a most admirable aid in Mr. George Nichols, who was a vigilant officer, carrying a search warrant for any and all literary misdemeanors. The _Atlantic_ at this time was printed at Riverside, and there is a charming description, in a letter which Mr. Norton prints,[128] of the morning walk which Lowell was wont to take to the Press by the footpath that lay along the river bank.

The pressure upon Lowell, which his college work and his editorship brought, did, during these four years, stop, somewhat, his spontaneity. He wrote but few poems, and his letters show the effort he needed to make to force some gayety. “I am that man among mortals,” he wrote to Miss Norton, “whose friends must forgive him the most treasons against friendship,--silence, staying away, dulness when he writes or comes--and I know not what else,--yet I do believe that my heart holds fire as long as another, and that I neither grow cool nor forget sooner than most. I cannot write unless I feel as if I could give the best part of myself to those who deserve it best, and I am so forever busy that I am either employed or weary, and who can write then? I believe that none but an idle man can write a good letter. I mean by idle, a man who is not under the necessity of tapping his brain on the public side, and tapping so freely that the runnings on the other cannot be sprightly for want of _head_. This is why women are such good letter-writers. Their ordinary employments do not suck them dry of all communicativeness,--I can’t think of any other word,--and their writing is their play, as it should be. As for me, nowadays, taking up my pen is only the reminder of work. This that I write with is one worn to a stump with my lectures three years--four years ago. I would not write with the same one I had used for Mr. Cushing and drudgery. So the fault is not in the quill that I am stupid. If I had only been laid away in a drawer these four years, as it had been! What a fury I should be in to declare myself on all manner of topics! But this exhaustion one feels from overwork extends itself to the receptive faculties as well. A dry sponge floats and is long in saturating. The mind, I think, goes even beyond this--it must be _full_ to take up more.”

The diversions which Lowell found in this period were not many. He made his yearly excursion to the Adirondacks, always looking forward eagerly to it, and working furiously just before home-leaving, that he might go with some serenity of mind. He saw scarcely anything of social life in Cambridge or Boston;[129] he went frequently to Shady Hill, the home of the Nortons, but nowhere else to speak of, and he found true relaxation in his whist club. Aside from all this, he derived most entertainment from the very informal clubs, with their dinners, which had sprung chiefly out of the establishment of the _Atlantic_. For a short time, apparently, there were two of these loose organizations, the Atlantic Club, so called, which was the gathering of the contributors at dinner, under the auspices of the publishers, during the first months of strong interest,--dinners which seem to have sprung from the little one given by Mr. Phillips at the institution of the magazine; and the Saturday Club, which still survives, a dining club, made up at first chiefly of literary men naturally connected with the _Atlantic_, and of congenial spirits, some of whom never and some rarely contributed. This latter club appears, after a while, to have supplanted the former. “Dined with the _Atlantic Monthly_ people,” Longfellow writes in his diary, 21 December, 1857, and again, 14 May, 1859, “Dined with the Atlantic Club, at Fondarivés’s. The ‘Atlantic’ is not the ‘Saturday’ club, though many members belong to both;” and on 9 July, 1859, he again notes that he dined with the Atlantic Club at the Revere House, but the references cease at this point, and the club dinners which he attends afterward are Saturday Club dinners, held on the last Saturday of the month at Parker’s Hotel. Dr. Holmes also, in later years, found the flourishing Saturday Club so constant in his recollection that he was disposed to deny the existence of any Atlantic Club. Properly speaking there never was any club, but only occasional dinners to which contributors were invited by the publishers. It was of one of the Saturday Club dinners that Lowell wrote 11 October, 1858: “You were good enough to tell me I might give you an account of our dinner. There at least was a topic, but I find that when I am full of work, I do not see the men I go among, but only shadows which make no impression. It is odd that when one’s mind is excited by writing so that one cannot sleep, one should see in the same way a constant succession of figures without really seeing them. They come and change and go without any dependence on the will, without any relation to the preoccupying thought.

“I remember one good thing at our last dinner. The dinner was for Stillman, and I proposed that Judge Hoar should propose his health in a speech. ‘_Sir!_’ (a long pause) ‘in what I have already said, I believe I speak the sentiments of every gentleman present, and lest I should fail to do so in what I might further say’--(another pause) ‘I sit down.’ And two days before at Agassiz’--the Autocrat giving an account of his having learned the fiddle, his brother John who sat opposite, exclaimed, ‘I can testify to it; he has often fiddled me out of the house as Orpheus did Eurydice out of the infernal regions.’ Isn’t that good? It makes me laugh to look at it now that I have written it down. The Autocrat relating how Simmons the Oak Hall man had sent him the two finest pears--‘of trowsers?’ interrupted somebody. But can one send poured-out Champagne all the way to Newport, and hope that one bubble will burst after it gets there to tell what it used to be? A dinner is never a good thing the next day. For the moment, though, what is better? We dissolve our pearls and drink them nobly--if we have them--but bring none away. A good talk is almost as much out of the question among clever men as among men who think themselves clever. Creation in pairs proves the foreordained superiority of the _tête-a-tête_. Nevertheless, we live and dine and die.” And a few months later he recorded a bit about a dinner of the Atlantic people, which has had more than one raconteur. “Our dinner the other day was very pleasant. Only Mrs. Stowe and Miss Prescott, author of ‘In a Cellar.’ She is very nice and bright. Mrs. Stowe would not let us have any wine, and I told her that I was sorry she should deprive herself of so many pleasant dinners in England (whither she goes 3d August) by so self-denying an ordinance. She _took_ at once, colored a little, laughed, and asked me to order some champagne.”

Perhaps the very necessity for constant criticism, whether unrecorded, as where he determined the grounds for acceptance and rejection of manuscripts, or in his correspondence with contributors, and his own articles in the magazine, tended to stimulate Lowell’s critical faculty. At any rate, in the midst of his busy hours he would now and then yield to the impulse, created by some current publication it may be, and give expression to judgments, either publicly or in his letters to friends. Thus his interest in “The Minister’s Wooing” led him not only into writing the letter to Mrs. Stowe, already noticed, but into a careful, unsigned analysis of Mrs. Stowe’s power in the _New York Tribune_.[130]

In August, 1859, Mr. Phillips, the publisher, died. Lowell characterized him as a man of great energy and pluck; but during the months previous to his death Mr. Phillips had by no means been in sound health, and had fretted much over complications in his affairs. He seems to have had reason, for a few weeks after the death of Mr. Phillips, the firm of Phillips & Sampson suspended payment, and went into the hands of an assignee, Mr. Harvey Jewell. “What is to come, or why they have done it,” Lowell wrote to Mr. Norton, “I cannot conjecture. I trust arrangements will be made to put the _Atlantic_ in good hands. _That_ at least is a paying thing. If it shall end in my losing the editorship, it would cause me little regret, for it would leave me more time to myself.” The assignee brought out the October number of the magazine, pending the settlement of affairs, and there was a lively competition among publishers to secure the publication. The Harpers proposed to buy it, to suppress their rival, it was said; there were offers from Philadelphia, and some of the younger men connected with the firm of Phillips & Sampson made an effort to establish a new firm which should buy the whole business of Phillips & Sampson, including the magazine. Mr. William Lee, who had left a large sum with the firm when he withdrew from it, was at the time travelling in Europe, and by a series of mischances did not even learn of the situation till it was too late for him to have a hand in any reorganization. There was even a plan mooted by which Lowell and his friends should buy the magazine, but Lowell’s own judgment was against this. “It ought,” he said, “to be in the hands of a practical publisher for we should be in danger of running aground.”

In the end, Ticknor & Fields bought the magazine. “As friend to friend,” Lowell wrote to Mr. Norton, I may say that I think it just the best arrangement possible, though I did not like to say so beforehand too plainly. I did not wish in any way to stand in ----’s light, but it is much better as it is. Whether T. will want _me_ or not, is another question. I suppose that he will think that Fields will make a good editor, beside saving the salary, and F. may think so too. In certain respects he would, as the dining editor for example, to look after authors when they came to Boston and the like. I shall be quite satisfied, anyhow,--though the salary is a convenience, for I have done nothing to advance my own private interest in the matter.”

The break-up of the business of Phillips & Sampson naturally led to the distribution of their copyright books, and Emerson was one of the authors publishing with them, who was now considering the transfer of his books to Ticknor & Fields. “I saw Ticknor yesterday,” Lowell wrote him, 21 October, 1859, “and he says he wants the magazine to go on as it has gone. I never talked so long with him before, and the impression he gave was that of a man very shrewd in business after it is once in train, but very inert of judgment. I rather think Fields is captain when at home.[131] My opinion about your book is this. The book is a sure one at any rate, and if Little & Brown publish it, they will sell copies to all who would buy anything of yours at any rate. They are eminently respectable and trustworthy. Ticknor would have of course the same chance to start on that L. & B. would have, but I should think it natural that he would be able to sell more copies because the _kind_ of book he publishes is rather less of the library-completing sort than those of L. & B., and because (I suppose) he has correspondents who always take a certain number of his books whether or no. In short, it seems to me that his chances in the way of distribution and putting the volume on many counters and under many eyes are the best. With an author like you this is not much, but it is something....

“I have quite a prize in the December number--the story of a real filibuster written by himself.[132] It is well done and will interest you. I wish to get together a few of our chief tritons at a dinner soon to make them acquainted with the new Poseidon. Will you come? At Porter’s or Parker’s, whichever you prefer, and as early as you like so that you may get back to Concord.”

After Mr. Fields returned from Europe the question of the editorship came up anew. The times were lowering, every one who had ventures was taking in sail, Mr. Fields had been the editorial member of the book firm, his relations with authors both at home and abroad were of the most friendly nature, and it was thus most reasonable and natural that he should take charge of the _Atlantic_, and Lowell resigned the editorship in a half-serious, half-whimsical letter which Mr. Norton has printed.[133] It is clear that he had a divided mind. He had become so far wonted to his work that he had less anxiety in performing it, and he had an honest pride in maintaining the high standard which his own taste and judgment had created. He was glad also of the greater ease in money matters which the salary gave; and yet, as his letters show, he welcomed the freedom from the daily exactions of the editorial life, and the return to the more self-determined occupation which he had known most of his days.

Yet in editing the _Atlantic_, Lowell was more or less consciously reënforcing the love of literature which commanded him, and the combined labor of academic study and teaching and the organization of literature undoubtedly enriched his life, and made him more ready for the large enterprises which lay before him.

It was a great reënforcement of contentment that he had returned to his old home at Elmwood. There had been some talk of his taking the house which Professor Felton was to give up on getting a new one, but arrangement was made, finally, to go back to Elmwood, and there the new establishment was set up with Dr. Lowell and Miss Rebecca Lowell as joint occupants. This was a few months before Lowell retired from the editorship of the _Atlantic_, and his content appears in a letter which he was writing to Mr. Richard Grant White, 15 March, 1861: “We are having,” he says, “the finest snowstorm of the winter. And what a delight to me to be here in my old garret at Elmwood, no college to go to (it is Saturday), sheltered by the very wings of the storm, and shut in from all the world by this white cloud of peace let down from heaven! The great chimney stacks roar a deep bass like Harlaem organ pipes. The old lightning rod thumps and rattles with every gust, as I used to hear it so long ago when there were no colleges nor magazines, nor any world outside our belt of pines. I am at _home_ again. I like everything and everybody. Presently I shall draw on my Canada leggings and wade down to the post with this. I shall come back full of snow and northwest wind and appetite. I shall sit down at my own table in the old familiar room where I hope to welcome you one of these days.”[134]

In his L’Envoi, “To the Muse,” which appears to have been written not far from this time, he has some bright reflections on the elusiveness of the spirit of poetry which beckoned him. In point of fact there was very little poetry written by him while he was at once professor and editor. His “Biglow Papers” had been republished in England, with an Introduction by T. Hughes. His old friend, Mr. Gay, was in England at the time and had a hand in the business. The publication naturally drew fresh attention to Lowell’s satiric verse, and he wrote, a trifle piqued: “I confess I am a little jealous of people who like my humorous poems best. I guess they are right ‘up to date,’ but I feel also as if it were a little unfair to t’other half of me, which has not fairly worked itself free so as to combine--here I was interrupted day before yesterday, and I believe I was going to say--so as to combine the results of life with those of study. However, I grow more and more persuaded that what a man is is of greater consequence than what he _does_, especially than what he writes. The secret is, I suppose, to work oneself out clear so that what he is may be one with what he writes.”

END OF VOLUME I

The Riverside Press _Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton & Co._ _Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See Appendix A, The Lowell Ancestry.

[2] In 1853 Dr. Lowell contemplated the publication of a volume of sermons, and his then associate, Dr. Bartol, wrote privately to the son, discouraging the venture. He had not the heart openly to oppose Dr. Lowell. “I know,” he writes, “I can trust you to understand me fully when I say it is my persuasion and that of true and strong friends of your father in the parish, that a volume could never overtake his actual reputation, that what is best in him, his voice, his look, his manner, _himself_, cannot be printed, and that his peculiar glory is one that should scarcely be touched with ink.” There did appear, however, in 1855 a volume by Dr. Lowell, entitled _Sermons; chiefly Occasional_.

[3] _Alongside_, by Mrs. Caroline H. Dall. Privately printed.

[4] “My grandmother,” Lowell once said, “was a loyalist to her death, and whenever Independence Day came round, instead of joining in the general rejoicing, she would dress in deep black, fast all day, and loudly lament ‘our late unhappy differences with his most gracious Majesty.’”

[5] In a review of _the Book of British Ballads_ in _The Pioneer_, Lowell says: “And the dear ‘Annie of Lochroyan,’ too, made thrice dear to us by the often hearing it from lips that gave an original beauty of their own to whatever they recited.”

[6] He was named after his father’s maternal grandfather, Judge James Russell, of Charlestown.

[7] Robert Traill Spence Lowell was graduated at Harvard College in 1833. He became an Episcopal clergyman in 1842, went shortly after as a missionary to Newfoundland, had a parish later in New Jersey, then took the headmastership of S. Mark’s School, Southborough, Mass., and finally was called to the chair of Latin language and literature in Union College. He remained in Schenectady till his death, 12 September, 1891, just a month after the death of his younger brother. He had a distinct literary gift, and published several books, which were the outcome of his life in its varied scenes. _The New Priest in Conception Bay_ has vivid pictures of Newfoundland, and contains one character, Elnathan Bangs, who is as racy a Yankee in his own way as Hosea Biglow himself. The book unfortunately was published by Philips & Sampson just as Mr. Phillips died and the firm went into bankruptcy, and lost thus the advantage of a good start. It was revived a good many years later, but never enjoyed the vogue it might have had. Mr. Lowell’s experiences at S. Mark’s lay behind a story for schoolboys, _Antony Brade_, and his life in Schenectady suggested _A Story or Two from an Old Dutch Town._ He published also _Fresh Hearts that Failed Three Thousand Years Ago, and Other Poems_, a book which his brother had the pleasure of reviewing in the _Atlantic_. His best known poem, “The Relief of Lucknow,” appeared also in the _Atlantic_, under his brother’s editorship.

[8] Mary Traill Spence Lowell was born 3 December, 1810, was married to Samuel Raymond Putnam, 25 April, 1832, and died in Boston, 1 June, 1898. She was a woman of intellectual power and literary accomplishment. She chose to write anonymously, but the books she wrote, _Records of an Obscure Man_, _The Tragedy of Errors_, _Fifteen Days_, and _The Tragedy of Success_, though remote from the current of popular taste in her day, not only disclose a most thoughtful nature, and one profoundly interested in great subjects of racial and philosophical moment, but not infrequently are exceedingly felicitous in expression.

[9] In a lecture on Spenser, given in 1856, Lowell said, “_The Faery Queene_ was the first poem I ever read, and I had no suspicion of any double meaning in it.”

[10] “An Epistle to George William Curtis,” 1874.

[11] _Conversations on Some of the Old Poets_, pp. 170, 171.

[12] Said at the commemoration of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the West Church, Boston, 1887.

[13] _The Power of Sound: a rhymed lecture_, pp. 22, 23.

[14] “‘Tis near midnight, and I hear a bass-drum, kettle-drum and fife in the distance, playing the dear old _boongalang_ tune of my earliest days, the very one to which General Gage marched out of Boston. It is delightful. I think it is the noise Wagner is always trying to make and failing.”--J. R. L. to C. E. Norton, 16 April, 1889.

[15] “Books and Libraries” in _Literary and Political Addresses, Works_, vi. 83.

[16] _Latest Literary Essays and Addresses_, p. 43.

[17] _Literary and Political Addresses_, pp. 69, 70.

[18] Mr. Shackford did not live to continue his friendship with Lowell. He died in 1842.

[19] The Hasty Pudding Club, a Harvard students’ club, which has always made much of literature of the lighter sort, its specialty now being amateur theatricals.

[20] “Thoreau,” in _Literary Essays_, i. 366.

[21] There is a letter from Mrs. Anna Cabot Lowell, 3 July, 1838, to her brother-in-law, which throws a little light on the way in which his friends regarded Lowell at this time: “Aunt S. was here last evening and depicted in a lively manner the grief of Scates for your idle courses. She says he went to you with tears in his eyes to implore you to persevere, and that he told his friends in faltering accents that you had but this one fault in the world. Being desirous to know the exact nature of that fault, that you might apply the specific remedy, I asked her what the fault was. She said ‘indolence to be sure: indolence and the Spence negligence.’ I quote her very words. My opinion of the case is that it proceeds more from negligence than indolence, and more from a blind confidence in your powers and your destiny than either.”

[22] _Letters_, ii. 302.

[23] It was not uncommon in those days and long after for a student to take his degree at the Law School after a year or two only of study and then to continue to hear lectures. Lowell’s name is on the catalogue of the school for the year following his degree.

[24] William Page, the artist, whom Lowell first knew through the Whites.

[25] “Goethe’s poetic sense was the Minotaur to which he sacrificed everything. To make a study he would soil the maiden petals of a woman’s soul.”--“Lessing,” in _Literary Essays_, ii. 195.

[26] It is very likely under the impetus given by Maria White that Lowell took a place as delegate to the Anti-Slavery Convention held in Boston, 17 November, 1840.

[27] _Letters_, i. 67-69.

[28] _James Russell Lowell and His Friends_, pp. 72-76.

[29] “I have enjoyed the society of my fair cousin Maria very much. She has shown me several of James’s letters, and I think I never saw such perfect specimens of _love-letters_,--those in any novel you ever read are perfectly indifferent compared to them. Without being silly in the least, they are full of all the fervor and extatification which you would expect from the most ardent lover.”--L. L. Thaxter to T. W. Higginson, 19 January, 1842.

[30] “I am obliged to stay at home whenever Father goes to Boston, and as he usually goes thither on the four first days of the week, I am rather closely prisoned.”--J. R. L. to R. Carter, 31 December, 1843.

[31] Thomas W. White, the editor.

[32] The sonnet, “To the Spirit of Keats,” was the first of the two; the other was “Sunset and Moonshine,” not retained by the poet in his final collection.

[33] “[Mrs. Longfellow] was the first stranger that ever said a kind word to me about my poems. She spoke to me of my _Year’s Life_, then just published. I had then just emerged from the darkest and unhappiest period of my life, and was peculiarly sensitive to sympathy. My volume, I knew, was crude and immature, and did not do me justice; but I knew also that there was a _heart_ in it, and I was grateful for her commendation.”--J. R. L. to H. W. Longfellow, 13 August, 1845.

[34] “Especially grateful is the praise of one in whose conversation I have marked a hearty appreciation of those greatest reformers, our glorious old English Poets.”--J. R. L. to Robert Carter, 2 September, 1842.

[35] Mr. Woodberry, in editing “Lowell’s Letters to Poe,” in _Scribner’s Monthly_ for August, 1894, explains the situation thus: “The contract bound Lowell and Carter to furnish the publishers five thousand copies on the twentieth of each month under a penalty of five hundred dollars in case of failure and the publishers to take that number at a certain price. The March number was eight days late, and the publishers, in the face of what was probably seen to be an unfortunate speculation, claimed the forfeit but offered to waive it if the contract should be altered so as to require them to take only so many copies as they could sell. The result was that the editors were obliged to stop printing from a lack of credit, and were left with a large indebtedness for manufacture as well as to contributors. It appears from Poe’s letters that he was paid his small claim a year later.”

[36] Carter had just been to see Maria White.

[37] “The Maiden’s Death.”

[38] In a letter written after he had at last seen Miss White, Mr. Briggs writes: “I hardly know what I could say to M. W. unless what I felt inclined to when I saw her, ‘_Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis_.’”

[39] “L’Envoi,” beginning

“whether my heart hath wiser grown or not.”

[40] _The Broadway Journal_, which Mr. Briggs was just projecting.

[41] Mr. Briggs had written to Lowell: “I suppose that you are going to impose upon yourselves the heathenish ceremonies of a wedding, and in the most solemn period of your lives, give yourselves up to the most foolish of all the world’s follies. Tut! you will be sick of white satins and raisins for the next century. Is’t the first of the month that you are to be married? I would like to know the day that I may keep you in remembrance. Page will be here and I will have him down to Bishop’s Terrace, and we will keep it up with becoming solemnity. One of my darling fowls shall be sacrificed.”

[42] The exact succession of his books was _A Year’s Life_, 1841; _Poems_, 1843 (dated 1844); _Conversations on Some of the Old Poets_, 1845.

[43] Mr. Evert A. Duyckinck, in March, 1846, replying to a suggestion by Lowell of “specimens of old translators” for Wiley & Putnam’s Library, doubts the practicability, but adds, “You will, I hope, not lose sight of so good a topic which might provoke a new conversation between yourself and your Mrs. Harris (Philip and John) very profitably.”

[44] _Letters_, i. 69.

[45] See Appendix B.

[46] Editor of _Graham’s Magazine_.

[47] _Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife_, i. 283.

[48] The circumstances pertaining to the close of Mr. Briggs’s connection with _The Broadway Journal_ are detailed with some particularity in letters from Mr. Briggs to Lowell, printed in Mr. G. E. Woodberry’s _Edgar Allan Poe_ in the _American Men of Letters_ series. See pp. 234-239.

[49] Lowell’s letters to Poe may be found in an article with that title, edited by Mr. Woodberry, and printed in _Scribner’s Magazine_, August, 1894. Those of Poe to Lowell appear in Mr. Woodberry’s volume on Poe in the _American Men of Letters_ series. Lowell’s letters, which run from 19 November, 1842, when he was beginning his _Pioneer_ venture, to 12 December, 1844, just before his marriage, are occupied mainly with solicitation of contributions, interest in Poe’s work, and efforts at obtaining opportunities for Poe to lecture in Boston. They have slight value as illustrations of Lowell’s life, save as they show his eagerness to help a brother author, and his keen interest in letters.

[50] It may be noted that at the New England Anti-Slavery Convention held in Boston, 28 May, 1844, the issue of disunion was plainly presented in a set of resolutions. The vote stood 250 in favor to 24 in dissent. Among the number who voted “nay” were James Russell Lowell and Maria White. See _William Lloyd Garrison_, iii. 111, 112.

[51] For a striking use of the poem, see _infra_, vol. ii. p. 137.

[52] But his talk went on as unrestrictedly as ever. Longfellow records in his diary under date of 23 October, 1845: “Lowell passed the morning with me. Amiable enthusiast! He proposes to write a book in favor of fanaticism.”

[53] It is a comment on Lowell’s indifference to wealth that his imagination did not take fire at the announcement of the discovery of gold in California. It may be said that his mind was directed toward the immediate political consequences, but he had occasion to write upon the subject of the discovery, when this alone engaged his attention. He was struck with some of the picturesque situations, but his reflections were mainly summed up in these words: “We have never seen anything like the accounts from California since we read that chapter of _Candide_, in which Voltaire carries his hero to El Dorado. Supposing all we hear to be true, it is hardly probable that gold will continue to be found there in such large quantities for any great length of time. It will doubtless become more and more scarce, and the difficulty of obtaining it greater. After all, the gold mines which give the surest and richest yield are the brain and the common earth. The discovery of a new fertilizer is of more practical benefit than that of the philosopher’s stone would be; the invention of the steam-engine has created more wealth than the richest gold mines; and wise men are not wanting who believe that Fourier has given us something better than a California. And why travel fifteen thousand miles around Cape Horn for a place to dig in? Heaven knows the earth wants more washing here than at Sacramento River. Moreover, every one of us has a vein more or less profitable, if it were only diligently worked.”--“Eldorado,” in _National Anti-Slavery Standard_, 21 December, 1848.

[54] Mr. Briggs was highly entertained by the French exercise, and asked: “Who is your master? But never mind. Let me recommend you to an incomparable one who had the honor of teaching Talleyrand a new language (English) to help him conceal his thoughts. I mean Cobbett. If you have never seen his French grammar, get it by all means and read it, if you do not study it; and then read his English grammar, which you will find more amusing than the Comic Latin Grammar.” Lowell does not seem to have followed his advice immediately. At least he wrote to me three or four years before his death: “I never read any English grammar in my life, thank God, except Cobbett’s a few years ago, and in that I found errors of ignorance,--as was to be expected.”

[55] At the close of 1866 a testimonial was presented to Mr. Garrison when he retired from active service, and Lowell was the medium of certain English subscriptions, among them that of John Bright. In sending this Lowell writes to Mr. Garrison: “Nothing could have been more in keeping with the uniform wisdom of your anti-slavery leadership than the time you chose for resigning it.”

[56] It is greatly to be regretted that the important correspondence of Quincy and Lowell does not exist. By agreement each destroyed the letters of the other.

[57] The curious reader may see here one of the little idiosyncrasies in which Lowell indulged throughout his life, though this is one of the first instances I have noted.

[58] Mr. Gay had written: “I do not know how you feel about the Imprint, but my own opinion is that there had better be either no name, or only one there. Every one will know that yourself, Mrs. Chapman and Quincy and Briggs and others contribute to its columns. The more we can make believe contribute to it the better, and to put three or four names in the Imprint will seem to limit the number. I wish that all its readers shall believe that a variety of people have had a hand in the making up of every number, and not only those whose names are before them. For the same reason I wish that the initial system shall be done with. The readers will be prone to believe the best if they are not certain, and if there are none of these ‘small caps,’ as the printers say, to guide, they may sometimes be humbugged into eating my chaff for your and others’ wheat.” Mr. Gay had his way at first, but before long his readers’ curiosity drove him into the use of initials as signatures.

[59] See _Letters of James Russell Lowell_, i. 111-116. Copyright, 1893, by Harper & Brothers.

[60] A little of this jest is preserved in Parson Wilbur’s note to the second _Biglow paper_, as published in book form.

[61] In his address on “The Place of the Independent in Politics,” delivered forty years later, Lowell pithily says: “A moral purpose multiplies us (Independents) by ten, as it multiplied the early Abolitionists. They emancipated the negro; and we mean to emancipate the respectable white man.”

[62] There is a reference to Jefferson in a letter written ten years later, which is interesting as one of the rare apprizements by Lowell of American public men. “I have run through Randall’s _Jefferson_ with the ends of my fingers--a perfect chaos of biography--but enough to confirm me in the belief that Jefferson was the first _American_ man. I doubt if we have produced a better thinker or writer. His style is admirable in general, warmed with just enough enthusiasm for eloquence, not too much for conviction.”--J. R. L. to C. E. Norton, 11 October, 1858.

[63] “A steam-engine in breeches,” was Sydney Smith’s characterization.

[64] _Letters_, i. 157, 21 May, 1849.

[65] Dr. Lowell’s course in this matter was characteristic of his fine sense of honor. Previous to the ordination of his colleague, Dr. Bartol, 1 March, 1837, he received from the West Church Society a salary of $2000 a year. At a meeting of the proprietors held 22 April, 1849, a letter was read from Dr. Lowell, in which he says: “It was always a favorite object with me, in the event of the settlement of a colleague pastor, to resign the whole of my salary, or at most, to retain only a small portion of it, that you might have less hesitation in calling upon me for the services I might be able to render you.” It was with great reluctance, he added, that he then came to the conclusion it was his duty to accede to the request of the proprietors and retain all the salary he had been accustomed to receive; now he could do so no longer, and he insisted respectfully on an arrangement by which he should resign a quarter of his salary, “with the purpose at no distant day, if Providence permit, of resigning a further sum.” In 1854 Dr. Lowell resigned the whole of his salary, but the Society declined to accept the proposal.

[66] “I do not blame Foster or Philbrick or Jackson for not being satisfied with me; but, on the other hand, I thank God that he has gradually taught me to be quite satisfied with _them_.”--_Letters_, i. 157.

[67] Cornelius Matthews.

[68] The greater part of this letter will be found in _Letters of James Russell Lowell_, i. 120. Copyright by Harper & Brothers, 1893.

[69] The reference apparently is to Miss Fuller’s criticism of Lowell three years previously, in which she said: “His interest in the moral questions of the day has supplied the want of vitality in himself; his great facility at versification has enabled him to fill the ear with a copious stream of pleasant sound. But his verse is stereotyped: his thoughts sound no depth, and posterity will not remember him.”--_Papers on Literature and Art_, p. 308.

[70] Briggs did not like Bryant, and in this he was abetted by Page, to whom Bryant at this time was sitting. Page was angry because, in the brief notice of Lowell’s _Poems_ which Bryant wrote, he commended only the “Morning Glory,” which was Mrs. Lowell’s, and because Bryant intimated that Lowell’s “To the Past” was suggested by a poem of his own with the same title.

[71] This was the year of General Taylor’s nomination.

[72] In a letter to me about the _Fable_ written in 1890, Lowell says: “Mr. Putnam, I believe, never discovered that the title-page was in metre, nor that it was in rhyme either. Mr. Norton told me the other day that he had a copy of some later edition (after Putnam had changed his place of business), in which the imprint was ‘G. P. Putnam, Astor (or something) Place.’ I don’t remember whether I knew of it at the time, but had I known, I should have let it pass as adding to the humor of the book.” The first title-page ended

SET FORTH IN _October, the 31st day, in the year ’48_ G. P. PUTNAM, BROADWAY.

[73] Hunt’s poem again doubtless owed its being to Lord Byron’s _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_.

[74] Morse’s _Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes_, ii. 107. In an unfinished letter to Dr. Holmes written from Madrid in 1878, Lowell refers to a recent criticism of Holmes’s poems, in which the characterization in the _Fable_ was quoted. “I thought the young fellow who wrote it had some sense, especially as he quoted something I said of you in my impudence thirty years ago. It is an awful thought, but these who then were passing out of the baldness of infancy are now entering upon that of middle age, and here we both are as if nothing had happened. And probably precious little has happened,--I mean of any great account. The more one reads of history the more one sees mankind doing the same foolish things over again with admirable gravity and then contemplating themselves with the satisfaction of Jack Horner. I remember when I was writing the _Fable for Critics_ and used to walk up and down the front walk at Elmwood, I paused to watch the ant-hills, and in the seemingly aimless and yet ceaseless activity of their citizens thought I saw a very close paraphrase of the life of men.”

[75] The Bibliographical Note in the Appendix gives the dates of the successive numbers. See Appendix C.

[76] When he was supervising the final _Riverside_ edition of his writings, he gladly accepted the services of a graduate student at Harvard, now Professor of Law in Western Reserve University, Mr. Frank Beverly Williams, who prepared a series of notes.

[77] Mr. Otis died October 28. “Only think of H. G. O!” wrote Lowell to Gay early in November; “I would not have squibbed him if I had known he was sick, but I never hear anything.”

[78] Writing forty years later in excuse of a petty solecism, he said: “I think it must have been written when I was fresh from the last _Biglow Papers_. When my soul enters Mr. Biglow’s person, she divests herself for the time of all conventional speech, and for some time after she leaves it is apt to forget herself.”

[79] He had the ill luck which not infrequently attends the writers of fiction, to make use of an actual name in one of his inventions, and received this protest from the Rev. H. Wilbur:--

“Unknown Sir, I believe there is no other clergyman in New England besides myself of the same name you sometimes associate with your writings. Perhaps with the scintillations of your genius my name would be more likely to descend to posterity than from writings or labours of my own. But if your edification could be as well promoted under the ministry of Parson Smith or some _fictitious_ name not likely to be associated with individuality as with the _old Parson_ you will much oblige yours very respectfully.”

[80] He intended first to call this “A June Idyll.”

[81] That is, the hostile criticisms of his book.

[82] These letters from Hawthorne were first printed in the London _Athenæum_, 10, 17 August, 1889, and have since been included in vol. xvii. of the _Old Manse Edition_ of Hawthorne’s writings.

[83] An article on Landor.

[84] In a note to T. W. Higginson, who proposed an article in the _Atlantic_ on Parker, Lowell wrote 28 June, 1860: “I think that folks have confounded (as they commonly do) _force_ with _power_ in estimating him, and so have overrated him.”

[85] _The Liberty Bell._

[86] _The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America._ By Fredrika Bremer. New York: Harper & Bros. 1853. Vol. i. pp. 130, 131.

[87] See _Boston Courier_, 3 January, 1850.

[88] “The Darkened Mind.”

[89] Whether or no this started Mr. Gay on an historical investigation, he did inquire into the matter; for thirty years later he published in the _Atlantic_ for November, 1881, an article entitled, “When did the Pilgrim Fathers land at Plymouth?” in which he established to his own satisfaction that the first landing was neither on the 21st or 22d, but on the 4th of January, 1621.

[90] In another letter written on shipboard, Lowell refers to the gift thus: “I held it in especial esteem because it was given in a way so characteristic of John, who sidled up to me as if he were asking a favor instead of doing one, and having slipped it into my hand in a particularly let-not-your-right-hand-know-what-your-left-hand-doeth kind of manner, instantly vanished and remained absconded for half an hour.”

[91] _Leaves from my Journal, Works_, i. 213.

[92] It was more than thirty years later that Lowell wrote the significant poem suggested by this picture.

[93] Mr. Black’s daughter, Mrs. Hayllar, kindly sends the two prologues, which are in a way wholly from memory. Lowell afterwards, she writes, “tore up his notes, saying the lines were too insignificant for preservation, when to his astonishment, my father, who had a quite remarkable memory, repeated them both to him.” From her own memory Mrs. Hayllar recalled the bits of the first prologue, and afterward found amongst her father’s papers the whole of the second.

[94] See “Walter Savage Landor,” in _Latest Literary Essays and Addresses_, p. 51.

[95] _The Poems and Prose Remains of Arthur Hugh Clough_, i. 188.

[96] Perhaps his partial friend Briggs was referring to this when he wrote, 18 March, 1860: “If you bring out that long promised volume of fireside travels, I hope you will not omit that racy chapter of the novel you read to me, but which you will never write. I think it was much better than anything of the Autocrat’s that I have read.”

[97] The lines on pp. 80, 81, of “Cambridge Thirty Years Ago” are also saved from the same poem, but from the unprinted portion.

[98] See his two letters to T. W. Higginson, outlining his plan, and published by the latter in his _Old Cambridge_.

[99] See letter to Mr. Norton, 13 April, 1884, _Letters_, ii. 279.

[100] “A Few of Lowell’s Letters” in _The Old Rome and the New and other Studies_, p. 134.

[101] The poem was not printed till April, 1858, when it appeared in _The Atlantic Monthly_.

[102] It was the custom when there was an unusual demand for tickets, for the lecturer, besides his Tuesday and Friday evening discourses, to repeat them on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons. In those days also, applicants for tickets registered their names during a certain number of days in advance, and at the close of the registry notification was made that persons holding numbers divisible by two, three, four, or five, as the case might be (in the ratio of applicants to the number of seats in the hall), might call and receive tickets.

[103] Probably the verses beginning,--

“Farewell, for the bark has her breast to the tide.”

[104] “A Good Word for Winter,” in _Literary Essays_, iii. 267.

[105] “Mr. Lowell as a Teacher:” _Scribner’s Magazine_, November, 1891. Included in his volume _Stelligeri_: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

[106] “Address before the Modern Language Association of America.”

[107] 21 August, 1857.

[108] 31 August, 1857.

[109] 31 December, 1857.

[110] “A Few of Lowell’s Letters,” in _The Old Rome and the New, and Other Studies_, by W. J. Stillman.

[111] _Literary Friends and Acquaintance_, p. 242.

[112] See especially “The Subjective of It,” first printed in the _Atlantic Monthly_, and “The Philosophers’ Camp,” printed in _The Century_, and both included in _The Old Rome and the New, and Other Studies_. And more particularly see the first volume of _The Autobiography of a Journalist_.

[113] It is worth noting that the year in which this sentence was written, the _Atlantic Monthly_ was, in a special contingency, edited by the Professor of English Literature at Princeton.

[114] Mr. Phillips was by marriage connected with Mr. Emerson’s family.

[115] Mr. J. Elliot Cabot.

[116] E. E. Hale’s _James Russell Lowell and his Friends_.

[117] “The New Portfolio,” January, 1885.

[118] In publishing in book form _The Mortal Antipathy_, of which the first paper of “The New Portfolio” was made the Introduction, Dr. Holmes so far corrected his statement as to make it read: “I wondered somewhat when Mr. Lowell insisted upon my becoming a contributor.”

[119] “He envied every daysman and drover in the tavern their manly speech.” In reprinting the paper in his volume _Society and Solitude_, Emerson corrected to “He envied every drover and lumberman.”

[120] Most of this letter is given in Mr. Pickard’s _Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier_.

[121] “The Origin of Didactic Poetry.”

[122] I recall the sententious principle which another editor announced to me as the rule by which he was governed. “The only question I ask myself is, _must_ I take this?”

[123] _Letters_, i. 288, 289.

[124] There are three or four witty passages, to which this is applicable.

[125] See _Letters_, i. 283, 284.

[126] The Wanderer was a slave-ship seized in New York harbor. A Charleston jury refused to convict the captain.

[127] _Letters_, i. 286.

[128] _Letters_, i. 281.

[129] He was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 14 November, 1855, and into the Massachusetts Historical Society, 14 May, 1863, but he does not appear to have been a frequent attendant at the meetings of either of these bodies.

[130] This criticism also is given in C. E. Stowe’s _The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe_.

[131] Mr. Fields was in Europe when the transaction occurred.

[132] “Experience of Samuel Absalom, Filibuster,” by D. Deaderick.

[133] _Letters_, i. 310. May 23, 1861.

[134] The household at Elmwood was broken in upon apparently not long after the return of the Lowells, by the death of Dr. Charles Lowell, 20 January, 1861.