CHAPTER XI

POETRY AND PROSE

1858-1872

Lowell’s writing during the war, and very largely also during the four previous years in which he had been engaged on the _Atlantic_, was mainly of a political character, and it has seemed best not to interrupt the record with much reference to his other writings and his pursuits generally during these eight years. But though he felt keenly the great movement which was breaking up the old union and making way for the new and greater union, he was too established in his own order of life to permit that to undergo any violent change. Even in his political writing, as we have seen, he was first of all a man of letters, with an imaginative foresight; his occupation both as a teacher and an editor gave a certain steadying force to his powers, so that though he rebelled against the irksomeness of routine he was delivered from what might have been the waywardness of a too self-centred life.

His safety-valve during all this period was in his letters to his familiar friends, as it was also in the free talk which he held with them; and this, even though he chafed under restraint and pressure which seemed to him to lessen his spontaneity. “How malicious you are,” he writes to Miss Norton, 23 October, 1858, “about what I said of women’s being good letter writers! What I meant was that they wrote more unconsciously than we do. I don’t know how it is with other folks, but I cannot sit down now and write a letter as if I were talking. Good writing, I take it, can only result from necessity of expression, and an author satisfies that in so many ways that his letters are apt to be dull.

“I like ‘Miles Standish’ better than you do. I think it in some respects the best long poem L. has written. It is so simple and picturesque, and the story is not encumbered with unavailing description, which is a fault in ‘Evangeline.’ But I quite agree with you about the metre. It is too deceitfully easy.

“One might begin at dawn nor end till the purple twilight, Stringing verses at will, nor know it was verse he was stringing. This is the modern way, the way of steamer and railroad Where all the work is done, you scarcely know how, by the Engine. Ah, but the Hill of Fame, can they dig it down? can they grade it? Difficult always is Good, and he, I guess, who attains it Starts with two feet and a staff and bread for To-day in his wallet, Footsore dropping at last, repaid by long hope of the summit.”

His college duties he performed with conscientious fidelity, and he found at times a genuine satisfaction in the free intercourse with his students over great subjects, yet he could not always overlook the immaturity of his pupils, and he was impatient at the sort of work outside of direct teaching which falls to the lot of college professors. The task of lecturing itself was sure to suggest the incompleteness of expression, and so offend all his genius as a writer. “Yesterday,” he writes to Miss Norton, in the fall of 1859, “I began my lectures. I came off better than I expected, for I am always a great coward beforehand. I _hate_ lecturing, for I have discovered (entre nous) that it is almost impossible to learn _all_ about anything, unless, indeed, it be some piece of ill-luck, and then one has the help of one’s friends, you know.... I am trying to reform the Spanish and Italian classes. Charles would be astonished to hear me read the Castilian tongue, now wellnigh as familiar to me as Castilian soap. If he wouldn’t be, _I am_. I am about as much ‘Spanish,’ tell him, ‘as a Connecticut segar.’”

At the same time he wrote to Mr. Norton: “I am busier than ever, and, I fear, fruitlessly. My Italian class are half of them drones, and this hinders my getting on as I would with the rest. I am studying Spanish, as I did German in Dresden, reading it in all my leisure time, and before long mean to make myself thorough in it. At forty a man learns fast. My Spanish class is a very good one. There are only five, and they all do their best. _Vacare musis_--what does that mean? I have almost forgotten.”

“I champ the bit sometimes here,” he writes to the same a year later, “but God’s will be done! _Ancora imparo_, though I be in a go-cart. My Spanish recitations cost me some time and trouble as yet, for I make the students parse and construe with never-failing strictness. For this I have to study the grammar harder than any of them, for my Italian is always in my way with its slightly differing forms. However, I have learned more already than I should have thought possible a year ago, and I think some of the students seem to be interested.”

Now and then he could make his college work and his _Atlantic_ work play into each other, but not often. “I have as yet only dipped into your last four volumes,” he writes 12 June, 1860, to R. G. White, “and those I keep for the same good time (i.e. vacation). I have to prepare some lectures on Shakespeare, and shall kill two birds with one stone by making use of your edition, and so enabling myself to write an intelligent notice of it for the _Atlantic_.”

The _Atlantic_ itself gave him an agreeable change from his class-room duties, even if it took him along somewhat the same road as when, shortly after he undertook it, he received a contribution from Sainte-Beuve on Béranger, and translated it for the number for February, 1858. Two months later he began that series of criticisms on the successive volumes of Smith’s “Library of Old English Authors,” which he completed in the _North American_ ten years afterward, and combined into the long paper printed in the first volume of his “Literary Essays.” As an instance of minute detective work in criticism, the article is noteworthy, but we suspect that his readers to-day pass lightly over the scoring of Hazlitt’s editorship to read the brilliant characterizations of Elizabethan poets and dramatists, which crop out of the stony soil of textual criticism. In writing these articles Lowell was recurring to subjects which had, as we have seen, unfailing interest for him, and one cannot compare these notes on Chapman, Webster, Marlowe, and others with the observations that occur in “Conversations with the Old Dramatists,” without marking the greater mellowness of nature from which the later criticism proceeds. Lowell writes of them, not as in the first instance when he was just returned from a voyage of discovery, but as one who has lived long and familiarly in this rich country of the poetic mind.[19]

Excepting the “Biglow Papers,” a couple of political articles, two or three poems, and a few brief reviews of books, Lowell did not contribute to the _Atlantic_ during the four years of the war, and naturally he turned his prose work into the _North American_ after he became one of its editors. There, as we have seen, his work was mainly political, though he also did much reviewing of books; but after the pressure of war-time was lifted he made the review the vehicle for more strictly literary articles, and it was plainly a relief to him to spring back to subjects more congenial to his nature. In January, 1865, when Mr. Norton supplied the main political paper, Lowell printed that most characteristic article which in his collected writings bears the title “New England Two Centuries Ago,” and is in outward form a review of the third volume of Palfrey’s “History of New England” and of four volumes of the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. In its larger part a skilful florilegium of early writings, the paper is also and emphatically the reflection of Lowell’s mind during the stress of the war, when he was doubly concerned over the relation between the two great English-speaking nations and the practical solutions of the problems presented to democracy in the reëstablishment of order and union in the United States. He had rising in him, as his Ode shows, a great passion for the whole country; but as has been well said by Colonel Higginson, that no one can be a true cosmopolitan who is not at home in his own country, so it is equally true that national consciousness has its basis in local pride and affection. The genius of our political organism, by which one is called on for a double loyalty to state and nation, a loyalty jeoparded by the heresy of an extreme state-rights dogma, was finely disclosed in Lowell’s attitude. Fortunately for us the locality, the community in which our fortune is cast, has in itself a political essence, so that it is not mere attachment to the place of birth and breeding which makes its natural demand on us, but membership in an organism lacking only the crown of absolute independence to make it a unit of politics. It is a subtle but very real distinction between state and nation that permits not a divided but a complex loyalty, and the profound meaning which lies in the interplay of state and federal power is reflected in the consciousness of Americans as they bear themselves toward one or the other authority.

Now New England, though not an entity in politics, has so distinct a character that each of the states included in that name is representative of an order which is far more than a geographical division. Largely by reason of its historic genesis and development, New England is more an individual than any other group of commonwealths unless it be the Cotton States, and a man of Massachusetts, clearly the heart of the whole system, is very sure to think of himself as a New Englander without prejudice to his loyalty to his own state. Lowell certainly did. It was through New England, its history, its spirit, its genius, that he apprehended the very nature of freedom and the principles of democracy. Mr. Henry James has well said: “New England was heroic to him, for he felt in his pulses the whole history of her _origines_; it was impossible to know him without a sense that he had a rare divination of the hard realities of her past.”[20] And this article on “New England Two Centuries Ago,” designed to offer something of a conspectus of a people and land from which he was sprung, whose life was coursing in his veins, was also an interpretation of the political faith he held, a faith which he postulated for the final manifestation of the whole nation that in his imagination he saw rising out of the confusion of struggle. “I have little sympathy,” he says at the close, “with declaimers about the Pilgrim Fathers, who look upon them all as men of grand conceptions and superhuman foresight. An entire ship’s company of Columbuses is what the world never saw. It is not wise to form any theory and fit our facts to it, as a man in a hurry is apt to cram his travelling-bag, with a total disregard of shape or texture. But perhaps it may be found that the facts will only fit comfortably together on a single plan, namely, that the fathers did have a conception (which those will call grand who regard simplicity as a necessary element of grandeur) of founding here a commonwealth on those two eternal bases of Faith and Work; that they had indeed no revolutionary ideas of universal liberty, but yet, what answered the purpose quite as well, an abiding faith in the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God; and that they did not so much propose to make all things new, as to develop the latent possibilities of English law and English character, by clearing away the fences by which the abuse of the one was gradually discommoning the other from the broad fields of universal right. They were not in advance of their age, as it is called, for no one who is so can ever work profitably in it; but they were alive to the highest and most earnest thinking of their time.”

In this article, also, one may see something of Lowell’s feeling about England, which again was almost a traditionary sentiment. He saw the mother country through the glass of New England, and especially valued that Puritan strain in English history which had found such free play in New England. “Puritanism,” he says, “believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy;” and he found in the governmental attitude of England toward America in his own day a reminder of the policy exercised after the Restoration toward New England.

Lowell’s letters make it clear that at this time he was not given to the enjoyment of much hospitality. Mrs. Lowell was frequently an invalid, and though he had familiar friends to stay with him, as Rowse the painter, and gave cordial invitations to such as might be passing through Cambridge, he neither entertained much himself nor accepted entertainment at other houses. Now and then some man of letters came over from England or France and Lowell was asked to meet him. He records such an experience in a letter dated 20 September, 1861:--

“I dined the other day with Anthony Trollope, a big, red-faced, rather underbred Englishman of the bald-with-spectacles type. A good roaring positive fellow who deafened me (sitting on his right) till I thought of Dante’s Cerberus. He says he goes to work on a novel ‘just like a shoemaker on a shoe, only taking care to make honest stitches.’ Gets up at 5 every day, does all his writing before breakfast, and always writes just so many pages a day. He and Dr. Holmes were very entertaining. The Autocrat started one or two hobbies, and charged, paradox in rest--but it was pelting a rhinoceros with seed-pearl.

“_Dr._ You don’t know what Madeira is in England?

“_T._ I’m not so sure it’s worth knowing.

“_Dr._ Connoisseurship in it with us is a fine art. There are men who will tell you a dozen kinds, as Dr. Waagen would know a Carlo Dolci from a Guido.

“_T._ They might be better employed!

“_Dr._ Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well.

“_T._ Ay, but that’s begging the whole question. I don’t admit it’s _worse_ doing at all. If they earn their bread by it, it may be _worse_ doing (roaring).

“_Dr._ But you may be assured--

“_T._ No, but I mayn’t be asshŏrred. I _won’t_ be asshored. I don’t intend to be asshŏred (roaring louder)!

“And so they went it. It was very funny. Trollope wouldn’t give him any chance. Meanwhile, Emerson and I, who sat between them, crouched down out of range and had some very good talk, with the shot hurtling overhead. I had one little passage at arms with T. _apropos_ of English peaches. T. ended by roaring that England was the only country where such a thing as a peach or a grape was known. I appealed to Hawthorne, who sat opposite. His face mantled and trembled for a moment with some droll fancy, as one sees bubbles rise and send off rings in still water when a turtle stirs at the bottom, and then he said, ‘I asked an Englishman once who was praising their peaches to describe to me exactly what he meant by a peach, and he described something very like a cucumber.’ I rather liked Trollope.”

Lowell found in the winter of 1865-1866 a most congenial occasion for society in the meetings in Mr. Longfellow’s study, held for scrutiny of the proofs of that poet’s translation of the “Divina Commedia.” Mr. Longfellow records in his Diary, 25 October, 1865: “Lowell, Norton, and myself had the first meeting of our Dante Club. We read the XXV. _Purgatorio_; and then had a little supper. We are to meet every Wednesday evening at my house.” In the first Report of the Dante Society, Mr. Norton gives a full and interesting account of these meetings, and of the task they set themselves.

“We paused,” he says, “over every doubtful passage, discussed the various readings, considered the true meaning of obscure words and phrases, sought for the most exact equivalent of Dante’s expression, objected, criticised, praised, with a freedom that was made perfect by Mr. Longfellow’s absolute sweetness, simplicity, and modesty, and by the entire confidence that existed between us. Witte’s text was always before us, and of the early commentators Buti was the one to whom we had most frequent and most serviceable recourse. They were delightful evenings; there could be no pleasanter occupation; the spirits of poetry, of learning, of friendship, were with us. Now and then some other friend or acquaintance would join us for the hours of study. Almost always one or two guests would come in at ten o’clock, when the work ended, and sit down with us to a supper, with which the evening closed.”

With the _North American Review_ still making its quarterly demands upon him, but the political impulse less urgent, Lowell turned naturally to literary criticism. Thus far, he had not made any deliberate appraisal of great writers, save in his short paper on Keats, which, from the occasion that called it out, was rather biographical than critical. He had in a fragmentary fashion in his “Conversations,” and in a discursive manner in his lectures, given appreciations of the great poets and dramatists of England, but in the next decade he was to print a series of essays which should embody his reading, study, reflection, and poetic insight in that field of human endeavor where his own work stands, and which had been since his boyish days the one great subject of his investigation.

History, which he read with avidity, was the background from which were projected the great figures of literature. Philosophy was not for him a system of independent reasoning, but rather the unclassified winged thoughts on high themes embodied in great poetic and dramatic art. Language, always a subject full of interest for him, was attacked, not from the point of view of a man of science, but from that of one curious of its human relations and its instrumentality in art. Nor was his knowledge of the plastic arts more than that which comes incidentally to a traveller and a general reader and observer, or his interest in them especially keen. He was very likely to bring the canons of literary art to bear upon them, sometimes indeed, as might be guessed, with shrewdness and analogical truthfulness; or he was affected by personal considerations, as when he writes of Story: “I saw the photographs of William’s statues, and think them _very_ fine. They are really noble. The Quincy is admirable--the best thing of the kind our modern times has produced. In short, to my thinking, William is the only man of them all who knows how to do the thing. It was a real pleasure to be so thoroughly satisfied with the work of an old friend.” He recognized frankly his own limitations in the matter, as indeed he was disposed to think the defect almost ineradicable in the Saxon, who “has never shown any capacity for art, nay, commonly commits ugly blunders when he is tempted in that direction;” and apparently his only suggestion for bettering the condition was to put before workmen good illustrations of great art in the books they should find in their libraries, and give them an acquaintance with Ruskin’s writings.

But literature stood to him as the great exponent of all that was permanent in the human spirit. “There is much,” he says, “that is deciduous in books, but all that gives them a title to rank as literature in the highest sense is perennial. Their vitality is the vitality not of one or another blood or tongue, but of human nature; their truth is not topical and transitory, but of universal acceptation; and thus all great authors seem the coevals not only of each other, but of whoever reads them, growing wiser with him as he grows wise, and unlocking to him one secret after another as his own life and experience give him the key, but on no other condition.”[21] It was with this principle determining his choice that he proceeded with more or less conscious assembling to discourse on Carlyle, Emerson, Lessing, Rousseau, Shakespeare, Dryden, Chaucer, Pope, Milton, Dante, Spenser, and Wordsworth, as well as to write in many detached passages on the genius of Goethe. Later he returned to the same general field, and besides revising his judgment on some of these topics, treated also with more or less fulness of Gray, Cervantes, Fielding, and Coleridge, while any one who consults the elaborate index to his prose writings will readily see how many other authors who belong in the great ranks have been drawn upon for illustration of the one great theme.

To his reading of all this literature he brought the touchstone of his own life and experience. In this word “experience,” moreover, must be included his own highest experiments. His poetry, for the most part, as we have already seen, does not have its roots in other literature; it springs from that life which he held in common with those whom he reverenced for their own acts of literary creation. He quotes the recommendation of a friend that he should read poetry, feed himself on bee bread so that he might get into the mood of writing poetry; but, though all his life long Lowell fed, as by the most natural appetite, on poetry and other forms of imaginative literature, his own poetry is not bookish, nor does it borrow in form or phrase. Even when most impressionable in his youth, the influence upon him of Keats and Tennyson was more obvious than that of Shakespeare or Marlowe, only because, eschewing the imitative, his verse took the color of his generation. The likenesses were always general, and when he essayed forms of verse most rigid in their historical development, as the sonnet and the ode, he simply obeyed the law as his great progenitors had done, finding his freedom within the law, and not in outbreaks and protests. The conscious intention to be original, he himself says, seldom leads to anything better than extravagance; and there is a passage in his paper on Chaucer which sums up a large part of his literary philosophy.[22]

“Poets have forgotten that the first lesson of literature, no less than of life, is the learning how to burn your own smoke; that the way to be original is to be healthy; that the fresh color, so delightful in all good writing, is won by escaping from the fixed air of self into the brisk atmosphere of universal sentiments; and that to make the common marvellous, as if it were a revelation, is the test of genius.”

With his large literary essays as works of art I do not purpose concerning myself; such study lies somewhat outside the range of a biography, but as these papers formed a considerable and very important expression of his mind at one period of his life, it is worth while to look at them with a view to discover how far they serve to disclose him, to read them by the light of his experience, and to see if he put his personality into this form of writing. The publication of Carlyle’s “Frederick the Great” was the occasion of the first of these articles. In writing of it to Leslie Stephen, when it was reprinted in “My Study Windows,” he admits that he was harder on Carlyle than he meant to be, because he was fighting against a secret partiality. The phrase lets one a little into Lowell’s mind. As far back as in his college days he was reading Carlyle with gusto, and the breezy description[23] which he gave of Boston at the period when Carlyle’s “message” acted as a sort of leaven in the new dough of New England, was a lively reminiscence of his own tumultuous youth. Thus, upon writing of Carlyle when he himself was nearing the line of fifty, there was an undercurrent of reminiscence of his own callowness. He remembered his devotion to the Carlyle of the “Miscellanies,” and was more or less conscious that he had outlived his first enthusiasm. With all his admiration for the great critic who stirred him when he was himself pricking on the plain of Reform, his point of view was now changed, for he had left Carlyle’s side and come into more complete possession of his own judgment. The secret influences which forbade him to be preponderatingly ethical, which kept him from abandoning himself to the anti-slavery cause, even when he was fighting in the ranks, and made it impossible for him to be a great teacher, though quite aware of what constitutes a great teacher, had lessened, perhaps, his effectiveness in some single direction, but had given him greater poise and enabled him on rare occasions to bring all his powers into play, and then to do easily, without conscious effort, the thing he wanted to do. The “Commemoration Ode” is an instance, and in this judgment of Carlyle he seems to me unwittingly to be judging the Lowell who seemed somewhat possible in the days when he first read Carlyle. There is a sentence in the essay which puts the thing in a nutshell. “The delicate skeleton of admirably articulated and related parts which underlies and sustains every true work of art, and keeps it from sinking on itself a shapeless heap, he [Carlyle] would crush remorselessly to come at the marrow of meaning. With him the ideal sense is secondary to the ethical and metaphysical, and he has but a faint conception of their possible unity.”

It was in the growing conception of this unity that Lowell had moved away from Carlyle. The constant adjustment of the ideal and the ethical had been the ripening process in his mind, a process greatly stimulated by the urgent need he felt during the past few years for finding some common ground on which his visions of truth and freedom and his practical sense could meet. It was largely through a great political realization that Lowell came to be what thenceforth he was, a sane critic of literature and a poet whose imagination instinctively sought large moulds. This is not to say that he was indifferent to any other expression; his nature was too free and spontaneous for that; but if one is to be measured by the main incidents of his life, it is fair to say that the Lowell who after this left his impress on his countrymen was a man of such balance of mind that his judgments and his poems alike had the weight that comes from this equipoise, and the man thus characterized could scarcely fail in new relations to show the ease of one self-centred, and not the restlessness and anxiety of an experimenter with life.

It is this consciousness of art governed by great laws, whether applied to life or to literature, that dominates Lowell’s expression, and in the essay on Carlyle, his keenest criticism is called out by his perception of Carlyle’s failure in this respect. “Had Mr. Carlyle been fitted out completely by nature as an artist, he would have had an ideal in his work which would have lifted his mind away from the muddier part of him, and trained him to the habit of seeking and seeing the harmony rather than the discord and contradiction of things.” Again we read in this passage the unconscious reflection of its writer’s own mind, which once had been far enough away from this habit. Nothing in Carlyle appears to interest him more than the lawlessness into which his exuberant humor had led him, and the narrow escape he had had of being a great poet, and he sums up his judgment of “Frederick the Great” by saying that “it has the one prime merit of being the work of a man who has every quality of a great poet except that supreme one of rhythm, which shapes both matter and manner to harmonious proportion, and that where it is good, it is good as only genius knows how to be.”

In the same number of the _Review_ which holds this article on Carlyle appears a shorter one on Swinburne, which, though dealing with a more occasional subject, also illustrates the temper in which Lowell was now writing, and has a special interest, since it deals directly with poetry and intimates, that when treating of a contemporary writer his mind was most set on that aspect of poetry which ignores the distinction of time. The phenomenon of a new poet sends him back into an inquiry into the very realities of poetry itself. Though he has a few specific criticisms of Swinburne’s “Chastelard” and his “Atalanta in Calydon,” the theme which interests him most is the possibility of reënacting antiquity in poetry, and he devotes the larger part of his paper to a demonstration of the truth that the result of all such endeavors is to produce the artificial and not the artistic. In a letter to Mr. Stedman, written apparently when this subject was fresh in his mind, he repeats his conclusion with the force of a friendly letter writer. Mr. Stedman had thanked him for a review of his poem, “Alice of Monmouth,” but asks his judgment of another poem he had written on an antique theme. “I will answer frankly,” wrote Lowell, “that I did not like Alektryon, and don’t think him at all to be compared to his sister Alice,--a strutting fellow that wants to make me believe he can crow in ancient Greek. Alice is Christian, modern, American, and that’s why I like her. I don’t believe in these modern antiques--no, not in Landor, not in Swinburne, not in any of ’em. They are all wrong. It’s like writing Latin verses--the material you work in is dead.”

Though Lowell had thus turned with avidity to his more congenial field of letters, he was not yet to be released from the duty imposed upon him by his editorship of the _Review_, and by his own political thought, of taking part in the discussion which Reconstruction raised. In the same number of the _North American_ which contained the two papers just noted, he wrote also an article on “The President on the Stump,” which, after a cursory consideration of the growing division between President Johnson and Congress, closed with a hypothetical address delivered to a Southern delegation by an imaginary President Johnson. Into this address Lowell packed his convictions as to the attitude which should be taken toward the Southern States by a President who had come from the South. It was so unusual for Lowell to dramatize, even in poetry, that this assumption has a singular interest, and, barring the element of Southern birth, is a close copy of Lowell’s mind at this time. Every man of thought has his dream of action, and we can read in this speech how Lowell would have translated his ideals of truth, freedom, and justice into executive acts, could he, who had watched the conflict closely, have had the chance that poets picture of being king for a day.

Perhaps all this was in his mind when he wrote in his last “Biglow Paper:”--

“Ez I wuz say’n’, I hain’t no chance to speak So’s ’t all the country dreads me onct a week, But I’ve consid’ble o’ thet sort o’ head That sets to home an’ thinks wut _might_ be said.”

This last paper, “Mr. Hosea Biglow’s Speech in March Meeting,” followed in the May _Atlantic_, and said over again the same lesson in the freer form of verse and with the more familiar dramatic impersonation of the Yankee countryman. It is an illustration of the greater carrying power of Lowell’s verse over his prose that the shrewd political philosophy which lies in the two series of the “Biglow Papers,” closely as it applied to the political situations in 1846-1848 and 1861-1866, has come again into play in the very different situation in national politics following the war for the independence of Cuba, so that while one would find in the newspapers but few quotations from Lowell’s “Political Essays” he would find plenty of lines from the “Biglow Papers.”

These two productions were not to be the last of his political writings at this period. One more was to follow in October, but the impulse to take part in the discussion of national events was relaxed, and he was falling back into his more congenial life of devotion to letters in the quiet retreat of Elmwood. “My dear Charles,” he writes to Mr. Norton, 30 May, 1866, “I snatch a moment from the whirl of dissipation to bring up for you the annals of Cambridge to the present date. In the first place, Cranch and his daughters are staying with us--since last Saturday. On that day I took him to club, where he saw many old friends (he has not been here for twenty years, poor fellow!) and had a good time. We had a pleasant time, I guess. With me it was a business meeting. I sat between Hoar and Brimmer, that I might talk over college matters. Things will be arranged to suit me, I rather think, and the salary (perhaps) left even larger than I hoped.

“Cranch and I amuse me very much. They read their poems to each other like a couple of boys, and so contrive for themselves a very good-natured, if limited, public. I cannot help laughing to myself, whenever I am alone, at these rhythmical debauches. The best of it is that there is always one at least who is never bored. I like him very much, though it always makes me a little sad that a man with so many gifts should lack the one of being successful. He brought with him a fairy story full of fancy, and illustrations, most of which are as charming and original as can be. I hope to get Fields to publish it.[24] Cranch wants some such encouragement very much. He begins to think himself born under an ill star. I fancy the trouble is that he was not brought up to work, in a nation of day laborers. You know I have a natural sympathy with the butterflies as against the ants and the bees, and I think they will all be put in a heavenly poor-house one of these days, with the industrious rich to work for them, and buy their books and pictures. Cranch always reminds me of Clough, so you may be sure I like to have him here. We shall enjoy each other very much if we don’t quarrel over our poems.

“You will see my verses to Bartlett in the next _Atlantic_,[25] and I guess you will like ’em. They seemed to me fanciful and easy when I corrected the proof, with some droll triple rhymes....

“It is now high time to change the conversation and speak of the weather. We are having it of the rarest April sort--whims of sunshine dappling a continuous mood of rain erratic thunderclaps ending like my novel with the first chapter--promising notes of fine to-morrows ending not in bankruptcy but liquidation. In short, the clerk of the weather seems suddenly to have bethought him of his remissness with the watering-pot for the last two years and is making it up all at once. All the wells (except, of course, that of Truth) will be filled again and milk will be plenty once more. The greenness of everything is delicious. I feel as if I were sprouting myself, so keen is my farmer’s sympathy with my beets and carrots, and especially with a new field of grass which was becoming _too_ emblematic of flesh, and has been snatched from the very jaws of death by this intervention of Jupiter Pluvius. I had just had a new pump set in the well at the foot of the garden, and had begun to think it would be merely a dry symbol, but this will set all its arteries a-throbbing.

“Your dream of a stock-farm is a delightful one (there is a yellow-bird in the cherry-tree by my window drinking the tremulous rain diamonds that hang under the twigs), but I fear that the only stocks I am young enough for now are in railroad companies and the like whose golden fleeces yield a half yearly clip. I am satisfied, though, that nobody has such a sympathy with the seasons and feels himself so truly a partner in the trade of nature as a farmer. I find great pleasure in my own little ventures in this Earth-ship of ours on her annual voyages, and shall even grow jolly again if my college duties are so arranged next year that I shall get rid of some of my worries, and be able to give my trees and crops the encouragement of a cheerful face. Depend upon it, they feel it and grow in proportion. Fancy the disheartenmentof a regiment of cabbages or turnips when they see the commander-in-chief with a long face! Where shall they find the cheerful juices that shall carry them through a long drouth, or the happy temper that is as good as an umbrella to ’em in dull wet spells of weather, if their natural leader be as bloodless as the one, or show no better head than the other? Doesn’t it stand to reason?”

Six weeks later he wrote to the same friend: “The hot weather we have been having for some time--95° for nearly a week together--has pretty nearly used me up. It has made me bilious and blue, my moral thermometer sinking as the atmospheric rose. But Sunday afternoon we had one of the finest thunderstorms I ever saw, beginning in the true way with a sudden whirl of wind that filled the air with leaves and dust and twigs (_dinanzi va superbo_), followed in due time by a burst of rain. One flash struck close by us somewhere, and I heard distinctly the crack of a bough at the moment of its most intense redness. Just at sunset the cloud lifted in the west, and the effect was one that I always wish all my friends could be at Elmwood to see. The tops of the English elms were turned to sudden gold, which seen against a leaden background of thundercloud had a supernatural look. Presently that faded, and after the sun had set came a rainbow more extravagant than any I ever saw. There were seven lines of the glory looking like the breaking of quiet surf on the beach of a bay. First came one perfect bow--the more brilliant that the landscape was dark everywhere by the absence of the sunlight. Gradually another outlined itself at some distance above, and then the first grew double, triple, till at last six arches of red could be counted. The other colors I could only see in the two main bows. I thought it a trick of vision, but Fanny and her sister counted as I did. A triple arch was the most I had ever seen before. Here is a diagram.... _d_ is the spectator for whom this wonderful show was exhibited. I should have made _d_ a capital, thus, _D_, to indicate his importance in the scene. For have I not read in some old moralist that God would not have created so much beauty without also creating an eye to see and a soul to feel it? As if God could not be a poet! The author of the book of Genesis knew better. However, it is something to have had an eye see what we are seeing; it seems to double the effect by some occult sympathy, and my rainbows are always composed of one part rain, one part sunshine, and one part blessed Henry Vaughan with his ‘Still young and fine,’ and his ‘World’s gray fathers in one knot!’ The older I grow the more I am convinced that (there) are no satisfactions so deep and so permanent as our sympathies with outward nature....

“In some moods I heartily despise and hate myself, there is so much woman in me ( ... I mean no harm. I was designed, sketched rather, for a man). Why, I found myself the other day standing in a muse with something like tears in my eyes, before a little _pirus_ that had rooted itself on the steep edge of the runnel that drains the meadow above Craigie’s pond, and thinking--what do you suppose? Why, how happy and careless the life of such a poor shrub was compared with ours! But I was in a melancholy and desponding mist of mind, and I snatched myself back out of it to manlier thoughts. But the reality and sincerity of the emotion struck me as I mused over it, and I set it down on the debtor side of my account. Still, _can_ one get away from his nature? That always puzzles me. Your close-grained, strong fellows tell you that you can, but they forget that they are only acting out their complexion, not escaping it. I did not expect to chase my rainbow into such a miserable drizzle, but for that very reason I will let it go as I have written it, though I am rather ashamed of having uncovered my nakedness so plumply. In spite of the heat we have had rain enough to keep the country beautiful, and my salt marshes have been in their glory. The salt grass is to other grass like fur compared with hair, and the color of the ‘black grass,’ and even its texture at the right distance remind one of sable. I have been making night studies of late, having enjoyed, as folks say, a season of sleeplessness, and I saw the dawn begin the other night at two o’clock. The first bird to sing was a sparrow. The cocks followed close upon him, and the phœbe upon them. The crows were the latest to shake the night out of them.

“The Corporation have given me a tutor and cut my salary down to $1500. But I think they will give me what they call a ‘gratuity’ if the college funds justify it. If not, I must take to lecturing.... I am called away to the hayfield, so good-by. I work more or less every day out of doors and like it. I am getting back as well as I can to my pristine ways of life.”

He had wished to purchase a little immunity from the routine of college duties, but he needed to increase his income, for the change in his college work, though it gave him more liberty, left him with smaller salary. Except for the months when his editorship of the _Atlantic_ and his college professorship had jointly given him a fairly comfortable livelihood, he had always been in an impecunious condition; his writings had not been especially remunerative, and as he was somewhat dependent on outside pressure for a stimulus to work, it is probable that his need of money had furnished this stimulus.

So this summer he was not unwilling to help himself out with some special tasks on the _British Poets_. “My job,” he writes, “is correcting Dryden for the next edition. I enjoy it, to be sure, but it is rather wearisome. I have always had a great respect for Dryden’s solid ability, and I am glad to read him in this minute way as a study of his language. I have long thought that he was the last writer of really first-rate English prose. Make every possible deduction, and I still think so, and I believe it is because of two things: first, that the language had not yet been sophisticated by writing for the press; and second, that he wrote as a gentleman rather than as an author. It is easy to see why his verse has been so much admired, it is so vigorous and easy, and there is such mastery of language. Dryden _knew_ a great deal, and uses his knowledge with an ease of manner that is very charming to me.

“The work takes about three days to a volume, and I have the first two to go over again, because I corrected more than they are willing to pay for (I mean to the printer). I find some strange nonsense, chiefly caused by punctuation. The Donne, on which I spent three or four weeks of unremitting work, I have literally lost. Little & Brown don’t want the expense of printing, and I have lost the book; can’t find it anywhere. I find another copy--but perfectly clean!”[26]

A proposal was made at this time that he should write the life of Hawthorne. Longfellow suggested this to Mrs. Hawthorne, who talked with Lowell about it. He was attracted by the subject, and saw that he would have abundant material, for Mrs. Hawthorne told him that there were seventeen volumes of notes, beside the letters which could be collected. After consideration, however, Mrs. Hawthorne feared to take the risks involved in having the precious manuscripts go out of her hands, and the plan was abandoned, Mrs. Hawthorne contenting herself with printing a portion of the notes in the _Atlantic_, and afterward issuing the several volumes of Passages from the American, English, French, and Italian Note-Books.

Lowell was busy also this summer getting ready for publication the second series of the “Biglow Papers,” his chief labor being in the long Introduction, which is a justification of his use of the rustic New England form by a careful tracing of many of the words and phrases and local pronunciation to the English usage of the seventeenth century, brought over by the early settlers and domesticated under conditions which served to preserve them in common speech. And here may be printed an unfinished letter, written a few months later, in which he sets forth more familiarly some of his linguistic views: “I am not obstinate, but Shakespeare does not tack his ‘lesses’ to nouns but to verbs. He says ‘viewless winds’ in ‘Measure for Measure,’ and means as Milton does in ‘Comus’ (‘I must be viewless now’) ‘invisible.’ So in ‘Hamlet,’ when he says ‘woundless air’ he means ‘invulnerable,’ as you will see by turning to Act I., scene i. I admit that _less_ ought to be joined to a noun (as in German _los_ always is), but I think one may sin with Shakespeare or Milton, for my instance from which latter I have to thank Malone. I grant that Whittier is no authority--though I suspect he is right in rhyming for the ear and not for the eye, as used to be the fashion. So long as we don’t pronounce _arrums_ Hibernice, why shouldn’t he rhyme it with psalms? Not that I would. I would be conservative about pronunciation,--the test of good-breeding,--and would leave idioms to the grace of God, where they properly belong. Boys and blackguards have always been my masters in language. I have always felt that if I could attain to their unconscious freedom, I were safe. I would not insist (for example) with our excellent _Daily Advertiser_ on ‘house to be let,’ because it is unidiomatic and because it is glossologically wrong. We took it directly from the French _maison à louer_. Nor would I say ‘by auction,’ because ‘at’ is quite as good. Nor would I say ‘the house is in process of erection’ for ‘the house is building.’”

Lowell dedicated his second series of “Biglow Papers” to Judge Hoar. “A very fit thing,” he writes, “it seems to me, for of all my friends he is the most genuine Yankee.” In the same letter he writes with eagerness of a new poetic enterprise he had undertaken, or rather of an old one revived.[27] “I have been working hard, and if my liver will let me alone, as it does now, am likely to go on all winter. And on _what_ do you suppose? I have taken up one of the unfinished tales of the ‘Nooning,’ and it grew to a poem of near seven hundred lines! It is mainly descriptive. First, a sketch of the narrator, then his ‘prelude,’ then his ‘tale.’ I describe an old inn and its landlord, barroom, etc. It is very homely, but right from nature. I have lent it to Child and hope he will like it, for if he doesn’t I shall feel discouraged. It was very interesting to take up a thread dropt so long ago, and curious as a phenomenon of memory to find how continuous it had remained in my mind, and how I could go on as if I had let it fall only yesterday.” This was “Fitz Adam’s Story,” which Mr. Child found no difficulty in liking, so that Lowell sent it at once to Mr. Fields for the _Atlantic_, where it appeared in January, 1867. “I mean to work ahead as fast as I can with the rest,” he wrote to Mr. Fields, and in the spirit which then possessed him he had high hopes of completing “The Nooning,” having already, as we have seen, various parts of it ready for final articulation. He wrote Mr. Fields again, 8 November, 1867, when urged to send more of the poem: “I cannot get into the mood of my Nooning story just now,” but evidently he hoped still to go on with it, for he did not include “Fitz Adam’s Story” in his next collection of poems published in 1869; yet when twenty years more had gone by, and “The Nooning” was still in fragments, he saw that there was no likelihood of his ever producing the rounded whole, and so included “Fitz Adam’s Story” in his latest collection with an apologetic note.

“I am already beginning to feel the relief from those confounded recitations,” he wrote a month or so after the fall term at college began, “both in better health and better spirits.” He sent Mr. Fields not only this poem for the _Atlantic_, but a fairy tale and a poem for _Our Young Folks_. “You asked me once,” he writes, “for a fairy story, and I suppose never expected to hear of it again. But it is not safe to cast bread on _my_ waters. I invented a kind of one at once, and yesterday and the day before contrived to write it, partly to spite an infernal pain I was suffering, and which got me under at last. I think I have told it simply enough, and was surprised to find how easy it was to write in words mostly of one syllable. I think there are some pleasant humors in it, but it may have suffered from my being in such a wretched condition while I wrote it. Please read it yourself, and show it to no one. To tell the honest truth, I have never read _Our Young Folks_, and so do not know whether it is suitable or not. Perhaps I could write it over again, but that might spoil it, for I might not be able to fancy myself so vividly telling it again as I did before.

“Also: I have a jolly little poem that would do for a Christmas number, called ‘Hob Gobbling’s Song,’ written years ago for my nephews, now all dead. Just think of it! and three of the four in battle. Who could have dreamed it twenty years ago?

“You will think I am mad to bombard you thus, but no, I am only beginning to feel the sort of spring impulse of my college freedom. I mean to work off old scores this winter if I can.”

The fairy tale, “Uncle Cobus’s Story,” had pleasant fancy in it, but was curiously literary in its allusions and in its thinly concealed moral a parable of Lowell’s own life, with its struggle for supremacy of the two fairies Fan-ta-si-a and El-bo-gres. The song might fairly be called a New England survival of Elizabethan fairy lore.

As a result of his industry during the summer and early fall, he was able to write at the end of October: “I have in my pocket $820 for my last six weeks’ work, and mean for the first time in my life to make an investment of money earned!”

The pain, by the way, which he tried to assuage by writing, was some facial trouble which resulted in a swelling making him look, as he said, “like a hornpout with the mumps.” He had an odd experience with ether which he thus describes: “The ether didn’t deaden the pain a bit, that I could discover. Its only effect was to make my head feel as if it were violently waggled to and fro. One odd result there was. For a moment, I lost entirely my present personal identity, and absolutely _was_ (without anything of that sense of dualism which commonly goes along with and criticises hallucination) twelve years old and getting ready to go out shooting as I used. Odd as it seems, it was a most painful sensation, and all the rest of the night I was haunted by a feeling that my life was the merest illusion, and I a poor puppet worked by some humorous higher power, who could by a jerk put me back at Mr. Wells’s school if he liked.”

In the midst of all this congenial labor he was moved also to write one more political article, which appeared in the _North American_ for October, 1866. The President and the Secretary of State had formed that curious combination which may be said still somewhat to baffle students of our political history, and Lowell wrote of it,--the last of his series of political writings growing out of the great conflict and the early movements toward reconstruction. Under the title, “The Seward-Johnson Reaction,” he examines all the elements in the situation, the President, the Secretary, Congress, and the two parties, and, as before, his study is less an analysis of the component parts than a reassertion of those fundamental principles which it was his political philosophy to seek for and expound. Trust in the people was the prime article of his creed; hence he sought chiefly for evidence of the settled drift of the nation’s conviction, conscience, and instinct. The great stake played for in the war was, in his words, the “Americanization of all America, nothing more and nothing less.” Yet with all his clear sight of the ideal and his confidence in the ultimate reason of national thought, Lowell was not a vague theorist nor a contemner of political activity. On the contrary, one of the most impassioned sentences in the paper is that in which he speaks of the dignity of politics. “Now that the signs of the times,” he says, “show unmistakably to what the popular mind is making itself up, they [members of Congress] have once more a policy, if we may call that so which is only a calculation of what it would be ‘safe to go before the people with,’ as they call it. It is always safe to go before them with plain principles of right, and with the conclusions that must be drawn from them by common sense, though this is what too many of our public men can never understand. Now joining a Know-Nothing ‘lodge,’ now hanging on the outskirts of a Fenian ‘circle,’ they mistake the momentary eddies of popular whimsy for the great current that sets always strongly in one direction through the life and history of the nation. Is it, as foreigners assert, the fatal defect of our system to fill our highest offices with men whose views in politics are bounded by the next district election? When we consider how noble the science is,--nobler even than astronomy, for it deals with the mutual repulsions and attractions, not of inert masses, but of bodies endowed with thought and will, calculates moral forces, and reckons the orbits of God’s purposes toward mankind,--we feel sure that it is to find nobler teachers and students, and to find them even here.”[28]

With this paper Lowell took leave of political writing for a long time.[29] When next we meet him in this field it will be after certain practical experience in the field of politics has given its own color to his mind. Now, as if he had shaken off an irksome task, he turned more entirely to literature. The next three or four years were occupied, as the calendar of his published writings shows, with diligent excursions in letters, both in prose and verse. The article on Percival which appeared in the _North American_ for January, 1867, was an amusing treatment of a commonplace book, but it was worth preserving for its humorous presentation of the touchstones of genuine poetry; and from what Lowell says in his letters of the slight personal acquaintance he had with Percival, it is quite likely that the encounter gave a little fillip to his interest; yet one may be permitted to look a little more closely and find in Lowell’s characterization of the poetic temperament and sentimentalism, when laid bare through the absence of the clothing of sound sense and humor, a distant reflection on weaknesses of which he was conscious when in the depressed mood. There was an assimilating faculty which he possessed that led him, when reading lives and records especially of literary careers, to suffer somewhat as the young student of medicine who is never quite sure that he is not acting as a sort of proxy for the cases whose diagnosis is laid before him. It is curious to find Lowell, when engaged on Lessing’s life and works, which he reviewed in the April _North American_, writing to Mr. Norton:[30] “I find somewhat to my surprise from his letters that he had the imaginative temperament in all its force. Can’t work for months together, if he tries, his forehead drips with _angstschweiss_; feels ill and looks well--in short, is as pure a hypochondriac as the best. This has had a kind of unhealthy interest for me, for I never read my own symptoms so well described before.” And the article itself, if one reads it with Lowell’s thought about himself in mind, becomes a curiously parallel record, even to external circumstances, of the two men. It would, of course, be untrue to say that Lowell was thinking of himself when he was writing of Lessing, but I cannot help suspecting, as I read the article, that there was a subconsciousness which gave a force to certain passages, and that Lowell’s interest in his subject was heightened by the plucking at his sleeve of his own memories and ambitions.

In writing for the _North American_ the articles on great literature which were afterward reproduced in his books, Lowell was not only drawing upon a liberal familiarity with most of the subjects from repeated readings, but he was sometimes availing himself of earlier treatment in the form of lectures which he had given in connection with his college work. He complains, when preparing his article on Rousseau, that he is always bothered when he tries to do anything with old material, as he was in this case, inserting in his paper patches from college lectures; and any one who has had the experience appreciates the difficulty of turning the _oratio directa_ of the lecture into the _oratio obliqua_ of the essay,--to mention but one of the “bothers” of such work. But a comparison of the manuscript of Lowell’s college lecture with the text of the printed article shows two things: first, that in going back to his old lecture, Lowell easily took fire from his own words and, in copying a sentence, ran on into a fuller, more finished conclusion. For example, in comparing the sonnets of Petrarch with those of Michelangelo, he says alike in lecture and in article: “In them (i. e. in Michelangelo’s) the airiest pinnacles of sentiment and speculation are buttressed with solid mason-work of thought, of an actual, not fancied experience.” In the lecture, he goes on: “You seem to feel the great architect in them. Petrarch’s in comparison are like the sugared frostwork upon cake.” In the article, however, he adds to “fancied experience,” “and the depth of feeling is measured by the sobriety and reserve of expression, while in Petrarch’s all ingenuousness is frittered away into ingenuity. Both are cold, but the coldness of the one is self-restraint, while the other chills with pretence of warmth. In Michelangelo’s you feel the great architect: in Petrarch’s the artist who can best realize his conception in the limits of a cherry-stone.”[31]

Again, it is evident from the comparison that Lowell’s direct address in speaking to his class from the written lecture was in form of sentences little different from what he used when writing for the public. In each case, his spontaneity was uppermost; he was not especially aware, as he wrote, either of audience or of readers. In revising his articles for book publication he altered the impersonal _we_ of the reviewer to the _I_ of the author, and in doing so merely strengthened the natural voice in which he spoke. Such papers as “A Good Word for Winter,” or “My Garden Acquaintance,” are scarcely more direct in the relation of author and reader than are those papers which have the external form of book reviews. It was the personality of the man at home in a hospitable manner that found this expression, and just as some of his happiest letters were written to persons whom he scarcely knew, but happened to be called out by some apt occasion, so he wrote and lectured, except on the most formal themes, with a freedom which was neither disturbed nor excited by audience or readers. One may notice a difference in this respect between the political papers and the literary essays. The _I_ scarcely is at home in the former.

The Dante Club had finished its task, and Longfellow’s translation was published in 1867. The affectionate relation between the two men found more than one poetic expression during their long neighborly existence, and when Longfellow’s sixtieth birthday occurred in 1867 Lowell wrote a poem, and printed it in the daily paper which he knew would be laid on Longfellow’s breakfast-table. On the appearance of the Dante he wrote, with Mr. Norton, a joint review which appeared in the _North American_. Of his own brief part he wrote in humorous dismay to his collaborator: “I could only wish that the latter part had been more critical if it were but for Longfellow’s sake. It’s lucky, perhaps, that I got almost crazy over the insertion I was to make in it, or I should have rushed into the thing myself--for, though I think his version (as you know) truly admirable, there are some things to be questioned in it. However, all the better that I couldn’t. I say I was almost crazy. You see I went up to Shady Hill--picking up Longfellow on the way and it was _very_ hot, and I brought away an armful of translations, just cutting out Howells, who was on the same errand. I came home with my prize, wet through with the only sure result of all earthly toils, and began to compare. Good heavens! I had Cayley and Ford, and Dayman and Ramsay (and lots of others that made me ’d--’ say), and Brooksbank and Wright, and last Rossetti. Well, I addled my brains over ’em--my tables were heaped, my floor stumbly with my a-versions, as I called them when I looked _at_ them, my in-versions when I read them. Now, to begin with, I have read Dante so much that I can’t remember a line of him--in short, ’twas _infandum renovare dolorem_. I spent three days in bothering through what will make two pages.”

The critical reviews of Longfellow’s Dante from the hands of competent scholars were few, but one published in a daily journal called out a letter from Lowell to the friend who sent it to him, which gives with frankness Lowell’s estimate of the translation. “The review,” he writes, “does not change my opinion of Mr. Longfellow’s translation--not as the best possible, by any means, but as the best probable.... Nobody who is intimate with the original will find any translation of the ‘Divina Commedia’ more refreshing than cobs. Has not Dante himself told us that no poetry can be translated? But, after all is said, I think Mr. Longfellow’s the best thus far as being the most accurate. It is to be looked on, I think, as measured prose--like our version of Job, for example, though without that mastery of measure in which our Bible translators are unmatched except by Milton. I mean where they are at their best, as in Job, the songs of Debórah and Barak, the death of Sisera, and some parts of the Psalms. Mr. Longfellow is not a scholar in the German sense of the word, that is to say, he is no pedant, but he certainly _is_ a scholar in another and perhaps a higher sense, I mean in range of acquirement and the flavor that comes of it.”

Specific criticism, with all the painstaking of which he was capable, was but the obverse of the medal which Lowell struck in his literary work. On the face was his generous delight in his books. “The Nightingale in the Study,” written in the summer of 1867, holds in capital form a genuine confession that there was an appeal to him from nature in literature which did not antagonize the appeal made to him by the world of natural beauty, yet sometimes constrained and invited him in tones he could not resist, even though the birds without were calling him. Mr. Leslie Stephen who visited him in the summer of 1868, renewing an acquaintance begun five years earlier and ripening into a friendship which meant much to Lowell ever after, has given a pleasant account of the impression made upon him by the poet in his study at Elmwood. “All round us,” he says, “were the crowded book-shelves, whose appearance showed them to be the companions of the true literary workman, not of the mere dilettante or fancy biographer. Their ragged bindings and thumbed pages scored with frequent pencil marks implied that they were a student’s tools, not mere ornamental playthings. He would sit among his books, pipe in mouth, a book in hand, hour after hour; and I was soon intimate enough to sit by him and enjoy intervals of silence as well as periods of discussion and always delightful talk.”[32]

It was a quarter of a century since Lowell had collected his fugitive poems, though he had meantime published the second series of “The Biglow Papers,” and when 1868 came in he was moved to make a new volume which should include the poems he had been printing, chiefly in the _Atlantic_. It was with this in mind that he took up a fragment of a poem written a score of years before, rewrote and added to it, designing to make it the title poem in the volume. He printed it first in the June _Atlantic_, under the title “A June Idyll.” In sending it he wrote to Mr. Fields: “In the first flush of having just finished and copied it (for which I was obliged to miss Dickens last night) I am inclined to think there is something characteristic.... Surely there are good bits in it, and it is good for more than usual, or good for nothing. If I haven’t made a spoon, I have certainly spoiled a horn that would have turned out a very good one. You sometimes find fault with my names. I have called this ‘A June Idyll,’ which is just what it is. Do you object?”

Mr. Fields, either himself or through a friend, wrote a very appreciative notice of the poem in the _Boston Advertiser_, which drew from Lowell this response to his friendly editor:--

“Such a notice of my Iddle Met my eyes in the _Advertiser_!

“‘To order,’ thought I, ’no, fiddle! ’Tis the dull world growing wiser.

“‘My forehead they twine with bayses, They’re eager to shout hosanna, My style as pure epic they praises Where they used to add acuanha.’

“‘’Tis always their fate whom at christening Your genuine Helicon’s spilt on; Long ears are the latest at listening, _Vide_ Wordsworth _passim_ on Milton.’

“So I read it aloud to my family, One delicate phrase after t’other, And surely the good little Sammle he Wasn’t sadder at leaving his mother

“Than I when I came to the close of it, For I wanted, as I’m a sinner, (Such poetry seemed in the prose of it) To keep up my reading till dinner.

“But now, oh worst of collapses, My Temple of Fame is in ruins, Its forecourt, nave, transept, and apse is A shelter for foxes and bruins!

“For all of my Public Opinion With the wind in its sails to drive it To the port of supreme dominion Turns out most especially private.

“My Fame’s accoucheur sadly yields his Place up to the Deputy Cor’ner, For my Public Opinion was Fields’s, My tradewind a puff from the ‘Corner.’”

That the poem at once found disinterested friends is evident from the letter which Lowell writes in acknowledgment of the praise which the poet, Dr. Parsons, gave it. “Something more than half of it,” Lowell says, “was written more than twenty years ago, on the death of our eldest daughter; but when I came to complete it, that other death, which broke my life in two, _would_ come in against my will, so that you were right in your surmise. I was very glad you liked it, and your letter touched me deeply, as you may well conceive.”

In September Lowell made out a tentative list of the poems to be included in the volume, and wrote to Mr. Fields: “I think it best not to include any humorous poems in this collection. They can come by and by, if they are wanted. They would jar here. Some I may be able to shorten somewhat in printing, but commonly I find it hard work to improve them after they are dry, though I seem to see well enough where and how much they need it. The poems of the war I shall put by themselves at the end, so as to close with the Ode as I begin with the Idyll. How I do wish the whole of them were better--now that I am putting them between stiff covers to help them stand alone! ‘Bad is the best’ is a good proverb--but how if the best is bad? Well, here and there one catches a good strain, but I feel very hopeless about them.”

Lowell meant to call his volume “A June Idyll and other Poems,” but Mr. Fields pointed out that Whittier’s new volume just about to appear was to carry the title of “A Summer Idyll.”[33] Lowell retorted: “Why the devil should Whittier bag my title? I can’t claim a copyright in ‘Idyll,’ that is in the dictionary--but, June ‘Idyll’ was mine. It will be thought his poem suggested mine, as it was with the ‘Present Crisis,’ though mine was written two years before. However, J. G. W. is welcome to anything of mine, for he is a trump, and after all the milk is spilt. But if his volume is not advertised, might I not insist? It’s of more consequence to me than to him, for I have nothing else that will look so well in the vanguard. But if it’s all up, how would ‘Appledore and other Poems’ do? It is a pretty name enough, and the poem is one of my longest,--though not, perhaps, the one I would otherwise have put first. My dedication, I think, is good, and that will take the edge off.”

Mr. Fields suggested that he should give the volume the title of his place, “Elmwood,” but Lowell replied: “I can’t bear ‘Elmwood,’ and the more I think of it, the more I can’t bear it--’tis turning one’s household gods upon the town, as it were. No, never! They have endured me for fifty years, and I won’t desert ’em in their old age. Let me have my hermitage to myself. (I had eight visitors this morning--one of whom wanted me to read ‘The Biglow Papers’ to him.) But I have it now. Instead of ‘June Idyll,’ which was the _pis aller_ of a prosaic mind, I shall call it ‘Under the Willows.’ Like all great discoveries, it is simple, and, you may depend upon it, it is _the_ thing. It means everything and nothing. I can’t make the poem over so as to suit ‘Elmwood,’ and so I shall settle upon this, fixed as a butterfly, stable as the Horse-railway stables. You can’t move me. The man that moved Chicago couldn’t move me. I am happy, and discharge my mind of the whole concern. I shall now devote my evening to the ‘Flying Dutchman’ in peace, and write you something clever for the _Atlantic_. I snap my fingers at you and Bazin,[34] wore he even the helmet of Mambrino. Nothing can touch me further. ‘Under the Willows and other Poems’--it satisfies every want, and will be immensely popular. The basketmakers will buy up the first edition and the gunpowder makers the second. Then comes the general public, mad with curiosity to know what the d--l I mean. I am charmed with my own powers of invention. A duller man would have said ‘Under the Elms,’ or some such things. Let me alone for tickling the fancy of a purchaser. _I_ know what they want.”

To Mr. Norton he writes, reciting his tribulations over the name of his book, and adds: “I was suddenly moved to finish my ‘Voyage to Vinland,’ part of which you remember was written eighteen years ago.[35] I meant to have made it much longer, but maybe it is better as it is. I clapt a beginning upon it, patched it in the middle, and then got to what had always been my favorite part of the plan. This was to be a prophecy by Gudrida, a woman who went with them, of the future America.

I have written in an unrhymed alliterated measure, in very short verse and stanzas of five lines each. It does not aim at following the law of the Icelandic alliterated stave, but hints at it and also at the _asonante_, without being properly either. But it runs well and is melodious, and we think it pretty good here, as does Howells.”

Again we quote a passage from Emerson’s unprinted journal, dated December, 1868: “In poetry, tone. I have been reading some of Lowell’s new poems in which he shows unexpected advance on himself, but perhaps most in technical skill and courage. It is in talent rather than in poetic tone, and rather expresses his wish, his ambition, than the uncontrollable interior impulse which is the authentic mark of a new poem, and which is unanalyzable, and makes the merit of an ode of Collins or Gray or Wordsworth or Herbert or Byron, and which is felt in the pervading tone rather than in brilliant parts or lines; as if the sound of a bell, or a certain cadence expressed in a low whistle, or booming or humming to which the poet first timed his step as he looked at the sunset, or thought, was the incipient form of the piece, and was regnant through the whole.”

There were two essays written in the fall of 1868 which are very expressive of Lowell’s nature. “My Garden Acquaintance” records delightfully that attachment to one spot which was made possible not merely by long life at Elmwood, but by that sympathy with life which enabled him to suck the juices from nature, not by roving, but by that attitude of listening and observing which sometimes belongs to home-keeping wits. “A Certain Condescension in Foreigners,” though it was at first sight a clearing of his mind such as his letters repeatedly show, grows warm with that passion for his country and the ideas it stood for, which had been burned into him by his personal experience in the war and by his constant brooding over the deep realities which underlay the meaning of the war. He returned to political writing under stress of need for copy in the January _North American_ with “A Look Before and After.” The _Review_ itself had become somewhat more of a burden to him, for Mr. Norton went abroad in the summer of 1868 for an indefinite stay, and though Mr. E. W. Gurney, who took his place, was competent, Lowell felt the responsibility rather more than when he had easily left the main business to Mr. Norton. Moreover, the special work which he and his friend had undertaken had, in a measure, been accomplished, and the _Review_, though winning a _succes d’estime_, had not that worldly success which reconciles one to drudgery. There is a half-vexed, half-humorous letter to Mr. Fields, dated Elmwood 10 P.M. Thursday, 1868, which was 24 September. “The express has just brought,” he writes, “your note asking for the log of the _North American_ on her present voyage. The N. A. is teak-built, her extreme length from stem to stern post 299 feet 6 inches, and her beam (I mean her breadth of beam) 286 feet 7 inches and a quarter. She is an A 1 _risk_ at the Antediluvian. These statements will enable you to reckon her possible rate of sailing. During the present trip I should say that all the knots she made were Gordian, and of the tightest sort. I extract from log as follows:--

“11 July. Lat. 42° 1´, the first officer, Mr. Norton, lost overboard in a fog, with the compass, caboose, and studden-sails in his pocket, also the key of the spirit-room.

“25 July. Lat. 42° 10´, spoke the Ark, Captain Noah, and got the latest news. 26, 27, 28, dead calm. 29, 30, 31, and 1 August, head winds N. N. E. to N. E. by N. 15 August. Double reef in foretopsl, spoke the good ship Argo, Jason commander, from Colchos with wool.

“17 August, dead calm, schooner Pinta, Capt. Columbus, bound for the New World, and a market, bearing Sou Sou West half South on our weather bow. Got some stores from him.

“20. Capt. Lowell cut his throat with the fluke of the sheet anchor.

“So far the log.

“Now for the comment. Toward the 1st September I received notice that the _Review_ was at a standstill. Mr. Gurney was at Beverly, ill and engaged to be married. I had not a line of copy, nor knew where to get one. I communicated with G. and got what he had--viz: two articles, one on Herbert Spencer, and t’other on Leibnitz. I put the former in type, but did not dare to follow with the latter, for I thought it would be too much even for the readers of the N. A. By and by, I raked together one or two more,--not what I _would_ have but what I _could_. James’s article on Spanish G.”[36] is good and ought to go in. So of the Siege of Delhi. We want _something_ interesting, and we must have some literary notices. As I receive none of the books, of course I had to depend on others for these, and I have got as many as I could. I have edited the number for October because it was absolutely necessary,--not, surely, because I desired it. I have read all the proof and have done all that I agreed _not_ to do when I made my engagement with Crosby & Nichols. All I promised to give them was my name on the cover, and I supposed T. & F. succeeded to their agreement. I have much more than kept my word. The October number can’t be printed by Saturday.

“But I am altogether willing that it should be, only in that case my name must be withdrawn from the cover. I never desired to be its editor, and I put my resignation in your hands. Get some better man, say----, who can write on all subjects equally ill at a moment’s notice. I wash my hands of the whole concern. I will read the rest of the proof of this number if you wish, for that is in the bond, but for January look out for somebody who can make something out of nothing. I recommend----.” Six days later he wrote again:--

“Correct estimates from log thus: 25 September. Lat. 42° 10´. Captain Lowell committed suicide by blowing out his brains with the gafftopsl halyards. There can be no doubt of the fact, as the 2nd officer recognized the brains for his (Cap. L.’s), he being familiar with them.

“30 September. Captain L. reappeared on the deck, having only been below to oversee the storage of ballast, whereof on this trip the lading mainly consists. What was thought to be his brains turned out on closer examination to be pumpkin pie, though the second officer was unconvinced and the Captain himself could not make up his mind.

“The fact is I was cross, and did not quite like being brought up with such a round turn at my time of life. I had done all I could, and was hoping that the literary notices would make up for the rest. I had been disappointed in three body articles by Bigelow, Poole, and Willard (on von Bismarck). Gurney will take hold of the next number and it will all go right. Say beforehand how many sheets you are willing to allow, and we will keep as near the wind as we can, but don’t--well, never mind, but I am as touchy as if I were even poorer than I am.”

The publication of “Under the Willows” brought Lowell some of those expressions of admiration and affection for which the friends of a writer gladly use such occasions. The publishing of a book is like an announcement of an engagement,--an opportunity for one’s friends to show their affection unreservedly. Among the notes which pleased Lowell was one from Mr. Aldrich who had lately come to Boston to edit _Every Saturday_, and in his pleasure he sent a copy of the special edition of the Commemoration Ode with this letter.

ELMWOOD, 23rd December, 1868.

MY DEAR SIR,--That note was so pleasant to an old fellow who doesn’t think too well of himself, that I can’t help (with a very good will and a very balky pen) telling you how much pleasure it gave me. That I don’t deserve all the fine things you say of me doesn’t make it any the less friendly in you to say them, and I, for one, frankly confess that I like a little _lubrication_ now and then. It makes our machine (as they used to call it in the last century) run easier for a day or two, till its general ramshackliness reproduces the familiar friction.

Now lest the twins should repeat the tragedy of Eteocles and Polynikes, and the house of Aldrich be extinguished in an internecine duel for the possession of that other fatal volume, I send what will enable your paternal anxiety to make a fair division between them. If they are proper twins (I am a kind of twins myself divided between grave and gay) they will be the one sentimental and t’other humorous. Bequeath one sacred tome to each, and keep for yourself the cordial feeling that sends both.

This which you now receive has at least the value of rarity. It is one of twelve copies printed in this form. Think of me after I am gone on (for in the nature of things you will survive me) as one who had a really friendly feeling for everything human. It is better to be a good fellow than a good poet, and perhaps (I am not sure) I might have shown a pretty fair talent that way, with proper encouragement. Any how, I wish you and Mrs. Aldrich, and _the_ Twins a Merry Christmas, and am

Cordially yours, J. R. LOWELL.

That Lowell himself knew how to give pleasure with praise is evident enough from the several letters which Mr. Norton has printed, to Mr. Aldrich, to Mr. Howells, to Mr. Gilder, and to other younger writers. He was constantly sending pleasant messages and writing notes with unaffected expressions of enjoyment, and his friendly feeling made it easy for the editor of the _Atlantic_ to consult him with reference to contributions even from strangers. Thus he wrote to Mr. Howells: “I would be burned at the stake--nay, I would agree to be shut up alone for an hour with ---- before I would acknowledge (I spelt it without a d!) a poem to be good unless it was so. I would be burned at two stakes, and be shut up with ---- and ---- ere I would say a good word for the verses of a _rising_ young author. But I expect to see and like your poem in the next _Atlantic_. It _is_ good, despite Mrs. Howells and the anapests,--or whatever other kind of pests they were.

“Go by your ear, my dear boy, or by Madam’s and leave Latin prosodies to ---- and the other profound scholars who understand ’em, but be sure that the plot of your little poem is so charming that it will take all the lovers and loved, and who else is worth caring for?

“I tried it on Mrs. Lowell (you know we have a bit of Darby and Joan left in us still) and she purred at once. No: it is good and subtle (or subtile, I don’t know which, thanks to Mr. Nichols), but it is either you like.

“P.S. You have a real vein, so don’t be bothered, but make it as good as you can and thank the gods.”

And again, in answer to some questions Mr. Howells had asked him respecting the Isles of Shoals, apropos of the articles by Mrs. Thaxter then to appear in the _Atlantic_: “‘Londoner’s’ is right. The names of the islands are ‘Haley’s,’ otherwise (and better) ‘Smutty-nose,’ ‘Star,’ always called ‘Star-island,’ ‘Hog,’ which Mrs. T. no doubt calls ‘Appledore,’--the name of a village that once stood on it,--‘Cedar,’ ‘White,’ ‘Malaga,’ and ‘Duck.’ There you have ’em all.

“Now I have a favor to ask of you--_Se io meritai di voi assai o poco_--and that is to have the sheets of the life of Landor sent me. I guess I could make something out of them, which perhaps you _boys_ hardly could. By the way, I was very much pleased with your notice of that fellow’s (Sebright,[37] I think) Congressional reminiscences. It made me laugh, and was so fine (so subtile) that the man himself, despite his name, will never feel the edge of it. I always had great expectations of you,--but I am beginning to believe in you for good. You are the only one that hasn’t cheated me by your blossom. I like your flavor now, as once I did your perfume. You young fellows are dreadfully irreverent--but don’t you laugh--I take a kind of credit to myself in being the first to find you out. I am proud of you. But see how Fate takes me down! As I wrote the words, it began to rain on my hay. _Absit omen._ And may it be long before you are mown!

“As for your gigantic _boongalong_ there in Boston,--I fancy it is like Niagara, a thing that one can reckon mathematically. It is but one voice raised to the nth power or so. And I remember that the Colosseum was where the early Christians used to be martyred. Now I got up this morning at half past six, and therefore count myself among the early Christians.

“I forgot to tell you that George Curtis liked your Venetian poem very much. So did I.”

His position naturally made him the recipient of many commissions for securing the publication of poems and other manuscripts, and his friendliness drew him into many letters of counsel, and it might be encouragement. To one whose acquaintance he had made through a contribution which he had accepted when editor of the _Atlantic_, he wrote in answer to a letter in which she had confessed to discouragement over hostile attack on a more recent work:--

That my note gave you any pleasure gives me a sensible satisfaction. I am glad to find it _was_ my Miss ---- after all.

You mustn’t be disheartened. If you had written a foolish thing, don’t you see?--nobody would be attacking it. People don’t bring artillery to bear on soap-bubbles, but wait till they burst of themselves. Don’t allow yourself to be shaken from that equipoise of good sense and good temper that drew my attention so strongly in your first article. Above all, don’t be drawn into any controversy. Keep straight on, as if nothing had happened, and if you have anything in you be sure the world will find it out. Publicity is one of the painful necessities of authorship. For my own part, I would give all the praise I ever received for the right to be valued simply for my personal good qualities alone. But you must resign yourself. You have given everybody who can command pen, ink, and paper the right to talk flippantly and ignorantly and unfeelingly of things into which you have put your very heart’s blood. But don’t be disheartened. If you honestly _try to think_ (and it was because you seemed to me to do so that I felt an interest in you) you will come out right in the long run. If you have the true quality you will at last get the power of _thinking_, the only abiding satisfaction and security for happiness which this life or the other for that matter affords, a thing rarer than is generally supposed. Really to think is to see things as they are, and when we have once got firm foot-hold on that rock of ages, our own little trials and triumphs take their true proportions, and are as indifferent to us, morally, I mean, as the changes of the weather. I think you have the root of the matter in you, that is, that you are in earnest to do honest work, and not to flaunt in the newspapers. For that reason I wish to help you all I can. Don’t think I am writing such letters as this every week. On the contrary, I am shy of writing letters at all, especially to women. But whenever a word from me will cheer you, you shall have it.

I have directed two books to be sent you by express and beg you to accept them as a token of sincere esteem from your friend,

J. R. LOWELL.

There is another letter drawn out from him by a stranger who was concerned over a case of literary honesty, which is interesting as showing how sensitive Lowell was in all matters pertaining to his art. “You ask,” he writes, “my judgment on a point of literary morals. In the case you set forth I find it hard to judge of the facts without some knowledge of the character of the man, because thoughtlessness, want of moral sensibility, and loose habits of mind generally, may in the particular instance tend to lenify our judgment of the ethical quality of the offence, without in the least changing our opinion of its discreditable nature as respects good scholarship and honest literature. There can be no question that every article (such as you describe) should have had the name of its true author at the head of it, so that no man who read could fail to know whose work he was reading. Nay, I think we should be so scrupulous in such matters as to acknowledge even an apt quotation when we owe it to another man. For example, I suppose I must have read the ‘Divinia Commedia’ of Dante at least thirty times with minute attention and yet it had never occurred to me that _cima di giudizie_ was literally Shakespeare’s phrase, ‘top of judgment,’ till Mr. Dyce pointed it out in a note on ‘Measure for Measure.’ I should never think of using it as an illustration without giving credit to Mr. Dyce. Even had I found the coincidence noted on the margin of my own copy of Dante, I should still have quoted Dyce for it as having first mentioned it in print, in order to avoid even the appearance of evil. I think an honest man can easily resolve any doubt he may have in such matters by asking himself the simple question, Do I gain any credit that does not belong to me by letting it pass for my own? If I do, it is stealing, neither more nor less, for there is no real distinction between picking a man’s pocket of his money and filching the fruits of his industry or thought from a book.

“In literature proper, originality consists of such an energy of nature as enables a man so to infuse thoughts or sentiments common to all with his own individuality as to give them a new character--flavor would be the better word--commending them anew to the general palate. Chaucer is a capital instance in point. He formed himself wholly on foreign models, helped himself to plots, incidents, and reflections from any and everywhere, and yet is on the whole fresher than almost any of our poets. I always liked him the better for remembering in his ‘House of Fame’ the pipes of those

‘little heardgromes That kepen bestes in the bromes,’

for he was, I doubt not, paying the debt he owed to some nameless minstrel.

“In matters of research and scholarship, the question seems to present itself under a somewhat different aspect. All _learning_ is of necessity to a great extent second-hand--but here also there is a manifest distinction between _appropriating_ another man’s scholarship and _assimilating_ it. In the one case it lies a mere load of indigestible rubbish upon the brain; in the other, it is dissolved and worked over into a new substance, giving sustenance and impulse to one’s native thought. So that after all, whether in literature or scholarship, the point is not so much what a man has taken, as whether he has made something new of what he has taken.[38] If he have _not_, then he should make punctilious acknowledgment of the sources whence he drew. It is one thing to be indebted to a man for a hint that sets us on a path of original research and discovery, and quite another to rob him of his journals and publish them as one’s own. So as to giving credit where it is due; I would not thank a guide-post, but I must pay a guide. I may read by a man’s lamp, but if I tap his gas pipe, I ought to attach a gasometer that shall record precisely how much I borrow.

“The leading case in this branch of literary ethics is the famous one of Schelling _et als._ against Coleridge. For the defence we should take into account the defendant’s lifelong habits of mental dissipation, his own really great learning which might make him careless alike in borrowing and lending, and above all the effect of opium in blurring the memory and deadening the nerves of moral sensation. On the other hand, it would be urged that he _lifted_ (to borrow a word, peculiarly apt here, from the loose dialect of the border) from foreigners whose property would be least liable to identification by his countrymen; he did it by translation and transfusion, thus, as it were, obliterating the marks of former ownership; and above all (in the case of A. W. Schlegel) he did it in oral lectures, thus driving his stolen cattle so hurriedly by in a way to baffle detection.

“You will find in Mrs. Nelson Coleridge’s Introduction to the ‘Biographia Literaria’ an eloquent and even passionate vindication of her father from the charge of plagiarism. It does her honor as a daughter, but is hardly convincing. Coleridge’s acknowledgment of general indebtedness to Schelling and others was, to speak mildly, wholly inadequate, and his evasions in regard to Schlegel leave a very painful impression on the mind. If he was not lying, he was so shamefully inaccurate in dates (to his own advantage) as to have all the appearance of it.

“Now, your case (I mean the one you present) is in many respects very like this--almost identical with it indeed....

“In the old trials, one of the questions on which the jury were called on to pass was, ‘Did he fly for it?’ That is, I suppose, ‘Did he give that proof of conscious guilt?’ I should ask the same question in this case. Is there any evidence of an attempt at concealment?

“But, abstractedly from any opinion we may form of the _person_, the action was one altogether discreditable and contemptible. We cannot be too scrupulous on any point of morals in a country where members of Congress see no dishonor in selling appointments to the Army and Navy.”

Dr. Thomas Hill, who was president of Harvard in 1868, asked Lowell in the summer of that year to look over some papers he had received from Virginia and to give his opinion of them. They were the letters and journals of a Virginian gentleman, Mr. John B. Minor, who had visited New England in 1834, and Lowell found them exceedingly interesting. “Not the least engaging thing in the journal,” he wrote to the lady who had sent the papers, “is the character of the author, everywhere showing itself and everywhere amiable. So far as he is concerned, the whole journal might be printed _verbatim_, for there is not an indiscreet word, much less a breach of hospitality, from beginning to end. At the same time there are, of course, passages here and there which should be omitted in printing--I think not more than two or three at most--where he describes the personal appearance of those he met.”

The next day he wrote to Mr. Fields: “There has been put into my hands to dispose of, the Journal of a Virginia gentleman during a short tour in New England, partly on foot. The date--1834, which is now ages ago. There is not a great deal of it, but I found it truly entertaining. I think I could make selections from it that would run through four or five numbers of the _Atlantic_.... Now, do you want it? and if so, what do you think it would be worth? When I say it is entertaining, I do not mean for fanatics like me, who would cradle I know not how many tons of common earth for a grain of the gold of human nature, but for folks in general. It is not only interesting but valuable, and the character of the author, as it blinks out continually, most engaging. It seems to me remarkable that there is positively not an ill-natured word from the first page to the last. Now you know that I have once or twice pressed Sibylline books upon you which you wouldn’t take. Don’t let this one slip through your fingers. I think it might be published afterwards in a small volume with advantage, but of its adaptation to the _Atlantic_ I have no doubt.”

The journal was printed in the _Atlantic_ in the summer and fall of 1870, Lowell furnishing an introduction to the first number. It was no doubt under the influence of this new acquaintance with a fine type of Southern manhood, that Lowell wrote to Mr. Godkin, 20 November, 1868: “I confess to a strong sympathy with men who sacrificed everything even to a bad cause, which they could see only the good side of; and now the war is over, I see no way to heal the old wounds but by frankly admitting this and acting upon it. We can never reconstruct the South except through its own leading men, nor ever hope to have them on our side till we make it for their interest and compatible with their honor to be so.”[39]

Mr. and Mrs. Fields were proposing to make a journey to Europe in the spring and summer of 1869, and asked Lowell to send his daughter in their company. Lowell wrote in reply, 19 January, 1869: “I have been thinking over your very kind invitation to Mabel, and, after turning it in every possible way, I have come to the conclusion that the only way to treat a generous offer is to be generous enough to accept it. My pride stood a little in the way, but my common sense whispered me that I had no right to feed my pride at my daughter’s expense. And moreover, my dear Fields, you left me a most delicate loophole for my pride to creep out of, in conferring on me a kind of militia generalship of the _Atlantic Monthly_ while you were away. Now, if you will let me make it something real, that is, if you will let me read the proof-sheets, I can be of some service in preventing ---- (for example, merely) from writing such awful English, and mayhap in some other cases, as a consulting physician. Moreover, I should like to translate for _Every Saturday_ something now and then, as, for instance, the article on Déak and the dramatic sketch of Octave Feuillet, lately published in the _Revue de Deux Mondes_. May I?”

While his daughter was travelling with Mr. and Mrs. Fields, Lowell wrote to Mr. Fields a piece of news anticipative of what came to an event a little less than ten years later: “Mabel’s letters overrun with happiness, which I fully share in reading them. I wrote her a long letter about nothing yesterday--but I did not tell her what you may (_as a secret for you three_), that I came very near being sent to Spain, and that in case the Senate should not confirm Sickles in December, the chances for me are the best. Judge Hoar told me when he was here the other day, that Mr. Fish was friendly, and that the Assistant Secretary was ‘zealous even unto slaying,’ as he was himself. So who knows but my name may get into capitals in the triennial catalogues yet? That, after all, is the main thing--for is it not a kind of fame as good as the next? For my own part, I can conceive of no place better to live or die in than where I was born.

“I hope Mabel makes a jolly companion. She always does for _me_.[40] If she is as happy as her letters show her, I think she must. Tell her I should have told her about Spain--but I forgot it. I shall have my choice of castles to live in, if I go there, of my own building.”

“For awhile last spring,” he wrote in December to Mr. Norton, “I thought it possible I might be sent abroad. Hoar was strenuous for it, and I should have been very glad of it then.... However, it all fell through, and I am glad it did, for I should not have written my new poem.”[41] The new poem was “The Cathedral” which was issued in book form at Christmas, 1869, as well as in the _Atlantic_ for January, 1870. He wrote it during the summer vacation and took great pleasure in the writing. He had told Mr. Howells what he was about, and on being asked for the poem for the _Atlantic_ replied: “Up to time, indeed! the fear is not about time, but space. You won’t have room in your menagerie for such a displeaseyousaurus. The verses, if stretched end to end in a continuous line, would go clear round the Cathedral they celebrate, and nobody (I fear) the wiser. I can’t tell yet what they are. There seems a bit of clean carving here and there, a solid buttress or two, and perhaps a gleam through painted glass--but I have not copied it out yet, nor indeed read it over consecutively.”[42] A little later he could write to Miss Norton: “The poem turned out to be something immense, as the slang is nowadays, that is, it ran on to eight hundred lines of blank verse. I hope it is good, for it fairly trussed me at last and bore me up as high as my poor lungs will bear into the heaven of invention. I was happy writing it, and so steeped in it that if I had written to you it would have been in blank verse. It is a kind of religious poem, and is called ‘A Day at Chartres.’”[43] He dedicated the poem with special pleasure to Mr. Fields, who by the bye had persuaded him to substitute the name used for that he had chosen, a change which Lowell regretted in writing to Mr. Stephen, as depriving the poem of certain definite, local, and historical justification. “The Cathedral” drew from Mr. Ruskin warm praise. “The main substance of the poem is most precious to me,” he wrote, “and its separate lines sometimes unbetterable,” and he added some specific criticism on words, which Lowell met with more of his favorite instances of long-lived words brought over in the mental baggage of the early New England settlers. The letter in which he conclusively justifies himself is an excellent example of the reasoning of a philologist to whom words are alive, and not specimens in a museum.[44]

A correspondent had enquired in behalf of a friend, as had Ruskin, for his authority in using “decuman” in the line

“Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman,”

and he replied: “My friendly catechist has certainly put in a fair claim to a speedy answer. Whence that word ‘decuman’ got into my memory I have no notion. It seems to have got embedded there during my eocene period, and hopped out lively as one of those toads we have all heard of the moment it got a chance. And the likeness was the nearer that it had ‘a precious jewel in its head.’ In short, the word was there--it was canorous, and it expressed just what I meant. So I used it unsuspiciously. I did not mean to make a conundrum--I never do, but I had made one. When I was asked for the solution, the answer was ready enough--‘the tenth wave,’ which was thought higher than the rest. But when I was asked for my authority! I thought I had met with it in Ovid. No! In Lucan. No! They both speak of the tenth wave, but not in that absolute way. I looked in my dictionaries. I found it at last in Forcellini. Then I went to my Ducange, and the authority cited was one of the Latin Fathers, I forget which. However, there it was, and with the meaning I had remembered.”

Although the title, “A Day at Chartres,” carries with it a notion of less formality, and has a picturesque quality, there is a fitness in the soberer title that permits the mind to play with the theme. For Lowell here builds upon the foundation of human life a fane for worship, and in the speculations which discriminate between the conventional and the free aspirations of the soul, constructs out of living stones a house of prayer. Nor is there absent that capricious mood which carved grotesques upon the under side of the benches at which the worshippers kneeled, so that when the reader, borne along by the high thought, stumbles over such lines as

“Who, meeting Cæsar’s self, would slap his back, Call him ‘Old Horse’ and challenge to a drink,”

he may, if he will, console himself with the reflection that the most aspiring Gothic carries like grimacing touches within its majestic walls.

“Imagination’s very self in stone.”

That is the epithet Lowell bestows on Chartres Cathedral, and in the few spirited lines in which he contrasts the Greek with the Goth, and hints at the historic evolution of the latter, he is in a large way reflecting the native constitution of his own mind,

“Still climbing, luring fancy still to climb.”

In the letters which Lowell wrote when “The Cathedral” was stirring his mind one sees most impressively the struggle which was always more or less racking him of an unfulfilled poetic power. The very spontaneity of his nature was in a way an obstacle to expression. He waited for the waters to be troubled, he was critical of his moods, of his opportunities, and when the moment was seized, if he could indeed hold it, he was supremely happy. “How happy I was while I was writing it,” he says just as the poem is to be published; “for weeks it and I were alone in the world till Fanny well-nigh grew jealous.” And yet in the very memory of this bliss he is haunted by the thought of that black care which rides behind. “You don’t know, my dear Charles, what it is to have sordid cares, to be shivering on the steep edge of your bank-book, beyond which lies debt. I am willing to say it to you, because I know I should have written more and better. They say it is good to be obliged to do what we don’t like, but I am sure it is not good for me--it wastes so much time in the mere forethought of what you are to do.” The matter was not made easier by the pride and honorable resolve not to mortgage the future for the sake of some present indulgence. Lowell went without things he wanted rather than get into debt for them, and though he chafed under the conditions which compelled him to the doing of irksome tasks, he would borrow no short-lived ease. In making up an account with Mr. Fields at the close of 1869, when he found himself on the wrong side of the ledger, he wrote: “You must allow me also to clear off the rest ... as soon as I can. There is no earthly reason why I shouldn’t, and a great many why I should. I hate any kind of money obligations between friends. When I have paid this off, the kindness will be left, and the obligation gone. I shall be able to manage it before long. I never could see any reason why poets should claim immunity beyond other folks. It is not wholesome for them.” Even in petty matters he disliked exceedingly to be under pecuniary obligation. His letters to Mr. Godkin, as printed by Mr. Norton, show an unconquerable aversion to being a “deadhead” under any circumstances, and I remember once, when I went with him to the Museum of Fine Arts for some special exhibition, his annoyance at finding it was a free day and he could not pay the ordinary toll.

His prose work, in 1869, included his papers on Chaucer and Pope, and his “Good Word for Winter,” and at the end of the year he issued a selection from what he had already written, in the first series of “Among My Books.” But his slowly growing collection of published writings did not add materially to his income, and he continued to be embarrassed by the poverty of a landholder who had heavy taxes to pay and only the meagrest return from the productive part of his estate. The only relief he could foresee was in the possible sale of some of his land.

The point to be noted, however, is that with all this pressure of need, Lowell knew himself so well that he would not, even when a golden bait was dangled before him, accept invitations to write which required of him the diligence and the punctuality of the hack workman. No. He would attend to his college duties, do what he could for the _North American_, and accept the occasional opportunity which offered for reading a lecture. He honored his art, and he refused to make it a perfunctory task. His old friend Robert Carter was now editor of _Appleton’s Journal_, and very naturally sought contributions from Lowell, but Lowell replied in a letter written 11 March, 1870:

“Many thanks for your _Journal_, which I have looked through with a great deal of pleasure, and which I should think likely to do good in raising the public taste.

“I am much obliged to you also for your proposal, though I cannot accept it. I have not time. I have not that happy gift of inspired knowledge so common in this country, and work more and more slowly toward conclusions as I get older. I give on an average twelve hours a day to study (after my own fashion), but I find real knowledge slow of accumulation. Moreover, I shall be too busy in the college for a year or two yet. It is not the career I should have chosen, and I half think I was made for better things--but I must make the best of it. Between ourselves, I declined lately an offer of $4000 a year from ---- to write four pages monthly in----.

“It takes me a good while to be sure I am right. A five or six page notice in the next N. A. R.[45] will have cost me a fortnight’s work of a microscopic kind. My pay must be in a sense of honest thoroughness.”

Lowell lectured in the spring of 1870 at Baltimore, and before the students of Cornell University. In the summer he enjoyed much making the personal acquaintance of Thomas Hughes, who visited America at this time. Lowell had known him by correspondence, and Hughes, who was an ardent admirer of Lowell and had introduced the “Biglow Papers” to the English public, somewhat embarrassed the author of those poems by quoting from them on all occasions. For his work he gave himself to the reading of old French metrical romances, but the year saw scarcely any product, though at its close he brought together a group of indoor and outdoor studies under the title of “My Study Windows.” “I long to give myself to poetry again,” he writes in October to Miss Norton, “before I am so old that I have only thought and no music left. I can’t say as Milton did, ‘I am growing my wings.’” There is a phrase noting a curious consciousness he had at this time in a letter to Mr. Norton, written 15 October, 1870: “I wrote Jane yesterday a kind of letter, but you must wait till my ships come in before I can write the real thing. I can’t get rid of myself enough when I am worried as I am a good part of the time. It is curious, when I am in company I watch myself as if I were a third person, and _hear the sound of my own voice_, which I never do in a natural mood. However, I shall come out of it all in good time.”

His old correspondent, Mr. Richard Grant White, published this year his “Words and their Uses,” and wrote to Lowell, asking permission to dedicate the book to him. Lowell replied:--

ELMWOOD, 2 August, 1870.

MY DEAR SIR,--In the midst of my sallow grass and my leaves crumpled with drought, a little spring seemed to bubble up at my feet in your letter. How could I feel other than pleased and honored with your proposal? I wish only I deserved it better--but anyhow I can’t find it in my heart to wave aside my crown out of modesty, lest Anthony might not offer it again. So I put it on my head with many thanks, consoled with the reflection that a wreath unmerited always avenges itself by looking confoundedly like a foolscap in the eyes of every one but the wearer. So I bow my head meekly to your laurels, and thank you very heartily for an honor as agreeable as it is unexpected. I shall have the satisfaction of knowing that the deserved popularity of your book will carry my name into many a pleasant home where it is now unfamiliar, and if my publisher’s accounts show a better figure hereafter, I shall say it is your doing.

With a very sincere acknowledgment of the obligation you lay upon me to do some credit to your second leaf,

I remain, my dear Sir, Very cordially yours, J. R. LOWELL.

RICHARD GRANT WHITE, ESQ.

After some delays attendant on such business, Lowell was able in the summer of 1871 to make a sale of a portion of the original estate of Elmwood which left him the house and a couple of acres for his home, and an income of four or five thousand dollars a year. It was a modest living, but it cleared his mind of fretting cares. As he wrote to Mr. Stephen: “It is a life-preserver that will keep my head above water, and the swimming I will do for myself.” Of the effect upon his mind he wrote more freely to his friend Mr. Norton: “I cannot tell you how this sense of my regained paradise of Independence enlivens me. It is something I have not felt for years--hardly since I have been a professor. The constant sense of a ball and chain jangling at my heels, and that those who are inexpressibly dear to me were at the risk of my giving satisfaction in an office where what is best in me was too often held in abeyance by an uneasy self-consciousness forced upon me by my position, have been greater hindrances than anybody else can ever know. But now I can draw a full breath of natural air and discarbonate my lungs of the heavy atmosphere of an unnatural confinement. I look forward to my next year’s work with cheerfulness. I am no longer chained to the oar, but a volunteer. Whether I shall recover the wholesome mental unrest which kept me active when I was younger, I know not, but at least I shan’t have to print before I am ready, nor to keep on with the spendthrift habit of splitting up the furniture of my brain to keep the pot boiling.... I mean to come abroad at the end of the next college year, and shall pop in on you some day, bringing a familiar odor, half Cambridge, half pipe. I shall read you my new poem--when it gets written--and bore you with old French in which I am still plunged to the ears. I am become a pretty thorough master of it, and wish I knew the modern lingo half as well.”

“It takes a good while,” he writes to Miss Norton, “to slough off the effect of seventeen years of pedagogy. I am grown learned (after a fashion) and dull. The lead has entered into my soul. But I have great faith in putting the sea between me and the stocks I have been sitting in so long.” He worked steadily at his college duties, with some thought, I suspect, of finishing with his professorial work, the laboriously learned part of his life. The minute, painstaking care to which he gave to the studies which underlay his college work, so evident in the annotation of his books, was after all a severe drain upon a nature that took the greatest delight in imaginative freedom. He seems hardly to have allowed himself any relief. “I have been reading over your book[46] again,” he writes to Mr. Fields, 29 February, 1872, “and found it very interesting and queer. Queer, I say, because it is the first volume I have read for some months later than the XIV. century, and I was a little puzzled at first, like Selkirk when he got back among his own people and heard his own language again. I am glad you have left out the imaginary nephew. One was apt to stumble over him and apologize with a ‘Beg pardon, but really had forgotten you were here.’ These buffers between the reader and the first personal pronoun never lessen the shock, though they are always in the way. But nobody wants them, for egotism does not consist in never so many capital _I’s_. Moreover, I am persuaded that everybody likes it in his secret heart (as he does garlic), and says he doesn’t for appearances.

“Your Dickens letters are a great deal more interesting than Forster’s for some reason or other. I fancy it is because they are more natural. In writing to Forster, Dickens must have felt that he was writing to his biographer, and had the constraint of sitting before a glass. Indeed, I was very much disappointed in Forster’s volume.[47] It doesn’t leave an agreeable impression, which is surely a fault in biography.

“What a dear old affectionate soul Miss Mitford was! I knew nothing about her before. Even her little vanities are rather pleasant than otherwise. It is surely a delightful gift to be made happy as easily as she.

“We are all busy getting ready for Mabel’s departure. I hate to think of it, though I believe she is as safe as human forethought could make her. Burnett is all I could wish.”

Miss Lowell was married 2 April, 1872, to Mr. Edward Burnett, and went with him to Southboro, Massachusetts, where he was carrying on a dairy and stock farm. Miss Rebecca Lowell died in May, so that the household at Elmwood was in a measure dissolved. Lowell was busy up to the last over the long article on Dante which he contributed to the July _North American_. He was released from his college work, having resigned his professorship; he let Elmwood to Mr. Aldrich and sailed 9 July for Europe with Mrs. Lowell, to be absent two years.