CHAPTER XII

THIRD JOURNEY IN EUROPE

1872-1874

When Lowell went to Europe in the summer of 1872, he left his college routine behind him; with his new-found liberty, he seemed to find all the expression he cared for in familiar talk with the many friends, old and new, whom he encountered in his travels, and in letters to friends at home and abroad. Once only, as will be seen, did he break into poetry, but the two years of his absence contain so little to add to the record of his production that it seems the natural course, as it is most pleasant to the biographer, to let this holiday in Lowell’s life be told for the most part in his letters. The letters printed by Mr. Norton[48] are not drawn upon, except now and then for a needful phrase.

_To Thomas Hughes._

ROYAL VICTORIA HOTEL, KILLARNEY, 20 July, 1872.

MY DEAR HUGHES,--Finding I could land in Queenstown, I did so with most infinite discomfort, and here I am in Ireland, having on my way hither done Blarney Castle which is well-nigh as good as Kenilworth. Here, to my surprise, I find a gigantic new R. C. Cathedral, See of the Bishop of Kerry. However, I am not writing a guide-book. I wish to ask if you are in London, and how long you will remain. I am of two minds,--one to go straight to the Continent, the other to stay a week or two in London in lodgings and see things quietly in that blessed season when everybody is out of town. You I “lot” upon seeing. Will you write me at the Grosvenor Hotel, Chester (where I shall turn up by and by), and let me know? I am not even sure if Parliament have adjourned. Think of it! Just like our Yankee impudence, isn’t it? But the truth is, the last paper I saw was dated 9th July, and I hate to make acquaintance again with the World and its goings-on.

I must run to my breakfast, or rather to Madame, of whom I have visions wandering disconsolate in search of me who am ensconced in the smoking-room, where I happened to see an inkstand last night.

In the hope of seeing you soon, Affectionately yours always, J. R. LOWELL.

_To the Same_.

CHESTER, 28 July, 1872.

Your letter and I arrived here together last night. We shall stay here three or four days to recruit from the Irish accent,--which somehow wearied me wonderfully.

If lodgings may be had by the week, to renew or no at will, you would greatly oblige me by taking plain and inexpensive ones for us, where I can let my cup fill again from a tap that rather dribbles than runs. Travelling, I find, drains. A pleasant landlady I should prefer to splendor. I get more than enough of that in the hotels....

If you should find lodgings, I will engage them, beginning with Friday next. If I once get a perch to which I can return at need, I can take short flights wherever I will, without such heaps of luggage. Will you telegraph or write me here? If no lodgings, tell me of some quiet hotel,--not on the American caravanserai system, whither we can go.

_To Miss Grace Norton._

11 DOVER STREET, PICCADILLY, Aug. 4, 1872.

...Dublin interested me much.... From Dublin to Chester, where we stayed five days, and where Charles Kingsley (who is a canon there) was very kind. We had the advantage of going over the Cathedral with him, and over the town with the chief local antiquary. We fell quite in love with it and with the delightful walk round the walls. We arrived in London night before last.

Affectionately yours, LLUMBAGO LLOWELL.

_To C. E. Norton._

11 DOVER STREET, PICCADILLY, 13 August, 1872.

Give my love to Grace and relieve the anxiety of her mind by telling her I have found J. H. at the Tavistock Hotel, Covent Garden, where he is Mr. ’Omes. I have tried in vain to get him up hither. He goes to Dresden on Thursday to meet some friends whom he learned to know at the Fosters’ and whom he likes. Then he is coming round slowly to Paris, where we are to meet and decide on plans. Meanwhile I have resolved to stay here till you come, if you come soon enough.[49] If not, I shall cross over to you. I go down to Yorkshire (I mean Cumberland) on Friday or Saturday to see the Storys. I can show Fanny York, Durham, and Fountain’s Abbey on the way,--and Ripon, though I did not think it much twenty years ago. We shall spend a few days with the Storys at “Crosby Lodge on Eden” (which has a pleasant name, as if it stood in a garden of cucumbers), and then work downward through the Lake Country and so back to London. We have very central lodgings here, with what I value above all, a pleasant landlady. Our rooms are very small, but they can be smoked in, being bachelor apartments construed into the dual. As it is not the season, we shall probably have no trouble in getting them again when we come back. Now if you are coming over early in September, you see it would be better for us to stay till you come.

We have been having a very pleasant time thus far, though I have not yet quite got over the feeling of the ball and chain. It will take a good while. I do not know whether I told you I had resigned my professorship? I did so the night before we sailed that there might be no discussion. I found that at any rate my salary ceased during my absence, and so I thought it a good chance. I do not altogether like this matter of the salary. It prevents any professor who has not some private fortune of his own from having any vacation at all.[50] But I am glad it happened so, for it just turned the scale with me in favor of the wiser decision,--as I think it is. I cannot yet get over the dulness it ground into me. I begin to think I am too old ever to shake it wholly off....

We have been seeing all sorts of things (persons are out of town) since we have been here. The Hogarths delight me again, and I have twice seen the Rake’s Progress, which I did not get at when I was here before. Hogarth’s color is as fine as his invention and dramatic powers. He astonishes me always by his soft brilliancy and harmony. I have _lots_ of things to talk over when we meet.

_To the Same._

11 DOVER STREET, PICCADILLY, 15 September, 1872.

Here we are back again in our old lodgings, with the nicest of possible landladies, Mrs. Bennett. We spent ten days with the Storys at Crosby Lodge, and while there went to Naworth and Corbie Castles and Lanercost Abbey. Naworth interested me specially as being an old border keep tamed to modern civilities, and I liked the Howards, father and son, more even than their dwelling. On our way north we saw Peterboro, Lincoln, York, Fountain’s Abbey, Ripon, Durham, and Carlisle. My old impression was confirmed, and Durham lords it over all of them in my memory. Again, also, as twenty years ago, the Cumberland people seemed more American in look and manner than other English folk. Our visit with the Storys was very pleasant--for a friendship of forty years’ standing is no common thing--and William is absolutely unchanged. I found that I had grown away from him somewhat, but not in a way to lessen our cordiality, and as always in such cases, I held my tongue on controversial points.

From Cumberland we went right through to Grasmere, lodging at the old Swan Inn (the only one left), which pleased me more than it did Fanny. We drove to Dungeon Ghyll Force and Keswick, and then to Lichfield. Here I had a most amusing evening in the smoking-room, listening to the talk of the city magnates, full of _Philisterei_, if you will, but with a full Shakespearian flavor and a basis of English good sense that pleased me. From Lichfield through Worcester to Hereford and thence to Gloucester, whose cathedral I liked best on the whole, its centre tower being less squat than the others. But the northern minsters beat ’em.

Thence to Tintern, where we spent four days, doing Ragland meanwhile. From Tintern to Chepstow we took boat down the Wye, and very delightful it was. Thence to Bristol, where we slept, saw St. Mary Radcliffe and the cathedral, and then through to London. The sight of masts at Bristol was a cordial to me, and I thought them the finest trees I had seen in England.

I have not been over well since I have been in England. “Flying gout” I am fain to call it, and I am now drinking _Vichy_ in the hope to make it fly altogether. But it is partly _dumps_, I fancy, for travelling bores me horribly. I am wretched at not finding a letter from Mabel here, and J. H. and Rowse have vanished, leaving no sign. I shall be all ready to come over so soon as I hear from you. You will find me dull, but honestly willing to brighten. A few days with you will do me infinite good. It is abroad that one truly misses friends. At home one is always expecting them back, and they do half come back in a thousand things that daily recall them. But here!

_To the Same._

11 DOVER STREET, PICCADILLY, 20 September, 1872.

... I will take the room at your hotel to begin on Monday, and shall without doubt be in Paris on Monday night at 8.15, according to the railway guide. I can only hope that trains are more punctual in France than here, where I have literally not found _one_ up to time since I landed in Ireland, and often more than an hour behind it....

My gout seems to have left off threatening, though it bullied me well for some weeks, but I have been out of sorts ever since I got here, _why_ I can’t divine. We have had letters from Mabel, in good health and happy, which have done me great good....

_To the Same._

HOTEL DE LORRAINE, RUE DE BEAUNE, NO. 7, 16 October, 1872.

... We like our new quarters very much.[51] Moreover, our living (_vin et bois y compris_) costs us about fifty francs a week less than at the Hotel Windsor, and we get a better dinner here for three francs than there for six. Moreover, everything here is French. Even the quarter of the town where we are has an indefinable Gallic flavor like the soupçon of garlic in their cookery. There are three or four regular habitués of the table (_dont trois decorés_) who seem to be scientific men; at any rate, one is a surgeon, and another who has lots of _esprit_ an _avocat_, I suspect. On parle toujours et quelquefois tous ensemble, aussi qu’a force d’écouter consciencieusement je m’habitue sans le savoir à la langue. Un beau matin je me trouve parlant à merveille débitant les mots avec toute l’insouciance d’un aqueduc qui n’a pas aucune responsabilité des eaux qu’il verse. Si je veille pendant la nuit, je m’occupe à composer des petits discours qui auraient mis le peu Massillon hors de lui d’envie.

Je ne suis pas encore allé chez M. Littré, mais je te remercie beaucoup pour la lettre et la presenterai en très peu de jours. J’ai acheté une de les plumes d’or que tu m’as louées mais soit la pauvreté du papier (à très bon marché) ou bien des idées, elle refuse de marcher dans une langue aussi facile que doit lui etre la française.

Since your departure, my dear boy, I have bucaneered (’tis a free translation of bouquiné, corresponding to my exploits in turning my native tongue into French--for I like to be consistent) among the stalls, but Fortune packed her trunk (the baggage!) at the same time with you, and I have not prospered much. One attribute of deity I have not arrogated presumptuously but enjoy by a privilege of nature, to wit (_à savoir_), that of confounding the counsels of the wicked, for I puzzle the dealers awfully now and then with my _discours_. I suppose it must be that I inadvertently mix in too much of l’ancien Français. ’Tis as if one should talk pure Chaucer to Burnham.[52] However, I bought the seventeen volume Byron for $40, and have sent it to my grandson’s (I mean Petit fils--you see how I am getting translated) to be bound. If it were not for this confounded pen (saving your reverence) I would write you a cheerful letter--but what can one do when it takes so long to write the first half of a sentence that one forgets the last? I assure you I had several clever things to say, but they are stuck in my pen--a very unfortunate position of things, because you will see they have gone out of my head....

_To the Same._

PARIS, 1 November, 1872.

... Now for _bouquiniste_ news. I think I did not tell you that I had picked up a splendid quarto (with fine port) of Montaigne’s Travels. It is a beauty. Also _Nouveaux Memoires pour servir à l’histoire du Cartesianisme_, a tiny tome in vellum with Ste. Beuve’s autograph and pencil marks. Best of all, I got at an auction _Le Chevalier au Cigne_, which I have long vainly sought, four volumes quarto _demi mar._ for $33.50. I should not have thought it dear at a hundred. I am going out presently after a copy of the _Poètes Champenois_, which I have found at Aubry’s, for $180. Pillet asked $350 for an incomplete set. After this last extravagance I shall retire from business for a while, for I am getting beyond my depth. Aubry has a copy of _Renard_ bound for $40. Shall I buy it for you? It includes Chabaillé’s supplementary fifth volume....

We are having a nice time, though I felt like Dante when he turned round and missed Virgil, when I found that Rowse had flown. However, three days after John [Holmes] arrived in excellent health and spirits--likes our hotel, and will stay _ad libitum_. His knee is not quite right, but otherwise he is robustious. He confided to me yesterday that the first time we walked out, he wished me to guide him to where he could get some oysters! He thought they would quite set him up. He is very droll with his German, and delightful to the last degree. In French he is as inarticulate as one of his favorite shell-fish. We have a little woman who comes to talk with us an hour a day, and so soon as I get _fluid_ I am going to Littré. I already enter into conversation at table with gusto.

_To the Same._

PARIS, 14 November, 1872.

... I am very glad you sent the Emersons to me. I have engaged him a lovely little apartment _au premier_ at 8 frs. the day. I think I shall take it myself when they go, for I am more and more minded to stay the winter through. We are all well and send lots of love to all of you. Fanny is at work on French exercises all day, and as for me, when I get my French suit of clothes I shall be a thorough Gaul. I am ready for a revolution (or at any rate an _e mute_) to-morrow. It is pretty chilly here now, and I almost wish the Commune had put off their bonfires till the middle of November, when they would have done some good. I am writing on a marble table, and my fingers are numb as gutta percha.

_To the Same._

PARIS, 6 December, 1872.

There has been an untoward gap in my correspondence, because I have fallen back a little into home habits, and have been pegging away at Old French again.... But the days are so short! and it has been such gloomy weather. Fifty-seven days of rain, think of it, and the only excitement the _crue_ of the Seine. Yes, we are beginning to have another, for we are threatened with a revolution. The Right are resolved to push things to extremes, and would rather have a military triumvirate than Thiers with a ministry of his own choosing. The French look upon Paris as the metropolis of the world, but I am more and more struck with a certain provincialism of mind shown in the importance they attach to their own personality. Every one of them has the flavor of a village great man. It is not individuality I mean, but value of self. No man can bring himself to get out of the way, even though it is the country he is blocking. I pick up a good deal at my _table d’hôte_ and am more and more pleased with it.

I have not yet been to call on Littré, but I shall before long. My French still refuses to go trippingly from my tongue. However, I manage now to converse at table, and plunge into general discussion bravely. In the intervals of the rain (for it does not always rain all day long, though it rains every day) I take long walks in every direction, and am grown pretty intimate with Paris. I still like it and the people. By the way, Clarice (the maid who waits at breakfast) said to me this morning: “Les aristocrats ne veulent pas que la basse classe soit instruite. Ils croient que le peuple sait trop déja. Avec la République nous aurions l’instruction obligatoire. Ah, ce serait une chose très bonne pour nous.” I am inclined to believe that the people know more than my friend, the Marquis de Grammont, thinks!

_To the Same._

PARIS, 11 January, 1873.

... My life runs on in the same canal. A walk before breakfast round the parallelogram formed by the Pont de Solferino at one end and the Pont des Arts at the other, then a walk after breakfast with John up to the Pont Neuf and across to the courtyard of the Tuileries where we sit and collogue over our cigars, feeding the sparrows between whiles; then home, and John to Schiller’s Thirty Years’ War and I to my Old French. In the dusk I generally take a longer walk by myself, or else the same one with John. I have got a whole closet full of books, and have reached the end of my tether, having just received an account from the Barings showing that I have overdrawn £104. However, the books are a kind of investment. But I begin to foresee that I shall not stay abroad so long as I expected. I thought I was all right now, but as usual my income is never so large as my auguries. Fortunately, I like Cambridge better than any other spot of the earth’s surface, and if I can only manage to live there shall be at ease yet....

_To the Same._

PARIS, 18 March, 1873.

... I shall probably be in England before you go, for Hughes writes me (this is between ourselves) that there is a chance of their giving me a D. C. L. at Oxford, which I should like. I am not, I think, overfond of decorations, but I should like this one, for I cannot get over a superstitious respect for what goes into the college triennial catalogue.

_To Thomas Hughes._

PARIS, 19 March, 1873.

... What you say of the quiet lives that would come to the front in England in a time of stress, I believe to be true of us also. I cannot think such a character as Emerson’s--one of the simplest and noblest I have ever known--a freak of chance, and I hope that my feeling that the country is growing worse is nothing more than men of my age have always felt when they looked back to the _tempus actum_.... If I had dreamed you would have run over to Paris, wouldn’t I have told you where I was! But, in fact, I have lingered on here from week to week aimlessly, having come abroad to do nothing, and having thus far succeeded admirably.

_To Leslie Stephen._

PARIS, 29 April, 1873.

... I think I have made up my mind to run over to London for a day or two, to bid the Nortons good-by, for I cannot bear to have the sea between us before I see them again. If I do, I shall arrive about the 7th of May, and I shall count on seeing you as much as possible.... I have read your “Are we Christians?” and liked it, of course, because I found _you_ in it, and that is something that will be dear to me so long as I keep my wits. I think I should say that you lump _shams_ and _conventions_ too solidly together in a common condemnation. All conventions are not shams by a good deal, and we should soon be Papuans without them. But I dare say I have misunderstood you.

_To the Same._

PARIS, 3 May, 1873.

I shall arrive Monday night, and have taken a chamber at the Queen’s Hotel, which is described to me as “somewhere behind the Burlington Arcade,” which is tolerably central. I shall not think of billeting myself on you, especially as you are not yet fairly settled. But I wish to see as much of you as may be. I must see your new nest as I did the old one, for that was a great satisfaction to me, and I recall it often in fancy. I must make the acquaintance of Miss Laura, too, in whom I feel an added interest now that I have got my step, and am a grandfather.[53] You would laugh at the number of perambulators (as they call baby-wagons nowadays) and ponies that I have bought for that wonderful boy, as I lie awake at night and hear the tramp of the _sergent de ville_ under my windows. I have carried him through college so many times, that he must be a prodigy of learning by this time. I do not know whether I ought to betray it even to you, but he has more than once shown a tendency to be _fast_, though I have reclaimed him. I am quite sure he is steady now, and does not drink more than is good for him. That story of the police court was much exaggerated.

I don’t wonder that you feel sad at the thought of losing the Nortons. They have been and are more to me than I can tell. But you will see them all again, when you come to make your visit to me, which I look upon as pledged. It is as easy to get to us as to Switzerland, and you shall sleep now and then in the ice-chest to make you comfortable. The roof of the barn is pretty slippery and the ground below hard enough to give you a smart Alpine shock. By the way, what you say about Switzerland in July delights me. Remember that my address is always to the care of the Barings, and let me know where you are to be and when. I have a sort of glimmering of Lausanne, where I could exist cheaply, for though on pleasure I am bent, I am forced to have a frugal mind. But I am more and more convinced that a man (especially a grandfather) is most comfortable when he has worn his ruts deepest, and I should fly over the deep to-morrow if I could. It is ignoble, but it is true. I always hated the sights _qu’il faut voir_, and now there is no hope of strangeness anywhere. Man is a most uninventive animal--you scratch through the nationality and there _he_ is underneath--the very bore you were running away from. However, I am rested and grown so stout that I have positively had to let out a reef in my trousers.

I reckon on a very jolly time in London, because I shall always be in the tremor of going away--though I am almost sorry that I am going when I think of saying good-by to the Nortons. I am sorry you did not see more of Emerson; he is good to love, and if his head be sometimes in thin and difficult air, his heart never is. He must have left London, then? Gay told me he met you at the Nortons, and kept calling you Stevens, and I irascibly correcting him as I would a vicious proofsheet. I don’t know why, but I am always exasperated when anybody pluralizes you. Whether it is that I hold you to be unique, or that I was once cheated by a man named Stevens, I can’t tell. However, Gay is a good fellow and a good artist for all that. Why is it that people do so? They always call Child _Childs_ in the same fashion.

My eyes gave out some time ago, so I will only say that I shall go straight to Cleveland Place Tuesday morning, and if you dropt in on your way down town, it would be the best possible world so long as it lasted.

_To C. E. Norton._

(Passenger by “Olympus.”)

PARIS, 13 May, 1873.

I am so wont to carry Home about with me and to say “here,” when I mean Cambridge, even in Paris, that I did not fairly realize to myself that you were all going away till I was meditating over my pipe on board the Channel steamer. I made up my mind that I would fling an old shoe after you in the shape of a good-by that should surprise you after you were fairly embarked. I need not say how happy my three days with you in London were, nor how sweet it was to renew the old, old friendship with you all. We don’t make new friends, at least not in the same sense, for it is the privilege of old friendship that it knows all our weaknesses and accounts for them beforehand, taking almost a kind of pleasure in them as we do in bad weather that we have prophesied.

I wish I could have gone with you to Oxford, but Fanny was so happy at seeing me a day sooner than she expected that I was glad I didn’t. However, I made a memorandum never to leave her behind again in future.... They had taken good care of her while I was away, for somehow or other everybody in the house is fond of her.

The best wish I can make for you is that every day of your passage may be as fine as this which is a mixture of all that is sweetest in spring time. May the dry masts of your steamer be covered with leaves and flowers like Joseph’s rod, and may the porpoises gamble about you for the children’s sake....

No iceberg come anigh thee, No curdling east wind try thee, The wreaths of the wake Whirl in moons for thy sake, And the fogs furl off and fly thee!

My heart is fuller than I dreamed of with this parting, but it is not foreboding I am sure. I shall find you all again after many days, and we shall have many happy hours together....

_To T. B. Aldrich._

PARIS, 28 May, 1873.

... I shall stay out my two years, though personally I would rather be at home. In certain ways this side is more agreeable to my tastes than the other,--but even the buttercups stare at me as a stranger and the birds have a foreign accent....

Before this reaches you I shall have been over to Oxford to get a D. C. L. So by the time you get it this will be the letter of a Doctor and entitled to the more respect. Perhaps, in order to get the full flavor, you had better read this passage first, if you happen to think of it. Do you not detect a certain flavor of parchment and Civil Law?...

_To Thomas Hughes._

PARIS, 2 June, 1873.

... We shall leave Paris to-morrow or next day, stopping in Rheims to see the churches, at Louvain for the Town House, and so on to Antwerp, Ghent, and Bruges.... If I don’t see you in Oxford, I shall stop long enough in London to get a glimpse of you. Our plan is to go to Switzerland and Germany, and so down to Italy for the winter. Then back to Paris, and so over to England on our way home next year. I hate travelling with my whole soul, though I like well enough to “be” in places....

_To Mrs. Lewis A. Stimson._

BRUGES, 25 June, 1873.

... I have been over to Oxford to be doctored, and had a very pleasant time of it. You would respect me if you could have seen me in my scarlet gown.... We go from here in a day or two to Holland--then up the Rhine to Switzerland, where we join the Stephens and Miss Thackeray.

_To C. E. Norton._

VENICE, 30 October, 1873.

... Since we left Bruges, we have been up the Rhine, and then across to Nürnberg, where we spent a fortnight in great contentment. Before this, however, we had made a pretty good giro in the Low Countries, going wherever there was a good cathedral or Town Hall.... When we reached Geneva we found ourselves so comfortable that we stayed two months and did some reading. I liked the town, and especially the walks in its neighborhood, very much. Then we went to Chamonix, and then over the Simplon to the Italian lakes, whence we came hither. Venice charms me more than ever. We keep a gondola and go about leisurely seeing all the lovely things.... The weather has not been very good, but there has been only one day when we could not go out in the gondola without the _coperto_, either toward the Lido or over the lagunes to watch the sunset, or through the smaller canals to find that the very back lanes of Venice are finer than the highstreets anywhere else....

I am recovering a little facility in Italian--to be lost again when I get beyond the daily sound of it. I give Fanny a lesson every day in the Promessi Sposi, which has so often served as a go-cart to those who are learning to take their first steps in the language. She reads aloud to me, so that I save my eyes and practise my ears at the same time. She is a very good scholar for she puts zeal into whatever she does, and is making great progress. It is odd to me how the familiar phrases cling round my brain like bats to the roof of a cage, and are set flying all of a sudden by a chance footfall. I am very much struck, by the way, to find how much more vividly I remember the Venetian pictures than any others. I can’t help thinking it implies a peculiar merit in them. I recall them as I do natural objects--the Staubbach for example, or Hogarth....

_To Thomas Hughes._

VENICE, Thanksgiving Day, 1873.

... I can’t “do” anything over here except study a little now and then, and I long to get back to my reeky old den at Elmwood. Then I hope to find I have learned something in my two years abroad.... I am looking forward to home now, and shouldn’t wonder if I took up my work at Harvard again, as they wish me to do. We leave Venice probably to-morrow for Verona. Thence to Florence, Rome, and Naples....

As the year 1874 opened, the question of Lowell’s return to college work was mooted. He had felt a little piqued at being suffered to leave, after sixteen years’ continuous service, without any concession from the college. He thought at least he might have been granted leave of absence on half pay, and when no proposal of this sort was made, he sent in a definite resignation. Now the authorities intimated that they hoped he would resume his old place. He was in doubt what he should do. He had tasted the pleasures of freedom; he remembered well the uncongeniality of much of his work; he was painfully conscious of lacking qualities requisite for success in the profession of teaching; he had, moreover, been disturbed by physical disabilities, especially in a blurring of memory and a weakness in his head which alarmed him; the trouble, he decided, was “flying gout,” a disorder to which he had been more or less subject for many years, and which never left him for long after this period. More disturbing still was the “drop of black blood” he had inherited from his mother, which was apt to spread itself over the pupil of his eye, darkening everything, and, as he said, temporarily inducing a mood of suspicion or distrust.

On the other hand, he was at a time of life when uncertainties of income were likely to create anxiety rather than to stimulate exertion. His income from the sale of his land had proved less than he anticipated, and he felt the need of a fixed increase. Moreover, he found that college life had become more of a habit than he suspected; the putting of the sea between him and it did not emancipate him, though it gave a temporary exhilaration. He was timid about experiments in living. Yet he was unwilling to allow himself to be governed in such a matter wholly by financial considerations. As he wrote to a friend: “If the worst came, I could sell my house and go into lodgings, which perhaps wouldn’t be so unwise after all. At any rate, I can’t let that be a prevailing motive to decide me about so sacred an office as that of Teacher.”

“I never was good for much as a professor,” he wrote to Mr. Norton, 2 February, 1874; “once a week, perhaps, at the best, when I could manage to get into some conceit of myself, and so could put a little of my _go_ into the boys. The rest of the time my desk was as good as I. And then, on the other hand, my being a professor wasn’t good for me--it damped my gunpowder, as it were, and my mind, when it took fire at all (which wasn’t often), drawled off in an unwilling fuse instead of leaping to meet the first spark.” There was, besides all this, a possible complication with a friend in whose light he would not stand, and letting this tip the scales, he wrote refusing the reappointment. There came in reply a letter from the president of the college, removing the supposed complication and setting the whole matter in such a light that Lowell revoked his decision and accepted the appointment. It was characteristic of him, that though asked to send his final answer before a certain date, he dismissed the subject from his mind, and wrote from Paris three months later: “I don’t know whether I am a professor or no. On the second of May it suddenly flashed across me that I was to say _yes_ or _no_ before the first of that whimsical month, and that I had forgotten all about it. I meant to say _yes_ on the whole, but if luck has settled it _no_, perhaps it’s for the best.”

A more consuming interest had driven professorships out of his head. He was in Florence at the time of this correspondence, and in Florence, too, when he heard of the death of Agassiz, and on the eve of leaving for Rome he was moved to write that elegy which, if it does not reach the height of his odes in poetical spirit, has that endearing quality which will continue to make it read as long as people continue to take delight in the verses in which poets celebrate their friendships. But Goldsmith’s “Retaliation,” Longfellow’s Introduction to the “Tales of a Wayside Inn,” Emerson’s “Adirondacs,” and Holmes’s occasional poems are in lighter vein than “Agassiz,” which stands midway in poetry between such poems and Milton’s “Lycidas.” As in the case of the others, it has a succession of portraits, but it strikes a deeper note; the elegiac quality is present, and the complaint, the linking of personal grief with universal emotion, the widening of sympathy, all serve to leave in the mind rather the mood of restless enquiry into deep problems of life, than of sensitive appreciation of a series of portraits. It is perhaps worth noting that he had just been reading Leslie Stephen’s “Essays on Free Thinking and Plain Speaking,” and had been stirred by the book into more or less of an enquiry of his own attitude toward the great questions of life and immortality. Referring to the book, he wrote to Mr. Norton: “I emancipated myself long ago, and any friendly attempt to knock off my shackles is apt to result in barking my shins, don’t you see? Science has scuttled the old Ship of Faith, and now they would fain persuade me that there is something dishonest as well as undignified in drifting about on the hencoop that I had contrived to secure in the confusion. They undertake to demonstrate to me that it’s a hencoop and an unworthy perch for a philosopher. But I shall cling fast. ’Tis as good as a line-of-battle ship if it only keep my head above water. I am so made that I allow no distinction between natural and supernatural. There is none for me. I am as supernatural a ghost as was ever met with. But I like Leslie’s book all the same. It is very able, honest, and clever--full of wit and trained muscle.” And to Mr. Stephen himself he wrote later: “My only objection to any part of your book is, that I think our beliefs more a matter of choice (natural selection, perhaps, but anyhow not logical) than you would admit, and that I find no fault with a judicious shutting of the eyes.”[54]

When one compares the portraits in “Agassiz” with the earlier sketches, sometimes of the same persons, in “A Fable for Critics,” one finds it easy to mark the mellower, richer tints in the later work. The poem was indeed almost a real posthumous work. Lowell, removed by an ocean’s width from his old comrades and his familiar haunts, mingled the dead and the living in his imagination and found in the whole concourse, headed by Agassiz himself, a microcosm of that world in which he took the greatest delight, the world of friendly, wise, and witty men. As in the case of the Commemoration Ode, it drew virtue from him, for he had put into it a large part of himself, and had been possessed by it. Shortly after finishing it, he wrote of his experience in the composition to Mr. Norton,[55] and later, when there had been time for the sensation to cool, for an interchange of comment and criticism, and for the poem itself to meet his eyes in its printed form, he wrote again:--

“To tell the truth, my collapse from the happy excitement of composition was so great, that when the poem came to me in print, it inspired me with something like that disgust a freshman feels at sight of an empty bottle the next morning after his first debauch. I have not been able to read it through yet, but have only turned to such passages as you thought needed retouching. In doing this a few others caught my eye. My dear boy, don’t you see (to answer what I forgot before and what you remind me of again) that Emerson and Longfellow are both, thank God, still in the flesh, and that I should not have mentioned them at all, but that I _saw_ them so vividly I couldn’t help it. This, too, is my reply to what you say of a resemblance to a passage in Rogers (I thought it was Beckford). I think I see what you mean, but I regard it not, for the _thought_ is altogether unlike, and came to me (as the receivers of stolen goods say) in the way of my business. I had gone out of myself utterly. I was in the dining-room at Parker’s, and when I came back to self-consciousness and solitude, it was in another world that I awoke, and I was puzzled to say which. It was a case of possession but not of self-possession. I was cold, but my brain was full of warm light, and the passage came to me in its completeness without any seeming intervention of mine. I was delighted, I confess, with this renewal of imagination in me after so many blank years. If there be any verbal coincidence with Rogers, I shall be surprised and sorry. It had never occurred to me, and I think if anywhere it must be in the couplet beginning: ‘In this abstraction.’ But I hope you will turn out to be mistaken. I am glad the poem is liked, though I cannot yet see it fairly. I thought it should be good by the state in which it left me and by the unconscious way in which it came. The only part I _composed_ was the concluding verses, which I suspect to be the weakest part. The verse that cost me most trouble was the first, which, do what I would, insisted on being as Johnsonian as ‘Observation, with extensive view.’ But it is hard to put a wire into a verse without stiffening the latter.

“I surrendered the last verse about Longfellow without a murmur. I spoiled it by thinking more of the vehicle than what it was to carry. But Emerson’s nose must stand.[56] I will give you ‘shrewd’ instead of ‘wise,’ however, for it is better and (I think) the word that came first. I have not left my opinion of either of these two doubtful, for I have celebrated one in prose, and the other in verse, which is more than either of ’em has done for me, go to!

“I thank you heartily, my dear Charles, for all your criticisms. I like to hear them, and when I don’t agree it is not from self-love, of which (in such matters) I have as little as most men. But I have a respect for things that are _given me_, as the greater part of this was, and my poetry ought to show marks of design if it doesn’t. If I have done anything good, I owe it more largely to your sympathy, which spurred me out of my constitutional indolence and indifference, than to anything else. I like to tell you so, for it is true. I value my own natural gifts (as I think I have a right) but set no great store by my performance. I came into the world with a strong dose of poppy in my veins, and love dreaming better than doing. This has been a great hindrance to me, and I have struggled hard against it, but never against my consciousness of it.” ...

* * * * *

From Florence the Lowells went, 23 February, 1874, to Rome, and were with the Storys at the Palazzo Barberini.

_To C. E. Norton._

ROME, 26 February, 1874.

... The journey from Florence was one long surprise in the snowy mountains. There is much more than common, and I had never seen them so before. But the almond-trees are in blossom. Rome saddens me, I can’t quite say how. My associations with it are of so peculiar and deep a kind, and so astonishingly undeadened by time. Generally I find I have forgotten much, but here all my memories seem of yesterday....

I have not much time to myself here in the Palazzo Barberini, as you will easily fancy. I am thoroughly glad to find my old friend’s statues so much to my liking. The Libyan Sybil, the Salome and the Electra I especially like. But he is now at work on an Alcestis which will be a long way ahead of anything he has done. It is beautifully simple, graceful, and dignified.

_To the Same._

ROME, 2 March, 1874.

... The sun is just about to set, and I see the moon rising white over the stone pines that sentinel the gate of the Barberini Gardens. We have been at Sant’ Onofrio and seen the incomparable view thence. We started for the Vatican, but were too late, and so walked on to Sant’ Onofrio. The mountains are white as Switzerland--the farther ones I mean. I hardly knew the road from Florence hither for this strangeness of snow. But the almond-trees are in blossom, and the daisies and violets and other little field flowers unknown to me.

_To Miss Norton._

ALBERGO CROCOLLE, NAPOLI, Marzo 12, 1874.

... We left Rome after a fortnight’s visit to the Storys, which was very pleasant _quoad_ the old friends, but rather wild and whirling _quoad_ the new. Two receptions a week, one in the afternoon and one in the evening, were rather confusing for wits so eremitical as mine. I am not equal to the _grande monde_....

We have been twice to the incomparable Museum, which is to me the most interesting in the world. There is the keyhole through which we barbarians can peep into a Greek interior--provincial Greek, Roman Greek if you will, but still Greek.

_To C. E. Norton._

HOTEL DE LORRAINE, 7 RUE DE BEAUNE, PARIS, 11 May, 1874.

... I expected to arrive here a fortnight earlier than I did, for the fine weather began just as we were leaving Rome, and I dawdled as one always does in that lovely air. I had one delightful drive out to the Tavolato with Story, Dexter, Wild, and Tilton the day before we left. We lunched under an arbor of dried canes, drank _vino asciulto_, ate a _frittata_ and endless eggs _al tegame_, and were like boys on a half-holiday. What a light that was half shadow, and what shadows that were all light were over everything!...

They explain all our bad weather here, and it is nearly all bad, by the simple formula _ce sont les giboulées_, and you see I have been lucky enough to get from a doctor in Rome a phrase that makes me more content under the unseasonable performances of my own personal meteorology. I have already accumulated a heap of catalogues, but have bought no books. I shall buy a few more....

_To W. D. Howells._

PARIS, 13 May, 1874.

... We have taken our passage for the 24th June, and shall arrive, if all go well, in time for the “glorious Fourth.” I hope we shall find you in Cambridge. I long to get back, and yet am just beginning to get wonted (as they say of babies and new cows) over here. The delightful little inn where I am lodged is almost like home to me, and the people are as nice as can be....

_To George Putnam._

PARIS, 19 May, 1874.

... For my own part, though I have had a great deal of homesickness, I come back to Cambridge rather sadly. I have not been over well of late. The doctor in Rome, however, gave my troubles a name--and that by robbing them of mystery has made them commonplace. He said it was _suppressed gout_. It has a fancy of gripping me in the stomach sometimes, holding on like a slow fire for seven hours at a time. It is wonderful how one gets used to things, however. But it seems to be growing lighter, and I hope to come home robust and red....

_To Thomas Hughes,_

PARIS, 27 May, 1874.

To see your handwriting again was almost like taking you by the hand. I seem next door to you here, the distance is so short compared with the long ferry between me and Mabel.

I had no thought of reproaching you with not answering my note from Venice. I only wished you to know that I had written, for I should not have done it if Field had not told me you wished to know where I was. I never write if I can help it, and therefore am ready not only to forgive, but even to sympathize with those who have the same failing.

If I could get in at Mrs. Bennett’s again I should like it particularly, for I was perfectly satisfied there. She was not a bit the lodging-house landlady of tradition, but a really refined woman, and her household matched her. But I fear that paradise is closed against us, for when I was last in London somebody else had discovered her, and hired the whole house. If you would be good enough to ask and let me know I should be greatly obliged.... I should want the lodgings for a fortnight. The steamer’s day is put back to the 23d. On the whole I shall go back as young as I came except my eyes, which fail me more and more....

_To the Same._

BRUNSWICK HOTEL, LONDON, Thursday.

MY VERY DEAR FRIEND,--I was hoping to see your manly and tender face once more before I go, but perhaps it is better as it is, for I hate farewells--they always seem to ignore another world by the stress they lay on the chances of never meeting again in this. We shall meet somewhere, for we love one another. Your friendship has added a great sweetness to my life, whether I look backward or forward....

I had a delightful visit to Cambridge. Everybody was as warm as the day was cold. When I go home I shall try to be half as good as the public orator said I was.... Good-by and God bless you. With most hearty love,

Yours always, J. R. LOWELL.

The reference in the last sentence is to the generous language in which the degree of Doctor of Laws was conferred upon him by the University of Cambridge. He regarded the decoration as in a measure a friendly recognition of the University’s daughter in the American Cambridge, but he could not help being pleased by it. “You don’t know,” he wrote to a friend, of the public orator’s Latin speech, “what an odd kind of _posthumous_ feeling it gives one.”

The Lowells sailed from Liverpool 23 June, 1874, and after a foggy and rainy passage were ten miles from Boston Light Friday evening, 3 July. There the fog caught them again and forced them to lie off till the morning, so that they reached Cambridge at half after nine o’clock on the Fourth of July.