CHAPTER XVII

THE LAST YEARS

1888-1891

Lowell went again to England in the spring of 1888, and in June to Bologna, where he was a delegate from Harvard on the occasion of the celebration of the eight hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the University. He received from Bologna the degree of Doctor of Letters. He left London for the continent on Saturday the 9th of June and was back in a week. He had a most uncomfortable experience, being attacked severely by the enemy which now seemed to be always lying in wait for him. He gave an outline of his discomfiture in a letter written to Mr. Norton three weeks after his return to London.

“My gout began in Bologna. It announced itself on Tuesday by an illness which prevented me from venturing out, and so a very pretty speech in Italian which I had in my head remained there to the great loss of mankind. Doctor Weir Mitchell[103] came to me at once on hearing of my disorder, so that I was able to be out next day to receive my degree with the rest. As I walked home from the ceremony I found myself very lame and foreboded what was coming to pass. I got off with Story to Milan by the train leaving Bologna at 1 A.M. I spent Thursday in Milan, where I provided myself with felt slippers, and next day started for London to escape being ill in an Italian inn. I got through the thirty-one hours’ journey fairly well with the help of the Glasgow delegates Ramsay and Ferguson, who helped me in every way. I don’t think my journey did me any harm. By the time I reached Calais on Saturday I was able to get on my boot again and thought I had got over the worst, but next day I had to resign myself to my sofa, and for ten days was in intense pain. The whole foot in every joint and the ankle were inflamed. For three days the other foot (in the toe joint only) took sides with its mate, and I was discouraged. This, however, passed off, and last Thursday [5 July] I was able to be dressed. To-day I have my boots on, though _stropeato. Ecce tutte._”

He was in Whitby again in August, living as he liked so well now to do with his books and letters and few friends and the walks which were little more than easy strolls. He wrote to his friend Mrs. Leslie Stephen who was at St. Ives in Cornwall: “I am still pretty lame (do you know I begin to think that I am really seventy at last, and not playing that I am) and can take only short walks. But I hope that the air here will gradually blow the years out of me again. And the fish diet, too, a far more invigorating animal here than in your sleepy Southern waters which have done nothing but sun themselves and doze since Sir Cloudesley Shovel’s days. What are your pilchards when you contrive to catch ’em, and your gurnards (of which latter indeed nothing is left but a petrified head fit only for the table of a geologist that ever I heard of) to our cod and whiting and ling, to speak of no others, with their flesh hardened by constant struggle with our cold Northern waters? Why, your poor fellows have to come all the way hither to catch even a herring, while we have them fresh from the sea every morning. I wish I could send you a few as we know them. And where is your Abbey? We are under the special protection of B. V. Sanctæ Hildæ with the added flavor in our prayers that she was a king’s daughter and therefore of our set, and with that sympathy for our special infirmities that comes of knowledge. If you have any saint ’tis some fellow with a name you can’t pronounce, and who understands nothing but Cornish, whereas Hilda spoke English, as Freeman has proved over and over again.”

To Mr. Norton, who had been advising with him on some points in the translation of Dante, he wrote from Whitby: “You put me some pretty stiff conundrums, but I will try.... The swoon at the end of the canto (Inferno III.) is a nut too hard for my hammer. I have turned it and tapped it on every corner that seemed hopeful without making so much as a crack in it. Tambernic and Pietrapana might fall on it in vain. I must have expressed myself clumsily in my last letter. I did not mean to counsel paraphrase in the text, but at foot of page for the help of the Philistine to whom all poetry is a dead language. At best the translation of a poem is a waxen image of the living original, and being too literal is to dress it in the very clothes it wore as if the reality were in them.

“I do not know whether I told you that my last attack of gout had left me more infirm than ever before. I am still lame in both feet, though I insist on walking in the hope of getting limber and because without exercise I can’t sleep. We have had disastrous weather here, a cold of Antenora, with fierce winds to drive it in. Even the stones of the Abbey seem to feel it and shudder. I am sitting by a fire as I write. For the first time I begin to think myself capable of growing old.[104]

“I am in the same lodgings as last year, which is a pleasure to me, with kind, simple people, who do all they can to make me happy. They are very like our New England country folk, except in accent, almost the same thing in fact.”

In this letter Lowell intimates one of the physical ills that were attacking him, the loss of sleep. One of his friends and admirers, Canon Stubbs, gave this reminiscence,[105] not long after Lowell’s death. “Some years ago,” he writes, “I was in the habit of meeting him from time to time at the country house of a common friend. One especial evening--a ‘golden night of memory’--I shall never forget. After dinner one of the guests asked Lowell to read one of his own poems. This request he playfully put aside, but he began to talk to us about Wordsworth, and read to us part of the ‘Laodamia,’ commenting, as he read, much I confess to my surprise, on the narrowness and limited experience of Wordsworth, and the one-sided development of his intellectual powers. Then some chance expression turned the current of his talk, and he began describing, with all the quaint humor and delightful raillery of which he was so complete a master, a special antidote to sleeplessness which he said he had himself lately devised,--the invention of new chapters in Cæsar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War. I wish I could remember the chapter which he then recited. The aptness of the Latin phraseology was irresistibly funny. It told ‘how Vercingetorix and his army, retreating before Cæsar, had taken refuge on a high, rocky hill, strongly fortified and precipitous on every side, from which at first Cæsar had despaired of dislodging him without a long siege. But while Cæsar was considering these things an opportunity of acting successfully seemed to offer. He noticed a fissure in the rock, which on investigation by night was discovered to pierce the hill from side to side. [Here we expected the anachronism of dynamite or gunpowder. But no; Lowell more justly appreciated the natural genius of Cæsar.] Knowing that the winter was now nigh at hand, Cæsar ordered two legions of soldiers to block up with clay and twisted willow work the opposite ends of the rocky cleft, and then, having filled the chasm with water, to await the issue. That night the frost came; the water expanded; the high rock was cleft asunder; and down came Vercingetorix and his army. For this success’--Lowell concluded--‘a supplication of twenty days was decreed by the Senate upon receiving Cæsar’s letter.’”

After a visit to St. Ives, Lowell returned to London and remained there till the middle of November. His friends the Misses Lawrence were at Wildbad. As he never quite finished his couplets to Mrs. Gilder, so he never quite exhausted the playful names he gave these two ladies. “O Giminy,” he wrote from London, 1 October “(for I have exhausted all other ways of expressing your twinship in my affection, and any opening exclamation will suit the context), O Giminy, I say, how can you be happy in a hotel that Klumpps with a double p like a man with a club foot, and in a town which, by its own confession, is both wild and bad? What are you doing there? Taking the baths? You can’t soak the goodness out of you, if you try never so hard, that’s one comfort. You ‘admired the traces of the Romans at Treves’ did you? Pray, did you see the Holy Coat? _That_ is what the place is famous for, bless your innocent souls. And then your single room at Munich with ‘2 or 3 Bismarcks, as many Gladstones and Döllingers’ in it. Do you expect me to believe _that_? It would have been uninhabitable had there been only one apiece of them, and you know it. You trifle with my understanding. Smoky London, indeed! The sky to-day is like a gigantic blue bell tipped over to pour out the sunshine it cannot contain. And the town is emptily delightful and one does not see a soul one knows from one end of the week to t’other. I shouldn’t mind its being fuller by a dozen or so, my Ambidue among them. Indeed, I was thinking yesterday of writing to ask where you were and when you were coming back to the lovers who (all but one of them) make me so jealous. The middle of October seems a great way off to that single inoffensive one, but ’tis better than nothing. I shall be here till the middle of November, and you will let me know the moment you come, won’t you?

“I haven’t the least notion where Wildbad is, and you give no geographical details, so I don’t feel sure that this will ever reach the Hôtel Klumpppppp though there can’t be two of that name even in this most patient of worlds. Did Wagner ever set it to music? Methinks ’twould have suited his emphatic and somewhat halting genius. But I shall try for a guide-book, and if this never reaches you, I shall be consoled with thinking that you will never know how little you have lost.

“I am very well, almost as well as before my gout; but I am rather dull, as you were just saying to each other. However, your return will brighten me, and you shall take me to the play and the opera and Madame Tussaud’s just as often as you please. And I invite myself to dine with you too--I mean two. Am I not generous? The nearer I get to the end of my sheet (like a prisoner escaping and doubtful where he was going to drop) the more I wonder where Wildbad is. I shall ask at a foreign book-shop. That is the simplest plan, for they are all kept by German Jews who know every place where Christians are plundered the world over. And if a Bad of any kind does not come within that definition I am greatly mistaken. My only doubt would be as to whether you were Christians? Well, you have always treated me as if you were. Good-by.”

Lowell spent a night at Chester with Mr. Hughes and sailed from Liverpool 22 November. He spent the winter of 1888-1889 at his sister’s, Mrs. Putnam’s, in Boston. He found himself physically depressed and disinclined to any effort. A hasty acceptance of an invitation to lecture in Philadelphia brought him intolerable discomfort, and he begged to be let off, if it could be done without prejudice to his hosts. “It is absurd,” he wrote, “but I was made so. I won’t torment myself by speaking in public any more. With any such engagement on my mind, I can do nothing else, and indeed do nothing but think about that.” Dr. Mitchell at once released him, and Lowell wrote in reply, 27 December, 1888: “I got your welcome letter last evening, and when I first looked in the glass this morning I was pleased to find my hair less gray than when I went to bed. You never wrote a better prescription. My mind has been relieved of what really seemed to me an intolerable weight, for, whether it be from old age or whatever cause, I have been undoubtedly inert both in body and mind since my attack of gout last summer.” On the same day he wrote to Mr. Gilder: “Many thanks for your welcome home. I am miserably dumpy, thank you, with the remains of my tedious fit of gout last summer, which continues to hold my frontier posts as the British did ours after the treaty of 1783. But I hope to go on to Washington early in February in time to get back for my seventieth birthday, which I can’t spend in the tents of Kedar.”

Lowell’s visit to Philadelphia and Washington is pleasantly reflected in his letters. His son-in-law, Mr. Burnett, was at that time a member of the House of Representatives, and Lowell, though he expressed a fear lest his lion’s mane should blow off, was entertained agreeably and came away with an admiration for many of the public men he met. His seventieth birthday came shortly after his return to Boston, when he was given a dinner at the Tavern Club over which Mr. Norton presided. “I was listening to my own praises for two hours last night,” he wrote to Mrs. Fields, “and have hardly got used to the discovery of how great a man I am.” He heard these praises again in a more public way when the _Critic_ of New York made its number for 23 February a “Lowell birthday number,” having collected warm tributes of affection and admiration from seventy men and women of note in America and England. By an ingenious alphabetical arrangement the editor displayed his letters from Y to A, the astronomer Young heading the list and the poet Aldrich closing it. The English names naturally were fewer in number, but they included Tennyson and his son, Gladstone, Lord Coleridge, Lang, Locker-Lampson, and Palgrave; amongst his own countrymen were those yet his seniors, Holmes, Whittier, Mrs. Stowe, the elder Furness, and President Barnard, while the poet Parsons born in the same year and a host of juniors joined in the chorus of loving praise. As Dr. Horace Howard Furness truly said: “It is no small tribute, in itself, to Mr. Lowell that we should all be thus ready to praise him to his face.”

Lowell had set the date for his annual pilgrimage to England at 27 April, but a pressing invitation to speak on the 30th of that month at the great celebration in New York of the hundredth anniversary of Washington’s inauguration as first president, which he tried in vain to decline, compelled him to postpone his departure for nearly a month. Meanwhile he worked somewhat fitfully at literature, belabored as he was with letters and social distractions. Mr. Aldrich asked him to write for the _Atlantic_ a paper on John Bright, who had just died. At first he thought he could write it, but a fortnight later he wrote: “There is no use in trying. Cold molasses is swift as a weaver’s shuttle compared with my wits. I have essayed every side of the subject like a beetle in a tumbler and find myself on my back after each attempt. So you must let me give it up.” It was characteristic of his unfailing interest in all genuine literature, new or old, that he should at the same time have written to Mr. Aldrich his pleasure in a poem, “Deaths in April,” in the current _Atlantic_. “Too intricate and even obscure I thought it here and there, but perhaps the intricacy is of forest-boughs and the obscurity nothing more than the gloom which they teach light to counterfeit. Never mind, ’tis the Muses’ utterance.”[106]

The special piece of writing which did occupy him for awhile, an introduction to Isaak Walton’s “Complete Angler,” may fairly be called one of the happiest of his literary appreciations. He writes, to be sure, to Dr. Mitchell that he is “thoroughly fagged” with the work, but to the unsuspecting reader who comes upon it in the volume of Lowell’s “Latest Literary Essays and Addresses” there is the sense only of a quieter tone than he finds in the Gray, for example, in the same volume. There is no lack of acuteness, rather one is struck with the delicacy of the criticism, but the special charm is in the delight which Lowell takes in his sunny-tempered author. It is as if he had been thoroughly fagged when he took Walton down and as he read the “Lives” and the “Complete Angler” was drawn within the cheerful mind of Walton and warmed himself at the open fire of his charity. The paper has the value one finds so often in Lowell’s writings, of reflecting the writer’s mood, and one who has followed Lowell into the recesses of his consciousness of age can scarcely fail to bear him company when he finds him writing of Walton: “But what justifies and ennobles these lower loves (of music, painting, good ale, and a pipe), what gives him a special and native aroma like that of Alexander, is that above all he loved the beauty of holiness and those ways of taking and of spending life that make it wholesome for ourselves and our fellows. His view of the world is not of the widest, but it is the Delectable Mountains that bound the prospect. Never surely was there a more lovable man, nor one to whom love found access by more avenues of sympathy.”

The after-dinner speech for which Lowell consented to postpone his summer journey to England was in response to the toast “Our Literature.” The speech appears as the last piece of literature which Lowell published in his collected writings, and it is a coincidence that this should stand at the end of his career, when at the beginning, if we may, not unnaturally, count _The Pioneer_ as his formal bow in the profession of letters, stood the announcement of his outlook on national literature. Nearly forty-seven years lie between the two deliverances. As a young man of twenty-three he scouted the idea of an artificial division between the literature of America and that of England, he deprecated the too close dependence upon the current judgments of English writers for the press, and he pleaded eagerly for a natural literature in America, the free reflection of a free people. Now, with the reflection of age he considers in his brief space those fundamental principles which make for the endurance of a national literature,--the right sense of proportion between things material and things spiritual, the necessity of inviolable standards, the dependence upon the whole literature of the world. His last word is a word of hope, as was befitting a prophet of literature, standing at the end of the first century of a nation’s life, as years are measured from the consciousness of existence.

“The literature of a people should be the record of its joys and sorrows, its aspirations and its shortcomings, its wisdom and its folly, the confidant of its soul. We cannot say that our own as yet suffices us, but I believe that he who stands a hundred years hence where I am standing now, conscious that he speaks to the most powerful and prosperous community ever devised or developed by man, will speak of our literature with the assurance of one who beholds what we hope for and aspire after become a reality and a possession forever.”

* * * * *

Lowell sailed for England 18 May, 1889, and spent five months there at his customary haunts in London and in Whitby, revisiting his old friends and preferring the intimate associations to the social functions. “You ask me so many things,” he writes to Mrs. Clifford from Radnor Place, 17 June, “in such a breathless way--all of them disparate, and some of them desperate--that I know not which way to turn. Besides, haven’t you confessed that you set springes in your notes? And how can I tell but that every? is a springe (they look like it), and that I may not find myself dangling like an unwary hare with no chance ever to put my foot into anything again? However, I will tread cautiously and give each of ’em a little preliminary shake to see if there be any mischief in ’em.

“1st. Will I come to tea Thursday? I turn it over gingerly--it lies quite still and doesn’t seem likely to go off with a jerk. I think it harmless and answer ‘yes.’ I don’t like the artist being there with her pictures, for that may incur me the expense of several fibs, and I am not sure how many I have left.

“2d. Do I know Miss----? This looks more suspicious and I give it a wide berth.

“3d. Have I read ‘A Conversation in a Balcony’? Here I seem safe enough because I haven’t. So I reply boldly, ‘I have sent for it and will read it.’

“4th. Will I take your head off? This is a specific proposition and therefore less likely to have any _dolus_ hidden in it, and you offer me a prodigious bribe. But no, I won’t! I have a better opinion of your top-piece than you have (for the moment), and think it more useful and becoming where it is. Moreover, there was never head heard of that looked well after it was off except Charlotte Corday’s, and this is worth your consideration, and I am sure (since you are a woman) will have it. So we will wait. But I will come Thursday.”

There is a playfulness about all Lowell’s letters during this last summer he was to spend in England, a pleasure in little things, as in his walks and encounters, and a deep draught of delight in the sea. His month at Whitby lengthened to six weeks, and he was reluctant to leave this secluded corner. Here he read Dante and Milton, Lope de Vega and Calderon, Byron, and some old French texts. He felt uncommonly well, and he even wrote a poem, “The Brook,” for which the _New York Ledger_ had offered a generous sum.

When Lowell returned to America he went back to Elmwood. Mrs. Burnett had arranged to return with her children and make a home there for her father, and it was with a long sigh of content that he settled himself in a place which was endeared to him by lifelong attachment. Yet it was with some discomposure that he looked upon the changes going on in the neighborhood. The village of Cambridge had long ago become a city, though still retaining a lingering village air, but now houses were creeping toward the confines of the town and filling those great empty spaces which had given him the sense of delightful roominess. He was a genuine conservative as regards places, and no doubt his English residence had confirmed his conviction that it was well to strike root deeply in planting the family, which is the greatest conservative force. A few years before, when he was minister to England, I brought him news of the neighborhood, and his brow clouded as I reported the rumor that more horse-car tracks were to be laid near Elmwood. “I never, never will go back there to live,” he declared vehemently, “if they make these inroads on my place.” He had been forced to reduce the area of the estate as it was in his father’s day and his youth, but he was jealous of any further encroachment on the integrity of his little patch of land, and in a world of change about him clung tenaciously to his foot-hold.

* * * * *

During the winter of 1889-1890 Lowell occupied himself with preparing a uniform edition of his writings, and answered one or two of the applications he had for poems or papers. His own needs were few, he lived simply, and he was under no stress of necessity, but he was eager to turn over with increment the little estate he had to his daughter and her children. Mr. Howells had interested himself in procuring a poem from Lowell for _Harper’s Monthly_, for which a liberal sum was paid, and Lowell, when the transaction was over, wrote him: “I happened to want the money, and though one cannot write a poem for money, one is glad to get what one can for it once written. You partly know how it is with me. My heart’s desire is to leave Mabel as independent as I can, and what I leave will, at best, hardly go round among so many. Now I had got myself into a place where I could not keep certain promises I had made without encroaching on my principal. Your benefice will just tide me over. The sacredness of my little pile has become almost a cult with me.”

In preparing his writings for a new definitive edition, Lowell did much more than merely see to an orderly arrangement. He took great pains with his prose, going over his various papers with care, and tucking in new sentences, or erasing sentences he did not like. He did not meddle much with his poetry; he wished indeed he might get rid of some of his juvenilia, and it was suggested that he should dismiss them to the back-yard of an Appendix. The question was raised if it would be well to date his poems, for the student of literature rightly values the opportunity of marking development in the author he is at work on, but the objection was made that such dating coming from him would be authoritative, and would give sanction to those publishers who lined the legal fence and were ready to seize upon an author’s work the moment it was technically out of copyright, whether the author were living or not, and whether he and his family still had an interest in an undisturbed possession. It was in answer to all this that be wrote me: “_Manet litera scripta_ is a law which might have given points to that of the Medea and Persians. There is no good in squirming. If one could only learn it early enough! I must bear my penalty. I must march through Coventry with my tatterdemalions, whether I like it or not. As for dates, as I have never kept copies of my books (in some of which dates were given), I could not hunt them down without more trouble than it is worth. I had not thought of the bucaneer (I leave out one intrusive _c_) objection till you suggested it. It is enough. Let them go hang!--both dates and bucaneers. And my Lord Chief Justice Holt (wasn’t it he who first made the unrighteous distinction between the property of authors and that of their worsers?), let him swing amidst of ’em! This settles the Appendix.”

Lowell loved the minutiæ of verbal criticism. It was part of his jealousy for the purity of the language, and meant that touch which the artist gives. Slovenliness was his abhorrence, and free as he was with the vernacular, he made a clear distinction between the undress and the dress occasions of speech. I transmitted to him at this time a criticism which took him to task for the use of the form “try and.” He replied: “I am much obliged to Mr. ---- for his friendly interest in my English. The phrase ‘try and,’ like ‘come and,’ is to some extent conversational, but it is idiomatic. There is plenty of authority for it. Here is one from Thackeray, who uses it often:--

“Don’t they try and pass off their ordinary-looking girls? &c.’[107]

“You will observe that in the passage criticised by Mr. ---- I am supposing another person to speak, and therefore made it purposely familiar. ‘Come and’ occurs in the first motto of the Bay Colony: ‘Come over and help us’--from the Bible, ‘Come over into Macedonia, and help us.’ Matthew Arnold uses it, and I think it is in Shakespeare also.”

In the spring of 1890 Lowell suffered from what he called the “first severe illness of my life.” It proved indeed to be the beginning of the end. For six weeks he kept his bed, and when he was able at last to crawl about, his physician forbade even the briefest journey. He had been asked to give an address in Vermont, and he was obliged to write: “I am not yet allowed even to drive out or to use my legs except in loitering about my own grounds. So you see that Castleton is as impossible to me as Mecca.... Let me add that I have a special partiality for Vermont as the New England State which maintains most persistently our best traditions.”

To Mr. Godkin he wrote, 29 April: “I have had rather a hard time of it, and for a day or two Wyman had fears. The acute symptoms ceased a month ago, and I am now doing well, but my malady has somewhat demoralized me and I must consent to be an invalid for a good while yet. ’Tis my first experience and I don’t like it. Moralists tell us that pain is for our good, but even the gout has failed to make me think so, and this was even harder to bear.” But he had been amusing himself with some verses on “infant industries” which he sent in this letter, giving them the title, “The New Septimius Felton.” They were printed in the _Nation_ with the title, “The Infant Prodigy.”

On the second of May he wrote from Elmwood to Mr. Gilder, who was to give the poem that year before Φ. Β. Κ. in Cambridge: “You may be sure that I shall support you with my sympathetic presence at Φ. Β. Κ. if my legs will by that time support me, as I have now every reason to think they will. I made an excursion to Cambridge (by horse-car) yesterday, my first adventure of the kind for fourteen weeks, and am none the worse for it.”

Of course a summer in England was out of the question, and Mr. Leslie Stephen, one of the friends who made so large a part of an English summer to Lowell, came instead to America to see Lowell once more in his home. There he found him amongst his books and with the squirrels gambolling outside, but the days of long walks were over, and even the social pleasures which Lowell could share with his guest were few and simple.

He saw the completion of the revision of his writings, and the ten comely volumes standing all a-row were a fair evidence to him that he was not so indolent as he was wont to call himself. His malady left him little power for any continuous work, but he wrote the introduction to a reprint of the first edition of Milton’s “Areopagitica,” a brief paper on Parkman for the _Century Magazine_, and a trifle for the Contributors’ Club in the _Atlantic Monthly_. It may be that he glanced at the six volumes of his own prose when he wrote of Milton: “He must have known, if any ever knew, that even in the ‘sermo pedestris’ there are yet great differences in gait, that prose is governed by laws of modulation as exact, if not so exacting, as those of verse, and that it may conjure with words as prevailingly. The music is secreted in it, yet often more potent in suggestion than that of any verse which is not of utmost mastery.” And then follows a brief sentence which has in it the very charm he is praising. “We hearken after it as to a choir in the side chapel of some cathedral heard faintly and fitfully across the long desert of the nave, now pursuing and overtaking the cadences, only to have them grow doubtful again and elude the ear before it has ceased to throb with them.”

It was characteristic of him that he should write to Mr. Gilder: “...Now what I wish to know is, how soon do you want the Parkman? I have just had an offer of a thousand dollars for a short paper of reminiscences, and I think I might make something that would at least _do_, out of my boyhood. I want the money--I always do, more’s the pity, but want it particularly just now that I may help a friend who is in straits. May I write this first? The Parkman is more than half done, and all thought out.” Plenty of money lay within Lowell’s grasp if he would sell his name and a few hours of work, but he never had been able to make merchandise of his art, and it cost him an effort, when he was asked to name a price, to cast his name into the balance. His publishers, finding him putting off the volume on Hawthorne, held out the promise of a very liberal payment as soon as they could have the book, but he did not get beyond the preliminary business of re-reading his author. Yet the needs of a friend offered the requisite stimulus.

The article in the Contributors’ Club was a humorous defence of certain American locutions and forms of spelling against half-learned objections. It was a return to a favorite theme and contains an amusing sketch of a proof-reader whom we take to be his old friend Mr. George Nichols. The club is in a vein which naturally assumes a half antique manner, and the treatment shows that smiling acceptance of the prejudices of learning which is the scholar’s defence against the logic of the pedant. Even this trifle, unsigned, and inconspicuous in its setting, could not get printed finally without two or three hurried notes from its author, amending and adding to it, and the last proofs were returned with a sigh: “I thought the thing livelier than I find it--it kicked so lustily in the womb. But nothing is good after ’tis born!”

If Lowell was growing old, so also were others with whom he had had lifelong associations. Whittier was twelve years his senior, and though all his life an invalid, never lost his singing voice, and Lowell wrote him, 16 December, 1890:--

DEAR FRIEND WHITTIER,--I had meant to write you a word of thanks for your “Captain’s Well” [in the _New York Ledger_], but that with some other good intentions was hindered of fruition by my illness. It seemed to me in your happiest vein--a vein peculiarly your own. Tears came into my eyes as I read it.

Since I could not write then, I do it now to wish you and all of us many happy returns of your birthday. It is partly a selfish wish, for the world will seem a worse world to me when you have left it, but it is not wholly so. The universal love and honor which attend you, and in which I heartily join, are of excellent example, and it is well that you should live long to enjoy them.

Faithfully yours, J. R. LOWELL.

Dedications, those shy birds, came fluttering about Lowell in these days. One was in an anonymous volume of verse from a friend dear for her own sake and her mother’s. It had come to him in manuscript first and then revised. When it came first, he wrote: “I am perfectly satisfied with the dedication--how should I not be? But how, in any case, could I look such a gift horse in the mouth? I should like it _quand même_ as a proof of your affection, for that is the main thing; ‘Only, only call me dear!’” and two days later, when an alternate form came: “Yes, I like this better. I could not have discussed what you should say in such a case, but you have shown your woman’s wit (as I thought you would) in divining what I stole from Coleridge and he from Lessing.”

Dr. Weir Mitchell inscribed to him his volume “A Psalm of Death and other Poems,” and Lowell acknowledged the honor: “I am very proud of my book. You know how in the tray for visiting cards those of the more socially distinguished drift to the top (by a kind of natural selection) where they may be better seen of such, and so your volume lies conspicuously on my table by some happy chance, that everybody who comes to see me is sure also to pick it up and look at it. I read it through as soon as I got it and with entire satisfaction. Without partiality I like it better than any of its predecessors, and I have told you how much I like _them_. Your touch, I think, is more assured, and the slag more thoroughly worked out of the ore. I shan’t tell you which I like best any more than I should think of showing any preference among my grandchildren, though I am conscious that I obscurely feel something of the kind. Without indelicacy, however, I may mention a favorite passage. It occurs on the leaf following the title-page, and seemed to me every way admirable. It will be a treasure to me so long as I live. I have had no sharp attack since the middle of November, but for the last three weeks have been in so wretched a valetudinarian way that Mabel has called in Wyman again. I am beginning to think ’tis Old Age after all. I fancy I know how a bear feels during hibernation when he is getting near the end of his fast.”

A fortnight after this Lowell wrote again of himself, to his friends the Misses Lawrence: “I ought to have written long ago to thank you for your dear remembrance of me at Christmas. It was not ingratitude but sheer unconsciousness of the goings on of Time. I have been a wretched valetudinarian, and the days dribble away from me ere I am aware. I don’t mean that I have been seriously ill again; but I don’t get strong and seem in a lethargy half the time. However, I still reckon on the approaching visit of Doctor Spring, whose prescriptions have always done me good. They are simple enough,--birds and bees and things,--but they do wonders for me. My great bother now is that the least exertion tires me. Yet I believe I am as happy as most men. At any rate, I have had my share. You have been a part of it, and I have you still, thanks to your persistent kindness.

“We have had a better winter than you (thanks to our admirable form of government), but more snow than for several years. This has made the roads merry with sleighs. I myself have been out in a sleigh two or three times and enjoyed it in a quiet way. To-day it is raining and eating away the snow very fast.... Spite of your crusty winter I should have been glad to share it with you. I am so true a lover that I love my London even in the sulks. ’Tis the best place for dwelling in the world except this house where I was born.”

Not long after Lowell began his work at Harvard, he came into his class-room one day, and before giving his regular lecture, spoke to his students a few pointed words regarding Dr. Henry Ware Wales, who had recently died, and whose name is perpetuated in the University by the books he gave and by the Sanscrit professorship which he founded. Dr. Wales had been his friend from boyhood, and Lowell spoke kindly and touchingly of his amiability and generosity; but then he passed to a graver theme suggested by the superb courage with which his friend faced Death. As one reads these passages in connection with Lowell’s own final experience, one cannot fail to hear almost a prophetic voice. Little stress has been laid in these pages on the keen suffering which marked the closing months of Lowell’s life, but suffering there was, almost unbearable. Above this physical pain, however, rose the courageous spirit which does not lose itself in vain murmurings. Something of his cheerful encounter with death appears in his letters, and he made light to his friends of his pain; but the physicians who attended him knew through what he was passing.[108] Hear then how he spoke of Dr. Wales thirty-five years earlier, when he himself was in full vigor.

“I saw him frequently in Rome a few months before his death, and I can speak from my own knowledge. Just before coming to Rome, I had been reading over the Philoctetes of Sophocles, little thinking that I was so soon to find the story of that hero acted over again under my eyes by a coeval and friend. Like Philoctetes, his grievous wound was in a single limb, or rather in a single joint--and yet there he lay, otherwise a strong man, utterly helpless, and hopeful only of that release which comes to all. His island of Lemnos was the bed from which he could not rise. He was perfectly aware of his situation. He had studied medicine, and knew that his death warrant was signed. And here it was that he showed a courage and a firmness which were truly heroic. He told me that he had no hope, that he saw death approaching, and I shall never forget the expression of his face as he said it. He looked into the distance as if he literally saw the messenger of his doom, and measured him with a fearless and unquailing eye, as a braver man measures an antagonist. He spoke alike without levity and without selfish sentimentality. He did not wish to die, nor did he pretend it, but like a true man he fronted Death like an equal, advanced to meet him cheerfully, and did not wait to be dragged to his door like a culprit. I have stood on many battlefields, but here I was present at the battle itself. I saw what the ancients declared the noblest prospect for human eyes,--at once the noblest and most tragic,--a brave man meeting Fate. For it was Fate,--the wound was apparently a trifling one, but the arrow was poisoned. There was no escape.

“Rome was at its gayest, and he knew it. The great Easter throng was gathered before St. Peter’s to receive the blessing of him whom his subjects curse. The great dome shone with that illumination so beautiful that one might almost rank it as a new constellation suddenly created upon the purple evening sky of Italy. And all the while he lay there chained--suffering pains which no opiate could entirely deaden--and uttered no complaint, nay, was cheerful. And now it was that his studies stood him in good stead. As he had been faithful to virtue and honorable aims, so were they now not unfaithful to him. He felt the truth upon his sleepless pillow of Cicero’s _pernoctant nobis_. Those invisible visitants that thronged his chamber came not with faces of reproach, but with countenances of hope and consolation, on which truly the light of Easter morning, of the Resurrection, was shining.

“It is proverbial that all men die game. But it was not the mere act of dying which tried his courage and serenity. It was the lying in prison under sentence of Death, and it was the prison of the Inquisition, too, where he was hourly tortured.

“It is not, then, as our benefactor, it is not as my schoolmate, classmate, and the friend of nearly twenty-five years, it is not merely as the scholar, that I feel impelled to commemorate him here. It is as an example of how refined studies refine and elevate the character, how they give a vantage ground impregnable to chance and pain and death; it is as the heroic man, quietly and without hope of fame or credit, fighting the good fight in that single combat in which any one of us at any time may be compelled to take up the gauntlet of that foe who fights with enchanted weapons, against which there is no hope.

“He is now dead and nailed in his chest. I pray to God to give his soul good rest.”

The spring of 1891 came and Lowell had cheerful hope of further work. He had not dismissed literature because he had collected his writings into a series of books. He meant to write more, to bring together more scattered papers for a volume and to make at least one more collection of his poems. Meanwhile he read--his books were close at hand and his constant friends. He re-read Boswell’s Johnson for the fourth time, and he read the recently published full diary of Walter Scott. He took up novel reading, rather a new taste, and amused himself with contemporaneous society in England as depicted by Norris. At Mr. Bartlett’s suggestion, the whist club to which he had been so faithful held one more meeting which he made out to attend. But though he could go out but little, he had a pleasant glimpse of the world that lay about his house,--the earliest and the best known world to him. He had had a flat dish with stones in it conveniently placed in his garden, and connected it with his water pipe so that his little friends the thrushes, the orioles, and squirrels might have free use of the modern improvements to which he was indifferent enough.[109] Outside of his bedroom window a pair of gray squirrels had nested, and as he was imprisoned there by the illness which now closed in about him, he looked with kindly interest on their gambols in the treetops. His is friends came as he could see them, and he entertained them with humorous diatribes on his gaoler gout. Now and then he could pencil a letter or note, sending a message perhaps to some equally bound sufferer, as when he commiserated his old friend Judge Hoar, shut up with an attack of inflammatory rheumatism, and whimsically cautioned him against mistaking it for the gout which he himself was enduring. A faint smile plays about these last expressions of his kindly nature, as he seems to wave the world aside that he may take his friends by the hand. Death found him cheerful, and he passed away in the middle of the bright summer.

APPENDIX

A. THE LOWELL ANCESTRY

I. _Paternal._[110]

1. The first American ancestor of the Massachusetts Lowells was PERCEVAL LOWELL, written also LOWLE, who came from Somersetshire, England, in 1639, when he was 68 years old, and was one of the early settlers of Newbury, Mass., which was organized in 1642. He wrote a poem on the death of Governor Winthrop, and died in Newbury, 8 January, [1664/5].

2. Perceval Lowell brought with him to America two sons, JOHN and RICHARD, and a daughter JOAN. John, the elder brother, was made a Freeman in 1641; he was a deputy from Newbury to the General Court in 1643-1644. He died in Newbury in 1647, aged 52 years.

3. His son JOHN was born in England, and came to America when he was ten years old, with his father and grandfather. He was a cooper by trade, and made his home first in Boston and then in Scituate. He was thrice married, the third time to Naomi Sylvester, a sister of his second wife; he moved later to Rehoboth, Mass., but finally returned to Boston, where he died 7 June, 1694. He had nineteen children in all.

4. EBENEZER LOWELL, fifteenth son of John Lowell, his mother being Naomi [Sylvester] was born in Boston in 1675, and married in 1694 Elizabeth Shailer. He was a cordwainer, which sounds more dignified than shoemaker, and died in Boston, 10 September, 1711.

5. JOHN LOWELL, son of Ebenezer and Elizabeth [Shailer] Lowell, was born in Boston, 14 March, 1703/4. He was graduated from Harvard in 1721, and married Sarah, daughter of Noah and Sarah [Turell] Champney, 23 December, 1725. On 19 January, 1726, he was ordained pastor of the Third Parish in Newbury, which became the First Parish in Newburyport, when under that name the part of Newbury up to that time designated the Waterside was set off as a separate township in 1764. Mrs. Lowell died in 1756, and the Rev. John Lowell married again in 1758 Elizabeth, daughter of Robert Cutts, Jr., and widow of the Rev. Joseph Whipple. The Rev. John Lowell died in Newburyport, 15 May, 1767.

6. JOHN, son of John and Sarah [Champney] Lowell, was born in Newbury, 17 June, 1743. He took his bachelor’s degree at Harvard in 1760, and under the arrangement of those days, which recorded the members of a class in order of social dignity, he was seventh in a class of twenty-seven. He studied law in Boston with Oxenbridge Thacher [H. U. 1698], and was admitted to practice in 1763. He returned to his native town and at once became prominent in public affairs. In 1767 he drew up a report upon a letter from the selectmen of Boston concerning the measures to be taken to frustrate the encroachments of Great Britain. He served for several years as one of the selectmen of Newburyport, and in May, 1776, was one of the five representatives of the town in the General Court. He removed to Boston in 1777, and the next year was chosen a representative to the General Court from Boston. In 1779 he was elected a member of the convention for framing the constitution of the State. In 1781 he was chosen a delegate to the Continental Congress. In 1782 he was appointed by Congress one of the three judges of the newly created Admiralty court of appeals. In 1784 he was one of the commissioners to establish the boundary line between Massachusetts and New York. On the adoption of the constitution of the United States, President Washington appointed him Judge of the U. S. District Court in Massachusetts. In 1801 he was appointed Chief Justice of the Circuit Court for the first circuit, under the new organization of the judiciary.

He married, in 1767, Sarah, daughter of Stephen and Elizabeth [Cabot] Higginson, and had by her three children, Anna Cabot, John, and Sarah Champney. His wife, Sarah, died 5 May, 1772, and he married again, 31 May, 1774, Susanna, daughter of Francis and Mary [Fitch] Cabot, by whom he had two children, Francis Cabot, founder of the factory system in Lowell, and Susanna. His second wife, Susanna, died 30 March, 1777, and he married a third time Rebecca, daughter of James and Katharine [Graves] Russell, of Charlestown, and widow of James Tyng, of Dunstable, Mass. By her he had four children, Rebecca Russell, Charles, Elizabeth Cutts, and Mary. He died in Roxbury, Mass., 6 May, 1802.

He was for eighteen years a member of the corporation of Harvard College, and was one of the founders of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His son, the Rev. Charles Lowell, stated: “My father introduced into the Bill of Rights the clause by which slavery was abolished in Massachusetts. My father advocated its adoption in the convention, and when it was adopted, exclaimed: ‘Now there is no longer slavery in Massachusetts; it is abolished and I will render my services as a lawyer gratis to any slave suing for his freedom if it is withheld from him,’ or words to that effect.”

7. CHARLES LOWELL, son of John and Rebecca [Russell] Lowell, was born in Boston, 15 August, 1782. He was graduated from Harvard College in 1800, travelled in Europe 1802-1805, and on his return to Boston was made pastor of the West Congregational Church in that town, and remained its pastor, either active or emeritus, till he died. He was married, 2 October, 1806, to Harriet Brackett, daughter of Keith and Mary [Traill] Spence. He was elected a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1815, and was its recording Secretary from 1818 to 1833, and corresponding Secretary from 1833 to 1849. He was stricken with partial paralysis in the autumn of 1851, and died 20 January, 1861.

The children of Charles and Harriet Traill [Spence] Lowell, were

1. Charles Russell, born 30 October, 1807; he married Anna Cabot Jackson, 18 April, 1832, and died 23 June, 1870; their children were

i. Anna Cabot Jackson, married to Dr. Henry Elisha Woodbury.

ii. Charles Russell, Jr., commissioned Brigadier General, who died 20 October, 1864, from wounds received at the battle of Cedar Creek.

iii. Harriet, married to George Putnam.