CHAPTER V
LOVE AND LETTERS
Lowell always had a presentiment that he should never practice law. He was always dreaming of becoming independent in some other way. "Above all things," he declares, "should I love to sit down and do something literary for the rest of my natural life."
He did not then think of marrying, and it does not require much to support a single man. Though he opened a law office in Boston, it does not appear that he did any business. He wrote a story entitled "My First Client," but one of his biographers unkindly suggests that this may have been purely imaginary.
All through his letters we see his ambitious yearning. "George," says he in one place, "before I die your heart shall be gladdened by seeing your wayward, vain, and too often selfish friend do something that shall make his name honored. As Sheridan once said, 'It's in me, and' (we'll skip the oath) 'it shall come out!'"
His bachelor dreams were soon dissipated, however. He went to visit a friend of his, W.A. White, and there met the young man's sister Maria. He thought her a very pleasant and pleasing young lady, and he discovered that she knew a great deal of poetry. She could repeat more verse than any other one of his acquaintances, though he laments that she was more familiar with modern poets than with the "pure wellsprings of English poesy."
The friendship grew apace. In the same fall that he began the pretended practice of law he became engaged to her, and she caused a fresh and voluminous outpouring of verse. His productions were printed in various periodicals, such as the Knickerbocker Magazine, to which Longfellow had contributed, and the Southern Literary Messenger, which Poe once edited.
Miss White was a most charming and interesting young lady. She was herself a poet, and had a delicate intellectual sympathy that enabled her to enter into her lover's ambitions, and assist him even in the minutest details of his work.
It is fair to suppose that Lowell's friends brought every possible pressure to bear upon him to make him give up poetry and dig at the law. His father's financial losses had left him without an inherited income; he was engaged to a beautiful girl and anxious to be married; in some way he must earn his living, and if possible do more. Such was not the effect, however. He devoted himself to poetry with an almost feverish activity. He has made up his mind that he will do something great; for only so can he hope possibly to make literature a paying profession.
It was Maria who inspired most of his verse at this time. One of his best poems even to this day was written directly for her. It is called "Irene'." It may be taken as the best possible description of his lady herself:
Hers is a spirit deep, and crystal-clear;
Calm beneath her earnest face it lies,
Free without boldness, meek without a fear,
Quicker to look than speak its sympathies;
Far down into her large and patient eyes
I gaze, deep-drinking of the infinite,
As, in the mid-watch of a clear, still night,
I look into the fathomless blue skies.
As the struggle between money and law on the one side and literature on the other still went on, he expressed his feelings on the subject to his friend Loring in the following stanza, which puts the whole argument into a nutshell:
They tell me I must study law.
They say that I have dreamed and dreamed too long,
That I must rouse and seek for fame and gold;
That I must scorn this idle gift of song,
And mingle with the vain and proud and cold.
Is, then, this petty strife
The end and aim of life,
All that is worth the living for below?
O God! then call me hence, for I would gladly go!
Thus he had finally come to the conclusion that he would rather die than give up literature.
"Irené" won the good opinion of many. The young poet, though but twenty-one, felt that he was beginning to be a lion. His next definite step was to publish a volume of verses. Says he, "I shall print my volume. Maria wishes me to do it, and that is enough."
So his first volume, "A Year's Life," was published, with the motto in
German, "I have lived and loved."
The young poet's friends were very much opposed to this publication, for the reason that a rising young lawyer is not helped on in his profession at all by being known as a poet. Who would employ a poet to defend his business in a court room? No one! A hard-headed business man is wanted. Walter Scott was a lawyer of much such a temperament as Lowell's, and when he put forth a similar volume he suffered as it was certain that Lowell would suffer. But it is probable that Lowell was now fully determined to give up law altogether.
"I know," he declares passionately, "that God has given me powers such as are not given to all, and I will not 'hide my talent in mean clay.' I do not care what others may think of me or of my book, because if I am worth anything I shall one day show it. I do not fear criticism as much as I love truth. Nay, I do not fear it at all. In short, I am happy. Maria fills my ideal and I satisfy her. And I mean to live as one beloved by such a woman should live. She is every way noble. People have called 'Irene' a beautiful piece of poetry. And so it is. It owes all its beauty to her."
It is very plain that she was on the side of the poet, not of the worldly-minded persons who advocated the law, business, money-making. She did not dread the prospect of being a poor man's wife. To be the wife of a poet, a man of courage and ambition and nobleness of heart, was far more to her. The turning point in Lowell's life was past; and he had been led to that turning point by the little woman who was soon to become his wife.