“I have been rather amused with some of the comments of your press that have been sent me. They almost seem to think I shall come in a hostile spirit, because I have commented sharply on the pretension and incompetence of one or two British bookmakers! It is also more than hinted that I said bitter things about England during our war. Well, I hope none of my commentators will ever have as good reason to be bitter. It is only Englishmen who have the happy privilege of speaking frankly about their neighbours, and only they who are never satisfied unless an outsider likes England better than his own country. Thank God I have spoken my mind at home too, when it would have been far more comfortable to hold my tongue. Had I felt less kindly toward England, perhaps I shouldn’t have been so bitter, if bitter I was.”
Mr. Hughes records, again in the Introduction, that Lowell said in one of his letters during the American War, “We are all as cross as terriers with your kind of neutrality”—but he rejoices in the gradual increasing warmth of his feeling for England as he grew to know her better during the last years of his life.
While I knew him he was always most friendly, and it is pleasant to recall him sitting in the garden at Osterley on peaceful summer evenings enjoying specially that blue haze peculiar to the Valley of the Thames which softens without obscuring the gentle English landscape.
One more letter, including a copy of verses, I cannot resist copying. In July 1887 he endowed me with Omar Khayyám, and some months later I received this—dated “At sea, 2nd November 1887”:
“Some verses have been beating their wings against the walls of my brain ever since I gave you the Omar Khayyám. I don’t think they will improve their feathers by doing it longer. So I have caught and caged them on the next leaf that you may if you like paste them into the book. With kindest regards to Lord Jersey and in the pleasant hope of seeing you again in the spring,
Faithfully yours,
J. R. Lowell.”
“With a copy of Omar Khayyám.
“These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred,
Each softly lucent as a rounded moon:
The diver Omar plucked them from their bed,
Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread.
“Fit rosary for a queen in shape and hue
When Contemplation tells her pensive beads
Of mortal thoughts for ever old and new:
Fit for a queen? Why, surely then, for you!
“The moral? When Doubt’s eddies toss and twirl
Faith’s slender shallop ’neath our reeling feet,
Plunge! If you find not peace beneath the whirl,
Groping, you may at least bring back a pearl.”
He adds beneath the lines: “My pen has danced to the dancing of the ship.”
The verses (of course not the covering letter) appeared in Heartsease and Rue.
Mr. Lowell stayed with us at Osterley in the two summers following his return. He died in America just before we went to Australia.