James Russell Lowell and His Friends

by Edward Everett Hale

Passing along the Edgeware Road with a friend two years ago, their eyes were attracted by a sign with this inscription, “Hospital for Incurable Children.” Turning to his companion, with that genial smile for which he is remarkable, Lowell said quietly, “There’s where they’ll send me one of these days.”

But, all the same, seven years of Europe had changed Elmwood and Cambridge and Harvard College and New England and America and the world. In a way, of course, Lowell knew this as well as any man. He knew it better than most men knew it. And there were a good many sad things in his arrival, as there must be after seven years. So many deaths of old friends! So many changes in the daily life of the people around him! And he, almost without a vocation; obliged to establish his new avocations!

Some years before this, Mr. Lothrop Motley, in all the triumph of his well-earned success after the publication of his first volumes of history, came back to his old home—shall I say for a holiday? I do not know but that he meant to reside here. Not many months after he arrived, however, he told me, to my surprise, that he was going back to Europe. He was going to work in Holland on the archives again; to continue his great historical enterprise. I need not say that I expressed my regret that he was to leave us so soon. But he replied, almost sadly, that there was no place here in Boston for a man who was not at work: “You ought to hang out a long pendant from one of the forts in the harbor to the other, and write on it, ‘No admittance except on business.’” This was fatally true then of Boston; it is near the truth now.

And Lowell was no longer a diplomatist; nor had he any special abuses to reform; he had no regular lectures to deliver; he had no wife with whom to talk and read and make dinner linger long, and breakfast and lunch. He was in a changed world, and for that world had to prepare himself.

Perhaps it is as well to say that Boston also was changed; the Boston of 1885 was not the Boston of 1838. The late Mr. Amos Adams Lawrence said to me, not long before his death, that his father used to say that in the beginning of the century Boston was governed by the great national merchants: such men as “Billy Gray,” one of whose ships discovered the Columbia River; or as Colonel Perkins, who handled the trade of the East in the spirit in which a great artist composes a great picture; or as William Tudor, who supplied ice to the tropics, and when a winter failed him in New England, sent his schooners up into Baffin’s Bay to cut ice from the icebergs.

Mr. Lawrence said that when this sort of men gave up the government of Boston, it fell into the hands of the great mechanics: such men as developed the quarries at Quincy; as built Bunker Hill Monument, and in later days have built the Mechanics’ Hall, have united Boston with San Francisco and all the Pacific coast by rail. And then, he said, the government of Boston passed into the hands which hold it now,—into the hands of the distillers and brewers and retailers of liquor.

So far as the incident or accident of administration goes, this bitter satire is true; and it expresses one detail of the change between the Boston of the middle of this century and the Boston to which Lowell returned in June of 1885. Now, such a change affects social order; it affects conversation; in spite of you, it affects literature. Thus it affects philanthropy. The Boston of 1840 really believed that a visible City of God could be established here by the forces which it had at command. It was very hard in 1885 to make the Boston of that year believe any such thing.

But Lowell was no pessimist. He was proud of his home, and I think you would not have caught him in expressing in public any such contrast as I have ventured upon in these lines. On the other hand, the letters which Mr. Norton has published in his charming volumes confirm entirely the impression which Lowell’s old friends received from him: that he was glad, so glad, to be at home; that he had much to do in picking up his dropped stitches; and that he liked nothing better than to renew the old associations. It was, so to speak, unfortunate that he could not at once return to Elmwood. In fact, he did not establish himself there for three years. But, on the other hand, at Southborough, five-and-twenty miles from Boston, where he lived at the home of Mrs. Burnett, his daughter, he had a beautiful country around him, and, what was always a pleasure to him, the exploration of new scenery.

I asked a near friend of his if Lowell were the least bit wilted after his return. “Wilted? I should say not a bit. Bored? yes; worried, a little. But,” he added, as I should do myself, “the last talk I had with him, or rather listened to, I shall never forget.”

He spent the winter of 1889 in Boston with his dear sister, Mrs. Putnam, from whose recollections I was able to give the charming account which he furnished to us of his childhood for the first pages of this series. We have lost her from this world since those pages were first printed. And he was, of course, near his old friends and kindred: Dr. Holmes, John Holmes, all the Saturday Club, Dr. Howe, Charles Norton,—his intimate and tender friendship with whom was one of the great blessings of his life. These were all around him. But there was no Longfellow, no Appleton, no Emerson, no Agassiz, no Dana, no Page; Story was in Europe.