For occupation, he had just as many opportunities for public speaking as he chose to use. He had to prepare for the press the uniform edition of his works, both in prose and in poetry. It seems to me that he was too fastidious and rigid in this work. I think he left out a good deal which ought to have been preserved there. And this makes it certain that the little side-scraps which the newspapers preserved, or such as linger in some else forgotten magazine, will be regarded as among the treasures of collectors. More than that, many a boy and many a girl will owe to some such scraps inspirations which will last them through life. He occasionally published a poem, and occasionally delivered an address or lecture. But he took better care of himself than in the old days. There was no such crisis before the country as had engaged him then; and, in a way, it may be said that he enjoyed the literary leisure which he deserved.
WILLIAM PAGE
He was, alas! at many periods during these six years a very sad sufferer from sickness. There is something very pathetic in the manly way in which he alludes to such suffering. From no indulgence of his own, he was a victim of hereditary gout; and you find in the letters allusions to attacks which kept him in agony, which sometimes lasted for six weeks in succession. Then the attack would end instantly; and Lowell would write in the strain which has been referred to, as if he were a boy again, skating on Fresh Pond or tracing up Beaver Brook to its sources.
Simply, he would not annoy his friends by talking about his pains. If he could cheer them up by writing of his recovery, he would do so.
I remember that on the first visit I made him after he was reëstablished at Elmwood, when I congratulated him because he was at home again, he said, with a smile still, “Yes, it is very nice to be here; but the old house is full of ghosts.” Of course it was. His father and mother were no longer living; Mrs. Burnett, who was with him there, was the only one of his children who had survived; and the circle of his brothers and sisters had been sadly diminished. He and his brother, Robert Lowell, died in the same year. Still, he was here with his own books; he had the old college library under his lee, and he had old friends close at hand. Once or twice in his letters of those days he goes into some review of his own literary endeavor. Certainly he had reason to be proud of it. Certainly he was not too proud; and I think he did have a feeling of satisfaction that his neighbors and his country appreciated the motive with which he had worked and the real success which he had attained.
As the great address at Birmingham sums up conveniently the political principles which governed his life, whether in literature or in diplomacy, so the address at the quarter-millennium celebration of Harvard College at Cambridge may be said to present a summary of such theories as he had formed on education, and of his hopes and his fears for the future of education. There are two or three aphorisms there which I think will be apt to be quoted fifty years hence, perhaps, as they are not quoted to-day. In the midst of a hundred or more of gentlemen who had served with him in the college he had the courage to say, “Harvard has as yet developed no great educator; for we imported Agassiz.”
On the 30th of April, 1889, there was a magnificent festival in the city of New York, at which he spoke. It is already forgotten by the people of that city and of the country, but at the moment it engaged universal attention. It was the celebration of the centennial of the establishment of the United States as a nation; the centennial of the birth of the Constitution; of the inauguration of Washington. It was, of course, the fit occasion for the expression of the people’s gratitude for the blessings which have followed on the establishment of the federal Constitution.
Copyrighted by Mrs. J.H. Thurston.
MR. LOWELL IN HIS STUDY AT ELMWOOD
Taken in the spring of 1891