James Russell Lowell and His Friends

by Edward Everett Hale

Robinson, he’

who declared that

‘They didn’t know everythin’ down in Judee.’”

In one of Lowell’s letters written to England after his return he says that in America they had invented a new torture while he was away, in the shape of calling upon authors to read their own works aloud for the benefit of charities. I am always grateful to this form of torture when it brings as agreeable compensation as I remember on an occasion when we were both reading, I think, for the pleasure of an audience which had contributed to the purchase of the Longfellow Park at Cambridge. For this gave me the pleasure of talking to Lowell for the two hours while the “entertainment” lasted, as we sat upon the stage in the Boston Museum. It is rather a curious thing, to a person as little used to a stage as I am, to find how wholly the footlights separate you, not simply from the personal touch of the people in the audience, but from them, until it comes to be your turn to address them. Even at a public dinner, when you sit by some agreeable person, you have not exactly the chance for conversation with him which you have when both of you are in mediæval chairs dug out from the property-room, and reading is going on quite in front of you which you may attend to or not, as you both choose. Of course the fortune of a charity was made, if Lowell were willing to read poetry or prose which he had written.

As the reader remembers, he lectured again in Boston in one or two full courses to large audiences at the Lowell Institute. He did not absolutely refuse calls from distant cities, but I think traveling became somewhat a burden to him, and after he was once in Elmwood, the associations of the old books and the old life were so pleasant that it was more difficult to draw him away from home.

For his summer holiday, however, he could run across the ocean and visit his English friends in the country, or go back to his pleasant Whitby surroundings. Whitby had for him a particular charm, and one really wishes that he had been in the mood at some time to make a monograph on Whitby, so interesting are some of the references which he makes to it in his letters.

“I am really at Whitby, whither I have been every summer but 1885 for the last six years. This will tell you how much I like it. A very primitive place it is, and the manners and ways of its people much like those of New England. The people with whom I lodge, but for accent, might be of Ashfield. It is a wonderfully picturesque place, with the bleaching bones of its Abbey standing aloof on the bluff and dominating the country for leagues. Once, they say, the monks were lords as far as they could see. The skeleton of the Abbey still lords it over the landscape, which was certainly one of the richest possessions they had, for there never was finer. Sea and moor, hill and dale; sea dotted with purple sails and white (fancy mixes a little in the purple, perhaps); moors flushed with heather in blossom, and fields yellow with corn, and the dark heaps of trees in every valley blabbing the secret of the stream that fain would hide to escape being the drudge of man.”

We shall find this “hiding of the stream” again. “I know not why wind has replaced water for grinding; and the huge water-wheels green with moss and motionless give one a sense of repose after toil that to a lazy man like me is full of comfort.” “I wish you could see the ‘yards,’ steep flights of stone steps hurrying down from the west cliff and the east, between which the river whose name I can never remember crawls into the sea.” The river is the Esk River, but not that which Lochinvar swam where “ford there was none.”

A year afterwards Lowell writes from Whitby: “I am rather lame to-day, because I walked too much and over very rough paths yesterday. But how could I help it? For I will not give in to old age. The clouds were hanging ominously in the northwest, and soon it began to rain in a haphazard kind of way, as a musician who lodges over one lets his fingers idle among the keys before he settles down to the serious business of torture. So it went on drowsily, but with telling effects of damp, till we reached Falling Foss, which we saw as a sketch in water-colors, and which was very pretty.

“Thunderstorms loitered about over the valley like ’Arries on a Bank Holiday, at a loss what to do with their leisure, but ducking us now and then by way of showing their good humor. However, there were parentheses of sunshine, and on the whole it was very beautiful.”