James Russell Lowell and His Friends

by Edward Everett Hale

Again, the next year, in 1889, he says: “I was received with enthusiasm by the Misses Galilee, the landladies; they vow they will never let my rooms so long as there is any chance of my coming. I like it as much as ever. I never weary of the view from my window; the Abbey says to me, ‘The best of us get a little shaky at last, and there get to be gaps in our walls.’ And then the churchyard adds, ‘But you have no notion what good beds there are at my inn—.’ The mill runs no longer, but the stream does, down through a leafy gorge in little cascades and swirls and quiet pools with skyscapes in them, and seems happy in its holiday.” We shall come to this “happy holiday” again. Will the reader observe that it is of a series of summers spent in this charming retirement at Whitby, that we hear people speak who talk of his summers in England as if the grand society he had met there had spoiled him for America.

One cannot read Lowell for five minutes without seeing how large his life was, and how little he was fettered by the commonplace gyves of space or time or flesh or sense. He never preaches as Dr. Young would do, or Mr. Tupper, or Satan Montgomery. But, all the same, he is living in the larger life, and so are you if he calls you into his company. Writing to Miss Norton, he says:—

“I don’t care where the notion of immortality came from.... It is there, and I mean to hold it fast. Suppose we don’t know. How much do we know, after all?... The last time I was ill, I lost all consciousness of my flesh. I was dispersed through space in some inconceivable fashion and mixed with the Milky Way.... Yet the very fact that I had a confused consciousness all the while of the Milky Way as something to be mingled with, proved that I was there as much an individual as ever.

“There is something in the flesh that is superior to the flesh, something that can in finer moments abolish matter and pain. And it is to this we must cling....

“... I think the evolutionists will have to make a fetich of their protoplasm before long. Such a mush seems to me a poor substitute for the rock of ages, by which I understand a certain set of higher instincts which mankind have found solid under all weathers.”

If I am writing for those who have read Lowell carefully and loyally, they know that he knew that “the human race is the individual of which different men and women are separate cells or organs.” They know that he knew that “honor, truth, and justice are not provincialisms of this little world,” but belong to the life and language of the universe. They know that he knew that he belonged to the universe and was the infinite child of the infinite God. He says sometimes in joke that he hates to go to church. I am afraid that most men who could preach as well as he would say the same thing with the chances of the ordinary religious service. But he also says, “If Dr. Donne or Jeremy Taylor, or even Dr. South, were the preacher, perhaps”—

As it happens, I recollect no expressions of his more enthusiastic than those in which he described public services of religion. His mother had belonged to the Church of England, and his love for the Prayer Book was associated with his earliest recollections of her.

For the rest, I am sure I should be most sorry to have any one think that a man of his large, religious nature, who lived in the eternities, could be satisfied with the average ecclesiastical function of to-day.

It was a disappointment to him that his health forbade one more visit to his dear Whitby, which he had proposed for the summer of 1890. On the last day of his last visit there, as I suppose, he wrote the beautiful poem, not so well known as it should be, with which I will close this series of reminiscences. He wrote it happily, and he liked it.

It begins with a gay description of the flow and joyous dash of young life. As time passes on, the lively brook is held back by dams sometimes; it is set to work to feed mankind, or to help men somehow; it is pent in and almost prisoned. But not for always. Why should not his brook burst its bonds and leap and plash and sparkle as happily as when it was born?