I print this poem because the circumstances of its composition and publication prevented its insertion in what are generally spoken of as the complete editions edited by himself. He says to his daughter, in speaking of it, “A poem got itself written at Whitby which seems to be not altogether bad; and this intense activity of the brain has the same effect as exercise on my body, and somehow braces up the whole machine.” It is a pleasure to feel that he read this beautiful poem himself with something of the satisfaction which every one will find in it. And it is impossible that it should not suggest the conditions of his own closing life. “My Brook,” he calls it. And one need not run back to the memories of “Beaver Brook” to fancy the walk or the ride in which some mountain brook in the North Riding renewed the old Cambridge experiences. The charming brook of his youth, gay and joyous, had passed through one and another channel of hard work and of close discipline; but, as he says, there was no reason why, as he and his brook came nearer to the ocean, there should not be the same joy and freedom that there was when he and his brook began on life.
Just after he had written this charming poem—better than that, just when he liked it—it happened that he received an earnest request from that excellent friend of literature, Mr. Robert Bonner, asking him to send something which he might print. On the impulse of the moment Lowell sent this poem. Mr. Bonner kept it for illustration. He illustrated it beautifully, and it appeared before the world fifteen months after, at Christmas of the year 1890, in the New York “Ledger.” By the courtesy of Mr. Bonner’s sons, I am able to print it all—as the fit close of these papers. I could not otherwise have given so charming a review by the poet of his own life and his eternal hopes.
FIRST TWO AND LAST TWO STANZAS OF “MY BROOK”
From the original manuscript
MY BROOK.[[10]]
It was far up the valley we first plighted troth,
When the hours were so many, the duties so few;
Earth’s burthen weighs wearily now on us both—
But I’ve not forgotten those dear days; have you?
Each was first-born of Eden, a morn without mate,