“Well, good-by—delusive royalty! I abdicate with what grace I may. I lay aside my paper crown and feather sceptre.”
And in the same note he says he shall always gladly do what he can for the “Atlantic,” a promise which he well fulfilled. The second series of the “Biglow Papers” was published there.
In a way, perhaps, he had a right to feel that he, earlier than any one else, had the credit for the first fortunes of the “Atlantic,” and to be proud of them. To become the editor of the aged “North American,” hand in hand with his near friend Mr. Norton, was a wholly different thing.
I am sure that there is somewhere, among his by-letters, an outburst as to what he will do “if he shall ever edit the ‘North American.’” I think most youngsters of his time—who were born with a pen in hand—indulged in the same dream, if they were bred within sound of the college bell at Cambridge.
In those prehistoric days the “North American,” to the notions of the few hundred people who had ever heard of it, was wholly different from what any journal is now to any reader. Four times a year only—quarterly!—think of that, young contributors to to-day’s “Atlantic” who can hardly live three weeks, to know if that horrid man has refused your poem, or if that charming and sensible editor has printed it! Read Mrs. Lyman’s Life, or any other good sketch of New England life in the twenties of this century, and see how people wrote or spoke of the arrival of the new “North American,” with the interest with which the inhabitants of Saturn might speak of the regular decennial fall of some well-timed aerolite!
The “North American” is now so different from what it was in 1864, when Lowell took charge of it with Mr. Norton, that its accomplished editor will pardon me if I say ten words more about its infant issues, to the young writers of this generation. It was founded—modestly, yes, but with determination—among a little confident circle of the well-trained young men of Boston, at a moment when Boston counted, perhaps, fifty thousand people. These were people who had time to read, and time to write, and thought themselves, strange to say, the rivals and equals of anybody in the world. The quarterly was the then regnant fashion. The Edinburgh “Quarterly,” the London “Quarterly,” were the arrogant dictators of English literature. “Go to, now! We will dictate also! We will have a ‘Quarterly’ of our own!” For one, I like what the vernacular calls the “dander” of that determination.
And some plucky and loyal bits of good American sentiment and statement got themselves into the juvenile “North American.” But it was awfully proper. Its editors were more anxious about making their “Quarterly” respectable in the eyes of their ten English readers than of the thousand American readers, more or less, who paid them five dollars a year for their editing.
J.R. Lowell. Elmwood.