J. R. L.
Lowell’s own comment on the poem years after was in the lines:—
“Behold the baby arrows of that wit
Wherewith I dared assail the woundless Truth!
Love hath refilled the quiver, and with it
The man shall win atonement for the youth.”[22]
In this the earliest of his acknowledged publications, as so often in his later poems, satire and sentiment jostle each other. The predominant note, indeed, is satire in the lofty tone of nineteen, but the invocation and the close are in a different strain. Here, too, there is the exaltation of a very young man, and one may read phrases which perhaps said more than Lowell meant to say; but it was a ruffled youth with which his college career closed, and this period of his life was not to know as yet any steadying force. It is not strange that he grasped at somewhat illusory phantoms in his eagerness to stay himself. Here are the invocation and epilogue:—
“Oh thou! to whom, where’er my footstep roam,
My restless soul would spread its pinions home,—
Reality! more fair than any seeming
E’er blest the fancy of an angel’s dreaming,—
Be thou my muse, in whose blue eye I see
The heaven of my heart’s eternity!
Oh, hover like a spirit at my side,
In all my wanderings a heavenly guide,
Then, if in Cant’s dim mists I lose my way,
Thy blessed smile shall lead me back to day,
And, when I turn me from the land of night,
Thou, morning star of love, shalt herald light!
“Lady! whom I have dared to call my muse,
With thee my day began, with thee shall end—
Thou can’st not such a poor request refuse
To let thine image with its closing blend!
As turn the flowers to the quiet dews,
Fairest, so turns my yearning heart to thee,
For thee it pineth—as the homesick shell
Mourns to be once again beneath the sea—
Oh let thine eyes upon this tribute dwell,
And think—one moment kindly think of me!
Alone—my spirit seeks thy company,
And in all beautiful communes with thine,
In crowds—it ever seeks alone to be
To dream of gazing in thy gentle eyne!”
After all, the irregular impulses of the class poem point to what is of more consequence, the beginning of Lowell’s manhood. Until the summer of 1837, he had been a happy-go-lucky boy, sunning himself in literature, in nature, and in his friends; then there set in a period when he was at odds with fortune, and a stirring of half-understood desires arose; the consciousness of power was struggling with the wilfulness of youth.
CHAPTER III
FIRST VENTURES
1838-1844
As his college course drew near its close, Lowell began to forecast his immediate future. His growing devotion to letters, especially to poetry, and perhaps the wish to linger a little longer within the shelter of the academic life, led him to cherish the notion of studying a while in Germany, and he wrote to his father, who was still abroad, in pursuance of this plan; but he received no encouragement. Germany, it was properly said to him, was no place for the study of law by an American, and the law was regarded as his vocation.
Vaguely conscious of his real calling, Lowell passed in review the two professions of the ministry and the law, which at that time would be likely to attract one who had begun to use his pen with as much assiduity as an embryo artist plies his pencil in sketches. Unquestionably the ministry opened a fair way of life to him, somewhat as it had, less than a score of years earlier, to Emerson, though the conditions had already begun to change. Lowell shrank from adopting that calling with an instinct which sprang in part from his sense of its traditional sacredness, in part from an increasing consciousness of his own separation from the form of religious teaching which would naturally be looked for in him. There was a preacher in Lowell not merely by inheritance, but, even at this time of nonsense and idle levity, in the stirring of a soul that hated evil, and longed to exercise an active influence in righting wrongs. The full strength of this impulse was to be developed shortly, and thenceforward to find constant expression through his life, for a preacher at bottom he was throughout his career. An undercurrent of feeling persuaded him that he might even take to preaching, if he could be sure of being a celibate, and independent of any harassing anxiety respecting his support. But as he wrote of himself a few years later to his friend Briggs: “I believe my religion (I am an infidel, you know, to the Christianity of to-day, and so my religion is something palpable to me in case of strait) arms me against any sorrows to come.” The youthful protest in the parenthesis must be taken seriously, but not subjected to microscopic analysis. Reverence was an abiding element in his nature, and it was early displayed, but it was reverence for what was intrinsically to be revered, and that very spirit carried with it an impatient reaction against conventional religion. In the letter to Dr. Loring, in which he discussed the question of going into the Divinity School, he was led, from a slight reference to the doctrines which Emerson was announcing, to speak more directly of personal religion.