“A many streams that once ran full
Of joy or Marah waves of pain,
Wasting or making beautiful,
Have sunk no more to flow again,
And scarce the tracks they wore remain.
“And many shades of joy and woe
Pass cloudlike, silent, o’er my soul,
Which not one being else may know,
And into utter darkness roll,
Links lost from out my being’s whole.
. . . . . . . .
“This Present is becoming Past;
Live then each moment manfully
If you would wish your deeds to last,
Sowing good seed continually
Whose harvest time is yet to be.
———
“In our great pride we think that we
Build up our high or low estate,
Dimly half conscious that we see
The paths which lead to small and great
Through the fixed eye of settled Fate.
“The Past may guide the Future’s ways:
Seeds cast far up the stream of time,
Returning after many days,
May grow to their ordained prime
Of fruitage in another clime.”
As if to reinforce our confidence in the genuineness of the emotion which prompted these moral verses, written apparently to the sound of Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life,” which had just appeared in the Knickerbocker, we come in a few weeks to a rhymed letter in which a reminiscence of the same experience is recorded with simplicity and naturalness in a homely poetic strain:—
“Two years ago, in days how like to these,
Yet how unlike! beneath the changing trees
I walked with her full many a happy hour,
Pausing to gather some belated flower,
Or to pick up some nut half eaten, dropt
By a scared squirrel as away he hopt.
The jest, the laugh, and the more high debate
To which the forest aisles seem consecrate,
Nay, even the jest, and the dark plaided shawl
That loved her light form—I remember all:
For then I entered that fair gate of love
On whose bright arch should be inscribed above,
As o’er that other in the Tuscan’s story—
‘Per me si va ne l’eterno dolore.’
The leaves were falling round us then, and we
Talked of their many meanings musingly.
Ah, woe is me! we did not speak at all
Of how love’s leaves will wither, change, and fall—
Full silently—and how the pent up breast
Will hide the tears that cannot be represt.”
In this same letter Lowell enumerates at the close the books he is reading and about to read:—
“I’m reading now the Grecian tragedies,
Stern, gloomy Æschylus, great Sophocles,
And him of Salamis whose works remain
More perfect to us than the other twain.
(Time’s a gourmand, at least he was so then,
And thinks his leavings good enough for men.)
When I have critically read all these,
I’ll dip in cloudy Aristophanes,
And then the Latin dramatists, and next
With mathematics shall my brain be vext.
So if I carry all my projects through
I shall do pretty well, I think, don’t you?”
What most impresses the attentive reader of Lowell’s verses and letters as the two years, to which he so often refers, draw to a close, is the evidence that the young man was finally emerging from the mist and cloud through which he had been struggling, and was getting his feet upon solid ground, so that not only was his irresolution changed for a fairly diligent pursuit of his profession, but he had acquired a greater robustness of spirit and was squaring himself with life in earnest. The internal conflict had been fought out and the substantial victory gained was showing itself in greater self-reliance and a growth in manly ways.
It is therefore with especial satisfaction that the chronicler of his external history comes upon an event which was to mark emphatically the attainment of his intellectual and spiritual majority. Near the end of the year 1839 he made the acquaintance of Maria White. She was the daughter of Mr. Abijah White, a farmer in Watertown, whom Lowell characterized on first meeting him as “the most perfect specimen of a bluff, honest, hospitable country squire you can possibly imagine.” Mr. White had a family of sons and daughters who thenceforward became Lowell’s familiar acquaintance. One of the sons, William A. White, had been a classmate at Harvard,—he speaks of him once as his “quondam chum,”—and it was by him that Lowell was introduced to his home. As Lowell had written with great freedom to his friend Loring of his troubled experience, so now one may trace in this very frank correspondence the manner in which this new affection displaced the mournfulness of that experience and substituted great peace and content for the soreness which still remained after a struggle that had resulted in substantial self-mastery.
In his earliest, hardly more than casual reference to Maria White he characterizes her as “a very pleasant and pleasing young lady” who “knows more poetry” than any one he is acquainted with. “I mean,” he says, “she is able to repeat more. She is more familiar, however, with modern poets than with the pure well-springs of English poesy.” His changing mood during the winter months that follow is visible in the poetry which he writes and copies in his letters, but in the early summer there is a bolder and franker tone, until the acquaintance which has ripened into intimacy culminates in an engagement not long after the completion of the lover’s law studies.