“And I mean to live as one beloved by such a woman should live. She is every way noble. People have called ‘Irene’ a beautiful piece of poetry. And so it is. It owes all its beauty to her, and were it a thousand times as beautiful would not be so much so as she is to me.”
The strong emotional experience which thus possessed Lowell came to him when he was largely under the sway of sentiment, but though, as we have seen, it was translated into poetry very freely, it is not so much the immediate expression in literary form which concerns us as it is the infusion of an element in the formation of character. Lowell was overcharged in his youth with sensitiveness in affection. There was a fitfulness in his demonstration of it, an almost ungovernable outflow of feeling, which left him in danger of coming under the control of morbid impulse. What he required, and what most happily he found, was the serenity and steadfastness of a nature, exalted like his own, but glowing with an ardor which had other than purely personal aim.
Miss White was a highly sensitive girl of a type not unknown, especially at that time, in New England. Of delicate sensibility, she listened eagerly to the voices rising about her which found their choragus in Emerson. It was before the time of much organization among women, but not before the time when one and another woman, inheritors of a refined conscience, stirred by the movement in the air, sought to do justice to their convictions in espousing this or that moral cause, not at all necessarily in public championship, but in the eloquent zeal of domestic life. As her brother William was to become an active reformer, so she fed her spirit with aspirations for temperance, and for that abolition of slavery which was already beginning to dominate the moral earnestness of the community, holding all other reforms as subordinate to this. Lowell, seeing in her a Una, was quickened in the spirit which had already been awakened, and instantly donned his armor as her Red Cross Knight.[26]
At this period there was a much greater homogeneity in New England life, than there has been at any time since. The democratizing of society had been going on under favoring conditions, for industry was still at the basis of order, less was made of the distinction of wealth, more of the distinction of education, the aristocratic element was under the same general law of hard work, and a proletariat class had not been created by an inflow of the waste of Europe which inevitably accompanied the sturdy peasants. The city had not yet swept ardent youth into its rapids, and the simplicity of modes of life was hardly more marked in the country than in the town. Whoever recalls the now old-fashioned tales by Miss Catherine Sedgwick will have a truthful picture of a social order which seems Arcadian in the haze of sixty years since.
It was, in some aspects, the culmination of the ingrowing New England just before the Atlantic ocean became contracted to a broad stream, the West was clutched by iron hands, and all manner of forces conspired to render this secluded corner of the earth a cosmopolitan part of a larger community.
One of the most characteristic phases of this life was the attention paid by all classes to the awakening which was going on in education, reform, politics, and religion. Mr. Norton has printed a letter[27] of Lowell’s in which he gives an animated picture of a temperance celebration in Watertown, at which Maria White appeared in a sort of New England translation of a Queen of the May, as the celebration itself was a festival in the moral vernacular. Lowell’s own delight in her was unbounded, and the scene as he depicts it, was a New England idyl.
Maria White and her brother belonged to a group of young people on most friendly terms with one another, and known offhand by themselves as the Band. They lived in various places, Boston, Cambridge, Watertown, Salem, and were constantly seeking occasions for familiar intercourse. Dr. Hale has given a lively account of their fellowship and summons a witness who was herself a member of the company.[28] To this coterie Lowell was now introduced, and the relations between him and Miss White made the pair the centre of attraction. Miss White’s spirituelle beauty and poetic temperament and Lowell’s spontaneity of wit and sentiment were heightened in the eyes of these young people by the attachment between them, and they were known with affectionate jesting as the Queen and King of the Band. In the exalted air upon which the two trod, stimulating each other, their devotion came to have, by a paradox, an almost impersonal character, as if they were creatures of romance; their life was led thus in the open, so much so that, as has been said more than once, the letters exchanged by them were passed about also among the other young people of the circle.[29] Be this as it may, the assertion is rendered credible by the highly charged atmosphere in which they were living. The two young poets—for Maria White was not only of poetic temperament, but wrote verses, some of which found place in current magazines—were lifted upon a platform by their associates, and were themselves so open in their consciousness of poetic thinking and acting that they took little pains to abscond from this friendly publicity. It is a curious instance of freedom from shamefacedness in so native a New Englander as Lowell, but his letters, his poems, and common report, all testify to an ingenuousness of sentiment at this time, which was a radical trait, and less conspicuous later in life only because like other men he became subject to convention.
But though Lowell lived in this exhilarated state, he was not likely to be led away into any wholly impracticable scheme of living. His own good sense could be relied on, and his independence of spirit, as could his detestation of debt, which kept him all his life a frugal liver. He was, besides, brought up sharply at this time by the necessity suddenly laid on him to earn his living, if he would be married, since his father, always generous to him, had now lost almost all his personal property, and was land poor; it was clearly understood, too, that the young people must rely on themselves for support. Fortunate was it for him that he was to have a wife who shared to the full his views on living. “It is easy enough,” wrote Maria White to Levi Thaxter, “to be married—the newspaper columns show us that every day; but to live and be happy as simple King and Queen without the gifts of fortune, this is, I confess, a triumph which suits my nature better.”
Lowell, who had been lodging in Cambridge, moved into Boston when he was established in Mr. Loring’s office, but in the spring of 1842 went back to Elmwood to live. Dr. Lowell had returned from Europe with his wife and daughter in the early summer of 1840. It is probable that the return of Lowell to his father’s house was due to the declining health of his mother, who showed symptoms of that disorder of the brain which clouded her last years, and is graphically depicted in her son’s poem, “The Darkened Mind.” From this time her husband and children watched her with solicitude and tried various remedies. She was taken on little journeys to Saratoga and elsewhere, in search of restoration, but in vain. In this case, as so often happens, the sufferer who draws largely on one’s sympathy is the faithful, despairing husband.[30]
Although Lowell had been admitted to the bar, and was ready to practice, clients were slow in coming, and with his resources in literature it was natural enough that he should use his enforced leisure in writing for publication. There were few periodicals in America in 1840 that could afford to pay their contributors, and the sums paid were moderate. But the zeal of the editors was not measured by their ability to reward contributors, and both editors and writers fed a good deal at the table of the Barmecides spread in the somewhat ramshackle House of Fame. The Southern Literary Messenger was one of these impecunious but ambitious journals, and the editor teased Lowell constantly for contributions. Lowell gave them freely, for writing was his delight, and he was not unwilling to have a hospitable and reputable magazine in which to print what he wrote, both for the slight incentive which publication gave, and because he could thus with little effort “make believe” that he was a popular author. He used frequently the signature Hugh Perceval. He liked the name Perceval, which had been borne by his earliest American ancestor, and regretted that it had not been given him at his birth, as had then been proposed. In the Southern Literary Messenger he could publish half personal poems to be read between the lines by his intimate friends; but he grew impatient of this unprofitable business.