These kindling words are those of a reformer dealing with existing conditions. It would be much more to the point if we could have in definite terms that revelation of the inner verity of religion which visited Lowell a little earlier than this, as may be seen by a passage from a letter to Dr. Loring, 20 September, 1842. “I had a revelation last Friday evening. I was at Mary’s, and happening to say something of the presence of spirits (of whom, I said, I was often dimly aware), Mr. Putnam entered into an argument with me on spiritual matters. As I was speaking the whole system rose up before me like a vague Destiny looming from the abyss. I never before so clearly felt the spirit of God in me and around me. The whole room seemed to me full of God. The air seemed to wave to and fro with the presence of Something, I knew not what. I spoke with the calmness and clearness of a prophet.”[44]
No doubt this ecstasy may be regarded as one manifestation of that psychical temper which caused him to see visions in his childhood, but it allied itself with intellectual processes, for he goes on to say: “I cannot tell you what this revelation was. I have not yet studied it enough. But I shall perfect it one day, and then you shall hear it and acknowledge its grandeur. It embraces all other systems.”
We may not find a clear statement of this mystic revelation in the discursive “Conversations;” rather we should look for it in his poems of this period, and here, though we find nothing whatever to correspond to a system of divine order, we do find, recurring in various forms, a recognition of an all-embracing, all-penetrating power which through the poet transmutes nature into something finer and more eternal, and gives him a vantage ground from which to perceive more truly the realities of life. “The Token,” “An Incident in a Railroad Car,” “The Shepherd of King Admetus,” all in a manner witness to this, and show how persistently in Lowell’s mind was present this aspect of the poet which makes him a seer. Perhaps there is a more direct attempt at expressing this truth in one of the poems not retained in later collections. It is entitled “A Dirge,” and is the imagined plaint over a poet who has died. In this tumultuous period of Lowell’s youth, when the tranquillity which a returned love brought was after all a very self-conscious tranquillity, there was always room for morbid fancies, and the frequency with which in his poetry he recurs to the images of death leads one to suspect that he experimented a little with the idea of his own death. And it may be that in this poem, which a healthier judgment later led him to suppress, he was dramatizing himself.
“Poet! lonely is thy bed,
And the turf is overhead,—
Cold earth is thy cover;
But thy heart hath found release,
And it slumbers full of peace
’Neath the rustle of green trees,
And the warm hum of the bees
Mid the drowsy clover;
Through thy chamber still as death
A smooth gurgle wandereth,
As the blue stream murmureth
To the blue sky over.
. . . . . . . .
Thou wast full of love and truth,
Of forgivingness and ruth,—
Thy great heart with hope and youth
Tided to o’erflowing;
Thou didst dwell in mysteries,
And there lingered on thine eyes
Shadows of serener skies,
Awfully wild memories
That were like foreknowing;
Thou didst remember well and long
Some fragments of thine angel-song,
And strive, through want, and woe, and wrong,
To win the world unto it;
Thy curse it was to see and hear
Beyond to-day’s scant hemisphere,
Beyond all mists of doubt and fear,
Into a life more true and clear,—
And dearly thou didst rue it.
. . . . . . . .
“Poet! underneath the turf,
Soft thou sleepest, free from morrow;
Thou hast struggled through the surf
Of wild thoughts, and want, and sorrow;
Now, beneath the moaning pine
Full of rest thy body lieth,
While, far up in pure sunshine,
Underneath a sky divine,
Her loosed wings thy spirit trieth;
Oft she strove to spread them here,
But they were too white and clear
For our dingy atmosphere.”
The limitations of his theme and measure forbid more than a hint at this vocation of the poet, but it happens that we have a somewhat more explicit statement of the same general idea in a prose form. A very few weeks after the revelation referred to in the letter to Dr. Loring, too soon certainly for it to have faded from his mind, he sat down to write a paper on “The Plays of Thomas Middleton,” and the introductory passages contain what may fairly be taken as snatches from that music of the spheres which he seems suddenly to have overheard.
“Poets are the forerunners and prophets of changes in the moral world. Driven, by their finer nature, to search into and reverently contemplate the universal laws of soul, they find some fragments of the broken tables of God’s law, and interpret it, half conscious of its mighty import. While philosophers are wrangling, and politicians playing at snapdragon with the destinies of millions, the poet, in the silent deeps of his soul, listens to those mysterious pulses which, from one central heart, send life and beauty through the finest veins of the universe, and utters truths to be sneered at, perchance, by contemporaries, but which become religion to posterity....
“The dreams of poets are morning-dreams, coming to them in the early dawn and day-breaking of great truths, and are surely fulfilled at last. They repeat them, as children do, and all Christendom, if it be not too busy with quarrelling about the meaning of creeds which have no meaning at all, listens with a shrug of the shoulders and a smile of pitying incredulity: for reformers are always madmen in their own age, and infallible saints in the next.”
In such rhetorical terms did Lowell, all aflame himself with poetic zeal, try to outline the divine call of the poet, and the “Conversations” reënforce a doctrine which was held more firmly since the preacher was eager to display it in his own practice. At this time, certainly, Lowell’s conception of the function of the poet was blended with his apprehension of the divine order, and he entered upon the discharge of poetic duties with the seriousness which a young priest might have carried to the sacred office. The very suppression of his native humor, so that it makes only a few furtive leaps in his poetry up to this time,—for we are setting aside his boyish pranks in verse,—illustrates the exalted mood in which he was living.
The “Conversations on Some of the Old Poets” was published, as we have seen, in January, 1845,[45] but as soon as his own part of the book was done, he was free for a more vital venture: on the 26th of December, 1844, after a five years’ betrothal, he was married in her father’s house at Watertown to Maria White.