Lowell had not found himself out yet. He had, indeed, a premonitory consciousness of his strength. “I shall do something as an author yet,” he wrote to Briggs, 21 August, 1845. “It is my laziness and my dissatisfaction at everything I write that prevents me from doing more.” But he adds, “there is something, too, in feeling that the best part of your nature and your performance lies unmined and unappreciated.” For the present he seems to have written chiefly under the impulse created by some sudden affair, as in the verses “On the Capture of Fugitive Slaves near Washington,” which appeared in the Boston Courier, 19 July, 1845. The lines were prefaced by this note to the editor, Mr. Buckingham:—
“Reading lately in the newspapers an account of the capture of some fugitive slaves, within a few miles of the Capital of our Republic, I confess my astonishment at finding no comments made upon what seemed to me an act of unparalleled inhumanity. Thirty unfortunate disciples of the Declaration of Independence pursued and captured by some two hundred armed minions of tyranny! It seems strange that a burst of indignation from one end of our free country to the other did not follow so atrocious a deed. At least it seemed a proper occasion for sympathy on the part of one of our daily papers which a year or two ago indorsed Lord Morpeth’s sentiment that
‘Who would be free themselves must strike the blow.’
Though such a mode of emancipation is totally abhorrent to my feelings, and though I would earnestly deprecate any attempt at insurrection on the part of our slave population, yet I confess to the weakness of being so far human in my feelings as to sympathize deeply with these unhappy beings who have been thwarted in their endeavor to convert themselves from chattels into men by the peaceful method of simply changing their geographical position. Under these feelings, and believing you to be a man with sufficient confidence in the justness of your own opinions not to fear to publish sentiments which may chance to go beyond or even directly contravene your own, I wrote the following lines.”
There is a prophetic ring to the verses which indicates how surely Lowell’s poetic spirit had absorbed the underlying truth of abolitionism. The poem is far less declamatory, more profoundly indignant than the Texas verses which he had printed in the same paper. The intimation which he gave in his prefatory note, that his sentiment might be unacceptable even to so hearty and honest a hater of slavery as Mr. Buckingham, plainly points to the doubt expressed whether a higher allegiance might not demand a revolt from the constitution and union if they were found to be the impregnable defence of slavery,—a doubt which was already certainty in the minds of the most radical of the abolitionists; but the stage of doubt was as far as Lowell ever went, and this may be taken as the utmost expression which he ever reached.[50] The poem was vigorous enough to make an impression, and successive numbers of the Courier show two long-winded writers knocking away at the spectre of Dissolution which the poem had raised.[51]
Although the summer of 1845 does not seem to have yielded much in the way of verse or prose, Lowell had quite definitely taken ground as a man of letters. There was no more talk of the law, and he even dropped lines of correspondence which had marked his old carelessness of occupation. “You hint in your last letter,” he wrote to E. M. Davis in October, that it must be very easy for me to write, because writing is my profession, while in truth this is precisely what makes it hard. You must recollect that it is vacation time with me when the pen is out of my hand. Before I became an author I used to write multitudes of letters to my friends. Then, wherever I set my foot, thoughts rose up before me short winged and chirping as the flights of grasshoppers which spring from the path of one who walks in September stubble-fields. The post-office was my safety-valve, which eased me in a trice of all my too explosive thoughts, humors, and moods. Now my thoughts take a higher and wider flight, and are not so easily followed and defined by the eye. I confess that my opinions seem to me of less importance.”[52]
By his regular and his random writing Lowell had met the expense of his winter in Philadelphia, and with his simple mode of life and his horror of debt it was not a very serious problem which his livelihood presented. Elmwood gave shelter, and the young couple shared the family economy. A little more ease, however, was to come through the accession of Mrs. Lowell to a share in the estate of her father, who died suddenly in September of this year. “I suppose,” Lowell writes in the letter just quoted, “that when the estate is settled (Mr. White died intestate) we shall be the possessors of $20,000 or more. I confess I hardly feel so independent as before. I believe that in this age poverty needs to have apostles, and I had resolved to be one, but I suppose God knows what is best for me, or the event would not have happened. That I should ever have lived to be such a nabob!”[53]
One of the effects of this modest fortune was to give the Lowells a further sense of independence and to lead them to form plans of travel and life abroad, for from the first the frailty of Mrs. Lowell’s health had been a factor in all their problems. They meant to go again to Philadelphia the next spring, and they looked forward to going to Italy in the coming fall for a two or three years’ residence. “Now that we know the amount of our property,” Mrs. Lowell wrote shortly after to Mrs. Davis, “it seems quite doubtful whether we shall be able to travel much; but we can live in Italy as cheaply as at home, and have all the advantages of climate and beautiful works of art besides.”
On the last day of the year their first child was born, and they gave her the name of Blanche in gentle allusion to Mrs. Lowell’s maiden name. Lowell wrote the news in a brief note on New Year’s Day, 1846, to Mr. Davis: “Our little daughter Blanche was born yesterday afternoon at 3-1/2 o’clock. She is a very fine hearty child, very fair and white, with red cheeks, and looks already a month old. Maria, thank God, is quite well.... Our fair has been eminently successful, more so than any hitherto. I received your tract only a day or two since, having only been to Boston once or twice for the last two months. I am much obliged to you for it, though my thankfulness is almost used up by the baby.”
How happy the parents were in their anticipation may be read in the affectionate terms in which Lowell had confided their hopes late in August to his friend Briggs. “Never mind what our child will be (if it should be born safely), we can at least enjoy our parentship now and fancy what glories we please of our little darling. We have christened it long ago. If she is a girl she is to be named Blanche (White), a sweet name, thus uniting Maria’s family name with mine. If a boy we shall call him Perceval, that being the given name of the first Lowle who set foot in America, and having, moreover, a pretty diminutive (Percie), an important thing for a boy. Now, do not set your wits at work to discover prophetically the unhearworthy nickname which the perverse ingenuity of boys will twist out of it at school. He shall never go to school. The only reason I have for a preference of sex is that girls ordinarily resemble the father most, and boys the mother. Therefore I hope for a boy, and if you knew Maria (I call her mother already) as well as I do, you would hope so too. It is true I can never persuade her of the force of this argument—because she does not know how good she is. When people arrive at that pitch of consciousness they are generally good for nothing.” And then follows the half-prophetic passage: I have never forgotten the sympathy I felt with your hopes and your disappointment in a similar case.... I look upon death so constantly and surely as but a continuation of life (after the glad removal or subsidence of the plethora of flesh which now chokes half the spirit out of us) that I shall be quite willing to send before us such an ambassador as our little angel would be if he goes sooner than we do. At all events, nothing can ever take away from me the joy I have already had in it.” The haunting fear which every young father has at such a time, and which Lowell intimates in these lines, was not made real at once, but the child lived with them only a brief fourteen months. It is touching to find Mrs. Lowell a month before the birth of her child writing verses of profound sympathy entitled “The Slave Mother,” in which she reflects the anguish such a mother feels on the birth of her child; and on the same day Lowell was writing his poem “The Falcon,” though in its original form, entitled “The Falconer,” it was longer and filled with a certain savage indignation over the quarry upon which the falcon, Truth, descends. Both poems were contributed to “The Liberty Bell,” published for the anti-slavery bazaar which was held each December in Boston. This was the social rally of the abolitionists and a resource with which to meet the modest demands of a crusade into which men and women threw themselves without counting the cost. Before and after her marriage Mrs. Lowell took an active part in the bazaar under the generalship of Mrs. Chapman. Lowell hits off the characteristics of those who were conspicuous in the local movement most wittily in his “Letter from Boston,” which he sent to the Pennsylvania Freeman, at the close of 1846.