It does not appear just when “The Vision of Sir Launfal” was written, but in a letter to Briggs, dated 1 February, 1848, Lowell speaks of it as “a sort of story, and more likely to be popular than what I write generally. Maria thinks very highly of it. I shall probably publish it by itself next summer.” But it was not till the “Biglow Papers” were off his hands that Lowell took steps to print the book, which was published 17 December, 1848. It was not long after that he went to Watertown for the wedding of Mrs. Lowell’s sister with Dr. Estes Howe, and the next day he wrote to Briggs: “I walked to Watertown over the snow with the new moon before me and a sky exactly like that in Page’s evening landscape. Orion was rising behind me, and as I stood on the hill just before you enter the village, the stillness of the fields around me was delicious, broken only by the tinkle of a little brook which runs too swiftly for Frost to catch it. My picture of the brook in ‘Sir Launfal’ was drawn from it. But why do I send you this description—like the bones of a chicken I had picked? Simply because I was so happy as I stood there, and felt so sure of doing something that would justify my friends. But why do I not say that I have done something? I believe I have done better than the world knows yet, but the past seems so little compared with the future.” And then referring to a recent notice of him which intimated that he was well to do, he says: “I wish I might be for a day or two. I should like such an income as Billy Lee desired, who, when some one asked his idea of a competence, replied, ‘A million a minute, and your expenses paid!’ But I am richer than he thinks for. I am the first poet who has endeavored to express the American Idea, and I shall be popular by and by. Only I suppose I must be dead first. But I do not want anything more than I have.”
It is not very likely that Lowell was thinking specifically of “Sir Launfal” when he wrote this. It is more likely that he would have named “Prometheus,” “Columbus,” or “Freedom” if he had been asked to name names; and yet it is not straining language too far to say that when he took up an Arthurian story he had a different attitude toward the whole cycle of legends from that of Tennyson who, a half dozen years before, had begun to revive the legends for the pleasure of English-reading people. The exuberance of the poet as he carols of June in the prelude to Part First is an expression of the joyous spring which was in the veins of the young American, glad in the sense of freedom and hope. As Tennyson threw into his retelling of Arthurian romance a moral sense, so Lowell, also a moralist in his poetic apprehension, made a parable of his tale, and, in the broadest interpretation of democracy, sang of the levelling of all ranks in a common divine humanity. There is a subterranean passage connecting the “Biglow Papers” with “Sir Launfal”; it is the holy zeal which attacks slavery issuing in this fable of a beautiful charity, Christ in the guise of a beggar.
The invention is a very simple one, and appears to have been suggested by Tennyson’s “Sir Galahad,” but the verses in the poem which linger longest in the mind are not those connected with the fable, but rather the full-throated burst of song in praise of June. Indeed, one might seriously maintain from Lowell’s verse that there was an especial affinity which he held with this month. Witness the joyous rush of pleasure with which “Under the Willows”[80] is begun, and the light-heartedness with which Hosea Biglow leaves the half-catalogue manner rehearsing the movement of Spring in “Sunthin’ in the Pastoral Line,” and leaps almost vociferously into the warm, generous air of June, when “all comes crowdin’ in.” The poem entitled “Al Fresco” is but a variation on the same theme; when he first published it, save the opening stanza, in the Anti-Slavery Standard, he gave it the title of “A Day in June.” And when, compelled to lie indoors, he found a compensation in Calderon singing to him like a nightingale, it was still a wistful look he cast on his catbird that joined with the oriole and the cuckoo to call him out of doors, and he sighed to think that he could not like them be a pipe for June to play on. “The Nightingale in the Study” was written when he sought in illness for something that would seclude him from himself; but the three poems of 1848 were the outcome of a nature so tingling with vitality that expression was its necessity, and spontaneity the law of its being. Literature, freedom, and nature in turn appealed to the young enthusiast; the visions he saw stirred him, in the quiet of Elmwood, to eager, impetuous delivery; and his natural voice was a singing one.
CHAPTER VI
SIX YEARS
1845-1851
When, in the spring of 1845, the Lowells returned to Cambridge from Philadelphia, where they had spent the first four months of their married life, it was to share the family home of Elmwood for the next six years. Lowell’s father retired in the summer of 1845 from active charge of the West Parish in Boston, but retained his interest in various societies which gave him partial occupation, leaving him leisure for the indulgence of his taste for reading and for the pleasures of gardening and small farming. His mother, whose malady slowly but steadily increased, was under watchful care. She was taken to various health resorts in hopes of recovery, and spent a part of her last years under more constant treatment at an asylum for the mentally deranged. Miss Rebecca Lowell had charge of the little household, and now and then went on journeys with her father or mother or both, leaving the young couple to themselves. As one child after another came into the circle, the grandfather found a solace for the sorrow which lay heavily upon him, and his letters, when he was on one of his journeys, were filled with affectionate messages for his new daughter and her children, mingled with careful charges to his son concerning the well-being of the cattle, small and large, and the proper harvesting of the little crops.
Mrs. Lowell’s family lived near by in Watertown, and one by one her sisters married, one of them coming to Cambridge to live. The society of the college town was open, and it was in these early years that Lowell formed one of a whist club, which, with but slight variation in membership, continued its meetings to the end of his life, and the simple records of which were kept by Lowell. Its most constant members were Mr. John Holmes, a younger brother of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mr. John Bartlett, who was for a while a bookseller in Cambridge, and afterward until his retirement a member of the publishing firm of Little, Brown & Co. of Boston, and best known by his handbook of “Familiar Quotations” and his elaborate “Concordance to Shakespeare,” and finally Dr. Estes Howe, who married Mrs. Lowell’s sister.
Lowell was much given to concealing in his verse or prose little allusions which might be passed over by readers unaware of what lay beneath, but would be taken as a whispered aside by his friends. Thus in a “Preliminary Note to the Second Edition” of “A Fable for Critics,” he says: “I can walk with the Doctor, get facts from the Don, or draw out the Lambish quintessence of John, and feel nothing more than a half comic sorrow, to think that they all[81] will be lying to-morrow tossed carelessly up on the waste-paper shelves, and forgotten by all but their half dozen selves.”
In the summer of 1846 the sickness of little Blanche took the family suddenly to Stockbridge in the Berkshire Hills, whence Lowell wrote to Carter: “Stockbridge is without exception the quietest place I was ever in, and the office of postmaster here one of the most congenial to my taste and habits of any I ever saw or heard of. The postmaster has no regular hours whatever. Even if engaged in sorting the mail, he will run out and lock the door behind him, to play with his grandchildren. I do not believe that in the cabinet of any postmaster-general there is a more unique specimen. He is a gray-bearded old gentleman of between sixty and seventy, wears the loose calico gown so much in vogue among the country clergy, and feels continually that he is an important limb of the great body politic. I do not mean that he is vain. There is too profound a responsibility attached to his office to allow of so light and unworthy a passion. There is a solemn, half-melancholy grandeur about him, a foreboding, perchance, of that change of administration which may lop him from the parent tree,—a Montezuma-like dread of that mysterious stranger into whose hands his sceptre must pass. In purchasing a couple of steel pens or a few cigars of him (for he keeps a small variety store) you feel that the parcel is done up and handed over the counter by one of the potent hands of government itself.... We have found Stockbridge an exceedingly pleasant place and have made many agreeable acquaintances. Blanche is a favorite throughout the village and knows everybody.”
Longfellow, who was near by in Pittsfield at this time, notes in his Diary, 16 August: “In the afternoon Lowell came with his wife from Lenox to see us. He looks as hale as a young farmer; she very pale and fragile. They are driving about the country and go southward to Great Barrington and the region of the Bash Bish.”
The illness of Blanche which led her parents to take her into the country was slight and temporary. The child grew in beauty and winning grace, and endeared herself to her father in a manner which left its signs long afterward. Early in March, 1847, however, when she was vigorous and gave promise of a hearty life, she was seized suddenly with a malady consequent upon too rapid teething, and after a week’s sickness died. “In the fourteen months she was with us (for which God be thanked),” Lowell wrote to Briggs, “she showed no trace of any evil tendency, and it is wonderful how in so brief a space she could have twined her little life round so many hearts. Wherever she went everybody loved her. My poor father loved her so that he almost broke his heart in endeavoring to console Maria when it was at last decided the dear child was not to be spared to us.” After Blanche was buried, her father took her tiny shoes, the only ones she had ever worn, and hung them in his chamber. There they stayed till his own death. “The Changeling” preserves in poetry the experience of the father in this first great sorrow of his life, and “The First Snow-Fall” intimates the consolation which was shortly to be brought, for in September the second child, Mabel, was born.