James Russell Lowell, A Biography; vol. 1/2

by Horace Elisha Scudder

The literary product of 1847 was inconsiderable. A few poems appeared, and Lowell even contemplated trying his hand at a tragedy founded on the Conquest of Mexico,—the first conquest, as one of his friends slyly remarks,—suggested no doubt by Prescott’s history, which had appeared four years earlier, and had just been followed by the “Conquest of Peru.” He made some progress with the tragedy, and even purposed offering it in competition for the large prize promised by Forrest for a good acting tragedy, but no line of it appears to have been preserved. He contributed also two or three articles to the North American Review, and in the fall of the year he set about the collection of such poems as he had written since his previous volume appeared. In the midst of this work he wrote to his friend Carter, then in the little village of Pepperell, and his letter reflects pleasantly the attitude he always took toward New England country life, as well as shows the wistfulness of his regard for his lost child.

“There are pleasanter ways of looking at a country village like Pepperell,” he writes to his somewhat discontented correspondent; “there are good studies both within doors and without, and either picture will be new to you. Talk to the men about farming, and you will find yourself in good society at once. Inquire of the women about the mysteries of cheese—and butter-making, and you will be more entertained than with the Georgics. At first, you find yourself in a false relation with them. You touch at no points and bristle repellingly at all. They flounder in their conversation and seek shelter in the weather or the price of pork, because they consider themselves under a painful necessity to entertain you. They can’t converse because they try—effort being the untimely grave of all true interchange of natures. They make a well where there should be a fountain. Get them upon any common ground, and you will find there is genuine stuff in them. The essence of good society is simply a community in habits of thought and topics of interest. When we approach each other naturally, we meet easily and gracefully; if we hurry too much we are apt to come together with an unpleasant bump.

“Who knows how much domestic interest was involved in that question the goodwife asked you about Mr. Praisegod’s servant? Perhaps she has a son, or a daughter betrothed to a neighbor’s son, who thinks of beginning life (as many of the farmers’ children in our country towns do) by entering into service in the city. Perhaps she wished and yet did not dare to ask of the temptations he would be exposed to. I love our Yankees with all their sharp angles.

“Maria is and has been remarkably well ever since the birth of our little darling, if I may call her so when Blanche still holds the first place in our hearts. Little Miss Mabel thrives wonderfully. She is, I think, as good a child as her little sister—though I tremble to trace any likeness between the two. She certainly has not Blanche’s noble and thoughtful eyes, which were noticeable even when she was first born. But some of her ways are very like her sister’s. Those who have seen her say that she is a very beautiful child.”

Toward the end of the year the volume of poems pressed hard upon him. “I should have written to you,” he writes to Briggs, 13 November, 1847, “at any rate just to say that I loved you still and to ask how you did, had I not been most preposterously busy with the printers. I had calculated in a loose way that I had ‘copy’ enough prepared to make as large a volume as I intended mine should be, but about three weeks ago the printers overtook me, and since then we have been neck and neck for something like a hundred pages—thirty page heats. It was only yesterday that I won the cup. Everybody has a notion that it is of advantage to be out before Christmas; and though I feel a sort of contempt for a demand so adventitiously created, and do not wish anybody to buy my book but those who buy to read, yet it is one of these little points which we find it convenient to yield in life, and not the less readily because it will be for our advantage not to be obstinate. I have a foolish kind of pride in these particulars. I had rather, for example, that you should have copied into the Mirror a column of abuse than those exaggerated commendations of my Louisville friend. I do not know whether it is a common feeling or not, but I can never get to consider myself as anything more than a boy. My temperament is so youthful, that whenever I am addressed (I mean by mere acquaintances) as if my opinion were worth anything, I can hardly help laughing. I cannot but think to myself with an inward laugh: ‘My good friend, you would be as mad as a hornet with me, if you knew that I was only a boy of twelve behind a bearded vizor.’ This feeling is so strong that I have got into a way of looking on the Poet Lowell as an altogether different personage from myself, and feel a little offended when my friends confound the two.”

The volume of poems to which Lowell refers in this letter came out just before Christmas, 1847. It bore the words “Second Series” on the title-page, being coupled in the author’s mind with the Poems issued four years previous. It is in the main a collection of the poems which Lowell in the past four years had scattered through papers and magazines, though he omitted several which had appeared in print, one or two of which indeed he went back and picked up on issuing his next collection a score of years later. He did not draw on his Biglow poems, reserving them for a volume by themselves, and he omitted several that were in a similar vein. There was perhaps no single poem in the new series which struck a deeper note than is to be found in one or two of the poems in the earlier collection, yet the art of the second series is firmer than that of the first, and the book as a whole is distinctly more even and more free from the mere sentimentalism which marks the previous volume. Scattered through it are a few of the more serious of his anti-slavery poems, as if for a testimony; but he does not retain the violent, not to say turgid, songs which he had thrown out upon occasions of public excitement.

There is one poem among the few contributed directly to the volume, which is familiar to lovers of Lowell himself rather than of Lowell the poet, if we may take his own discrimination, and it is most likely that it was written under conditions referred to in the letter just quoted. “An Indian-Summer Reverie,” which fills sixteen pages of the little volume, near its close, bears the marks of rapid writing. It is easy to believe that Lowell, coming away from the printing-office, where he had learned that the printers needed at once more copy, paused near the willows, and in the warm, hazy November afternoon let his mind drift idly over the scene and blend with it reflections on his own life. The poet, by virtue of his gift, is always young, and yet when young is the most retrospective of men. Not yet thirty, Lowell could remember his youth, and helped by the autumn that was in the air, could see nature and man and his own full life through a medium which has the mistiness and the color of the Indian Summer. There are poetic lines and phrases in the poem, and more than all the veil of the season hangs tremulously over the whole, so that one is gently stirred by the poetic feeling of the rambling verses; yet, after all, the most enduring impression is of the young man himself in that still hour of his life, when he was conscious, not so much of a reform to which he must put his hand, as of the love of beauty, and of the vague melancholy which mingles with beauty in the soul of a susceptible poet. The river winding through the marshes, the distant sound of the ploughman, the near chatter of the chipmunk, the individual trees, each living its own life, the march of the seasons flinging lights and shadows over the broad scene, the pictures of human life associated with his own experience, the hurried survey of his village years—all these pictures float before his vision; and then, with an abruptness which is like the choking of the singer’s voice with tears, there wells up the thought of the little life which held as in one precious drop the love and faith of his heart. Mr. Briggs, in a letter written upon receiving the volume, says: “I have just laid it aside with my eyes full of tears after reading ‘The Changeling,’ which appears to me the greatest poem in the collection, and I think that it will be so regarded by and by, a good many years hence, when I shall be wholly forgotten and you will only be known by the free thoughts you will leave behind you.” Mr. Briggs had himself lost a child, and his grief had been commemorated by Lowell; this same letter announces the birth of a daughter. One’s personal experience often colors if it does not obscure one’s critical judgment; but in taking account of Lowell’s life and its expression, we may not overlook the fact that up to this time certainly he was singularly ingenuous in making poetry, not simply a vehicle for the conveyance of large emotions generalized from personal experience, but a precipitation of his most intimate emotions. His love, his tender feelings for his friends, his generous and ardent hopes for humanity, his passion for freedom and truth, all lay at the depths of his being; but they rose to the surface perpetually in his poems and his letters, and he had scarcely learned to hold them in check by that hard mundane wisdom which comes to most through the attrition of daily living.

Thus far Lowell had looked out on life pretty steadily from the sheltered privacy of a happy home, and he was not immediately to change his surroundings; but a certain induration was now to be effected which can scarcely be said to have arrested his spontaneity, but may fairly be looked upon as leading him to regard himself more as others regarded him, as no longer “a boy of twelve behind a bearded vizor,” but as grown up and become a man of the world. For it was not long after this that the relation into which he had entered with the National Anti-Slavery Standard, and which had undergone a sort of suspension as we have seen, became a very close and exacting one.

The seclusion of his life satisfied Lowell; he was an infrequent visitor to Boston even, and made but few journeys. Now and then he went to New York, and, as we have seen, once to Stockbridge. To Canada also he made one journey; but it is clear from the circumstances attending these flittings that the Lowells had no money to spend on luxuries. They could live simply and without much outlay of cash at Elmwood, but travelling meant hoarding first, and in those early married years the young couple was not often out of debt. Even a trip to New York had to be postponed again and again on this account. Mr. Gay’s drafts in payment of account for contributions to the Standard were irregular and always seemed to come just in the nick of time.

“I thought to see you this week,” Lowell wrote to Gay, 8 June, 1848, when acknowledging one of these raven-flights,—“but cannot come yet. I cannot come without any money, and leave my wife with 62-1/2 cents, such being the budget brought in by my secretary of the treasury this week.... I am expecting some money daily—I always am—I always have been, and yet have never been fairly out of debt since I entered college.” And again, writing to the same, 26 February, 1849, “The truth is, that I have just been able to keep my head above water; but there is a hole in my life-preserver, and what wind I can raise from your quarter comes just in season to make up for leakage and save me from total submersion. Since the day after I received your remittance for December, I have literally not had a copper, except a small sum which I borrowed. It was all spent before I got it. So is the last one, too. As long as I have money I don’t think anything about it, except to fancy my present stock inexhaustible and capable of buying up the world.” A few days later, on receiving the draft which his half-humorous letter called for, he wrote in the same strain: “I am not very often down in the mouth: but sometimes, at the end of the year, when I have done a tolerable share of work, and have nothing to show for it, I feel as if I had rather be a spruce clerk on India wharf than a man of letters. Regularly I look forward to New Year, and think that I shall begin the next January out of debt, and as regularly I am disappointed.”