There is a picture of the Lowells at home at this time, drawn by Miss Fredrika Bremer. Lowell had reviewed her writings in their English dress—it was his first contribution to the North American,—and on her coming to America a meeting occurred, which resulted in a friendly visit paid by Miss Bremer to Elmwood. The form in which she recorded her impressions of travel was in letters home, afterward gathered into a book. It was on 15 December, 1849, that she wrote:—
“The whole family assembles every day for morning and evening prayer around the venerable old man; and he it is who blesses every meal. His prayers, which are always extempore, are full of the true and inward life, and I felt them as a pleasant, refreshing dew upon my head, and seldom arose from my knees with dry eyes. With him live his youngest son, the poet, and his wife; such a handsome and happy young couple as one can hardly imagine. He is full of life and youthful ardor, she as gentle, as delicate, and as fair as a lily, and one of the most lovable women that I have seen in this country, because her beauty is full of soul and grace, as is everything which she does or says. This young couple belong to the class of those of whom one can be quite sure; one could not for an hour, nay, not for half an hour, be doubtful about them. She, like him, has a poetical tendency, and has also written anonymously some poems, remarkable for their deep and tender feeling, especially maternal, but her mind has more philosophical depth than his. Singularly enough, I did not discern in him that deeply earnest spirit which charmed me in many of his poems. He seems to me occasionally to be brilliant, witty, gay, especially in the evening, when he has what he calls his ‘evening fever,’ and his talk is then like an incessant play of fireworks. I find him very agreeable and amiable; he seems to have many friends, mostly young men.... There is a trace of beauty and taste in everything she [Mrs. L.] touches, whether of mind or body; and above all she beautifies life.... Pity it is that this much-loved young wife seems to have delicate lungs. Her low, weak voice tells of this. [Madame Lowell was plainly not at home.] Maria reads her husband’s poetry charmingly well.”[86]
Near the close of 1849 Lowell reissued in two volumes, under the imprint of W. D. Ticknor & Co., the two series which had appeared in 1843 and 1847, and thus registered himself, as it were, among the regular vine-growers on the slopes of Parnassus. Moreover, with his former products thus formally garnered, he began to please himself with the prospect of some more thoroughgoing piece of poetical composition. He was practically clear of his regular engagement with the Standard, and his “Biglow Papers” had given him the opportunity to free his mind in an exhilarating fashion on the supreme question of the hour. There was something of a rebound from this in “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” but the free use of the Yankee vernacular with the immediate popularity which it secured must have set him thinking of the possibility of using this form in some freer and more genuinely poetic fashion. The little pastoral, “The Courtin’,” published in a fragmentary form, was an experiment in this direction at once highly successful, and accordingly we find him writing to Mr. Briggs on the eve of the publication of his two volumes of Poems: “I think you will find my poems improved in the new edition. I have not altered much, but I have left out the poorest and put others in their places. My next volume, I think, will show an advance. It is to be called ‘The Nooning.’ Now guess what it will be. The name suggests pleasant thoughts, does it not? But I shall not tell you anything about it yet, and you must not mention it.” And a few weeks later, with the project still high in his mind, he wrote to the same correspondent: “Maria invented the title for me, and is it not a pleasant one? I am going to bring together a party of half a dozen old friends at Elmwood. They go down to the river and bathe, and then one proposes that they shall go up into a great willow-tree (which stands at the end of the causey near our house, and has seats in it) to take their nooning. There they agree that each shall tell a story or recite a poem of some sort. In the tree they find a countryman already resting himself, who enters into the plan and tells a humorous tale, with touches of Yankee character and habits in it. I am to read my poem of the ‘Voyage of Leif’ to Vinland, in which I mean to bring my hero straight into Boston Bay, as befits a Bay-state poet. Two of my poems are already written—one ‘The Fountain of Youth’ (no connection with any other firm), and the other an ‘Address to the Muse’ by the Transcendentalist of the party. I guess I am safe in saying that the first of these two is the best thing I have done yet. But you shall judge when you see it. But ‘Leif’s Voyage’ is to be far better.” The scheme thus formed intended clearly a group of poems lightly tied together: indeed the plan, always a favorite one, was carried out on very nearly the same lines by Mr. Longfellow in his “Tales of a Wayside Inn” a dozen years later, and it is not impossible that Lowell, who had been interrupted in his plan, was still more reluctant to complete it, when it would have so much the air of being a copy of his neighbor’s design. At any rate, the disjecta membra of the poem found publication in a straggling fashion. Writing to Mr. J. B. Thayer, in reply to an inquiry about the poem, years after, Lowell says: “‘The June Idyl’ [renamed ‘Under the Willows’] (written in ’51 or ’52) is a part of what I had written as the induction to it. The description of spring in one of the ‘Biglow Papers’ is another fragment of the same, tagged with rhyme for the nonce. So is a passage in ‘Mason and Slidell,’ beginning ‘Oh strange new world.’ The ‘Voyage to Vinland,’ the ‘Pictures from Appledore,’ and ‘Fitz-Adam’s Story’ were written for the ‘Nooning’ as originally planned. So, you see, I had made some progress. Perhaps it will come by and by—not in the shape I meant at first, for something broke my life in two, and I cannot piece it together again. Besides, the Muse asks all of a man, and for many years I have been unable to give myself up as I would.” To this list should be added “Fragments of an Unfinished Poem,” which was printed in the author’s final Riverside edition, when he had abandoned all thought of completing the “Nooning.”
That Lowell was conscious of his vocation by this time, and that with the publication of his collected poems he was entering upon a new, resolute course of poetic action, is clear from a few pregnant sentences in a letter to Briggs, dated 23 January, 1850: My poems hitherto have been a true record of my life, and I mean that they shall continue to be.... I begin to feel that I must enter on a new year of my apprenticeship. My poems have thus far had a regular and natural sequence. First, Love and the mere happiness of existence beginning to be conscious of itself, then Freedom—both being the sides which Beauty presented to me—and now I am going to try more wholly after Beauty herself. Next, if I live, I shall present Life as I have seen it. In the ‘Nooning’ I shall have not even a glance towards Reform. If the poems I have already written are good for anything they are perennial, and it is tedious as well as foolish to repeat one’s self. I have preached sermons enow, and now I am going to come down out of the pulpit and go about among my parish. I shall turn my barrel over and read my old discourses; it will be time to write new ones when my hearers have sucked all the meaning out of those old ones. Certainly I shall not grind for any Philistines, whether Reformers or Conservatives. I find that Reform cannot take up the whole of me, and I am quite sure that eyes were given us to look about us with sometimes, and not to be always looking forward. If some of my good red-hot friends were to see this they would call me a backslider, but there are other directions in which one may get away from people besides the rearward one.... I am not certain that my next appearance will not be in a pamphlet on the Hungarian question in answer to the North American Review. But I shall not write anything if I can help it. I am tired of controversy, and, though I have cut out the oars with which to row up my friend Bowen, yet I have enough to do, and, besides, am not so well as usual, being troubled in my head as I was summer before last. I should like to play for a year, and after I have written and printed the ‘Nooning’ I mean to take a nooning and lie under the trees looking at the skies.”
The Hungarian movement interested both Lowell and his sister, Mrs. Putnam, deeply. Lowell had printed in the Standard his verses to Kossuth, and Mrs. Putnam had written vigorously in the Christian Examiner. Robert Carter also printed a series of papers on the subject in the Boston Atlas, which were reprinted in a pamphlet. Lowell did not write the pamphlet he meditated, but a year later he wrote seven columns in the Boston Daily Advertiser, in defence of his sister against Professor Bowen’s attack. “It was the severest job I ever undertook,” he wrote Gay. “I believe I was longer at work in actual hours than in writing all Hosea Biglow and the ‘Fable for Critics.’” He had displayed his interest previously by a stirring appeal for funds in aid of the Hungarian exiles.[87]
And now came three events to the little household at Elmwood that wrought a change in the life of Lowell and his wife. The first was the death of their third child, Rose, 2 February, 1850, after a half-year’s life only. The loss brought vividly to remembrance the experience which had entered so deeply into their lives when the first-born, Blanche, was taken away. “For Rose,” Lowell writes to Gay, “I would have no funeral; my father only made a prayer, and then I walked up alone to Mount Auburn and saw her body laid by her sister’s. She was a very lovely child—we think the loveliest of our three. She was more like Blanche than Mabel, and her disease was the same. Her illness lasted a week, but I never had any hope, so that she died to me the first day the doctor came. She was very beautiful—fair, with large dark gray eyes and fine features. Her smile was especially charming, and she was full of smiles till her sickness began. Dear little child! she had never spoken, only smiled.”
Again death came that way, and on 30 March, 1850, Lowell’s mother died. The cloud which had for years hung over her had deepened, and her death was looked upon as a release, for whether at home or in seclusion she was alike separated from her family. As Lowell wrote:—
“We can touch thee, still we are no nearer;
Gather round thee, still thou art alone;
The wide chasm of reason is between us;
Thou confutest kindness with a moan;
We can speak to thee, and thou canst answer,
Like two prisoners through a wall of stone.”[88]
The third event was the birth of the fourth child and only son, Walter. Gay had lately lost a boy, and Lowell’s announcement to him of this birth was tempered by the fact. “I should have written you a note the other day,” he writes, 3 January, 1851, “to let you know that we have a son, only I could not somehow make up my mind to it. It pained me to think of the associations which such news would revive in you. Yet I had rather you should hear it from me than from any one else.... The boy is a nice little fellow, and said (by his mother) to look like me. He was born on the 22d December, and I am doubting whether to name him Pilgrim Father or no. I have offered Maria her choice between that name and Larkin, which last I think would go uncommonly well with Lowell. She has not yet made up her mind.
“But now for the tragic part of it. Just after we had got him cleverly born on the 22d, there springs me up an Antiquary (like a Jack in a box) and asserts that the Pilgrims landed on the 21st, that eleven days were added instead of ten in allowing for O. S., and that there is no use in disputing about it. But I appeal to any sensible person (I have no reference to antiquaries) whether, as applied to Larkin, this decision be not of the nature of an ex post facto law, by which he, the said Larkin, ought not of right to be concluded. What was he to know of it in his retirement, with no access to reading-rooms or newspapers? Inheriting from his father a taste for anniversaries, no doubt he laid his plans with deliberation, and is he now to give up his birthright for a mess of antiquarian pottage? Had proper notice been given, he would surely have bestirred himself to have arrived a day earlier. On the whole I shall advise Larkin to contest the point. For my part, I shall stick to the 22d, though it upset the whole Gregorian calendar, which to me, indeed, smacks a little too strongly of the Scarlet Woman. Would