“To the still chamber with its half-closed shutter
Where the beloved father lay in pain,
To sit beside him in contentment utter,
Never to part again.”
There are four sonnets in which her love for her husband glows with a deep, steady passion, one of them written doubtless in the solemn days near the end, in the spirit recorded by Lowell when he wrote to Briggs after her death: “She promised to be with me if that were possible.”
“In the deep flushing of the Western sky
The new moon stands as she would fain be gone,
And, dropping earthward, greet Endymion:
If Death uplift me, even thus should I,
Companioned by the silver spirits high,
And stationed on the sunset’s crimson towers,
Bend longing over earth’s broad stretch of bowers,
To where my love beneath their shades might lie:
For I should weary of the endless blue,
Should weary of my ever-growing light,
If that one soul, so beautiful and true,
Were hidden by earth’s vapors from my sight,
Should wane and wane as changeful planets do,
And move on slowly, wrapt in mine own night.”
What most impresses the reader who takes all these poems at a sitting is the reserve, the just balance of sentiment which controls them. Passion is here, but it is not stormy, and love and tenderness, but they are not feeble and tearful. Depth of feeling and strength of character lie open to view in the firm lines, and the fine light and shade of the verse come incontrovertibly from a nature evenly poised, whose companionship must have been to Lowell that of a kindred spirit, capable indeed of guiding and not merely of seconding his resolves.
Mrs. Maria White Lowell
The frontispiece to the volume, which is here reproduced, was a crystallotype of a drawing by Cheney after Page’s portrait. “It is like,” Lowell wrote at the time, “as far as there can be any likeness made of a face so full of spiritual beauty, and in which so much of the charm was subterficial.” He tried to convey to a friend, with whom his association was purely literary, some notion of her when he wrote: “All that was written of Lady Digby, all that Taylor said of the Countess of Carbery and Donne of Elizabeth Drury—belongs as well to her, she was so beautiful and good. She was born 8th July, 1821, married 26th December, 1844, and went home 27th October, 1853. ‘The Pilgrim they laid in a large upper chamber whose windows opened toward the sunrising: and the name of the chamber was Peace.’”
This was written more than a year after the event. He made use of the same allusion just after his wife’s death, when writing to his friend Briggs, but added mournfully that he himself was not in that chamber. Indeed, in the first months of his desolation he was in a most unhappy state, and endured a loneliness from which now and then an uncontrollably passionate cry would be uttered. His father was perfectly deaf and often alarmingly excitable, and his sister Rebecca eccentric to a degree which made her preserve for days an absolute silence. He would rush out into the world, and there showed an artificial gayety which bewildered his friends, only to come back to despise himself. “I know perfectly well,” he wrote to his most intimate friend, “that my nature is naturally joyous and susceptible of all happy impressions; but that is the very reason I am wretched. I am afraid of myself. I dread the world and its temptations, for I do long to keep myself pure enough to satisfy her who was better than all I can say of her. I often troubled her while she was here, but I cannot bear to now that she is in entire felicity.” He was, as he afterward said of himself, in great agony of mind, and he had to force himself into those laborious hours which one instinctively feels contain a wise restorative.