He was, in a measure, undergoing solitary confinement. He sat in his lonely study, or walked up and down, pencilling sentences on the wall as if he were really a prisoner, and finding a strange consolation in repeating the Service for the Dead, which he had learned by heart. “I remember,” he wrote long after,[99] “the ugly fancy I had sometimes that I was another person, and used to hesitate at the door when I came back from my late night walks, lest I should find the real owner of the room sitting in my chair before the fire. A well-nigh hermit life I had led till then.” There were but few who could approach his real self in those days, but there came from Longfellow a gentle word of consolation in his poem “The Two Angels,” written on the coincidence of the birth of his own daughter and the death of Mrs. Lowell.
Meanwhile, his letters, even when disclosing his misery, contained happy references to his sturdy, affectionate child. True, all the losses he had suffered seemed now to be but the messengers of a final disaster. “I have only one lamb left of four,” he wrote to an occasional correspondent, “and think I hear the foot of the inexorable wolf if a leaf rustle;” but as the days went by this sensitiveness subsided. He was fortunate in having for her a most admirable governess, and he found the child’s companionship an unfailing joy. “I said as I sat down to dinner,” he writes in one of his letters; “‘This is a rare day, I have positively had an idea.’ Not knowing the meaning of ‘idea,’ and I being in the habit of telling her (when she is hypt, no rare thing) that she has some disease to which I give a very hard name,—she thought I was joking, and said, ‘Nonsense, papa, you haven’t got an idea,’—evidently thinking it some terrible complaint. ‘Why, shouldn’t you like a papa that had ideas?’ She threw her arms round my neck and said: ‘You dear papa! you’re just the kind of papa that I love!’” “Mabel,” he writes again, “has just begun to have ‘Robinson Crusoe’ read to her. Think of that and burst with envy! What have you and I left in life like that? She has already arranged a coronet of feathers, and proposes to play Indian Chief in future. Her great part lately has been the Great Wild Goat of the Parlor,—produced every evening with unbounded applause, especially from the chief actor. With a pair of newspaper horns she chases her father (who knows what it is to be tossed on the horns of the newspapers), qualifying his too excessive terrors with a kiss at last to show that it is really not real, but only play.... She has been in the habit of hearing her grandfather always say, ‘If Providence permit,’ of course not knowing what it meant. But one day, having made an uncommonly successful slide, she turned triumphantly to her aunt and cried, ‘There, that time I went like Providence permit.’ The doctor ordered her a blanket bath. She had already tried one and said, ‘If you please, papa, I had rather not.’ ‘But, darling, most people like them very much.’ ‘Well, papa, I don’t; people have different tastes you know. I’ve often noticed that everybody has a different mind.’”
Added to the need of wresting his mind from the despondency of grief was the pecuniary pressure. He had an income at this time from such little property as he possessed of six hundred dollars a year, and that plainly would not suffice. So he shook his portfolio, and even began writing new poems which he sent to his friend Briggs for Putnam’s, and he set about working over the letters he had written in Italy, publishing them in Graham’s Magazine, under the title “Leaves from my Italian Journal.” It was easier to do such mechanical work as this, and he began to speculate on the possibility of editing Shakespeare, and meditated a life of Dean Swift. He did during 1854 edit Marvell for the series of British Poets which his friend Professor Child was preparing for Little, Brown & Co., expending a good deal of loving care on the text, and editing Henry Rogers’s brief memoir by omissions, illustrations from Marvell’s writings, and a slight addition. He wrote also at this time, for use in the same series, the brief sketch of Keats which afterward he placed with his collected essays. As an introduction to Keats’s poems, it was designedly more biographical than critical, and did little more than set forth in a lively fashion the facts gathered by Milnes. When one considers Lowell’s early appreciation of Keats, it seems a little singular that he should have contented himself with so slight an expression.
Lowell spent the last week of June, 1854, at Newport, R. I., on a visit to the Nortons, and then went for the summer to Beverly, chiefly to be near his sister, Mrs. Charles Lowell. At this time the north shore of Massachusetts Bay had all the charm of rock and beach which it now has, with a pristine simplicity of life which it has lost. To-day the visitor drives through the woods near Beverly by well-kept roads, meeting at every turn other carriages and pleasure parties. Then, the woods were as beautiful, but had unbroken solitude. “At Newport,” Lowell wrote to Miss Norton, “you have no woods, and ours are so grand and deep and unconverted! They have those long pauses of conscious silence that are so fine, as if the spirit that inhabits them were hiding from you and holding its breath,—and then all the leaves stir again, and the pines cheat the rocks with their mock surf, and that invisible bird that haunts such solitudes calls once and is answered, and then silence again.”
A letter to Mr. Norton, dated 14 August, 1854, hints at the restful character of this seaside sojourn. “This is an outlying dependency of the Castle of Indolence, and even more lazy,—in proportion as the circulation is more languid at the extremities. By dint of counting on my fingers, and with the aid of an old newspaper and an almanac, I have approximated, I believe, to the true date of your world out there, and that seems to me quite a sufficient mental achievement for one morning. The chief food of the people here is Lotus. It is cunning to take various shapes,—sometimes fish, sometimes flesh, fowl, eggs, or what not,—but is always Lotus. It does not make us forget, only Memory is no longer recollection, it is passive, not active, and mixes real with feigned things, just as in perfectly still pools the images of clouds filter down through the transparent water and make one perspective with the matter-of-fact weeds at the bottom. I feel as if I had sunk in a diving-bell provisioned and aired for three months, and knew not of storm or calm, or of the great keels, loaded, perhaps, with fate, that sigh hoarsely overhead toward their appointed haven....
“What do I do? Tarry at Jericho chiefly. Also I row and fish, and have learned to understand the life of a shore fisherman thoroughly. Sometimes I get my dinner with my lines,—a rare fate for a poet. Sometimes I watch the net result when the tritons draw their seine. Also I grow brown, and have twice lost and renewed the skin of my hands and, alas, my nose, Also I know what hunger is and, reversing the Wordsworthian sheep, am one feeding like forty.”
He went on one or two short cruises and enjoyed the genuine country life with its salt flavor, but was back at Elmwood in the fall. The year had found some intimate expression in his verse, as well as the more objective poems like “Pictures from Appledore,” suggested in part it may be by one of his summer cruises, though the last section was written four years before. Mr. Stillman, who made his acquaintance at this time, when he was foraging for The Crayon, the new literary and art journal which his enthusiasm had projected, speaks warmly of the princely courtesy with which Lowell received him. “Out of the depth of the shadow over his life,” he writes,[100] “in the solitude of his study, with nothing but associations of his wrecked happiness permitted around him, the kindly sympathy with a new aspiration wakened him to a momentary gaiety, his humor flashed out irrepressible, and his large heart turned its warmest side to the new friend, who came only to make new calls on his benevolence; that is, to give him another opportunity to bestow himself on others.” On his part, Lowell welcomed heartily this ingenuous lover of art and letters. They took long walks together over the country Lowell knew so well, to Beaver Brook, the Waverley Oaks, and the Waltham hills. “You made me fifteen years younger,” he wrote, “while you stayed. When a man gets to my age, enthusiasms don’t often knock at the door of his garret. I am all the more charmed with them when they come. A youth full of such pure intensity of hope and faith and purpose, what is he but the breath of a resurrection-trumpet to stiffened old fellows, bidding us up out of our clay and earth if we would not be too late?”
The poems which register the tranquillity of a return to common life, like “The Windharp” and “Auf Wiedersehen,” are tremulous with the emotion which he could bear to express. Indeed, when Lowell came to print the former of these poems he omitted one stanza, possibly as going farther than he cared to with his contemporaneous public. In the letter last quoted, he sent it to Mr. Stillman.
“O tress that so oft on my heart hath lain,
Rocked to rest within rest by its thankful beating,
Say, which is harder,—to bear the pain
Of laughter and light, or to wait in vain,
’Neath the unleaved tree, the impossible meeting?
If Death’s lips be icy, Life gives, iwis,
Some kisses more clay-cold and darkening than his!”
But as a comprehensive record of this whole experience, the “Ode to Happiness” written at this time may be taken as most conclusive. The very form of the ode, a form to which Lowell was wont to resort in the great passages of his life, aided the expression, for its gravity, its classic reserve, even its labored lines served best to hold that sustained mood which impelled the poet to stand as it were before an altar and make his sacrificial hymn. Tranquillity, he avers, is the elder sister of Happiness. “She is not that,” he says:—