Very likely the fame of his lectures brought him invitations to go elsewhere; at any rate, when his course in Boston was finished, he made a tour in the West, and became so desperately out of conceit with the business before a week had passed that he tried to escape the remaining lectures, but he was not released and had at least the satisfaction of carrying home six hundred dollars as the proceeds. “I hate this business of lecturing,” he wrote from Madison, Wisconsin, to Miss Norton. “To be received at a bad inn by a solemn committee, in a room with a stove that smokes but not exhilarates, to have three cold fish-tails laid in your hand to shake, to be carried to a cold lecture-room, to read a cold lecture to a cold audience, to be carried back to your smoke-side, paid, and the three fish-tails again—well, it is not delightful exactly.”
Lowell does not seem to have written anything in the short time that elapsed after the close of his lecture tour before he sailed for Europe, though he showed a lively interest in Mr. Stillman’s paper The Crayon, and sent it his poem “Invita Minerva,” in which Longfellow discovered a reminder of Emerson’s “Forerunners.” The fact that Lowell was to be the elder poet’s successor naturally drew them together much at this time. “A beautiful morning,” wrote Longfellow on the 17th of May. “Went and sat an hour with Lowell in his upper chamber among the treetops. He sails for Havre the first of June; “and on the 29th he records: “Lowell’s friends gave him a farewell dinner at the Revere, whereat I had the honor of presiding. A joyous banquet: one of the pleasantest I ever attended,—a meeting of friends to take leave of a friend whom we all love.” Lowell himself refers briefly to the occasion in a note written the next day: “Everything went off finely after you left. Holmes sang another song and repeated some very charming verses,[103] and Rölker to his own intense delight got through two stanzas of ‘a helf to ve nortward boun’,’ William White having incautiously supplied him with the initial line. He gave it with so much sentiment that we were all entirely overcome and laughed so immoderately that the brave Rölker at length sat down. We sang ‘Auld lang syne’ in true college style and so parted. On the whole I renewed my youth last night—and my recollections of ‘1790’ this morning, for I only had four hours’ sleep. However, aboard ship I shall have leisure enough to emulate Chaucer’s Morpheus
‘That slept and did no other work.’”
That day Longfellow drove into town with Lowell and saw him off for New York, whence he was to sail.
But the weeks before Lowell’s departure brought other things to mind than leaving home and affectionate friends. He had been asked to pronounce a poem before the senior class of Hamilton College at the coming commencement. The invitation reached him on the memorable day when the runaway slave Burns was captured in the streets of Boston, and he wrote in reply to the invitation: “In six months I shall be in Switzerland; an ocean between me and a slave hunt, thank God!”
Lowell again took passage in a sailing vessel, the St. Nicholas, Bragdon, master, which left New York 4 June, 1855, bound for Havre. Among his companions was Dr. Elliott, under whose care he had been a dozen years before, when his eyes were in a bad way. It was a four weeks’ voyage, and Lowell amused himself with Lever’s novels from beginning to end, as he lay stretched in a hammock on the quarter-deck. Reaching France, he spent three weeks in Paris among the pictures chiefly, and made an excursion to Chartres, apparently his first visit, but one which left so deep an impression on his mind that fourteen years later, when he wrote “The Cathedral,” which he wished at first to call “A Day at Chartres,” the same images which sprang to his mind when he wrote of his visit directly after in a letter to Mr. Norton, recurred and found poetic expression. “It is the home now,” he wrote, “of innumerable swallows and sparrows, who build upon the shoulders of those old great ones (the stone angels and saints)—as we little folks do too, I am afraid. Even here I found the Norman—for when I mounted to the spire, I saw numbers of hawks who dwell in the higher parts, as in their castles, and prey on the poor Saxons below.” So in the poem he takes a parting look
“At those old weather-pitted images
Of by-gone struggle, now so sternly calm.
About their shoulders sparrows had built nests,
And fluttered, chirping, from gray perch to perch,
Now on a mitre poising, now a crown,
Irreverently happy. While I thought
How confident they were, what careless hearts
Flew on those lightsome wings and shared the sun,
A larger shadow crossed; and looking up
I saw where, nesting in the hoary towers,
The sparrow-hawk slid forth on noiseless air,
With sidelong head that watched the joy below,
Grim Norman baron o’er this clan of Kelts.”
From Paris Lowell ran over to London, chiefly to see the Storys, who were there, and renewed his acquaintance with Thackeray and the Brownings, and fell in with Leigh Hunt. But his main business was to make himself proficient in German, and so having taken his academic vacation in advance, he journeyed through the Low Countries, and settled himself in Dresden for the autumn and winter. The quiet Saxon city was a favorite resort for Americans then even more than now, and for the first few weeks his sister, Mrs. Putnam, was there with her family. It was with a dull, heavy feeling that he gave himself to his tasks, seeing very little of society. “I confess frankly,” he wrote, shortly after his establishment there, “that I am good for nothing, and have been for some time, and that there are times almost every day when I wish to die, be out of the world once for all.... I fear I shall come back with my eremitical tendencies more developed than ever.” But dogged persistence in work was something better than an anodyne, and work hard he did. “A man of my age,” he wrote to his father, “has to study very hard in acquiring a new language, and I cannot be satisfied without knowing thoroughly all I undertake to know. I am very well and constantly busy.”
Mr. Norton with his sisters crossed the Atlantic in the autumn, and Lowell wrote to him at Paris: “Did I tell you that I had a room on the ground floor, with a glass door giving upon a large garden? that I have a flock of sparrows that come to breakfast with me every morning, and eat loaf sugar to the detriment of my coffee? That I go to hear lectures on the Natural Sciences and have even assisted at the anatomical class,—beginning with horror and ending with interest? That we have the best theatre here I ever saw? And by the way, if Bouffé acts the Abbé Galant while you are in Paris, go and see it by all means. It is a truly artistic piece of representation. If it be not too cold, go down to Chartres. It is simply the best thing in France, and must have come out of some fine old Norman brain,—I am sure no Frenchman could ever have conceived it. After all, there are no such poets as the elements. Leave a thing to them, and they redress all imperfections and expunge all prose.”
He had planned spending a portion of his time in Spain, and took lessons in Spanish in Dresden, but finally abandoned the notion. His host and hostess, with whom he talked, assured him that he made astonishing progress in German. “What a language it is to be sure!” he wrote; “with nominatives sending out as many roots as that witch-grass which is the pest of all child-gardens, and sentences in which one sets sail like an admiral with sealed orders, not knowing, where the devil he is going to till he is in mid-ocean!” To his friend Stillman he wrote, as the winter wore away: “To say all in one word, I have been passing a very wretched winter. I have been out of health and out of spirits, gnawed a great part of the time by an insatiable homesickness, and deprived of my usual means of ridding myself of bad thoughts by putting them into verse, for I have always felt that I was here for the specific end of learning German, and not of pleasing myself.” Fifteen years later, looking back, he wrote: “I once spent a winter in Dresden, a southern climate compared with England, and really almost lost my respect for the sun when I saw him groping among the chimney-pots opposite my windows as he described his impoverished arc in the sky.”[104]