Mr. Howells also, who first knew her a decade later, has sketched her in these lines: “She was a woman perfectly of the New England type and tradition: almost repellently shy at first, and almost glacially cold with new acquaintance, but afterward very sweet and cordial. She was of a dark beauty, with a regular face of the Spanish outline; Lowell was of an ideal manner toward her, and of an admiration which delicately travestied itself and which she knew how to receive with smiling irony.”[111] Mrs. Herrick, in an unpublished reminiscence, speaks of her in similar terms: “She was a noble and beautiful woman eminently practical in all the affairs of life. Commanding in presence, gracious in her hospitality, highly cultured, and full of a keen appreciation of every word of Mr. Lowell, and always charming and womanly.”
Stillman’s tender sketch of Mrs. Lowell brings to mind that it was in the summer of his marriage that Lowell joined this friend in a reconnaissance of the Adirondacks which was followed by the formation of the Adirondack Club, and the successive sojourns in the wilderness which Emerson has enshrined in his poem “The Adirondacs,” and Stillman himself has recorded delightfully in his Autobiography as well as in magazine articles.[112]
“Ten men, ten guides, our company all told,”
says Emerson, but his chronicle was of the next year when the club was fully organized, and Stillman, Emerson, Lowell, Jeffries Wyman, E. R. Hoar, Dr. Howe, Binney, Woodman, Agassiz, and John Holmes, went into the wilderness. In 1857, the tentative exploring party; led by Stillman, consisted of John Holmes, Dr. Estes Howe, Lowell, and his two nephews, Charles and James Lowell, forever immortalized in the passionate verse of the second “Biglow Papers.” Lowell, who had known the near charms of nature in the Waverley Oaks and Beaver Brook, and had tasted the wild wood in his Maine excursion, entered with frolic delight into this forest picnic. The conditions were such as to bring out the best that was in him, for he had the freedom of the woods and the satisfaction of congenial society. “He was the soul,” says Stillman, “of the merriment of the company, fullest of witticisms, keenest in appreciation of the liberty of the occasion and the genius loci.... Not even Emerson, with all his indifference to the mere form of things, took to unimproved and uncivilized nature as Lowell did, and his free delight in the Wilderness was a thing to remember.” To these companions, quick to appreciate and respond, Lowell, light-hearted with the new promise of happiness and set free in his mind by the large privacy of the woods, brought the treasures of his fancy, his wit, his imagination. He revelled especially in recounting those visionary experiences which seemed all the more real under the starry skies and in the companionship of trees and silent forest creatures. Yet with it all, his inquisitive, searching mind, quickened too by the presence of scientific and philosophic comrades, was forever probing these phenomena to discover what was their ultimate rationale.
There can be little doubt that at this period of his life Lowell was poised for flight, as it were, having reached a stage when all the conditions were most favorable for the full expression of his powers. It is true that his academic work, as I have said, did in a measure supplant a freer poetic movement. But it may not unfairly be affirmed that Lowell’s attitude toward poetry was always that of expectation of some greater gift to come. His poems “Fancy’s Casuistry,” “In the Twilight,” “To the Muse,” all written about this time, record with iteration his restless pursuit of the elusive dream. His academic work afforded indeed a daily outlet, but it could not satisfy the demand for expression. Best of all, there was a pleasure-house in which he dwelt with his wife and daughter, perfectly fitted to the contentment of his spirit, and to furnishing that ease of mind which gives health of nature. Stillman has in another passage drawn a picture which may well be given here in evidence.
“Lowell was indeed very happy in his married life, and amongst the pictures Memory will keep on her tablet for me, till Death passes his sponge over it once for all, is one of his wife lying in a long chair under the trees at Dr. Howe’s, when the sun was getting cool, and laughing with her low, musical laugh at a contest in punning between Lowell and myself, haud passibus æquis, but in which he found enough to provoke his wit to activity; her almost Oriental eyes twinkling with fun, half-closed and flashing from one to the other of us; her low, sweet forehead, wide between the temples; mouth wreathing with humor; and the whole frame, lithe and fragile, laughing with her eyes at his extravagant and rollicking word-play. One would hardly have said that she was a beautiful woman, but fascinating she was in the happiest sense of the word, with all the fascination of pure and perfect womanhood and perfect happiness.”
CHAPTER IX
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
1857-1861
Lowell had not been a year in his professor’s chair when he was invited to take another position more closely identified with literature and having its own cares and drudgery. Under the present conditions of magazine editorship and of college professorship as well, the union of the two offices would be quite out of the question.[113] But the condition in 1857 was different, and to install a professor in Harvard College as editor of a new magazine was both natural and in a measure traditional. I have already called attention to the effort made in 1853 to establish a literary magazine, and to Lowell’s interest in the venture. The person most concerned in that effort did not lose sight of his project, and now pushed the matter through to a fortunate conclusion.
Mr. Francis Henry Underwood was in 1857 the literary adviser and reader for the firm of Phillips & Sampson in Boston, and he was an ardent admirer of Lowell. He was a strong advocate of anti-slavery doctrines, and in his first proposals for a magazine in 1853 was working in conjunction with the firm of John P. Jewett & Co., that had just sprung into notice as publishers of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The firm with which he was now connected was active chiefly in the publication of cheap editions of standard works in literature. It had a large Southern constituency, and when “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was offered to it in the form of a scrap-book of clippings from The National Era, commercial prudence dictated a polite refusal. When, however, Mrs. Stowe’s name had become one of great value, it was easy for Phillips, Sampson & Co. to publish, as they did, her “Sunny Memories” in 1854 and “Dred” in 1856.
Mr. Moses Dresser Phillips had been brought up in the book trade and knew it first as a bookseller. He was a man who had large business energy and laid his plans for wide connections and not merely a local trade. Mr. Charles Sampson, with whom he had formed his partnership, had died about five years before, and his only partner at this time was Mr. William Lee, well known for many years as the senior partner in the publishing house of Lee & Shepard. He was nearer Mr. Underwood’s age and it was chiefly with him that Mr. Underwood talked over his cherished plan. It was through him, indeed, that Mr. Underwood expected to gain over Mr. Phillips, who had the practical man’s distrust of new enterprises suggested by authors, and a temperament which was calculated to chill enthusiasm. Mr. Underwood had already won consent to engage in the work from Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes, and others, and he represented strongly to Mr. Lee the possibilities of a magazine which should have at once a staff of writers of a character so eminent. I suspect he kept in the background any purpose he might have of making the magazine play a part in politics. Mr. Lee in turn at his daily lunch with Mr. Phillips kept that gentleman in mind of the project, though he was himself neither an advocate nor an opponent. He simply used Mr. Underwood’s arguments, the most effective of which may have been the prospect held up before Mr. Phillips of the association he should thus form with a distinguished group.