[53] It is a comment on Lowell’s indifference to wealth that his imagination did not take fire at the announcement of the discovery of gold in California. It may be said that his mind was directed toward the immediate political consequences, but he had occasion to write upon the subject of the discovery, when this alone engaged his attention. He was struck with some of the picturesque situations, but his reflections were mainly summed up in these words: “We have never seen anything like the accounts from California since we read that chapter of Candide, in which Voltaire carries his hero to El Dorado. Supposing all we hear to be true, it is hardly probable that gold will continue to be found there in such large quantities for any great length of time. It will doubtless become more and more scarce, and the difficulty of obtaining it greater. After all, the gold mines which give the surest and richest yield are the brain and the common earth. The discovery of a new fertilizer is of more practical benefit than that of the philosopher’s stone would be; the invention of the steam-engine has created more wealth than the richest gold mines; and wise men are not wanting who believe that Fourier has given us something better than a California. And why travel fifteen thousand miles around Cape Horn for a place to dig in? Heaven knows the earth wants more washing here than at Sacramento River. Moreover, every one of us has a vein more or less profitable, if it were only diligently worked.”—“Eldorado,” in National Anti-Slavery Standard, 21 December, 1848.
[54] Mr. Briggs was highly entertained by the French exercise, and asked: “Who is your master? But never mind. Let me recommend you to an incomparable one who had the honor of teaching Talleyrand a new language (English) to help him conceal his thoughts. I mean Cobbett. If you have never seen his French grammar, get it by all means and read it, if you do not study it; and then read his English grammar, which you will find more amusing than the Comic Latin Grammar.” Lowell does not seem to have followed his advice immediately. At least he wrote to me three or four years before his death: “I never read any English grammar in my life, thank God, except Cobbett’s a few years ago, and in that I found errors of ignorance,—as was to be expected.”
[55] At the close of 1866 a testimonial was presented to Mr. Garrison when he retired from active service, and Lowell was the medium of certain English subscriptions, among them that of John Bright. In sending this Lowell writes to Mr. Garrison: “Nothing could have been more in keeping with the uniform wisdom of your anti-slavery leadership than the time you chose for resigning it.”
[56] It is greatly to be regretted that the important correspondence of Quincy and Lowell does not exist. By agreement each destroyed the letters of the other.
[57] The curious reader may see here one of the little idiosyncrasies in which Lowell indulged throughout his life, though this is one of the first instances I have noted.
[58] Mr. Gay had written: “I do not know how you feel about the Imprint, but my own opinion is that there had better be either no name, or only one there. Every one will know that yourself, Mrs. Chapman and Quincy and Briggs and others contribute to its columns. The more we can make believe contribute to it the better, and to put three or four names in the Imprint will seem to limit the number. I wish that all its readers shall believe that a variety of people have had a hand in the making up of every number, and not only those whose names are before them. For the same reason I wish that the initial system shall be done with. The readers will be prone to believe the best if they are not certain, and if there are none of these ‘small caps,’ as the printers say, to guide, they may sometimes be humbugged into eating my chaff for your and others’ wheat.” Mr. Gay had his way at first, but before long his readers’ curiosity drove him into the use of initials as signatures.
[59] See Letters of James Russell Lowell, i. 111-116. Copyright, 1893, by Harper & Brothers.
[60] A little of this jest is preserved in Parson Wilbur’s note to the second Biglow paper, as published in book form.
[61] In his address on “The Place of the Independent in Politics,” delivered forty years later, Lowell pithily says: “A moral purpose multiplies us (Independents) by ten, as it multiplied the early Abolitionists. They emancipated the negro; and we mean to emancipate the respectable white man.”
[62] There is a reference to Jefferson in a letter written ten years later, which is interesting as one of the rare apprizements by Lowell of American public men. “I have run through Randall’s Jefferson with the ends of my fingers—a perfect chaos of biography—but enough to confirm me in the belief that Jefferson was the first American man. I doubt if we have produced a better thinker or writer. His style is admirable in general, warmed with just enough enthusiasm for eloquence, not too much for conviction.”—J. R. L. to C. E. Norton, 11 October, 1858.