[100] See “A Poet’s Yorkshire Haunts,” in the Atlantic Monthly, August, 1895.
[101] Chickering Hall, New York, 28 November, 1887.
[102] In one of the verses of this poem Lowell had used the picturesque phrase:—
“Let the bull-fronted surges glide
Caressingly along thy side,
Like glad hounds leaping by the huntsman’s knees.”
In answer to a criticism from a friend, he wrote: “There is no mixed metaphor. I don’t compare the waves to bulls, but merely say they are bull-fronted,—and so they are, with the foam curling over between their horns as in the bulls which I have often interviewed in the pastures here—with a stout stone wall between us viersteht sich. That I afterward say they leap like hounds implies no confusion of images. My dog Vixen has a bull-front, if ever there was one, and is always leaping about my knees, as my trousers can testify.—— saw the waves and heard ’em butt against the prow. Ask her. I always see what I describe while I am thinking of it. I see the waves now, as if I were in mid ocean on board the good barque Sultana in ’51.” To the same friend he wrote a month later: “I am glad you found something in the Téméraire for all that,—or try to be glad. But when I saw it in print, it saddened me.”
[103] Dr. Mitchell likewise received an honorary degree in medicine from the University of Bologna on this occasion.
[104] In a note to me at the same time he wrote: “I begin to examine my cards curiously, expecting to find that of Old Age overlooked in some corner.”
[105] The Westminster Gazette, 21 August, 1893.
[106] The poem was by Mr. Bliss Carman.
[107] “Small-Beer Chronicle,” in Roundabout Papers.