The critical reviews of Longfellow’s Dante from the hands of competent scholars were few, but one published in a daily journal called out a letter from Lowell to the friend who sent it to him, which gives with frankness Lowell’s estimate of the translation. “The review,” he writes, “does not change my opinion of Mr. Longfellow’s translation—not as the best possible, by any means, but as the best probable.... Nobody who is intimate with the original will find any translation of the ‘Divina Commedia’ more refreshing than cobs. Has not Dante himself told us that no poetry can be translated? But, after all is said, I think Mr. Longfellow’s the best thus far as being the most accurate. It is to be looked on, I think, as measured prose—like our version of Job, for example, though without that mastery of measure in which our Bible translators are unmatched except by Milton. I mean where they are at their best, as in Job, the songs of Debórah and Barak, the death of Sisera, and some parts of the Psalms. Mr. Longfellow is not a scholar in the German sense of the word, that is to say, he is no pedant, but he certainly is a scholar in another and perhaps a higher sense, I mean in range of acquirement and the flavor that comes of it.”
Specific criticism, with all the painstaking of which he was capable, was but the obverse of the medal which Lowell struck in his literary work. On the face was his generous delight in his books. “The Nightingale in the Study,” written in the summer of 1867, holds in capital form a genuine confession that there was an appeal to him from nature in literature which did not antagonize the appeal made to him by the world of natural beauty, yet sometimes constrained and invited him in tones he could not resist, even though the birds without were calling him. Mr. Leslie Stephen who visited him in the summer of 1868, renewing an acquaintance begun five years earlier and ripening into a friendship which meant much to Lowell ever after, has given a pleasant account of the impression made upon him by the poet in his study at Elmwood. “All round us,” he says, “were the crowded book-shelves, whose appearance showed them to be the companions of the true literary workman, not of the mere dilettante or fancy biographer. Their ragged bindings and thumbed pages scored with frequent pencil marks implied that they were a student’s tools, not mere ornamental playthings. He would sit among his books, pipe in mouth, a book in hand, hour after hour; and I was soon intimate enough to sit by him and enjoy intervals of silence as well as periods of discussion and always delightful talk.”[32]
It was a quarter of a century since Lowell had collected his fugitive poems, though he had meantime published the second series of “The Biglow Papers,” and when 1868 came in he was moved to make a new volume which should include the poems he had been printing, chiefly in the Atlantic. It was with this in mind that he took up a fragment of a poem written a score of years before, rewrote and added to it, designing to make it the title poem in the volume. He printed it first in the June Atlantic, under the title “A June Idyll.” In sending it he wrote to Mr. Fields: “In the first flush of having just finished and copied it (for which I was obliged to miss Dickens last night) I am inclined to think there is something characteristic.... Surely there are good bits in it, and it is good for more than usual, or good for nothing. If I haven’t made a spoon, I have certainly spoiled a horn that would have turned out a very good one. You sometimes find fault with my names. I have called this ‘A June Idyll,’ which is just what it is. Do you object?”
Mr. Fields, either himself or through a friend, wrote a very appreciative notice of the poem in the Boston Advertiser, which drew from Lowell this response to his friendly editor:—
“Such a notice of my Iddle
Met my eyes in the Advertiser!
“‘To order,’ thought I, ’no, fiddle!
’Tis the dull world growing wiser.
“‘My forehead they twine with bayses,
They’re eager to shout hosanna,
My style as pure epic they praises
Where they used to add acuanha.’
“‘’Tis always their fate whom at christening
Your genuine Helicon’s spilt on;
Long ears are the latest at listening,
Vide Wordsworth passim on Milton.’
“So I read it aloud to my family,
One delicate phrase after t’other,
And surely the good little Sammle he
Wasn’t sadder at leaving his mother
“Than I when I came to the close of it,
For I wanted, as I’m a sinner,
(Such poetry seemed in the prose of it)
To keep up my reading till dinner.