“Now, your case (I mean the one you present) is in many respects very like this—almost identical with it indeed....
“In the old trials, one of the questions on which the jury were called on to pass was, ‘Did he fly for it?’ That is, I suppose, ‘Did he give that proof of conscious guilt?’ I should ask the same question in this case. Is there any evidence of an attempt at concealment?
“But, abstractedly from any opinion we may form of the person, the action was one altogether discreditable and contemptible. We cannot be too scrupulous on any point of morals in a country where members of Congress see no dishonor in selling appointments to the Army and Navy.”
Dr. Thomas Hill, who was president of Harvard in 1868, asked Lowell in the summer of that year to look over some papers he had received from Virginia and to give his opinion of them. They were the letters and journals of a Virginian gentleman, Mr. John B. Minor, who had visited New England in 1834, and Lowell found them exceedingly interesting. “Not the least engaging thing in the journal,” he wrote to the lady who had sent the papers, “is the character of the author, everywhere showing itself and everywhere amiable. So far as he is concerned, the whole journal might be printed verbatim, for there is not an indiscreet word, much less a breach of hospitality, from beginning to end. At the same time there are, of course, passages here and there which should be omitted in printing—I think not more than two or three at most—where he describes the personal appearance of those he met.”
The next day he wrote to Mr. Fields: “There has been put into my hands to dispose of, the Journal of a Virginia gentleman during a short tour in New England, partly on foot. The date—1834, which is now ages ago. There is not a great deal of it, but I found it truly entertaining. I think I could make selections from it that would run through four or five numbers of the Atlantic.... Now, do you want it? and if so, what do you think it would be worth? When I say it is entertaining, I do not mean for fanatics like me, who would cradle I know not how many tons of common earth for a grain of the gold of human nature, but for folks in general. It is not only interesting but valuable, and the character of the author, as it blinks out continually, most engaging. It seems to me remarkable that there is positively not an ill-natured word from the first page to the last. Now you know that I have once or twice pressed Sibylline books upon you which you wouldn’t take. Don’t let this one slip through your fingers. I think it might be published afterwards in a small volume with advantage, but of its adaptation to the Atlantic I have no doubt.”
The journal was printed in the Atlantic in the summer and fall of 1870, Lowell furnishing an introduction to the first number. It was no doubt under the influence of this new acquaintance with a fine type of Southern manhood, that Lowell wrote to Mr. Godkin, 20 November, 1868: “I confess to a strong sympathy with men who sacrificed everything even to a bad cause, which they could see only the good side of; and now the war is over, I see no way to heal the old wounds but by frankly admitting this and acting upon it. We can never reconstruct the South except through its own leading men, nor ever hope to have them on our side till we make it for their interest and compatible with their honor to be so.”[39]
Mr. and Mrs. Fields were proposing to make a journey to Europe in the spring and summer of 1869, and asked Lowell to send his daughter in their company. Lowell wrote in reply, 19 January, 1869: “I have been thinking over your very kind invitation to Mabel, and, after turning it in every possible way, I have come to the conclusion that the only way to treat a generous offer is to be generous enough to accept it. My pride stood a little in the way, but my common sense whispered me that I had no right to feed my pride at my daughter’s expense. And moreover, my dear Fields, you left me a most delicate loophole for my pride to creep out of, in conferring on me a kind of militia generalship of the Atlantic Monthly while you were away. Now, if you will let me make it something real, that is, if you will let me read the proof-sheets, I can be of some service in preventing —— (for example, merely) from writing such awful English, and mayhap in some other cases, as a consulting physician. Moreover, I should like to translate for Every Saturday something now and then, as, for instance, the article on Déak and the dramatic sketch of Octave Feuillet, lately published in the Revue de Deux Mondes. May I?”
While his daughter was travelling with Mr. and Mrs. Fields, Lowell wrote to Mr. Fields a piece of news anticipative of what came to an event a little less than ten years later: “Mabel’s letters overrun with happiness, which I fully share in reading them. I wrote her a long letter about nothing yesterday—but I did not tell her what you may (as a secret for you three), that I came very near being sent to Spain, and that in case the Senate should not confirm Sickles in December, the chances for me are the best. Judge Hoar told me when he was here the other day, that Mr. Fish was friendly, and that the Assistant Secretary was ‘zealous even unto slaying,’ as he was himself. So who knows but my name may get into capitals in the triennial catalogues yet? That, after all, is the main thing—for is it not a kind of fame as good as the next? For my own part, I can conceive of no place better to live or die in than where I was born.
“I hope Mabel makes a jolly companion. She always does for me.[40] If she is as happy as her letters show her, I think she must. Tell her I should have told her about Spain—but I forgot it. I shall have my choice of castles to live in, if I go there, of my own building.”
“For awhile last spring,” he wrote in December to Mr. Norton, “I thought it possible I might be sent abroad. Hoar was strenuous for it, and I should have been very glad of it then.... However, it all fell through, and I am glad it did, for I should not have written my new poem.”[41] The new poem was “The Cathedral” which was issued in book form at Christmas, 1869, as well as in the Atlantic for January, 1870. He wrote it during the summer vacation and took great pleasure in the writing. He had told Mr. Howells what he was about, and on being asked for the poem for the Atlantic replied: “Up to time, indeed! the fear is not about time, but space. You won’t have room in your menagerie for such a displeaseyousaurus. The verses, if stretched end to end in a continuous line, would go clear round the Cathedral they celebrate, and nobody (I fear) the wiser. I can’t tell yet what they are. There seems a bit of clean carving here and there, a solid buttress or two, and perhaps a gleam through painted glass—but I have not copied it out yet, nor indeed read it over consecutively.”[42] A little later he could write to Miss Norton: “The poem turned out to be something immense, as the slang is nowadays, that is, it ran on to eight hundred lines of blank verse. I hope it is good, for it fairly trussed me at last and bore me up as high as my poor lungs will bear into the heaven of invention. I was happy writing it, and so steeped in it that if I had written to you it would have been in blank verse. It is a kind of religious poem, and is called ‘A Day at Chartres.’”[43] He dedicated the poem with special pleasure to Mr. Fields, who by the bye had persuaded him to substitute the name used for that he had chosen, a change which Lowell regretted in writing to Mr. Stephen, as depriving the poem of certain definite, local, and historical justification. “The Cathedral” drew from Mr. Ruskin warm praise. “The main substance of the poem is most precious to me,” he wrote, “and its separate lines sometimes unbetterable,” and he added some specific criticism on words, which Lowell met with more of his favorite instances of long-lived words brought over in the mental baggage of the early New England settlers. The letter in which he conclusively justifies himself is an excellent example of the reasoning of a philologist to whom words are alive, and not specimens in a museum.[44]