I remain, my dear Sir,
Very cordially yours,
J. R. Lowell.
Richard Grant White, Esq.
After some delays attendant on such business, Lowell was able in the summer of 1871 to make a sale of a portion of the original estate of Elmwood which left him the house and a couple of acres for his home, and an income of four or five thousand dollars a year. It was a modest living, but it cleared his mind of fretting cares. As he wrote to Mr. Stephen: “It is a life-preserver that will keep my head above water, and the swimming I will do for myself.” Of the effect upon his mind he wrote more freely to his friend Mr. Norton: “I cannot tell you how this sense of my regained paradise of Independence enlivens me. It is something I have not felt for years—hardly since I have been a professor. The constant sense of a ball and chain jangling at my heels, and that those who are inexpressibly dear to me were at the risk of my giving satisfaction in an office where what is best in me was too often held in abeyance by an uneasy self-consciousness forced upon me by my position, have been greater hindrances than anybody else can ever know. But now I can draw a full breath of natural air and discarbonate my lungs of the heavy atmosphere of an unnatural confinement. I look forward to my next year’s work with cheerfulness. I am no longer chained to the oar, but a volunteer. Whether I shall recover the wholesome mental unrest which kept me active when I was younger, I know not, but at least I shan’t have to print before I am ready, nor to keep on with the spendthrift habit of splitting up the furniture of my brain to keep the pot boiling.... I mean to come abroad at the end of the next college year, and shall pop in on you some day, bringing a familiar odor, half Cambridge, half pipe. I shall read you my new poem—when it gets written—and bore you with old French in which I am still plunged to the ears. I am become a pretty thorough master of it, and wish I knew the modern lingo half as well.”
“It takes a good while,” he writes to Miss Norton, “to slough off the effect of seventeen years of pedagogy. I am grown learned (after a fashion) and dull. The lead has entered into my soul. But I have great faith in putting the sea between me and the stocks I have been sitting in so long.” He worked steadily at his college duties, with some thought, I suspect, of finishing with his professorial work, the laboriously learned part of his life. The minute, painstaking care to which he gave to the studies which underlay his college work, so evident in the annotation of his books, was after all a severe drain upon a nature that took the greatest delight in imaginative freedom. He seems hardly to have allowed himself any relief. “I have been reading over your book[46] again,” he writes to Mr. Fields, 29 February, 1872, “and found it very interesting and queer. Queer, I say, because it is the first volume I have read for some months later than the XIV. century, and I was a little puzzled at first, like Selkirk when he got back among his own people and heard his own language again. I am glad you have left out the imaginary nephew. One was apt to stumble over him and apologize with a ‘Beg pardon, but really had forgotten you were here.’ These buffers between the reader and the first personal pronoun never lessen the shock, though they are always in the way. But nobody wants them, for egotism does not consist in never so many capital I’s. Moreover, I am persuaded that everybody likes it in his secret heart (as he does garlic), and says he doesn’t for appearances.
“Your Dickens letters are a great deal more interesting than Forster’s for some reason or other. I fancy it is because they are more natural. In writing to Forster, Dickens must have felt that he was writing to his biographer, and had the constraint of sitting before a glass. Indeed, I was very much disappointed in Forster’s volume.[47] It doesn’t leave an agreeable impression, which is surely a fault in biography.
“What a dear old affectionate soul Miss Mitford was! I knew nothing about her before. Even her little vanities are rather pleasant than otherwise. It is surely a delightful gift to be made happy as easily as she.
“We are all busy getting ready for Mabel’s departure. I hate to think of it, though I believe she is as safe as human forethought could make her. Burnett is all I could wish.”
Miss Lowell was married 2 April, 1872, to Mr. Edward Burnett, and went with him to Southboro, Massachusetts, where he was carrying on a dairy and stock farm. Miss Rebecca Lowell died in May, so that the household at Elmwood was in a measure dissolved. Lowell was busy up to the last over the long article on Dante which he contributed to the July North American. He was released from his college work, having resigned his professorship; he let Elmwood to Mr. Aldrich and sailed 9 July for Europe with Mrs. Lowell, to be absent two years.
CHAPTER XII
THIRD JOURNEY IN EUROPE
1872-1874
When Lowell went to Europe in the summer of 1872, he left his college routine behind him; with his new-found liberty, he seemed to find all the expression he cared for in familiar talk with the many friends, old and new, whom he encountered in his travels, and in letters to friends at home and abroad. Once only, as will be seen, did he break into poetry, but the two years of his absence contain so little to add to the record of his production that it seems the natural course, as it is most pleasant to the biographer, to let this holiday in Lowell’s life be told for the most part in his letters. The letters printed by Mr. Norton[48] are not drawn upon, except now and then for a needful phrase.