The summer was spent happily in the old familiar home. Lowell had no impulse to stir. He never could find any reason for escaping to the resorts in the White Mountains. “Why the deuce people fly to the mountains before the Last Day,” he wrote to Mr. Aldrich, “I can’t conceive, but when you get over your insanity and come back to the breezy plains again (thermometer 70° at half-past eight this morning), I shall hope to see you. My catbird saved one sonata for the first day of my home-coming and has been dumb ever since.”
Lowell fell to work at once in his study, giving laborious days to Old French and Old English and feeling a confidence which he expressed naïvely by saying that he used a pen instead of a pencil in his notes in his books. When the college term opened in the fall, he renewed his connection, walking up and down to his class-room and resuming his teaching of Dante and Old French. After his death the
more valuable part of his library came into the possession of the college either by his bequest[57] or by purchase, and the student having recourse to these books is constantly reminded of the care with which Lowell read them, pencil or pen in hand, going over the text as if it were proof-sheets requiring revision, and jotting down now textual criticism, now ingenious comparison with words and phrases in other languages. Sometimes he had two texts by him, and revised one by the other, sometimes his better knowledge or his mother wit enabled him to supply emendations to some careless editor’s work. The annotations show his keen philological interest. A word, whether in Old French, English, or Yankee was at once a lively image and an article in a museum. He never tired of pursuing the ancestry or the kin or the progeny of these winged creatures, and the very wealth of his puns testified to the quick association which his mind kept up with all the material of language.[58]
So far as the interpretation of mediæval literature went, Lowell’s intuitive perception and quick poetic sympathy enabled him to touch into life what to many scholars was a mere cadaver to be dissected; but in the historical treatment, and more especially in the comparative method, he was at the disadvantage of entering upon the study before the great work had been done in this field. It was probably on this account that though he covered a good deal of ground in his lectures to his classes, he did not avail himself of this work for publication.
Besides his academic work, Lowell took up also some writing, contributing verses during the next few months to the Atlantic and the Nation and making the last of his studies in great literature in an article on Spenser. A large part of the pleasure of these papers for him was the opportunity it gave him for a fresh reading of his author. “I have been very busy with Spenser,” he writes to Mrs. T. S. Perry, 28 February, 1875, “about whom I hope to have something in the next N. A. R. I have been reading him through again. It is as good as lying on one’s back in the summer woods.” To another friend he had written just before: “I have had a bath of Spenser. Your Turkish are nothing to him.” It is an illustration of the thoroughness with which he revised his work that this article on Spenser started as a lecture, but when he came to turn the lecture into a paper, he retained only a passage or two of the original form.
He confessed in a letter written in the summer of 1875 that he had become a quicker writer in verse and slower in prose than when he was younger. The confession may well have grown out of his experience in writing the two centennial odes for which he was called on this year, that “For the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Fight at Concord Bridge,” and that “Read at Cambridge on the Hundredth Anniversary of Washington’s Taking Command of the American Army, 3rd July, 1775.” Both were very nearly improvisations, the former being written in the two days before the celebration, and the latter at short notice after Dr. Holmes could not be had. The lyrical character of the Concord ode makes it sing a little more quickly to the ear of youth, and I think that while there are in it slight allusions to the dead Hawthorne and Thoreau, there is also a faint echo of the living Emerson. It would be strange indeed if Lowell, called thus to celebrate the fight which had already been celebrated in the noblest patriotic hymn in our literature, had not had the vision of Emerson before him as he wrote. What Emerson, who must have been present, said of the ode we do not know, but in a letter written after “Under the Old Elm” had been delivered and printed, Lowell quotes his comment on the second Ode. “I went,” he says, “to club on Saturday and nominated——, whom Emerson seconded. Longfellow was there and James and Quincy and Dr. Howe and Carter and Charlie L. and I. We had a very jolly club and good talk. Emerson was tenderly affectionate. He praised my Cambridge poem, saying that when he began it he said: ‘Why, he hasn’t got his genius on, but presently I found the tears in my eyes.’”
Into the second Ode Lowell put more thought and rose to the height of his great theme, for he was able to look at his country from the vantage-ground of the personality of Washington, and he read in the great past an augury of the future which for the moment at least did not vex his anxious mind. “I took advantage of the occasion,” he wrote to a correspondent who was Southern born, “to hold out a hand of kindly reconciliation to Virginia. I could do it with the profounder feeling, that no family lost more than mine by the civil war. Three nephews (the hope of our race) were killed in one or other of the Virginia battles, and three cousins on other of those bloody fields.”