A souvenir of the enjoyment Lowell had in his visit to Baltimore is in a sonnet which he wrote to a young daughter of President Gilman of the university. “I shall assume,” he wrote her from Elmwood, 7 April, 1877, “for my own convenience that there were just fourteen roses in the lovely sheaf I found in my room when I came in for shelter from the ill-humor of that February day, so unlike the temperature, both outward and inward, to which Baltimore had accustomed us. I repay them in fourteen verses, and I wish it were as easy to match the sweetness of your sonnet as its numbers. However, I promised you that I would send it and have not forgotten, but have had so many things to do that I have delayed paying my debt till you have half forgotten your debtor. The two quatrains with which my sonnet gets well under way were written on the spot with your roses comforting two of my benumbed senses. Luckily I wrote them on the back of an invitation which certifies to the date—‘Saturday, 24 February.’ The concluding triplets I had partly written down when I was interrupted, and I finished them this morning. I wish it were better, but at least the gratitude will last, if not the sonnet.”
TO MISS ALICE GILMAN,
WHO SENT ME ROSES, 24TH FEBY., 1877.
A handful of ripe rosebuds in my room
I found when all heaven’s mercy seemed shut out
By clouds morose that dallied with a doubt
’Tween rain and snow: meanwhile mine eyes with bloom
Were comforted, and over Summer’s tomb,
Out of your gift rose nightingales to flout
With Easter prophecies the chill without
And sing the mind clear of the season’s gloom.
So may your innocent fancy be rarest
Ever with impulses to timely deeds
Generous of sunshine, and your life be blest
With flower and fruit immortal, sprung of seeds
Sown by those singing birds that make their nest
In natures thoughtful of another’s needs!
Not long after Lowell’s return from Baltimore rumors began to fly about that he was to have a foreign mission. Mr. Longfellow notes in his diary, 7 April, 1877: “In the afternoon Charles Norton called. We talked of Ruskin and Carlyle, and of Lowell’s having the English mission.” It was not unnatural that public attention should be called to him in connection with some diplomatic post, in view of the somewhat peculiar circumstances connected with his relations to the recent presidential election. He was one of the electors in Massachusetts upon the Republican ballot, and when the issue of the election was in doubt and many believed that Mr. Tilden was the actual choice though Mr. Hayes was nominally chosen, there were voices that called on Lowell to use his technical right and cast his vote for Mr. Tilden. It was a curious comment on affairs. It implied on the part of those who proposed it a confidence that Lowell was independent enough to use this right. I am not sure that any other elector was named who might be expected to take this responsibility. On the other hand, those who urged this course seem to have been blind to the enormous violation of faith involved in such a course. The machinery of the electoral system, however it had been designed at first, had gradually and immutably become a mere device for the registry of the popular choice; all initiative on the part of the electors was totally cancelled. Lowell himself never had any hesitation. As he wrote to Mr. Leslie Stephen: “In my own judgment I have no choice, and am bound in honor to vote for Hayes, as the people who chose me expected me to do. They did not choose me because they had confidence in my judgment, but because they thought they knew what that judgment would be. If I had told them that I should vote for Tilden, they would never have nominated me. It is a plain question of trust. The provoking part of it is that I tried to escape nomination all I could, and only did not decline because I thought it would be making too much fuss over a trifle.”
The actual facts of the appointment of Lowell to the Spanish mission have been so explicitly told by Mr. Howells, who had a grateful part to play in the transaction, that with his permission I copy his account of it. “I do not know whether it crossed his mind after the election of Hayes that he might be offered some place abroad, but it certainly crossed the minds of some of his friends, and I could not feel that I was acting for myself alone when I used a family connection with the President, very early in his term, to let him know that I believed Lowell would accept a diplomatic mission. I could assure him that I was writing wholly without Lowell’s privity or authority, and I got back such a letter as I could wish in its delicate sense of the situation. The President said that he had already thought of offering Lowell something, and he gave me the pleasure, a pleasure beyond any other I could imagine, of asking Lowell whether he would accept the mission to Austria. I lost no time in carrying his letter to Elmwood, where I found Lowell over his coffee at dinner. He saw me at the threshold, and called to me through the open door to come in, and I handed him the letter, and sat down at table while he ran it through. When he had read it, he gave a quick ‘Ah!’ and threw it over the length of the table to Mrs. Lowell. She read it in a smiling and loyal reticence, as if she would not say one word of all she might wish to say in urging his acceptance, though I could see that she was intensely eager for it. The whole situation was of a perfect New England character in its tacit significance; after Lowell had taken his coffee, we turned into his study, without further allusion to the matter.
“A day or two later he came to my house to say that he could not accept the Austrian mission, and to ask me to tell the President so for him and make his acknowledgments, which he would also write himself. He remained talking a little while of other things, and when he rose to go he said, with a sigh of vague reluctance, ‘I should like to see a play of Calderon,’ as if it had nothing to do with any wish of his that could still be fulfilled. ‘Upon this hint I acted,’ and in due time it was found in Washington that the gentleman who had been offered the Spanish mission would as lief go to Austria, and Lowell was sent to Madrid.”[66] In a letter to his daughter[67] Lowell says further that he had also the choice of going to Berlin.
Mr. Evarts, the Secretary of State, was in Boston at this time, and in a personal conference the preliminary arrangement appears to have been made. Mr. Hayes also came to Boston in June, and Lowell met him and his wife, and has left a record of the impression they produced upon him, in one of his letters written shortly afterward.[68] The anticipation of this new chapter in his life seems to have given him a divided feeling. The honor of the place half amused and half pleased him. With the ingenuous pride of a college man, he thought how his name would look in capitals in the college triennial, and wished his father, who had a high sense of that dignity, could have enjoyed the sight. He was too fixed in his position before the world to be over-elated at the conspicuousness which the place brought him, and he disliked publicity so much that that side of the business filled him with a sort of dismay. He welcomed the opportunity for enlarging his Spanish studies, and he had an honest desire to represent his country well. “I believe,” he wrote to his friend Thomas Hughes, “that I can live my own life (part of the time, at least) in Madrid, and need not have any more flummery than I choose. What unsettled me first was that a good many people wished to see me sent to London, and I was persuaded that I might be of some service there by not living like a Duke, and in promoting a better understanding between the two countries. But my friends were mistaken in supposing that I had been thought of for England.... Things are going more to my mind now, and President Hayes made a most agreeable impression on me when he was here the other day. He struck me as simple, honest, and full of good feeling, a very good American to my thinking.... By all means come to Madrid. I shall have a house there, and a spare bed in it always. It would be delightful to take you a drive to the Prado in my own (hired) ambassadorial coach. My ‘Excellency’ will give me cause for much serious meditation.”
It must not be supposed, however, that the prospect was untouched with doubt. “I am by no means sure,” Lowell writes to Mr. Reverdy Johnson of Baltimore, shortly after accepting the post, “that I did wisely in accepting the Spanish mission. I really did not wish to go abroad at all, but my friends have been urgent (Godkin among them), and I go.”
Mr. and Mrs. Lowell sailed for Liverpool on the Parthia from Boston, Saturday, 14 July, 1877. The agent of the steamship company followed custom in making special provisions for the send-off of a public man, and a comment on Lowell’s incapability of filling the rôle in every respect may be read in his good-by note to his friend Mr. Norton, who had received one of the agent’s invitations: “You will laugh to-morrow, I hope, when you think of me going down the harbor with the revenue cutter and a steam tug to bring back those who can’t part with me this side the outer light. If the agent of the Cunard line had given a month’s meditation to devising what would annoy me most, he could have hit on nothing to beat this. When I got his note yesterday morning, I positively burst forth into a cold sweat. But Sunday will bring peace.” ...