“Is this then,” he breaks out fervently at the close of his paper, “to be a commonplace war, a prosaic and peddling quarrel about cotton? Shall there be nothing to enlist enthusiasm or kindle fanaticism? Are we to have no cause like that for which our English republican ancestors died so gladly on the field, with such dignity on the scaffold?—no cause that shall give us a hero, who knows but a Cromwell? To our minds, though it may be obscure to Englishmen, who look on Lancashire as the centre of the universe, no army was ever enlisted for a nobler service than ours. Not only is it national life and a foremost place among nations that is at stake, but the vital principle of Law itself, the august foundation on which the very possibility of government, above all of self-government, rests as in the hollow of God’s own hand. If democracy shall prove itself capable of having raised twenty millions of people to a level of thought where they can appreciate this cardinal truth, and can believe no sacrifice too great for its defence and establishment, then democracy will have vindicated itself beyond all chance of future cavil. Here, we think, is a Cause the experience of whose vicissitudes and the grandeur of whose triumph will be able to give us heroes and statesmen. The Slave-Power must be humbled, must be punished,—so humbled and so punished as to be a warning forever; but slavery is an evil transient in its cause and its consequence, compared with those which would result from unsettling the faith of a nation in its own manhood, and setting a whole generation of men hopelessly adrift in the formless void of anarchy.”
The reserve with which he speaks of the President’s policy is the wise tone to be adopted in a printed article. In his private letters, where such caution is not needed, he gives expression openly to his impatience. In a letter written at the same time as this article, he says: “I confess that my opinion of the Government does not rise, to say the least. If we are saved it will be God’s doing, not man’s, and will He save those who are not worth saving? Lincoln may be right, for aught I know,—prudence is certainly a good drag upon virtue,—but I guess an ounce of Frémont is worth a pound of long Abraham. Mr. L. seems to have a theory of carrying on war without hurting the enemy. He is incapable, apparently, of understanding that they ought to be hurt. The doing good to those that despitefully entreat us was not meant for enemies of the commonwealth. The devil’s angels are those that do his work, and for such there is a lake of fire and brimstone prepared. We have been undertaking to frighten the Devil with cold pitch.
“At the same time it looks as if the rebels must be losing more than we. They must be poorly off for most things that go to make up the efficiency of an army, and if they can’t attack us what can they do? I am in a constant state of unpleasurable excitement. Jemmy[4] and Willy[5] are at Leesburg, in full sight of the enemy’s pickets, and I can’t bear to think of either of them being hurt. Mary was here last night, and though she puts a good face on it, there was something very painful to me in the hoarse hollowness of her voice. If they should die in battle well on into the enemy’s lines, it would be all that one could ask, but it would be dreadful to have them picked off by those murdering cowards. Let’s think of something else.”
A month later, and the boys he spoke of so affectionately and tremulously had fallen. In that most affecting of the second series of the “Biglow Papers,” “Mr. Hosea Biglow to the Editor of the Atlantic Monthly,” printed at the close of the war, he could refer to them in verse which holds all the passion of tears. Now, he can only send tidings to his most intimate friend in a few restrained words: “We have the worst news. Dear Willie is killed, and James badly wounded. They must have behaved like men. Think of poor Mary, whose husband is so ill that he cannot be told of it. She does not know it yet, though she is prepared. But he will be brought home this afternoon. He was truly a noble young fellow. Simple, brave, and pure I knew him to be in a very rare measure. We have the pride of knowing that our men must have done well. Of the officers of the 20th, two were drowned, and all the rest (except Col. Lee) wounded. Willie was the only one killed. Wendell Holmes wounded. Last despatch says, ‘Lowell and Holmes doing well this morning,’—that’s to-day. Thank God for that, and that they all did their duty.” Two days later he added: “He came home yesterday afternoon, his face little changed, they tell me, and with a smile on it. He got his wound as we could wish. The adjutant of the regiment was hit, Willie sprang forward to help him, and was shot instantly. Jamie sprang to help him, and was hit, but will be about again in ten days or so.... It is some consolation to think that he was struck in so graceful an action, and his wound is in front, as I knew it would be.”
The depth of feeling which appears in his prose at this time, as he tries to set forth the essential character of the great conflict, could scarcely fail to find manifestation in poetry, since that was his native speech. Yet it required genuine possession of mind. In the years just preceding the actual breaking out of war Lowell could, as we have seen, treat with badinage such manifestations as the American Tract Society, and the speech-making of Choate and Cushing; he could, indeed, pass in these papers from satire to earnest examination of fundamentals; but somehow he could not bring himself to use the keener weapon which he had handled so skilfully in the discussion over Texas and the Mexican War. “Friendly people say to me sometimes,” he writes to Thomas Hughes, 13 September, 1859, “‘write us more “Biglow Papers,”’ and I have even been simple enough to try, only to find that I could not.” And a couple of months later R. G. White writes: “The Atlantic has just come in, and I miss what you led me to expect from your friend B. O. F. Sawin.” He had plainly made a deliberate attempt, for in July of this year he was writing to Mr. Norton: “I have a new ‘Biglow’ running in my head, and I shall write it as soon as my brain clears off. At present I feel all the time like the next morning without having had the day before, which is too bad. I think my new ‘Biglow’ will be funny. If not you will never see it. It will be on the reopening of the slave trade, and some rather humorous combinations have come into my mind. We shall see.”
It is not improbable that the impetus to verse came from the stirring of his personal emotions in the autumn of 1861, when he was following with anxious yet proud emotions the career of the two nephews whom he loved with that freedom which an uncle bestows on those who, not his own children, are yet his children’s nearest kin. It was on 20 September that he wrote of the “constant state of unpleasurable excitement” under which he labored. On 8 October he writes to Mr. Fields, who had been urging him to send a contribution to the Atlantic: “I set about a poem last night,—apropos of the times,—and hope to finish it to-morrow, and if it turn out to be good for anything, I will send it at once, and you can print it or no as you like.”
This poem was “The Washers of the Shroud,” which appeared in the November Atlantic. The same thought prevails in this poem which found ampler expression in his prose, as we have seen, a conviction that his country was not to “join the waiting ghosts of names,” but was to have the
“larger manhood, saved for those
That walk unblenching through the trial-fires.”[6]
How deeply he felt the poem may be seen not only in the solemn measure of the verse itself, but in the confession of physical exhaustion in which the writing of it left him.[7] Most impressive was the coincidence of the final stanza with the news which reached Elmwood just as the poem itself fell under the eye of the great public. “God, give us peace!” he had said in the penultimate stanza,—
“God, give us peace!—not such as lulls to sleep,
But sword on thigh, and brow with purpose knit!
And let our Ship of State to harbor sweep,
Her ports all up, her battle-lanterns lit,
And her leashed thunders gathering for their leap!”