Good-by, affectionately yours,
J. R. Lowell.

To an old and attached friend of his wife he wrote: “You will have a sad pleasure in knowing that she suffered no pain. In her last consciousness when I asked her if she suffered, she shook her head. But I cannot write about these things coolly, and hate to put sentiment on paper where it lacks the witness of sincerity which the voice carries with it. And yet I am glad to write to you who knew how noble she was. You knew also her goodness and perfect faith, and are as sure as I am that she sees God.”

In fulfilling a wish of his wife, Lowell wrote to his old friend, Mrs. W. W. Story, 31 March: “I send you General Wallace’s book by to-day’s post. It was touchingly characteristic that I should find it on her writing-desk done up and addressed to you. She never forgot or neglected a duty. But, not knowing the requirements of the Post Office, she had closed it at both ends, and sealed it. So I was obliged, much to my regret, to have it done up in the right way. But I ordered her original address to be left inside that it might show she had not forgotten.

“I am on the whole glad to be rid of my official trammels and trappings. I do not know yet when my successor will arrive, but hardly look for him before July. I shall then go home, but whether to stay or not will be decided after I have looked about me there. If I decide to stay I shall certainly visit the Old World pretty regularly, and shall be sure to turn up in Rome.”

Lowell added one more to his public addresses before leaving England, that delivered on unveiling the bust of Coleridge, in Westminster Abbey, 7 May, 1885. It is a slight, graceful performance, but in it I think we may hear now and then that echo of his own thought about himself which we have more than once caught in his addresses, as when he says: “His critical sense rose like a forbidding apparition in the path of his poetic production;” and again: “We are here to-day not to consider what Coleridge owed to himself, to the family, or to the world, but what we owe to him. Let us at least not volunteer to draw his frailties from their dread abode. Our own are a far more profitable subject of contemplation. Let the man of imaginative temperament, who has never procrastinated, who has made all that was possible of his powers, cast the first stone.”

Early in June, 1885, Lowell left England, that held his wife’s grave, and returned lonely to his old home.

CHAPTER XVI
RETURN TO PRIVATE LIFE
1885-1888

Elmwood was let, and if it had been vacant Lowell could hardly have gone back there at once to live. There were too many ghosts in the house, he said. He made no attempt to take up again his college work, though he held his title of Smith Professor with emeritus added, and as his daughter had abandoned her plan of taking her children abroad, he made his home with her at Deerfoot Farm, Southborough, Massachusetts, about two hours by rail from Boston, in a pretty country where there was little intrusion of manufactures. He always had also a home in Boston at the house of his sister, Mrs. Putnam. He was at once besieged with invitations from many friends; as he wrote to Mr. Gilder: “I have been all these days in the condition of a bird of Paradise, unable to perch, no matter I might wish it, and perhaps embarrassed by the number of friendly roosts offered to my choice—yours not the least seductive among them.” He made up his mind to attend the Commencement at Harvard, though he dreaded both the heat and the emotion,—as he wrote: “O for a good freezing English July day!” He found himself deluged with letters—it was almost as bad as in London. Many he was unable to answer, many answered themselves after Napoleon’s easy-going philosophy, but with the return to private life and in the absence of any routine duties, Lowell took up again with a careless prodigality the occupation of letter-writing. He had left friends in England who had endeared themselves to him, and whose letters to him readily drew a response, and to his old friends he was always faithful, so that, taking Mr. Norton’s two volumes as a gauge, we find that he wrote twice as many friendly letters in the five years after his return to America as in the five years just preceding.

“I am already,” he writes to Mr. Norton, 22 July, 1885, “in love with Southborough, which is a charmingly unadulterated New England village, and with as lovely landscapes as I ever saw.... ’Tis an odd shift in the peep-hole of my panorama from London to this Chartreuse. For the present I like it and find it wholesome. I fancy myself happy sometimes—I am not sure—but then I never was for long;” and to Mrs. Clifford he wrote, 2 August: “I am planting my cabbages diligently and growing as much like them as I can. One must have confidants of one kind or another, and where one is cut off from women, one must follow Wordsworth’s advice and seek an intimacy with nature in whose impartial eyes cabbages are as interesting as—I was going to say strawberry-leaves, but remembered that you were an Englishwoman. I wasn’t going to say women, though logically I ought. Perhaps they are as safe. I am trying to make myself tolerable to five grandchildren, though I am not so sure that I have enough of the Grandfather in me to go round among so many.”

There is a playful allusion in this letter to a side of Lowell’s nature which is hinted at also in his choice of correspondents. He was peculiarly dependent upon the companionship of women, and he attracted to himself the wittiest and most responsive. For it was not so much the cushioned comfort that he looked for, as the cosiness of good fellowship and the intellectual equality which he sometimes found and always prized. He loved the generous natures with whom he had good converse, and his talk and letters went freely to these habitual dwellers in a world of honest sentiment. As in so many other cases, this side of Lowell’s life found its expression in poetry, and there is no exaggeration in the sonnet “Nightwatches,” written after the death of one who had stood to him in this free, intimate relation for many years.