“With bits of wreck I patch the boat shall bear
Me to that unexhausted Otherwhere;”
but it is in the group of poems referred to above that one sees most clearly a recurrence to the great underlying questions of faith. With a half-mocking smile Lowell asks in “Credidimus Jovem regnare” if science has found the key which religion has lost, and falls back on the somewhat lame conclusion that he had best keep his key, which may be but a rusty inheritance, on the chance that the door and lock may some day be made to fit the key. Again, in the poem “How I consulted the Oracle of the Goldfishes,” where he muses over the realities and illusions of the spiritual world, he does not deny the doubts that have arisen in his own mind, but after all refuses to permit even his doubts to dismay him.
“Here shall my resolution be:
The shadow of the mystery
Is haply wholesomer for eyes
That cheat us to be over-wise,
And I am happy in my sight
To love God’s darkness as His light.”
Nor will he allow himself, even when contemplating what he regards as the obscuration of the Church’s light, to look upon this as the last state of organic faith. He takes that noble painting by Turner, “The Fighting Téméraire tugged to her last berth, to be broken up,” and sees science, “a black demon, belching fire and steam,” drag it away “to gather weeds in the regardless stream.” Ruskin makes the picture an unconscious expression by the painter of his own return to die by the shore of the Thames, “the cold mists gathering over his strength, and all men crying out against him, and dragging the old ‘Fighting Téméraire’ out of their way, with dim, fuliginous contumely;” but surely this is rather the passionate comment of a disciple making his master’s work prophetic. Lowell’s poem strikes a deeper than a personal note. It is a fine imaginative conception, a rare interpretation of a great work of art by another work of art, and what is noticeable in the cry of the poem is the protest which Lowell, in his instinctive faith, makes against the finality of his own interpretation. He sees in imagination the splendid history of the church, and no fighter under Nelson could have witnessed this desolate funeral of the great ship with more anguish than Lowell has thrown into his pathetic words; but as the English sailor could have righted himself with a vision of the glories of the future English navy, so Lowell closes his dirge with a triumphant prophecy:—
“Shall nevermore, engendered of thy fame,
A new sea-eagle heir thy conqueror name,
And with commissioned talons wrench
From thy supplanter’s grimy clench
His sheath of steel, his wings of smoke and flame?
“This shall the pleased eyes of our children see;
For this the stars of God long even as we;
Earth listens for his wings; the Fates
Expectant lean; Faith cross-propt waits,
And the tired waves of Thought’s insurgent sea.”[102]
In taking another great painting as the prompter of his verse, Titian’s so-called “Sacred and Profane Love,” Lowell again is not so much interpreting the painter’s thought as he is using the canvas for a mirror in which to read his own soul, and though in printing “Endymion” he adds the gloss “a mystical comment,” one may guess that Lowell in this twilight of his life, musing upon the ideals which had beckoned him from earliest days, still saw in the heavens that vision of beauty, of truth, and of freedom which had never been dethroned in his soul. Faithfulness to high emprise,—that at least he could declare of himself amidst all the doubt that beclouded his intellectual vision, and it was fitting that the poet should, in this veiled figure of Endymion, see the reflection of his own face and form.
In sending “Endymion” to his publishers for insertion in the volume “Heartsease and Rue,” Lowell had written from Deerfoot Farm, 20 December, 1887: “I hoped to have sent this [‘Endymion’] by Monday morning’s post, but for two days after my return my head continued to be cloggy and my vein wouldn’t flow. I have at last managed to give what seems to me as much consecutiveness as they need to what have been a heap of fragments in my note-books for years. Longer revolution in my head might round it better, but take it as a meteorolite, splintery still, but with some metallic iridescence here and there brought from some volcanic star. Let it come among poems of sentiment, and as the longest, first if possible.”
He was still looking forward at this time to full labors. He had been urged by his publishers to undertake the volume on Hawthorne in the American Men of Letters series. He had signified his assent in general, some time before, and seemed now to be deliberately contemplating the task, for he wrote four days after the last:—
“I think there have been one or two volumes published within a few years about old Salem. I should be glad to have them sent to me at Southborough. I have one little job of writing to finish, after which I shall revise my poems and prose for a new edition. I don’t know whether it be second childhood, but I am beginning to take an interest in them. Then I mean to take up Hawthorne in earnest....”