Lowell spent a night at Chester with Mr. Hughes and sailed from Liverpool 22 November. He spent the winter of 1888-1889 at his sister’s, Mrs. Putnam’s, in Boston. He found himself physically depressed and disinclined to any effort. A hasty acceptance of an invitation to lecture in Philadelphia brought him intolerable discomfort, and he begged to be let off, if it could be done without prejudice to his hosts. “It is absurd,” he wrote, “but I was made so. I won’t torment myself by speaking in public any more. With any such engagement on my mind, I can do nothing else, and indeed do nothing but think about that.” Dr. Mitchell at once released him, and Lowell wrote in reply, 27 December, 1888: “I got your welcome letter last evening, and when I first looked in the glass this morning I was pleased to find my hair less gray than when I went to bed. You never wrote a better prescription. My mind has been relieved of what really seemed to me an intolerable weight, for, whether it be from old age or whatever cause, I have been undoubtedly inert both in body and mind since my attack of gout last summer.” On the same day he wrote to Mr. Gilder: “Many thanks for your welcome home. I am miserably dumpy, thank you, with the remains of my tedious fit of gout last summer, which continues to hold my frontier posts as the British did ours after the treaty of 1783. But I hope to go on to Washington early in February in time to get back for my seventieth birthday, which I can’t spend in the tents of Kedar.”
Lowell’s visit to Philadelphia and Washington is pleasantly reflected in his letters. His son-in-law, Mr. Burnett, was at that time a member of the House of Representatives, and Lowell, though he expressed a fear lest his lion’s mane should blow off, was entertained agreeably and came away with an admiration for many of the public men he met. His seventieth birthday came shortly after his return to Boston, when he was given a dinner at the Tavern Club over which Mr. Norton presided. “I was listening to my own praises for two hours last night,” he wrote to Mrs. Fields, “and have hardly got used to the discovery of how great a man I am.” He heard these praises again in a more public way when the Critic of New York made its number for 23 February a “Lowell birthday number,” having collected warm tributes of affection and admiration from seventy men and women of note in America and England. By an ingenious alphabetical arrangement the editor displayed his letters from Y to A, the astronomer Young heading the list and the poet Aldrich closing it. The English names naturally were fewer in number, but they included Tennyson and his son, Gladstone, Lord Coleridge, Lang, Locker-Lampson, and Palgrave; amongst his own countrymen were those yet his seniors, Holmes, Whittier, Mrs. Stowe, the elder Furness, and President Barnard, while the poet Parsons born in the same year and a host of juniors joined in the chorus of loving praise. As Dr. Horace Howard Furness truly said: “It is no small tribute, in itself, to Mr. Lowell that we should all be thus ready to praise him to his face.”
Lowell had set the date for his annual pilgrimage to England at 27 April, but a pressing invitation to speak on the 30th of that month at the great celebration in New York of the hundredth anniversary of Washington’s inauguration as first president, which he tried in vain to decline, compelled him to postpone his departure for nearly a month. Meanwhile he worked somewhat fitfully at literature, belabored as he was with letters and social distractions. Mr. Aldrich asked him to write for the Atlantic a paper on John Bright, who had just died. At first he thought he could write it, but a fortnight later he wrote: “There is no use in trying. Cold molasses is swift as a weaver’s shuttle compared with my wits. I have essayed every side of the subject like a beetle in a tumbler and find myself on my back after each attempt. So you must let me give it up.” It was characteristic of his unfailing interest in all genuine literature, new or old, that he should at the same time have written to Mr. Aldrich his pleasure in a poem, “Deaths in April,” in the current Atlantic. “Too intricate and even obscure I thought it here and there, but perhaps the intricacy is of forest-boughs and the obscurity nothing more than the gloom which they teach light to counterfeit. Never mind, ’tis the Muses’ utterance.”[106]
The special piece of writing which did occupy him for awhile, an introduction to Isaak Walton’s “Complete Angler,” may fairly be called one of the happiest of his literary appreciations. He writes, to be sure, to Dr. Mitchell that he is “thoroughly fagged” with the work, but to the unsuspecting reader who comes upon it in the volume of Lowell’s “Latest Literary Essays and Addresses” there is the sense only of a quieter tone than he finds in the Gray, for example, in the same volume. There is no lack of acuteness, rather one is struck with the delicacy of the criticism, but the special charm is in the delight which Lowell takes in his sunny-tempered author. It is as if he had been thoroughly fagged when he took Walton down and as he read the “Lives” and the “Complete Angler” was drawn within the cheerful mind of Walton and warmed himself at the open fire of his charity. The paper has the value one finds so often in Lowell’s writings, of reflecting the writer’s mood, and one who has followed Lowell into the recesses of his consciousness of age can scarcely fail to bear him company when he finds him writing of Walton: “But what justifies and ennobles these lower loves (of music, painting, good ale, and a pipe), what gives him a special and native aroma like that of Alexander, is that above all he loved the beauty of holiness and those ways of taking and of spending life that make it wholesome for ourselves and our fellows. His view of the world is not of the widest, but it is the Delectable Mountains that bound the prospect. Never surely was there a more lovable man, nor one to whom love found access by more avenues of sympathy.”
The after-dinner speech for which Lowell consented to postpone his summer journey to England was in response to the toast “Our Literature.” The speech appears as the last piece of literature which Lowell published in his collected writings, and it is a coincidence that this should stand at the end of his career, when at the beginning, if we may, not unnaturally, count The Pioneer as his formal bow in the profession of letters, stood the announcement of his outlook on national literature. Nearly forty-seven years lie between the two deliverances. As a young man of twenty-three he scouted the idea of an artificial division between the literature of America and that of England, he deprecated the too close dependence upon the current judgments of English writers for the press, and he pleaded eagerly for a natural literature in America, the free reflection of a free people. Now, with the reflection of age he considers in his brief space those fundamental principles which make for the endurance of a national literature,—the right sense of proportion between things material and things spiritual, the necessity of inviolable standards, the dependence upon the whole literature of the world. His last word is a word of hope, as was befitting a prophet of literature, standing at the end of the first century of a nation’s life, as years are measured from the consciousness of existence.
“The literature of a people should be the record of its joys and sorrows, its aspirations and its shortcomings, its wisdom and its folly, the confidant of its soul. We cannot say that our own as yet suffices us, but I believe that he who stands a hundred years hence where I am standing now, conscious that he speaks to the most powerful and prosperous community ever devised or developed by man, will speak of our literature with the assurance of one who beholds what we hope for and aspire after become a reality and a possession forever.”
Lowell sailed for England 18 May, 1889, and spent five months there at his customary haunts in London and in Whitby, revisiting his old friends and preferring the intimate associations to the social functions. “You ask me so many things,” he writes to Mrs. Clifford from Radnor Place, 17 June, “in such a breathless way—all of them disparate, and some of them desperate—that I know not which way to turn. Besides, haven’t you confessed that you set springes in your notes? And how can I tell but that every? is a springe (they look like it), and that I may not find myself dangling like an unwary hare with no chance ever to put my foot into anything again? However, I will tread cautiously and give each of ’em a little preliminary shake to see if there be any mischief in ’em.
“1st. Will I come to tea Thursday? I turn it over gingerly—it lies quite still and doesn’t seem likely to go off with a jerk. I think it harmless and answer ‘yes.’ I don’t like the artist being there with her pictures, for that may incur me the expense of several fibs, and I am not sure how many I have left.
“2d. Do I know Miss——? This looks more suspicious and I give it a wide berth.
“3d. Have I read ‘A Conversation in a Balcony’? Here I seem safe enough because I haven’t. So I reply boldly, ‘I have sent for it and will read it.’