“4th. Will I take your head off? This is a specific proposition and therefore less likely to have any dolus hidden in it, and you offer me a prodigious bribe. But no, I won’t! I have a better opinion of your top-piece than you have (for the moment), and think it more useful and becoming where it is. Moreover, there was never head heard of that looked well after it was off except Charlotte Corday’s, and this is worth your consideration, and I am sure (since you are a woman) will have it. So we will wait. But I will come Thursday.”
There is a playfulness about all Lowell’s letters during this last summer he was to spend in England, a pleasure in little things, as in his walks and encounters, and a deep draught of delight in the sea. His month at Whitby lengthened to six weeks, and he was reluctant to leave this secluded corner. Here he read Dante and Milton, Lope de Vega and Calderon, Byron, and some old French texts. He felt uncommonly well, and he even wrote a poem, “The Brook,” for which the New York Ledger had offered a generous sum.
When Lowell returned to America he went back to Elmwood. Mrs. Burnett had arranged to return with her children and make a home there for her father, and it was with a long sigh of content that he settled himself in a place which was endeared to him by lifelong attachment. Yet it was with some discomposure that he looked upon the changes going on in the neighborhood. The village of Cambridge had long ago become a city, though still retaining a lingering village air, but now houses were creeping toward the confines of the town and filling those great empty spaces which had given him the sense of delightful roominess. He was a genuine conservative as regards places, and no doubt his English residence had confirmed his conviction that it was well to strike root deeply in planting the family, which is the greatest conservative force. A few years before, when he was minister to England, I brought him news of the neighborhood, and his brow clouded as I reported the rumor that more horse-car tracks were to be laid near Elmwood. “I never, never will go back there to live,” he declared vehemently, “if they make these inroads on my place.” He had been forced to reduce the area of the estate as it was in his father’s day and his youth, but he was jealous of any further encroachment on the integrity of his little patch of land, and in a world of change about him clung tenaciously to his foot-hold.
During the winter of 1889-1890 Lowell occupied himself with preparing a uniform edition of his writings, and answered one or two of the applications he had for poems or papers. His own needs were few, he lived simply, and he was under no stress of necessity, but he was eager to turn over with increment the little estate he had to his daughter and her children. Mr. Howells had interested himself in procuring a poem from Lowell for Harper’s Monthly, for which a liberal sum was paid, and Lowell, when the transaction was over, wrote him: “I happened to want the money, and though one cannot write a poem for money, one is glad to get what one can for it once written. You partly know how it is with me. My heart’s desire is to leave Mabel as independent as I can, and what I leave will, at best, hardly go round among so many. Now I had got myself into a place where I could not keep certain promises I had made without encroaching on my principal. Your benefice will just tide me over. The sacredness of my little pile has become almost a cult with me.”
In preparing his writings for a new definitive edition, Lowell did much more than merely see to an orderly arrangement. He took great pains with his prose, going over his various papers with care, and tucking in new sentences, or erasing sentences he did not like. He did not meddle much with his poetry; he wished indeed he might get rid of some of his juvenilia, and it was suggested that he should dismiss them to the back-yard of an Appendix. The question was raised if it would be well to date his poems, for the student of literature rightly values the opportunity of marking development in the author he is at work on, but the objection was made that such dating coming from him would be authoritative, and would give sanction to those publishers who lined the legal fence and were ready to seize upon an author’s work the moment it was technically out of copyright, whether the author were living or not, and whether he and his family still had an interest in an undisturbed possession. It was in answer to all this that be wrote me: “Manet litera scripta is a law which might have given points to that of the Medea and Persians. There is no good in squirming. If one could only learn it early enough! I must bear my penalty. I must march through Coventry with my tatterdemalions, whether I like it or not. As for dates, as I have never kept copies of my books (in some of which dates were given), I could not hunt them down without more trouble than it is worth. I had not thought of the bucaneer (I leave out one intrusive c) objection till you suggested it. It is enough. Let them go hang!—both dates and bucaneers. And my Lord Chief Justice Holt (wasn’t it he who first made the unrighteous distinction between the property of authors and that of their worsers?), let him swing amidst of ’em! This settles the Appendix.”
Lowell loved the minutiæ of verbal criticism. It was part of his jealousy for the purity of the language, and meant that touch which the artist gives. Slovenliness was his abhorrence, and free as he was with the vernacular, he made a clear distinction between the undress and the dress occasions of speech. I transmitted to him at this time a criticism which took him to task for the use of the form “try and.” He replied: “I am much obliged to Mr. —— for his friendly interest in my English. The phrase ‘try and,’ like ‘come and,’ is to some extent conversational, but it is idiomatic. There is plenty of authority for it. Here is one from Thackeray, who uses it often:—
“Don’t they try and pass off their ordinary-looking girls? &c.’[107]