“You will observe that in the passage criticised by Mr. —— I am supposing another person to speak, and therefore made it purposely familiar. ‘Come and’ occurs in the first motto of the Bay Colony: ‘Come over and help us’—from the Bible, ‘Come over into Macedonia, and help us.’ Matthew Arnold uses it, and I think it is in Shakespeare also.”
In the spring of 1890 Lowell suffered from what he called the “first severe illness of my life.” It proved indeed to be the beginning of the end. For six weeks he kept his bed, and when he was able at last to crawl about, his physician forbade even the briefest journey. He had been asked to give an address in Vermont, and he was obliged to write: “I am not yet allowed even to drive out or to use my legs except in loitering about my own grounds. So you see that Castleton is as impossible to me as Mecca.... Let me add that I have a special partiality for Vermont as the New England State which maintains most persistently our best traditions.”
To Mr. Godkin he wrote, 29 April: “I have had rather a hard time of it, and for a day or two Wyman had fears. The acute symptoms ceased a month ago, and I am now doing well, but my malady has somewhat demoralized me and I must consent to be an invalid for a good while yet. ’Tis my first experience and I don’t like it. Moralists tell us that pain is for our good, but even the gout has failed to make me think so, and this was even harder to bear.” But he had been amusing himself with some verses on “infant industries” which he sent in this letter, giving them the title, “The New Septimius Felton.” They were printed in the Nation with the title, “The Infant Prodigy.”
On the second of May he wrote from Elmwood to Mr. Gilder, who was to give the poem that year before Φ. Β. Κ. in Cambridge: “You may be sure that I shall support you with my sympathetic presence at Φ. Β. Κ. if my legs will by that time support me, as I have now every reason to think they will. I made an excursion to Cambridge (by horse-car) yesterday, my first adventure of the kind for fourteen weeks, and am none the worse for it.”
Of course a summer in England was out of the question, and Mr. Leslie Stephen, one of the friends who made so large a part of an English summer to Lowell, came instead to America to see Lowell once more in his home. There he found him amongst his books and with the squirrels gambolling outside, but the days of long walks were over, and even the social pleasures which Lowell could share with his guest were few and simple.
He saw the completion of the revision of his writings, and the ten comely volumes standing all a-row were a fair evidence to him that he was not so indolent as he was wont to call himself. His malady left him little power for any continuous work, but he wrote the introduction to a reprint of the first edition of Milton’s “Areopagitica,” a brief paper on Parkman for the Century Magazine, and a trifle for the Contributors’ Club in the Atlantic Monthly. It may be that he glanced at the six volumes of his own prose when he wrote of Milton: “He must have known, if any ever knew, that even in the ‘sermo pedestris’ there are yet great differences in gait, that prose is governed by laws of modulation as exact, if not so exacting, as those of verse, and that it may conjure with words as prevailingly. The music is secreted in it, yet often more potent in suggestion than that of any verse which is not of utmost mastery.” And then follows a brief sentence which has in it the very charm he is praising. “We hearken after it as to a choir in the side chapel of some cathedral heard faintly and fitfully across the long desert of the nave, now pursuing and overtaking the cadences, only to have them grow doubtful again and elude the ear before it has ceased to throb with them.”
It was characteristic of him that he should write to Mr. Gilder: “...Now what I wish to know is, how soon do you want the Parkman? I have just had an offer of a thousand dollars for a short paper of reminiscences, and I think I might make something that would at least do, out of my boyhood. I want the money—I always do, more’s the pity, but want it particularly just now that I may help a friend who is in straits. May I write this first? The Parkman is more than half done, and all thought out.” Plenty of money lay within Lowell’s grasp if he would sell his name and a few hours of work, but he never had been able to make merchandise of his art, and it cost him an effort, when he was asked to name a price, to cast his name into the balance. His publishers, finding him putting off the volume on Hawthorne, held out the promise of a very liberal payment as soon as they could have the book, but he did not get beyond the preliminary business of re-reading his author. Yet the needs of a friend offered the requisite stimulus.
The article in the Contributors’ Club was a humorous defence of certain American locutions and forms of spelling against half-learned objections. It was a return to a favorite theme and contains an amusing sketch of a proof-reader whom we take to be his old friend Mr. George Nichols. The club is in a vein which naturally assumes a half antique manner, and the treatment shows that smiling acceptance of the prejudices of learning which is the scholar’s defence against the logic of the pedant. Even this trifle, unsigned, and inconspicuous in its setting, could not get printed finally without two or three hurried notes from its author, amending and adding to it, and the last proofs were returned with a sigh: “I thought the thing livelier than I find it—it kicked so lustily in the womb. But nothing is good after ’tis born!”
If Lowell was growing old, so also were others with whom he had had lifelong associations. Whittier was twelve years his senior, and though all his life an invalid, never lost his singing voice, and Lowell wrote him, 16 December, 1890:—
Dear Friend Whittier,—I had meant to write you a word of thanks for your “Captain’s Well” [in the New York Ledger], but that with some other good intentions was hindered of fruition by my illness. It seemed to me in your happiest vein—a vein peculiarly your own. Tears came into my eyes as I read it.