Since I could not write then, I do it now to wish you and all of us many happy returns of your birthday. It is partly a selfish wish, for the world will seem a worse world to me when you have left it, but it is not wholly so. The universal love and honor which attend you, and in which I heartily join, are of excellent example, and it is well that you should live long to enjoy them.
Faithfully yours,
J. R. Lowell.
Dedications, those shy birds, came fluttering about Lowell in these days. One was in an anonymous volume of verse from a friend dear for her own sake and her mother’s. It had come to him in manuscript first and then revised. When it came first, he wrote: “I am perfectly satisfied with the dedication—how should I not be? But how, in any case, could I look such a gift horse in the mouth? I should like it quand même as a proof of your affection, for that is the main thing; ‘Only, only call me dear!’” and two days later, when an alternate form came: “Yes, I like this better. I could not have discussed what you should say in such a case, but you have shown your woman’s wit (as I thought you would) in divining what I stole from Coleridge and he from Lessing.”
Dr. Weir Mitchell inscribed to him his volume “A Psalm of Death and other Poems,” and Lowell acknowledged the honor: “I am very proud of my book. You know how in the tray for visiting cards those of the more socially distinguished drift to the top (by a kind of natural selection) where they may be better seen of such, and so your volume lies conspicuously on my table by some happy chance, that everybody who comes to see me is sure also to pick it up and look at it. I read it through as soon as I got it and with entire satisfaction. Without partiality I like it better than any of its predecessors, and I have told you how much I like them. Your touch, I think, is more assured, and the slag more thoroughly worked out of the ore. I shan’t tell you which I like best any more than I should think of showing any preference among my grandchildren, though I am conscious that I obscurely feel something of the kind. Without indelicacy, however, I may mention a favorite passage. It occurs on the leaf following the title-page, and seemed to me every way admirable. It will be a treasure to me so long as I live. I have had no sharp attack since the middle of November, but for the last three weeks have been in so wretched a valetudinarian way that Mabel has called in Wyman again. I am beginning to think ’tis Old Age after all. I fancy I know how a bear feels during hibernation when he is getting near the end of his fast.”
A fortnight after this Lowell wrote again of himself, to his friends the Misses Lawrence: “I ought to have written long ago to thank you for your dear remembrance of me at Christmas. It was not ingratitude but sheer unconsciousness of the goings on of Time. I have been a wretched valetudinarian, and the days dribble away from me ere I am aware. I don’t mean that I have been seriously ill again; but I don’t get strong and seem in a lethargy half the time. However, I still reckon on the approaching visit of Doctor Spring, whose prescriptions have always done me good. They are simple enough,—birds and bees and things,—but they do wonders for me. My great bother now is that the least exertion tires me. Yet I believe I am as happy as most men. At any rate, I have had my share. You have been a part of it, and I have you still, thanks to your persistent kindness.
“We have had a better winter than you (thanks to our admirable form of government), but more snow than for several years. This has made the roads merry with sleighs. I myself have been out in a sleigh two or three times and enjoyed it in a quiet way. To-day it is raining and eating away the snow very fast.... Spite of your crusty winter I should have been glad to share it with you. I am so true a lover that I love my London even in the sulks. ’Tis the best place for dwelling in the world except this house where I was born.”
Not long after Lowell began his work at Harvard, he came into his class-room one day, and before giving his regular lecture, spoke to his students a few pointed words regarding Dr. Henry Ware Wales, who had recently died, and whose name is perpetuated in the University by the books he gave and by the Sanscrit professorship which he founded. Dr. Wales had been his friend from boyhood, and Lowell spoke kindly and touchingly of his amiability and generosity; but then he passed to a graver theme suggested by the superb courage with which his friend faced Death. As one reads these passages in connection with Lowell’s own final experience, one cannot fail to hear almost a prophetic voice. Little stress has been laid in these pages on the keen suffering which marked the closing months of Lowell’s life, but suffering there was, almost unbearable. Above this physical pain, however, rose the courageous spirit which does not lose itself in vain murmurings. Something of his cheerful encounter with death appears in his letters, and he made light to his friends of his pain; but the physicians who attended him knew through what he was passing.[108] Hear then how he spoke of Dr. Wales thirty-five years earlier, when he himself was in full vigor.
“I saw him frequently in Rome a few months before his death, and I can speak from my own knowledge. Just before coming to Rome, I had been reading over the Philoctetes of Sophocles, little thinking that I was so soon to find the story of that hero acted over again under my eyes by a coeval and friend. Like Philoctetes, his grievous wound was in a single limb, or rather in a single joint—and yet there he lay, otherwise a strong man, utterly helpless, and hopeful only of that release which comes to all. His island of Lemnos was the bed from which he could not rise. He was perfectly aware of his situation. He had studied medicine, and knew that his death warrant was signed. And here it was that he showed a courage and a firmness which were truly heroic. He told me that he had no hope, that he saw death approaching, and I shall never forget the expression of his face as he said it. He looked into the distance as if he literally saw the messenger of his doom, and measured him with a fearless and unquailing eye, as a braver man measures an antagonist. He spoke alike without levity and without selfish sentimentality. He did not wish to die, nor did he pretend it, but like a true man he fronted Death like an equal, advanced to meet him cheerfully, and did not wait to be dragged to his door like a culprit. I have stood on many battlefields, but here I was present at the battle itself. I saw what the ancients declared the noblest prospect for human eyes,—at once the noblest and most tragic,—a brave man meeting Fate. For it was Fate,—the wound was apparently a trifling one, but the arrow was poisoned. There was no escape.
“Rome was at its gayest, and he knew it. The great Easter throng was gathered before St. Peter’s to receive the blessing of him whom his subjects curse. The great dome shone with that illumination so beautiful that one might almost rank it as a new constellation suddenly created upon the purple evening sky of Italy. And all the while he lay there chained—suffering pains which no opiate could entirely deaden—and uttered no complaint, nay, was cheerful. And now it was that his studies stood him in good stead. As he had been faithful to virtue and honorable aims, so were they now not unfaithful to him. He felt the truth upon his sleepless pillow of Cicero’s pernoctant nobis. Those invisible visitants that thronged his chamber came not with faces of reproach, but with countenances of hope and consolation, on which truly the light of Easter morning, of the Resurrection, was shining.
“It is proverbial that all men die game. But it was not the mere act of dying which tried his courage and serenity. It was the lying in prison under sentence of Death, and it was the prison of the Inquisition, too, where he was hourly tortured.