These were the opening lines and the audience responded with roars to the inimitable fun-maker. In later years we learned to accord him a higher appreciation. The Autocrat and the Professor at the Breakfast Table have deep and acute thought as well as wit, and what one of our poets has produced a grander or more solemn lyric than the Chambered Nautilus? I dwell with emotion upon the funeral of Lowell, in itself a touching occasion, because it so happened that I saw on that day three great men for the last time, Justin Winsor, Phillips Brooks, and Dr. Holmes. I stood on the stairs at the rear of Appleton Chapel as the audience came down the aisle at the close. The coffin of Lowell rested for a moment on the grass under its wreaths, President Eliot and Holmes walked side by side; I have a distinct image of the countenance of Holmes as they came slowly out. It was no longer a young face but it had all the old vivacity and even at the moment was cheerful rather than serious; it had not, however, the cheerfulness of a man who looks lightly on life, but that of one whose philosophy enables him to conquer sorrow and look beyond, the face of a man who might write a triumphant hymn even in an atmosphere of death. These lines ran in my thought:
"Build thee more stately mansions, oh my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low vaulted past,
Let each new temple, nobler than the last
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine out-grown shell
By life's unresting sea!"
The fame of James Russell Lowell, too, in these years was incipient. As a writer he had shown himself to be elegantly schooled, but in the Fable for Critics and the Biglow Papers, he had burst forth as a most effective and slashing satirist. His culture was closely and perfectly fitted, but when scratched, revealing in full proportions the "Whang-doodle" Yankee. The whang, however, handling with all the deftness in the world the broadest and subtlest themes, and the doodle standing for a patriotism of the noblest. Those who came into close connection with him say that he grew morbidly fastidious, shrinking from coarse contacts and was happy at last only in a delicate environment. When in health, nevertheless, he was a Yankee of the truest, though sublimated by his genius and superb accomplishments. I know a little inn far away among the hills on whose porch half concealed by the honeysuckle, Lowell is said often to have sat listening to the dialect of the farmers who "vanned" and "vummed" as they disputed together in the evenings after the chores were done. Lowell had the dialect in his very bones, and loved it, but took pains to confirm his knowledge of it by studying on the sod.
"An' yit I love the unhighschooled ways
Ol' farmers hed when I was younger—
Their talk wuz meatier and would stay,
While book-froth seems to whet your hunger.
For puttin' in a downright lick 'twixt humbug's
eyes, there's few can metch it.
An' then it helves my thoughts as slick, ez stret
grained hickory does a hetchet."
On one occasion I heard Lowell tell a story in which he surrendered himself fully to the rustic heredity that was in him, flinging aside the accretions of culture. "It is strange," he said, "how even the moral sense of men may become warped. In a certain Cape Cod village, for instance, it had long been the custom to profit from the wrecks that happened upon the dangerous shore, until at last the setting of false lights and the appropriation of the lost cargoes became a legitimate business. One Sunday a congregation at church (they were rigid Puritans and punctilious about worship) was startled by the news that a West India ship loaded with sugar was going to pieces on the rocks near by. The birds of prey flocked to make prize of the booty. A good deacon bagged a large quantity of sugar, piling it on the shore while he went for his oxen to carry it home. The bad boys, however, resolved to play a trick on the deacon; they emptied out the sugar and filled the bags with clean, brown sand, which counterfeited well. This the deacon laboriously carted to his barn, and only came to a sense of his loss when his wife at night attempted to sweeten his tea from the bags. This brought out from the deacon the following remark: 'I declare, when I felt that 'ar sand agrittin' between my teeth, I don't know but it was wicked, but I e'en a'most wished that there wouldn't never be another wreck!'" Lowell told the story with all the humour possible, rendering the deacon's remark with a twang and an emphatic dwelling on the double negative (a thing which Lowell believed we had suffered to drop out of polite speech unfortunately) with inimitable effect and most evident enjoyment. The substratum of the man was Yankee but probably no other of the stock has so enriched himself with the best of all lands and times. He had a most delicate sense of what was best worth while in all literatures and absorbed it to the full. One of the greatest mistakes I ever made was in neglecting to become a member of his class in Dante when the opportunity came to me. What an interpreter he was of the soul of the great Italian, and with what unerring instinct he penetrated to what was best in the sages and poets of the world everywhere! His own gifts as poet and thinker were of the finest, and they were set off with acquirements marvellous in their range and in the unerring precision with which they were selected. I recall him at a very impressive moment. Many regard Lowell's Commemoration Ode, read at the Commemoration in 1865 of the Harvard soldiers who had taken part in the Civil War, as the high-water mark of American poetry. Whether or not that claim is just I shall not debate, but it is a great composition and perhaps Lowell's best. The occasion was indeed a noble one. A multitude had collected in the college-yard and through it wound the brilliant procession of soldiers who had taken part in the war, marching to the drum and wearing for the last time the uniform in which they had fought. From Major-Generals and Admirals down to the high privates, all were in blue, and the sun glittered resplendent on epaulet and lace worn often by men who walked with difficulty, halting from old wounds. The exercises in the church, the singing of Luther's hymn, A Mighty Fortress is our God, the oration and the impressive prayer of Phillips Brooks were finished. The assembly collected under the great tent which filled the quadrangle formed by the street, Harvard and Hollis Halls and Holden Chapel. I sat at the corner by the side of Phillips Brooks. He was the Chaplain of the day and I had been honoured by a commission to speak for the rank and file. The speeches, though not always happy, preserved a good level of excellence. At length came Lowell. He stood with his back toward Hollis about midway of the space. He was then in his best years, brown-haired, dark-eyed, rather short-necked, with a full strong beard, his intellectual face, an Elizabethan face, surmounting a sturdy body. His manner was not impassioned, he read from a manuscript with distinctness which could be heard everywhere, but I do not recall that his face kindled or his voice trembled. Even in the more elevated passages, I think we hardly felt as he proceeded that it was the culmination of the day's utterances and that we were really then and there in an epoch-making event. Unfortunately for me my speech was yet to come and, unpractised as I was, I was uncomfortably nervous as to what I should say. I lost therefore the full effect of the masterpiece. One or two of the speakers on the programme had dropped out and behold it was my turn. The announcement of my name with a brief introduction from the chairman struck my ear, and it was for me to stand on my feet and do my best. My voice sounded out into the great space in which the echo of Lowell's was scarcely silent. I spoke for the rank and file and in my whole career of nearly eighty years it was perhaps the culminating moment, when fate placed me in a juxtaposition so memorable.
In 1857 I sent a poem to the Atlantic then just beginning under his editorship. My poem came back with the comment, "Hardly good enough, but the writer certainly deserves encouragement." This frost, though not unkind, nipped my budding aspirations in that direction. I hung my modest harp on the willows and have almost never since twanged the strings. At a later time in England I came into pleasant relations with Lowell and saw his tender side. His term as Minister to England had come to a close. He had just lost his wife and was in deep affliction, the sorrow telling upon his health, but he took kind thought for me and helped me zealously in my quest of materials for a considerable historical work. He enable me to approach august personages whom otherwise I could not have reached; in particular securing for me a great courtesy from the Duke of Cleveland, a descendant of Vane, who gave me carte blanche to visit Raby Castle in Durham, Vane's former home, a magnificent seat not usually open to visitors but which I saw thoroughly. I have already mentioned the funeral of Lowell. It took place on a lovely day in the August of 1891. The procession passed from Appleton Chapel to Mount Auburn, and I, hurrying on reached the open grave before the line arrived. It was a spot of great beauty in a dell below the pleasant Indian Ridge on which just above lies the grave of Longfellow. At a few rods' distance is the sunny bank where later was laid to rest Oliver Wendell Holmes. Close at hand to the grave of Lowell lay his gifted wife, Maria White who wrote the lovely poem "The Alpine Shepherd," and the three brilliant and intrepid nephews who were slain in the Civil War. The old horn-beams, quaint and unusual trees, stand sentry on either hand. I saw the coffin lowered. Standing just behind Phillips Brooks, I heard for the last time the voice of my boyhood friend reading with tenderness the burial service. One final experience remained for me on that day which I especially treasure. Leaving the cemetery I walked the short distance to the gate of Elmwood, the birthplace and always the home of Lowell. This spot he especially loved, he knew its trees, every one, and the birds and squirrels that came to visit them. I stood at the gate looking toward the old mansion aloof among the woods. I had often stood there and looked toward the house, but now it had a different aspect; usually its doors and windows were tightly closed, but now everything was wide open, the mourners had not returned to the house and at the moment no living being was visible. The windows and the portal looked out upon the late afternoon, in the dead silence; in the heightened feeling of the moment it seemed to me that the mansion had come to life, that it missed the fine spirit that had so lately flown forth from it, that with lids widely apart and distressful it looked forth into the great spacious heavens after a loved soul that had passed from it into the world beyond. It was only a dream of my excited fancy, but I shall always think of Elmwood as it was that afternoon.
I am so fortunate as to have a close association with the town of Concord. My first American ancestor, landing from his ship in 1635, went thither with the earliest settlers and established himself on the level at the west of the town, at that time I suppose the outmost Anglo-Saxon frontier of the Western continent. Seven generations of his descendants have lived in the town. I am in the eighth, and, though not native, and only transiently resident, I have a love for it and it is a town worth loving. It is fair by nature, pleasant hills rising among green levels and the placid river creeping toward the sea. It still maintains its vigorous town-meeting and holds well to the ancient traditions. The thirteen colonies made on its soil their first forcible resistance to British aggression and there is no village in America so associated with great men of letters. When a boy of ten in 1844 I was swapped with a cousin, he going for a year to western New York, while I went for a year to the house of my aunt in Concord, the ancient homestead out of which eighty years before my great-grandfather had gone with gun in hand to take his part with the Minute Men. Emerson had just become famous through Nature, Thoreau was then a young man quite unknown to fame. The Alcotts the year before had lived next door to my aunt, Louisa, a child of twelve, and her sisters the "Little Women" whom the world now knows so well. Close to the Battle Ground stood the two tall gate-posts behind which lay the "Old Manse" whose "Mosses" Hawthorne was just then preserving for immortality. With all these I then, or a little later, came into touch and I can tell how the figures looked as scanned by the eyes of a boy.
Thoreau in those days was known in the town as an irregular, eccentric spirit, rather hopeless for any practical purpose. He could make a good lead-pencil but having mastered the art he dropped it, preferring to lead a vagabond life, loitering on the river and in the woods, rather to the disquietude of the community, though he had a comfortable home cared for by his good mother and sister. He housed himself in a wigwam at Walden Pond and was suspected of having started from the brands of his camp a forest fire which had spread far. This strange man, rumour said, had written a book no copy of which had ever been sold. It described a week on the Concord and Merrimac rivers. The edition fell dead from the press, and all the books, one thousand or more, he had collected in his mother's house, a queer library of these unsold books which he used to exhibit to visitors laughing grimly over his unfortunate venture in the field of letters. My aunt sent me one day to carry a message to Mrs. Thoreau and my rap on her door was answered by no other man than this odd son who, on the threshold received my message. He stood in the doorway with hair which looked as if it had been dressed with a pine-cone, inattentive grey eyes, hazy with far-away musings, an emphatic nose and disheveled attire that bore signs of tramps in woods and swamps. Thinking of the forest fire I fancied he smelled of smoke and peered curiously up the staircase behind him hoping I might get a glimpse of that queer library all of one book duplicated one thousand times. The story went that his artless mother used to say that Emerson, when he talked, imitated Henry, and I well recall a certain slow hesitation and peculiar upward intonation which made me think of Emerson at whose house I had often been. The Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers found its public at last and I suppose a copy of the first edition, authenticated as having belonged to that queer library, would easily bring to-day in the market its weight in gold. Whether or not Thoreau deserves great fame the critics sometimes discuss. I heard a distinguished man say that he was greatly inferior to Gilbert White of Selbourne, and I myself feel that Lowell in some of his essays recording his study of the nature life at Elmwood equalled in fine insight, and surpassed in expression the observer at Concord. Then in these later years we have had John Muir and John Burroughs who cannot be set low, but among American writers Thoreau was the pioneer of nature-study. Audubon had preceded him but he worked mainly with the brush; to multitudes Thoreau opened the gate to the secrets of our natural environment. The subtle delicacy of the grass-blade, the crystals of the snowflake, the icicle, the marvel of the weird lines traced by the flocks of wild geese athwart the heavens as they migrated, these he watched and recorded with loving accuracy and sensitive poetic feeling as no one in our land before had done. I have thrown a stone upon the cairn at Walden Pond which has now grown so high through the tributes of his grateful admirers. I shall throw still others in grateful admiration if the opportunity comes to me.
Many years ago I used to feel that Louisa Alcott and I were in a certain way bracketed together. Both were children of Concord in a sense, she by adoption and I through the fact that it had been the home of my forbears for seven generations. We were nearly of the same age and simultaneously made our first ventures into the world of letters, taking the same theme, the Civil War. One phase of this she portrayed in her Hospital Sketches, another, I in my Colour Guard. So we started in the race together but Louisa soon distanced me, emerging presently into matchless proficiency in her books for children. I sometimes saw her after she had become famous when she was attuning sweetly the hearts of multitudes of children with her fine humanity. She was a stately handsome woman with a most gracious and unobtrusive manner. She mingled with her neighbours, one of the quietest members of the circle. Said a kinswoman of mine who lived within a few doors:
It is so hard to think of Louisa as being a distinguished personage; she sits down here with her knitting or brings over her bread to be baked in my oven as anybody might do, and chats about village matters, as interested over the engagements of the girls and sympathising with those in sorrow as if she had no broader interest.