"There murmured, as if one strove to speak,
And tears came instead; then the sad tones wandered
And faltered among the uncertain chords
In a troubled doubt between sorrow and words;
At last with themselves they questioned and pondered,
'Hereafter?—who knoweth?' and so they sighed
Down the long steps that lead to silence and died;"
"The Dead House," "Auf Wiedersehen (Summer)" and the "Palinode (Autumn)," in which the first grief had deepened while losing its acuteness, and the feeling of loneliness had taken largely the place of the first desolation, the wrenching apart of soul and body:—
"It is pagan; but wait till you feel it,—
That jar of our earth, that dull shock
When the ploughshare of deeper passion
Tears down to our primitive rock;"
and some of his friends had tried the folly of condolence, to whom he replies, in the same poem ("After the Burial"):—
"Console if you will, I can bear it;
'Tis a well-meant alms of breath;
But not all the preaching since Adam
Has made Death other than Death."
But the man was too robust in body and mind to linger long in the shadows of melancholy, and though the effects of bereavement—which, in the few years before I knew him, had taken his only boy, who died in Rome, his elder daughter, of whose death "The First Snow-Fall" keeps a touching record, and finally his wife—deepened his character as expressed in his subsequent writing, the buoyancy and elasticity which he found in his enjoyment of nature, and his severe application to the studies of the new position to which the retirement of Longfellow from the professorship of modern languages at Harvard promoted him, restored his old tone of life, while his very happy marriage with his second wife made him, as may now be said without indiscretion, happier than he had ever been.
The second Mrs. Lowell was a woman of the rarest mental, moral, and personal qualities, and her influence on Lowell was of the happiest and sunniest. She was one of three daughters of a merchant of Maine, who had left them without other resources than what their own excellent education gave them, and with the charge of a younger brother, for whose education they provided after the New England way. The other sisters I never knew; but Fannie, Mrs. Lowell, was one of the most remarkable women I ever knew for the combination of resolute and persistent courage and serene religious temperament. She was a Swedenborgian, and probably owed to that form of faith her serenity and imperturbable faith in a Divine Providence; but her unflinching courage in adversity and her extreme sweetness of character were of her New England birth and education. After her father's death she became a governess, and came to Lowell's house in that capacity after the death of his wife; but she had, before that, gone through many vicissitudes of fortune. She told me one day an incident of travel which is worth recording as indicating her character. She had been in a situation in Charleston, S.C., and had accepted another in the valley of the Ohio, to reach which, there being then no railway that traversed the distance, she had to make a long journey by stagecoach, traveling day and night across the Alleghanies. One night she found herself in the coach with a single fellow-passenger, apparently a gentleman, who took his place with her on the back seat, and who, after a time, pretending to be asleep, fell over towards her, so that his head lay on her shoulder, but, correcting himself, sat upright again, to repeat the feint again and again, each time with more abandon, until his arm dropped behind Fannie's waist, with an unmistakable attempt to embrace her. She quietly drew out her shawl-pin and drove it into his arm, without any remark or other attention to him. He sat up instantly, at the next stopping-place took an outside seat, and discontinued his journey at the first town they came to.
Mrs. Lowell fitted her husband as sunshine fits calm, and the gravest sorrow he ever felt with her was her having no children. When, two or three years after the time I am now writing of, I had decided to go to Europe again, and he tried to dissuade me from going, and I, for reasons I could not tell him, persisted, he brought me one day, just before I sailed, six hundred dollars, insisting on my accepting it as a gift, saying: "I shall never want it. I know now that I shall never have another child, and I can well spare it." Lowell had never been wealthy, but he had an income sufficient for all needs in the state of life which he preferred, and his generosity towards his friends who were poorer than he took all the surplus. He rejoiced in the addition to his income in the salary of his professorship, but it added nothing to his own expenditure. And yet I have always felt that if he had been a poor man, compelled to work for his daily bread, he would have occupied a larger place in the world of letters. He was not one of the "intellectual giants buried under mountains of gold," but he was a greater man than he ever showed him self, always cushioned by a sufficiency of fortune for all his needs, and by his tastes inclined to a simple and tranquil life; for, though he became later a political personage, he cared little, au fond, for the political world. Perhaps the little was too much for his attainment as a poet, and some of his best friends have always held that his diplomatic life was a disaster for his intellectual completion.
I have elsewhere alluded to his going to Europe to complete the preparations to enter into his professorship, and when he came back from this voyage he said to me, "I must study yet a good deal before I attempt to produce anything more." He finally felt the carelessness of form in his work, and in the succeeding years he worked very hard in his professorial work, which was, perhaps, not the best for his advancement as an author, but it certainly gave more solidity to the production of those years which intervened between his simpler life and his diplomatic career. His lectures before the students and the public (the popularity of Lowell as a lecturer was immense) solidified an education which, as he himself humorously avowed, was often broken by freaks of irrepressible youthful spirit; and the saddening and indelible effects of the war, which came between and sharply divided those phases of his career, had so modified his character for the graver and more profound that I agree with those of his friends who consider his entry into the diplomatic career as a misfortune for American letters, and that his mind flowed to waste in those later years. Nor was he at home in diplomacy. It was a reversal of all the conditions of his habitual existence; but it flattered his amour propre that the country should recognize the part he had taken in the cultivation of the anti-slavery sentiment of the nation, and the trace of worldly feeling which I have noted grew under the stimulus to a motive in life. His social gifts were very great, and his patriotic pride intensified the pleasure of his successes in a line of life which was really secondary in his nature.
In those years of his diplomatic life we saw little of each other. Our intimate intercourse was suspended by my going to Europe in 1859. We were nearest each other in our Adirondack life, in which he had all the zest of a boy. He was the soul of the merriment of the company, fullest of witticisms, keenest in appreciation of the liberty of the occasion, and the genius loci. One sees through all his nature-poetry the traces of the heredity of the early settler, the keen enjoyment of the fresh and unhackneyed in nature, even of the angularity of the New England farmhouse and the brightness and newness of the villages, so crude to the tastes founded in the picturesqueness of the Old World. Not even Emerson, with all his indifference to the mere form of things, took to unimproved and uncivilized nature as Lowell did, and his free delight in the Wilderness was a thing to remember, and perhaps by none so keenly appreciated as by me, to whom the joy of forest life was a satisfactory motive for living.