JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

A BIOGRAPHY

BY

HORACE ELISHA SCUDDER

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. I

Mr. Lowell in 1889

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

A Biography
BY
HORACE ELISHA SCUDDER
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1901

COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY HORACE E. SCUDDER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER, 1901

TO
G·O·S·
“NAUGHT CAN BE UNWORTHY, DONE FOR YOU.”

PREFACE

The existence of the two volumes of Letters of James Russell Lowell, edited by Charles Eliot Norton, has determined the character of this biography. If they had not been published, I might have made a Life and Letters which would have been in the main Lowell’s own account of himself, in his voluminous correspondence, annotated only by such further account of him as his letters failed to supply. As it is, though I have had access to a great many letters not contained in Mr. Norton’s work, I have thought it desirable not so much to supplement the Letters with other letters, as to complement those volumes with a more formal biography, using such letters or portions of letters as I print for illustration of my subject, rather than as the basis of the narrative.

I have kept the Letters always by my side as my main book of reference; by the courtesy of their editor and by arrangement with their publishers, Messrs. Harper & Brothers, I have now and then drawn upon them where it seemed especially desirable that Lowell should speak for himself, but their greatest use to me has been in their disclosure of Lowell’s personality, for they undoubtedly contain the cream of his correspondence. I have, however, had other important material for my use. First of all, Lowell’s collected writings in verse and prose, and some uncollected writings, both in print and manuscript. After all that a biographer can do, after all that Lowell himself can do through his letters, the substantial and enduring revelation of the man is in that free converse which he had with the world in the many forms which his literary activity took.

After this I must again thank Mr. Norton for his generosity in placing in my hands a large body of letters and papers, which he holds as Lowell’s literary executor; perhaps even more for the wise counsel with which he has freely aided me in the course of the work. Without his coöperation the biography could not have been written in its fulness.

My thanks are due, also, to the friends and the children of the friends of Lowell who have sent me letters and other material; to Miss Charlotte P. Briggs, daughter of the late Charles F. Briggs, the warm friend of Lowell in his early literary life; to Mrs. Sydney Howard Gay, who sent me not only letters, but the original manuscript of Lowell’s contributions to the National Anti-Slavery Standard; to Mrs. Richard Grant White; to Dr. Edward Everett Hale, whose James Russell Lowell and his Friends has been a pleasant accompaniment to my labors; to General James Lowell Carter for the use of his father’s letters; to Col. T. W. Higginson; to Mrs. S. B. Herrick; to Mrs. Mark H. Liddell for Lowell’s letters to Mr. John W. Field; to Mr. R. R. Bowker; to Mr. R. W. Gilder; to Mr. Edwin L. Godkin; to Mr. Howells, Mr. Aldrich, Mr. De Witt Miller, Mr. J. Spenser Trask, and others.

Cambridge, Mass., 27 September, 1901.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

CHAPTER I
ELMWOOD AND THE LOWELLS

James Russell Lowell was born at Elmwood in Cambridge, New England, Monday, 22 February, 1819. When he was about to leave England at the close of his term as American minister, he was begged by a friend to make Washington his home, for there he would find the world in which lately he had been living; but he answered: “I have but one home in America, and that is the house where I was born, and where, if it shall please God, I hope to die. I shouldn’t be happy anywhere else;” and at Elmwood he died, Wednesday, 12 August, 1891.

The place was endeared to him by a thousand memories, and he liked it none the less for the historic associations, which lent it a flavor whimsically suggestive to him of his own lurking sympathy. “It will make a frightful Conservative of you before you know it,” he wrote in 1873 to Mr. Aldrich, then living at Elmwood; it was born a Tory and will die so. Don’t get too used to it. I often wish I had not grown into it so.”

The house was one of a succession of spacious dwellings set in broad fields, bordering on the Charles River, built in the eighteenth century, and occupied for the most part, before the War for Independence, by loyal merchants and officers of the Crown. They were generous country places, pleasantly remote from Boston, which was then reached only by a long détour through Brookline and Roxbury, and the owners of these estates left them, one by one, as they were forced out by the revolt of the province: but the name of Tory Row lingered about the group, and there had been no great change in the outward appearance of the neighborhood when Lowell was born in one of these old houses.

From the colleges, past the unenclosed common, a road ran in the direction of Watertown. It skirted the graveyard, next to which was Christ Church, the ecclesiastical home of the occupants of Tory Row, and shortly turned again by an elm already old when Washington took command, under its shade, of the first American army. Along the line of what is now known as Mason Street, it passed into the thoroughfare upon which were strung the houses of Tory Row; a lane entered it at this point, down which one could have walked to the house of the vacillating Thomas Brattle, occupied during the siege of Boston by Quartermaster-General Mifflin; the main road, now known as Brattle Street, but in Lowell’s youth still called the Old Road, keeping on toward Watertown, passed between the estates of the two Vassalls, Henry and John, Colonel John Vassall’s house becoming in the siege of Boston the headquarters of Washington, and wreathing its sword later in the myrtle boughs of Longfellow. Then, at what is now the corner of Brattle and Sparks streets, stood the Lechmere house, afterward Jonathan Sewall’s, and occupied for a while by the Baron Riedesel, when he was a prisoner of war after the defeat of Burgoyne, in whose army he commanded the Hessian forces.

The Baroness Riedesel, in her lively letters, rehearses the situation as it existed just before she and her husband were quartered in Cambridge: “Seven families, who were connected with each other, partly by the ties of relationship and partly by affection, had here farms, gardens, and magnificent houses, and not far off plantations of fruit. The owners of these were in the habit of daily meeting each other in the afternoon, now at the house of one, and now at another, and making themselves merry with music and the dance—living in prosperity, united and happy, until, alas! this ruinous war severed them, and left all their houses desolate, except two, the proprietors of which were also soon obliged to flee.” Beyond the Lechmere-Sewall estate was that of Judge Joseph Lee, where in Lowell’s middle day lived his friend and “corrector of the press” George Nichols, and then, just before the road made another bend, came the Fayerweather house, occupied in Lowell’s youth by William Wells, the schoolmaster. Here the road turned-to the south, and passed the last of the Row, known in later years as Elmwood.

The house, square in form, was built in 1767 on the simple model which translated the English brick manor house of the Georgian period into the terms of New England wood; it was well proportioned, roomy, with a hall dividing it midway; and such features as abundant use of wood in the interior finish, and quaintly twisted banisters to its staircase, preserve the style of the best of domestic colonial buildings. Heavy oaken beams give the structure solidity and the spaces between them in the four outer walls are filled in with brick, while great chimneys are the poles which fasten to the earth the tent which seems likely still to shelter many generations.

The house was built for Thomas Oliver, the son of a West India merchant, and a man of fortune, who came from the town of Dorchester, not far off, to live in Cambridge, probably because of his marriage to a daughter of Colonel John Vassall. He was lieutenant-governor of the Province, and had been appointed by George III. President of the Council, a position which rendered him especially obnoxious to the freemen of Massachusetts. In that contention for strict construction of the charter, which was one of the marks of the allegiance to law characteristic of the king’s American subjects, it was held that councillors were to be elected, not appointed. On the morning of 2 September, 1774, a large number of the freeholders of Middlesex County assembled at Cambridge and surrounded Oliver’s house. He had previously conferred with these zealous people and represented that as his office of president was really the result of his being lieutenant-governor he would incur his Majesty’s displeasure if he resigned the one office and retained the other. The explanation seemed satisfactory for a while, but on the appearance of some signs of activity among his Majesty’s soldiers, the committee in charge renewed their demands, and drew up a paper containing a resignation of his office as president, which they called on the lieutenant-governor to sign. He did so, adding the significant clause: “my house at Cambridge being surrounded by about four thousand people, in compliance with their command I sign my name.”

Oliver left Cambridge immediately, never to return. He succeeded to the civil government of Boston, and Sir William Howe to the military command, when Governor Gage returned to England, but when Boston was evacuated Oliver retired with the British forces. The estate, with others in the neighborhood, was seized for public use. When the American army was posted in Cambridge it was used as a hospital for soldiers. Afterwards it was leased by the Committee of Correspondence. A credit of £69 for rent was recorded in 1776. Subsequently the estate was confiscated and sold by the Commonwealth, the land contained in it then consisting of ninety-six acres. The purchaser was Arthur Cabot, of Salem, who later sold it to Elbridge Gerry, Governor of Massachusetts from 1810 to 1812, and Vice-President of the United States under Madison, from 4 March, 1813, until his sudden death, 23 November, 1814, a man personally liked, but politically detested by his neighbors. In 1818 the estate, or rather the homestead and some ten acres of land, was sold by Gerry’s heirs to the Rev. Charles Lowell, minister of the West Church in Boston, who now made it his home, establishing himself there with his wife and five children. In the next year his youngest child, James Russell Lowell, was born in this house of many memories.

The Rev. Charles Lowell was the seventh in descent from Percival Lowell, or Lowle, as the name sometimes was written, a well-to-do merchant of Bristol, who, with children and grandchildren, a goodly company, came from England in 1639, and settled in Newbury, Mass.[1] Charles Lowell’s father, the Hon. John Lowell, had led a distinguished career as a lawyer and publicist; and as a member of the corporation of Harvard College, and of learned societies having their headquarters in Boston, had been a conspicuous figure in the community. One of his sons, Francis Cabot Lowell, was the organizer of the industries on the banks of the Merrimac which resulted in the building of the city of Lowell. A son of Francis Cabot Lowell was the originator of the Lowell Institute, a centre of diffusing light in Boston. Charles Lowell himself, springing from a stock which, by inheritance and accumulation of intellectual forces, was a leading family in the compact community of Boston, was endowed with a singularly pure and gracious spirit, and enjoyed an unusual training for the life of rich service he was to lead.

Graduated at Harvard in 1800, his bent was toward the ministry; but yielding to the wishes of his father, he entered the law office of his elder brother, and spent a year or more in the study of the profession of law. His inclination, however, was not changed, and his father withdrew his opposition and consented to a plan by which the young man was to pursue his theological studies in Edinburgh. He had three years of study and travel abroad. He was a pupil of Sir David Brewster and of Dugald Stewart, and kept up a friendly acquaintance for many years with Stewart’s later colleague, Dr. Brown. He met Wilberforce, heard Pitt, Fox, and Sheridan in the House of Commons, and, as his letters show, made eager incursions into the world of art.

He carried through all his experience a nature of great simplicity and of unquestioning faith. His son once wrote of him: “Nothing could shake my beloved and honored father’s trust in God and his sincere piety;” and his work as pastor of the West Church in Boston, to which he was called shortly after his return to America, was characterized by a single-minded devotion which made him, in the truest sense, a minister. All who have recorded their recollections of him agree in their impression of great distinction of manner and a singularly musical voice. He had a way, it was said, of uttering very familiar sentences, such as a quotation from the Bible, with singular effectiveness,—a manner which was peculiarly his own. After infirmities of sight and hearing had made his appearance in the pulpit rare, he would still, now and then, take part in the service by reciting in his melodious voice one or more of the hymns—he knew by heart all in the book. Emerson said of him that he was the most eloquent extemporaneous speaker he had ever heard. He had the natural gift of speech, but until one read by himself some sermon to which he had listened with delight, he would scarcely be aware that the spell lay in the pure tones of the voice that uttered it.[2]

Above all, he was the parson, making his powers tell less in preaching than in the incessant care and cure of souls. In Edinburgh he had studied medicine as well as theology, and, as his church stood on the border of a district which was forlorn and unwholesome, Dr. Lowell was constantly extending the jurisdiction of his parochial authority, carrying the gospel in one hand and bread and pills in the other. He knew every child in his parish, and if, as he said, his ministry was an unclouded one, it was because he was too busy with the needs of others ever to perplex himself greatly over his own cares. Indeed, it was the unremitting performance of his pastoral duties which impaired his health and led to the necessity of his removal from the city to the outskirts of the country village of Cambridge, four miles away, though doubtless he was largely influenced also by the needs of the growing family that surrounded him.

Dr. Lowell had seen something of the great world abroad, and he stood in an amiable relation to that self-centred, comfortable world of New England which held to the established order, even though there had begun within it already the agitation which was to shake the nation. Like many thus poised, he hated slavery in the abstract, but shrank back when it became a question of meddling with it: the instinct for the preservation of an established order was strong. The “abolitionism” which he saw rising was to him “harsh, dogmatic, uncharitable, unchristian,” and it disturbed his gentle, orderly nature. From the sheltered nook of Elmwood, he looked out on a restless, questioning world, but his own part seemed to be marked out for him. He had his parish, with a thousand petty disorders to rectify; he had his books, which he loved and read; he drove to town in his chaise to attend the meetings of the Historical Society, of which he was long secretary, and he watched the chickens and growing things in his green domain of Elmwood. The tall pines which murmur about the old house were planted by him. He brought to the solution of the new problems which were vexing men the calm religious philosophy which had solved any doubts he may have had, and if his equanimity was disturbed he righted himself always with a cheerful optimistic piety. One of his parish who had grown to womanhood under his eye, and had married, made up her mind to take a stand in some reform as a public speaker, and from his chamber at Elmwood—for this was late in his life, when he was in retirement—he sent for her to come to him.

“I shall never forget his greeting,” she wrote long after. As I opened the chamber door he rose from the old easy-chair, and standing erect, cried out: ‘Child! my child! what is this I hear? Why are you talking to the whole world?’ He was clothed in a long white flannel dressing-gown, with a short shoulder cape hardly reaching to his belt. His was no longer the piercing expression, aggressive to a degree, that Harding has portrayed. The curling locks that gave individuality to his forehead had been cut away, the gentle influence of a submissive spirit had impressed itself upon his features. In a moment I was seated at his feet, and then came a long and intimate talk of why and when and wherefore, which ended in a short prayer with his hand upon my head, and the words, ‘Now promise me that you will never enter the desk without first seeking God’s blessing!’ I answered only by a look.”[3]

Rev. Charles Lowell

This Dr. Primrose, as his son once affectionately called him, had for a companion one who was the farthest possibly removed from the fussy, ambitious wife of the Vicar of Wakefield. When he once made a journey to Europe with Mrs. Lowell and their eldest daughter, the little party took especial delight in a trip to the Orkney Islands, and in the enjoyment of friendly intercourse with the Traills from that region; for it was but a step that Mrs. Lowell needed to take to bring her into close kinship with the Orkney folk. Her grandfather, Robert Traill, whose name, together with her own name of Spence, she gave to one of her boys, had come from Orkney to America, had married there, and left a daughter, Mrs. Lowell’s mother,[4] when he went back to Great Britain at the revolt of the colonies. Thus, when Robert Traill’s granddaughter visited Orkney, she was returning to her own kin. Not only so, but her father, Keith Spence, came of Highland ancestry, and it was easy to find a forbear in the Sir Patrick Spens of the old ballad, as it was also to claim kinship with Minna Troil, whom the Wizard of the North had lifted out of the shadowy forms of life into the enduring reality of “The Pirate.”

This close affiliation with the North disclosed itself in Mrs. Lowell in a rare beauty of person and temperament, together with a suggestion of that occult power which haunts the people of the Orkney Isles. Whether or no Mrs. Lowell had, as was sometimes said, the faculty of second sight, she certainly had that love of ballads and delight in singing and reciting them which imparts a wild flower fragrance to the mind;[5] and her romantic nature may easily be reckoned as the brooding place of fancies which lived again in the poetic genius of her son. She had been bred in the Episcopal Church, and that may possibly have had its influence in the determination of her son Robert’s vocation, but in marrying Dr. Lowell she must have found much common ground with one who always resolutely refused to be identified with a sect almost local in its bounds. “I have adopted,” he wrote in 1855, “no other religious creed than the Bible, and no other name than Christian as denoting my religious faith.” The few letters from Mrs. Lowell’s pen which remain contain messages of endearment that flutter about the head of her “Babie Jammie,” as she called him, and betray a tremulous nature, anxious with pride and fond perplexity.

The companionship of the elder Lowells began in a happy manner in their childhood. The grandfather of Charles Lowell was the Rev. John Lowell, of Newburyport, who was twice married. His widow continued to make her home in Newburyport after her husband’s death, but when her husband’s son, John Lowell, the lawyer and jurist, left the place and established himself in Boston, she also left the town and went to live in Portsmouth near her niece, Mrs. Brackett. Mrs. Lowell had been John Lowell’s mother since his boyhood, and after the manner so common in New England households the titular grandmother ruled serenely without being subjected to nice distinctions. Charles Lowell, thus, when a boy, was a frequent visitor at his grandmother’s Portsmouth home, and his playmate was his grandmother’s great-niece, Harriet Brackett Spence. The intimacy deepened and before Charles Lowell sailed for Europe a betrothal had taken place.

There were three sons and two daughters when James Russell,[6] the youngest in this family, was born. Charles was between eleven and twelve, Rebecca ten, Mary a little over eight, William between five and six, and Robert[7] between two and three. All these lived to maturity, excepting William, who died when James was four years old. Charles by his seniority was the mentor and guide of his younger brother during his adolescence, especially when their father was absent, as he was once for a journey in Europe, but Mary[8] was the sister to whom he was especially committed in his childhood. She was his little nurse, and as her own love of poetry came early, she was wont to read him to sleep, when he took his daily nap, from Spenser,[9] and she used to relate in after years how hard the little boy found it to go to sleep under the charm of the stories, yet how firmly nature closed his eyes at last.

His own recorded recollections of childhood are not many, yet as far back as he could remember he was visited by visions night and day. An oft-recurring dream was of having the earth put into his hand like an orange. Dr. Weir Mitchell notes that Lowell told him he had since boyhood been subject to visions, which appeared usually in the evening. Commonly he saw a figure in mediæval costume which kept on one side of him,—perhaps an outcome of his early familiarity with Spenser and Shakespeare. Most of all in his memories of childhood he recalled vividly the contact with nature in the enchanted realm of Elmwood, and the free country into which it passed easily. With the eye of a hawk he spied all the movements in that wide domain, and brooded over the lightest stir with an unconscious delight which was the presage of the poet in him. “The balancing of a yellow butterfly over a thistle broom was spiritual food and lodging for a whole forenoon.”

Indeed, there could scarcely have been a better nesting-place for one who was all his life long to love the animation of nature and to portray in verse and prose its homely and friendly aspects rather than its large, solemn, or expansive scenes. In after life, especially when away from home, he recurred to his childish experiences in a tone which had the plaint of homesickness. From the upper windows of the house—that tower of enchantment for many a child—he could see a long curve of the Charles, the wide marshes beyond the river, and the fields which lay between Elmwood and the village of Cambridge. Within the place itself were the rosebushes and asters, the heavy headed goat’s-beard, the lilac bushes and syringas which bordered the path from the door to what his father, in New England phrase, called the avenue, and which later became formally Elmwood Avenue; but chiefest were the shag-bark trees, the pines, the horse-chestnuts, and the elms, a young growth in part in his childhood, for his father took delight in giving this permanence to the home; and the boy himself caught the fancy, for when he was fifty-six years old he rejoiced in the huge stack of shade cast for him by a horse-chestnut, whose seed he had planted more than fifty years before. And in trees and bushes sang the birds that were to be his companions through life. Over the buttercups whistled the orioles; and bobolinks, catbirds, linnets, and robins were to teach him notes,—

“The Aladdin’s trap-door of the past to lift.”

In those days bank swallows frequented the cliff of the gravel pit by the river, and Lowell remembered how his father would lead him out to see the barn swallows, which had been flying in and out of the mows, gather on the roof before their yearly migration. “I learned,” he wrote long after,—

“I learned all weather-signs of day or night;
No bird but I could name him by his flight,
No distant tree but by his shape was known,
Or, near at hand, by leaf or bark alone.
This learning won by loving looks I hived
As sweeter lore than all from books derived.”[10]

When he was not far away from his childhood, and in a time of great sensitiveness, he wrote: I never shall forget the blind despair of a poor little humming-bird which flew through the open window of the nursery where I was playing when a child. I knew him at once, for the same gay-vested messenger from Fairy-land, whom I had often watched disputing with the elvish bees the treasures of the honeysuckle by the doorstep. His imprisoned agony scarce equalled my own; and the slender streaks of blood, which his innocent, frenzied suicide left upon the ceiling, were more terrible to me than the red witness which Rizzio left on the stair at Holyrood to cry out against his murderers.”[11]

If we may trust the confession in “The Cathedral” as personal and not dramatic, Lowell was singularly sensitive in childhood to those subtle stirrings of nature which give eternity to single moments, and create impressions which are indelible but never repeated.

“The fleeting relish at sensation’s brim
Had in it the best ferment of the wine.”

A spring morning which witnessed the sudden miracle of regeneration; an hour of summer, when he sat dappled with sunshine, in a cherry-tree; a day in autumn, when the falling leaves moved as an accompaniment to his thought; the creaking of the snow beneath his feet, when the familiar world was transformed as in a vision to a polar solitude:—

“Instant the candid chambers of my brain
Were painted with these sovran images;
And later visions seem but copies pale
From those unfading frescos of the past,
Which I, young savage, in my age of flint,
Gazed at, and dimly felt a power in me
Parted from Nature by the joy in her
That doubtfully revealed me to myself.”

CHAPTER II
SCHOOL AND COLLEGE
1826-1838

The outer world came early to the notice of Lowell in his garden enclosure. “I remember,” he writes on the fourth of July, 1876, “how, fifty years ago to-day, I, perched in a great ox-heart cherry-tree, long ago turned to mould, saw my father come home with the news of John Adams’s death.” Two or three journeys also carried him out into the world in his early boyhood. He remembered going to Portsmouth in his seventh year, for the visit was impressed on his memory by the startling effect produced by a skeleton which he confronted when he opened a long red chest in Dr. Brackett’s house; and it was the next year that his father took him to Washington and carried him out to Alexandria, where he spent some days with the Carroll family, who were connections on his mother’s side, and whence he made an excursion to Mount Vernon. It all came back to him fifty-nine years later when he took his grandson to the same shrine; he went straight to the key of the Bastile and to the honey-locusts in the garden.

The rambles, too, to Beaver Brook and the Waverley Oaks, in the country within easy stroll of Elmwood, were extended when he climbed into the chaise with his father and drove off to neighboring parishes at such times as Dr. Lowell exchanged with his brother ministers. In those little journeys he had an opportunity to see the lingering reverence still paid to the minister, when boys doffed their hats and girls dropped a curtsy by the roadside as his father passed by. These exchanges drew Dr. Lowell and his little son as far as Portsmouth on the east and Northampton on the west. “I can conceive,” says Lowell, “of nothing more delightful than those slow summer journeys through leafy lanes and over the stony hills, where we always got out and walked. In that way I think I gained a more intimate relation with what we may call pristine New England than has fallen to the fortune of most men of my age.”[12] Thirty years after these experiences he could give this graphic report of the contests he was wont to witness in the village choir:—

“Sometimes two ancient men, through glasses dim,
In age’s treble deaconed off the hymn,
Paused o’er long words and then with breathless pace
Went down a slope of short ones at a race,
While who could sing and who could not, but would,
Rushed helter-skelter after as they could.
Well I remember how their faces shone,
Safe through some snare like Re-sig-na-ti-on,
And how some graceless youth would mock the tones
Of Deacon Jarvis or of Deacon Jones:
In towns ambitious of more cultured strains,
The gruff bass-viol told its inward pains
As some enthusiast, deaf to catgut’s woe,
Rasped its bare nerves with torture-rosined bow;
Hard-by another, with strained eyeballs set,
Blew devious discord through his clarinet,
And the one fiddle, that was wont to seek
In secular tunes its living all the week,
Blind to the leader’s oft-repeated glance
Mixed up the psalm-tune with a country dance.”[13]

More frequent journeys were those which he and his brothers and sisters invented for themselves by naming different parts of Elmwood after cities of the world and spending thus with their imagination the small geographical earnings of the schoolroom.

The first school which the boy attended was a dame school, which appears to have been somewhere not far from the river in the neighborhood of what is now Brattle Square. Once in verse and once in prose Lowell recorded his childish experience in and out of this primary school. In his introduction to “The Biglow Papers,” first series, is a fragment beginning—

“Propped on the marsh, a dwelling now, I see
The humble school-house of my A, B, C;”

and in his “New England Two Centuries Ago” there is a passage often read and quoted, which is a faithful picture of the author’s life within and without one of the “martello towers that protect our coast,” but he does not add the personal touch of his own return from school, whistling as he came in sight of his home as a signal to the mother watching for him. A bit of childish sport may be added from an omitted extract from the same fragmentary poem, since it brings to view two of Lowell’s boy companions:—

“Where Felton puns in English or in Greek,
And shakes with laughter till the timbers creak,
The ‘Idle Man’ once lived; the man I knew,
The author dwelt beyond my boyish view.
There once, the college butler aided, too,
My pony through his own front door he drew,
I on her back, and strove with winning airs
To coax my shaggy Shetlander upstairs;
Rejected hospitality! the more
He tugged in front, she backed toward the door.
Had oats been offered, she had climbed at least
Up to the garret, canny Scottish beast.
Across the way, where once an Indian stood
O’er Winthrop’s door, carved horribly in wood,
On the green duck-pond’s sea, where water fails
In droughty times, replenished then with pails,
Richard the Second from their moorings cast
His shingle fleets, and served before the mast,
While Ned and I consigned a well-culled store
Of choicest pebbles for the other shore.
Then walked at leisure to the antipodes,
Changing en route to Chinese consignees.”

Both Richard and Edmund Dana were his neighbors and friends, and with these early playmates should be named William Story. To him, as to one who had journeyed with him “through the green secluded valley of boyhood,” he addressed his “Cambridge Thirty Years Ago.” Story and the two Higginsons, Thatcher and Thomas Wentworth, were the only day scholars with Lowell at the boarding-school, kept by Mr. William Wells, to which Lowell was sent to be prepared for entrance to college. Mr. Wells was an Englishman, who brought with him to this country attainments in scholarship which were disclosed in the making of a simple Latin grammar and in an edition of Tacitus. He engaged in publishing under the firm name of Wells & Lilly, but meeting with reverses, he opened a classical school in the old Fayerweather house in Cambridge. He was a man of robust and masterful habit, who kept up the English tradition of the rattan in school and manly sport out of doors. The school had its gentler side in the person of Mrs. Wells, to whom Lowell sent a copy of “The Vision of Sir Launfal” in 1866, with the words: “Will you please me by accepting this little book in memory of your constant kindness to a naughty little cub of a schoolboy more than thirty years ago? I hope you will forget his ill deserts as faithfully as he remembers how much he owes you.”

It was at the hands of Mr. Wells that Lowell received that severe drilling in Latin which was one of the traditions of English scholarship transported to New England by the early clergy, and reënforced from time to time by newcomers from England like Mr. Wells, elegant scholars like Mr. Dixwell, and stern disciplinarians like Dr. Francis Gardner, the latter two long holding the Boston Latin School fast bound to the old ways. Mr. George Ticknor Curtis, who was sixteen years old when Lowell was ten, at Mr. Wells’s school, in a reminiscence of that period says: “Mr. Wells always heard a recitation with the book in his left hand and a rattan in his right, and if the boy made a false quantity or did not know the meaning of a word, down came the rattan on his head. But this chastisement was never ministered to me or to ‘Jemmy Lowell.’ Not to me, because I was too old for it, and not to him because he was too young.” With his quickness of mind and linguistic agility, Lowell evidently acquired in school rather than in college a familiarity with Latin forms, to judge by the ease with which he handled the language later in mock heroics; his early letters, too, are sprinkled with Latin phrases, the well worn coin of the realm, it is true, but always jingling in his pocket.

The schoolroom to an imaginative boy is a starting point for mental rambles. Lowell studied the rime on the window panes as well as his Latin verses. From his readings with his elder sister, and out of his own fertile imagination, he told or made up stories for his young comrades. T. W. Higginson, recalling Lowell and Story, remembers “treading close behind them once, as they discussed Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene,’ which they had been reading, and which led us younger boys to christen a favorite play-place ‘the Bower of Bliss.’” Dr. Samuel Eliot, who was one of Mr. Wells’s pupils, was also one of the small boys who listened to Lowell’s imaginative tales. I remember nothing of them,” he told Dr. Hale, except one, which rejoiced in the central interest of a trap in the playground, which opened to subterranean marvels of various kinds.”

“I can conceive of no healthier reading for a boy, or girl either, than Scott’s novels,” says Lowell, and he had the good fortune to be introduced early to Scott, and to read him as a contemporary. When he was nine his mother gave him, one can guess with what Scottish eagerness, the “Tales of a Grandfather,” which had just been published; and the then great event of American history was not so remote but that the freckle-faced boy who lived in a house once a Tory’s, then a soldier’s hospital, and then the home of a governor of the commonwealth and vice-president of the United States, would have lively reminders of it in the veterans who turned out at muster, and in the rude village drama of the “Cornwallis.”[14]

Yet, as Lowell himself reminds us, the Cambridge of his boyhood, besides possessing the common characteristics of New England towns, had its special flavor from the presence there of the oldest college of New England. Like the Cambridge boys of to-day, he hovered about the skirts of Alma Mater, took in, year by year, the entertainment offered by the college at its annual Commencement festival,—a greater raree-show then than now,—and made the acquaintance of the queer misshapen minds that by some occult law of nature always seem to be found in the shade of a college town, as if the “Muses’ factories” must necessarily have their refuse heaps not far away. A boy who grows up in a college town, especially when the community and the town are somewhat isolated, hardly knows the wonder and gravity which assail one who comes up to college from a distant home. In Lowell’s youth Harvard College and Cambridge town were singularly isolated in spite of their geographical nearness to Boston. Once an hour a long omnibus, and twice an hour a short one, jogged back and forth between the village and the city, picking up passengers in a leisurely fashion, and going longer or shorter distances from the college yard, according to the importunity of the passenger or the good-nature of the driver. An hourly stage to the city meant much deliberation in making the journey, and Cambridge was by no means the bedchamber for city merchants and professional men which it has since become.

When Lowell entered Harvard from Mr. Wells’s school in 1834, the college was surrounded by houses and gardens which marked almost the bounds of the town as one went toward Boston. The college itself was within a straggling enclosure still known by the homely name of the Yard, and occupied seven buildings therein; the library was in Harvard Hall, for Gore Hall was not begun till just as Lowell was graduating. The chapel was a dignified apartment of University Hall, designed by the architect Charles Bulfinch, who left his mark in Boston and its neighborhood upon buildings which stand in serene reproof of much later architecture. In the chapel also were held the academic functions, one of which, Exhibition Day, was observed three times a year; on two of these occasions the Governor of the Commonwealth attended, and on all of them the President of the college in his academic dress, the Fellows, the Overseers, and the Faculty marched to the chapel with ceremony, there to listen, along with an indulgent crowd of parents and friends, to the youthful speakers, who discoursed in Latin or in English, but were always introduced in Latin.

During Lowell’s college course there were only about two hundred and twenty undergraduates, his own class entering with sixty-eight members and graduating with sixty-five; the whole list of the faculty, including the schools of law, divinity, and medicine, did not exceed thirty-four, and not half of these constituted the college faculty proper. But among them were names known then and later beyond the college enclosure. Felton was professor of Greek, Peirce of mathematics, and Ticknor of modern languages, to be succeeded, when Lowell was nearly through his college course, by Longfellow. Francis Sales, graphically set off by Lowell in his “Cambridge Thirty Years Ago,” was instructer [sic] in French and Spanish, and Pietro Bachi in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. The president of the college was Josiah Quincy, and when thirty years later Lowell reviewed his friend Edmund Quincy’s life of his father, in the article entitled “A Great Public Character,” he referred with a fine note of sincere feeling to the association with him which he bore away from his college days, in a passage which reflects a little of Lowell as well as pictures the figure of the president.

“Mr. Quincy had many qualities calculated to win him favor with the young,—that one above all which is sure to do it, indomitable pluck. With him the dignity was in the man, not in the office. He had some of those little oddities, too, which afford amusement without contempt, and which rather tend to heighten than diminish personal attachment to superiors in station. His punctuality at prayers, and in dropping asleep there, his forgetfulness of names, his singular inability to make even the shortest off-hand speech to the students,—all the more singular in a practised orator,—his occasional absorption of mind, leading him to hand you his sand-box instead of the leave of absence he had just dried with it, the old-fashioned courtesy of his ‘Sir, your servant,’ as he bowed you out of his study, all tended to make him popular. He had also a little of what is somewhat contradictorily called dry humor, not without influence in his relations with the students. In taking leave of the graduating class, he was in the habit of paying them whatever honest compliment he could. Who, of a certain year which shall be nameless, will ever forget the gravity with which he assured them that they were ‘the best-dressed class that had passed through college during his administration’? How sincerely kind he was, how considerate of youthful levity, will always be gratefully remembered by whoever had occasion to experience it.”

The change from school to college, as I have intimated, was not such as to strike very deeply into the boy’s consciousness. He continued for a while to live at his father’s house, a mile away from the Yard, though he had a room of his own nearer, at Mr. Hancock’s in Church Street, and in the latter part of his course lived there altogether. Going to college, thus, was very much like going to school as he had always done. The college methods were not markedly different from those of a preparatory school. There were lessons to learn and recite; the text-book was the rule, and the fixed curriculum suggested no break from the ordinary course of formal instruction. Except in the senior year, there was a steady attention to Greek, Latin, and mathematics. In the first year Tytler’s History was studied; in the second year English grammar and modern languages were added; in the third year, besides Greek and Latin and modern languages, Paley’s Evidences, Butler’s Analogy, and chemistry appeared on the list, and themes and forensics were introduced. In the senior year the ancient languages were dropped, and natural philosophy, intellectual philosophy, astronomy, and political economy took their place, with lectures on rhetoric, criticism, theology, Story on the Constitution of the United States, mineralogy, and anatomy—a somewhat confused jumble on paper in the catalogue of the time, which it is to be hoped was reduced to some sort of order, though it looks as if the senior were suddenly released from too monotonous a course and bidden take a rapid survey of a wide range of intellectual pursuits.

In his school days Lowell had been under the close surveillance given to boys, and the partial freedom of college life brought with it a little more sense of personal rights, but throughout the four years he was boyish, frolicsome, very immature in expression, and disposed, in a fitful fashion, to assert an independence of authority. He won a “detur” in his sophomore year, and in a public exhibition in the first term of his senior year he took part in a conference bearing the labored title: “Ancient Epics, considered as Pictures of Manners, as Proofs of Genius, or as Sources of Entertainment,” but both in his sophomore and senior years he was at first privately and then publicly admonished for excessive absence from recitations and for general negligence in themes, forensics, and recitations. There was enough of the boy left in him at the beginning of his senior year to require the fine of a dollar for cutting seats in the recitation room; and the college discipline of the day frowned on Lowell as on others for wearing a brown coat on Sunday. It is difficult for one scanning the records of the faculty at that time to avoid a feeling of commiseration for these excellent gentlemen and scholars sitting, as if they were boarding-school masters, in serious consultation over the pranks and petty insubordination of a parcel of boys.

Meanwhile in his own fashion Lowell was stumbling on his way, gradually finding himself. He was a reader, as we have seen, before he went to college, and he continued to find his delight in books. “A college training,” he once said, is an excellent thing; but after all, the better part of every man’s education is that which he gives himself,”[15] and in college he was following, without much reflection, the instincts of his nature, both as regards his reading and his writing. His letters show him a schoolboy when attending to the enforced tasks of the college, with occasional outbreaks of enthusiasm for the more distinctly literary studies, but somewhat of an independent voyager when launched on the waters of general literature.

It was in the large leisure of his college days that he formed an acquaintance which ripened into intimacy with the great writers and with those secondary lights that often suit better the ordinary mood. “I was first directed to Landor’s works,” he says, in 1888, when introducing some letters of Landor to the readers of his own day, “by hearing how much store Emerson set by them. I grew acquainted with them fifty years ago in one of those arched alcoves in the old college library in Harvard Hall, which so pleasantly secluded without wholly isolating the student. That footsteps should pass across the mouth of his Aladdin’s Cave, or even enter it in search of treasure, so far from disturbing only deepened his sense of possession. These faint rumors of the world he had left served but as a pleasant reminder that he was the privileged denizen of another beyond ‘the flaming bounds of space and time.’ There, with my book lying at ease and in the expansion of intimacy on the broad window-shelf, shifting my cell from north to south with the season, I made friendships, that have lasted me for life, with Dodsley’s ‘Old Plays,’ with Cotton’s ‘Montaigne,’ with Hakluyt’s ‘Voyages,’ among others that were not in my father’s library. It was the merest browsing, no doubt, as Johnson called it, but how delightful it was!”[16]

The record of books withdrawn by Lowell from the college library during his four years’ residence would of course furnish a very incomplete account of his reading, since, as intimated above, he had his father’s well-stocked shelves, and access apparently to the alcoves of Harvard Hall. The record, nevertheless, is interesting as showing the range and the drift of his reading. Some of this reading is ancillary to his task work, but much is simply the gratification of an expanding taste, and covers such diverse works as Terence, Hume, the Anthologia Græca, Smollett, Hakluyt, Boileau, Scott, and Southey. It is noticeable that as his college course proceeded the emphasis was laid on the greater English literature.

Nor was he without the excellent ambition to collect a library of his own. “It is just fifty-one years ago,” he said 7 May, 1885, when unveiling the bust of Coleridge in Westminster Abbey, “that I became the possessor of an American reprint of Galignani’s edition of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats in one volume. It was a pirated book, and I trust I may be pardoned for the delight I had in it.”[17] His letters to his college friends during these years contain frequent references to the purchases of books he had made and the gifts from his family which he prized. He has been given a beautiful edition of Milton, which he had looked forward to buying; he has been purchasing Samuel Butler and Beattie; a new edition of Shakespeare has been announced, which he means to buy if he can afford it; he has had a “detur” of Akenside; he has laid his hands on a “very pretty edition of Cowper;” and his frequent quotations from the poets show the easy familiarity he had won in his reading.

Besides his continued friendship with Story and other neighbors’ sons, Lowell formed new alliances among his college mates, and in his correspondence with two of them in this period he discloses something of his character and tastes. One of these friends, W. H. Shackford, was his senior by two or three years, and Lowell’s letters to him show the boy’s side turned toward one whom he regarded with the friendly reverence which sixteen pays to nineteen. On his part, Shackford seems to have taken a violent fancy to Lowell, to have made indeed the first overtures of friendship. To this sager companion, who was a senior when Lowell was a freshman, he reveals his more studious side. Shackford left college to teach at Phillips Exeter Academy, and Lowell wrote to him from Cambridge and Boston, not much in the way of college gossip, but of his own studies, the treasures he picked up at book-stores or auctions, his plans for reading and travel, and brief comments on his instructors. Through the correspondence runs an affectionate current, an almost lover-like tone of self-exculpation, the warm feeling of a boy toward his mentor, and an impulse to make him somewhat of a confessor.[18]

The earliest of these letters was written in the middle of July, 1835, when Shackford had gone to Portsmouth. It was a hasty shot fired after his departing friend to assure him of his affection, written under stress of headache from his brother’s office, and was followed the same day by a longer letter. “When I wrote to you this morning,” he says, “I was laboring under three very bad complaints enumerated in my other letter. I was then at my brother’s office. I am now at home, sitting by an open window, with my coat off, my stock do., with Coleridge’s works before me wherewith to consume the rest of the day, and also as cool as a cucumber. Shack, if you are a victim to any other disease, and are lying tossing with pain under some physician’s prescription (such, for instance, as the pleasing draught concocted by Wm. Rufus, or the Red King, composed of the following truly delectable compounds, viz., ‘rue, tansy, horehound, coltsfoot, hyssop, and camomile flowers, farther enriched by a handful of earthworms, half a dozen wood lice and four centipedes’), if, I say, you labor under all these misfortunes, devoutly thank your more fav’ring stars, that you are not the yawning victim of ennui, a disease which Æsculapius himself couldn’t cure, and which I therefore humbly opine to have been the disease of Achilles.... I hope you’ll be amused with this epistle (if perchance you are able to read it). But the fact is I can’t write anything serious to save my life. Answer this the very day you get it....”

At the end of the summer when more letters had passed between them, Lowell returned to his college work, and wrote from Cambridge a long letter dated 9 October, 1835, in reply to one long delayed. “My dearest friend,” he writes, “I am rejoiced that you have broken the long silence that existed between us, not because I should not have written to you first, but because it shows that you were not grievously offended with me. I willingly confess myself to blame, but not in so great a degree as you may suppose. I did go to the White Mountains, and while travelling was not offended (do not use any stronger term) by not receiving any letters from you; on the contrary I expected none, for how could you have any knowledge of my ‘whereabouts’ unless I wrote to you as I went along and told you where to direct? This I did not do, nor did I write any letters on my journey except one which I was obliged to write to Bob because I promised him I would. After I got home I was taken sick and kept my bed a week without being able to sleep most of the time on account of a raging sick headache which hardly allowed me to move. The day I saw you was the third time I had been out. I did go down, however, three times to see you, but could not find you, or saw you walking with somebody I did not know, and then I did not like to speak to you. Did you or could you think that I would forfeit your friendship, the most precious (because I believe it to be the truest) I ever enjoyed, because you did not find it convenient to write to me? I hope you will not think that I say all this because I am ashamed to treat you coldly, or not to answer you. I am sure of one thing, that I have no such opinion of you. Your letter, Shack, was a delight to me (though I am not ashamed to confess that it [made] me cry)....

“I like Prof. Channing very much indeed, inasmuch as I sit where I can see his marks, and he has given me an 8 every recitation this term except once, and then he gave me 7. I went up to ask him something so as to see whether I was not mistaken (as he makes a 6 something like his 8’s) and I found on the paper exactly what I expected. I have written one theme and got but two marks on the margin, one for a change required in the sentence, and another was a straight line drawn under the word ‘to,’ and also marked on the margin. Tell me whether you think this is good, as you have experienced. I study quite hard this term. I get on in German astonishingly; it comes quite easy to me now.... I have written the longest letter I ever wrote in my life. I translated an ode of Horace into poetry the other day, and it was pretty good. Mathematics are my only enemies now.... I hope I may subscribe myself your dear friend.”

A month later he writes his friend a lively account of a town and gown row, and notes his progress in reading Shakespeare. “I was surprised on looking over Shakespeare to find that I had read all his plays but two or three, among them ‘Hamlet.’ Only think, I haven’t read Hamlet.’ I will go at it instanter.”

At the beginning of 1836, on returning to college after the holidays, he writes with a boyish bibliomaniac enthusiasm of the Milton and Coleridge which had been given him, and passes into comment on the books he is reading and those he means to buy. He grows more literary and political in the subjects of his letters, disclosing already not only a warm interest in public affairs, but a generous judgment. “I suppose you heard of the Seminoles massacring, as it is called, those companies of American troops. I think they are in the right of it; by ‘they’ I mean the Seminoles. Not much danger of war with France now.” Then follows an odd jumble of frank confessions of his likes and dislikes for his fellows, and his boyish passions, with a return to his hunt for books in special editions.

His letter of 22 April, 1836, is taken up with a long discussion in a semi-philological vein of love and friendship, but what would strike a reader of these letters most is the distinct change which now takes place in the handwriting, which has passed from a not always neat copy-book hand to one which suggests the delicacy of the hand he afterward wrote, though not its elegance; it is still constrained with the air of being the result of close attention. These gradual changes in style of handwriting rarely fail to mark a maturing of character, and it is interesting to observe, in Lowell’s case, how they register a long period of vacillation and immaturity.

There is a gap of nearly a year in this correspondence as preserved, and the next letter, under date of 26 February, 1837, is filled with extracts from a long poem he is writing, in Spenserian stanza, and even occasionally with a word borrowed from Spenser; but the spirit that stirs the lines is Campbell. The theme is an imaginary journey up the Hudson, and West Point suggests the two stanzas:

“Follow this narrow path to where the grass
Grows fresher on yon gently-rising mound,
To that lone brook, whose ripples as they pass
Spread to the air a sleep-compelling sound;
Here, Poland’s hero erst a refuge found.
Go ask whose good right arm hurl’d back the slave,
When Russia’s eagle o’er his country frown’d,
Who led her little band of patriots brave;
And weeping Freedom points to Kosciusko’s grave.

“Spirit of Freedom! who didst erst inspire
Our nation ground beneath oppression’s sway,
With trust in God, with thine own holy fire;
Who nerv’dst the mother fond to send away
Her first-born boy to brave the bloody fray,
Bid him farewell, with full averted eyes,
Ne ask, though longing, for a moment’s stay,
Still hover o’er us, if thou didst not rise
With Washington’s pure spirit to thy native skies!”

The other correspondent whose letters from Lowell are preserved was George Bailey Loring, a boy of his own age, the son of a clergyman who was Dr. Lowell’s friend, so that the friendship partook of an hereditary character; with him Lowell had frank intimacy during their college days and in the years immediately following. Their ways in life separated, and they had less community of interests and tastes when they came to manhood. Dr. Loring went early into public life and held various offices, being Commissioner of Agriculture at one time and at another United States Minister to Portugal.

In this fuller series of letters which is largely contained in Mr. Norton’s two volumes, Lowell is the frank, unformed boy, giving vent to nonsense, a lad’s hasty impulse, and the foolery which goes on in the name of sentiment. The equality of age created a different relation between them from that which Lowell bore to Shackford, and the familiarity of their intercourse called out all manner of intellectual pranks and youthful persiflage. The jingle and lively verses which Lowell threw out for the amusement of his comrade show him playing carelessly with the instrument which he was already beginning to discover as fitting his hand.

Lowell’s unaffected interest in boyish things is much more apparent in these random letters than in the more careful epistles to his older friend, though he is by no means silent on the side of his intellectual life. In his first letter, dated 23 July, 1836, he talks about the things that two college boys have on their minds at the beginning of vacation. “You must excuse me if this be not a very long or entertaining epistle, as I am writing from my brother’s office (with a very bad pen) in a great hurry. I shall not go to Canada and shall not start for P[ortsmouth] probably for three weeks. My circular came on last night, 14 prayers, 56 recitations, whew! The class supper was glorious, toasts went off very well. Those about Parker and the Temperance Society were most applauded. I am going to join the ‘Anti-Wine’ I think. The ‘Good Schooner Susan, R. T. S. L. owner and master,’ will make an excursion to Nahant this day. Distinguished Passenger etc. We shall go to church at Nahant Sunday and return Monday morning. By the way I ‘made up’ with —— and —— at the supper. I had a seat reserved (!) for me (as an officer) on the right hand of the distinguished president (?) A prettier table I never saw.”

The letters to his college friends were naturally written mainly in vacation time, and in Christmas week of the same year, 1836, he writes: “I am going to a ball to-night at the house of a young lady whom I never heard of.... I’ve begun and written about forty lines of my H. P. C.[19] prœmium. I shall immortalize I——k W——. I extol him to the skies and pari passu depreciate myself.” He went to the ball, and a few days later wrote: “I think I told you I was going to a party or ball (call it what you will): well, I went, made my bow, danced, talked nonsense with young ladies who could talk nothing but nonsense, grew heartily tired and came away. I saw a great many people make fools of themselves, and charitably took it for granted that I did the same.... I may add something in the morning, so no more from your aching headed and perhaps splenetic, but still affectionate friend, J. R. L.”

In these letters Lowell twits his friend with his attentions to girls, and intersperses his jibes with poor verses; he has become a zealous autograph hunter, and the letters he laid his hands on in his father’s house from home and foreign notabilities illustrate the wide connections of the family, and the part it had had in the great world. In the midst of it all he will burst forth into almost passionate expression of his love for nature and his strong attachment to his birthplace and its neighborhood; and again quote freely from the books he is reading, and tell of the progress he is making in his more serious poetical ventures, and the books he is adding to his library. He made no boast of immunity when he laughed at his friend for too much susceptibility. Here is a passage from a letter written in the summer of 1837, when he was closing his junior year:—

... “Didn’t I have a glorious time yesterday? That I did if smiles from certain lips I

‘prize
Above almost, I don’t know what, on earth’

could make a day glorious. Excuse me for quoting my own nonsense, but ’twas more apt than anything I could think of.... Imagine yourself by the side of a young lady the perfection of beauty, virtue, modesty, etc., etc., in whom you entertain a pleasing interest, and you may form a ‘faint imagining’ of my situation. I am not calm yet. In fact, every time I think of her eyes—those eyes! Guido never could have conceived her. Well, a truce with all recollections when there is no hope.”

A month later he gave a brief account of Commencement to his friend, and then speaks of a letter his brother Rob had received from their sister, then in Glasgow. Lowell’s father, mother, and sister Rebecca went to Europe early in the summer of 1837. They were gone three years, and during that time the young collegian found in his brother Charles his nearest friend and adviser; his house indeed was the student’s home when he was not in college, and his wife was the best of sisters to him. Mrs. Anna Cabot Lowell was herself a woman of fine culture and of unwonted intellectual power. At a later period than this she opened a school for girls, which is looked upon by many now in mature life with warm gratitude. She edited a choice collection of poems for the reading of schoolgirls, and compiled also a little volume of suggestive thoughts called “Seed Grain.” Dr. Lowell, meanwhile, parted from his son with parental solicitude, and wrote him on the eve of sailing a letter which is quaintly expressive of his own ingenuous nature and of the simplicity of the day, and slightly indicative of his son’s weaknesses as they appeared to a father’s eyes:—

New York, May 29th, 1837.

My dear Son,—I wish you to write us once a month, making an arrangement with Robert not to write at the same time he does. You know the necessity for economy, and you know that I shall never deny you, but from necessity, what will afford you pleasure. I shall direct Charles to pay you half a dollar a week. If you are one of the first eight admitted to the Φ Β Κ, $1.00 per week, as soon as you are admitted. If you are not, to pay you 75 cents per week as soon as you are admitted. If I find my finances will allow it, I shall buy you something abroad. If you graduate one of the first five in your class, I shall give you $100 on your graduation. If one of the first ten, $75. If one of the first twelve, $50. If the first or second scholar, $200. If you do not miss any exercises unexcused, you shall have Bryant’s ‘Mythology,’ or any book of equal value, unless it is one I may specially want.

My dear child, I wish you only to be faithful to yourself. You can easily be a fine scholar, and therefore in naming the smallest sum for your weekly expenses, I feel no hesitation, as it depends on yourself, with very little exertion, to secure the second highest sum, and with not more exertion than is perfectly compatible with health and sufficient recreation to secure the largest. Use regular exercise. Associate with those who will exert the best influence upon you. Say your prayers and read your Bible every day. I trust you have made up all your exercises. If not, make them up in one week, and let the president know it. Do not get anything charged except with Charles’s knowledge and approbation. I have given him instructions respecting your expenses....

Your affectionate father.

Dr. Lowell wrote many letters home and recounted the pleasant experiences of the little party in Scotland and England, their foregathering with the Traill family, and the visits they paid to Wordsworth, Southey, Sir David Brewster, and others. But he does not forget to continue his admonitions and encouragements, as he receives his son’s reports of his doings. “Your office,” he writes from London, 13 December, 1837, “as one of the editors of the ‘Harvardiana’ may give you a greater familiarity in composition. Be careful that it does not abstract you from severer pursuits, and that your style is not trifling, but the subject and the manner useful and dignified. I do not allow myself to doubt of your furnishing the criterion of good standing which a membership of the Φ Β Κ will furnish, and I trust you will leave college with a high part and a high reputation.

“God bless you, my dear child. Aim high, very high. I feel its importance for you more than ever.”

Harvardiana, to which Dr. Lowell refers, was the college magazine of the day, started just as Lowell entered college, and naturally inviting a scribbler like Lowell to become one of the editors when his senior year came round. His associates were Rufus King, who later attained a leading position in the bar of Cincinnati, and wrote “Ohio” in the American Commonwealths series; George Warren Lippitt, afterward for a long time secretary of legation at Vienna; Charles Woodman Scates, a South Carolinian lawyer of great promise, who died young, and Nathan Hale, an older brother of Dr. Edward Everett Hale, and later a strong figure in Boston journalism. Lowell contributed twenty-four pieces in prose and verse, translations from the German, a bit of moralizing in the minor key which youth likes to pursue, some fierce sardonic verses, some sentiment, and then a mockery of sentiment. For the most part his contributions are the “larks” of students given to literature. With his associates he followed the example set by Blackwood, and imitated by the Knickerbocker and similar magazines, aiming at the sauciness and jocularity which were assumed to be the ordinary temper of editors gathered about their table, whereas in actual experience such editors are painfully at their wits’ end. What most strikes one in these varied contributions is the apparent facility with which everything is thrown off, sense and nonsense coming with equal ease, but nonsense predominating.

Lowell’s letters to his friends in his last year at college have frequent reference to his willing and unwilling labors on this “perryodical,” as he was wont to call it in mimicry of Dr. Walker. In August, 1837, he sends Shackford a circular inviting subscriptions to Harvardiana, and on the blank leaf writes one of the imitative letters in verse, for which he had a penchant at this time:—

“Dear Shack, a circular I send ye
The which I hope will not offend ye;
If sae, ’t wad tak’ Auld Nick to mend ye
O’ sic an ill
But, gin ye are as when I kenn’d ye
It never will!

“Gin ye could get ae body’s name
’T wad add forever to his fame
To help to kindle up the flame
O’ sic a journal,
Whose reputation, though quite lame,
Will be eternal.

“Now if ye do your vera best
In this waist glorious behest,
By gettin’ names and a’ the rest
I need na tell
Yese thus fulfil the airn’st request
O’ J. R. L.”

“King has been up here,” he writes from Elmwood, 22 December, 1837, “for an article for the ‘Perry,’ but was unsuccessful in the attempt. The fact is, it is impossible to read Lockhart’s ‘Life of Scott’ and attend to my illustrious nephew, ‘the corporal,’ who is a very prototype of Jack Falstaff, and write an article which requires such deep study and abstraction.”

The magazine was a part of that spontaneous literary activity which is pretty sure to find vent in college life outside of the class room, in independent reading, in societies sometimes secret, sometimes public, and in weekly, monthly, or quarterly journals. Lowell, with his growing consciousness of literary faculty and his naturally vagarious impulses, turned aside from the set tasks of college, as we have seen, and allowed himself to be indifferent to the routine imposed by college regulations. There are always men in college who undertake to be independent while living in it; sometimes the instinct is wise, sometimes it is merely the impulse of an indolent or conceited nature, but college authorities, like most constitutional governors, are bound to take more account of law than arbitrary and irresponsible rulers are, and their severity falls indiscriminately on the just and unjust. Lowell had made himself amenable to discipline on this score, but he might have escaped with reprimands only, had he not committed a breach of propriety in chapel which could not be overlooked. Such, at least, is the recollection of one of his college mates writing long afterward to Mr. T. W. Higginson, who prints his letter in “Old Cambridge.”

The circumstantial account given in this letter has a plausible air, and may be wholly true, but if so, it was probably the final occasion rather than the cause of Lowell’s suspension. The record of the Faculty is somewhat more general in its explanation. “25 June, 1838. Voted that Lowell, senior, on account of continued neglect of his college duties be suspended till the Saturday before Commencement, to pursue his studies with Mr. Frost of Concord, to recite to him twice a day, reviewing the whole of Locke’s ‘Essay’ [On the Human Understanding], and studying also Mackintosh’s ‘Review of Ethical Philosophy,’ to be examined in both on his return, and not to visit Cambridge during the period of his suspension.”

Lowell seems to have taken his exile philosophically. The fact that he would not be able to read the class poem he had been chosen to give did not prevent him from writing it, and the isolation of his life gave him plenty of time for working at it. The mild discipline of “rustication” included, as the record shows, the requisite amount of study, and Concord, to which he was sent for a couple of months of study and reflection, was only fifteen miles from Cambridge. The Rev. Barzillai Frost, to whose oversight he was committed and with whom he lodged, was a young man, recently graduated from the Harvard Divinity School, and Mrs. Frost endeared herself to the young culprit by her affectionate care. In a speech which Lowell made at Concord, on the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the town, he introduced this slight reminiscence of his work with Mr. Frost:—

“In rising to-day I could not help being reminded of one of my adventures with my excellent tutor when I was in Concord. I was obliged to read with him ‘Locke on the Human Understanding.’ My tutor was a great admirer of Locke, and thought he was the greatest Englishman that ever lived, and nothing pleased him more, consequently, than now and then to cross swords with Locke in argument. I was not slow, you may imagine, to encourage him in this laudable enterprise. Whenever a question arose between my tutor and Locke, I always took Locke’s side. I remember on one occasion, although I cannot now recall the exact passage in Locke,—it was something about continuity of ideas,—my excellent tutor told me that in that case Locke was quite mistaken in his views. My tutor said: ‘For instance, Locke says that the mind is never without an idea; now I am conscious frequently that my mind is without any idea at all.’ And I must confess that that anecdote came vividly to my mind when I got up on what Judge Hoar has justly characterized as the most important part of an orator’s person.”

Lowell knew something of Emerson when he went to Concord. His letters show him before that time going to hear him lecture in Boston, and years afterward he recalled with fervor the impression made upon him by Emerson’s address before the Φ Β Κ in Lowell’s junior year. It “was an event,” he says, “without any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent! It was our Yankee version of a lecture by Abelard, our Harvard parallel to the last public appearance of Schelling.”[20] But in 1838 Emerson had published little, his fame resting mainly on his public lectures and addresses. In the address at Concord, quoted above, Lowell records a memory of the personal relations which he then established with the elder poet:—

“I am not an adopted son of Concord. I cannot call myself that. But I can say, perhaps, that under the old fashion which still existed when I was young, I was ‘bound out’ to Concord for a period of time; and I must say that she treated me very kindly. I then for the first time made the acquaintance of Mr. Emerson, and I still recall with a kind of pathos, as Dante did that of his old teacher, Brunetto Latini, ‘La cara e buona imagine paterna,’ ‘The dear and good paternal image,’ which he showed me here; and I can also finish the quotation and say, ‘And shows me how man makes himself eternal.’ I remember he was so kind to me—I, rather a flighty and exceedingly youthful boy, as to take me with him on some of his walks, particularly a walk to the cliffs, which I shall never forget.”

Lowell formed at Concord the friendship which lasted for life with E. R. Hoar, and the lady who was to be Judge Hoar’s wife. These two indeed seemed to be excepted in his mind from the Concord people whom he met. He was plainly, as his letters show, in a restless mood, dissatisfied with himself, going through his appointed tasks with the obedience which was habitual, and writing, as the impulse took him, on his Class Poem, but moody, irritable, and chafing at the bonds which held him. There was the uncomfortable consciousness of serving out his time at Concord for a momentary jest, but there was also the profounder unrest which came from the friction of discipline with the awakening of powers not yet fully understood or determined. A few passages from his letters to G. B. Loring will partially disclose the way he tossed himself about.

July 1, 1838.

You mustn’t expect so long a letter from me as the one you favored me with (and I hope sincerely you’ll favor me with many more such (for nothing is more pleasant to me than a friend’s letters) (except himself) (there, I have got into one of my parentheses, which I can’t help to save my life—damnation! I’m only making the matter worse! so I’ll begin again.... This appears to be a pretty decent sort of a place—but I’ve no patience talking about. I shall fly into a passion on paper, and then—as Hamlet says—then what? You can’t guess, now you know you can’t! Why, I should be apt to “tear my passion to tatters.” Pretty good, eh! for an un-Sheridanic one? Well, as I was saying, the poem hasn’t progressed (they say that’s a Yankee word; it’s a damned good word, as most Yankee things are) a line since I left the shades of Alma Mater. I want the spirit up here, I want

‘Mine ancient chair, whose wide embracing arms,’ etc.

I shall take to smoking again for very spite. The only time I have felt the flow of song was when I heard the bull-frogs in the river last night....

I shall do my best to please Mr. F. since I find he does his best to please me and make me comfortable; “that’s the ground I stand on.” I feel in a shocking humor, that is, not grouty (I’m not such a damned fool; no offence I hope), but cursed queer. I damn Concord, and as the man in a story I read somewhere who was shot in a duel pathetically exclaimed in his last struggle, I—“damn everything.”... I have written you more than I intended, have two more to write to-night, and 50 pages in MacIntosh.... Don’t for heaven’s sake think I write in such a hurry from affectation. I wish with all my heart it were so.

July 8.

... I don’t know that I shan’t get gloomy up here, and be obliged, like the gallant old Sir Hudibras’s sword,

“To eat into myself, for lack
Of something else to cut and hack.”

Everybody almost is calling me indolent,”[21] “blind, dependent on my own powers” and “on fate.”... I acknowledge that I have been something of a dreamer and have sacrificed perchance too assiduously on that altar to the “unknown God,” which the Divinity has builded not with hands in the bosom of every decent man, sometimes blazing out clear with flame (like Abel’s sacrifice) heaven seeking, sometimes smothered with green wood and earthward like that of Cain. Lazy, quotha! I haven’t dug, ’tis true, but I have done as well, and “since my free soul was mistress of her choice and could of books distinguish her election,” I have chosen what reading I pleased and what friends I pleased, sometimes scholars and sometimes not....

July 12.

For the Campbell I trust I needn’t let my thanks stare me in the face, so I shall leave you to put yourself in my place and imagine them. If you see Scates tell him to write, or I shall—excommunicate, or something dreadful. If you happen to go down by the bath house I wish you would take a look after the skiff and write me about it. Because perhaps I might come down to the Supper in a wagon and bring it up; at any rate, there will be nobody there to take care of it when you leave (or rather to lay claim to it), and it may be lost, for which I should be sorry, for I hope to have considerable navigation out of her yet.

August 9.

I shall be free as a bird in a fortnight, and ’twill be the last Concord will ever see of me I fancy.... I am again in doubt whether to have my “Poem” printed or no. I haven’t written a line since I have been in this horrible place. I feel as queer as a woman does probably (unmarried of course) when she finds herself in what Dante calls “mezzo cammin del nostro vita.”... I’m homesick and all that sort of thing. Miss —— being the only being I have actually sympathized with since I have been in Concord has made me feel like a fool. I must go down and see Emerson, and if he doesn’t make me feel more like a fool it won’t be for want of sympathy in that respect. He is a good-natured man, in spite of his doctrines. He travelled all the way up from his house to bring me a book which had been sent to me via him.

August 17.

The first eight pages of the “Poem” are probably printed by this time, and the proof on its winding way, as Charlie Foster would say to me. I wrote to the President requesting him to let me go home to-morrow, but haven’t yet received any answer, and doubt much whether I ever shall.

I don’t know what to do with Miss ——. She runs in my head and heart more than she has any right to, but then

A pair of black eyes
Of a charming size
And a lip so prettily curled, O!
Are enough to capsize
The intention wise
Of any man in the world, O!

For a pretty smile
Is a mighty wile
For a heart, for a heart that is light, O!
And a girl like a dove
Makes a man fall in love,
Though he knows that it isn’t right, O!

For love is a thing
That will quit the lonely king
To make sunny the cot of the peasant, O!
And it folds its gauzy wing—
In short—it is a thing—
’Tis a thing—that is deuced pleasant, O!

Oh a gentle heart
Is the better part
Of a lovely woman’s looks, O!
And I totter on the brink
Of love when I think,
When I think, when I think of Miss B——, O!

For a thousand girls
Have hair that curls,
And a sort of expressive face, O!
But it isn’t the hair
Nor the genteel air—
’Tis the heart that looks bright and gives grace, O!

Ay, lasses are many
Without e’en a penny,
But with hearts worth their weight in gold, O!
Whom I’d sooner wed—
Yea, and sooner bed
Than a princess rich, ugly, and old, O!

No bee e’er sucked honey
From gold or silver money,
But he does from the lovely flower, O!
Then give me a spouse
Without fortune, land, or house,
And her charming self for a dower, O!

By Jove, I like that better than anything I’ve written for two years! I wrote it con amore and currente calamo. ’Tis yours now, but by your leave I’ll copy it off, alter it a little and send it down as “a song” for Harvardiana, for which I protested I would write nothing O! Why, it’s good! It sings itself! I don’t think I shall alter anything but Miss B.’s name, for it ran off the end of my pen so that it must be better than I can make it. Why, I like it, I do. There isn’t anything good in it either, except in the last passage. It has really put me in good spirits. Between Sunday and Wednesday I added about 250 lines to the “Poem.” It is not finished yet. I wish it were.

The Class Poem, which he printed since he was not permitted to be present at his class celebration, when he would have read it, is a somewhat haphazard performance, as Lowell intimates in his letters. He says naïvely in one of the notes to the poem, of which there is a liberal supply in an appendix, that he suddenly discovered his subject after he had begun writing, by happening to refer in an off hand way to Kant.

“Kant, happy name! change but the K to C,
And I will wring my poem out of thee.
Thanks, vast Immanuel! thy name has given
The thing for which my brains so long have striven.
. . . . . . . .
Cant be my theme, and when she fails my song,
Her sister Humbug shall the lay prolong.”

The satire of a young collegian is apt to be pretty severe, and Lowell runs amuck of Carlyle, Emerson, the Abolitionists, the advocates of Woman’s Rights, and the Teetotallers. For the most part the poem runs along glibly in the decasyllabic verse so handy to familiar poetry, and though there are many lame lines, there are more instances of the clever distichs which Lowell knocked off so easily in later years than one would have guessed from the examples of his verse which appear in his early letters. Here, for example, are some of his lines on Carlyle:—

“Hail too, great drummer in the mental march,
Teufelsdröckh! worthy a triumphal arch,
Who send’st forth prose encumbered with jackboots,
To hobble round and pick up raw recruits,
And, able both to battle and to teach,
Mountest thy silent kettledrum to preach.
Great conqueror of the English language, hail!
How Caledonia’s goddess must turn pale
To hear the German-Græco-Latin flung
In Revolutions from a Scottish tongue!”

In the more serious and practical part of the poem there is an impassioned burst imitative of Campbell, in which he imagines the farewell words of the Cherokee Indians, who at this time, to his indignation, were being pushed westward from Georgia.

To the debit of his youthful zeal may be set down the lines on Emerson which were his footnote to the famous address to the Divinity School delivered 15 July, 1838:—

“Woe for Religion, too, when men, who claim
To place a ‘Reverend’ before their name,
Ascend the Lord’s own holy place to preach
In strains that Kneeland had been proud to reach,
And which, if measured by Judge Thacher’s scale,
Had doomed their author to the county jail!
When men just girding for the holy strife,
Their hands just cleansed to break the bread of life,
Whose souls, made whole, should never count it loss
With their own blood to witness for the cross,
Invite a man their Christian zeal to crown
By preaching earnestly the gospel-down,
Applaud him when he calls of earthly make
That One who spake as never yet man spake,
And tamely hear the anointed Son of God
Made like themselves an animated clod!”

To the credit of his manliness may be set down, per contra, the following letter which he wrote after the publication of the poem: a letter, which, for all its boyish assumption of the toga virilis, has a ring of sincerity about it:—

Cambridge, Sept. 1st, 1838.

Dear Sir,—In my class poem are a few lines about your “address.” My friends have expressed surprise that after I had enjoyed your hospitality and spoken so highly of you in private, I should have been so ‘ungrateful’ as ever to have written anything of the kind. Could I have ever dreamed that a man’s private character should interfere with his public relations, I had never blotted paper so illy. But I really thought that I was doing rightly, for I consider it as virtual a lie to hold one’s tongue as to speak an untruth. I should have written the same of my own brother. Now, sir, I trouble you with this letter because I think you a man who would think nowise the worse of me for holding up my head and speaking the truth at any sacrifice. That I could wilfully malign a man whose salt I had eaten, and whose little child I had danced on my knee,—he must be a small man who would believe so small a thing of his fellow.

But this word “ingratitude” is a very harsh and grating word, and one which I hope would never be laid to my charge since I stood at my mother’s knee and learnt the first very alphabet, as it were, of goodness. I hope that if you have leisure, sir, you will answer this letter and put me at rest. I hope you will acquit me (for I do not still think there is aught to forgive or pardon, and I trust you will not after reading this letter) of all uncharitableness.

Of course no one can feel it as strongly as I do, for since my friends have hinted at this “ingratitude” I have felt a great deal, and scarcely dare to look at the Tennyson you lent me without expecting some of the devils on the cover to make faces at me.

I hope you will find time to answer this and that I may still enjoy your friendship and be able to take you by the hand and look you in the face, as honest man should to honest man.

I remain yours with respect,
James Russell Lowell.

P. S. I have sent with this a copy of my “poem”—if it be not too tiresome, you would perhaps think better of me, if you were to read it through. I am not silly enough to suppose that this can be of any importance to you (if, indeed, you ever heard of the passage I refer to), but it is of very great importance to me.

J. R. L.

Lowell’s own comment on the poem years after was in the lines:—

“Behold the baby arrows of that wit
Wherewith I dared assail the woundless Truth!
Love hath refilled the quiver, and with it
The man shall win atonement for the youth.”[22]

In this the earliest of his acknowledged publications, as so often in his later poems, satire and sentiment jostle each other. The predominant note, indeed, is satire in the lofty tone of nineteen, but the invocation and the close are in a different strain. Here, too, there is the exaltation of a very young man, and one may read phrases which perhaps said more than Lowell meant to say; but it was a ruffled youth with which his college career closed, and this period of his life was not to know as yet any steadying force. It is not strange that he grasped at somewhat illusory phantoms in his eagerness to stay himself. Here are the invocation and epilogue:—

“Oh thou! to whom, where’er my footstep roam,
My restless soul would spread its pinions home,—
Reality! more fair than any seeming
E’er blest the fancy of an angel’s dreaming,—
Be thou my muse, in whose blue eye I see
The heaven of my heart’s eternity!
Oh, hover like a spirit at my side,
In all my wanderings a heavenly guide,
Then, if in Cant’s dim mists I lose my way,
Thy blessed smile shall lead me back to day,
And, when I turn me from the land of night,
Thou, morning star of love, shalt herald light!

“Lady! whom I have dared to call my muse,
With thee my day began, with thee shall end—
Thou can’st not such a poor request refuse
To let thine image with its closing blend!
As turn the flowers to the quiet dews,
Fairest, so turns my yearning heart to thee,
For thee it pineth—as the homesick shell
Mourns to be once again beneath the sea—
Oh let thine eyes upon this tribute dwell,
And think—one moment kindly think of me!
Alone—my spirit seeks thy company,
And in all beautiful communes with thine,
In crowds—it ever seeks alone to be
To dream of gazing in thy gentle eyne!”

After all, the irregular impulses of the class poem point to what is of more consequence, the beginning of Lowell’s manhood. Until the summer of 1837, he had been a happy-go-lucky boy, sunning himself in literature, in nature, and in his friends; then there set in a period when he was at odds with fortune, and a stirring of half-understood desires arose; the consciousness of power was struggling with the wilfulness of youth.

CHAPTER III
FIRST VENTURES
1838-1844

As his college course drew near its close, Lowell began to forecast his immediate future. His growing devotion to letters, especially to poetry, and perhaps the wish to linger a little longer within the shelter of the academic life, led him to cherish the notion of studying a while in Germany, and he wrote to his father, who was still abroad, in pursuance of this plan; but he received no encouragement. Germany, it was properly said to him, was no place for the study of law by an American, and the law was regarded as his vocation.

Vaguely conscious of his real calling, Lowell passed in review the two professions of the ministry and the law, which at that time would be likely to attract one who had begun to use his pen with as much assiduity as an embryo artist plies his pencil in sketches. Unquestionably the ministry opened a fair way of life to him, somewhat as it had, less than a score of years earlier, to Emerson, though the conditions had already begun to change. Lowell shrank from adopting that calling with an instinct which sprang in part from his sense of its traditional sacredness, in part from an increasing consciousness of his own separation from the form of religious teaching which would naturally be looked for in him. There was a preacher in Lowell not merely by inheritance, but, even at this time of nonsense and idle levity, in the stirring of a soul that hated evil, and longed to exercise an active influence in righting wrongs. The full strength of this impulse was to be developed shortly, and thenceforward to find constant expression through his life, for a preacher at bottom he was throughout his career. An undercurrent of feeling persuaded him that he might even take to preaching, if he could be sure of being a celibate, and independent of any harassing anxiety respecting his support. But as he wrote of himself a few years later to his friend Briggs: “I believe my religion (I am an infidel, you know, to the Christianity of to-day, and so my religion is something palpable to me in case of strait) arms me against any sorrows to come.” The youthful protest in the parenthesis must be taken seriously, but not subjected to microscopic analysis. Reverence was an abiding element in his nature, and it was early displayed, but it was reverence for what was intrinsically to be revered, and that very spirit carried with it an impatient reaction against conventional religion. In the letter to Dr. Loring, in which he discussed the question of going into the Divinity School, he was led, from a slight reference to the doctrines which Emerson was announcing, to speak more directly of personal religion.

“I don’t know,” he says, “whether we poor little worms (who though but little lower than the angels are [but] a little higher than those whom our every step annihilates) ought not to condescend to allow that there may be something above his reason. We must sometimes receive light like the Aurora without knowing where it comes from. And then, on the other hand, we may be allowed to doubt whether our wise Creator would have given us a dispensation by which to govern our everyday life, any part of which was repugnant to our reason. It is a question which every man must settle for himself: indeed he were mad to let any settle it for him.”

An independence of judgment did not lead him to throw away a fundamental faith in spiritual realities, but it made him ready to refuse conformity with the nearest form of religion. At the time he was writing, Lowell thought he saw the churches, if not tolerant of a great evil, at least mainly silent before it, and with the radicalism which was as integral a part of him as his conservatism, he broke away from associations which seemed thus inert and false to the very ideals they professed to cherish. Had not the poetic impulse and the artistic temper been so strong in him, it is quite possible that as Emerson in his philosophic idealism had let the minister’s gown slip from his shoulders, yet had remained on the platform, so Lowell in his moral earnestness might, if he had really gone into the ministry, have shortly become a witty reformer, preaching with the prophet’s leathern girdle and not in the priest’s cassock.

But heredity and an impulse to deliver his mind were not strong enough to take him into the pulpit against the clear dictates of a reasonable judgment, and with apparently no disposition toward medicine, he turned almost from necessity to the law. The law, at first, at any rate, did not so much attract him, as it was reached by a process of elimination. The substantial motive which urged him was his need of a livelihood. Although his father at this time was in what is quaintly termed “comfortable circumstances,” Lowell, like his fellows everywhere in America, most certainly in New England, never would have entertained the notion of living indefinitely at his father’s expense. As a matter of course he must earn his living, and he was so meagrely supplied even with pocket money at this time that his letters contain frequent illustration of his inability to indulge in petty pleasures—a short journey, for instance, the purchase of a book or pamphlet, even postage on letters.

So, in the fall of 1838, when he was living at Elmwood with his brother Charles, he began to read Blackstone “with as good a grace and as few wry faces” as he could. But suddenly, a fortnight only after making this assertion, he had abandoned the notion of studying law, out of utter distaste for it. It was after a great struggle, he says, but the struggle was evidently one of those occasional self-communings of the young man who is not predestined to any profession, and yet is unable to respond to the half articulate demands of his nature. We can read Lowell’s mind at this time in the fragmentary confessions of his letters, and see that the controlling influence was to secure ultimately the right to devote himself to literature. The law is a jealous mistress, and Lowell was sagacious enough to perceive that to secure success in the profession he must needs devote himself to it with long and unremitting attention, and he was sure a real love for the study of law was a condition precedent to success. So again he weighed the chances. Once more he considered the ministry; he even speculated over the possibilities of medicine—his friend Loring had taken up that for his profession; but with a certain common-sense view of the matter, he argued that if his occupation were to be merely a means to an end, why, trade was the logical road to money-making, and he set about looking for a “place in a store.”

“I must expect,” he writes ruefully, “to give up almost entirely all literary pursuits, and instead of making rhymes, devote myself to making money.” But with a whimsical attempt after all to join his ideals with this practical course, after saying that in abandoning the law he gives up the chance of going to Europe, since his father had promised him this plum if he would stick to the law for three years, he closes his letter: “I intend to go into a foreign store so that I may be able to go to Europe yet. I shall have to brush up my French so as to write foreign letters.”

This was written on Tuesday the 30th of October. The next Monday, when he had gone to Boston to look for a place, he dropped in at the United States court where a case was on in which Webster was one of the counsel. His imagination took fire. “I had not been there an hour,” he writes, “before I determined to continue in my profession and study as well as I could.” By an unexpected circumstance, however, he was within a month interrupted in his study. His brother Robert, who was in the counting-room of a coal merchant, was laid up with a lame hand, and so James took his place at the desk. It is not impossible that he was secretly glad of making thus, with a good conscience, a little test of his aptitude for business.

His position as a substitute gave him a breathing spell, and he plunged again into rhyming. His letters during the winter were full of experiments in verse, and he was, moreover, giving serious attention to the technique of poetry, having recourse to such manuals as Sidney’s “Defense of Poesie” and Puttenham’s “Art of English Poesie,” a characteristic act, for he had the same instinct for the great genetic period of English poetry as Lamb and his fellows in England had a generation earlier. He even began to throw out lines in the direction of self-support through literature. Besides his trials in the newspapers and magazines, he took the chance given him to lecture in Concord, and he wondered if his friend Loring could get him an opportunity at Andover. He had “quitted the law forever” on the 26th of February, 1839, but the mood of exhilaration over a possible maintenance through lecturing evaporated after a return from Concord with four dollars, less his travelling expenses, as the result of his first experiment. And yet business was as repellent to him as law. In a letter to G. B. Loring of March, 1839, he bursts forth into a cry of bitterness:—

“I don’t know what to do with myself. I am afraid people will think me a fool if I change again, and yet I can hardly hope ever to be satisfied where I am. I shouldn’t wonder if next Monday saw me with Kent’s Commentaries under my arm. I think I might get to take an interest in it, and then I should not fear at all about the living. If I had not been thrice a fool, I should have been in Dane Law College reciting at this very moment. And what makes me feel still worse is that nobody knows or can know my motive for changing, and the struggle which kept me irresolute.

“I am certainly just at present in a miserable state, and I won’t live so long. You must excuse the shortness of this letter, for my feelings are in such a distracted sort of a state that the more I write the less do I feel able to write.

“Dear George, when I am set at table
I am indeed quite miserable,
And when as that I lie in bed,
Strife and confusion whirl my head;
When I am getting up at morn
I feel confoundedly forlorn,
And when I go to bed at eve
I can do nought but sigh and grieve.
When I am walking into town
I feel all utterly cast down,
And when I’m walking out from it
I feel full many a sorrow fit.”

The struggle in his mind went on through the rest of the spring. He kept doggedly at his desk, apparently, but wrote more verse, especially of a serious sort. At last, on the 20th of May, he could write in a somewhat forced strain of exultation: “Rejoice with me! For to-morrow I shall be free. Without saying a word to any one, I shall quietly proceed to Dane Law College to recitation. Now shall I be happy again as far as that is concerned. Nature will smile for me yet again. I shall hear the merry tinkle of the brook and think not of the tinkle of dollars and cents. Upon the ocean I may look, nor dream of the rates of freight. Let us rejoice, George, in the days of our youth. We shall find it very different when we come to support ourselves. Good old Homer in the Odyssey makes Telemachus tell Minerva, ‘Well may they laugh and sing and dance, for they are eating the bread of another man.’ Now we who eat our father’s bread at present may be as merry as we will. But very different will it be when every potato that we eat (lucky if we can get even those) shall seem watersoaked with the sweat of our brow. I am going to be as happy as the days are long.”

A little later he wrote: “I am now a law student, and am really studying and intend to study. I shall now be able to come and spend some Saturday with you and come down Monday morning.... To-day I have been engaged an hour in recitation, 9 to 10, and then from 11 to 3-1/2 o’clock in studying law, which, as we only have one recitation a day, is pretty well. I have determined that I will now do something. I am lazy enough, heaven knows, but not half so much so as some of my friends suppose. At all events, I was never made for a merchant, and I even begin to doubt whether I was made for anything in particular but to loiter through life and then become manure.”

From this time forward Lowell did not relinquish his study of law. He confessed, indeed, to a doubt if he should ever practice. He had a “blind presentiment of becoming independent in some other way,” and he allowed himself to dream of cultivating literature in solitude on a little oatmeal, but he pushed through to the nominal end, and took his degree of bachelor of laws at commencement in August, 1840.[23] Not long after, he entered the law office in Boston of Mr. Charles Greely Loring, and when the winter came he went himself to Boston to live.

The vacillation and apparent irresolution outlined in his fickle pursuit of a profession in the months after his graduation are unmistakable, but there are expressions now and then in the letters we have quoted that strike one as a little exaggerated even to one so open to attacks from conscience as was Lowell. Why such a pother, one might ask, over an embarrassment which is not very uncommon, and after all touches chiefly the prudential side of character? “Nobody knows or can know my motives for changing, and the struggle which kept me irresolute;” but the boyish companion to whom he wrote undoubtedly had an inkling of his friend’s perturbation, though frank as that friend was in his correspondence and intercourse, he could surely have said, “the heart knoweth its own bitterness.”

The solution is simple enough in statement. Before his last year in college Lowell had met and fallen fiercely in love with a beautiful girl, one of the circle in which his family moved, and endowed with intellectual grace and great charm of manner. Then something came between them, and separation became inevitable, at least it became so in Lowell’s own view of the situation. The shock of this rupture left not a shade of reproach for the girl in Lowell’s mind, but it broke up the fountains of the deep in his own life. He was scarcely more than a boy in years, but he had in temperament and capacity for emotion a far greater maturity. He could write of himself a few years later: “Brought up in a very reserved and conventional family, I cannot in society appear what I really am. I go out sometimes with my heart so full of yearning toward my fellows that the indifferent look with which even entire strangers pass me brings tears to my eyes.” There was indeed an extraordinary frankness about him in these early days, filling his letters with expressions which might easily have made him wince in later years; but the spontaneity of his nature, which was always seen in the unguardedness of his familiar writing and his conversation, had in these days the added ingenuousness of youth.

The experience thus referred to in the summer of 1837 was no short, sharp passion burning itself out in quick rage; it smouldered and leaped up into flame at intervals for two years, fed moreover by the consciousness of his own impotence and the predicament into which he was helplessly drawn; and it was during these two years that this restlessness and vacillation of temper were almost ungovernable. Later in life even he looked back with horror upon this time, saying half in pity, half in contempt for himself, that he put a cocked pistol to his forehead in 1839, and had not finally the courage to pull the trigger.

It would be easy to fill many pages with illustrations drawn from unprinted poems written during this period, and they would have the added value of disclosing the fact that poetry was fast becoming the natural expression of his mind, even while he was fashioning it with constantly better art. In a letter written to Loring, 26 July, 1839, containing two bits of verse lyrically interpretative of his experience, he says: “You must not be surprised if I don’t write again for some time, but the next time I do write I trust my letters will be better worth the postage. At any rate, it shall be filled more with my real than with my poetical me; although now they are synonymous terms, as they should be, for my poetry answers me very much as a sort of journal or rather nousometer.”

It is hard for most of us to escape the lurking judgment that the man, or boy either, who throws his spiritual experience into verse is more or less consciously dramatizing, and we are apt to credit greater honesty to the one who does not than to the one who does poetize his disappointments; but in spite of the artfulness which betrays itself in the effort of one who has not yet perfect command of his instrument, there is a ring of sincerity about Lowell’s poetic journal which, without juggling, we both infer from his nature as it is otherwise disclosed, and make illustrative of the real life of the spirit. Here are some verses which occur in a letter to Dr. Loring in the summer of 1839. In writing of them to his friend a few days later, Lowell says: “The lines I wrote to you the other day were improvised, and you must judge them leniently accordingly. I do not think now, as I did ‘two years ago,’ that poetry must be an inspiration, but am convinced that somewhat of care, nay, even of thought, is requisite in a poem.”

“Turn back your eyes, my friend, with me
Upon those two late parted years—
Nay, look alone, for I can see
But inward through these bitter tears:
Deep grief sometimes our mind’s eye clears.

“How much lies in that one word ‘Past’!
More than in all that waits before;
How many a saddened glance is cast
To that stern wall of nevermore,
Whose shadow glooms our heart’s deep core.
. . . . . . . .
“As hard it is for mortal glance
To pierce the Has been’s mystery
And force of iron circumstance
Which said let these and these things be,
As to resolve futurity.

“A many streams that once ran full
Of joy or Marah waves of pain,
Wasting or making beautiful,
Have sunk no more to flow again,
And scarce the tracks they wore remain.

“And many shades of joy and woe
Pass cloudlike, silent, o’er my soul,
Which not one being else may know,
And into utter darkness roll,
Links lost from out my being’s whole.
. . . . . . . .
“This Present is becoming Past;
Live then each moment manfully
If you would wish your deeds to last,
Sowing good seed continually
Whose harvest time is yet to be.
———
“In our great pride we think that we
Build up our high or low estate,
Dimly half conscious that we see
The paths which lead to small and great
Through the fixed eye of settled Fate.

“The Past may guide the Future’s ways:
Seeds cast far up the stream of time,
Returning after many days,
May grow to their ordained prime
Of fruitage in another clime.”

As if to reinforce our confidence in the genuineness of the emotion which prompted these moral verses, written apparently to the sound of Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life,” which had just appeared in the Knickerbocker, we come in a few weeks to a rhymed letter in which a reminiscence of the same experience is recorded with simplicity and naturalness in a homely poetic strain:—

“Two years ago, in days how like to these,
Yet how unlike! beneath the changing trees
I walked with her full many a happy hour,
Pausing to gather some belated flower,
Or to pick up some nut half eaten, dropt
By a scared squirrel as away he hopt.
The jest, the laugh, and the more high debate
To which the forest aisles seem consecrate,
Nay, even the jest, and the dark plaided shawl
That loved her light form—I remember all:
For then I entered that fair gate of love
On whose bright arch should be inscribed above,
As o’er that other in the Tuscan’s story—
‘Per me si va ne l’eterno dolore.’
The leaves were falling round us then, and we
Talked of their many meanings musingly.
Ah, woe is me! we did not speak at all
Of how love’s leaves will wither, change, and fall—
Full silently—and how the pent up breast
Will hide the tears that cannot be represt.”

In this same letter Lowell enumerates at the close the books he is reading and about to read:—

“I’m reading now the Grecian tragedies,
Stern, gloomy Æschylus, great Sophocles,
And him of Salamis whose works remain
More perfect to us than the other twain.
(Time’s a gourmand, at least he was so then,
And thinks his leavings good enough for men.)
When I have critically read all these,
I’ll dip in cloudy Aristophanes,
And then the Latin dramatists, and next
With mathematics shall my brain be vext.
So if I carry all my projects through
I shall do pretty well, I think, don’t you?”

What most impresses the attentive reader of Lowell’s verses and letters as the two years, to which he so often refers, draw to a close, is the evidence that the young man was finally emerging from the mist and cloud through which he had been struggling, and was getting his feet upon solid ground, so that not only was his irresolution changed for a fairly diligent pursuit of his profession, but he had acquired a greater robustness of spirit and was squaring himself with life in earnest. The internal conflict had been fought out and the substantial victory gained was showing itself in greater self-reliance and a growth in manly ways.

It is therefore with especial satisfaction that the chronicler of his external history comes upon an event which was to mark emphatically the attainment of his intellectual and spiritual majority. Near the end of the year 1839 he made the acquaintance of Maria White. She was the daughter of Mr. Abijah White, a farmer in Watertown, whom Lowell characterized on first meeting him as “the most perfect specimen of a bluff, honest, hospitable country squire you can possibly imagine.” Mr. White had a family of sons and daughters who thenceforward became Lowell’s familiar acquaintance. One of the sons, William A. White, had been a classmate at Harvard,—he speaks of him once as his “quondam chum,”—and it was by him that Lowell was introduced to his home. As Lowell had written with great freedom to his friend Loring of his troubled experience, so now one may trace in this very frank correspondence the manner in which this new affection displaced the mournfulness of that experience and substituted great peace and content for the soreness which still remained after a struggle that had resulted in substantial self-mastery.

In his earliest, hardly more than casual reference to Maria White he characterizes her as “a very pleasant and pleasing young lady” who “knows more poetry” than any one he is acquainted with. “I mean,” he says, “she is able to repeat more. She is more familiar, however, with modern poets than with the pure well-springs of English poesy.” His changing mood during the winter months that follow is visible in the poetry which he writes and copies in his letters, but in the early summer there is a bolder and franker tone, until the acquaintance which has ripened into intimacy culminates in an engagement not long after the completion of the lover’s law studies.

June 13, 1840. I got back from Watertown, whither I went to a gathering at Miss Hale’s (whose family are boarding at the Nonantum). I spent the night at W. A. W.’s. Lovely indeed it was with its fair moon and stars and floating cloud mist. I walked back with M. W. on my arm, and not only did my body go back, but my spirit also over the footsteps of other years. Were not the nights then as lovely ... and the river that we gazed down into—think you those water-parties are so soon forgotten? When we got to the house we sat upon the steps and talked,—

And then like a Spring-swollen river
Roll the full waves of her tumultuous thought,
Crested with glittering spray;
Her wild lips curve and quiver,
And my rapt soul on the deep stream upcaught,
Lulled by a dreamful music ever,
Unwittingly is borne away.
. . . . . . .
I float to a delicious land,
By a sunset Heaven spanned,
And musical with streams.
Around, the calm majestic forms
And Godlike eyes of early Greece I see,
Or listen till my spirit warms
To songs of courtly chivalry,
Or weep, unmindful if my tears be seen,
For the meek suffering love of poor Undine.

She is truly a glorious girl with her spirit eyes. On the mantel is a moss rose she gave me and which when it withers I shall enshrine in my Homer. This morning I drove her up to Waltham. They tell me I shall be in love with her. But there is but one Love. I love her because she is a woman, and so was another being I loved.

August 18, 1840. Since you heard from me I have been at Nantasket and had a fine time. I found M. W., her brother, and Page,[24] down there, and I carried Heath with me. I had one glorious ride on the beach with M. W., I having hired a horse and gig at Hingham. Hingham is a strange place. I walked through the greater part of it one day and did not even see a living soul....

Nantasket is a beautiful place. The beach is five miles long, smooth, hard sand without a pebble. When the wind blows on shore you may see one line of unbroken white foam, five miles long, roll up the beach at once. I spent one whole evening alone on the rocks with M. W. A glorious evening it was. Page’s portrait of M. W. is going to be fine, at least I hope so. It ought to be....

August 25, 1840. I have just finished reading Goethe’s correspondence with a child, Bettina Brentano. I had long tried (rather wished) to get it, the more so from some beautiful extracts which M. W. read to me, but had never seen it till now. It is beautiful. It is wonderful when we think that Bettina was a child. It is like sunshine on grass newly rained upon—like the smell of a flower—like the song of a bird. We are given to look into the very core of the most loving heart that ever came directly from God and forgot not whence it came.

But it was mournful to think that all this love should have been given to the cold, hard Goethe.[25] I wanted such a soul for myself. M. W.’s is nearer to it than any I have ever seen. But I should have seen her three years ago. If that other love could raise such a tempest in my soul as to fling up the foul and slimy weeds from the bottom, and make it for so long sluggish and muddy, a disappointment from her would I think have broken my heart.

George, twice lately I have had a very strange dream. Byron says that dreams “shake us with the vision of the past.” Do they not also shake us with the vision of what is to come? I dreamed that I went to see M. W., that I saw her walking just before me, and that when I strove to overtake her, she vanished. I asked a man whom I met if he had seen her (describing her). He said “yes, she has gone down the happy road.” I followed, but could get no glimpse of her. Does this mean that I shall love M. W. and that she will die? Homer says that there are two gates of quickly fading dreams, one of sawn ivory, and the other of polished horn. Those dreams that pass thro’ the ivory gate are liars, but those that forth issue from the polished horn tell truth to any one of mortals who sees them. Did my dream come thro’ the horn or the ivory? Are you oneirocritical enough to say? At any rate, remember this. M. W. lent me a “sweet” book (she did not call it so and I don’t know why I did), “Philothea,” by Mrs. Child. If you ever come across it, read it. It is, as Mr. Emerson called it, “a divine book.”... To-day is (or was) Commencement. I was standing in the pew listening to the music when I looked round and saw a pair of eyes fixed on me that made me feel glad; they were M. W.’s. I thought she was in Beverly. I managed to squeeze my way up to her at last and walked with her to Judge Fay’s, stayed there a little while and then went to take my degree of LL. B. After dining with the alumni, I walked round to the President’s in the faint hope of seeing her again. Just as I got nearly there, I saw her go in. I went in after. The man she was with left her, and I enjoyed her for more than two hours. Scates made his appearance here to-day, so that my day has been a very happy one.

P. S. There are more lies contained in the piece of parchment on which my degree is written than I ever before saw in a like compass. It praises me for assiduous attention at recitations, etc., etc. (This letter seems to be all about M. W.)

Good by, J. R. L.

Sunday, [31 August, 1840.] I have received your letter and had also written an answer to it, which I just burnt. It was written when I was not in a fit state of mind to write. I had been feeling very strongly that

“Custom lies about us with a weight
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life.”

If I had written this an hour ago, it would have been black and melancholy enough, but I have smoked three cigars and ruminated and am calm—almost....

If I had seen her three years ago things might have been not thus. But yet I would not give up the bitter knowledge I gained last summer for much—very much.

“Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
Who never passed the lonesome hours,
Weeping and watching for the morrow,
He knows ye not, ye Heavenly powers.”

I have been calmer and stronger ever since. Oh the glory of a calm, still soul! If we could keep our souls ever in a holy silence, we should be wise, we should hear the music of the spheres. But they will ever be talking to themselves. If we could but become so, we should then ever have at our beck those divine messengers which visit us also as well as Abraham....

Do “they say” that she is “transcendental”? Yes, she does indeed go beyond them. They cannot understand a being like her. But if they mean that she is unfit for the duties of life, they are entirely wrong. She has more “common sense” than any woman I have ever seen. Genius always has. Hear what Maria herself says in one of her glorious letters to me. “When I said that I loved you, I almost felt as if I had said ‘and I will espouse sorrow for thy sake,’ for I have lived long enough and observed life keenly enough to know that not the truest and most exalted love can bar the approach of much care and sorrow.” And all these she is ready and able to bear. Yes, she will love you, for she loves everything that I love.

The first volume of poetry which Lowell published, “A Year’s Life,” is, as its name intimates, a poetic record of the time covered by these and other passages from his correspondence. It appeared in January, 1841, and he was moved to print it both because Miss White desired it, and because it was so full of her. The love which found expression, as we have seen, in letters to a familiar friend, could not fail of an outlet in verse, and was but thinly concealed from the public in a volume which, from Dedication to Epilogue, was glowing with it. Many of the poems he had already printed in the magazines for which he had been diligently writing, and these poems, as they appeared, were announcements, to those who knew both the lovers, of the pure passion which was flaming.

Two of the poems in particular reflect Lowell’s idealization of the lady and his consciousness of what this experience meant to him. “‘Ianthe,’” he writes to Loring, “is good as far as it goes. I did not know her then. She is a glorious creature indeed!”

“Dear, glorious creature!”

he exclaims, near the close of the poem,

“With eyes so dewy bright,
And tenderest feeling
Itself revealing
In every look and feature,
Welcome as a homestead light
To one long-wandering in a clouded night;
O, lovelier far her woman’s weakness,
Which yet is strongly mailed
In armor of courageous meekness
And faith that never failed!”

The lines on pages 77, 78 are from the same poem, which was written thus when the acquaintance was ripening into intimacy. The whole poem is a tribute to the visionary beauty of her face and character as revealed to him. “There is a light,” thus the poem opens:—

“There is a light within her eyes
Like gleams of wandering fire-flies;
From light to shade it leaps and moves
Whenever in her soul arise
The holy shapes of things she loves.”

Throughout the poem runs, moreover, an undercurrent of holy awe and a presage of her short life, which drew from him the reflections on death that occur in his letters:—

“I may not tell the blessedness
Her mild eyes send to mine,
The sunset-tinted haziness
Of their mysterious shine,
The dim and holy mournfulness
Of their mellow light divine;
The shadows of the lashes lie
Over them so lovingly,
That they seem to melt away
In a doubtful twilight-gray,
While I watch the stars arise
In the evening of her eyes.
I love it, yet I almost dread
To think what it foreshadoweth;
And, when I muse how I have read
That such strange light betokened death,—
Instead of fire-fly gleams, I see
Wild corpse lights gliding waveringly.”

The closing section of the poem holds a reflection of that image which is after all most enshrined in the poet’s heart, as one may gather not only from his after words concerning her, but from the influence manifest in his own early career from this time forward.

“Early and late, at her soul’s gate
Sits Chastity in warderwise,
No thought unchallenged, small or great,
Goes thence into her eyes;
Nor may a low, unworthy thought
Beyond that virgin warder win,
Nor one, whose passion is not ‘ought,’
May go without, or enter in.
I call her, seeing those pure eyes,
The Eve of a new Paradise,
Which she by gentle word and deed,
And look no less, doth still create
About her, for her great thoughts breed
A calm that lifts us from our fallen state,
And makes us while with her both good and great,—
Nor is their memory wanting in our need:
With stronger loving, every hour,
Turneth my heart to this frail flower,
Which, thoughtless of the world, hath grown
To beauty and meek gentleness,
Here in a fair world of its own,—
By woman’s instinct trained alone,—
A lily fair which God did bless,
And which from Nature’s heart did draw
Love, wisdom, peace, and Heaven’s perfect law.”

Lowell did not retain “Ianthe” in his later collections, but he reprinted to the last the other poem especially identified with Miss White which bears the significant title “Irene.” This, as the reader perceives, is more distinctly a piece of characterization, and its closing lines, wherein Irene is likened to the lone star seen by sailors tempest-tost, may be read as carrying more than a pretty poetic simile, for it cannot be doubted that the love which now possessed the poet was in a profound sense a word of peace to him. Something of the same strain, though more remote and dramatic, may be read in the poem “The Sirens,” which is also retained by Lowell in his later collections, and is dated in “A Year’s Life” “Nantasket, July, 1840,” a date which has an added interest when one refers to the letter given above on page 78. One more passage may be read from his letters as giving his own final word of retrospect and prospect. It occurs in a letter to G. B. Loring, 2 January, 1841.

“Yes, my friend, it is most true that I have changed. I thank her and one other, under God, for it.... Had the love I bore to a woman you know of three years ago, been as pure, true, and holy as that I bear to her who ‘never from me shall be divided,’ I had been a man sooner. My love for her was fierce and savage. It rose not like the fair evening star on the evening I first saw her (I remember it well), but (as she has said of such love) like a lurid meteor. And it fell as suddenly. For a time I was dazed by its glare and startled by the noise of its bursting. But I grew calm and soon morning dawned....

“And I mean to live as one beloved by such a woman should live. She is every way noble. People have called ‘Irene’ a beautiful piece of poetry. And so it is. It owes all its beauty to her, and were it a thousand times as beautiful would not be so much so as she is to me.”

The strong emotional experience which thus possessed Lowell came to him when he was largely under the sway of sentiment, but though, as we have seen, it was translated into poetry very freely, it is not so much the immediate expression in literary form which concerns us as it is the infusion of an element in the formation of character. Lowell was overcharged in his youth with sensitiveness in affection. There was a fitfulness in his demonstration of it, an almost ungovernable outflow of feeling, which left him in danger of coming under the control of morbid impulse. What he required, and what most happily he found, was the serenity and steadfastness of a nature, exalted like his own, but glowing with an ardor which had other than purely personal aim.

Miss White was a highly sensitive girl of a type not unknown, especially at that time, in New England. Of delicate sensibility, she listened eagerly to the voices rising about her which found their choragus in Emerson. It was before the time of much organization among women, but not before the time when one and another woman, inheritors of a refined conscience, stirred by the movement in the air, sought to do justice to their convictions in espousing this or that moral cause, not at all necessarily in public championship, but in the eloquent zeal of domestic life. As her brother William was to become an active reformer, so she fed her spirit with aspirations for temperance, and for that abolition of slavery which was already beginning to dominate the moral earnestness of the community, holding all other reforms as subordinate to this. Lowell, seeing in her a Una, was quickened in the spirit which had already been awakened, and instantly donned his armor as her Red Cross Knight.[26]

At this period there was a much greater homogeneity in New England life, than there has been at any time since. The democratizing of society had been going on under favoring conditions, for industry was still at the basis of order, less was made of the distinction of wealth, more of the distinction of education, the aristocratic element was under the same general law of hard work, and a proletariat class had not been created by an inflow of the waste of Europe which inevitably accompanied the sturdy peasants. The city had not yet swept ardent youth into its rapids, and the simplicity of modes of life was hardly more marked in the country than in the town. Whoever recalls the now old-fashioned tales by Miss Catherine Sedgwick will have a truthful picture of a social order which seems Arcadian in the haze of sixty years since.

It was, in some aspects, the culmination of the ingrowing New England just before the Atlantic ocean became contracted to a broad stream, the West was clutched by iron hands, and all manner of forces conspired to render this secluded corner of the earth a cosmopolitan part of a larger community.

One of the most characteristic phases of this life was the attention paid by all classes to the awakening which was going on in education, reform, politics, and religion. Mr. Norton has printed a letter[27] of Lowell’s in which he gives an animated picture of a temperance celebration in Watertown, at which Maria White appeared in a sort of New England translation of a Queen of the May, as the celebration itself was a festival in the moral vernacular. Lowell’s own delight in her was unbounded, and the scene as he depicts it, was a New England idyl.

Maria White and her brother belonged to a group of young people on most friendly terms with one another, and known offhand by themselves as the Band. They lived in various places, Boston, Cambridge, Watertown, Salem, and were constantly seeking occasions for familiar intercourse. Dr. Hale has given a lively account of their fellowship and summons a witness who was herself a member of the company.[28] To this coterie Lowell was now introduced, and the relations between him and Miss White made the pair the centre of attraction. Miss White’s spirituelle beauty and poetic temperament and Lowell’s spontaneity of wit and sentiment were heightened in the eyes of these young people by the attachment between them, and they were known with affectionate jesting as the Queen and King of the Band. In the exalted air upon which the two trod, stimulating each other, their devotion came to have, by a paradox, an almost impersonal character, as if they were creatures of romance; their life was led thus in the open, so much so that, as has been said more than once, the letters exchanged by them were passed about also among the other young people of the circle.[29] Be this as it may, the assertion is rendered credible by the highly charged atmosphere in which they were living. The two young poets—for Maria White was not only of poetic temperament, but wrote verses, some of which found place in current magazines—were lifted upon a platform by their associates, and were themselves so open in their consciousness of poetic thinking and acting that they took little pains to abscond from this friendly publicity. It is a curious instance of freedom from shamefacedness in so native a New Englander as Lowell, but his letters, his poems, and common report, all testify to an ingenuousness of sentiment at this time, which was a radical trait, and less conspicuous later in life only because like other men he became subject to convention.

But though Lowell lived in this exhilarated state, he was not likely to be led away into any wholly impracticable scheme of living. His own good sense could be relied on, and his independence of spirit, as could his detestation of debt, which kept him all his life a frugal liver. He was, besides, brought up sharply at this time by the necessity suddenly laid on him to earn his living, if he would be married, since his father, always generous to him, had now lost almost all his personal property, and was land poor; it was clearly understood, too, that the young people must rely on themselves for support. Fortunate was it for him that he was to have a wife who shared to the full his views on living. “It is easy enough,” wrote Maria White to Levi Thaxter, “to be married—the newspaper columns show us that every day; but to live and be happy as simple King and Queen without the gifts of fortune, this is, I confess, a triumph which suits my nature better.”

Lowell, who had been lodging in Cambridge, moved into Boston when he was established in Mr. Loring’s office, but in the spring of 1842 went back to Elmwood to live. Dr. Lowell had returned from Europe with his wife and daughter in the early summer of 1840. It is probable that the return of Lowell to his father’s house was due to the declining health of his mother, who showed symptoms of that disorder of the brain which clouded her last years, and is graphically depicted in her son’s poem, “The Darkened Mind.” From this time her husband and children watched her with solicitude and tried various remedies. She was taken on little journeys to Saratoga and elsewhere, in search of restoration, but in vain. In this case, as so often happens, the sufferer who draws largely on one’s sympathy is the faithful, despairing husband.[30]

Although Lowell had been admitted to the bar, and was ready to practice, clients were slow in coming, and with his resources in literature it was natural enough that he should use his enforced leisure in writing for publication. There were few periodicals in America in 1840 that could afford to pay their contributors, and the sums paid were moderate. But the zeal of the editors was not measured by their ability to reward contributors, and both editors and writers fed a good deal at the table of the Barmecides spread in the somewhat ramshackle House of Fame. The Southern Literary Messenger was one of these impecunious but ambitious journals, and the editor teased Lowell constantly for contributions. Lowell gave them freely, for writing was his delight, and he was not unwilling to have a hospitable and reputable magazine in which to print what he wrote, both for the slight incentive which publication gave, and because he could thus with little effort “make believe” that he was a popular author. He used frequently the signature Hugh Perceval. He liked the name Perceval, which had been borne by his earliest American ancestor, and regretted that it had not been given him at his birth, as had then been proposed. In the Southern Literary Messenger he could publish half personal poems to be read between the lines by his intimate friends; but he grew impatient of this unprofitable business.

“Have you got the August S. L. M. yet?” he writes to Loring, 18 August, 1840. “I have not. White[31] wrote to me a short time since that the July and August numbers were coming out together, and at the same time asking me to translate a long poem of Victor Hugo’s. I have not answered him yet. But when I do I shall tell him that ‘reading and writing come by nature, but to be a translator is the gift of Fortune,’ so that if he chooses to pay me he shall have translations. I don’t think I shall write any more for him. ’Tis a bad habit to get into for a poor man, this writing for nothing. Perhaps if I hang off he may offer me somewhat.”

The publication of “A Year’s Life” was a more definite assertion of his place as a poet. He had been encouraged to publish both by the confidence of Miss White and by the practical aid of friends, like his friend J. F. Heath, who engaged to secure the sale of at least a hundred copies. Lowell watched the fortunes of his first open venture eagerly, from a conviction that it would have some influence on his further efforts. “I have already,” he writes to Loring, 18 February, 1841, “been asked to write for an annual to be published in Boston, and ‘which is to be a fair specimen of the arts in this country.’ It is to be edited (sub rosa) by Longfellow, Felton, Hillard, and that set. Hawthorne and Emerson are writing for it, and Bryant and Halleck have promised to write. The pay for poetry is five dollars a page, at any rate, and more if the work succeeds according to the publishers’ expectation. So you see my book has done me some good, although it does not sell so fast as it ought, considering how everybody praises it. If you get a chance to persuade anybody to buy it, do so. The praise I don’t Care so much about, because I knew just how good and how bad the book was before I printed it. But I wish, if possible, to get out a second edition, which will do me more good, as an author, than all the praise and merit in the world. My father is so very much pleased with the book that he wishes me to publish a second edition at any rate, and he will pay all expenses, and be responsible for its selling.”

The little volume was the first fruits of Lowell’s poetic harvesting, and the promise it gave of poetical genius was by no means inconsiderable. In his maturer judgment, to be sure, Lowell preserved but seven of the thirty-three poems and two of the thirty-five sonnets contained in it,—in all, thirty-five of the one hundred and eighty-two pages of the book, and had he been drawn off from poetry, supposing this possible, the book would have been reckoned as lightly in the general account of his production as Motley’s fiction was in his full measure. But he was not drawn off from poetry, and the early note here struck was a dominant one afterward. In most poets of any consequence the disciple is pretty sure to be evident in early work, and Lowell in “A Year’s Life” unmistakably owned himself an ardent lover of Keats and to a less degree of Tennyson, who had been caught up by the lively circle in which he moved with the eagerness of an American discovering, as one so often did, the old world of contemporary England. In copying Keats, Lowell was indeed copying the Keats who copied, and it is not at all unlikely that when he was enamored of “Fancy,” “Lines on the Mermaid Tavern,” “Robin Hood,” and the like, and echoed them faintly in “The Bobolink,” “Ianthe,” “Irene,” and others, he was harking back also to Wither and other Elizabethans whom Keats loved, and whose light touch was caught so deftly by Milton in his “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” Be this as it may, Lowell was most outspoken at this time in his admiration of Keats. He had become acquainted with him, as we have seen, in that volume which contained the triad, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, which was the fountain of modern English poetry to which so many thirsty Americans went. Lord Houghton’s memoir of Keats had not appeared, and Lowell himself, in 1840, contemplated writing a life, going so far as to concoct a letter to Keats’s brother George, which, however, he never sent. His admiration, besides taking the form of frank imitation, displayed itself in his early sonnet, “To the Spirit of Keats,” which he contributed to the New York literary journal Arcturus, conducted by the brothers Duyckinck. His letter to Evert A. Duyckinck, accompanying the sonnet, is interesting for its tribute to the two modern English poets who, after Spenser, were his nearest friends.

Boston, Dec. 5, 1841.

My dear Sir,—I address you rather than your brother editor, because I judge that the poetical department of Arcturus is more especially under your charge. I have to thank you for your sympathizing notice of my verses last spring. I thought then that you might like to have a contribution occasionally from me, but other engagements which it were tedious to specify hindered me from doing what my sympathy with the aim of your magazine dictated. I subscribed for your Arcturus before I had seen a number of it (though I can ill afford many such indulgences of taste) because I liked the spirit of your prospectus. For the same reason I sent you my volume—of which I sent but a bare half-dozen to “the press”—because I despise our system of literary puffing. Your notice of Keats, in the number for this month, a poet whom I especially love and whom I consider to be one of the true old Titan brood—made me wish to see two of my own sonnets enshrined in the same volume. One of them you will see is addressed to the same “marvellous day.” I cannot help thinking that you will like both of them.[32]

In your “News Gong” I see that you suggest a reprint of Tennyson. I wish you would say in your next that he is about to reprint a new and correct edition of his poems with many new ones which will appear in a few months. I think it would be a pity to reprint his poems at all—for he is poor and that would deprive him of what little profit he might make by their sale in this country—especially would it be wrong to reprint an incorrect edition. (Moxon will be his publisher.)

I do not wish you to state your authority for this—but you may depend on it, for my authority is the poet himself. I have the great satisfaction of thinking that the publication is in some measure owing to myself, for it was by my means that he was written to about it, and he says that “his American friends” are the chief cause of his reprinting.

Wishing you all success in the cause of true and good literature,

I remain your friend,
J. R. Lowell.

The little book was received with an attention which seems to suggest the paucity of hopeful literature at the time and the Marchioness spirit of the critics. Lowell’s eager friends came forward with their notices, but there were then fewer journals even than now that could be looked to for careful judgment. In Graham’s Magazine there was a long account of the book headed “A New School of Poetry at hand,” and the writer, who hides behind the letter C., after crediting Lowell with ideality, enthusiasm, love for his fellow men, freshness, and delicacy, finds fault with him chiefly for affectation of language and carelessness; but he welcomes him as the herald of a new school which is to be humanitarian and idealistic. It is amusing to find our familiar friend, the “great original American poem,” looked for confidently from this new poet. Lowell warmed himself with this praise.[33]

The most serviceable vehicle for Lowell’s literary endeavors at this time was The Boston Miscellany projected by Nathan Hale, Lowell’s associate in Harvardiana, and published by two young Boston men, Bradbury and Soden. The Miscellany had the short life characteristic of American literary magazines in the early half of the century, but it showed the sound literary judgment of its editor in the list of contributors he attracted. Lowell entered heartily into the plans for the new magazine. He wrote for it, among other things, a sketch, “My First Client,” which is in its form as near an approach to fiction as he ever attempted, and is a slightly embellished narrative of his own clientless experience as a lawyer. He thought so ill of it that he refused to allow it to be reprinted, a few years later, in one of the annuals then popular.

The most significant contribution which he made to the Miscellany was a series of papers on the Old English Dramatists, begun anonymously, but continued with his name. These were readings in Massinger, Marlowe, and others, with running comments, and reflected the keen interest which he took then and all his life in that great quarry of noble thoughts and brave images. The series was the forerunner of his labors in the field of criticism of literature, and the pleasure which he took in the work, as well as the appreciation which the papers received, gave him a hopeful sense that he might trust to letters for support, and abandon the law, which he hated, and which naturally returned the compliment. In September, 1842, he had become so sanguine that, after mysteriously hinting at an even more substantial means of support, he wrote to his friend Loring:—

“I think I may safely reckon on earning four hundred dollars by my pen the next year, which will support me. Between this and June, 1843, I think I shall have freed myself of debt and become an independent man. I am to have fifteen dollars a poem from the Miscellany, ten dollars from Graham, and I have made an arrangement with the editor of the Democratic Review, by which I shall probably get ten or fifteen dollars more. Prospects are brightening, you see.”

It was the prophecy of a sanguine young man, but unhappily the plan which seemed to him to promise most was instead to plunge him into debt. The Miscellany had closed its short career by merging itself in the Arcturus of New York, and taking courage from the brilliancy of the journal rather than caution from its brevity of life, Lowell, in company with Mr. Robert Carter, projected a new Boston literary and critical magazine to be issued monthly. The Prospectus has all the bravery and gallant dash of these forlorn hopes in literature.

The contents of each number will be entirely Original, and will consist of articles chiefly from American authors of the highest reputation.

The object of the Subscribers in establishing The Pioneer, is to furnish the intelligent and reflecting portion of the Reading Public with a rational substitute for the enormous quantity of thrice-diluted trash, in the shape of namby-pamby love tales and sketches, which is monthly poured out to them by many of our popular magazines,—and to offer instead thereof, a healthy and manly Periodical Literature, whose perusal will not necessarily involve a loss of time and a deterioration of every moral and intellectual faculty.

The Critical Department of The Pioneer will be conducted with great care and impartiality, and while satire and personality will be sedulously avoided, opinions of merit or demerit will be candidly and fearlessly expressed.

The Pioneer will be issued punctually on the day of publication, in the principal cities of the Union. Each number will contain 48 pages, royal octavo, double columns, handsomely printed on fine paper, and will be illustrated with Engravings of the highest character, both on wood and steel.

Terms: Three Dollars a year, payable, in all cases, in advance. The usual discount made to Agents. Communications for the Editors, letters, orders, &c., must be addressed, postpaid, to the Publishers, 67 Washington St. (opposite the Post Office,) Boston.

Leland & Whiting.

October 15th, 1842.

The publishers appear to have had no pecuniary interest in the venture, the editors being the proprietors as well. Mr. Carter was a young man of Lowell’s age, living at the time in Cambridge, where he afterward married a daughter of Mr. George Nichols, long known for his scholarly attainments as printer and corrector of the press, and for a short time also as a publisher. Mr. Carter was a man of wide reading and tenacious memory and a good writer, as his breezy book, “A Summer Cruise on the Coast of New England,” testifies. His encyclopædic mind stood him in good stead when, later, he held a position in the publishing house of D. Appleton & Co., and superintended the “New American Encyclopædia.”

The Pioneer, though it might be called a continuation of The Boston Miscellany, had characteristics of its own which show that its conductors had a clearly defined ideal in their minds and did not lack the courage and energy to pursue it. The Miscellany had made concessions to the supposed taste of the day, and had tried to catch subscribers with fashion plates and articles, while really caring only for good literature. The Pioneer discarded all adventitious aid, and, with fidelity to its name, determined to break its way through the woods of ignorance and prejudice to some fair land beyond. Upon-its cover page it bore a sentence from Bacon: “Reform, therefore, without bravery or scandal of former times and persons; but yet set it down to thyself as well to create good precedents as to follow them.” It is easy to see that Lowell, with his love of good letters, and with a zeal for reform just now quickened by the fine fervor of Maria White, meant with his individual means to do very much what the proprietors and conductors of the Atlantic Monthly attempted on a larger scale fifteen years later. But those fifteen years made a good deal of difference in the attitude of men toward the greatest of national evils, and in 1843 Lowell was not likely to be a trenchant political writer, or to think of literature and anti-slavery sentiment in the same breath. The vague spirit of reform which stirred him was rather a recurrence to fundamental ideas of freedom which made him impatient of formality and provincialism in literature, and led him to associate American political ideas with large independence of intellectual life. He had been breathing the atmosphere of the spacious England of the dramatists, and it was the nature of this literature which attracted him, as it was its art which drew Lamb, Hazlitt, and Keats.[34] Hence, when he planned the Pioneer, he was not projecting a journal of national reform under the mask of literature; he was ambitious to bear his testimony to the ideal of a national literature springing from a soil of political independence, and akin to great literature the world over. In a word, he knew the exhilaration of a native spirit, not in spite but because of his feeding upon great and not superficial, modish letters, and he was eager to demonstrate both creatively and critically the possibility of a genuine and unaffected American literature. In the Introduction to the Pioneer, for every new journal then had its salutatory,—and the valedictory was likely to follow shortly,—he sets forth this principle of a native literature. After complaining of the derivative character of current criticism and opinions, derived, that is, from the latest English quarterlies and monthlies,—he continues:—

“We are the farthest from wishing to see what many so ardently pray for, namely, a National literature: for the same mighty lyre of the human heart answers the touch of the master in all ages and in every clime, and any literature, as far as it is national, is diseased, inasmuch as it appeals to some climatic peculiarity, rather than to the universal nature. Moreover, everything that tends to encourage the sentiment of caste, to widen the boundary between races, and so to put farther off the hope of one great brotherhood, should be steadily resisted by all good men. But we do long for a natural literature. One green leaf, though of the veriest weed, is worth all the crape and wire flowers of the daintiest Paris milliners. For it is the glory of nature that in her least part she gives us all, and in that simple love-token of hers we may behold the type of all her sublime mysteries; as in the least fragment of the true artist we discern the working of the same forces which culminate gloriously in a Hamlet or a Faust. We would no longer see the spirit of our people held up as a mirror to the Old World; but rather lying like one of our own inland oceans, reflecting not only the mountain and the rock, the forest and the red man, but also the steamboat and the rail car, the cornfield and the factory. Let us learn that romance is not married to the past, that it is not the birthright of ferocious ignorance and chivalric barbarity, but that it ever was and is an inward quality, the darling child of the sweetest refinements and most gracious amenities of peaceful gentleness, and that it can never die till only water runs in these red rivers of the heart, that cunning adept which can make vague cathedrals with blazing oriels and streaming spires out of our square meeting-boxes,—

“‘Whose rafters sprout upon the shady side.’

“In this country where freedom of thought does not shiver at the cold shadow of Spielberg (unless we name this prison of ‘public opinion’ so), there is no danger to be apprehended from an excess of it. It is only where there is no freedom that anarchy is to be dreaded. The mere sense of freedom is of too fine and holy a nature to consist with injustice and wrong. We would fain have our journal, in some sort at least, a journal of progress, one that shall keep pace with the spirit of the age, and sometimes go near its deeper heart. Yet, while we shall aim at that gravity which is becoming of a manly literature, we shall hope also to satisfy that lighter and sprightlier element of the soul, without whose due culture the character is liable to degenerate into a morose bigotry and selfish precisianism. To be one exponent of a young spirit which shall aim at power through gentleness, the only means for its secure attainment, and in which freedom shall be attempered to love by a reverence for all beauty wherever it may exist, is our humble hope....”

Here was a literary creed, expressed in no very exact formulas, and really declarative of little more than an individual purpose that the Pioneer should contain good and not dull or imitative literature. A good beginning was made, for the three numbers which were published contained poems and papers by Dr. Parsons, Story, Poe, Hawthorne, Jones Very, John Neal, John S. Dwight, and the two editors. Lowell continued his studies in the Old English Dramatists, printed several poems, and wrote apparently much of the criticism, but there were no papers of a directly didactic character; it was clear that the editor relied on criticism for a medium of aggressive preaching of sound literary doctrine. Here also Lowell had his opportunity to fly the flag of anti-slavery, and he did it with a fine chivalry in a notice of Longfellow’s “Poems on Slavery,” when he used the occasion to pay glowing tribute to the earlier fighters. Garrison, “the half-inspired Luther of this reform, a man too remarkable to be appreciated in his generation, but whom the future will recognize as a great and wonderful spirit;” Whittier, “the fiery Koerner of this spiritual warfare, who, Scævola-like, has sacrificed on the altar of duty that right hand which might have made him acknowledged as the most passionate lyrist of his time;” the “tenderly-loving Maria Child, the author of that dear book, ‘Philothea,’ a woman of genius, who lives with humble content in the intellectual Coventry to which her conscientiousness has banished her—a fate the hardest for genius to bear. Nor ought the gentle spirit of Follen, a lion with a lamb’s heart, to be forgotten, whose fiery fate, from which the mind turns horror-stricken, was perhaps to his mild nature less dreadful than that stake and fagot of public opinion, in dragging him to which many whom he loved were not inactive, for silence at such times is action.”

Lowell threw himself into this literary venture with resolution and hope. He had the double motive of making a vehicle for sound and generous literature, and of securing for himself a rational means of support. Those nearest to him watched the experiment with solicitude, for magazine making on a small scale was as perilous then as it is now on a scale of magnitude. His sister, Mrs. Putnam, wrote him a most anxious letter called out by the fact that her brother was in New York and Carter in charge, a man too easy and good-natured she thought for such a position. She begged him to consider that his first number was better than his second, and that in turn seemed likely to be better than the third, and she dreaded a decline in the magazine. As for Miss White, she looked upon the scheme, when it was taking shape, with mingled pride and anxiety. She shared Lowell’s lively trust in the pioneer character of the journal, but she had a prudent mind, and saw with a woman’s instinct the possibility of failure, where Lowell would listen to nothing but the note of success.

The Pioneer lived but three months. The ostensible cause of its failure was the sudden and lamentable breakdown of its chief supporter, as shown in the following card printed at the close of the third number.

“The absence of any prose in the present number of The Pioneer from the pen of Mr. Lowell, and the apparent neglect of many letters and contributions addressed to him personally, will be sufficiently explained by stating that, since the tenth of January, he has been in the city of New York in attendance upon Dr. Elliot, the distinguished oculist, who is endeavoring to cure him of a severe disease of the eyes, and that the medical treatment to which he is necessarily subjected precludes the use of his sight except to a very limited extent. He will, however, probably be enabled, in time for the fourth number, to resume his essays on the Poets and Dramatists, and his general supervision of the magazine. R. C.”

It is plain that when the third number appeared the conductors expected to bring out a fourth, but the enforced abstention from work of the principal editor and writer and the lack of resources in money made the discontinuance of the magazine inevitable.[35] In spite, however, of the disastrous experience and the debt which it entailed, the activity of mind which the venture called forth was worth much to Lowell. He had not a specially orderly or methodical habit, and he lacked thus the equipment which an editor requires, but he had great fertility, and was under an impulse which at this time he turned to account in literature. Could he have been associated with some well organized nature, it is not impossible that the Pioneer would have become established on a sound basis and have been the vehicle for Lowell’s creative and critical work in literature. Such work would have attracted the best that was to be had in America, and the periodical might have been an important factor in the intellectual life of the day.

The persistence with which the magazine idea was exploited hints at the possibilities which lay for a rising literature in this particular form. The vigorous John Neal wrote to Lowell when he was projecting the Pioneer: “Persevere; be bold and fear not. A great change is foretelling itself in the literature of the day. Magazines are to supersede newspapers, and newspapers novels among light readers.” The criticism which Lowell wrote or commanded for the Pioneer was frank, fearless, and sure to arrest attention. It pointed the way, and might easily have done much to shape the course of letters and art. In the absence of such a serviceable vehicle, Lowell was left to his own resources, and having no organ at hand he dropped criticism for the time and concentrated his mind on his poetry.

As Mr. Carter’s apologetic note intimates, Lowell was obliged to go to New York early in January, 1843, for treatment at the hands of the oculist, Dr. Elliot. A few extracts from his letters to Mr. Carter during his absence show something of his life and interests in this enforced absence.

January 15, 1843.... My course of life is this. Every morning I go to Dr. Elliot’s (who, by the way, is very kind) and wait for my turn to be operated upon. This sometimes consumes a great deal of time, the Dr. being overrun with patients. After being made stone blind for the space of fifteen minutes, I have the rest of the day to myself.

Handbills of the Pioneer in red and black with a spread eagle at the head of them face me everywhere. I could not but laugh to see a drayman standing with his hands in his pockets diligently spelling it out, being attracted thereto doubtless by the bird of America, which probably led him to think it a proclamation of the President—a delusion from which he probably did not awake after perusing the document.... I shall endeavor while I am here to write an article on Pope. Something I will send you for the next number, besides what I may possibly glean from others. A new magazine has just been started here, but it is illiberal and will probably fail.

January 17, 1843. I shall only write a word or two, as I have already been writing, and my eyes, having been operated on yesterday with the knife, must be used charily.... I hope to hear better accounts of money matters in your next. Explain as to the 500 copies you speak of as sold the day before. Remember how interesting the least particle of news is to me, and I may be at home under three weeks from this, though I hope to be in a fortnight....

January 19. So you are fairly bewitched![36] Well, I might have expected it, but still it was no reason that you should have told me so little about the magazine. I should not have talked wholly about one individual—of course not. I should not have been bewitched....

Have you got any copy for the third number? Do not ask any conservatives to write, for it will mar the unity of the magazine. We shall be surer of success if we maintain a uniform course, and have a decided tendency either one way or the other. We shall, at least, gain more influence in that way.

I have picked up a poem by Harry Franco against capital punishment. It has a good deal of humor in it and is striking. A woodcut of a poor devil hanging with the crows discussing his fate will perhaps accompany it. Prose I have got no scent of as yet....

January [20]. I have received all your letters, and like to have you send by express. I should like to see Miss Gray’s and Miss Peabody’s articles before they go to press. I am a better judge of that kind of merchandise than you. The second number is a good one, but full of misprints. The notices in the cover, if printed at all, should have been expurgated. See to it next time, and do not let your kind heart seduce you into printing any more puffs of me personally. What do you mean by that notice of Emerson? I shall have to write to him. Your notice of De Quincey was excellent.

I send herewith a poem of Miss Barrett[37] which came with the letters you sent me. She sent three others, and promises more in a very pleasant letter. I shall send on quite a budget of prose, I hope, soon, but cannot use my eyes much. I am going to answer an article on the copyright question by O’Sullivan in the forthcoming Democratic Review. I must see proofs of Miss Barrett and all my own pieces.... I must not write any more or I shall not get home these six months.

January 22.... My dear, good, kindest, best friend, you know that I would not write a word that should knowingly pain your loving heart. So forgive whatever there has been in my other letters to trouble, and only reflect how anxious I must naturally feel, away from home as I am, and left a great part of the time to the solitude of my own thoughts by the total deprivation of the use of my eyes.

Willis is under Dr. E.’s care also, and yesterday introduced himself to me, and said all manner of kind things. He had meant to write to me, giving me his experience in editing, and had long been anxious to know me, &c., &c. This morning he came and took me to church with him, and altogether overwhelms me with attention. His wife is a very nice pretty little Englishwoman, with a very sweet voice. W. said he wrote the notice in the Jonathan as the most judicious way of helping the magazine, giving your own philosophic theory as to its possible results....

January 24.... I must write an article for the next number, and yet I do not see very well how I am to do it. For I can scarcely get through one letter without pain, and everything that I write retards my case and so keeps me the longer here. But I love Keats so much that I think I can write something good about him.

Willis continues very kind, and I begin to think that he really likes me. At least he said the same to Dr. E. about me that he told me to my face. He told the Dr. (I copy it the more readily that I know it will delight you) that I had written the most remarkable poem that had been written in this country, and that I was destined to be the brightest star that had yet risen in American literature. He told me, also, that I was more popular and more talked about and read at this time than any other poet in the land, and he is going (or was) to write an article in the Jonathan to that effect. These things you must keep in your own heart. He promises to help the Pioneer in every way he can, and he will be able to do us a great deal of good, as he has last week taken half the ownership of the Jonathan on condition of solely editing it. He talks of paying me to write letters for him from Boston....

John Neal lectures here to-night. I have not seen him, and I do not know whether I shall hear him, for if I get a package from you to-day, as I hope I shall, I shall hardly have 25 cents left to buy a ticket with. So you think we have succeeded. They are the pleasantest words I have heard since I have been here. But we must not feel too sure yet. I think we shall succeed. Folks here (some of them) say that we shall beyond our utmost expectation....

Saturday.... You shall have some copy from me on Wednesday morning if I get blind by it. Where is Brownson? Don’t print nonsense. Better not be out till the middle of March. But you are only trying to frighten me. Do not print nonsense, for God’s sake. Print the history of Mesmerism. Write an article on Japan. If I were to read over your letters again in order to answer them categorically, I should not be able to use my eyes for a week. You do not recollect that I undergo an application or an operation every day. If I could see you for ten minutes I could arrange all. I perhaps may come on and return hither again. Do not hint this to any one, for if Maria heard of it, she would be expecting anxiously every day. I am sick to death of this place, yet it does me good spiritually to stay here. I must not write any more. In your next letter ask all questions and I will answer....

Lowell stayed on in New York on account of his eyes till the end of February. At a period when Mrs. Child could gravely write and publish in a book “Letters from New York,” to go to New York from Cambridge was nearly equivalent to a winter abroad. As his letters to Carter show, with the disabilities under which he labored Lowell could do little at reading or writing, and he used the opportunity for social occupation. Page he had already come to know, and he had made the acquaintance through the Miscellany of Charles F. Briggs, whom now he took into warm friendship. Mr. Briggs was a diligent man of letters, best known to the public of that day as “Harry Franco,” and through him Lowell fell in with many writers and book people. But he was most impatient to return, and now that his magazine had ceased he found himself with no routine labors, but with a mind full to overflowing.

The real pursuit of Lowell during 1843 was poetry, and poetry of a lofty character. In the Ode which he wrote in 1841 beginning,—

“In the old days of awe and keen-eyed wonder”—