JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

A BIOGRAPHY

BY

HORACE ELISHA SCUDDER

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. II

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

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

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

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

CHAPTER X
LOWELL AND THE WAR FOR THE UNION
1858-1865

When the Atlantic Monthly was founded, its conductors did not conceal their intention to make it a political magazine. It bore as its sub-head a title it has never relinquished, “A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics.” The combination under Lowell’s superintendence did not denote that articles were to be grouped under these heads; it intimated that in the attitude taken by the magazine both art and politics were to be discussed by men having the literary faculty, and that apprehension of subjects which finds its natural training not exclusively in practice and affairs but in acquaintance with great literature which is, after all, the express image of art and politics. Thus, the magazine did not become, as it might in lesser hands, a mere propaganda of reform, or the organ of a political party, neither did it assume the air of philosophical absenteeism. If one examines the early numbers he is struck with the preponderance of imaginative literature aid of that artistic element which finds expression in historical narrative or in the essay. The space given to discussion of affairs is not considerable, but evidently the subjects are chosen with deliberation, and they are treated if not with distinction yet with a good deal more than merely newspaper care.

Such articles are found at the latter end of the magazine, a place indeed naturally adapted to them, since in the practice of printing opportunity would thus be given for the latest possible consideration of current events; still, though the latest articles in the successive numbers, they were written at least a month, and more likely six weeks or two months even before they could come into the hands of readers, so that the authors were compelled to see things in the large far more than writers who might change their judgments over night on the receipt of a telegram.

These articles, corresponding, as far as a monthly could parallel a daily, to the leader of a journal, were usually one to a number. In the November, 1857, Atlantic, the first to be issued, was “The Financial Flurry,” by Mr. Parke Godwin, who had been an important writer on the staff of Putnam’s Monthly. In December appeared “Where will it End?” by Edmund Quincy, an enquiry into the outcome of slavery in America, somewhat in the nature of that gentleman’s contributions to the Anti-Slavery Standard, when he and Lowell were associated there, though somewhat more moderate in manner. It was vigorous, pointed, and a reasonable summary of the situation politically, but it was an appeal to fundamental principles, not to temporary political conditions. In January Mr. Godwin again wrote the political leader, this time on “The President’s Message,” which had been delivered by Mr. Buchanan at the coming together of Congress early in December, and the paper could therefore be regarded as a prompt consideration of the policy of the new administration. The article was brief and passed in review the three main topics of the currency, our foreign relations, and the Kansas-Nebraska difficulties. In February Mr. Godwin took up more in detail an examination of the Kansas Usurpation; there was no political article in March, but in April Lowell took a hand in a characteristic fashion.

Mr. Buchanan had been in office a year, and the momentous hour was approaching when the forces for and against the Union, with all that the Union stood for in the progress of freedom, were to be marshalled. The preliminary test of strength was already offered in Kansas, and the moral and intellectual debate was apparent in Washington. The principles for which the Atlantic stood were those for which the Anti-Slavery Standard had stood ten years before, but Lowell was now on a broader platform, since the Atlantic represented freedom, history, law, and civilization, where the Standard had represented the attack upon a pernicious system. Mr. Godwin was again called on to review the first year of the Buchanan administration, which he did in an article of about eight Atlantic pages, with the caption “Mr. Buchanan’s Administration.” The review was methodical and severe. It examined the record upon four leading points, the Mormon question, the Financial question, the Filibuster question, and the Kansas question. Mr. Godwin, a trained journalist of the older school, a man of resources in reading and scholarship, and a vigorous thinker, handled his subject with skill and analyzed the situation with clearness, giving the results in an incisive manner. The article accomplished what it set out to do, and is a capital example of a shrewd, forcible political leader.

Then Lowell took up the parable, and it is hardly likely that any observant reader of the April Atlantic failed to note that in stepping over the white line which separated the first eight from the latter six pages of the article, he had passed from the domain of one writer to that of another. It is quite as likely that, however he may have been impressed with the good sense and virility of the former part of the article, he was not so piqued by curiosity to know who wrote it, as he was in the case of the latter part, for that portion is instinct with a vivid personal note. If the reader of that day were familiar with Lowell’s political writings of ten years before, he would not fail to attribute these pages to the editor of the magazine. The same note is struck in each, though the insouciance of wit is somewhat hidden by a fiery earnestness here, as if the author could not stop to play by the way, as he was wont to do when the political thunder-clouds were not gathering so ominously in the west.

Lowell did not preserve his share of the article among his “Political Essays,” and this is not strange, not only because his writing was a detachment of a fuller article, but because with all its undoubted eloquence it was not so careful and rounded a piece of work as his later essays in the same field. In the absence of any correspondence on the subject, it is reasonable to conjecture that, having received Mr. Godwin’s article and assigned it to the number, he was constrained to think that forcible as it was in its indictment of Mr. Buchanan’s administration for errors and blunders, it might well afford the starting-point for a further arraignment, not of the administration in particular but of the nation itself so far as that was particeps criminis with the administration in its rôle of attorney for the slave-power.

But any such indictment as this must be drawn under the provisions of the moral law and find its precedents in history, and make its appeal to the conscience of the people as the final court. Into this business, therefore, Lowell threw himself with vehemence. He knew his own country’s history, he knew also the history of man; and the moral ardor, the almost prophetic power which had been both his inheritance, and the characteristic of his early manhood when he was almost persuaded to be a Reformer, now flamed out. It was as if he had been storing energy during the ten years of comparative silence since the issue of the “Biglow Papers” and the contributions to the Standard.

“Looking at the administration of Mr. Buchanan,” he begins, “from the point of view of enlightened statesmanship” (which was Mr. Godwin’s), “we find nothing in it that is not contemptible; but when we regard it as the accredited exponent of the moral sense of a majority of our people, it is saved from contempt, indeed, but saved only because contempt is merged in a deeper feeling of humiliation and apprehension. Unparallelled as the outrages in Kansas have been, we regard them as insignificant in comparison with the deadlier fact that the Chief Magistrate of the Republic should strive to defend them by the small wiles of a village attorney,—that, when the honor of a nation and the principle of self-government are at stake, he should show himself unconscious of a higher judicature or a nobler style of pleading than those which would serve for a case of petty larceny,—and that he should be abetted by more than half the national representatives, while he brings down a case of public conscience to the moral level of those who are content with the maculate safety which they owe to a flaw in an indictment, or with the dingy innocence which is certified to by the disagreement of a jury.”

Regarding this as a logical consequence of the profound national demoralization which followed the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Bill, and warming to his subject as he rehearses that deplorable business, he clears the way for his first proposition, by which he aims to lift the discussion into the higher air of history and elemental morality. “The capacity of the English race for self-government,” he proceeds, “is measured by their regard as well for the forms as the essence of law. A race conservative beyond all others of what is established, averse beyond all others to the heroic remedy of forcible revolution, they have yet three times in the space of a century and a half assumed the chances of rebellion and the certain perils of civil war, rather than submit to have Right infringed by Prerogative, and the scales of Justice made a cheat by false weights that kept the shape but lacked the substance of legitimate precedent. We are forced to think that there must be a bend sinister in the escutcheon of the descendants of such men, when we find them setting the form above the substance, and accepting as law that which is deadly to the spirit while it is true to the letter of legality. It is a spectacle portentous of moral lapse and social disorganization, to see a statesman, who has had fifty years’ experience of American politics, quibbling in defence of Executive violence against a free community, as if the conscience of the nation were no more august a tribunal than a police justice sitting upon a paltry case of assault.... There is a Fate which spins and cuts the threads of national as of individual life, and the case of God against the people of these United States is not to be debated before any such petty tribunal as Mr. Buchanan and his advisers seem to suppose.”

The difficulty, Lowell sees, is in the lack of any organized public sentiment, and thus in the weakness of the sense of responsibility. “The guilt of every national sin comes back to the voter in a fraction, the denominator of which is several millions,” and the need is of a thorough awakening of the individual conscience. It is the moral aspect of the great question before the country which is cardinal, yet the moral must go hand in hand with common sense, and Lowell contrasts the solidarity of the South, created by the gravitation of private interest, with the perpetual bickering of the Northern enemies of slavery amongst themselves. He calls for less scrutiny of the character of the allies the anti-slavery people draw to themselves, and more political forethought and practical sense. “The advantage of our opponents has been that they have always had some sharp practical measure, some definite and immediate object, to oppose to our voluminous propositions of abstract right. Again and again the whirlwind of oratorical enthusiasm has roused and heaped up the threatening masses of the Free States, and again and again we have seen them collapse like a waterspout into a crumbling heap of disintegrated bubbles before the compact bullet of political audacity.[1] While our legislatures have been resolving and re-resolving the principles of the Declaration of Independence, our adversaries have pushed their trenches, parallel after parallel, against the very citadel of our political equality.”

Hence he calls for an offensive attitude on the part of the lovers of freedom. “Are we to be terrified any longer,” he asks, “by such Chinese devices of warfare as the cry of Disunion,—a threat as hollow as the mask from which it issues, as harmless as the periodical suicides of Mantalini, as insincere as the spoiled child’s refusal of his supper? We have no desire for a dissolution of our confederacy, though it is not for us to fear it. We will not allow it: we will not permit the Southern half of our dominion to become a Hayti. But there is no danger; the law that binds our system of confederate stars together is of stronger fibre than to be snapped by the trembling finger of Toombs or cut by the bloodless sword of Davis; the march of the Universe is not to be stayed because some gentleman in Buncombe declares that his sweet-potato patch shall not go along with it. The sweet attraction which knits the sons of Virginia to the Treasury has lost none of its controlling force. We must make up our minds to keep these deep-descended gentlemen in the Union, and must convince them that we have a work to accomplish in it and by means of it. If our Southern brethren have the curse of Canaan in their pious keeping, if the responsibility lie upon them to avenge the insults of Noah, on us devolves a more comprehensive obligation and the vindication of an elder doom;—it is for us to assert and to secure the claim of every son of Adam to the common inheritance ratified by the sentence, ‘In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy bread.’ We are to establish no aristocracy of race or complexion, no caste which nature and Revelation alike refuse to recognize, but the indefeasible right of man to the soil which he subdues, and the muscles with which he subdues it. If this be a sectional creed, it is a sectionality which at least includes three hundred and fifty-nine degrees of the circle of man’s political aspiration and physical activity, and we may as well be easy under the imputation.”

The contempt with which Lowell treats the renewed threats of secession illustrates the blindness which he shared with most of his friends, and it is not likely that in after years he would have been so confident that the South had no higher principles mingled with the baser ones of love of prosperity and power. The “bloodless sword” of Davis also gave way in his phrase to the “drippin’ red han’,” and the deep gravity of war caused him to strike profounder notes. But it is not easy for men of this generation to realize the galling sense of humiliation which the men of Lowell’s day felt at the manner in which the general government was made subservient to the demands of the slave power. So conscious were they of the steady degeneration of the political sense, that they were scarcely aware of the counter force of the rising tide of anti-slavery and union sentiment, so that the great wave which swept over the North after the attack upon Sumter came with almost as much a surprise to them as to the South.

It is in confession of this political degeneracy that the article proceeds, and Lowell lashes his countrymen with scorn for it, but he refuses to believe that this is to be the fate of the republic. “When we look back upon the providential series of events which prepared this continent for the experiment of Democracy,—when we think of those forefathers for whom our mother England shed down from her august breasts the nutriment of ordered liberty, not unmixed with her best blood in the day of her trial,—when we remember the first two acts of our drama, that cost one king his head and his son a throne, and that third which cost another the fairest appanage of his crown and gave a new Hero to mankind,—we cannot believe it possible that this great scene, stretching from ocean to ocean, was prepared by the Almighty only for such men as Mr. Buchanan and his peers to show their feats of juggling on, even though the thimble-rig be on so colossal a scale that the stake is a territory larger than Britain. We cannot believe that this unhistoried continent,—this virgin leaf in the great diary of man’s conquest over the planet, on which our fathers wrote two words of epic grandeur,—Plymouth and Bunker Hill,—is to bear for its colophon the record of men who inherited greatness and left it pusillanimity,—a republic, and made it anarchy—freedom, and were content as serfs,—of men who, born to the noblest estate of grand ideas and fair expectancies the world had ever seen, bequeathed the sordid price of them in gold. The change is sad ’twixt now and then; the Great Republic is without influence in the councils of the world; to be an American, in Europe, is to be the accomplice of filibusters and slave-traders; instead of men and thought, as was hoped of us, we send to the Old World cotton, corn, and tobacco, and are but as one of her outlying farms. Are we basely content with our pecuniary good-fortune? Do we look on the tall column of figures on the credit side of our national ledger as a sufficing monument of our glory as a people? Are we of the North better off as provinces of the Slave-holding States than as colonies of Great Britain? Are we content with our share in the administration of national affairs, because we are to have the ministry to Austria, and because the newspapers promise that James Gordon Bennett shall be sent out of the country to fill it?”

The subordination of the Free States in the administration of the government is traced to the moral disintegration which has set in, and after a recital in incisive terms of the act in subversion of true democracy which they have been compelled to witness, he closes with this appeal: “It lies in the hands of the people of the Free States to rescue themselves and the country by peaceable reform, ere it be too late, and there be no remedy left but that dangerous one of revolution, toward which Mr. Buchanan and his advisers seem bent on driving them.... Prosperity has deadened and bewildered us. It is time we remembered that History does not concern herself about material wealth,—that the life-blood of a nation is not that yellow tide which fluctuates in the arteries of Trade,—that its true revenues are religion, justice, sobriety, magnanimity, and the fair amenities of Art,—that it is only by the soul that any people has achieved greatness and made lasting conquests over the future. We believe there is virtue enough left in the North and West to infuse health into our body politic; we believe that America will reassume that moral influence among the nations which she has allowed to fall into abeyance; and that our eagle, whose morning-flight the world watched with hope and expectation, shall no longer troop with unclean buzzards, but rouse himself and seek his eyrie to brood new eaglets that in time shall share with him the lordship of these Western heavens, and shall learn of him to shake the thunder from their invincible wings.”

The merits and the defects of Lowell’s political writings appear in this article. There is the divination of the real question, the reference to moral principles, and the witty phrase; but also there is that sort of coruscation of language which tends to conceal point and application. The writing is that of a good talker rather than of a good pleader. The very breadth of the play of mind in Lowell militated against directness of attack. He finds the seat of the difficulty not in this or that political blunder, but in a disintegration of the public conscience which had long been going on, and he sees no remedy for this but in the arousing of the individual responsibility. It is the voice of the preacher, and even so not of the crusading preacher.

He was more in his own field when writing the article on “The American Tract Society,” since here his wit and satire were engaged on a theme where fundamental morals and expediency were at issue, and two articles which followed on Rufus Choate and Caleb Cushing[2] had the incisiveness of brilliant newspaper work, and a breadth not to be looked for in a newspaper. “Phillips [the publisher] was so persuaded,” he writes to Mr. Norton after the first had appeared, “of the stand given to the magazine by the Choate article that he has been at me ever since for another. So I have written a still longer one on Cushing. I think you will like it—though, on looking over the Choate article this morning, I am inclined to think that on the whole the better of the two. Better as a whole, I mean, for there are passages in this beyond any in that, I think. These personal things are not such as I should choose to do, for they subject me to all manner of vituperation; but one must take what immediate texts the newspapers afford him, and I accepted the responsibility in accepting my post.”

It must be remembered that these articles were written two or three years before the great crisis was reached, and when in the minds of nearly all public men the question was one of everlasting debate, not yet of action, except so far as the debate found concrete expression in the struggle for possession in Kansas. In writing these personal papers Lowell therefore was using his scorn and satire in defence of the political idealists of whom he was one, and in attack of the political trimmers of whom he took Choate and Cushing as representatives. Yet even in these papers he recurs again and again to those fundamental political questions which underlie all notions of persons and parties. This is especially evident in the conclusion of the article on Caleb Cushing.

“The ethical aspects of slavery,” he contends, “are not and cannot be the subject of consideration with any party which proposes to act under the Constitution of the United States. Nor are they called upon to consider its ethnological aspect. Their concern with it is confined to the domain of politics, and they are not called to the discussion of abstract principles, but of practical measures. The question, even in its political aspect, is one which goes to the very foundation of our theories and our institutions. It is simply, shall the course of the Republic be so directed as to subserve the interests of aristocracy or of democracy? Shall our territories be occupied by lord and serf or by intelligent freemen? by laborers who are owned, or by men who own themselves? The Republican party has no need of appealing to prejudice or passion. In this case there is a meaning in the phrase, ‘Manifest Destiny.’ America is to be the land of the workers, the country where, of all others, the intelligent brain and skilled hand of the mechanic, and the patient labor of those who till their own fields, are to stand them in greatest stead. We are to inaugurate and carry on the new system which makes Man of more value than Property, which will one day put the living value of industry above the dead value of capital. Our republic was not born under Cancer, to go backward. Perhaps we do not like the prospect? Perhaps we love the picturesque charm with which novelists and poets have invested the old feudal order of things? That is not the question. This New World of ours is to be the world of great workers and small estates. The freemen whose capital is their two hands must inevitably become hostile to a system clumsy and barbarous like that of Slavery, which only carries to its last result the pitiless logic of selfishness, sure at last to subject the toil of the many to the irresponsible power of the few.”

In these papers Lowell again separated himself instinctively from the extreme Abolitionists, the men, that is, who concentrated their attention exclusively upon the sin of slavery, and refused to use any political weapons for the overthrow of the system. He did not delay much over the economic aspects of the matter, but based his attacks almost wholly upon the eternal principles of Freedom. It was for Freedom, almost as a personal figure, that he had been a free lance from his youth, and he had come in his manhood to identify freedom with his country till he had a passionate jealousy for the fair name of the nation. He was not blind to the inconsistency which slavery created, but he refused to accept slavery as a permanent condition, and was strenuous in his belief that the fundamental, historical, and prophetic life of the nation was aggressively free, and made for freedom.

Hence he identified himself with the Republican party, in its early days, with cheerful alacrity, supporting it by his pen and his vote, and hence, also, as the lines were drawn more closely at the time of the election of Mr. Lincoln, his political articles in the Atlantic became more direct and more charged with a statesmanlike rather than with a merely opportune character. In October, 1860, he printed a paper on “The Election in November,” which is preserved in his “Political Essays.” It is a survey of the field on the eve of the great election, in which he aims to present the issue clearly. He finds it in the death struggle of the slaveholding interest, which has so long dominated national politics, but it is to him not a question of political preponderancy, but of the moral integrity of the non-slaveholding States. “We believe,” he says, “that this election is a turning-point in our history; for, although there are four candidates, there are really, as everybody knows, but two parties, and a single question that divides them.... The cardinal question on which the whole policy of the country is to turn—a question, too, which this very election must decide in one way or the other—is the interpretation to be put upon certain clauses of the Constitution.” After a witty analysis of the parties which trade most in the term “conservative,” he makes a keen inquiry into the basis of Southern civilization, with the purpose of considering what degree of permanence there is in the society which rests on it, and reaches the conclusion that “in such communities the seeds of an ‘irrepressible conflict’ are surely, if slowly, ripening, and signs are daily multiplying that the true peril to their social organization is looked for, less in a revolt of the owned labor than in an insurrection of intelligence in the labor that owns itself and finds itself none the richer for it. To multiply such communities is to multiply weakness. The election in November turns on the single and simple question, Whether we shall consent to the indefinite multiplication of them; and the only party which stands plainly and unequivocally pledged against such a policy, nay, which is not either openly or impliedly in favor of it;—is the Republican party.”

It is interesting to note that Lowell frankly expresses in this article his regret that Lincoln instead of Seward should have been selected as candidate for the presidency. He saw in Seward a reasonable and persistent exponent of the cardinal doctrines of the party, and hence he wished him at the front as the most conspicuous representative. “It was assumed that his nomination would have embittered the contest, and tainted the Republican creed with radicalism; but we doubt it. We cannot think that a party gains by not hitting its hardest, or by sugaring its opinions. Republicanism is not a conspiracy to obtain office under false pretences. It has a definite aim, an earnest purpose, and the unflinching tenacity of profound conviction.” Evidently he had not yet, as very few at the East had, made the acquaintance of Mr. Lincoln, but he accepts the nomination with confidence. “Mr. Lincoln,” he says, “has proved both his ability and his integrity; he has had experience enough in public affairs to make him a statesman, and not enough to make him a politician.... He represents a party who know that true policy is gradual in its advances, that it is conditional and not absolute, that it must deal with facts and not with sentiments, but who know also that it is wiser to stamp out evil in the spark than to wait till there is no help but in fighting fire with fire. They are the only conservative party, because they are the only one that is not willing to pawn to-morrow for the means to gamble with to-day. They have no hostility to the South, but a determined one to doctrines of whose ruinous tendency every day more and more convinces them.” And again he emphatically declares of the members of the party which he believes about to triumph at the polls: “They believe that slavery is a wrong morally, a mistake politically, and a misfortune practically, wherever it exists; that it has nullified our influence abroad and forced us to compromise with our better instincts at home; that it has perverted our government from its legitimate objects, weakened the respect for the laws by making them the tools of its purposes, and sapped the faith of men in any higher political morality than interest or any better statesmanship than chicane. They mean in every lawful way to hem it within its present limits.”

Lowell confessed in a letter to Mr. Nordhoff, [3] written a few weeks after the election, when it will be remembered there was very little evidence to show that the Republican party had not recoiled from its own success, that he was greatly puzzled to gauge the actual mind of the public. “But one thing seems to me clear,” he says, “that we have been running long enough by dead reckoning, and that it is time to take the height of the sun of righteousness.” It was the time of Buchanan’s attitude of helplessness, the logical result of a life spent in adjustment of principle to occasion. “Is it the effect of democracy,” Lowell asks, “to make all our public men cowards? An ounce of pluck just now were worth a king’s ransom. There is one comfort, though a shabby one, in the feeling that matters will come to such a pass that courage will be forced upon us, and that when there is no hope left we shall learn a little self-confidence from despair. That in such a crisis the fate of the country should be in the hands of a sneak! If the Republicans stand firm we shall be saved, even at the cost of disunion. If they yield, it is all up with us and with the experiment of democracy.”

When he wrote this letter, he had already written and indeed printed his paper on “The Question of the Hour” in the Atlantic for January, 1861. However apparently inert and even dazed the North might be, and however paralyzed the federal government, there was little indecision at the South. South Carolina had already taken steps to “withdraw from the Union,” and the Southern public men were in a high state of activity. In this article, which has not been reprinted, Lowell considers briefly the possibility of disunion through the action of the South. He is somewhat incredulous of the imminence of this danger, and the real question of the hour to him is whether the Free States, having taken a stand for freedom, will maintain their self-possession and spirit. He groans over the miserable straits to which the nation is reduced by having at its head in this critical hour a man of such mediocrity as Mr. Buchanan. Again he makes his familiar point that the political training of the party in power has caused a distinct degeneration in politics, and thus has brought about a state of things which renders resistance to the treasonable conduct of the leaders of secession weak and ineffective; and he points out with sagacity a source of weakness, which nearly a generation later was to draw from him a new political moral.

“It has been the misfortune of the United States that the conduct of their public affairs has passed more and more exclusively into the hands of men who have looked on politics as a game to be played rather than as a trust to be administered, and whose capital, whether of personal consideration or of livelihood, has been staked on a turn of the cards. A general skepticism has been induced, exceedingly dangerous in times like these. The fatal doctrine of rotation in office has transferred the loyalty of the numberless servants of the Government, and of those dependent on or influenced by them, from the nation to a party. For thousands of families, every change in the National Administration is as disastrous as revolution, and the Government has thus lost that influence which the idea of permanence and stability would exercise in a crisis like the present. At the present moment, the whole body of office-holders at the South is changed from a conservative to a disturbing element by a sense of the insecurity of their tenure. Their allegiance having always been to the party in power at Washington, and not to the Government of the Nation, they find it easy to transfer it to the dominant faction at home.”

Even granting that the secessionists carry out their schemes, the losers, he points out, would not be the Free States. “The laws of trade cannot be changed, and the same causes which have built up their agriculture, commerce, and manufactures will not cease to be operative. The real wealth and strength of states, other things being equal, depends upon homogeneousness of population and variety of occupation, with a common interest and common habits of thought. The cotton-growing States, with their single staple, are at the mercy of chance. India, Australia, nay Africa herself, may cut the thread of their prosperity. Their population consists of two hostile races, and their bone and muscle, instead of being the partners, are the unwilling tools of their capital and intellect. The logical consequence of this political theory is despotism, which the necessity of coercing the subject race will make a military one.”

A month later the situation had become still more serious, and in his article “E Pluribus Unum,” which is reprinted in “Political Essays,” Lowell writes with an earnestness which appears even in the wit and humor that play over the surface. After discussing with an impatient scorn the sophisms of secession, he inquires if any new facts have come to light since the election which would lead the people to reconsider the resolution then made. “Since the election of Mr. Lincoln, not one of the arguments has lost its force, not a cipher of the statistics has been proved mistaken, on which the judgment of the people was made up.” And then, after reaffirming the limitations of the power to be assumed by the Republican party, he bursts forth:—

“But the present question is one altogether transcending all limits of party and all theories of party policy. It is a question of national existence; it is a question whether Americans shall govern America, or whether a disappointed clique shall nullify all government now, and render a stable government difficult hereafter; it is a question, not whether we shall have civil war under certain contingencies, but whether we shall prevent it under any. It is idle, and worse than idle, to talk about Central Republics that can never be formed. We want neither Central Republics nor Northern Republics, but our own Republic and that of our fathers, destined one day to gather the whole continent under a flag that shall be the most august in the world. Having once known what it was to be members of a grand and peaceful constellation, we shall not believe, without further proof, that the laws of our gravitation are to be abolished, and we flung forth into chaos, a hurly-burly of jostling and splintering stars, whenever Robert Toombs or Robert Rhett, or any other Bob of the secession kite, may give a flirt of self-importance. The first and greatest benefit of government is that it keeps the peace, that it insures every man his right, and not only that but the permanence of it. In order to do this, its first requisite is stability; and this once firmly settled, the greater the extent of conterminous territory that can be subjected to one system and one language and inspired by one patriotism, the better.... Slavery is no longer the matter in debate, and we must beware of being led off upon that side-issue. The matter now in hand is the reëstablishment of order, the reaffirmation of national unity, and the settling once for all whether there can be such a thing as a government without the right to use its power in self-defence.” And he closes with the solemn words: “Peace is the greatest of blessings, when it is won and kept by manhood and wisdom; but it is a blessing that will not long be the housemate of cowardice. It is God alone who is powerful enough to let His authority slumber; it is only His laws that are strong enough to protect and avenge themselves. Every human government is bound to make its laws so far resemble His that they shall be uniform, certain, and unquestionable in their operations; and this it can do only by a timely show of power, and by an appeal to that authority which is of divine right, inasmuch as its office is to maintain that order which is the single attribute of that Infinite Reason which we can clearly apprehend and of which we have hourly example.”

The article headed “The Pickens-and-Stealins’ Rebellion,” which appeared in the Atlantic for June, 1861, was the latest of the political articles contributed by Lowell to the magazine while he was editor, and appeared just as he surrendered his charge to Mr. Fields. It was written immediately after the attack on Fort Sumter and in the glow of that popular rising which swept away all the flimsy structure of the politicians and showed the might of that conviction which Lowell never doubted to lie in the minds of the American people. He longed then for a great leader. Major Anderson served for a brief hour to typify the spirit of uncompromising fidelity to duty, but Lowell was disappointed in Lincoln’s public utterances. He was impatient at the President’s caution, and especially at the temporizing policy which he pursued toward the Border States, and he traced the course of events before the first gun was fired on Sumter with the evident conviction that a firmer policy would have been surer to defeat the plans of the Confederacy; but the splendid assertion of the Union spirit fills him with an almost awed sense of joy. “We have no doubt of the issue,” he writes. “We believe that the strongest battalions are always on the side of God. The Southern army will be fighting for Jefferson Davis, or at most for the liberty of self-misgovernment, while we go forth for the defence of principles which alone make government august and civil society possible. It is the very life of the nation that is at stake. There is no question here of dynasties, races, religions, but simply whether we will consent to include in our Bill of Rights—not merely as of equal validity with all other rights, whether natural or acquired, but by its very nature transcending and abrogating them all—the Right of Anarchy. We must convince men that treason against the ballot-box is as dangerous as treason against a throne, and that, if they play so desperate a game, they must stake their lives on the hazard.... A ten years’ war would be cheap that gave us a country to be proud of, and a flag that should command the respect of the world because it was the symbol of the enthusiastic unity of a great nation.... We cannot think that the war we are entering on can end without some radical change in the system of African slavery. Whether it be doomed to a sudden extinction, or to a gradual abolition through economical causes, this war will not leave it where it was before. As a power in the state its reign is already over. The fiery tongue of the batteries in Charleston harbor accomplished in one day a conversion which the constancy of Garrison and the eloquence of Phillips had failed to bring about in thirty years. And whatever other result this war is destined to produce, it has already won for us a blessing worth everything to us as a nation in emancipating the public opinion of the North.” Thus in his last sentence he reiterates the judgment which he had over and over again pronounced in the whole series of these political papers, for he never lost sight of the fundamental fact that freedom resides in the spirit of man and is but recorded in his institutions.

Once more he wrote a prose paper for the Atlantic, moved by the attitude in England, for with others of his kind Lowell took grievously to heart the comments of the English press and the actions of the British government. In this paper, published December, 1861, entitled “Self-Possession vs. Prepossession,” he finds unmistakable symptoms of reaction in England, since 1848, against liberalism in politics, and tries the criticism of the United States government in which the press indulged by the action of England toward Ireland and India; and finally he points out the restrictions imposed on any constitutional government by the very conditions of its existence, forbidding it to act in advance of the convictions of its people. This he does to defend the administration against the charge that it is indifferent to the question of emancipation. He is impatient indeed of the extreme caution of Mr. Lincoln and his associates, but he is nevertheless of the opinion that the time has not yet come for turning the war into a crusade. It is interesting to mark how uppermost in Lowell’s mind is the cause of national unity. Time was when he drew near to the position taken by some of his anti-slavery associates that disunion was preferable to complicity with slavery; but as the conflict between the two opposing forces deepened, he took more and more steadily the larger view, and his democratic principles became bound up with the unity of the nation, and at last with the supremacy of law as represented by the national cause.

“Is this then,” he breaks out fervently at the close of his paper, “to be a commonplace war, a prosaic and peddling quarrel about cotton? Shall there be nothing to enlist enthusiasm or kindle fanaticism? Are we to have no cause like that for which our English republican ancestors died so gladly on the field, with such dignity on the scaffold?—no cause that shall give us a hero, who knows but a Cromwell? To our minds, though it may be obscure to Englishmen, who look on Lancashire as the centre of the universe, no army was ever enlisted for a nobler service than ours. Not only is it national life and a foremost place among nations that is at stake, but the vital principle of Law itself, the august foundation on which the very possibility of government, above all of self-government, rests as in the hollow of God’s own hand. If democracy shall prove itself capable of having raised twenty millions of people to a level of thought where they can appreciate this cardinal truth, and can believe no sacrifice too great for its defence and establishment, then democracy will have vindicated itself beyond all chance of future cavil. Here, we think, is a Cause the experience of whose vicissitudes and the grandeur of whose triumph will be able to give us heroes and statesmen. The Slave-Power must be humbled, must be punished,—so humbled and so punished as to be a warning forever; but slavery is an evil transient in its cause and its consequence, compared with those which would result from unsettling the faith of a nation in its own manhood, and setting a whole generation of men hopelessly adrift in the formless void of anarchy.”

The reserve with which he speaks of the President’s policy is the wise tone to be adopted in a printed article. In his private letters, where such caution is not needed, he gives expression openly to his impatience. In a letter written at the same time as this article, he says: “I confess that my opinion of the Government does not rise, to say the least. If we are saved it will be God’s doing, not man’s, and will He save those who are not worth saving? Lincoln may be right, for aught I know,—prudence is certainly a good drag upon virtue,—but I guess an ounce of Frémont is worth a pound of long Abraham. Mr. L. seems to have a theory of carrying on war without hurting the enemy. He is incapable, apparently, of understanding that they ought to be hurt. The doing good to those that despitefully entreat us was not meant for enemies of the commonwealth. The devil’s angels are those that do his work, and for such there is a lake of fire and brimstone prepared. We have been undertaking to frighten the Devil with cold pitch.

“At the same time it looks as if the rebels must be losing more than we. They must be poorly off for most things that go to make up the efficiency of an army, and if they can’t attack us what can they do? I am in a constant state of unpleasurable excitement. Jemmy[4] and Willy[5] are at Leesburg, in full sight of the enemy’s pickets, and I can’t bear to think of either of them being hurt. Mary was here last night, and though she puts a good face on it, there was something very painful to me in the hoarse hollowness of her voice. If they should die in battle well on into the enemy’s lines, it would be all that one could ask, but it would be dreadful to have them picked off by those murdering cowards. Let’s think of something else.”

A month later, and the boys he spoke of so affectionately and tremulously had fallen. In that most affecting of the second series of the “Biglow Papers,” “Mr. Hosea Biglow to the Editor of the Atlantic Monthly,” printed at the close of the war, he could refer to them in verse which holds all the passion of tears. Now, he can only send tidings to his most intimate friend in a few restrained words: “We have the worst news. Dear Willie is killed, and James badly wounded. They must have behaved like men. Think of poor Mary, whose husband is so ill that he cannot be told of it. She does not know it yet, though she is prepared. But he will be brought home this afternoon. He was truly a noble young fellow. Simple, brave, and pure I knew him to be in a very rare measure. We have the pride of knowing that our men must have done well. Of the officers of the 20th, two were drowned, and all the rest (except Col. Lee) wounded. Willie was the only one killed. Wendell Holmes wounded. Last despatch says, ‘Lowell and Holmes doing well this morning,’—that’s to-day. Thank God for that, and that they all did their duty.” Two days later he added: “He came home yesterday afternoon, his face little changed, they tell me, and with a smile on it. He got his wound as we could wish. The adjutant of the regiment was hit, Willie sprang forward to help him, and was shot instantly. Jamie sprang to help him, and was hit, but will be about again in ten days or so.... It is some consolation to think that he was struck in so graceful an action, and his wound is in front, as I knew it would be.”

The depth of feeling which appears in his prose at this time, as he tries to set forth the essential character of the great conflict, could scarcely fail to find manifestation in poetry, since that was his native speech. Yet it required genuine possession of mind. In the years just preceding the actual breaking out of war Lowell could, as we have seen, treat with badinage such manifestations as the American Tract Society, and the speech-making of Choate and Cushing; he could, indeed, pass in these papers from satire to earnest examination of fundamentals; but somehow he could not bring himself to use the keener weapon which he had handled so skilfully in the discussion over Texas and the Mexican War. “Friendly people say to me sometimes,” he writes to Thomas Hughes, 13 September, 1859, “‘write us more “Biglow Papers,”’ and I have even been simple enough to try, only to find that I could not.” And a couple of months later R. G. White writes: “The Atlantic has just come in, and I miss what you led me to expect from your friend B. O. F. Sawin.” He had plainly made a deliberate attempt, for in July of this year he was writing to Mr. Norton: “I have a new ‘Biglow’ running in my head, and I shall write it as soon as my brain clears off. At present I feel all the time like the next morning without having had the day before, which is too bad. I think my new ‘Biglow’ will be funny. If not you will never see it. It will be on the reopening of the slave trade, and some rather humorous combinations have come into my mind. We shall see.”

It is not improbable that the impetus to verse came from the stirring of his personal emotions in the autumn of 1861, when he was following with anxious yet proud emotions the career of the two nephews whom he loved with that freedom which an uncle bestows on those who, not his own children, are yet his children’s nearest kin. It was on 20 September that he wrote of the “constant state of unpleasurable excitement” under which he labored. On 8 October he writes to Mr. Fields, who had been urging him to send a contribution to the Atlantic: “I set about a poem last night,—apropos of the times,—and hope to finish it to-morrow, and if it turn out to be good for anything, I will send it at once, and you can print it or no as you like.”

This poem was “The Washers of the Shroud,” which appeared in the November Atlantic. The same thought prevails in this poem which found ampler expression in his prose, as we have seen, a conviction that his country was not to “join the waiting ghosts of names,” but was to have the

“larger manhood, saved for those
That walk unblenching through the trial-fires.”[6]

How deeply he felt the poem may be seen not only in the solemn measure of the verse itself, but in the confession of physical exhaustion in which the writing of it left him.[7] Most impressive was the coincidence of the final stanza with the news which reached Elmwood just as the poem itself fell under the eye of the great public. “God, give us peace!” he had said in the penultimate stanza,—

“God, give us peace!—not such as lulls to sleep,
But sword on thigh, and brow with purpose knit!
And let our Ship of State to harbor sweep,
Her ports all up, her battle-lanterns lit,
And her leashed thunders gathering for their leap!”

And then,

“So cried I, with clenched hands and passionate pain,
Thinking of dear ones by Potomac’s side:
Again the loon laughed mocking, and again
The echoes bayed far down the night and died,
While waking I recalled my wandering brain.”[8]

There is a single sentence in a letter written four days before the fatal news came which helps to show that side of Lowell’s nature out of which his best work sprang, the attitude of receptivity to the large elemental life. Taken in connection with the sudden blow so soon to fall, it enables one to understand better the power by which Lowell was aroused to action: “These last rains have been lifting the leaves (si levan le foglie) with a vengeance, making as clean work as ever Highland Cateran with cattle. I can’t understand people who call autumn a melancholy season unless they are cockneys indeed. To a country-bred fellow like me, the exquisite atmosphere and the dear associations with nutting and fishing and trying to shoot ducks, and lying under warm hillsides, make it anything but sad. Even to see the leaves fall is a pleasure to me which few others match.”

Certain it is that from this time there seemed to be a new and, I think, loftier and more sustained spirit in his writing upon the great issues of the day. For one thing, he found vent in a rapid succession of poems which form the second series of the “Biglow Papers.” Early in December, 1861, he wrote the first, apparently under pressure to return to this form. “It was clean against my critical judgment,” he writes, “for I don’t believe in resuscitations—we hear no good of the posthumous Lazarus—but I may get into the vein and do some good;” and it is clear that the effort did seat him again in the saddle, for he followed his first paper, which appeared in January, 1862, with five more in successive months, which were in effect pungent comments on the course of events in that dark period. He had apparently the stimulus of an engagement with Mr. Fields, the editor of the Atlantic, for we find him in August confessing his inability to bring to light another paper which was confined somewhere in his perplexed brain.

Lowell could not of course escape his own shadow cast by the brilliant success of the first series, although fourteen years in a man’s memory does not raise such an accumulation of fame as it does in the memory of spectators. He was doubtless a bit nervous as he essayed to repeat an earlier impromptu, for such the first series may fairly be called, but the nervousness really attacked only the beginning of his effort; once he was fairly under way, the old assurance all came back, and it was easy enough to indulge in that vernacular which was so imbedded in his early consciousness as to be not an acquisition but an inheritance. The Yankee dialect and macaronics, both of which were the lingo of his boyhood, were so native to his wit that he handled them in maturity as freely as one’s hand grasps in a return to the country the scythe which has been swung in boyhood.

It is perhaps more to the point to observe that, as in the earlier series, the figures of this pastoral had been developed from suddenly designed sketches until they stood full formed to the reader in the resultant book, now, upon the resumption of the art, they became simply accepted types to be illustrated rather than developed; and there is therefore from the start a firmness of touch and a solidity of modelling which give to the entire series an air of certainty and ease, as if the author had no need to add or rub out. There is possibly a little loss of buoyancy and spontaneity, but if so there is compensation in the touch of wisdom and especially of deep feeling characteristic of the series as a whole. Lowell is so sure of the rustic form he is using, and of the old-fashioned pedantry of Mr. Wilbur, that he can draw more confidently from deeper soundings, as indeed the very growth of his own nature compels him to do. Thus, while the satire of the earlier series is more amusing, that of the second is more biting. For when he was dealing with the iniquities of the Mexican war, he was after all contemplating what might be deemed a cutaneous disease as compared with the deadly virus now attacking the most vital part of the national body, and, moreover, fourteen years of personal experience such as he had known could scarcely fail to give him more penetration.

There are one or two surface indications of all this which may be noticed. Thus, though the Reverend Homer Wilbur of the second series is the same serene, absconding sort of parson as in the first, now and then Lowell forgets the impersonation and speaks in his own voice. This is especially observable in the second of the papers. What Mr. Wilbur says there respecting the English and their criticism of America can scarcely be distinguished in manner from Lowell’s own utterances in prose papers already referred to. And again, in the first number, written when Lowell was freshly grieving over the loss of his nephews, there is a trumpet note in the voice of Mr. Wilbur which is both the perfection of art and the sincerity of feeling. The parson is defending himself against the charge of inconsistency in allowing his youngest son to raise a company for the war. He refers with characteristic complacency to the example he himself had set by serving as a chaplain in the war of 1812, and adds: “It was, indeed, grievous to send my Benjamin, the child of my old age; but after the discomfiture of Manassas, I with my own hands did buckle on his armor, trusting in the great Comforter and Commander for strength according to my need. For truly the memory of a brave son dead in his shroud were a greater staff of my declining years than a living coward (if those may be said to have lived who carry all of themselves into the grave with them), though his days might be long in the land, and he should get much goods. It is not till our earthen vessels are broken that we find and truly possess the treasure that was laid up in them.”

It is possible that Lowell took a little alarm when he read over the prose introduction to his second paper, for thereafter there is a studied care to make Mr. Wilbur speak in his own measured tones, even to an indulgence in the introduction to the fifth paper in a piece of most elaborate nonsense mocking the antiquary’s enthusiasm. The manner, at last, in which Mr. Wilbur’s death is announced, the bringing upon the scenes for obituary purposes of his colleague the Reverend Jeduthun Hitchcock, who is deliciously discriminated from his senior yet shown to have been formed out of the same clay, the posthumous sayings from Mr. Wilbur’s Table Talk,—all this is conceived in a most sympathetic and genuine spirit of art. The delineation of old age, indeed, in this character was, one may guess, something more than artistic imagining. There is a bit of nonsense which Lowell wrote to Miss Norton in 1864, which for its full effect ought to be reproduced in facsimile, for he took the most elaborate pains to transform his hand into that of a poor trembling old nonagenarian: “Since I lost my last tooth, I am a great deal more comfortable, I thank you. The new sett maide for me Doctor Tucker’s great granson works well and I eat comfortable. Let me recommend Tinto’s hair dyes. It makes all black to be sure, and you look like your fotograms. My palsy hardly troubles me at all now. My memory is as good as it ever was, and my hand-writing as good as in my earliest years. I wrote a little poem last week which Fanny thinks as good as anything I ever did. It begins

Let dogs delight to bark and bite
For ’tis their nature, too.

But I don’t think she hears very well with her new trumpet.

“Certainly I will dine with you on Sunday and shall expect you on Thursday if Tuesday should be a fair day. The death of Holmes is an awful warning, but one can’t expect to be very strong at ninety nine. I remember his mother who died near fifty years ago.”

The fun we make often discloses the gravity that lies behind, as if we could exorcise a spirit by jesting at it, and Lowell was tormented, strange to say, by the apprehension of old age long before he approached it. There is, therefore, something pathetic as well as humorous in the fragment of Mr. Wilbur’s letter which introduces the “Latest Views of Mr. Biglow.” It is the imitation palsy again, and yet behind Mr. Wilbur’s tremulous phrases one reads those strong convictions which Lowell held to throughout the perplexing days before Gettysburg. “Though I believe Slavery,” Mr. Wilbur says, “to have been the cause of it [the war] by so thoroughly demoralizing Northern politicks for its own purposes as to give opportunity and hope to treason, yet I would not have our thought and purpose diverted from their true object,—the maintenance of the idea of Government. We are not merely suppressing an enormous riot, but contending for the possibility of permanent order coexisting with democratical fickleness; and while I would not superstitiously venerate form to the sacrifice of substance, neither would I forget that an adherence to precedent and prescription can alone give that continuity and coherence under a democratic constitution which are inherent in the person of a despotick monarch and the selfishness of an aristocratical class. Stet pro ratione voluntas is as dangerous in a majority as in a tyrant.”

Distinct as are the judgments of Mr. Wilbur, it is after all in the poems from Hosea Biglow and his foil Birdofredom Sawin that we get the freest and most luminous expression of Lowell’s mind. He began the new series in a low key by recounting the experience of the renegade Yankee during the years since the Mexican war, but the affair of the Trent happened immediately after he had written the first paper, and before completing Birdofredom’s story he dashed off that quaint fable of the dialogue between the Bridge and the Monument, ending with the verses “Jonathan to John,” which was a genuine delivery of his mind. “If I am not mistaken,” he wrote to Mr. Fields on sending it, “it will take. ’Tis about Mason and Slidell, and I have ended it with a refrain that I hope has a kind of tang to it.” The judgments which he passed in it were not momentary impulses. Three years later he wrote a letter[9] which repeats in prose much the same sentiments. It would be difficult to find a better exponent than Lowell of the temper of educated Americans toward England, a temper which discriminates sharply between the England of history and of personal affection and the England that registered in the nineteenth century the prejudices of a lingering bureaucratic régime.

In the third, fourth, and fifth papers Lowell used his satire effectively to sting his countrymen into a perception of the meaner side of politics, for his incessant cry throughout his political career was for independence and idealism, and the obverse was an unfailing denunciation of shams and cowardly truckling to popular views. It was when he came to the close of the six numbers which he appears to have agreed to write that he gave himself up to the luxury of that bobolink song which always swelled in his throat when spring melted into summer. “Sunthin’ in the Pastoral Line,” like the opening notes of “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” like “Under the Willows,” “Al Fresco,” and similar poems, is the insistent call of Nature which is perhaps the most unmistakable witness in Lowell of a voice most his own because least subject to his own volition. To be sure, Lowell had a truth he wished to press,—the need of crushing the rattlesnake in its head of slavery; but he must needs first clear his throat by a long sweet draught of nature, and the mingling of pure delight in out of doors with the perplexities of the hour renders this number of the “Biglow Papers” one that goes very straight to the reader’s heart.

There is no flagging in this monthly succession, as one reads the “Papers” now, but Lowell hated the compulsory business of a poem a month,—as he says in this latest number:—

“I thought ef this ’ere milkin’ o’ the wits
So much a month, war n’t givin’ Natur’ fits,—
Ef folks war n’t druv, findin’ their own milk fail,
To work the cow that hez an iron tail,
An’ ef idees ’thout ripenin’ in the pan
Would send up cream to humor ary man.”

And he wrote to Fields, 5 June, 1862: “It’s no use. I reverse the gospel difficulty, and while the flesh is willing enough, the spirit is weak. My brain must lie fallow a spell,—there is no super-phosphate for those worn-out fields. Better no crop than small potatoes. I want to have the passion of the thing on me again and beget lusty Biglows. I am all the more dejected because you have treated me so well. But I must rest awhile. My brain is out of kilter.” And again in August he wrote to the same: “Give me a victory and I will give you a poem: but I am now clear down in the bottom of the well, where I see the Truth too near to make verses of.”

So it was six months before he wrote again, this time the “Latest Views of Mr. Biglow.” He carried out his plan, after this interval, of putting an end to Mr. Wilbur. The verses repeat his impatience for some action, some great leader, but at the close he bursts forth into exultation over Lincoln’s proclamation of emancipation. And then, for two years and more, Hosea keeps silence.

Yet if victory did not arouse him, the greater theme of sacrifice called out one of his most solemn and stirring odes, that dedicated to the memory of Robert Gould Shaw, and entitled “Memoriæ Positum R. G. Shaw.” It may well be read in connection with the other poem suggested by the events of the war in 1863, “Two Scenes from the Life of Blondel.” There is in this parable a half confession of failure, a reflection upon ideals once held gallantly and then trailed in the dust of disappointment. He seems to have written the first scene, in which Lincoln is the ideal captain, without at first designing the second, for he writes to Mr. Fields, who already had the first: “I have written a Palinode to ‘Blondel,’ and so made two poems of it. The latter half is half-humorous and, I think, will help the effect. You see how dangerous it is to pay a poet handsomely beforehand. I don’t know where I shall stop. I shall be sending an epic presently.... I should like your notion of the second part of Blondel, which (in the first relief of incubation) I am inclined to think clever. But there was nothing wiser than Horace’s ninth year—only it overwhelms us like a ninth wave (that’s Wendell’s, tenth the Latins said, but I wanted nine), and if we kept our verses so long we should print none of them. A strong argument for monthly magazines, you see.” There is so little of the essentially dramatic about Lowell’s poetry that it is not unfair to hear his voice only slightly changed in such a poem as this. But all such speculative and half-moody expressions gave way before the dignity of Shaw’s death. “I would rather have my name known and blest, as his will be,” Lowell writes to Colonel Shaw’s mother, “through all the hovels of an outcast race, than blaring from all the trumpets of repute.” And the ultimate judgment which he held, despite the confusion wrought by all the meaner passions of the time which vext his soul, rings out clearly in the final lines:—

“Dear Land, whom triflers now make bold to scorn,
(Thee! from whose forehead Earth awaits her morn,)
How nobler shall the sun
Flame in thy sky, how braver breathe thy air,
That thou bred’st children who for thee couldst dare
And die as thine have done!”[10]

For the one note, in the discord of the war, heard more and more clearly by Lowell, was that of triumph for democracy as incarnate in his country. No one can read his writings from this time forward without observing how deep a passion this love of his country was. In earlier life he had had a passion for Freedom, and the Freedom which was to him as the Lady to her knight, was very comprehensive and took many forms. Now, in his maturity, and when he saw the one great blot fading from the escutcheon, there was a steady concentration of passion upon that incorporation of freedom in the fair land which seemed to his imagination to have gotten her soul, and no longer Earth’s biggest country, but to have

“risen up Earth’s greatest nation.”

“The Biglow Papers” had appeared in the Atlantic. There also had been printed his “Blondel” and “Memoriæ Positum R. G. Shaw;” but since the article in December, 1861, “Self-Possession vs. Prepossession,” and another in January, 1863,[11] he had not made that magazine the vehicle for prose articles on public affairs, as had been his practice during his editorship of it. Now, at the close of 1863, he entered upon an engagement which was to give him a new medium for communication, and one which he used effectively for the next ten years. The North American Review, which had been founded by a number of cultivated gentlemen in Boston in 1815, was modelled on the famous quarterlies of Great Britain, and had for fifty years been the leading representative in America of dignified scholarship and literature. At times it had been spirited and aggressive, but for the most part it had stood rather for elegant leisure and a somewhat remote criticism. For the last ten years it had been conducted in a temperate and careful way by the Rev. Dr. Andrew P. Peabody, who held by the old traditions. But its fortunes were at a low ebb, it no longer was a power, and the publishers, hoping to reinstate it in authority, applied to Lowell to take charge of it. He saw the opportunity it would give him, and he accepted the offer, but only on condition that Mr. Norton should be associated with him as active editor. The advertisement put forth by the publishers was such as to quiet the minds of any who might be uneasy over a change of conduct; for, after naming the now editors, it characterized them as “gentlemen who, for sound and elegant scholarship, have achieved an enviable reputation, both in this country and in Europe; and whose taste, education, and experience eminently qualify them for the position they have assumed. Of the former it may be said that his essays in the periodical which, under his editorship, reached the summit of its fame, surpassed in vigor and force those of any contributor; of the latter, that he has ‘added new honors to the name he bears by the extent and variety of his knowledge, and by the force and elegance which he has exhibited both as a writer and a speaker.’ And of both, that their thorough loyalty to the liberal institutions of our country, and their sympathy with the progressive element of the times, renders them peculiarly fitted to conduct the Review, which has by competent authority been pronounced ‘the leading literary organ of the country,’ and of which it has been said ‘it has not its equal in America, nor its superior in the world.’” The advertisement continued in measured phrases to announce the policy of the review, and it would have been difficult for its old subscribers to detect any promise of change, though as a matter of fact, while the term scholarly could equally well be applied to it in the next ten years, the scholarship was more exact, the scope of the review was greatly widened, and for pungency and thoroughness of criticism, for good English and for breadth of view, it was so strikingly marked, that it became a signal example of how a magazine may at once be lifted to a higher level without being compelled to turn a somersault.

The advertisement, however, which Crosby & Nichols put forth no doubt with a dignified elation, excited Lowell’s ire, and he gave vent to his annoyance in a rhymed letter to his colleague:—

“Dear Charles,—
I am mad as a piper
And could bite those old files like a viper,
Reading their d—d advertisement
For donkeys, and not for the wise, meant,
(Which undoubtedly tickles
Messrs. Crosby and Nichols
To the innermost jecur
Or brain—where they’re weaker!)
I feel as if the rogues meant to work us
Like the clowns of a travelling circus,
Blowing their trumpets before us
In a brazen and asinine chorus,
Sending advance troops of blackguards
To blear all the fences with placards,—
‘This is the famous Dan Rice, sirs,
Whose jokes are beyond any price, sirs,
And this is that eminent man Joe
Grimes, so sublime on the banjo,
And especially great in the prances
Of the best Ethiopian dances!’
Why, I feel my shamed visage o’erdarkle
With my last evening’s waterproof charcoal!
Dear Charles, all your articles toss by
And see Messrs. Nichols and Crosby:
Curl up your moustache like a bandit
And tell ’em we never will stand it
To be treated (I put here one more curse)
Like a couple of literate porkers
(Nay, a literate one would much rather
Be made into pork like his father.)
I’d go, but must hurry to college
To help the confusion of knowledge,
So remain
Your true friend, as you know well,
!!!!‘The world famous James Russell Lowell
Shuperior every way vastly
To the late justly-favorite Astley!!!!’”

Though Mr. Norton took the laboring oar in editing, Lowell put in his stroke now and then, as may be seen in a letter to Mr. Motley asking for a contribution.[12] In that he sets forth the situation in a few sentences: “You have heard,” he says, “that Norton and I have undertaken to edit the North American,—a rather Sisyphian job, you will say. It wanted three chief elements to be successful. It wasn’t thoroughly, that is, thickly and thinly, loyal, it wasn’t lively, and it had no particular opinions on any particular subject. It was an eminently safe periodical, and accordingly was in great danger of running aground. It was an easy matter, of course, to make it loyal,—even to give it opinions (such as they were), but to make it alive is more difficult. Perhaps the day of the quarterlies is gone by, and those megatheria of letters may be in the mere course of nature withdrawing to their last swamps to die in peace. Anyhow, here we are with our megatherium on our hands, and we must strive to find what will fill his huge belly, and keep him alive a little longer.”

That this and similar letters were not so much evidence of Lowell’s energetic assumption of editorial tasks as special efforts coaxed out of him by his associate, may be inferred from a letter to Mr. Norton written three days later, in which he begins: “It is abominable that you should have been gone a whole month without a letter from me,—and yet so wholly in accordance with natural laws that you must be pleased when I explain the reason of my silence. That I have thought of you I need not say. Well, do you understand the nature of a cask, and accordingly the analogous human nature of a ‘vessel of wrath?’ A cask has a bung which is kept tight, and a spigot through which it delights to unbosom itself into the can for refreshment or mirth. But this is not all. It may be never so small,—a needle might stop it,—but if stopped, not a drop shall you coax out of the faucet for love or money. Now when I read your letter, walking in the hot sun along the side of the graveyard, I was full of good liquor reaming ripe to flow for you. But you bound me by a vow to write to Motley ere I wrote to you, and in so doing hermetically sealed the vent, and locked up all my vintage in myself. I could have written to you, but Motley was another thing. And first came Commencement, then Phi Beta, then the making of my salt hay, and at last I got it done and a letter also to Howells.”

But if Lowell shirked the drudgery of editing he gave what was much more worth while to the Review in his frequent contributions. During the remainder of the war, and during the early stages of the reconstruction period, he had in nearly every number a political article. The new editors issued their first number in January, 1864, and Lowell took for his subject “The President’s Policy.” The last direct public expression he had given of his estimate of Mr. Lincoln was in his Atlantic article in December, 1861. Two years had passed since that time and the question was now looming up of the election of Mr. Lincoln’s successor. The election was to be held in November, 1864, and the four articles which Lowell wrote in the quarterly numbers of that year are all practically arguments for the reëlection of Mr. Lincoln. The January article, combined (with some confusion of tenses) with what he wrote after the President’s death, now appears under the title “Abraham Lincoln,” in “Political Essays.” The estimate of the President, made for the most part when Lincoln was under fire, not only from his political opponents, but from those who might be expected to support him, is a clear appreciation of those great qualities of patience and balance of mind which have come to be recognized as the source of his strength. Lowell, as we have seen, had not at the outset refrained from a critical attitude toward Lincoln. Now he confesses his own blunder and throws the confession into the scales when weighing him. “Mr. Lincoln, as it seems to us in reviewing his career, though we have sometimes in our impatience thought otherwise, has always waited, as a wise man should, till the right moment brought up all his reserves;” and he reads well a prime element of Lincoln’s power when he makes distinction between the conscientiously rigid doctrinaire and the statesman who achieves his triumph by quietly accomplishing his ends. “Mr. Lincoln’s perilous task has been to carry a rather shaky raft through the rapids, making fast the unrulier logs as he could snatch opportunity, and the country is to be congratulated that he did not think it his duty to run straight at all hazards, but cautiously to assure himself with his setting pole where the main current was, and keep steadily to that. He is still in wild water, but we have faith that his skill and sureness of eye will bring him out right at last.” What especially bound Lincoln’s policy to Lowell’s confidence was the fact that its pole-star was national integrity, and in tracing as he does the slow process by which the President carried the nation with him till the abolition of slavery became no longer the cry of a party but the logical necessity of a nation, he practically unfolds the process of his own development.[13]

In the April number of the North American Lowell took for his text General McClellan’s Report, and applied his powers of analysis to this for the purpose of constructing the figure of Lincoln’s opponent. McClellan was no longer in the field, but he was the military critic of the administration and the man about whom the forces in opposition were gradually collecting, since he seemed to have been thrown up for this purpose by the elements which were most active. McClellan’s report, which had recently appeared, covered the period from July, 1861, to November, 1862, a period which in the rapid progress of events was already historical and could be examined in the light of later movements. To McClellan, however, the Report was an apologia pro vita sua, and nothing had happened since it was written, so essentially was he a critic rather than a creator. Lowell was quick to see the weakness of McClellan’s position in defending himself, preliminary to assuming a position where he was to defend the country, and in making his defence issue in charges against the authority under whose orders he had acted. He saw not so much the politician under the soldier’s cloak as a man of such calibre as fitted him to become the tool of politicians, and so self-conscious that once he is possessed of the notion of his political importance he looks at everything from a personal point of view. The Report gave abundant evidence of this, and Lowell follows him through the narrative, not as a military critic but as a student of human nature, and in his summary asks the very pertinent question if a man of this make-up is a man to put at the head of affairs. “Though we think,” he says, “great injustice has been done by the public to General McClellan’s really high merit as an officer, yet it seems to us that those very merits show precisely the character of intellect to unfit him for the task just now demanded of a statesman. His capacity for organization may be conspicuous; but be it what it may, it is one thing to bring order out of the confusion of mere inexperience, and quite another to retrieve it from a chaos of elements mutually hostile, which is the problem sure to present itself to the next administration. This will constantly require precisely that judgment on the nail, and not to be drawn for at three days’ sight, of which General McClellan has shown least. Is our path to be so smooth for the next four years that a man whose leading characteristic is an exaggeration of difficulties is likely to be our surest guide?... The man who is fit for the office of President in these times should be one who knows how to advance, an art which General McClellan has never learned.”

In the July number Lowell recurs more distinctly to the fundamental questions involved in the war, since his task is to place in comparison two historical works issuing from opposite sides, Pollard’s initial volume of “The Southern History of the War,” devoted to the first year, and the first volume of Greeley’s treatise, “The American Conflict.” As these two, and more especially the latter, naturally set about accounting for the war, Lowell makes them the text for his article, “The Rebellion: its Causes and Consequences.” The breadth of the theme tempts him into an introductory discussion of the several modes of writing history, and an inquiry into the spirit in which history in the making should be interpreted, but his real business, when he gets at it, is to examine the political character of the nation at the breaking out of the war, and to trace the insidious influence of slavery on national politics. He repeats in newer and more forcible phrases the contention, so often made by him, that the corruption of government had been going on steadily under this subtle solvent, and that the hope of the nation was in the extinction of so disturbing an element. He applies the truth to the political situation in the approaching election, and warns the South that “there is no party at the North, considerable in numbers or influence, which could come into power on the platform of making peace with the Rebels on their own terms. No party can get possession of the government which is not in sympathy with the temper of the people, and the people, forced into war against their will by the unprovoked attack of pro-slavery bigotry, are resolved on pushing it to its legitimate conclusion. War means now, consciously with many, unconsciously with most, but inevitably, abolition.... If the war be waged manfully, as becomes a thoughtful people, without insult or childish triumph in success, if we meet opinion with wiser opinion, waste no time in badgering prejudice till it becomes hostility, and attack slavery as a crime against the nation, and not as individual sin, it will end, we believe, in making us the most powerful and prosperous community the world ever saw.”

Though he wrote hopefully in his public articles, Lowell’s letters show alternations of hope and discouragement, and intimate how much the war disturbed his peace of mind. He wrote to Mr. Norton, midway between the July and October numbers: “I shall say nothing about politics, my dear Charles, for I feel rather down in the mouth, and moreover I have not had an idea so long that I should not know one if I saw it. The war and its constant expectation and anxiety oppress me. I cannot think. If I had enough to leave behind me, I could enlist this very day and get knocked in the head. I hear bad things about Mr. Lincoln and try not to believe them.”

In July the two candidates for the presidency had not been formally named, but when Lowell came to prepare his article for the October number, which would appear on the eve of the election, the contest was at its height, though events were rapidly throwing their votes against the losing party. Lowell makes capital use of this fact in his article “McClellan or Lincoln?” which gains in wit through the evident elation which possesses the writer over the almost certain results. He had written Motley at the end of July: “My own feeling has always been confident, and it is now hopeful. If Mr. Lincoln is re-chosen, I think the war will soon be over.... So far as I can see, the opposition to Mr. Lincoln is both selfish and factious, but it is much in favor of the right side that the Democratic party have literally not so much as a single plank of principle to float on, and the sea runs high. They don’t know what they are in favor of—hardly what they think it safe to be against. And I doubt if they gain much by going into an election on negatives.” By a series of eliminations, he leaves, in his article, the single point of difference between the policy of Lincoln and that which McClellan, according to his own showing, would pursue, namely, the policy of conciliation concerning which McClellan made loud protestations; and then he proceeds to riddle that assumption. The article, however, is interesting chiefly for another summary of Lowell’s judgment of Lincoln:—

“Mr. Lincoln, in our judgment, has shown from the first the considerate wisdom of a practical statesman. If he has been sometimes slow in making up his mind, it has saved him the necessity of being hasty to change it when once made up, and he has waited till the gradual movement of the popular sentiment should help him to his conclusions and sustain him in them. To be moderate and unimpassioned in revolutionary times that kindle natures of a more flimsy texture, may not be a romantic quality, but it is a rare one, and goes with those massive understandings on which a solid structure of achievement may be reared. Mr. Lincoln is a long-headed and long-purposed man, who knows when he is ready,—a secret General McClellan never learned.... We have seen no reason to change our opinion of Mr. Lincoln since his wary scrupulousness won him the applause of one party, or his decided action, when he was at last convinced of its necessity, made him the momentary idol of the other. We will not call him a great man, for over-hasty praise is too apt to sour at last into satire, and greatness may be trusted safely to history and the future; but an honest one we believe him to be, and with no aim save to repair the glory and the greatness of his country.”

The reëlection of Lincoln with a convincing majority, and the rapid crushing of the shell of the Confederacy, conspired at once to give Lowell a spirit of exultation, tempered with profound regret, and a keen interest in the results of the war. The one mood appears in the striking paper on “Reconstruction” which he contributed to the North American for April, 1865, the other in the new “Biglow Paper” which he contributed to the Atlantic for the same month. The latter was written earlier and apparently was drawn out of him by the golden persuasion of Mr. Fields, for we find Lowell writing him 2 February, 1865, when he sends him No. X. of the “Biglow Papers,” “Mr. Hosea Biglow to the Editor of the Atlantic Monthly:”

“You pulled the string of this cold shower-bath, so you can’t complain. But if you don’t like it, I am willing to take back my machine. If on the other hand you do,—and if you don’t, by Jove, count on my undying hate,—why, suppose you send me the canvas—greenback, I mean, before you print it. This would give us both a sensation which is desirable in a world where an Emperor offered a kingdom for a new one. Remember in future that asking poets for verses is almost as fatal as asking them to read them. ‘Thyself art the cause of this anguish.’ Item. I have been mulling over a fairy story, of which something may come and something may not.[14] I begin to suspect the egg may be chalk. I have heard of such things. Even the muses in this degenerate age have learned to sophisticate. The devil tempts me to tell you I have also a novel in progress, and an epic poem and a tragedy—also a satire in which those who don’t like the foregoing are ground to powder. But I have scared you enough for once, and I really haven’t begun one of ’em, unless it may be the tragedy which one goes on composing all his life.”

The ground-swell of emotion which stirs the verses written in that winter of 1865, just before spring came, and when the buds of peace were already beginning to open, is expressive of that strong personal feeling which entered into Lowell’s measure of the sacrifice which had been made when he reckoned on the great gain that was to accrue to the nation. Poetry, and especially that cast in a homely mould, was his vent for this feeling. He rarely showed emotion in his prose, but in the article which he wrote a few weeks later when the end was just in sight, he discloses in another way, and almost as strongly, the depth of his nature, for in this article on “Reconstruction” there is scarcely any of that play of wit which marks his earlier political papers.

“Come, while our country feels the lift
Of a gret instinct shoutin’ ‘Forwards!’”

Hosea Biglow had just sung with tearful eyes and firm set lips, and Lowell’s whole nature seemed to rise in an eager desire to grapple with the great problem which was to confront the nation as soon as the last gun had been fired. The quiet, stately opening of the subject as he recounts with deep pride the attitude of the country, and the splendid attestation it had given of the staying power of democracy, is followed by a close examination of the main lines of policy to be followed in the reconstruction of the insurgent states. “We did not enter,” he says, “upon war to open a new market, or fresh fields for speculators, or an outlet for redundant population, but to save the experiment of democracy from destruction, and put it in a fairer way of success by removing the single disturbing element. Our business now is not to allow ourselves to be turned aside from a purpose which our experience thus far has demonstrated to have been as wise as it was necessary, and to see to it that, whatever be the other conditions of reconstruction, democracy, which is our real strength, receive no detriment.”

Hence, after some wise words regarding the treatment of the governing class at the South, and a penetrating exposition of the relation between these and the non-slaveholding class, he applies himself most closely to a study of the situation as regards the blacks, with the conclusion that the prime necessity is to make them land-holders and to give them the ballot. There are some sentences which have a mournful sound read to-day, thirty-five years after the discussion. “We believe the white race, by their intellectual and traditional superiority, will retain sufficient ascendancy to prevent any serious mischief from the new order of things.” “As to any prejudices which should prevent the two races from living together, it would soon yield to interest and necessity.” He is aware of the difficulties which beset the subject, but he contends that the large way is the only way. “If we are to try the experiment of democracy fairly, it must be tried in its fullest extent, and not halfway.... The opinion of the North is made up on the subject of emancipation, and Mr. Lincoln has announced it as the one essential preliminary to the readmission of the insurgent States. To our mind, citizenship is the necessary consequence, as it is the only effectual warranty, of freedom; and accordingly we are in favor of distinctly settling beforehand some conditional right of admission to it. We have purposely avoided any discussion on gradualism as an element in emancipation, because we consider its evil results to have been demonstrated in the British West Indies. True conservative policy is not an anodyne hiding away our evil from us in a brief forgetfulness. It looks to the long future of a nation, and dares the heroic remedy where it is scientifically sure of the nature of the disease.”

Then came the triumphant close in the surrender of Lee, and he writes to Mr. Norton: “The news, my dear Charles, is from Heaven. I felt a strange and tender exaltation. I wanted to laugh and I wanted to cry, and ended by holding my peace and feeling devoutly thankful. There is something magnificent in having a country to love. It is almost like what one feels for a woman. Not so tender, perhaps, but to the full as self-forgetful. I worry a little about reconstruction, but am inclined to think that matters will very much settle themselves.” He closed his political articles of the war period with one in July, entitled “Scotch the Snake, or kill it?” which is in a lighter vein than “Reconstruction,” and is in its way a quick survey of the underlying character of the great contest, suggested by an examination of that scrapbook of the war, Frank Moore’s The Rebellion Record. This mirror gives so many varied reflections that Lowell writes a little at random, making felicitous comments, but coming back, as so often before, to the paramount question of slavery and the treatment of the negro. As the title of his article intimates, he contends for a radical solution of the problem. “The more thought we bestow on the matter, the more thoroughly are we persuaded that the only way to get rid of the negro is to do him justice. Democracy is safe because it is just, and safe only when it is just to all. Here is no question of white or black, but simply of man. We have hitherto been strong in proportion as we dared be true to the sublime thought of our own Declaration of Independence, which for the first time proposed to embody Christianity in human laws, and announced the discovery that the security of the state is based on the moral instinct and the manhood of its members.”

The character, of the work he was noticing led him at the beginning of his paper into some reflections on the part played by newspapers in modern times, and the stimulus given to national sensitiveness by the quick transmission of news. “It is no trifling matter,” he says, “that thirty millions of men should be thinking the same thought and feeling the same pang at a single moment of time, and that these vast parallels of latitude should become a neighborhood more intimate than many a country village. The dream of Human Brotherhood seems to be coming true at last. The peasant who dipped his net in the Danube, or trapped the beaver on its banks, perhaps never heard of Cæsar, or of Cæsar’s murder; but the shot that shattered the forecasting brain, and curdled the warm, sweet heart of the most American of Americans, echoed along the wires through the length and breadth of a continent, swelling all eyes at once with tears of indignant sorrow. Here was a tragedy fulfilling the demands of Aristotle, and purifying with an instantaneous throb of pity and terror a theatre of such proportions as the world never saw. We doubt if history ever recorded an event so touching and awful as this sympathy, so wholly emancipated from the toils of space and time that it might seem as if earth were really sentient, as some have dreamed, or the great god Pan alive again to make the hearts of nations stand still with his shout. What is Beethoven’s ‘Funeral March for the Death of a Hero’ to the symphony of love, pity, and wrathful resolve which the telegraph of that April morning played on the pulses of a nation?”

It was perhaps with one of these phrases lingering in his mind that he characterized Lincoln a few weeks later when he came to write his Ode recited at the Harvard Commemoration. This commemoration was held by Harvard College, 21 July, 1865, in honor of its sons who had died in the war. Lowell was asked to write a poem for the occasion, and he has given in a letter written a score of years later, to Mr. Gilder, a bit of reminiscence respecting its composition. “The ode itself,” he says, “was an improvisation. Two days before the commemoration I had told my friend Child that it was impossible—that I was dull as a door-mat. But the next day something gave me a jog, and the whole thing came out of me with a rush. I sat up all night writing it out clear, and took it on the morning of the day to Child. ‘I have something but don’t yet know what it is, or whether it will do. Look at it and tell me.’ He went a little way apart with it under an elm-tree in the College yard. He read a passage here and there, brought it back to me, and said ‘Do? I should think so! Don’t you be scared!’ And I wasn’t, but virtue enough had gone out of me to make me weak for a fortnight after.” Something of this reaction appears in a letter to Miss Norton, written four days after the delivery of the poem: “I eat and smoke and sleep and go through all the nobler functions of a man mechanically still, and wonder at myself as at something outside of and alien to me. For have I not worked myself lean on an ‘Ode for Commemoration?’ Was I not so rapt with the fervor of conception as I have not been these ten years, losing my sleep, my appetite, and my flesh, those attributes to which I before alluded as nobly uniting us in a common nature with our kind? Did I not for two days exasperate everybody that came near me by reciting passages in order to try them on? Did I not even fall backward and downward to the old folly of hopeful youth, and think I had written something really good at last? And am I not now enduring those retributive dumps which ever follow such sinful exaltations, the Erynnyes of Vanity? Did not I make John Holmes and William Story shed tears by my recitation of it (my ode) in the morning, both of ’em fervently declaring it was ‘noble’? Did not even the silent Rowse declare ’twas in a higher mood than much or most of later verse? Did not I think, in my nervous exhilaration, that ’twould be the feature (as reporters call it) of the day? And, after all, have I not a line in the Daily Advertiser calling it a ‘graceful poem’ (or ‘some graceful verses’ I forget which), which ‘was received with applause?’ Why, Jane, my legs are those of grasshoppers, and my head is an autumn threshing-floor, still beating with the alternate flails of strophe and antistrophe, and an infinite virtue is gone out of me somehow—but it seems not into my verse as I dreamed. Well, well, Charles will like it—but then he always does, so what’s the use? I am Icarus now,

with the cold, salt sea over him instead of the warm exulting blue of ether. I am gone under, and I never will be a fool again.... Like a boy, I mistook my excitement for inspiration, and here I am in the mud. You see, also, I am a little disappointed and a little few (un petit peu) vexed. I did not make the hit I expected, and am ashamed at having been again tempted into thinking I could write poetry, a delusion from which I have been tolerably free these dozen years.”[15]

There was one other comment made by Lowell on the ode which confirms these impressions and adds a little to the record of his experience in writing it. It occurs in a letter to J. B. Thayer, 8 December, 1868, upon the occasion of a review by Mr. Thayer of the volume of verse just published in which the ode was included: “I am not sure if I understand what you say about the tenth strophe. You will observe that it leads naturally to the eleventh, and that I there justify a certain narrowness in it as an expression of the popular feeling as well as my own. I confess I have never got over the feeling of wrath with which (just after the death of my nephew Willie) I read in an English paper that nothing was to be hoped of an army officered by tailors’ apprentices and butcher boys. The poem was written with a vehement speed, which I thought I had lost in the skirts of my professor’s gown. Till within two days of the celebration I was hopelessly dumb, and then it all came with a rush, literally making me lean (mi fece magro), and so nervous that I was weeks in getting over it. I was longer in getting the new (eleventh) strophe to my mind than in writing the rest of my poem. In that I hardly changed a word, and it was so undeliberate that I did not find out till after it was printed that some of the verses lacked corresponding rhymes.[16]... I had put the ethical and political view so often in prose that I was weary of it. The motives of the war? I had impatiently urged them again and again,—but for an ode they must be in the blood and not the memory. One of my great defects (I have always been conscious of it) is an impatience of mind which makes me contemptuously indifferent about arguing matters that have once become convictions.”

Once more, in writing to the same correspondent in 1877, with regard to the versification, he says: “My problem was to contrive a measure which should not be tedious by uniformity, which should vary with varying moods, in which the transitions (including those of the voice) should be managed without jar. I at first thought of mixed rhymed and blank verses of unequal measures, like those in the choruses of ‘Samson Agonistes,’ which are in the main masterly. Of course Milton deliberately departed from that stricter form of the Greek Chorus to which it was bound as much (I suspect) by the law of its musical accompaniment as by any sense of symmetry. I wrote some stanzas of the ‘Commemoration Ode’ on this theory at first, leaving some verses without a rhyme to match. But my ear was better pleased with the rhyme, coming at a longer interval, as a far-off echo, rather than instant reverberation, produced the same effect almost, and yet was grateful by unexpectedly recalling an association and faint reminiscence of consonance.” [17]

The ode did at once assert its high character, yet it must be borne in mind that the very reason of its form acted somewhat against its immediate popularity. It is truly an ode to be recited, and as a chorus depends for its power upon a volume of sound, so this ode needs, to bring out its full value, a great delivery. Lowell himself, always a sympathetic reader, had no such power of recitation as would at once convey to his audience a notion of the stateliness and procession of words which attaches to the ode. The impression of the hour was produced by the spontaneous outpouring of the heart of Phillips Brooks in prayer. “That,” says President Eliot, “was the most impressive utterance of a proud and happy day. Even Lowell’s Commemoration Ode did not at the moment so touch the hearts of his hearers; that one spontaneous and intimate expression of Brooks’s noble spirit convinced all Harvard men that a young prophet had risen up in Israel.”[18]

Lowell’s explanation of the form of the ode is significant. So native to him was the most genuine literary spirit that he could conceive of the ode and its delivery as one consistent whole without being perturbed by the consideration that he was to deliver it and to a modern audience trained in the reading of poetry, not in the hearing of it. Both the poetic reciter and the recipients were wanting, and the ode remains, a noble piece of declamation indeed for whoever has the great gift of poetic declamation, yet after all as surely to be read and not spoken as Browning’s dramas are to be read and not acted. It is this fine literary sense, penetrating even to a supposititious occasion, which clings to the ode and makes it so far caviare to the general. Yet it would be false indeed to regard such a statement as final. The fire which burned in Lowell’s members, leaving him cold afterward, glows in the great lines, and certain it is that at no other single poem, unless it be Whitman’s “My Captain,” does the young American of the generation born since the war so kindle his patriotic emotions.

The sixth stanza was not recited, but was written immediately afterward. It is so completely imbedded in the structure of the ode that it is difficult to think of it as an afterthought. It is easy to perceive that while the glow of composition and of recitation was still upon him Lowell suddenly conceived this splendid illustration and indeed climax of the utterance of the Ideal which is so impressive in the fifth stanza. So free, so spontaneous is this characterization of Lincoln, and so concrete in thought, that it has been most frequently read, we suspect, of any single portion of the ode, and it is so eloquent that one likes to fancy the whole force of the ode behind it, as if Lowell needed the fire he had fanned to white heat, for the very purpose of forging this last, firm tempered bit of steel.

Into these threescore lines Lowell has poured a conception of Lincoln which may justly be said to be to-day the accepted idea which Americans hold of their great President. It was the final expression of the judgment which had slowly been forming in Lowell’s own mind, and when he summed him up in his last line,—

“New birth of our new soul, the first American,”

he was honestly throwing away all the doubts which had from time to time beset him, and letting his ardent pursuit of the ideal, his profound faith in democracy as incarnate in his country, centre in this one man.

In April, 1887, the Century Magazine had a brief article headed “Lincoln and Lowell,” in which the editor, quoting the pregnant sentence on Lincoln from Lowell’s recently published address on “Democracy,” is reminded that Lowell “was the first of the leading American writers to see clearly and fully, and clearly and fully and enthusiastically proclaim the greatness of Abraham Lincoln.” And after quoting this sixth stanza of the ode, he goes back and recalls the political papers in the Atlantic and North American Review, with their references to Lincoln which we have already noted. The next number of the Century contained an article in the nature of a postscript, citing the early judgment of Emerson also on the President. In publishing Nicolay and Hay’s “Life of Lincoln” in the magazine, the editor naturally was interested to recover the impression made by Lincoln when he was comparatively an untried man, on the poets and seers, who have a clearer divination than politicians. He was in correspondence with Lowell and wished if he could to learn what Longfellow and Whittier had then said.

Lowell replied under date of 7 February, 1887: “I can recollect nothing about Lincoln by either L. or W., though this would prove nothing. I do remember a debate with Dr. Holmes just after Lincoln’s nomination. It was under the elms in front of the old Holmes house (where he took a photograph of me by O. W. H. and Sun), and he was much exercised in mind because Seward had not been the man. I, who had read Lincoln’s speeches, was entirely content.” The extracts which I have given from Lowell’s letters and essays make it, however, quite clear that the full recognition of Lincoln’s greatness was a growth and not an immediate insight. Nor is this strange. Lowell never saw Lincoln. Had he met him early in his career, and enjoyed the advantage which comes from personal sight, as Hawthorne for example did, there is little doubt that he would have borne away from the interview the impression which was stamped on so many ingenuous minds, and he would have read the President’s utterances by the light of that illuminating countenance. That Lowell did not at once throw away all doubts and accept Lincoln at the valuation he later placed upon him was due to the facts that Lincoln revealed himself only by degrees in his speech and act, and that while he was then making himself known Lowell was cherishing an ideal of his country and its destiny which called for the loftiest expression of patriotism. He was above all eager for a demonstration of high courage and fearless insistence upon national supremacy, when the country seemed rocking with inconstancy. That he should confess in Lincoln the “new American” was an evidence that the pure idealism which had marked Lowell’s political thinking and writing, an idealism moreover conjoined with shrewd practical sense, had at last found, to his profound satisfaction, a great exemplar, and the life and death of this wonderful product of the American soil presaged for him the development of a race of freemen.

CHAPTER XI
POETRY AND PROSE
1858-1872

Lowell’s writing during the war, and very largely also during the four previous years in which he had been engaged on the Atlantic, was mainly of a political character, and it has seemed best not to interrupt the record with much reference to his other writings and his pursuits generally during these eight years. But though he felt keenly the great movement which was breaking up the old union and making way for the new and greater union, he was too established in his own order of life to permit that to undergo any violent change. Even in his political writing, as we have seen, he was first of all a man of letters, with an imaginative foresight; his occupation both as a teacher and an editor gave a certain steadying force to his powers, so that though he rebelled against the irksomeness of routine he was delivered from what might have been the waywardness of a too self-centred life.

His safety-valve during all this period was in his letters to his familiar friends, as it was also in the free talk which he held with them; and this, even though he chafed under restraint and pressure which seemed to him to lessen his spontaneity. “How malicious you are,” he writes to Miss Norton, 23 October, 1858, “about what I said of women’s being good letter writers! What I meant was that they wrote more unconsciously than we do. I don’t know how it is with other folks, but I cannot sit down now and write a letter as if I were talking. Good writing, I take it, can only result from necessity of expression, and an author satisfies that in so many ways that his letters are apt to be dull.

“I like ‘Miles Standish’ better than you do. I think it in some respects the best long poem L. has written. It is so simple and picturesque, and the story is not encumbered with unavailing description, which is a fault in ‘Evangeline.’ But I quite agree with you about the metre. It is too deceitfully easy.

“One might begin at dawn nor end till the purple twilight,
Stringing verses at will, nor know it was verse he was stringing.
This is the modern way, the way of steamer and railroad
Where all the work is done, you scarcely know how, by the Engine.
Ah, but the Hill of Fame, can they dig it down? can they grade it?
Difficult always is Good, and he, I guess, who attains it
Starts with two feet and a staff and bread for To-day in his wallet,
Footsore dropping at last, repaid by long hope of the summit.”

His college duties he performed with conscientious fidelity, and he found at times a genuine satisfaction in the free intercourse with his students over great subjects, yet he could not always overlook the immaturity of his pupils, and he was impatient at the sort of work outside of direct teaching which falls to the lot of college professors. The task of lecturing itself was sure to suggest the incompleteness of expression, and so offend all his genius as a writer. “Yesterday,” he writes to Miss Norton, in the fall of 1859, “I began my lectures. I came off better than I expected, for I am always a great coward beforehand. I hate lecturing, for I have discovered (entre nous) that it is almost impossible to learn all about anything, unless, indeed, it be some piece of ill-luck, and then one has the help of one’s friends, you know.... I am trying to reform the Spanish and Italian classes. Charles would be astonished to hear me read the Castilian tongue, now wellnigh as familiar to me as Castilian soap. If he wouldn’t be, I am. I am about as much ‘Spanish,’ tell him, ‘as a Connecticut segar.’”

At the same time he wrote to Mr. Norton: “I am busier than ever, and, I fear, fruitlessly. My Italian class are half of them drones, and this hinders my getting on as I would with the rest. I am studying Spanish, as I did German in Dresden, reading it in all my leisure time, and before long mean to make myself thorough in it. At forty a man learns fast. My Spanish class is a very good one. There are only five, and they all do their best. Vacare musis—what does that mean? I have almost forgotten.”

“I champ the bit sometimes here,” he writes to the same a year later, “but God’s will be done! Ancora imparo, though I be in a go-cart. My Spanish recitations cost me some time and trouble as yet, for I make the students parse and construe with never-failing strictness. For this I have to study the grammar harder than any of them, for my Italian is always in my way with its slightly differing forms. However, I have learned more already than I should have thought possible a year ago, and I think some of the students seem to be interested.”

Now and then he could make his college work and his Atlantic work play into each other, but not often. “I have as yet only dipped into your last four volumes,” he writes 12 June, 1860, to R. G. White, “and those I keep for the same good time (i.e. vacation). I have to prepare some lectures on Shakespeare, and shall kill two birds with one stone by making use of your edition, and so enabling myself to write an intelligent notice of it for the Atlantic.”

The Atlantic itself gave him an agreeable change from his class-room duties, even if it took him along somewhat the same road as when, shortly after he undertook it, he received a contribution from Sainte-Beuve on Béranger, and translated it for the number for February, 1858. Two months later he began that series of criticisms on the successive volumes of Smith’s “Library of Old English Authors,” which he completed in the North American ten years afterward, and combined into the long paper printed in the first volume of his “Literary Essays.” As an instance of minute detective work in criticism, the article is noteworthy, but we suspect that his readers to-day pass lightly over the scoring of Hazlitt’s editorship to read the brilliant characterizations of Elizabethan poets and dramatists, which crop out of the stony soil of textual criticism. In writing these articles Lowell was recurring to subjects which had, as we have seen, unfailing interest for him, and one cannot compare these notes on Chapman, Webster, Marlowe, and others with the observations that occur in “Conversations with the Old Dramatists,” without marking the greater mellowness of nature from which the later criticism proceeds. Lowell writes of them, not as in the first instance when he was just returned from a voyage of discovery, but as one who has lived long and familiarly in this rich country of the poetic mind.[19]

Excepting the “Biglow Papers,” a couple of political articles, two or three poems, and a few brief reviews of books, Lowell did not contribute to the Atlantic during the four years of the war, and naturally he turned his prose work into the North American after he became one of its editors. There, as we have seen, his work was mainly political, though he also did much reviewing of books; but after the pressure of war-time was lifted he made the review the vehicle for more strictly literary articles, and it was plainly a relief to him to spring back to subjects more congenial to his nature. In January, 1865, when Mr. Norton supplied the main political paper, Lowell printed that most characteristic article which in his collected writings bears the title “New England Two Centuries Ago,” and is in outward form a review of the third volume of Palfrey’s “History of New England” and of four volumes of the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. In its larger part a skilful florilegium of early writings, the paper is also and emphatically the reflection of Lowell’s mind during the stress of the war, when he was doubly concerned over the relation between the two great English-speaking nations and the practical solutions of the problems presented to democracy in the reëstablishment of order and union in the United States. He had rising in him, as his Ode shows, a great passion for the whole country; but as has been well said by Colonel Higginson, that no one can be a true cosmopolitan who is not at home in his own country, so it is equally true that national consciousness has its basis in local pride and affection. The genius of our political organism, by which one is called on for a double loyalty to state and nation, a loyalty jeoparded by the heresy of an extreme state-rights dogma, was finely disclosed in Lowell’s attitude. Fortunately for us the locality, the community in which our fortune is cast, has in itself a political essence, so that it is not mere attachment to the place of birth and breeding which makes its natural demand on us, but membership in an organism lacking only the crown of absolute independence to make it a unit of politics. It is a subtle but very real distinction between state and nation that permits not a divided but a complex loyalty, and the profound meaning which lies in the interplay of state and federal power is reflected in the consciousness of Americans as they bear themselves toward one or the other authority.

Now New England, though not an entity in politics, has so distinct a character that each of the states included in that name is representative of an order which is far more than a geographical division. Largely by reason of its historic genesis and development, New England is more an individual than any other group of commonwealths unless it be the Cotton States, and a man of Massachusetts, clearly the heart of the whole system, is very sure to think of himself as a New Englander without prejudice to his loyalty to his own state. Lowell certainly did. It was through New England, its history, its spirit, its genius, that he apprehended the very nature of freedom and the principles of democracy. Mr. Henry James has well said: “New England was heroic to him, for he felt in his pulses the whole history of her origines; it was impossible to know him without a sense that he had a rare divination of the hard realities of her past.”[20] And this article on “New England Two Centuries Ago,” designed to offer something of a conspectus of a people and land from which he was sprung, whose life was coursing in his veins, was also an interpretation of the political faith he held, a faith which he postulated for the final manifestation of the whole nation that in his imagination he saw rising out of the confusion of struggle. “I have little sympathy,” he says at the close, “with declaimers about the Pilgrim Fathers, who look upon them all as men of grand conceptions and superhuman foresight. An entire ship’s company of Columbuses is what the world never saw. It is not wise to form any theory and fit our facts to it, as a man in a hurry is apt to cram his travelling-bag, with a total disregard of shape or texture. But perhaps it may be found that the facts will only fit comfortably together on a single plan, namely, that the fathers did have a conception (which those will call grand who regard simplicity as a necessary element of grandeur) of founding here a commonwealth on those two eternal bases of Faith and Work; that they had indeed no revolutionary ideas of universal liberty, but yet, what answered the purpose quite as well, an abiding faith in the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God; and that they did not so much propose to make all things new, as to develop the latent possibilities of English law and English character, by clearing away the fences by which the abuse of the one was gradually discommoning the other from the broad fields of universal right. They were not in advance of their age, as it is called, for no one who is so can ever work profitably in it; but they were alive to the highest and most earnest thinking of their time.”

In this article, also, one may see something of Lowell’s feeling about England, which again was almost a traditionary sentiment. He saw the mother country through the glass of New England, and especially valued that Puritan strain in English history which had found such free play in New England. “Puritanism,” he says, “believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy;” and he found in the governmental attitude of England toward America in his own day a reminder of the policy exercised after the Restoration toward New England.

Lowell’s letters make it clear that at this time he was not given to the enjoyment of much hospitality. Mrs. Lowell was frequently an invalid, and though he had familiar friends to stay with him, as Rowse the painter, and gave cordial invitations to such as might be passing through Cambridge, he neither entertained much himself nor accepted entertainment at other houses. Now and then some man of letters came over from England or France and Lowell was asked to meet him. He records such an experience in a letter dated 20 September, 1861:—

“I dined the other day with Anthony Trollope, a big, red-faced, rather underbred Englishman of the bald-with-spectacles type. A good roaring positive fellow who deafened me (sitting on his right) till I thought of Dante’s Cerberus. He says he goes to work on a novel ‘just like a shoemaker on a shoe, only taking care to make honest stitches.’ Gets up at 5 every day, does all his writing before breakfast, and always writes just so many pages a day. He and Dr. Holmes were very entertaining. The Autocrat started one or two hobbies, and charged, paradox in rest—but it was pelting a rhinoceros with seed-pearl.

“Dr. You don’t know what Madeira is in England?

“T. I’m not so sure it’s worth knowing.

“Dr. Connoisseurship in it with us is a fine art. There are men who will tell you a dozen kinds, as Dr. Waagen would know a Carlo Dolci from a Guido.

“T. They might be better employed!

“Dr. Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well.

“T. Ay, but that’s begging the whole question. I don’t admit it’s worse doing at all. If they earn their bread by it, it may be worse doing (roaring).

“Dr. But you may be assured—

“T. No, but I mayn’t be asshŏrred. I won’t be asshored. I don’t intend to be asshŏred (roaring louder)!

“And so they went it. It was very funny. Trollope wouldn’t give him any chance. Meanwhile, Emerson and I, who sat between them, crouched down out of range and had some very good talk, with the shot hurtling overhead. I had one little passage at arms with T. apropos of English peaches. T. ended by roaring that England was the only country where such a thing as a peach or a grape was known. I appealed to Hawthorne, who sat opposite. His face mantled and trembled for a moment with some droll fancy, as one sees bubbles rise and send off rings in still water when a turtle stirs at the bottom, and then he said, ‘I asked an Englishman once who was praising their peaches to describe to me exactly what he meant by a peach, and he described something very like a cucumber.’ I rather liked Trollope.”

Lowell found in the winter of 1865-1866 a most congenial occasion for society in the meetings in Mr. Longfellow’s study, held for scrutiny of the proofs of that poet’s translation of the “Divina Commedia.” Mr. Longfellow records in his Diary, 25 October, 1865: “Lowell, Norton, and myself had the first meeting of our Dante Club. We read the XXV. Purgatorio; and then had a little supper. We are to meet every Wednesday evening at my house.” In the first Report of the Dante Society, Mr. Norton gives a full and interesting account of these meetings, and of the task they set themselves.

“We paused,” he says, “over every doubtful passage, discussed the various readings, considered the true meaning of obscure words and phrases, sought for the most exact equivalent of Dante’s expression, objected, criticised, praised, with a freedom that was made perfect by Mr. Longfellow’s absolute sweetness, simplicity, and modesty, and by the entire confidence that existed between us. Witte’s text was always before us, and of the early commentators Buti was the one to whom we had most frequent and most serviceable recourse. They were delightful evenings; there could be no pleasanter occupation; the spirits of poetry, of learning, of friendship, were with us. Now and then some other friend or acquaintance would join us for the hours of study. Almost always one or two guests would come in at ten o’clock, when the work ended, and sit down with us to a supper, with which the evening closed.”

With the North American Review still making its quarterly demands upon him, but the political impulse less urgent, Lowell turned naturally to literary criticism. Thus far, he had not made any deliberate appraisal of great writers, save in his short paper on Keats, which, from the occasion that called it out, was rather biographical than critical. He had in a fragmentary fashion in his “Conversations,” and in a discursive manner in his lectures, given appreciations of the great poets and dramatists of England, but in the next decade he was to print a series of essays which should embody his reading, study, reflection, and poetic insight in that field of human endeavor where his own work stands, and which had been since his boyish days the one great subject of his investigation.

History, which he read with avidity, was the background from which were projected the great figures of literature. Philosophy was not for him a system of independent reasoning, but rather the unclassified winged thoughts on high themes embodied in great poetic and dramatic art. Language, always a subject full of interest for him, was attacked, not from the point of view of a man of science, but from that of one curious of its human relations and its instrumentality in art. Nor was his knowledge of the plastic arts more than that which comes incidentally to a traveller and a general reader and observer, or his interest in them especially keen. He was very likely to bring the canons of literary art to bear upon them, sometimes indeed, as might be guessed, with shrewdness and analogical truthfulness; or he was affected by personal considerations, as when he writes of Story: “I saw the photographs of William’s statues, and think them very fine. They are really noble. The Quincy is admirable—the best thing of the kind our modern times has produced. In short, to my thinking, William is the only man of them all who knows how to do the thing. It was a real pleasure to be so thoroughly satisfied with the work of an old friend.” He recognized frankly his own limitations in the matter, as indeed he was disposed to think the defect almost ineradicable in the Saxon, who “has never shown any capacity for art, nay, commonly commits ugly blunders when he is tempted in that direction;” and apparently his only suggestion for bettering the condition was to put before workmen good illustrations of great art in the books they should find in their libraries, and give them an acquaintance with Ruskin’s writings.

But literature stood to him as the great exponent of all that was permanent in the human spirit. “There is much,” he says, “that is deciduous in books, but all that gives them a title to rank as literature in the highest sense is perennial. Their vitality is the vitality not of one or another blood or tongue, but of human nature; their truth is not topical and transitory, but of universal acceptation; and thus all great authors seem the coevals not only of each other, but of whoever reads them, growing wiser with him as he grows wise, and unlocking to him one secret after another as his own life and experience give him the key, but on no other condition.”[21] It was with this principle determining his choice that he proceeded with more or less conscious assembling to discourse on Carlyle, Emerson, Lessing, Rousseau, Shakespeare, Dryden, Chaucer, Pope, Milton, Dante, Spenser, and Wordsworth, as well as to write in many detached passages on the genius of Goethe. Later he returned to the same general field, and besides revising his judgment on some of these topics, treated also with more or less fulness of Gray, Cervantes, Fielding, and Coleridge, while any one who consults the elaborate index to his prose writings will readily see how many other authors who belong in the great ranks have been drawn upon for illustration of the one great theme.

To his reading of all this literature he brought the touchstone of his own life and experience. In this word “experience,” moreover, must be included his own highest experiments. His poetry, for the most part, as we have already seen, does not have its roots in other literature; it springs from that life which he held in common with those whom he reverenced for their own acts of literary creation. He quotes the recommendation of a friend that he should read poetry, feed himself on bee bread so that he might get into the mood of writing poetry; but, though all his life long Lowell fed, as by the most natural appetite, on poetry and other forms of imaginative literature, his own poetry is not bookish, nor does it borrow in form or phrase. Even when most impressionable in his youth, the influence upon him of Keats and Tennyson was more obvious than that of Shakespeare or Marlowe, only because, eschewing the imitative, his verse took the color of his generation. The likenesses were always general, and when he essayed forms of verse most rigid in their historical development, as the sonnet and the ode, he simply obeyed the law as his great progenitors had done, finding his freedom within the law, and not in outbreaks and protests. The conscious intention to be original, he himself says, seldom leads to anything better than extravagance; and there is a passage in his paper on Chaucer which sums up a large part of his literary philosophy.[22]

“Poets have forgotten that the first lesson of literature, no less than of life, is the learning how to burn your own smoke; that the way to be original is to be healthy; that the fresh color, so delightful in all good writing, is won by escaping from the fixed air of self into the brisk atmosphere of universal sentiments; and that to make the common marvellous, as if it were a revelation, is the test of genius.”

With his large literary essays as works of art I do not purpose concerning myself; such study lies somewhat outside the range of a biography, but as these papers formed a considerable and very important expression of his mind at one period of his life, it is worth while to look at them with a view to discover how far they serve to disclose him, to read them by the light of his experience, and to see if he put his personality into this form of writing. The publication of Carlyle’s “Frederick the Great” was the occasion of the first of these articles. In writing of it to Leslie Stephen, when it was reprinted in “My Study Windows,” he admits that he was harder on Carlyle than he meant to be, because he was fighting against a secret partiality. The phrase lets one a little into Lowell’s mind. As far back as in his college days he was reading Carlyle with gusto, and the breezy description[23] which he gave of Boston at the period when Carlyle’s “message” acted as a sort of leaven in the new dough of New England, was a lively reminiscence of his own tumultuous youth. Thus, upon writing of Carlyle when he himself was nearing the line of fifty, there was an undercurrent of reminiscence of his own callowness. He remembered his devotion to the Carlyle of the “Miscellanies,” and was more or less conscious that he had outlived his first enthusiasm. With all his admiration for the great critic who stirred him when he was himself pricking on the plain of Reform, his point of view was now changed, for he had left Carlyle’s side and come into more complete possession of his own judgment. The secret influences which forbade him to be preponderatingly ethical, which kept him from abandoning himself to the anti-slavery cause, even when he was fighting in the ranks, and made it impossible for him to be a great teacher, though quite aware of what constitutes a great teacher, had lessened, perhaps, his effectiveness in some single direction, but had given him greater poise and enabled him on rare occasions to bring all his powers into play, and then to do easily, without conscious effort, the thing he wanted to do. The “Commemoration Ode” is an instance, and in this judgment of Carlyle he seems to me unwittingly to be judging the Lowell who seemed somewhat possible in the days when he first read Carlyle. There is a sentence in the essay which puts the thing in a nutshell. “The delicate skeleton of admirably articulated and related parts which underlies and sustains every true work of art, and keeps it from sinking on itself a shapeless heap, he [Carlyle] would crush remorselessly to come at the marrow of meaning. With him the ideal sense is secondary to the ethical and metaphysical, and he has but a faint conception of their possible unity.”

It was in the growing conception of this unity that Lowell had moved away from Carlyle. The constant adjustment of the ideal and the ethical had been the ripening process in his mind, a process greatly stimulated by the urgent need he felt during the past few years for finding some common ground on which his visions of truth and freedom and his practical sense could meet. It was largely through a great political realization that Lowell came to be what thenceforth he was, a sane critic of literature and a poet whose imagination instinctively sought large moulds. This is not to say that he was indifferent to any other expression; his nature was too free and spontaneous for that; but if one is to be measured by the main incidents of his life, it is fair to say that the Lowell who after this left his impress on his countrymen was a man of such balance of mind that his judgments and his poems alike had the weight that comes from this equipoise, and the man thus characterized could scarcely fail in new relations to show the ease of one self-centred, and not the restlessness and anxiety of an experimenter with life.

It is this consciousness of art governed by great laws, whether applied to life or to literature, that dominates Lowell’s expression, and in the essay on Carlyle, his keenest criticism is called out by his perception of Carlyle’s failure in this respect. “Had Mr. Carlyle been fitted out completely by nature as an artist, he would have had an ideal in his work which would have lifted his mind away from the muddier part of him, and trained him to the habit of seeking and seeing the harmony rather than the discord and contradiction of things.” Again we read in this passage the unconscious reflection of its writer’s own mind, which once had been far enough away from this habit. Nothing in Carlyle appears to interest him more than the lawlessness into which his exuberant humor had led him, and the narrow escape he had had of being a great poet, and he sums up his judgment of “Frederick the Great” by saying that “it has the one prime merit of being the work of a man who has every quality of a great poet except that supreme one of rhythm, which shapes both matter and manner to harmonious proportion, and that where it is good, it is good as only genius knows how to be.”

In the same number of the Review which holds this article on Carlyle appears a shorter one on Swinburne, which, though dealing with a more occasional subject, also illustrates the temper in which Lowell was now writing, and has a special interest, since it deals directly with poetry and intimates, that when treating of a contemporary writer his mind was most set on that aspect of poetry which ignores the distinction of time. The phenomenon of a new poet sends him back into an inquiry into the very realities of poetry itself. Though he has a few specific criticisms of Swinburne’s “Chastelard” and his “Atalanta in Calydon,” the theme which interests him most is the possibility of reënacting antiquity in poetry, and he devotes the larger part of his paper to a demonstration of the truth that the result of all such endeavors is to produce the artificial and not the artistic. In a letter to Mr. Stedman, written apparently when this subject was fresh in his mind, he repeats his conclusion with the force of a friendly letter writer. Mr. Stedman had thanked him for a review of his poem, “Alice of Monmouth,” but asks his judgment of another poem he had written on an antique theme. “I will answer frankly,” wrote Lowell, “that I did not like Alektryon, and don’t think him at all to be compared to his sister Alice,—a strutting fellow that wants to make me believe he can crow in ancient Greek. Alice is Christian, modern, American, and that’s why I like her. I don’t believe in these modern antiques—no, not in Landor, not in Swinburne, not in any of ’em. They are all wrong. It’s like writing Latin verses—the material you work in is dead.”

Though Lowell had thus turned with avidity to his more congenial field of letters, he was not yet to be released from the duty imposed upon him by his editorship of the Review, and by his own political thought, of taking part in the discussion which Reconstruction raised. In the same number of the North American which contained the two papers just noted, he wrote also an article on “The President on the Stump,” which, after a cursory consideration of the growing division between President Johnson and Congress, closed with a hypothetical address delivered to a Southern delegation by an imaginary President Johnson. Into this address Lowell packed his convictions as to the attitude which should be taken toward the Southern States by a President who had come from the South. It was so unusual for Lowell to dramatize, even in poetry, that this assumption has a singular interest, and, barring the element of Southern birth, is a close copy of Lowell’s mind at this time. Every man of thought has his dream of action, and we can read in this speech how Lowell would have translated his ideals of truth, freedom, and justice into executive acts, could he, who had watched the conflict closely, have had the chance that poets picture of being king for a day.

Perhaps all this was in his mind when he wrote in his last “Biglow Paper:”—

“Ez I wuz say’n’, I hain’t no chance to speak
So’s ’t all the country dreads me onct a week,
But I’ve consid’ble o’ thet sort o’ head
That sets to home an’ thinks wut might be said.”

This last paper, “Mr. Hosea Biglow’s Speech in March Meeting,” followed in the May Atlantic, and said over again the same lesson in the freer form of verse and with the more familiar dramatic impersonation of the Yankee countryman. It is an illustration of the greater carrying power of Lowell’s verse over his prose that the shrewd political philosophy which lies in the two series of the “Biglow Papers,” closely as it applied to the political situations in 1846-1848 and 1861-1866, has come again into play in the very different situation in national politics following the war for the independence of Cuba, so that while one would find in the newspapers but few quotations from Lowell’s “Political Essays” he would find plenty of lines from the “Biglow Papers.”

These two productions were not to be the last of his political writings at this period. One more was to follow in October, but the impulse to take part in the discussion of national events was relaxed, and he was falling back into his more congenial life of devotion to letters in the quiet retreat of Elmwood. “My dear Charles,” he writes to Mr. Norton, 30 May, 1866, “I snatch a moment from the whirl of dissipation to bring up for you the annals of Cambridge to the present date. In the first place, Cranch and his daughters are staying with us—since last Saturday. On that day I took him to club, where he saw many old friends (he has not been here for twenty years, poor fellow!) and had a good time. We had a pleasant time, I guess. With me it was a business meeting. I sat between Hoar and Brimmer, that I might talk over college matters. Things will be arranged to suit me, I rather think, and the salary (perhaps) left even larger than I hoped.

“Cranch and I amuse me very much. They read their poems to each other like a couple of boys, and so contrive for themselves a very good-natured, if limited, public. I cannot help laughing to myself, whenever I am alone, at these rhythmical debauches. The best of it is that there is always one at least who is never bored. I like him very much, though it always makes me a little sad that a man with so many gifts should lack the one of being successful. He brought with him a fairy story full of fancy, and illustrations, most of which are as charming and original as can be. I hope to get Fields to publish it.[24] Cranch wants some such encouragement very much. He begins to think himself born under an ill star. I fancy the trouble is that he was not brought up to work, in a nation of day laborers. You know I have a natural sympathy with the butterflies as against the ants and the bees, and I think they will all be put in a heavenly poor-house one of these days, with the industrious rich to work for them, and buy their books and pictures. Cranch always reminds me of Clough, so you may be sure I like to have him here. We shall enjoy each other very much if we don’t quarrel over our poems.

“You will see my verses to Bartlett in the next Atlantic,[25] and I guess you will like ’em. They seemed to me fanciful and easy when I corrected the proof, with some droll triple rhymes....

“It is now high time to change the conversation and speak of the weather. We are having it of the rarest April sort—whims of sunshine dappling a continuous mood of rain erratic thunderclaps ending like my novel with the first chapter—promising notes of fine to-morrows ending not in bankruptcy but liquidation. In short, the clerk of the weather seems suddenly to have bethought him of his remissness with the watering-pot for the last two years and is making it up all at once. All the wells (except, of course, that of Truth) will be filled again and milk will be plenty once more. The greenness of everything is delicious. I feel as if I were sprouting myself, so keen is my farmer’s sympathy with my beets and carrots, and especially with a new field of grass which was becoming too emblematic of flesh, and has been snatched from the very jaws of death by this intervention of Jupiter Pluvius. I had just had a new pump set in the well at the foot of the garden, and had begun to think it would be merely a dry symbol, but this will set all its arteries a-throbbing.

“Your dream of a stock-farm is a delightful one (there is a yellow-bird in the cherry-tree by my window drinking the tremulous rain diamonds that hang under the twigs), but I fear that the only stocks I am young enough for now are in railroad companies and the like whose golden fleeces yield a half yearly clip. I am satisfied, though, that nobody has such a sympathy with the seasons and feels himself so truly a partner in the trade of nature as a farmer. I find great pleasure in my own little ventures in this Earth-ship of ours on her annual voyages, and shall even grow jolly again if my college duties are so arranged next year that I shall get rid of some of my worries, and be able to give my trees and crops the encouragement of a cheerful face. Depend upon it, they feel it and grow in proportion. Fancy the disheartenment of a regiment of cabbages or turnips when they see the commander-in-chief with a long face! Where shall they find the cheerful juices that shall carry them through a long drouth, or the happy temper that is as good as an umbrella to ’em in dull wet spells of weather, if their natural leader be as bloodless as the one, or show no better head than the other? Doesn’t it stand to reason?”

Six weeks later he wrote to the same friend: “The hot weather we have been having for some time—95° for nearly a week together—has pretty nearly used me up. It has made me bilious and blue, my moral thermometer sinking as the atmospheric rose. But Sunday afternoon we had one of the finest thunderstorms I ever saw, beginning in the true way with a sudden whirl of wind that filled the air with leaves and dust and twigs (dinanzi va superbo), followed in due time by a burst of rain. One flash struck close by us somewhere, and I heard distinctly the crack of a bough at the moment of its most intense redness. Just at sunset the cloud lifted in the west, and the effect was one that I always wish all my friends could be at Elmwood to see. The tops of the English elms were turned to sudden gold, which seen against a leaden background of thundercloud had a supernatural look. Presently that faded, and after the sun had set came a rainbow more extravagant than any I ever saw. There were seven lines of the glory looking like the breaking of quiet surf on the beach of a bay. First came one perfect bow—the more brilliant that the landscape was dark everywhere by the absence of the sunlight. Gradually another outlined itself at some distance above, and then the first grew double, triple, till at last six arches of red could be counted. The other colors I could only see in the two main bows. I thought it a trick of vision, but Fanny and her sister counted as I did. A triple arch was the most I had ever seen before. Here is a diagram.... d is the spectator for whom this wonderful show was exhibited. I should have made d a capital, thus, D, to indicate his importance in the scene. For have I not read in some old moralist that God would not have created so much beauty without also creating an eye to see and a soul to feel it? As if God could not be a poet! The author of the book of Genesis knew better. However, it is something to have had an eye see what we are seeing; it seems to double the effect by some occult sympathy, and my rainbows are always composed of one part rain, one part sunshine, and one part blessed Henry Vaughan with his ‘Still young and fine,’ and his ‘World’s gray fathers in one knot!’ The older I grow the more I am convinced that (there) are no satisfactions so deep and so permanent as our sympathies with outward nature....

“In some moods I heartily despise and hate myself, there is so much woman in me ( ... I mean no harm. I was designed, sketched rather, for a man). Why, I found myself the other day standing in a muse with something like tears in my eyes, before a little pirus that had rooted itself on the steep edge of the runnel that drains the meadow above Craigie’s pond, and thinking—what do you suppose? Why, how happy and careless the life of such a poor shrub was compared with ours! But I was in a melancholy and desponding mist of mind, and I snatched myself back out of it to manlier thoughts. But the reality and sincerity of the emotion struck me as I mused over it, and I set it down on the debtor side of my account. Still, can one get away from his nature? That always puzzles me. Your close-grained, strong fellows tell you that you can, but they forget that they are only acting out their complexion, not escaping it. I did not expect to chase my rainbow into such a miserable drizzle, but for that very reason I will let it go as I have written it, though I am rather ashamed of having uncovered my nakedness so plumply. In spite of the heat we have had rain enough to keep the country beautiful, and my salt marshes have been in their glory. The salt grass is to other grass like fur compared with hair, and the color of the ‘black grass,’ and even its texture at the right distance remind one of sable. I have been making night studies of late, having enjoyed, as folks say, a season of sleeplessness, and I saw the dawn begin the other night at two o’clock. The first bird to sing was a sparrow. The cocks followed close upon him, and the phœbe upon them. The crows were the latest to shake the night out of them.

“The Corporation have given me a tutor and cut my salary down to $1500. But I think they will give me what they call a ‘gratuity’ if the college funds justify it. If not, I must take to lecturing.... I am called away to the hayfield, so good-by. I work more or less every day out of doors and like it. I am getting back as well as I can to my pristine ways of life.”

He had wished to purchase a little immunity from the routine of college duties, but he needed to increase his income, for the change in his college work, though it gave him more liberty, left him with smaller salary. Except for the months when his editorship of the Atlantic and his college professorship had jointly given him a fairly comfortable livelihood, he had always been in an impecunious condition; his writings had not been especially remunerative, and as he was somewhat dependent on outside pressure for a stimulus to work, it is probable that his need of money had furnished this stimulus.

So this summer he was not unwilling to help himself out with some special tasks on the British Poets. “My job,” he writes, “is correcting Dryden for the next edition. I enjoy it, to be sure, but it is rather wearisome. I have always had a great respect for Dryden’s solid ability, and I am glad to read him in this minute way as a study of his language. I have long thought that he was the last writer of really first-rate English prose. Make every possible deduction, and I still think so, and I believe it is because of two things: first, that the language had not yet been sophisticated by writing for the press; and second, that he wrote as a gentleman rather than as an author. It is easy to see why his verse has been so much admired, it is so vigorous and easy, and there is such mastery of language. Dryden knew a great deal, and uses his knowledge with an ease of manner that is very charming to me.

“The work takes about three days to a volume, and I have the first two to go over again, because I corrected more than they are willing to pay for (I mean to the printer). I find some strange nonsense, chiefly caused by punctuation. The Donne, on which I spent three or four weeks of unremitting work, I have literally lost. Little & Brown don’t want the expense of printing, and I have lost the book; can’t find it anywhere. I find another copy—but perfectly clean!”[26]

A proposal was made at this time that he should write the life of Hawthorne. Longfellow suggested this to Mrs. Hawthorne, who talked with Lowell about it. He was attracted by the subject, and saw that he would have abundant material, for Mrs. Hawthorne told him that there were seventeen volumes of notes, beside the letters which could be collected. After consideration, however, Mrs. Hawthorne feared to take the risks involved in having the precious manuscripts go out of her hands, and the plan was abandoned, Mrs. Hawthorne contenting herself with printing a portion of the notes in the Atlantic, and afterward issuing the several volumes of Passages from the American, English, French, and Italian Note-Books.

Lowell was busy also this summer getting ready for publication the second series of the “Biglow Papers,” his chief labor being in the long Introduction, which is a justification of his use of the rustic New England form by a careful tracing of many of the words and phrases and local pronunciation to the English usage of the seventeenth century, brought over by the early settlers and domesticated under conditions which served to preserve them in common speech. And here may be printed an unfinished letter, written a few months later, in which he sets forth more familiarly some of his linguistic views: “I am not obstinate, but Shakespeare does not tack his ‘lesses’ to nouns but to verbs. He says ‘viewless winds’ in ‘Measure for Measure,’ and means as Milton does in ‘Comus’ (‘I must be viewless now’) ‘invisible.’ So in ‘Hamlet,’ when he says ‘woundless air’ he means ‘invulnerable,’ as you will see by turning to Act I., scene i. I admit that less ought to be joined to a noun (as in German los always is), but I think one may sin with Shakespeare or Milton, for my instance from which latter I have to thank Malone. I grant that Whittier is no authority—though I suspect he is right in rhyming for the ear and not for the eye, as used to be the fashion. So long as we don’t pronounce arrums Hibernice, why shouldn’t he rhyme it with psalms? Not that I would. I would be conservative about pronunciation,—the test of good-breeding,—and would leave idioms to the grace of God, where they properly belong. Boys and blackguards have always been my masters in language. I have always felt that if I could attain to their unconscious freedom, I were safe. I would not insist (for example) with our excellent Daily Advertiser on ‘house to be let,’ because it is unidiomatic and because it is glossologically wrong. We took it directly from the French maison à louer. Nor would I say ‘by auction,’ because ‘at’ is quite as good. Nor would I say ‘the house is in process of erection’ for ‘the house is building.’”

Lowell dedicated his second series of “Biglow Papers” to Judge Hoar. “A very fit thing,” he writes, “it seems to me, for of all my friends he is the most genuine Yankee.” In the same letter he writes with eagerness of a new poetic enterprise he had undertaken, or rather of an old one revived.[27] “I have been working hard, and if my liver will let me alone, as it does now, am likely to go on all winter. And on what do you suppose? I have taken up one of the unfinished tales of the ‘Nooning,’ and it grew to a poem of near seven hundred lines! It is mainly descriptive. First, a sketch of the narrator, then his ‘prelude,’ then his ‘tale.’ I describe an old inn and its landlord, barroom, etc. It is very homely, but right from nature. I have lent it to Child and hope he will like it, for if he doesn’t I shall feel discouraged. It was very interesting to take up a thread dropt so long ago, and curious as a phenomenon of memory to find how continuous it had remained in my mind, and how I could go on as if I had let it fall only yesterday.” This was “Fitz Adam’s Story,” which Mr. Child found no difficulty in liking, so that Lowell sent it at once to Mr. Fields for the Atlantic, where it appeared in January, 1867. “I mean to work ahead as fast as I can with the rest,” he wrote to Mr. Fields, and in the spirit which then possessed him he had high hopes of completing “The Nooning,” having already, as we have seen, various parts of it ready for final articulation. He wrote Mr. Fields again, 8 November, 1867, when urged to send more of the poem: “I cannot get into the mood of my Nooning story just now,” but evidently he hoped still to go on with it, for he did not include “Fitz Adam’s Story” in his next collection of poems published in 1869; yet when twenty years more had gone by, and “The Nooning” was still in fragments, he saw that there was no likelihood of his ever producing the rounded whole, and so included “Fitz Adam’s Story” in his latest collection with an apologetic note.

“I am already beginning to feel the relief from those confounded recitations,” he wrote a month or so after the fall term at college began, “both in better health and better spirits.” He sent Mr. Fields not only this poem for the Atlantic, but a fairy tale and a poem for Our Young Folks. “You asked me once,” he writes, “for a fairy story, and I suppose never expected to hear of it again. But it is not safe to cast bread on my waters. I invented a kind of one at once, and yesterday and the day before contrived to write it, partly to spite an infernal pain I was suffering, and which got me under at last. I think I have told it simply enough, and was surprised to find how easy it was to write in words mostly of one syllable. I think there are some pleasant humors in it, but it may have suffered from my being in such a wretched condition while I wrote it. Please read it yourself, and show it to no one. To tell the honest truth, I have never read Our Young Folks, and so do not know whether it is suitable or not. Perhaps I could write it over again, but that might spoil it, for I might not be able to fancy myself so vividly telling it again as I did before.

“Also: I have a jolly little poem that would do for a Christmas number, called ‘Hob Gobbling’s Song,’ written years ago for my nephews, now all dead. Just think of it! and three of the four in battle. Who could have dreamed it twenty years ago?

“You will think I am mad to bombard you thus, but no, I am only beginning to feel the sort of spring impulse of my college freedom. I mean to work off old scores this winter if I can.”

The fairy tale, “Uncle Cobus’s Story,” had pleasant fancy in it, but was curiously literary in its allusions and in its thinly concealed moral a parable of Lowell’s own life, with its struggle for supremacy of the two fairies Fan-ta-si-a and El-bo-gres. The song might fairly be called a New England survival of Elizabethan fairy lore.

As a result of his industry during the summer and early fall, he was able to write at the end of October: “I have in my pocket $820 for my last six weeks’ work, and mean for the first time in my life to make an investment of money earned!”

The pain, by the way, which he tried to assuage by writing, was some facial trouble which resulted in a swelling making him look, as he said, “like a hornpout with the mumps.” He had an odd experience with ether which he thus describes: “The ether didn’t deaden the pain a bit, that I could discover. Its only effect was to make my head feel as if it were violently waggled to and fro. One odd result there was. For a moment, I lost entirely my present personal identity, and absolutely was (without anything of that sense of dualism which commonly goes along with and criticises hallucination) twelve years old and getting ready to go out shooting as I used. Odd as it seems, it was a most painful sensation, and all the rest of the night I was haunted by a feeling that my life was the merest illusion, and I a poor puppet worked by some humorous higher power, who could by a jerk put me back at Mr. Wells’s school if he liked.”

In the midst of all this congenial labor he was moved also to write one more political article, which appeared in the North American for October, 1866. The President and the Secretary of State had formed that curious combination which may be said still somewhat to baffle students of our political history, and Lowell wrote of it,—the last of his series of political writings growing out of the great conflict and the early movements toward reconstruction. Under the title, “The Seward-Johnson Reaction,” he examines all the elements in the situation, the President, the Secretary, Congress, and the two parties, and, as before, his study is less an analysis of the component parts than a reassertion of those fundamental principles which it was his political philosophy to seek for and expound. Trust in the people was the prime article of his creed; hence he sought chiefly for evidence of the settled drift of the nation’s conviction, conscience, and instinct. The great stake played for in the war was, in his words, the “Americanization of all America, nothing more and nothing less.” Yet with all his clear sight of the ideal and his confidence in the ultimate reason of national thought, Lowell was not a vague theorist nor a contemner of political activity. On the contrary, one of the most impassioned sentences in the paper is that in which he speaks of the dignity of politics. “Now that the signs of the times,” he says, “show unmistakably to what the popular mind is making itself up, they [members of Congress] have once more a policy, if we may call that so which is only a calculation of what it would be ‘safe to go before the people with,’ as they call it. It is always safe to go before them with plain principles of right, and with the conclusions that must be drawn from them by common sense, though this is what too many of our public men can never understand. Now joining a Know-Nothing ‘lodge,’ now hanging on the outskirts of a Fenian ‘circle,’ they mistake the momentary eddies of popular whimsy for the great current that sets always strongly in one direction through the life and history of the nation. Is it, as foreigners assert, the fatal defect of our system to fill our highest offices with men whose views in politics are bounded by the next district election? When we consider how noble the science is,—nobler even than astronomy, for it deals with the mutual repulsions and attractions, not of inert masses, but of bodies endowed with thought and will, calculates moral forces, and reckons the orbits of God’s purposes toward mankind,—we feel sure that it is to find nobler teachers and students, and to find them even here.”[28]

With this paper Lowell took leave of political writing for a long time.[29] When next we meet him in this field it will be after certain practical experience in the field of politics has given its own color to his mind. Now, as if he had shaken off an irksome task, he turned more entirely to literature. The next three or four years were occupied, as the calendar of his published writings shows, with diligent excursions in letters, both in prose and verse. The article on Percival which appeared in the North American for January, 1867, was an amusing treatment of a commonplace book, but it was worth preserving for its humorous presentation of the touchstones of genuine poetry; and from what Lowell says in his letters of the slight personal acquaintance he had with Percival, it is quite likely that the encounter gave a little fillip to his interest; yet one may be permitted to look a little more closely and find in Lowell’s characterization of the poetic temperament and sentimentalism, when laid bare through the absence of the clothing of sound sense and humor, a distant reflection on weaknesses of which he was conscious when in the depressed mood. There was an assimilating faculty which he possessed that led him, when reading lives and records especially of literary careers, to suffer somewhat as the young student of medicine who is never quite sure that he is not acting as a sort of proxy for the cases whose diagnosis is laid before him. It is curious to find Lowell, when engaged on Lessing’s life and works, which he reviewed in the April North American, writing to Mr. Norton:[30] “I find somewhat to my surprise from his letters that he had the imaginative temperament in all its force. Can’t work for months together, if he tries, his forehead drips with angstschweiss; feels ill and looks well—in short, is as pure a hypochondriac as the best. This has had a kind of unhealthy interest for me, for I never read my own symptoms so well described before.” And the article itself, if one reads it with Lowell’s thought about himself in mind, becomes a curiously parallel record, even to external circumstances, of the two men. It would, of course, be untrue to say that Lowell was thinking of himself when he was writing of Lessing, but I cannot help suspecting, as I read the article, that there was a subconsciousness which gave a force to certain passages, and that Lowell’s interest in his subject was heightened by the plucking at his sleeve of his own memories and ambitions.

In writing for the North American the articles on great literature which were afterward reproduced in his books, Lowell was not only drawing upon a liberal familiarity with most of the subjects from repeated readings, but he was sometimes availing himself of earlier treatment in the form of lectures which he had given in connection with his college work. He complains, when preparing his article on Rousseau, that he is always bothered when he tries to do anything with old material, as he was in this case, inserting in his paper patches from college lectures; and any one who has had the experience appreciates the difficulty of turning the oratio directa of the lecture into the oratio obliqua of the essay,—to mention but one of the “bothers” of such work. But a comparison of the manuscript of Lowell’s college lecture with the text of the printed article shows two things: first, that in going back to his old lecture, Lowell easily took fire from his own words and, in copying a sentence, ran on into a fuller, more finished conclusion. For example, in comparing the sonnets of Petrarch with those of Michelangelo, he says alike in lecture and in article: “In them (i. e. in Michelangelo’s) the airiest pinnacles of sentiment and speculation are buttressed with solid mason-work of thought, of an actual, not fancied experience.” In the lecture, he goes on: “You seem to feel the great architect in them. Petrarch’s in comparison are like the sugared frostwork upon cake.” In the article, however, he adds to “fancied experience,” “and the depth of feeling is measured by the sobriety and reserve of expression, while in Petrarch’s all ingenuousness is frittered away into ingenuity. Both are cold, but the coldness of the one is self-restraint, while the other chills with pretence of warmth. In Michelangelo’s you feel the great architect: in Petrarch’s the artist who can best realize his conception in the limits of a cherry-stone.”[31]

Again, it is evident from the comparison that Lowell’s direct address in speaking to his class from the written lecture was in form of sentences little different from what he used when writing for the public. In each case, his spontaneity was uppermost; he was not especially aware, as he wrote, either of audience or of readers. In revising his articles for book publication he altered the impersonal we of the reviewer to the I of the author, and in doing so merely strengthened the natural voice in which he spoke. Such papers as “A Good Word for Winter,” or “My Garden Acquaintance,” are scarcely more direct in the relation of author and reader than are those papers which have the external form of book reviews. It was the personality of the man at home in a hospitable manner that found this expression, and just as some of his happiest letters were written to persons whom he scarcely knew, but happened to be called out by some apt occasion, so he wrote and lectured, except on the most formal themes, with a freedom which was neither disturbed nor excited by audience or readers. One may notice a difference in this respect between the political papers and the literary essays. The I scarcely is at home in the former.

The Dante Club had finished its task, and Longfellow’s translation was published in 1867. The affectionate relation between the two men found more than one poetic expression during their long neighborly existence, and when Longfellow’s sixtieth birthday occurred in 1867 Lowell wrote a poem, and printed it in the daily paper which he knew would be laid on Longfellow’s breakfast-table. On the appearance of the Dante he wrote, with Mr. Norton, a joint review which appeared in the North American. Of his own brief part he wrote in humorous dismay to his collaborator: “I could only wish that the latter part had been more critical if it were but for Longfellow’s sake. It’s lucky, perhaps, that I got almost crazy over the insertion I was to make in it, or I should have rushed into the thing myself—for, though I think his version (as you know) truly admirable, there are some things to be questioned in it. However, all the better that I couldn’t. I say I was almost crazy. You see I went up to Shady Hill—picking up Longfellow on the way and it was very hot, and I brought away an armful of translations, just cutting out Howells, who was on the same errand. I came home with my prize, wet through with the only sure result of all earthly toils, and began to compare. Good heavens! I had Cayley and Ford, and Dayman and Ramsay (and lots of others that made me ’d—’ say), and Brooksbank and Wright, and last Rossetti. Well, I addled my brains over ’em—my tables were heaped, my floor stumbly with my a-versions, as I called them when I looked at them, my in-versions when I read them. Now, to begin with, I have read Dante so much that I can’t remember a line of him—in short, ’twas infandum renovare dolorem. I spent three days in bothering through what will make two pages.”

The critical reviews of Longfellow’s Dante from the hands of competent scholars were few, but one published in a daily journal called out a letter from Lowell to the friend who sent it to him, which gives with frankness Lowell’s estimate of the translation. “The review,” he writes, “does not change my opinion of Mr. Longfellow’s translation—not as the best possible, by any means, but as the best probable.... Nobody who is intimate with the original will find any translation of the ‘Divina Commedia’ more refreshing than cobs. Has not Dante himself told us that no poetry can be translated? But, after all is said, I think Mr. Longfellow’s the best thus far as being the most accurate. It is to be looked on, I think, as measured prose—like our version of Job, for example, though without that mastery of measure in which our Bible translators are unmatched except by Milton. I mean where they are at their best, as in Job, the songs of Debórah and Barak, the death of Sisera, and some parts of the Psalms. Mr. Longfellow is not a scholar in the German sense of the word, that is to say, he is no pedant, but he certainly is a scholar in another and perhaps a higher sense, I mean in range of acquirement and the flavor that comes of it.”

Specific criticism, with all the painstaking of which he was capable, was but the obverse of the medal which Lowell struck in his literary work. On the face was his generous delight in his books. “The Nightingale in the Study,” written in the summer of 1867, holds in capital form a genuine confession that there was an appeal to him from nature in literature which did not antagonize the appeal made to him by the world of natural beauty, yet sometimes constrained and invited him in tones he could not resist, even though the birds without were calling him. Mr. Leslie Stephen who visited him in the summer of 1868, renewing an acquaintance begun five years earlier and ripening into a friendship which meant much to Lowell ever after, has given a pleasant account of the impression made upon him by the poet in his study at Elmwood. “All round us,” he says, “were the crowded book-shelves, whose appearance showed them to be the companions of the true literary workman, not of the mere dilettante or fancy biographer. Their ragged bindings and thumbed pages scored with frequent pencil marks implied that they were a student’s tools, not mere ornamental playthings. He would sit among his books, pipe in mouth, a book in hand, hour after hour; and I was soon intimate enough to sit by him and enjoy intervals of silence as well as periods of discussion and always delightful talk.”[32]

It was a quarter of a century since Lowell had collected his fugitive poems, though he had meantime published the second series of “The Biglow Papers,” and when 1868 came in he was moved to make a new volume which should include the poems he had been printing, chiefly in the Atlantic. It was with this in mind that he took up a fragment of a poem written a score of years before, rewrote and added to it, designing to make it the title poem in the volume. He printed it first in the June Atlantic, under the title “A June Idyll.” In sending it he wrote to Mr. Fields: “In the first flush of having just finished and copied it (for which I was obliged to miss Dickens last night) I am inclined to think there is something characteristic.... Surely there are good bits in it, and it is good for more than usual, or good for nothing. If I haven’t made a spoon, I have certainly spoiled a horn that would have turned out a very good one. You sometimes find fault with my names. I have called this ‘A June Idyll,’ which is just what it is. Do you object?”

Mr. Fields, either himself or through a friend, wrote a very appreciative notice of the poem in the Boston Advertiser, which drew from Lowell this response to his friendly editor:—

“Such a notice of my Iddle
Met my eyes in the Advertiser!

“‘To order,’ thought I, ’no, fiddle!
’Tis the dull world growing wiser.

“‘My forehead they twine with bayses,
They’re eager to shout hosanna,
My style as pure epic they praises
Where they used to add acuanha.’

“‘’Tis always their fate whom at christening
Your genuine Helicon’s spilt on;
Long ears are the latest at listening,
Vide Wordsworth passim on Milton.’

“So I read it aloud to my family,
One delicate phrase after t’other,
And surely the good little Sammle he
Wasn’t sadder at leaving his mother

“Than I when I came to the close of it,
For I wanted, as I’m a sinner,
(Such poetry seemed in the prose of it)
To keep up my reading till dinner.

“But now, oh worst of collapses,
My Temple of Fame is in ruins,
Its forecourt, nave, transept, and apse is
A shelter for foxes and bruins!

“For all of my Public Opinion
With the wind in its sails to drive it
To the port of supreme dominion
Turns out most especially private.

“My Fame’s accoucheur sadly yields his
Place up to the Deputy Cor’ner,
For my Public Opinion was Fields’s,
My tradewind a puff from the ‘Corner.’”

That the poem at once found disinterested friends is evident from the letter which Lowell writes in acknowledgment of the praise which the poet, Dr. Parsons, gave it. “Something more than half of it,” Lowell says, “was written more than twenty years ago, on the death of our eldest daughter; but when I came to complete it, that other death, which broke my life in two, would come in against my will, so that you were right in your surmise. I was very glad you liked it, and your letter touched me deeply, as you may well conceive.”

In September Lowell made out a tentative list of the poems to be included in the volume, and wrote to Mr. Fields: “I think it best not to include any humorous poems in this collection. They can come by and by, if they are wanted. They would jar here. Some I may be able to shorten somewhat in printing, but commonly I find it hard work to improve them after they are dry, though I seem to see well enough where and how much they need it. The poems of the war I shall put by themselves at the end, so as to close with the Ode as I begin with the Idyll. How I do wish the whole of them were better—now that I am putting them between stiff covers to help them stand alone! ‘Bad is the best’ is a good proverb—but how if the best is bad? Well, here and there one catches a good strain, but I feel very hopeless about them.”

Lowell meant to call his volume “A June Idyll and other Poems,” but Mr. Fields pointed out that Whittier’s new volume just about to appear was to carry the title of “A Summer Idyll.”[33] Lowell retorted: “Why the devil should Whittier bag my title? I can’t claim a copyright in ‘Idyll,’ that is in the dictionary—but, June ‘Idyll’ was mine. It will be thought his poem suggested mine, as it was with the ‘Present Crisis,’ though mine was written two years before. However, J. G. W. is welcome to anything of mine, for he is a trump, and after all the milk is spilt. But if his volume is not advertised, might I not insist? It’s of more consequence to me than to him, for I have nothing else that will look so well in the vanguard. But if it’s all up, how would ‘Appledore and other Poems’ do? It is a pretty name enough, and the poem is one of my longest,—though not, perhaps, the one I would otherwise have put first. My dedication, I think, is good, and that will take the edge off.”

Mr. Fields suggested that he should give the volume the title of his place, “Elmwood,” but Lowell replied: “I can’t bear ‘Elmwood,’ and the more I think of it, the more I can’t bear it—’tis turning one’s household gods upon the town, as it were. No, never! They have endured me for fifty years, and I won’t desert ’em in their old age. Let me have my hermitage to myself. (I had eight visitors this morning—one of whom wanted me to read ‘The Biglow Papers’ to him.) But I have it now. Instead of ‘June Idyll,’ which was the pis aller of a prosaic mind, I shall call it ‘Under the Willows.’ Like all great discoveries, it is simple, and, you may depend upon it, it is the thing. It means everything and nothing. I can’t make the poem over so as to suit ‘Elmwood,’ and so I shall settle upon this, fixed as a butterfly, stable as the Horse-railway stables. You can’t move me. The man that moved Chicago couldn’t move me. I am happy, and discharge my mind of the whole concern. I shall now devote my evening to the ‘Flying Dutchman’ in peace, and write you something clever for the Atlantic. I snap my fingers at you and Bazin,[34] wore he even the helmet of Mambrino. Nothing can touch me further. ‘Under the Willows and other Poems’—it satisfies every want, and will be immensely popular. The basketmakers will buy up the first edition and the gunpowder makers the second. Then comes the general public, mad with curiosity to know what the d—l I mean. I am charmed with my own powers of invention. A duller man would have said ‘Under the Elms,’ or some such things. Let me alone for tickling the fancy of a purchaser. I know what they want.”

To Mr. Norton he writes, reciting his tribulations over the name of his book, and adds: “I was suddenly moved to finish my ‘Voyage to Vinland,’ part of which you remember was written eighteen years ago.[35] I meant to have made it much longer, but maybe it is better as it is. I clapt a beginning upon it, patched it in the middle, and then got to what had always been my favorite part of the plan. This was to be a prophecy by Gudrida, a woman who went with them, of the future America.

I have written in an unrhymed alliterated measure, in very short verse and stanzas of five lines each. It does not aim at following the law of the Icelandic alliterated stave, but hints at it and also at the asonante, without being properly either. But it runs well and is melodious, and we think it pretty good here, as does Howells.”

Again we quote a passage from Emerson’s unprinted journal, dated December, 1868: “In poetry, tone. I have been reading some of Lowell’s new poems in which he shows unexpected advance on himself, but perhaps most in technical skill and courage. It is in talent rather than in poetic tone, and rather expresses his wish, his ambition, than the uncontrollable interior impulse which is the authentic mark of a new poem, and which is unanalyzable, and makes the merit of an ode of Collins or Gray or Wordsworth or Herbert or Byron, and which is felt in the pervading tone rather than in brilliant parts or lines; as if the sound of a bell, or a certain cadence expressed in a low whistle, or booming or humming to which the poet first timed his step as he looked at the sunset, or thought, was the incipient form of the piece, and was regnant through the whole.”

There were two essays written in the fall of 1868 which are very expressive of Lowell’s nature. “My Garden Acquaintance” records delightfully that attachment to one spot which was made possible not merely by long life at Elmwood, but by that sympathy with life which enabled him to suck the juices from nature, not by roving, but by that attitude of listening and observing which sometimes belongs to home-keeping wits. “A Certain Condescension in Foreigners,” though it was at first sight a clearing of his mind such as his letters repeatedly show, grows warm with that passion for his country and the ideas it stood for, which had been burned into him by his personal experience in the war and by his constant brooding over the deep realities which underlay the meaning of the war. He returned to political writing under stress of need for copy in the January North American with “A Look Before and After.” The Review itself had become somewhat more of a burden to him, for Mr. Norton went abroad in the summer of 1868 for an indefinite stay, and though Mr. E. W. Gurney, who took his place, was competent, Lowell felt the responsibility rather more than when he had easily left the main business to Mr. Norton. Moreover, the special work which he and his friend had undertaken had, in a measure, been accomplished, and the Review, though winning a succes d’estime, had not that worldly success which reconciles one to drudgery. There is a half-vexed, half-humorous letter to Mr. Fields, dated Elmwood 10 P.M. Thursday, 1868, which was 24 September. “The express has just brought,” he writes, “your note asking for the log of the North American on her present voyage. The N. A. is teak-built, her extreme length from stem to stern post 299 feet 6 inches, and her beam (I mean her breadth of beam) 286 feet 7 inches and a quarter. She is an A 1 risk at the Antediluvian. These statements will enable you to reckon her possible rate of sailing. During the present trip I should say that all the knots she made were Gordian, and of the tightest sort. I extract from log as follows:—

“11 July. Lat. 42° 1´, the first officer, Mr. Norton, lost overboard in a fog, with the compass, caboose, and studden-sails in his pocket, also the key of the spirit-room.

“25 July. Lat. 42° 10´, spoke the Ark, Captain Noah, and got the latest news. 26, 27, 28, dead calm. 29, 30, 31, and 1 August, head winds N. N. E. to N. E. by N. 15 August. Double reef in foretopsl, spoke the good ship Argo, Jason commander, from Colchos with wool.

“17 August, dead calm, schooner Pinta, Capt. Columbus, bound for the New World, and a market, bearing Sou Sou West half South on our weather bow. Got some stores from him.

“20. Capt. Lowell cut his throat with the fluke of the sheet anchor.

“So far the log.

“Now for the comment. Toward the 1st September I received notice that the Review was at a standstill. Mr. Gurney was at Beverly, ill and engaged to be married. I had not a line of copy, nor knew where to get one. I communicated with G. and got what he had—viz: two articles, one on Herbert Spencer, and t’other on Leibnitz. I put the former in type, but did not dare to follow with the latter, for I thought it would be too much even for the readers of the N. A. By and by, I raked together one or two more,—not what I would have but what I could. James’s article on Spanish G.”[36] is good and ought to go in. So of the Siege of Delhi. We want something interesting, and we must have some literary notices. As I receive none of the books, of course I had to depend on others for these, and I have got as many as I could. I have edited the number for October because it was absolutely necessary,—not, surely, because I desired it. I have read all the proof and have done all that I agreed not to do when I made my engagement with Crosby & Nichols. All I promised to give them was my name on the cover, and I supposed T. & F. succeeded to their agreement. I have much more than kept my word. The October number can’t be printed by Saturday.

“But I am altogether willing that it should be, only in that case my name must be withdrawn from the cover. I never desired to be its editor, and I put my resignation in your hands. Get some better man, say——, who can write on all subjects equally ill at a moment’s notice. I wash my hands of the whole concern. I will read the rest of the proof of this number if you wish, for that is in the bond, but for January look out for somebody who can make something out of nothing. I recommend——.” Six days later he wrote again:—

“Correct estimates from log thus: 25 September. Lat. 42° 10´. Captain Lowell committed suicide by blowing out his brains with the gafftopsl halyards. There can be no doubt of the fact, as the 2nd officer recognized the brains for his (Cap. L.’s), he being familiar with them.

“30 September. Captain L. reappeared on the deck, having only been below to oversee the storage of ballast, whereof on this trip the lading mainly consists. What was thought to be his brains turned out on closer examination to be pumpkin pie, though the second officer was unconvinced and the Captain himself could not make up his mind.

“The fact is I was cross, and did not quite like being brought up with such a round turn at my time of life. I had done all I could, and was hoping that the literary notices would make up for the rest. I had been disappointed in three body articles by Bigelow, Poole, and Willard (on von Bismarck). Gurney will take hold of the next number and it will all go right. Say beforehand how many sheets you are willing to allow, and we will keep as near the wind as we can, but don’t—well, never mind, but I am as touchy as if I were even poorer than I am.”

The publication of “Under the Willows” brought Lowell some of those expressions of admiration and affection for which the friends of a writer gladly use such occasions. The publishing of a book is like an announcement of an engagement,—an opportunity for one’s friends to show their affection unreservedly. Among the notes which pleased Lowell was one from Mr. Aldrich who had lately come to Boston to edit Every Saturday, and in his pleasure he sent a copy of the special edition of the Commemoration Ode with this letter.

Elmwood, 23rd December, 1868.

My dear Sir,—That note was so pleasant to an old fellow who doesn’t think too well of himself, that I can’t help (with a very good will and a very balky pen) telling you how much pleasure it gave me. That I don’t deserve all the fine things you say of me doesn’t make it any the less friendly in you to say them, and I, for one, frankly confess that I like a little lubrication now and then. It makes our machine (as they used to call it in the last century) run easier for a day or two, till its general ramshackliness reproduces the familiar friction.

Now lest the twins should repeat the tragedy of Eteocles and Polynikes, and the house of Aldrich be extinguished in an internecine duel for the possession of that other fatal volume, I send what will enable your paternal anxiety to make a fair division between them. If they are proper twins (I am a kind of twins myself divided between grave and gay) they will be the one sentimental and t’other humorous. Bequeath one sacred tome to each, and keep for yourself the cordial feeling that sends both.

This which you now receive has at least the value of rarity. It is one of twelve copies printed in this form. Think of me after I am gone on (for in the nature of things you will survive me) as one who had a really friendly feeling for everything human. It is better to be a good fellow than a good poet, and perhaps (I am not sure) I might have shown a pretty fair talent that way, with proper encouragement. Any how, I wish you and Mrs. Aldrich, and the Twins a Merry Christmas, and am

Cordially yours,
J. R. Lowell.

That Lowell himself knew how to give pleasure with praise is evident enough from the several letters which Mr. Norton has printed, to Mr. Aldrich, to Mr. Howells, to Mr. Gilder, and to other younger writers. He was constantly sending pleasant messages and writing notes with unaffected expressions of enjoyment, and his friendly feeling made it easy for the editor of the Atlantic to consult him with reference to contributions even from strangers. Thus he wrote to Mr. Howells: “I would be burned at the stake—nay, I would agree to be shut up alone for an hour with —— before I would acknowledge (I spelt it without a d!) a poem to be good unless it was so. I would be burned at two stakes, and be shut up with —— and —— ere I would say a good word for the verses of a rising young author. But I expect to see and like your poem in the next Atlantic. It is good, despite Mrs. Howells and the anapests,—or whatever other kind of pests they were.

“Go by your ear, my dear boy, or by Madam’s and leave Latin prosodies to —— and the other profound scholars who understand ’em, but be sure that the plot of your little poem is so charming that it will take all the lovers and loved, and who else is worth caring for?

“I tried it on Mrs. Lowell (you know we have a bit of Darby and Joan left in us still) and she purred at once. No: it is good and subtle (or subtile, I don’t know which, thanks to Mr. Nichols), but it is either you like.

“P.S. You have a real vein, so don’t be bothered, but make it as good as you can and thank the gods.”

And again, in answer to some questions Mr. Howells had asked him respecting the Isles of Shoals, apropos of the articles by Mrs. Thaxter then to appear in the Atlantic: “‘Londoner’s’ is right. The names of the islands are ‘Haley’s,’ otherwise (and better) ‘Smutty-nose,’ ‘Star,’ always called ‘Star-island,’ ‘Hog,’ which Mrs. T. no doubt calls ‘Appledore,’—the name of a village that once stood on it,—‘Cedar,’ ‘White,’ ‘Malaga,’ and ‘Duck.’ There you have ’em all.

“Now I have a favor to ask of you—Se io meritai di voi assai o poco—and that is to have the sheets of the life of Landor sent me. I guess I could make something out of them, which perhaps you boys hardly could. By the way, I was very much pleased with your notice of that fellow’s (Sebright,[37] I think) Congressional reminiscences. It made me laugh, and was so fine (so subtile) that the man himself, despite his name, will never feel the edge of it. I always had great expectations of you,—but I am beginning to believe in you for good. You are the only one that hasn’t cheated me by your blossom. I like your flavor now, as once I did your perfume. You young fellows are dreadfully irreverent—but don’t you laugh—I take a kind of credit to myself in being the first to find you out. I am proud of you. But see how Fate takes me down! As I wrote the words, it began to rain on my hay. Absit omen. And may it be long before you are mown!

“As for your gigantic boongalong there in Boston,—I fancy it is like Niagara, a thing that one can reckon mathematically. It is but one voice raised to the nth power or so. And I remember that the Colosseum was where the early Christians used to be martyred. Now I got up this morning at half past six, and therefore count myself among the early Christians.

“I forgot to tell you that George Curtis liked your Venetian poem very much. So did I.”

His position naturally made him the recipient of many commissions for securing the publication of poems and other manuscripts, and his friendliness drew him into many letters of counsel, and it might be encouragement. To one whose acquaintance he had made through a contribution which he had accepted when editor of the Atlantic, he wrote in answer to a letter in which she had confessed to discouragement over hostile attack on a more recent work:—

That my note gave you any pleasure gives me a sensible satisfaction. I am glad to find it was my Miss —— after all.

You mustn’t be disheartened. If you had written a foolish thing, don’t you see?—nobody would be attacking it. People don’t bring artillery to bear on soap-bubbles, but wait till they burst of themselves. Don’t allow yourself to be shaken from that equipoise of good sense and good temper that drew my attention so strongly in your first article. Above all, don’t be drawn into any controversy. Keep straight on, as if nothing had happened, and if you have anything in you be sure the world will find it out. Publicity is one of the painful necessities of authorship. For my own part, I would give all the praise I ever received for the right to be valued simply for my personal good qualities alone. But you must resign yourself. You have given everybody who can command pen, ink, and paper the right to talk flippantly and ignorantly and unfeelingly of things into which you have put your very heart’s blood. But don’t be disheartened. If you honestly try to think (and it was because you seemed to me to do so that I felt an interest in you) you will come out right in the long run. If you have the true quality you will at last get the power of thinking, the only abiding satisfaction and security for happiness which this life or the other for that matter affords, a thing rarer than is generally supposed. Really to think is to see things as they are, and when we have once got firm foot-hold on that rock of ages, our own little trials and triumphs take their true proportions, and are as indifferent to us, morally, I mean, as the changes of the weather. I think you have the root of the matter in you, that is, that you are in earnest to do honest work, and not to flaunt in the newspapers. For that reason I wish to help you all I can. Don’t think I am writing such letters as this every week. On the contrary, I am shy of writing letters at all, especially to women. But whenever a word from me will cheer you, you shall have it.

I have directed two books to be sent you by express and beg you to accept them as a token of sincere esteem from your friend,

J. R. Lowell.

There is another letter drawn out from him by a stranger who was concerned over a case of literary honesty, which is interesting as showing how sensitive Lowell was in all matters pertaining to his art. “You ask,” he writes, “my judgment on a point of literary morals. In the case you set forth I find it hard to judge of the facts without some knowledge of the character of the man, because thoughtlessness, want of moral sensibility, and loose habits of mind generally, may in the particular instance tend to lenify our judgment of the ethical quality of the offence, without in the least changing our opinion of its discreditable nature as respects good scholarship and honest literature. There can be no question that every article (such as you describe) should have had the name of its true author at the head of it, so that no man who read could fail to know whose work he was reading. Nay, I think we should be so scrupulous in such matters as to acknowledge even an apt quotation when we owe it to another man. For example, I suppose I must have read the ‘Divinia Commedia’ of Dante at least thirty times with minute attention and yet it had never occurred to me that cima di giudizie was literally Shakespeare’s phrase, ‘top of judgment,’ till Mr. Dyce pointed it out in a note on ‘Measure for Measure.’ I should never think of using it as an illustration without giving credit to Mr. Dyce. Even had I found the coincidence noted on the margin of my own copy of Dante, I should still have quoted Dyce for it as having first mentioned it in print, in order to avoid even the appearance of evil. I think an honest man can easily resolve any doubt he may have in such matters by asking himself the simple question, Do I gain any credit that does not belong to me by letting it pass for my own? If I do, it is stealing, neither more nor less, for there is no real distinction between picking a man’s pocket of his money and filching the fruits of his industry or thought from a book.

“In literature proper, originality consists of such an energy of nature as enables a man so to infuse thoughts or sentiments common to all with his own individuality as to give them a new character—flavor would be the better word—commending them anew to the general palate. Chaucer is a capital instance in point. He formed himself wholly on foreign models, helped himself to plots, incidents, and reflections from any and everywhere, and yet is on the whole fresher than almost any of our poets. I always liked him the better for remembering in his ‘House of Fame’ the pipes of those

‘little heardgromes
That kepen bestes in the bromes,’

for he was, I doubt not, paying the debt he owed to some nameless minstrel.

“In matters of research and scholarship, the question seems to present itself under a somewhat different aspect. All learning is of necessity to a great extent second-hand—but here also there is a manifest distinction between appropriating another man’s scholarship and assimilating it. In the one case it lies a mere load of indigestible rubbish upon the brain; in the other, it is dissolved and worked over into a new substance, giving sustenance and impulse to one’s native thought. So that after all, whether in literature or scholarship, the point is not so much what a man has taken, as whether he has made something new of what he has taken.[38] If he have not, then he should make punctilious acknowledgment of the sources whence he drew. It is one thing to be indebted to a man for a hint that sets us on a path of original research and discovery, and quite another to rob him of his journals and publish them as one’s own. So as to giving credit where it is due; I would not thank a guide-post, but I must pay a guide. I may read by a man’s lamp, but if I tap his gas pipe, I ought to attach a gasometer that shall record precisely how much I borrow.

“The leading case in this branch of literary ethics is the famous one of Schelling et als. against Coleridge. For the defence we should take into account the defendant’s lifelong habits of mental dissipation, his own really great learning which might make him careless alike in borrowing and lending, and above all the effect of opium in blurring the memory and deadening the nerves of moral sensation. On the other hand, it would be urged that he lifted (to borrow a word, peculiarly apt here, from the loose dialect of the border) from foreigners whose property would be least liable to identification by his countrymen; he did it by translation and transfusion, thus, as it were, obliterating the marks of former ownership; and above all (in the case of A. W. Schlegel) he did it in oral lectures, thus driving his stolen cattle so hurriedly by in a way to baffle detection.

“You will find in Mrs. Nelson Coleridge’s Introduction to the ‘Biographia Literaria’ an eloquent and even passionate vindication of her father from the charge of plagiarism. It does her honor as a daughter, but is hardly convincing. Coleridge’s acknowledgment of general indebtedness to Schelling and others was, to speak mildly, wholly inadequate, and his evasions in regard to Schlegel leave a very painful impression on the mind. If he was not lying, he was so shamefully inaccurate in dates (to his own advantage) as to have all the appearance of it.

“Now, your case (I mean the one you present) is in many respects very like this—almost identical with it indeed....

“In the old trials, one of the questions on which the jury were called on to pass was, ‘Did he fly for it?’ That is, I suppose, ‘Did he give that proof of conscious guilt?’ I should ask the same question in this case. Is there any evidence of an attempt at concealment?

“But, abstractedly from any opinion we may form of the person, the action was one altogether discreditable and contemptible. We cannot be too scrupulous on any point of morals in a country where members of Congress see no dishonor in selling appointments to the Army and Navy.”

Dr. Thomas Hill, who was president of Harvard in 1868, asked Lowell in the summer of that year to look over some papers he had received from Virginia and to give his opinion of them. They were the letters and journals of a Virginian gentleman, Mr. John B. Minor, who had visited New England in 1834, and Lowell found them exceedingly interesting. “Not the least engaging thing in the journal,” he wrote to the lady who had sent the papers, “is the character of the author, everywhere showing itself and everywhere amiable. So far as he is concerned, the whole journal might be printed verbatim, for there is not an indiscreet word, much less a breach of hospitality, from beginning to end. At the same time there are, of course, passages here and there which should be omitted in printing—I think not more than two or three at most—where he describes the personal appearance of those he met.”

The next day he wrote to Mr. Fields: “There has been put into my hands to dispose of, the Journal of a Virginia gentleman during a short tour in New England, partly on foot. The date—1834, which is now ages ago. There is not a great deal of it, but I found it truly entertaining. I think I could make selections from it that would run through four or five numbers of the Atlantic.... Now, do you want it? and if so, what do you think it would be worth? When I say it is entertaining, I do not mean for fanatics like me, who would cradle I know not how many tons of common earth for a grain of the gold of human nature, but for folks in general. It is not only interesting but valuable, and the character of the author, as it blinks out continually, most engaging. It seems to me remarkable that there is positively not an ill-natured word from the first page to the last. Now you know that I have once or twice pressed Sibylline books upon you which you wouldn’t take. Don’t let this one slip through your fingers. I think it might be published afterwards in a small volume with advantage, but of its adaptation to the Atlantic I have no doubt.”

The journal was printed in the Atlantic in the summer and fall of 1870, Lowell furnishing an introduction to the first number. It was no doubt under the influence of this new acquaintance with a fine type of Southern manhood, that Lowell wrote to Mr. Godkin, 20 November, 1868: “I confess to a strong sympathy with men who sacrificed everything even to a bad cause, which they could see only the good side of; and now the war is over, I see no way to heal the old wounds but by frankly admitting this and acting upon it. We can never reconstruct the South except through its own leading men, nor ever hope to have them on our side till we make it for their interest and compatible with their honor to be so.”[39]

Mr. and Mrs. Fields were proposing to make a journey to Europe in the spring and summer of 1869, and asked Lowell to send his daughter in their company. Lowell wrote in reply, 19 January, 1869: “I have been thinking over your very kind invitation to Mabel, and, after turning it in every possible way, I have come to the conclusion that the only way to treat a generous offer is to be generous enough to accept it. My pride stood a little in the way, but my common sense whispered me that I had no right to feed my pride at my daughter’s expense. And moreover, my dear Fields, you left me a most delicate loophole for my pride to creep out of, in conferring on me a kind of militia generalship of the Atlantic Monthly while you were away. Now, if you will let me make it something real, that is, if you will let me read the proof-sheets, I can be of some service in preventing —— (for example, merely) from writing such awful English, and mayhap in some other cases, as a consulting physician. Moreover, I should like to translate for Every Saturday something now and then, as, for instance, the article on Déak and the dramatic sketch of Octave Feuillet, lately published in the Revue de Deux Mondes. May I?”

While his daughter was travelling with Mr. and Mrs. Fields, Lowell wrote to Mr. Fields a piece of news anticipative of what came to an event a little less than ten years later: “Mabel’s letters overrun with happiness, which I fully share in reading them. I wrote her a long letter about nothing yesterday—but I did not tell her what you may (as a secret for you three), that I came very near being sent to Spain, and that in case the Senate should not confirm Sickles in December, the chances for me are the best. Judge Hoar told me when he was here the other day, that Mr. Fish was friendly, and that the Assistant Secretary was ‘zealous even unto slaying,’ as he was himself. So who knows but my name may get into capitals in the triennial catalogues yet? That, after all, is the main thing—for is it not a kind of fame as good as the next? For my own part, I can conceive of no place better to live or die in than where I was born.

“I hope Mabel makes a jolly companion. She always does for me.[40] If she is as happy as her letters show her, I think she must. Tell her I should have told her about Spain—but I forgot it. I shall have my choice of castles to live in, if I go there, of my own building.”

“For awhile last spring,” he wrote in December to Mr. Norton, “I thought it possible I might be sent abroad. Hoar was strenuous for it, and I should have been very glad of it then.... However, it all fell through, and I am glad it did, for I should not have written my new poem.”[41] The new poem was “The Cathedral” which was issued in book form at Christmas, 1869, as well as in the Atlantic for January, 1870. He wrote it during the summer vacation and took great pleasure in the writing. He had told Mr. Howells what he was about, and on being asked for the poem for the Atlantic replied: “Up to time, indeed! the fear is not about time, but space. You won’t have room in your menagerie for such a displeaseyousaurus. The verses, if stretched end to end in a continuous line, would go clear round the Cathedral they celebrate, and nobody (I fear) the wiser. I can’t tell yet what they are. There seems a bit of clean carving here and there, a solid buttress or two, and perhaps a gleam through painted glass—but I have not copied it out yet, nor indeed read it over consecutively.”[42] A little later he could write to Miss Norton: “The poem turned out to be something immense, as the slang is nowadays, that is, it ran on to eight hundred lines of blank verse. I hope it is good, for it fairly trussed me at last and bore me up as high as my poor lungs will bear into the heaven of invention. I was happy writing it, and so steeped in it that if I had written to you it would have been in blank verse. It is a kind of religious poem, and is called ‘A Day at Chartres.’”[43] He dedicated the poem with special pleasure to Mr. Fields, who by the bye had persuaded him to substitute the name used for that he had chosen, a change which Lowell regretted in writing to Mr. Stephen, as depriving the poem of certain definite, local, and historical justification. “The Cathedral” drew from Mr. Ruskin warm praise. “The main substance of the poem is most precious to me,” he wrote, “and its separate lines sometimes unbetterable,” and he added some specific criticism on words, which Lowell met with more of his favorite instances of long-lived words brought over in the mental baggage of the early New England settlers. The letter in which he conclusively justifies himself is an excellent example of the reasoning of a philologist to whom words are alive, and not specimens in a museum.[44]

A correspondent had enquired in behalf of a friend, as had Ruskin, for his authority in using “decuman” in the line

“Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman,”

and he replied: “My friendly catechist has certainly put in a fair claim to a speedy answer. Whence that word ‘decuman’ got into my memory I have no notion. It seems to have got embedded there during my eocene period, and hopped out lively as one of those toads we have all heard of the moment it got a chance. And the likeness was the nearer that it had ‘a precious jewel in its head.’ In short, the word was there—it was canorous, and it expressed just what I meant. So I used it unsuspiciously. I did not mean to make a conundrum—I never do, but I had made one. When I was asked for the solution, the answer was ready enough—‘the tenth wave,’ which was thought higher than the rest. But when I was asked for my authority! I thought I had met with it in Ovid. No! In Lucan. No! They both speak of the tenth wave, but not in that absolute way. I looked in my dictionaries. I found it at last in Forcellini. Then I went to my Ducange, and the authority cited was one of the Latin Fathers, I forget which. However, there it was, and with the meaning I had remembered.”

Although the title, “A Day at Chartres,” carries with it a notion of less formality, and has a picturesque quality, there is a fitness in the soberer title that permits the mind to play with the theme. For Lowell here builds upon the foundation of human life a fane for worship, and in the speculations which discriminate between the conventional and the free aspirations of the soul, constructs out of living stones a house of prayer. Nor is there absent that capricious mood which carved grotesques upon the under side of the benches at which the worshippers kneeled, so that when the reader, borne along by the high thought, stumbles over such lines as

“Who, meeting Cæsar’s self, would slap his back,
Call him ‘Old Horse’ and challenge to a drink,”

he may, if he will, console himself with the reflection that the most aspiring Gothic carries like grimacing touches within its majestic walls.

“Imagination’s very self in stone.”

That is the epithet Lowell bestows on Chartres Cathedral, and in the few spirited lines in which he contrasts the Greek with the Goth, and hints at the historic evolution of the latter, he is in a large way reflecting the native constitution of his own mind,

“Still climbing, luring fancy still to climb.”

In the letters which Lowell wrote when “The Cathedral” was stirring his mind one sees most impressively the struggle which was always more or less racking him of an unfulfilled poetic power. The very spontaneity of his nature was in a way an obstacle to expression. He waited for the waters to be troubled, he was critical of his moods, of his opportunities, and when the moment was seized, if he could indeed hold it, he was supremely happy. “How happy I was while I was writing it,” he says just as the poem is to be published; “for weeks it and I were alone in the world till Fanny well-nigh grew jealous.” And yet in the very memory of this bliss he is haunted by the thought of that black care which rides behind. “You don’t know, my dear Charles, what it is to have sordid cares, to be shivering on the steep edge of your bank-book, beyond which lies debt. I am willing to say it to you, because I know I should have written more and better. They say it is good to be obliged to do what we don’t like, but I am sure it is not good for me—it wastes so much time in the mere forethought of what you are to do.” The matter was not made easier by the pride and honorable resolve not to mortgage the future for the sake of some present indulgence. Lowell went without things he wanted rather than get into debt for them, and though he chafed under the conditions which compelled him to the doing of irksome tasks, he would borrow no short-lived ease. In making up an account with Mr. Fields at the close of 1869, when he found himself on the wrong side of the ledger, he wrote: “You must allow me also to clear off the rest ... as soon as I can. There is no earthly reason why I shouldn’t, and a great many why I should. I hate any kind of money obligations between friends. When I have paid this off, the kindness will be left, and the obligation gone. I shall be able to manage it before long. I never could see any reason why poets should claim immunity beyond other folks. It is not wholesome for them.” Even in petty matters he disliked exceedingly to be under pecuniary obligation. His letters to Mr. Godkin, as printed by Mr. Norton, show an unconquerable aversion to being a “deadhead” under any circumstances, and I remember once, when I went with him to the Museum of Fine Arts for some special exhibition, his annoyance at finding it was a free day and he could not pay the ordinary toll.

His prose work, in 1869, included his papers on Chaucer and Pope, and his “Good Word for Winter,” and at the end of the year he issued a selection from what he had already written, in the first series of “Among My Books.” But his slowly growing collection of published writings did not add materially to his income, and he continued to be embarrassed by the poverty of a landholder who had heavy taxes to pay and only the meagrest return from the productive part of his estate. The only relief he could foresee was in the possible sale of some of his land.

The point to be noted, however, is that with all this pressure of need, Lowell knew himself so well that he would not, even when a golden bait was dangled before him, accept invitations to write which required of him the diligence and the punctuality of the hack workman. No. He would attend to his college duties, do what he could for the North American, and accept the occasional opportunity which offered for reading a lecture. He honored his art, and he refused to make it a perfunctory task. His old friend Robert Carter was now editor of Appleton’s Journal, and very naturally sought contributions from Lowell, but Lowell replied in a letter written 11 March, 1870:

“Many thanks for your Journal, which I have looked through with a great deal of pleasure, and which I should think likely to do good in raising the public taste.

“I am much obliged to you also for your proposal, though I cannot accept it. I have not time. I have not that happy gift of inspired knowledge so common in this country, and work more and more slowly toward conclusions as I get older. I give on an average twelve hours a day to study (after my own fashion), but I find real knowledge slow of accumulation. Moreover, I shall be too busy in the college for a year or two yet. It is not the career I should have chosen, and I half think I was made for better things—but I must make the best of it. Between ourselves, I declined lately an offer of $4000 a year from —— to write four pages monthly in——.

“It takes me a good while to be sure I am right. A five or six page notice in the next N. A. R.[45] will have cost me a fortnight’s work of a microscopic kind. My pay must be in a sense of honest thoroughness.”

Lowell lectured in the spring of 1870 at Baltimore, and before the students of Cornell University. In the summer he enjoyed much making the personal acquaintance of Thomas Hughes, who visited America at this time. Lowell had known him by correspondence, and Hughes, who was an ardent admirer of Lowell and had introduced the “Biglow Papers” to the English public, somewhat embarrassed the author of those poems by quoting from them on all occasions. For his work he gave himself to the reading of old French metrical romances, but the year saw scarcely any product, though at its close he brought together a group of indoor and outdoor studies under the title of “My Study Windows.” “I long to give myself to poetry again,” he writes in October to Miss Norton, “before I am so old that I have only thought and no music left. I can’t say as Milton did, ‘I am growing my wings.’” There is a phrase noting a curious consciousness he had at this time in a letter to Mr. Norton, written 15 October, 1870: “I wrote Jane yesterday a kind of letter, but you must wait till my ships come in before I can write the real thing. I can’t get rid of myself enough when I am worried as I am a good part of the time. It is curious, when I am in company I watch myself as if I were a third person, and hear the sound of my own voice, which I never do in a natural mood. However, I shall come out of it all in good time.”

His old correspondent, Mr. Richard Grant White, published this year his “Words and their Uses,” and wrote to Lowell, asking permission to dedicate the book to him. Lowell replied:—

Elmwood, 2 August, 1870.

My dear Sir,—In the midst of my sallow grass and my leaves crumpled with drought, a little spring seemed to bubble up at my feet in your letter. How could I feel other than pleased and honored with your proposal? I wish only I deserved it better—but anyhow I can’t find it in my heart to wave aside my crown out of modesty, lest Anthony might not offer it again. So I put it on my head with many thanks, consoled with the reflection that a wreath unmerited always avenges itself by looking confoundedly like a foolscap in the eyes of every one but the wearer. So I bow my head meekly to your laurels, and thank you very heartily for an honor as agreeable as it is unexpected. I shall have the satisfaction of knowing that the deserved popularity of your book will carry my name into many a pleasant home where it is now unfamiliar, and if my publisher’s accounts show a better figure hereafter, I shall say it is your doing.

With a very sincere acknowledgment of the obligation you lay upon me to do some credit to your second leaf,

I remain, my dear Sir,
Very cordially yours,
J. R. Lowell.

Richard Grant White, Esq.

After some delays attendant on such business, Lowell was able in the summer of 1871 to make a sale of a portion of the original estate of Elmwood which left him the house and a couple of acres for his home, and an income of four or five thousand dollars a year. It was a modest living, but it cleared his mind of fretting cares. As he wrote to Mr. Stephen: “It is a life-preserver that will keep my head above water, and the swimming I will do for myself.” Of the effect upon his mind he wrote more freely to his friend Mr. Norton: “I cannot tell you how this sense of my regained paradise of Independence enlivens me. It is something I have not felt for years—hardly since I have been a professor. The constant sense of a ball and chain jangling at my heels, and that those who are inexpressibly dear to me were at the risk of my giving satisfaction in an office where what is best in me was too often held in abeyance by an uneasy self-consciousness forced upon me by my position, have been greater hindrances than anybody else can ever know. But now I can draw a full breath of natural air and discarbonate my lungs of the heavy atmosphere of an unnatural confinement. I look forward to my next year’s work with cheerfulness. I am no longer chained to the oar, but a volunteer. Whether I shall recover the wholesome mental unrest which kept me active when I was younger, I know not, but at least I shan’t have to print before I am ready, nor to keep on with the spendthrift habit of splitting up the furniture of my brain to keep the pot boiling.... I mean to come abroad at the end of the next college year, and shall pop in on you some day, bringing a familiar odor, half Cambridge, half pipe. I shall read you my new poem—when it gets written—and bore you with old French in which I am still plunged to the ears. I am become a pretty thorough master of it, and wish I knew the modern lingo half as well.”

“It takes a good while,” he writes to Miss Norton, “to slough off the effect of seventeen years of pedagogy. I am grown learned (after a fashion) and dull. The lead has entered into my soul. But I have great faith in putting the sea between me and the stocks I have been sitting in so long.” He worked steadily at his college duties, with some thought, I suspect, of finishing with his professorial work, the laboriously learned part of his life. The minute, painstaking care to which he gave to the studies which underlay his college work, so evident in the annotation of his books, was after all a severe drain upon a nature that took the greatest delight in imaginative freedom. He seems hardly to have allowed himself any relief. “I have been reading over your book[46] again,” he writes to Mr. Fields, 29 February, 1872, “and found it very interesting and queer. Queer, I say, because it is the first volume I have read for some months later than the XIV. century, and I was a little puzzled at first, like Selkirk when he got back among his own people and heard his own language again. I am glad you have left out the imaginary nephew. One was apt to stumble over him and apologize with a ‘Beg pardon, but really had forgotten you were here.’ These buffers between the reader and the first personal pronoun never lessen the shock, though they are always in the way. But nobody wants them, for egotism does not consist in never so many capital I’s. Moreover, I am persuaded that everybody likes it in his secret heart (as he does garlic), and says he doesn’t for appearances.

“Your Dickens letters are a great deal more interesting than Forster’s for some reason or other. I fancy it is because they are more natural. In writing to Forster, Dickens must have felt that he was writing to his biographer, and had the constraint of sitting before a glass. Indeed, I was very much disappointed in Forster’s volume.[47] It doesn’t leave an agreeable impression, which is surely a fault in biography.

“What a dear old affectionate soul Miss Mitford was! I knew nothing about her before. Even her little vanities are rather pleasant than otherwise. It is surely a delightful gift to be made happy as easily as she.

“We are all busy getting ready for Mabel’s departure. I hate to think of it, though I believe she is as safe as human forethought could make her. Burnett is all I could wish.”

Miss Lowell was married 2 April, 1872, to Mr. Edward Burnett, and went with him to Southboro, Massachusetts, where he was carrying on a dairy and stock farm. Miss Rebecca Lowell died in May, so that the household at Elmwood was in a measure dissolved. Lowell was busy up to the last over the long article on Dante which he contributed to the July North American. He was released from his college work, having resigned his professorship; he let Elmwood to Mr. Aldrich and sailed 9 July for Europe with Mrs. Lowell, to be absent two years.

CHAPTER XII
THIRD JOURNEY IN EUROPE
1872-1874

When Lowell went to Europe in the summer of 1872, he left his college routine behind him; with his new-found liberty, he seemed to find all the expression he cared for in familiar talk with the many friends, old and new, whom he encountered in his travels, and in letters to friends at home and abroad. Once only, as will be seen, did he break into poetry, but the two years of his absence contain so little to add to the record of his production that it seems the natural course, as it is most pleasant to the biographer, to let this holiday in Lowell’s life be told for the most part in his letters. The letters printed by Mr. Norton[48] are not drawn upon, except now and then for a needful phrase.

To Thomas Hughes.

Royal Victoria Hotel, Killarney,
20 July, 1872.

My dear Hughes,—Finding I could land in Queenstown, I did so with most infinite discomfort, and here I am in Ireland, having on my way hither done Blarney Castle which is well-nigh as good as Kenilworth. Here, to my surprise, I find a gigantic new R. C. Cathedral, See of the Bishop of Kerry. However, I am not writing a guide-book. I wish to ask if you are in London, and how long you will remain. I am of two minds,—one to go straight to the Continent, the other to stay a week or two in London in lodgings and see things quietly in that blessed season when everybody is out of town. You I “lot” upon seeing. Will you write me at the Grosvenor Hotel, Chester (where I shall turn up by and by), and let me know? I am not even sure if Parliament have adjourned. Think of it! Just like our Yankee impudence, isn’t it? But the truth is, the last paper I saw was dated 9th July, and I hate to make acquaintance again with the World and its goings-on.

I must run to my breakfast, or rather to Madame, of whom I have visions wandering disconsolate in search of me who am ensconced in the smoking-room, where I happened to see an inkstand last night.

In the hope of seeing you soon,
Affectionately yours always,
J. R. Lowell.

To the Same.

Chester, 28 July, 1872.

Your letter and I arrived here together last night. We shall stay here three or four days to recruit from the Irish accent,—which somehow wearied me wonderfully.

If lodgings may be had by the week, to renew or no at will, you would greatly oblige me by taking plain and inexpensive ones for us, where I can let my cup fill again from a tap that rather dribbles than runs. Travelling, I find, drains. A pleasant landlady I should prefer to splendor. I get more than enough of that in the hotels....

If you should find lodgings, I will engage them, beginning with Friday next. If I once get a perch to which I can return at need, I can take short flights wherever I will, without such heaps of luggage. Will you telegraph or write me here? If no lodgings, tell me of some quiet hotel,—not on the American caravanserai system, whither we can go.

To Miss Grace Norton.

11 Dover Street, Piccadilly,
Aug. 4, 1872.

...Dublin interested me much.... From Dublin to Chester, where we stayed five days, and where Charles Kingsley (who is a canon there) was very kind. We had the advantage of going over the Cathedral with him, and over the town with the chief local antiquary. We fell quite in love with it and with the delightful walk round the walls. We arrived in London night before last.

Affectionately yours,
Llumbago Llowell.

To C. E. Norton.

11 Dover Street, Piccadilly,
13 August, 1872.

Give my love to Grace and relieve the anxiety of her mind by telling her I have found J. H. at the Tavistock Hotel, Covent Garden, where he is Mr. ’Omes. I have tried in vain to get him up hither. He goes to Dresden on Thursday to meet some friends whom he learned to know at the Fosters’ and whom he likes. Then he is coming round slowly to Paris, where we are to meet and decide on plans. Meanwhile I have resolved to stay here till you come, if you come soon enough.[49] If not, I shall cross over to you. I go down to Yorkshire (I mean Cumberland) on Friday or Saturday to see the Storys. I can show Fanny York, Durham, and Fountain’s Abbey on the way,—and Ripon, though I did not think it much twenty years ago. We shall spend a few days with the Storys at “Crosby Lodge on Eden” (which has a pleasant name, as if it stood in a garden of cucumbers), and then work downward through the Lake Country and so back to London. We have very central lodgings here, with what I value above all, a pleasant landlady. Our rooms are very small, but they can be smoked in, being bachelor apartments construed into the dual. As it is not the season, we shall probably have no trouble in getting them again when we come back. Now if you are coming over early in September, you see it would be better for us to stay till you come.

We have been having a very pleasant time thus far, though I have not yet quite got over the feeling of the ball and chain. It will take a good while. I do not know whether I told you I had resigned my professorship? I did so the night before we sailed that there might be no discussion. I found that at any rate my salary ceased during my absence, and so I thought it a good chance. I do not altogether like this matter of the salary. It prevents any professor who has not some private fortune of his own from having any vacation at all.[50] But I am glad it happened so, for it just turned the scale with me in favor of the wiser decision,—as I think it is. I cannot yet get over the dulness it ground into me. I begin to think I am too old ever to shake it wholly off....

We have been seeing all sorts of things (persons are out of town) since we have been here. The Hogarths delight me again, and I have twice seen the Rake’s Progress, which I did not get at when I was here before. Hogarth’s color is as fine as his invention and dramatic powers. He astonishes me always by his soft brilliancy and harmony. I have lots of things to talk over when we meet.